“Obedience doth not well in parts”: Jonson, Shakespeare, and the Atlantic Archipelago

Abstract

ABSTRACTBy considering Shakespeare’s Henry V through an archipelagic comparison with Jonson’s subsequent The Irish Masque at Court, this essay participates in the recent reconsideration of English literature’s early modern inter-island context. Considering Shakespeare’s and Jonson’s different reflections on Ireland and the Irish in the Atlantic archipelago provides access to changing early seventeenth-century differences in English, metropolitan attitudes toward Ireland. While there has been more discussion of English literature understood archipelagically over the last two decades, including some consideration of Shakespeare and Jonson in inter-island contexts, there has been little reference to this slim text by Ben Jonson. In it, Jonson takes up the question of Ireland with all the playfully cruel benefit of hindsight not available when his rival, Shakespeare, wrote Henry V, his play that most famously and directly addresses Irish geopolitics within a new, emerging inter-island kingdom. Jonson’s later masque, with its four principal characters, offers a re-reading of Shakespeare’s earlier Four Captains scene, particularly of the role of MacMorris.