The North-South Divide in Gorboduc : Fratricide Remembered and Forgotten

Abstract

Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Gorboduc metaphorizes the nation’s divide into North and South as a fratricidal feud. The narrative allegorically represents the southern English prejudice against the northern territory above the Humber. This provincial community had a shifting allegiance to the English Crown, and it was also against the unified juridical sovereignty and the Reformation propagated by the Tudor nation-state. This essay focuses on the effects of Gorboduc’ s reissue in 1570 by its official publication right after the Northern Rising (1569). If at the time of the play’s official print circulation, the settlement of the Rising was the burning political issue in the Elizabethan court, Gorboduc’ s reissue supports the Tudor state’s propagation by claiming that the nation’s disintegrated sovereignty into the North and South should be fully overcome by creating a southern-based centralized state.