‘What country, friends, is this?’ The Performance of Conflict in Shakespeare’s Drama of Migration

Abstract

‘What country, friends, is this?’ (TN, 1.2.1).1 Shipwrecked on the coast of Illyria, Viola in Twelfth Night is anxious as to how she will be received. Is it hospitality or persecution that is awaiting her? Antonio will later substantiate the fear that the country ‘often prove[s] / Rough and unhospitable’ to a stranger who is ‘unguided and unfriended’ (3.3.9–11). Viola’s question introduces a recurrent conflict in Shakespearean drama. For Richard Wilson, it ‘sets the scene for almost any play by Shakespeare, who repeatedly initiates plots with the mumming gambit of shipwreck, exile, or migration of an alien in an alien land’.2 The plays explore the precarious situation of the traveller, the migrant or the exile, banished or otherwise separated from family, community or culture: cut loose from structures securing individual identity.