ABSTRACT
Among Shakespearean spokespersons the Chorus of Henry Vis the shrewd theatrical geographer par excellence, ever alert to the inevitable elasticity whereby our wooden O clings to a spatial dimension, from its very own cockpit through immediate London, pouring out her citizens, and on to the farthest fields of France. Yet even he refers exclusively to the real territories to which the narrative frameworks of Shakespeare’s histories (a project he is almost in a position to sum up) may stretch the imagination of their audience. He never mentions the loci reached through metaphor or free association, let alone alluding (as Cassius and Brutus are to do after their own fashion) to the measure between the represented presence of ‘Pompey’s basis’ and the virtual one of states unborn. It is that virtual dimension, hovering between geography and ideology, that provides an ideological foundation for the manipulative use of the concept of ‘nation’ in early modern drama.
