The Construction Of Map Space Of British Identity

As one of Shakespeare’s most representative tragedies,King Lear explores the major important issues of the times,such as kinship and morality;inheritance and politics;nation and state through the dual narrative techniques of main plot and subplot.Scholars at home and abroad have made great achievements in the study of King Lear,mainly from the critical perspectives of political metaphor,image interpretation,language analysis,Biblical archetypes and cartography,which construct the research routine of King Lear.However,there are few systematic discussions on the strategy of construction of map space of British identity hidden under the text of the play,which constitutes the origin of this research.As an outstanding representative of political cartography,British scholar J.B.Harley clearly points out that the map is a kind of discourse in the context of power.Map is not an inert record of the landscape or passive reflection of the world,but a form of discourse in social construction.At the same time,Harley also believes that map is a graphic language that needs to be decoded and studied in the context of a specific era(Harley 36).When it comes to the field of literary cartography,John Gillies proposes that map is an arbitrary model of any spatial image,that the existence of the map is regarded as a process rather than a product,a symbolic act rather than an indiscriminate artifact.And the space of the other,marginalized by the map,is deeply depicted in Shakespeare’s plays(Gillies 54).On the whole,J.B.Harley and John Gillies’ profound interpretations of the political dimension of the map are in line with the construction strategy of British nation-state identity in King Lear,thus providing a solid theoretical foundation and logical connection for this research.In addition to the introduction and conclusion,the main body of this thesis is divided into three chapters.The first chapter focuses on Lear’s imprecise pragmatic strategy of political cartography.In the meantime,when the British nation-state is invaded by the French,Albany and Cornwall temporarily put aside their contradictions and establish a British military alliance which has a profound political implication.The second chapter explores the presence of Dover and the absence of Calais.The “hidden Calais”,the other in the history of England,exists in order to serve the self-shaping of Dover and the power conception of the overseas colonial expansion during the reign of James I.The third chapter explores the profound spatial colonial implication behind the proposal of the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy to Cordelia in the play.And the pursuit of Cordelia by the Duke of Burgundy and the King of France is essentially a political imagination projected by France and Spain on England’s desire for power.The study finds that Lear,who divides his kingdom in front of the map,has become a dual paradoxical mirror image expression of the current monarch James I and the English Parliament.His pragmatic strategy of imprecise political cartography has weakened and blurred the political and physical geographical boundaries of England and Scotland on the map,thereby weakening the Scottishness of the subcultural foreign identity of the current monarch and the Catholic descent of his birth mother,thus maintaining the British community identity.Besides,in order to highlight the nobility of Britain,Shakespeare also portrays the Spain’s selfish and greedy nature.And the French polity is feminized and becomes the other of derogation.Spain and France thus fall victims to the British-centrism that praise themselves and derogates the other.