by Peter Womack
There is something obsessive about writing cultural history. My book Shakespeare, the Sea and the Stage has just been published, but for years before that it sat in the back of my mind, mostly inert, but occasionally going off like a smoke alarm when somebody mentioned the sea.
In the Christmas 1862 issue of Dickens’s magazine All The Year Round, for example, there is a fictitious waiter called Christopher who introduces himself by explaining what being a waiter truly means, and then continues:
Having, I hope without offence to any quarter, offered such observations as I felt it my duty to offer, in a free country which has ever dominated the seas, on the general subject, I will now proceed to wait on the particular question.
Like quite a few Dickensian voices, this is conventional and bizarre at the same time. The companionable dining room of the West Country Hotel is abruptly juxtaposed with Britain’s mastery of the ocean. This comes about not because the waiter is a surrealist, but because the two subjects are connected by the automatic machinery of a cliché: sea power = liberty. For Christopher, it literally goes without saying that his freedom to express his opinions, on waitering or any other topic, is founded, as he later says, ‘on the broad basis of a wave-girt isle’.
What is the point of the connection? Arguably it starts from the nature of sea power as such. As George Orwell remarked, military dictatorships are everywhere, but there is no such thing as a naval dictatorship. A government may well use its army to coerce its own people, but not its navy – maritime violence essentially points outwards. This is why English champions of liberty (at different times Parliamentarian, Whig, or Liberal) have been suspicious of the idea of a ‘standing army’, but happy with the power of the Royal Navy. Battleships are the natural weapons of a free people.
Historically this distinction has sustained a myth of the British Empire as an inherently freedom-loving institution. According to this story, its adversaries – the early modern Hapsburgs, Bourbon and Napoleonic France, the imperial Germany of the early twentieth century – were land empires controlled by great armies and authoritarian ideologies (Catholicism, Jacobinism, Fascism), whereas the UK, on the contrary, prided itself on its Protestantism, its liberalism, and its fleet – or rather, its two fleets, the Royal Navy and the significantly named Merchant Navy. The imperial model was not so much conquest as commerce; this was the appropriate military configuration of a nation of shopkeepers.
The opposition of land and sea counted domestically as well as internationally. One unexpected cheerleader for the Navy was Jane Austen – not only (as the sentimental Janeite legend has it) because of her affection for her nautical brothers, but also because in her fiction the sea works to unlock the class-bound rigidities of the land. In Persuasion, especially, it is the naval characters who rescue the heroine from the desolate snobbery that seems to enclose her. They make money through their own energy and skill, and this releases them from the humiliations of inheritance, but at the same time their aura of warlike gallantry distances them from the vulgarity of ‘trade’. Standing, or as it were free-floating, outside the hierarchies that prevail on shore, they are in a position to liberate the landed gentry from itself.
Like other national myths, this one culminated in the Battle of Britain, but also perished there. There was the iconography of Dunkirk – the day the ‘little ships’ interrupted their holidays to rescue the British Army, an exploit which became, in J.B. Priestley’s adroitly sentimental account, a sort of apotheosis of the seaside. But almost simultaneously the Royal Navy’s status was being undermined by air raids on British cities, and by the speed with which the U.S. Navy was coming to ‘dominate the seas’ of the world. By April 1941, the diarist Harold Nicolson thought that ‘(although they are unaware of the fact) the British public have lost confidence in the power of the sea’. The trope of maritime freedom – the doctrine that Britons, ruling the waves, never never never will be slaves – turns out to have been a definingly imperial one, which could not convincingly survive the empire itself.
Feel sorry, then, for the nautical time traveller who, embarking in 1862 and stopping over in 1940, lands in the middle of the 2024 General Election. Everyone is talking about the Small Boats, which looks for a moment as if the Little Ships have been through Google Translate and back. The traveller will soon discover that the translation is more fundamental than that. Once again improvised ferries are crowding the Straits of Dover, but this time the freedom-loving islanders are not confronting foreign oppression. They are trying to stop its victims coming ashore.
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About the book
Explores the idea that Shakespeare’s dramatic writing, which powerfully represents the sea, also resembles it
- Provides both close and expansive readings of the figure of the sea in a wide range of Shakespeare plays
- Focussed comparisons with other dramatic voices, such as Plautus, Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, W.B. Yeats
- Brings to bear the histories of the sea, of theatre, of early modern English society, of Shakespeare reception, and of the British Empire in an interdisciplinary study
About the author
Peter Womack is Emeritus Professor of Literature and Drama at the University of East Anglia, where he taught courses on and around Shakespeare for thirty years. His books include Dialogue (2011), English Renaissance Drama (2006) and Ben Jonson (1986).
