This book analyses three Shakespearean plays that particularly deal with abusive forms of banishment:King Richard II, Coriolanus,andKing Lear.In these plays, the abuses of power are triggered by fearless speeches that question the legitimacy of power and are misinterpreted as breaches of allegiance; in these plays, both the bold speech of the fearless speaker and the performative sentence of the banisher trigger the relentless dynamics of whatDeleuze and Guattari termed deterritorialisation. This book approaches the central question of the abusive denial of territory from various angles: linguistic, legal and ethical, physical and psychological. Various strategies of resistance are explored: illegal return, which takes the form of a frontal counterattack employing a war machine; ruse and the experience of internal(ised) exile; and mental escape, which nonetheless may lead to madness, exhaustion or heartbreak.

Pascale Drouet is Professor in Early Modern British Literature at the University of Poitiers in France

Introduction

Part I: The dynamic of deterritorialisation inKing Richard II,King Lear andCoriolanus
1 Swearing allegiance or questioning power
2 Abuse of power and banishment: from effet de retour to unnaturalness
3 The talion effect: deterritorialisation for deterritorialisaion

Part II: The dynamic of riposte inKing Richard II andCoriolanus
4 The politics of illegal return
5 The necessity of the war machine
6 Alternatives to the war machine

Part III: The experience of internal(ised) exile inKing Lear
7 Dissembling and avoiding banishment
8 Assuming otherness, or the spiral of degradation
9 Home as a foreign elsewhere

Part IV: The dialectic of endurance and exhaustion inKing Richard IIandKing Lear
10 Mental spaces and types of interiority
11 The limits of endurance and the signs of exhaustion
12 Maps of emotions

Conclusion
Bibliography
Index