Building a Wall Around Tudor England: Coastal Forts and Fantasies of Border Control in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay

Abstract

This article examines the border wall and the image of fortress England in RobertGreene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and early 1590s nationalist discourse. While Greene recognizes the need for an international outlook in geopolitics, Bacon's wall speaks to contemporary interest in coastal fortifications and brass ordnance in the wake of the Spanish Armada. Greene lampoons the wall as magical thinking, but the play clings to metaphorical walls as more cost-effective symbols of national security and autonomy. The play's awkward combination of pan-European sentiment and strident nationalism offers a prophetic commentary on post-Brexit Britain.

Roman walls in English Renaissance writing

“…14 It could also, though, be related to a common cultural fantasy about the feasibility and desirability of walls made of brass. Todd Borlik, noting that 'The Roman poet Horace speaks of Troy as protected by murus aeneus, or brazen walls' 15 and that both The Faerie Queene and Poly-Olbion have Merlin planning to surround Carmarthen with a brass wall, explains that in early modern usage the word 'brass' encompassed what we now call bronze, and the two were only differentiated in the mideighteenth century. Both are copper alloys, and brass simply includes zinc whereas bronze is mingled with tin.…”