“Here at least / We shall be free”: The Places of English Renaissance Literature

Abstract

F lung far from his beloved vales of heaven, Satan takes possession of his infernal world: “Here wemay reign secure” (1.261). So the fallen rebel of Paradise Lost establishes his ownership of that location he now knows as hell, asserts his presence, indeed, his agency, “Here at least / We shall be free” (1.259–60). Deixis (“Here”) marks a frame, invites a spectator to come inside it. By its self-reflexivity, there is a potential for laying claim to agency, even calling attention to the act of asserting, as Heather Dubrow has shown. The space of the “here,” as Satan makes it, is immediately political: a space of freedom. Exile, refugee, migrant, settler, colonist: each a category of person to move across space to reach new, possibly permanent destinations. Domestic vagrancy on the one hand, long-distance international travel on the other: two distorting mirrors in which the Renaissance English saw themselves. Errands into the wilderness, pilgrimages, founders of a “City upon a Hill”: all those early modern motifs for experiencing forms of displacement and adherence to new political relations with those they left behind, with those they travelled with, and with local populations. Conveying fragments of older communities, developing as they detached from them, English Renaissance settlers occupied spaces caught between the originating world and the ones they were in the process of taking as their own. Theirs was a condition of ambivalence, fracture, and elasticity. Satan’s claims for freedom have come hard on the