Fortification and Its Discontents from Shakespeare to Milton

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

“…In a recent monograph, Adam McKeown demonstrates that the militarized city functions as 'an ideal not only of design but also of social and political organization, which was developed extensively but also critiqued in utopian literature of the period'. 12 A similar argument can be made about the fortified nation, which was not simply a fantastical castle-in-the-sky but a military strategy and figurative trope with real purchase in late Tudor England, and Greene's comedy shares much of the ambivalence of the utopian texts vetted by McKeown. 13 While Barbara Traister, Deanne Williams, and Brian Walsh have incisively analyzed the nationalistic overtones of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Greene's play demands reassessment as the most significant commentary on a national wall-building project in early modern English literature.…”