BORDER METAPHORS show up in two recent critical treatments of Shake speare's plays. At first glance, one might see little connection between Alexander Leggatt's Shakespeare's Tragedies: Violation and Identity and Judith Weil's Service and Dependency in Shakespeare's Plays, other than they are both written by scholars of Shakespeare. Yet both books are interested in identity, and Leggatt and Weil each use the metaphor of borders or boundaries, among other things, to discuss their subjects. While border metaphors are not new to Shakespeare Studies, they are not as common as they are in American Studies, especially in Chicana /o writing, where border theory and border literature have become key ideas to engage issues of nation, culture, gender, and sexuality (for example, see Hicks). In Renaissance Studies, the borders have been mainly geographical and interest has been on national identity (see for example, Hopkins). While neither Leggatt nor Weil deal directly with geographical borders in Shakespeare, each scholar attends to various borders to explore representations of identity in Shakespearean drama. As his title suggests, Leggatt is primarily interested in violation and identity. He argues that Lavinia's violation in Titus Andronicus is a foundational moment in the beginning of Shakespeare's career that resonates throughout many of the later tragedies including Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. Leggatt finds it useful to consider a whole list of boundaries crossed within the plays to explore the ways the plays "question not just what we do to each other, but who we are" (7). For Leggatt, meaningful boundaries are constantly negotiated (for example, between stage and audience and actor and role, as well as within the world of the play). Each act of crossing can be a kind of violation, one that can echo throughout a play.
