'Inland' is used five times in Shakespeare between Merchant of Venice and As You Like It. Portia, the first character to use the word, uses it in a simple geographical sense that depends on the opposition of land and sea:
So doth the greater glory dim the less:
A substitute shines brightly as a king
Until a king be by, and then his state
Empties itself, as doth an inland brook
Into the main of waters.
(MeV 5.1.93-97)
The characteristically Shakespearean inflection of the word appears most clearly in Henry V, when the king worries about a Scottish invasion prompted by his expedition to France. The Archbishop of Canterbury seeks to reassure him:
They of those marches, gracious sovereign,
Shall be a wall sufficient to defend
Our inland from the pilfering borderers.
(He5 1.2.139-141)
But Henry worries less about such "coursing snatchers," and instead fears "the main intendment of the Scot." Whether main is phonetic echo or a deliberate pun, the threat from Scotland is figured as a tidal wave:
For you shall read that great-grandfather
Never went with his forces into France
But that the Scot on his unfurnish'd kingdom
Came pouring like the tide into a breach,
(1.2.144-147)
A distinct political geography emerges from this exchange: qua land, the inland is threatened by the sea; qua England, it is threatened by unruly forces beyond the margins that are precariously held in check by the "marches."
We next hear the word from the mouth of Orlando, who, very much as a "pilfering borderer" or "coursing snatcher," disturbs the peaceful picnic of the exiled Duke:
Duke S. Art thou thus bolden'd, man, by thy distress?
Or else a rude despiser of good manners,
That in civility thou seem'st so empty?Orl. You touch'd my vein at first. The thorny point
Of bare distress hath ta'en from me the show
Of smooth civility: yet am I inland bred
And know some nurture.
(AYL 2.7.91-97)
'Inland' here means the opposite of what we call 'outlandish', and an in/out opposition implicitly underlies the Duke's offer that "your gentleness shall force, / More than your force move us to gentleness" (2.7.102-103).(While Shakespeare does not use 'outlandish', the word, meaning 'foreign' goes back to Old English and has the same form and meaning as the German 'Ausland'. But Shakespeare's "inland bred" is not the opposite of an implied contemporary "outlandish." According to the OED, the modern meaning of that term is not attested until the eighteenth century).
'The 'inland' is thus the sphere of civilization ruled by gentleness but protected by force against force. As a creature of peace, the inlander is a man of love and refinement. When Orlando hears in Rosalind/Ganymede's speech a "finer" accent than could be acquired by growing up in the forest, Rosalind explains that "an old religious uncle of mine taught me to speak, who was in his youth an inland man, one that knew courtship too well, for there he fell in love" (3.2.343-346).
Hotspur's sarcastic portrayal of a courtier out of his element on the battlefield (1H4 1.3.33-64) is very much a picture of an inlander, just as Hal in his sketch of "the Hotspur of the North" draws his adversary in the most outlandish colors. In Falstaff's apotheosis of sherry, the inlander's aversion to war is overcome by the "spirit":
It illumineth the face, which as a beacon gives warning to all the rest of this little kingdom, man, to arm, and then all the vital commoners and inland petty spirits muster me all to their great captain, the heart, who great and puff'd up with this retinue, doth any deed of courage; and this valor comes of sherris. (2H4 4.3.107-113)
If the civilized inland is "petty" and must be roused to
vigilance and deeds of courage, the implications of Falstaff's soliloquy cast a shadow on
greatness. The "little kingdom" of man returns in Julius Caesar
(2.2.67-68), and in Macbeth (1.3.140), where it is shaken by assassination and
murder, and the intoxication of valor is a major theme of the latter play.