The most comprehensive edition of the surviving documents is P. E. H. Hair’s Sierra Leone and the English in 1607: Extracts from the Unpublished Journals of the Keeling Voyage to the East Indies, Occasional Paper No. 4 (Freetown: Institute of African Studies, University of Sierra Leone, 1981); although Hair’s extracts omit some passages and contain some errors, they are generally accurate and relatively complete for the days in Sierra Leone. In citing the manuscript journals (from the originals), I supplement the manuscript folios with page numbers from Hair. All the extant manuscripts are now in the British Library: William Hawkins, Egerton MS 2100; Anthony Marlowe, Cotton MS Titus B VIII; John Hearne and William Finch (aboard the Dragon; see extracts), India Office MS L/MAR/A/v; Unidentified, India Office MS L/MAR/A/iv. This fourth manuscript breaks off abruptly at the foot of a page, after entry for 30 August, then begins again 18 February, then ends mid-entry 12 March.
Google Scholar
The most thorough early eyewitness account of flora and fauna in the estuary is André Donelha, An Account of Sierra Leone and the Rivers of Guinea of Cape Verde, ed. Avelino Teixero da Mota, trans. P. E. H. Hair (Lisbon: Junta de Investigates Cientificas do Ultramar, 1977).
Google Scholar
In quoting Hamlet throughout this essay, I cite the text of the Second Quarto, with modernized spelling and punctuation, occasionally emended. For what seem to me necessary emendations of the Second Quarto (as opposed to authorial variants), see the textual notes to Hamlet in Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor et al., William Shakespeare:A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 396–420. My conclusions would not be significantly altered if Keeling’s crew used the 1603 edition.
Google Scholar
Manuel Álvares, Ethiopia Minor and a Geographical Account of the Province of Sierra Leone (ca. 1615), trans. P. E. H. Hair (Liverpool: privately published, 1990), f. 62–62v (ch. 4, p. 4), f. 77 (ch. 10, p. 3). For ear and nose rings in particular, see André Alvares de Almada, Brief Treatise on the Rivers of Guinea (ca. 1594), trans. P. E. H. Hair (Liverpool: privately published, 1984), ch. 15, p. 5 (and commentary note). Hair’s “interim translations” have no through pagination; Álvares is cited by chapter and page, Almada by chapter and paragraph.
Google Scholar
Arnold Aronson, “Shakespeare in Virginia, 1751–1863,” in Shakespeare in the South: Essays on Performance, ed. Philip C. Kolin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1983), 25; Charles H. Shattuck, Shakespeare on the American Stage from the Hallams to Edwin Booth (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976).
Google Scholar
For early German performances, see Simon Williams, Shakespeare on the German Stage, Volume I: 1586–1914 (Cambridge: University Press, 1990), 27–45; for the relationship between Shakespeare’s play and the German adaptation, Bestrafte Brudermord, see Harold Jenkins, ed., Hamlet, Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1982), 118–22.
Google Scholar
Helen Phelps Bailey, Hamlet in France from Voltaire to Laforgue (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1964), 1–23; Williams, Shakespeare on the German Stage, 1–26, 46–87.
Google Scholar
Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), 122–24, 167–68, 317. There are more than 20 verse translations of the play into Polish. For Hamlet in Russia, see Laurence Senelick, Gordon Craig’s Moscow “Hamlet”: A Reconstruction (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982); Grigori Kozintsev, Shakespeare:Time and Conscience, trans. Joyce Vining (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966); and Eleanor Rowe, Hamlet: A Window on Russia (New York: New York University Press, 1976).
Google Scholar
Takeshi Murakami, “Shakespeare and Hamlet in Japan: A Chronological Overview,” in “Hamlet” and Japan, ed. Yoshiko Uéno (New York: AMS Press, 1995), 250, 252.
Google Scholar
Barry Gaines, “Shakespeare Translations in Former British Colonies of Africa,” International Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed. Armin Paul Frank, Norbert Greiner et al. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001), article 374.
Google Scholar
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 420.
Google Scholar
Terence Hawkes, That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process (London: Methuen, 1986), 94.
Google Scholar
P. E. H. Hair, “The Spelling and Connotation of the Toponym ‘Sierra Leone’ since 1461,” Sierra Leone Studies, 18 (1966): 43–58.
Google Scholar
Frederick S. Boas, Shakespeare and the Universities and Other Studies in Elizabethan Drama (New York: Appleton, 1923), 95.
Google Scholar
Ania Loomba, “Shakespearian transformations,” in Shakespeare and National Culture, ed. John J. Joughlin (Manchester: University Press, 1997), 111. Loomba incorrectly states that “two performances of Shakespeare took place aboard the Hector while the two ships were anchored in Sierra Leone”; the single performance in Sierra Leone clearly took place aboard the Red Dragon.
Google Scholar
Dennis Kennedy, “Introduction: Shakespeare without His Language,” in Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance, ed. Dennis Kennedy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 2.
Google Scholar
See extracts. For two independent nineteenth-century transcriptions of these additional entries from Keeling’s (now lost) manuscript journal, see Narratives of Voyages towards the North-west, ed. Thomas Rundall (London: Hakluyt Society, 1849), 231, and G. Blakemore Evans, “The Authenticity of Keeling’s Journal Entries on ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Richard II,’” Notes and Queries, 196 (1951), 313–15; 197 (1952), 127–28. At the beginning of the text of Keeling’s journal printed by Samuel Purchas in Haklytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrims (London, 1625), Purchas notes that “This journal of Captain Keeling’s … I have been bold to so shorten as to express only the most necessary observations for sea or land affairs” (Part I, book iii, 188); the printed text skips from August 22 (189) to September 7 (190).
Google Scholar
“Master William Keeling, another of our principal merchants,” The Voyage of Sir Henry Middleton to the Moluccas 1604–1606, ed. Sir William Foster (London: Hakluyt Society, 1943), lxxxviii (quoting Middleton’s commission from the Company).
Google Scholar
The Journal of John Jourdain, 1608–1617, ed. William Foster (Cambridge, UK: Hakluyt Society, 1935), xxix.
Google Scholar
The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 1615–1619, as narrated in his journal and correspondence, ed. William Foster (London: Hakluyt Society, 1899), 18.
Google Scholar
Philip Larson, The East India Company: A History (London: Longman, 1993), 25–26.
Google Scholar
It was founded with an initial capital investment of only £30,000; by contrast, the Dutch East India company, founded in 1602, began with £540,000 (18 times as much). In the first decade of the seventeenth century, the English sent a mere 17 ships around Africa to the East Indies; the Dutch sent 60. See Brian Gardner, The East India Company: A History (New York: McCall, 1972), 32.
Google Scholar
Captain John Hawkins on March 9, 1608 noted “our master’s plot being a Portingale plot”: see “A Journal kept by m[e William Hawkins in] my voyage to the East I[ndies, beginning the 28 of] March a0 1607 …”, in The Hawkins’ Voyages during the reigns of Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth, and James I, ed. Clement R. Markham (London: Hakluyt Society, 1878), 379.
Google Scholar
P. E. H. Hair, “Guinea,” in The Hakluyt Handbook, ed. D. B. Quinn, 2 vols (London: Hakluyt Society, 1974), 204.
Google Scholar
Adam Jones, “Sources on Early Sierra Leone (22): The Visit of a Dutch Fleet in 1625,” Africana Research Bulletin, 15 (1986): 51, 61.
Google Scholar
William Scouten, “The Sixth Circum-Navigation,” in Purchas, Pilgrims, II, i, 88–9. For another account of this same voyage, see P. E. H. Hair, “Sources on Early Sierra Leone (10): Schouten and Le Maire, 1615,” Africana Research Bulletin, 7 (1977): 36–75; it specifies “a brother-in-law of the king” (66). Hair also identifies the source of the text printed by Purchas (who edited, abbreviated, and sometimes misunderstood it, sometimes conflating material from different days, or misdating entries); this is significant in relation to his abbreviation of Reeling’s journal. Purchas, for instance, describes the interpreter as a “Moore,” where his source reads “black”—an important distinction, because Lucas Fernandez was a Christian.
Google Scholar
P. E. H. Hair, “Hamlet in an Afro-Portuguese Setting: New Perspectives on Sierra Leone in 1607,” History in Africa, 5 (1978): 36–37.
CrossRef
Google Scholar
P. E. H. Hair, “Early sources on Sierra Leone: (5) Barreira (letter of 23.2.1606),” Africana Research Bulletin, 5 (1975): 101.
Google Scholar
John Keay, The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 39.
Google Scholar
The Voyages of Sir James Lancaster, Knight, to the East Indies, ed. Clements R. Markham (London: Hakluyt Society, 1877), 113, 111.
Google Scholar
The Register of Letters etc of the Governour and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies 1600–1619, ed. Sir George Birdwood and William Foster (London: 1893; reprint Quaritch, 1966), 199 (Commission, item 11).
Google Scholar
Jean Boulegue and Jean Suret-Canale, “The Western Atlantic coast,” in History of West Africa, ed. by J. F. Ade Ajayi and Michael Crowder, 3rd ed. (Longman: New York, 1985), I, 507.
Google Scholar
P. E. H. Hair, “Sources on Early Sierra Leone: (21) English Voyages of the 1580s—Drake, Cavendish and Cumberland,” Africana Research Bulletin, 13 (1982): 62–8.
Google Scholar
P. E. H. Hair, “Sources on Early Sierra Leone: (7) Barreira, Letter of 9.3.1607,” Africana Research Bulletin, 6 (1976): 66, 70; Hair, “Sources on Early Sierra Leone: (8) Bartolomeu André’s Letter, 1606,” Africana Research Bulletin, 6 (1976): 46; Adam Jones, “The Kquoja Kingdom: A Forest State in Seventeenth Century West Africa,” Paideuma, 29 (1983): 29.
Google Scholar
P. E. H. Hair, “The Abortive Portuguese Settlement of Sierra Leone 1570–1625,” in Vice-Almirante A. Teixeira de Mota: In Memorium, 2 vols. (Lisbon, 1987), I, 171–208.
Google Scholar
For the earliest contact, see The Voyages of Cadamosto, and other documents on Western Africa in the second half of the fifteenth century, trans. and ed. G. R. Crone (London: Hakluyt Society, 1937), xx, xxvii, 81. On early missionary activity, see P. E. H. Hair, “Christian Influences in Sierra Leone before 1787.” Journal of Religion in Africa, 27 (1997): 3–14.
Google Scholar
John W. Blake, West Africa: Quest for God and Gold 1454–1578 (London: Curzon Press, 1977), 188–92.
Google Scholar
George E. Brooks, Landlords and Strangers: Ecology, Society, and Trade in Western Africa, 1000–1630 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), 167–83.
Google Scholar
K. N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company (London: F. Cass, 1965), 105–6.
Google Scholar
Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), 102.
Google Scholar
Chaudhuri, East India Company, 105; Michael Strachan and Boies Penrose, ed., The East India Company Journals of Captain William Keeling and Master Thomas Bonner, 1615–1617 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 45. This was also true of other Europeans voyaging to India: see C. R. Boxer, From Lisbon to Goa, 1500–1750: Studies in Portuguese Maritime Enterprise (London: Variorum Reprints, 1984), I, 58–59.
Google Scholar
N. A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (London: Collins, 1986), 45; P. E. H. Hair and J. D. Alsop, English Seamen and Traders in Guinea 1553–1565, Studies in British History, 31 (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1992): 346–7. For books aboard ship on Keeling’s 1617 voyage, see Strachan and Penrose, Keeling and Bonner, 68, 95.
Google Scholar
For this affective community, see Gary Taylor, “Feeling Bodies,” in Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century, ed. Jonathan Bate, Jill L. Levenson, and Dieter Mehl (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 258–79.
Google Scholar
Chaudhuri, East India Company, 46, citing Court Book, III, 211–12, September 7, 1614; The Voyage of Thomas Best to the East Indies, 1612–14, ed. Sir William Foster (London: Hakluyt Society, 1934), 282–83.
Google Scholar
Claire Sponsler, “Medieval America: Drama and Community in the English Colonies, 1580–1610,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 28 (1998): 453–78.
Google Scholar
Sydney Race, “J. P. Collier’s fabrications,” Notes and Queries, 195 (1950), 345–46; 196 (1951), 513–15; 197 (1952), 181–82.
Google Scholar
For the authenticity of the documents see—in addition to previously cited studies by F. S. Boas, G. Blakemore Evans, and P.E.H. Hair — E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930), II, 334. Keeling’s surviving journal for the 1617 voyage demonstrates the normality of routines of text-production which meant some men were “continually writing” on board ship (Keeling and Bonner, 104, 119, 127, 165). Perhaps because he was aware of such conditions, the authenticity of the Keeling entries was defended—in Notes and Queries, 145 (1900), 41–42, and 195 (1950), 414–15—by William Foster, an archivist and scholar well-known to historians of the East India Company but less familiar to literary critics: for his “meticulous accuracy” and “vast knowledge of the India Office records,” see C. F. Beckingham, “William Foster and the Records of the India Office,” in Compassing the Vaste Globe of the Earth: Studies in the History of the Hakluyt Society 1846–1996, ed. R. C. Bridges and P. E. H. Hair (London: Hakluyt Society, 1996), 191–99. Foster’s suspicions of Purchas as an editor/abridger were no doubt based, in part, upon his editing of The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe (1899), where he was able to compare the Purchas printed abridgement with its manuscript source: “his editing of this particular journal is a very bad piece of work. That he should cut it down to a third or less … while leaving untouched many trivialities … that he should excise passages vital to the comprehension of others which were allowed to stand; that his dates should often be wrong; and that the carelessness of his copyist (or his printer) should be allowed to make nonsense of important passages, will scarcely admit of excuse” (lxiii).
Google Scholar
T. J. King, Casting Shakespeare’s Plays: London Actors and Their Roles, 1590–1642 (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1992), 88.
Google Scholar
An Elizabethan in 1582: The Diary of Richard Madox, Fellow of All Souls, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (London: Hakluyt Society, 1976), 195 (September 24).
Google Scholar
W. W. Greg, Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses: Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), 300–5.
Google Scholar
For summaries of scholarship on early modern theatre conditions, see for instance Alan C. Dessen, “Shakespeare and the theatrical conventions of his time,” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 85–100, and Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History, ed. Jonathan Bate and Russell Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 10–44.
Google Scholar
Peter Floris, his voyage to the East Indies in the Globe, 1611–1615, ed. W. H. Moreland (London: Hakluyt Society, 1934).
Google Scholar
See, for instance, Eldred Jones, Othello’s Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama (London: Oxford University Press [“on behalf of … the University College of Sierra Leone”], 1965); Winthrop P. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Kim E Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).
Google Scholar
Otherwise, the first recognized translation of Hamlet into Portuguese was Oliveira Silva’s text for a performance in Brazil by João Caetano in 1835; the first translation published in Portugal itself was by Dom Luis (king of Portugal) in 1877. See Eugênio Gomes, Shakespeare no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Ministry of Education and Culture, 1961). My thanks to Michael Warren for this reference.
Google Scholar
Laura Bohannan, “Shakespeare in the Bush,” Natural History, 75 (1966), 28–33.
Google Scholar
Valentim Fernandes, Description de la Côte Occidentale d’Afrique, ed. Th. Monod, A. Teixeira da Mota, R. Mauny (Bissao: Centro de Estudos da Guine Portuguesa, 1951), 81–97; excerpts translated in Christopher Fyfe, Sierra Leone Inheritance (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 28. This practice, recorded at the beginning of the sixteenth century, was still in place after the Mane invasions, in 1582: “if the king die, leaving his sons under years of discretion to govern, then he appointeth the eldest of his kindred to be his protector, who shall govern the kingdom; but if the king’s son during this protector’s life come to his years, yet he, the protector, will be king during his own life” (August 22, in Madox, Diary, 308). Álvares, early in the seventeenth century, makes the same observation repeatedly: ff. 58, 68v, 89v (3,1; 6,4; 15, 5–6).
Google Scholar
See Janine Brutt-Griffler, English as an International Language: Historical, Linguistic, and Pedagogical Dimensions, Bilingual Editions and Bilingualism (Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2001), ch. 4.
Google Scholar
P. E. H. Hair, “Protestants as Pirates, Slavers, and Proto-missionaries: Sierra Leone 1568 and 1582,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 21 (1970): 215.
CrossRef
Google Scholar
John N Morris, “Hamlet at Sea,” in A Schedule of Benefits (New York: Athenaeum, 1987). My thanks to Peter Holland for calling this poem to my attention. As poets are permitted to do, Morris gets many of the facts wrong.
Google Scholar