Abstract
The Third Voyage of the London East India Company (1607–10), five of whose journals are herein fully published for the first time, rewards attention. Departing the year after King James licensed the Virginia Company, it was England’s first voyage to reach India and, on the way, the Arab island of Socotra. The foothold in Surat focused the merchants’ mobile attentions on India, where Portuguese power was waning and the Dutch were not, as in the Spice Islands, ascendant. The expedition’s heady profits quickened the fortunes of the nascent, cash-hungry East India Company. As the first Company voyage fully conceived and performed after King James had concluded peace with Spain and outlawed piracy, the voyage strived to implement a more irenic, sustainable commerce than the privateering vital to the Company’s formation.’ Beyond its economic and political importance, the expedition holds acute interest for literary scholars and theater historians. If the surviving transcripts of General William Keeling’s journal are, as most scholars have inferred, genuine—though he alone notes the performances—the Red Dragon’s crew staged Hamlet (twice) and Richard II (once) on the outbound voyage. These were the first productions of Shakespeare outside Europe.2 Putting an innovative spin on the discursive and performative culture of voyaging, Keeling’s men happened to initiate the global export of the canon that eventually became an important tool in the cultural work of colonization.
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Notes
On the East India Company’s finances, see William Robert Scott, The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish, and Irish joint Stock Companies to 1720, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912);
K. N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company. The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company, 1600–1640 (London: Cass; repr. New York: Kelley, 1965).
On privateering and corporate initiative, see Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, plunder, and settlement. Maritime enterprise and the genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
For an earlier overview, see Sir William Foster, England’s Quest of Eastern Trade (London: A and C Black, 1933).
On the first production, see Gary Taylor, “Hamlet in Africa 1607,” in Travel Knowledge. European “Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period, ed. Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna Singh (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 223–48.
Sir George Birdwood, ed., The First Letter Book of the East India Company: 1600–1619 (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1893), 16. Subsequent references in text.
Keeling in Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes (Glasgow: James MacLehose, 1905), 2:502–48;
unless otherwise indicated, citations of Purchas are to the 20-volume edition. Hawkins in Clements R. Markham, ed., The Hawkins’ Voyages during the Reigns of Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth, and James I (New York: Burt Franklin, n.d.; orig. pub. Hakluyt Society, 1878), 364 442 (voyage, 364–88); Finch in Purchas, Pilgrimes, 4:1–77 (voyage, 1–19); Middleton in Purchas, Pilgrimes, 3:51–60.
For voyage bibliographies, see Judith Farrington, “The First Twelve Voyages of the English East India Company, 1601–13: A Guide to Sources,” Indonesia and the Malay World 29, no. 85 (2001): 141–60.
See Bibliography for Bucke, Hearne and Finch, Keeling summary, Marlowe, and anonymous Hector journal. Extracts: P. E. H. Hair, ed, 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);
Taylor in Kamps and Singh, Travel Knowledge, 211–22. Abstracts: Clements R. Markham, The Voyages of Sir, James Lancaster, K t, to the East Indies (New York: Burt Franklin, n.d.; orig. pub. Hakluyt Society, 1877), 108–119.
On “cultural logistics”—a variant of cultural materialism that interrogates the interlocking energies of work, culture, decision making, and agency— see Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism. London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 6–8.
Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), xxv. Cf. Stephen Greenblatt on early modern European culture’s “immense confidence in its own centrality,” Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), 9.
See, inter alia, Mary Fuller, Voyages in Print. English Travel to America, 1576–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999);
Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk. English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
On trade in the Indian Ocean, see Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean. A History of People and the Sea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993);
G. R. Tibbetts, Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean before the Coming of the Portuguese (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1971);
G. W. B. Huntingford, trans. and ed., The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (London: Hakluyt Society, 1980). My thanks to Bernhard Klein on these sources.
On the Hector in Constantinople, see Thomas Dallam, The Diary of Master Thomas Dallam, 1599–1600, in Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant, ed. J. Theodore Bent (New York: Burt Franklin, n.d.; orig. pub. Hakluyt Society, 1893), 57–60.
Hamlet, 4.6.16, in Orgel and Braunmuller, 1381. Quotations of Shakespeare are from this edition. On the purchase and rechristening of the Malice Scourge (a.k.a. Mare Scourge), see Henry Stevens, ed., The Dawn of British Trade to the East Indies as Recorded in the Court Minutes of the East India Company, 1599–1603 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970; orig. pub., 1886), 20–33. Charter East India Company members in Birdwood, First Letter Book, 164–66;
on Cumberland, see Kenneth R. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering. English Privateering during the Spanish War, 1585–1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), esp. 70–80.
Richard T. Spence, The Privateering Earl (Phoenix Mill, UK, 1995. Stroud, Gloucestershire: A. Sutton), 179; launch noted 127.
See commission in Birdwood, 114–36. Useful accounts of the East-Indian market include Holden Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600–1800 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976);
Neils Steensgaard, The Asian Trade Revolution of the Seventeenth Century. The East India Companies and the Decline of the Caravan Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971);
John Keay, The Honourable Company. A History of the English East India Company (London: HarperCollins, 1993).
On the first two voyages, see Sir William Foster, The Voyages of Sir James Lancaster to Brazil and the East Indies, 1591–1603 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1940);
Sir William Foster, The Voyage of Sir Henry Middleton to the Moluccas, 1604–1606 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1943).
See Sir William Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 1615–1619; Barbour, Before Orientalism, 146–93. Foster publishes the Indian journals of Hawkins and Finch in Sir William Foster, Early Travels in India, 1583–1619 (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), 60–187. Hawkins’ remuneration estimated in DNB (Dictionary of National Biography).
The Court Book (see Bibliography) names attendees of Courts of Committees, the executive body. Minutes of 7 September 1614 meeting in Sir William Foster, The Voyage of Thomas Best to the East Indies, 1612–1614 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1934), 283.
On Keeling and his wife, see Michael Strachan and Boies Penrose, eds., The East India Company Journals of Captain William Keeling and Master Thomas Bonner, 1615–1617 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 5–6;
W. Noel Sainsbury, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, East Indies, China and Japan, 1513–1616 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1862; repr. Vaduz, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1964), 333 (#787), 379 (#899), 385 (#912); Foster, Embassy, 18n;
Alan and Veronica Palmer, Who’s Who in Shakespeare’s England (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981, 1999), 138.
Anthony Marlowe, “Aboard the Hector … 22 June 1608,” India Office Records, Original Correspondence, E/3/1, No. 3; cf. Charles Danvers and Sir William Foster, eds., Letters Received by the East India Company from its Servants in the East (London: Sampson Low, 1896–1902, repr. Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1968), 1:13.
Roe on Hawkins in Foster , Early Travels, 70; Sir William Foster, The Journal of John Jourdain, 1608–1617 (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1945), 156, 162.
W. H. Moreland, ed, Peter Floris His Voyage to the East Indies in the Globe, 1611–1615 (London: Hakluvt Society, 1934), 60, 61.
Adam Max Cohen, Shakespeare and Technology. Dramatizing Early Modern Technological Revolutions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 51f.
Birdwood, First Letter Book, 329; Sir William Foster, The Voyage of Nicholas Downton to the East Indies, 1614–15 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1939), 21–22. Strachan speculates that the Matthew Molyneux of the subsequent voyages was not the Hector’s master on the third, but he produces no evidence (Journals, 183n). It is not uncommon for a single agent to provoke contradictory testimony in East India Company papers.
Birdwood, First Letter Book, 287. On Bezoar stones, see Arthur Coke Burnell, ed., The Voyage of John Huyghen Van Linschoten to the East Indies (New York: Burt Franklin, orig. pub. Hakluyt Society, 1885), 2:143; Foster, Embassy, 178n.
Richard Wilson, “Visible Bullets: Tamburlaine the Great and Ivan the Terrible,” ELH 62 (1995): 48, 63n7;
Park Honan, Christopher Marlowe, Poet Spy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 345.
British Library, Lansdowne Manuscript 241, f51, f318; cf. Sir William Foster, The Travels of John Sanderson in the Levant, 1584–1602 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1931), 16, 174. Sanderson notes “Mad Marlowe” among his debtors (Lansdowne 241, f 51 v; Foster, Sanderson, 287).
On the Portuguese in Sierra Leone, see P. E. H. Hair, “Hamlet in an Afro-Portuguese Setting: New Perspectives on Sierra Leone in 1607,” in Africa Encountered: European Contacts and Evidence, 1450–1700 (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1997), Sec. 4:21–42. Citrus numbered by Hearne and Finch, 179.
On John Hawkins, see P. E. H. Hair, “Protestants as Pirates, Slavers, and Proto-missionaries: Sierra Leone in 1568 and 1582,” in Africa Encountered, Sec. 2:203–24; Nick Hazelwood, The Queen’s Slave Trader (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004);
on the arson, Richard Halduyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (Glasgow, UK: MacLehose, 1904–**1914), 11:292, 202–7. Unless otherwise noted, Halduyt citations are to the 12 vol. edition.
Dudley Digges, The Defence of Trade (London: William Stansby, 1615; repr. Amsterdam: Da Capo, 1968), 36.
On the company’s discursive protocols, see Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink. Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
On Sandys, see Jonathan Haynes, The Humanist as Traveler (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986).
Notes to Cecil printed in E. G. R. Taylor, Original Writingser Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts. 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Soc., 1935), 2:465–68.
E. G. R. Taylor, Original Writings, 2:476–82; quotation 478. See also Heidi Brayman Hackel and Peter Mancall, “Richard Hakluyt the Younger’s Notes for the East India Company in 1601,” Huntington Library Quarterly 67, no. 3 (2004): 423–36.
On the capture, see Foster, England’s Quest, 137–38; Theodore B. Leinwand, Theatre, finance, and society in early modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 120–28.
See, for example, Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions; Jonathan P. A. Sell, Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1569–1613 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006).
Cf. T. J. Cribb, “Writing up the Log: The Legacy of Hakluyt,” in Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit, ed. Steve Clark (London: Zed, 1999), 100–112.
See, for example, Birdwood, First Letter Book, 324. On the East India Company’s relations with workers, see Richmond Barbour, “A Multi-national Corporation: Foreign Labor in the London East India Company,” in A Companion to the Global Renaissance, ed. Jyotsna Singh (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 129–48.
Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 1:xliv (1904); Richard Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation (London: George Bishop, Ralph Newberie, and Christopher Barker, 1589), 280 (original italics). On travel wagers, see Anthony Parr, “Bills of Adventure,” Renaissance Mad Voyages (forthcoming). On Coryat, see Michael Strachan, The Life and Adventures of Thomas Coryate (London: Oxford University Press, 1962); Barbour, Before Orientalism, 114–45.
Ania Loomba, “Shakespearean Transformations,” in Shakespeare and National Culture, ed. John J. Joughin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 113.
Sir Sidney Lee, A Life of William Shakespeare (London: Smith, Elder, 1898), 369. Lee was unaware of the 1825 transcript; see Appendix.
Sydney Race, “J. P. Collier’s Fabrications,” Notes & Queries 195 (1950): 345–46; 196 (1951): 513–15; 197 (1952): 181–82 (quotation 182). In John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), Arthur and Janet Ing Freeman demonstrate that Collier could not have been Gunthio, 2:1039–40.
William Foster, Notes & Queries 145 (21 July 1900): 41–42; 195 (1950): 414–15; quotation 415.
F. S. Boas, Shakespeare and the Universities (London: D. Appleton, 1923), notes “the school plays which were so prominent a feature of Tudor life” (93). Cf. G. Blakemore Evans, Notes and Queries 196 (21 July 1951): 313–15; 197 (15 March 1952): 127–28.
Gerard Eades Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590–1642 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971, 1984), 52.
Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 102n.
On Spencer, see Charles Whitney, “The Devil His Due: Mayor John Spencer, Elizabethan Civic Antitheatricalism, and The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 14 (2001): 168–84. On Spencer’s role in the Company, see Stevens, Dawn of British Trade, 245; Birdwood, First Letter Book, 164, 281.
Birdwood, First Letter Book, 99, 165; see also E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare. A Study of Facts and Problems (Oxford: Clarendon, 1930), 1:132, 408.
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© 2009 Richmond Barbour
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Barbour, R. (2009). Introduction. In: The Third Voyage Journals. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100886_1
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