Abstract
The broad yet poignant reflection on the Mediterranean as a cultural signifier in this epigraph points to the route taken by the essays in this book. The word “remapping” in the title refers to discursive representations of the Mediterranean in early modern English literary and nonliterary writings. The essays in Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings2 address the Mediterranean from a variety of perspectives, reflecting recent scholarly interests in, and definitions of, Anglo-Mediterranean contacts. Some of those definitions in these essays take the Mediterranean to mean a geographical reality and an area of Anglo-Ottoman trade and diplomacy. For others, it implies early modern imperialism. In this volume, the Mediterranean is subsumed under a more specific category of the eastern Mediterranean as a region onto which Renaissance England projected discursively, if not in reality, its colonizing fantasies. The essays in Remapping the Mediterranean World examine how early modern English imagination conceptualized the intermingling categories of sameness and difference, of otherness and familiarity, which were produced through complex and often ambiguous contacts between Renaissance England and the Mediterranean, especially the eastern Mediterranean.
The Mediterranean is not merely history … not merely belonging.
—Predrag Matvejević, The Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape1
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Notes
Predrag Matvejević, Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape, trans. Michael Henry Heim (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 10, 12.
Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 7.
David Abulafia, “Introduction,” in The Mediterranean in History, ed. David Abulafia (Los Angeles: The Paul Getty Museum, 2003), p. 11.
This is a different question (it concerns scholarly approaches and methods) from the questions of the etymology and meanings of the “Mediterranean Sea,” succinctly summarized by Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave, 2003), p. 33.
See Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance 1545–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
The volume Shakespeare and the Mediterranean brings out a number of essays on Italy and the Mediterranean that mostly look at Italy as a discursive influence, intertext, or direct influence in Shakespeare’s works. Other sources that deal with the Anglo-Italian connections in the Renaissance, include: Mario Praz, Shakespeare e l’Italia (Firenze: F. le Monnier, 1963),
Ernesto Gillo, Shakespeare and Italy (Glasgow: Privately printed by Robert Maclehouse and Co., the University of Glasgow, 1949),
David C. McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Myth of Venice (Newark: University of Delaware, 1990),
Michèle Marrapodi, A.J. Hoenselaars, Marcello Cappuzzo, and L. Falzon Santucci, Shakespeare’s Italy: Functions of Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993),
Murray J. Levith, Shakespeare’s Italian Settings and Plays (London: Macmillan Press, 1989),
and Michèle Marrapodi and A.J. Hoenselaars, The Italian World of English Renaissance Drama: Cultural Exchange and Intertextuality (Newark: University of Delaware Press, London: Associated University Presses, 1998),
and Jonathan Bate, “The Elizabethans in Italy,” in Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, ed. Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michèle Willems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 55–74. In her essay “Shakespeare’s Greek World: The Temptations of the Sea” (in Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in Renaissance Drama, ed. John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan [Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, London: Associated University Presses, 1998], pp. 107–28), Sara Hanna provides a good survey of early modern, especially Shakespeare’s, appropriations of Greece.
I am referring to Jerry Brotton’s argument, presented at the literary festival in Hay-on-Wye in June 2004 and reported by John Ezard in an article in the British newspaper The Guardian, that a hitherto unnoticed letter from Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I’s “security chief and spymaster,” to William Harborne shows that it was the Ottomans’ maneuvers off the Mediterranean coast of Africa meant to occupy and split King Philip II’s fleet and not Sir Francis Drake’s “swashbuckling” that helped to defeat the Spanish Armada. Ezard quotes Brotton as saying: “So alongside all the stories we’re told at school of why the Spanish Armada failed to conquer Britain and destroy Protestantism, we should add another reason: the Anglo-Ottoman alliance brokered by Elizabeth, Walsingham [and others].” See John Ezard, “Why we must thank the Turks, not Drake, for defeating the Armada,” The Guardian, June 1, 2004. See, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1228687,00.html (accessed June 20, 2006). While Brotton has made the connection between the letter and the historical event, the material about the letter can be found in S[usan] A. Skilliter, William Harborne and the Trade with Turkey, 1578–1582: A Documentary Study of the First Anglo-Ottoman Relations (London: Oxford University Press for The British Academy, 1977). I am grateful to Jerry Brotton for sharing the context for his argument.
See Fernand Braudel, ed., La Méditerranée: les homes et l’héritage (Paris: Arts et métiers graphiques, 1978); ed., La Méditerranée: l’espace et l’histoire (Paris: Arts et métiers graphiques, 1977); The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols., trans. Siân Reynolds (London: Collins, 1972).
Andrew C. Hess, The Forgotten Frontier: A History of the Sixteenth-Century Ibero-African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East & West (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 61.
Points made about the English trade and financial activities in the Mediterranean in this volume go beyond those made in the essays in Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism, which are not concerned with the Mediterranean mercantile transactions. See Linda Woodbridge, ed., Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
I borrow the term “cultural collision” from Andrew C. Hess, who uses it to write about the “division[s] between Mediterranean civilizafions” in the context of his study about the north-south barrier on the sixteenth-century Hispano-Muslim frontier. See Andrew C. Hess, The Forgotten Frontier: A History of the Sixteenth-Century Ibero-African Frontier (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 3.
Looked at from the Mediterranean perspective, early modern England illustrates Fernand Braudel’s observation that “Northern Europe, beyond the olive trees, is one of the permanent realities of Mediterranean history.” See Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds (Glasgow: William Collins Sons & Co, 1972), p. 24.
Robert Boerth, “The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World on the Stage of Marlowe and Shakespeare,” Journal of Theatre and Drama 2 (1996): 36.
Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 113.
On the consequences of the Battle of Lepanto, see also Andrew C. Hess, “The Battle of Lepanto and Its Place in Mediterranean History,” Past and Present 57 (1972): 53;
and Colin Imber’s review of Hugh Bicheno’s Crescent and Cross: The Battle of Lepanto (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003), Times Literary Supplement (October 2, 2003): 25.
Lisa Jardine, “Alien Intelligence: Mercantile Exchange and Knowledge Transactions in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta,” Reading Shakespeare Historically (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 98–113.
See G.D. Ramsay, English Overseas Trade During the Centuries of Emergence: Studies in Some Modern Origins of the English-Speaking World (London: Macmillan, 1957), p. 61.
Molly Greene, A Shared World: Christians and Moslems in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 5.
England registers the shifts between the new emerging powers and the “ancient regime.” This new power shift involved even Russia, which was the last to join, in the seventeenth century, eastern Mediterranean mercantile activities. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great and the Muscovy Company’s Asian trade, see Richard Wilson, “Visible Bullets: Tamburlaine the Great and Ivan Terrible,” ELH 62:1 (1995): 47–68.
The Tempest has recently been restored to its Mediterranean context in The Tempest and Its Travels, ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). In “Voyage to Tunis: New History and the Old World of The Tempest,” ELH, 64:2 (1997): 333–57, Richard Wilson makes arguments about the Mediterranean context of The Tempest in “The Island of The Tempest,” On Shakespeare: Jesus, Shakespeare, and Karl Marx, and Other Essays (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989], pp. 322–40), Brockbank argues for the indebtedness of The Tempest to the Mediterranean setting and politics. D.D. Carnicelli, in his essay “The Widow and the Phoenix: Dido, Carthage, and Tunis in The Tempest,” Harvard Library Bulletin 27:4 (1979): 389–433), also locates this within the sixteenth century’s thinking about Dido, Carthage, and Tunis.
Peter Hulme, “Hurricane in the Carribees: The Constitution of the Discourse of English Colonialism,” in 1642: Literature and Power in the Seventeenth Century, Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Society of Literature, ed. Francis Barker, Jay Bernstein, John Coombes, Peter Hulme, Jennifer Stone, Jan Stratton (n. p., 1980), pp. 55–83.
Jerry Brotton, “‘This Tunis, sir, was Carthage’: Contesting Colonialism in The Tempest,” in Post-Colonial Shakespeare, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 24.
Roslyn L. Knutson, “Elizabethan Documents, Captivity Narratives, and the Market for Foreign History Plays,” ELR 26:1 (1996): 95.
A recent collection of travel and discovery includes texts that reveal early travelers’ interest in ethnography as part of the proto-colonial writing about the Mediterranean. See Travel Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period, ed., Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna G. Singh (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
Andrew Hadfield, ed., Amazons, Savages & Machiavels: Travel & Colonial Writing in English, 1550–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 119. In his book Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), Nabil Matar suggests that England’s representations of the Mediterranean ought to be seen as precursors of the colonial projects of the New World of the Atlantic.
On the gendering of empire, see Bernadette Andrea, “Pamphilia’s Cabinet: Gendered Authorship and Empire in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania,” ELH 68 (2001): 335–58.
See Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 3.
For an earlier interpretation of empire represented in Shakespeare’s mercantile cities, see Philip Brockbank’s “Urban Mysteries of the Renaissance: Shakespeare and Carpaccio,” in his book The Creativity of Perception (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), pp. 145–61.
Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 35.
On Marlowe’s use of the Mediterranean, see Emily C. Bartels, “Malta, the Jew, and the Fictions of Difference: Colonialist Discourse in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta,” ELR 20:1 (1990): 1–16; “The Double Vision of the East: Imperialist Self-Construction in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Part One,” Renaissance Drama 23 (1992): 3–24; “Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Revision of Stereotypes,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 32 (1993): 13–26; and Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993).
Daniel J. Vitkus and Nabil Matar, eds., Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 6.
For a historicized account of English captivity narratives and to Braudel’s view of the politicized Christian-Islamic polemics, see Nabil Matar, “English Accounts of Captivity in North Africa and the Middle East: 1577–1625,” Renaissance Quarterly 54: 2 (2001): 553–72, on p. 554.
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© 2007 Goran V. Stanivukovic
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Stanivukovic, G.V. (2007). Introduction: Beyond the Olive Trees: Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings. In: Stanivukovic, G.V. (eds) Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601840_1
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