“The Ship Comes Well-Laden”: Court Politics, Colonialism, and Cuckoldry in Gil Vicente’s Auto da Índia

Abstract

Through such stories does Othello, famously, “beguile” Desdemona “of herself” (1.3.66). While editions of the play usually note that Othello’s “travels’ history” borrows from Pliny’s Naturalis Historia and Mandeville’s Travels—both regularly reprinted through the seventeenth century—what has been perhaps insufficiently stressed is just how antiquarian these details are, even in 1604. Arguably, Othello’s “conjuration and … mighty magic” (1.3.92) is self-consciously outdated, especially when contrasted with the play’s reliance on contemporary texts such as Richard Knowles’s General History of the Turks (1603) for its depiction of the Turco-Venetian conflict that frames its action. The quotidian realities of discovery and conquest often lacked, after all, the wonder and magic so central to medieval and classical accounts of unseen worlds. No surprise, then, that even contemporaneous adventurers such as Sir Walter Ralegh felt compelled to confirm the marvels of the past.² The theatrical debunking of Mandeville and Pliny would have to await the appearance of Richard Brome’s The Antipodes (1636), a play that nonetheless shares Othello’s belief in the power of such stories—, precisely, as stories, for only as dramatic fictions capable of shaping reality do they retain their efficacy.

Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle, Rough quarries, rocks, hills whose heads touch heaven, It was my hint to speak—such was the process: And of the cannibals that each other eat, The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Dogrow beneath their shoulders. This to hear Would Desdemona seriously incline; But still the house affairs would draw her thence, Which ever as she could with haste dispatch, She’d come again, and with a greedy ear Devour up my discourse…

—William Shakespeare, Othello (1.3.139–49)¹