The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia

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T he Engl ish Re naissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia

10.1057/9780230106222 - The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia, Debra Johanyak and Walter S. H. Lim


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Debra Johanyak and Walter S. H. Lim, Editors


The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia


the english renaissance, orientalism, and the idea of asia Copyright © Debra Johanyak and Walter S. H. Lim, 2009.

First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe, and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-0-230-61599-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The English renaissance, orientalism, and the idea of Asia / edited by Debra Johanyak and Walter S. H. Lim. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-230-61599-1 (alk. paper) 1. English literature—Early modern, 1500-1700—History and criticism. 2. East and West in literature. 3. English literature—Asian influences. 4. Renaissance—England. I. Johanyak, Debra, 1953- II. Lim, Walter S. H., 1959PR421.E65 2010 820.9'3585—dc22

2009031043

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: April 2010


All rights reserved.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.


Introduction: The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia—Framing the Issues Walter S. H. Lim 1

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Persia, Tartaria, and Pamphilia: Ideas of Asia in Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, Part II Bernadette Andrea

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Romancing the Turk: Trade, Race, and Nation in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene Marion Hollings

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“Turning Turk,” Early Modern English Orientalism, and Shakespeare’s Othello Debra Johanyak

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Indian and Amazon: The Oriental Feminine in A Midsummer Night’s Dream James W. Stone

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Marlowe’s Asia and the Feminization of Conquest Lisa Hopkins

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As Good as Gold: India, Akbar the Great, and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Plays Bindu Malieckal

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Westward to the Orient: The Specter of Scientific China in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis Gwee Li Sui

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Object Protocols: The “Materials” of Early English Encounters with India Pramod K. Nayar

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131 161


C onte nts

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vi

John Milton, Orientalism, and the Empires of the East in Paradise Lost Walter S. H. Lim

203

Contributors

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Index

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Contents


The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia—Framing the Issues Walter S. H. Lim

Critical readings of the English Renaissance have recently shown a marked increase in interest in the literary representation of foreign lands, an interest that can be traced in part to the influence of postcolonial criticism. Many of these readings have focused their attention on topics of nationhood, English responses to foreign cultures and geopolitical spaces, the emergence of expansionist dreams and ambitions, and the structures of early modern Orientalism.1 There is also especial attention paid to Ireland and the New World in the writing and conceptualizing of English nationhood, and for good reason—Ireland and the Americas constituted the primary “colonial” projects of Elizabethan and Stuart England. It is possible to trace England’s nascent dreams of expansionism to the latter half of the sixteenth century, a time when private expeditions of discovery were launched to seek the elusive gold of myth and legend, and when pirates actively wrested cargoes collected in distant lands. By 1577, Francis Drake had already made his famous expedition passing through the Strait of Magellan, sailing up the coast of America, and returning to England by way of the Indian Ocean and Cape of Good Hope. At this point Sir Walter Ralegh was pressing hard for English settlement of the New World. He obtained a patent for an American colony in 1584 and, in the following year, a settlement was established on Roanoke Island in the area he christened Virginia in honor of his queen. In the very same


INTRODUCTION


Walter S. H. Lim

year Ralegh planted Virginia, Drake was waging war in the Caribbean. Elizabethan England contributed significantly toward the exploration and exploitation of the wealth of the oceans. In this period, when the English set out to establish colonial presence in the Americas and also to chart commercial seaways to Asia, the story of Jason and the golden fleece resonated because it framed and energized the vast possibilities of Renaissance England’s overseas ventures. Joan Pong Linton observes that “the quest for the golden fleece is a common trope in the period for gold- and treasurehunting, and pirates like Drake and Martin Frobisher were often celebrated in the ballads as Jasons. . . . Whereas the mythic Jason obtains the fleece to reclaim his usurped kingdom, latter-day Jasons ventured abroad to find the patrimony that eluded them at home”; the “myth of the golden fleece is generally used in the period to glorify piracy and the search for gold.”2 As the sixteenth century gave way to the seventeenth, the flamboyance of Elizabeth Tudor’s historically famous sea captains was superseded by a different profile of long-distance ocean adventurer (less colorful perhaps, but certainly no less courageous), one who worked for wealthy London entrepreneurs. In 1600, Queen Elizabeth granted a charter to the East India Company, expressly giving her support to its mission to challenge the Dutch-Portuguese domination of the spice trade. The Company was granted the monopoly to transport goods from India to England, indicating South Asia’s significant drifting into England’s expansionist field of vision. India started attracting merchants, diplomats, and “tourists” to its shores. Ralph Fitch a London merchant, William Hawkins, Sir Thomas Roe (England’s first official ambassador to the Mughal court), and Thomas Coryate made their way to India, coming into contact with the great Mughal Dynasty, and sending stories about South Asia to a curious readership back in England. If interest in distant Asian lands (like India) is facilitated by travel narratives, journals, plays, and literature, it is also very much encouraged by maps. The younger Richard Hakluyt—a leading authority in maritime enterprises who had studied and taught the new cosmography and cartography at Oxford—recognized early on that control over the seas would transform England into a great nation. One does not have to read far into the literature of early modern England to discover a culture’s fascination with the science of cartography and discipline of geography. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England possessed a distinctive and revealing “mapmindedness.” The life of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine is, for example, defined by the insatiable devouring of geographical spaces, involving the literal imprinting of the violent body of God’s “scourge” upon the geopolitical realities represented by maps. John Donne found


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ample opportunity to make use of the images and metaphors of maps and ocean travel as metaphysical conceits and for ironic purpose in both his love lyrics and devotional poetry. Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost is distinctively characterized by the persistent listing of place names. Geographical and cartographical knowledge developed in tandem with early modern European expansionist ambitions. In fact, as Jerry Brotton has argued in Trading Territories, it was Portugal’s and Spain’s scramble to lay claim to the Moluccas—the prized possession of the spice trade—as existing within their respective spheres of territorial influence that led to the formal inauguration of geography as a discipline and as a practice. Both the imperial courts of Portugal and Castile hired geographers to produce maps that served to support their political claims to overseas territory and dominion. When the leading Flemish mathematician and mapmaker Gerardus Mercator, the father of modern mapmaking honored for coining the word “atlas,” served the Castilian court as its major geographer, he continued to map the world with reference to the eastern and western dominions of the Portuguese and Spanish Empires.3 In Mercator’s day, the Portuguese controlled the flow of merchandise back into northern Europe from Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean to the east; in contrast, Habsburg Spain focused its expansionist energies on the Americas and the Pacific Ocean to the west. Mercator’s famous and groundbreaking world map, Nova et aucta orbis terrae descriptio ad usum navigatium emendate accomodata, captured the concentration of Spain’s commercial interests in the Americas to the west of Europe, a focus differentiated from Portugal’s imperial and commercial activities in the east. It was only with the diminishing of Portuguese imperial authority in Southeast Asia toward the end of the sixteenth century that the “Atlantic world” was brought into sharper focus even as it gained increasing political and commercial predominance.4 Rival Portuguese and Spanish claims to domination over specific areas of the globe created “the conditions for the discursive deployment of the idea of the ‘Orient’ within European travel accounts and geographical discourse of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which implicitly framed descriptions of an exotic, indolent and mysterious ‘East’ in relation to a dynamic and enlightened ‘West.’”5 They also led to a foregrounding of the significance of Asia, a name that designated different geographical regions of the known world and carried various metaphorical and cultural meanings and resonances. “Asia” is a broad geographical designator, referring to such diverse regions of the world as Southwest Asia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Far East. Locatable on maps, these different Asias are distinguished on the basis of historical and political engagements, of merchandising and




Walter S. H. Lim

economic activities, and even of stories brought back to Europe by travelers who have made it to distant lands. For early modern Europe and England, Southwest Asia (largely overlapping with what we know today as the Middle East) is one region of the world that had attracted much attention because of the dominance there of the Islamic powers of the Ottoman Empire and Persia. Palpable anxieties existed in the Western world concerning the threat, both real and perceived, posed by the Islamic Orient to the political and moral integrity of Christian Europe. Memories persisted in Europe of defeats sustained in wars conducted against Muslim forces at Lepanto, Constantinople, the Crimea, Hungary, and Vienna, all within a hundred-year period from 1450 to 1550. Edward Said observes in Orientalism: “Until the end of the seventeenth century the ‘Ottoman peril’ lurked alongside Europe to represent for the whole of Christian civilization a constant danger, and in time European civilization incorporated that peril and its lore, its great events, figures, virtues, and vices, as something woven into the fabric of life.”6 Fascination with and revulsion toward the Islamic Orient is evident in many literary works produced in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. In Othello, Shakespeare’s black tragic protagonist is sent by Christian Venice to lead the fight against the Turks at the outpost of Cyprus. In Paradise Lost, John Milton portrays Satan as the archetypal sultan and compares hell’s fallen angels to a formidable Turkish military machine; in his prose works, he specifically identifies the Turkish monarchy as exemplifying consummate tyrannical authority. If various writings and literary representations tended to demonize Turks in the early modern period, this did not mean that very little contact took place between the Ottomans and England. Behind literary representations, therefore, may be found some of the concrete and actual realities of social, cultural, political, and economic interactions between East and West. These interactions are not always purely negative or antagonistic, a point that has been emphasized in recent literary and historical scholarship on the subject. It has been noted, for instance, that even though the Islamic Orient was viewed with distrust and loathing in that period, this did not prevent England from engaging in commercial, diplomatic, and social engagements with both Turks and Moors.7 Queen Elizabeth I had even considered the possibilities of an alliance with the Ottomans so as to place obstacles in the path of Spain’s imperial ambitions. Such engagements and contacts in fact contributed to the growth of knowledge about the culture, politics, and peoples of the Muslim world. Nabil Matar, Daniel Vitkus, and Gerald MacLean have in particular sought to correct “surface” readings of the cultural and historical significance of the Ottoman Empire as the West’s bogey and demonized Other


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by assessing the depth and complexity of their interactions at various levels—political, cultural, and economic. After the events of 9/11, when questions have been raised concerning the relevance of literature as an academic discipline to the highly conflictual realities of politics in the contemporary world, such studies have been instrumental in inspiring literary and historical scholarship and inquiry that resist certain culturally instinctive and embedded ideas that a “conflict of civilizations”8 had defined the West’s relationship with the Muslim world since the time of the Crusades. Matar’s, Vitkus’s, and MacLean’s studies highlight not only the various forms of Orientalism in existence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but also the realities of cross-cultural and political interactions taking place between the Western and Arab-Islamic worlds. Arab-Islamic perspectives have also been foregrounded in their studies to avoid some of the more obvious orientalist pitfalls of an Anglocentric or Eurocentric perspective. One thinks here especially of Nabil Matar’s Europe through Arab Eyes, which offers an important history of how the Arab-Islamic world views and responds to Europe’s rise to power. In Matar’s writings, the argument has been robustly and consistently made that the early modern Arab world had indeed been very much engaged with the social, political, and economic developments of European Christendom.9 This is an argument aimed at correcting the orientalist view that cultural exchanges of the period were dominated by a West whose curiosity after knowledge constitutes an intrinsic part of its cultural superiority and offers potent expression of its energetic participation in the liberating aspects of modernity. When early modern English writings on Muslim culture placed stereotypical stress on the attributes of despotism, lasciviousness, and barbarism, these were not always generated in tandem with supporting historical facts and experience. In highlighting the complexities attending EastWest and Ottoman-European contacts and relations in the early modern period, revisionist scholarship has even more emphatically highlighted the importance of not loosely and retrospectively applying Edward Said’s (post-Enlightenment) model of Orientalism backward to a period when political power in the international arena was not under the superior control of the courts and palaces of the West. In this period of world history, the Europeans had a healthy respect for Ottoman might and thought of another distant land like China as a powerful empire and civilization. When discussing the subjects of Asia and the East, it is important to note that the Islamic Orient associated with the Ottoman Empire was not the sole controlling point and frame of reference. By definition, the Islamic Orient stretched beyond the Ottoman world to embrace another great bastion of Muslim might—Mughal India. With India, the famed




Walter S. H. Lim

splendor of the Mughal court jostled against a more abstract conception of the land as a cultural space at once “chaotic and kinetic, timeless only in its unmanageable variety.”10 Literary representations of Mughal India are intertwined with the history of the beginnings of the English East India Company and also with early encounters between the Muslim court and such well-known personages as Sir Thomas Roe and Sir Thomas Coryate. Early seventeenth-century England had begun to experience an urgent need to compete with Europe (and in particular, Holland) for supremacy in international trade. Next to India, China was the other great Asian power that captured the cultural imagination of the early modern world. European adventurers, which included Christopher Columbus, had early on dreamt of finding at the other end of the world an oriental land of stately pleasure domes (borrowing Coleridge’s phrase) and unsurpassed wealth. In Elizabethan England, readers were afforded a view of China in Robert Parke’s 1588 translation of Juan González de Mendoza’s Historia de las cosas mas notables, ritos y costumbres del gran reyno de la China. Parke’s The Historie of the Great and Mightie Kingdome of China was the first detailed work on China to be available in the English language. Wanting to obtain patronage for discovering the Northwest Passage to the Orient, Parke’s narrative highlights various trade ventures engaged in by the English and stresses the importance of the spice trade. Recognizing that knowledge of the Orient has been made available through the observations afforded by the Portuguese and the Spanish, he seeks to “increase . . . the knowledge of the subjects of England, and specially for the illuminating of the minds of those, that are to take the voyage next in hand to Japan, China, and the Philippines.”11 In a bid to undercut Spain’s preeminence as an aggressive imperial power, Parke sets out to offer relevant knowledge pertaining to Spanish ambitions to access the riches of the Orient. In Parke’s emphasis, trade and merchandising activities are crucially important for an England ambitious to assert a powerful (inter)national identity. Assessing the representations of Asian spaces like India and China in early modern England entails seeing how writers of the period bring their readings of Asia from various sources to inform their particular understanding and conception of the East. Many of these perceptions stem directly from projections and presuppositions encouraged by travel narratives and other accounts, meaning that much of what is found in the writings on Asia that we read are in fact imagined. Filling in the blanks, imagination often has the habit of removing distinctions between nations, peoples, and cultures so that origins can get confused, geographical homelands become unfocused, and metaphorical conflations are not uncommon. Christopher


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Marlowe makes, for example, his Tamburlaine both a Tartar and a Scythian while Peter Heylyn makes reference to “the Scythians” who were “not yet called Tartars.”12 Likewise, Scythia has even been identified as the home of the Amazons, while the Turks themselves have been said to be of Scythian descent. When an English traveler finally makes his (literal) way to a distant land in the East, a major part of that experience involves bringing imagination and presuppositions to square with reality and actuality. This is an experience that can prove to be disconcerting. It appears it is not always assumed that obtaining firsthand knowledge of foreign lands, peoples, and cultures through actual voyaging to foreign shores is necessarily superior to learning or reading about distant places made available in published books. Literal voyaging across the seas may be not only exceedingly difficult but also error prone, leading to cultural engagement with the question of whether it may make more sense first to get acquainted with distant lands via the printed text before deciding to submit to the rigors of ocean travel. Imagination, as Richmond Barbour notes, is sometimes accorded importance over the experiential benefits of literal travel. Together with the audience in the public playhouse, the reader of travel accounts finds distance bridged even as faraway lands and cultures are made readily and immediately accessible through “representation.”13 And this “representation” brought home (in the immediate present) to the English reader and audience the worlds of the East and the Orient. At this time when England was busily involved in building a national literature and working out the terms of its political identity with reference to other European nations, the major empires and kingdoms of the world were all generally associated with Asian terms of reference—Safavid Persia, the Ottoman Empire, Mughal India, the Uzbek Khanate of Bukhara, the Middle Kingdom. “Asia,” which refers to discrete geopolitical regions of the world, stands for many things. It functions as a powerful metaphor for the cultural alterity against which England measures itself to arrive at a sense of its own cultural and national identity. It yields powerful historical portraits of unbelievably cruel conquerors and tyrants. It foregrounds the presence of a pluralistic universe that sometimes even threatens to destabilize some of the controlling presuppositions of the Judeo-Christian worldview. And it also propels competition between European nations pursuing commercial gain and territorial expansionism. When we consider the significance of Asia for the early modern English literary imagination, we find its multifaceted meanings shaped by various factors and influences—Christian European wars with the Muslim world in the Crusades; writings of medieval and later travelers to the Orient; ethnographic conceptions of peoples and cultures different from




Walter S. H. Lim

one’s own; theories about differences in language and skin color; political understandings of governmental systems; and so on. The creation of understandings and ideas of the East and the Orient reveals much about the society and culture undertaking these readings, as there are, for the most part, some obvious gaps separating imagination, and even fantasy, from reality. Conceptions of the East and of Asia can reveal much about one’s own subordinate subject position, as would typically, for instance, be the case of the woman in a patriarchal culture. As Bernadette Andrea has passionately argued in Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature, women writers in early modern England had already written about the Islamic Orient in ways that drew attention to not only the disadvantaged subject position of women in English society but also nascent undercurrents of a culture’s imperial fantasies. The Asian world of the Ottomans is imagined and written via the mediations of gender(ed) cultural experience as much as by the inflections of historical anxieties generated by the perceived threat posed by the Muslim world. As “early feminists,” some of these women (such as those associated with the Quakers) had played a part in contributing to the foundational structures of the future British imperium in their personal negotiations with the discourses of gender and Orientalism.14 In this collection of essays, an important question posed is the extent to which readings of the significance of “Asia” can, properly speaking, be said to be orientalist or even protocolonialist in character and definition. Responding to this question entails engaging with the theoretical implications of what it means to interpret the historical past in the light of our own contemporary postcolonial and globalized present and positioning. It encourages the literary critic to consider the relationship between literary production and the historical context informing that production. While the chapters in this book engage substantially with the materials of history, they also pay close and detailed attention to canonical authors and literary works. Major literary figures such as Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton all have important things to say about the relationship of early modern England to the discourses of Orientalism and (proto)colonialism. Noting that recent studies of early modern English and European relationship with the East and the Orient have tended to focus on the Ottoman Empire and the formidable Islamic power it embodies, this book specifically extends the Asian frame of reference to encompass India, China, and Southeast Asia. Often enough, reading about and writing on the East entail the importation and application of binaristic structures that position contemporary England against Asian Others. What this


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means is that, even while literature exists that registers real fascination with the mystical and enticing lands of the East, there are also other writings that view Asia and the East as symbolic sites where barbarism, tyranny, and degeneracy abound and thrive. This production of Asia as the space of cultural alterity underwrites sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England’s literary and discursive efforts to define, fashion, and work out the terms of its national identity. We know that nationhood in this period is a complexly contested idea. If self and its interlinked idea of nationhood fundamentally depend on positioning “us” against “them,” a civilized England over and against the barbaric Other, literary efforts expanded to construct a coherent definition of selfhood and nationhood are not, however, always successful. As studies in the “New British Historiography” have highlighted, literary attempts to write the coherent identity of the English nation are regularly compromised by “hybrid” intermingling and unstable cultural interactions.15 Remarkably, such representational and discursive destabilizations are not confined to “British” and “European” intertextualities but stretch to encompass oriental(ist) ones. Early modern England identified many candidates for the cultural Other—the Irish, the Turk, the Tartar, the Indian, the Saracen, and so on— in the process of its writing and definition of national and cultural identity. In the first essay of this book, “Persia, Tartaria, and Pamphilia: Ideas of Asia in Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, Part II,” Bernadette Andrea explicates the imaginary geographies in Wroth’s ground-breaking romance by tracing early modern genealogies of the Tartar, which oscillate between representations of alien difference (as in the Islamic “scourge of God”) and of potential alliances (as in the narratives of Tamerlane, the Tartar and Scythian who halted the Ottoman advance into Europe—albeit temporarily—by conquering, and capturing, the sultan). By further attending to the possibilities of the romance genre, which depend on such overdeterminations, Andrea analyzes Wroth’s negotiation of the shifting discourses of empire through her ideas and representations of Asia. The second essay, Marion Hollings’s “Romancing the Turk: Trade, Race, and Nation in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene,” considers the subject of the writing of early modern English nationhood. Focusing on the primary figure of the Redcrosse Knight, Hollings argues that any reading of the rehabilitation of this mythic character in book I’s romance narrative must take into account the embedded presence and traces of TurkishEuropean encounters. Having sprung from the English, the Redcrosse Knight is identified with Saint George whose cultural ancestry has nevertheless been traced back by Greek and Coptic traditions to Cappadocia in modern Turkey, bringing into play an oriental(ist) dimension. Analyzing




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the significance of Turkish allusions in a poem deeply concerned with the mythicization of English national identity, Hollings reads The Faerie Queene as a work that depicts “interracial” sexual arrangements in ways that attempt to facilitate Western fantasies of political virility and racial mastery over the Orient. The Ottoman Empire and the Islamic Orient then function as important symbolic signifiers in early modern English literary engagements with cultural and national identity. Recent years have witnessed a growth in scholarly interest in the relationship between Renaissance England and the Ottoman Empire, an interest driven by the understanding that political and trade relations between the two realms were much more involved and complicated than suggested by a predominantly adversarial and orientalist model. This scholarship draws the reader’s attention to authors and literary works that have hitherto not been much noted: examples include Selimus, Emperor of the Turks (attributed to Robert Greene), Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk, and Philip Massinger’s The Renegado. It is as recent as 2000 that these three plays have been brought out in a scholarly edition— Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England—by Daniel J. Vitkus.16 Like these plays, Shakespeare’s canonical Othello is also very much interested in issues related not only to race but also to cultural perceptions and constructions of Turkishness and the Muslim faith with which the Turk is indelibly associated. While Othello is identified as a Moor in Shakespeare’s play, he is also associated with the Turk in the dramatic development of his destructive passions. In her essay, “‘Turning Turk,’ Early Modern English Orientalism, and Shakespeare’s Othello,” Debra Johanyak enquires into the ways that “turning Turk” signified in England at that time, analyzing how cultural understandings of the Turk and Moor served to shape and inform audience responses to the play. Johanyak teases out the possible allusions to contemporary popular (and biased) notions and ideas of Islam in Shakespeare’s portrayal of Othello and the unfolding of his tragedy. She argues that, owing to cultural and popular fascination with dramatic representations of the Islamic world in Shakespeare’s England, Othello’s resonance as a play is directly related to its exploration of how cultural roots and origins make for a bifurcated and social subjectivity that participates in the experience of the tragic. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as James Stone demonstrates, Shakespeare opens up a world in which the Oriental is denigrated as a measure of falling short of the Greek male cultural ideal on the one hand, and valorized as an escape from the rigors and prejudices of patriarchy on the other hand. Theseus conquers Hippolyta the Amazon queen, who is made by the conqueror to represent everything that resists Greek culture


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as she bridles at having to succumb to patriarchy by way of marriage to her enemy. Whereas Theseus can find no compromise with the Amazonian foreigner short of conquest, Titania adopts a register that sentimentalizes distant and exotic India, speaking nostalgically of the changeling boy that her Indian votaress died in giving birth to. This changeling from the East serves as the major bone of contention between Titania and Oberon. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the East is a space of difference and détente that, while serving as solace for Titania, comes between her and Oberon to create discord. East differs from and subverts West as female rises against male and insists on the division between them. These culturally resonant tensions are represented in this comedy through the woman’s claim in the tug-of-war over the Indian changeling. Debra Johanyak’s and James Stone’s reading of Othello and A Midsummer Night’s Dream show that, even as Shakespeare created drama based on his culture’s perceptions of the Turkish threat to European security, he also registers interest in the matter of Asia. We know that, uplifted by the science of cartography, Elizabethan England had set out to define and shape its particular political and cultural identity by engaging in commercial activities across the seas. It was fully aware that European ambitions to establish commercial supremacy over the Indian Ocean—to cut, in other words, a trade route to the East Indies—involved recognizing and seizing important geopolitical sites in South and Southeast Asia. European imperial ambition had impelled the famous Portuguese, Don Alfonse de Albuquerque, to capture Goa in 1510. Albuquerque had labored to wrest from the Moors their trade monopoly in the region; this active design to gain uncontestable control over the spice trade was part of a larger political ambition to hit at the heart of the mighty Ottoman Empire. The conquest of Malacca one year after the capture of Goa highlighted the vast scope of Portuguese imperial ambitions. Portugal’s political and economic engagements in the region also involved islands that constituted part of the Maluku Archipelago. Exerting important influence in the Sultanate of Ternate, the Portuguese found themselves coming into direct political conflict with the Spanish, who were allied with Tidore. Conflict not only erupted between the Portuguese and the Spanish—the first two decades of the seventeenth century also saw the Dutch aggressively pushing their way into the region to consolidate a near-monopoly of the spice trade to Europe. The Dutch subsequently forced the Portuguese out of Ternate and Tidore, placing formidable obstacles in the way of English efforts to access the lucrative clove and nutmeg markets of Asia. Fully aware of European expansionist ambitions, Elizabethan England developed an interest in such Asian lands as India. In “Christopher




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Marlowe and the Feminization of Conquest,” Lisa Hopkins discusses Marlowe’s representation of the East as the source of both the greatest danger and greatest attraction. In Marlowe’s plays, Asia and the East are charged with not only geographical but also gendered and spiritual significance. If Asia is figured as female, and therefore amenable to (sexual) conquest, it is also the home of Lucifer, Prince of the East. Registering a binaristic conception of Europe and Asia, West and East, Marlowe generates a literary discourse of the East that may be read as amounting to a form of early modern Orientalism. In her essay on India, “As Good as Gold: India, Akbar the Great, and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Plays,” Bindu Malieckal offers historical insight into the reign of Akbar, the Mughal emperor, and argues that familiarity with aspects of his rule might have yielded subject matter for Marlowe’s portrayal of the brutal Tamburlaine. While Malieckal finds that Marlowe possesses revolutionary and subversive energies that cannot finally be dissociated from a cultural preoccupation with the character of tyranny and an enthusiasm for the ideas of conquest and expansionism, she makes the point of analyzing Tamburlaine in relation to the quest for economic profit and general Elizabethan awe with the majesty of Mughal India. The ubiquitous image and metaphor of gold, Malieckal argues, significantly informs early modern English fascination with South Asia. Offering more than simply orientalist representation, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine reveals fascination with India that possesses a distinctively historical and material(ist) dimension. Even as India started making its presence felt in the literary production of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, so did China. Gwee Li Sui’s “Westward to the Orient: The Specter of Scientific China in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis” analyzes the significance of China for Bacon within the context of cartography and English culture’s imagination of new worlds. If New Atlantis has often been read as an expression of Bacon’s eccentric utopian vision for a scientific culture, that vision, Gwee argues, is marked by identifiable cultural anxiety pertaining to the Middle Kingdom’s looming civilizational presence. Bacon’s work must therefore be read as an obvious call for the formation of a scientific priesthood in England and the quieter dream of an Orient totally converted to “Christian” rule via a rivalry of scientific achievements. Gwee analyzes this second dimension by setting Bacon’s own list of projects for natural knowledge, a magnalia naturae also mentioned in his Novum Organum (1620), against the technological culture of early seventeenth-century China to establish their underlying connection. Gwee’s essay also reminds us that at a time when any effort to apprehend and appreciate the significance of distant nations like China was


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very much complicated by the general lack or absence of direct contact between the West and the Far East, one avenue for the interpretation of cultures was via the availability of material culture—objects that originated in foreign lands but made their way to England in the early modern period. As material artifact, chinaware may signify China’s unfathomable mystery, a mystery stemming from attempts of the vivid early modern imagination to bridge gaps of understanding generated by transcultural difference. If chinaware exists as a major sign of oriental alterity, facilitating conceptual imaginings and (mis)apprehensions, it also finds itself imbricated in the development and expressions of contemporary English social life. In Ben Jonson’s Epicoene,17 a play that dramatizes a hard, fragmented, and cynical world, Mistress Otter runs a shop in the newly fashionable West End of London. Significantly this shop, a “china-house,” sells oriental goods including chinaware, an indication that she wishes to be identified as someone who is an authority on matters of cultural taste and value. In Mistress Otter, Jonson satirizes social pretensions by showing that the farthest this character can really go toward appreciating and comprehending the value of china is by reducing this luxury item to nothing beyond its monetary worth.18 Impressions, conceptions, and (mis)understandings of the Middle Kingdom have been facilitated and enabled by the entry into England of chinaware. Like Epicoene, Bacon’s New Atlantis captures English fascination with chinaware as visible embodiment of material culture, which complements and supplements travel narratives in generating particular impressions of Asia. Impressions of the East are also created when political personages interact on the ground, such as directly experienced by Thomas Roe in India. In the case of Roe, a complex series of ritualistic maneuvers are enacted between host country (India) and guest even as the Stuart ambassador strives to attain some degree of political gravitas in the Mughal court. On this subject, Pramod K. Nayar discusses English perceptions of South Asia by reading the cultural/political semiotics of an important early encounter—that of Roe’s ambassadorial mission to the Mughal court. Nayar’s essay brings a deeply anthropological dimension into play—treatments of foreigners and guests, how the etiquette and protocols of a meal are conducted, host-guest relations, ruler-ambassador relations, and gift-giving all participate in a ritual performance wherein the English emissary from the court of James I works out the terms and conditions of England’s relations with Mughal India via the conduct of a man who represents the authority of the Stuart monarch on foreign soil. In the concluding essay of this book, “John Milton, Orientalism, and the Empires of the East in Paradise Lost,” Walter S. H. Lim assesses




Walter S. H. Lim

Milton’s representation of India in particular with reference to the cultural backdrop of contemporary writings available on South Asia and the interpretive mediations of his republican convictions. Milton’s “internationalism,” Lim posits, is not limited to the European world. It in fact reaches out to encompass such distant regions of the world as the Far East and South Asia, regions that yield images and metaphors that facilitate Milton’s representation of the postlapsarian kingdoms of the world, political tyranny, the condition of the theological Fall, and Restoration England’s energetic pursuit of commercial interests to contest European expansionist ambitions in the East. The essays in this book engage with the subject of how literature, plays, political pamphlets, travel narratives, and other writings in early modern England register deep interest in and fascination with Asia and the East. They analyze not only the textual and cultural influences that give shape and expression to literary representations of Southwest Asia, South Asia, the Far East, and Southeast Asia but also how such representations function as powerful indicators of the disjunctions that often separate contemporary cultural perceptions from existing geopolitical realities. Imprecise portrayals of Otherness can be the result of ideological and cultural bias, or they can stem from the absence of contact with peoples of other lands. But negative perceptions of difference can also be the result of direct contact, for the encounter with foreign lands and peoples often entails anxious negotiations as cultural instincts collide with forms, practices, and manners that appear radically different from and resistant to accommodation. Because often embellished and exaggerated, and therefore unreliable as reference guides for travel in foreign lands, available writings on places like China and India cannot function as “signposts” or “maps” for travel to and in foreign lands. In fact, when travel narratives prove to be inadequate vehicles for disseminating information on Asian lands, peoples, and cultures, artifacts and objects may afford opportunity for interpretation and access. But material culture, the protocols of gift exchange, and etiquette of hospitality in the courts of the Muslim emperors are all text(ual) in the ways in which they facilitate interpretation, generate (mis)understanding, and reinforce or adjust (pre)existing conceptions of self and national identity. In reading how various authors of the English Renaissance represent the East and Asia, we find that their perceptions are often informed by cultural conceptions shaped by accounts (the travelogue, fictionalized narratives, etc.) bequeathed by travelers who have journeyed to foreign lands. Even as both authors and readers make sense of and then set out to represent the Orient based on (second-hand) readings that have come their way, they contribute toward reinforcing the various, alternatively


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imprecise and concrete, impressions of these lands and the peoples that inhabit them. The result is a discernible tendency to break down categorical demarcations between peoples, cultures, and nations: the Tartar and the Turk often lose their distinctiveness in the conflations through literary figurations of the Islamic Orient; political tyranny becomes a controlling cultural trait that cuts across various nations and societies associated with the Orient and the East; even “Jews” find themselves entangled with “Asians” in the perceived commonality of their radical cultural alterity.19 This book sets out to engage with the following questions: Do stereotypical cultural readings of the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic Orient get transferred over to inflect and impact readings and interpretations of India, China, and Southeast Asia in the literary production of early modern England? What specific kinds of knowledge did sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England possess about Asia? Were there identifiable attitudes brought to bear on engaging with and interpreting Asian spaces in the Renaissance cultural imagination? What were some of the anxieties experienced in English encounters with the cultures of Asia? To what extent did formulating views and perceptions of Asia in its complex cultural and political expressions contribute toward the construction of English national identity in the period? In engaging with these questions, the contributors to this volume undertake not only close readings of important literary works but also a critical deciphering of the close relationship between literary production and the conditions of a historical moment in which greater contacts were being made between England and distant lands. There are readings of genres (romance, epic, tragedy, etc.) and analyses of the historical, political, and cultural milieu within which the literary deployment of these genres obtain their significance and derive their meanings. There are also readings that explicate the semiotics of international and intercultural encounters via an anthropological perspective. The critical methodologies and interpretive strategies employed in this book are interdisciplinary, ranging from familiar close readings of literary texts and engaging with details of history to reading the “meanings” behind the protocols of cultural and political exchange. Early modern England is the period of the development of the travel narrative as an important and instrumental (literary) genre, one that is inextricably intertwined with mapmaking and the science of cartography. Richard Hakluyt’s and Samuel Purchas’s highly significant compilation of travel narratives went hand in hand with a culture’s distinctive fascination with maps to fuel England’s general curiosity about and fascination with distant lands and foreign cultures. The coming into cultural prominence




Walter S. H. Lim

of the travel narrative is announced in the ways in which poets and dramatists drew upon information found in it for literary representation and for stage performance. Enabling Hakluyt’s project of compiling the narratives of English trade and travel is the strict and methodological ordering of knowledge, a systematic itemization that brings to the reader a wealth of information about diverse geographical locations, trade activities, and a pluralism of cultures. Richard Helgerson notes that Hakluyt played an important role in conferring social significance on the figure of the merchant in his vast accounts and records of men who had traveled the oceans and encountered foreign lands. In addition to giving the merchant an increasingly prominent place in defining early modern English nationhood, Hakluyt also involved the aristocratic class in the activities of trade and commerce.20 Ordering the world in his compilation, Hakluyt enables his reader to engage in vicarious travel and inscribes English overseas activities on the map of European expansionism.21 When discussing the subject of trade and commerce in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, we often find ourselves thinking in terms of assessing the forms and content of a modernity associated with the emergence of secular cultural impulses. In this period, expressions of the secular are almost always intertwined with conceptions informed by spiritual and religious considerations. Once the dimension of the spiritual is taken into account, the related larger question arises about the extent to which this interplay between the secular and the sacred gives form to the nascent structures of a colonial and imperial imagination. In undertaking the major cultural projects of The Principal Navigations and Hakluytus Posthumus, both Hakluyt and Purchas reveal their conceptualizations of the English nation. Whereas Hakluyt’s corpus does not appear to have been much shaped by religious consideration at both the generic and rhetorical levels, Purchas was generally given to thinking of England’s national significance in relation to sacred history. In Virginia’s Verger, Purchas provides legal and theological reasons for displacing the Amerindians from their land and for Christianizing Virginia. God’s created order is Calvinistic, with savage nations preordained from time immemorial to line the coffers of English colonists—godliness is directly equated with economic gain.22 David Armitage has made the observation that Purchas’s geographical histories “placed England firmly in the context of the history of the Three Kingdoms, of Europe, and of a wider world conceived within sacred time,” conferring upon his works a “more elect-nationalist and more cosmopolitan” dimension.23 Reinforcing the importance of the travel narrative and the map is, of course, England’s literature in all its varied genres and forms. Together


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with poetic expressions and dramatic representation, travel narratives, journals, and sermons all offer ample evidence of this fascination with the Other. If impressions and knowledge of foreign lands, peoples, and cultures are often accessed and mediated through second-hand sources and information for the average and typical English reader who never had an opportunity to cross the Atlantic or sail to India, they are also generated on the basis of close international and intercultural encounters—Sir Thomas Roe, Thomas Coryate, Peter Mundy, and Edward Terry immediately come to mind. Narratives and accounts of firsthand encounters with foreign nations and cultural alterity associated with these are instrumental in giving nascent shape to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English dreams of empire building at a time when the defining properties and constitutive elements of empire—the concerted ability to deploy military power for the defense of the nation and acquisition of colonies as well as the enjoyment of a prosperous economy predicated upon controlling the world’s trade—are still a distance away from sight and certainly from materialization. Any reading of Orientalism in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury England must recognize that expressions and representations of political and cultural superiority often belie deep cultural nervousness concerning the East’s political and military might as well as its vibrant economic life in controlling the major trade arteries of the world. When discussing England’s representations of and dealings with Asia in the early modern period, we need to be especially alert to the fact that the historical, social, and political conditions of the time are in many ways akin to what we understand as “globalization” at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Fascinated by Venice as a leading European port city and gateway to the Muslim Levant, Shakespeare notes in The Merchant of Venice “that the trade and profit [of Venice] / Consisteth of all nations.”24 If Venice was known in the period for its cosmopolitan and international character, so was Shakespeare’s London. With the official opening of the Royal Exchange in 1570, many foreigners found their way to London, transforming it into a meeting place of peoples from different lands. In London many foreign languages were heard and different cultures experienced. Crystal Bartolovich describes London in this period as a “‘world city’ . . . loosening its dependence on Antwerp and diversifying its trade relations, geographically and in content.”25 And Paul Stevens offers a succinct summary of the larger “globalized” context within which London came to assume its identity as a “world city”:



What a deeper historical perspective would have made most immediately clear about globalization is that modern, Western capitalism was global from its inception. How else are we to explain the genuinely paradigm-shifting


Walter S. H. Lim

expansion of Europe in the Renaissance if not in terms of the beginning of the present world economy? As Immanuel Wallerstein and many others have emphasized, it is in the sixteenth century, not the twentieth, that the global economy begins. It is in the sixteenth century that the massive influx of gold and silver from America first financed the voyages that established a vast network of ‘factories’ or trading settlements in Africa, India, the East Indies, China, and Japan, and brought silk and porcelain, nutmeg and pepper to Lisbon, Amsterdam, and rain-soaked Deptford—“The east with incense and the west with gold,” as Dryden puts it.26

Within the context of early modern “globalization,” contacts with the Other brought unavoidable tensions and generated much anxiety about difference in relation to national and cultural identity. But cultural nervousness about encounters with alterity only made up one part of the picture. Real pressures were felt in England’s race with Europe to establish the rights of first contact with the wealthy and powerful nations of the East. Notes Many thanks to my colleague, Dr. Susan Ang, editor extraordinaire, for the time she has generously taken from her very busy schedule to proofread this Introduction as well as Chapter 9 of this book. 1. Representative studies on these topics that have emerged in recent years include David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens, eds., Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Imperialisms: Historical and Literary Investigations, 1500–1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); David J. Baker and Willy Maley, eds., British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Milton and the Imperial Vision (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999); Walter S. H. Lim, The Arts of Empire: The Poetics of Colonialism from Ralegh to Milton (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998); David J. Baker, Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell, and the Question of Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield, and Willy Maley, eds., Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from “Utopia” to “The Tempest” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 2. Joan Pong Linton, The Romance of the New World: Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 31, 56–57.


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3. Jerry Brotton, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 167. Brotton analyzes the importance of early modern mapmaking and production of knowledge with reference not only to European but also Arab, Muslim, Ottoman, and Asian activities. 4. Ibid., 167–68. 5. Ibid., 168. 6. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 59–60. 7. See especially Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Gerald MacLean, Looking East: English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); and Gerald MacLean, ed., ReOrienting the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Matthew Birchwood and Matthew Dimmock, eds., Cultural Encounters between East and West (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2005); Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and Brotton, Trading Territories. 8. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). In Huntington’s dichotomous thesis, the post–cold war world is one that will be defined by civilizational conflicts in which the West is innately (owing to its particular cultural values, which are understood to be superior) at enmity with other cultures. For the very survival of America (a metonymy for the idea of the “West” itself ), cultural fundamentalisms and the civilizations to which they contribute toward building and reifying must be challenged by the greatness of Anglo-Saxon (American) culture itself. Edward Said has noted that Huntington’s “clash of civilizations thesis,” already made familiar by the orientalist historian Bernard Lewis, has the effect of “maintaining a wartime status in the minds of Americans and others” in the post–cold war world: see Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 571. 9. See Nabil Matar, Europe through Arab Eyes, 1578–1727 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Nabil Matar, ed. and trans., In the Lands of the Christians: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003). 10. John Archer, Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 191. 11. Robert Parke, The Historie of the Great and Mightie Kingdome of China, and the Situation Thereof: Togither with the Great Riches, Hugh Citties, Politike Governement, and Rare Inventions in the Same (London: 1588), see “The Epistle Dedicatory,” 3. 12. Peter Heylyn, Cosmographie, ed. Robert Mayhew, 4 vols. (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003) 3:210. 13. In Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Richmond Barbour notes, “The problem




14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

Walter S. H. Lim

of educating domestic magnates and future voyagers about realities apprehended at steep empirical cost abroad produced not only published books of advice, but also discursive regimes among the joint-stock traders. Must each new voyage err perpetually, or might a working knowledge of the East, transferrable to unseasoned mariners and factors, accumulate in London? How might such transfer be optimized? Ascham’s pedagogic challenge—to make reading the surrogate for more entire exposures until sound precepts had been internalized—became a logistical challenge for the East India Company. The merchants designed habits of writing and reading to manage the contingencies of long-range commerce. Their confidence that discursive procedures might master time and distance was bolstered by an important literary trope that, like the playhouse itself, typically valorized imaginative over literal travel: voyaging in place” (104–5). See Bernadette Andrea, Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). One of the major objectives of the criticism that has come to be associated with the “New British Historiography” is to offset critical and historical studies perceived to be anglocentric in perspective. Writings of the Tudor “borderlands” are read in conjunction with English works to highlight the principle of cultural and political interactions at a time when the concept of Britain is far from unified and sustained. One of its central points is that when conventionally English texts are read within the context of “the British problem,” they lose their unity and are marked instead by fissures and instabilities that are identifiably ideological. Representative studies include Baker, Between Nations; Baker and Maley, eds., British Identities; and Andrew Murphy, But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us: Ireland, Colonialism, and Renaissance Literature (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999). See Daniel J. Vitkus, Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). Ben Jonson, Epicoene or the Silent Woman, ed. Roger Holdsworth (New York: New Mermaids, 1979). I wish to thank Jane Degenhardt for sharing with me her reading of how Mistress Otter’s running of a successful china-shop facilitates Jonson’s satirization of the pretensions of London’s emerging and newly moneyed middling class in her paper, “Cracking the Mysteries of ‘China’: China(ware) in the early modern imagination.” See, for example, Rachel Trubowitz, “‘The People of Asia and with them the Jews’: Israel, Asia, and England in Milton’s Writings,” in Milton and the Jews, ed. Douglas A. Brooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 151–77. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 151–91. Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 44–46. Samuel Purchas, Virginias Verger: Or a Discourse shewing the benefits which may grow to this Kingdome from American-English Plantations, and especially those of Virginia and Summer Ilands, in Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes: Contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells by Englishmen


20


23. 24. 25.

26.

21

and Others, 20 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, Publishers to the University, 1905–1907), 19:218–67. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 81, 85. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Russell Brown (1955; repr., New York: Methuen, 1984), act 3, scene 3, lines 30–31. Crystal Bartolovich, “‘Baseless Fabric’: London as a ‘World City,’” in “The Tempest” and Its Travels, ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 15. Paul Stevens, “How Milton’s Nationalism Works: Globalization and the Possibilities of Positive Nationalism,” in Early Modern Nationalism, ed. Loewenstein and Stevens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 279–80.







Persia, Tartaria, and Pamphilia Ideas of Asia in Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, Part II

Bernadette Andrea

This paper seeks to explicate the imaginary geographies of Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621) by tracing conflicting early modern genealogies of the Tartar—conventionally represented as issuing from Central Asia during the Middle Ages and threatening Western Europe up to the early modern period—in relation to English engagement with the Ottoman and Safavid empires around the turn of the seventeenth century.1 Wroth’s Urania is significant as the first original, as opposed to translated, prose romance by an English woman to appear in print.2 She was forced to withdraw the first part from circulation shortly after its initial publication under pressure from powerful men for whom her depictions of the patriarchal abuse of wives, daughters, and servants struck too close to home; however, she continued with an equally substantial second part, which remained in manuscript until its publication as a scholarly edition in 1999.3 In this second part, Wroth shifts from the classical emphasis of the first part to an increasingly belligerent assertion of a universalistic Christian identity, albeit one primarily in service of political expansionism and not presented as a spiritual practice or doctrine.4 Ultimately, the Urania links this identity to a polity encompassing


CHAPTER 1


Bernadette Andrea

“East” (Asia) and “West” (Europe) under the auspices of an imaginary Holy Roman Empire, which in Wroth’s era was “a phantom” of “a universal imperialist hope” for Western Europeans and not a political reality.5 The notion of an imaginary or “imaginative geography” derives from Edward Said’s seminal, if contested, study, where he defines it as “one of the chief characteristics of Orientalism.” Specifically, it is “a fixed, more or less total geographical position” taken “towards a wide variety of social, linguistic, political and historical realities.”6 Said has been critiqued for his own lack of historicity when considering Western European attitudes toward the East (a malleable term covering Biblical lands, Islamic regions, and Asia as defined by the ancient Greeks), especially during a time when “England was not a colonial power—not in the imperial sense that followed in the eighteenth century.”7 Certainly, Wroth’s representations of Asians— Tartars, Persians, and residents of the regions ruled by the Ottomans— cannot be confined to the East-West dichotomy characterizing the nineteenth-century peak of Western European imperialism that primarily concerns Said. Nonetheless, Said’s theorization of “imaginative geography” as “a set of representative figure, or tropes” constituting “the Western approach to the Orient” remains useful for analyzing Wroth’s romance, which took shape during the period Richmond Barbour reassesses through the prism of “proto-orientalism.”8 The “precolonial engagements” of the English with the “East,” especially the empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals, involved “more pliant, polyvalent attitudes towards various ‘others.’”9 These attitudes were premised on a mixture of admiration and fear, with England’s marginal position in the global imperial circuits at the turn of the seventeenth century not allowing for the scorn associated with full-fledged Orientalism.10 In Wroth’s case, her encounter with these “others” was enabled by contemporary reports in influential collections such as Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1599–1600)11 and histories such as Richard Knolles’s The Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603), with her family having an unusually close connection to early ventures in Russia, Central Asia, and Persia.12 Yet, by ignoring praise for Tartars in these influential seventeenth-century sources, critics have considered Wroth’s representative Central Asian, Rodomandro, “the great King of Tartaria,” an anomaly.13 His origins have been located in a “region . . . said to be filled with barbarous persons who display despicable habits,”14 drawing on “the ancient tripartite divisions of climatic regions” into “northern, southern, and temperate zones” that informed the Greco-Roman and Renaissance humanist discourses of empire.15 Concomitantly, he has been described in terms of “blackness” as a “secondary status,”


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which anticipates the transatlantic discourse of empire.16 As such, his marriage with the “principal character” of the romance, Pamphilia, who straddles West and East, has been deemed impossible and puzzling.17 (Pamphilia is a princess from Morea, a past Byzantine province on the southern Greek peninsula under Ottoman suzerainty during Wroth’s lifetime. Over the course of the romance, she becomes queen of her eponymous kingdom in Asia Minor.) Still, within the romance itself their marriage is accepted without comment. As I propose, this ostensibly “interracial”/“intercultural”18 marriage may be understood more completely when it is considered not simply in terms of alien difference, but also in terms of newly Protestant England’s alliances (actual and attempted) with Islamic powers against the Catholic empire of the Habsburgs. What has been missing from previous critical assessments of Wroth’s prose romance, then, are those early modern accounts of Tartars, along with Turks and Persians, who were portrayed as amenable and even assimilable, a process by no means “unidirectional.”19 The genre of romance, which is characterized by wish-fulfillment, facilitates this proto-orientalist admiration and acceptance.20 Still, the reality of Ottoman expansion into Western Europe during Wroth’s era and the memory of Mongol expansion during the Middle Ages produce dissonance in the otherwise amenable image of the Tartar king. Kim F. Hall has analyzed Rodomandro’s contradictory characterization as “black” and “white” through the emerging model of race as a fixed hierarchy, particularly as it is deflected onto the shifting relationship between blackness and beauty.21 However, prior to the late seventeenth century, after which England gained the monopoly over the transatlantic slave trade, the anglocentric discourse of empire emphasized the quest for the northwest and the northeast passages to “Cathay,” leaving the transatlantic trade to the Iberians.22 Influenced by narratives of earlier voyages, the variable referents for whiteness in Wroth’s romance resonate with concurrent descriptions of the native peoples the English encountered in Central Asia and North America. Combined with the shifting relationship between blackness and beauty in early seventeenth-century England, these multivalent notions of whiteness point toward the more complicated “web of empire” in the early modern period, which required English identifications with the “other” as part of their global exchanges.23 As we shall see, Wroth’s Tartar king serves as an index of the era’s increasingly racialized, but still unstable, paradigms. *

*


Persia, Tartaria, and Pamphilia

*

While Pamphilia, who straddles West and East, features as the primary female protagonist in both parts of the Urania, the Tartarian and Persian 10.1057/9780230106222 - The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia, Debra Johanyak and Walter S. H. Lim

Bernadette Andrea

characters appear only in the second part. The burgeoning discourse in the first decades of the seventeenth century about the Sherley brothers’ exploits in Persia, where the Safavid Shah Abbas was ascendant, largely explains this new plot line. The Safavids and Ottomans were engaged in almost constant warfare from the founding of the former dynasty at the beginning of the sixteenth century, which established Shi’ism as the state religion to distinguish it from the Sunni Ottomans.24 The Safavids sought alliances with various European powers to counter Ottoman pressure, just as the Ottomans sought alliances with the French and English to counter Habsburg aggression. The Sherley brothers took their own initiative in contacting the Safavids, for which Queen Elizabeth punished the elder, Anthony. This initiative ran counter to Elizabeth’s ongoing attempts to forge alliances with the Ottomans against the Habsburgs. The younger brother, Robert, who remained in Persia for almost a decade, eventually returned to England as an “ambassador” for Shah Abbas.25 He had assimilated to Persian norms, including wearing a turban, which earned him the encomium “this famous English-Persian.”26 To counter accusations he had become a Muslim, this turban bore a prominent cross, confirming his Christian (albeit Catholic) status.27 He thus epitomizes the proto-orientalist Western European subaltern vis-à-vis the more established Islamic empires rather than the much later imperial overlord. While in the Safavid court, he married a Central Asian (Circassian) woman, Teresa Sampsonia Sherley, who accompanied him to England. They ultimately returned to Persia, where he died somewhat ignominiously. She brought his remains to Rome, where she was celebrated as “a lady of great spirit and valour.”28 When she died there, she was eulogized as an Amazon.29 She also epitomizes the proto-orientalist fluidity of the era, which as a woman is signaled through her name: Teresa (from her baptism as a Roman Catholic by the Carmelite missionaries in Persia, with her background Orthodox Christian and/or Muslim); Sampsonia (from her father, who was a prominent tribal leader in Central Asia); and Sherley (from her husband, with the English unlike the Islamic tradition requiring a woman to take her husband’s surname upon marriage).30 In summary, while the Sherleys’ embassies to England did not produce any diplomatic successes, they did result in the spate of pamphlets and plays that influenced Wroth’s depiction of Persian characters in the second part of the Urania. Significantly, the first mention of Persians in the Urania is coupled immediately with Tartaria when a forlorn lady identifies herself as “daughter to the King of Tartaria; my mother was a Persian” (9). She had previously been described through the “black, but beautiful” formula associated, as we shall see, with other Central Asian characters (7).31


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Moreover, it is through this character that we first learn about the King of Tartaria, when she claims, “. . . my brother is well and arming in defense of the most rare Queen Pamphilia, against the fierce Soldaine [Sultan] of Persia” (10). Yet she immediately undermines her own testimony by dismissing it as “a dreame” and “a fiction” (10). Further discredited, she is subsequently identified as a malevolent spirit who has sexually ensnared one of the narrative’s chivalric heroes (10, 303–5, 397).32 Nonetheless, the Persian and Tartarian plot lines blend from the beginning of the romance, with both linked to Pamphilia.33 Rodomandro’s first physical appearance in the narrative, following this brief, albeit overdetermined, reference, occurs in the court of the King of Morea, Pamphilia’s father. “The great King of Tartaria” has traveled to this seat of Western power, as his messenger announces, “hearing of your magnanimity and the glory of your court” (42). As the messenger continues, the Tartarian king “returning homeward” after “two years abroad”—an exotic variant of the Grand Tour, which was just becoming de rigueur for young male aristocrats in Western Europe34—desired “to be eyewitness of your [the King of Morea’s] glory, and to see those brave princes whose fame hath filled the world with admiration, and to learn amongst them the rare and perfect exercise of chivalry” (42). (These princes include Amphilanthus, Pamphilia’s fickle lover, modeled on William Herbert, Wroth’s cousin, lover, and father of her two illegitimate children; Amphilanthus is the Prince of Naples, King of the Romans, and Holy Roman Emperor.35) It turns out “the King [of Morea] had heard very much of this excellent prince,” who is praised as “the brave stranger,” “the great Tartar,” and “a brave and comely gentleman” (42). Yet, dissonance surfaces through “a color/race schema that from the beginning marks him [Rodomandro] as unfavored and in some ways peripheral even though he wins Pamphilia’s hand.”36 For instance, emphasis on his “hands so white as would have become a great lady” is coupled with an apology for “his face of curious and exact features, but for the color of it, it plainly showed the sun had either liked it too much, and so had too hard kissed it, or in fury of his delicacy, had made his beams too strongly to burn him” (42).37 This dissonance continues with the description of “[h]is diamond eyes (though attired in black)” (42). He is thus branded with the faint praise of “black, but beautiful” reiterated in early modern sources, including the Masque of Blackness (1605), in which Wroth performed.38 While the conclusion that “this brave prince, entering the room of presence,39 came with so brave a countenance and yet so civil a demeanor as made all eyes subject to his sweetness” shifts to the more subtle dissonance of a qualifier (42), the next comparison reduces him to




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a “coal black” and “humble” stag (43).40 As we have seen, this vacillation between identification and othering characterizes proto-orientalism at a time when England was imagining, but had not realized, its stake in the Western imperial project, particularly in its encounters with more powerful Eastern “others.” The balance of Rodomandro’s physical description is replete with further praise and ultimate acceptance, although the latter is complicated by Amphilanthus’s jealousy when he notices “the Tartarian’s black eyes must needs encounter the true heaven of Pamphilia’s grey eyes and yield to them, as to the perfect sky, the rule of his and their thoughts” (44). Indeed, Amphilanthus has reason to be jealous, as Pamphilia ultimately marries the King of Tartaria, despite her previous vows with Amphilanthus (45).41 In the end, however, the King of Tartaria is endorsed as “an exquisite man in all things, and a Christian” (46), which enables the union of East and West under (Western) Christian control, another instance of wish-fulfillment in Wroth’s era. The masque concluding this episode, in which the Tartarians “present the court with a show of their country fashion,” dramatizes this contradictory position by praising “the beauties of Tartaria” (46) even as their king abandons them for “the excellent Lady,” Pamphilia (49). Here we have another echo of The Masque of Blackness, where similar language is used to represent the displaced beauty of the Ethiopian daughters.42 However, while the masque showcases “the Tartarian fashion”—as other masques of the era had featured costumes from non-English, but not necessarily non-European or even non-British, ethnic groups—it does not exclude these Tartarian men from mixing with “the ladies when they would honor them with dancing with them” (46).43 Moreover, the distinctive costumes in the masque do not define the Tartarians, especially their king, outside this performance, other than the mention of an Eastern princess (elsewhere identified as his sister) wearing “apparel of the Asian fashion” while in an Asian court (168).44 Conforming to Jacobean conventions, the masque concludes with “an infinite rich banquet prepared purposely for Rodomandro and his companion maskers [masquers], who were all princes in his country but his subjects” (49). These Tartarians are thereby invited into the world of the Morean court, whose norms of chivalry and civility they share, even as they are marked by variable differences in complexion and costume. To reiterate, despite these differences—some indelible, such as variations in skin color, and some ephemeral, such as the display of Tartarian fashions in a court masque—Rodomandro’s marriage with Pamphilia is not seen as transgressive by the other characters in the romance. Indeed, this marriage provides the basis for an increasingly belligerent Christian


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league seeking to encompass East and West under a single imperial banner. At the same time, it reinforces Pamphilia’s association with Asia, which she identifies by the end of the romance as “my husband’s country and mine” (378). Still, influential assessments of Rodomandro deem his generally positive treatment in the romance, admittedly colored by racial ambivalence, as going against the grain of early modern representations of Tartars, which presumably were all negative. For instance, in her accomplished monograph on Wroth, which covers the “numerous aesthetic, literary, scientific, and philosophical concerns” informing the “multivalent” geographies and cosmographies of the Urania, Sheila T. Cavanagh speculates that his name derives from “the boastful Saracen leader Rodomante in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso,” a popular Renaissance romance cited as a source for the Urania.45 Drawing on these sources, she concludes, “Like the Saracens, who are presented as evil in much contemporary literature, Tartarians receive considerable bad press in the histories and travel narratives that would have been available to Wroth.” She goes on to cite Strabo’s false etymology linking Tatars with Tartarus (the classical hell), resulting in the persistent misspelling “Tartar.”46 Part of the problem, as I shall establish, is the anachronistic focus on the sources for Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (first staged in the 1580s and printed in the 1590s), which present a lopsided negative view.47 In addition, this interpretation adduces hostile narratives from medieval friars, such as Matthew Paris’s thirteenth-century account (from Samuel Purchas’s Hakluytus posthumus, or Purchas his pilgrimes, published in 1625),48 and continental humanist narratives, such as Joannes Boemus’s Fardle of Facions (1555) and Giovanni Botero’s The Travelers Breviat (1601), which regurgitated classical prejudices. Contemporary works such as George Abbot’s A Briefe Description of the Whole Worlde (1599), the portions of Edward Brerewood’s and John Smith’s narratives in Purchas’s collection, and Peter Heylyn’s Microcosmus or A Little Description of the World (1621) have since been questioned as sources.49 Yet, more reliable reports from the first volume of Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1599), focusing on “the worthy Discoveries, & c. of the English toward the North and Northeast by Sea,” do not appear in this list.50 Also absent is Knolles’s extended narrative of a Tartar king in The Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603), which Linda McJannet identifies as “the standard version of the story [of Tamerlane and Bajazet] for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English readers.”51 Both Hakluyt and Knolles feature many positive representations of Tartars, albeit within a proto-orientalist framework. The assumptions that “the region is said to be filled with barbarous persons




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who display despicable habits” and “as a rule, Tartarians are said to be uncivil or savage” are thus based on anachronistic, limited, and often faulty sources.52 A related article reinforces this assumed dichotomy between East and West with the statement, “By situating Rodomandro as King of Tartaria and labeling him as ‘The Great Cham,’ Wroth ties Pamphilia’s husband explicitly with a vast ‘Eastern’ empire that shares a conflict-filled history with the ‘West.’”53 This argument nevertheless ignores the connections between those Islamic powers most closely associated with the West. As Daniel Goffman documents, the Ottoman Empire was part of the “Greater Western World” of mercantile exchanges and diplomatic alliances, along with the independent Moroccan kingdom; the Safavid Empire likewise sought alliances with the West to counter the Ottomans.54 Hence, the conclusion that “Rodomandro’s portrayal as a civil Christian in contradiction to the most common representations of his countrymen leaves his own characterization open for continual questioning by the reader” depends on a partial interpretation, as does the conclusion that “this union between Pamphilia and Rodomandro offers an especially intriguing portrait of intercultural relationships because the narrative’s conceptualization of Tartaria runs counter to standard ancient and early modern descriptions of this land and its inhabitants.”55 An analysis of previously neglected sources is therefore essential for a more accurate understanding of Wroth’s Central Asian characters, particularly Rodomandro, who as “the great King of Tartaria,” becomes increasingly central to the plot of the Urania as it moves toward the personal and political union of East and West. In his historical survey of the “Timur the (Terrible/Tartar) Trope,” Adam Knobler rigorously documents how the “notion of Timur as a tyrant of despicable character was of relatively recent provenance in the West,” linked directly to English imperial designs on India from the eighteenth century onwards.56 From the fifteenth through the seventeenth century, however, Timur was admired, and even courted, by Western Europeans. The English King Henry IV exchanged letters with Timur, addressing the Tartar king as “our friend.”57 Seeking a military and trading partner to counter the Ottoman Empire, which by the fourteenth century had extended into Southern and Central Europe, Western European rulers and their scholars imagined Timur was “a Christian who shared Latin animosity toward Islam and its rulers,” a view promulgated in several British chronicles.58 By the Reformation, it was clear Timur was not Christian, and in fact Muslim; however, he retained his place in the English tradition “as God’s agent for the cruelty meted upon Christians by the Ottoman sultan.” Examining the plays of Christopher Marlowe and


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Thomas Dekker in light of this genealogy, Knobler concludes, “Timur is the consummate virtuous ‘other,’” despite some late seventeenth-century “anti-Marlovian pieces.”59 Hence, during Wroth’s lifetime, the Tartar king appeared positively, albeit ambivalently, in numerous sources. To summarize, while the allusions to the East in Marlowe’s two plays, the first English-language literary representation of the Tartar king, “are almost invariably of the earlier kind,”60 English dramatists in the decades after Marlowe had little interest in Tartars overall. Instead, the influence of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine extended to “characters of many ethnicities, including Britons.”61 As we have seen, interpretations of Rodomandro as the praiseworthy exception proving the rule of purported Central Asian barbarousness rely heavily on narratives by three Catholic friars, one of whom was English,62 written during “the age of Mongol prestige” and the advance of this “universalistic” empire into Eurasia, India, and Egypt.63 Indisputably, these medieval narratives from the first volume of Hakluyt’s 1599 edition of The Principal Navigations on “the worthy Discoveries, &c., of the English toward the North and Northeast by Sea”—“The voyage of a certaine Englishman [the Benedictine monk, Matthew Paris] into Tartaria, and from thence into Poland and Hungary, Anno 1243”; “The long and wonderfull voyage of Frier John de Plano Carpini, Anno 1246”; and “The journall of Frier William de Rubricis, Anno 1253”64—represent Tartars as “‘cruel,’ ‘hardy,’ ‘barbarous,’ ‘fierce,’ ‘grim,’ ‘ruthless,’ ‘stern,’ ‘pitiless,’ ‘deceitful,’ ‘treacherous,’ ‘crafty,’ ‘inhuman,’ ‘brutish,’ ‘savage,’ ‘bestial,’ ‘impious,’ ‘tyrannous,’ and ‘uncivil.’”65 Yet they also describe them as “partly prayse-worthie” for their obedience “unto their lords and masters,” which means “they seldome or never fall out among themselves, and, as for fightings or brawlings, wounds or manslaughters, they never happen among them.” They are also praised for “their abstinence,” “their courtesie,” and “their chastity,” with Friar John’s and Friar William’s narratives containing elaborate descriptions of the Mongol courts, where these Christian emissaries were clearly subordinate.66 Furthermore, all three medieval friars’ accounts are atypical of Hakluyt’s collection, which includes mostly contemporary references, starting with the “2. Tartarians, which were then of the King’s [Edward VI] Stable [probably stable hands],” who were consulted by the group of merchants that became the Muscovy Company prior to their inaugural voyages in the mid-1550s.67 Featured in Hakluyt’s 1589 edition, this account continues: “. . . an interpreter was gotten to be present, by whom they [the Tartarians] were demanded touching their Countrey and the man[n]ers of their nation. But they were able to answere nothing to the purpose: being in deede more acquainted (as one there mer[r]ily and openly saide)




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to tosse pottes, then to learne the states and dispositions of people.”68 Clearly, these Tartars from the Russian empire were of a different class than Wroth’s character, and thus not a model for “the courteous Tartarian,” Rodomandro (278).69 However, this reference confirms Tartars were not simply remnants from classical and medieval sources, but present within early modern English society.70 Interestingly, it is preceded by a speech (or approximation thereof ) by Mary Wroth’s grandfather, Henry Sidney (1529–86), who was actively involved with the Muscovy trade.71 His contemporary, William, first earl of Pembroke, was also involved in the merchant companies that financed the early voyages to Russia, Central Asia, and Persia.72 Mary Sidney Wroth’s aunt and mentor, Mary Sidney Herbert, became countess of Pembroke upon marrying his son, Henry Herbert.73 Wroth thus had multiple avenues through her family to contemporary reports about Tartars. Following Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (the first two volumes [1599] introducing the English reading public to their countrymen’s recent voyages through the Russian, Persian, and Ottoman empires, and a third volume [1600] adding on the early voyages to the Americas), Knolles’s The Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603) was “the first major work on Ottoman history in English.” The Generall Historie went through five editions during Wroth’s lifetime and several editions thereafter.74 Exemplifying “the two primary, interlocking functions of Jacobean proto-orientalism”—“to alarm and to reassure”75—it introduces the “mightie Tartar prince Tamerlaine (unto Bajazet fatall)” in chapters on sultans who reigned prior to his appearance, as this reference in “The Life of Orchanes, or Urchan, Second King of the Turkes” shows.76 His reign saw “the first comming over of the Turks into Europe, with purpose there to conquer and inhabit, under the fortune of the Othoman kings” (185). Knolles thus stokes the dread partly motivating his history: “And it were to be wished that the Christians of our time also (by their example warned) would at length awake out of their dead sleepe: who of late have lost unto the same enemie, not the castle of Zembenic, or the citie of Callipolis, but whole kingdomes, as Hungarie, and Cyprus and are still faire in the way” (186). The next chapter on “The Life of Amurath, the First of that Name, Third King of the Turkes, and the Great Augmentor of their Kingdome” (189), details “the true begining of the greatenesse of the Othoman kingdome in Asia” (196). Again, Knolles modulates this threat by anticipating “Tamerlan the great Tartarian prince,” who “some few yeares after, taking Bajazet prisoner in a great battle at mount Stella, abated the Othoman pride” (196). Examining these earlier chapters explains why “The Life of Bajazet, the First of that Name, the Fourth and most Unfortunate King of the


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Turks” (203) eschews its ostensible subject, the “Prowd Bajazet most false of faith, and loathing blessed peace” (202), to focus on Tamerlane.77 Tracing the progress of Bajazet’s armies in Europe, Knolles ominously concludes, “This was the first time (that I read of ) that the Turks ever passed over the river Danubius [Danube]” (203–4), which presaged their eventual control of Europe up to the gates of the Habsburg stronghold in Vienna. Again, the real prospect of Vienna falling to the Ottomans in Knolles’s era motivates the theme of “terrour” framing his history (1).78 As a countervailing force, “the great Tartarian prince” (206, 209, 210), Tamerlane, is praised as “that mightie prince,” “the noble Tartarian,” and as epitomizing the chivalric virtue of “releeving of the distressed, and chastising of the proud” (210). Moreover, “the greatnesse of the Tartarian empire” is associated with his religious tolerance, manifested by the Christian Axalla as his right-hand man (211). Tamerlane himself is not represented as Christian in Knolles’s narrative, despite medieval hopes otherwise.79 More ambiguously, he is described as “disliking of no man for his religion whatsoever, so as he did worship but one only God, creator of heaven & earth, and of all that therein is” (211). Knolles states Tamerlane tolerated neither atheists, nor idolaters, nor polytheists. Otherwise, as a pure monotheist, he is reminiscent of later defenders of religious liberty, such as Milton, which helps to explain the popularity of his positive portrayal during the commonwealth period (1649–60).80 Safely secured in past history, “this mightie Tamerlane,” who “held the East in such awe, as that he was commonly called, The wrath of God and Terrour of the World” (211), becomes an ally for besieged Christendom (first in Asia, then in Europe), which Knolles represents in the opening lines of his history as under constant threat by “the glorious Empire of the Turkes, the present terrour of the world” (1). Knolles accordingly clears him of the charge that he was “poorly borne, of base and obscure parents” (211).81 With the benefit of sources unavailable to Marlowe, who promulgated this misunderstanding, Knolles critiques those who rely on Turkish histories, which naturally would be biased (212).82 Although not central to his chapter, which is concerned with Tamerlane’s conquest of the Ottoman sultan, Knolles mentions his association with “the Great Cham of Tartaria (his father’s brother)” (213), thus lending him further prestige. Yet, an anxiety about this Eastern conqueror’s westward turn remains, which Knolles addresses by limiting Tamerlane’s motives to “the abating of Othoman pride: for which he and other such like, he was (as he would often times say) by God himself appointed” (213).83 By rendering him a champion for besieged Christians in Asia Minor and Europe, Knolles defends Tamerlane against the common charges of cruelty laid against




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him (215). In particular, Bajazet’s punishment after his defeat, which Marlowe dramatizes as the infamous cage/footstool scene, receives only a passing mention in Knolles (220).84 Nevertheless, this description of Tamerlane’s “courtesie and bountie” remains contingent on his disavowal of imperial aims in the region (217), as in his victory speech in front of the “Greek embassadours”: “For he with a mild countenance beholding them, answered them, That he was not come from so farre a countrey, or undertaken so much pains for the enlargement of his dominions alreadie large inough, (too base a thing for him to put himselfe into so great danger and travaile for) but rather to winne honour, and thereby to make his name famous unto all posteritie for ever” (221). In the mold of a chivalric hero, Knolles’s Tamerlane is more concerned with his good name, and thus “refused an empire offered to him” by the Greek emperor (222).85 Similarly, when Tamerlane in this account turns his attention to Jerusalem, it is to visit Jesus’s sepulcher (223), which is specific to Christians as Muslims do not hold that Jesus was crucified, and to curse the Jews (224), which was more characteristic of Christians than Muslims in the premodern era. This scene is repeated later in the chapter, where Tamerlane is reported to have “remained eleven dayes, daily visiting the Sepulchre of Christ Jesus (whom he called the God of the Christians) and the ruines of Salomon his temple” (226). The historical Timur, as a Muslim, would consider it anathema to refer to Jesus as God (a notion critiqued throughout the Qur’an); to do so would also run counter to Knolles’s earlier description of him as a pure monotheist, although it retains an embedded critique from Knolles’s Eastern sources of Christians as imperfect monotheists. This description also contains a reference, albeit submerged, to the Muslim holy site of al-Aqsa mosque (al-Masjid al-Aqsa), which is reputed to sit on Solomon’s temple.86 However, a casual reader at no time would take Knolles’s Tartar king for a Muslim, even though “Mahometane princes” are mentioned throughout (204).87 The chapter concludes with a sharp critique of Bajazet as a tyrant and fulsome praise of his Tartar opponent: “Whereas all the aforesaid vertues in Tamerlane were graced with divers others of like nature, no man being unto his friends more courteous or kind, either under his enemies more dreadfull or terrible” (227). Any anxiety about the potential threat of this Eastern conqueror in his westward advance against the Ottomans is contained at the end of the chapter by recording the ultimate fall of his empire, which is interpreted through the de casibus tradition.88 Although Barbour suggests that Knolles sought to structure his monumental history “like a drama for English readers, viewable in an afternoon,” this is an improbable description for a dense volume running to


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over a thousand printed pages in its first edition.89 Hence, the value of the portraits in each chapter, including “a bare-headed engraving of Tamburlaine” in the following one on “The Life of Mahomet, the First of that Name, Fifth King of the Turks, and Restorer of Their Sore Shaken Kingdom.”90 As Barbour continues, this engraving “stands out from the turbanned Asiatic portraits in the volume.”91 Sporting the shoulderlength hair and neat beard of James I’s courtiers rather than the turban Robert Sherley refused to doff before the king, Tamburlaine’s pale complexion, uncovered head, and unremarkable costume “familiarizes him to the [Western] Christian reader.”92 Hence, if one did not gain an understanding of his “rare majestie,” “comely modestie,” and “amiable and well proportioned” appearance from Knolles’s preceding description (235), one could not miss the visual representation of the Tartar king as indistinguishable from an English gentleman. The single discordant note comes with the description of his uncovered hair, which “was of a dark colour, somewhat drawing toward a violet,” or blue-black (235). Yet, his hair is not represented as such in the engraving, which although in two tones seems more blond than black. As we shall see, while Knolles’s description makes clear that Tamerlane’s dark hair is “right beautifull to behold” (235), this qualifier drops out of subsequent descriptions, thus foregrounding the potential dissonance of his difference.93 The influence of Knolles’s overwhelmingly positive portrayal of the Tartar king is reinforced by its reproduction, without attribution, in Samuel Clarke’s The Life of Tamerlane the Great, published in 1653 during the height of the commonwealth period and reissued in 1664 after the restoration of the monarchy.94 While lifting the content of his history from Knolles, who drew his narrative largely from The Historie of the Great Emperour Tamerlan (translated into English in 1597), Clarke added marginal glosses that accentuate Tamerlane’s laudable aspects, including “his merciful disposition” (2); “Tamerlane’s piety” (3); “his prudence,” “his agility and strength,” “his piety” and tolerance to Christians (4);95 “his justice” (5); “Tamerlane’s courtesie,” “his gratitude” (14); “Tamerlane’s constancy” (19); “Tamerlane’s temperance” (20); “his humility and modesty” (21); “his liberality” (25); “Tamerlane’s moderation” (29); “Tamerlane’s favour to the Christians” (31); “Tamerlane’s fidelity” (41); “Tamerlane’s justice” (44); “Tamerlane’s devotion” (52); “his love to his soldiers” (53); “Tamerlane’s plaine apparel” (54); “his love to his servants,” “his bounty,” “his frugality,” (60) and so on.96 These virtues contrast with “Bajazet’s pride” (29), specified as “Turkish pride” (30), and “Bajazet’s arrogance” (31).97 The history ends with an assessment of Tamerlane’s character as studious and devout, with his eyes expressing




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“a Divine beauty, and radiancy full of majesty” (60). On the whole, “his visage was courteous, and well proportioned” (60) and his actions done “with such grace, mixed with humanity, that he whom he overcame held himself therein most happy” (61). Wroth’s portrayal of Rodomandro in the second part of the Urania becomes fully explicable when we consider this previously neglected context. *

*

*

Returning to the imaginary geographies of Wroth’s romance with an understanding that her positive representation of the Tartar king was normative for this proto-orientalist transitional period, we still must assess the dissonance of her representation of Rodomandro as a “stranger,” albeit a “brave” one, through an increasingly racialized discourse of blackness (42). As we have seen, this discourse needs to be set not only in the subsequent transatlantic context, which did not take hold in the English tradition until the late seventeenth century, but also in the context of “the web of empire” from earlier in the century, when England remained subordinate to more established Eastern empires such as the Ottomans and Safavids. Along these lines, after laying the groundwork for the impending war between the “usurping Sophy of Persia” and “the true Sophia of Persia” (54),98 the next episode featuring Rodomandro as “the brave Tartarian” (107) recalls his debut in the Morean court, including its racialized dissonance. The events leading up to the marriage of the Morean princess, Pamphilia, and the Tartarian king are rendered through reiterated tropes of blackness, although they draw on residual discourses not necessarily associated with racialization: “By this little shadow foreseeing her long time of darkest night, which now grew on as the black curtains covering awhile the scene, wherein the blacker tragedy is to be acted; and the blackest did it prove that ever fairest beauty or sweetest fairness could have inflicted on” (107).99 The tragedy is the report, which Pamphilia later learns is false, that Amphilanthus had married another, which impelled her to marry Rodomandro. While this discourse of blackness is not explicitly racialized, its association with Rodomandro is unmistakable, as is the tendentious contrast with “fairest beauty.” Hence, as Hall identifies, when Pamphilia marries Rodomandro “all in black” (108)—“ostensibly because she is in mourning for her brother when in truth she is mourning the loss of Amphilanthus”—the overdetermined color of her garb signals her “ambivalent agreement.”100 It is significant, although less remarked, that Pamphilia turns immediately after this ceremony to a threatening letter from the Sophy of Persia,


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who seeks her hand in marriage. Pamphilia scorns this Eastern prince, who “in demanding such a princess for wife by way of threatening and force” breaches the etiquette of Western courts (108).101 In recompense, she vows to “prepare for war” (109). Dismissing this Eastern sovereign as a “barbarous fellow,” she retorts, “Tell him that when I marry, it shall be to such a one as shall bring me to a safe and justly settled title of honor, not to a tyrannized and usurped one as he is” (109). This reply sounds a discordant note in the romance, as it follows without pause from her marriage to the Eastern sovereign from Tartaria, adjacent to the Persian realm. Still, her alliances with the “Asian princes” remain contingent on their regard for the Tartarian king (109), which corresponds to the relatively powerless position of the English vis-à-vis the Islamic empires of Wroth’s era. The next episode featuring Rodomandro and Pamphilia confirms their marriage as a political union essential for defending “this Christned world”—rendered as in the manuscript, where it could mean “Christian world” or “christened” world”—in the cause of “the delicate, distressed princess, rightful Sophie of Persia” (115–16). As the Tartarian king concludes, “And great assistance shall we meet there towards our enterprise, for here certainly all the west hath resolve to succor her. Then we of the East joining, what shall hinder us to obtain a whole and happy victory?” (116). In relation to this military alliance, he speaks one more time to ask for “the [Morean] king’s consent for his daughter Pamphilia” (270), meaning his leave to take her to Tartaria with him as his wife and implying their earlier marriage ceremony had not been consummated. Suggesting the analogous interruption of Othello and Desdemona’s marriage, Rodomandro uses similar rhetoric, stating, “Divine Lady . . . the Tartarians are no orators, but plain blunt men. Our hearts are rich in truth and loyalty. Proud indeed we are, but only of ladies’ favors, knowing our sunburnt faces can but rarely attain to fair ladies’ likings” (271).102 Unlike the former couple’s tragic conclusion, however, Rodomandro and Pamphilia provide proof of their union in the form of a son (406). But the death of this son means their blended lineage has no future, anticipating the shift in the understanding of “race” from “lineage or genealogy” to “paradigms of physical and phenotypical difference.”103 After this episode, Rodomandro does not speak, and so also has no future in the world of the romance, although he surfaces in a posthumous appearance as Pamphilia travels across Asia to Cyprus (406–7).104 As Mary Floyd-Wilson proposes in her study of “the marginal English” during the early modern period, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, with his palimpsestic Central Asian (Tartar, Scythian, Parthian) genealogy, is depicted through “blindingly white conceptions of beauty” that appeared




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“insistently and peculiarly ‘northern.’” This barbarous connection was the source of much anxiety for the English in this period.105 Hence, just as the Tartar king’s physical difference in Marlowe’s play, Knolles’s history, and Clarke’s narrative is signaled by hair “of a dusky colour inclining somewhat to a violet,”106 Wroth’s character is represented through shades of difference, which while unsettling are not the terms of racialized abuse of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.107 Wroth’s Tartarian characters are not so much “black,” therefore, as unsettlingly “white,” from the “so white” hands of Rodomandro to the excessive whiteness of the Persian princess in a subsequent episode (42, 168). Analogously, Hakluyt glosses the chapter, “Of their [the Mongols’ or Tartars’] forme, habite, and manner of living,” from the aforementioned medieval account by Friar John de Plano Carpini, with the marginalia: “Like unto Frobisher’s men.”108 The narratives of Martin Frobisher’s three voyages “for the search of the straight or passage to China” (1576, 1577, and 1578) cover the earliest English accounts of their encounters with the natives of Labrador and more northward regions.109 Following the inaugural English voyages in search of a northeast passage by twenty years, Frobisher’s frame of reference when viewing the natives he encountered was Central Asian: “They be like Tartars, with long black haire, broad faces, and flatte noses, and tawnie in color” (621). “Their colour” is later described as “not much unlike the Sunne burnt Countrie man, who laboureth daily in the Sunne for his living” (627).110 The point of comparison, in other words, is the English laborer and not the “Ethiopian” slave, which would be more plausible from a British perspective through the first half of the seventeenth century.111 As an additional point of comparison, Sebastian Cabot, who voyaged to this region earlier in the sixteenth century, brought back three natives who, once dressed like English men, were indistinguishable from other Britons. To quote an eyewitness account from Hakluyt’s first collection of early English voyages to the Americas: This yeere also were brought unto the king [Henry VII] three men taken in the New found Island [Newfoundland] that before I spake of. . . . These were clothed in beasts skins and did eate rawe flesh, and spake such speach, that no man could understand them, and in their demeanor like to brute beasts, whom the king kept a time after. Of the which upon two yeeres after, I saw two apparelled after the manner of Englishmen in Westminster pallace, which that time I could not discerne from Englishmen, till I was learned what they were, but as for speech, I heard none of them utter one word.112


38

This passage reveals how the early encounters of the English with natives of the north, whether westward or eastward, involved identifications that


39

do not correspond to the equation of Ethiop and Tartar in Shakespeare’s play, which we have seen was not normative in any case. To move into Wroth’s era, a related coding of Tartars as “white” occurs in Robert Covert’s A True and Almost Incredible Report of an Englishman, that (being cast away in the good Ship called the Assension in Cambaya, the farthest part of the East Indies) travelled by Land thorow many unknowne Kingdomes and great Cities. . . . With a Discovery of a Great Emperour called the Great Mogoll, a Prince not till now knowne to our English Nation, published in 1631 but recording Covert’s sojourn from 1607 to 1611. Referring to Akbar the Great, the Timurid ruler of the Mughal Empire who was a contemporary of Queen Elizabeth, Covert defines “the word Mogol in their language is as much to say, the great white King; for he is a white man and of the Race of the Tartares.”113 With English men, who wore “Turkish [and Persian] clothes” out of necessity while traveling in the Islamic empires, appearing indistinguishable from the natives—until they spoke or were pointed out as a “Frank” (Western Christian)—the difference from Tartars, Persians, and Ottomans seems less fixed on both sides.114 Accordingly, without ignoring the racialized connotations emerging from the transatlantic slave trade that Hall has emphasized, we must acknowledge the closeness of the Tartar to the English, with both defined as “white” and “tawny,” creates as much dissonance in Wroth’s romance, where the Tartar king marries “the eastern star, the never-enough-admired Pamphilia” without comment (417), as does his distance as a stranger marked by blackness. Indeed, it is the combination of blackness and whiteness that renders him an important liminal figure for early modern discourses of race determined by England’s “sluggish” involvement in the era’s global imperialist project.115 As such, while it would be anachronistic to label the ideas of Asia in Wroth’s Urania as orientalist in the sense Said defines for the height of Western imperialism two centuries later, it may be insufficient to describe them as proto-orientalist in the sense Barbour defines in the context of English men’s subaltern status in Eastern empires. Rather, Wroth’s prose romance showcases shifting discourses of “black” and “white” around the union of Asia and Europe under the banner of a universalistic Christian identity. She therefore provides a unique representation of the residual possibilities and emerging limits characterizing those decades when England transitioned from its imaginary geography of global empire to more durable colonial ventures.




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1. For the origins of this representation, see C. W. Connell, “Western Views of the Origin of the ‘Tartars’: An Example of the Influence of Myth in the Second Half of the Thirteenth Century,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 3, no. 1 (1973): 115–37, esp. 117–18; and C. W. Connell, “Western Views of the Tartars, 1240–1340,” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1969). On the Western misnomer, “Tartar,” for Tatars, see Robert Ralston Cawley, The Voyagers and Elizabethan Drama (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 188. 2. Mary Wroth, The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1995), to which was appended the first Petrarchan sonnet sequence by an English woman to appear in print; see also The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983). Wroth also composed, and perhaps saw performed, the first original pastoral drama by an English woman, Love’s Victory, which remained in manuscript until recently. For more on Wroth’s life and works, see Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 243–307. Wroth was born ca. 1587; Lewalski lists Wroth’s approximate year of death as 1651; Roberts lists it as 1653. 3. Mary Wroth, The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts, completed by Suzanne Gossett and Janel Mueller (Tempe, AZ: Renaissance English Text Society, 1999). 4. Sheila T. Cavanagh, “‘She Is but Enchanted’: Christianity and the Occult in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania,” in Things of the Spirit: Women Writers Constructing Spirituality, ed. Kristina K. Groover (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 69–89. See also Bernadette Andrea, Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 30–52. 5. Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1975), 1. 6. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 49, 50. See also Said on “Empire, Geography, and Culture,” in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Random House, 1994), 1–14. John Michael Archer uses Said’s concept of “imaginative geography” in Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 4. 7. Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 10. See also Daniel Goffman, Britons in the Ottoman Empire, 1642–1660 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), 4. 8. Said, Orientalism, 71, 73; Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 17. 9. Barbour, Before Orientalism, 5. Cf. Archer on “para-colonial studies,” Old Worlds, 17. 10. For critiques of Said’s anachronisms, see Andrea, Women and Islam, 131n3. 11. As noted on the Hakluyt Society Web site, “This, the second edition, much enlarged, of the Principal Navigations, has an equally involved printing and


Notes


12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

41

publication history [as the 1589 first edition]. The title-page of the first volume (1598) promises an account of Essex’s ‘famous victorie’ at Cadiz in 1596, which duly appears at the end of that volume (pp. 607–619). It is usually referred to as the ‘Cadiz leaves’. Within a year of the first volume’s publication, the Cadiz leaves were withdrawn, the title-page was reprinted without mention of Essex or Cadiz, and its publication date changed to 1599” (http://www.hakluyt.com/ hakluyt_census.htm, accessed 21 October 2009). Henceforth, I list the edition from which I am citing by year based on its title page. T. S. Willan, The Muscovy Merchants of 1555 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1953; repr. Clifton, NJ: Augustus M. Kelley, 1973), 10, 46, 122. Wroth, Second Part, 42. Unless otherwise noted, I have modernized my citations from this edition, which reproduces the erratic spellings of the manuscript. I indicate further citations parenthetically. Sheila T. Cavanagh, Cherished Torment: The Emotional Geography of Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 39. Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 2. Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 206. Cf. Mary Ellen Lamb’s description of Rodomandro as “darkly handsome” in Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 233. On Pamphilia, see Roberts, Critical Introduction to The First Part of the . . . Urania, xxv. On the marriage between Pamphilia and Rodomandro, see Hall, Things of Darkness, 206; Cavanagh, Cherished Torment, 43. Hall, Things of Darkness, 206; Sheila T. Cavanagh, “Prisoners of Love: CrossCultural and Supernatural Desires in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania,” in Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, 1570–1640, ed. Constance C. Relihan and Goran V. Stanivukovic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 97. See also Cavanagh, “‘What ish my nation?’ Lady Mary Wroth’s Interrogations of Personal and National Identity,” in Early Modern Prose Fiction: The Cultural Politics of Reading, ed. Naomi Conn Liebler (New York: Routledge, 2007), 98–114. Barbour, Before Orientalism, 4. In a parallel case, Jack D’Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1991), shows how English views of North Africans during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shifted from negative to positive in the accounts of merchants and diplomats as it “served their purpose” (25). On wish-fulfillment as a characteristic of the genre, see Barbara Fuchs, Romance (New York: Routledge, 2004), 6. Helen Hackett focuses on “Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania” in Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 159–93. For a related discussion of “protoorientalist” wish-fulfillment, see Barbour, Before Orientalism, 9. Hall, Things of Darkness, 187–210. For a general discussion of this shift, see St. Clair Drake, Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropology, 2 vols. (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, UCLA, 1987, 1990) and Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, Introduction to Women, “Race,” and Writing




22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

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in the Early Modern Period (London: Routledge, 1994), 1–14. For a more focused discussion, see Sujata Iyengar, Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). Richard Hakluyt, “The Epistle Dedicatorie” (“To the right worshipfull and most vertuous Gentleman master Phillip Sydney Esquire”), in Divers voyages touching the discoverie of America, and the Ilands adjacent unto the same, made first of all by our Englishmen, and afterward by the Frenchmen and Britons (London: Thomas Woodcocke, 1582), sig. 2v. Philip Sidney (1554–86) was Mary Wroth’s uncle. Her romance was modeled on Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (published posthumously in 1590 by Fulke Greville and in 1593 by Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke). I have adjusted u/v and i/j in citations from Hakluyt, as well as added apostrophes in possessive constructions. Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). On “England’s eastward trajectory,” see Archer, Old Worlds, 3. Roger Savory, Iran Under the Safavids (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 27–30. In elaborating a “reciprocal comparison,” Jonathan Burton, in “The Shah’s Two Ambassadors: The Travels of the Three Sherley Brothers and the Global Early Modern,” in Emissaries in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Mediation, Transmission, Traffic, 1550–1700, ed. Brinda Charry and Gitanjali Shahani (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), highlights the difference between “ambassador” in a Western European sense and a “Persian ambassador, or safir” (34). Middleton quoted in Boies Penrose, The Sherleian Odyssey (London: Simpkin Marshall, 1938), 174. Penrose, The Sherleian Odyssey, 175, 184, 186. See also Nabil Matar, “Renaissance England and the Turban,” in Images of the Other: Europe and the Muslim World Before 1700, ed. David R. Blanks (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1997), 39–54. A Chronicle of the Carmelites in Persia and the Papal Mission of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries, vol. 1 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1939), 293. See Savory, Iran under the Safavids, for a caution when using “the Carmelite records” (229). Chronicle of the Carmelites, 290. Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity, discusses “the ancient associations between Amazons and Scythia” (26), a region associated with Tartars in the early modern period. Chronicle of the Carmelites, 143–45. On this formula as it applies to African characters in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English literature, see Hall, Things of Darkness, 107–16; and Iyengar, Shades of Difference, 44–79. On this spirit, see Sheila T. Cavanagh, “Mystical Sororities: The Power of Supernatural Female Narratives in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania,” in Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England, ed. Corinne S. Abate (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 151–65. For the Tartar/Persian princess in the Urania, and her connection to Tartar and Persian women in England during the same period, see Bernadette Andrea,


42


34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

43

“The Tartar Girl, the Persian Princess and Early Modern English Women’s Authorship From Elizabeth I to Mary Wroth,” in Women Writing Back/Writing Women Back: Transnational Perspectives from the Late Middle Ages to the Dawn of the Modern Era, ed. Anke Gilleir, Alicia C. Montoya, and Suzan van Dijk (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). Games, Web of Empire, 18–46. On the travels of men from the Islamic world to the West prior to the eighteenth century, see Nabil Matar, In the Land of the Christians: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003). Roberts, Introduction to Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, 24–26. Hall, Things of Darkness, 206. Cf. Archer, who shows how “Russians were symbolically ‘blackened’ along with Africans because of the servile nature attributed to them in western European texts” during the sixteenth century; however, “by the seventeenth century . . . Russians have become white, however dark their eyes or high-flown their complexions” (Old Worlds 122, 132). Hall, Things of Darkness, 208–10, discusses the class, gender, and racialized connotations of “fair hands” for other male characters in the romance. The meaning of “curious” in this description, to follow the usage in Wroth’s era, is “made with care or art; skil[l]fully, elaborately or beautifully wrought,” (Oxford English Dictionary [OED], 2nd ed., s.v. “curious”). Hall, Things of Darkness, 128–41. See also Bernadette Andrea, “Black Skin, The Queen’s Masques: Africanist Ambivalence and Feminine Author(ity) in the Masques of Blackness and Beauty,” English Literary Renaissance 29 (1999): 246–81. This is the “presence chamber” or “chamber of presence,” “a room, especially one in a palace, in which a monarch or other distinguished person receives visitors” (OED, s.v. “presence chamber”). Cf. the crude, even pornographic, comparison in Othello (1.1.88–118), citing The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 1997), 2102–3. On the validity of these vows, see Josephine A. Roberts, “‘The Knott Never to Bee Untied’: The Controversy Regarding Marriage in Mary Wroth’s Urania,” in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 109–31. Andrea, “Black Skin, The Queen’s Masques,” 270–73. Iyengar, Shades of Difference, 80–100, examines Jacobean masques featuring Irish natives and Native Americans, as well as masques of “blackness.” This contrasts with Cavanagh’s claims in “What ish my nation?” 104. See also Cavanagh, Cherished Torment, 47. Cavanagh, Cherished Torment, 2, 8, 38. Roberts, Critical Introduction to The First Part of the . . . Urania, xxvii–xxviii, initially proposed this connection. Cavanagh, Cherished Torment, 38, 39. On Marlowe’s sources for Tamburlaine, see Vivien Thomas and William Tydeman, eds., Christopher Marlowe: The Plays and Their Sources (London: Routledge, 1994), 69–168. As Thomas and Tydeman note, “It was not only in order




48.

49.

50.

51.

52. 53.

54.

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to achieve the desired degree of coherence that Marlowe discarded many of the features with which Tamburlaine’s several chroniclers endowed him. His aim was in part to exclude elements which might detract from his protagonist’s sublime superiority” (10). On the relationship of Purchas to Hakluyt, see C. R. Steele, “From Hakluyt to Purchas,” in The Hakluyt Handbook, vol. 1, ed. D. B. Quinn (London: Hakluyt Society, 1974), 74–96. As Steele shows, “Purchas in the Pilgrimage condenses and rewords Hakluyt’s material to such an extent that accurate analysis is not always possible” (77). On Heylyn, see Archer, Old Worlds, 77–78, 87–88, 111. See also Robert Markley, “Riches, Power, Trade and Religion: The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1720,” Renaissance Studies 17, no. 3 (2003): 494–516, esp. 505–10, and The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 57–63. Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, made by Sea or over-land, to the remote and farthest distant quarters of the Earth, at any time within the compasse of these 1600 yeres: Divided into three severall Volumes, according to the positions of the Regions, whereunto they were directed. The first volume containeth the worthy Discoveries, &c. of the English toward the North and Northeast by Sea. . . . The second volume comprehendeth the principall Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and discoveries of the English nation . . . to the South and South-east parts of the world (London: George Bishop, Ralph Newberie, and Robert Barker,1599). Hakluyt’s preface to the first edition of 1589 explains the division of the collection into three parts, with the volumes on Asia preceding those on America. His preface to the second edition of 1599 showcases Anthony Jenkinson’s voyages to “certaine Tartarian kings” and to “the great Sophy of Persia.” Linda McJannet, The Sultan Speaks: Dialogue in English Plays and Histories about the Ottoman Turks (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 89. McJannet focuses on Knolles’s “unflattering account of Bayazid [Bajazet in Knolles and other early modern English sources],” whereas I am focusing on the positive account of Tamerlane. See also Margaret Meserve, “Tamerlane: Humanist Hero,” in Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 203–23. Cavanagh, Cherished Torment, 39. Sheila T. Cavanagh, “‘The Great Cham’: East Meets West in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania,” Meridian: The La Trobe University English Review 18, no. 2 (2002),91. Wroth’s romance initially follows the parallel with Tamerlane by representing the Great Cham as Rodomandro’s uncle. However, the romance confuses Rodomandro with the Great Cham toward its conclusion (325, 392, 401, 407). Tamerlane (Temür), who was not a descendent of Genghis (Chingghis) Khan, never bore this title, on which see Beatrice Forbes Manz, The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 4–5, 14–16. Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002), 8. See also Adam Knobler, “Pseudo-Conversions and Patchwork Pedigrees: The Christianization of Muslim Princes and the Diplomacy


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55.

56.

57.

58.

59. 60. 61.

62.

45

of Holy War,” Journal of World History 7, no. 2 (1996): 181–97, and Adam Knobler, “Missions, Mythologies and the Search for non-European Allies in anti-Islamic Holy War, 1291–c.1540,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 1989). Cavanagh, “The Great Cham,” 93; “Prisoners of Love,” 97. Cavanagh’s reliance on the early twentieth-century literary historian Robert Ralston Cawley (see note 1 above) leads her erroneously to assign a negative value to Tartars in Wroth’s era. Kenneth Parker, in his Introduction to Early Modern Tales of Orient: A Critical Anthology (London: Routledge, 1999), provides an illuminating discussion of literary histories from the 1930s to 1960s, such as Cawley’s, as compared with late twentieth-century studies (8–9). Adam Knobler, “Timur the (Terrible/Tartar) Trope: A Case of Repositioning in Popular Literature and History,” Medieval Encounters 7, no. 1 (2001), 103. As Manz, Rise and Rule, points out, “Tamerlane is more correctly called by his Turkic name, Temür; the western version of his name comes from the Persian Timur-i lang, Temür the lame” (1). My use of names in this essay depends on the source from which I am citing. Knobler, “Timur the (Terrible/Tartar) Trope,” 103. Knobler states in “The Rise of Timur and Western Diplomatic Response, 1390–1405,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 3, no. 5 (1995): 341–49, that “the reports of Timur’s victories [over Bayezid/Bajazet] which appeared in England were certainly the most ebullient” (344). Knobler, “Timur the (Terrible/Tartar) Trope,” 103. Manz, Rise and Rule, clarifies “the question of Temür’s religious beliefs,” identifying him as a Sunni Muslim, following the Hanafi school of law and the Naqshbandi Sufi order. However, “in religion as in other aspects of his life Temür was above all an opportunist; his religion served frequently to further his aims, but almost never to circumscribe his actions” (17). Knobler, “Timur the (Terrible/Tartar) Trope,” 104–6. Cawley, Voyagers and Elizabethan Drama, 113. McJannet, Sultan Speaks, 81. Knobler, “Timur the (Terrible/Tartar) Trope,” mentions a “parallel between Timur and pre-Christian leaders of classical antiquity” in “a pageant written for the Drapers’ Company by Thomas Middleton,” The Triumphs of Integrity (1623; 104–5n13). Dekker’s Old Fortunatus (1600) alludes to Timur as “Fortunes best minion,” but does not represent him as a character (105n15). Knobler also discusses English plays from the 1680s featuring Tamerlane as a character (106n18, 107n22). An intriguing “lost” source is recorded in the biography of Elizabeth Cary (ca. 1585–1639): “Of all that she then writ [in her early life], that which was said to be the best was the life of Tamberlaine in verse,” The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry, with The Lady Falkland: Her Life, By One of Her Daughters, ed. Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 190. Cary’s achievements include the first published tragedy by an English woman. Cawley begins his genealogy of “Tartary” in Voyagers and Elizabethan Drama with these friars, describing the Benedictine Matthew Paris (ca. 1200–59) as “the first to paint them full-size” (189). Cawley dismisses Knolles in a footnote,




63.

64.

65.

66. 67.

68.

69.

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suggesting only “incidental information could be picked up from such works as Knolles’ History of the Turks (1603)” (189n16; italics missing in note). However, I am proposing that Knolles’s overwhelmingly positive representation of the Tartar king, Tamerlane, is central to Wroth’s characterization of Rodomandro. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, vol. 2, The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 369, 404–5; Manz, Rise and Rule, 16. Hakluyt, Principal Navigations (1599 ed.), title page, table of contents (items 11–13). Samuel Purchas begins the section on the “Peregrinations and Discoveries, in the remotest North and East parts of Asia; called Tartaria and China,” in Purchas his Pilgrimes in Five Bookes . . . The Third Part (London: William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, 1625), with the narrative by Friar William of Rubruck (Rubricis), which is more negative than Carpini’s narrative, which he does not include. But he does include “Extracts of Alhacen his Arabike Historie of Tamerlan, touching his Martial Travels, done into French by Jean Du Bec, Abbat of Mortimer,” which is the basis for the overwhelming praise of Tamerlane— identified as a Tartar—in seventeenth-century English representations, including, as I am arguing, Wroth’s. Cavanagh does not consider the “Extracts of Alhacen.” Cawley, Voyagers and Elizabethan Drama, 190. Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 87–121, contrasts these tendentious “missionary travels” with the travels of more “quotidian” merchants such as Marco Polo (87, 91). See also Janet L. Abu-Lughod, “The Mongols and the Northeast Passage,” in Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 153–84, where she discusses “the magnitude of Europe’s ignorance of the east” as evidenced by the narratives of John of Pian di Carpine [Carpini], William of Rubruck, and other papal envoys to the Mongol court during the thirteenth century (162). Hakluyt, Principal Navigations (1599 ed.), 55. As J. S. G. Simmons in his chapter on “Russia” in The Hakluyt Handbook emphasizes, “The materials in Principall navigations (1589) relating to Muscovy (and they amount to between a quarter and one-third of the total text of the first edition) have been characterized as the finest body of materials in the book” (161). W. E. D. Allen’s chapter on “The Caspian” quotes the same assessment (171). “The newe Navigation and discoverie of the kingdome of Muscovia, by the Northeast, in the yeere 1553: Enterprised by Sir Hugh Willoughbie knight, performed by Richard Chanceler [Chancellor], Pilot major of the voyage. Translated out of the former Latine into English,” Principall Navigations (1589 ed.), 281. Archer points out that “Chancellor was raised in the Sidney household” (Old Worlds 112). While it is not clear whether these Tartar stable hands are servants or slaves, Richard Hellie, Slavery in Russia, 1450–1725 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), identifies “a Russian slave in England in 1569,” who “could have been a Russian, a Tatar, a Finn, a Pole, or a member of any of several other ethnicities” (22n32).


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70. Archer similarly shows “how commercial observation overlays traditional knowledge [of Southwest Asia], turning history into a palimpsest” (Old Worlds 74). 71. “The newe Navigation and discoverie of the kingdome of Muscovia,” Principall Navigations (1589 ed.), 281. Willan, Muscovy Merchants, 46, 122. Archer elaborates on the Sidney-Chancellor connection (Old Worlds, 112–13); he further points out that “the great map of Russia and Tartary that [Anthony] Jenkinson produced in 1562” was “dedicated to Henry Sidney” (114). Richard Wilson, “Visible Bullets: Tamburlaine the Great and Ivan the Terrible,” ELH 62, no. 1 (1995): 47–68, also mentions the Sidney connection (51, 54). 72. Willan, Muscovy Merchants, 10–11, 117. 73. On this May-December marriage, see Margaret P. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 38–40. 74. Barbour, Before Orientalism, 16, referencing Catherine Woodhead, “‘The Present Terrour of the World?’ Contemporary Views of the Ottoman Empire c 1600,” History 72, no. 234 (1987): 20–37. Woodhead, an Ottomanist, provides a rare comparison of Knolles’s history with Ottoman sources. Cf. McJannet’s discussion of John Foxe’s History and Tyranny of the Turks (1570), preceding Knolles by three decades and drawing on similar sources, as “The First English History of the Turks?” (Sultan Speaks 58). 75. Barbour, Before Orientalism, 17; McJannet, Sultan Speaks, 139–40, qualifies Barbour’s claim. 76. Richard Knolles, The Generall Historie of the Turkes, from the first beginning of that Nation to the rising of the Othoman Familie (London: Adam Islip, 1603), 179, 186; subsequently indicated parenthetically. I have adjusted u/v and i/j in citations from Knolles. 77. Knolles begins this chapter by describing Bajazet’s conquest of Serbia and Croatia, wherein the departing Christians were “most cruelly slaine” after the sultan rescinded his agreement with them (203). 78. The Ottomans besieged Vienna in 1529 and 1532, after which the Habsburg emperor recognized Ottoman control of Hungary (conquered in 1526). The final unsuccessful siege of Vienna in 1683 marked the limits of Ottoman westward expansion. On these sieges, see Hodgson, Venture of Islam, vol. 2, 115, 131, 139. 79. Knobler, “Rise of Timur,” 344; and Knobler, “Pseudo-Conversion,” 189–91. 80. On Milton and Muscovy, see Archer, Old Worlds, 101–2, 137–38. Cf. Markley, Far East, 80–81, 97n2. 81. As Manz, Rise and Rule, explains, “one trait common to most major nomadic dynastic founders was their difficult youth. Temür accordingly emphasized his own modest beginnings—if he did not invent them—and made no secret of his early career as a livestock-thief, while still claiming an aristocratic lineage” (15). 82. As McJannet, Sultan Speaks, shows, Knolles drew this critique from “Jean Du Bec’s Histoire du grand Empereur Tamerlanes (Paris, 1595), which was translated into English in 1597 by ‘H. M.’ (The Historie of the Great Emperour Tamerlan . . . Drawen from the auncient monuments of the Arabians)” (97; see also 101, 113–15). 83. Manz, Rise and Rule, situates Temür’s claims within the Mongol discourse of empire (15), which Western Christians appropriated “within a recuperative,




84.

85. 86.

87.

88. 89. 90. 91.

92. 93.

94.

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providential framework,” on which see Jonathan Burton, “English Anxiety and the Muslim Power of Conversion: Five Perspectives on ‘Turning Turk’ in Early Modern Texts,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2002): 35–67. Cf. Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part I, act 2, scene 2, where Tamerlane and his lords enter, with “two Moors drawing Bajazeth in his cage, and his wife [Zabina] following him” (42). In act 5, scene 1, Bajazeth “brains himself against the cage,” followed by his wife who “runs against the cage and brains herself ” (57–58). The eponymous protagonist in Tamburlaine the Great, Part II refers to this scene when he promises his son, “If thou wilt love the wars and follow me, / Thou shalt be made a king and reign with me, / Keeping in iron cages emperors” (72). All citations are from Marlowe, Complete Plays and Poems, ed. E. D. Pendry (London: J. M. Dent, 1976). Manz, Rise and Rule, 90–91, discusses more plausible reasons for Temür refraining from establishing direct control in these regions. Ibn Battuta, the famous Moroccan traveler and contemporary of Tamerlane, who visited the Haram al-Sharif, which includes al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, on which see Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the 14th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 56–57. In addition, as McJannet points out in Sultan Speaks, “unlike the Latin editors of the eastern sources, Knolles does not adopt Muslim dates, place names, and titles” (121). On this moral, see McJannet, Sultan Speaks, 131. Barbour, Before Orientalism, 33. Ibid., 42; Knolles, Generall Historie of the Turkes, 231. Barbour, Before Orientalism, 42. For instance, the anomalous bare-headed portrait of Tamerlane in Knolles’s chapter on “Mahomet fifth king of the Turks” (236) is framed by portraits of the sultan and his heir, Solyman the Magnificent, in prominent turbans (230, 239). Barbour, Before Orientalism, 44. Cf. the description in Knolles’s primary source, The Historie of the Great Emperour Tamerlan . . . Drawen from the auncient Monuments of the Arabians, by Messire Jean du Bec, Abbot of Mortimer. Newly translated out of French into English, for their benefite which are ignorant in that language (London: William Ponsonby,1597): “verily they [Tamerlane’s hairs] were of a duskie colour drawing towards a violet, the most beautifull that anie eye could behold” (6). The Life of Tamerlane the Great, with His Wars against the great Duke of Moso [Muscovy], the King of China, Bajazet the great Turk, the Sultan of Egypt, the King of Persia, and some others, carried on with a continued Series of Success from the first to the last. Wherein are Rare Examples of Heathenish Piety, Prudence, Magnanimity, Mercy, Liberality, Humility, Justice, Temperance, and Valour (London: J. H. for Simon Miller, 1653). “Sa[muel] Clarke, late pastor in St. Bennet Fink, London” is identified as the author on the title page of the 1664 edition. In the dedication “To the High-Born Prince, His Grace, James Duke of Monmouth, &c” of the 1679 edition of The History of Tamerlan the Great (sig. A2), Tamerlane is described as “a Sovereign Prince, of a Heroick Spirit, of an


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95. 96. 97.

98.

99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

104.

105.

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undaunted Courage, and of an admirable Conduct in War” and as “a Prince so exact in the Execution of Justice, and of so singular a Piety and Goodness, that the Christian Profession, as well as his own Religion, flourished all over his Dominions under his Protection” (sigs. A2–A2v). The Duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s illegitimate son and the hope of the Protestant cause during the succession crisis that sought to exclude the Catholic James II, brother and legitimate heir of Charles II, from the English throne, is explicitly praised by analogy with Tamerlane in the rest of the dedication. On Monmouth, from the first Exclusion Bill of 1679 to his failed revolt in 1685 (for which he was executed), see Christopher Hill, Century of Revolution, 1603–1714, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1980), 168–70. Similarly, William of Orange, whose placement on the English throne with his wife Mary in 1688 finally decided the succession in favor of a Protestant sovereign, was likened to Tamerlane in the dual sense of being the conqueror of the Grand Seignior (in this case, James II as “the wicked Ottoman Sultan, Bayazit”) and a “champion of civil and religious liberty,” on which see Craig Rose, England in the 1690s: Revolution, Religion and War (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 180. Rose references Nicholas Rowe’s play, Tamerlane (1702), noting “the eponymous hero of the play is an idealized portrayal of King William” (290n58). Prudence and piety are frequently repeated qualities in these glosses. I have adjusted these marginal glosses for initial capital letters, unless the gloss is a proper name, and have added possessive apostrophes. McJannet, Sultan Speaks, 16, addresses the “pejorative” and “positive” epithets for “the Turks” in early modern English sources. She provides an extended “case study of Marlowe’s Bajazeth” in her chapter on “Marlowe’s Turks” (64–89). Western Europeans referred to the Safavid shah as “the Sophy,” pointing towards the Sufi history of the dynasty, which includes reported encounters with Timur/ Tamerlane, on which see Savory, Iran under the Safavids, 1–26. Sophia, Greek for wisdom, resonates with the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, where they converted the Byzantine imperial cathedral, Hagia Sophia, into a mosque. Drake, Black Folk, vol. 2, discusses these premodern connotations of blackness. Hall, Things of Darkness, 206. See also Hall on “the racialized nature of the language of fairness and beauty” (177). For an earlier breach of etiquette, this time of Eastern courts, see The Second Part of the . . . Urania, 76–78. Cf. Othello 1.2.81ff., “Rude am I in my speech . . .” (Norton Shakespeare, 2109). Hendricks and Parker, Women, “Race,” and Writing, 2. Henry Sherley, the son of Robert and Teresa, who seems to have assimilated to English culture without a trace of his Persian lineage, on which see Samuel C. Chew, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937), 314–16. Cavanagh analyzes this anomaly in Cherished Torment, 190–94. For the significance of Cyprus in The First Part of the . . . Urania, see Andrea, Women and Islam, 36–42. Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity, 2, 91.




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106. Clarke, Life of Tamerlane, 60. 107. Hall begins Things of Darkness with the lines “‘Away, you Ethiop!’ and ‘Out, tawny Tartar’ (3.2.257 and 263)” (1; cf. 22). She later describes Rodomandro as “almost literally ‘the tawny Tartar,’ who is black and out of favour” (207). See also Archer, Old Worlds, on Giles Fletcher’s description in Of the Russe Common Wealth (London, 1591) of Tartars as “of a tanned colour into yellowe and blacke” as it relates to Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (124). 108. Hakluyt, Principall Navigations (1589 ed.), 54. 109. “The First voyage of Sir Martin Frobisher to the North west. An 1576” (615), “The second voyage of Sir Martin Frobisher, to the same coastes. An. 1577” (622), and “The third and last voyage of Sir Martin Frobisher, to Meta Incognita. An. 1578” (630) in Hakluyt, Principall Navigations (1589 ed.), as listed in the title page. The expanded title for the first voyage is “to the Northwest for the search of the straight or passage to China . . .” (615). 110. Iyengar, Shades of Difference, 11, mentions this passage. 111. Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), stresses that, while Catherine of Aragon brought “two slaves to attend on the maids of honor” when she arrived in England from Spain at the beginning of the sixteenth century (23), persons of African descent in the British Isles cannot be assumed to be slaves prior to the transfer of the monopoly over the transatlantic slave trade from the Iberians to the British at the end of the seventeenth century (57–58). 112. Hakluyt, Principall Navigations (1589 ed.), 515. Cf. Habib, Black Lives, 251– 55, 276–77. 113. Covert, True and Almost Incredible Report, 39. Cawley, Voyagers and Elizabethan Drama, 149, identifies this king as “Akbar the Great (1542–1605).” 114. Parker, Early Modern Tales of Orient, 171; see also 185 and 207–11. 115. Hakluyt, “The Epistle Dedication,” Principall Navigations (1589 ed.), sig. *2.


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Romancing the Turk Trade, Race, and Nation in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

Marion Hollings

Edmund Spenser’s presence in Ireland as a high-level political official from around 1588 until shortly before his death in 1599, combined with his use of epic and the genre’s investiture as propaganda in nation-making, has made him interesting to postcolonial theorists who wish to supply a longer historical perspective to Britain’s colonial relations and imperial aspirations. Since Stephen Greenblatt’s seminal study, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, scholarly investigation of English nationhood in the early modern period has focused especially on the vexed place of Ireland—and more recently—Scotland, Wales, and the Americas, in Tudor politics and ideology; and Spenser’s work has particularly drawn close scrutiny in this regard.1 In his essay on The Tempest in Post-colonial Shakespeares, Jerry Brotton notes how the scholarly focus of the last twenty years on “New World” contexts for the play reiterates a colonial impulse to elide the Eastern Other, and I would argue that the same case could be made for The Faerie Queene: “In dismissing the significance of the Mediterranean geography of [The Tempest], colonial criticism . . . leaves the play curiously one-dimensional, implying that the eastern frontier of the play’s geography is politically inert, thus suggesting that significant contemporary English expansion was confined to a western horizon encompassing the Atlantic and the Americas. Such an assumption [reproduces] an orientalizing discourse which occludes any possible traces of English involvement with the Eastern Mediterranean and North


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Africa.”2 Although in The Faerie Queene, Spenser follows the romance tradition of locating the land of fairy in the East, the extent to which early modern England’s relations with the world of the Eastern Mediterranean have informed the poem has remained largely unexamined.3 In the “House of Holinesse” episode (book I, canto x) of The Faerie Queene, the Redcrosse knight is led by Mercie to a hospital in which “seuen Bead-men” offer their services in “doing godly thing” (I.x.36.3 and 5).4 Redcrosse has just been rescued from two types of captivity, one in Orgoglio’s dungeon, and one in the Cave of Despaire. The fourth of these “Bead-men” retains the office “Poore prisoners to relieue with gratious ayd, / And captiues to redeeme with price of bras, / From Turkes and Sarazins” (40.2–4).5 It immediately follows his encounter with the “Bead-men” that Redcrosse is introduced to Contemplation, who reveals his true identity not as “Elfin’s sonne” (60.2) but as “Saint George of mery England” (61.9). Although Redcrosse, after his convalescence in the House of Holinesse and enlightenment by Contemplation, learns that he is “borne of English blood” (64.6) and “sprong out from English race” (60.1), he is, as Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton have noted, “explicitly identified with St. George,” who in Greek and Coptic traditions was born in Cappadocia, in central modern Turkey.6 This scene of the Redcrosse knight’s rehabilitation and its narrative situatedness in The Faerie Queene calls attention to the embeddedness of the TurkishEnglish encounter in the formation of English national identity. While on the one hand, the scenes of the Redcrosse knight’s captivity recall details of the life of the historical, and Middle Eastern, Saint George as preserved in legend and romance, on the other hand, the narrative reference to prisoners of “Turkes and Sarazins” woven into the Redcrosse knight’s episodes of bondage resonates a more contemporary historicity regarding English captivity among the Muslims of North Africa and the Levant (i.e., regions of the Eastern Mediterranean controlled by the Ottoman). Addressing the complex historical contexts that inform the significance of the “Turk” at the heart of both the Redcrosse knight’s identity appropriated as a national icon and The Faerie Queene as an engine of Elizabethan ideology deepens our understanding of Spenser’s and England’s engagement with the East in early modern English identity formation and nation-making. The iconic figure of Saint George is central to my analysis of the Spenserian writing of English nationhood. To begin with, we need to note that Saint George has a complex and hybrid pedigree. Born in Cappadocia to a mother who was Christian Palestinian, Saint George was baptized as an infant. According to the Acta Sanctii Georgii (originally in Greek) and the Greek Acts quoted by Saint Andrew of Crete, he was a nobleman who for a time served as a tribune in the Roman army and put aside his


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office to protest to the Emperor Diocletian (284–305) his pagan beliefs and persecutions of Christians (begun around 302).7 Thrown into prison and tortured, Saint George refused to recant his faith, and was publicly humiliated and eventually beheaded. Inspired by his fealty, the Empress Alexandria converted to Christianity and was also executed in the purges of Christians that were carried out in the fourth century. Along with the story of Saint George’s martyrdom, the vanquishing of the dragon, his other legendary exploit, which accrued later, also centers on his ability to inspire conversion to Christianity.8 Well known from the fourteenthcentury troubadours by way of the Greek Church, who honored Saint George as a soldier saint, is the story of how he rescued a pagan town in Libya from a dragon that was terrorizing it. Noting that Saint George was originally an Eastern saint who made his way into the Catholic church’s roster of saints by the sixteenth century, Hugh MacLachlan identifies Jacopus de Voragine’s early medieval lectionary of saints’ lives, the Legenda Aurea, as providing influential structures for interpreting his life and significance.9 Spenser himself would have had recourse to John Lydgate’s Legend of St George (c. 1425) and Alexander Barclay’s Life of St George (1515) as well as the Carmelite Johannes Baptista Spagnola’s Latin verse translation, the Vita sancti Georgi (1507).10 In England, as MacLachlan notes, Saint George managed to survive the “Protestant hostility to saint cults.”11 Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton also point out that, by the fifteenth century, “the cult of Saint George was shared by the Eastern and Western Christian churches, while the autonomous Coptic and Syrian churches gave him particular prominence[,] and he also figured as a soldier saint in Islam. . . . [;] his iconography turned up repeatedly, all over the globe.”12 Jardine and Brotton make the thought-provoking point that Redcrosse’s unstable identity fractures the concept of a “heroic ‘Englishness’” by drawing attention to the problem of forging an English identity within a historical context of “competing imperial challenges.”13 Even as Spenser emphasizes the Christian Saint George’s “heroic capacity to compel the infidel to convert,” The Faerie Queene’s nationalistic vision is predicated upon a “collection of pre-existing elements” that remain highly contested in the new internationalism activated by traffic in culture and commodities.14 The multivalency of Saint George’s cultural identity means that any literary attempt to appropriate it to write an epic of the English nation must engage with diplomatic and trade relations even while valorizing militaristic strength, and political and religious authority. Spenser’s adoption in The Faerie Queene of the legend and figure of Saint George brings into play the hybridity that lies at the heart of English national identity formation. Because of Saint George’s discursive,


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oscillating, and liminal identity, any nationalism that is built upon it has its binary and ideological fixities made open to destabilization and even subversion.15 We note that Saint George’s ability to bring about conversion to Christianity as well as his significance as a point of coalescence for Western and Byzantine Christians in the Crusades have resonance for Spenser’s adaptation of the legend for his epic in the sixteenth century.16 The handling of Saint George in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene cannot be separated from early modern European anxieties about the threat posed by the Ottoman Empire. Like Charles V’s alliances with the Protestant princes whose military support he needed to staunch the Ottoman aggression in Hungary, Venice especially called for the Christians to unite against the Turkish threats of invasion of Christian territories in the sixteenth century. Lozzaro Soranzo’s The Ottoman, for instance, notes Virginia Mason Vaughan, “expounds a sixteenth-century Venetian version of the domino theory.”17 If the Venetian frontier is not fortified by the combined forces of Christendom, Soranzo argues in commonplace rhetoric, eventually all of Italy would fall to an empire that already controlled most of Eastern Europe. Soranzo and others (such as Abraham Ortelius) urge that God inspire “the hartes of the Christian Princes vnitedly” not only “to resiste him [Mahomet the Third]” but also to take Constantinople back.18 James G. Harper notes that in the fifteenth century Pope Pius II, an “orthodox crusade polemicist,” cast the “rise of the Ottoman Empire . . . as a transgression of the proper order of things . . . a clash of order against chaos, good against evil, and civilization against barbarity,” in rhetoric deployed “to help rally the Christian princes” against the threat of imminent invasion.19 Niccolo Sagundino’s De Turcarum origine, commissioned by Pius II and reproducing the Turks’ proposed Scythian descent, was printed in 1531. The success of the Turkish Empire is cast in biblical terms by these polemicists as a scourge on corrupt Christians preoccupied with internecine warfare and as an incentive to mediate religious differences and strike concord in an attempt to join forces to defend their territories in the interests of a common and renewed faith. In his Notable History of the Saracens (1575), Thomas Newton, drawing on numerous other authors such as Augustine Curio, aptly captures the sixteenth-century crusader discourses circulating in Europe and aimed at the Turkish threat:


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Herein as in a Myrrour is set down, how, when & by whom, this pestilent Generation [the issue or “nation” descended from “Orthogule the first Emperour of the Turkes,” in Lithgow’s words] was first set abroche [astir], what successe in their Affaires euer synce they haue had, and if we wyllnot by others harmes take warning, what curtesye is to bee looked for at their 10.1057/9780230106222 - The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia, Debra Johanyak and Walter S. H. Lim

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hands, whe[n] and wheresoeuer they can espye any occasio[n] or oportunitie to put in practice their bloudy tyranny. They were (indeede) at the first very far of from our Clyme & Region, and therefore the lesse to be feared, but now they are euen at our doores and ready to come into our Houses, yf our penitent heartes doe not the sooner procure at the mercifull handes of God, an vnitie, peace and concord among the Princes, Potentates and People of that litle porcion of Chrystendome yet left, which through diuision, discord and ciuile dissention hath from time to time enticed and brought this Babylonian Nabugadnezar and Turkish Pharao so neere vnder our noses.20

Circulating in an earlier draft in 1614, William Lithgow’s The Totall Discourse, of the Rare Aduentures, and painefull Peregrinations of long nineteene Yeares Trauayles continues to deploy rhetoric inducing the formation of a Christian league to make common cause against the Ottoman Turks. Lithgow proposes not only that Christian princes should form an alliance “to subdue the Turkes” but also that Christian slaves and subjects rise up in rebellion against “the great Turke” to bring about the “root[ing] out” of their “very names.”21 Daniel J. Vitkus reminds us not to forget “that while Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Dutch ships sailed to the New World and beyond . . . the Ottoman Turks were rapidly colonizing European territory. Thus in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Europeans were both colonizers and colonized, and even the English felt the power of the Turkish threat to Christendom.”22 In deploying a reconfigured Saint George in The Faerie Queene to lead a sixteenth-century Christian League in the present crisis posed by the Turks, Spenser places England and the reformed faith in a position of imagined imperial power, like Charles V’s, intolerant in its official discourse, tolerant at the practical level. Spenser’s interest in the “theater of the world,” made evident by his contributions to A Theatre for Worldlings (1569) and his poem on “Fayre Venice” in the front matter to Lewis Lewkenor’s translation of Gasparo Contarini’s The commonwealth and government of Venice (1599), suggests he perceived certain analogous political and cultural experiences to exist between Venice and England. Like the dispersed, often insular, territories of the Republic of Venice, the frontiers of late sixteenth-century England also appeared susceptible to invasion by an imperial aggressor, threatened by Spanish troops in Ireland and the Netherlands, and by the Spanish navy in seas along the English coasts.23 Throughout the sixteenth century, the Turks mounted aggressive campaigns that involved the seizure of territories from Venice (Durazzo in 1501 and Cyprus in 1571) and Spain (Tunis in 1571). They also conquered Egypt and interrupted the commercial route to India in 1517, with economic consequences for Europe. They mounted the first siege


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of Vienna in 1529, and within a few years, most of Hungary was lost to the Ottoman. While on the one hand Spenser heroically figures an imperial vision involving a “Protestant League” that responds to historically topical events, on the other hand, his career registers ambivalence regarding the significance of worldly power. Spenser’s early contributions to Jan van der Noot’s anti-Catholic polemic, translations of Petrarch and Du Bellay made when he was seventeen, present to the reader for meditation visions of the vulnerability of empire and the vanity of worldly power, motifs he returns to again and again throughout his ensuing work. Van der Noot had emigrated to London to escape persecution of Protestants in the Spanish Netherlands, and his popular tract was published in London in Dutch in 1568 and in French the same year. An English translation would appear in the following year.24 The predominant theme of Spenser’s contributions is the mourning of the transience of material glory, epitomized in the sumptuous forms of imperial architectural monuments and their precipitous decline: Then did appeare to me a sharped spire Of diamant, ten feete eche way in square, ... Upon the top therof was set a pot ... And in this golden vessell couched were The ashes of a mightie Emperour. ... A sodaine tempest from the heaven, I saw, With flushe stroke downe this noble monument. (lines 1–14)25

Prefixed to Lewkenor’s translation and published in the year of his death, Spenser’s commendatory sonnet to the volume, “The antique Babel, Empresse of the East,” revisits the topos of empire reduced to ashes but incorporates a celebration of Venetian republicanism and promise.26 In this sonnet, Spenser presents the fall of two empires—one Eastern, the other Western—in emblematic terms:


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The antique Babel, Empresse of the East, Upreard her buildinges to the threatned skie: And Second Babell tyrant of the West, Her ayry Towers upraised much more high. But with the weight of their own surquedry, They both are fallen, that all the earth did feare,


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And buried now in their own ashes ly, Yet shewing by their heapes how great they were.

Like Thomas Newton’s conflation of Babylonian and Turk in naming “this Babylonian Nabugadnezar and Turkish Pharao,” the Eastern empire to which Spenser makes reference suggests not only ancient Babylon but also the contemporary Ottoman Empire; the Western empire suggests ancient Rome as well as Spain with its ties to the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic Church. Filling the vacancy resulting from the demise of these two empires is “a third,” described as “Fayre Venice, flower of the last worlds delight” (lines 9–10). By presenting Venice as “farre exceed[ing]” the world’s earlier empires in its possession of “policie of right” (line 12), Spenser reveals his view of the Republic as a political ideal where justice reigns and is ordered by fairness—the Venetians had advanced the cause of European military alliances to repulse and contain the Ottoman threat while at the same time engaging in trade with the Islamic Orient. Venice beckoned because it afforded England a possible paradigm for engaging in effective political relations with Turkey, maintaining peace while negotiating lucrative and mutually beneficial trade with the East.27 In The Faerie Queene, Spenser’s crusader tropes lend literary support to the place of military might for the defense of Christian Europe against the Ottoman threat; but one also notes elsewhere a certain degree of openness to the possibilities of trade relations with the East and the Orient. It is important to note that in the reign of Elizabeth I, some quite vibrant political interactions took place between England and the Islamic Orient. Both Elizabeth and Sultan Murad III agreed, for example, “lawfully” to allow English and Turkish traders into each other’s kingdoms.28 Elizabeth engaged in correspondence with the Moroccan ruler Ahmad al-Mansur and was described in his Arabic letters as the “sultana” of the English.29 Cooperating commercially and diplomatically with both the Ottoman Turks and the Moors of Morocco, Elizabeth I was on the constant lookout for new markets for her merchants as well as ways to protect England’s overseas investments.30 It was during her reign that the granting of trading privileges to England known as “capitulations” marked the establishment of official ties between England and Turkey, and facilitated the creation of the “Turkey Company” in 1581.31 Scholars have also noted that a possible military alliance with Muslim forces was even considered as a means to counteracting the Spanish threat.32


(lines 1–8)


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Political interactions and negotiations between the West and the Orient find sustained expression in The Faerie Queene in Spenser’s portrayal of various romantic pursuits, cross-cultural intermingling, and even miscegenation. In book II of The Faerie Queene, Spenser’s episode of Phaedria in her little “Gondelay” (II.vi.2.7 and 11.5) offers a compelling consideration of the cultural negotiations transpiring between East and West. In this episode, the fairy knight Guyon and his “Blacke Palmer” (19.7) encounter Phaedria in their chivalric pursuit of Acrasia, who is protected by the “Sarazin” (viii.49.1) brothers Pyrochles and Cymochles.33 In a manner suggestive of an Eastern transport, Phaedria uses her “Gondelay” at her discretion to provide passage to islands and also to ferry travelers across “perlous” waters (vi.19.9). Upon encountering Phaedria, who is cast in Spenser’s narrative as a kind of orientalized prostitute, Cymochles asks her “what she was, and what that vsage ment,” an enquiry after name and origins (9.3).34 In response, Phaedria chastises him for not recognizing her as “thine owne fellow seruaunt,” for, she discloses, they both serve the same Mistress—Acrasia—presented as a powerful Eastern Queen (“Asia” is embedded in her name; 9.8–9). She further chides Cymochles for being a “straunger in [his] home” (9.6). After her sexual interlude with Cymochles, in which the Saracen engages in pastimes of “lasciuious luxury” typical of politicized Western portrayals of oriental and Asian peoples, Phaedria deserts him, returns to her boat, and turns the application of her sexual favors to Guyon: By this time was the worthy Guyon brought Vnto the other side of that wide strond, Where she was rowing, and for passage sought: Him needed not long call, she soone to hond Her ferry brought, where him she byding fond, With his sad guide; himselfe she tooke a boord, But the Blacke Palmer suffred still to stond, Ne would for price, or prayers once affoord, To ferry that old man ouer the perlous foord. (19.1–9)

Phaedria provides her services to Cymochles and Guyon but refuses them to the Palmer. While she demonstrates selectivity in the “practice” (9.4) of her trade, Phaedria is as interested in casting the net of her services toward the Western pilgrims as they are in negotiating with her. This scene clearly registers a bartering for passage involving the attempted exchange of money (“price”). The episode also presents a rendering of intercultural and interracial sexual arrangements in process


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of negotiation. If Phaedria is linked by kinship to Cymochles, a Saracen, Guyon, a fairy, must be from another “race.”35 Guyon advances the ethos of the Western and christianized romance tradition in the virtues he champions by “despising” Phaedria’s overtures (21.9). Significantly, Guyon demonstrates his moral superiority to the “paynim” knight. As the hero of the “Legend of Temperaunce,” he supercedes Cymochles in the attentions of Phaedria, Cymochles’ “fellow” or countrywoman. In Cymochles’ failure to recognize Phaedria and her customs (“vsage” or “practice”), we discern the mark of the disintegration of the community to which both belong. In relating economic negotiations to intercultural sexual liaisons via their shared associations with prostitution, Spenser suggests in the scene an awareness of the stresses to the cultural and social fabric such mixing engenders. The process by which the European stranger wandering in the East comes to displace the Muslim warrior in geographic, martial, and sexual arenas is central to the (inter)cultural politics of The Faerie Queene. In book I, canto ii, the Redcrosse knight wins Duessa from the eldest of the three Saracen brothers, Sansfoy. After he has “cleft [the] head” and collected the shield of the “faithlesse Sarazin” (I.ii.19.5 and 12.6), Redcrosse reassures Duessa, “the sole daughter of an Emperour,” that she has found “a new friend” (22.7): Henceforth in safe assuraunce may ye rest, Hauing both found a new friend you to aid, And lost an old foe, that did you molest: Better new friend then an old foe is said. (27.1–4)

In the course of their journeying in fairyland, many of the knights work out temporary sexual arrangements with the women they meet, and Redcrosse is no different in this regard. After being parted from Duessa as she gives aid to Sansjoy (the middle Saracen brother), mortally wounded in battle, Redcrosse is reunited with her at the fountain of the sacred Nymph, where they enjoy a “solace” that leaves him “pourd out in loosenesse on the grassy grownd” (vii.4.1 and 7.2). In the (d)alliance between Duessa and Redcrosse, we further encounter the mingling of cultural categories whose collapse ultimately highlights the contradictions inherent in the formation of an English identity predicated on distinguishing between them. While Duessa reveals to Redcrosse that she is the daughter of “an Emperour . . . that the wide West vnder his rule has” (ii.22.7–8), her lavish apparel, especially her headdress (likened to “a Persian mitre”


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[13.4]), is Eastern. It was commonplace in late medieval European art for elaborate, jeweled clothing, and especially turbans, to bedeck figures meant to represent Asian or Eastern peoples.36 The composite elements constituting the figure of Duessa effectively collapse various “Eastern” empires—Babylonian, Persian, Roman, and Ottoman—into one allegorical body. This mingling is enhanced by the opportunistic negotiations Duessa advances with the three Saracen brothers in their adventures across fairyland. That the Redcrosse knight wins Duessa from the eldest of the Saracen brothers, Sansfoy, dramatizes an English—and in a broader sense European—fantasy of virility, which, while it subordinates and emasculates the oriental warrior, also suggests intimate (if not dangerous) liaisons with the East. Sites of international mingling then record the dissolution—and absorption into one another—of national identities even while discriminating between them. The episodes involving the Saracen brothers in book II culminate in an epic battle in which Arthur, standing in for an unconscious Guyon, single-handedly defeats and kills Cymochles and Pyrochles (viii.30–52). One of the interesting literary features of Spenserian romance is that, in the battle scenes between Christian knights and Saracens, the furious and prolonged exchange of blows makes both knights and Saracens indistinguishable from one another after a period of time.37 The identities of the combatants become obscured or are simply lost not only because of the furious battle frenzy but also because pronouns cannot readily seek out their related noun antecedents: With that he strooke, and th’other strooke withall, That nothing seem’d mote beare so monstrous might: The one vpon his couered shield did fall, And glauncing downe would not his owner byte: But th’other did vpon his troncheon smyte Which hewing quite a sunder, further way It made, and on his hacqueton did lyte, The which diuiding with importune sway, It seizd in his right side, and there the dint did stay. (38.1–9)


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Pyrochles, Cymochles, Christian knight, “Caytiue,” “Prince,” and “Paynim” all lose their distinct identities in the midst of combat (37.6, 39.6 and 50.1). It is only after the melee is over that Arthur, Guyon, and


the Palmer—all champions of the Christian ethos—emerge victorious and return to their distinctive forms. In book II of The Faerie Queene, the decisive vanquishing of the Saracens ultimately takes the form of a scene of conversion. Cymochles has his “braine” (viii.45.6) cleaved by Arthur, and his brother, Pyrochles, is brought by Arthur to his knees, “now subiect to the victours law / . . . / As one that loathed life, and yet despis’d to dye” (50.5–9). Arthur, the magnanimous “Conquerour,” offers the Saracen “life” and “grace” if only he will confess what to Arthur amounts to a deadly spiritual disorientation: But full of Princely bounty and great mind, The Conquerour nought cared him to slay, But casting wrongs and all reuenge behind, More glory thought to giue life, then decay, And said, Paynim, this is thy dismall day; Yet if thou wilt renounce thy miscreaunce, And my trew liegeman yield thy self for ay, Life will I graunt thee for thy valiaunce. (51.1–8)

Pyrochles is asked to exchange his faith for his life. Arthur will spare him only if he renounces his “miscreaunce,” which refers to his false faith (or literally his “wrong belief ”). This forced conversion represents the final stripping away of any identifying aspects of Pyrochles’ humanity. Significantly, Pyrochles is offered the conditional terms of surrender as a reward for his “valiaunce,” and so he is doubly inscribed in this discourse as “Caytiue” (villain) and as valiant.38 In rejecting Arthur’s “gift,” Pyrochles dies for his faith in an attitude of bravery that despises a life without it (52.1–4). Notably, the actual act of Arthur’s execution of Pyrochles is elided in the narrative: Foole (said the Pagan) I thy gift defye, But vse thy fortune, as it doth befall, And say, that I not ouercome do dye, But in despight of life, for death do call. Wroth was the Prince, and sory yet withall, That he so wilfully refused grace; Yet sith his fate so cruelly did fall, His shining Helmet he gan soone vnlace, And left his headlesse body bleeding all the place.


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(52.1–9)


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We do not see Arthur’s execution of Pyrocles, a narrative elision that may be read as registering representational unease even as the poet negotiates between his culture’s negative reception of the “Saracen” and a certain reservation with judgments on matters of faith. This conversion motif in The Faerie Queene recalls contemporary situations in which English subjects, who had been seized and enslaved by Turkish privateers in the Mediterranean and northeast Atlantic, converted to Islam.39 Indeed there circulated reports of the miserable conditions of sixteenth- and early-seventeenth century Christian captives in North Africa. Nabil Matar has calculated that there were “twenty-two accounts written by Englishmen about captivity among the Muslims between 1577 and 1704.”40 Nicholas Nicholay, whose French text was translated into English in 1580, recounts in 1551 the slave trade in captured Christians carried out by Algerians.41 According to Nicholay, the Algerians were “a people given all to whoredom, sodemtrie, theft, and all other detestable vices.”42 The Christian captives (whom Matar estimates as “countless”) were sold daily, notes Nicholay, “unto Moores . . . who afterward transport them and sell them where they think good, or else beating them miserably . . . doe imploy and constraine them to worke in the Fields, and in all other vile and abject occupations and servitude almost intolerable.”43 To escape such conditions, as well as for “personal gain,” argues Robert Bryan, “Christians captured by Turks and Saracens gave up their faith,” or in Nicholay’s words, became “Mahumetised.”44 Matar informs us that throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, continuous diplomatic exchanges and negotiations for the ransom and release of prisoners took place between England and the Muslim Levant and North Africa.45 According to Daniel Vitkus, demonized representations of Turks in early modern England can in fact be traced to the fear of capture and forced conversion to Islam.46 On this subject, Jonathan Burton notes that sixteenth-century English “apostasy sermons” sounded great alarm at the seemingly large numbers of Christians who appeared to be converting to Islam without much compulsion—such Christians, referred to as “Renegadoes,” were identified as “shamefully weak.”47 Arthur’s offer of life to Pyrochles in exchange for his conversion to the Christian faith can be read with reference to the experience of forced conversions that appeared to have attracted much notice in the period. This episode reverses the direction of the conversion motif—here it is the Christian Arthur who is “forcing” the Muslim to enter the Christian fold. Unlike the legendary Saint George’s success at getting pagans to convert, Arthur fails. Reflecting a narrative compulsion to revise this perceived crisis of English Christians “turning Turk,” Pyrochles’ refusal


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to assent to Arthur’s condition of grace nevertheless underscores limits to any act of forced “religious” and “cultural” conversion in the writing of a nation’s moral authority and identity. It appears that while Spenser bound himself in his poem to the theological and cultural parameters of the militant Protestantism championed by his patrons, we nevertheless catch a strain of ambivalence concerning the terms of the debate between Christianity and Islam and the contours of the identities forged to contest them. In The Faerie Queene, “Pagans,” “Saracens,” and “Souldans” need not only be tied to pagan, godless, and Muslim lands and cultures. The oriental Other can also readily be brought into metaphorical conjunction with a European monarch like Philip II of Spain, viewed as an archenemy of Protestant England. As Daniel Vitkus highlights, there exists a polemical and propagandistic context for such figurative conflations: “English Protestant texts, both popular and learned, conflated the political/external and the demonic/internal enemies, associating both the Pope and the Ottoman sultan with Satan or the Antichrist. According to Protestant ideology, the Devil, the Pope, and the Turk all desired to ‘convert’ good Protestant souls to a state of damnation, and their desire to do so was frequently figured as a sexual/sensual temptation of virtue, accompanied by a wrathful passion for power.”48 In book V of The Faerie Queene, Spenser specifically invokes the “Souldan” as an allegorical figure standing for King Philip II of Spain, the Catholic monarch bent on undermining Queen Elizabeth’s sovereignty. Spenser’s casting of Philip II as a Muslim ruler in the “Legend of Justice” draws attention to the Spanish presence in Ireland while gesturing toward Islamic presence in the Iberian Peninsula. In relation to the context of Spanish “pure blood laws,” Spenser’s figuring of the tyrant as a hybrid— Philip II or “Souldan”—calls into question the purity of Philip’s own bloodline and thus the legitimacy of his position as a European monarch and human embodiment of divine power.49 Much of the referential meaning of this allegorization is focused upon the image of the “Souldan all with furie fraught” riding a chariot “drawne of cruell steedes” (V.viii.28.1 and 6). This image recalls an earlier emblem employed by Spenser in “Sonet 4” of A Theatre for Worldlings (1569)50:


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I saw raisde up on pillers of Ivorie, Whereof the bases were of richest golde, The chapters Alabaster, Christall frises, The double front of a triumphall arke. On eche side portraide was a victorie. With golden wings in habite of a Nymph. 10.1057/9780230106222 - The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia, Debra Johanyak and Walter S. H. Lim

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And set on hie upon triumphing chaire, The auncient glorie of the Romane lordes.

This poetic description of a “triumphing chaire” (line 7) is accompanied by a woodcut replicating the popular portrait of an emperor in a horsedrawn chariot found, among other places, on Philip’s Impresa.51 Both the “chaire” at the top of the triumphal arch in Spenser’s early sonnet and the Souldan’s “charret” in book V are smashed to pieces, leaving “no litle moniment” (V.viii.43.9). Indeed, like Phaeton and Hyppolotus destroyed with their horse-drawn “chaires,” the megalomaniacal “Souldan” and his chariot are completely torn to bits. The capacity of the discourse of empire to signify rests partly on its inherited tropes and symbols (conventions) and partly on historical resonance (historicity or historical conditioning). While Spenser’s casting of Philip II as a “Souldan” is widely acknowledged to signify the Spanish presence in territories such as Ireland (or in the seas off England’s coasts), it also presents the discursive processes of cultural mixing entailed in moralizing foreign and domestic policies. Awareness of complexities that undermine the attempt of representational strategies to attach morality to binaries of true and false belief is present throughout Spenser’s oeuvre. The ethnographic categories of “Saracen” and “Turk” are ambiguous in both sixteenth-century Western romance tradition and travel narratives, genres which reproduce imperial discourse in whose manufacture Spenser also participates.52 “Turk” and “Saracen” often slide into one another in the rhetoric of romance and travel, which insists on rigid ethnic and religious categories at the same time that it collapses distinctions between them. Spenser continues these ambiguous signifying practices in his evocations of these terms. In Renaissance ethnographic discourses, Saracens are indistinguishable from the Turks, who are their conquerors, as a result of the cultural and ethnic mixing that has joined them to each other.53 According to Norman Daniel, the term “Saracen” sustains a history of pre-Islamic Greek usage.54 To later Greeks and Romans, the name referred to nomads of the Syro-Arabian desert who troubled the margins of the Roman Empire and eventually came to signify an Arab. During the medieval period, “Saracen” was frequently linked to Sarah, Abraham’s wife. Church fathers such as Jerome (in his commentary on Ezekiel) understand the Saracens to be the Agareni (descendants of Hagar), who have “tak[en] to themselves the name of Sara.” The Western pre-Islamic use of “Saracen” to refer to an Arab, or a descendent of Hagar, came, by extension, to invoke a “Mohammedian” or “Moslem,” particularly in the


(lines 1–8)


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context of the Crusades. Such usage is preserved in medieval Christian crusade chronicles like the St. Albans chronicle (1184).55 Treatments of the Saracen in Crusade chronicles and in the chansons de geste and the matière de France of romance inform the configuration of Muslim warriors in the sixteenth-century Italian epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, Spenser’s own direct sources.56 In Spenser’s Italian sources, and the French from which they draw, Islamic warriors are often bold and worthy opponents of the Christian knights who oftentimes befriend them. Thus, in the Western romance tradition, the representation of the Saracen warrior as the enemy of Christians is often ambiguous, and Spenser himself reveals a sense of ambiguity in his literary portrayals. But in Spenser’s depictions of Saracens, such as the two sets of brothers— Sansfoy, Sansloy, and Sansjoy in book I, and Cymochles and Pyrochles in book II—the Muslim knights have lost most of the affective dimensions of their representation as might be encountered, for example, in Marsile of La Chanson de Roland or in Ruggiero or Rodomonte of Orlando Furioso. Also, Spenser’s use of rhyming and similar-sounding names for his Saracens and his stripping of their particular, identifying details makes the Muslim warriors of the French chansons and the Italian epics become undifferentiated and interchangeable, a process by which the Arab knights are made comical (involving repetition) and mechanical rather than heroic and individuated and thus further dehumanized.57 Within the historical context in which Islam posed a serious threat to the security of Christian Europe in the sixteenth century, the vanquishing of the Saracen brothers by Redcrosse and Guyon can be read as amounting to a romantic bravado. Spenser’s romance epic thus performs at some level the ideological task of valorizing Christian virtues and martial prowess to offset perceived dangers posed to the Western world by the Islamic Orient. For his nationalistic aims, Spenser draws material for his epic from the matter of Briton, explicitly stating in “A Letter of the Authors expounding his whole intention in the course of this worke,” addressed to Sir Walter Ralegh: “For that variety of matter . . . I chose the historye of king Arthur as most fitte.”58 But in the “eastward drift” of the geography of his fairyland, and in his encomiastic rhetoric, Spenser reveals a far-reaching international dimension to his aspirations for his “Magnificent Empresse . . . Elizabeth by the Grace of God Queene of England[,] Fraunce[,] Ireland and of Virginia.”59 Elizabeth I is Gloriana, the “Queene of Faery,” and the “Great Lady of the greatest Isle.” Her “light,” Spenser enthusiastically proclaims in his opening invocation to The Faerie Queene, “like Phoebus lampe throughout the world doth shine” (I.proem.4). In this invocation, Spenser reproduces an imperial discourse still vibrant in depicting the


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geography of Victorian England’s later colonial rule, on which, for a time at least, it appeared that “Phoebus lampe” would never set. The extent of Elizabethan England’s nascent imperial fantasies emerges in the rhetoric, iconography, and geography of The Faerie Queene. Indeed, Spenser’s rhetoric in the proem to book I recalls, competes with, and in a sense displaces, that of the motto advanced by Philip II on his Impresa: “Iam illustrabit omnia” (soon he will illuminate all). Philip’s intentions in identifying himself with the sun-god Apollo driving his chariot across the heavens and over continents and seas cannot be dissociated from the universal scope of his imperial ambitions.60 In recasting the imperial image of Philip, not as Phoebus but as Phaeton and Hyppolytus destroyed by their own arrogance, Spenser revises the Spanish monarch’s symbolic inscription of authority. The trope of the writer as an epic hero and crusader knight deployed by Spenser to characterize the narrator of The Faerie Queene resonates with reference to early modern narratives of travel to the East. William Lithgow, whom Clifford Edmund Bosworth notes is “preoccupied with presenting himself as a Protestant Pilgrim,” is in many ways Spenser’s heir in this regard.61 The frontispiece to Lithgow’s Totall Discourse, of the Rare Aduentures, and painefull Peregrinations of long nineteene Yeares Trauayles, from Scotland, to the most Famous Kingdomes in Europe, Asia, and Affrica depicts the author in Eastern dress holding a walking staff and proudly standing astride a hilltop. The couplets beneath the woodcut that illustrates them make connections between the lands visited by the author and the geography and history of the Trojan War: Loe here’s mine Effigie, and Turkish suite; My Staffe, my Shaffe, as I did Asia foote: Plac’d in old Illium; Priams scepter thralles: The Grecian Campe design’d; lost Dardan falles.62

The sense of the verses indicates an appositive relation between “staffe” and “shaffe,” and in the context of the image of the author’s triumphal pose, the staff seems to double as a spear or “shaft.” As the Greek camp pierced ancient Ilium, so the author pierces these Middle Eastern lands anew with a walking staff/shaft/spear that makes way for him, allowing him to place his “foote” on Asia in a symbolic gesture of conquest. This image of the walking staff in the author’s hand further suggests a scepter, effectively transforming the author into an Emperor and his adventures into an imperial dream of power and domination. The fact that Lithgow “prostrates” (or dedicates) his “Pen and Pilgrimage” to a king (Charles I in the 1632 edition) also elaborates upon the author’s fantasy of himself


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as a crusader in noble and dangerous service to a lord, reinscribing for his audience the desires of Western romance across newly traveled Eastern territories. The tenor of Lithgow’s dedicatory epistle echoes that found in earlier European travel narratives. In the preface to Tome Pires’s Suma Oriental, written in 1512–1515, the humble apothecary claims that his labors in recording the geography and customs of the Eastern lands he has traveled in are offered in the service of his king and the glory of the Portuguese nation.63 The chivalric pose, a commonplace among writers of early modern travel narratives, cloaks the author’s self-interests in the rhetoric of nationalism. Spenser participates in similar practices of self-fashioning. Lithgow’s discourse, which, as noted, is inherited from earlier sixteenth-century English sources on the Turks and Ottoman, displays the durability of certain Eurocentric characterizations of Middle Eastern peoples and is filled with ethnological complexities and ambiguities. A selfproclaimed Protestant, who throughout his “trauayles” suffered showily for his faith (in Malaga he was sentenced to death “for the Gospel’s sake”), Lithgow does not hesitate to categorize others in terms of their cultural beliefs and religious orientation.64 Among his observations of ethnicity, Lithgow gives an account of the beginnings of the “Turkes” and their rulers from the time they “tooke a Monarchick name, vnder the name of Ottoman, even to Mahomet the second, the first Grecian Emperour.”65 He asserts that “Ottoman, the sonne of Orthogule the first Emperour of the Turkes,” is “the first that erected the glory of his Nation”: “The Originall [ancestor] of the Turkes, is sayd to haue bene in Scythia, from whence they came to Arabia Petrea, and giving battell oft to the Sarazens, in the end subdued them, and so they multiplied, and mightily increased: the appearance of their further increasing, is very euident / except God of his mercy towards vs preuent their blood sucking threatnings, with the vengeance of his iust iudgements.”66 Lithgow’s description of the glory of the Turkish nation aptly captures the romance tradition’s ambivalence toward Turks in general. The powerful Ottoman is admired for his exemplary skills in warfare and dynastic successes. In his widely circulated 1590 treatise on weapons, Sir John Smyth makes an observation about “that braue Saladin, Souldan of Egipt, with his notable milicia of Mamelucks (by many called Sarasins).”67 This powerful Turk is also at the same time castigated as a barbaric cannibal who is indulgent in every sort of excess. This seems to be implied in the figure of Spenser’s “Souldan” who feeds his horses human flesh. In his discourse on the Turks, Lithgow makes an interesting comment on their Scythian ancestry:


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The Turkes being naturally discended of the Scythians or Tartars are of the second stature of man, and robust of nature, circumspect and couragious 10.1057/9780230106222 - The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia, Debra Johanyak and Walter S. H. Lim

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in all their attempts, and no way giuen to industry or labour, but are wonderfull auaritious and couetous of money aboue all nations of the world. They neuer observe their promises, vnlesse it be with aduantage, and are naturally prone to deceiue strangers; changing their con- / ditionall bargaines, as time giueth occasion to their liking . . . they are extreamely inclined to all sorts of lasciuious luxury; and generally adicted, besides all their sensuall and incestuous lusts, vnto Sodomy, which they account as daynty to digest all their other libidinous pleasures.68

Scythians were nomadic tribes renowned in Renaissance Europe as “barbarous.” The Irish were said to be of Scythian origin, a view invoked by Spenser in A View of the State of Ireland so as to emphasize their uncivilized, anarchic, and barbaric nature.69 If, in the discourse of late sixteenthcentury Europe, the Scythian is a term loosely used to suggest all kinds of barbarism (including cannibalism), it also begins to function as a designation for military valor.70 One immediately thinks here of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine who is a Scythian as well as a Tartar. The figure of the Scythian also signifies in meditations on gender and sexuality.71 Aristotle, Herodotus, and Hippocrates all note the effeminacy and impotence of Scythian men, attributed to their chronic horsemanship.72 The Turkish or Scythian military prowess on horseback also becomes that which “unhorses” them. In Lithgow’s discourse, the Turks, via their Scythian association, follow a slippery path from robustness and courage through a series of vices that render them finally as morally degenerate and physically emasculated “daynty”-loving Sodomites.73 Saracens—once Arabs of the medieval crusader landscape—have become, in early modern ethnographic discourse, interchangeable with Turks, owing to both Ottoman dominance and cultural and racial intermingling. In the process of this mingling, the Saracen, originally descended from Esau (for Lithgow) or from Sara or Hagar, has been subsumed under the category of the “Turk” and, according to Lithgow, lost both name and right of descent.74 Spenser’s Saracens have also been, in part, divested of heroic attributes. Their historical prowess as warriors has been distilled in Spenser’s estimation to an irrational rage, arbitrary and violent (even while retaining vestiges of valiance). The stripping of virtuous qualities from their portrayal, part of the representational process by which Muslim warriors are dehumanized in Spenser, is a natural consequence of the progressive loss of name and rights recorded in ethnography. The undecidability of early modern ethnography and Eurocentric perceptions of the relationship between Turks, Scythians (often merged with “Tartars”), and Saracens found in travel narratives is reproduced by Spenser not only in The Faerie Queene but also in A View of the State of


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Ireland.75 In deliberating why the Irish would want to claim descent from the Spanish “to enoble themselves,” Irenaeus observes in A View, “Of all nations under heaven (I suppose) the Spanyard is the most mingled, most uncertayne, and most bastardly.”76 Remarking that “all the nations of Scythia . . . like a mountaine flood, did over-flow all Spaine,” Irenaeus maintains that “they had left no pure drop of Spanish blood.”77 Like the discussion of mingled “nations” in A View, Spenser’s depiction of Philip II in book V of The Faerie Queene (as discussed earlier in this essay) may also be read as participating in the discourses of race. Since, as we recall, the symbolic landscape of book V is generally associated with Ireland, the English (embodied in Arthur) defeat of a “Sultan” figures England’s presence in Ireland with reference to European attempts to stave off the Turks from territorial, political, and cultural encroachments.78 In conclusion, the attempts of Spenser’s “English” Saint George to displace the hybrid complex of the Christian Palestinian Cappadocian Saint George shed paradigmatic light on The Faerie Queene’s romance representation of the various tensions and interactions transpiring between East and West, the Islamic Orient and Christian Europe. Even as the Western stranger who wanders in the East strives to displace Muslim peoples (and types) in various domains—geographic, martial, religious, and sexual— the cultural instinct toward embracing binary oppositions is more often than not complexified by the disruption of discrete boundary demarcations, leading to cultural intermingling and all its related political complications. In The Faerie Queene, sites of conversion and “interracial” sexual arrangements are also sites of cultural tension and anxiety, where literary enactments of the West’s virility and religious and racial mastery seem possible only in relation to the inescapable context of intercultural and international negotiations. Notes 1. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); see also Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Andrew Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Willy Maley, Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (London: Macmillan, 1997); Walter S. H. Lim, The Arts of Empire: The Poetics of Colonialism from Ralegh to Milton (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998). 2. Jerry Brotton, “‘This Tunis, sir, was Carthage’: Contesting colonialism in The Tempest,” in Post-Colonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998), 31. The notion of “elision” or “occlusion” of the East


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3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

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in “orientalizing discourse” ultimately derives from Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). Michael Murrin notes that in locating fairyland, Spenser “faithfully follows his sources, the Charlemagne romances,” and in imitating the Italian epics that derive from them, he “found faery in the Near and Middle East.” See Michael Murrin, The Allegorical Tradition: Essays in Its Rise and Decline (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), 137. In Huon de Bordeaux, the thirteenth-century chanson de geste, Huon meets the fairy king Oberon on his way from Jerusalem to Cairo; translated into English in 1534 by Lord Berners, the romance had gone through eleven editions by 1586; see Murrin, 137. See also “Le Huon de Bordeaux” en prose du XVeme siècle, in Studies in the Humanities, ed. Michel J. Raby, vol. 27 (New York: Peter Lang, 1998). Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1995). All references of the poem are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by book, canto, stanza, and line number. Subsequent references in the same paragraph to the same book and canto cite only stanza and line number. Jonathan Burton discusses the episode in the context of sixteenth-century sermons and polemical tracts, including John Foxe’s “History of the Turks” in The Acts and Monuments, that highlight the weakness of Christians held captive and their inclination, if not readily ransomed, to “turn Turk”; see Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 165–66. Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 14–16. Spenser makes several interesting references to “race” in the poem, and the references to race are denser in book V than in the other books. Astrea, for instance, “deriu’d her race” from heaven, to which she returns (V.i.11.4) and the “vertuous race” of the heroic age are recalled in the opening canto of book V (V.i.1.6). Likewise, Osyris is “of the race” of Egyptians (V.viii.2.5), and Redcrosse, as here, “springst from ancient race / Of Saxon kings” (I.x.65.1–2). See Jonathan Bengston, “Saint George and the Formation of English Nationalism,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 317–18, for an overview of the details of Saint George’s life; in remarking the widely adopted Saint George as the “tutelary saint” of cities and kingdoms from Malta to Barcelona and Aragon, Bengston notes that “even the Turks vied with the Christians in celebrating the martial prowess of their celestial enemy, whom they styled the ‘Knight of the White Horse’” (318). See also Michael Collins on “St. George,” Britannia History from http://www.britannia.com/history/ stgeorge.html. In St. George: Patron Saint of England (London: Triangle, 2002), Christopher Stace notes that “after The Golden Legend, the dragon-episode is prominent in all the English literary versions of the legend” (43). Hugh MacLachlan, “St. George,” The Spenser Encyclopedia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 329. See Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend


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10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

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(Legenda aurea) (Westminster: William Caxton, 1483). The Legenda aurea was reprinted by Wynkyn de Worde in 1493, 1498, 1512, and 1527. For an overview of the popularity and influence of the Legend, see William Granger Ryan, Introduction, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, by Jacobus de Voragine, trans. William Granger Ryan, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), xiii–xviii. See Stace, St. George, 11–13 and 43–50; Stace also mentions as sources circulating in the period Richard Johnson’s The most famous history of the seaven champions of Christendome (London: J. Danter, for Cuthbert Burbie, 1596) and Peter Heylyn’s The historie of that most famous saint and souldier . . . St. George of Cappadocia (London: Thomas Harper, for Henry Seyle, 1633). Lydgate was widely printed by Caxton, although his attention to Saint George in early sixteenthcentury editions was confined to The virtue of the masse (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1520). See Alexander Barclay, The Lyfe of the glorious Martyr Saynt George (London: Richard Pynson, ca. 1530). MacLachlan, 330. Jardine and Brotton, 17. Samantha Riches notes Saint George is “the Christian hero . . . yet he is also Al Khidr, the mythic hero of Islam” (1) in St George: Hero, Martyr and Myth (London: Sutton Publishing, 2000). Spenser’s view of St. George was influenced partly by the Italian epics that also participate in the legend; see in Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (Gerusalemme Liberata), Clorinda’s prison chamber (book 12.23), which, in Edward Fairfax’s Elizabethan translation, is described as “painted round / With goodly portraits and with stories old: / As white as snow there stood a virgin bound / Beside a dragon fierce; a champion bold / The monster did with poignant spear through wound; / The gored beast lay dead upon the mould” (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962); and in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, the narrator, speaking of the spurs given by Sansonetto to Astolpho, compares them to those “which the brave dragonslayer used to wear / Who rescued the princess in days of old.” See Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, trans. Barbara Reynolds (New York: Penguin, 1973), 15.98. Jardine and Brotton, 16, 14. Ibid. 18, 14; Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 3, The Perspective of the World (London: Collins, 1984), for instance, notes that sixteenth-century “Islam and Christendom faced each other along the north-south divide between the Levant and the Western Mediterranean. . . . All the great battles between Christians and Infidels were fought along this line. But merchant vessels sailed across it every day” (22). See also Jerry Brotton, The Renaissance Bazaare: From the Silk Road to Michaelangelo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). For the concept of hybridity as the negotiation of identity within imperialist discourses, see Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); and Ania Loomba, “‘Local-manufacture made-in-India Othello fellows’: Issues of race, hybridity and location in post-colonial Shakespeares,” in PostColonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998), 143–63.


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16. Bengston notes Saint George’s efficacy in building loyalty and community, arguing that the cult of Saint George was central to shaping a “national sense of culture” (317) in England. 17. Virginia Mason Vaughan, “Global Discourse: Venetians and Turks,” in Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 24. 18. Vaughan, 24. See The Ottoman of Lazaro Soranzo, trans. Abraham Hartwell (London: Iohn Windet, 1603); and Abraham Ortelius, His Epitome of the Theatre of the Worlde (London: Adam Islip, 1603). 19. James G. Harper, “Turks as Trojans; Trojans as Turks: Visual Imagery of the Trojan War and the Politics of Cultural Identity in Fifteenth-century Europe,” in Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures, ed. Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 167–68. See La Discritione de l’Asia, et Evropa di Papa Pio. II. e l’historia de le cose memorabilia fatte in quelle, con l’aggionta de l’Africa, secondo diuersi scrittori, con incredibile breuita e diligenza (Venegia: Vincenzo Vaugris, 1544); and Niccolo Sagundino, De Turcarum Origine (Viterbo: 1531). 20. Thomas Newton, “The Epistle Dedicatorie,” A Notable Historie of the Saracens (London: William How, for Abraham Veale, 1575). Filiz Turhan notes that in the sixteenth century, the number of printed texts disseminating information about Turkey “is astonishing”: “900 separate [European] texts from the [first half of the] sixteenth century have been identified, 232 having been published between 1501 and 1525, with an astonishing increase to 669 texts having been published between 1526 and 1550. Furthermore, no less than 2,500 have been recorded from the second half of the sixteenth century”; see Filiz Turhan, The Other Empire: British Romantic Writings about the Ottoman Empire (London: Routledge, 2003), 11. See Berna Moran, Turklerle Ilgili Ingilizce Yayinlar Bibliografyasi. From the Fifteenth-Seventeenth Century (Istanbul: Istanbul Matbassi, 1964). 21. William Lithgow, The Totall Discourse, of the Rare Aduentures, and painefull Peregrinations of long nineteene Yeares Trauayles, from Scotland, to the most Famous Kingdomes in Europe, Asia, and Affrica (London: Nicholas Okes, 1632), 162. The Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) notes the first draft of 1614, titled A Most Delectable and True Discourse, of an admired and painefull peregrination and reissued in 1616 (both printed by Nicholas Oaks), is “now excessively rare.” See Clifford Edmund Bosworth, An Intrepid Scot: William Lithgow of Lanark’s Travels in the Ottoman Lands, North Africa and Central Europe, 1609–21 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006). Lithgow reproduces much of the material from Richard Knolles’s The Generall Historie of the Turkes, from the first beginning of that nation to the rising of the Othoman Familie: with the notable expeditions of the Christian Princes against them (London: Adam Islip, 1603), which itself relies on Paolo Giovio’s Shorte Treatise upon the Turkes Chronicles, trans. Peter Ashton (London: Edward Whitchurch, 1546); see Turhan, 11–14. 22. Daniel J. Vitkus, “Turning Turk in Othello: The Conversion and Damnation of the Moor,” Shakespeare Quarterly 48, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 146; see also Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).


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23. Perhaps most famously illustrating the Spanish presence in Ireland were the papal troops at Smerwick: an expedition of Italian and Spanish forces landed at Smerwick Harbor in County Kerry, sent to support the Munster rebels and massacred by Lord Grey in September 1580; see Ciaran Brady, British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Matthew Dimmock has argued that metaphors of the “turke” were increasingly applied in sixteenth-century English “narratives of Christian crisis” to the Spanish in New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England (London: Ashgate, 2005), 86. 24. Edmund Spenser, The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al., vol. 11, The Life of Edmund Spenser, Alexander C. Judson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1945), 20–23. 25. Edmund Spenser, A Theatre for Worldlings, in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 472. All subsequent citations of this text are to this edition. 26. Spenser, Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems, 776. See also The commonwealth and gouernment of Venice. Written by the Cardinall Gasper Contareno, and translated out of Italian into English, by Lewes Lewkenor, Esquire (London: Iohn Windet for Edmund Mattes, 1599), A.3.v. 27. See Vaughan, 15–16; and David C. McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Myth of Venice (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990). Vaughan notes that, along with Lewkenor’s translation of Contarini, “the myth of Venice had been widely disseminated in England through William Thomas’ Historie of Italie (1549)” (16); see William Thomas, Historie of Italie (London: Thomas Bertelet, 1549). 28. Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 19–21. 29. Nabil Matar, “Queen Elizabeth through Moroccan Eyes,” Journal of Early Modern History 12, no. 1 (2008): 55–76, see esp. 65. Sultan Murad III reigned from 1574 to 1595, while Ahmad al-Mansur reigned from 1578 to 1603. Filiz Turhan discusses the correspondence concerning trade agreements between Elizabeth and the “Turkish Queen Mother” in the 1590s: “Letters [with reference to the renewal of the Capitulations of 1580] from Safiye Sultan, the mother of Sultan Mahmud, were written to Queen Elizabeth in 1594 and 1599, and the letter from 1594 is reprinted among other documents in Hakluyt’s Voyages” (12); see Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation, vol. 2 (London: George Bishop et al., 1589). 30. Matar, 19. See also Vitkus, “Trafficking with the Turk: English Travelers in the Ottoman Empire during the Early Seventeenth Century,” in Travel Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period, ed. Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna Singh (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 35–52. 31. Turhan, 12. 32. Nabil Matar presents evidence that the Moroccan sultan, Ahmad al-Mansur, had in fact attempted to forge an alliance that would combine Elizabeth’s own English forces with the Muslim army against Catholic Spain; see Matar, 9–10, 53.


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33. The brothers Cymochles and Pyrochles are referred to throughout variously as “Miscreant” (II.vi.39.6), “Paynim” (II.viii.43.6), “Pagan” (II.viii.22.1 and 32.2), and “Sarazin” (V.viii.39.3), and they swear by “Termagaunt” and “Mahoune” (II. viii.30.4 and 33.3). 34. For a reading of Eastern elements in the episode, and especially Acrasia and Phaedria as orientalized and sexually exoticized, see Marion D. Hollings, “Fountains and Strange Women: Eastern Contexts for Acrasia and Her Community,” in Consuming Narratives: Gender and Monstrous Appetite in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), 144–156, esp. 145. 35. Guyon’s “faerie” ancestry is given in II.x.71–75. 36. Harper, 160. The ubiquitous turban to denote the “Turk” is found in countless sixteenth-century tracts on the customs and apparel of peoples recorded in early modern ethnographies; see, for instance, François Desprez, Recueil de la diuersite des habits, qui sont de present en usage, tant es pays d’Europe, Asie, Affrique & Isles sauuages, le tout fait après le naturel (Paris: Richard Breton, 1564); Lithgow notes the “sumptuous attire” of “the better sort” of Turkish women, and sports an elaborate turban in the frontispiece to his Peregrinations (163). 37. Benedict S. Robinson notes the “collapse of crusader and infidel” in the battle scene between Redcrosse and Sansfoy in book I.ii.15–16, “The ‘Secret Faith’ of Spenser’s Saracens,” Spenser Studies 17 (2003): 56. Robinson claims that in their “over-investment in objects,” Puritan, Saracen, and Catholic mirror each other and are therefore linked in “secret faith” (58). 38. “Caytiue,” also “caytif,” “implies a mixture of wickedness and misery,” “often expressing contempt and involving strong moral disapprobation”: “base, mean, despicable, wretched, villain” (Oxford English Dictionary [OED], s.v. “caytiue”). 39. Vitkus, “Turning Turk,” 146. 40. Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen, 71. 41. Nicholas Nicholay, The nauigations, peregrinations and voyages, made into Turkie by Nicholas Nicholay Daulphinois, Lord of Arfeuile, Chamberlaine and Geographer ordinaire to the King of Fraunce, etc., trans. T. Washington the younger (London: Thomas Dawson, 1585). 42. Robert A. Bryan, “Apostasy and the Fourth Bead-Man in the Faerie Queene,” English Language Notes 5, no. 2. (December 1967): 87–91; quoted on 88. 43. Qtd. in Bryan, 88. See also Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen, 71. 44. Bryan, 89–90. 45. Matar, “Soldiers, Pirates, Traders, and Captives: Britons among the Muslims,” in Turks, Moors, and Englishmen, chap. 2, 43–82. See also Matar, “Introduction: England and Mediterranean Captivity, 1577–1704,” Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption, ed. Daniel J. Vitkus (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 1–52. 46. Vitkus, “Turning Turk,” 146–47. 47. Burton, 166. For a reading of Englishmen who converted to Islam for the purposes of advancing trading activities as well as plunder in the Mediterranean, see Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen, 60–71. 48. Vitkus, “Turning Turk,” 145.


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49. See Jerome Friedman, “Jewish Conversion, the Spanish Pure Blood Laws and Reformation: A Revisionist View of Racial and Religious Antisemitism,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 18, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 3–30. 50. Spenser, A Theatre for Worldlings, 473. 51. Commissioned around 1560, Philip’s Impresa recalls the imperial images on commemorative medallions such as that of the Duke of Berry, issued in 1402 and depicting the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius in a horse-drawn chariot; see Brotton and Jardine, 11–32. Devised by Philip II “some time before 1566,” the Impresa appears in the 1566 and subsequent editions of Girolamo Ruscelli’s Le Imprese Illustri con espositioni, et discorsi (Venice: Francesco Rampazetto, 1566, 1572, 1580, and 1584); see René Graziani, “Philip II’s Impresa and Spenser’s Souldan,” in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27 (1964): 322–24. Jardine and Brotton claim that the “cultural value of Renaissance portrait medals . . . was . . . equally recognizable by both Eastern and Western recipients” (24). See Walter S. H. Lim, “Figuring Justice: Imperial Ideology and the Discourse of Colonialism in Book V of The Faerie Queene and A View of the Present State of Ireland,” Renaissance and Reformation 19, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 45–67. 52. For an analysis of the “discourse about human diversity” developing in the Renaissance (x–xi), see Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). See also Gerald MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 53. Lithgow, 160. 54. See Norman Daniel, The Arabs and Medieval Europe (London: Longman, 1975); and Heroes and Saracens: An interpretation of the chansons de geste (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984). See also Scarfe Beckett, Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 93–106; and OED, “Saracen.” 55. See Svetlana Loutchitskaja, “L’image des musulmans dans chroniques des croisades,” Le Moyen Age: Revue d’Histoire et de Philologie 3–4 (1999): 717–35. 56. See William Wistar Comfort, “The Saracens in Italian Epic Poetry,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 59 (1944): 882–910; and Robinson, who argues that “Spenser assimilates Catholicism to Islam by writing together narratives of crusade with Protestant apocalyptic” (37). 57. See Malcolm Bull, “Pagan Names in The Faerie Queene, I,” Notes and Queries (December 1997): 471–72; and Mark Heberle, “Pagans and Saracens in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene,” Comparative Literature East and West: Traditions and Trends, ed. Cornelia N. Moore and Raymond A. Moody (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), 81–87. 58. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, “A Letter of the Authors,” 737–38. 59. Murrin, 138; Spenser, The Faerie Queene, title page of the 1596 edition, 22. 60. Graziani, 323. 61. Bosworth, 19. 62. Lithgow, frontispiece to Totall Discourse.


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63. Tome Pires, The Suma Oriental of Tome Pires, an account of the East . . . written in 1512–1515, ed. and trans. A. Cortesao (London: Hakluyt Society, 1944). 64. Lithgow, from the dedicatory epistle to Totall Discourse, 3. 65. Ibid., 160. 66. Ibid., 160–61. 67. Sir John Smythe, Certain discourses . . . concerning the forms and effects of diuers weapons and other verie important matters militarie . . . , etc. (London: Thomas Orwin, for Richard Jones, 1590). 68. Lithgow, 162–63 (the latter page number is transposed as 361). 69. See Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland, ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley [based on the Ware edition of 1633] (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 50; A Vewe of the Present State of Ireland was written in 1596 and registered in the Stationer’s Register in 1598; see the introduction to the above volume, xi. 70. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “Dismantling Irena: The Sexualizing of Ireland in Early Modern England,” in Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker et al. (London: Routledge, 1992), 159. 71. Jones and Stallybrass, 161. 72. Ibid., 162. 73. Lithgow, 163. 74. Ibid., 161. 75. For the merging of Scythians and Tartars, see Lithgow, 162. 76. Spenser, A View, 50. 77. Ibid. 78. I wish to express my gratitude to Linda McJannet for pointing out that the terms “Souldan” and “Sultan” may retain a geographical specificity regarding heads of state in Ottoman Turkey and Egypt.


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“Turning Turk,” Early Modern English Orientalism, and Shakespeare’s Othello Debra Johanyak

In commemorating four hundred years of William Shakespeare’s Othello, we find ourselves today, like English society then, a consortium of Western cultures poised to counter Muslim terrorist aggression. Whereas early modern Europeans feared the massive advance of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, the twenty-first century world is preoccupied with threats posed by fringe elements of Islamic culture—paramilitary or political organizations like Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah. In the early seventeenth century, William Shakespeare engages with the subject of the EastWest conflict troubling Europe in his great tragedy Othello. Othello is a play that reverses the trope of “turning Turk,” a euphemism in the period meaning to convert from Christianity to Ottoman Islam or adopting a code of behavior deemed barbaric in the Christian world. The play accomplishes this by focusing on the life of a blackamoor whose cultural ancestry is Muslim but whose identity in Venice is powerfully Christian. Shakespeare’s tragic protagonist seems to have embraced, in every way he can, the Christian values and assumptions of Venetian society.1 Othello defends Venice against the Ottoman threat and defines destructive villainy with reference to the Turkish Other.2


CHAPTER 3


Debra Johanyak

In featuring a Moor as his tragic protagonist, Shakespeare reveals a deep fascination not only with issues of race but also with Christian-Muslim tensions shaping Europe’s relationship with the Ottoman Empire.3 In a period when early modern texts “depended upon a significant charge of violence,”4 Othello contributes to English stage representations of the political and cultural world of the Islamic Orient precisely in the dramatization of a character who is forced to negotiate between Muslim and Christian aspects of his cultural identity with tragic consequence. Othello’s Moorish identity is understood by Shakespeare’s audiences to represent a barely restrained Muslim persona who may burst forth at any slight provocation to wreak havoc. Edward Said has emphasized that “European fear, if not always respect,” was the common response to Islam.5 Like the man on whom he is partially modeled—John Leo Africanus, author of the ethnographic compendium A Geographical Historie of Africa—Othello may be read as a Christian convert. The place that Othello occupies in the Venetian military hierarchy means that he is now defined by the parameters of Mediterranean conflict and by his vaunted “service” to the state (1.2.18; 5.2.339). But the true villain in this tragic drama surprisingly is Iago, a Venetian ensign under Othello’s leadership. Michael Neill suggests that Iago’s name is an Iberian version of James, the patron saint of the reconquista, Sant’ Iago Matamoros (Saint James, the Moor Slayer).6 Perhaps Shakespeare intends Iago to be an ironic version of the “Moor Slayer” because, in this tragedy, he turns out to be European culture’s own consummate villain who plots the downfall of Othello by destroying the credibility and reputation of Desdemona, the Moor’s wife. The availability of travel narratives offered Shakespeare fresh and exciting subject matter for drama and theatrical performance. Shakespeare would have experienced the Orient second-hand from these narratives. David Bevington makes the following observation: “Shakespeare traveled by book. The invention of printing brought with it the importation into England of a treasure trove of stories located in foreign lands, which were avidly rendered into English during one of the great ages of translation. Shakespeare need hardly have been able to read in foreign languages to capitalize on this influx of material, though he clearly did know some French (along with some Latin), and may have read at least a few stories from the Italian in the original language.”7 Shakespeare’s keen interest in oriental history and themes can be seen in such plays as Antony and Cleopatra and Othello. In Antony and Cleopatra the oriental land of Egypt finds powerful symbolic embodiment in a queen who frequently threatens to disrupt conventional European notions of proper gender demarcations as well as the military patriarchalism of the Roman imperial order.


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Edward Said has indeed pointed out that “the Orient and Islam are always represented as outsiders having a special role to play inside Europe.”8 Shakespeare puts that theme to use in Othello. In the tragedy, journeying to foreign lands, experiences referred to by Othello as “my travel’s history” (1.3.128–70), generates a spellbinding narrative that captures Desdemona’s fascination and finally her heart. The account of his adventures not only impresses the senator’s daughter with the hardships and sufferings endured but also registers Othello’s direct participation in life-threatening adventures in foreign lands that involve encounters with creatures such as “Cannibals that each other eat” and “Anthropophagi, and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders” (1.3.143–45). His descriptions of “disastrous chances,” “hairbreadth escapes,” and being “sold to slavery” reveal a swashbuckling hero’s life that heretofore Desdemona might only have accessed through books and travelers’ accounts. Perhaps she could empathize with Othello’s distress as a former slave, living in a constrained manner herself as the sole female under constant watch to perform domestic duties in her father’s household. Thus she can commiserate with Othello’s “redemption” (l.138) from servitude and the vast world of adventure that has become an intrinsic part of his life story. Many women have been swept off their feet by a man in uniform and his exotic experiences. Othello feeds Desdemona’s imagination with exciting views of a larger world existing beyond the confines of her household as well as the city walls of Venice. What other real or imagined boundaries might be breached at this man’s side? Even as Desdemona abandons the security of her social position and affections of her father to elope with Othello, the Moor enters more emphatically into the fold of Venetian life by marrying the daughter of a senator. When we consider the dissolution of the generic boundaries between fiction and reality—Othello’s stories distinctively carry some of the hallmarks of exaggerated travel narratives—Shakespeare’s tragedy suggests that here is a protagonist with a basic desire to embrace deep identification with the European traveler to foreign lands. In other words, Othello is a Moor who wishes he were European and takes steps to acquire that status through military service and marriage. Desdemona is the Venetian aristocrat who is dazzled by the heroic adventures of fabled proportions. Each longs to share the other’s life, and consequently the pair abandon their previous social roles to join in a mixed-blood marriage that is challenged at the outset by the Venetian patriarchy and the advancing Ottoman fleet. During the sixteenth century, Shakespeare’s England became increasingly exposed to images and accounts of oriental encounters. Like other European monarchs, Queen Elizabeth I fostered cultural exchanges with


“Turning Turk,” Modern English Orientalism, and Othello


Debra Johanyak

Islamic emissaries and rulers. In January 1583, she appointed Sir William Harborne as the first ambassador to the Great Turk, and Sir Thomas Glover became the first English ambassador to Constantinople. In 1592, the Levant Company was created to facilitate trade with Middle Eastern countries. In August 1600, the queen received sixteen embassy visitors from Morocco, accompanied by nine prisoners. These Moorish representatives remained in England for six months, during which some quite intriguing political maneuverings took place—there was, for example, the clandestine proposal for a Muslim alliance with England against the expansionist ambitions of imperial Spain. Although nothing came of the plan, the Moors left behind impressions that incited curiosity and suspicion about Islamic society.9 Othello’s tragic subject matter, focused on the figure of a Moor, could not help but draw upon the 1600 visit of these Muslim emissaries from Barbary to the Elizabethan court, led by the Moroccan Ambassador Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun. While this famous “Moorish” delegation came with the professed interest of entering into trade negotiations, it also carried letters concerning a military alliance against Catholic Spain.10 Virginia Vaughan notes, “During their six-month stay, the Moroccans were regarded with mingled curiosity and contempt. Like Othello, the Moroccans were potential allies against a common enemy while remaining ineluctably different. Once the ambassadors departed, plans for a common military enterprise against Spain dissolved.”11 A few decades before the arrival of this Moroccan embassy, Elizabeth I had already demonstrated openness to political and economic relations with the Muslim world: correspondence took place between the queen and Murad III; the English were granted a series of trading “capitulations” at the Ottoman court; and trading relations were established between England and Muslim-controlled Constantinople through the Turkey Company.12 Given these historical and political contexts, Shakespeare’s plays, like those of his contemporaries, found resonant subject and thematic matter in the contemporary concern with Turkish threats and Moorish visitors. At least sixteen—nearly half—of Shakespeare’s plays reference Turks (or variant terms). Information about Ottoman history and the beliefs and values of the Turks was disseminated through travelers’ letters, reports, poems, and stories, serving both commercial purposes and private entertainment. Writings about Islamic culture and religious beliefs also were evident in smaller works like Wynkyn de Worde’s 1515 English tract, which prefaces its ten pages with a simple description: “Here begynneth a lytell treatyse of the turkes lawe called Alcaron.”13 Well-known accounts of travel through Islamic regions included chapters in Andrew Borde’s “The Order of the Great Turckes courte” (1544)


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and Peter Ashton’s “Short Treatise upon the Turkes Chronicles” (1546). Along with works such as these were the more extensive writings of Richard Knolles (1603) and later writers. “Written in Arabicke and Italian by John Leo Africanus, a More, borne in Granada and brought up in Barbarie,”14 John Pory’s 1600 English translation of A Geographical Historie of Africa by Leo Africanus offered valuable information about Moors. The travel writers William Biddulph and George Sandys commented on Turkish beliefs, as did Sebastian Munster’s Cosmography; Sandys points out that husbands would “drowne” wives suspected of “adulterie.”15 In 1597, the anonymous publication of The Policy of the Turkish Empire offered details on Islamic culture. Many accounts of Ottoman society, culture, religion, and politics were exaggerated, speculative, or fictitious; others, like some reports of European travelers, did, however, strive for a certain degree of accuracy. A few early modern thinkers even promoted tolerance and understanding of Middle Eastern culture and the Islamic faith.16 Othello registers nascent English anxieties about cultural alterity and the looming threat of losing one’s identity to the Islamic Ottoman Empire. As Daniel Vitkus points out, “The Great Turk became a European bogey partly on the strength of a dynastic track record of executions, poisonings, strangulations, and general familicide.”17 Just as terrifying was the prospect of “turning Turk,” when English sailors were captured by Ottoman pirates and sold into slavery or converted and joined Turkish pirates on the high seas to make their fortunes, themes dramatized in such plays as A Christian Turned Turk and The Renegado. Shakespeare’s tragedy pivots on the historical and cultural conflicts between East and West, between Christian Europe and the Islamic Orient. Directly responsible for the security of Venice in his role as military commander, Othello, the trusted general, is appointed to lead Venice’s naval fleet against the militant Ottoman Turks. When his marriage to Desdemona is revealed, the Duke tries to calm Brabantio, Desdemona’s father, with the affirmation that “Your son-in-law is far more fair than black” (1.3.290), but his seemingly enlightened perspective must not be taken to indicate that Venice is, generally speaking, accepting of racial and ethnic difference. Brabantio can only make sense of his daughter’s marriage to Othello by appealing to the distorted conviction that the blackamoor must have seduced Desdemona through the black arts. How otherwise could a well-to-do young white woman forego “The wealthy curled darlings of our nation” (1.2.68) to be married to “such a thing as [Othello]—to fear, not to delight!” (1.2.70–71)? Following an interruption of the couple’s elopement at the Sagittary Inn (1.2.158), their privacy is continually “invaded” literally and




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figuratively when Iago makes suggestively crude comments to Brabantio, and when Othello’s troops in Cyprus imagine in voyeuristic musings the marital intimacy of the private bedroom space shared between a black Moor and a white woman. Othello’s marriage to Desdemona provides rich matter for gossip and rumor, offering occasion for Iago to build an enormous lie to shatter the couple’s happiness. Iago speaks titillatingly about how Othello “hath not yet made wanton the night with her, and she is sport for Jove” (2.3.15–16). One possible reason—and there are many (and indeterminate) for Iago’s destructiveness—may then have to do with his jealousy that a black Moor could have won the love of a white woman. Because Othello “is of a free and open nature, / That thinks men honest that but seem to be so, / And will as tenderly be led by th’ nose / As asses are” (1.3.399–402), a strikingly colonial perspective revealed by Iago, the Moor can be easily misled and brought to a tragic end. Shakespeare’s play allows the audience to believe that Iago is a villain particularly sensitive to the fact that Othello has chosen to distance himself from the Muslim roots of his Moorish culture. Based on Othello’s ethnic identity, it can be surmised that at some point in his life, Othello the Moor converted from Islam to Christianity—an instance of “turning Christian.” For Othello, the term “Turk” refers not only to the Muslim Other who is the historic enemy of Christendom but also to those values that are perceived as directly antithetical to the enlightened values of Christian Europe. It is interesting to note here that Catholics of the period accused the English of being the “new turkes” of Europe even as Protestants believed that “the Pope is a more perillous ennemie vnto Christe, than the Turke: and Popery more Idolatrous, then Turkery.”18 Turk and Moor share the Muslim faith, and if Shakespeare’s Othello positions himself religiously, culturally, and ideologically against the Turk as the infidel Other, his identity as a Moor makes him incapable of totally dissociating from his people’s religion and ethnic culture. While Shakespeare’s Moor is bestowed with nobility, he also is directly associated with a racial constituency that has generated fear and unease in the West.19 In terms of racial and cultural genealogy, Othello represents Africa, even possible Arabic ancestry, and certainly the Islamic faith. On one hand the Moor is a physical embodiment of “otherness,” with his African and Arab genetic characteristics; on the other hand, he represents Venetian solidarity as the general who will lead a military campaign against the Ottoman Turks. Is Othello more Muslim or Christian, African or Venetian? Can a Moor be trusted to fight the Ottomans with whom he shares a Muslim heritage? William Biddulph claimed that in Aleppo (Syria), the “Moores are more ancient dwellers . . . then Turkes, and more forward


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in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk Beat a Venetian and traduc’d the state, I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog, And smote him—thus. (5.2.353–57)

This reference to Othello’s assault in Aleppo, whether literal or figurative, reinforces the Moor’s deep associations with the Islamic Orient and his cultural heritage. Leo Africanus offers descriptive accounts of African culture that include the fact that African wives accompanied their husbands to battle: “When they goe to the warres each man carries his wife with him, to the end that she may cheere up her good man, and give him encouragement.”21 When Othello seeks “fit disposition” for Desdemona (1.3.236) in preparing to depart and fight the Turks, the Duke suggests that she return to Brabantio’s house. Desdemona rejects this option and makes a plea before the senate to be with her husband in the arena of battle, unaware that the real battle will soon be fought with the demons of jealousy in the marriage domain rather than in a public clash of arms with the Turks. Military imagery (and its ominous foreshadowing) suggestively informs Othello’s relationship with his wife—he refers to her, for example, as “my fair warrior!” (2.1.182) when he welcomes her to Cyprus. One of the challenges confronting Othello in Venice is the persistently implicit and explicit reminders from various quarters that he is black and Other, and therefore can never fully belong to European society. Othello’s vulnerability may be traced to his implicit subscription to this binaristic conception of selfhood and Otherness, belonging and marginalization. Innate anxieties inform his deep desire to be more Venetian than the Venetian and, when that fails, lead directly to reverting to his original identity to accomplish what sophistication and assimilation have failed to achieve. When, at the end of the play, Othello views himself as a Turk, he ratifies European perceptions of the treacherous and destructive Muslim Other at the same time that he draws the audience’s attention to the religion of the Other to which both Turk and Moor are historically and culturally linked. Ultimately, even though Othello strives to be distanced as far as possible from everything in his origins that is associated with the


and zealous in Mahometisme then Turkes.”20 Othello prefaces his suicide with a reference to Aleppo:


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Islamic Orient, he finds himself occupying the very place and identity of the Other that he has sought so earnestly to subjugate and banish. Cyprus, located just forty miles south of Turkey (the Ottoman power base), sets the stage in Othello for symbolic East-West confrontations, distancing the Venetians from European society in an environment where the situation rapidly deteriorates. When the Turkish fleet disappears in a storm at sea, the conflict turns inward to spiritual elements warring within and between the main characters. Othello’s lieutenant Michael Cassio is lured into a drunken brawl that costs him his position while Othello degenerates from a respected leader into a gullible follower and then into a raging dispenser of justice. Iago’s lies shake Othello to his core, driving him to epileptic seizures. It is here that the metaphor of “turning Turk” translates into the literalism of the tragic action as each main character undergoes a dramatic shift: Cassio loses self-control, Iago plots to destroy Othello, and Othello must avenge his wife’s lost honor. Leo Africanus points out that African men are especially prone to jealous fits: “No nation in the world is so subject unto jealousie; for they will rather leese their lives, then put up any disgrace in the behalf of their women . . . being also very proud and high-minded, and wonderfully addicted unto wrath; . . . and they are so credulous, that they will believe matters impossible, which are told them.”22 Othello fits this description perfectly, for although he initially trusts fully in Desdemona’s loyalty (“My life upon her faith!” [1.3.294]) and Iago’s veracity (“Honest Iago” [1.3.294]), he is deceived by Iago into believing that his wife is an adultress (4.2.88), and his “great revenge” (5.2.74) conceives of a plan to kill Cassio and Desdemona. The coupling of storm imagery with romantic fulfillment suggests a certain tension in Othello as he greets Desdemona upon her arrival in Cyprus. Othello exclaims, “O my soul’s joy! / If after every tempest come such calms, / May the winds blow till they have waken’d death!” (2.1.186), to which Desdemona responds, “The heavens forbid / But that our loves and comforts should increase / Even as our days do grow!” (2.1.192–94). Stephen Greenblatt notes sexual anxieties to be discernibly present in Othello’s words: “If the death he invokes may figure not the release from desire but its fulfillment—for death is a common Renaissance term for orgasm—this fulfillment is characteristically poised between an anxious sense of self-dissolution and a craving for decisive closure.”23 Greenblatt suggests that Othello possesses a general distrust of erotic sexuality, traceable to Christian orthodoxy’s views of proper conduct and relationship within the conjugal economy. Herein may be found one of the ironically destructive aspects of European Christian culture that Othello desires to adopt. If a puritanical (Christian) conception of human sexuality informs


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Othello’s marital relationship with Desdemona, his destructive distrust of her as a perceived adulteress that ensues then brings about a retaliation that appears to have a basis in Islamic culture as represented in various writings and plays of the period. If Othello’s distrust of Desdemona obtains significance with reference to an identifiable unease with human sexuality as defined by moral parameters set by orthodox Christianity, it is also possible to suggest that this distrust signifies in a Muslim context as well. There is the interesting possibility that Othello’s Christian(ized) response to Desdemona’s expression of sexuality that seeks to resist closure intersects with a Muslim reading based on his religious heritage of what constitutes proper modesty and conduct for women. At some level, Shakespeare’s Othello satisfies his audience’s stereotypical expectations of Islamic peoples and cultures by representing Turks and Moors in generally savage terms. The audience’s response to the representation of cultural alterity, however, is not straightforward for, while introducing us to surface distinctions between black and white, male and female, Muslim and Christian, Shakespeare complicates the relationship between “good” and “evil,” and “us” versus “them” in his tragedy. In particular, Shakespeare brings Othello the blackamoor and Iago the Venetian into suggestive entanglement when, in affirming his uncompromising faith in Iago’s honesty, the gullible black general literally embraces the villain in what can be read as a metaphorical conflation of identity. In fact, Othello’s language implies a marital union, as though the two men have pledged a parody of unholy troth to vigilante justice, initiated by Othello while kneeling: “Now by yond marble heaven, / In the due reverence of a sacred vow / I here engage my words” (3.3.461–64). Thus Othello falls prey to Iago’s machinations and affirms “ownership”: “Now art thou my lieutenant” (3.3.479), to which Iago ominously declares, “I am your own forever” (3.3.482). While Shakespeare’s play may locate the “evil” plaguing Venetian society in the character of Iago—a white man who is at once both a malcontent and a racist—he also portrays destructive weaknesses and passions in the figure of the Moor. As the plot unfolds, Iago manages to convince Othello that Desdemona is a devourer of men that Othello must take into hand, awakening his racial “blood” that cries out for justice. In Shakespeare’s primary source, Cinthio’s Hecatommithi, Disdemona (“Desdemona” in Shakespeare’s play) describes her husband’s wrath by invoking cultural stereotypes: “Nay, but you Moors are of so hot a nature that every little trifle moves you to anger and revenge.”24 The Moor’s deeply rooted desire to retrieve his lost honor means that Othello must set aside his Venetian identity. The cuckolded husband cannot successfully divest himself of




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Muslim inscriptions in his desire to be fully Christianized; thus, his murder of Desdemona is dramatized in the suggestive mode of a Catholic confession scene and also with the implied enactments of Islamic justice. Toward the close of the play, Othello’s identity shifts to that of a father confessor (a Catholic priest who hears confessions) in the bedchamber with Desdemona in which extracting the sinning subject’s confession of adultery becomes his driving obsession.25 In a dark parody of Catholic practice, where the father confessor tries to draw out a meaningful confession from the sinner, Othello grows angrier when the “sinner” refuses to show recognition of sin. In another dark parody of Judeo-Christian theology in which God offered up his Son to die for humanity’s sins, Othello sacrifices Desdemona for the overall good of men in society.26 There are many ways to get rid of the adulterous wife. Alluding to the Muslim tradition, William Lithgow reported that if a Turkish wife or concubine “prostituteth her selfe to an other man besides her husband; then may he by authority, bind her hands and feete, hang a stone about her necke, and cast her into a River, which by them is usually done in the night.”27 Desdemona’s mournful song while awaiting Othello’s return to their chamber features a heartbroken girl beside a stream that “murmur’d her moans” (4.3.43–44), almost as though she anticipates drowning. Certainly, stifling or suffocation resembles drowning in the stopping of one’s breath, which is Desdemona’s ultimate fate. Othello’s Islamic heritage resonates with the dramatic conventions of the time period. While there is no evidence to suggest that Shakespeare read English translations of the Koran or even knew of the existence of a much earlier Latin translation, is it possible he had met sailors or travelers who were Muslim or familiar with the Koran’s teachings? The first English translation (done from an earlier French translation) in 1649 has been attributed to Alexander Ross. The Koran includes commentaries on infidelity and adultery that can offer an interesting framing for deciphering Othello’s motivations, understanding, and actions.28 The following section from Surah Al-Nisa (Women) (chap. 4, verses 15–36) deals with marital duties as well as punishment for adultery: Men are the protectors And maintainers of women, Because God has given The one more (strength) Than the other, and because They support them From their means. Therefore the righteous women


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Are devoutly obedient, and guard In (the husband’s) absence what Allah would have them guard. As to those women On whose part ye fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, Admonish them (first), (Next), refuse to share their beds, (And last) beat them (lightly); But if they return to obedience, Seek not against them Means (of annoyance): For God is Most High, great (above you all).29

Othello interestingly appears to follow the Koran’s guidelines for disciplining a wayward wife when he initially reacts to Desdemona’s championing of Cassio in act 3, “Not now, sweet Desdemon, some other time” (3.3.55), as though admonishing his wife. Later he seems to comply with the second response advocated in the Koran when he sends her away: “Out of my sight!” (4.1.247). He also avoids sharing Desdemona’s bed during this period: “leave me but a little to myself ” (3.3.85). In act 4, scene 1, he strikes Desdemona; and in act 4, scene 2, he confines her to their chamber and later attempts to extract from her a confession of adultery. Finally, he murders his wife so that she will not “betray more men” (5.2.7). Desdemona’s “execution” is carried out under the “huge eclipse / Of sun and moon” (5.2.98–99). The image of darkness combines Othello’s two competing belief systems: “sun” (with its pun on “Son”, a term applied by Christians to Jesus Christ as the Son of God), and “moon” as a symbol of Islam; their convergence overlaps Christian and Muslim imagery as competing influences within Othello’s character. The audience witnesses “the very error of the moon” (5.2.109), suggesting Othello’s spiritual confusion in addressing Desdemona’s perceived adultery first from the perspective of Christian father confessor and then as Muslim judge and executioner. Making desperate sense of the killing of his wife, Othello expostulates, “For naught I did in hate, but all in honor” (5.2.302–4), and so he restores Muslim honor with Desdemona’s death. To finalize this ritual, the Moor says, “Let me the curtains draw” (5.2.107), permanently veiling her body literally and symbolically from view. It is possible that Othello’s action of drawing the curtains to hide his horrid act is borrowed by Shakespeare from Marlowe’s portrayal of Zenocrate’s deathbed scene in Tamburlaine (part 2), in which stage direction has the arras drawn. As Othello transforms from Christian to “Turk,” he cries “blood, blood, blood!” (3.3.467), fitting the stereotype of the bloodthirsty and




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tyrannical Muslim often enough portrayed on the English Renaissance stage and hinting at his reverting (or “re-turning”) to his Muslim roots. If we invoke Koranic discourse on adultery and punishment, Othello’s actions provocatively carry Sharia resonances. Thus, Othello can be read as a Muslim avenger of his beleaguered honor. The idea of the veil that Shakespeare brings into play toward the end of Othello is central to the dramatization of Othello’s reading of Desdemona’s (in)fidelity and (im)modesty. In Cyprus, as we recall, Desdemona enters the arena of conflict as a kind of equal with men. It can be argued that in Cyprus, Desdemona’s public presence—in other words, her general lack of “modesty”—generates anxiety for Othello. Desdemona’s presence in the battlefield is a powerful indicator of her openness to the public sphere and her embracing of “equality” with men. After all, she mingles with soldiers and men of war, and soon takes up the cause of Cassio’s reinstatement. It is precisely this anxiety about Desdemona’s presence (indeed, circulation) among men that contributes directly to Othello’s breakdown and the ensuing tragedy. For Othello, as instigated by Iago and underwritten by his own innate anxieties in relation to the white men of Venetian society, Desdemona’s open expressions of love translate into a suggestive threat of the exuberantly libidinal woman. Othello’s anxieties are revealed through his responses to ideas of female (im)propriety, underscored by his Muslim upbringing in which women must be veiled from the eyes of men outside the family. It is through the insinuated gestures of such impropriety that Iago succeeds in poisoning Othello’s mind against his wife. The relationship between private and public spaces also suggests an interesting orientalist dimension when considered with reference to Ottoman culture in which men were supposed to separate their personal lives from their public duties, especially with regard to military matters and leadership roles. (The word “harem” in seventeenth-century Arabic means “forbidden” or private place, or sanctuary.)30 Marital and family issues were expected to be managed privately, and Muslim men who conducted personal affairs in public—especially by showing excessive affection before others—were accused of compromising their virility and could be upbraided by those courageous enough to do so. In Richard Knolles’s General Historie of the Turks,31 Turkish rulers who demonstrated an overabundance of feeling for their wives, particularly when it resulted in neglecting matters of state, could very well be reminded of their leadership duties and loss of status. Such reminders could readily lead to the unhappy disposal of a hapless wife or concubine. Othello’s public display of affection for his wife in both Venice and Cyprus may be normative in a European context but certainly less so in Ottoman culture. At various levels Othello


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suggests competing systems of cultural values in its portrayal of a Moor who has turned Christian (within limits?) and also in the play’s generation of suggestive meanings in relation to other “Turk plays” in existence in the period. The tensions between private possession and public circulation, between fidelity and promiscuity, are given powerful and disturbing (because excruciatingly painful) expression in the tragic misunderstanding generated as a result of the missing handkerchief. When Desdemona cannot produce the handkerchief asked for by Othello, its absence is read with reference to the wife’s (perceived) infidelity—her circulation, like the piece of cloth, among men. If the inability to produce the handkerchief becomes for the jealous husband the most potent and obvious sign of his wife’s promiscuity, its absence also cannot be dissociated from his concern with veiling and modesty. Natasha Korda points out that “by the late sixteenth century, the display of a silk or finely wrought handkerchief, rather than its mere use, . . . designated the elite status of its bearer . . . the handkerchief, like Othello himself, is caught between competing systems of value and property and is woven together out of ideological discourses.”32 Othello’s growing alarm stemming from the overpowering sense that he has lost control over his wife even as she is understood to be “circulating” among men is inextricably intertwined with the horror of dwindling honor. Following the loss of the magical handkerchief and its representative protective veiling, the couple’s marriage and Desdemona’s life are doomed, and her wedding sheets are destined to become winding sheets.33 As the literal and symbolic marker of the couple’s sanctified union, the handkerchief has its provocative provenance in the Orient. Othello’s maternal heirloom possessed of a magical spell is the sole material link to his African and Muslim heritage, when we consider its origins in Egypt—the land of Cleopatra, and the reputed, if erroneous, origins of the Gypsy people, many of whom were fortune tellers by trade: That handkerchief Did an Egyptian to my mother give; She was a charmer, and could almost read The thoughts of people. She told her, while she kept it, ‘Twould make her amiable, and subdue my father Entirely to her love; but if she lost it, Or made a gift of it, my father’s eye Should hold her loathed, and his spirits should hunt After new fancies. She, dying, gave it me, And bid me, when my fate would have me wiv’d, To give it her. I did so; and take heed on’t,




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Make it a darling like your precious eye. To lose’t or give’t away were such perdition As nothing else could match. ... ‘Tis true; there’s magic in the web of it. A sibyl, that had num’ered in the world The sun to course two hundred compasses, In her prophetic fury sew’d the work, The worms were hallowed that did breed the silk, And it was dy’d in mummy which the skillful Conserv’d of maidens’ hearts. (3.4.55–67, 69–74)

Othello’s recitation of the handkerchief ’s history may be intended to frighten Desdemona into guarding the handkerchief as well as her virtue. Suspecting the worst, he tries to read her thoughts and elicit her confession: “Is’t lost? Is’t gone? Speak, is’t out o’ th’ way?” (3.4.79–80), his emotions rising as the handkerchief ’s absence begins to confirm beyond doubt in his mind his wife’s promiscuity, with its attendant shame, loss, and hopelessness. Beyond its “spiritual” meaning, the handkerchief also indicates the Moor’s destructive possessiveness—Desdemona’s “lost handkerchief” becomes for him a revelation of her disregard for her husband and marriage vows. She has been careless with a symbol of her husband’s love. Has she also been careless with her virtue? When Othello rejects Desdemona’s offer of the handkerchief with the words, “Your napkin is too little” (3.3.301), he directly associates this piece of cloth with not only the loss of modesty but also her reputation. The “veil” with which Othello wishes Desdemona to be symbolically covered has been rent, and the sanctity of her fidelity to her marriage vows, violated. Emilia’s retrieval of the kerchief leads to her musing on its significance, underscoring the handkerchief ’s veiling power: “she so loves the token—for he conjured her she should ever keep it—that she reserves it evermore about her” (3.3.307–11, emphasis mine). Interestingly, the handkerchief also reflects an Ottoman and Muslim context. In the Turkish seraglio, the emperor collected many women, and “when it is his pleasure to have one, they stand ranckt in a Gallery, and she prepareth for his bed to whom he giveth his Handkerchiefe, who is delivered to the aforesaid Aga of the Women.”34 The woman whose beauty the emperor prefers over the others becomes the favorite, who wears “a veile that reacheth to her anckles.”35 Veiling—and its lack—as represented by the handkerchief plays a prominent role in Othello’s (dis)trust of Desdemona.


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If Cinthio’s Hecatommithi is Shakespeare’s most obvious source for the subject matter of his play, it also may be possible that Richard Knolles’s General Historie of the Turkes constitutes another influence. In Knolles’s text we encounter the story of a Turkish sultan, Mahomet the Great, and his infatuation with a beautiful Grecian captive, which may have influenced Shakespeare’s penning of Othello. Admiring the woman’s “incomparable beautie and rare perfection, both of body & mind,” he put her under the supervision of a chief eunuch but soon sent for her, “doing her the greatest honour and service he could. All the day he spent with her in discourse, and the night in dalliance . . . his fierce nature was now by her wel tamed, and his wonted care of armes quite neglected.”36 Because military affairs suffered from the Sultan’s neglect, a respected courtier named Mustapha Bassa, concerned about court murmurings and Janissary rumors that spoke of replacing the Sultan with his son, brought the matter to the ruler’s attention. Mustapha Bassa implored the Sultan to reflect on the past glories and attainments of his ancestors and keep his word to conquer “Italie” to “lead them forth for the honour and enduring of the Ottoman empire.”37 Although received with stern looks, the sincere plea of Mustapha to protect his master’s honor was taken to heart by the Sultan: After his wonted manner [Mahomet] went in unto the Greeke, and solacing himself all that day and the night following with her, . . . dined with her, commanding that after dinner she should be attired with more sumptuous apparel than ever she had before worne: and for the further gracing of her, to be deckt with many most precious jewels of inestimable valour. . . . behold, the Sultan entered into the palace leading the faire Greeke by the hand; . . . Thus coming together into the midst of the hall and due reverence unto them done by al them there present; . . . catching the faire Greeke by the haire of the head, and drawing his falchion with the other, at one blow struck off her head to the terror of all.38

Mahomet kills Irene to refocus his military might and reclaim his diminished honor. The Irene story caught the Elizabethan imagination and apparently was featured in a lost play by George Peele called The Turkish Mahomet and Hiren, the Fair Greek, referenced in the 1607 Peele’s Jests.39 William Shakespeare and other Elizabethan playwrights seem to have been familiar with the Westernization of Irene’s name (“Hiren”) and her tragedy, as evidenced, for example, in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV: “Have we not Hiren here?” (2.4.159–60). Apparently referring to Pistol’s weapon, “Hiren” perhaps draws attention to the sword used by Mahomet to dispatch Irene. That Shakespeare had Peele’s play in mind is likely when we consider Pistol’s reference a few lines later to “Calipolis” (2.4.179), an




Debra Johanyak

awkward quote from another oriental play by George Peele, The Battle of Alcazar. In General Historie of the Turkes, Richard Knolles reports another quite similar historical incident in the “great Bassa” Ionuses who murders his innocent foreign wife. In Knolles’s narrative, the cruel murder of this “faire ladie Manto his best beloued wife” stunned and outraged the Bassa’s people who generally had loved and honored him. Without any obvious reason to distrust his wife, this tyrannical bassa was primarily moved by the “mad humour” of his destructive jealousy.40 We do not know whether Shakespeare was familiar with this story from Knolles’s General Historie (with its striking similarities with the story of Othello). If he was, this Turkish narrative afforded a culturally inflected orientalist dimension to Jacobean society’s deep interest in how strong passions, like jealousy, functioned to shape and determine relationships between husband and wife in the matrimonial economy. The theme of a Muslim ruler’s growing distrust of his true, faithful, and beloved wife controls the tragic unfolding of Othello, except that in Shakespeare’s story, as influenced by Cinthio, the protagonist is a military leader whose distrust of his spouse is incited by a conniving subordinate. In European representations of Ottoman history, tendencies of Muslim rulers to doubt their wives’ faithfulness afford opportunity to highlight the perceived natural and cultural propensity of the Turks toward irrationality and cruelty (common characteristics of tyrannical authority). Many Europeans believed that Muslim men were not only domineering, controlling husbands but also clearly undeserving of their virtuous European spouses (in cases of miscegenation), a point that the story of Mahomet and Irene in Knolles serves at some level to underscore. Obvious problems in the matrimonial context, powerfully evidenced in Ottoman society and culture, offer cautionary messages for intercultural and political relations between the West and the Islamic Orient. The recurring theme found in period drama was that the European world must remain vigilant in the face of the constant threat posed by the Muslim world. Othello readily compares with other “Turk plays” in drawing attention to representations of race, cultural alterity, and gender politics in Shakespeare’s oeuvre. The tragedy engages with all of these topics in its dramatization of miscegenation, which obtains specific resonance in relation to a contemporary topicality involving Europe’s relations with the dreaded Ottoman Empire. Settings like Venice, Cyprus, Rhodes—actual as well as invoked in this play—have historical significance as arenas of conflict between Europe and the Islamic Orient. If Othello’s tragedy is predicated upon the destructive fractures of an “alien” who desires assimilation but


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cannot effectively sanitize the inscriptions of “originary” culture tied to race and religion, it nevertheless also complicates binary conceptions of selfhood and identity by pointing out that a major part of the destructive spirit of the play (embodied in Iago) lies at the heart of white, Christian, Venetian society. Shakespeare displays significant interest in the politics of cultural difference. He is just as fascinated with how the “alien” and the “Other” coexist and function within the norms of the dominant culture as he is with how race and cultural interactions as well as miscegenation can inform relations between nations. William Shakespeare’s plays tend to bring the cultural politics of assimilation and marginalization into intersection with the larger politics defining relations between cultures, nations, and empires. In Othello, the Moor’s position in Venetian society cannot be extricated from the larger context of European-Ottoman relations. If Shakespeare does not, in the end, portray a Moor that is demonized in a one-dimensional and overdetermined binaristic universe, he nevertheless brings into play EastWest, Christian-Muslim, and Europe-Ottoman Empire tensions and conflicts in his tragedy of the blackamoor who greatly desires and yet ultimately fails to become an intrinsic and authentic part of Venetian society. Othello is a tragedy that strikes a meaningful chord in Shakespeare’s cultural milieu and shares our twenty-first century struggle of grappling with little understood images and ideas of the Islamic Orient. Notes 1. The Oxford English Dictionary offers this definition of “Moor”: “a native of Mauritania, a region of Northern Africa corresponding to parts of Morocco and Algeria. In later times, one belonging to the people of mixed Berber and Arab race, Muslim in religion, who constitute the bulk of the population of Northwestern Africa, and who in the 8th c. conquered Spain. In the Middle Ages, and as late as the 17th c., the Moors were commonly supposed to be mostly black or very swarthy (though the existence of ‘white Moors’ was recognized), and hence the word was often used for ‘Negro’; cf. BLACKAMOOR.” 2. William Shakespeare, Othello, in The Riverside Shakespeare: Complete Works, ed. Herschel Baker, Anne Barton, Frank Kermode, Harry Levin, Hallett Smith, and Marie Edel, 2nd ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997), 1246–1296. All references of this play and other works of Shakespeare are to this edition, and will be cited parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line number. 3. For an important collection of essays on the subject, see Catherine M. S. Alexander and Stanley W. Wells, eds., Shakespeare and Race (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).




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4. Cynthia Marshall, The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 5. 5. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 59. 6. Michael Neill, “Othello and Race,” in Approaches to teaching Shakespeare’s “Othello,” ed. Peter Erickson and Maurice Hunt (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2005), 47. 7. David Bevington, “Imagining the East: Shakespeare’s Asia,” NTU Studies in Language and Literature 14 (2005): 110. 8. Said, Orientalism, 71. 9. Bernard Harris, “A Portrait of a Moor,” in Shakespeare and Race, 34. 10. See Matthew Dimmock, ed., William Percy’s “Mahomet and his Heaven”: A Critical Edition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 7–10. 11. Virginia Mason Vaughan, Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 58. 12. See John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (London: Fontana Press, 1994), 41; Walter S. H. Lim, The Arts of Empire: The Poetics of Colonialism from Ralegh to Milton (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 128–29; and Dimmock, William Percy’s “Mahomet,” 4–5. 13. Samuel Chew, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England During the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937), 441. 14. Leo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa and of the Notable Things Therein Contained, Done into English in the Year 1600 by John Pory, ed. Robert Brown, 3 vols. (New York: Burt Franklin, 1896). 15. George Sandys, “A Relation of a Journey begunne, Anno Dom. 1610. Written by Master George Sandys, and here contracted,” in Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes: Contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells by Englishmen and Others, 20 vols. (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1905–7), 8:147. 16. Daniel J. Vitkus, Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 16. 17. Ibid., 21. 18. Dimmock, William Percy’s “Mahomet,” 4, 11. For a study of how print culture helped shape early modern English as well as European constructions of “Turkishness” with all their persistently shifting definitions and parameters, see Dimmock, New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 19. For surveys of blacks and Moors on the English Renaissance stage, see especially Eldred Jones, Othello’s Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama (London: Oxford University Press, 1965); Anthony Gerard Barthelemy, Black Face; Maligned Race: the Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southern (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987); Jack D’ Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (Tampa: University of Florida Press, 1991). 20. William Biddulph, “Part of a Letter of Master William Biddulph from Aleppo.” in Hakluytus Posthumus, 8:262.


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21. Africanus, History and Description of Africa, 1:159. 22. Ibid., 1:183, 185. 23. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 243. 24. Cinthio, Hecatommithi, digitalized by Stephen L. Parker from J. E. Taylor’s translation of 1855, http://virgil.org/dswo/courses/shakespeare-survey/cinthio .pdf (accessed June 9, 2009), 2. 25. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 245. 26. I am indebted to Walter Lim for his detailed discussion of Othello’s fashioning of spiritual identity as a Catholic “father confessor” to Desdemona toward the end of the play. 27. William Lithgow, Rare Aventures and painefull Peregrinations, ed. B. I. Lawrence (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), 95. 28. Thanks are due to Mohamed Jeeshan (National University of Singapore) for sharing his knowledge on translations of the Koran in early modern England and also for reference to the following Koranic treatment of women’s infidelity and adultery. 29. The Holy Qur’an: Text, Translation and Commentary, ed. A. Yusuf Ali (Brentwood, MD: Amana Corp., 1983), 190–91. 30. Merriam-Webster Online, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/harem (accessed June 10, 2009). 31. Richard Knolles, The General Historie of the Turks from the first beginning of that Nation to the rising of the Ottoman Familie: with all of the notable expeditions of the Christian Princes against them. Together with the Lives and Conquests of the Ottoman Kings and Emperours Faithfullie collected out of the Histories both antient and moderne, and digested into one continual Historie Untill this present yeare 1603 (London: Adam Islip, 1603). 32. For a detailed discussion of the handkerchief ’s symbolism, see Natasha Korda’s “The Tragedy of the Handkerchief: Female Paraphernalia and the Properties of Jealousy in Othello,” in Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 127, 129. 33. Neill, Othello and Race, 55. 34. Sandys, “A Relation,” 158. 35. Ibid., 160. 36. Knolles, General Historie of the Turks, 350. 37. Ibid., 351–52. 38. Ibid., 352–53. 39. George Peele, Merrie Conceited Jests (London: 1620?), in Renascence Editions, transcribed by R. S. Bear, March 2003 (from Singer and Triphook type facsimile of 1809), https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/849/ peele.pdf?sequence=1 (accessed June 9, 2009), 16. 40. Knolles, General Historie of the Turks, 557. For a consideration of the story of Ionuses and Manto as a “precursor of Othello and Desdemona,” see Vaughan, Othello, 78–83.







Indian and Amazon The Oriental Feminine in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

James W. Stone

. . . female unruliness is always another country —Ania Loomba You orientals are all alike—incest between Father and daughter, brother and sister, mother and son; And murder too—the closest family ties outraged, And no law to forbid any such crime! You can’t Import your foreign morals here. —Euripides, Andromache

Asia, under its wonted rubric of the exotic Orient, makes its way into the text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a non sequitur, the surprise that Greece is not hegemonic or omnipresent, or the sole locus of the drama. “Why art thou here, / Come from the farthest step of India?” (2.1.68–69), Titania asks Oberon in their first dialog under moonlight.1 Her free association of India with sexual license is a predilection that many of Shakespeare’s countrymen would have shared. The word “India” leads Titania to suspect her husband of foreign idylls, what in today’s parlance would go by the name of sex tourism. Oberon’s sexual indulgence is associated not just with India but also with another clime on the far margins of Greece, the land of the Amazons, a place even more remote and fictive for Shakespeare’s England than India was. Titania’s jealous eye imagines her fairy husband bounding from distant India back to Greece


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in order to attend the marriage of Hippolyta, an old amour, “the bouncing Amazon, / Your buskin’d mistress and your warrior love” (2.1.70–71). In response, Oberon levels charges of gallivanting against Theseus, who enjoyed cover under the conniving aegis of Titania (2.1.74–80). Why does Shakespeare let India and the land of the Amazons obtrude into the text of his play set in Athens and its sylvan environs? The Asian lands of India and of the Amazons, Titania and Oberon imply, are places of exotic license where one goes to cheat on one’s partner. These are regions of the world beyond the reach of Athenian custom and law, with its taboos against fornication and adultery, and its strict marriage statutes that grant a father absolute control of his daughter’s choice of husband, on pain of death if she disobeys the rigors of Athenian law that Duke Theseus, himself a former libertine adventurer, now enforces. A Midsummer Night’s Dream portrays a world in which official culture denigrates the Oriental as a measure of what falls short of the Greek male cultural ideal, but there are gaps in the play as well that valorize Asia as a place for escaping the rigors and prejudices of patriarchy. Theseus conquers Hippolyta, the Amazon queen, who in the eyes of the conqueror signals what resists Greek culture as she bridles at having to succumb to the male order of things by marrying her enemy. For Theseus, the Amazons represent the threat of barbarism and the feminine that the Persians will assume in a later era.2 Whereas Theseus can find no compromise with the Amazonian Other short of conquest, in dealing with the foreign world Titania adopts a more sentimental register. She speaks nostalgically of India. The boy that her Indian votaress died in giving birth to is initially a sign of concord between mistress and votary, but when displaced and abducted from East to West he becomes a bone of invidious contention—in René Girard’s terms, an object of “mimetic acquisitiveness”3— between husband and wife, Oberon and Titania. As a “changeling,” the boy’s roots cannot be traced; he is the offspring of parents even more estranged than the bickering Oberon and Titania in Greek fairyland. As an object of mimetic desire, the adopted boy exemplifies the paradox that the “same” object of affection is perceived as different by the two emulous parties in their rivalrous tug-of-war over who shall own him and his affections. That the marriage of the fairy king and queen has failed to produce any children is its most salient index of discord and failure. The vicarious child has the potential either to bridge or to exacerbate the fissure between his new foster parents. The collapse of the foundational hierarchical difference between male and female that undergirds patriarchal marriage; the projection of this difference onto nature so that the marks of civil cultivation like paths and


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boundary lines become flooded over and erased in the mire; the confusion among the four lovers when Puck puts love-in-idleness in mistaken eyes, making Lysander and Demetrius undistinguishable and causing Lysander to exchange his beloved Hermia indifferently for Helena; the concomitant lack of difference between Helena and Hermia save that one is slightly taller and fairer than the other—all give rise to a mimetic crisis of indistinguishability. The resolution of this crisis can only be achieved by means of inciting a violent sacrifice that will reintroduce hierarchy and difference. The prospect of this violence takes many forms in the play: Theseus’s threat to put Hermia to death if she does not obey her father’s demand that she marry Demetrius; the fight between Hermia and Helena that risks each woman scratching out the eyes of the other in order to efface her rival; the falling out of Oberon and Titania over the changeling; Puck’s inciting of contentious jealousy between Lysander and Demetrius; and the death of Pyramus and Thisbe as a consequence of their feuding families’ erecting a wall of difference and prejudice between them.4 To go outside the city walls of Athens is to leave behind the patriarchal law of Theseus’s court and Egeus’s peremptory claims on whom his daughter shall marry. Preferring in place of the city to roam without firm direction results in Lysander becoming “wood” (2.1.192) within the woods because the juice of love-in-idleness makes him give way to desires that Shakespeare’s play often characterizes as subversive because oriental: Amazonian Ethiopian, Indian—the barbarian and the female, or the barbarian as female. Love is a species of madness, for men as for women, and for men its consequence is effeminization. Effeminizing desire threatens the man’s sense of integral identity and privilege over against the woman, contests the Greek image of itself as superior to that which it conquers or to what falls outside the Hellenic sphere of interest or cognition, and confirms the Athenian sense that love that challenges patriarchal taboo must be maintained at a safely extramural distance, in the woods. Greek geography ultimately made little distinction between Asia and Africa, since all regions to the south and east of Greece represented a locus of oriental difference. The Greeks employed the pejorative and ethnocentric onomatopoeia barbaros (barbarian) to caricature the garbled sounds (to Greek ears) of anyone unable to articulate the Greek language. The use of Africa as a pretext for racist epithet is evident in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Under the influence of the exotic and alienating lovejuice, Lysander turns against Hermia and calls her “Ethiope” (3.2.257) and “tawny Tartar” (3.2.263). His sudden estrangement from Hermia expresses itself in terms of his metaphorical translation (literally, transporting) of her from Greek to African. Lysander ridicules Hermia for


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being shorter and darker than her erstwhile friend Helena, “Not Hermia, but Helena I love: / Who will not change a raven for a dove?” (2.2.112– 13). At the moment that his fancy drifts away from her, Lysander sees Hermia as foreign and barbaric, as a woman who defies the male-dominated norms of beauty as defined by Greek culture. (The resistance is all Lysander’s, ironically, for Hermia continues to love him as she always did before.) Africa is the “dark continent” of female sexuality, the antithesis of Athens, if not of its extramural woods shadowed in night. Kim F. Hall comments on the nodal nexus of prejudices against blacks, women, and foreigners: “What is also apparent is that . . . threatening female sexuality and power is located in the space of the foreign: male, Grecian order is opposed to the dark, feminine world of the forest, which is also replete with Indians, Tartars, and ‘Ethiops’. . . . In this play blackness is associated with femaleness, foreignness, political upheaval, and chaos.”5 Binarisms of race, region, and gender are hierarchical; one term insists on its superiority to its rather too conveniently paired opposite. The logic of such binary oppositions does not hold for long when subject to withering critique of its ideological interests and inconsistencies. Characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream who claim to be ideologically pure and romantically constant deconstruct themselves; their abuses of language and power undercut what they claim to be the disinterested grounds for the elevation of their status vis-à-vis “barbaric” others. India and Female Parthenogenesis In the cultural imagination of Britain, India served primarily as a land where women catered to male desire, often extravagantly so. Kate Teltscher adduces a broad range of depictions of Indian women in the travel narratives written by Western male travelers in the early modern period: veiled Muslim women, the harem, unveiled and ostentatiously wealthy Hindus, widow immolation, lingam worship, and religious prostitution. Such exoticisms instilled both horror and fascination in British tourists.6 In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare appeals not to this stock of exotic religious and gender stereotypes, but instead to India as a feminist utopia where Titania and her female servant raise together a changeling boy with no assistance or intrusion from any man. Feminist collaborators, the servant labors to give birth to the posthumous child, and Titania labors to raise it as memorial tribute to its beloved but absent surrogate mother. The marriage of Oberon and Titania turns so divisive that all of nature rebels in sympathetic response to their discord: the nine-men’s morris flows with mud, diseases abound, and the once well-trodden paths become “undistinguishable” (2.1.100) from the wilderness. Under the


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inundations, marks of cultivation slide traceless back into primal nature. That the distinction between the wilds and the paths cleared by human hands is reduced to mud epitomizes the logic of topsy-turvy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for it serves as a synecdoche paradigmatic of the collapse between Greek civility and culture, on the one hand, and the barbaric (i.e., not Greek-speaking) world of India and the Amazons that threatens to encroach on the Hellenic, on the other. When individuals who quarrel are kings and queens, the “distemperature” (2.1.106) that results is not surprisingly both local and universal, psychological and meteorological—personal, world-historical, and seasonal: The spring, the summer, The childing autumn, angry winter, change Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world, By their increase, now knows not which is which. And this same progeny of evils comes From our debate, from our dissension; We are their parents and original. (2.1.111–17)

Her sojourn in India vouchsafes Titania an opportunity to forge extramarital bonds with the votaress and to enjoy a surrogate child by her. Her return from India with the boy engenders a deeper falling out of wife and husband, a quarrel whose paradoxical “progeny” is that reproduction in the natural world (“childing autumn,” “increase”), according to the usual progress of the seasons, has been aborted. The birth of an extramarital child is cause for dissension between husband and wife. Titania’s changeling boy—whose importation into the heart of the Athenian woods is the proximate cause of the confusion of the seasons and ultimately the erasure of the differentiating traces of Greekness— inhabits an exclusively female space of nurture and sentiment. The boy seems to have been engendered in such an all-female space as well. The feminine fantasy that binds Titania and her Indian votaress is of a woman impregnated by the spirit of the wind, her distended womb likened to the billowing sail of a boat:


Indian and Amazon

The fairy land buys not the child of me. His mother was a votress of my order; And in the spiced Indian air, by night, Full often hath she gossip’d by my side; And sat with me on Neptune’s yellow sands, Marking th’ embarked traders on the flood: When we have laugh’d to see the sails conceive 10.1057/9780230106222 - The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia, Debra Johanyak and Walter S. H. Lim

James W. Stone

And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind; Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait Following (her womb then rich with my young squire), Would imitate, and sail upon the land, To fetch me trifles, and return again As from a voyage rich with merchandise. But she, being mortal, of that boy did die; And for her sake do I rear up her boy; And for her sake I will not part with him. (2.1.122–37)

The votaress’s “marking” (remarking) of the trading ship at the psychological level leads, by means of a magical materialization of the imagination, to an imitative marking or inscription at the anatomical level, viz. pregnancy. The metaphor is literalized in orientalized India in a way that it cannot be within the walls of occidental Athens, where the language of realism and realpolitik predominate, not to mention the ordinary exigencies of reproductive biology. In the passage above the mytheme of an autochthonous, spontaneous generation from the native earth is rewritten as a birth that metaphorically mirrors the fertile conjunction of sea, sail, and wind. The wanton wind is the inseminating spirit that raises the sail or womb and makes it pregnant. The conventional masculine gender-valence of wind has less rhetorical import for Titania, however, than the fact that the sail itself, as if by its own (feminine) agency, is able to buoy itself. The sail or womb seems to be self-propelling, selfgenerating, whether blowing at sea or mimicked on shore by the servant as she fetches and delivers to Titania both trifles and the rich yield of a baby boy. In an article abundant in implications for materialist feminist theory, Laura Levine observes that “though women imitate the man-made objects of commerce, that imitation is predicated on the knowledge that these objects themselves are at best imitations of the powers of generation reserved specifically for women. . . . The votress imitates the world of merchandise, which is itself an imitation of her own fecundity, her own rich cargo.”7 Women are the ground for economic productivity and for the poetic figures of speech that their parturient reproduction models. The Indian votaress’s male partner is not mentioned, his semen displaced metonymically by marine winds or spirits.8 Hence the motive for Titania’s metaphor—perhaps more accurately characterized as an elaborate conceit about conception—is that its sailing vehicle can serve as an apt device for delivering parthenogenesis as its tenor. Shakespeare’s text never asks us literally to conceive of reproduction without the conjunction


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of male and female. Figuratively, however, A Midsummer Night’s Dream invites and cajoles its readers and spectators once and again to imagine a space (a utopia, a no-place) in which female parthenogenesis is rich with possibility. This imaginary heterocosm of the feminine, unmixed and uncontaminated by maleness, is located in the Orient, a realm free of the constraints of Greek law, science (e.g., Aristotle’s and Galen’s account of reproductive biology), and rationalism. Titania’s vision of female parthenogenesis personified in the votaress runs counter to the way that Theseus, in the opening scene of the play, speaks for the Greek male view of reproductive biology and of paternal law in vindicating Egeus’s claim to dispose of Hermia to the suitor of his choice. Since the father creates the child, by this logic the father is the arbiter of the child’s conduct as well. Theseus reminds Hermia of her fundamental passivity, both biological and moral, since she had nothing to do with her own making: What say you, Hermia? Be advis’d, fair maid. To you your father should be as a god: One that compos’d your beauties, yea, and one To whom you are but as a form in wax, By him imprinted, and within his power To leave the figure, or disfigure it. (1.1.46–51)

In this narrative of male parthenogenesis, man is the efficient and final cause of generation and the one who has the right to prescribe conduct as the child grows to adulthood, whereas the woman provides merely the matter (material cause) that father or husband works on and the vessel where such work transpires.9 Louis Montrose comments that “the father is a demiurge or Homo faber who composes, in-forms, imprints himself upon, what is merely inchoate matter.”10 The woman has no will of her own, no control, no ability to write her own destiny. Man impregnates and inscribes propriety, the one a model licensing the other. Hermia has no property in herself; not even her body is her own. The male prerogative to “disfigure” means that the man may appeal to the state to put Hermia to death if she disobeys the father, in whose image (figure) she is made. Hermia rebels against the will of her father, as Titania resists Oberon in their tug-of-war over who will get the title to be the Indian boy’s foster parent. Titania dissociates herself from Oberon by severing their conjugal ties—“I have forsworn his bed and company” (2.1.62)—and devoting herself instead to an exclusive, extramarital liaison with the boy.


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Queen Elizabeth granted a royal charter to the East India Company on December 31, 1600, the last day of the sixteenth century. In her speech about her pregnant votaress, as we have seen, Titania admires “the spiced Indian air” (2.1.124) and the trading ships “rich with merchandise” (2.1.134). Shankar Raman argues that the Indian boy is an absent presence in the text because he is not seen on stage but he represents the importance for England of the idea of India and its practical, mercantile potential. “His absence is nothing less than the immense distance that separates Europe from India, a distance doubly figured as death. His presence is nothing less than a bridging of that distance in the form of Europe’s consumption of Eastern wares: Titania will not ‘part’ with the boy because she has made him part of her. . . . In other words, the colonial enterprise metaphorically provides Titania the measure of value upon which metonymically to ground her claim.”11 Titania’s claim is primarily sentimental, not mercantile, but appealing to the language of mercantilism provides Titania with a convenient metaphor to justify her incorporation, as it were, of the boy. Oberon counters Titania’s dream of impregnation without male agency by a fantasy of male parthenogenesis. The boy is for Oberon a “changeling” “stol’n from an Indian king” (2.1.22) whom he wants to “have . . . / Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild” (2.1.24–25). In this fantasy of an all-male milieu, Oberon the kidnapper reduces the changeling to exchange-value, whereas Titania invests herself emotionally in the boy in terms of sentimental use-value. At the same time that she eschews physical congress with Oberon, Titania valorizes commerce with India in imagining her votaress sailing like a merchant ship on the sea, her womb bearing a rich and royal cargo that is untranslatable into any money-form (to use Marx’s terminology). Titania refuses to allow her Indian boy, whom she never refers to as a “changeling,” to become a pawn fought over by lovers or a token of trade. He is unavailable for foreign exchange. From Gynecocracy to Patriarchy Hermia’s mother is absent from the text and is thus unable to provide any support for her daughter. The erasure of the mother-daughter relationship in Theseus’s fantasy of male parthenogenesis indicates how, in the geocultural imaginary of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Greece lies at the (metaphorical) antipodes from India. So, too, Greek patriarchalism is at the opposite extreme from Scythia, the home of the Amazons.12 The Amazons contract with foreign men only briefly in order to become pregnant, and then they murder, maim, or return intact any male offspring to the fathers, whereas the baby girls are raised to be warrior women like


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For thys cause they treated maryage with their neighbors named Gargarians (as Plinie sayeth) with condition, that upon certayne tymes of the yeare, their husbandes should assemble together in some appointed place, and use them for certaine days untyll they were with chylde, which beinge done and knowen, they should returne home agayne to their own houses. If they brought forth daughters, they norished and trayned them up in armes, and other manlik exercises, and to ride great horse: they taught them to run at base, and to followe the chace. If they were delivered of males, they sent them to their fathers, and if by chaunce they kept any backe, they murdred them, or else brake their armes and legs in sutch wise as they had no power to beare weapons, and served for nothynge else but to spin, twist, and to doe other feminine labour.13

In the Amazonian system of governance, the male drops out after impregnating the woman, much as the changeling’s father is absent during the pregnancy and parturition of the Indian votaress. In forcing the queen Hippolyta to marry him at the end of the Amazonomachy, Theseus publicizes the ascendancy of Greece over Asia in terms of the victory of patriarchy over matriarchy and gynecocracy. As queen of the Amazons, Hippolyta is like Queen Elizabeth in having a more than mild distaste for marriage. The wedding ceremony of Theseus and Hippolyta is a public performance of ideology, the king’s military triumph over his adversary and her feminist culture. The waning of the old moon and the coming-to-be of its silver-bowed successor, bent menacingly in the opening lines of the play, emblematize the trajectory of a woman moving from power in her own right qua woman to the state of being penetrated by a man—her favored weapon, the bow, the privileged symbol of the Amazon, suddenly appropriated by her male conqueror cum husband. Wishing to remain a fair vestal who escapes the shaft loosed from Cupid’s bow and to be still unpierced by fancy, Hippolyta opens the play reluctant to accept Theseus’s proposal to make of her a trophy of war:


their mothers. William Painter describes how the Amazons reproduce in The Palace of Pleasure (1576):

Four days will quickly steep themselves in night; Four nights will quickly dream away the time; And then the moon, like to a silver bow New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night Of our solemnities. (1.1.7–11) 10.1057/9780230106222 - The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia, Debra Johanyak and Walter S. H. Lim

James W. Stone

Adept at archery, the Amazons are so devoted to the martial arts over against marriage and maternity that Herodotus, Plutarch, and other classical authorities aver that they cut off one of their breasts in order not to obstruct the recoil of the bowstring after its release and to facilitate throwing the javelin.14 The bowed new moon signals ironically the ultimate sacrifice of Hippolyta’s masculine martialism, for Theseus’s calendar insists that the time of the new moon must be Hippolyta’s wedding day and entry into conventional femininity. She must cede her passion for the bow and arrow even as she yields to a man and his sole authority to bear rod, bow, and Cupid’s “fiery shaft” (2.1.161). The word “votress” recurs just forty lines after we encounter Titania’s Indian devotee, in a passage that allies Queen Elizabeth implicitly with the votaress even as it reminds us that she does not succumb to marriage as Hippolyta is forced to do.15 In the remarkable story whose telos is the etiology of love-in-idleness,16 Cupid takes aim with his “love-shaft” to penetrate “a fair vestal” virgin, “throned by the west” (2.1.158–59), but he misses the mark. Oberon recalls having seen young Cupid’s fiery shaft Quench’d in the chaste beams of the watery moon; And the imperial votress passed on, In maiden meditation, fancy-free. (2.1.161–64)

On this occasion the word “votress” refers to the empress Diana, the virgin goddess who triumphs over Venus’s son, Cupid. Critics see in this mininarrative of the fair western virgin an allusion to Queen Elizabeth, more specifically to pageants honoring her like those at Kenilworth (1591) or Elvetham (1595). Elizabeth’s resistance to marriage may be seen as the condition that made marriage possible and guaranteed its security for others. Had she married, perhaps she would not have remained sovereign in the fullest sense—the absolute guardian of the law, including the law of matrimony—for she would have had to compromise her autonomous authority by yielding to a man.17 The two references to a votaress, one from India, the other alluding to an English appropriation of Greek mythology (Elizabeth as Diana), indicate the importance for A Midsummer Night’s Dream of imagining a world of women apart from men. Such a world is located apart from Greece—in the Asian realms of India and the land of the Amazons, and in occidental England under Queen Elizabeth. Unlike the eponymous Fairy Queen of Spenser’s epic, Shakespeare’s Titania (also styled the Queen of the Fairies) chooses to marry and, different again from Elizabeth, she falls enamored


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of an ass. The connection between the two fairy queens—Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s, Elizabeth and Titania—is more structural than characterological. Shakespeare takes Titania’s name from Ovid’s use of the name in the Metamorphoses to refer to Diana and Circe, but Shakespeare’s Titania is as far from chaste Diana as Elizabeth is allegorically proximate to the “fair vestal” and “imperial votress.” As a symbol for Elizabeth’s chastity, Diana is a foil for the fickle victims of love-in-idleness, the flower purpled with love’s wound when Cupid’s arrow fails to hit the virginal mark. The relationship between Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Gloriana, and her allegorical avatars like Britomart and Belphoebe) and Shakespeare’s Queen of the Fairies remains one of the least studied aspects of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. One reason for suspecting that the play was not written for an aristocratic wedding with Queen Elizabeth in attendance—this notion of an occasional Dream has been a springboard of long standing for speculation on the part of critics and editors18—is that the portrait of Titania enamorata could hardly have been taken as a compliment to royalty, however careful Shakespeare was to distance himself from Spenser’s land of faery by setting his play in ancient Greece and by suggesting that Oberon and Titania hailed from still more distant India.19 In any event, both Titania and Hippolyta represent women who have to compromise their gynecocracy, something that Elizabeth was not willing to do. Humanism and Xenophobia A Midsummer Night’s Dream bodies forth two quite distinct sexual spaces, alternative and antithetical to each other: a world of fantasmatic male sexual abandon (Theseus and the male lovers, human and fairy), and a female utopia like India or the land of the Amazons. And the play presents two models of parthenogenesis, male and female, the vision of Theseus and that of Titania’s poetic meditation on her Indian votaress. In his long and painstaking introduction to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Arden editor Harold F. Brooks devotes considerable effort to whitewashing Theseus’s character by emphasizing his nobility and “humanism,” achieved as the result of Shakespeare’s scant attention to the many unseemly stories of romantic entanglement from Theseus’s past.20 James L. Calderwood champions Theseus the humanist as a model of heteronormativity, “compelling the Amazon queen to be true to her sex by becoming subordinate to his, thus reestablishing the proper relationship between man and woman” in the same way that Oberon prevents Titania from “violating natural order” by devoting herself more to the changeling than to her husband and by keeping the boy from having contact with the male world where he belongs “if natural growth is to have its way.”21 The Brooks and


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Calderwood positions are at the antipodes from my view of Theseus as someone who gives habitation and name to various heterosexist abuses couched in naturalizing and normalizing rhetoric.22 These unhappy love affairs enter into the text of Shakespeare’s play only at the margins, in Oberon’s reproach of Titania (often neglected by commentators) for her erstwhile love for Theseus and her connivance at his faults: How canst thou thus, for shame, Titania, Glance at my credit with Hippolyta, Knowing I know thy love to Theseus? Didst not thou lead him through the glimmering night From Perigouna, whom he ravished; And make him with fair Aegles break his faith, With Ariadne and Antiopa? (2.1.74–80)

Among Theseus’s youthful amours abroad, before the prodigal returned home and became the enforcer of Athens’s conservative marriage laws, was his abandonment of Ariadne to her death on Naxos after she had saved him from being devoured by the Minotaur in the labyrinth at Knossos. On his return to Athens from Crete, Theseus forgot to change his sails from black to white and so caused his father, Egeus, to commit suicide out of despair for what he took to be the dark sign of his son’s death abroad. Theseus’s marriage to Phaedra led to the murder of his son Hippolytus. Thus, over the course of a long amorous career Theseus committed uxoricide, parricide, and filicide. The prodigal affairs that Oberon alludes to occurred on terra incognita, beyond the margins of civilized maps, and away from the exigencies of repression. Although these amours may have been licensed by the unconscious, they do not imply the “dark continent” of female sexuality—as Freud was to put it, ripe for the withering postcolonial critique of Frantz Fanon—since Theseus’s lovers were blameless, after all. In The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Plutarch details the many rapes committed by Theseus, motivated by what Sir Thomas North’s translation (1579) calls the “womannishenes” of the hero: “Then his taking of the daughters of the Troezenians, of the Lacedaemonians, and the Amazones . . . dyd geve men occasion to suspect that his womannishenes was rather to satisfie lust, then of any great love.”23 Montrose comments that “womannishenes” suggests that “masculine heterosexual desire is itself, in its essence, effeminizing; that concupiscence weakens and degrades manly virtue.”24 This logic implies that a man who continually lusts after a woman is behaving like a woman; but in the sources, if


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not in Shakespeare’s text, Theseus blames his crimes against women on women. He projects the woman in himself onto the women he seduces. The playwright must suppress this pattern in order to fit the epithalamic context and tone of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In principle and in practice, sexual difference and the discord between the sexes cannot be univocally mapped onto a geographical grid in terms of female East versus patriarchal West, for differences within the EastWest binarism implode the facile distinctions that typecast the Other, the Asian, as the origin of difference, as in the mimetic tug-of-war between Oberon and Titania over the Indian changeling. Postcolonial criticism helps us to effect useful cultural work in deconstructing this stock in trade of “humanism,” its facile construction of difference across the binary antithesis between humane self and demonic-barbaric Other. But Oberon does reestablish clear binary difference between the combating spouses; he wins the contest by resorting to the magic love-juice, scapegoating Titania, and humbling her to the status of the bodily grotesque. Oberon punishes Titania at home for her prodigal dreams of a feminine utopia abroad. When she falls in love in the Athenian woods, she becomes an idle and unwitting practitioner of miscegenation and bestiality. Her innocent maternal love for the adorable changeling boy is displaced by Titania’s adulterous besottedness for a mechanical ass, hideous to those whose eyes (unlike hers) have not been blinded by love-in-idleness. For the surrogate Indian boy is substituted Bottom, who figures as Titania’s monstrous human child and as her adulterous animal mate—as an object of infantilism, anality, and incest.25 That Titania confuses the human and the animal, and that she commits both incest and adultery by mating with her transmogrified child, exemplifies Giambattista Vico’s definition of what constitutes barbarism for the Greeks: the “infamous promiscuity of people and things in the bestial state.”26 Illicit miscegenation (promiscuity) and bestiality result from the failure to honor the familiar and familial oikumene (“house,” house as “world”), allowing instead the eschatia—the wastelands that lie beyond the bounds of Greek civility—to transgress domestic borders.27 One returns to the inescapable subtext of Herodotus, the father of Orientalism and of its defining notion that what constitutes the lure of the exotic abroad is degrading, decadent, and perverse when transposed to the domestic register. Monsters, the objects of the civilized traveler’s fascinated gaze, must be regarded at a distance, on foreign soil; Bottom the ass must remain outside the walls of Athens, unless his monstrosity is contained within the licensed, secure confines of the play within the play on the stage in Theseus’s palace, where the playwright’s didactic, satirical and


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punitive thrust is that the human ass be shown (monstrare) to be a monster. Since the monster is used to admonish, the show within the show that is performed by the mechanicals serves the interests of state power. India, a space of difference and détente that serves as solace for Titania, ironically comes between her and Oberon as obstacle and discord. For Titania, dreams of autonomy and female parthenogenesis must give way to the dark reality of male control and miscegenation. Kings prevail over their wives’ oriental mysteries by deploying a venerable, albeit controversial, formula of misogyny: as the incarnation of the principle of difference, woman is the subversion of man, an insubordinate sub-version. The difference between East and West is the East itself, as the difference between man and woman (according to this old misogynistic formula) is woman herself.28 Such is the currency that anxious Greek patriarchs like Theseus and Oberon believe in and benefit from. The legacy of humanism, its sweetness and light, cannot be isolated from the foundation of humanism’s demonic other, xenophobia, the fear of the barbarians lurking in the woods, just beyond the bounds of intramural Athens, and the fear of those women who dwell in, or day-dream ad libitum of, Asian climes. Paradigmatic Greek culture is inseparable from the violence that it is predicated upon and that it seeks to repress: the scapegoating that sets itself up as humanistic value by expelling barbarian and all-female spaces, strident to represent the foreign and the feminine as Other and thus to obfuscate the violence lurking within male humanism, its antinomian heart of darkness. Notes 1. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks (London: Methuen, 1979). All references of the play are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line number. For discussion of the Indian origins of Oberon in English literary history, see Margo Hendricks, “‘Obscured by dreams’: Race, Empire, and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare Quarterly 47, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 37–60, esp. 44–48. 2. Edith Hall discusses the Greek demonization of the Persians in Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), esp. chap. 2. For the origins and defining terms of Orientalism, see Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). In Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), John. M. MacKenzie critiques Said’s work for being too essentialist and hegemonic in its portrayal of the Orient as a solely negative construction of the West, and for Said’s reluctance to gender the orient as female. 3. René Girard evacuates desire of any biological referent, seeing it instead as imitation, the desire to mimic the desire of the other, one’s rival. Emulous contention


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4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

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over the same love object is what Girard calls “mimetic desire” in Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972) or “mimetic acquisitiveness” in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978). Girard devotes many chapters to A Midsummer Night’s Dream in A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Patricia Parker argues that the wall is more than simply a symbol of division. Since its chink brings the lovers together, it is a jointure, a sexual part as well as a partition, an anagogic copular. The wall delays action by frustrating its consummation, but such partition draws forth or “dilates” the unfolding time of the drama. See “Anagogic Metaphor: Breaking Down the Wall of Partition,” in Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye, ed. Eleanor Cook, Chaviva Hošek, Jay Macpherson, Patricia Parker, and Julian Patrick (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 38–58. Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 22–23. Hall examines the ideological use to which the black-white binary is put in the works of George Best, Sir Thomas Browne, and others who assumed that whiteness was original and blackness an acquired aberration. She foregrounds “the problem that dark skin and certain physical features posed for a culture that believed that God made man in his own image” (13). In The Arts of Empire: The Poetics of Colonialism from Ralegh to Milton (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), Walter S. H. Lim analyzes how George Best attributed the “naturall infection” of blackness to Cham, whose violation of Noah’s prohibition against sexual intercourse on the Ark resulted in the birth of his son Chus, “who not onely it selfe, but all his posteritie after him should bee so blacke and lothsome, that it might remaine a spectacle of disobedience to all the worlde” (131). See the second chapter of Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600–1800 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). Laura Levine, “Rape, Repetition, and the Politics of Closure in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 213. An intriguing genealogy, mentioned once but never pursued further, posits that the changeling is a “lovely boy, stol’n from an Indian king” (2.1.22). This line is ambiguous as to the boy’s paternity: he may be the king’s son, his ward, or his godson; but in any event, the Indian king has long since dropped out, unlike Oberon, the king of the fairies in the Athenian woods, who maintains a pressing and jealous presence in pursuit of a boy to whom he is connected even more tenuously than his Indian counterpart was. Thomas Laqueur analyzes the persistence of the model of a single (male) sex through the seventeenth century in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 133.


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11. Shankar Raman, Framing “India”: The Colonial Imaginary in Early Modern Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 244. 12. In Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), John Gillies applies Vico’s poetic geography to the early modern cartography of Ortelius and Mercator, who banished the barbarous, the monstrous, and the unknown to the margins of their maps. 13. William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure (1576; repr., London: The Crescent Press, 1929), 2: 209–10. Herodotus discusses the Amazons in The Histories (4.110–17, 9.27), locating them in Scythia, to the east of Greece, and portrays them as barbarians whose practices were eccentric to and thus threatened Greek norms. Ania Loomba cites Father Monserrate, a Jesuit priest who visited the court of the Moghul emperor Akbar in 1580 and relayed stories of Amazons in the town of Landighana. See “The Great Indian Vanishing Trick—Colonialism, Property, and the Family in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Dympna Callaghan (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 173–74. Amazons were located in the New World as early as the first voyage of Columbus. In 1540 Francisco de Orellana sighted them on the “rio de las Amazones.” See Joyce Lorimer, ed., Sir Walter Ralegh’s “Discoverie of Guiana” (London: Hakluyt Society, 2006), lxxii–lxxiv. 14. In The Palace of Pleasure (1567), William Painter writes, “And for as mutch as these Amazones defended themselves so valiantly in the warres with bowe, and arrows, and perceyved that their breastes did very mutch impech the use of that weapon, and other exercises of armes, they seared up the right breasts of their yonge daughters, for which cause they were named Amazones, which signifieth in the Greeke tongue, wythout breasts, although some other do geeve unto that name an other meaninge” (2:210). It was common to refer to the Amazons as “Umimamians” (single breasted). With regard to the Amazons whom he encountered in Guiana, Ralegh was skeptical about some of the more notorious lore: “but that the[y] cut of the right dug of the brest I do not finde to be true” (Lorimer, ed., 65). In “The Amazons in Elizabethan Literature,” Studies in Philology 37, no. 3 (1940): 433–56, Celeste Turner Wright traces a wide range of classical sources that describe the Amazons; and she cites important early modern English authorities like Sidney, Ralegh, Spenser, Shakespeare, Thomas Heywood, and Samuel Purchas. 15. These two occurrences of “votress” in 2.1 are the only uses of the word in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, though variants like “votary” and its plural do appear infrequently in other works. 16. Richard Wilson rings complex changes on “love-in-idleness” in Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion, and Resistance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 144–54. Arguing that “in the Tudor cultural revolution ‘idleness’ was the punning code used by Protestant reformers to condemn Catholic idolatry” (145), Wilson detects in Puck’s and Shakespeare’s “weak and idle theme” (5.1.413) a subtext that secretly supports Catholicism. He identifies the “mermaid on a dolphin’s back” (2.1.150) as Queen Mary, Catholic rival of the Protestant “imperial votress” (2.1.163).


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17. For Elizabeth’s masculinism as motive and means for avoiding marriage, see Leah Marcus, “Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines, Elizabeth I, and the Political Uses of Androgyny,” in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 135–53. Marcus discusses the way that Queen Elizabeth incorporated the Amazons into the panoply of her official mythology (e.g., when she addressed the troops at Tilbury, in 1588, as they were departing to fight the Armada). See also Montrose, The Purpose of Playing, 124–39, and Winfried Schleiner, “Divina Virago: Queen Elizabeth as an Amazon,” Studies in Philology 75 (1978): 163–80. 18. Arden editor Harold F. Brooks, liii–lxvii, summarizes the arguments in favor of an aristocratic wedding as the occasion for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, positing as possibilities the marriage of Elizabeth Vere and William Stanley, Earl of Derby (1595) or, more likely, that of Elizabeth Carey and Thomas, the son of Henry, Lord Berkeley (1596). See David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Almanac: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Marriage and the Elizabethan Calendar (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993) for further claims for the Berkeley-Carey wedding as the most probable setting for the debut of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Recent editors of the play tend to be much more skeptical than Brooks and Wiles about the matrimonial occasion of the play. 19. In “The Fey Beauty of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Shakespearean Comedy in Its Courtly Context,” Shakespeare Studies 32 (2004): 118–72, J. P. Conlon argues that characters that seem uncomplimentary to Elizabeth like Hippolyta and Titania could have provided contrast cases for displaying the queen’s virtues. “The compliment emerged once the audience acknowledged a historical or spatial distance between the monarch and her foils” (126). Counter to the way that A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems to distance Elizabeth from Titania and thus in part from India, Samuel Purchas hailed Elizabeth as the “Mother to so many famous Expeditions in and about the World and . . . the Mother of Indian Trafficke” (quoted in Loomba, 169). The East India Company came into being late in Elizabeth’s reign. 20. Brooks, cii. 21. James L. Calderwood, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Illusion of Drama,” Modern Language Quarterly 26 (1965): 511. 22. My perspective on Theseus is close to that of A. D. Nuttall, who suggests that “it is a mistake to suppose that the darker side of the mythical material has been excluded from the play,” for Shakespeare’s Theseus is not so far from Racine’s. See Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 121. 23. Quoted in Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 1:388. 24. Montrose, The Purpose of Playing, 149. 25. Allen Dunn argues that through a “defensive projection” it is not the Indian changeling but Bottom the stand-in upon whom the guilt of pre-oedipal infantile dependency is played out. “The Indian Boy’s ultimate defense is his absence” (22). See “The Indian Boy’s Dream Wherein Every Mother’s Son Rehearses His Part: Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare Studies 20 (1988): 15–32.


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26. Quoted in Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference, 5. 27. See Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference, 5. For Herodotus, Amazons and Persians, inhabitants of the Asian extremities of the known world, exemplify the eschatia in terms of the feminine and the effeminate, respectively (9). Gillies cites a speech by Hermione to the eponymous widow of Euripides’ Andromache, part of which I take as my epigraph. The playwright’s Medea is another cautionary tale about the dangers of a miscegenetic union between a Greek man (Jason) and an exotic, barbarian woman. 28. Joel Fineman argues that in Neoplatonic schemata like those set forth in Robert Fludd’s seventeenth-century representations of the cosmos or in Shakespeare’s sonnets, man is figured as the sun, woman as the moon, in service of an “orthodox erotics for which woman is the Other to man, the hetero to homo, precisely because her essence is to be this lunatic difference between sameness and difference.” See Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 120. For analysis of Petruchio and Kate’s acrimonious debate over whether it is the sun or the moon that shines in 4.5 of The Taming of the Shrew, see Fineman’s “The Turn of the Shrew,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 138–59. In this essay I have had space to discuss only a few instances of the moon as presiding female deity and omnipresent symbol in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, most pertinently in the initial encounter between Theseus and Hipployta, in their debate over the significance of the old versus the new moon for their impending marriage.


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Marlowe’s Asia and the Feminization of Conquest Lisa Hopkins

In 1507, Martin Waldseemüller in his Cosmographiae Introductio proposed the name “America” for Columbus’s newly discovered land on the explicit grounds that “I do not see why anyone should object to its being called after Americus the discoverer, a man of natural wisdom, Land of Americus or America, since both Europe and Asia have derived their names from women.”1 Just over a hundred years later, in 1614, Thomas Campion’s masque for the wedding of Robert Carr and Frances Howard shows Asia wearing “a Persian Ladies habit.”2 In both these texts, Asia is inherently and unquestioningly gendered as feminine. Equally, at least some of the men who inhabited it were also considered to be on the edge of the category of the feminine: Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass have recently pointed to the classical tradition of regarding Scythians as effeminate and prone to impotence and possibly pederasty, since Herodotus recounted how they succumbed to “‘the Scythian disease,’ defined as ‘the atrophy of the male organs of generation, accompanied by the loss of masculine attributes.’”3 Taken together, these figurings should alert us to two important facts about the way in which Asia is represented in the sixteenth century. First, its representation is gendered; and second, there is thought to be a quasi-mystical link between the land and its inhabitants, not least since climate was supposed to exert a direct influence on temperament.4 Christopher Marlowe never went to Asia.5 Everything he knew about the East therefore came to him through either a written or a printed


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source, but this did not prevent it from becoming a locus of extraordinary imaginative power in his writing.6 For Marlowe too, Asia is both gendered and able to condition the temperaments and attitude of its inhabitants. What almost certainly was his final and crowning work, Hero and Leander, is set on the banks of the Hellespont, one of the points where Europe meets Asia, and involves repeated and increasingly dangerous negotiations of that threatening, liminal space. Marlowe tells us that “At Sestos Hero dwelt,”7 that is, on what is now the Gallipoli peninsula, while Leander lived at Abydos, a city in Asia Minor that was later used by Xerxes as a springboard for the invasion of Greece. It was on the basis of a spear that he threw to Abydos while crossing the strait that Alexander the Great laid claim to Asia. The difference between Sestos and Abydos thus marks the difference not only between two cities but also between two continents; and while it is possible to cross from one to the other, it is dangerous to do so. Indeed, the crossing explicitly brings Leander’s gender identity into question, or at least appears to, when Leander supposes that Neptune’s sexual advances must mean that the god has mistaken him for a woman. The poem even offers its twin cities as the locus of a “myth of origins” for the difference between European and non-European when we are told that So lovely fair was Hero, Venus’ nun, As Nature wept, thinking she was undone, Because she took more from her than she left, And of such wondrous beauty her bereft: Therefore, in sign her treasure suffered wrack, Since Hero’s time hath half the world been black.8

Hero and Leander, then, live in a time before the difference between Europe and Asia was fully established, and indeed the poem’s immediate future will mark the originary moment at which “fair” Europe, by virtue of Hero’s beauty, will first assert superiority over “blackened” Asia. The site, then, is loaded with significance. In the first place, it is imagined by Marlowe as a locus of absolute rupture and polarization—the inhabitants are Asian on one side, European on the other; white on one side, black on the other; a man on one side, a woman on the other— but at the same time it signifies both a time and a place where the two radically separate opposites are brought as close together as they can ever be. This notion of a fault line between Europe and Asia is one that is also explored in Tamburlaine the Great, where Tamburlaine mentions the Volga, a river that is usually understood as a crucial dividing line between Europe and Asia. In a further example of instability, the Don was also a


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candidate for the dividing line. John Michael Archer notes that “Lake Maeotis or the Tanais river (the Don) were often said to demarcate Asia from Europe. After 1452 the Volga competed with the Don for this role, confirming Russia’s status as an in-between nation.”9 Marlowe registers the significance of this particular demarcation between Europe and Asia on two occasions. The first is in Edward II, when Isabella says, Ah sweet sir John, even to the utmost verge Of Europe, or the shore of Tanaēs, Will we with thee to Hainault, so we will.10

The second is in Tamburlaine, part 1, when Tamburlaine positions his preferred display of power absolutely on the alternative version of this crucial border line, when he promises Zenocrate that she shall scale the icy mountains’ lofty tops, Which with thy beauty will be soon resolved; My martial prizes, with five hundred men, Won on the fifty-headed Volga’s waves, Shall all we offer to Zenocrate. (part 1, 1.2.100–4)

In Hero and Leander Marlowe’s attention is also on the divide between Europe and Asia, although he is looking at a different part of that fluid and notional border. There is also a separate layer of resonance evoked by mentioning Abydos, since it is cited in the Iliad as the home of some of the allies of Troy, and this not only calls to mind the culturally crucial narrative of the translatio imperii but also reminds us, unusually, of the Asiatic identity of the Trojans. This, too, is something that is also suggested in Tamburlaine part 1, when Philemus rather unexpectedly tells Zenocrate that Madam, your father and th’Arabian King, The first affecter of your excellence, Comes now as Turnus ’gainst Aeneas did, Armèd with lance into th’Egyptian fields, Ready for battle ’gainst my lord the King. (Tamburlaine the Great, part 1, 5.1.379–83)


Marlowe’s Asia and the Feminization of Conquest

Here, the Asiatic Tamburlaine is explicitly identified with the Trojan Aeneas, and thus instantiated as a figuring of self rather than Other in a neat reversal of customary boundaries. In both cases, it is as if a crucial 10.1057/9780230106222 - The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia, Debra Johanyak and Walter S. H. Lim

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border has suddenly turned round on itself, so that what should be outside becomes disturbingly inside instead. Finally, the two cities of Abydos and Sestos not only collectively connote sexual conquest but also invert the expected and accustomed polarities of that narrative. Historically, it was Asian Abydos that was conquered and subdued by Alexander’s phallic spear. In Marlowe’s poem, it is Abydosborn Leander who makes a conquest of Hero, albeit in a fumbling, vulnerable, and notably unauthoritative manner that perhaps associates him with the imperilled masculinity of Herodotus’s Scythians. Again, this is something that will be echoed in Tamburlaine, where the apparently marauding Asiatic barbarian Tamburlaine proves in fact to be curiously coy in matters sexual. He not only proves monogamous when actually married to Zenocrate but also postpones that marriage until he can secure the blessing of her father, thus ending part 1 rather incongruously with the early modern equivalent of a big family wedding. There is also another dimension to the writing of Asia in Marlowe’s plays. In Doctor Faustus, the East is understood in two distinct ways, one geographic and the other spiritual, which collectively constitute an extreme instance of correspondence between the human and the geographical spheres. In the first place, in classic Saidian terms, the East, and Asia in particular, is the locus of the exotic. Faustus asks, Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please, Resolve me of all ambiguities, Perform what desperate enterprise I will? I’ll have them fly to India for gold, Ransack the ocean for orient pearl, And search all corners of the new-found world For pleasant fruits and princely delicates.11

At the same time, however, the East is also the place of heresy, when Faustus resolves that “I, John Faustus of Wittenberg, Doctor, by these presents do give both body and soul to Lucifer, Prince of the East” (2.1.105–6). However disparate these two ideas may seem to be, they are actually linked. John Donne said that the “new philosophy calls all in doubt,”12 and for Faustus the new knowledge acquired through exploration of the territories of the East is certainly associated with skepticism and the practice of magic, as when he says to the Duchess of Vanholt, “If it like your grace, the year is divided into two circles over the whole world, that when it is here winter with us, in the contrary circle it is summer with them, as in India, Saba, and farther countries in the East; and by means of a swift spirit that I have, I had them brought hither, as ye see” (4.2.20–24). For


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Marlowe, therefore, the East was doubly charged with spiritual as well as geographical significance. It was a place utterly antithetical in every possible respect to Christianity, whether as the home of Islam and “England’s most powerful and threatening non-European competitor for the world’s land and wealth: the Turks,”13 or, as in Doctor Faustus, as the home of Lucifer, Prince of the East. As such, the East is the source of both the greatest danger and the greatest attraction in Marlowe’s works, and this is never more obvious than in Tamburlaine part 1, with the name of Asia resonating throughout and dominating act 1, where it seems to be purely geographical in significance. Toward the end of part 2 of the play, Asia recurs like the return of the repressed, clearly revealed there as a landscape of the mind as well as of a map. That it should loom thus large is not surprising, for Asia in the sixteenth century was a magnet for Western travelers. Emily C. Bartels points to the importance of “England’s confrontation with the East, particularly the Near East, where the state’s efforts to develop ties were more vigorous, unified, and sustained than in the less familiar worlds of Africa and the Americas”; moreover, “while . . . contemporary representations tended to exoticize their subject to some degree, they nonetheless produced an East at base more civilized, more organized, and more knowable than Africa and the Americas.”14 However, Asia was very difficult to pin down. George Best’s 1578 account of Frobisher’s voyage declared that “Asia is bounded on the South Side with the South Ocean, on the Easte side with Mare Eoum, and the straighte Anian, on the North side with the Scithian Sea, on the Weaste side with the Meridian of the riuer Tana . . . , & parte of the Sea Mediteraenaeum, as Pontus Euxinus, Mare Egeum, Sinus Issicus, and the red Sea.”15 However, this apparent precision proves to melt away as one looks at it for, like Marlowe’s teasing reference to “the farthest equinoctial line” (part 1, 1.1.119), Best’s coordinates prove to have a disturbing tendency to relativity: “the Meridian” of a river and “parte of ” a sea could well prove dangerously fluid and unstable as boundary lines. Some geographers even believed that Asia was joined to America, and hence offered a gateway to the fabled gold and drugs of South America.16 Particularly problematic was the location and definition of India. For Bernardino de Escalante in 1579, “this region that commonly is called India, is the Country with in which is conteined the two famous riuers, Indus and Ganges,”17 while Richard Eden’s translation of Sebastian Münster’s A treatyse of the newe India (1553) refers to “the superior or high India, whiche is nowe called Cathay” (f2r) and, to confuse the issue still further, declares that “this people of Cathay are of the nacion of the which in tyme past were called Scythians” (f2v). Though India on Ortelius’s map is firmly within Asia, as




Lisa Hopkins

Shankar Raman explains, “a quick glance at a Renaissance map suggests that answering the simple question ‘Where is India?’ presupposes a later relation to the world that was only then beginning to emerge.”18 This was the blurred picture that Marlowe inherited when he came to write his two great plays set in Asia—Tamburlaine, parts 1 and 2—and, characteristically, the confusion about precise coordinates becomes a stimulus rather than a hindrance for him. For Marlowe, Asia is of interest not primarily for its physical contours but also for its political, economic, and even—to borrow a term from Garrett Sullivan—affective ones.19 Only rarely does Marlowe’s geography descend to detail: Tamburlaine’s “here in Afric where it seldom rains” (part 1, 5.1.458) is a rare exception, and even that is the briefest glance at actual particularities. Marlowe is also quite happy to associate the Turkish Bajazeth repeatedly with Africa. Bajazeth, in his capacity as Turkish emperor, orders Tamburlaine “Not once to set his foot in Africa” (part 1, 3.1.28), and later in the play, Bajazeth, despite his title of “the Turk,” underlines still further his identification with Africa: Bassoes and janizaries of my guard, Attend upon the person of your lord, The greatest potentate of Africa. (part 1, 3.3.61–63)

Even more unclear is whether Asia, as Marlowe understands it, includes India. At times, in Tamburlaine, India seems not to lie in Asia. Even after he has conquered Asia, Tamburlaine seems to refer to full domination of India as something still in the future. He says to Bajazeth after he has conquered him, I’ll make the kings of India, ere I die, Offer their mines, to sue for peace, to me, And dig for treasure to appease my wrath. (part 1, 3.3.263–65)

At other times, however, India does appear to be understood as part of Asia. Orcanes, in part 2, says,


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From Scythia to the oriental plage Of India, where raging Lantchidol Beats on the regions with his boisterous blows, That never seamen yet discoverèd: All Asia is in arms with Tamburlaine. (part 2, 1.1.73–77) 10.1057/9780230106222 - The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia, Debra Johanyak and Walter S. H. Lim

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Marlowe, then, seems fully to share his contemporaries’ confusion about where Asia actually begins and ends. However uncertain its contours, the idea of Asia is central to the Tamburlaine plays, for Asia is represented as both an empire, in the technical sense of an overarching political entity comprising many subordinate kingdoms, and, even more crucially, the overwhelming object of desire, possession of which confers absolute gratification. Menaphon assures Cosroe, This should entreat your highness to rejoice, Since Fortune gives you opportunity To gain the title of a conqueror By curing of this maimèd empery. (part 1, 1.1.129–32)

Asia is also an entity in other ways: Cosroe declares that “all Asia / Lament to see the folly of their king” (part 1, 1.1.95–96). The geographical vagueness of Marlowe’s Asia, indeed, serves only to underscore its metaphorical importance. Wherever it may actually lie, therefore, one thing is clear: Asia in Tamburlaine, part 1, is the ultimate prize; and by the end, Tamburlaine himself has become virtually identified with it. This is of a piece with the characteristic Renaissance attitude to geography that typically reads space in human terms. (This idea is something echoed in the cordiform projection used by Ortelius for his world maps, which we know Marlowe to have consulted. The cordiform projection was intended to signify sincerity and to resonate in the heart, as part of the irenicist project of the atlas.)20 A similar blurring of any sense of secure difference between geographical macrocosm and human microcosm is also found in Tamburlaine, part 1, where Menaphon remarks that Tamburlaine has Such breadth of shoulders as might mainly bear Old Atlas’ burden; ’twixt his manly pitch A pearl more worth than all the world is placed. (part 1, 2.1.10–12)



Atlas famously supported the world, so that Tamburlaine here is presented to us as a colossal figure on the same scale as the world itself, and the microcosm is again equated with the macrocosm when we are told that Tamburlaine bears “A pearl more worth than all the world.” On similar lines, Mycetes equates the body natural with the body politicogeographical when he refers to Meander as “The hope of Persia, and the 10.1057/9780230106222 - The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia, Debra Johanyak and Walter S. H. Lim

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Though strait the passage and the port be made That leads to palace of my brother’s life. (part 1, 2.1.42–43)

Tamburlaine himself is the most vigorous proponent of this association. He declares, And these that seem but silly country swains May have the leading of so great a host As with their weight shall make the mountains quake. (part 1, 1.2.47–49)

For Tamburlaine, humans here bulk larger than the geographical world, and so they do again when he declares, I hold the Fates fast bound in iron chains, And with my hand turn Fortune’s wheel about, And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome. (part 1, 1.2.173–76)

Similarly, Tamburlaine says of himself, For I, the chiefest lamp of all the earth, First rising in the east with mild aspect But fixèd now in the meridian line, Will send up fire to your turning spheres And cause the sun to borrow light of you. (part 1, 4.2.36–40)

Most notably, Tamburlaine proposes to subjugate the world entirely to his essence when he says that he will not only conquer territories but


very legs / Whereon our state doth lean” (part 1, 1.1.59–60), and Cosroe too collapses the difference between humans and their physical surroundings when he says,

with this pen reduce them to a map, Calling the provinces, cities and towns After my name and thine, Zenocrate. (part 1, 4.4.84–86)


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And similarly, in part 2, he is confident that he can “make whole cities caper in the air” (part 2, 3.2.61). A particularly striking example of this tendency to read geography on the scale of the human body is the resultant gendering of territory, which is particularly marked when it comes to Asia. Cosroe, lamenting the fate of Persia, regrets particularly that it should be Now to be ruled and governed by a man At whose birthday Cynthia with Saturn joined, And Jove, the Sun, and Mercury denied To shed their influence in his fickle brain! (part 1, 1.1.12)

Presumably glancing at what appears to be the homosexual orientation of Mycetes,21 Cosroe seems to be falling in with the familiar trope of gendering land as feminine and implying that it can, therefore, only be effectively ruled by a proper man, not one in whose constitution the goddess Cynthia has had a hand. There is of course a marked contrast here between Mycetes and Tamburlaine, who asserts an unambiguous and uncompromising masculinity: Smile, stars that reigned at my nativity And dim the brightness of their neighbour lamps! Disdain to borrow light of Cynthia. (part 1, 4.2.33–35)

When it comes to his own rule, Cosroe does indeed associate it with a female figure, but it is one that functions very differently from the threatening figure of Cynthia. Cosroe anticipates the time when Themis, goddess of justice, that rules in Rhamnus’ golden gates And makes a passage for all prosperous arms Shall make me solely Emperor of Asia. (part 1, 2.3.36–38)



This goddess seems to be imagined as a mistress rather than a mother, one who is amenable to and influenced by prosperous arms. Her metaphorical presence thus serves to validate Cosroe’s potency and masculinity rather than work in the potentially threatening and emasculating role of a dominant mother.


Lisa Hopkins

This association between favor of a woman and success in battle is developed throughout part 1 of Tamburlaine. Certainly it is notable that the first of Tamburlaine’s conquests that we see is of Zenocrate, and Sir Walter Ralegh was soon explicitly to link the two spheres of activity when he declared that “Guiana is a Countrey that hath yet her Maydenhead.”22 Tamburlaine too directly compares his abduction of Zenocrate with his campaign for empire: But lady, this fair face and heavenly hue Must grace his bed that conquers Asia. (part 1, 1.2.39–40)

It is therefore not surprising that Bajazeth threatens to make Tamburlaine a eunuch (part 1, 3.3.77), nor that the battle between Tamburlaine and Bajazeth is conducted entirely offstage. We do not need to see this battle because hostilities can be more effectively conducted through what we do see, which is the entirely feminized combat between Zenocrate and Zabina, a character who seems indeed to have been introduced expressly for this purpose. Similarly, the climax of Tamburlaine’s military campaign in part 1 is played out not against warriors but against the virgins of Damascus, who specifically contrast his proposed treatment of them to that of a more tamed and legalized sexuality, accommodated within existing social structures rather than seeking to impose new ones. We see this when the First Virgin pleads, Pity the marriage bed, where many a lord In prime and glory of his loving joy Embraceth now with tears of ruth and blood The jealous body of his fearful wife, Whose cheeks and hearts, so punished with conceit To think thy puissant never-stayèd arm Will part their bodies, and prevent their souls From heavens of comfort yet their age might bear, Now wax all pale and withered to the death. (part 1, 5.1.83–91)


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John Gillies contends that “for the first time in the play, our sympathies are seriously divided. We wonder why world conquest should absolutely require the destruction of Damascus, a city which Zenocrate begs Tamburlaine to spare and to which she is emblematically linked.”23 However, for Tamburlaine, it appears to be not so much that this particular territory is associated with Zenocrate as that all territory is gendered feminine


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because it is to be conquered, and therefore must be conquered. Given this underlying association, there is more logic than might initially appear in the fact that, as soon as the virgins have been killed, Tamburlaine begins his soliloquy on Zenocrate’s beauty (part 1, 5.1.135). Along similar lines, Anippe expressly links Tamburlaine’s military success with his role as successful lover of both Zenocrate and a feminized Fortune Your love hath Fortune so at his command That she shall stay, and turn her wheel no more As long as life maintains his mighty arm That fights for honour to adorn your head. (part 1, 5.1.374–77)

Conquest, then, is inextricably associated with gender. Asia, in part 1, lies waiting for Tamburlaine to conquer her. It is therefore unsurprising that in part 2, Asia begins to seem menacing to Tamburlaine after his invulnerability and masculinity are threatened by the loss of his wife and the perceived effeminacy of his son. It is at this point also that Asia begins to be more clearly marked as a locus of the psychological rather than just a place on the map. In the second of the two plays, the nature of Asia changes markedly. In the first place, Asia itself fragments in part 2 with the introduction of the idea of Asia Minor, first introduced by Orcanes: I thank thee, Sigismond, but when I war All Asia Minor, Africa, and Greece Follow my standard and my thund’ring drums. (part 2, 1.1.157–59)

More strikingly still, from being the place that Tamburlaine desires to conquer, Asia in part 2 morphs uncannily into the place from which he seeks to escape. This is foreshadowed in part 1, when Fesse suggests to Bajazeth, Renownèd emperor and mighty general. What if you sent the bassoes of your guard To charge him to remain in Asia, Or else to threaten death and deadly arms As from the mouth of mighty Bajazeth? (part 1, 3.1.16–20)



In part 2, however, the idea is much more strongly developed as the drive of Tamburlaine’s opponents refocuses on keeping him in Asia rather than


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keeping him out of it. It is of a piece with this that Asia, in part 2, becomes something scorned rather than desired by Tamburlaine. Immediately after killing Calyphas, Tamburlaine turns on Orcanes and his followers with “now, ye cankered curs of Asia” (part 2, 4.1.132). Soon after, he famously addresses his tributary kings with “Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia!” (part 2, 4.3.1). Dying, he explicitly laments that he is now trapped in “Asia, where I stay against my will” (5.3.142), which thus seems almost to become a metaphor for his mortality. In Tamburlaine, part 1 then, Asia initially emblematizes the scope to which humanity may aspire; but by the end of part 2, as the horizons shrink, Asia seems rather to represent the constriction and pettiness of human dreams. The link between sexual and territorial conquest might also be something that is revisited and reversed in part 2, if it is accepted that there may be a crux in the text. When Tamburlaine orders the slaughter of the camp followers, Mark Thornton Burnett’s edition prints: Live content, then, ye slaves, and meet not me With troops of harlots at your slothful heels. (part 2, 4.3.81–82)

The Revels edition also prints “content,” but points out that most editors since William Oxberry have amended “content” to “continent.” The Revels editor declines to deviate from Q here merely on the grounds that “continent” has a more precise meaning than “content,” but actually that is not the only reason for preferring it. If, as seems likely, the “i” is elided to give an effective pronunciation of “cont’nent,” then “continent” clearly scans better than “content” as well as expressing precisely what Tamburlaine is demanding. It would also be an interesting reading for my purposes, because although OED’s first recorded use of “the Continent” in our modern sense of Asia, Europe, and so forth is not until 1614, it does record Sir John Smyth in his Discourse of Weapons using it to mean the European mainland in 1590. It also cites Tamburlaine for the use of the word to indicate land as opposed to water, when Orcanes calls himself he That with the cannon shook Vienna walls And made it dance upon the continent. (part 2, 1.1.87–88)


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Tamburlaine also contains a description of God as one who “everywhere fills every continent / With strange infusion of his sacred vigour” (part 2, 2.3.51–52), which does indeed look as if it might well be a usage of the word in something approaching our modern sense. It might be, then, that 10.1057/9780230106222 - The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia, Debra Johanyak and Walter S. H. Lim

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we can glimpse an imaginative link here between Tamburlaine’s changed attitude to Asia and his insistence on rigid fidelity to Zenocrate even after her death: now he is contained in both spheres rather than aggressively advancing out of them. Once again, Asia in Marlowe’s imagination could be seen in part 2 as inverting the customary stereotype that twinned sexual aggression with territorial conquest, and also as inverting the logic of part 1. It is also in part 2, where religious affiliation starts to emerge as a serious issue, that Asia becomes clearly identified as spiritually Other in something of the same way as the East was in Doctor Faustus. Conceivably, Marlowe might have been aware of and influenced by the attempts of the Mughal Emperor Akbar to formulate a syncretic religion, because it is clear that if there is any deity in the world of Tamburlaine, it is one not easily assimilable to any single conventional religious system: Open, thou shining veil of Cynthia, And make a passage from th’empyreal heaven, That he that sits on high and never sleeps Nor in one place is circumscriptible, But everywhere fills every continent With strange infusion of his sacred vigour, May in his endless power and purity Behold and venge this traitor’s perjury. Thou Christ that art esteemed omnipotent, If thou wilt prove thyself a perfect God Worthy the worship of all faithful hearts, Be now revenged upon this traitor’s soul. (part 2, 2.3.47–58)

Perhaps Marlowe might even have known that the historical Timur the Lame was something of a religiously pluralistic figure, as his most recent chronicler observes: “Temur’s observation of the Muslim faith was based on pragmatism rather than principle. Although he came from a conventional Sunni tradition, his Sufi credentials were bolstered through his patronage of the Naqshbandi order, centred in Bukhara, and his cultivation of the Sufi shaykhs of Mawarannahr and Khorasan, who enjoyed a prominent position in his court.”24 However this may be, there is certainly a heady mixture of references to various religious systems in Tamburlaine, part 2. Christianity is alluded to—as in the three kings who acclaim Tamburlaine; or when Tamburlaine, having cut his arm, mentions India, the country of which Doubting Thomas was the apostle. So too is Islam. Although Tamburlaine dismisses the power of Mahomet, Amasia declares




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Fear not, my lord, I see great Mahomet Clothèd in purple clouds, and on his head A chaplet brighter than Apollo’s crown, Marching about the air with armèd men To join with you against this Tamburlaine. (part 2, 5.3.31–35)

The fact that Tamburlaine dies shortly after burning the Qur’an could well be taken as suggesting that Amasia’s confidence is justified. For Marlowe, then, Asia is less important for where and what it is than for what it tells us not only about Tamburlaine but also, by extension, about ourselves. Functioning as the frame of the tragic glass that the play holds up to its audience, Asia offers Marlowe a discourse through which to ask far-reaching questions about human identity, gender roles, religious authority, and the ways in which these may be conditioned and perhaps ultimately altered by the rapidly expanding horizons of the known geographical world. Notes 1. Nicholas Crane, Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet (2002; repr., London: Phoenix, 2003), 56. 2. Paulina Kewes, “Contemporary Europe in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Drama,” in Shakespeare and Renaissance Europe, ed. Andrew Hadfield and Paul Hammond (London: Thomson Learning, 2005), 150–92, 163. 3. See Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “Dismantling Irena: The Sexualizing of Ireland in Early Modern England,” in Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Summer, and Patricia Yaeger (London: Routledge, 1992), 157–74. 4. See Michael G. Brennan, “English Contact with Europe,” in Shakespeare and Renaissance Europe, ed. Hadfield and Hammond, 53–97, 57. 5. Although we do not always know where he was, the known facts of his life do not allow for any absence from England long enough to have permitted him to travel so far. See Lisa Hopkins, Christopher Marlowe: An Author Chronology (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005). 6. Ralph Fitch had traveled widely in eastern India in the 1580s, but did not return to England until April 1591, too late to be an influence on the Tamburlaine plays (see William Foster, Early Travels in India, 1583–1619 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921], 6). The one person probably known to Marlowe who may conceivably have traveled to Asia seems to be Simon Forman, but it is not certain that he did. Forman says merely (referring to himself in the third person)


that he actually sees him, albeit in a guise that eerily mingles Islam with classical mythology:


7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

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that “he travailed moch in to the Estern countries” (Barbara Howard Traister, The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of Simon Forman [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001], 9). Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander, in Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Poems and Translations, ed. Stephen Orgel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), Sestiad I, 5. Ibid., Sestiad I, 45–50. John Michael Archer, Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 102, 105, and 108. John Gillies notes that “if for no other reason, Marlowe’s familiarity with the ancient boundary discourse may be assumed on the basis of his translation of the first book of Lucan’s Pharsalia” (210), in Tamburlaine, then, the Volga may well have something of the function of the Rubicon. See John Gillies, “Marlowe, the Timur Myth, and the Motives of Geography,” in Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama, ed. John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1998), 203–29. Christopher Marlowe, Edward II, in Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett (London: Everyman, 1999), 4.2.29–31. Unless otherwise indicated, all references of Marlowe’s plays are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line number. Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus: A text, in Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1.1.81–7. All references of the play are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line number. John Donne, “An Anatomy of the World,” in John Donne: The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 276. Emily C. Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 54. Ibid., 54, 55. George Best, A true discourse of the late voyages of discouerie, for the finding of a passage to Cathaya, by the Northvveast, vnder the conduct of Martin Frobisher Generall deuided into three bookes (London: Henry Bynnyman, printer, 1578), 9. On this idea, see for instance Samuel Bawlf, The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 3. Bernardino de Escalante, A discourse of the nauigation which the Portugales doe make to the realmes and prouinces of the east partes of the worlde, trans. John Frampton (London: Thomas Dawson, printer, 1579), 10. Shankar Raman, Framing “India”: The Colonial Imaginary in Early Modern Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 2. See Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., “Geography and Identity in Marlowe,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, ed. Patrick Cheney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 231–44. According to Sullivan, “In Marlowe, it is not only world geographies that matter; the affective geography of the




20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

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household, for instance, can serve a crucial function in Marlowe’s exploration of the interrelatedness of space and identity” (232). Paul Binding, Imagined Corners: Exploring the World’s First Atlas (London: Hodder Headline, 2003), 131. See, for instance, Constance Brown Kuriyama, Hammer or Anvil: Psychological Patterns in Marlowe’s Plays (Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980), 14. Sir Walter Ralegh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtifull Empyre of Guiana, ed. Neil L. Whitehead (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 196. Gillies, “Marlowe, the Timur Myth, and the Motives of Geography,” 204. Justin Marozzi, Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World (London: HarperCollins, 2004), 93.


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As Good as Gold India, Akbar the Great, and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Plays1

Bindu Malieckal

Since ancient times, societies and cultures have been consumed with the acquisition of gold, but the fascination was particularly high among the early moderns, especially those seeking and sometimes finding gold in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.2 José de Acosta, a Spanish Jesuit who traveled to Peru in 1572 and subsequently published Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1590), devotes an entire chapter to gold, of which he writes, “Gold was always held to be the chief among all metals, and rightly so, because it is the most durable and incorruptible.”3 Explorers believed that the Americas or “western Indies” were overflowing with gold in the form of untapped mines, unexplored rivers, and Amerindian kingdoms with innumerable gold possessions. As Acosta testifies, more than fifty years after Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Anahuac—Aztec and Maya principalities—and Francisco Pizarro’s plunder of Tawantinsuyu or Inca areas,4 there is great abundance of this metal in the Indies, and it is known from reliable histories that the Incas of Peru were not content to have large and small vessels made of gold, and pitchers and goblets, and cups and flasks, and jugs and even large jars, but they also had chairs and litters made of solid gold and placed solid gold statues in their temples. There was also a great deal of gold in Mexico, though not so much, and when the first conquistadors went to these two realms the riches that they found were immense and those that the Indians buried were incomparably greater.5


CHAPTER 6


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Acosta’s account, like similar others, precipitated the image of a goldfilled Americas seen throughout early modern literature, fiction and nonfiction.6 However, prior to this rendering, the eastern “El Dorado” of India was believed to be awash with gold. Acosta himself notes that “the ancients” knew of the presence of gold dust in “the Ganges in the East Indies.”7 Herodotus mentions gold in northern India and giant ants that excavate the gold.8 Gold was not the only commodity that India was famous for: India was believed to be a source of gem stones, pearls, spices, woods, silks, and other items of trade that were to make India a colonial prize in later centuries. Hence, when Columbus began his journey over the “Ocean Sea,” he hoped to find India and its “gold,” a word that denotes the precious metal as well as the expensive goods specific to “India,” itself a wide-ranging term analogous to East Asia in medieval and early modern texts, as well as the Americas in post-1492 literature. As Herodotus had asserted, “There are many Indian nations; and they do not all speak one language.”9 Therefore, upon arrival at the Bahaman island of Guanahani that he rechristened San Salvador, Columbus believed, and continued to do so for six years, that he had reached “India.” Early moderns eventually distinguished “Indias Occidentales” from “Indias Orientales,”10 but even if the Americas were not the “India,” they were acknowledged to be an “India,” similar to its sister in the East. English dramatist Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) maps the literal and figurative Indias in his influential plays, Tamburlaine the Great, part 1(1587) and Tamburlaine the Great, part 2 (1588). The “Indies”— East and West—are sometimes the same, sometimes separate, but always repositories of gold. The purpose of this essay is not to dissect Marlowe’s presentation of the Americas and its gold, a topic that should be explored in another project, but to interpret the Tamburlaine plays’ understanding of India in the context of Asia, specifically the realms of Prester John and Akbar the Great. The former is an imagined, wealthy, Christian, and “Indian” monarch eager for an alliance with Europe against the Islamic powers. The latter—Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar (r. 1556–1605), known in the West as “the Great Mogor”—the most successful emperor of India’s Mughal Dynasty (1526–1857) and direct descendant of the historical Tamburlaine or Timur (1336–1405) as well as Genghis Khan (1162–1227). Marlowe’s hero-villain Tamburlaine complements the English consideration of Akbar. Early moderns were well-aware of Akbar’s connection to Timur, as the anonymous English writer R. B. reported in 1700:


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The Dominions of the Great Mogol are larger then the Persians, and equal to the Grand Seigniors. His strength lyes in the Number of his Subjects, the Vastnes of his wealth, and the extent of his Empire; his Revenue exceeding 10.1057/9780230106222 - The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia, Debra Johanyak and Walter S. H. Lim

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While the passage shows the possible influence of Marlowe’s play on the shaping of R. B.’s history, Akbar’s and Timur’s connection also involves the perception that their home countries are abundant in gold. The entry “Gold” in Robert Lovell’s Pammineralogicon, Or An Universal History of Mineralls (1661) notes that the metal can be found in “India, Scythia, Spaine, Italy, Asia.”12 Although the active search for Prester John cooled in the early sixteenth century after the Portuguese “discovery” of Coptic Ethiopia,13 a finding that Marlowe briefly announces in Tamburlaine, part 2—in Africa, Techelles defeats “the mighty Christian priest / Called John the Great” (1.3.187–88)—the Tamburlaine plays do not quite discard the mythical India for the recently recharted Ethiopia.14 For Marlowe, Ethiopia cannot match the glitter of literary India, and by the time Marlowe composed the Tamburlaine plays, Ethiopia could not compete against the historical India in the form of the Mughals, political giants in comparison to the more modest Ethiopians.15 Akbar was a lifelong Indian Muslim, but early modern accounts are either similar to medieval reports of Prester John or contemporary interpretations of Timur. These accounts include the English travelogues of Ralph Fitch, William Finch, John Mildenhall, William Hawkins, and Thomas Coryate; the Portuguese testimonials of Rudolf Acquaviva, Francis Henriques, and Anthony Monserrate; and histories by Akbar’s officials, Muhammad Arif Qandhari’s Tarikh-iAkbari (ca. 1580), Abul Fazl’s Ain-i Akbari (1596) and its source Akbarnama (1590–1597), Akbar’s own Mukātabāt-i-‘Allāmī (1582–1597), and Timurnama (1584), a book commissioned by Akbar in which Timur is positioned as Akbar’s role model for Timur’s paradoxical reputation as successful conqueror and thoughtful king. The analysis of Mughal documents in their presentation of Akbar, which parallels the depiction of Tamburlaine in Marlowe’s plays, is yet to be examined in criticism. Under Akbar, the Mughal Empire reached the height of its wealth. He actively studied Christianity, and at one point, the Portuguese Jesuits in his presence thought he might convert. Instead, Akbar founded Din-i-Ilahi, a new monotheistic faith that incorporated elements of Christianity. He bestowed special privileges on both the Portuguese and the English Protestants at his court. Important women in his household, like his mother, were honored with the name of Jesus’s mother, “Mariam,” whom Muslims revere.16 While Marlowe’s Tamburlaine is ostensibly a tyrant whose


the Persian and the Turks both put together . . . The present Mogol derives his Original from Tamberlan the Scythian, who overcame all Asia, and took Bajazet the Ottoman Emperor Prisoner, putting him into an Iron Cage, against the Bars of which he beat out his brains.11


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extreme ambition causes his fall, the triumphs of Tamburlaine are reminiscent of English commentators’ praise for Akbar, the most illustrious of Timur’s descendants. Both acquire gold, are estranged from Islam, and are crowned as emperors of “India.” A reassessment of the early modern responses to Akbar and a brief review of the Prester John myth as it might apply to Akbar offer a new reading of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays. While early maps informed Marlowe’s “world picture,”17 Tamburlaine’s “India” also reflects medieval intelligence on India, specifically Prester John’s “India,” a vast empire from Sri Lanka to Japan and awash with gold. John Mandeville’s Travels (originally written in French), based on journeys that allegedly took place between 1322 and 1356 and published shortly thereafter, depicts India as unified but diverse, seemingly spanning most of Asia: “In India there are very many different countries . . . In India there are more than five thousand good large isles that people live in, not counting those that are uninhabited. Each of these isles has many cities and towns, and many people.”18 Similarly, Venetian Nicolo Conti, an early fifteenth-century traveler, proclaims that “all India is divided into three parts: one, extending from Persia to the Indus; the second, comprising the district from Indus to the Ganges; and the third, all that is beyond.”19 Early modern fascination with India finds testament in the publication of seventy-two editions of Mandeville’s work in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and also in a 1579 English translation of Conti’s Asian travels.20 There was clearly also fascination with “Prester John,” whom Giovanni da Pian del Carpini in Historia Mongalorum (1253–1255), Marco Polo in Il Milione (1298–1299),21 and Mandeville recognize as “Emperor of India.”22 Mandeville’s description of the gold fixtures, jewels, architecture, and furniture in Prester John’s abode are similar to Acosta’s listing, four hundred years later, of the uses of gold in the Americas: “All the steps are bordered with fine gold, set full of pearls and other precious stones on the sides and edges. The sides of his throne are of emerald, edged in fine gold set with precious stones. The pillars of his chamber are of gold set with precious stones, many of which are carbuncles to give light at night.”23 Referencing the outer reaches of Prester John’s influence, Mandeville mentions the “great hills of gold” in “Ceylon” (Sri Lanka)24 and in Java, a palace with “walls . . . covered with plates of gold and silver, and on them are engraved stories of kings and knights and battles, with crowns and circlets of precious stones on their heads.”25 The “India” east of the Ganges, adds Conti, is the wealthiest part of the many Indias and “excels the others in riches, politeness, and magnificence.”26 Marco Polo had heard that “Cipangu” (Japan) was so abundant in gold that the king’s palace was constructed of solid gold.27


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Prester John’s oriental excess is seen as an asset, making him a worthy rival of the opulent Islamic empires and a fortunate friend of the needy West. Reports of Prester John included accounts of his wars against nonbelievers, of great significance to Europeans engaged in the Crusades during the medieval period and resisting Ottoman expansion in later ages. Early modern literature often elides Asian and Islamic dominions into one non-Christian world in order to construct artificial religiopolitical binaries and justify Europe’s position against “the Saracen,” but in the case of Prester John, these strategies of Othering allied Prester John with the Christian West rather than the Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist East. Mandeville describes Prester John and most of his subjects as “Christian” despite their apparent deviance from Roman Catholicism or in Mandeville’s words, “even if they do not have all the articles of faith as clearly as we do.”28 Pointing out India’s Christian community permits Mandeville to assert India’s reputable place in Christendom, even if Indian churches followed the Syrian rather than the Latin rite; Mandeville carefully notes the subtle difference between the practices of Catholicism in the Occident compared to the Orthodox practices of the Orient: In the land of Prester John there are many good Christian men, living good lives, of good faith and religion; they are natives of the country. They have priests among them who sing Mass for them, but they make the sacrament of leavened bread, as the Greeks do. Also they do not say their Mass in exactly the same way as our priests do; they only say the Pater Noster and the words of the consecration with which the sacrament is made, as Saint Thomas the Apostle taught them long ago. They know nothing about the ordinals and additions of the court of Rome that our priests use.29

Whatever is concluded about the legitimacy of Mandeville and his text, the St. Thomas Christians are an existent community in southern India.30 Mandeville, like other Catholics who encountered the Christians of India, is disturbed but not dismissive. This general attitude toward religious practice in India anticipates early modern English traders’ opinions of Akbar as well as Marlowe’s representation of Tamburlaine: as liberal Muslims and Christian sympathizers, both figures are acceptable in sixteenth-century literature to a degree. In the seafaring activities of the early modern period, the search for India continued, albeit in an altered form. Christopher Columbus read Marco Polo and Mandeville among others and ventured into the “Ocean Sea” fully hoping to reach India.31 Indeed, when Columbus tried as early as 1484 to persuade João II, the Portuguese king, to fund his expedition, he argued that he would first encounter Japan, China, and the Moluccas


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before continuing to India “to seek gold and spices.”32 In his Diario, Columbus believes “Colba” (Cuba) is “Cipango”33 and makes reference to the Caribbean as the “dlas t[ie]rrās de yndia” (lands of India)34 and the “Islas de yndia” (islands of India).35 While gold is mentioned often in Columbus’s narrative—of the Amerindians’ gold jewelry, of where gold can be mined, of cross-Caribbean journeys to find gold, of indigenous legends pertaining to gold—Columbus is also eager to convert the “Indians” from Islam to Christianity. Columbus opens the Diario by referencing Ferdinand and Isabella’s defeat of the Moors at Granada, an event he considered a great victory: for Columbus, Islam was “the false doctrine of Mahomet,”36 and he hoped to build support for a siege of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, which was controlled by the Mamluks during his time. Because Columbus knew from earlier literature that descendants of Genghis Khan ruled much of Asia, including India, he states that he will directly attempt to convert the Indians and their presumably Muslim leader, the “grā Can” (Grand Khan).37 Columbus’s posture on Islam in India correlates to the early moderns’ increasing awareness of geopolitics and growing skepticism for finding a Prester John in the heart of Asia, but Columbus’s successor, Vasco da Gama, who arrived in India in 1498 by crossing the Indian Ocean, famously stated upon arrival that his motivation was the potential discovery of “Christians and spices,”38 indicating that the idea of Prester John, if not the actual Prester John, was alive and well. The English—the first being Thomas Stevens in 1579—also made their way to India, by land and by sea, though rather late in the game compared to their European counterparts. By this time it was well known that Columbus had discovered not the India but a “newe India,” as Richard Eden terms the Americas in his 1553 translation of Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographiae universalis.39 Nevertheless, European perspectives—along with Mandeville’s adventures—inspired in the sixteenth-century an English imaginary in which India, gold, Islam, and Christianity were intertwined. Elizabethan travelers who encountered India were not disappointed. The Mughal Empire made real their dreams of India’s worldly goods, and although Akbar was a Muslim in name, he seemed, for all practical purposes, a possible heir of Prester John. Elizabethans and Jacobeans in India have been well documented in recent critical studies.40 Englishmen who ventured to India were many, and a few of the major figures were, in no particular order, Thomas Stevens, John Newberry, Ralph Fitch, William Leeds, James Story, Robert Sherley, Richard Steele, John Crowther, John Mildenhall, William Hawkins, William Finch, Thomas Best, Thomas Coryate, Thomas Herbert, Thomas


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Roe, Edward Terry, and William Biddulph.41 While at least one traveled as part of a religious order (Stevens was a Jesuit), others did so to facilitate trade (Newberry, Fitch, and Hawkins), and some for adventure (Story and Coryate). Of these, several visited the Mughal realms and gained an audience with Akbar and his son and successor, Jahangir, ruler from 1605 to 1628. Based on the testimonials of his countrymen, John Ogilby noted in 1673 that “he [Akbar] deported himself with equal moderation to Strangers and Natives, whether Christians, Mahumetans, or Heathens.”42 English interaction with the Mughals gave realism to the image of India in the early modern consciousness. Englishmen saw firsthand the Mughal Empire at the height of its glory. Thomas Coryate, in Jahangir’s India between 1612 and 1617, notes that the Mughal Empire or “the goodly continent of India” was immense yet unfragmented, unlike the Ottoman Empire.43 Coryate also comments on the Empire’s productivity and outstanding wealth: “The fatness . . . of his [Jahangir’s] land, no part of the world yeelding a more fruitfull veine of ground then all that which lieth in his empire.” 44 Coryate claims that Jahangir’s “revenue” of “40 millions of crownes (of sixe shillings value) by the yeare” was greater than the income of the Turks, “no more than fifteene millions,” or of the Persians, “five millions, plus minus.”45 Coryate was not exaggerating about Mughal fortunes. While the greatest architectural achievement of the Mughal period is credited to Shah Jahan (r. 1628–1658), during whose reign the Taj Mahal was completed in 1653, the “Golden Age” of the Mughals was under the tenure of Shah Jahan’s grandfather, Akbar. At the age of fourteen, Akbar inherited from his father, Humayun (r. 1530– 1540; 1555–1556), a principality that was more tenuous kingdom than established empire. In 1556, Mughal lands were threatened by Rajput chieftains in the west and Afghan kings in the east. Akbar’s defeat of the powerful Hemu at the Battle of Panipat (1556) was a turning point after which the fall of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Kashmir, Kabul, and Bengal inflated Mughal dominions.46 When Akbar took the throne, the Mughal treasury, depleted by Humayun’s costly and unsuccessful wars, was almost empty. By the end of Akbar’s reign, it was overflowing.47 In Tarikh-i-Akbari (ca. 1580), Mughal historian Muhammad Arif Qandhari summarizes Akbar’s assets: “With jewels, gold and pearls, the imperial treasury is so full.”48 Akbar was generous with gifts, as the following account by Qandhari reveals: “He is one, who showers pearls and gems, that from necklaces of jewels, matchless pearls, vessels and vases of gold and silver, brilliant rubies, emeralds, topazes, famous cornelians, wealth and treasure in such quantities were stored in the imperial exchequer that even the belts were adorned with


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strings of pearls, and also there are rings up to the finger tips, so that such wealth had never been witnessed by the account helpers.”49 At a banquet held in honor of Nawab Sulaiman Shah Mirza’s visit to Fatehpur Sikri, Akbar spared no expense, even commanding courses to be served on “bejewelled and golden plates.”50 Gold was readily available to the Mughals. In Ain-i Akbari (1596), a history of the latter part of Akbar’s reign, Akbar’s courtier and biographer, Abul Fazl (1551–1602), writes that while gold was imported, it could also be found in the Ganges and Indus51 as well as “in abundance in the northern mountains of the country.”52 As Muslim artisans of the early modern world were master goldworkers, Mughal architecture, essentially Islamic in style, was uninhibited in the use of gold, and furnished minarets with gold roofs.53 Gold can also be found in Mughal texts and paintings. Qandhari reports that in books commissioned by Akbar, like the Hamzanama (1562–1577), “all plates were gilded.”54 In these texts, as with all Mughal books, gold is used in background scenes, for delineation, to depict light, and to show, with a halo, the divinity of an individual.55 Mughal gold funded the building of Fatehpur Sikri, a magnificent city and world heritage site today. Qandhari states that Akbar personally supervised the building of “the great edifices in Fatehabad Sikri, and very strong and lasting forts of red stone.”56 The English were awed by Fatehpur Sikri. William Finch, an associate of William Hawkins and in India from 1608 to 1611, says that the inner courtyard of the “goodliest meskite of the East” or the Jama Masjid of Fatehpur Sikhri is “sixe times the largenesse of Londons Exchange, with faire large walkes alongst the side more then twice as broad and double the height of those about the Burse of London.”57 Elizabethans were impressed with Mughal hospitality. John Newberry had an audience with Akbar at Fatehpur Sikri in 158458 and presented the emperor with a letter, purportedly from Queen Elizabeth I formally requesting an Anglo-Indian trade alliance.59 Newberry arrived in Fatehpur Sikri via a laborious route, after escaping house arrest by the Portuguese in Goa and traveling to Bijapur, where he and his companions (Ralph Fitch and William Leeds) canvassed the area for gold, silver, and gems.60 In the realm of “Zelabdim Echebar,” however, the men realize that they have reached an artistically advanced civilization. Fitch is so dazzled that he places London a weak second to the Mughal capitals: “Agra and Fatepore are two very great cities, either of them much greater then London and very populous.”61 Fitch also praises the superior belongings of the Mughals: “They have many fine cartes, and many of them carved and gilded with gold, with two wheeles, which be drawen with two litle buls. . . . they are covered with silke or very fine cloth, and be used here as


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our coches be in England.”62 Not surprisingly, Mughal India, according to Fitch, is full of traders: “Hither is great resort of marchants from Persia and out of India, and very much marchandise of silke and clothe, and of precious stones, both rubies, diamants, and pearles.”63 Fitch notes that William Leeds, who remained in Fatehpur Sikri to work for Akbar, was compensated by the emperor, “who did entertaine him [Leeds] very well, and gave him a house and five slaves, an horse, and every day sixe S. S. (shillings) in money.”64 Likewise, John Mildenhall, another Englishman who resided in India from 1603 to 1605, reveals that Akbar provided him with “an house with all things necessarie.”65 Given the infinite assets of the Mughals, their money, described by one scholar as “one of the best minted currencies of its time in the world,”66 was greatly desirable. Mughal coins—gold, silver and copper—were of excellent, enduring quality to the extent that their purity remained for two hundred years.67 During Akbar’s reign, there were eighty-six functioning mints, and many coined all three metals, but twenty-one produced only gold.68 In contrast, during the reigns of Akbar’s predecessors, Babur and Humayun, gold coins were not minted.69 Akbar’s gold standard was the “mohur,” which carried his seal, even after his death. Mohurs were coined in pieces of 1,000 (very rare), 500, 200, 100, and 50.70 They carried a verse stating, “By Akbar’s seal this gold becomes bright; / His name on this gold is light upon light.”71 Mohurs and other gold coins, such as the “dinar,” did not escape the notice of the English. Hawkins describes the “severall coine of gold” of the Mughals: “Inprimis, of seraffins Ecberi [gold mohurs of Akbar], which be ten rupias a piece, there are sixtie leckes. Of another sort of coyne of a thousand rupias a piece, there are twentie thousand pieces. Of another sort of halfe the value there are ten thousand pieces. Of another sort of gold of twenty toles a piece there are thirtie thousand pieces. Of another sort of tenne toles a piece there bee five and twenty thousand pieces. Of another sort of five toles, which is this kings stampe [Jahangir], of these there be fiftie thousand pieces.”72 If Elizabethans thought they had hit the jackpot when they encountered Mughal cities, commodities, and coins, they were overjoyed to discover that the owner of these wonders was not an orthodox Muslim but a student eager to appreciate different faiths: Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and even Christianity.73 Many historians claim that Akbar was illiterate, but that claim is disputed, since Akbar had many tutors, an interest in various disciplines,74 and as Fazl mentions in Ain-i Akbari, an extensive library75 from which companions read books to the Emperor.76 A few key dates mark Akbar’s spiritual development. In 1562, he married several Rajput princesses and began to practice elements of his


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wives’ Hinduism.77 In 1564, Akbar eliminated “jizya,” a tax required of all non-Muslims in the Empire.78 In 1571, Sufism became a major influence on Akbar’s outlook after a Sufi saint correctly predicted the birth of Jahangir.79 In 1575, Akbar ordered the building of the “Ibadat Khana” in Fatehpur Sikri. This structure was a gathering place for people of all faiths to engage in dialogue on their respective theologies.80 Khaliq Ahmad Nizami explains that by 1581, Akbar came to believe that “all religions are either equally true or equally illusory,”81 rejected orthodox Islam outright82 and adopted the Sufi doctrine of “sulh-i kul” or “Absolute Peace.”83 Iqtidar Alam Khan argues that since the Mughal Empire was religiously diverse, Akbar’s implementation of “sulh-i kul” was a shrewd move to foster interfaith harmony and respect.84 Akbar’s religious policies were compatible with those of his ancestors. Babur (r. 1526–1530), Akbar’s grandfather and founder of the Mughal Empire, descended from Genghis Khan on his mother’s side and Timur on his father’s side. Timur himself claimed descent from Genghis Khan, who, interestingly, early medieval Europeans once thought was the real Prester John.85 The Mughals followed their ancestors’ politics of tolerance. “Yāsā-i Chingezī” or Genghis’s belief that all religions are equal was apparently incorporated into Timur’s religious policy and trickled down to the practices of the Timurids as well.86 As John Ogilby notes, when describing the Mughal Empire in 1673, “In India is a general Toleration, each man being free to change his Religion, and use what form he pleases, without fear of the Great Mogol’s Magistrates, which are Mahumentans.”87 But Akbar’s most significant spiritual movement occurred in 1582, the year he founded a new religion, Din-i-Ilahi (Divine Faith).88 While it is impossible to abridge the many facets of this syncretic and short-lived faith, Din-i-Ilahi was Akbar’s attempt to reconcile the major religions of his time and to forward that divinity could be found in nature and the individual rather than in a prophet or priest. To promote Dini-Ilahi and to curb the dominance of Islam in the Empire, Akbar was accused of regulating the activities of Mullahs, restricting Hajj and Azan, discouraging Arabic, and destroying apocryphal copies of the Koran, although his total commitment to these policies is unclear.89 In Akbar, Elizabethans and other Westerners found a kind of Prester John, not simply in his rejection of orthodox Islam and in the conception of Din-i-Ilahi, but in his keen interest in Christianity, a fact known to the English and the rest of Europe from three Portuguese Jesuits who were in residence at Fatehpur Sikri from 1580 to 1583. In 1578, Akbar sent a note to the Jesuits of Goa requesting that two of them be sent to Fatehpur Sikri. The invitation, in which Akbar begins by identifying himself as


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I send thither Abdullah my ambassador and Dominic Pires to ask you to send me two learned priests, who should bring with them the principal books of the Law and the Gospel, so that I may learn the Law and what is most perfect in it. And I earnestly request that they should not fail to come with the said ambassadors as soon as these arrive there, and that they should bring along the books of the Law: and let the Fathers who come know that they will be received with all possible honours, and I shall be greatly pleased with their coming. And when I shall know about the Law and its perfection as I desire, they may go whenever they like, and I shall send them with many honours and favours; and they should have no fear to come, because I take them under my protection.90

In response, Rudolf Acquaviva, Francis Henriques, and Anthony Monserrate were dispatched to the Mughal capital. As Ain-i Akbari reports, “Learned monks . . . came from Europe, who go by the name Padre.”91 Akbar showed great favor to the Jesuits, as their letters reveal.92 In an April 6, 1580, missive to Fr. Lawrence Peres, Henriques affirms, “He [Akbar] treats us, in love and friendship and affability, as may be expected of him.”93 The Jesuits regarded Akbar as intelligent, inquisitive, and very close to conversion, considering how reverentially Akbar treated Christian items. When presented with a Bible, Akbar accepted it with grace and honor: he touched the Bible to his head, causing the Jesuits to be “surprised” and the attending nobles to be “amazed.”94 When Akbar visited the quarters of the Jesuits, he “made deep obeisance” to paintings of Jesus’s mother Mary and told his own painters to make copies, a fact that the Jesuits took as a good sign.95 Incidentally, Akbar wanted the copies to employ gold paint.96 The Jesuits had many conversations with Akbar on Christ and the Gospels, conversations that Akbar appears to have welcomed. A collection of Mughal letters, written by Abul Fazl on Akbar’s behalf and appearing in a document titled Mukātabāt-i-‘Allāmī (1582– 1597), contains one message, dated March–April, 1582, to “Danayani Farang” (either Manuel of Portugal or Philip of Spain). Written when Akbar was contemplating a Western alliance against the Ottomans, the letter asserts Akbar’s friendship with Luso-Iberia and interest in learning more about Christianity, so he requests a Persian or Arabic Bible, the Psalms of David, and the Book of Moses.97 The Jesuits took Akbar even more seriously after he commanded his son to study Christianity, as Ain-i Akbari elucidates: “His Majesty firmly believed in the truth of the Christian religion, and wishing to spread the doctrines of Jesus, ordered


“King by God appointed” and with the following assurance to the Jesuits, “know that I am your great friend,” states,


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Prince Murad [his son] to take a few lessons in Christianity by way of auspiciousness, and charged Abul Fazl to translate the Gospel.”98 Despite these encouraging signs, in the end and for reasons unclear in sources, the Jesuits were unable to achieve Akbar’s conversion and departed disappointed from Fatehpur Sikri.99 Regardless of the failure, Akbar’s dabbling excited other Western Christians who thought they might be more successful than the Portuguese and thereby reap political and economic benefits from his expected religious conversion. The always opportunistic Elizabeth I made sure to enter the fray. When John Mildenhall entered Akbar’s court and was asked the nature of his business, the Englishman replied, “I made him answere that his greatnesse and renowmed kindnesse unto Christians was so much blased through the world that it was come into the furthermost parts of the westerne ocean and arrived in the court of our Queene of Englands Most Excellent Majestie; who desired to have friendship with him.”100 Although he apparently had no authority to say so, Mildenhall claimed that Elizabeth was keen on an alliance with Akbar, in part, because “as the Portugals and other Christians had trade with His Majestie, so her subjects also might have the same, with the like favours.”101 Akbar accepted Mildenhall’s petitions and furnished him with signed and sealed agreements for trade and treaties with the English.102 This AngloIndian relationship would later develop into the East India Company Charter of 1600 and founding of the first English factory in Bengal in 1610. However, what might be noted as well is that while Anglo-Indian relations had a commercial motive, it seems unlikely that the English thought of Akbar as an economic asset alone. As Elizabethan narratives show, the Mughal Empire and Akbar fulfilled imaginative and religious expectations of India and Indians gleaned from literary and nonfictional sources. India was extensive, diverse, and gold-laden. Akbar was powerful, peaceable, and pious. Although Akbar was not a zealot in the mode of his great-grandson, Aurangzeb, the English knew that Akbar came from an Asian and Islamic cultural context. Akbar was proud of his relationship to Timur (he intentionally emulated his ancestor), and he commissioned Timurnama (1584), a life of Timur and his descendants.103 Akbar’s own biography, Abul Fazl’s Akbarnama (1590–1597), carries an early, entire chapter on Timur that immediately precedes the chapter on Babur, thereby emphasizing the Mughals’ identity as Timurids. Akbarnama makes clear that Akbar shares with Timur the latter’s auspicious birth, “capacious intellect,” and military accomplishments.104 According to Fazl, when Timur won a battle, he engaged in indiscriminate plunder and the enslavement and execution of


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the overpowered citizenry, after which he “uplifted the banners of authority and sovereignty in the four quarters of the world and in the seven climes.”105 Timur’s raid of Delhi in 1398 included the wholesale slaughter of thousands and the demolition of the city.106 Akbar, who at one time proclaimed, “God willing, I’ll bring the cream of the earth’s surface under my sway and fulfill the desires of the sorrowful of the seven climes,”107 was not as bloodthirsty as Timur. After the Battle of Panipat, Akbar refused to decapitate the defeated and unconscious Hemu, saying, “in the justicehall of the Only One there was nothing meritorious in such an act.”108 This act of clemency does not negate the fact that Akbar often condoned atrocities committed during war. Islamic armies in India, from Mahmud Ghazni and Muhammad Ghori in the medieval period to Babur and Nadir Shah in early modern times, massacred opposing armies and civilians and would construct, with the skulls, a macabre tower of triumph. Akbar’s soldiers did the same at Panipat.109 After the fall of the Chittor fortress in 1568, the victorious Akbar ordered a “general massacre” of the remaining thirty thousand Rajputs present within the walls.110 Events in Akbarnama purposely parallel those in Timurnama (the earlier work).111 Elizabethans were aware of the relationship between Akbar and Timur, as the 1601 English translation of Giovanni Botero’s The Travellers Breviat notes: “Their [the Tartars’] chiefe citie is Shamarcand, from whence came Tamarlan, and of whose bloud these Mogor princes do boast that they are descended.”112 Did Timur’s and Akbar’s shared imperialistic ideology and renowned cruelty toward adversaries remind Elizabethans of a catastrophe that hit closer to home: Mehmed II or the “raging” Turk’s brutal subjugation of Constantinople in 1453? Did they see Timur and Akbar, along with Genghis and Mehmed, Ghazni and Ghori, as archetypal Muslim tyrants, skilled warriors yet sadistic conquerors? Indeed, Akbar belonged to the same political and religious traditions, but his spiritual dilemmas, as well as his economic accessibility, set him apart, making him a more complicated figure than his forebears. Similar complexity is present in Marlowe’s rendering of Tamburlaine. If the Elizabethan image of Akbar is connected to the literary Tamburlaine, what is its relationship to Marlowe’s sources, especially the one closest to the Mughals in its praise of their ancestor, Jean du Bec’s The Historie of the Great Emperor Tamerlan? 113 The work originally appeared in French in 1594 and was translated to English in 1597, but the French commentary itself was the translation, by an associate of Du Bec named “Alhacen,” of an earlier Arabic text.114 Du Bec’s “Tamerlan” is quite likely a model for Marlowe’s protagonist.115 Tamerlan, like Tamburlaine, is a rampaging warrior and collector of gold (often plundered from a vanquished army


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like the Chinese116), but Du Bec anachronistically refines his hero using Machiavelli’s ideal, going as far as to call Tamerlan “Prince” and sermonizing on the necessary brutality of the successful ruler: the immediate “terrour of death” that must be meted out to the “sedicious person.”117 Du Bec’s Tamerlan, however, also possesses the quality of “mildnesse.” Among the Tartars, writes Du Bec, “he is there reverenced for his great mildnesse and clemencie, for rewarding of the good, & bearing somtimes with a fault (if there be any) and for having moreover a stiffe hand to punish the wicked and sedicious.”118 “Mildnesse” is mentioned again in Tamerlan’s pledge of “friendship” to the Greeks against the Ottomans, arguing that the will of “God” is responsible for the alliance.119 According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), “mildnesse” is equivalent to “gentleness,” “placidity,” and “even-tempered calmness,” characteristics one would not immediately associate with the war-mongering historical Timur or fictional Tamburlaine, but these are indeed essential features of both and Du Bec’s Tamerlan. The juxtaposition of “mildnesse” and “God,” along with many references to Tamerlan’s “justice,” account for his affinity for and patronage of the Christians who form his circle of advisors, slaves, and soldiers: “His pleasure was they should have a Temple built for to pray . . . which hee called the Te[m]ple of Jesus.”120 These characteristics illustrate a likeness to Akbar, but unlike the great Mughal, Tamerlan has no tolerance for polytheism or “the pluralitie of Gods,” going as far as to enslave and murder “Idolaters.”121 We might ask what role Du Bec’s English translator, “H. M.,” had in the assertion of this last point. In his introduction, H. M. posits that Du Bec’s Tamerlan is historically accurate, “most true, and not devised.”122 But did H. M.’s early modern English environment—Protestantism, narratives of travel and trade—affect his translation? By the time The Historie of the Great Emperor Tamerlan appeared in English, Elizabethans would have returned from India, bringing with them the good news of Akbar. The English knew that Akbar was descended from Timur. They might have been aware that Akbar’s Timurnama was based on the same Arabic sources as Du Bec. Add the Prester John myth to this concoction of overlapping circumstances, and we have a rather rich recipe that Marlowe sampled for inspiration. In his narrative on Mughal India, William Finch provides a moving description of Akbar’s tomb, which was being built outside Agra at the time of Finch’s viewing. Finch observes Muslims and non-Muslims— “Moores and Gentiles”—coming to pray and pay their respects to Akbar, “holding him for a great saint.”123 Finch finds the marble and gold of Akbar’s expensive sarcophagus appropriate shelter for an equally unique


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and ambitious soul: “Here, within a faire round coffin of gold, lieth the body of this monarch, who sometimes thought the world too little for him.”124 In a letter to his mother, Thomas Coryate states that his future itinerary involves travel to another famous mausoleum. He resolves “to go from India into the countrey of Scythia, now called Tartaria, to the cittie of Samarcanda, to see the sepulcher of the greatest conqueror that ever was in the worlde, Tamberlaine the Great.”125 Finch and Coryate are clearly awed by the reputations of Akbar and Timur, and the fame of the men lies in the fact that they both owned the greatest prize of all: India. “India,” we know, was so synonymous with Asian capital that a monarch of India might morph, Midas-like, from individual to icon. Consider, for instance, the figure of Emetreus in “The Knight’s Tale” of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1387).126 Emetreus, “the king of Inde” (2156) and an ally of Arcite, is adorned with gold and jewels: “Upon a steede bay trapped in steel, / Covered in clooth of gold, dyapred weel, / Cam ridynge lyk the god of armes, Mars. / His cote-armure was of clooth of Tars / Couched with perles white and rounde and grete; / His sadel was of brend gold newe ybete; / A mantelet upon his shulder hangynge, / Bret-ful of rubyes rede as fyr sparklynge” (2157–2164). With his “yelow” (2166) hair and “citryn” (2167) eyes, Emetreus looks like a “leon” (2171). Though only “fyve and twenty yeer his age” (2172), he commands like an experienced and respected general with a “thonderynge” “voys” (2174) and “noble compaignye” (2183). Although Chaucer’s Emetreus is the idealized medieval construction of an Indian king, he anticipates the early modern outlook on India as well, for Marlowe’s Tamburlaine—a medieval character but early modern protagonist—is, like Emetreus and Akbar, attractive, charismatic, talented, and victorious: a “golden boy” in the manner of a fellow conqueror of India, Alexander the Great. Throughout the Tamburlaine plays and other works of Marlowe, the supremacy of an individual is related to the amount of gold in the person’s possession. Characters covet gold, discuss its whereabouts, actively pursue it, and use it to their advantage. In Doctor Faustus (1588), the ambitious Faustus lists the commands he could disperse to the spirits once he masters necromancy: “I’ll have them fly to India for gold, / Ransack the ocean for orient pearl, / And search all corners of the new-found world / For pleasant fruits and princely delicates” (1.84–87). Faustus makes a distinction between the gold of the old India and the gluttonous pleasures of the new Americas. Similarly, in The Jew of Malta (1590), Barabas views gold as established currency when he says, “Give me the merchants of the Indian mines, / That trade in metal of the purest mould” (1.1.19–20) and “Well fare the Arabians, who so richly pay / The things they traffic for


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with a wedge of gold” (1.1.8–9). When caught lying by Friar Jacomo and Friar Barnardine, Barabas offers a bribe for the men’s silence: “Cellars of wine and sollars full of wheat, / Warehouses stuffed with spices and with drugs, / Whole chests of gold, in bullion and in coin, / Besides I know not how much weight in pearl, / Orient and round, have I within my house” (4.1.67–71). Later in the play, when Ferneze asks Callapine the reason for his visit to Malta, the Ottoman bashaw replies, “The wind that bloweth all the world besides: / Desire for gold” (3.5.3–4). Callapine’s expectation of tribute acts as a reminder of Ottoman might and Maltese insignificance, reiterated when Ferneze comments on the shortage of gold in early modern Europe and its abundance in the Americas: “Desire of gold, great sir? / That’s to be gotten in the Western Inde; / In Malta are no golden minerals” (3.5.4–6). Thus gold functions as a symbol of status in The Jew of Malta just as much as it does in The Massacre at Paris (1592). In The Massacre at Paris, the Duke of Guise notes the worth of Spanish colonies in the Americas: “From Spain the stately Catholics / Sends Indian gold to coin me French écues” (2.61). Guise argues that he has the political support of staunch Catholics like the Pope and King Philip of Spain, who, “Ere I shall want, will cause his Indians / To rip the golden bowels of America” (19.48–49). Here, gold maintains tyrants and funds their religious wars. In Marlowe’s plays, “gold” frequently appears with “orient pearl,” a product of the East. Pearls were available in the Americas too, but these were of the Atlantic variety. Richard Eden’s A Treatyse of the Newe India mentions that the Spaniards encountered many islands “with great ple[n] tie of golde and pearles.” To differentiate Western and Eastern pearls, the “orient pearl” refers to those found in Asia, whether the pearls of the Ceylon Pearl Oyster, whose habitat is the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and the eastern Mediterranean;127 or according to Eden, the pearls of the “Molucca” islands, where Spaniards were amazed to see “pearles as bygge as turtle doues egges: but they are gathered in the depth of the sea.”128 Gold, pearls, silks, spices, and jewels were prevalent in Mughal India. Akbar’s court wore silk clothing,129 and a famous painting of Shah Jahan from 1617 shows the Emperor wearing and holding pearls.130 These commodities were exported from India, and Marlowe’s characters desire to profit from the traffic and to become “moguls” in their own right. In Tamburlaine, part 1, Tamburlaine praises his future Queen Zenocrate and calls her “the lovliest maid alive, / Fairer than rocks of pearl and precious stone” (3.3.117–18). The alignment of Zenocrate with objects of value is a listing of prized possessions, including the lady. Barabas conducts similar inventorying, and his collection includes “silks” (1.1.45). Like Tamburlaine and Barabas, Englishmen in Mughal India


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acquired commodities through gift, purchase, and plunder. Hence, references to Indian wares in Tamburlaine and other plays acknowledge the benefits of the Asian marketplace. Additionally, the ownership of gold is equated with political and military power, the signs of empery. In Tamburlaine, part 1, Ceneus, a Persian lord, argues that ransomed “Afric captains” (1.1.142) have elevated Persian aristocracy, who now “march in coats of gold / With costly jewels hanging at their ears” (1.1.143–44). A Tartar soldier describes to Tamburlaine the opulent appearance of the enemy Persians: “Their plumèd helms are wrought with beaten gold, / Their swords enamelled, and about their necks / Hangs massy chains of gold down to the waist” (1.2.124–26). Tamburlaine himself is enamored of gold. Prior to his conflict with the Persians, Tamburlaine lays out his treasure of gold bars, declares his desire to be “the monarch of the East” (1.2.185), and predicts that “Jove himself will stretch his hand from heaven / To ward the blow and shield me safe from harm. / See how he rains down heaps of gold in showers / As if he meant to give my soldiers pay!” (1.2.180–83). On the other side of the combat zone, Meander, attempting to inspire his troops, reveals his military strategy: he says that if the Persians scatter gold on the battlefield, Tamburlaine’s deprived and thievish Scythians will pause to collect the treasure, allowing the Persians the opportunity to kill the enemy. Then, continues Meander, the Persians can gather the gold for themselves: “And when their scattered army is subdued / And you march on their slaughtered carcasses, / Share equally the gold that bought their lives / And live like gentlemen in Persia” (2.2.68–71). Meander’s promise is never fulfilled because the Persians are routed, and the “base” Tamburlaine, rather than the Persians, enjoys heightened status. Tamburlaine’s rise happens because he colonizes wealthy empires, not modest kingdoms, so it is claimed that his financial power supersedes that of God. According to Theridamas, “A god is not so glorious as a king. / I think the pleasure they enjoy in heaven / Cannot compare with kingly joys in earth: / To wear a crown encased with pearl and gold, / Whose virtues carry with it life and death” (2.5.57–61). The “crown,” a symbol of supremacy, is also emblematic of the monarch’s fiscal worth in gold and gems, the loss of which would cause poverty and subsequently subjection. Tamburlaine’s towering ambition is, in part, the desire to exceed his lowly origins, to gain, through his successes, wealth and respect, but Tamburlaine’s strategies do not deviate from the unscrupulous stereotype of which he is constantly accused. Tamburlaine does not woo Zenocrate; he kidnaps her and appropriates the dowry meant for Capolin, the King of Syria and Arabia and Zenocrate’s betrothed. Tamburlaine does not


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ransom Bajazeth as the rules of war advise (the Persians ransomed captive Africans, one might remember); rather, Tamburlaine tortures Bajazeth, who, says Zabina, is more suited for “roofs of gold and sun-bright palaces” (4.2.62) than a cage. The annexation of the mighty Ottoman Empire should have satiated Tamburlaine, but instead, he enthusiastically pursues a smaller but significant deal. He proceeds to Damascus and salivates over its coffers: “The golden statue of their feathered bird / That spreads her wings upon the city walls / Shall not defend it from our battering shot. / The townsmen mask in silk and cloth of gold, / And every house is a treasury” (4.2.105–9). After Damascus ignores Tamburlaine’s initial overtures to surrender peacefully, Tamburlaine resolves to fight and asks his soldiers to pray to the “god of war” for victory: “That means to fill your helmets full of gold / And make Damascus’ spoils as rich as you / As was to Jason Colchis’ golden fleece” (4.4.7–9). Although Tamburlaine, part 1, is set in the fourteenth century, prior to the detection of the Americas, the play conflates the West Indies and East Indies when bringing up gold. When the Persian lord Meander complains to his king Mycetes about Tamburlaine’s confiscation of Persian trade, he alludes to the islands of Britain or the Caribbean: “Tamburlaine, that sturdy Scythian thief, / That robs your merchants of Persepolis / Trading by land unto the Western Isles” (1.1.36–38). When Cosroe, Mycetes’s usurping brother, is crowned emperor, he becomes the commander of “the late-discovered isles” (1.1.166). References to the Americas, however, merge with those alluding to the Indian subcontinent and Greater India. Cosroe states that he wishes to uplift the image of the Persian Empire, which lost its Indian outpost under Mycetes: “And—that which might resolve me to tears— / Men from the farthest equinoctial line / Have swarmed in troops into the Eastern Inde, / Lading their ships with gold and precious stones, / And made their spoils from all our provinces” (1.1.118–22). The use of “Eastern” in his remarks suggests that Cosroe is not thinking of the Americas. After the defeat of Mycetes by Tamburlaine, Cosroe promises to make good on the recovery of India and promises that he will “march to all those Indian mines / My witless brother to the Christians lost, / And ransom them with fame and usury” (2.5.41–43). This is a problematic passage. In the previous speech, Cosroe identified India and Asia as a part of the Persian Empire ransacked by marauders. Has Cosroe confused the East and West Indies? Are the “Christians” of his declaration the Spanish colonialists of the Caribbean and South America? The quotations show that for Marlowe, his characters, and the English imaginary, India—whether “Oriental” or “Occidental”—was thought to be rich in gold. Like Cosroe, Tamburlaine too craves the gold quarries of


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“India” but does not specify which India is his object: “Not all the gold in India’s wealthy arms / Shall buy the meanest soldier in my train” (1.2.85– 86). But by the end of the play, when Tamburlaine crowns Zenocrate and honors her father, Tamburlaine separates the two Indias: “To gratify thee, sweet Zenocrate, / Egyptians, Moors, and men of Asia, / From Barbary unto the Western Indie, / Shall pay a yearly tribute to thy sire, / And from the bounds of Afric to the banks / Of Ganges shall his mighty arm extend” (5.1.516–21). After the defeat of Bajazeth, Tamburlaine sees himself as ruler of the world, and his inclusion of India in his sway, whether East India or the Western Indies, is necessary to construct a truly global empire. He envisions that his navy will cross the Pacific from Asia, pass the Caribbean, traverse the Atlantic, and arrive in the Mediterranean, where they will join ships from Africa to form one fleet, with the intention of “Keeping in awe the Bay of Portingale / And all the ocean by the British shore. / And by this means I’ll win the world at last” (3.3.250–60). Passages indicate that the old world consists of different spaces, Europe being distinct from Asia, which is separate from Africa. In act 3, Bajazeth, who is in the midst of an assault on “the famous Grecian Constantinople” (3.1.6), will not withdraw his siege to quell the threatening Tamburlaine. The King of Fez advises that instead of starting a war with Tamburlaine, Bajazeth might dispatch advisors “To charge him [Tamburlaine] to remain in Asia” (3.1.18), to refrain from directly provoking Bajazeth or charging into Europe. Tamburlaine’s ally, Theridamas, also places Asia and Europe in two geographical categories (3.3.38). Africa is the third component in the drawing board of war. As Fez, Morocco, and Argier are subject to Bajazeth, the Ottoman considers himself “Dread lord of Afric, Europe, and Asia, / Great king and conqueror of Graecia” (3.1.23–24). Thus, Tamburlaine believes that when Bajazeth is defeated and Africa falls to his forces (3.3.10), he will be crowned “emperor of Africa” (3.3.221), not to mention ruler of the world. Although the additions of Bajazeth’s principalities in Africa and Asia as well as Cosroe’s Persian dominions cement Tamburlaine’s reputation as a warrior and emperor, Tamburlaine, in whose mappaemundi the jewel in the crown is Asia (India and Greater India), will not stop until he controls every corner of the continent. Cosroe is the first character in the play to emphasize Asia’s importance and start the sequence of usurpation. He states his political goal: “To crown me [Cosroe] emperor of Asia” (1.1.112). Indeed, when Mycetes is toppled and Cosroe takes his place, Ortygius declares, “We here do crown thee monarch of the East, / Emperor of Asia and of Persia, / Great lord of Media and Armenia, / Duke of Assyria


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and Albania, / Mesopotamia and of Parthia, / East India and the latediscovered isles, / Chief lord of all the wide vast Euxine Sea / And of the ever-raging Caspian lake” (1.1.161–68). Tamburlaine wants to emulate Cosroe, for in doing so he gains political legitimacy, and he gains “India.” Meander explains that Tamburlaine’s objective is “To reign in Asia and with barbarous arms / To make himself monarch of the East” (1.1.42– 43). Tamburlaine allows nothing to hinder him. His enemies shudder at his ruthlessness: “Without respect of sex, degree, or age, / He razeth all his foes with fire and sword” (4.2.62–63). Tamburlaine’s indiscriminate slaughter is exemplified in the murder of the innocent virgins of Damascus. If a city under attack declines Tamburlaine’s offer to surrender without bloodshed, Tamburlaine unflinchingly prepares for war, as he does in the Damascus engagement: “I will not spare these proud Egyptians, / Nor change my martial observations / For all the wealth of Gihon’s golden waves, / Or for the love of Venus” (5.1.121–24). Tamburlaine, part 1 ends with the fall of Damascus. With the city’s capture, Tamburlaine has conquered all of Asia, previously held by the prosperous but ineffectual and foolishly arrogant monarchs Cosroe and Bajazeth. The victory over Cosroe and Bajazeth allows Tamburlaine to consolidate and redefine Asia, and to make it a mirror of its new monarch as well as a clearer copy of India, the continent’s palpable superpower. India and Asia transform into Christian protector, and Tamburlaine, officially an Islamic tyrant battling other Islamic tyrants, casts himself as a savior of Christians. The parallel between Christ and Tamburlaine is raised when Tamburlaine notes the “stars that reigned upon my nativity” (4.2.33). Although Tamburlaine describes himself as “the scourge and wrath of God” (3.3.44), he predicts Bajazeth’s defeat, which, Tamburlaine says, will allow him to “enlarge / Those Christian captives which you [Bajazeth and others] keep as slaves” (3.3.46–47). He decries the fact that the Ottomans and Africans “make quick havoc of the Christian blood” (3.3.58) and that corsairs or “pilling brigantines” (3.3.248) cruise close to Venice “for Christians’ wrack” (3.3.250). Tamburlaine supports Christians partly because, as Bajazeth reminds Tamburlaine, he is a “Scythian slave” (3.3.68), a descriptor that might signify the actual bondage of Scythians or more likely, Turkish characters’ denigration of the Scythian people. So Tamburlaine identifies with the sufferings of Christian galley slaves and the state of slavery itself. A more complex reason for Tamburlaine’s pro-Christian sympathies concerns his alienation from Islam. For Bajazeth, who flaunts his kinship to the Prophet Muhammad (3.3.75), Islamic identity gives him a privileged social position and is thought to provide political power. Prior


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to the Turk-Tartar clash, Zabina says a prayer that suggests Muhammad’s supposed partiality for the Ottomans: “Now, Mahomet, solicit God himself, / And make him rain down murdering shot from heaven / To dash the Scythians’ brains, and strike them dead / That dare to manage arms with him / That offered jewels to thy sacred shrine / When first he warred against the Christians” (3.3.195–200). Thus, the Ottoman loss makes Bajazeth and Zabina feel that they have been forsaken by Muhammad and call him “O sleepy Mahomet” (3.3.269) and “O cursèd Mahomet” (3.3.270) respectively. “The rogue of Volga” (4.1.4) does not claim lineage or special favor from Muhammad. Granted, Tamburlaine is a descendant of Genghis Khan, and this connection gives him some clout, but Tamburlaine’s fellow Muslims so disparage his Scythian ethnicity that they refuse to acknowledge him as a co-religionist. For Christian audiences, Muslims’ rejection of Tamburlaine suggests the possibility of his entrance to their spiritual camp. Additionally, if the early modern playgoers harbored anti-Semitic attitudes (as many did), Bajazeth’s boast on the dimensions of his army—“I have of Turks, Arabians, Moors, and Jews, / Enough to cover all Bithynia” (3.3.136–37)—would make Tamburlaine even more attractive. No wonder then that when Bajazeth is defeated, he bemoans the inevitable celebrations of “foul idolators” (3.3.239): “Now will the Christian miscreants be glad, / Ringing with joy their superstitious bells, / And making bonfires for my overthrow” (3.3.236–8). Bajazeth’s statement possesses some truth, as his defeat, to likely Christian delight, has averted the fall of Constantinople (the city would eventually succumb to Ottoman forces in 1453). The remainder of the play depicts Tamburlaine’s torture of Bajazeth. For the reader or audience of Tamburlaine, sympathies change. Tamburlaine becomes a manifestation of all the negative qualities attributed to him by his enemies, and he transforms from Christian savior to dangerous dictator. His decision to give Capolin, Bajazeth, and Zabina a decent burial briefly redeems his dignity, but he remains a disturbing protagonist. Such dichotomy can be seen in Akbar, who informs Marlowe’s rendering of Tamburlaine. Akbar possesses all the positive qualities that Marlowe bestows on Tamburlaine: keen statesmanship, military prowess, a stable empire, an Indian state, Christian leanings, and a store of gold. However, their spiritual distance from Western Christianity and their commitment to imperialist policies are regarded with certain wariness. Characters receive Tamburlaine’s statements of friendship with a reasonable amount of distrust. Hence, in Tamburlaine, part 2, “the mighty Christian priest / Called John the Great” (1.3.187–88) is subdued, suggesting that Christian identity could not immunize this “Prester John” from imperialist annexation.


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In Tamburlaine, part 2, Marlowe’s protagonist, who has risen to the sacrilegious position of an “earthly god” (3.5.22), reaches further heights of ruthlessness, so much so that after the fall of Babylon, he orders the drowning of every inhabitant of the city, including women and children (5.1.169). Zenocrate’s death inspires him to recommence combat and pillage. His faithful associates, Techelles and Theridamas, subdue Africa and Europe respectively. Tamburlaine charges deep into Asia. As Orcanes, King of Natolia observes, “From Scythia to the oriental plage / Of India, where raging Lantchidol / Beats on the regions with his boisterous blows, / That never seaman yet discoverèd, / All Asia is in arms with Tamburlaine” (1.1.68–72). Tamburlaine still pursues gold for his coffers, and the play, like its earlier installment, anachronistically refers to the “gold of rich America” (1.2.35), but the gold of Asia and India is Tamburlaine’s immediate goal. Tamburlaine predicts that the defeat of Orcanes will provide him with “liquid gold . . . / Mingled with coral and oriental pearl” (1.3.223–4). The Governor of Babylon tells him that the city’s gold is hidden in “Limnasphaltis’ lake” (5.1.115), and Tamburlaine dispatches officers to find the hoard. To his sons, Tamburlaine compares his selfworth to “a chair of gold enamellèd, / Enchased with diamonds, sapphires, rubies, / And fairest pearl of wealthy India” (3.2.119–21). As the Tamburlaine plays reveal, images of India correspond to the reception of the Mughals, the (re)discovery of the Americas, and the revisioning of India. Early moderns recycled and refashioned their acquaintance with India from the English imaginary. In particular, India’s association with gold was reconsidered. While America’s gold was plundered, melted, and shipped to Europe, the English endeavored to acquire but preserve India’s gold, which was appreciated for its skillful usage in art, architecture, manuscripts, belongings, and coins. Gold’s cultural and monetary merits were recognized. In this sense, the English approach imitated Indian sensibilities, so that gold, along with spices, pearls, and silks, was an artifact and a commodity, the custody of which would lead to colonial monopoly and imperial greatness akin to Tamburlaine and Akbar. Also, the English saw firsthand that the Mughals were quite different from the more familiar Ottomans. For early moderns accustomed to pitting political Christendom against the “infidel Moor,” Akbar’s rejection of an overt Islamic identity for the Mughal Empire was almost disorienting. Yet his refusal to formally convert to Christianity prevented his wholesale acceptance by English authorities. Later English arrivals in India during the reign of Jahangir were to complicate their responses with more forceful requests for trade and assessments of the Mughals as farcical and flamboyant,131 but as newly encountered emperors, Akbar and Tamburlaine appropriate the magic of golden India and beyond.


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1. The completion of this chapter was made possible with the assistance of many. I thank Saint Anselm College for awarding me a Faculty Summer Research Grant for the project. I am indebted to Sue Gagnon and Madeleine Greiner of the Inter-Library Loan Office for efficiently obtaining numerous books and other materials on my behalf. Last but not least, I am grateful for my sweet little son, Leo, who was born in the midst of this project and whose winning smile motivated me to work with joy. 2. For analyses by modern-day historians, see Peter L. Bernstein, The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000); Hugh Thomas, Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993); Louis B. Wright, Gold, Glory, and Gospel: The Adventurous Lives and Times of the Renaissance Explorers (New York: Atheneum, 1970); Agustín de Zárate, The Discovery and Conquest of Peru, ed. J. M. Cohen (Baltimore: Penguin, 1968). 3. José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, ed. Jane E. Mangan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 166. 4. I learned of the terms “Anahuac” and “Tawantinsuyu” from Walter D. Mignolo, “Introduction to José de Acosta’s Historia Natural y Moral De Las Indias,” Natural and Moral History of the Indies, ed. Jane E. Mangan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), xvii. 5. Acosta, Natural and Moral History, 167. 6. See Edmund Valentine Campos, “West of Eden: American Gold, Spanish Greed, and the Discourses of English Imperialism,” Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires, eds. Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 247–69; Annaliese Connolly, “‘O quenchable Thirst of Gold’: Lyly’s Midas and the English Quest for Empire,” Early Modern Literary Studies: A Journal of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Literature 8, no. 2 (2002): 36 paragraphs; Mary C. Fuller, “Ralegh’s Fugitive Gold: Reference and Deferral in The Discoverie of Guiana,” Representations 33 (1991): 42–64. 7. Acosta, Natural and Moral History, 168. 8. Stuart Cary Welch, “Encounters with India: Land of Gold, Spices, and Matters Spiritual,” Age of Exploration: Circa 1492, ed. Jay A. Levenson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 363. 9. Ibid. 10. See Mignolo, “Introduction to José de Acosta’s Historia,” xx. 11. R. B., The English Acquisitions in Guinea & East-India (London: Printed for Nathaniel Crouch, 1700), 157. 12. Robert Lovell, Pammineralogicon, Or An Universal History of Mineralls (Oxford: Printed by W. Hall for Joseph Goodwin, 1661), 12. 13. In the fourteenth century, the publication of cartographer Giovanni da Carignano’s map, showing the kingdom of Prester John in Ethiopia, prompted the Portuguese, in 1520, to announce that Prester John was finally found in the


Notes


14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

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form of Emperor David II or Lebna Dengel (1508–1540), an Ethiopian of the Orthodox faith. See Charles F. Beckingham, “The Quest for Prester John,” Lecture at Manchester University, October 31, 1979, Between Islam and Christendom: Travellers, Facts and Legends in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Charles F. Beckingham (Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1983), 294. For an account of the Portuguese encounter with the Ethiopian king, see Francisco Alvares, The Prester John of the Indies: A True Relation of the Lands of the Prester John, ed. C. F. Beckingham and G. W. Huntingford, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Hakluyt Society, 1961). Christopher Marlowe, Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays, ed. Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey (New York: Penguin, 2003). All references of the Tamburlaine plays are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line number. At its height in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Mughal Empire spanned almost four million square kilometers. In contrast, the Ethiopia-based Aksumite Empire in the fourth-century CE reached only 1.25 square kilometers, which included much of northern and eastern Africa. This empire dissolved in the tenth century, so by the early modern period, Abyssinia consisted only of Ethiopia and Eritrea. Early modern narratives about the Mughals will be elaborated upon later in this essay, but for an Ethiopian counterpart, see Jerónimo Lobo, A Voyage to Abyssinia: Containing the History, Natural, Civil, and Ecclesiastical, of that Remote and Unfrequented Country (New York: AMS, 1978). Mariam Makani aka Hamideh Banu Begum was Akbar’s mother. Mariam uzZamani or Rajkumari Hira Kunwari was Akbar’s Rajput wife and the mother of Akbar’s successor, Jahangir. Ellison B. Findly, “The Lives and Contributions of Mughal Women,” The Magnificent Mughals, ed. Zeenut Ziad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 28. See Bernhard Klein, “Tamburlaine, Sacred Space, and the Heritage of Medieval Cartography,” Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England, ed. Gordon McMullan and David Matthews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 143–58. John Mandeville, The Travels of John Mandeville, trans. C. W. R. D. Moseley (New York: Penguin, 1983), 120. R. H. Major, ed., India in the Fifteenth Century (London: Hakluyt Society, 1857), 21. Major’s English translation of Conti’s narrative is based on the Latin version that appears in Poggio Bracciolini’s De Varietate Fortunœ libri quator. Conti told his tale to Bracciolini, Pope Eugene IV’s secretary, who rendered it into Latin. See Rosemary Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences: A Study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville (1371–1550) (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 1, note 2; and Kennon Breazeale, “Editorial Introduction to Nicolò de’ Conti’s Account,” SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research 2, no. 2. (2004): 102. Christopher Dawson, Mission to Asia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 22; Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo (New York: Orion, 1958), 98. Mandeville, The Travels, 167. Ibid., 170.


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24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41.

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Ibid., 183. Ibid., 131–32. Major, India in the Fifteenth Century, 21 Martin Collcutt, “Circa 1492 in Japan: Columbus and the Legend of Golden Cipangu,” Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 305. Collcutt writes, evocatively, “As Marco Polo’s fabulous accounts of the wealth and wonders of East and Southeast Asia filtered into the Western view of the world, they added to the lure of the Indies and the Spice Islands in the Western imagination. Cipangu joined the Kingdom of Prester John, St. Brendan’s Isles, and Antillia as yet another fabulous kingdom to be reached and exploited” (305). Mandeville, The Travels, 168. Ibid., 182. The St. Thomas Christians of the southern Indian states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu claim to be descendants of the first Indians converted by the Apostle Thomas. Today, the St. Thomas Christians belong to the Syro-Malabar Church. See J. N. Farquhar and G. Garitte, The Apostle Thomas in India (Kottayam, India: s.n., 1972); and Eugene Tisserant, Eastern Christianity in India: A History of the Syro-Malabar Church from the Earliest Time to the Present Day (Westminster, MD: Newman, 1957). Collcutt, “Circa 1492,” 305. Wright, Gold, Glory, and Gospel, 61; Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley, Jr., eds., The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America 1492–1493 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 141. Dunn and Kelley, The Diario, 109. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 146. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 16, 18. C. D. Ley, ed., “A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama in 1497–99,” Portuguese Voyages, 1498–1663: Tales from the Great Age of Discovery (London: Phoenix, 2000), 27. Richard Eden, A Treatyse of the Newe India (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1966); this is a facsimile copy and is not paginated. See, for instance, Jyotsna G. Singh, Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: Discoveries of India in the Language of Colonialism (New York: Routledge, 1996); John Michael Archer, Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Shankar Raman, Framing “India”: The Colonial Imaginary in Early Modern Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); Pompa Banerjee, Burning Women: Widows, Witches, and Early Modern European Travelers in India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). For a good list of English and European travelers in India, with relevant biographical data, see Banerjee, Burning Women, 211–13.


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42. John Ogilby, Asia, The First Part Being An Accurate Description of Persia and the Several Provinces Thereof. The Vast Empire of the Great Mogol, and Other Parts of India: And their Several Kingdoms and Regions (London: Printed by John Ogilby, 1673), 169. 43. William Foster, ed., Early Travels in India, 1583–1619 (Delhi: S. Chand & Co., 1968), 246. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. For a good review of military history under Akbar, see S. M. Burke, Akbar: The Greatest Mogul (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1989). 47. Abdul Aziz, The Imperial Treasury of the Indian Mughuls (Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Delli, 1972), 28. 48. Muhammad Arif Qandhari, Tarikh-i-Akbari, trans. Tasneem Ahmad (Delhi: Pragati, 1993), 63. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 243. 51. Abul Fazl, The Ain-i Akbari, trans. H. Blochmann (Delhi: Aadiesh Book Depot, 1965), 39. 52. Ibid., 38. 53. Larisa Dodkhudoeva, “Gold in the Pictorial Language of Indian and Central Asian Book Painting,” Persian Painting from the Mongols to the Qajars: Studies in Honor of Basil W. Robinson, ed. Robert Hillenbrand (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 97. 54. Qandhari, Tarikh-i-Akbari, 65. 55. Dodkhudoeva, “Gold in the Pictorial Language,” 97–98. 56. Qandhari, Tarikh-i-Akbari, 60. 57. Foster, Early Travels in India, 149. 58. William Foster, England’s Quest for Eastern Trade (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1967), 92. 59. Foster, England’s Quest for Eastern Trade, 92. 60. Ibid., 97. 61. Foster, Early Travels in India, 17–18. 62. Ibid., 18. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 55. 66. M. P. Singh, Town, Market, Mint and Port in the Mughal Empire, 1556–1707 (New Delhi: Adam, 1985), 169. 67. Om Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4. 68. C. R. Singhal, Mint-Towns of the Mughal Emperors of India (Bombay: The Numismatic Society of India, 1953), 33. 69. Singhal, Mint-Towns, 33. 70. Foster, Early Travels in India, 101, note 7.


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71. Joe Cribb, Barrie Cook, and Ian Carradice, eds., The Coin Atlas: The World of Coinage from its Origins to the Present Day (New York: Facts on File, 1990), 176. 72. Foster, Early Travels in India, 101. 73. Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, Akbar & Religion (Delhi: Idarah-i-Adabiyat-i-Delli, 1989), 123, 134. 74. Ibid., 18–22. 75. Fazl, Ain-i Akbari, 109. 76. Ibid., 110. 77. Iqtidar Alam Khan, “Akbar’s Personality Traits and World Outlook—A Critical Appraisal,” Akbar and His India, ed. Irfan Habib (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 85. 78. Annemarie Schimmel, “Religious Policies of the Great Mughals,” The Magnificent Mughals, ed. Zeenut Ziad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 61. 79. Khan, “Akbar’s Personality,” 86. 80. Nizami, Akbar & Religion, 122. 81. Khan, “Akbar’s Personality,” 87. 82. Nizami, Akbar & Religion, 131. 83. Khan, “Akbar’s Personality,” 88. 84. Ibid. 85. John Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 26. 86. Khan, “Akbar’s Personality,” 81. 87. Ogilby, Asia, 143. 88. Nizami, Akbar & Religion, 132. 89. Makhan Lal Roy Choudhury, The Din-i-Ilahi or the Religion of Akbar (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1985), 155–64. 90. John Correia-Afonso, ed., Letters from the Mughal Court (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1981), xv. 91. Fazl, Ain-i Akbari, 191. 92. By 1586, however, the Portuguese had fallen out of favor with Akbar due to their trouble-making in the Bay of Bengal and their harassment of pilgrims going to Mecca. See Mansura Haidar, ed., Mukātabāt-i-‘Allāmī (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1998), 36, 44. 93. Correia-Afonso, Letters, 21. 94. Ibid., 29–30. 95. Ibid., 31. 96. Ibid., 33. 97. Haidar, Mukātabāt-i-‘Allāmī, 8–10. 98. Fazl, Ain-i Akbari, 191–92. 99. English commentators made similar observations about Jahangir, of whom Coryate writes, “Hee speaketh very reverently of our Saviour, calling him in the Indian tongue Isazaret Eesa [Hazarat Īsa], that is, the Great Prophet Jesus; and all us Christians, especiallie us English, he useth so benevolently as no Mahometan prince the like” (Foster, Early Travels in India, 246). Coryate has


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100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114.

115.

116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

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also heard that Jahangir was uncircumcised: “It is saide that he is uncircumcised, wherein he differeth from all the Mahometan princes that ever were in the world” (Foster, Early Travels in India, 246). In reality, however, Qandhari records in Tarikh-i-Akbari that Jahangir and his brothers were circumcised in 1573 or 1574 (219). Foster, Early Travels in India, 55. Ibid. Ibid., 59. Milo Cleveland Beach, Mughal and Rajput Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 48. Abul Fazl, The Akbarnama, vol. 1, trans. H. Beveridge (New Delhi: Ess Ess, 1979), 208. Ibid. Burke, Akbar: The Greatest Mogul, 2. Ibid, 31. Fazl, The Akbarnama, vol. 2, 66. Ibid., vol. 2, 65. Ibid., vol. 2, 475. Beach, Mughal and Rajput Painting, 64. Giovanni Botero, The Travellers Breviat (New York: Da Capo, 1969), 110. Jean Du Bec, The Historie of the Great Emperor Tamerlan, trans. H. M. (London: Printed for William Ponsonby, 1597). Howard Miller, “Tamburlaine: The Migration and Translation of Marlowe’s Arabic Sources,” Travel and Translation in the Early Modern Period, ed. Carmine G. Di Biase (New York: Rodopi, 2006), 263. Miller argues that the description of Timur in Ahmad bin Muhammad bin ’Arabshah’s early fifteenth-century biography, ’Aja’ib al-maqdur fi nawa’ib Timur, bears a close resemblance to Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (257–59). Linda McJannet, The Sultan Speaks: Dialogue in English Plays and Histories about the Ottoman Turks (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). McJannet points out that in Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603), Richard Knolles’s description of the Timur-Ottoman conflict is “word for word” similar to Du Bec (115). Du Bec, 77. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 130–31. Ibid., 233. Ibid. Ibid., A2. Foster, Early Travels in India, 186. Ibid. Ibid., 260.


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126. Larry D. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 127. Neil H. Landman, Paula M. Mikkelsen, Rüdiger Bieler, and Bennet Bronson, Pearls: A Natural History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 33. 128. We can add to this list the Black-Winged Pearl Oyster, which forms the “Mabé Pearl,” and the Silver- or Golden-lipped Pearl Oyster, source of the “South Sea Pearl” (Landman, Mikkelsen, Bieler, and Bronson, 34). 129. Choudhury, The Din-i-Ilahi, 160. 130. Landman, Mikkelsen, Bieler, and Bronson, Pearls, 108. 131. Barbour, Before Orientalism, 176–78.


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Westward to the Orient The Specter of Scientific China in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis

Gwee Li Sui

The theme of scientific utopianism is often extracted from Francis Bacon’s dream in New Atlantis of a national college whose ends were “the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things” and “the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire.”1 Meanwhile, scholarly discussion has been all but silent on what seems to be the lesser implications of a historically charged trade route that grounded the same narrative. This “Work Unfinished,” which Bacon’s secretary and publisher William Rawley described as a “fable,” made its first print appearance in 1627 at the end of a posthumous volume of Sylva Sylvarum: or A Natural Historie in Ten Centuries.2 No one, to be sure, disputes the fact of its author’s familiarity with both the geographical explorations and the mercantile opportunities to the left of newer European world maps of his time. Except for the fateful push of Hernando de Grijalva’s ship toward the Moluccas in 1537, all Western expeditions into the so-called la otra mar, or “the other sea,” had left from the ports of Mexico and not Peru before 1568.3 The famous nao de China (ships of China), which traveled between Acapulco and Manila once or twice a year from 1565 to as late as the 1810s, fed the lucrative trade in “Chinese damasks, satins, silks, chinaware, porcelain, perfumes, and jewelry.”4 Bacon simply set his vision of institutional science on a more logical enterprising form of an updated route: “We sailed from Peru, (where we had continued by the space of one whole year,) for China and Japan, by the South Sea; taking with us victuals for twelve


CHAPTER 7


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months; and had good winds from the east, though soft and weak, for five months’ space and more.”5 Most critics situate the secret city of Bensalem, to whose shore this fictional vessel was then diverted by sudden south winds, within the long shadow of Spain’s and Portugal’s foray into the Americas and beyond. After all, a scroll with instructions the island’s coastguards dispatched to the incomers on sight was written in not just ecclesiastical Hebrew, Greek, and Latin but also the Spanish of the dominant regional colonizers.6 This master language seemed to be known by all of Bensalem’s middle-level officials, from a senior coastal authority who first queried the seamen to the Christian priest and governor of its lodge for foreign guests named Strangers’ House.7 A visiting overseer of its central business of scientific research spoke Spanish too and appeared as a cross between a Catholic missionary and a conquistador, being called a Father of Salomon’s House and identified by a hat “like a helmet, or Spanish Montera.”8 Both Peruvian natural resources and legends of Inca treasures were themselves what had inspired England’s own chief projector of advancement under James I to assume vast undiscovered wealth in the Pacific Ocean. Bacon’s head of a Bensalemite family, or a Tirsan, sat on white ivy “curiously wrought with silver and silk of divers colours” between two pages who held a “shiny yellow” charter with clan honors and entitlements, and “a cluster of grapes of gold.”9 His state chariot for the Father came with “cloth of gold tissued upon blue” and was “all of cedar, gilt, and adorned with crystal,” displaying “a sun of gold,” “a small cherub of gold,” “sapphires, set in borders of gold,” and “the like of emeralds of the Peru colour.”10 This article aims to take such familiar historicizing further and tie Bacon’s allegorical adventure to its own unreached and habitually neglected end-point in China during the late Ming period. I will not consider the other destination of Japan, only because I want to uncover Bacon’s reactions to Chinese accomplishments in the areas of natural knowledge, technology, and experimental culture, and their potential repercussions on the West. An obvious first necessity here is to clarify the limits of a coastal American and Pacific context and the relevance of a route that concerned not just the expansionist politics of European empires but also the regular intercontinental activities promoted by trade. These certainties will allow me to go on to observe how much New Atlantis drew on the traditional tales of eastward land travels through the Orient as well as more recent encounters with Chinese culture initiated by merchants, trekkers, conquerors, and missionaries via the South Sea. My inquiry should be able to establish at length an important new angle into the unresolved question of why an idiom that routinely conflated notions of “New Science” and “New World”


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was vital to the emergence of early Western modernity. This well-known feature, which Denise Albanese terms an “isomorphism of novelty,” took root through Robert R. Cawley’s seminal revelation in 1967 of the impact rapid expansion in sea travel had on the Elizabethan imagination.11 It was Cawley who noted that Bacon seemed acquainted with the historic voyage of Portuguese Pedro Fernandez de Quirós, a link further implicating the Spaniard Alvaro de Mendaña de Neyra’s since both set sail westward from Callao, a Peruvian port in Lima.12

Plus Ultra: From the Americas to the Far East What made Mendaña’s and Quirós’s fact-finding missions all the more interesting was a converse reliance on the power of narrative fiction through the frontier and the genre of writing they involved. The South Sea might be largely unexplored then, but it was not empty in enclosing no fewer than four abstract realms from sixteenth-century European cosmology: the golden isles of Indian folklore, the biblical paradise terrestre (earthly paradise) and rich Ophir that King Solomon mined, and the cartographers’ terra australis incognita (unknown southern land).13 Explorers like Christopher Columbus were led by their encounters with American natives to move the fabulous Judeo-Christian lands to this vicinity from their traditionally assumed sites in Africa, Arabia, and India.14 The belief was further helped by the dormant visualization of a whole continent that Aristotle once proposed to keep the weight of the hemispheric land-masses in balance and Claudius Ptolemy later went on to map.15 All these powerful myths of place were interlocking in a way that fixed the common imagination of an ocean O. H. K. Spate calls “the Spanish lake,” its unknown lands already claimed in Spain’s name by the conquistador Vasco Nuñez de Balboa in 1513.16 Documents such as Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa’s Historia de los Incas (1572; History of the Incas) and Miguel Cabello de Valboa’s Miscelánea antártica: una historia del Perú antiguo (1586; Antarctic Miscellany: A History of Ancient Peru) show the seriousness with which early adventurers treated hearsay, like how the late-fourteenth-century Inca ruler Tupac Yupanqui came back from two islands with trophies of “black people, gold, a chair of brass, and a skin and jaw bone of a horse.”17 These stories of Avachumpi and Ninachumbi, or “Outer Island” and “Fire Island,” were layered with still more stories— Alvaro de Saavedra’s visit to an isla del oro (island of gold) in 1528 being one—to convince Philip II of Spain to order an immediate search for “certain islands and a continent (tierra firme).”18 The hastily fitted fleet that sailed with the Viceroy of Peru’s rather inexperienced nephew Mendaña as commandeer went on to make on


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February 7, 1568, the first and, for another two centuries, only recorded Western sighting of the Solomon Islands.19 Exact details were far more troublesome, since Mendaña’s guide Sarmiento claimed that his own discovery of what he differently called Nombre de Jesús (Name of Jesus) was suppressed by his glory-seeking superior.20 The notorious feud between these two men and the Solomons’ continued elusiveness seemed nonetheless incidental to the way the map of European knowledge was evolving, with the 1587 edition of Abraham Ortelius’s authoritative atlas unveiling an Insulae Salomonis (Solomon’s Island) just east of New Guinea.21 Mendaña’s attempt to return with Quirós’s help twenty-seven years later proved futile and ran aground from inadequate supplies, the loss of half his fleet, and widespread illness and deaths, including his own. His successor’s second excursion reached the largest of a group of islands that James Cook would name the New Hebrides in 1774 but, on May 14, 1606, Quirós simply proclaimed his journey’s end. Declaring the whole region australia del Espiritu Santo (southern land of the Holy Spirit), this mariner established on 15° 10’ South latitude the biblical “city of New Jerusalem” and instituted an “Order of the Holy Ghost” by knighting both colonists and natives as its “discoverers, settlers, defenders, and preservers, and no other, obliged without pay to serve in all the royal and public employments.”22 With age, he even boasted of having found there “one fourth of the world,” lands “better than Spain,” and what “should be an earthly paradise” rich with gold, silver, and pearls and populated by angelic “decent people, clean, cheerful and reasonable.”23 The similarities between Quirós’s and Bacon’s travelogues are no doubt uncanny: both rewarded hardship and despair in the Pacific with entry into New Jerusalem or New Atlantis Bensalem, hidden sophisticated societies run by multicultural Christian brotherhoods. Salomon’s House, as the “noblest foundation” and “lanthorn” of Bensalem, might bear “a little corrupted” the name of its third-century BCE founder King Solamona, but it is hard not to see in “Salomon” “Solomon,” the two spellings being used interchangeably by Bacon himself.24 News of Mendaña’s discovery had also reached English ears by 1572, the year Henry Hawks gave his trader’s account of the Spanish find in the new edition of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, a three-volume compendium of sea reports released between 1598 and 1600.25 All these tightly connected factors are what compel many critics today to assume a limit to historicizing and reassert an allegory of progress tied to the Columbian journey that defied the famed warning on the mythological Pillars of Hercules, non plus ultra (nothing further beyond). The vessel steering through “the greatest wilderness of waters in the world”


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is for them an unquestioned picture of science as it was pushing its way toward an America of the mind, a brave new world of truths based on concrete experience rather than old knowledge, superstition, and hearsay.26 Therefore, Neil Rennie’s updating of Cawley’s work sums up New Atlantis with a single line from another late Baconian text, De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (1623; The Dignity and Improvement of Science): “For how long shall we let a few received authors stand up like Hercules’ columns, beyond which there shall be no sailing or discovery in science?”27 Others like Albanese, Jerry Weinberger, Charles C. Whitney, and Simon Wortham follow an angle established by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno to observe a Eurocentric-humanist “work of domination” that could conflate Western sea exploration and Bensalemite science.28 To be sure, this use of a familiar Baconian analogy is not modern and began with Rawley’s own claim of its centrality, leading him to expunge from his 1647 Latinized version the opening reference to the South Sea.29 Its singular truth may be asserted only at the expense of an obscured level of meaning, what we must now recover by pointing out that Rennie’s cited line actually originated eighteen years earlier in Bacon’s two-book Proficience and Advancement of Learning (1605). Almost all the same words had appeared there in a question that did not specify science as the primary frustrated field of inquiry and asked not “how long” but “why” traditional authorities should be allowed to remain unchallenged.30 These subtle differences are central because they show Bacon initially agonizing over a general cultural stasis whose effect he then downplayed by focusing more on the practical cost of stagnancy. In other words, what Bacon once regarded as the West’s natural apathy toward pure inquiry was later revised into a mere phase of a civilization’s more representative life, a condition to be overcome by the march of grand history itself. The understanding reposits New Atlantis as less a novelization of Bacon’s argument for scientific pursuits than the exact means through which he created cultural markers of greatness to light the path of his conjectured progress. Thus, a match between Renaissance Europe’s reach at sea and Bensalem’s at around 1400 BCE secured not just the West’s claim to glory but primarily a timeline that could cast its recent feats some three millennia into its own future’s past: “And for our own ships, they went sundry voyages, as well to your Straits, which you call the Pillars of Hercules, as to other parts in the Atlantic and Mediterrane Seas; as to Paguin (which is the same with Cambaline) and Quinzy, upon the Oriental Seas, as far as to the borders of the East Tartary.”31 This imagination of a bygone era of global maritime commerce also underscored the benchmarks of two real civilizations: that of classical




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Europe and the supposedly unbroken one of the Chinese. The move was meant to provoke Bacon’s readers to set themselves against the great Bronze Age cultures of Greece and the Aegean as well as the astonishing Far Eastern world lately grasped for its internal continuity and long list of technical accomplishments. Yet, while Bensalem served as such an alter ego, its past mirroring Europe’s present as its sophisticated present a potential future, its express place among the pre-Christian sea powers of Phoenicia, Carthage, Egypt, Palestine, the Americas, and China stressed the last’s unique modern status.32 Chinese longevity was the basis for Bacon’s fantasy of an enduring cultural alternative aligned with the West and reframed his adventure “beyond both the old world and the new” as more than a metaphor in its desire to encroach upon the known sphere of Chinese socioeconomic influence.33 Anachronistic elements show this fixation clearly: by depicting China as still polarized three thousand years ago between Quinzy and Cambaline, or Manzian Hangchow and Tartar Peking, Bacon’s grossest error was hardly his depiction of Peking as a seaport, a notion possibly derived from John Mandeville’s mid-fourteenthcentury reference to the “isle of Cathay.”34 Rather, he revealed that the only Middle Kingdom he cared about was either recent or unchanging since Bensalem’s age-old familiarity with China did not translate into a knowledge of its contours prior to the Yuan or Mongol dynasty of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. His siting of Cathay and China as one and the same terrain further did away with a geographical indeterminacy that could not have been resolved before the clarifications of Jesuits Matteo Ricci and Bento de Góis around the turn of the seventeenth century.35 These points fix the span of what Bacon knew about China firmly within the circulated narratives from Marco Polo’s visit to the Orient between 1271 and 1298, up to recent reports like Ricci’s and de Góis’s. Overt material borrowings deepen our understanding here: the textual surface bearing Bensalem’s official decrees was said to be “somewhat yellower” than European parchments, “shining like the leaves of writing tables, but otherwise soft and flexible.”36 Although the knowledge of paper-making and printing must disqualify the influence of the Incas, it implicated the Mesoamericans and the Chinese in a double attribution that affirmed Bacon’s own belief in a vibrant pre-Columbian relationship between the continents.37 In fact, it was the Chinese who had gone beyond mere technical use to employ polished yellow paper for swift dissemination of imperial dictates, Bensalem’s entry laws regulated in this manner being precisely admitted as Chinese in origin.38 On top of other protocols resembling recorded Western experiences in oriental courts, we also read of “scarlet oranges” that could help the body to resist infection and three


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“wholesome and good” beverages: grape wine, “a drink of grain” like ale “but more clear,” and cider made from a local fruit.39 Polo’s Cathayans were known to consume rice wine “clear and pleasing to the eye,” and the markets of his Hangchow or Kinsay, which he translated as “City of Heaven,” sold great pears with pulps “white and fragrant like a confection,” and peaches.40 Mandarin oranges were available commercially in the West only from the early nineteenth century, but the Augustinian Padre Juan González de Mendoza, sent by Philip II to observe China in 1580, did mention having tasted three new types of oranges as well as lychees, huge tasty melons, and “a kinde of russet appels.”41 Tales of Chinese Science: From Marco Polo to Matteo Ricci Climactically, the impressive range of research by Salomon’s House is still regarded today as a distinct Baconian vision that helped found the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge in 1660. This connection enjoying early affirmation was what Jonathan Swift satirized in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) via a depiction of a vast Academy of Lagado with chambers for numerous grand but plainly ridiculous experiments.42 A sense of Bacon’s complete originality here seems to be supported by his so-called Magnolia naturæ, præcipue quoad usus humanos (Great Works of Nature, Particularly in Their Use for the Benefit of Man), a wish-list ranging from the improvement of human life, health, and pleasure to the manipulation of nature and people alike, which Rawley appended to all his editions of New Atlantis.43 We must, however, go on to see both this long catalogue and the story’s closing survey of Bensalemite science as reacting to the might of a spectral Otherness shaped by China’s strange but thriving centers of commerce and social improvement. Polo’s surreally water-bound Kinsay was its region’s industrial powerhouse with “twelve guilds of the different crafts,” each given “12,000 houses in the occupation of its workmen” and managed by master craftsmen who doubled as the companies’ household heads.44 Its likeness to Bensalem’s corporate infrastructure is matched by that of hierarchically seated feasts and rich pageants in Polo’s Peking, called New Cambaluc or “City of the Emperor,” to New Atlantis’s spectacular Feast of the Family and lavish welcome for a high-ranking official.45 The Tartar Khan’s dazzling throne room is mirrored in the inner space of theatricalized power exercised by the Tirsan and the visiting Father, Salomon’s House itself imaging a central symbol of Yuan greatness, a research body made up of Christian Europeans, Mohammedan Arabs, and Orientals.46




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This prestigious pluralistic council of some five thousand astrologers was described by Polo as being in the permanent employ of the “Great Kaan” through the guarantee of very attractive annuities.47 Almanacs collecting the researchers’ regular findings were sold openly for the considerate, if not intellectual, purpose of letting a wider public verify their accuracy and the reliability of their methods. The Venetian’s further claim to have seen huge elaborate instruments of inquiry were confirmed three centuries later by Ricci, who found in a northern “college of Chinese mathematicians” astrolabes outstripping in both size and design “anything of the kind as yet ever seen or read about in Europe.”48 The earlier account related how Christian, Saracen, and Cathayan knowledge-seekers used the devices to investigate celestial motions with care and predict not just the weather, but also “disease, murrain, wars, disorders, and treasons.”49 Bensalem’s own occult interest, which critics Weinberger and Richard Serjeantson are shrewd to detect, could show Bacon defining its superiority by an acquisition of what he thought the Chinese to have been seeking in vain, a stable methodology for grasping all phenomena.50 Presumably, the island paradise’s cultural and religious foundations were fused in the first century CE when a college fellow admitted that science should not reject every account of the miraculous but must discern “between divine miracles, works of nature, works of art, and impostures and illusions of all sorts,” and interpret authentic signs.51 The Father who narrated this thus numbered among Bensalem’s great rituals its publication of reports on selected “new profitable inventions” and its priestly scientists’ regular trips to key cities to offer prognostic guidance: “And we do also declare natural divinations of diseases, plagues, swarms of hurtful creatures, scarcity, tempests, earthquakes, great inundations, comets, temperature of the year, and divers other things; and we give counsel thereupon what the people shall do for the prevention and remedy of them.”52 The broad influence of Polo’s vision was self-evident in all major Oriental tales up to Bacon’s time, but it had its most pronounced form in Mandeville’s possibly Anglo-Norman account from the late Middle Ages. This narrative drew on what was already well-known by the time about the technical competence and material opulence of Chinese capitals, his bountiful Hangchow, called Cassay, being the world’s biggest city and having many “merchants of different nations” and “Christian men,” and “a house of Christian friars.”53 Mandeville’s Camalach followed Polo’s Cambaluc as the pride of “a great country, beautiful, rich, fertile, full of good merchandise,” but was so advanced that its royal gifts included “cleverly and intricately made” birds that “leapt, and danced, and flapped their wings, and disported themselves in other ways.”54 These mysterious


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automatons fascinated the author to the point that he believed the Cathayans to “surpass all other nations in cleverness, for good or ill,” and their rivals “blind, without eyes, as far as knowledge and craft are concerned.” Versions of such excessive admiration perpetuated a notion of Chinese superiority that would last well into the seventeenth century when it was challenged famously by Ricci’s report of having baffled the Chinese with his own European clocks and skill in mathematical computation.55 The drastic shift could reveal two trends: the damage to China’s reputation and exploratory culture with the Ming court’s mid-fourteenth-century move toward isolationism, and a growing climate of competition through which the West itself was learning to articulate, and to create by articulating, its desired legacy. Indeed, the host of Bacon’s seamen depicted his people’s noble trade as not for gold, silver, jewels, silks, or spices—all notably oriental commodities—but for “Light,” “God’s first creature,” what signified the means through which the idea of possessing earth’s bounty could be transformed.56 A check with Sung Ying-Hsing’s scientific classic Tiangong Kaiwu (Exploitation of the Works of Nature) of 1637, if not Joseph Needham’s modern, unfinished series Science and Civilisation in China begun in 1954, shows what the Chinese were already capable of by the seventeenth century. Sung offered a long list of industries monopolized by the Ming state: agriculture, irrigation, and hydraulics; sericulture and textile technology; milling machinery; production of salt and sugar; making of ceramics and paper; casting and forging; land and sea transportation; calcination of stones; manufacture of oils, fats, mercury, and ink; metallurgy; gunpowder weaponry; fermentation; and production of pearls and gems.57 Salomon’s House was marked by not just a similar organizational division of knowledge and skills but also pools for distilling salt and fresh water and burials for making “divers cements, as the Chineses do with porcellain” but “in greater variety and some of them more fine.”58 Its more conspicuous difference resided in how it proceeded further to bury “in the air” and “below the earth,” with both high towers and deep caves to test different methods of isolation, coagulation, and refrigeration and to create new synthetic materials.59 There were likewise other means familiar to the Chinese: water- and wind-powered mechanisms, artificial sources “tincted upon vitriol, sulphur, steel, lead, brass, nitre, and other materials,” chemical and biological laboratories, breeding enclosures for silkworms and honeybees, “brew-houses, bake-houses, and kitchens” for making nourishing food, apothecaries, factories for paper and textiles, furnaces, military machineries, and movements on land, sea, and air.60 Yet, Bensalem’s scientists took the effects on basic bodily experiences to




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an extreme by having “perspective-houses” to work on light and lens, “sound-houses” and “perfume-houses” on sound and smell respectively, and a separate department to perfect sensory deception too. Its “enginehouses” investigated a range from obviously Chinese gunpowder technology “both for pleasure and use” to the mechanics of underwater travel and Ricci’s “curious” clocks, while its mathematicians sought to widen what was perceived after Ricci’s testimony to be a clear Western lead.61 The final form of Sung’s text postdated New Atlantis’s writing, but there were earlier Chinese technical encyclopedias and, hearsay and minor accounts aside, an English edition of Polo’s Most Noble and Famous Travels published by the merchant John Frampton in 1579. Also, Mendoza’s Historia de las cosas más notables, ritos y costumbres del gran reyno de la China (History of the Most Remarkable Things, Rites, and Customs of the Great Kingdom of China) was translated into English by Robert Parke two years after its appearance in 1586 and almost certainly came to Bacon’s prompt attention. This text began by relating how the “mightie countrie” of China, “the most fertilest in all the world,” could not tolerate “vacabunds and idle people” but invested every resource it had into the generation of food and materials to restore well-being, advance culture, and safeguard prosperity.62 An admiration for such folks “prudent and wise in the government of their common wealth” and “subtill and ingenious in all arts” was what convinced Mendoza to see an otherwise idolatrous “blind people” as long ripe for Christian conversion.63 He would, in fact, prove their divine election by noting how they seemed aware of their descent from “nevewes of Noe” who traveled eastward for paradise, and of a three-headed deity like the Christian Trinity, suggesting the early witness of the Apostle Thomas stationed in India.64 By comparison, Bensalem’s heathen forefathers were illumined around 50 CE through a drifting cedar chest—a form of both Noah’s Ark and the Ark of the Covenant— which contained the complete Christian Bible, with books expressly not written yet, such as the Apocalypse of John, and a handwritten letter from the Apostle Bartholomew. This epistle spoke of how, being warned by an angel in “a vision of glory,” “I, Bartholomew,” had committed God’s message “to the floods of the sea”: “Therefore I do testify and declare unto that people where God shall ordain this ark to come to land, that in the same day is come unto them salvation and peace, and good-will, from the Father, and from the Lord Jesus.”65 Because even Bacon’s biblical evangelist reflected a conquistadorial quest or at least a Columbus-inspired westward push for “Gold, God, and Cathay,” the body of Europe resided in both his utopian land and that power alighting from without to fulfill its ordained destiny. In other


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words, the Western desire to achieve parity with the advanced civilizations of history came doubled with an inverted belief that the daunting Far East was still barbaric in being polytheistic and pluralistic, showing a lack of spiritual and thus methodological clarity. Such a vision of China radically differed from those held by English seekers of the so-called Northwest Passage, an elusive route to the Orient via the Arctic Ocean, who kept in mind the competition of other European powers. Parke himself hoped to gather financial support for “late worthie attemptes” such as John Davis’s by dedicating his translation to Thomas Cavendish, whose circumnavigation of the world in the 1580s opened “the gate to the spoile of the great and late mightie, vniuersall, and infested enimie of this realme, & of al countries that professe true religion,” namely Spain.66 To be sure, one may read Bacon’s scientific utopia for an affront to both tradition and the Spanish empire, Plato’s original Atlantis being ironized as the land of Nueva España or “New Spain,” home to the defunct “mighty and proud kingdoms” of Tyrambel and Coya, that is, Mexico and Peru. These two American civilizations abounding in “arms, shipping, and riches” were said to have grown so arrogant that they mounted tragic “great expeditions,” Tyrambel’s through the Atlantic to invade Athens, in a battle Plato allegedly mentioned, and Coya’s through the South Sea to attack Bensalem. Coya’s subsequent defeat by superior tactics rather than sheer might alluded to England’s historic victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588 and, in being paired with Athen’s legendary triumph over the Atlanteans, further hinted at its potential ascension to Greek grandeur.67 Yet, although the Spanish threat was real, immediate, and textually noticeable, Bacon’s greater instinct lay in his recognition of China’s more enduring rivalry, this clarifying his actual contribution as an international socioeconomic outlook. His depictions of Spain and China bore tellingly distinct shapes of cultural Otherness: unlike Spanish dominance, Chinese superiority was not so much vilified, opposed, and negated as admired on all terms except those with regard to morality and an unframed scientific diversity. Because Bacon’s imagined world might appear more happily as New China than as New Spain, the usual critical comparison of New Atlantis to Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and other seventeenth-century utopian narratives such as Johann Valentin Andreae’s Reipublicae Christianopolitanae descriptio (1619; A Description of the Christian Republic), Tommaso Campanella’s Civitas solis (1623; City of the Sun), and Gabriel Plattes’s A Description of the Famous Kingdome of Macaria (1641) has still not grasped its full imaginative range. Bacon’s use of fiction to secure a vantage point that could obscure the West’s real limitations, weaken its cultural inertia, and shift the epicenter of its engagements stressed not




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just his individual originality but also the factor of neurosis arising from his anxiety over a truly inassimilable Other that seemed to undermine or overwhelm it. This ironic creative reliance on an agon challenges the common assumption that Bacon chose the mode of travel-writing for its inherent empirical rigor and highlights his likelier understanding that the leading travelogues then tended to, in the words of Parke’s printer, “extoll their owne actions, even to the setting forth of many vntruthes and incredible things.”68 Indeed, Matthew Restall recently reminds us to treat with gravity the truth that most Spanish travel narratives had been self-aggrandizing probanza de mérito (claims to merit) aimed at securing wealth, title, and royal favor, their kind of knowledge tied less to pure facts than to personally invested assertions of objective reliability.69 Such grounding artifice at a time when the notion of facticity itself was coalescing was what Bacon understood too in Novum Organum: sive, Indicia vera de interpretatione naturæ (1620; New Organon: or True Directions Concerning the Interpretation of Nature): he declared that, as the mind existed “not only in its own faculties” but also “in its connection with things,” in yet another conflation of geography and science, “the art of discovery may advance as discoveries advance.”70 Made in China: From New Atlantis to New Europe We therefore do well to read the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travel genre less for a visionary scientific mode than for a practice of dramatic improvisation in the space of truths yet to arrive. The distinction can help us to see Bacon’s own audacity in pairing Chinese junks with Indian canoes as vessels he deemed both inferior and degenerate, poor shadows of the “tall ships” that characterized their respective civilizations’ Golden Age.71 To be fair, his false association and contrast here might have followed some European reports such as the Jesuit Jerónimo Román de la Higuera’s, which alleged that Chinese vessels would “go out a little” in fine weather but “hasten back at the least wind.”72 Junks had already demonstrated their versatility and sturdiness by this time, as best seen in how Admiral Cheng Ho’s early-fifteenth-century nine-masted treasure ships would set the structural limit in wooden shipbuilding for the next four centuries. The whole fleet of Cheng Ho famously made seven voyages between 1405 and 1433 to regions from Southeast Asia, India, and Ceylon to the Persian Gulf and East Africa, and demonstrated organizational and technological abilities whose impact on visited societies is still being studied by historians today.73 For this reason, the mentioned “tall ships” of China might refer not just to the enormous Yuan carriers noted by medieval travelers like Polo for their crews of almost three hundred


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men, but also to more recent early Ming vessels.74 Bacon’s comments certainly showed his knowledge of a range of nautical developments as well as social changes in Ming China, from its initial economic expansionism to its later restrictions on foreign trade, from the ambitious scale of those great sea missions to a retreat into mere inland navigation.75 In fact, these shifts were presented in New Atlantis as symptoms of a cultural decline that could affirm the Baconian belief that all human civilizations answered to the true Christian God and must fall when “Divine Revenge” discovered any work along nonhumanistic lines.76 The fate of native American civilizations was explained in such dramatic terms, with the fabled “descendants of Neptune” in Tyrambel and Coya decimated by a “particular deluge”—a version of the biblical flood—within a century of their impudent acts of aggression toward God’s future elect.77 Chinese offence, however, went beyond plain hubris to involve a manner of conduct that was painstakingly torn out of Bensalem’s social fabric by King Solamona, a legendary “lawgiver” who resembled Moses, Solomon, and More’s benevolent despot King Utopos.78 Distrustful of imported “novelties and commixture of manners,” Solamona had installed a farreaching system of cultural exclusion directly based on an “ancient law in the kingdom of China,” which “yet continued in use.”79 The ensuing discrepancy of borrowing a foreign idea to bar foreign influence was swiftly resolved by having the prototype reposited as “a poor thing” conjured by “a curious, ignorant, fearful, foolish nation” and unlike Bensalem’s version, whose attention to “all points of humanity” was seen in its care for troubled vessels. Such overt belittling of China went further: some lines later, a remark that “the Chineses sail where they will or can” led to the claim that, as their own wanderlust contradicted their social guardedness, the Orientals truly adhered to an unnatural “law of pusillanimity and fear.”80 By comparison, Bacon’s exotic people conveyed no such irregularity: given their kind nature, if they ever ventured out at all, they would observe the “admirable” value of a contract “preserving the good which cometh by communicating with strangers, and avoiding the hurt.”81 These enigmatic pronouncements have polarized decades of academics between an impression of Bensalem as splendidly open and forward-looking and as suspicious in its somewhat chronic and uncritical self-congratulation. Conservative readers see “an exceptional degree of charity, humanity, kindness, and compassion,” and find recent allies in Perez Zagorin and Catherine Gimelli Martin who hail Bacon’s historical “rebuttal of ideologically regimented society,” treating his modern skeptics as either overspeculative or anachronistic.82 Meanwhile, textually visible awkwardness and contradictions in the lives of ordinary




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Bensalemites have opened the way for critics such as Weinberger, Whitney, and Wortham to question the city’s often mystified reliance on espionage, secrecy, censorship, and even repression.83 To this debate, my own point of Bacon’s ambivalent Sinophilia must prove useful: an area made contentious by Horkheimer and Adorno’s anti-Enlightenment thesis has been Bacon’s lament that earlier thinkers simply “substituted belief for knowledge” and were “as unwilling to doubt as they were reckless in supplying answers.”84 A resistance to “the happy match between the mind of man and the nature of things” was described as what kept Europeans from using their intellect to improve their conditions even as the great inventions of printing, artillery, and the compass had emerged “more by chance than by systematic enquiry into nature.”85 Yet, because all three named discoveries were known Chinese imports issuing from Chinese modes of inquiry, this whole section from Novum Organum—which would rank creators above “founders of cities and empires, legislators, saviours of their country from long endured evils, quellers of tyrannies, and the like”— intrigues us.86 We already observe its cultural politics at work behind openly noble statements: “For the benefits of discoveries may extend to the whole race of man, civil benefits only to particular places; the latter last not beyond a few ages, the former through all time. Moreover the reformation of a state in civil matters is seldom brought in without violence and confusion; but discoveries carry blessings with them, and confer benefits without causing harm or sorrow to any.”87 The focus on general humanity here is central: printing, artillery, and the compass, which altered “the whole face and state of things throughout the world” in literature, warfare, and navigation, illustrated how “no empire, no sect, no star” could have “exerted greater power and influence in human affairs.”88 However, Bacon came to this piece of wisdom by taking his examples as proof of not “the force and virtue and consequences of discoveries” per se but how such impact was possible for inventions “unknown to the ancients, and of which the origin, though recent, is obscure and inglorious.”89 He also incriminatingly used the pure value of inventiveness to differentiate between Renaissance Europe and the “wildest and most barbarous districts of New India,” a gap he found “great enough to justify the saying that ‘man is a god to man’” in “aid and benefit” as well as “condition.”90 So two moves through which this scientific visionary held on to incompatible meanings may be noted: he first suppressed the notion of Chinese creativity in order to raise an argument that could establish objective coordinates for the practice of cultural evaluation. At the same time, the appeal to a sense of grand humanity sought through a level of commensurateness across all cultures set up an


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anthropological hierarchy that would name ranks below Europeans but erase those above them. These sleights of hand do tempt us to read for a racial ontology extending to New Atlantis, seeing how, in a double frame of racial typecasting, the equations of the “Spirit of Fornication” with “a little foul ugly Æthiop” and Bensalem’s “Spirit of Chastity” with “a fair beautiful Cherubin” was attributed to the sex-fixated Jew Joabin.91 The seemingly essentialist content is pursued by Claire Jowitt in relation to colonialism but can be returned to a conservative perspective: it could be tied to a larger strategic attempt to clarify English socioeconomic power and interests between the poles of China and Spain and of the Americas and Africa.92 More crucially, we may also complicate the skeptical view and trace the Enlightenment’s “disenchantment of the world,” argued by Horkheimer and Adorno, not to what Bacon’s science would do, but to what his words were already doing.93 The rise of human power to a spirited conquest of all nature and society did not follow the negation of a naive, arbitrary, and lethargic stance toward knowledge, but involved first a cultural pillaging which that manner of describing progress itself permitted. We find the same maneuver in Novum Organum when Bacon illustrated his claim that innovations arose from a strong imagination of effects with the discovery of gunpowder, silk, the magnet, and then “of sugar, of paper, or the like” and “the art of printing.”94 China was given credit only in a later admission that the West had exploited all the possibilities of heat, its work tending toward “rarefaction, and desiccation, and consumption,” but there existed practices of cold that “the Chinese were said to do in the making of porcelain,” burying masses “for forty or fifty years” and transmitting them “to heirs, as a kind of artificial minerals.”95 This statement revealing exactly the Far Eastern origin of Bensalemites’ turn to both “condensation and inteneration” and long-term experimentation bore a curious tone of admiration that must make us see the islanders’ open contempt for the Chinese as a kind of competitive anxiety.96 At New Atlantis’s close, we even hear of two large museums of science conjoining the outward life of inventions and inner creative genius, one housing replicas of “more rare and excellent inventions” and the other “the statua’s of all principal inventors.”97 The latter’s luminaries included “the statua of your Columbus, that discovered the West Indies: also the inventor of ships: your monk that was the inventor of ordnance and of gunpowder: the inventor of music: the inventor of letters: the inventor of printing: the inventor of observations of astronomy: the inventor of works in metal: the inventor of glass: the inventor of silk of the worm: the inventor of wine: the inventor of corn and bread: the inventor of sugars.”98




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Bacon’s roll call of important creators revealed at least three of his characteristic strategies: first, in cases such as printing and the manufacturing of silk, the key inventions were named and celebrated while their Chinese origins were suppressed. Second, by passing over the technique of porcelain-making he admired in favor of the heat-based production of glass, he chose to trumpet Western achievements, a move he repeated with “letters of the alphabet,” what he listed in Novum Organum as an ancient invention alien to the Chinese “to this day.”99 Most outrageously, claiming to show how Bensalem possessed “more certain tradition than you have,” his fictional authority on science hailed ordnance and gunpowder as discovered by “your monk,” a nameless genius syntactically paired with “your Columbus” and so encrypted as European.100 A reader may be tempted to join Nathan Sivin in assuming Bacon’s ignorance here, but his 1625 edition of Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral actually noted that ordnance was called “thunder and lightning, and magic” by the Macedonians, present in “the city of the Oxidrakes in India,” and “well known” to be used “in China above two thousand years.”101 This awareness appeared in an essay titled “Of Vicissitude of Things,” where he sought to qualify a sense of progress with the truth of endless change and mutation, and cited how “Plato had an imagination, That all knowledge was but remembrance,” and “Salomon giveth his sentence, That all novelty is but oblivion.”102 The emphasis on the reality of lost memory was meant to warn an audience excited by the growth of new knowledge against a conceited ignorance that would marginalize ancient learning and its inestimable scope of influence. Yet, in New Atlantis, this lesson seemed to be inverted to say that, in the light of mutability and a civilization’s rising destiny, what arrived belatedly could always be posited as the original, and what was borrowed, taken for the authentic. Conclusion: Scientific Orientalism The sole reason behind Bacon’s scheme to disembody Chinese genius should now be obvious: the West’s transcending of a scientific civilization had to begin with the reimagination of its Other’s position of relative inferiority. This understanding changes the terrain of a puzzle around which the whole study of the history of Chinese science as pioneered by Needham has been revolving: why sixteenth-century China, with all its advances, did not play midwife to modern inquiry. The historian Toby E. Huff rightly finds such a question deceptive since its premises for what constitutes knowledge are already cast in Western terms: “The application of mathematical hypotheses to Nature, the full understanding and use of the experimental method, the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, the


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geometrisation of space, and the acceptance of the mechanical model of reality.”103 A frame that prioritizes theoretical wholeness over technical efficiency and science over sciences prejudges the value of Chinese epistemology and effectively permits the recovery of what can only prove its case. Huff ’s own angle, however, maintains that the Chinese “problem” resided more in its grounding on largely Confucian metaphysics that, unlike what Christian values could achieve in the West, retarded the growth of pure empirical learning and a conceptually abstract integration of ideas.104 All I have shown through New Atlantis so far is the simple divergent fact that—as early modern science was not a clear by-product of Christian culture—an assessment on the level of religious sciences would still be as self-validating as Needham’s approach via methodologies. Huff may further see aspects of incommensurability in the notion of civilizational difference, but he does so by downplaying how capital could be a transcultural force affecting intellectual landscapes, how new money was an axis in the relationship between New Science and New World. I have conversely asserted that, as applied metaphysics existed in both the East and the West whose knowledge lay open to mutual influences, it would be presumptuous to ignore the full impact of real transgressive encounters. This point makes a vital distinction between a pure and autonomous pursuit of knowledge and the kind sought in a direction and in areas where it must matter sociopolitically, a difference stressing the quiet significance of “soft” competition among peoples. Contemporary discussion on scientific progress still tends to privilege discrete innovative forms over the maps of social desire tied to their worldly emergence and so persists in a denial that deception, secrecy, and selectivity—all Bensalemite features Bacon approved of—had any relevance to scientific inquiry. The alternative mindset I am encouraging here is one that can expose and acknowledge the contest of cultures and the active revisionism through which methodologies identified spaces for their own truths, errors, and ambiguities and then cloaked their maneuvering. This rethinking requires us to treat early modern knowledge as a subtler entity in the way it interacted with both the express statements of its ideas and an underlying selfimagining kept up by a culture’s real or spectral rivalry with another. The warier investigations can help to reevaluate Bacon in a proper multicultural history of Western thought as well as an economically determined political struggle overlapping with the possibilities of knowledge production. A more exciting study of progress as itself an invention awaits us in our willingness to traverse what is strictly neither interdisciplinary nor comparative: a field of historically covert efforts to close the gaps between dissimilar epistemes through the flagrant rehearsal of power.




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1. Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount of St. Albans, and Lord High Chancellor of England, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 15 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1900), 5:398. 2. Bacon, The Works, 5:355, 5:357. 3. Celsius Kelly, “The Terra Australis—A Franciscan Quest,” The Americas 4, no. 4 (1948): 436. Grijalva had sailed in search of rich islands from Paita in Peru when his ship was blown off course to the latitude of the Moluccas. His refusal to travel deeper into Portuguese waters led to a mutiny during which he was killed; the vessel itself broke up somewhere on the northern coast of New Guinea. See O. H. K. Spate, The Spanish Lake (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), 96–97. 4. John Lynch, Spain under the Habsburg, 2 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964– 69), 2:225; L. A. Clayton, “Trade and Navigation in the Seventeenth-Century Viceroyalty of Peru,” Journal of Latin American Studies 7, no. 1 (1975): 5–13. 5. Bacon, The Works, 5:359. 6. Ibid., 5:360–61. 7. Ibid., 5:362, 5:367–68. While almost nothing is known about the Bensalemites’ domestic lingua franca, there is a brief mention of the city-name, Hebrew for “son of peace,” being in their dominant tongue: see 5:370. 8. Ibid., 5:397–98, 5:395. 9. Ibid., 5:386–88. 10. Ibid., 5:395–96. 11. Denise Albanese, New Science, New World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 1. 12. Robert R. Cawley, Unpathed Waters: Studies in the Influence of the Voyagers on Elizabethan Literature (London: Frank Cass, 1967), 42; Neil Rennie, FarFetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 40–44. 13. Harry Kelsey, “Finding the Way Home: Spanish Exploration of the Round-Trip Route across the Pacific Ocean,” Western Historical Quarterly 17, no. 2 (1986): 145–49; Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts, 39–40. Ophir was King Solomon’s legendary source of gold, silver, precious stones, and almug wood: see 1 Kings 9:28, 10:11, 22:49; 1 Chronicles 29:4; 2 Chronicles 8:18; Job 22:24, 28:16; Psalms 45:9; and Isaiah 13:12. 14. Christopher Columbus, The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus: Being His Own Log-Book, Letters and Dispatches with Connecting Narrative Drawn from the Life of the Admiral by His Son Hernando Colon and Other Contemporary Historians, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), 220–22, 300. 15. Aristotle, Meteorologica, 2:362b. 16. Balboa may be known as the first European to behold the Pacific Ocean, but Martin Waldseemüller’s Universalis cosmographia secundum Ptholomaei


Notes


17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

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traditionem et Americi Vespucii aliorumque lustrationes (Cosmography of the world according to the tradition of Ptolemy, Amerigo Vespucci, and other surveyors) already mapped it six years earlier, in 1507. See Peter Whitfield, The Image of the World: Twenty Centuries of World Maps (San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1994), 54–55. Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa and Baltasar de Ocampo, History of the Incas and The Execution of the Inca Tupac Amaru, ed. and trans. Clements Markham (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1907), 135–37. Alvaro de Mendaña de Neyra et al., The Discovery of the Solomon Islands by Alvaro de Mendaña in 1568, ed. and trans. William A. Amherst and Basil Thomson, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1901), 1:5, 1:83. Bacon invoked the same words to describe how his lost sailors were galvanized by the thought of “islands or continents, that hitherto were not come to light”: see Bacon, The Works, 5:360. Philippe de Buache demonstrated only in 1781 that the Solomon Islands should lie between Santa Cruz and New Guinea, at about 12° 30’ South latitude, and were thus what French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville had found in 1768 and Jean-François-Marie de Surville in 1769. Sarmiento and Ocampo, History of the Incas, 11, 136. Also, compare Mendaña’s and Sarmiento’s accounts with those of chief pilot Hernando Gallego, chief purser Gomez Catoira, and an unnamed witness. Mendaña, The Discovery of the Solomon Islands, 1:17–19, 1:86–87, 1:107–11, 2:196–97, 2:226–30. Marcel van den Broecke, Ortelius Atlas Maps: An Illustrated Guide (Utrecht: HES Publishers, 1996), 3:1, 11:1. Pedro Fernandez de Quirós, Voyages of Pedro Fernandez de Quirós, 1595 to 1606, ed. and trans. Clements Markham, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1904), 1:251. Ibid., 2:478–81. Bacon, The Works, 5:382. Note the following references to the biblical Solomon: from The Proficience and Advancement of Learning (1605), 6:92, 6:94–95, 6:108, 6:141, 6:159, 6:172, 6:182, 6:195, 6:223, 6:296, 6:309, 6:326, 6:352, 6:358, 6:364, 6:399; and from Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral (1625), 12:198, 12:260, 12:270, 12:273. Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, Made by Sea or Over-Land to the Remote and Farthest Distant Quarters of the Earth at Any Time within the Compass of these 1600 Yeeres, 12 vols., 2nd ed. (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1903–5), 9:392. Bacon, The Works, 5:359. Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts, 39; Bacon, The Works, 8:396. Albanese, New Science, New World, 97; Jerry Weinberger, “Science and Rule in Bacon’s Utopia: An Introduction to the Reading of the New Atlantis,” American Political Science Review 70, no. 3 (1976): 865–85; Charles C. Whitney, “Merchants of Light: Science as Colonization in the New Atlantis,” in Francis Bacon’s Legacy of Texts: “The Art of Discovery Grows with Discovery,” ed. William A. Sessions (New York: AMS Press, 1990), 255–68; Simon Wortham, “Censorship




29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38.

39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

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and the Institution of Knowledge in Bacon’s New Atlantis,” in Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis”: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Bronwen Price (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 180–98; Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 1–5. Bacon, The Works, 5:359. Ibid., 6:172. Ibid., 5:376–77. Ibid., 5:375–76. Ibid., 5:366–67. John Mandeville, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, trans. C. W. R. D. Moseley (London: Penguin Books, 1983), 167. Matteo Ricci, China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci: 1583–1610, trans. Nicola Trigault and Louis J. Gallagher (New York: Random House, 1953), 505–14. Bacon, The Works, 5:360–61. The Incan writing system conveyed information via a complex system of cords and knots with varying numbers, sizes, shapes, and colors in different arrangements: see Tarmo Kulmar, “On the Writing Systems of Ancient Peru: The Possibility of the Quellqa and the Quipu as an Instrument of Power of the Incas,” Folklore 38 (2008): 135–44. Bacon, The Works, 5:381; Robert Temple, China: Land of Discovery (Wellingborough: Patrick Stephens, 1986), 81–84, 110–16; Charles D. Benn, China’s Golden Age: Everyday Life in the Tang Dynasty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 58. Bacon, The Works, 5:366. Marco Polo, The Book of Ser Marco Polo the Venetian Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, ed. Henri Cordier, trans. Henry Yule, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1929), 1:441, 2:202. Juan González de Mendoza, The History of the Great and Mighty Kingdom of China and the Situation Thereof, ed. George T. Staunton, trans. Robert Parke, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1853–54), 1:14, 2:60–61. Jonathan Swift, The Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Robert A. Greenberg and William Bowman Piper (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1973), 152–64. Bacon, The Works, 5:415–16. Polo, The Book, 2:185–87. Ibid., 1:374–78, 1:386–96; Bacon, The Works, 5:385–89. According to Polo, the rebuilding of Cambaluc in 1267 had followed the warning of royal astrologers to Kublai Khan that the old site would invite rebellion and disorder to his rule. Polo, The Book, 1:381–86, 1:446–56; Bacon, The Works, 5:397. Polo, The Book, 1:446–47. Ricci, China in the Sixteenth Century, 329; Temple, China: Land of Discovery, 36–39.


180


181

49. Polo, The Book, 1:446–47. 50. Jerry Weinberger, “On the Miracles in Bacon’s New Atlantis,” in Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis,” ed. Price, 106–28; Richard Serjeantson, “Natural Knowledge in the New Atlantis,” in Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis,” ed. Price, 82–105. 51. Bacon, The Works, 5:371–72. 52. Ibid., 5:412–13. 53. Mandeville, The Travels, 138–39. 54. Ibid., 141–43. 55. Ricci, China in the Sixteenth Century, 201. Both the world’s first mechanical clock and the most sophisticated medieval one were, in fact, Chinese: the former was built by the Taoist priest and mathematician I-Hsing in 730 CE and the latter by Su Sung in 1092. See Temple, China: Land of Discovery, 103–10. 56. Bacon, The Works, 5:384. 57. Sung Ying-Hsing, Chinese Technology in the Seventeenth Century, trans. E-tu Zen Sun and Shiou-Chuan Sun (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966); Joseph Needham, et al., Science and Civilisation in China, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954). 58. Bacon, The Works, 5:398–400; Temple, China: Land of Discovery, 91–94. 59. Bacon also suggested in Novum Organum (1620) that the use of cold temperatures be tested for its range by “exposing bodies on steeples,” “laying them in subterranean caverns,” “surrounding them with snow and ice in deep pits,” “letting them down into wells,” “burying them in quicksilver and metals,” “plunging them into waters,” and “burying them in the earth.” See Bacon, The Works, 8:335. 60. Bacon, The Works, 5:400–9; Temple, China: Land of Discovery, 14–27, 42–57, 62–66, 68–69, 71–72, 75–86, 91–96, 101–16, 120–21, 123–37, 172–97, 214–48. 61. Bacon, The Works, 5:408–9; Temple, China: Land of Discovery, 103–10, 139– 47, 224–29, 241–48. 62. Mendoza, Great and Mighty Kingdom of China, 1:12–18. 63. Ibid., 1:36–37. 64. Ibid., 1:12–13. Ricci’s own challenge to deep-seated assumptions of Chinese heathenism maintained that the earliest form of religion in China was essentially monotheistic: see Ricci, China in the Sixteenth Century, 93–95. 65. Bacon, The Works, 5:372–73. By having “all the canonical books of the Old and the New Testament,” Bensalem’s Bible actually predated both the fixing of the Christian canon by the Third Council of Carthage and the earliest known complete New Testament manuscript, the Codex Sinaiticus, by some three centuries. See Larry W. Hurtado, “How the New Testament Has Come Down to Us,” The History of Christianity, ed. Tim Dowley (Oxford: Lion Publishing, 1997), 130–36. 66. Mendoza, Great and Mighty Kingdom of China, 1:2–4. 67. Bacon, The Works, 5:377–78; Plato, Timaeus 24d–25d; Plato, Critias 108e–109a. Bacon’s Atlantean navy should have been defeated by the Greeks around 1500 BCE whereas Critias, in Plato’s text, dated this event some eight millennia earlier.




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68. Mendoza, Great and Mighty Kingdom of China, 1:6. 69. Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 11–18. 70. Bacon, The Works, 8:164. 71. Ibid., 5:376. 72. R. H. Major, introduction to Great and Mighty Kingdom of China, by Mendoza, 1:lxxix. 73. Spate, The Spanish Lake, 145; Temple, China: Land of Discovery, 186–91. Gavin Menzies’s recent claim that Cheng Ho had also visited West Africa, the Americas, Greenland, Iceland, the North Pole, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica is widely dismissed by scholars. He has since gone on to assert that a Ming fleet reaching Italy in 1434 helped to pave the way for the European Renaissance: see Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (London: Bantam Press, 2002) and Menzies, 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance (New York: William Morrow, 2008). 74. Polo, The Book, 1:34, 2:249–51. 75. Spate, The Spanish Lake, 144–47. 76. Bacon, The Works, 5:378. 77. Ibid., 5:377–80. Unlike the first universal flood after which Noah’s ark became an inspiration for early global maritime activities, Atlantis’s inundation was an act of local divine judgment where only “some few wild inhabitants of the wood” escaped. This argument was also pursued in Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral, with the current Indians described as “a newer or a younger people than the people of the old world” because of a great deluge: see 12:274–75. 78. Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Paul Turner (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), 69–70. 79. Bacon, The Works, 5:380–81. 80. Ibid., 5:382. 81. Ibid. 82. Perez Zagorin, Francis Bacon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 171; Catherine Gimelli Martin, “The Ahistoricism of the New Historicism: Knowledge as Power versus Power as Knowledge in Bacon’s New Atlantis,” in Fault Lines and Controversies in the Study of Seventeenth-Century English Literature, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 36. 83. Weinberger interestingly suggests that, as presumably no foreigners other than the story’s sailors had left Bensalem, “those who were unwilling to stay must have been imprisoned or killed”: see Weinberger, “Science and Rule,” 874. 84. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1. 85. Ibid. 86. Bacon, The Works, 8:160–63; Temple, China: Land of Discovery, 110–16, 148–57, 224–48; Nathan Sivin, “Science and Medicine in Chinese History,” in Heritage of China: Contemporary Perspectives on Chinese Civilization, ed. Paul S. Ropp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 164–66.


182


87. 88. 89. 90.

91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

100. 101. 102. 103.

104.

183

Bacon, The Works, 8:161. Ibid., 8:162. Ibid. Ibid., 8:161–62. Elsewhere in Novum Organum, Bacon appeared to have the same inventions in mind as he described “many useful discoveries” made “by accident or upon occasion, when men were not seeking for them but were busy about other things”: see 8:140. Bacon, The Works, 5:392. Claire Jowitt, “‘Books Will Speak Plain’? Colonialism, Jewishness, and Politics in Bacon’s New Atlantis,” in Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis,” ed. Price, 129–55. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1. Bacon, The Works, 8:141–43. Ibid., 8:334–35. Ibid., 8:335. Ibid., 5:411. Ibid., 5:411–12. Ibid., 8:118. This catalogue of casual discoveries included astronomical motions, musical harmony, “delicacies of the table,” “distillations and the like,” “things mechanical,” “arts of preparing wine and beer,” and bread-making. Bacon, The Works, 5:411–12. Sivin, “Science and Medicine,” 164–65; Bacon, The Works, 12:279. Bacon, The Works, 12:273; Plato, Phaedo 76a; Ecclesiastes 1:2. Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 32–39; Joseph Needham, The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), 15. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science, 240–51.







Object Protocols The “Materials” of Early English Encounters with India

Pramod K. Nayar

At one point in his account of his stay in India, Sir Thomas Roe, ambassador from the court of King James I to the Mughal Emperor Jahangir, is asked by the emperor to show him his locket. Inside the little ornament is a portrait of Roe’s wife. Jahangir inquires about the identity of the woman in the portrait and Roe, for some inexplicable reason, describes her as a dead friend (Roe 222), when in fact it was his wife, very much alive, whom he had married only a few months before departing for India in 1615. Fascinated by the portrait of the lady, Jahangir requests Roe for it so that he may get reproductions—“five copies”—of the work for his wives to wear. Roe offers the portrait to Jahangir as a gift, but Jahangir refuses, saying he only needed it to make copies. In the course of the same conversation, Jahangir requests Roe to join him for drinks since it was the emperor’s birthday.1 This anecdote reveals that “transactions” between the Englishman and the Indian emperor, between races and cultures, in the early modern English encounter with India are often mediated through material cultures.2 Material objects here are not distinguished in terms of their physical appearance or category, but rather through the roles they play. Janet Hoskins has written about the “narrative elaboration” of objects in the context of human settings and “lifestories.”3 The idea of “narrative elaboration” accounts, I believe, for a certain agency of the object, but an agency that is inseparable from its social and human settings. In this


CHAPTER 8


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paper I explore the “object biographies”4 of artifacts in contributing to the narrativization of the early English experience of India: how they affected the definitions of English identities; how they worked within relations of power between the English and the Mughals; how their meanings and “lifestories” altered through these relations. The aim is not to see the circulation of every material object through these narratives, but to highlight occasions and instances where particular objects play a significant role in social interaction, the negotiation of power and the engagement with the Other’s culture. I focus on select “moments” in Thomas Roe’s narrative where different objects play their role in these interactions. This chapter therefore deals with a variety of objects—food and dining, clothing, gifts, personal baggage, maps, portraits, and jewelry. In terms of settings for these object-dominated interactions, Roe’s encounter with India and the Mughals was distributed across Surat and Agra, Roe’s house, the Mughal customs-shed, the imperial darbar, the houses of Mughal nobility, and even the Mughal army’s marches. The intention is to see how, in particular settings of formalized rituals (say, feasts), local hospitality (the nobleman’s house or the Agra darbar), or official spaces (the custom house), objects become significant in influencing the interaction between Roe/Englishman and the natives. This essay thus necessarily moves across scattered moments—from the examination of Roe’s baggage in the custom house to the dinners he attends to intimate exchange of gifts with Mughal nobility. Its dominant concern is with settings, events, and relations as determined by objects, and where objects attain, lose, or shift in their values based on the nature of the relations or action. Recent postcolonial scholarship has argued persuasively for examining the colonial context in terms not just of literary representations, but also material cultures. Domestic life, official processes and relations (among the British as well as between British-Indian ones), and architecture and living spaces are now the subject of critical inquiry for the ideologies and politics of colonial empires.5 The beginnings of the British encounter with India, which, though not “colonial” or “Orientalist” in the strict sense of these terms, nevertheless anticipate many of the aspirations, tropes, and ideologies of later times, what Richmond Barbour has termed “proto-Orientalism.”6 The politics of these beginnings are recorded in The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India 1615–19, as Narrated in his Journal and Correspondence, which first appeared in Samuel Purchas’s Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625). Roe’s Embassy instantiates an entire discourse of objects and material culture, a discourse shared with such other texts of the period as Edward Terry’s A Voyage to East-India (1655), John Ovington’s A Voyage


186


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Travel/ing Objects The opening moments of Roe’s sojourn in India are defined with reference to material possessions: the local customs officers seizing his goods and taking them to the inspection sheds. Roe’s fury at what he perceives to be an insult to himself and England is illustrative of the role material objects will play in his engagement with India. Upon arrival, Roe had issued instructions as to how his material possessions were to be handled: “I landed my chests and provisions, with directions to suffer them to be sealed, but not opened; and to deliver them at my house and to prepare it next day” (Roe 29). However, when he requests that his possessions be sent to him at his residence, the local authorities refuse. Roe then embarks on a series of negotiations with the local governor and his subordinates to obtain his provisions that were detained in the custom house (Roe 38). It is significant that Roe’s first encounter with native peoples and customs is framed by the movement and inspection of objects. The objects are imbricated in rituals of space, interaction, and civic engagement; and they invariably signify in proximity to, sometimes even antagonism toward, other human bodies. These objects function within and even shape the nature of human interactions. I term this role of objects in social interactions between the English and Indians in Roe’s text “object protocols,” indicating that there are rituals of behavior, circulation, and exchange that involve objects and humans in social settings.8 Writing about the “cultural biography of things,” Igor Kopytoff argues that objects in themselves do not possess agency; it is in the dynamic interactions with human beings that objects attain particular meaning and value.9 Kopytoff ’s theoretical framing of the role of objects is a useful entry-point into the dynamics of early English-Mughal encounters. Roe’s obsession with the objects he has brought with him, and what he deems should be the proper conduct of the Indians toward them, confers on the objects certain sanctity. For Roe, the movement of English objects is nothing short of the (symbolic) movement of a sovereign country. The “person” of the Englishman is metonymically conflated with commodities. Neither the English person nor his objects should (theoretically, at least) encounter any hindrance in travel from Stuart England to Mughal India. A letter from King James I carried by Sir Thomas Roe to Emperor Jahangir makes clear this request and expectation: “We having notice of


to Surat, in the Year 1689 (1696), and John Fryer’s A New Account of EastIndia and Persia (1698).7 Terry’s work is a necessary supplement to Roe’s because Terry was the chaplain accompanying the English ambassador, and he records the same incidents.


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your great favour . . . for the entertainment of our loving subjects the English nation with all kind respect, at what time soever they shall arrive at any of the ports within your dominions, and that they may have quiet trade and commerce without any kind of hinderance or molestation” (Roe 502). Jahangir responds by confirming that he has given express command to his kingdom to receive with hospitality “all the merchants of the English nation as the subjects of my friend” (Roe 505). “My friend” refers to King James. The English in India can live and conduct their commercial activities without any hindrance. “Object protocols” in Mughal India demanded that foreign objects be interred, examined, and taxed. Roe sought to reinscribe these Mughal protocols within his own convention by reinforcing the Westerner’s right to mobility. This mobility concerns the circulation of material objects between bodies, cultures, and spaces. If the movement of goods is inextricably intertwined with the movement of the ambassadorial person of Thomas Roe and the nation he represents, it also importantly inscribes the symbolic transport of the English monarch in Mughal India. The circulation of material objects is given “narrative elaboration” as the movement of the ambassador and the King himself. Roe makes this conflation of ambassador and royal authority clear when responding to the local Mughal authorities that, in accordance with their laws, all Roe’s company might be searched (Roe 32). This “search” would include an examination of the foreigners’ luggage and even their physical bodies.10 At this, Roe loses his temper—any examination of or hindrance to his possessions or his person is tantamount to an obstruction of the sovereign king of England. Roe declares himself “the ambassador of a mighty and free Prince” whom he will never dishonor by subjecting himself “to so much slavery” (Roe 32). Roe adds, “I was free landed, and I would die so, and if any of them dared touch any belonging to me, I bade him speak and show himself” (Roe 34). When his men are physically searched, Roe rises “in extreme choler,” because such searches are appropriate for “rogues and thieves” but “not to free men” (Roe 35). Roe’s actions here imply an alignment of goods with national identity, and also, arguably, with race. Objects participate in what may be termed “protocols of sovereignty,” visible, for example, in a “copy of conditions” sent by Roe to Prince Khurram (on Khurram’s demand) soon after the latter has been given charge of Surat. Roe’s letter categorizes the goods arriving in English ships into three types, the first of which lays out the “protocols of sovereignty”:


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The goods coming in our fleets are of three sorts. One are presents sent by my Lord and master to the Kings Majesty, your royal father, and to Your Highness; which I desire Your Highness will be pleased to grant your 10.1057/9780230106222 - The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia, Debra Johanyak and Walter S. H. Lim

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Roe here folds the identities of both sender and recipient of the goods into forms of behavior revolving around the movement of objects. The worth of the goods merit particular kinds of handling—proper protocol is called for—and Roe astutely works the Prince into the symbolic structures of the transaction. Roe emphasizes the sovereignty of both the goods and the human sender-recipient; the goods are from one sovereign monarch to another. Obviously, the reception of Englishmen and the objects they carried was more often than not fraught with difficulties.11 Object Identities In the early modern period, there was considerable anxiety over the arrival and circulation of non-English products, which were seen as embodying their “original” cultures.12 England was threatened with the possibility of “new cultural” realities through the arrival and consumption of, for instance, tobacco. Material culture was evaluated for its nonmaterial effects—cultural realities—in early modern writings. By the sixteenth century, “magnificence” was a common term in England, and luxury was not necessarily evil.13 Oriental luxuries flooded the homes of the English upper classes.14 Splendid clothing and houses were markers of wealth as well as lineage,15 and therefore of identity. The consumerism and acquisitiveness of Renaissance Europe (as Lisa Jardine has admirably demonstrated)16 and their consequent effects had found their way especially into the upper crust of English society. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass have argued that objects “can be made to absorb other evanescent cultural realities especially within the institutionalized contexts of early modern theatrical display, symbolic representation, and ritual observance.”17 Thus, objects are linked with bodies, even as bodily identities bestow values on objects. Exposure to foreign material cultures, the idea that objects were intimately linked to a person’s identity and can assimilate new values in new contexts, as well as changing notions of luxury, all frame Roe’s engagement with India. Objects figure in this engagement in the realm of clothing and fashion, food and its patterns of consumption, personal baggage, and native rules regarding imported goods and gift exchange. Roe was clear that particular classes of people were entitled to particular kinds of clothing and fashion, thus linking social and individual


firman that they may be sealed only by your officers and so delivered to the English to be sent up to me unsearched or without violence, being the presents of a king, that I may according to my duty present them to the King and your Highness. (Roe 227–28)


Pramod K. Nayar

identity with objects and materials. He was, for example, emphatic that his servants be in proper and complete livery.18 The chaplain to the Company on Roe’s expedition, Edward Terry, notes, “My Lord Ambassador observed not that uneasy way [Terry is referring to the native way of eating while seated on the ground] of sitting at his meat, but in own house had table and chairs. Served he altogether in plate and had an English and an Indian cook to dress his diet” (Terry 216). This emphasis on the formal arrangement of the table or attire for dining persisted well into the century.19 Roe’s insistence on English costume suggests that fashion and table arrangements were deemed integral to English identity, particularly in India. Thus, English representations of the period often focused on the inappropriate and “excessive” jewelry on Indian bodies, interpreting them as wicked, unwarranted, and the result (in the case of nobility) of tyranny and exploitation, thus constituting a discourse of the “social monstrous” in the “foreign” culture.20 Stemming from a conflicting set of ideas about luxury and vanity of the time21 but also, I believe, from the pervasive sumptuary laws especially for the upper classes, Roe’s attention to clothing and personal effects merits further examination. Recounting his first official visit from a Mughal officer one evening, Roe describes how “he came, very well accompanied and in good equipage after the manner of the country, clothed in linen and Persian cloth of gold very rich” (Roe 42). Roe views this theatrical arrival not simply as a spectacle but also as one that honors the personage of the English ambassador. It is important to understand the context in which the local Governor visits Roe, and why the “equipage” comes in for mention.22 Thus far, Roe only had interactions with the customs officers and servants of the Governor. He had not met any superior official, and was deeply annoyed, we recall, at what he considered to be an insult directed at both his “body” (that is, persona/ge) and the authority of his king. Fashion, appropriate clothing, and protocol are all woven together in Roe’s emphasis on the Governor’s clothing and the general tone of pleasure at beholding the finery viewed as appropriate to the occasion. Roe’s emphasis on the Governor’s finery is interesting for the meaning it bestows on clothing. While Roe might have appreciated the Governor’s finery as a basic mark of respect for his ambassadorial position, he nevertheless insisted on reiterating the cultural and political difference separating host from visitor, Mughal India from Stuart England. Roe makes a point of recounting that he met the Governor at the door and led him in, but he, “going rudely like a horse forward, got before me; which thinking he did on purpose, I crossed the way and was at the stairs foot before him”


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(Roe 42). At this point, the Governor’s servant moved to stop Roe from interfering with the Governor’s right of way and actually “pulled” (Roe’s description) at him, thus violating once again the space of the Englishman’s body. Roe expects the Governor to accept his superior status as the host in the English camp. No amount of appropriate livery or dress can function without a protocol of action in which the English ambassador is acknowledged as the superior—and this is what the Governor has contravened. In fact, Roe’s entire India sojourn is marked by an obsession with ensuring appropriate proxemics—spacing the world of the Mughals through the deployment of the English body in strategic ways.23 A second incident that calls the protocols of objects into crisis follows soon after this historic meeting. The Governor visited the custom house in which the English visitors’ things were stored. Roe informs the reader that this Governor “shares our cloth, takes whatsoever he pleases, and finally steals one by a base conveyance out of a window” (Roe 49). The Governor mishandles English goods, even spiriting them away in a “base” manner—through a window. Roe’s complaint is directed at inappropriate native handling of his/English goods. The third incident occurred on February 21, 1616, when Roe paid a visit to Prince Khurram. The important context for this visit was Roe’s vain anticipation for a positive response from Khurram regarding his petitions for trade rights in Surat of which the prince was in charge. Roe first presents the Crown Prince “with a few toys after the custom”; he then “demanded the firman long promised me” (Roe 119). In offering what he labels “toys,” Roe reduces the value of the gifts offered to the prince; and he also links the gift offering, viewed as a transaction, to a “demand.” The unequal nature of this “exchange” is what Roe sets out to underscore, perhaps to reflect his own prowess at determining the terms of the debate. In exchange for “toys,” Roe is not requesting a grant or rights, but demanding it. He situates the objects within a set of social relations here, using them as modes of facilitating an economic gain in the form of favorable trading rights from the Mughals.24 A set of incidents involving objects in identity formation and affirmation revolves around food. This circulation of objects occurs in ritualized settings such as feasts. Feasts in Mughal India were governed by Mughal protocols, especially those specifying rank and authority. Jahangir invites Roe to take his choice from the spread of “foul and fish” (Roe 328). Jahangir makes this offer first to the English visitor and not to other members of the Mughal nobility, as Roe notes (Roe 328). It is with this act of offering objects that Jahangir symbolically signals Roe’s rank within his darbar. Food and its consumption build and reinforce social relations.25 In the context of the Roe-Mughal interaction, there is even a certain degree


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of incertitude about the whole event of a meal. When Jamal-ud-Din, newly appointed Governor of Sindh, came to Roe’s house for dinner, this nobleman ate “some banqueting stuff made in my house by a Moor cook” (Roe 215), that is, a non-English cook, but refused other items “provided of my own fashion” (Roe 215) owing to superstition. He then asked for food to be sent to his place so that he could dine in private. Jamal-ud-Din breaks the standard patterns of a formal meal with this last move. The setting and its protocols—of how food is consumed at a formal dinner—are contravened and suggests a dissonance in the English-Mughal encounter. In these various experiences recounted by Roe in his Embassy, it is not that the Stuart ambassador does not recognize his status as a visitor in Mughal India. Rather, he is attempting to assert the “sovereign” right of an Englishman in a different national, political, and cultural space, an attempt that betrays degrees of anxiety. I see these incidents as symptomatic of a larger colonial move. The protocol of behavior, according to Roe, must accept the English ambassador’s right of way and right of offering hospitality. He is conscious that the finery, the objects themselves, and the actions are all spectacles because the entire meeting of the Governor and Roe is watched by both Englishmen and the local Mughal officers and men. Power is in operation. But Roe does not understand his position: he is a visitor on Mughal territory, territory over which he has no authority of any kind. The Governor’s material finery is not in honor of the Englishman—it is an assertion of his own (and Mughal) authority as host, owner, and ruler. Roe’s attempt to alter the “cultural realities” of the objects of Mughal finery, the Englishman’s luggage in the custom house, and even the Englishman’s body itself through the invention of new roles and functions for objects approximate what Stephen Greenblatt has termed “improvisation.”26 This is achieved through two main moves involving objects. In his first move in rewriting the role of the object, Roe discounts Mughal finery as being about Mughal power, seeing it instead as an honor due to him—Roe. This is a reinscription of the “cultural realities” of the encounter in which Roe is the visitor/guest/plaintiff and the Mughal officer is the host/sovereign/benefactor. Objects absorb the cultural realities of Mughal India when they circulate between the Englishman and the native. Roe disconnects objects from their cultural contexts and recontextualizes them for his purposes, enabling him to affirm his own status. Second, the Governor does indeed have a right to inspect the goods, as his officers repeatedly inform Roe. It is a fact that objects in the custom house will be scrutinized. What Roe attempts is to undermine the reality of objects in the Mughal custom house by imposing a new reality:


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the symbolic sovereignty of English objects even when they are on Mughal territory. This—the Englishman and his object’s right to mobility and sovereignty in any/all spaces—is the “cultural reality” that Roe seeks to impose in his first encounters with Mughal India. Roe reinvents the roles of objects in order to use them within new protocols of self-affirmation and English identity. Here questions of wealth (the Mughals’), power (the Mughals vis-à-vis the ambassador), and roles (Mughal-as-benefactor, Roe as seeking trade favors) are played out around objects. That reassigned protocols begin to have their impact is clear from the new “cultural realities” imposed on Mughal spectacles. On March 11, 1616, Roe was invited to participate in the New Year’s feast in the Mughal darbar. Canopies were laid out and at the upper end of the darbar were displayed portraits—material objects with specific symbolic value—of English royalty (the king and queen of England, and the Princess Elizabeth) and aristocrats (Roe 125–26). The location of these portraits gives them prominence and honor. Since Roe has made a concerted effort always to be in the public eye, as close to the throne as possible,27 the positioning of these portraits might be seen as reconfiguring new “cultural realities”—the pictures are absorbed into Mughal spatial arrangements. This spatialization via objects is emphasized in the incident that immediately follows the darbar in Roe’s narrative. When Roe visited Jahangir the very next day (March 12, 1616), he was “brought right before him, expecting a present, which I delivered to his extraordinary content” (Roe 126–27). This suggests that Roe’s spatial location in the court was linked to the objects—gifts—he was carrying. The gift object, once again, helps reconfigure space while giving a prominent location to Roe. As the conversation between Roe and Jahangir proceeds, the topic returns to the duality of gifts and firmans. Jahangir asks what presents would be brought him, to which Roe responds that “many curiosities were to be found in our country of rare price and estimation, which the King [of England] would send and the merchants seek out in all parts of the world, if they were once made secure of a quiet trade and protection on honorable conditions” (Roe 129; emphasis added). Roe continues to elaborate on “such things . . . as were rare here [in India] and unseen, as excellent artifices in painting, carving, enamelling, figures in brass, copper, or stone, rich embroideries, stuffs of gold and silver” (Roe 129), in response to which the Mughal emperor “said it was very well: but that he desired an English horse” (Roe 129). The conversation is cleverly engineered. When Jahangir asks about the gifts he can expect, Roe offers him a list, but with a rider: he can procure rare and valuable gifts, provided the English are given a secure


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trade route and residence. The gifts, Roe suggests, are linked to the rights and safety of English trade voyages. That is, the route the objects will take as gifts is metaphorically linked to the route the trade products will take. The symbolic value of the gifts is located within conditions of safety and economic value for East India Company products. The objects here are situated at the intersection of formal economic trading rights and social capital and relations (gifts). The gift exchange here is not necessarily based on a moral condition of reciprocity, or even affection, but on economic rights. The “gift” is no more a symbolic object of Indo-British relations: it is a bribe. Thus the assigned roles and intentions for objects are not about equal relations or mutual affections but one of business and economics.28 It must be noted that the gifts are still in the realm of fiction and fantasy since they are not yet secured for Jahangir: they lie somewhere in the future. These future gift objects are invested with the ability to clear space (trade routes, residence), economic rights (privileges of trading), and social obligation (Mughal protection of East India Company ships). Privately, Roe would write to his Company and advise his people at Surat about “fit presents” for the Mughal emperor and the princes (Roe 457–60). He would also take with him several objects from India for patrons back in England (famously, to the Countess of Arundel and her Tart Hall).29 But within the Mughal domain, he projected himself as a man who did not seek material goods for himself. This self-denial of material objects becomes part of Roe’s improvisation of identity. A particularly illuminating incident of such improvisation occurs on Jahangir’s birthday. Jahangir wishes every one present to drink to his health. Roe describes this event by focusing on a cup of gold, decorated with an overwhelming array of precious stones (such as turquoises, rubies, and emeralds) called for by the emperor (Roe 224–25). After commenting on this heavily jeweled cup, Roe concludes that he is unable to compute its value “because the stones are many of them small, and the greater, which are also many, are not all clean, but they are in number about 2,000 and in gold about 20 oz” (Roe 225). Commenting on this incident, Roe’s chaplain, Terry, seeks to show how Roe was completely disinterested in personal gain: [The King] would moreover often ask him [Roe] why he did not desire some good, and great gifts at his hands, he being a great King, and able to give it, the Ambassador would reply, that he came not thither to beg anything of him, all that he desired was that his country-men the English might have a free and safe and peaceable trade in his dominions. . . . The Mogol. . . . would often bid the Ambassador to ask something for himself. . . . in conclusion the Ambassador had no gift from him . . . besides a horse or two, and sometimes a vest, or upper garment made of slight cloth


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Here objects and their circulation (or lack of) become markers of identity. Roe portrays himself as a selfless man and a nationalist who only sought benefits for his country. The wealthy Mughal is, on the other hand, portrayed as miserly and petty. The ritual of gift taking and gift giving codes important national and cultural differences. It is important to note here that object protocols did not always work effectively. Despite his threats, pleas, and bluster, Roe often found his goods seized and the gifts intended for the emperor taken away by the princes (see especially the incident when the gifts and other goods were seized and Roe had to write a letter to the Mughal prince “containing my desire for privileges and justice” (Roe 351).30 Object Relations As we have already seen, objects within relations possess values that are reinvented. Values of objects can also come through emplacing the artifact in a “conversational ethos.” Conversational ethos refers to speeches, responses, and conversational acts generated out of and in response to the presence of the object. Object values and roles in Roe’s encounter with Mughal India are firmly embedded in linguistic performances. Things and language are not opposed to each other, and the object attains its value only in the accompaniment of linguistic performance.31 The presence of material artifacts with(in) language is visible in all personal encounters in early English writings on India. On one particular occasion, the same that I invoked at the beginning of this chapter, Jahangir requested to be shown “a picture” (Roe 222) that he heard Roe had in his possession. Shown two different portraits by Roe, the emperor, finding himself captivated by the one that belonged to “a friend . . . that was dead” (Roe 222), asked if he could be given this picture. Roe said he esteemed this portrait above everything else he possessed, to which Jahangir responded with an equally dramatic statement that this was the only picture he really desired. Together these two responses establish the priceless value of the portrait. Then Roe shifts ground—“I was not so in love with any thing that I would refuse to content His Majesty” (Roe 223)—thus suggesting that he valued the emperor more than even the object he esteemed most in the world. With this Roe transfers the value of the object to the friendship and person of Jahangir. Jahangir is now the most esteemed “object.” Not to be outdone, Jahangir bowed to Roe, replying that it was sufficient that he had been willing to


of gold, which the Mogol would first put on his own back, and then give it to the Ambassador. But the Mogol (if he had so pleased) might have bestowed on him some great princely gift. (Terry 397)


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offer the object. Seeing that Roe “had so freely given him” (Roe 224) the object that he valued so much, Jahangir affirmed he “would not rob” (Roe 224) Roe of it. Instead he would show this portrait to his ladies and commission copies to be made. While the obvious reading of this incident would be to focus on its gender(ed) cultural politics (the portrait of Roe’s wife, and the wives of Jahangir who are given copies of this portrait to wear), the role of the artifact in sealing a pact between the two men presents a fascinating example of what I am calling “object relations.”32 It could be argued that Roe reverses the role of patron and dependent by possessing the power to present to Jahangir this artifact.33 The circulation of this intimate object—the portrait of his wife—serves the purpose of endearing Jahangir to Roe. This incident is the first step in the “protocols of intimacy.” Intimacy between the two men here involves personal items and artifacts that suggest a personal relation(ship). The significance of personal items reside not merely in the perceived or stated value of the object itself but also in the “conversational locationality” of the object, specifically the formalized speeches made (between Roe and Jahangir) around the object. Conversations reconfigure power relations (gift-giver/receiver) and value (sentiment/friendship). The object is constituted as valuable not due to any inherent feature but in its relation to tones, implications, and structures of “theatricalized” conversations. “Protocols of intimacy” can result from the framing of material artifacts within conversational practices and performance. Yet Roe’s politics of intimate objects is not always necessarily straightforward. During one of his later visits to Prince Khurram, the prince’s attention was drawn to a white feather in Roe’s hat. Roe recounts this event as follows: “His Highness, looking on a white feather in my hat, demanded if I would give it him. I replied I would not offer that I had worn, but, if he pleased to command it, that or any thing in my power was to serve him and I was highly honored in his acceptance. He asked if I had any more. I answered: three or four of other colors. He replied if I would give them all. . . . I promised to bring all I had on the morrow” (Roe 261). Conversations once again constitute the value of the object. Khurram wishes the feather; Roe refuses in the name of depreciating value and offers anything else. Khurram asks for other items; Roe promises. The object in itself—a feather—has little value: its value is constituted in a person’s willingness to offer it as a gift. The curious shift in object protocols in these two incidents must be noted. Roe was willing to part with the portrait of his wife when Jahangir asked for it, but he refuses to offer his white feather to Khurram as a gift. An intimate and personalized item


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becomes enmeshed in object protocols when the potential recipient is the Emperor of India. In the second instance, Roe’s strategy is to offer substitutes to the Prince, a deliberate undervaluing of the recipient as perhaps unworthy? This shift becomes startlingly clear in Khurram’s own actions soon after the incident of the feather. A few days later Prince Khurram gifts Roe his own cloak: “By and by came out a cloth of gold cloak of his own, once or twice worn, which he caused to be put on my back, and I made reverence, very unwillingly. When his ancestor Tamerlane was represented at the theatre the garment would well have become the actor; but it is here reputed the highest of favour to give a garment worn by the Prince, or, being new, once laid on his shoulder” (Roe 294). The Prince, in contrast to Roe’s attitude toward personal effects, “gifts” his cloak, which Roe is strangely wary of accepting. The portrait and the cloak are personal objects in circulation. The first two items share the space of the gift-giver and receivers’ persons and identities. With the second object the gift-giver and the receiver metaphorically share a world between them. All three together constitute an intimate body mapping through which official and intimate relations are forged. These body mappings are nothing less than relations in space enabled by commodities: Jahangir and Roe, Khurram and Roe. The material artifact from one person is mapped on the body of the other. When the two persons represent different races and cultures, the mapping of objects on(to) bodies serves as a kind of investiture, which literally means to “cloak in the robes of office.” Now, clothing has often been used to, and known to, elicit intense emotions.34 In the case of the cloak-object, one sees a convergence of both official-ceremonial significance and emotions. The cloak becomes an object that draws forth strong emotions (here, friendship), but it also functions as a ceremonial cloth enabling Roe’s recognition as the confidante of a prince. In Roe’s narrative, the generation of intimacy through objects partakes of both affective and ceremonial/ official dimensions. When Roe visits Jahangir on one of the emperor’s tours in a culminating moment, he discovers awkwardly that he has no gifts with him. Roe then takes with him “a fair book well bound, filleted and gilt, Mercators [sic] last edition of the maps of the world” and presents it to Jahangir: “I presented with an excuse that I had nothing worthy, but to a great king I offered the world, in which he had so great and rich a part” (Roe 380). Jahangir’s response is recorded thus by Roe: “The King took it in great courtesy, often laying his hand on his breast, and answering: Everything that came from me was welcome” (Roe 380). Jahangir responds with an invitation to Roe to join him at a feast (Roe 380).35 In this episode


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involving the gift of the Mercator map, spatial relations embed the functions of power. Jahangir is incorporated into a Western map symbolic of all the regions with which the English sought to trade. Furnished by an Englishman, the Mughal emperor’s role “on” the map will have to be seen. Roe’s “English” map is directly related to the aim of securing trading rights in the “East.” Roe recognizes that in this East Jahangir “had so great and rich a part” to play. Edward Terry has noted the importance of seeking accuracy of representation where it comes to the reflection of geopolitical realities on maps. In his concluding remarks to his survey on the Mughal Empire, Terry writes, “And here a great error in geographers must not escape my notice, who in their globes and maps make East-India and China near neighbours, when as many large countries are interposed betwixt them” (Terry 90). The map’s protocols are essentially those of distance, space, and knowledge with a South Asian emperor certain of his territories and an English ambassador seeking territories for his king. Both Jahangir and Roe are seeking the conquest of space in different ways. Jahangir wished to identify his own territories on the map, and having viewed them found “no more to fall to his share, but what he first saw” (Terry 368). Terry notes wryly that Jahangir “calling himself the conqueror of the world, and having no greater share in it, seemed to be a little troubled,” elaborating that, even were Jahangir to bring action against Mercator and other map-makers for showing him occupying only one section of the world, it cannot be denied that when “compared with the globe of the whole earth, they [Jahangir’s domains] did not appear bigger than a small title” (Terry 367–68). Here the map, which exemplifies European knowledge-making of the world, disillusions Jahangir by pointing out that the emperor does not own the entire world. The map here cannot be dissociated from Roe’s speech (where Roe refers to Jahangir as “a great King” and to whom he “offered the world, in which he [Jahangir] had so great and rich a part”) and the representational strategies—a version of “conversational locationality”—of both Mughal hagiography (Jahangir’s name means “conqueror of the world”) and the Englishmen’s “correction” of the same. Redrawing territories and geopolitical limits, the map is an object directly implicated in and enabling East-West political interactions. It highlights the emergence of new “cultural realities” with Jahangir acknowledging his territorial limits and the Englishman questing after freedom to travel and trading rights. It is evident in our reading of narrative moments from Roe’s Embassy that the first English encounters with India revolved, to a considerable extent, around objects. “Object protocols,” as this essay demonstrates,


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governed the acquisition, display, and distribution of material items. The “narrative elaborations” of objects—from drinking cups to cloth to food—reveal how dependent early English-Indian encounter was on material artifacts. Objects acquire specific meanings and functions in the meeting between nations and cultures. This essay has argued that the politics of cultural encounter in a protocolonial context can be fruitfully read with reference to material cultures (by which I mean more than simply the import and export of, and trade in, material products), especially in the ritualized settings of meals, personal encounters, and gift giving. It highlights that the complexities of colonial discourse can be read not only via literary narratives and textual production but also through “object protocols” embedded in the “materials” that are deployed in strategic ways to facilitate “originary” encounters between peoples, cultures, and nations. “Object protocols” constitute the first sheets in the book of English discourses on India. Notes 1. Sir Thomas Roe, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India 1615–19, as Narrated in his Journal and Correspondence, ed. William Foster (1926; repr., New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1990), 222–24. All subsequent references of this work are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by page number(s). 2. I am not distinguishing between objects—such as food items, clothing, housing and furnishings, luxury products—here, except toward the end where personal effects and intimate artifacts come into the picture. It might be useful to see how different kinds of objects—personal items, gifts from or to royalty, communitarian artifacts—functioned differently within these contexts, but that is outside of the scope of the current essay. 3. Janet Hoskins, “Agency, Biography and Objects,” in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, and Susanne Kuchler (London: Sage, 2006), 79. 4. Ibid., 78. 5. Swati Chattopadhyay, “Blurring Boundaries: The Limits of the ‘White Town’ in Colonial Calcutta,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 59, no. 2 (2000): 154–79, and “‘Goods, Chattels and Sundry Items’: Constructing Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Indian Domestic Life,” Journal of Material Culture 7, no. 3 (2002): 243–71; Pramod K. Nayar, “Colonial Proxemics: The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India,” Studies in Travel Writing 6 (2002): 29–53; Peter Van Dommelen, “Colonial Matters: Material Culture and Postcolonial Theory in Colonial Situations,” in Handbook of Material Culture, 104–24. 6. Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 7. Edward Terry, A Voyage to East-India (London: T. Martin and T. Allestrye, 1655); John Ovington, A Voyage to Surat, in the Year 1689 (London: Jacob Jonson,


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8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

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1696); John Fryer, A New Account of East-India and Persia (London: R. I. Chiswell, 1698); Thomas Herbert, A Relation of Some Years Travels, begun Anno 1626 (London: William Stansby and Jacob Bloome, 1634). I also use the term “protocol” to signal the opening moves of the English-Indian interaction, since “protocol” etymologically refers to the first sheet glued to the document. “Object protocols” are, this essay suggests, the first, and most significant, moves in the cultural encounter—dictating terms, providing “content” (as “protocols” originally did), and governing the way interactions proceeded. Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64–91. William Foster notes that, in an earlier expedition, one Edwards “had had to submit to this indignity . . . being ‘very familiarly searched . . . to the bottom of [their] pockets, and nearer to, modestly to speak it’” (Roe, The Embassy, 32). John Ovington complained, for example, about the “severity” with which the English were treated by the local authorities, where the “very gold buttons which the chief factors wore upon their cloths, were demanded to be paid custom for” (Ovington, A Voyage to Surat, 150). Ovington’s objection is not necessarily to the imposition of customs duties but rather the subjection to norms and computations of the person and personal effects of Englishmen. Like Roe, Ovington seeks to assert the sovereignty of the English body—and anything on it—by demanding exemption from local laws and customs. In the writings of James I and Ben Jonson, importing tobacco was seen as bringing in the barbarism of the plant’s origins (the tropics) into civilized England. See Sandra Bell, “The Subject of Smoke: Tobacco and Early Modern England,” in The Mysterious and the Foreign in Early Modern England, ed. Helen Ostovich, Mary V. Silcox, and Graham Roebuck (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 153–69. Linda L. Peck, Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 7. Ibid., 18 Ibid., 21. Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). Margreta De Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, eds. Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 9. Michael Strachan, Sir Thomas Roe, 1581–1644: A Life (Salisbury: Michael Russell, 1989), 87. As late as the 1690s, we find Ovington noting how all the “dishes and plates brought to the table are of pure silver” (Ovington, A Voyage to Surat, 396), and that when the English ate “at home, [they] do it after the English manner” (Ovington, A Voyage to Surat, 401). Thus, even though the sumptuary laws had ended in 1604, vestiges of it seem to have persisted, especially in contexts such as Roe’s.


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20. Pramod K. Nayar, English Writing and India, 1600–1920: Colonizing Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2008), see esp. chap. 2. In India, English travelers met with plenty on a scale they could not comprehend. Every single travelogue from 1580 to 1700 itemizes with a sense of awe India’s agricultural productivity, fertile fields, varieties of fruits and vegetables, wealth of the inhabitants (manifest in particular in the jewelry worn by Indian women), and even animal wealth. See, for example, Terry, Voyage to East-India, 95–97, 102; Herbert, Relation of Some Years Travels, 182–83; Fryer, A New Account, 56, 76, 134–35, 178–83, 186, 188, 411–12. Ovington describes Surat as “the most fam’d emporium of the Indian empire” (Ovington, A Voyage to Surat, 218) and speculates on the value of the Emperor’s crown. Like many other English travelers, he also comments on the excess jewelry worn by the women: see 178, 196, 319–21. 21. See John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). 22. Kate Teltscher has argued that Roe’s emphasis on the theatrical aspects of Mughal royalty serves to reduce all of the wealth and splendor to “unreality” or “feigning”: see India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, 1600–1800 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 20–22. 23. See Nayar, “Colonial Proxemics.” 24. However, the reverse of this situation, where the natives undervalue English/ European gifts, is also visible in a few cases in Roe’s narrative. In his January 25, 1615 letter to the East India Company, Roe writes, “Then he sent to me, though ten a clock at night, for a servant to tie his scarf and sword the English fashion; in which he took so great pride that he marched up and down, drawing it and flourishing, and since has never been seen without it . . . But after the English came away he asked the Jesuit [Francesco Corsi] whether the King of England was a great King, that sent presents of so small value, and that he looked for some jewels” (Roe, The Embassy, 99). 25. See Mary Douglas, Food in the Social Order (London: Routledge, 2003), and C. Counihan and P. V Esterik, eds., Food and Culture: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1997). 26. See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 27. See Nayar, “Colonial Proxemics.” 28. Other seventeenth century travelers make similar claims for their gift and object exchanges. Ovington wrote, “Our Presidents are obliged to . . . gratify not only the Mogul now and then, with grateful gifts, but likewise to be always upon the same method with the Omrahs and favorites at Court, engaging a continuance of their favors” (Ovington, A Voyage to Surat, 387–88). John Fryer also records how the English obtained trading rights from Shivaji, the Maratha king, through a careful system of gift-giving (Fryer, A New Account, 77–81). 29. See Peck, 220–21. 30. Object protocols also shifted through the century. Ovington notes how the President of Surat went out with a large retinue of ensigns, Persian horses, saddles of “velvet richly embroidered,” with “head-stalls, reins, and croupers” covered with


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31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

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“solid wrought silver in what he terms “a pompous procession” (Ovington, A Voyage to Surat, 399–400). John Fryer writes about the agent of Madras’ Fort St. George, William Langham, who “never goes abroad with fifes, drums, trumpets, and a flag with two balls in a red field” (Fryer, A New Account, 38, 85–86). Here material objects serve as symbols of privilege and power; eventually, in the Victorian age, these would develop into the imperial “darbars.” Christopher Tilley, “Objectification,” in Handbook of Material Culture, 60–73. One of the most explicit gendering of this early encounter with India occurs in Thomas Herbert where he claims that as soon as a visitor arrives, he selects one candidate from a “choice of virgins,” who then “performs his domestic affairs what ever, at bed and board” (Herbert, Relation of Some Years Travels, 40–41). Nayar, “Colonial Proxemics,” 39–40. Jane Schneider, “Cloth and Clothing,” in Handbook of Material Culture, 203–20. Feasts and consumable objects occupy considerable place in Roe’s interactions with the Mughals. In addition to the feasts with Jahangir, members of the local nobility also frequently invite Roe to their meals or dine with him. During these feasts, food plays an important role in the decorum, hospitality, and warmth between guest and host.


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John Milton, Orientalism, and the Empires of the East in Paradise Lost Walter S. H. Lim

As Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Commonwealth Council of State, John Milton was deeply familiar with the workings of England’s foreign policy and conduct of international relations. Did Milton’s knowledge of international affairs inform and shape the thematic, political, and ideological concerns of his epic poem, Paradise Lost; if so, in what directions? Critics discussing Milton’s “internationalism” usually take as the focus of their consideration the general ambit of the European world. When Thomas Corns recently described Milton’s Protestantism as possessing a “pronounced internationalism,” he read Milton with reference to continental European thought, art, and consciousness.1 Likewise, when John Kerrigan identified the Netherlands as the controlling center of gravity for Milton’s involvement with foreign affairs, his focus on the deeply tangled politics of “the Anglo-Scoto-Dutch triangle” continued to limit the reach of Milton’s “internationalism” to the European world.2 This essay proposes to widen the definition of Miltonic “internationalism” to encompass a much larger world that includes the Far East and South Asia. These distant lands register their presence in Milton’s oeuvre often through metaphorical significations that help to communicate the poet-polemicist’s republican convictions. In Paradise Lost, Milton might have focused his attention on the current state of England’s political and theological health but that did not


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prevent him from casting his encyclopedic gaze over the vast expanse of the known world, to as far away as the Middle Kingdom and Mughal India. At first glance, China and India may strike the reader as incidental geopolitical sites captured in Paradise Lost only in passing as the epic poet unfolds the satanic journeying from hell to Eden. On closer consideration, however, one finds that Milton’s China and India possess complex cultural significations: associations with the dream of economic possibilities; anxieties relating to early modern European expansionist ambitions in Asia; questioning of the place of “absolutist” theological convictions in a culturally pluralistic world. Even as Milton finds himself grappling with the implications of holy nationhood in the face of the English people’s recalcitrant repudiation of God’s plans for the establishment of a free England, he finds he must take into account the significance of foreign societies and cultures when interpreting England’s political condition at the present time. Milton’s interest in China’s and India’s cultural otherness owes much to what the fact of their difference can spell out (by way of contrast) for the very ideals he has long envisioned for England as God’s Christian commonwealth. Even as Milton alludes to China and India to flesh out the terms of his theological understanding and political vision, he finds himself pressured at some level to grapple not so much with what are sorely lacking in these sites of cultural difference as with what some of the strengths and virtues (economic, political, etc.) visible there may reveal about England’s particular cultural and political experience. The international community imprints its presence in Paradise Lost’s distinctive listing of place names, a listing that vividly registers the early modern period’s deep fascination with geography and cartography. Milton deploys the itinerary of the devil (as he journeys from the gates of hell to Eden) to highlight the existence of various cities, regions, and empires of the world for his reader. In so doing, he infuses his epic representation of the devil’s crossing of Chaos with a topical resonance tied to ocean travel in the quest for settling overseas plantations, establishing trade relations with the East, or making diplomatic and political contact with foreign governments. In the epic tradition, travel over water is a controlling metaphor conferring distinctive thematic gravitas—one thinks immediately of Odysseus’s homecoming and Aeneas’s founding of the new Troy. Read in relation to Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, Milton’s Satan is portrayed as the demonic version of the great classical and epic heroes, history’s archetypal antagonist of all good defined by his deconstructing and nihilistic energies. Instead of reestablishing social order with a homecoming like Odysseus, Satan returns to hell to encounter the hisses of his followers metamorphosed into serpents. And, as the dark archetype


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of Virgil’s heroic prince of destiny, he sets forth to lay the foundations of hell’s infernal imperium. If Milton’s seventeenth-century reader could be relied on to identify various literary allusions in the epic portrayal of Satan’s journey across Chaos, he would also have been generally alert to Europe’s instrumentally historic voyages of discovery. We have not only Christopher Columbus sailing to discover the Americas but also the great Portuguese Vasco da Gama making his way to India. Well-known European voyages of discovery help give concrete geographical shape to Milton’s epic narrative, enabling the poet to meditate on such culturally topical subjects as the dreams and enactments of early modern expansionism and colonialism. In addition to maps, writings of the period (in particular Richard Hakluyt’s and Samuel Purchas’s compendious compilation of travel narratives, letters, descriptions, and excerpts from other literatures) had also made widely available accounts (often exaggerated) of the customs, religions, and social practices of various peoples in the world. If the end of the fifteenth century had witnessed Christopher Columbus’s founding of the Americas, Milton’s seventeenth-century England saw the emergence of the “tourist” and “globetrotter.” I am thinking here of the inimitable Sir Thomas Coryate whose fascination with this “goodly Fabric of the World” had entailed traveling unbelievably long distances.3 Coryate claimed to have traveled on foot and by caravan all the way from Jerusalem to India.4 Invoking Ulysses (Aeneas) as his model for the worldly traveler, Coryate feasted on the world through his “insatiable greediness of seeing strange countries: which exercise is indeed the very queen of all the pleasures in the world.”5 If Milton set out to portray Satan as history’s original colonist, imperialist, and terrorist, he also found himself registering obvious fascination with travel and foreign lands in his epic unfolding of the demonic itinerary. It has been observed that the epic poet in Paradise Lost exercises a globe-consuming gaze that ranges encyclopedically over vast stretches of land and geopolitical spaces to culminate in Michael’s prophetic unfolding of world history framed by the politics of voracious human ambition manifested in the building of empires.6 This is because Paradise Lost has a vast geographical imagination, where rivers, cities, capitals, mountain ranges, and continents are invoked as a matter of course to gloss everything from the trajectory of Satan’s journeying to earth to describing Eden to envisioning the dark and tragic consequences of the Fall. Focusing on the implications of Milton’s “Lordly eye” (PL 3.578), his epic gaze, Bruce McLeod has argued that Milton’s aerial and panoramic sweep of lands and continents cannot be dissociated from an imperial temper “geared


John Milton, Orientalism, and the Empires of the East


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to millenarian Protestantism” and the anticipatory vision of “universal reform”; Milton’s epic poem is informed by his vision of a world unified under the absolutist authority of the Protestant God.7 When we consider Milton’s geographical imagination, a related question is whether this commanding cartographic sweep over the vast lands of Asia and kingdoms of the East may be read as amounting to an orientalist discourse. According to Edward Said’s highly influential definition, Orientalism is intrinsically tied up with the West’s possession of the prerogative of (textual) representation and narrativization to write the East into existence in the light of its own cultural assumptions and defining sense of innate superiority.8 Is Said’s theoretical presupposition here relevant to a critical reading of the significations of Asia in Milton’s epic poem? Does interest in an Asian country like India in Paradise Lost indicate the emergence of nascent English imperial desire? Can one propose that Paradise Lost gets to be unavoidably associated with the imperial idea because of the controlling presence of a “superior” and “arrogant” attitude, encapsulated in the way through which the epic poet’s global optics surveys the nations of the world? Geographical and cartographical place names abound in Paradise Lost, a point that has attracted the attention of readers interested in determining how references made to various regions and countries of the world code Milton’s theological and political convictions and whether they can be said to amount to an imperial vision.9 Robert Markley has written extensively on the significance of China to Milton’s political and theological vision in Paradise Lost;10 and, more recently, taking her cue from Markley’s pioneering study, Rachel Trubowitz likewise expands on Milton’s understanding of Asia by highlighting overlaps existing between his polemical and poetic representations of Israel and the Orient.11 However, despite Markley’s and Trubowitz’s elaborate accounts of Milton’s understanding of the Far East in his writings, the point remains that references made to China in his oeuvre are far and few between, and highly unelaborated. When a poet does not always set out to explain why he invokes particular geographical locations at different narrative moments in his epic poem, it is not an easy task for the reader to unpack the meanings or connotations underlying certain literary allusions and references. Sometimes, when such textual references are not readily forthcoming in revealing the reasons for their presence in a literary work, their significance, or more precisely their resonance, may be deciphered by appealing to the poet’s immediate social, cultural, and political context, one that often entails multiple, even stridently antagonistic, perspectives. On the matter of Asia in Milton’s writings then, the reader often finds himself or herself interpreting significance by relying on the poet-polemicist’s familiar


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republican convictions as well as English culture’s broader understanding of the East and the Orient. The consistent challenge of critical readings in early modern English Orientalism, a challenge implicitly and explicitly present in various essays in this book, is how to be attentive to such informing contexts while at the same time remaining accurate and precise in interpreting an author’s understanding of Asia. Early on, in book 3 of Paradise Lost, Milton’s reader learns that, somewhere along the course of his voyaging, Satan makes a stop and “lights on the barren Plains / Of Sericana, where Chineses drive / With Sails and Wind thir cany Waggons light” (PL 3.437–39). The consciously exotic-sounding “Sericana” draws attention to the Gobi Desert over which the Chinese were reputed to have traveled in sail-powered wagons, information first drawn to the attention of the English reader via Robert Parke’s 1588 translation of Juan González de Mendoza’s Historia de las cosas mas notables, ritos y costumbres del gran reyno de la China. In Cosmographie (1652), the most comprehensive description of the known world available in seventeenthcentury England, the royalist Peter Heylyn makes reference to the Chinese traveling on “Carts and Coaches driven with sayles, as ordinarily as drawn with horses.”12 Later on, in book 10 of Paradise Lost, Milton makes reference once again to China, but relates it this time to the dark context of Sin and Death’s journey across Chaos to gain possession of Satan’s recently colonized Eden. Sin and Death’s voyaging to the terrestrial world after the Fall is imaged with reference to the severe challenges of distant ocean travel. Invoking the “raging Sea” (PL10.286) and “two Polar Winds blowing adverse” (PL 10.289), Milton makes reference to the major icy obstacles of the Northwest Passage—a water route from the Atlantic to the Pacific through the Arctic Archipelago—which, if discovered, would open up a direct sea route to Cathay, Japan, and India, the nations of the East. Milton is thinking here of the quest for an effective sea passage to the East Indies and the Orient undertaken by such famous English explorers as Henry Hudson, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and Martin Frobisher. Highlighting the richness of the “Cathaian Coast” (PL 10.293) in his epic rendition of Sin and Death’s destructive itinerary, Milton indicates his familiarity with the trope of China as a land of plenty.13 When imagining postlapsarian Eden, Milton had in mind not only the Far East but also the idea of Asia in general. Notice the historical reference when he describes the construction of a causeway between hell and earth, a project imaged and metaphorized in terms of aggressive military expansionism:



from hence a passage broad, Smooth, easy, inoffensive down to Hell. So, if great things to small may be compar’d, 10.1057/9780230106222 - The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia, Debra Johanyak and Walter S. H. Lim

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The historical reference here is to Xerxes, the king of the mighty Persian Empire who decided to bridge the Hellespont in order for his Asian army to invade Greece. In this simile, hell and its inhabitants are directly associated with Asia and the East with Satan’s destruction of Eden analogized with the invasion of Europe by Xerxes’ Asian forces chronicled in Herodotus’ Histories. In the early modern period, China was generally perceived to be a powerful kingdom with which various European nations had sought to establish trade relations. The Dutch, Portuguese, and Russians had all sent embassies to Beijing with the express purpose of encouraging China to lend support to the activities of large-scale foreign trade.14 The merchant class in particular had deep vested interests in building up robust trade relations with the East—one thinks immediately of India and the Spice Islands—contributing to an emerging spirit of competition among European nations for the rights and privileges of first access. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, China was, according to David Porter, “acknowledged the seat of a great and ancient civilization whose cultural achievements not only reached back four thousand years but also continued to rival those of Europe into the current age.”15 Compared to the imposing presence of China, India remained far more obscure even though significant journeys had been made by merchants and traders to its shores. Porter further suggests that this could be due to the merchant travelers’ lesser overall effectiveness in cultivating European understanding of South Asia.16 Interestingly enough, however, in Paradise Lost it is India that appears to enjoy greater literary presence than China, with Milton revealing cultural alertness toward the economic activities of English merchants as well as formidable political standing of Mughal India. Together with the Ottoman Empire, the Mughal Empire, another bulwark of the Muslim world, appeared to have fascinated Milton. “India” announces its presence early in book 1 of Paradise Lost in Milton’s description of the demons who “Throng numberless, like that Pigmean Race / Beyond the Indian Mount” (PL 1.780–81), and also in book 2 in the portrayal of Satan’s infernal throne (PL 2.1–6). According to Merritt Y. Hughes, the “Indian Mount” may be a reference to the


Xerxes, the Liberty of Greece to yoke, From Susa his Memnonian Palace high Came to the Sea, and over Hellespont Bridging his way, Europe with Asia join’d, And scourg’d with many a stroke th’ indignant waves. (PL 10.304–11)


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Himalayas, while “that Pigmean Race” draws attention to a tradition that portrays images of pygmy-like inhabitants found inscribed on some maps of eastern Asia.17 If Milton made use of mythologized accounts of South Asia to generate a literary sense of the exotic in Paradise Lost, he was also certainly very much alert to popular contemporary conceptions of Mughal glory. At the beginning of book 2, Satan sits in state as hell’s oriental monarch and history’s archetypal “Sultan” (PL 1.348), his splendor and wealth far superseding not only Ormuz, the famed oriental emporium situated at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, but also the glory of contemporary Mughal India. On the subject of the allusive presence of Muslim India in Paradise Lost, Balachandra Rajan has suggested that Milton might have modeled Satan’s throne (in part at least) on the historically famous Peacock Throne of Shah Jahan.18 In general terms, Satan’s infernal throne is directly tied to the immense wealth and sensual luxury associated with the Islamic Orient—the seraglio of the “Great Turk” in Istanbul had been the focal point for early modern European fantasies of sexual and economic excess; stereotypical conceptions of the wealth of the Orient had been enforced by the valuable and luxury goods—silk, spices, gold, carpets, and incense—that made their way to Europe from the East. Spiritual discourse lends support to political discourse in the general polemical thrust of Milton’s republican convictions. Satan’s opulent throne reveals not only the supreme artifice of ostentatious display intrinsic to the empires of the East but also the performance of absolutist and tyrannical authority of which he is the great spiritual ancestor. If the image is by definition suspect in Milton’s theological and political Puritanism, and Satan is ontologically substanceless (in the Augustinian sense) even as the tyrannical ruler is hollow underneath the grand faćade of all his royalist trappings, this image can also seductively entice when originating in the far reaches of the globe where geographical, cultural, and political distance means that any apprehension or interpretation of Asia necessarily involves the exercise of a fertile literary imagination. If Mughal India fired Milton’s literary imagination, the political implications of entering into commercial relations with the East also became an important topic for consideration. Critical literature has long recognized that Milton’s allusion to the Indian Ocean world in Paradise Lost importantly indicates the presence of The Lusiads, Camões’s great epic poem that retells the story of Vasco da Gama’s historic voyage to India; Camões’s epic rendition of the early years of European colonial expansionism provides an important intertext against which Paradise Lost positions its own particular epic, political, and theological vision.19 In Paradise Lost, the Asian kingdom of India obtains its significance in relation to references




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made by Milton to other lands in the region. In book 2 of the epic poem, we encounter Satan traveling to the gates of hell “Close sailing from Bengala, or the Isles / Of Ternate and Tidore, whence Merchants bring / Thir spicy Drugs” (PL 2.638–40). Given their distinctively “hot and intemperate air,” comments Peter Heylyn in Cosmographie, the spice islands of the Moluccas (the two most important being Ternate and Tidore) may not be “very well furnished with necessaries for the life of man,” but this inconvenience is more than abundantly compensated for by “the abundance of Spices which are growing here” (3:250). For these very spices (Milton’s “spicy Drugs”), which include cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, aloes, and pepper, “Merchants bring them all things that the Country wants” (3:250). Next to South Asia (designated by Bengal [Bengala] that was part of the Mughal Empire), Southeast Asia (where the Moluccas are found) constitutes another politically important region in the context of the new internationalism of the early modern period, where “for the first time the world was physically united by the opening of direct trade routes between Europe and every other corner of the globe.”20 In Milton’s day, Dutch commercial and political ambitions in Southeast Asia impacted English national interests in various ways. Importantly, in 1602, the Netherlands East India Company obtained a monopoly on all Dutch trading activities with Asia, and the push was on to exclude other European nations from sharing in the commercial benefits of the East. Dominating trading activities in New Guinea, Borneo, Sumatra, and Java, the Dutch severely dented English aspirations to gain access to the much-sought-after spice market of Asia. Indeed, after having successfully driven the Portuguese from the Maluku Islands in 1605 and excluded the English from the Banda Islands in 1623, the Dutch exercised virtually uncontestable control over the principal clove-, nutmeg-, and mace-producing regions of Indonesia. Political friction persisted into the Interregnum when the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654) broke out between the English republic and the United Provinces of the Netherlands, precipitated by trade disputes and England’s desire to dislodge the dominant position enjoyed by the vast Dutch mercantile fleet. When Charles II became king, he specifically sought to displace Amsterdam with London as the entrepot of world trade. The Restoration monarch’s efforts to disrupt Dutch domination of world trade led once again to the eruption of major conflict (the Second Anglo-Dutch War of 1665–1667) between England and Holland after the English attacked the Western bases of the Dutch slave trade and captured New Amsterdam (now New York). It turned out that the Treaty of Breda that was signed in 1667 (the same year in which the ten-book first edition of Paradise Lost was


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published) to secure peace between the two nations did not lead, as hoped for, to a loosening of Dutch control over world trade. It appears that Milton was very much aware of Dutch commercial and imperial ambitions in Asia as well as the role played by such commercial companies as the Dutch East India Company in underwriting the formal production of atlases and geographical knowledge. This generation of geographical knowledge served mercantile and political interests in securing control over the vast trading networks of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. In the light of Dutch expansionist activities in the East, Milton’s invocation of places like the spice islands of the Moluccas would have resonated for his seventeenth-century reader. Indeed, within the associational and metaphorical complex of Paradise Lost, Satan’s figuration as a merchant adventurer might have been informed in part by Milton’s thoughts on the contemporary activities of Dutch merchandising vessels.21 It has even been suggested that Michael’s roll call of the following place names—“Mombaza, and Quiloa, and Melind, / And Sofala thought Ophir” (PL 11.399–40)— may be traced to the influence of contemporary Dutch atlases.22 That having been said, a contemporary work like Heylyn’s Cosmographie might also have influenced Milton’s exuberant unfolding of place names. In terms of genre, the Cosmographie can be described as an encyclopedic “digest” in which different countries of the world are identified by their geographical coordinates, followed by elaborations on their political, economic, social, and cultural makeup. Important regions, cities, towns, and areas belonging to a country are listed, and their special characteristics and distinctiveness are described and amplified. Under the heading “Of India” in Cosmographie, for example, the reader encounters in subsections such places as “Dulsinda,” “Pengab,” “Mandao,” “Delly,” “Agra,” “Sanga,” “Cambaia,” “Decan,” “Canara,” “Malabar,” “Bengala,” and so on (3:213–46). A number of these names are invoked by Milton in Paradise Lost. Does Milton’s association of Satan with a seafaring vessel plying the Indian Ocean world imply a general opposition toward, if not distrust of, contemporary trading enterprises and commercial ventures? Was he simply setting out to portray Portuguese and Dutch colonial ambitions in a demonic light? To respond to these questions, we need to take a closer look at Milton’s deployment of a host of trading and commercial images and metaphors across the vast stretch of his writings. Milton’s distinctive use of economic accounts to accentuate the importance of political principles like freedom of speech, liberty of conscience, and even free intellectual exchange suggests, as Hoxby has argued, that he generally regarded the market as a force for spiritual good.23 Hoxby’s view of Milton as economically savvy and knowledgeable has been questioned by some.




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For David Hawkes, for example, “Milton did not and could not have regarded the market as a force for spiritual good”24; and, more recently, Paul Stevens has made reference to Hoxby’s “neo-conservative ‘free marketplace of ideas,’” concluding that central for Milton “is the vision of a nation not obsessed with material gain but standing absolute for truth in all her teeming forms, a nation capable of separating vehicle from tenor and not confusing talent with capital.”25 I myself do not see Milton’s relation to commercial activities in terms of an either-or dichotomy—while Milton might not have sacrificed his religious understanding and its interrelated republican political convictions on the altar of Mammon, he certainly gave ample evidence of an involved interest in commerce to the extent that economic allusions and references appear again and again in his writings to inform expressions of his spiritual concerns and political views. In Milton’s epic handling of the matter of the East and of Asia, the seductions of commercial profit and the character of political tyranny come into forceful play. Here differences distinguish South Asia and Southeast Asia from Ottoman Southwest Asia. Muslim India fascinated Milton with its opulence and dynastic power whereas the Ottoman Empire provided metaphors for understanding the character and attributes of political tyranny. In an essay, “Milton, Islam, and the Ottomans,” Gerald MacLean, noting that “Milton wrote nearly nothing about Islam and very little about the Ottomans,” sets out nevertheless to argue that this poet-polemicist’s relative silence on topics relating to the Muslim world was the result of “tactical negligence rather than indifference.”26 However, MacLean finds himself quite hard pressed to come up with a convincing argument as to how this paucity of allusions and references to Islam in Milton’s writings can indicate the poet-polemicist’s obvious interest in this oriental religion and its political and cultural embodiments, except to point out that some writers and scholars of the Arab-Islamic world have found in these writings thematic structures consistent with the teachings of Islam and even embraced Milton as one of their own. While Milton might not have written detailed, sustained, or extensive treatments of Islam, he nevertheless did think of the Ottoman Empire as the literal and symbolic home of tyrannical authority. This theme cuts across Milton’s political prose and Paradise Lost. Also, when considering the subject of Islam in Milton’s writings, we need to note that in addition to the Ottoman world, there was also, very importantly, the presence and significance of Mughal India. When Milton imagined the world of the Islamic Orient—and this categorically encompasses both the Ottoman Empire and Muslim South Asia—he did not think in monological terms, grappling instead with the implications of a faith system that, while theologically


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antithetical to Christianity, also enjoyed quite substantial political power and economic prosperity. Throughout Paradise Lost, Milton never allows his reader to forget that satanic absolutism is best understood and imagined with reference to the Islamic Orient. If Satan is identified as hell’s formidable Ottoman sultan at the start of the epic poem, marshaling his forces against the authority of heaven, he is also the “mighty Chief ” (PL 10.455) of its “great consulting Peers” (PL 10.456) compared to the “dark Divan” (PL 10.457), a reference to the Turkish council of state. In Paradise Lost, Milton finds occasion to dilate on the general significance of the Ottoman Empire in his epic portrayal of hell’s military organization. Milton’s Satan rules a generally ordered and disciplined regiment suggestive of not only imperial Rome’s formidable military machine but also unity of oriental heathen armies like the Turks. James A. Freeman has suggested that Milton’s epic representation of Satan’s army may be traced to an identifiable tradition “that locates such military and social solidarity in the East.”27 This tradition, Freeman elaborates, was built out of historical memories of European wars fought and lost against the Muslim infidel, thus generating cautionary writings that contrasted the Turks’ impressive discipline against the general lack of the same on the part of the English soldier.28 If Milton relies on this cultural perception of the armies of the Islamic Orient to depict the military organization of the infernal angels, it is obviously not to showcase Ottoman might per se as to cast a demonic sheen on the Muslim world of Southwest Asia. In Paradise Lost, demonic militarism is portrayed in part with reference to the fighting capabilities of the Ottoman Turks, still viewed with anxiety at the time. By portraying hell as the infernal archetype of the Turkish political economy, Milton demonizes the Ottoman Empire and the Muslim faith that it practices, defends, and seeks to disseminate by the point of the sword. But perhaps more than expressing theological antagonism toward this world religion that is European Christianity’s much feared and vilified bogey since the time of the Crusades, Milton’s Islamicization of hell makes clear the point that the political organization of the infernal abode affords the most revealing example of the workings of tyranny. Milton’s meaning is a politically resonant one—every tyrant in human history finds his great original ancestor in the devil; also, tyranny is a defining hallmark of the governments of the East and should not be emulated by any civilized nation that prizes the values of true liberty. Milton’s emphasis is a familiar one in republican discourse. In Oceana (1656), a highly influential treatise on free states and the most celebrated republican treatise of the seventeenth century, James Harrington had




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identified the Turkish monarchy as exemplifying the quintessential form of political tyranny; unrestrained by law, the despotic, autocratic, and capricious Ottoman sultan exercises total power over the lives of his subjects. The playwright (sometimes argued to have been Robert Greene) of Selimus, Emperor of the Turks (1594) gives to the Ottoman tyrant Selimus the following definition of identity that would have struck a chord not only in Harrington but also in John Milton: “Let them view in me / The perfect picture of right tyranny.”29 Like Harrington, Milton readily links the trampling of laws and deprivation of liberty to the ways of the tyrannical Turk, Saracen, and heathen (CPW 3:215), directly linking the Englishman that is without law to the demonized Other whose defining space is the Islamic Orient. In Areopagitica (1644), he bases his great defense against censorship on a conception of the English nation as built on the principles of liberty, in contrast to the world of “the Turk [who] upholds his Alcoran, by the prohibition of printing” (CPW 2:549). In Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church (1659), he identifies Islam as the “religion [that] stands by force only” (CPW 7:319). Orating on how “Learning Makes Men Happier than does Ignorance” in Prolusions VII, he finds himself having to grapple with the fact “that the Turks of to-day have acquired an extensive dominion over the wealthy kingdoms of Asia in spite of being entirely devoid of culture” (CPW 1:298). The perplexing question for him is how to explain the relationship between a nonliterary people like the Turks and their apparent ability to sustain an empire. Milton attempts to formulate a response by attributing the Turks’ ability to provide the necessities of life and hold onto them to nature and not to art. He argues that the sense of justice that even the illiterate Turks appear to possess is for the purpose of ensuring social order, a force of preservation grounded in nature itself. The fact of the Turkish Empire is then traced to the existence of a natural law that governs the preservation of human societies in general and not to the Turk’s particular cultural and political character (directly associated with “the perversion of Nature” [CPW 1:298])—making aggressive onslaughts on the property of others, rallying together for the sake of plunder, and conspiring in crime. If Milton defined English nationhood with reference to the converging templates of classical and biblical republicanism, he was certainly not averse to invoking tropes of radical cultural difference in his writings to underscore political points. In his polemical works, he found ample opportunity to highlight distinctions between civility and barbarism to reinforce political arguments and communicate lessons of history for the benefit of government and the English nation. In A Second Defence of


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the English People (1654), he equates the success of the English nation in fighting for and defending the cause of liberty with its possession of the attributes and virtues of civility, that important yardstick by which the English can measure the terms and extent of their historic achievements. Barbarism, the diametric opposite of the cultural value of civility, is the condition of the Other that must be resisted at all costs because so easily succumbed to. In an obvious cautionary message inserted into his celebration of English nobility in defending law and liberty, Milton makes reference to the “Indians, themselves [as] the most stupid of mortals” (CPW 4.1:551) because of their religious beliefs and practices, worshipping “malevolent demons whom they cannot exorcize” (CPW 4.1:551) as gods. Not worshipping the true Christian God is equated with being caught in the condition of a most foul barbarism. Whenever a people (like the royalists)—and this is Milton’s message to the English—commit the egregious error of exalting monarchs into deities and embracing the rule of tyrants through willful apathy, they degenerate into a state of barbarism far more vile than the horrible superstitious and idolatrous condition inhabited by the Indians. Where, in book 9 of Paradise Lost, Milton metaphorically conflates geographically and culturally specific South Asian banyan leaves with the Amazonian shield (an object associated with the Americas) to describe the leaves gathered to conceal Adam and Eve’s postlapsarian shame, in A Second Defence he deploys the word “Indians” in a way that has generated diverse readings. The word “Indians” can refer to the Amerindians or South Asian natives, or maybe to both at the same time. In an earlier reading of the subject, I have identified Milton’s “Indians” as referring to the Amerindians, but there have been suggestions made by other critics that Milton was in fact thinking of South Asian Hindus in this particular reference in A Second Defence.30 Arguing that Milton was a Renaissance historicist for whom “the English Civil War was meant to continue the work of the Reformation in separating the present from its medieval past,” Paul Stevens posits that Milton had in mind the native inhabitants of South Asia when making reference to those “Indians” who mistook demons for deities and worshipped them.31 Stevens tells us Milton understands that “in their idolatry, what the Hindus are, the English of feudal and some even of recent times were.”32 This reading is intriguing in its provocative suggestion that Milton’s view of culture and world history is very much framed by “the emergence of a new sense of historical consciousness” in which some non-European countries and the cultures associated with them are understood as not having arrived because buried deep under the enslaving conditions of an outmoded medievalism.33 Stevens is specifically




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arguing that the Orientalism of Barnard Lewis’s What Went Wrong?, the highly controversial thesis that traces all the problems besetting contemporary Islam to its inability to enter into and participate in the conditions of modernity, was already present in the cultural and ideological expressions of early modern England and also of John Milton.34 When Milton identifies a people like the “Indians” in A Second Defence as being hopelessly lost in their paganism, he gives to this identification more of a political than theological emphasis. He invokes the Indians for the express purpose of instructing the English nation on the terrible shame of embracing the conditions of tyranny with its most vivid cultural analogy afforded in the heathen transformation of demons into gods. A people’s embracing of tyranny then becomes a political version of the idolatry typically figured by Milton as fornication in his writings. Temperamentally, Milton was not generally given to losing himself in the enthusiasms of the proselytizing mandate, and this is despite his identification of the gods of “the Heathen World” (PL 1.375) as infernal angels establishing their destructive presence in the lives of the unsaved. In Milton, acceptance of Judeo-Christianity’s claim to exceptionalism as being the only true faith that saves does not readily translate into any significant recognition of the importance of converting poor lost souls of the heathen world to a saving knowledge of the true faith. When we note that the “Indians” who are identified as “the most stupid of mortals” in A Second Defence might not actually have been intended by Milton to refer to South Asians but instead to Amerindians, we become less clear about the degree to which Milton brings into play an instinctively denigrating impulse in the various references made to India in his writings. The challenge for the reader deciphering Miltonic intention, and by extension inferring the forms of his Orientalism, is of course complicated by the fact that the idea of India is sufficiently elastic in the cultural discourses of early modern Europe. Accepting an inevitable degree of open-endedness in deciphering the referential specificity of Milton’s “Indians” in A Second Defence does not detract from a certain binaristic habit of thought that tends to inflect the expressions of Milton’s theological convictions—Christianity versus paganism; civility versus barbarism; freedom and liberty versus slavery. Paul Stevens has referred to this habit of thought as “Leviticus thinking,” an Old Testament view of the world in which the chosen nation of Israel was expressly commanded by God in the early days of its formation not to intermingle with the peoples of other cultures and pagan tribes; in this exclusivist conception of community and nation building, the integrity of one’s tribe and nation is framed by the absolutist denigration of all foreign cultures and peoples as sexually


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impure and theologically contaminated.35 While, on occasion, Milton may celebrate the fraternity of shared experience based on commonality of political vision—as when he refers to republican minded people in foreign lands coming together in “a mutual bond of amity and brotherhood” (CPW 3:214) in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649)—he generally holds a distrust of cultural intermingling. Indeed, the clear-cut and distinctive separation of peoples and cultures frames Milton’s conception of England’s national identity as directly defined by a community’s ardent quest for and defense of liberty. Milton’s Tenure cannot sustain any suggested language of cultural egalitarianism for long, as the point is emphatically made that the Englishman who forgets all laws and offends against life and liberty becomes no different from “a Turk, a Sarasin, a Heathen” (CPW 3:215). The infidel Turks and other “oriental” heathens that constitute Christian Europe’s traditional enemies do not belong to “real” nations since “real” nations are defined by their possession of the controlling values of civility—the subscription to “Laws, human, civil, and religious” (CPW 3:215). The civility of the Christian West is directly tied to its embracing of “Laws,” which is contrasted against the lawless Islamic Orient where tyranny finds its supreme embodiment. In republican political discourse, the Turkish ruler is defined by his despotic, autocratic, and capricious identity, attesting to a disregard for law. In this discourse, such lawlessness finds visible expression in the absolute power and control exercised by the sultan over the life of his subject. Within the context of Milton’s rhetorical and ideological binarism, cultural intermingling brings about a contamination and compromising of the integrity of the people and the nation—a point powerfully underscored and dramatized in Samson Agonistes. Much is made in Samson Agonistes of its protagonist fracturing the integrity of Israel’s exclusivist identity by entering into sexual relations with the women of foreign tribes. Importantly, the degeneration of a people owing to cross-cultural contamination is not always presented as stemming from the encroachment of the external forces of barbarism. The English, as Milton finds occasion to emphasize repeatedly, can participate in their own degeneration and enslavement by refusing to transform the hard-fought liberty that had been won into the good and able governance of a nation upheld by wisdom, virtue, and hard work. Colonialism is always a complex trope in Milton’s writings—in the conquest of early Britain narrativized in The History of Britain (1670), Roman imperialism not only represents a negative historical experience but also makes way for the dissemination of law, civility, discipline, learning, valor, and eloquence. Civility is, however, never a straightforward concept in Milton, for its trappings can also lead




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to the degeneration into luxury, slavish imitation, and the condition of bondage. If, in emphasizing the importance of preserving the virtues of civility in grounding the moral and political integrity of England, Milton writes about overcoming the forces of barbarism that threaten from without, he also persists in underscoring the equal importance of subjugating the forces of barbarism found to lie latent and awaiting opportunistic resurgence within oneself and the nation. As Eric B. Song has noticed, Milton’s preoccupation with the contending forces of civility and barbarism is not limited to the expressions of his theological and political convictions but expands to embrace Paradise Lost’s cosmography, in which Chaos is represented as simultaneously feminized (like the womb) and racialized (through its Tartar associations) matter threatening the coherence of the Miltonic universe. Milton’s Creation “is akin to the Western subjugation of unruly Eastern forces.”36 As a cultural signifier, India not only refers to an important country in South Asia but also functions as a metaphor that can always be readily invoked for the purpose of undertaking a binaristic reading of self and Other. Imagined as an amorphous landmass that seems to embrace about every place that is not Europe, “the name of India,” observes Pompa Banerjee, “becomes a handy cosmographical synecdoche for identifying all of Europe’s others.”37 This South Asian subcontinent affords ample room for metaphorizing the tensions between the civilized West and the barbaric East. In Revolutionary England, we encounter another interesting engagement with the relationship between Indians, barbarism, and civility in Heylyn’s Cosmographie, an engagement that prompts comparison with Milton’s particular handling of the subject. In his “chorographie and historie” of India in Cosmographie, Heylyn next affirms that “the Naturall Indians” (3:214), the “Original Inhabitants” (3:213) of the land, are “tall of stature, strong of body, and of complexion inclining to that of the Negroes: of manners Civill, and ingenuous, free from fraud in their dealings, and exact keepers of their words” (3:214). Following a summary of physical characteristics, Heylyn proceeds to comment on how class position in South Asian society finds expression in whether an Indian is “meanly clad, for the most part naked” (3:214) or whether he or she is covered “with oils, and perfumes, and . . . Jewels, Pearls, and other Ornaments befitting” (3:214). Concerning the “Common sort” (3:214), Heylyn finds that they are “content with no more covering than to hide their shame” (3:214). The idea of shame can be loaded with heavy theological, political, and cultural implications and meanings. In his reading of South Asia in Cosmographie, Heylyn appears to use “shame” prosaically as a synonym


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simply meant to describe the condition of nakedness. This is quite different from his reading of the condition of the inhabitants of the Moluccas whose general state of nakedness—they do not much care “to hide their shame” (3:250)—is the external manifestation of the fact that they have not been “civilized by the cohabitation of more modest and civill Nations” (3:250). For the most part idolaters, the people of the Moluccas are “all in generall fraudulent, perfidious, treacherous, inhumane, and of noted wickedness” (3:250). In regard to the Moluccas, Heylyn directly associates shame with the idea of depravity. Robert Markley has proposed that Heylyn’s different treatment of the relationship between shame and depravity in the Moluccas and India may be traced to a certain valorized perspective informed by his support of vibrant trading activities transpiring between South Asia and England: “Skin colour, religious differences, and seemingly odd customs such as vegetarianism can be encompassed by a class-specific notion of trans-cultural civilization: upper-class Indians (both Hindu and Muslim, as Heylyn makes clear elsewhere) exhibit the civility, honesty, and even aesthetic sensibilities that mirror an idealized self-image of English virtues. This identification of Indian and English sensibilities enacts the civilizing function that Heylyn attributes to the activity of trade itself. Trade civilizes: it both produces and reaffirms a like-minded compatibility between English desires and South Asian interests.”38 In Milton, shame generally plays an important disciplinary function in defining the nation as a godly community. In his political and theological discourse, the discipline of shame functions when the errors of a people and nation are put on display for others to be able to see and deride; knowing how far you have fallen in the eyes and estimation of others should prompt a wayward people to make necessary adjustments and regulate in the right direction. In Paradise Lost, South Asian flora—“The Figtree, not that kind for Fruit renown’d, / But such as at this day to Indians known / In Malabar or Decan spreads her Arms” (PL 9.1101–3)—affords covering for Adam and Eve’s newfound shame, suggesting an association between India and the theological experience of the Fall. Where Milton invokes “Malabar” and “Decan” as allusive place names in Paradise Lost, Heylyn elaborates on their geographical and cultural interest in Cosmographie. After describing the “very temperate Air, and . . . fruitfull Soyl” (3:227) and many strange animals characterizing Malabar, Heylyn elaborates on the religion practiced by its people: “In Religion for the most part Gentiles, and more besotted generally on their Idolatries, than the rest of these Nations. The Pagode, or Idol which they worship, seated upon a brazen throne, and crowned with a rich Diadem. From his head issue out four horns, from his mouth four Tusks; his eyes fiery like a Glow-worm, his




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nose flat and ugly, his visage terrible, his hands like claws, his legs and thighs like those of a Lion. In a word, we cannot paint the Devill in a more ugly figure, than they do their God” (3:227). The grotesque external forms of the deities worshipped by the inhabitants of Malabar not only testify to the idolatrous ways of the Indians but also suggest an extremely close connection between the gods of Malabar and demons of the infernal world. Heylyn even analogizes some of Malabar’s devotional forms with the worship of Moloch (one of the demons who speaks in Milton’s infernal council) practiced in times past by the Syrians. In the midst of the many flexible significations of “India,” one aspect— that related to the ritual practice of sati, or widow immolation on the funeral pyre of the late husband—might be of interest to us here because of its possible implications for early modern English Orientalism and for Milton’s writing of Asia. In a letter written to Prince Charles on October 30, 1616, Sir Thomas Roe, James I’s ambassador to the Mughal court, finds it necessary to include this sentence in his account of Indian cultural and religious life: “Many women burn with joy at their husbands’ funerals.”39 On the subject of sati, Peter Mundy, an employee of the English East India Company and an extensive traveler in Europe and Asia, offers a fairly lengthy account of an event that he had supposedly witnessed while in India. Detailing “the burning of a Banian woman with her dead husband,”40 Mundy recounts this event in Surat with awe, fascination, and incredulity, his narrative revealing all the features of anthropological interest. He describes sati as “an ancient Custome”41 that has been relegated to the margins of cultural practice in Muslim Mughal India. On this particular occasion, the widow had to make a special plea before the governor of Surat to grant her permission to be immolated with her deceased husband. Once that request is granted, Mundy elaborates, this woman proceeds to be washed in the River Ganges and then permits herself to be locked up in “a little lowe house with a doore”42 built of highly combustible wood. Special note is made of the widow’s general cheerfulness, the ostensible sign of her unending loyalty to and love for her husband. After the door to the wooden hut is closed on the woman, the bystanders stand guard with long poles not only “to Right the fire if neede bee” but also “rather I thinck to knock her downe if shee should chance to gett out.”43 The apparent personal willingness to be burnt alive is framed by the presence of social coercion. The great noise generated by the beating of various kinds of instruments and clapping is not only some ritualistic expression of celebration but also something “to drowne her voyce if shee should chance to Crye.”44 There is fascination in Mundy, but there is also revulsion. Drawn to a cultural practice extreme in its Otherness,


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this early seventeenth-century traveler to India also detaches himself from its illogicality, its inscrutability. As a cultural site, India resists ready interpretation and easy comprehension. Sati reveals just how truly radical is India’s cultural alterity.45 François Bernier, a French traveler who spent twelve years in the court of Aurengzeb and served as the Mughal emperor’s physician, found himself grappling with “the barbarous custom” of sati, highlighting the role played by Muslims in suppressing the practice as well as his own saving of a woman from the fires of the funeral pyre.46 For Bernier, the barbarism of Hindu religious and cultural life is not confined to the ritual practice of widow immolation. “In some parts of the Indies,” records Bernier, “instead of burning the women who determine not to survive their husbands, the Brahmens bury them alive, by slow degrees, up to the throat; then two or three of them fall suddenly upon the victim, wring her neck, and when she has been effectually and completely choked, cover over the body with earth thrown upon it from successive baskets, and tread upon the head.”47 Whereas Bernier reveals his great indignation at the atrocities of sati, to the point that he “ardently . . . wished for opportunities to exterminate those cursed Brahmens,”48 Peter Mundy presents his witnessing of sati very much as an observer watching a form of cultural theater elaborately put up on display by the East. Thinking of India with reference to cultural performance is not only restricted to “incomprehensible” phenomena like sati but also extended to English perceptions of the Mughal court. When in India, Sir Thomas Roe had made the following observation on the display of wealth as a form of theater in the Mughal court: “In jewels (which is one of his felicities) [Jahangir] is the treasury of the world, buying all that comes, and heaping rich stones as if he would rather build then wear them. And yet all this greatness, compared and weighed judiciously, is like a play, that serves more for delight and to entertain the vulgar than for any use.”49 Like other foreign visitors to the India of the historically famous Mughal emperors—Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb—Thomas Roe was stunned by the Muslim dynasty’s awe-inspiring authority and imperial magnificence. Given the obvious experience of being dazzled by the Mughal court’s unimaginable opulence, Roe’s response that all of Jahangir’s glory belies a deep cultural and political hollowness signifies in the context of an Englishman’s nervous attempts to engage with and accommodate the radical alterity of the East. Specifically sent to India in 1615 to impress on Jahangir English political authority and eminence, Roe strategically sought to downplay the impressive grandeur of the Mughal court by theatricalizing his own ambassadorial office and the greatness of England. In




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this political and cultural encounter between East and West, South Asia and England, arranged by James I, Roe’s efforts to impress India with English political authority were countered by ironically layered negotiations or met with outright disdain much of the time.50 In Paradise Lost, Milton’s India signifies in different registers—theological, political, and economic. In the theological domain, India’s cultural alterity becomes associated with the experience of the Fall while, in the political and economic, there is recognition that various European nations have brought Asia into their expansionist line of vision. When we consider Milton’s response to South Asia as a space of cultural difference in a pluralistic world, we note there is nothing in his allusions to India that comes even remotely close to the disturbingly fascinating “performance” of sati for the Western gaze as experienced and narrated by Peter Mundy. Yet, not rendering India an extreme spectacle for the voyeuristic consumption of the West (as Peter Mundy did in his handling of sati) does not necessarily translate into any identifiable cultural tolerance (generally speaking) of the people and cultures of Asia. If, as Andrew Hadfield has noted, Milton generally showed little tolerance for the other peoples within the British Isles owing to cultural prejudice, religious conviction, and political understanding, he would likewise not have been tolerant toward the peoples of South Asia.51 And while he did not transform India into a symbolic locus for reinforcing and amplifying an exclusionary conception of England as God’s elect Protestant nation, he understood the idol-worshipping religions of Asia as demonic in origin. This theological understanding, which makes Milton unable to embrace religious difference and diversity, does not, however, finally detract from a general fascination with the peoples and cultures of the East. Any possibility for an overdetermined reading of Asia based on a theological understanding is distracted or compromised by pressures exerted by the secular political and economic activities of the larger international community. Milton’s identifiable and inescapable fascination with India attests to this distraction and compromise. The first aspect of this Miltonic fascination with the matter of the East that is of interest to us here is tied up with the politics of trade and with the Restoration regime’s ambition to build England into a powerful commercial empire. If Satan has been associated with a Dutch merchant fleet, he can also just as readily stand for the East India merchant. The controlling context has to do with the growing clout and political influence of the English East India Company in its underwriting of Restoration England’s conception of her (inter)national identity as a trading and commercial empire. Restoration England’s support for the activities of the English East India Company appears to have been brought to a


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symbolic climax when Charles II made a demonstrative point of stopping at the East India House as part of his royal progress from the Tower of London to Whitehall. Before this, Hoxby notes, no English monarch had ever stopped at a merchant house during a royal progress.52 Expressing dutiful affection for Charles II, the East India Company symbolically and explicitly granted the monarch a far more laudable role in furthering the nation’s economic interests, reinforcing a mutually beneficial relationship that would consolidate Restoration England’s (inter)national viability and visibility as a vibrant commercial empire. The second aspect of Milton’s fascination with Asia is related to his general understanding of the kingdoms of the world within the context of the republican historiography that shapes books 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost. In these concluding books of Milton’s epic poem, the genealogy of Adam and Eve’s descendants and beginnings of Israel’s formation as a nation give expression to Milton’s understanding of God’s mysterious workings in the lives of his people, celebration of the faithful remnant in an unbelieving world, and even consideration of the Sanhedrin as a divinely sanctioned paradigm for a central governing council. Milton finds in Israel a community of people “select / From all the rest” (PL 12.111–12) and God’s own “one peculiar Nation” (PL 12.111). Old Testament history also signifies importantly within the typological framework that finds in the unfolding of this history the foreshadowing of the promised Messiah whose coming will bring to light the controlling structures of God’s grand salvific design for fallen humanity. If the significance of Old Testament history inheres in its typological relation to the New Testament, it is also an instrumental mirror by which Milton is able to discern analogies between Hebrew characters of old (prophets, priests, and kings) and important political figures in seventeenth-century Revolutionary England. Old Testament Hebraic history is a veritable storehouse of information, providing valuable instruction on God’s will for his chosen people as well as highlighting with great clarity the repercussions for disobedience and conditions for restoration. In Milton’s oeuvre, Old Testament history is generally invoked for the purpose of placing contemporary English historical and political conditions in proper perspective. The lessons of Hebraic history hold direct relevance for the political efforts needed to be expanded for building the English republic—they educate on the point that monarchy was never intended by God to be the ideal form of government for his chosen people; they yield precedents showing that tyrants can be removed from power by violence; and they impress the importance of regulating and maintaining the moral integrity of the nation by refusing to succumb to




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the temptations of political and spiritual compromise, typically metaphorized in terms of idolatry, fornication, and miscegenation. It appears that when Milton turns to scripture for God-inspired lessons, they are lessons extrapolated for their direct relevance to the architects and supporters of the English republic. The Old Testament’s binaristic structures, aimed at upholding Israel’s exceptionalism as God’s chosen nation, are applied to distinguish between those who support the English republic and those antagonistic toward it. Milton’s writing of the English nation is predicated upon identifying and demonizing the people who are bent on disrupting the successful materialization of the republican project, going as far as to associate them with ethnic impurity metaphorized by such biblical figures as the Canaanites, Philistines, and Dalilah. Expurgating the foreigner in one’s midst for the establishment of England as God’s holy commonwealth effectively entails bringing an understanding of national exceptionalism into convergence with a solipsistic ethnic vision.53 In Milton, generally speaking, political Orientalism—the demonization of a people (like the Turks) owing to the nature of their political system—cannot be disentangled from biblical Orientalism or the idea of Israel as God’s chosen nation whose religious and national integrity is predicated on complete separation from other peoples, tribes, and nations of the heathen world. But if Old Testament Orientalism supposedly offers a clear-cut “us-versus-them” modality that can be relied on for lessons to build and sustain the English commonwealth, it seems capable of doing so only at an abstract and conceptual level. For when Milton reaches out to tap the Old Testament experience and conception of nation building, he discovers that the radical Other, which is meant to be repudiated, may very readily be tangled up with the constitution and definition of the self. The enemy is not always someone or something that threatens from without—often enough it is discovered to lurk within the individual self or composite body of the nation. Slavery is, for example, not only the result of the cruelty of Egyptian taskmasters but also the perverse desire of a people to gravitate toward and embrace its asphyxiating condition. Milton’s relationship to Hebraic tradition and history is then far from straightforward, ranging from the appropriation of important controlling experiences that can help inform the shaping of English history to the belief that the Jews are locked into the existential condition of bondage and slavery.54 Giving to Milton a particular conception of the transcendent exceptionality of a nation because set apart by God for his purpose and pleasure, a conception directly relevant to his typological reading of England as the second Israel and general intolerance toward theological, political, and cultural difference, Old Testament Israel is


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itself nevertheless also associated with slavery and degeneracy. As it plays an important eschatological role in the millennial conception that the reunification of a dispersed Israel will pave the way for Christ’s highly anticipated return, Israel, also associated with the condition of slavery, must likewise be abjected for the emergence and renewal of God’s English commonwealth. Rachel Trubowitz has recently argued that Milton’s writings give indication that he views both Jews and Asians alike as possessing an innate predisposition toward slavishness. There is a cultural context in support of such a view: Jews and Asians were sometimes understood to have ethnic links; in fact, there was even speculation that different peoples like the Amerindians, Tartars, South Asians, Chinese, and Japanese all have genealogical links with the Jews. This view that a Hebraic-Asian nature and character connected various nations of the earth was shaped in part by a reading of the theological Fall and of the subsequent sojourning of Adam and Eve’s descendants to different lands.55 Milton’s Orient finds literary expression either in terms of distinct geopolitical and cultural spaces or as controlling metaphors aimed at capturing the essence of cultural alterity against which the (ideal) definition of the English republic and godly commonwealth can be brought into sharper focus. If there are many Asias in Milton’s writings, obtaining their meanings in different literary, political, and theological registers, one also notes certain sustainable features in his general representation of the Orient—it is the historical ground of absolutist and tyrannical rule as well as the cultural space of untrammeled human ambition; defined by the spirit of slavishness, it also entraps with its emasculating sensuality; and it is associated with mind-boggling luxury.56 In Paradise Lost, the East and the Orient are directly related to the world of the Fall. Asia appears particularly susceptible to the wiles of the devil. Like a scavenging bird bred in “Imaus” (the Himalayas), Milton’s Satan flies “toward the Springs / Of Ganges or Hydaspes, Indian streams” (PL 3:430–36). Traveling across Central Asia and the Far East toward South Asia, the vulture-like Satan suggestively transforms by association the entire continent into a decaying corpse, a figure inextricably tied to the condition of the Fall.57 In book 11 of his epic poem, Milton directly incorporates Asian geopolitical spaces into Michael’s history of the world—on the hill of vision where Adam is shown “all Earth’s Kingdoms and thir glory” (PL 11.384), Michael begins his narrative of postlapsarian history not with the empires of the West but of the East (PL 11.386–92). By first showcasing the world of the Orient as exemplifying the hollow fruits of all fallen human ambition, Milton appears to be saying that if one wanted to witness the most dramatic consequences of Adam and Eve’s transgression, one only needed to turn to




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the East for compelling historical examples. Drawn to their exotic appeal, Milton’s evocation of the Far East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia shows distant oriental lands and kingdoms facilitating republican meditation on the experiences of the theological Fall and of political defeat. Asia and the East offer the first immediate and most powerful expressions of the intertwining of the exercise of political tyranny with the ambitions of empire building. From Asia Milton gathers compelling examples with which to tie the idea of “mightiest Empire” (PL 11.387) to the insatiable appetites of human ambition, the quest for earthly glory that knows no bounds. Asia is the geographical and cultural home to some of the world’s most ambitiously cruel conquerors, and, while it fascinates because of its exoticism and promises of economic profitability, nevertheless must also be recognized for its natural and instinctive propensity toward embracing tyrannical rule. This notion that the natural servility of Asians causes them to embrace unthinkingly the enormities of tyrannical and despotic rule can be traced all the way back to Aristotle. In the Politics, Aristotle had declared northern Europeans to be full of spirit but lacking in intelligence and skill and Asians to possess intelligence and inventiveness but lacking in spirit. This “wanting in spirit” on the part of “the natives of Asia” explains why they are characteristically trapped “in a state of subjection and slavery.”58 The Asians’ natural servility causes them to subscribe only all too readily to despotic rule. Invoking the condition of barbarism as the extreme low point in the scale of a people’s and culture’s degenerative slide, Milton goes on to expand on the classical Aristotelian definition of the barbarian as one who exists outside of the civilizational pale of Athenian law and order. He emphasizes that deprivation of liberty refers not simply to the despotic imposition of constraints upon individual freedoms: as long as one lives in subjection to somebody else’s will, one is already enslaved. It is in Asia where one encounters the city of “Cambalu, seat of Cathaian Can” (PL 11.388). Khanbalik or Cambalu, earlier made familiar to the European reader by Marco Polo, refers to the Mongol capital established by Kublai Khan in the area of what is present day Beijing. This capital city in China functions for Milton as one of the controlling symbolic centers of oriental authority together with “Samarchand” (PL 11.389), a place name rich in historical resonance. Reinforced through the use of the coordinating conjunction, these two sites, “Cambalu . . . / And Samarchand” (PL 11.388–89), function interchangeably at the metaphorical level to capture not only the dynastic power of the East but also voracious appetite for wars, invasions, and cruelty associated with both the Mongols and the Tartars. If Milton’s invocation of Khanbalik makes the reader think


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of Kublai Khan, his reference to Samarkand has relevance in Mongol history as well—for Genghis Khan, Kublai’s grandfather, had captured Samarkand when he waged war against Sultan Mohammed Shah, sovereign of the empire of Khwarizm. But for readers of the period, Samarkand resonates in particular because of its associations with Tamerlane the Great, the dark historical figure at the center of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays. Born near Samarkand and claiming direct descent from Genghis himself through the house of Chagatai, Tamerlane extended his rule to encompass India and Anatolia from the capital of Samarkand itself. In Tamburlaine (part 2), Marlowe’s brutally violent protagonist waxes lyrical in his celebration of Samarkand as he imagines with cruel relish the trembling and subjugated “kings of greatest Asia” (4.3.98): Then shall my native city Samarcanda And crystal walls of fresh Jaertis’ stream, The pride and beauty of her princely seat, Be famous through the furthest continents, For there my palace royal shall be placed: Whose shining turrets shall dismay the heavens, And cast the fame of Ilion’s tower to hell. (4.3.107–13)59

Here Marlowe’s eponymous protagonist, embodying in extreme form the insatiable will to power, metonymically conflates Samarkand with his own overreaching subjectivity so that, Babel-like, both man and city become one in their vaulting ambition to assault the domain of the gods. In Paradise Lost, Milton’s reader is reminded of the brutal history of human cruelty informed by the voracious expansionist ambitions of such conquerors as Genghis Khan and Tamerlane—both infamously associated with Samarkand, both significantly having their origins in the East. Clearly then, the traditional seat of imperial authority in “Paquin” (also the site of Cambalu) allowed Milton to meditate on the character and nature of monarchical or tyrannical authority, since—as Peter Heylyn puts it—this is the place “where the King continually resideth; and that, either because the air hereof is more healthfull and pleasant, than any of the other, or because it lieth neer unto the Tartars, with whom the Chinois are in perpetuall warre” (3:209). Although he was a Royalist, Heylyn offers a reading of the political order of the Middle Kingdom that echoes republican interpretations of Ottoman political authority itself: “The Government of this Kingdome is meerly tyrannicall; there being no other Lord but the King. . . . The King alone is the generall Landlord, and him the subjects do not onely reverence as a Prince, but adore like a God” (3:211). In Oceana,




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for instance, James Harrington describes the Turkish monarchy as the prototype of absolutist rule in similar language: “If one man be sole landlord of a territory, or overbalance the people, for example, three parts in four, he is grand signor; for so the Turk is called from his property; and his empire is absolute monarchy.”60 In a letter written to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the minister of finance to King Louis XIV, the French traveler Bernier deploys resonatingly similar discourse when describing the immense sufferings of the common people in order to emphasize that the Mughal emperor was sole “proprietor” and “possessor” of all the land over which he governs. When “timariots, governors, or contractors,”61 or those who are delegated to take charge of the peasantry, exercise total control over their lives, there is no incentive for these people to work their land for the bounties of nature or for profit. This perceived political mismanagement of India becomes, for Bernier, a parable for the systems of governance generally defining the kingdoms of the East: “Actuated by a blind and wicked ambition to be more absolute than is warranted by the laws of God and of nature, the Kings of Asia grasp at everything, until at length they lose everything.”62 For Bernier, Asia is marked by destructive greed and tyrannical authority, and he cannot help but exult that “in our [European] quarter of the globe, Kings are not the sole proprietors of the soil!”63 In Milton, the insatiable ambition to power, strikingly exemplified in Asian monarchical and tyrannical authority, constitutes an important marker of postlapsarian existence. Benedict S. Robinson has observed that “the east of Paradise Lost is an imperial scene, a scene of power, wealth, magnificence, and luxury, a scene of misplaced human ambition and false heroism.”64 On the subject of the kingdoms of the East, Milton finds it hard to think about the dynamism of Asian dynasties without also thinking of their (stereotypical) opulence. When Michael’s visual presentation of postlapsarian history moves on from the Middle Kingdom to “Agra and Lahor of great Mogul” (PL 11.391), Milton made reference not only to Babur’s capital city at Agra, the famed repository of the riches of one of the great empires of the medieval world, but also to the Kohinoor (another meaning for the “great Mogul”), a diamond of unprecedented size presented to Shah Jahan.65 If, for Milton, opulence, ostentatious display, and the possession of untold riches function as identifiers of imperial emptiness and the bleak realities of the voracious postlapsarian appetite for power, these elements also tantalize because they cannot be effectively disengaged from the discourse of economic pursuit in the period. Here it is difficult, if not impossible, to think in strictly binaristic terms with economic interests relegated without nuance to the domain


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of Mammon who cannot (at least as Christ would have it) be served together with God. With India, any theological assignment of overdetermined meanings is disrupted by an encroaching and, one might say, inescapable sense of excitement pertaining to Mughal power and also the potential of this Asian subcontinent for facilitating England’s commercial and mercantile ambitions. If Milton’s representations of Asia cannot be strictly described with reference to Edward Said’s model of Orientalism (which presupposes the always, already superior position of the West), they nevertheless obtain a certain resonance when viewed from the vantage point of postcolonial history. As Rajan notes concerning the historical and cultural context out of which Paradise Lost emerged, “In an age when empires were materializing on the horizon and India was beginning to assume its glittering shape as the most coveted of imperial prizes, [Milton] cannot quite say that the pursuit of empires can only be destructive and that no people can ‘conquer well.’”66 Generally speaking, the Orient in Milton’s oeuvre yields important cautionary lessons for the English nation. One needs to be especially alert to what is happening in the world of the Orient to avoid being trapped in a political condition in which liberty is trampled on and held captive. If the Turkish monarchy stands for consummate tyranny—a commonplace trope in republican polemics—South Asia, metonymically linked to Mughal glory, affords powerful historical testimony to untrammeled human ambition that makes a goal of transforming all things into the objects of Mammon. Where Paradise Lost concludes with a vision of the postlapsarian kingdoms of the world beginning with Asia, Paradise Regained centers on the West and imperial Rome as representing the apex of what the political ambitions of humankind can attain—exercise of mastery over the entire world. (In an interesting moment in The Readie and Easie Way, Milton imagined outside observers deriding England’s failure to build the “goodly tower of a Commonwealth, which the English boasted . . . would overshaddow kings and be another Rome in the west” [CPW 7:422–23]. This reference suggests that, had England succeeded in materializing the republican project, it would have enjoyed an authority and influence akin to that enjoyed by the great Roman imperium.) Emphasizing the ubiquitous presence of the ambition to power as a controlling principle and reality characterizing the postlapsarian world has the effect of collapsing any abstract or theoretical distinctions between East and West, Asia and England or Europe—all peoples, cultures, and civilizations have, in other words, been uncompromisingly contaminated by Adam and Eve’s transgression in Eden. As the 1650s rolled on, Milton was afforded ample evidence that parliamentarians, army generals, and even




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Oliver Cromwell himself were all equally susceptible to the temptation to power. In Paradise Regained, what frames Satan’s exhortation for Jesus to fulfill his destined role as Israel’s messiah is precisely to try to get the Incarnate Son of God to succumb to the seductions of power—freeing Israel from the yoke of imperial Rome and ascending the Davidic throne as his people’s great liberator. In this chapter, we have seen how Asia functions as a metaphor for those aspects of theological, political, and cultural alterity that need critique and repudiation in order to differentiate the ideals of a republican vision from the problems of absolutist authority, and the potentialities of a godly commonwealth from the fallen kingdoms of the world. Considering Milton’s writings in the light of seventeenth-century England’s important interest in the Asia associated with such nations as China and India highlights the perceptions of difference that are brought into play in the imagining and writing of English (inter)national identity. These perceptions are far from uniform, shaped by such various factors as cultural understandings of Christian-Muslim historical conflicts, readings of the Old Testament emphasis on national purity, and practical recognition of the importance of Asia to Europe’s economic development and imperial ambitions. Milton’s Paradise Lost cogently captures a defeated republican poet’s engagement with the implications of what is entailed in living as a member of God’s faithful remnant in a disobedient nation that has turned its back on truth. Under the conditions of revolutionary defeat, this preoccupied focus on the political health of the English nation may give rise to a discourse suggesting a certain insularity of vision, but it does not mean that Milton paid no attention to contemporary events entailing interactions, both economic and political, between England, Europe, and the nations of the East. In fact, the impinging presence of the larger international community of nations, a world of “irremediable human pluralism,”67 affords the republican poet metaphors and terms of reference for thinking and writing about an England adversely affected by the defeat of the Puritan Revolution. While this larger outside world may yield degrees of comfort in that cultural alterity can always be invoked for the purpose of envisioning the ideal structures of the English commonwealth and nation to which Milton had devoted his life as its prophet, it can also be a major source of anxiety because of the destabilizing of simplified dichotomies between peoples, cultures, and nations. From the geopolitical world of the Levant, which offered daunting images of the stereotypical Muslim infidel, to the more distant and unfamiliar worlds of China and India, representations of the East and Asia abound not only in England’s literary production


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but also in the theater that emerged as a distinctive form in the period. These representations register cultural perceptions based on the stereotypical as well as England’s actual literal encounters with Otherness via the activities of merchants and men who committed themselves to discovering sea routes to the Orient. Asia and the East afford a rich source of imagery and metaphors for giving shape and form to Milton’s puritan and republican convictions. In his literary and polemical use of the matter of Asia, Milton reveals that his perception and understanding of the East are really far from monolithic—ideological and cultural binary structures are complicated by the practical recognition that focusing on the English nation’s immediate political interests cannot be fully divorced from the pressures of inescapable international contact and encounters. Asia may be the (symbolic) space of the Other, but its existence cannot be repudiated without risking the consequence of being left far behind in the energetic European push for economic and political expansionism. Notes 1. Thomas N. Corns, “Milton and the Limitations of Englishness,” in Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England, ed. David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 209. 2. John Kerrigan, “The Anglo-Scoto-Dutch Triangle: Milton and Marvell to 1660,” in Early Modern Nationalism, ed. Loewenstein and Stevens, 217–48. 3. Thomas Coryate, Greeting from the Court of the Great Mogul (Amsterdam: Da Capo Press and Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1968), 3. I have modernized spelling in citations from the text. 4. Ibid., 3–4. 5. Ibid., 6. 6. John Milton, The Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1957). References to Milton’s prose works are to Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don Wolfe et al., 8 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82) and will be referred to as CPW. 7. Bruce McLeod, “The ‘Lordly eye’: Milton and the Strategic Geography of Empire,” in Milton and the Imperial Vision, ed. Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1999), 66. 8. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978). 9. For readings related to the subject of Milton’s colonial and imperial vision, see the collection of essays in Rajan and Sauer, Milton and the Imperial Vision; Balachandra Rajan, Under Western Eyes: From Milton to Macaulay (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Martin J. Evans, Milton’s Imperial Epic: “Paradise Lost” and the Discourse of Colonialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Walter S. H. Lim, John Milton, Radical Politics, and Biblical Republicanism (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), chap. 5; Walter S. H. Lim,




10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

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The Arts of Empire: The Poetics of Colonialism from Ralegh to Milton (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), chap. 5. For a reading of Milton’s understanding of the significance of the Middle Kingdom, see Robert Markley, “‘The Destin’d Walls / Of Cambalu’: Milton, China, and the Ambiguities of the East,” in Milton and the Imperial Vision, ed. Rajan and Sauer, 191–213; and an updated version of this chapter in The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 70–103. Rachel Trubowitz, “‘The People of Asia and with them the Jews’: Israel, Asia, and England in Milton’s Writings,” in Milton and the Jews, ed. Douglas A. Brooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 151–77. Peter Heylyn, Cosmographie, ed. Robert Mayhew, 4 vols. (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003), 3:208. All subsequent references of this work are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by volume and page number. I have adjusted s/ſ in citations from the text. In A Brief History of Moscovia, published posthumously in 1682—an expository travel narrative heavily redacted from Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas—Milton draws attention to China as a land abounding in “rich Merchandize, Velvets, Damasks, Cloth of Gold and Tissue, with many sorts of sugars” (CPW 8:509). Markley, The Far East, 97. David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 2–3. Ibid., 3. Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, see 226n575 and 231nn780–781. Balachandra Rajan, Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 52. Luis Vaz de Camões, The Lusiads, trans. William C. Atkinson (London: Penguin, 1952), 169. For critical discussions of Paradise Lost’s intertextual relationship to The Lusiads, see Walter S. H. Lim, “China, India, and the Empire of Commerce in Milton’s Paradise Lost,” in Sinographies: Writing China (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 125–27; John Milton, Radical Politics, and Biblical Republicanism, 224–27; and The Arts of Empire, 208–11. See also Balachandra Rajan, “Banyan Trees and Fig Leaves: Some Thoughts on Milton’s India,” in Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and his World, ed. P. G. Stanwood (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995), 213–28; and Under Western Eyes, chaps. 1 and 2. Anthony Reid, “A Time and a Place,” in Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Period: Trade, Power, and Belief, ed. Anthony Reid (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 1. Robert Markley, “Riches, Power, Trade and Religion: The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1720,” in Asian Travel in the Renaissance, ed. Daniel Carey (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 177–78. Blair Hoxby, Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 160–77. Ibid.


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24. David Hawkes, “The Concept of the ‘Hireling’ in Milton’s Theology,” Milton Studies 43 (2004): 67. 25. Paul Stevens, “How Milton’s Nationalism Works: Globalization and the Possibilities of Positive Nationalism,” in Loewenstein and Stevens, Early Modern Nationalism, 290–91. 26. Gerald MacLean, “Milton, Islam, and the Ottomans,” in Milton and Toleration, ed. Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 298. 27. James A. Freeman, Milton and the Martial Muse: “Paradise Lost” and European Traditions of War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 76. 28. Ibid., 71–76. 29. Daniel J. Vitkus, ed., Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England: “Selimus,”“A Christian Turned Turk,” and “The Renegado” (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 70. 30. See Lim, John Milton, Radical Politics, and Biblical Republicanism, 95–96. 31. Paul Stevens, “England in Moghul India: Historicizing Cultural Difference and its Discontents,” in Imperialisms: Historical and Literary Investigations, 1500– 1900, ed. Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 99. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 95. 34. See Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 35. Paul Stevens, “‘Leviticus Thinking’ and the Rhetoric of Early Modern Colonialism,” Criticism 35 (1993): 441–61. 36. Eric B. Song, “Nation, Empire, and the Strange Fire of the Tartars in Milton’s Poetry and Prose,” Milton Studies 47 (2008): 138. 37. Pompa Banerjee, “Milton’s India and Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 37 (1999): 142. 38. Markley, “Riches, Power, Trade and Religion,” 184. 39. Sir Thomas Roe, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India: 1615–19, ed. Sir William Foster (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), 271. I have modernized spelling of all references to the text. 40. Peter Mundy, “The Travels of Peter Mundy in Asia (1628–34), Observations of India,” in Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels, Travel and Colonial Writing in English, 1550–1630: An Anthology, ed. Andrew Hadfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 228. 41. Mundy, “The Travels,” 228. 42. Ibid., 229. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. John Archer, Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 191. For an analysis of the cultural assumptions underwriting Early Modern Europe’s complex and tension-riddled responses to sati as cultural practice and as social




46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59.

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phenomenon exemplifying, on the one hand, heroic self-sacrifice and, on the other, the revealing spirit of a devil-worshipping culture, see Pompa Banerjee, Burning Women: Widows, Witches, and Early Modern Travelers in India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). For samples of extracts of English and European travel narratives on India and critical commentaries on these, see Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna G. Singh, eds., Travel Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 127–207; for a commentary on Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s description of sati, see 174–76. François Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, trans. Archibald Constable and ed. Vincent A. Smith (London: Oxford University Press, 1914), 306. Bernier’s original text in French is titled, Histoire de la dernière révolution des états du Grand Mogul. Published in 1670, with a sequel in 1671, both were almost immediately translated into English in 1671 and 1672, respectively. For information on the history of publication and translations of Histoire, see the introduction to John Dryden, Aureng-Zebe, ed. Frederick M. Link (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), xiv–xv; and also Bernier, Travels, xxv–xlii. Bernier, Travels, 315. Ibid., 314. Roe, Embassy, 270. Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 146–93. See Andrew Hadfield, “The English and Other Peoples,” in A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas Corns (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 174–90. For a collection of essays that engage with the topic of Milton’s relationship to the discourses of “toleration,” see Achinstein and Sauer, Milton and Toleration. Hoxby, Mammon’s Music, 98–99. See Stevens, “How Milton’s Nationalism Works,” 273–301. If Milton’s exceptionalist and even solipsistic national discourse reveals a disturbingly negative side to his nationalism, this discourse, Paul Stevens argues, is mediated in places by the positive dimensions of a nationalism that does not discount the possibilities of understanding between sovereign nations (288–89). See the recent collection of essays in Brooks, Milton and the Jews. See Trubowitz, “The People of Asia and with them the Jews.” For a reading of how luxury as image, metaphor, and idea shapes Milton’s formulation of the nation, see Laura Lunger Knoppers, “Consuming Nations: Milton and Luxury,” in Early Modern Nationalism, ed. Loewenstein and Stevens, 331–55. For Knoppers, “Milton defines the nation not so much by geography, shared language, religion, or even culture as by a kind of national character, evinced negatively in intemperance and corruption” (338). Trubowitz, “The People of Asia and with them the Jews,” 163. Aristotle, The Politics, ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 165. Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine, ed., J. W. Harper (London: Ernest Benn, 1971), 156.


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60. James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, in The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 163. 61. Bernier, Travels, 225. 62. Ibid., 232. 63. Ibid. 64. Benedict S. Robinson, “Returning to Egypt: ‘The Jew,’ ‘the Turk,’ and the English Republic,” in Milton and the Jews, ed. Brooks, 189. 65. Rajan, Under Western Eyes, 63. 66. Ibid., 65. 67. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 69.







Bernadette Andrea is associate professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she chaired the Department of English, Classics, and Philosophy. Her books include Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2007; paperback reprint, 2009) and English Women Staging Islam, 1696–1707: Delarivier Manley and Mary Pix (forthcoming from the Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies/University of Toronto Press, 2010). Gwee Li Sui has taught at the National University of Singapore and specializes in early modern science and the long eighteenth century. He has published articles on the Reformation, Romantic literature, modern Protestant theology, and critical theory. His work on modern Singaporean and Malaysian writing in English will culminate in a forthcoming twovolume collection of essays, of which he is an editor. As a visual artist and a poet, his output includes a collection of poems Who Wants to Buy a Book of Poems? (1998) and a graphic novel Myth of the Stone (1993). Marion Hollings is professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, where she also teaches in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. Her teaching and research address questions of gender and race in the early modern period. She works as an International Bibliographer for Encomia: Bibliographical Bulletin of the International Courtly Literature Society. Hollings is the author of “Fountains and Strange Women: Eastern Contexts for Acrasia and her Community” in Consuming Narratives: Gender and Monstrous Appetite in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Liz Herbert MacAvoy and Teresa Walters (Wales, 2002). She is currently completing a book on the discourses of gender, race, and nation in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and early modern travel narratives to the Middle East, India and Southeast Asia.


Contributors

Debra Johanyak is professor of English at the University of Akron (Wayne College) and chairs the Wayne College Shakespeare Festival Steering Committee that features the American Shakespeare Center on Tour. She has presented conference papers on suicide, Orientalism, terror, and anti-Semitism in Shakespeare, and is the author of two books—Behind


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Contributors

Lisa Hopkins is professor of English at Sheffield Hallam University and coeditor of Shakespeare, the journal of the British Shakespeare Association. Her publications include Christopher Marlowe, Dramatist (Edinburgh University Press, 2008), Christopher Marlowe: An Author Chronology (Palgrave, 2005), and Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life (Palgrave, 2000). Walter S. H. Lim is associate professor of English Literature at the National University of Singapore. He has published articles on English Renaissance Literature and Asian American Literature. He is also the author of John Milton, Radical Politics, and Biblical Republicanism (Delaware, 2006) and The Arts of Empire: The Poetics of Colonialism from Ralegh to Milton (Delaware, 1998). Bindu Malieckal is associate professor in the Department of English at Saint Anselm College, New Hampshire. She specializes in representations of Muslims, Jews, and India in early modern texts, and has additional interests in genocide studies and postcolonial literature. Bindu Malieckal has published in The Muslim World, Shakespeare Yearbook, The Upstart Crow, Essays in Arts and Sciences, Atenea, Papers in Language and Literature, and other venues. She is currently completing a book titled “Spice Wars: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Early Modern Literature from India to England.” Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India. His publications include An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Packaging Life: Cultures of the Everyday (Sage, 2009); Seeing Stars: Spectacle, Society and Celebrity Culture (Sage, 2009); English Writing and India, 1600–1920: Colonizing Aesthetics (Routledge, 2008); Postcolonial Literature: An Introduction (Pearson, 2008); The Penguin 1857 Reader (Penguin, 2007); Reading Culture: Theory, Praxis, Politics (Sage, 2006); and Virtual Worlds: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cybertechnology (Sage, 2004). He is also the editor of The New Media and Cybercultures Anthology (forthcoming from Wiley-Blackwell). James W. Stone is a visiting fellow in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. He has published essays on Shakespeare, Milton, and the Renaissance Ovid. His book Crossing Gender in Shakespeare: Feminist Psychoanalysis and the Difference Within was published by Routledge in 2010.


the Veil (University of Akron Press, 2007) and Shakespeare’s World (Prentice Hall, 2004).


Acapulco, 161 Adorno, Theodor, 165, 174–75 Aegean, 166 Aeneid, The (Virgil), 204 Africa, 18, 52, 62, 72, 78, 81–82, 93n1, 99–100, 119–20, 125, 131, 133, 149, 152, 154n15, 163, 172, 175, 182n73 African, 42n31, 50n111, 82–84, 89, 94n19, 99 Africanus, John Leo, 78, 81, 83–84 Agra, 138, 144, 186, 211, 228 Ain-i Akbari (Institutes of Akbar), 133, 137–39, 141 Akbar (the Great), 12, 39, 127, 131–45, 151–52, 221 Akbarnama (Book of Akbar), 133, 142–43 al-Aqsa mosque (al-Masjid al-Aqsa), 34, 48n86 Aleppo, 82–83 Alexander the Great, 116, 145 Alexandria (Empress), 53 Algerians, 62 al-Mansur, Ahmad (Sultan), 57, 73n29, 73n32 Amazon(s), 7, 10, 26, 97–98, 101, 104–7, 112nn13–14, 113n17, 114n27 America(s), 1–3, 18, 25, 32, 38, 51, 94, 119, 131–32, 134, 136, 145–46, 148, 152, 155, 162–63, 165–66, 175, 178, 182n73, 205, 215 Amerindians, 16, 136, 215–16, 225 Amsterdam, 18, 210, 231 Anahuac, 131, 153

Anderson, Benedict, 235n67 Anglo-Indian, 138, 142 Antarctica, 163, 182n73 Arab(s), 5, 64–65, 68, 75, 82, 93n1, 167, 212 Arabia, 67, 147, 163 Arabic, 57, 82, 88, 140–41, 143–44 Archer, John Michael, 117 Arctic Ocean, 171 Ariosto, Ludovico, 65 Aristotle, 68, 163, 178, 226 Armada, 113n17, 171 Asia, 1–9, 11–15, 17, 23–26, 29, 32–33, 37, 39, 58, 66, 97–99, 105, 115–21, 123–29, 131–34, 136, 146, 148–50, 152, 172, 203–4, 206–15, 218–20, 222–23, 225–31, 237 Asia Minor, 25, 33, 116, 125 Athens, 98–100, 102, 108–10, 171 Atlantic, 3, 17, 51, 62, 146, 149, 165, 171, 207 Aurangzeb, 142, 221, 234n46 Australia, 164, 182n73 Aztec, 131 Babur (Mughal Emperor), 139–40, 142–43, 221 Babylon, 57, 152 Bacon, Francis, 8, 12, 161–77 Banda Islands, 210 barbarism, 5, 9, 68, 98, 109, 200, 214–18, 221, 226 Barbary, 80, 149 Barbour, Richmond, 7, 24, 34–35, 39 Battle of Panipat, 137, 143


Index


Index

Bay of Bengal, 157n92 Bengal, 137, 142, 210 Bensalem (New Atlantis), 162, 164, 166, 171, 173, 176 Bernier, François, 221, 228 Best, George, 111n5 Biddulph, William, 81–82, 137 Bijapur, 138 Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 65 Borneo, 210 British Isles, 50n111, 222 Brotton, Jerry, 3, 51–53 Buddhism (Buddhist), 135, 139 Bukhara, 7, 127 Cabot, Sebastian, 38 Cambaluc, 167, 168, 180, 226–27 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer), 145 Cape of Good Hope, 1 Cappadocia, 9, 52 Caribbean, 2, 136, 148–49 Carr, Robert, 115 Carthage, 166 Castile, 3 Cathay, 25, 119, 166, 170, 207 Cavendish, Thomas, 171 Ceylon, 134, 146, 172. See Sri Lanka Charles I (King), 66 Charles II (King), 49, 210, 223 Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor), 27 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 145 Cheng Ho (Admiral), 172, 182n73 China, 5–6, 8, 12–15, 18, 38, 135, 161–62, 166–67, 169–76, 198, 204, 206–8, 226, 230, 232 china(ware), 13, 161, 175–76 Chinese, 161–62, 166–77, 207, 225 City of Heaven, 167 Civitas solis (City of the Sun) (Thomas Campanella), 171 Christian League, 55 Cipangu, 134. See Japan Colba, 136. See Cuba Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 6

Columbus, Christopher, 6, 112n13, 115, 132, 135–36, 163, 170, 175–76, 205 Constantinople, 4, 54, 80, 143, 149, 151 Conti, Nicolò, 134 Cook, James, 164 Coptic Ethiopia, 133 Cortés, Hernán, 131 Coryate, Thomas, 2, 6, 17, 133, 136–37, 145, 205 Cosmographie (Heylyn), 207, 210–11, 218–19 Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, Part II (Mary Wroth), 9, 23, 25–26, 29–30, 36, 39 Crimea, 4 Cromwell, Oliver, 230 Crusades, 5, 7, 54, 65, 135, 213 Cuba, 136 Cyprus, 4, 32, 37, 55, 82–84, 88, 92 Daborne, Robert, 10 da Gama, Vasco, 136, 205, 209 Damascus, 124, 148, 150 de Acosta, José, 131 de Albuquerque, Don Alfonse, 11 de Balboa, Vasco Nuñez, 163 de Camões, Luis Vaz, 209 de Gamboa, Pedro Sarmiento, 163 de Góis, Bento, 166 de Grijalva, Hernando, 161 Dekker, Thomas, 31 de la Higuera, Jerónimo Román, 172 Delhi, 143 de Mendoza, Juan González, 6, 167, 170, 207 de Neyra, Alvaro de Mendaña, 163 de Quirós, Pedro Fernandez, 163 de Saavedra, Alvaro, 163 de Valboa, Miguel Cabello, 163 de Voragine, Jacopus, 53 Diario (Columbus), 136 Din-i-Ilahi (the Religion of Akbar), 133, 140


240


Diocletian (Emperor), 53 Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 118–19, 127, 145 Donne, John, 2, 118 Drake, Francis, 1–2 Dryden, John, 18, 234n46 du Bec, Jean, 143–44 Dutch, 2, 11, 55–56, 203, 208, 210–11, 222 Dutch East India Company, 211 East Indies, 11, 18, 39, 132, 148, 207 Eden, Richard, 119, 136, 146, 155 Egypt, 31, 55, 78, 89, 166 Egyptians, 89, 149, 150, 224 El Dorado, 132 Elizabeth I (Queen), 2–4, 26, 39, 57, 65, 73n29, 79–80, 104–7, 113n17, 113n19, 138, 142 empire, 7, 9, 13, 17, 24–25, 30–31, 34, 36, 39, 54, 56, 64, 121, 124, 149, 151, 161–62, 174, 186, 203–4, 209, 214, 222–23, 225–26, 228–29 English East India Company, 6, 220, 222 Enlightenment, 5, 52, 174–75 Epicoene (Jonson), 13 ethnography, 68 Eurasia, 31 Euripides, 97, 114n27 Europe/European, 3–9, 11–12, 14, 16–17, 23–28, 30–33, 39, 54–55, 57, 59–60, 63, 65, 66–69, 77–79, 81–84, 88, 92–93, 104, 115–17, 119, 126, 128, 132, 135–36, 140–41, 146, 149, 152, 161–72, 174–76, 189, 198, 203–5, 208–10, 213, 215–18, 220, 222, 226, 228–31 Ethiopian (Ethiope), 28, 38, 99, 133 Faerie Queene, The (Spenser), 9–10, 51–55, 57–59, 61–63, 65–66, 68–70, 107 Fanon, Frantz, 108

241

Far East, 3, 13–14, 163, 166, 171, 175, 203, 206–7, 225–26 Fatehabad Sikri, 138 Fatehpur Sikri, 138–40, 142 Fatepore, 138 Fazl, Abul, 133, 138–39, 141–42 Ferdinand and Isabella, 136 Finch, William, 133, 136, 138, 144–45 First Anglo-Dutch War, 210 Fitch, Ralph, 2, 128n6, 133, 136–39 Forman, Simon, 128–29n6 Frobisher, Martin, 2, 38, 119, 207 Fryer, John, 187 Galen, 103 Ganges, 119, 132, 134, 138, 149, 220, 225 Generall Historie of the Turkes, The (Knolles), 24, 29, 32, 88, 91–92 Genghis Khan, 132, 136, 140, 151, 227 George (Saint), 9, 52–55, 62, 69–72 Ghazni, Mahmud, 143 Ghori, Muhammad, 143 Gilbert, Humphrey, 207 Gillies, John, 124 Girard, René, 98 Goa, 11, 138, 140 Gobi Desert, 207 Golden Age, 137, 172 Granada, 81, 136 Grand Khan, 136 Grand Tour, 27 Greece, 97–100, 104–7, 112, 116, 125, 166, 208 Greek, 9–10, 24–25, 34, 52–53, 64, 66, 91, 98–101, 103–4, 106, 109–10, 135, 144, 162, 171 Greenblatt, Stephen, 51, 84, 192 Greene, Robert, 10, 214 Guiana, 124 Gujarat, 137 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 167


Index


Index

Habsburg(s), 3, 25–26, 33 Hakluyt, Richard, 2, 15–16, 24, 29, 31–32, 38, 164, 186, 205 Hall, Kim F., 25, 100 Harborne, William, 80 harem, 88, 100 Hawkins, William, 2, 133, 136, 138 Helgerson, Richard, 16 Hellespont, 116, 208 Hemu (Hemchandra), 137, 143 Herbert, Mary (Sidney) (Countess of Pembroke), 32 Herbert, Thomas, 136 Hero and Leander (Marlowe), 116–17 Herodotus, 68, 106, 109, 115, 118, 132, 208 Heylyn, Peter, 7, 29, 207, 210, 227 Hezbollah, 77 Hindu(s), 100, 135, 215, 219, 221 Hinduism, 139–40 Hippocrates, 68 Holland, 6, 210 Holy Roman Empire, 24, 57 Holy Sepulcher, 34 Homer, 204 Horkheimer, Max, 165, 174–75 Hudson, Henry, 207 humanism, 107, 109–10 Humayun (Mughal Emperor), 137, 139, 221 Hungary, 4, 31, 54, 56 Huntington, Samuel, 19n8 I-Hsing, 181 Il Milione (Marco Polo), 134 Inca(s), 131, 162–63, 166, 179–80, 230 India, 2–3, 5–9, 11–18, 30–31, 55, 97–107, 109–10, 118–20, 127, 131–40, 142–52, 163, 170, 172, 174, 176, 185–99, 204–12, 215–16, 218–23, 225, 227–30 Indian Ocean, 1, 3, 11, 136, 146, 209, 211 Indus, 119, 134, 138 internationalism, 14, 53, 203, 210

Ireland, 1, 51, 55, 63–65, 68–69 Irish, 9, 20, 43, 68, 69 Islam(ic), 4–5, 8–10, 15, 24–26, 30, 37, 39, 53, 57, 62–65, 69, 77–87, 92, 119, 127–28, 132, 134–36, 138, 140, 142–43, 150, 152, 209, 212–14, 216–17 Israel, 206, 216–17, 223–25, 230 Istanbul, 209 Italy, 54, 133 Jahangir (Mughal Emperor), 137, 139–40, 152, 185, 187–88, 191, 193–98, 221 Jainism, 139 James I (King), 13, 35, 162, 185, 187–88, 220 Japan, 6, 18, 134–35, 161–62, 207, 225. See Cipangu Jardine, Lisa, 52–53, 189 Jason, 2, 148 Java, 134, 210 Jerome (Saint), 64 Jerusalem, 34, 136, 164, 205 Jesuit(s), 131, 133, 137, 140–42, 166, 172 Jew of Malta, The (Webster), 145–46 Jews, 15, 26, 34, 151, 224–25 João II (King), 135 Jonson, Ben, 13 Kabul, 137 Kashmir, 137 Knolles, Richard, 24, 29, 32–35, 38, 81, 88, 91–92 Kublai Khan, 226–27 Lahor, 228 Lepanto, 4 Levant, 17, 52, 62, 80, 230 Levant Company, 80 Lewis, Bernard, 19n8 Lewkenor, Lewis, 55 Lima, 163 Lisbon, 18


242


Lithgow, William, 55, 66, 86 Loomba, Ania, 97 Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus), 129n9 Lusiads, The (Camões), 209 luxury goods, 209 Lydgate, John, 53 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 144 MacLean, Gerald, 4, 212 Malacca, 11 Maluku Archipelago, 11 Mandeville, John, 134, 166 Manila, 161 Marlowe, Christopher, 8, 29–30, 115–28, 132, 227 Massinger, Philip, 10 Matar, Nabil, 4, 5, 62 material culture, 13–14, 185–86, 189, 199 Maya, 131 Mediterranean, 51–52, 62, 78, 146, 149 Mehmed II (Sultan), 143 Mercator, Gerardus, 3, 198 Mesoamericans, 166 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 107 Mexico, 131, 161, 171 Middle Ages, 23, 25, 168 Middle East(ern), 4, 52, 66–67, 80–81 Middle Kingdom, 7, 12–13, 166, 204, 227–28 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), 10–11, 38, 97–101, 103–4, 106–7, 109–10 Mildenhall, John (Father), 133, 136, 139, 142 Ming China (Dynasty), 173 Milton, John, 4, 8, 13, 33, 203–31 Mohammed, Prophet, 64, 167 Mohammed Shah (Sultan), 227 Moluccas, 3, 135, 161, 210–11, 219 Mongol(s), 25, 31, 38, 166, 226–27 Monserrate, Anthony, 133, 141

243

Moor(s), 4, 10–11, 57, 62, 77–83, 85, 87, 89–90, 93, 136, 144, 149, 151–52, 192 More, Thomas, 171 Moroccan, 30, 57, 80 Morocco, 57, 80, 149 Mughal India (Mughal Empire), 5–7, 12–13, 139, 144, 146, 187–88, 190–93, 195, 204, 208–9, 212, 220 Mundy, Peter, 17, 220–22 Munster, Sebastian, 81, 119, 136 Murad III (Sultan), 57, 80 Muscovy Company, 31 Muslim, 4–8, 10, 14, 17, 26, 30, 34, 52, 57, 59, 62–63, 65, 68–69, 77–78, 80, 82–83, 85–90, 92–93, 100, 127, 133, 135–36, 138–40, 143–44, 151, 208–9, 212–13, 219–21, 230 Mustapha Bassa, 91 nation (nationhood), 1–2, 6–7, 9–10, 14–16, 18, 31, 51–54, 60, 63, 65, 67, 69, 76, 188, 192, 195, 199, 204, 210, 212, 214, 216–19, 222–24, 230 Needham, Joseph, 169 Netherlands, 55–56, 203, 210 New Atlantis (Bacon), 12–13, 161–62, 164–65, 167, 170–73, 175–77 New British Historiography, 9 New Guinea, 164, 210 New World, 1, 12, 51, 55, 162, 165, 177 North Africa, 41, 52, 62 Northwest Passage, 6, 171, 207 Novum Organum (Bacon), 12, 172, 174–76


Index

“object protocols,” 185, 187–88, 195–99 Occident, 102, 106, 132, 135, 148 Ogilby, John, 137, 140


Index

Orient(al), 1, 3–10, 12–15, 17, 24–26, 28–29, 32, 36, 39, 51, 57–58, 60, 63, 65, 67, 69, 77–79, 81, 83–84, 88–89, 92–94, 97–99, 102–3, 109, 118, 120, 132, 135, 145–46, 148, 152, 161–62, 165–69, 171, 173, 186, 189, 206–7, 209, 212–14, 225–26, 229 Orientalism, 1, 4–5, 8, 10, 12–13, 17, 24, 28, 32, 41, 47–48, 70, 176, 186, 203, 206–7, 216–17, 220, 224, 229 Orlando Furioso (Ariosto), 29, 65, 71 Ortelius, Abraham, 54, 164 Othello (Shakespeare), 4, 10–11, 37, 43, 49, 77–93 Ottoman(s), 4–5, 7–9, 23–26, 30, 32–34, 36, 39, 52, 54–57, 60, 63, 67–68, 77, 79–82, 84, 88, 90, 92–93, 133, 135, 141, 144, 146, 148–52, 212–14, 227 Ottoman Empire, 4–5, 7–8, 10–11, 15, 30, 32, 54, 57, 77–78, 81, 91–92, 137, 148, 208, 212–13 Ovid, 107 Ovington, John, 186, 200n11, 200nn19–20, 201n28, 201n30 Pacific Ocean, 3, 162, 211 Palestine, 166 Palestinian, 52, 69 Paradise Lost (Milton), 3–4, 13, 203–13, 215, 218–19, 222–23, 225, 227–31 Parke, Robert, 6, 170, 207 parthenogenesis, 100, 102–4, 107, 110 Peking (Beijing, Paquin), 166–67, 208, 226–27 Persepolis, 148 Persia, 4, 7, 9, 23, 26–27, 32, 36–37, 121, 123, 134, 139, 147, 149, 187 Persian(s), 24–25, 27, 32, 37–39, 60, 98, 115, 132–33, 137, 141, 147–49, 172, 190, 201, 208 Persian Gulf, 146, 172, 209

Peru, 131, 161–63, 171 Petrarch, 56 Philippines, 6 Philip II (King), 63–64, 66, 69, 163, 167 Pius II (Pope), 54 Pizarro, Francisco, 131 Plato, 171, 176 Plutarch, 106, 108 Polo, Marco, 134–35, 157, 166–67, 226 Portugal, 3, 11, 141–42, 162 Portuguese, 2–3, 6, 11, 55, 67, 133, 135, 138, 140, 142, 163, 205, 208, 210–11 postcolonial criticism, 1, 109 Prester John, 132–36, 140, 144, 151 Prince Khurram, 188, 191, 196–97 Principal Navigations, The (Hakluyt), 16, 24, 29, 31–32 “protocols of sovereignty,” 188 Ptolemy, Claudius, 163 Purchas, Samuel, 15, 29, 186, 205 Protestant League, 56 Qur’an (Koran), 86–88, 128, 140 race, 9–10, 25, 27, 37, 39, 51–52, 59, 69, 78, 92–93, 100, 174, 185, 188, 197, 208–9 Rajan, Balachandra, 209 Ralegh, Walter, 1, 65, 124 Raman, Shankar, 104, 120 Red Sea, 119, 146 renegado(es), 10, 62, 81 republic(an), 14, 55, 57, 171, 203, 207, 209–10, 212–13, 217, 223–27, 229–31, 235 republicanism, 56, 214 Restoration, 14, 35, 210, 222–23 Rhodes, 92 Ricci, Matteo, 166–67 Roanoke Island, 1 Roe, Thomas, 2, 6, 13, 17, 185–88, 220–21


244


romance (genre), 9, 15, 23–25, 27–29, 36–37, 39, 52, 59–60, 64–65, 67, 69 Rome, 26, 57, 135, 213, 229–30 Ross, Alexander, 86 Royal Exchange, 17 Royal Society of London, 167 Russia(n/s), 24, 32, 117, 208 Safavid Persia, 7, 23–24, 26, 30, 36 Said, Edward W., 4–5, 24, 78–79, 94, 206, 229 Saladin, 62 Samarchand (Samarkand), 226–27 San Salvador, 132 Saracen(s), 29, 54, 60–65, 68 sati, 220–22 science, 2, 11, 15, 103, 161–62, 165, 167–69, 172, 175–77 scientific orientalism, 176 Scotland, 51, 66, 72 Scythia, 7, 67, 69, 104, 120, 133, 145, 152 Scythian(s), 7, 9, 37, 54, 67–68, 115, 118–19, 133, 147–48, 150–51 Second Anglo-Dutch War, 210 Seraglio, 90, 209 Shah Abbas (of Persia), 26 Shah Jahan (Mughal Emperor), 137, 146, 209, 221, 228 Shakespeare, William, 4, 8, 10–11, 17, 38–39, 51, 77–93, 97–110 Sharia, 88 Sherley brothers, 26 Sherley, Robert, 35, 136 Sherley, Teresa Sampsonia, 26 Shi’ism, 26 Sidney, Henry, 32 slave trade, 25, 39, 62, 210 Smith, John, 29 Solomon Islands, 164 Sophy, the, 36 South America, 119, 148 South Asia, 2, 12–14, 198, 203, 208–10, 212, 215–16, 218–19, 222, 225–26, 229

245

Southeast Asia, 3, 8, 11, 14–15, 172, 210, 212, 226, 228 South Sea, 161–63, 165, 171, 178 Southwest Asia, 3–4, 14, 212–13 Spain, 3–4, 6, 55, 57, 63, 69, 80, 133, 141, 146, 162–64, 171, 175 Spanish (Spaniard), 3, 6, 11, 55–57, 63–64, 66, 69, 131, 146, 148, 162–64, 171–72 Spenser, Edmund, 8, 51–69 Spice Islands, 208, 210–11 Sri Lanka, 134, 146, 172. See Ceylon Stevens, Paul, 17, 18, 212, 215–16 Strabo, 29 Straits of Magellan, 1 Stuart England, 1, 187, 190 Sufi(sm), 127, 140 Sumatra, 210 Sunni Ottomans, 26, 127 Surat, 186–88, 191, 194, 200n11, 200n19, 201n20, 201n28, 201n30, 220 Swift, Jonathan, 167 Syrian(s), 53, 135, 220 Taj Mahal, 137 Tamburlaine (Tamerlane, Timur), 2, 7, 9, 12, 29, 31, 33–35, 37, 68, 87, 116–28 Tamburlaine the Great (Marlowe), 131–35, 143–52, 197, 227 Tarikh-i-Akbari, 133, 137 Tartar(s), 7, 24–25, 29, 31–32, 38–39, 67–68, 100, 143–44, 225–27 Tartaria(n), 9, 23–33, 36–38, 145 Tasso, Torquato, 65 Ternate, 11, 210 Terry, Edward, 17, 137, 186, 190, 198 Thomas (Saint), 135 Tidore, 11, 210 Timur, 30–31, 34, 39, 127, 132–34, 140, 142–45 travel narrative(s), 2, 6, 13–15, 17, 29, 64, 67–68, 78–79, 100, 172, 205 Treaty of Breda, 210


Index


Tunis, 55 Turk(s), 4, 7, 9–11, 15, 24–25, 29, 32–33, 35, 39, 51–52, 54–55, 57, 62–64, 66–69, 77, 80–92, 119–20, 133, 137, 143, 150–51, 209, 213–14, 217, 224, 228–29 Turkey, 9, 52, 57, 80, 84 Turkey Company, 57, 80 “Turning Turk,” 10, 62, 77, 81, 84 Venice, 4, 17, 21, 54–55, 57, 77, 79, 81, 83, 88, 92, 150 Vico, Giambattista, 109, 112n12 Victorian England, 66

Index

Vienna, 4, 33, 56, 126 View of the State of Ireland, A (Spenser), 68, 76n69 Virgil, 204–5 Virginia, 1–2, 16, 54, 65, 80 Vitkus, Daniel, 4–5, 10, 55, 62–63, 81 Volga, 116–17, 151 Wales, 51 Wroth, Mary, 9, 23–39 Xerxes, 116, 208 Zoroastrianism, 139


246


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