Abstract
“Interlude: A Tale of Two Toms: Dallam and Coryate Speaking in Oriental Tongues” counterpoints Thomas Dallam’s and Thomas Coryate’s linguistic abilities to demonstrate that sounds of otherness both change, and are changed by, sounding bodies and objects. Dallam and Coryate, both Englishmen, proudly record their ability to sound the otherness of foreign languages throughout their travels in the East. While Coryate embraces the transformations his body undergoes through sounding the otherness of a foreign language, delivering a Farsi oration before the Mughal Emperor (and replicating a copy of this speech for his readers), Dallam and his travelling companions fail to interpret uncanny sounds of their native English language heard out of context in a foreign land.
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Notes
- 1.
Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London ’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 151. Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain: 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 30, notes that some Christians living in the Ottoman Empire learn some “Arabic and/or the Turkish language in their idioms and exclamations.”
- 2.
Jonathan Burton, Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 94.
- 3.
Dallam ’s manuscript, BL Add MS 17480, is the source of all parenthetical citations here, and the paleographic transcriptions are my own. Coryate is also repeatedly assaulted by lice in his journeys.
- 4.
Gerald MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 31.
- 5.
Jonathan Gil Harris, “Becoming-Indian,” in Early Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry S. Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
- 6.
Michael Strachan, The Life and Adventures of Thomas Coryate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 138–139.
- 7.
Roe , like many other English travelers, was musical and brought a viol with him. Captain William Keeling wrote in his journal that he sent the Ambassador “some silke stringes for the viol.” As Ian Woodfield, English Musicians in the Age of Exploration (New York: Pendragon Press, 1995), 79, notes, “the use of silk strings of a viol is interesting,” and it underscores the changes objects undergo across journeys, for “it suggests the possibility that gut had been found an unreliable material in the humid and hot conditions experienced on previous voyages.”
- 8.
According to Strachan, Life and Adventures of Thomas Coryate , 252, “Coryate’s audience with Jahangir must have taken place about August 1616, by which time he had been in Ajmer for over a year.”
- 9.
William Foster, Early Travels in India : 1583–1619 (Delhi: S. Chand & Co., 1968), 6.
- 10.
Foster, Early Travels in India , 24.
- 11.
Strachan , Life and Adventures of Thomas Coryate , 241.
- 12.
William Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India , 1615–19: as narrated in his Journal and correspondence (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt Ltd., 1990), 1.104.
In addition to presenting English orations, Coryate is proud of the fact that he has succeeded in learning Turkish and Arabic: as he writes in his letter addressed to Laurence Whitaker included in the Travailer for the English Wits, while at “the Court of the most Mighty Monarch, called the Great Mogul, resident in the Towne of Asmere, in the Orientall India,” “at this time I haue many Irons in the fire; for I learne the Persian , Turkish , & Arabian tongues, hauing already gotten the Italian (I thank God) I haue bene at the Moguls Court three moneths already, and am to tarry here (by Gods holy permission) fiue moneths longer, till I haue gotten the foresaide three tongues, and then depart herehence to the Ganges, and after that, directly to the Persian Court” (30).
- 13.
Foster, Early Travels in India , 284.
- 14.
Foster, Early Travels in India , 288. Terry also records a moment of Coryate’s linguistic bravado in which Coryate converses with a laundry-woman speaking Hindustani: Coryate “undertook her in her own language, and by eight of the clock in the morening so silenced her that she had not one word more to speak” (cited in Strachan, Life and Adventures of Thomas Coryate , 241).
- 15.
Jonathan Gil Harris, “Becoming-Indian,” 451.
- 16.
In the commendatory verses accompanying the text Mr Thomas Coriat to his friends in England sendeth greeting (London, 1618), a poem titled “A Little Remembrance of his variety of Tongues, and Politicke forme of Travell” indicates that Coryate possesses “A very Babell of confused Tongues,” and that he also “wisely canst in any language begge” (Ar).
- 17.
Jonathan Gil Harris, The First Firangis: Remarkable stories of Heroes, Healers, Charlatans, Courtesans & other Foreigners who Became Indian (New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2015), 9.
- 18.
Foster, Early Travels in India , 262.
- 19.
Coryate also sees in Jahangir a reflection of himself, writing that he was of an “olive” complexion, and “Hee is of a seemelie composition of bodie, of a stature little unequall (as I guesse, not without grounds of probabilitie) to mine, but much more corpulent than my selfe,” which might be expected since Coryate was thin from living off of tuppence a day (Foster, Early Travels in India , 245).
- 20.
Harris , “Becoming-Indian,” 457. Harris, First Firangis, 187, notes that “A fakir is not just an itinerant religious beggar. He is also a performer.”
- 21.
Thomas Coryate, Mr Thomas Coriat to his friends in England sendeth Greeting (London, 1618), B2v–B4r.
- 22.
Foster, Early Travels in India , 263.
- 23.
As a reward for his speech, Jahangir gave Dallam a hundred silver rupees “each worth two shillings sterling, which counteruailed ten pounds of our English mony” (Foster, Early Travels in India , 266). Coryate is also rewarded with money and given kind treatment shortly after his encounter with Jahangir: he writes, “I went to a certaine noble & generous Christian of the Armenian race, a daies iourny from the Mogols court, to the end to obserue certain remarkable matters in the same place, to whom by means of my Persian tongue I was so welcome that hee entertained me with very ciuill and courteous complement, and at my departure gaue mee very bountifully twenty peeces of such kind of mony as the King had done before” (Foster, Early Travels in India, 267). Coryate also resolves to speak with the King of Persia, “for,” he notes, “seeing I can discourse with him in his Persian tongue, I doubt not but that going vnto him in the forme of a Pilgrime, he will not onely entertaine me with good words, but also bestow some worthy reward vpon me beseeming his dignity and person; for which cause I am prouided before hand with an excellent thing written in the Persian tongue that I meane to present vnto him” (Foster, Early Travels in India, 268).
- 24.
Reading was not a solitary, silent practice; rather, texts were often sounded out loud, as Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England : Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 46, explains. Please refer also to Roger Chartier, “Leisure and Sociability: Reading Aloud in Early Modern Europe,” and Joyce Coleman’s Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
- 25.
Harris , First Firangis, 206, and Harris, “Becoming-Indian,” 25.
- 26.
Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India , 2.60.
- 27.
Harris , “Becoming-Indian,” 458.
- 28.
Harris , “Becoming-Indian,” 453.
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Wood, J.L. (2019). Interlude: A Tale of Two Toms: Dallam and Coryate Speaking in Oriental Tongues. In: Sounding Otherness in Early Modern Drama and Travel. New Transculturalisms, 1400–1800. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12224-9_9
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