Abstract
In the aesthetic of the sonnets, in which poet, mistress, and young man live in a drama of love, lust, and time, it is difficult, even at the moments of disgust or the mediations on the slipping away of hours, always to remember the breaking in of the world of culture, politics, and history, the minute particulars of those who made the way for Shakespeare and for England in the expansion of Europe. That is not to say that the sonnets in Shakespeare’s plays and in the sonnets are really about love’s empire or the clash of worlds, but that after examining the nature of time in these sonnets, I would like to shift to contexts and to another range of allusion in the texts of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The shock of discovery with the expansion of Europe was one of the many great changes that Europeans and other cultures lived through from the fifteenth century onward. The divisions between we and they, and us and other, were temptations, but there was also a making of new hybrid cultures, and in this translation, amid whatever practical problems and suspicions, considerations of barbarity and monstrosity nibbled at the edge of Shakespeare’s works and his culture like the monsters beyond the known or in uncertain places on the maps of the time.
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Notes
About the time of the first draft of my discussion of barbarism and its contexts, an interesting and provocative book appeared: see Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998).
See Jonathan Hart, “Portugal and the Making of the English Empire: The Case of Richard Hakluyt the Younger,” Literatura de Viagem, ed. Ana M. Falcão, Maria T. Nacimento, and Maria L. Leal (Lisboa: Ediçõ;es Cosmos, 1997), 155–68.
Barbarism is a widespread topic that persisted into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and beyond. A few examples will show that this topic never seems to go away, at least thus far. There are many faces of barbarism in the various discourses. One book looks to the time of Judges in the Bible and sees a decline into barbarism, which is the danger of the age, as well as the threat of “Romanism”; see Horace Bushnell, Barbarism the First Danger: A Discourse for Home Missions (New York: American Home Missionary Society, 1847), esp. 1–6.
Charles Roger, The Rise of Canada: From Barbarism to Wealth and Civilization (Quebec: Peter Sinclair, 1856), esp. 3–10.
F. J. P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism: How the Reversion to Barbarism in Warfare and War-Trials Menaces Our Future (Appleton, Wisconsin: C. C. Nelson, 1953), esp. 1–7
Bernard Wasserstein, Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), esp. 1–36
Herodotus, The Histories, Greek with an English translation by A. D. Godley (London: Heinemann, 1920), 1.1.
The discussion of Aristotle and mimesis is vast and informative. For this debate on approaching and being distanced from nature through art in Aristotle’s theory of poetics, see Jonathan Hart, “The Author Writes Back (and Speaks Up),” Primerjalna književnost 31, no. 2 (2008): 15–37.
There are various versions of this essay under the original name “On the Concept...” and the alternative “Theses...” The version I am using is the Zohn translation: see Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (1955; New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 258.
Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Materialist Theology, 1940, vol. 4 of Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge MA: Belknap, 2006)
All citations and quotations are from The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans, with J. J. M. Tobin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
Ian Smith, “Barbarian Errors: Performing Race in Early Modern England,” Shakespeare Quarterly 49 (1998): 168–86.
Robin Headlam Wells, “An Orpheus for a Hercules: Virtue Redefined in The Tempest,” in Neo-Historicism: Studies in Renaissance Literature, History, and Politics, ed. Robin Headlam Wells, Glenn Burgess, and Rowland Wymer (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000), 240–62.
Christopher Baker, “Ovid, Othello, and the Pontic Scythians,” in A Search for Meaning: Critical Essays on Early Modern Literature, ed. Paula Harms Payne (New York: Lang, 2004), 61–80.
Richard W. Grinnell, “Witchcraft, Race, and the Rhetoric of Barbarism in Othello and 1 Henry IV,” Upstart Crow 24 (2004): 72–80.
Ben Saunders, “Iago’s Clyster: Purgation, Anality, and the Civilizing Process,” Shakespeare Quarterly 55 (2004): 148–76.
Jessica Lugo, “Blood, Barbarism, and Belly Laughs: Shakespeare’s Titus and Ovid’s Philomela,” English Studies 88 (2007): 401–17.
On the relation between Caliban and Prospero in the context of travel or encounter narratives and of the tensions between civilization and barbarism, see Ileana Azor Hernandez, “Dos instantes de una parábola teatral sobre el colonialismo: La tempestad de William Shakespeare y Aimé Césaire,” Conjunto 49 (1981), 95–108.
Concerning civility and barbarism and its relation to moral shortcomings in this play, see John Rooks, “Mental and Moral Wilderness in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare and Renaissance Association of West Virginia: Selected Papers 16 (1993): 33–42.
Annie Gagiano, “‘Barbarism’ and ‘Civilization’ in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and in Marechera’s Black Sunlight,” The Literary Griot 10, no. 1 (1998): 12–27.
Virginia Mason Vaughan, “The Construction of Barbarism in Titus Andronicus,” in Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance, ed. Joyce Green MacDonald (Madison NJ: Fair-leigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 165–80.
Charles Sedley, John Milton, and John Dryden; see her “‘Profuse, proud Cleopatra’: ‘Barbarism’ and Female Rule in Early Modern English Republicanism,” Women’s Studies 24, no. 1–2 (1995): 85–130.
Patricia Parker, “Barbers, Infidels, and Renegades: Antony and Cleopatra,” in Center or Margin: Revisions of the English Renaissance in Honor of Leeds Barroll, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2006), 54–87.
On two African versions that counter the dichotomy of civilization and barbarism, see Jyotsna Singh, “Othello’s Identity, Postcolonial Theory, and Contemporary African Rewritings of Othello,” in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994), 287–99.
Robin Headlam Wells, “Civility and Barbarism in The Winter’s Tale,” in Intertestualità shake-speariane: Il Cinquecento italiano e il Rinascimento inglese, ed. Michele Marrapodi (Rome: Bulzoni, 2003), 275–92.
See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978)
Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, rev. 1986).
Ambrose Paré, On Monsters and Marvels, trans. Janis L. Pallister (1982; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Samantha J. E. Riches, “Virtue and Violence: Saints, Monsters and Sexuality in Medieval Culture,” in Medieval Sexuality: A Casebook, ed. April Harper and Caroline Proctor (London: Routledge, 2007), 59–78.
Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender and Property (London: Methuen, 1987), esp. 60
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993. London: Vintage, 1994), xxviii
Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
Jonathan Hart, “Images of the Native in Renaissance Encounter Narratives,” ARIEL 25 (1994): 55–76
My discussion is here indebted to the thread of empire and its translation in Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval & Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1983).
See, for example, Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, Natural History of the West Indies, trans. Sterling A. Stoudemire, University of North Carolina Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures 32 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959)
André Thevet, Les Singularités de la France antarctique (Paris: Le Temps, 1982)
Richard Hakluyt, Voyages, vol. 1 (London: Dent, 1907).
Christopher Columbus, The Four Voyages of Columbus: A History in Eight Documents, Including Five By Christopher Columbus, In the Original Spanish, with English Translations, ed. and trans. Cecil Jane (1930; repr. New York: Dover, 1983), 3.
Hernán Cortés, Letters from Mexico, ed. and trans. Anthony Pagden (1971; repr., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 98–99.
Richard Hakluyt, Voyages and Documents, ed. Janet Hampden (1958; repr., London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 8–9.
Jacques Cartier, The Voyages of Jacques Cartier, ed. H. P. Biggar (Ottawa: Publications of the Public Archives, 1924), 116
Marcel Trudel, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France (Montreal: Fides, 1963), 1:20.
Jacques Cartier, Relations, ed. Michel Bideaux (Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1986).
L. C. Green and Olive P. Dickason, The Law of Nations and the New World (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1989), 36
Bartolomé de Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, ed. and trans. Nigel Griffin and introduction by Anthony Pagden (London: Penguin, 1992).
Green and Dickason, 221, 235, see 87; Neal Salisbury, “Squanto: Last of the Patuxets,” Struggle and Survival in Colonial America, ed. David G. Sweet and Gary B. Nash (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 239–40.
William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 16200–47, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (1952; repr., New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991).
See Anthony Pagden, “History and Anthropology, and the History of Anthropology: Considerations on a Methodological Practice,” in Hart, Imagining Culture, 27–40, 199–201; Ross Chambers, “No Montagues Without Capulets: Some Thoughts on ‘Cultural Identity,’” Explorations in Difference: Law, Culture, and Politics, ed. Jonathan Hart and Richard W. Bauman (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 25–66.)
Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Montaigne, trans. E. J. Treichmann (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 119.
See Edward Said, Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism as well as Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 63–65.
Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Montaigne, 108–9. See Michel de Montaigne, Essais (Paris: Garnier Freres, 1962).
William Hawkins, “A brief relation of two sundry voyages made by the worshipful M. William Haukins of Plimmouth...,” in Hampden, 21. See Thomas More, Utopia (Berlin: Weidmann, 1895)
Columbus, The Four Voyages of Columbus, 294–95; see also 30–40; and see Peter Hume, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492–1797 (1986; repr., London: Routledge, 1992), 45–87.
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© 2009 Jonathan Hart
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Hart, J. (2009). Barbarism and Its Contexts. In: Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230103986_5
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