Abstract
Shakespeare, whose private-public exploration of language and topoi chapters 3 and 4 have examined, had a contemporary who was a very public figure, courtier and favorite of Elizabeth I, Walter Ralegh (1552–1618). This chapter examines him and then other lesser known advocates of the colonies in North America, at a crucial time in the mid-eighteenth century. The language of Ralegh and these officials or soldiers, writing a report partly in his tradition, is the focus here, with all their ambivalence and contradiction. They are full of hopes and cautions. These figures look at the local and the world in the field of empire. They represent Europeans, Natives and slaves.
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Notes
Just as I was sending this book off to the publisher, that is in the last two days of revisions and proofreading to the final version, I discovered that Nicholas Popper had looked at this same copy. As Ralegh helps to frame my book and as I have written here and there about Ralegh for decades, and as Popper has written a recent and proper book devoted to Ralegh, I refer the reader to his study for something in a wider context of Ralegh and his reception, which I have only touched on here. On the Comberbachs and their copy of Ralegh’s History of the World, see Nicholas Popper, Walter Ralegh’s “History of the World” and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 276–77. Popper sees at least three hands over two generations and gives some background on the family.
Popper, 276–77. For a key study of Ralegh, see Stephen Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and his Roles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973).
A recent book is Mathew Lyons, The Favourite: Sir Walter and his Queen (London: Constable, 2009, repr. 2012).
Paul De Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd revised ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1983).
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© 2013 Jonathan Hart
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Hart, J. (2013). Walter Ralegh, England, America and the World. In: From Shakespeare to Obama. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375827_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375827_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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