Abstract
The sea was connected with the classical idea of unstable fortune and the more recent implications of mercantile cosmopolitanism in the Elizabethans’ and Jacobeans’ minds. Discussing the cultural meanings of the maritime world in early modern English literature, Steve Mentz makes the case for “a blue cultural studies,” by which he refers to explorations of the maritime discourses that can change interpretations of literature. Mentz’s approach is integrated in the broader concept of “new thalassology,” devised by Nicholas Horden and Peregrine Purcell and intended to revitalize Mediterranean history.1 My primary concern is to use the sea environment to reconsider paradigms of early modern globalization as revealed through dramatic representations of sea cities. I will explore the theatrical inflections of the cultures of communities influenced by the sea as inspired by geographic narratives describing a strategically located city of the sea—Constantinople.2 Early modern English drama placed the meanings of the sea in the context of the massive ocean-bound expansion of European culture that began in the fifteenth century, but mainly in the old world of the Mediterranean that generated that culture. The sea’s ancient meanings shifted in the early modern period as geographic experience and knowledge increased.
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Notes
Steve Mentz, “Toward a Blue Cultural Studies: The Sea, Maritime Culture, and Early Modern English Literature,” Literature Compass 6, no. 5 (2009): 997–1013.
For a study of shipwrecks in the accumulation of early modernity, see Steve Mentz, “God’s Storms: Shipwreck and the Meanings of Ocean in Early Modern England and America,” in Shipwrecks in Art and Literature: Images and Interpretations from Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. Carl Thompson (New York and London: Routledge, 2013), 77–91. In the presentist and historicist overview of Shakespeare’s awareness of the ocean, Shakespeare’s Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2012), Dan Brayton examines the figurative construction of an “oceanic subjectivity” (63) throughout Shakespeare’s dramatic corpus. I also subscribe to Paul Cantor’s argument that the hybrid image of the Mediterranean drawn from the classical world was at the center of Shakespeare’s imagination, in “The Shores of Hybridity: Shakespeare and the Mediterranean,” Literature Compass 3, no. 4 (2006): 896–913, 899.
In my attempt to reveal the constructed, social, and class-determined nature of cultural identity of the Black Sea area and Constantinople as disclosed through maritime geography and drama, I rely on scholarship such as Nabil Matar’s Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) and Britain and Barbary, 1589–1689 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005); Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, 2nd ed. (1996; New York: W.W. Norton, 1998)
Jerry Brotton, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (London: Reaktion Books, 1997)
Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Gerald MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)
and Daniel Carey, ed., Asian Travel in the Renaissance (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004) on early modern English eastern and western travel.
Discussing early modern discourses of difference and the volatility of the concept of “Orient,” Benedict S. Robinson notes that Hakluyt and Purchas put the sea rather than the land at the center of attention; they organize the books “according to lines of movement, paths, or routes, not fixed bounded spaces” (124). See Benedict S. Robinson, “England, the ‘Orient,’ and the Ocean,” in A Companion to British Literature: Early Modern Literature 1450–1660, ed. Robert Demaria, Jr., Heesok Chang, and Samantha Zacher, vol. 2 (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 116–28.
For an account of the Venetians’ presence in sixteenth- to seventeenth-century Constantinople, see Eric R Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells, in The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, gen, ed. Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), observe that about a third of the play was composed by young Thomas Middleton, including all of Act 3 (475).
Ian W. Archer, “Economy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 165–81, 180.
For critics who have seen Shakespeare developing a critique of capitalism in Timon of Athens, see Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare; ed. Karl Klein, Timon of Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Hugh Grady, “Timon of Athens: The Dialectic of Usury, Nihilism, and Art,” in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, ed. R. Dutton and J. E. Howard, vol. 1: The Tragedies (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 430–51.
Robert Greene, The Tragical Reign of Selimus (1594), ed. W. Bang, gen. ed. W. W. Greg, The Malone Society Reprints (London: The Chiswick Press, 1908).
Brian Walsh, Shakespeare, the Queen’s Men, and the Elizabethan Performance History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 55.
Linda McJannet, The Sultan Speaks: Dialogue in English Plays and Histories about the Ottoman Turks (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 83.
Matthew Dimmock, New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, Publishing, 2005), 171.
Daniel Vitkus, ed., Three Turk Plays: Selimus, A Christian Turned Turk, The Renegado (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
Ben Jonson, The Case Ls Altered, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, 2nd ed., vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 110–11.
Richard Dutton, Ben Jonson Authority Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), 41.
Ben Jonson, Everyman Out of His Humour, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, 2nd ed., vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 230–92.
Richard Cave, “Visualising Jonson’s Text,” in Ben Jonson and Theatre: Performance, Practice, and Theory, ed. Richard Cave, Elizabeth Schafer, and Brian Woolland (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 31–42, 33.
James Loxley and Mark Robson, Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Claims of the Performative (New York and London: Routledge, 2013), 117.
H. L. Snuggs, “Fynes Moryson and Jonson’s Puntavorlo,” Modern Language Notes 51, no. 4 (1936): 230–34.
For a brief survey of the origins of ‘putting out’ in pilgrimage arrangements and courtly culture, as well as a discussion of wager on travel into the Ottoman dominions, see Anthony Parr, “Going to Constantinople: English Wager-Journeys to the Ottoman World in the Early-Modern Period,” Studies in Travel Writing 16, no. 4 (2012): 349–61. In this context we should also consider The Tempest, where Gonzalo speaks of the travelers’ fantastic tales, “Which now we find/Each putter-out of 5 for 1 will bring us/Good warrant of” (3.3.47–49). Gonzalo’s imaginary but reversed commercial speculation highlights the scene’s metatheatricality.
Ben Jonson, Epicoene, or The Silent Woman, Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Hereford and Percy Simpson, 2nd ed., vol. 5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954). We could certainly connect the reference to Virginia to William Strachey’s ill-fated voyage of the Sea Venture, which left England in 1609, bound for Jamestown in Virginia and was shipwrecked on the island of Bermuda. Similarly, the reference to Ireland may allude to the efforts made by James I to colonize Ulster in 1611, when the title of Baronet was created to raise funds for this purpose and desperate men were invited to repair their fortunes by settling there. However, since my argument highlights the polyvocality of geographic allusions on Jonson’s stage, I prefer to consider these historical facts as delightful contingencies. From the perspective of my argument concerning metatheatricality through geography, all these places were related to vain aspirations and hopes of material self-realization to be fulfilled overseas.
Discussing the role of language in London’s urban and increasingly diverse landscape, Heather C. Easterling, in “Epicoene, Women, and the Language of the City” argues that “the play’s concerns for language and the city reflect anxieties about women’s place in a changing society that are encompassed by women as speakers” (47). See Heather C. Easterling, Parsing the City: Jonson, Middleton, Dekker and City Comedy’s London as Language (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), 47–79. I see this particular kind of fashionable double-talk as a form of theatrical dislocation of a specific urban topography, similar to the fictionalized geographic discourses describing faraway and exotic spaces.
Richard Wilson, in “‘When Golden Time Convents’: Shakespeare’s Eastern Promise,” Shakespeare 6, no. 2 (2010): 209–26, accounts for “Shakespeare’s eastern orientation” (222) dramatized in Twelfth Night and connects the references to the travels of the Sherley brothers to Persia with Catholic plots to exploit the Shah for Essex and King James. Wilson argues that the relations between east and west were determined more by internecine Christian schism than any anti-Islamic crusade, which gave Shakespeare the occasion “to turn a hostage crisis into hospitality, and western prejudice to eastern promise” (222).
Justin Kolb, “‘A Turk’s Mustachio’: Anglo-Islamic Traffic and Exotic London in Ben Jonson’s Everyman Out of His Humour and Entertainment at Britain’s Burse,” in Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds, ed. Bernardette Andrea and Linda McJannet (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 197–214, 203.
In comparing the city’s landscapes as described by Stow and in Heywood plays, Richard Rowlands notes a similar “gap between rhetoric and reality” (74) in Heywood’s representation of the burse built by Gresham; see Richard Rowlands, “A ‘London that yee see hourely’: Heywood, Stow, and the Invention of the City Staged,” in Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, 1599–1639: Locations, Translations, and Conflict (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 21–84.
Thomas Heywood, The Second Part of If You Know Not Me, You Know No Body, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood with a Life of the Poet and Remarks on His Writings, ed. J. Payne Collier (London: The Shakespeare Society, 1853), 2: 113.
For a “cultural biography” (40) of England’s Royal Exchange, see Joachim Frenk, “Symbolic Exchanges: Building English Overseas Trade,” in Textualized Objects: Material Culture in Early Modern English Literature (Heidelberg: Universitätverlag, 2012), 45–118. In Theater of a City, Jean E. Howard notes that Heywood used the image of the Royal Exchange in If You Know Not Me, Part 2 “to articulate ambivalent attitudes to the scale and abstract nature of international commerce and to the effect of new economic practices on traditional guild life and on the exercise of charity” (212).
Crystal Bartolovich, “‘Baseless Fabric’: London as ‘World City’”, in ‘The Tempest’ and its Travels, ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 13–26, 15.
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© 2015 Monica Matei-Chesnoiu
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Matei-Chesnoiu, M. (2015). Cities of the Sea: Constantinople—Mobility and Cosmopolitanism. In: Geoparsing Early Modern English Drama. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137469410_5
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