Abstract
Canvassing the spatial intersection of geography, cartography, ethnography, and history with dramatic texts, it is unavoidable to look at the galaxy of islands in the Mediterranean or the Aegean that formed the settings or were alluded to in early modern plays. The inner space of Mare nostrum was at the center of geographic and cartographic cultures in late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Even the newly discovered lands were often perceived as fictional islands because information about them was compiled from a variety of narratives. English playwrights exploited and dramatized the complex interplay of the islands’ material and metaphorical meanings and their implications in suggesting territorial nationalism. In exploring not only the insular geographic and cultural diversity but also some of the consequences for the human understanding of these environments, dramatists revealed the catalytic role of island representations in shaping early modern subjectivity. Moreover, in drawing on island geographic and ethnographic narratives, English playwrights generated a limbo fictional space signifying change. This malleable space is the place of action—the stage. From the diversified sixteenth-century geographic and cartographic island representations, I will consider the distinctive genre of the isolario,1 a compendium of maps and texts, of histories and myths about the islands of the Mediterranean, focusing mainly on the Aegean archipelago.
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Notes
On the term isolario, which came into use in 1534, and for a full analysis of the genre and bibliography, see George Tolias, “Isolarii, Fifteenth to Seventeenth Century,” in The History of Cartography: Interpretive Essays, ed. David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 3: 263–84.
On the history of books about islands in Western culture, see Chet Van Duzer, “From Odysseus to Robinson Crusoe: A Survey of Early Western Island Literature,” Island Studies Journal 1, no. 1 (2006): 143–62. See also Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye on the isolario (90–95).
On the Mediterranean, see Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1976)
Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000)
Colin Heywood, ed., The Rise of the Ottoman Empire: Studies on the History of Turkey, 13th–15th Centuries (Richmond: Curzon, 2001)
David Abulafia, Mediterranean Encounters, Economic, Religious, Political, 1100–1550 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000)
Iain Chambers, Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008)
William W. Harris, ed., Rethinking the Mediterranean (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)
Colin Heywood, “Fernand Braudel and the Ottomans: The Emergence of an Involvement (1928–50),” Mediterranean Historical Review 23, no. 2 (2008): 165–84.
See also Irad Malkin, ed., Mediterranean Paradigms and Classical Antiquity (New York: Routledge, 2005).
Bronwen Wilson, “Assembling the Archipelago: Isolarii and the Horizon of Early Modern Public Making,” in Making Space Public in Early Modern Europe: Performance, Geography, Privacy, ed. Angela Vanhaelen and Joseph P. Ward (London: Routledge, 2013), 101–26, 101.
Frederic Jameson, “Of Islands and Trenches: Naturalisation and the Production of Utopian Discourse,” Diacritics 7, no. 2 (1977): 2–21.
Gillian Beer, “Island Bounds,” in Islands in History and Representations, ed. Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 32–42, 42.
Matthew Boyd Goldie, “Island Theory: The Antipodes,” in Islanded Identities: Constructions of Postcolonial Cultural Insularity, ed. Maeve McCusker and Anthony Soares (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011), 1–40, 29.
Rebecca Weaver-Hightower, Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies of Conquest (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xiv.
Considering the effect of the emerging “map consciousness” on the literature of Britons in the early modern period, Stewart Mottram looks at Britain’s insularity in relation to concepts of empire and nation, exploring links between maps and monarchy; Mottram observes an “ideological shift” between late Elizabethan maps, focusing on the nation, and those produced under James, which were monarchy-centered (55). See Stewart Mottram, “Mapping the British Archipelago in the Renaissance,” 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), 54–69.
David McInnis, Mind-Travelling and Voyage Drama in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 131.
Chee-Seng Lim, “Crossing the Dotted Line: Shakespeare and Geography,” in Shakespeare without Boundaries: Essays in Honor of Dieter Mehl, ed. Christa Jansohn, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Stanley Wells (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 253–63, 257.
Discussing the impact of the isolarii on medieval romance literature, Simone Pinet observes that the genre never competed with formal geography and cartography, while some of the early printed atlases incorporated information drawing on the insular narratives. See Simone Pinet, Archipelagoes: Insular Fictions from Chivalric Romance to the Novel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 29–74, esp. 63.
Tom Conley, The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 169.
Cristoforo Buondelmonti, Description des îles de l’archipel grec, ed. and trans. Emile Legrand (Amsterdam: Philo Press, 1974).
See also Hilary Turner, “The Expanding Horizons of Cristoforo Buondelmonti,” History Today 40 (1990): 40–41
Benedetta Bessi, “Cristoforo Buondelmonti: Greek Antiquities in Florentine Humanism,” The Historical Review/La Revue Historique 9 (2012): 63–76, about Buondelmonti from the point of view of classical archeology.
George Tolias, “The Politics of the Isolario: Maritime Cosmography and Overseas Expansion during the Renaissance,” The Historical Review/La Revue Historique 9 (2012): 27–52, 28.
Ben Jonson, Volpone, or the Fox, in Ben Jonson: Three Comedies, ed. Michael Jamieson, Penguin Classics (New York and London: Penguin Books, 1966), 49–171, 52.
Stephen J. Greenblatt, “Marlowe and Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1977),” in Marlowe: Tamburlaine the Great, Edward the Second and The Jew of Malta: A Casebook, ed. John Russell Brown (London: The Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1982), 207–29, 209.
Richard Wilson, “Tragedy, Patronage, and Power,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, ed. Patrick Cheney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 207–30, 218; 221.
For Claire Harraway, in Re-citing Marlowe: Approaches to the Drama, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), The Jew of Malta interrogates the very nature of genre by initially identifying itself as tragedy and “then proceeding to complicate and to contradict this pronouncement throughout the rest of the play” (168).
Andrew Hiscock discusses the ways in which the social and spatial structures of urban environments in The Jew of Malta challenge practices of cultural interaction and argues that the play “is obsessively preoccupied with the business of enclosing” (52); see Andrew Hiscock, “Enclosing ‘infinite riches in a little room’: The Question of Cultural Marginality in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta,” in The Uses of This World, 52–82. In relation to the volatile representations of space, Marjorie Garber also concludes that each of Marlowe’s plays “finds its closure in enclosure: the inner stage, or discovery space, becomes a version of hell, and a place of final entrapment” (6); see Marjorie Garber, “‘Infinite Riches in a Little Room’: Closure and Enclosure in Marlowe,” in Two Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, Selected Tapers from the English Institute, 1975–76, ed. Alvin Kernan (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 3–21.
See Emily C. Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); Bartels sees Marlovian space as “shapeless” as a result of the arbitrariness of the differences assigned to it (15). Emily Bartels also locates Marlowe’s Malta in the no man’s land between Christendom and Islam, in the context of the new geographic encounters, in “Malta: The Jew of Malta and the Fictions of Difference,” in Christopher Marlowe, ed. Richard Wilson (London and New York: Longman, 1999), 159–73, 160. See also Thomas Cartelli, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
See David Bevington, From ‘Mankinde’ to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962)
Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997).
Stevie Simkin, “Playing False: Barabas as Performer,” A Preface to Marlowe (Edinburgh: Pearson Education Limited, 2000), 149–54.
Rick Bowers, Radical Comedy in Early Modern England: Contexts, Cultures, and Performances (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Group, 2008), 23.
Julia Reinhard Lupton, “The Jew of Malta,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, ed. Patrick Cheney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 144–57, 153.
Jacques Lezra, “Geography and Marlowe,” in Christopher Marlowe in Context, ed. Emily C. Bartels and Emma Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 125–37, 132.
Richard Wilson, “Another Country: Marlowe and the Go-Between,” in Re-Mapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings, ed. Goran V. Stanivukovic, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 131–56, 142.
Theatricality and subversion are likewise explored by Darryll Grantley in “‘What means this Shew?’ Theatricalism, Camp and Subversion in Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta,” in Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture, ed. Darryll Grantley and Peter Roberts, 2nd ed. (1996; Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 224–38.
Carla Keyvanian illustrates several sixteenth-century maps of Malta showing the island’s Turkish siege. Concerning the isolarii about Malta, Keyvanian notes that they “found a market among would-be travelers” (44); see Carla Keyvanian, “Maps and Wars: Charting the Mediterranean in the Sixteenth Century,” in Cities of the Mediterranean: From the Ottomans to the Present Day, ed. Biray Kolluoglu and Meltem Tokösz (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 38–60.
Virginia Mason Vaughan, “The Maltese Factor: The Poetics of Place in The Jew of Malta and The Knight of Malta,” in A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, ed. Jyotsna Singh, Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2013), 340–54, 340.
Lisa Hopkins, “Marlowe as Scholar: Old and New Knowledges in the Plays,” in Christopher Marlowe, Renaissance Dramatist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 82–105, 96.
Richard F. Hardin argues that early modern England witnessed a form of globalization that is characterized by the erosion of distance and finds that Marlowe was well-positioned in Canterbury (as an international and polyglot center) to respond to it. See Richard F. Hardin, “Marlowe Thinking Globally,” in Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman: Lives, Stage, and Page, ed. Sarah K. Scott and M. L. Stapleton (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 23–32, 24.
Roma Gill, “Introduction,” in The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe: The Jew of Malta, ed. Roma Gill, ix-xvii, vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), ix–xi. All references of textual lineation are keyed to this edition.
Janet Clare, “Marlowe’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty,’“ in Constructing Christopher Marlowe, ed. J. A. Downie and J. T. Parnell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 74–87, 75.
Bernadette Andrea, “From Invasion to Inquisition: Mapping Malta in Early Modern England,” in Re-Mapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings, ed. Goran V. Stanivukovic (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 245–71, 251.
William M. Hamlin, “Misbelief, False Profession, and The Jew of Malta,” in Placing the Plays of Christopher Marlowe: Fresh Cultural Contexts, ed. Sara Munson Deats and Robert A. Logan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 125–34, 126.
Both Simon Shepherd and Lisa Hopkins have persuasively proposed that Elizabethan audiences may have been minded to align the perfidious governor Ferenze with the contemporary prince of Parma, Alessandro Farnese, the Spanish commander in the Netherlands. See Simon Shepherd, Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1986), 171
Lisa Hopkins, Christopher Marlowe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 63.
Analyzing the carnivalesque revenges in The Jew of Malta, Rozalya Yaneva observes the exaggerations and hyperbolic aggrandizement in depicting Barabas and notes: “Falsehood and the attractiveness of deceiving are displayed as Barabas self-consciously performs himself on stage” (184); see Rozalya Yaneva, Misrule and Reversals: Carnivalesque Performances in Christopher Marlowe’s Plays (München: Herbert Utz Verlag, 2012), 184–206. Similarly, in her study exploring the interplay of imitation, borrowing, and competition in the ambience of Shakespeare’s theater, Janet Clare notes the “preposterous over-reaching” of the appalling crimes in the final act of The Jew of Malta, which carry the events even further from any semblance of verisimilitude (128)
see Janet Clare, Shakespeare’s Stage Traffic: Imitation, Borrowing and Competition in Renaissance Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 128–29.
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, 237.
Lukas Erne, Beyond The Spanish Tragedy: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001), 96. I believe that the ridicule and frequent ironic references to “Hieronimo” in many contemporary plays were an in-joke for the larger-than-life events and the inconsistent theatrical geography represented onstage.
William N. West, Theaters and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 44 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), discusses Hieronimo’s “Soliman and Perseda” play-within-the play to reveal a growing early modern awareness of the theater’s limitation as a space of encyclopedic knowledge (112).
Thomas Kyd, The Tragedy of Solyman and Perseda, in A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Originally Published by Robert Dodsley in 1744, ed. W. Carew Hazlitt, vol. 5 (London: Reeves and Turner, 1874), 259.
Jeremy Lopez, Theatrical Conventions and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 146.
Jane Hwang Dagenhardt, Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 153.
Bernadette Andrea and Linda Mcjannet, “Introduction: Islamic Worlds in Early Modern English Literature,” in Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds, ed. Bernadette Andrea and Linda McJannet (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1–19, 3.
See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978; New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 23
Anthony Pagden, Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East and West (New York: Random House, 2008), xiv–xv.
See, for example, Ania Loomba, “‘Delicious Trafick’: Alterity and Exchange on Early Modern Stages,” Shakespeare Survey 52 (1999): 201–14
Jonathan Burton, “Emplotting the Early Modern Mediterranean,” in Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writing, ed. Goran V. Stanivukovik (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 21–40. Lisa Jardine, Jerry Brotton, and Gerald McLean emphasized the dynamism of East-West cultural exchanges and the circulation of commodities in: Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods
Jerry Brotton, The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo, 2nd ed. (2002; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)
Gerald McLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Reorienting Cultural Exchanges with the East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
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© 2015 Monica Matei-Chesnoiu
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Matei-Chesnoiu, M. (2015). Isolarii or Performative Island Routes. In: Geoparsing Early Modern English Drama. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137469410_6
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