A knight’s legacy: Mandeville and Mandevillian Lore in Early Modern England 9781526148230

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A knight’s legacy

Mandeville and Mandevillian Lore in Early Modern England

edited by

ladan niayesh

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A K N I G H T and ’ S L Epornography GACY sanctity in medieval culture

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Anke Bernau Davidj. Matthews seriesgail editors Founding seriesand editors j. anderson, ashton This series is broad in scope and receptive to innovation, bringing together a variety of Series advisory board: Ruth Evans, Nicola McDonald, Larry Scanlon, Stephanie Trigg approaches. It is intended to include monographs, collections of commissioned essays, and editions and/or translations of texts, with a focus on English and English-related Series founded by: J. J. ANDERSON, GAIL ASHTON literature and culture. It embraces medieval writings of many different kinds (imaginative, The Manchester and series publishes newof research, historical, political,Medieval scientific, Literature religious) as wellCulture as post-medieval treatments medieval informed by important current critical methodologies, oncontributions the literary cultures of medieval Britain material. An aim of the series is that to it should be written in a (including and Celtic writings), including post-medieval style which Anglo-Norman, is accessible to aAnglo-Latin wide range of readers. engagements with and representations of the Middle Ages (medievalism). ‘Literature’ is viewed in a broad and inclusive sense, embracing imaginative, historical, political, already published scientific, dramatic and religious writings. The series offers monographs and essay Language and imagination in the Gawain-poems collections, as well as editions and translations of texts. J. J. Anderson Water Available and fire: The myth of the Flood in Anglo-Saxon England Titles in the Series Daniel Anlezark Language and imagination in the Gawain-poems The Parlement of Foulys (by Geoffrey Chaucer) J. J. Anderson D. S. Brewer (ed.) Water and fire: The myth of the Flood in Anglo-Saxon England Greenery: Ecocritical readings of late medieval English literature Daniel Anlezark Gillian Rudd The Parlement of Foulys (by Geoffrey Chaucer) A. S. Brewer (ed.) Sanctity and pornography in medieval culture Bill Burgwinkle and Cary Howie In strange countries: Middle English Literature and its Afterlife Essays in Memory of J. J. Anderson David Matthews (ed.) Greenery: Ecocritical readings of late medieval English literature Gillian Rudd

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A knight’s legacy

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Mandeville and Mandevillian Lore in Early Modern England

EDITED BY LADAN NIAYESH

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

Manchester University Press manchester

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Copyright © Manchester University Press 2011 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

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Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN

978 0 7190 8175 0 hardback

First published 2011

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

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In memoriam Heshmatollah Niayesh, the best knight in Fatherdom

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Contents

List of contributors Acknowledgements Abbreviations

ix x xi

Introduction Mary Baine Campbell

1

Part I: 1 2

3

Mandeville in England: the early years Michael C. Seymour ‘Whet-stone leasings of old Maundeuile’: reading the Travels in early modern England Charles W. R. D. Moseley Mandeville reviviscent: early modern travel tales Kenneth Parker

Part II: 4

5

6

Editions and receptions

Mandevillian ideologies

The four rivers of paradise: Mandeville and the Book of Genesis Leo Carruthers Mandeville on Muhammad: texts, contexts and influence Matthew Dimmock A ‘science of dreams’: ‘the fantastic ethnography’ of Sir Walter Ralegh and Baconian experimentalism Line Cottegnies

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13 15

28 51

73

75

92

108

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Contents

viii

Part III: 7

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8

9

10

Mandevillian stages

Marlowe’s Tamburlaine: the well-travelled tyrant and some of his unchecked baggage Richard Hillman Prester John writes back: the legend and its early modern reworkings Ladan Niayesh Stage-Mandevilles: the Far East and the limits of representation in the theatre, 1621–2002 Gordon McMullan The politics of Mandevillian monsters in Richard Brome’s The Antipodes Claire Jowitt

Index

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129

131

155

173

195

213

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List of contributors

Mary Baine CAMPBELL, Brandeis University Leo CARRUTHERS, University of Paris Sorbonne (Paris IV), France Line COTTEGNIES, University of Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III), France Matthew DIMMOCK, University of Sussex Richard HILLMAN, University of Tours, France Claire JOWITT, Nottingham Trent University Gordon McMULLAN, King’s College London Charles W. R. D. MOSELEY, Hughes Hall, Cambridge Ladan NIAYESH, University of Paris Diderot (Paris VII), France Kenneth PARKER, University of London Michael C. SEYMOUR, Hales Croft, Oxford

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Acknowledgements

Most of the contributions to this volume are the selected proceedings of a conference on ‘Mandeville and Mandevillian lore in early modern England’ held at the Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier, France, in June 2007. Other specially commissioned chapters were added at a later stage to form the present volume. As organiser of the conference and editor of this volume, I wish first to express my gratitude to the contributors for their thoughtprovoking work, as well as their patience and trust throughout the stages leading to the production of the present book. I would also like to thank the different institutions and individuals that made the conference possible and supported the publication: the Université Paul Valéry and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), which both funded the conference, the Institute for Research on the Renaissance, the Neoclassical Age and the Enlightenment (IRCL), where the conference was held, its Director Charles Whitworth and several members who greatly helped me with organisational practicalities. Among them, my special thanks go to Jean-Marie Maguin, Jean-Christophe Mayer, Nick Myers, our colleague Anne Mathieu from the university, and of course the centre’s invaluable secretary, Vanessa Kühner-Blaha. My appreciation also goes to commissioning editor Matthew Frost, who offered us this opportunity for publication with Manchester University Press, and to the Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture series editors Anke Bernau and David Matthews who saw the volume through the various stages of its production. I am most particularly grateful to Anke for her professionalism and her many constructive remarks and suggestions. This list of acknowledgements would be incomplete without a reference to my ever supportive family: my sisters Niloufar and Farinaz, and our father who encouraged this and all my projects most enthusiastically in his lifetime.

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Abbreviations

BL EETS OED

o.s. STC

British Library Early English Text Society The Oxford English Dictionary, prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, 20 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989 old series Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475– 1640, compiled by A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, 2nd edition revised by W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson and Katharine F. Pantzer, 3 vols. London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–91

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Introduction

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Mary Baine Campbell

It is surprising, at this point in the story of the rich and strange rediscovery of a text so important to both French and English literary and social history, that no collection of scholarly essays related to Mandeville’s Travels yet exists in English or French. So much groundbreaking work has been done in my lifetime, in the areas of literary history and criticism, textual studies, travel writing and postcolonial theory, in addition to – or perhaps enforcing – the transformation of medieval and Renaissance studies by the recognition of Europe’s debts (political and moral, as well as literary and artistic) to the cultures and histories of Asia. We are in the enviable situation now of having a solid base of fact and interpretation from which to venture forth on a surer footing, in a greatly enriched scholarly and theoretical landscape, in the quest of a twenty-firstcentury Mandeville. The essays collected here by scholars in England and France produce a complex and sometimes contradictory view of Mandeville’s book as an important object of early modern attention, as well as a feature of early modern literary context. As such, the book had been neglected until recently, except in obligatory reference to the copy Martin Frobisher brought with him to Baffin’s Bay, and before him Christopher Columbus – who brought as well an interpreter unhelpfully versed in Arabic on his epochal westward Journey to the East. In their negotiations of and around it, the chapters in this volume range in emphasis from textual and bibliographic studies of Mandeville’s late medieval and early modern Nachleben to studies of what the editor Ladan Niayesh calls ‘Mandevillian ideologies’, to readings of romances and especially theatrical productions, illuminated by understandings of the new life in print of the Travels and its excerpted account of the Levant. The scholarly world has a new object to consider, early modern Mandeville (a big step towards twenty-first-century

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Mandeville), whose text has far different roles to play in Europe’s first age of long-distance colonial enterprise. A monograph on the subject of Mandeville’s early modern afterlife deserves to be written, as readers of this book will feel. But a gathering between two covers of such well-integrated materials, seen through such varied critical lenses, must precede it: the issues at stake are many, and require the nimble footwork and multiple approaches of scholars with an array of epistemological and critical commitments, working with (and introducing us to) a full spectrum of materials. Why exactly do we need such a collection, other than the fact that it has no predecessor? As a scholar who straddles both the period of its first composition and dissemination and the period of print and greatly increased desire for and access to geographical knowledge, I am in a position to answer that question. But I am hardly alone: increasingly, graduate programmes in the humanities are turning out new scholars and critics whose dissertations encompass both later medieval and early modern texts, corpuses and topical traditions. For many of us, the newish category ‘early modern’ has come into being precisely to permit the study of developments, continuities and significant epistemic breaks (where they exist) between the older categories of ‘medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’, even, in AngloSaxon parlance, the first half of the ‘long eighteenth century’, and in the francophone world between the medieval, Renaissance and ‘classical’ periods so forbiddingly divided in Foucault’s magisterial Order of Things.1 The epistemic break of the Renaissance (differently periodised for different national literatures) has come to seem less clear over the course of the last twenty-five years of scholarship and theory in several fields, and has been theorised away most famously in Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern.2 One place in which it has remained more stable, however, has been in the ever-burgeoning field of travel writing. At a material-technological level, the development in Europe of transoceanic navigation and overseas colonisation, with their resultant stimulation of a truly global economy, makes a fairly clean break with the ‘authorities’ and feudal economies of the Middle Ages. As the chapters of Part I of this book make especially clear, despite the continuous dissemination and republication of various versions of Mandeville’s book between 1365 and 1744 (when a chapbook for children was published in England), there were profound changes in motives for publication, anthologisation and readerly reception of the text(s) from the time of the incunabula,

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through its use by explorers Columbus, Frobisher and Ralegh, to its appearance as a children’s book in the Enlightenment. These changes underscore the aforementioned alterations of economies and geographical experience in the mostly post-medieval ‘Age of Discovery’. Indeed, we tend now to define a period break not so much as that between the manuscript and print cultures of the literate elite as between the time-before and the time-after the navigational and cartographical innovations of the Portuguese King Henry the Navigator and his intrepid pilots, in the later fifteenth century. The long-lived text, or rather texts (its ‘isotopes’, in Iain Higgins’s inspired coinage), of the Travels provide thus an extraordinary opportunity for studying historical, social, literary and even scientific change within a continuous, if continually mutating, textual tradition. Implicit in Michael Seymour’s lists of manuscript groupings and the beginning of their modern republication history is a recognition that we still participate in this mutating history (consider for instance that non-scholarly readers in English today are likely to have read only the Egerton version translated for Penguin Classics by C. W. R. D. Moseley, but first published only in 1889). Of course the Bible (on which see Leo Carruthers, Chapter 4 below) and the major works of Ovid and Virgil provide similar and even longer-lived grounds for studying literary history. But there is no text to compete with Mandeville’s as an opportunity to scrutinise the transformations and continuities between specifically medieval and early modern reception – and use – of a widely read vernacular book. Its nature as a work of travel and geography cathects directly what may be the sole remaining believable break between what are still commonly held to be the Middle Ages and Renaissance, or early modern, relations to knowledge, truth and writing. Mandeville’s Travels is not only of value as a case study. I have taught it very successfully to both undergraduate and graduate students in courses that did not concern themselves with the break or non-break in question, and sensitive literary critics such as Christian Zacher and Stephen Greenblatt have written aesthetic, if historically contextualised, appreciations which respond vitally to its literary charm.3 It is a good book, even out of context, and we are still enjoying it. (An opera composer in Alberta recently asked permission to set some of my own words about it to music!) Its ‘charm’ is not, it seems, the minor quality of light literature, but something closer to its etymological meaning of ‘spell’: the book

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is not simply enchanting, it has literally enchanted readers in a plethora of languages for going on seven centuries, not to mention the dire enchantment of Peregrine in Richard Brome’s 1638 production, The Antipodes. That it has done so is not, however, a mystical factoid. We owe its survival beyond the period of its composition (during a fraught episode in the ghastly Hundred Years War between France and England) to features of that charm that were important to early modern readers and printers confronting a whole ‘New World’, and new heavens to boot. Once the text had survived in the incunabula, as indeed the single most often printed vernacular text of the Middle Ages, it was loosed into a much longer durée that includes very markedly our own period. This collection helps us to understand that watershed, and displays our current participation in the making of a classic – as the ‘Penguin Classics’ edition implicitly insists. But part of this ongoing work of canonisation, or of renewal of an old canonisation, involves necessarily an appreciation of the Travels as source and, to quote the editor’s second section title, ideology. It is not just a fascinating and tonally complex work – or network of versions, as Iain Higgins’s erudite study reminds us. It was also a name for a Weltanschauung, and a resource for geographers, cartographers, explorers, anthologists and proto-ethnologists, from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries and even into the eighteenth, especially in Britain. It is a mass of data that makes its way, cited or not, into many corpuses – including Shakespeare’s – and it contains, or is felt to contain, a world view. Although it leaves out for the most part all of sub-Saharan Africa, little known to fourteenth-century Europeans, it aims to describe (as Marco Polo’s book in fact does not) the whole world of the mappae mundi, including the sacred parts known to medieval Europe primarily from the Bible. For British literary history, finally, it became a source (as it did not in France) for a very wide array of dramatic productions and texts of that neverequalled period in English theatre history. French exotic drama, much of it belonging to an equally great period in French theatre history, was a somewhat later phenomenon that took advantage of considerable up-to-date French travel writing about the Levant and the Ottoman Empire, with which it had mercantile traffic.4 But Part III of this collection concentrates especially on London theatrical productions of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (also the twenty-first century), at a time when ‘Mandevillian’ exotica remained in England, as Matthew Dimmock especially informs us in Chapter 5, a current resource in the vernacular and in Latin.

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Here the views of the authors of this collection differ. For Moseley and Dimmock, Mandevillian ‘lore’ is still viable in the Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods, if not to everyone. For Line Cottegnies, in her Chapter 6 on the epistemological modernity of Ralegh’s 1595 voyage to the ‘Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana’, it is open to question and subject to corrective modification. For Kenneth Parker (Chapter 3), Cottegnies’s distinction between the ‘serious’ and the ‘fictional’ is suspect. The four authors of the section on Elizabethan and Jacobean ‘Mandevillian theatre’, as Gordon McMullan terms it, do not concern themselves with the epistemological break focused on most centrally by Cottegnies. For them, Mandeville and the Mandevillian are literary facts of life, grist for the mills of a commercial and aesthetic enterprise. But for ‘Mandevillian lore’ to exist as a fact of life in this period, it must be kept alive by the texts’ republication, illustration and contestation, and the first two sections of this book provide us ample evidence, and invaluable bibliography, on those processes. Processes that give us fascinating windows on the transformation of medieval manuscripts and medieval facts into the usable and readable versions of an era marked by the critical ‘invention’ of the printing press, and the suddenly impinging realities of the Ottoman Empire and the New World. The book moves in a roughly chronological direction from Seymour’s account (Chapter 1) of the late medieval and fifteenthcentury dissemination and provenance of English versions and manuscripts (in Latin and the vernacular) of the original French text to the first performances in 1638 of Richard Brome’s play The Antipodes. It is divided into three parts oriented around, respectively, ‘Editions and receptions’, ‘Mandevillian ideologies’ and ‘Mandevillian stages.’ For some authors, the text in all or many of its versions is paramount; for others, a kind of hypostatic approximation of it is taken for granted as paradigmatic background. The structure of the book mimics the transformation of the text from an object of tendentious redaction to a symbol of exotic fauxknowledge: it is barely mentioned in the bibliography of Richard Hillman’s chapter on Tamburlaine in Part III, while the provenance of individual manuscripts focuses the attention of the book’s first chapter, Seymour’s ‘Mandeville in England’, and Moseley’s second chapter scrutinises Tudor and Elizabethan dissemination of the printed versions and their extracts and reuses. Part I provides us with accounts of the fifteenth- and

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sixteenth-century travels of the Travels’ variable text in its English or ‘Insular’ versions, along with some account, especially in Parker’s chapter, of the epistemological considerations that accompanied its travel to the more pragmatic economic and colonial concerns of the Tudor and Jacobean periods. The crucial Mandeville scholars of the second half of the twentieth century (with Josephine Waters Bennett, Iain Higgins and Christiane Deluz), Moseley and Seymour, give us the fundamental knowledge of the text’s manuscript peregrinations and its transformations in the age of print. Moseley in Chapter 2 (contrary to Cottegnies’s contribution in Part II and McMullan’s and Jowitt’s in Part III, even though he shares Cottegnies’s concern with epistemological shifts) insists on the well-documented evidence of Mandeville’s continued auctoritas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, while Parker (Chapter 3) takes issue, as a historicist literary critic, with the modern epistemological conflict between ‘hoax’ and ‘fact’, which meets a basic challenge in the ‘mouvance’ and multiform reception of Mandeville’s book in the new era of colonial exploration and protoethnological discourse. Such motivated and over-determined discourse in the print Nachleben of the Travels is examined in Part II through the optics of Dimmock’s interest in the historical discourse on the Turks and Islam in early modern England (Chapter 5),5 Cottegnies’s concern with the development, in England, of an empirical relation to knowledge (versus ‘belief’, or our ‘Imaginary’) in Chapter 6, and Carruthers’s effort to contextualise Mandevillian geography within the still-authoritative, though increasingly problematic, geography of scripture (Chapter 4). Taken together, these chapters introduce us to the variety of early modern questions within which Mandeville’s text(s) could surface as an object of attention or a source of information. The continuous relevance of ‘Mandevillian lore’ to such important nexuses of discourse and attention in the sixteenth century as Biblical interpretation, the impingement on commerce and military strategy of the Ottoman Empire, and the nascent empiricism of natural philosophy (in England especially) constitutes evidence, if it is still needed, of the importance of medieval culture to our understanding of a European Renaissance no longer recognisably described by Burckhardt’s Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy. The last and longest section of the book, ‘Mandevillian stages’, concerns itself especially with the newly invented medium of the commercial theatre. Of course this section is dominated by critics

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and historians of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, but it is necessary to adduce here the recent work of the intellectual and literary historian William West on the inextricability of theatre, in its first modern exfoliation, from the contemporary philosophical and epistemological considerations brought to our attention in Part II by Cottegnies (Chapter 6).6 As West reminds us, ‘theatrum’ was a word for (among other things) geographical atlases as much as for the physical theatres that first opened in England in 1576. As late as Ben Jonson, ‘theatre’ was a word for a certain kind of open-ended, encyclopedic compilation of geographical and protoethnographic information, and West is convincing in his readings of Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson as consciously participating in this strange generic fusion. The theatre was a venue for transmitting, interpreting and judging knowledge of ‘the world’ and, as some of these essays give evidence, the ‘New World’ (and new Old World) of the discoverers and explorers especially. Indeed, early theatre and opera were often nothing but a display of sets depicting that New World and the newly relevant Turkish ‘East’, or ballets displaying and interpreting its ritual dances.7 As a medium of spectacle, early theatre often occupied itself with essentially wordless displays of visually available proto-ethnographic information (as late as the use of Indian feather dresses brought by Aphra Behn from Surinam and donated to the Royal Society, in Dryden and Purcell’s 1695 musical drama The Indian Queene). The genre brought into focus in Part III, the drama of the new commercial theatre, where scripted plays were memorised and performed by paid actors in purpose-built theatres for a diverse popular audience, is only mentioned in passing in Parts I and II. This generic switch to theatrical performance from texts of knowledge seems to have encouraged a particular new use of Mandeville’s Book and its images that particularly requires the term ‘Mandevillian’ (as in ‘Mandevillian lore’, ‘Mandevillian ideology’ and ‘Mandevillian tropes’). The adjective pays homage to the cultural centrality of the text in England, as shown in the book’s earlier chapters, especially those of Seymour and Moseley. But where the earlier chapters saw the text as knowledge-bearing and usually credible, for critics of early modern drama it has become a style of fantastical imagination, a tone, a set of tropes set free from the texts and subject to invocation by the mere name of Mandeville, as for instance uttered, reverently, by the moon-mad Peregrine of Brome’s Antipodes (on which see especially but not exclusively Claire Jowitt’s Chapter 10). Even the tone has changed

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in these overt and implicit evocations: McMullan’s Chapter 9 particularly underlines the loss of what he calls the ‘liberatory wonder’ of Mandeville’s text in the cynical courtly rivalries and colonial violence of Fletcher’s The Island Princess (1621). For all four of the concluding chapters on (mostly) drama, the ‘Mandevillian’ is a substrate, referred to explicitly only in Brome’s Antipodes, which represents the felt decadence of Caroline London by means of a character driven mad by too much reading of Mandeville’s monstrous and topsy-turvy antipodean travel fantasy. Hillman’s Chapter 7 on the relations between Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (1587) and the French poet Du Bartas’s epyllion, La Judit (1573), hardly mentions Mandeville, but the implicit intertext is the Travels, with its famous section on ‘Turkey’, printed separately in the period and quoted often in early modern texts concerned with the new military and economic challenges presented by the Ottoman Empire. Here we see in two sixteenthcentury texts, French and English, the Mandevillian biblical geography explored in Carruthers’s chapter in Part II put to work in the early modern context of heightened contact with the Levant. We also see, in Marlowe’s Judith-manquée character of Zenocrate, the trope of the marriageable woman as mediator between the imaginary Judeo-Christian and Muslim or pagan worlds – a figure we will meet again in the Quisara of Fletcher’s Island Princess, and in the sixteenth-century romances explored by Ladan Niayesh. Niayesh’s Chapter 8 takes up the matter of Prester John again, introduced in Part I by Parker as a figure in his rejection of the epistemological dichotomy of hoax versus truth. Here, it is viewed in its extraordinary historical transition (along a persistent axis of Sameness/Difference), from the mediating character in Otto of Freising and in Mandeville – the Christian, if Nestorian, priestking of the fabulous East, a potential ally – to the romance image of the oriental pagan/Muslim tyrant, whose unmarried daughter becomes, in sixteenth-century romance and comic drama, the mediatrix between these poles on the axis of Difference. Niayesh’s emphasis on the complex re-gendering of the mediating figure, so important in early modern colonial travel writing (Pocahantas, La Malinche), has resonance with Hillman’s chapter on La Judit and Tamburlaine, as well as with McMullan’s on Fletcher’s Island Princess, and especially Jowitt’s on Brome’s Antipodes (Chapters 7, 9, 10). But McMullan is particularly interested, as I have noted, in the negotiation of ‘Mandevillian drama’ with ‘the East’, in the newly heated context in which what he

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calls Mandeville’s ‘restraint’ is ineluctably left behind for an only grimly ‘carnivalesque’ confrontation with the rage and violence of colonial encounter. The tropes persist, but the Mandevillian spirit, as McMullan sees it, is replaced by an almost Conradian sense of apocalypse: ‘There is . . . nothing liberating about the [island] Townsmen’s wonder here. On the contrary, they seem to marvel only as they are blown to shreds.’ His chapter looks ahead to the play’s revival in Britain after ‘9/11’, just before and after the terrible explosion in Bali. Claire Jowitt’s concluding chapter on Brome’s Antipodes displays Brome’s meta-take, as it were, on Mandevillian reception and reading in the mid-seventeenth century, by which point the Travels is losing ground faster, despite Purchas’s (ambivalent) republication in 1625 of Hakluyt’s Latin version from The Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1598–1600). Mandeville exists as a kind of sub-character in this play (invoked and lauded by the protagonist, Peregrine), but he represents now a mere Imaginary, which has infected the mind of the armchair traveller Peregrine as a contagious mental illness. The scenario is London; the Antipodes visited by Peregrine is a kind of hallucination induced by a ‘play’ which is really what one would now call an ‘intervention’, staged by friends who want to cure him of his madness. Within it he meets that now-familiar mediatrix, his real-life wife Martha in a so-far unconsummated marriage, and is brought back to an ambivalently represented normalcy by finally having sex with this faux-antipodean queen. The magic of theatrical illusion replaces the actual experiences of exotic travel and renders moot its necessity, or Peregrine’s longing for it. Where McMullan sees the demands of the genre of theatrical drama as determining a violent swerve from Mandeville’s ‘restraint’ and ‘liberatory wonder’, Brome’s play in Jowitt’s reading is a corrective to both Antipodean longing and projective fantasy. ‘There’s no place like home’ here, even if home is revealed as incurably decadent and destabilised – in a desperate echo, perhaps, of the critique of Christendom and ‘home’ in Mandeville’s conversations with that Sultan/Sowdone of Babylon whom Niayesh shows us to have become, finally, as conflated with Prester John, an oriental potentate experienced as anti-Christian enemy. It is of course in the theatre above all that Mandeville and the ‘Mandevillian’ receive their comeuppance. The complex epistemological anxieties over too-much and not-enough belief that wracked the literature of knowledge and the yeasty developments

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in natural philosophy and geography of the period could hold on to Mandevillian lore and various of the Travels’ texts a little longer than could the dramatic literature of the period in England (or later France, where Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670) retraces some of the themes and techniques of Brome’s Antipodes). When Peregrine fights backstage with pasteboard Antipodeans whom he believes, in his theatrically provoked dream, to be real, we see English drama do to Mandevillian travel writing what Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605 and 1615) had previously done to chivalric romance, in a country earlier acquainted with the terrible realities of Spanish chivalric questing in the Antipodean New World. The text so frequently and gravely reproduced in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, by Seymour’s account in Part I, has been conflated, as Niayesh demonstrates, with romance, and as such traduced by the sardonic realities, generic and political, of the Jacobean English stage. How one longs to read the sixteenth-century stage version of the Travels itself, now lost, but referred to in some of these chapters.8 And how perfect somehow that it is lost: what remains is the before and after, in English, French and Latin, of a text whose authority, for good and ill, became in the seventeenth century a joke. A joke in which we can see the traces of an ethical consciousness, but one which could do nothing to curtail colonial violence and the aftermath in which, as McMullan reminds us, we are fatally enmeshed today. Notes 1 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970). 2 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). 3 Christian Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth-Century England (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (London: Clarendon Press, 1991). 4 See Michèle Longino, Orientalism in French Classical Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and her more recent articles. On the trade networks, see Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, Orientalism in Early Modern France: Eurasian Trade, Exoticism, and the Ancien Régime (Oxford: Berg, 2008), and Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West (London: Reaktion Books, 2000).

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5 See Matthew Dimmock, New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 6 William West, Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 7 See Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 225–30. Consult also Fredi Chiappelli, Michael J. B. Allen and Robert Benson (eds), First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, 2 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 8 The anonymous lost romance of Sir John Mandeville (1599) is mentioned in Alfred Harbage (rev. Samuel Schoenbaum, rev. Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim), Annals of English Drama, 975–1700, 3rd edition (London: Routledge, 1989). Its hypothetical contents are discussed by Moseley and Niayesh in their chapters below.

Works cited Campbell, Mary Baine, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999. Chiappelli, Fredi, Michael J. B. Allen and Robert Benson (eds), First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Dimmock, Matthew, New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock, 1970. Greenblatt, Stephen, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. London: Clarendon Press, 1991. Harbage, Alfred (rev. Samuel Schoenbaum, rev. Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim), Annals of English Drama, 975–1700, 3rd edition. London: Routledge, 1989. Jardine, Lisa and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West. London: Reaktion Books, 2000. Latour, Bruno, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Longino, Michèle, Orientalism in French Classical Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. McCabe, Ina Baghdiantz, Orientalism in Early Modern France: Eurasian Trade, Exoticism, and the Ancien Régime. Oxford: Berg, 2008. West, William, Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Zacher, Christian, Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth-Century England. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

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Part I Editions and receptions

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1 Mandeville in England: the early years

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Michael C. Seymour

The evidence suggests that Mandeville’s Travels was written between 1351 (the date of completion of Jean Le Long’s translations of some of the sources of the book) and March 1357 (the date of the signing of the treaty between England and France after the battle of Poitiers on 19 September 1356). The author was certainly a Benedictine writing in northern France and possibly, even probably, Jean le Long himself, later librarian of the abbey of St Bertin at St Omer, about 40 kilometres south of Calais. The area was frequently fought over. Calais surrendered to Edward III on 3 August 1347 and became the base for various armed sorties in the French-held surrounding territories. One such force, led by John de Beauchamp captain of Calais, was soundly defeated in the neighbourhood of St Omer in June 1351. Mandeville’s Travels, written while these hostilities still plagued the countryside, was sent to Paris, the major book-producing centre of Europe, possibly by the author anonymously very early on, and by c. 1360 was part of the staple of the Parisian stationers. The earliest dated copy, written in 1371 by Raoulet d’Orleans for Gervaise Cretien, physician to Charles V (a bibliophile who withdrew a copy from the Louvre library in 1392) shows an incidence of scribal error which suggests that his copy-text was part of a developed scribal tradition. And several near-contemporary undated copies of the book support the idea of its establishment in Paris by that date. The date of the appearance of the book in England is not precisely known. All extant manuscripts written in England in French, Latin and English ultimately derive from one lost exemplar which gave the variant readings which now distinguish the Insular Version (in modern critical parlance). It is a reasonable speculation that this lost copy came to the London book trade from Paris. The first indication that the book had reached England is given by the anonymous author of Cleanness, a sophisticated alliterative

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poem written in the north-west Midlands (probably Shropshire c. 1375) who, in lines 1013–51, 1405–12 and 1441–88, makes use of Mandeville’s description of the Dead Sea and the palace of the Great Khan. This suggests, somewhat tentatively within a reasonable context, that Mandeville’s Travels in the Insular Version was in England at the latest c. 1370. None of the later fourteenthcentury literary references and echoes of the book, most famously by Chaucer in ‘The Squire’s Tale’ c. 1390, is more informative about its first appearance in England. Once arrived, the book achieved a wide circulation within the kingdom, helped no doubt as much by its claim to be a genuine relation of a genuine English knight born and bred at St Albans as by its exotic descriptions of the Holy Land and the fabulous East. By c. 1385 it existed in three languages (French, Latin, English) and in several versions. And since modern scholarship continues to explore the provenance and affiliations of the 66 extant manuscripts of the book that were written in England before 1500, it may be useful to list them in their most recently defined categories, as I have done in the Appendix at the end of this chapter. The origins and audiences of each of these three major linguistic traditions are distinct and most easily comprehended in separate discussions. The French tradition of the Insular Version is the earliest and most homogeneous of the three. Written in the AngloFrench dialect common to the educated classes of late fourteenthcentury England and extant in two subgroups, the manuscripts are for the greater part without precise provenance and comparatively late, i.e. after 1400. The larger subgroup carries an interpolated dedication to Edward III (d. 1377) described inter alia as king of France and duke of Aquitaine. The smaller subgroup has appended a short life of St Albans. The work stands alone in most of the manuscripts, which are generally of octavo size and with little decoration apart from some rubrication of names and modestly decorated initals in penwork, occasionally gilted, which begin the 34 unnumbered chapter divisions. None of these manuscripts is illustrated. Marks of their ownership before 1500 are few. One copy (MS. Harley 212) was given by Rodger to the house of Augustinian canons at Bolton, Yorkshire, in 1425 or 1426. Another copy (MS. Harley 1739) was owned by Richard Lee alderman of the City of London (d. after 1468). And another (MS. Bodley 841) was inherited by Christopher Urswick, king’s almoner and dean of Windsor, from his father Sir Thomas, Recorder of the City of London (d. 1471). External documentary evidence extends this

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knowledge of early owners a little. John of Scardeburgh rector of Tichmarsh, Yorkshire, in 1395, Thomas Roos gentleman of Ingmanthorpe, Yorkshire, in 1399 and his legatee William de Helagh priest, Thomas duke of Gloucester in the library of his foundation at Pleshy, Essex, in 1397, and Sir George Darell of Sessey, Yorkshire, in 1432 are recorded as owners of the book in wills and post-mortem inventories of goods. Together with Chaucer and the poet of Cleanness these names are probably representative since literacy in French was confined to gentry, senior clergy and religious, and prosperous merchants. The record of copies in Yorkshire is notable. The extant scribal tradition has many gaps in its transmission, especially in its earlier stages from which the Latin and English translations were made. It seems reasonable to assume that about a hundred copies of the Insular Version were made between c. 1370 and c. 1450 (the approximate date of the earliest and latest extant manuscripts). This estimate is based on the incidence of error observable in the extant copies. The extant Anglo-Latin manuscripts are more colourful and informative. There are four independent contemporaneous translations of four separate copies of the Insular Version. Three of these were made by Benedictines before 1390, presumably responding to a professional concern with accounts of the Holy Land, and the fourth (MS. Ashmole 769) of a slightly less polished Latinity is also the work of a religious. All are competent translations which attest to a high level of French fluency among the communities which produced them, and all are slightly abridged, at least in their extant copies. Two (MS. Cotton Appendix IV and Ashmole 769) have small passages crossed through by pious readers, and scribes presumably omitted other details, like the Introduction to the Royal Version. This version was the most widespread among the abbeys of the south and west. Copies are recorded at St Albans, Westminster, Canterbury and Durham, and also at the Cistercian abbey at Bylands, Yorkshire, and the two copies of the epitome are found in codices preserved in Benedictine libraries. The earliest dateable copy was written by Richard Frampton at London (c. 1405, MS. Hunterian T. 4. 1) and the latest (MS. Cosin V. iii. 7) by William Ebesham at Westminster after 1485. Another copy was at York (c. 1390) where it served as the base-text of an English translation, now only partially preserved in the Bodley and Egerton Versions. Two individual owners outside the abbeys are recorded: John Stafford bishop of Bath (1423–43) who owned the Hunterian copy, a large volume containing Marco Polo and Odoric and other

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items; and Robert Ayscough, canon and archdeacon of Colchester before becoming chancellor of Cambridge (d. 1447), who owned MS. Cotton Appendix iv. The incidence of error within the extant scribal tradition suggests that at least twenty copies were made. A similar record of ownership by religious houses and senior secular clergy is evident in the three extant manuscripts and fragments of a second Latin version. One (MS. Vulcan 96) was written by Richard Bledelewe OSB at Abingdon in 1390. Another was owned by Thomas Merkaunt, a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (d. 1439), who bequeathed his books to the college. A third (the Cardiff fragment) was copied by a university scribe at Oxford after 1425 and carried by a religious thence to the Welsh March, possibly to his house of Augustinian canons at Llanthony Prima. Two more Latin translations survive, each in a unique copy. The Harley Version (MS. Harley 82) is extant in an imperfect copy written, it appears, at the Benedictine abbey at Reading before 1400. This version was used by the maker of the English Metrical Version, also a religious. The Ashmole Version was translated before 1400. The extant copy (MS. Ashmole 769) was written after 1425 in a professional hand, possibly a university scribe, and has no discernible marks of provenance. Three other Latin manuscripts of Mandeville’s Travels are recorded in the book-lists of the Cluniac priory of Monks Bretton, Yorkshire, the Premonstratensian house at Titchfield, Hampshire (c. 1400), and the Augustinian abbey at Leicester (c. 1475). John Benet, vicar of Hartington, Bedfordshire, copied five extracts from an unidentified Latin version into his commonplace book (TCD MS. 516 ff. 49–53v, 56–75v) in 1461, possibly from the Augustinian priory at Dunstable. William Horton, a monk at the Cluniac priory of St Pancras, Lewes, copied extracts from another into a compendium of abstracts from chronicles (Copenhagen MS. Ny Kgl S. 172) in 1485. Thomas of Burton, abbot (1396–99) of the Cistercian abbey at Meaux, Yorkshire, recorded a note about Mandeville in his Chronica Monasterii de Melsa (Rolls Ser. III. 158). John Capgrave, later Prior Provincial of the Augustinians in England, also recorded in 1451 in his Solace of Pilgrimes (MS. Bodley 423 f. 355): ‘Ion maundevyle knyth of ynglond aftir his laboure made a book ful solacious on to his nacyoun.’ Thomas Walsingham included a similar reference in his chronicle at St Albans (Rolls Ser. II. 306) before 1396. And at the cathedral priory at Canterbury (c. 1400) an inventive Benedictine composed a Latin

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letter from Sir John Mandeville (Canterbury Archives MS. 6) to accompany the acquisition of a fine manuscript of the book. The existence of four contemporaneous translations before 1400 attests to a remarkable interest in the book among religious communities. Every major abbey possessed a copy of one of these translations, and probably most inmates of the four major orders in successive generations in late medieval England read their library copy. In addition, both universities owned copies and the monks who came to Oxford and Cambridge to study for a year or two at their religious studia (like Lydgate at Gloucester Hall, Oxford, c. 1410) probably helped the dissemination of the book, as the Cardiff fragment of the Leiden Version testifies. The importance of the Latin translations to any modern assessment of the impact of Mandeville’s Travels in England is thus obvious. Yet, interesting and important as these French and Latin versions are as evidence of the book’s circulation in England before 1500, they are overshadowed by the presence of the English translations made from them. Thirty-eight English manuscripts survive (compared with 15 French and 11 Latin copies) in four major versions, with several abstracts, fragments and dependent literary artifices. They exist in copies written throughout the fifteenth century in all regions of the kingdom and exhibit an extraordinary variety of purpose and production. A list of those scribes who signed their work illustrates the geographical diversity: Berstede in Sussex (Sneyd MS.), John Blair at Glasgow in 1467 (James III’s copy), Herun in Norfolk (MS. Harley 3954), Jenkyn in south-west Midlands (MS. Queen’s 383), RT in Essex (MS. Arundel 140), and perhaps ‘dominus Richardus ermitum’ in south-east Midlands whose name appears as a pen-trial in MS. Laud misc. 699. The earliest English translation, which was the dominant form of the book in England published by Pynson in the editio princeps (c. 1496), appeared c. 1385, and there are slight linguistic pointers in the earliest surviving copies to a Lincolnshire origin. Its copytext was an Insular manuscript which lacked the second of its eight quires and so omitted much of the description of Egypt, the ‘Egypt Gap’ which gives the Defective Version its modern name. The extant manuscripts have several other smaller omissions which were a feature of their common ancestor and, perhaps, were made by the translator. Notwithstanding these losses, the Defective Version spread rapidly. The earliest copies (MSS. Queen’s 383, Douce 33, Dd. i. 17) preserve a text generally free from copying error and so derive from a common ancestor very near to the lost

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archetype of the version. This was divided into 24 chapters, rubricated and possibly numbered, where the Insular Version has 34 chapters. All extant manuscripts contain an outstanding interpolation apparently added during or after translation, the story that Mandeville submitted his book on his way home to the Pope in Rome, and one manuscript (MS. Douce D 101) further embellishes this tale: ‘oure holy fader graunted to al that redith or wrytith or heryth this boke with good devocion a c. dayes to pardon and goddis blessynge on hye.’ Since Pope Gregory XI did not finally return to Rome from Avignon until 1377, the story helps to date the translation. Almost from the beginning the scribes of this version began to omit parts of the narrative, and two clear traditions developed. The earliest subgroup of nine manuscripts retains the account of the rotundity of the world which the rest (with the exception of the independently derived MS. Royal 17 C. xxxviii) omit. This dropping of a serious part of the book parallels the omission of the Boethius stanzas in some manuscripts of Chaucer’s Troilus. Generally, as the scribal tradition develops across the country, the scribes’ approach to their copy shows a remarkable diversity. Thus, one (Chetham MS. 6711) drops a large portion of the final chapters; another (Huntington MS. HM 114) virtually paraphrases every sentence; another (MS. Rawl. B 216) adds the story of St Katherine of Alexandria, apparently from his own account; another (MS. Royal 17 B xliii) elaborates language and content in playful exuberation. This ability of the book to absorb such scribal idiosyncrasies without losing its identity is a feature of other versions outside England. There were, none the less, two attempts to preserve the whole book in English by conflating the Defective Version with another source. The Cotton Version exists in a unique manuscript, written c. 1400, which is very close to the fair copy of the conflator, who used an unabridged copy of the Insular Version to expand his base Defective manuscript. He was not wholly fluent in French and some of the passages which he translated and added to his English copy-text have unique errors. Another conflation based on the Defective text was made in Yorkshire c. 1390, known as the Egerton Version after its unique manuscript (MS. Egerton 1982). Here the conflator combined his base Defective manuscript with another English version translated from the Latin Royal Version. This second translation survives only in an abridgement made shortly after 1400 and extant in two manuscripts, the Bodley

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Version. Unlike the Cotton conflator who preserved the 34 chapter divisions of the Insular text, the Egerton conflator divided his text into 162 chapters without number or rubrication. His Defective copy-text probably had 24 chapters and his secondary English copy-text probably had the 88 chapters found in the Latin Royal Version. The unique manuscript, very close to the conflator’s fair-copy, was written by a Benedictine in the North Riding c. 1400 and eventually passed to the abbey at St Albans where the printer William Caxton acquired it on 6 April 1490. Because the lost English translation of the Royal Version which the conflator used was itself slightly abridged, the Egerton Version is marginally less comprehensive than the Cotton Version. Neither conflation appears to have achieved a wide circulation. Alongside these expansions of the dominant Defective Version, there were two popular abridgements of the book, the Bodley Version extant in two manuscripts and the Metrical Version uniquely extant in a collection of some large verse items (Hoccleve, Lydgate, six minor poems of Chaucer), put together for an educated layman after 1425. Based on a copy of the Latin Harley Version and cast in approximately four thousand lines of octosyllabic verse (of which almost three thousand survive in the unique Coventry manuscript), this version has all the major stories presented in popular form. Its author inserted several biblical and learned references and a long description of the ancient monuments of Rome into his narrative and was probably a religious writing in the East Anglian literary milieu inhabited by the Augustinian contemporaries John Capgave and Osbern Bokenham and the Benedictine John Lydgate and his followers. By contrast, nothing can be inferred about the maker of the abridged Bodley Version. It too has the best stories popularly presented. The earlier manuscript (MS. e Musaeo 116) was written in Cambridge or thereabouts c. 1420 by a professional scribe who also wrote a copy of the Canterbury Tales (CUL MS. Gg. iv. 27). The later manuscript (MS. Rawl. D 99, once part of a large collection dismembered by Thomas Rawlinson, d. 1725) was written after 1450 in north-east Derbyshire and is more a redaction in 69 chapters and five books with a major reordering of the narrative than a simple copy, a deliberate attempt to present a popular account. This diversity of literary form in the English versions of the book is matched by a diversity of physical presentation. Thus, the earliest formats of the Defective Version are both a small handsized parchment volume bound in leather-covered oak boards (like

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MS. Queen’s 383, probably the oldest extant copy) and a doublecolumned folio-sized volume containing several other items in English and intended for serious reference (like MS. Dd. i. 17, c. 1400). Later copies of the version are more commonly a small quarto- or octavo-sized volume in which Mandeville’s Travels provides the sole or dominant content, written across the page and, after 1425, generally of paper. Sometimes an accompanying item is of equal weight. Thus, five of these manuscripts contain copies of the Plowman, sharing in the eyes of these five stationers a common didactic intent. Such association with sober and serious works, including the Brut and the Seven Sages and the Siege of Thebes, indicates the esteem in which Mandeville’s Travels was held by the literate laity. The more popularly presented copies of the book are lightly rubricated and, after 1425, are also mostly written on paper, with a wide geographical distribution about the central book-trade in London. Five copies have gilted decoration on parchment and are finely written, indicating perhaps that they were commissioned work for the gentry. The record of fifteenth-century owners of the English versions reflects this readership. John Tittleshall, master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, gave a copy to his college in 1446 with its second folio beginning ‘the ouertwert dale’. James III of Scotland had a copy written for him by John Blair in 1467. The St John family of Bletsoe, Bedfordshire, included a Mandeville among a list of its English books in Balliol College MS. 329 f. 172. These three manuscripts have not survived, but three others, still extant, carry the names of early owners: Sir Edmund Wyghton (d. 1484) of Lancashire owned the Chetham copy; Thomas Chylde of Langley Green, Worcestershire, owned MS. Rawl. D 100; and Henry Martyn OSB, camerarius of St Albans in 1492, signed his name as Martin Celarius in MS. Ff. v. 35. About that time the abbey at St Albans also owned the Egerton manuscript which William Caxton acquired and, on a paste-down destroyed in 1803, wrote: ‘Thys fayre Boke I have fro the abbey at Saint Albons in thys year of our Lord M. CCCCLXXXX. The sixt daye of Apryl Willyam Caxton.’ Within this general record of the English manuscripts, two illuminated copies require special mention. From the beginning Mandeville’s Travels attracted illustrators in Paris alongside copies of Marco Polo’s Livre des merveilles du monde. Thus, the earliest dated French manuscript has six paintings of scenes from the narrative. But in England, where the book-trade was slower to develop such possibilities for Mandeville, illustrations are individual responses

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independent of any pictorial tradition (such as the ones which appear in the later Lydgate manuscripts). The earlier English illustrated Mandeville is an octavo-sized parchment double-columned manuscript written c. 1410 in Hampshire, probably in Winchester, for a bibliophile like Sir Geoffrey Luttrell. It has a detailed table of contents and is carefully edited to remove textual cruces and occasional descriptions, and in its lower margins has 110 tinted drawings. These are the neatly executed work of one limner who depicts persons, places and monsters within the text, using both copy-book models (as in bestiaries) and his own free-hand imagination. By contrast, in a holster-book written after 1425 in Norfolk, the scribe has embellished his text with 100 crude and colourful pictures, generally one-half or one-third of the page in size and leaving space for 38 more. Both sets of illustrations are discussed in the wider context of English work by Dr K. L. Scott in her Later Gothic Manuscripts (sub MSS. Royal 17 C. xxxviii and Harley 3954). Two other pictures adorn the English Mandevilles in a more traditional frontispiece. One fine copy with an unidentified coat of arms (MS. TCC R. 4. 20) has an imagined picture of Mandeville in armour within its illuminated initial. And another, a Carthusian miscellany probably written at Axholme c. 1450 (MS. Additional 37049), has a tinted drawing of Jerusalem before its epitome of Mandeville. This summary of the evidence concerning the dissemination and readership of Mandeville’s Travels in England before the appearance of Pynson’s print c. 1496 shows that the book was widely known and read by gentry and clergy alike. These were educated and informed readers concerned with apparently factual narrative. Alongside them there existed a less particular audience who embraced the abridgements in prose and verse and their recital of fables and marvels with enthusiasm. For readers of both types, as the author speculated in his prologue, Mandeville’s Travels was an adventure and a delight. Appendix: Provenance and affiliation of the 66 extant manuscripts of The Travels I FRENCH INSULAR VERSION Subgroup A BL MS. Harley 204 BL MS. Harley 212 BL MS. Harley 1739 BL MS. Harley 4383

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BL MS. Royal 20 A.i BL MS. Royal 20 B.x Bodleian MS. Bodley 841 Bodleian MS. Ashmole 1804 Durham Cathedral MS. B.iii.3 Pierpont Morgan Library MS. M957 Berlin Stadt Bibl. MS. Phill. 1930 Subgroup B Bodleian MS. Addit. C 280 BL MS. Sloane 1464 BL MS. Sloane 560 Bibl. der Rijkuniversiteit Leiden MS. Vossius Lat. F 75 A manuscript of this version was carried into France in 1402 and a further ten copies were made there. The manuscripts are described by Christiane Deluz in her edition of the work. II LATIN ROYAL VERSION BL MS. Royal 13 E.ix BL MS. Harley 175 BL MS. Cotton Appendix iv Hunterian Museum, Glasgow MS. T.4.1 Jesus College, Cambridge MS. Q.B.18 Durham University MS. Cosin V.iii.7 BL MS. Cotton Otho D.i (epitome) Corpus Christi College MS. 426 (epitome) The version and its epitome are printed in part by Michael Seymour for the EETS 253 and in Manuscripta, 49, and the manuscripts are described there. III LATIN LEIDEN VERSION Bibl. der Rijkuniversiteit Leiden MS. Vulcan 96 Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS. 275 BL MS. Egerton 672 (first half of text only) A fragment of two leaves in Cardiff Public Library MS. 3.236 is printed by Michael Seymour in the National Library of Wales Journal, 33. IV LATIN HARLEY VERSION BL MS. Harley 82 (lacks 26 leaves) The version is printed in part and the manuscript described by Michael Seymour for the EETS 269.

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V LATIN ASHMOLE VERSION Bodleian Ashmole 769

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VI ENGLISH DEFECTIVE VERSION (with second folio incipits) Subgoup A Corning Museum of Glass, New York MS. 6: In Þe name of god Magdalene College, Cambridge MS. Pepys 1955: kenenesse for Þe grete loue Cambridge University MS. Dd.i.17: cittees and castels Balliol College, Oxford MS. 239: that it may come to mynde The Queen’s College, Oxford MS. 383: miyt he not Bodleian MS. Rawl. D 101: suffre dethe ryght wele Bodleian MS. Douce 33: neuer ille ne dude Bodleian MS. E Musaeo 124: 2nd fol. lost Cambridge University MS. Ff. v. 35 Subgroup B BL MS. Arundel 140: story of Noe BL MS. Royal 17 B. xliii: serue and drede and worschyp BL MS. Harley 2386: I Iohn maundevylle knyht Huntington Library, San Marino MS. HM 114: reheÞe alle Þe townes BL MS. Royal 17 C. xxxviii (independent affiliate) Subgroup C Rugby School MS. Bloxam 1008: Bote y mai not telle BL MS. Additional 33758 Trinity College, Cambridge MS. R. 4. 20: children of crist Bodleian MS. Douce 109: pepul and her catel Bodleian MS. Rawl. B 216: put the apple in the Images honde Bodleian MS. Rawl. D 100: 2nd fol. lost Bodleian MS. Latin misc. e 85: chaps 13–15 only Sneyd MS. (Sotheby SC Oct. 1945): I Ion de Maundevyle Prof. Takamiya, Tokyo MS. 63 Subgroup D Cambridge University MS. Gg. i. 34: whider to go for wolde Bodleian MS. Addit. C 285: Þat oure fader lefte vs Bodleian MS. Tanner 405: chase awey the tyrauntis Princeton University MS. Taylor 10: he Þat wolle Chetham’s Library, Manchester MS. 6711: the whilk ylk man

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Subgroup E National Library of Scotland MS. Advocates 19. 1. 1: 2nd fol. lost Trinity College, Dublin MS. E. 5. 6.: poeple and wolde take Bodleian MS. Rawl. D 652: 2nd fol. lost Bodleian MS. Laud misc. 699: departyd A sunder and wot not BL MS. Sloane 2319: 2nd fol. lost There are also brief extracts in Bodleian MSS. Ashmole 751 and Digby 88, and an epitome in BL MS. Additional 37049, and two leaves in Ripon Cathedral. The manuscripts are described by Michael Seymour in Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions, 4, and the version is edited by him for the EETS 319. VII ENGLISH COTTON VERSION (conflation based on Defective) BL MS. Cotton Titus C. xvi The version is printed by Paul Hamelius for the EETS 153 and by Michael Seymour for the Clarendon Press. VIII ENGLISH EGERTON VERSION (conflation based on Defective) BL MS. Egerton 1982 The version is printed by Sir George Warner for Roxburghe Club, and by Michael Seymour for the EETS 336. IX ENGLISH BODLEY VERSION (an abridgement for a lost translation) Bodleian Library MS. Rawl. D 99 Bodleian MS. e Musaeo 116 The version is printed by Malcolm Letts for the Hakluyt Society 102 and by Michael Seymour for the EETS 253. X ENGLISH METRICAL VERSION Coventry City Record Office MS. The version is printed by Michael Seymour for the EETS 263. Works cited Deluz, Christiane, Jean de Mandeville: Le livre des merveilles du monde. Paris: L’Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes, 2000. Hamelius, Paul, Mandeville’s Travels, 2 vols. London: EETS 153 and 154, 1919 and 1923. Scott, Kathleen L., Later Gothic Manuscripts 1390–1490. London: Harvey Miller, 1996.

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Seymour, Michael, The Bodley Version of Mandeville’s Travels. London: EETS, 1963. ——, ‘The English manuscripts of Mandeville’s travels’, Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions, 4.5 (1966), pp. 169–210. ——, The Metrical Version of Mandeville’s Travels. London: EETS, 1973. ——, Sir John Mandeville. Aldershot: Variorum, 1993. ——, The Defective Version of Mandeville’s Travels. London: EETS, 2002. ——, ‘A Latin Mandeville fragment’, National Library of Wales, XXXIII (2004), pp. 349–57. ——, ‘Burnt Mandeville: a Latin epitome’, Manuscripta, 49 (2005), pp. 95–122. ——, ‘More thoughts on Mandeville’, pp. 19–30 in Ernst Bremer and Susanne Röhl (eds), Jean de Mandeville in Europa. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007. Warner, George F., The Buke of John Maundeuill. Westminster: Roxburghe Club, 1889.

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2 ‘Whet-stone leasings of old Maundeuile’:1 reading the Travels in early modern England Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Charles W. R. D. Moseley

It has often been asserted that as a result of ‘new discoveries’ the factual credibility of Mandeville’s description of the world evaporated towards the end of the sixteenth century – between, say, the two editions of Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations (1589, 1598–99).2 My main contention in this chapter is that this is simplistic. Far more complex combinations of factors were at work, and perceptions of Mandeville, then and later, were far from tidy. Furthermore, it is too easy to project back unthinkingly on to the past our own concepts of space,3 of mapping, of what one can loosely call geography – literally, ‘writing the earth’. Maps (to be distinguished from charts),4 understood as offering ways of finding one’s way around, are in 1600 a relatively new thing, not a hundred years old, and it is interesting that in England the first use made of maps as we would recognise them is political, legal and authoritarian.5 The very idea of a mathematical projection allowing places to be represented in relation to each other offers a major conceptual leap from the mappae mundi of the later Middle Ages, like those of Hereford and Ebstorf, and others, which record a world of symbol whose significance is less material than spiritual and teleological. Not for nothing does the Hereford mappa mundi have the letters MORS in its four corners: Death surrounds everything worldly. Such maps formed part of the mindset of the author of the Travels, as well as that of his readers. That did not change overnight, least of all among the less learned, and the symbolic force of the distant and/or mythical, on which could be inscribed moral and political agendas, lasted well into the nineteenth century. Even in 1600, the Dutch atlases imported in England were expensive, and had little immediate effect on a wide scale. Correspondingly, the growth in European experience of the wider world did not make people abandon older myths and legends, but rather relocated them in regions not yet explored: they were after all useful imaginative

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tools. Finally, a general sceptical and analytical approach to evidence, and its interpretation, as distinct from its interpretation according to existing templates, was far in the future, despite the stirrings of such an attitude in the works of Francis Bacon, Petrus Ramus and Humphrey Gilbert.6 So the concept of clear-eyed geographical thought ousting ignorance – or what some have called ‘anti-geography’ – is a false opposition, as impossible to make in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries as the distinction we would make between magia and ‘science’. For, as Stephen Greenblatt remarked, one of the ‘key principles of the Renaissance geographical imagination’ is that ‘eye-witness testimony, for all its vaunted importance, sits as a very small edifice on top of an enormous mountain of hearsay, rumor, convention and endlessly recycled fable’.7 Indeed, the mentalité constructed by what is inherited often determines perception of the new, and the formulation of genuine first-hand accounts. Christopher Columbus’s Letter to Luis Santangel is a classic instance of this. My subtitle raises two issues: how and in what form did people in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England encounter Mandeville’s Travels, and, having done so, in what way, or ways, might they read it? Let us take as our temporal starting point somewhere around 1500 – just after the first European voyages to America. Firstly, there are, in every sense, a lot of Mandevilles around: as I have discussed several times, the mouvance (to use Paul Zumthor’s word) which the Travels underwent according to different intellectual, cultural, religious, social and receptional imperatives is extreme – so extreme that Iain Macleod Higgins helpfully used the metaphor of the ‘isotopes’ to describe the numerous versions of the Travels existing in the fifteenth century and later.8 The book is Protean. It would have been perfectly possible, then and later, for any single person to have encountered more than one of these isotopes, each radiating different interests and imperatives. The huge – not a word to be used lightly – number of surviving manuscripts indicates that demand for copies was heavy and sustained. And, given the odds against survival of manuscripts, we may be quite sure that those 320 or so that survive do not represent anything like a total. Again, these manuscripts, in more or less all the languages of Europe, differ from the respectable (and sometimes costly) redactions of the main versions of the book. For the sake of clarity, I offer a simplified summary diagram, descending from the lost original to very free reworkings indeed:

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The lost original, c. 1356

The Continental Version (in most languages by 1500) ➔ ‘Standard’ Versions, including Latin ‘Vulgate’ version, first printed in England 1587 ➔ The ‘Ogier’ versions

The Insular Version (in English, French and Latin|) ➔ ‘Defective’ Version (large lacuna in description of Egypt), c. 1370– 1410, printed 1496 ➔ ‘Cotton’ text, c. 1370–1410, printed 1725 ➔ ‘Egerton’ text, c. 1370–1410, printed 1889

Manuscripts continued to be made well into the sixteenth century, as is commonly forgotten: it took longer for the print culture to develop into the dominance that historical hindsight sometimes seduces us into assuming. But from the late 1400s printed copies were about in some numbers, from German, Italian, French and other presses, and though the editions of early printers were quite small, with limits imposed by wear on type and the need to distribute type before setting the next sheets, their books soon were cheaper than manuscripts, and more plentiful. A book printed in Augsburg, or Venice, might well be read in London, or Mexico. And although in this chapter I concentrate on printed texts from English presses, we ought not to forget that texts printed on the Continent did circulate in England, and the Continental input into the English printing tradition of Mandeville is clear. The woodcuts in the English version of Wynkyn de Worde and all their descendants derive from the cuts in Anton Sorg’s Augsburg edition of 1481.9 Furthermore, Mandeville was not printed by nobodies: Richard Pynson (1496: STC 17350), Wynkyn de Worde (1499: STC 17247), Thomas East (1568 and 1583: STC 17250 and 17251), William Stansby (1618: STC 17252) and Thomas Snodham (1625: STC 17253) are among the foremost printers of their day, with extensive and discriminating lists in which they chose to include Mandeville. Richard Pynson’s copy-text for his print was of the unhappily named Defective Version.10 This became the parent, or grandparent, of all known subsequent printed English editions of the Travels down to 1725, when the complete Cotton version was printed, edited (probably) by Peter le Neve, who was Norroy King of Arms and later President of the Society of Antiquaries, from that unique manuscript.11 De Worde in 1499 modernised

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the language somewhat, copied Sorg’s woodcuts,12 and he issued further editions in 1503 and 1510. No editions are then recorded until Thomas East’s of 1568, but the presswork of his woodcuts (75 copied as positives from de Worde, with eight used twice) indicates that the blocks were very worn and must often have been used in editions of which no trace now remains.13 Thomas East was a good craftsman (he became a prominent music printer in the later years of Elizabeth).14 With considerable intelligence he added to and transposed parts of de Worde’s text, and he seems to have had access to a manuscript of another group.15 Effectively, his edition does represent a change in the base text for future editions,16 and so it is difficult to overestimate its importance. East reissued it in 1582/1583, and 16 known later editions down to 1725 derive from it.17 East’s copyrights eventually passed via his widow and her assigns to William Stansby. After apprenticeship to John Windet, Stansby took up his freedom on 7 January 1597/8.18 By 1615 he had three presses allowed him,19 and his press became one of the most notable of the early Stuart period, with excellent presswork and a very interesting list.20 On 23 February 1625/6 all East’s copyrights, including music, were assigned to him.21 This list, covering every branch of literature, is the longest in the Registers, and Stansby seems to have been intellectually ambitious, as well as discriminating, in what he added to it.22 His Mandeville appeared in 1618, soon after his Jonson Folio (STC 17252). That edition was followed quite closely in 1625 by that of Thomas Snodham, another heir of East, with whom Stansby worked closely. Against this steady issuing of English quartos of the Defective Version, there is only Hakluyt’s inclusion of the Latin Vulgate text of the Continental version in his first edition (1587), and Purchas’s reuse of that, for a somewhat different purpose, in Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625). Hakluyt’s copy-text must have been from a Continental press. The signals to readers given by a Latin Folio and an English quarto, of course, are quite different, and posit different audiences. In material terms, then, there were a lot of copies around, though we can only guess at the size of editions. Generally this would not legally exceed about twelve hundred copies,23 and there are natural limits imposed by printing speed (sixty or so per hour), storage problems, the rate of wear on type and the availability of type for setting when much might already be locked up in the chaise. We can draw some interim inferences. Firstly, printers of standing regarded the book as important,

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and, as no printer who wants to stay in business prints merely for fun, they expected their editions to make money: they were sure of demand. Secondly, the right to print the Travels was valuable; which is why it was mentioned expressly in East’s, his widow’s and his successors’ wills. Thirdly, as far as we can see, printed English copies of the Travels were in the cheaper, but not cheapest, quarto format, suggesting that printers anticipated a large and varied market. Fourthly, demand lasts right through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Early English Books Online illustrates copies of fifteen English editions before 1696, and there is no slackening of demand after 1650. There are editions in 1657, 1659, 1660, 1670, 1677, 1684, 1696, all showing that strong family resemblance, retaining the illustrations with little adaptation and only in the 1677 edition introducing any part of the text in humanistic. As for the 1684 edition, it reverts once more to blackletter. Fifthly, there often seems to have been some connection between events and the demand anticipated by printers for the Travels. In an essay some years ago, I suggested that Continental and English printers’ decisions to undertake an edition were affected by interest in events like the voyages of Columbus, Cabot, Vespucci, Magellan and Drake, the chartering of the East India Company and the threat from Islam – things that suddenly reawaken curiosity about the East and a demand for what material about it (not much) there was available.24 One of the more curious points in this speculation is the sudden increase in editions in German in the early 1680s, when the Turks nearly took Vienna. Sixthly, Hakluyt, collecting materials for his Principall Navigations, in the serious Folio format, which would provide a history of the exploring endeavour of the English as part of his programme to encourage and support colonisation and planting overseas, especially in America, felt it necessary to include the Travels. Hakluyt’s Latin version has a limited progeny, but the authority of the Latin itself might suggest an ethos for the Travels at some variance with the reputation that the book was already, in some quarters, developing. Finally, the quarto editions show a remarkable consistency of appearance. For example, if we compare the cuts from East’s 1568 edition25 with those in Stansby’s in 1618,26 the woodcuts are in many cases the same.27 By the 1657 edition, separated by a hundred years from East, though the text remains in blackletter, the blocks

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must have been worn out, and the pictures have been recut, often reversed. The opportunity to modernise completely, however, has not been taken very often. In the illustration of the Bane of Satalye, for example, the clothes of the young man have been somewhat updated, but the monster has the same horns and its lair remains the same.28 Similarly, though East recut the illustration he used in his 1568 edition for the Dragon of Cos (Chapter 4), reversed for his 1582 edition, the Knight remains a knight in full plate armour, while the dragon is made more obviously feminine. That block with its knight is used or copied by later printers for over a hundred years, but by 1696 the knight is very damaged.29 This consistency might suggest that there is a special sense of what ‘a Mandeville’ ought to look like: the mise en page, the appearance, the woodcuts are perhaps in some sense validating. And as a final thought on this, the title pages are interesting exercises in presentation, and Karl-Josef Höltgen has reminded us to be alert to what title pages do at this time. East’s edition of 1568 shows Jerusalem at the centre of a schematic world (Mandeville’s own emphasis). But in 1582 readers might think they were getting an account of one of those dramatic sea voyages, for in this second of East’s printings of Mandeville (STC 2nd ed. 17251) he uses an old block showing what was then a very old-fashioned ship, a hulk, despite the fact that Mandeville explicitly says he did not find ‘company and shipping’ to see the whole ‘roundness of the firmament’ (Chapter 20). His successors – Stansby, Snodham, Bishop – do likewise, but the ship becomes more modern, offering the suggestion of contemporary topicality.30 This brings us to how people might read, what went on in their heads. Hakluyt perhaps included Mandeville with some misgivings: auctor licet alioqui fabulosus. Fabulosus means ‘renowned in story, fabled’ (i.e. famous), but licet suggests that its other sense of ‘rich in fables’ might also be in play. Hakluyt did drop the Travels from his second edition (1598), but, as stated earlier, I do not agree that ‘new discoveries’ so damaged the factual credibility of Mandeville’s book between his two editions that he had to drop the Travels.31 Hakluyt himself certainly recognised (as indeed did Mandeville!) a problem with taking evidence from report – in both directions, for the strange but true ‘may to the ignorant seeme incredible’.32 Hakluyt stressed that: ‘there is not any history in the world (the most Holy Writ excepted) whereof we are precisely bound to beleeue ech word and syllable.’33 But

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removing Mandeville may have more to do with the amount of new material that had become available between his two editions, especially from voyages to Russia and to the West like Ralegh’s (which Hakluyt’s own first edition had encouraged), than with any sudden development of sceptical criticism. Even as English (and Dutch) colonial enterprise in the mid-seventeenth century began to show something of a profit, whether ill-gotten or not, and the business of counting house and factory became the experience of many travellers to distant lands, the mythic and the legendary were not rejected. They simply became less relevant to immediate concerns, but perhaps more potent in the imagination by that very fact. So what we are doing is like trying to pick up a handful of water. Perceptions of Mandeville, then and later, were confused and various. It is after all a fact that editions of Mandeville continued to appear right through the 1600s and into the 1700s, and he is referred to respectfully in the Satires of Thomas Bancroft, after 1633, as having been confirmed in what he said by later writers.34 The latter include the learned Peter Heylin in his Cosmographie in four bookes: containing the chorographie and historie of the whole vvorld, and all the principall kingdomes, provinces, seas and isles thereof (London, 1652), which Milton used, as well as Heylin’s Biographer George Vernon, in his Life of the learned and reverend Dr. Peter Heylyn chaplain to Charles I, and Charles II, monarchs of Great Britain (London 1682).35 Vernon too stresses the inescapability of relying on others’ evidence. The frequent editions indicate a steady, and on the whole respectful, market. Indeed, accounts of travel sold in immense numbers, as S. C. Chew pointed out decades ago,36 many recycling material from earlier books. Yet, the lying and/or affected traveller is a cliché,37 and had been so, in fact, since (if not before) More’s Raphael Hythlodaeus. References to Mandeville as the paradigmatic traveller (lying or not) are too various to document, and the issues of his identity, with which Greenblatt makes play,38 do not seem to have caused anyone any problems much before the EETS Edition of the Cotton Text by Hamelius in 1919 and 1923, which on scant evidence asserted the identity of Mandeville and Jean d’Outremeuse of Liège. Richard Willes in his History of Trauayle (London, 1577) mentions him respectfully, as does Robert Johnson’s sober Traveller’s Breviat in the early 1600s, but a few years before Willes William Bullein’s Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence (1564–65) had suggested pretty comprehensive disbelief. He guys the figure of Mandeville and his style of narrative, I think, in his character

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Mendax.39 Indeed, the latter seems to presuppose a familiarity not just with the figure of Mandeville but with the Travels itself. Joseph Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem (London, 1605, Englished by John Healey as The Discovery of a New World), a satiric Utopia of ‘Taerg Niatirb’ (Great Britain), aims to laugh the reader into virtue through an entertaining burlesque of contemporary travellers’ accounts. Hall drily invokes Polo and Mandeville – with Aristotle, Erasmus and Albertus Magnus! – among his sources for this extraordinary geography of vice.40 A few years earlier, in his Satires, adroitly adapted from and modelled on Horace and Juvenal, he had commented, like Horace in his own Satire I.i, on the discontent of many with their lot and their envy of others’. His allusion to Peter Martyr’s Decades de Orbe Novo (translated into English in 1555)41 and Mandeville suggests the imaginative power of books about far countries, even if their material might be held to be untrue: O happy all estates except his owne, Some drunken Rimer thinks his time well spent, If he can liue to see his name in print, Who when he is once fleshed to the Presse; And sees his handsell haue such fayre successe. Sung to the wheele, and sung vnto the payle, He sends forth Thraues of Ballads to the sale. Nor then can rest: But volumes vp bodg’d Rimes, To haue his name talk’t of in future times: The brainsicke youth that feeds his tickled eare, With sweet-sauc’d lies of some false Traveiler, Which hath the Spanish decades red awhile; Or whet-stone leasings of olde Maundeuile. Now with discourse breakes his mid-night sleepe, Of his aduentures through the Indian deepe, Of all their massy heapes of golden mines, Or of the antique Toombs of Palestine.42

So around 1600, perceptions of Mandeville and his book are demonstrably various, as various as attitudes to travel and travellers,43 and the word ‘Mandeville’ meant many contradictory things. Earlier I used the term ‘Protean’ of the text. No adaptor could have been more Procrustean, if one can use the expression, in what he did to that text than William Warner. Warner is almost forgotten now, and Robert Birley’s delightful book on what once were regarded as masterpieces, Sunk Without Trace, is the only writing on him of substance in the last fifty years. Yet Francis

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Meres – whose taste was sometimes uncritical – ranked him and Spenser in Palladis Tamia (1597) as the ‘chief heroical poets’ of the day, comparing Warner with Euripides. His Albion’s England consisted at first (1586) of four books covering the period from Noah to Brutus, then to the Normans. The second edition of 1589 expanded this down to Henry VII, the 1592 edition to Elizabeth, and the posthumously issued one of 1612 to James. Warner gave books 11 and 12 to contemporary travellers, and, in alternate chapters, he inserts a story (avowedly fictional) of Mandeville, and fair Elenor: Who reads Sir John de Mandeville, his travels and his sights, That wonders not? And wonder may, if all be true he writes. Yet rather it believe (for most now modernly approved) Than this our story, whence suppose he was to travel moved.44

For Warner, Mandeville, the archetypal traveller, is ideal as patron for his discussion of England’s maritime exploits. He makes him to be in love with Elenor, a cousin of Edward III. Disguised as the Green Knight, Mandeville jousts for her, and then, despairing of winning one so much his social superior, goes abroad, whence he writes long letters home to her describing Egypt, the Well of Youth and the Phoenix. Eventually, of course, after many vicissitudes and a chase across continents, the lovers are united amid relief and rejoicing. It is pretty drasty stuff, but it is perfectly possible that Warner’s book, well known to the University Wits, and quarried often for material for play plots, might have been the source for the play of Mandeville, which I shall come to shortly. Warner recast quite a bit of the Travels into Mandeville’s letters to Elenor, and some of the original elements turn into pretty sonneteers’ compliments: ‘The Amazons, those lustie girls, beleeue mee lik’t me well / But nothing in the best of them but doth in you Excel.’45 This is a long way from the complex handling of that episode in the Travels. The Phoenix is, naturally, comparable only with Elenor – she needs neither balsam nor the Well of Youth. Interestingly, in the early part of the romance, Warner sticks quite close to the Defective Version, and, moreover, the way he refers to Mandeville’s experiences, and the comment of Mandeville’s friend Stafford, ‘how stoical grows Mandeville, quoth Stafford, since his travel’,46 suggest he had some appreciation of the cool persona of the Travels. So by Warner’s time, ‘Mandeville’ already signified a confusing number of things. To some, a book useful for those sailing, it

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was hoped, to China: in 1576, off Baffin Bay, Martin Frobisher had a copy with him, and Ralegh uses details of the Travels as corroboration in his Discoverie of Guiana. To others, Mandeville is a shadowy figure, a compound of truth and fiction with whom liberties could be taken openly. ‘Mandeville’ indeed becomes a noun: Torquemada’s Jardin de Flores Curiosas was translated as the Spanish Mandevile of miracles in 1600, while in Jonson’s The Newe Inne (1629), a character can talk about a troublesome, lying wife being a ‘she-Mandeville’. Further, there was a fashion for plays on Oriental themes, one of which was the play of ‘Mandevile’. Henslowe’s diary records that Lord Strange’s Men played it in February 1591, twice in April, then in May and June 1592, thrice in January 1593, and that its takings ranged from 12s 7d up to 40s, with an average of around 25s – a box office similar to that for ‘Jeronimo’ (probably The Spanish Tragedy).47 So it was quite a success. There might be a clue to what was in it in a remark in Nashes Lenten Stuffe (1599), which is only some six or seven years later than performances of which we know, although there may, of course, have been later ones. In his delightfully ironic version of the Hero and Leander story, he says: The sunne was soe in his mumps vpon [Leander’s death] that . . . at night, when hee was begrimed with dust and sweat of his iourney, he would not descend – as he was woont, to wash him in the Ocean, but vnder a tree layde him downe to rest in his cloathes all night, and so did the scouting Moonne vnder another fast by him, which of that are behighted the trees of the Sunne and Moone, and are the same that Sir John Mandeuile tell vs hee spoke with, and that spoke to Alexander.48

Now those trees, foretelling Alexander’s future, are very much a feature of the Alexander Romances. But, although all versions (Defective, Cotton, Egerton and Continental) of Mandeville’s Travels mention the Trees and Alexander, no extant English version says they spoke to Mandeville. While one must make all allowances for Nashe’s customary inaccuracy and joking, the ironic inversion of the relative importance of Alexander and Mandeville might indicate some reference to a specific tale, and he just might be referring to the stage version.49 Mandeville’s stage career does not end there. Claire Jowitt’s chapter in this book discusses Brome’s Antipodes (1636–37),50 and I will not trespass on that territory too much. The play would be virtually meaningless without pretty full knowledge of the

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Travels. A copy is even a prop on stage (1.6.32). Ann Haaker in her edition (1967) suggested that the play drew on Purchas’s printing of the Latin text of the Travels in 1625.51 I do not think one can be so specific, for there are Stansby’s and Snodham’s recent quartos. Far more important is that a play which seems to have been a reasonable draw, and which was revived in the Restoration,52 simply would not work well if nearly every member of the audience had not had some detailed knowledge of the book and could play with it. Indeed, the knowledge Peregrine shows, and which an audience is expected to recognise, especially as it relates to gender and sexual relations, is striking. Such knowledge, of course, would not exclude an ambiguous attitude to Mandeville himself. But the play is not, as Robert Appelbaum would have it, the ‘theatrical debunking of Mandeville and Pliny’,53 for such a target would draw only an audience of pedants. At the heart of the play is the propensity of humans to mistake the fanciful for the real. Peregrine’s obsession with (and complete trust in) the book, leading to his refusal to consummate his marriage, is the mainspring of the plot.54 It is what reading the paradigmatic travel book – that represents them all, and which presents acutely the problem of truth, evidence and belief – can do to the mind of a fool that provides the mainspring for this metatheatrical comedy of illusion, knowledge and reality, as well as some satirical and political bite, with its Anti-King who reflects the unrepresentable majesty of Charles I.55 Fantasy is intolerable when it governs conduct, replacing what we call reality, but reality may owe more to fantasy than might be comfortable to admit. The play shares The Tempest’s and Othello’s belief (and Othello’s experience) in the power of stories, travellers’ tales, to shape reality, to direct relationships – though, precisely, as stories, for only as fictions do they retain their efficacy.56 One might add, too, that such fictions were necessary if English ‘venturing’ was to be sustained. For tales of marvellous things to be possessed perhaps compensated for the relative paucity of real achievement in a field opened up and still dominated by Spain. The English still seemed not to be doing much more than plunder. By 1611, say, the year of The Tempest – a play which glances, as indeed does Othello, at the potency of the distant to subvert or qualify the near – intelligent and cultured readers might have on the one had what we may call a mythology of travel and the distant, and a growing body of accounts, worked up into prose or not, from

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men whose cognition of their actual travels was coloured by the myths they carried with them. Of Mandeville a cultured reader’s complicated and contradictory experience could include the standard Defective Version, in Quarto; Hakluyt, in Folio and good company; the play; Warner’s romantic hero; and all the varying responses they embody, from respect to contempt, even moral disapproval of ‘whetstone leasings’. It is curious that, in Warner’s romance, the ironic, unassertive persona of the original Travels should have become one of the heroes of England and one of the pioneers of English expansion overseas. Possibly, Warner’s enormously popular book prompted Purchas’s decision to include ‘Iohanes Mandeville Eques’ on the title page of his influential Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625), as one of the ‘Worthies’ of Travel and discovery. But, equally easily, they might both have been drawing on the sort of general perception that Brome exploits. Purchas reused Hakluyt’s Latin text, with circumstantial detail of the Liège epitaph and Mandeville’s supposed retirement there under the name of Jean de Bourgogne. Purchas’s agenda was not Hakluyt’s determined encouragement of English settlement and exploitation, as his editing of the text might indicate. His vision is far more theological and teleological (Noah, King Solomon and Hiram of Tyre are among Mandeville’s companions on the title page),57 and God’s wonders, which reveal his nature (Romans, 1.20), are to be supported by ‘eyewitness’ accounts. Purchas asserts the unity of Nature everywhere, but does not unambiguously dismiss the stories of the marvellous he inherited from traditional accounts of the world. He may have disbelieved them, and he certainly shows how beliefs in the Amazons or Prester John could have originated in distortion of plausible evidence. If ‘Nature . . . hath diversified herself in divers places’, it is only by a rule of ‘naturall exception that it hath bounded and limited [its] generall rules’ (727). The world has no real monsters, like Sciapods, nor are there societies violating fundamental laws of human nature.58 But his vision remains of a pilgrimage, a teleology of knowledge, a searching of the mind of God by the experience of his works. Taking Mandeville seriously certainly continued: if not, what made the market for all those frequent editions of the Travels? But some were morally uneasy about such reading. In 1657, as Cromwell’s reign drew to its sour close, William London the bookseller of Newcastle can complain (and note the disapproval of idle, that is, not improving, reading): ‘Too many idly sit down in the

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Chaire of Ignorance, travelling by the fireside, with the Wandering Knight Sir John Mandevil, or it may be Bevis of Southampton’ (sig. A4v), which suggests there was something like a ballad version.59 About then too Thomas Browne regards Mandeville’s as a hopelessly corrupt account, contributing to the present confusion of natural knowledge he aims to sort out. He comments that the fables of Ctesias in Herodotus were: taken up by some succeeding Writers, and many thereof revived by our Countryman, Sir John Mandevil, Knight . . . He left a Book of his Travels, which hath been honoured with the translation of many Languages, and now continueth above three hundred years; herein he often attesteth the fabulous relations of Ctesias, and seems to confirm the refuted accounts of Antiquity. All of which may be received in some acceptions of morality, and to a pregnant invention, may afford commendable mythologie; but in a natural and proper exposition, it containeth impossibilities, and thing inconsistent with truth.60

How interesting that Browne should accept the mythic value of the improbable! Here we hear those echoes of Bacon that will come to resound in the meetings of the Royal Society. But if factual authority is weakened, a world of the fancy can, perhaps patronisingly, replace it. A few decades later still, Steele in Tatler 254 (21 November 1710) will talk of Mandeville’s ‘copious invention’ (my italics) offering ‘enchanted Ground and Fairyland’.61 And with the publication of the Cotton Text in 1725, Mandeville will be locked firmly into the newly conceptualised Middle Ages, reinvented now as quaint, romantic – and ignorant. There may well still be attempts by booksellers to breathe new life into the old text, as a mid-eighteenth-century Compendium of Travels did, by putting Mandeville between the same covers as the excellent Jonas Hanway and Lionel Wafer, and making him set out in 1732!62 And there are several other editions descending from East at the same time. But Cluer Dicey and Richard Marshall in their 1744 catalogue offer a chapbook version specifically, like their Tom Hickathrift or Bevis of Hampton, for children, and for most people, though not all, the alliterative pairing with Munchhausen is now inevitable. Notes 1 Bishop Joseph Hall, Virgidemiarum. The three last bookes. Of byting satyres (London, 1598), IV.vi. An allusion to the ancient custom of hanging a whetstone round the neck of a liar (see OED).

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2 Repeated, for example, by Robert Appelbaum, ‘Anti-geography’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 4.2, Special Issue 3 (September 1998), pp. 1–17. 3 See the interesting discussion in Dick Harrison, Medieval Space: The Extent of Microspatial Knowledge in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, Lund Studies in International History 34 (Lund: Lund University Press, 1996). 4 Such charts, portolans, were produced in great numbers for people making (predominantly) coasting voyages round Europe and the Mediterranean. 5 I am thinking of Saxton’s Maps, of the Dytchley Portrait of Elizabeth standing on a map of England, of Burghley’s own copy of Saxton with his annotations. 6 Petrus Ramus, Aristotelicae Animadversiones and Dialecticae Institutiones (Paris, 1543); Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (London, 1620); Humphrey Gilbert, Queene Elizabeths Achademie (London, 1573). 7 In Frank Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery, trans. David Fausett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. xi. Greenblatt could have supported his remark from much earlier evidence. The Catalan Atlas of 1375, made by Abraham Cresques and his workshop, is compiled from as accurate portolan charts as any contemporary navigator could demand, as well as mapping on to the vast spaces of Asia and Africa material from Pliny, Solinus, Polo and Mandeville – and others. 8 See his penetrating discussion in Writing East: The ‘Travels’ of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). 9 Some three-quarters of Sorg’s known books were illustrated. In the case of his Mandeville, Nathalie Filliat has argued (in a paper delivered at the Montpellier conference in 2007) that the sources of the illustrations are the illuminations in the Spenser manuscript, made in 1451, of Velser’s translation of the Travels, now in New York. There is some discussion of the circulation of the Travels in O. Sullivan and B. White (eds), Writing and Fantasy (London: Longman, 1999), pp. 137–50; see especially p. 138. 10 Michael Seymour, ‘Early English editions of Mandeville’s Travels’, The Library, 5.19 (1964), pp. 202–7; Josephine Waters Bennett, The Rediscovery of Sir John Mandeville (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1954), pp. 7–8, 346–53. Iain Higgins, Writing East, rejects the ‘best text’ premises that dominated Mandeville criticism for many years, in favour of a diachronic reading which would rehabilitate as of major importance the hitherto neglected Defective. Certainly in any analysis of Mandeville’s reception in England,

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13

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15 16

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18

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Defective is crucial. But there is still a strong case for seeing it as not reflecting fully the nature of the very earliest texts on which an assessment of the author’s achievement must be based. British Library Egerton MS. 1982, also complete, remained unpublished until 1889. Nathalie Filliat (see note 9 above) has argued that Sorg’s valuable blocks were bought by two Lyons printers, who used 103 of the 120 in an edition of the Travels of 1490. Those 103 became the basis for de Worde’s edition. De Worde recut the pictures to fit the same measure of text, unlike the inconvenient differently sized blocks of the Augsburg and Lyons editions. Josephine Waters Bennett, ‘The woodcut illustrations in the English edition of Mandeville’s Travels’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 47 (1953), pp. 59–69. It is by no means uncommon for books to have been printed without registration. East’s 1568 Mandeville, as it happens, was not registered with the Stationers. He was licensed as a printer in 1565, aged about 25, and died in 1609. He possessed a considerable stock of mostly good type, the presswork was uniformly good and he is among the best English printers of his time. See Seymour, ‘Early English editions’. See Tamarah Kohanski, The Book of John Mandeville: An Edition of the Pynson Text with Commentary on the Defective Version (Tempe: Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001); and see the review by Helen Moore, Review of English Studies, NS 55, No. 218 (2004), pp. 117–19. Seymour, ‘Early English editions’, p. 207, says 15; I have added what I think is another (British Library G6714). See my note, ‘The availability of Mandeville’s Travels in England, 1356–1750’, The Library, 30.1 (1975), pp. 125–33, especially 129. The next April he registered The Polycie of the Turkishe Empire, but this quarto was printed for him by his old master, John Windet, and there is no further entry in the registers until 1611, though the STC suggests he may have printed some things that have been attributed to Windet. In 1609 Stansby printed an unregistered edition of Greene’s Pandosto, and in 1611 he purchased the copyright in the books of his old master Windet. A Star Chamber decree of 1615 ‘VPON complaint to this Court [by the Master printers] of the Multitude of presses that are erected among them’ lists 19 master printers and the maximum number of presses allowed them. Such decrees mark attempts by the authorities to control an expanding industry by periodic efforts to cut the number of presses. Stansby is allowed two, which may indicate he still possessed the three presses known to have belonged to Windet 27 years earlier (See E. Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company

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22

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24 25 26 27

28 29 30

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of Stationers of London, 1554–1640 A.D. (London and Birmingham, privately printed, 1875–94, vol. 3; also rept Gloucester, Mass: Peter Smith, 1967), p. 699). Henry Plomer, A Short History of English Printing, 1476–1898 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Company, 1900), pp. 166ff. Thomas Snodham had inherited Thomas East’s business and presses. The copyright in the list passed to William Stansby, one of his executors (Plomer, Short History, p. 169). He did the second and subsequent editions of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Politie, in folio; the 1616 folio Works of Ben Jonson; Ralegh’s Historie of the World, 1617, with that elaborate title page designed by Jonson; Eadmer’s Historia Novorum, 1623, folio; Selden’s Mare Clausum, 1635, folio; Blundeville’s Exercises, 1622, quarto; Coryate’s Crudities, 1611, quarto; and Purchas’s Purchas His Pilgrimage, 1613, that exhaustive survey of world religion. See ‘Certen orders concerning printing’, issued late 1587, reprinted in Arber’s A Transcript. See also H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers, 1603 to 1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 227. Moseley, ‘The availability of Mandeville’s Travels’, pp. 125–33. STC (2nd ed.) 17250. STC (2nd ed.) 17252. See for example, the picture of the necrophiliac suitor of the Lady of Satalye (East, sig. C1r; Stansby, sig. C3r) and the monster he has engendered emerging from her tomb (I cite only illustrations which can be viewed on the Web at Early English Books Online: eebo.chadwyck.com/marketing/eebo_demo1.htm). ‘Printed by R.B and are to sold [sic] by Andrew Crooke, at the Green Dragon in S. Pauls Church-yard, 1657’: Wing (2nd ed.) M413. The edition by Rich. Chiswell, B. Walford, Mat. Wotton, and Geo. Conyers, 1696. Wing (2nd ed.) M417. Richard Bishop in 1639 (STC (2nd ed.) 17254) seems to have been the first to discard the block used by East, Stansby and Snodham (in 1625). His block is used again in the 1650 edition printed ‘by R. B. and are to be sold by Edward Dod and Nathaniel Ekins, at the Gun in Ivy Lane’ (Wing (CD-ROM, 1996) M412) and in editions through to the end of the century. The ship, even in 1639, is somewhat old-fashioned, with the high poop and forecastle of an earlier period. The idea is repeated by Appelbaum, who argues that in England the ‘dislodgement’ of Mandeville, ‘the most popular repository of antigeographical legend’, results from this (‘Anti-geography’, p. 6). Richard Hakluyt, The principal nauigations, voyages, traffiques and discoueries of the English nation (London, 1599), vol. I, p. 13. Hakluyt, The principal nauigations, vol. I, p. 13.

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34 Thomas Bancroft, Time’s out of tune, plaid upon however in XX Satyres (London, 1658). See Satyre XVII, ‘Against Detraction’: ‘What Author is more grave or exquisite / Then Pliny, that so punctually doth write / Of Natures works, and took such pains to be / Well learned in her copious History? / Yet some that measure others qualities / By their own habits, with mistakes and lyes / Are bold to charge him, as if purposely / He gull’d the world with specious vanity, / And more directly at a shadowy fame / Did look, then at substantial truth did aim. / The like did to our Mandeville befall, / Who having measur’d of this earthly ball / A greater part then any of his time, / When he re-visited his native Clime, / Publisht his travels, that his Countrey so / Might what with pain he found, with pleasure know. / Now what was the success? his Readers threw / Contempt upon his news, more strange then true / Thought his reports, accounting them such toyes / And sigments as phantastiques oft devise. / Yet afterwards when travellers did make / Further discov’ries, and surveyes did take / Of this main Globe, they found his wonders true / I’ th’ greater part, and gave him praises due / To his high merits, making him thereby / A just amends for wrongful obloquy’ (p. 122). 35 ‘If it be said, that as ’tis now completed by him, he has as well run into new Errors, as corrected the old ones; it may be so too. For those humane Abilities are yet to be named, that were in all things governed by an infallible Spirit. And no man that is not so guided, can plead the privilege of not being liable to mistakes. But his own words are the most satisfactory answer to this objection. I must have been a greater Traveller than either the Greek Vlysses, or the English Mandeville, all Purchase his Pilgrims, many of our late Iesuites and Tom Coriot into the bargain, if in describing of the whole world, with all the Kingdoms, Provinces, Seas and Isles thereof, I had not relied more on the Credit of others, than any knowledge of my own. But if any Gentleman, Merchant, or other Traveller shall please to let me understand in what those Authors, which I trusted, have misinformed me, let it be done in jest or earnest, in love or anger, in a fair manner or a foul, with respect or disrespect unto me, in what way soever, I shall most thankfully receive the Instructions from him, and give him the honour of the Reformation, when that Book shall come out in another Edition. I will neither kick against those who rub upon such sores as I have about me, nor fling dirt on them who shall take the pains to bestow a brushing on my Coat. I was trained up, when I was a Child, to kiss the Rod, and I can do it, I thank God, now I am a man’ (pp. 143–4). 36 Samuel C. Chew, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1937), pp. 22, 18–19. 37 See Kenneth Parker’s Chapter 3 below. According to [T. Lavender], The Travels of Certain Englishmen into Africa, Asia, Troy, Bythinia,

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Thracia etc. (London, 1609), Rev. William Biddulph did not wish to publish his travels because of the usual notion (referred to in The Tempest) of the lying traveller: he did not want to be disbelieved. See also Sir Thomas Overbury, ‘Affected Traveller’, in The Overburian Characters, ed. Paylor, pp. 11–12; or Lodge’s very interesting glance at the Travels in his characterisation of the lying traveller in Wits’ Miserie or the World’s Madnesse (London, 1596), in Works, vol. IV, p. 35. ‘Mandeville’s identity is famously unstable . . . problematising the distinction between truth and fiction in all directions . . . an almost postmodern tricksiness’ (Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), see especially pp. 26–51). In the later editions of 1573 and 1578, Mendax is given much more importance, i.e. nine more pages! The dependence on Mandeville is extensive: in Tenterbelly, the Barnacle goose and the Vegetable lamb are juxtaposed exactly in Mandeville’s manner; the fish in Eat-Allia come to the shore like Mandeville’s; the Idle Berghers seem to owe much to Mandeville’s long-nailed Mandarin; his loadstone rocks capture ships for the pirates of Theevingen, where dogheaded mean live. This satiric Utopia depends heavily on Mandeville, and it not undeservedly had a high reputation: Peter Heylyn, on p. 1093 of his Cosmographie, comments on the ‘witty and ingenious invention . . . the style acutely clear, in the invention singular’. Peter Martyr de Anghiera, The decades of the newe worlde or west India conteynyng the nauigations and conquestes of the Spanyardes, with the particular description of the moste ryche and large landes and ilandes lately founde in the west ocean perteynyng to the inheritaunce of the kinges of Spayne. . . . Wrytten in the Latine tounge by Peter Martyr of Angleria, and translated into Englysshe by Rycharde Eden (London, 1555). Hall, Virgidemiarum, p. 47. As examples against travel, see Joseph Hall, Quo Vadis? A iust Censure of Travaile as it is commonly vndertaken by the gentlemen of our nation (London, 1617), or the very representative Geoffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (Leiden, 1586), p. 178. On the other hand, the humanist agenda favouring travel is well represented in the stern Jerome Turler, The Traveiler (London, 1575); William Bourne, A Treasure for Travelers (London, 1578); and Justus Lipsius, A Direction for Travailers (London, 1592). LXI, p. 267 of 1602 ed. Warner, Albion’s England, p. 275. Ibid., p. 313. See entries for 21, 22, 23 and 25 May 1591. In Works, ed. McKerrow, vol. IV, pp. 198–9.

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49 Travel plays are not uncommon and draw on much traditional material, possibly via Mandeville. The fairly recently discovered Tom a Lincoln, studied by Ladan Niayesh in Chapter 8 below, has Prester John and Amazons on stage, but without geographical or cultural curiosity. The plot follows a standard Romance trajectory to an exotic location, by the ‘Dry Se and the Carrenare’. Dekker’ s Patient Grissill (1600) has a traveller who claims to have seen Othello’s ‘Monsters of Men’, the traditional marvels of the East of which Mandeville, in fact, makes little. 50 Anthony Parr (ed.), Three Renaissance Travel Plays: The Travels of the Three English Brothers [1607], The Sea Voyage [1622], The Antipodes [1636] (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). 51 Ann Haaker (ed.), The Antipodes (London: E. Arnold, 1967), p. 12. 52 Pepys, not generally the most discerning of theatre critics, saw it on 26 August 1661: ‘much mirth but not much matter’. 53 Appelbaum, ‘Anti-geography’, p. 8. 54 ‘All our voyagers / Went short of Mandeville: but had he reach’d / To the place here – yes, here – this wildernesse / And had seen the trees of the Sunne and Moone, that speake’ (Peregrine to Dr Hughball, 3.2.48). 55 See the discussion of the play in M. Steggle, Richard Brome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), especially pp. 110–12. See also Julie Sanders, ‘The politics of escapism: fantasies of travel and power in Richard Brome’s Antipodes and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist’, in Sullivan and White (eds), Writing and Fantasy, pp. 137–50. 56 Shankar Raman, ‘“The Ship comes Well-Laden”: court politics, colonialism, and cuckoldry in Gil Vicente’s Auto da Índia’, in Elizabeth Sauer and Rajan Balachandran (eds), Imperialism: Historical and Literary Investigations 1500–1900 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 57 See for details K.-J. Höltgen, ‘Emblematic title pages and brasses’, in Aspects of the Emblem: Studies in the English Emblem Tradition and the European Context (Kassel: Reichenberger, 1986), pp. 91–141. 58 Purchas did accept the recent myth, originating in Vespucci, of giants in Patagonia, because it was apparently eyewitnessed. It had a long future. See A. Gerbi, ‘Earliest accounts of the New World’, in F. Chiapelli (ed.), First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 59 Catalogue of the Most Vendible Books in England (London, 1657). But this title may be slightly worrying: has London confused the Travels with The Voyage of the Wandering Knight, a loosely devotional allegory, by Jean de Mandevie? Booksellers with large stocks do not always remember which book is which. 60 Pseudodoxia Epidemica, I, cap. vi.

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61 G. A. Aitken (ed.), The Tatler (London: Duckworth, 1898–99), vol. IV, pp. 287–8. 62 A compendium of the travels of Mr. Hanway, Sir John Mandeville. And Mr. Lionel Wafer, and a description of Greenland (London: Sold by R. Dampier, J. Panton, T. Davidson, W. Nixon, A. Manson, H. Newton, S. Darnton and M. Oldman (12mo), [c. 1760]). Works cited Note: early printed editions of Mandeville referred to in this essay can be consulted in Early English Books Online: eebo.chadwyck.com/marketing/ eebo_demo1.htm (accessed on 27 November 2009). Primary sources Anon., A compendium of the travels of Mr. Hanway, Sir John Mandeville. And Mr. Lionel Wafer, and a description of Greenland. London: Sold by R. Dampier, J. Panton, T. Davidson, W. Nixon, A. Manson, H. Newton, S. Darnton and M. Oldman (12mo), [c. 1760]. Aitken, G. A. (ed.), The Tatler, 4 vols. London: Duckworth, 1898–99. Anghiera, Peter Martyr de, The decades of the newe worlde or west India conteynyng the nauigations and conquestes of the Spanyardes, with the particular description of the moste ryche and large landes and ilandes lately founde in the west ocean perteynyng to the inheritaunce of the kinges of Spayne. . . . Wrytten in the Latine tounge by Peter Martyr of Angleria, and translated into Englysshe by Rycharde Eden. London, 1555. Bacon, Francis, Novum Organum. London, 1620. Bancroft, Thomas, Time’s out of tune, plaid upon however in XX Satyres. London, 1658. Brome, Richard, The Antipodes, ed. Ann Haaker. London: E. Arnold, 1967. Brome, Richard, The Antipodes (London, 1636–37), in Anthony Parr (ed.), Three Renaissance Travel Plays. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Bourne, William, A Treasure for Travelers. London, 1578. Browne, Sir Thomas, Pseudodoxia Epidemica. London, 1658. Bullein, William, Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence. London, 1564–65. Dekker, Thomas, Patient Grissill. London, 1600. Gilbert, Humphrey, Queene Elizabeths Achademie (London, 1573). London: EETS (Extra Series 8), 1869. Hakluyt, Richard, The principal nauigations, voyages, traffiques and discoueries of the English nation made by sea or ouer-land, to the remote and farthest distant quarters of the earth, at any time within the compasse of these 1600. yeres: deuided into three seuerall volumes, according to the positions of the regions, whereunto they were directed. The first volume containeth the worthy discoueries, &c. of the English . . . The second volume

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comprehendeth the principall nauigations . . . to the south and south-east parts of the world . . . By Richard Hakluyt preacher, and sometime student of Christ-Church in Oxford. London, 1599. Hall, Joseph, Virgidemiarum. The three last bookes. Of byting satyres. London, 1598. ——, Mundus Alter et Idem. London, 1605 (Englished by John Healey as The Discovery of a New World). ——, Quo Vadis? A iust Censure of Travaile as it is commonly vndertaken by the gentlemen of our nation. London, 1617. Heylin, Peter, Cosmographie in four bookes: containing the chorographie and historie of the whole vvorld, and all the principall kingdomes, provinces, seas and isles thereof. London, 1652. Johnson, Robert, Traveller’s Breviat. London, 1601. Jonson, Ben, The Newe Inne. London, 1629. [T. Lavender], The Travels of Certain Englishmen into Africa, Asia, Troy, Bythinia, Thracia etc. London, 1609. Lipsius, Justus, A Direction for Travailers. London,1592. Lodge, Thomas, Wits’ Miserie, or the World’s Madnesse (London, 1596), in E. Gosse (ed.), Works. New York: Russell and Russell, 1963. London, William, Catalogue of the Most Vendible Books in England. London, 1657. Mandeville, Sir John Editions: Egerton Text, ed. Sir George Warner. London: The Roxburghe Club, 1889. Cotton Text, ed. Paul Hamelius. London: EETS, 1919 and 1923. Defective or ‘Pynson’, ed. Tamarah Kohanski, The Book of John Mandeville: An Edition of the Pynson Text with Commentary on the Defective Version. Tempe: Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001. Translation: Moseley, C. W. R. D. Second edition. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005. Meres, Francis, Palladis Tamia. London, 1597. Nashe, Thomas, Nashes Lenten Stuffe, in R. B. McKerrow (ed.), Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, rept 1958. Overbury, Sir Thomas, The Overburian Characters, ed. W. J. Paylor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936. Purchas, Samuel, Purchas His Pilgrimage. London, 1613. ——, Purchas his Pilgrimes. London, 1625. Ramus, Petrus. Aristotelicae Animadversiones and Dialecticae Institutiones. Paris, 1543. Tom a Lincoln, ed. G. R. Proudfoot. Malone Society Reprints. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

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Torquemada, Antonio de, The Spanish Mandeuile of miracles. Or The garden of curious flowers VVherin are handled sundry points of humanity, philosophy, diuinitie, and geography, beautified with many strange and pleasant histories. First written in Spanish, by Anthonio De Torquemeda, and out of that tongue translated into English. It was dedicated by the author, to the right honourable and reuerent prelate, Don Diego Sarmento de Soto Maior, Bishop of Astorga. &c. It is deuided into sixe treatises, composed in manner of a dialogue, as in the next page shall appeare. London, 1600. Turler, Jerome, The Traveiler. London, 1575. Vernon, George, Life of the learned and reverend Dr. Peter Heylyn chaplain to Charles I, and Charles II, monarchs of Great Britain. London, 1682. Warner, William, Albion’s England. London, 1586, and expanded in frequent editions until 1612. Whitney, Geoffrey, A Choice of Emblemes. Leiden, 1586. Willes, Richard, History of Trauayle. London, 1577. Secondary works Appelbaum, Robert, ‘Anti-geography’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 4.2, Special Issue 3 (September 1998), pp. 1–17. Arber, E., A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640 A.D. London and Birmingham: privately printed, 1875–94, vol. 3. Also rept Gloucester, Mass: Peter Smith, 1967. Birley, Robert, Sunk without Trace: Some Forgotten Masterpieces Reconsidered. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962. Bennett, H. S., English Books and Readers, 1603 to 1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Bennett, Josephine Waters, The Rediscovery of Sir John Mandeville. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1954. ——, ‘The woodcut illustrations in the English edition of Mandeville’s Travels’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 47 (1953), pp. 59–69. Chew, Samuel C., The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1937. Forker, R. A., and R. T. Rickert (eds), Henslowe’s Diary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961. Gerbi, A., ‘Earliest accounts of the New World’, in Fredi Chiapelli (ed.), First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Greenblatt, Stephen, ‘Foreword’ to Frank Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery, trans. David Fausett. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. ——, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

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Harrison, Dick, Medieval Space: The Extent of Microspatial Knowledge in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. Lund Studies in International History 34. Lund: Lund University Press, 1996. Higgins, Iain, Writing East: The ‘Travels’ of Sir John Mandeville. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Höltgen, K.-J., Aspects of the Emblem: Studies in the English Emblem Tradition and the European Context. Kassel: Reichenberger, 1986. Moore, Helen, Review of Tamarah Kohanski, The Book of John Mandeville: An Edition of the Pynson Text with Commentary on the Defective Version (2001), Review of English Studies, NS 55, No. 218 (2004), pp. 117–19. Moseley, C. W. R. D., ‘The availability of Mandeville’s Travels in England, 1356–1750’, The Library, 30.1, (1975), pp. 125–33. ——, ‘The Lost Play of Mandeville’, The Library, 35.1 (1970), pp. 46–9. Plomer, Henry R., A Short History of English Printing, 1476–1898. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Company, 1900. Raman, Shankar, ‘“The Ship comes Well-Laden”: court politics, colonialism, and cuckoldry in Gil Vicente’s Auto da Índia’, in Elizabeth Sauer and Rajan Balachandran (eds), Imperialism: Historical and Literary Investigations 1500–1900. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Sanders, Julie, ‘The politics of escapism: fantasies of travel and power in Richard Brome’s Antipodes and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist’, in O. Sullivan and B. White (eds), Writing and Fantasy. London: Longman, 1999. Seymour, Michael C., ‘Early English editions of Mandeville’s Travels’, The Library, 5.19 (1964), pp. 202–7. Steggle, M., Richard Brome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004.

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3 Mandeville reviviscent: early modern travel tales Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Kenneth Parker

Introduction Any commentary upon the continuation of Mandevillian lore in early modern England needs to focus on two particular features: (1) elements inherited from that earlier medieval moment, as well as those of the moment under consideration, that demonstrate both similarities and differences; (2) selected recent critical scholarship about both of those earlier times. While the former might be recalled through the fourteenth-century proverb that ‘a traveller may lie with authority’1 and perhaps also by the observation made by Gonzalo, the ‘honest old counsellor of Naples’, that ‘Travellers ne’er did lie / Though fools at home condemn ’em’,2 the position of their present-day successors might be summed up by the term by which the latter dismiss The Travels of Sir John Mandeville as ‘hoax’,3 and in so doing replace the equally confident post-Second World War distinction that Percy G. Adams made between travellers and those he referred to as ‘travel liars’.4 Ranged against such simplistic binaries is the process engaged in – as well as the categories delineated by – the court jester Touchstone: Oh sir, we quarrel in print, by the book, as you have books for good manners. I will name you the degrees. The first, the Retort Courteous; the second, the Quip Modest; the third, the Reply Churlish; the fourth, the Reproof Valiant; the fifth, the Countercheck Quarrelsome; the sixth, the Lie with Circumstance; the seventh, the Lie Direct. All these you may avoid but the Lie Direct; and you may avoid that, too, with an ‘if’ . . . Your ‘if’ is the only peacemaker; much virtue in ‘if’.5

Therefore, not only in the spirit of that ‘if’, but also because it is evident that I qualify on one other count, I wish to remind my readers of one proverb listed in Camden’s Remaines concerning Britain (1636), that ‘Old men and far travellers may lie with authority’.6

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Mandevillian foundations A consideration of the continuing popularity of Mandevillian lore in early modern English travellers’ tales requires one, first of all, to take account of the assessment made by the eminent present-day Mandeville scholar M. C. Seymour, that nine-tenths of the substance of the Travels can be traced precisely to previously existent written resources.7 Seymour proceeds to the crucial distinction that, while the framework of the narration is fictitious, the substance is not. This, in turn, leads him to the conclusion that the chronicler reported in good faith what his authorities recorded and that his book was seriously intended. Perhaps as fascinating is the assertion by Stephen Greenblatt that Mandeville, unlike Marco Polo or Columbus, ‘takes possession of nothing in the name of an imperial power’,8 thereby further marking him off, not only from those two but also from subsequent voyagers. There are two further instances that call in question the charge of ‘lie’ (deliberate deception) or ‘hoax’ (mischievous deception) that might also account for Mandeville’s continued popularity in that moment that marks the shift from late medieval to early modern. Firstly, writing about the process by which books in a college library were issued on long-term loan to Fellows and Scholars, Elizabeth Leedham-Green observes in her contribution that: ‘the most highly valued volume, a compilation described as Magna moralia Aristotelis, was probably borrowed every year from 1440 to 1517; but almost as popular was another volume, now in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, with contents unusually remote from academic demands, including Mandeville’s Travels’.9 Secondly, in another contribution to the same volume, Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards argue that, in the case of prose texts other than religious ones, ‘certain individual works found a continuing appeal in both manuscript and print, as with the extraordinarily popular Mandeville’s Travels [STC 17246].’10 Evidence of the popularity of the Mandeville text none the less registers one particular silence: that is, the absence of speculation about, or questioning of, the veracity of the tales, by either medieval or early modern readers. How unlike this is to the following story told about that intrepid traveller of more or less the same times, Ibn Battutah, a.k.a Shams ad-Din (born in Tangier 1304 – died in Fez 1368 or 1377?), who travelled the known world for about thirty years before returning to tell his tale. His account is recorded by another famous Maghrebian philosopher of history,

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Ibn Khaldun (born in Tunis 1330 – died in Cairo 1395), who, in his volume translated into English under the title Prolegomena, records that: people began to whisper that Ibn Battutah was a liar. Eventually it reached the stage where the majority of people disbelieved Ibn Battutah’s stories. At this time I met Sultan Abu Ninan’s vizier, the renowned Faris Ibn Wadrar, and asked his opinion on the matter. The vizier said to me, ‘You should never dismiss accounts of other lands merely on the grounds of not having seen them. If you did so, you would be like the vizier’s son who grew up in prison. His story is as follows: a certain sultan imprisoned his vizier. The vizier remained in custody for many years, during which his infant son was confined with him. When the boy reached the age of reason, he asked about the meat which was sent for their meals. His father replied, “This is mutton,” at which the boy asked, “What is mutton?” So his father gave him a full and precise description of a sheep. The boy then said, “Father, is a sheep like a rat?” “No,” said the vizier. “There is a huge difference between the two!” Similar exchanges took place concerning camel meat and beef. This was all because the only creature the boy had ever seen was a rat: therefore, he considered all creatures to be a sub-species of rat.’11

Early modern (as well as some later) variants A fuller consideration of the varieties of rodentia in early modern travellers’ tales should bear in mind that while the publication and reading of texts categorised as travellers’ tales was second in popularity only to publications devoted to religious themes and topics,12 one noteworthy feature of the texts to which reference will be made here is that hardly any of these were included in the multiple editions of collections of travellers’ tales inaugurated by Halkluyt’s Principal Navigations (1598), continued by Samuel Purchas with Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625), and concluded in Awnsham and John Churchill’s A Collection of Voyages and Travels (1704) and John Harris’s Navigantium atque itinerarium bibliotheca (1705) that are so distinct a feature of book production of the early modern period in England. Examples of volumes of a Mandevillian kind might be grouped under the following categories: Volumes which mimic that genre, but only in order to mock it. One example is the 1631 (repr. 1636) anonymous volume in verse called The Legend of Captain Jones. Credited by some scholars to David Lloyd, by others to Martin Lluelyn, the sense of that volume might be readily derived from its subtitle: ‘Relating his adventure to sea;

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his first landing and strange combat with a mighty bear; his furious battle with his six and thirty men against the army of eleven kings, with their overthrow and deaths; his relieving of Kemper Castle; his strange and admirable seafight with six huge galleys of Spain, and nine-thousand soldiers; his taking prisoner and hard usage; lastly, his setting at liberty by the King’s command and return for England.’ Writings which mimic the titles of travel narratives in order to comment upon the political situation at home. Three examples serve to illustrate the wide-ranging nature of this category. Firstly, the 1608 (?) volume entitled The Discovery of a New World or a description of the South Indies. It is attributed on the title page to Joseph Hall, yet the same page claims that the text is a translation by a John Healey. While the title page is silent about the language from which the work is supposed to have been translated, one potential claimant might have been the traveller and translator John Healey (1585?–1616?) who was briefly imprisoned and interrogated in York Castle in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. Especially noticeable in that volume is the ironic commentary upon the differences between rich and poor (and probably also between those who could and could not read) by the publication of the laws of the land, chained to a marble pillar, among which: ‘that eating but one meal a day be henceforth held for a capital transgression; that none eat alone nor violate the laws of the table by any private suppers but that every citizen do eat either in the streets or in an open window upon pain of eating his next meal with his heels upward,’ and that ‘to belch be held not only lawful but honourable also and that the government of the next future feast be assigned unto him that broke wind the strongest at the last’.13 Secondly, the 1641 volume A Description of the famous Kingdome of Macaria, anonymous but probably written by Gabriel Plattes (c. 1600–44), a member of the circle around the reformer Samuel Hartlib (c. 1599 – c. 1670). Not only is that volume specifically addressed ‘To the High and Honourable Court of Parliament’ but it also has the most clear indication of purpose on its title page, i.e. that of Macaria ‘shewing its excellent governement: wherein the inhabitants live in great prosperity, health and happinesse; the king obeyed, the nobles honoured, and all good men respected, vice punished and virtue rewarded. An example to other nations. In a dialogue between a scholar and a traveller.’ Thirdly, the once again anonymous text entitled The Floating Island (pub. 1673), which makes its intentions clear on the title page: ‘A new discovery, relating the strange adventure on a late

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voyage from Lambethana to Villa Franca alias Ramallia, to the eastward of terra del Templo, by three ships, viz. the Pay-Naught, Excuse, Least-in-Sight, under the conduct of Captain Robert Owemuch, describing the nature of the inhabitants, their religion, laws and customs.’ The anonymous author, identified by scholars as probably Richard Head, informs his readers that: ‘I formed this supposed voyage from Lambeth to the bridge on one side and back again to the other, recounting all remarkables between the two shores, the one whereof (on the city side) I call the Christian, on the Southwark side the Turkish or Barbarian . . . Coming to Ramallia [Ram Alley] . . . I give an account of the condition of the poor debtor and what shifts he is forced to use to preserve his liberty.’14 Translations into English of accounts from other European languages. While one example from the Spanish, The Travels of Don Francisco de Quevedo through Terra Australis incognita (1684) is mentioned by Michael McKeon as an instance of the destabilisation of generic categories in the early modern period,15 there are many examples from the French that constitute even more interesting variants. There is, for instance, the 1581 Voyage of the Wandering Knight, itself translated from the 1557 Le Voyage du Chevalier errant, with both the original and its translation going through several editions and variants.16 It was not until 1687 that the title page revealed how the text had nothing to do with actual travel, but was instead concerned with Christian ethics: ‘The Conviction of Worldly-Vanity: or, the Wandring Prodigal, and his return. In two parts. Part I containing his debate with himself about his setting forward in search of the Palace of Worldly Felicity . . . Part II giving a full account of his miraculous escape from the Palace of Worldly Felicity . . . both pleasant and profitable. Deliver’d under the similitude of a wandring youth.’ In passing, two fascinating details are worth mentioning about the French originals. Firstly, unlike their English translations that were published in London, none of the half dozen or so editions were published in Paris, but emanated from cities such as Antwerp (1557, 1572, 1595), Arras (1587), Douai (1587) and St Omer (1620). Secondly, it was only with the 1595 Antwerp version that there was an indication on the title page of the topic. But perhaps even more relevant in the context of Mandevillian lore are two other works taken together: A New Discovery of the Southern World of Terra Incognita Australis (1676), by a writer referred to either as Gabriel de Foigny or Sadeur (of which volume a new annotated edition appeared in French in

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1990), and the 1695 The History of the Sevarites or Sevarambi, a translation of the 1680 Histoire des Sevarambes (of which updated annotated texts were also issued in France in 2001 and the United States in 2006). Furthermore, evidence of continuing demand for fabrications in English throughout the eighteenth century might be demonstrated by the appearance of a parallel to the story of the Sevarites, set in an equally exotic location. Written in Latin and possibly once again by a Frenchman, under the pseudonym George Psalmanazar, An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa (London, 1704)17 has also received the epithet ‘hoax’ from a recent scholar, Michael Keevak, in the subtitle of his edition of that text.18 Psalmanazar’s effort had early modern precedents, such as the anonymous satire on Ireland and Wales entitled The Western Wonder: or, O Brazeel, an Inchanted Island discovered (1674), probably written by the Irish-born son of Church of England clergyman Richard Head (c. 1637–86?), and the 1670 The Adventures of (Mr. T. S.) an English Merchant. The last-named is especially fascinating because, while it manifests extensive as well as sophisticated knowledge and descriptions of North African regions, and wellknown themes such as being captured and enslaved by corsairs, or the question of trading relations between the competing states in the Mediterranean, in the end the volume leaves no clue about authorship. The name ‘Richard Norris’ appears on the title page, but that is probably because the person so named was the author of the annexure about tides and the techniques of turning a ship around in a situation when the wind is westerly. The previously mentioned Richard Head conjures Mandevillian echoes, identified by C. W. R. D. Moseley in another of Head’s writings, The English Rogue (1665).19 Finally, on the cusp of the late medieval/early modern moment, there is the tale told by the so-styled ‘master gunner of England’ Edward Webbe (b. 1553–54), whose text – The rare and most wonderfull things which Edward Webbe an Englishman borne hath seen and passed in his troublesome travailes (1590) – rehearses all the familiar themes: being captured and enslaved by enemies (religious as well as political) usually referred to as ‘Turks’, whom he credits with eventually making him master gunner of their forces in contest with Persia; being tried as a heretic in Padua, but set at liberty as a direct consequence of papal intervention; being denounced as an English spy in Genoa, but eventually arriving in France where he is once again made master gunner, this time to Henry IV at the Battle of Ivry. The justification for mentioning Webbe is that,

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although his tale was issued by three different publishers in the same year (1590), it was, like most of the others listed thus far, excluded from the above-mentioned major collections published during the century. In his introduction to the account of the travels of Francesco Alvarez to the place referred to by that voyager as ‘das Indias’, Purchas dismisses Webbe as a ‘mere fabler’, with reference to the Englishman’s accounts of his sojourn in the lands of Prester John.20 Since Mandeville devotes a chapter (30) to that same place and ruler, and since a purported letter from that ruler is referred to as a ‘hoax’, it will be used as a brief case study of some elements of the tales told by those travellers who are dismissed by recent critics as ‘liars’ or ‘hoaxers’. The ‘Prester John’ story While perhaps the most satisfactory recent accounts of the history of the ‘Prester John’ legend are, respectively, those of a lecture by I. de Rachelwitz21 and the much more comprehensive study by Robert Silverberg,22 my intention is to make reference to selected texts of the times in which the stories about that figure were produced, in order to seek to emphasise the singularities, as well as the differences, between the late medieval and the early modern. Crucial to that recuperation is the recognition that Mandeville’s placing of that priest-king was consistent with geographical knowledge in Europe of those times. John Kirtland Wright is quite clear on this: The legend . . . became an integral part of late medieval geographical theory, and exerted in subsequent centuries a powerful influence on the course of exploration. The thirteenth-century Oriental travellers were constantly on the lookout for Prester John’s kingdom and, when it finally became obvious that there was no such kingdom in Asia, Prester John was transferred to Africa, where he was sought for by the Portuguese navigators of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.23

Furthermore, Wright observes that, when the name of Prester John became associated with a place referred to as Ethiopia: in the minds of medieval travellers this name was not restricted to the region beyond Upper Egypt, but was applied to the entire southern part of the known world . . . Indeed, from early classical times Ethiopia had itself been confused with India and some . . . writers . . . believed that the two regions were coterminous.24

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Perhaps it is most important to remember that the term, as well as the geographical location ‘India’, were vague concepts to European scholars who were especially lacking in knowledge of the Indian Ocean. Broadly, their usual division of the phrase ‘the three Indias’ was as follows: (1) Nearer or Lesser India, as approximately the northern parts of the subcontinent; (2) Further or Greater India – the south, Malabar, and Coromandel – the geographical space in which Mandeville located his Prester John; (3) Middle India/ Ethiopia, an identification incidentally also made by that other doubtful travel writer Marco Polo.25 In passing, I would also like to mention one example of that association of Ethiopia with the southern tip of the African continent: when Sir Thomas Herbert, a member of the English embassy to the Persian monarch Abbas the Great (1557–1629), stopped at the Cape of Good Hope, he promptly annexed that space not yet colonised by Europeans because: ‘to what peculiar potentate it belongs, I dare not determine . . . If I should appropriate it unto Prester John, Emperor of the Abizines, ’tis a question if he would own it, the two places being so remote, and the people so indomitable.’26 Consequently, while it was probably the commonly held view in Europe from around the mid-twelfth century onwards that Prester John ruled over a space referred to as one of the ‘three Indias’, by the early modern period that space had become more precisely associated with present-day Ethiopia.27 While the earliest reports, reputedly by emissaries, of converts to Christianity in India since the time of St Thomas (an apostle named in all the lists of the twelve, but a major figure only in the gospel of John) were uncorroborated, the German chronicler Otto of Freising reported that when he was in Viterbo in Italy in 1144 he had, in the presence of Pope Eugene III, met an emissary from a Prince Raymond of Antioch who had come to seek the Pope’s aid against the Saracens.28 It was apparently that emissary who reported that Prester John (whose status he described as simultaneously that of priest and of monarch) had not only won battles against the Medians and Persians but had unfortunately been prevented from reaching Jerusalem in order to liberate the Holy Land because the flooded river Tigris had made the crossing impossible.29 There were also stories circulating that, during the Second Crusade (1147–49), Prester John was willing to assist in the recapture of cities such as Edessa from the Saracen forces. It is in that hope that might be found the core of the interest, of Popes as well as of secular rulers of Christian Europe, to cement

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an alliance with that legendary counterpart in the East in support of Crusader endeavours. This is expressed with splendid clarity in the 1177 letter from Pope Alexander III, addressed to the ‘Magnificus rex Indorum sacerdotum sanctissimus’.30 How are we to interpret one of the most intriguing aspects of that letter, that is to say the fact that, despite the Pope’s acknowledgement that he had heard stories of Prester John’s piety, he none the less sent his physician Philip to expound the tenets of Western Christianity to him, as a basis for that supposedly Eastern ruler’s conversion to Catholicism? If the most memorable aspect of the letter is the evidence it provides for Rome’s desire for interpretative control and authority, then one minor quibble might be: why send the Papal physician, rather than, say, a cardinal or someone else trained in Christian theology and ritual? The above-mentioned letter by Alexander III was probably a response to accounts dating from around 1165 of the receipt of a letter purported to have been sent by Prester John (styled as a descendant of one of the Three Magi and King of India) to the Byzantine Emperor Manuel I Comnenus (1143–80). Those two letters, dismissed in later years as ‘hoax’, accrued embellishments in their own time, to the point of being published in Constantinople in 1519, so that by the time of the Third Crusade (1217–21), news had spread amongst the ranks of those referred to as ‘Franks’ that Prester John, ruler of the three Indias, was coming to their aid. It is perhaps important to note that, contrary to present-day assertions that the letters were a ‘hoax’, i.e. a deliberate fabrication, some equally modern textual analyses of those letters have concluded that they contain forms of Hebrew common in northern Italy as well as in the Languedoc at the time of the Third Crusade.31 With the arrival in Europe of some thirty emissaries from Abyssinia in 1306, the story of the ‘Three Indias’ underwent profound change. It was possibly during that visit that reference was made by the visitors to their patriarch Prester John; after this, an African instead of an Asian location for the kingdom of Prester John became increasingly popular, so that in the 1520s, when the Portuguese and the Ethiopians had established diplomatic relations, ‘Prester John’ was the name by which the African monarch was known in Europe. Paul Henze reminds us that: the most remarkable feature of that period is the role which Portugal, a small country on the fringe of Europe, came to play in world affairs . . . In the same year that Dias rounded the Cape [of Good Hope],

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[King] Joã sent Pero da Covilhão overland to reconnoitre the East. He took the disguise of a Muslim merchant and travelled via Cairo to India. He then made his way to Ormuz, the trading center at the mouth of the Persian Gulf . . . He finally reached Ethiopia and never left it, becoming an influential advisor in the imperial household. When the Portuguese mission eventually arrived in Ethiopia in 1520, Covilhão, an old man, was its most valuable source of information and advice about the country.32

It is important to recognise, as a common feature of this otherwise variegated range of publications, that the titles convey confusing views, not only about the geography of the African continent but also about the precise situation of the space referred to sometimes as ‘Abassia’, sometimes as Ethiopia. This confusion is increased by other usages and associations, of which three examples are mentioned below: Firstly, the 1597 Abraham Hartwell compilation, from the Italian translation by Pigafetta, of the writings of the Portuguese Odoarda Lopez, contains a section on the ‘Empire of Prete Gianni’. Not only is that story told in a volume entitled A Report on the Kingdom of Congo, but the subtitle informs us that it will show, for instance, ‘that the black colour which is the skin of the Ethiopians and Negroes etc. proceedeth not from the sunne’, and that ‘the two zones torrida and frigida are not only habitable but also inhabited and very temperate’.33 Secondly, the 1670 translation from Italian of the purported account of a traveller by the name of Giacomo Baratti not only asserts that ‘the Emperor of the Abisins is a Prince highly honoured by his subjects, because they fancy him to be lineally descended from that noble and religious king that first planted the Christian Religion amongst them’,34 but goes on to state the apparently common perception in Europe concerning differences in skin colour: The Emperor’s person is whiter than any of his Kingdom, for the Abisins are tawny, a colour being near to black. I never saw any others of his Relations, or kindred, but I hear [that] they are the same colour. The people interpret this to his advantage, that God by this distinction, has singled out that Family.35

Thirdly, the 1623 account of a volume by a merchant and travel writer about voyages to the Gambia in West Africa, William Jobson (fl. 1620–23), entitled The golden trade, makes clear in the subtitle that it is a treatise on ‘a discouery of the riuer Gambra, and the golden trade of the Aethiopians’.36

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Although a large part of that volume is republished in the 1745 Thomas Osborne collection of voyages,37 it is nevertheless important to emphasise that readers in English as well as French were kept aware of the endeavours of the earliest Portuguese diplomatic travellers, such as those by Francisco Alvares, first printed in Lisbon (1540), with translations into French (1556) and Spanish (1588), and with a title that still places Prester John in ‘dos Indias’. The 1625 Purchas his Pilgrimes not only has a chapter entitled ‘The voyage of Sr Francis Alvarez, a Portugall priest made unto the court of Prete Ianni, the great Christian Emperour of Ethiopia’,38 but it reprints a further two items: (1) ‘A brief relation of the embassage which the Patriarch Don John Bermudez brought from the Emperor of Ethiopia, vulgarly called Presbyter John, to the most Christian and zealous of the Faith of Christ, Don John, the third of his name, King of Portugal’;39 (2) a document entitled ‘A copy of a letter which Prester John wrote to Diego Lopez de Sequira which was delivered by Lopez Vaz of St. Paul, his successor in the government of the Indies’.40 While the story of the Alvarez embassy is again issued in 1881 under the auspices of the Hakluyt Society, in their 1961 revision of that volume, the joint editors C. F. Beckingham and G. W. B. Huntingford point out that the book was published seventeen years before any Jesuit reached Ethiopia and almost before the Society of Jesus was in existence. The editors assert, furthermore, not only that ‘both Alvarez and the Ethiopian clergy were too hopelessly confused about the Councils of Nicaea [325 CE] and Chalcedon [451 CE], but that the Ethiopians never understood the theological issues at all’.41 Incidentally, that 1961 edition was, in many ways, a follow-up to the edition by the same two editors of the 1954 Hakluyt Society offering entitled Some Records of Ethiopia 1593–1646. Being extracts from The History of High Ethiopia or Abassia by Manuel de Almeida, in which manuscript there are remarks about the name of Prester John and the extent of his kingdom. Once again, translations reinforce the spread of the name. For instance, following upon the 1556 translation of the 1540 Portuguese original, two further editions are important: (1) the 1611 Discours de la religion et de l’etat du Roy d’Ethiopie, appelé Prestre Jean. Avec un discourse au Pape Gregoire XIII auquel est propose le moyen d’augmenter grandement la religion Catholique par la voye ce Roy;42 (2) the even more specific ‘Description de l’empire du Prete-Jean’, taken principally from D’Almeida, and contained in Justel’s 1674 volume about voyages to Africa and

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America, reprinted by the celebrated female publisher the Widow Cellier in 1684.43 While the English compilation more or less equivalent to that by Justel is the one made by the clergyman Samuel Clarke,44 arguably one of the most influential was the translation from the Latin of a history of Ethiopia by the compiler of an Ethiopic–Latin lexicon, Hiob Ludolf (1624–1704).45 It is worthy of recall that the Ethiopian delegation which came to the Council of Florence in 1441 insisted that their monarch was never addressed by the name by which he was known in Western Europe – a view which was corroborated by the discovery, in the library of the University of Warsaw in the late twentieth century, of a manuscript of the account of the travels of the Franciscan priest Remedius Prutky (1717–70). In that manuscript, which was eventually published under the auspices of the Hakluyt Society in 1991, Prutky, in a section entitled ‘Derivation of the imperial title of Prester John’, firmly asserts the view that the peoples of Abyssinia who dwelt by the sources of the Nile being black, the name Preteiani was given by the Spanish and Portuguese to the black inhabitants of that region, then, by bad translation from the Portuguese to the French, the name of ‘Presbyter Joannes’ was coined. Prutky goes on to state further that: ‘this however is a title which the Emperor of Abyssinia has never borne and never wishes to hear, especially when you consider that he is not a priest, but a layman who has been advanced to the imperial title’.46 Prutky’s views were subsequently challenged by scholars such as the former Professor of Islamic Studies in the University of London, C. F. Beckingham,47 and Vsevolod Slessarev.48 But even more interesting for me is that Prutky continues, in the paragraph quoted above (concerning the derivation of the appellation ‘Prester John’), to comment upon the characteristics of the Ethiopians as follows: ‘the Abyssinians are lazy, ignorant, idle, overbearing, they labour long at nothing, they go naked and gorge themselves on raw flesh, and they aspire to nothing further’.49 Sentiments such as those remind me of similar remarks made by my ancestors from the northern parts of Europe during first encounters in early modern times with their counterparts at the Cape of Good Hope – of which one classic observation from Jean Mocquet: The subjects of Monomotapa [itself a European coinage], when they kill their enemies, cut off their privy members and, having dried them, give them their wives to wear about the neck: of which they are nor a little proud. For they who have the most are the most esteemed in regard that evidences the husband to be more hardy and valiant.50

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Conclusion Two of the main objectives of this chapter were to show that texts modelled upon the Mandevillian mode were not only published and read in early modern England but perhaps even more fascinatingly excluded from the collections of travellers’ tales published and read throughout those times – a practice that continued afterwards. Balanced against those are two perhaps equally intriguing silences: about the motivations that spurred writers as well as publishers, and about whether or not readers could make (or were interested in making) distinctions between volumes of the kind categorised as ‘Mandevillian’ and those based upon actual travels. Justification for continuing exploration of texts of the former kind points, therefore, to the need for further interrogation of the foundations which underpin research of early modern travel tales by scholars in the present, of which some of the most obvious absences are the failure to recognise that whether they classified these non-European spaces by names such as ‘three Indias’ (Mandeville), ‘Abassia’ (Portuguese accounts) or the ‘Congo’ (Pigafetta, Jobson), and whether or not they travelled to these spaces, the makers of these ‘Mandevillian’ texts constructed their tales within the limits of the geographical knowledge available to them at those times. If that point is taken, it follows that while these early modern tellers of tales might be excused because they could not distinguish between camel meat and beef, no such qualification can be made for those recent and current critics, because attempts at separating travels from ‘travel lies’ (and even more dismissive epithets such as ‘hoax’) simply highlight the questionable ideological mainstays that underpin their literary and critical foundations. Instead, there remains great need, not only for recognition but also for celebration of the intellectual skills of the forgers of these texts that continue to have a Mandevillian afterlife. Notes 1 D. C. Browning, Everyman’s Dictionary of Quotations and Proverbs (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1951), p. 354, number 27. 2 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 3.3.26–7. All Shakespeare quotes in this essay are taken from The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 3 www.museumofhoaxes.com (accessed on 29 November 2009). 4 Percy G. Adams, Travel Tales and Travel Liars 1660–1800 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962).

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5 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 5.4.87–101. 6 William Camden, Remaines concerning Britaine (London, 1636), p. 304. 7 M. C. Seymour, Sir John Mandeville, www.oxforddnb.com (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) (accessed on 29 November 2009). 8 Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions. The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 27. 9 Elizabeth Leedham-Green, ‘University libraries and booksellers’, in Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), vol. 3: 1400–1557, pp. 323–4. 10 Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, ‘Literary texts’, in Hellinga and Trapp, The Cambridge History of the Book, p. 570. 11 The Travels of Ibn Battutah, ed. Tim Mackintosh-Smith (London: Picador, 2002), p. xvii. 12 H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers, 1603 to 1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 87–117, 167–71. 13 Joseph Hall, The Discovery of a New World or a description of the South Indies (London, 1608), pp. 36, 38. 14 Anon., The Floating Island (London, 1673), sig. A2v. 15 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (London: Radius/Century-Hutchinson, 1988), pp. 26, 105, 293. 16 Jean de Cartigney, The Voyage of the Wandering Knight (Antwerp, 1557). First English edition: The Voyage of the Wandering Knight (London, 1581). Further editions: 1581, 1607, 1609, 1620, 1626, 1650, 1661, 1670. 17 Further editions: 1705, 1707, 1710, 1736, 1747, 1779. 18 Michael Keevak, The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-Century Hoax (Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 2004). 19 C. W. R. D. Moseley, ‘Richard Head’s The English Rogue: a modern Mandeville?’, Yearbook of English Studies, 1 (1971), pp. 102–9. 20 Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimage, 4th edition (London: William Stansby for Henry Fetherstone, 1626), side-note b, p. 785. 21 I. de Rachelwitz, Prester John and Europe’s Discovery of East Asia (Canberra: Australian National University, 1972). 22 Robert Silverberg, The Realm of Prester John (London: Phoenix, 2001). 23 John Kirtland Wright, The Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades (New York: Dover, 1965), p. 283. 24 Wright, The Geographical Lore, pp. 302–3. See also George H. T. Kimble, Geography in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1938), and J. R. S. Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 25 On this aspect, see C. F. Beckingham, The Achievements of Prester John.

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26 Sir Thomas Herbert, A relation of some yeares trauaile, p. 13. 27 For more details on this, see L. W. Brown, The Indian Christians of St. Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956). 28 Charles F. Beckingham and Bernard Hamilton, Prester John, the Mongols and the Ten Lost Tribes (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996), p. 2. 29 For more details on that text and the emergence of the Prester John legend, see Ladan Niayesh, Chapter 8 below. 30 See for details Rosemary Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences: A Study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 192–3. 31 On these analyses, see E. Ullendorff and C. F. Beckingham (eds), The Hebrew Letters of Prester John (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). 32 Paul Henze, Layers of Time: A History of Ethiopia (London: Hurst and Co., 2000). 33 Pigafetta, Phillippo, A Report of the Kingdome of Congo, a region of Africa and of the countries that border round about the same . . . Drawn out of the writings and discourses of Odoardo Lopez, a Portingale . . . Translated out of the Italian by Abraham Hartwell (London: John Wolfe, 1597). 34 Giacomo Baratti, The Late Travels of S. Giacomo Baratti, an Italian Gentleman (London: Benjamin Billingsly, 1670), p. 30. 35 Baratti, The Late Travels, p. 33. 36 Richard Jobson, The Golden Trade; or, a discovery of the river Gambra, and the Golden Trade of the Aesthiopians (London: Nicholas Okes for Nicholas Bourne, 1623). 37 Thomas Osborne, A Collection of Voyages and Travels, 2 vols (London: Thomas Osborne, 1745). 38 Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimes (London: W. Stansby for Henry Fetherstone, 1625), the First Part, pp. 1027ff. 39 Ibid., pp. 1149ff. 40 Ibid., the Second Part, pp. 114–18. 41 Francisco Alvarez, The Prester John of the Indies, ed. C. F. Beckingham and G. W. B. Huntingford (Cambridge: The Hakluyt Society and Cambridge University Press, 1961), p. 12. 42 Anon., Tresor politique contenant les relations, instructions, traitez et divers discours (Paris: Rolin Thierry, 1611), pp. 509–17. 43 H. Justel (ed.), Recueil de divers voyages faits en Afrique et en l’Amerique (Paris: Louïs Billaine, 1674). 44 Sa[muel] Clarke, A Geographicall Description of all the Countries of the Known World (London: R. I. for Thomas Newberry, 1657). 45 Job Ludolphus, A New History of Ethiopia (London: Samuel Smith, 1682). 46 J. H. Arrowsmith (ed.), Prutky’s Travels in Ethiopia and Other Countries (London: Hakluyt Society, 1991), pp. 117ff.

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47 C. F. Beckingham, The Achievements of Prester John (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1966). 48 Vsevolod Slessarev, Prester John, the Letter and the Legend (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1959). 49 Arrowsmith (ed.), Prutky’s Travels, p. 118. 50 [Jean Mocquet], Travels and Voyages into Africa, Asia and America (London: William Newton, and Joseph Shelton and William Chandler, 1696), pp. 234–5. Works cited Primary sources Anon. [David Lloyd?; Martin Lluelyn?], The Legend of Captaine Iones relating his aduenture to sea; his first landing, and strange combate with a mightie beare. His furious battell with his sixe and thirtie men against the armie of eleven kings, with their overthrowe and deaths. His relieving of Kemper Castle. His straunge and admirable sea-fight with sixe huge gallies of Spain, and nine-thousand sonldiers [sic]. His taking prisoner, and hard usage. Lastly his setting at liberty by the Kings command, and returne for England. London: I. M.[arriott], 1631. Anon. [Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas?; John Hall?; Alberti Gentili?], The Travels of Don Francisco de Quevedo through Terra Australis incognita, discovering the laws, customs, manners and fashions of the South Indians. A novel. Originally in Spanish. London: William Grantham, 1684. Anon. [A. Roberts?], The Adventures of (Mr. T. S.) an English Merchant, taken prisoner by the Turks of Argiers and carried into the inland countries of Africa. With a description of the Kingdom of Argiers, of all the towns and places of note thereabouts; whereunto is added a relation of the chief commodities of that country and of the actions and manners of the people. London: Moses Pitt, 1670. Anon., ‘Discours de la religion et de l’etat du Roy d’Ethiopie, appelé Preste Jean’, in Tresor politique: contenant les relations, instructions, Traictez, et divers discours appartenans à la parfaicte intelligence de la raison d’Estat, & de tres-grande importance à l’entiere cognoissance des interests, pretentions, desseins & revenus des plus grands princes & seigneurs du monde. Paris: Rolin Thierry, 1611. Alvarez, Father Francisco, The Prester John of the Indies. A true relation of the lands of Prester John, being the narrative of the Portuguese embassy to Ethiopia in 1520, written by Father Francisco Alvares; the translation of Lord Stanlet of Alderley (1881), ed. C. F. Beckingham and G. W. B. Huntingford. Cambridge: The Hakluyt Society and Cambridge University Press, 1961. Arrowsmith, J. H. (ed.), with annotations by Richard Pankhurst, Prutky’s Travels in Ethiopia and Other Countries. London: The Hakluyt Society, 1991.

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Baratti, Giacomo, The Late Travels of S. Giacomo Baratti, an Italian Gentleman into the remote countries of the Abissins, or of Ethiopia Inferior; wherein you shall find an exact account of the Laws, Government, Religion, Discipline, Customs etc. Of the Christian People that do inhabit there, with many observations which some may improve to the advantage and increase of trade with them. Together with a confirmation of this Relation drawn from the writings of Diamanus de Goes and Jo. Scaliger, who agree with the author in many particulars. Translated by G. D. London: Benjamin Billingsly, 1670. Camden, William, Remaines concerning Britaine. London: Thomas Harper for John Waterson, 1636. Careless, Franck [Richard Head?], The floating island, or, a new discovery, relating the strange adventure on a late voyage from Lambethana to Villa Franca, alias Ramallia, to the eastward of Terra del Templo, by three ships, viz. the Pay-naught, the Excuse, the Least-in-Sight, under the conduct of Captain Robert Owe-much, describing the nature of the inhabitants, their religion, laws and customs. Published by Franck Careless, one of the discoverers. London: Publisher unknown, 1673. Cartigney, Jean de, Le Voyage du Chevalier errant. Antwerp: J. Bellére, 1557. ——, The Voyage of the Wandering Knight, deuised by Iohn Cartenie, a Frenchman, and translated out of the French into English by William Goodyear of Southampton merchant. A work worthie of reading and dedicated to the Right Worshipful Sir Frauncis Drake, knight. London: Thomas East, 1581. Churchill, Awnsham and John, A Collection of Voyages and Travels, some now first printed from original manuscripts, others translated out of foreign languages and now first published in English, to which is added some few that have formerly appeared in English, but do now, for their excellency and scarceness, deserve to be reprinted. London: Awnshawm and John Taylor, 1704. Clarke, Sa[muel], A Geograpihicall Description of all the Countries of the Known World. London: R. I. for Thomas Newberry, 1657. Foigny, Gabriel de, La Terre Connue (1676), ed. Pierre Ronzeaud. Paris: S. T. M. F., 1990. Hakluyt, Richard, The Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation. 3 vols. London: G. Bishop, R. Newbwerrie and R. Barker, 1598–1600. Hall, Joseph, The Discovery of a New World or a description of the South Indies . . . By an English Mercury. London: E. R. Blount and W. Barrett [n.d., 1608?]. Harris, John, Navigantium atque itinerarium bibliotheca: or, a compleat collection of voyages and travels, consisting of above four hundred of the most authentick writers, beginning with Hakluit, Purchas, & in English; Ramusio in Italian; Theveot, etc. in French. London: Thomas Bennet, John Nicholson and Daniel Midwinter, 1705.

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Head, Richard [?], The Western Wonder: or, O Brazeel, an Inchanted Island discovered; with a relation of two ship-wracks in a sea-storm in that discovery. To which is added a description of a place called Montecapernia, relating the nature of the people, their qualities, humours, fashions, religion, etc. London: N. C., 1674. Herbert, Thomas, A relation of some yeares trauaile, begunne anno 1626. Into Afrique and the greater Asia, especially the territories of the Persian monarchie: and some parts of the orientall Indies, and iles adiacent. London: William Stansby and Iacob Bloome, 1634. Ibn Battutah, The Travels of Ibn Battutah, ed. Tim Mackintosh-Smith. London: Picador, 2002. Jobson, Richard, The golden trade; or, A discouery of the riuer Gambra, and the golden trade of the Aethiopians. London: Nicholas Okes for Nicholas Bourne, 1623. Justel, H. (ed.), Recueil de divers vouages faits en Afrique et en l’Amerique qui n’ont pointe esté encore publiez, contenant l’origine, les mœurs, les coûtumes & le commerce des habitants de ces deux parties du monde. Paris: Louïs Billaine, 1674. Ludolphus, Job, A New History of Ethiopia. Being a full and accurate description of the kingdom of Abyssinia, vulgarly though erroneously called the Empire of Prester John. London: Samuel Smith, 1682. Mandeville, Sir John, Mandeville’s Travels, ed. M. C. Seymour. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Mocquet, Jean, Travels and Voyages into Africa, Asia and America, the Far East and West Indies; Syria, Jerusalem and the Holy Land performed by Mr. John Mocquet. London: William Newton, and Joseph Shelton and William Chandler, 1696. Osborne, Thomas, A Collection of Voyages and Travels, consisting of authentic writers in our own tongue, which have not before been collected in English, or have only been abridged in other collections, and continued with others of note that have published histories . . . compiled from the curious and valuable library of the Earl of Oxford. 2 vols. London: Thomas Osborne, 1745. Pigafetta, Phillippo, A Report of the Kingdome of Congo, a region of Africa and of the countries that border round about the same . . . Drawn out of the writings and discourses of Odoardo Lopez, a Portingale . . . Translated out of the Italian by Abraham Hartwell. London: John Wolfe, 1597. Plattes, Gabriel [?], A description of the famous Kingdome of Macaria; shewing its excellent government: wherein the inhabitants live in great prosperity, health, and happinesse; the king obeyed, the nobles honoured; and all good men respected, vice punished and virtue rewarded. An example to other nations. In a dialogue between a schollar and a traveller. London: Francis Constable, 1641. Psalmanazar, George, An historical and geographical description of Formosa . . . giving an account of the religion, customs, manners, etc. of the

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inhabitants, together with a relation of what happen’d to the author in his travels; particularly his conferences with the Jesuits and others . . . Also the history and reasons for his conversion to Christianity . . . to which is prefix’d a preface in vindication of himself from the reflections of a Jesuit lately come from China. London: Dan Brown, G. Strahan, W. Davis, Fran[cis] Cotton, and Bernard Lintott, 1704. Purchas, Samuel, Purchas his Pilgrimes. London: William Stansby for Henry Fetherstone, 1625. ——, Purchas his Pilgrimage, fourth edition. London: William Stansby for Henry Fetherstone, 1626. Sadeur, Jean [?] / De Foigny, Gabriel [?], La Terre Australe Connue. C’est à dire la description de ce pays inconnu jusqu’ici, de ses mœurs & de ses coûtumes . . . Avec les aventures qui le conduisirent en ce Continent, & les particularitez du sejour qu’il y eut durant trente-cinq ans & plus, & de son retour. [Geneva?]: Iacques Verneuil, 1676. Sadeur, James, A New Discovery of the Southern World of Terra Incognita Australis, or the Southern World. By James Sadeur a French man who being cast there by a shipwreck, lived 35 years in that country, and gives particular description of the manners, customs, religion, laws, studies and wars of those southern people and some animals pertaining to that place; with other rarities. These memoirs were so curious that they were kept secret in a closet of a late great Minister of State, and never published till now since his death. Translated from the French copy printed at Paris by Public Authority. April 8, 1693. Charles Hern. London: John Duncton, 1693. Shakespeare, William, The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Siden, [Denis Vairasse d’Allais], The History of the Sevarites or Seravambi, a nation inhabiting part of the third continent commonly called Terre Australis Incognitæ. With an account of their admirable government, religion, customs, and language. Written by one Captain Siden, a worthy person who, together with many others, was cast upon those coasts and lived many ears in that country. London: Henry Brome, 1695. Stanley [of Alderney], Lord, Narrative of the Portuguese Embassy to Abyssinia, 1520–1527. London: Hakluyt Society, 1881. Webbe, Edward, The Rare and Most Wonderfull things which Edw. Webbe an Englishman borne, hath seene and passed in his troublesome trauailes in the cities of Ierusalem, Damasko, Bothlehem and Galely: and in the landes of Iewrie, Egypt, Grecia, Russia and Prester John. London: William Wright, 1590. Secondary sources Adams, Percy G., Travel Tales and Travel Liars 1660–1800. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962. Beckingham, C. F., The Achievements of Prester John: An Inaugural Lecture. London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1966.

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Beckingham, C. F. and Bernard Hamilton, Prester John, the Mongols and the Ten Lost Tribes. Aldershot: Variorum, 1996. Bennett, H. S., English Books and Readers, 1603 to 1640: Being a Study of the Book in the Reigns of James 1 and Charles 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Boffey, Julia, and A. S. G. Edwards, ‘Literary texts’, in Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 3: 1400–1557. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Brown, L. W., The Indian Christians of St. Thomas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956. Browning, D. C., Everyman’s Dictionary of Quotations and Proverbs. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1951. Greenblatt, Stephen, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Henze, Paul, Layers of Time: A History of Ethiopia. London: Hurst and Co., 2000. Keevak, Michael, The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s EighteenthCentury Hoax. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 2004. Kimble, George H. T., Geography in the Middle Ages, London: Methuen, 1938. Leedham-Green, Elizabeth, ‘University libraries and booksellers’, in Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 3: 1400–1557. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. McKeon, Michael, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740. London: Radius (Century-Hutchinson), 1988. Milton, Giles, The Riddle of the Knight: In Search of Sir John Mandeville. London: Allison and Busby, 1996; London: Sceptre (Hodder and Stoughton), 2001. Moseley, C. W. R. D., ‘Richard Head’s The English Rogue: a modern Mandeville?’, Yearbook of English Studies, 1 (1971), pp. 102–9. Phillips, J. R. S., The Medieval Expansion of Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Rachelwitz, I. de, Prester John and Europe’s discovery of East Asia. Canberra: Australian National University, 1972. Seymour, M. C., Sir John Mandeville, www.oxforddnd.com. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Silverberg, Robert, The Realm of Prester John. London: Phoenix, 2001. Slessarev, Vsevolod, Prester John, the Letter and the Legend. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1959. Tolan, John, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. ——, Les Sarrasins: L’Islam dans l’imagination européenne au Moyen Age. Paris: Aubier, 2003.

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Tzanaki, Rosemary, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences: A Study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville (1371–1550). Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Ullendorff, E. and C. F. Beckingham (eds), The Hebrew Letters of Prester John. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Wright, John Kirtland (with a new Introduction by Clarence J. Glacken), The Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades. New York: Dover, 1965.

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Part II Mandevillian ideologies

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4 The four rivers of paradise: Mandeville and the Book of Genesis Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Leo Carruthers

According to Mandeville’s Travels, a spring in the very centre of the Garden of Paradise gives rise to four great rivers from which all the fresh water in the world ultimately comes.1 The geography of this rather surprising statement requires examination. What are the names of these rivers, and what course do they follow? To begin with, where exactly is the Paradys Terrestre, as the writer unfailingly calls it, to be located? It is somewhere at the other end of the world, we are told in this extraordinary book which sets out as a guide to the Holy Land, but turns, half-way through, into an account of the marvels of the East. The Earthly Paradise is described in the ultimate stage of the Travels, in Chapter 33, the last but one. This was not simply the narrator’s invention, since he was relying, like other medieval writers, on a well-known passage in the Book of Genesis which describes the Garden of Paradise and its four rivers. Any discussion of its whereabouts must therefore take us, away from a modern, scientific viewpoint, outside the physical world and into the realm of theology, into what Rosemary Tzanaki has called ‘religious geography’, a space in which the account of the East is not a ‘digression’ but a means of ‘stressing the unity of this world’.2 This becomes evident in the way the author deals with the question of the Earthly Paradise. Indeed, however imaginary the latter may appear to the modern mind – as merely one more unidentified exotic place in a long series – it is central to the author’s purpose, and the text’s very engagement with marvels and cultural diversity must not obscure the fact that ‘for the author religious issues are paramount’.3 The narrator informs us in the Prologue that he has visited Jerusalem on several occasions; he offers to show readers the way (3/32–4), while promising at the same time to describe the marvels he has had the chance to see during his long voyages to ‘manye dyuerse londes and many prouynces and kyngdomes and

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iles’ (3/20). Both aims will be achieved. Precisely half of the book (17 chapters out of 34, 115 pages out of 230) covers the lands of the Bible, extending as far as Mesopotamia in one direction and Ethiopia in the other: among the last sacred places mentioned are Ur, birthplace of Abraham (112/26–8), and Saba, or Sheba (115/8).4 From there he sets out for ‘Inde’, a land reached by passing through ‘manye dyuerse contreyes’ (115/11), which he proceeds to describe. The pivotal Chapters 16–17 swing from the known world to the unknown, looking at once backwards to biblical sites and forwards to fabulous distant lands. The second half of the book explores India, whose emperor is the legendary Prester John (Chapter 32 explains why he is thus named),5 the isle of Java, China (‘Chatay’ in the text) and Persia, to mention just a few of the known proper names – for a large number of unidentified placenames occur in this traveller’s tale, whose geography seems to grow progressively more imaginary. After many other adventures the ultimate destination, the Earthly Paradise, becomes the focus of the book’s climax, Chapter 33. Its location is explained and its outside appearance is described – but only the outside, because sinful human beings are not considered worthy to enter the garden. After that the only thing the intrepid ‘Sir John Mandeville’ can do is to go back home, passing through China, India and neighbouring islands (Chapter 34). Since he has no space to give a full account of all the countries visited, with all their wonderful sights, he begs the reader to be satisfied for the present with what he has written (228/6–14). But before going back to England, he takes the time to visit the Pope in Rome, in order to present him with a copy of ‘this tretys’ (228/33). After a close examination by the Holy Father and other wise experts, who find that the text compares favourably with another book, which had been used in making the Mappa Mundi (229/8–9), the Pope declares its authenticity.6 Even people who normally believe only what they have seen with their own eyes are thus invited to trust the Pope’s judgement as to the truth of the author’s account (229/9–13). The visit to Rome is an interpolation found only in the English versions, and, as the papacy did not leave Avignon until 1377, this may be taken as evidence that the translation was written some time after that date.7 This summary makes it clear where the Earthly Paradise is situated in the structure of the narrative. However, the author had already briefly referred to the existence of this apparently real place as early as Chapter 6, when he first mentions the Nile, one of the

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rivers flowing from the Garden of Paradise (30/33–4). Both the city of Cairo and the neighbouring town of ‘Babyloyne the lesse’, where the Sultan of Egypt has his residence, are said to stand together on ‘the ryuere of Gyson, somtyme clept Nyle, that cometh out of Paradys Terrestre’ (30/33–4). This calls for two remarks, firstly about the two Babylons, and secondly about the river ‘Gyson’, here identified with the Nile. The author rightly distinguishes between the two Babylons, the lesser one near Cairo (it is now called ‘Old Cairo’ and forms the Christian district in the southern part of the modern capital city), and the greater in Mesopotamia, the latter being the site of the famous Tower of Babel in the Bible (28/7–28). It is interesting to see how the author introduces the ‘Gyson, somtyme clept Nyle’, as if the first name was the normal one, thus creating the impression that it was only occasionally called the Nile. This perspective is deliberately set up by the writer, as it will allow him to harmonise the four rivers of the Garden of Eden mentioned in Genesis with the major rivers of the known world.8 The modern reader, familiar with full-colour printed atlases and clearly defined political frontiers, may find it necessary to shake off such images and concepts when thinking of Mandevillian geography. The author traces the course of the Nile which, on leaving Paradise, is said to cross the deserts of India before disappearing underground for a great distance; it returns above ground below Mount Aloth (i.e. Atlas), somewhere between India and Ethiopia, then it flows around Ethiopia and ‘Morekane’ (Mauretania) before entering Egypt (31/13–21). It may be helpful to recall that India and Ethiopia (or Abyssinia) would have been seen by the medieval audience as belonging to a continuous landmass, not as isolated parts of different continents separated by the Indian Ocean. Bible readers would also have known, indeed, that at one period of history both territories had belonged to the same empire, that of the Persians, at least as early as the fifth century BCE when they were ruled by King Ahasuerus (486–465 BCE).9 In the biblical Book of Esther, an infamous letter or edict from the king begins thus: ‘Rex magnus Artaxerxes, ab India usque Æthiopiam, centum viginti septem provinciarum ducibus ac principus, qui nostræ jussioni obediunt, salutatem dicit’ (Esther, 16. 1).10 As the Book of Esther would have been well known to readers of ‘Mandeville’, the idea that India and Ethiopia were contiguous lands, and that the Nile flowed underground between them – ideas which seem at first sight to defy all modern notions of geography – would not in fact have seemed inherently unlikely. And needless

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to say, with the exception of a handful of Scholastic exegetes, most medieval readers of the Book of Esther would not have been aware of, or affected by, the textual niceties of the apocryphal passages; nor would they have known that Ahasuerus is ‘the only identifiable historical figure in the book’.11 The Nile is also reputed, as ‘Sir John’ later tells us, for the quantity of precious stones to be found in its bed, as well as for a very valuable wood, lignum aloes, much desired for its medicinal properties, which floats down the river from the Earthly Paradise (41/20–4). And precious stones are indeed associated with the ‘Gyson’ (Gehon) in the biblical account. On the other hand, the medicinal aloes, which is not in Genesis, may have been inspired by the trees of life which grow on the banks of the river flowing from the Celestial Jerusalem in John’s vision (Apocalypse, 22.2).12 Finally in the pivotal Chapter 16, ‘Mandeville’ makes another reference to the Earthly Paradise, and to the regions embraced by the rivers which rise there (mention is made of four rivers, though only three are actually named at this point): he says that Mesopotamia, Chaldea and Arabia lie between the Tigris and the Euphrates; Medea and Persia between the Tigris and the Nile; and Syria, Palestine and Phoenicia between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean (105/7–17). Towards the end of the book the author gives a more precise account of the Earthly Paradise and an indication of its geographic location (219/28ff.). Indeed, the brief allusions in the first half of the text hardly prepare the reader for the description that will come in Chapter 33. The Earthly Paradise, we are told, is situated in the Far East – as far as one can possibly go, way beyond Prester John’s empire – ‘at the begynnynge of the erthe’ (219/36), in a rocky, mountainous desert of eternal darkness. Beyond the known Orient, this antipodean region is actually on the other side of the globe – a globe whose roundness, interestingly enough, is emphasised by ‘Mandeville’ (220/4–5), thus contradicting the popular modern impression that all medieval people believed the earth to be flat.13 Clearly the author’s imagination has taken him way beyond Mesopotamia, the region which doubtless gave rise to the myth of the Garden of Eden described in Genesis. The reason for the discrepancy is explained by the Deluge, i.e., Noah’s Flood: ‘aquae diluvii inundaverunt super terram [. . .] Et aquae praevalerunt nimis super terram, opertique sunt omnes montes excelsi sub universo caelo’ (Genesis, 7.10, 19).14 According to ‘Mandeville’, the face of the earth was forever

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changed by this cataclysm, in such a way that mountains were turned into valleys (220/7–11). Only the garden of humankind’s first parents, placed on the highest point of the world, remained unharmed (220/15–21). Unfortunately the author cannot give an eyewitness account of the Earthly Paradise, because he was unable to go that far (220/12). The great distance is of course one reason for this, but even more important is his own unworthiness: in fact, he says, this holy place is not accessible to ordinary, sinful mortals (222/4–5). Anyone who dares to carry on without having received a special grace from God will have the greatest difficulty in finding the site and will die in the attempt. The Earthly Paradise is a secret garden, touching ‘nygh to the cercle of the mone’ (220/17), the description of which is based on earlier sources going back to Isidore of Seville, Peter Comestor, Jacques de Vitry and Vincent de Beauvais.15 Enclosed by an enormous wall made of a strange substance not like natural stone (220/24), it is camouflaged by greenery and thus hard to see, ‘for the walles ben couered alle ouer with mosse, as it semeth’ (220/22–3). And, finally, its only entry (should anyone even survive up to that point) is protected by burning fire, impossible for mortal man to cross (220/22–7). All of the difficulties evoked explain why ‘Mandeville’ did not succeed in finding or entering such a mysterious, sacred place, which he nevertheless presents as truly existing somewhere in our physical world. ‘Sir John’ now returns to the four rivers whose valleys were among the most important centres of civilisation in the ancient world. But all four of them come, he tells us, from a spring placed in the very centre of the Earthly Paradise (220/28–30), which is the source of all the fresh water in the world (221/2–5). The author’s account is directly inspired by the Book of Genesis, to which he adds some geographical details, so as to better situate the rivers for his readers. The four rivers are the Ganges, the Nile, the Tigris and the Euphrates, three of which have been mentioned earlier (in Chapter 16), while the Ganges now makes its first appearance. But the name Ganges, we are told, is only another word for the Phison of Genesis (220/30). It flows across ‘Ynde or Emlak’, which is all the same to ‘Mandeville’; that is to say, ‘Emlak’ is supposed (though why is unclear) to be the equivalent of the biblical Havilah, a land which is indeed crossed, according to the Bible, by the Phison; although the Bible itself is not always very precise about certain locations, the name Havilah appears to refer to Arabia.16 So the correspondence set up between the real Ganges and the

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mythical Phison of Genesis is a parallel to that mentioned earlier between the real Nile and the Gyson or Gehon of the Bible. The Ganges, or Ganga to give it its Hindi name, is not mentioned anywhere in the Bible.17 The Tigris and the Euphrates do not require further discussion at this point, though ‘Mandeville’ notes the etymology of the two names: Tigris means ‘Faste Rennynge’ (221/16), and Euphrates, ‘Wel Berynge’ or fruitful (221/19–21). Supposing, for the sake of argument, that the Phison and the Gehon of Genesis really were just different names for the Ganges and the Nile, would it not make sense for the seekers of the lost garden to sail upriver to find their common source? This would at least prove, once and for all, that they both lead directly to the Earthly Paradise. Calling for such a pragmatic attitude may appear overly simplistic; but we are surely entitled to say that if early readers of Mandeville’s Travels really believed the truth of the text, as Seymour suggests, then they might well have wished to explore further.18 To do so, however, would by no means have proved simple. To begin with, both the Nile and the Ganges flow from more than one source, high up in distant mountains which are practically inaccessible even today, despite the help of modern maps; and thus the sources of these rivers remained mysterious down to recent times. Secondly, since the Nile, according to the text, flows underground for a great distance between the deserts of India and Ethiopia, its point of disappearance at the Indian end is hard to identify, thus adding to its inaccessibility. The idea of a river going underground for some considerable distance before reappearing again is not, of course, contrary to nature or to probability; the phenomenon is well known in desert regions like Arabia, North Africa and Ethiopia. The ‘disappearance’ of the river is clearly an extension of the awe with which the ancient Egyptians regarded the Nile: crossing as it does the vast and inscrutable Sahara, it appears to come from nowhere, and they never succeeded in exploring the Nile’s upper reaches. South of Khartoum the river divides into the White Nile, which rises in Lake Tana (Ethiopia), and the Blue Nile, which rises in Lake Victoria (whose southern shore lies in Tanzania), but these facts could not have been known to ‘Mandeville’, since the exploration of those regions by Europeans began only in the seventeenth century and was pursued during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.19 In any case, as ‘Sir John’ graphically points out, the incredible hardships of a voyage seeking to reach the source are beyond the powers of any man or any ship: deserts, wild beasts, huge rocks and waterfalls, fierce currents and rapids, blinding

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storms and roaring waves, and total darkness for the final stage, all conspire to render the journey impossible. Untold numbers of people are said to have perished in the foolhardy attempt, because they were not acting in accordance with God’s will (221/22ff.). Even the most intrepid of readers would thus be discouraged from setting out to find the source of any of the four rivers of Paradise, since they would be no more likely to succeed in the attempt than the author himself was. Before we turn to the Bible to examine the origin of the belief in an Earthly Paradise, another remark may be made about the English text of Mandeville’s Travels. The exotic nature of the Garden of Eden seems to be hinted at through a particular use of language. Though translated from the French, as the Prologue explicitly says (4/1–2), it is strange that the English writer never changes the expression Paradys Terrestre, which unfailingly remains in French throughout the book. And this is equally true of the so-called Defective Version.20 The original, anonymous book was in fact composed in French, based on a variety of Latin sources.21 The English translator, apparently posing as ‘Mandeville’ the author, says that he first wrote in Latin and then translated his own text into French, before turning the French into English for the benefit of his countrymen (3/36–4/2). The editor describes this apparent pose or claim as being merely due to a ‘mistranslation’.22 But one could argue that it is, in fact, a deliberate attempt on the translator’s part to impress his English readers by showing off his multilingual learning. And the use of the foreign words, Paradys Terrestre, undeniably produces a distancing effect in English, somehow suggesting the translator’s perception of the exotic character of the subject, thereby reinforcing the difficulties involved in attempting to locate the Garden of Eden. The Book of Genesis, with its image of the Earthly Paradise and the four rivers, is clearly a major source of inspiration for the same idea in the Book of Sir John Mandeville. The primary meaning of the word paradise is ‘garden’, referring to the account in Genesis of the Garden of Eden where God placed the first human couple, Adam and Eve, mythical founders of the whole human race: ‘Plantaverat autem Dominus Deus paradisum voluptatis a principio; in quo posuit hominem quem formaverat. Produxitque Dominus Deus de humo omne lignum pulchrum visu, et ad vescendum suave; lignum etiam vitae in medio paradisi, lignumque scientiae boni et mali’ (Genesis, 2.8–9).23

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The Hebrew word for ‘garden’ was translated, in the Greek version known as the Septuagint, by the word parádeisos, which later gave rise to the name Paradis or Paradise in other European languages. This was not a neologism but a Greek word already in use, with the meaning of park, garden or orchard, the Greek word itself having been borrowed from the Old Iranian pairi-daéza, ‘circumvallation, walled-in park’.24 As for ‘Eden’ (not used at this point in the Vulgate or the Rheims/Douay Bible, but occurring in the Authorised Version and the Jerusalem Bible), it is a geographical name which at first meant simply ‘steppe’ or ‘plain’.25 According to this etymology, therefore, Paradise is literally ‘the garden of (or in) the plain’. It is reasonable to ask if the author of the account in Genesis was thinking of any particular plain. The distinction which appears in the first verses, between the garden itself and the plain (Eden) which surrounds it, disappears in the following verses, as well as in later books of the Bible, where the expression used is ‘Garden of Eden (or of pleasure)’, as of a single place, i.e. ‘Eden’ (or pleasure) has become the name of the garden itself rather than a plain surrounding it. As the commentary in the Bible de Jérusalem goes on to explain, there is in the Hebrew tradition a pun on the word for ‘plain’ (Eden) and the word for pleasure or delight, the Hebrew root being ’dn, ‘delights’. Though sometimes lost in translation, the possible confusion of the two may be deliberate. In both the Latin Vulgate and the English of Rheims/Douay, the idea of ‘pleasure’ (used as a common noun) is brought to the fore, whereas in the Authorised Version (the King James Bible), as well as the Jerusalem Bible, the word Eden is used as a proper name. The pun is justified by the reference to the trees, ‘fair to behold and pleasant to eat’, which provide sensual satisfaction. The theme of sensual pleasure conforms to the idea of a genuine garden, actually existing somewhere in the known world, which the next verses of Genesis make clearer: Et fluvius egrediabatur de loco voluptatis ad irrigandum paradisum, qui inde dividitur in quatuor capita. Nomen uni Phison; ipse est qui circuit omnem terram Hevilath, ubi nascitur aurum; et aurum terrae illius optimum est ; ibi invenitur bdellium, et lapis onychinus. Et nomen fluvii secundi Gehon; ipse est qui circumit omnem terram Æthiopiae. Nomen vero fluminis tertii, Tygris; ipse vadit contra Assyrios. Fluvius autem quartus, ipse est Euphrates. Tulit ergo Dominus Deus hominem, et posuit eum in paradiso voluptatis, ut operaretur et custodiret illum. (Genesis, 2.10–15)26

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Four rivers are here said to spring from the Earthly Paradise, and some geographical details are included to indicate their course. As suggested earlier, one might reasonably expect some adventurer to have attempted to follow at least one of them to its source in order to reach the Garden of Eden. The difficulty of exploring the first two, the Ganges and the Nile (supposing them to be identical with the biblical Phison and Gehon), is clear enough. And even if we set aside this identification, the problem still remains that neither of the names mentioned in Genesis is that of an actual river. The Phison (or Pishon) and the Gehon (or Gyson) do not appear on any ancient maps, and the Hebrew words behind these names are of uncertain meaning. There is a Gihon (perhaps from the Hebrew verb gîah, ‘spring up’) in Jerusalem, but it is only a spring feeding one of the wells outside the walls of the Old City, which does not refer to any river, near or far.27 It is nevertheless important as a spring (it still exists), and gives rise to a small stream which enters a man-made conduit which used to fill the (now ruined) pool of Siloam.28 Its apparent promotion in Genesis to a river flowing from Paradise seems, rather, to have a theological purpose, i.e. Jerusalem itself is being portrayed in symbolic terms. A similar symbolism will appear in the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of the future Temple (Ezekiel, 47.1–12): ‘from its very threshold would flow a river whose waters would get deeper and deeper as they flowed eastwards until they reached the Dead Sea, giving life to its waters . . . God’s Temple in Jerusalem will be at the heart of God’s land and be a source of life in the most remarkable way.’29 The minuscule Gihon, a source of water in the City of David but not to be compared in importance with the River Jordan, hardly seems to merit Ezekiel’s rhetoric or the Yahvist’s vision of Paradise, unless we realise that it is being elevated to a mystical level as a symbol of grace abounding. It would no doubt have been hard for ‘Mandeville’ to grasp that the extremely tortuous geography outlined for the Phison and Gihon in Genesis is anything but realistic. Hevilath (Havilah), the country supposed to be encompassed by the Phison, is, according to Genesis 10.29, a region of Arabia, a desert land in fact far from any river. Ethiopia, also known in some translations as Kush, does indeed contain one of the sources of the Nile (the Blue Nile), and this could indicate the Gehon, a river that is said to encompass that land. In terms of realistic, actual geography, both of these regions – even allowing for the fact that the names may not correspond exactly to the modern countries thus named (Arabia and Ethiopia)

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– are obviously very far away from the biblical land of Israel, where the Yahvist writer must have lived. Could an explorer have discovered the so-called ‘common source’ of the two genuine rivers correctly named in Genesis, the Tigris and the Euphrates, which were, like the Nile, the cradle of a brilliant civilisation in ancient times? No, because both of them in fact have twin sources, all in modern Turkey, rising in the Armenian mountains. It does not seem improbable that the idea of the ‘four heads’ of the river rising in the Earthly Paradise was ultimately based on these four Armenian springs. The two rivers flow south towards present-day Syria: the Euphrates divides this country in two while the Tigris forms a section of its border; never far apart, they then flow through modern Iraq, linked in places by canals, ancient and modern, forming Mesopotamia, ‘the land between the rivers’, an alluvial plain which is the cradle of agriculture. In ancient times each river ran separately into the Persian Gulf, which extended further inland than it does today, before the bay silted up; but silting eventually caused them to join up together some miles from the modern coastline, thus forming the Shatt el Arab, the name now given to the joint river before it enters the sea.30 Occupying one end of the Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia is quite far away from Israel, which lies in the opposite direction. In another important passage, Genesis 15.18, both the Nile and the Euphrates are mentioned together as the limits of the territory promised by God to Abraham’s descendants: ‘That day God made a covenant with Abram, saying: To thy seed will I give this land, from the river of Egypt even to the great river Euphrates.’ Significantly, this covers the entire area known as the Fertile Crescent, which, viewed from either of its extremities in Egypt and Mesopotamia, curves northwards around the inhospitable Arabian desert which travellers had to avoid. God’s promise does not, however, imply that the Israelites ever occupied such an extensive area in historical times, or even had any realistic hope of ever doing so as a distinct ethnic group. Current exegesis sees it as ‘an expression of the idea of a Promised Land’, i.e., a symbol of the divine will to unite all civilised peoples in knowledge of the one true God.31 In theological terms, the Promised Land is not a geographical entity, even if the author of Genesis thinks of it as such, but rather a spiritual state. While it is clear that the author places his own country in the centre of the civilised world, it is equally clear that the distance between the named lands, at opposite points of the compass, makes it quite impossible for rivers of the north

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to have a common source with rivers of the south. It thus appears that the Yahvist, as the Jerusalem Bible puts it, ‘was using old ideas about the configuration of the earth. His purpose was not to localise the Garden of Eden, but to show that the great rivers which are the vital arteries of the four regions of the world have their source in Paradise.’32 Despite appearances, in other words, this is not a physical description but a theological one. Indeed, his reference to the Gihon – which, as we have seen, is a small stream rising just outside the Old City in Jerusalem – may indicate a desire to present the Holy City itself as a symbol of Paradise, of the meeting place between humankind and God. As Curtis puts it, ‘Jerusalem is being likened to Eden’.33 And this is very much in line with Rosemary Tzanaki’s statement that, for ‘Mandeville’, ‘Jerusalem is not a mere physical area, but the spiritual heritage of Christianity; its centrality is not simply a physical but a theological necessity’.34 The misleading effect of scientific realism in Genesis is created by the use of two authentic rivers; and the fact that the Tigris and the Euphrates were the cradle of agriculture is not without relevance to the biblical conception of the ‘garden of pleasure’ in the plain, with its ‘trees, fair to behold, and pleasant to eat’ (Genesis, 2.9). This fertile plain could hardly be anywhere but in Mesopotamia, as Bible commentators have already remarked, noting further the linguistic connection between Eden and the Akkadian word edinu, ‘plain (of Mesopotamia)’.35 Here indeed, in a place situated about 100 miles (160 km) north of Baghdad, the German archaeologist Friedrich Delitzsch thought he had found the site of the Garden of Eden in 1881.36 Modern historians and literary critics, on the other hand, hesitate to take scriptural texts at face value; the author of Genesis may well have been thinking of Mesopotamia, but his notions of geography were primitive and partly based on mythology.37 No such precise location was attributed to the garden in the Hebrew tradition, and specialists in all disciplines are most reluctant to go any further.38 People have always been fascinated by the sources of rivers and tend instinctively, especially in hot, dry places, to see them as the origin of life and thus to attribute divine significance to them, as did the Egyptians in relation to the mysterious source of the Nile. In the Ugaritic tradition, from which the Yahvist borrowed certain elements, the god El dwelt ‘at the source of the two rivers, possibly a cosmic paradise similar to Eden but not a human abode’.39 It thus appears that the Yahvist’s vision, notwithstanding the apparently realistic aspect of the Genesis account, is in fact a theological one. It emphasises both the common origin

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of humanity, symbolised by water, and the central position of Israel in the ancient world. The medieval European mappae mundi inherited the same idea as they normally place Jerusalem at the centre of the world.40 This belief thus finds a natural expression in Mandeville’s Travels: ‘The centrality of Jerusalem, stressed from both a Christian and a geographical, scientific viewpoint, symbolises the unity of a world laid out around a common centre, within reach of an ultimate salvation promised to all.’41 In the biblical account of the Fall, Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden and are forced to earn their living by tilling the earth (Genesis, 3.23). Nevertheless, they and their children must still be in the fertile region because the story of Cain and Abel, in the next chapter, makes it clear that produce of all kinds is in abundance. Unfortunately, Cain is ‘cursed . . . upon the earth’ (4.11) for the murder of his brother, as a result of which he ‘went out from the face of the Lord, and dwelt as a fugitive on the earth, at the east side of Eden’ (4.16). Both the Authorised Version and the Jerusalem Bible speak at this point of his going to ‘the land of Nod, (on the) east of Eden’, but this is a misinterpretation since ‘Nod’ is not a place-name; it is based, rather, on the Hebrew nad or nod, meaning ‘wanderer’.42 Cain, therefore, is pictured as a vagabond in a vague and hostile east, far removed from the Garden of Eden. Curiously enough, ‘Mandeville’ locates the Earthly Paradise in this very region, somewhere in the east. There is an apparent contradiction here, an inversion of east and west: Cain is said to go east of Eden, leaving the garden behind him (presumably in Mesopotamia), so one would not expect the Earthly Paradise to be further east. This, however, may be explained by the Deluge, a cataclysm which entirely disrupted the world’s pre-existing physical contours (Genesis, 7 and 8); at that time, at least in the logic of the ancient cosmology, the garden must have been moved to the top of a mountain and beyond human reach. There is no doubt that medieval exegetes were aware that any verse in Sacred Scripture could be given a metaphorical or spiritual sense, of a kind universally found in biblical commentaries. It was not clear, however, that such a reading should take primacy over the literal sense in passages presenting apparently genuine facts. The four methods of scriptural interpretation – the literal (historical), allegorical (symbolic), moral (spiritual) and anagogical (mystical) senses of the text – are a common feature of Scholastic exegesis as practised by theologians such as Hugh of Saint-Victor (d. 1142), Peter Abelard (1079–1142) and Peter Lombard (c. 1100–60).43 But,

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though often found together in medieval sermons and treatises, the recognition that other interpretations were possible did not imply that the literal sense was called into question. As Jorge Luis Borges puts it, ‘The idea that the sacred Scriptures have (aside from their literal value) a symbolic value is ancient and not irrational.’44 But the recognition of the symbolic does not necessarily undermine the literal; one can thus hardly blame ‘Mandeville’ for taking the Bible at face value. Indeed, to do otherwise in the fourteenth century would have invited accusations of heresy. Before the application of the techniques of literary criticism during the nineteenth century, it was difficult to recognise or acknowledge that parts of the Bible might be symbolic alone. It was not therefore problematic for medieval readers to take every part of Genesis literally, and to think of the Garden of Eden as a real place in the physical world, however inaccessible it might be. There would be no good reason to doubt the reality of the four rivers named in Genesis, rising together in the Garden of Eden. Travellers as well as serious Bible readers would naturally take it for granted that the four rivers had a precise identification somewhere on this Earth, and no doubt some people would dream of navigating them in order to reach the garden – which of course nobody ever succeeded in doing, if indeed anyone ever tried. And it had to be God’s will that nobody should succeed. Why the Paradys Terrestre was beyond the reach of any human being could not be given a merely scientific, physical explanation but had to have a theological one, which is just what is provided by the book’s religious geography. Notes 1 220/28–30 and 221/2–5. All quotations given by page/line are from Mandeville’s Travels, ed. M. C. Seymour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). This is an edition of MS. London, BL Cotton Titus C.xvi, an English version of c. 1400. 2 Rosemary Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences: A Study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville (1371–1550) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 11. 3 Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences, p. 11. 4 The author’s treatment of Sheba shows a typical preference for the fabulous or legendary. Whereas he does not mention an authentic biblical figure like the Queen of Sheba, whom the context might reasonably have called to mind, he does give credence to the legend that one of the city’s rulers was among the ‘three kings’ (115/9–10) who supposedly paid a visit to the infant Jesus in the stable at Bethlehem.

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5 For further information on Prester John and his ‘Letter’, see Chapter 8 by Ladan Niayesh and Chapter 3 by Kenneth Parker. 6 On such maps see David Woodward, ‘Medieval Mappaemundi’, in J. B. Harley and D. Woodward (eds), The History of Cartography, vol. I (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1987), pp. 464–501. The anonymous author’s library most likely possessed a mappa mundi, of which there existed many, both in number and in type. 7 M. C. Seymour (ed.), The Defective Version of Mandeville’s Travels, EETS o.s. 319 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 172. This version of ‘Mandeville’, based on Queen’s College, Oxford, MS. 383, is the earliest English translation of the French text. 8 The rivers given as Phison and Gyson in Middle English are named Phison and Gehon in the Vulgate Bible; the Latin spelling was preserved in the Rheims-Douay Bible, the first official English version of the Vulgate, published by the English College at Rheims in 1582 (New Testament) and at Douay in 1609 (Old Testament). The Authorised Version (1611) gives Pison and Gihon; the Jerusalem Bible uses the spelling Pishon and Gihon. 9 Ahasuerus (or Assuerus) is known as Xerxes I in Greek; in the Vulgate he is called Artaxerxes in order to distinguish him from later rulers also named Xerxes. Latin quotations in this article are from the Vulgate Bible, the version current in medieval Europe. English translations are from the Rheims-Douay Bible. 10 ‘The great king Artaxerxes, from India to Ethiopia, to the governors and princes of a hundred and twenty-seven provinces, which obey our command, sendeth greeting.’ The Greek text of the Book of Esther gives this edict in the middle of chapter 3, as is also the case in modern editions such as the Jerusalem Bible. But in the Vulgate (and in Rheims-Douay) it will be found in chapter 16, where St Jerome appended those passages of the book which were of non-Hebrew origin. 11 See John Barton and John Muddiman (eds), The Oxford Bible Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 325. 12 The Apocalypse in Rheims-Douay (Apocalypsis Beati Joannis Apostoli in the Vulgate) is translated as The Revelation of Saint John the Divine in the Authorised Version. 13 Seymour, Mandeville’s Travels, p. xv, points out that while a belief in the roundness of the world was taught in the thirteenth century at the University of Paris, ‘Mandeville’ did much to make it popular. 14 ‘the waters of the flood overflowed the earth . . . And the waters prevailed beyond measure upon the earth; and all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered.’ 15 Seymour, The Defective Version, p. 171. 16 John L. McKenzie, S.J., Dictionary of the Bible (London and Dublin: Chapman, 1976), p. 341.

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17 The name Ganga may share an Indo-European root, ghe¯- (go, release, let go) with the Old English verb gangan (go), suggesting a basic meaning like ‘moving, flowing’ which would be natural for a river-name. 18 Seymour, Mandeville’s Travels, p. xiv, comments on the irony of the fact that the ‘genuine and truthful’ Marco Polo should be dubbed a liar while the fictitious ‘Mandeville’ should be ‘believed by all’ when the text was published. ‘[I]t is incontrovertible’, states Seymour again, that ‘“Mandeville” himself and his contemporaries believed implicitly in the wonders that he recorded’ (p. xv). 19 For more details, see Gianni Guadalupi, The Discovery of the Nile, trans. N. F. Davenport (Shrewsbury: Airlife, 1998). 20 Seymour, The Defective Version, p. 130/16, 25. 21 Seymour, Mandeville’s Travels, p. xiv, and The Defective Version, p. xi. 22 Seymour, Mandeville’s Travels, p. 231. 23 ‘And the Lord God had planted a paradise of pleasure from the beginning, wherein he placed man whom he had formed. And the Lord God brought forth of the ground all manner of trees, fair to behold, and pleasant to eat of: the tree of life also in the midst of paradise: and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.’ 24 C. T. Onions, Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966): see ‘Paradise’. 25 La Bible de Jérusalem: Nouvelle édition revue et augmentée (Paris: Cerf, 1977), p. 32, note to Genesis 2.8. 26 ‘And a river went out of the place of pleasure to water paradise, which from thence is divided into four heads. The name of the one is Phison: that is it which compasseth all the land of Hevilath, where gold groweth. And the gold of that land is very good: there is found bedellium, and the onyx stone. And the name of the second river is Gehon: and the same is it that compasseth all the land of Ethiopia. And the name of the third river is Tigris: the same passeth along by the Assyrians. And the fourth river is Euphrates. And the Lord God took man, and put him into the paradise of pleasure, to dress it, and to keep it’ (my italics). 27 McKenzie, Dictionary of the Bible, p. 309. 28 Adrian Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962; 4th rev. ed. 2007), pp. 8, 142; and see photo at p. 116. 29 Ibid., p. 7. 30 McKenzie, Dictionary of the Bible, p. 253. 31 Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas, p. 7 (my emphasis). 32 La Bible de Jérusalem (Paris: Cerf, 1977), p. 36 (my translation). 33 Curtis, Oxford Bible Atlas, p. 8. 34 Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences, p. 101. 35 McKenzie, Dictionary of the Bible, p. 211.

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36 F. L. Cross and Elizabeth A. Livingstone, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957; 3rd edition 1997), p. 467. 37 The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, p. 529. 38 McKenzie, Dictionary of the Bible, p. 211. 39 Ibid., p. 211. 40 See further on this subject in Iain Macleod Higgins, ‘Defining the Earth’s center in a medieval “Multi-Text”: Jerusalem in The Book of John Mandeville’, in Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (eds), Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), pp. 29–53. 41 Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences, p. 270. 42 La Bible de Jérusalem (Paris: Cerf, 1977), p. 35, note to Genesis 4.16 (my translation). 43 See A. J. Minnis, A. B. Scott and David Wallace (eds), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c. 1100 – c. 1375. The Commentary Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), especially Chapter 3, ‘Scriptural allegory and authority: Hugh of Saint-Victor, Peter Abelard, and Peter Lombard’, pp. 65–112. See also The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, p. 585, ‘Exegesis’, and p. 1465, ‘Scholasticism’. 44 Jorge Luis Borges, in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (Harmondsworth: Penguin Modern Classics, 1962; 1981), p. 244, quoted by Minnis, Scott and Wallace (eds), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, p. 65. Works cited Primary sources Mandeville’s Travels, ed. M. C. Seymour. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. The Defective Version of Mandeville’s Travels, ed. M. C. Seymour. EETS, o.s. 319. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. The Bible and Bible commentaries Biblia Sacra juxta vulgatam clementinam. Rome and Paris: Desclée, 1927. The Holy Bible: Rheims-Douay Version. New York: Douay Bible House, 1941. La Bible de Jérusalem: Nouvelle édition revue et augmentée. Paris: Cerf, 1977. Barton, John, and John Muddiman (eds), The Oxford Bible Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Curtis, Adrian, Oxford Bible Atlas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962; 4th revised edition 2007. McKenzie, John L., S.J., Dictionary of the Bible. London and Dublin: Chapman, 1976.

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Secondary sources Cross, F. L., and Elizabeth A. Livingstone, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957; 3rd edition 1997. Guadalupi, Gianni, The Discovery of the Nile, trans. N. F. Davenport. Shrewsbury: Airlife, 1998. Harley, John Brian, and David Woodward (eds), The History of Cartography, vol. 1: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. See especially chapter 18 by David Woodward on ‘Medieval Mappaemundi’. Higgins, Iain Macleod, ‘Defining the Earth’s center in a medieval “MultiText”: Jerusalem in The Book of John Mandeville’, pp. 29–53 in Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (eds), Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Minnis, A. J., A. B. Scott and David Wallace (eds), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c. 1100 – c. 1375. The Commentary Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Onions, C. T., The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966. Seymour, M. C., Sir John Mandeville, in Authors of the Middle Ages (1). Aldershot: Variorum, 1993. Tzanaki, Rosemary, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences. A Study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville (1371–1550). Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.

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Matthew Dimmock

In the search for Sir John Mandeville that occupies Giles Milton’s The Riddle and the Knight (1996), Milton relates a meeting he has with the Mufti of Northern Cyprus, Ahmed Djemal. After some discussion through an interpreter about Islam in Cyprus, tourism and extremism, they turn to the text of The Travels. Milton continues: Although Mandeville was fearful of Islam he writes from an extremely informed point of view. Unlike many of his contemporaries – to whom the killing of Muslims was a moral obligation – Sir John was both curious and tolerant, and instead of stressing the differences between Islam and Christianity he was interested in the similarities: ‘I will tell you,’ he writes, ‘something of their laws and their creed, as is contained in the book of their law, the Koran . . . The Saracens accept the Incarnation, and they will willingly speak of the Virgin Mary . . . and that the angel Gabriel told her that she had been chosen by God before the world’s beginning to conceive Jesus Christ and bear Him; they say she bore Him and yet was a virgin afterwards as she was before . . . Each year they fast for a whole month, eating only in the evening . . .’ The Mufti listened carefully . . . and nodded at the end of every sentence. ‘He was an intelligent man,’ he said at last. ‘He’s right in nearly everything he writes.’1

There are two aspects of this interchange worthy of note. Firstly, Milton clearly skirts around the potentially divisive aspects of the passage from which he quotes – depending upon the text he is using, he opts not to include phrases like ‘it is they who are wrong’ and their ‘false law’, or assertions that ‘Saracens’ might be ‘quickly and easily converted to our creed’ and that ‘they well know from their prophecies’ that their ‘law’ shall fail ‘as the law of the Jews failed, and that the Christian law shall endure to the end of the world’.2 Milton, ever keen to celebrate his subject, clearly has an agenda, and it leads him to quote entirely from one particular

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section of The Travels – the fifteenth chapter – ‘Of the customs of the Saracens and their law’. In Thomas East’s 1568 edition of The Travels this chapter is divided into three – the first (Chapter 44) is titled ‘Of the faith of the Saracens, and of the book of their law named Alkaron’, the second (Chapter 45) is titled ‘Yet it treateth more of Machomet’ and the third (Chapter 46) titled ‘Of the byrth of Machomet’. Milton refers only to the first of these, the section in which Mandeville, drawing entirely upon his primary source, identifies a range of connections and differences between the ‘religions of the book’ (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) with the intention of indicating Christian legitimacy in opposition to misguided Islam and demonised Judaism. Milton chooses not to refer to Mandeville’s depiction of the Prophet Muhammad – perhaps unsurprisingly – and it is this specific section that will provide the focus of this chapter. Milton is not the first to characterise Mandeville’s attitude to Islam as ‘extremely informed . . . curious and tolerant’.3 Frank Grady describes this episode as ‘sympathetic’, while C. W. R. D. Moseley identifies its remarkable ‘openness’ and notes that Mandeville’s ‘summary of Muslim attitudes to Jesus and Muhammad is fair, sensible and detailed’.4 Michael Paull argues that the primary purpose of this episode was simply to entertain, yet that ‘on the whole’ this account of Islam is ‘fairly objective’.5 Rosemary Tzanaki is a little more guarded, remarking upon the way in which The Travels portrays ‘the Muslim faith in a relatively favourable light’, while she interestingly places this episode in the context of Mandeville’s general ‘tolerance and respect’ for the devotions of ‘non-Catholic Christians’.6 R. W. Southern, in his Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages offers a more complex sense of competing elements, asserting that, for Mandeville, Islam was a ‘practical problem’ that ‘called for action and for discrimination between the competing possibilities of crusade, conversion, coexistence, and commercial interchange’.7 Regardless of the nature of Mandeville’s reflections, there is no doubt that his presentation of Islam was hugely influential. As ‘the most popular secular book in circulation’ in its day, this episode was undoubtedly a primary source for medieval Christian notions of Islam, the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad.8 Initially I want to consider the source for this small part of The Travels. Giles Milton breaks from his discussion with the Mufti of North Cyprus to address this question, noting in a conspiratorial aside that the tolerance of The Travels ‘was not as straightforward

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as it seemed. For although Mandeville was indeed one of the first Europeans ever to write about Islam, I had unearthed a littleknown book by a Dominican friar named William of Tripoli.’9 Aside from the erroneous assertion that Mandeville was one of the first Europeans to write on Islam – he was nearly six hundred years too late for that, and was not even the first ‘Englishman’ to write on Islam – Milton also promotes his own role in this ‘unearthing’ of a primary source.10 The standard critical orthodoxy – certainly since Malcolm Letts’s work in the 1950s – identifies one central source, from which was lifted – almost word for word – the key sections concerning Islam in The Travels: William of Tripoli’s De statu Saracenorum (1273).11 In addition one or two minor secondary supplemental sources are identified, most convincingly the sections on Islam in Vincent of Beauvais’ encyclopaedic Speculum Historiale (c. 1250), and also potentially the work of Philippe de Valois (there are other candidates).12 Only the encounter with the Sultan of Egypt, in which the Sultan offers an Islamic corrective to the morals and behaviour of Christians, cannot be easily sourced – but this scene, in which an ostensibly ‘alien’ figure reminds a Christian audience of their religious duties and the state of Christendom, is to some extent a commonplace. Any tolerance we identify in Mandeville must thus stem from William of Tripoli. However, Milton is right to suggest all is not as straightforward as it seems. Both Peter Engels and John Tolan have recently argued convincingly that De statu Saracenorum, traditionally attributed to William of Tripoli, ‘now appears to be an anonymous compilation that used William’s Notitia de Machometo [1271] as its principal source’.13 This text offers a great deal more detail on the Prophet and the rise of Islam than the original Notitia and, galvanised by the Mongol sack of Baghdad, as Tolan notes, it ‘argues that Islam is so close to Christianity that the conversion of Muslims by peaceful means should be an easy task’.14 This is clearly mirrored in the assertion in The Travels that ‘the Saracens beleue so nere our faith, that they are lightly conuerted, whan men preach the law of Iesu Christ’.15 To demonstrate this, the anonymous Statu Saracenorum – like Mandeville’s text – presents ‘a largely accurate (though obviously partial) description of Islamic history, doctrine, and ritual’ taken from the Notitia.16 Just as Mandeville indicates that the Saracens themselves believe that ‘theyr lawe of Machomet shall fayle’, the Statu ‘makes a series of predictions of Islam’s imminent demise, claiming that Muhammad himself had predicted the end of Islam when the caliphate was

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destroyed’.17 This text further emphasises the correspondences between Christian and Muslim perspectives upon the immaculate conception and the prominent position occupied by both Jesus and the Gospels in the Qur’an, just as Mandeville does. Finally – and of central importance for the Statu Saracenorum – the author ‘maintains that the way to bring [Muslims] . . . into the fold is through preaching, not war’.18 In popularising and recycling this focus upon conversion rather than conflict from decades before (although elsewhere in the text Mandeville appears in favour of crusade), the Travels fit alongside a range of texts whose writers sought conversion rather than violence. Significant opposition to the structures and rationale of crusade appeared in England from Wycliffe’s writings onwards and, from the 1390s, the Lollards, but also from figures like the poet William Langland and his influential Vision of Piers Plowman.19 Langland is ‘able to conceive of a reformed church, a just government, and a universal peace’ in which ‘Sarsens and Jewes’ are entitled to ‘the heritage of hevene as any man Cristene’.20 This formula can also be found in different forms throughout medieval literature in England, from the Willehalm epic (c. 1210–20) to the book of the English pilgrim and mystic Margery Kempe (finished in 1438).21 Yet The Travels diverges from De statu Saracenorum in its description of the Prophet Muhammad, and this may well be a consequence of the compiler’s reading of a more virulently polemical and popular tradition, and signals the consolidation of a single ‘life’ of the Prophet in early English printed texts, alongside the accounts found in The Golden Legend (printed by Caxton in 1483), Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon (printed by Caxton in 1482) and Lydgate’s Fall of Princes (printed by Pynson in 1494). Certainly many of those texts that seek to emphasise the connections between Christianity and Islam do so on the basis of an unquestioned assumption of Christian superiority and the inevitable conversion of Muslims and Jews. Even in this context, Muhammad is inassimilable. He is either ignored or characterised in terms of an arch-heretic/antichrist formula generated centuries earlier by (amongst others) John of Damascus in the eighth century and Eulogius of Cordoba in the ninth, as well as the influential twelfthcentury Toletano-Cluniac corpus, overseen by Peter of Cluny and incorporating the first Latin translation of the Qur’an, the Lex Mahumet Pseudoprophet, completed by Robert of Ketton in 1143.22 Thus while Langland can imagine Saracen entry into a Christian heaven, he repeats the standard anti-hagiography of ‘Makometh’

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– that he had been a ‘Cristene man’ and might even have ‘ben a pope’, but, frustrated in his ambition, he perverted the scripture and ‘in mysbileue men and wommen broughte’.23 The anonymous De statu Saracenorum is considerably different. ‘Machometus’ is schooled by a monk (named Bahira), ‘a simple Christian religious, of austere life’ who recognises in him ‘the fulfillment of the prediction of Genesis 16, the wild man whose hand will be against all. The monk takes the young Machometus under his wing and teaches him to pray devoutly to Jesus, son of the Virgin Mary.’24 A controlling and benevolent figure, this monk is ultimately killed by Machometus’ followers, who are jealous of his influence. Consider the representation of this myth in Mandeville: And also Machomet loued well a good man an hermite that dwelled in the wildernesse a myle from mounte Sinay . . . and Machomet went so often to this hermyte that all his men were wroth, for he harde gladly the hermit preach, and his men did walke all the night, and his men thought they would this hermyte were dead. So it befell on a night that Machomet was full dronken of good wine, and he fell in a slepe, and his men toke Machomet’s sworde out of his sheath whyles he lay and slept, and therewith they slew the hermit, and afterwarde they put vp the sword againe all bloudy, and vpon the morrow when that he founde the hermite thus dead, he was in his mynde verye angry and right wroth, and woulde haue done his men vnto the death, but they all with one accorde, and with one will sayde that he himselfe hadde slaine hym whan he was dronken, and they shewed his owne swerd all bluddy, & than he beleued that they sayde soth, & than cursed the wine & all those that drank it. And therefore Sarasins that are deuout drinke no wine openly.25

The details of the killing and the subsequent prohibition of wine are in the statu Saracenorum, yet the compiler of the Travels decides not to include any mention of the Christian nature and influence of the monk Bahira, who is not named. The followers are not jealous of his Christian power over ‘Machomet’ – they are just tired of walking around all night. Along with reference to the Prophet falling often into the ‘falling euill’ – epilepsy, which for medieval and early modern Christians was the means by which he cynically manufactured the illusion of divine visitation – and his vocation as a tradesman and a ‘great Astronomer’, as well as the implications of his drunkenness, the selective use and embellishment of the sources here makes the later sections on Muhammad in the Travels very different from the ‘relatively objective’ earlier sections.

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As I have suggested, this shift in register when discussing the Prophet indicates a keen sense of a more polemical tradition which the compiler of the Travels may well have found in his reading of Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum Historiale, which he certainly used elsewhere in the Travels. For his source on Islam, Vincent abbreviated Petrus Alfonsi’s ‘acerbic and derogatory biography of Muhammad’ from the latter’s Dialogues against the Jews (1110) which characterizes the Prophet as a cynical sybaritic heretic, educated by a Jacobite heretic called Sergius.26 The very wide circulation of this particular narrative – in medieval as well as in early modern England – might have given the compiler of the Travels pause for thought. Perhaps he downplayed the benevolent Christianity of the monk in his primary source in order to accommodate the polemical narrative of Sergius and his Prophet that was considerably more widely known. It was this narrative that would come to dominate early modern English imaginings of the genesis of Islam. The portrayal of Islam in Mandeville’s Travels thus appears ambivalent – the emphasis upon religious common ground between Islam and Christianity in the opening chapter implies a more ‘objective’ response, which – despite being transparently conducted within carefully drawn Christian parameters – does not demonise with the same polemic found in many contemporary texts and illustrations. Where his source describes the ‘lies’ and ‘fables’ of the Saracens, Mandeville attempts simply to describe a faith.27 This would appear to set the scene for the Egyptian Sultan’s reflection upon Christian sin – given all the more force since it comes from the mouth of an ‘infidel’, but one who recognises Christian morality. Yet I want to suggest that the tone shifts in the account of ‘Machomet’ – here the compiler of the Travels downplays (rather than foregrounds) the potential for assimilation in his source material. ‘Machomet’, this final chapter suggests, is a fraud: an intelligent but cynical manipulator, a lascivious drinker afflicted by the ‘falling evil’ with all the connotations such a condition carried for a late medieval and early modern readership. The implication is, perhaps, that the Prophet Muhammad and the assimilation or conversion of Muslims are incompatible – that the former must be discredited for the latter to succeed, an idea that was commonplace in early modern English texts concerning Islam. This may give us some sense of how influential this particular section proved to be upon English notions of Islam and the

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Prophet Muhammad, and how the Travels might have been read. As Rosemary Tzanaki has recognised, many of the extant manuscript copies of the Travels contain marginal notes surrounding the Islam and Muhammad section. In some only the dates of Muhammad’s birth and death are highlighted, while others – most notably the British Library’s Sloane 1464 – seem fixated with the Prophet, and pay particular attention to the story of the murdered hermit and the resulting prohibition of wine. This particular manuscript also features extensive notes on both the Prophet and the Qur’an.28 Such a focus is common in many manuscripts of this period, as well as in later, early printed texts which feature information on Islam, and suggests a keen appetite for this information. Other annotators and transcribers alter Mandeville’s initial date of 509 for Muhammad’s reign as new and more accurate information became available.29 There are also a number of images drawn to accompany this section in the manuscript: the British Library manuscript Royal 17 C xxxviii, for instance, features an image of the ‘Alcaron’ on a plinth and ‘Machomet’ wearing a rounded hat and carrying a large halberd, while a French version at the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Livre des Merveilles, also features images of Muhammad and his book, as well as of the slaying of the hermit mentor.30 As Tzanaki has recognized, for many illustrators of the Travels in manuscript ‘the Holy Land and its relics are far less important than the marvellous events of the Orient’: the original pilgrimage ‘has been changed into a sightseeing tour of Asia’. She argues that this continues with the woodcuts produced by Anton Sorg in his 1481 Velser edition, many of which were incorporated into ‘the French, Spanish and English edition[s]’.31 There were no images in Richard Pynson’s first English edition of 1496, but the single image that accompanies the section on Islam in de Worde’s 1499 edition (and again in his 1510 edition) is by no means straightforward. Following immediately after the tale of the slaying of the hermit, this image appears to show a prone figure having flames applied to one of his feet by a second standing figure. In Thomas East’s editions of 1568 and 1582, based upon the de Worde original, the same process is taking place. Other images of this episode – most notably Lucas van Leyden’s celebrated 1508 woodcut – are very different. One possibility – put forward but not explored by Tzanaki – is that here we have the Prophet suffering an epileptic fit – the ‘falling evil’ mentioned earlier in this section that so preoccupied medieval and early modern writers as a sure indicator of a lack of divinity. The total absence of any expression

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of pain on the face of the prone man in both versions of the image may indicate he is suffering a fit, and burning – although not often referenced – is recorded as potential relief for those suffering from the ‘falling sickness’.32 In terms of the further influence of Mandeville’s Islamic episode in early modern English print culture, there are three key examples I want finally to consider. This relation of a biography of the Prophet Muhammad for a Christian audience, drawn from Christian sources and traditions, was undoubtedly influential, and is incorporated into a number of sixteenth-century printed texts. The market for texts dealing with this material grew considerably with the Ottoman incursions into Christendom, which had begun with the ‘general crisis’ that was the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Following the first Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1529, the printing presses and the translators that fed them material struggled to keep up with demand – in sixteenthcentury Europe it is estimated that at least 3,500 titles directly concerning Islam and the Ottomans were produced.33 The Travels of Sir John Mandeville began the sixteenth century at the centre of that explosion of interest in England. As we have seen, Pynson’s edition was produced in 1496 and de Worde produced one in 1499 and another in or around 1510. Clearly aware of the potentially lucrative nature of this material, around 1515 de Worde then produced a radically pared-down version of the Travels, which featured no reference to Mandeville at all, and which consisted only of the three chapters concerning Islam and Muhammad from his earlier edition. His 1499 edition had been titled Here begynneth a lytell treatyse or booke named Johan Mau[n]deuyll knight born in Englonde in the town of saynt Albone [and] speketh of the wayes to the holy londe towarde Jherusalem, [and] of marueyles of Ynde [and] of other dyuerse cou[n]trees. His 1515 edition of the Islamic material alone was titled simply: Here begynneth a lytell treatise of the turkes lawe called Alcaron. And also it speketh of Machamet the Nygromancer. The similarity in the titles is obvious, and commensurate with a number of de Worde titles – yet the tone is very different. In de Worde’s new, reduced edition, ‘Mahomet’ is transformed from a ‘great astronomer’ to ‘a fals nygromancer’.34 Otherwise the text is reproduced almost exactly from his earlier edition of the Travels, although with the addition of around twenty-one lines at the start, which combine elements familiar from the Travels with more polemical material, and emphasise this shift in tone. It begins:

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For to knowe and to here some newe tydynges for to refresche ye menes wyttes and vnderstandynge. So wyll I somewhat wryte of ye turkes lawes/ whiche law in many poyntes accordeth wt our lawe & is ye lawe of Machomet / ye whiche in his lawe vsed a worde occidite. That is to saye kylle. So all them yt wyll not byleue in theyr lawe they slee them . . . And whan yt the predycante or prechour shal go to preche theyr fals byleue he hath a naked swerde in his hande as long as his sermon shall endure & last. Or elles he putteth yr sayd swerde in a hyghe place wher as euery body may beholde it yt is there for to fere and threten them therwithall. And we crysten people putteth a crucyfyxe in the myddes of yr chyrche on hyghe for humylyte & not for fere or thretenynge lyke as the turkes do the foresaid swerde.35

Then de Worde immediately picks up the start of the section in the Travels: ‘and so for the I wyll procede and wryte of theyr lawes and boke’. There are, however, a few choice alterations from the start – instead of ‘he’ we have ‘this fals negromancer Mahomet’. In this way, even the ‘relatively objective’ opening section becomes considerably more polemical, in line with the dominant narratives of Islam and the Prophet in circulation. This text is useful, I want to suggest, not simply for the ways in which it indicates an ‘afterlife’ for the specific section in the Travels concerning Islam and the Prophet but also because it demonstrates both how that section might be manipulated, and how it might clearly cater for a commercial demand that required ‘newe’ and up-to-date information (even if that novelty had to be manufactured from older texts). Notice, for example, the conspicuous shift away from ‘Saracens’ in the opening lines to ‘turkes’. It also might give us some sense of what that demand was for – certainly the less polemical tone of the Travels is here reconceived in a far more opprobrious frame. But how long could this crucial section of the text continue to be made relevant as more and more information became available in the later sixteenth century? Great significance is often accorded the incorporation of Mandeville’s Travels in the two great travel compendia of the early modern period – Richard Hakluyt’s The Principall Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589) and Samuel Purchas’s vast Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625). I want to suggest that, for the section concerning Islam and the Prophet Muhammad under discussion, the difference between these two texts is crucial for an understanding of the declining prominence of this episode and its influence upon conceptions of Islam in English culture. Hakluyt used a different version of the

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Travels from the Insular Version that forms the basis for all early English printed editions. He reproduced a version in Latin known as the Vulgate edition – and his is the only example of this version in print. Intriguingly, the Vulgate offers a rather less objective portrayal of Islam, beginning this section with ‘Of the detestable sect of the Saracens and their faith’ (De secta detestabili Saracenorum et eorum fide), making the opening section rather more oppositional. ‘False’ Muslims and Jews ‘walk in the dark, while only baptized Christians’ walk in the light and are destined for paradise.36 The life of ‘Mahomet’ remains largely unchanged, however, although the Sultan of Egypt’s chastisement comes at the end, rather than in the middle of this section. Hakluyt therefore chooses a text that is closer in tone to de Worde’s modifications earlier in the century. More important, perhaps, is the fact that this is the primary text concerning Islam and the Prophet Muhammad in the Principal Navigations – when looking up ‘Mahomet’ (there is no reference to ‘Mahometan’) in the index, Hakluyt refers the reader solely to Mandeville.37 This is perhaps surprising, given that a number of important works with carefully compiled biographies of the Prophet – far more extensive and considerably more up-to-date than the Travels – had been translated into English over the previous thirty years, including Boemus’s extensive section in his Fardle of Facions (1555) and Celio Augustine Curione’s A notable historie of the Saracens (1575), while medieval material such as Riccoldo da Montecroce’s Contra Legem Sarracenorum (c. 1300) continued to be printed and circulated in English. Yet perhaps the appeal of the Travels for Hakluyt lay in its apparent ‘Englishness’ – certainly no other English author had written so extensively on the Prophet without some transparent debt to Mandeville by 1589. The situation seems profoundly different with the publication of Purchas his Pilgrimes in 1625. By this point a crowd of British travellers had returned from Muslim lands and published detailed accounts of their experiences – including William Biddulph, Fynes Morrison, George Sandys, William Lithgow and Thomas Coryat. Ralph Carr, of the Middle Temple, had produced his considerable Mahumetane, or Turkish Historie in 1600, and Richard Knolles launched his monumental Generall Historie of the Turks three years later. Most importantly for the study of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad, William Bedwell – father of English Arabism – had produced his detailed Mohammedis Imposturae in 1615. In Purchas’s first major volume, Purchas his Pilgrimage, or Relations of the World and the Religions observed in all Ages of 1613, there

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is no sign of Mandeville’s account, but Purchas does include an extraordinarily detailed chapter on the life of ‘Mahomet’, largely taken from the preface to an Italian translation of the Qur’an, L’Alcorano di Macometto, completed by Arrivabene in 1547.38 In his 1617 third edition, Purchas would augment this with a further chapter titled ‘The Saracen Storie of Mahomet’s Life’.39 This ongoing shift in emphasis towards ‘authentic’ Muslim sources gives a sense of the increasing sophistication of this knowledge. So when we come to the massive 1625 edition – Purchas his Pilgrims – we find Mandeville’s Travels in Latin, as in Hakluyt, but here purged of the entire section on Islam and Muhammad. Instead, later in the text, Purchas writes that those readers wanting to know more on these subjects should refer to ‘my learned friend Master Bedwell’ and ‘my Pilgrimage’.40 On Islam at least, the Travels had been superseded. This chapter has been concerned with the peculiarly uneven character of Mandeville’s conception of Islam and Muhammad – a likely consequence of the differing investments of his sources. However it was composed, it no doubt had a prolonged influence in early modern England, at least into the early years of the seventeenth century. However, while later seventeenth-century editions did not necessarily follow Purchas’s example in cutting Islam out of the Travels – both the 1696 Chiswell, Walford, Wotton and Conyers edition and the 1722 Conyers edition do keep this section – by 1750 the status of the Travels had clearly changed. The Foreign Travels of Sir John Mandeville containing an Account of remote kingdoms, countries, rivers, castles &c together with a description of Giants, pigmies, and various people of odd deformities . . . produced in 1750, 1780 and 1785 does not include any mention of Islam or Muhammad, probably because English scholarship on the subject – epitomised in the work of the great English orientalist George Sale – seemed to have rendered this section obsolete. Until Giles Milton’s rediscovery, that is. Notes 1 Giles Milton, The Riddle and the Knight: In Search of Sir John Mandeville (London: Allison and Busby and Stourghton, 1996), pp. 96–7. 2 These phrases do vary across different printed editions of this text. For the purposes of this chapter, I will be quoting from (unless specifically mentioned) Thomas East’s edition of The voiag[e] and trauayle, of syr

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5

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7 8

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Iohn Maundeuile knight, which treateth of the way toward Hierusalem, and of maruayles of Inde with other ilands and countries (London: In Breadstreat at the nether ende, by Thomas East, 1568). See particularly sig. G1v–G4v. Milton, The Riddle and the Knight, p. 96. Frank Grady, ‘“Machomete” and Mandeville’s Travels’, in John V. Tolan (ed.), Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 271–88 (273); C. W. R. D. Moseley (ed.), The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (London: Penguin Classics, rev. ed., 2005), p. 27. Michael R. Paull, ‘The figure of Mahomet in Middle English literature’ (Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of North Carolina, 1969), p. 187. Rosemary Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences: A Study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville (1371–1550) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 225. R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 3. Grady, ‘“Machomete” and Mandeville’s Travels’, p. 271. Aside from R. W. Southern, more detail concerning medieval Christian attitudes towards Islam can be found in Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1960), and John Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Milton, The Riddle and the Knight, p. 97. There are certainly earlier examples, but the most prominent early Englishman to write on Islam may well be Robert of Ketton, whose translation of the Qur’an in 1143 (the Lex Mahumet Pseudoprophet) was the first of its kind. Malcolm Letts, Mandeville’s Travels: Texts and Translations (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1953), p. 93, n. 1. Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences, p. 191. William of Tripoli, Notitia de Machometo: De statu Sarracenorum, ed. Peter Engels (Würzburg: Corpus Islamo-Christianum, 1992), pp. 52–74, and Tolan, Saracens, pp. 203–9. Tolan, Saracens, p. 204. East’s The voiag[e] and trauayle, of syr Iohn Maundeuile knight, sig. G1v. Tolan, Saracens, p. 204. Ibid., p. 204. Ibid., p. 204. Wycliffe and the Lollards are considered in Christopher Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 1095–1588 (London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 262–6. William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman [the B-text], ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), passus

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25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

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X, ll. 344–8; further discussed in Robert Schwoebel, The Shadow of the Crescent: The Renaissance Image of the Turk (1453–1517) (Nieuwkoop: B. De Graaf, 1967), p. 222. Kempe ‘prayed for the conversion of Saracens and Jews’; further discussed in Schwoebel, The Shadow of the Crescent, p. 221. On translations of the Qur’an, see Thomas E. Burman, Reading the Qur’a¯n in Latin Christendom, 1140–1560 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, passus XV, ll. 397–408. William of Tripoli, Notitia de Machometo, §1, p. 196 and [pseudo-] William of Tripoli, De statu Sarracenorum, §1, pp. 270–2. Also quoted in Tolan, Saracens, pp. 204–5. East’s The voiag[e] and trauayle, of syr Iohn Maundeuile knight, sig. G3v–G3r. Tolan, Saracens, pp. 149–50. Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences, p. 225. BL Sloane 1464. See also Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences, pp. 248–9. Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences, p. 202. BL Royal 17 C xxxviii. On the Livre des Merveilles see Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences, p. 252. Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences, p. 75. See Oswei Temkin, The Falling Sickness: A History of Epilepsy from the Greeks to the Beginnings of Modern Neurology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1945), pp. 115–16. Avignor Levy, The Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1992), p. 13. Here begynneth a lytell treatise of the turkes lawe called Alcaron. And also it speketh of Machamet the Nygromancer (London: In fletestrete in the sygne of the Sonne by me Wynkyn de Worde, 1519?), sig. A2v. Here begynneth a lytell treatise of the turkes lawe called Alcaron, sig. A2v. Richard Hakluyt, The principall nauigations, voyages and discoueries of the English nation made by sea or ouer land, to the most remote and farthest distant quarters of the earth . . . (London: By George Bishop and Ralph Newberie, deputies to Christopher Barker, printer to the Queenes most excellent Maiestie, 1589), p. 42. See also Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences, p. 245. Hakluyt, The principall nauigations, voyages and discoueries, ‘A Table Alphabeticall’ [unpaginated]. Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimage. Or Relations of the world and the religions obserued in all ages and places discouered, from the Creation vnto this present In foure partes . . . (London: William Stansby for Henry Fetherstone, 1617), p. 199. Although Arrivabene claimed his

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edition was translated directly from the Arabic, it was in fact based on Bibliander’s 1543 Latin printed edition and thus on Ketton’s 1143 translation. 39 Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimage, p. 280. 40 Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimes In fiue bookes . . . (London: William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, 1625), p. 1505. Works cited Primary sources Anon., Here begynneth a lytell treatise of the turkes lawe called Alcaron. And also it speketh of Machamet the Nygromancer . . . Enprynted at London: In fletestrete in the sygne of the Sonne by me Wynkyn de worde, 1519? Biddulph, William, The Travels of certaine Englishmen . . . London: Printed by Th. Haueland for W. Aspley, 1609. Boemus, Joannes, The Fardle of Facions conteining the aunciente maners, customes, and lawes, of the peoples enhabiting the two partes of the earth, called Affrike and Asie . . . trans. W. Watreman. London: Jhon Kingstone & Henry Sutton, 1555. Carr, Ralph, The Mahumetane or Turkish Historie, containing three Bookes . . . London: Printed by Thomas Este, 1600. Curione, Celio Augustino, A notable historie of the Saracens . . . London: Imprinted by William How for Abraham Veale, 1575. Hakluyt, Richard, The principall nauigations, voyages and discoueries of the English nation made by sea or ouer land, to the most remote and farthest distant quarters of the earth . . . Imprinted at London: By George Bishop and Ralph Newberie, deputies to Christopher Barker, printer to the Queenes most excellent Maiestie, 1589. Knolles, Richard, The Generall Historie of the Turkes, from the first beginning of that Nation to the rising of the Othoman Familie . . . London: Printed by Adam Islip, 1603. Langland, William, The Vision of Piers Plowman [the B-text], ed. A. V. C. Schmidt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Lithgow, William, A most delectable, and true discourse, of an admired and painefull peregrination . . . London: Printed by Nicholas Okes, 1614. Mandeville, John, The voiag[e] and trauayle, of syr Iohn Maundeuile knight, which treateth of the way toward Hierusalem, and of maruayles of Inde with other ilands and countries. Imprinted at London: In Breadstreat at the nether ende, by Thomas East, 1568. ——, The Voyages & Travels of Sir John Mandeville . . . with woodcuts. London: For Chiswell, Walford, Wotton and Conyers, 1696. ——, The voyages and travels of Sir John Mandevile . . . London: G. Conyers, 1722.

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——, The Foreign Travels of Sir John Mandeville containing an Account of remote kingdoms, countries, rivers, castles &c together with a description of Giants, pigmies, and various people of odd deformities . . . London: Aldermary Churchyard, 1750. Moryson, Fynes, An itinerary written by Fynes Moryson Gent. . . . London: Printed by Iohn Beale, 1617. Purchas, Samuel, Purchas his pilgrimage. Or Relations of the world and the religions obserued in all ages and places discouered, from the Creation vnto this present In foure partes . . . London: William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, 1613. ——, Purchas his pilgrimage, or Relations of the world and the religions obserued in al ages and places discouered, from the Creation vnto this present In foure parts . . . London: William Stansby for Henry Fetherstone, 1617. ——, Purchas his pilgrimes In fiue bookes . . . London: William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, 1625. Sale, George [editor and translator], The Koran, commonly called the Alcoran of Mohammed: translated into English immediately from the original Arabic with explanatory notes, taken from the most approved commentators . . . London: C. Ackers for J. Wilcox, 1734. Sandys, George, A relation of a iourney begun an: Dom: 1610 . . . London: Printed by Richard Field for W. Barrett, 1615. William of Tripoli, Notitia de Machometo: De statu Saracenorum, ed. Peter Engels. Würzburg: Corpus Islamo-Christianum, 1992. Secondary sources Burman, Thomas E., Reading the Qur’a¯n in Latin Christendom, 1140– 1560. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Grady, Frank, ‘“Machomete” and Mandeville’s Travels’, pp. 271–88 in John V. Tolan (ed.), Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam. London: Routledge, 2000. Letts, Malcolm, Mandeville’s Travels: Texts and Translations. London: The Hakluyt Society, 1953. Levy, Avignor, The Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire. Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1992. Milton, Giles, The Riddle and the Knight: In Search of Sir John Mandeville. London: Allison and Busby, 1996. Moseley, C. W. R. D. (ed.), The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. London: Penguin Classics, revised ed., 2005. Paull, Michael R., ‘The figure of Mahomet in Middle English literature’. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of North Carolina, 1969. Schwoebel, Robert, The Shadow of the Crescent: The Renaissance Image of the Turk (1453–1517). Nieuwkoop: B. De Graaf, 1967. Southern, R. W., Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962.

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Tolan, John, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Tyerman, Christopher, England and the Crusades, 1095–1588. London: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Tzanaki, Rosemary, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences: A Study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville (1371–1550). Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.

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6 A ‘science of dreams’: ‘the fantastic ethnography’ of Sir Walter Ralegh and Baconian experimentalism Line Cottegnies

Sir Walter Ralegh mentions Mandeville twice: once in The Discoverie of Guiana (1596) and again almost twenty years later, in The History of the World (1614). Ralegh could have had easy access to Mandeville’s Travels in Hakluyt’s 1589 collection where it was published in Latin in what is known as the ‘Vulgate’ version.1 These two references to Mandeville show Ralegh’s ambiguous attitude towards what was universally acknowledged at the time as an unreliable source. In The History of the World he is clearly aware of the dubious reputation of ‘our great traveller’ as ‘the greatest fabler in the world’.2 Yet he seems loath to do away with him,3 very much like Purchas who, in 1625, adds a whole preliminary to justify his inclusion of Mandeville in Purchas his Pilgrimes.4 The problem with Mandeville was that many of the seemingly impossible things he mentioned had indeed later been proved true. In The Discoverie of Guiana, Ralegh writes: ‘Mandeville, whose reportes were held for fables many yeares, and yet since the East Indies were discovered, wee finde his relations true of such thinges as heeretofore were held incredible.’5 Ralegh further comments upon the importance of ‘experience’ as an antidote to a certain provincial attitude in The History of the World when he writes that the ‘magnificence and riches of those Kings we could in no sort be perswaded to [believe], till our owne experience had taught us, that there were many stranger things in the World, than are to bee seene between London and Stanes’ (p. 207). The topos of the suspension of disbelief is inseparable from a belief in a world open to exploration where knowledge is known to be incomplete and sketchy.6 As the OED reminds us, one of the meanings of ‘discovery’ in fact explicitly links exploration and the uncovering of secrets or marvels.7 It is clear that the fabulous proceeds from the belief in the ‘remainder’, i.e. all that lies beyond the pale of the known world and cannot be explained away.

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In his Travels Mandeville relies on the fabulous lore that he inherits from ancient and medieval sources (aptly called in the subtitle of this volume ‘Mandevillian lore’) and to which he, in turn, contributes. As we know, he is only one of numerous authors writing about ‘Plinian races’ and marvels.8 Ancient histories, Christian encyclopaedias, books of secrets, cosmographies and geographies all relied on the same folklore, which they contributed to making and transmitting.9 They were all using common sources for such ‘classic’ marvels as, for instance, men without heads or Amazons – both discussed by Ralegh. The former he mentions in fact specifically in conjunction with Mandeville, pointing to his probable source of inspiration,10 while the Amazons obviously capture his imagination in a region of the world that bears their name. Mandeville’s Travels, among all the possible sources, was particularly popular in England, most probably because of its pseudo-English protagonist. Written from a subjective point of view as a peripatetic quest, it could thus be read as an English alternative to Marco Polo’s famous narrative. In the context of Spanish domination on travel and travel writing in the sixteenth century, it offered a nationalistic epic that could stand as a counterpart to Spanish narratives of exploration. William Warner thus uses Mandeville as an antidote to the Spanish domination on the seas in Albion’s England.11 In The Discoverie of Guiana, I would like to argue, Ralegh uses a type of experimental observation that Bacon would come to theorise only a few years later, in The Advancement of Learning, published in 1605. For Bacon, a reformed natural history needed to reject ‘all superstitious stories’ and ‘old wives’ fables’.12 On the one hand, Ralegh proves an attentive reader of ‘Mandevillian lore’; but, on the other, his attitude towards authorities shows a pre-scientific concern for verification and accuracy that implies a more sceptical examination of his sources.13 As will be apparent, Ralegh consistently rejects the supernatural and tends to lean towards rationalist explanations for the fabulous creatures of yore, while still, in Anthony Grafton’s wording, ‘peer[ing] through tightly woven filters of expections and assumptions from the past’.14 So while his narrative of exploration, The Discoverie of Guiana, privileges firsthand testimonies, it is also a site of conflict between what can be seen and recorded, and what cannot be seen and must therefore be taken on trust or mediated through other sources. Like Columbus before him,15 Ralegh discovers for himself that his learned ‘authorities’ might have been wrong about the torrid zone, and about the

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existence of most monstrous races; but he does not quite disqualify ancient and medieval ‘knowledge claims’ either. His cautious attitude towards Mandeville is representative of the epistemological bind in which he finds himself.16 As will become apparent, the fabulous races of old are submitted to a complex hermeneutics in The Discoverie of Guiana. Firstly, they are given what the anthropologist Neil Whitehead has called ‘protoethnological interpretations’ (with all the decoding, investigating and transposing this involves), through which local myths and cultural practices are enrolled to help explain away the fabulous lore of old – sometimes at the expense of misreadings.17 Tribes of warrior women are thus made to fit the part of the Amazons of old, while men ‘with their heads not appearing above their shoulders’ are identified with the ancient Blemmies or Acephali.18 Secondly, Ralegh submits the signifiers used to designate the monstrous races to a contextualised philological revising. Such is the case with the word ‘Cannibals’, which, following a long-established tradition, he uses as a generic term for Carib tribes, by virtue of its phonetic resemblance with ‘Caribas’.19 I will show that this strategy is also applied to the Acephali. Finally, the old ‘fables’ transmigrate and become reincarnated into others. The need for the marvellous seems irrepressible, and the monstrous races go through a series of metamorphoses. While Ralegh inherits the modern myth of Eldorado from the Spaniards, he reads it in the light of his own search for a colonial paradise. The epistemology of travel: ascertaining authority and probability Even though both Mandeville’s Travels and Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana present themselves as travel narratives, their epistemologies of travel have very little in common. Critics have amply shown that Mandeville’s text is a generic palimpsest – a geography, an encyclopaedia of knowledge and travels, a book of secrets and marvels.20 In many respects, Ralegh’s travel narrative is of the early modern kind, in particular for its attention to direct observation rather than reliance on second-hand testimony and report, and also for its mistrust of authorities. The text is striking for its precision regarding the dates of narrated events and the spatial progress of the expedition with its clear emphasis on visual perception or firsthand testimony (‘I saw’, ‘we saw’, ‘we can witness’, ‘I beheld’). Yet the narrative is itself a generic hybrid. It presents itself as an almost day-by-day travelogue (with many ellipses) of a journey four hundred miles upstream the Orenoque in present-day Venezuela,

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a passage full of incidents and suspense, as the exploration of the region is coupled with the quest for the secret city of the Inca (or ‘Inga’, as Ralegh has it), El Dorado. But the text is also a pamphlet through which Ralegh competes for Elizabeth’s favour, while defending himself against aspersions about the spurious nature of his trip to Guiana. According to Anna Beer, by resorting to print, Ralegh was attempting to bypass the patronage system to appeal to a larger public of enterprising investors to finance a venture about which the Queen had become sceptical.21 Essential to this strategy was, of course, the attempt to turn his failed ‘discovery’ into a fruitful investment for future colonisation. The text is vitally concerned with the problem of belief-claims: it deals with how to build an epistemological apparatus that will ensure that the writer (and ‘performer’ of the discovery, as the text has it) is believed. This means establishing certainty in sorting out valid knowledge-claims from heterogenous sources, i.e. ancient and medieval authorities, Spanish (and other) accounts of previous explorations, various contemporary documents (such as correspondence stolen from his Spanish rivals, which he includes in his own published account of the voyage), but also oral testimonies of the Spanish enemies and of the ‘Indians’ themselves. Failing to sift the information provided from those sources would necessarily have disqualified Ralegh as the ‘author’ of the text and of the discovery, and would have annihilated his hopes for a future plantation. Many critics have noted the unique, meticulous attention to local ‘nations’ and local politics in the text.22 Ralegh carefully collects data and compares notes between his sources of information. The record of the various settlements and ethnic groups, but also of their relative politics and systems of alliances, makes of the text as much a geographic exploration of a hitherto little-known ‘labyrinth of rivers’ as a geopolitical cartography of the region, no doubt for future use. The fact that Ralegh should promise a map, and yet withhold it, shows how conscious he was of dealing with sensitive information. He warns: ‘by a draught thereof all may bee prevented by other nations’ (p. 144). Ralegh shows little xenophobia towards the locals: he describes them mostly as ‘beautiful’ and virtuous, except when prolonged contact with the Spaniards has made them vicious. Thanks to an apparently ‘faithful’ interpreter, he seems to consider communication with most of his ‘Indian’ interlocutors as transparent, even gaining the confidence of one King, Topiawari, who becomes his friend and main source of information.23 In one unusually poignant moment, Ralegh’s fascination and identification

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with the old chief is revealed in the blurring of the narrative frame around Topiawari’s reported speech, which turns into direct speech recorded in the first person (p. 183). The subsequent symbolic ‘exchange of sons’ between Ralegh and Topiawari can be read as an extraordinary expression of the intensity of the encounter (p. 185). Mary B. Campbell notes how the inclusion of Topiawari’s two long speeches turns the ‘Indian’ into a subject in the narrative, a moment which she sees as ‘quietly revolutionary’.24 It is certainly worth noting that even with ulterior motives in mind (‘my desire of golde’, which he is careful, however, to keep secret, p. 185), Sir Walter’s focus on Indian affairs is remarkable, especially when contrasted with the eurocentrism of other narratives of the period about the same region, such as Robert Harcourt’s fascinating but chilling account of his 1607 expedition in Guiana in Ralegh’s footsteps.25 In Harcourt’s narrative, not only are the ‘Indians’ taught what they should remember and say – i.e. that they abdicated the governement of their land to Ralegh ten years before – but he also highlights his ultimate goal: forced conversion and christening in order to free the natives from ‘that infernall darkeness wherein they live’.26 In contrast, two salient aspects of Ralegh’s text are precisely its reliance on local toponyms and patronyms, which is in direct opposition to the Spanish strategy of forced conversion and renaming, and his silence about the question of evangelising. The anthropologist Neil Whitehead has shown, in fact, how Ralegh’s text, more than others, qualifies as protoethnography because it reflects something of the local practices and records muted echoes of native discourse, even if Ralegh did not always understand what he was told.27 Establishing certainty: revising authorities Ralegh constantly finds himself having to resort to second-hand documentary evidence, first, as Kathryn Schwarz (among others) has shown, because he ‘attempts to invent a world that he has failed to experience’.28 He has not, in fact, seen the Amazons and Acephali, or the city of El Dorado and its fabulous gold himself. Another reason concerns the very nature of knowledge-building, which is always at some level based on that of others. Ralegh can be seen to participate in the wider movement which, according to historians such as Anthony Grafton and Steven Shapin, led to the great questioning of auctoritates in the Renaissance and early modern period.29 With his Discoverie of Guiana, he was contributing to the

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new, reformed natural history that Bacon was to advocate in The Advancement of Learning (1605), a natural history that meant to set aside ‘all superstitious stories’, the ‘old wives’ fables’ and would reject the accepted narrations of Pliny, Cardan and other ancient and Renaissance natural historians, which Bacon saw as ‘fraught with much fabulous matter, a great part not only untried but notoriously untrue’.30 Like many discoverers and empiricists of his age, Bacon repeatedly stated that ‘the world demonstrably contained more things than were dreamt of in established inventories’, a topos which allowed him to underline the inadequacy of traditional philosophies (see Shapin, p. 200) – and paradoxically reads like the Plinean truth-claim mentioned at the beginning of this chapter.31 Bacon was concerned with the need to purify modern science of its reliance on authority and advocated a methodic scepticism towards ancient as well as modern authorities and opinions, for neither ancient nor modern testimonies were deemed adequate for the constitution of the new empirical science.32 Travel narratives such as Ralegh’s Discoverie necessarily had to deal with the notion of trust, because they dealt with the unknown, which had traditionally been the site of the fabulous (like the margins of Ortelius’s map). They had therefore to find specific means of proving and certifying the knowledge-claims they were making.33 Ralegh’s whole narrative is based on epistemological strategies that adumbrate in many ways the Baconian method, even if it is a far cry from the factual objectivity of the Royal Society experimentalists. As Barbara Shapiro has shown, Bacon ‘sought to create a new philosophy that would, using carefully analysed and refined sense data and his inductive method, reach natural principles of scientific certitude’, in particular by theorising carefully distinguished degrees of probability.34 Ralegh can be seen to exemplify how early modern scientific knowledge was constructed through his careful definition of various shades of moral certainty.35 As a first step, absolute truths can be established about what he, the ‘observer’, has seen and, even better, when the event has been observed by a number of witnesses (‘all witnessed’, p. 127), repeated verification becomes possible. For what he has not himself seen, Ralegh defines degrees of probabilities. He establishes as absolutely true, for instance, the propositions that he derives from gentlemanly (therefore trustworthy) informants. The importance of gentlemanly certification for early modern science has been studied by Shapin, who has shown how modern science was built on pre-existing gentlemanly practices that allowed individuals to identify trustworthy

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agents in a society governed by a strong code of honour.36 It can hardly be a coincidence, then, that most of Ralegh’s informants happen to be gentlemen: captains of ships (English, French or Spanish), the Spanish Governor of Trinidado – whose word, as a gentleman’s, is repeatedly emphasised as trustworthy, even though he is a rival (‘he hath sworne to me’, p. 144). Other sources include, more interestingly, those among the natives that he describes as ‘Casiques . . . or Lords’, or ‘Captains’ (p. 144), an equivalent suggested by the Indians themselves – incidentally showing their own adaptation to the European seafaring community. Ralegh is very sensitive to status and everywhere he goes he first turns to the ‘Caciques’ or to the ‘aged men’ (p. 149), whom he recognises as valid interlocutors. Reciprocally, when he describes Elizabeth I to the natives as ‘the great Cacique of the North’ (p. 134), he is doing more than just showing pragmatic adaptation to local practices: he is expressing a fundamental protoethnological belief in the social and political equivalence between European and local power structures. It is only this belief that can explain his trust in the Indians’ discourse and their status in the text as legitimate experiential authorities, where most of his predecessors had described the natives as inveterate liars. Finally, other authorities (one notch down) include a category of individuals who could be called ‘experts’, such as the sailors – described as the ‘greatest travelers’ – of both European and Indian origins (p. 149). It is clear that the seafaring community possesses a social hierarchy of its own. As we move down the scale of authority, we find information that is most likely, but not absolutely, certain. This is derived from testimonies of multiple reliable sources, most particularly, of course, if they are gentlemen.37 But what is derived from ancient or Renaissance authorities can also be judged probable, as long as it can be corroborated by at least one reliable witness. This allows Ralegh to conclude, for instance, that El Dorado, the Amazons and the headless men most probably exist. In these instances, Ralegh emphasises the probability of what he declares himself convinced of, although he admits it cannot be proved further, at least not for the time being. Thus, about El Dorado, he writes: ‘I have been assured by such of the Spanyardes as have seen Manoa’ (p. 136, my emphasis), and again, ‘because I have not my selfe seene the cities of Inga, I cannot avow my credit what I have heard, although it be very likely’ (p. 186, my emphasis). This statement paradoxically appears after he has spent several pages musing about the gold of Manoa: it is clear that for him rational thinking and fantastic

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amplification are two alternative perspectives on the same object. This example also shows how, in The Discoverie of Guiana, the division between the rational and the fabulous is still far from being stable and clear-cut.38 After declaring himself ‘very desirous’ to hear about the Amazons, Ralegh launches into a thorough investigation, enquiring among ‘[t]he most ancient and best traveled of the Orenoqueponi’ (p. 145), and especially ‘a Casique or Lord of people’ (p. 146). He has read the Spanish sources that attest to their existence – Orellaña had named the Amazon river in 1542 after claiming he had met some Amazons there39 – and he submits them to a sceptical method of inquiry. This he does at greater length in The History of the World, where his starting point is one of radical doubt: ‘this Amazonian business may justly breed suspition of the whole matter as forged. Much more justly may we suspect it as a vain tale’ (p. 195).40 Then he attempts at comparative ethnography by offering a synthesis of the ancient and medieval lore about Amazons. Yet in both The History of the World and The Discoverie of Guiana he ends up endorsing their existence, since he has met several witnesses who can testify to having met them.41 In the 1596 text, he makes of the Amazonian Amazons a subgroup of the larger category of ‘warrior women’: ‘in many histories they are verified to have been, and in divers ages and Provinces: But they which are not from Guiana do accompanie with men but once a yeere.’ He does not hesitate to edit his sources, however, flatly denying that Amazons maim themselves: ‘but that the cut of the right dug of the brest I do not finde to be true’ (p. 146). Ralegh is also told about the Ewaipanoma, ‘men whose heads appear not above their shoulders’, by a ‘friend’, the son of Topiawari (the ‘Indian’ King): [A] nation of people, whose heades appeare not above their shoulders, which though it may be thought a meere fable, yet for mine owne parte I am resolved it is true, because every child in the provinces of Arromaia and Canuri affirme the same: they are called Ewaipanoma: they are reported to have their eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their breasts, & that a long train of haire groweth backward between their shoulders[.] (p. 178)

Ralegh immediately identifies them as the Blemmies of old and concludes: ‘whether it be true or no the matter is not great . . . for mine owne part I saw them not, but I am resolved that so many people did not all combine, or forethinke to make the report’ (p. 178, my

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emphasis). Even though absolute truth in this matter cannot be established (nor absolute lie), he himself inclines to believe in their existence, but this he presents as an individual belief-claim (‘for mine owne part . . . I am resolved’), based on the number of reliable witnesses involved, including a King’s son. It is at this point in the text that he mentions Mandeville as one of his sources for those warriors seemingly without heads. Yet if Ralegh had Mandeville in mind, he radically changes the latter’s formulation. The Mandeville Vulgate version, as available in Hakluyt, reads: ‘Alia Insula habet homines aspectu deformes, nihil autem colli aut capitis ostendentes, unde & Acephali nuncupantur: oculos autem habent ante ad scapulas, & in loco pectoris os apertum ad formam ferri, quo nostri caballi fraenantur.’42 This is the standard description for the Blemmies or Acephali in most early modern commentaries, and it appears again, in substance, in Torquemada’s Spanish Mandevile of Miracles (1600): ‘There are others without either neck or head, having their eyes in their shoulders’ (p. 12).43 Yet it looks as if Ralegh did not follow the Mandeville version closely, and he seems to have given this point a great deal of thought. In the only extant manuscript of the narrative, the passage reads: ‘a nacion of people without heads, which though it be thought a meere fable, yet for mine own part I am resolved it is true’.44 It is only for the printed version that Ralegh changed his mind and substituted ‘whose heades appeare not above their shoulders’ for the original formulation.45 In the definitive version, then, these men are not described as straightforwardly headless, and are thus only partially identified with the Acephali of Mandevillian lore. Instead, they are pointedly described as appearing to have none: ‘whose heades appear not above their shoulders’, ‘without a neck’ (p. 178, my emphasis). It seems that for this Ralegh might have gone back to sources anterior to Mandeville, such as Pliny, which Hakluyt had obligingly appended to Mandeville’s Travels for his readers’ comfort – Ralegh would not have had far to go if indeed he had been reading Mandeville in Hakluyt’s collection. In this version, the relevant passage reads: ‘quosdam sine cervice, oculos in humeris habentes.’46 Herodotus, meanwhile, simply wrote: ‘Akephaloi oi en toisi stethesi tous ophthalmous ekhontes’ (Histories, 4.191.3).47 Only the word Acephali, etymologically ‘without heads,’ alludes to the absence of a head. Ralegh seems conscious of the textual variants between his various sources. From the late Middle Ages, Blemmies became identified quite uniformly with their representations in cosmographies and

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in the margins of maps such as Ortelius’s, square-shaped creatures with eyes on their chests or shoulders.48 This rather stable iconographical tradition found a counterpart in encyclopaedias and commentaries, which simply tended to repeat similar descriptions of men without heads. The more nuanced formulations of Pliny and Herodotus had led to a more or less fixed type. One sixteenthcentury translation of Pliny from the French, probably influenced by this (by then) ossified tradition, thus describes the Acephali as men that: ‘have no heads, but have eyes in their shoulders’.49 Through probable contamination by the signifier ‘Acephali’ and under the overbearing influence of the iconographical tradition, creatures that Pliny had simply described as having no neck gradually lost their heads somewhere along the line. Mandeville seems himself to participate unwittingly in this gradual disfiguring of the Blemmies, when he tells us about men without either heads or necks. In The Discoverie of Guiana, Ralegh’s formulation is in fact closer to Pliny’s original, incidentally stripping the Blemmies of the glosses of later centuries. This allows him to suggest a rational explanation for the existence of men seemingly without heads. For his own ‘headless’ men are not exactly identified with the headless, fabulous creatures of Mandevillian lore: they simply have ‘heades [that] appeare not above their shoulders’. In other words, the emphasis shifts from radical otherness on to appearance. To support his hypothesis, Ralegh includes as an appendix a letter from a Spanish officer, Domingo de Vera, allegedly seized at sea among other documents. In this letter dated 1593, the Spaniard clearly describes them as having heads, although they seem to be devoid of necks: ‘these men had the points of their shoulders higher then the Crownes of their heades’ (The Discoverie of Guiana, p. 205). Like the Spaniard, however, Ralegh refrains from going into possible causes for this phenomenon, but his careful formulation and the fact that the tribe is given a local name, unequivocally identified by local informers, suggest that he believes this strange peculiarity might be due to more straightforward, physiological causes. Ralegh’s sceptical approach was explicitly endorsed by John Bulwer, in his 1653 edition of Anthropometamorphosis: A View of the People of the Whole World, which contains a nine-page long passage on the Acephali (pp. 20–9).50 It seems that Ralegh, by offering a description of the Blemmies that emphasised the perception of their appearance rather than their otherness, helped Bulwer describe the ‘Acephali’ as ordinary human beings, with a few

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peculiarities. Bulwer confesses he derives his original theory about the headless men from Ralegh himself: Sr Walter Rawleigh saith, their Heads appeare not above their Shoulders. And I conceive that they are not so much headless, as that their Heads by some Violent and constant Artifice are pressed down between their Shoulders, and affecting to have their Shoulders higher then their Heads, the Scrapula’s by the constant endeauvour of their Levators grown to a habit, hath drowned the Head in the Breast, the Head being crowded too close to the Shoulders, and as it were growing to them, the Neck is quite lost and the Eies seem planted as upon the Shoulders, and the Mouth in the Breast, a shadow of which resemblance we may sometimes see in very croked short neck’d Men . . . [Y]ou Gentlemen Readers of the Jury may give up your Verdict according to your Judgements, and either find Billa vera, or returne Ignoramus. (pp. 27–8)

It was Ralegh who helped him crack the mysterious visual puzzle, he claims: the appearance of headlessness Bulwer simply attributes to a local custom whereby the Indians prevent the development of their own necks through the use of weights – a hypothesis that is not totally fantastic in view of some ritualistic practices in native cultures. To the best of my knowledge, Bulwer is the first author to suggest such a hypothesis, and he is also unique in attributing the source of his theory to Ralegh.51 This shows that a sceptic rationalist of the 1650s could perceive Sir Walter Ralegh as a kindred spirit, even an authority in such matters. In a way, Bulwer’s essay can be seen to exemplify a later stage in the questioning of authorities to which Ralegh contributed. As was the case for Ralegh, this approach eventually leads Bulwer to emphasise the reader’s individual decision and judgement (with such phrases as ‘your Judgements’, p. 28) and to invoke reason in the process of decisionmaking. The use of weights is incidentally a plausible ethnological explanation, which was later endorsed and rationalised by late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century ethnographers.52 Yet, paradoxically, the woodcut illustration that accompanies Bulwer’s essay about the Acephali still represents the familiar Blemmies of the old maps,53 just as Theodore de Bry’s illustration for Ralegh’s Ewaipanoma falls back on to the same well-known image.54 It is clear that the iconographical tradition consistently looks back to the Middle Ages for inspiration. In the face of such an enduring tradition, Ralegh’s astuteness in his careful revising of sources appears definitely modern. In the three

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cases mentioned above (the Cannibals, Amazons and Acephali), Ralegh establishes various epistemological strategies to ascertain truth and probability, which take all their meaning in the context of contemporary science. He even elucidates two phenomena inherited from Mandevillian lore (the Amazons and the headless men), while allowing himself to daydream about another, newer myth of Eldorado – which had of course not been identified as such and was still a very recent and powerful idea in South America. Given what he knew, his method for establishing belief can be said to be fairly scrupulous and careful.55 He questions his authorities and verifies them through the direct experience of at least one reliable direct witness; the jump to the belief-statement is then made (or not), but only once the various stages of verification are passed through. The example of the Acephali shows how by resorting to an early source Ralegh manages to distance himself from the iconographical and fabulous tradition. He is then free to recast the former ‘monstrous’ men as merely a tribe among others, with their local, cultural peculiarities. By the same token, he does away with an epistemological obstacle and adapts the old fable to local cultures and practices. Contrary to Christiane Deluz, who claimed that Ralegh must be seen as ‘the last Elizabethan, a late manifestation of a century on the wane’,56 I see Ralegh as an important transitional figure who manifests a new relationship to authorities, which must be validated by the rational individual as the instance of certification – the new Baconian man. Even while acknowledging Mandeville’s power of seduction, Ralegh reads the Travels, as all his other sources, with a measure of scepticism. The wellknown narratives about Plinean races he reads no longer as being about monstrous creatures, but as probable descriptions (albeit incomplete) of actual tribes: faced with a new world that in many ways exceeds the wildest dreams, the ‘authorities’ must simply be worked on in order to yield a correct meaning. Like anthropologists later, he considers these ‘fables’ as meaningful narratives that can be explained rationally, and will be – it should come as no surprise that his reading of the Acephali was current until the nineteenth century. The Discoverie of Guiana does not, however, completely do away with the fabulous. Protoanthropological hermeneutics go together with the migration of the marvellous towards the unknown, the unseen, what is round the next corner perhaps, where dreams can live on. The text closes on an odd, romantic vision, in which Ralegh focuses on the Amazons and what they have become a

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metonymy for – the river, the continent itself, but also El Dorado, and its fabulous gold, perhaps even a version of Paradise.57 In the conclusion that is a panegyric of the Queen, Ralegh shows the Amazons tentatively submitting to the woman that also liked to see herself depicted in the poetry of the period as a virgin Queen.58 It is the verbal agility and allegorical imagination of the poet Sir Walter Ralegh that comes to the fore here, as this vision suggests strong Spenserian associations. In the final lines, the ‘Shepherd of the Ocean’ (as Spenser had hailed Ralegh),59 offers an allegorical reading of the New World as a romance fairyland. Critics have often used such moments in the text to dismiss Ralegh as a mere dabbler in natural history and travel literature.60 I think, on the contrary, that they show Ralegh as one of the finest readers and interpreters of his time, capable of mastering very distinct hermeneutic systems. What we see here is nothing less than an attempt at coming up with a modern scientific discourse about the stuff travels are made of. Notes 1 For the history of the text, see Charles Moseley, ‘The metamorphoses of Sir John Mandeville’, Yearbook of English Studies, 4 (1974), pp. 5–25 (especially p. 9). 2 The History of the World (London, 1614), p. 297. My emphasis. 3 Contrary to Hakluyt who excised Mandeville’s Travels from his second edition of the Principal Navigations (London, 1598–1600). 4 Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimes (London, 1615), vol. 3, p. 127. 5 Sir Walter Ralegh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana [1596], ed. Neil L. Whitehead (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 178. All subsequent references are to this edition. 6 For the migration of the notion of the ‘wonderful’, see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), pp. 21–66, and Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), especially pp. 23–110. 7 See Oxford English Dictionary, Entry ‘Discovery’ (2). 8 See Rudolf Wittkower, ‘Marvels of the East: a study in the history of monsters’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 5 (1942), pp. 159–97. 9 See Wittkower, ‘Marvels of the East’; Anthony Grafton, with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995 [1992]), in

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particular pp. 35–42; Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, p. 25. Ralegh, The Discoverie, p. 178. Mandeville himself could have found precedents for those in Herodotus or Pliny, for a start. For his sources, see Christiane Deluz, Le Livre de Jehan de Mandeville: une ‘géographie’ du 14e siècle (Louvain: Institut d’Etudes Médiévales de l’Université Catholique de Louvain, 1988), pp. 130–1, and Rosemary Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences (London: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 144–5. He is mentioned in a violently anti-Spanish context in William Warner’s Albions England (London, [1586]), chapter 62, pp. 270 and 273. The Advancement of Learning, quoted in Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 201. On the Baconian standards of observation, see also Diana B. Altegoer, Reckoning Words: Baconian Science and the Construction of Truth in English Renaissance Culture (Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson Press; London and New York: Associated University Presses, 2000), p. 15. On this aspect, see Deluz, Le Livre de Jehan de Mandeville, p. 256. Grafton, Shelford and Siraisi, New World, Ancient Texts, p. 75. See John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 199. Ralegh is not a downright sceptic like Thevet. See Deluz, Le Livre de Jehan de Mandeville, p. 327. He is more in tune, in this respect, with men such as Mercator or Ortelius, who, in spite of the fact that they had their own doubts, treated him as one of the authorities (on equal footing with the Greeks and Romans), or, closer to him, to the translator of Torquemada’s The Spanish Mandeville of Miracles: Or The Garden of Curious Flowers (London, 1600), who, after criticising the ‘fained matters’ of the Amazons, concludes nevertheless with the conventional topos: ‘There have been in the Worlde many notable thinges unknowne for want of wryters’ (p. 14). Yet, as will be shown, Ralegh treats Mandeville simply as one of his literary sources, to be interpreted and deciphered. See Neil Whitehead, ‘The historical anthropology of text: the interpretation of Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana’, Current Anthropology, 36.1 (1995), pp. 53–74. Ralegh, The Discoverie of Guiana, p. 178. The Discoverie of Guiana, p. 150. Kathryn Schwarz has astutely shown how for Ralegh cannibals are not men who eat human flesh, but men who trade women, like the Spaniards whose cruelty to the good ‘Indians’ they share. See Kathryn Schwarz, Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 72–3.

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20 See for instance Charles W. R. D. Moseley, ‘The metamorphoses of Sir John Mandeville’, or Rosemary Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences. 21 Anna R. Beer, Sir Walter Ralegh and His Readers in the Seventeenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 3–9. 22 For example, Whitehead, ‘The historical anthropology of text’. 23 The ‘faithful interpreter’ is of course a construction of Ralegh’s in the narrative and should be taken with a pinch of salt. 24 Mary Baine Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 242. 25 Robert Harcourt, A Relation of a Voyage to Guiana (London, 1613). 26 Harcourt, A Relation, p. 60. 27 See Whitehead, ‘The historical anthropology of text’, ‘Introduction’; Ralegh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana [1596], ed. Whitehead, p. 94, and H. Dieter Heinen and Stanford Zent, ‘On the interpretation of Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana: a view from the field’, Current Anthopology, 37.2 (1996), pp. 339–41. For more on this point, see my ‘Waterali goes native: describing first encounters in Sir Walter Ralegh’s The Discovery of Guiana (1596)’, in Frédéric Regard (ed.), British Narratives of Exploration: Case Studies of the Self and Other (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), pp. 51–61. 28 Schwarz, Tough Love, p. 68. 29 Grafton, Shelford and Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts; Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in SeventeenthCentury England (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1994). 30 The Advancement of Learning, quoted in Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth, p. 201. 31 Shapin, A Social History of Truth, p. 200. One is of course reminded of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy’ (1.5.166–7). The paradox is only apparent here: as two complementary modalities of the human quest for meaning, both science and the fabulous attempt at mapping out and exploring the world, albeit through different means – rational deduction and imagination. 32 Shapin, A Social History of Truth, p. 201. 33 It is clear that Ralegh must have felt in deep sympathy with the pseudo-Mandeville, for he was like him accused of being a ‘fabler’ by unsympathetic readers. 34 Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships Between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 16. 35 See Shapin, A Social History of Truth, p. 212.

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36 Shapin, A Social History of Truth, pp. xxi, xxvi, xxvii. For a careful distinction between notions of ‘epistemology’ and ‘credibility’, see also Julia Schleck, ‘“Plain Broad Narratives of Substantial Facts”: Credibility, narrative, and Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations’, Renaissance Quarterly, 59.3 (2006), pp. 768–94 (especially 780–90). 37 See for instance A Discoverie of Guiana, p. 143. 38 For a study of the boundaries between the ‘natural’ and the ‘supernatural’ in the Middle Ages, see Robert Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 1–34, and, for the Renaissance, see Shapin, A Social History of Truth, pp. 200–11 in particular. 39 See Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought, p. 200. 40 Ralegh proceeds to examine the authorities, ancient, medieval, the Spanish narratives, and ends laconically: ‘I have produced these authorities, in part, to justifie mine owne relation of these Amazons, because that which was delivered mee for truth by an ancient Casique of Guiana, how upon the River of Papamena (since the Spanish discoveries called Amazons) that these women still live and governe, was held for a vaine and unprobable report’ (The History of the World, p. 196). 41 The History of the World, p. 195; The Discoverie of Guiana, p. 146. 42 Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations, p. 52. ‘In another island there are men who have a deformed aspect, as they present neither necks nor heads, hence they are known as Acephali: and they have eyes in the front on their shoulders, and on their breasts an open mouth shows in the shape of a bit such as we use to curb our horses’ (my translation). 43 It might be interesting at this point to compare it with the one in the Cotton version of Mandeville’s text, which is very different: ‘folk that have no heads. And their eyes be in their shoulders, and their mouth is crooked as an horseshoe, and that is in the midst of their breasts. And in another isle also be folk that have no heads, and their eyes and their mouth be behind in their shoulders’ (Mandeville’s Travels, ed. M. C. Seymour (London and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 156.) 44 Lambeth Palace MS. 250. Quoted in Sir Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana, ed. Joyce Lorimer (London: The Hakluyt Society, 2006), pp. 154 and 156. 45 The Discoverie of . . . Guiana (London, 1596), p. 69. 46 Hakluyt, The Principall Nagivations, p. 79. ‘Without a neck, and who have their eyes in their shoulders’ (my translation). 47 ‘Acephali who, if the Africans may be credited, have their eyes in their breasts’ (The History of Herodotus, translated from the Greek. By William Beloe, 4 vols (London, 1791), vol. II, pp. 347–8). 48 See Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, pp. 25 and 64.

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49 Pliny, A Summarie of the antiquities, and wonders of the worlde, abstracted out of the sixtene first bookes of the excellente historiographer Plinie, translated from the French (of Pierre de Changy) by I. A. [possibly John Aldey] (London, 1566). 50 In the first, non-illustrated 1650 edition, the long section on the Acephali is not included, and there is only a short paragraph on a ‘people in the West Indies’ whose ‘shoulders are higher then their heads’; the source is Purchas, whom Bulwer quotes: ‘Whether these Nations are guilty or not of using Art to this purpose, I shall not conclude, although I half suspect some concurrent affectation’ (J[ohn] B[ulwer], Anthropometamorphosis. Man Transform’d: Or, The Artificiall Changling (London, 1653), p. 162. 51 By basing himself on the authority of the dead Ralegh, Bulwer might also perhaps have tried to give more legitimacy to a theory he devised. But in any case, it is highly significant of Ralegh’s status that he should have been invoked in such a context as a rationalist authority. 52 The ideological slant of early anthropology will not, however, be addressed here. In his 1791 translation of Herodotus, William Beloe includes a long footnote humourously explaining how the inconvenience of the ‘men without head’ could be explained away: ‘Acephali, men with no heads at all; to whom, out of humanity, and to obviate some very natural distresses, Herodotus gives eyes in the breast; but he seems to have forgot mouth and ears, and makes no mention of a nose.’ And he turns to Larcher for a logical explanation: ‘There is, says [Larcher], in Canibar, a race of savages who have hardly any neck, and whose shoulders reach up to the ears. This monstrous appearance is artificial, and to give it to / their children, they put enormous weights upon their heads, so as to make the vertebrae of the neck enter (if we may so say) the channel-bone (clavicule). These barbarians, from a distance, seem to have their mouth in the breast, and might well enough, in ignorant or enthusiastic travellers, serve to revive the fable of the Acephali, or men without heads’ (The History, vol. 2, pp. 348–9, note 149). It should also be noted that the anthropologist Neil Whitehead has another explanation: he suggests that these ‘men whose heads appear not above their shoulders’ are warriors with figurative breastplates or even body-paint designs, by virtue of a play on words – Ralegh might have confused having heads in their chests and on their chests. See Neil Whitehead, ‘The historical anthropology of text’ p. 58 and ‘Introduction’, in Ralegh, The Discoverie, ed. N. Whitehead, p. 94. 53 Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis, p. 20. 54 Theodor de Bry, Americae pars VIII. Continens primo, descriptionem trium itinerum nobilissimi et fortissimi equitis Francisci Draken (Frankfurt, 1599). 55 Campbell agrees, talking about ‘persuasive rationality’ (The Witness and the Other World, p. 253).

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56 Le Livre de Jehan de Mandeville, p. 326 (my translation). See also similar claims made more recently by Jonathan P. A. Sell in Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing (London: Ashgate, 2006). 57 Columbus thought that he had found the location of Paradise. M. B. Campbell suggests that Ralegh’s vision of the New World chimes in with some millenarian myths (Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, pp. 246, 257). 58 Elizabeth was also of course represented as a warrior Queen, but not specifically as an Amazon, a figure often associated with unbridled sexuality. See Britomart, in The Faerie Queene, for instance, by opposition with the Amazon Radigund. I am grateful to Ladan Niayesh for pointing this out to me. 59 Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, line 428, in The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. R. Morris (London: Macmillan, 1899), p. 553. 60 See Deluz, who calls Ralegh ‘la figure du dernier élisabéthain, représentant attardé d’un siècle qui s’efface’ (‘the figure of the last Elizabethan, the belated representative of a century on the wane’, Le Livre de Jehan de Mandeville, p. 326). Works cited Primary sources B[ulwer], J[ohn], Anthropometamorphosis. Man Transform’d: Or, The Artificiall Changling. London: William Hunt, 1653. De Bry, Theodor, Americae pars VIII. Continens primo, descriptionem trium itinerum nobilissimi et fortissimi equitis Francisci Draken. Frankfurt: M. Becker, 1599. Hakluyt, Richard, The Principall Nauigations, Voiages and Discoueries of the English Nation made by sea or ouer land. Vol. 3. London: George Bishop and Ralph Newberie, 1589. Harcourt, Robert, A Relation of a Voyage to Guiana. London: John Beale for W. Welby, 1613. Herodotus, The History of Herodotus, translated from the Greek. By William Beloe, 4 vols. London: Leigh and Sotheby, 1791. Mandeville, Mandeville’s Travels, ed. M. C. Seymour. London and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. Pliny, A Summarie of the antiquities, and wonders of the worlde, abstracted out of the sixtene first bookes of the excellente historiographer Plinie, trans. I. A. London: Henry Denham for Thomas Hacket, 1566. Purchas, Samuel, Purchas his Pilgrimes. London: Wiliam Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, 1625. Ralegh, Sir Walter, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana. London: Robert Robinson, 1596. ——, The History of the World. London: [William Stansby] for Walter Burre, 1614.

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——, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana [1596], transcribed, annotated and introduced by Neil L. Whitehead. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. ——, Discoverie of Guiana, ed. Joyce Lorimer. London: The Hakluyt Society, 2006. Spenser, Edmund. The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. R. Morris. London: Macmillan, 1899. Torquemada, Antonio de, The Spanish Mandeville of Miracles. Or The Garden of Curious Flowers. London: I[ames] R[oberts] for Edmund Matts, 1600. Warner, William, Albions England. London: George Robinson, [1586]. Secondary sources Altegoer, Diane B., Reckoning Words: Baconian Science and the Construction of Truth in English Renaissance Culture. Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson Press; London and New York: Associated University Presses, 2000. Bartlett, Robert, The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Beer, Anna R., Sir Walter Ralegh and His Readers in the Seventeenth Century. London: Macmillan, 1997. Campbell, Mary B., The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988. ——, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999. Cottegnies, Line, ‘Waterali goes native: describing first encounters in Sir Walter Ralegh’s The Discovery of Guiana (1596)’, pp. 51–61 in Frédéric Regard (ed.), British Narratives of Exploration: Case Studies of the Self and Other. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009. Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. New York: Zone Books, 1998. Deluz, Christiane, Le Livre de Jehan de Mandeville: une ‘géographie’ du 14e siècle. Louvain: Institut d’Etudes Médiévales de l’Université Catholique de Louvain, 1988. Friedman, John Block, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. Grafton, Anthony, with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts. The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995 [1992]. Heinen, H. Dieter, and Stanford Zent, ‘On the interpretation of Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana: a view from the field’, Current Anthopology, 37.2 (1996), pp. 339–41.

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Moseley, Charles W. R. D., ‘The metamorphoses of Sir John Mandeville’, Yearbook of English Studies, 4 (1974), pp. 5–25. Shapin, Steven, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Shapiro, Barbara J., Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships Between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Schleck, Julia, ‘“Plain Broad Narratives of Substantial Facts”: credibility, narrative, and Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations’, Renaissance Quarterly, 59.3 (2006), pp. 768–94. Schwarz, Kathryn, Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000. Sell, Jonathan P. A., Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing. London: Ashgate, 2006. Tzanaki, Rosemary, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences: A study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville (1371–1550). London: Ashgate, 2003. Whitehead, Neil, ‘The historical anthropology of text: the interpretation of Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana’, Current Anthropology, 36.1 (1995), pp. 53–74. Wittkower, Rudolf, ‘Marvels of the East: a study in the history of monsters’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 5 (1942), pp. 159–97.

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Part III Mandevillian stages

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7 Marlowe’s Tamburlaine: the well-travelled tyrant and some of his unchecked baggage Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Richard Hillman

Over the last ten years or so, a culture of war has returned to prominence in English-speaking societies, and war has broken out again as a favoured topic in the criticism of early modern English drama. Despite the much-heralded ‘Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies’,1 the orientation has remained overwhelmingly materialist, often at the expense of the metaphysical archetypes and images through which this most material of practices engaged Elizabethan knowledge and culture. It is part of my purpose to recall that the discourse of early modern (if not modern) warfare almost invariably turns on a religious axis – at bottom, the rhetoric of crusade – on the paradoxical premise that the exercise of power over life and death is human practice but divine prerogative. This amounts, of course, to a re-energising and refocusing of the medieval crusading heritage, whose vestiges are still visible in the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, written c. 1356–57, at a time when the practical likelihood of regaining the Holy Land from the Mamluk Sultans had become remote. Mandeville is also to the point, as will be evident, for portraying himself, early in the Travels, as a warrior in the service of the mighty Sultan of Egypt, one who might have been rewarded by marriage ‘to a gret princes doughter yif I wolde han forsaken my lawe and my beleue, but I thanke God I had no wille to don it for no thing that he behighte me’ (p. 24 (Chapter 6)).2 Indeed, this presentation of sexual temptation as a test of religious truth resonates more particularly, if distantly, with my argument because Mandeville in this chapter associates the ‘Babyloyne’ near Cairo with the biblical one (in common medieval style)3 and thereby makes the Sultan ultimately the successor of Nabuchodonosor. More immediately, I propose that perhaps the most culturally prominent instance of a combined metaphysical and military narrative, the biblical encounter between the Jewish heroine Judith

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and the Assyrian general Holofernes, hovers in the background of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays. The basic story was available in all the major versions of the Bible, even if designated as apocryphal in Protestant ones. But I believe that Marlowe’s sustained allusion particularly depends on the dynamic, richly embroidered and both theologically and politically charged epyllion of Guillaume de Saluste, seigneur Du Bartas. La Judit (1574) had been frequently republished, and in 1582 it began appearing with an uncompromising commentary by the Calvinist Simon Goulart, thereby acquiring fresh currency and stature as a militant Protestant tract. And while Marlowe’s mastery of French is hardly in question, since 1584 there had also existed – a telling fact in itself – a translation by Thomas Hudson, published in Scotland and dedicated to King James.4 The salient points of contact between La Judit and Marlowe are provided by the Oriental travelling and the Oriental barbarity of Du Bartas’s warrior, who likewise throws divinity up for grabs and ‘dar[es] God out of his heaven’.5 Also to the point, though more obliquely, is the insistent physicality of the tyrant’s well-deserved demise, his decisive reduction to ashes and dust. These are all additions by Du Bartas to the biblical account, and what especially activates them intertextually within Tamburlaine is Marlowe’s major addition to the historical and biographical accounts of Timur. J. S. Cunningham terms Marlowe’s invention of Zenocrate ‘perhaps the most striking extension of his source-material’;6 it is the more so for introducing into that fable of irresistible masculine force a Judith manquée, profoundly seduced rather than deceitfully seducing – losing her own head, as it were, while Tamburlaine keeps his (the more impressively because it verbally teeters for a moment on his shoulders). He thereby displays the resistance to temptation demonstrated by Mandeville, but gets the girl anyway. It is notable, moreover, that she is not just any ‘gret princes doughter’ but the daughter of the Sultan of Egypt himself. Du Bartas applies the biblical account so as to affirm God’s convenant with man in the cause of Reformed Christianity. The poet’s militant Protestantism was the key to his extraordinary popularity in England, as well as to his cameo appearance as Bartus in Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris (first performed in 1593),7 where he serves, more than incidentally, as Navarre’s interlocutor on the subject of divine vengeance.8 La Judit begins by acknowledging its origins in a commission by Navarre’s mother, Jeanne d’Albret – herself, for French Protestants, a plausible type of Judith.

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More specifically, Du Bartas was alluding to the 1563 assassination of François, duc de Guise, which rescued the besieged Protestants in Orléans. The ungodly Assyrians of the Bible were calculated to evoke the Spanish and German troops who had formed part of his army.9 This is where the poet’s representation of Holofernes as an Oriental tyrant comes in. It intersects with the anti-Turkish discourse deployed against the Valois – at this point by Protestants, although the Sainte Ligue (the ultra-Catholic movement that condemned Henri III for indulgence of ‘heretics’ and Machiavellian practices, amongst other failings) eventually came round to the same view. Suggestively, the key text here, an anonymous 1576 attack couched as a defence of the monarchy against evil Eastern influence, was produced by an Orléans printer: La France-Turquie c’est-à-dire conseils et moyens tenus par les ennemis de la couronne de France pour réduire le royaume en tel estat que la Tyrannie turquesque. Throughout the period, the model of Judith served to show the true God putting impossible strength into a woman’s hand, and its most frequent adaptation was to Protestant underdogs resisting Catholic ‘tyrants’.10 It was, then, a small and natural step from the Queen of Navarre to Elizabeth (precisely, in fact, the trajectory traced by Marlowe in Massacre), and from the Duke of Guise to Philip II. An anonymous 1578 pamphlet on the struggle of Dutch Protestants concludes with a prayer applying the paradigm to the English queen and the Spanish king.11 That analogy had as much staying power as the protagonists themselves – witness Charles Gibbon’s A Watch-Worde for War, occasioned in 1596 by a renewal of the Spanish menace. This pamphlet also neatly illustrates the interdependence of the human and divine perspectives on warfare. Gibbon systematically treats the various branches of his subject first from one point of view, then from the other. But finally the two conjoin under the sign of transcendent truth: for him the figure of Judith is taken to manifest human anomaly, namely the ‘courage of a woman’, but as a manifestation of divine strength.12 Such doubleness, I suggest, is deployed ironically in Tamburlaine, where the absence of divine intervention leaves a Judith in potentia vulnerably human in every sense. The model of Judith, complete with Oriental overtones, also served the Catholic cause. Thus in 1580 the anti-Turkish card was played from an anti-Protestant hand by Fronton Du Duc in L’histoire tragique de la Pucelle de Dom-Rémy, aultrement d’Orléans.

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This was in honour of the House of Lorraine, then headed by the son of the Guise murdered at Orléans, who had avenged his father on St Bartholomew’s day 1572 upon the Admiral Coligny, widely held responsible. The Jesuit playwright juxtaposed the English depredations in France during the Hundred Years War with contemporary troubles for Christians in the East: Or ceci se faisait lorsque vers le levant Ce roi turc Bajazet les chrétiens poursuivant Battait Constantinople et que ce grand tartare Vainqueur le châtia de son désir avare, Ce fléau du genre humain, Tamerlan, qui si tôt De rustaud se fit roi pour l’effort de son ost Trainant un million de soldats qui saisie Lui mit en son pouvoir presque toute l’Asie.13

For Fronton Du Duc, this is background to the emergence of Jeanne d’Arc as the Catholic saviour of France and, not incidentally, the deliverer of Orléans in her own day – on the model, explicitly and insistently, of Judith (ll. 47–54, 712–13, 1598–1601, 2390ff.). The evocation of Tamburlaine as scourge of God – a commonplace of Marlowe’s source-material14 – reminds us of this essential dimension, too, of early modern thinking about Holofernes. The beginning and ending of Du Bartas’s epyllion succinctly make the point. As background to the fearful laments of Israel over the looming menace, recognised as a token of God’s wrath (‘“O Seigneur”, disent-ils, “veus-tu donc contre nous / Toujours, tousjours lancer les dards de ton courroux?”’ (1.77–8)),15 the poet affirms that ‘Dieu . . . par l’aigreur d’un juste chastiment / Souvant reveille ceux qu’il aime cherement’ (1.25–6).16 Some two thousand lines later, he concludes by recording the thanksgiving prayer: Ainsi, ainsi, Seigneur, desormais puissions nous Te sentir non pour juge, ainçois pour pere doux; Ainsi les fiers tyrans de ton Eglise chere Te sentent desormais pour juge et non pour pere. (6.357–60)17

Judith’s exploit, at once humanly willed and divinely assisted, thus serves as the pivot that restores the chosen people to grateful obedience and transforms wrathful justice into mercy for them, destruction for their enemies. This is the pivotal role that Zenocrate conspicuously fails to play, and its absence, by testifying to the ambiguity of Tamburlaine as scourge, reflects the elusiveness of God as God. A Judith manquée raises the stakes as a Judith

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manquante. The paradigm powerfully confirms the ‘atheistic’ subversiveness that has attached itself to Marlowe’s plays from their own day to ours. Du Bartas’s retelling fleshes out the biblical account in every sense, including a vivid evocation of the seductive arts mutually practised by Judith (calculatingly) and Holofernes (naively) during their encounter. Judith as an icon of godly virtue has the potential to cut especially deeply (as it were), given that the very womanliness by which she exercises her courage is usually cast as dangerous and debasing. Early modern English theatre had a predilection for emblematic encounters between warriors and women, most of which, of course, ring straightforward changes on the Samson motif: masculine duty meets effeminising desire, with a bad or good outcome depending, respectively, on male vulnerability or resistance. In Judith’s case, exceptionally, a contrary response is called for, which gains force by going against the moral and cultural grain: the more desire her beauty provokes, the better for her divine mission. The (over-)loading with Truth of the Judith/ Holofernes paradigm simultaneously invests it with enormous subversive potential. Her symbolism is thus imbued with a destabilising potency: one might call it the ‘Judith jinx’ – the femme fatale as femme divine. This is, in effect, to invert – and to elevate to cosmic proportions – the threat to ‘my lawe and my beleue’ that Mandeville perceived in union with a Muslim ‘gret princes doughter’. When Shakespeare, ten years or so after Tamburlaine’s stage debut, parodically appropriated the latter’s military and cartographic prodigies for Pistol, he was arguably harking back to pre-Marlovian origins. The ‘hollow pamper’d jades of Asia’ are hitched imaginatively not only to a miles gloriosus but to a moreor-less Christian metaphysics: ‘damn them with King Cerberus, and let the welkin roar’.18 Tamburlaine’s extravagant Oriental landscape, brushed with the mighty line and thickly dotted with exotic place-names – the tyrant’s travelling music – was not wholly a novelty. However embellished from Ortelius and elsewhere,19 the essential elements were in place, thanks to Holofernes, another well-travelled tyrant, who is also, however, in Du Bartas’s treatment, doomed to damnation and branded as a lying braggart, for ‘Les bravaches gen-d’armes / Mentent le plus souvent parlant de leurs faicts d’armes’ (5.441–2).20 Allowing for the relative historical and geographical precision of Marlowe – for time and place in

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the Book of Judith are notably indefinite (not even Bethulia can be confidently identified with a real city) – the two cartographic spaces overlap considerably. The vast territory swarms with many of the same peoples (Persians, Moors, Arabs, Parthians – and, of course, Hebrews), and it is largely staked out, with similar sonority, by the same landmarks: Judaea, Arabia, Babylon, Syria, Damascus, Persia, Media, Egypt, Ethiopia, the Euphrates, the Danube, the Euxine Sea – and with particular resonance, Scythia. That he keeps control of this sonority, his rhetorical mastery matching his material prowess, is perhaps the ultimate measure of Tamburlaine’s defusing of the Judith jinx. After all, his Shakespearean tin-plate avatar, Pistol, is forced to eat his own words in the guise of a leek. More seriously, Holofernes’ failure to keep a civil tongue in his head is punished by the jubilant citizens of Bethulia, who, when his head is set up on the wall, ‘arrachent de sa place / La langue qui souloit mesme outrager les cieux’ (6.220–1).21 With that outrageous tongue the Holofernes of Du Bartas chiefly celebrates and sings himself, like Tamburlaine. The epyllion restructures the direct and spare biblical narrative to begin in medias res with Holofernes’ descent upon Israel. The background to this invasion, the war between the Assyrians and the Medes, is thoroughly transformed by being presented through the boastful recital Judith urges Holofernes to deliver, encouraging him to suppose that she is drinking in every word (this is, of course, in order to get the Assyrian to drink too much and defer his amorous intentions). The transformation entails allbut-expunging his royal commander-in-chief, Nabuchodonosor. According to this Holofernes, it was his own intervention that won the battle against the Medes (the biblical narrative does not even mention him in this regard). He provides an account worthy of the eyewitness in Macbeth (1.2.7ff.), presenting the combat as uncertain until he arrived ‘comme un foudre’ (5.374) to rescue the cause of his king: and as Macbeth ‘carv’d out his passage’ (19), so for Holofernes his enemies’ pieces of armour, ‘devant mon coutelas / Sont fresles comme verre’ (5.376–7).22 Indeed, Macbeth’s treatment of the chief rebel – he ‘unseam’d him from the nave to the chops’ (22) – is anticipated in reverse: ‘Cetuy-ci d’un fendant / Je vais depuis le chef jusqu’au ventre fendant’ (5.383–4).23 The ‘curtle-axe’ (the word derives from French ‘coutelas’ – see OED) is also Tamburlaine’s preferred armour-piercing weapon: ‘See where it is, the keenest curtle-axe / That e’er made passage thorough Persian arms’ (1 Tamburlaine, 2.3.55–6).

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Holofernes’ campaign against the Jews originates in Nabuchodonosor’s vengeance against those who had failed to support his previous war. The Book of Judith cites the king at length as he gives Holofernes his bloody marching orders – and makes clear who is boss: ‘And take thou hede that thou transgresse not any of the commandements of thy Lord but accomplish them fully, as I haue commanded thee, and differre not to do them’ (2.13).24 Holofernes is thereby invested as the scourge of a false god, ‘for it was enioyned him to destroy all the gods of the land, that all nacions shulde worshippe Nabuchodonosor onely, and that all tongues and tribes shulde call vpon him as God’ (3.8). In Du Bartas, by contrast, Nabuchodonosor is all but cut out of the picture by Holofernes’ tongue; in the midst of his narrative, Holofernes devotes a few spare lines (5.426–30) to receiving his orders, then launches into a self-glorifying account of his own exploits, beginning with his inspirational address to his army. In reporting this discourse (without biblical precedent), and the enthusiasm with which it infuses his soldiers, he anticipates Tamburlaine with some precision. Central to the parallel is the impression that the scourge, not least in his own view – and voice – eclipses the god. Certainly, as in various battles of Tamburlaine, the attack on Israel will test the power of the enemies’ God, whom Holofernes has dismissed as an invention of Moses (‘Un dieu qu’à son plaisir ton Moïse a forgé’ (2.416)),25 thereby anticipating Marlowe’s opinion according to Richard Baines, the informer who accused him of atheistic utterances.26 But Nabuchodonosor is not named; the soldiers are roused to warlike fury by and for Holofernes, whose rhetoric appropriates apocalypse and whose promises include ‘the glory of an earthly crown’: ‘Vengés le plus grand dieu qui descendit jamais Des cercles estoilés. Armés, soldats, armés L’une main d’une torche et l’autre d’une lame Pour gaster l’Occident et par glaive et par flamme. Couvrés d’une mer rouge et ses monts et ses vaux. Faites dedans le sang nager vos fiers chevaux. Recevés bienheureux le sceptre et la couronne De ce grand univers, qui tout à vous se donne . . .’ Lors j’acheve et ma vois fut quant et quant suivie D’un frapement d’escus qui tesmoignoit l’envie Qu’ils avoyent de marcher sous mes fiers estandars. (5.451–67)27

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Accordingly, in Du Bartas’s poem the terrified nations hasten to humble themselves, not, as in the biblical version, to Nabuchodonosor through Holofernes but to the divine power within Holofernes himself: ‘Nous ne venons icy’, disent-ils, ‘avec armes Pour resister au choc de tes braves gendarmes; Ains, prince, nous venons pour recevoir de toy Ou la vie ou mort; bref, telle quelle loy Qu’il te plaira donner. ... Hé, Dieu! quel plus grand aise, Hé, Dieu! quel plus grand heur nous pourroit advenir Que d’avoir un tel chef qui sçache soutenir Et la vaillante lance et la balance esgale Et qui par ses vertus les plus grands dieux esgale?’ (5.537–50)28

On the one hand, then, the metaphysical stakes in Du Bartas, as well as the evocation of Holofernes’ means and (would-be) ends, are strikingly proto-Marlovian. On the other, Tamburlaine’s virtual – or virtuous – usurpation of the higher power whose ‘scourge’ he purports to be is certainly not a feature of Marlowe’s recognised sources. That is the heart of the scandal, and the obvious precedent for it is Du Bartas’s Holofernes. Holofernes’ florid recital of the conquests due to his ‘vertu’ bears particular comparison with Tamburlaine’s résumé of his career as it comes to a close – as Holofernes’ own, ironically, is likewise about to do: je gaigne ce mont dont les obliques cornes Fendent toute l’Asie et qui servent de bornes A meint puissant empire: où j’occis, je romps, j’ards Tout ce que je rencontre et mes felons soldars Font comme les faucheurs, qui d’une main adroitte Ne laissent apres eux une seule herbe droitte; ... L’Asie mise en friche et r’entrant au Levant, Je conqueste Coelé, sans pitié je ravage De l’Euphrate profond le plantureux rivage. Je deserte Rapses et l’Agraee abatu De ma puissante main recongoist la vertu. De-là, tousjours suyvant le bord de la marine, Je gaste Madian, puis au nort m’achemine Vers le double Liban; je fourrage Damas

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Et ses villes Gaane, Abile et Hippe abas Et de là, curieux, je viens mes pas conduire Sur le mont d’où l’on voit Phoebus de nuict reluire Et se lever hatif, faisant marcher mon ost Vers l’Occident batu de phoenicée flot.

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(5.473–532)29

Holofernes might as well be tracing his route on a map, as Tamburlaine actually does, and his first-person – as remorselessly incantatory as it is remorseless tout court – finally effects a transcendence of his exploits, as if conquest were modulating into exploration, even intellectual abstraction. Tamburlaine virtually becomes a visionary booster of the global economy: Here I began to march towards Persia, Along Armenia and the Caspian Sea, And thence unto Bithynia, where I took The Turk and his great empress prisoners. Then marched I into Egypt and Arabia; And here, not far from Alexandria, Whereas the Terrene and the Red Sea meet, Being distant less than full a hundred leagues, I meant to cut a channel to them both, That men might quickly sail to India. From thence to Nubia near Borno lake, And so along the Ethiopian sea, Cutting the tropic line of Capricorn, I conquered all as far as Zanzibar. Then, by the northern part of Africa, I came at last to Græcia, and from thence To Asia, where I stay against my will. (2 Tamburlaine, 5.3.126–42)

At the end, Tamburlaine, too, looks towards the west to lands beyond his reach: Look here, my boys; see what a world of ground Lies westward from the midst of Cancer’s line Unto the rising of this earthly globe, Whereas the sun, declining from our sight, Begins the days with our Antipodes. (2 Tamburlaine, 5.3.145–9)

Tamburlaine takes the measure of his travels – and to some extent has it ironically taken for him – ‘from Scythia, where I first began, /

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Backward and forwards near five thousand leagues’ (143–4). It may not be mere coincidence that Du Bartas’s conqueror concludes his recital ‘prez du rampart scythique’ (5.570),30 from which he has moved ‘backward and forwards’, in time and imagined space, since the opening of Book 2 (‘Holoferne deja dans le rampart scythique / Plantoit ses estandars’ (2.1–2)).31 In featuring a conqueror threatened with conquest by his captive, Tamburlaine, pioneering text though it was, had at least one notable precursor in Lyly’s Campaspe (1580–84), and if the latter registers generically in the lightweight division, an intertextual evocation of Alexander in relation to Tamburlaine remains to the point, encouraged by the standard sources. The earlier conqueror’s career had much in common with Tamburlaine’s, from riding ‘in triumph through Persepolis’ (I, 2.5.50, 54) – the idea that thrills the Scythian with royal ambition at the outset – to doing so in Babylon, his final conquest. Indeed, Tamburlaine savours that culmination as a triumph over mortality itself, a literal overriding of not only Alexandrian but Assyrian accomplishment – and of femininity as well: Where Belus, Ninus, and great Alexander Have rode in triumph, triumphs Tamburlaine, Whose chariot-wheels have burst th’Assyrians’ bones, Drawn with these kings on heaps of carcasses. Now in the place where fair Semiramis, Courted by kings and peers of Asia, Hath trod the measures, do my soldiers march, And in the streets where brave Assyrian dames Have rid in pomp like rich Saturnia, With furious words and frowning visages My horsemen brandish their unruly blades. (2 Tamburlaine, 5.1.69–79)

Yet for Tamburlaine thus to arrogate a bird’s-eye view of Alexander inevitably opens the door to irony at his expense. An audience might recall the perspective of Pero Mexía in his above-mentioned account, as he coolly takes the measure of both conquerors together: ‘il ne fut moind[r]e qu’Alexandre, ou s’il le fut, c’estoit bien peu’ (1: 262).32 Tamburlaine is about to learn that, in the Dance of Death, he will not always get to lead. Further on, Mexía develops the conventional contrast between seemingly boundless achievement and its banal erasure by death:

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Ces choses accomplies, & ayant ce grand personnage conquis de grans pays, vaincu, & mis à mort plusieurs Rois, & grands seigneurs, ne trouvant aucune resistence en toute l’Asie, se retira en son pays chargé d’infinies richesses, & de la compagnie des principaux de tous les pays par luy suppeditez, lesquels apportoyent quant & [sic] eux la meilleure part de leurs biens: et là fit edifier vne fort magnifique ville, . . . la plus somptueuse ville du monde, . . . abondante & pleine de toutes richesses. Mais enfin ce grand Tamburlam, combien qu’il maintint son estat en ceste grande authorité, si est-ce que comme homme, il paya le deuoir de nature, & finit ses iours laissant deux fils, non toutefois tels que leur pere. (1.267–8)33

Marlowe has previously intimated this discrepant ending: Tamburlaine waltzes through most of Part II with Zenocrate’s corpse, in futile (and at least imaginatively malodorous) defiance of death’s evident power to ‘scourge the scourge of the immortal God’ (2 Tamburlaine, 2.4.80). Yet even the most common of Christian commonplaces is subversively charged by Marlowe. Tamburlaine deploys his full rhetorical force to exalt the ascension to heaven of Zenocrate’s soul, repeatedly confirming her ‘divine’ status (2 Tamburlaine, 2.4.17, 21, 25, 29, 33). He himself, moreover, makes his exit at the height of his glory, and it hardly reflects negatively on him – on the contrary – if his sons are not up to the succession. But he also seizes rhetorical control of his very confrontation with endings – ‘And shall I die, and this unconquerèd?’ (5.3.158) – and preaches ‘that magnanimity / That nobly must admit necessity’ (200–1). His management of transcendental mechanisms displaces his son’s feeble appeal to some god who may ‘oppose his holy power / Against the wrath and tyranny of Death’ (220–1). In scripting a reunion with Zenocrate, he arrogates an immortal ‘virtue’ sustained by a syncretic sublimation of Machiavellian, neo-platonic, and Christian ideologies (all in five lines!): Now, eyes, enjoy your latest benefit, And when my soul hath virtue of your sight, Pierce through the coffin and the sheet of gold, And glut your longings with a heaven of joy. (224–7)

This point jars sharply with Du Bartas’s treatment of his tyrant’s downfall, which proceeds from intimations of damnation34 to spectacular physical overkill. The mutilation of Holofernes begins head-first, but its consummation comes later, after the Hebrew

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victory, when his corpse is discovered on the battlefield and torn, not merely limb from limb, but atom from atom, by a vengeful mob eager for souvenirs: Car il n’a nerf, tendon, artere, veine, chair Qui ne soit detranché par le sot populace Et si son ire encore ne trouve assés d’espace. ... Il n’y a dans Jacob si malotru coquin Qui de sa chair ne vueille avoir quelque lopin. (6.310–18)35

The conclusion harps (almost literally, given the Hebrew hymn) on the ironic contrast between the tyrant’s boundless drive for Lebensraum and the tiny room, less than a grave, now needed for his remains:36 ‘O grand Dieu, qui croira que cil qui possedoit Et l’Aube et l’Occident, qui ses bras estendoit Des Syrtes jusqu’au Nort, mort ne trouve à cette heure Un pouce de gazon pour toute sepulture? Ce bravache qui vint si bien accompaigné Or’ sur la terre gist, de tous abandonné. Mais non, il ne gist seul: ceux qui durant sa vie Le suyvoyent, mortz aussi luy tiennent compaignie. Non, il ne gist sur terre, ains l’affamé corbeau Est de son corps haché le merité tombeau.’ (6.337–54)37

As the key to the grotesque irony in Du Bartas is the exploit of Judith, the key to disarming it in Marlowe is Tamburlaine’s amorous possession of Zenocrate, in life as in death. That possession is complete, in fact, to the point of suggesting the numinous sense of the term – witness her rendition of the Song of Songs, which shows her under the spell of, among other things, his tongue: As looks the sun through Nilus’ flowing stream, Or when the morning holds him in her arms, So looks my lordly love, fair Tamburlaine; His talk much sweeter than the Muses’ song They sung for honour ’gainst Pierides, Or when Minerva did with Neptune strive; And higher would I rear my estimate Than Juno, sister to the highest god, If I were matched with mighty Tamburlaine. (1 Tamburlaine, 3.2.47–55)

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There is surely more to it than the positioning of a ‘silenced woman on the margins’, as Simon Shepherd puts it.38 After all, from her introduction as a captive in Act 1, Scene 2, Zenocrate occupies centre-stage to a surprising degree, given the geopolitical competition for attention. For it is not enough for Tamburlaine to resist the female captive who threatens to captivate (as Alexander resists Campaspe),39 to collect her as a trophy of victory (as Henry V does the Princess Katherine), or even to cultivate her complicity with ‘custom-made persuasions’ (the expression of Emily Bartels),40 as he does with others. More profoundly, he must coopt Zenocrate’s potential to act beyond the usual limits of her sex – to destroy him as a destroyer, if not physically, at least morally.41 That potential is multiply suggested by presenting her as compassionate with the sufferings of others (especially her countrymen), devout, a dutiful daughter, even finally a virtual widow. She thus fulfils the three estates of womanhood elaborated at length by Du Bartas in establishing Judith’s perfection (4.73–239). Her ‘divinity’, then, is not just the usual neoplatonic glamour but is teasingly enhanced, then entrusted to Tamburlaine’s safe-keeping. From the first, he asserts control of it – rhetorically and otherwise: ‘divine’ is his insistent epithet for her. Despite her initial protest that ‘The gods, defenders of the innocent, / Will never prosper your intended drifts’ (1 Tamburlaine, 1.2.68–9), he makes her the gift of the same made-to-measure Jove who, if Theridamus should draw his sword ‘to raze my charmèd skin’ (178), ‘will stretch his hand from heaven / To ward the blow and shield me safe from harm’ (178–80). This is precisely to invert the dynamic of Judith. Thereafter, Tamburlaine’s hegemony extends to the feminine sphere in and through Zenocrate. Before she comes to pity the dead Bajazeth and his empress, she willingly joins Tamburlaine in scorning them, and afterwards, when she prays, it is to ask ‘mighty Jove and holy Mahomet’ to ‘Pardon my love!’ (1 Tamburlaine, 5.2.300–1). If her dying fiancé leaves her ‘wounded in conceit for thee, / As much as thy fair body is for me!’ (352–3), this hardly prevents her from jumping into Tamburlaine’s arms (‘Else should I much forget myself, my lord’ (436)) or rejoicing as much as her father, the Sultan, says he does in his own ‘overthrow’ (421), thus echoing the nations who submit to Holofernes in Du Bartas. By the end of Part I, the triumph of the God of Israel proclaimed by Judith can be seamlessly appropriated by a thoroughly transcendent tyrant:

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Then sit thou down, divine Zenocrate, And here we crown thee Queen of Persia, And all the kingdoms and dominions That late the power of Tamburlaine subdued. As Juno, when the giants were suppressed, That darted mountains at her brother Jove, So looks my love, shadowing in her brows Triumphs and trophies for my victories; Or as Latona’s daughter, bent to arms, Adding more courage to my conquering mind. (1 Tamburlaine, 5.2.443–52)

It is all the easier for Tamburlaine to pre-empt any divine designation of Zenocrate as the redemptress of her people because he has exterminated the greater part of them – men and women. What is left of her people become his own, part of her dowry, as her father survives to testify. As is signalled by the reference to Diana (‘Latona’s daughter’), what Tamburlaine most conspicuously keeps safe, despite his presumptive barbarity, is Zenocrate’s chastity: Her state and person wants no pomp, you see, And for all blot of foul unchastity, I record heaven, her heavenly self is clear. Then let me find no further time to grace Her princely temples with the Persian crown. (422–6)

This declaration magnetically draws her father’s blessing, too, within his hegemonic discourse: ‘I yield with thanks and protestations / Of endless honor to thee for her love’ (433–4). Given the biblical models of symbolic castration – Samson as well as Holofernes 42 – that hover in the background (‘She that hath calmed the fury of my sword, / Which had ere this been bathed in streams of blood’ (374–5)), Tamburlaine’s sexual self-restraint carries overtones of self-preservation. The model of Judith remains especially insistent. By respecting Zenocrate’s chastity, he avoids the whirlpool of the Judith jinx, which caught hold of Holofernes by blinding his senses to the true nature and source of Judith’s attraction. In this context, Tamburlaine’s moment of faltering before Zenocrate’s beauty – hence his appreciation of ‘Beauty’ itself (82) as enhanced by ‘thy passion for thy country’s love’ (74) – emerges as a well-managed weak moment. His inward ‘sufferings’ (97) are ironically circumscribed between paroxysms of barbarity – his

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killing of the Damascan virgins and his taunting of Bajazeth – and they issue in a triumph over ‘thoughts effeminate and faint’ (114), sealed by the Machiavellian affirmation that ‘virtue solely is the sum of glory, / And fashions men with true nobility’ (126–7). That he is flirting with the Judith jinx would have been signalled for many spectators by the parallel soliloquy that Du Bartas invents for his love-stricken Holofernes. Unlike Tamburlaine, Holofernes is genuinely on the slippery slope to losing his manhood to a cluster of interrelated vices before he loses his life. But the contrast is also visible along the axis of ‘virtue’ of the Machiavellian stamp: ‘Helas! helas!’, dit-il, ‘faut-il donc que je vive, O change malheureux! captif de ma captive? Mais est-ce vivre, helas! quand le corps abatu Et quand l’ame abrutie ont perdu leur vertu?’ (5.41–4)43

While Tamburlaine laments that Zenocrate’s ‘sorrows’ (5.2.92), expressed by her beautifully ‘flowing eyes’ (83), ‘lay more siege unto my soul / Than all my army to Damascus’ walls’ (92–3), he is not about to give in. For Holofernes, the battle is lost, ‘Puis que le traict aigu qui de son bel œil part / Fauçant fer et soldats, m’outre de part en part’ (5.59–60).44 Tamburlaine’s very pain affirms his discursive mastery – ‘What is beauty, saith my sufferings, then?’ (5.2.97) – while Judith’s beauty renders Holofernes timid, blind, and mute: Car je respecte tant les graces que les cieux, Prodigues, ont versé sur elle que mes yeux Ne l’osent regarder et ma langue s’atache A mon palais muet tout soudain qu’elle tasche Decouvrir ma douleur. (5.83–7)45

The moment that strips Holofernes of boldness (‘[n]e l’osent . . .’) and compels his recognition of ‘les cieux’ bodes ill for a tongue ‘qui souloit mesme outrager les cieux’ (6.221). Tamburlaine will nimbly talk his way out of danger and carry on ‘daring God out of heaven’. Holofernes’ self-mocking surrender of his strength ironically heralds the triumph of Truth by way of Beauty: ‘Changés doncques, Hebrieux, changés en ris vos larmes, / Triomphés de mon ost, de moy et de mes armes’ (5.65–6).46 Against this background, the originality of Marlowe is to enforce the separation of Beauty

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from Truth, indeed, to defer the latter indefinitely. It is not likely to have been lost on contemporary audiences that, when confronted with Tamburlaine’s superheated vitality, the ‘three score thousand’ (2 Tamburlaine, 3.5.33) Hebrew warriors ecumenically marshalled against him by the Turkish King of Jerusalem blend into the ethnic melting pot with the rest of the losers. Audiences may have thought, too, of Mandeville’s magnification of the Sultan of Egypt as ‘lord of v. kyngdomes’, including ‘the kyngdome of Ierusalem’, from which he could summon vast hosts to his standard (pp. 24–6 (Chapter 6)). But if so, they would surely have drawn a contrast with that rather less formidable Sultan of Egypt whom Tamburlaine spares only so that the grateful father may give the bride away. Notes 1 The allusion is to Ken Jackson and Arthur F. Marotti, ‘The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies’, Criticism, 46.1 (2004), pp. 167–90. 2 I cite Mandeville’s Travels, ed. M. C. Seymour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). Seymour notes here the recurrent romance pattern of ‘Offers of marriage to highly born heathens’ (p. 234, n. to 24/21). 3 See Seymour (ed.), Mandeville’s Travels, p. 234, n. to 23/23. 4 Guillaume de Saluste, seigneur Du Bartas, Thomas Hudson’s Historie of Judith, trans. Thomas Hudson, ed. James Craigie (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1941). Hudson’s translation included arguments and summaries reflecting the thrust of Goulart’s glosses. I have elsewhere proposed that the circumstances of its production point to English intervention in the propaganda battle for the heart and mind (and indeed the body) of the young James VI of Scotland. See Fronton Du Duc, The Tragic History of La Pucelle of Domrémy, Otherwise Known as The Maid of Orléans (L’histoire tragique de la Pucelle de Dom-Rémy, aultrement d’Orléans), trans. with introduction and notes by Richard Hillman, Carleton Renaissance Plays in Translation, 39 (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 2005), pp. 43–51; and Richard Hillman, ‘La Pucelle sur la scène littéraire et politique: le trajet Pont-à-Mousson – Londres’, pp. 131–50 in Yves Peyré and Pierre Kapitaniak (eds), Shakespeare et l’Europe de la Renaissance: Actes du congrès organisé par la Société Française Shakespeare (Paris: Société Française Shakespeare, 2004). 5 ‘[D]aring God out of heauen with that Atheist Tamburlan’ is, of course, what Marlowe was accused of doing by Robert Greene in Perimedes the blacke-smith, etc. (London: John Wolfe for Edward White, 1588), sig. A3r.

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6 Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, ed. J. S. Cunningham, Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press; Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. 20. 7 My recent argument that Marlowe drew on Simon Belyard’s Le Guysien, published in 1592, implies a date of composition shortly prior to the first recorded performance. See Richard Hillman, ‘Marlowe’s Guise: Offending against God and King’, Notes and Queries, 55.2 (2008), pp. 154–9. 8 See Christopher Marlowe, The Massacre at Paris, ed. H. J. Oliver, in Dido Queen of Carthage and The Massacre at Paris, Revels Plays (London: Methuen, 1968), scenes xvi and xviii. 9 On the typological reading of Guise’s assassination, see Histoire et dictionnaire des Guerres de Religion, ed. Arlette Jouanna, Jacqueline Boucher et al. (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1998), p. 120. Agrippa d’Aubigné, too, invokes it in Les Tragiques, ed. Frank Lestringant (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 5.381–6. On the political symbolism of Du Bartas’s poem in particular, see Guillaume de Saluste, seigneur Du Bartas, La Judit, ed. André Baïche, Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Toulouse, Série A, Tome 12 (Toulouse: Association des Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Toulouse, 1971), pp. xxi–xlvii. In the Histoire ecclésiastique, attributed to Théodore de Bèze, the actual assassin, Poltrot de Méré, has a notably Judith-like moment in which he prays that God may either change his purpose, if the act is not according to the divine will, or give him the constancy and strength to kill the ‘tyran’ and deliver Orléans from destruction; see Théodore de Bèze (attrib.), Histoire ecclésiastique des églises réformées du Royaume de France, ed. G. Baum and E. Cunitz, 3 vols (1580; fac. rpt Nieuwkoop: B. De Graaf, 1974), 2: 349 (original pagination). 10 Catherine de Parthenay’s (lost) play of Holoferne was staged during the Catholic royalist siege of La Rochelle in 1572. Le Miroir des vefves, tragedie sacrée d’Holoferne et Judith, by the schoolmaster Pieter Heyns, was performed at Antwerp ten years later. See J. S. Street, French Sacred Drama from Bèze to Corneille: Dramatic Forms and the Purposes in the Early Modern Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 52, 54–5. 11 Cited by Nick De Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), p. 156. 12 Charles Gibbon, A Watch-Worde for Warre: Not So New As Necessary (Cambridge: John Legat, 1596), sig. C2v. The paradigm matches, of course, the paradox of a ‘weak and feeble woman’ endowed with the ‘heart and stomach of a king’ in order to achieve a ‘famous victory over those enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people’. These are, famously, the terms of Elizabeth’s 1588 speech to the troops at Tilbury, some of whom, at least, would undoubtedly have

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16 17

recognised the biblical subtext. See Elizabeth I, ‘Speech to the Troops at Tilbury’, in M. H. Abrams (gen. ed.), The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th ed., 2 vols (New York: Norton, 1993), vol. I, p. 999. Fronton Du Duc, L’histoire tragique de la Pucelle de Dom-Rémy, ed. Marc-André Prévost, in La Tragédie à l’époque d’Henri III, vol. 2 (1579–1582), Théâtre français de la Renaissance, 2e série, 2 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki; Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), Pro.47– 54; translation follows: ‘Now, this all happened at a time when, in the east, / That King of the Turks, Bajazeth, who never ceased / Harrying Christians, battered Constantinople; then / It was the turn of that great Tartar to chasten / Him in battle for his greed: Tamburlaine, that scourge / Of humankind, who, from a peasant, cresting the surge / Of a million soldiers, made himself king in a day, / Enforcing nearly all Asia under his sway.’ All translations are my own; this one is taken from Fronton Du Duc, The Tragic History of La Pucelle of Domrémy, Otherwise Known as The Maid of Orléans (L’histoire tragique de la Pucelle de Dom-Rémy, aultrement d’Orléans), trans. with introduction and notes by Richard Hillman, Carleton Renaissance Plays in Translation, 39 (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 2005). Marlowe’s chief source was Pero (or Pedro) Mexía’s Silva de varia leción (1540), as translated into French by Claude Gruget (Les diverses leçons de Pierre Messie), then into English, in various partial forms, by Thomas Fortescue (The Foreste, or Collection of Histories (London: John Kingston for William Jones, 1571), republished 1576) and George Whetstone (The English Myrror (London: J. Windet for G. Seton, 1586)). The arguments over Marlowe’s use of Fortescue and Whetstone are long-standing and complex. I will sidestep them here by citing Gruget, who offered the most complete version of the Tamburlaine material and whom Marlowe might have used directly. The work was frequently reprinted. I refer to Pe[d]ro Mexía, Les diverses leçons de Pierre Messie gentil-homme de Seville . . . contenans variables et memorables histoires, . . . Augmentées outre les precedentes impressions de la suite d’icelles, faite par Antoine du Verdier, Sieur de Vauprivaz, etc., trans. Claude Gruget, supplemented by Antoine Du Verdier, 2 vols in 1 (Lyons: Estienne Michel, 1580). ‘“O Lord,” they said, “will you against us ever and ever hurl the darts of your wrath?”’ Cited throughout by book and line numbers is Du Bartas, La Judit, ed. Baïche. This edition is based on the author’s revised version of 1579, which was multiply reissued. ‘God . . . by the bitterness of a righteous punishment often rouses those whom he loves dearly.’ ‘Thus, thus, Lord, henceforth may we be able to feel you not as a judge but rather as a gentle father; thus may cruel tyrants henceforth feel you as a judge, and not as a father.’

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18 See (or rather hear) Pistol in 2 Henry IV: ‘Shall packhorses / And hollow pamper’d jades of Asia, / Which cannot go but thirty mile a day, / Compare with Caesars and with Cannibals / And Troiant Greeks? Nay, rather damn them with / King Cerberus, and let the welkin roar’ (2.4.163–8). Shakespeare is cited, by act, scene, and line numbers, from The Riverside Shakespeare, G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin (gen. eds), 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). Compare 1 Tamburlaine: ‘Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia! / What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day, / And have so proud a chariot at your heels, / And such a coachman as great Tamburlaine?’ (4.4.1–4). The Tamburlaine plays are cited, by act, scene and line numbers, from Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Irving Ribner (New York: Odyssey Press, 1963). 19 See Ethel Seaton, ‘Marlowe’s Map’, Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, 10 (1924), pp. 13–35, and ‘Fresh Sources for Marlowe’, Review of English Studies, 5 (1929), pp. 389–90, as well as John Bakeless, The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe, 2 vols (1942; rpt Hamdon, Conn.: Archon, 1964), vol. 1, pp. 236–7. 20 ‘Boastful warriors are most often liars when they speak of their deeds of arms.’ 21 ‘Tear from its place the tongue that was accustomed to defy heaven itself.’ Here Du Bartas retributively applies a punishment dealt out to Huguenot ‘heretics’. See David Nicholls, ‘The Theatre of Martyrdom in the French Reformation’, Past and Present, 121 (1988), pp. 49–73. 22 ‘before my short–sword are frail as glass’. 23 ‘Him with a cleaving blow I split from the head to the belly.’ 24 Cited is The Bible and Holy Scriptvres Conteyned in the Olde and Newe Testament (Geneva, 1562). 25 ‘A god your Moses has fashioned as he pleased.’ 26 These included, according to Baines, the statement that ‘Moses was but a juggler’ who found it easy enough ‘to abuse the Jews, being a rude and gross people’ (cited by A. L. Rowse, Christopher Marlowe: A Biography, revised edition (London: Macmillan, 1981), p. 193. 27 ‘“Avenge the greatest god who has descended from the starry circles. Arm, soldiers, arm, one hand with a torch, the other with a blade to despoil the Occident by sword and by flame. Cover its mountains and valleys with a red sea. Make your proud horses swim in blood . . .” Thus I finished, and my voice was at once followed by a beating of shields, which witnessed the desire they had to march beneath my bold banners.’ 28 ‘“We come not here,” they said, “with arms to resist the assault of your brave warriors, but we come, prince, to receive from you life or death, in brief, whatever law it shall please you to give . . . O god, what greater ease, O god, what greater happiness could come upon us than to have

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30 31

32 33

such a leader who knows how to wield both the valiant lance and the scales of justice, and who by his virtues equals the greatest gods?”’ ‘I gain that mountain whose oblique horns divide all Asia and which serve as the boundary for many a potent empire. There I slaughter, I smash, I burn all that I encounter, and my brutal soldiers behave like mowers and with an able hand leave no single blade of grass standing upright after them . . . Asia laid to waste, and returning to the east I conquer Coele; without pity I ravage the fertile banks of the deep Euphrates. I devastate Rapsis and the land of the Agraei, beaten down, recognises the power of my mighty hand. From there, always following the shore-line, I spoil Midian, then make my way north to the double Lebanon; I ravage the region of Damascus and flatten its cities Gaane, Abila, and Hippas, and from there, curious, I direct my steps to that mountain whence one sees Phoebus gleam at light and rise abruptly, causing my host to march towards the west pounded by the waves of the Phoenician sea.’ ‘near the Scythian rampart’. ‘Holofernes was already setting up his banners on the Scythian rampart.’ The underlying biblical reference, of course, cannot be to Tamburlaine’s homeland of Scythia; Du Bartas himself may have been puzzled, and Hudson (Du Bartas, Thomas Hudson’s Historie of Judith) did nothing to clarify the point by translating as ‘Scythique rampier’ (2.1, 5.580). As the more learned translators of the Authorised Version accurately established (Judith, 3.10), Holofernes’ camp is near ‘Scythopolis’, or Bethshan, on the West Bank of the Jordan – thus, a natural staging point for his invasion. But what Marlowe would have read in the Geneva Bible might well have strengthened – perhaps all the more strongly because geographically he knew better – an imaginative association with Tamburlaine: specified there is ‘a citie of the Scythians’. In fact, the name Scythopolis may be the trace of an ancient Scythian invasion, and the Greek name is first documented from the Books of Judith and Machabees (2 Machabees, 12.29), so the confusion on the part of early readers is understandable; see The Catholic Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Church, ed. Charles G. Hebermann et al., 16 vols (New York: Encyclopedia Press, 1914), s.v. Scythopolis. ‘He was no lesser than Alexander, or if so, it was by very little.’ ‘These things accomplished, and when this great personage had conquered many countries, vanquished, and put to death a number of kings, finding no resistance in all of Asia, he withdrew into his country with infinite riches and with the company of the principal persons of those lands that he had trodden under foot, who carried with them the greater part of their goods. And there he caused a truly magnificent town to be constructed, . . . the most sumptuous city in the world,

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35

36

37

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39

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. . . abounding and teeming with all riches. But at last this great Tamburlaine, in however great authority he maintained his estate, yet so it was that, as a man, he paid the debt of nature and finished his days, leaving two sons, not, however, like their father.’ Hence, when the doomed Holofernes falls drunkenly asleep: ‘Ja se tourne son lict, ja mille clairs brandons / Luisent devant ses yeux, ja dix mille bourdons / Bruyent dans son oreille. Il voit des Minotaures, / Meduses, Alectons, Chimeres et Centaures’ (Now his bed whirls round, now a thousand bright torches glow before his eyes, now ten thousand hummings buzz in his ear. He sees the Minotaurs, Medusas, Alectos, Chimeras, and Centaurs) (6.97–100). ‘For there is no nerve, tendon, artery, vein, or piece of flesh that is not sliced off by the foolish populace, and even so their anger does not find enough scope . . . In all the tribe of Jacob there is no rascal so crude but he will have some little bit.’ On this point, too, La Judit turns the vindictive tables, echoing Catholic commentaries on the fate of the Admiral Coligny, whose body was also grotesquely mutilated. See François de Chantelouve, The Tragedy of the Late Gaspard de Coligny, in The Tragedy of the Late Gaspard de Coligny and The Guisiade [by Pierre Matthieu], trans. with introduction and notes by Richard Hillman, Carleton Renaissance Plays in Translation, 40 (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 2005), pp. 41–3, 55–6, 171–2 (nn. 170, 172). ‘O great God, who will believe that he who possessed both the Levant and the West, who stretched his arms from the Syrtes to the North, now, dead, finds not an inch of turf for his tomb? That braggart who came so fully accompanied now lies on the earth, abandoned by all. But no, he does not lie alone: those who followed him while he lived also keep him company in death. No, he lies not upon the earth, but the hungry raven is the deserved tomb of his corpse hacked in pieces.’ Simon Shepherd, Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), p. 203. He makes the point with particular reference to the masculine bonding of Tamburlaine and Theridamus. See John Lyly, Campaspe, in Five Elizabethan Comedies, ed. A. K. McIlwraith (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 2.2.42: ‘What! is the son of Philip, King of Macedon, become the subject of Campaspe, the captive of Thebes?’ Emily C. Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p. 62. See Kent Cartwright, Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 213–17.

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42 See Mary Jacobus, ‘Judith, Holofernes and the phallic woman’, in Jacobus, Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 110–36. 43 ‘Alas, alas,’ he said, ‘must I then live – O miserable change – the captive of my captive? But is it to live, alas, when the body, stricken down, and the bewildered soul have lost their virtue?’ 44 ‘Since the sharp dart that flies from her beautiful eye, striking down sword and soldiers, bewilders me to the core.’ 45 ‘For I so respect those graces that the heavens, prodigal, have poured upon her that my eyes do not dare look at her and my tongue suddenly clings mute to my palate when it tries to reveal my pain.’ 46 ‘Change, then, Hebrews, change your tears to laughter; triumph over my army, myself, and my arms.’ Works cited Primary sources Anon., La France-Turquie c’est-à-dire conseils et moyens tenus par les ennemis de la couronne de France pour réduire le royaume en tel estat que la Tyrannie turquesque. Orléans: Thibaut Des Murs, 1576. Anon., Mandeville’s Travels, ed. M. C. Seymour. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. D’Aubigné, Agrippa, Les Tragiques, ed. Frank Lestringant. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. Bèze, Théodore de (attrib.), Histoire ecclésiastique des églises réformées du Royaume de France, ed. G. Baum and E. Cunitz, 3 vols. 1580; fac. rpt Nieuwkoop: B. De Graaf, 1974. The Bible and Holy Scriptvres Conteyned in the Olde and Newe Testament. Geneva, 1562. Chantelouve, François de, The Tragedy of the Late Gaspard de Coligny, in The Tragedy of the Late Gaspard de Coligny and The Guisiade [by Pierre Matthieu], trans. with introduction and notes by Richard Hillman. Carleton Renaissance Plays in Translation, 40. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 2005. Du Bartas, Guillaume de Saluste, seigneur, La Judit, ed. André Baïche. Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Toulouse, Série A, Tome 12. Toulouse: Association des Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Toulouse, 1971. ——, Thomas Hudson’s Historie of Judith, trans. Thomas Hudson, ed. James Craigie. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1941. Elizabeth I, ‘Speech to the Troops at Tilbury’, in M. H. Abrams (gen. ed.), The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed., 2 vols. New York: Norton, 1993. Fortescue, George. The Foreste, or Collection of Histories. London: John Kingston for William Jones, 1571.

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Fronton Du Duc, L’histoire tragique de la Pucelle de Dom-Rémy, ed. MarcAndré Prévost, in La tragédie à l’époque d’Henri III, vol. 2 (1579–1582). Théâtre français de la Renaissance, 2e série, 2. Florence: Leo S. Olschki; Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000. ——, The Tragic History of La Pucelle of Domrémy, Otherwise Known as The Maid of Orléans (L’histoire tragique de la Pucelle de Dom-Rémy, aultrement d’Orléans), trans. with introduction and notes by Richard Hillman. Carleton Renaissance Plays in Translation, 39. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 2005. Gibbon, Charles, A Watch-Worde for Warre: Not So New As Necessary. Cambridge: John Legat, 1596. Greene, Robert, Perimedes the blacke-smith, etc. London: John Wolfe for Edward White, 1588. Lyly, John. Campaspe, in Five Elizabethan Comedies, ed. A. K. McIlwraith. London: Oxford University Press, 1934. Marlowe, Christopher, The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Irving Ribner. New York: Odyssey Press, 1963. ——, The Massacre at Paris, ed. H. J. Oliver, in Dido Queen of Carthage and The Massacre at Paris. The Revels Plays. London: Methuen, 1968. ——, Tamburlaine the Great, ed. J. S. Cunningham. The Revels Plays. Manchester: Manchester University Press; Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. Mexía, Pe[d]ro, Les diverses leçons de Pierre Messie gentil-homme de Seville . . . contenans variables et memorables histoires, . . . Augmentées outre les precedentes impressions de la suite d’icelles, faite par Antoine du Verdier, Sieur de Vauprivaz, etc, trans. by Claude Gruget, supplemented by Antoine Du Verdier, 2 vols in 1. Lyons: Estienne Michel, 1580. Shakespeare, William, The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. eds G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin, 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Whetstone, George, The English Myrror. London: J. Windet for G. Seton, 1586. Secondary sources Bakeless, John, The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe, 2 vols. 1942; rpt Hamdon, Conn.: Archon, 1964. Bartels, Emily C., Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Cartwright, Kent, Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Hebermann, Charles G. et al. (eds), The Catholic Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Church, 16 vols. New York: Encyclopedia Press, 1914. De Somogyi, Nick, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998.

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Hillman, Richard, ‘La Pucelle sur la scène littéraire et politique: le trajet Pont-à-Mousson – Londres’, pp. 131–50 in Yves Peyré and Pierre Kapitaniak (eds), Shakespeare et l’Europe de la Renaissance: Actes du congrès organisé par la Société Française Shakespeare. Paris: Société Française Shakespeare, 2004. ——, ‘Marlowe’s Guise: offending against God and King’, Notes and Queries, 55.2 (2008), pp. 154–9. Jackson, Ken, and Arthur F. Marotti, ‘The turn to religion in early modern English studies’. Criticism, 46.1 (2004), pp. 167–90. Jacobus, Mary, ‘Judith, Holofernes and the phallic woman’, pp. 110–36 in Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism. London: Methuen, 1986. Jouanna, Arlette, Jacqueline Boucher et al. (eds), Histoire et dictionnaire des Guerres de Religion. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1998. Nicholls, David, ‘The theatre of martyrdom in the French reformation’, Past and present, 121 (1988), pp. 49–73. Rowse, A. L. Christopher Marlowe: A Biography, rev. ed. London: Macmillan, 1981. Seaton, Ethel, ‘Marlowe’s map’, Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, 10 (1924), pp. 13–35. ——, ‘Fresh sources for Marlowe’, Review of English Studies, 5 (1929), pp. 385–401. Shepherd, Simon, Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre. Brighton: Harvester, 1986. Street, J. S., French Sacred Drama from Bèze to Corneille: Dramatic Forms and the Purposes in the Early Modern Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

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8 Prester John writes back: the legend and its early modern reworkings Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Ladan Niayesh

This chapter concerns itself with one of the staples of Mandevillian lore, the figure of Prester John, whom the ‘knight of transmission’ (more than of ‘non-possession’, as Stephen Greenblatt dubs the narrator of Mandeville’s Travels)1 portrays as ‘a grete Emperour of Ynde’.2 His legendary realm of ‘Pantaxore’, peopled with a whole array of mirabilia, is said to lie ‘foot agaynst foot to Englonde’3 in a climactic passage of the book, as the narrator narrowly fails to reach the earthly Paradise. The starting point of my research on this fantasy-laden figure was a bewildering episode in the anonymous Tom a Lincoln, a loose-knit heroic and romantic comedy written sometime after 1607, discovered in manuscript in 1973 and tentatively attributed to Thomas Heywood by Richard Proudfoot, its editor for the Malone Society Reprints.4 The play is set in Arthurian times, and deals with the adventures of the eponymous hero and other Knights of the Round Table. In the episode in question, the knights reach the land of Prester John, where Tom (also known as the Red Rose Knight) slays a dragon and falls in love with Anglitora, the King’s daughter. Prester John refuses to grant his daughter’s hand to a stranger, so the lovers choose to elope, leaving him and his queen Bellamy to peak and pine and eventually commit suicide. Why Prester John, rather than any other monarch? Nothing in the play lends any specificity to his realm, where the character and his daughter simply appear as types of the angry father and disobedient daughter. No reference is made here to Prester John’s being a Christian; in fact, he actually swears by ‘the gods’ (l. 2529) like a true pagan. The geographical whereabouts of his land are in no way detailed, leaving us only to infer that he is neither Indian (since he contends that were it not for the dragon ruining his land, his wealth would surpass that of ‘the Indian Monarch’, l. 1853) nor Ethiopian (since he frowns at the ‘Ethiops scandall’ of the

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Red Rose Knight’s treason, l. 2535). No Mandevillian marvels are mentioned in connection with his country, except of course the dragon (conveniently slain offstage) which is a ubiquitous feature of knightly adventures, regardless of their geographical locations. The slaying of the dragon may diversely recall that of the ‘Questing Beast’ in Arthurian legends, the story of St George, and quite a few classical precedents, since the creature’s three tongues can also make us think of Cerberus, while the golden tree which it guards may be reminiscent of the story of the Golden Fleece. So why Prester John? The question is all the more intriguing since, in the absence of the lost 1547 Christmas Masque of Prester John,5 Tom a Lincoln is the only extant play from the period in which the figure appears onstage. Through what ideological and literary meanderings has the would-be rescuer of the Christian armies of the Second Crusade (1147–49) and Mandeville’s ‘grete Emperour of Ynde’ become a contemporary of King Arthur and at the same time an analogue to, say, Medea’s father Pelias, or Floripas’s father the Sowdone of Babylone?6 This chapter attempts to retrieve part of the Priest-King’s complex itinerary through medieval and early modern imaginations. The emergence of the Prester John legend and its success are first and foremost the products of crusading Europe’s ambivalent attitude towards the East, an attitude which Albert Hourani defines as ‘a mixture of fear, bewilderment and uneasy recognition of a kind of spiritual kinship’.7 In twelfth-century writings, both learned and popular, the ‘Saracens’8 are presented alternately as pagans and as heretics, but in all cases their beliefs are explained on the basis of a Christian referential. As pagans in the Chansons de geste, such as La Chanson de Roland, they mostly worship not a large pantheon of gods but an unholy trinity, composed of Tervagant, Apollyon (another European referential) and Mahomet.9 In polemicist writings sponsored by the likes of Peter the Venerable (c. 1095–1156) and drawing on such earlier sources as John of Damascus (c. 676–749) and the Venerable Bede (672/3–735), they become the erring followers of the Christian heretic Mahomet and his mentor Bahira (or Sergius), a Christian monk.10 Their fate is either to be converted and saved by the polemicists or to be overcome by the Crusaders and surrender Christian holy places to Christians. In both cases, the aim is not to crush religious and cultural otherness in them, but to retrieve sameness in and through them, a dream which materialises in the figure of the converted Saracen of

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romances from the twelfth century onwards,11 or in that of Prester John, a déjà vu and déjà chrétien embodiment of alterity. Two centuries before Mandeville, the first known reference to Prester John is to be found in Otto of Freising’s chronicle, the Historia de duabus civitatibus (1158), which contains the report made by Hugh, a bishop from Lebanon: He also related that not so many years ago a certain Iohannes, a king and a priest, living in the Far East, in extremo Oriente, beyond Persia and Armenia, who like all his people was a Christian though a Nestorian, made war on the brothers, the kings of the Persians and Medes, the Samiardi, and stormed the capital of their kingdom, Egbattana . . . When the said kings encountered him with Persian, Median, and Assyrian troops, they fought for three days . . . At last Presbyter Iohannes – for so they are in the habit of calling him – was victorious, putting the Persians to flight with most bloodthirsty slaughter.12

This extract shows how, from his very first appearance, Prester John is an embodiment of the ambivalence mentioned above by Hourani, caught half-way between the pagan past of classical authorities and the present of Christian Crusaders. Roaming about in space and time, he is vaguely located in extremo Oriente and is made to fight the long extinct nations of the Medes and Assyrians, rather than directly facing contemporary ‘Saracens’. He beats them back to Ecbatana, which was the ancient capital of the Medes vanquished and destroyed by Cyrus the Great in 550 BCE, i.e. about twelve centuries before Otto wrote his chronicle. As for the mysterious name of John’s kingly adversaries, the ‘Samiardi’, it recalls the Persian ‘Smerdis’, name of the murdered brother of Cambyses, son and heir to Cyrus the Great, who died in the Syrian homonym city of Ecbatana in 522 BCE. To complete this patchwork portrait, Prester John is at the same time a Priest and a King, a Christian and a heretic through his Nestorian faith, since the Nestorians had parted from Byzantine Christianity in 431, following their condemnation at the council of Ephesus. Modern scholarship has tentatively identified the figure as a Qara-Khitai ruler from Central Asia who adopted Nestorianism and defeated the Seljuk Sultan Sanjar near Samarkand in 1141.13 Later avatars include Wang Khan of the Keraits, another Nestorian who opposed Genghis Khan in the early thirteenth century and who is mentioned by William of Rubruck’s Itinerarium (1253) and Odoric of Pordenone’s Travels (c. 1330).14 Yet, Otto’s spatially

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and temporally garbled account takes his readers’ imaginations way beyond any such reductive identification and makes the PriestKing look like a distant spiritual relative on a world map which has grown unexpectedly large since the appearance of the Mongols on the scene of history in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century. On this new map, R. W. Southern remarks, the enemies of faith stop being ‘a fringe phenomenon’, but rather become the besieged centre, while the Altaic tribes and the rediscovered Nestorians associated with the Prester John legend embody the dream of a difference which has come full circle and has been transformed into Christian sameness.15 Defined as he is by his spatio-temporal mobility, the Prester John of Otto’s report thus has one foot in the ideological context of the Crusades, since he is likely to aid the Christian forces by attacking their enemies from behind, and one foot in an already extensive tradition of mirabilia writings on the East, dating back at least to such classical authorities as Ctesias (fifth century BCE), Megasthenes (c. 350–290 BCE) and Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE). More than contemporary rulers of Turkic tribes, the figure recalls well-known precedents from the Alexander legends, such as the Indian king, Porus, whose land allegedly bordered on those of the monstrous races, and as such marked the end of the civilised world: ‘For ther more in to the este / Ther was nothyng but wyld best’, as we can read in one of the remaining fragments of an early modern English edition of the Romance of King Alexander.16 This in-between status is what soon allows the fictive figure of Prester John to play the part of a cultural mediator presenting inside information on the East to the addressees of his 1164 Letter of Prester John. This forged document was to enjoy immense popularity throughout the Middle Ages, with over a hundred mansucripts surviving to date in a variety of European languages, and Pope Alexander III himself answering it in 1177.17 Prester John’s posture in his Letter is somewhat akin to that of Shakespeare’s ‘Moor of Venice’. Like Othello, the alien witness who reports of such wonders as the Blemmyes and the Anthropophagi,18 Prester John is a fantasised cultural and ideological missing link, a gobetween who relates otherness in the language of sameness, since the ‘original’ Letter was allegedly composed not in some barbarian tongue but in Greek, the language of its recipient, the Byzantine emperor.19 Interestingly enough, the only printed early modern version of the Letter in English of which I am aware (Antwerp, 1520) was

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issued with two other works fulfilling the same ideological purpose of cultural reclaiming of otherness.20 One is the first account in English of the voyages of discovery made by the Portuguese under King Manuel I. The other is an account of the ‘ten nations of Christ’ grouped under his banner notwithstanding the disparities between them in terms of dogma and ritual. Together the three works still do away with spatial and temporal variables (just as Otto’s twelfth-century account of Prester John did), since the same engravings of naked men and fabulous animals are used to illustrate all three of them. Furthermore, if a date is provided for the Portuguese explorations described – ‘Here aforetymes in the yere of our Lorde god .M.CCC.C.xcvi.’ (sig. A2r) – Prester John’s Letter is not dated otherwise than internally: ‘Written in oure holy pallays in the byrth of my selfe .v. hõdred and seuen’ (sig. E4r). Here, Prester John shares his Methuselah-like longevity, not just with the biblical patriarchs but also with the naked and promiscuous New World cannibals who ‘lyue comonly .iii.C. yere & more as wt sykenesse they dye nat’ (sig. A2v). Meanwhile the Amazons inhabiting the land of ‘Feminie’ under his dominion (sig. C3r) are hardly more feminine than the female Georgian fighters of the ‘eyght [Christian] nacyon’ who ‘bere harneyse lyke the men and . . . haue also beardes as ye men’ (sig. C3r). As for the harrowing reports of New World cannibalism (‘the man etethe his wyfe his chylderne / as we also haue seen’, sig. A2v), they find an echo which is distant both in space and in time through the ferocious hosts of Gog and Magog who turn allelophagous and devour each other whenever Prester John is left without enemies against whom he might unleash them (sig. C2v–C3r). Altogether, what is most striking about this and similarly popular travel compendia is their syncretic quality. Indeed, such compilations seem to track basic deep elements and common denominators in stories and reports from various places and times, as if they were possibly different combinations or versions of the same pattern. By so doing, they frequently assign echoes of age-old beliefs to newly explored locales.21 In this instance, the pattern is a Christian or an Ur-Christian one pointing to the spiritual unity of all those who qualify as humankind by the Augustinian standards of The City of God: ‘But whatsoeuer he bee, that is Man, that is a mortall reasonable creature, bee his forme, voice, or what euer, neuer so different from an ordinary mans, no faithfull person ought to doubt that hee is of Adams progeny.’22 In this sense, the Prester John of the early accounts appears above all to be a symbol of the

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Church’s universality, transcending both history and geography to offer a prospect of underlying unity under a thick veneer of difference. The familiarising approach to otherness exemplified here is of course not specific to early modern compilations. This is exactly the design which two centuries earlier ruled over Mandeville’s Travels in general, and its protrayal of Prester John and his land in particular. In the words of Rosemary Tzanaki, the author of Mandeville’s Book has created ‘a religious geography centred upon the physical and spiritual Jerusalem, stressing the unity of this world through its very diversity.’23 Mandeville’s approach to faith and custom is an equally syncretic one, seeking out a unity of meaning behind the diversity of the worlds ‘par-deçà’ (‘on this side’, closer to home) and ‘par-delà’ (‘on the other side’, in distant lands), to take up the categories which Christiane Deluz defines by using Mandevillian terminology.24 Prester John and his land play a crucial role in this syncretic view of the world. Technically speaking, the Priest-King’s dominion lies furthest from ‘us’ than any other inhabited land, and as such is visited last by Mandeville, right before his crossing of the Vale Perilous and his failure to reach the Earthly Paradise. In Mandeville’s view of a round earth, Prester John’s land is antipodal to England: ‘prester Johans londe lyeth foot agaynst foot to Englonde . . . and they are vnder the erthe to vs’.25 Yet, what Mandeville finds there is not a nether world plagued by moral topsy-turvydom but a land mostly of abundance and faith in which even the strangest beings and behaviours often find a justification grounded in the Scriptures. As with the story, earlier in the book, of the man who unwittingly circumnavigated the globe and returned close to his own home without realising it, the Prester John episodes break down polarity into resemblance and nurture the hope that diversity might come full circle and lead to sameness and unity. Mandeville’s Travels has a significant place, not just in the Western history of travel but also of literature. A look at the appellations for some of its early manuscripts and editions bears witness to the diversity of responses which the work elicited from its early audiences: it was described with terms as diverse as ‘livre’, ‘geste’, ‘romant’, ‘tractatus’, ‘itinerarium’, ‘voiage and trauayle’.26 In her study of the medieval audiences of what she chooses to call more objectively the Book of Sir John Mandeville, Rosemary Tzanaki

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lists five dominant types of receptions of this work, which classified it as a pilgrimage itinerary, a geographical treatise, a romance, a history or a work of theology. Likewise, the figure of the would-be author himself elicits a variety of responses in the late Middle Ages and early modern period, including romantic reworkings, as in William Warner’s Albion’s England (1596), mentioned by Charles Moseley in Chapter 2 above. Warner endows the English traveller’s persona with the recognisable traits of a romance knight: thus he jousts under the guise of the Green Knight for Lady Elenor, cousin to Edward III, before undertaking his travels for her sake.27 Moseley believes that Warner’s best-seller could have provided the plot for at least one other romantic reworking of the figure of Mandeville, contained in the lost anonymous play of Sir John Mandeville (1599).28 Medieval and early modern responses to the accounts of Prester John are at least as varied as the responses to Mandeville and his Travels as a whole. This may partly be due to Mandeville’s (and others’) vague location of John’s kingdom in India: ‘prester John that is a grete Emperour of Ynde’ (fol. lxxxxi v). The term ‘Ynde’ used here could refer either to what was then known as ‘Lesser India’ around the Indus River, or to ‘Middle India’ covering parts of Persia and Media as well, or even to ‘Greater India’, which comprised the whole Indian subcontinent and large areas in the Far East. Furthermore, since for the Middle Ages the River Nile was considered the frontier between Africa and Asia, Prester John’s India could actually be located anywhere between Ethiopia and central to eastern Asia.29 If the original ‘function’ of Prester John as the potential rescuer of Christian armies receded as a consequence of the failure of successive Crusades, culminating in the Mamluk capture of Acre (the last of the Crusaders’ strongholds in Holy Land) in 1291 and the conversion to Islam of the prominent Mongol rulers,30 the hope to find the legendary Priest-King and his fabulous land endured throughout the late Middle Ages, as well as the early modern period of voyages, and even late into the modern period. The search for Prester John’s land progressively became not only a geographical endeavour but also and perhaps chiefly a religious and romantic quest for a land of faith and/or riches beyond the territories occupied by Turks and other Muslims. This quest was possibly one of the motives for the Portuguese explorations in the East, and it resulted in such reports as that of Francisco Alvares, The True Relation of the Lands of the Prester John, which is a narrative

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of the Portuguese embassy to Ethiopia in 1520.31 As stated above, the Indian location of Prester John’s realm also contributed towards an amalgamation of his figure with that of the Indian king, Porus, in the Alexander Romances, and Mandeville’s Travels has its share in this process by associating various Alexandrian marvels with the land of Prester John, such as the Trees of the Sun and Moon, the Enclosed Tribes or the Gymnosophists.32 But above all, the circulation of Mandeville’s Travels contributes to popularising a humanising and potentially romantic evolution which was absent from the originally static description of Prester John’s land in his Letter, and that element is his daughter: ‘This Emperour preest Johan weddeth comonly the doughter of the grete Chane / & the grete Chane his doughter.’33 The latter detail paves the way for a portrayal of Prester John not just as an invincible hero and an immortal Christian champion in the East but as a king of flesh and blood with whom it is possible to enter a very material and practical political transaction through the sexual mediation of a daughter, ‘the family’s most expendable member’ in Lynda Boose’s classification.34 This matrimonial addition to the accounts of Prester John intervenes in the context of a growing romanticisation of the East, around the increasingly popular type figure of the ‘Noble Saracen’ in various Western European literatures (e.g. French, Italian or German). Gloria Allaire attributes the development of this figure partly to closer, non-conflictual contacts with Muslims through missionaries, merchants and pilgrims in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and partly to the infusion of romance material into that of epic.35 Meanwhile, focusing more specifically on English literature, Dorothee Metlitzki underlines that nearly all of the ten metrical romances of the Carolingian tradition which have survived in the English vernacular of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries primarily concern themeselves not with Charlemagne and his ‘dozepers’ (twelve peers) but with noble Saracen figures, mainly Fierabras and Otinel.36 The plots of most of these romances, Metlitzki contends, revolve around four alien stock figures: the converted Saracen knight, the Saracen princess falling in love with a Christian hero (‘la paienne amoureuse’ of Norman Daniel’s classification),37 the defeated emir or sultan, and the Saracen giant or monster overcome by Christian heroes.38 Such a context prepares the ground for Prester John – who has now become a cross between a Christian knight and an alien monarch, complete with a marriageable daughter and a land full of

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giants and monsters – to turn into stock fare for late medieval and early modern romances of travel and conquest, where he appears alternately in the guise of an ally and in that of an enemy. In some romances, he is still a partner (albeit a junior partner) in the Christian heroes’ adventures in the East. We may think, among other examples, of Canto XXXIII in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1504–16). This episode is devoted to the adventures of the English Knight Astolpho, a possible avatar of Mandeville, who finds himself at the court of an Ethiopian Prester John. As required by the conventions of heroic romance, the roles are reversed and it is no longer Prester John who comes to the Christians’ aid as he was originally supposed to do in the context of crusading propaganda. It is, rather, the heroic English knight who rescues the legendary figure, as the latter is made blind and beset by harpies following a failed attempt to reach the Earthly Paradise through his seeking out the source of the Nile.39 In other romances, a now secularised figure of Prester John tends increasingly to be referred to as just one more oriental tyrant to be defeated. This is how he appears, along with his unruly daughter (the aptly named ‘Anglitora’, since she chooses to elope with an English knight) in the anonymous Tom a Lincoln with which I started this chapter, as well as in that play’s source, Richard Johnson’s prose romance The Most Pleasant History of Tom a Lincolne (1599, 1607). If the play stops with the elopement and the promise of a wedding, the prose romance carries on to show the hero begetting a son, the Black Knight, on Prester John’s daughter, while he already has a son, the Fairy Knight, by his lawful wife, the Queen of Fairyland. Fair or Fairy Knight versus Black Knight: this opposition, as well as the future enmity between the two sons and heirs in the second part of the romance, recreate the East–West gap which the Prester John legend was originally meant to bridge. In the literary context of what Michael L. Hays calls the neo-chivalric revival of the late 1580s and 1590s, which mirrored the warlike achievements of Ralegh, Sidney and Essex on the international scene, true valour had to be grounded in national ideology, as exemplified by such markedly native heroic models as King Arthur, Bevis of Hampton or Guy of Warwick.40 We may think here, for example, of Spenser’s Arthur fighting a treacherous, tyrannical and idolatrous ‘Souldan’, who seems to be an allegorical version of Philip II of Spain, and whose defeat can be read as a symbolic rendering of the English victory over the Spanish Armada.41 In such an ideological and literary context, the figures

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of a foreign Priest-King and his train could appear only as more obstacles to be overcome, and not as helpers by any means. This is how in the nascent imperialist discourse of such romances as Richard Johnson’s above-mentioned Tom a Lincolne or his Seven Champions of Christendom (1596, 1597), Prester John gradually turns into the prototype of the eastern ruler who is to be overcome and no longer sought after as an ally. At the level of drama, this is exactly the way in which Prester John is portrayed in 2 Tamburlaine, where he appears on the long list of the African rulers overcome by Tamburlaine’s lieutenant Techelles: And I have martch’d along the river Nile, To Machda, where the mighty Christian Priest Cal’d John the great, sits in a milk-white robe, Whose triple Myter I did take by force, And made him sweare obedience to my crowne. (1.3.186–90)42

Apart from being given a vague African location for Prester John, we are told nothing here about the marvels of his land, while the PriestKing’s ‘triple Myter’ conjures up the closer-to-home image of the Pope’s tiara rather than an oriental kingly turban or any similar headdress. Prester John’s function here is not to be admired, but primarily to be subdued. We will hear no more of him in the play, and Techelles continues his speech, as well as his journey of conquest, by moving on to the next territory on his map, the land of the Amazons, whom Mandeville and others located in territories adjoining those of Prester John and often presented as his tributaries.43 Other romances of conquest keep the frame of the oriental monarch losing his crown and/or his daughter to Christians, but altogether do away with Prester John. A case in point is the analogue to the Tom a Lincoln story which we find in Richard Johnson’s other romance, The Seven Champions of Christendom.44 Here we are presented with more or less the same elements: the kingly father, the disobedient daughter Angelica – a possible variation on the Tom a Lincoln material, since Angelica is Tom’s mother in the earlier romance – who elopes with her knight, the dragon which has to be overcome etc. The only exception is that Prester John has stopped being Prester John and is cast as the ‘King of Babylon’, a title recalling the ‘Sowdone of Babylone’, the main character from ‘the most popular “Saracen” romance in medieval England’ according to Metlitzki.45

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The game of analogues and near-analogues can also lead us to consider certain elements in the patchwork portrait of the Great Turk Amurack in Robert Greene’s Alphonsus, King of Aragon (c. 1587), that is to say another oriental ruler and angry father who refuses to marry his daughter to a Christian knight. Although this version presents a few variations to the pattern seen above (such as the fact that the Turk’s daughter does not approve of the match), the Prester John background might for example account for the fact that the Great Turk’s Queen is an Amazon, and that neighbouring Amazonian armies are made to support the cause of the grieving father (Act 5).46 In all these romance variations, we find the same mixture of the politics and erotics of exotic space. As with ‘la paienne amoureuse’ of late medieval romances in the vein of The Sowdone of Babylone, in which Floripas betrays her Saracen father to gain a Christian husband, it is the feminisation of otherness which makes its reclaiming possible through bonds of blood and inheritance.47 It is a similar schema to that which we find in the Christian match of the Jew’s daughter in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, in such romanticised New World reports as the story of the Algonquin princess Pocahontas, or in the conversion and marriage of the Moluccan princess Quisara in John Fletcher’s The Island Princess, dealt with by Gordon McMullan in Chapter 9 below.48 This aspect is certainly a central feature of the propaganda productions, both literary and non-literary, around the embassies of the English brothers Anthony and Robert Sherley, to and from the Sophy (the Safavid Shah of Persia) in the early seventeenth century, of which John Day, William Rowley and George Wilkins’s play The Travels of the Three English Brothers (1607) is an example.49 In this and similar works, the Sophy is by turns presented as a powerful monarch harbouring Christian tendencies and about to join forces with European princes against the Turks, and as one subjecting himself and relinquishing power to a certain extent by giving his own niece (a variation on the daughter figure) away in marriage to Robert Sherley. As I argue elsewhere, traces of the Prester John model may account for the curious religious mix in the Sophy’s speeches and his niece’s lines before her conversion late into the play.50 These include the oaths ‘by Mortus Ali’ (11.17) and ‘by’r lady’ (11.57). The Latinate flavour of ‘Mortus’ may have led a Western audience to believe that the mysterious Ali is a local saint or a martyr (while

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in fact Morteza Ali, to give him his correct name, is Muhammad’s son-in-law and the first Imam of the Persian Shiites), while ‘by’r lady’ subtly suggests Roman Catholicism, to which the Sherleys had converted in the course of their peregrinations, a circumstance which is of course not included openly in this propagandist work meant for English audiences. So, like the Prester John of the famous letter, the Sophy remains a figure whose exact religious faith is a mystery, but who is nevertheless on the Christians’ side as a whole. Not for nothing does the word ‘Christian’ dominate the final scene of the play, in which it is repeated no fewer than fourteen times, mostly at the end of the Christian characters’ lines, in such compounds as ‘Christian’s love’ (49), ‘Christian faith’ (52, 170), ‘Christian make’ (55), ‘Christian ground’ (66) and ‘Christian glory’ (128). Stepping out of the play as such, we may also see distant echoes of the Prester John precedent in Robert Sherley’s highly theatrical ambassadorial outfits when he is sent back to Europe as the Sophy’s envoy. These include a huge golden crucifix affixed to an Oriental turban, thus embedding Christianity in an Eastern clothing stereotype, somewhat in the manner of Prester John’s famed cross-shaped sceptre adorned with diamonds.51 Likewise, the funeral inscription on Sherley’s wife’s tomb in Rome prolongs this amalgamating effect by presenting her as an Amazon, i.e. a tributary, not of any historical monarch of Persia but of a legendary Prester John: ‘Theresia Sampsonia Amazonitis, Sampsuffi Circassiae Principis Filia’.52 In the hands of the Sherley propagandists, the Sophy and his niece belong, like Prester John before them, to an East which in the words of Mary B. Campbell has become ‘a concept separable from any pureley geographical area’, an essential ‘Elsewhere’.53 ‘History is not the past: it is the consciousness of the past used for present purposes’, writes Greg Dening.54 The study of the historical evolution of the legend of Prester John is a good illustration of this principle. Diversely located in space and time, cast successively as a crusading king, Mandeville’s ‘grete Emperour of Ynde’ and an oriental tyrant, appearing as a geographical as well as a romantic entity, Prester John is a labile figure, produced by and for the Christian West, which shaped and fashioned it over several centuries. As such, the shifts in Prester John’s representation follow and mirror not just the changing fortunes of Mandeville’s legacy but the errancies in the West’s complex relationship to

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‘the East’ (taken in its broadest sense). They are the products of a Western interest in the rest of the world, an interest which gave rise to a quest for discovery, as a preliminary to a quest for subjection.

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Notes 1 Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 28. 2 Quoted (as all other Mandeville quotes in this chapter) from an early printed English version of the Travels (London: W. de Worde, 1499), STC 17247, f. lxxxxiv v. 3 Mandeville, Travels, f. lxxxxvi v. 4 Anon., Tom a Lincoln, ed. G. R. Proudfoot, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). All quotes from the play are taken from this edition. 5 See for details Alfred Harbage (rev. Samuel Schoenbaum, rev. Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim), Annals of English Drama, 975–1700 (London: Routledge, 1989). 6 ‘The Romance of the Sowdone of Babylone and of Ferumbas His Sone who Conquered Rome’, in Three Middle English Charlemagne Romances, ed. Alan Lupack (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1990). 7 Albert Hourani, Islam in European Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 9. 8 I am using this term in the sense of ‘Muslim’, a word which was not used by medieval writers. On this and the other meanings and uses of ‘Saracens’ (e.g. as ‘Arabs’), see Norman Daniel, Heroes and Saracens: An Interpretation of the Chansons de Geste (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984), pp. 8–9. 9 See John V. Tolan, Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), chapter 5: ‘Saracens as pagans’, pp. 105–34. 10 See Minou Reeves, Muhammad in Europe (Reading: Garnet, 2000), chapter 3: ‘Muhammad as Mahound: medieval Europe and the fear of Islam’, pp. 73–97. 11 Late twelfth-century examples include the Fierabras epics and the Chevalerie d’Ogior. We may also think of the thirteenth-century Roman de Palamède. See for details Nina Dulin Mallory, ‘“Seven trewe bataylis for Jesus sake”: the long-suffering Saracen Palomides’, in David R. Blanks and Michael Frassetto (eds.), Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 165–72. 12 Book VII, chapter 33. Quoted by Charles F. Beckingham and Bernard Hamilton, Prester John, the Mongols and the Ten Lost Tribes (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996), p. 2.

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13 Beckingham and Hamilton, Prester John, p. 3. 14 See C. W. R. D. Moseley’s explanatory note on Prester John in his edition of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (London: Penguin, 1983; 2005), p. 203. 15 R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 43. 16 Second remaining fragment page of the Romance of King Alexander (London: R. Faques, 1525), STC 321. 17 See for details Rosemary Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences: A Study on the Book of Sir John Mandeville (1371–1550) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 192–3. 18 ‘And of the cannibals that each other eat, / The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders’ (Othello, 1.3.137–44). Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett and William Montgomery (eds), William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005). 19 For details on the Letter and its supposed translation by Christian, Archbishop of Mainz, see Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences, pp. 192–3. For the alternative theory arguing for a Hebrew original, see Kenneth Parker, Chapter 3 above. 20 Anon., Emanuel King of Portugal . . . (Antwerp: John of Doesborowe, 1520), STC 7677. 21 This is a familiar feature of medieval historiography. On this aspect, see, for example, Yitzhak Hen and Matthew Innes (eds), The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), or Victor I. Scherb, ‘Assimilating giants: the appropriation of Gog and Magog in medieval and early modern England’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 32.1 (Winter 2002), pp. 59–84. 22 St Augustine, Of the Citie of God, trans. J. Healey (London: G. Eld, 1610), STC 916, sig. Ddd3r. 23 Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences, p. 11. 24 Jean de Mandeville, Voyage autour de la terre, translated and introduced by Christiane Deluz (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993). See ‘Introduction’, p. xxi. 25 Mandeville, Travels, f. lxxxxvi v. 26 See Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences, p. 1. 27 William Warner, Albions England a continued historie of the same kingdome (London: Widow Orwin for I. B., 1596), STC 25082. See in particular Book XI, chapter 62: ‘Of Sir John Mandevuil and the faire Elenors loue: his Prowesse for her sake performed: and his departure to trauell strange Countries’, pp. 269–73. 28 Listed under that year in Harbage, Annals of English Drama. 29 On the shifting location of Prester John’s land, see Mary B. Campbell, ‘Asia, Africa, Abyssinia: writing the Land of Prester John’, in Julia

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31 32 33 34

35

36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46

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Kuehn and Paul Smethurst (eds), Travel Writing, Form, and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 21–37. See Tolan, Islam in the Medieval European Imagination, chapter 8: ‘Apocalyptic fears and hopes inspired by the thirteenth-century Crusades’, pp. 194–213. Edited by C. F. Beckingham and G. W. B. Huntingford for the Hakluyt Society (Millwood: Kraus Reprint, 1961; 1975). On this aspect see Moseley’s notes for the corresponding passages, which appear in Chapter 32 (pp. 178–82) of his edition of the Travels. Mandeville, Travels, f. lxxxxij v. Lynda E. Boose, ‘The father’s house and the daughter in it: the structures of Western culture’s daughter-father relationship’, in Boose and Betty S. Flowers (eds), Daughters and Fathers (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 19–74 (31). Gloria Allaire, ‘Noble Saracen or Muslim enemy? The changing image of the Saracen in late medieval Italian literature’, in Blanks and Frassetto (eds), Western Views of Islam, pp. 173–84 ; see in particular p. 181. Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 120. Daniel, Heroes and Saracens, pp. 78–89. Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby, p. 161. Edition used: Roland Furieux, bilingual edition, trans. André Rochon (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2000), Canto xxxiii, 102ff., pp. 334ff. On Paradise and the rivers flowing out of it, see Leo Carruthers, Chapter 4 above. Michael L. Hays, Shakespearean Tragedy as Chivalric Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), p. 3. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London and New York: Longman, 1977): Book 5, canto 8. Edition used: The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Fredson Bowers, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). See Mandeville, Travels, f. lvii v–lviii r, and the above mentioned English translation of Prester John’s letter, sig. C3r. Richard Johnson, The Seven Champions of Christendom, ed. Jennifer Fellows (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), Part II, chapter xi, pp. 217ff. Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby, p. 169. Alexander Dyce (ed.), Dramatic and Poetical Works of Robert Greene and George Peele (London: Routledge, Warne and Routledge, 1861), pp. 243ff. See Daniel, Heroes and Saracens, chapter 4: ‘The family, women and the sexes’, pp. 69–93. On this aspect, see also Claire Jowitt, Travel Drama and Gender Politics: 1589–1642: Real and Imaginary Worlds (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).

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49 Anthony Parr (ed.), Three Renaissance Travel Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). 50 Ladan Niayesh, ‘Shakespeare’s Persians’, Shakespeare, 4.2 (June 2008), pp. 137–47. 51 For a reproduction of Van Dyck’s portrait of Robert Sherley in ambassadorial robes, see D. W. Davies, Elizabethans Errant: The Strange Fortunes of Sir Thomas Sherley and His Three Sons (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967). 52 Quoted in Bernadette Andrea, Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 48. 53 Mary Baine Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 48. 54 Greg Dening, Performances (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 72. Works cited Primary sources Anon., Emanuel King of Portugal . . . Antwerp: John of Doesborowe, 1520. STC 7677. Anon., The Romance of King Alexander. [Unnumbered fragments. Titlepage missing] London: R. Faques, 1525. STC 321. Anon., ‘The Romance of the Sowdone of Babylone and of Ferumbas His Sone who Conquered Rome’, in Three Middle English Charlemagne Romances, ed. Alan Lupack. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1990. Anon., Tom a Lincoln, ed. G. R. Proudfoot, The Malone Society Reprints. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Alvares, Francisco, The True Relation of the Lands of the Prester John, ed. C.F. Beckingham and G. W. B. Huntingford, The Hakluyt Society Prints. Millwood: Kraus Reprint, 1961; 1975. Ariosto, Ludovico, Roland Furieux (Orlando Furioso), bilingual edition, trans. André Rochon. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2000. Augustine (St), Of the Citie of God, trans. J. Healey. London: G. Eld, 1610. STC 916. Day, John, George Wilkins and William Rowley, The Travels of the Three English Brothers, in Three Renaissance Travel Plays, ed. Anthony Parr. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Greene, Robert, Alphonsus, King of Aragon, in Dramatic and Poetical Works of Robert Greene and George Peele, ed. Alexander Dyce. London: Routledge, Warne and Routledge, 1861. Johnson, Richard, The Seven Champions of Christendom, ed. Jennifer Fellows. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.

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Mandeville, Sir John (Pseudo), Travels. [Fragments. Title-page missing] London: W. de Worde, 1499. STC 17247. Mandeville, Sir John (Pseudo), The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, ed. C. W. R. D. Moseley. London: Penguin, 1983; 2005. Mandeville, Jean de (Pseudo), Voyage autour de la terre, trans. and ed. Christiane Deluz. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993. Marlowe, Christopher, 2 Tamburlaine, in The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Fredson Bowers, vol. I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Shakespeare, William, Othello, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd edition, ed. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett and William Montgomery. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005. Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton. London and New York: Longman, 1977. Warner, William, Albions England a continued historie of the same kingdome. London: Widow Orwin for I. B., 1596. STC 25082. Secondary sources Andrea, Bernadette, Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Beckingham, Charles F., and Bernard Hamilton, Prester John, the Mongols and the Ten Lost Tribes. Aldershot: Variorum, 1996. Blanks, David R., and Michael Frassetto (eds), Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999. Boose, Lynda E., ‘The father’s house and the daughter in it: the structures of Western culture’s daughter-father relationship’, pp. 19–74 in Lynda E. Boose and Betty S. Flowers (eds), Daughters and Fathers. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Campbell, Mary B., The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988. ——, ‘Asia, Africa, Abyssinia: writing the land of Prester John’, pp. 21–37 in Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst (eds), Travel Writing, Form, and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility. New York and London: Routledge, 2009. Daniel, Norman, Heroes and Saracens: An Interpretation of the Chansons de Geste. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984. Davies, D. W., Elizabethans Errant: The Strange Fortunes of Sir Thomas Sherley and His Three Sons. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967. Dening, Greg, Performances. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Greenblatt, Stephen, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Harbage, Alfred (rev. Samuel Schoenbaum, rev. Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim), Annals of English Drama, 975–1700, 3rd revised edition. London: Routledge, 1989.

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Hays, Michael L., Shakespearean Tragedy as Chivalric Romance. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003. Hen, Yitzhak and Matthew Innes (eds), The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Hourani, Albert, Islam in European Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Jowitt, Claire, Travel Drama and Gender Politics: 1589–1642. Real and Imaginary Worlds. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Metlitzki, Dorothee, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977. Niayesh, Ladan, ‘Shakespeare’s Persians’, Shakespeare, 4.2 (June 2008), pp. 137–47. Reeves, Minou, Muhammad in Europe. Reading: Garnet, 2000. Scherb, Victor I., ‘Assimilating giants: the appropriation of Gog and Magog in medieval and early modern England’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 32.1 (Winter 2002), pp. 59–84. Southern, R. W., Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962. Tolan, John V., Islam in the Medieval European Imagination. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Tzanaki, Rosemary, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences: A study on the Book of Sir John Mandeville. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.

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9 Stage-Mandevilles: the Far East and the limits of representation in the theatre, 1621–2002 Gordon McMullan

My concern in this chapter is twofold. I am interested in the persistence, overt or implicit, of Mandeville in early modern England and especially on the early modern stage. And I am interested in the negotiation of certain problems of representation – that is, of the Far East and of the Eastern ethnic other – in the performance of what I will call ‘Mandevillian drama’ both in the early seventeenth century and in the early twenty-first. My focus is on a particular dramatic text – John Fletcher’s 1621 tragicomedy, The Island Princess – and, in the latter part of the chapter, on a particular production of that text: the Royal Shakespeare Company’s revival in 2002–3 (the first for three centuries) at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon and, subsequently, at the Gielgud Theatre in London. While the final section, which addresses the unforeseeable simultaneity of the production and of the Bali bombing of autumn 2002, reflects on a specific postmodern (or post-‘9/11’) problem, the bulk of the chapter seeks a sense, first of all, of continuity and difference in medieval and early modern negotiations of the Far East and, secondly, of the feasibility or otherwise of producing a play inevitably seen now primarily in relation to the history of colonialism yet which, in its moment of origin, predated (or, perhaps better, inhabited the cusp of) the colonial. In a sense, I am asking a question about authenticity – how best to (re)produce early modern drama on the postmodern stage in face both of the inevitable loss of original contexts and of subsequent discursive impositions – a question made all the more complex when the play in question inherits a premodern discourse or set of discourses. Early modern dramatists were not very respectful towards Sir John Mandeville, and neither, it can be assumed, were the audiences for whom they wrote.1 Mandeville’s reputation as a liar is often thought to have been established in the eighteenth century,

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but the process was already in train early in the seventeenth. The sting in the tail of Samuel Purchas’s comment, in his Pilgrims, that Mandeville, ‘our countriman’, was a ‘famous Traveller . . . whose Geographie Ortelius commendeth, howesoever he acknowledgeth his Worke stuffed with Fables’, reads Mandeville’s Travels as, at least in part, a work of the imagination.2 The playwrights are not even as generous as this. In the anonymous Second Part of the Return from Parnassus, a university play of 1606, Momus juxtaposes Mandeville with that byword for the tall tale, Bevis of Hampton, dismissing him as reading for the gullible: ‘For Catastrophe ther’s neuer a tale in Sir Iohn Mandeuil, or Beuis of Southampton but hath a better turning.’3 Again, in Richard Brome’s 1640 comedy The Antipodes – which, as Claire Jowitt makes clear in Chapter 10 below, incorporates the fullest set of Mandeville references in early modern drama – the character Peregrine has gone mad as a result of reading too much travel writing, leading him to revere the memory of Mandeville far more than actual, recent explorers: ‘Drake was a Dy’dapper to Mandevile’, he insists, adding (in case the audience hadn’t quite caught on) that ‘Candish, and Hawkins, Furbisher, all our voyagers / Went short of Mandevile’.4 Earlier, Ben Jonson’s New Inn (1629) had concluded in similar vein, with Lord Frampull admitting his addiction to travel – if only internal travel around the British Isles – and citing Mandeville: I am he Have measured all the shires of England over, Wales and her mountains, seen those wilder nations, Of people in the Peak and Lancashire; Their pipers, fiddlers, rushers, puppet-masters, Jugglers, and gipsies, all the sorts of canters And colonies of beggars, tumblers, ape-carriers, For to these savages I was addicted, To search their natures, and make odd discoveries; And here my wife, like a she-Mandeville, Ventured in disquisition after me.5

Mandeville is very clearly, for Jonson, Brome and their projected audiences, a writer of the imagination, not of actual geography: he ‘ventures in disquisition’, not in the world. An early modern play need not of course actually name Mandeville in order to be ‘Mandevillian’. Obvious cases in point include Othello (1604) and The Tempest (c. 1611). In the latter, Gonzalo, amazed at the sight of the spirits conjured up by Prospero, recalls

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his childhood reading in Mandevillian travel writing and sees in the island’s inhabitants evidence of things he had previously considered merely fictional: When we were boys, Who would believe that there were mountaineers Dewlapped like bulls, whose throats had hanging at ’em Wallets of flesh? Or that there were such men Whose heads stood in their breasts? Which now we find Each putter-out of five for one will bring us Good warrant of.6

Stephano the butler, meanwhile, has already found a Mandevillian islander: ‘Four legs and two voices – a most delicate monster!’ (2.2.89–90), he exclaims, and his separating of the legs of Trinculo from those of Caliban does not diminish his reading of the latter as monstrous. In Othello, Mandevillian monstrosity emerges more subtly, remaining rhetorical until the orator turns out himself to be the monster. Othello recounts to the Duke and senators the conversations he had with Desdemona that made her fall for him, in which he had spoken of being: . . . sold to slavery, of my redemption thence, And portance in my traveller’s history, Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle, Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven, It was my hint to speak. Such was my process, And of the cannibals that each other eat, The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders. (1.3.137–44)

This eloquent account is designed to alleviate the fear of witchcraft invoked by Brabantio, Desdemona’s father, and it does so by demonstrating that it was rhetoric – what Othello calls, simply, ‘my story’ – that wooed Desdemona, not ‘spells and medicines bought of mountebanks’ (1.3.61), implying at the same time that it was Desdemona’s innocent admiration that led her not to question his veracity. The play’s Mandevillianism is thus unsettling: not only would the audience fret about Desdemona’s gullibility in believing Othello’s tales; they might also wonder at the Duke’s tone in his response to Othello’s recounting of his original speech – ‘I think this story would win my daughter, too’ (1.3.170) – which can be played either as credulity or as wry commentary on the easy gulling of daughters. Either way, the audience’s sense of Othello’s

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character, right from the beginning, may be that of a Mandevillian liar. Moreover, he is, in Iago’s racist phrase, a ‘Barbary horse’ (1.1.113–14): not only a non-Venetian but also, implicitly here and explicitly in the final moments of the play, a Muslim – ‘a baptised Moor turned Turk’.7 Othello (according to his narrative) has gone, like Mandeville before him, beyond the recognised territories of Islam to the ‘endless textual archipelago . . . about and beyond India’.8 For Mandeville, the islands of the Far East serve several functions, each of which is collapsible. They lie beyond Jerusalem and are thus beyond possession – though Jerusalem, too, dreadfully, tantalisingly, persists in being beyond possession. They lie beyond Islam – in Mandeville’s Travels, Muslims seem at times more Christian than the Christians, providing Mandeville with the basis for a critique of Christian behaviour.9 And, finally, they lie beyond the self – yet the further you go, it seems, in Mandeville, the nearer home you find yourself, as we learn from the story in Chapter 20 of the young man who travelled very far indeed, eventually reaching a place where he heard someone speaking his own language and turning back, amazed, to retrace his vast journey only to realise, when he eventually returned home, that he must in fact have circumnavigated the globe and that the person he had heard speaking his language was his fellow-countryman. Mandeville travels far beyond the lands of the Saracens, and Othello follows suit in his ‘story’, seeking to erase his own Muslim origins by associating himself, in effect, with the Mandevillian dream-lands that lie beyond the Islamic world. Mandeville, however, even as he gleefully recounts the savagery of idol worship, keeps finding Muslims where there ought only to be pagans, and his word for an idol, ‘mawmet’ – deriving from and debasing, as it does, the name Muhammad – reminds us of the interweaving of Islam and paganism in the premodern imagination. Othello, despite his rhetorical travels far beyond Muslim terrain to a Mandevillian realm of cannibals and mutants, ends by finding Islam within the self. ‘Set you down this,’ he cries at the close of the play, ‘that in Aleppo once, / Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk / Beat a Venetian and traduc’d the state, / I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog, / And smote him – thus’ (5.2.360–5) – stabbing himself and, in so doing, revealing that he is himself the ‘dog’ in question. The negotiations of the East on the early modern stage suggest that the medieval/early modern divide implied by those scoffing at Mandevillian far-fetchedness is not quite as fixed as might be

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imagined. Certain shared engagements drew the scoffers and their target rather more closely together than they cared to acknowledge. There is, for instance, a persistent foregrounding of islands in preference to any form of mainland – ‘[i]nsularity,’ for Roland Greene, ‘comes to stand for a kind of knowledge . . . that counters the totalities of institutions and regimes’, and theatrical manifestations, such as The Tempest, of what he calls ‘island logic’ belong ‘to the final episode in this convention, before it becomes totalizing itself, and before the knowledge that it conveys becomes systematic’.10 There is also an obsession with conversion premised on a fear of the reversibility of the conversion process which – as well as being what happens in the bitter last seconds of Othello’s life – provides the basic plot-device of several early modern plays. Massinger’s The Renegado, first performed in 1624, a year before Purchas included Mandeville’s Travels in the first edition of his Pilgrims, pivots on the reversibility of the conversion process so as to give the Christian characters victory over the Turks: the protagonist Vitelli, who at the start of the play had succumbed to the seductive charms of the Ottoman princess Donusa, has, by the end, turned the tables, stealing her away as a convert to Christianity in a sudden flurry of action in the final scene – assisted by Grimaldi, a former pirate and convert to Islam who has returned to the fold. These are fixations common to both medieval and early modern representations of the Far East. At the same time, there are clear distinctions between attitudes in Mandeville’s Travels and those in early modern plays. Chief amongst these is the contrast between the unashamed acquisitiveness on display in the travel plays and the rejection of possession evident in Mandeville: Stephen Greenblatt, in his essay on the Travels, christens Mandeville ‘the knight of non-possession’.11 Certainly, the scene, in Act 4 of The Tempest, in which Stephano and Trinculo find they cannot resist the temptation to grab and dress up in the rich clothes that Ariel has hung in their path – ‘O King Stephano,’ cries the fool Trinculo gleefully, ‘O worthy Stephano! look what a wardrobe here is for thee! / . . . we steal by line and level’ (4.1.221–2, 238) – could have been designed directly to contrast with the anecdote from the Travels in which Mandeville and his companions refuse to touch the treasure that they pass as they traverse the Vale Perilous: And my companions and I went through the valley, and saw many marvellous things, and gold and silver and precious stones and many

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other jewels on each side of us – so it seemed to us. But whether it was really as it seemed, or was merely illusion, I do not know. But because of the fear that we were in, and also so as not to hinder our devotion, we would touch nothing we saw: for we were more devout then than we ever were before or after because of the fear we had on account of devils appearing to us in different guises.12

The theatre, however, always in quest of sensation, tends towards Stephano’s position, for all of its perils, rather than, at this telling and self-destructive moment, towards what his early modern readers would have recognised, perhaps to their surprise, as the restraint of Mandeville. Jacobean and Caroline writers set out both to celebrate and to parody expansionist dreams. We do not have The Tragedy of the Plantation of Virginia – only tantalising mentions remain – or other plays that bear directly on colonial activities, but we have a good deal of wry commentary on colonisation in plays such as Jonson, Chapman and Marston’s Eastward Ho! (1605) which treat the material-utopian dreams of would-be colonisers with a huge pinch of salt. ‘A whole country of English is there,’ insists Seagull, describing Virginia to his gullible companions, ‘bred of those that were left there in ’79; they have married with the Indians, and make ’em bring forth as beautiful faces as any we have in England; and therefore the Indians are so in love with ’em that all the treasure they have they lay at their feet . . . I tell thee, gold is more plentiful there than copper is with us; and for as much red copper as I can bring, I’ll have thrice the weight in gold.’13 And we have The Tempest, which over the last half-century or so has become the key text for readings, critical and theatrical, of early modern colonial discourse.14 I want, however, to turn to a play with a tangible inheritance from The Tempest – it was first performed just a decade later – but which, by way of its geographical location in the Far East rather than the New World, of its attitude to religion, and of its negotiation of the potential impact of travel on European culture arguably helps shape our understanding of the intersections and mismatches of colonialism and what I have called Mandevillianism on the early modern English stage; and I want, in so doing, to reflect on the limits of representation in the Western performance of the Far East, then and now.15 On his travels, Mandeville passes briefly through Indonesia. He mentions Java (‘Iava’) and Sumatra (‘Sumobor’) and he is aware that the wealth of the many islands in this part of the world is based

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in the spice trade: the people of Java, he notes, ‘grow different kinds of spices in more abundance than in other places – ginger, cloves, nutmegs, mace, and many others’ (p. 131). It is in this locale, far beyond the Aleppo of Othello’s suicidal rhetoric or the Tunis of The Renegado, that John Fletcher sets The Island Princess. The play’s location is described vaguely as ‘India’ in the 1679 Folio, but its specific setting is two islands (Tidore and Ternate) in the Malukan archipelago – the early modern ‘Spice Islands’ – in what is now Indonesia, islands which had played a major role in imperial and commercial struggle for well over a century by the time the play was written. The Island Princess represents the attempts of the Portuguese to acquire the immense wealth offered by the supposedly health-giving spices that these islands – particularly the dominant, feuding islands of Tidore and Ternate – produced in abundance. By the time Fletcher wrote his play, the Portuguese were in fact long gone from Maluku. They had first arrived in 1512 and were welcomed as traders, allying themselves with Ternate, but relations soured steadily and, by 1575, the Portuguese had been expelled by the Ternatese. A little later, other nations tried their luck: in 1606, the Spanish captured from Ternate the fort the Portuguese had built, while within the year the Dutch had built a rival fort. For a time the Spanish sided with the Tidorese and the Dutch with the Ternatese, the consistent factor throughout remaining the fierce rivalry between the two islands. Fletcher’s play dramatises European motivations for mercantile adventure and the experiences of venturers as they come to terms with an alien culture. It opens with a group of veteran Portuguese trader-colonists discussing native ‘treachery’, island politics and the recent arrival from Portugal of a new batch of idealistic venturers. Where, for Mandeville, Paradise was both forbidding and forever inaccessible,16 the prospects for The Island Princess’s venturers seem infinitely better. Armusia waxes lyrical about the Edenic scope of the isles: We are arrived among the Blessed Islands, Where every wind that rises blows perfumes And every breath of air is like an incense . . . Nothing we see but breeds an admiration: The very rivers, as we float along, Throw up their pearls and curl their heads to court us; The bowels of the earth swell with the births Of thousand unknown gems and thousand riches: Nothing that bears a life but brings a treasure.17

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The established Portuguese, however, are unimpressed. They have been around too long to retain such ideals. Their disparagement of local culture and repeated references to the ‘tawny’ skin of the Malukans set an uneasy tone for the play from the outset, underlining the play’s inescapable, if in part ironic, complicity in emerging discourses of race and colonialism. The Island Princess is, in fact, a play not so much about colonial relations as about clashing courtly cultures. It is one of a series of romantic tragicomedies that Fletcher and his collaborators (Beaumont to begin with, Massinger later) produced in the 1610s and early 1620s, in which the characters test modes of courtliness, deploying ethical frameworks only as it might appear advantageous so to do. The version of courtly behaviour manifest in Maluku – particularly in the person of the King of Tidore – is compared, frequently favourably, with Portuguese attitudes and actions and, in the process, assertions of racial superiority by Portuguese characters are undermined by cultural relativism: Base breedings love base pleasure. They take as much delight in a baratto, A little scurvy boat – to row her tithely And have the art to turn and wind her nimbly – . . . As we Portugales or the Spaniards do in riding, . . . The French in courtship, or the dancing English In carrying a fair presence. (1.1.18–21, 24, 25–6)

Here, in a tactic repeated throughout the play, the Europeans’ emphasis on their difference from the Indonesians serves only to foreground their similarity. The structural pairing of the boasting King of Bakam and the Portuguese blusterer Rui Dias (the inept leader of the veteran party on the islands and Quisara’s only welcome suitor, at least initially) provides a focus for this relativism: both are represented as men of words but not deeds, who ‘say’ but do not ‘do’, making them morally equivalent despite their racial difference. The relationship that develops between Quisara and the swashbuckling ideologue Armusia tautens this comparative tendency, demonstrating both the agency and the malleability of the island’s de facto female ruler as well as the active courtliness and ferocious religious bigotry of the fresh-faced European. And since Bakam and Syana are little more than caricatures (I will return to the figure of the Governor in a moment) and Quisara herself hovers between caricature and characterisation, the King

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of Tidore, Quisara’s brother, seems the only genuinely temperate individual on stage and is thus noticeably more impressive than any of the Europeans, none of whom is capable of emotional restraint. The climactic scenes of the play are those in which the Ternatese Governor, disguised as a ‘Moore priest’, incites resistance to the Portuguese by offering, in the most obvious direct citation of The Tempest, a vision of the colonial process that echoes and amplifies Caliban’s brief account of Prospero’s takeover of ‘his’ island. The Governor’s name appears to suggest that he is a Western imposition on the Eastern scene, yet he is in fact not only a Malukan islander himself but also by far the most implacably resistant of the Malukans to Western imperialism. The Portuguese, he points out forcefully, came to the islands: Poor, weather-beaten, almost lost, starved, feebled – Their vessels, like themselves, most miserable – Made a long suit for traffic, and for comfort, To vend their children’s-toys, cure their diseases. They had their suit: they landed, and to th’ rate Grew rich and powerful; sucked the fat and freedom Of this most blessed isle; taught her to tremble. Witness the castle here, the citadel They have clapped upon the neck of your Tidore – This happy town, till that she knew these strangers To check her when she’s jolly. (4.1.45–55)

As the entry direction of 4.1 makes clear, the Governor adopts the disguise of a Muslim cleric to initiate his plot. This is, at first sight, odd, since descriptions of the local religion in the play ostensibly represent it as a form of paganism: ‘The sun and moon we worship,’ says Quisara, ‘And their bright influences we believe’ (4.5.70–1). Yet, although Armusia’s hysterical denunciation of Malukan religion, which immediately follows Quisara’s attempt to convert him, depicts pagan rites and sacrifices (Fletcher’s Islam, like Mandeville’s only more so, is conflated with paganism), a particular word-choice reminds us that the local religion is in fact Islam. ‘Where I meet your maumet gods,’ cries Armusia, ‘I’ll swing ’em / Thus o’er my head and kick ’em into puddles, / [. . . and] demolish / Your shambles of wild worships’ (4.5.114–15, 117–18). Muslims were thought to worship various idols, including Mahomet (that is, ‘maumet’, a doll or idol) and Termagant; they were also sometimes thought, because of Islam’s crescent moon symbol, to worship the

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moon (thus Quisara’s ‘sun and moon’). The Malukans turn out, despite Fletcher’s apparent (or partial) ignorance, to be Muslims. Armusia’s outburst, though at the time catastrophic (it precipitates conflict between the Tidorese and the Portuguese, thereby threatening to fulfil the Governor’s intention to destroy both sides), in due course leads to Quisara’s conversion to Christianity. In a characteristically Fletcherian coup, she falls in love with Armusia because of his absolute loyalty to God, switching allegiance in an instant, so that the play concludes, however uneasily, with peace negotiations, themselves prompted by the uncovering of the Governor’s plot. We see the triumph of Christianity over Muslim treachery, and Armusia becomes, momentarily, a figure equivalent (as Philip Finkelpearl has noted) to Spenser’s Redcross Knight, vanquishing his Far Eastern version of the Saracen knights Sansloy, Sansjoy and Sansfoy in Book One of The Faerie Queene.18 And, as in Spenser’s epic, this military success is a specifically English, Protestant success. Shankar Raman has shown that the play’s Portuguese would almost certainly have been understood by its first audiences as versions of the English, seeing ‘Drake in Armusia’ and ‘England in the Spice Islands’19 – as well, it might be added, as one or perhaps two Elizabeths (the Elizabeth I of Protestant nostalgia and/or Princess Elizabeth, daughter of James I, currently embroiled in the opening rounds of what would turn out to be the Thirty Years War) who could both be thought of, reasonably enough, as ‘island princesses’. As with Mandeville, so too with Fletcher: travelling to the Far East is also, in a certain way, travelling home. At the same time, there are ways in which Fletcher seems very far from Mandeville in his responses to these distant lands. Mandeville’s Travels, David Matthews notes, ‘are designed to provoke a sense of liberating wonder’.20 By contrast, for all of the emphasis in The Island Princess on religion, there is little ‘wonder’ in the Fletcher canon – and certainly not of the supernatural kind familiar to us from The Tempest. ‘Liberation’, when it happens, comes from material sources. To cite a character in The Custom of the Country, a Fletcher-and-Massinger play from approximately the same year as The Island Princess: ‘Wonders are ceased, sir: we must work by means.’ Two short parallel scenes in The Island Princess, 2.3 and 5.3, show very clearly the bewildered response of the Malukans (first, the Ternatese and then the Tidorese) to European ‘means’ – that is, to their technological superiority. In 2.3, Armusia – who might have begun the play in wonder but

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has rapidly adapted to means – blows up the storehouse of the Governor as a decoy to allow him to rescue Quisara’s brother, the King, from captivity. In 5.3, enraged by what they consider the ‘ingratitude’ shown by the King in imprisoning Armusia for religious incitement, the Portuguese bombard the town with cannons, prompting the Tidorese to describe the experience in comically grotesque terms: here flies a powdering-tub, the meat ready roasted, and there a barrel pissing vinegar, and they two overtaking the top of a high steeple, newly sliced off for a salad . . . (8–10) they tosse our little habitations like whelps, like grindle-tailes, with their heeles upward . . . (16–17) I met a hand – and a letter in’t – in great haste, and by and by a single leg running after it, as if the arm had forgot part of his arrant: heads fly like footballs everywhere. (19–21)

In both scenes, the Malukans are depicted as farcically unable to cope with the technological sophistication of the Europeans, and any sympathy that might be evoked in the audience is deflected by the carnivalesque vocabulary with which the death and destruction brought about by the bombardment is described. ‘Carnivalesque’ these scenes certainly are in their inversion of normal topographies – a powdering tub and a vinegar barrel flying over a church steeple, a house like an upside-down dog – but they are also, more to the point, inescapably Mandevillian, so that a play apparently very far in tone, genre and attitude from Mandeville’s Travels suddenly turns out to depend, at a key moment, on Mandevillian imagery. The fragmented people that the townsmen describe are, after all, grimly akin to the freaks and mutants that Mandeville relishes finding in Far Eastern (and specifically Indonesian) islands, and Tidore, in the townsmen’s description, is not so very different from upside-down islands like Mandeville’s Ceylon, where ‘the sea which surrounds this island and other isles nearby seems so high above the land that it looks to men who see it as if it hung in the air on the point of falling and covering the earth; and that is a marvellous thing’ (p. 136). The same topsyturvy logic operates in this Fletcherian scene as in Mandeville. The lack of a limb, or head, or other significant part of the body is comically offset by physical prowess of one kind or another. Mandeville describes an ‘isle where the people have only one foot [yet t]hey will run so fast on this one foot that it is a marvel to

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see them’ (p. 137). Likewise in Fletcher, the Townsman says: ‘I met a hand . . . in great haste, and by and by a single leg running after it.’ Again, on one island, Mandeville assures us, ‘there are ugly folk without heads, who have eyes in each shoulder’ (p. 137). Meanwhile, in Fletcher’s play, ‘heads fly like footballs’. This detachment of part from whole, a kind of violent anti-synecdoche, is a residual Mandevillian trope. It is what early modern readers seem mainly to have remembered from Mandeville – Othello and Fletcher amongst them. Fletcher cannot resist Mandevillian expression, even as, in the grotesque grimness of the scene, he also sends it up. The crisis of violence and the uncomfortable light the violence casts on European behaviour seems to provoke this turning-back on Fletcher’s part to a prior representative mode that he and his peers (Jonson, say, or Brome) had ostensibly rejected. Moreover, in a further inversion of expectations, there may be no ‘wonder’ for the Europeans in this staged version of the Far East – not, at least, once they have got over the initial overexcitement exemplified by the neophyte Armusia in his ‘blessed islands’ speech – but there is a distinct sense of wonder, even if it is violently circumscribed, for the local inhabitants. ‘Heaven blesse us, what a thundering’s here?’ cries the First Townsman, ‘what fire spitting? We cannot drink, but our Cans are mald amongst us’ (5.3.1–3). ‘By this leg,’ swears the Second Townsman, ‘let me sweare nimbly by it, for I know not how long I shall owe it, if I were out oth’ Towne once, if I came in agen to fetch my breakfast, I will give ’em leave to cram me with a Portugall pudding: Come, let’s doe any thing to appease this thunder’ (5.3.30–4). There is, very clearly, nothing liberating about the Townsmen’s wonder here. On the contrary, they have time to marvel only as they are blown to shreds. In 2002, the Royal Shakespeare Company director Greg Doran included Fletcher’s Island Princess in the award-winning ‘Jacobean’ season – not a strictly accurate title, in fact, since the plays performed included an Elizabethan play, Edward III (first published in 1596), and a Caroline one, The Roman Actor (1626), alongside the genuinely Jacobean Malcontent (1605), Eastward Ho! and Island Princess – for which he was overall artistic director.21 Doran chose to direct The Island Princess himself, in the first staging of the play since the end of the seventeenth century. The production opened at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in July,

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toured to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and finished with a West End run in early 2003 at the Gielgud Theatre, and it provided Doran with problems of representation over and above the usual moderndress-or-doublet-and-hose question that a contemporary director of any early modern play necessarily faces: how specific to be about the Indonesian setting? how to cast a play, in the context of a five-play repertory season, with such an unusual number of non-European characters? and how to address the play’s tangible, if partially submerged, engagement with Islam in the febrile post‘9/11’ political and cultural environment in Britain? The choices Doran made underline the difficulties faced by anyone reviving an early modern play with a geographically distant setting. Doran chose to set and costume his production both in the early seventeenth century and in Indonesia, underpinning the visuals with a continuous, hypnotic score for gamelan band. Prior to rehearsals, he spent time researching early modern English relations with the East Indies – talking, for instance, to Giles Milton, author of Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, a popular history of the Spice Island trade (and, earlier, as it happens, of a book on Mandeville, The Riddle and the Knight), and passing nutmegs around the room at the first read-through while describing the Jacobean fervour for the spices – nutmeg, mace, cloves – produced in commercial quantities only in the Maluku islands.22 He asked the designer, Niki Turner, to come up with a minimal set (in keeping with the overall ethos of the Swan season: pared-down performances, maximum flexibility), evoking images of pre-Islamic Indonesian religions, and to provide three styles of costume – for the Malukans, gorgeous figure-hugging reds and golds; for the veteran Portuguese, European clothing incorporating elements of the colours and patterns of Malukan costume; and for the newly arrived Portuguese, European dress with, as yet, no local adaptation (that is, no evidence of ‘going native’), and he acquired a cast for the entire season which, with The Island Princess in mind, featured an atypically high number (compared, that is, with the RSC’s norm) of British Asian actors. The production was well received by both critics and the theatrical world (the season as a whole won an Olivier ‘Outstanding Achievement’ award), and it enhanced Doran’s status as an emerging directorial talent of considerable potential. ‘This real theatrical discovery is played swiftly, wittily and clearly . . . A delight,’ proclaimed The Sunday Times. ‘Here’, said Michael Billington in The Guardian, resonantly, ‘is something rich and strange.’23 Billington

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thus highlighted the Shakespeare connection – ‘The story,’ he noted, ‘owes something to The Tempest, with its exotic setting . . . and its allegorical condemnation of colonialism’ – though he added, slightly contradictorily, that ‘Fletcher’s play seems like a precursor of those Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals that see the east as quaintly picturesque and ripe for exploitation’.24 Other reviewers phrased this understanding of the play noticeably less elegantly, one suggesting that the costumes appeared to have been borrowed from The King and I (a long-running, tired production of which had closed just a few months earlier) and another that the set looked like ‘a Knightsbridge curry house’ – thus situating RSC productions a little higher up the social scale of West End productions than musicals such as The King and I. Benedict Nightingale, in his Times review, neatly merges the curry house and the (same) musical: ‘Half the cast has stepped out of The King and I or is maybe auditioning for jobs as receptionists in some upmarket Thai or Indian restaurant.’25 And Faye Claridge, in a BBC website review which recommends the production with great gusto, uses different words to say the same thing: ‘Go and see The Island Princess’, she insists, ‘and embrace the exotic flavour of a new experience.’26 The attitudes here underline the continued status of the Far East, centuries after Mandeville, as a locus of novelty (‘new’), wonder (‘exotic’), sexuality (‘embrace’) and consumption (‘flavour’). Elements in the production may, in hindsight, have encouraged reviews of this kind – though to blame Doran, as director, for some sort of theatrical racism would be absurd, as Woza Shakespeare!, his account of producing Titus Andronicus in South Africa, written with Antony Sher, makes clear.27 One such moment, arguably, was the comic war-dance (or ‘haka’, as it was known in rehearsal, after the New Zealand rugby team’s pre-match ritual challenge to the opposition) performed by Joe Dixon, playing the King of Bakam, at his first encounter with his rivals for Quisara’s hand. The Bakam of the text is clearly a buffoon, but the ‘haka’ exacerbated his comic qualities still further with grotesquely exaggerated movements, which, along with the presentation of the disguised Governor as a kind of Hindu ‘fakir’ – giving his anti-colonial speech standing in a yoga pose, left sole lodged against right thigh – threatened momentarily to align the production with certain stereotyped British comic traditions. Yet Doran aimed from the start to foreground the play’s representation of the clash of cultures and to underline both the admirable qualities of the Malukans and the Machiavellianism

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of the Europeans. He sought to emphasise the inadequacy of Rui Dias, the sexual aggression and racial bigotry of the Portuguese and the religious hysteria of Armusia (as one reviewer observed, the actor Jamie Glover, playing Armusia, ‘erupts into a malevolent fury of hardline Christian fundamentalism’), as well as the strength of Quisara and the temperate serenity of the King, highlighting the uneasy undercurrents of the play’s conclusion with its excess of closure.28 As Lois Potter noted in a review for TLS: Doran, who knows (as Fletcher did) that the Portuguese Empire in the East Indies was short-lived and (as Fletcher did not) that English colonial ambitions in that region were similarly doomed, makes the tone of the final moments more uneasy. The Portuguese and islanders go off in opposite directions; Pyniero ignores the lady-in-waiting with whom he had been tactically flirting a moment before; Quisara and Armusia, once ready to die together, seem less sure about cohabiting. Only the king . . . sees the ending as happy.29

Potter here quite explicitly sees the production as occupying theatrical ground equivalent to the critical work of Raman and Neill, foregrounding the play’s implicit engagement, even as it ostensibly represents prior Portuguese colonial or commercial exploits, with the rapid development of English interest in the region and emphasising the exploitative, as well as the utopian, impetus of that interest. In context, it turned out, the play’s Muslim subtext quietly reasserted itself. Doran, as I have noted, asked his designer to incorporate images of pre-Islamic Indonesian religions into the set and chose not to represent the disguised Governor as ‘a Moore priest’ but rather as a generic Indian ‘holy man’. Reviewers none the less – showing that they had done their homework with the text – ignored or deadpanned the production’s reticence with regard to Islam, finding in Paul Bhattacharjee, the disguised Governor, not an unspecific ‘fakir’ but a figure of much more immediate, and uncomfortable, contextual resonance. ‘In the stage instructions,’ observed John Gross in The Sunday Telegraph, ‘the priest is described as a “Moor” and at the Swan the disguise the governor assumes makes him look like a stand-in for Osama bin Laden.’30 ‘Whether or not Fletcher fully realises it,’ added Benedict Nightingale, ‘this 17thcentury Osama makes some prophetic accusations.’ And, as if to confirm this connection, the final tableau, in which the Governor kneels, defiant, in the same kind of chains with which he had earlier burdened the King, was inescapably redolent of the pictures

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relayed to the world of the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. There was no blindfold or orange jumpsuit, but the visual resonance was hard to miss. The politics of the production, then, pivoted on the figure of the Governor, and the downplaying of parallels with contemporary geopolitics was also a kind of foregrounding. Moreover – and, as it turned out, crucially – Doran made certain cuts, the most significant of which was the omission of the second military-technology scene, 5.3, in its entirety – a move which (along with the curious quietness of the explosion set off to assist with the rescue of the King) served both to negotiate potential audience disaffection with the violence of the Portuguese and, as with the choice not to follow the stage direction and dress the Governor specifically as a Muslim cleric, to deflect the audience’s thoughts from the immediate post-‘9/11’ world outside the theatre. The reason for this is obvious enough on one level – not to make overt the simplistic equation of Governor and Osama that would be one obvious response to the context of the production in summer 2002. Directly to address polarised Muslim/Christian relations – an interpretative option clearly offered by both text and context – might have been to encourage publicity of a sort that the RSC would be unlikely to welcome, and Doran, even while incorporating implicit echoes of Osama and Guantánamo, chose another path. The second level is that, given the post-/neo-colonial attitudes that remain a persistent subcurrent of British culture – at least if the reviewers’ blithe bigotry about curry houses and musicals can be taken as representative – it is arguably impossible to produce a Jacobean play of this kind on the (post)modern commercial stage without, intentionally or otherwise, engaging with assumptions and expectations that are the product of a colonial era not yet quite in place when Fletcher wrote the play. Decades of stage stereotypes of the kind typified for the reviewers by productions of The King and I, in any case, arguably make it impossible to stage the Far East without automatically evoking a set of unwelcome orientalisms. In this sense, the Jacobean stage’s ‘island logic’ remains far closer to that of Mandeville’s imaginings than to anything we might call ‘modern’ or ‘postmodern’. On 12 October 2002, a bomb went off in a nightclub in Bali, the best-known tourist island in Indonesia. It killed 185 people, the majority Australian university-age backpackers, but also many Balinese. This shocking event took place in the space between the close, at the beginning of the month, of the RSC’s post-Stratford

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season in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and its reappearance as a set of West End productions in December. The bombing thus served to endorse, in a grimly ironic sense, Doran’s decisions in directing The Island Princess, underscoring the complex position of a production of any ideologically provocative early modern play in a postmodern commercial context. Had Doran decided to engage with the aftermath of ‘9/11’ by explicitly addressing the tensions between Islam and Christianity in the play, his production would suddenly have acquired a highly uncomfortable topicality as a representation of the historical origins of a cultural crisis being played out in Indonesia at that time (most fiercely, as it happens, in Maluku) between a West-leaning government and radical Muslim groups connected to Al-Qaeda. More to the point, had he not made the decision to cut the bombardment scene, the spectators would have been treated to a bloody carnivalesque staging of the dismembering impact of a powerful explosion, creating for the audience – expected, even in winter, to include a substantial proportion of tourists – a distressing equation of Jacobean play and Balinese nightclub. And had the production set out to address these contexts directly, Armusia’s speech outlining his motivation for coming to the islands in the first place – ‘Nothing we see but breeds an admiration: / The very rivers, as we float along, / Throw up their pearls and curl their heads to court us’ (1.3.26–8) – might have chimed uneasily with the advertisements that no doubt encouraged the tourist victims to fly to Bali in the first place. As it was, the production was positioned so as to avoid the grim topicality of the Bali bombing. But the coincidence of events suggests that the interconnections of the premodern, early modern and postmodern in the discourses of exploration, travel and empire – we have seen, after all, that in both Mandeville and Fletcher to travel to far distant places is at the same time to turn back home – are such that this kind of avoiding is never, in the end, going to be sustainable.

Notes 1 I have chosen not to cite Mandeville as ‘Mandeville’, so as not to clutter the page with inverted commas, but it is important to be aware of the multiplicity and impersonality of authorship in Mandeville’s Travels. ‘Mandeville’ was neither a traveller nor a (single, authoritative) author. For a thorough account of the Mandevillian text, see Iain Macleod Higgins, Writing East: The ‘Travels’ of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). ‘We continue,’

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2

3

4 5 6

7

8

9

10

11 12

13

14

notes Stephen Greenblatt in a landmark essay, ‘to speak of Mandeville as if he existed and as if the text referred back to his bodily existence. To do so is not simply to submit to an imposition; it is to participate in one of the founding desires of language, the desire to refer us to the world’ (Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 36). Samuel Purchas, ‘Briefe Collection of the Travels and Observations of Sir John Mandevile’, in Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 1625 (Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1906), vol. 2, p. 363. Anon., The Returne from Pernassus: Or The Scourge of Simony (The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus), Prologue, pp. 51–2, in J. B. Leishman (ed.), The Three Parnassus Plays (1598–1601) (London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1949). Richard Brome, The Antipodes: a Comedie (London, 1640), sig. C3r. Ben Jonson, The New Inn, ed. Michael Hattaway, Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 5.4.92–102. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 3.3.43–9. All quotations from Shakespeare are from Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett and William Montgomery (eds), William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005). Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 106. David Matthews, ‘The further travels of Sir John: Mandeville, Chaucer, and the canon of Middle English’, in Geraldine Barnes, with Gabrielle Singleton (eds), Travel and Travellers from Bede to Dampier (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005), pp. 159–76 (160). Iain Macleod Higgins describes the writer’s tactics in this as ‘instructing, chastising, challenging, and consoling The Book’s projected Christian audience, in addition to entertaining and diverting them’ (Writing East, p. 267). Roland Greene, ‘Island logic’, in Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (eds), The Tempest and Its Travels (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), pp. 138, 293–4. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, p. 28. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, trans. C. W. R. D. Moseley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983; 2005), p. 174. I have cited Moseley’s translation throughout, though readers should also consult M. C. Seymour’s edition of Mandeville’s Travels (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). Ben Jonson, George Chapman and John Marston, Eastward Ho!, ed. C. G. Petter, New Mermaids (London: Ernest Benn, 1973), 3.3.17–21, 23–5. Octave Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonisation (London: Methuen, 1956; first published in French: Paris: Editions

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du Seuil, 1950), George Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile (London: Michael Joseph, 1960) and Philip Mason’s Prospero’s Magic: Some Thoughts on Class and Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962) together provoked a series of postcolonial productions of the play by a range of directors from Jonathan Miller to Neil Armfield. Later, key essays by Paul Brown (‘“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”: The Tempest and the discourse of colonialism’, in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 48–71) and by Francis Barker and Peter Hulme (‘“Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish”: the discursive con-texts of The Tempest’, in John Drakakis (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 191–205) prompted a long series of ‘colonial’ readings of the play, which gradually opened out to the far broader understanding of Tempest geographies represented in Hulme and Sherman, The Tempest and Its Travels. 15 A decade and a half ago I published a book which included a chapter on The Island Princess and on its Fletcherian sister-play The Sea Voyage. My argument about the former, in part, was that the play represented a dramatisation of the relationship between John Rolfe and Pocahontas, and thus addressed the Jacobean experience specifically of American colonisation. In so doing, I was, of course, ignoring the actual geography of the play and I have been corrected by Shankar Raman and Michael Neill. They are quite right: the play is not a New World play and, while I maintain my claim that there is a deliberate parallel between Quisara and Pocahontas – that is, that the play bears a marked trace of colonial experience in the New World – I now read (and teach) it both in its Indonesian context and as a play which negotiates Islam. See Gordon McMullan, The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), pp. 222–35; Shankar Raman, ‘Imaginary islands: staging the east’, Renaissance Drama, 26 (1995), pp. 131–61, reworked as chapter 4 of Raman, Framing ‘India’: The Colonial Imaginary in Early Modern Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 155–88; Michael Neill, ‘“Material Flames”: romance, empire, and mercantile fantasy in John Fletcher’s Island Princess’, in Neill, Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 312–38. 16 ‘You should realise that no living man can go to Paradise. By land no man can go thither because of the wild beasts in the wilderness, and because of the hills and rocks, which no one can cross; and also because of the many dark places that are there. No one can go there by water either, for those rivers flow with so strong a current, with such a rush and such waves that no boat can sail against them. There is also such a great noise of waters that one man cannot hear another, shout he never

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18

19 20 21

22

23

24 25 26

27 28 29 30

so loudly. Many great lords have tried at different times to travel by those rivers to Paradise, but they could not prosper in their journeys’ (p. 185). John Fletcher, The Island Princess, in Fredson Bowers (gen. ed.), The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, vol. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 1.3.16–18, 26–31. Philip J. Finkelpearl, ‘John Fletcher as Spenserian playwright: The Faithful Shepherdess and The Island Princess’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 27 (1987), pp. 297–8. Raman, Framing ‘India’, p. 185. Matthews, ‘The further travels of Sir John’, p. 161. I am grateful to Greg Doran for inviting me to be part of the production and to him and to the cast for making me feel so welcome in the Stratford rehearsal room. I’m grateful too to Clare McManus – who is editing The Island Princess for Arden Early Modern Drama and with whom I gave a joint paper on the play at the Montpellier conference from which this book derives – for productive conversations about the play. Giles Milton, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: How One Man’s Courage Changed the Course of History (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1999); Milton, The Riddle and the Knight: In Search of Sir John Mandeville (London: Allison & Busby, 1996). Robert Hewison, review of RSC Island Princess, The Sunday Times, 7 July 2002; Michael Billington, review of RSC Island Princess, The Guardian, 3 July 2002. Madeleine North, Review of RSC Island Princess, Independent on Sunday, 7 July 2002. Benedict Nightingale, review of RSC Island Princess, The Times, 4 July 2002. Faye Claridge, ‘New RSC production stuns with no death count’, BBC Coventry and Warwickshire website www.bbc.co.uk/coventry/ stage/stories/2002/07/island-princess-review.shtml (accessed on 14 October 2008). Antony Sher and Gregory Doran, Woza Shakespeare!: Titus Andronicus in South Africa (London: Methuen, 1996). Charles Spencer, review of RSC Island Princess, The Daily Telegraph, 4 July 2002. Lois Potter, ‘Songs of excess’, TLS, 12 July 2002, p. 19. John Gross, review of RSC Island Princess, The Sunday Telegraph, 7 July 2002.

Works cited Primary sources The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, trans. C. W. R. D. Moseley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983; 2005.

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Mandeville’s Travels, ed. M. C. Seymour. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Anon., The Returne from Pernassus: Or The Scourge of Simony (The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus), in J. B. Leishman (ed.), The Three Parnassus Plays (1598–1601). London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1949. Brome, Richard, The Antipodes:a Comedie. London, 1640. Fletcher, John, The Island Princess, in Fredson Bowers (gen. ed.), The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, vol. 5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Jonson, Ben, The New Inn, ed. Michael Hattaway, The Revels Plays. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. ——, George Chapman and John Marston, Eastward Ho!, ed. C. G. Petter, New Mermaids. London: Ernest Benn, 1973. Purchas, Samuel, ‘Briefe Collection of the Travels and Observations of Sir John Mandevile’, in Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 1625. Hakluyt Society Extra Series. Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1906. Shakespeare, William, The Tempest, in Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett and William Montgomery (eds), William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005. Secondary sources Barker, Francis, and Peter Hulme, ‘“Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish”: the discursive con-texts of The Tempest’, pp. 191–205 in John Drakakis (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares. London: Methuen, 1985. Billington, Michael, review of RSC Island Princess, The Guardian, 3 July 2002. Brown, Paul, ‘“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”: The Tempest and the discourse of colonialism’, pp. 48–71 in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985. Claridge, Faye, ‘New RSC production stuns with no death count’, review of RSC Island Princess. BBC Coventry and Warwickshire website www. bbc.co.uk/coventry/stage/stories/2002/07/island-princess-review.shtml (accessed on 14 October 2008). Finkelpearl, Philip J., ‘John Fletcher as Spenserian playwright: The Faithful Shepherdess and The Island Princess’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 27 (1987), pp. 297–8. Greenblatt, Stephen, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Greene, Roland, ‘Island logic’, pp. 138–48 in Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (eds), The Tempest and Its Travels. London: Reaktion Books, 2000. Gross, John, review of RSC Island Princess, The Sunday Telegraph, 7 July 2002.

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Hewison, Robert, review of RSC Island Princess, The Sunday Times, 7 July 2002. Higgins, Iain Macleod, Writing East: The ‘Travels’ of Sir John Mandeville. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Lamming, George, The Pleasures of Exile. London: Michael Joseph, 1960. Mannoni, Octave, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonisation. London: Methuen, 1956 (first published in French: Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1950). Mason, Philip, Prospero’s Magic: Some Thoughts on Class and Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. Matthews, David, ‘The further travels of Sir John: Mandeville, Chaucer, and the canon of Middle English’, pp. 159–76 in Geraldine Barnes and Gabrielle Singleton (eds), Travel and Travellers from Bede to Dampier. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005. McMullan, Gordon, The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. Milton, Giles, The Riddle and the Knight: In Search of Sir John Mandeville. London: Allison & Busby, 1996. ——, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: How One Man’s Courage Changed the Course of History. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1999. Neill, Michael, Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Nightingale, Benedict, review of RSC Island Princess, The Times, 4 July 2002. North, Madeleine, review of RSC Island Princess, Independent on Sunday, 7 July 2002. Potter, Lois ‘Songs of excess’, Times Literary Supplement, 12 July 2002, p. 19. Raman, Shankar, ‘Imaginary islands: staging the East’, Renaissance Drama, 26 (1995), pp. 131–61; reworked in Shankar Raman, Framing ‘India’: The Colonial Imaginary in Early Modern Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, pp. 155–88. Sher, Antony, and Gregory Doran, Woza Shakespeare!: Titus Andronicus in South Africa. London: Methuen, 1996. Spencer, Charles, review of RSC Island Princess, The Daily Telegraph, 4 July 2002. Vitkus, Daniel, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

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10 The politics of Mandevillian monsters in Richard Brome’s The Antipodes Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Claire Jowitt

Richard Brome’s satirical travel drama The Antipodes of 1636–38 is a late example of the Renaissance vogue for English plays which engage with the idea of New Worlds and colonial politics. The Antipodes relies on a genre of writing about foreign experiences, specifically a tradition of writing about travel and imaginary New Worlds satirically, which included Lucian’s second-century CE comic and grotesque fantasy voyage A True Story, Mandeville’s Travels (1356), and the more recent text by Joseph Hall, Mundus Alter et Idem (1605). The play is largely distinct from its dramatic antecedents such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), Fletcher’s The Island Princess (1619–21), Fletcher’s and Massinger’s The Sea Voyage (1622) or Massinger’s The City Madam (1632), which are indebted to post-Columbus accounts of travel to and discovery of the Americas. However, in terms of dramatic precursors, as befitting a ‘Son of Ben’, Brome is most indebted to Ben Jonson. The Antipodes is particularly informed by Volpone (1606), which, akin to Brome’s play, also includes an English traveller called Peregrine, though in Jonson’s text he is not merely an armchair traveller since he visits Italy on the Grand Tour. Brome’s characters in The Antipodes are also reminiscent of the Host, Goodstock, from The New Inne (1629). Goodstock has a double identity, Lord Frampul, who, like Lord Letoy and Dr Hughball, is an explorer-colonist in the Mandevellian manner.1 However, in contrast to The Antipodes, Jonson, like Shakespeare, Fletcher and Massinger, frequently included the New World topos in his plays Eastward Hoe (1605, written with Chapman and Marston), Bartholomew Fair (1614) and The Staple of News (1626), where debates about colonial life in Virginia and encounters between colonists and indigenous inhabitants are important to each play’s action. Brome’s text, then, is dramatically unusual in its reluctance to engage with new information in circulation about New World

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experiences in the Americas. Yet paradoxically it uses the idea of a New World, specifically the Antipodes, in order to focus on Renaissance London. The fantasy continent of ‘Terra Australis Incognita’, the Antipodes, is used by Brome as a vehicle through which to discuss domestic issues of gender identity and performance.2 Jonson’s influence can be seen here since, in Bartholomew Fair for example, London of Smithfield Fair and the Virginia colony are brought together when in the play’s Induction the Stagekeeper observes: ‘When it comes to the fair, once: you were even as good go to Virginia, for any thing there is of Smithfield.’3 However, it is not an American world that interests Brome, instead it is an Antipodean one. In his treatment of the Antipodes, Brome is following, in particular, Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem, which had satirised the way in which during the sixteenth century detailed cartographic representations of a southern continent proliferated, though no certain discovery took place.4 It had long been felt by geographers (such as Pomponius Mela and Ptolemy) that a southern continent was needed to balance the one in the north, and increasingly elaborate representations circulated of the land and peoples expected to be found there.5 As other chapters in this volume describe, Brome’s text is particularly indebted to Hall’s anti-travel text where in ‘Terra Australis Incognita’ his narrator, Mercurius Britannicus, travels through a supposedly new continent that represents in exaggerated form the vices of Renaissance Europe; in other words he meets ‘a world, another and the same’.6 In Brome’s The Antipodes, we have the representation of pointless travel, or travel that gets the traveller nowhere.7 In other words, Brome’s text charts a fantasy voyage to a fantasy kingdom: a journey nowhere. This is crucial in switching the focus of the drama from the assimilation of new ideas, knowledge and peoples concerning the New World in the Americas – which was apparent in many earlier Renaissance travel dramas – to the values and behaviour of the inhabitants of the Old World in Europe. Despite being framed by the idea of travel, the emphasis in this text is very much Renaissance London in the 1630s. This chapter, however, focuses on another influential source for Brome’s play, Mandeville’s Travels, and it will examine the significance of the relationship between the texts in two related ways. Firstly, Brome’s importation to 1630s ‘London’ of Mandevillian monstrousness is explored, specifically with regard to gender behaviour and sexual appetite. Secondly, the chapter examines the status accorded to Mandeville’s text in The Antipodes and in the

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early to mid-seventeenth century more generally, in order to pose larger political and generic questions concerning the ways in which dramatic texts use travel writing in this period. In particular the focus is on the implications of Brome’s choice of Mandeville as his source for Peregrine’s information about foreign locations, since by the seventeenth century Mandeville was no longer uniformly viewed as an authority on geography and ethnography. Firstly, then, I want to discuss the gender politics of Richard Brome’s appropriation of Mandeville’s Travels in The Antipodes. The play describes how, following the retreat of the plague epidemic in London in 1636–37, the Joyless family come to London in an attempt to cure the son of the family, Peregrine, who has lost his wits through the reading of exotic travel writing, particularly Mandeville’s Travels. Because his parents have not allowed him to become an explorer, Peregrine in The Antipodes has become so obsessed with the idea of travel that he is guilty of succumbing to the condition against which Jerome Turler warned his readers in his influential travel manual The Traveiller (1574). In his chapter ‘the preceptes of traveyling’ Turler’s principal point was that travellers must not forget the morals and social customs of their own society whilst abroad, since promiscuous cultural intermingling will result in their no longer fitting into their home society on return.8 In The Antipodes, this is precisely what has happened, since Peregrine has grown so demented through thinking of nothing but strange customs and countries described in Mandeville that he has become a social misfit. He is interested only in travel writing and neglects everything else, even his marital duties towards his young wife Martha, so that the marriage remains unconsummated, and hence without issue, after three years. In fact it is Peregrine, rather than his wife, who has conceived, since he suffers from a ‘tympany’ (1.1.178), meaning a monstrous swelling or a pregnancy. This condition requires the services of a male midwife, so Peregrine’s father, Joyless, consults Hughball, a famous doctor who takes on the case. The doctor lives with Letoy, a ‘plaine’ but ‘fantastic lord’ (1.2.83), who keeps a well-equipped private stage, and a group of menservants who are trained actors. In order to affect a cure, Hughball and Letoy drug Peregrine and thus persuade him that he has travelled to the Antipodes whilst asleep. They stage a series of scenes of supposed inversion concerning life in the Antipodes, designed to restore their patient to his wits by making him recognise the natural and correct order of things. However, Peregrine invades the property-room backstage

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and, after a fight with pasteboard monsters, makes himself King of the Antipodes. He intends to introduce a programme of reform concerning Antipodean customs, but is persuaded to take an Antipodean wife – Martha in disguise – as his queen. The couple finally consummate their marriage and are cured of their maladies since they are now sexually satisfied. The play is also concerned with Letoy and Hughball’s cure of Joyless’s excessive jealousy concerning his young wife, Diana. Joyless overhears Lord Letoy amorously proposition Diana, who firmly repulses him, maintaining her love for her husband. Joyless is further convinced of Diana’s chastity by Letoy’s revelation that he is Diana’s father. After all these explanations the play ends with, superficially at least, the reestablishment of correct relations in Renaissance London. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that the first performances of this play at the Salisbury Court Theatre in 1638 were when the playhouses reopened after a plague outbreak, The Antipodes is obsessed with ideas of disease and contagion.9 But The Antipodes is also concerned with issues of paternity, gender and sexual relations, and these concerns cannot be explained as merely a reflection of the recent London health crisis. Critics such as Ian Donaldson, Martin Butler, Ira Clark and most recently Matthew Steggle have argued that The Antipodes should be seen as making comments about the strengths and weaknesses of Caroline rule and society.10 Extending these readings, this chapter focuses on the representations of gender and its impact on the debate concerning the extent of the resemblance between the Antipodes and Renaissance London. Brome’s treatment of sexual appetite and behaviour is also explored, and the connections between these issues and the text’s representation of the apparent pointlessness of travel through staging a pretend voyage to a Mandevillian-inspired fantasyland. In The Antipodes, Brome represents the characters’ various social problems and health issues as types of madness or moral sickness: Peregrine is travel mad, Martha is full of love melancholy, Joyless is ‘horn-mad’ (1.1.79). Yet it becomes apparent that it is not just the Joyless family that is suffering from different forms of madness: virtually all the characters suffer from psychological ill health. The married couple Blaze and Barbara, mutual friends of Letoy and the Joyless family, have themselves previously been through Doctor Hughball’s somewhat radical cure for a husband’s horn-madness, which involves accepting that he is already a cuckold and ceasing to worry about it. At the end of the play, even Letoy describes the way that his marriage with Diana’s mother

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was soured through his belief he had been cuckolded, and his doubts about his daughter’s legitimacy were answered only on his wife’s death-bed. All these conditions concern gender behaviour or sexual relations in one form or another. The most striking image in this play, and the one upon which the plot of The Antipodes revolves, is the removal of Peregrine Joyless’s ‘tympany’ which, in the seventeenth century, meant pregnancy or a disease of the belly and could refer to a literal or a metaphorical condition.11 Barbara, the sexually experienced and, perhaps, unfaithful (with Letoy) wife of Blaze, asks Hughball, in his role as ‘man midwife’ to deliver the travel obsessed and sexually dysfunctional Peregrine of his ‘huge tympany of news’ (1.1.178). She requests that he be delivered of his Mandeville-based fantasies of: . . . monsters, Pygmies and giants, apes and elephants, Griffins and crocodiles, men upon women, And women upon men, the strangest doings – As far beyond all Christendom as ’tis to’t. (1.1.178–82)

Peregrine’s ‘tympany’ is an image of a monstrous male pregnancy and it has been caused by his reading of the 1625 edition of Mandeville, as Ann Haaker and Antony Parr point out in their respective editions of The Antipodes.12 However, his swelling in fact exceeds even Mandeville’s monsters. Mandeville describes how hermaphrodites may be found in an island south of Ceylon: ‘folks that are both men and women, and have members of both, for to engender with, & when they will, they use one at one time, & another at another time’.13 Peregrine’s pregnancy takes the situation one step further since his imagined tumescent belly is the outcome and consequence, it seems of these ‘strangest doings’ rather than part of the activities themselves. As such, Barbara’s rhetoric is both part of the text’s gender play, as well as linking to the debate about resemblances between the Antipodes and Renaissance London. Gender play is clearly present in this passage since, rather ironically, Barbara asks Hughball to take the specifically female role of midwife in order to deliver a man, Peregrine, of his ‘strange’, nonChristian interests in exotic and salacious ‘monsters’ and hermaphrodites: ‘men upon women, / And women upon men’. Though ‘men-midwives’ were to become common in the eighteenth century

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when men took over the profession, in the seventeenth century they were not welcome at births. Indeed, the taboo against male attendance was such that in 1552 a physician in Germany was condemned to death when it was discovered that he had attended a birth crossdressed, and in 1646 a Massachusetts man, Francis Rayus, was fined 50s ‘for presuming to act the part of a midwife’.14 Hence a male midwife inverts accepted gender roles as much as Peregrine’s tympathic pregnancy. In terms of appropriate gender behaviour, there is little difference between patient and doctor as both are figures of transgression. Furthermore, Barbara’s speech – which asserts that Peregrine’s diet of exotic travel literature has made him sick – shows the potentially destabilising nature of the influence of travel writing. As Barbara’s comments about ‘news’ or information makes clear, travel writing of necessity affects those left at home. More particularly, when those accounts are fantastic ones – ‘of the strangest doings’ – then their effects will be particularly acute. Peregrine’s tympany is just an extreme manifestation of a common condition; it is, crucially, one from which the Doctor also suffers. Peregrine’s tympany not only represents a physical condition, it can also be seen to reflect a moral one, since at this time tympany was a metaphorical term referring to ‘a swelling, as of pride, arrogance, self-conceit, [which was] figured as a disease’.15 Like Falstaff’s tumescent belly in 2 Henry IV, Peregrine’s stomach has become ‘puffed up’.16 He has internalised or consumed the strange and exotic travel stories he has read in Mandeville so that he is unable to pay his marriage debt.17 And his disease appears contagious in the world of the play. Martha, his virgin wife, meanders through scenes, making embarrassing, misdirected sexual remarks as she tries to discover the secrets of married love. Almost immediately after Barbara’s earlier speech, both Martha and her situation are described as ‘monstrous’.18 It appears that Peregrine’s obsession with Mandeville’s stories, and his lack of attention to his wife, have driven her out of her wits. The lure of the exotic and the unknown is so strong that established social and sexual relations are undermined and inverted, for the travel-obsessed individual, for those with whom he comes into contact, and the characters who attempt his cure: the worlds of seventeenth-century London and the Antipodes are not far apart. The play goes on to question the superficially easy identification of the character that caused the contagion. As Martha tries to gain sexual knowledge from all who will listen to her, she describes her experiences:

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For were I now to die, I cannot guess What a man does in child-getting. I remember A wanton maid once lay with me, and kissed And clipped and clapped me strangely, and then wished That I had been a man to have got her with child.

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(1.1.252–6)

The woman-to-woman sexual encounter described here is clearly not a celebration of female same-sex desire; rather it is predicated on the need of an (absent) man to father children and fulfil women’s biological and social roles. Desire grows between Martha and the ‘wanton maid’ only because of the absence of any available man. Martha now finds herself in a similar situation since, though she wants Peregrine to father a child on her, she still asks Barbara whether she can share a bed with her: ‘I’ll lie with you and practise, if you please. Pray take me for a night or two’ (1.1.264–5). Martha’s desires for pregnancy or ‘tympany’, which were apparently awakened by the wanton maid, connect to the moral disorder of Renaissance London. Peregrine’s disease should thus be viewed as a consequence rather than a cause of the moral malaise described in the text. The contagion, represented in Martha’s case as samesex desire, was already fully present prior to Peregrine’s reading of Mandeville. Indeed, as the play progresses, it becomes clear that the character who attempts to be the moral and sexual arbiter in the world of the play, the ‘fantastic’ Lord Letoy, is in fact the most deviant and excessive. With Hughball’s help, Letoy organises a dramatic production to cure Peregrine of his ‘tympany’. This play-within-a-play (where Peregrine thinks he has travelled to the Antipodes) at first presents the Antipodean world as a place of inverted class, gender and sexual relations, but it soon becomes apparent that such a discrete separation cannot be maintained. Despite setting himself up as the instigator of Peregrine’s cure, Letoy is the most socially, sexually and morally ambiguous character in the play. During the play-withinthe-play in 4.1.167–205, we are confronted with a knock-about, satirical scene involving three Antipodean courtiers and sodomitical relationships, which attempts to condemn such practices. Yet, for much of the play, Letoy is obsessed with one of the actors, his servant Byplay, a name which indicates sexual ambiguity, since, as Parr comments, it means ‘action carried on aside . . . while the main action proceeds’.19 Letoy insistently talks of his ‘love’ for Byplay and his other male servants, dresses effeminately in the manner of

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Richard II, employs the gender-inverting male midwife Hughball, and, at the end of the play, describes an unhappy marriage. These factors undermine Letoy’s position as self-proclaimed guardian of normative sexual and gender relations, a role in which his attempts to cure Peregrine would initially seem to place him. Peregrine’s tympany – his phantom pregnancy, his morbid swelling and the moral malaise it figuratively represents – is symptomatic, then, of a much more pervasive condition. Significantly, it does not appear to be a disease that originated in the Antipodes. Rather, the moral and social decay the tympany represents was already endemic to Renaissance London. At the end of the play, it appears to be Letoy who is suffering from a moral tympany, when he admits that he is the father of Diana. For most of the play he has been relentless in sexually pursuing her, claiming to be attempting to cure Joyless’s jealousy. The revelation and miraculous delivery of Diana as Letoy’s daughter – another bloodless male birth which echoes Peregrine’s – is unprepared for by the text and comes as a complete surprise to both Diana and the audience. The sense of disquiet caused by this disclosure is especially strong since Letoy’s confession immediately follows an attempted seduction of her that seems serious in tone. Letoy has just threatened Diana with financial and social ruin if she will not succumb: ‘I’ll . . . not spare / To boast thou art my prostitute, and thrust ye / Out of my gates, to try’t out by yourselves’ (5.2.115–18). Letoy’s tympany represents an excessive and indiscriminate sexuality. He incestuously tries to seduce his daughter; the text makes it clear he has already had an affair with Barbara; and his relationship with his servants, especially Byplay, is sexually orientated. Brome’s play, then, urges its audience and readers to question where anti-establishment social and sexual practices originate. It becomes apparent that the excessive and monstrous sexuality associated with foreign parts in Mandeville’s text is rather tame compared to the activities of the inhabitants of seventeenth-century London. This analysis demonstrates, then, that London and the Antipodes are interchangeable in Brome’s drama. In contrast to other contemporary travel and travel-inspired plays, this voyage drama does not actually travel anywhere in the sense of engaging with experiences from life in colonial and foreign locations.20 Other voyage dramas are either set in colonial regions, juxtapose Virginia or Virginia-inspired locations against London or engage with the hardships and vicissitudes of mercantile adventuring and sea-life.

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In these other ‘geographic’ plays, of course, the locations and issues with which they engage are available to be read as allegories about aspects of the culture out of which they emerge, and often they also utilise Mandevillian tropes, but The Antipodes is unusual in that the only meaning of travel is as a lens to focus on the behaviour of the population of Renaissance London. In The Antipodes, the fantasy new world Peregrine visits is merely an exaggerated version of England: Antipodean natives are recognisably European since, though their customs are supposedly inversions of British ones, their practices are derived from the same conceptual framework. In established Mandevillian tradition of ‘foot against foot’ societies in the southern hemisphere, the discovery in the Antipodes of lawyers that are honest is not a representation of radical difference. Consequently, Brome’s play demonstrates little interest in either contemporary America or other current British territorial ambitions or spheres of interest. In fact, there is only one direct reference to New England when Peregrine contemplates asking the American Puritan regime for advice on the reformation of Antipodean manners: Peregrine: Before I reign A month among them, they shall change their notes, Or I’ll ordain a course to change their coats. I shall have much to do in reformation. Doctor: Patience and counsel will go through it, sir. Peregrine: What if I craved a counsel from New England? The old will spare me none. Doctor: [Aside] Is this man mad? My cure goes fairly on. (4.1.260–7)

Peregrine’s request for counsel from New England marks a stage in his return to something approximating psychic health. The remark satirically attacks Charles’s government since Peregrine says ‘the old will spare me none’: in other words, the butt of the joke is Britain’s undemocratic rule, since Charles I ruled without calling Parliament in the 1630s, hence it was impossible to get any sort of counsel. Because British colonies were from the start administered by a Governor and Council, New England is here represented as enjoying more liberty than Caroline Britain. However, Peregrine’s request for New World counsel should not be seen as praise for the Puritan regime. Peregrine may be on the mend when he makes this request, but, as both Letoy and Hughball make clear in their

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commentary on the actions of the inset play to the other characters and the audience, Peregrine is still at the ‘folly’ stage of mental health (4.1.495–506). Consequently, Peregrine’s request for New World counsel whilst a fool needs to be seen as a satiric attack on the Puritan reformers and their government in New England as well as an attack on the Stuart monarchy.21 The only other mention of English colonial endeavour is much earlier in the play, in Act 1, Scene 3, and it is swiftly dismissed. Proposing to cure Peregrine with a voyage to the Antipodes and, in order to establish his credentials with his patient, Doctor Hughball boasts that he has already been there ‘through and through’, since there is ‘No isle nor angle in that nether world / But I have made journey of’ (1.3.8–10). Peregrine, clearly not convinced, brandishes his copy of Mandeville at the Doctor suggesting: Peregrine: . . . that Mandeville, Whose excellent work this is, was th’only man That e’er came near it. Doctor: Mandeville went far. Peregrine: Beyond all English legs that I can read of. Doctor: What think you, sir, of Drake, our famous countryman? Peregrine: Drake was a didapper to Mandeville. Candish, and Hawkins, Furbisher, all our voyagers Went short of Mandeville. (1.3.25–32)

Peregrine’s derisory assessment of Drake as a ‘didapper’ – a small water fowl – in comparison to Mandeville, is out of kilter with the seventeenth-century nostalgic view of the sea-dog’s achievements, exemplified by the ironic contemporary phrase ‘there were now no more Drakes in England, all were hens’.22 For example, the 1633 revision of the Second Part of Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody singles out Drake for his heroism in its account of the defeat of the Armada, and adds a lengthy report of his actions.23 In fact, as Mark Netzloff describes, ‘Heywood’s play insistently memorializes the anticipated loss of England’s commanders’, more generally as, in the play, Queen Elizabeth repeatedly prepares herself and the nation for the loss the English naval heroes – Drake, Frobisher and Hawkins – the ones whom Peregrine dismisses.24 For Peregrine, English imperial projects – Drake’s circumnavigation, Hawkins’s establishment of the slave trade, Frobisher’s search for the North West Passage, and their united efforts is repelling the Spanish in 1588 – are inconsequential beside

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Mandeville’s encounters with prophetic speaking trees, whose fruit gives immortality: ‘And monsters more, as numberless as nameless’ (1.3.40). Peregrine demonstrates no interest in England’s Elizabethan voyages of discovery, the actual achievements and failures of these seamen, or their patriotic role in the defence of the nation; instead he relies solely on outdated written accounts as evidence of attainment, seeing Mandeville’s status as supreme as he, according to his book, has travelled furthest (‘Beyond all English legs that I can read of’). Size matters, as the length of journey is the sole determining factor of success for Peregrine, and he is reliant on obsolete information. At the height of his illness, his promotion of Mandeville, rather than England’s celebrated explorers, suggests that Brome in The Antipodes emphasises the questions surrounding the status of Mandeville’s text. Certainly by the mid-seventeenth century Mandeville’s text, though extremely popular (it was reprinted five times between 1612 and 1639), was treated with a considerable degree of scepticism in some circles.25 Famously Richard Hakluyt, the tireless promoter of English imperialism, included a Latin text of Mandeville in the 1589 edition of The Principall Navigations, but not in the 1598–1600 edition, as Mandeville’s utility faded as a practical tool for the furtherance of the ‘traffiques’ of the English nation.26 However, Hakluyt’s dismissal of Mandeville was by no means uniform: Samuel Purchas wrote of Mandeville in 1625 as ‘the greatest Asian traveller that ever the world had’;27 and Martin Frobisher, one of the explorers and naval commanders dismissed by Peregrine, took Mandeville’s text with him for its information about China when searching for the North West Passage.28 Brome’s The Antipodes appears to reflect this ambivalence in Mandeville’s reception, since Peregrine’s championing of his heroic achievements is clearly satiric, yet at the same time the character, Hughball, who is attempting to cure Peregrine of his folly, sets out to effect his treatment by boasting he himself has exceeded Mandeville. Similar to the manner in which the apparent normality of Letoy and Hughball is undermined through their own gender inversions (Letoy having a tympany of his own, and Hughball as a male midwife), here characters’ relationship with and attitude to Mandeville’s Travels is also indicative of their position vis-à-vis orthodox patterns of behaviour. Of course it is perfectly possible to read Hughball’s claim that he has travelled further than Mandeville as merely the play-acting required as part of Peregrine’s cure, yet his embrace of Mandeville’s geography as

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the most authentic might also be seen to question his status as an authority on moral, political, sexual or social health. At no other times in the drama does The Antipodes engage with the harsh realities or perceived sexual excesses of British colonial life in the 1630s, or the kinds of issues that specifically affected colonists and explorers and with which other contemporary dramas engage.29 Instead, in The Antipodes, we have a bowdlerised version of travel in which, by falling asleep, a would-be traveller can painlessly awake on another continent, an apparently New World, where, paradoxically, the traveller finds his own culture. This conflation of new and old worlds means that this travel drama does not explore any culture apart from the British one. The main result of Peregrine’s sojourn is that as a couple he and his wife become sexually active, but this merely enables them to become part of the deviant and unwholesome sexual atmosphere of Caroline London. Peregrine’s Mandevillian interests and fears are, it transpires, no more strange or bizarre than the behaviour of the rest of the characters outside the inset play. When Peregrine meets Martha in disguise as a native Antipodean queen, he is initially reluctant to couple with her, because he is worried that she is a Mandevillian Gadlibrien that ‘stings oft-times to death’ the man she has married (4.1.468). But on being assured by Hughball that ‘She’s no Gadlibrien, sir, upon my Knowledge’ (4.1.469) – presumably, like his earlier claim to have travelled beyond Mandeville, a boast designed to announce that he has had sexual knowledge of her – Peregrine is persuaded to pursue the relationship. Here Peregrine’s virginity – his lack of, as Diana puts it, ‘the real knowledge of the woman’ (4.1.514) – makes him credit Mandevillian stories concerning the practice of hiring ‘another man to couple with his bride, / To clear the dangerous passage of a maidenhead’ (4.1.464–5), because, as Mandeville writes, Gadlibrien women had ‘snakes within them, which stung their husbands on their penises inside the women’s bodies; and thus many men were slaine’.30 Peregrine’s sexual inadequacy – demonstrated by his failure to consummate his marriage earlier – makes him receptive to fantastic and exotic stories about women’s threatening sexuality. Similarly, his desire to allow another man to have sexual relations with his wife – his positive willingness to be cuckolded – marks Peregrine as an example of failed masculinity.31 Yet, Peregrine’s inadequacy is no more striking – in fact it is perhaps somewhat less so – than the peculiarity of Letoy attempting to seduce his own daughter. Brome does not encourage the audience to have any faith in the

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moral conclusion of his drama: Diana is reunited with her father, Peregrine and Martha have consummated their marriage, Joyless and Diana are reconciled, as are Barbara and Blaze. Nevertheless there is a sense of pointlessness about the whole text, since what the characters achieve through Hughball’s and Letoy’s machinations is not necessarily better than their previous situations. Martha and Peregrine may have finally achieved sexual union, but the examples of married life around them are not such as to recommend the condition. Just as in the inset play nobody actually travels to anywhere, the play’s resolution is equally pointless. This play represents a paradox then: it is a travel drama that is not about travel, except as fantasy, and offers a resolution where supposed normative values are re-established, but they turn out, on closer inspection, to be as outlandish as the ones they replaced. The fantasy of the Antipodean, Mandevillian-inspired New World is, in this drama, filled solely with the Old World; there is nothing new about it. Brome’s choice of Mandeville’s Travels for Peregrine’s reading matter, then, is deliberately designed to emphasise this paradox, since its ambiguous and contradictory status in the seventeenth century perfectly encapsulates the complexities of The Antipodes’ attitude to travel writing.

Notes 1 For a recent discussion of Jonson’s dramas and colonial politics see Rebecca Ann Bach, Colonial Transformations: The Cultural Production of the New Atlantic World 1580–1640 (New York: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 113–48. 2 Richard Brome, The Antipodes, in Three Renaissance Travel Plays, ed. Anthony Parr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). All subsequent references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the chapter. 3 Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, ed. Suzanne Gossett (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), ‘The Induction on the stage’, pp. 9–10. 4 On the history of the discovery of Australia see Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia 1787–1868 (London: Pan, 1988), pp. 43–6. 5 For discussion of the satiric exploitation by writers of the inconsistency between the representation of a detailed Terra Australis Incognita on maps and certain knowledge of the continent see Richard McCabe, Joseph Hall: A Study in Satire and Meditation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 85–8.

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6 For discussion see Claire Jowitt, ‘Old worlds and new worlds: Renaissance voyages of discovery’, Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Southampton, 1996, pp. 133–52; Ruth Gilbert, Early Modern Hermaphrodites: Sex and Other Stories (London: Palgrave, 2002). 7 See Joseph Hall, Mundus Alter et Idem, ed. and trans. Joseph Millar Wands (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), ‘Introduction’, pp. xxvii–xxxii. 8 Jerome Turler, The Traveiller, ed. D. E. Baughan (Gainesville, Florida: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1951), pp. 19–22. For a consideration of the traveller’s iconoclastic potential see Wayne Franklin, Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers? The Diligent Writers of Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 1–12. 9 For information about the history of stage performance in this period see Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 21–2. See also Ann Haaker, ‘The Plague, the theater and the poet’, Renaissance Drama, 1 (1968), pp. 283–306; Matthew Steggle, Richard Brome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 112–13. 10 Ian Donaldson, for instance, has seen Brome’s play as essentially conservative: Peregrine’s exposure to the inverted world of the Antipodes, ‘presenting to him the things he imagined he most wished to see, forces him to see them not as desirable but as repugnant, and drives him steadily back to normality’ (p. 94). In Donaldson’s view the drama stages a reassuring catharsis where the characters emerge purged of their unhealthy humours through their sojourn in anti-London. However, other critics persuasively argue that the ‘normality’ of the play’s representation of London is not as assured as Donaldson suggests. Martin Butler, for instance, sees the play as an attack on Charles I’s autocratic rule in which any demarcation between anti-London and London is unstable. Brome’s anti-London draws attention to Charles’s financial abuses and the corruption of monarchical rule without a Parliament, but at the same time makes it clear that there are aspects of anti-London (honest lawyers, merciful sergeants, cultured aldermen and paid poets) from which Caroline London could profitably learn (pp. 216–17). Ira Clark’s account also argues that the play demonstrates the need for ‘healing reform’ in social, political and familial arenas of 1630s London, but suggests that Brome does not specify what exactly these reforms should be, instead exemplifying ‘a process of extemporaneous free play, of improvisation, of vicarious trial of potential reforms’ (p. 183). According to Clark, the play is not programmatic, since it fails to suggest a direct course of action to be followed, but it shows the processes by which change and reform become possible. See Donaldson, The World Turned

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11 12

13 14

15 16

17

18

19 20

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Upside Down: Comedy from Jonson to Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 78–98; Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis 1632–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 211–20; Ira Clark, Professional Playwrights: Massinger, Ford, Shirley and Brome (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1992), pp. 155–96; see also Parr, ‘Introduction’, Three Renaissance Travel Plays, pp. 34–52. OED, 2nd edition, vol. 18, pp. 783–5. Richard Brome, The Antipodes, ed. Ann Haaker (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), p. 27; Parr, Three Renaissance Travel Plays, p. 230. Mandeville, Voyages and Travailes of Sir John Mandeville Knight (London: Thomas Snodham, 1625), Sig. O3r. The generally accepted explanation of the origin of male midwifery is that it began for the lying in of Louis XIV’s mistress Louise de la Vallière in 1663, when the King’s need for secrecy led to the exclusion of the ‘gossiping’ midwives. See Jane B. Donegan, Women and Men Midwives: Medicine, Morality and Misogyny in Early America (London: Greenwood Press, 1978), pp. 18–19; see also Jane Sharp, Jane Sharp’s The Midwives Book, ed. Elaine Hobby (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1999), ‘Introduction’, pp. xi–xxxv. OED, vol. 18, p. 785. Falstaff in 2 Henry IV also seems to be an example of a character suffering from a tympany: ‘I have a whole school of tongues in this belly of mine, and not a tongue of them all speaks any other word but my name. And I had but a belly of any indifferency, I were simply the most active fellow in Europe: my womb, my womb, my womb undoes me’ (4.3.18–23). For a reading of Falstaff’s sexual ambiguity – which is reliant on the dual meaning of ‘womb’ as both uterus and stomach which was available at the end of the sixteenth century – see Colin MacCabe, Theoretical Essays: Film, Linguistics, Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 116–17. For a discussion of Mandeville and his influence in the period see Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 26–51; see also Mary Baine Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing 400–1600 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 122–62. ‘Poor heart, I guess her grief, and pity her. / To keep a maidenhead three years after marriage / Under wedlock and key! Insufferable, monstrous!’ (1.1.202–4). Parr, Three Renaissance Travel Plays, p. 220. For a selection of readings of travel dramas from this period see JeanPierre Maquerlot and Michèle Willems (eds), Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); see also Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (eds), The Tempest

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21

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23

24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31

and Its Travels (London: Reaktion, 2000); Claire Jowitt, Voyage Drama and Gender Politics 1589–1642: Real and Imagined Worlds (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). The ridiculous nature of Peregrine’s assumption of the Antipodean throne and his fight with the paste-board monsters whilst ‘King’ further undermine the institution of monarchy. Kenneth R. Andrews et al., Ships, Money and Politics: Seafaring and Naval Enterprise in the Reign of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 1; see also N. A. M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain 660–1649 (New York: Norton, 1999), pp. 347–63. For further details see Mark Netzloff, ‘Sir Francis Drake’s ghost: piracy, cultural memory, and spectral nationhood’, in Claire Jowitt (ed.), Pirates? The Politics of Plunder 1550–1650 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 137–50. Netzloff, ‘Sir Francis Drake’s ghost’, pp. 145–6. Parr, Three Renaissance Travel Plays, p. 230. See Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, pp. 30–2. Ibid., p. 30. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, trans. C. W. R. D. Moseley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983; 2005), ‘Introduction’, p. 32. See Nicholas Canny, ‘The permissive frontier: the problem of social control in English settlements in Ireland and Virginia 1550–1650’, in K. R. Andrews et al. (eds), The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America, 1480–1650 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1979), pp. 17–45, especially pp. 22–8. For an alternative view see David Ransome, ‘Wives for Virginia, 1621’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 48.2 (1991), pp. 3–18, especially 11–15. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, trans. Moseley, p. 175. On appropriate masculinity in this period see Anthony Fletcher, ‘Manhood, the male body, courtship and the household in early modern England’, History, 84 (1999), pp. 419–36.

Works cited Primary sources Brome, Richard, The Antipodes, ed. Ann Haaker. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966. ——, The Antipodes, in Three Renaissance Travel Plays, ed. Anthony Parr. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Hall, Joseph, Mundus Alter et Idem, ed. and trans. Joseph Millar Wands. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. Jonson, Ben, Bartholomew Fair, ed. Suzanne Gossett. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.

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Mandeville, John, Voyages and Travailes of Sir John Mandeville Knight. London: Thomas Snodham, 1625. ——, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, trans. C. W. R. D. Moseley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983; 2005. Shakespeare, William, 2 Henry IV, ed. David Scott Kastan. London: Thompson Learning, 2002. Turler, Jerome, The Traveiller, ed. D. E. Baughan. Gainesville, Florida: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1951. Secondary sources Andrews, K. R. (ed.), Ships, Money and Politics: Seafaring and Naval Enterprise in the Reign of Charles I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Bach, Rebecca Ann, Colonial Transformations: The Cultural Production of the New Atlantic World 1580–1640. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Butler, Martin, Theatre and Crisis 1632–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Campbell, Mary Baine, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing 400–1600. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Canny, Nicholas, ‘The permissive frontier: the problem of social control in English settlements in Ireland and Virginia 1550–1650’, pp. 17–45 in K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny and P. E. H. Hais (eds), The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America, 1480– 1650. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1979. Clark, Ira, Professional Playwrights: Massinger, Ford, Shirley and Brome. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1992. Donaldson, Ian, The World Turned Upside Down: Comedy from Jonson to Fielding. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Donegan, Jane B, Women and Men Midwives: Medicine, Morality and Misogyny in Early America. London: Greenwood Press, 1978. Fletcher, Anthony, ‘Manhood, the male body, courtship and the household in early modern England’, History, 84 (1999), pp. 419–36. Franklin, Wayne, Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers? The Diligent Writers of Early America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Gilbert, Ruth, Early Modern Hermaphrodites: Sex and Other Stories. London: Palgrave, 2002. Greenblatt, Stephen, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Gurr, Andrew, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Haaker, Ann, ‘The plague, the theater and the poet’, Renaissance Drama, 1 (1968), pp. 283–306. Hughes, Robert, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia 1787–1868. London: Pan, 1988.

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Hulme, Peter, and William. H. Sherman (eds), The Tempest and Its Travels. London: Reaktion, 2000. Jowitt, Claire, ‘Old worlds and new worlds: Renaissance voyages of discovery’. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Southampton, 1996. ——, Voyage Drama and Gender Politics 1589–1642: Real and Imagined Worlds. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. —— (ed.), Pirates? The Politics of Plunder 1550–1650. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. MacCabe, Colin, Theoretical Essays: Film, Linguistics, Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985. Maquerlot, Jean-Pierre, and Michèle Willems (eds), Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. McCabe, Richard, Joseph Hall: A Study in Satire and Meditation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Netzloff, Mark, ‘Sir Francis Drake’s ghost: piracy, cultural memory, and spectral nationhood’, pp. 137–50 in Claire Jowitt (ed.), Pirates? The Politics of Plunder 1550–1650. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. Ransome, David, ‘Wives for Virginia, 1621’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 48. 2 (1991), pp. 3–18. Rodger, N. A. M., The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain 660–1649. New York: Norton, 1999. Sharp, Jane, Jane Sharp’s The Midwives Book, ed. Elaine Hobby. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999. Steggle, Matthew, Richard Brome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004.

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Index

Alexander legends 37, 140, 158, 162 Alvares, Francisco 61, 161–2 Amazons 36, 39, 46n.49, 109, 110, 112, 114, 115, 119–20, 123n.40, 125n.58, 159, 164, 165, 166 Antipodes 9, 78, 139, 196, 197–204 Bacon, Francis 29, 40, 108, 109, 113, 119 Bevis of Hampton 40, 163, 174 Bible 3, 75–9, 81–2, 84–7, 88n.8, 88n.10, 96, 131–2, 136, 144, 150n.31 Brome, Richard The Antipodes 4, 5, 7, 10, 37–8, 174, 195–207, 208n.10 Caxton, William 21, 22, 95 Chapman, George, Ben Jonson and John Marston Eastward Ho! 178, 184, 195 Columbus, Christopher 1, 3, 29, 32, 52, 109, 125n.57 Crusades 58–9, 93, 131, 156–7 Ctesias 40, 158 Day, John, William Rowley and George Wilkins The Travels of the Three English Brothers 165–6

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Deluz, Christiane 6, 119, 125n.60, 160 De Worde, Wynkyn 30–1 see also Mandeville texts Doran, Greg 184–9, 192n.21 Drake, Francis 32, 174, 182, 204 Du Bartas, Guillaume de Saluste La Judit 8, 132–46, 146n.4 East, Thomas 31, 42n.14 see also Mandeville texts Egypt 19, 30, 36, 57, 77, 80, 84, 85, 136, 139 see also Sultan of Egypt Ethiopia(n)(s) 57, 59–62, 76–80, 83, 136, 139, 155, 162, 163 Euphrates (river) 78–80, 82, 84–5, 89n.26, 136, 150n.29 Fletcher, John The Island Princess 8, 165, 173, 179–89, 191n.15, 192n.21 Frobisher, Martin 1, 3, 37, 174, 205 Ganges (river) 79–80, 83 Greenblatt, Stephen 3, 29, 34, 41n.7, 45n.38, 52, 155, 177, 189n.1 Greene, Robert Alphonsus, King of Aragon 165 Pandosto 42n.18 Perimedes the blacke-smith 146n.5

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214 Hakluyt, Richard The Principal Navigations 9, 28, 32, 33–4, 53 Hall, Joseph The Discovery of a New World 54 Mundus Alter et Idem 35, 195, 196 Virgidemiarum 40n.1 Herodotus 40, 116–17, 124n.52 Heywood, Thomas If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody 204 Higgins, Iain Macleod 3, 4, 6, 29, 41n.10, 190n.9 India(s) (Old World) 58, 59, 63, 76, 77, 80, 155, 158, 161, 166, 186, 187 Indians (New World) 7, 111–12, 114, 159, 178, 191n.15, 195–6, 203–4 Indonesia 173, 179–80, 183, 185, 187, 188–9, 191n.15 Islam 32, 92–5, 97–102, 103n.8, 103n.10, 176, 181, 185, 187, 189, 191n.15 see also Muslim(s); Saracens Jerusalem 33, 75, 83, 85, 160, 176 Jonson, Ben Bartholomew Fair 195, 196 The New Inn 174, 195 The Staple of News 195 Volpone 195 Lyly, John Campaspe 140, 143 Mandeville texts medieval versions Ashmole (Latin) 18, 25 Bodley (English) 17, 20–1, 26 ‘Continental’ group 30, 31

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Index Cotton (English) 18, 20–1, 26, 30, 34, 37, 40, 123n.43 Defective (English) 19–22, 25–6, 30, 36, 37, 39, 41n.10, 81 Egerton (English) 3, 17, 20–1, 22, 26, 30, 37, 42n.11 Harley (Latin) 18, 21, 24–5 ‘Insular’ group 6, 15–17, 19–21, 23–4, 37 Leiden (Latin) 19, 24 lost original (c. 1356) 15, 30, 81 Metrical (English) 18, 21, 26 ‘Ogier’ versions 30 Royal (Latin) 17, 20–1, 24, 98 ‘Standard’ versions 30 Vulgate (Latin) 30, 31, 32, 101, 108, 116 printed early modern versions De Worde (1499) 30, 31, 42n.12, 98, 99, 101 East (1568 and 1582/3) 30, 31, 32–3, 42n.13, 93, 98 Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1589) 9, 31, 32, 39, 100–1, 102, 108, 116, 205 Purchas’ Purchas his Pilgrims (1625) 31, 38, 39, 100, 101–2, 108, 177 Pynson (1496) 19, 23, 30, 98, 99 Snodham (1625) 30, 31, 33, 38 Sorg (1481) 30, 31, 41n.9, 42n.12, 98 Stansby (1618) 30, 31, 32, 33, 38, 42n.18 see also under individual denominations maps 28–9, 41n.4–7, 76, 86, 88n.6, 116–17, 118, 207n.5

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Index Marlowe, Christopher The Jew of Malta 165 The Masacre at Paris 132, 147n.7 Tamburlaine 5, 8, 132–46, 148n.14, 164 marvels of the East 46n.49, 75, 109, 162 see also monstrous races Massinger, Philip The City Madam 195 The Renegado 177, 179 Milton, Giles Nathaniel’s Nutmeg 185 The Riddle and the Knight 92–4, 102, 185 monstrous races 110, 119, 124n.52, 158 see also marvels of the East; Pliny (the Elder) More, Thomas Utopia 34 Muhammad 93–102, 143, 156, 166, 176, 181 Muslim(s) 8, 32, 92–5, 97, 101, 102, 167n.8, 176, 181–2, 187, 188, 189 see also Islam; Saracens Nile (river) 62, 76–80, 83–5, 161, 163, 164 Odoric of Pordenone 17, 157 Otto of Freising 58, 157–8 Ottoman(s) 4, 6, 8, 99, 177 see also Turk(s) Paradise 75–9, 81–3, 85–7, 155, 163, 179, 191n.16 Persia(n)(s) 56, 58, 76, 77, 78, 136, 139, 157, 161, 165–6 Pliny (the Elder) 38, 44n.34, 113, 116, 117, 158 see also monstrous races Polo, Marco 4, 17, 22, 35, 41n.7, 52, 58, 89n.18, 109

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215 Prester John 8, 9, 39, 46n.49, 57–62, 65n.29, 78, 155–67 Prester John’s Letter 59, 158–9, 168n.19 Prutky, Remedius 62 Purchas, Samuel Purchas his Pilgrims 53, 174, 205 Ralegh, Walter 3, 34 The Discoverie of Guiana 37, 108–20 The History of the World 108, 115, 123n.40 romance (genre) 8, 10, 11n.8, 36–7, 39, 46n.49, 120, 146n.2, 155, 156–7, 161, 162–5 Saracens 58, 92–7, 100–2, 156–7, 162, 164, 165, 167n.8, 176, 182 see also Islam; Muslim(s) Shakespeare, William As You Like It 51 Hamlet 122n.31 Henry IV, Part 2 135–6, 200, 209n.16 Henry V 143 Macbeth 136 The Merchant of Venice 165 Othello 38, 158, 174–5, 177, 179, 184 The Tempest 38, 45n.37, 51, 174–5, 177, 178, 181, 182, 186, 190n.14, 195 Sherley brothers 165–6, 170n.51 Sir John Mandeville (The lost play of) 37, 39, 161 Snodham, Thomas 31 see also Mandeville texts Sowdone of Babylon, The 9, 156, 164, 165 Spenser, Edmund The Faerie Queene 120, 163, 182

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Stansby, William 31, 42n.18, 42n.19, 43n.21, 43n.22 see also Mandeville texts Sultan of Egypt 77, 94, 97, 101, 131, 132, 146 see also Egypt Tigris (river) 58, 78–80, 84, 85, 89n.26 Tom a Lincoln (The play of) 46n.49, 155–6, 163, 164 Tom a Lincolne, The Most Pleasant History of (prose romance) 163–4

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Index travel liars 8, 40n.1, 51–2, 53, 57, 63, 89n.18, 173–4, 175–6 Turk(s) 32, 56, 100, 133, 161, 165, 176, 177 see also Ottoman(s) tympany (disease) 200–2, 209n.16 Tzanaki, Rosemary 75, 85, 93, 98, 160–1 Warner, William Albion’s England 35–6, 39, 109, 161 William of Tripoli 94–5

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