Case VI: Shakespeare’s Global Imagination
This case surveys a panoply of material from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, maps, emblems, dictionaries, and costume books to explore the cultural commonplaces that animate Shakespeare’s portrait of the ‘Moor of Venice.’ Set side-by-side with the play, these materials invite us to consider how Shakespeare’s tragedy both generates and challenges commonplaces about cultural ‘others.’ Characterized as ‘a free and wheeling stranger, of here and everywhere’ (1.1.135–36), Othello invites us to linger on questions of belonging and estrangement as we ask what it might have meant to be of a place, and also of every place, in Shakespeare’s early modern world.
Peter Heylyn (1600-1662). Cosmographie in four Books, Containing the Chorography & History of the whole World. London: P. Chetwind, 1670.
First published in 1657, Heylyn’s Cosmographie expanded his earlier Microcosmos, or a little Description of the Great World (1621) from a small octavo of 418 pages to a great folio of well over one thousand pages. Heylyn aimed to describe all details of the known world, from its divine creation, to its geography, as well as its history, nations and tribes, peoples, customs, habits, and diversity of religious beliefs. The title page features allegorical representations of the four continents, each represented in distinctive ethnic attire. Below are four male figures in military dress, accompanied by regionally specific weapons and animals.
Richard Knolles (1550?-1610). The Generall Historie of the Turkes. London: Printed by A. Islip, 1638.
Knolles’ Historie of the Turkes was the first English chronicle devoted to detailing the political, military, and cultural dimensions of the Ottoman Empire. First printed in 1603, the year of King James I’s ascension to the English throne, the work conveys England’s divided fascination with and fear of the Turks. ‘Of all others now upon the earth,’ Knolles writes, the Turkish Empire is ‘far the greatest.’ A massive twelve hundred folio pages in length, the work continued to expand over subsequent editions throughout the seventeenth century. Together with popular dramas, which staged Europe’s encounters with Turks in the Mediterranean, including Shakespeare’s Othello, Knolles’ Historie of the Turkes powerfully shaped how England imagined its encounters with the Ottoman East.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616). Othello, The Moor of Venice. London: Printed for R. Wellington, 1705.
This eighteenth-century quarto of Shakespeare’s Othello provides a window onto the performance history of the play. The circled passage, apparently marked for deletion in performance, focuses on a moment when Othello narrates his ‘Travels history.’ Recent scholarship has focused on the importance of this particular passage to our understanding of Othello as a stranger ‘of here and everywhere,’ a Moor whose global encounters risk rendering him suspect to some in Venice, but all the more desirable to his beloved, Desdemona. The text provides us with a striking reminder of one reason why Shakespeare’s plays continue to change over time as acting companies emphasize, or cut, various moments from the play, changing its emphasis and meaning along the way.
John Speed (1552?-1629). Map of Africa from A Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World. London: Printed by M. and S. Simmons, 1662.
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maps conveyed a richness of both geographic and ethnographic information. Then as now, maps and the information they convey are not neutral, nor have they always been accurate. Initially published in 1627, John Speed’s Prospect included large maps of each of the continents. These maps featured detailed geographic information, as well as providing city views along the horizontal margins and pictures of human figures from different regions running along the vertical axes. Notice the ways in which the figures on the borders of this map are similar to the images in costume books, like Vecellio’s (in this case). Cartographers and publishers of costume books pirated one another’s images, reminding us of the profitability of representing cultural ‘Others’ for readerly consumption in the Renaissance.
Cesare Vecellio (ca. 1530-ca. 1621). Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo. Venice: Appresso I Sessa, 1598.
The Clothing, Ancient and Modern, of the whole World was a popular Italian costume book in which the rich diversity of fashion from around the world was displayed and celebrated. This costume book conveys ethnological information about the clothing and habits of people around the globe. The second edition, featured here, is in both Italian and Latin, suggesting a vernacular readership. The page on display illustrates the ‘Moro di conditione’ or the ‘Maurus nobilis’ (Noble Moor). On another page, the Moor of Barbary appears. This multiplicity underscores that ‘Moor’ was not a single kind of subject in the Renaissance, but a highly indeterminate category. Like Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moors in costume books could be at once noble as well as low, of Africa and ‘of Venice’ too.
Hendrik Doncker (1626-1699). De zee-atlas ofte Water-Waereld. Amsterdam: H. Doncker, 1666.
Like the plot of Othello, which traverses land and sea, seventeenth-century atlases also mapped both earth and water. Doncker’s Sea-atlas, or Water-World offered readers thirty-two charts of the sea. This was a first of its kind. Prior to it, navigational charts were rarely published, and had never before been compiled into a single atlas in Europe. Unlike the now-familiar Mercator projection—also an invention of the Renaissance—this double-hemisphere map has the effect of provincializing Europe, making Africa appear central on the map, while Europe appears dwarfed in comparison. On this world map, the seas appear free of the Barbary pirates, Venetian navies, Turkish fleets, and storms that animated both the real and imagined geographies of Shakespeare’s water-worlds.