Fynes Moryson Research Articles

Epitomes of Dacia: Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania in Early Modern English Travelogues

This essay examines the kaleidoscopic and abridged perspectives on three early modern principalities (Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania), whose lands are now part of modern-day Romania. I examine travelogues and geography texts describing these Eastern European territories written by Marco Polo (1579), Abraham Ortelius (1601; 1608), Nicolas de Nicolay (1585), Johannes Boemus (1611), Pierre d’Avity (1615), Francisco Guicciardini (1595), George Abbot (1599), Uberto Foglietta (1600), William Biddulph (1609), Richard Hakluyt (1599-1600), Fynes Moryson (1617), and Sir Henry Blount (1636), published in England in the period 1579-1636. The essay also offers brief incursions into the representations of these geographic spaces in a number of Shakespearean plays, such as The Merchant of Venice and Othello, as well as in Pericles, Prince of Tyre by Shakespeare and Wilkins. I argue that these Eastern European locations configure an erratic spatiality that conflates ancient place names with early modern ones, as they reconstruct a space-time continuum that is neither real nor totally imaginary. These territories represent real-and-fictional locations, shaping an ever-changing world of spatial networks reconstructed out of fragments of cultural geographic and ethnographic data. The travel and geographic narratives are marked by a particular kind of literariness, suggesting dissension, confusion, and political uncertainty to the early modern English imagination.

The Issues of Cultural Hierarchies in Early Modern Ethnography Based on the Accounts by Petrus Petrejus, Paul Rycaut, Fynes Moryson, and John Davies

This paper is focused on the issues of cultural hierarchies in early modern European imperial discourses in all-European discourse about Muscovy and Ottoman Empire and English discourse about Ireland, which have not been previously compared, in the narratives by Petrus Petreus, Paul Rycaut, Fynes Moryson and John Davies. The authors of the article have analyzed mechanisms of building the cultural hierarchies and compares different traditions of ethnographical descriptions with each other. The authors under consideration not only create cultural hierarchies, but also instrumentalize the image of the Other to some extent. They focus on government, laws, religion and manners. The choice of these aspects aims to highlight problems important not for (or not only for) the Other, but for authors` societies themselves. The fact that most accounts describe relative barbarians rather than absolute also can be a consequence of such instrumentalization, because comparison between “us” and the Other becomes important.

The Image of The Other In Early Modern Imperial Discourses: Venetian Discourse About Istria and English Discourse About Ireland

This paper is focused on the image of the Other in early modern European imperial discourses as exemplified by Venetian discourse about Istria and English discourse about Ireland, which have not been previously compared, in the narratives by Pietro Coppo, Fynes Moryson, John Davies and Barnabe Rich. The authors of the article have analyzed mechanisms of construction of the Image of the Other and political or rhetorical context of its instrumentalization. The examination of English imperial discourses about Ireland and Venetian discourse has demonstrated instrumentalist nature of early modern ethnographic discourses of the Other. Imperial discourse of the Other justified sovereignty of the metropole over the periphery and also communicated knowledge about the Other in order to suggest possible solutions to the problems of governance.

Spinella’s Name in John Ford’s The Lady’s Trial

Set in Genoa, John Ford’s The Lady’s Trial (1637–38, publ. 1639) features a character named Spinella, the wife of the main character Auria, Ford’s version of the glorious Genoese surname Doria—probably influenced by the spellings ‘Auria’ and ‘D’Auria’ used in Richard Knolles’s The general historie of the Turkes (1603) and in Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary (1617) respectively. Lisa Hopkins, the latest editor of the play, rightly argues that Spinella’s name ‘Probably derives from spinel, a precious stone which is red in colour and resembles a ruby. Ford was interested in jewels’.1 Yet, I would suggest that Spinella’s name may have also been reminiscent of another prestigious Genoese surname, that is Spinola. This surname was well known in early modern London especially through the activities of Benedetto (Englished as Benedict) Spinola. Born to one of Genoa’s most influential and affluent families, he lived the best part of his life in London, where he ‘was in the very top rank of merchants’ as an exporter of woollen cloths and importer of wines, ‘was granted full denization in 1552’ and even served the English government as an agent and financier.2 R. B.’s epitaph on Spinola’s death extols him as a virtuous man who ‘lived here / A noble Merchaunt euery way, / no straunger was his peere’, and whose ‘pursse was shut from none’.3 Moreover, the surname Spinola was often associated in early modern Genoa with the surname Doria by way of marriage, as it was commonplace for families of means to consolidate their wealth through intermarriage.

‘Lying by authority’: travel dissimulations in Fynes Moryson's Itinerary

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe have long been recognized as an ‘Age of Dissimulation’; in the period, their compatriots often depicted English travellers to the Continent as the ultimate liars and dissemblers. This article suggests that Fynes Moryson's An Itinerary of a Journey (1617) is one important example of how travel writers engaged with the charge of dissimulation made against them by opponents to European travel, beginning in the 1570s with Roger Ascham's The Scholemaster (1571). With particular focus on the role of Catholic Italy in the travel debate, the article shows how An Itinerary negotiates what was perceived as a hostile and infectious Catholic Italian reality to develop its own approach to travel observation at a moment of generic and epistemic fluidity. Via a number of textual tricks, Itinerary turns the threat of the Inquisition into a strategic advantage; ultimately, the travel report represents strategies of ‘honest dissimulation’ as the basis of the traveller's claim to truthful observation.

Traveller or Tourist? The Sensible Observations of Roland Barthes and George Sandys<sup>1</sup>

Is it better to be a tourist or a traveller? Tourists are usually denigrated as vulgar and ignorant while travellers are thought to be more sensitive and observant and to be performing more useful cultural work. However, the iconoclastic writings of Roland Barthes might persuade readers to rethink these commonly-held assumptions. Barthes’ insights into the nature of travel and tourism provide us with a way of exploring the history of travel writing and the relationship between ideas of travelling and tourism. George Sandys’ Relation of a Journey begun An; Dom: 1610 (1615) can be read as a work that thinks about and values tourism, setting its author apart from his contemporary travel writers Thomas Coryat, William Lithgow and Fynes Moryson. While they concentrate on their own ability to understand and appropriate the value of other cultures for their readers, Sandys writes for a reader who might wish to follow in his footsteps and enjoy the experience of encountering other places. A strong case can be made that Sandys’ book is the ancestor of the late nineteenth-century guides that did so much to encourage European tourism, Baedeker and Cook.

Der Bestrafte Brudermord (The Punished Fratricide)

Reviewed by: Der Bestrafte Brudermord (The Punished Fratricide) Michael J. Hirrel Der Bestrafte Brudermord (The Punished Fratricide) Presented by Mary Baldwin College at the Blackfriars Playhouse, Staunton, Virginia. January 18–19, 2110. Directed by Christine Schmidle, with assistance from Paul Menzer, Jemma Levy, Cassie Ash, and Hilde Schmidle. Costumes by Theresa Coleman and Amanda Devlin. Fights by Colleen Kelly. With Thadd McQuade (Hamlet), Jack Morgan (King Erico), Linden Kueck (Queen Sigrie), Johnny Adkins (Corambus and Phantasmo), Casey Caldwell (2nd Sentry and 2nd Ruffian), Emily Gibson (Ophelia), Zach Brown (1st Sentry, Leonhardus and player king), Maxim Overton (Horatio), Paul Rycik (Francisco and 1st Ruffian), Brett Gann (Jens), and James Loehlin (Ghost). What if you gave a play in a language that almost no one in your prospective audience understood? Would they come? Would they stay? And, most importantly, would they pay? Those questions actually mattered to English actors who traveled to Germany and nearby parts of the Continent from roughly 1585 to 1630. In the first two decades, at least, they performed their plays in English, a language which few Germans knew. Seeking to understand this phenomenon, Christine Schmidle calculated that the actors could succeed if their performances emphasized action rather than words. No better play exists to test her hypothesis than that of the very verbal, and Melancholy, Dane. English actors took that [End Page 578] play, or rather a version of it, to Germany probably early in the 1600s. Their version was translated into German sometime before 1710 as Der Bestrafte Brudermord, The Punished Fratricide. Schmidle's idea was to present that version of the play in its own German. Would an American audience, few of whom knew German, come to the performance, respond to it, and enjoy it? Brudermord certainly seems to reflect an effort by its authors to remake Shakespeare's play along the lines envisioned by Schmidle. It calls to mind a performance by English players seen by Fynes Moryson on his visit to the Frankfurt trade fair in 1592. The performance consisted of "peeces and patches of English playes." To Moryson it was cause for "great wearysomenes." Yet, although the players were "speaking English, which they vnderstoode not," the Germans "flocked wonderfully to see theire gesture and Action." Brudermord is likewise patched together from Shakespeare's own play. It lacks virtually all that play's cerebral elements. Every soliloquy, for example, save a truncated "How all occasions," is gone. Instead, elements of physical comedy alien to the play we know are added. The ghost boxes a sentry on the ears. A delusional and love-stricken Ophelia pursues a court clown whom she believes to be Hamlet. Hamlet tricks two ruffians assigned to kill him into shooting one another. Schmidle produced and directed this mélange as a sequel to her M.Litt degree in the graduate Shakespeare and Renaissance drama performance studies program at Mary Baldwin College. She recruited an eclectic cast composed of other students, alumni, and instructors in the MBC program, plus an actor or two from the nearby American Shakespeare Center. The performers first needed to learn or reacquaint themselves with enough German to pronounce and make sense of their lines. And not just any German either: Brudermord's seventeenth-century language is almost as different from German today as Shakespeare's language is from ours. Acquisition of those language skills took up much of the four months in which the group rehearsed. The actors made that effort for just two public performances. The venue was the American Shakespeare Center's grand replica of the original Blackfriars Playhouse, and in ASC tradition the play hummed along with no sets, few props, and minimal costuming. The performance began with Brudermord's prologue, which features the figures of Night and her Furies. In text the prologue seems rather odd to readers familiar with contemporary English drama. Its figures and imagery are extravagant. Its speeches seem to describe a play other than the one that follows. A reader imagines that in performance the prologue [End Page 579] would best be omitted. Yet Schmidle's production made the prologue seem relevant. Night and her Furies were made up and costumed fantastically. They...

Teaching & Learning Guide for: ‘Nowhere is a Place’: Travel Writing in Sixteenth‐Century England

Teaching & Learning Guide for: ‘Nowhere is a Place’: Travel Writing in Sixteenth‐Century England

Introduction: What Fynes Moryson knew

Introduction: What Fynes Moryson knew

“Nowhere is a Place”: Travel Writing in Sixteenth‐Century England*

AbstractTravel is an experience of cultural encounters; the account that witnesses and represents that experience is not only a literary text but also a cultural document, involving issues of power, knowledge, and identity. In sixteenth‐century England the popularity of travel accounts, which documented colonial aspirations, quixotic voyages, and mercantile ventures, manifests that the book as an integral part of the voyage has the power to inform and instruct. Narratives by authors such as Sir Walter Ralegh, Robert Dallington, Fynes Moryson, and Thomas Dallam, depended on the pun between travel ( journeying) and travail (toil, pain), presenting the adventures and adversities of travelers together with information on geographical areas with their human societies and cultures, linked to questions of nationality, race, and gender. The written record of the great number of early travels, represented in Richard Hakluyt's and later in Samuel Purchas's collections, attests to the rise of England's colonial and commercial power, as well as to the significance of travel writing in English literary history. Despite the contemporary debate over the purpose of going abroad and representing foreign countries, travel, like translation – a word semantically related to it – functioned as a cross‐cultural process challenging the boundaries of both geographical and ideological insularity.

Conquest and English Legal Identity in Renaissance Ireland

Like the Spanish administrators of the American territories, English administrators of Ireland attempted to impose their own native legal system on the Irish inhabitants. Nonetheless, important differences existed between the two kingdoms' legal approaches to their respective colonial contexts. Because Spanish jurisprudence was allied with universalist Catholic doctrine and was officially based on Justinian's Corpus Iuris Civilis (the ancient Roman legal code which had close affinities to natural law discourse), Spanish administrators expected New World inhabitants to accept what they considered to be the values that were inherent in Spanish law.1 In contrast English common law had its roots not in natural law but in the peculiar customs of the English people. Thus, while the Spanish were able to claim that they were replacing unnatural Indian customs with a legal system rooted in universal natural law, the English were attempting to reform what they considered to be the unnatural practices of the Irish by imposing a legal system defined by its insularity and its peculiar affinity with English institutions.2 In this essay I show that Renaissance ethnographies on Ireland by such English administrators of Ireland as Edmund Spenser, Sir John Davies, and Fynes Moryson are fractured by a conflict between a commitment to natural-law theory, which had its origin in continental writings, and a corresponding commitment to the native English tradition of common law. I examine how works by Spenser, Davies, and Moryson dealt with this conflict within their collective project of articulating a legal justification and strategy for the pacification of Ireland.Despite reports throughout Europe of Spanish-perpetrated cruelty throughout the Americas, the idea that war or conquest could be just or even charitable when prosecuted against oppression originated within the Catholic tradition of scholastic just-war theory.3 Many of the sixteenth-century writers who were writing about war and conquest in legal or ethical terms were Spanish or continental theologians who had attempted to evaluate Spanish imperial policy in the New World. On the one side were such figures as the Scottish theologian John Major and Spanish historian Juan Gines de Sepulveda, both of whom had justified Spanish conquest and treatment of the Indians using arguments based on the foundation of natural law.4 On the other side were those who had, on similar terms, voiced criticisms of the which Spanish forces were inflicting on the Indians. Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolome de las Casas were certainly the most notable Spanish writers who favored more ethical treatment of New World inhabitants.5 Other prominent defenders of Indian rights were Domingo de Soto and Melchor Cano.6 Whether directly or through intermediaries, the ideas of many of these writers permeated the ideological fabric of England.Sir Fulke Greville's famous statement about Sir Philip Sidney's goal of fostering alliances with New World inhabitants in order to overthrow the Spanish authorities included an awareness of the inhuman cruelties of the Spanish forces, an awareness that probably originated in the English translation of Las Casas 's Brevissima relation de la destrucyion de las Indias (1552).7 Beyond this significant text, however, there were others. One important book that captured the ideas of the early Spanish debates on the ethics and justice of the New World conquests was Antonio de Guevara's Relax de principes (1529), a work twice translated into English during the sixteenth century.8 The third book of the Relax de principes, which treats the princely virtues of justice, peace, and magnificence, contains several sections that together constitute a polemic against violent imperialism and unjust conquest. In one notable episode Guevara employs the example of ancient Roman imperialism to produce a veiled critique of the injustices which Spain had committed against New World polities. …

Old Scratch.

Old Scratch.

A Routledge literary sourcebook on William Shakespeare's Othello

Series Editor's Preface Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Introduction 1. Contexts Contextual Overview Chronology Contemporary Documents: Giraldi Cinthio, Gli Hecatommithi (1566) Leo Africanus (John Leo) The History and Description of Africa, trans. John Pory (1600) Fynes Moryson An Itinery Containing His Ten Yeeres Travell (1617) Thomas Coryat Coryat's Crudities (1611) Christopher Marlowe The Jew of Malta (c. 1590) Robert Greene Selimus, Emporer of the Turks (1594) William Shakespeare Titus Andronicus (c.1594) 2. Interpretations Critical History Early Reception: Thomas Rymer, from A Short View of Tragedy (1693) Samuel Johnson, from The Plays of Shakespeare (1765) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from 'Notes on the Tragedies' (published 1836-9) from Table Talk (1835) Edward Dowden, from Shakespeare: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875) A. C. Bradley, from Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (1904) Twentieth-Century Criticism: G. Wilson Knight The Othello Music E. E. Stoll 'Iago' (1940) William Empson Honest in Othello (1951) F. R. Leavis, from Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero (1952) Marvin Rosenberg from The Masks of Othello (1961) G. K. Hunter, Othello and Colour Prejudice (1967) Terry Eagleton Nothing (1986) Karen Newman 'And wash the Ethiop white': femininity and the monstrous in Othello (1987) David McPherson Othello and the Myth of Venice (1990) Lisa Jardine 'Why should he call her a whore?': Defamation and Desdemona's case (1990) Andrew Hadfield The 'gross clasps of a lascivious Moor': The Domestic and Exotic Contexts of Othello (1998) The Work in Performance: Virginia Mason Vaughan Othello on the English Stage 1604-1754 Sir Richard Steele The Tatler, no. 167 (2 May 1710) William Hazlitt 'Mr Macready's Othello' (13 October 1816) Virginina Mason Vaughan 'Paul Robeson's Othello' (1930, 1943) Patricia Tatspaugh 'Orson Welles Othello' (1952) Stanley Wells 'Trevor Nunn's Othello' (1989) 3. Key Passages Introduction Key Passages: Act 1, scene 1, lines 81-80, Act 1, scene 3, lines 1-294, Act 2, scene 3, lines 255-357, Act 3, scene 3, lines 90-281, Act 3, scene 3, lines 333-482, Act 4, scene 1, lines 60-142, Act 4, scene 2, lines 30-92, Act 5, scene 2, lines 257-369 Further Reading Editions and Text Collections of Essays Background Reading Critical Interpretations Stage History Index

Gender Stereotyping in Early Modern Travel Writing on Holland

This article challenges the use of British seventeenth-century travel writing on Holland as historical evidence, especially with regard to passages concerning Dutch women's independence. Two British travelers' accounts illustrate the complexities of employing travel literature to fill out the historical record: Fynes Moryson's Itinerary and Owen Felltham's Brief Character. Stuart royalist ideology and patriarchalist gender assumptions inform both texts. In addition, Moryson's Itinerary consists of intertextual pastiche; Felltham's Brief Character invokes the conventions of the Theophrastan character. Failing to understand travel accounts' status as discursive medium leads to acquiescing na�vely to their strategies of mimetic literary representation.

Shakespeare's England: life in Elizabethan & Jacobean times

This is an intriguing and fascinating collection of excerpts from some of the best, wittiest and most unusual sixteenth and seventeenth century writing. Shakespeare's England brings to life the variety, the energy and the harsh reality of England at this time. Providing a fascinating picture of the age, it includes extracts from a wide range of writing, taken from books, plays, poems, letters, diaries and pamphlets by and about Shakespeare's contemporaries. These include William Harrison and Fynes Moryson (providing descriptions of England), Nicholas Breton (on country life), Isabella Whitney and Thomas Dekker (on London life), Nashe (on struggling women writers), Stubbes (with a Puritan view of Elizabethan enjoyments), Harsnet and Burton (on witches and spirits), John Donne (meditations on prayer and death), King James I (on tobacco) and Shakespeare himself.

(Un)folding the Map of Early Modern Ireland: Spenser, Moryson, Bartlett, and Ortelius

This paper departs from the assumption that Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland and other contemporary works related to the conquest and colonization or to Ireland, including Fynes Moryson's Itinerary and Richard Bartlett's bird's-eye views, map the secrets of the Irish land and its peoples so as to facilitate and stimulate their conquest. Moryson's and Spenser's texts, like Bartlett's views and the frontispiece of Ortelius's Theatrum, can be read as cartographic narratives to be folded and unfolded in a process of discovery and possession designed to implicate readers and viewers. They can thus be classed, using Tom Conley's formulation, as "cartographic writings" that exploit the geographical overtones of their titles, and rely on a particular way of seeing, the aim of which is to own, subject, and control. However different, these written and visual representations foreground the prominence of the eye/I in the processes of conquest and domination. Travel narrative, dialogue, and map, that is, become interchangeable weapons in a destructive visual and discursive unveiling of cultural and geographical "secrets."

The Influence of Edmund Spenser's View on Fynes Moryson's Itinerary

The Influence of Edmund Spenser's View on Fynes Moryson's Itinerary

Carole, Rondeau & Branle in Ireland 1300-1800: Part II Social and Theatrical Residues 1550-1800

In the first part of this article,1 evidences of the use of carole, rondeau and various kinds of branle in some sections of society in Ireland in the 13th, 14th and early 15th centuries were presented. This second part deals with residues and adaptations of some of these, long after the political-cum-cultural influences which brought them to Ireland had become diluted and virtually disappeared. As with other aspects of Irish history, there is a paucity of evidence about dance of any kind in the 15th and early 16th centuries. From the later 16th century on, there are descriptions of various kinds of dancing, mostly in English and none technically explicit; these include ritual rings and processionals in spring and at midsummer, recreational dancing round domestic fires, sword dances and male jigs. As in contemporary England (though not in Scotland) there is little hint of carole; the social circumstances in which that communal, tightly integrated text-plus-tune-pluschoreographic structure could flourish were gone. There was certainly some kind of dance repertory considered in England to be Irish, even if it were, in fact, from the English Pale, with little or no native Irish character. According to Fynes Moryson, in 1602 Queen Elizabeth I was much pleased to watch Country Dances in her privy chamber and 'Irish tunes are at this time much liked'.2 Conversely, there must also have been a repertory of Irish branles which were performable to other than Irish music. In Nicholas Vallet's Secretum Musarum, a collection of current music arranged for lute published in Amsterdam in 161516, the music titled 'Brande Yrlandt' ('Branle d'Irlande' in the later French edition) is an English tune, titled 'Lord Zouches Maske' in Thomas Morley's First booke of Consort lessons (1599) and simply 'Chanson Engelsae' in another Netherlandish lute book.3 There is slightly more explicit evidence from the 17th century. A few tunes with Irish titles, some with dance figures and some in tune-only supplements, were included in several editions of Playford's Dancing Master. 'The Irish Lady or Aniseed-water

John Evelyn and the Art of Travel

JOHN EVELYN'S Bildungsreise marks a new stage in the history of English travel abroad, and especially in the history of English travel to Italy. The Middle Ages saw Englishmen in Italy in the role of cleric or pilgrim, soldier or diplomat or student. The Reformation suppressed most of the earlier interests, leaving as the principal role that of student. The student traveler of the Renaissance was devoted not alone to law or medicine or the new learning. Beginning with William Thomas, the author of the first English book on Italy (I549), English students paid special devotion to the art of political inquiry; that is, to such study of foreign nations, their peoples and their polities, as would profit a statesman. Like Roger Ascham in Germany, in Italy Thomas Hoby, Philip Sidney, Fynes Moryson, and, most of all, Henry Wotton worked seriously at their study of statesmanship. Ascham's Report on Germany, Moryson's elaborate Itinerary (too ample to be published in full), and Henry Wotton's State of Christendom illustrate this political education. Evelyn's The State of France (i652) represents his gesture of compliance with this tradition; but it was his only one. He affected scorn in the moment of compliance. I was least of all inquisitive, he wrote in the dedication of the book, how others were governed, finding it so difficult a province to regulate my self.' This sounds like a boutade, as does a gibe at another supposed essential of travel, the learning of languages. Mere philologicall peregrinations, he wrote, yielded onely a parrot-virtue . . . one of the shels of travel.2 If we were to count full value for these remarks, we might be further led astray by Evelyn's advice in i658 to the Earl of Northumberland, who was sending his son abroad. Evelyn warned against sending Lord Percy in the company of a mere pedant, who could

Malvolio's Cross-Gartered Yellow Stockings

Previous articleNext article FreeMalvolio's Cross-Gartered Yellow StockingsM. Channing LinthicumM. Channing Linthicum Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 25, Number 1Aug., 1927 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/387685 Views: 159Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Anita BUTLER Pink Stockings, Yellow Stockings: the Use of Pink-Yellow in Marston and Shakespeare, E-rea , no.12.212.2 (Jun 2015).https://doi.org/10.4000/erea.4435