Thomas Coryat Research Articles

Tediousness in Coryats Crudities (1611): early modern travel writing, rhetoric, and notions of canonicity

ABSTRACT Despite its increasing prominence in university syllabi and anthologies, travel writing continues to be excluded from the canon of early modern literature. Its exclusion can be attributed to the view, articulated explicitly and implicitly, that its formal and stylistic conventions render it insufficiently ‘literary’. Such assessments reveal a tendency to read early modern travel accounts using aesthetic criteria that are anachronistic, disconnected from the discursive contexts in which these accounts were originally written and read. This article examines one of the genre’s most distinctive features, one which has shaped its relationship to notions of literary value and canonicity: its preoccupation with particulars, something early modern and modern readers alike characterise as ‘tedious’. Focusing on Thomas Coryate’s eponymous Coryats Crudities (1611), it situates the particularity of early modern travel writing within the reconstructed contexts of classical rhetoric, early modern poetics, and travel advice, placing special emphasis on the rhetorical quality of enargeia, or vividness. In addition to offering a fresh assessment of the Crudities and modelling a new approach to the study of travel writing more generally, the article reflects on how we can expand our sense of what early modern literature might be said to comprise.

William Shakespeare. Coryat’s Crudities (2 vols)

The first Russian translation of Thomas Coryat’s travel over Europe cuts a fantastic figure on the London literary scene at the beginning of the 17th c. The book opens with over one hundred pages occupied by the panegyrics to the traveller from the pen of the customers at the Mermaid tavern, Ben Jonson and John Donne most illustrious among them. The prevalent carnivalesque style adds a mysterious flavour to the book, enhanced in the Russian version where Caryot is presumed to be a literary mask of Shakespeare (his name stands on the titlepage as one of the authors) while Shakespeare, in accordance with one of the anti-Stratfordian heresies, is advanced as the mask of the earl of Rutland. The exaggerated academic style of the Russian edition features as another carnivalesque attribute in this enigmatic case. Coryat’s Crudities, apart from the anti-Stratfordian guess, is an important contribution to Shakespeare studies in Russia vividly presenting Elizabethan wit as a fact of literary everyday life.

Sirenaicks, Guilds and a New Coryate Manuscript

Abstract While Thomas Coryate (1577–1617) is most often remembered as an eccentric and pioneering travel writer, his other claim to fame is his participation in a group called ‘right Worshipful Fraternitie of Sireniacal Gentlemen’. Often conflated with the ‘Mermaid Club’, this group met monthly at the Mermaid Tavern to eat, drink and trade jesting verses. Coryate’s role in the group was often that of the comic butt, a position that had classical antecedents in the buffoonish roles of the parasite at Greek symposia and the scurra at Roman convivia. However, a previously overlooked manuscript suggests that Coryate had a closer relationship to at least one of the other Sireniacal Gentlemen, John Hoskins, than simply being his club’s object of ridicule. This new evidence prompts a re-examination of the primary sources related to the ‘Sirenaicks’ (as Coryate called them) as well as the scholarship scrutinizing that group. This essay argues that the Sirenaicks organised themselves as a mock-guild and it begins to develop an understanding of how that social structure affected the group’s mode of literary production.

Thomas Coryate versus John Taylor: the emergence of the early modern celebrity

By pursuing traditional and emergent forms of patronage and by establishing himself as a travel writer in Jacobean London, Thomas Coryate created a public persona that allowed him to promote himself to a broad audience but also made himself vulnerable to appropriation and parody. John Taylor, the Water Poet, took advantage of Coryate’s project and used the traveller as the subject of a series of pamphlets and poems. Plagued by Taylor’s industriousness, Coryate failed to create a reliable public persona but, at the same time, emerged as an early example of a media celebrity.

Performing Identity

The article focuses on three early-seventeenth-century (English and Scottish) leisure travelers’ accounts of the (alleged) ruins of Homeric Troy, namely those penned by Thomas Coryat, William Lithgow, and George Sandys. It argues that their rumination on the specific remains both shaped and reflected their manifold, fractured, and precarious identities while it also highlighted the complex dialogue taking place in these texts between a ruinous past and a fragmented and malleable present. The essay also examines the three travelers’ broken poetics, interspersed in the aforementioned accounts, and shows that they constitute highly self-aggrandizing narratives through which their authors perform their fragile identities.

The Local and Global East India Company

The Local and Global East India Company Jyotsna Singh (bio) I begin with some evocations of personal, intellectual, and cultural "journeys" that have involved early modern Anglo-Indian encounters as they are represented in the travel narratives of Thomas Roe, Edward Terry, and Thomas Coryate—studies of which began in the mid to late 1980s. As a student of Renaissance studies, which at the time was a largely Eurocentric cultural formation, I was surprised and heartened to "travel" beyond the confines of the European world and look afresh at India through the eyewitness accounts of these early travelers, all of whom were directly or indirectly affiliated with the East India Company. Thomas Coryate (Traveller for the English Wits [1616], Mr. Thomas Coriat to his Friends in England Sendeth Greeting [1618]) was not a functionary, but a supplicant and "hanger on" of the East India Company during its first years in India. Writing from Agra, the dominion of the Great Mughal Jahangir, Coryate left behind an idiosyncratic personal memoir and cultural text that invoked both the local and global with a refreshing chutzpah. Thomas Roe was King James' ambassador in the Court of the Great Mughal and also a representative of the Company interests, as reflected in his journals and letter, later published as The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India 1615–1619. And Edward Terry also traveled at the behest of the Company as an accompanying chaplain to Ambassador Roe, and left us his rich account of his stay, published later as A Voyage to East India (1655). The imperatives of promoting English trade in Mughal India are conjoined with these travelers' complex and mixed reactions to the culture and society of India, often framed by the Christian view that their hosts were unbelievers and infidels. Since the 1980s, the postcolonial "turn" in English studies has influenced [End Page 121] early modern studies, opening up sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travel archives such as those above, while re-evaluating racial, sexual, ethnic, and religious inflections within early modern literary works. A case in point: the seemingly innocuous "Indian boy" in A Midsummer Night's Dream now globalizes the play, taking it to Indian shores. Directors and critics today offer distinctly global productions of the play which take into account the early modern English engagements with East India. And the 2016 production of the play at the Globe Theatre locates the action in a culturally Indian world! Thus we are at a promising moment in early modern studies, with the convergence of the literary, historical, and ethnographic in reappraisals of cross-cultural interactions—and what constitutes the boundaries of Renaissance England. These shifts in turn have complicated and pluralized the empirical—mostly economic and political—histories of the East India Company, often doing so by recovering new stories about the actors who were brought to the shores of various East India locations as well as the native interlocutors such as translators, traders, and in few cases wives, who all functioned and often interacted under the auspices of the Company.1 The local, the quotidian, the commonplace have begun to constitute a new prism through which the East India Company's global workings are coming to light in novel ways. This collection of essays expands the parameters of this research by, for instance, including the the VOC (Dutch East India Company) and by examining the East India Company's failed forays in Japan. In all instances, while we learn of the knowledge-production imperatives accompanying the commercial and political endeavors of the trading entity, we can also view the cultural and affective mediations of individual actors in the activities of the company. Thus this special issue of JEMCS, I believe, gestures toward a historiographical shift, pushing beyond the ubiquitous trope of the cross-cultural, face-to-face encounters between Europeans and the East Indian actors; the fixity of this trope falls apart along shifting chronologies that include a range of interactions, and this instability is evident in a theatricalized history of Anglo/European-Indian encounters under the auspices of the East India Company. Following and expanding on the imperatives of this volume, I want to reflect further on the possibilities of "connected...

What We Call the Scuttle

Inspired from a line in a 16th century poem written by one R.R. and dedicated to the English explorer Sir Thomas Coryate, the essay lifts the phrase “the scuttle hole ascending” and conceptualizes it through various ecocritical and psychoanalytic lenses. Moving associatively and inductively, the essay becomes a portrait of the scuttle hole (portholes in the sides of ships) as abject, trans, and queer. By transposing Freud’s “castration anxiety” to “catastrophe anxiety” I argue that only by embracing failure and vulnerability (i.e. ascending the scuttle) will humans be able to live more ecologically. A scuttle hole (and its verb correlative scuttling— the purposeful sinking of a ship) can be abject and erotic lessons in embracing catastrophe and failure. Lessons gleaned from scuttle holes critique mainstream discourses surrounding sustainability and “staying afloat”—a critique begun by Steve Mentz and Stacy Alaimo that I take up here.

Truth and Lying in Early Modern Travel Narratives: Coryat’s Crudities, Lithgow’s Totall Discourse and Generic Change

This article looks at concepts of truth and falsehood in early modern travel narratives, focusing particularly on Thomas Coryat’s Crudities (1611) and William Lithgow’s The Totall Discourse (1614). It argues that these travelogues point towards a change in the generic conventions of literature, especially the split between factual and fictional narratives that emerged in the course of the early modern period and which is decisive for understanding conceptions of mendacity in literary accounts. Partly, the texts by Coryat and Lithgow still cling to long-established practices of myth-making in travel writing; but partly, they already follow new expectations concerning the veracity of travel narratives and, in the case of Coryat, they even use (a simulation of) accuracy for spectacular and satirical effects.

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.

‘The progress of thy glorious book’: material reading and the play of paratext in Coryats Crudities (1611)

Coryats Crudities (1611), a 939‐page narrative of its author's five‐month journey through Western Europe, is well known as a strange amalgam of euphuistic prose travel writing and a substantial body of ‘Panegyricke Verses’, comprising over eighty mock encomiastic poems written by the likes of Ben Jonson, John Donne, Inigo Jones, and Sir John Harington (among others). Described by Thomas Coryate as a prose and verse ‘miscellany’, the volume enables a variety of readerly strategies for interpreting its mixed‐mode form, employing printed marginalia in particular to lend its miscellaneity a playfully referential structure. Material evidence left by seventeenth‐century readers, moreover, reveals a complex and imitative paratextual dialogue between the printed marginalia and manuscript additions to the volume. My case study of the extensively annotated copy surviving as Pierpont Morgan Library W 02 B, owned by the poet and writing master John Davies of Hereford and at least three, perhaps four additional seventeenth‐century readers, not only recovers valuable early approaches to reading Coryats Crudities, but investigates how those readers responded to various textual stimuli in the volume – from the author's incessant measurements to the satirical mode of the mock panegyrists – to construct the Crudities as both innovative travel book and site of elaborate literary play.

Samuel Daniel in Italy: New Documentary Evidence

huntington library quarterly | vol. 75, no. 2 283 abstract Scholars have long assumed that poet-playwright Samuel Daniel (1562–1619) had traveled to Italy, basing this view on dedications and prefaces to Daniel’s poetry. But until now, there has been no documentary evidence that clearly places him there. An album amicorum owned by an Austrian, Erhard Grunthaler (1562–1614), contains signatures of four Englishmen, including Daniel, whose inscription to the album owner, dated June 30, 1591, recalls their journey together across the Alps to Italy. keywords: album amicorum; early modern English travel to the Continent; Thomas Coryat; Edward Dymoke; Battista Guarini

Katharine A Craik, Reading sensations in early modern England, Early Modern Literature in History, Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. xi, 200, £45.00, $69.95 (hardback 978-1-4039-2192-5).

Katharine A Craik, Reading sensations in early modern England, Early Modern Literature in History, Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. xi, 200, £45.00, $69.95 (hardback 978-1-4039-2192-5). - Volume 53 Issue 1

Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (review)

Reviewed by: Reading Sensations in Early Modern England Mary Floyd-Wilson Katharine A. Craik . Reading Sensations in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Hampshire, U.K.: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. xi + 200 pp. $69.95 (ISBN-10: 1-4039-2192-X, ISBN-13: 978-1-4039-2192-5). Katharine A. Craik's Reading Sensations in Early Modern England contributes to a subfield of literary studies that aims to recover early modern emotional experiences by drawing on contemporary understandings of the psychophysical humoral subject, thus sharing the interests of Michael Schoenfeldt1 and Gail Kern Paster.2 Craik, however, shifts the discussion in a new direction by drawing attention to the relationship "between the word and the flesh—and, more specifically, the relationship between literary texts and the bodies of English gentlemen" (p. 3), tracing how George Puttenham, Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, Thomas Coryat, Richard Braithwait, and Thomas Cranley emphasized and valued the somatic effects of reading. Thoughtful and concise, Reading Sensations makes the compelling argument that reading was an active and often dangerous experience that "shaped, and sometimes imperiled, masculine subjectivity" (p. 3). In the first chapter, Craik puts Thomas Wright's The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1601, 1604), a guide to emotional self-mastery founded on medical knowledge and moral philosophy, next to Henry Crosse's Vertues Common-wealth: Or The High-way to Honour (1603), a moral treatise on the vices that plagued English gentlemen of the age. This textual pairing, Craik argues, brings to light a paradox "at the centre of many polemics . . . : how can poetry be both trifling and insignificant and, at the same time, devastating to those who consumed it?" (p. 26). The [End Page 936] risks lie in the dynamic and reciprocal exchange between "contagious books and the pliable minds, bodies and souls of those who consume them" (p. 26). Craik's observation that "poetry and the sacred word" appear to work on the passions and the body "in remarkably similar ways" (p. 33) is provocative but underdeveloped. It opens the door for others to consider further how the Reformation's emphasis on personal reading of the scripture may have influenced moral perspectives on the reader's somatic experience. In chapters 2 and 3, Craik focuses on George Puttenham and Sir Philip Sidney to consider how the "physical sensations triggered by imaginative writing which so worried Wright and Crosse became a creative resource" (p. 34) for those invested in the "transformative power of literature" (p. 35). In one of the book's strongest arguments, Craik maintains that Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie (1589) develops a "new aesthetic vocabulary" to establish a productive link between poetry's stirring effects and a masculine English identity. Most surprising, as Craik notes, is Puttenham's insistence that the parts of poetry "not only move or arouse the sensitive bodies of readers, but are also themselves characterized by changeable bodily attributes such as heat, colour, size and texture" (p. 39). In her discussion of An Apology for Poetry (1595), Craik stresses Sidney's interest in the power of poetry to incite choler in soldiers serving their country. While noting that prominent male readers of The Arcadia such as Gabriel Harvey described the text's potential to inspire "noble courage," Craik suggests that Sidney actually "forbids readers" from taking pleasure in its representations of anger, acknowledging instead poetry's tendency to beguile (p. 71). In "'These Spots are but the Letters': John Donne and the Medicaments of Elegy," Craik reads a progression in Donne's faith in expressing, and thereby easing, sorrow. Whereas The Anniversaries fail as texts "designed to work therapeutically on despair," the confessional language in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions not only "registers in its very structure and syntax the stages of Donne's sickness" (p. 91) but also "betokens God's grace" (p. 92). Overly neat and compressed, this chapter sees an evolution in Donne's beliefs that could be explained by emphasizing the generic differences between an elegy for a stranger and one's personal prayers in a time of crisis. Following an entertaining chapter on Thomas Coryat's literalizing the "rich vocabulary of bibliophagia" (p. 95), Craik tackles the...

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

Venice and Rome in the Addresses and Dispatches of Sir Henry Wotton: First English Embassy to Venice, 1604–1610

Sir Henry Wotton served as first English ambassador to Venice in three successive missions - from 1604 to 1610, 1616 to 1619, and again from 1621 to 1623 - where he effected a two-way fashioning of Venice to England and England to Venice.1 Whilst in Venice he also sought to further English interests by strategically engaging various other autonomous, distinct, yet interrelated, Italian urban locations, such as Rome, Florence, and Padua. This article looks primarily at how Wotton handled affairs in Venice by monitoring activities at Rome and deploying strategic representations of Rome. The two sections of this article examine different but related aspects of Wotton's activities in Venice in this respect. The first section looks in part at Wotton as supervisor of English travellers to Italy, and particularly Rome, and sets him alongside two other contemporary travellers to Italy: Anthony Munday, who infiltrated the English College at Rome in 1579 and exposed the subversive activities there of Jesuits and English scholars;2 and Thomas Coryat, who tried to cultivate Wotton's acquaintance in Venice in 1608, and whose presence there testifies to an increase in English travel to the signory in the wake of Wotton's appointment. 3 The second section considers Wotton's attempts to stir up anti-Papal feeling during a specific historical incident that dominated his first embassy: the Venetian-Papal split of 1606-07 in which Rome placed Venice under an interdict for its perceived infringement of ecclesiastical liberties - a jurisdictional conflict involving a protracted consideration of the proper limits of secular and religious authority.4Sources of tension between Venice and the Papacy were exacerbated on 17 April 1606, when Pope Paul V issued Venice with a bull of Interdict and Excommunication for its refusal to surrender the two clerics arrested on criminal charges and to annul its decrees prohibiting both the holding of public office by priests and the erecting of new churches without governmental consent. Venice issued an edit declaring the bull to be invalid, dismissed the Papal Nuncio, and expelled the Jesuits from its territories, partly because their obedience to the Pope was seen to challenge their allegiance to the state. Paolo (Pietro) Sarpi stood as advisor to, and apologist for, the republic, his Consolatione della Mente, translated as Rights of Sovereigns and Subjects (1722),5 challenging Rome's encroachments of power, identifying limits to Papal jurisdiction, and reassuring the republic of the invalidity of the excommunication, which he saw as not only undeserved (Venice not having departed from the Catholic faith), but also as a misuse of a spiritual weapon to serve the Pope's temporal ambitions.6 As the second section of this article shows, Wotton sought to exploit this split with the Papacy, and to use it further to cement links between Venice and England, by utilising what scholars call 'the Myth of Venice', which had taken shape by accumulation around discrete historical events that it also served to help navigate.7 Involved in this 'Myth of Venice' were the combined features of its unique constitution, its political independence, and its longevity. There existed a perceived link between the harmonious operation and unimpeachable justice of Venice's governmental system and its continued freedom from external oppression. James Howell's S.PQ.V. A Survay of the Signorie of Venice (1651) begins with a verse 'Upon the Citty and Signorie of VENICE' that includes the lines:Could any State on Earth Immortall be,Venice by Her rare Goverment is She;Venice Great Neptunes Minion, still a Mayd,Though by the warrlikst Potentats assayd;Yet She retaines Her Virgin-waters pure,Nor any Forren mixtures can endure ....8Howell is typical in attributing Venice's duration to the soundness of her constitution, and in using the metaphor of her virginity to signal her resistance to foreign domination. …

Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England by Kevin Sharpe , Steven N. Zwicker (review)

MLR, 101.1, 2006 221 ing ventures certainly sought profit (financial and political) and knowledge without necessarily formulating schemes of domination in Asia. While the introduction conjures up visions of Sir Thomas Roe's embassy to India, in the main body of the volume the firsthalt is in the fairly familiar territoryof the Ottoman Empire. This area has not been neglected critically. The 'East' of Barbour's title may be seen to include, it seems, North Africa, the Roman Empire, and Egypt; whereas this reader would have been particularly interested to see neglected early modern narratives of a 'European' East being made to rub shoulders with those of the Asiatic East. The accounts of Tamburlaine and Antony and Cleopatra are much less vigorous than the subsequent detailed analyses of royal and civic spectacle. Here, Barbour clearly comes into his own with an animated discussion stretching from Peele's pageants in the 1580s to the later Jacobean offerings of Middleton, Webster, and Heywood, for example. If 'the East' is not always within Barbour's sights in this discussion, he is expert in moving from the details of ethnocentrism, racial mytholo? gies, and stereotyping in civic display to those of court masques, for example. However, the most absorbing and successful studies are contained in the second half of the book, with the accounts of the travels of Thomas Coryate and Sir Thomas Roe. Coryate, the firstrecorded Briton with non-mercantile ambitions to reach India, is clearly important as a travel author who wishes to inform, intrigue, and please his readership rather than simply broadcast narratives of religious, commercial, or poli? tical conquest. Barbour clearly exposes how the Jacobean traveller misrepresents his experiences in order to heroize himself and to appeal to contemporary tastes for cul? tural stereotyping and exoticism. During his embassy to India (1615-19), Roe's brief was to convince the Emperor that Britain was not a marginal, insignificant kingdom. Born into an aspiring family of merchants with a grandfather and an uncle as ex-Lord Mayors of London, he was knighted by James in 1603. Thus, he was a seemingly ideal character to send on this embassy to represent both royal and mercantile interests. However, neither Roe nor his company had any detailed knowledge of the languages requisite for this kind of mission and he often found himself extremely vulnerable in his reliance upon the translation skills of the resident Jesuits. If the main thrust of this volume is not upon the London theatre world, as the title might have us believe, Barbour is clearly interested in the wider politics of the cultural performance of racial expectations and composes some compelling narratives of Jacobean travellers in the process. University of Wales, Bangor Andrew Hiscock Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England. Ed. by Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge Uni? versity Press. 2003. 1X+ 363PP. ?50; $70. ISBN 0-521-82434-6. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker describe their project as a 'history of reading or a historicizing of readers', calling for 'a true collaboration between case study and theory, between materiality and aesthetics, between social history and exegesis' (pp. 2-3). For the contributors, this frequently means an engagement with (to use Joad Raymond's terms) not 'implied or ideal readers' but 'real readers' (p. 189) who have lefttraces of their reading experience. Raymond, forinstance, surveys the marginalia and commonplace books leftby readers of newsbooks and pamphlets. Not all acts of reading were so enduring, however. As Heidi Brayman Hackel explains, Anne Boleyn 'reportedly annotated Tyndale's Obedience of a Christian Man for the king with her fingernail' (p. 107), and most women were discouraged from annotation by pressures similar to those exhorting them to silence. The absence of annotation from early copies of Locke's Second Treatise of Government complicates Kirstie M. McClure's 222 Reviews attempt to recover the responses of its firstreaders; she uses an intertextual critique of its anecdote about Cato the Younger to argue that, notwithstanding its subsequent reputation as a 'founding text of modern constitutionalism', the text should be read as 'oscillating' between the factual and the fictional in the manner of Utopia (pp...

Textual Patronage in English Drama, 1570-1640. By DAVID M. BERGERON.

In 1962, Franklin B. Williams published his Index of Dedications and Commendatory Verses in English Books Before 1641 , and opened up a rich new seam for the study of early modern literary culture. Here was the patronage system laid out in all its messy complexity, in dedicatory epistles to monarchs and merchants, Irish Catholics and zealous Calvinists, unhappy lovers and ‘malapert mistresses’. Here were the swelling ranks of commendatory verses, precursors of the modern dust-jacket blurb, reaching a parodic apogee in the anthology of panegyrics that prefaced Thomas Coryate's Crudities in 1611. And here (in appendices) was a feast of bibliographical arcana—spoof errata lists, mock-imprimaturs, dedications cancelled at the last minute or added in manuscript, and books that chose to solicit different patrons, for a host of reasons, in subsequent editions. Here, one might think, was material for several absorbing books, books which would use the paratexts thus indexed as a guide to what Gérard Genette astutely called ‘the customs and institutions of the Republic of Letters’.

Before Orientalism: London's Theatre of the East 1570-1626 (review)

Reviewed by: Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East 1570–1626 Jyotsna G. Singh (bio) Richmond Barbour. Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East 1570–1626 Cambridge University Press. xii, 238. $80.95 In Before Orientalism, Richmond Barbour offers us rich insights into manifestations of theatricality in selected texts and contexts that relate England to the 'East': Richard Knolles's Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603); Marlowe's Tamburlaine; Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra; selected royal spectacles and civic entertainments (mostly Jacobean); and the travels and writings of Thomas Coryate. Moving beyond a typically Eurocentric perspective on Renaissance England, Barbour takes us on a journey from London's spectacles of the 'East' to the theatrical and political encounters of Thomas Coryate and Sir Thomas Roe in Moghul India. In his introduction, Barbour examines the 'cultural logistics' of England's eastern initiative. Overall, the author looks afresh at the theatrum mundi trope, while capturing the way in which it informs and energizes English constructions of the 'East.' Here Barbour draws on the familiar critique of Edward Said's Orientalism, as he cautions against focusing on 'the West's constructions of the East, while ignoring reversals, hybrid permutations, and offsetting triangulations of that dynamic.' At the same time, Barbour [End Page 407] distinguishes 'domestic constructions' of the 'East' from Europe's 'strategic and economic relations' that reveal more tolerance for non-Europeans. Richard Knolles's demonizing representations of Islam are the focus of the first chapter. Using a few passages, Barbour explores Knolles's emphases on the theatricality of Ottoman power as well as its 'slothfull and effeminate' attributes. Overall, Barbour offers a limited historical analysis of Knolles. Instead, he reads it more as a 'drama for English readers,' while linking the 'antitheatricalist and masculine discourses' to a 'proto-orientalist critique ... [of] eastern shows of opulence and power.' In the next chapter on 'Asiatic themes and trappings on the London stage,' Barbour's discussion of Tamburlaine covers many areas, ranging from humanist debates about rhetoric to Elizabethan 'politics of spectacle,' but without a consistent focus on the play's constructions of the 'East.' Neither does the author acknowledge recent work by Shankar Raman and others on the play's investment in discourses of discovery. The traditional, conservative reading of Antony and Cleopatra that follows is based on a binary opposition: 'Rome asserts itself as a place of discipline, premeditation, rationality ... [while] Egypt knows itself as a carnivalesque zone of excess, impulsive self-dramatization ... compelling eroticism, transcendence, deliquescence, death.' Thus, he precludes a more complex, dialectical perspective on the play's conflicts, which, since Janet Adelman's early work, has now become a critical commonplace. Instead, in his explorations of the 'topoi of orientalism' in the play, Barbour seems to overlook the more 'hybrid permutations' that he calls for in his introduction. The next, enlightening chapter explores representations of 'the East' in civic, courtly, and professional entertainments. While conflating classical and exotic themes, and frequently representing a 'fabulous, not empirical geography,' these spectacles reveal a tendency to convey 'Exotic splendor, not ethnographic precision.' Significantly, as Barbour demonstrates, these 'proto-orientalist' productions produce a 'haphazard ethnography ... despite the increasing contacts between English subjects and peoples overseas.' In chapter 4, Barbour examines the writings of an important but frequently overlooked figure, Thomas Coryate, whom he labels 'Britain's first modern tourist and travel writer,' since he went to India 'with no commitment to trade.' Here, Barbour shows us how Coryate's commodification of travel exemplifies an 'emergent attitude of modernism,' while also functioning as a 'logical extension of commercial Jacobean appetites.' The final chapter, on Sir Thomas Roe, offers an enlightening section on 'The London Company's discursive regime.' Here Barbour illuminates how the East India Company developed a novel system of surveillance - of information-gathering and record-keeping - that became a model for later forms of corporate control. In addition, we also see how Roe's eyewitness accounts of the Moghul Court's 'power on display' reveal the limits of self-aggrandizing, Jacobean self-representations. The fact that Roe is absent [End Page 408] from the Moghul emperor's memoirs is a telling detail that Barbour deploys in looking at English history...

Shakespeare and Thomas Coryate

Journal Article Shakespeare and Thomas Coryate Get access R. E. Pritchard R. E. Pritchard Standlake Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 51, Issue 3, September 2004, Pages 295–296, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/510295 Published: 01 September 2004

Shakespeare and Thomas Coryate

Journal Article Shakespeare and Thomas Coryate Get access R. E. Pritchard R. E. Pritchard Standlake Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 51, Issue 3, September 2004, Pages 295–296, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/510295 Published: 01 September 2004