Читать книгу A Companion to the Global Renaissance - Группа авторов - Страница 21

It would be a critical commonplace to suggest that the very name of Renaissance London’s Globe Theater pointed to the drama’s engagement with England’s role in the expanding world of exploration and trade, with the metaphor of “the world as stage” evoking life as reminiscent of a play. London’s thriving trading communities and cosmopolitan atmosphere provided large audiences, including foreign visitors from Europe, for both the public and private theaters. While the presence of penny-paying apprentices and others in the pit was often invoked by the players, new infusions of money also made the theaters a part of a growing consumerist culture, as one theater historian notes: “Drake’s bullion ships indirectly helped the players because the more that wealth came to the hand in the readily exchangeable form of money, the more the idle gallants, hangers-on at Court, and Inns-of-Court lawyers were created to seek the entertainment the players were selling” (Gurr, 13). English drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was strongly nationalistic in many of its historical and cultural themes and characters, and not surprisingly so, given the aristocratic patronage system as well the royal censorship. Yet equally striking is the drama’s engagement with England’s expanding geographical, cultural, religious, and commercial horizons, and with the peoples from foreign lands. Cosmopolitan London in the Renaissance is frequently described as a place with large numbers of foreigners and foreign commodities omnipresent in the city streets (Howard 2007, 19–23). Several earlier essays in this volume draw on plays such as Shakespeare’s Othello, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays, and Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday in order to show how they incorporated and engaged with global perspectives and processes: in terms of commerce, geography, encounters with foreigners – especially with Moors, Turks, and other Muslims – and involving complex race, gender, class, and sexual politics. The four essays in Part IV are reminiscent of these earlier chapters, but they focus more exclusively on early modern English drama – both in terms of text and performance. Thus, they demonstrate that globalization was not simply an economic movement but as much a product of the cultural and ideological work done by the popular institution of the theater. And, finally, though we assume this drama as quintessentially English, these essays demonstrate its incorporation of many “worlds elsewhere” into its repertoire and appeal.

The public theater’s engagement with “the circulation of fashionable and exotic objects and people, an engagement that was part of its allure” is the subject of the opening essay of this section by Jean E. Howard: “Bettrice’s Monkey: Staging Exotica in Early Modern London Comedy” (Chapter 26). She begins with a scene in the middle of the first act in a London city comedy, Eastward Ho, in which stage directions indicate that Bettrice, a maid in the home of the goldsmith, Touchstone, enters “leading a monkey after her.” Who or what is this monkey? Is it a prop and if not, where did the live monkey come from? Addressing these questions, Howard examines their symbolic associations and performative skills as well as the novelty of acquiring and flaunting a real monkey, which came “among the unitemized curiosities and trifles offloaded with more serious cargo of spices, cloth, and precious metals brought from these long voyages.” They came from regions as far away as India, Africa, and South America, supporting a trend of the domestication of the exotic into “English regimes of representation and pleasure.”

Suggesting that the play probably used a real monkey on stage, in a drive for “novelty,” Howard also explains how it would also have strengthened the play’s imbrications within the geography of the East and West, “situating the theater in a geographical frame much larger than that of London proper.” Typically, London comedy may be considered a localized genre, since its subject matter focuses on the locales and mores of the city, but, as Howard demonstrates, “this most localized of genres is also a cosmopolitan and decidedly global genre.” Clearly, then, the seemingly innocuous though attention-grabbing presence of the monkey on the stage in Eastward Ho brought home to domestic audiences a reminder of England’s global trade and proto-colonial explorations as well as reinforcing in them a taste for novelties that buttressed that very trade.

A number of themes and issues that thread through this volume reemerge in the next essay (Chapter 27) by Virginia Mason Vaughan titled “The Maltese Factor: The Poetics of Place in The Jew of Malta and The Knight of Malta.” These include England’s increasing geographical awareness; the role of Venice and its geopolitics in the English imagination; English relations with the Ottoman Turks and the Catholic Spaniards; and the complex and often fraught cross-cultural interactions in “contact zones” on the borders of Europe, in this case the island of Malta in the Mediterranean. The English stage, Vaughan demonstrates, functions as a site for reenactments of these global issues and geopolitics in two plays, Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (c. 1589–1592) and The Knight of Malta, crafted by John Fletcher, Nathan Field, and Philip Massinger for the King’s Company in 1619. According to Vaughan, both plays draw their themes and characters from the historical episode of the siege of Malta in 1565, when the last order of crusading knights in Europe miraculously defeated the Turks: Marlowe’s play depicts Malta “as a site of commercial transactions among Jews, Christians, and Ottoman Turks,” and The Knight of Malta “uses the island’s famous knights (The Order of St. John) as the backdrop for complex negotiations between rival suitors for ‘Oriana,’ the chaste heroine.”

Malta, as Vaughan reminds us, was regarded as “a liminal space, where a broad cross section of cultures, religions, and nationalities mingled and struggled for domination” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In his representation of Jews in Malta, for instance, Marlowe draws on both negative and positive associations, as collaborators with the Turkish enemy and as defenders of Europeans in his portrayal of Barabas. And in The Knight of Malta it is the black woman, Abdella, who “can never be integrated into Maltese society because she lacks whiteness, the sign of sexual purity.” Ironically, even while dealing with the threat posed by the Ottoman Turks, “infidels,” both plays ultimately mark not the Turk as enemy, but “the alien within who must be expunged.” Whether depicting tragic scapegoats or comic butts for jokes, English Renaissance drama frequently deployed figures of “otherness” – outsiders – who evoked social, cultural, and religious anxieties in an expanding world. Not surprisingly, such figures were often foreigners.

The next essay (Chapter 28) by David Morrow frames its argument in the general questions about globalization and capitalism with which the volume began (as in Vitkus and Bartolovich). Titled “Local–Global Pericles: International Storytelling, Domestic Social Relations, Capitalism,” this essay provides a counterpoint to others in the collection in offering a “domestic” reading of a “global” play. It revisits the long-standing debate about the origin of capitalism by working within the narrative of social transformation developed by Ellen Wood.

Morrow focuses on how Shakespeare’s play raises and resolves issues around the transformation of the social relations of domestic production, arguing that Pericles “everywhere appeals to the reciprocal rights and obligations of communal ideology,” as instantiated in Shakespeare’s insistence on the play’s links with ritual: in the banter of the fishermen; in the benevolent rule of Cerimon; and in the representations of the travailing bodies of Pericles, Marina, and the prostitutes. Yet Morrow asserts that because they were enacted within the capitalist playhouse such residual appeals generate and reveal contradictions that are inextricably part of the social transformations that Shakespeare examines. Morrow maintains that attention to the process that Marx termed “primitive accumulation” offers a fruitful (and neglected) means for literary commentators to suggest links between key social struggles of early modern England with the deprivations created by the so-called globalization of our present day.

The final essay of this volume, by Amrita Sen, “Staging the Global in the Street: Spices, London Companies, and Thomas Middleton’s The Triumphs of Honor and Industry” (Chapter 29), turns to the streets of early modern London to better understand the cultural impact of the East India Company’s early trading activities – resonating with the themes of “staging exotica” in Chapter 26. Beginning with a discussion on the role of spices in everyday life that moves beyond aesthetic considerations of flavoring and into their humoral implications in diet and physic, this chapter outlines how England’s direct trading with the spice producing regions such as East India had social and cultural implications. At a time when Galenic ideas on the humoral impact of food and medicines was still prevalent, the possibility of altering one’s humors through diet raised questions about similar transformation of ethnic identity. Thomas Middleton’s civic entertainment, The Triumphs of Honor and Industry (1617), allows us to read early modern cosmopolitanism in terms of a civic cookout and a change in London’s demographic complexion brought about by the East India Company’s spice trade.

Ultimately, global drama in Renaissance England – like other literary and cultural works of the period – poems and paintings, for instance – mentioned in this volume demonstrates a configuration of cultural forms and material practice. If the promise of commercial profit and future colonization propelled many globalizing drives in early modern England, these in turn were fueled by a world-encompassing imagination, which shaped the endeavors of England’s differing classes, ranging from the monarch, aristocrats, merchants, ambassadors, and commoners, though in different forms and with varying interests and investments. This imagination could transform a “brazen world” into a “golden” one, dangers and trials notwithstanding, by evoking what was possible and could be discovered behind frontiers unknown. Analogues for a convergence of global drives and imaginings found on the English stage can be found in European cultural production overall. Europe’s era of exploration, in the profusion of travel and ethnographic accounts, as well as in visual culture, for instance, brought to life worlds that were both real and embellished. Thus, the Western expansion depicted was conceived imaginatively as much as it was given practical form via mercantile and financial ventures, often shaped by a colonizing vision trying to “establish authority through a demarcation of identity and difference” (Spurr, 7). The “global Renaissance” took shape at the confluence of these differing drives and imaginings. The essays that follow elaborate on this story.