Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Foreign relations in Jacobean England: the Sherley brothers and the ‘voyage of Persia’
- 3 ‘The naked and the dead’: Elizabethan perceptions of Ireland
- 4 The Elizabethans in Italy
- 5 Tragic form and the voyagers
- 6 Nationality and language in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy
- 7 Marlowe's Argonauts
- 8 Pirates and ‘turning Turk’ in Renaissance drama
- 9 The wrong end of the telescope
- 10 ‘Travelling hopefully’: the dramatic form of journeys in English Renaissance drama
- 11 ‘Seeing things’: Amazons and cannibals
- 12 Industrious Ariel and idle Caliban
- 13 The New World in The Tempest
- 14 ‘What's past is prologue’: metatheatrical memory and transculturation in The Tempest
- 15 Lope de Vega and Shakespeare
- Index
2 - Foreign relations in Jacobean England: the Sherley brothers and the ‘voyage of Persia’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Foreign relations in Jacobean England: the Sherley brothers and the ‘voyage of Persia’
- 3 ‘The naked and the dead’: Elizabethan perceptions of Ireland
- 4 The Elizabethans in Italy
- 5 Tragic form and the voyagers
- 6 Nationality and language in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy
- 7 Marlowe's Argonauts
- 8 Pirates and ‘turning Turk’ in Renaissance drama
- 9 The wrong end of the telescope
- 10 ‘Travelling hopefully’: the dramatic form of journeys in English Renaissance drama
- 11 ‘Seeing things’: Amazons and cannibals
- 12 Industrious Ariel and idle Caliban
- 13 The New World in The Tempest
- 14 ‘What's past is prologue’: metatheatrical memory and transculturation in The Tempest
- 15 Lope de Vega and Shakespeare
- Index
Summary
The foreign relations of my title are both diplomatic and textual. I am concerned with the ways in which some of the travel narratives or ‘relations’ of the period present intercultural contact and help to shape attitudes to the foreign, both in their own right and also through the literary and theatrical texts that are inspired by them. A large and varied body of such material grew up around the exploits of the Sherley brothers in the late 1590s and during the Jacobean era, and I shall begin with the most flamboyant piece of writing it has to offer, a fairly typical extract from Purchas His Pilgrimes, Samuel Purchas' huge collection of travel narratives, published in 1625 as a sequel to Hakluyt's Principall Navigations:
Amongst our English Travellers, I know not whether any have merited more respect than the Honorable, I had almost said Heroike Gentlemen, Sir Anthony & Sir Robert Sherleys. And if the Argonauts of old, and Graecian Worthies, were worthily reputed Heroicall for Europaean exploits in Asia: what may wee thinke of the Sherley-Brethren, which not from the neerer Graecian shoares, but from beyond the Europaean World, Et penitus toto divisus Orbe Britannia; have not coasted a little way (as did those) but pierced the very bowells of the Asian Seas and Lands, unto the Persian centre…
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- Information
- Travel and Drama in Shakespeare's Time , pp. 14 - 31Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996
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