Akhimie Complete Diss

Cultivating Difference in Early Modern Drama and the Literature of Travel Patricia Akhimie Submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2011 © 2011 Patricia Akhimie All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT Cultivating Difference in Early Modern Drama and the Literature of Travel Patricia Akhimie This dissertation argues that the early modern discourse of conduct, which produced social difference within English households and communities, took on greater importance in a newly global world. In the conduct-obsessed culture of early modern England, two competing and contradictory beliefs about the nature of social difference emerged. The first of these was an ideology of cultivation, a widespread belief that social identity was malleable, that socio-economic status could be determined by measuring an individual's adherence to accepted codes of conduct. The second belief depended upon the idea that social difference was fixed and naturally determined, and thus that somatic differences such as sex and race were deeply significant. For those bearing stigmatized somatic marks, particularly women and non-Europeans, access to cultivating strategies was systematically circumscribed, and this process of socio-economic differentiation was understood as the natural consequence of bodily difference. This dissertation examines the discourse of conduct at work in both domestic and global contexts through early modern English conduct literature, guides to self-improvement through specific cultivating activities or strategies; through plays that stage cultivation as beneficial to self, community, and nation; and through travel writing, where authors attempt to make sense of unfamiliar customs and behaviors. In these works the social and material benefits of cultivation achieved through practices such as good husbandry, educational travel, and hunting for sport are affirmed, even as the limited access of some groups to these same cultivating strategies is reiterated. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One New World Georgic: Husbandry, Plantation, and Colonial Huswifery 44 Chapter Two "Manifest me rightly": Othello, Travel and the Epistemology of Credit 110 Chapter Three "This Green Plot Shall Be Our Stage": Performance and the Periphery 165 Coda: Slaves, Markets, People(s), Prices 243 Works Cited 252 i List of Illustrations Figure 1: Fred Wilson, "Chesapeake Bay Waterfowling Region," Mining the Museum Figure 2: Fred Wilson, "Metalwork 1793-1880," Mining the Museum Figure 3: Theodor de Bry, "English Sportsmen in the New World," Americae pars decima, 1618. Figure 4: Theodor de Bry, "Arrival of the Englishmen," A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia, 1590. Figure 5: detail, Robert Vaughan, The Generall Historie of Virginia. ii Acknowledgments In the process of completing this project I have benefited from the support and advice of a small group of determined and dedicated people. First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Jean Howard. Professor Howard went above and beyond at every stage. I could not have asked for a more sage and savvy mentor. In Kim Hall's rigorous scholarship and open and easy collegiality I found a singular role model. I thank the other members of my dissertation committee, Alan Stewart, Peter Platt, and Celia Naylor for their generosity, kind words, and keen-eyed critique. My thanks also, to Ellen Ketels Rentz and Karen Emmerich, sounding-boards and proof-readers extraordinaire. I must also express my gratitude to the staff and librarians of the John Carter Brown Library for all their aid in my study of sport in early American promotional literature. Finally, my thanks to my family for their unconditional and unwavering love and support. iii For my other, better half. iv 1 Introduction Now internationally recognized as an artist and political activist, Fred Wilson has created installations that investigate the concept of race as it is perpetuated by the modern museum as institution. In the 1993 exhibit, Mining the Museum, Wilson juxtaposed objects from the Maryland Historical Society associated with hunting, such as carved wooden decoys, fowling pieces, and punt guns, with broadsides announcing the reward for the return of runaway slaves.1 Conflating the hunt for fowl with the hunt for runaway humans, the installation reveals these activities as contemporaneous. Further, Wilson's reordering insists that the spirit of the hunt cannot be disentangled from the spirit of industry that enslaves and enforces hardship and oppression in pursuit of gain. Wilson makes a similar statement with a simple graphic, "Chesapeake Bay Waterfowling Region" (Figure 1), a map on which three types of locations are marked: names of towns and water bodies, settlements of local indigenous tribes, and popular hunting clubs. In offering only these three types of information, Wilson's piece suggests how readily the map lends itself to the politics of its maker, yielding solely the information that is deemed appropriate, or useful. In "Chesapeake Bay Waterfowling Region" the addition of the names of tribes is deliberately inappropriate, creating "tribe" and "club" as distinct groups, and thus as distinct categories of human societies. They share the same geographic region and perhaps a similar interest in wildlife for sport and sustenance, but they are definitively separated through the mechanism of mapping. Wilson uses the language of cartography to illustrate a moment of discursive, even epistemic, crisis. Chesapeake Bay is claimed by and for both indigenous tribes and 1 Mining the Museum was presented by The Contemporary and the Maryland Historical Society from April 4, 1992 to February 28, 1993. 2 Figure 1: Fred Wilson, "Chesapeake Bay Waterfowling Region," Mining the Museum 3 hunting clubs, groups that hold divergent and competing ideas about the social meanings of the hunting. At this crux, hunting is more than an activity; it is a culturally specific custom connected to larger notions of regional and perhaps racial identity. To acknowledge such notions of identity as contested is to acknowledge the role of custom, or conduct, in the production of social difference. To map contested identities onto Chesapeake Bay, in particular, is to summon up a history of encounter and epistemic conflict stretching back to the earliest dealings between Native American communities and English settlers. In "Cultivating Difference" I seek out such moments of epistemic conflict, presenting examples of early modern English conduct discourse in crisis. In doing this I have two aims. First, I introduce a new approach to thinking about the early modern English engagement (imaginative and material) with the wider world.2 Second, I offer a 2 The past few decades have seen a steady increase of literary critical scholarship on early modern England's engagement with the global through travel, trade and settlement, in a variety of textual, material and discursive media. "Cosmopolitanism" and "New Globalism" have emerged as useful terms for describing the historical moment of the early modern period as one of intense paradigmatic change for many cultures as a result of unprecedented contact with and interest in the foreign. On early modern cosmopolitanism see Howard's introduction to the recent Shakespeare Studies forum "English Cosmopolitanism in the Early Modern Moment." On globalism see especially Singh's The Global Renaissance. Scholarly treatments of travel drama (see Jowitt, Travel; and Hadfield, Literature), and travel writing (see Fuller, Voyages and Remembering; and the edited volume Travel Knowledge from Kamps and Singh) have brought early modern plays into conversation with a body of travel writing in order to explore connections between English experiences of cross-cultural contact and literary representations of those experiences. Cox remains the most comprehensive bibliography of travel writing before 1800; see Parks Richard Hakluyt as well. Studies such as Hall, "Object into object?"; Brotton; and those in Sebek and Deng's recent edited volume examine the changes in English visual and material culture as long-distance trade brought exotic images and luxury goods--particularly textiles, jewels, and spices--to English marketplaces, households and imaginations. Jowitt; Vitkus; Burton and others have focused on the threat and thrill of piracy, armed conflict, and religious conversion in the early modern Mediterranean and in the dramatic sub-genre of Turk plays. Other scholars have focused on specific geographic regions in order to explore cultural contact and cross-pollination between England and Europe and the wider world. Scholars such as Matar and Andrea, for example, have offered in depth studies of the impact and influence of Ottoman empire and culture, while Raman and Singh have focused on Southeast Asia. On the topic of colonialism scholars have offered both studies of colonial discourse broadly understood and focused treatments of colonial discourse and the historical practice of colonization in specific regional and cultural contexts. Thus Knapp; Bach; Netzloff; and Loomba engage with early modern colonialism, writ large, while Maley; Palmer; Hadfield; and Herron have focused on Ireland as a crucible of early modern English ideas about ethnic difference, imperial ambitions and colonial schemes. 4 critique of the conduct system framed by a new analytic perspective.3 Instead of focusing on court-centered conduct, male subject

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