Constructing Genealogies in Early Modern England and the Mediterranean a Dissertation Submitted to the Department of Comparativ
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CONSTRUCTING GENEALOGIES IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND AND THE MEDITERRANEAN A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND THE COMMITTEE OF GRADUATE STUDIES OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Anne Marie Guglielmo May 2010 © 2010 by Anne Marie Guglielmo. All Rights Reserved. Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/ This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/kg857mb9088 ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Roland Greene, Primary Adviser I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Vincent Barletta I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Johannes Gumbrecht I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Patricia Parker Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost Graduate Education This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives. iii iv Acknowledgments I am indebted to my adviser Roland Greene for thinking like no one else does, for asking the most provocative questions, and for pushing my writing and research beyond where even I thought it was going. His insight has guided my project since my first class with him—Edmund Spenser—as I began my graduate studies. I thank Patricia Parker for the invaluable independent studies I took with her after her inspiring class on Islam and Shakespeare. Her encyclopedic knowledge on Shakespeare and the epic genre has enriched my research. Although he came to Stanford late in my career as a graduate student, Vincent Barletta’s expertise on medieval and early modern Islam in the Iberian Peninsula and his balanced approach to analyzing the religion and politics of that period have helped me immensely. Finally, I thank Sepp Gumbrecht for his brilliance in everything. Without my family, I can truly say that this dissertation would never have been written. Thank you to my beautiful children for bringing me joy. To my mother and father and to Florence and Mike LaFemina thank you for thousands of hours of childcare so that I could work on my dissertation and still be a mother. I could not have completed my PhD without your help. I also want to thank my parents for their wisdom and perspective throughout my time at Stanford. To my three sisters, I cannot overestimate how much their support, friendship, and love has meant to me, particularly these last few years. Finally, thank you to my husband who, especially when my confidence waned, always believed in my ability to succeed. v Table of Contents Introduction 1 Ch 1. Describing and Constructing Europe’s Africa 20 Ch 2. Romance and Empire: Reclaiming Genealogies in Orlando furioso and The Faerie Queene 87 Ch 3. Fluellen’s Parallel Lives: Constructing East-West English Kings in Shakespeare’s Henriad 144 Ch 4. Don Quijote: Reconstructing Genealogies in La Mancha 211 1 Introduction: “Ahijándolos al Preste Juan” ‘Making sons/texts for Prester John’ In many ways, the myth of Prester John permeates this dissertation, encapsulating various types of genealogical construction in early modern literature of England and the Mediterranean. He is mentioned in Leo Africanus’ Descrizione dell’Africa as a king of tantamount importance to an “emperor” ‘imperadore’ and in the second volume of Navigazioni e viaggi, Ramusio places an edited translation of Verdadera Informaçam das terras do Preste Joam das Indias, Francisco Alvarez’s account of his travels to Ethiopia.1 Mármol Carvajal mentions him and his various Abyssinian, Chaldean, and Tartarian names.2 He appears in Orlando furioso, blind and starved by harpies as punishment for his audacity against God. After Astolfo drives the harpies away, he provides the English knight with soldiers in order to conquer Charlemagne’s pagan and Muslim enemies. He crops up even in one of Shakespeare’s plays. Benedict tells Don Pedro in Much Ado About Nothing that in order to avoid Beatrice he would “bring [ …] the length of/ Prester John's foot […] rather than hold three words' conference with this/ harpy” (2.1.239-240), suggesting the distance of his mythic realm and even the ridiculousness of his sheer existence. Prester John is mentioned in the first volume of Don Quijote as well. In the canon’s speech on the ridiculous nature of chivalric romance and fiction in general, he states “What mind, that is not barbarous or coarse, would believe a huge tower of knights fell into the sea, like a ship with strong seas, and tonight went to Lombardy, and tomorrow rose in the lands of Prester John of the Indies, or anywhere else that neither Ptolemy discovered, 1 Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, ed. Marica Milanesi, 6 Vol (Turin: Einaudi, 1978) vol 1, 21 and vol 2, 75-385. 2 Luis del Mármol Carvajal, Descripción general de Africa (1573-1599), Facsim. ed. (Madrid: el Instituto de Estudios Africanos, 1953) Fol 20r, 198v. 2 nor Marco Polo saw?” ‘¿Qué ingenio, si no es del todo bárbaro e inculto, podrá contentarse leyendo que una gran torre llena de caballeros va por la mar adelante, como nave con próspero viento, y hoy anochece en Lombardía, y mañana amanezca en tierras del Preste Juan de las Indias, o en otras que ni las descubrió Tolomeo ni las vio Marco Polo?’ (DQ1, 565).3 Also in the prologue, the author’s friend advises him not to worry about having the authority of prefatory sonnets and epigrams by famous poets. Rather, he suggests that the narrator write them himself and “baptize and name them whatever you’d like, making them into sons of Prester John of the Indies or the Emperor of Trebizond, both of whom, I’ve heard were famous poets” ‘los podéis bautizar y poner el nombre que quisiéredes, ahijándolos al Preste Juan de las Indias o al Emperador de Trapisonda, de quien yo sé que hay noticia que fueron famosos poetas” (DQ1, 54). The pronoun “los” ‘them’ in “ahijándolos al Preste Juan,” refers of course to the mock poems that the narrator’s friend suggests he invent. However, “ahijando” signifies more than merely “attributing” or “imputing” them to Prester John. Indeed, it introduces genealogy, creating illegitimate or unauthorized “sons” for the imagined author-father Prester John. Prester John, as he is named in English, is an amalgamation of many mythical and historically based figures across a broad span of time and geography.4 In the earlier Middle Ages he was supposedly located somewhere in Asia 3 Miguel de Cervantes, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, vol 1, ed. Luis Andrés Murillo (Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1978). 4 For more on the history and texts associated with Prester John see L. N. Gumilev’s Searches for an Imaginary Kingdom: the Legend of the Kingdom of Prester John, trans. R. E. F. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) and Vsevolod Slessarev’s published dissertation Prester John: The Letter and the Legend, Diss. University of Wisconsin, 1960, Facsim Ed. (Ann Arbor: ProQuest, 1988 and for a select bibliography of works on Prester 3 (China, Mongolia, India), but by the 1500s his elusive kingdom migrated west to Africa (Ethiopia/Abyssinia).5 Despite many geographers’ and explorers’ persistence, a pontiff-emperor figure by the name of Prete Gianni/Prester John was not located. The most concrete evidence of such a figure’s existence came in the form of a letter delivered to the pope by the priest Francisco Alvarez in 1533 (in Ramusio), supposedly pledging the obeisance of “Atani Tingil” to the pope.6 The papacy and its supporters believed that they had a Christian ally in African lands primarily inhabited by Muslim people. Indeed, finding Prester John was a major agenda for Portugal’s Prince Henrique “the Navigator.”7 As one can see in Cervantes’ and Shakespeare’s treatment of Prester John, by the seventeenth-century, mounting evidence suggesting that such an omnipotent, emperor-pope did not exist changed his literary function from tantalizing to farcical. Why then, his persistence in European literature for so many centuries? Aside from his notoriously elusive location, one of the only constants of the Prester John myth was John see Prester John: the Mongols and the Ten Lost Tribes ed. Charles F. Beckingham and Bernard Hamilton (Aldershot, Great Britain: Variorum, 1996) 291-304. 5 See C.F. Beckingham “An Ethiopian Embassy to Europe, c. 1310,” “Prester John in West Africa,” and “The Quest for Prester John” in Prester John: the Mongols and the Ten Lost Tribes ed. Charles F. Beckingham and Bernard Hamilton, 197-207, 207-212, 271-290. Note also that, as Peter Russell explains, references to “the Indies” and “Indians,” as in my examples from Cervantes and Mármol above are based on the various meanings that “India” had at this time, “as well as a failure to take into account the configuration of the western coast of Africa as […] imaginatively described in the Libro del Conosçimiento and depicted by some fifteenth-century map makers […] the ‘India’ that Henrician [Prince Henrique] documents have in mind is in fact north-east Africa,” Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) 121.