Seeing Things’: Amazons and Cannibals1 MICHAEL HATTAWAY
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‘Seeing things’: Amazons and Cannibals1 MICHAEL HATTAWAY I, when I value gold, may think upon The ductileness, the application, The wholesomeness, the ingenuity, From rust, from soil, from fire ever free, But if I love it, ‘tis because ‘tis made By our new Nature, use, the soul of trade. Donne, Elegy xviii ‘Love’s Progress’, 11-16 Donne, although writing about love, is here manipulating two of the commonplaces that we associate with encounters in the Renaissance between the Old and New Worlds: gold,2 and the manner by which, when two peoples engage in trade, their natures are changed. ‘Nature’ in this poem is both external and internal, great creating Nature as well as that which makes up humanity.3 ‘Use’ also has two meanings, ‘usury’ and ‘cultural practice or custom’. Practice generates particular behaviour, so constituting a new ‘nature’ for individuals involved in that behaviour, here the process of trading. Translating this into slightly different terms, the behaviour of the market-place is a form of theatricalization.4 Donne may, I think, be seen here as a cultural relativist, someone who was prepared to conceive of Nature not as something transhistorical or transcultural, but as a power made by culture. We might compare Montaigne’s aphorism from one of the greatest of his essays, ‘Of Custom, and How a Received Law Should Not Easily be Changed’: ‘Custom is a violent and deceiving school•mistress... we may plainly see her upon every occasion to force the rules of Nature: Usus efficassimus rerum omnium magister: Use is the most effectual master of all things.’5 Ethics might be demolished by ethnics. There were, however, few relativists before the end of the seventeenth century.6 For most writers of the period there was only one ‘Nature’, and Europe and the New World were seen in her terms. That is one point of reference: for my second I want to take the title of Seamus Heaney’s recent collection of verse Seeing Things (1991). The title proclaims a pun, obvious but unfamiliar. It reminds us that travel and voyaging may be a question of invention rather than discovery. The things a European voyager sees in America are both present and invented. In the categories of the Renaissance, they are ‘fantasies’, or, in the words of Florio’s Montaigne, ‘fashioned and masked’ by their observers, ‘according to the visage they 1 Published as Michael Hattaway, ‘“Seeing Things”: Amazons and Cannibals’, Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, ed. Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michèle Willems, (Cambridge, 1996), 179-92. 2 Gold is the first attribute of the New World, the subject of the ‘Epistle to the Reader’ in Ralegh’s Discovery of the... Empire of Guiana (London, 1596), sig. A4r - ¶4v; see also George Chapman’s ‘De Guiana’ (1596), in Poems, ed. Phyllis Brooks Bartlett (New York, 1941), pp. 353-7. 3 Donne is, by implication, eschewing alchemy. 4 See Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: the Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550--1750 (Cambridge, 1986); see also Steven Mullaney, ‘Brothers and Others, or the Art of Alienation’, in Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce, ed. Marjorie Garber (Baltimore, 1987), pp. 67-89, and Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions (Oxford, 1991). 5 Montaigne, ‘Of Custom, and How a Received Law Should Not Easily be Changed’, Essays, trans. J. Florio (Everyman Edition); the Latin quotation comes from Pliny, Epistle xx. 6 For the change in attitude at this time, see Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: the American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, (Cambridge, 1982). 2 saw them in’.7 We might, by combining the Donne and the Heaney, go even further: not only does observation lead us to stereotype and ‘see things’, but we the observers are ourselves transformed, acquire a ‘second nature’ - a point made in a modern play, The Ik by Peter Brook.8 It is now our task to consider not just what was seen but how it was seen, and we turn for our examples to drama. Although Renaissance England was awash with new discoveries in physical geography, there was not, as in most periods, much attempt to separate the fabulous from the factual,9 and little cultural curiosity compared with that evinced towards the Old World – Thomas Harriot10 and the artist John White may exhibit more concern with specifics than most of their contemporaries, but even their ‘new world’ was inhabited by stereotypes, and their cultural landscapes were refracted through ideological commonplaces.11 The explorers of the age, given their desire to ransack the occidental discoveries for gold, were little better than pirates. Nor was it an age of large-scale colonization – Ralph Lane complained that ‘the discovery of a good mine, by the goodness of God, or a passage to the South Sea, or some way to it, and nothing else can bring this country in request to be inhabited by our nation’12 – or of Christian imperialism – Edward Hayes (another writer anthologized by Hakluyt) lamented that no ‘right way [had] been taken of plan ting a Christian habitation or regiment’ upon the lands that lay north of the twenty-fifth parallel.13 Plantations were simply ventures that were conducted abroad: there was little rumination on idealistic values of the sort that future settlers wanted to project on to the land that was to become their home.14 The following, the digest of a young woman’s ‘devoir’, ‘an emigrant’s letter to his friends at home’, in Charlotte Bronte’s The Professor (1857), sets out common-places that we shall not find in our period: It opened with simplicity; some natural and graphic touches disclosed to the reader the scene of virgin forest and great, New-World river - barren of sail and flag- amidst which the epistle was supposed to be 7 Montaigne, ‘Of the Cannibals’, I, xxx, p. 218; Steven Mullaney, ‘Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renaissance’, &presentations 3 (1983), 40-67. 8 This play’s relationships to ideas of Victor Turner and its source, Colin Turnbull’s The Mountain People (New York, 1972), are described by Elinor Shaffer, ‘The Hermeneutic Approach to Theatre and Drama’, in New Directions in Theatre, ed. Julian Hilton (London, 1993), pp. 120-44, especially pp. 138-9. 9 See G. K. Hunter, Dramatic Identities and Cultural Tradition (Liverpool, 1978), p. 7 and James A. Boon, ‘Comparative De-Enlightenment: Paradox and Limits in the History of Ethnology’, Daedalus 109 (1980), 73-91. 10 See Andrew Hadfield, ‘Writing the "New World": more "Invisible Bullets"‘, Literature and History 2: 2 (1991), 3-19. 11 Greenblatt, Possessions, p. 8. 12 Ralph Lane, ‘The First Virginia Colony, 1585-6’, in Richard Hakluyt, Voyages to the Virginia Colonies, ed. A. L. Rowse (London, 1986), pp. 86-106, quote at p. 95; Harriot begins his ‘Brief and true report’ with a catalogue of the ‘merchantable’ (Hakluyt, Voyages, p. 109). 13 Edward Hayes, ‘Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s Newfoundland Voyage, 1583’, in Hakluyt, Voyages, pp. 21-48 quote at p. 21. 14 There is a Messianic tone in a text by the Sheffield Puritan, The Revd. William Crashaw, A Sermon Preached in London before the Right Honorable the Lord Lawarre (running title, A New rear’s Gift to Virginia) (London, 1610), but the impulse is anti-papist, ‘the plantation of a church of English christians [in Virginia], and consequently the conversion of the heathen from the devil to God’ (sig. C3r), a projection upon the New World of English religious dissension. He also writes of the redemptive power of adversity upon the basest and worst men, ‘the very excrements of a full and swelling state’ (sig. E4v); the sermon is discussed by Louis B. Wright, Religion and Empire (Chapel Hill, NC, 1943). 3 indited. The difficulties and dangers that attend a settler’s life were hinted at; and in the few words said on that subject, Mdlle Henri failed not to render audible the voice of resolve, patience, endeavour. The disasters which had driven him from his native country were alluded to; stainless honour, inflexible independence, indestructible self- respect there took the word. Past days were spoken of; the grief of parting, the regrets of absence, were touched upon; feeling, forcible and fine, breathed eloquent in every period. At the close, consolation was suggested; religious faith became there the speaker, and she spoke well.15 The Renaissance was not imbued with these heroic imperialist values; rather the New World was not seen as different but simply as the ‘Other’,16 the barbarous - a dystopia, or occasionally, as in the ironic vision of a More17 or a Montaigne,18 a Utopia. Its customs were seen in the light of an ethno- centred nature and not as another culture. The cultures described in texts like Sir Walter Ralegh’s The Discovery of Guiana (1596), or, more fantastically, in George Chapman’s wedding masque for the Princess Elizabeth (1612),19 are seen almost entirely in terms of their prosperity: the texts are a celebration of the gold that might be found in the New World. In Ralegh’s text, Guiana figures also as a political prize that might be wrested from the grasp of England’s old enemy Spain. Similarly, in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Valdes promises the hero that the spirits shall drag ‘from America the golden fleece I That yearely stuffes old Phillips treasury’. 20 The New World was also, interestingly, a source of evil: Ralegh wrote: ‘It is [Spain’s] Indian gold that indangereth and disturbeth all the nations of Europe: it purchaseth intelligence, creepeth into councils, and setteth bound loyalty at liberty in the greatest monarchies of Europe’.21 We may be reminded of the myth of syphilis, immediately supposed (and now proved22) to have crossed into Europe when Columbus returned and, in our time, the myth of the origins of Aids, a visitation from darkest Africa.