Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World

Travel and Travail Early Modern Cultural Studies SerieS editorS Carole Levin Marguerite A. Tassi travel and travail Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World Edited and with an introduction by Patricia Akhimie and Bernadette Andrea UniverSity of nebraSka Press Lincoln and London © 2019 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Akhimie, Patricia, editor, writer of introduction. | Andrea, Bernadette Diane, editor, writer of introduction. Title: Travel and travail: Early Modern women, English drama, and the wider world / edited and with an introduction by Patricia Akhimie and Bernadette Andrea. Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [2018] | Series: Early modern cultural studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2018027855 iSbn 9781496202260 (pbk.: alk. paper) iSbn 9781496210296 (epub) iSbn 9781496210302 (mobi) iSbn 9781496210319 (pdf ) Subjects: lcSh: English drama— Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500– 1600— History and criticism. | Women travelers in literature. | English prose literature— Women authors— History and criticism. | Women travelers. | Travelers’ writings, English— History and criticism. Classification: lcc Pr678.w6 t73 2018 | ddc 820.9/32082– dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018027855 Set in Merope Basic by Mikala R. Kolander. contentS List of Illustrations viii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World 1 Patricia akhimie and bernadette andrea Part 1 Early Modern Women Travelers: Global and Local Trajectories 1. Desdemona and Mrs. Keeling 19 richmond barboUr 2. A Stranger Bride: Mariam Khan and the East India Company 41 karen robertSon 3. Sailing to India: Women, Travel, and Crisis in the Seventeenth Century 64 amrita Sen 4. Teresa Sampsonia Sherley: Amazon, Traveler, and Consort 81 carmen nocentelli 5. The Global Travels of Teresa Sampsonia Sherley’s Carmelite Relic 102 bernadette andrea 6. Gender and Travel Discourse: Richard Lassels’s “The Voyage of the Lady Catherine Whetenall from Brussells into Italy” (1650) 121 Patricia akhimie 7. Advance and Retreat: Reading English Colonial Choreographies of Pocahontas 139 eliSa oh 8. Lady Anne Clifford’s Way and Aristocratic Women’s Travel 158 laUra williamSon ambroSe Part 2 Early Modern Women and the Globe: Gendered Travel on the English Stage 9. Mapping Women: Place Names and a Woman’s Place 181 laUra aydelotte 10. Eroticizing Women’s Travel: Desdemona and the Desire for Adventure in Othello 199 StePhanie chamberlain 11. Desdemona’s Divided Duty: Gender and Courtesy in Othello 215 michael Slater 12. From Adventure to Danger in the Travels of Desdemona and Miranda 236 eder Jaramillo 13. Marian Mobility, Black Madonnas, and the Cleopatra Complex 250 Ruben EspinoSa 14. Precarious Travail, Gender, and Narration in Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World 273 dyani JohnS taff 15. Traveling Companions: Shakespeare’s As You Like It and the Book of Ruth 292 SUzanne tartamella 16. English Women, Romance, and Global Travel in Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West, Part I 313 Gaywyn moore Afterword: Looking for the Women in Early Modern Travel Writing 331 mary c. Fuller Contributors 353 Index 357 illustrationS Following page 157 1. Sandro Botticelli, Venus and Mars, ca. 1485 2. The Santa Casa and Madonna di Loreto, The history of our B. Lady of Loreto, 1608 3. Map depicting properties of Lady Anne Clifford’s inheritance in northern England 4. Map of England depicting Lady Anne Clifford’s many residences and properties 5. Natural history cabinet, Ferrante Imperato, Dell’historia naturale, 1599 viii acknowledGmentS First and foremost, we thank the participants in our seminar on “Early Modern Women and Travel: Local Histories and Global Designs” at the 2016 Shakespeare Association of America conference in New Orleans. This collection has grown far beyond that seminar, with new contributors and substantially expanded (sometimes radically different) chapters. The collaborative spirit of the seminar happily extended throughout the editing of this collection, which led to the historical, interpretive, and methodological questions we raise in our introduction. We look forward to seeing how this conversation continues, guided by these questions and beyond them to sources, histories, and locales we could not cover. Patricia would like to thank the Shakespeare Association of America for the invitation to propose a seminar on the topic of early modern women’s travel, and, of course, Bernadette, for her steadfast partner- ship. Thanks also to Manu and to PJ, who was born not long before this book began. Bernadette, in addition to her expressing her gratitude to Patricia for our several collaborations on early modern women and travel, would like to thank Brianne Dayley, who is completing her doctoral degree at the University of Texas–San Antonio, for her assiduous bibliographical work. And, as always, thanks to Ben. Introduction Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World Patricia akhimie and bernadette andrea Traditionally, early modern women’s travel has been construed as an “absent presence” due to the general ban on women’s movement outside the domestic sphere. An influential articulation of this ban was disseminated in The Traveiler of Jerome Turler (1575), which intones: “the wide wandring of Weemen cannot want suspition, & bringeth some toke[n] of dishonestie. Whereupon the Tragicall and Comicall Poets, when they bringe in any far traueiling Woman, for the most parte they feine her to be incontinent,” or unchaste.1 Another popular travel guide, Thomas Palmer’s An Essay of the Meanes how to make our Travailes, into forraine Countries, the more profitable and honorable (1606), lists women in general—along with “Infants,” “Decrepite persons,” “Fooles,” “Mad- men,” and “Lunaticke[s]”— under the category “What persons are inhib- ited trauaile,” or prohibited from traveling.2 By adducing new sources and examining familiar sources in new ways, the essays collected here confirm that a wide range of girls and women engaged in extensive movement within and beyond the British Isles during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries despite these proscriptions.3 Complementing this expanded focus on historical women travelers, contributors also engage the representation of women’s travel on the English public stage and in other manuscript and printed works.4 Such representations arguably function as a reproach to the travel ban promulgated in admonitory tracts and as further evidence of women’s movement within and outside England, whether voluntary (recreational, educational, or at least self- willed) or involuntary (occurring as a result of political exile, religious persecution, capture, enslavement, or coercion).5 1 In focusing on historical and literary sources, this collection accord- ingly highlights and rectifies gendered lacunae in foundational studies such Jaś Elsner and Joan- Pau Rubiés’s Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cul- tural History of Travel (1999), which defines “travel” as “a culturally signifi- cant event rather than as mere physical movement.”6 Yet, this definition effaces the wide range of forms women’s travel took in the premodern era, as the lone reference to a medieval woman pilgrim demonstrates.7 Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna Singh’s Travel Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period (2001), which pairs critical essays with excerpts from travel narratives to the Levant, India, and Africa, includes a section on the Ottoman travels of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1716– 18).8 Yet, the inclusion of the canonical Montagu only reinforces the widely held belief that women’s travel begins in earnest only in the eighteenth century.9 In this vein, Kristi Siegel’s edited volume, Gender, Genre, and Iden- tity in Women’s Travel Writing (2004), includes a chapter on Montagu but focuses on travel narratives from the Victorian period so that Montagu comes to seem like the terminus a quo of early modern women’s travel.10 Andrew McRae in his influential study Literature and Domestic Travel in Early Modern England (2009) offers astute readings of Queen Elizabeth I’s progresses at the end of the sixteenth century and Celia Fiennes’s travels within Britain at the end of the seventeenth century.11 However, because he asserts that “in the early modern period to ‘travel’ typically meant to leave the nation’s shores,” he does not account for women’s travel to and from Britain as dependent wives, servants, and chattel.12 More recently, in Mind-Travelling in Early Modern England (2013), David McInnis adduces Aphra Behn’s “New World” writings to conceptualize travel in the period. However, he does not address female travelers or travel prior to the late seventeenth century.13 In dialogue with related critical studies, Travel and Travail features new historical material and new readings of familiar texts to account for the journeys of these various girls and women.14 It thereby expands our understanding of “travel” in the period, as well as the archive of “travel writing,” to account for the journeys of a diverse group of girls and women. To this end, the essays address a series of pressing con- ceptual, historical, literary, and methodological questions. To start, 2 | Akhimie and Andrea what constitutes “travel” for early modern women locally and glob- ally? How is women’s

Load more