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Introduction: Reading Persia in Renaissance England

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Introduction: Reading Persia in Renaissance England Notes Introduction: Reading Persia in Renaissance England 1. Chartered in 1555, its origins lie in the failed 1553 Willoughby and Chancellor voyage to the northeast passage, and the company was founded as the Mystery and Company of Merchant Adventurers to New Found Lands. 2. ‘The voyage to Cathaio by the East is doutlesse very easie and short’, the geogra- pher Gerardus Mercator wrote to Richard Hakluyt, ‘and I haue oftentimes mar- velled, that being so happily begun it hath bene left of[f], and the course changed into the West, after that more then half of your voyage was discovered’. Richard Hakluyt, The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1935), vol. 1, p. 161. 3. He was not, however, the first Englishman sent on embassy to the Safavid court. The cloth merchant Robert Brancetour was sent by Charles V in 1529. See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to be Alien: Travails and Encounteres in the Early Modern World (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2011), pp. 82–3. 4. Richard Hakluyt, The Principall Nauigations, Voiages, and Discoueries of the English Nation (London: George Bishop and Ralphe Newberie, 1589), sig. [2K6]r–v/ff. 361–2. 5. On Achaemenid iconography in Safavid royal ideology, see Colin Mitchell, The Practice of Politics in Safavid Iran: Power, Religion and Rhetoric (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2011). 6. Johannes Boemus, one of the few to lament the difference between the Achaemenids and Safavids, presents it as one of military culture. He is writing barely twenty years after the Safavid accession, however, having observed only the early days of the Persian campaign against the Ottomans: ‘It was once a warlike nation, and had for a long space the gouernment of the East: but now for want of excercise in armes, it fayleth much of his ancient glory.’ The manners, lawes, and customes of all nations, trans. Edward Aston (London: George Eld, 1611), sig. H1v. 7. Giovanni-Tommaso Minadoi The History of the Warres Betweene the Turkes and the Persians, trans. Abraham Hartwell (London: John Wolfe, 1595), sig. H2v; the English traveller to Persia John Cartwright repeats it in The Preachers Trauels (London: for Thomas Thorppe, 1611), sig. H2v. The translation is that of Abraham Hartwell, secretary to Elizabeth’s trusted friend and Privy Councillor, Archbishop Whitgift; by 1595 Elizabeth’s potential sources on Persia had improved greatly. On Minadoi and the introduction of his text to England even before its 1587 publication, see Abid Hafiz Masood’s unpublished doctoral dissertation, ‘From Cyrus to Abbas: Staging Persia in Early Modern England’ (University of Sussex, 2011), p. 84. 8. Both Elizabeth and Minadoi overstate Persian political and economic power, however: the Ottoman empire was undeniably the superpower in the region. See pp. 8–11. 9. Gerald MacLean and Nabil Matar, Britain and the Islamic World, 1558–1713 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 14. 10. Lodowick Lloyd gives an extensive summary of the various classical accounts of Cyrus in The Consent of Time (London: George Bishop and Ralphe Newberie, 1590) at sig. Q1–Q3. 185 186 Notes 11. Richard III, 5.4.13; Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), p. 111; Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (London: Richard Grafton, 1553), sig. 2F1; Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster (1570), ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 38. 12. See Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 3. 13. On the medieval European constructions of Islam in which these representations partake, see Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient 1100–1450 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). 14. The Faerie Queene, I.iv.7. These particular examples are cited by Samuel Chew in The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England During the Renaissance (New York: Octagon Books, 1937; rpt. 1965), pp. 234–5, but there are many more. 15. See Jonathan Woolfson, ‘Thomas Hoby, William Thomas and Mid-Tudor Travel to Italy’, in The Oxford Handbook to Tudor Literature, 1485–1603, ed. Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), pp. 404–17. 16. Roger Savory, Iran Under the Safavids (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 118. 17. Carole Levin and John Watkins, Shakespeare’s Foreign Worlds: National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), pp. 51–2. 18. Anthony Parr, ‘Foreign Relations in Jacobean England: The Sherley Brothers and the “Voyage of Persia”’, in Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, ed. Jean- Pierre Maquerlot and Michèle Willems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 14–31 (p. 20). 19. See also Su Fang Ng, ‘Pirating Paradise: Alexander the Great, Dutch East Indies, and Satanic Empire in Milton’s Paradise Lost’, Milton Studies 52 (2011): 59–91. 20. ‘Linguistic cues signaled the reader to engage the conceptual operation of relat- ing.’ Frances Dolan, True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth- Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), p. 15. 21. This compliment comes from Thomas Middleton’s translation of Andrew Leech’s pamphlet on Robert Sherley’s reception at Cracow. In ‘England’s complaint to Persia’, England apostrophizes Persia and reproaches her for keeping Sherley away from her: ‘O thou glorious kingdome, thou chief of empires, the palace where wisdom only kept her court, the land that was governed by none but wise men […] thou robbest me of my subject.’ ‘Sir Robert Sherley His Entertainment in Cracovia’, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 673–8 (p. 675). 22. See Stewart Mottram, ‘Reading the Rhetoric of Nationhood in Two Reformation Pamphlets by Richard Morison and Nicholas Bodrugan’, Renaissance Studies 19 (2005): 523–40. 23. See David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 70–81. The 1580s also witnessed some of England’s foundational imperial moments: the Munster plantation in Ireland, the first settlements of what would become the Virginia colony. 24. Sidney, Apology, p. 103. 25. The Boke Named the Governour (1531), Book 2, chapter 9 is particularly closely modelled on the Cyropaedia. 26. David Harris Sacks, ‘The True Temper of Empire: Dominion, Friendship and Exchange in the English Atlantic, c. 1575–1625’, Renaissance Studies 26 (2012): 531–58 (pp. 531–2, 534–5). Notes 187 27. On Renaissance republican thought see Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 28. Minadoi, History of the Warres, sig. B4v. 29. On the strained efforts of Italian humanist scholars to identify some kind of classical origins for the Ottomans in the absence of evidence, see Margaret Meserve, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 117–54. 30. So, for example, the title of William Parry’s 1601 travel account refers to Anthony Sherley’s travels ‘to the Persian Empire’. 31. See Mitchell, The Practice of Politics, especially pp. 19–67 (p. 17) and Kathryn Babayan, Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 32. See Mitchell, The Practice of Politics, pp. 15–16. Access (albeit indirect) to the writings of Hetoum of Korikos also helped to consolidate that imperial link between ancient and Safavid Persia thanks to his evincing of Persian imperium in the period following the Arab invasions, especially under the Seljuks. See Meserve, Empires of Islam, pp. 163–8. 33. Daniel Vitkus critiques Fuchs’s ‘imperium studies’ model, arguing that we should call this an age of plunder rather than of empire. Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 3. 34. Samuel Daniel, Defence of Ryme, in A Panegyrike Congratulatory … (London: [R. Read] for Edward Blount, 1603), sig. G4v. 35. Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006; first published 2003), p. 107. 36. On British efforts to escape or rewrite its ‘barbarian’ past, see Neil Rhodes, ‘Shakespeare the Barbarian’, in Early Modern Civil Discourses, ed. Jennifer Richards (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 99–114; Sean Keilen, Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of English Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Jodi Mikalachki, The Legend of Boadicea: Gender and Nation in Early Modern England (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). On the tarnish of Roman Catholicism in English historical engagements with Rome, see John E. Curran, The Roman Invasions: The British History, Protestant Anti-Romanism and the Historical Imagination in England, 1530–1660 (Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont, 2002). 37. Willy Maley, ‘Postcolonial Cymbeline: Sovereignty and Succession from Roman to Renaissance Britain’, in his Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
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