‘A Sea-Change’: Representations of the Marine in Jacobean Drama and Visual Culture By Maria Shmygol Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements of the University of Liverpool for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy December 2014 TABLE OF CONTENTS ______________________________________________________ List of Illustrations ii Acknowledgements iv Note on Presentation v INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE The Marine in English and Scottish Entertainments pre 1603 36 CHAPTER TWO Civic Pageantry: Marine Metaphor and Urban Location 69 CHAPTER THREE Seafaring and Maritime Endeavour 100 CHAPTER FOUR Strange Fish 135 CHAPTER FIVE Representations of the Marine in the Jacobean Court Masque 179 CONCLUSION 232 ILLUSTRATIONS 240 APPENDIX: Transcription and translation of Histoire tragique, & espouvantable […] d’un monstre marin (1616) 256 BIBLIOGRAPHY 263 i LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS _____________________________________________________ Fig. 1. Detail from a hand-coloured woodcut depicting the Elvetham Entertainment (1591) as it appears in the revised second quarto of the printed account. Fig. 2. Plate from John Gough Nichols, ed., The Fishmongers’ Pageant on Lord Mayor's Day, 1616 Fig. 3. Woodcut from A True Relation, of the Lives and Deaths of two Most Famous English pyrats, Purser, and Clinton (London, 1639). Fig 4. Sea monster tableau vivant from Sebastian Münster’s Comographia Universalis (Basel, 1559). Fig. 5. Detail from Olaus Magnus, Carta Marina (Rome, 1572). Fig. 6. Title-page of A Most Strange and True Report of a Monsterous Fish, that Appeared in the forme of a Woman, from her Waist Upwardes (London, 1603). Fig. 7. From Conrad Gesner, Conradi Gesneri Medici Tigurini Historiae Animalium, 5 vols (Zurich, 1551-87), IV (1558). Fig. 8. From Thomas Johnson’s The Workes of that Famous Chirurgion Ambrose Parey Translated out of Latine and Compared with the French (London, 1634) Fig. 9. From Thomas Johnson’s The Workes. Fig. 10. Woodcut illustration from Histoire tragique, & espouvantable, arrivée en l'annee 1615. en Frise, en la ville d'Emden, d'un monstre marin, representant la forme humaine (Paris, 1616). Fig. 11. A ‘Jenny Haniver’ or artificial composite monster from Book II of Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Serpentum et Draconum Historiae (Bologna, 1640). Fig. 12. Current view of Giambologna’s Apennino (Pratolino, Florence). ii Fig. 13. View of the Apennino by Stefano della Bella. Fig. 14. Buontalenti, Grotta Grande (Boboli, Florence). Fig. 15. Detail of stalactite wall decorations in the Grotto Grande. Fig. 16. Stoldo Lorenzi, Neptune Fountain (Boboli, Florence). Fig. 17. Examples of Bernard de Palissy’s pottery-ware (Victoria and Albert Museum). Fig. 18. Ewer by Adam van Vianen, 1614 (Rijksmusum). Fig. 19. Dolphin basin by Christaen van Vianen, 1635 (Victoria and Albert Museum). Fig. 20. ‘Parnassus Fountain’ from Salomon de Caus, Les Raisons des forces mouvantes (Paris, 1624). iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ______________________________________________ I would like to thank my supervisor, Prof Nandini Das, for her excellent guidance and support throughout the course of my doctoral studies, and Dr Nick Davis for his helpful feedback on my research. Many thanks to the AHRC and the University of Liverpool for providing me with funding without which the completion of this study would not have been possible. To my friends and colleagues—for the endless supply of caffeine and donuts, the play- readings, the pub trips, the giant papier-mâché bear-head, and menagerie of garden gnomes that haunted our old office—many, many thanks (especially to Douglas, Lee, Leimar, and Michelle for never failing to offer a sympathetic ear or a second pair of eyes, and for generally helping me to preserve my sanity during the ups and downs of PhD life!). With greatest thanks to my family, especially my parents, Anatoliy and Svitlana, on whose love and support I know I can always rely—за все, дякую. iv NOTE ON PRESENTATION _______________________________________________________ Standard Editions and Abbreviations: ELH English Literary History N&Q Notes and Queries OED Online edition http://dictionary.oed.com/, unless otherwise stated PMLA Publications of the Modern Languages Association SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500-1800 Initial quotations from primary sources (whether from modern editions or EEBO texts) are cited fully in a footnote following the first quotation and then appear in parentheses in the main text following all subsequent references to the text in question. Editorial Note: The usage of i/j and u/v in all quotations from early modern texts has been silently regularised, unless the quotation is taken from modern scholarly editions or appear as citations in critical texts that have retained the archaic forms). I/j, u/v, and y/i in the quotations from the Histoire tragique in Chapter Four are similarly regularised but all other early modern French forms are retained. The translation which follows the quotations is my own and appears in full alongside a transcription of the Histoire tragique in the Appendix. This thesis follows the referencing conventions of the Modern Humanities Research Association’s MHRA Style Guide: A Handbook for Authors, Editors, and Writers of Theses (2008). v INTRODUCTION _______________________________________________________ I. Representations of the marine in Jacobean drama Pericles (1606-1609) is a play haunted by the persistent threats of immersion. The storm-tossed Prince of Tyre, his wife, and their daughter come dangerously close to drowning at sea. Both the identities and the fortunes of Pericles and his family are shaped by the sea, which demonstrates its capacity to bring about the loss, reconciliation, and wonder that occur throughout the play. During the first shipwreck, which deposits Pericles in Pentapolis, the storm-tossed prince pleads with the natural elements and begs them to relent their ceaseless battering of his body: Wind, rain and thunder, remember earthly man Is but a substance that must yield to you, And I, as fits my nature, do obey you.1 ‘Substance’ is a telling choice of word here, highlighting as it does both the corporeal substance of Pericles’s anatomy and the elemental substances of air, water, and thunder that threaten to annihilate it. In the early modern theatre, these elemental substances would have been generated by very material means, given that the stormy sound effects would emanate from properties used backstage, such as the rolling of a cannon ball for thunder.2 ‘Substance’, however, also gestures towards ‘that of which something incorporeal is considered to exist’ (OED, 7b). This complicates any straightforward division of the overtly corporeal Pericles and the supposedly incorporeal elements of air and water, which are, in fact, embodied precisely through the bodily labour of the men working the sound effects backstage, while Pericles’s own corporeality is put into question in the process of being attacked by the elements. This is also echoed in Pericles’s subsequent invocation of Aeolus, the god of the 1 William Shakespeare, Pericles, ed. by Suzanne Gossett (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2004), (II. 1. 2- 4). 2 Andrew Gurr notes that ‘thunder came from the “roul’d bullet”’, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574- 1642, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 186. 1 winds, whom he begs to quell the gales and stop the ‘sulphurous flashes’ of lightening, which again alludes to the materials involved in realising the effects of the storm backstage.3 Upon being forced to contend with the elements once more in another storm at sea later in the play, Pericles, instead of attempting to address the raging elements, pleads with Neptune, whom he clearly identifies as the sovereign (and therefore the regulator) of the dangerous space in which he finds himself. He beseeches the ‘god of this great vast’ to: ...rebuke these surges Which wash both heaven and hell, and thou that hast Upon the winds command, bind them in brass, Having called them from the deep. O, still Thy deafening dreadful thunders; gently quench Thy nimble sulphurous flashes! (III. 1. 1-6) The request that Neptune should not simply quell but ‘rebuke’ the surging waters is provocative, since it implies that Neptune should shame or otherwise punish the rebellious seas which may be acting independently of his command, which suggests these spaces have the potential to resist control even at the hands of their mythological master. The suggestion that the marine forces surrounding Pericles somehow rebel against Neptune’s will is implicit here, and this supposed volatile temperamentality serves to undermine what was commonly recognised as the absolute power of the sea- god over his dominions. Pericles’s plight in the midst of these sea storms raises two important issues with which this thesis is concerned: issues of control over marine spaces and the material dimensions of representing those spaces. While the term ‘marine’ normally encompasses the natural environment of the seas and ‘maritime’ usually designates the human uses of that environment, my work reveals that the two categories often overlap 3 On the use of sulphur as means of producing lightening through fireworks see Philip Butterworth, Theatre of Fire: Special Effects in Early English and Scottish Theatre (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1998), pp. 38-46. 2 in Jacobean drama. My approach to thinking about representations of the marine necessarily takes into account the natural environment and life found in the sea, but I am also interested in exploring the maritime elements of this—that is, the human interactions and utilisations of that environment. As the ensuing chapters shall demonstrate, maritime agents and adventurers often take on the characteristics of the non-human marine fluidity. As Chapters One and Two demonstrate, for example, the richness of the iconographic, symbolic, and metaphorical devices and images associated with the marine informs celebration of maritime endeavours. Chapters Three, Four, and Five continue this line of enquiry, but in considering a range of dramatic maritime characters and distinctly non-human marine bodies they reveal that maritime occupations and personages are often inflected with a distinctly marine set of fluid characteristics.