Abstract
The presence and influence of the Amazons, Hippolyta and Emilia, and the assertive French female warriors, Joan and Margaret, generate a powerful sense of instability that endangers gender roles and threatens to erode national and cultural identity. The next two chapters will focus on Jews and Moors in order to explore the place of the written word in the cross-cultural experience. I will argue that in The Merchant of Venice, Titus Andronicus, and Othello the cross-cultural encounter, while retaining its gender foundation, becomes a textual negotiation.
Here you may both see all manner of fashions of attire, and heare all the languages of Christendome, besides those that are spoken by the barbarous Ethnickes; the frequencie of people being so great.
Thomas Coryat, Coryat’s Crudities (1611)
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Notes
Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 215.
Bergeron, Royal Family, Royal Lovers, p. 79. An example from the nineteenth century illustrates how archives can be searched to resuscitate a tradition or ceremony. After Dom Pedro, Crown Prince of Portugal, proclaimed Brazil’s independence in 1822 and was proclaimed emperor, Brazilians searched the Portuguese archives to duplicate, in the New World, the coronation ceremonies used by the Portuguese kings. Particularly elaborate was the order of precedence used in the Portuguese court, which was carefully searched and adopted for the coronation of Dom Pedro. The archives were also searched for the state funeral of President Kennedy, which was carefully modeled on the funeral of President Lincoln. I have discussed these examples in ‘The Peasants’ Revolt and the Writing of History in 2 Henry VI,’ in Reading and Writing in Shakespeare, ed. David M. Bergeron (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), pp. 178-93.
E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (1923; rpt Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 3: 484.
John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 123.
See Apollonius of Rhodes, Jason and the Golden Fleece (The Argonau-tica), trans. Richard Hunter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. xix-xxi.
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Works, ed. E N. Robinson (1933; rpt Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), pp. 506-7.
John Lydgate, The Hystorye / Sege and Dystruccyon of Troye (London, 1513), 1: sig. C4-C6. In the Folger Library copy of STC 5579, the illustration appears on sig. C4.
Robert Withington, English Pageantry: An Historical Outline (1918; rpt New York: Benjamin Bloom, 1963), 1: 176.
David M. Bergeron, ed., Pageants and Entertainments of Anthony Munday: A Critical Edition (New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1985), p. 77.
David M. Bergeron, ‘Politics and The Tempest,’ lecture given at ‘The Heart of America Shakespeare Festival’ in Kansas City, Missouri, on 3 July 1993.
Robert Bassett, Curiosities or the Cabinet of Nature, contayning Phylosophicall Naturall and Morali Questions answered (London: 1637), pp. 11-12.
Julian Litten, The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral Since 1450 (London: Robert Hale, 1991), p. 92.
David Cecil, The Cecils of Hatfield House: An English Ruling Family (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), p. 158.
Olivia Bland, The Royal Way of Death (London: Constable, 1986)
Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, 1984).
Kathleen Cohen, Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol: The Transi Tomb in the Eate Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).
In the Appendix to Gasper Cantarini, The Commonwealth and Gouernment of Venice, trans. Lewis Lewkenor (London, 1599), sig. Cc2v
Euripides, Medea, in Medea and Other Plays, trans. Philip Vellacott (London: Penguin; New York: Viking/Penguin, 1963), p. 33.
Jessica, The Merchant of Venice, and the Discourse of Early Modern English Identity,’ PMLA 113.1 (1998): 52-63
Bernard Glassman, in Anti-Semitic Stereotypes without Jews: Images of the Jews in England 1290-1700 (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1975)
Norman Jones, God and the Moneylenders: Usury and Law in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
For detailed analyses, consult Scarlett Freund and Teofilo F. Ruiz, eds, Jewish-Christian Encounters Over the Centuries: Symbiosis, Prejudice, Holocaust, Dialogue (New York: Peter Lang, 1994)
Richard H. Popkin and Gordon M. Weiner, eds, Jewish Christians and Christian Jews: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1994)
B. Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain (New York: Random House, 1995)
James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
Fynes Moryson, Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary, ed. Charles Hughes (London: Sherratt & Hughes, 1903)
Thomas Coryat, Coryat’s Crudities (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1905), 1: 370-6.
John Stow, The Annales of England (London, 1605), p. 137. See Shapiro, pp. 46-76.
Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), pp. 143-4.
George Carleton, A Thankfvll Remembrance of Gods Mercie (London, 1630), p. 164.
Alfred Rubens, Anglo-Jewish Portraits (London: Jewish Museum, 1935)
Andrewe Boorde, The Tyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge (London, 1542).
P. Boaistuau, Certaine Secrete Wonders of Nature, translated by Edward Fenton (London, 1569), fol. 141.
Gen. 31: 19-21. Quotation from The New English Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1993).
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© 1999 Geraldo U. de Sousa
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de Sousa, G.U. (1999). Textual Encodings in The Merchant of Venice. In: Shakespeare’s Cross-Cultural Encounters. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286658_4
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