Abstract
Rivers were vital to the identities and economies of ancient and early modern societies. Rivers were the key to how people interpreted the landscapes they experienced, from their early recorded encounters in Greek and Roman times to Renaissance associations of rivers with knowledge, conflict, and power. Water and its active management was a critical component to European economies, and it was with this mentality that ancient and early modern peoples approached the rivers. Is it possible to view river landscapes in and through human experience? Differing expectations and answers to this question may help to explain early modern English and European-related imagination of geography, river landscapes, and river cities as disclosed in drama. Emotions—from greed and pride, to enmity, frustration, and despair—informed many geographic accounts about rivers and the dramatic representations of river nations. What are the emotional traces of these actions and descriptions as mirrored in early modern English drama? Additionally, can we draw upon such emotions to find common ground to interpret dramatic interaction concerning river metaphors? Early modern playwrights used classical and mythological ramifications of river symbols to serve their dramatic design. They drew on a network of associations to establish the context and to delineate the objectives of certain scenes—particularly those which emphasized foreignness and displacement, internal dissension, civic disorder, and war.
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Notes
Wyman H. Herendeen, From Landscape to Literature: The River and the Myth of Geography (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1986), 117.
Julie Sanders, The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama, 1620–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 64.
Mark S. R. Jenner, “From Conduit Community to Commercial Network? Water in London: 1500–1725,” in Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London, ed. Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 250–72, 254.
Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modem England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 57.
Hester Lee-Jeffries, England’s Helicon: Fountains in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Andrew McRae, Literature and Domestic Travel in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 21–66.
See Jacqueline Pearson, “Shakespeare and Caesar’s Revenge” Shakespeare Quarterly 32 (1981): 101–4.
Pearson suggests that, although the play appears in the Stationers’ Register in June 1606, it is almost certainly Elizabethan rather than Jacobean, and hypothesizes that Shakespeare knew Caesar’s Revenge. See also Harry Morgan Ayres, “Caesar’s Revenge,” PMLA, 30, no. 4 (1915): 771–87.
Anonymous, The Tragedy of Pompey or Caesar’s Revenge, ed. F. S. Boas, The Malone Society Reprints, gen. ed. W. W. Greg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911), sig. Blv.
W. B. Patterson gives an iconic example of James’s role as a peacemaker by describing the ceiling of the Banqueting House at Whitehall, where Peter Paul Rubens’s paintings of James’s achievements show that the king rejects the warrior god Mars, who is vanquished by Minerva, the goddess of wisdom and peaceful negotiation. See W. B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 358.
Reid Barbour, English Epicures and Stoics: Ancient Legacies in Early Stuart Culture (Massachusetts: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 190.
Jodi Mikalachki, “The Masculine Romance of Roman Britain: Cymbeline and Early Modern English Nationalism,” in Shakespeare’s Romances, ed. Alison Thorne, 117–44, New Casebook Series (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), notes the masculine associations in the symbolic merging of national emblems in the construction of empire in Cymbeline, Bonduca, and The True Trojans, which dramatize “the masculine romance of Roman Britain” (127). River symbology, I would add, emphasizes the geographic and intellectual reflexivity of masculine identification to the point in which rivers become analogous with the empires they border.
Lisa Hopkins, The Cultural Uses of the Caesars on the English Renaissance Stage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 127–28.
Neither the play’s date of composition nor the date of its one attested performance is known. However, Lisa Hopkins remarks that “It seems reasonable to assume” that the play’s date of composition and original performance were close together (39). See Lisa Hopkins, “We Were the Trojans: British National Identities in 1633,” Renaissance Studies 16, no. 1 (2002): 36–51.
John E. Curran, Jr., Roman Invasions: The British History: Protestant Anti-Romanism, and the Historical Imagination in England, 1530–1660 (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Preses, 2002), 20.
Warren Chernaik, Myth of Rome in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 219.
Thomas May, The Tragedy of Julia Agrippina Empresse of Rome (1633), in Materialien zur Kunde des älteren Englisches Drama, ed. W. Bang (Louvain: A. Uystpruyst; London: David Nutt, 1914).
See Lisa Hopkins, The Cultural Uses of Caesars, 140–41; Dale B. J. Randall, Winter Fruit: English Drama, 1642–1660 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 245–46, suggests May’s allusion to the Italian-born French Queen Marie de Médicis, Henrietta Maria’s mother.
See also Curtis Perry, Literature and Favoritism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 258–63.
For Queen Henrietta Maria as a transgressive female performer, see Su Fang Ng, Literature and the Polities of the Family in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 40–45.
Publius Cornelius Tacitus, The Histories, trans. Cliford H. Moore, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1962), 1:3.45.
Tacitus, The Annals of Tacitus, trans. George Gilbert Ramsay, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1909), 2: 123.
Writing about the new nostalgic and patriotic tastes of the Jacobean and Caroline amphitheaters, Martin Butler includes A Shoemaker, A Gentleman among the plays performed in 1608, demonstrating that the play “gives a lively account of a mythical British past, in which good princes and common men combine to defend Christianity against Roman persecution” (585). See Martin Butler, “Literature and the Theatre to 1660,” in The Cambridge History of Early Modern Literature, ed. David Lowenstein and Janel Mueller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 565–602.
Andrew Escobedo refers to Henry V when discussing the dynastic anxieties emerging from Shakespeare’s dramatization of Roman Britain in Cymbeline: “An English king claims blood comradeship with a Welsh subject whose ancestors the English violently displaced centuries ago, and so the appeal to ancient British roots potentially reveals national heritage as an imposed fabrication, dividing the nation as much as it legitimizes it” (60). See Andrew Escobedo, “From Britannia to England: Cymbeline and the Beginning of Nations,” Shakespeare Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2008): 60–87.
William Rowley, A Shoemaker, A Gentleman, in William Rowley: All’s Lost by Lust, and A Shoemaker, A Gentleman, ed. Charles Warton Stork, Publications of the University of Pennsylvania, Series in Philology and Literature, vol. 13 (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1910), 163–260, 176.
Colin Kidd, British Ldentities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 9–10.
Alison A. Chapman comments on the social leveling related to shoemakers, showing that the play “furthers the associations between shoemakers and the making of holidays”; the play dramatizes the first two stories of Deloney’s Gentle Craft, uses the story of Crispin and Crispianus as the main plot, and turns the account of Sir Hugh’s disguise as a shoemaker and subsequent martyrdom in the subplot (1479). See Alison A. Chapman, “Whose Saint Crispin’s Day Is It? Shoemaking, Holidaymaking and the Politics of Memory in Early Modern England,” Renaissance Quarterly 54c, no. 4 (2001): 1467–94.
Lisa Hopkins, “Roman Ruins on the English Stage,” Philological Quarterly 89, no. 4 (2010): 415–33, 419.
Historian Peter Heather, in “Afterword: Neglecting the Barbarian,” in Neglected Barbarians, ed. Florin Curta, Studies in the Early Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepolis Publishers, 2010), 605–23, 32, observes that a fundamental reason for the “historic neglect of barbarians” is “the almost complete lack of first-hand access to their history” (607).
Nicholas Purcell, “Romans in the Roman World,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Augustus, ed. Karl Galinsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 85–105, writes about the border relationships in the Roman period and observes: “Negotiating and regulating the boundaries between various sorts of insiders and outsiders was one of the main functions of public institutions” (87).
Sam Moorhead and David Stuttard, in The Romans Who Shaped Britain (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012), show that British settlement and life here were directly affected not just by wars between rival British tribes but by the state of the empire.
For other historical works covering the main aspects of life in the province, see David Mattingly, An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire, 54 BC-AD 409 (London: Penguin Group, 2006)
Richard Hobbs and Ralph Jackson, Roman Britain: Life at the Edge of the Empire (London: The British Museum Press, 2010)
Miles Russell and Stuart Laycock, Unroman Britain: Exposing the Great Myth of Britannia (London: The History Press, 2011).
Andrew Hadfield, “Tragedy and the Nation State,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy, ed. Emma Smith and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 30–43, 31.
Ruth Morse, “Shakespeare and the Remains of Britain,” in Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents, ed. Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper, and Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 119–37, 130.
Rachel E. Hille, “The Limitations of Concord in the Thames-Medway Marriage Canto of The Faerie Queene” Studies in Philology 108, no. 1 (2011): 70–85, 82. Hille argues for an aspect of “concord” as the bringing together of opposites, in an attempt to educate the reader in virtue (70). I submit that in The Tragedy of Locrine, however, the river imagery destabilizes the idea of harmony and typifies dissension within the family, nation, and self.
Anonymous, The Tragedy of Locrine, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, gen. ed. W. W. Gregg, The Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908).
On Shakespeare apocrypha in relation to Locrine, see William Kozenko, Disputed Plays of William Shakespeare (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1974)
Jane Lytton Gooch, ed., The Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine: A Critical Edition (New York: Garland, 1981), 27–32
Peter Kirwan, “The First Collected ‘Shakespeare Apocrypha,’” Shakespeare Quarterly 62, no. 4 (2011): 594–601
Richard Finkelstein, in “The Politics of Gender, Puritanism, and Shakespeare’s Third Folio,” Philological Quarterly 79 (2000): 315–41, demonstrates how the plays included in the Third Folio (including Locrine) feature Puritan concerns but not always Puritan sympathies
see also James G. McManaway, “New Discoveries in the Third Folio of Shakespeare,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 70 (1976): 469–76.
Comparing the two versions of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia, A. E. Parsons observes: “The belief that English Kings had a right, other than that of the sword, to the thrones of Wales and Scotland, of Brittany and, indeed, to the whole of France, though bolstered from time to time by specious arguments, had its ultimate source in the Brut and Arthur legends” (397). A. E. Parsons, “The Trojan Legend in England: Some Instance of Its Application to the Politics of the Times,” The Modern Language Review 24 (1929): 294–408.
Huston Diehl, “The Iconography of Violence in English Renaissance Tragedy, Renaissance Drama 11 (1980): 27–44, 30. G. Blakemore Evans speaks of the “crude realism” represented by stage blood in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama: A New Mermaid Background Book, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (London: A & C Black, 1987), 70–77. This is part of the tragedy genre’s paraphernalia, and the violent emotions were intensified, I suggest, by the bloody river symbolism.
Anonymous, The Tragedy of Tiberius (1607), gen. ed. W. W. Gregg, The Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1914), A3v.
Christopher Hill, “The English Revolution and Patriotism,” Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, ed. Raphael Samuel, 159–68 (London: Routledge, 1989), 1: 163.
Philip Edwards, in Threshold of a Nation: A Study in English and Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), notes: “There is certainly a cheap and unsavoury patriotism in many history plays, with crude and obscene attacks on everything to do with Catholicism, derision of the martial ability of foreigners, and strutting complacency about the justice of the English cause and the invincibility of her soldiers” (67–68).
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© 2015 Monica Matei-Chesnoiu
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Matei-Chesnoiu, M. (2015). Hydrography as Poetics: Rivers and Empires. In: Geoparsing Early Modern English Drama. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137469410_4
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