as a local, micro setting for England’s global trade – a “contact zone” – invoking English relations of contention and exploitation with the native workers while mimicking local customs in paying homage to the Javanese ruler. Examining the “local” dimensions of the East India Company’s global vision, shaped by emergent racist ideologies and the commercial imperatives of the company’s directors in London, Barbour demonstrates a clearer cause–effect relation between economic policy and labor exploitation in the period.
The next chapter purports to be a follow-up on Bernadette Andrea’s past and present investigations on the refracted literary presences of displaced girls and women from Islamic lands in early modern English texts, in a context of globalized human and commodity traffics and turnings. “Patterning the Tatar Girl in George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesie (1589)” by Ladan Niayesh (Chapter 25) takes as its starting point one such possibility of refracted presence for the person of the Tartar girl offered to Elizabeth I by Anthony Jenkinson, an agent of the Muscovy company engaged in the circuit of textile trade with the East. It first shows how the Tatar’s girl’s presence and her connections to the textile trade networks can be inferred from the fictional oriental origin attributed by George Puttenham to pattern poetry in The Art of English Poesie (1589), a volume offered to the queen in an act of self-promotion, just as the Tatar girl herself had been offered to her with a similar promotional agenda by the Muscovy Company. It further explores how the Tatar and textile associations are reflected both in the shapes retained for Puttenham’s visual poems (including spindles) and in the textile-connected puns implied in the nomenclature and origins chosen for his Tatar and Persian speakers. Next, Niayesh moves on to study how fusing an actual ancient literary form from the West with very contemporary and global concerns allows Puttenham to map an emerging global discourse of trade and conquest onto bodies that are both the ornate ones of his poems and the transcultural ones of the ladies he stages. She concludes that Puttenham’s literary composites invite us to take stock of the social lives of artistic forms and their accumulated meanings in a period in which culture was at times as globally interwoven as the patterns on the rich textiles that were traded internationally.
Some implications one can draw from this chapter are that global history is not a straightforward contractual document of one-way conquest and subjection but a complex and at times experimental narrative progressing by fits and starts. Fine prints and supplements add up to produce a ramified narrative, with meaning greater than the sum total of its parts. Thus, to explore an instance, here those fine prints and supplements bring into focus the contribution of gendered subaltern voices refusing to be suppressed by the master narrative of European economic and cultural engagements with the global.
The Globe Staged
It would be a critical commonplace to suggest that the very name of Renaissance London’s Globe Theater pointed to the drama’s engagement with England’s role in the expanding world of exploration and trade, with the metaphor of “the world as stage” evoking life as reminiscent of a play. London’s thriving trading communities and cosmopolitan atmosphere provided large audiences, including foreign visitors from Europe, for both the public and private theaters. While the presence of penny-paying apprentices and others in the pit was often invoked by the players, new infusions of money also made the theaters a part of a growing consumerist culture, as one theater historian notes: “Drake’s bullion ships indirectly helped the players because the more that wealth came to the hand in the readily exchangeable form of money, the more the idle gallants, hangers-on at Court, and Inns-of-Court lawyers were created to seek the entertainment the players were selling” (Gurr, 13). English drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was strongly nationalistic in many of its historical and cultural themes and characters, and not surprisingly so, given the aristocratic patronage system as well the royal censorship. Yet equally striking is the drama’s engagement with England’s expanding geographical, cultural, religious, and commercial horizons, and with the peoples from foreign lands. Cosmopolitan London in the Renaissance is frequently described as a place with large numbers of foreigners and foreign commodities omnipresent in the city streets (Howard 2007, 19–23). Several earlier essays in this volume draw on plays such as Shakespeare’s Othello, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays, and Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday in order to show how they incorporated and engaged with global perspectives and processes: in terms of commerce, geography, encounters with foreigners – especially with Moors, Turks, and other Muslims – and involving complex race, gender, class, and sexual politics. The four essays in Part IV are reminiscent of these earlier chapters, but they focus more exclusively on early modern English drama – both in terms of text and performance. Thus, they demonstrate that globalization was not simply an economic movement but as much a product of the cultural and ideological work done by the popular institution of the theater. And, finally, though we assume this drama as quintessentially English, these essays demonstrate its incorporation of many “worlds elsewhere” into its repertoire and appeal.
The public theater’s engagement with “the circulation of fashionable and exotic objects and people, an engagement that was part of its allure” is the subject of the opening essay of this section by Jean E. Howard: “Bettrice’s Monkey: Staging Exotica in Early Modern London Comedy” (Chapter 26). She begins with a scene in the middle of the first act in a London city comedy, Eastward Ho, in which stage directions indicate that Bettrice, a maid in the home of the goldsmith, Touchstone, enters “leading a monkey after her.” Who or what is this monkey? Is it a prop and if not, where did the live monkey come from? Addressing these questions, Howard examines their symbolic associations and performative skills as well as the novelty of acquiring and flaunting a real monkey, which came “among the unitemized curiosities and trifles offloaded with more serious cargo of spices, cloth, and precious metals brought from these long voyages.” They came from regions as far away as India, Africa, and South America, supporting a trend of the domestication of the exotic into “English regimes of representation and pleasure.”
Suggesting that the play probably used a real monkey on stage, in a drive for “novelty,” Howard also explains how it would also have strengthened the play’s imbrications within the geography of the East and West, “situating the theater in a geographical frame much larger than that of London proper.” Typically, London comedy may be considered a localized genre, since its subject matter focuses on the locales and mores of the city, but, as Howard demonstrates, “this most localized of genres is also a cosmopolitan and decidedly global genre.” Clearly, then, the seemingly innocuous though attention-grabbing presence of the monkey on the stage in Eastward Ho brought home to domestic audiences a reminder of England’s global trade and proto-colonial explorations as well as reinforcing in them a taste for novelties that buttressed that very trade.
A number of themes and issues that thread through this volume reemerge in the next essay (Chapter 27) by Virginia Mason Vaughan titled “The Maltese Factor: The Poetics of Place in The Jew of Malta and The Knight of Malta.” These include England’s increasing geographical awareness; the role of Venice and its geopolitics in the English imagination; English relations with the Ottoman Turks and the Catholic Spaniards; and the complex and often fraught cross-cultural interactions in “contact zones” on the borders of Europe, in this case the island of Malta in the Mediterranean. The English stage, Vaughan demonstrates, functions as a site for reenactments of these global issues and geopolitics in two plays, Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (c. 1589–1592) and The Knight of Malta, crafted by John Fletcher, Nathan Field, and Philip Massinger for the King’s Company in 1619. According to Vaughan, both plays draw their themes and characters from the historical episode of the siege of Malta in 1565, when the last order of crusading knights in Europe miraculously defeated the Turks: Marlowe’s play depicts Malta “as a site of commercial transactions among Jews, Christians, and Ottoman Turks,” and The Knight of Malta “uses the island’s famous knights (The Order of St. John) as the backdrop for complex negotiations between rival suitors for ‘Oriana,’ the chaste heroine.”