struggled for domination” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In his representation of Jews in Malta, for instance, Marlowe draws on both negative and positive associations, as collaborators with the Turkish enemy and as defenders of Europeans in his portrayal of Barabas. And in The Knight of Malta it is the black woman, Abdella, who “can never be integrated into Maltese society because she lacks whiteness, the sign of sexual purity.” Ironically, even while dealing with the threat posed by the Ottoman Turks, “infidels,” both plays ultimately mark not the Turk as enemy, but “the alien within who must be expunged.” Whether depicting tragic scapegoats or comic butts for jokes, English Renaissance drama frequently deployed figures of “otherness” – outsiders – who evoked social, cultural, and religious anxieties in an expanding world. Not surprisingly, such figures were often foreigners.
The next essay (Chapter 28) by David Morrow frames its argument in the general questions about globalization and capitalism with which the volume began (as in Vitkus and Bartolovich). Titled “Local–Global Pericles: International Storytelling, Domestic Social Relations, Capitalism,” this essay provides a counterpoint to others in the collection in offering a “domestic” reading of a “global” play. It revisits the long-standing debate about the origin of capitalism by working within the narrative of social transformation developed by Ellen Wood.
Morrow focuses on how Shakespeare’s play raises and resolves issues around the transformation of the social relations of domestic production, arguing that Pericles “everywhere appeals to the reciprocal rights and obligations of communal ideology,” as instantiated in Shakespeare’s insistence on the play’s links with ritual: in the banter of the fishermen; in the benevolent rule of Cerimon; and in the representations of the travailing bodies of Pericles, Marina, and the prostitutes. Yet Morrow asserts that because they were enacted within the capitalist playhouse such residual appeals generate and reveal contradictions that are inextricably part of the social transformations that Shakespeare examines. Morrow maintains that attention to the process that Marx termed “primitive accumulation” offers a fruitful (and neglected) means for literary commentators to suggest links between key social struggles of early modern England with the deprivations created by the so-called globalization of our present day.
The final essay of this volume, by Amrita Sen, “Staging the Global in the Street: Spices, London Companies, and Thomas Middleton’s The Triumphs of Honor and Industry” (Chapter 29), turns to the streets of early modern London to better understand the cultural impact of the East India Company’s early trading activities – resonating with the themes of “staging exotica” in Chapter 26. Beginning with a discussion on the role of spices in everyday life that moves beyond aesthetic considerations of flavoring and into their humoral implications in diet and physic, this chapter outlines how England’s direct trading with the spice producing regions such as East India had social and cultural implications. At a time when Galenic ideas on the humoral impact of food and medicines was still prevalent, the possibility of altering one’s humors through diet raised questions about similar transformation of ethnic identity. Thomas Middleton’s civic entertainment, The Triumphs of Honor and Industry (1617), allows us to read early modern cosmopolitanism in terms of a civic cookout and a change in London’s demographic complexion brought about by the East India Company’s spice trade.
Ultimately, global drama in Renaissance England – like other literary and cultural works of the period – poems and paintings, for instance – mentioned in this volume demonstrates a configuration of cultural forms and material practice. If the promise of commercial profit and future colonization propelled many globalizing drives in early modern England, these in turn were fueled by a world-encompassing imagination, which shaped the endeavors of England’s differing classes, ranging from the monarch, aristocrats, merchants, ambassadors, and commoners, though in different forms and with varying interests and investments. This imagination could transform a “brazen world” into a “golden” one, dangers and trials notwithstanding, by evoking what was possible and could be discovered behind frontiers unknown. Analogues for a convergence of global drives and imaginings found on the English stage can be found in European cultural production overall. Europe’s era of exploration, in the profusion of travel and ethnographic accounts, as well as in visual culture, for instance, brought to life worlds that were both real and embellished. Thus, the Western expansion depicted was conceived imaginatively as much as it was given practical form via mercantile and financial ventures, often shaped by a colonizing vision trying to “establish authority through a demarcation of identity and difference” (Spurr, 7). The “global Renaissance” took shape at the confluence of these differing drives and imaginings. The essays that follow elaborate on this story.
Afterword
Following the four parts, Ayesha Ramachandran’s “Afterword: Lyric Poetics for the Global Renaissance” moves beyond familiar expectations for an afterword, which typically call for a reflection on the contents of the volume. Instead, it seeks to expand our understanding of an “emerging global imaginary” by calling for a “more substantive consideration of lyric poetry” within the critical methodological paradigm of the “Global Renaissance.” This configuration, she suggestively proposes, can “usefully expand and deepen studies of both the lyric and the early modern experience of globality.” Here the term “lyric” is not simply used as a formal generic designation. For Ramachandran, it is a “philosophic and anthropological mode to signal the vast array of shortish poems … that call attention to the person of a human individual,” making “a philosophic claim for the significance of the particular” – as for example, of the “first-person address.” The many products of “early modern engagement” in the chapters of this volume include visual and material objects as well epic poems, travel narratives, and in one instance, lyric poems. However, the Afterword’s call, as I see it, is to reflect on further possibilities – to follow lyric circulations around the world, attending to affective economies of exchange and interaction among individuals. More importantly, Ramachandran’s call to “lyric thinking” as an “alternate means of exploring and expressing the global” offers us a lens and a methodology (as I explore in the Preface) through which to consider lyrical elements – lyric thinking – within narratives, discourses, and artifacts of a global early modernity. What did it mean for individuals in the Renaissance to inhabit a shifting, expanding world of globalization, travel, and cross-cultural encounters? How can we uncover glimpses of individual viewpoints, experiences, voices? “Lyric thinking” entails a focus on phenomenology and process, rather than on ideological fixities. Thus, I hope that as readers, the “Afterword” nudges us to reappraise the experiential – the “phenomenology of worldly experience” – that can be drawn out from individual chapters, by attending to different perspectives and voices, and to reflect on “which voices get heard and how they get heard.”
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Abdulhamit Arvas Daniel Vitkus, and João Vicente Melo for their comments and suggestions on the Preface.
NOTES
1 1 The Armada portrait is frequently ascribed to George Gower, the Queen’s Sergeant–Painter, but Karen Hearn questions this certainty: “Apart from the portrait miniatures of the Queen, principally by Nicholas Hilliard, it is almost impossible to identify the actual artists who painted the portraits that have survived. A draft patent drawn up in 1584 would have given Gower a monopoly of her image in every format in large … Yet no extant portraits can with certainty be ascribed to Gower himself” (77). For a fuller account of Elizabethan portraits, see Karen Hearn, Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England, 1530–1630 (77–116). Leah Marcus, like several other critics, accepts the attribution to George Gower in Puzzling Shakespeares: Local Reading and its Discontents (279).
2 2 See Hearn (88). Also, given that there are different dates ascribed to the portrait, general references