At 2:19 AM +0000 1/28/03, Robin Hamilton wrote:
>(I wuz brung up on _Shakespeare Our Contemporary_, but after the sixties it
>was one of the Books Without A Name. Sure, you recommended it, but it
>carried a heavy Health Warning: DON'T REFERENCE THIS. The only remotely
>comparable text i can think of that everyone read but nobody admitted to was
>Colin Wilson -- NOT Camus -- 's _The Outsider_. )
What was the problem with _Shakespeare our Contemporary_? Bizarre.
Is it the English suspicion of foreigners? Especially foreigners
learnedly radicalising an icon of English nationalism?
I don't know about the Irish connection, but that doesn't mean it's
not there. I mean, you don't have to go far to find the inspiration
for Renaissance texts about the New World. England in Shakespeare's
time was awash with such writings: exploration journals, fantasies,
you name it; and these all worked on an axis of Arcadia and
Prelapsarian innocence (it's there later in Paradise Lost, in
Milton's description of Eden). But Kott's reference to the hunting
dogs has got me intrigued: I'm sure the accounts of the Spaniards'
savage usage of mastiffs on Indians is in Bartolome de las Casas' _A
Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies_, which was
published in 1552 in Spanish and quickly translated into six European
languages. It's the text that gave the Spanish their evil reputation
as colonists, though the Germans and English and the rest were just
as bad; they just didn't have a Las Casas documenting their
atrocities. But it is not at all beyond the bounds of the possible
that Shakespeare was familiar with that text, which is still a
horrifying document of what colonisation meant for an indigenous
population, and which might have given Shakespeare the dramatic
fulcrum for his portrayal of a New World as corrupt as the Old, and
permitted that balance between the myth of the new and history as
repetition.
In connection with this, Kott's description of the geographical
location of the island is most suggestive: it permits both
metaphorical immediacy and distance. According to Kott, the island
of The Tempest is situated both in the New World and the Old.
"Prospero's 'uninhabited island' has two geographical locations. It
lies both on Aeneas' sea route between Carthage and Cumae/Naples and
on the map of the New World near the Bermudas. The African hag
Sycorax, pregnant with Caliban, sails from 'Argier'; the
'Mediterranean fleet' of Alonso, king of Naples, sails as Aeneas'
from Carthage/Tunis. (Gonzalo: This Tunis, sir, was Carthage. ...
Antonio: His word is more than the miraculous harp) Prospero's place
is simultaneously a Mediterranean island of metamorphosis and
penitence and a new plantation on the coast of America."
Well, all this is so close to the heart of stuff I'm interested in
for something else I want to work on, so my apologies if I've talked
your ears off -
Best
A
--
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
Masthead Online
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
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