The 27th Annual Meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, San Francisco, 1999. Seminar: "New and Old Approaches to Pericles" Monica Matei Chesnoiu University "Ovidius" Constanta Romania 'Of every nation a traveler': Geographical and Spatial Imagination in Pericles The knowledge of Geography is...the eye of History1 Current theoretical work in the domain of cultural studies emphasizes the need for a complex reorganization of temporal and spatial relations, a reordering of space in accordance with the complex post-modern constructions of human geographies, life practices, global values and discourses.2 According to Clifford Geertz, 'the world is a various place' 3 and by confronting its actuality and difference one can barely hope to access a fragment of its complexity. Foucault's 'heterotopias' 4 -- heterogeneous spaces of sites and relations - include, in a convergence of socially created spatiality, the theatre and the garden, the museum and the library, the brothel and the prison. This innovative interpretation of space and time juxtaposes in a single real place several socially produced spaces of imagination: The brothel is in fact a place, and an architecture of pleasure... The men of the city meet at the brothel; they were tied to one another by the fact that the same women passed through their hands, that the same diseases and infections were communicated to them. There was a sociality of the brothel...5 The Elizabethan theater seems to have been a similar space, a marketplace of interlocking 'social energies'6, as in Pimlyco or Runne Redcap: Amazed I stood to see a crowd Of Civill-Throats stretched out so loud As at a new-play all the Roomes Did swarme with Gentiles mix'd with Groomes So that I truly thought all these Came to see Shore or Pericles.7 While socio-historical criticism of Shakespeare's romances in the eighties and the nineties examined the representations of political power in Jacobean England, particularly the king and his family,8 other recent studies have centered on an interpretive geography of Shakespeare's last plays.9 I will argue here that, contrary to late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century ideological constructions of Eastern Mediterranean cultures as being liminal, the ambiguous topoi in Pericles and the vague Hellenistic10 atmosphere are dramatized as part of a common 'European' ancient and early modern world, a site of fluid interference of archaic and Elizabethan practices intersecting within the imaginary world of a far-traveled story.11 The brothel space functions as an authentically shared social architecture of communal cultural paradigms, an Eastern and Western concurrence of mutual habits converging in the same omnipresent and multiply-rewritten narrative of loss and recovery. For reasons of brevity I will call the author of Pericles 'Shakespeare' and I hope to encompass the entire vexing problem of authorship12 and text 13 within these conventional limits. I will focus mainly on the two brothel episodes in Act II, scenes 2 and 4 (the Arden edition), or Scenes 16 and 19 (the Norton Shakespeare),14 particularly on the intriguing references to various European nationalities in the context of the discussion on venereal disease: the Pander's report on a 'poor Transylvanian' (16.18),15 who is dead for having lain with one of the 'poor three'(6) prostitutes left in the depleted Mytilene brothel, Boult's account of the lecherous and ludicrous 'Spaniard' (16.87)16 whose mouth watered at the mere description of Marina's charms, and the already diseased 'French' Monsieur Veroles (16.90),17 who gloats in expectation of seeing her.18 In an anomalous model of distorted rhetoric, the Bawd tries to convince Marina of the 'pleasure' (16.17) of alterity experienced in the brothel, where she is supposed to 'taste gentlemen of all fashions' (16.69) and 'have the difference of all complexions' (16.17). 19 The cosmopolitan society of this particular establishment contains, in a loose democracy of the body, Eastern 'barbarians' and 'civilized' Western Europeans, all confounded in a mixture of interracial sexual liaisons. Such an urbane milieu articulates the reductive Jacobean view of the Other with the play's clearly-mapped awareness of difference. I suggest that the particular reference to the three white male Europeans, a Transylvanian, a Spaniard and a Frenchman, formerly lodged or expected to stay at the brothel on the island of Lesbos,20 integrate the Western paradigms of race, sex and travel within the common space of the brothel, the marketplace21, the theatre, and a geography of illusion. All national stereotypes of virtues and vices converge within the socially-conditioned space of love as commodity, an artificially constructed site of self-delusion and grotesque reality, as specified in Boult's22 explicit remark: 'Well, if we had of every nation a traveler, we should lodge them all with this sign' (16.99-100).23 According to the pimp's figurative logic, his verbal description of Marina, the image of an image, simultaneously expands geographically to include all the nations (of Europe) and contracts into the iconic representation of a social space: the brothel, the theatre, or the printing house. The Pander informs his co-workers that 'Mytilene is full of gallants' (16.3) and the cynical discourse revolves around the value of 'money' (16.4) represented by sexuality at market time (16.4).24 The Bawd, Pander and Boult elaborate on 'trade' (16.9), 'credit (16.26), 'estate (16.28) and sex as 'commodity' (16.26; 27) which implies 'wages (16.27), marketing value, 'warrant' (16.51) and bargaining, while they eagerly express their wish to 'prosper' (16.10) financially and the invitation to 'search the market' (16.3;14;20;82). This economic banter25 is curiously blended with echoes of 'conscience' (16.9;18), the profession's standing with 'the gods' (16.30), or the 'mystery' of religious 'calling' (16.33).26 Boult is invited to describe the attractive colors of Marina's seductiveness and the pimp perceives his portrayal as theatrical representation, with himself as the author and the actor of an original performance and the philanderers of Mytilene as his audience: 'Performance shall follow' (16.55). After he has 'drawn her picture with [his] voice' (16 sently to their multi-national Mediterranean Greek, Jacobean English 27, and Western European place of artificially-constructed illusion and make-believe pleasure. The arbitrary sign of the brothel outlines a cosmopolitan site of encounter between past and present, history and geography, in the global representation of a common European and Mediterranean space incorporating shared weaknesses, vicissitudes and fears. The political and moral ambiguity surrounding Mytilene throughout the play alludes to an antagonistic place of self-represented reality and harsh deception that deserves no closure. Pericles is a particular representation of the 'theatre of wonder',28 and it relies specifically on Apollonius' 'mouldy tale'29 to reconstruct collectively a narrative concerned with tale-making and re-making within a shared theatrical space that creates the telescoping illusion of an entire globe. The brothel space articulates in the audience's imagination the horizontal geographic expansion of 'this our Europe'30 and the Mediterranean with the vertical antiquity of the tale. 'Shakespeare' may have been aware of the temporal and geographic extension of the Apollonius saga31 from other sources besides Gower and Twine,32 or the popular middle-age Latin Gesta Romanorum.33 I suggest that the author of Pericles is likely to have come across the 1578 Falckenburgk version of the story, printed in London at Richard Graphei.34 It is a poem in Latin hexameters dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, the Earl of Leicester, Lord Burghley, and others. Apart from the fact that in the initial dedicatory verses to the queen the author mentions the hero's 'mille periclis', this version combines the traditional story of Apollonius with the parts of the Jewish-Syrian struggle related in the two Books of Maccabees, identifying the incestuous king as Antiochus IV Epiphanes. What I find particularly interesting for my argument is the final justification of the poem, where the author adds a brief biography of Apollonius and explains that he reconstructed the story from manuscript fragments, 'from an ancient exemplar,' in both Greek and Latin, which he came across during a military expedition in Hungary.35 An average Elizabethan or Jacobean would know that Transylvania, now in Romania, was at that time part of Hungary. If they did not know, they would probably hear about it, or check in one of the English versions of Ortelius' Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. The Theatre of the Whole World.36 He or she could read there about 'Hungaria...now comprehending Transsylvania, Vvallachia and Moldavia' (p. 95), and about this region as a province 'beyond the Carpathian mountains' which 'now vulgarly is known under the name of Transsylvania' (p. 97). The 1606 edition of Ortelius' atlas is also interesting because it presents aspects of contemporary and ancient geography, the "Peregrinations of St.Paul" (p. iiij), maps of the Roman Empire and the Mediterranean, with the Greek islands (Cyprus, Rhodus, Lesbos, p. xxvij) in detailed framed presentations. 'History' is blended with 'Geography' in the graphic presentation of "The Voyage of Alexander the Great" (p. xxxij)37 and finally visual and literary discourses coalesce in "The Voyage and Navigation of Aeneas, especially gathered out of the renowned poet Virgil: with some other matters perteining to that historie collected out of others" (p. xxxiij) and "The Peregrinations of Ulysses" (p. xxxiiij). The poetry of traveling and the spatial geographic dimension of poetry are absorbed in a disconcerting collusion of texts and images. Moreover, a monumental perspective picture of "Daphne, or the pleasant Suburbs of Antiochia in Syria" (p. xxxvij) is offered to the curious eye. George Abbot's A Briefe Description of the Whole Worlde...38 might be another source of information for a Jacobean interested in world geography. In the chapter entitled De Graecia one can read: On the south side of Hungarie, and South-east, lyeth a countrie of Europe called in old time Dacia, which is large and wide, comprehending in it Transylvanya, Valachia, Moldavia, and Seruia. Of which little is famous save that the men are warlike, and can hardly be brought to obedience. They have lately bin under the king of Hungarie. The riuer Danubius doth diuide this Dacia from Mysia, commonly called Bulgaria, which lieth on the South from Danubius, and is seuered from Graecia by the mountaine Hamus. (p.B3) If my hypothetical Jacobean would be interested in Newes from diuers countries...39 he or she might find out 'That the Transylvanian hath overthrown fifteen thousand Turks and Tartars of Valachia and Moldavia' (p.15).40 This news is further interpreted: They signifie also that Sicily offered the prince of Transylvania, that he would graunt them their ancient libertie, that they would aide him with fifteen thousand men, alleging that the cause of their returne to the obedience of that house...is to eschewe the daungers which are likely to ensue by the wars (p.18). The 1610 English edition of Ortelius' atlas describes the Transylvanians in favorable colors: The people are very valiant, and have beene very victorious against their cruel easterne Neighbours the Turks, from whose invasions they are much defended through the mountaines that environ the whole countrie even as a citie is enuyroned with a walle.41 According to most Elizabethan (and Jacobean) historians and geographers, at that time Transylvania was a barrier for the civilized world against the menacing Turks, an ambivalent space of intermingling Western and Eastern cultures where margins and center converge for the accomplishment of a common anti-Ottoman goal. There is general consensus among Renaissance scholars regarding the Elizabethan and early Jacobean anxieties towards the 'Turk', who was perceived as the alien 'other' invading the supposedly 'civilized' Christian world.42 In Abraham Ortelius' description of the Mediterranean area this uneasiness is perceived as a paradox of classical versus Renaissance culture and religion: Greece, which sometimes was as it were the mother and source of all good learning and discipline,... is at this day driven to that state (such is the mutability and inconstancy of fortune, which turneth all things upside down) that there is no part of it but either is subject to the Turke... or els is under the command of the Venetians, or tributary to them. The Turke possesses the greater part, the Venetians do only enjoy certaine islands in the sea. Those which are under the Venetian gouvernment are in a better state, in respect of Religion, than those which are subiect to the Turke.43 Constance C. Relihan has observed that 'the liminal cultures in which Pericles occurs, cultures which simultaneously belong to Classical Greek and New Testament traditions -- the sources of Western civilization; and to the infidel, anti-Christian Ottoman Empire -- the location of that which is perceived as the non-Western Other, both promote and defeat English identification with the events of the play.'44 If there is a Jacobean English analogue in Pericles, it may be explored through the cultural, geographic and linguistic allusions that go beyond the domestic political constructions of early Jacobean rule. By mentioning the three Western European nations associated in the adversities of pleasure and suffering within the socially empowered sign of a brothel, placed in a suggestive Eastern Mediterranean location, the author of Pericles dramatizes the ambiguity of a cultural space balanced between two colliding worlds. The now-corrupt classical Greek culture, in a debased state of submission to the former 'barbarians,' encounters the Western liberal spirit in the emblem of a long-lost yet multiply-rewritten tale, in which the undeserved adversities of fortune play an important part. The Jacobean audience must have been aware of at least a few of the many variants of the Apolonius story, if only from the onomastic allusions in the Apocrypha, The Geneva Bible.45 The apparently random reference to a 'Transylvanian' might conjure the image of a traveler from an uncertain Eastern and bizarre land46, placed in the same location and direct relation to the familiar Western ethnic groups, the Spaniard and the Frenchman. The 'poor Transylvanian' is already dead, he atoned for his sexual transgressions, and an attentive actor may introduce a glimmer of pity in the Pander's otherwise cynical discourse. Boult's derogatory version of the diseased Spaniard and Frenchman, on the other hand, offers large scope for irony. Pericles' mille pericles and alterations of fortune paraphrase the cultural and geographical adventures of his own antique story: an original lost Greek manuscript, supposedly rendered into Latin, translated into many vernaculars, including English, French and Spanish, printed in Transylvania and translated into medieval Greek, this story is like a palimpsest, an inscription that testifies to the fragility of all cultural negotiations. 'Shakespeare' must have been aware, at least in part, of the antiquity and geographic extension of the story -- as I have tried to indicate -- and the specific ethnic allusions include this theatrical representation (the first extant dramatization in a long succession of prose and verse narratives) in an authentically shared European and Mediterranean textual geography, a new Theatrum Orbis Terrarum: This our Europe... honourable throughout all the world... And although it be in compas lesser then the other, yet for the worthinesse of the people it is preferred before all other partes of the world, & euer hath bin by all auncient writers, hauing both for the Empier of the Macedonians, and mightynesse of the Romaines bin moste renowmed. 47 Gower's choric presence in this amalgam of interconnected perspectives acknowledges the Apollonius story as a dynamic exchange between past and present. He links Pericles's dramatic appropriation to a long narrative tradition and creates a telescoping effect of a story within a story within a story, amplifying ad infinitum the arbitrariness of an allegedly authenticated poetic discourse. This mise-en-abyme effect produces an imaginary historical geography best suited for the dramatic representation, grounded as it is in the visual and the imaginary. Other place names referred to or suggested in Pericles may be seen as abstractions in a symbolic landscape, but when they are considered in a concrete geographic reference they outline an authentic Mediterranean territory. Antioch, Tyre, Tarsus, Troy48, Ephesus, the islands of Lesbos and Cyprus49, Pentapolis50, even the equivocal homelands of the contestants in the uncertain tournament scene (Sparta, Macedon, Athens, Corinth), all these places define 'our country of Greece' (5.100), a common site of Hellenistic and Renaissance culture. What was formerly a paragon of civilization and learning is currently 'corrupted' by the Turkish military invasion, as it is, in the play, by incest, famine, disease, envy, ambition, political duplicity, lechery. Even the 'mind' (19.20) and the language are perverted, as the owner of the brothel suggests and the metaphor of the riddle51 implies. The Mediterranean sea as a geographic space of imagination and illusion-making is very much present in Pericles' voyages, in Marina's name, and it appears in the second brothel scene, in a grotesquely distorted way, by Lysimachus' callous declaration that Marina's beauty 'would serve after a long voyage at sea' (19.45). This particular geographic space, where most of the ancient and Renaissance history was played out, is a commonly-shared expanse of mirage and reality which can take shape only in the audience's imagination, as Gower repeatedly points out (10.53-8; 18.2-4; 21.13-5). A sea that the Romans called 'Mare Internum', or sometimes self-sufficiently 'Mare nostrum', the Mediterranean was not called by its present name, which means 'in the middle of the land' or 'at the center of the earth' until the third century AD in the works of the geographer Caius Julius Solinus52. The key-scenes of parting and reunion take place at sea, like in the long-voyaged Apollonius saga. Shakespeare's dramatic rendering of the source tale replicates it with such narrative accuracy that one wonders if this is not a subtle way of indicating the cloudy zones that lie beyond, before and between text(s) and author(s). Particular spaces and geographical ambiguities may confuse the issue even more, but they can also indicate significant landmarks, and a starting point for one of the many possible readings. Instead of being seen as representative of what is alien to Western culture, the English Jacobean brothel space, the vague Eastern Mediterranean exotic geography, and the representation of ethnic groups in Pericles outline areas of association in difference and identification through dislocation. 1 Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. The Theatre of the Whole World, J. Norton, 1606. For references to Renaissance texts I have used extensively the microfilm series Early English Books, 1475-1640, Selected from Pollard and Redgrave's "Short title Catalogue" (Ann Arbor: University Microfilm international, 1938- ):STC 18855. The English translations of Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Antwerp, 1570) are in succession: 1603, 1606, and 1610. I am indebted to The Council for International Exchange of Scholars (The Fulbright Commission) and The World Shakespeare Bibliography (Professor James Harner) for having made research for this paper possible. 2 See Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Maria Jolas tr. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969); M. Berman, 'All That Is Solid Melts Into Air': The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982); Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces", Diacritics 16 (1986): 22-7; Edward Soja, "History: Geography: Modernity," The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. by Simon During (London: Routlege, 1993): 135-50. For studies on Renaissance cartography see Robert W. Karrow, Jr., Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century and Their Maps (Chicago: Speculum Orbis Press for the Newberry Library, 1993), 9; John Goss, The Mapmakers' Art: An Illustrated History of Cartography (New York: Rand McNally, 1993), 101-6. For a discussion of 'representational spaces' and 'mapmindedness' in Shakespeare's England see John Gillies, "Introduction: Elizabethan Drama and the Cartographizations of Space", in John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan (eds.), Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1998): 19-45. 3 Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge. Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983): 234. 4 Michel Foucault, "Space, Power, Knowledge," The Cultural Studies Reader: 168; Diacritics (1986): 23. 5 Foucault, "Space, Power and Knowledge": 168. 6 Any discussion of 'the circulation of social energy' is, inevitably, indebted to Stephen Greenblatt's Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 7 In Pimlyco or Runne Redcap, the extant copies dating from 1609. Facsimile edn. A.H.Bullen (London, 1963). Cited by F.D. Hoeniger in his second edition of Pericles (London, 1963): lxvi. This passage from an anonymous pamphlet, describing how people desert the theaters to drink Pimlico ale in Hogsdon, demonstrates the popularity of the play. The fact that, incidentally, this reference is one of the main signposts for dating the existence of the controversial Ur-Pericles is interesting, but does not constitute the object of my study. For evidence that Wilkins' narrative was based upon a dramatized account of Pericles' story, performed by Shakespeare's company, see Nancy C. Michael, "The Relationship between the 1609 Quarto of Pericles and Wilkins' Painful Adventures", Tulane Studies in English 22 (1977): 51-68. 8 See David Bergeron, Shakespeare's Romances and the Royal Family (University Press of Kansas, 1985); Leonard Tannenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986); Glynne Wickam, "From Tragedy to Tragicomedy: King Lear as a Prologue", Shakespeare Survey 2 (1973): 33-48. For a discussion of Shakespeare's plays and Jacobean political thought see Robin Headlam Wells, Shakespeare: Politics and the State (London: Macmillan, 1986); Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Political Drama: The History Plays and the Roman Plays (New York: Routledge, 1988); Rebecca W. Bushnell, Tragedies and Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Constance Jordan, Shakespeare's Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997): 35-67. 9 Constance C. Relihan, in "Liminal Geography: Pericles and the Politics of Place," Philological Quarterly 3 (1992): 281-99, considers that Pericles dramatizes 'locations whose relations to Europe may be considered liminal' (p. 281); John Gillies, in Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), explores Shakespeare's geographic imagination in its intimate relationship with the 'poetic' geographic tradition; the collection of essays edited by John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Playing the Globe... (1998) almost exhausts this topic. 10 For a discussion of Shakespeare's representation of Greek culture and the Mediterranean see Sara Hanna, "Shakespeare's Greek World: The Temptations of the Sea", in Playing the Globe: 107-128. 11 For further reference to the extension of the Apollonius narrative see Albert H. Smith, Shakespeare's 'Pericles' and Apollonius of Tyre. A study in Comparative Literature ( Philadelphia: MacCalla&Comp. Inc., 1898; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1972); Elizabeth Archibald, Apollonius of Tyre. Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations. Including the Text of the "Historia Apollonii Regi Tyri" with an English Translation (Cambridge: D.S.Brewer, 1991); Archibald gives only a brief survey of the versions of the story of Apollonius produced up to 1609, the year of publication of the quarto of Pericles, admitting that there are too many to be described in detail (p.182). 12 For perspectives on authorship see James G. McMannaway, The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, gen. ed. Alfred Harbage (London: The Viking Press, 1969); Hallet Smith, the editor of Pericles in The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton & Mifflin Comp., 1974): 1479; Ernest Schanzer, the Pericles editor of The Signet Classic Shakespeare, gen. ed. Sylvan Barnet (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1972):149; David Bevington, in The Complete Works of Shakespeare. The fourth edition (New York: Harper & Collins Publishers, 1992): 1398; James O. Wood, "The Running Image in Pericles", Shakespeare Studies 5 (1969): 240-52; F. David Hoeniger, "Gower and Shakespeare in Pericles", Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (Winter 1982): 461-79, who posits Shakespeare as the single author who deliberately shifted style to enhance the role of Gower in the play and Sidney Thomas's response in "The Problem of Pericles", Shakespeare Quarterly 34 (Winter 1983): 448-50, who does not accept the 1609 Quarto of Pericles as genuine; Richard Hillman, in "Shakespeare's Gower and Gower's Shakespeare: The Larger Debt of Pericles", Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (Winter 1985): 427-37, sees the play as an artistic whole, whatever the circumstances of composition, through Gower's choric role (p.427); Karen Csengeri, "William Shakespeare, Sole Author of Pericles", English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 71 (1990): 230-43; Mac D.P. Jackson, in "Pericles, Acts I and II: New Evidence for George Wilkins", Notes and Queries 37 (1990):192-96, uses statistical analysis to suggest that Wilkins wrote Acts I and II of Pericles; in "Rhyming in Pericles: More Evidence of Dual Authorship", Studies in Bibliography 46 (1993):239-49, Jackson argues that evidence from rhymes supports the case for dual authorship; see also the collaboration between Gary Taylor and MacDonald P. Jackson in issuing the collation represented by the Oxford text, in William Shakespeare. A Textual Companion, ed. by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor Acts I-II of Pericles", Notes and Queries 39 (1992): 346-55, uses Principal Component Analysis to maintain the Wilkins authorship. Whether Shakespeare revised an earlier play or not does not alter my analysis of the play's imaginative landscape in relation to the Apollonius story. However, since my argument will focus mainly on the topical references in the two brothel scenes, definitely considered to be by Shakespeare, I hope that my comments on these locations will illuminate indirectly the problem of authorship. All the Apollonius narratives focus on a brothel scene, yet only Pericles mentions the three European nations in connection to this place. 13 My focus is on the surviving text of Pericles, corrupt as it is, including the possible collaborative enterprise with Wilkins and the generally accepted view that Shakespeare wrote most of all Acts III-IV, according to F.D. Hoeniger, The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare. Pericles ( London: Methuen, 1963): liv; or Scenes 10-22 in the Oxford and Norton editions, the 'reconstructed' text of Pericles included in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, gen. ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) and The Norton Shakespeare, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 1997). 14 All references to the play are to the Norton edition. 15 J. Madison Davis and Daniel Frankforter, in The Shakespeare Name Dictionary ( New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1995), consider Shakespeare's reference to the 'Transylvanian' as incidental: 'In Shakespeare's England this would have been a remote and obscure place, so it is likely that Shakespeare is merely drawing on the common knowledge of Latin in which Transylvania means 'across the forest' (p.488). This is a position I will argue here. 16 The Shakespearean references to Spaniards are usually a form of ethnic parody, for the obvious reasons of the Armada conflict. The Spaniard is mocked for his lechery and his ruff. David Bevington glosses at note [101] that the large starched collars worn by Spanish gentlemen were a matter of jest to the English (The C omplete Works of Shakespeare, Pericles: 1423); There is another ironic reference to a Spanish non-speaking gentleman in Cymbeline (1.4.SD). 17 According to the authors of The Shakespeare Name Dictionary, 'French nobles are often portrayed as being too fashion-conscious and decadent' (p. 173); the French Monsieur Veroles' presence is 'used for nationalistic humor like the Spaniard mentioned before him; his name is French for 'pox' or 'syphilitic sores' (p.503). 18 There is no mention of 'Transylvanian', 'Spaniard' or 'French' in Gower's Confessio Amantis, Twine's Patterne of Painefull Adventures, or in Wilkins' narrative The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre. Moreover, Bullough admits that in the brothel scene 'for the first time the play elaborates considerably on the story material', in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1966), vol.VI: 364; Hoeniger, in the Arden edition of Pericles, considers that the two brothel scenes are clearly by Shakespeare (p. liv). Q1 mentions all these nationalities, in The Oxford Shakespeare. Original Spelling Edition, ed. by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986):1214. All Qs are consistent in this respect. 19 Carol Gesner, in Shakespeare and Greek Romance. A Study of Origin (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1970), notices that Shakespeare altered the number of the residents of the brothel, as compared to the Apollonius story: "The two bawds who trouble Tarsia are three when Marina is thrust into the brothel, again giving Shakespeare the opportunity to write more flexible realistic comedy" (p.87). 20 This Greek island off the coast of Asia Minor may create associations with love and poetry in the minds of some members of the reasonably educated Jacobean audience. The poets Terpander, Arion, Sappho, and Alcaeus were born there, and the poet Anacreon maliciously alludes to the island in a way that suggests that it was already known for the practice of female homosexuality, to which it has given its name; The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, ed. by M.C. Howatson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989):522. 21 In Language and Stage in Medieval and Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Janette Dillon shows how language and the theater were in popular use 'an image of the marketplace' (p.221). 22 Boult's name is not found in any of the sources (The Signet Classic Shakespeare: 1414); Bevington glosses that 'the name phalically suggests a shaft, a projectile or arrow' (The Complete Works of Shakespeare: 1421); Frankie Rubinstein, in A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and Their Significance ( London: Macmillan, 1989), suggests that Boult is appropriately named, since 'to bolt is to copulate' (p.30). 23 Bevington glosses this passage as: 'attract them to lodge here by means of Marina's picture, metaphorically hung out as though it were a shop sign' (note 112: 1423); The Norton Shakespeare offers a similar paraphrase: 'We would draw them all here by my pictorial description of Marina' (note 6: 2757). 24 For the economic wordplay and the equation of commerce with prostitution and the theatre see Greenblatt, The Norton Shakespeare, Introduction: 35-7; Introduction to Pericles: 2731-4; Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage. License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995): 26-39. For a discussion of family relationships and Jacobean political theater in Pericles see Constance Jordan, "'Eating the Mother': Property and Propriety in Pericles", Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, David Quint, Margaret W. Ferguson, G.W. Pigman III, and Wayne A. Rebhorn, eds. (Medieval and Renaissance Texts Studies, 1992): 331-53. For a study of Shakespeare's use of themes involving sexuality, especially incest, in Pericles, see Alexander Leggatt, "The Shadow of Antioch: Sexuality in Pericles, Prince of Tyre", in Louise Fothergill-Payne and Peter Fothergill-Payne, eds., Parallel Lives: Spanish and English National Drama, 1580-1680 (Lewisburg, Pa: Bucknell University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1991): 167-79. 25 For a reading of Pericles, especially the instances involving sexuality, as a critique of nascent capitalism that offers risk-openness and self-giving as alternatives to bourgeois ethic, see Ronnie Mulryne, "'What's aught but as 'tis valued?': Pericles, Sexuality and Trade", in Margaret Jones-Davies, ed., Shakespeare et l'argent. Societé Française Shakespeare. Actes du Congrčs, 1992 (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1993): 57-67. Maurice Hunt, in Shakespeare's Laboured Art: Stir, Work, and the Late Plays (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), observes that "By putting the language of commerce into the Bawd's and Pandar's mouths, Shakespeare encourages auditors to regard them as prudent, respectable merchants - an image that playgoers violently reject upon the briefest consideration" (p.86). 26 For a Christian reading of the scenes involving sexuality in Pericles see Luis Martin, "Human Sexuality in Pericles: Images of Damnation, Images of Salvation", Shakespeare and Renaissance Association of West Virginia: Selected Papers 15 (1992): 78-85; Sara Hanna, "Christian Vision and Iconography in Pericles", The Upstart Crow 11 (1992): 92-116. 27 The editor of The Norton Shakespeare considers that the allusion to syphilis as 'the French disease' is one indication of 'the distinctive English feel of the scene' (note 4: 2757). 28 See T. G. Bishop, "Pericles or the Past as Fate and Miracle", in Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder , Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 9 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 93-124, particularly his comments on 'eching - the enlargement or augmentation - of the story' (p.109); Frederick Kiefer, in Writing on the Renaissance Stage. Written Words, Printed Pages, Metaphoric Books (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1996), considers the illustration on the title page of Wilkins' Painful Adventures, representing Gower beside an open book, as meaningful for 'emphasizing the antiquity of events dramatized, the psychic distance separating past and present' (p. 211). 29 Ben Jonson, 'On the New Inn: Ode to Himself', ll.21-30 (1631); ed. Ian Donaldson in Ben Jonson, Oxford Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985): 502-3. Jonson's play was not a success; in this poem he complains about the poor taste of the theatre-going public and the popularity of Pericles. Ironically, this derogatory remark can prove my point. 30 Abraham A. Ortelius, Ortelius his epitome of the Theater of the Worlde. Now lately renewed and augmented by M. Coignet. Amplified With new mappes wanting in the Latin edition, J. Norton, 1610 (STC 18857). 31 Among the numerous versions of the Apollonius story, Elizabeth Archibald lists a Hungarian version printed in 1591 at Kolozsvár (Cluj), a city in Transylvania. For further reference see Elizabeth Archibald, Apollonius of Tyre: 183-216. Though the author(s) of Pericles cannot have been aware of this particular version in Hungarian, it is interesting to note that the large geographic extension related to the publication of the Apollonius narrative included a city in Transylvania, among many well-known Spanish, French, and other places. 32 Hoeniger thinks that 'Gower and Twine's are the only versions whose use by the dramatist of Pericles can be demonstrated with certainty' (The Arden edition: xiv) but he admits that it is not unlikely for Shakespeare to have been aware of the Latin Gesta Romanorum (p. xvii). He also mentions briefly 'another Latin version of some interest', namely Jacobus Facklenburgk's Latin verse story printed at London in 1578 and dedicated to Elizabeth (p. vii). Hoeniger admits that 'Shakespeare knew some folklore versions of the tale unknown to us' (p. xviii). 33 Alfred Harbage, in The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, suggests that a Latin version, possibly the Gesta Romanorum, may have been used by the author of Pericles (p. 1414). 34 Jacobi ŕ Falckenburgk, Saxonis Brandenburgi, Britannia, siue de Apollonica humilitatis, virtutis, et honoris porta; in qua, veluti vitae theatrido, praeter innumeros fortunae labyrinthos, in afflictorum solatium, maxime amplificatur bonitatis divinae, ad gloriam ipsam atque salutarem perducentis, Encomium, libris 4 ... In Sereniss. Augustiss: q:, Angliae, Franciae, & Hyberniae Reginae Elizabethae, Principis eminentiss... Londini. Typis Richardi Graphei. anno 1578 (STC 10674). 35 I am indebted to Professor Craig Kallendorf (Texas A&M University) for his scholarly exact guidance in the intricacies of the Falckenburgk Latin text. However, the basic meaning of the dedicatory verses, the story itself, and the final paragraph can be grasped even with someone's 'small Latin' , like myself. 36 Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. The Theatre of the Whole World (London, J. Norton, 1606). The page numbering is in the text. For a statement regarding the importance of this book in its time see Virginia Mason Vaughan, "The Mental Maps of English Renaissance Drama", in Playing the Globe: 7-16. 37 The death of Alexander the Great of Macedon (in 323 BC) is known as the incipient moment of the Hellenistic age; the three dynastic kingdoms that emerged after his death, stemming from his generals: Ptolemy (in Egypt), Seleucus (in Syria) and Antigonus (in Macedonia), have been fighting for supremacy in the Mediterranean and the adjacent territories. According to North's Plutarch, in The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (London, 1595), "The Life of Demetrius", on which Shakespeare drew for many of his names in Pericles, Lysimachus is a king of Thrace involved in the Seleucids' power struggle. It is interesting to note that Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra was entered in the Stationer's Register at the same time with The Booke of Pericles Prince of Tyre (presumably the promptbook), on May 20, 1608, to Edward Blount (Harbage: 1415), and Cleopatra is a descendant of the Ptolemies. The historical events described in I and II Maccabees (68B.C) and those in Antony and Cleopatra are very close in time. 38 George Abbot, A Briefe Description of the Whole World: wherein are particularly described all the monarchies, empires, and kingdoms of the same, with their seuerall titles and situations thereunto adioyning. At London: Printed by T. Iudson, for John Browne, and are to be sould at the signe of the Bible in Fleete-Streete, 1599 (STC 24). The pages are included in the text. The popularity of this book is demonstrated by two editions in the same year (1599) and five subsequent editions: 1600, 1605, 1608, 1617, 1620. 39 Newes from diuers countries: as from Spaine, Antwerp, Collin, Venice, Rome, the Turke, and the prince Doria: and how the arch-duke of Austria is intended to resigne his cardinall hat through his marrying with the king of Spaine's daughter. Printed at London: By Valentine Simms, and are to be sold in Gratious streete, 1597 (STC 1854.5). The pages are in the text. I am indebted to Professor Douglas Brooks (Texas A&M University) for having pointed to me that Valentine Simms was the printer of some of Shakespeare's plays. Douglas Brooks made helpful comments at various stages of the production of this paper. 40 Newes from diuers countries, "From Venice the thirtieth of May, 1597" (p.15). At that time (1593-1606) there was a war between Austria and the Turks (who controlled most of Vallachia and Moldavia), and the prince of Transylvania took the part of the emperor; he succeeded to keep the Turks at bay for a while. During 1599-1600 all the Romanian provinces, Transylvania, Vallachia and Moldavia were ruled by the same prince, Michael the Brave, who opposed the Turks. For further reference about the political situation at the time see An Encyclopedia of World History, ed. by William D. Langer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1968): 453. 41 Ortelius (1610): 92. 42 Constance C. Relihan quotes John Foxe's (1609) anxiety about the Turkish expansion, and William Watreman's The Fardle of Facions (1555) that explicitly excludes Greece from the Christian world, but includes '...France, Spain,... Hungary' (Relihan: 283). On the differences between the Greek and the barbarian in St.Paul's ethno-political theology see Julia Reinhard Lupton, "Othello Circumcised: Shakespeare and the Pauline Discourse of Nations", Representations 57 (Winter 1997): 73-89. In "Barbarian errors: Performing Race in Early Modern England." Shakespeare Quarterly 2 (1998): 168-86, Ian Smith makes an inquiry into the metalanguage of race and he points out that 'barbarism... functions as a discursive site from which to examine racial formation in the period' (p. 170). 43 Ortelius (1610): 91. 44 Relihan: 293. 45 The Geneva Bible. A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1969): 450-474. I and II Maccabees mention Antiochus Epiphanes (p.450), Apollonius, the governor of Coelesiria (p.466), and Lysimachus, one in a series of corrupted governors and tyrants in a Seleucid-subjugated Jerusalem (p.466). The Biblical events unfold in a Mediterranean geography encompassing Tyrus, Tarsus, Ephesus, Egypt, the island of Lesbos (Mytilene). 46 The same fugitive image-making process may have led to the augmentation and expansion of the modern Dracula myth from the totally inaccurate Bram Stoker story about Transylvania. 47 Ortelius (1610): 2. 48 'The Trojan horse' (5.92); when Pericles enters Tarsus he compares his own ships with the Greeks' evil-bearing dissimulated gift to the Trojans. 49 The reference is to the 'dove of Paphos' (15. Introd.32); Marina's exquisite skills and virtues make Philoten's pale by contrast. Paphos is a town sacred to Venus on the Western side of Cyprus. 50 Linda McJannet, in "Genre and Geography: The Eastern Mediterranean in Pericles and The Comedy of Errors", Playing the Globe: 86-106, makes the case of a more likely Shakespearean Pentapolis, of the seven candidates known in the ancient world, a location that is more geographically consistent with the play's detail that the ship was driven by a north wind towards Ephesus (p. 91); McJannet names the city of Tomi, the place of Ovid's exile [and an ancient colony of Milet (my note)]. As a modern inhabitant of this ancient city, now named Constanta (Romania), I am very much tempted to subscribe to this suggestion, all the more so as McJannet quotes Ortelius's map of the Black Sea in support of her argument (note 14, p.104). However, in the play's vague geographic context, the question of the exact location of Pentapolis becomes irrelevant. 51 Phyllis Gorfain, in "Puzzle and Artifice: The Riddle as Metapoetry in Pericles", Shakespeare Survey 29 (1976):11-20, focuses on the riddle as a folkloric device, a paradoxical type of enigma found only in narratives. John Pitcher, in "The poet and Taboo: The Riddle of Shakespeare's Pericles", Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association 31 (1982): 14-29, examines symmetries in structure and the development of the incest motif to argue that Acts I and II are in unity with the rest of the play. Riddles occur in almost every version of the Apollonius story (Archibald: 26). 52 The Worthie Work of Iulius Solinus Polihistor...Translated out of Latine into English by Arthur Golding (1587). Solinus is the Duke of Ephesus in Shakespeare's earlier The Comedy of Errors, a play that draws partially on the Apollonius story.
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