Introduction: Shakespeare's Mediterranean

For Shakespeare, the Mediterranean represents a sense of in-betweenness. No other region, except for the British Isles, engaged his imagination so thoroughly and consistently from his earliest to his latest plays. In his 1917 essay, J. D. Rogers argues that “Europe is Shakespeare's centre, and although things intrude now and then, like spectres from another world, his plots, themes and scenes are almost exclusively European” (1917: 170). “Beyond these limits lay the unknown, or hardly known, wonderland of discovery and romance,” adds Rogers. Borders do indeed fascinate Shakespeare; yet his Mediterranean, where many of his plays are set, lies both within and without the borders of Europe. His Mediterranean remains both distant and near, a region of boundary crossing par excellence. It borders on worlds unknown, and it is fraught with specters from distant borderlands. Freedom of movement and global interconnectedness collide with xenophobic attitudes, religious and racial conflict, and fear of foreign migration and influence. Shakespeare thought of the Mediterranean as part of Europe but also as a world unto itself, familiar and strange.The word “Mediterranean” in its Anglicized form entered the English language circa 1556 to mean “the almost landlocked sea separating Europe from Africa, connected with the Atlantic Ocean by the Strait of Gibraltar, with the Black Sea by the Bosporus” (OED). The Suez Canal connected it to the Red Sea in 1869. The Mediterranean Sea extends some 3,500 kilometers (2,175 miles) from the Strait of Gibraltar to the shores of Syria. Since 1595, “Mediterranean” has also come to mean that which is characteristic of the lands, climate, countries, people, and culture of the Mediterranean basin (OED). The word itself occurs only twice in Shakespeare: first in Love's Labour's Lost (published in 1598), where the pompous Spanish braggart Don Adriano de Armado speaks of the “salt wave of the Mediterraneum” (5.1.54).1 He boasts of his preference for the Latin term Mare Mediterraneum (Hibbard 1994: 183n54), but seems aware of the Mediterranean's higher levels of salinity than the open ocean.2 In The Tempest, the spirit, Ariel, uses magic to create the illusion that the King of Naples' ship has shipwrecked off the coast of Prospero's Island, but he announces that “For the rest of the fleet / Which I dispersed, they all have met again / And upon the Mediterranean float [waves] / [are] Bound sadly home for Naples” (1.2.232–35). Those aboard the other ships believe that “they saw the king's ship wracked / And his great person perish” (1.2.236–27). There are also references to the “swelling Adriatic seas,” as being particularly rough and dangerous (Taming of the Shrew, 1.02.79), and to the Ionian Sea which affords quick passage for Roman war vessels in Antony and Cleopatra (3.07.22).As a setting, the Mediterranean dominates Shakespeare's plays. Some twenty-three plays from earliest to latest are set in the Mediterranean region. If one excludes Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, the English history plays, and the two comedies Merry Wives of Windsor, set in England, and Measure for Measure, set in Vienna, respectively, all the other plays are set in the Mediterranean. However, one should remember that even King Lear, set in ancient Britain, has French characters, namely the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy, who are candidates for Cordelia's hand. In Hamlet, the troupe of players visiting the Castle of Elsinore perform scenes about Hecuba and the Trojan War for the Danish Court, and Polonius boasts of having played Julius Caesar in a school play. The Henry VI plays and Richard II have prominent French characters, and Henry VI, Part One, like Henry V, is set in part in France. Richard II is married to a French queen. Henry VIII has a prominent Spanish character, Henry's first wife, Katherine of Aragón, daughter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. Despite its setting in Vienna, Measure for Measure has characters with Italian-sounding names, including Duke Vincentio, Isabella, Angelo, Claudio, Ragazini, and Julietta (Taylor 2004: 250).3The pervasive presence of the Mediterranean stems from the array of Mediterranean texts that Shakespeare loved and consulted in writing plays, let alone other texts, such as the Bible, that he undoubtedly read and knew (McDonald 2001: 146–47). These include Ovid's Metamorphoses, both in Latin and in Arthur Golding's 1567 translation; Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans; Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Suetonius, Livy, Seneca, and Plautus and Terence (McDonald 2001: 147–48). Likewise, Shakespeare loved European and English fiction, including the works of Matteo Bandello (ca. 1480–1562), a native of Tortona (Piedmont); the Portuguese Jorge de Montemayor (1520?–1561), whose prose romance, Diana Enamorada, Shakespeare used as a source for The Two Gentlemen of Verona; Ferrara's native son, Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinthio (1504–1573); Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375); and many other Italian, Spanish, and French writers in English translation.4 Shakespeare knew and echoed many other Mediterranean texts but did not directly draw from them. Shakespeare's readings reveal a keen interest in the Mediterranean, although unlike Chaucer, Anthony Munday, and John Milton later, he presumably never set foot outside of England.Over the course of his career, Shakespeare developed considerable expertise in things Mediterranean. This expertise did not depend on what Clifford Geertz refers to as “local knowledge” in his fascinating discussion of ethnographic analysis (1983: 170). In fact, Shakespeare's Mediterranean emerges from a process that Northrop Frye describes in The Educated Imagination: “Our impressions of human life are picked up one by one, and remain for most of us loose and disorganized”; but, he adds “we constantly find things in literature that suddenly coordinate and bring into focus a great many such impressions” (1964: 64). As Walter Cohen aptly argues, Shakespeare's prevalent mode of representation is not mimetic art but “nonrepresentational”: Emphasis on the nonrepresentational is not intended to be paradoxical. It merely insists on the importance of the allusive, the suggestive, the inspirational—at the relative expense of the ethnographically informative literature, direct depictions of cultural and colonial encounters or narratives of travel, exploration, and conquest. (2017: 239) Shakespeare seems constantly engaged in the process of recovering fragments of foreign and distant worlds (Sousa 2002: 2). His Mediterranean world oscillates between stable and unstable, known and unknown, within and without the borders of Europe.5 François Laroque suggests that Shakespeare's plays draw attention to locality, “seen both as real places and as dream-like backdrops” (2005: 191). This method allows Shakespeare to explore an array of topics and themes, including religious, cultural, and racial difference; merchants and commerce; land travel and sea voyages; coastal communities and interactions; ports and islands; and the sea as an archetypal force that scatters and reunites. Historically, his Mediterranean ranges from the Trojan War, to different periods of Roman history, up to the Renaissance period. The result is diverse and compelling.Shakespeare was very much aware of contemporary events in the Mediterranean region. Cohen argues, for example, that “Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations (1589, 1598, 1600) popularizes the shift in English foreign policy from anti-French militarism aimed at continental conquest to mercantile initiative” (Cohen 2017: 253). He notes Shakespeare's allusion to Aleppo in Macbeth, as being “inspired by a voyage to the east from 1604 to 1606”: “Shakespeare could also have gotten information from leading courtiers and merchants who actively supported maritime enterprise and were possibly connected to his poetic or theatrical career or private affairs” (2017: 253). In reference to The Taming of the Shrew, Cohen notes that this play “combines the fascination of commodities with the business, vehicles, and agents of international trade” (2017: 254), whereas “The Comedy of Errors and especially The Merchant of Venice dramatize the world of the Mediterranean merchants” (2017: 255). Likewise, Shakespeare addresses concerns over the expansion of the Ottoman Empire and the resulting challenge to Venice, England, and other European powers. He raises immigration issues and border crossings in The Merchant of Venice and the forces of globalization in Antony and Cleopatra.6Surprisingly, Shakespeare's Mediterranean has received relatively little scholarly attention. Tom Clayton, Susan Brock, and Vicente Forés edited a collection of papers, titled Shakespeare and the Mediterranean, which brought together papers that were presented at the International Shakespeare World Congress in Valencia, Spain, in 2001. Several other studies focus on single Mediterranean countries. These include Shaul Bassi's Shakespeare's Italy and Italy's Shakespeare: Place, “Race,” Politics (2016); Jack D'Amico's Shakespeare and Italy: The City and the Stage (2001); a collection, titled Shakespeare's Italy: Function of Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama (1993), edited by Michele Marrapodi et al.; and other works, such as Shakespeare and Greece (2017), edited by Alison Findlay and Vassiliki Markidou. Studies of individual countries provide a fragmentary view of the larger region; therefore, they may ironically obscure rather than enhance our understanding of the complexity and diversity of the region. As a concept, the Mediterranean continues to pose a challenge not only to Shakespeare scholars but also to historians and other scholars alike.David Abulafia poses the central question: “What is the Mediterranean?” (2011: 11). Scholars have provided contrasting answers. Fernand Braudel, focusing on the sea and its bordering lands, explored “the way the physical geography of the Mediterranean moulded the civilizations that grew up on its shores” (2011: 11). Abulafia, however, cautions against defining the Mediterranean by “its edges” (2011: 11) because it downplays the complexity and diversity of a region made up of many seas, each with its own distinctive history, and whose historical, cultural, and political influence extends far beyond its geographical borders. From a fascinating ecological and agricultural perspective, John Head et al. suggest that “the Mediterranean Basin encompasses a number of transboundary rivers and aquifers discharging into the Mediterranean Sea,” and consequently “bring[s] a variety of states and peoples within its perimeters” (2017: 100–101).Shakespeare's concept of the Mediterranean, singularly capacious and slippery, intertwines with other ideas associated with oceans. In his literary imagination, unstable borders between Mediterranean and other regions collapse and reveal regions unknown. Dan Brayton explains that Shakespeare represents the sea's “wildness” in a mixture of danger and slipperiness as “an entity that exists outside of time” (2012: 63). The sea becomes “an ancient, chaotic, and dangerous entity set off from civilization and distinct from the ‘firmament’ established by logos” (2012: 63). In his thinking about the oceans, argues Brayton, Shakespeare discovers “the aesthetic appeal of the protean depths,” where he finds “the potential for a ‘brave new world’ in which human life and marine life harmonize in new ways” (2012: 63). Brayton refers to this as Shakespeare's “Benthic Imagination,” a fascination with the depths, rhythms, and vastness of the oceans (2012: 62).The Mediterranean never seems far away in Shakespeare's plays. In Titus Andronicus, it makes an unexpected appearance in startlingly vivid imagery. Titus's homecoming, in the first act, serves not only to deliver the Gothic prisoners to Rome, but also to bury his sons who were killed on the battlefield fighting the enemies of Rome. The history of the Andronici intertwines with the history of Rome. Titus views himself as a ship returning to Ostia Antica, the port of ancient Rome, located fifteen miles southwest of the city of Rome, at the mouth of the Tiber River (1.4.73–79). His situation changes fast. From being an insider, he quickly turns into an outsider. He now reflects and embodies the sea. The calm waters of Rome's seaport transform into something wild: For now I stand as one upon a rock,Environed with a wilderness of sea,Who marks the waxing tide grow wave by wave,Expecting ever when some envious surgeWill in his brinish bowels swallow him. (3.1.93–97) The “wilderness of sea” connects to the wildness of Rome, controlled by the Gothic queen Tamora and her followers. Images of borders pervade this part of the play, first with a reference to Narcissus, who gazed in a fountain so long that his tears turned the fresh water into “a brine pit,” full of “bitter tears” (3.1.127–29), and then with a reference to Limbo, at the borders of hell (3.1.149). Finally, Titus Andronicus sees himself as the Mediterranean Sea, waxing mad and threatening to engulf the sky (3.1.220–23), as he contemplates his daughter Lavinia raped, her hands lopped off, her tongue cut out, unable to communicate: I am the sea; hark how her sighs doth blow!She is the weeping welkin [sky], I the earth:Then must my sea be moved with her sighs,Then must my earth with her continual tearsBecome a deluge, overflowed and drowned,For why my bowels cannot hide her woes,But like a drunkard must I vomit them. (3.1.225–31) The play later abandons its sea imagery, but not before it creates adjacency, juxtaposition, and contiguity. Rome abuts a fantastical, dangerous, wild world.As in Titus Andronicus, the sea comes into view in Timon of Athens, but this time, only in the last few lines, as a Messenger brings news of Timon's death: “My noble general, Timon is dead, / Entombed upon the very hem o'th'sea” (5.4.65–66). In its sea imagery, Timon of Athens takes us to the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean and symbolically to the very borders of what it means to be human.Shakespeare also evokes the smaller seas that make up the great Mediterranean. The Albanian/Illyrian coast serves as the backdrop for the action of Twelfth Night, the Turkish/Anatolian region of Ephesus comes into view in The Comedy of Errors, and the beautiful Sicilian landscapes come into focus in Much Ado about Nothing. In Comedy of Errors, the Eastern Mediterranean turns wild; it destroys Egeon's ship, and separates and scatters his family across the vast expanses of the Mediterranean for decades. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Fairies, like a band of Romany, encamp in the woods outside Athens and in the characters' imagination and dreams. The vast globe of the world comes into view, as the fairies indicate they can traverse great distances to the farthest “steep of India” (2.1.68–69) and can bask “in the spiced Indian air” (2.1.124). Shakespeare repeatedly engages in a process of estrangement of the Mediterranean to suggest that this region, so familiar to his imagination, abuts strange, unknown worlds.Shakespeare has maintained a continuous presence at the annual international congresses of the Mediterranean Studies Association from the first congress, held in Lisbon in 1998, to the most recent, held at the Sant'Anna Institute in Sorrento.7 Four of the five essays in this special issue of Mediterranean Studies were presented at the MSA Congress in Palermo, Sicily, in 2016. These revised, expanded articles provide fresh insights into Shakespeare's Mediterranean, but they also register a vibrant record of scholarly discussions in beautiful settings across the Mediterranean region. The first three articles explore concepts of home, travel, and hospitality in Shakespeare's comedies and romance. My article on The Comedy of Errors, one of Shakespeare's earliest plays, explores the juxtaposition of home and abroad. Gaywyn Moore deals with the dangers that overseas travel poses to women traveling alone. In his article on Much Ado about Nothing and The Winter's Tale, David Bergeron addresses questions of hospitality. The last two articles focus on moments of transition and challenge to Roman identity in a Mediterranean context. Brian Harries's article on Titus Andronicus (a welcome addition to those on the original panel) and Richard Raspa's on Coriolanus provide bookends for Shakespeare's Rome. Titus Andronicus, an early play, represents late Roman history; Coriolanus, a late play, represents early Roman history. In both articles, Rome struggles to maintain its identity at moments of transition and change. Collectively and individually, our essays reveal recurring themes in Shakespeare's representation of the Mediterranean, as familiar and strange, both known and unknown.