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Main page » Non-Fiction » Science literature » Literature Studies » Shakespeare's Cross-Cultural Encounters


Shakespeare's Cross-Cultural Encounters

 

Things alien fascinate Shakespeare and reveal an interest in a multicultural and cosmopolitan environment of foreign commercial transactions and cross-cultural interactions. References to distant lands on world maps, foreign commodities, strange artifacts, and exotic cultures and customs abound in his plays. Through metaphor and allusion, a picture of the world emerges from his drama.
Maria, in Twelfth Night, compares Malvolio's grinning face to a map: `He does smile his face into more lines than is in the new map with the augmentation of the Indies'(III.ii.70 ±1).1 She alludes to the first map engraved in England based upon Mercator Projection, included in the second edition of Hakluyt's The Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation (1598).2 Sir John Falstaff, in Merry Wives of Windsor, does not distinguish colonial from sexual conquest. He views Mistress Page as `a region in Guiana, all gold and bounty'(I.iii.63) ; he expresses his desire for Mistress Ford and Mistress Page in the language of commerce: `They shall be my East and West Indies, and I will trade to them both' (I.iii.64±6). Benedick of Much Ado About Nothing offers to accomplish the most preposterous quest he can think of: to travel to Africa to measure the length of Prester John's foot or to do `any embassage to the Pygmies,'or to go to Asia to `fetch a hair off the great Cham's [Khan's] beard' (II.i.236±46). In Lear, we find a reference to a `pygmy's straw' and in The Winter's Tale to an `Ethiopian's tooth' (IV.iv.357). Macbeth speaks of the exquisite `perfumes of Arabia



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Tags: Sousa, gender, Shakespeare, another, Writing, Encounters, Cross-Cultural