The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare | travel, trade, and colonialism
travel, trade, and colonialism. Travel tales of voyages constituted one of the largest categories of popular reading of Shakespeare's period. To Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations (1 vol., 1589; 3 vols., 1599–1603), with its title page announcing the intention of celebrating the ‘navigations, voyages, traffiques and discoveries of the English nation’, can be added those by William Biddulph (1609), John Cartwright (1611), Anthony Sherley (1613), and William Lithgow (1614) to the Orient, North Africa, and Asia, and by Sir John Hawkins (1569), Thomas Hariot (1588), Walter Ralegh (1596), and John Smith (1608) to the New World. Works by the Frenchman Cartier (1580), the merchant of Venice Cesare Federici (1588), and the Dutchman Jan Huyghen van Linschoten (1598) were available in translation.
Shakespeare's plays abound with references to travel literature. The tale related by Othello is a superb encapsulation of many of the key elements of...
[The entire page is 1601 words long]
Join eNotes
The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:
