The Open Worlde: The Exotic in Shakespeare | John Gillies, La Trobe University
John Gillies, La Trobe University
The Cytes frame new walles them selves to
keepe,
The open worlde lettes nought rest where it laye.
(Medea, 2nd Chorus, The Tenne Tragedies of Seneca
Translated into English, London, 1581)
Having suggested the need for a poetics of Renaissance geography, and having … outlined one direction along which such a poetics might proceed, I now propose to return to the question with which we began: how to define Shakespeare's idea of the 'exotic'? An obvious procedure is simply to catalogue and analyse whatever seems to correspond to the Elizabethan usage. Thus, the exotic in Shakespeare would include all phenomena—persons, imagery, settings, objects, props, costumes, speaking-registers—suggesting the 'barbarous', 'outlandish' or 'strange'. In practice, such a discussion would inevitably focus on Shakespeare's ethnic others:...
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