[In the excerpt below, Parr describes the context for travel plays such as Day's Travels of the Three English Brothers, particularly stressing the mixture of fear and fascination felt by the English for the foreign and alien.]

And when, after the long trip, I arrived in Patagonia I felt I was nowhere. But the most surprising thing of all was that I was still in the world—I had been travelling south for months. The landscape had a gaunt expression, but I could not deny that it had readable features and that I existed in it. This was a discovery—the look of it. I thought: Nowhere is a place.

Paul Theroux, Patagonia Revisited

LEARNING AT HOME

In his account of a visit to England in 1599, the Swiss traveller Thomas Platter comments at some length on the variety of organised entertainment available in London, reporting visits to two plays and a bearbaiting, and concludes: ‘With these and many more amusements the English pass their time, learning at the play what is happening abroad … since the English for the most part do not travel much, but prefer to learn foreign matters and take their pleasures at home.’¹ Platter's picture seems to suggest an important role for the travel play in Renaissance England. By 1599 Hakluyt's Principall Navigations and imported Dutch atlases were—at a price—available to armchair travellers, and some of the innovative work done on the Continent in geography and comparative history was beginning to be translated into English. But most people still relied for foreign information on the travellers' tales that abounded in port cities like London and Bristol and on much-reprinted compilations like the ‘briefe collection … of strange and memorable thinges’ made from Sebastian Munster's Cosmographia in 1572. Otherwise, popular conceptions of exotic experience were shaped by occasional journalism (pamphlets with titles like Strange Newes out of Poland) or by Mandeville's Travels and romance fiction, writing whose images of ‘abroad’, when they were not purely conventional, drew from the encyclopaedias and natural histories, with their catalogues of marvels and curiosities, that the Renaissance inherited from late antiquity and the Middle Ages.²

Platter's assertion that the English do not travel much conflicts with an old idea that they are naturally errant and curious, governed by the moon,³ and it ignores their role in opening maritime trade routes and their robust legends of westward discovery.⁴ Moreover, his picture of a people remaining in its island fastness can be qualified by pointing to aristocratic tourists in the sixteenth century—early exponents of what would evolve into the Grand Tour—and the pioneering forays of British merchants into Russia and the Middle East.⁵ But despite the feats of its seamen and the determined efforts of the colonising lobby to settle North America in the 1570s and 1580s, England remained a deeply insular country. Fernand Braudel asserts, with telling hyperbole, that with the loss of its Angevin possessions in France and the subsequent break with Catholic Europe, England ‘became … an island’;⁶ and Jeffrey Knapp has recently suggested that humanism merely emphasised the breach, since the rediscovery of the classics ‘gave new life to an old image of England that uncannily reflected its modern plight—an island whose inhabitants were penitus toto divisos orbe (Virgil, Eclogues i), wholly divided from all the world’.⁷ In such a situation, a popular art-form like the theatre which undertook to deal with foreign subjects might find itself with a ready audience and an opportunity to shape its views.

Consciousness of their relative isolation led to much soul-searching by English humanists. The lure of European travel was considerable for those wanting to participate in the Renaissance movement: it offered opportunities to meet foreign intellectuals, visit famous cities and their universities, and learn about modern art and architecture, as well as to tour the ancient sites. But enthusiasm for this project was constantly hedged around by anxiety about the moral and physical dangers posed by foreign places—particularly the risk to Protestants travelling in the Catholic south—and checked by more fundamental doubts about the wisdom of being on the move. Moralists were fond of quoting classical admonitions on the subject, and this rendering of lines from Horace's second Epistle is one of many that reached a wide audience:

Why fleest thou through the worlde? in hope to alter kinde:
No forren soile, hath anie force to change the inward minde.
Thou doste but alter aire, thou alterest not thy thoughte:
No distance farre can wipe awaye, what Nature first hath wroughte.
The foole, that farre is sente some wisdome to attaine:
Returnes an Ideot, as he wente, and bringes the foole againe.(8)

Parochial assurance of this sort will always find a voice, though inevitably it did not still the aspirations of most humanists. Their response to the perceived perils of travel was to turn it as far as possible into a controlled exercise, setting out itineraries and stipulating the conduct and agenda of the cultural tourist in guides which, despite their forbidding tone, were to be enormously influential, and in some ways have never been entirely superseded.⁹

The other major focus of humanist aspiration lay in the west, as the English pondered the Iberian achievement in Central and South America (for many the consequence of the Tudor failure to back Columbus) and made the first tentative moves towards their own colonial effort. In 1519 the lawyer and printer John Rastell, who two years earlier had launched an abortive colonising voyage to North America, consoled himself with writing what might be called the first English travel play and lamented the opportunity lost in the New World:

O what a thynge had be[en] than
yf that they that bee Englyshe men
Myght have ben the furst of all
That there shulde have take possessyon
And made furst buyldynge & habytacion …(10)

Other voyages followed, but more than half a century was to pass before plans for a colony were renewed, and none of the settlements planted in Elizabeth's reign managed to put down lasting roots.

At the end of the sixteenth century, then, interest in a wider world was vigorous but largely unfulfilled. For many Londoners it may have best been satisfied at the theatre. In 1599 Thomas Platter could have seen or heard of performances of Sir John Mandeville, Jerusalem, and Muly Molloco (all now lost plays); English military adventures abroad were portrayed in Henry V and their consequences for impressed soldiers shown in The Shoemaker's Holiday; Dekker's Old Fortunatus offered a lively and mildly topical version of the romantic ‘journeying’ play. Marlowe's plays still held the stage, recreating Tamburlaine's campaigns and more recent historical conflicts in Malta and Paris, and exposing in Dr Faustus' world tour the ultimate vanity of travel—a message that was being more satirically enforced in 1599 by Jonson's Every Man out of his Humour. More than one play, no doubt, portrayed Sir Philip Sidney's ‘awry-transformed traveller’ who brings home foreign fashions and affectations.¹¹ In 1595 the Admiral's Men had staged The New World's Tragedy, perhaps inspired by the lost colony on Roanoke Island in Virginia or by the much-trumpeted atrocities of the Spanish further south; and there must have been other plays which exploited the large chronicle of travel and adventure by then available in English.

Platter sees the London audience going to such plays for information, to get a window on the world. This appears to be too simple a view, reducing all foreign representations to a documentary function. But there is a sense in which the capacious category of ‘travel writing’, as defined by Hakluyt's great project, might have encouraged that audience to see foreign subjects on the stage as part of a current debate about England's place within and designs upon a larger world. Travel literature at this date means many things—various kinds of survey, historical geography, accounts of colonial conquest, as well as actual relations of a journey. Even for the more empirically-minded ‘travel writing’ meant almost any kind of enquiry into foreign matters, and the few accounts of a journey proper that exist from the sixteenth century were not recognised as belonging to a distinct genre. Hakluyt had included Mandeville in his first edition of 1589, and by the end of the century the empirical endeavour to describe the variousness of the world and its inhabitants was only just beginning to sort itself into distinct categories of study and writing. The travel play is an offshoot of this vigorous, confused and fluid project.

The question of drama as information raises another issue. Recently there has been a tendency to see travel writing in general as a discursive operation rather than as an historical record, dissolving the difference between real-life and fictional narratives and insisting upon the dependence of both on prior perspectives and established tropes. Philip Edwards has eloquently defended the factual accounts of travel and exploration against this levelling process, which effectively equates things that happened with things that are made up.¹² Where literary and dramatic fictions about travel are concerned the argument is more slippery. Even where they obviously owe something to recorded events, plays, stories and poems also operate by their own laws, and there is one kind of ‘travel writing’, the peripatetic romance in which the characters seek themselves and each other through an exotic landscape, which remains almost entirely untraumatised by the specifics of Renaissance discovery: a good example is the recently discovered play Tom o'Lincoln, which puts Prester John and the Amazons on stage without a flicker of geographical or cultural curiosity.¹³ But most travel fictions lack this kind of hermeneutic purity. All the plays in this volume originally appealed to their audiences' imaginative investment in a developing state of affairs, whether it was an on-going political story like the Sherley brothers' adventures, or the latest developments in Atlantic colonisation, or the current exploration of the southern hemisphere. The crusade against Islam, the shipwreck on a desert isle, and the trope of the world upside-down are long-established motifs made subject to modification by the pressure of contemporary events and discoveries, and no dramatist dealing with such subjects could assume that the curiosity of the theatre spectator would automatically be satisfied by received ideas, or that his own inventio—his particular assembly of exotic themes and materials—had an authority independent of the reconstructions of the world that travel and exploration were themselves effecting.

In other words, the travel play is implicated in the material processes of Europe's reconnaissance of the Old World and its ‘fortunate discovery’ of the New. In it traditional ideas become volatile, trendy and debatable, and it is potentially a very sensitive register of changing historical (and spacial) awareness. This is not to say that its function is usually a documentary one. There are few surviving plays which take a recorded journey as their subject, perhaps in part because the most prestigious English travels were those of sailors like Drake and Cavendish, whose adventures could scarcely be staged; and the awareness amongst dramatists of the technical difficulties of dramatising any journey may have inhibited them from using ones that already existed in written form. It is unfortunate that plays like the already-mentioned New World's Tragedy and The Plantation of Virginia (1623)—the latter presumably about the massacre of colonists by the Indians in 1622—have not survived, since these may well have been attempts to stage specific instances of cultural encounter in the Americas. But between such chronicle efforts and the wandering romance lies a body of writing whose contract with the realities of travel is complex and difficult to define. To take a well-known example: critics have worked hard to justify the conviction that The Tempest is a play about colonialism and New World discovery, despite its paucity of reference to such things; and without wanting to rely, as too much new-historicist writing has done, on the argument that ‘absence is presence’, it is clear that, when a dramatist declines to make his exotic setting conform exactly to one in Hakluyt, he is not necessarily discouraging us from making an imaginative connection with the navigations of his own or any other nation. The Tempest and The Sea Voyage in their very different ways depend on a lack of geographical specificity to create a world that seems full of the travails of contemporary voyaging.

Fletcher and Massinger's The Sea Voyage (acted 1622) is the most promiscuous of these three plays in exploiting a wide variety of travel reports for the purposes of a theatrical entertainment. As a consequence it manages to be modish and ‘relevant’ without having to make claims for its accuracy. It is preceded here by a drama as topical as anything which survives from the Renaissance stage—indeed, one which might easily have offended political sensibilities, given its advocacy of a clan whose activities continued to be suspect in government eyes even as the play was being performed. The praise of maverick adventurers in The Travels of the Three English Brothers, written by Day, Rowley and Wilkins and acted in 1607, was, however, probably designed to set them off against the eponymous hero in Captain Thomas Stukely, a 1590s play about a notorious Elizabethan pirate and traitor which was published in 1605 and probably revived at the rival Fortune theatre at about the same time. Anthony Nixon, whose pamphlet about the Sherleys was the principal source for Travels, explicitly invokes Stukely and points the contrast between ‘the manner of their travels … The one having his desire upon a luxurious, and libidinous life: The other [i.e. Sir Anthony Sherley] having principally before him, the project of honour’ (Gv); but it is a comparison which links as much as it distinguishes the two plays. At a time when some theatrical companies were poking fun at the vogue for travel and staging burlesques of the journeying play—the collaborative Eastward Ho! (1606) is a prime example—the more popular playhouses like the Red Bull and the Fortune were plotting the courses of contemporary knights-errant and assimilating their travels to an older species of quest. It is a kind of writing which may have helped to provoke the satirical mood on the other London stages, though (as I shall suggest) we should not assume too readily that it had only a naive appeal. Travels takes its task seriously, for it undertakes to portray diplomatic activity and cultural contact between England and both Catholic and non-European powers in a way that was impossible as long as the foreign was simply demonised or caricatured on the stage. Its topicality is part of a cultural process.

At the end of the spectrum, seemingly, is Richard Brome's The Antipodes (acted 1638), in which the theatrical representation of a journey is designed to cure the obsession with foreign marvels and promote harmony at home. In many ways Brome's play, written when tourism was commonplace and colonial voyages had become routine, returns to old humanist anxieties about travel and its consequences for education and self-knowledge. Peregrine's disorientation sounds a note that is largely absent from the tribulations of the Sherley brothers and Fletcher's castaways, but recalls the warnings of earlier moralists on the perils of what the play calls ‘extravagant thoughts’ (I.i.147). Essentially this is because the issue of the efficacy of travel is built into the play, in a fantasy journey which is designed to discredit itself in the eyes of its protagonist. Is the only worthwhile journey the one that leads to disillusionment? Is the same true of representations of travel? In one sense we are not very far here from Ascham's jeremiad against Italy in The Scholemaster (‘I was once in Italy myself, but I thank God my abode there was but nine days’);¹⁴ but whereas for the early humanists the argument was often conducted in terms of books versus experience, with the study being recommended as safer and more beneficial than actually venturing abroad, by the seventeenth century the issue had become more complicated. Peregrine after all has lost his wits not by travelling but because he was refused the opportunity to put his reading into practice. This is an interesting variant on the scenario drawn by Joseph Hall in one of his verse satires, where he describes ‘the brainsicke youth that feeds his tickled eare’ with ‘whet-stone leasings of old Maundevile’ and talks obsessively about mermaids, ‘head-lesse men’ and cannibals, until he is driven

Of voyages and ventures to enquire.
His land mortgag'd, He sea-beat in the way
Wishes for home a thousand sithes a day:
And now he deemes his home-bred fare as leefe
As his parch't Bisket, or his barreld Beefe.(15)

It is unlikely that by 1598 Mandeville's Travels inspired many to follow in his footsteps, and it is doubtful whether Hall thought that it did. His collocation of reading and venturing is itself a kind of literary conceit which takes general aim at the frivolity of the age. But it leaves open the question of how travel accounts were to be regarded and used by his contemporaries. The quoted lines are also reminiscent of the gallants in The Sea Voyage as they complain about the sacrifices they have made and think nostalgically about home comforts; Hall would perhaps have read that play as a cautionary fable, warning the audience against the folly and danger of overseas ventures. Yet in his own terms it is also an incitement to travel, and even his scornful dismissal of Mandeville's tall tales recognises their appeal to the imagination. Hall went on to create his own antipodean fiction in Mundus Alter et Idem (1605), a scathing satire on social and intellectual trends which, like Brome's play, creates an exotic fantasy world designed to disturb the assumptions of its audience. The admonitory purpose of these fictions is realised not by putting up a No Entry sign but by taking the reader or viewer on a journey of discovery, one which (to invert the Horatian dictum quoted earlier) changes our minds despite not requiring us to tread on foreign soil.

BROTHERS AND OTHERS: THE TRAVELS OF THE THREE ENGLISH BROTHERS

The circumstances in which The Travels of the Three English Brothers was written and performed in 1607 give us some insight into the commercial opportunities that well-documented foreign adventures offered to the professional stage. The play is fairly closely based on Anthony Nixon's pamphlet The Three English Brothers, but the exact relationship between the two works has never been properly stated. The three-week difference between their entries in the Stationers' Register has sometimes been taken as a measure of how quickly the play was written, but if it was a rush job it was done earlier in the year, since the results were evidently on the stage before Nixon's account went to press. The playwrights must have had access to Nixon's manuscript, or to the sources (written or oral) on which Nixon drew. It seems possible that there was extensive collusion. If, as is likely, Thomas Sherley commissioned Nixon soon after his return to England in December 1606, he may well have encouraged plans for a stage play as well, to give maximum publicity to the brothers' adventures. And Nixon might not have been averse to a theatrical trailer for his own efforts. But the decision to print the play seems to have caused a few ripples. Judging by the Stationers' Register entry, Nixon's original title was to have been the same as the play's, and the sub-title given there reflected his statement in the text that Robert Sherley married the Sophy's ‘cousin Germaine’. When his book appeared, however, the title was abbreviated to The Three English Brothers, and the sub-title (though not the text) now agreed with the play that Robert's wife was the Sophy's niece. It looks as though the decision to publish the play was announced after Nixon's book had been registered but before it (or at any rate its title-page) was actually printed.

Why did the players decide to publish? The usual argument against doing so—that the company would lose exclusive control of the text—had particular force in 1607, for it was in that year that playtexts began to be registered under the hand of the Master of the Revels, in effect acknowledging that publication of a play was equivalent to licensing it for performance.¹⁶ It had always been the case that a printed play was available to be acted by other companies; but the new practice of official registration seems to recognise that the conditions now existed for widespread production of plays that had done well in London. The provinces boasted a number of competent acting companies which toured widely, and one of these—known to have used printed quartos to make its own prompt-books—staged Travels in Yorkshire at Christmas in 1609.¹⁷ Other plays in this company's repertory that season were Pericles and King Lear, so clearly they went for the most popular and up-to-date plays available. And since Queen Anne's Men (who performed Travels in London) also did a fair amount of touring, it had a strong incentive in these circumstances not to let its most successful plays escape into print.

The most likely explanation is that the company saw Nixon's book as about to capitalise on successful production of their play in the summer of 1607, and decided not to let it reap all the advantage to be had out of printing the Sherley story. A longish summer run of a highly topical play may have been thought to have exhausted its theatrical interest, and since parts of the saga it tells were unfinished it ran the risk of being overtaken by future events. Commercial judgements of this kind probably coincided with a desire on the part of Thomas Sherley to help his brothers, both of whom were effectively marooned abroad, by circulating their story as widely as possible. In the wake of Anthony Sherley's inconclusive embassy, the problem was how to keep the absent brothers in the public eye, and in the Epistle to the printed quarto edition the authors are careful to point out that a book can be a reassuringly solid ‘picture’ of absent friends and heroes. But we need to look more closely at the kind of impact this play was designed to have, and the effect it actually had, on audiences and readers in the early Jacobean period.

Thomas Fuller later described Travels as ‘but a friendly foe’ to the memory of the Sherleys, ‘more accommodated to please the present spectators than inform posterity’.¹⁸ But the dramatists felt able to claim that their treatment of the brothers was based on available knowledge, and would not be condemned by anyone in the audience who might ‘better know their states than we’ (Epilogue, 26—). We should be cautious about seeing the play only through the eyes of a rival dramatist like Francis Beaumont, whose Knight of the Burning Pestle (1608) is a thoroughgoing burlesque of ‘adventuring’ plays like Travels and Heywood's Four Prentices of London, mocking the pretensions of a patriotic drama which shows English heroes abroad in a series of implausible triumphs over foreign adversaries. That such plays appealed to popular taste at theatres like the Fortune and the Red Bull is unquestionable; but it is less clear that martial adventure on the stage found favour only with unsophisticated audiences. Recently William Hunt, discussing the fashion for military exercises amongst London's citizens, and Marion Lomax have each suggested that Beaumont's play may have failed at its first Blackfriars production because it underestimated the appeal of chivalric subjects to educated tastes.¹⁹ Lomax points out that Shakespeare's Pericles, a play which is indebted in some ways to Travels, includes a visual quotation from Don Quixote by having Pericles appear at Simonides' court in rusty armour, but turns this potentially satirical moment into an affirmation of knightly virtue and endurance, one which ‘defies ridicule and appears to support the current chivalric revival associated with James I's eldest son, Prince Henry’.²⁰ The dedication of the quarto of Travels to ‘Honour's favourites’ seems also to be aimed at the constituency around the prince which, in marked contrast to his father's court, was promoting an aggressive and interventionist foreign policy. It had been at the behest of the Earl of Essex that Anthony Sherley set out in 1598 on the travels which eventually took him to Persia, his initial brief being to defend the Italian city-state of Ferrara against the Pope; when this initiative collapsed, a visit to Venice yielded a commission to attack Portuguese bases in the Persian Gulf.²¹ Many of Prince Henry's supporters were keen to espouse causes such as these, finding themselves ‘cold and unactive’ (as Sherley puts it in the play, i.144) in the cautious world of Jacobean diplomacy.

The appeal to militant Protestant opinion in Travels is not, however, allowed to exclude a broader vision of foreign relations. The play is remarkable for its sympathetic depiction of the Papacy in scene v, one that apparently helped to recommend Travels as suitable viewing for a Catholic family in 1609.²² The dramatists were probably aware that at an early point in his travels Anthony Sherley had converted to Rome, and this may have influenced their decision to present the Pope as a dignified and credible spiritual leader, the ‘mouth of heaven’ and the ‘stair of men's salvations’ (v.39, 46). No such emphasis is to be found in the play's known sources; indeed, Nixon's way of promoting the Sherley mission was to contrast it with Thomas Stukeley's ‘treacherous designes … in the behalfe of the Pope’ (Gv). In 1607 anti-Catholic feeling was still rife in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot, and had contributed to the virulent polemic of a play like Dekker's Whore of Babylon, staged at the Fortune theatre in the previous year. But Day and his colleagues do not merely avoid anti-Papal propaganda: they actively counter it (and the prevailing public mood) by enlisting the Pope in a larger Christian cause. In their play Babylon is not Rome but the seat of the Ottoman empire, and the vaunt of Dekker's Empress that of ‘this vast Globe Terrestriall … almost three parts [is] ours’ (1607 ed., A4v) is transferred in Travels to the Great Turk who boasts that ‘we … with our eagle's wings / Canopy o'er three quarters of the world’ (viii.3-7).

This rephrasing in fact tightens the connection between the two plays, for that unexpected Ottoman eagle, and the Great Turk's reference to his ‘petty kings’ (viii.3), adapt Dekker's allusion to the apocryphal three-headed eagle that was taken to symbolise the tributary powers of the Roman Catholic Church.²³ The two plays give us very different and in effect mutually exclusive visions of how the outside world impinges on Europe's security. In one view, the power and wealth of the Iberian nations, fuelled by American conquest and East Indian trade, makes possible a Catholic crusade against the Protestant powers which needs to be resisted in every way; in the other, Europe must unite against her common enemy in the East. The fact that these two aims were in conflict did not prevent Anthony Sherley from switching between them, as he did when he abandoned the plan to attack the Portuguese base at Ormuz in the Gulf and took up the idea of a Perso-Christian alliance against the Turks—even though the latter project threatened trade routes used by English companies (passing overland from the East through Ottoman dominions) that the disruption of rival Portuguese seaways had been designed to promote. But the dramatists, even if they were aware of Sherley's change of heart, obey the logic of the situation as their sources presented it and omit any hostility towards the Catholic powers, making the vision of a pan-Christian contract with enlightened paganism the centre of their play.

It is a vision that relied heavily upon belief in the Turkish threat. Christian Europe generally overestimated the strength of the Ottoman empire in the early seventeenth century, but the Turkish stranglehold on the Near East was undeniable, and for purposes of trade several countries, including England, tried to retain cordial relations with Constantinople. Turkish customs and political organisation often aroused the grudging admiration of travellers, though few could overcome their resistance to what they perceived as a deeply alien culture, and the animus against Islam joined with the notorious cruelty of Ottoman sultans to create an immovable stereotype of the raging and expansionist Turk. Persia was a rather different case. Traditionally the land of wealth and luxury, with a glorious imperial past, it was for Western writers a genuinely exotic country, not a malign and unknowable neighbour but a fabulous resource. Like India or Japan, it was not so much Europe's Other as its opposite or foil; and while the fascination with the glamorous east was later to become a disabling orientalism, arguably it was during the early modern period a positive alternative to views of Asia either as the home of barbarian hordes or of the hellish doctrine of Islam—Western conceptions that Edward Said describes as ‘a closed system’ which ‘no empirical material can either dislodge or alter’.²⁴ Of course, as an Islamic country itself Persia was capable of attracting opprobrium like its Ottoman neighbour, and some commentators were happy to contemplate the two infidel states being at war to their mutual disadvantage (an enmity ‘very commodious and of great opportunitie to the Christian Commonweale’, as John Cartwright put it (A2v)). But the long-cherished design of a league between Persia and Christian Europe, something which had been talked about for over three hundred years, was fed by more substantial ideas.

In a pamphlet published in 1609 to promote Robert Sherley's subsequent embassy to Europe, Thomas Middleton (as G. B. Shand has shown) carefully omits from the description of Persia any reference to Islam and almost all suggestion of hedonistic luxury. This is a spartan state in which Persians ‘seem more like Protestants than like Turks in their religion’²⁵ and customs, and are thus a worthy ally against the Ottoman threat. The writers of Travels are altogether more eclectic in their portrayal of Europe's potential war partner. Like Middleton they make use of pre-Islamic descriptions of Persian society—many of which were reproduced in supposedly up-to-date geographies and ethnographies—but they also draw on first-hand travel accounts and do not avoid the tricky question of how a rapprochement between Christianity and Shia Islam is to be achieved. It is clear from contemporary references that Europeans were intrigued by the schism between Sunni Muslims (generally identified with the Turks) and the Shi'ites in Persia, and even when their interest was largely pragmatic—to drive a wedge between the followers of Mahomet—it forced them to look at, and seek correspondences with, the Islamic culture that they chose to support. Shi'ism, at least from the English perspective, was all about true succession and the legitimacy of a martyred prophet: ‘Mortus Ali’, as the son-in-law of Muhammad was known in the West, was regarded as the Prophet's nominated heir by Shi'ites who rejected the ‘false’ caliphs that had initially succeeded him. Later European translations of traditional Persian ‘miracle’ plays clearly find an analogy between ‘Ali's messianic inheritance and the Christian ministry,²⁶ one that may also have been perceptible to sixteenth-century visitors attending performances of such plays. At the same time the claims of ‘Ali could be seen to resemble those of dynastic monarchy, and both English and Persian sensitivity to the advantages of this is apparent in Sir Thomas Herbert's report that Shah Abbas I claimed to be ‘of true Discent from Mortys-Ally’.²⁷

Although Abbas I tolerated some Christian minorities within his borders, it is doubtful that he spent any time thinking about ideological—as opposed to tactical—affinities with the Western powers. Similarly, as we have seen, Anthony Sherley was being thoroughly opportunistic in the way he took up the idea of a Perso-Christian alliance. But those whose job it was to write about Europe's new market-places and spheres of interest had the more considered task of placing them in an imaginative framework where their meaning, value and potential could be assessed. In travel accounts, geographies, promotional literature for trading and colonial companies, and fictional writing that takes up their concerns, the primary task is to provide a way of seeing the unfamiliar; and while this is almost by definition a matter of reconceiving the foreign in one's own terms, the process is not uniformly reductive. The Western demonisation of the Turk is a brutal travesty in a way that the attempt to accommodate Persian Shi'ism is not, even though the effect of the latter, and maybe part of its initial purpose, was to reinforce the prejudice against Ottoman power and beliefs. We should not be surprised that a play like Travels contains its fair share of crude caricature, for figures like The Great Turk and Zariph the Jew are theatrical stereotypes that keep the play anchored in a Renaissance audience's reality; but they co-exist with, and in a sense help to support, a fairly complex dramatisation of cultural encounter.

Cultural difference is in fact the play's principal theme. The English negotiations at the Persian court, which span politics, religion, the ethics of war and mixed marriage, provide a sort of frame for arguments between Persians and Turks over Islamic doctrine, Christian—Jewish antipathy in Venice, and an encounter between the two great acting traditions of the English stage and the Italian commedia dell'arte. Less an intricate fabric than a miscellany of related ideas, it is none the less rather carefully constructed, as Neville Davies has shown, so that a rough symmetry puts the encounter between Will Kemp and Harlequin (scene ix) at the centre of the play, sandwiched between the Zariph scenes which in turn are enclosed by the episodes featuring Thomas Sherley's adventures and his brother Robert's attempts to ransom him and vanquish his own enemies (scenes vi-vii and xi-xii).²⁸ As Davies points out, this symmetrical plan is somewhat obscured by other features, but the dramatists also endeavour to make it unobtrusive by not punctuating each episode with Chorus and dumb show, allowing the action ‘to pass freely between narration, mime, and spoken drama’. Davies finds this ‘mixing of media’ to be ‘unsettling’,²⁹ but I would argue that it is a flexible and resourceful way of organising the material. The dramatists use the Chorus mainly to recount journeys which it is impracticable to stage, and accompanying mime to suggest key moments in the journeys like the events in Moscow in scenes iv and v. The Chorus's summary role in those scenes and at the beginning of scene vi, dispatching—with the aid of dumb show—a great deal of far-flung movement, offsets the lengthy opening sequence in Persia (i-iii), rapidly broadening the scene to prepare for the fluid interplay of geographically separated storylines in the remainder of the action. As a consequence the cross-cultural arguments about clemency, honour and religious belief which are raised in the first third of the play do not get lost in congested plot movements in its second half.

The debate that takes place between the Sophy and Anthony Sherley in scene i arises out of interpretation of the mock-battle that each side stages for the other: the Persians demonstrate a victory over the Turks by entering ‘with heads on their swords’, while the Christian brothers conclude their show by having the winning side parade its prisoners (i.47-86). The episode reveals the dramatists' careful deployment of their source-material, coming as it does only a few lines after the entry direction for the Sophy ‘from wars with drums and colours’ (i.32). All the contemporary accounts of the Sherley mission describe the Shah's return to Qasvin after his victory over the Uzbegs, and none omits the graphic detail that his army carried pikes surmounted by thousands of the heads of the defeated. I have tried to analyse these accounts elsewhere;³⁰ what is important now to note is the use made of this information in the play. The writers carefully avoid any suggestion that the heads on Persian swords are meant to be real: this is not a representation of an actual triumph, as it would have been if they had simply dramatised what they found in their sources, but a show of a show, a representation of courtly make-believe, a masque or pageant within a play. And it is clear that such a strategy is necessary to keep the Persian triumph within the same discursive arena as its Christian counterpart—as if the dramatists recognised that to show the procession of severed heads as part of the main action (and so early in the play) is a strong visual statement that might generate unwanted responses. As it is, the pageant of mock-battles establishes the context for a debate, initiated by the Sophy's puzzlement about one element in the Christian charade:

SOPHY.
But what means those in bondage so?
SIR Anthony.
These are our prisoners.
SOPHY.
                                                                                                    Why do they live?

(i.100-1)

To which Anthony replies that it is Christian practice to show clemency to a yielding foe. A significant portion of the later action is shaped by this issue: in the third scene Robert Sherley, Hotspur-like, refuses to yield up his Turkish prisoner to Halibeck, who relishes the prospect of putting him to death—a fate which his victim accepts as part of the ‘custom of tyranny’ between the two nations (ii.105). Later in the play Robert orders that the captains of the defeated Turkish army be put to death, on the grounds that as commander he is ‘the Persian substitute / And cannot use our Christian clemency’ (vii.14-15), though he halts the executions when he sees the chance to ransom his brother with those that remain alive. In his version of this episode Nixon reports that Robert cut off the heads of the captains ‘and (according to the custome of Persia) caused them to bee carried in triumph about the Market place’ (K3); but the dramatists avoid the implication either that Robert has gone native or that his action legitimises Persian military custom.

Any suggestion, however, that Persia is the acme of pagan cruelty is carefully qualified by other elements in the play. For instance, the dramatists pass over Nixon's story of a benevolent Jew who helped Thomas Sherley in prison in favour of their invented figure of Zariph, who in scene x proves himself a savage lurking in Christian society by his ambition to make Anthony's heart ‘the sweetest part / Of a Jew's feast’ (19-20). Even this melodramatic portrayal, though, is obedient to the play's interest in cultural encounter by interspersing Zariph's taunts and gloating with a certain amount of theological disputation. Sunni Islam, on the other hand, never succeeds in getting a hearing in the play, and the violent episode (xii.81-107) of Thomas Sherley's torture by the Ottoman Turks proves to be the play's starkest opposition of Christian fortitude and pagan tyranny. In the end The Great Turk is confounded by Thomas' inexplicable constancy, and returns his captive to King James with a pompous formality that on the Renaissance stage no doubt reflected the niceties of contemporary diplomacy—and leaves us clear about who is the moral victor. When we return after these episodes to Halibeck's hearing before the Persian court in scene xiii, the grounds for a rapprochement between England and Persia have been laid. Already the Sophy has shown a ludic sensitivity to the truth by his device of mock-execution in scene ix; and in the final scene his instinctive recognition of Halibeck's guilt is matched by a sure judgement of how it must be punished. Robert's plea for mercy on Halibeck's behalf (more substantial than it was in Nixon) is seen as honourable but unrealistic, and the condemnation of the traitor is the point at which Persian rigour and Jacobean security are seen to coincide: the Sophy makes a proper distinction between Halibeck's personal injury to the Sherleys and his offence against the state, one which an English audience would have been bound to endorse. In what follows the compliment is returned, as the granting of Robert's petition confirms the openness of Shi'ite Islam to the beneficial example of Christianity.

The diplomatic fiction created here is not entirely illusory. James I's officers of state may not have been interested in building the particular alliance adumbrated here, and indeed saw the Sherleys as a threat to their links with the Ottoman court and the interests of the Levant Company; but the vision of reciprocity conjured by Anthony in praising his homeland to the Sophy—

                              There lives a princess
Royal as yourself, whose subject I am
As these are to you.

(i.136-8)

—is precisely the kind of gesture that was being made in numerous cultural encounters in the Americas and the Far East, where recognition of an analogous structure of authority was the easiest (and often the only) way of creating confidence on both sides. That such affirmations were often preludes to and even strategies for obtaining dominion over native peoples has, oddly, just been acknowledged in the Sophy's reaction to a demonstration of the English guns:

Chambers go off.
HALIBECK.
                                                                                          Mahomet! It thunders.
SOPHY.
Sure this is a god …
First teach me how to call thee ere I speak.
I more and more doubt thy mortality.
Those tongues do imitate the voice of heaven
When the gods speak in thunder; your honours
And your qualities of war more than human.
If thou hast godhead, and disguised art come
To teach us unknown rudiments of war,
Tell us thy precepts and we'll adore thee.

(i.117-27)

This speech, so reminiscent of reported first encounters in the New World, is hardly appropriate to the present context, though it is certainly revealing of the potential for misunderstanding and self-betrayal in any dialogue between widely dissimilar cultures. Anthony's response is in effect a tactful corrective, and the means by which the play recovers its balance: ‘No stranger are the deeds I show to you / Than yours to me’ (130-1). For the remainder of Travels Persia is shown neither as a primitive society nor as a luxurious and hedonistic one, and its political dignity and standards of honour (despite the Sophy's professed ignorance of the latter) are betrayed only by the provincial small-mindedness of courtiers like Halibeck and Calimath. It is such men, not problems of cultural difference, that jeopardise the prospect of real alliance, which Anthony enthusiastically perceives as resting on a fundamental human oneness:

All that makes up this earthly edifice
By which we are called men is all alike.
Each may be the other's anatomy;
Our nerves, our arteries, our pipes of life,
The motives of our senses all do move
As of one axletree, our shapes alike.

(164-9)

We have already noted that this ecumenical vision has its human limits in the play—no room in it for Turk of Jew—and its rhetorical purpose of building political kinship is what emerges most clearly here. The dramatists shape their material with a similar end in mind, as for instance when they make Halibeck the sole cause of Anthony's subsequent problems in Moscow and Rome: in his account William Parry attributes some of the blame to a quarrelsome Dominican friar who was part of the embassy, but it is essential to the play's design for a seamless Christianity to underwrite the new alliance against the infidel. This artistic decision recognises the diplomatic truth that unity always depends to some extent on tactical exclusion.

How seriously, then, does the play take its own affirmations? It is tempting now to dismiss its ending (which attracted some contemporary ridicule) as a Eurocentric vanity, incorrigibly naive about the realities of cultural exchange. But Renaissance people were not modern multiculturalists, nor did the majority espouse the relativism of Montaigne. As J. H. Elliott has lately remarked, it is

currently fashionable to denounce the observers of earlier ages for their insensitivity to the otherness of the Other. But … some of those observers … had quite a different set of goals from our own, and were struggling to discover resemblances, not differences … It was brothers, not others, whom they wished to find. Ironically, it is the otherness of these early European observers and ethnographers which now tends to be overlooked.³¹

What is true of explorers and missionaries is also true of those who use their findings, and in this play Day and his colleagues dramatise the Persian mission with some uncertainty of tone but with a sound sense of what is politically feasible. The final scene of Travels is a finely judged resolution, in which the Sophy grants a series of requests with a crisp urbanity that gives away nothing of importance: he shows no personal interest in Christianity, and the offer to stand godfather is the indulgent gesture of a self-confident ruler. In the dying moments of the play the barriers begin to go up again: Robert's last petition is for a Christian enclave or ghetto where children will be kept in ignorance of the surrounding culture, and the Epilogue confirms that he and Anthony Sherley, for all their status in foreign courts, have paid the price of estrangement for their travels:

Unhappy they (and hapless in our scenes)
That in the period of so many years
Their destinies' mutable commandress
Hath never suffered their regreeting eyes
To kiss each other at an interview.

(3-7)

The final dumb show offers to rectify the situation:

Enter three several ways the three brothers: … Fame gives to each a prospective glass: they seem to see one another and offer to embrace

—but at this point ‘Fame parts them’, in a poignant acknowledgement that actual reconciliation is the one ‘ornament’ that poesy cannot add to the brothers' history (Prologue, 6-7).

The dangers passed by the Sherley brothers are meant to evoke admiration, approval and pity, but we might ask whether the dramatists altogether exclude the possibility of a contrary response. In scene vi, for instance, where Thomas Sherley invades the Greek island of Kea, it seems at first that they are trying to make the best of a sordid and ignominious episode, for the tone is heroic and there is no acknowledgement of who his antagonists really are. The play registers some of the logical objections to the raid (presenting them as his followers' disloyal sentiments), but suppresses the most obvious—that Sherley was not attacking Turks but killing and plundering their Greek subjects, whom Western Europe wanted to see freed from the Ottoman yoke. Anthony Nixon is uneasily aware of this, making sporadic references to ‘Greeks’ and having Thomas order that no Christians are to be harmed, but he leaves the issue unresolved. The playwrights cut the Gordian knot: committed overall to a design in which the Turk (here the occupying power) is the common enemy, they do not permit the question of the raid's morality (as opposed to its tactical wisdom) to complicate the issue. The Greeks are simply erased from the scene. But this economical account is managed in a heavily inflated register, so that the scene teeters on the edge of burlesque.

In his previous play, The Ile of Gulls (1606), John Day had aired the much-discussed issue of dramatic style on London's stages where, the Prologue complains, if the poet ‘compose a Sceane / Of high writ Poesie, fitting a true stage, / Tis counted fustian’.³² This suggests that he and his fellow-dramatists were well aware of the potential effect on an audience of Thomas' epic calls to arms, and of how cogent his followers' rejection of them might sound. The possible presence of the real Sir Thomas in the audience (perhaps as a sponsor of the play—see above) would have constrained the writers from open criticism of his reckless aggression, but it might also have encouraged the thought that he was one of those travellers who ‘like the industrious bee, having sucked the juice of foreign gardens, they make wing to their own homes and there make merry with the fraught of their adventures’ (iii.126-9). (Nixon refers unsatirically to ‘the pleasure that he [Sir Thomas] now conceives in the remembrance of his forepassed miseries’ (E3v).) The fact that this caveat about adventurers is entered early in the play certainly renders the brothers' exploits more subject to the audience's judgement. And if, as suggested earlier, plays about knights-errant were popular at this time and not simply considered low fare, this makes it all the more likely that the substance and quality of the Sherleys' adventures would have been a matter for general debate.

Notes

1. Thomas Platter's Travels in England 1599, tr. Clare Williams, 1937, p. 170.

2. The fourteenth-century account of Sir John Mandeville's Travels was reprinted in 1568 and 1582. An influential example of exotic romance fiction is the Primaleon of Greece, translated into English by Anthony Munday in 1596 (see the illuminating discussion by Bruce Chatwin in In Patagonia, 1979, chapter 49). On the encyclopaedists, see Margaret Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the 16th and 17th Centuries, 1964.

3. Mandeville's Travels, ed. M. C. Seymour, 1967, pp. 119-20.

4. K. R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement, 1984, p. 356; D. B. Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 1481-1620, 1973, chapter 1.

5. Men like Sir Thomas Hoby and Sir Richard Moryson set the trend in Europe, followed by the generation of Sir Philip Sidney (see his and others' Profitable Instructions, published only in 1633). Boies Penrose, Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance 1420-1620, 1967, Ch. 13 deals with early trade missions to The Middle East. George B. Parks provides a useful overview of the literature generated by these various enterprises in D. B. Quinn (ed.), The Hakluyt Handbook, 1974, I.97-132.

6. Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World, 1984, p. 353.

7. Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere, 1992, p. 7. See note to Travels, i.131-6.

8. G. Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes, 1586, p. 178.

9. Perhaps the most heavily used were Jerome Turler, The Traveiler, 1575; William Bourne, A Treasure for Traveilers, 1578; Justus Lipsius, A Direction for Travailers, 1592.

10. A new interlude and a mery of the iiij elementes (c. 1519), reprinted in Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, p. 168.

11. Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, line 1370 (ed. K. Duncan-Jones, 1989, p. 245).

12. Philip Edwards, Last Voyages, 1988, pp. 7-14.

13. Tom o'Lincoln, ed. G. R. Proudfoot, Malone Soc., 1991.

14. Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, 1570, fol. 29.

15. Joseph Hall, Virgidemiarum (1599), IV.6 (p. 48).

16. See Richard Dutton, Mastering the Revels, 1991, p. 149.

17. C. J. Sisson, ‘Shakespeare Quartos as Prompt-Copies’, Review of English Studies 18 (1942), 136-8.

18. Thomas Fuller, The Worthies of England, 1662, p. 108.

19. William Hunt, ‘Civic Chivalry and the English Civil War’, in A. Grafton & A. Blair (eds.), The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe, 1990, pp. 206-17; Marion Lomax, Stage Images and Traditions, 1987, p. 74.

20. Lomax, p. 75.

21. The fullest account of the Sherleys' adventures is D. W. Davies, Elizabethans Errant, 1967.

22. W. Schrickx, ‘Pericles in a Book-list of 1619’, Shakespeare Survey 29 (1976), 22-4.

23. See C. Hoy's note to I.i.0.3 of the play, in his Introductions … to ‘The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker’, 1979, II.314. The shift of reference may also glance ironically at the treaty between the Ottomans and the Holy Roman Empire signed only a few months earlier, on 11 November 1606.

24. Edward Said, Orientalism, 1978, p. 70. See also Mary W. Helms, Ulysses' Sail, 1988, pp. 220-2, on the shaping of Renaissance views of the East.

25. G. B. Shand, ‘Source and Intent in Middleton's Sir Robert Sherley’, Renaissance and Reformation 19 (1983), 261.

26. In The Miracle Play of Hasan and Husain, ed. Sir L. Pelly, 1879, scene 5, the Prophet on his deathbed predicts to ‘Ali that ‘thy martyrdom will be the means of salvation to my people, in raising thee to the high office of intercessor for them’ (I.87).

27. Thomas Herbert, A Relation of some yeares travaile (1634), p. 129.

28. H. Neville Davies, ‘Pericles and the Sherley brothers’, in E. A. J. Honigmann (ed.), Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Essays in Comparison, 1986, pp. 106-7.

29. Ibid., p. 104.

30. See my ‘Foreign Relations in Jacobean England’, forthcoming in M. Willems & J.-P. Maquerlot (eds.), Travel and Drama in Shakespeare's Time (1995). Several first-hand accounts of the mission are collected in E. Denison Ross, Sir Anthony Sherley and his Persian Adventure (1933).

31. ‘The Rediscovery of America’ (review of Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World, 1993), New York Review of Books, XL. 12 (24 June 1993), p. 38. See also Pagden's ‘Afterword’ on the current tendency to sentimentalise the Other.

32. The Ile of Gulls (1606), A3v; E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare's Impact on his Contemporaries, 1982, pp. 92-3.