Remote Islands as Fictional and Metaphorical Places in Cervantes, Fletcher and Shakespeare

José Manuel González

doi:10.1515/mstap-2017-0010

Authors

José Manuel González University of Alicante

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1515/mstap-2017-0010

Keywords:

islands, sea, travels, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Fletcher, barbarism, gender, culture, metaphorical, exotic

Abstract

Islands have always occupied a significant place in literature and have been a source of inspiration for the literary imagination. Fictional islands have existed as either lost paradises, or places where law breaks down under physical hardships and a sense of entrapment and oppression. Islands can be sites of exotic fascination, of cultural exchange and of great social and political upheaval. However, they are more than mere locations since to be in a place implies being bound to that place and appropriating it. That means that the islands narrow boundaries, surrounded by the sea and cut off from mainland, can create bridges between the real and the imaginary as a response to cultural and social anxieties, frequently taking the form of eutopias/dystopias, Edens, Arcadias, Baratarias, metatexts, or cultural crossroads, deeply transforming that particular geographical location. This article is concerned with insularity as a way of interrogating cultural and political practices in the early modern period by looking at the works of Cervantes, Fletcher and Shakespeare where insular relations are characterized by tensions of different sort. The arrival of Prospero and Miranda, Periandro and Auristela (The Trials of Persiles and Segismunda), and Albert and Aminta (The Sea Voyage) to their respective islands take us to a different world, revealing different political and cultural interests and generating multiple perspectives on the shifting relationship between culture, society and power.

Author Biography

José Manuel González, University of Alicante

José Manuel González is Professor of English Literature at the University of Alicante. He is the author of a number of books and articles on various aspects of early modern poetry and drama in England and Spain. He has been Visiting Professor at the universities of Delaware, South Carolina, Groningen, Bangor, Lodz and King’s College London. He is a member of the International Committee of Correspondents of the World Shakespeare Bibliography, and of the editorial board of Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, and Shakespeare until 2011. He is the editor of Shakespeare and Spain (Mellen, 2002), Spanish Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Delaware, 2006), Shakespeare, and Cervantes and Rabelais. New Interpretations and Comparative Studies (Mellen, 2011). His contributions have appeared in Women Making Shakespeare (Bloomsbury, 2013), Neophilogus (2015) and Shakespeare and the Visual Arts (Routledge, 2017). He has edited the last issue of Multicultural Shakespeare, entitled “Shakespeare, National Origins, and Originality”. His latest book Cervantes y Shakespeare. Una aproximación comparativa has been published by Síntesis in 2016.

References

Ardila, J.A.G., ed. The Cervantean Heritage: Reception and Influence of Cervantes in Britain. London: Legenda, 2009.

Bate, Jonathan. “Shakespeare’s Islands”. Shakespeare and the Mediterranean. Ed. Tom Clayton, Susan Brock and Vicente Forés. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. 289-307.

Bender, Barbara, “Introduction: Landscape-Meaning and Action.” Landscape: Politics and Perpectives, Ed. Barbara Bender, Providence and Oxford: Berg, 1993.

Brown, Tom. “Amusement Five: The Play-House.” Amusements Serious and Comical. 1700. http://public-library.uk/ebooks/08/71.pdf. 19 June 2016.

Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Translation by John Rutherford. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Cervantes, Miguel de. The Travels of Persiles and Segismunda: A Northern Story. Trans. T.L. Darby and B.W. Ife. Electronic text. http://www.ems.kcl.ac.uk/content/etext/e006.html. 12 May 2016.

Childers, William. Transnational Cervantes. University of Toronto Press, 2006.

Colahan, Clark. “Quixotic Idealism Triumphant: Persiles and Segismunda in Britain”. The Cervantean Heritage: Reception and Influence of Cervantes in Britain. Ed. J.A.G. Ardila. London: Legenda, 2009. 243-248.

Cro, Stelio. “The Utopian in Cervantes and Shakespeare”. The Cervantean Heritage: Reception and Influence of Cervantes in Britain. Ed. J.A.G. Ardila. London: Legenda, 2009. 234-241.

Fletcher, John and Philip Massinger. “A Sea-Voyage”. Three Renaissance Travel Plays. Ed. Anthony Parr. Manchester University Press, 1999. 135-216.

Fletcher, John and Philip, Massinger. The Custom of the Country. Ed. Arnold Glover. New York: Octagon Books, 1969.

Fletcher, John. The Island Princess. Ed. Clare McManus. Arden Early Modern Drama. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

Fuchs, Barbara. The Poetics of Piracy. Emulating Spain in English Literature. Pennsylvania University Press, 2013.

Hutchinson, Stephen. Cervantine Journeys, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.

Jehenson, Myriam Yvonne and Peter N. Dunn. “Discursive Hybridity: Don Quixote’s and Sancho Panza’s Utopias”. Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Bloom Modern Critical Interpretations. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 2010. 127-144.

Johnson, Carroll B. Cervantes and the Material World. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

Mandeville, John. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. Translated by C.W.R.D. Moseley. London: Penguin, 2005.

Marientras, Richard. New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World. Cambridge University Press, 1985.

McMullan, Gordon., The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After. London: Routledge, 1992.

McMullan, Gordon., The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher. University of Massachusett Press, 1994.

More, Thomas. Utopia, Trans. Robert M. Adams, New York: W.W. Norton, 1975.

Padgen, Anthony. European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1993.

Pinet, Simone. Archipelagos. Insular Fictions from Chivalric Romance to the Novel, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2011.

Saffar, Ruth El. “Persiles´ Retort: An Alchemical Angle on the Lovers”. Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 10.1 (1990): 17-34.

Samson, Alexander. “Last thought upon a Windmill: Cervantes and Fletcher.” The Cervantean Heritage: Reception and Influence of Cervantes in Britain. Ed. J.A.G. Ardila. London: Legenda, 2009. 223-233.

Shakespeare, William. Richard II. The Norton Shakespeare. Gen. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton, 2016. 885-956.

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman. A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004.

Sullivan, Garrett A. Jr., The Drama of Lanscape, Stanford University Press, 1998.

Walcott, Derek. Omeros. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992.

Weller, Celia, E. and Clark A. Colahan, “Cervantine Imagery and Sex-Role Reversal in Fletcher and Massinger’s The Custom of the Country”. Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, 5.1 (1985), 27-43.