Mind-Travelling and Voyage Drama in Early Modern England

D. McInnis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137035363
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Drawing on a wide range of drama from across the seventeenth century, including works by Marlowe, Heywood, Jonson, Brome, Davenant, Dryden and Behn, this book situates voyage drama in its historical and intellectual context between the individual act of reading in early modern England and the communal act of modern sightseeing.

1

The Wings of Active Thought

In the first section of this chapter, I consider anti-travel polemics and an important strand of early modern travel writing which has only recently begun to receive sustained critical attention: the ars apodemica (or ‘instructions for travel’) treatises. I attempt to establish the propensity for travel to be enjoyable for early moderns by examining the converse position: the moral opposition to travel, as articulated in anti-travel tracts and denied in ars apodemica treatises. At stake is more than a superficial objection to styles of clothing and mannerisms; it is a question of identity, in which cross-dressing, dressing above one’s rank, or affecting Italianate or Frenchified manners was both deceptive and (more alarmingly) destabilising, because constitutive of selfhood.

In the second section, I stray from the conventional travel writings of the period and consider some important (though often fleeting) examples of writing which openly celebrate the pleasures of travel. My intention here is to challenge the traditional assumption that early moderns voyaged purely for instrumental purposes and that their written reports of these expeditions were strictly utilitarian and informative. I ask whether travel accounts were read exclusively for facts, and conclude that although not the predominant form of reading in the period, there did in fact exist an important segment of the reading public who practised the art of vicarious travel from the safety of their closets. These readers, it seems, sought a simulation of the travel experience, irrespective of whether they were likely to voyage anywhere physically. Following an instructive instantiation of the term in the early modern lexicon, I refer to this phenomenon as ‘mind-travelling’.

Mind-travelling entails a quasi-Kamesian notion of ideal presence (see the third section below), in which the reader imaginatively reconstructs a vivid psycho-physiological experience of distant lands without leaving their homes. Importantly, it has little practical utility; it is as idle a pursuit as playgoing, and equally unprofitable if one were to take a pragmatic stance. Yet like the theatre, there was demand for this aesthetic experience.

In the final section, I ask how this experience of mind-travelling translates into the realm of the theatre, for it is evident that solitary imaginative rehearsals of reported travels, when experienced from the comfort of one’s room and under cover of darkness, will not necessarily operate in the same manner in the context of a crowded playhouse in broad daylight. The communal nature of the playgoing experience leads me to consider the prospect of collaborative labour shared between player and playgoer; a concept which feeds into recent scholarship on Distributed Cognition, but which also raises the possibility of reconceptualising theatrical experience through contemporary critical work on pleasurable travel (that is, tourism or sightseeing). If the theatre is a form of vicarious experience – vicarious travel, in the context of voyage drama – what can this teach us about the nature of spectacle, of representation, of mimesis? How might we construe the experience of playgoing differently, in light of the mutually illuminating (though not necessarily causative) relationship between travel and the theatre?

Instructions for travel, or ars apodemica

It has become a commonplace assumption that travel was purposeful and utilitarian in early modern England. Daniel Carey’s recent characterisation of the period is representative of scholarship on the subject: ‘[t]he sixteenth century constituted a remarkable period of expansion in travel – whether for purposes of trade, education, exploration, or colonial settlement’ (‘Hakluyt’s Instructions’ 167). Conspicuously absent from Carey’s survey of early modern travel typologies is any mention of pleasure. Some early moderns do explicitly discuss the pleasure of travel (Justus Lipsius and Thomas Coryate, both of whom I will discuss below), but these writers are clearly exceptional. Nevertheless, without wanting to stake my argument on the New Historicist equation of absence with presence, I do believe that a prominent strain of travel literature from the early modern period can teach us something (indirectly) about pleasure whilst purportedly instructing the reader on the art of travelling well.

I have in mind a specific sub-genre of travel literature that emerged, in England, in the late sixteenth century: the ars apodemica treatises, or instructions for travel. Proponents of this literature in England and Europe included Robert Dallington, Philip Sidney, Robert Devereux (2nd Earl of Essex), Justus Lipsius, Albrecht Meyer, Thomas Neale, Thomas Palmer, and Jerome Turler (amongst others). A great many of these texts were written for the benefit of young aristocrats about to embark on a proto-grand tour of the Continent, and contain pragmatic advice drawn from the author’s own experiences and Humanist education. Thus Sir Balthazar Gerbier advises his princely traveller that

[t]he best Circuit a Traveller can take, is to go through Holland towards Germany, thereby to satisfie his curiosity by degrees, which will encrease upon him, for Germany will afford more satisfaction than the Low Countries; France more than Germany; Italy more than France; and as for Spain, what it may want of the French Complements, it will make good in matter answerable to the Pirenean Hills…

(17)

The more usual course, though, was for these texts to instruct the future traveller on how to travel well, rather than simply guiding them through their destinations. Implicit in this focus is a belief that travel could be beneficial; a Humanist reaction against the likes of Roger Ascham (The Scholemaster, 1570) and others who had heartily condemned travel in the later decades of the 1500s. To this end, Carey notes, by printing treatises of this kind, ‘Hakluyt participated in the rehabilitation of travel in several ways. The instructions he printed defined it as a beneficial activity in which observations made abroad contributed to the national good.’ Carey also notes that such tracts were efforts by ‘Humanist authorities and Spanish officials to exert control over travel, to make it a useful and disciplined activity serving national interests’ (‘Hakluyt’s Instructions’ 180, 168).

The purpose of methodising (or regularising) travel in the manner insisted upon by these ars apodemica treatises is to maximise the utility of travel through a reliably systematic procedure for information collection; in other words, to define ‘a set of norms and expectations for travel during a crucial era in which it was redefined as a secular activity designed to serve the interests of the state’ (Carey, Continental Travel 2). The documents published by Hakluyt, for example, ‘demonstrate the aspiration to coordinate travel in order to maximise commercial interests’, where ‘the challenge was to identify and exploit the potential of new markets for English goods’ (Carey, ‘Hakluyt’s Instructions’ 171). In an illustrative example, Albrecht Meyer insisted on an exhaustive taxonomy of attributes of a foreign country to be recorded by the traveller, consisting of:

1. Cosmographie, or, the description of the worlde.

2. Astronomie, or, the art of skill, in the course of the starres and planets.

3. Geographie, or, the drawing and proportioning of the earth.

4. Chorographie, or, the demonstration of Cities and Regions.

5. Topographie, or, the protraiture [sic] of particular places.

6. Husbandrie.

7. Nauigation.

8. The Politicall

9. The Ecclesiasticall

10. Literature.

11. Histories.

12. Chronicles.

(Meyer B)

As Louis B. Wright observed, Meyer’s ‘was not a guidebook but a syllabus of points to be observed. Its purpose was so to train observers that, in the country visited, they might study intelligently every characteristic which would be of profit or interest to their own people’ (Middle-Class Culture 527). It is in this context that Joan-Pau Rubiés has also demonstrated the contribution of such empirically-oriented travel literature, with its Ramist logic, to the rise of the new Baconian science (139–90). This rigorous gathering of information from first principles, which was becoming the normative role of travel, participated in and accelerated the scientific move away from a reliance on authorities of classical antiquity as the foundation of knowledge.

However, there is more at stake in this regularisation of travel than a pedantic desire to standardise the gathering of information. Justin Stagl pays particular attention to the emphasis placed by ars apodemica treatises on the definition of travel, noting that ‘the utility of travel for education and research is stressed. This is done by means of a characteristic distinction: true travel (“peregrinari”) is contrasted with aimless and useless rambling (“vagari”)’ (Stagl 71). To illustrate his point, Stagl translates and cites a 1638 treatise by S. Zwicker, Breviarium apodemicum methodice concinnatum: ‘Travel is thus a certain journey, undertaken by a suitable man out of the desire and wish to wander through, inspect and get to know external places, in order to acquire from there some good or other, which could be useful either to the fatherland and the friends or to ourselves’ (71). This emphasis on the usefulness of true travel (peregrinari), especially in stark contradistinction to purposeless vagrancy or wandering (vagari) reveals a deeply embedded concern over the morality of voyaging. Mary Floyd-Wilson has convincingly demonstrated the currency of geohumoral thought in early modern England; for the English, who at this time were struggling to define their national identity, the threat of cultural degeneration (ostensibly posed by exposure to Continental cultures) was a significant concern. To wander aimlessly through a wilderness of vices was not simply to be lazy (idle), but to be susceptible to moral corruption, which in turn could lead to changes in national or cultural identity.

Beyond the provision of practical instructions then, these ars apodemica texts promote ‘a strong sense of the moral constraints upon the traveller’ and urge the voyager to document their observations systematically, not simply for the benefit of the state or for educational purposes, but in order to assist the traveller to ‘avoid the perils of aimless curiosity’ (Parr, ‘Coryat’ 581). As Rubiés notes, these texts ‘offered to instruct the traveller in the process of observation and classification, as well as on the moral and educational implications of his activity’ (141). Whilst travel may have been increasingly secularised – the pilgrimage route to Jerusalem being supplanted by a Continental circuit incorporating famous sites from Classical antiquity – the concept of idle travel, of whimsical wandering or relaxation and indulgence, was not yet endorsed. Intemperance threatened to undermine England’s New World colonies (Wilson-Okamura 721), and it was an equally undesirable trait in voyagers who travelled to more familiar regions. If Edward Leigh is to be believed, when young nobles came to take their leave of King Charles, he counselled them to ‘keep alwaies the best Company, and be sure never to be idle’ (B^v).

Idle travel was a profitless pursuit, but it could be remedied by keen observation and judicious recording of information, which not only satisfied the state’s need for reconnaissance but served the individual well, by regulating their desires. Justin Stagl and Christian K. Zacher have demonstrated the traditional connection between travel and idle pastimes in an earlier period:

Mobility and curiosity had always been seen together. For medieval moralists curiositas was ‘a wandering, unstable state of mind’, which was ‘exemplified in metaphors of motion and in the act of travel’. Curiositas was thus opposed to stabilitas.

(Stagl 48, quoting Zacher 21)

The instructions for travel in the early modern period similarly attest to the potential for moral degeneration whilst abroad, but attempt to neutralise them ‘by assimilating them in the shape of the methodical self-control of the traveller’ (Stagl 73). For example, the Profitable Instructions of Essex, Sidney, and Davison, printed 1633 (but with a terminus ad quem of 1608, when Davison died), raises the possibility of even the noblest of men being corrupted by travel:

Some goe ouer full of good qualitie, and better hopes; who, hauing as it were emptied themselues in other places, return laden with nothing but the vices, if not the diseases of the Countries which they haue seene. And, which is most to bee pittied, they are commonly the best wits, and purest receptacles of sound knowledge, that are thus corrupted. Whether it be, that they are more eagerly assaulted with vice then others; or whether they doe more easily admit any obuious impression: howeuer it be; fit it is, That all young Trauellers should receiue an Antidot against the infectious Ayre of other Countries.

(A3^v–A6)

Edward Leigh likewise criticises the traveller who returns ‘leavened with the ill Customes and Manners of the Countries they passed through’ (B^v) and Robert Dallington cautions his travelling reader about the cultural hazards of travel:

The hazards are two: of the minde, and of the body: that, by the infection of errors; this by the corruption of manners. For who so drinketh of the poysonous cup of the one, or tasteth of the sower liquor of the other, looseth the true rellish of religion and vertue, bringeth home a leprous soule, and a tainted body…

(B^v)

It is Justus Lipsius, however, whose reservations about travelling provide the greatest insight here. In claiming that it is easier to sin than to improve virtue, Lipsius intimates even more clearly than these other writers that temptation (and thus, by inference, pleasure) is ubiquitous in travel:

we attaine vnto vertue, not without great industrie, but vnto vice we need no schoolemaister. Wherefore, sweete Earle, haue diligent care in this behalfe, least you fall into the naturall faults of those nations where you trauell.

(C2^v)

The very existence of these instructional treatises is testament to the presence of pleasure in voyaging: the instructions were composed at least partially in order to restrain the tempted traveller, to regulate travel so as ‘to produce positive effects rather than merely corrupting a country’s nobility and gentry during their time abroad’ (Carey, Continental Travel 4). Or as Judith Adler puts it, ‘[m]oral tracts aiming to establish the utility of travel distinguished serious practitioners from idlers on the grounds of whether more than personal pleasure was their aim’ (18).

Mind-travelling

Was this the only way that travel was enjoyed – as a transgressive activity? It would be a mistaken criticism that suggested that travel was undertaken purely for the shock value of flirting with immorality. Moral subversion might have held a certain deviant appeal to the early modern Englishman, but the pleasure of travel cannot be reduced to the titillation of the risqué. What of the aesthetic dimension of pleasure? To read these objections to travel, and to witness the growth of documents addressing the need to regularise travel so as to produce profitable results, one might be forgiven for assuming that early moderns never wrote about the pleasures of voyaging – and that if they did enjoy travel, they self-censored when it...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Wings of Active Thought
• 2 Marlovian Models of Voyage Drama
• 3 Morals, Manners, and Imagination: Jonson and Heywood
• 4 Therapeutic Travel in Richard Brome’s The Antipodes
• 5 Davenant, Saint-Évremond, Dryden, and the Ocular Dimension of Travel
• 6 Old Genres, New Worlds: Behn Domesticates the Exotic
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index