Voyage Drama and Gender Politics, 1589-1642: Real and Imagined Worlds.

Vitkus, Daniel

Voyage Drama and Gender Politics, 1589-1642: Real and Imagined Worlds, by Claire Jowitt. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003. Pp. vii + 240. Cloth $79.95.

Claire Jowitt's monograph, Voyage Drama and Gender Politics, is not only a study of early modern "voyage drama"; it is also an extended exercise in the interpretation of topical allegory. The book is comprised of a series of linked readings of travel plays (twelve in all) that were written during the late Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. Each reading is well researched and contextualized by a helpful array of references to current events and to other writings from the same period. Jowitt declares in her introduction that her study "concentrates on the ways travel drama does domestic work" (5), and she shows how this work is accomplished by means of allegorical insinuations that lie beneath "the primary literal level of meaning of the story" (5). Her concern throughout the book is to show how representations of colonial or foreign experience subtly "comment upon problems and iniquities at home" (5).

At first it may seem perverse to argue that these voyage plays are not really what they seem--that the foreign settings are merely substitute situations employed by the playwrights in order to communicate, under foreign cover, controversial messages that are sometimes sharply critical of those in power--but this book demonstrates quite convincingly that plays set in the New World, the Mediterranean, or even Asia, are full of allegorical allusions to domestic English issues. The issues that concern Jowitt most are intersecting questions of gender construction and national or colonial politics, and much of the discussion revolves around three rulers--Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I--and public perceptions of their femininity or masculinity.

The opening section of the book sets forth a theory of allegorical interpretation that acknowledges the complex "bifurcated or polyvalent allegorical meanings" (5) at play in early modern drama. In her introduction Jowitt emphasizes "the branch of allegory known as aenigma" (6), explaining that the plays' meanings were shrouded in obscurity, split by ambiguity, or layered by allegory in order to conceal and protect the expression of oppositional political messages. According to Jowitt, the voyage plays "have the ability to accommodate a variety of topical allegorical readings but do not necessarily authorize any one particular interpretation" (6). Having initially pointed to the semiotic slipperiness of early modern theater, Jowitt then goes about to clarify what is obscure by arguing for various specific topical meanings in each of the plays she analyzes. Jowitt claims that these plays were constantly glancing at specific domestic issues, but because these texts are examples of "aenigmatic allegory," this obviates the need to present firm evidence that the topical allusions she details would be clearly perceived by London playgoers. Instead, she can simply say that the plays suggest or gesture toward various domestic concerns by setting up analogies between homegrown issues and the situations presented in the voyage plays.

Of course, when looking for topical meaning, one does not expect to find one-to-one correspondences between dramatic characters and historical people, or between stage actions and real events. Theatrical representation is never simply a "mirror" of contemporary society--this is true at the "literal level" of meaning as well as any other, more obscure levels. A good play is certainly capable of conveying meaning through various "layers" or "levels," and Jowitt's analyses show how this works in these voyage plays. The question of how early modern theater employed allegorical meaning is further complicated, though, by the fact that these plays were written to be performed and seen, not read, and while Jowitt's account of the plays as bearers of allegorical meaning refers to the interpretive experience of live spectators in the London playhouses and at court, she does not fully explore the effect that conditions of performance or staging might have had on the plays' allegorical meanings.

In her introduction and in chapter 1, Jowitt's discussion of "real and imagined worlds" assumes a distinct separation between the realm of "the imaginary voyage" and that of the "home nation." Some of the strongest sections of the book do not actually maintain this distinction, but Jowitt's study does exhibit a tendency to neglect the historical reality of connectedness, of a system or network, a diasporic mobility, that linked England to foreign parts (and indeed, to the global system as a whole, once the Atlantic had been crossed). The London stage was a site of cultural production that absorbed, reshaped, and reproduced exciting new information that flowed into England from abroad, carried on the tide of trade. London was rapidly becoming a "world city" with a cosmopolitan theater to match, and though travel plays certainly allude to domestic issues, they also have a lot to say about the explosion of cross-cultural connectivity that was taking place in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Early modern travel and voyaging, particularly from England to the Mediterranean and to the Americas, expanded rapidly after the 1570s. This expansionary thrust produced and maintained a set of cultural and economic connections that linked English society to other parts of the world in concrete, meaningful ways. Travel did not occur within a separate space; rather, it was part of a system that conducted people, commodities, texts and ideas from one part of the global matrix to another. In other words, England, the space of the voyage, and other parts of the world beyond England formed a dynamic, interconnected system. Voyaging to and from foreign shores was of great interest in its own right because of the wealth it brought to merchants and investors, because of the geopolitical implications of colonial activity, because of national competition with other maritime, imperial powers (like Spain), and because of the perennial fascination for the exotic. Perhaps it is the spate of recent scholarship on early modern travel and colonialism that moved Jowitt to seek a new approach and to excavate the underlying, allegorical meanings of voyage drama rather than connecting these plays to the realities of contemporary trade, travel, exploration, colonization, and international rivalry.

Jowitt declares from the outset that her study will not concern itself with the texts' relatively straightforward, "literal" representation of cross-cultural encounters. Her hermeneutic strategy relies upon the bifurcation of meaning performed by allegory, and allegory becomes a catchall term for the way that texts can produce multiple, even contradictory, meanings. Jowitt makes evident the notion that travel writing or drama can function as an allegory of English national identity, but in doing so she de-emphasizes the fact that travel drama also represents and performs cultural difference in ways that are unequivocal and unenigmatic. Though her study emphasizes the plays' coded domestic significations, Jowitt does not deny that voyage drama does represent voyaging qua voyaging. Some sections of the book acknowledge that the travel plays comment, literally and directly, on foreign contexts and issues (for instance, she shows how plays featuring pirates represent the reality of international piracy), but she chooses to stress the ways that the exotic plays function, allegorically and indirectly, to explore domestic issues.

Jowitt skillfully teases out all sorts of allegorical meanings, beginning in the first chapter, where she writes about Heywood's plays The Fair Maid of the West, Part I and Part II, but also treats nondramatic travel writings by Raleigh, Hakluyt, and others. Building on the work of Mary Fuller and Louis Montrose on gender and colonialism, Jowitt traces English efforts to establish an imperial identity in writings like Raleigh's Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana. She concludes, "The gendered discourse of these colonial texts operates at an allegorical level to reveal the marginal nature of the Queen domestically just as much as it does in the project of empire" (38). Jowitt then pursues this allegorical reading in her analysis of The Fair Maid of the West, describing Heywood's Bess, in Part I, as a version of Elizabeth I. She reads the earlier play both as a celebration of Elizabeth's queenship and, at the same time, as a text that reveals "the problems attendant upon female rule" (39). Jowitt then discusses Heywood's sequel, Part II, which was written during the Caroline period and printed in 1630 with a prologue penned for a performance at Hampton Court. According to Jowitt, the shift from the aggressive Bess of Part I to the relatively passive Bess of Part II indicates, in the second play, a topical message for Queen Henrietta Maria, "designed to school her in the role of consort, rather than encouraging forms of 'queenly' behaviour where she might actively interfere in matters of state" (51).

The next chapter focuses on "the ways antiestablishment patterns of behaviour (such as piracy and other forms of rebellion) are used in early modern dramatic texts about empire" (61). While the first chapter stresses the queen's femininity, the second chapter features the unruly masculinity of Captain Thomas Stukeley in the two plays that dramatize his exploits, Peele's The Battle of Alcazar and the anonymous Famous Historye of ... Captaine Thomas Stukeley. Despite the play's setting in Morocco, Jowitt argues that The Battle of Alcazar "is fundamentally concerned with values and debates within Europe--rendering the representation of Moorish characters important primarily as an amplification of European political disputes rather than directly discussing the relationship between Christianity and Islam" (73). A similar displacement or encryption of domestic issues is at work in the second Stukeley play: according to Jowitt's reading of The Famous History, the internecine conflict between Abdelmeleck and Muly Mahamet "can be seen as a geographically displaced rehearsal of contemporary anxieties about the English succession" (98). Jowitt shows how both Stukeley plays trace the limits of a heroic masculinity that could threaten to place individual ambition and honor above the interests of the nation. She makes a convincing case that Stukeley's transgressive behavior would be seen as analogous to the actions of aggressive male courtiers like Essex and Leicester.

Chapter 3 provides readings of two plays by John Fletcher, Bonduca, set in an ancient Britain beset by Roman invaders, and Massinger's The Island Princess, which involves the intervention of Portuguese colonialists in the Moluccan spice island kingdoms of Tidore and Ternata. Jowitt's commentary on Bonduca shows how the text succeeds in containing seemingly contradictory elements: in Fletcher's play, "The Romans represent an alien and hostile conquering force finally defeating the Britons, but they also imaginatively stand in for the British in contemporary Virginia" (105). Jowitt deftly demonstrates how Bonduca expresses anxiety about maintaining British identity in the face of threats from both foreign powers (like Spain) and colonized peoples (like the Native Americans in Virginia) who threaten to alter the British nation even as they are absorbed by it.

Following the analysis of Bonduca, Jowitt offers an allegorical interpretation of The Island Princess, a play set in a distant colonial border zone. Despite the far-flung setting, Jowitt argues that the plays would have sent clear messages to London playgoers about the following domestic topics: "concerns about James's personal sexual conduct, Stuart attitudes to Catholicism ..., and contemporary perceptions that the King had failed to act decisively enough in the Palatinate crisis" (123). This reader felt that here some of the assertions about the play's topical referencing were a bit forced, and again in the next chapter, where Daborne's A Christian Turned Turk and Massinger's The Renegado are discussed, the allegorical meanings were, at times, far-fetched. For example, Jowitt claims that in The Renegado the relationship of the Venetian aristocrat Vitelli and the Turkish princess Donusa is an allegorical version of the potential marriage between Prince Charles and the Spanish Infanta Maria, and that English domestic worries about the Spanish match are signified by fears that the Christian Vitelli will marry the Muslim seductress Donusa. Jowitt runs into trouble, however, when she is forced to explain away the play's strongly positive representation of Roman Catholic religion and priestly guidance (embodied in a Jesuit character, Francisco, who is Vitelli's moral mentor). In order to support her topical, allegorical reading, Jowitt admits that Francisco is a "heroic" figure (182) but then makes the untenable claim that he is "an untrustworthy machiavel" (182). It must be said, however, that this wresting of the text's meaning to conform to a purported topical allegory is not typical of this study, and in the fifth and final chapter Jowitt recovers a more balanced approach in her readings of three more plays: Fletcher and Massinger's The Sea Voyage, Massinger's The City Madam, and Brome's The Antipodes. These are three fascinating plays that are often neglected by critics of early modern drama, and it is a pleasure to see them treated in detail here.

The final chapter takes a slightly different approach than the first four chapters, looking at what Jowitt calls "social allegory," rather than topical allusions to the politics of court or nation. In her readings of The Sea Voyage and The City Madam, Jowitt shows how these texts comment, not only on domestic gender issues, but also on the perilous condition of women in the Virginia colony. The action of The Sea Voyage occurs in an undetermined New World setting and dramatizes the adventures of a group of French and Portuguese castaways. The City Madam is set in London, but includes a Virginian subplot in which the wife and daughters of Sir John Frugal are chastised for their unruliness and threatened with being taken to the Virginia colony by a Native American king or "sachem," who is visiting London. The king is really Sir John in disguise, attempting to scare the women straight, but it is this ruse that leads to a discussion of the conditions of living for women in Virginia. In both plays, argues Jowitt, "the correct management of sexual appetite figures as an important gauge for national colonial performance" (191).

In the final pages of the study, Jowitt offers a reading of Brome's The Antipodes, a play in which a nonexistent antipodean kingdom becomes the imaginary location for a satirical attack on England as a topsy-turvy society. This play, she argues, is "purely allegorical" (12)--"it is a travel drama that is not about travel" (222); and so The Antipodes serves as the culminating example of the paradox that has functioned through Jowitt's study.

In each of the twelve plays discussed in Voyage Drama and Gender Politics, the allegorical, topical meanings are painstakingly unpacked by Jowitt, whose handling of gender politics is both learned and perceptive. This book demonstrates a wide-ranging knowledge of early modern culture, and looks to both canonical and noncanonical sources for its contextualizations. Jowitt's scholarship is solid, and even if her zeal for picking out allegorical topicality sometimes carries her away, one has to appreciate the clear writing and careful exposition that make the reading of this book a pleasure. Jowitt's study will certainly be of great value to students and scholars interested in early modern colonialism, travel drama, and gender politics.

Reviewer: DANIEL VITKUS