With the recent shift in literary studies towards what is often described as a “global Renaissance,” it is hardly surprising that figures of merchants and travelers both in early modern travelogues and plays have come under greater scrutiny as sites for understanding the formation of a fluid English identity, transnational commerce, emergent colonialism, and nation building. What still remains largely unexplored, however, particularly in the context of the East Indies trade, is the impact of this emergent globalization on the bodies of the European women who were closely related to the merchants or factors. While scholarship on plays such as Fletcher's The Island Princess or Dryden's Amboyna emphasizes the roles of both European men and their beloved native women, the white woman still remains a shadowy presence at the fringes of our current academic interest in the early modern spice trade.

This essay seeks to address this gap by turning to the public stage, particularly to a play that explores how the emergent trade with the East Indies appeared to affect the physical and moral complexion of one such European woman. In the trial scene of John Webster's play The Devil's Law-Case (1623), Jolenta, the sister of Romelio, an East Indies merchant enters with “her face colour'd like that of a Moore,” accompanied by two Surgeons, “one of them like a Jew.” Although the assembled people quickly recognize her they still comment on her changed complexion. Ariosto the advocate exclaims, “Shee’s a blacke one indeed” (5.5.40) while Ercole, one of her suitors, wails “to what purpose / Are you thus ecclipst?” (5.5.57–58). Of course, Jolenta’s transformation is temporary and apparently superficial; yet her blackening appears to gesture towards deeper concerns regarding the impact of the East Indies trade, particularly on a woman who has never left her home or sailed the high seas to profit from pepper, cinnamon, cardamom and mace.

Analyses of Antony and Cleopatra have long noted the dialectical opposition between Rome and Egypt, an opposition that sets up a concomitant correspondence between geography and gender. Although recent scholarship has destabilized the categories, Rome has traditionally represented the masculine—solid, controlled, bounded—while Egypt is feminine—fluid, unchecked, limitless, and thus constantly generating. Egypt in the play evokes an elemental fecundity that is spontaneous and natural at the same time that it is corrupting and degenerate, “dungy,” in Antony's words. Further, the connection between Cleopatra and Egypt is inextricable in the play; she exists in metonymic relation to her country, the word “Egypt” used no less than seven times to refer to her directly. Picking up on Janet Adelman's argument that the play constructs Cleopatra as “one with her feminized kingdom as though it were her body,” this essay examines the complex idea of Egyptian earthiness in connection with Cleopatra and her fertile/infertile body by reading it in conjunction with various theories of reproduction—what the Renaissance called generation. Specifically, I seek to show how the trope of spontaneous generation allows Shakespeare to expand his interrogation of procreation in the play, blurring gender boundaries as he does so.

In the sticky, sweet, and sweaty world in which Shakespeare situates his Venus and Adonis, something has gone awry. According to Venus, “Nature” is “at strife” with herself for having made Adonis. By “Nature” Venus is, of course, referring to herself. Compared to the Venus of book 10 of Ovid's Metamorphoses—a goddess who makes men and women fall in love, who brings stone to life, and whose magical doves transport her anywhere she wishes to go—Shakespeare's Venus is, by comparison, a much more natural being. A creature of the senses, most especially smell, Shakespeare's Venus does not so much manipulate the natural world as bond with it. She experiences heightened, animal-like sensibilities that allow her to commune with Adonis's horse and to imagine herself as the earthbound and hunted Wat the Hare.

But why would Shakespeare strip Ovid's goddess of her supernatural powers and drive her so literally down to earth? The answer, I would suggest, is that Venus and Adonis traces its ancestry not only to Ovid's Metamorphoses but also to Lucretius's De Rerum Natura. Consider the powerful invocation to Venus with which Lucretius begins his great philosophical poem on “the nature of things”: “Venus, power of life, it is you who beneath the sky's sliding stars inspirit the ship-bearing sea, inspirit the productive land.

In John Shawcross's book The Development of Milton's Thought: Law, Religion, and Government, he quotes that famous phrase from Milton, “fit audience, though few.” I was brought up short while reading because this quotation does not include an ellipsis. Can even Shawcross nod? I was reassured when I realized that he had not cited book and line numbers for the quotation; he was simply quoting an oft-used phrase rather than Paradise Lost itself. I thus felt better about John, but continued to be troubled by the broader implications of “fit audience … though few,” with or without the ellipsis. Here I shall argue that the ellipsis eliminates a central element, in the line and the poetic sentence and in terms of Milton's own concerns about the fate of his text. And what scholars so often omit by typifying Milton's audience using this phrase is the place of the ineffable Spirit of God in the communion or community of believers.

I shall dispense with the simple part first: how often is the ellipsis used, and what does it skate over? The phrase appears in the invocation to Book 7 of Paradise Lost:

In act 4 of The Comedy of Errors, Adriana, in response to her husband's wildly erratic behaviour, recruits one Doctor Pinch to cure his apparent madness. Antipholus of Ephesus is of course not really mad at all, but understandably frustrated and confused with the events of the day, which have seen him locked out of his own house and accused of failing to pay for valuables that he actually never received, thanks to a series of misunderstandings involving his identical twin, Antipholus of Syracuse. When Antipholus of Ephesus refuses to cooperate with his wife's well-intentioned intervention, Doctor Pinch attempts an exorcism to drive away the demons which he supposes to possess him:

Of course, Pinch's attempted exorcism fails, because there is no Satan to exorcise, and Antipholus becomes so angry that Adriana has him forcibly bound and taken away in Pinch's custody. In a later scene a messenger reports that Antipholus and his servant Dromio have gnawed through their bonds and escaped and then captured and tormented the hapless Doctor Pinch, burning off his beard “with brands of fire,” putting it out again with “Great pails of puddled mire,” and then preaching patience to him while cutting him with scissors and concludes that “unless you send some present help, / Between them they will kill the conjurer” (5.1.172, 74–76, 177–78).

In the criticism of the last thirty years, the consensus has been that the English Civil War was fought on the battlefield and on the page. Titles such as Writing the English Republic, Literature and Revolution, Literature and Dissent, Literature and Politics, and Poetry and Allegiance urge that politics and literature were inextricable in mid-century England. And, when talking about the English Civil War, when we say “political” we mean “partisan.” Lucasta, we have learned, is a royalist rallying cry and Paradise Lost a “Republican epic.” In these contentious times, the act of taking up the pen was a partisan one. But while much attention has been given to the expressions of partisanship, much less has been given to the concepts of sociability that marked its borders. While the violent disruptions of the English Civil War certainly created a culture of divisiveness, they also created an alternative culture increasingly attentive to the advantages of adaptability. Recent work on literary form in the period suggests that, far from sites of stable partisan expression, literary genres were inherently flexible spaces that lent themselves to experimentation not conflict. Lyric's association with “verses” or “turnings,” romance's many reversals and transformations, and the essay's function as a genre of “attempts” provided authors opportunities to explore and enact strategies of “flexibleness.” In this essay, I would like to consider this “flexibleness” as it appears in an unlikely place: the English vernacular dictionary.

Erotic encounters between women appear with surprising frequency in the middle books of The Faerie Queene. Both Guyon's adventure in the Bower of Bliss and Britomart's encounters with Malecasta and Amoret reflect Renaissance beliefs about female-female desire. Spenser consistently associates heterosexual intercourse with sexual maturity: his treatment of homoerotic desire as an “adolescent” stage of development adheres to early modern myths regarding same-sex attraction. Indeed, one of Spenser's goals in the middle books of The Faerie Queene seems to be discouraging women's non-teleological, non-reproductive eroticism, and encouraging them to “move forward” into a reproductive sexual marriage. The homoeroticism that fills Spenser's garden of sexual delight motivates Guyon's wrathful destruction of Acrasia's Bower—a destruction that points toward the potential threat of feminine stasis in non-reproductive sexual activity. In addition, Britomart's sexual encounters with other women become both a primary challenge to the lady Knight's quest and a central element of her sexual education as she learns to embrace her role as a mother and wife.

Reconstructing the Bower of Bliss

Spenser's Bower of Bliss is a space of feminine sexual autonomy. Although critics once viewed the sexuality displayed in the Bower as a show that exists only for Guyon, describing it as a realm of lust devoid of sexual fulfillment, a world of pornographic show as opposed to one of sexual satisfaction, more recent readings acknowledge the rampant female sexuality of the Bower. Only Guyon sees a show without sexual satisfaction. Indeed, the women in the fountain who “wrestle wantonly” are enjoying lust in action (2.12.63). Acrasia repeatedly “bedew[s] Verdant’s lips . . . with kisses light” and “sucke[s] his spright,”—considering the early modern connection between “spright” and “semen,” Acrasia is obviously engaged in sexual activity and satisfying her lust (2.12.72). For the women fondling each other in the fountain, and for Acrasia and Verdant, the Bower contains sex: the reader only sees a show if he or she looks through the eyes of the voyeuristic Guyon. Indeed, Spenser invites such a perspective: the Bower is full of references to eyes and sight.

Summoning provokes the psyche's most momentous unfoldings. The mental and visceral impact of a legal summons is obvious to all who receive one, unleashing a flood of piteous self-justification and sharp questioning of the Rule of Law. No one likes being called to judgment. To the discomfort of social courts Shakespeare's summonings add a spiritual burden. Because King Hamlet was killed as he slept, when his sinful soul was unready, his anxious ghost vanishes at cock-crow “like a guilty thing / Upon a fearful summons” (1.1.154–55). King Lear, distraught at lost power and public humiliation, allies his voice with heavenly thundering (“Close pent-up guilts, / Rive your concealing continents and cry / These dreadful summoners grace”), but he denies that the thunder summons him: “I am a man / More sinned against than sinning” (3.2.57–60).

Each play begins with a king, or a kingly wraith, summoning children for judgment, and each king's spectacular enactment of sovereignty goes terribly wrong. The “fearful summons” and “dreadful summoners” carry deep irony in that each king—one secretly slain, one publicly shamed—clings to an illusory summoner-power after having been quite defanged. Old Hamlet's ghost is “majestic” in complete armor.