Dire Straits: The Perils of Writing the Early Modern English Coastline from Leland to Milton

by Elizabeth Jane Bellamy

Overview

England became a centrally important maritime power in the early modern period, and its writers – acutely aware of their inhabiting an island – often depicted the coastline as a major topic of their works. However, early modern English versifiers had to reconcile this reality with the classical tradition, in which the British Isles were seen as culturally remote compared to the centrally important Mediterranean of antiquity. This was a struggle for writers not only because they used the classical tradition to legitimate their authority, but also because this image dominated cognitive maps of the oceanic world.

As the first study of coastlines and early modern English literature, Dire Straits investigates the tensions of the classical tradition’s isolation of the British Isles from the domain of poetry. By illustrating how early modern English writers created their works in the context of a longstanding cultural inheritance from antiquity, Elizabeth Jane Bellamy offers a new approach to the history of early modern cartography and its influences on literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781442645011
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
Publication date:	04/09/2013
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Elizabeth Jane Bellamy is a professor and John C. Hodges Chair of Excellence in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

1 The Imperatives of Humanism: Early Modern English Shorelines under Quarantine 3

1 Spectral Geographies and the Coastline 3

2 From Anachronism to Belatedness: Medieval English Coastlines before Humanism 15

3 Philautus's Nausea 20

4 'Profounde' Navigators, 'Vnlettered' Coasters, and the Fortunate Isles 24

5 Antiquity's Apeiron 31

6 Poetry and Place, Time and Tide, and Coasts 'with no measures grac'd' 38

2 Lurid Shorelines: Mapping Spenser's Queen Elizabeth in Ariosto's Hebrides 46

1 'compassed with one Sea' 46

2 Poet, Royal Patron, Ultima Britannia 48

3 The Turn to Literary History: Mapping Spenser's Faerie Seacoast via Ariosto 52

4 Cymoent's Lyrical Mediterranean, Marinell's Terror-Coast 55

5 Local Rivers, Local Shores in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe 65

6 Prophecy as Slander: Britomart's Thames, Paridell's Briton Seacoast 71

7 North by Northwest: Ariosto's Ptolemaic Hebrides 78

8 Reading Spenser Reading Ariosto's Hebrides 83

3 Ever-Receding Shorelines: Antiquarian Poetry and Prose and the Limits of Shakespeare's Coastal Dramatic Verse 88

1 Antiquarianism at the Water's Edge 88

2 Shakespeare's Coastal Legerdemain 89

3 From Henry IV to Henry V: Chorographic Nationalism and Coastal Provinciality 92

4 Antiquarianism's Paradoxical Embrace of Ultima Britannia 99

5 Cymbeline's Irreconcilable Shorelines 106

6 Of 'swan's nests,' River Poetry, and Antiquarian Prose, 1545-1610 113

7 Losing Perspective on the Ever-Receding Rocky Coast 124

4 Exiled Shorelines: Early Milton and the Rejection of the Mare Ovidianum 131

1 'Love your Naso's name …' 131

2 Poetry, Place, and the Mare Ovidianum 136

3 Tomitan Ovid: Writing a Pontic Epic on the Apeiron 142

4 Rejecting the Pose of Ovidian Exile 147

5 'At last he twitch't his mantle': Lycidas and Milton's 'Writing' of Local Coastlines 158

6 The Londini Milto, Mansus, and the Thames 165

7 Milton, Horace, and Ovid in Geneva 169

5 Coda: Exiting the Shadow of Ultima Britannia in Paradise Lost 179

Bibliography 185

Index 201

What People are Saying About This

Garrett Sullivan

“Dire Straits is a fresh, engaging, and important study. Its emphasis on coastlines is entirely new, and it is very well researched and effectively grounded in relevant criticism.”

Steven Mentz

“A major contribution to early modern literary studies, Dire Straits surfaces watery connections between familiar figures, including Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, and less well-known ones, including William Bourne and John Cleveland. Elizabeth Jane Bellamy reveals the struggles of English poets to re-define cold and distant British coastlines against sun-drenched and classical Mediterranean shores. Readers interested in the fluvial shapes of English poetry, the influence of the classics, and the career paths of these writers will find much of value here.”

From the Publisher

“A major contribution to early modern literary studies, Dire Straits surfaces watery connections between familiar figures, including Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, and less well-known ones, including William Bourne and John Cleveland. Elizabeth Jane Bellamy reveals the struggles of English poets to re-define cold and distant British coastlines against sun-drenched and classical Mediterranean shores. Readers interested in the fluvial shapes of English poetry, the influence of the classics, and the career paths of these writers will find much of value here.”

“Dire Straits is a fresh, engaging, and important study. Its emphasis on coastlines is entirely new, and it is very well researched and effectively grounded in relevant criticism.”

Editorial Reviews

‘This volume is an ingenious and persuasive tour de force of interdisciplinary research. Highly recommended.’—A.R. Vogeler, Choice Magazine; vol 51:05:14
‘Dire Straits is to be welcomed as an important counter-balance to influential histories of the rise of English patriotism and its figuration through geographic discourse… A book which has much to offer to geographers, historians and students of literature alike.’—Robert Mayhew, Journal of Historical Geography vol 30:01:2014

“A major contribution to early modern literary studies, Dire Straits surfaces watery connections between familiar figures, including Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, and less well-known ones, including William Bourne and John Cleveland. Elizabeth Jane Bellamy reveals the struggles of English poets to re-define cold and distant British coastlines against sun-drenched and classical Mediterranean shores. Readers interested in the fluvial shapes of English poetry, the influence of the classics, and the career paths of these writers will find much of value here.”—Steven Mentz, Department of English, St John’s University
“Dire Straits is a fresh, engaging, and important study. Its emphasis on coastlines is entirely new, and it is very well researched and effectively grounded in relevant criticism.”—Garrett Sullivan, Department of English, The Pennsylvania State University

From the Publisher

‘This volume is an ingenious and persuasive tour de force of interdisciplinary research. Highly recommended.’

Choice Magazine; vol 51:05:14 - A.R. Vogeler

‘Dire Straits is to be welcomed as an important counter-balance to influential histories of the rise of English patriotism and its figuration through geographic discourse… A book which has much to offer to geographers, historians and students of literature alike.’

Journal of Historical Geography vol 30:01:2014 - Robert Mayhew