while transporting settlers to Virginia in 1609. Yet, given the material, currency and opportunity to write a play about a newfound land, the nation’s greatest playwright remained European in outlook. The Tempest is set on a desert island lying between Tunis and Naples, and its principal human characters are Italian noblemen and their relations. Indeed, the often-quoted lines from the play, which some suggest hark forward to a triumphant colonial future, Miranda’s joyful
By 1587 Mercator was able to show the true extent of the American hinterland, but he still showed a narrow navigable passage passing over the North and leading to the Pacific.
How beautiful mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in’t!
refers, not to the comely and almost-naked ‘savages’ that welcomed Ralegh’s men, but to her first sighting of sea-soiled courtiers in whose company she will return to their ancient kingdom leaving the native, the ‘aborred slave’ Caliban, alone with two marooned drunks, the same number of people that Thomas Gates left in Bermuda in the original voyage. No hint of discovery and distant voyages there. Mentions of cannibals and anthropophagi and a few hints in Twelfth Night that Shakespeare had seen ‘the new map with the augmentation of the Indies’ that had appeared in Hakluyt’s second edition of his Voyages and Discoveries is but dust in a great folio that is indifferent to the wonders of a newly discovered world.
Indeed the most popular play to be inspired by the nascent colony in Virginia was Eastward Ho, a satirical farce written in 1605 by Ben Jonson, George Chapman and John Marston, that so mocked the endeavours of those working towards the American plantations that the King had Chapman and Jonson imprisoned in the Tower until they saw the unfunny side of their jokes. Perhaps the dour King had a point: what was about to be undertaken under his Charters was to have more elements of tragedy than comedy.
It was the same in the world of poetry. The major English work of the time, Edward Spenser’s Faerie Queen, was a lengthy historical allegory, the first instalment of which was published in 1590. Throughout the epic, Gloriana, the Faerie Queen, an obvious reference to Elizabeth, is served by faithful knights who undertake quests on her behalf around England, Ireland and the Netherlands; although they wander on an allegorical sea it does not take them to the newfound land that Spenser’s friend, fellow poet and neighbour in Ireland, Walter Ralegh, was trying to settle. England’s great Tudor epic verse is most insular in outlook, as was the remainder of English poesy. A voyage through the poems anthologized in the Oxford Book of Sixteenth-Century Verse and the Oxford Book of Seventeenth-Century Verse reveals two centuries of poets obsessed with the legends of Greece and Rome and the works of Virgil, Homer and Ovid. Just one indifferent poem on the subject of the new world, Michael Drayton’s 1619 ode, ‘To the Virginian Voyage’, is thought worthy of inclusion. That is, apart from the most erotic poem in the English language, John Donne’s ‘To his Mistress Going to Bed’, which was written in 1593 but was not published until 1633, denying a generation of young men the seductive aid of:
Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America, my new found land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,
My mine of precious stones, my empery,
How blessed am I in this discovering thee!
It is doubtful if Donne would have been inspired to use his principal metaphor had not Ralegh bestowed upon the newfound land the potentially erotic name of Virginia. But that was it: English popular entertainment looked to the classics for its subject matter; the newfound lands were not considered suitable or popular material.
More surprisingly, the same indifference holds true with the plastic arts. Surprisingly, because Ralegh sent a most accomplished artist, John White, with the first Roanoke party to work with his protégé, the astronomer, anthropologist, cartographer, mathematician, linguist and polymathical genius Thomas Harriot, to record what they saw. Although much of his work may have been dumped overboard in the haste to depart with Drake’s fleet, White produced an accomplished portfolio depicting a brave new world with wonderful people in it. The works’ significance became immediately apparent to the Flemish engraver Theodore de Bry, who left England after a three-year stay in 1588 to establish a press in Frankfurt, where White’s work was copied and embellished. English artists remained wedded to the court and classical literature.
The contrast with Portugal could not be more obvious; the Portuguese national epic poem, The Lusiads, tells the story of how Portuguese mariners created a trading empire around the world. Published in 1572, it was written by Luis Vaz de Camoëns, and was based not only on the accounts of foreign ventures, but on his own service and adventures, in Ceuta, Goa and Macau. No English poet or playwright was similarly inspired by overseas adventures, nor did English bards wish to sail to new worlds. If England was to establish a commonwealth, as a small cabal of thinkers wished, then a great deal of persuasion and propaganda was going to be necessary. And it needed to start at the very top.
The lack of a presence in popular poetry and plays may imply but not confirm that colonial enterprises did not engage the public imagination. Yet it is quite possible to read a scholarly and detailed history of the Tudor and Stuart regimes, or even individual biographies of the monarchs and their leading counsellors, and not come across a reference to America. This would not be possible in works about the Spanish and Portuguese courts of the same period, for their monarchs were very much occupied with overseas enterprises.
CONVINCING THE COURT
In 1387 Philippa of Lancaster, the daughter of John of Gaunt, married João I of Portugal, and left her countrymen’s insular views behind her as she encouraged, even to her deathbed, her adopted country’s overseas expansion. Her third son, known to the world as Prince Henry the Navigator, dedicated his life to the foundation and support of a school of navigation and exploration at Sagres on the south coast. From here, the Portuguese island-hopped their way to India and, along the way, cornered the market in gold, ivory, spices and slaves. Impressed by what he had heard, Ferdinand of Aragon created at Seville in 1503 the Casa de la Contratación (House of Trade), with similar aims to Prince Henry, to support global expansion and trade. Ten years later Henry VIII of England founded Trinity House to chart and mark the mudflats and sandbanks of the Thames.
A somewhat sylvan early representation of Cupid’s Cove, more beckoning than the windswept reality of a harsh Newfoundland winter, which would have attracted few immigrants.
England did have princes who shared their distant Portuguese cousin’s global outlook but both died young. The first was Edward VI, who famously dragged himself from his final sickbed to watch Willoughby and Chancellor slip down the Thames in 1553 on their voyage to search for a northeast passage to Cathay. The second was another Henry, James I’s son and heir, the Prince of Wales who, on arrival in England at the age of nine, had been urged by Ben Jonson to, ‘Look over the strict Ocean . . . and think where, you may lead us forth’. Defying his father, Henry even visited the imprisoned Ralegh to learn from the dreamer’s own lips of the glories that awaited the bold voyager either to Virginia or Guiana. For Henry this was no passing teenage passion. In 1609 he visited the ships of the third supply as they gathered at Woolwich, and he championed the cause of the planters so strongly that the Spanish ambassador, Velasco, felt that the enterprise was surviving ‘just because the Prince of Wales lends them very warmly his support’. Henry’s enthusiasm for the Virginia venture
