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Othello Among the Anthropophagi

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

J. Milton French
J. Milton French*
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College
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Extract

      … of antres vast and desarts idle,
      Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven,
      It was my hint to speak, such was the process;
      And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
      The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
      Do grow beneath their shoulders.

It has usually been assumed that Othello's adventures came to Shakespeare out of the pages of Mandeville or Pliny. There is, however, another possibility and one likely to offer a far more exciting invitation to a poet with Shakspere's keen sensitivity to visual impressions. There is a startling resemblance between the items in the passage quoted and the quaintly decorated Renaissance maps.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , September 1934 , pp. 807 - 809
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1934

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References

1 Othello, i. iii. 140–145 (Craig's Oxford Shakespeare).

2 I have counted some thirty-five editions between 1475 and 1600.

3 See section viii of the map of Asia, that entitled “Oceani Occidentalis,” and that of “Moder [n] India.” The “Tabv. Nova Partis Aphri” shows men with one eye in their chests: “Colopedes siue monoculi homines st [i.e., sunt] grandes nigri et horribiles.”

4 Typus Cosmographicus Universalis (Basel, 1532), reproduced in Nordenskiöld, Facsimile-Atlas to the Early History of Cartography (Stockholm, 1889), plate xlii.

5 A copy, somewhat reduced but otherwise identical, appeared in The National Geographic Magazine, lxii (1932), 765. The original is here reproduced, facing p. 807.

6 Twelfth Night, iii. ii. 88.—For a reproduction of what is supposed to be the map in question, see that accompanying The Voyages and Works of John Davis (Hakluyt Society Publications, no. lix). One might venture the heresy that Shakspere's “new map” was not new at all—in 1600—but merely one of the numerous “new” maps in the various editions of Ptolemy, such as those of “Nova Insulae,” “Nova Partis Aphri,” etc.

7 See The Comedy of Errors, iii. ii. 117–144; The Merchant of Venice, i. i. 19; Henry V, iv. vii. 25; Richard III, ii. iv. 54; Coriolanus, ii. i. 70; Titus Anironicus, iii. ii. 12.

8 For instance, Sir Thomas Smith had three copies of Ptolemy's Geography in his library, and John Dee had as many or more. See E. G. R. Taylor, Tudor Geography (London, 1930), pp. 36, 231–232. Some of Shakspere's patrons and friends would no doubt have been equally well equipped.

9 Jonathan Swift, “On Poetry, A Rhapsody,” ll. 177–180.