In chapter 9 of Shirley, Charlotte Brontë gives us a brief, vivid description of the Yorke family's domestic life. Among the six children, the twelve-year-old Rose stands out for her strength of character. Although her strong-minded, dour mother would like to turn Rose into a copy of herself, 'a woman of dark and dreary duties', the girl is of a very different, independent mould. She has 'a mind full-set, thick-sown with the germs of ideas her mother never knew' and it 'is agony to her often to have these ideas trampled on and repressed' (S, 148). Later, Rose shares her impressions of Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian with Caroline Helstone: the gothic romance, she says, feeds her longings to travel, and she expansively gestures to the breadth of her hunger for experience:

Tetralogy thinking

In its Summer 2000 programme, the Royal Shakespeare Company announced the staging of Shakespeare's two tetralogies as a cycle called This England. The programme made a distinctive break with the past by conceding that the plays were 'originally conceived by Shakespeare at different times and written in non-chronological order', but, in order to preserve the integrity of the history play cycle, the programme went on to argue that the separate plays together 'form a collage of one man's insight into England's history'. No one authorial vision, or even one directorial vision, would dominate this cycle, and the plays were to be staged in all the different theatre spaces of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. As a self-styled 'national' theatre, the RSC was swimming with the currents of the time, matching national devolution with a form of artistic devolution in which its various, disparate spaces were reconstellated as an architectural metaphor of the United Kingdom, with unity is sustained only through the acknowledgement of difference. In this way, the This England cycle both accepted that the plays are not a unified, complete work and presented an authorial, legitimate way of seeing the plays as a set of works on a shared theme.

John Heminges and Henry Condell, Shakespeare’s fellow actors and the compilers of the first collection of his plays in the First Folio (1623), would have been surprised at critical reaction to their organisation of the volume. Gathering plays about England under the rubric of History and plays about Rome under the rubric of Tragedy, they could have intended no serious generic distinction. In the parlance of the time the terms overlapped and interpenetrated. Both histories and tragedies related stories of past ‘contentions’ as well as the lives and deaths of famous figures. The 1594 Quarto of 2 Henry VI featured the ‘Contention’ between the houses of York and Lancaster as well as the ‘tragical end of the proud Cardinal of Winchester’; similarly, the Quartos of Richard II (1597) and Richard III (1597) both offered ‘Tragedy’ to their readers on the title-pages. Titus Andronicus appeared in the Stationers’ Register, the official record book of the London company of Stationers (booksellers and printers), as ‘a Noble Roman History’; the 1594 Quarto, however, advertised the play as The Most Lamentable Roman Tragedy of Titus Andronicus.

John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722), is alleged to have said that he knew no English history but what he had learned from Shakespeare. The irony of Marlborough's claim was that Shakespeare's ten history plays, covering a century and a half between them, could eclipse the infinitely broader, complex narrative of the English nation. A similar type of irony may be discerned in the modern reception of the Shakespearean history play. Here, the experience of many readers and theatre-goers with the Shakespeare histories tends to be inversely proportional to their familiarity with the genesis and history of the history play as a literary genre in an early modern European context, in England and abroad. The same individual who might now visit Blenheim Palace at Woodstock under the assumption that the Duke of Marlborough was a wealthy tobacconist, is likely also to live under the delusion that Shakespeare invented the history play. But as G. K. Hunter has rightly noted, 'Shakespeare could not, any more than God, invent ex nihilo.' Shakespeare had predecessors but also contemporaries who practised the history play, and although it seems beyond doubt, as Richard Helgerson has argued, that 'Shakespeare did make a larger contribution to that genre than anyone else', these contemporaries provide an indispensable framework within which the unique achievement of Shakespeare may be appreciated. One of the aims of this essay is to bring into focus Shakespeare's accomplishment within the immediate English contexts of the new genre. In addition, this essay seeks to position Shakespeare and the early modern project of historical drama in its no less relevant, though frequently neglected, European framework.

Introduction

'Travel literature' is the significantly generic descriptor that has succeeded the Modern Language Association Bibliography's pre-1980s 'travel, treatment of'. But as a tool it cannot complete a search for relevant critical and theoretical materials. Very early in the contemporary resurgence of interest in travel writing, relations with the analysis of ethnography, thus with the history and function (and future) of anthropology in the West, and with postcolonial theory generally, became vital and generative. The interest in travel writing - across a wide political spectrum - was part of the necessary reimagining of the world first occasioned by the post-World War Two resistance movements and wars of liberation in the former European colonies, as well as by the waves of immigration that followed. It is a vivid shock to walk into the room-sized stained glass globe of the world (1935) suspended in the Mother Church of the Christian Scientists in Boston. Not only because, with loud metaphorical resonance, you can hear the whispers of people on the far side of the glass world as if they were speaking in your own ear, but also because the various pieces, each a different jewelled colour, belong to a world on the point of explosion. Much of the work of observing, interpreting, articulating the explosion of that world, as well as the historical development of the imperialised world that led to it, was done through recovery and analysis of people’s writings about ‘foreign’ and especially ‘exotic’ places in which they had travelled and lived: as colonial masters, pilgrims, explorers, ambassadors, ambivalent wives, roving soldiers, ecstatic cross-dressers, conquistadores, missionaries, merchants, escaped slaves, idle students of the gentry and aristocracy, ‘adventurers’, and alienated modern artists.

Fact and fiction

The best-known Congo journey is a fictional one that does not name its setting. Marlow's voyage to find Kurtz, the agent who has 'gone native', in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899), operates on several levels: the story's critical engagement with colonialism is flanked by the mythical and psychological dimensions of the protagonists' experiences. All sorts of later travellers to the Congo refer to this tale. Most of the narratives discussed towards the end of this chapter (and still others that are not) cite it. Journalist Michela Wrong even turns to it for the title of her admirably self-effacing book chronicling the downfall of Zaire's President Mobutu, In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz (2000).

Conrad spent six months in the Congo in 1890 working for the Belgian Société Anonyme pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo. His ‘Congo Diary’ records his 250-mile trek from Matadi to Kinshasa and notes the discomfort, obstacles, sickness, and the sight of murdered Africans. His ‘Up-river book’, written on board the steamer ‘Roi des Belges’, contains mainly technical information on the navigation of the river. The experiences of both journals inform Heart of Darkness and the short story ‘An Outpost of Progress’ (1898) but are different in kind from them. Curiously, the travellers who later take Heart of Darkness as their reference point tend not to mention these documents of Conrad’s actual travel. On the whole it is easy to tell such journals and fictions apart: Graham Greene’s Congo Journal, for example, which has Greene re-reading Heart of Darkness, after having ‘abandoned’ Conrad in ‘about 1932 because his influence on me was too great and too disastrous’, records a trip to the Belgian Congo in 1959 to research the novel A Burnt-Out Case. But Europe’s mythologising of Africa in general and of the Congo in particular means that fact and fiction do sometimes overlap.

The essence of adventure lies in taking risks and exploring the unknown, so it is hardly surprising to find that early travel accounts tended for the most part to be written by men, who moved more freely in the public sphere. The great European sagas of knightly questing (such as The Norse Sagas and The Arthurian Cycle) or seafaring exploration (such as The Odyssey and The Lusiads) are also male narratives with women the objects of desire or destination points rather than active co-travellers, though the figure of the warrior-princess roaming the world in search of adventure was popular in Renaissance epics like Orlando furioso and Gerusalemme liberata. The adventure quest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when men journeyed in search of fortune and renown to the new worlds that were opening up beyond the frontiers of Europe, was explicitly gendered, since the idea of man as heroic risk-taking traveller underpinned not only the great travel narratives of the next centuries, but much of the travel writing of the twentieth century also.

Alongside the myths of the heroic explorer, however, are other kinds of narrative, some of which have been produced by women. The travel text as ethnography or social commentary transcends gender boundaries and, increasingly in the twentieth century, male and female travellers have written self-reflexive texts that defy easy categorisation as autobiography, memoir, or travel account. There is also, in British travel writing, a tendency to self-deprecation and irony, a style of writing that has both Henry Fielding and Jane Austen as its antecedents, despite the fact that the latter did not move beyond the confines of southern England. Contemporary writers like Redmond O’Hanlon and Eric Newby subvert or satirise the image of the explorer-hero, turning themselves into anti-heroes in their narratives, a comic reversal of the dominant image of the male traveller who seeks to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Travel has recently emerged as a key theme for the humanities and social sciences, and the amount of scholarly work on travel writing has reached unprecedented levels. The academic disciplines of literature, history, geography, and anthropology have all overcome their previous reluctance to take travel writing seriously and have begun to produce a body of interdisciplinary criticism which will allow the full historical complexity of the genre to be appreciated.

The absence within the academy of a tradition of critical attention to travel writing means that this Companion, unlike most others in the series, whose areas of study are well-defined, has to bring its subject into focus in order to ‘accompany’ it. As a result, our volume offers only a tentative map of a vast, little-explored area. As far as practicable, we have opted for a broad definition of travel writing, with the huge range of potential texts leading us to focus on major shifts, on kinds and forms, on places written about, and on exemplary instances, rather than on particular travel writers. The two major limitations we have worked within are concentrations on the period since 1500 and on travel writing in English and published in Britain. The Anglocentric concentration is by no means exclusive: non-English travel writing has often been influential in Britain, with translations appearing soon after original publication, and travel writing has played an important rôle in recent years in the creation of an international literary field, so it would not make sense to operate rigid principles of exclusion.

Putting the world on paper

Among the many texts produced before, during, and after Sir Humphrey Gilbert's expedition to Newfoundland in 1583 - from patents and provision lists to narrative accounts and celebratory poems - was a detailed set of instructions for a surveyor named Thomas Bavin. Bavin was charged with compiling a cartographic, pictorial, and textual record of the east coast of America, and with acquiring the books, instruments, and drawing materials he would need for the task. His employers suggested that he pack an almanac, a pair of notebooks, several large sheets of paper, various inks and leads, and 'all sorts of colours to draw all things to life'.

Documentation had always played an important rôle in travel, particularly in overseas ventures. English merchants and mariners had long been instructed to keep careful records of their movements, to direct the travelers who would follow in their footsteps and fill in the gaps of geographical knowledge. But Bavin’s instructions – and the texts they were designed to generate – outline a more ambitious project. Bavin and his men were to move along the coast, mapping each successive region and writing accounts of any features that might be ‘strange to us in England’. The maps were to use a key of symbols for rocks, rivers, hills, and trees (which were to be copied onto a parchment card and kept handy at all times), and the notes were to pay special attention to any commodities the country had to offer. Finally, Bavin was instructed to ‘draw the figures and shapes of men and women in their apparel as also their manner . . . in every place as you shall find them differing [from us]’. This would require him to get close enough to the natives to study their social structure, religious customs, and relations with friends and enemies, and to record their language in an English dictionary brought along for the purpose.

The very first documents to emerge from the New World were travel accounts. Although this was not the earliest travel writing in Europe the encounter with the Americas certainly stimulated a vast production of such literature and arguably made textual experience of the exotic a much more mundane occurrence. At the time of the discovery of the New World, the horizons of colonial Europe were also being expanded by travel to the east and south, but the unanticipated discoveries of Columbus provided a frisson of mystery and a need for explanation. This was the basis not just for recurrent attempts to detail, catalogue, and locate the peoples, creatures, and geographies of the continents, but also for a particular sense of the possibility of encountering the marvellous, the novel, and the extreme. The cross-cutting of these themes and ideas has produced a travel writing in South America that is filled with the discovery of the fantastic, the survival of the anachronistic, and the promise of marvellous monstrosity.

In this way, South America – more than its northern counterpart – and particularly the Amazon region, has been largely imagined through such travel writing. This becomes very evident in attempts to define and locate the region. The ‘Amazon’ might be restrictively identified with the main river channel or the river basin, but the Amazon river basin actually has a watershed connection with that of the Orinoco, so that hydrology defies neat boundaries and definitions. Likewise, although western Amazonia has an intensity of rainfall that is unrivalled elsewhere in the river basin, the actual extent of the ‘tropical rainforest’ in South America exceeds the limits of the Amazon basin itself, stretching into Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Surinam, and French Guiana. The Amazon could therefore be seen to comprise not only the contiguous forests that spread beyond the river-system, but also savanna and scrub forest environments.

Itineraries and expectations

Travel is everywhere in eighteenth-century British literature. The fictional literature of the age 'is full of travelling heroes enmeshed in journey-plots', and 'almost every author of consequence' - among them Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Laurence Sterne, Mary Wollstonecraft - 'produced one overt travel book'. To these must be added the 'numerous essayistic and philosophic performances' that were cast in the form of imaginary travelogues, such as Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels(1726), Johnson's Rasselas (1759), and Oliver Goldsmith's Citizen of the World (1762). Writers seemed to be travelling, in reality or in their imaginations, just about everywhere. Paul Fussell speculates that travel's pervasive appeal may have owed something to the high degree of acceptance which philosophical empiricism had gained in Britain by the end of the seventeenth century. John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) became a sort of bible for those who espoused a ‘blank slate’ conception of human consciousness and held that all knowledge is produced from the ‘impressions’ drawn in through our five senses. If knowledge is rooted in experience and nowhere else, travel instantly gains in importance and desirability. Following the great Renaissance age of colonial exploration and expansion, an articulated, systematic empiricism made travelling about the world and seeing the new and different ‘something like an obligation for the person conscientious about developing the mind and accumulating knowledge’. Merely reading about conditions elsewhere was not enough. Those who could travel, should – though of course precious few actually could.

The ethnographic impulse

The description of peoples, their nature, customs, religion, forms of government, and language, is so embedded in the travel writing produced in Europe after the sixteenth century that one assumes ethnography to be essential to the genre. In England this assumption became part of the justification for the most representative form of this writing, the travel collections published from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Already in 1577 one of the first of these collectors, Richard Willes, had announced that all branches of learning have their 'special times' of flourishing, and 'now' was the time of geography. In Renaissance learning geography, or cosmography, acted as an encyclopaedic synthesis for the description of the world. Therefore, the description of peoples became the empirical foundation for a general rewriting of ‘natural and moral history’ within a new cosmography made possible by the navigations of the period. As Awnsham and John Churchill wrote in the preface to their 1704 Collection of Voyages and Travels: