From the Elephant's Back

by Lawrence Durrell

  All this has a certain bearing on the question of Shakespeare’s problematical travels; his own testimony shows that, had the chance ever come to him, he would have been man enough of the age to take it.

  He wondered that your lordship

  Would suffer him to spend his youth at home,

  While other men, of slender reputation,

  Put forth their sons to seek preferment out

  Some to the wars, to try their fortunes there;

  Some to discover islands far away;

  Some to studious universities.

  For any or for all these exercises

  He said that Proteus your son was meet,

  And did request me to importune you

  To let him spend his time no more at home,

  Which would be great impeachment to his age

  In having known no travel in his youth.[2]

  Apart from the pure snobism, however, which forced men of slender reputation to put forth their sons, there were purely literary and cultural criteria prevailing; there was the immense cultural accent placed upon the antique works and the countries in which they had been hatched. The English language was still apologetic about itself. The courtier could be witty in several languages; and learned in two or three. Here is the sententious Mr. Howell on the subject; a Welshman with the inevitable bias for Wales, his writings reflect him as a typical mannered arbiter of fashionable travel—the touring gentleman’s gentleman.

  “Amongst other peoples of the earth,” says he, “Islanders seem most in need of foreign travel, for they being cut off (as it were) from the rest of the citizens of the world, have not those obvious accesses, and contiguity of situation, and other advantages of society, to mingle with those more refined nations, whom Learning and Knowledge did since urbanize and polish.”[3]

  The Elizabethan was more than willing to be urbanized and polished; he was avid for it. His whole literature took its formal impetus from exotic models; no paper war could be fought which did not invoke the Classical ghosts of literature at least twice a page. Antiquity was the universal provider. Quite half the writers strangled themselves and their work by an application to foreign manners and tongues; more than half did the grand tour, even if it was on foot like Munday.[4] A few managed to do it in the grand manner, like Sir Thomas Unton,[5] who walked across France with an umbrella, preceded by a menial who announced him with a flourish outside the gates of each town they passed through.

  Whether Shakespeare was among those who travelled nobody knows; the critics who detected a “heightened colouring” in Lucrece which might perhaps indicate a visit abroad, do not tell us precisely what sort of travel-colouring was native to the Elizabethan mind. One thing is certain: it was in no way scenic or pastoral, but anti-quarian rather and provincial—as anyone who opens Coryat[6] can see for himself. The olive and cypress were symbols of the contemporary poetic thought—not testimonies of quickened eyesight or unfamiliar landscapes. They were borrowed direct from Virgil and the rest. No. The reigning marvels were of a different order. Urban mannerisms, forms of dress, and curious machines—those were the exciting items which touring parvenus like Coryat jumped at. This eccentric and delightful courtier whose passion for walking landed him finally in India (where he died), never fails to sacrifice scenery for marvels of architecture or mechanics. Almost his only piece of natural travel-writing as we (the descendants of Borrow) know it today is his description of a channel-crossing, which took him seven hours and ended only when “I had varnished the exterior parts of the ship with the excremental ebullitions of my tumultuous stomach, as desiring to satiate the gormandising paunches of the hungry haddocks.”[7] Between his infectious bouts of buffoonery we get occasional glimpses of towns and manners—but it is always the eye of the courtier at work, the vision of the townee traveller. It is fairly certain from all this that the literary colouring which we should expect to find in the writers of the time is usually absent; like awed antiquaries they pursued their dutiful tours, but brought back what one would least expect of them—urban memoranda instead of novelty in landscapes.

  In the case of Shakespeare, who is to be certain? A great number of his plays were written into foreign settings; but this argues for a possible unfamiliarity with the continent. The sea-coast of Bohemia has become a critical chestnut; it is used as proof positive that he did not know what he was talking about. Yet the mistake was lifted direct from Greene, as was the plot of the play.[8]

  In the criticism of the day no very great emphasis has been laid on the Venetian plays: the plays whose setting was concerned with the domains of the Venetian Republic. It is perhaps a subject that lacks interest for those whose scholarship is not speculative but factual. Yet I would like to point out that Venice was, to all intents and purposes, the boundary of the known Europe, and as such would be a possible dramatic boundary which the Elizabethan would not trespass. This has a certain relation to what I am about to write on the subject of The Tempest. Howell remarks, “How the Signory of Venice is the greatest rampart of Christendome against the Turk by sea.”[9] Venice at that time owned a large portion of what today is Greece—notably the Ionian islands which still have so many legacies of this great occupation. Read any of the Elizabethan travel-books and you will notice the air of unfamiliarity which enters them once they move beyond the confines of the Venetian republic. It is the “Great Turk’s Land” which looms up then: unfamiliar, religiously alien, obscure. It has the same ring as the word “Muscovy.” It was to the Elizabethan what Prester John[10] was to the medieval man: as unreal and exciting as Mandeville’s quaint bestiary. My point here is simply that dramatically the subject was too exotic for great treatment. Shakespeare stops short at Cyprus, where a frontier battle was fought against the hideous Ottoman. The travellers penetrated deeper—Sandys, Lithgow, Coryat, Fynes Moryson[11]—the list is a formidable one. But the geographical boundaries of Venice were good enough for Shakespeare; Othello at Cyprus, Measure for Measure pitched in Sicily, Anthony and Cleopatra further south in Arta, The Merchant of Venice in the great capital city of the Republic which was the marvel and enjoyment of every traveller. These are not the only plays whose setting is Neapolitan; but these are the plays whose impulse and interest is Venetian; today we should say “Dalmatian.”

  The Barbary coast[12] was a dangerous and indented coast-line swarming with armed pirates—a large portion of whom, by the way, were English. The Venetian State papers in the British Museum which deal with the Ionian Islands bristle with the names of English robbers, whose capabilities for loot were quite equal to those of the Turk himself. The great sea-lines of the Republic were continually nibbled for plunder by the pirates, operating from the islands north and south of Corfu. By Shakespeare’s time there were still maritime difficulties with these seafaring vagabonds. Argosies of merchandise were lost and written off the sheets; thus Shylock on the Rialto.

  Ships are but boards, Sailors but

  men: there be Land Rats and Water Rats:

  Water thieves and Land thieves: I mean

  Pirates.[13]

  In the Venetian plays (the last of which, as I hope to demonstrate, being The Tempest) there is a connection which argues for a geographical familiarity; perhaps not personal, but second hand. There is no proof that Shakespeare knew the Ionian from his own personal experience. Both the Rome and Athens of the fustian plays become anonymous classical localities; and the few dim touches in A Midsummer Night’s Dream do not carry us much further south than Dulwich; to argue for a greater verisimilitude with regard to Verona, Padua, Vienna, would also be of little use. The detail of Anthony and Cleopatra is from Plutarch; and there is only one Grecian touch. It is when Anthony says:

  Is it not strange, Camidius,

  That from Tarentum and Brundisium,

  He could so quickly cut the Ionian Sea

  And take in Toryne?[14]

  The battle of Actium itself does not afford a single clue to locality; yet the place-names are bandied about with
a familiarity which may well be bookish. Anthony’s desire to live “a private man in Athens” (a desire shared most ardently by the writer) does not indicate an Athens any newer than classical. Greece itself was very largely unknown; the mainland at any rate. There was a caravan route across Greece to Asia Minor, which Howell recommends as an alternative route to the Ionian one (the better known). But the sad plight of Greece then evokes the following note:

  Here he (the traveller) may ruthfully observe how that great country, which used to be the source of all speculative knowledge, as also of policy and prowess, is now overwhelmed with barbarism and ignorance, with slavery and abjection of spirit. He will admire how the whole people are degenerated both in their hearts and heads, from the ancient courage and knowledge they were so cried up for in former ages.[15]

  Yet he mentions that the pure Greek spirit must be sought among the mountains, among the “Epirotiques.”[16]

  This argues a certain degree of thoroughness in Howell’s investigations; Welshman though he was, it did not prevent him from making a few excellent observations on the language of the Greek mainland and the islands. “There is also,” he says, “a mongrel dialect composed of Italian and French, and some Spanish words also in it, which they call Franco, that is used in many of the islands of the Aegean sea: and it is the ordinary speech of commerce ’twixt Christians, Jews, Turks and Greeks in the Levant.”[17] To the best of my knowledge this dialect still persists in the Venetian private language of the Ionian Jews of today. “Nor,” adds the untiring Howell, “is some vulgar Greek so far adulterated and eloignated from the true Greek, for there is yet in some places of the Morca true Greek spoken.”[18] He adds that until quite recently in Italy herself, as in Calabria and Apulia, the Liturgy was in Greek. This seems to demonstrate a very close and accurate knowledge of the Ionian on the part of an Englishman.

  It will be fairly apparent by now that in dealing with The Tempest I am about to put forth a theory which involves Venice. The island which Shakespeare had in mind is almost certainly an Ionian island. The colouring was not West Indian—if only because the West Indies were too remotely and fancifully new to offer him a sound conceptual basis. Venice was the boundary of the poetic imagination; and in searching for an imaginary island he chose one of the Venetian islands.

  This is not to say that a marmoset or two did not creep in amongst the pieces of Southern décor—the machinery of Ariel. Herein lay his concession to modernity as the Elizabethan knew it. The West Indies would have been a difficult setting for a cast of Neapolitan noblemen, bound home for Naples; more likely Zante or Corfu; most likely a dim backwash of memory blending the two from the tales of a travelling merchant. Is there any evidence? Coryat certainly touched Zante. William Webbe[19] was lugged up through the Seven Isles by his misfortunes at sea. Lithgow, more useful still, reports the steady importation of currants from Zante to England, “where some liquorish lips forsooth can now hardly digest Bread, Pasties, Broth and bag puddings without these currants.”[20] It will be seen from this that the trade was no small one; and if one needs testimony that the name Zante was familiar to Londoners of that time, it is only necessary to turn to the Ortho-Epia Gallica of John Eliot.[21] This is a quaint phrasebook for French students, which is made up of descriptive dialogues. I imagine that the scope of its reference would be restricted to the topical and immediate in Elizabethan London. Yet even here we find Zante mentioned:

  Is the Fleet returned from Bourdis?

  You hear no news of the Tripoli and

  Zante ships?[22]

  It is surely not unlikely that the storm which broke up the Naplesbound fleet carried them past the heel of Italy into the Ionian Sea.

  It would do no harm to examine the text of the play itself, and see whether there are any geographical hints as to its situation. The reference to the “still-vext Bermoothes” has been pounced upon as an indication of a familiarity with Sylvester Jourdain’s Discovery of the Bermudas;[23] but the actual context shows that the locality is used to indicate the speed of Ariel, who could be sent from Prospero’s island as far as Bermuda for dew; Bermuda, then, being a place incredibly far from the island. Thus Ariel:

  Safely in harbour

  Is the King’s ship, in the deep nook where once

  Thou call’dst me up at midnight to fetch dew

  From the still-vext Bermoothes, there she’s hid.[24]

  I suggest that Shakespeare was influenced by the tales he had been told by some Ionian merchant; some friendly gossip on the London exchange who swapped salt-water yarns for tobacco or ale. From such a person he would have heard of the incomparable and exquisite island of Corcyra (now Corfu); the amount of philological talent which has been exhausted in trying to find a source for the name Sycorax might well have been saved. For Corcyra in anagram gives one almost Sycorax.

  Caliban’s curse, too, is special to a land where the sirocco[25] is the worst kind of weather. “A south-west blow on ye,” he screams, “and blister ye all o’er.”[26] Merchants plying from Zante would have encountered this pestilent Levantine wind.

  But this is not all; certain small items among the “qualities of the isle” have a Grecian flavour. Both Corcyra and Zante were famous for the “brine-pits” which Caliban mentions; indeed the Venetian salt-pans in the south of Corfu still exist and salt is still extracted from them. Something more than coincidence perhaps prompts the remark of the castaway Antonio:

  What impossible matter will he make easy next?[27]

  Sebastian’s answer is this:

  I think he will carry this island home in his pocket and give it to his son for an apple.[28]

  As a matter of fact Corcyra was presented to a Venetian in 1259, as a dowry; it is an extraordinary enough present even for those times—an island forty miles long and eight broad. Manfred, King of Sicily, became the owner of it by marrying the daughter of Michael II of Epirus.

  Something of these matters I have no doubt was talked over and jumbled with other foreign colours in Shakespeare’s mind. Just as the gossip of Dowland[29] gave him the vague outlines of Elsinore for Hamlet, so the chatter of some Ionian merchant gave him a sea of islands, in which he could choose for himself a site for Prospero.

  Thy turfy mountains where live nibbling sheep,

  And flat medes thatched with clover, them to keep

  Thy banks with pioned and with twilled brims,

  Which spungy April at her best betrims

  To make cold nymphs chaste crowns; and thy broom-groves

  Whose shadow the dismissed Bachelor loves,

  Being lass-lorn: thy pole-clipped vineyard

  And thy sea-marge sterile and rocky-hard.[30]

  There is another point which has caused a certain amount of contention among the wise.

  “Though woulds’t give me,” says Caliban,

  “Water with berries in’t.”[31]

  The ghost of Fynes Moryson is here invoked to prove that coffee is the suggested drink. But there is a peculiarly national drink which answers the case much better. It is made of cherry jam, of which a spoonful is mixed in cold water. There seems to be no reason to doubt that this was the drink which our anonymous merchant told Shakespeare about. When he came to write The Tempest there existed in his mind the flavour of these names and facts; so that Prospero’s island is really a mixture of Zante and Corcyra.

  Here I would like to explain that I am aware of the symbolic properties of the isle; I am aware that The Tempest is really a lucid parable which touches the island of the heart’s desire; and that in pressing for a reference to Corfu I am animated only by a most fervent Ionian patriotism. It has not been my intention to drive nails into the coffin of legitimate criticism—the graveyard property of others. But there do seem analogies worth mentioning; and they do point with tolerable conviction to Corcyra (already celebrated by Homer in the Odyssey). There remains one conjecture more which will perhaps serve to drive home my argument.

  The most famous of the patron saints a
mong the Seven Islands is St. Spiridian. A synoptic history of his life, covering the period of his early adventures, would make exciting reading. Born a Cypriot in the third century or thereabouts, he was destined to become Corcyrean by posthumous adoption. Dead, buried, forgotten, the body of the good bishop of Tremythous in Cyprus (for such was he) was only rediscovered a hundred and one years after his death. From the grave exhaled a powerful scent of spices, which drew attention to the saint. The body, once recovered, began to perform miracles no less miraculous than its subsequent adventures and travels. From Constantinople through Macedonia he travelled, always under the protection of well-wishing believers; he arrived in Corcyra about the year 1456. His adoption was spontaneous—by the consent of both parties; for subsequent history shows the saint to have been a stout miracle worker against the Turks, who were at the time ravaging the coasts of the island. I will not give a detailed account of the argosies he sank, nor the number of times he saved the island from famine by side-tracking convoys of food bound for other ports and impelling their captains to put into Corfu harbour. It is sufficient to say that sailors have always been the children of St. Spiridian; their safety has always depended, and still depends, on his spiritual seamanship. In honour of him children are named Spiro (which is fairly near to Prospero). I defy anyone to travel for a day in Greece, among the islands, without encountering several Spiros. In the Ionian you will scarcely ever see a ship without its little eikon of the saint; it will generally depict him coaxing a storm, a mildly Byzantine and benevolent figure in a cloud. Any such eikon could be used to illustrate The Tempest. The likeness between the good saint and Prospero is fairly close. I like to think that in St. Spiridian we have here the original wonder-worker, saint, good man, whom Prospero so much resembles. Those who had travelled in the Ionian (and I hope I have made it clear that many a Londoner of the day did so) could not help hearing of the wonder-working saint; it is even possible that some forsook St. George, whose saving graces are lacking in the spectacular and generous; in favour of this little Ionian saint, whose mummified body is still carried round the Esplanade during festivals, lolling upright in his red sedan-chair. That Prospero, the courtly necromancer of the isle, should be second cousin by conversation, as it were, is not such a frivolous idea as it might seem. His powers over the creatures of the island are no stronger (and no less strong) than the power which St. Spiridian exercises over the hearts and minds of the Corcyreans. There is a certain poetic justice about these matters. The concerns of a saint and a poet in this case converge upon a point of virtue and benevolence; for The Tempest is the most lucidly Taoist of the plays, and the most fitting ending to the great wild cycle of comedies and tragedies. It is pleasant to think that these islands became entangled with the dream of the old English poet; influencing him, as they had influenced Homer so many years before. And then: the renunciation of Prospero! Concealed behind this fantasy surely there is a clear statement of the artistic problem—the problem which finds expression in Faust, in the Abbey Theleme of Rabelais[32] (which is only another Prospero’s isle): the problem, I make so bold as to say, which the great artist shares with the saint. Here is the pure statement of the case—for all who have ears to hear.[33] Prospero’s last words are a beatitude.