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By Marc Frucht. 28apr09

“Safely in harbor / Is the King’s ship; in the deep nook where once / Thou call’dst me up at midnight to fetch dew / From the still-vexed Bermoothes, there she’s hid / The mariners all under hatches stowed / Who, with a charm joined to their suff’red labor.”

(The Tempest i.2.)

Many people suppose William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest to be set in the “Americas;” still other British authors such as Andrew Marvell, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser and Sir Walter Raleigh may well have been strategically placing a more broad awareness of the New World into the mythology and literature of their day just the same.

As John Cabot and his sons Lewis, Sebastian and Sancio did set out to explore the “new lands” they did this with the full written permission of a Tudor, most notably The Right Honorable Henry VII, King of England and all of Ireland; one might wonder if any of the literature in Britain reflects these journeys? If not, how soon after this does a growing awareness of the Americas enter the fancy of British readers and writers alike? Certainly it becomes a central discussion topic within the next hundred years. This essay tries to explore but a few of these footnotes in the literature with hopes that it might become a springboard of sorts for more comprehensive research at a later date.

“As Indian Moors obey their Spanish lords,” writes Christopher Marlowe in scene 1 of his Doctor Faustus, published sometime around 1604, “So shall the spirits of every element be always serviceable to us three.” (Doctor Faustus, I, 121)

Here Marlowe refers to dark-skinned native Americans. This is just over a hundred years after Cabot’s first voyages but almost two hundred years before America will gain her freedom from Great Britain in a series of wars referred to at the time as merely the “many headed hydra.” (Rediker,1)

At almost the same point in time, about 1596, Sir Walter Raleigh discusses the golden city of Manoa (which in Spanish is called El Dorado) in his The Discovery of Guiana. (Norton, 923) Many of his informants during these years, including a Spanish soldier named Francisco de Orellana (who was credited as the first explorer of the Amazon) are already journeying throughout south and central America looking for resources to mine and people to enslave as well as passage routes between what they will soon call the West Indies and the already chartered East Indies.

For the rest, which myself have seen, I will promise these things that follow, which I know to be true. Those that are desirous to discover and to see many nations may be satisfied within this river, which bringeth forth so many arms and branches leading to several countries and provinces… (Norton, 924)

Already these “new found lands” are becoming part of the collective imagination and spirit of the times as more and more people learn about Venezuela, Bermuda, and perhaps the Amazon river basin. El Dorado quickly becomes the ever so dangerous cliche “streets paved with gold” as sailors and merchants report back to moneyed people exactly what they’ll want to hear in order to excite them toward hopefully funding someone’s next expedition.

In 1497 Cabot made land far up the east coast of the American continent in what soon came to be called Newfoundland. When news of this regional “discovery” traveled back to England the next few decades; countless other explorers followed searching places all over the coast.

Edmund Spenser pens these words about Peru, the Amazon and Virginia (and all points in between) in his 1590 Epic poem TheFaerie Queene:

But let that man with better sense advise,

That of the world least part to us is read:

And daily how through hardy enterprise

Many great regions are discovered,

Which to late age were never mentioned.

Who ever heard of th’Indian Peru?

Or who in venturous vessel measured

The Amzons’ huge river, now found true?

Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever view? (Norton,928)

This “fruitfullest Virginia” might even be the first “Jamestown” which fails several times over many years before becoming officially termed the “original” permanent English settlement.

Now, Shakespeare’s The Tempest no doubt refers to indigenous Algonquin people as the play juxtaposes that the English will not give even a small coin “to relieve a lame beggar,” with Trinculo saying, “they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian” (ii.2.32–33).

The expression “World Turned Upside Down” shares a place in the collective conscience of people both sides of the pond from centuries of plagues, wars, depressions and other major events but its place and the time of its origin finds no authoritative agreement.

Many believe this turn of phrase to be a lyric sung either to the tune of “When the King Enjoys his Own Again” or “Welcome Brother Debtors” when Lord Cornwallis surrenders to Washington in 1781 at the Siege of Yorktown but some say it’s an expression the British use earlier in reference to General Washington and his soldiers fighting in a style they don’t understand or accept. It really is a matter of competing legends lacking any attribution where this music or the lyrics come from but it is published earlier than that as a broadside in 1643 protesting against Oliver Cromwell who replaced Britain’s King Charles after he was beheaded in a treason trial.

Listen to me and you shall hear, news hath not been this thousand year:

Since Herod, Caesar, and many more, you never heard the like before.

Holy-dayes are despis’d, new fashions are devis’d.

Old Christmas is kickt out of Town.

Yet let’s be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn’d upside down.

The wise men did rejoyce to see our Savior Christs Nativity:

The Angels did good tidings bring, the Sheepheards did rejoyce and sing.

Let all honest men, take example by them.

Why should we from good Laws be bound?

Yet let’s be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn’d upside down.

(The World Turned)

Still earlier Chris Eyre’s PBS documentary We Shall Remain has Wampanoag people near coastal Massachusetts in 1618 saying that an epidemic that wiped out 9/10 of their people felt like the ‘world turned upside down.’

Whichever direction that expression travels during these years, one can be sure both sides of the Atlantic Ocean know quite a bit about each other.

Works Cited

Rediker, Marcus, and Peter Linebaugh. The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001.

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest (Signet Classics). Signet Classics, 1998.

The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume B: The Sixteenth Century/The Early Seventeenth Century. W.W. Norton, 2005.

“The World Turned Upside Down.” Blackletter Ballads. 29 Apr. 2009. <http://www.lukehistory.com/ballads/worldup.html>.

We Shall Remain. Dir. Chris Eyre;Sharon Grimberg (Executive Producer). Perf. Narrated by Benjamin Bratt. DVD. PBS (DIRECT),