Exploration in English Renaissance Literature
So people really like throwing around the appellation "The Age of X," and those who dubbed the Renaissance the "Age of Exploration" were no different. So stop us if you've heard this one: Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492.
Inaccurate. He sailed way before that. But in 1492, he just happened to land on what we now call Cuba and assumed that he had hit India. Suffice it to say that people who spent their time drawing monsters on the edge of every map when they were stumped prob didn't have the best grasp of what was where.
Once everyone figured out that (parts of) the New World hid untold mounds of gold, however, they weren't too shy about sending more and more ships out into the wild blue yonder. Greed is a powerful motivating force, you know?
Anyway, the New World changed people's internal and external boundaries—it expanded people's notions of what was and wasn't possible. It allowed writers to think of the great unknown as a place inhabited with all sorts of different creatures, both real and imaginary.
Unfortunately, this intrepid outlook led to some pretty nasty encounters between European explorers and people in the New World. As it turns out, since they had been living there for as long as their ancestors could remember, their part of the world didn't seem so new to them.
But for playwrights, poets, and treatise writers, the exploration of the New World expanded the scope of where they could go—figuratively, if not literally. Renaissance writers tended to veer away from reality, as they embraced a classic "I can now go and do whatever I like" attitude.
Thomas More created his own world to discover in Utopia. And Shakespeare's The Tempest plays with the idea of exploration by taking a poignant look at worlds divided. Nice.
Chew on This
The currency of the Renaissance was the new. It was a rebirth of culture and art, after all. So what do you make of a play that's more concerned with the aging—with fading away into the darkness? We're talking about Twelfth Night here; it starts with a (ship) crash and ends with a bang. Let us know what you think about its spin on the Age of Exploration.
We can never really shake the feeling that even when something isn't about exploration and the rise of the merchant class, it's always there. Like, just behind the scenes, shaping what's happening on the stage. Like in Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta. How is it that all these peeps are on an island together in this play? And what does it all have to do with trade?