Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing (review)

In a paper given at the 1989 Ohio Shakespeare Conference at the University of Akron, John Michael Archer announced a revisionary reading of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish: "In conflating Foucault's ideas [of surveillance] with Elias' analysis of the court I am suggesting that some elements of surveillant power developed within a sovereignty of display, which concealed the practices of courtly observation just as the idea of the state was later to conceal surveillance itself."¹ Where Foucault found definitive rupture, Archer described an opaque continuity that informs modern rationality. Taking Bacon as his muse, Archer expanded on this agenda in Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance (1993), a book that established its author as one of our best interpreters of cultural evolution.

An ambitious and exotic outgrowth of this orientation, Old Worlds will be essential reading as we begin to explore early modern England's relationship with countries that permitted contact but kept their distance. At the end of the last century, we turned to the pages of Hakluyt for the data of New World experience, but we hardly noticed his commencement. As TheTempest does in Shakespeare's First Folio, Russia stands as threshold in The Principall Navigations, a clear signal that Old Worlds functioned as pre-texts for all early modern voyaging. In this spirit, Archer claims that "the New World was almost always conceived as a lost part of the Old World, a fold in its global immensity and temporal endurance" (2). Picking up on a theme first emphasized by Stephen Greenblatt, Archer contends that "Europeans reinterpreted their place in the Old World and managed their own anxieties about internal instability and decay" by rewriting various old worlds in terms of decadence and degeneration (7).

Archer introduces his study with a thought-provoking first chapter that styles such rewriting as "para-colonial" (17). The term makes sense in this context and may help many of us to organize more productively the two strands of early modern travel writing. At the same time, Archer's emphasis on the way these texts "model" various regions turns out to be most helpful in his later readings (11). If the compact introduction strays, it is only with the author's indefinite invocation of Wallerstein's world-systems model (6-7). Wallerstein's classic work simply does not mesh well with the author's literary vocabulary. The author might instead have consulted Emily Bartels's nuanced account of the way in which early modern writers developed "Europe's self-image and self-authorization."² Nevertheless, by the end of the chapter, we have a clear sense of the project: "Through four chapters, I address travel accounts, geographical works, and literary texts that rewrite European traditions about a plural antiquity from the English perspective, with consequences for developing notions of racial and sexual difference" (19).

In the next chapter, Archer takes up "The Representation of Egypt and Shake-speare's Antony and Cleopatra" in order "to trace the relation between racial and sexual constructions during the period by reading Shakespeare's text in relation to a number of historical, geographical, and travel writings that became available roughly within a century of its publication" (24). What Archer discovers is sexual transgression trumped by a "narrative of degeneration" that "leaves the text open to appropriation by the developing radical, and ultimately imperial, system of European modernity" (61). Critics accustomed to finding subversion in their colonial texts may be surprised to find Archer reiterating this verdict in subsequent chapters. For my part, I would want to qualify this conclusion by drawing on Geraldo U. de Sousa's superb account of the way habitat, gender, and text ultimately unsettle European narratives of degeneration in Egypt.³

John Milton's distinctive vision guides the next two chapters. In...