Columbus, Shakespeare, and the Interpretation of the New World (review)

The problem of the New World has inspired some of the most innovative, enlightening and thrilling criticism written over the last twenty years or so. Essays and books by Stephen Greenblatt, Tzvetan Todorov, and Anthony Pagden, among many others, have completely changed our understanding of early modern literature with their peerless combination of erudition and eloquence. Thus, Hart's topic is certainly an interesting one. He wants to investigate, as he says in the introductory chapter, the problem of interpretation in and of the New World, "how the Europeans brought their hermeneutical repertoire in representing and interpreting signs in the New World" (3).

Hart examines, in chapter three, "After Columbus," not only how Columbus projected his own concerns in his famous letter, but how Columbus was himself subject to the projections and appropriations of later writers and cultures. He devotes the fourth chapter to the issue of "Sexing America," promising to discuss "other instances of sex and gender than those that focus on the rape of the virgin land or of amazons" (82), which really means the presence of sodomy in depictions of the New World. Chapter five, "Between Cultures," takes up the issue of exchange, sometimes forced exchange, the form of kidnapping, between native and European cultures, and as Hart writes, "this chapter is a coming to terms with some important examples of hostages, go-betweens and the mixing of cultures" (105). Hart follows with a chapter, "Shakespeare's Island," devoted to Shakespeare's The Tempest, a play, he writes, "about the meeting, if not the clash of cultures. The go-betweens here are principally Ariel and Caliban" (129). The book concludes with a theoretical discussion entitled "Cultural Appropriation: Colonialism and Postcolonialism," the precise gist of which, I must admit, escaped me.

Hart does make some important, insightful points over the course of this book. In particular, I found his discussion of the textual difficulties surrounding Columbus' Letter and his journal very instructive. Hart's point is that the matter of translation and transmission is so complex and convoluted that "it is difficult to know just what we are hearing and from whom" (21). The fact is, as Hart reminds us, "[t]here is no original of this letter, which has been reconstructed from four Spanish versions as well as three Italian versions and one Latin version" (21). Using this text as a source for what actually happened is therefore fraught with all sorts of difficulties. I also found valuable Hart's attention to important texts that are not often looked at. To be sure, Columbus and Shakespeare's The Tempest are familiar enough in discussion of colonialism and Postcolonialism, but examinations of the reports by Samuel de Champlain and Jacques Cartier, both of whom explored Quebec, are surprisingly missing in most scholarship on this period. The fascinating differences between Cartier's and Jean de Lévry's treatment of sexuality ("Cartier's text is quite sexless" [97], very much unlike de Lévry's) usefully reminds us that European concerns are not homogenous, and that we need to be alive to the differences as well as the similarities in how Europeans wrote about the New World.

Yet the book's flaws outweigh its virtues. First, some smaller problems. At times, basic grammar seems to elude both Hart and his copy editor. It's astonishing to read, "The differences among the Europeans or among the Natives is something [. . .] that is easy to elide" (96; my emphasis); "I [. . .] is not capable of bad faith" (102); and "The controversy over rap music in the United States, where the record companies, the artists and the groups calling for censorship have collided" (151). In Chapter Three, "After Columbus," Hart cites a large number of images of Columbus (see in particular pp. 29-31), and in Chapter Four, "Sexing America," Hart returns to an analysis of the visual representation of America, but surprisingly, the book does not contain a single illustration, which seriously hampers the analysis...