Dire Straits: The Perils of Writing the Early Modern Coastline from Leland to Milton by Elizabeth Jane Bellamy (review)

In this short but wide-ranging book Elizabeth Jane Bellamy writes about the way the English coastline was imagined and written about by early modern English literary writers, primarily Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. Writers of antiquity had described England as harsh and unpleasant: Ultima Britannia was located in the distant and inhospitable north at the edge of the empire. When early modern writers began to redescribe England as the centre of a new empire, reusing the language of ancient Rome or of Renaissance Italy, it was, claims Bellamy, difficult for them to speak of their island using the imagery at their disposal. They had to reinvent a way of conceptualizing the coastal geography of England.

Overall, the argument works. This book offers a much more deeply and imaginatively thought-through discussion than any old-style study of “the image of the coastline in the English Renaissance” might have provided. You can sense the struggle experienced by the authors, especially Milton, trained to the rhythms and language of the ancient and Continental texts, trying to get the right tone and lexicon to situate and modulate the narrative. Many of the close readings attend to these details effectively, and Bellamy loves to trace the subtle parallels and influences. The English poets are seen to be in continuous conversation with one another and with their ancient predecessors, principally Virgil, Horace, and Ovid.

Now and then I found that some of these close readings misfired. Thus, the description of Milton’s reaction on meeting Giambattista Manso in Naples is based not on anything in Milton but on Bellamy’s reading of a passage in David Masson’s nineteenth-century biography. In the discussion of John Lyly’s Euphues, we are told that Philautus is “nauseated” by Euphues’s description of Caesar’s Britain, but despite Bellamy’s philological explanation of nausea and its relation to the Greek word naus for “ship,” such language is nowhere to be found in Lyly. To learn that Marlowe’s “ratling murmur” of the sea in Hero and Leander is a Mediterranean description is also unexpected: Marlowe does mention “yellow sand,” but a “ratling murmur” is what one hears on a stony English beach (later on Bellamy quotes Lear 4.6.21 on such chaffing pebbles). The section on Milton that concludes the book initially seems to work best for such close readings, then becomes caught up in an increasingly refined discussion of Ovid’s Tristia (marred, incidentally, by a surprising number of typos or incorrect citations for the Latin, which appear never to have been checked, or even read in proof). Bellamy is a highly receptive reader, yet, for me, some of these readings suddenly overstep a limit. It is like being told a joke, and though one can follow the story, at the end one cannot quite get the punch line. I am going to hope that other readers will not face this problem.

There is one other issue in the book, acknowledged from the start. There is little developed sense of the lived reality of the sea coast when it is presented through Bellamy’s cleverly termed but never defined “numinous poetics.” Attention to social history, narratives of exploration, and cultural geography could have helped to enlarge the argument (Richard Hakluyt is mentioned once in an aside on page 48 and doesn’t make it to the index). How alert are the poets to the reality of the coastal life, and do they help us to understand it? I would have liked to see a more grounded and interdisciplinary discussion along the lines of the “new thalassology” described by Steve Mentz (in the 2009 issue of Literature Compass).⁸ This book certainly belongs in this discussion.

That said, the overall argument of the book is memorable, and even though I was now and then frustrated by my inability to be moved by some of the refined...