Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World ed. by Patricia Akhimie and Bernadette Andrea (review)

‘Let me go with him’ (1.3.260).¹ With these five words, Desdemona opens herself up to the vagaries of travel. We might also understand her to be opening herself up to ‘travail’, i.e. childbirth: these words, after all, are spoken on her wedding night, which matters of state and the wrath of her father have curtailed. Desdemona’s decision to refuse to ‘reside’ (242) with her father and endure ‘a heavy interim’ (259) at home is a transgression too far, Shakespeare’s play seems to argue. Joining her husband in Cyprus, in a garrison populated almost entirely by men, leaves her open to accusations of multiple transgressions: in Venice she can claim to be ‘subdued / Even to the very quality of my lord’ (251–2), while in Cyprus she is labeled ‘the general’ (2.3.310); in Venice she is ‘a maiden never bold’ (1.3.95), but in Cyprus she gets called ‘the whore of Venice’ (4.2.91). Had she remained at home, she may well have endured a ‘heavy interim’, an image that surely connotes the weight of pregnancy. Abroad, she endures the weight of her husband as he smothers her. Travel and travail, terms so often interlinked in early modernity (terms sometimes indistinguishable, given the fluidity of spelling), here cancel each other out. Desdemona travels; hence, it seems, she cannot travail, as the form her murder takes violently makes clear.

Desdemona is a key figure in Patricia Akhimie and Bernadette Andrea’s brilliant essay collection, Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World. In five of the collection’s sixteen essays she is a central figure, as well as in the introduction. A cautionary tale she may be, but as this collection makes clear, she is not an outlier. We should perhaps remember that nobody in Othello thinks it is a bad idea for her to ‘go with him’, even if Iago sees it as an opportunity for revenge. While Desdemona’s story echoes the prohibitions against female travel we find in print, we can (thanks in part to this collection) locate women who pushed against such prescriptiveness, or ignored it altogether, in ultimately far more successful ways than Othello allows. To do this work, Travel and Travail argues, we need more creative and theoretical entry points to our archival resources. These approaches may evolve out of material cultural theory, compare sources in continental archives, reimagine the body in the gaps between archival traces, and apply deconstructive reading practices that think through and with issues of class, race, religion, and gender as well as with and against received notions of what constitutes the genre of travel writing.

The first half of the book focuses on women who traveled. Essays on the East India Company (eic) bring to light case studies of women who both flouted restrictions on travel and found themselves delimited by Company policy, but whose actions and accounts troubled the paths and forms that women’s lives were supposed to take in the early modern period. Richmond Barbour contextualizes Desdemona by comparing her plight to that of Anne Broomfield Keeling, whose petition to join her husband Sir William Keeling was denied, in response to which she boarded the East India Company flagship while several months pregnant. Her challenge to eic dictates may have ultimately been unsuccessful, but, as Barbour argues, Keeling’s plight serves to expose Othello’s pessimism, since she (unlike Desdemona) ‘took to exercise her own sexuality and reproductive agency’ (33). Karen Robertson’s chapter recovers the life of Mariam Khan, the Mughal Armenian woman who married two eic captains, in a fascinating historical account. Three essays focus on women in the Sherley entourage. Amrita Sen considers the ways in which their class, ethnicity, and religion...