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

I learned much from this collection of sixteen essays, in particular those in Part 1, which documents the travels of a handful of exceptional women within and between Europe and the Islamic world (Ann Broomfield Keeling, Mariam Khan, Teresa Sampsonia Sherley, Catherine Whetenall) and between America and Europe (Pocohontas). Their exploits are impressive, and their lives make for good reading. Part 2, which looks at women and travel in drama, has some outstanding contributions but was more uneven in terms of speculative arguments. Of the eight chapters, three deal with Desdemona in Othello, and the others with less obvious but nonetheless interesting targets such as Cleopatra, Marina in Pericles and The Empress in The Blazing World, Rosalind in As You Like It, and Bess in The Fair Maid of the West.

The aim of the collection is to demonstrate that, despite the ubiquitous bans on women’s mobility in prescriptive literature, women did indeed travel overseas, and they participated in the era’s expansionist projects (Introduction, 4). Richmond Barbour paves the way for this counter-argument to the conduct books in the opening chapter with a fascinating description of Mrs Keeling’s travels with her husband, General William Keeling, in the East India Company. This very readable chapter provides ample evidence of support for wives on board for a range of reasons all ultimately in the interests of the company. Barbour uses Desdemona as an apt comparison. Michael Slater similarly presents documentary evidence to show that women such as Desdemona from elite circles were indeed expected to travel with their husbands. Given all the women in this collection are from these higher echelons of society is it necessary to justify their travels? Apparently yes. For contemporary biographers it remained obligatory to prove that feminine virtue, chastity and respectability were not incompatible with their female voyager. The two most common justifications for travel were love of husband and religious motivation. In the case of Teresa Sampsonia Sherley, a Circassian polyglot who travelled widely with her husband, the adventurer Robert Sherley, Carmen Nocentelli proposes her representation as a travelling consort, a gender-neutral term, overcame the usual sexual suspicions for female travellers. By drawing on European biographies Nocentelli uncovers a very different Sherley myth. Bernadette Andrea’s essay focuses on Teresa’s religious motivations by reference to a Carmelite relic she wore around her neck, a piece of flesh from the body of St Teresa of Avila. The account of the relic’s origins and subsequent ‘career’ makes for compelling reading. Most of the historical essays draw on archival records or biographies. One of the few to use personal travel writings is Laura Ambrose, whose careful analysis of Lady Anne Clifford’s diaries and memoirs reveals how Clifford constructed her own image of herself not so much as a traveller but as moving between her estates. This also explains Clifford’s use of the term ‘remove’ rather than ‘journey’ (p. 169). Mobility in fact becomes the primary means through which Clifford organizes and remembers her life (p. 171) and by which she continually claims her legal entitlement to her estates.

It is not possible to cover all sixteen contributions here, but the following stand out in Part 2. One is Laura Aydelotte’s ‘Mapping Women’, which covers several plays, including Othello. Aydelotte traces the way male and female characters employ geographic names and what that says about the boundaries of their power within the world of the plays they inhabit (p. 182). This is part of a digital project, ‘Shakespeare on the Map’, to identify and map the place names in Shakespeare’s plays and their gendered contexts. The Taming of the Shrew (not discussed by Aydelotte) is a good example of the value of this type...