Cosmopolite subjectivities and the Mediterranean in early modern England

Recent work on early modern Anglo-Mediterranean relations focuses almost exclusively on colonialist discourses which produce a recognizably modem English subject defined in opposition to an 'Other'. In contrast, my reading of poetry, drama and travel writing shows that English writers use the figure of the Mediterranean to imagine a "cosmopolite" identity that is incorporative and dependent upon multiple exchanges with 'the foreign.';When a character in Every Man Out of His Humour purports to parade around St Paul's central aisle by proposing, "let's walk in the Mediterraneo," Ben Jonson uses the Mediterranean to describe a place in the heart of the city of London in a building that, in many ways, defines Englishness itself. If the Mediterranean provides the very means whereby the English made sense of their own space and urban practices, it is also central to their literary production. While scholars of the Renaissance have looked at English attempts to "forge genealogies" to a classical past and new historicist work has looked at the importance of trade in material culture, no study investigates the early modern commonplace that literary production is a matter of international trade. Early modern poets understood the circulation of texts, conventions and figures as a matter of "traffick" to foreign ---especially Mediterranean--- shores. In the course of 'trading' in both literary conventions and representations of the strange, the novel, and the exotic, writers such as Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Jonson, and Howell suggest that text, city and reader are dependent alike upon foreign things. Here "Mediterranean" operates as a sign of value, not simply for its significance to the humanist 'rediscovery' of antiquity or because it contained many of the richest cities of the Renaissance and early modern period to whose status the English aspired, but also because the Mediterranean occupied a privileged position in the discourse about the international movement of things through travel, trade and migration.