Tobacco – A Poem about Sir Walter Ralegh

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English Renaissance, poetry, Ralegh, tobacco

Sixteenth Century Clay Pipe Smoker

Whilst reviewing Mathew Lyons’ excellent The Favourite: Ambition, Politics and Love – Sir Walter Ralegh in Elizabeth I’s Court,  I remembered a poem I wrote a few years ago about Ralegh. I reread the poem and thought it good enough to publish on Hobbinol’s Blog.  The poem reflects on Ralegh’s ‘achievements’ as explorer, coloniser and entrepreneur as he

Othello’s Barbaric Past

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cannibals, English Renaissance, Othello, Shakespeare

Othello’s toleration or, more accurately, his masochistic acceptance of his barbaric past that is a surplus requirement of his European identity, is demonstrated in his ‘travailous history’ (1.3, line 140) that captivates Desdemona:

 

Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle
Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven
It was my hint to speak – such was my process –
And of the cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders… (1.3, lines 141-146)

Othello describes a non-European space characterised by its vast caves and empty deserts. The implied gigantic scale of uncultivated land is confirmed by the alliteration in ‘Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch/heaven’. The pathetic fallacy of the ‘hills whose heads touch/heaven’ indicates exotic phallic excess that threatens to exceed its boundaries. The border created between the

The Elizabethan’s Exotic Identity

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barbaric, Edmund Spenser, England, exotic, Guiana, Hariot, Ireland, maps, New World, Ralegh, Virginia

The Elizabethan adventurers Thomas Eliot, Sir Walter Ralegh and Edmund Spenser travelled overseas to meet cultures different from themselves. The acknowledgement of these cultures that are ‘other’ to the dominant Elizabethan civilization are what John Gillies terms the exotic, wondrous, strange and barbaric (Gillies 25). However, I am arguing that the Elizabethan notion of individuality is challenged, because they identify an exotic or a more pleasing variation of themselves in the people they label as their inferiors.

These exotic identities are illustrated by Hariot