In the late sixteenth century, English merchants and diplomats
ventured into the eastern Mediterranean to trade directly with the
Turks, the keepers of an important emerging empire in the Western
Hemisphere, and these initial exchanges had a profound effect on
English literature. While the theater investigated representations
of religious and ethnic identity in its portrayals of Turks and
Muslims, poetry, Miriam Jacobson argues, explored East-West
exchanges primarily through language and the material text. Just as
English markets were flooded with exotic goods, so was the English
language awash in freshly imported words describing items such as
sugar, jewels, plants, spices, paints, and dyes, as well as
technological advancements such as the use of Arabic numerals in
arithmetic and the concept of zero. Even as these Eastern words and
imports found their way into English poetry, poets wrestled with
paying homage to classical authors and styles. In Barbarous
Antiquity, Jacobson reveals how poems adapted from Latin or Greek
sources and set in the ancient classical world were now reoriented
to reflect a contemporary, mercantile Ottoman landscape. As
Renaissance English writers including Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe,
and Chapman weighed their reliance on classical poetic models
against contemporary cultural exchanges, a new form of poetry
developed, positioned at the crossroads of East and West, ancient
and modern. Building each chapter around the intersection of an
Eastern import and a classical model, Jacobson shows how
Renaissance English poetry not only reconstructed the classical
past but offered a critique of that very enterprise with a new set
of words and metaphors imported from the East.
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