Pt. 1 - How Edward de Vere Didn't Depart Italy (it turns out).
Pt. 2-2 - Crocodiles, Prester John and where the Earle of Oxenford wasn't.
Pt. 2-3 - Edward de Vere in Palermo: the final analysis.
Pt. 3 - More on Edward Webbe’s troublesome trauailes and Edward de Vere.
Occasionally I have the interesting experience of discovering that an essay I’ve written thinking I may have been the first person to address a particular subject was preceded by some goodly number of years. In the present instance a polymath, polyglot officer in the British Royal Artillery, at the turn of the previous century, named Lieut.- Col. Henry William Lovett Hime wrote a short letter to The Westminster Chronicle of July 1916, regarding “The Travels of Edward Webbe”.
The travels in question are THE Rare and most wonderful thinges which Edward Webbe an Englishman borne, hath seene and passed in his troublesome trauailes, in the Citties of Ierusalem, Dammasko, Bethelem and Galely : and in the Landes of Iewrie, Egipt, Grecia, Russia, and in the Land of Prester lohn (1590). The book was quite popular, going through three editions and the text being expanded all in one year.
Contemporary readers seem, as a whole, to have considered the travelogue to be non-fiction. But then, so many non-fiction travelogues at the time seemed so fantastical that an actual work of fantasy might be difficult to distinguish. Who knew what the rest of the world, suddenly arrived on a reader’s doorstep, was like? It was genuinely exotic in jaw dropping ways… but which ways and which not?
With the advantage of hind sight and access to a digital Internet library of tens of millions of volumes, it is possible to trace how the purported Webbe assembled the descriptions in his travelogue. They were certainly not from personal experience (as I have shown in some detail in my “Edward de Vere in Transit”[1] series).
Himes had fewer resources with which to work but his letter revealed to me a source I could not seem to chase down. I was confident that it existed. But where?
Webbe's remarks about Palestine and Egypt bear so close a resemblance to Mandeville's that it is unnecessary to dwell upon them;…[2]
The Mandeville in question is John Mandeville. That said, the game’s afoot. John Mandeville would seem to have been an actual English medical man practicing in the French city of Liege during the mid-14th century. The account of his “Voyages and Travels,” however, while written in his name, was actually written by a fellow citizen of the city named Jean d'Outremeuse.
Little is known of Outremeuse with the exception that he had taken minor orders and written at least two accounts of travel under two different names not his own that he compiled from other works he had at hand. In the instance of the Mandeville travels it became one of the best sellers in history, Tudor times included.
Webbe’s description of the kingdom of Prester John comes from Mandeville’s combined descriptions of the kingdom of the Great Chan and of Prester John. Of course, in both instances Prester John was every bit as much of a myth then as in Tudor times and now. The man behind the name of Webbe used the occasion to describe the tame unicorns and elephants in Prester John's park. Mandeville’s Prester kingdom had parrots who were able to talk as fluently as men the more their feet went from four-toed claws to five-toed feet.
Webbe does not simply copy, by any means. The “many wylde men” of Prester’s kingdom, in Mandeville, for example, that “ben hidouse to loken on for thei ben horned”[3] become in Webbe “wilde men”
chained fast to a post every day, the one in Prester Johns Court, and the other in the high street of Constantinople, each of them having a Mantel cast about their shoulders, and all over their bodies they have wonderfull long haire, they are Chained fast by the neck, and will speedily devoure any man that commeth in their reach.[4]
Where “grete lordes & riche barouns… seruen the” Great Chan “at the mete,”[5] in Mandeville, in Webbe they become “sixty kinges, wearing leaden Crownes on their heads,” who “serve in the meat unto Prester Johns Table”[6].
For my part, I am pleased to have closed the deal that Hime opened some one hundred years ago. He realizes that Cairo is featured in Mandeville and borrowed by Webbe. What Hime’s find could not clarify for me was the most particular mystery: where did Webbe get the inspiration for the claim that
Egipt is continually watred by the water which uppon ye 25 day of August is turned into the cuntries round about, by means of ye wonderfull growing and swelling of the water upright without any stay at all, on the one side thereof, it is to ye height of a huge mountaine, which beginneth to increase the 15 day of August, and by the 25. of the fame moneth it is at the highest, on which day it is cut by ye deviding of 2 pillars in a straunge fort, neere to the cittie of ye great Caer, and so turned as off from a great mountaine into the lande of Egipt: by meanes whereof, the Turke holdes all the land of Egipt in subjection to him selfe, and might if he would dismisse them cleane from having any water at all.[7]
While Mandeville makes clear that the flooding begins each year in the astrological sign of Cancer, giving Webbe “15 day of August,” he makes no mention of the Turkish control of the flow to Alexandria and Ethiopia. That particular can be found in Sansovino[8]. Hime would seem to have realized that Turkish rituals of circumcision are mentioned off-hand in Mandeville, but the level of detail about the festival around the circumcision of a Sultan’s son, in Webbe, comes from Sansovino also.
[1] “Edward de Vere in Transit” Virtual Grub Street. http://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2017/07/how-edward-de-vere-didnt-depart-italy.html.
[2] Hime, Lieut.- Col. Henry William Lovett. “The Travels of Edward Webbe.” Westminster Chronicle, July, 1916, 464-70 @ 466.
[3] Hamelius, P. Mandeville's Travels Translated from the French of Jean d'Ouremeuse (1916, 1919). I.182.
[4] Webbe, Edward. Edward Webbe, chief master gunner, his trauailes (1590). Edward Arber, ed. 25.
[5] Hamelius, I.143.
[6] Webbe, trauailes. 24.
[7] Webbe, trauailes. 22.
[8] Sansovino, Francesco. Historia Vniversale Dell Origine Et Imperio De Tvrchi;… (1560, 1564, 1568, 1582). Various scattered references, esp. 187. “Et Selim volendo insignorirsi di tuttte le provincie che di la & di qua dal Nilo era solite obedire a Selim del Cairo.”
Also at Virtual Grub Street:
- A 1572 Oxford Letter and the Player’s Speech in Hamlet. August 11, 2020. “The player’s speech has been a source of consternation among Shakespeare scholars for above 200 years. Why was Aeneas’ tale chosen as the subject?”
- Edward de Vere, Shakespeare and Tycho Brahe. June 9, 2020. “When Brahe was encouraged by his friends and associates to publish a book on the November 1572 supernova for which he is now famous, his answer belonged to his times.”
- Shakespeare’s Funeral Meats. May 13, 2020. “Famous as this has been since its discovery, it has been willfully misread more often than not. No mainstream scholar had any use for a reference to Hamlet years before it was supposed to have been written.”
- The Medieval Chimney: Not What You Might Think. May 19, 2019. “The famous Royal antiquary, John Leland, source of a great deal of detailed information about the towns and countryside of England during the reign of Henry VIII, stood awestruck before a full-length vertical chimney as if he were standing before the Hagia Sophia.”
- Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
- Check out the English Renaissance Letter Index for many letters from this fascinating time, some related to the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
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