This informative study explores the representation of Eastern European lands and peoples, especially the territories that now constitute the author's native Romania, from 1585 to the mid-1630s. Matei-Chesnoiu's findings will interest students of early modern drama and geographic writing and of crosscultural discourse generally. She surveys a large number of historical, geographical, and ethnographic texts - atlases, chorographies (descriptions of specific regions), and travel narratives - to appreciate how English plays absorb, refashion, or call into question accepted ideas about the region. She emphasizes the unfortunate persistence of negative classical stereotypes about these lands and argues that Shakespeare's last plays embody a more complex, "triangulated" view of this liminal space.
Chapters 1 and 2 focus on classical sources and Roman plays and establish that since ancient times Eastern Europe was seen as a place of barbarism at the limit of the "civilized" (Graeco-Roman) world. Thrace was associated with violent dismemberment (Orpheus and Philomel), and the Black Sea was home to the savage Goths of Titus Andronicus. Chapter 3 argues that early modern geopgraphic works recycled ancient fables about these locales and that, even in the 1600s, travelers relied heavily on classical authors, using Roman names for provinces - "Dacia" instead of Wallachia, Transylvania, and Moldavia - and repeating tales of barbarism first circulated about the ancient Scythians, alleging that the inhabitants drank blood from their victim's skulls. Even Ortelius's atlas included such fictions until the edition of 1610, which replaced ancient lore about Dacia with factual information about Translylvania (96). Later writers did update the ancients by stressing the Ottoman presence in Eastern Europe, but Matei-Chesnoiu laments their erasure of the native populations' periodic resistance to the "Ottoman occupation" (100) and of the fact that most Eastern Europeans were Christian, not "heathen" (91). (There is on this occasion an implication that the term might have been justified if they had been Muslim). Chapters 4 and 5 identify and analyze allusions to Eastern Europe in the drama generally, and Chapter 6 focuses on Shakespeare's romances, arguing that they are set primarily in indefinate, symbolic spaces, in which Eastern Europe is "visualized" and embodied so as to challenge received stereotypes even while invoking them.
Chapter 6 is implicitly the culmination of the argument, but the "visualization" to which Matei-Chesnoiu alludes seems mostly a question of verbal imagery and the allure of exotic place names. She acknowledges that Shakespeare's stage was relatively "barren" (63), and she does not argue (though she might have) that costumes or props brought Eastern Europeans concretely before an English audience. Rather she argues, in the case of The Winter's Tale, that the actors playing Leonato and Polixenes embody Sicilia and Bohemia by "synecdoche" (178), and that verbal images of the kings shaking hands metaphorically "from the ends of opposite winds" (1.1.30-31, qtd. 178) and the pastoral harmony of the sheep-shearing scene allow audiences to experience a Bohemia that contradicts many geographical works and raises "significant questions of cultural integration and tolerance" (16-17). The larger argument, though appealing to lovers of Shakespeare, is less convincing than her comments on individual plays. She notes, for example, that in the brothel scene in Pericles and its sources, Shakespeare alone alludes to a "poor Transylvania" alongside denizens of "more privileged nations" (171) and that Prospero's island, though saturated with references to real places, ultimately resembles the "encased space" of the Jacobean stage, "where all the real events in the play happen . . . between two and six in the afternoon" (192).
The chief contribution of the book is the comprehensive surbey of dramatic allusions to Eastern Europe in chapters 4 and 5. Matei-Chesnoiu ranges beyond familiar works, such as Tamburlaine and Twelfth Night; to academic plays, such as Misogonus (1577); anonymous history plays like Nero (1623); Middletons' The Roaring Girl (1611); and Shirley's Lady of Pleasure (1635); among many others. She provides a quick sketch of the relevant history and geography and explains allusions that are likely to escape even well-informed modern readers. While less prominent that, say, Italy, Eastern Europe was by no means absent from the imaginative landscape of English plays. Although she acknowledges that most of these allusions evoke negative connotations, she argues that their frequency tends to collapse "the distinctions between the foreign and the familiar" and thus signals "a culture in transition" (159). In collecting and explaining these references, Matei-Chesnoiu fills an important gap for Anglophone students of early modern drama, for whom Eastern Europe may still be a shadowy "elsewhere."
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