These words are spoken by Phaedria to Guyon in Book II of Edmund Spenser’sThe Faerie Queene.Phaedria is a lady full of merriment and song who runs a crooked ferry-service on the Idle Lake. She takes those passengers she chooses to her island, a place of paradisal loveliness, and tempts them to yield to a life of pleasure. She has already waylaid Cymochles, who was bound on a mission of revenge, and now she has taken up Guyon, who is on his quest to destroy the Bower of Bliss. She has refused to allow both men the company of...

In these contexts the voyage is the image of desire; with the vision of the riches of newly discovered worlds often linked with the search of Jason for the Golden Fleece. There is, however, a counter-image in Marlowe, in which the voyage is an image of separation.

In three plays of Marlowe the sea plays a vital role. The locality is sea-girt; arrival and departure are by ship. This is obviously the case with the island-play,The Jew of Malta,and also withDido,Queen of Carthage, which wholly depends on the arrival and departure of Aeneas by sea. But...

John Donne’s serious illness of 1623 was the occasion of two major poems, the ‘Hymne to God my God, in my sicknesse’, above,² and ‘A Hymne to God the Father’ (see p. 95), as well as the prose work,Devotions upon Divergent Occasions.All three writings make central use of voyage imagery, the ‘Hymne to God my God’ being entirely dependent on it. My study of Donne’s voyage imagery as a whole will lead up to an examination of this difficult and challenging poem.

Unlike Spenser’s, Donne’s references to voyaging, which are everywhere in his writing and constitute some of...

These are very familiar lines, but they have not provoked much discussion. They seem to me to mark a vital moment inOthello,a moment of recognition and reversal. I wish to show in this chapter how a single metaphor can illuminate an entire play.

Othello speaks these words in the last scene of the play. The bodies of Desdemona and Emilia lie on the bed. Othello has only just realized that he has been duped by Iago; he has attacked him with his sword and been disarmed. Iago rushes off stage pursued by Montano. Gratiano is stationed outside to...

The word ‘break’ is Pope’s addition to what seems to be an imperfect line in the Folio. Most editors agree that ‘whence the Sunne ‘gins his reflection’ refers to the vernal equinox, with ‘reflection’ meaning ‘turning back’. This strained interpretation surely misses the whole point of the passage. No doubt editors are affected by the word ‘spring’, though it here means ‘source’. ‘Reflection’ can hardly mean a turning-back in this equinoctial sense. The word means ‘shining’, and Shakespeare uses the word equally for direct and indirect shining. What the captain means is that from the self-same point of the compass...

Shakespeare made extensive use of a shipwreck as a major structural device in his comedies and romances either to set the action of a play going or to create a redirection of the action. It is fundamental to a very early play,The Comedy of Errors,and to a very late play,The Tempest;it is important in The Merchant of Venice,Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale,andPericles Prince of Tyre.It is surprising how often these sea-disasters are insertions in or alterations of the source-material Shakespeare was using. It is surprising again how indifferent Shakespeare often seems to...

In his writings Francis Bacon was constantly associating the progress of knowledge with voyaging.² The association was most strongly affirmed in the title-page of theInstauratio Magnaof 1620, which shows two ships sailing through the Pillars of Hercules (the Straits of Gibraltar) with the motto from the Book of Daniel (12:4), ‘Multi pertransibunt et augebitur scientia’, which Bacon was always quoting (in different renderings). ‘Manie shall passe too and fro, and science shalbe increased’ is the version given inValerius Terminus: Of the Interpretation of Nature(1603). Interestingly, Simon Passe’s engraving (see opposite) shows two ships which seem to...

The idea of the Fall is central in Milton’s use of voyage imagery.Lycidascontains at the end a promise of hope or protection ‘to all that wander in that perilous flood’—meaning all of fallen humanity. In discussing the poem, Isabel MacCaffrey pointed out the ‘heavy change’ from pastoral innocence to a dark journey by sea and an ultimately regained Paradise.¹ The idea of the Fall is most marked in apportioning the blame for the wrecking of Edward King’s ship. Although the sea is named ‘the remorseless deep’, and ‘that perilous flood’, and although we have the vision of...