Today is the bard's 450th birthday. Had he ever heard of South America's 'Wild Coast'?
Undoubtedly, yes. In 1595, when Shakespeare was aged 31, and at the height of his creative powers, Sir Walter Raleigh published his great prospectus, "The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana".
Today is the bard's 450th birthday. Had he ever heard of South America's 'Wild Coast'?
Undoubtedly, yes. In 1595, when Shakespeare was aged 31, and at the height of his creative powers, Sir Walter Raleigh published his great prospectus, "The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana".
Certainly, Shakespeare will have heard of it, and it would have made a vivid impression. The book described a remarkable world. Quite apart from golden cities and comely Amazons, here were diamond mountains, dog-headed mermen, week-long drinking festivals, and men with their eyes in their chests. Better still, the locals were conveniently hopeless. ‘Those Guianians,’ Raleigh wrote, ‘are marvellous great drunkards, in which vice I think no nation can compare with them.’ The book was, it seems, a composite of Spanish tittle-tattle, salesmanship and a feverish classical education. It was widely lampooned.
Raleigh was disappointed by the ridicule of his peers. They were, he said, ‘blockishe and slothful dullards’. To prove them wrong, he sent out another expedition in 1596, led by an Oxford mathematician, called Lawrence Keymis. This time, the Englishmen head not for Venezuelan Guiana but the area that became British Guiana (or today's Guyana). The new expedition, instead of battling up the Orinoco, would approach Guiana from the seaward side. In this, Keymis was partly successful. He sailed up the coast of the Guianas, identifying fifty-two rivers, of which forty have never been seen before. He deduces that several of these lead to the lost city, but that the best bet is the Essequibo (pictured here at Flag Island).
These journeys will have made an unforgettable impression on Shakespeare. A year later, in 1597, he produced "The Merry Wives of Windsor". In it Shakespeare's character, Falstaff flatters Mistress Page, as ‘a region of Guiana, all good and bounty’. This must have been a great joke at the time, and it would have got lots of laughs, showing how familiar the Elizabethans were with the world of Guiana.
Interestingly, Shakespeare wasn't the only writer of that period to bring Guiana into his work. John Milton (1608-1674) too was entranced, and an ‘unspoilt Guiana’ pops up in the heart of "Paradise Lost", in 1667
