RAGUSA and SHAKESPEARE

Ragusa's fame was poised to travel far. William Shakespeare appropriated the corruption of the name for its fleet, Argosy (from Ragosy) and employed it as a generic term for all navies in The Merchant of Venice and The Taming of the Shrew, and more imaginatively, in Henry VI, Part III. In Measure for Measure a plot turn in the last act depended on the substitution of the severed head of a "Rhagozin" pirate for Claudio's. Shakespeare might have had better luck with this ploy if Hungary, the titular lord of Ragusa, had remained the setting of the tale rather than Vienna, to which Shakespeare had moved Measure for Measure. But these were only passing references to Ragusans, as it happened the playwright found a more resonant role for the city-state as a setting for drama.

In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare's references to the court, to carnival, to London's taverns and its people, were immediately obvious to a contemporary audience, yet he further enriched plot and character by employing remote Illyria as the setting for the play. It appears to have been anything but a casual choice. Shakespeare mentioned Illyria directly ten times; he made other references to its coast, its sailors and pirates, its tall people, its robust" wines, and its fabled city. This required more than casual knowledge of contemporary sixteenth-century Illyria-that is, Dalmatia-and it was apparently contemporary Illyria that he had in mind since ancient Illyria supported neither the viticulture and wine production to which he alluded nor the romanticized Christian pirates who preyed on Turkish vessels of which he was so fond. Nearer to home, Shakespeare could find such a wealth of reference to carnivals, misrule, drunkenness, pirates, and the world turned upside down that there was no need to travel to Illyria for that context. Still misrule and disorder, in the sixteenth century at least, were one side of a coin, and Illyria could supply Shakespeare with the obverse: an idyllic city where, so the story went, order and deference were the pleasure and duty of everyone.

The Croatian scholar of Renaissance literature, Rudolf Filopovic, has argued that Ragusa-Dubrovnik was the setting for Twelfth Night, opposing the opinions of his fellow countrymen who favor Split or Zadar as Shakespeare's Illyrian town. English scholars have generally favored either a mythic and more general antique setting as the backdrop for Twelfth Night, that is, if they have given the matter consideration at all. Filopovic reached his conclusion after comparing travel literature, particularly Hakluyt Society publications of the voyages of John Lock to Jerusalem (1553) and Henry Austel to Constantinople (1585), to Shakespeare's output. While Hakluyt's publications were known to have provided Shakespeare with ideas for settings, there is some question whether he had read an earlier traveler's account written by Sir Richard Guylford and published in 1511. Filopovic believes he had, resulting in a claim that Twelfth Night includes all the elements of Guylford's description of Ragusa in one place or another. These include relics, monuments of renown and beauty, massive fortifications, vintage wines of great potency, and above all the high spirits, geniality, and mirth that knowledge of one's proper place in a society may bestow.

Guylford's own description of Ragusa runs: "It is also ryche & fayre in suptuous buyldynge with marveylous strengthe and beautye togyther with many fayre churches and glorious houses of Relygyon . . . there be also many Relyques, as the hed and arme of seynt Blase." The traveler then relates that Ragusa was "the strongest towne of walles, towres, bulwerke, watches, and wardes that euer I sawe in all my lyfe." Twelfth Night, Filipovic argues, echoes Guy1ford whenever it partakes something of the tone of a travelogue.

Sounding the note of revels in Twelfth Night, 1. 3. "I'll drink to her as long as there is a passage in my throat and drink in Illyria," introduces a more central dramatic theme that echoes descriptions found in all three: Lock, Austel, and Guy1ford. In fact, many sixteenth-century traveler's accounts of Ragusa spoke of order capped by an uncommon good humor, an intoxicating, often intoxicated, measure of jocular well-being open to those who "will" their own happiness through being content with their proper station in life. Were the old nobles of Ragusa fated to be seen as genial aristocrats keeping order as they executed a kind of wine-sodden romp through life?

Needless to say a late sixteenth-century English audience with general knowledge of the republic of Ragusa faced few difficulties in associating its society with Illyria, since Ragusa alone among the Dalmatian cities remained an autonomous state. In Dubrovnik i Engleska, 1300-1650, Veselin Kostic traced the increased contacts between the English and Ragusans that occurred after 1590. In a much-regretted deviation from policy the republic had been drawn, as Spain's ally, into supplying ships for the Armada in 1588 in consonance with treaty obligations. Perhaps the recent infatuation with Orlando Furioso had unwisely led Ragusans into misdirecting their zeal toward the remote North Atlantic waters; they certainly had little idea what Protestantism was all about. Kostic asserts that the most famous British wreck of the Armada, the galleon in Tobermory Bay, was a Ragusan ship.

Almost immediately regretting this ill-conceived venture, Ragusa's noble merchants reestablished their business network in England through elaborate efforts, and by the end of the sixteenth century, when Twelfth Night was written for a court production, the English had tolerantly resumed amicable relations, allowing a Ragusan consul to resettle along with a community of his fellow countrymen bent on trading in London. These men assured themselves of local good will with lavish entertaining, awash in a privately imported stock of "wine of Illyria.” Ragusan merchants in London entered the textile trade, and Ragusan ships (the much mentioned Argosy) visited London's docks. Kostic contends from the weight of documentation that resident Ragusan merchants flourished in England, becoming immensely wealthy. Shakespeare could have known about or met these merchants who circulated widely in London society.

On the other side of the trading equation, the new English Levant Company, established in 1582, did not immediately forge trading links at Ragusa because the republic was still Spain's close ally. However, the loss of the Armada, as well as Ragusa's apologetic posture, freed English merchants to redirect their eastern trade through the town. At the end of the century, again, by the date that Twelfth Night was written, the Levant Company had already begun to trade at Ragusa, so it appears that Twelfth Nightwas first performed at court at just the time when the republic of Ragusa was coming into favor again. As court entertainment the play's reference to Illyria accurately reflected new initiatives in English foreign policy.

William Shakespeare's choice of Illyria as a setting for Twelfth Night was deft and even evocative, if, as he seems to have intended, he wished to fasten attention on the consequence to society of signs of deference: knowing one's station, acting it, propriety, and, particularly, proper marriage. Bodin had made it clear that Ragusans recognized that appropriate marriage partners were the key to a successful society. Shakespeare might easily have drawn material for his dramatic commentary on marriage from the reputation Ragusa had won abroad.

So there was extensive use that could be made of Illyrian Ragusa in dramas like Twelfth Night. Although tragedies and tempestuous plays such as Othello and The Mercbant of Venice might be set in Venice, where a violent tenor of life was reputed to have diluted or possibly even destroyed the seemliness and order of a virtuous republic, Illyria or Ragusa was employed for the plot that most turned on knowing one's place in the order of things and performing life's tasks according to that knowledge. As the play begins, order is disrupted by the absence of adequate governance; the duke languishes. Order and rule are both restored in a final, and happy, resolution wherein private order and public rule harmonize once more. Virtue in Twelfth Night springs from behaving according to one’s rank or condition. This is important in all human discourse, but most important in the most significant of all personal decisions, the choice of a marriage partner. In Twelfth Night people of all stations are expected to recognize peers (even in disguise and in extraordinary circumstances) and then to make appropriate choices for life partners. The failure to do so could be a source of humor, as in the countess's ill choice of Viola, Sebastian's twin, or a subject for cruel derision, as in the humiliation of Malvolio. Olivia's household, including Olivia herself, is not exemplary, but by the end of the play it is brought back to propriety. Shakespeare's audience readily accepted his claim that those endowed with nobility by nature, that is, by birth, might be brought to recognize each other. It was significant for Ragusa's reputation abroad that an audience in the west could believe in an Illyria where, survived a remnant of persons who still exhibited such seemly behavior.

Notes

See William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, I-3.18; 111.1.105; V.I.276. The Taming of the Shrew, 11.1.376;. 11.1.378; II.I.380. Henry VI, Part 111, 11.6.36. The references to the plays are taken from The Complete Works and Poems of William Shakespeare, ed. William Nielson and Charles Hill (Cambridge., Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942).

Natalie Zemon Davis, "The Reason of Misrule," in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975)3 Pp. 97-123. The ten references to Illyria in Twelft Night are: 1.2.2-3; 1.3.20, 42, 124, 132; 1-5-31; 111.4.294; IV-1-37; IV.2.I15.

Rudolf Filipovic, "Shakespeareova Ilirija,," Filologija (Zagreb) 1 (1957): 123-38.

English scholars have given much consideration to Illyria and assumed that Shakespeare's knowledge of Ovid's Metanorphoses prompted him to associate Twelft Night with northern or Latin Illyria. This opinion may be found in Edward Sugden's Topograpbical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare (Manchester: Longmans, Green, 1925), P. 263, and in John Draper, "Et in Illyria Feste," Shakespeare Association Bulletin 16 (1941): 220-28. The New Arden edition of Twelft Night, edited by J. Lothian and J. Craik (London: Methuen, 1975), p. 8, concurs, which suggests opinion has not changed much on the question over the decades.

Dictionary, ed. N. Hammond and H. Scullard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), P. 54-1. This more extensive Illyria would include the republic of Ragusa, the only independent city-state on the eastern littoral of the Adriatic in the sixteenth century (which Sugden's Illyria does not include). For English scholars, the assumption that Illyria meant only Latin Illyria to Shakespeare may be the leading reason for suggesting that Split or Zadar served as the contemporary setting for Twelft Night. The idea has never been given much weight, however, because most English scholars assume Shakespeare intended an ancient setting for Twelft Night.

The Croatian edition and notes for Twelft Night (M. Bogdanovic, ed., Na tri kmlja [Zagreb: JAZU, 1922]), and V. Kriskovic in "Shakespeare i mi. Ceska morska obala u 'zimskoj prici,"' Hrvatska revija 14.:5 (1941), P 3, place Twelft Night in Latin Illyria also, following the lead of English editors of the play (Charles Knight and Morton Luce in particular).

In 1988, Joseph Papp's production of Twelft Night in New York's Central Park employed Croatian folkloric motifs, reintroducing contemporary-that is, sixteenth-century-Illyria as setting for the play. The peasant motifs seem somewhat at odds with the aristocratic culture Shakespeare associated with Illyria.

Nicola de Goce and the brothers Nicola and Marinus de Mence were most prominent among the long-distance traders in England, and they were joined by another noble, Paul de Gondola. None of these persons appears to have been married, although de Mence left an illegitimate son born in England a legacy in his will. Vast wealth allowed these men to maintain great households, entertain, and forge ties with great merchant families in England. The "Elephant and Castle" in Bankside was a corruption of Infanta de Castile and a gathering place for sailors from Mediterranean countries; Ragusans were habituated to it during their years as Spain's allies. Shakespeare may have learned about the Dalmatian coast and Ragusa from sailors and sea captains who visited London and did their drinking there. I

Josip Torbarina, "The Setting of Shakespeare's Plays," Studia Romanica et Anglica Zagrabiensia 17-18 (1964): 21-59. If the literature on this topic has been largely neglected because it appeared in Croatian, this article, which reviews much of the evidence, should have brought it to the attention of Shakespeare scholars. Torbarina amasses some compelling evidence for Shakespeare's use of contemporary Dalmatia and the city of Ragusa as the setting for Twelfth Night.