‘All that glisters’: The moral meanings of gold in the Frobisher narratives and The Merchant of Venice

Abstract

This essay follows the proverb contained in Portia's golden casket in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (‘all that glisters is not gold’) in George Best's and Dioynse Settle's accounts of the search for precious ore on Martin Frobisher's second voyage to Baffin Island in 1577. Best and Settle, applying the proverb to the search for gold, suggest that the English are best suited to reveal what is hidden, with the right moral outlook to recognise the hidden potential in Arctic ore. The proverb points to a particular way of thinking about the pursuit of precious metals that is exemplified by the Frobisher texts and replayed in Merchant. Finding gold, according to this way of thinking, depends on a combination of judgment, expertise and fortune. Though the Frobisher venture failed, the proverb is redeemed in the play.

Keywords:

• Shakespeare
• Frobisher
• gold
• caskets
• proverbs
• metallurgy

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to David McInnis and Kelly Wisecup for reading and responding to earlier drafts of this essay. I would also like to thank Mary Fuller, whose 2011 NEH summer seminar on ‘English Encounters with the Americas, 1550–1610’ provided the initial impetus for this study.

Notes

1. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Drakakis, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 2010), 2.7.65–6. All further citations of the play are to this edition and are given parenthetically.

2. The proverb is of Latin origin and appeared in English beginning in the thirteenth century. It is used in Chaucer's ‘Yeoman's Tale’. The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, Oxford Reference Online, s.v. ‘glitters’. It is also recorded in Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950), 8 (A146) and in R.W. Dent, Shakespeare's Proverbial Language: An Index (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 47 (A146).

3. This shift in focus from geography to geology was driven in part by English rivalry with Spain and Portugal, who were already exploiting their own sources of New World gold in the tropics. For a useful historical overview of the Frobisher enterprise, see Ann Savours, ‘A Narrative of Frobisher's Arctic Voyages’, in Meta Incognita: A Discourse of Discovery, 2 vols., ed. Thomas H.B. Symons (Hull, Canada: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1999), 1:19–54. On the unorthodox structure of the company, see James McDermott, ‘The Company of Cathay: The Financing and Organization of the Frobisher Voyages’, in Meta Incognita, 1:147–78.

4. Dionyse Settle, A true report of the laste voyage into the west and northwest regions . . . [1577], in The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, ed. Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Eloise McCaskill, 2 vols. (London: Argonaut Press, 1938), 2:1–25 (16). All further citations of Settle are to this edition and volume and are given parenthetically.

5. George Best, A true discourse of the late voyages of discovery [1578], in The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, ed. Richard Collinson (London: Hakluyt Society, 1867), 13–76 (133). All further citations of Best are to this edition and are given parenthetically. In comparing similar language in Best and Settle, my method follows Mary Fuller's. Fuller compares another key moment of identical language in Best and Settle to trace a significant pattern of ‘cultural judgment’ in their texts. Mary Fuller, Remembering the Early Modern Voyage: English Narratives in the Age of European Expansion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 29–31.

6. Mark Netzloff, ‘The Lead Casket: Capitalism, Mercantilism and The Merchant of Venice’, in Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism, ed. Linda Woodbridge (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 159–76 (167); James W. Stone, ‘A Carrion Death’: The Theme of the Gold Casket in The Merchant of Venice', The Upstart Crow 28 (2009): 35–49 (35).

7. Though it is certainly likely that Shakespeare knew Best and Settle's narratives of the Frobisher expeditions, especially given that Settle's was included in Richard Hakluyt's 1589 Principal Navigations, my argument does not depend on the golden casket's proverb being a conscious allusion to Frobisher's voyages.

8. On the Inuit, see Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 109–18.

9. There are extensive accounts of the various assays of the ore in the State Papers collected in Collinson's The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, but I concentrate mainly on print accounts that circulated beyond the limited circle of Cathay Company principals and Privy Councilors.

10. Michael Lok, ‘Michael Lok's Testimony’, in The Third Voyage of Martin Frobisher to Baffin Island, 1578, ed. James McDermott (London: Hakluyt Society, 2001), 71–102 (72).

11. D. D. Hogarth, P. W. Boreham and J. G. Mitchell, Martin Frobisher's Northwest Venture, 1576–1581: Mines, Minerals and Metallurgy (Hull, Canada: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1994), 31.

12. Stefansson and McCaskill cite an analysis by a mineralogist who suggests that this story may have been inspired by the legend of Hannibal crossing the Alps by softening the stones with vinegar. Stefansson and McCaskill, The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, 2:250.

13. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘marcasite’, sense 2.

14. Richard Eden, The Decades of the Newe World [1555], in The First Three English Books on America, ed. Edward Arber (Birmingham, 1885), 43–398 (158).

15. Eden, Decades, 367.

16. Eden, Decades, 358.

17. Georgius Agricola, De Re Metallica [1556], trans. Herbert Clark Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover (New York: Dover, 1950), 231, 239–42. For a concise description of early modern assaying procedures, see Georges Beaudoin and Réginald Auger, ‘Implications of the Mineralogy and Chemical Composition of Lead Beads from Frobisher's Assay Site, Kodlunarn Island, Canada: Prelude to Bre-X?’, Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences 41 (2004): 669–681 (671).

18. Michael Lok, ‘Discourse touching the ore’, in Collinson (ed.), Three Voyages, 92–99 (92).

19. For a short summary of the assays, see James McDermott, introduction to The Third Voyage of Martin Frobisher to Baffin Island, 1578 (London: Hakluyt Society, 2001), 1–51 (4–5); Hogarth, Boreham and Mitchell, 30–32. See also Robert Baldwin, ‘Speculative Ambitions and the Reputations of Frobisher's Metallurgists’ in Meta Incognita, 2: 401–76.

20. Lok, ‘Discourse’, 93.

21. Biringuccio makes a sharp distinction between alchemy and metallurgy, ridiculing alchemists for putting art above nature, but Moran shows that there was considerable overlap between the two in the early modern period. Vannoccio Biringuccio, Pirotechnia [1540], trans. Cyril Stanley Smith and Martha Teach Gnudi (American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, 1943; reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966), 37–8; Bruce Moran, Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 6. On the emerging discipline of metallurgy, see Pamela Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 176–7.

22. Bernard Allaire, ‘Methods of Assaying Ore and their Application in the Frobisher Ventures’, in Meta Incognita, 2: 477–504 (484).

23. Lok, ‘Discourse’, 94.

24. Allaire, ‘Methods of Assaying’, 500.

25. Allaire, ‘Methods of Assaying’, 497. See also Hogarth, Boreham and Mitchell, Martin Frobisher's Northwest Venture, 94.

26. Beaudoin and Auger, ‘Implications’, 678–80; Hogarth, Boreham and Mitchell, Martin Frobisher's Northwest Venture, 138.

27. McDermott, Third Voyage, 5; Hogarth, Boreham and Mitchell, Martin Frobisher's Northwest Venture, 32.

28. Hogarth, Boreham and Mitchell, Martin Frobisher's Northwest Venture, 32.

29. Eric Ash shows that managing foreign metallurgists with essential technical expertise was a challenge for sixteenth-century English mining ventures. Eric Ash, Power, Knowledge and Expertise in Elizabethan England (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 31–45. See also Baldwin, ‘Speculative Ambitions’, 432–3.

30. Roger D. Abrahams and Barbara A. Babcock, ‘The Literary Use of Proverbs’, in Wise Words: Essays on the Proverb, ed. Wolfgang Mieder (New York: Garland, 1994), 415–37 (418–19). For the uses of rhetorical devices in travel literature, see Jonathan Sell, Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560–1613 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).

31. Wolfgang Mieder, Proverbs: A Handbook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 7–8.

32. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene [1590], ed. A. C. Hamilton (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2001), 2.8.14.

33. Modern analyses of the ore found its primary mineral component to be hornblende. Hogarth, Boreham and Mitchell, Martin Frobisher's Northwest Venture, 102.

34. Eden, Decades, 355, 356.

35. Eden, Decades, 361.

36. Agricola, De Re Metallica, 22–25.

37. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship, 179–80.

38. Despite their nationalistic rhetoric, Best and Settle seem untroubled by the English reliance on foreign metallurgists, probably because the English had long relied on such experts for domestic mining ventures. Baldwin, ‘Speculative Ambitions’, 432–3.

39. Baldwin, ‘Speculative Ambitions’, 402. This concern is connected to the mercantilist emphasis on national bullion reserves, as Mark Netzloff shows. Netzloff, ‘The Lead Casket’, 160–1. On the vast cosmography that produced this alignment of natures and latitudes, see Nicolás Wey-Gómez, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 40–52, 221–2.

40. Baldwin, ‘Speculative Ambitions’, 402.

41. For an overview of geohumoral theory, see Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 23–47.

42. Best's care to distinguish English and Spanish colonial activities is inflected by the Black Legend discourse of Spanish atrocities in the New World. William S. Maltby, The Black Legend in England: The Development of Anti-Spanish Sentiment, 1558–1660 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1971), 12–28.

43. Mary C. Fuller, Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 22.

44. Sell, Rhetoric and Wonder, 16.

45. The last estimate available before the third voyage put the value of the ore at five pounds per ton. Stefansson and McCaskill, introduction, Three Voyages, cxiv.

46. Baldwin, ‘Speculative Ambitions’, 439.

47. On the legal and financial manoeuvrings following the third voyage, see McDermott, Third Voyage, 46–8.

48. McDermott, Third Voyage, 49.

49. Sir Walter Ralegh, The Discoverie of the Large, Riche and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, ed. Neil L. Whitehead (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 176.

50. Fuller, Voyages in Print, 70.

51. Ralegh, Discoverie, 177.

52. Ralegh, Discoverie, 177.

53. Among many examples, see Walter Cohen, ‘The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism’, ELH 49 (1982): 765–89 (770–1); Michael Ferber, ‘The Ideology of The Merchant of Venice’, English Literary Renaissance 20 (1990): 431–64 (443–54); Aaron Kitch, Political Economy and the States of Literature in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 121–8; Ian MacInnes, ‘“Ill Luck, Ill Luck?”: Risk and Hazard in The Merchant of Venice', in Global Traffic: Discourses and Practices of Trade in English Literature and Culture from 1550 to 1700, ed. Barbara Sebek and Stephen Deng (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 39–55; David McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson and the Myth of Venice (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), 51–68; Karoline Szatek, ‘The Merchant of Venice and the Politics of Commerce’, in The Merchant of Venice: New Critical Essays, ed. John Mahon and Ellen Macleod Mahon (New York: Routledge, 2002), 325–52.

54. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 117.

55. For Shakespeare's use of proverbs to describe situations, themes and characters, see Richard Harp, ‘Proverbs, Philosophy and Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and King Lear’, Ben Jonson Journal 16, nos. 1–2 (May 2009): 197–215; Marjorie Donker, Shakespeare's Proverbial Themes: A Rhetorical Context for the Sententia as Res (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 149–59.

56. On Shakespeare's familiarity with Hakluyt, see The Hakluyt Handbook, ed. David Quinn (London: Hakluyt Society, 1974), vol. 2:593. On the investors, who included a mix of prominent mercantile and non-mercantile figures from city and court, see McDermott, Third Voyage, 10–11.

57. Milton A. Levy, ‘Did Shakespeare Join the Casket and Bond Plots in The Merchant of Venice?’ Shakespeare Quarterly 11, no. 3 (1960): 388–91. The source of the casket test is the Gesta Romanorum, but Levy argues that Shakespeare united these two plots, which were not united in The Jew, a lost play that could have been an intermediary source. For Shakespeare's other sources, see John Drakakis, introduction to The Merchant of Venice, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Metheun, 2010), 31–2.

58. Moran, Distilling Knowledge, 25–6.

59. Lars Engle, ‘Thrift is Blessing’: Exchange and Explanation in The Merchant of Venice', Shakespeare Quarterly 37, no. 1 (1986): 20–37 (32). See also Netzloff, ‘The Lead Casket’, 165.

60. Samples of the Frobisher rock have been found in various locations in and around Dartford, suggesting that it was used as a general building material once the smelting furnaces there ceased operation in 1583. Hogarth, Boreham and Mitchell, Martin Frobisher's Northwest Venture, 103–6.