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CLASSICA L PR ESENCES
General Editors
lorna hardwick james i. porter
CLASSICAL PRESENCES
Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome
inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to authenticate the present.
Exploring the ways in which the classical past has been mapped over the centuries allows
us to trace the avowal and disavowal of values and identities, old and new. Classical
Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such
use, and abuse, of the classical past.
Alexander the Great

from Britain
to Southeast Asia
Peripheral Empires in the Global
Renaissance
Su Fang Ng
1
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Acknowledgments
Following Alexander into Europe and Asia has been a long labor of love, and along the
way I have incurred many debts to institutions and individuals. I am grateful for all
the support that made this book possible. A Bunting fellowship at the Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard in 2005–6 provided an inspiring environment
of highly-accomplished women in which to begin this project. I must thank Judy
Vichniac, then Executive Director, and her staff, as well as fellow fellows, especially
Susan Suleiman, who invited me to contribute an essay to a special issue. When I was
on a Delta Delta Delta fellowship at the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle
Park, I learnt much from discussions with a group of like-minded scholars who formed
a seminar on Master Languages and Vernaculars—Catherine Chin, Mary Ellis Gibson,
Alison Keith, Tim Kircher, Stephen Rupp, David Samuels, and Nigel Smith—as well
as benefiting from the support of the Center’s staff and librarians. In 2009–10 as a
Harrington faculty fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, I enjoyed the intellectual
community of early modernists in the English department. It was a particularly lively
time as it was the inaugural year of the Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies
(TILTS) organized by Wayne Rebhorn and Frank Whigham. At Texas I particularly
appreciated the warm welcome from Hannah Wojciehowski and John Rumrich, whose
work on Milton I have long admired. I also thank the Harrington Foundation for spon-
soring a symposium I organized on “The Seaborne Renaissance”; additional support
was provided by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the South Asia Institute, and
the Harry Ransom Center.
It is a pleasure to thank several other institutions for short-term fellowships and
grants that supported research for this book. The American Philosophical Society and
British Academy awarded me a Joint Fellowship for Research in London, which gave
me a summer in London archives. The International Institute for Asian Studies at Leiden
granted me an affiliated fellowship for a month’s stay. This research was supported in
part by a grant from the Oklahoma Humanities Council and the National Endowment
for the Humanities. (Findings, opinions and conclusions do not necessarily represent
the views of the OHC or the NEH.) In addition, this scholarship was supported by an
Arts and Humanities Faculty Fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Working
Group through funding from the Office of the Vice President for Research (VPR) at
the University of Oklahoma Norman Campus. During its tenure, I spent two months
at Leiden University as a visiting scholar courtesy of the Scaliger Institute: I thank
Harm Beukers, at the time the Scaliger chair, and Kasper van Ommen for helping me
get settled. I would also like to acknowledge the scholarship I received from the Dutch
Language Union (Nederlandse Taalunie) for a three-week Dutch immersion course in the
vi Acknowledgments
Netherlands; and tuition grants for language study from the University of Oklahoma’s
Office of the Vice-President for Research.
A number of scholars generously shared their expertise and work, including
Bernadette Andrea, Richmond Barbour, Jonathan Burton, Martin Dzelzainis, Annabel
Teh Gallop, Jane Grogan, Robert Markley, Ian McClure, Thom Richardson, Peter
Riddell, Lisa Voigt, Rienk Vermij, Timothy Wilks, and Paul Wormser. I would also like
to thank Leonard Blussé, who graciously allowed me to audit his graduate course on
the history of European-Asian relations when he was Erasmus Chair at Harvard, as
well as Sharon Achinstein, Chris Chism, Geraldine Heng, Vince Leitch, Curtis Perry,
and Michael Schoenfeldt. I appreciate the opportunities to present work-in-progress
to various audiences. Especially fruitful was the conference on “Alexander the Great in
Medieval and Early Modern Culture” organized by Markus Stock at the University of
Toronto: the collected essays have now been published. I thank the following organ-
izers for kindly inviting me to speak on their campuses: Elizabeth Chang and Samuel
Cohen at the University of Missouri, David Porter who organized a conference on
“Comparative Early Modernities” at the University of Michigan, Jonathan Eburne and
Lovalerie King at Pennsylvania State University, David Loewenstein (then) at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison, Allyson Creasman and Christopher Warren at
Carnegie Mellon, Jennifer Waldron at the University of Pittsburg, Adam McKeown
and Scott Oldenburg at Tulane University, Thomas Martin at College of the Holy
Cross, and not the least, at my alma mater Whitman College, Dana Burgess, who first
got me interested in all things Greek.
The anonymous reviewers read the manuscript with care and their detailed comments
made this book far better. I am grateful for the support of the general editors of the
Classical Presences series, Lorna Hardwick and especially James Porter, and I thank
the press editors, Charlotte Loveridge and Georgina Leighton, for their indispensable
help. I also thank a number of colleagues who welcomed me into their language class-
rooms: Hossam Barakat (Arabic), Ehsan Qasemi and Marjan Serafi-Pour (Persian),
Joseph Sullivan (German), Vincent Vanderheijden (Dutch), and Arthur Verbiest (Dutch
at the Taalunie). Final revisions were completed while on a Solmsen Fellowship at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison. I thank Stewart Scales for drawing the maps. My
thanks also to Virginia Tech for their support: the cost of maps and image permissions
was covered by financial support from the Faculty Book Publishing Subvention Fund.
Librarians and staff at various archives have been very helpful, especially the British
Library, the Royal Asiatic Society in London, and Leiden University Special Collections.
I still remember the day when one librarian at Leiden thoughtfully brought out a stool
for me to stand on so I could more easily photograph an oversized manuscript in its
entirety. Particular thanks are due to the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; the
syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Centre for Research Collections, University
of Edinburgh; and Leiden University Special Collections for permission to quote from
manuscript material. I am also grateful to archives that granted permission to repro-
duce images (noted in the List of Figures). Further thanks are due to journal publishers
Acknowledgments vii
for permission to reuse earlier work. An earlier version of Chapter 9 appeared as

“Pirating Paradise: Alexander the Great, Dutch East Indies, and Satanic Empire in
Milton’s Paradise Lost” in Milton Studies 52 (2011): 59–91, published by Duquesne
University Press. Parts of an article were reworked and incorporated into the book:
“Global Renaissance: Alexander the Great and Early Modern Classicism from the
British Isles to the Malay Archipelago,” special issue on The Idea of Europe, ed. Susan
Rubin Suleiman, Comparative Literature 58.4 (Fall 2006): 293–312, published by Duke
University Press. Brief excerpts of two other articles were also incorporated into the
book: “Dutch Wars, Global Trade, and the Heroic Poem: Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis
(1666) and Amin’s Sya’ir Perang Mengkasar (1670),” Modern Philology 109.3 (February
2012): 352–84, published by the University of Chicago Press (© 2012 by The University
of Chicago. All rights reserved); and “Global Souvenirs: Bridging East and West in the
Malay Alexander Romance,” special issue on The Global Middle Ages, ed. Geraldine
Heng and Lynn Ramey, Literature Compass 11/7 (2014): 395–408, published by Wiley-
Blackwell Publishing (© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.).
My family has been a constant source of support: I thank my father Ng Kim Nam,
who made sure his children got an education, and my mother Chan Lai Kuen, who first
taught us to read in English and Malay. Finally, this book would not have been written
if not for Kenneth Hodges, who believed in the project before I did. His faith in it kept
me going and his love, encouragement, and generosity sustained me.
Nota Bene
I follow Marshall Hodgson’s distinction between the adjective “Islamicate” to refer to
societies where Muslims are dominant and “Islamic” to pertain more specifically to the
religion. Europeanists, however, do not make such distinctions with Christianity. All
translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated or where I quote from published
translations. I use Loeb translations of Greek and Latin texts for their accessibility.
Contents
List of Maps and Figures xi
Introduction: Intimate Strangers—Peripheries in Global Literary Networks 1
Part I. Conjunctions
1. Heirs to Rome 49
2. Islamic Alexanders in Southeast Asia 75
3. Scottish Alexanders and Stuart Empire 113
4. Greco-Arabic Mirrors for Barbarian Princes 149
5. Hamlet and Arabic Literary Networks 179
Part II. Invocations

6. From Source to Allusion: Alexander in Intercultural Encounters 203
7. English Alexanders and Empire from the Periphery 211
8. Millennial Alexander in the Making of Aceh 243
9. Milton, Alexander’s Pirate, and Merchant Empires in the East 277
10. Demotic Alexander in Indian Ocean Trading Worlds 303
Epilogue 333
Timeline of Texts and Events 343

Bibliography 345
Index 399
List of Maps and Figures
Maps
1. Eastern Hemisphere. xiii
2. Southeast Asia. xiv
Figures
0.1 Map of the Spice Islands by Willem Jansz. Blaeu, Molvccae insvla
celeberrimae, Amsterdam, 1630? 6
Harvard Map Collection, Harvard Library.
0.2 Judocus Hondius, Vera totius expeditionis nauticae: description
D. Franc. Draci, Amsterdam?: I. Hondius, 1595 (“Drake Broadside”). 25
Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, https://www.loc.
gov/item/92680608/.
2.1 Opening illuminated pages of Hikayat Iskandar Dhulkarnain, copied by
Enci’ Yahya bin ʿAbdulwahid anak Melaka, 1816. Farquhar MS 2, f.1–2. 82
Reproduced courtesy of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain
and Ireland.
2.2 Detail from “Genealogies of Rulers of Palembang,” copied by
Raden Mochtar bin Raden Rangga Astrawidjaija Abdulla at Palembang,
January 22, 1869 showing descent from Iskandar Zulkarnain.
MS Or. 78, f2. 98
Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Leiden
University Libraries.
2.3 World map, Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq (Entertainment for
He Who Longs to Travel the World), copied from Muhammad al-Idrisi
(c.1110–66) in Cairo, 1553; Gog and Magog (‫ )یأجوج و مأجوج‬are confined by
Alexander’s wall in the bottom left corner. MS Pococke 375, f. 3v–4.
The Bodleian Libraries, the University of Oxford. 106
Image © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
3.1 [Poly-Olbion. Part 1] Poly-Olbion by Michael Drayton Esqr. [1612],
engraving of prince, fourth page from beginning. STC 7226 copy 1. 142
Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
xii List of Maps and Figures
4.1 Miniature of Aristotle instructing Alexander the Great, from

Kitab Nact al-hayawan (Book of the Characteristics of Animals),
compiled from works by Aristotle and cUbayd Allah ibn Bakhtishu,
Baghdad, c. first half 13th century. MS Or. 2784, f. 96. 154
© The British Library Board.
8.1 English cannon with James I’s coat of arms and cartouche of his
name given to Aceh in 1615; inventory number 1875/07-1-6. 245
Author’s photograph. Museum Bronbeek, Arnhem, the Netherlands.
8.2 Sultan Iskandar Muda’s 1615 letter to King James I. MS Laud Or. Rolls
b. 1 (R). The Bodleian Libraries, the University of Oxford. 248
Image © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
8.3 Sultan Iskandar Thani of Aceh’s 1636 letter to Prince Fredrik Hendrik
of Holland. MS. Cod. Or. 4818a.I.3. 251
Special Collections, Leiden University Libraries.
9.1 “Gezicht op de stad Bantam” (View of the City of Bantam) by
Pieter Serwouter after Pieter Sibrantsz., 1614–22. Number
RP-P-1886-A-11180.278
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Map 1 Eastern Hemisphere.
Map 2 Southeast Asia.
Introduction
Intimate Strangers—Peripheries in
Global Literary Networks
. . . more kings and princes have written of his deeds [Alexander the Great] than
other historians have written of any king or prince that has ever been; that even
today the Mahometans who despise all other biographies accept and honour his
alone by a special dispensation.
Michel de Montaigne1
When Michel de Montaigne praises Alexander the Great as one of the three most
outstanding of men, he notes Muslim reverence for Alexander as proof of his wide
influence, suggesting the easy translatability of such stories into other kingdoms, cul-
tures, and religions.2 Alexander’s gests spread so widely they were retold in Southeast
Asia even before European arrival. The Southeast Asian Alexander, however, was a
Muslim conqueror, transmitted to the region through a Perso-Arabic literary tradition.
Furthermore, he was claimed as an honored ancestor in royal genealogies, and several
sultans took his Arabic name, Iskandar. When in the early modern period Europeans
started arriving in numbers in Southeast Asia, subsumed under the catch-all term East
Indies, they encountered this alternate Alexander tradition. Shortly after Afonso de
Albuquerque’s stunning victory in capturing the key port city of Melaka in 1511, the
Minangkabau people from the highlands of nearby Sumatra sent an embassy; the
report notes that they incorporated Alexander into their royal traditions:
And just at this very juncture there arrived at Malaca three pangajaoas [boat propelled by oars]
from the kingdom of Menamcabo [Minangkabau], which is at the point of the island of
Çamatra [Sumatra] on the other side of the south, and brought with them a sum of gold, and
they came to seek for cloaths of India, for which there is a great demand in their country. The
men of this kingdom are very well made, and of fair complexion; they walk about always well
dressed, clad in their silken bajus [Malay dress], and wearing their crisis [kris, a Malay short
sword with a wavy blade] with sheaths adorned with gold and precious stones in their girdles.
1
“On the most excellent of men,” Essais II:36, Montaigne 1991: 854.
2
For Montaigne’s knowledge of the Ottoman Empire, see Rouillard 1941: 363–74.
2 Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia
These are a people of good manners and truthful character; they are Hindoos [gentios, Gentiles];
they have a great veneration for a certain golden head-dress which, as they relate, Alexander
[the Great] left there with them when he conquered that country.3
Instead of absolute alterity, the Portuguese found commensurability in shared literary

history. The report emphasizes likeness in the antipodeans, describing them as “white”
(alvos) and in such positive terms as “well habituated and true” (bem acostumada, e
verdadeira). The Minangkabau’s “high esteem” (grande estima) for Alexander –
translated as “great veneration” in the nineteenth-century edition—suggests they fall
on the near side of the civilized–barbarian divide. Not fully understanding that the
people they met were Muslim, the Portuguese classified them as gentios (Gentiles,
meaning pagans)—(mis)translated as “Hindoos”—of another nation, non-Christian.
But like Montaigne, they found Alexander revered by strangers, and over the course
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as they came into greater contact with
Islamicate societies, Europeans became increasingly aware of this other reception
of Alexander.
Alexander’s notable translatability should alert us to the connectedness of literary
cultures of East and West, guiding our understanding of early modern literary cultures
and cross-cultural interactions. The Alexander stories—fascinated with strangers
and marvels, thematizing travel and cross-cultural contact, and featuring an impe
rial conqueror as protagonist—offered not only shared motifs for divergent imperial
self-definitions but also provided ways for peoples across Europe and Asia to con-
ceptualize their place in the world. The Alexander legends spread through economic
and political networks connecting the world’s different regions and became a means of
imagining these linkages.
My particular foci are the cultures of Britain and Southeast Asia in the early
modern period of direct contact as Europeans entered the Indian Ocean sphere in
search of spices, with their ultimate goal the Spice Islands (the Moluccas or Maluku)
of eastern Indonesia. Myriad versions of Alexander offer many points of entry into
this transnational body of literature, but the unprecedented meeting of cultures from
the two ends of Eurasia makes early modern Southeast Asia a particularly acute locus
to “map the labyrinth” of a global literary network.4 Of places to find Alexander, Britain
and Southeast Asia are some of the most distant culturally and linguistically. As the
regions came into contact, classical presences in both shaped ideas of empire, of trade,
and of contact with foreigners. In this early modern encounter, their “connected
3
Albuquerque 1964: 3.161–2. The report is included in the narrative compiled by Afonso’s son Braz
and published in Lisbon in 1557: “e neste tempo chegáram tres pangajaoas do reyno de Menamcabo, que
he na ponta da ilha de Çamatra da outra banda do sul a Malaca, e trouxeram somma de ouro, e vinham
buscar pannos da India, de que tem muita necessidade na sua terra. Os homens deste reyno sáo muito
bem dispostos, e alvos, andam sempre bem tratados, vestidos em seus bajus de seda, e crisis com bocaes
de ouro, e pedraria na cinta. He gente bem acostumada, e verdadeira. São gentios. Tem em grande estima
huma carapuça de ouro, que dizem que lhes ali deixou Alexandre, quando conquistou aquella terra”
(Albuquerque 1923: Parte 3, Capitulo 37, 2. 133–4).
4
The phrase is from Akbari 2013: 20.
Introduction: Intimate Strangers 3
istories”—Sanjay Subrahmanyan’s term to refer to “supra-local connections,” wherein

h
“ideas and mental constructs, too, flowed across political boundaries” so that histories
are recognized as “not separate and comparable, but connected”5—included a literary
dimension: the flows of Alexander stories. Given the significance of the early history
of Asia’s interactions with Europe, their connected literary histories of Alexander
constitute an important exemplar for cultural translation.
This book explores parallel literary traditions of the mythic Alexander in Europe
and Southeast Asia. They share a common ancestry as cousins springing from the
same classical sources and shaped by mutual contact with Middle Eastern Islamicate
societies, both in the shared inheritance of medieval Arabic literature and in contem-
porary trade and diplomatic relations, particularly with the Ottoman Empire.
Moreover, these parallel traditions were shaped by cross-cultural encounters arising
from trade and exploration that were starting to connect Britain and Southeast Asia.
The economic stimulation of long-distance trade gave rise to state centralization,
including forceful incorporation of surrounding provinces. The expansionist king-
doms in both archipelagoes were empires of trade. And out of these cross-cultural
interactions they produced parallel discourses of empire. These imperial discourses
pivoted around Alexander the Great (356–323 bce), whose name has long been syn-
onymous with empire. The historical Alexander waged war so successfully—and bru-
tally—that in a short lifetime he subdued an immense territory. Pushing further into
Asia than any Greek before him and overthrowing the great Achaemenid empire,
Alexander’s conquests turned him into a figure of myth. Yoking together East and
West—especially in the symbolic unification of the Susa weddings where he and his
men took Persian brides—Alexander, seemingly, created a universal empire. Even
after death, Alexander became the object of imitation by Roman emperors and many
others, including Southeast Asian sultans.
In the age of early modern exploration Alexander became associated with trade.
European travelers to Asia saw themselves as another Alexander in the East. They
couched the pursuit of long-distance trade in the rhetoric of imperial conquest. Southeast
Asians turned to the example of Alexander to understand their diplomatic relations
with the West, which for them also included the Ottoman empire. Their Alexander
romances tentatively explore Alexander’s role in encouraging East–West trade; later
fictions invoking Alexander in moments of cross-cultural encounter use him as model
first for monarchs and then for merchants. By the eighteenth century, Pierre Briant has
shown, Enlightenment authors—especially Montesquieu in his influential Spirit of the
Laws (De l’esprit des loix, 1748)—developed a full theory of Alexander’s “commercial
revolution,” depicting him as the discoverer of the Indian Ocean who opened up the
East for trade; justifying European imperialism, they saw in Alexander a “sovereign
guided by reason, exercising power based on knowledge, and able to introduce har-
mony and peace in a new world made up exchanges and communications,” in short,
5
Subrahmanyam 1997b: 747–48.
the rational Western ruler reviving a supposedly stagnant “orient.”6 While the image of
Alexander as “conqueror-civilizer” would become a prominent strand in European
Enlightenment discourse at a time when an ascendant Europe was colonizing Asia,
elements of this discourse were already present in earlier representations of Alexander.7
British and Malay versions of the Alexander Romance depict Alexander as a conqueror
who institutes civilization; their literatures associate him with the values, positive and
negative, of contemporary empires of trade.
As trade and exploration expanded knowledge of the world, English and Malay lit-
erary traditions evinced increasing awareness of each other. Their literary traditions
incorporated images of the other in their representations. The literatures of maritime
empires adapted Alexander to reflect local ideas of empire, outsiders, trade, and mar-
vels; he functioned as a transcultural icon through which various cultures mediated
their relationship to the foreign. Reading the varied discourses of Alexander in English
and Malay literatures, this book examines what Barbara Fuchs calls “mimetic rival-
ries”: while focusing on “European dynamics of imperial competition,” she notes that
rivalries “extend across hemispheres because of Rome’s contested nature as imperial
exemplum and predecessor. Thus, Ottomans and Incas engage with a Roman imperial
imagery as they argue for their imperial status.”8 My book turns to Britain and
Southeast Asia’s imperial claims to examine their mimetic rivalries in a shared imitatio
Alexandri. Their retailing of Alexander stories did not happen in a closed system;
rather, increased cross-cultural contact and the consequent need to assimilate new
knowledge generated by that contact made Alexander an especially attractive figure as
a conceptual bridge to the outside world.
The existence of shared literary elements and traditions suggests that the character
of cross-cultural encounters was not the civilizational clash of utterly alien Others but
rather a meeting of distantly-related cultures with overlapping interests and history,
and these parallel traditions (and the interactions between them) shaped major canon-
ical works in both traditions. Comparative literature has long focused on the study of
influences, sources, and allusions, which provide insight into how individual authors
read and wrote; however, study of literary traditions should go beyond influence and
imitation to consider unstated assumptions that define the period’s crucial ideas.
Historicizing the parallel receptions of Alexander traditions in Britain and Southeast
Asia, this book shows how borrowings from a transcultural literary tradition fash-
ioned imperial self-definition.
Traffic in Books
Europe’s eastern “trafficking” focused particularly on Southeast Asia, especially the
famed Moluccas (Maluku) or Spice Islands in eastern Indonesia, whose “ownership,
possession . . . navigation and trade” was the direct cause of a series of negotiations
6
Briant 2017: 158, 150. 7
Briant 2017: 118. 8
Fuchs 2015: 412; see also Fuchs 2001.
between Portugal and Spain that finally ended in the Treaty of Tordesillas.9 The poet
Edmund Spenser praises Queen Elizabeth’s glory by alleging that it extended to the
“margent of the Moluccas,” while John Milton compares Satan to East India ships
sailing from “the Isles / Of Ternate and Tidore, whence Merchants bring / Thir spicie
Drugs.”10 Ternate and Tidore are two islands of the Moluccas (Maluku) or Spice Islands,
whose importance as the only source of nutmeg and cloves far exceeded their size; two
pages are devoted to these tiny islands in Willem Blaeu’s Atlas Maior (1665), the earlier
Atlantis Appendix (1630), and other Blaeu atlases (Figure 0.1). European intervention
in the islands’ local politics served as matter for William Shakespeare’s successor with
the King’s Men, John Fletcher, whose play The Island Princess (1619–21) was so popular
it was adapted four times in the Restoration.11
Southeast Asia’s centrality in European imagination may be discerned from
Portuguese traveler António Galvão’s view of European discoveries as simultaneous
expansion eastward and westward to meet in the Pacific anti-meridian of the Treaty of
Tordesillas, offering, as Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam suggest, “a world-
view in which the imagined centre lies in fact in the Moluccas.”12 The Spice Islands
were the new hub of a globalizing economy, as Europeans found a sea route that
rounded the Cape of Good Hope to obtain spices directly from the source; however,
the historical and cultural center lay westward, in the area defined by Mecca, Jerusalem,
Rome, and Constantinople. How trading kingdoms of the East and West reimagined
themselves in relation to the old cultural center, the theme of this book, is traced in the
elliptical orbits of world literature.
Literary journeys took circuitous paths along trade routes. Trade was not just in
silk, spices, porcelain, and silver but also in books and manuscripts. Asian texts were
acquired for European collections and in the early modern period collections of eastern
works were dearly sought after. One such collection came available in 1625: the famed
Arabist Thomas van Erpe (Erpenius, 1584–1624)’s library of “oriental” manuscripts. In
November 1625, George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, was at the Hague in the
Low Countries in November 1625 pawning England’s crown jewels to raise funds in sup-
port of a Protestant alliance to recover the Palatinate lost to the Spanish in the Thirty
Years’ War. It was an unpopular cause, exacerbated by royal high-handedness: having
ascended the throne only in March that year when his father James I died, already in
August Charles I dissolved Parliament when he was refused further s ubsidies for the
war. But in 1625, the worst of the crises were yet to come, and Villiers had leisure to
pursue cultural interests. An influential patron and collector of art, while abroad he
purchased Erpenius’ manuscript collection for the sum of 500 pounds, thwarting
Leiden University’s months-long effort to acquire it. This collection, which came to
Cambridge University Library in 1632 when Buckingham’s widow finally donated it to
fulfill his intent to build up the library when he was appointed Chancellor in 1626,
9
Brotton 1998: 132. 10
Spenser 2007: 5.10.3; Milton 1998: Paradise Lost 2.638–40.
11
Sprague 1926: 49, 74, 82–6, 123. 12
Alam and Subrahmanyam 2011: 340.
Figure 0.1 Map of the Spice Islands by Willem Jansz. Blaeu, Molvccae insvla celeberrimae, Amsterdam, 1630?
Harvard Map Collection, Harvard Library.
included six Malay manuscripts. One is a commentary on the Qur’ān identifying the
figure of Dhū’lqarnayn from Sura 18 (Sura of the Cave) as Alexander the Great.
The transfer of Alexander in a Malay work to Cambridge was part of a larger early
modern movement of material objects, luxury goods (spices, silk, and porcelain),
ideas, and even people from what was then known as the “East Indies” into Europe.
Exploration had a profound effect: it opened up new natural worlds for scientific study
while material and knowledge exchanges with Asia through commerce led to the
development of medicine and natural history.13 This “trafficking”—a term Jonathan
Burton proposes, from the early modern word “traffique,” to signify not just trade but
also wider, multidirectional forms of cultural intercourse and exchanges14—not only
transformed European material culture—drinking tea from china or spicing foods
with pepper—but also left its mark on art and literature.15 Trafficking with Asia left not
only traces in literary representations and images of the exotic, but also on English lit-
erary forms. Eastern imports—as Miriam Jacobson shows with the imagery of sugar,
horses, bulbs, “orient” pearls, and the concept of zero—modified classical reception to
give English verse a “materially inflected Eastern poetics.”16
The path taken by the idea of Alexander in the Cambridge manuscript, MS Or.
Ii.6.45, Tafsīr sūrat al-Kahfi, reveals the complexity of intertwined literary and trade
networks in the early modern era that connected Southeast Asia with Europe and the
Middle East. The manuscript itself, a duodecimo of 134 pages, presenting Arabic
verses in rubrication interspersed with Malay commentary in black ink, is one of the
earliest extant Malay works of Qur’ānic exegesis. The work’s two major sources,
al-Khāzin (d. 741/1340)’s Lubāb al-ta’wīl fī ma‘ānī al-tanzīl (The Core of Interpretation
in the Meanings of Revelation) and al-Bayḍāwī (d. 685/1286)’s Anwār al-tanzīl wa
asrār al-ta’wīl (The Lights of Revelation and the Secrets of Interpretation) show reli-
ance on Middle Eastern traditions of Qur’ānic commentary that identified Alexander
as Dhū’lqarnayn. In addition, the manuscript shows traces of transcultural traditions
of Alexander, for its commentary on Dhū’lqarnayn (verses 83–98) offers rival Greek
and Persian genealogies. The name is first mentioned in verse 83, in which the Jews ask
prophet Muhammad for the story of Dhū’lqarnayn journeying to the East and West.
The exegesis of the second half of the line, running to about four and a half eleven-line
pages, offers varied opinions on his identity:
Kata Moghaser bahawa nama Dhū’lqarnayn itu Marzaban anak Marzazabah al-Yunani dari-
pada anak Yafith. Yafith [sic] itu anak Noh. Kata setengah nama[nya] Iskandar anak Filis cucu
Qaylasuf Rumi dan Parsi. Kata setengah raja mashrik dan maghrib bahawa raja besar dalam
dunia. Mengata orang dua orang raja Islam dua orang raja kafir. Maka Islam itu Dhū’lqarnayn
dan Sulaiman. Maka yang kafir itu Namrud dan Tajta Naṣar dan al-Dhūlqarnayn itu salah.
[Moghaser says that the name Dhū’lqarnayn [refers to] Marzaban the son of Marzazabah
al-Yunani, who is the son of Japheth. Japheth is the son of Noah. Some say his name is Alexander
13
Cook 2007. 14 Burton 2005: 15–16. 15
Jardine and Brotton 2000; Brotton 2003.
16
Jacobson 2014: 14.
the son of Philip the grandson of Qaylasuf, a Roman and Persian. Some say it is the king of the
east and west that is the great king in the world. People say that two are Muslim kings and two
infidel kings. The Muslims are Dhū’lqarnayn and Solomon. The infidels are Nimrod and Tajta
Naṣar and not Dhū’lqarnayn.]17
Competing exegeses, whether of Dhū’lqarnayn’s identity as Persian or Greek, or of

Alexander’s genealogy, offer varied interpretations. Alexander’s father is Philip, from
the Greek tradition, but he is identified as Roman and Persian. The name Dhū’lqarnayn
has multiple meanings as well: the “two-horned” refers either to world conquest in its
associations with the compass points of East and West, or to a world divided between
two Muslim kings and two unbelievers. The commentary thus weaves together histories
from several traditions: Greek, Persian, and Hebraic. For the history of Qur’ānic exege-
sis in Southeast Asia, the manuscript’s importance lies in representing the kind of writ-
ing produced in early seventeenth-century Aceh in northern Sumatra, its place of
composition, before the period when many exegetical works were destroyed by the
cleric Nuruddin al-Rānīrī, who tried to purge the land of heretical (sufistic) works.18
But its significance goes beyond a local reception of cosmopolitan forms: the manu-
script is only extant today because of the connected history of European trade in
Southeast Asia.
Several of the Cambridge Malay manuscripts came into Erpenius’ hands through
the collecting activities of an East India merchant, Pieter Willemsz. van Elbinck, known
in English records by his maternal surname, Peter Floris. He was already in Southeast
Asia by 1604. One of the Cambridge manuscripts, MS Or. Dd.5.37, a Malay version of
the history of the biblical Joseph (Hikayat Yusuf), concludes with a note indicating that
the copyist was Floris in October 1604, and another, MS Or. Gg.6.40, includes in the
fourth part a Malay-Dutch vocabulary with the note that the Malay was written in Arabic
letters by Peter Willemsz. van Elbinck on 1 June 1604 in Aceh.19 Initially employed by
the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie), Floris chafed at
their restrictions on private trade, complaining, “I cannot imagine what the Hollanders
meane, to suffer these Maleysians, Chinesians and other moores of these contries, and
17
Cambridge MS. Or. Ii.6.45, f. 105v. For the commentary tradition on the name, see Nöldeke et al. 2013:
115 n. 137. Regarding the name Dhū’lqarnayn, Ibn Kathīr mentions Marzaban: “Scholars disagreed regard-
ing his name. . . . It has been narrated in a Hadith that he was from the tribe of Himyar and that his mother
was Roman, and he was called the Philosopher for the excellence of his mentality. However, As-Suhaili
said: his name was Marzaban Ibn Marzabah. This was mentioned by Ibn Hisham who mentioned in
another location that his name was: As-Saʿb Ibn Dhi Mar’id who was the grandfather of the Tababiʿah and
it was him who gave the verdict to the benefit of Ibrahim” (Ibn Kathīr 2001: 130–1). See Arthur Schaade’s
German translation, Ibn Kathīr 1908. If the first letter of the name Qaylafus were fah (‫ )ف‬instead of qaf (‫)ق‬,
the word might be ‫فيلسوف‬, or philosopher.
18
Riddell 1990: 33, which published verses 1–3, 9, 17, 34, 47–9, 75–9; Riddell 2001: 154–60; Riddell 1989;
Riddell 2014. I would like to thank Peter Riddell for sending me a copy of the last article; in an email, he
mentioned that he is completing a full study of the manuscript. The earliest notice of this manuscript
appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, van Ronkel 1896: 9, 47–9. Malay manuscripts may have been
collected in Aceh by Peter Floris (Pieter Wilemsz. Floris van Elbinck) (see also Iskandar 1996: 315).
19
MS Or. Ii.6.45 does not indicate provenance; it is probably acquired by Floris.
to assiste theym in theyr free trade thorough all the Indies, and forbidde it theyr owne
servants, contryemen and bretheren uppon payne of death and losse of goods.”20
In 1609 he sought employment with the English East India Company, and led an
expedition on board the Globe, the East India Company’s seventh voyage, that left in
January 1611 to trade first on the Coromandel coast of India, next Bantam (Banten)
in Java, then Patani on the northern Malay Peninsula, and finally Siam. He died two
months after his return to London in 1615, leaving a journal of the voyage, written in
Dutch and translated into English, of which extracts were printed by Samuel Purchas
in his continuation of Richard Hakluyt’s work, Hakluytus posthumus, or Purchas his
Pilgrimes (1625).
It is worth pausing briefly over Peter Floris’s biography, a man whose many transla-
tions reveal the complexities of the early modern transculturated sphere. In name and
identity, he was translated from Dutch merchant to “English” (even as his surname van
Elbinck suggests an origin on the Baltic coast), entailing the crossing of national lines.
His East Indies travels meant further crossings of political boundaries, not only from
the European sphere to Southeast Asia, but also from polity to polity within Southeast
Asia. Aptly, this much-translated man would himself be engaged in copying and trans-
lating foreign texts. These geo-political crossings resulted in the transformation of his
tongue, as his facility in Malay and interest in its literature show.
Floris’s transculturated European in the Malay world is by no means unique, as
attested by East Indies archives. Europeans learnt Malay and other local languages out
of commercial necessity. Malay was particularly important as the region’s lingua
franca. In the early sixteenth century, António Galvão writes that in the East Indies
“the number of languages is so great that even neighbours do not, so to speak, under-
stand each other. Today they use the Malay tongue, which most people speak, and it is
employed throughout the islands, like Latin in Europe.”21 Two centuries later, Malay’s
importance has not waned: in 1725 François Valentijn, vicar of the Dutch Reformed
Church in Ambon, testifies to its importance: “Certainly Portuguese and the Malay
language are two languages with which one can reach all peoples directly, not only in
Batavia, but indeed through the whole Indies up to Persia.”22 English factors posted in
Java or the Moluccas, the Spice Islands, in archipelagic Southeast Asia learnt Malay to
conduct business. At the English factory in Banten, Floris met Augustine Spaulding,
who was also fluent in Malay. An interpreter for the factory, having lived in Banten for
over a decade, Spaulding, like Floris, was interested in the study of Malay, translating
the Frankfurter Gothard Arthusius’ Latin translation of Dutch Frederik de Houtman’s
20
Floris 1934: 44.
21
Galvão 1971: 75. The original reads: “São tamtas he tão desvairadas, que quasy se não emtemde[m] os
vezinhos huns ha outros, por omde parece que fforão povoadas de companhas entranhas. . . . Prezão-se
aguora do malayo e os mais ho ffalão e servem-se dela por toda terra como latim na Eyropa” (74).
22
The original quotation reads: “Dog de Portugeesche en de Maleitze taal zyn de twee taalen, waar mede
men niet alleen op Batavia, maar zelf door gansch Indiën, tot in Persiën toe, met allerlei volkeren te recht
kan raken” (Valentijn 1724–6: 4.1:367).
handbook of conversational Malay to which is given the title Dialogues in the English
and Malaiane Languages (1614).23 This work of translation was promoted by the East
India Company: their 22 January 1614 minutes mentions “a book of dialogues, hereto-
fore translated into Latin by the Hollanders, and printed with the Malacca tongue,
Mr. Hakluyt having now turned the Latin into English, and supposed very fit for the
factors to learn, ordered to be printed before the departure of the ships.”24 Even in
Japan, the English relied on translation through Malay: John Saris, who opened up
Japan for English trade in 1613, employed an interpreter who translated from Japanese
into Malay: Saris writes that his “Linquist [sic], who was borne in Iapan, and was
brought from Bantam to our ship thither, being well skild in the Mallayan tongue, wherin
he deliured to me what the King spoke vnto him in the Iapan language.”25 By the early
eighteenth century, European grammarians would recommend works like the Malay
Alexander romance, Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain, for the study of good Malay.26
Examples like Floris and his compatriots, Bertrand Romain argues, break down
the divide between amateur collectors and professional philologists.27 The work of
collecting eastern manuscripts depended on efforts of overseas merchants. The
Bodleian Library saw its collection of Arabic manuscripts grow with the patronage of
William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, Chancellor of Oxford from 1630 to 1640,
who donated over a thousand manuscripts between 1635 and 1640—including works
in Malay such as the Hikayat Seri Rama, a Malay version of the Ramayana—amassed
in part through a royal letter he obtained to require the Levant Company to bring back
23
Arthus 1614, a translation of Houtman 1603.
24
Calendar SPC/EIC, I, Doc. no 682 (January 22, 1614); quoted in Bertrand 2013: 144.
25
Saris 1900: 84. When the former daimyo of Hirado, Matsura Hōin, governing as regent for his young
grandson, gave John Saris a diplomatic letter, the latter brought it to Java to be translated into Malay:
“I procured Lackmoy and Lanching, two Chinesa Merchants, to translate the Letter which the King of
Firando in Iapan had deliuered mee to carry to our King James. It was written in China Character and
Language; they translated it into the Malayan, which in English is as followeth, viz.” (195).
26
In his introduction to Tweede Deel van de Collectanea Malaica Vocabularia of Maleische Woordboek-
Sameling, Peter van der Vorm says, “’t boek genaamd hhikaΛjat Λiskander dzuw Λ-lcarnajn, of de ges-
chiedenis van Alexander de Groot, is niet alleen van een seer goed mallays, maar ook van een klaare / en
gemakkelijke stijl / buiten dat het met weynig vreemde woorden opgetooyd is / en dierhalven om de taal te
leeren voor ieder nut” (The book named Hikayat Iskandar Dhū’lqarnayn, of the history of Alexander the
Great, is not only [composed] in very good Malay, but also in a clear and easy style, except that it is embel-
lished with a few foreign words and therefore useful for learning the language for everyone) (Vorm 1708: 8);
and George Hendrik Werndly, Maleische Spraakkunst: “De Historie van Alexander den Groten. De stoffe
van dit boek is gericht om te tonen dat Alexander de Grote, een heer van ‘t Westen en van ‘t Oosten
geworden zynde de gansche wereldt heeft trachten te brengen tot de rechtzinnige lere des geloofs in den
Godsdienst van den propheet Gods Abraham van den vriendt Gods over wien vrede zy! Dit boek is in zeer
goed Maleisch geschreven en met zeer weinig vremde woorden opgetooid als mede van een zeer klaren en
gemakkelyken styl en deshalben zeer nut om daar uit de taal te leren” (The History of Alexander the Great.
The matter of this book aims to show that Alexander the Great, who became a lord of the West and of the
East, has attempted to bring the whole world to the orthodox teaching of faith in the religion of God’s
prophet Abraham, the friend of God, upon whom be peace! This book is written in very good Malay,
embellished with very few foreign words, as well as in a very clear and simple style, and therefore it is very
useful to learn the language from it) (Werndly 1736: 345); my translations.
27
Bertrand 2013.
a manuscript on each ship.28 Other Southeast Asian manuscripts were similarly

acquired: in 1627 two palm-leaf manuscripts in Javanese and Old Sundanese came to
Thomas James, the Bodleian’s first librarian, through his mercantile relatives trading in
Java, while in 1629 another Javanese work—a version of the popular Persian tale of
Amir Hamzah—was donated by William Shakespeare’s patron, William Herbert, the
third Earl of Pembroke, probably acquired through the East India Company, which
Herbert joined in 1611 and of which he became director from 1614.29 These works
came to furnish significant national cultural institutions by way of the circuits of East
Indies trade. National cultural innovations—the Bodleian Library only opened in
1602—were deeply implicated in exchanges with the East.
It is this sort of collecting and engagements with Asia—the cultural translatio of
books and knowledge—that historian Robert Batchelor argues was instrumental to
London’s rise to a global city and influenced its modern developments. Noting the
transmission of manuscripts to London from Southeast Asia—including Malay works
such the Hikayat Bayan Budiman collected by Edward Pococke from Borneo, Laud’s
Hikayat Seri Rama, or William Herbert’s Javanese Amir Hamzah, Caritanira Amir—
Batchelor says, “almost a century before the Arabian Nights became popular in France
and England, collections of stories and plays that circulated widely in Asia in multiple
languages were arriving in London from the port cities of Southeast Asia, suggesting
transcultural models of linguistic exchange.”30 Intriguingly, he suggests that such
exchanges not only affected the development of ideas in London but also in Southeast
Asia: briefly mentioning Southeast Asian works, including those discussed in this
book, he argues, “New strategies of collecting and new kinds of history writing in
Southeast Asia in part responding to English and Dutch activities . . . all suggested not
an imposition of European models in Asia but complex emerging practices of history
writing and archiving.”31 As scholars start doing justice to the full range of materials in
early modern libraries and collections, we need to go beyond simply noting the presence
of so many Asian materials in Western scholars’ hands to reading and analyzing the
texts themselves. Historical revisionism calls for a corresponding literary comparatism.
As imported eastern books filled the shelves of English libraries newly revived after
the depredations of the Reformation, eastern matter came to transform English books,
even literary works. Cambridge MS Or. Ii.6.45’s relation to English culture does not
simply have to do with the amassing of libraries; its citation of Alexander’s Arabic
name is, in a striking convergence, consonant with similar enunciations in English
poetry. This convergence can be seen in Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622), a
work of chorography, which though describing British lands—and thus has largely
been read as a writing of nation—is also inflected by the East.32 Far from an inward-
looking parochialism the genre implies, Poly-Olbion’s celebration of England expands
28
Wakefield 1994: 130.
29
For Thomas James, see Batchelor 2011: 122–3. See description of the Amir Hamzah manuscript in
Gallop and Arps 1991: 74–6; Noorduyn 1985: 58–64.
30
Batchelor 2014: 127. 31
Batchelor 2014: 127–8. 32
Helgerson 1992: 117–24.
outward to the globe, viewing eastern places, including key locales in Southeast Asia,
as the proper stage for English action. At the same time, its interest in antiquarianism
takes a global perspective by suggestively linking England to the Islamic East through
the citation of Alexander’s Muslim name, Dhū’lqarnayn, from none other than the
father of English poetry, Chaucer.
Drayton’s ambitious Poly-Olbion was so lengthy a work that while he settled on a
plan by 1598, the first part was not published till 1612 and a second only appeared in
1622.33 Although the poem, as Drayton says, “delivered by a true native Muse,” is
devoted to Britain, it is a Britain connected to the East. The first book of the second
part, “The Nineteenth Song,” on Essex and southern Suffolk, coastal counties north of
London, ventures far beyond Britain’s borders, as its Muse “poynts directly to the East”
to celebrate “Our Brittish brave Sea-voyagers” (“Argument,” 19th Song). One of the
earliest explorers, Ralph Fitch (1550–1611), was the first Englishman to visit Portuguese
Melaka in 1588:
With Fitch, our Eldred next, deserv’dly placed is;
Both travailing to see, the Syrian Tripolis.
…
On thence to Ormus set, Goa, Cambaya, then,
To vast Zelabdim, thence to Echubar, agen
Crost Ganges mighty streame, and his large bankes did view,
To Baccola went on, to Bengola, Pegu;
And for Mallacan then, Zeiten, and Cochin cast,
Measuring with many a step, the great East-Indian wast. (Song 19.237–46)
The numerous foreign place names, including Southeast Asian Melaka, Pegu (Burma),
and Cochin (Vietnam), displace English ones to signal England’s considerable invest-
ment in the overseas trade. Drayton was not the only poet to turn English voyages
into verse. His friend, William Warner wrote a poem of English history, Albions
England (1597), that extols English voyagers, telling the reader to read in Hakluyt “Of
These, East-Indian Goa, South & South-east People moe, / And of their memorable
Names those Toyles did vnder-goe.”34 Richard Hakluyt’s accounts in his Principal
Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discouveries of the English Nation (1589–1600)
were matter for poetry, influencing William Shakespeare, who alludes to Fitch in
Macbeth (1609): “Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’th’ Tiger” (1.3.6). The new
geography, as John Gillies argues in the case of Shakespeare, was central to English
poetic imagination, but he rightly observes that classical geography continued to be
influential, not the least the enduring fascination exerted by classical others populating
the margins of the new maps, and that poets like Shakespeare and Marlowe “combine
ancient and Renaissance forms.”35
33
J. William Hebel, “The Preface” to Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (Drayton 1961: 4.viii–ix). Quotations
are from this edition and given parenthetically.
34
W. Warner 1597: 297, chap. 71. 35
J. Gillies 1994: 182, 60.
This combination is strikingly brought together by Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, interested

in both geography and antiquarianism. Poly-Olbion’s antiquarianism moves beyond
places into linguistic and literary concerns to include Arabic printing: a crude wood-
cut of Alexander’s Arabic name. Drayton’s “Chorographicall Description,” as his s ubtitle
calls it, not only describes the land but also retells ancient stories associated with
place. Thus Drayton asked his friend John Selden, hailed by Milton as “chief of learned
men,” to provide annotations explaining historical allusions.36 Notable in Selden’s
preface, which discusses the reliability of sources, is his long digression on Chaucer.
Complaining that Chaucer’s “Learned allusion” has been misunderstood, he proceeds
to argue that Chaucer (acknowledged in the early modern period as the fount of
English literature) was master of Arabic learning, thus making the English literary
tradition entwined with eastern traditions from its imagined origin.
This surprising claim is based on a gloss on a neologism in Troilus and Criseyde
(c.1382–5) from lines spoken by Criseyde: “I am till God mee better mind send / At
Dulcarnon right at my wits end.”37 Selden rejects the medieval theologian Alexander
Neckam’s derivation of “Dulcarnon” from Latin to identify it instead as Arabic:
It is not Necham, or any else, that can make mee entertaine the least thought of the signification
of Dulcarnon to be Pythagoras his sacrifice after his Geometricall Theorem in finding the
Squares of an Orthogonall Triangles sides, or that it is a word of Latine deduction; but, indeed,
by easier pronounciation it was made of ‫ ذوالقرنني‬.i. Two horned: which the Mahometan Arabians
vie for a Root in Calculation, meaning Alexander, as that great Dictator of knowledge Joseph
Scaliger (with some Ancients) wills, but, by warranted opinion of my learned friend Mr. Lydyat
in his Emendatio Temporum, it began in Seleucus Nicanor, XII. yeares after Alexanders death;
The name was applyed, either because after time that Alexander had perswaded himselfe to be
Jupiter Hammons sonne, whose Statue was with Rams hornes, both his owne and his Successors
Coines were stampt with horned Images: or else in respect of his II. pillars erected in the East
as a Nihil ultra of his Conquest, and some say because hee had in Power the Easterne and
Westerne World, signified in the two Hornes.38
Chaucer’s Criseyde’s expression of perplexity in the linguistic borrowing is the earliest

attestation of Alexander’s Arabic appellation, Dhū’lqarnayn, the two-horned, to appear
in English, though Marco Polo mentions it.39 The term, as Chaucer’s sixteenth-century
36
Milton’s praise of Selden appears in Areopagitica (Milton 1953–82: 2.549).
37
Chaucer 1987: Troilus and Criseyde 3.930–1; Selden modernizes the verse.
38
John Selden, “From the Author of The Illustrations,” in Drayton 1613: sig. A3–A3v.
39
Marco Polo also mentions dhū’lqarnayn in his account of Badashan or Badakhshan (Balascian in
Latin, situated in today’s southeast Tajiskistan and northeast Afghanistan): “Badashan is a Province
inhabited by people who worship Mahommet, and have a peculiar language. It forms a very great kingdom,
and the royalty is hereditary. All those of the royal blood are descended from King Alexander and the
daughter of King Darius, who was Lord of the vast Empire of Persia. And all these kings call themselves in
the Saracen tongue ZULCARNIAIN, which is as much as to say Alexander; and this out of regard for
Alexander the Great” (Polo 1903: 1.157). By the time of early modern print editions, dhū’lqarnayn seems
to be dropping out of the texts. One of the earliest from Venice has this description: “Balassin e una prou-
incia econtrada laqual ha lingua per si & adora macometo. Lo regno de Balassia egrande e ua per heredita;
questi re sono descesi da lo re Alexandro e da lo re Dario de Persia: e quelli fi appelladi Recultari & ea dir
editor, Thomas Speght, notes, is the name for Euclid’s Book 1, 47th p roposition, the
Pythagorean Theorem, showing that a square constructed on each side of any right
triangle would have the largest square equal in area to the sum of the smaller two: the
figure looks as if it has two horns sticking out. In Troilus and Criseyde, Pandarus
wrongly associates it with the 5th proposition, known as fuga miserorum: he asserts,
“Dulcarnon called is ‘fleminge of wrecches’ ” (3.933). Previous attempts to explain the
term fell short of the mark. The first English translation of Euclid, published 1570,
offers the explanation of Pythagoras’ sacrifice of oxen, which Selden rejects in the
passage above.40 Only in the nineteenth century did Walter William Skeat in his
edition of Chaucer point to Selden’s commentary to clear up scholarly perplexity about
the word’s origin.41
Selden’s comments on Chaucer go even further. Praising him for the term “dulcar-
non” ’s aptness in describing Criseyde’s dilemma, Selden imputes to Chaucer a wider
knowledge of Arabic science: “How many of Noble Chaucers Readers never so much as
suspect this his short essay of knowledge, transcending the common Rode? and by his
Treatise of the Astrolabe (which, I dare sweare, was chiefly learned out of Messahalah)
it is plaine hee was much acquainted with the Mathematiques” (xi*). Skeat concurs
with Selden’s assessment of Chaucer’s familiarity with Messahalah—the Latin name of
Māshā’allāh ibn Atharī, an eighth-century astronomer from Persia, whose work was
known in medieval Europe—suggesting the poet’s indebtedness to Māshā’allāh’s work
in Latin translation, Compositio et operatio astrolabii (13th century), a standard teaching
text in the following centuries.42 Engaged in far more than simply source study, Selden
linked the origin of English poetry to Arabic science.
One of a pan-European group of “orientalists,” like his compatriot Thomas Lydiat
and Lydiat’s Leiden opponent Joseph Justus Scaliger, Selden’s historical research was
profoundly comparative. Two years after the first part of Poly-Olbion, Selden published
his Titles of Honour (1614), aiming to collect together all the world’s sovereign titles.
Selden’s research was based on correspondence from foreign monarchs, including
those from Southeast Asia, to England mediated through the East India Company; using
the help of friends with mercantile contacts—Archbishop Laud, Thomas Erpenius,
among others—he constructed, as Robert Batchelor calls it, his “globally comparative
in lingua nostra Alexandro amor de re Alexandri grandi” (Polo 1496: sig. c iiiiv). The first English print edition,
John Frampton’s translation, omits entirely the sentence about what they call themselves (Polo 1579: 29,
sig. C.iii). In the same year, Frampton translated an account of Portuguese voyages to the East Indies and
China that he said confirmed Polo’s account (Frampton 1579).
40
H. Billingsley’s translation of Euclid’s Geometry notes: “This most excellent and notable Theoreme
was first invented of the greate philosopher Pithagoras, who for the exceeding joy conceived of the invention
thereof, offered in sacrifice an Oxe, as recorde Hierone, Proclus, Lycius, & Vitruvius. And it hath bene
commonly called of barbarous writers of the latter time Dulcarnon” (Euclid 1570: f. 58, sig. Q.ii).
41
Chaucer 1894: 479–80 n. 931. For dulcarnoun as mathematical architecture for Troilus, see Hart 1981:
129–70. Incidentally, Skeat’s son, with the same name, was an anthropologist of Malaya.
42
Chaucer 1872: xxiv–xxvi.
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medicine, or some little thing to eat, put out her candle, open the
window a moment, and then I would return to my task.
After the day of my debut at the Chicago Progressive Lyceum I
continued my dramatic career. The incidents of my performances
would suffice to fill several volumes. For without interruption,
adventures succeeded one another to such an extent that I shall
never undertake the work of describing them all.
I should say that when this first theatrical incident took place I
was just two and a half years old.
III
HOW I CREATED THE SERPENTINE DANCE
I N 1890 I was on a tour in London with my mother. A manager

engaged me to go to the United States and take the principal part
in a new play entitled, “Quack, M.D.” In this piece I was to play
with two American actors, Mr. Will Rising and Mr. Louis de Lange,
who has since then been mysteriously assassinated.
I bought what costumes I needed and took them with me. On our
arrival in New York the rehearsals began. While we were at work, the
author got the idea of adding to the play a scene in which Dr. Quack
hypnotised a young widow. Hypnotism at that moment was very
much to the fore in New York. To give the scene its full effect he
needed very sweet music and indeterminate illumination. We asked
the electrician of the theatre to put green lamps along the footlights
and the orchestra leader to play a subdued air. The great question
next was to decide what costume I was to wear. I was unable to buy
a new one. I had spent all the money advanced me for my costumes
and, not knowing what else to do, I undertook to run over my
wardrobe in the hope of finding something that would be fit to wear.
In vain. I could not find a thing.
All at once, however, I noticed at the bottom of one of my trunks a
small casket, a very small casket, which I opened. Out of it I drew a
light silk material, comparable to a spider’s web. It was a skirt, very
full and very broad at the bottom.
I let the skirt dangle in my fingers, and before this little heap of
fragile texture I lingered in reverie for some time. The past, a past
very near and yet already far away, was summoned up before me.
It had happened in London some months before.
A friend had asked me to dine with several officers who were
being wined and dined just before leaving for India, where they were
under orders to rejoin their regiment. The officers were in handsome
uniforms, the women in low dresses, and they were pretty, as only
English women are.
At table I was seated between two of the youngest officers. They
had very long necks and wore extremely high collars. At first I felt
myself greatly overawed in the presence of people so imposing as
my neighbours. They looked snobbish and uncommunicative.
Presently I discovered that they were much more timid than I, and
that we should never be better acquainted unless one or the other of
us resolved to overcome his own nervousness and, at the same
time, that of his companions.
But my young officers were afraid only in the presence of women.
When I told them I hoped they might never be engaged in a war, and
especially that they might never have to do any killing, one of them
answered me very simply:
“I fancy I can serve as a target as well as any other man, and
certainly the people who draw on me will understand that war is on.”
They were essentially and purely English. Nothing could unsettle
them, provoke them or change them in the least. At our table they
seemed timid. They were nevertheless men of the kind who go into
the presence of death just as one encounters a friend in the street.
At this period I did not understand the English as I have
subsequently come to know them.
I left the table without remembering to ask the names of my
neighbours, and when I thought about the matter it was too late.
I recalled, however, that one of them took the trouble, in the
course of our conversation, to learn the name of the hotel at which I
was staying. I had quite forgotten the incident when, some time after,
I received a little casket, addressed to me from India.
It contained a skirt of very thin white silk, of a peculiar shape, and
some pieces of silk gauze. The box was not more than sixteen
inches long and was hardly taller than a cigar box. It contained
nothing else, not a line, not a card. How odd! From whom could it
come?
I knew no one in India. All at once, however, I remembered the
dinner and the young officers. I was greatly taken with my pretty box,
but I was far from suspecting that it contained the little seed from
which an Aladdin’s lamp was destined to spring for my benefit.
This, of course, was the casket which I had just discovered in my
trunk.
Deep in thought I stooped and gathered up the soft, silky stuff. I
put on the Hindu skirt, the skirt sent me by my two young officers,
those young men who must by this time have “served as targets”
somewhere out there in the jungle, for I never heard from them
again.
My robe, which was destined to become a triumphal robe, was at
least a half a yard too long. Thereupon I raised the girdle and so
shaped for myself a sort of empire robe, pinning the skirt to a
décolleté bodice. The robe looked thoroughly original, perhaps even
a little ridiculous. It was entirely suitable for the hypnotism scene,
which we did not take very seriously.
Photo Sarony
LOIE FULLER IN HER ORIGINAL SERPENTINE DRESS
We “tried the play on the dog” before offering it to the New York
public, and I made my debut as a dancer at a theatre in a small city
of which the average New Yorker had hardly heard. No one, I
suppose, outside its boundaries took the slightest interest in what
went on in that city. At the end of the play, on the evening of the first
presentation, we gave our hypnotism scene. The stage scenery,
representing a garden, was flooded with pale green light. Dr. Quack
made a mysterious entrance and then began his work of suggestion.
The orchestra played a melancholy air very softly, and I
endeavoured to make myself as light as possible, in order to give the
impression of a fluttering figure obedient to the doctor’s orders.
He raised his arms. I raised mine. Under the influence of
suggestion, entranced—so, at least, it looked—with my gaze held by
his, I followed his every motion. My robe was so long that I was
continually stepping upon it, and mechanically I held it up with both
hands and raised my arms aloft, all the while that I continued to flit
around the stage like a winged spirit.
There was a sudden exclamation from the house:
“It’s a butterfly! A butterfly!”
I turned on my steps, running from one end of the stage to the
other, and a second exclamation followed:
“It’s an orchid!”
To my great astonishment sustained applause burst forth. The
doctor all the time was gliding around the stage, with quickening
steps, and I followed him faster and faster. At last, transfixed in a
state of ecstasy, I let myself drop at his feet, completely enveloped in
a cloud of the light material.
The audience encored the scene, and then encored it again—so
loudly and so often that we had to come back twenty times, or more.
We were on the road about six weeks. Then came our opening in
one of the New York suburbs, where Mr. Oscar Hammerstein, who
has since become a famous impresario, owned a theatre.
The play was unsuccessful, and even our hypnotism scene was
not strong enough to save it from the attacks of the critics. No New
York theatre cared to give it house room, and our company broke up.
The day after this opening at Mr. Hammerstein’s theatre a local
newspaper of the little community in which we had successfully
presented this “Quack, M.D.,” which the New York managers refused
to touch, wrote a ridiculously enthusiastic article on what it called my
“acting” in the hypnotism scene. But as the play had not “made
good,” no one thought that it would be possible to take a single
scene out of it, and I was left without an engagement.
Nevertheless, even in New York, and in spite of the failure of the
play, I personally secured some good press notices. The
newspapers were in agreement in announcing that I had a
remarkable string to my bow—if I only knew how to make the most of
it.
I had brought my robe home to sew up a little tear. After reading
these comforting lines I leaped from the bed and arrayed only in my
night-gown, I put the garment on and looked at myself in a large
glass, to make sure of what I had done the evening before.
The mirror was placed just opposite the windows. The long
yellow curtains were drawn and through them the sun shed into the
room an amber light, which enveloped me completely and illumined
my gown, giving a translucent effect. Golden reflections played in the
folds of the sparkling silk, and in this light my body was vaguely
revealed in shadowy contour. This was a moment of intense
emotion. Unconsciously I realised that I was in the presence of a
great discovery, one which was destined to open the path which I
have since followed.
Gently, almost religiously, I set the silk in motion, and I saw that I
had obtained undulations of a character heretofore unknown. I had
created a new dance. Why had I never thought of it before?
Two of my friends, Mrs. Hoffmann and her daughter Mrs.
Hossack, came from time to time to see how I was getting on with
my discoveries. When I found an action or a pose which looked as if
it might amount to something they would say: “Hold that. Try it
again.” Finally I reached a point where each movement of the body
was expressed in the folds of silk, in a play of colours in the
draperies that could be mathematically and systematically
calculated.
The length and size of my silk skirt would constrain me to repeat
the same motion several times as a means of giving this motion its
special and distinctive aim. I obtained a spiral effect by holding my
arms aloft while I kept whirling, to right and then to left, and I
continued this movement until the spiral design was established.
Head, hands and feet followed the evolutions of the body and the
robe. It is very difficult, however, to describe this part of my dance.
You have to see it and feel it. It is too complicated for realisation in
words.
Another dancer will obtain more delicate effects, with more
graceful motions, but they will not be the same. To be the same they
must be created in the same spirit. One thing original, though up to a
certain point it is not so good as an imitation, is in reality worth much
more.
I studied each of my characteristic motions, and at last had
twelve of them. I classed them as Dances No. 1, No. 2, and so on.
The first was to be given under a blue light, the second under red
light, the third under a yellow light. For illumination of my dances I
intended to have a lantern with coloured glass in front of the lens. I
wanted to dance the last one in total darkness with a single ray of
yellow light crossing the stage.
When I had finished studying my dances, I went in search of a
manager. I was acquainted with them all. During my career as singer
and actress I had served all of them more or less frequently.
I was, however, hardly prepared for the reception which they
gave me. The first one laughed me in the face as he said:
“You a dancer! Well, that’s too good! When I want you for a
theatrical part I’ll look you up with pleasure; but as for dancing, good
heavens! When I engage a dancer she will have to be a star. The
only ones I know are Sylvia Gray and Lettie Lind in London. You
cannot outclass them, take my word for it. Good-evening.”
He had lost all respect for my perspicacity and he made fun of
the idea of my being a dancer.
Mrs. Hoffmann had come with me, and was waiting in the lobby,
where I rejoined her. She noted at once how pale and nervous I was.
When we left the theatre it was night. We walked in silence through
dark streets. Neither spoke. Some months later, however, my friend
told me that all that evening I never stopped emitting little groans like
those of a wounded animal. She saw that I was cut to the very quick.
Next day I had to continue my search, for necessity was spurring
me on.
Mrs. Hoffmann offered me the privilege of coming to live with her
and her daughter—an offer which I accepted gratefully, not having
the faintest idea when and how I could ever repay her.
Some time later I had to give in; since I was known as an actress,
nothing could hurt me more than to try to become a dancer.
One manager went so far as to tell me that two years of absence
from New York had caused the public completely to forget me, and
that, in trying to recall myself to their memory, I should seem to be
inflicting ancient history on them. As I had then just passed my
twentieth birthday I was extremely irritated by that insinuation, and I
thought: “Would it then be necessary for me painfully to build up a
reputation and to look old to prove that I was young to-day?”
Unable to restrain my feelings any longer, I told the manager
what I thought.
“Hell,” he replied, “it isn’t age that counts. It’s the time the public
has known you, and you have become too well known as an actress
to come back here as a dancer.”
Everywhere I encountered the same answer, and finally I became
desperate. I was aware that I had discovered something unique, but
I was far from imagining, even in a daydream, that I had hold of a
principle capable of revolutionising a branch of æsthetics.
I am astounded when I see the relations that form and colour
assume. The scientific admixture of chemically composed colours,
heretofore unknown, fills me with admiration, and I stand before
them like a miner who has discovered a vein of gold, and who
completely forgets himself as he contemplates the wealth of the
world before him.
But to return to my troubles.
A manager who, some time before, had done his best to engage
me as a singer, and who had absolutely refused to consider me as a
dancer, gave a careless consent, thanks to the intervention of a
common friend, to an interview at which I was to show him my
dances.
I took my robe, which made a neat little bundle, and I set out for
the theatre.
Mrs. Hoffmann’s daughter accompanied me. We went in by the
stage entrance. A single gas jet lighted the empty stage. In the
house, which was equally dark, the manager, seated in one of the
orchestra chairs, looked at us with an air of boredom, almost of
contempt. There was no dressing-room for my change of clothing,
not even a piano to accompany me. But the opportunity was a
precious one, all the same. Without delay I put on my costume, there
on the stage and over my dress. Then I hummed an air and started
in to dance very gently in the obscurity. The manager came nearer
and nearer, and finally ascended the platform.
His eyes glistened.
I continued to dance, disappearing in the darkness at the rear of
the stage, then returning toward the gas jet. Finally I lifted a part of
my robe over my shoulders, made a kind of cloud which enveloped
me completely and then fell, a wavering mass of fluffy silk, at the
manager’s feet. After that I arose and waited in keenest anxiety to
hear what he would say.
He said nothing. Visions of success were crowding upon each
other in his brain.
Finally he broke his silence and gave my dance the name of “The
Serpentine Dance.”
“There is the name that will go with it,” he said, “and I have just
the music that you need for that dance. Come to my private office. I
am going to play it for you.”
Then for the first time I heard an air which later became very
popular, “Au Loin du Bal.”
A new company was rehearsing “Uncle Celestin” at the theatre.
This company was to go on the road for several weeks before
playing in New York. My new manager offered me, for this tour, an
engagement at fifty dollars a week. I accepted, making it a condition
that I should be featured on the placards, in order to regain in a
measure the prestige I had lost.
A few days after I joined the company and made my first
appearance at a distance from New York. For six weeks I appeared
before country audiences, feverishly counting the hours until I should
at last have my chance in the big city.
During this tour, contrary to the conditions I had imposed, I was
not featured. The posters did not even announce me, and yet my
dance, which was given during an interval and without coloured
lights, was successful from the first.
A month and a half later in Brooklyn its success was
phenomenal. The week following I made my debut in New York, at
what was one of the prettiest theatres in town.
There I was able for the first time to realise my dances just as I
had conceived them; with darkness in the house and coloured lights
on the stage. The house was packed and the audience positively
enthusiastic. I danced my first, my second, my third. When I had
finished the whole house was standing up.
Among the spectators was one of my oldest friends, Marshall P.
Wilder, the little American humourist. He recognised me and called
my name in such a way that everybody could hear it, for they had
neglected to put it on the programme! When the audience
discovered that the new dancer was its old favourite comedian, the
little soubrette of a former day, it gave her an ovation such as, I
suppose, never another human being has received.
They called out, “Three cheers for the butterfly! Three cheers for
the orchid, the cloud, the butterfly! Three cheers!” And the
enthusiasm passed all bounds. The applause resounded in my ears
like the ringing of bells. I was overcome with joy and gratitude.
Next morning I arose early to read the papers. Every New York
newspaper devoted from a column to a page to “Loie Fuller’s
Wonderful Creation.” Numerous illustrations of my dances
accompanied the articles.
I buried my face in my pillow and shed every tear that, for a long
time, had lurked in my discouraged soul. For how many months had
I waited for this good luck!
In one of these articles a critic wrote “Loie Fuller had risen from
her ashes.” Next day the whole city was plastered with lithographs,
reproduced from one of my photographs, representing me larger
than life, with letters a foot high announcing: “The Serpentine Dance!
The Serpentine Dance!” But there was one circumstance came near
giving me heart failure. My name was nowhere mentioned.
I went to the theatre and reminded the manager that I had
accepted the modest salary he offered on condition that I should be
featured. I hardly understood when he remarked drily that he could
not do more for me.
I asked him then whether he supposed that I was going to
continue dancing under such conditions.
“Nothing can compel you to do so,” answered the manager. “In
any case, I have taken my precautions in case you do not care to
keep on.”
I left the theatre in desperation, not knowing what to do. My head
swam. I went home and consulted my friends.
They advised me to go and see another manager, and, if I
secured an engagement, simply to drop the other theatre.
I went to the —— Theatre, but on the way I began to cry, and I
was in tears when I arrived there. I asked to see the manager, and
told him my story.
He offered me one hundred and fifty dollars a week. I was to
make my first appearance at once, and sign a contract dating from
the next day.
On reaching home I asked if nothing had come for me from the
other theatre.
Nothing had come.
That evening my friends went to the theatre, where they saw a
poster announcing, for the following evening, the initial appearance
in the “Serpentine” of Miss —— ——. When they told me that piece
of news I understood that my six weeks on the road had been
profitably employed by my manager and one of the chorus girls to
meet just this situation, and I understood, too, why my name was not
mentioned on the first posters.
They had stolen my dance.
I felt myself overcome, dead—more dead, as it seemed to me,
than I shall be at the moment when my last hour comes. My very life
depended on this success, and now others were going to reap the
benefit. I cannot describe my despair. I was incapable of words, of
gestures. I was dumb and paralysed.
Next day, when I went to sign my new contract, the manager
received me rather coldly. He was willing to sign only if I would give
him the privilege of cancelling at his own discretion. He felt that my
imitator at the Casino, announced for the same day, would diminish
greatly the interest that would be felt in what he ironically called my
“discovery.”
I was obliged to accept the conditions which he imposed, but I
experienced all the while an access of rage and grief as I saw in
what a barefaced manner they had stolen my invention.
Heartbroken, with my courage oozing, I made my appearance at
the Madison Square Theatre and, to my astonishment, to my
immense satisfaction, I saw that the theatre had to turn people away.
And it was that way as long as my engagement lasted.
As for the other theatre, after three weeks of featuring my
imitator, it was obliged to close its doors to rehearse a new opera.
IV
HOW I CAME TO PARIS
A LITTLE while after my appearance at the Madison Square

Theatre I was asked to dance for the benefit of a charity at the
German theatre in New York. I had forgotten all about my
promise until the day of the performance, when a card arrived to call
it to my mind. I had neglected to ask my manager’s permission to
appear on that evening, not thinking that he would refuse to grant the
privilege of my participating in a philanthropic affair.
A short time before there had taken place the first part of a
painful incident which was destined to rupture the pleasant relations
subsisting between the management of the Madison Square and
myself. My manager’s associate had asked me as a great favour to
come to open a ball given by some friends in his honour. Delighted
to be of service to him, I readily agreed to do so. When I asked him
the date of this affair he told me not to bother about that.
It was just then that I asked permission to dance at the German
theatre for the benefit of an actress who was ill. The manager
consented. At the German theatre they had engaged a Roumanian
orchestra for me. The leader of this orchestra, Mr. Sohmers, an
enthusiastic man, as the Roumanians are apt to be, came to see me
after I had danced and foretold for me the wonderful artistic success
which I was sure to meet with in Europe. He advised me to go to
Paris, where an artistically inclined public would give my dances the
reception they deserved. From that moment on this became a fixed
idea with me—to dance in Paris. Then the manager of the German
theatre proposed to me a tour abroad, beginning with Berlin.
I promised to think the matter over and acquaint him with my
decision.
Some days later the famous ball took place which my manager’s
associate had asked me to open. I went to it.
They took us, a friend who accompanied me, and myself, into a
little drawing-room where they begged me to wait until some one
should come and fetch me for my appearance on the stage. More
than an hour passed. Finally a gentleman came to tell me that
everything was ready. Through a corridor I reached the platform,
which had been erected at the top of the ball-room. It was terribly
dark, and the only light perceptible was the little ray that filtered
through from one of my lanterns that was imperfectly closed. The
hall looked totally empty. I saw, when I had taken my bearings, that
the whole audience was disposed in the galleries, forming a balcony
half-way up the room. The orchestra finished its overture and I
began to dance. After having danced three times, as I was
accustomed to do at the theatre, I returned to the scene to
acknowledge the applause and I saw before me in luminous letters a
sign with the words: “Don’t think Club.”
That looked queer to me, but I did not attach much importance to
it. I bowed again to the magnificently gowned women and the men,
who were all in sombre black, and then, walking through the same
passage way, I once more reached the dressing-room, where I put
on my outdoor clothes and left. At the door I entered the carriage
that had brought me there, and while we were on our way home I
kept wondering what the Don’t Think Club could be.
That worried me in spite of myself.
The next morning my friend brought me a newspaper, in which I
found on the first page a long article headed:
“LOIE FULLER OPENS THE DON’T THINK CLUB.”
There followed a description of the affair and of the orgies which
took place there. The article had been written with a deliberate
purpose of creating a scandal. I was exasperated beyond measure. I
had gone there merely to please my manager, and the humiliation
inflicted upon me wounded me deeply.
Possibly he thought that I would never know where I had been. A
single newspaper might print something about the affair; but most
probably my manager thought it would never come to my notice. No
newspaper men had been invited to the performance. There was
one guest, a very little man but with a great reputation, who found
himself among the invited, and he wrote the scandalous article, so I
have been told.
I have since had my revenge, a terrible revenge; for this man,
then at the climax of his career, so mismanaged his affairs and those
of others, that he was imprisoned.
“Everybody is blaming him for the article,” my manager explained
to me when I reproached him for having dragged me to this club.
That was his only excuse. He thought he was lessening the insult
by offering me more money. This offer so increased my anger that I
tendered my resignation. I felt in no wise under obligation to a man
who I thought had morally lost all right to consideration. This was the
reason for my leaving, never to return.
The notion of going to Paris possessed me after that more
completely than before. I wanted to go to a city where, as I had been
told, educated people would like my dancing and would accord it a
place in the realm of art.
I was making at this time one hundred and fifty dollars a week
and I had just been offered five hundred. I decided, nevertheless, to
sign a contract with the manager of the German theatre that
guaranteed me sixty-five dollars instead of five hundred. But the
objective, after a tour in Europe, was Paris!
While I was dancing in New York I had to begin to invent special
robes for my new dances. These were just being made and, when I
was about to leave for Europe, they were ready.
The manager of the German Theatre had gone ahead and had
reserved berths for us on one of the steamers.
After taking leave of my friends I was still full of hope and
ambition. My mother in vain tried to share my feelings; she could not
avoid painful misgivings. As for me, I wanted to think only of the
good things that awaited, and to forget all the past annoyances.
During the voyage an evening entertainment was organised for
the benefit of the seamen and I agreed to dance. A stage was
arranged by the bridge. There with the sea for a background and
with the coloured lights used for signalling as the media of
illumination, I tried for the first time a series of new dances, each with
a special gown.
The enthusiasm of passengers and crew knew no bounds and I
felt that I had taken my first step in the conquest of a new world.
We landed in Germany. My manager came to meet us and took
us to Berlin. But, to my great annoyance, I found that I was not to
make my initial appearance for a month, and I could not discover in
what city I was to make it.
That meant a month of inactivity.
Finally I learned that I was to make my debut, not at the Opera as
my manager had promised, but in a music hall. The Opera was
closed, and the music hall was the only place where I could dance.
In that event I would dance only my first dance and would exhibit
only a single gown, just as I had done in New York. I then chose
three of my numbers and prepared myself for my appearance. But
this debut was made without personal interest. In America the best
theatres offered me engagements on much better terms than those I
had to accept in Europe. In Berlin I was obliged to appear where my
New York manager wished. If, before signing the contract, he had
told me where I should have to dance I should have declined. But
when the time for my appearance was at hand I was without
resources and quite at his mercy. To cap the climax my mother fell
seriously ill.
At the time of which I am writing cholera had just broken out at
Hamburg. My mother’s illness came on so suddenly that it was
thought she was stricken with cholera. Everybody at the hotel was
frightened, and we were obliged to take my poor mother to the
cholera hospital.
All these circumstances, conjoined with frightfully trying weather,
put me in bad shape for the struggle. I renounced everything, my
pride, my highest hopes, and I started in assiduously to gain our
livelihood. But I was disabled and without courage.
After a month my German manager informed me he did not care
to continue my contract. He was going back to the United States with
a company that he had come for the express purpose of engaging in
Germany. It seemed clear to me that his only motive in bringing me
to Europe had been to procure the means with which to engage this
new company and take it back with him. He travelled with his wife, a
pretty American woman, who had become a close friend of mine,
and who reproached him most bitterly on my account.
Our manager left Berlin with his company, leaving me with only
just enough money to pay my bills at the hotel when I had completed
the contract that held me to the music hall in Berlin. I then had
absolutely no engagement in sight. I learned that he was getting ten
thousand marks—about $2,500—a month for me. And yet he had
given me only about $300 a month. What was I to do? My
appearance in Berlin had been deplorable and was likely to have an
unfortunate influence on my whole career in Europe. My purse was
empty, my mother ill. We had not the slightest hope of an
engagement and we had no one to help us.
A theatrical agent, an unknown man at that time, who has since
become a theatrical manager, Mr. Marten Stein, came to see me,
and I tried to continue at the music hall where I was dancing. I was
obliged to make concessions to keep going a week or two more, to
get money enough to go away and to look for a new engagement. I
kept thinking more than ever of Paris. If I could only go there!
In these circumstances Mr. Marten Stein secured for me a dozen
performances in one of the beer gardens at Altona, the well-known
pleasure resort near Hamburg. I earned there several hundred
marks, which allowed us to go to Cologne, where I had to dance in a
circus between an educated donkey and an elephant that played the
organ. My humiliation was complete. Since then, however, occasions
have not been lacking when I have realised that the proximity of
trained horses and music-mad elephants is less humiliating than
intercourse with some human beings.

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Alexander the Great from Britain to

Southeast Asia: Peripheral Empires in

Alexander the Great

for permission to reuse earlier work. An earlier version of Chapter 9 appeared as

List of Maps and Figures xi

Introduction: Intimate Strangers—Peripheries in Global Literary Networks 1

Part II. Invocations

Timeline of Texts and Events 343

List of Maps and Figures

xii List of Maps and Figures

4.1 Miniature of Aristotle instructing Alexander the Great, from

2 Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia

Instead of absolute alterity, the Portuguese found commensurability in shared literary

Introduction: Intimate Strangers 3

­ istories”—Sanjay Subrahmanyan’s term to refer to “supra-local connections,” wherein

4 Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia

Introduction: Intimate Strangers 5

Introduction: Intimate Strangers 7

8 Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia

Competing exegeses, whether of Dhū’lqarnayn’s identity as Persian or Greek, or of

Introduction: Intimate Strangers 9

10 Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia

Introduction: Intimate Strangers 11

a manuscript on each ship.28 Other Southeast Asian manuscripts were similarly

12 Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia

Introduction: Intimate Strangers 13

This combination is strikingly brought together by Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, interested

Chaucer’s Criseyde’s expression of perplexity in the linguistic borrowing is the earliest

14 Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia

I N 1890 I was on a tour in London with my mother. A manager

A LITTLE while after my appearance at the Madison Square

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istories”—Sanjay Subrahmanyan’s term to refer to “supra-local connections,” wherein