A Margarite of America by Thomas Lodge
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Overview: A Margarite of America was Thomas Lodge’s last work of imaginative writing, aptly described as a ‘horror novella.’ It was composed while the author was on a privateering voyage to South America with Sir Thomas Cavendish (1555–92), written, according to his own testimony, while sailing through the Straits of Magellan, where ‘many wondrous isles, many strange fishes, many monstrous Patagones with drew my senses.’ A reader unfamiliar with the Italianate horror fictions of Matteo Bandello and Cinthio, not to mention recent English works such as Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller or Robert Greene’s Planetomachia, might suppose that the circumstances of Cavendish’s failed and dreadful colonialist voyage do much to account for the generally dark tone of this curious work. But as Donald Beecher points out in his thorough and helpful introduction, Lodge needed to look no further than the traditional sources of Renaissance romance which he had drawn on already for earlier fictions, the growing body of Elizabethan romance, including of course Arcadia, and Senecan style revenge tragedy such as the recent Titus Andronicus, for imaginative inspiration. He also drew extensively on motifs and characters from his own earlier works, such as the villain-hero in Robert, Second Duke of Normandy, and the suffering lady in The Complaint of Elstred. Despite critical attempts to capitalize on the work’s title to connect it with the New World and colonization, Beecher is convincing in his view that the Margarite ‘is merely the romance brought back from America because found or written there,’ and the heroine, always called Margarita, has no American associations, but belongs entirely to the Europe of romance. Along with invented place-names such as Volgradia, Tamirah and Macarah, there are references to Macedonia, Moravia, various ancient classical locations, Hungaria, Bohemia, and ‘the deserts of Russia.’
Genre: Fiction > Sci-fi/Fantasy > Horror
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