ABSTRACT
Travel in Shakespeare can mean a quest, a displacement, an exile and much else, and the exotic and the other can take many forms in William Shakespeare. There are traces of Asia, travel and the exotic in plays like The Merchant of Venice, Othello and The Tempest. This chapter examines how these traces operate and to what end. Sometimes when talking about Shakespeare, it is good to speak of Christopher Marlowe, a Cambridge-educated son of a Canterbury shoemaker, who was born in the same year as Shakespeare but died, murdered, when he was 29. Both Marlowe and Shakespeare represented other places in and on the way to Asia. Asia, Africa, Egypt and even Venice become exotic in the playwrights. The other becomes part of a geography of otherness, a geographical language that, in its diction, syntax, images and grammar, overwhelms and overreaches the very constraints of content and form.
