“Shakespeare’s Cathayans: Twelfth Night, maritime exchange, and early modern China,” Notes and Queries 70, no. 4 (2023): 254–9.

Rhema Hokama, “Shakespeare’s Cathayans: Twelfth Night, maritime exchange, and early modern China,” Notes and Queries 70, no. 4 (2023): 254–9.

I intend to demonstrate that extant editorial glosses of Shakespeare’s use of the term Cathayan in Twelfth Night have incorrectly attributed a moralizing valence to the term that reflects a misunderstanding of how Ming dynasty China’s policies regarding international maritime exchange would have been understood by European traders in the sixteenth century. Shakespeare uses the term Cathayan only twice in his oeuvre—once in in The Merry Wives of Windsor and once in Twelfth Night. In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare references the Cathayans in an exchange between the serving woman Maria and the buffoonish Sir Toby Belch—uncle to the lady Olivia, who has repeatedly rejected her suitors’ advances as she mourns her brother’s recent death. At Olivia’s request, Maria chastises Toby for his drunken brawling; her reprimand elicits a puzzling retort from Toby about his niece:

MARIA

What a caterwauling do you keep here! If my lady have not called up her steward Malvolio and bid him turn you out of doors, never trust me.

SIR TOBY

My lady’s a Cathayan, we are politicians.1

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