Travel and Drama in Early Modern England

The Journeying Play

Claire Jowitt, David McInnis

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781108471183
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108623803
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This agenda-setting volume on travel and drama in early modern England provides new insights into Renaissance stage practice, performance history, and theatre's transnational exchanges. It advances our understanding of theatre history, drama's generic conventions, and what constitutes plays about travel at a time when the professional theatre was rapidly developing and England was attempting to announce its presence within a global economy. Recent critical studies have shown that the reach of early modern travel was global in scope, and its cultural consequences more important than narratives that are dominated by the Atlantic world suggest. This collection of essays by world-leading scholars redefines the field by expanding the canon of recognized plays concerned with travel. Re-assessing the parameters of the genre, the chapters offer fresh perspectives on how these plays communicated with their audiences and readers.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title page
• Imprints page
• Contents
• List of Figure
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Understanding the Early Modern Journeying Play
• 1 ‘For his Travailes let the Globe witnesse’: Venturing on the Stage in Early Modern England
• 2 Seeing and Overseeing the Stage as Map in Early Modern Drama
• 3 Marlowe’s Mediterranean and Counter­Epic Forms of Oceanic Hybridity
• 4 Making the Land Known: Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 and the Literature of Perambulation
• 5 Eastward Ho and the Traffic of the Stage
• 6 Language and Seafaring in Thomas Middleton and John Webster’s Anything for a Quiet Life
• 7 Rogue Cosmopolitans on the Early Modern Stage: John Ward, Thomas Stukeley, and the Sherley Brothers
• 8 Drama at Sea: A New Look at Shakespeare on the Dragon, 1607-08
• 9 Strange Bedfellows: The Ordinary Undersides of ‘A True Reportory’ and The Tempest
• 10 Travelling Characters in Early Modern Drama
• 11 ‘Constant Changelings’, Theatrical Form, and Migration: Stage Travel in the Early 1620s
• 12 The Uses of Cultural Encounter in Sir William Davenant’s Caroline-to-Restoration Voyage Drama
• Bibliography
• Index