Travel and Drama in Early Modern England
The Journeying Play

Offers new ways to conceptualize the relationship between early modern travel and drama, and re-assesses how travel drama is defined.

Claire Jowitt (Edited by), David McInnis (Edited by)

9781108471183, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 11 October 2018

284 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.54 kg

'This fascinating collection offers an insightful analysis of the uses and representations of travel on the early modern stage.' Jennifer Cryar, The Year's Work in English Studies

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.

Introduction: understanding the early modern journeying play Claire Jowitt and David McInnis
1. 'For his travailes let the Globe witnesse': venturing on the stage in early modern England Anthony Parr
2. Seeing and overseeing the stage as map in Early Modern drama Ladan Niayesh
3. Marlowe's Mediterranean and counter-epic forms of oceanic hybridity Steve Mentz
4. Making the land known: Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 and the literature of perambulation Julie Sanders
5. Eastward Ho and the traffic of the stage Andrew Gordon
6. Language and seafaring in Thomas Middleton and John Webster's Anything for a Quiet Life Marianne Montgomery
7. Rogue cosmopolitans on the Early Modern stage: John Ward, Thomas Stukeley, and the Sherley brothers Daniel Vitkus
8. Drama at sea: a new look at Shakespeare on the Dragon, 1607–8 Richmond Barbour and Bernhard Klein
9. Strange bedfellows: the ordinary undersides of 'a true reportory' and The Tempest Emily C. Bartels
10. Travelling characters in early modern drama David McInnis
11. 'Constant changelings', theatrical form, and migration: stage travel in the early 1620s Clare McManus
12. The uses of cultural encounter in Sir William Davenant's Caroline-to-Restoration voyage drama Claire Jowitt.

Subject Areas: Travel writing [WTL], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Shakespeare plays [DDS], Literature & literary studies [D]