Travel and Drama in Shakespeare's Time

Interconnections between voyage narratives and travel plays in Shakespeare's era.

Jean-Pierre Maquerlot (Edited by), Michèle Willems (Edited by)

9780521035149, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 14 December 2006

276 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.8 cm, 0.364 kg

This book explores interconnections between voyage narratives and travel plays in a period of intense foreign relations and the incipient colonization of the New World. Eminent Renaissance scholars use historical inquiry and textual analysis to offer readings of narrative and dramatic texts, envisaged both in the context of the period and from the far-reaching perspective of Britain's cultural history. Plays like The Spanish Tragedy, Doctor Faustus, Eastward Ho! or The Tempest - itself the subject of three chapters - are discussed alongside relatively obscure works. The plays are never approached as mere cultural documents. The underlying assumption is that the theatre is not reducible to a medium for conflicting ideologies but should be viewed as a privileged site of various meanings, of roads leading in several directions.

List of contributors
1. Introduction Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michèle Willems
2. Foreign relations in Jacobean England: the Sherley brothers and the 'voyage of Persia' Anthony Parr
3. 'The naked and the dead': Elizabethan perceptions of Ireland Andrew Hadfield
4. The Elizabethans in Italy Jonathan Bate
5. Tragic form and the voyagers Philip Edwards
6. Nationality and language in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy J. R. Mulryne
7. Marlowe's Argonauts Yves Peyré
8. Pirates and 'turning Turk' in Renaissance drama Lois Potter
9. The wrong end of the telescope Brian Gibbons
10. 'Travelling hopefully': the dramatic form of journeys in English Renaissance drama Peter Holland
11. 'Seeing things': Amazons and cannibals Michael Hattaway
12. Industrious Ariel and idle Caliban Andrew Gurr
13. The New World in The Tempest Leo Salingar
14. 'What's past is prologue': metatheatrical memory and transculturation in The Tempest Günter Walch
15. Lope de Vega and Shakespeare Kenneth Muir
Index.

Subject Areas: Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS]