Travel and Drama in Shakespeare's TimeJean-Pierre Maquerlot, Michèle Willems 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 from five countries use historical enquiry and textual analysis to offer new 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 like The Travels of the Three English Brothers by Day, Rowley and Wilkins, Daborne's A Christian Turn'd Turk or Fletcher and Massinger's The Sea-Voyage. 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. Several chapters identify the various discourses which inform contemporary travel documents. The authors of these chapters clarify the cultural codes which travel narratives place between the reader and the supposed eyewitness. The readings of drama and travel literature are grounded firmly in the period for which they were written, and take into account the preconceptions and perceptions of their original public. |
Contents
1 Introduction | 1 |
the Sherley brothers and the voyage of Persia | 14 |
Elizabethan perceptions of Ireland | 32 |
4 The Elizabethans in Italy | 55 |
5 Tragic form and the voyagers | 75 |
6 Nationality and language in Thomas Kyds The Spanish Tragedy | 87 |
7 Marlowes Argonauts | 106 |
8 Pirates and turning Turk in Renaissance drama | 124 |
9 The wrong end of the telescope | 141 |
Other editions - View all
Travel and Drama in Shakespeare's Time Jean-Pierre Maquerlot,Michèle Willems No preview available - 2006 |
Travel and Drama in Shakespeare's Time Jean-Pierre Maquerlot,Michèle Willems No preview available - 2006 |
Common terms and phrases
Amazons America Anthony Sherley Antonio apprentice Argonauts Ariel audience Caliban Cambridge Cannibals Chorus Christian Christian Turn'd Turk civilized colonial comedy contrast Coryate court critical cultural Daborne's death discourse discovery Doctor Faustus dramatic dramatist Eastward Eastward Ho edition Elizabethan England essay European gold Golden Fleece Hakluyt Hamlet hath Heywood's honour Ibid Indians Ireland Irish island Italian Italy Jacobean James Jason John Jonson journey King Henry Kyd's land London Lope Lope's magic Marlowe Marlowe's masque Miranda myth narrative nature Persian piracy pirates play play's poem political Portugal Prospero Purchas Ralegh Renaissance Robert Robert Sherley savage scene seems seen servant Shakespeare ship shipwreck Sir Anthony Sir Pol Sir Thomas Soliman Spain Spanish Tragedy Spenser stage Stephen Orgel story suggest Sycorax Tamburlaine Tempest theatre theatrical thou Three English Brothers travel literature Tudor Turkish Utopia Venice Virginia voyage World Wotton writing