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Focusing on early modern plays that stage encounters between peoples of different cultures, this book asks how a sense of geographical location was created in early modern theatres that featured minimal scenery. While previous studies have stressed these plays’ connections to a historical Mediterranean in which England was increasingly involved, this book demonstrates how their dramatic geography was shaped through a literary and theatrical heritage. Reading canonical plays including The Merchant of Venice, The Jew of Malta, and The Tempest alongside lesser-known dramas such as Soliman and Perseda, Guy of Warwick, and The Travels of the Three English Brothers, Dramatic Geography illustrates, first, how early modern dramatists staging foreign worlds drew upon a romance tradition dating back to the medieval period, and second, how they responded to one another’s plays to create an ‘intertheatrical geography’. These strategies, the book argues, shape the plays’ wider meanings in important ways, and could only have operated within the theatrical environment peculiar to early modern London: one in which playwrights worked in close proximity, in one instance perhaps even living together while composing Mediterranean dramas, and one where they could expect audiences to respond to subtle generic and intertextual negotiations. In reassessing this group of plays, the book brings into conversation scholarship on theatre history, cultural encounter, and literary geography; it also contributes to current debates in early modern studies regarding the nature of dramatic authorship, the relationship between genre and history, and the continuities that run between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This book challenges the narrative of Shakespeare's ‘bare’ stage by looking at the ‘ground zero’ of early modern theatrical representation: the painted body of the actor. Organised as a series of studies and considering the impact of the materiality of stage properties on live performance, the four chapters of the book examine goldface and divinity in York's Corpus Christi play; bloodiness in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, including the unexpected use of blood as a disguise device; blackface performance within seventeenth-century court masques and in popular plays performed at the public playhouses; and finally whiteface, death, and stoniness in two King's Men plays of 1611. Not only did dramatists turn to paint to sustain a variety of theatrical illusions, they also strategically manipulated the multiple significations of this technology to create stage characters with complex effects of depth; allude to past and to contemporary performances; and thrill audiences by showcasing actors’ virtuoso transformations. Addressing current debates about the relationship between pre- and early modern subjectivity and embodiment, this book challenges the persistent notion that the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries was built predominantly around a new, ‘modern’ language of interiority. As a whole, the book questions the boundaries of the period categories ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’ by demonstrating important continuities in theatrical labour and theatrical materials from medieval cycle drama through to the popular and courtly drama of the 1630s.

Chaste Value reassesses chastity’s significance in early modern drama, arguing that presentations of chastity inform the stage’s production of early capitalist subjectivity and social difference. Plays invoke chastity—itself a quasi-commodity—to interrogate the relationship between personal and economic value. The economic imagery surrounding chastity ranges from romantic evocations of treasure to more quotidian references to usury, counterfeiting, and commodity exchange. Attending to such discourse in late Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, Chaste Value argues that representations of chastity (married fidelity as well as virginity) figure centrally within the early modern theatre’s interrogation of early capitalism, particularly with regard to the incorporation of people into commercial exchange. Through chastity discourse, the stage disrupts pre-capitalist ideas of intrinsic value while also reallocating such value according to emerging hierarchies of gender, race, class, and nationality. Chastity, therefore, emerges as a central category within early articulations of humanity, determining who possesses intrinsic value and, conversely, whose bodies and labour can be incorporated into market exchange.

This book examines why early modern drama’s response to English settlement in the New World was muted, even though the so-called golden age of Shakespeare coincided with the so-called golden age of exploration: no play is set in the Americas; few plays treat colonization as central to the plot; and a handful feature Native American characters (most of whom are Europeans in disguise). However, advocates of colonialism in the seventeenth century denounced playing companies as enemies on a par with the Pope and the Devil. Instead of writing off these accusers as paranoid cranks, this book takes as its starting point the possibility that they were astute playgoers. By so doing we can begin to see the emergence of a “picture of America,” and of the Virginia colony in particular, across a number of plays performed for London audiences: Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, The Staple of News, and his collaboration with Marston and Chapman, Eastward Ho!; Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso; Massinger’s The City Madam; Massinger and Fletcher’s The Sea Voyage; Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl; Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Fletcher and Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. We can glean the significance of this picture, not only for the troubled Virginia Company, but also for London theater audiences. And we can see that the picture that was beginning to form was, as the anti-theatricalists surmised, often slanderous, condemnatory, and, as it were, anti-American.

What happens when Chaucer turns up where we don’t expect him to be? Transporting Chaucer draws on the work of the British sculptor Antony Gormley alongside more traditional literary scholarship to show that Chaucer’s play with textual history and chronological time prefigures how his poetry becomes incorporate with later (and earlier) texts. The shuttling of bodies, names, and sounds in and amongst works that Chaucer did write anticipates Chaucerian presences in later (and earlier) works that he did not. Chaucer’s characters, including ‘himself’ refuse to stay put in one place and time. This book bypasses the chronological borders of literary succession to read The Canterbury Tales and Chaucer’s Dream Vision poetry in present company with Chaucerian ‘apocrypha’, and works by Shakespeare, Davenant and Dryden. Conventional models of source and analogue study are re-energised to reveal unexpected (and sometimes unsettling) literary cohabitations and re-placements. Transporting Chaucer presents innovative readings of relationships between medieval texts and early modern drama, and between literary texts and material culture. Associations between medieval architecture, pilgrim practice, manuscript illustration, and the soundscapes of dramatic performance reposition how we read Chaucer’s oeuvre and what gets made of it. Written for scholars and students (undergraduate and graduate) who work in medieval English literary studies and early modern drama, Transporting Chaucer offers a new approach to how we encounter texts through time.

Hamlet’s Moment reveals how plays written in the first decade of the seventeenth century were shaped by forms of professional political knowledge and the social promises such knowledge held. This argument presupposes that there was such a thing as a political profession, however loosely understood: that there was a career path associated with political employment that was assumed to be a means to social advancement, and that there was a recognizable body of knowledge and mode of thinking defining it. To illustrate this, the first half of the book focuses on Hamlet and its reflection on the conditions of political employment, the education and intellectual work required for advancement in political careers, and the characteristics of a politic style, arguing that in Shakespeare’s play, drama turns from open, military conflict to diplomacy and court policy, and from the public contestation of power to the technologies of government. The second half of the book turns to plays that follow in the wake of Shakespeare’s path-breaking tragedy. Plays written by Ben Jonson, John Marston, George Chapman and others invited the public to imagine what it meant to have a political career. In doing so, they transformed political knowledge into a more broadly useful type of cultural capital, something even people without political agency could deploy in conversation and use. The book suggests that the demand for this social asset was a driving force behind the burgeoning public discussion of the seventeeth century, and thus, behind the rise of the modern public sphere.