Travel and Drama in Early Modern England

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.

“'Travel and Drama in Early Modern England manages to be at once unified and multifocal.' Cecilia Lindskog Whiteley, Notes and Queries”

'… this important volume presents a broad discussion about travel on the early modern stage, fittingly for a subject that evoked such different emotions and was an emblem for so many different things.' Cecilia Lindskog Whiteley, Notes and Queries
'Travel and Drama in Early Modern England adds significantly to ongoing conversations on travel and its dramatic afterlives during the age of exploration.' Amrita Sen, Renaissance Quarterly
'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
'… a fascinating study that will be of use to scholars and students working on a variety of topics, from city comedy to the trope of the colonial 'encounter', and indeed, as the contributors show, the gap between these two examples is rarely wide.' Laura Seymour, Sixteenth Century Journal

Claire Jowitt is Associate Dean for Research in Arts and Humanities and Professor of English and History at the University of East Anglia. She is author of Voyage Drama and Gender Politics, 1589–1642 (2003) and The Culture of Piracy: English Literature and Seaborne Crime 1580–1630 (2010). David McInnis is the Gerry Higgins Senior Lecturer in Shakespeare Studies at the University of Melbourne. He is author of Mind-Travelling and Voyage Drama in Early Modern England (2011) and co-editor (with Matthew Steggle) of Lost Plays in Shakespeare's England (2014).

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