Travel and Drama in Early Modern England: The Journeying Play - Hardcover

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.

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).