Overview

Focusing on early modern plays which 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 volume 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 how early modern dramatists staging foreign worlds drew upon a romance tradition dating back to the medieval period, and how they responded to one another's plays to create an 'intertheatrical geography'. These strategies 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, Laurence Publicover brings into conversation scholarship on theatre history, cultural encounter, and literary geography; the book 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.

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9780191844362

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Reviews

""This is an important book on the geographies of Early Modern English drama that is long overdue. It is beautifully, at times even movingly, written. It includes some stunning exegeses of individual plays [...] This book offers some of the best intertextual reading I have seen since David Quint's Epic and Empire. [...] Publicover brings this most difficult of all hermeneutic practices with pathbreaking originality to the dramatic canon. The second section of the book, in which he reads Shakespeare reading Marlowe reading Kyd, is a tour de force. I don't know of anyone else in the field who can do what Publicover can do, and it was a pleasure being led by him through a London theater world haunted with recollections of its own past performances. [...] Dramatic Geography is a magnificent accomplishment. It has left me inspired and even a little shaken. This is exactly what the best literary criticism should accomplish."" --Prof. John Watkins, University of Minnesota

This is an important book on the geographies of Early Modern English drama that is long overdue. It is beautifully, at times even movingly, written. It includes some stunning exegeses of individual plays [...] This book offers some of the best intertextual reading I have seen since David Quint's Epic and Empire. [...] Publicover brings this most difficult of all hermeneutic practices with pathbreaking originality to the dramatic canon. The second section of the book, in which he reads Shakespeare reading Marlowe reading Kyd, is a tour de force. I don't know of anyone else in the field who can do what Publicover can do, and it was a pleasure being led by him through a London theater world haunted with recollections of its own past performances. [...] Dramatic Geography is a magnificent accomplishment. It has left me inspired and even a little shaken. This is exactly what the best literary criticism should accomplish. --Prof. John Watkins, University of Minnesota

Author Information

Laurence Publicover, Lecturer in English, University of Bristol Laurence Publicover studied at the University of Oxford and the University of Bristol, receiving his PhD in 2010. He worked for two years at the University of Leeds before returning to Bristol, where he is now Lecturer in English. His research and teaching focus on early modern drama and on the sea in literature and culture from the classical period to the present day. He has published articles in several major journals, including Essays in Criticism and Renaissance Studies, and has coedited a special edition of Cahiers Elisabethains entitled 'Space on the Early Modern Stage'.

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