Awards

• Winner of Shortlisted for the Shakespeare's Globe Book Award 2016.

Overview

The Absence of America: the London Stage 1576â1642 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; a handful features 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.

Full Product Details

9780198734321

Table of Contents

Reviews

The Absence of America stands out as one of the past year's most critically sophisticated studies ... the series will quickly establish itself as the home of our field's most innovative scholarship on issues of space, place, and environment. Kevin Curran, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

'[T]his book is an impressive first in a new series entitled 'Early Modern Literary Geographies'. It contains many beautiful illustrations[...] and its structure of clearly signposted and digestible parts ensures that this text - full of detail and vivid imagery - is easily navigable. Hollis has made a perceptive new departure on a topic that has in recent years, as he acknowledges, stagnated [...] Hollis brings something fresh to the exploration of representations of America on the early modern stage. --Misha Ewen, History

Author Information

Gavin Hollis received his PhD in English Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is Assistant Professor at Hunter College CUNY specializing in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama. Originally from Great Britain, he also holds degrees from Cambridge University and the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available