Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time

This book explores interconnections between voyage narratives and travel plays in a period of intense foreign relations and the incipient colonisation of the New World. Eminent Renaissance scholars use historical inquiry and textual analysis to offer new readings of narrative and dramatic texts, envisaged both in the context of the period and from the far-reaching perspective of Britain’s cultural history. Plays like The Spanish Tragedy, Doctor Faustus, Eastward Ho! or The Tempest - itself the subject of three chapters - are discussed alongside relatively obscure works. The plays are never approached as mere cultural documents. The underlying assumption is that the theatre is not reducible to a medium for conflicting ideologies but should be viewed as a privileged site of various meanings, of roads leading in several directions.