Colonial Failure and Theatrical Form in Early Modern England
Stages of Unsettlement
Series: Early Modern Literary Geographies;
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP Oxford
- Date of Publication 30 October 2025
- ISBN 9780198969419
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages272 pages
- Size 223x145x20 mm
- Weight 495 g
- Language English 633
Categories
Short description:
Colonial Failure and Theatrical Form in Early Modern England shows how popular English dramatists such as William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson took inspiration from early records of England's American conquest.
MoreLong description:
Colonial Failure and Theatrical Form in Early Modern England shows how early modern English dramatists preserved and instrumentalized the early history of England's failed conquests of the Americas in the formal techniques they used to stage fictional worlds. Scholars have long noted that early English drama was interested in representing colonial ventures, largely emphasizing references, themes, or settings as evidence for this engagement.
Through an analysis of the technical features of early English commercial drama, this book establishes that popular Renaissance dramatists such as William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton were also sourcing new theatrical tools from contemporary records of colonial failure, recognizing in them a set of techniques for representing geographic disorientation, strandedness, and confusion. During a time when theater's foundational technologies - prop, person, line, and scene - were themselves undergoing a formal transformation, dramatists turned to the narrative and spatial incoherence of these settler accounts, their uncoupling of the link between representation (what is shown) and presentation (how it is shown), as a resource for highlighting the interpretive challenges these changing conventions posed. By demonstrating that popular drama's development was deeply imprinted by the history and textual legacy of England's colonial conquests, not only as setting or theme but as form, this book radically expands the archive of plays that we could call “New World dramas,” allowing plays that don't appear to be “about” colonialism to be understood as borrowing from the rhetorical or narrative structure of colonial texts. Stages of Unsettlement proves that the expansion of the English stage into new settings cannot be understood apart from the colonial strategies for representing place that informed these representations.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Failures of Reading, Readings of Failure
"To Occupy Down by the Great Waters"
An Uncommonplace: Richard Hakluyt, the Americas, and the Common Reader
Metonymic Possession in Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine
"This Island's Mine"
Seasoned Settlers in Ben Jonson's City Comedies
Stagewreck in William Shakespeare's The Tempest
"Those Instruments That Delved Them Out of the Earth"
Stagework in the Lord Mayor's Show, 1611–1627
Coda: Settlement's Futures
