Early Modern Drama And The Eastern Europen Elsewhere

This study explores how Eastern European spaces and meanings are constituted in specific cultural contexts in early modern English drama. Focusing on the ways in which these texts integrate the articulation of Eastern European space and geography into a variety of interpretative conventions, the book develops ways of thinking critically and reflexively about the production of knowledge and identity in Shakespeare and his contemporaries through representations of space in drama.

This study integrates Renaissance texts of classical and early modern geography, cartography, and travel writing, and postmodern theory, to challenge the long-standing tradition of Eastern European space as a distant land of elsewhere and to demonstrate how contemporary modes of geographic thinking influenced aspects of English dramatic form. By examining the ways in which habits of thought derived from these texts informed Renaissance ideas about Eastern European space, this book shows how the threshold dividing the symbolic and the real is traversed and imagined as traversable. The study gives useful background on how Eastern European locations would have signified as marginal to early modern English audiences. Re-reading early modern texts ranging from geographic and travel accounts to the early modern drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, this study argues for a questioning and perspectival dimension of early modern subjectivity as fashioned by these texts, which emerges as enabling and compelling.

Matei-Chesnoiu examines the changing understanding of world geography in sixteenth-century England and the concomitant involvement of the London theatre in shaping a new perception of Western European space. Fresh readings are offered of Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, Middleton, Dekker, Massinger, Marston, and others.

Taking as its focus an age of transformational development in cartographic history, namely the two centuries between Columbus’s arrival in the New World and the emergence of the Scientific Revolution, this study examines how maps were employed as physical and symbolic objects by thinkers, writers and artists. It surveys how early modern people used the map as an object, whether for enjoyment or political campaigning, colonial invasion or teaching in the classroom. Exploring a wide range of literature, from educational manifestoes to the plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare, it suggests that the early modern map was as diverse and various as the rich culture from which it emerged, and was imbued with a whole range of political, social, literary and personal impulses. Intellectual and Imaginative Cartographies in Early Modern England, 1550-1700 will appeal to all those interested in the History of Cartography

The format of the book as a collection of case studies is designed to highlight the variety and plurality specific for the translation and circulation of Shakespeare in borderlands. As the essays do not only cover a spate of locations, but also a large swathe of time, they have been organized in a chronological order.

Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries explores the crucial role of Roman female characters in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. While much has been written on male characters in the Roman plays as well as on non-Roman women in early modern English drama, very little attention has been paid to the issues of what makes Roman women ‘Roman’ and what their role in those plays is beyond their supposed function as supporting characters for the male protagonists. Through the exploration of a broad array of works produced by such diverse playwrights as Samuel Brandon, William Shakespeare, Matthew Gwynne, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, Thomas May, and Nathaniel Richards under three such different monarchs as Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries contributes to a more precise assessment of the practices through which female identities were discussed in literature in the specific context of Roman drama and a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which accounts of Roman women were appropriated, manipulated and recreated in early modern England.

This collection offers an overview of the ways in which space has become relevant to the study of Shakespearean drama and theatre. It distinguishes various facets of space, such as structural aspects of dramatic composition, performance space and the evocation of place, linguistic, social and gendered spaces, early modern geographies, and the impact of theatrical mobility on cultural exchange and the material world. These facets of space are exemplified in individual essays. Throughout, the Shakespearean stage is conceived as a topological ‘node’, or interface between different times, places and people – an approach which also invokes Edward Soja’s notion of ‘Thirdspace’ to describe the blend between the real and the imaginary characteristic of Shakespeare’s multifaceted theatrical world. Part Two of the volume emphasises the theatrical mobility of Hamlet – conceptually from an anthropological perspective, and historically in the tragedy’s migrations to Germany, Russia and North America.