Voyage Drama And Gender Politics 1589 1642

The interest in aesthetics in Philosophy, Literary and Cultural Studies is growing rapidly. 'The new aestheticism' contains exemplary essays by key practitioners in these fields which demonstrate the importance of this area of enquiry.

Early modern scholarship often reads the dramatic representations of the Muslim woman in the light of postcolonial identity politics, which sees an organic relationship between the West’s historical domination of the East and the Western discourse on the East. This book problematizes the above trajectory by arguing that the assumption of a power relation between a dominating West and a subordinate East cannot be sustained within the context of the political and historical realities of early modern Europe. The Ottoman Empire remained as a dominant superpower throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was perceived by Protestant England both as a military and religious threat and as a possible ally against Catholic Spain. Reading a series of early modern plays from Marlowe to Beaumont and Fletcher alongside a number of historical sources and documents, this book re-interprets the image of Islamic femininity in the period’s drama to reflect this overturn in the world’s power balances, as well as the intricate dynamics of England’s intensified contact with Islam in the Mediterranean.

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England is an international volume published annually. Each volume contains essays and studies by critics and cultural historians from both hemispheres as well as substantial reviews of books and essays dealing with medieval and early modern English drama before 1642. Volume 19 reflects a variety of scholarly interests. The collection opens with two essays - each exploring different aspects of John Webster and James Shirley - that further our understanding of attribution studies. One essay - on the ownership of the Bell Savage Playhouse - showcases MaRDiE's ongoing interest in early playhouses, while another - on Marston's Entertainment at Ashby - addresses performance history. Two further essays discuss issues related to stage costuming. Issues of actual identity are raised in an essay concerning John Lyly's biography, while two other authors probe the complex connections between drama and economics. William Rowley's All Lost by Lust becomes the centerpiece for a reassessment of rape tragedy. S. P. Cerasano is the Edgar W. B. Fairchild Professor of Literature at Colgate University.

Drawing on a wide range of drama from across the seventeenth century, including works by Marlowe, Heywood, Jonson, Brome, Davenant, Dryden and Behn, this book situates voyage drama in its historical and intellectual context between the individual act of reading in early modern England and the communal act of modern sightseeing.

This book provides an insight to the cultural work involved in violence at sea in this period of maritime history. It is the first to consider how 'piracy' and representations of 'pirates' both shape and were shaped by political, social and religious debates, showing how attitudes to 'piracy' and violence at sea were debated between 1550 and 1650.

Offers new ways to conceptualize the relationship between early modern travel and drama, and re-assesses how travel drama is defined.

This edited collection examines the meeting points between travel, mobility, and conflict to uncover the experience of travel – whether real or imagined – in the early modern world. Until relatively recently, both domestic travel and voyages to the wider world remained dangerous undertakings. Physical travel, whether initiated by religious conversion and pilgrimage, diplomacy, trade, war, or the desire to encounter other cultures, inevitably heralded disruption: contact zones witnessed cultural encounters that were not always cordial, despite the knowledge acquisition and financial gain that could be reaped from travel. Vast compendia of travel such as Hakluyt’s Principla Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries, printed from the late sixteenth century, and Prévost's Histoire Générale des Voyages (1746-1759) underscored European exploration as a marker of European progress, and in so doing showed the tensions that can arise as a consequence of interaction with other cultures. In focusing upon language acquisition and translation, travel and religion, travel and politics, and imaginary travel, the essays in this collection tease out the ways in which travel was both obstructed and enriched by conflict.

Listening to what she terms 'unruly pirate voices' in early modern English literature, in this study Claire Jowitt offers an original and compelling analysis of the cultural meanings of 'piracy'. By examining the often marginal figure of the pirate (and also the sometimes hard-to-distinguish privateer) Jowitt shows how flexibly these figures served to comment on English nationalism, international relations, and contemporary politics. She considers the ways in which piracy can, sometimes in surprising and resourceful ways, overlap and connect with, rather than simply challenge, some of the foundations underpinning Renaissance orthodoxies-absolutism, patriarchy, hierarchy of birth, and the superiority of Europeans and the Christian religion over other peoples and belief systems. Jowitt's discussion ranges over a variety of generic forms including public drama, broadsheets and ballads, prose romance, travel writing, and poetry from the fifty-year period stretching across the reigns of three English monarchs: Elizabeth Tudor, and James and Charles Stuart. Among the early modern writers whose works are analyzed are Heywood, Hakluyt, Shakespeare, Sidney, and Wroth; and among the multifaceted historical figures discussed are Francis Drake, John Ward, Henry Mainwaring, Purser and Clinton. What she calls the 'semantics of piracy' introduces a rich symbolic vein in which these figures, operating across different cultural registers and appealing to audiences in multiple ways, represent and reflect many changing discourses, political and artistic, in early modern England. The first book-length study to look at the cultural impact of Renaissance piracy, The Culture of Piracy, 1580-1630 underlines how the figure of the Renaissance pirate was not only sensational, but also culturally significant. Despite its transgressive nature, piracy also comes to be seen as one of the key mechanisms which served to connect peoples and regions during this period.