Colonial failure and theatrical form in early modern England : stages of unsettlement / Caro Pirri.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pirri, Caro, author.

Series:

Early modern literary geographies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Colonies in literature.

Imperialism in literature.

English drama--Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600--History and criticism.

English drama.

English drama--History and criticism.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource : illustrations.

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxford University Press, [2025]

Summary:

"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." -- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Cover

Colonial Failure and Theatrical Form in Early Modern England : Stages of Unsettlement

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Settlement and Unsettlement

Unsettled Theatricality and the Theatricality of Unsettlement

PART I: 'To Occupy Down by the Great Waters': Navigation and Conquest, 1589-1600

1: Hakluyt, the Americas, and the Common Reader: Navigation and Conquest, 1589-1600

Great Travails in Little Rooms: Hakluyt's Commonplaces

Monuments and Fragments

Travels and Travails

Magical Props and Imagined Passages

Metonymic Possession and Arctic Conquest

Tamburlaine's Metonymic Possessions

Dispossession and Repossession

'Discourse of a Discoverie'

'This Island's Mine'

2: Metonymic Possession in ChristopherMarlowe's Tamburlaine

Magical Props and Imagined Passages

Metonymic Possession and Arctic Conquest

PART II: 'THIS ISLAND'S MINE'Conquest and Settlement, 1599-1611

3: Seasoned Settlers in Ben Jonson's City Comedies: Conquest and Settlement, 1599-1611

'Respectless Courses' in Every Man In His Humour

Humoring the Americas

Jonson's New World Humors

'Perj'rous Air' in Every Man Out of His Humour

Jonson's American London

4: Stagewreck in William Shakespeare's The Tempest

'We Split, We Split!': Getting Lost in Shakespeare

Insular Theatricality

Prospero's Wooden O

Unsettling The Tempest

PART III: 'THOSE INSTRUMENTS THATDELVED THEM OUT OFTHE EARTH': Imagining Settler Futures, 1611-1627

5: Stagework in the Lord Mayor's Show, 1611-1627: Imagining Settler Futures, 1611-1627

Emblematic Theatricality in the Lord Mayor's Show

Working the Americas

New World Labour on the Early Modern Stage

Coda

Bibliography

General and Name Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource and publisher information; title from PDF title page (viewed on November 12, 2025).

Other Format:

Print version :

ISBN:

9780198969402

0198969406

OCLC:

1527036772

Publisher Number:

CIPO000257187

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license