The adventurous stage: Constructions of overseas endeavor in early modern English drama.

摘要

This dissertation explores early modern dramatic representations of overseas travel and considers how the stage advanced and shaped notions of outward expansion as well as a range of new subjectivities, especially that of an increasingly confident “middle class.” In my examination of a range of late sixteenth and early seventeenth century plays featuring foreign adventure I use a feminist and historicist methodology to consider this literature in relation to England's overseas commercial expansion as well as emerging nationalism, the growing “middle class,” and changing ideologies of race and gender. I suggest that, like Hakluyt's Voyages and Discoveries , this drama is “proleptic,” as it anticipates England's overseas growth (both commercial and imperial), and so helps to precipitate and advance these processes in the social realm. This productive function is shared by other contemporary travel works, but drama, in particular, advances this development at a popular level. This is perhaps most true of “adventure plays,” the well-liked and boisterous dramas performed in outdoor theaters such as the Rose, plays in which middling sorts had leading roles. Travel dramas thus provide more than just a forward thrust to English overseas endeavor, they also play a significant role in shaping new subjectivities and ideologies. In my readings of plays from the 1580s to the 1620s, I explore both dramatic content and representational form, analyzing subject matter alongside discursive strategy. In the latter regard, I am especially interested in the manner in which a social group's appropriations of another's values—such as occurs with merchant chivalry—performs important cultural work in helping an emerging “class” establish a foothold, as well as the various responses to this representational borrowing.