The Absence of America

The London Stage, 1576-1642
Erscheinungsjahr 2015
ISBN: 978-0-19-873432-1
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 276 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 142 mm x 218 mm, Gewicht: 476 g

The Absence of America: the London Stage 1576â1642 examines why early modern drama's response to English settlement in the New World was muted, even though the so-called golden age of Shakespeare coincided with the so-called golden age of exploration: no play is set in the Americas; few plays treat colonization as central to the plot; a handful features Native American characters (most of whom are Europeans in disguise). However, advocates of colonialism in the seventeenth century denounced playing companies as enemies on a par with the Pope and the Devil. Instead of writing off these accusers as paranoid cranks, this book takes as its starting point the possibility that they were astute playgoers. By so doing we can begin to see the emergence of a "picture of America," and of the Virginia colony in particular, across a number of plays performed for London audiences: Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, The Staple of News, and his collaboration with Marston and Chapman, Eastward Ho!; Robert Greene's Orlando Furioso; Massinger's The City Madam; Massinger and Fletcher's The Sea Voyage; Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl; Shakespeare's The Tempest, and Fletcher and Shakespeare's Henry VIII. We can glean the significance of this picture, not only for the troubled Virginia Company, but also for London theater audiences. And we can see that the picture that was beginning to form was, as the anti-theatricalists surmised, often slanderous, condemnatory, and, as it were, anti-American.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hollis, Gavin

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Dramen und Dramatiker
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Introduction: "Where America? The Indies": London Theater and the New World

- Part I: Adventurers and Cannibals

- 1: The Devil, the Papist, the Player: the Virginia Company's Anti-theatricalism

- 2: Plantation and "the Powdered Wife": The Roaring Girl, Eastward Ho!, and The Sea Voyage

- Part II: Indians and Londoners

- 3: The Dead Indian: Virginians in The Memorable Masque, "The Triumph of Time," Henry VIII, and The Tempest of 1613

- 4: "He would not goe naked like the Indians, but cloathed just as one of our selves": Indian Disguise in The Historie of Orlando Furioso, The Fatal Marriage, and The City Madam

- Afterword: "Scene: Virginia": America and the Heroic Drama on the Restoration Stage

Über Autor(innen)

Gavin Hollis received his PhD in English Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is Assistant Professor at Hunter College CUNY specializing in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama. Originally from Great Britain, he also holds degrees from Cambridge University and the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham.