Mind-Travelling and Voyage Drama in Early Modern England (Early Modern Literature in History)
David McInnis
Language: English
Pages: 236
ISBN: 1137035358
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
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poysonous cup of the one, or tasteth of the sower liquor of the other, looseth the true rellish of religion and vertue, bringeth home a leprous soule, and a tainted body… (Bv) It is Justus Lipsius, however, whose reservations about travelling provide the greatest insight here. In claiming that it is easier to sin than to improve virtue, Lipsius intimates even more clearly than these other writers that temptation (and thus, by inference, pleasure) is ubiquitous in travel: we attaine vnto vertue,
Vatican, and his procuring of out of season grapes from across the world all please him as much as his travels. All these feats are manifestations of the protagonist’s desires, however ridiculous and petty. But these representations of Faustus’s whims can also be viewed as Marlowe’s metatheatrical meditation on drama’s gratification of audience desires. As Roger Sales notes of Faustus’s conjuration of the ‘merry Greek’: ‘It is a dumb show that strikes the students momentarily dumb with admiration
narrowly missing out on recognising Spencer en route, and ultimately landing at the Barbary Coast in search of water, where she is finally reunited with Spencer at the King of Fez’s court. Jean E. Howard claims that ‘[n]ot surprisingly in a post-Armada text, Fair Maid from its opening moments defines the English as the moral and religious antithesis of their great European rivals, the Spanish’ (‘English Lass’ 102). Whilst this is undoubtedly part of the story – the Chorus pointedly declares of
to the Jonsonian model, The Antipodes can be seen to engage with the psychology of travel and, more specifically, the pleasures of vicarious travel. Brome foregrounds travel tropes within the framework of Jonsonian comedy not merely for the sake of producing yet another entertaining quirk or eccentricity, but to examine the psychology of travel writing and critique the experiences of playgoers. Jonsonian psychology and drama Critics typically regard Brome’s play as belonging to a satiric
Mandeville’s Travels as his sacred text? Why Mandeville, and not other notable writers such as Richard Hakluyt, Münster, or Peter Martyr)? Why not Drake, Cavendish, Hawkins, or Frobisher (all examples that Peregrine himself provides)? One answer is that an interest in Mandeville signals an interest in the literariness of travel writing, for Mandeville was not a genuine traveller. We now know (and it is very probable that Brome, too, knew) that, unlike these other writers, the furthest Mandeville
