Mind-Travelling and Voyage Drama in Early Modern England (Early Modern Literature in History)

Early modern playgoers were avid consumers of voyage drama. When they entered the playhouse they engaged with the players in a collaborative form of mind-travelling, and the result was an experience of stage-travel that was predicated on pleasure. This book investigates the pleasures of vicarious travel in early modern England, treating playgoing as part of a playing system, wherein imaginative work is distributed across the various participants: playwright, player, the physical environment, technologies of the stage, and emphatically in this study, the playgoer. Drawing on a wide range of drama from across the entire seventeenth century, including works by Marlowe, Heywood, Jonson, Brome, Davenant, Dryden and Behn, it 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. Cover 1 Contents 10 Illustrations 12 Acknowledgements 13 Introduction 15 Voyage drama 21 Lost plays 24 Vicarious travel 25 The scholarship of sightseeing 27 1 The Wings of Active Thought 33 Instructions for travel, or ars apodemica 34 Mind-travelling 39 The imagination and ideal presence 48 Travelling at the theatre 52 2 Marlovian Models of Voyage Drama 65 The 'will to travel' in Marlovian drama 66 The playwright's travels in 'map and card' 71 Acting on knowledge: Faustus's journey 'to prove cosmography' 77 Fortunatus and the wishing hat 85 3 Morals, Manners, and Imagination: Jonson and Heywood 97 Jonson's moral imperative 98 Heywood and travel as a fantasy of escape 110 Staging travel in Heywood's plays 121 4 Therapeutic Travel in Richard Brome's The Antipodes 137 Jonsonian psychology and drama 138 Disdain for the familiar 140 Peregrine as mind-travelling reader 143 The stars change, the mind remains the same 146 'Mandeville madness' 152 5 Davenant, Saint-Évremond, Dryden, and the Ocular Dimension of Travel 159 Davenant and the effects of perspectival scenery on mind-travelling 161 Sightseeing and morality in Saint Évremond's Sir Politick Would-be 178 Dryden's aesthetics and the theatre-as-prospective-glass 184 6 Old Genres, New Worlds: Behn Domesticates the Exotic 196 Virginian customs and culture in The Widow Ranter 198 Women, marriage, and slaves 207 A domestic tragedy in the New World 217 Conclusion 224 Bibliography 228 Index 244 Front Matter....Pages i-xiii Introduction....Pages 1-18 The Wings of Active Thought....Pages 19-50 Marlovian Models of Voyage Drama....Pages 51-82 Morals, Manners, and Imagination: Jonson and Heywood....Pages 83-122 Therapeutic Travel in Richard Brome’s The Antipodes....Pages 123-144 Davenant, Saint-Évremond, Dryden, and the Ocular Dimension of Travel....Pages 145-181 Old Genres, New Worlds: Behn Domesticates the Exotic....Pages 182-209 Conclusion....Pages 210-213 Back Matter....Pages 214-236 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.