Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ForGED (Foreign Geographies in English Drama, c.1576-1660)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2022-02-01 al 2024-01-31
The overall objective of the project was to undertake a wide-ranging reassessment of how English drama from the 1570s to 1660 responded to burgeoning cultural interest in non-European geographies. My research explicates how English drama reflected cultural interest in and new forms of knowledge about distant geographical locations such as Africa, India, the Ottoman Empire, and the Americas. The project examined a key period for the development and rise of England’s national ambitions relating to trade, exploration, colonialisation, and imperialism. The focus on drama as an important site of cultural production has facilitated a better understanding of how this popular form of entertainment imaginatively engaged with ‘foreign’ and distant geographies. My analysis of a large body of plays written and performed between the 1570s and 1660 traces key developments in how distant geographical locations were invoked and represented, particularly with reference to the costuming of characters, cognitive and poetic figurations of space and place, and the possibilities afforded by different performance venues and theatrical repertories. The project is of importance to society because it shows how the historical, literary, and theatrical contexts of ‘foreign’, non-European geographies in this period inculcated racialised stereotypes and negative forms of thinking about cultural difference that prevail to this day.
The main elements of work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report include the study and critical analysis of English plays from 1576 to 1660 which are substantially set in non-English geographical locations, with a view to dissemination of results in scientific publications and an online database (in progress). The work also included archival research and analysis of other early modern primary sources (including travel narratives, atlases, navigational manuals, and geographical treatises), a review of existing scholarship on drama, space and place, overseas ventures, scholarship from premodern critical race studies. The results have so far been exploited and disseminated via a range of presentations and papers at international conferences and through scientific articles (in progress / under review). The articles respectively focus on technologies of the stage and imperial ambition in the ‘New World’, the feminization of distant geographies, and new evidence relating to a ‘lost’ public performance that my archival research has uncovered. The results will also be substantially exploited in a monograph tentatively entitled 'Distant Geographies in Early Modern English Drama'. This book will advance scholarly understandings of long-neglected non-canonical plays, covering a broader chronology than in available studies to date. Other work performed during the project included organising events, including a two-day international symposium at the University of Galway on the topic of ‘The Local and the Global in Early Modern English Writing’. No website has been developed for the project.
The project gives critical attention to many non-canonical plays that have been largely excluded from previous studies of space, place, foreignness, and representation of cultural and racial difference on the early modern stage, thereby widening critical understanding of early modern drama. My project’s contribution to the state of the art thus provides a much broader understanding of how English drama from the 1570s to 1660 responded to and was shaped by cultural interest in distant locations and the implications that this had for how English audiences encountered these locations in the theatre. The project outputs advance the current state of the art in the field of early modern English drama studies by moving beyond chronological and thematic limitations that have characterized many previous studies (e.g. those focused only on the works of single playwrights such as William Shakespeare, or a narrow selection of works by canonical dramatists). Important findings from archival research conducted during the project have enabled me to fill a gap in scholarly knowledge about early Jacobean performance culture by offering a discussion of primary evidence long overlooked by literary scholars (article currently under review).