David McInnis

Mind-Travelling and Voyage Drama in Early Modern England

Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Introduction The Wings of Active Thought Marlovian Models of Voyage Drama Morals, Manners, and Imagination: Jonson and Heywood Therapeutic Travel in Richard Bromes The Antipodes Davenant, Saint-Evremond, Dryden and the Ocular Dimension of Travel Old Genres, New Worlds: Behn Domesticates the Exotic Conclusion Works Cited Index

Therapeutic Travel in Richard Brome's The Antipodes

The matters explored in the preceding chapters — the concept of mind-travelling at the theatre and the staging of voyage drama — are addressed most explicitly in Richard Brome’s Caroline comedy The Antipodes (1636–38). The play revolves around the ironically named Peregrine, who unlike his Jonsonian namesake (the veteran traveller of Volpone) has yet to undertake any peregrinations, but has since ‘tender years’ always ‘loved to read / Reports of travels and of voyages’ and been consumed with ‘travelling thoughts’ (1.1.131–2 and 124). Peregrine’s monomaniac obsession with travel writing (his ‘humour’) leads to antisocial behaviour and complete estrangement from his wife. With Peregrine’s wanderlust diagnosed as mental illness, the characters Letoy and Doctor Hughball devise a proto-psychotherapeutic plan to ‘soothe him into’s wits’ through the elaborate charade of staging an imaginary voyage to the Antipodes (4.401). Peregrine, whose life is focused exclusively on his desire to travel, is explicitly identified as an armchair traveller; he thus forms a contrast with Faustus, who enjoyed actual travel as one of many indulgences made possible by his infernal pact. Benevolently duped by players who exploit his desire to travel, Brome’s character can be taken as representative of the members of the audience.

Repetition and Revision in Shakespeare's Tragic Love Plays

Shakespeares cynical handling of tragic love in Troilus and Cressida (1602) has confounded critics, given the tenderness of its precursor – Chaucers medieval romance. However, six years before Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare had already experimented with tragic love (Romeo and Juliet, 1596). Significantly, Shakespeare used precisely the same source for this earlier experiment (Ann Thompson has identified Chaucer as a subsidiary source for Romeo and Juliet). Analyzing instances in Troilus and Cressida in which Shakespeare recycled and revised those motifs from Chaucer which he had already used in Romeo and Juliet helps ascertain whether previous uses of Chaucerian material affected Shakespeares reuse of it in the later, darker play.

Humoral Theory as an Organizing Principle in Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind"?

vision of how liberty had been established in England through the actions of “gathering men” stressed that history was a process. Thomson was confident that if liberty were threatened, the same forces that had first freed people could and would act again in the present and future. The restoration of liberty, like the return of spring, would take its natural course. However cloying Thomson’s sentimentalism might seem to a jaded observer today, in the gloom of 1819 it was a bulwark against despair. The echo of gathering suggests that Keats let himself be persuaded that the autumn of political oppression and social injustice would be followed by a spring of liberation and the government by “the patriot-council, the full, / The free, and fairly represented whole.” If it was natural for the swallows to assemble without hindrance, then surely the people of England could do likewise, without being trampled and killed as they had been in Manchester.

Samuel Phelps’ Antony and Cleopatra in Australia: An Unrecorded Promptbook for Performance in Melbourne, 1856

ABSTRACT The University of Melbourne’s Baillieu Library holds an unrecorded and virtually unknown document related to Samuel Phelps’ landmark production of Antony and Cleopatra (Sadler’s Wells, 1849): a promptbook apparently marked up for a slated performance in Australia, bearing a half-title inscription that reads: “R. W. Younge / Theatre Royal / Melbourne. Feby 1856″. Although there is no record of a performance having actually taken place, the promptbook offers a fascinating glimpse of how Phelps’ extraordinarily successful English production – which is, remarkably, the earliest documented performance of Shakespeare’s play rather than Dryden’s adaptation – was considered for an overseas performance. It is especially valuable in that the promptbook for Phelps’ original production is also still extant, meaning that we have both an original and a touring promptbook for the same nineteenth-century production of a Shakespeare play. When Antony and Cleopatra did eventually premiere in Australia in 1867 at the Theatre Royal, Melbourne, it was Charles Calvert’s much abbreviated version, following performances in Manchester and London. Younge’s promptbook therefore represents not only a potential production in Australia over a decade before Antony and Cleopatra’s true premiere there, but also an ambitious attempt to emulate the success of Phelps’ earlier production in England.

Lord Strange's Men and their Plays

devices – its abbreviations, symbols and conventions. It should not have attempted to represent the printed page’s line breaks with virgules (“|”) and it should have laid out verse properly rather than as run-on prose where the lines are separated (again) by virgules. One might have used symbols to indicate the title-page, cropped and damaged text, and inferred text only, and followed the volume’s use of signatures. Paratexts’ apparatus does not communicate the layout of the playbooks’ pages effectively and is moreover intrusive. Nor is it clear, after reading Paratexts, how a project of this size, or larger, can adequately reproduce the appearance of early modern texts. Further, Paratexts is not comprehensive, as it includes only the marginal notes which flank other paratexts, not those which surround main playtexts, Ben Jonson’s Sejanus (1605) being, of course, the most well-known example of a heavily annotated play. Notwithstanding these substantial misgivings, Paratexts constitutes a fantastically large, valuable body of textual evidence on the production, dissemination and promotion of printed drama, as well as insights into the history of the stage. Its indices alone should preserve Paratexts’ place as an essential database, as they allow a more convenient and speedy retrieval and comparison of paratextual information than current digital databases such as Early English Books Online. Paratexts’ greatest influence could, however, come in the classroom. As long as teachers take the time either to explain or cut through the bibliographical jargon, Paratexts could prosper as a contextual tool, an object of literary study in its own right, and be the source for exceptional undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations.

Introduction: Nothing Will Come of Nothing? Or, What can we Learn from Plays that Don’t Exist?

What, if anything, can we say about the Renaissance drama that does not survive? And how much of it is there?

Old Genres, New Worlds: Behn Domesticates the Exotic

This final chapter serves almost as a coda to the rest of the book, in that the plays it discusses — whilst an integral part of the voyage drama tradition which I have been sketching throughout my argument — differ significantly from their dramatic predecessors in their use of the exotic. The representations of the New World in Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter (and Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko, which is also briefly considered here) are conditioned by historical circumstances and eyewitness evidence that was unavailable to earlier dramatists. Behn and an increasing number of her playgoers now had first-person eyewitness accounts (what Karnes would call ‘first order presence’) against which the ideal presence of the theatre could be tested. Hence whilst the mind-travelling phenomenon is still at play in these examples, its novelty and significance are gradually becoming subservient to the interest in depicting a genuinely New World story for its own sake. The Widow Ranter and Oroonoko allow a local politics to emerge, and foreground the ethics of domesticity in colonial life rather than retaining an epicentre in London society.

Davenant, Saint-Évremond, Dryden, and the Ocular Dimension of Travel

The closure of the public theatres in 1642 and the political discontinuity of the Interregnum necessarily affected the production of drama in England. Whilst aesthetic continuity cannot by any means be assumed, in this chapter I trace new lines of interconnection between Interregnum entertainments not formerly linked (as voyage dramas) to the other plays of this study, in order to ask whether there may be value in seeing some kind of continuous innovation in the theatre, however limited that might be. I interrogate the effects of the hiatus in playing and of the altered conditions that accompanied the reopening of the theatres, and in particular I am interested in how changing stage technologies affected the playgoer’s experience of voyage drama. Categorical distinctions between Renaissance plays and Restoration plays are predicated on the assumption that these periods possess substantial aesthetic differences, and it is not my intention to deny that such differences exist. Rather, I take these differences as the impetus to investigate the concomitant alteration (if there were any) of imaginative activity and mind-travelling at the theatre.

Morals, Manners, and Imagination: Jonson and Heywood

Precious little has been written about Jonson and travel. In the first section of this chapter, I examine the concerns over the fluidity of national identity which may have occasioned Jonson’s wariness of travellers, and consider Volpone as a means of illustrating the humorous (in both senses of the word) consequences of adopting foreign affectations. I do so with a view to establishing the reasons for Jonson’s negative attitude to voyaging as manifested in his writings (though not, apparently, his personal convictions), and question whether his public preference for the domestic was a widely embraced value in his age.