The Absence of America on the Early Modern Stage

Résumé du livre

accounts, overseas trading company documents, and maps and other cartographic/geographical records. This interdisciplinary approach reveals that, although drama did not represent America directly, it appropriated and circulated rumours about what was occurring in the transatlantic colonies, much to the chagrin of their promoters, and by so doing it disseminated mockery and concern about English activity in the New World. Renaissance Drama perpetuated the idea that Atlantic trade was unwise or the purview of the corrupt; it associated colonists and investors with excessive wealth, materialism, lust, corruption, and greed; it branded the project of converting the natives as a failure and a folly. That America was articulated indirectly did not lessen its impact. Renaissance drama's active engagement of its audience's imagination meant that what might now be considered at the periphery was the point of contact between the world