This agenda-setting volume on travel and drama in early modern England provides new insights into Renaissance stage practice, performance history, and theatre's transnational exchanges. It advances our understanding of theatre history, drama's generic conventions, and what constitutes plays about travel at a time when the professional theatre was rapidly developing and England was attempting to announce its presence within a global economy. Recent critical studies have shown that the reach of early modern travel was global in scope, and its cultural consequences more important than narratives that are dominated by the Atlantic world suggest. This collection of essays by world-leading scholars redefines the field by expanding the canon of recognized plays concerned with travel. Re-assessing the parameters of the genre, the chapters offer fresh perspectives on how these plays communicated with their audiences and readers.

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.

Popular English travel guides from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries asserted that women who wandered too far afield were invariably suspicious, dishonest, and unchaste. As the essays in Travel and Travail reveal, however, early modern women did travel, often quite extensively, with no diminution of their moral fiber. Female travelers were also frequently represented on the English stage and in other creative works, both as a reproach to the ban on female travel and as a reflection of historical women's travel, whether intentional or not. Travel and Travail conclusively refutes the notion of female travel in the early modern era as "an absent presence." The first part of the volume offers analyses of female travelers (often recently widowed or accompanied by their husbands), the practicalities of female travel, and how women were thought to experience foreign places. The second part turns to literature, including discussions of roving women in Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, and Thomas Heywood. Whether historical actors or fictional characters, women figured in the wider world of the global Renaissance, not simply in the hearth and home.

Offers new ways to conceptualize the relationship between early modern travel and drama, and re-assesses how travel drama is defined.

Explores Shakespeare's plays in their most immediate context: the hundreds of plays known to original audiences, but lost to us.

In the early modern period, the population of England travelled more than is often now thought, by road and by water: from members of the gentry travelling for pleasure, through the activities of those involved in internal trade, to labourers migrating out of necessity. Yet the commonly held view that people should know their places, geographically as well as socially, made domestic travel highly controversial. Andrew McRae examines the meanings of mobility in the early modern period, drawing on sources from canonical literature and travel narratives to a range of historical documents including maps and travel guides. He identifies the relationship between domestic travel and the emergence of vital new models of nationhood and identity. An original contribution to the study of early modern literature as well as travel literature, this interdisciplinary book opens up domestic travel as a vital and previously underexplored area of research.

This analysis of five exemplary domestic plays--the anonymous Arden of Faversham and A Warning for Fair Women (1590s), Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness (1607), Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women (ca. 1613), and Walter Mountfort's The Launching of the Mary, or The Seaman's Honest Wife (1632)--offers a new approach to the emerging ideology of the private and public, or what Ann C. Christensen terms "the tragedy of the separate spheres." Feminist scholarship has identified the fruitful gaps between theories and practices of household government in early modern Europe, while work on the global Renaissance attends to commercial expansion, cross-cultural encounters, and colonial settlements. Separation Scenes brings these critical concerns together to expose the intimate and disruptive relationships between the domestic culture and business culture of early modern England. Separation Scenes argues that domestic plays make the absence of husbands for business the subject of tragedy by focusing not on where men traveled but on whom and what they left behind. Elements that critics have rightly associated with domestic tragedy--adultery, sensational murders, and the lavishly articulated operations of domestic life--define this world, which, Christensen argues, was equally shaped by the absence of husbands. Her interpretations of these domestic plays invite us to historicize and further complicate the seemingly universal binary between a feminine "private sphere" and a masculine "public sphere." Separation Scenes demonstrates how domestic drama played an active, dynamic, and critical role in deliberating the costs of commercial travel as it disrupted domestic conduct and prompted realignments within the home.