Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage

Abstract

Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage traces the way that characters think through their surroundings in early modern drama—not only how these characters orient themselves within unfamiliar or otherwise strange locations but also how their locations function as the scaffolding for perception, memory, and other forms of embodied thought. Such moments of thinking through place stage a process that both resembles and parallels the cognitive work that early modern playgoers undertook as they reimagined the stage as the settings of the dramatic fiction. The book traces the vexed relationship between these two registers of thought in works by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Jonson. In doing so, it counters a critical tradition that figures drama as a form of spatial abstraction and demonstrates, instead, that theatrical performance constituted a sophisticated and self-reflexive mode of thinking through place in the early modern period.

Time and memory in Carthage

“…56 For Bozio, more concerned with the innate connections between place and memory, Aeneas's dreams of building 'a statelier Troy' foregrounds the irony 'that his dream of rebuilding one city requires the destruction of another'. 57 Yet as we have seen, that power which Marlowe's Carthage wields to undercut the imperial ambitions of both Aeneas and Elizabethan England draws its vitality from a long tradition. For Marlowe's Aeneas, the new Troy he hopes to establish is familiar: it works through re-writing, and its imperial momentum is centripetal, drawing the riches of the globe to itself:…”