Romancing the globe: Romance, English expansion, and the early modern stage

In Shakespeare studies, the term romance is widely understood to refer to a group of plays from the late period of the Shakespearean canon. This dissertation contends that rather than being a strictly defined authorial category, dramatic romance first emerged in the sixteenth century out of the social, intellectual, and economic changes that came as a result of England\u27s increasing role in an expanding global economy. Romancing the Globe identifies a group of plays called stage romances that originated in the earliest years of the commercial theater in London and remained popular through the seventeenth century. The possibility of recognizing such a history for dramatic romance has been obscured by the lasting impact of nineteenth-century uses of the term romance in dramatic criticism---primarily as a psychological designation used to describe Shakespeare\u27s mind at the end of his career. The opening chapters of the dissertation thus trace the development of stage romance as a dramatic kind that originated outside of Shakespeare. Subsequent chapters then approach plays from the Shakespearean canon (Henry V, Pericles, and The Tempest ), as well as John Milton\u27s Masque Performed at Ludlow Castle with the reformulated understanding of romance and genre set out in the introduction and first chapter. To shift away from biographical criteria for defining romance to historical and formal parameters for the category, chapters in the study focus on particular formal elements of drama (i.e., the representation of time and space, the transformation of a narrative source into enactment) and dramatic strategies (the use of a dramatic Chorus, the adaptation of romance into court entertainment). Drawing on materials from early modern cartography, literary theory, historiography, travel writing, and racial theory, these chapters relate the transformations in dramatic form to the social and historical issues raised by England\u27s expansion into new territories. Romancing the Globe thus seeks to broaden critical understanding of romance on the early modern stage, but also to raise critical awareness of the connections between the dramatic kinds of early modern England and the global events that shaped the period