Laurence Publicover. Dramatic Geography: Romance, Intertheatricality, and Cultural Encounter in Early Modern Mediterranean Drama.

Abstract

The last twenty years or so has seen a wealth of scholarship on early modern English drama and the Mediterranean. Thanks to work by Daniel Vitkus, Benedict Robinson, Jane Hwang Degenhardt, and many others, we now have a clearer sense of how the English conceived of the Ottoman Empire, Southern Europe, and North Africa. Moreover, we have a clearer sense of how this geographical imaginary was reflected and refracted across a range of plays set in the Mediterranean and/or featuring characterizations of Turks, Jews, Moors. While questions of genre have come up in this work—in particular in relation to romance and tragicomedy (see work by Cyrus Mulready and Valerie Forman)—the tendency has been to interpret early modern drama in the context of the Mediterranean world, often by employing nondramatic sources about its places and its peoples. In Dramatic Geography: Romance, Intertheatricality, and Cultural Encounter in Early Modern Mediterranean Drama, Laurence Publicover both complements and counters this tendency by positing a more immediate context: the theater itself. Drawing more from stage history and repertory studies than from postcolonial theory, Publicover argues that playing companies, and especially individual playwrights, who mounted plays set in the Mediterranean drew as much from literary tradition as from contemporaneous events. As he points out, the Mediterranean is a key locus in medieval romance, even though the genre’s geographical bearings are often distorted by its blend of real and fantastical locations. Dramatic romance, which is sometimes associated exclusively with late Shakespeare, but which could credibly be called early modern drama’s foundational genre, integrated medieval romance’s unfixed coordinates. According to Publicover, the attraction for playwrights lay in no small part in the popularity of such tales, and in large part in the ways that playhouses were equipped to stage space fluidly and dynamically—which is to say, in ways that dovetailed neatly (or not so neatly) with the fluid, dynamic geographies of romance. Hence a play like Clyomon and Clamydes (early 1580s) travels between Denmark and Macedonia while taking in allegorical landscapes such as the dragon-dwelling “Forest of Strange Marvels” and the “Isle of Strange Marshes” (67). In Publicover’s reading of the play, geography is made to fit genre rather than the other way around.