Colonial Failure and Theatrical Form in Early Modern England

Colonial Failure and Theatrical Form in Early Modern England shows how early modern English dramatists preserved and instrumentalized the early history of England's failed conquests of the Americas in the formal techniques they used to stage fictional worlds. Scholars have long noted that early English drama was interested in representing colonial ventures, largely emphasizing references, themes, or settings as evidence for this engagement. Through an analysis of the technical features of early English commercial drama, this book establishes that popular Renaissance dramatists such as William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton were also sourcing new theatrical tools from contemporary records of colonial failure, recognizing in them a set of techniques for representing geographic disorientation, strandedness, and confusion. During a time when theater's foundational technologies - prop, person, line, and scene - were themselves undergoing a formal transformation, dramatists turned to the narrative and spatial incoherence of these settler accounts, their uncoupling of the link between representation (what is shown) and presentation (how it is shown), as a resource for highlighting the interpretive challenges these changing conventions posed. By demonstrating that popular drama's development was deeply imprinted by the history and textual legacy of England's colonial conquests, not only as setting or theme but as form, this book radically expands the archive of plays that we could call “New World dramas,” allowing plays that don't appear to be “about” colonialism to be understood as borrowing from the rhetorical or narrative structure of colonial texts. Stages of Unsettlement proves that the expansion of the English stage into new settings cannot be understood apart from the colonial strategies for representing place that informed these representations.

Caro Pirri is an assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. They work at the intersection of settler colonial studies and English theater history. They have published on a wide range of theatrical genres, from Jacobean coronation entries to anti-theatrical pamphlets, to show how English theatricality was formally imprinted by the early history of American conquest. Their work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Their work has appeared in Renaissance Drama, Exemplaria, and the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Cultural Studies.