The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama, 1620-1650

Literary geographies is an exciting new area of interdisciplinary research. Innovative and engaging, this book applies theories of landscape, space and place from the discipline of cultural geography within an early modern historical context. Different kinds of drama and performance are analysed: from commercial drama by key playwrights to household masques and entertainment performed by families and in semi-official contexts. Sanders provides a fresh look at works from the careers of Ben Jonson, John Milton and Richard Brome, paying attention to geographical spaces and habitats like forests, coastlines and arctic landscapes of ice and snow, as well as the more familiar locales of early modern country estates and city streets and spaces. Overall, the book encourages readers to think about geography as kinetic, embodied and physical, not least in its literary configurations, presenting a key contribution to early modern scholarship.

Introduction: entering the bear pit: cultural geography and early modern drama; 1. Liquid landscapes: water, culture, and society in the Caroline period; 2. Into the woods: spatial and social geographies in the forest; 3. 'Hospitable fabrics': thinking through the early modern household; 4. Moving through the landscape: mobility and sites of social circulation; 5. Neighbourhoods and networks; 6. Writing the city: emergent spaces.

Literary geographies is an exciting new area of interdisciplinary research. This innovative study applies theories of landscape, space and place to early modern drama productions in the decades immediately before the English Civil War, covering works by key playwrights including Ben Jonson, John Milton and Richard Brome.

Julie Sanders is Professor of English Literature and Drama at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of Ben Jonson's Theatrical Republics (1998), the editor of Ben Jonson in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and has recently edited The New Inn for The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson. She has appeared several times on the BBC Radio 4 programme 'In our Time' talking about early modern literature and drama, and has advised on theatre and radio programmes as well as giving talks for playhouses and theatre companies in the UK and USA.