ForGED · Foreign Geographies in English Drama, c.1576-1660
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2022-02-01 → 2024-01-31
- EU contribution
- €184,591
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Foreign Geographies in English Drama, c.1576-1660
The overall objective of the project was to undertake a wide-ranging reassessment of how English drama from the 1570s to 1660 responded to burgeoning cultural interest in non-European geographies. My research explicates how English drama reflected cultural interest in and new forms of knowledge about distant geographical locations such as Africa, India, the Ottoman Empire, and the Americas. The project examined a key period for the development and rise of England’s national ambitions relating to trade, exploration, colonialisation, and imperialism. The focus on drama as an important site of cultural production has facilitated a better understanding of how this popular form of entertainment imaginatively engaged with ‘foreign’ and distant geographies. My analysis of a large body of plays written and performed between the 1570s and 1660 traces key developments in how distant geographical locations were invoked and represented, particularly with reference to the costuming of characters, cognitive and poetic figurations of space and place, and the possibilities afforded by different performance venues and theatrical repertories. The project is of importance to society because it shows how the historical, literary, and theatrical contexts of ‘foreign’, non-European geographies in this period inculcated racialised stereotypes and negative forms of thinking about cultural difference that prevail to this day.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Existing studies of foreign geographical settings in early modern English drama are limited by narrow focus on particular authors, sub-periods, or geographical locations. My project will, for the first time, quantify and explicate the role that non-European geographies had in shaping the production of drama in England between c.1576 and 1660. I will uncover the overall extent of non-European settings for plays, and interrogate how English drama invoked locations that were the focus of national colonialist interest, and established foreign Empires that were at once alluring and threatening to English national interests and theatre audiences alike. ForGED will make available a body of new knowledge that will help the scientific community to better understand how England’s cultural, commercial, and colonial interests in--and anxieties about--the ‘foreign’ impacted the theatre and shaped key developments in drama. I will work with Daniel Carey (Professor of English Literature and Director of the Moore Institute) at the National University of Ireland, Galway, to refine my engagement with English travel writing and colonialist literature, which has an important bearing on my research. I will receive digital humanities training from David Kelly (DH specialist at the Moore Institute) in order to develop digital methodologies for quantitative research that will enable me to organize data about my corpus of plays and perform data visualisations to identify trends pertaining to particular dramatist, theatres, years, and foreign locations. My qualitative analysis of the data will be communicated to the scientific community through conferences and peer-reviewed puplications, and to the wider community through social media, blogs, and public engagement events.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITY OF GALWAY · GalwayCoordinatorIreland
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union