Imagined Empires: The Cultural Geography of Stage Romance

Abstract

As the allusions to Peru and Calicut hinted in the previous chapter, the theatrical meanings of foreign geography frequently overlapped with economic interests in the sixteenth century. Sidney chooses two places associated with bullion and mercantile exchange, respectively, and the power of these references stems from their economic associations as well as their geographic eccentricity. The London stage was far more accommodating to the changes in global economics than was Sidney, in part because, as several scholars have noted in recent years, the theaters were situated at the nexus of an increasingly aware global society.¹ In the years that followed Sidney’s writing of the Defense, and as the English became more intertwined in transnational networks of traffic and travel, the geographies of the stage continued to proliferate. In the present chapter, I will extend the trajectory of the book’s argument by looking more specifically at how the spatial imaginings of the stage aligned with various geographic discourses in the period. I connect these discourses back to romance to show how even within more “scientific” undertakings romance continued to influence conceptions of geography. Through readings of geographic treatises, travel narratives, and imperial prospectuses, I will examine ways in which early modern England staged speculative engagements with its increasingly expanding world.