Courses

This lecture course explores England’s sense of itself in relation to the rest of the world in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It will examine the hopes and fears provoked by the trade and traffic between the English and other peoples, both inside and outside the country’s borders, and raise questions of economics, race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, immigration, and slavery. The central materials are familiar and unfamiliar English plays, by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Philip Massinger, John Fletcher, and others, which we will study alongside economic treatises, acts and proclamations, and travel narratives.