Renaissance theatres of the world: staging authority in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Thomas Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia
Renaissance theatres of the world: staging authority in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Thomas Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia

Summary/Abstract: Drawing on notions of authority as described by Stephen Greenblatt with reference to Renaissance drama and travel writing, of love and obedience explored by William Shakespeare in The Tempest and Thomas Harriot in A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, this paper argues that playwrights and travellers to the New World find themselves discoursively connected in imagining, describing and colonising America in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Focusing on the idea of theatre that moves beyond the scope of drama and permeates other fields of writing, the paper discusses rhetorical tropes and commonplaces by means of which literary traditions and overseas ventures address encounters in the New World.

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