The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage - Tapa dura

'A work of genuine importance, this book enters into one of the more active ongoing conversations in early modern scholarship and makes a significant contribution to it.' Richard Helgerson, University of California, Santa Barbara

This work explores the ways in which a range of early modern plays such as Shakespeare's "King Lear", "Cymbeline", and "Richard II", Heywood's "Edward IV", Brome's "A Jovial Crew", and the anonymous Arden of Faversham and Woodstock intervene in the ongoing reconceptualization of land and land ownership in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. In addition to plays, the author looks at a variety of texts ballads, estate surveys, accounts of coronation processions, county atlases and spaces, the highway, the city, the market town, the estate in order to retrieve for gotten landscapes of early modern England. Associated with the landscape arts, such as country house poems or landscape paintings, the category of landscape has come to be seen as inseparable from texts produced in accordance with the values of aristocratic landowners. Though literary critics have recognized that such an account of landscape represents as natural and inevitable the perspective of landed aristocrats and gentry, they have offered no alternative to this account.