Renaissance Forum: Volume 1, Number 1, March 1996: Emma Smith

Anthony Parr. Ed. 1995. Three Renaissance Travel Plays. Revels Plays Companion Library. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 330 pp. 6 illus. ISBN 0-7190-3746-8. Ł35.00

Anthony Parr's edition of Three Renaissance Travel Plays for the Revels Plays Companion Library comprises three plays written over a span of more than thirty years: The Travels of the Three English Brothers, by John Day, William Rowley and George Wilkins, first performed in 1607, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher's The Sea Voyage of 1622, and Richard Brome's 1638 play, The Antipodes. The edition brings all three plays back from the editorial margins and gives clearly annotated, modern-spelling texts, together with a substantial introduction. This places the plays in generic and historical context, bringing out their complex interplay of sources and influences, from travellers' tales to Prince Henry's neo-chivalry, taking in Shakespearean allusions, contemporary political and religious alliances, and colonial chronicles.
Parr begins this survey, after a brief diversionary epigraph from Paul Theroux, where one might expect - with the Swiss visitor Thomas Platter's observations on English culture in 1599. Reporting on popular entertainments in London, including bearbaiting and plays, Platter concludes:
With these and many more amusements the English pass their time, learning at the play what is happening abroad...since the English for the most part do not travel much, but prefer to learn foreign matters and take their pleasures at home.

For Parr, the role of the travel play is in both creating and satisfying the vigorous early modern interest in foreign lands. This edition views the importance of the genre through its intervention into the debate about 'England's place within and designs upon a wider world' (5). Parr discerns an 'increasingly sophisticated response to the act of travel' (11) during the three decades covered by the plays he discusses.
In his The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago:1988), Steven Mullaney gives a translation of Platter's original German which is slightly, though significantly, different from Parr's. Instead of translating 'frembde Sachen' as 'foreign matters', Mullaney has 'strange things' (75). This distinct emphasis draws attention to Parr's narrower focus. While Mullaney is concerned to explore the role of the strange, the exotic and the alien on the stage in terms of a 'rehearsal of cultures' (60ff), Parr's version of Platter interprets the drama as more of a documentary form than a discursive one. Despite the decision to open with Theroux, there is no explicit sense of an ongoing discourse of travel writing to which the plays can be seen to contribute, and little attention is paid to the troubling interface between travel and colonialism.
Parr is, however, alert to the implicit opposition between theatre and travel in Platter's observation, and discusses the self-consciousness of dramatic representations of foreign cultures. This is particularly obvious in his treatment of the encounter between the celebrated English actor and jig-maker Will Kemp, and Harlequin, the commedia dell'arte clown in The Travels of the Three English Brothers, and Diana's coterminous experiences of visiting the theatre and transportation abroad in The Antipodes. One of the strengths of his edition is the parallels it begins to draw between the plays, and the emergent sense of the topography of the genre. Like the plays themselves, Parr's introduction maps a terrain which has been largely unexplored beyond a well-documented coastal strip of canonical texts. His short reference to the role of women as scapegoats for the negative connotations of wandering and venturing is particularly suggestive. Parr points out that in representing the English traveller as the foreigner, the plays both resound with, and undermine, seventeenth-century xenophobia, and he also recognises that some of the portrayals of foreign cultures are surprisingly sympathetic. Thus, while The Travels of the Three English Brothers in some ways represents a continuation of the bellicose Protestantism of Essex and the 1590s, it is also free of the kind of anti-papal propaganda of Dekker's contemporary play The Whore of Babylon. Here, Parr's selection counters more readily available chauvinistic drama by rehearsing the complex dynamics of cross-cultural encounter.
While the shared features of the plays traced by Parr give coherence to the edition, the genre-based selection inevitably terminates certain other lines of investigation. Parr is understandably keen to ensure that these plays are not merely colourful contextual material for, say, Faustus's journey to the Pope's court, or the allusions to the colonial project in Shakespeare's The Tempest. However, the introduction underplays the significance of The Tempest to Beaumont and Fletcher's The Sea Voyage, perhaps to correct the impact of Pepys's opinion that he saw the latter 'without much pleasure, it being but a mean play compared with The Tempest'. Parr effectively avoids the particular interest of Fletcher's fascination with Shakespeare's themes in, for example, The Wild-goose Chase, The Double Marriage, The Pilgrim, or The Island Princess by taking The Sea Voyage out of the corpus of his work. All these reworkings of uneasy moments of The Tempest contribute to a discourse of colonialism on which Parr touches but does not dwell.
As in other such volumes with a long shelf-life, Parr's introduction is a mediation of, rather than an intervention into, methodological debates. In common with the other volumes in the Companion Library there is no bibliography, which may be felt as a lack by those stimulated by Parr's evocation of his genre and its significance to early modern negotiations of frembde Sachen. The retrieval of these texts from the obscurity of Victorian editions is to be welcomed: critical developments from this new availability are eagerly awaited.

EMMA SMITH
ALL SOULS COLLEGE, OXFORD