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Aug 10, 2026
Colonial Failure and Theatrical Form in Early Modern England
Stages of Unsettlement
Summary
Today’s guest, Caro Pirri, is the author of Colonial Failure and Theatrical Form in Early Modern England: Stages of Unsettlement (Oxford University Press, 2025). This book explores how early modern colonial travel writing informed the London theater’s spatial and placemaking conventions. It suggests that what the stage found most compelling about narratives of colonial settlement was their failure to claim interpretive control over unfamiliar places and people. The book goes on to link colonial misreadings of places and people to theatrical strategies for staging disorientation, which Pirri characterizes as a condition of “unsettlement.”
Each chapter focuses on a specific formal device that emerged from colonial misreadings: “uncommonplacing” in Richard Hakluyt’s travel compendium; metonymic possession in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine; “seasoning” in Ben Jonson’s city comedies; “stagewreck” in Shakespeare’s The Tempest; and “stagework” in the Lord Mayor’s Shows.
By approaching form as an interpretive process that is always engaged in the act of making and being made, Colonial Failure and Theatrical Form offers a model for reading past the seeming impasses of colonial narratives. It shows how narratives of failed settlement served as a productive resources for the formal worldmaking conventions of early modern theater.
Jane Hwang Degenhardt is Professor English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford UP, 2022) and Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (Edinburgh UP, 2012). She is also a co-editor of the academic journal English Literary Renaissance.
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