Manchester University Press Three Romances of Eastern Conquest (Revels Plays Companion Library)

This volume brings together three little-known works by key playwrights from the late sixteenth-century golden age of English drama. All three convey the public theatre’s fascination with travel, adventure and individual achievement through the popular genre of heroic romance, while reflecting the contemporaries’ wide range of responses to cross-cultural contacts with the Muslim East. Exploring various imaginative scenarios in dealing with the Mediterranean challenges posed by the Ottoman empire and other Muslim powers, the plays illustrate the versatility and the dynamic innovativeness of the romance genre in the period, extending from the comic happy end of assimilation through love and marriage to the tragic extremes of individual revenge and crusading mass-destruction. Three romances of Eastern conquest presents the first modern-spelling editions of each play, with extensive annotations that cater for specialised scholars while also making the texts accessible to students and theatre-goers. A detailed introduction discusses issues of authorship, dates and sources, and sets the plays in their historical and cultural contexts, offering exciting insights on Elizabethan performance strategies, printing practices, and the circulation of knowledge and stereotypes related to ethnic and religious difference.