The drama of landscape

This book explores the ways in which a range of early modern plays - Shakespeare's King Lear, Cymbeline, and Richard II, Heywood's I 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 sixteenth and early seventeenth 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 forgotten landscapes of early modern England. The book shows that Renaissance dramatic texts participate in the construction of an array of early modern landscapes, thereby producing multiple conceptions of the relationship between land and social relations. These conceptions both reformulate the category of landscape and reveal the contributions of literary and nonliterary texts to an ongoing ideological struggle over the ways in which land can mean.