Introduction: Understanding the Early Modern Journeying Play

Abstract

In contrast to ‘voyage drama’ and ‘travel drama’ (as used elsewhere, interchangeably and inconsistently), this chapter proposes a new term, ‘the journeying play’, to open up more precise and nuanced understandings of the relationship between travel and processes of dramatic fictionalizaton. Doing so takes into account the ethical issues associated with the term ‘travel’ and the generic division between fiction and non-fiction, literature and travel writing. The early modern ‘journeying play’, as a term, encompasses both the inventive and the authentic, whilst also alluding to the origins of travel and voyage drama in the ‘old’ medieval journeying plays, where physical movement, such as Every..