Embodying empire: Roman plays on the early modern English stage

This dissertation considers plays about Rome and Troy as performing comparable functions on the early modern English stage. Through an investigation of Roman and Trojan plays by Fletcher, Heywood, Jonson, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, recurrent patterns are revealed. I contend that the repeated representations of certain figures and situations, such as raped female bodies, conspiratorial murders, sodomites, suicides, and prominently displayed corpses, register the anxieties consequent to an English nation testing its limits and exploring certain imperial possibilities. Anxieties about permeable boundaries, invasion and miscegenation, shifting borders, and evolving political identities are inscribed through the figurative matrices of the plays as bodily crises. For early modern dramatists, the Roman mythic-historical tradition becomes a means of investigating the particular conditions and consequences of empire. Upon examination it becomes clear that Rome embodied many of England's greatest imperial aspirations as well as some the nation's most powerful cultural fears.