Review of: Gavin Hollis, The Absence of America: The London Stage, 1576-1642

• Main Author: SOON, Emily
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2017
• Subjects: Theatre and Performance Studies
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3374; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/4631/viewcontent/Review_Absence_of_America_pvoa.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Given the premium often placed on the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States in today’s public discourse, it is hard to imagine a time when transatlantic affairs were deemed peripheral to London’s interests. And yet, as Gavin Hollis, Associate Professor at Hunter College, City University of New York, reminds us, in the decades surrounding the 1607 founding of Jamestown, the New World was only of ‘marginal’ interest to those living in the Old (10). From the opening of the first permanent playhouse in 1576 to the closure of the theatres in 1642, a mere three English plays are believed to have focused on the Americas, none of which have survived, and the fleeting references to the New World in extant dramatic works are rarely enthusiastic about colonial expansion.