Three Renaissance Travel Plays.

This carefully edited volume presents three little-known seventeenth-century plays centering on travel and exploration, two of which are published here for the first time in a modern critical edition: Day, Rowley, and Wilkins's The Travels of the Three English Brothers (first staged 1607) and Fletcher and Massinger's The Sea Voyage (first staged 1622). Brome's The Antipodes (first staged 1638), previously published in Ann Haaker's 1966 Regents edition, rounds out the volume.

Aimed at serious students of the period (yet useful for upper-division courses in Renaissance drama or travel writing), Three Renaissance Travel Plays is a welcome addition to The Revels Plays Companion Library, a series dedicated to expanding the range of early English drama available in modern editions. Anthony Parr's introductory essay nicely supplements his discussion of the individual plays with a succinct overview of both the early seventeenth century's fascination with travel and the diversity of its travel writing, tracing the complex issues involved in shaping English attitudes toward the outside world.

Attending to shifting European perceptions of the Ottoman empire and the so-called Turkish threat, for example, Parr mounts something of a defense of Renaissance England's ability to consider the Other on empathetic and sophisticated terms. In the three plays collected here, Parr finds "a fairly complex dramatisation of cultural encounter" (13). "[T]he impulse to interrogate the whole [European] colonial project," he writes, "is not confined to modern cultural critics" (28). By complicating our idea of what "travel" might mean for a Jacobean audience, Parr's introduction helps to complicate the volume's thematic unity and demonstrate the variety of impulses, assumptions, and motives informing England's divergent attitudes toward foreign travel and cultures.

The drama is a particularly rich field for studying the effects of contemporary travel accounts on Jacobean culture, since dramatists had to deal with these accounts, "news" published in pamphlet form, as well as established travel stereotypes: the "Italianate" traveler, the teller of tales, the naive young gentleman abroad. Three English Brothers, as Parr notes, is based on a pamphlet published within weeks of the play, both of which capitalize on the plight of the Sherley brothers, marooned abroad after failed embassies to Persia. Blending events from the brothers' adventures with audience expectations regarding Persian bloodlust, the dramatists exploit their audience's "dual desire for topicality and timeless adventure" (22). The result is a travel play anchored partly in the "reality" of literary and dramatic tradition, partly in the shifting realities of actual cultural encounters.

The volume has been carefully edited. Parr's copious footnotes manage to remain unobtrusive while providing helpful cross-references to pertinent historical events and figures. He follows "no absolute rule" in modernizing the text, however, retaining certain archaic titles and names but changing others to accepted modern forms; stage directions are added or revised in the interest of clarity.

Modern editions of otherwise unavailable Renaissance texts are always timely. Students of early modern travel will also find much of use here, since dramatizations of current events provide one window onto the culture's "reading" of travel - travel experienced by most English citizens only on the stage or via the printed page.

DOUGLAS L. HOLLINGER Texas Christian University