Imagining Jerusalem in Early Modern Dramas

• In Event: Representing Cities in Early Modern Literature

Abstract

Jerusalem has been one of the politically and culturally important cities in the world. As Karen Armstrong has pointed out, Jerusalem is a city sanctified by three faiths in human history. Early modern writers wrote about Jerusalem in various travel and diplomatic accounts, and English playwrights were never tired of the anecdotes of Jerusalem. Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene take Jerusalem as a looking glass for their contemporary London, Thomas Heywood relates Jerusalem as a city for merchants, while Fletcher and Beaumont write about diasporic communities of the knights of Malta. Jerusalem, as a holy city, represents itself also as a contested space, a place for memory and a looking glass for early modern England. This paper, by comparing and contrast of three early modern English dramas, is a study on Jerusalem as imagined by playwrights.

Author

• I-Chun Wang, Kaohsiung Medical University