‘Where am I Now?’: The Articulation of Space in Shakespeare's King Lear and Marlowe's Dido,Queen of Carthage

Abstract

This article considers the instability of the bare Elizabethan stage in relation to two significant early modern plays. Considering first King Lear as an example of the mimetic flexibility of the bare stage space, the article goes on to demonstrate that in the staging of Dido, Queen of Carthage Troy becomes a malleable, mobile entity, much as it did in historico-political discourses which appropriated it as a legitimising ancestor for aspirant colonial powers. The capacity of the early modern stage to absorb multiple spatial identities provides uniquely apt conditions for a play that is fascinated with the transplantation of physical space.