ABSTRACT
The early modern period witnessed many colonial expeditions and displayed great interest in the literature of travel, actual and fictional, for political, commercial and scientific reasons, but also as a source of aesthetic pleasure. This chapter considers the potency of fantasies of travel, their complicity in the colonial desires for power and possession, and the politics of fantasies of this nature in period. The plays that form the focus of that discussion, Ben Jonson's The Alchemist and Brome's The Antipodes, are in many respects intricately related: Jonson was Brome's theatrical mentor and directly influenced many of his plays. The fantasy of travel operates not as some transcendental act of escapism but constitutes the act of coming home. While the political context of Jonson's playwriting is beginning to emerge with force, Caroline drama has too often been dismissed as an escape into aestheticism which blinded itself to the tense political situation in the period of Personal Rule.
