SOURCE: Parr, Anthony. “Introduction.” In Three Renaissance Travel Plays, edited by Anthony Parr, pp. 1-54. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.

In the excerpt below, Parr describes the context for travel plays such as Day's Travels of the Three English Brothers, particularly stressing the mixture of fear and fascination felt by the English for the foreign and alien.

And when, after the long trip, I arrived in Patagonia I felt I was nowhere. But the most surprising thing of all was that I was still in the world—I had been travelling south for months. The landscape had a gaunt expression, but I could not deny that it had readable features and that I existed in it. This was a discovery—the look of it. I thought: Nowhere is a place.

Paul Theroux, Patagonia Revisited

Learning at Home

In his account of a visit to England in 1599, the Swiss traveller...