Amazons have long made their presence felt in epics of love, empire, and war; and from early antiquity to the present day, it is both at generically rocky impasses and geographically distinct interstices that they make themselves known. This chapter explores these ideas with respect to the performance of the Amazon on the English and Irish stage across the first half of the seventeenth century. It focuses on a particular moment in early 1640, on the verge of the outbreak of civil war across the Three Kingdoms of England, Ireland, and Scotland, when, in London, Sir William Davenant’s Salamanca Spolia is performed at court and, in Dublin, Henry Burnell’s play Landgartha is performed at the public theatre in Werburgh Street. It locates these coinciding performances in the context of two evolving and competing English literary embodiments of the figure of the Amazon.
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