In his New World narratives, Captain John Smith presents himself as the playwright of the the Virginia colonization and he offers his reading audience Virginia as a theatrical spectacle. In his theatrical representations, Ben Jonson poses as a discoverer and explorer. This dissertation examines Smith\u27s theatrical metaphors and his constructed dialogues and cast lists, and argues that Smith represented himself as the dramatist of the American colonial effort in order to script and control the ongoing encounter. Jonson, who quotes Smith in a late play, displayed and popularized that colonial effort to his theatrical audience. He offered that audience a picture of a transformed imperial England. Using anthropological evidence, current Native American theory, and a materialist feminist analysis, the dissertation rereads Smith\u27s and Jonson\u27s dramas of conquest, and reveals instead a process of transformation and resistance. English culture and literature were transformed as the English attempted, against the resistance of the Native Powhatans, to make a New World empire
