A Golden World

From rumours of lost Amazonian cities of gold to the silver running through the mountains of Bolivia, hopes for dazzling wealth fuelled the imperial fantasies of the Tudors and Stuarts. But while stories of treasure ships and privateers like Walter Raleigh have become entrenched in national myths – what did Elizabethans actually know about Mexico, the Amazon rainforest, or the Chesapeake? How did Indigenous people and knowledge enter the art, fashion, and literature of Shakespeare’s time – and at what cost? ‘A Golden World’ illuminates how the Americas became a visible and material presence in English culture, through a range of unexpected objects: from tobacco leaves strewn in playhouses to a boy wearing a pearl earring.