England's age of exploration and colonization in the late 1500s and early 1600s brought with it an increase in the publication of non-fiction travel literature, and in the treatment of exploration and colonization on the English stage.  Particularly in the genres of travel/adventure drama and city comedy, playwrights examined many facets of exploration and colonization.  Plays from the early 1600s illustrate contemporary attitudes towards adventurers and would-be colonists, as well as towards the colonized natives of worlds newly "discovered" by Europeans.  These plays also explore the greater implications of colonization: its possible repercussions for the rigid class structure of Jacobean and Caroline England, and the potential complications that might arise from the goal of converting the natives of other lands to English religion and English culture.

No plays survive from this period whose action takes place in Virginia, although in George Chapman's The Memorable Masque of the Two Honorable Houses or Inns of Court, the character Capriccio claims to that Virginia has been brought to England by a theatrical device.  Virginia is "by earths round motion mov'd neere this Britan shore... A troupe of the noblest Virginians inhabiting attended hether the God of riches... 'Two lost plays from the period may have taken place in Virginia: The New World's Tragedy, performed by the Lord Admiral's Men in 1595, and The Plantation of Virginia, performed by an unknown company in 1623 . 

Despite the lack of extant plays with specifically Virginian settings, many plays survive which contain references to Virginia or other parts of the New World, or which have non-fiction accounts of the exploration of Virginia as their source materials.  Additionally, plays which depict ventures of exploration and colonization in other parts of the world, or in exotic locales invented by the playwrights, demonstrate that the discovery (from the European point of view) and colonization of new lands was alive in the popular imagination of the time.

Several plays from this period make reference to the hold that travelers' tales had on the English popular imagination. In Shakespeare's Othello, written around 1603, Othello describes the way in which he wooed Desdemona with stories of his adventures in exotic places:

The creatures Othello describes here often appear in the stories Early Modern European explorers brought back from their journeys.

In The Tempest, a slightly later play, from 1611, Shakespeare's characters refer to the travelers' tales they have heard at home in Naples, and how their own experiences of the things they have seen on the island surpass even those stories:

Shakespeare's shipwrecked Neapolitans make it clear that travelers' stories are common in their experience, and that they will now be able to contribute to the lore of exotic lands.

By the time Richard Brome wrote his play

in the late 1630s, the traveler who was full of extravagant tales of faraway lands had become a stock figure in literature.  Brome constructs his play around the character Peregrine, who has never physically traveled away from home, but who has gone mad from reading too much travel literature:

Plays like these demonstrate that travel and exploration were very much on the minds of the English people during this period, and that playwrights incorporated ideas about exploration, colonization, and travel into their scripts.