The depictions of explorers and colonists in Early Modern plays connect exploration and colonization to socio-economic issues.  These same issues arise in other themes of the plays as well.  The image of America as incredibly wealthy, which originally came from Spanish explorers' reports of the wealth of the Central and South American people they encountered, contributed to the idea that anyone could gain high social status by seeking his fortune in the New World.  During the Early Modern period, the merchant class was on the rise in England and throughout Europe.  People discovered that economic power could be a source of social status, a revolutionary idea within a hierarchical social system based on aristocracy and title.  The New World was made up of land that, at least from Europeans' point of view, did not automatically pass through family lines, although in truth, Native American tribes resided on that land.  The Virginia Company's calls for colonists often expressed the necessity for tradespeople with particular skills.  In the plays of the period, characters express the hope, albeit a somewhat idealistic one, that the distinctions of class may cease to exist in the New World.

Many plays contain discussions of the wealth to be found in the New World and in other colonies.  In John Fletcher's The Island Princess, the character Armusia describes the abundance if the Molucca, or Spice Islands, in which Spain, Portugal, and England all had a colonizing interest during the late 16th and early 17th centuries:

A similar description of the wealth of Virginia occurs in George Chapman's The Memorable Masque of the Two Houses or Inns of Court.  The character Capriccio says:

In this masque, which was part of the wedding celebration of the King James' daughter in 1613, native Virginian characters come to present their riches to the king, an onstage representation of the English court's hope that the colony in Virginia would prove rich in gold.

In Eastward, Ho! by George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, a group of sailors who plan to set out for Virginia discuss the riches they expect to find there:

In the same scene, Captain Seagull puts forth a vision of the New World that makes Virginia into a sort of classless utopia:

William Shakespeare's The Tempest contains a similar speech.  The counselor Gonzalo sees the island as a potential utopian society:

Scholars speculate that Shakespeare may have used Michel de Montaigne's essay "Of the Cannibals" as a source for Gonzalo's speech.  Montaigne's essay paints an idealized picture of Native American societies.

Another of Shakespeare's likely sources for the The Tempest is William Strachey's "The True Repertory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates," in which Strachey describes his experiences in the shipwreck of the Sea Venture, a ship which set sail for England to deliver new governor Sir Thomas Gates to the Jamestown colony in 1609.  The ship encountered a storm and the passengers found themselves shipwrecked in the Bermudas.  Strachey describes the way in which the storm at sea created a dangerous situation in which divisions of class dissolved as noblemen had to take their turns bailing water alongside commoners.  The opening of Shakespeare's The Tempest plays on this idea that dangerous situations can erase status differences:

Strachey also praises Sir Thomas Gates' willingness to perform physical labor, both on board the ship and on the Bermudan island where the prospective colonists remained for many months.  Many other non-fiction accounts of the Jamestown colony include similar praise for men whose status in England kept them from physical labor, but who took on difficult tasks once they had arrived in the colony.  In his many publications concerning the colony, Captain John Smith refers with disdain to men among the colonists who assumed their noble titles exempted them from manual labor.  In The Tempest, Shakespeare's Ferdinand, a shipwrecked Prince, performs the tasks set for him by Prospero, who rules the island:

Ferdinand here has something in common with the "virtuous adventurer" figures on many Early Modern plays.  He proves his inner nobility through his humility.

In these plays' depictions of the New World, playwrights explore burgeoning ideas about the traditional class distinctions of English society.  The New World appears as a place of fantastic wealth, available to any who seek it, and as a clean slate for societal structure, where distinctions of status disappear.  Finally, the dangerous situations many colonists faced made them place value on the things that people could do, and not on those people's names and titles.