Travel or adventure drama became a staple of English theatre with British maritime expansion. Renaissance drama’s mercantile poetics lionized middle-class traders, but foreign exotica also provoked deep unease. The emergent imperial consciousness was at once ambitious and anxious. The nascent British Empire’s dynamic of emulation and disavowal produces “peripheral heroics.” Voyage drama’s glorification of English deeds abroad follows Marlowe’s Tamburlaine’s arc of heroic action with unlikely protagonists – women, middle-class adventurers, pirates, and merchants – rising from low social origins to claim a place at imperial centers. Their decidedly middle-class status is defensively justified by nobility of character. A strong Christian strain frames that valor in terms of humility and even martyrdom. Racialized encounters with Islamic characters abjure the foreign taint, by redirecting it at European rivals, the Spanish and the Dutch. Defined by English marginality, this heroism is marked by ambivalences, with shifting and flexible modes of gendering and racializations. Through transnational figures with malleable identities, Renaissance drama negotiated English marginality in an interimperial context, exploring through peripheral heroics English desires for and fears of transculturation, their emulation and disavowal of empire.