The Routledge Anthology of Renaissance Drama

City, country, commerce and class

By the end of the sixteenth century, London had become a city in rapid transition, experiencing transformations that were for the most part the outcome of unprecedented and accelerating economic change. Although most people continued to live and work in agricultural communities, towns and cities were nonetheless expanding rapidly and becoming increasingly powerful. This expansion was the result of a number of factors: the development of early forms of manufacturing and trade, an increase in the overall population of the country (doubling from 2.5 million in the 1520s to around 5 million in 1600), and the continuing process of the enclosure of land into larger, privately owned, units of production. Philip Stubbes, writing in The Anatomie of Abuses (1583), explained that:

They take in, and inclose commons, moores, heaths, and other common pastures, wher out the poore commonalitie were wont to have all their forage and feeding for their cattell, & (which is more) corne for them selves to lyve uppon … For these inclosures be the causes, why rich men, eat up poore men, as beasts do eat grass.

(Stubbes 1973: n.p.)

Historians debate the extent and effect of this process during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603) but most note the considerable unrest such dispossession caused, especially in times of poor harvest and the accompanying migration to the towns. Early industrial activity, often benefiting from the skills of Protestant immigrants from The Netherlands and France, also drew people from the countryside to the towns in search of wages and the perceived benefits of urban life. The population of London itself was most affected and the city grew to be one of the largest in Europe. The 200,000 people who lived in London in 1600 represented a doubling of the city’s population since 1580, and it was to double again, to 400,000, by 1650.

One effect of this increase was to create a large audience for the expanding network of theatres. Many of the people who attended these theatres had a memory of the traditions and cycles of activity in the countryside, as well as a new consciousness of the rigours and, indeed, the dangers of urban life. Many Londoners retained a connection with the countryside through the city’s agricultural markets, but London was also rapidly becoming the focus for a new kind of commercial activity which had an increasingly international dimension. For more people than ever before, there emerged an awareness of ‘the nation’ in relation to the rest of Europe, as well as to the expanding world itself, as news circulated of the settlements made in the territories of the ‘new worlds’ beyond Europe. The period of history during which the plays in this volume were written was one of increasing exploration and the first tentative ‘planting’ (of people) overseas. England’s only real colony (and most successful plantation of Protestantism) was Ireland. However, whatever the practical successes and failures of these activities, the impulse towards the settlement of overseas territories can be glimpsed surprisingly early in the sixteenth century.

Trade links to the east of Europe (and particularly with Turkey through the Levant Company) opened up possibilities of further links as far as India and China. Some of this business involved the establishment of small groups of traders abroad. The lands across the Atlantic to the west, however, gave rise to the possibility of an entirely different form of activity. The idea arose in the 1560s that a ‘stabling place’ could be set up in North America through which local raw materials could be exchanged for English cloth. Indeed, in 1582 Humphrey Gilbert declared English sovereignty over Newfoundland but the project failed, as did the idea of a ‘New Albion’ in what is now California and early plantations in Virginia during 1584 and 1587. It was not until the 1620s that more successful settlements were established, yet this earlier expansion, together with associated tensions in international affairs, particularly with Spain, had made an enlarged concept of the world available for a great number of people. However, there were insecurities about the development of a non-agrarian structure of employment and in the new awareness of the world which it had helped to deliver, and these tensions are revealed in the dramatic writing of the period.

Whilst many of these plays, such as A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), are located in the claustrophobic settings of English (or foreign) country estates, an increasing number, such as The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), Epicoene, or The Silent Woman (1609) and The Roaring Girl, established the importance of towns and cities as places recognisable as images of the structure and pattern of everyday life for the theatre audience. Even where town life was represented in European settings (The Changeling (1622) is set in Spain, for example, and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1633) in Italy), there would have been a keen sense of identification for London audiences intrigued by the potential for comparison between these imagined overseas locations and their own expanding city. Moreover, a strong element throughout the drama of the seventeenth century is the perceived clash between the ways of the country and the ways of the town. Rural life was idealised for its purity and simplicity, ridiculed and attacked for its lack of sophistication, or both: in Epicoene, for instance, Truewit signals the impossibility of finding a chaste wife in the city by suggesting that such a creature existed only in some distant – and undesirable – rural past:

If you had lived in King Etheldred’s time, sir, or Edward the Confessor’s, you might, perhaps, have found in some cold country hamlet, then, a dull frosty wench would have been contented with one man; now they will as soon be pleased with one leg or one eye.

(II.ii.39-44)

In The Roaring Girl, the countryside figures, on the one hand, as a place for the staging of illicit sexual encounters (at Ware, Hoxton or Brentford, villages outside of, but accessible from, London), or, on the other hand, as a place of impoverishment and dearth (as signalled by the names of Lord Noland and Laxton). In all of these instances the countryside is attributed its meanings only through reference to, and in order to define, its perceived opposite: the city.

The material conditions of city life are a key element in many of these plays. The rich diversity of London’s population is represented, together with the opportunities and pitfalls of the new economic order. Although rural life had been, and continued to be, dependent upon the uncertainties of the harvest (and deeply affected over the centuries by disease, high mortality rates and migration), it was also insular and, for the most part, characterised by the stability and continuity of its population. Life in the towns was less predictable, since it depended upon a more complex social and economic structure and a more mobile population. The varying fortunes of trade led to uneven levels of employment, whether in work directly related to enterprise or in the associated positions of servants and those involved in the supply trades. ‘Masterless’ people, both victims of changing rural economies and ex-soldiers (such as Trapdoor and Tearcat in The Roaring Girl), threatened both country and city, and the new concentration of large numbers of people in urban areas helped spread the recurrent bouts of plague, the extent and effect of which can be fairly accurately traced by, amongst other things, the occasions when they forced the closure of the theatres.

Day-to-day life in the city was characterised by high levels of both casual and surprisingly ‘organised’ crime in a society which lacked anything like a modern police force; indeed, the attention given to ‘thieves’ cant’, the specialist language of criminals and vagrants, in The Roaring Girl testifies to the highly developed structures of communication and organisation within this social grouping. Moreover, justice was itself a form of theatre, in the sense that it often resulted in spectacular displays of power by the authorities as a means of deterrence. Whilst the agents of government might initially confine and torture their enemies in the hidden chambers of the Tower of London, it was also common for examples to be made of both political opponents and ordinary criminals in the public areas of the city, with branding, mutilations and hangings being conducted for all to see. In this most unequal of societies, it was not unusual to see women and men publicly abused and chastised through a number of popular rituals and punishments for their lack of conformity to the ‘laws’ of gender and sexual conduct which governed their lives. This was a society in which the power of the state and the law was demonstrated and enacted precisely through its public ‘performance’. Far from the theatre and the law occupying separate spheres of entertainment and social regulation, then, the plays engaged fundamentally with issues of power and authority, just as the judiciary and the state relied on the power of spectacle.

The plays’ engagement with such issues involved a recognition that power and authority were distributed differentially through society, and that the social hierarchies that had previously determined social status and power were undergoing a process of transformation. This evolution of the early modern system of social rank or degree was inextricably bound up with the changing pattern of economic development. The largely rural medieval social formation had for centuries held relatively few opportunities for social advancement, the land-controlling aristocracy presiding over a hierarchy of gentry and peasantry that was firmly linked to their roles within the countryside and mediated through the dual institutions of local feudal justice and the church. However, by the late sixteenth century, this was giving way to a more diverse and rather more fluid system of social hierarchy, where a man’s degree depended on a combination of his wealth, power and status, and a woman’s usually depended on that of her father or husband. Whilst the social hierarchy was still characterised by the nobility and land-owning gentry at the top, the professions (such as the church, the law, medicine and the army) and major trades (based on wholesaling and retailing) complicated the old structures of rural stratification in that the growing wealth and power of increasingly urban-based groups began to effect a change in their status. These urban elites tended to be drawn from the middling gentry and continued to act in their own interests; however, they also increasingly came to control positions of authority in the towns and cities, on councils and in courts of aldermen, or in guild companies (as demonstrated in The Knight of the Burning Pestle). Below them in the hierarchy came the rural yeomen, who acted as the gentry’s ‘agents’ by servicing juries, acting as constables and administering the system of poor relief. In descending order of degree, they were followed by craftsmen, tradesmen and copyholders (tenant farmers), then apprentices and servants (drawn from a number of social groups and therefore most likely to change their position within the social hierarchy) and, finally, husbandmen (who farmed their own smallholdings), cottagers (who supplemented their income with paid labour), labourers and vagrants. These distinctions varied somewhat from locality to locality, but within this general system of social inequality, however, there was constant movement, in that some farm labourers would become yeomen, some urban apprentices would become masters, and so on. The system of fine gradations and stratification operated in as thoroughgoing a way at the lower end of the hierarchy as it did at the higher. However, whilst capable of ranking groups and occupations into a complex and finely tuned system of stratification, contemporaries also increasingly grouped these many positions into three broad clusters: ‘gendemen’, ‘the middling sort of people’ and ‘the poor’ – a tripartite system closer to the urban-based class system which was to supersede it in the eighteenth century.

The plays’ determined preoccupation with matters of social rank is evidence both of the evolution of the social structure, and of the way that this produced a tension between the emerging classes and the old aristocracy which, although it had fought wars within its own ranks, had never conceded its own ‘divinely sanctioned’ power over the majority of the population. Much of the drama of the period can be seen as fairly even-handedly implying criticism of the beliefs of both the older aristocratic layer of society and the newly-emerging and increasingly influential ‘middling sort’. Epicoene, for example, is relentless in its excoriation of fashionable and rootless urbanites as represented by Morose, the collegiate ladies, the ersatz Sir John Daw (whose learning is indiscriminate and cavalier, and who ‘buys tides’), the Otters, and even the putative ‘heroes’, the three gallants. Family longevity and continuity, however, is no guarantee of wisdom or good order, as La Foole demonstrates. His family, the La Fooles of London, are the source of all the La Fooles of the land: ‘They all come out of our house, the La Fooles o’ the north, the La Fooles of the west, the La Fooles of the east and south – we are as ancient a family as any is in Europe’ (I.iv.37-40). Even in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, which is a much less acerbic comedy than Epicoene, a chivalric past is invoked only to be parodied and undercut by a sense of the lack of relevance of such ideals and practices in the new urban context. Perhaps these comedies are exceptional in their unwillingness to identify ‘the old order’ as more desirable and harmonious than the new. Much of the drama at this time would probably have been viewed as conservatively and nostalgically favouring this system of patronage and stability, seen as increasingly vulnerable and unstable.

Early modern theatre: origins, locations and dramatic forms

By the 1560s, London, with its rapidly expanding population, its new forms of trade and commerce, and its complex and diverse social composition, was on the brink of a new era of theatre-building and play-performing. The theatres in which the plays were first performed owed their development not only to a remarkable confluence of dramatic tradition, intellectual energy and commercial enterprise, but also to the developments in building skills which allowed structures to be designed specifically for theatrical entertainment. This is not to say, however, that popular dramatic forms and performances were themselves new. On the contrary, the medieval period had been rich in varied forms of drama, much of it closely bound up with the folk traditions of an agrarian society. It is thought, for example, that the popularity of plays dealing with Christian notions of death and resurrection owed something to pre-Christian traditions celebrating the cycle of the changing seasons. Indeed, many of the festivals, particularly Christmas and Easter with their entertainments and rituals, can be seen as having been grafted on to pre-existing pagan celebrations, and the legacy of these combined traditions can be found in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

More specifically, it was the church which encouraged the more formal kinds of dramatic tradition from which the early modern theatre descended. The Mystery plays, which were organised in the towns by the guilds of professional artisans, had their origins in dramatic representations of episodes from the Bible which had first been acted in the larger Catholic places of worship as far back as the ninth century. In the years leading up to (and perhaps overlapping with) the establishment of the first public theatres in London, these productions annually retold those key Christian stories which were considered the literal history of human existence. Although central figures (Adam, Noah and Christ) were often played by professional actors, the main cast was drawn from amongst local people, and the form allowed topical references, local customs and even limited social critique to combine with the reinforcement of the truth of Christian teaching.

Medieval Morality plays such as Mankind (1464-71) and Everyman (c. 1520) had, perhaps, more forceful messages to convey, with their severe warnings against sin and the corruption of the soul. These plays, which toured around towns and villages, dramatised the various temptations to which ‘man’ was open. Typically a central human figure was visited by emblematic figures representing various sins or moral dilemmas, a tradition handed on to the Renaissance theatre and easily seen in plays such as Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (c. 1589) or Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606). In the absence of buildings specifically designed for the theatre, these early plays were staged in market squares, the courtyards of inns and the banqueting halls of the larger mansions (as in the case of the travelling players who act ‘The Mousetrap’ in Hamlet (1600)). Despite the gravity of their spiritual messages, these were also entertainments, and their mixing of comedy with theology is a tradition that perhaps explains the mixing of genres in the plays of the Elizabethan and early Stuart period. Some of the most compelling figures in the plays in this volume happen to be some of the most morally corrupt (Salome in The Tragedy of Mariam (1604), De Flores in The Changeling, or Giovanni in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore), and many of the figures of high comedy, such as Moll Cutpurse in The Roaring Girl, are the most philosophically gifted and eloquent.

The poets who turned to the theatre in the period immediately before Shakespeare were well aware of these older traditions and incorporated them into their new work. They were also attuned to the long-standing forms of entertainment at court (where the masque was cultivated) and to such European forms of street entertainment as the commedia dell’arte and the earliest forms of ltalian opera. The London of the second half of the sixteenth century was fast becoming a cosmopolitan society visited by groups of travelling actors from abroad. In addition, there was an interest in classical forms of theatre, an interest which adds to the sense of the period as the Renaissance, a revaluation of classical culture. A notion of the ideal structure and form of a play was derived from a knowledge of the work of the Greek writer Aristode (384-322 BC). His early ‘criticism’ was highly influential in the work of many of the playwrights, his theory of dramatic unity, explained in The Poetics, being perhaps most evident in the plays of Ben Jonson. Similarly, the plays of the Roman writer Seneca (4 BC–AD 64) interested contemporary students at Oxford and Cambridge and inspired much early modern tragedy, particularly after the publication of Thomas Newton’s Seneca, His Tenne Tragedies Translated into English in 1581. Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1585) is an early example of such ‘Senecan’ tragedy, whilst Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, a later play, is ‘Senecan’ not only in its interest in revenge, but also because it was a ‘closet’ drama, like Seneca’s plays, probably written to be read rather than to be performed on stage.

The evolution of these various influences into the dramatic genres represented in this volume depended, however, upon the practical development of drama into a commercial institution, housed in the new, purpose-built theatres. Until this point, when plays had been performed in halls, market places, inn yards or baiting arenas, payment for the actors had come from diverse sources, either from the host who had invited them to play, or, in cases where performance was in a market place, from passing a hat round after the play. With the new playhouses, the financial relationship between players and audiences changed:

By enclosing the plays inside a special building players made the customers who paid to see what was on offer more selective, and no doubt more demanding. Only those who paid got in. They got in for the exclusive purpose of seeing a play, and they handed their money over to the impresarios and players whose sole interest was in satisfying their demand for entertainment. Moreover a single fixed venue needed a much larger turnover of plays than was needed when the players were on their travels from one town to another. So the new London playhouses became a massive stimulus to the production of new plays.

(Gurr 1996: 10-11)

The earliest of these new theatres was the Red Lion, built by John Brayne in 1567 in Whitechapel. This was replaced in 1576 when James Burbage (Brayne’s brother-in-law and business partner) constructed a building known simply as ‘The Theatre’ at Shoreditch, then to the north-east of London proper; in the following year, and very near to the Theatre, the Curtain was built. The rapid proliferation of large public theatres is evidence of Londoners’ demand for all manner of entertainment. After the building of the Curtain, the favoured location for the erection of public theatres became Southwark, on the south bank of the River Thames, and thus safely outside the jurisdiction of the city authorities who sought, where possible, to suppress the performance of plays. These theatres were located near a similarly expanding array of bear and bull pits, brothels, cockfighting arenas, and other forms of public entertainment which contemporary writers and, in particular, Puritan critics, saw as equally dubious and degrading. Indeed, something like a tradition became established of invective against the theatre, ranging from John Rainold’s lectures at Oxford in the reign of Henry VIII to William Prynne’s scathing critiques of the 1630s. Stephen Gosson, in his The School of Abuse, a pamphlet of 1579, grouped players together with poets and ‘pipers’ as part of a general moral malaise:

Let us but shut uppe our eares to poets, pipers and players; pull our feete back from resort to theaters, and turne away our eyes from beholding of vanitie, the greatest storme of abuse will bee overblowne, and a faire path troden to amendment of life: were not we so foolish to taste every drugge and buy every trifle, players woulde shut in their shops, and carry their trash to some other country.

(Gosson 1841: 34)

Despite such attacks, theatres and other places of public entertainment proliferated. Southwark’s Rose theatre, an archaeological trace of which remains today, was built in 1587, followed by the Swan in 1595 and, most famously, the Globe, which opened in 1599. The Globe was situated a few hundred metres further away from the river than the present replica building, and was said to have been built from the timbers of Burbage’s Shoreditch theatre, demolished in 1598. The Globe was itself rebuilt in 1614 after a fire the previous year. Another Southwark theatre was the Hope (1614), also much used for bear-baiting. The Fortune (1600), the Boar’s Head (1601) and the Red Bull (1604) were to the north of the Thames, but again outside of the

Locations of London’s principal theatres, c. 1560-1642

jurisdiction of the London authorities (see map). These theatres attracted large audiences of up to 3,000 people, who were charged a small fee to attend the afternoon performances. Their designation as ‘public’ theatres results from their capacity, their cheapness and the fact that their clientele was drawn from diverse areas of society. These are also sometimes known as ‘amphitheatre’ playhouses, however, which indicates something of these buildings’ physical properties. Modelled on the inn yard or animal-baiting arena, these theatres were usually polygonal and were partially open to the sky (only the stage and the galleries were covered), and their stages projected into the open central ‘pit’ or courtyard. Thomas Platter, a German visitor to London in 1599, described the seating arrangements and the atmosphere of the London theatres that he visited:

Thus daily at two in the afternoon, London has two, sometimes three plays running in different places, competing with each other, and those which play best obtain most spectators. The playhouses are so constructed that they play on a raised platform, so that everyone has a good view. There are different galleries and places, however, where the seating is better and more comfortable and therefore more expensive. For whoever cares to stand below only pays one English penny, but if he wishes to sit he enters by another door, and pays another penny, while if he desires to sit in the most comfortable seats which are cushioned, where he not only sees everything well, but can also be seen, then he pays yet another English penny at another door. And during the performance food and drink are carried round the audience, so that for what one cares to pay one may also have refreshment. The actors are most expensively and elaborately costumed; for it is the English usage for eminent lords or Knights at their decease to bequeath and leave almost the best of their clothes to their serving men, which it is unseemly for the latter to wear, so they offer them then for sale for a small sum to the actors.

(Platter 1937 166-7)

Plays written for these public playhouses were shaped by their writers’ awareness of the social composition of their audiences as well as the physical characteristics of the buildings in which the plays would be acted. One of the most interesting features of the plays is the way that they frequently draw attention to the fact that they are, indeed, plays. There is none of the aspiration to realism found in many modern forms of drama, although there is an often repeated idea that ‘real’ life is itself rather like a play, in which we take roles and act out parts., it is possible to learn much from the lines written for the early modern actor about the emblematic environment in which he worked. The stage itself had a symbolic role. Hell was located below the platform (through a trap door) and heaven was above it, signified by a painted ceiling of stars. Actors would address an audience in full acknowledgement of its presence as part of the ‘event’; a few actors could easily be understood to represent a crowd, or even an army; boy actors could be understood to represent women (since there were no professional women actors) and a sense of place or time was indicated in the dialogue at the beginning of a new scene (as there was no scenery or artificial lighting), and a gesture would convey a message understood across the audience to its furthest members. This is not to say that this was a theatre lacking in subtlety; the actors worked their audiences’ imaginations to the full. Nor was it a spartan theatre; what the public theatres lacked in the modern sense of ‘scenery’, they gained not only through the committed involvement of their audiences in the entertainment, but also by the employment of elaborate costume, ingenious props and music.

Theatre clearly demanded then, as now, extremely high levels of organisation. The theatres were profit-making commercial concerns, and the owners, playwrights and companies of actors responded to the demands of their business with rigorous professionalism. Surviving documents from the time, and in particular the diary of the theatre-owner Philip Henslowe, reveal the intricate nature of the finances involved in running a theatre. Money was to be made in the theatres despite the fact that they were constantly under attack from the civic authorities (who thought of actors as little more than vagabonds) and subject to regular closure as a result of recurrent outbreaks of plague. Partly as a result of this precarious existence, acting companies sought patronage from the monarchs and aristocracy of the time, and this is reflected in the titles they assumed, such as the ‘King’s Men’ or ‘Queen Anne’s Men’. This patronage led the companies to perform at court, which meant that if a play was performed in a public theatre and again before the queen or king, its ultimate audience encompassed the full range of society.

During the seventeenth century the large public theatres began to lose ground to the smaller and more intimate ‘private’ theatres. The earliest of these had been constructed in the Elizabethan period at the same time as the larger public theatres. Although much smaller than the Southwark theatres, the Blackfriars, built in 1576 and rebuilt and enlarged by Burbage in 1596, had many of the characteristics of the public theatres: the stage, for example, still featured areas designated as ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’, and the audience was still distributed at different levels to watch the plays. But here, as in the Whitefriars (1606) and other private theatres such as the Salisbury Court (1629), the acting space and auditorium were more intimate and the audience more exclusive. These theatres were fully enclosed, and therefore the plays were lit artificially, leaving the audience in darkness. The stage was at one end of a rectangular space, and all members of the audience were seated. The design of these private (or ‘hall’) theatres meant that their capacity was much smaller than that of the public ones, probably no more than a quarter of the size, and admission prices were much higher.

By the time the Cockpit opened in Drury Lane in 1616 (mostly referred to as the Phoenix after 1617, when it burnt down and was swiftly rebuilt), the private theatres were far more financially secure institutions than the public ones, and playwrights increasingly wrote with these kinds of spaces and audiences in mind. The style of productions changed significantly, and there is a greater uniformity to the social bias in most of the plays from this later part of the historical period. By the end of the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the majority of new plays was being written for these private theatres and for performance by companies with firm connections at court. Older plays, which had been written for the public theatres, were also revived in the various forms of theatre which survived until their closure at the outbreak of civil war in 1642.

During the reigns of the early Stuart monarchs, King James (who had been the king of Scotland since 1567 and became king of England in 1603) and his son, Charles (who succeeded him in 1625), the court became highly preoccupied with the fashionable and politically important dramatic form known as the masque. These courtly entertainments, such as The Masque of Blackness (1605), with their combinations of acting, music and dance, usually involved members of the nobility as performers. They relied upon the elaborate Italianate set and costume designs originated by Inigo Jones, and the writing of dramatists such as Ben Jonson, who increasingly turned to the masque form as his career developed. These court productions may account for the particular masque-like quality of some of the ‘play-within-a-play’ entertainments included in other texts from the period, such as the dumb show in Act IV scene i of The Changeling.

These principal places of theatrical entertainment – public theatre, private theatre and court – are the ones which have received most scholarly attention, since they were where the majority of the better known plays and masques of the period were first performed. However, it is important to keep in mind that theatre was also available still from the visiting troupes of players from other parts of Europe and in the form of travelling productions in Britain and Ireland, and there continued to be theatrical activity in the houses of the aristocracy and at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Even after the civil war began in 1642., the theatre managed to survive in informal, private arrangements to re-emerge with considerable energy following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

A drama of institutions

Just as the proliferation of purpose-built theatres and the increased public enthusiasm for playgoing can be understood as the outcome of a particular set of social, economic and cultural configurations, so the plays written for these theatres can also be seen to be profoundly shaped by the contemporary circumstances of their production. Although some twentieth-century literary criticism reads this drama as concerned with universal and timeless issues relating to the ‘human condition’ – love, death, truth, loyalty, justice and morality – more recently, critics have traced the ways in which this drama is precisely not ‘timeless’ but very much ‘of its age’. This concept is based upon the drama’s close thematic engagement with so many of the key institutions of the time. These institutions, such as the monarchy, the church and the family, structured contemporary society. Such theatrical engagements, moreover, were far from being neutral ‘reflections’ of the world outside the theatre, but were often astute and passionate contributions to contemporary analyses and debates about the nature and remit of these institutions.

One of the most clear-cut examples of such an engagement concerns the location of the action of these plays: many feature court settings, presided over by figures of authority (kings, dukes or cardinals), which mimic the structures of power established by ‘divine right’, whereby absolute power, ultimately deriving from God, is invested in the monarch. In these dramatic worlds, we can observe the activities of rival factions, ambitious individuals from further down the social formation and those denied justice by the existing structures and systems. In The Spanish Tragedy, for example, following the killing of his son, Hieronimo seeks in vain to obtain justice from the king, the courts and heaven itself, whilst in Edward II (1592) we witness a similarly corrupt, divisive and self-interested exercise of political power at all levels of governance. In focusing on the imperfect exercise of political power, the plays demonstrate something of the tension which applied to the upper reaches of government in the world beyond the theatre. The considerable alterations in the social composition of the country had a significant effect upon the way that it was governed. Embedded in the plots of many of the plays, these struggles for power and justice between competing groups or factions can be seen as more or less directly representing and interrogating the vested interests inherent in the wider social formation, and the changes in their capacity to intervene in and influence the political process; and it is to a discussion of these changes that we now turn.

It is impossible to separate political power in early modem England from religious institutions and practices. The conflicts which so indelibly mark the years of Elizabeth I and the two Stuart monarchs who succeeded her (James and Charles) have their origins in the religious turmoil of the middle decades of the sixteenth century. The reign of Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, had been characterised both by his increasing centralisation of the machinery of government (intended, amongst other things, to put an end to the internal aristocratic disputes which had led to the Wars of the Roses of 1455-85) and by his break with Rome, when the 1534 Act of Supremacy established him as head of the English Church. Apart from a brief respite offered during the reign of Mary (1553-8), Catholics were persecuted throughout the remainder of the sixteenth century, whilst English Protestantism developed in such a way as to represent a powerful new sense of Anglocentric national identity. This is not to claim the successful subjugation of other regional and national identities within the British Isles to an all-powerful English one: whilst Wales had long before been absorbed into England’s sphere of influence, Scotland continued to be, until the Act of Union of 1707, a separate country with its own parliament; and Ireland remained only nominally part of the empire declared by Henry in his Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533). Nonetheless, part of the ‘Tudor project’ under Elizabeth continued to be the development and assertion of an English supremacy, much of which depended on Elizabeth’s image as a specifically Protestant leader. This was skilfully cultivated and stage-managed throughout her reign, and works of propaganda against Catholicism, together with the 1588 victory over the Armada (a Spanish fleet threatening an invasion of England), helped to seal the association between the monarchy, English nationalism and Protestant theology.

The advent of Protestantism can be closely identified with the increasing influence of a class of gentry which was turning its skills to trade and commerce. Some members of this group had benefited directly from the redistribution of land following Henry’s dissolution of Catholic monastic estates between 1536 and 1539. Indeed, Thomas Arden, in Arden of Faversham (1592.), is an instance of just such a man, his wealth deriving from the sale of the lands belonging to the Abbey of Faversham. With its ethic of individuality, self-reliance and hard work, Protestantism facilitated the turn to commerce by this segment of English people, as it had done for those abroad in the Reformation stronghold of the Netherlands. Towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign, however, and increasingly during the reigns of James and Charles, this rising commercial class identified itself with more rigorous or ‘Puritan’ forms of Protestantism, seeking to take further the ‘purification’ of religious practice that they thought had been inadequately implemented by the reformed English church. This group’s increasing economic power gave rise to political aspiration, representing itself in the influential trade guilds, the municipal authorities in London and other towns, and increasingly in parliament itself. Encouraged by the Catholic Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and disapproving of the Stuarts’ sympathy towards Catholicism, this was the class which consolidated itself with such strength against the monarch’s divine right to rule the country that it finally took complete charge in the civil wars of the 1640s. In a piece of theatre decisive enough to draw crowds from across London and beyond, Parliament executed Charles I in January 1649.

Protestantism represented an important break with the past in terms of the way that church services were organised and in the church’s theories concerning the relationship between the individual and God. No longer was the priest a necessary intermediary between the believer and God, but each believer was now to take direct responsibility for the state of his or her own spiritual well-being by means of a constant process of prayer, self-scrutiny, and Bible study. The latter was made possible by new translations of the Bible from Latin into English; particularly important here was the ‘Geneva’ Bible (1560), the most widely used translation until the 1630s, though better known now is the King James (or ‘Authorised’) version, published in 1611. These translations widened direct access to the ‘word of God’, which had hitherto been strictly interpreted for church congregations only by priests. The self-reliance and hard work so often associated with Puritanism, then, applied to its adherents’ religious beliefs and practices as well as to their business dealings.

Over the years during which the plays in this volume were written, the idea of a hierarchy of priests and bishops controlling the circulation of spiritual ideas was severely challenged, particularly in Puritan circles. The day-to-day conduct of religious life needed to be released from what Puritans saw as the clutter of icons, wealth and elaborate trappings characteristic of Catholicism, many of which had been preserved in the English church established by Henry VIII. The forms of religious worship and organisation which Puritans wanted to introduce were aimed not only at making the individual’s relationship with God more direct, but also more democratic. These more Puritan forms of Protestantism were varied, and notoriously difficult to anatomise and characterise, but ranged from a Calvinism which declared that an élite of people were ‘predestined’ from birth to enter heaven, to those who asserted ‘free will’ and the ability of any individual to gain salvation through the kind of pure life which was evidence of God’s hand in their earthly conduct. Some of the later seventeenth-century religious groups advocated the abolition of church services altogether, stressed the purity of rural life, and drew up egalitarian principles to do with the rights of men and women over property and land. Such beliefs proved much too radical for those Puritans who took the reins of power in the 1640s and 1650s.

The connection between these new forms of religious life and wider aspects of government cannot be overestimated. To a greater or lesser extent, all forms of Protestantism questioned the authority of the older church establishment, but the ‘purer’ versions increasingly challenged contemporary forms of non-representative national and local government. The ideals of Puritanism were the foundation of many of the new settlements in America of the 1620s onwards and played the biggest part in organised dissent from the authority of the monarchy at home, underpinning the confidence of the new, largely non-aristocratic class which found representation in the parliament which eventually overthrew Charles I.

The plays of the period endlessly rehearse issues to do with the relationship between power, authority, justice and theology (the discussions between Giovanni and the Friar in ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore are a good example of this), and whilst they often mock the extremes of the Puritan lifestyle, they are at the same time almost uniformly committed to reminding their audiences of the ‘horrors’ of Catholicism. Many plays of the period, and almost all the tragedies of revenge, are set in Catholic countries such as Italy or Spain. These were thought of as places of excess and uncontrolled appetites. Not only were these Mediterranean societies seen as being obsessed with revenge, but all aspects of their culture were thought of as lacking control and regulation. Food, manners, speech, costume and etiquette were much commented on by contemporary travellers as examples of a world of excessive consumption and gratification which lay beyond the English Channel. A particular preoccupation for English writers was with Italian sexual mores, often thought to be perverted, outlandish and undignified. In the realm of politics, Italy was singled out as a loose web of states which rivalled one another in corruption, opportunism and political intrigue. English translations of the Florentine political thinker Machiavelli, which circulated widely amongst the Elizabethan and Stuart intelligentsia, were read as confirming this view. Spain, meanwhile, notably successful in the conquest of territory overseas, had posed an immediate and local threat in the form of the Armada of 1588, and during the period of its threatened return in the 1590s.

In fact, the drama of the time parodied and damned the ‘otherness’ of all manner of ‘foreign’ peoples. The distinctive strands of anti-semitism in some plays of the period, such as Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (c. 1589) and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1596) had a chilling resonance for twentieth-century readers, and will continue to influence decisions about the re-staging of plays in this century. It is also possible to find casual abuse of the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish. This was the period which saw the development of the ideal of a modern ‘Britishness’, yet it was clearly based on the assumption that England was culturally superior. Indeed, a series of plays, now known as the ‘Elect Nation’ plays, were staged by the theatre owner Philip Henslowe in the first few years of the seventeenth century, with the express aim of celebrating and bolstering the superiority of a particular version of Protestant Englishness.

The marked distaste for Mediterranean Catholic culture was accompanied, ironically, by a clear fascination with its perceived excesses. In the drama of the period and in much contemporary prose, Spain and Italy could be made to represent everything that England, officially at least, had abandoned along with the doctrines of the Roman Catholic church, thus strengthening the image of a nation united against the kind of corruption and decay exhibited in these imagined Catholic worlds. Nonetheless, the design of the private theatres was heavily influenced by Italian style, and a vogue developed amongst the aristocracy for southern European music and dance. Given the suspicion that a sympathy for Catholicism lingered at court, these settings might be seen as a way by which the dramatists of the time could invite a critique of the very court which sponsored and witnessed their plays.

The early modern period saw a consolidation of a sense of nation based upon the cultivation of the distinctiveness of English Protestant identity, and a nurturing of history through the chronicles of Holinshed and Stow upon which Shakespeare, Marlowe and others based their historical dramas. However, such a project also raised immediate and unsettling questions, given the layered and fragmented society which witnessed it. For whom did such an identity make most sense, and in whose interests did it work? If a contest was underway over national identity, then the combatants were drawn from a social formation which itself was characterised by considerable instability and change. It was no longer possible, if it ever had been, to recognise a stable aristocracy which had gathered its own wealth and prestige under conditions dictated and fostered by feudal economic systems, inheritance and an oppressive government machinety. Many new ‘entrepreneurs’ and beneficiaries of social mobility were able to ‘buy into’ the nobility, especially in the reign of James Stuart (Sir John Daw in Epicoene is mocked by Truewit for just this reason (I.ii.83)). Similarly the new body of politically-minded individuals inspired by a new economic system, which, as they recognised, was fundamentally altering what could be expected from society’s political and social institutions, also included modernisers from old and established families.

To a large extent, this contest over a new national identity for the country was fought over the relationship between individuals and the numerous institutions which formed both the structure of the government in particular, and society in general. The existing governmental structure saw the monarch as God’s representative on earth. In the body of the king (or queen) reposed the absolute authority (or ‘divine right’) of the monarch to rule. Royal authority was handed from monarch to monarch through death and succession. The monarch’s subjects circulated around this absolute authority, against which their own positions in the order of things were defined. The older institutions of government reinforced this hierarchy. Elizabethan Parliaments were summoned in order to ratify and disseminate the power and authority of the queen. During his reign, James Stuart wrote extensively on the laws which governed his divine authority over his subjects, in texts such as The True Lawe of Free Monarchies (1603).

A parallel can be made between this model of power and the medieval notion that the earth (the monarch) was the centre of the universe, around which the planets (his or her subjects) simply circulated. Yet just as late medieval science determined, in the face of fierce opposition from the church, that the sun was in fact the centre of the universe, the rising class of politically-minded Protestants sought to de-centre the monarch’s authority. They increasingly conceived of power as residing in the institutions through which society was run, and ultimately in the elected chamber of Parliament. The new emphasis was not upon the notion of individuals as subjects of the monarch, but as citizens in the increasingly complex civil organisation to be found in society in general, particularly the society of the expanding towns and cities. This did not, of course, seamlessly succeed the notion of the individual-as-subject, but operated in tension with it and helped to raise questions about its foundation and reach. In the drama of the period, the city comedies such as The Roaring Girl and The Knight of the Burning Pestle represent a thoroughly ‘civic’ world of citizen concerns and values. However, even the histoty plays, such as Marlowe’s Edward II, by no means assume an unquestionable legitimacy for the model of individual-as-subject, for if the monarchy itself is represented as a flawed and all-too-human institution, then the subjection of the individual to it can no longer be taken for granted. So, whilst questions about the role of the individual in relation to society’s institutions produced a tension at the heart of the political drama which in turn unfolded at the heart of government during the seventeenth centuty (revolving around such issues as the law, money, divine right, representation and religion), they also created a tension which drives the plots of many of the plays of the period. The fictional worlds of this drama, whether located in contemporary England or in distant Spain and Italy, were inhabited by citizens and subjects whose roles were similarly defined in relation to institutional concerns.

The plays are not, of course, concerned only with the ‘politics’ of monarchy, government and the church. In a similar way, they also debate the workings of institutions such as the law, commerce and social rank which affected not just those members of society actively involved in early modern politics, but everyone who attended the performances. Evidence that the plays directed their audiences’ attentions to the experiences of everyday life can be seen, for example, through their close examination of marriage and the family, the institutions which most directly regulated sexuality. This aspect of Renaissance theatre has caught the interest of recent critics, undoubtedly because of the evolution of these institutions in the second half of the twentieth centuty. These old plays show how assumptions about sexuality were under intense examination in the early modern period, a time of profound transformation in notions of marriage and the family.

Questions concerning gender, sexuality and the changing structure of the family recur in much early modern drama, and are raised in comedies, tragedies and histories alike; indeed, it is difficult to identify any one play in this anthology that is not concerned to explore the meanings of one or all of these issues. This is perhaps not surprising, given the histoty of the period leading up to their production, which is notable for the manner in which a variety of governmental and religious institutions sought to regulate and control the sexuality of those subject to their scrutiny. Protestantism inherited a number of religious edicts from the Roman Catholic church that were designed to encourage monogamy, punish sexual irregularities, and formalise the procedures surrounding the marriage ceremony. For example, the practice familiar to modern Christian churchgoers of ‘calling the banns’, and the procedures for keeping records of marriages, were standardised and consolidated by canon (religious) law with a view to seeking out bigamy, incest and other forbidden practices. Nonetheless, despite the increasing popularity of church marriages throughout the sixteenth centuty, legal recognition of less formal unions, known as ‘clandestine marriages’ (no banns, and in a parish away from home), continued, and even canon law recognised as binding any public declaration before witnesses that a man and woman considered themselves married, although a church wedding was necessary to ensure the inheritance of property. Amongst the very poor, evidence suggests that many never contracted any kind of legally recognised marriage, and were thus more free to change their partners at will. Cohabitation could be prosecuted in the church courts, but increasingly this only happened if a child was involved, as there was concern that the child or the mother might become a cost to the parish. Although the Church of England did not recognise divorce, it was the subject of intense scrutiny during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and separations between husbands and wives were not unheard of. Questions about the regulation of marriages were, then, live issues, and can be seen to inform such diverse plays as The Tragedy of Mariam, with its interest in the politics of divorce and marital loyalty, Arden of Faversham, investigating the terms and meanings of Alice’s challenge to the marriage contract, A Woman Killed with Kindness, which foregrounds the uneasy combination of economics and sexual desire in marriage partnerships, and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, which invites us to examine the foundation of sexual and social taboos in relation to its exposé of the brutal foundations and betrayals of socially sanctioned sexual relationships. The multiplicity of such troubled, and troubling, representations of the family indicates something of the pressures on, challenges to, and uncertainties about the form, foundation and function of this institution during these years.

Alongside, and as a part of, these concerns about marriage went anxieties about changes to the structure of the family itself, and the plays’ obsession with conflicts which proceeded from sexual behaviour and the power associated with sexuality and gender offers a commentary on this evolution. The concept of the family had clearly been different in medieval society. Arrangements at the lower end of the social formation could sometimes be more liberal and changeable than they were to become in the early modern period, perhaps more readily following the real and fluctuating circumstances of people’s lives and affections. In the upper reaches of society, the ‘family’ was a grouping which often extended beyond ties of blood to include servants and retainers (and this sense is apparent in Epicoene, when Epicoene speaks of ‘a family where I govern’ (III.iv.56). Marriage was often above all an economic contract, to do with the control of land, the propagation of a dynasty and the strengthening, through amalgamation, of two or more fortunes. The idea of mutual love, leading to the voluntary entering into a partnership for life, was a secondary consideration, if at all. This meant that both men and women could be coerced into marriages against their will which, whilst on one level effective as a means of maintaining the institution of marriage, simultaneously undermined marriage as a secure means of ensuring reproduction within wedlock.

Historians disagree about the extent to which patterns of marriage changed through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some propose that the coercion of people into loveless marriages based on economic considerations gave way to voluntary consent in the name of love, and an emphasis, particularly amongst Puritans, of the need for mutual love and sympathy in marriage; others suggest that the process was much more gradual and partial than this rather optimistic version proposes. All agree, however, on the impossibility of generalising across all social ranks and all localities. What certainly seems to be the case is that this new, more mutual, model of marriage featured as an increasingly important ideal or reference point within the drama of the period; indeed, it is this that is celebrated in the opening scene of A Woman Killed with Kindness, when Frankford and Anne have just married:

You both adorn each other, and your hands

Methinks are matches. There’s equality

In this fair combination; you are both scholars,

Both young, both being descended nobly.

There’s music in this sympathy, it carries

Consort and expectation of much joy,

Which God bestow on you, from this first day

Until your dissolution – that’s for aye.

(I.i.65-72)

However, this rhetoric of mutuality and equality in fact did little for women’s rights in marriage, in many ways making them surrender the power they might have had in earlier generations. Consent secured the economic unit of the modern marriage, which became the building block of the social formation that developed from the early modern period.

Similarly, people were drawn out of a system in which they were coerced into obedience to the queen king by fear of physical punishment (and dazzled by splendour of the monarch’s power) and into a system in which they consented to the institutions which exercised power on their behalf. None of these new institutional arrangements enhanced the lives of most ordinary people, but they did propagate the illusion of progress and participation, and thereby strengthened the systems of organisation which were essential for the emerging new economic order which was to dominate succeeding centuries.

At the same time, there was considerable debate about what constituted desirable or permissible sexual behaviour, as well as about what attributes should be ascribed to masculinity and femininity. Although not categorised in the modem way, homosexuality was an issue at the courts of Elizabeth and James, but probably as part of wider anxieties over gender, power and favouritism. There was certainly concern about the ‘effeminate’ nature of the contemporary male (as there is with La Foole in Epicoene), a concern commonly linked to the perceived unfitness of the contemporary male for military duty. At the same time, some women were seen as overly male in their attire, manner and speech. In the plays, the issue of homosexuality is most evident in Edward II, but there were clearly broader anxieties about gender at issue, not least in relation to the issue of the cross-dressing of boy actors for their roles as women. With plays such as The Roaring Girl on the stage, with its unambiguous celebration of the values and freedoms enjoyed by its cross-dressing heroine, it is perhaps easier to understand why contemporary commentators continued to rail with such vehemence against what was seen as the pernicious influence of the theatre.

The intimate connection between the institutions of society and the dramatic representations of the tensions which they produced on the contemporary stage was not lost on the authorities. Opposition to the theatre was intense and it is possible to read many accounts, particularly by Puritan commentators such as Philip Stubbes, of the perceived ‘excesses’ of the theatre. The playhouses and their companies were licensed by government, and individual plays were subject to censorship. These arrangements were particularly enforced by the authorities which controlled London, leading, as was discussed earlier, to the establishment of public theatres beyond their jurisdiction in the suburbs and ‘liberties’ of London.

What surfaced in Renaissance drama were the anxieties and discontinuities which were inevitably produced in a historical period of unprecedented economic, social and political change. It is hard to think of any issue to do with the uncertain shift of men and women from the strictures of the medieval world into the modern that is not recognised in the theatre of the day. Matters of high state, recent history, the family, the law, economics, sexuality and domestic life were brought before audiences whose changing experiences of these matters must have given the theatre a distinctive resonance and sense of topicality. The theatre was primarily a place of entertainment, and some contemporary commentators praised it for diverting people’s minds from social unrest or even rebellion. Few accounts exist of audiences’ reactions to particular plays, and it is impossible to reproduce the circumstances which would have conditioned their responses. Reading from the perspective of the twenty-first century, however, a perspective shaped by the institutions and values which triumphed in the early modern period, it is possible to see articulated here something of the disquiet and uncertainty which accompanied the transition between two quite distinct periods of history.

Early modern society has been rightly celebrated for the rich diversity of its literature. Yet it is wrong to accompany this celebration with the assertion that these high levels of cultural achievement corresponded to a society of harmony and order. What makes the plays so compelling for modern readers and audiences is the glimpse we get of the uncertainties of the world which the plays sought to make sense of; and if we are ourselves products of the world which grew out of these uncertainties (as the use by critics and historians of the phrase ‘early modern’ to describe this period seeks to imply), then the plays speak to us of the generation of the conditions of our own existence.

Taken together, the plays chosen for this anthology range across issues which, to a greater or lesser degree, have a familiarity for modern readers. The nature of drama is such that these issues are seen as a source of conflict, with either tragic or comic effect, or a mixture of the two. What might disturb us, however, when we compare the worlds of the plays with our own, is the recognition that some of the assumptions we take for granted about ‘our’ society were open to significant challenge at the time when they were first considered, and that these earlier ‘alternatives’ sometimes reflect poorly on the sum of human achievement over the centuries since these plays engaged their first audiences.

Introduction

City, country, commerce and class

Early modern theatre: origins, locations and dramatic forms

A drama of institutions

References