Staging the Renaissance

David Scott Kastan, Peter Stallybrass, David Scott Kastan, Peter Stallybrass

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780415901666
• eBook ISBN: 9781136758249
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The essays in Staging the Renaissance show the theatre to be the site of a rich confluence of cultural forces, the place where social meanings are both formed and transformed. The volume unites some of the most challenging issues in contemporary Renaissance studies and some of our best-known critics, including Stephen Orgel, Margaret Ferguson, Cath

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Introduction: Staging the Renaissance

David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass

For thirty years, no new, wide-ranging anthology of essays on non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama has appeared to replace R. J. Kaufmann’s Elizabethan Drama (1961) or Max Bluestone and Norman Rabkin’s Shakespeare’s Contemporaries (1962); yet during that time there has been a remarkable quantity of important new work in the field and, perhaps as crucially, a significant shift in the very ways in which the drama is conceived and approached. Tacitly accepting the dominance in literary studies of the New Criticism, Kaufmann wrote in the preface to his anthology that in the selected essays “the emphasis is on essentially critical rather than scholarly writing—on writing that sharpens vision and releases sympathy rather than that designed primarily to inform.” For him Elizabethan drama is a “poetic drama,” verbally rich and tonally complex, demanding sympathetic attention to a poetic texture that is immediately available. If his selection of essays reveals an attractive variety of critical interests, it is, he argues, because of the variousness of the drama “in its permissive and intricate attentions to all things men do to and for each other.”¹ Particularly in the last decade, however, dramatic texts have been subjected to different kinds of scrutiny that make problematic considerably more than Kaufmann’s unself-conscious use of “men” for the agents and objects of dramatic action. Returning in some sense to the historical interests of an even earlier scholarly age, recent criticism of the drama increasingly has insisted upon it not primarily as a “poetic” and individual art, but as a theatrical and collaborative activity, demanding a focus both on its discursive complexities and on the institutional conditions in which it was produced, demanding, that is, theoretical and historical commitments unnecessary and impossible for Kaufmann and his contemporaries.

Feminism, Marxism, poststructuralism, and psychoanalysis have productively transformed the ways in which we now conceive of texts and representation, while at the same time a renewed attention to historical specificity, necessitated precisely by the largely metaphoric if not metaphysical appeals to “History” of many of these theoretical initiatives, has emphasized the importance of the particular, and often contradictory, material determinants of the Renaissance stage. As criticism has moved away from the formalism of the 1950s and 1960s, it has had to recognize that dramatic texts are sites rather than the exclusive sources of meaning, places where audiences, readers, actors, writers (not to mention scribes and compositors) construct and contest meanings. And those meanings are in turn inflected by systems of patronage, censorship, and newly emergent market relations. In the English Renaissance theater, the text is structured by the multiple and complex collaborations that the theater demanded between patrons and players, playwrights and printers, playhouses and playgoers.

The essays in this volume attempt to register these collaborations, emphasizing the ways in which the theater is at once responsive to and constitutive of the social formations of Renaissance England. At the same time, these essays recognize that their historical grounding is not unproblematic. Inevitably we interpret history only from our necessarily partial—in both senses of the word—points of view, constructing the past from our present questioning. Yet, however conditioned and constrained, an understanding of the past is achieved in these essays that is something more than a mere projection of our own categories and concerns. All interpretations of the past may well be what Gramsci called “actual politics in the making,” but the essays here avoid merely reproducing our own values and interests by refusing to collapse subject and object, by insisting on the historicity both of our object of study and of ourselves as observers, by insisting, that is, on history itself. What these essays offer, then, is not full, objective knowledge of a now past and completed history but an engaged reconstruction, necessarily mediated, provisional, and incomplete, of a history that is always in the making.

At one level, this collection is shaped by practical pedagogical concerns: most of the essays look at particular plays which regularly appear in courses on Tudor and Stuart drama. But the essays in the first section address more broadly the conditions of existence of the theater and theatrical scripts. They are in no sense intended as supplements to “close reading” rather, they make explicit many of the presuppositions from which the essays in the second part begin. In particular, they attend to some of the most important “conditions of playing”: the geographical and symbolic space of the theater; patronage and the staging of monarchical power; censorship; theatrical and anti-theatrical discourse; the heterogeneity of the theater’s audience; the transvestism that marks English playing; the production of theatrical scripts; the (re)production of plays as literary property by modern editors. Yet although these introductory essays are in many ways complementary in their focus upon the various determinations weighing upon the drama, they also implicitly articulate contrasting and even contradictory perspectives. Did the theater stage the power of an aristocracy who controlled it through patronage and censorship or did it displace that power, giving it over into the hands of servants and vagrants? Were plays performed for the eye of power or for that of hodge-podge audiences, mixed in gender, class, and age? Did the transvestite acting tradition that produced an all-male stage reproduce a culture which was, as has recently been argued, “ideologically male”² or did it unsettle gender categories by producing them in/as masquerade? Are class distinctions reproduced and reinforced in the theater or are they unsettled by the fact that class positions can be mimed at all? Are all our notions of identity produced by anachronistic conceptions of literary property and the political individual?

The essays below give no single answer to these questions, but they all engage with the recent political and theoretical developments both inside and outside the academy from which these questions rise and which have reshaped Renaissance studies. Those developments have already been finely mapped in collections of essays on Shakespeare, such as Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield’s Political Shakespeare (1985) and Jean Howard and Marion O’Connor’s Shakespeare Reproduced (1987), anthologies that in their emphasis upon the contingency of the plays’ values and social constructions reveal the tendentiousness of the recurring appeal to Shakespeare’s timelessness and universality. But the attention to Shakespeare, inevitable and necessary given his canonical status and his position on educational syllabi, risks reinscribing the very centrality it would challenge and has perhaps obscured the more general shifts in recent analyses of Renaissance drama.

At the simplest level, the pressing political concerns of the last three decades have brought new plays to our attention. As gender has become a central category of analysis, largely due to the women’s movement, the problematic construction of gender in the Renaissance has been traced in plays that were previously on the margins of academic courses (Epicoene, Arden of Faversham, The Roaring Girl) or, in the case of a play written by a woman (The Tragedy of Mariam), virtually unknown.³ At the same time, these plays prevent too simple a correlation between gender and genre that may suggest itself (which would conceive of tragedy and history as privileged male spaces, comedy as the space of female rule and festive inversion). For whereas it is true that most of Shakespeare’s tragedies (at least in their folio versions) are named after single male protagonists, tragedies with titles like The Changeling, Women Beware Women, The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi suggest a different range of concerns, in which women are central or in which the very question of centrality is constituted as a problem. In The White Devil, for instance, the title page of the 1612 quarto affirms that the “tragedy” is that of “Paulo Giordano Ursini, Duke of Brachiano,” thus reaffirming the hierarchies of gender and rank. But many readers (then as now) have found that “the Life and Death of Vittoria Corombona the famous Venetian Curtizan” provides the central scenes, while the fact that Vittoria’s brother, the malcontent Flamineo, has twice as many lines as any other character, may suggest that the very notion of “central character” is inadequate in a play whose very title gives no clear point of reference (is “the white devil” of the title even a person rather than the church, the law, or the court?). What is certainly striking, though, is that the final deaths to be staged are those of a malcontent of uncertain position, a courtesan, and a black maid. Inversion of gender hierarchy here intertwines with inversion of class and racial hierarchies to dethrone the male aristocrat not only within the plot of the play but also within the generic norms of tragedy. The gendering of genre in many of these plays becomes a formal problem which opens up the contradictory ways in which genre constructs gender.

If recent feminist criticism has encouraged us to see gender as a constructed category, the gay and lesbian movements have interrogated the naturalness of sexual identity and helped us to see how sexuality is also a variable historical construction. We have seen as a result not only renewed attention to gender and sexuality as masquerade but also a concern with how a normalizing dominant ideology produces and is in turn challenged by that which it has defined as perverse.⁴ As Jonathan Goldberg shows below, partly drawing upon Alan Bray’s important book Homosexuality in Renaissance England (1982), there was no language of “homosexuality” (a late nineteenth-century term) as such (and therefore, incidentally, no language of “heterosexuality,” this latter term being a back-formation from “homosexuality,” only coined at the beginning of this century). The language of sodomy, though— a language of an action rather than an identity—was part of a larger discourse on “religious, political, and cosmic subversion.” Yet it was precisely such subversions that Marlowe rehearsed upon the Elizabethan stage as “counterpositions.”

Until recently in Britain and America, there has been considerably less attention to questions of race and ethnicity (unlike in Latin America where there has long been a major debate around Shakespeare’s Ternpest ⁵). But the publication of Ania Loomba’s Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (1989), for example, demonstrates how an analysis of colonialism and imperialism is crucial to understanding a drama which staged its new-found lands both as conquest and as interrogation of the master’s voice.⁶ There has also been increasing recognition of the dominant role which Ireland played in the attempt to forge an English national identity, and of the ways in which the Irish presented active resistance to that identity. As Ann Jones shows below, the Irish appear as a demonized reference point even in a play like The White Devil which is set in Italy. More generally, in writing of places like Venice and Malta, dramatists were able in displaced form to examine the meetings of, and conflicts between, cultures, between European and African, Italian and Turk, Italian and English, Christian and Jew. If this attention to exoticized Others was in part a staging of marks of difference which would affirm, by negation, an emergent national identity, those very marks exercised a peculiar fascination which threatened both the centrality and the stability of that identity.

What we have been suggesting here is that identity—gendered, sexed, classed, racialized—has been increasingly seen by critics as an historical production rather than as an essential given. This view, challenging the familiar Burkhardtian notion of the Renaissance as the founding moment of individual autonomy, has, of course, been most powerfully developed by Stephen Greenblatt in Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) and Shakespearean Negotiations (1988). In the earlier book, Greenblatt described how he set out to write about the way in which Renaissance writers fashioned themselves:

But as my work progressed, I perceived that fashioning oneself and being fashioned by cultural institutions—family, religion, state— were inseparably intertwined. In all my texts and documents, there were, so far as I could tell, no moments of pure, unfettered subjectivity; indeed, the human subject itself began to seem remarkably unfree, the ideological product of the relations of power in a particular society. (256)

Greenblatt’s view of the cultural production of subjectivity has at times, as his critics have argued, depended upon a monolithic notion of power as an all-embracing system that produces subversion only the more effectively to contain it. In such a view, the staging of the Moor, the Jew, the masterless woman, the transvestite, the malcontent are the necessary supports for the development of the state’s hegemonic powers. The theater itself, then, becomes an agent of the absolutist state, reproducing its strategies and celebrating and confirming its power. Such a position is elaborated most fully in Leonard Tennenhouse’s influential book, Power on Display (1986), which powerfully explores the process by which power is produced and legitimated on the Renaissance stage.

The account of the stage as fully dominated and determined by the demands and desires of the court is, however, in some tension both with the cultural vision of many European Marxists and North American cultural critics, who, in different ways, recognize that the process of cultural domination can never be total.⁷ Alan Sinfield, for instance, emphasizes the extent to which the elite was composed of conflicting class fractions, while Jonathan Dollimore has brilliantly argued that the theater itself provided a radical challenge to dominant religious, political, and sexual orthodoxies.⁸ Indeed, many recent critics have argued against any unitary conception of domination, demanding a subtle understanding of the hegemonic process, in which the elite can be seen as both fractured in itself (along lines of gender, for instance) and, at the same time, as challenged by counter-hegemonic forces (e.g. the urban bourgeoisie or radical religious sects). Ideological fissures and social disjunctions are inevitable and are precisely what permit the possibility of challenge and change. Though his work has usually been taken as demonstrating the dominant culture’s ability successfully to contain any subversive threat, Greenblatt himself has always recognized both the contingency of power and the pressures that resist and disperse it. Even in Renaissance Self-Fashioning, he recognizes “that self-fashioning occurs at the point of encounter between an authority and an alien, that what is produced in this encounter partakes of both the authority and the alien that is marked for attack, and hence that any achieved identity always contains within itself the signs of its own subversion or loss” (9). Here, the notion of containment seems to suggest less a fixed state than a local maneuver, liable within the contingencies of the political process to disintegration and reformulation. And in his recent Shakespearean Negotiations, Greenblatt insists that “the stage was not part of a single coherent,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Staging the Renaissance
• Part I The Conditions of Playing
• Part II The Plays
• Notes on Contributors