Community-Making in Early Stuart Theatres

Stage and audience

Anthony W. Johnson, Roger D. Sell, Helen Wilcox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409427018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317163299
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Twenty-two leading experts on early modern drama collaborate in this volume

to explore three closely interconnected research questions. To what extent did

playwrights represent dramatis personae in their entertainments as forming, or

failing to form, communal groupings? How far were theatrical productions likely

to weld, or separate, different communal groupings within their target audiences?

And how might such bondings or oppositions among spectators have tallied with

the community-making or -breaking on stage? Chapters in Part One respond to

one or more of these questions by reassessing general period trends in censorship,

theatre attendance, forms of patronage, playwrights' professional and linguistic

networks, their use of music, and their handling of ethical controversies.

In Part Two, responses arise from detailed re-examinations of particular plays

by Shakespeare, Chapman, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Cary, Webster, Middleton,

Massinger, Ford, and Shirley. Both Parts cover a full range of early-Stuart

theatre settings, from the public and popular to the more private circumstances

of hall playhouses, court masques, women's drama, country-house theatricals,

and school plays. And one overall finding is that, although playwrights frequently

staged or alluded to communal conflict, they seldom exacerbated such divisiveness

within their audience. Rather, they tended toward more tactful modes of

address (sometimes even acknowledging their own ideological uncertainties) so

that, at least for the duration of a play, their audiences could be a community

within which internal rifts were openly brought into dialogue.

Part one

Period trends

1 Dramatic censorship: social cohesion and division

Richard Dutton

I

The Quene’s Majestie doth straightly forbid all maner Interludes to be played eyther openly or privately, except the same be notified before hande, and licenced within any Citie or town corporate, by the Mayor or other chiefe officers of the same, and within any shyre, by suche as shalbe Lieuetenauntes for the Quenes Majestie in the same shyre, or by two of the Justices of peax inhabyting within that part of the shire where any shalbe played.

And for instruction to every of the sayde officers, her majestie doth likewise charge every of them, as they will aunswere: that they permyt none to be played wherin either matters of religion or of the governaunce of the estate of the common weale shalbe handled or treated, beyng no meete matters to be written or treated upon, but by menne of aucthoritie, learning and wisdom, nor to be handled before any audience, but of grave and discreete persons.¹

Had the terms of Elizabeth’s proclamation still been strictly in force by the end of her reign, it is difficult to believe that the great era of drama associated with her name would have taken anything like the form it did. Popular drama would have been severely inhibited and subject to constraints from multiple authorities. The fact that this did not happen, why it did not happen, and the consequences of all this for community-formation in early Stuart London are the subjects of this chapter.

When Elizabeth came to the throne it was necessary to redefine England as, once more, a Protestant nation. This was community remaking on a grand scale; in it she recognized that theatre, of all social recreations, had the potential to make or mar the project. Hence the proclamation, insisting that theatre throughout the country be contained within the institutions of royal and civic authority and that those institutions be especially vigilant in respect of the most contentious Reformation issues, ‘matters of religion or of the governaunce of the estate of the common weale’. This is why, for example, the old mystery cycles died out in places like Chester and York: for all the attempts to reform them, they remained too closely identified with the old religion. But Elizabeth’s proclamation imagines bifurcated theatrical communities. Other decrees distinguish between plays in English and in Latin, but it is the same double standard, one distinguishing between popular and élite constituencies. Affairs of religion and state are not for the entertainment of ordinary folk. But they may be acceptable in establishment institutions like the households of the gentry and aristocracy, the universities, inns of court, and of course the Queen’s court itself, which could be expected by definition to understand what constraints are required.

An obvious instance of a play written for élite audiences is Gorboduc, played for the Queen by the Gentlemen of the Inner Temple in 1562; it speaks clearly (albeit through the mythology of ancient Britain) about the dangers of civil war if the royal succession is not secure, implicitly urging Elizabeth to marry – a very touchy issue in the first half of her reign. For the most part, each local community policed its own in these matters, and little record has survived of the process except in rare instances where something went spectacularly wrong and was referred to the central authorities, such as the performance of a raucously anti-Protestant St Christopher play at Gowlthwaite Hall in Yorkshire in 1609, which was the subject of a Star Chamber investigation.²

By the time of James I, the controls on what might be played had virtually abandoned these distinctions between popular and élite theatrical communities. Explanations can be found in the complex social and demographic changes of the last quarter of the sixteenth century and the place of theatre within them. London grew to a population of around 200,000; there was a consequent demand for regular entertainment; and this ensured the final evolution of the most successful playing troupes from touring household retainers into fully professional businesses (who nevertheless still had to operate within a patronage framework). The licensing regime had to be adapted to take account of the new facts of life in London. The court quickly recognized that these developments might serve its own purposes. It was a great consumer of theatre, especially in the dark nights of its Revels seasons, running from Christmas to Shrovetide. In 1578, the Privy Council identified a core group of the most proficient companies to perform at court and wrote to the Lord Mayor of London to ensure that their playing within the city was not interfered with:

requiring him to suffer the Children of her Majesties Chappell, the servauntes of the Lord Chamberlain, therle of Warwicke, the Erle of Leicester, the Erle of Essex and the Children of Powles, and no companies els, to exercise playing within the Cittie, whom their Lordships have onlie allowed thereunto by reason that the companies aforenamed are appointed to playe this tyme of Christmas before her Majestie.³

This clearly enunciated a policy that was to continue to the closing of the theatres in 1642: a select group of the most proficient companies were to be specially privileged in respect of London playing, for the express purpose of allowing them to rehearse to perform at court. The membership of this group would fluctuate over time as their fortunes waxed and waned. But the principle never varied.

Edmund Tilney was appointed Master of the Revels in 1579 to oversee these court theatricals. He understood that the employment of professional actors with strong London bases – and their own properties and costumes – was an effective way to control expense while maintaining quality.⁴ Tilney, a distant cousin of the Queen, and his successors as Masters of the Revels were the key intermediaries between this group of companies and the court. With elegant synergy, he became the licenser and censor of their plays for public performance, charging them for the privilege. But this subjection to Tilney’s authority also afforded the actors his protection: any play he licensed was implicitly fit for the Queen, and authorities throughout the kingdom would not lightly challenge their right to play it. When we speak of dramatic censorship in this era, then, we really mean the attention paid by Tilney and his successors to plays commissioned by the dozen or so most successful professional companies of the era: all London-based, all patronized at least for a time by the court. They were responsible for the great majority of play texts that survive from that time, primarily written for the recreation of the people of London, the community most affected by this licensing régime. But any play might also be presented at court.

The London authorities resisted these arrangements, which directly affected the city community: they worried not only about the content of plays but also about large and unruly crowds in an era without regular policing and the constant threat of plague. The outdoor theatres of the era, like the Globe, were consequently all built in the suburbs, outside the city proper, while indoor ones like the Blackfriars and Whitefriars were built in anomalous liberties, within the city walls but not subject to its authorities. Nevertheless, the Lord Mayor and Common Council of London repeatedly fenced with the Privy Council about theatre and Tilney’s role. At one point, they suggested that he join in a commission with representatives of the church and the city to license plays; at another, they proposed that court rehearsals should take place in private and that Tilney be bought off.⁵ The future of English theatre might have been very different if either proposal had succeeded.

But they did not, and from this time, the early 1590s, it was unequivocally the case that the licensing and censorship of the plays of the court-favoured companies was a matter of royal prerogative, vested normally in the Master of the Revels. When theatres reopened in 1594 after prolonged plague, two companies – and only two – were more or less permanently based in London: the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the Lord Admiral’s Men. And it was not coincidental that between 1594 and 1599 no other companies performed at court. The vastly increased flow of new plays necessary for these companies to entertain a static city audience made this a profitable arrangement for Tilney.

By 1603, the Chamberlain’s Men and the Admiral’s Men had been joined by the Earl of Worcester’s Men, while the Children of the Chapel and Paul’s Boys were revived, both after an absence of ten years. Tilney licensed their plays and invited them to court, but virtually no others. And this is the situation James I inherited. His decision to take four of the five companies into direct royal patronage did not, therefore, signal a new direction but followed evolving policy to a logical conclusion, the precise shape of which was driven by the new reality of multiple royal households. The leading companies became, respectively, the King’s Men, Prince Henry’s Men, Queen Anne’s Men, and the Children of the Queen’s Revels. (Paul’s Boys, the smallest troupe, went out of business in 1606.) All remained subject to Tilney’s authority – except the Queen’s Revels, who were given their own licenser, the poet and dramatist Samuel Daniel. This proved disastrous, as we shall see.

The fact that nothing has survived of the office-books of either Tilney or his successor, Sir George Buc, means that we have minimal evidence of the censorship they actually exercised. (Not until Sir Henry Herbert held the office, over the period from 1623 to 1642, do we have that kind of evidence.) But the evidence we have suggests that the constraints they imposed on the public theatres were far less restrictive than envisioned in Elizabeth’s proclamation: they were treated, in effect, as élite venues. A single playbook censored by Tilney has survived, the Book of Sir Thomas More (c. 1593/4). This certainly shows him to have been sensitive to public order issues. The play sought to depict the notorious 1517 Ill May Day riots which More helped to subdue, and Tilney ordered the players to trim this to brief reports only, not a re-enactment: it must be relevant that London was again seeing riots aimed at its alien residents in 1593–5.⁶ Tilney was also sensitive to the circumstances of More’s death, given that many Catholics regarded him as a martyr to Henry VIII’s Protestant tyranny: no discussion of the Acts of Supremacy or Succession is allowed. The author(s) had in fact been quite discreet from the outset: dramatists must quickly have come to understand what Tilney would and would not tolerate, and self-censored accordingly.

Yet it is remarkable that the actors felt a play about such a controversial figure might be allowed at all and that, when confronted with it, Tilney did not ban it outright but rather sought to render it playable. However discreet, he must have known it was inevitable that its audiences would contemplate issues of religion and of state governance (and indeed foreign immigrants). But, as we shall see, Buc and Herbert made similar calculations in their censorship. Their practice thus significantly blurred the social distinctions which Elizabeth’s proclamation sought to enforce in its control of playing. In terms of audiences, it effectively created a single community: those at the Rose or Paul’s playhouse, at the Red Bull or Salisbury Court, or indeed at court would all see plays vetted to the same standard. By the Stuart era, the acting companies specialized to a degree in different styles of drama and aimed to attract audiences from different social strata.⁷ But from a censor’s perspective, the plays that served one might equally serve the others. Indeed, the most successful company of them all, the King’s Men, contrived after 1608 to run both the Globe and the Blackfriars and to receive the lion’s share of the court’s business. And it could stage the same play at all of them.⁸

The London theatres were in one sense free commercial spaces: anyone with a penny (or sixpence) could turn up and see a performance. But, in another sense, they were extensions of the court by whose authority they existed at all, places where the actors – now literally members of the court (the King’s Men, for example, were unpaid Grooms of the Chamber) – rehearsed, however hypothetically, for the Revels season. This did not, of course, mean that the Masters of the Revels gave the actors carte blanche. What it did do, I shall argue, was to allow them – with imagination a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One Period trends
• Part Two Individual playwrights
• Select bibliography
• Index of persons and texts