Early Modern Academic Drama

Paul D. Streufert, Jonathan Walker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351942461
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this essay collection, the contributors contend that academic drama represents an important, but heretofore understudied, site of cultural production in early modern England. Focusing on plays that were written and performed in academic environments such as Oxford University, Cambridge University, grammar schools, and the Inns of Court, the scholars investigate how those plays strive to give dramatic coherence to issues of religion, politics, gender, pedagogy, education, and economics. Of particular significance are the shifting political and religious contentions that so frequently shaped both the cultural questions addressed by the plays, and the sorts of dramatic stories that were most conducive to the exploration of such questions. The volume argues that the writing and performance of academic drama constitute important moments in the history of education and the theater because, in these plays, narrative is consciously put to work as both a representation of, and an exercise in, knowledge formation. The plays discussed speak to numerous segments of early modern culture, including the relationship between the academy and the state, the tensions between humanism and religious reform, the successes and failures of the humanist program, the social profits and economic liabilities of formal education, and the increasing involvement of universities in the commercial market, among other issues.

Chapter 1
Gown Before Crown: Scholarly Abjection and Academic Entertainment Under Queen Elizabeth I

Linda Shenk

In 1592, Queen Elizabeth I and the Privy Council made a rather audacious request of their intellectuals at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The Christmas season was fast approaching, and a recent outbreak of the plague prohibited the queen’s professional acting company from performing the season’s customary entertainment. To avoid having a Christmas without revels, the crown sent messengers to both institutions, asking for university men to come to court and perform a comedy in English. Cambridge’s Vice Chancellor, John Still, wished to decline this royal invitation, and for advice on how to do so he wrote to his superior, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who was not only the Chancellor of Cambridge but also Elizabeth’s chief advisor. In this letter, Vice Chancellor Still implies the impropriety of having academics participate in such a performance:

how fitt wee shalbe for this that is moued, havinge no practize in this Englishe vaine, and beinge (as wee thincke) nothinge beseeminge our Studentes, specially oute of the Vniuersity: wee much doubt; And do finde our principale Actors (whome wee haue of purpose called before vs) very vnwillinge to playe in Englishe; Wherefore wee thoughte it not only our duties, to giue intelligence hereof vnto your Lordship as being our cheife hedd and governor; but also very expedient for vs, to craue your Lordships wisdome, either to disswade the matter withoute any displeasure vnto vs, yf wee shall not seeme meete in your Lordships iudgment for that purpose; or to advise vs by your Honorable direccion, what manner of argument wee should ch[o]use, and what course is best to followe. Englishe Comedies, for that wee neuer vsed any, wee presentlie haue none.¹

Finding that the request is “nothing beseeminge our Studentes, specially oute of the Vniuersity” and emphasizing that they “neuer vsed any” English comedies, Still insinuates that the crown has crossed a line by asking university men to perform in the vernacular—especially the lighter fare of a comedy. They are academics, after all, not professional stage-players.

By asking intellectuals to come to court, to perform a comedy, and a comedy in English, the crown is treating its university subjects as entertainers who can be called upon to provide diversion solely for amusement. The issue here is not simply that the crown wants scholars to perform a play, for the universities had already prepared many productions for the crown—some even in English.² The issue, rather, is that the crown requested a rather unacademic combination: a stand-alone comedy, in English, at court. In the past, university productions for the queen and nobility had always been produced on university soil, always performed at the end of a day of learned activities, and always scheduled between evenings that contained plays treating weightier material. When the crown asks for performances that occur without these learned contexts and the medium of Latin and Greek, it is asking for performances that ignore university men’s identities as intellectuals. As such, the state treats them as court players rather than future political advisors, clerics, and ambassadors.

The crown’s request to the universities crystallizes a trend that had become a uniquely Elizabethan phenomenon in English history: university men repeatedly performing for the crown. Before Elizabeth’s reign, university plays were private, university-only affairs, but after her first progress to Cambridge in 1564, the queen and court frequently attended university productions. The importance of these performances has not been lost on theater and university historians. Scholars such as Frederick S. Boas, John Elliott, Jr., and Alan H. Nelson have mined the accounts and university records, and their descriptive work has contributed substantially to our understanding of university culture and early modern staging practices. What scholars have not yet fully examined are the implications of these performances—the implications, essentially, of the gown entertaining the crown. How does having the monarch in the audience affect university drama? How might these performances, on a more profound level, affect the relationship between the monarch and intellectuals? Lastly, how might this relationship imply that the Elizabethan regime had created its own version of the humanist idea that the scholar should serve the state as a wise counselor?³

Answering these questions, in part, involves looking at the choices the universities made when preparing plays for the court. These performances begin with Elizabeth’s 1564 and 1566 progresses to the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford (respectively) and then include a series of later interactions when the universities hosted and performed either for the court or on the court’s behalf, such as for the Polish Palatine Alberto Laski’s visit to Oxford in 1583. These historical examples reveal that the universities (especially Oxford) increasingly linked drama with the crown by tailoring their productions to satisfy the court’s preferences for lavish spectacle and royal flattery. As Nelson has demonstrated, some private university productions did contain elaborate, costly spectacle.⁴ The university productions for the court, however, not only made much of highly scenic effects but specifically involved court-affiliated alumni to assist in making these productions pleasing to the courtly audience.

This interest in making university productions more court-like, though, had changed direction by 1592—a year full of events that shared a common concern: the need to distinguish university “actors” from professional stage-players. Early in the year, the famous controversy over academic drama flared between John Rainolds and William Gager,⁵ and Gager had defended university men, emphasizing that “ludii nos nec sumus, / nec esse cupimus” (“We are not professional players nor do we care to be”).⁶ Similarly, during the queen’s final visit to Oxford that September, Gager and the university overall continued to emphasize that their productions were bookish and inexpertly executed instead of spectacle-filled and skillfully performed. The meteoric rise of the professional theater, now put alongside an increasingly theatrical connection between crown and gown, was taking its toll. Before the rise of the public theater, performances for royalty were often conducted in aristocratic homes and at the Inns of Court, but the high visibility of the professional actor on the popular public stage began to loosen dramatic entertainment’s previously exclusive connections. University men faced the conjoining of two separate trends: the popularity of the professional actor (who, unlike the intellectual, possessed no established right to a political voice) and the rise of the universities’ dramatic connections with the crown. Pressed to keep these two trends from becoming conflated, many university men had a change of heart sometime around 1592 when the controversy over academic drama raged and Vice Chancellor Still wrote his letter to Lord Burghley. University men seemed to realize that their performances for royalty had cast them in the role of royal entertainers—a role that, particularly through its similarity with professional players, diminished the political authority their learning was supposed to give them.

These trends in drama offer a perspective on the political relationship between crown and gown, which is central to the idea of humanism and the scholar’s authority in early modern England. When the crown turned to university men for diversion more than disputation, it undercut the humanist mythology of the scholar serving the state as a learned advisor. I have argued elsewhere that the Latin orations Elizabeth delivered at the ends of her university visits reveal that the queen sought to contain the scholars’ authority through a language of learned absolutism and, later, of divinity.⁷ Turning to university men for entertainment similarly worked to contain the scholars’ influence by redirecting intellectual energy into a form that focused on pleasing Elizabeth. I contend that even university-educated playwrights for the professional stage recognized this trend and sought to capitalize on it. In the small window of years surrounding 1592, university “wits” Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe, and Thomas Nashe wrote works that portray university men performing spectacle to please royalty. In Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (circa 1589–92), Greene’s Friars Vandermast and Bungay compete to out-magic each other, while the Emperor and visiting royal dignitaries cheer them on; the protagonist in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (circa 1588–1592) sells his soul for empowering knowledge, yet ends up creating merriment for Emperor Carolus and Duke Vanholt; and in The Vnfortvnate Traveller (1594), Nashe’s intellectuals at Wittenberg try to impress their visiting Duke with ridiculous orations and a poorly acted comedy, but end up making fools of themselves.⁸ In his article on the magician-scholars in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Faustus, and The Tempest, Andreas Höfele explains that these characters, in their acts of performance, provide “a portrait of the artist, especially of the artist in society.”⁹ The theatrical spectacle-making that these figures depict, I propose, also provides a portrait of the university scholar in relation to his monarch. Modern historians have not examined in detail how these literary representations speak to the historical relationship between crown and gown. University drama implies that these institutions and their scholars were becoming satellites of the state. This trend matches university historian Penry Williams’s observation that the crown’s influence over the universities increased during Elizabeth’s reign so that, by the end of the sixteenth century, “the university’s independence had been heavily mortgaged.”¹⁰ By 1592, university men were beginning to acknowledge that their role as entertainers for the court tied them more closely (and abjectly) to the crown’s authority.

Despite this power dynamic, the decisions regarding drama did not arise as top-down, crown-imposed scenarios but, rather, evolved through a slow compilation of choices and requests made by both crown and gown. Though I began with the universities’ wary unease of 1592, I will now return to the early stirrings of this trend in the 1560s and then trace the subsequent events that comprise the gradual progression. Moving through the early university productions for the court and crown, through the literary representations, and finally to the events of 1592, I will demonstrate how the image of the scholar as a royal entertainer not only came into being but also revealed the universities’ increasing focus on the court’s preferences and authority. In fact, Oxford tended to follow this trajectory more so than Cambridge. The early modern period celebrated the scholar’s role in political life, but the dramatic activity between the crown and the universities in Elizabeth’s reign added entertainment to this idea of service. This idea, in turn, helps explain the rise of the entertaining intellectual throughout the 1590s—from the numerous scholars who did go on to perform for the court while still studying at the universities to the scholars hired to write entertaining prose against Martin Marprelate.

Elizabeth’s Early Progresses: Cambridge in 1564 and Oxford in 1566

On 12 July 1564, William Cecil, then Chancellor of Cambridge, notified his university that the rumors were indeed true: the queen intended to spend nearly a week visiting the university, and the university was to prepare orations, disputations, sermons, and plays for her visit. Elizabeth’s progress was unprecedented in English history. Never before had an English monarch conducted such a lengthy visit to one of the universities, and never before had an English monarch slept on university soil as a guest.¹¹ Over the course of her reign, Elizabeth would eventually conduct three such lengthy progresses to her universities (1564 to Cambridge; 1566 and 1592 to Oxford), and through these visits Elizabeth fostered a relationship between crown and gown that was markedly different from that created by the previous Tudor monarchs—a difference that underscores the image of the intellectual as an entertainer.

Throughout the sixteenth century, Elizabeth’s Tudor predecessors had occasionally called upon the universities to offer learned opinion regarding important matters of political policy. Henry VIII asked both institutions to provide public responses concerning the “great matter” of his divorce; Edward’s administration staged a disputation against the Mass at Cambridge; and Mary countered this disputation by organizing one in support of the Mass at Oxford. Even though the universities always produced the desired “answer” and affirmed the current monarch’s agenda, these demonstrations acknowledged the humanist notion that the enlightened prince should consult the wisdom of educated subjects. Elizabeth, however, never asked the universities to participate in political policy. Instead, her administration asked them to act as the queen’s hosts in a fashion similar to her progresses to private, aristocratic homes. They were to lodge her and prepare suitable entertainment. Cecil’s initial letter to Cambridge before the first progress makes these two priorities clear, asking the university to “consider what lodgynge shalbe metest for her maiestie & nexte what maner of [plaies]/plesures/in lernyng may be presented to her maiestie.”¹² As editor Alan H. Nelson’s brackets above denote, Cecil initially wrote “plaies” before striking through this choice and replacing it with “pleasures.” Cecil’s initial impulse was to specify dramatic entertainment before deciding to broaden the possibilities. His emphasis on pleasure (and his conflation of this idea with plays) is in harmony with the repeated use of “entertain” and “entertainment” in the accounts of the progresses. In essence, the universities were called upon to entertain their queen—a role that did not necessarily have a condescending air in the 1560s because many royal entertainments were staged in aristocratic homes and through connections with the Inns of Court. These two venues help explain why the universities would not have taken offense at royal requests for plays. The universities, after all, had a long-standing dramatic tradition in England and, as Siobhan Keenan n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Gown Before Crown: Scholarly Abjection and Academic Entertainment Under Queen Elizabeth I
• 2 Christopherson at Cambridge: Greco-Catholic Ethics in the Protestant University
• 3 The Spectre of the Shrew and the Lash of the Rod: Gendering Pedagogy in The Disobedient Child
• 4 The Government of Performance: Ignoramus and the Micropolitics of Tutor-Student Relations
• 5 Theatrical Experiment and the Production of Knowledge in the Gray’s Inn Revels
• 6 Fantastical Distempers: The Psychopathology of Early Modern Scholars
• 7 Cambridge at Sea: Byrsa Basilica and the Commercialization of Knowledge
• 8 Drama in the Academies of Early America
• Collected Bibliography
• Index