Carnival and Theater (Routledge Revivals)

Plebian Culture and The Structure of Authority in Renaissance England

Michael D. Bristol

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317748304
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Drama
• Index: History

In this title, first published in 1985, Michael Bristol draws on several theoretical and critical traditions to study the nature and purpose of theatre as a social institution: on Marxism, and its revisions in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin; on the theories of Emile Durkheim and their adaptations in the work of Victor Turner; and on the history of social life and material culture as practiced by the Annales school. This valuable work is an important contribution to literary criticism, theatre studies and social history and has particular importance for scholars interested in the dramatic literature of Elizabethan England.

PART I

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE

THEATER is an art form; it is also a social institution. By favoring a certain style of representation and a particular etiquette of reception, the institutional setting of a performance informs and focuses the meaning of a dramatic text and facilitates the dissemination of that meaning through the collective activity of the audience.¹ The social and political life of the theater as a public gathering place has an importance of its own over and above the more exclusively literary interest of texts and the contemplation of their meaning. Because of its capacity to create and sustain a briefly intensified social life, the theater is festive and political as well as literary – a privileged site for the celebration and critique of the needs and concerns of the polis. The critical intensification of collective life represented and experienced in the theater, and the possibility it creates for action and initiative, is the subject of this book.

The richest material for the elaboration of the argument pursued here is the dramatic literature of Renaissance England and its complex relationship to the traditions of Carnival. For most of its more recent history, theater has functioned with a diminished capacity to achieve its social and political purpose. In Renaissance England, however, the theater objectified and recreated broadly dispersed traditions of collective life that were also represented and disseminated through anonymous festive manifestations such as Carnival. The dramatic literature produced by this theater retains much of the power and the durable vitality of these strong political forms. Unlike the theater of later periods, that of Elizabethan and Jacobean England is not exclusively or even mainly a specialized institution of literary production and consumption. In this theater, literature as objet-d’art or as ideological finished product is subordinated to more active, though more ephemeral forms of institution-making carried over into theater from the traditions of popular festive form.

These collective traditions give rise to dramatic forms that are intensely critical and even experimental in their representation of social and political structure. There is, first, a negative critique that demystifies or ‘uncrowns’ power, its justificatory ideology, and the tendency of elites to undertake disruptive radicalizations of traditional patterns of social order, and to introduce novel forms of domination and expropriation. In addition, there is a positive critique, a celebration and reaffirmation of collective traditions lived out by ordinary people in their ordinary existence. That positive critique, which articulates the capacity of popular culture to resist penetration and control by the power structure, is a central theme of this text.

For the first few decades of its existence, the public playhouse of Elizabethan England was not yet fully differentiated from more dispersed and anonymous forms of festive life, play and mimesis. Theatrical spectacle and the theatricalization of social and intellectual life were common to virtually all social groups, corporations, and communities in Renaissance England, primarily in informal, amateur organizations. The performance traditions of these homogeneous groups usually emphasized the immediate social purposes of theater, in particular the enjoyment of corporate or communal solidarity, over the specialized appreciation of durable literary values. Theater and popular festivity were closely related forms of social life, neighboring institutions with similar patterns of representation and similar orientations to political and economic practice.

In the months of June and July, on the vigils of the festival days, and on the same festival days in the evenings after the sun setting, there were usually made bonfires in the streets, every man bestowing wood or labour towards them; the wealthier sort also, before their doors near to the said bonfires, would set out tables on the vigils, furnished with sweet bread and good drink, and on festival days with meats and drinks plentifully, whereunto they would invite their neighbours and passengers also to sit and be merry with them in great familiarity, praising God for his benefits bestowed on them. These were called bonfires as well of good amity amongst neighbours that being before at controversy, were there, by the labour of others, reconciled, and made of bitter enemies loving friends.²

The midsummer watch was a collective celebration, combining spectacle and festive abundance with the social and political functions of the town meeting and the family court. The practice was repeated ‘time out of mind’; it took place outside any formal administrative apparatus.

The same functions, according to Stow, have been accomplished through other traditional sports and collective pastimes, and, in his own day, these functions have been extended into the new institution of the public playhouse.

These, or the like exercises, have been continued till our time, namely, in stage plays … [and] of late time, in place of those stage plays, hath been used comedies, tragedies, interludes, and histories, both true and feigned; for the acting whereof certain public places, as the Theatre, the Curtain, etc. have been erected.³

Stow’s brief account describes theater as a continuation of popular festive activity in which the social purpose as well as the playful atmosphere of other popular sports and pastimes are sustained. The public playhouse, then, must be considered a politically significant mise-en-scène, where the energy and initiative of collective life are forcefully manifested in texts, in performance convention, and in the reception and appreciation of theatrical spectacle.

Renaissance drama is important in that it invites consideration of forms of collective life and of subjectivity other than those proposed and legitimated by a hegemonic culture. The problem of specifying the relationship among subjectivity, collective life and the structure of formally constituted or ‘official’ authority is obviously very complicated, and the difficulties are compounded by the accumulated prestige and literary authority of canonical texts by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The present analysis proceeds against the grain of traditional literary scholarship and also of its more recent, radically critical variants. The problem addressed here is not whether Shakespeare’s plays, for example, represent a traditional world picture of some kind, whether Christian humanist or its secular counterpart in the Tudor Myth, or, on the contrary, represent a critical and subversive demystifying of a dominant ideology. The second position is certainly an advance over the first, both in its emphasis on discontinuity and rupture within the Tudor consensus, and in its insistence that the problem of meaning cannot be considered independently of the problem of authority. But the larger issue of authority and its allocation between the centers of political power and exceptional individual subjects, such as Shakespeare, has been, even in the most strongly revisionist critical texts, analyzed primarily in light of the image power has of itself as an infinitely resourceful center of initiative, surveillance and control. The existence of a popular element in the cultural landscape of the period has either been ignored or been treated as yet another instrument of political and cultural domination. But the problem of authority cannot be fully elucidated by focusing exclusively on the relationship between what purports to be a virtual monopoly of significant political power and a few individual centers of avant-garde consciousness uneasily balanced between alternatives of affiliation or critical rejection of the imperatives of a ruling elite.

The problem of ‘authors’ and of their ‘authority’ is discussed here not only in the light of their relationship to de jure authority, but also and more centrally in the light of their relationship to a coherent, diverse and energetic popular culture that struggles to retain its own particular and local authority over the ordering of social and economic life. Before proceeding to any detailed analysis of that popular culture, however, it is useful to place the problem in a more fully developed theoretical context. That context has three significant elements. First, there is the problem of the literary text and how it is most effectively situated in relation to the non-literary. Though interpretation of literature is an important element in the discussions that follow, it does not take precedence over other issues, nor is the ‘reading of texts’ invested with decisive teleological importance. For this reason the perspective developed in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin has been adopted as a primary ‘literary’ or interpretive strategy. Second, there is the general problem of festivity and ritual form, and its evidently conservative function in sustaining the continuity of social life. That problem has been most powerfully addressed in the sociology of Emile Durkheim, and in recent revisions of his theory in the work of René Girard and Victor Turner. Third, there is the problem of specifying exactly what is meant by popular or plebeian culture, the degree to which that culture retained any degree of independent initiative, and the ability of that culture to articulate and carry out its own partisan agenda in the face of a powerfully organized hegemony. This is recognizably the problem of class struggle, but it is also an aspect of the social ‘architecture’ proposed by Fernand Braudel, in which the history of the longue durée and its embodiment in the diverse patterning of everyday life proceeds in accordance with its own interior rhythms independently of any mobility in the political superstructure.

The project undertaken here is informed by a range of materialist critical traditions. It is also animated by the attitude of materialist ‘sadness’ described so eloquently by Walter Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History:

this sadness stands out more clearly if one asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize. The answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers. Historical materialists know what that means. Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practise, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.⁴

CHAPTER 1

PLAYING THE OLD WORKS HISTORICALLY

DRAMATIC texts imply theatrical performances and thus a concrete social and institutional mise-en-scène. Although in some cultural settings theater has a relatively clear and well-defined relationship to the social structure as a whole, the theater of Elizabethan England was situated quite ambiguously in relation to the established categories and fully legitimated functions of the formally constituted social order. Despite this initially marginal status, a significant body of texts has not merely survived from this institution but been sustained within the canon of literature as a central and privileged tradition. The fate of an old play in a contemporary performance or reading presents many complex difficulties, but the most elusive of all these problems is the recognition and recuperation of their initially uncanonical literary and social status.

The dramatic texts remain, but the social and institutional setting in which they were performed has changed greatly. The problem of reading and performance is thus necessarily historical.

We too are at the same time fathers of a new period and sons of an old one; we understand a great deal of the remote past and can still share once overwhelming feelings which were stimulated on a grand scale. And the society in which we live is a very complex one, too.… What really matters is to play these old works historically, which means setting them in powerful contrast to our own time. For it is only against the background of our own time that their shape emerges as an old shape, and without this background I doubt if they could have any shape at all.¹

Diverse ideological orientations to both past and present are possible, and every historical analysis is grounded, at least implicitly, in a purposeful and usually self-conscious political stance. For Brecht, history is an indispensable part of his central critical purpose and of the requirement that the ‘spectator must master the incidents on the stage’.² Neither the actions represented, nor the techniques of any such representation, are to be considered as ‘natural’ or ‘universal’, since ‘man is the sum of all the social conditions of all times’. The spectator masters the incidents by dispelling the illusion of a trans-historical ‘human nature’, and by discovering the dynamic and contingent movement both of ‘man’ and of ‘social conditions’ through history.³

Brecht’s project for ‘playing the old works historically’ begins from the observation that Elizabethan dramatists were engaged in ‘global experiments’ testing social possibilities and mimetically working through abrasive social conflicts. In retrospect these experiments have a powerfully tragic feel, in that they represent forms of collective life that have almost entirely disappeared. The contrast between the old works and the cultural forms of our own time dramatizes the impermanence of that older way of life, and, equally, the impermanence of presently existing social and political arrangements.

To describe these plays as ‘global experiments’ suggests that literary artists and their audiences were immediately and objectively aware of struggle and change. This is certainly the view put forward by E.M. W. Tillyard, although his position contrasts very sharply with Brecht’s. Tillyard is currently regarded as outmoded both in his methodology and his interpretation of particular works. Nevertheless, he remains a powerfully influential figure, even among scholars who explicitly reject his views. The Elizabethan World Picture, for example, establishes the position that the literature of the past is part of a larger cultural and ideological totality, and that its interpretation consequently requires a disciplined act of historical imagination in which the willingness to discover and acknowledge difference is paramount.

Tillyard argues that, in the Elizabethan period, there is only one significant culture and that unanimity exists among those who share that culture in the form of a comprehensive ‘world picture’ or intellectual frame of reference. Literature, drama and theatrical activity are the reflection and the instrument of that world picture, which has an autonomous and virtually objective existence, independent of its actualization in concrete literary, theological or political writing. Even when a text depicts social disintegration, the idea of hierarchical order is the implicit prior standard that rationalizes the image of disorder. Although images of social conflict are common in Elizabethan literature, Tillyard argues that ‘pictures of civil war and disorder … [have] no meaning apart from a background to judge them by’.⁴ This ‘background’ is both a teleology and a durable social consensus that rejects any inference that disorder could ever be regarded as ‘natural’.

Such a way of thinking was abhorrent to the Elizabethans (as indeed it always has been and is now to the majority), who preferred to think of order as the norm to which disorder, though lamentably common, was yet the exception.⁵

Loyalty to the idea of order is the preference of the majority, even when the contingent circumstances of history seem to deny the very possibility of order, or when the exceptions occur more frequently than the instances of the norm. There are, however, important qualifications in the claims of unanimity and consensus.

The social and political boundaries of unanimity are acknowledged in a discussion of Richard Hooker, who represents for Tillyard the central and most accessible spokesman for the shared ideals of Elizabethans.

Hooker’s elaborated account must have stated pretty fairly the preponderating conception among the educated.… He writes not for the technical theologian but mediates theology to the general educated public of his day.… He has the acutest sense of what the ordinary educated man can grasp and having grasped ratify. It is this tact that assures us that he speaks for the educated nucleus that dictated the current beliefs of the Elizabethan Age.⁶ [Emphasis added]

Cultural unanimity exists among a narrowly circumscribed group, as the constantly reiterated term ‘educated’ suggests. The ‘world picture’ shared by Elizabethans is a selective tradition disseminated by an ‘educated nucleus’ and ratified by a somewhat wider community of ‘ordinary educated men’. The educated nucleus who share this outlook and responsibility for its dissemination are treated as unproblematic. Furthermore, though Tillyard’s argument emphasizes differences between past and present in ideological content, terms such as ‘art’ and ‘literature’ are not regarded as historical categories, much less ‘educated’ or ‘public’. The production of literary meaning, the use to which it is put by the ‘educated nucleus’ and the authority of that educated elite are not treated as questionable elements in a specific historical dialectic. On the contrary, there is a strong implication that the selective tradition and its interpretive community are continuous, and that their authority is above serious criticism.

Tillyard’s position represents one side of a debate about Renaissance culture – that which maintains that it is primarily a continuation of the unified, theocentric cosmology of the Middle Ages. The alternative view is that Renaissance culture is authentically ‘heterocosmic’, and that its art represents a tension between opposing but equally valid social and ontological systems. Norman Rabkin identifies this opposition as ‘complementarity’, a pattern created by the coexistence in a literary structure of symmetrically opposed meanings, each of which has a double valuation.

Shakespeare tends to structure his imitations in t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Theoretical perspective
• Chapter 1 Playing the old works historically
• Chapter 2 The social function of festivity
• Chapter 3 Carnival and plebeian culture
• Part II The texts of Carnival
• Chapter 4 Travesty and social order
• Chapter 5 Butchers and fishmongers
• Chapter 6 A complete exit from the present order of life'
• Part III Theater and the structure of authority
• Chapter 7 Authority and the author function
• Chapter 8 The dialectic of laughter
• Chapter 9 Clowning and devilment
• Part IV Carnivalized literature
• Chapter 10 Wedding feast and charivari
• Chapter 11 Treating death as a laughing matter
• Chapter 12 The festive agon: the politics of Carnival
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index