The Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama

Icon of Opposition

Kristen Deiter

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415762540
• eBook ISBN: 9781135894054
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama historicizes the Tower of London's evolving meanings in English culture alongside its representations in twenty-four English history plays, 1579-c.1634, by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and others. While Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I fashioned the Tower as a showplace of royal authority, magnificence, and entertainment, many playwrights of the time revealed the Tower's instability as a royal symbol and represented it, instead, as an emblem of opposition to the crown and as a bodily and spiritual icon of non-royal English identity.

Chapter One
Introduction

Historicizing Original Tower Play Audiences

The Tower of London’s representations in English Renaissance culture turned on the hinge of historical drama. By the late-Elizabethan age, the castle’s old-est and largest building, the White Tower, was about five hundred years old, and the Tower of London complex occupied a space whose history visibly dated to the Roman occupation of Britain.¹ The Tower had played a significant role in English culture up to Elizabeth I’s reign, and its symbolic meanings, having developed and evolved over the centuries, affected how Renaissance Londoners perceived and reacted to it as an icon. Then, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, twenty-four English history plays—twenty of which were most probably first presented between 1590 and 1624—represented the Tower, revolutionizing its cultural meanings.

The twenty-four plays include Thomas Legge’s Richardus Tertius (1579); William Shakespeare’s The First Part of King Henry the Sixth (1H6, 1590) and The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth (2H6, c.1590); The True Tragedie of Richard the Third [ … ] (True Tragedie R3, 1588–94); The Life and Death of Iacke Straw, A Notable Rebell in England (Iacke Straw, 1590–93); Shakespeare’s The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth (3H6, c.1591); George Peele’s, The Chronicle of King Edward the First, Surnamed Long-shanks, with The Life of Luellen Rebel in Wales (Edward the First, 1590–93); Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Richard the Third (R3, 1591–92); Christo-pher Marlowe’s Edward the Second (1591–93); Anthony Munday et al.’s Sir Thomas More (originally composed c.1592–93); Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Richard the Second (R2, 1595); Thomas Heywood’s The First Part of King Edward the Fourth (1E4, 1592–99) and The Second Part of King Edward the Fourth (2E4, 1592–99); Munday, Michael Drayton, Robert Wilson, and Richard Hathway’s The First Part of the True and Honorable Historie, of the Life of Sir John Old-castle, the Good Lord Cobham (Old-castle, 1599); The Life and Death of Thomas, Lord Cromwell (Cromwell, c.1599–1602); Thomas Dekker and John Webster’s The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat (Wyat, 1602); Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me You Know Me (When You See Me, 1604); Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie, or The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth (1 If You Know Not Me, 1604–05) and If You Know Not Me, You Know No Body. The Second Part (2 If You Know Not Me, 1604–05); Woodstock (c.1605–09); Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s The Life of King Henry the Eighth (H8, 1613); Thomas Drue’s The Life of the Dutches of Suffolke (1624); Robert Davenport’s King Iohn and Matilda, A Tragedy (Iohn and Matilda, c.1628–29); and John Ford’s The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck, A Strange Truth (Perkin Warbeck, c.1625–34).² For brevity I refer to these works collectively as the Tower plays.³

Although the Tower, as a royal palace and fortress, may appear to stand for royal control in the Tower plays, the dramatic representation of that control is always compromised. The Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama demonstrates that while Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I were fashioning the Tower as a showplace of royal temporal and spiritual authority, magnificence, and entertainment, English history plays disrupted this meta-narrative by revealing the Tower’s instability as a royal symbol and representing it, instead, as an emblem of opposition to the crown and as a bodily and spiritual icon of non-royal English identity.

The details of time and place that constructed and coincided with this “art of space as well as words” are paramount to my study of drama, as they were for Stephen Mullaney in The Place of the Stage (vii, 7). Places in Renaissance London, such as the marginal locations of the playhouses, were sites of multiple and emergent cultural meanings, for not until 1576, when James Burbage built London’s first playhouse, the Theatre, just outside the city walls, was the early modern theater itself envisioned as a place—a building.⁴ The Tower, another of London’s marginal structures replete with cultural significance, had been the setting of many of England’s defining moments, and the theaters redefined the Tower’s meanings when playwrights brought that setting from London’s margins to the popular stage. Because drama helped shape early modern culture and history,⁵ its representations of the Tower are a key to understanding Renaissance England. In fact, the Tower plays, Tower history, and other cultural representations of the Tower can be read as texts that interacted to produce new cultural meanings.⁶ As the Tower is today a familiar symbol of English national identity (The Tower of London: The Official Guide), so it was during the Renaissance. And because historical drama played a crucial role in the construction of English Renaissance national identity, playgoers’ experiences of the Tower in history plays revolutionized their image of the Tower and of themselves in relation to it.⁷ I read the Tower, a landmark whose history reached back for centuries before the playhouses were constructed and which history plays represented for over fifty years, like Mullaney has read Renaissance London: as “a cultural artifact,” an emblem.⁸

THE TOWER OF LONDON AS A DRAMATIC EMBLEM

By dissociating the Tower from the royal ideology that had come to define its meanings, and associating it instead with the oppositional ideology to which many disempowered, repressed, and disaffected playgoers subscribed, playwrights proved the Tower to be “quintessentially emblematic” or iconic (John Manning 27). Sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century English people of all social degrees were acutely aware of emblems—“combinations of mottoes and pictures, as well as emblematic motifs with their implied meanings.”⁹ Emblems, being vital to English Renaissance culture, influenced almost all visual and verbal communication and adorned every domestic and public space, and anything could be potentially emblematic.¹⁰ “Emblematic combinations of word and picture or emblematic designs with their implied meanings” were found in paintings, portraits, wall and ceiling decorations, carving, stained glass, and jewelry; embroidered onto cushions and bed valances; and woven into table carpets and tapestries. They were commonly used in books, triumphal arches, and Protestant and Catholic sermons, and were seen and heard in tournaments, pageants, state entries, court masques, and poetry.¹¹ Emblems were especially notable in drama, “the most emblematic of all the literary arts, combining [ … ] a visual experience [ … ] with a verbal experience” (Daly, “Emblematic Drama” 153).

Scholars attribute Renaissance drama’s emblematic qualities, especially scenic devices, to the prominence of emblem books, one of the most popular early modern literary forms (Diehl, An Index of Icons 3). By 1585 the emblem was “a serious, well-known genre commanding the attention of the sober literary critic” (Leisher 3). In 1589 George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie included a five-page discussion of emblematics that explained the desired effect of emblems upon their viewers: “the vse and intent [ … ] is to insinuat some secret, wittie, morall and braue purpose, presented to the beholder, either to recreate his eye, or please his phantasie, or examine his iudgement, or occupie his braine or to manage his will either by hope or by dread, euery of which respectes be of no little moment.”¹² By 1598, in Palladis Tamia, Francis Meres praised English emblem writers as “household names” (Daly, “England and the Emblem” 4–5). Peter M. Daly and Roy C. Strong have cited twelve such texts published in England between 1569 and 1635, eight of which were sixteenth-century works, and many emblem books published on the Continent after 1531 were influential in England.¹³

Although not all playgoers took note of dramatic symbolism or emblems in plays, and Renaissance antiquaries did not write about the Tower in emblematic terms,¹⁴ early modern English people were receptive to symbolism involving the Tower. Robert Greene treats lions emblematically in his 1590 fictional work, Never Too Late, deriving “from the fact that the Tower lions were a sight not to be missed.”¹⁵ This synecdoche reveals two expectations Greene had of his readers: first, that they acknowledged the Tower’s status as a visitor attraction for ordinary people; and second, that a feature of the Tower, the lions in the Menagerie, could stand for the whole castle. Over the next few decades, as a result of the Tower’s appearance on the stage, it became an emblem of English subjects’ struggles with the crown and a corporeal and spiritual icon of their national identity. In the plays, the Tower not only serves as a scenic unit that localizes the action in London but is truly emblematic in that it points to meanings beyond itself, plays a major role in the action, and gives the plays new levels of interpretation (Daly, “Emblematic Drama” 174–75, 178).

Despite the Tower’s centrality in English history and culture, literary and cultural studies have not yet historicized, nor revealed in any other mode, the Tower’s emblematic meanings in early modern drama. Nor has the Tower’s role as an evolving cultural icon been treated beyond its obvious functions as a medieval royal palace and fortress.¹⁶ Although the Tower’s prominent role in early modern English literature has received limited or marginal commentary in studies of Tower history or English history,¹⁷ scholars have not yet explored that role in any depth or attended to it in terms of national identity. In fact, research on the Tower’s evolution into the architectural symbol of the English people and their history has centered on the Restoration period or the Victorian age, when large numbers of tourists began to visit the castle.¹⁸ Such symbolism began to emerge, it appears, as early as 1579, when the Tower first appeared spatially on the early modern stage.¹⁹ The Tower of London developed, I will argue, as an icon of opposition to the crown and an evolving and complex symbol of English national identity alongside its representations in twenty-two history plays from 1579 to 1624 and two more in c.1628–29 and c.1625–34.²⁰

PRACTICING CULTURAL HISTORICISM

Like others engaged in the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies, I aim to interpret culture, specifically English Renaissance culture, by “draw[ing] from whatever fields are necessary to produce the knowledge required” (Nelson et al. 2, 4). My critical practice has grown out of, and thus incorporates enduring features of, new historicism. Along with new historicists and the intellectual historian Michel Foucault, whose work on “the new history” shaped their ideas, I am interested in “discontinuity and rupture, the moments of transformation and difference”—especially moments when the Tower took on new emblematic meanings in English culture—and the power relations that surrounded those transformations (Brannigan 46, 51). In addition to Foucault’s conception of new history, new historicists deploy cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s method of thick description: analysis of how a practice or idea is “produced, perceived, and interpreted” within its own culture (Geertz 6–7). Because Geertz viewed culture as “webs of significance,” he extrapolated “large conclusions from small, but densely textured facts” (5–9, 28). For new historicists, this practice involves placing a cultural text within “a network of framing intentions and cultural meanings” (Gallagher and Greenblatt 21). My critical practice follows this inductive method of analyzing tightly-woven threads of cultural evidence. Additionally, I utilize two concepts that the first and predominant new historicist, Stephen Greenblatt, has studied—self-fashioning and the theater’s exchanges with the surrounding culture—to explain Renaissance monarchs’ and other social groups’ efforts to shape their identities through the Tower.²¹ Another new historicist, Mullaney, first studied Renaissance drama in terms of London’s cultural spaces (vii), a topic I address with specific regard to the Tower. And Emily Carroll Bartels’ work on Christopher Marlowe’s negative representations of alien character types “as a strategy for self-authorization and self-empowerment” in Renaissance culture (xv) has influenced my thinking of the Tower’s dramatic and cultural representations.

Historicist critical practice differs from formalist literary analysis of the text alone as well as traditional historiography, which assumes that history can be known or seen objectively.²² Rather, I view history itself as a construct or a text, not a background against which to understand literary works.²³ Because history plays were events where the Tower’s cultural meanings were constructed,²⁴ I accord them an equal place with documentary history in the Tower’s development as a cultural icon. Like many early modern English people did, I recognize plays as profound sources of social power, “at once shaped by and, more actively, shaping the culture” that produced them.²⁵ The Tower plays are, in fact, a source of evidence that reveals new historical knowledge about the Tower’s early modern cultural meanings. Indeed, no place is better than the early modern stage to discover the formation of English national identity with the Tower, for the Tower’s evolving identity as a cultural symbol was defined there. The Tower’s symbolic meanings are located not onl...

Table of contents

• LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One Introduction
• Chapter Two The Tower of London as a Cultural Icon before the Tower Plays
• Chapter Three Stage vs. State
• Chapter Four The Tower of London
• Chapter Five Reading English Nationhood in the Dramatic Tower of London
• The Tower of London
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index