New Directions in Early Modern English Drama

Edges, Spaces, Intersections

Aidan Norrie, Mark Houlahan, Aidan Norrie, Mark Houlahan

• Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501514029
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Arte dramático británico

This collection examines some of the people, places, and plays at the edge of early modern English drama. Recent scholarship has begun to think more critically about the edge, particularly in relation to the canon and canonicity. This book demonstrates that the people and concepts long seen as on the edge of early modern English drama made vital contributions both within the fictive worlds of early modern plays, and without, in the real worlds of playmakers, theaters, and audiences. The book engages with topics such as child actors, alterity, sexuality, foreignness, and locality to acknowledge and extend the rich sense of playmaking and all its ancillary activities that have emerged over the last decade. The essays by a global team of scholars bring to life people and practices that flourished on the edge, manifesting their importance to both early modern audiences, and to current readers and performers.

Chapter 1 Introduction: Edges, Spaces, and Intersections in Early Modern English Drama

Aidan Norrie

Mark Houlahan

It is one of the most remarkable scenes in the whole of early modern drama: the aged courtier, blinded out of loyalty to his master, attempts suicide by falling off an imaginary cliff. Once he has fallen, and lives, he encounters his former master, the former king, who is reeling from the effects of what we might now describe as a nervous breakdown. In the height of his mania, the ex-king reels off speech after speech of searing critique of the deeply stratified world he ruled for so long.¹ It is no surprise that Lear has to go to the edge of his world to articulate this experience. The edge forms a clear boundary at which one can observe all that has been unfolding across ancient Britain in the previous three acts of Shakespeare’s play. The terrain at the top and bottom of the cliff at Dover becomes a classic space for ‘edge’ thinking. This complex scene is a formidable challenge to stage: the key actors need to sustain peak intensity throughout, and two-thirds of the way through any performance of the play their bodies and spirits (as too the audiences’) may well begin to droop. The scene is complex too, to analyze, as a formidable array of studies show.²

Shakespeare takes us to this edge because the plot requires the British characters to advance towards Dover to meet the French army with Cordelia at its head. Conversely, the French army needs to arrive by sea, and the final battle in Act 5 must take place not far from Dover, anticipating Caesar’s invasion across the English Channel in 55 BCE and William of Normandy’s assault in 1066.³ But, as Lisa Hopkins has shown in her finely textured studies of edges in early modern theater, it is not just that the edge gestured to on stage is one that would resonate with the first audience of the play, and that at least some would have passed over: it is that Shakespeare uses the location of the edge to expand into states of emotion and insight he had never quite broached in this way, and that expansion required a revolutionary form of dramaturgy.⁴ The edge advances the play on multiple fronts: in terms of character, rhetoric, thought, and innovative use of stage space, in flight from the ‘real’ in order to arrive at a densely imagined moment of truth. Despite centuries of commentary, critics, theater historians, textual scholars, and audiences still wrestle with this scene. If the scene proceeds through a dramaturgy that is unnerving and sophisticated, so too, we suggest, should it be matched with a welter of critical approaches. We seek in this book to expand the range of topics on offer in discussions of early modern English drama. We wanted both new and established voices to give a fresh sense of what it means, currently, to engage in this ever expanding, turbulent field. Our contributors have, we think, more than ably risen to this challenge, collectively evoking an early modern theater world of provocative richness, engaging completely new topics and refreshing traditional ones, encountering the ‘old’ world of early modern drama with the force of twenty-first-century digital technologies and paradigms, what Robert Hughes, in his great book on twentieth-century visual art, calls The Shock of the New.

It is of course something of a paradox to have begun with one of Shakespeare’s most well-known plays, because a core part of our provocation was not to dispense with Shakespeare altogether, but rather to add to the increasingly diverse conversations in and about early modern drama, so many of which fruitfully focus on collective, and not singular, achievements of early modern playwrights. Early modern English drama was multifaceted, adaptive, irregular, emotive, and provocative: it is these facets of the field that the contributors to New Directions in Early Modern English Drama have illuminated, some of them for the first time. We consider new edges of the field, enfolding biographical, phenomenological, sociolinguistic, and urban edges. We map out new spaces for theatrical encounters in the townscapes beyond London itself, and in the space below the ley lines of the conventional 1560 Agas map of the city of London and its environs;⁵ on London stages we can map new encounters with the exoticized space of the Mediterranean littoral and the orientalized, spectacular space of the Islamic Near East. Furthermore, to grasp the expanding dimensions of the field, we need to keep crossing intellectual and institutional boundaries (irrespective of budget codes and subject-based job descriptions) and be constantly alert to the power of intersectional discourses. By doing this we encounter, in the discourses and stage business ingeniously contrived by the willing congress of multiple authors, fresh meaning in the interstitial spaces between languages on stage, and sexual identities far beyond simple binaries. And, finally, we reach across an intersection often seen as an absolute limit, the closing of the theaters in 1642, to see theatrical practice from before the Civil War not constrained but rather replenished in the intricacies of political positionality in the mid-1650s.

Canon’s Edge

One of the immediate concerns addressed by the chapters in this collection is the idea of the “canon” of early modern English drama. This canon forms an edge that has only relatively recently been properly re-assessed, and as the chapters that follow demonstrate, there are multiple edges that can preclude a play, playwright, or playhouse from assuming canonicity. Indeed, these boundaries still see certain performances and productions relegated to the edge of the canon, not yet truly accepted or embraced. The “canon” is of course a nebulous concept, meaning different things to different people in different times and places. Even Shakespeare himself, long at the heart of the canon, has been subjected to intense scrutiny and re-evaluation, as the editors of the New Oxford Shakespeare, most recently, have demonstrated.

As is probably clear, in New Directions in Early Modern English Drama we have employed a dual meaning for “edge.” On the one hand, we have assembled chapters that illuminate English drama generally seen as being on the edge of the canon, rather than in the center. Collectively, we show also how drama moves through new spaces (virtual and real), creating fertile intersections. Those terms have been used here to represent distinct yet overlapping categories. We have considered then, for instance, civic entertainments, children’s companies, Restoration drama, and the actors and playhouses themselves. Conversely, we have also considered how the more ‘famous’ canonical texts can be better understood by blurring their edges, and thought about the way edges between drama types, performers, locations, and writers intersected and overlapped. This means we have considered (or thought anew), for instance, the links between Fletcher and Shakespeare, and religion, magic, and alterity on the stage and the page, asking how we should (or do) think about these issues and themes. Likewise, we are interested in exploring how to fruitfully harness the new affordances vouchsafed by the newest wave of digitality and databases. This duality was recognized by Hopkins, when she observed that edges allow two-way traffic, thereby investing them with a kind of power that could always be crossed, contested, or ceded.⁶

A core driver of this collection, then, is a (perhaps unspoken) acknowledgment that the canon, and thus its edges, are, in the words of Hopkins, “arbitrary and subject to radical change through time.”⁷ The arbitrary nature of the canon is of course well known in the scholarship. Recently, Paul Salzman has emphasized how editing practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries still impact us today. According to Salzman, the emergence of “Renaissance studies” as a field of academic study, and its wider impact, is visible in the “creation of Complete Text Editions in the nineteenth century, as well as in the editing of more ephemeral works and authors.” Nevertheless, as the contributors here demonstrate, “the history of this process has been skewed by the unrelenting focus on Shakespeare.”⁸ Indeed, work under way by Brett Greatley-Hirsch will add to Salzman’s depiction of the proliferation of Shakespeare editions with an in-depth statistical tracking of the complementary (inevitably much lesser) publication of non-Shakespearean drama.⁹

As the editors of Other Voices, Other Views argued twenty years ago, we too seek to encourage “the inclusion of other voices to augment the standard university syllabus for the early modern period, urging recognition of the period’s diversity and reforming the conditions under which we pass judgement on its culture.”¹⁰ The nature, status, appropriateness, and contents of the early modern literary canon have been debated, theorized, and problematized for decades, and we have no intention of revisiting these debates here.¹¹ Instead, New Directions in Early Modern English Drama seeks to bring aspects of early modern English drama that remain understudied to a wider audience, with the intention of sparking further scholarly debates and discussions. As Salzman observes, understanding how the canon was formed, and challenging the edges between what is included and excluded, offers us an “expanded notion of what could be known about the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Britain.”¹²

Academics, Edges, and the Canon

As alluded to above, academics are partially responsible for the perpetuation of the (restricted) edges of the canon. Teaching university courses requires set texts – physical or digital – and such courses are bound by time (and budgetary) constraints. Thanks to the editing done in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, plays are edited and presented in set formats, which has led to the rise of anthologies. These have affordances in the teaching space, in making a certain range of playtexts readily available; the downside has been to render a wide range of compelling texts invisible outside the range of the research monograph. Numerous scholars have studied the effect of this, but Jeremy Lopez has recently articulated our shared role in the more rigid edges of the canon of early modern drama:

With the developments of the anthology’s institutional function in the twentieth century, and the reconception of the general reader as a university undergraduate, a stable ide...