A Short History of English Renaissance Drama

Helen Hackett

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857733023
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Shakespeare is a towering presence in English and indeed global culture. Yet considered alongside his contemporaries he was not an isolated phenomenon, but the product of a period of astonishing creative fertility. This was an age when new media - popular drama and print - were seized upon avidly and inventively by a generation of exceptionally talented writers. In her sparkling new book, Helen Hackett explores the historical contexts of English Renaissance drama by situating it in the wider history of ideas. She traces the origins of Renaissance theatre in communal religious drama, civic pageantry and court entertainment and vividly describes the playing conditions of Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses. Examining Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson in turn, the author assesses the distinctive contribution made by each playwright to the creation of English drama. She then turns to revenge tragedy, with its gothic poetry of sex and death; city comedy, domestic tragedy and tragicomedy; and gender and drama, with female roles played by boy actors in commercial playhouses while women participated in drama at court and elsewhere.
The book places Renaissance drama in the exciting and vibrant cosmopolitanism of sixteenth-century London.

1

ENGLISH DRAMA BEFORE THE 1590s

William Shakespeare was born in 1564. As he grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon, where might he have experienced dramatic performance? How might his ideas of drama have been formed? Perhaps he made the 20-mile journey to Coventry, where the Corpus Christi pageants, a cycle of medieval Bible plays, continued to be performed annually until 1579.¹ Some scholars think he may have attended the Princely Pleasures at Kenilworth Castle, 12 miles from Stratford, a lavish 19–day festival of courtly masques and local drama laid on in 1575 to entertain Elizabeth I.² He could have read a variety of late medieval and early Tudor plays that were available in print (Everyman, for instance, a morality play which will be discussed below, survives in four early sixteenth-century editions).³ He would certainly have seen performances by touring companies of professional players, who frequently visited Stratford: in 1569, for example, Shakespeare’s father as the town’s high bailiff presided over the payment of two such troupes, while in 1587 no fewer than five companies performed at Shakespeare’s old school.⁴

Many different kinds of drama surrounded Shakespeare and his contemporaries in their childhoods. Long before the construction of the first purpose-built playhouses in the 1570s, England had a rich and thriving theatrical culture; indeed, two scholars of early drama have recently written, ‘There was arguably more theatre, and were certainly more kinds of people involved in theatrical productions, before Shakespeare’s time than after it’.⁵ Much medieval drama was religious, and it used to be thought that much of this died out or was suppressed soon after the Reformation. Recent scholarship, however, has indicated that even liturgical drama in churches persisted in many places well into the seventeenth century.⁶ Street performances of mystery plays continued well into Elizabeth’s reign; while other forms of drama included morality plays, Robin Hood plays, and mumming plays (folk plays, often about St George, a fight, and a miraculous restoration of life). Entertainments of various kinds were staged in private houses, schools, universities, the Inns of Court (the centres of legal training in London), and the royal court. Around 100 plays survive from the first three quarters of the sixteenth century, more than 200 more are recorded but lost, and more still undoubtedly existed.⁷ This chapter will briefly survey the fertile and diverse English dramatic traditions which preceded the drama of Shakespeare’s adulthood.

MYSTERY OR CORPUS CHRISTI PLAYS

These plays were performed on the feast day of Corpus Christi, the first Thursday after Trinity Sunday. They are also known as mystery plays, not because of any enigmatic qualities, but because they were performed by the ‘mysteries’, meaning the craft-guilds or professions.⁸ Corpus Christi might fall on any date between 23 May and 24 June, and so was an occasion for outdoor summer celebrations making the most of the long hours of daylight. The feast was introduced into the church calendar in 1311, and from the late fourteenth century onwards, at Coventry, York, Chester, and other towns, the central event was a cycle of plays telling Bible stories, performed on pageant wagons which processed around the town presenting each scene at a series of stations. The reasons why the cycles (apart from a very few local exceptions) died out by the late sixteenth century are many and complex; the banning of the feast of Corpus Christi in 1548 and the opposition of some Protestant churchmen undoubtedly contributed, but so too did economic problems in the towns that had staged them.⁹

The best preserved text is from York, where annual Corpus Christi performances continued into the late 1560s. The York cycle begins with the apocryphal story of the Fall of the Angels, presented by the guild of Barkers or Tanners, who prepared hides for use in leather goods. They performed this scene at the first pageant station at 4.30am, thus presenting at sunrise the story of the dawn of Creation; the play accordingly plays upon imagery of darkness and light. They then proceeded to perform the scene again at the other 11 stations through the town. They were followed at each station by wagon performances working through the Bible in sequence, sometimes assigned to appropriate guilds: the Shipwrights, for instance, presented the Building of the Ark, while the Bakers presented the Last Supper. By the time the Mercers presented the final play, the Last Judgement, at the twelfth and final station it would be after midnight, and once again the play-script makes use of the temporal setting, in this case of nocturnal darkness. Late fifteenth-century documents record some 50 pageants in total. Spectators could remain at one station all day to see the whole Old and New Testament narrative in sequence, or could move between stations at will to create a more flexible and individualised dramatic experience. It was a local and amateur performance, as audience-members watched their neighbours, relations, and colleagues on stage, but at the same time an epic spectacle, with over 300 speaking parts in the surviving York text.

We do not know any names of authors of the Corpus Christi plays, which were produced collectively and revised and expanded over a long period. Two modern editors of the York cycle liken it to ‘the Gothic cathedrals of northern Europe, such as York Minster, built and decorated in a succession of styles by generations of craftsmen but unified by a single spiritual aim’.¹⁰ Similarly each major role was shared between several actors, both across different years and in each single year in successive pageants in the procession: a day’s performance of the cycle would involve more than a dozen different Virgin Marys and two dozen Christs.¹¹ Traditions of characterisation developed: Noah’s wife, for instance, is a shrew who is sceptical of the prophesied Flood and vigorously resists boarding the Ark,¹² while King Herod is a tyrant whose pride and bombast anticipates Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Milton’s Satan:

The prince of planets that proudly is pight

Shall brace forth his beams that our bield blithe,

The moon at my mint he musters his might,

And Caesars in castle great kindnes me kithe.

(The sun that is proudly adorned shall radiate his beams to gladden our leisure, the moon at my gesture displays his might, and emperors in castles show great kindness towards me.) (here)

When he interrogates Christ, the latter’s resolute silence drives Herod to ever more violent ranting and raving:

How likes thou? Well lord? Say. What, devil, never a deal?

. . . Uta! Oy! Oy!

. . . Say, may thou not hear me? Hey, man, art thou wood?

(How does this suit you? Well lord? Speak. What, devil, not a word?

. . . Uta! Oy! Oy! . . . Say, can’t you hear me? Hey, man, are you mad?’) (here)

The surviving texts of the Coventry mystery plays include the striking stage direction ‘Here Erode ragis in the pagond [pageant wagon] and in the strete also.’¹³ Clearly Shakespeare was recalling such roles, either from his own experience or from the recollections of his parents’ generation, when Hamlet instructs the players not to ‘tear a passion to tatters . . . it out Herods Herod’ (Hamlet 3.2.7–13).

There was much comedy in such larger-than-life roles, and in the mischief-making and profanity of the Devil, who begins the York play of the Temptation of Christ by emerging from the crowd and breaching the imaginary boundary between audience and performers:

Make room belive, and let me gang!

Who makes here all this throng?

Hie you hence, high might you hang

Right with a rope.

I dread me that I dwell too long

To do a jape.

(Make room quickly, and let me pass! Who is making all this commotion here? Get out of the way quickly, I hope you hang high from a rope. I am afraid I have delayed too long to do an evil deed.) (here)

His direct engagement with the audience, at once insulting them and saucily inviting them to collude in his villainy, anticipates later figures such as Shakespeare’s Richard III and Iago.

At the same time the cycle includes moments of high tragedy and profound emotional depth; none more so, of course, than the crucifixion. This pageant begins with the soldiers nailing Christ to the cross. The audience can hardly see the prostrate Christ, and may be amused by the soldiers’ workmanlike banter as they go about their gruesome task. Then suddenly, shockingly, the cross is erected, and Christ delivers a speech of heart-stopping beauty and pain:

All men that walk by way or street,

Take tent ye shall no travail tine.

Behold mine head, mine hands, and my feet,

And fully feel now, ere ye fine,

If any mourning may be meet,

Or mischief measured unto mine.

(All men that walk by way or street, take heed that you miss none of your suffering. Behold my head, my hands, and my feet, and fully feel now, before you pass, if any mourning may be equal, or misfortune measured unto mine.) (here)

The speech draws upon both a well-known medieval lyric and the Good Friday liturgy, and it must have been startling to the audience to hear these familiar words delivered directly from the mouth of the crucified Christ. The grief and pathos is intensified as he prays to his Father to forgive his tormentors. Much medieval devotional writing is characterised by ‘affective piety’, a compelling appeal to the emotions, and we see this in action here. Theorists and historians of tragedy sometimes identify pity and terror as its defining characteristics; these are certainly present in abundance in this York play of Christ’s passion.¹⁴

MORALITY PLAYS

Texts survive of five medieval morality plays: The Pride of Life, The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind, and Everyman. They are allegorical dramas presenting a journey through spiritual trials to salvation which often involves ‘psychomachia’, a battle for the human soul by representatives of good and evil. Some morality plays were performed outdoors, using ‘place-and-scaffold’ staging in which an open acting space (the place) was surrounded by individual symbolic structures (the scaffolds), representing such features as a palace, a mountain, or hell. A circular staging plan of this type exists for The Castle of Perseverance.¹⁵ The audience may have sat around the outer circumference of the scaffolds, creating a kind of theatre-in-the-round, or they may have moved around the arena in promenade fashion. Some saints’ plays and passion plays also used place-and-scaffold staging. Mankind and Wisdom, on the other hand, may have been performed indoors in a great hall. There is wide variation in the scale and manner of morality plays: The Castle of Perseverance has 35 speaking parts, requires the building of six scaffolds, and lasts for over four hours in performance, whereas Mankind and Everyman are much sparser in their staging.¹⁶

The protagonist of Mankind (c.1471–79) is a simple, well-meaning working man – a farmer – who explains that ‘My name is Mankind. I have my composition / Of a body and soul, of condition contrary. / Betwixt them twain is a great division’.¹⁷ He is caught between Mercy, a preacher who offers consolation and spiritual guidance, and Mischief, who seeks to lead him astray. In alliance with Mischief are three sinful revellers, Newguise, Nowadays, and Nought, and Titivillus, a devil traditionally associated with idle speech. These reprobate characters fill the play with scatological and slapstick humour, but it is far more than low farce; its most entertaining qualities involve the audience in the same temptations as Mankind. The play begins with a sermon addressed directly to the audience by Mercy. While its sentiments are admirable – ‘O ye sovereigns that sit and ye brethren that stand right up, / Prick not your felicities in things transitory’ (here, lines 29–30) – we may be finding it just a little tedious when Mischief irreverently interrupts. As Mercy admonishes that ‘“The corn shall be saved, the chaff shall be brent”’, Mischief retorts, ‘Leave your chaff, leave your corn, leave your dalliation; / . . . / Driff-draff, mish-mash, / Some was corn and some was chaff’ (here, lines 43–50). It is easy to imagine sighs of relief or even naughty giggles and cheers from the audience. Later, as Mankind sets about the worthy labour of digging the soil and sowing seed, Titivillus conceals a board in the earth which thwarts all his efforts, and the audience is divided between sympathising with Mankind’s frustration and laughing at Titivillus’s...