Renaissance Theater

EN207Marymount University

Dr. HoweSpring 2011

Cultural Context: Feudal, Church-Governed Medieval Period

Cultural Context: Growing Reformation (15th Century—hinge between Medieval and Renaissance)

General Cultural Trends in the Medieval Period

Growing Protestant Reformation (Protestant Reformation also affected theatrical performance)

At the end of Medieval period, reformers targeted theater as idolatrously representational, associated with the pleasures of the flesh. This antitheatricalism would persist into the Renaissance and beyond (during the Puritan Commonwealth from 1642-1660, playhouses closed)

Gradual increase in the significance of the vernacular characteristic of the Reformation meant-->

Accessibility of language, play of language, increase in artistry and innovation, new forms of drama under impulse of economic competition

Gradual shift of power from clergy to laity (secularization, which would mark Renaissance theater as well)

Gradual shift in theatrical performance sites from inside-outside church, more associated with civic performance and communal rites (leading to professionalization in the Renaissance, with the demise of feudalism)

Actors less associated with church, more associated with skilled labor Patronage moved away from church, toward aristocracy

Performance spaces became more static by end of period, developing, in the Renaissance, into PURPOSE-BUILT THEATERS that were ENCLOSED

Weakening of rigid feudal social and political structures, with the rise of capitalism and secularization

Prohibitions against Theater

Theater allows us to contemplate ourselves, to examine our communities, to speculate on alternative possibilities—if we take the challenge. It helps shape us into who we are as individuals in a community.

Sometimes theater is expressly forbidden for precisely these reasons. Performance is not static—it happens between audiences and stages; in theater, especially earlier or politically radical forms of theater, this sense of movement can enable and model politicaland social dissent. Theater can therefore be dangerous.

Strongest deterrent to theater in general tends to be religion, despite what some critics see as a close relationship between religious and theatrical practice. This is one reason, why Medieval theater was so closely controlled by and allied to the Church (though it could never be fully policed).

Prohibitions against Theater: Religious and Moral

Some believe that, especially in Christian countries, the antagonism of religion toward theatrical performance derives from the second commandment

Possibility of sickness and contamination are issues; real (or inflated) concerns translate easily into moral metaphors

In some cultures and some periods, theater associated with something “unclean” or even heretical.

Partly because such promiscuous, performative spaces are difficult to police...

The Early Modern TheaterCultural Context

Tudor Period: (1485-1603) 1517: Reformation begins/LutherHenry VII to Elizabeth 1588: Spanish ArmadaElizabethan (1558-1603) 605: Gunpowder Plot

Stuart Period: 1620: Pilgrims land in PlymouthJacobean (1603-1625) 1649: Charles I beheadedCarolinean (1625-1649) 1662: Act of Uniformity; 1673: Test Act; Commonwealth (1649-1660) 1686: Tolerance

Restoration (1660-1685) 1665, 1666: Fire, PlagueCharles II (1660-1685) 1681: Exclusion CrisisJames II (1685-1688) 1689: Bill of Rights

ReformationFeudal to capitalistic societyUnrest and conflict: negotiation btw “divine right of kings and liberty of people” (Thomson 192)

Birth of a truly professional theater; also meant decline of truly popular/populist theater; increasingly becomes a high cultural activity

Major developments in Renaissance Theater History: Court Pageantry, Progresses, and Household Players

Developed in part from Medieval processionals, adapted for the civic demands of an early modern state

Machiavelli: A prince “at convenient seasons of the year, ought to keep the people occupied with festivals and shows.” To calm the masses? To reaffirm power?

The “progress”--a monarch's parade or procession through his or her dominions, displaying self, wealth, power to public (Thomson 175, 190)

Court pageantry marks a delight in representation, but also expensive “self-advertisement” and tactics for enacting the “claim[s] to political power” (Berthold 368)

Household players: liveried precursors to professional actors in England; provided powerful families entertainment, also went on tour, representing powerful families (opportunities for spying!) Warwick's Men, Leicester's Men, etc. to King's and Duke's Men, professional troupes given patents after Restoration

Tudor legislation moved increasingly to limit unlicensed or strolling players, in part to control the “masterless men” (Thomson 179).

Acting and the Law

Under Elizabeth I, acting becomes a lawful and legal profession (1572); yet, highly regulated (Master of Revels, 1574 act) and subject to suspicion--actors were alternately classified as vagrants or “vagabonds and sturdy beggars,” and as servants of noblemen.

The 1572 Poor Law classed actors in the same section as vagabonds, rogues and wandering beggars and therefore required them to be attached to a household theatre company and have the patronage of a nobleman. Professional theater companies evolved from household players.

As “servants,” actors could avoid some legal prohibitions, like sumptuary laws; yet, another 1572 act forbade “the unlawful retaining of multitudes of unordinary servants by liveries, badges, and other signs and tokens (contrary to the good and ancient statutes and laws of this realm),” which meant that some actors were turned away.

Professional actor had a “secure,” if somewhat transgressive and threatening, “position in the structure of society” (Berthold 394)

Some things have double the ill, both naturally in spreading the infection [of the plague], and otherwise in drawing God's wrath and plague upon us, as the erecting and frequenting of houses very famous for incontinent rule [italics added] out of our liberties and jurisdiction.

—Nicholas Woodrofe, lord mayor of London in 1580

Playhouses were regarded not merely as a breeding ground for the plague but as the thing itself, an infection “pestering the City” and contaminating the morals of London's apprentices. Theatres were viewed as houses of Proteus, and, in the metamorphic fears of the city, it was not only the players who shifted shapes, confounded categories, and counterfeited roles. Drama offered a form of “recreation” that drew out socially unsettling reverberations of the term, since playhouses offered a place “for all masterless men and vagabond persons that haunt the highways, to meet together and to recreate themselves [italics added].” The fear was not that the spectators might be entertained but that they might incorporate theatrical means of impersonation and representation in their own lives—for example, by dressing beyond their station and thus confounding a social order reliant on sumptuary codes to distinguish one social rank from another.

—Steven Mullaney, “Shakespeare and the Liberties”

In 1572, in fact, players were defined as vagabonds—criminals subject to arrest, whipping, and branding unless they were “liveried” servants of an aristocratic household. Burbage's company and others used this loophole in the law to their advantage by persuading various lords to lend their names (and often little more) to the companies, which thus became the Lord Chamberlain's or the Lord Strange's Men. Furthermore, “popular” drama, performed by professional acting companies for anyone who could afford the price of admission, was perceived as too vulgar in its appeal to be considered a form of art.

—Steven Mullaney, “Shakespeare and the Liberties”

Major developments in Renaissance Theater History: Professional Theater

First professional, secular drama developed in the Renaissance; by late 16th century, theater “had become an established part of city life” (Berthold 391); popular entertainment that embraced a variety of ranks and classes. Cost for admittance to an open air playhouse: 1 penny

Actors and managers could become wealthy; early modern “star system” developed, which would continue well into the modern period

Companies were organized like guilds and businesses; all takings went into a common pool, from which shareholders who put up money for performances recouped expenses; extra went to actors

Some actors were also shareholders

Playwrights didn't own their plays; sold copyright to a principal who then made money from performances. Actually received very little money, unless a member of the company or a shareholder.

Plays were commodities, and actors, entrepreneurs (Thomson 181)

Elizabethan Theater: Censure of the Stage

Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (1582)

Thomas White (1577): theater a sink of iniquity that “set a-gog: theft and whoredom; pride and prodigality; villainy and blasphemy”

Master Rainoldes, Th'overthrow of stage-playes (1599), a diatribe specifically against crossdressing in the theater

Some censure legitimate: opportunities for lawlessness and violence, congestion of traffic, encouragement of disreputable taverns, and danger of the spread of the plague. Theaters were often closed throughout the period, often in times of political turmoil or when contagions were feared.

Some less so: blasphemy of cross-dressing; 1580, an earthquake, and 1581, resurgence of the plague: signs from god (one churchman wrote that the theater caused these disturbances); chastised as “popish” (especially when discovered that the Church had used theater to teach scriptural history in Medieval period)

Increasing suspicion of acting as deliberate deception; “sensitivity about the very idea of impersonation” (Thomson 187)--CHIEFLY B/C OF THREATS TO AUTHORITY. CAN AN ACTOR PLAY A KING?

The Elizabethan Theater

Two forms: private and public, as usual! (Private: some court functions, plays performed for/by private families, or in schools)

Public theaters: octagonal ring-like structures; roofs weren't added until Jacobean period (Thomson 192)

BUT, enclosed—this lead to more accuracy in moneytaking; the first box office (Thomson 178)

First permanent building designed purposely for theater: 1567, The Red Lion (Stepney) ;1576 , James Burbage built The Theatre (Shoreditch); 1577, The Curtain [all these men were entrepreneurs, marketeers interested in profit]

On the right bank of the Thames (Southwark): The Rose (1587), the Swan (c.

1595), and the Globe (1599), built from timbers of the original Theatre

Located in “the liberties” of London, its outskirts—areas free from certain authorities (Steven Mullaney)

When performances were to occur, playhouses would fly flags: white for comedies, black for tragedies

"Hope Theatre: London theatres c. 1600." Online Map/Still. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 25 Feb. 2008 <http://www.britannica.com/eb/art-2974>.

The “liberties or suburbs” of early modern London bear little resemblance to modern suburbs in either a legal or a cultural sense. They were a part of the city, extending up to 3 miles (5 km) from its ancient Roman wall, yet in crucial aspects were set apart from it; they were also an integral part of a complex civic structure common to the walled medieval and Renaissance metropolis, a marginal geopolitical domain that was nonetheless central to the symbolic and material economy of the city. Free, or “at liberty,” from manorial rule or obligations to the crown, the liberties “belonged” to the city yet fell outside the jurisdiction of the lord mayor, the sheriffs of London, and the Common Council, and they constituted an ambiguous geopolitical domain over which the city had authority but, paradoxically, almost no control.

—Steven Mullaney, “Shakespeare and the Liberties”

Viewed from a religious perspective, the liberties were marked as places of the sacred, or of sacred pollution in the case of the city's lepers, made at once holy and hopelessly contaminated by their affliction. From a political perspective, the liberties were the places where criminals were conveyed for public executions, well-attended and sometimes festive rituals that served to mark the boundary between this life and the next in a more secular fashion. From a general point of view, the margins of the city were places where forms of moral excess such as prostitution were granted license to exist beyond the bounds of a community that they had, by their incontinence, already exceeded.

—Steven Mullaney, “Shakespeare and the Liberties”

"Southwark: view of London from Southwark." Online Photograph. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 25 Feb. 2008 <http://www.britannica.com/eb/art-11110>.

‘Long View' of London from Southwark, Wenceslaus Hollar, 1647.

Note the clearly visible—and labeled—Globe, as well as the nearby Bear Garden.

The Material Stage

Round/octagonal structure with three tiers of spectator galleries and the pit; small, people were crowded together; but, rowdy and loud.

Social background and ability to pay dictated where members of the public sat or stood in a theatre.

- Groundlings/Pit: 1 penny admission- Covered bench seats in upper galleries: 2 pennies- “Lords' rooms” next to the balcony, overhanging the stage: 6 pennies, a day's wages

for a highly skilled worker

Proscenium stage (thrust stage—as opposed to simple platform, more playing space than on Continental stages; less “raking,” no perspective scenery [203])

Gallery above stage supported by pillars (for musicians, noble patrons, upper stage for acting)

Above gallery, windowed loft (trumpeters, etc) Behind stage, dressing rooms accessible by doors; also where actors

entered/exited Very few props, very little if any scenery; essentially a bare stage Played in contemporary dress; rich patrons could afford rich clothes for

actors; sumptuary law exemptions (Thomson 170) No women on stage, though women did attend performances regularly

Jan de Witt, Dutch visitor to England in 1596, describes the Rose and the Swan as the finest of the four London playhouses.

This is a Renaissance drawing of the Swan made for him from his notes—the only extant visual contemporary record of an Elizabethan theater (outside of maps, which frequently shows their locations).

Note the trumpeter in the loft, the flag announcing a performance, the Lords' seats, the three tiers of bench seating, the pit, and the proscenium stage.

The Material Stage

Bare stage, few props, daytime performances (3:00-6:00pm) Mood had to be created by actor himself and the words he speaks Called “spoken decor”--a “crucial stylistic feature of the Elizabethan

stage” (Berthold 403) Playwrights used it for both aesthetic and practical purposes, and

actors used it to capture the audience The crowd “was silent only if the actors silenced it” (Thomson 181) Midsummer Night's Dream: the Rude Mechanicals' inept, overdrawn

attempts to paint a night scene and describe an actor as a wall:

Pyramus

O grim-look'd night! O night with hue so black! O night, which ever art when day is not! O night, O night! alack, alack, alack, I fear my Thisby's promise is forgot! And thou, O wall, O sweet, O lovely wall, That stand'st between her father's ground and mine! Thou wall, O wall, O sweet and lovely wall, Show me thy chink, to blink through with mine eyne!

Other Considerations:

Because outdoor (noise from city, Thames) and populated by unruly crowds (rotten fruit thrown at bad actors), acting likely dependent on a clear, “penetrating voice and widely visible gestures” (Berthold 401)

Some evidence that bombast and ranting becoming less acceptable, but definitely not absent—especially in tragedies

In comedies, low humor was enjoyed by all classes; NOT SIMPLE “COMIC RELIEF”!!! (Thomson 189, 190-191), though theater moving in direction of “high culture” by way of professionalization/gentrification

Significant gestures still very choreographed and meaningful, a practice that continues into the Restoration period—not “realistic” acting by our standards

No stage lighting

Relatively less stage machinery—trap doors were used, and some cranes, but in general relatively unspectacular (unlike Continental Renaissance and Medieval performance)

By this time, England had become a Protestant nation

Jacobean and Stuart Court Theater Under James II and Charles I, strict regulation of political topics in drama (Thomson

195) Elaborate masques “celebrat[ed] the serene authority of a King” (Thomson 196) were

the most “significant early Stuart contributions to the development of English theatre” (196), not because of the drama, but because of the “theatrical conduct” of the event itself.

Members of the court—women included—performed roles in an elaborate “courtly ritual” (196); example of Charles I becoming part of Salmacida spolia (201)

Gave an “illusion of security” belied by the rebelliousness and popular appeal of the public theaters, and of the very real political tensions of the period. Masque/antimasque—order/disorder harmonized and neutralized (200)

Very expensive, elaborate, stylized (198)--Inigo Jones “the acme of theatrical elitism” (199); Hierarchy, perspective...

Antitheatricalism continued to grow William Prynne (201-2); Court theater “reeked of Catholic ritual”; “corrputing guile of

women” (201) Harshly punished by Charles I [Gunpowder plot, Catholic intolerance; Charles I

tyranny—execution, itself a theatrical event (203)

Interregnum Some theater, but not much; public theaters closed 1655, Lord Mayor's pageant reestablished, Davenant lured back to stage an opera

(204)