Subversion in Elizabethan Theatre | ||
In the late summer of 1597, a monster emerged from the humid stench of London's Bankside. | Párr. 1 | |
News of the monster quickly reached Robert Cecil, Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth. | ||
Cecil determined that the monster was a threat to national security and arranged for its swift | ||
destruction. The nest where it had bred was raided and neutralised; the people who had | ||
5 | nurtured it were called to account and imprisoned. | |
The monster in question was a satirical play called The Isle of Dogs. Its co- | Párr. 2 | |
author, Thomas Nash acknowledged that in writing the play he'd created a monster: 'it was | ||
no sooner borne but I was glad to run from it'. No copy of the play exists today, so we can | ||
only guess at its contents. But the Privy Council clearly viewed it as 'seditious' and therefore | ||
10 | ordered not only that the dramatists and actors be imprisoned but that all theatres in the | |
city be closed for months as a punishment. This governmental response may seem like | ||
overkill, but the Queen and her enforcers were keenly aware of the potential danger posed | ||
by theatre's ability to subvert cultural norms. In Renaissance England, the development of | ||
theatre paralleled, and may have helped to spark, dramatic, culture-wide shifts in religious, | ||
15 | economic, social, sexual and even political perspectives. | |
Theatre historian Andrew Gurr has estimated that as many as 50 million people paid | Párr. 3 | |
to see live theatre in London during the golden age of English Renaissance drama. London | ||
loved theatre. And with theatre's popularity came a reorganising of social strata in which | ||
class divisions were no longer safe. After all, William Shakespeare, the son of a Stratford | ||
20 | glover, earned enough in a decade of playmaking and acting to buy a share in a theatrical | |
company as well as an opulent house in Stratford-upon-Avon. He even applied to the College | ||
of Heralds for a coat of arms. When the request was granted, Shakespeare effectively entered | ||
the nobility. This social step epitomises the potentially subversive nature of theatre: it | ||
allowed the playmaker son of an artisan father to style himself a gentleman. | ||
25 | Governmental authorities understood the potential disruptions public theatre could | Párr. 4 |
cause in a well-ordered cultural hierarchy, so took steps to control the performances of plays | ||
from the very beginning. As early as 1574, even before the first theatre was built, the Lord | ||
Mayor of London and the Common Council laid heavy restrictions on the times, places, | ||
contents and purposes of theatrical entertainments. Although the municipal government was | ||
30 | decidedly anti-theatre, its animosity had little effect. Beginning with the construction of the | |
first purpose-built playhouse in 1576 until the closing of the theatres in 1642, theatre's | ||
popularity and commercial success steadily increased. | ||
The successful playmakers who emerged during this period were a decidedly | Párr. 5 | |
subversive group. There was Christopher Marlowe, accused of being an atheist, suspected of | ||
35 | homosexual tendencies, an ex-spy who was murdered at age 29 in the suspicious company | |
of other spies. There was Ben Jonson, who had been apprenticed to his bricklayer | ||
stepfather as a youth, soldiered in the Low Countries, killed a fellow actor in a duel and | ||
became a Catholic while in prison for the killing. And there was George Wilkins, a thug who | ||
had a long arrest record for brutal assaults (including kicking a pregnant woman in the belly). | ||
40 | Wilkins was Shakespeare's landlord in London, and collaborated with him on Pericles. | |
When Sir Francis Walsingham formed an acting company under the patronage of | Párr. 6 | |
Queen Elizabeth, he dictated that plays written for and performed by the Company of Players, | ||
the Queen's Men, should feature patriotic representations of English history with wholesome | ||
Protestant morals, and ought to be written in stately verse. Although some early playwrights | ||
45 | adhered to this party line, Marlowe broke frame to take serious risks: writing about a Mongol | |
warlord, Tamburlaine – in blank verse, no less. More seriously, whereas the government had | ||
called for morality plays with English heroes, Marlowe's foreign infidel repeatedly commits | ||
heinously amoral acts and is never struck down by the hand of divine justice. And | ||
Marlowe's Tamburlaine was a runaway success. | ||
50 | Many of Shakespeare's plays actually deal with unstable political situations, | Párr. 7 |
especially those commonly referred to as the 'great tragedies'. Hamlet's famous indecision | ||
originates in the death of Denmark's monarch; Macbeth's plot involves two separate | ||
regicides, though both occur offstage. King Lear provides some of Shakespeare's most | ||
complex reflections on the nature of kingship. The image of the 'poor, infirm, weak, and | ||
55 | despis'd old' Lear (3.2.20) wandering mad on the heath may not have unsettled James I, | |
devoted fan of theatre as he was. But it certainly does raise questions about the actual | ||
differences between monarch and subject, questions that resonate with performers, critics | ||
and students to this day. | ||
The extant manuscript of Sir Thomas More – a play to which Shakespeare contributed | Párr. 8 | |
60 | a few speeches – gives us a peek of insight into the type of subversive material that the Master | |
of Revels, the censor, was on the lookout for. The Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney, has | ||
written on the first page of the manuscript 'leave out the insurrection wholly'. The government | ||
was obviously concerned that a stage representation of a riot by unemployed Londoners | ||
against foreign workers who had taken their jobs might breed real riots in the theatres and | ||
65 | the streets of the city. | |
All plays performed in the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre had to be approved by | Párr. 9 | |
the Master of the Revels, with the curious exception of those staged by the Children of the | ||
Queen's Revels. Dramatists flocked to this company where they (rightly) assumed that a | ||
sympathetic fellow writer would be more likely to allow subversive plays to be staged than | ||
70 | a rigorous government censor. In 1605, Ben Jonson, George Chapman and John Marston | |
went so far as to make fun of King James's Scottish accent in Eastward Ho! (Jonson and | ||
Chapman were subsequently imprisoned and 'in danger of having their ears and noses slit' as | ||
punishment, all the while blaming the offensive passages on Marston.) In the following year, | ||
John Day's Isles of Gulls, a thinly veiled attack on the government, occasioned such a | ||
75 | scandalous uproar that the playwright and entire cast of boys were imprisoned. | |
Religion was another favoured target of theatrical satire, and one that was seemingly | Párr. 10 | |
tolerated by the Master of the Revels. Characters such as Zeal-of-the-Land Busy in | ||
Jonson's Bartholomew Fair and Malvolio in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night exaggerated | ||
extremist Puritanism for comedic effect. Roman Catholicism was usually represented with | ||
80 | more seriousness, but hardly more concern for psychological realism. The Puritans deeply | |
disapproved of the theatrical practice of cross-dressing female roles. Women were not part | ||
of the theatrical guilds, so acting companies cast boys in most women's parts. This practice | ||
represented the ultimate in theatrical deception to religious eyes: boys were not women, and | ||
presenting boys in the guise of women misled audiences, both about boys' natures and | ||
85 | women's natures. When playmakers and companies realised that this casting habit bothered | |
the Puritans, they predictably leaned into it. With increasing frequency from the 1590s | ||
onward, English Renaissance plays deployed not only cross-dressing actors but cross- | ||
dressing characters as well. But the Puritans would ultimately get their revenge, and | ||
certainly the last laugh, when they came to power and succeeded in closing the theatres in | ||
90 | 1642. | |
Fuente: Rasmussen, E & Dejong, I. (8 de mayo de 2017). Subversive Theatre in Renaissance England. | ||
The British Library:Discovering Literature: Shakespeare & Renaissance. | ||
https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/subversive-theatre-in-renaissance-england |