The Places of the Stage: Drama and Culture in Early Modern

THE PLACES OF THE STAGE: DRAMA AND CULTURE IN EARLY MODERN LONDON by MATTHEW BEHEN KOZUSKO (Under the Direction of Christy Desmet) ABSTRACT The “place” scholars have assigned to the stage in early modern London is as much a reflection of the politics of contemporary literary criticism as a reflection of the cultural function of popular drama in the early modern period. Modern critics are generally not engaged in reexamining available data, preferring instead to rest on a conjectural paradigm or heuristic that has hardened, over the past couple of decades, into a New Historicist version of “fact,” an attitude toward or conception of social energies that collapses boundaries and subtle distinctions in the interest of a unified critical narrative. That critical narrative has characterized the theater as a culturally marginal phenomenon relative to early modern London. Using complementary frameworks for classifying cultural space and the space of the stage, this dissertation reevaluates the place of the stage by approaching popular drama as an important, and central, site of cultural production. Situated on a boundary between what Raymond Williams has called “dominant” and “emergent” cultural space, the playhouse offered a construction of reality that was simultaneously “central” and “marginal,” in Stephen Mullaney’s terms. Combining Williams’s and Mullaney’s paradigms of cultural geography, this dissertation argues that popular drama was both mimetic and constitutive, conservative and revolutionary. The stories of the stage mingled dominant narratives with emergent ones. When those stories are given credence and currency as fundamentally “like” or reflective of reality, the drama’s cultural authority can be highlighted. That Elizabethan and Jacobean drama was afforded such a currency and credence is apparent in the popularity of the theatrum mundi metaphor and the popularity of the theater industry itself. This popularity combines with the drama’s power to shape reality as it re-presents reality to make Elizabethan and Jacobean drama a significant, constitutive force in the writing of popular culture of early modern London. INDEX WORDS: Theater, Drama, Culture, Stage, Space, Early Modern, London, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Moll Frith, Raymond Williams, Stephen Mullaney, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Dominant, Emergent, Residual, Marginal, Central THE PLACES OF THE STAGE: DRAMA AND CULTURE IN EARLY MODERN LONDON by MATTHEW BEHEN KOZUSKO B.A., The University of Texas, 1994 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2002 © 2002 Matthew Behen Kozusko All Rights Reserved THE PLACES OF THE STAGE: DRAMA AND CULTURE IN EARLY MODERN LONDON by MATTHEW BEHEN KOZUSKO Approved: Major Professor: Christy Desmet Committee: Frances Teague Charles Doyle Sujata Iyengar Michelle Ballif Electronic Version Approved: Gordhan L. Patel Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2002 iv DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to Emily, who weathered its ups and downs and whose support made it possible. I were but little thankful, if I could say how much. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the members of my advisory committee, Frances Teague, Charles Doyle, Sujata Iyengar, and Michelle Ballif, for graciously working with the obnoxious demands of my timetable. Chiefly, I wish to thank the Chief herself, Christy Desmet, who read chapter drafts on a moment’s notice, in hotel rooms, on airplanes, and sometimes over the phone, and returned them with much needed speed and support. Thanks must also go to Nelson Hilton, Hugh Ruppersburg, Kathy Houff, and the Freshman Composition program for enabling me to teach from abroad; to Judith Shaw and the Oxford Program for letting me tag along; to Elizabeth Kraft for lunches at Ask; to Ian Archer for taking me seriously; to Jane Barroso for not taking me too seriously; to Douglas Anderson for encouragement; to Doc Ayres, who taught me how to play; to Keith O’Neill for caring about literature and life; to Bretagne O’Neill for tolerating lodgers; to my roommates for understanding; and to Ray and Nancy Kozusko, who asked nothing and gave all. Completion of this dissertation was made possible by a Franklin College Distinguished Doctoral Assistantship. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................v CHAPTER 1 The Place(s) of the Stage(s)............................................................................1 I. Liberties of the Law..............................................................................12 II. Other Complications............................................................................37 III. Places and Stages ...............................................................................42 2 Places, Spaces, Stages ..................................................................................51 I. Introduction: the Space of the Stage......................................................57 II. Dominant, Residual, Emergent and the Space of London.....................82 III. A New Historicism: Embracing Our Historicity .................................98 3 Fashionable Frith: Constructions of a Roaring Girl.....................................105 I. Fashions and Fashionability................................................................113 II. Fashioning Moll Frith........................................................................130 III. Middleton and Dekker’s Moll: Just the Fashion................................166 4 The Allowed Freak: Stage, Space, and Recreation in Volpone ....................170 I. Punctum Indifferens, Locus, and Platea: The Allowed Fool................181 II. From Fool to Freak: Blood, Bonds, and Boundaries...........................203 III. Recreation Abroad ...........................................................................225 vii 5 Histrio Agit Totum Mundum: Bartholomew Fair and the Theatrum Mundi Metaphor ...............................................................................................236 I. Mimesis and the Theatrum Mundi Metaphor.......................................248 II. The Shapes of Reality........................................................................260 III. Bartholomew Fair: Puritans, Puppets, and Plays...............................270 6 Conclusion .................................................................................................292 APPENDIX A. ............................................................................................................298 WORKS CITED..........................................................................................................304 1 Chapter 1 The Place(s) of the Stage(s) In her recent study of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Theatre, Court and City, 1595-1610, Janette Dillon remarks on a kind of complacency in the view “modern critics” continue to espouse of London’s best-known public amphitheaters: “the Bankside theatres are frequently described by modern critics as being outside the city boundary because they were across the river in Southwark, but this is incorrect. It was because they were located within the liberties of Paris Garden and the Clink in Southwark that they were outside city jurisdiction” (151 n. 1). The difference between “across the river” and “in the liberties of Paris Garden and the Clink” is a simple matter on the surface level, but it is symptomatic of a much broader and more significant set of conceptual indiscretions on the part of contemporary literary critical approaches to early modern drama. Despite a wealth of new and emerging work on the place and function of popular English drama in the second half of the sixteenth century that calls into question established conceptions of the “place” of the stage, the standard vision of popular theater as a socially, culturally, and geographically marginal phenomenon perpetually in conflict with the city authorities continues to serve as the background for studies of the plays themselves. The legend of James Burbage and his Theatre, extracted from the work of early twentieth-century historians such as C. W. Wallace and E. K. Chambers, continues to stand as representative of the whole of stage playing before the 1590s, while other stages, such as the Red Lion, the playhouse at Newington Butts, and the several inn-yard 2 theaters, both inside and outside of the city’s twenty-six wards, are often compressed into a footnote, or neglected entirely, and the relationship between the theaters and local authorities is almost always reduced to a matter of morally-driven antagonism. Similarly, the various venues used for performances at Court go almost unremarked despite, as Glynne Wickham reminded us a full thirty years ago, their centrality to the industry.1 This narrow conception of the theater in early modern London results from a general lack of historical record—the tattered and incomplete legal paper trail from which we have had to construct what we know about the playhouse at Newington Butts raises as many questions as it does answers—but it is also in part a matter of literary critics happily inheriting a streamlined and simplified picture of the emergence of the popular theater in early modern London. Seminal studies such as Stephen Mullaney’s The Place of the Stage have offered dramatic but ultimately disputable visions of

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