Part One Introduction

The plays of Shakespeare are understood best when studied alongside those of his contemporaries. That is the premise of this volume on Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama – one designed to reflect much of the present-day critical thinking about the period’s dramatic literature. There is a common, and understandable, assumption that the texts of Shakespeare’s plays are able to ‘speak for themselves’, each one readily approached on its own terms. Studying a work over a period of weeks, or rehearsing for a production over a period of months, encourages an immersion in its poetry, narrative and characters which can foster a sense of the play’s self-sufficiency and exclusivity. It is a measure of Shakespeare’s achievement as a dramatist – his ability to craft works of powerful internal coherence – that such a sense of immersion is still possible after over 400 years of overwhelming familiarity with his plays. Yet for those who lived in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean London, and perhaps witnessed his plays in their very first productions, Shakespeare was only one among a number of high-achieving playwrights, writers who differed from one another in some respects but who also shared telling similarities in their approach to the writing of drama. Shakespeare learned from earlier writers, adapting the poetic techniques and structural features of the plays of Christopher Marlowe and John Lyly as well as a host of other, now less well-known playwrights. Later writers such as Ben Jonson, John Marston and Thomas Middleton

1 Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama in turn borrowed liberally from Shakespeare and other dramatists, even as they strove to find their own distinctive approaches in an increasingly crowded marketplace for plays. One result of this is the sense of a continual dialogue going on between works written for the stage over this period: indeed, it has been pointed out that the great majority of literary allusions in the drama of this period are to contemporary plays and playwrights, and only secondarily to other kinds of literature.1 Beyond this tightly knit world of mutual allusion and self-reference, other important social and historical forces helped to shape the environments in which the plays were written and performed, not the least of which was the development of a fully commercialised theatre, with playing companies, playhouses and regular theatre-goers. In sum, an emphasis on the immediate contexts of these plays is seen now not simply as desirable or informative, but as essential to a proper understanding of the plays. Contextual study, of one kind or another, has firmly established the trend in which critical discussions of the plays are conducted. The present volume seeks to strike a balance between the close, single-text study often encountered in schools, and the broader picture which students will find themselves steered towards in university courses. Part Two of the book develops the argument for the appreciation of context which we have sketched out above, by taking as an example the production of one particular, non-Shakespearean play (The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe) and using it to explore the various historical, literary and theatrical points of contact it would have shared with other plays from this period. The subject matter of the play is less important in this instance than what is going on around it – the business of its reception at a given historical and cultural moment and the sense we can get of the rich possibilities of meaning that could be read into this – and by implication any other – play-text. From here we can address a different kind of context in Part Three: that provided by theatrical genre. This is another, important area in which the connections between texts can be opened out and examined. By studying genres – literally, the ‘kinds’ of play offered to audiences in Renaissance England – we are studying the process by which individual works both resemble and distinguish themselves from one another. At the same time, we are asking

2 Introduction why certain genres existed at certain times, and what might have been responsible for their popularity and durability. We are familiar with the concept of genre from the many different kinds of media – fictional and non-fictional – which we are exposed to today, with their associated groupings and sub-groupings. Thus, there are disaster films, historical biographies, plays of ideas, postmodern theatre, television soaps, science fiction novels, role-playing games – all labels which create a clear expectation in their audiences of a particular kind of experience which will unfold in a generally understood format. Yet the subject is less self-explanatory than it might appear at first glance. What exactly do these labels describe – aspects of form, theme, content, style, or a blend of these? And how do we know for sure which labels apply in each case, given that an individual work may have features linking it to several possible groupings? (A disaster film may also be, for example, a science fiction film.) The problem becomes more pronounced when we realise that the concept of genre, which we take for granted, is a comparatively modern one which was not precisely articulated in Shakespeare’s day. A good deal of Renaissance dramatic criticism, following classical precedent, formally recognised only two kinds of play: tragedy and comedy, which were conceived of as fairly static, unchanging categories. Yet we can see through discussions at the time that there was also an awareness of a much greater variety of informal groupings constantly being created through blending, hybridisation and departure from artistic precedent.* Part Three of the volume examines six such groupings from the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, while keeping a focus on what Lawrence Danson, in a helpful recent discussion, has distinguished as the formal and the affective (or emotional) aspects of genre.2 The formal aspects of a dramatic genre or grouping, which can include the shape, structure and overall plotline or trajectory of the plays, can be identified from internal evidence – for example, whether the plays have happy or unhappy

* A famous case in point is that the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, the First Folio of 1623, was obliged to introduce a whole separate category for ‘Histories’ to accommodate a kind of play which simply did not fit in either of the critically sanctioned groups.

3 Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama endings – and by making use of comparisons across a number of works. Persistent features in a number of plays suggest interrelatedness (as we will see, for example, in the cases of ‘humours’ and ‘revenge’ drama). It is also important to recognise that this modern analysis of genre should be balanced by an understanding of the historical and literary conventions at work in a play’s construction. For example, we need to be aware that the five-act structure, derived from Roman drama, that we encounter in most edited versions of Renaissance plays often bears little relation to the actual structure of the plays as written for the stage: in Shakespeare’s case act divisions were imposed by editors on what was originally a continuous succession of scenic units. At the same time, we need to acknowledge that classical and formal conventions were still operating at some level within the works of Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, with writers such as Ben Jonson more openly concerned to adhere to them. In our assessment of what Danson terms the affective aspects of a play’s genre we are on more difficult ground. What used to serve as a benchmark – our own emotional responses as audience and readers – is not now regarded as a reliable guide. Contemporary critical thinking has instilled a mistrust of ‘trans-historical’, or universalising, pronouncements about what people from earlier cultures may have thought or felt about a particular work. This may seem to cut right across our sense of the transcendent emotional power of some plays and the immediate, overwhelming effect they have on us. The denouement of Othello, for example, appears to generate in the modern audience the canonical emotions of pity and fear which have been associated with response to tragedy from Aristotle onwards (see Part Five: ‘Further Reading’). The fact that ‘pity’ is on record as an Elizabethan audience reaction to the death scene of Desdemona suggests a broad continuity between their emotions and ours.3 Yet we need to be aware that our present- day feelings towards the protagonist, Othello, will also be affected by the deeply troubled history of relations between white Europeans and black Africans, and the institutions of industrial slavery, racial ‘science’ and apartheid, which have intervened since the play was written. The sense of an injustice inflicted upon Othello as he is deceived and betrayed

4 Introduction by Iago cannot therefore be equal for both historical groups. In the Elizabethan case, it would be tempered by the religious implications of his murder of Desdemona (the act must inevitably damn Othello). In the modern case, it is exacerbated by the prolonged historical narrative of the maltreatment of African people. The chapters in Part Three therefore take an historical approach to the issue of theatrical genre in the period. When the first ever ‘Complete Works of Shakespeare’ appeared in 1623, only a few years after the dramatist’s death, the fellow actors who had now become his editors settled on three generic divisions: comedy, history and tragedy. To these three we add three more: tragicomedy (an important, developing genre at the time which is particularly helpful for understanding Shakespeare’s later plays), ‘humours’ comedy and revenge tragedy. These latter two categories were not formally recognised at the time, but are now seen as valid and important offshoots, or sub-genres, of the mainstream ones of comedy and tragedy. They are also chosen here because they can be seen as developing at something of a tangent to the classic Shakespearean genres (although as will be seen he provided an important stimulus to both of them). Each chapter begins with an example of response associated with the genre, wherever possible making use of contemporary anecdotal or theatrical records to provide an evaluation of the plays which may seem at some distance from our own. These records are points of departure only, and as might be expected they are very far from being unbiased. Some are wildly in favour of the plays they describe; some are wildly against them: none is neutral. They warrant inclusion, however, as flawed yet suggestive pieces of evidence in support of the view that the reception of plays could fall outside the range of the universal – indeed, that the idea of ‘universal’ responses to tragedy, comedy and other genres may be a misleading one. One further benefit of taking the approach outlined here is that it can encourage us to shift our focus onto the underlying principle of theatrical pleasure in our assessment of the plays of this era. This in many ways provides the guiding interpretive framework of the volume. Whatever well-established contemporary critical concepts could be brought to bear on the writing and reception of plays in this period –

5 Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama catharsis in the case of tragedy, for example, or moral correction in the case of comedy – these had to contend with the particular impulse which brought audiences to the theatres in the first place, and they can in many ways be seen as subordinate to that underlying impulse. Moreover, if, as many present-day critics argue, genres were not, and never have been, fixed categories but were constantly forming and re-forming, then this is because they found their identities in that roughly defined space between the consumers and the producers of plays. This volume suggests that the theatrical genres of Shakespeare’s day need to be thought through in terms of the pleasures they offered, or purported to offer, to audiences. These theatrical pleasures could range from joy, fear, amusement and shock, to the pity at Desdemona’s fate described earlier. They could also include the pleasures generated by pastoral and satiric forms, which are less familiar to us today. All of these were part of the complex entertainment provided by the Renaissance stage. This volume offers students an understanding of the way this process of interaction between theatre workers and play-goers helped shape not only individual plays but the development of the theatre industry as a whole. The penultimate part of this of this volume, Part Four, looks at some aspects of the plays of the period which have excited the greatest amount of interest from a present-day critical point of view. Students, particularly at university level, are likely to encounter a large number of ‘isms’ as an important adjunct to their development of a broader perspective on Shakespeare and Renaissance drama: new historicism, feminism and cultural materialism are probably the most important to have affected Renaissance studies over the last thirty years, but there are many others available and being developed.* In many ways, critical perspectives such as these operate on a principle similar to that of the genres we have described, continually forming and adapting to take account of the plurality of possible interpretations which can be brought to bear on the texts – no one of these being ‘right’ in the sense of having exclusive explanatory validity. The stimulus has been immense, and in many respects has permanently changed the way the plays are read;

* See in particular the series on Alternative Shakespeares in ‘Further Reading’.

6 Introduction but the critical landscape has as a result also become a more confusing one. Part Four, rather than reviewing these critical perspectives on an individual basis, will attempt to pick out those areas which have invited some of the most sustained and energising debate, allowing concerns with gender, subjectivity, rhetoric and national/racial discourse to guide the choice of plays and the shape of the discussion. The plays themselves, as throughout this book, will be the primary focus of attention, and Part Four merely shines a slightly different light on them than did Part Two and Part Three. All the chapters of this book share the assumption that no play of this period can be approached as an object detached from considerations of genre, politics and the informing standpoint of the observer. Yet these considerations can be seen as part of what made these plays so enjoyable to their first audiences, and still makes them enjoyable to us now.

Notes

1 Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 2nd edn, p. 85. 2 Lawrence Danson, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Genres (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; repr. 2007), p. 3. 3 At a production of the play in Oxford in 1610 one observer, Henry Jackson, wrote of the performance of the boy player: ‘Desdemona … although she always acted her whole part supremely well, yet when she was killed she was even more moving, for when she fell back upon the bed she implored the pity of the spectators by her very face.’ Translated from the Latin, in Gamini Salgado (ed.), Eyewitnesses of Shakespeare (London: Sussex University Press, 1975), p. 30.

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