Part One Introduction

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.

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