THE UNIVERSITY OF HULL The Production of Early Modern Dramatic Space: Practices, Places and Perceptions being a Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Hull by Simon Benson BA (Leeds), MA (Rose Bruford College) April 2010 2 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 4 i. Making the Invisible Visible 4 ii. Spatial Theory and Practice 8 1. IDLENESS, VAGRANCY AND COMMON PLAYING: THE PRACTICES OF APPROPRIATION 22 1.1 Introduction 22 1.2 Enclosure, Idleness and Vagrancy 22 1.3 Vagrancy as Idleness 58 1.4 Conclusion 69 2. THE SPATIAL PRACTICES OF COMMON PLAYING 73 2.1 Introduction 73 2.2 Locus and Platea as Spatial Practices 77 2.3 Logics of the Stage 81 2.3.1 Introduction 81 2.3.2 Logics of the Stage: Focus 83 2.3.3 Logics of the Stage: Balance 112 2.4 Conclusion 120 3 ROGUES, COZENERS AND COMMON PLAYING: THE SPATIAL PRACTICES OF DECEPTION 122 3.1 Introduction 122 3..2 The Spatial Practices of Rogues and Cozeners 124 3.2.1 Introduction 124 3 3.2.2 Roguery as Spatial Practice 126 3.3.3 Cozenage as Spatial Practice 139 3.3.4 Conclusion 148 3.3 Trickery and the Spatial Practices of Common Playing 153 3.3.1 Introduction 153 3.3.2 Staging the Practices of Cozenage 154 3.3.2.1 Harman’s Dummerer & Shakespeare’s Simpcox ( 2 Henry VI ) 154 3.3.2.2 Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night 169 3.4 Conclusion 188 4 ENSEMBLE PERFORMANCE AND COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE 197 4.1 Introduction 197 4.2 Playing as Complicity and Innovation 200 4.2.1 The Logics of Ensemble Playing in Contemporary Practice 200 4.2.2 Discourses and Practices 222 4.3 Common Players and the Playhouse: The Logics of Bodies and Places 239 4.3.1 Introduction 239 4.3.2 King Lear, Ensemble Practices and the Playhouse Stage: a Space (In)Divisable 244 4.3.3 Folio and Quarto: Texts and Practices 267 4.4 Conclusion 280 5 CONCLUSION 289 Appendix One 303 Appendix Two 305 Bibliography 306 Discography 315 4 INTRODUCTION i. MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE This dissertation explores the nature and development of dramatic space in early modern England. Arguing that essential to its quality and character was the early modern player’s ability to produce highly creative and productive spatial textures and experiences, this dissertation examines some of the shifting attitudes to and uses of space from ca. 1516 (the date of publication of Thomas More’s Utopia ) to the first decade of the 17 th century for what they reveal about the spatial economies that common playing responded to, participated in, developed and sustained. The theoretical basis for the work draws from the phenomenological philosophy of Lefebvre, de Certeau, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida – all of whom offer different but complementary ways of recognising the instrumental role of primordial experience (as opposed to the forms of intellectualised knowledge through which experience is subsequently organised and mediated) in the production of meaning. For Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, recognizing space as the product of experience is the necessary first step toward opening up the creative approaches necessary for recontextualising the past. 1 Rather than approaching the past looking for ‘things’ to collect and curate, Pearson and Shanks engage with it as an embodied field, wandering through it as one would a landscape, noting its various identities, instabilities and its constantly shifting textures. 2 Their highly spatial and spatialising approaches take account of what is lost when we engage with the past solely (or even largely) through texts (and the discourses texts sustain), and they argue for stories (plural) about the past rather than the 1 Pearson, Mike and Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). 2 Pearson and Shanks, pp.131-46. 5 production of single, dominant and authorising texts on it. Similarly, Michel de Certeau, asserting the value of the knowledge that is derived from stories, argues for a theory of narration in relation to practices and the spaces practices produce – for de Certeau, stories (plural) cannot be reduced to a single meaning, they ‘are not about movement, they make movements, not objects but effects, they transform, they do exactly what they say they do […] they bring invisible geographies into contact with the ordered realm of the rational’ (italics original). 3 In seeking to describe and account for the ephemeral and elusive nature of early modern dramatic space, this dissertation recognises the impossibility of such a task (of translating primordial experience into language). However, by taking into account some of the spatial transactions and exchanges that early modern dramatic production participated in, the story told here attempts to make visible a normally invisible geography by pointing out those logics of practice (‘the ordered realm of the rational’) through which that geography is/was produced. The story of space that begins this dissertation is that represented in and (re-)produced through the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia in 1516 (which is shown to express a number of contemporary anxieties about the production of early modern social space). On the one hand Utopia looks back to a mythological golden age (in which social space is conceived of as stable, quantifiable and ordered), on the other hand it looks forward to more idealised possibilities. At the same time, Utopia (the book) participated in an emerging early modern project attempting to define and take control of the world – to 3 Crang, Mike, “Relics, Places and Unwritten Geographies in the Work of Michel de Certeau (1925-86)” in Thinking Space, ed. by Crang, Mike and Nigel Thrift (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp.136-53 (p.150). 6 map it out and contain it. Nostalgic, optimistic, coercive: Utopia reproduces those contradictions of space that were the life blood of common playing – contradictions that common players, working predominantly from temporary stages in borrowed places, fully acknowledged and exploited to their own (and their audiences’) advantage. At the other end of this dissertation’s story are a number of modern ensemble productions of Shakespeare, which are considered for the insights that their fundamentally spatialised approaches and practices make available to us when considering how the experiences of early modern dramatic production might have been spatially produced through the ensemble practices of its players. Although by the end of the first decade of the 17 th century dramatic performance in the metropolis was largely a settled and institutionalised practice with its own dedicated and purpose-built places of performance, this dissertation argues that common playing was still predominantly an itinerant and intuitive set of practices dependent for its success (even in the Globe and other playhouses) on those logics of practice through which players were able to respond to their various (and unpredictable) contexts of performance (through which they ‘harness[-ed] the place to the play’). 4 The performances at court, in the Globe playhouse and on tour of Shakespeare’s King Lear during and after 1605 with which this dissertation closes are approached as ensemble and collaborative endeavours. If ‘the playhouse provided a site where authority […] came to constitute itself through the workmanship, the perceived cogency, and the actual experienced appeal of signifying practice itself’, this dissertation 4 Mackintosh, Ian, Architecture, Actor & Audience (London & New York: Routledge, 1993), p.127. 7 attempts to examine the basis of this perception, this experience – and argues for an approach that sees both as embodied spatial productions. 5 Taking as its starting point Henri Lefebvre’s notion that space is not a given but a temporal phenomenon actively produced in its moments of use, and de Certeau’s definition of ‘space [as] a practiced place’, this dissertation seeks to account for the role of practices (actorly and spectatorly) and their interactions with place in the production of early modern dramatic space. 6 Through a demonstration of how early modern playing companies worked to accommodate themselves to their places of performance, appropriating them in order to contract their audiences into playful exchanges that were collaborative and transactional in nature, the dissertation aims to provide a means of approaching the experiential nature of playing and spectating in the period – asserting an authority for the role of ephemeral experience in the spatial discourses we construct. Although not denying the fundamental differences between the experience of playing and spectating in a range of borrowed sites and the experience of playing and spectating in the purpose built playhouses (let alone the differences between playing and spectating in 1516 and playing and spectating in 1611), this dissertation explores what these experiences might have had in common (rather than what set them apart) – and how the latter might have evolved out of the former. Arguing that the ensemble practices of the early modern players included a tactical disposition that was not limited to or solely defined by the place of performance (enabling players to remain sensitive and responsive 5 Weimann, Robert, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.48. 6 Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp.26-7. De Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p.117. 8 to the unique opportunities provided by particular audiences and contexts for intensifying the audience’s experience), this dissertation seeks to define those stage logics that underpinned these practices – practices which were able both to communicate characters, themes and ideas while, at the same time, heightening the audience’s sense of complicity and pleasure. ii. SPATIAL THEORY AND PRACTICE A common thread running through much 20 th century spatial theory is the idea that space is something that is primarily experienced rather than seen, and is best defined not by its formal, quantifiable and measurable properties (i.e.