Breaking Boundaries

Politics and Play in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Molly Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429863844
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

First published in 1998, this volume explores the period 1585-1649, identifying it as rich in innovative drama which challenged the boundaries between social, political and cultural activities of various kinds. Molly Smith examines ways in which texts by Renaissance authors reflect, question and influence their society's ideological concerns. In the drama of Kyd, Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Middleton, Massinger and Ford, she identifies the simultaneously serious and playful appropriation of popular cultural practices, an appropriation which is expertly reversed by authorities in the political drama of Charles I's public trial and execution in 1649. This compelling interpretation of Renaissance drama will prove of value to students of literature and social history.

1

Breaking boundaries: politics and
play on the Renaissance stage

Until recently Renaissance drama was seen as reaching its height in the era of Shakespeare’s great tragedies and then falling off into increasing decadence until the wars of the mid-century forced the closing of the theatres in 1642. M. C. Bradbrook, for example, espoused this view and located the inauguration of this decadence in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. In their works she saw ‘a taste for the more extraordinary sexual themes (rape, impotence, incest) combined with the blurring of the aesthetic difference between tragedy and comedy and the moral distinction between right and wrong’ (Bradbrook 1935 p.243). To Bradbrook this blurring of boundaries between categories that should have remained discrete is naturally linked to moral decrepitude and lack of value. Bradbrook’s location of decadence in Beaumont and Fletcher points to generic hierarchies that inform her criticism, for Fletcher developed and defined the tragicomic mode and, as Gordon McMullen and Jonathan Hope point out, remained highly influential in the development of this so-called ‘mongrel’ genre during the seventeenth century (McMullen and Hope 1992 p.2). McMullen and Hope’s convincing call for a revaluation of this genre as energetic and innovative rather than decadent indicates a change of direction in recent attitudes towards Renaissance drama, but not all new work in the Renaissance can be regarded as dispelling the implicit hierarchies that informed earlier criticism such as Bradbrook’s.

Influential new historicists such as Leonard Tennenhouse, for example, gesture towards radical revisionist criticism in their vocabulary and tone while reinvesting in earlier demarcations. Tennenhouse insists on a clearly drawn boundary between the drama prior to 1604 and that which followed: ‘Around the year 1604, dramatists of all sorts suddenly felt it appropriate to torture and murder aristocratic female characters in a shocking and ritualistic manner. This assault was quite unlike anything seen on the Elizabethan stage – even at its most Senecan’ (Tennenhouse 1989 p.77). He attributes this dramatic imperative – to stage violent assaults on female aristocratic bodies – to the refiguring of the body politic as male that followed James’s arrival in England and the new monarch’s explicit invocation of patriarchal ideals. Tennenhouse thus reinstates the boundaries formulated by Bradbrook, though he does so in a new vocabulary and with a greater emphasis on the political locus of texts. Explicit moral condemnation may be absent in this political reading of the Renaissance, but Tennenhouse’s theory about increasing violence against females and the emergence of an entirely new conception of the body politic as male does not radically alter the picture presented by Bradbrook. A similar stance informs Lorraine Helms’s study of androgyny which also sees a dramatic change of direction in the course that theatre took in the year 1603: ‘When James succeeded to the throne in 1603, a new politics of androgyny emerged. The martial-spirited virgin prince ceded her authority to a misogynistic pacifist.... In the court of King James, androgyny became a male prerogative; the image of the Amazonian queen regnant soon dwindled into wife’ (Helms 1989 pp.60–61). Even the tone of condemnation that informed Bradbrook’s choice of the word ‘decadent’ manifests itself in Tennenhouse’s focus on gendered violence and Helms’s charge of misogyny. These influential recent studies of the Renaissance have perhaps been less radically revisionist than might first appear.

My work in the following pages offers a response to both Bradbrook and Tennenhouse, to earlier and recent attempts to erect stark boundaries between Elizabethan and early Stuart drama. Like Bradbrook I regard Renaissance drama as increasingly concerned with breaking boundaries; unlike her and like most new-historicist critics, I refrain from equating this experimenting in boundaries with moral decadence. Indeed some recent readings of the Renaissance have reversed the moral attitude of critics such as Bradbrook, suggesting that texts become especially important when they question and re-examine social and political norms rather than reiterate them.¹ Renaissance plays are most interesting when they threaten to dissolve social, generic and moral boundaries; the chapters that follow focus on dramatic experimentation with boundaries as marks of the intense innovation that characterizes this period. Unlike critics such as Tennenhouse, I insist that the beginnings of this intense experimentation emerge clearly in the work of Elizabethan dramatists, in the tragedies of Kyd and the early plays of Shakespeare. In other words, the relationship between Elizabethan and early Stuart drama remains a matter of degree rather than of radical and stark difference that manifests itself suddenly in 1604.

Among those who have influenced my attitudes towards Renaissance drama, four theorists/critics require particular mention, for they also express interest in the concept of boundaries and their violation, though their perceptions of this violation remain quite different: Mikhail Bakhtin, Stephen Greenblatt, Michel de Certeau and Gregory Bateson. Some of these writers also share an interest in tracing interrelationships among literary, social and cultural texts, an impulse which, however inadequately realized, also motivates the following study.

Bakhtin was among the first to insist that the most intense intellectual and political reconceptualizations of a society occur at the boundaries of cultural discourses rather than at the centres. His call for a rereading of cultural discourses along entirely different lines than had been typical of literary criticism may be especially appropriate to Renaissance contexts; he insists that

literary scholarship should establish links with the history of culture.... we have ignored questions of the interconnection and interdependence of various areas of culture; we have frequently forgotten that the boundaries of these areas are not absolute, that in various epochs they have been drawn in various ways; and we have not taken into account that the most intense and productive life of culture takes place on the boundaries of its individual areas and not in places where these areas have become enclosed in their own specificity.

(Bakhtin 1986 p.2)

The argument seems valid for the early modern age in general when demarcations among various cultural practices were particularly fragile and movement between cultural zones occurred frequently. Theatre, itself an activity located at the boundaries of society on the outskirts of the city amid whore houses, ale houses and bear-baiting arenas, as Steven Mullaney has so carefully documented, provides an especially fruitful avenue of research for students of Renaissance culture and society (Mullaney 1988). The importance of activity at the boundaries of cultural space is also emphasized by the Bakhtinian critic Yuri Lotman who suggests that

at the centre of the cultural space, sections of the semiosphere... become rigidly organized and self-regulating. But at the same time they lose dynamism and having once exhausted their reserve of indeterminacy they become flexible and incapable of further development. On the periphery – and the further one goes from the centre, the more noticeable this becomes – the relationship between semiotic practice and the norms imposed on it become ever more strained.... This is the area of semiotic dynamism. This is the field of tension where new languages come into being.

(Lotman 1990 p.134)

The theatrical space in early modern England may be regarded as just such a ‘field of tension’ where new languages came into being. The dynamic nature of these fields of tension and the consequent formation of new vocabularies provide the focus for this study.

Like Bakhtin, Greenblatt stresses the importance of movement among cultural activities and his own criticism of the Renaissance invariably seeks to expose the exotic, quixotic and marvellous as they emerge at the boundaries of social and cultural texts. He insists that traces of transference and appropriation are evident throughout the early modern period; ‘the textual traces that have survived from the Renaissance,’ he writes, ‘are products of extended borrowings. They were made by moving certain things – principally ordinary language, but also metaphors, ceremonies, dances, emblems, items of clothing, well-worn stories, and so forth – from one culturally demarcated zone to another.’ He argues that ‘we need to understand not only the construction of these zones but also the process of movement across the shifting boundaries between them’ (Greenblatt 1988 p.7). Greenblatt’s term ‘borrowing’ to describe the movement between cultural activities suggests a benign and natural process evident in texts that have survived from the Renaissance. His interest in ‘shifting boundaries’ reiterates Bakhtin’s conviction that areas of cultural activity rarely remain discrete and whole. In recognizing the constant reformulation of cultural activities as they borrowed from each other, Greenblatt seems to concur with Douglas Bruster’s point about the location of Renaissance theatres; Bruster argues that while theatre may have developed on the boundaries of the city of London, we should not make the mistake of seeing theatrical activity as an outside factor separated from the city and its culture, for by their very existence theatres ultimately contributed to the expansion of the city and a reformulation of its boundaries (Greenblatt 1988 pp.9–10; Bruster 1992 pp.9–10). In Lotman’s terms ‘the notion of boundary is an ambivalent one’ for ‘it both separates and unifies’ and cultural space inevitably produces constant shifts between centre and periphery (Lotman 1990 pp.136–137). Indeed the relationship between theatre and society in the Renaissance confirms this notion of boundaries and cultural space as inevitably subject to shifts and rearticulations.

Like Greenblatt, de Certeau in his arguments concerning the practice of daily living focuses on infinite borrowings among sociocultural practices, the ‘tactics’ of consumption and appropriation that ‘lend a political dimension to the practice of everyday life’ (de Certeau 1984 p. xvii). ‘Everyday life,’ he insists, ‘invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others’ (de Certeau 1984 p. xii). The same might be said about the dramatic mode in particular in early modern England as it poached on other cultural practices to market and create itself. Like Greenblatt and Bakhtin, de Certeau regards cultural activity as a fluid process of constant formation and reformation; but his choice of a more decisive term, ‘poaching’, to describe this movement suggests a transgressive and intrusive rather than benign process of assimilation between zones. His term ‘tactics’ further suggests a conscious rather than natural process and he insists that such poaching invariably carries political implications. De Certeau’s theory, which provides an useful gloss on the notion of boundaries, may be particularly relevant to Renaissance drama, a cultural form that established itself in the late sixteenth century as an alternative to other long-established cultural practices. Dramatists frequently engaged in active assimilation of other cultural practices as they marketed their products for popular consumption.

As Bakhtin, Greenblatt and de Certeau argue, the work of cultural history mandates scrutiny of breaking and shifting boundaries between sociocultural activities. Renaissance texts remain most interesting where they threaten to dissolve social and generic boundaries rather than when they reiterate the enclosed specificitgy of these areas. In many cases this collapse results from the manner in which playwrights poached on other equally popular cultural practices such as public punishments, carnival-like activities and devotional writing to market their products. Theatre’s violation of boundaries thus results quite naturally from the cultural institutions on which it draws to market itself as a viable alternative to long-established sports and customs. The most interesting instances of such poaching occur where dramatists exploit the marketability of the spectacles central to these other popular activities and at the same time challenge the function of these activities as non-threatening reiterations of social, religious and political norms. As Julia Gasper argues, ‘The theatre’s active involvement in religious-political affairs was of course illegal, but it was also characteristic of the age. Censorship does not seem to have dampened the creativity of the Elizabethan dramatists’ (Gasper 1990 p.10). Active involvement in social, religious and political affairs is especially intense in those works which insistently call attention to their violation of boundaries. In this sense the process I describe remains closest in conception to the movement described by de Certeau. My study insists that theatre’s sense of rivalry and appropriation remains crucial to understanding the movement between cultural zones in the Renaissance and, like many of the cultural activities on which it draws, theatre increasingly provided an occasion for seriousness and play simultaneously.

Bateson’s argument about the seriousness embedded within the structures of certain forms of play provides an useful addendum to the theories regarding cultural activities and zones outlined above. Bateson argues that in metacommunicative statements such as ‘This is play’, ‘the subject of discourse is the relationship between speakers’ and participants recognize the paradox generated by the statement which is ‘a negative statement containing an implicit negative metastatement’. As he insists, ‘Expanded, the statement... looks something like this: “These actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote” ’ (Bateson 1985 p.133). The idea holds also for specific forms of play such as theatre, a cultural form which calls attention to its artificiality. The communication ‘This is play’, in which participants recognize the metacommunicative implications of the statement, involves a complex set of rules and ‘language bears to the objects which it denotes a relationship comparable to that which a map bears to territory’ (Bateson 1985 p.134). But as Bateson insists, ‘the discrimination between map and territory is always liable to break down’ and we frequently encounter situations which involve a more complex form of play where the game is constructed ‘not upon the premise “This is play” but rather around the question “Is this play?” ’ (Bateson 1985 p.135). As I demonstrate, we encounter this complex form of play in many Renaissance plays which conclude by posing the question ‘Is this play?’ Dramatists who invoke this complex form of play also reveal a greater degree of engagement with the sociopolitical contexts of Renaissance England.

Of course engagement with sociopolitical contexts has dominated Renaissance literary criticism in the last decade; Stanley Stewart in a review of the year’s work for Studies in English Literature in 1991 attributed this continuing interest in history to the persistent appeal of the new historicism: ‘Among more than one hundred volumes of this year’s studies in the Renaissance,’ he noted, ‘history was the big winner, not history in the old-fashioned sense of “historiography” as distinct from “literary criticism”. That boundary, which has for some time become increasingly hard to defend, seemed to disappear completely, as representations by some recent “historicists” and even the term “history” itself came into question’ (Stewart 1991 p.179). More recently James Shapiro, reviewing the year’s work for 1996 in the same journal, points to the new historicism’s continuing appeal though, as he points out, it is ‘gradually becoming subsumed under the category of cultural criticism’ (Shapiro 1996 pp.516–517).² The following study, which draws its impulse from new historicist revaluations of Renaissance culture, sees this methodology as particularly suited to the Renaissance, sharing as it does the cultural sensibility that informed Renaissance interest in history and historiography; it is a sensibility evident for example in a representative Renaissance history such as Hayward’s Annals of Queen Elizabeth (1612).

Contemporary accounts of the development of historiography do not always acknowledge the complexity of this genre in pre-modern times. John Kronik, for example, introduces a Publications of the Modern Language Association volume on ‘The Theory of Literary History’ thus:

Once upon a time, history was an innocent word ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Breaking boundaries: politics and play on the Renaissance stage
• 2 Theatre and punishment: spectacles of death and dying on the stage
• 3 Theatre and cruelty: Renaissance notions of alterity in Roman tragedies
• 4 Theatre and carnival licence: exploring the boundaries of comic freedom and tragic excess
• 5 Theatre and transgression: secularizing the sacred and sacralizing the secular
• 6 Theatre and the scaffold: social drama and public spectacle in 1649
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index