She is the daughter of George, Duke of Clarence whose erratic behavior ( which included claiming his brother's throne for himself) led to his attainder and imprisonment. Reluctant to execute him, his brother had to be reminded by Parliament, upon which he was declared executed, legend having it that he was drowned in a butt of malmsey.
Also, From The Tudors:
THE FALL AND RISE OF ENGLISH THEATER:
WHEN ELIZABETH BECAME QUEEN, TWO VERY DIFFERENT
kinds of theater were alive and well in England. One was old and reli-
gious in impulse and tightly woven into the lives of the people. The other
was new and boisterously secular and more than a little disreputable.
Both were regarded, from Elizabeth's first days on the throne, as serious
problems—as threats to domestic peace if not to true religion, to the
morals of the community if not to the efficient functioning of the econ-
omy. Over the next forty years the government would systematically
suppress the old kind until finally, despite dogged popular resistance, it
was extinguished. By the end of the Tudor era the new kind, in spite of a
state censorship so strict as to amount almost to persecution, would be
emerging as one of the supreme achievements of English cultural history.
Drama, like so much of life in England, had its roots in the early Mid-
dle Ages. lt made its first, almost childishly simple appearance no later
than the tenth century, in the form of little scenes from Scripture acted
out by priests and worshippers inside their parish churches. Over the
next few centuries these performances grew larger and more elaborate,
finally spilling out of the churches and being taken over by the guilds.
Three types evolved: mystery plays, in which stories from the Bible were
acted out; miracle plays, based on incidents from the lives of saints; and
finally morality plays, forerunners of modern drama, in which characters
representing good and evil struggled to win the soul of some Everyman.
(Mystery plays, by the way, took their name not from the Latin word mys-
terium, meaning “secret,” but from misterium, meaning "occupation" or
”trade.” The name reflected the importance of the various occupational
guilds-—of silversmiths or bakers or carpenters or whatever—as spon-
sors, underwriters, and producers of dramatic performances, especially
in the cities and larger towns.)
Ultimately, and without losing their religious content and purpose,
such productions became a major form of popular entertainment and
communal celebration. Whole cycles of plays were developed; some
cycles included as many as twenty-five or even fifty separate tableaux
(enactments of the Genesis account of creation, say, or of Jesus raising
Lazarus from the dead). The sets for these miniplays would be mounted
on wagons called "pageants," which could be wheeled from place to
place in sequence so that in the course of a day spectators could see an
entire cycle without having to move. It was not unlike the passage of
floats in a parade. The cycles became central to observances of the major
events in the liturgical calendar: Christmas of course, but also Twelfth
Night (January 6, the feast of the epiphany), Candlemas (February 2),
Holy Week with its culmination in Easter, Whitsun (the seventh Sunday
after Easter), the feast of Corpus Christi (the Thursday after Trinity Sun-
day), and Hallowtide at the beginning of November. Schools, too, put on
regular theatrical productions-—which must have been a hugely wel-
come break from the tedious recitations that formed the core of class-
room instruction—as did the universities and the Inns of Court.
As in any society where even simple forms of theater thrive, some in-
dividuals found themselves prepared to sacrifice security and stability in
order to spend their lives performing. Tiny companies of professional
players began to form and to scratch out a living by traveling from place
to place. These groups would put on shows wherever they were allowed
to, occasionally finding employment in the universities’ Christmas pro-
ductions or at the courts of the great nobles or even the king. Thus did
the professional actor first emerge in post-Roman Britain. With him, in-
evitably, came nonreligious dramatic works. Few early examples have
survived; those available to us tend toward the crude, rude, and unre-
strainedly vulgar, but they are also funny enough in theirThree Stooges
slapstick way and sometimes surprisingly accomplished in character de-
velopment. One of the oldest survivals, Gammer Gurtons Needle, is be-
lieved to have been written as late as the 1550s but to be one of the first
comedies ever written in English. This dating, if correct, puts the play lit-
tle more than a generation before the start of Shakespeare’s career and
marks the beginning of a period of astonishingly rapid artistic develop-
ment.
At the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, in any case, the mystery, mira-
cle, and morality plays were still a central, much-loved element in En-
glish community life, and professional theater was becoming increas-
ingly popular both in London and in every place where local authorities
would permit touring companies to put on shows in exchange for
money. The new queen's council, its evangelical members especially,
was uncomfortable with theater of any variety and decided almost
before doing anything else that limits had to be imposed. The main prob-
lem with the religious plays was their traditional—meaning Catholic—
content. As for the newer, more secular performances, the Puritans
believed that, even if their content was not idolatrous or superstitious,
they wasted time that could better be devoted to work or prayer. Secular
theater suffered also from a growing perception on the part of the ever-
more-respectable middle classes that the kinds of people who engaged
in it were distinctly undesirable. Such opinions were not entirely unfair.
Plays were presented, usually, in neighborhoods where rents were cheap
and houses of prostitution and bear-baiting pits were leading forms of di-
version.
Officialdom’s first response was a 1559 proclamation to the effect
that no plays were to be presented anywhere unless licensed either by
the mayor of a city or town or by a titled nobleman. The sternest of the
Puritans undoubtedly would have preferred simply to ban all theater
outright, but this was rendered impossible by the inconvenient fact that
drama had established itself at court. Those responsible for providing
amusements for the queen and her courtiers were learning that hiring a
company of players to perform works already written and rehearsed was
easier—and vastly less expensive—than developing new entertainments
from scratch. Queen and courtiers, for their part, responded enthusiasti-
cally to theatrical performances—to the best of them at least.
Theater continued to be regarded as intrinsically disreputable, how-
ever. The Privy Council observed it through narrowed eyes, imposing in-
creasingly firm controls. Eventually it limited the authority to license
companies to the titled nobility, in part, no doubt, because nobles were
far fewer in number than mayors and judicial officials and more easily
monitored and subjected to pressure from the Crown. But another rea-
son must have been the fact that England's increasingly well-educated
nobility found pleasure in quality theater, displayed a willingness to sup-
port it, and would not have accepted its elimination without complaint.
By the 15605 the Earl of Leicester, the same Rob Dudley who stood first
Background - THE FALL AND RISE OF ENGLISH THEATER 471
among Elizabeth’s favorites, was sponsoring one of the most successful
companies. This weighty endorsement was given even more force by
Dudley's status as a prominent evangelical.
As the 15605 proceeded, men more puritanical than Dudley were
moving into positions of leadership in cities and towns including Lon-
don. Such men were repelled by the traditional religious theatricals so
loved by their neighbors, and they refused to issue licenses except for
scripts cleansed of all vestiges of the old religion. Finally they refused to
license the productions altogether, and though resistance was wide-
spread and persistent it was itself unlawful and ultimately fruitless. Cy-
cles tailored to the feast of Corpus Christi were still being performed in
Kendal in the north in the late 1580s, and in distant Cornwall even in the
1590s, but by the end of the century they were gone. The tradition they
expressed was fading. Henceforth the story of English theater was the
story of secular drama exclusively. And it, far more than the old religious
plays, was concentrated in London.
The capital was becoming the biggest city in Europe; by the end of the
century it would have 200,000 residents, four times as many as in 1500.
It was a boiling, brawling cauldron of tradesmen and nobles, clerics and
domestic servants, sailors and soldiers, idlers and whores and fortune-
seekers from every corner of Europe, most of them hungry for entertain-
ment and many with at least a penny or two to spare. Such a place was
a magnet for the traveling companies of actors that, as they put on per-
formances in the courtyards of inns and other rented spaces, found
themselves attracting large and lucrative audiences. Necessarily, such
performances were almost invariably presented in daytime, and natu-
rally they attracted the sorts of people who were free in the daytime-
prostitutes, sailors, and other visitors in search of a good time, workers
willing and able to slip away from their jobs. The city fathers, appalled,
appealed to the council to purge London of such decadence and refused
to issue licenses. The theater people responded by moving to downmar-
ket suburbs beyond the reach of city law. Respectable England's attitude
toward the whole phenomenon is apparent in the name of the bill with
which Parliament, in 1572, sought to impose order: An Act for Punish-
ment of Vagabonds. Now licenses could be granted only by nobles or
two 'judicial dignitaries of the realm.” In due course the lord chamber-
lain was made responsible for approving dramatic works-—which meant
banning any play of which he disapproved—and the stationers’ guild for
preventing the printing of banned works.
None of this even dented the popularity of the theaters. Audiences
continued to grow, and venues grew with them. Impresarios stopped
renting space and began to build theaters instead; these were ram-
shackle affairs at first but soon were more substantial, and by the 15805
the largest could hold three thousand people. Admission was a penny in
the large roofless amphitheaters, twopence if you wanted a place to sit,
while more exclusive indoor performances might charge as much as six-
pence per seat—a sum beyond the means of most people. The revenues
thus generated were more than sufficient to encourage the construction
of increasingly impressive theaters. The frequency with which many
people went to the theater created a voracious market for new material,
and the licensing restrictions tended to concentrate. the best talent in a
small number of companies. For many such reasons London's theatrical
world not only expanded but grew more accomplished at an extraordi-
nary pace. Its leading figures became almost respectable. Queen Eliza-
beth herself became patron of a company in 1583, and in 1594 the lord
chamberlain was authorized to select two companies to perform within
London itself. By then young Shakespeare had been on the scene for five
years, having come up to the city from Warwickshire in the hope of mak-
ing his way as a writer. The hunger for talent was so strong, and the re-
wards for exceptional talent so great, that when the grand Globe Theatre
was built on the south bank of the Thames in 1598, Shakespeare would
be one of its five principal shareholders.
No comments:
Post a Comment