Endgames

Abstract

The institution of the English Renaissance court — specifically the courts of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs — has long exercised some complex and peculiar compulsion over the imaginations of subsequent generations. Such interest has been largely historical (latterly sociological) and cultural (latterly anthropological), and it is precisely at the interface of what we normally call history and what we traditionally designate as culture, that both our studies of Shakespeare, The Play of History and Out of Court, have been joined. In this book our attention has engaged with the court as a profoundly important historical institution, and simultaneously as the source of a particular symbolic language, which seems to have been powerful enough to enter and pervade the general culture at almost every level. The plays of Shakespeare, which were often performed in the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts, and which frequently construct their dramatic worlds out of particular images of court society, evidently participated in both the ‘historical’ and the ‘symbolic’ realities of the court, and can be discussed in relation to either. But as we have shown in our detailed analyses of particular plays, the Shakespearean drama does not mediate between the historical court and its own symbolic language in any direct or simple relationship: and in many ways that new secular drama of the Elizabethan public playhouses was, and remained, sufficiently independent of the court to be capable of projecting and estranging both the historical and the cultural experience of the court into a remarkable degree of visibility.