Abstract
The essays in this collection present a series of short-focus views of England’s theatrical culture between the years 1625 and 1642. Taken as a composite, they establish a new wide-angle shot of texts and institutions too often overlooked by historians, teachers, readers, and contemporary directors of English drama. In fact, the period of theater history explored here may be the only one better known for its abrupt conclusion than for its constituent parts. The sudden blackout of London’s stages ordered by the Long Parliament in September of 1642 has probably occasioned more debate in recent years than the entire works of Jasper Mayne, Thomas Nabbes, and Shackerley Marmion combined.1 But the writers gathered here believe that London’s thriving theatrical scene during the reign of Charles I deserves to be widely studied as something other than the prelude to an interruption. Though it has in the past been seen even by its more generous critics as a kind of rusting, wobbly trestle bridge connecting the glorified age of Shakespeare to that of Dryden, Etherege, and Wycherly, the late 1620s and 1630s might better be understood as a moment in which theater in England began to come into its own as an integrated economic, social, and political institution. It is this specifically Caroline integration that the individual essays in this collection seek to characterize.
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Notes
For an excellent recent discussion of the debate over the closing of the theaters, see David Scott Kastan’s “‘Tublike Sports’ and Tublike Calamaties’: Plays, Playing, and Politics,” in Shakespeare After Theory ( New York and London: Routledge, 1999 ), 201–20.
On this point, see Michael Neill, “ ‘Wits most accomplished Senate’: The Audience of the Caroline Private Theaters,” Studies in English Literature 18 (1978): 341–60.
There is a healthy (if somewhat scattered) critical tradition that has periodically labored against this dismissal, including the work of the following scholars, who have deeply influenced our own thinking on the subject: Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984 )
Julie Sanders, Caroline Drama: The Plays of Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and Brome ( Plymouth: Northcote House, 1999 )
Ira Clark, The Moral Art of Philip Massinger ( London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1993 )
Ira Clark, and Professional Playwrights: Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and Brome ( Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992 )
James Bulman, “Caroline Drama,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, 2nd edn, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 ), 344–71
R. J. Kaufmann, Richard Brome, Caroline Playwright ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1961 )
Michael Neill, ed., John Ford: Critical Re-visions ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 )
Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope, eds., The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After ( New York: Routledge, 1992 ).
Johannes Adam Bastiaenen, The Moral Tone of Jacobean and Caroline Drama (1930; reprint, New York: Haskell House, 1966 ), 2.
See the essays compiled in Clare McManus, ed., Women and Culture at the Courts of the Stuart Queens ( New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003 )
Jane Farnsworth, “Defending the King in Cartwright’s The Lady-Errant (1636–37),” Studies in English Literature 42 (2002): 381–98
Julie Sanders, “Caroline Salon Culture and Female Agency: The Countess of Carlisle, Henrietta Maria, and Public Theatre,” Theatre Journal 52 (2000): 449–64
In addition to the essay by Benedict Robinson included here, see Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Nabil Matar, and Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 ( New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003 ).
Along with the seminal work of Martin Butler in Theatre and Crisis see Reid Barbour, Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002 )
Zachary Lesser, “Marlowe’s Jew Goes to Church: Nicholas Vavasour and the Creation of Laudian Drama,” in Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004 ), 81–114
Zachary Lesser, and Alan B. Farmer, “Play Reading, News Reading, and Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News,” in The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Marta Straznicky ( Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006 ), 127–58.
Paul W. Miller, “The Historical Moment of Caroline Topographical Comedy,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 32 (1990): 345–74
Adam Zucker, “Laborless London: Comic Form and the Space of the Town in Caroline Covent Garden,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 5 (2005): 94–119
See Rick Bowers, “Players, Puritans, and Theatrical Propaganda, 1642–1660,” Dalhousie Review 67 (1987–1988): 463–79, for a discussion of Parliament’s actions against playing between 1642 and 1649.
Peter Lake, “Retrospective: Wentworth’s Political World in Revisionist and Post-Revisionist Perspective,” in The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621–1641, ed. J. S. Merritt ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 ), 252–83
Glenn Burgess, “On Revisionism: An Analysis of Early Stuart Historiography in the 1970s and 1980s,” Historical Journal 33 (1990): 609–27
Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990 )
Glenn Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996 )
Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 )
For local histories of the developing West End that emphasize its diversity, see Jeremy Boulton, “The Poor Among the Rich: Paupers and the Parish in the West End, 1600–1724,” in Londinopolis, ed. Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner ( Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001 ), 197–225
R. Malcolm Smuts, “The Court and Its Neighborhood: Royal Policy and Urban growth in the Early Stuart West End,” Journal of British Studies 30 (1991): 117–49.
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© 2006 Adam Zucker and Alan B. Farmer
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Zucker, A., Farmer, A.B. (2006). Introduction. In: Zucker, A., Farmer, A.B. (eds) Localizing Caroline Drama. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601611_1
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