Abstract
This chapter establishes the central focus of the book: how, in the early years of the seventeenth century, indoor playhouse performances by boy companies came to be called ‘private’, in contrast to outdoor ‘public’ playhouse performances by adults. Theatre historians have long acknowledged this distinction but without subjecting it to sustained scrutiny; as a result they have obscured, or sought to explain away, the complex meanings of these important terms. The Introduction situates the book in relation to the subjects of theatre history, book history and intellectual history. It promises to overturn established thinking by offering fresh perspectives on commercial theatre culture, the printing and marketing of playbooks, and the intellectual concepts of ‘public’ and ‘private’ in the English Renaissance.
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Notes
E.k. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), vol. 4, p. 356.
See also, G.E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941–1961), vol. 6.
Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (New York: Macmillan, 1952)
Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, ‘Vile Arts: The Marketing of English Printed Drama, 1512–1660’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 39 (2000), pp. 77–165 (107).
For a similar quibble see Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 170.
Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis 1632–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 293–306; Gurr, Playgoing, p. 303. In The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London, 1576–1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), Ann Jennalie Cook also argued against Harbage, although her work is in turn countered by the critics listed above.
Mark Bayer, Theatre, Community, and Civic Engagement in Jacobean London (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2011).
See also, Bayer, ‘The Curious Case of the Two Audiences: Thomas Dekker’s Match Me in London’, in Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558–1642, ed. by Jennifer A. Low and Nova Myhill (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 55–70.
William A. Armstrong, ‘The Elizabethan Private Theatres: Facts and Problems’, The Society for Theatre Research Pamphlet Series (London: The Society for Theatre Research, 1958).
Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 56–57, pp. 337–338; and The Shakespearean Stage, 4th edition, pp. 66–67.
A number of invigorating studies have sought to reconsider ostensibly familiar terms in order to reveal otherwise obscured historical meanings. See, for example, Andy Kesson and Emma Smith, ‘Introduction: Towards a Definition of Print Popularity’, in The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England, ed. by Andy Kesson and Emma Smith (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 2–15
Andy Kesson, ‘Was Comedy a Genre in Early Modern England?’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 54 (2014), pp. 213–225. See, also, Tiffany Stern’s work on the idea that plays encompass ‘two hours traffic’: ‘Time for Shakespeare: Hourglasses, Sundials, Clocks, and Early Modern Theatre’, Journal of the British Academy, 3 (2015), pp. 1–33.
Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
See, for example, Julian Bowsher and Pat Miller, The Rose and the Globe: Playhouses of Shakespeare’s Bankside, Southwark: Excavations 1988–90 (London: Museum of London Archaeology, 2009)
Eva Griffith, A Jacobean Company and its Playhouse: The Queen’s Servants at the Red Bull Theatre (c. 1605–1619) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; rev. 2013)
Lukas Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)
Adam G. Hooks, ‘Introduction: Shakespeare for Sale’, Philological Quarterly, 91 (2012), pp. 139–150.
For an early, representative example of their work, see Farmer and Lesser, ‘Vile Arts’. On DEEP see, Farmer and Lesser, ‘Early Modern Digital Scholarship and DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks’, Literature Compass, 5 (2008), pp. 1139–1153. See also: DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks, ed. by. Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser http://deep.sas.upenn.edu [accessed 18 May 2015 ].
Marta Straznicky, ed. Shakespeare’s Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography (Philadelphia; Penn.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
Peter W.M. Blayney, The Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London, 1501–1557, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
See for example, Thomas L. Berger and Sonia Massai, eds, Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Alan B. Farmer, ‘John Norton and the Politics of Shakespeare’s History Plays in Caroline England’, in Shakespeare’s Stationers, pp. 147–176.
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. by Thomas Burger (Cambridge; Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1991).
Jürgen Habermas, Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People, Things, Forms of Knowledge, ed. by Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010)
Laura Lunger Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)
Mary Trull, Performing Privacy and Gender in Early Modern Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
Mary Trull, Making Space Public in Early Modern Europe: Performance, Geography, Privacy, ed. by Angela Vanhaelen and Joseph P. Ward (New York: Routledge, 2013).
Eoin Price, ‘The Politics of Privacy and the Renaissance Public Stage’, Literature Compass, 12 (2015), pp. 1–11.
Conal Condren, ‘Public, Private and the Idea of the “Public Sphere” in Early-Modern England’, Intellectual History Review, 19 (2009), pp. 15–28.
Thomas Cogswell and Peter Lake, ‘Buckingham Does the Globe: Henry VIII and the Politics of Popularity in the 1620s’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 60 (2009), pp. 253–278
Alastair Bellany, ‘The Murder of John Lambe: Crowd Violence, Court Scandal and Popular Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, Past and Present, 200 (2008), pp. 37–76.
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Price, E. (2015). Introduction. In: ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England: The Politics of Publication. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137494924_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137494924_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-49491-7
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