Abstract
Chapter 1 debunks one of the standard scholarly assumptions about the indoor playhouses: that they were described as ‘private’ in the sixteenth century. It shows that although ‘private’ might be used to refer to domestic performances and academic drama, it was not used in relation to the first set of Elizabethan indoor theatres. Instead, the chapter advances a more complex argument which accounts for the varying ways in which ‘public’ and ‘common’ were applied to sixteenth-century commercial playhouses. In doing so, it contextualises the early seventeenth-century emergence of the term ‘private’ in the discourse of commercial theatre. For the second set of indoor companies, the term appeared an attractive way of differentiating themselves from the ‘public’ playhouses.
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Notes
The practice of title page part division began to wane after The Conflict of Conscience, as observed by Gabriel Egan, ‘“As it was, is, or will be played”: Title-Pages and the Theatre Industry to 1610’, in From Performance to Print in Shakespeare’s England, ed. by Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 92–110.
Tamara Atkin and Emma Smith, ‘The Form and Function of Character Lists in Plays Printed before the Closing of the Theatres’, Review of English Studies, 65 (2014), 647–672.
Marta Straznicky, ‘Introduction: Plays, Books, and the Public Sphere’, in The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. by Marta Straznicky (Amherst and London: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), pp. 1–19. See also, Privacy, Playreading, and Women’s Closet Drama, passim.
Tiffany Stern and Simon Palfrey, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 4. See also, pp. 57–59. Stern has also written illuminatingly on these subjects in Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), especially pp. 22–123.
See, Martin Wiggins in association with Catherine Richardson, British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 830, p. 836.
Andy Kesson, John Lyly and Early Modern Authorship (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), passim. Kesson counters assumptions about Lyly’s elitism established by the title of Edward Blount’s 1632 collection of Lyly plays, Six Court Comedies and continued, in the twentieth century, by G.K. Hunter’s John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1962).
E.K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, (London: Oxford University Press, 1903), vol. 2, p. 191.
Chambers cites David Wilkins, Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae, vol. 3, (London: 1737), p. 864.
William Ingram, The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theater in London (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 84; English Professional Theatre, p. 62.
See, for example, Marrku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 18–53;Richard Cust, ‘The “Public Man” in Late Tudor and Early Stuart England’, in The Politics of the Public Sphere, pp. 235–258.
Linda Levy Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 184.
David Harris Sacks, ‘Private Profit and Public Good: The Problem of the State in Elizabethan Theory and Practice’, in Law, Literature, and the Settlement of Regimes, ed. by Gordon J. Schochet (Washington D.C.: The Folger Institute, 1990), pp. 121–142 (p. 130).
Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 192.
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© 2015 Eoin Price
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Price, E. (2015). ‘Public’, ‘Private’ and ‘Common’ Stages, 1559–1600. 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_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137494924_2
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