Why Didn’t Burbage Lease the Beargarden? A Conjecture in Comparative Architecture

Brownstein, Oscar

doi:10.2307/j.ctt1w6t9z6.8

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“…As with McMullan's reading, Burns thinks his play "an ironic meditation on what history is, and as such it constantly exposes the gratuitousness of the signs and symbols which allows to think we know history" (p. 6) Burns notes that refurbishment of the Rose theatre in 1592 was just before 1 Henry 6 premiered and the addition of a stage cover implies that the stage was permanent, whereas hitherto stages may have tended to be temporary to permit bear-baiting. In fact, there is no reason to suppose that animal baiting took place at any playhouse prior to the opening of the Hope in 1614 (Brownstein 1979). As for the suiting of play to venue, Burns notes that Titus Andronicus (which also played at the Rose) and 1 Henry 6 both open with a funeral procession, which suits the Rose's wide shallow stage.…”

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relic of a bygone age. Even in the twentieth century the play was never done in modern dress and was still used as propaganda. The attention on 'truth' and 'authenticity' shifted from the period in which the play is set (which the nineteenthcentury spectacles wanted to recover) to the period in which it was first performed. The BBC TV version is, ironically, low-budget and 'inward' rather than spectacularly expansive, thus breaking with the stage tradition. Terence Gray's 1931 production was irreverent towards the history and debunked it, albeit in the name of a different kind of 'authenticity': the original performance effect. Gray's method was not to recreate the original staging, but to find a modern way of doing what the original did. The characters were dressed like playing card figures and behaved like marionettes, although for the final moment Gray effectively rewrote Shakespeare: the baby turns out to be a cardboard doll of Elizabeth 1 aged 60 that is thrown into the audience. Rather than find subversiveness within the play, Gray worked against it to be radical. Gray's alienation effect has influenced three subsequent Stratford production, including Tyrone Guthrie's in 1949 where the duchess of Norfolk sneezed noisily during Cranmer's address in honour of the baby Elizabeth (p. 48). For the 1996 Royal Shakespeare Company production, Greg Doran's awareness of his predecessors made him want the play's ceremony to be taken 'straight' in order to show its emptiness, rather than have it undermined before it was even seen. Doran undermined the spectacle subtly by providing the rainstorm mentioned at 1.1.90, and by a persistent whispering of courtiers even when they should be attentive. McMullan believes that audiences did not understand these devices, expecting either unironic celebration or else entire debunking (p. 55n1). Returning to the play's first contexts, McMullan gives a splendid reading of Henry Wotton's account of the burning of the Globe as an example of the familiar Reformation genre of comedia apocalyptica (pp. 60-1). The play is situated between "celebration of James's Reformation inheritance and the suggestion that that Reformation had never truly taken place". The important historical context of 1613 was that prince Henry, a great hope for a Reformed Europe, was gone and protestant hopes were transferred to his sister Elizabeth's marriage to Frederick, the Elector Palatine, the most prominent continental protestant ruler (p. 64). The baby Elizabeth would remind the audience of this Elizabeth. The 'truth' of the play (its title and Cranmer's final speech) relates to the "Truth is the daughter of Time" iconography with which Elizabethan associated herself (Truth being the true church liberated from her sister's Catholic influence). The theme of veritas filia temporis was revived by Dekker in The Whore of Babylon and by Middleton in his pageant The Triumphs of Truth. To many protestant Henry 8 was hardly a true protestant reformer because, prior to the break with Rome, he had persecuted protestant...

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Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage

Bozio¹

2020

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Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage traces the way that characters think through their surroundings in early modern drama—not only how these characters orient themselves within unfamiliar or otherwise strange locations but also how their locations function as the scaffolding for perception, memory, and other forms of embodied thought. Such moments of thinking through place stage a process that both resembles and parallels the cognitive work that early modern playgoers undertook as they reimagined the stage as the settings of the dramatic fiction. The book traces the vexed relationship between these two registers of thought in works by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Jonson. In doing so, it counters a critical tradition that figures drama as a form of spatial abstraction and demonstrates, instead, that theatrical performance constituted a sophisticated and self-reflexive mode of thinking through place in the early modern period.

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Bozio

2020

Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage

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Why Didn’t Burbage Lease the Beargarden? A Conjecture in Comparative Architecture

Cited by 11 publications

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VI Shakespeare

Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage

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