Carnival and the Institutions of Theater in Elizabethan England

Abstract

Theater is an art form; it is also a social institution. The institutional setting and the characteristic formal strategies of theatrical practice are historically contingent a specific culture, so that theater continually redefines itself in relation to other closely related social, cultural, and artistic orders. As literature, a body of texts such as the canon of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama is determined within through the interactive relations of discrete dramatic works with their surrounding ideological context, and also without through its social and institutional setting. ' The institutions of theater affect forms of artistic production, of social interaction, and of the creation of meaning; by favoring certain styles of perception, representation, and understanding, institutional constraints determine how meaning will be created by the audience's experience of the text in performance. The structure of theatrical institutions is not usually something carefully planned and fully thought out but is more typically an informally improvised, ad hoc organization of short term expedients and residual practices left over from earlier cultural and social formations. Although in some cultures theater has a relatively clear relationship to the social structure as a whole, the theater of Elizabethan England is not contained by the established categories and fully legitimized functions of the formally constituted social order.2 In the present essay I will argue that the Elizabethan theater is an institution that is, in the first instance, a creation of the plebeian culture of the Renaissance. Specifically, it is an institutionalized and professionalized form of Carnival and of popular festive activity in general. Theater and Carnival are neighboring institutions with similar logics of representation and similar orientations to social