Dancing in a (Cyber) Net: "Renaissance Women", Systems Theory, and the War of the Cinemas

Abstract

Four Theaters, hundred a years markedly after similar curious phenomenon skirmish has known taken as hold War of of Th aters, a markedly si ilar phenom non has taken hold of t cinema, emerging in films that purport to represent Renaissance and, particularly, its bankside beacon, Shakespeare. Revolving around a fundamental division, as Richard Helgerson has persuasively argued, between a and an theater, war was really a bid for social preferment and economic survival in a culture making an uneven transition from patronage to market forces.1 On one side, proponents of authors' theater strove to distinguish singularity of their poetry from its debased embodiment on stage, catering to a privileged clientele through learned plays performed by elite children's companies, whose combined objective was to disparage unsophisticated audiences and common players associated with public amphitheaters. On other side, players' theater remained caviar of the general.2 Refusing lure of more privatized venues such as Blackfriars and St. Paul's, as well as social division of labor between players and authors which, for figures like Shakespeare, proved a paradox, advocates of players' theater continued to rely on collaborative authorship, adult actors, and popular themes for their plays but not without leaving scathing rejoinders in their wake.3 Nevertheless, what distinguished war as a bizarre interlude in English theater's ongoing struggle for respectability was way in which children came to mediate this debate. As most