Heywood’s Epic Theater

Abstract

Heywood’s Epic Theater Mark Bayer (bio) As scholarship of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama turned towards questions of politics in the 1980s and 1990s, many commentators turned to Bertolt Brecht for a theoretical vocabulary to describe a socially engaged theater of the early modern era. Jonathan Dollimore opened his groundbreaking Radical Tragedy (1984) with an epigraph from Brecht’s The Exception and the Rule, insisting (a few pages later) that “Brecht in fact figures prominently in my argument to the effect that a significant sequence of Jacobean tragedies, including the majority of Shakespeare’s, were more radical than has hitherto been allowed.”1 Brecht, in other words, was essential in illuminating this important and underappreciated aspect of Shakespearean drama. For materialist critics like Dollimore, turning to Brecht offered an extraordinarily cogent and enormously productive critical agenda. After all, Brecht himself was interested in Shakespeare’s history plays and saw in them a precursor of his own theatrical experiments. Just as Brecht sought to save the German theater from the bourgeois aestheticism that had come to permeate it in the early twentieth century, so Dollimore’s generation of critics sought to save Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists from an arid formalism that ignored the social and political energies of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. Although I don’t wish to repudiate this productive line of inquiry, I want to suggest that the application of Brechtian principles to early modern drama is considerably more complicated. To locate traces of what we now perceive as Brechtian dramatic techniques in the drama of this period, I want to do more than examine the plays for moments of artistic discontinuity, ideological rupture, and self-conscious theatricality. Instead, I want to think about the positioning of early modern audiences in relation [End Page 371] to the drama they witnessed. How were specific groups of spectators affected by these plays? How did theatrical performance interrupt their daily lives, enlisting them in the production of theatrical meaning that resonated with their shared experiences? I will argue that the early modern theater in several important ways resembled what Brecht would later call the “epic” theater, but that we might more easily recognize that theater’s contributions to a socially resonant dramatic praxis by looking beyond Shakespeare and the Globe to Thomas Heywood and the Red Bull. Specifically, I want to look at the five-part cycle of plays known as the Ages (c. 1609–13) that draw on classical epic to trace Roman mythical history from the birth of Jupiter to the fall of Troy.2 Examining the Ages, and the venue at which they were staged, according to Brechtian precepts gives us a new way to appreciate these frequently disparaged plays while marking a significant contrast with Shakespeare’s much more acclaimed history plays. When evaluated according to twentieth-century critical tastes, the Ages didn’t measure up to the canonical plays with which they were compared; the action and spectacle that are Heywood’s plays’ most prominent features pale next to the linguistic density, vivid characterization, and literary merits of Shakespearean drama.3 Understanding these plays historically, however, we must recognize that their differences have less to do with abstract aesthetic standards and more to do with the different expectations and tastes of the audiences that the two playwrights catered to. According to James Wright’s retrospective account in 1699, the Red Bull was “mostly frequented by citizens, and the meaner sort of people,”4 a group perhaps best placated by nostalgic tales, visual effects, and the exploits of larger-than-life classical heroes—audiences who enjoyed nothing but “drums, Trumpets, Battels and Hero’s,” according to that theater’s detractors.5 Thomas Dekker, writing for the Red Bull in 1612, realized that audiences at this playhouse required a different kind of play, that the playwright’s “Worthy friends Muse...deserve[s] a Theater full of very Muses themselves to be Spectators.”6 Rather than “hearing a play,” as Hamlet proposed to the audience at the Globe, the “uncapable multitude” at the Red Bull seemed more interested in seeing the drama, a predisposition satisfied abundantly by the Ages.7 [End Page 372] Such claims have...