Maps of the World: "Neo-Jacobeanism" and Contemporary British Theatre

Abstract

In 1986, the Royal Court Theatre in London premiered Howard Barker's version of Thomas Middleton's tragedy Women Beware Women. Accompanying publicity material credited the play as jointly authored, and indeed its first three acts were almost entirely Middleton's; Barker's contribution consisted of his own, original, concluding sequence. What struck many at the time was the seamless transition between Middleton's work and Barker's, a transition achieved despite a separating history of over 350 years and without recourse on Barker's pan to parody or even, except perhaps in its most formal sense, pastiche. In thematic concern, form, and style, there seemed an absolute confluence of interest between the theatre of the Jacobeans and that of one section, at least, of modem British theatre. Contemporary dramatists' awareness of the use that may be made of historical models to articulate their own critiques of modem society may be traced back almost to the beginnings of the revolution in post-war British drama and is not, of course, confined to reference to Jacobean theatre alone. But the work of John Webster, Cyril Toumeur, Middleton et al., and indeed the "darker" plays of Shakespeare, seem to have offered a particularly potent source of inspiration. One thinks especially of Edward Bond's Lear (1971), a landmark in contemporary British theatre. Perhaps more significantly, the explosion of activity on the Fringe from the mid- 1960s to the early 1970s, work often driven by despair and outrage at what was seen as an increasingly corrupt, inept, and ruthless establishment, found voice in subject matters and forms that, albeit for the most part unconsciously, echoed those of Jacobean antecedents.