Renaissance Intertheater and the Staging of Nobody

Abstract

Towards the end of the sixteenth century, English companies of strolling players initiated a remarkable form of cultural interaction between England the Continent. Leaving their own theaters struggling against religious opposition, outbreaks of the plague, internecine competition, these nomadic performers took sail in expectation of a better life abroad, as far from London as Paris, Stockholm, Warsaw. Many were bound ultimately for the courts of German princes, but most began their journey by crossing the North Sea to the port cities of the Netherlands. In defense of their travels, the actors contrasted the perils of home life with the prospects of Low Countries to roar in: We can be bankrupts on this side, they asserted, and gentlemen of a company beyond sea: be burst at London, pieced up in Rotterdam. The sea is a purger, at sea must our fortunes take physic.' The passage to Europe, the players hoped, would restore their health wealth thereby vindicate the theatrical profession itself. As it happened, their hopes were quite successfully realized, into the second half of the seventeenth century their companies remained profitable, their performances renowned. In the history of cultural relations between England Europe, especially the Netherlands Germany, the episode of the strolling players was an unexampled success. Yet it is a success that modern scholarship has been little interested in explaining. This is not to say that the phenomenon has been ignored; on the contrary, the last century a half has witnessed a steady recovery of information about the wanderings of these English comedians. They were first treated by Ludwig Tieck in his Deutsches Theater of 1817, though Tieck's sources remained unpublished until