The Elizabethan Theatre XI ed. by A.L. Magnusson and C.E. McGee

Abstract

A.L. Magnusson and C.E. McGee, eds., The Elizabethan Theatre XI (Port Credit, Ontario: P.D. Meany, 1990). xvi, 233. $45.00. Illustrations. This collection of papers, read at the University of Waterloo Conference on Elizabethan Theatre in 1985, features substantial research by scholars generally acknowledged as talented specialists. Guided by the useful “Intro­ duction” that A.L. Magnusson and C.E. McGee provide, readers will discover just how rich a field remains to be worked in understanding Waterloo’s topic, “The Theatre of 1580’s.” Although the editors, and John II. Astington in his essay, “The London Stage in the 1580’s,” humbly point out an abiding lack of evidence about plays and performances, the strength of these papers often lies in the new information and the surprising perspectives which they offer. Even when essays rehearse more familiar problems or approaches, they com­ municate that freshness of wit and observation which helped to make this particular conference uncommonly bearable. Astington’s cautious survey of current knowledge stresses both the size and sophistication of the stages, including inn-yards, that were available before Burbage erected his “Theatre” in 1576. But Astington also demonstrates that legal and court records have so far taught us more about stages than about the lost plays performed upon them. He conjectures that the very lack of later parodies based on plays of the 1570s and early 1580s suggests “the absence of a distinct or typical style of playwriting” (14) in compari­ son with either Cambyses or with the plays of Marlowe, Greene, and Peele. Alan H. Nelson focusses just as cautiously on several aspects of “Cambridge University Drama in the 1580’s.” Nelson argues that through her graduates, Cambridge actually became more influential in the 1580s and later, well after a “heyday” of college plays in the 1550s and 1560s, and after the unrepeated success of Legge’s Richardus Tertius in 1579. He also gleans from his thenin -progress edition of the Cambridge materials for REED (Toronto, 1989) records which indicate that Cambridge, while unfriendly to touring players, nonetheless carried on quite independently its traditional staging of plays in mid-chamber or hall, well away from partition screens. A third essay, Alan R. Young’s account of the tournament in the 1580s, establishes, with a wealth of fascinating detail, that “tournaments. . .have a very real claim to a place in the study of the Elizabethan drama” (52). Young pays par­ ticular attention to the stage-like character of the Whitehall tiltyard, to the “miniature dramas” grafted upon specific challenges, and to the organizing and financing of these technically elaborate and expensive entertainments. Editors Magnusson and McGee frame their volume with considerations of staging; the final essays, by directors Skip Shand and Douglas Abel, who had engaged in a panel discussion during the Conference, focus on Doctor Faustus in performance. More integrally, the first three essays, with their 370 emphasis on spectacle, marshall us toward wide-ranging speculations on the development of theatrical poetry by G.R. Hibbard and Sheldon P. Zitner. Hibbard is more interested in Marlowe’s “spacious volubilitie” and in sug­ gesting that lyricism entered dramatic language through popular song and through the verse experiments of George Peele. Zitner concentrates on the poetry of “opsis” in The Spanish Tragedy, concluding that repetitive and patterned speeches “were largely means to accompany and elaborate spec­ tacle and the modulations of its main emotion, horror” (93). Both writers sometimes sound like Theseus commenting on crude artifice or Touchstone apologizing for Audrey; both stress the techniques rather than the ethics of expressiveness, although Zitner provocatively detects an analogy between Kyd’s repetitions and a deterministic, Calvinized attitude. Scholars who find the chronic divorce of conceits from deeds to be a potent orphic conven­ tion throughout Renaissance tragedy will be challenged by Zitner’s insistence that “the divorce of word from thought and deed is a necessity of any play” (85). If Zitner’s Kyd is a workmanlike sensationalist, “out of step” with his con­ temporaries, Philip Edwards’s Kyd begs to be even more closely associated with his free-thinking London room-mate, Christopher Marlowe. Edwards argues that Kyd’s play, steeped in the tragic spirit...