| Subversion in Elizabethan Theatre |
| In the late summer of 1597, a monster emerged from the humid stench of London's Bankside. | Párr. 1 |
| News of the monster quickly reached Robert Cecil, Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth. | |
| Cecil determined that the monster was a threat to national security and arranged for its swift | |
| destruction. The nest where it had bred was raided and neutralised; the people who had | |
| 5 | nurtured it were called to account and imprisoned. | |
| The monster in question was a satirical play called The Isle of Dogs. Its co- | Párr. 2 |
| author, Thomas Nash acknowledged that in writing the play he'd created a monster: 'it was | |
| no sooner borne but I was glad to run from it'. No copy of the play exists today, so we can | |
| only guess at its contents. But the Privy Council clearly viewed it as 'seditious' and therefore | |
| 10 | ordered not only that the dramatists and actors be imprisoned but that all theatres in the | |
| city be closed for months as a punishment. This governmental response may seem like | |
| overkill, but the Queen and her enforcers were keenly aware of the potential danger posed | |
| by theatre's ability to subvert cultural norms. In Renaissance England, the development of | |
| theatre paralleled, and may have helped to spark, dramatic, culture-wide shifts in religious, | |
| 15 | economic, social, sexual and even political perspectives. | |
| Theatre historian Andrew Gurr has estimated that as many as 50 million people paid | Párr. 3 |
| to see live theatre in London during the golden age of English Renaissance drama. London | |
| loved theatre. And with theatre's popularity came a reorganising of social strata in which | |
| class divisions were no longer safe. After all, William Shakespeare, the son of a Stratford | |
| 20 | glover, earned enough in a decade of playmaking and acting to buy a share in a theatrical | |
| company as well as an opulent house in Stratford-upon-Avon. He even applied to the College | |
| of Heralds for a coat of arms. When the request was granted, Shakespeare effectively entered | |
| the nobility. This social step epitomises the potentially subversive nature of theatre: it | |
| allowed the playmaker son of an artisan father to style himself a gentleman. | |
| 25 | Governmental authorities understood the potential disruptions public theatre could | Párr. 4 |
| cause in a well-ordered cultural hierarchy, so took steps to control the performances of plays | |
| from the very beginning. As early as 1574, even before the first theatre was built, the Lord | |
| Mayor of London and the Common Council laid heavy restrictions on the times, places, | |
| contents and purposes of theatrical entertainments. Although the municipal government was | |
| 30 | decidedly anti-theatre, its animosity had little effect. Beginning with the construction of the | |
| first purpose-built playhouse in 1576 until the closing of the theatres in 1642, theatre's | |
| popularity and commercial success steadily increased. | |
| The successful playmakers who emerged during this period were a decidedly | Párr. 5 |
| subversive group. There was Christopher Marlowe, accused of being an atheist, suspected of | |
| 35 | homosexual tendencies, an ex-spy who was murdered at age 29 in the suspicious company | |
| of other spies. There was Ben Jonson, who had been apprenticed to his bricklayer | |
| stepfather as a youth, soldiered in the Low Countries, killed a fellow actor in a duel and | |
| became a Catholic while in prison for the killing. And there was George Wilkins, a thug who | |
| had a long arrest record for brutal assaults (including kicking a pregnant woman in the belly). | |
| 40 | Wilkins was Shakespeare's landlord in London, and collaborated with him on Pericles. | |
| When Sir Francis Walsingham formed an acting company under the patronage of | Párr. 6 |
| Queen Elizabeth, he dictated that plays written for and performed by the Company of Players, | |
| the Queen's Men, should feature patriotic representations of English history with wholesome | |
| Protestant morals, and ought to be written in stately verse. Although some early playwrights | |
| 45 | adhered to this party line, Marlowe broke frame to take serious risks: writing about a Mongol | |
| warlord, Tamburlaine – in blank verse, no less. More seriously, whereas the government had | |
| called for morality plays with English heroes, Marlowe's foreign infidel repeatedly commits | |
| heinously amoral acts and is never struck down by the hand of divine justice. And | |
| Marlowe's Tamburlaine was a runaway success. | |
| 50 | Many of Shakespeare's plays actually deal with unstable political situations, | Párr. 7 |
| especially those commonly referred to as the 'great tragedies'. Hamlet's famous indecision | |
| originates in the death of Denmark's monarch; Macbeth's plot involves two separate | |
| regicides, though both occur offstage. King Lear provides some of Shakespeare's most | |
| complex reflections on the nature of kingship. The image of the 'poor, infirm, weak, and | |
| 55 | despis'd old' Lear (3.2.20) wandering mad on the heath may not have unsettled James I, | |
| devoted fan of theatre as he was. But it certainly does raise questions about the actual | |
| differences between monarch and subject, questions that resonate with performers, critics | |
| and students to this day. | |
| The extant manuscript of Sir Thomas More – a play to which Shakespeare contributed | Párr. 8 |
| 60 | a few speeches – gives us a peek of insight into the type of subversive material that the Master | |
| of Revels, the censor, was on the lookout for. The Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney, has | |
| written on the first page of the manuscript 'leave out the insurrection wholly'. The government | |
| was obviously concerned that a stage representation of a riot by unemployed Londoners | |
| against foreign workers who had taken their jobs might breed real riots in the theatres and | |
| 65 | the streets of the city. | |
| All plays performed in the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre had to be approved by | Párr. 9 |
| the Master of the Revels, with the curious exception of those staged by the Children of the | |
| Queen's Revels. Dramatists flocked to this company where they (rightly) assumed that a | |
| sympathetic fellow writer would be more likely to allow subversive plays to be staged than | |
| 70 | a rigorous government censor. In 1605, Ben Jonson, George Chapman and John Marston | |
| went so far as to make fun of King James's Scottish accent in Eastward Ho! (Jonson and | |
| Chapman were subsequently imprisoned and 'in danger of having their ears and noses slit' as | |
| punishment, all the while blaming the offensive passages on Marston.) In the following year, | |
| John Day's Isles of Gulls, a thinly veiled attack on the government, occasioned such a | |
| 75 | scandalous uproar that the playwright and entire cast of boys were imprisoned. | |
| Religion was another favoured target of theatrical satire, and one that was seemingly | Párr. 10 |
| tolerated by the Master of the Revels. Characters such as Zeal-of-the-Land Busy in | |
| Jonson's Bartholomew Fair and Malvolio in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night exaggerated | |
| extremist Puritanism for comedic effect. Roman Catholicism was usually represented with | |
| 80 | more seriousness, but hardly more concern for psychological realism. The Puritans deeply | |
| disapproved of the theatrical practice of cross-dressing female roles. Women were not part | |
| of the theatrical guilds, so acting companies cast boys in most women's parts. This practice | |
| represented the ultimate in theatrical deception to religious eyes: boys were not women, and | |
| presenting boys in the guise of women misled audiences, both about boys' natures and | |
| 85 | women's natures. When playmakers and companies realised that this casting habit bothered | |
| the Puritans, they predictably leaned into it. With increasing frequency from the 1590s | |
| onward, English Renaissance plays deployed not only cross-dressing actors but cross- | |
| dressing characters as well. But the Puritans would ultimately get their revenge, and | |
| certainly the last laugh, when they came to power and succeeded in closing the theatres in | |
| 90 | 1642. | |
| Fuente: Rasmussen, E & Dejong, I. (8 de mayo de 2017). Subversive Theatre in Renaissance England. | |
| The British Library:Discovering Literature: Shakespeare & Renaissance. | |
| https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/subversive-theatre-in-renaissance-england | |