Wickham Glynne - Part I - Early English Stages 1576-1600

I N Volume One I have tried to collect together a wide variety of source material relating to stage practice in the Middle Ages. The governing factor in the choice of this material was the idea that what is seen in the theatre matters at least as much to an audience as what is heard: in other words, that records of spectacle are at least as worthy the attention of historians as literary texts. As a result of this attempt to give equal weight to the visual and aural elements of dramatic art and to regard audiences as individual human beings, it became clear that our early drama could not be regarded as a self-conscious, self-contained art form. Many varied pursuits and pastimes of everyday life contributed much more to stage practice in the Middle Ages than anything deliberately formulated by theorists or critics of the time as indigenous or proper to the medium.

Colour symbolism in stage costume, for example, was not, as we might think, the bright invention of some designer or producer, but was taken over from both the ecclesiastical iconography of mosaic, fresco, stained glass and statuary and from the conventions of Heraldry: as an identification device long familiar to society at large, it was therefore a good one for identifying characters in a play. Or again, music in stage directions concerning action involving God or angels is there not for emotive effect or atmosphere, as we might think, but because music was harmony and so was heaven. Music was heaven and heaven was musicas everyone knew who had ever read Augustine or Boethius, and as others who could not read had come to know by word of mouth from those who could.recognize that the audiences for this theatre possessed the capacity to accept mimetic action on two levels simultaneously. Where actor and character were inevitably fused within the same person, they nevertheless remained distinguished from one another for the beholders as the person representing and the person represented. This dual concept of the actor at work on the stage is about as far removed as can be imagined from the modern ideal of equating the character with the acting of it so closely as to simulate actuality of feeling and behaviour down to the smallest detail. This double image, not the photographic reproduction of the seemingness of things, was their stage realism. Always, contemporary philosophy dictated the inner meaning of the things said or done and made explicit in the drama; contemporary practice in real life dictated the form in which it was expressed on the stage. The forms existed to express the meaning and not as ends in themselves. Plot, character and language were framed and handled to compel attention, and attention was focused on the meaning which, in its turn, had immediate significance and relevance both for the individual spectator and for the society of which the individuals were members.

Armed with this source material, it is possible in this second volume of Early English Stages to trace the progress of this tradition through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, assuming that its basically emblematic stage-conventions will survive until changes in philosophical thought and in real life practice have become large enough to make those conventions meaningless to their audiences. Revolutionary changes in religious and political thought on the one hand, and in social behaviour on the other, characterize the sixteenth century in England. It is thus natural to anticipate some reflection of them in theatre practice both on the stage and in the auditorium. By far the most important of these three changes is that in religious thought, characterized by the Reformation and, specifically, by the transference of the headship of the Church of England from the Pope to the sovereign. The sovereign's assumption of ultimate authority in doctrinal matters automatically translated the subject matter of a predominantly religious drama into a political issue. State censorship becomes inevitable, and the very concept of drama as a means by which to mirror the cosmos in art is itself threatened: by 1660 this concept is virtually dead.

The concept of independent nationhood, developed at the expense of internationalism, marks the second change in the thinking of sixteenth century society that finds expression in the theatre. It is reflected most acutely in the formulation of dramatic theory differing widely from country to country, but common to all in one respect: a gradual exposure of divergence between the characteristics of life as lived in a country and the traditional stage conventions employed to depict it in the theatre. Devices evolved through an approach to art which sought to make eternity live in the present came to seem inadequate for the full depiction of the particular national and individual moment. Where England and the English are concerned, Ben Jonson crystallizes this sentiment in his Prologue to Every Man In His Humour.

Though neede make many Poets, and some such
As art, and nature have not betterd much;
Yet ours, for want, hath not so lov'dthe stage,
As he dare serve th'illcustomes of the age:
Or purchase your delight at such a rate,
As, for it, he himselfe must justly hate.