Simon Barker - The Routledge Anthology of Renaissance Drama

Although most people continued to live and work in agricultural communities, towns and cities were nonetheless expanding rapidly and becoming increasingly powerful. This expansion was the result of a number of factors: the development of early forms of manufacturing and trade, an increase in the overall population of the country (doubling from 2.5 million in the 1520s to around 5 million in 1600), and the continuing process of the enclosure of land into larger, privately owned, units of production. Philip Stubbes, writing in The Anatomie of Abuses (1583), explained that: They take in, and inclose commons, moores, heaths, and other common pastures, wher out the poore commonalitie were wont to have all their forage and feeding for their cattell, & (which is more) corne for them selves to lyve uppon For these inclosures be the causes, why rich men, eat up poore men, as beasts do eat grass. (Stubbes 1973: n.p.) Historians debate the extent and effect of this process during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603) but most note the considerable unrest such dispossession caused, especially in times of poor harvest and the accompanying migration to the towns. Early industrial activity, often benefiting from the skills of Protestant immigrants from The Netherlands and France, also drew people from the countryside to the towns in search of wages and the perceived benefits of urban life. The population of London itself was most affected and the city grew to be one of the largest in Europe.

The 200,000 people who lived in London in 1600 represented a doubling of the citys population since 1580, and it was to double again, to 400,000, by 1650. One effect of this increase was to create a large audience for the expanding network of theatres. Many of the people who attended these theatres had a memory of the traditions and cycles of activity in the countryside, as well as a new consciousness of the rigours and, indeed, the dangers of urban life. Many Londoners retained a connection with the countryside through the citys agricultural markets, but London was also rapidly becoming the focus for a new kind of commercial activity which had an increasingly international dimension. For more people than ever before, there emerged an awareness of the nation in relation to the rest of Europe, as well as to the expanding world itself, as news circulated of the settlements made in the territories of the new worlds beyond Europe. The period of history during which the plays in this volume were written was one of increasing exploration and the first tentative planting (of people) overseas.

Englands only real colony (and most successful plantation of Protestantism) was Ireland. However, whatever the practical successes and failures of these activities, the impulse towards the settlement of overseas territories can be glimpsed surprisingly early in the sixteenth century. Trade links to the east of Europe (and particularly with Turkey through the Levant Company) opened up possibilities of further links as far as India and China. Some of this business involved the establishment of small groups of traders abroad. The lands across the Atlantic to the west, however, gave rise to the possibility of an entirely different form of activity. The idea arose in the 1560s that a stabling place could be set up in North America through which local raw materials could be exchanged for English cloth.

Indeed, in 1582 Humphrey Gilbert declared English sovereignty over Newfoundland but the project failed, as did the idea of a New Albion in what is now California and early plantations in Virginia during 1584 and 1587. It was not until the 1620s that more successful settlements were established, yet this earlier expansion, together with associated tensions in international affairs, particularly with Spain, had made an enlarged concept of the world available for a great number of people. However, there were insecurities about the development of a non-agrarian structure of employment and in the new awareness of the world which it had helped to deliver, and these tensions are revealed in the dramatic writing of the period. Whilst many of these plays, such as A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), are located in the claustrophobic settings of English (or foreign) country estates, an increasing number, such as The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), Epicoene, or The Silent Woman (1609) and The Roaring Girl , established the importance of towns and cities as places recognisable as images of the structure and pattern of everyday life for the theatre audience. Even where town life was represented in European settings ( The Changeling (1622) is set in Spain, for example, and Tis Pity Shes a Whore (1633) in Italy), there would have been a keen sense of identification for London audiences intrigued by the potential for comparison between these imagined overseas locations and their own expanding city. Moreover, a strong element throughout the drama of the seventeenth century is the perceived clash between the ways of the country and the ways of the town.