Introduction

The great age of the English Renaissance was the great age of English drama. Roughly within the span of Shakespeare's lifetime, fifteen public and private theaters were built and opened in England where none at all had flourished before. John Brayne built the Red Lion in Whitechapel in 1569; nine years later, his brother-in-law, James Burbage, built the Theatre in Shoreditch, just northeast of the city walls of London; and a year after that, the Curtain was constructed nearby. They were large amphitheaters, roofless so that the sun shone in, and they had the capacity to hold up to 3,000 spectators. A rival center of dramatic activity sprang up in Southwark, south of the Thames and once more outside the city walls to escape the jurisdiction of London authorities who feared crowds, riots, and epidemics of plague. The Rose was built in 1587, the Swan in 1595, the Globe in 1599, and the Hope in 1614. Meantime, north of the Thames, but still outside the city, the Fortune was built in 1600, the Boar's Head in 1601, and the Red Bull in 1604; inside the city there were courtyards of inns and Blackfriars, Whitefriars, and even St. Paul's. By 1620, the traveler Fynes Moryson noted, "The City of London . . . hath four or five companies of players with their peculiar theatres capable of many thousands, wherein they all play every day in the week except Sunday. . . there be in my opinion more plays in London than in all the world I have seen." There was suddenly a "fashion of play-making," Thomas Middleton notes in the preface to his and Dekker's play The Roaring Girl (1611); indeed, as early as 1604 no one in London was more than two miles away from a major playhouse. Great poetry had become big business. Nor did that go unacknowledged. "The Theater is your poet's Royal Exchange," Thomas Dekker writes in The Gull's Hornbook (1609), "upon which their Muses - that are now turned to merchants - meeting, barter away that light commodity of words."

But Renaissance England had always been fundamentally theatrical - from Henry VIII's remarkable staging of the Field of the Cloth of Gold to Thomas More's dramatic execution for failing to recognize Henry as the Supreme Head of the Church; from Queen Anne Boleyn's coronation progress through the streets of London from the Tower to Westminster, already pregnant with the Princess Elizabeth, to the identical progress of her daughter as Elizabeth I, charting the same route with theatrical pageants of her own to honor her mother, whose reign had been so short-lived. Theater not only meant drama, it meant spectacle, as with Henry VIII; religious commentary, as with John Heywood; and political and social commentary, as with Queen Anne and Queen Elizabeth. Indeed, all of these dimensions come together in the execution of the Earl of Essex.

On February 25, 1601 - not coincidentally on Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Christian Lent, a period of forbearance and reconsecration - Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, was the fifth person under the Tudors to be beheaded publicly on the green in the Tower of London for treason. Once the favorite courtier and loyal servant of Elizabeth I, he was accused of leading his men in a bold, brash attempt to depose her. For several days before his public execution he was said to be hysterical with remorse and terror. If so, his steady composure on that fatal day came as a dramatic change. Eyewitnesses testified that he mounted the scaffold calmly and steadily, and once on the platform he swept off his black hat - the color of melancholy and the sign of repentance - and bowed to the peers of the realm who had gathered to see his end. He confessed his past sins, lamented his wasted youth, and prayed for forgiveness from God. With a speech that would long be remembered, he talked of his special regret for the rebellion and prayed for the Queen's welfare. Then, pausing dramatically while a clergyman prompted him, he went on to forgive his enemies, to pray against the fear of death, and to ask God to uphold the realm. He said the Lord's Prayer. He absolved his executioner, recited the Creed, and then began disrobing. He removed his outer garments, including the black cloak that signified mourning; he passed from the public dress of the condemned to the private dress of a man alone before God. He was now seen in a long-sleeved scarlet waistcoat, the rich red color symbolizing the bloody death that faced him but also the martyrdom he wished his death to become. Then he lay down, put his head on the executioner's block, and - commending his spirit to the Lord - gave the axeman the cue to strike. The Christian knight who had served his lady the Queen with such magnanimity, devotion, and obedience was transformed into a Christian servant of the Lord now reconciled to his Maker.

It is difficult to discern just how much of this scripted spectacle performed before a limited audience dramatized a man's conflict with guilt and how much was simply convention - on February 18, 1587, for example, the rebellious Mary, Queen of Scots, had been executed in much the same way at Fotheringhay Castle. Both were moments of extravagant theater before an audience for which life and theater, history and art, were often interchangeable. Shakespeare's plays make repeated use of this fact: the mechanicals' show before the Athenian Duke Theseus and his court in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the pageant of the Nine Worthies staged in Love's Labors Lost, the wedding masque in The Tempest, the revival of Hermione in The Winter's Tale, and even the whole play of Kate and Petruchio put on for Christopher Sly in The Taming of the Shrew all demonstrate how art might grow out of life, life might turn into art, or art might mock or transform human existence. "All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players," Jaques says in As You Like It - the word merely then meaning entirely - and he goes on to describe all the stages of man's life as stock theatrical characters with stock dramatic behavior. Everything is contained here - from the praise of Henry V by Shakespeare's Chorus to the poor players left to strut an hour on the stage of Macbeth's imagination. All of life, seen as representational, was also seen as enactment.

But if all the world was a stage in the English Renaissance, it follows that the stage might be the world. Surely this was so at the Globe playhouse, where a round building representing the world contained a stage in which the trapdoor represented hell while the actors spoke their lines in earthly settings beneath a roof painted to look like the heavens. Plays of the period, moreover, grew out of earlier village plays sponsored by the church and the guilds in which local folk enacted their own world history with biblical texts from Genesis to Revelation, from the dawn of creation to the Last Judgment; here ordinary men might become Adam or Moses or Christ or Judas for a day and ordinary women could play Eve or Noah's wife, the Virgin Mary or Mary Magdalene. Alongside plays of all sorts in the Renaissance in England, there were other public spectacles and entertainments, such as mummings, interludes, pageants, processionals, and masquers revels. These too followed scripts, usually implicit, often condensed, but essentially narrative when they unfolded, presenting life's moments of celebration and conflict. So theatrical beheadings - usually reserved for nobility - and hangings for offenders of other stations or rank or of no rank at all were essentially performative, as were the lesser punishments of scolds and witches carried in carts to the jeers of spectators, or cuckolds asked to ride backwards through the streets, or, in an equally theatrical if more static way, those condemned to the stocks or to whipping posts. The rule of state might be dramatized through the orations of town heralds reading royal proclamations; the word of God might be made dramatic by the delivery and gestures of preachers in their indoor and their outdoor pulpits. The grammar school curriculum taught ancient texts through performance and through the hypothetical reconstruction of ancient persons, as well as focusing on rhetoric taught by orations and dialogues that might later be imported into the drama directly. At London's Inns of Court, law students turned mock trials into serious theater or comic mockery. Indeed, Renaissance England was a world that measured time, welcomed ambassadors, and installed royal and local officials with plays, disguisings, and mummings as well as even more spectacular juggling, fencing, and the setting off of fireworks. The theatrical culture that inspired Renaissance plays and entertainments gave them its substance, and drama responded by not only representing but interrogating that culture. No performance was simply make-believe, and no performance was innocent of truth. They were, indeed, inherently analogous to the life they portrayed and inherently a comment on it.

The recorded coronation procession of Queen Elizabeth through the streets of London in 1559 is a case in point. The shows along the procession were designed to celebrate the new monarch and to entertain the broadest possible populace as they lined the streets, but these shows also had their political purposes. At the Conduit in Fleet Street, for example, the obligatory welcome of Elizabeth reinstated the sovereign as Deborah and her role as rex iustus, a queen of law and even-handed justice. The pageant, moreover,...