UNIVERSIDAD DE JAEN

DPTO. DE FILOLOGÍA INGLESA

3° de FILOLOGÍA INGLESA

Literatura Inglesa y sus relaciones con la literatura europea

TOPIC 3

ELIZABETHAN DRAMA IN THE CONTEXT OF THE EUROPEAN DRAMA OF THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES

PLAN

l. SOCIETY AND POLITICS: SEMI-ABSOLUTISM AND SUBVERSION.

2. RE-ELABORATION OF CLASSICAL CONCEPTS

3. SPANISH AND ENGLISH DRAMAS COMPARED

Luciano García García

1. SOCIETY AND POLITICS: SEMI-ABSOLUTISM AND SUBVERSION.- The history of European theatre during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries revolves around two main nuclei of dramatic activity: England and Spain. It does not mean that there was no drama development in other European countries, especially in France, Italy, and The Low Countries, countries which achieved their own and very important tradition of native drama from the Medieval Ages to that time. But, important and instrumental as these nations were (especially Italy and France) for the development of European drama in general, they never reached the level of maturity and accomplishment both as to a whole corpus of plays and dramatic tradition, and as to the development of a full and extensive theatrical industry (theatres as public buildings, companies of actor, theatrical activity on a commercial base) achieved in England and Spain during the late sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century. In effect, English and Spanish dramas, which evolved independently along their own national traditions and social conditions, are remarkable for presenting several outstanding and unique qualities that make them stand out in the general panorama of Western literature of the time. Of course, some of these features are common to both countries, whereas some other features are peculiar to each of them. The explanation both for similarities and differences must be found in the common medieval tradition of religious drama, in the partially shared features of the Renaissance thrust affecting both countries, and, finally, in the overall social conditions of semi-absolutism that with diverse fortune operated upon both England and Spain. All these three conditions explain not only the similarities, but also the differences, insofar as the diverging cultural, political, social and economic concretions of both countries established different conditions for the development of the cultural activity in general and the dramatic activity in particular.

When talking about semi-absolutism in relation to drama we invoke the main thesis of Walter Cohen (1985) stating “that the absolutist sate, by its inherent dynamism and contradiction, first fostered and then undermined the public theater. More precisely, the similarities between Spanish and English absolutism help account for the parallels between the two dramatic traditions, while the divergent courses of economic and religious developments in England and in Spain begin to explain the differences”.

The question that we are going to address under this heading is what is the relationship between the emergence of absolutism as a transitional form of organization in the Western countries in the transitional passage from feudalism to fully developed capitalism and the drama, notably the two most accomplished forms of drama during the period (English and Spanish) going roughly from the last quarter of the sixteenth century to 1650 and then, what is the relation of drama as to the complex relationship between the dichotomy conformity and subversion in that given sociopolitical context.

First of all, absolutism, or rather the incomplete form of it emerging in England and Spain, was a necessary condition for the establishment of a true national drama with all its accompanying circumstances: a drama that responds to a national ideal (territorial, political, cultural and religious), to a viable fusion of popular and classical or learned elements, to a concentration of population making it possible from a commercial point of view, and to a continuous process of development that allowed to set up a recognisable dramatic tradition. In its ideal form, this kind of semi-absolutism was realized only in England and Spain. Semi-absolutism means, on the other hand, that not only the forces of aristocracism implied in a certain refeudalization of the state were operating, but also the relative pressure of the emergent bourgeoisie, and to a lesser extend of the lower classes.[1]

For some reason or another, other countries in Europe did not achieved this kind of absolutism in the previous period from 1490 to 1575, either by defect or excess (Italy, Western Germany, the Netherlands, the Austrian Habsburg empire, Poland, Scandinavia) or by reaching it too late (France).

In the case of Italy, a pioneering neoclassical drama had spread throughout the peninsula, often drawing on popular culture, and profoundly influencing the professional acting companies of the country. Yet the exceptionalism of Italian political situation with its radical territorial fragmentation based on the city-state, the precocious development of capitalism, the copresence as governing bodies of nobility and bourgeoisie in the Italian towns, and the consequent absence of absolutism, national unity, and a national capital, prevented the possibility of existence of the accompanying circumstances of an absolute monarchy noted above, namely, a drama that responds to a national ideal, a viable fusion of popular and classical or learned elements, a concentration of population making it possible from a commercial point of view, and the setting up of a powerful dramatic tradition. Instead, what we witness in Italy is the emergence of a neoclassical vernacular drama shortly after 1500 made by nonprofessional playwrights (imitated anyway in England and Spain),[2] writing for an upper-class learned audience, often at court as an accompaniment to other festivities, and regionally dispersed in the different important courts of the peninsula.[3] In sum, we can say that Italian theatre of the sixteenth century was largely neoclassical, amateur, elite, occasional and regional.

The only popular product issued by the Italian drama —and one that exerted an enduring and large influence on the rest of Europe— is the commedia dell’arte, a type of play that drew freely on the learned theatre, converting its borrowings into standardized techniques, types and scenarios suitable for impromptu performance, and which, besides, was truly popular, professional, and successful for well over a century. However, it was more a general framework for the production of offhanded performances than a proper genre producing actual plays, and, despite its appeal to all social strata, was directed mainly toward wealthier circles and in time toward an international, rather than a merely local or even national, audience.

France possessed a capital comparable to Madrid or London and an absolute monarchy. But the power of the French monarchy was too weak during most of the sixteenth century to allow the consolidation of absolutism before 1600. In effect, four decades of civil war—dividing France among religious, geographical, and class line— ruled out national unity of any kind, much less the consolidation of absolutism, so that at the very time when the public theatres of Spain and England were being established, the possibility of a French national stage became increasingly remote. To this must be added the existence of an unusually potent and lasting amateur medieval tradition bent of farce, which inhibited the fusion between popular and neoclassical elements and the use or leasing of theatres by professional players in Paris as far as the reign of Henry IV (1589-1610).[4] Only between about 1600 and 1625 did Paris roughly duplicate theatrical conditions in Madrid and London a quarter of a century earlier, and indeed, the plays of Alexandre Hardy, composed and performed during this period, significantly resemble much Spanish and English drama. Yet Hardy seems to have achieved little popularity in Paris until the 1620s, for a number of forces, despite the beginning of the process of consolidation of absolutism during the reign of Henry IV, were working against the drama during the first twenty-five years of the seventeenth century. French national unity rested more on a truce between opposing parties than on a real community of interests (France enjoyed only religious toleration following the Edict of Nantes), which contrasted with the relative religious uniformity of Spain or England; its theatre, especially if compared with the London stage, lacked the patronage of crown and aristocracy; there was only one theatre in Paris[5] run as a monopoly; it seriously interfered with any efforts at a popular-neoclassical synthesis through its strong heritage of farce; the professional actor of the time were relatively young and with no professional tradition, as happened in England or Spain. These were some of the likely reasons why France even during the first quarter of the seventeenth century did not produced a drama like England’s and Spain’s, despite the analogous social and institutional milieu. When, after an unusually rapid transition from a very weak to a very strong absolutism, some important stage traditions developed during the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the dramatic result in France was a generally neoclassical drama, in this respect eminiscent of the Italian stage, rather than a synthesis of popular and learned elements, as occurred in Spain and England. The rise of absolutism particularly after Richelieu assumed power in 1620, and the consequent peacetime, brought a gradual elevation in urban aristocratic taste, which began to affect theatre in the 1620s: audience preference turned from farce to the more classical plays of Hardy and then, even before 1630, to the still more classical and polished works of his immediate succesors. After 1640, a relative decline in the mixed genre of tragicomedy coincided with the rise of a more regular, classical tragedy by Corneille and Racine, who were going to give France its great epoch of French national neoclassical drama. Thus we can say to summarize that the unusually potent amateur medieval tradition combines with an unusually rapid and late transition from a very weak to a very strong absolutism allied to prevent a fusion of popular and learned elements like the one that happened in Spain or England before 1630, and to produce instead its own type of neoclassical drama.

The Scandinavian countries in general did not achieve a theatre of their own during the sixteenth century, although samples of Latin neoclassical plays and school drama in Latin, sometimes in German, or the vernacular can be found here and there, especially in Denmark and Sweden. In general, the lack of an absolutist state or the late consolidation of it (the case of Sweden), and, more important, the existence of feeble towns, a weak bourgeoisie, and low commercialization impeded the urban synthesis between nobility and bourgeoisie, which, in turn, seriously hindered the development of national drama.

Western Germany and the Netherlands faced first of all the obvious problem of territorial fragmentation and lack of a ruling absolutist monarchy. Indeed these countries faced the opposite problem. The dominance of the bourgeoisie and a relative weakness of the aristocracy was the general rule, so that few aristocrats complemented the domination of the burgher classes in the cities. On the one hand, the density of urban settlement precluded the formation of absolutism and thus a political structure similar to France’s, Spain’s, or England’s. On the other, the towns of Germany and the Low Countries rarely acquired adequate weight in feudal society to conquer the surrounding countryside, and so, unable to become territorial city-states, they failed to incorporate the local aristocracy and hence to provide a geographical ground on which the urban and rural ruling classes might meet.

The question of why was the bourgeoisie, in the absence of the feudal landowners, incapable of fostering a major Renaissance theatre should be addressed differently for either Germany or the Low Countries. Through northern Europe urban lay culture retained a more religious characters than in Italy. In Germany the continued separation of burgher and noble may have perpetuated this situation, so that the courts, aristocratic halls, and learned private societies that sponsored plays in Italy and the absolutist West, have few parallels in Germany. Neoclassical theatre was largely limited to the schools, institutions whose language was often Latin and whose ideological orientation was didactic and religious, particularly after the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. As long as the humanist stage remained an adjunct of pedagogy, it could become neither secular nor vernacular. If, on the other hand, it emerged from the confines of the school in search of a broader public, the nonexistence of either a homogeneously educated audience drawn from the upper classes or of a national secular literary language resulted in the loss of its classical features. Any chance of a significant western German Renaissance theatre was eliminated later, first by the gradual decline of the towns after 1550 and then by the disastrous wars of religion of the seventeenth century.

If Germany had not reached the point where it could foster Renaissance drama, the socio-political development of Netherlands (especially in the United Provinces of the North) soon took the region beyond that point. During the fifteenth and most of the sixteenth centuries the Low Countries remained under the centralized rule of a foreign aristocracy, first of the Burgundian dukes, and then of the Habsburg monarchs, the bourgeoisie being native. Due to the ensuing ethnic and linguistic split no synthesis of foreign nobility and native bourgeoisie occurred. The outbreak of the eighty years rebellion against the Spanish Habsburg in 1568 was mainly a bourgeois revolution, despite the participation of the Dutch nobility and the often conservative aspirations of the rebels. An early outcome was the domination of the civil and political life of the country by the bourgeoisie. Under these conditions the possibility of the existence of a viable neoclassical drama and, what is more, its fusion with popular elements became impossible for the most part, although surprisingly enough a strongly neoclassical vernacular and bourgeois drama came into being by 1550 and especially after 1575.

In other countries of Europe the process and the result, with their particular development was basically the same. Only, as we have seen, in England and in Spain there was a favourable social and political ground for the development of a national drama.

The other important question that we have to address here is to determine up to what extent this drama, which was the result of the semi-absolutism prevailing in the two countries, responded to drives of conformism or subversion. The question is difficult, for the critical stance of the scholar considering this problem may enhance either the elements of conformism or the elements of subversion no doubt existing in the public drama of Spain and England (see Cohen, 1985: 25-28). Anyway, what is certain is that both theatres depended on a relatively unified national culture serving the interests and ideals of the ruling classes, but incorporating popular elements that make it potentially subversive at least in several respects. Already in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we witness, both in England and in Spain, several attacks on the popular subversiveness of the public theatres: in England on the part of the Puritans mainly; in Spain on the part of the Jesuits; and in both countries on the part of the town councils as representative of the local bourgeoisie. The crown and the aristocracy, on the other hand, generally defended it. “As is well known, only royal and aristocratic patronage insured the survival of the theatres in both England and Spain. Too much should not be made of this contribution, of course. The absolutist state and the high aristocracy exerted their primary influence on the plays through their domination of society, a position that made them a frequent focus of the drama and their ideology its fundamental orientation. The general support of the stage provided by this hegemonic class only reinforced such theatrical tendencies. Again, royal protection also involved royal censorship, in Spain as well as England. Finally, in both countries the ultimate impact of the state on the stage was profoundly ambiguous. The absolute monarchy, by the inherent dynamism and contradictions of its centralizing process, first created and then destroyed the public theatre”. In general, the dominant ideology, which sought at once to understand, to master, to disguise, and to justify the realities of late-sixteenth-century Spanish and English life, was a familiar, refurbished version of the medieval commitment to hierarchy and organic unity (the three orders of society nobility, clergy and peasantry, and now the artisan and commercial classes as well, should keep united, according to their station in the social scale for the commonwealth). It accorded the greatest esteem to the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the church, groups that, combined with the educational system, were in turn the main propagators of the ideology. The social values incorporated in the drama through the dependence on this dominant ideology were mainly those of national unity under the monarchy (embodied above all in the history plays of both countries), religion (either Anglican or Catholic respectively), and the acceptance of the leading role of monarchy, and, as an adjunct to it, of the aristocracy. In this respect, the same assumption of these values by all classes is generally apparent in both countries, albeit with a different emphasis on the aristocratic concept of honour in Spain (comedias de honor) versus a more liberal invocation of the conciliation of the values of social hierarchy, legitimacy and capacity of leadership of the aristocracy with the highly useful commercial values of the lesser gentry and middle class in England. This partly different assumption of the aristocratic values, given the weakness of the bourgeoisie in Spain in comparison with the other country, had a consequences in the great weight given in England to bourgeois tragedy and tragicomedy (witness the city comedies and country dramas by Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood and Thomas Middleton)[6], which sharply contrasts with the weight given instead in Spain to the peasant plays.[7] A similar diverging feature, within the social domination of religion in both countries, is to be witnessed in the absence of religious drama in England compared to the central role of religious plays (especially autos sacramentales and saints’ lives) in Spain. Once these differences have been accounted for, however, the question remains that the role of the plays is generally subservient to these values imposed by the ruling classes.

Where is to be found the subversion then? We must take into account that the public of these plays was composed to a large extent by the lower orders of society (soldiers, apprentices, artisans, students, women, servants, rural landowners and peasants) and that the playwrights addressed them as well as the high ranks, so that elements of social critique from the side of these groups does necessarily crop up in more or less apparent forms. Depending on the critical stand that we take, we may lay more or less emphasis on the popular heritage and the creativity of common people within an interclass, organicist unity that performs the dual and related functions of effacing the conflicts (witness such phenomena as the inclusion of comical elements within serious, and the figure of the fool or the gracioso) and expose them;[8] on the other hand, concern with the learned elite orientation of the drama has led a trend in combining Marxism, feminism, and poststructuralism both to the critique of the resulting conservatism and to advocacy of the resulting radicalism.[9] Another point of view is supplied by the skeptical interrogation of the role of popular culture to demonstrate how apparently popular initiatives reinforces the status quo.[10] Finally, a leftist enthusiasm for popular dramaturgy, centred in Marxist scholarship, takes the form of an insistence on the efficacy of lower-class initiatives and the importance of social antagonism, incurring too often in the overestimation of the autonomy of the oppressed.[11]

No matter which critical stance we take, the main issues of subversion in the public drama of both England and Spain revolves about the following issues: the popular heritage and the creativity of common people, expressed in such topics as role-play and disguise, carnival, farce, fantasy, and in general the breaking of the accepted social norms; the function of apparently anti-aristocratic values such as English middle-class or Spanish peasant consciousness which may or may not turned out in a plain or reformative justification of aristocratic values; the incidental or implied denunciation of specific or general unjust social conditions;[12] and the central function of the fool or the gracioso (or for that matter servants, discriminated population or women) as a marginal counter-discourse to the established values proposed by the play.

2. RE-ELABORATION OF CLASSICAL CONCEPTS

The one defining feature of the public theatres of Spain and England and, to a lesser extent or later chronology, of other countries is the blending of popular and learned forms of drama. The latter form did not come, however, straightaway from the classical antiquity but depended rather on received ideas during the Renaissance which had developed in connection with the humanist drive to unearth the classical inheritance of Rome and Greece, both by a theoretical reinterpretation and by a practical, if amateur, school-like, or upper-class staging of dramas translated, adapted, or highly moulded on their reception of Greek and Roman plays. In this context it is clear that a re-elaboration of classical concepts took place in two senses: in the reinterpretation of the preserved plays of antiquity according to the new social and cultural conditions of the Renaissance, and, secondly, in its fusion more or less extensive and intensive with the popular tradition originating in the strong medieval practice of drama in Europe. In the first sense it is noteworthy that the neo-classical dramas very often dealt with issues and topics of interest for the European Society of the late Middle Ages;[13] in the second sense even the most staunch neo-classical approach introduced some elements of popular or at least contemporary topicality and characterization.[14]

A first aspect that deserves attention is the fact that the classics were not unknown to the medieval intellectuals. However, the way in which they were read was completely subservient to a superimposed Christian sense that interpreted the classics as authorities who confirmed the Christian truths with their writings, either by way of imperfect anticipation, or by way of allegorical correlates of biblical truths. What the Renaissance humanist did, first in Italy and then in the rest of Europe, was to recover the classics in the light of their historical and human dimension.

This, of course, responded to the complex and contradictory social and economic situation of Europe in the pre-capitalist stage of the late Medieval Age, first in the Italian states and later in the Netherlands and the rest of the countries. One of the contradictions was the necessity of conciliation of these new humanist values and interests with the Christian background. More often than not, the solution was the separation of both worlds (as in interlude or comedy) or, at the best, the location of the classic values at the basis of and in relation to civic values, that were now appreciated by themselves, as a sort of prerequisite for the religious values. We observe in much of the neo-classical humanist drama a lack of concern for Christian values, not because they are anti-Christian, but because they are dealing with civic, didactic or urban issues which have their own autonomy. Otherwise, we witness the recuperation of classical values in those aspects that are more akin to Christianity. This is the case, for instance of the so-called Christian Terence, an immense corpus of varied plays mainly in Latin, so named after the collection of “sacred comedies”, “sacred tragicomedies” and domestic comedies or fabulae ludicrae began by the Dutch Cornelius Schonaeus towards 1570. Here we have a first attempt to conciliate both worlds profiting from the didactic and refomative possibilities of this Latin author. Indeed, the Christian Terence went as backwards in time as the tenth century nun of Gandersheim, Hroswitha, whose sacred plays, in which she attempted to christianize or moralize the Terentian method infusing it with a clearly edifying Christian moral purpose, had been published in 1501 at Nuremberg. Long before 1570 (about 1530) the technique of the Christian Terence had been established. And it was going to keep its vogue during the whole of the sixteenth century, giving rise, besides several interesting developments in comedy, to various outgrowths (the prodigal-son play as the most conspicuous of them) which in more than one respect advanced the cause of the tragicomedy in Europe. At all events, the authors of these academic plays, written mainly for the instruction of students, are noteworthy for the development of modern tragicomedy in several aspects. Thus, we see how in some way or another the recuperation of the classics means a certain re-interpretation in the light of the socio-political or religious reality of the humanists.

A main source of re-elaboration of classical drama lay with Continental humanists, such as Italian and French humanists and Dutch Neo-Latinists. The first important name is the French Ravisius Textor, whose Latin dialogues were soon adapted into very free versions with a convincing native air as soon as 1530. Two works of him deserve mention the Thersites, adapted into an English version in 1537 and Juvenis, Pater, Uxor which gave rise to a theme with had a considerable run of popularity in Europe: the Prodigal Son plays.[15]

In close connection with the humanists lie the first performances of classical plays and adaptations during the sixteenth in schools and other seats of learning. It was a common practice for schools, influenced by Humanist thought, to enact Plautus or Terence in Latin as part of their curriculum. Boys of grammar school or university students soon became amateur actors for the staging of translations and adaptations of the classics by their teachers.[16] For comedy the two more influential classical authors were the already mentioned Plautus and Terence.[17]

The Italian playwrights who, as has been said, did never amount to professional dramatists, contributed with different influential plays. The several attempts at comedy or tragedy and tragicomedy during the early and middle sixtenth century by Ariosto, the Cardenal Bibiena (La Calandria), Machiavelli (La Mandragora), Annibal Caro, Angelo Beolco, known as Ruzzante, Giraldi Cintio (Altile, Selene, Arrenopia, Antivalomeni, etc.), Pomponio Torelli,[18] Giambatista Guarini,[19] or the anonymous authors of Gli Ingannati or La Veniexiana were examples highly instrumental in the conformation of the national drama or England and Spain before 1575.[20]

European tragedy was partly brought about by interest in humanist thought as well, and this granted, it is only natural that the first dramatists looked at the classics for inspiration. The model that tragedy took in Europe was not Greek, but Roman, and within the Romans, Seneca, perhaps the one most dangerous, for his tragedies were oratorical (or "closet" dramas), and therefore, eschewed dramatic movement, abounded in monologues and had little action, in sum, fitter to be declaimed than acted. That Seneca were the favourite classical dramatist was no wonder, since he was also the most popular in France and Italy, and was the latter country the one influencing most the English stage.

As Anthony Burgess puts it, there were three ways of being influenced by Seneca:

1. reading him at schools in the original.

2. reading certain translations from French works which acknowledged their influenced (chorus) but watered language.

3. reading Italian plays which called themselves Senecan, but were full of horrors enacted on the stage. This was by far the most popular way with the Elizabethans and largely associated tragedy with the idea of monstruous crimes.

This was one of the not really genuine Senecan features most eagerly assimilated by the Elizabethan stage, but there were other Senecan features which played a decisive part in that development:

1. The sense of rebellion against the gods, the non acceptance, implicit in his philosophy of stocism, of their unjust and whimsical will.

2. The moralizing speeches which were prompted and complemented by the Elizabethan interest in crime, violence and atrocity, both things (violence and moralizing) being confirmed fully in Seneca and easier to assimilate due to the morality plays and the main tradition of medieval literature.

3. The use of blank verse (first employed by Earl of Surrey in a non dramatic work) in an attempt to render Latin at its best.

4. Some machinery such as the chorus to divide the acts or the ghost, charged with the explanation of the play.

All these influences were at the bottom of the formation of the European drama. All the countries benefited from them in their dramatic practice, but England and Spain were the countries that advanced more definitely towards their integration with native and popular elements, and in so doing, they succeeded in creating a new and powerful national tradition.

3. SPANISH AND ENGLISH DRAMAS COMPARED

The dramas of both Spain and England ran extraordinarily parallel in their developments. However, there was little contact between the two countries during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their general similarities should be accounted for by the homogenous social and political circumstances as far as the dominance of semi-absolutism is concerned, the more or less common medieval tradition, the humanist spirit, the Renaissance plays of Italy, and the possibility of reaching a synthesis between learned and popular elements. Their differences should be understood in the light of such particular circumstances as the different religion, the existence of a strong or weak bourgeoisie in each country, the slightly different balance in the mixing up of popular and learned elements on account of the qualified weight of the urban middle-class or peasantry, and, in the operating effect of the main literary personalities such as Lope de Vega or Shakespeare that inclined the balance towards a more canonical form of plays and genres.[21]

A brief and hurried account of the main similarities and differences of both dramas would yield the following synoptic list:

1. The chronological parallel in the development of both traditions: English public drama really starts during the decade of the 1580s (Elizabethan drama in a narrow sense) with the first efforts by the University Wits, roughly goes on with Shakespeare from 1590 to 1613, and might be thought of being followed by two partial periods corresponding to the reign of James the I from 1603 to 1625 (the Jacobean period) and the reign of Charles I from 1624 up to the closing of the theatres in 1642. Lope de Vega’s (1562-1635) outstanding and long career dominates Spanish drama from 1580 until 1640 and he provides an viable division in three twenty-year blocks (1580-1600, 1600-1620 and 1620-1640, dominated by the productions of Calderón, and after) which mark, in a close similarity with the English stage, the periods of emergence of public theatre (1580-1600), its triumph and initial experience of crisis (1600-1620), and, finally, its decline and gradual supersession by the court theatre. These three period might be made to coincide with the reigns of Philip II (d. 1598), Philip III (1598-21), and Philip IV (1621-65).

2. The surprising likeliness, though by no means absolute, of playhouses, and, more specifically, of stages. These similarities are to be accounted for by the common medieval and Renaissance tradition of playing in improvised public spaces such as inn yards and corrales, by a common experience in the search for the ideal performance space within the conditions that govern playing and view, and perhaps by the Italian influence through public buildings and itinerant groups.

3. The location of companies of actors in one capital (London) or several (Madrid, Valencia, Seville), due to the commercial possibilities offered by the copresence of court and commerce in the urban center of the nation. These companies, however, might frequently go on tour to the country. Their use of financing capital is divergent in both countries: in London, in a more typically capitalistic way, the public theatre were run for public profit, the main beneficiaries being the owners of the property on which the playhouses were erected and especially the merchants who loaned or invested for their construction. Although some instances of this scheme may be found in Spain (Valladolid and Seville) and some other lesser instances), the normal pattern was more precapitalist or even feudal, based on the ownership and exploitation of the theatres by religious houses and charitable organizations which devoted their profits to the administration of hospitals: the Cofradía de la Pasión and the Cofradía de la Soledad together managed the Madrid public theatres as a monopoly. However, subcontracting of various money-making activities (arrendamientos) related to the corrales became the norm after 1600.

4. The economic exploitation of theatres on commercial basis, with one or several proprietors, who might be some of the actors themselves, and other actors working as employees in a kind of precapitalist artisan drama.

5. The companies in both countries operated under royal licencing, patronage and censorship, while appealing to a large clientele in the pursuit of profit.

6. English and Spanish dramas attracted virtually all urban social strata, although the lower classes probably dominated the audience numerically. A relative cultural homogeneity of town and country, of upper and lower classes helped the drama exploit a variety of heritages and attract a broad spectrum of the populace.

7. Fusion of popular and classical materials that distinguishes English and Spanish drama.

8. The secularization of the English stage, an indication of the bourgeois future, contrasts with the roughly contemporaneous florescence of the Spanish religious play, a sign of the feudal past. Religious plays are central in Spain, but peripheral in England.

9. The typical treatment of authorship, publication, ownership, and revision are basically the same in both countries, with playwrights selling their manuscripts to the companies and losing their right of proprietary rights; publication of plays being an altogether subordinate matter;[22] and with abundance of composite authorship and tampering of previous plays.

10. A noticeable difference, however, is the absence of actresses in the English theatre until 1660. In Spain actresses were an important part of the staging of plays and the social life surrounding it from the very beginning.

11. Another characteristic difference is the distinctive convention to carry out the representation in the Spanish playhouse: with such short spectacles or interludes as the Loa, the entremés, the jácara, the mojiganga, or the baile, preceding and closing the actual play, and being interspersed before each act.

12. The main difference between English and Spanish drama is provided, however, by the general lack of coincidence among the dramatic kinds and themes. We find some forms that are peculiarly English such as the bourgeois tragedy (Anne of Faversham), urban city comedy (see above) that have not counterpart in the Spanish domain. Correspondingly, the peasant plays (see above) have no correspondence in English drama. The same happens with some themes such as the absolute loyalty to the sovereign, which finds some qualified correspondence in the English field only after the 1620s, and the characteristically Spanish theme of honour which is blatantly absent in the English drama. As has been said, the Spanish religious plays (autos, saints’ lives) are also fragrantly missing on the English side. In general, there is a lack of coincidence between the Spanish system of genres, organized around the comedia de capa y espada, and the English one, organized around a neater division in comedy, tragedy and tragicomedy. Precisely, in some forms of tragicomedy and comedy (the romantic comedy, the palatinate tragicomedy), which developed in England after 1600, and that is not central to the Spanish corpus of plays anyway, some common ground for the two dramas can be found.[23]

13. Other divergent features are to be found in sources, though there are more than one Italian common source; materials; versification (blank verse and prose versus the use of various kinds of metres or polimetría) style, act division (five versus three), and speech length.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A note on the elaboration of the topic

In the elaboration of this topic the author, or rather compiler, has drawn largely and extensively (even literally) on Cohen 1985, especially for heading number 1 (Society and politics: semi-absolutism and subversion). Other sources and the author’s own notes has gone into the working out of the different sections of this unit, but the guiding drive has, nonetheless, been Cohen in several of his various seminal works on the social and political relationship between Spanish and English dramas.

Allen, John J. 1991. "The Disposition of the Stage in the English and Spanish Theaters". In Louise Fothergill-Payne & Peter Fothergill-Payne (eds.) Parallel Lives: Spanish and English National Drama 1580-1680 54-72. Lewisburg, PA and London: Bucknell UP; Associated UPs.

Cohen, John Michael. 1956. A History of Western Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. (Préstamo)

Cohen, Walter. 1985. Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Cohen, Walter. 1987. "The Politics of Spanish Tragicomedy". In N.K. Maguire (ed.) Renaissance Tragicomedy: Explorations in Genre and Politics 154-176. New York: AMS Press.

Cohen, Walter. 1983 Dec. "The Artisan Theatres of Renaissance England and Spain" Theatre Journal 35:4, 499-518. (Baltimore, MD (TJ)) (Préstamo)

Chambers, E.K. 1923. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 vols. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. (Préstamo)

Díaz Plaja, Guillermo. 1976. La literatura universal. Barcelona: Martín Casanovas Editor. [library]

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[1] “As early as the sixteenth century, capitalism began to succeed feudalism as the dominant mode of production in western Europe. Yet the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witness not the definite triumph of capital on a international scale, but the gradual transition from feudalism to capitalism. The variable interaction of these two modes of production shaped both the heterogeneous social formations of the age and the structure of the emergent form of the state, the absolute monarchy”.

“Western European absolutism represented the reaction of the feudal nobility primarily to the decline of serfdom in the country and secondly to the rise of capitalism in the city”.

[2] Ariosto, Tasso, Giordano Bruno, Della Porta, Machiavelli, etc.

[3] Ariosto and Tasso wrote in Ferrara, Della Porta and Bruno in the Kingdom of Naples, and Machiavelli in Florence.

[4] The amateur fratenity Confrérie de la Passion enjoyed a theatrical monopoly in Paris. It performed at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, mainly a generically medieval repertory, centred on farce.

[5] The Hôtel de Bourgogne.

[6] For instance, Bartholomew Fair and The Devil is an Ass, by Jonson; The Shoemaker’s Holiday, by Dekker; A Woman Killed with Kindness by Heywood; A Mad World, My Masters, by Middleton; The Witch of Edmonton by Dekker, William Rowley, and John Ford.

[7] As exemplary types, we can quote Lope de Vega’s Peribáñez y el Comendador de Ocaña, Vélez de Guevara’s La Luna de la sierra, Rojas Zorrilla’s Del rey abajo ninguno, Calderón de la Barca’s El Alcalde de Zalamea, and many more.

[8] Witness the works of Leo Spitzer for Lope de Vega, Alfred Harbage and L. C. Knights.

[9] See the discussion of gender by Coppélia Kahn and by Lisa Jardine, or Jonathan Dollimore’s account of “Radical tragedy from the standpoint of cultural materialism.

[10] José Antonio Maravall and José María Díez Borque in Spain and Stephen Greenblatt in the United States are the best known representatives of this critical view.

[11] See the research of Noël Salomon, writing about Spain, Robert Weimann, writing about England, or, to take the leading theoretician of this position, Mikhail Bakhtin and his seminal work Rabelais and His World, about France.

[12] In this respect the criticism and derision of the conduct of masters and nobility in comedy is a recurrent topic; in the Spanish tragedy dealing with marital honour (Calderón) and/or absolute loyalty to the king (La estrella de Sevilla by Claramonte, for example), as a potential of subversion or at least of denunciation is a crucial subject of debate in modern criticism.

[13] This is the case, for instance, of the prodigal son plays or the topic or the debate of merit versus lineage, present in so many European works prior to 1575.

[14] Many learned or latinized comedies convert characters derived from classical sources into contemporary German (Hans Sachs and his Fastnachtspiele), English (Gammer Gurton’s Needle or Ralph Roister Doister), Italian (Gli Ingannati), French, or Spanish (Lope de Rueda’s pasos) commoners, regardless of their historical, national, and social origins.

[15] His influence in England is shown by two main examples: Misogonus, probably about 1560, by an unidentified writer called Thomas Richards, one of the most elaborate and original comedies on this theme; and George Gascoigne's (an interesting innovator in many field of Literature) The Glass of Government (1575) which takes the genus further in complication and is animated by a harsh Calvinistic spirit in the disguise of a humanistic play.

[16] In England, for instance, this happened in the Grammar School of Westminster, Eton and St Paul, Oxford or Cambridge and with the Chapel Royal, which supplied the religious exercises of the court and included a body of choir boys called Children of the Chapel Royal in London and Windsor, occasionally employed in "disguising" and other secular entertainment.

[17] It was a comedy of the latter, Andria, the one which became the earliest extant translation in English, being published by Rastell about 1520.

[18] Pomponio Torelli (1539-1609) gave rise to the political tragedy, focused on the thirst of power, the courtly intrigues and the Machiavellian reason of state, so pervasive in many political plays by Shakespeare.

[19] (1538-1612) with Il pastor fido and The Compendio della poesia tragicomica (1598), in which this author made a defence of his dramatic practice against the attacks of the contemporary critic Jason Denores, began the debate about pastoral tragicomedy so influential in the Fletcherian tragicomedy in England.

[20] Gli Suppositi (1509), one of the first comedies in a European vernacular was an important step toward the creation of what can be roughly called the comedy of intrigue. It was made by George Gascoigne into the first native form of an Italian comedy of intrigue, The Supposes, acted at Gray's Inn in 1566. Another English version of an Italian comedy is The Bugbear by an unknown author about the same date as The Supposes. It is based on La Spiritata ("the girl possessed by the devil"). There are other Italianate plays recorded, but they have not survived. Other Italian comedies such as Gli Ingannati, a strong influence in Los engañados by Lope de Rueda were highly influential in Spanish drama prior to Lope de Vega.

[21] The role of Lope de Vega is of the utmost importance in the conformation of the three act play instead of the more classical form of the five act play typical of the English drama.

[22] The cases of Ben Jonson, publishing carefully his works in 1616, the publication of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works and the publication of Lope de Vega’s works are unusual, though with the advance of the seventeenth century it became more popular.

[23] As a tentative body of the palatine comedy we can mention A King and No King, The Loyal Subject, The Island Princess, The Mad Lover, A Wife for a Month, The Humorous Lieutenant, The Queen of Corinth, The Knight of Malta and The Laws of Candy by Beaumont-Fletcher; The Renegado, The Picture, The Emperor of the East, A Very Woman, The Bondman, The Maid of Honour, The Great Duke of Florence by Massinger; The Young Admiral, The Coronation, The Duke’s Mistress, The Royal Master, The Gentleman of Venice, The Imposture, The Doubtful Heir and The Court Secret by James Shirley; La ocasión perdida, Don Lope de Cardona, El amor desatinado, La corona merecida, Laura perseguida, El príncipe melancólico, Ursón y Valentín, La infanta desesperada, El mayorazgo dudoso, Los pleitos de Ingalaterra, El amigo por fuerza by Lope de Vega; La república al revés, Siempre ayuda la verdad, Quien da luego, da dos veces and Amar por razón de estado by Tirso de Molina.