Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-19T02:11:35.664Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core

16 - Literature, the playhouse and the public

from LITERARY CANONS

By
John Pitcher
Edited by
John Barnard  and
D. F. McKenzie
With
Maureen Bell
John Pitcher
Affiliation:
St John's College, Oxford
John Barnard
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
D. F. McKenzie
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Maureen Bell
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
Get access

Summary

Books and performance

In 1576 the actor James Burbage constructed the first purpose built public theatre in Europe since the fall of ancient Rome. Burbage’s new playhouse, situated in the district of Shoreditch in London, was called simply The Theatre. What followed from this, over the next fifty years and more, in cultural interactions of the most complex kind, was the emergence of two histories, one of material objects and the marketplace (since The Theatre was soon competing with rival playhouses in London), and the other of an eruption and opening in human consciousness manifested in and provoked by the drama that Shakespeare and his contemporaries wrote for the stage. The first history is of the physical spaces and economic conditions in which Elizabethan and Jacobean plays were performed, of the actors who played them, and the audiences who watched them. The second history is that of the plays themselves, as artefacts of words and spectacle shaped by and in turn shaping the imaginations and the psychological and social desires and needs of the dramatists and their audiences.

Other forms of human endeavour and achievement converged on this moment of public theatre, among them the resources of classical drama, poetry and rhetoric, and the conventions for the conduct of public and state ceremony in all aspects of English life, in royal courts, in the streets, and in the Church. One of the reasons for the astonishing success of the public stage was its capacity to assimilate and to exploit the many different cultural forms that were presented to it.

Keywords

English literary canonliterary genreslate Elizabethan periodJames Burbagevernacular literaturepublic stageplayhouseupper crust of European society
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
, pp. 351 - 375
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2002

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Allen, D. C. ed. Essayes by Sir William Cornwallis, the younger, (Baltimore, 1946).Google Scholar
Beal, P. 1993 ‘“Notions in garrison”: the seventeenth century commonplace book’, in Hill, Speed 1993.Google Scholar
Bentley, G. E. 1943, ‘John Cotgrave’s English treasury of wit and language and the Elizabethan drama’, Studies in Philology, 40.Google Scholar
Bentley, G. E. 1965 Shakespeare and Jonson: their reputations in the seventeenth century compared, Chicago and London.Google Scholar
Blayney, P. M. W. 1991 The First Folio of Shakespeare, Washington DC.Google Scholar
Blayney, P. M. W. 1997a ‘The publication of playbooks’, in Cox, J. D. and Kastan, D. S. (eds.) A new history of early English drama, New York.Google Scholar
Bowers, F. gen. ed. The dramatic works in the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, (Cambridge, 1966–1996), ii.Google Scholar
Bruster, D. 2000 ‘The structural transformation of print in late Elizabethan England’, in Marotti, A. F. and Bristol, M. D. (eds.), Print, manuscript, & performance: the changing relations of the media in early modern England, Columbus, OH.Google Scholar
Bullough, G. ed. Narrative and dramatic sources of Shakespeare, (London, 1964–1975), viGoogle Scholar
Burke, V. 1997 ‘Women and early seventeenth-century manuscript culture: four miscellanies’, The Seventeenth Century, 12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burt, R. 1993 Licensed by authority: Ben Jonson and the discourses of censorship, Ithaca and London.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chambers, E. K. William Shakespeare: a study of facts and problems (Oxford, 1930), ii –5.Google Scholar
Clarke, S. The lives of sundry eminent persons in this later age … (1693), ‘154’ [162], 173 on Mary, Countess of Warwick’s commonplace book.Google Scholar
Coppens, C. 1993 Reading in exile: the libraries of John Ramridge (d. 1568), Thomas Harding (d. 1572) and Henry Joliffe (d. 1573), recusants in Louvain, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Creigh, G. and Belfield, J. ed. The cobler of Caunterburie: and, Tarltons newes out of Purgatorie, (Leiden, 1987).Google Scholar
Dahl, F. 1952 A bibliography of English corantos and periodical newsbooks 1620–1642, London.Google Scholar
Elias, N. The civilizing process, 2 vols., trans. Jephcott, E. (Oxford, 1978–1982).Google Scholar
Falls, C. Mountjoy: Elizabethan General (London, 1955).Google Scholar
Frearson, M. 1993a ‘Distribution and readership of London corantos in the 1620s’, in Myers, and Harris, 1993.Google Scholar
Gurr, Andrew in Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge, 1987).Google Scholar
Habermas, J. in The structural transformation of the public sphere, usefully summarized by Halasz 1997 –5 and 162–71.Google Scholar
Halasz, A. 1997 The marketplace of print, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jardine, L. and Grafton, A. 1990 ‘“Studied for action”: how Gabriel Harvey read his Livy’, Past and Present, 129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kelliher, H. 1990a Review of Ringler’s, W. A. Bibliography and index of English verse printed 1476–1558, Library, 6th ser., 12.Google Scholar
Kewes, P. 1995 ‘“Give me the sociable pocket-books…”: Humphrey Moseley’s serial publication of octavo play collections’, Publishing History, 23.Google Scholar
Kewes, P. 1998 Authorship and appropriation: conceptions of playwriting in England, 1660–1710, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kiessling, N. K. 1988 The library of Robert Burton, Oxford Bibliographical Society Publication, ns..Google Scholar
Langham, R. 1983 Robert Langham: a letter [1573], ed. Medieval, R. J. P. Kuin and Renaissance Texts, 2, Leiden.Google Scholar
Lanyer, A. 1993 The poems of Aemilia Lanyer: salve deus ex Judeorum, ed. Woods, S., New York and Oxford.Google Scholar
Leedham-Green, E. 1986 Books in Cambridge inventories: book lists from Vice-Chancellor’s Court probate inventories in the Tudor and Stuart periods, 2 vols., Cambridge.Google Scholar
Leishman, J. B. ed. The three Parnassus plays, (London, 1949), lines 923–3, 983, 989, 995–1000 and 1002–3, 1452–3.Google Scholar
Lever, J. W. ed. Everyman in his humour: a parallel-text edition of the 1601 quarto and the 1616 folio, (London, 1972) –2.Google Scholar
Lever, J. W. ed. Titus Andronicus, (London, 1953), IV. i. –9.Google Scholar
Loewenstein, J. F. 1991 ‘Printing and “The multitudinous presse”: the contentious texts of Jonson’s masques’, in Brady, and Herendeen, 1991.Google Scholar
McKitterick, D. 1997 ‘“Ovid with a Littleton”: the cost of English books in the early seventeenth century’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 9.Google Scholar
McKitterick, D. 2000 ‘Women and their books in seventeenth-century England: the case of Elizabeth Puckering’, The Library. Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 7th ser..Google Scholar
Morgan, P. 1989 ‘Frances Wolfreston and “hor bouks”: a seventeenth-century woman book collector’, The Library. Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 6th ser., 11.Google Scholar
Moryson, Fynes An itinerary containing his ten yeeres travel … (Glasgow, 1907–8), ii ff.Google Scholar
Munro, John ed., The Shakespere allusion-book: a collection of allusions to Shakespere from 1591 to 1700, 2 vols. (1909: repr.with new preface, Oxford, 1932), i.Google Scholar
Pask, K. 1996 The emergence of the English author, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Raven, J., Small, H. and Tadmor, N. (eds.) 1996 The practice and representation of reading in England, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Riggs, D. Ben Jonson: a life (Cambridge, MA, 1989) –8.Google Scholar
Williamson, G. C. George, Third Earl of Cumberland (1558–1605) (Cambridge, 1920).Google Scholar
Woudhyusen, The Old Arcadia manuscripts are considered by 1996 ff.Google Scholar
Wright, L. B. 1935 Middle-class culture in Elizabethan England, Chapel Hill.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×