23 - Elizabethan theatrical genres and literary theory

Summary

The practice of Elizabethan drama cannot easily be brought into focus for us by the statements of Renaissance literary criticism. Literary criticism in the period was, of course, tied to the humanist project of recuperating a classical literary and cultural order (revered as an aspect of a classical social order that had shown its power by dominating the known world and leaving Latin as the natural medium for all serious discourse). The vernacular drama of Shakespeare and his fellows was, however, a commercial and pragmatic enterprise, dependent not on the precepts of authority but on the willingness of a heterogeneous contemporary audience to take delight in what they were shown. Moreover, the taste of Elizabeth's court (unlike that of the Italian princes) did not contradict in essentials that of the common people who found entertainment in the popular playhouses, and this makes it possible to speak of a homogeneous taste in English drama, to be set against the theorizing of the Continent. There were, of course, aristocrats in tune with the demands of current literary criticism, who sought to return drama to a strictly classical form (as did Fulke Greville, Sir William Alexander, Lady Elizabeth Cary and the Countess of Pembroke); but the purposes of these people did not point towards performance, since that would be (as Greville remarks) ‘to write for them against whom so many good and great spirits have already written’. And in the universities students not only performed Latin comedies but wrote close imitations of them (modified by innovations Elizabethan theatrical genres and literary theory found in Italian plays and novelle, especially those that enlarged the roles of women).