Chapter 3 - Histories

Summary

In the theatrically vibrant decade of the 1590s, there was one genre of play above all that seemed to virtually ensure good box office for the new theatrical entrepreneurs of London's Bankside, and that was the history play. Philip Henslowe's working diary of his Rose Theatre operations reveals to us regular performances for these plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Thomas Heywood, Robert Greene and others, and good commercial returns in the form of ticket sales. Once at least some history plays had proved successful on the stage it was perhaps inevitable that businessmen like Henslowe would seek to commission more of the same and that this kind of economic rationale would have its own effect on theatrical history. But it is also worth asking why this kind of play – drama focused ostensibly on English, and occasionally Scottish, history of the recent centuries and in particular on the causes and consequences of the period of civil war known as the ‘Wars of the Roses’ and the subsequent foundations of the Tudor regime at the tail end of which an ageing Queen Elizabeth I found herself in the 1590s – caught the public imagination so strongly at this particular moment in time? What was it that these plays addressed or staged that so excited audiences that they wanted to see more and why was it the space of the commercial theatre in particular that seems to have made this kind of work not only possible but deeply alluring?