Jacobean Pageant or Elizabethan Fin-de-siècle? The Political Context of Early Seventeenth-Century Tragedy

Summary

FOR a long time it has been something of a routine gesture to demand that English Renaissance tragedy be approached as a ‘historically specific’ phenomenon rather than in relation to any more universal interest it might have for us. Jonathan Dollimore speaks for many critics of the last twenty years when he writes that, ‘the corrupt court is, of course, a recurrent setting for the drama; far from being (as is sometimes suggested) a transhistorical symbol of human depravity, this setting is an historically specific focus for a contemporary critique of power relations’. Leaving aside any consideration of how such a determinedly historical approach often fails to engage with the theatrical power of these plays, with their continuing capacity to excite and move modern audiences, I will be arguing that the Marxist and Foucauldian forms of historical criticism practised by many critics, together with a number of other factors (such as the misdating of particular plays and the distortions arising from conventional periodisation), have succeeded in muddling and misrepresenting the precise conditions which helped to shape early seventeenth-century tragedy. In so far as the attacks on court life in Jacobean tragedy emerge from a specific political context, that context is, subject to one or two important qualifications, late Elizabethan rather than anything particularly to do with James.

The teleological characteristics of Marxist thought mean that Marxist historians and critics, like their Whig predecessors, are always tempted to interpret early seventeenth-century history and literature in relation to future events, using the advantage of hindsight to detect pre-revolutionary tendencies in the earlier period. According to Margot Heinemann, ‘the greatest political drama […] often seems strangely to prefigure what was to become real material history a generation later’, a view given concrete theatrical expression in Adrian Noble’s 1983 RSC production of A New Way to Pay Old Debts which had the date 1642 written in dust on the stage floor. From such a perspective, Jacobean tragedy is seen as vividly registering the growing disgust with the Stuart court which would eventually precipitate the English Civil War. Literary critics have generally been happy to follow Liberal and Marxist historians in accepting the picture of James and his court first constructed in the Commonwealth period by writers like Anthony Weldon, Francis Osborne, and Arthur Wilson as part of a retrospective attempt to justify the overthrow of the Stuart monarchy.