This chapter contextualises the rise of the stage Machiavel in the suppression of the Elizabethan Puritan movement in the late 1580s and early 1590s and the period’s distrust in the hidden, inward self of religious dissenters. The stage Machiavel of the early 1590s, most prominently embodied by Barabas in Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, bears traces of anti-Puritan polemics that have been mostly overlooked so far. Hence, the stage Machiavel can be read as a predecessor of the stage Puritan and as a theatrical convention, most notably in his typical revelation of his plans to the audience, which showcases the theatre as an institution that grants access, or rather a fantasy of access, to the inward secrets of religious dissenters. Marlowe’s Jew of Malta can be read as an expression of such a desire to make windows into men’s hearts and as a poetological statement that flaunts the complicity of the theatre in this enterprise.

This chapter explores how early modern dramatists were often preoccupied with ideas of pity and compassion, and sought out new words and metaphors for articulating such feelings. It begins by considering Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage (c. 1585-6) and Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1587), arguing that these plays centralize ideas of emotional comparability, receptivity, and resistance that fed into the subsequent emergence of the term sympathy. It goes on to examine Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (c. 1594), which contains an important early example of the word sympathy being used to describe a harmony of woe. The chapter then explores the emergence of the verbal form sympathize in several plays from the late 1590s, including The Comedy of Errors and Troilus and Cressida. It concludes with a discussion of Samuel Brandon’s 1598 closet drama The Vertuous Octavia, in which the protagonist invokes the possibility that she might ‘simpathize’ with her husband, while simultaneously suggesting that she is capable of resisting such emotional forces. This new word reflected and enabled a more active conception of sympathy as a practice of individual choice and agency.

Chapter 1 examines London’s Rose Theatre (1587–1603), which contributed significantly to the development of western theatre. We explore Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in the intimacy of the Rose against his large-scale imagined worlds. The Rose was located very near the Globe Theatre, best known for William Shakespeare’s plays. The virtual-reality model of the Rose highlights physical proximity as a key factor in this intimate amphitheatre. The chapter takes readers through blocking and how a virtual model can determine possibilities for movement and action on this stage, against both a physical and metaphysical attention to subjectivity, as audience members were shifting from the end of the medieval era into the early modern era. In this polygonal cauldron-like venue, Doctor Faustus rehearses the profound shifts of subjectivity from God-centred to human-centred. The performance laboratory research conducted in the virtual amphitheatre demonstrates a convergence of multiple theatrical forms, philosophical ideas, and audiences.

Stage talk is a style that makes theater out of one’s own mastery of talk by generating a density of formal coherence in place of the messiness that ordinary conversation entails. As Erving Goffman has proposed, “[e]very transmission … is necessarily subject to ‘noise.’” In conversation, this noise manifests as interruptions, overlaps, false starts, rewinds, and other influencies. And yet we manage to filter out such static as extraneous to the conversation at hand, often with such success that we might be surprised to discover their inclusion in a transcript of what we had just experienced. Stage talk aestheticizes the idealization of form that subtends representations of speech: It purifies the noise that defines ordinary talk – interruptions, false starts, gaffes are gone – in order to impart utterance a conspicuous poetic coherence. The actor who delivers this language to audiences assembled at a playhouse constitutes the early modern period’s animating fantasy of publicness, which is the fantasy that a style of talk can turn one from a stranger into a spectacle for other strangers to imitate.

Numerous Elizabethan philosophical and theological treatises deplored the duplicity, waywardness, and treachery of the imagination. Even Spenser participated in this, filling the chamber of Phantastes with freaks, monsters, and dangerous deceptions. Yet in the new commercial playhouses, from the late 1580s onwards, audiences were increasingly exhorted to ‘imagine’ or ‘suppose’, in a type of speech that we can dub the ‘imagine’ chorus. Originally a device to cover time and space in history plays and travel plays, the ‘imagine’ chorus began to be used not only to conjure unseen spectacles in the mind, but also to celebrate the powers of the imagination. This essay argues that it arose from the unprecedented experience of collective imagining in the new playhouses, and produced new thinking about the imagination as a magical and exhilarating creative force, as explored with particular sophistication by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Henry V.

While the first two-thirds of the book focus on the immiserating aspects of bondage, this fourth part recognises its pleasures. Looking back to the trope of the slave or soldier of love in Roman elegy as a rejection of the values of Roman imperialism, this chapter shows how relations of domination, bondage and resistance have infused amorous lyric for two millennia. It examines another lacuna – the missing foot in elegiac distich – in relation to castration, and the effeminisation of the lyric speaker. In Ovid’s elegies the female beloved is momentarily the triumphator who drives her captive lover before her like a slave, before the domination of the female beloved by the male speaker is reasserted through sadistic violence. An examination of Marlowe’s prosody shows how he re-queers this speaker, intermingling militarism and eroticism, masculine heroism and effeminate otium, paradoxically challenging the authority of Augustan and Tudor sexual norms through failure.

ew works of literature have occasioned such vehement controversy as Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Almost every aspect of the play has been debated: the date, the text, the authorship, and, most significant, the ethos of the drama. Commentators adopting a heroic interpretation of the tragedy see the play as a celebration of Faustus, the humanist hero of Renaissance individualism, who barters his soul in return for all the things the Renaissance privileged: knowledge, beauty, power. Conversely, Christian apologists read the play as a religiously orthodox drama condemning Faustus as a damned sinner. After seeking to guide the reader through the labyrinth of critical controversy surrounding the tragedy, I conclude that the play validates both the Christian and humanist readings, depicting a hero whom we can simultaneously admire and censure, sympathize with and deplore. The presence of contradictory perspectives evoking markedly divergent responses to the multifaceted hero suggests that in Doctor Faustus Marlowe penned an interrogative drama that brilliantly argues on both sides of the question.

The conclusion focuses on Sonnet 18 and compares its significance in Shakespeare in Love (the film) and Shakespeare in Love (the play). It argues that this Sonnet has transcended the sequence, and has come to signify the Sonnets as a whole. Whilst this can be a reactionary decision, which ignores the overt homoeroticism of the sequence, it can also be a means of making the Sonnets more accessible by offering multiple different appropriations, emphasising the polyvocality of the individual Sonnet.