The Theatre and the London Liberties: The Place of the Sacrificial Stage

I

In his historical and textual analysis of Elizabethan London and the Liberties (the notably squalid districts immediately outside the London city walls), Steven Mullaney describes the outskirts of London as 'places of a complex and contradictory sort of freedom, ambivalent zones of transition' to which 'exiles were conveyed, shackled so as to be fully and visibly under the sway of authority,' and then 'released from their bonds – the visible ones of iron, the invisible ones of the community – to be cast altogether outside the magic circle described by power, authority, and community' (21). The liminal outskirts known as the Liberties were, he observes, 'excluded, yet retained; denied a place within the community, yet not merely exiled'; they became the 'preserve of the anomalous, the unclean, the polluted, and the sacred' (22). Once known chiefly as the habitat of lepers, by 1557 the Elizabethan Theatre had supplanted the leprosarium as the main attraction of the Liberties. In this essay, I want to connect the London Liberties to René Girard's theories on cultural scapegoats and sacrificeable victims, particularly as developed in Violence and the Sacred.

In his explorations of the dynamics of society and culture as shaped by a pervasive and persistent violence and in his depiction of human aggression as a force both destructive and constructive, Girard attempts to expose rituals that obscure mankind's cultural and spiritual relationship to violence. In light of such an ambitious undertaking, it is not surprising that there are shortcomings in Violence and the Sacred – yet an awareness of these insufficiencies does not so much constitute a critique of Girard's theories as encourage new applications of his far-reaching speculations. For instance, if one accepts the New Historical argument, put forth by Louis Montrose among others, that texts shape as well as reflect society, then one must go beyond Girard, who sees texts only as reflections of society and fails to consider the influence of the texts on society. One must search not only for a purpose, a signification, within the text, but also for the social function of the text; one must consider its social utility at the time of its creation. More pertinent to the immediate point of my argument, while Girard, in his extensive analyses of the sacrificeable victim, conveys the necessity for such a cultural scapegoat to exist both within and without society, he fails to consider the existence of sacrificial spheres – threshold areas in which individuals can simultaneously exist as 'a part of' and as 'apart from' the community. In The Place of the Stage, Mullaney shows us that such liminal areas play a vital role but, despite his insights into the liminal nature of the London Liberties, does not see this role in terms of its sacrificial function. It is a dual reading of Girard's Violence and the Sacred with Mullaney's The Place of the Stage that offers insight into the essential nature of the Liberties as sacrificial space.

The relevance of Girard's theories about the sacrificeable victim to Mullaney's description of the Liberties is striking. Mullaney's word choice, in its use of terms and phrases such as 'excluded,' 'magic circle,' and 'polluted, and the sacred' resonates with the Girardian language of 'sacrificial exile,' 'ritual circle of violence,' and 'sacredness of the polluted scapegoat.' Looking through a Girardian perspective, one can see that Mullaney's 'preserve of the anomalous' constituted a sacrificial sphere – a space in which future sacrificeable victims could exist, remaining always just outside society, their position in the community (in other words, their function) always outwardly denied, yet thoroughly necessary to the society's stability. Indeed, Mullaney's usage of the phrase 'ambivalent zones of transition' suggests particularly well their function as a preserve for sacrificeable victims, a delimited, controllable area in which the average man and woman could transfer their vengeful, potentially...