Theatrical Movements

My ventures are not in one bottom trusted,
Nor to one place.

(The Merchant of Venice, 1.1.42–43)¹

Ever since 1923, when E. K. Chambers described the moment at which public playhouses replaced "temporary scaffolds,"² the Elizabethan stage has acquired an air of fixity. In his history of early playhouses, Chambers noted that various inn yards were converted into "permanent" theaters and that eventually most of the public playhouses adopted a common design, one he imagined as being "generally circular, with covered stage and galleries, and a central yard or 'pit' open to the day."³ In addition to the implication that basic design elements became settled, so too—according to Chambers—did the locations of the playhouses. Public theaters "stood" either to the north of the city of London or south of the River Thames, on Bankside.⁴ To be sure, the theater world gained much—economically and professionally—by having well-established locations, including audiences that knew where to seek out entertainment, a playing space that was predictable and workable, and a "house" that guaranteed a specific performance venue; and doubtless, all of these factors made the public theaters attractive to actors and dramatists. Nor were theater owners, such as James Burbage and Philip Henslowe, ignorant of the advantages that came from the construction of playhouses in fixed locations. According to Chambers, these new capitalists "specially laid themselves out to secure the attraction of public entertainments."⁵ Therefore, by 1596 it would appear that the public theaters were firmly positioned on the outskirts of the city. Chambers concluded: "Londoners had now to look wholly to the suburbs for their dramatic entertainment."⁶

As discussion has unfolded in subsequent years, other aspects of the theatrical scene have also been envisioned as inert; or, at the very least, we often operate under the assumption that the players, companies, and theater financiers settled into similar—and stagnant—patterns of behavior. We observe that Philip Henslowe, as owner of the Rose playhouse, "bound" some players to service, and playing companies are, in like fashion, thought of as having been bound, in a semi-permanent way, to specific playhouses. (So too were companies bound, by patent, to aristocratic patrons.) And just as we have imagined that all of these elements were static, we have presumed that a similar inertia surrounded the repertories of individual companies—that acting companies developed particular kinds of play lists—even while we have acknowledged that dramatic fashion changed over time. This sense of fixity has so pervaded the narrative of theater history, in fact, that it has produced an almost undifferentiated picture of the Elizabethan public playhouses. It is a view that, somewhat ironically, replicates the opinion shared by the early opponents of the theaters, such as Thomas White and William Harrison, who in the late 1570s referred to the playhouses interchangeably as "the sumptuous Theatre houses" or simply as "such houses."⁷

It is perhaps inevitable, given the difficulties of writing about historical events in general, that we have sought out points of stability in order to fix the ever-changing ways in which we see earlier times. Nevertheless, many historians of classical and medieval cultures are currently engaged in tracing what seem to be distinctive countertrends, trends that emphasize the many kinds of movement at work in earlier societies and the enormous inXuence of these movements in altering, shaping, and sustaining vital aspects of cultural development. For example, in The Corrupting Sea, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell highlight the discovery that the ancient Mediterranean world saw much more movement, both of people and of goods, than we had formerly imagined. Although the sea, they note, was "local to many ancient cultures," a revised understanding of the Mediterranean requires that historians map out the interlocking routes that people, commodities, languages, and other cultural goods traveled throughout the region.⁸ Attending to the effects of increased mobility transforms utterly our perceptions of numerous elements of Mediterranean life. In extending the earlier work of Ferdnand Braudel, Horden and [End Page...