Renaissance Intertheater and the Staging of Nobody

I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation

—Derek Walcott, "The Schooner Flight"

Towards the end of the sixteenth century, English companies of strolling players initiated a remarkable form of cultural interaction between England and the Continent. Leaving their own theaters struggling against religious opposition, outbreaks of the plague, and internecine competition, these nomadic performers took sail in expectation of a better life abroad, as far from London as Paris, Stockholm, and Warsaw. Many were bound ultimately for the courts of German princes, but most began their journey by crossing the North Sea to the port cities of the Netherlands. In defense of their travels, the actors contrasted the perils of home life with the prospects of "Low Countries to roar in": "We can be bankrupts on this side," they asserted, "and gentlemen of a company beyond sea: be burst at London, and pieced up in Rotterdam. The sea is a purger, and at sea must our fortunes take physic."¹ The passage to Europe, the players hoped, would restore their health and wealth and thereby vindicate the theatrical profession itself. As it happened, their hopes were quite successfully realized, and into the second half of the seventeenth century their companies remained profitable, their performances renowned. In the history of cultural relations between England and Europe, especially the Netherlands and Germany, the episode of the strolling players was an unexampled success.

Yet it is a success that modern scholarship has been little interested in explaining. This is not to say that the phenomenon has been ignored; on the contrary, the last century and a half has witnessed a steady recovery of information about the wanderings of these English comedians. They were first treated by Ludwig Tieck in his Deutsches Theater of 1817, though Tieck's sources remained unpublished until a study by his assistant Albert Cohn appeared in 1865.² During the nineteenth century a number of studies saw publication, for the most part in Germany, and by the twentieth the players had become a staple of theater surveys by such authors as J. A. Worp (1904), E. K. Chambers (1923), and Heinz Kindermann (1959).³ An annotated bibliography on the subject appeared in 1984; the following year saw the eastward extension of this research with a monograph by Jerzy Limon.⁴ But the passage of time has scarcely changed the nature of these accounts, almost every one of which concentrates on empirical questions: Which player was where, and at what time? Who were the members of each company? And what made up their repertory? While these questions are undoubtedly important, the answers scholars have given them tend to raise greater uncertainties: Who exactly were the folk we call the English players? How should we describe the cultural interchange in which they participated? And what will count as evidence in our redescription? Above all, the limitations of the existing scholarship prompt us to confront the strangeness of this traveling theater, a strangeness that provoked equal measures of delight in its enthusiasts and bafflement in its critics. Such a confrontation will be needed if we seek to explain rather than merely recount the success of the strolling players, and by sustained attention to advance their story from a curiosity of literary history to an illustrative example of cultural theory.

Let us begin, then, with the players' description of themselves. What could it mean to "be burst at London, and pieced up in Rotterdam"? The language of rupture and recombination here alerts us to the difference made by the North Sea crossing, a displacement that caused the players to "suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange."⁵ To be sure, their account of the voyage across is rather more brutal than Ariel's disembodied fancies; to be "burst," after all, carries besides a sense of financial dissipation one of physical eruption. Moreover, the declaration that "the sea is a purger" recalls the emetic...