The Book of The Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England

Chapter Four. Closet Drama and ahe Case of Tyrannicall-Government Anatomized

four Closet Drama and the Case of Tyrannicall-Government Anatomized elizabeth sauer The channeling of performance into print and the realignment of the dramatic mode are timely subjects of inquiry in light of the scholarly interest in the book trade, publication history, and reading practices , including play-reading. The early modern theater had served in the Renaissance as a charged territory and site of affiliation, presenting opportunities for various kinds of social formation as well as critical commentary on current affairs. Stage productions in turn helped satisfy the growing hunger of early modern society for domestic news and information about affairs abroad.1 In the Jacobean period, playwrights, including Thomas Middleton, Philip Massinger, Richard Brome, Henry Shirley, and Ben Jonson, used the stage subversively to participate in contemporary debates. In her influential discussion on this subject , Margot Heinemann observes that the critical discourse of the stage was sharpened in the public, political sphere during the following decade: “If there was an attempt by some opposition leaders to encourage use of the stage as a political medium, it seems likely that it was still continuing and indeed intensifying in the late 1630s.”2 Among the learned and scholarly works of drama of the decade which contributed to the critical discourse of the stage, one might cite two examples: Nathanael Richards’s Messalina (1634–36), Richards being the eulogist of Middleton, and Julia Agrippina (1638) by Thomas May, the official historiographer of the Parliament. An antitheatrical prejudice grew up alongside the fascination with theater culture. This antagonism against stage productions was not, however, as severe as in the 1580s.3 The later Puritans’ concerns about the social and moral dangers posed by the theaters were resolved to some 80 degree by the establishment of more private playhouses and the greater respectability accorded to playgoing. Moreover, the possibility that the theaters might give way to reformed stages was also entertained, though William Prynne remained skeptical: “I take it for my owne part; that Christians should rather argue thus; They are onely reduceable to good, and lawfull ends, but they are not yet reduced: their abuses may bee reformed, but as yet they are not corrected: therefore wee must take them as we finde them now, unpurged, uncorrected; and so we must needes avoyde them, yea, condemne them.” After praising the virtues of dramatic verse as “usefull and commendable among Christians, if rightly used,” Prynne identifies various exemplary ancient and modern poets and playwrights , including Gregory Nazianzen and George Buchanan, who, in different centuries, deployed the drama in a manner he approved. While condemning theatrical performances, Prynne maintains it is “lawfull to compile a Poeme in nature of aTragedie, or poeticall Dialogue, with severall acts and parts, to adde life and luster to it, especially, in case of necessitie when as truth should else be suffocated.” Nazianzen is again invoked, this time as a poet who relied on the dramatic mode to advance morality. In certain cases, then, it may be “lawfull to read Playes or Comedies now and then for recreation sake”; thus, if a play’s content is wholesome, it may be read, and even recited.4 The translation of the theater experience into the writing, printing, and reading of plays to which Prynne alludes was already enacted in the productions of the anti-court Senecan tragedies of the Sidney circle, inspired by Buchanan’s anti-persecution drama. Play-reading served not only as a way of ensuring the “wholesome” consumption of dramatic works but also as an act of textual revolt and political resistance. In the mid-seventeenth century, the predominantly royalist dramatic political allegories and satires aimed to redeem the royalist cause5 and encouraged play-reading as political engagement. Little attention, however, has been directed at anti-royalist, antiestablishment dramas, which relied on the conventions of the private-public closet drama, as well as on classical and biblical models. Such writings offered alternative venues and sites of critical participation and enabled meaningful interventions in political debates.6 Parliament was aware of the role that dramatic productions could perform in the formation of political and communal identities. The August 1642 Special order . . . concerning Irregular Printing, and . . . the suppressing of all false and Scandalous Pamphlets was followed several 81 Closet Drama and the Case of Tyrannicall-Government Anatomized weeks later by the closure of the theaters (and bear gardens) as potential breeding grounds for civil unrest...