1 - Toward a material theater

Summary

Did not Will Summers break his wind for thee?

And Shakespeare therefore write his comedy?

All things acknowledge thy vast power divine

(Great God of Money) whose most powerful shine

Gives motion, life.

Chremylus to Plutus, in Thomas Randolph's Hey for Honesty (1627)

This study evolves out of an apparent cultural paradox: during the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean era – a time that many commentators agree constituted a signal transitional period in English history – London responded to the rapidly intensifying pressures of social change by institutionalizing its theater. Throughout the early and middle sixteenth century, players had traditionally adapted themselves and their theatrical productions to the spaces at hand – to inn-yards, city streets, and the interiors of various and varied buildings. With the opening of the Red Lion in 1567, the Theater in 1576, and the Curtain in 1577, however, there came a general, significant movement from itinerant playing to acting in fixed playing spaces. For the first time, acting companies began to enjoy the use of semipermanent, purpose-built structures for the marketing of dramatic entertainment, staging productions in playhouses that would become regular fixtures in the urban geography of Renaissance London. That these acting companies ceased having to adapt themselves to changing performing conditions (or rather, ceased having to do this on such a regular basis) just when the social landscape itself became especially changeful – this constitutes what seems to be a paradox underlying the physical institutionalization of English drama during the Renaissance.