2 - Shakespeare’s Life, Times and Stage

Summary

This Stage-Play World, by Julia Briggs (Oxford University Press, 1983), embodies in its title most of the themes which have dominated this year’s work. Shakespeare’s ‘Stage’ has swallowed up his ‘Life’ and ‘Times’; writers vie with one another to show that life was (and is) theatrical, that politics and theatre are inseparable, and that the visual side of the theatre - its architecture, its staging, its iconography - was after all as important as the words that were spoken there. I shall consider some of the reasons for this emphasis later, but first I shall look at some general works, starting with the one I just mentioned.

Julia Briggs’s excellent book is thematically structured, with examples from literary works illustrating chapters on Renaissance politics, religion, society, and so on. Though the theatre gets a chapter to itself, drama is shown to be interwoven with every aspect of the period: it provides an analogy for the Platonic view of life as a shadow, as well as for the formal and ceremonial nature of society, and it allows the expression, if not necessarily the resolution, of ‘passionately conflicting convictions’.