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  • 16 - Literature, the playhouse and the public

  • from LITERARY CANONS
  • Edited by John Barnard, University of Leeds, D. F. McKenzie, University of Oxford
  • With Maureen Bell, University of Birmingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    14 November 2002, pp 351-375

  • Summary

    In 1576 the actor James Burbage constructed the first purpose built public theatre in Europe, which was called simply 'The Theatre'. Over the next fifty years and more, what followed was the emergence of two histories, one of material objects and the marketplace, and the other of an eruption and opening in human consciousness manifested in and provoked by the drama that Shakespeare and his contemporaries wrote for the stage. In the late Elizabethan period, the arrival of the recognizably modern literary author, and the beginnings of the formation of the English literary canon, is seen. One of the major transformations of the upper crust of European society was more or less completed in England even before Queen Elizabeth was born. The literary canon was becoming accessible to the many rather than just the few, and the fecundity and riotousness of the public stage threatened to overturn fundamental rules of sexual decency, law and order, and artistic decorum.