Download Chloe Preedy, `Breaches in a Battered Wall`

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Breaches in a Battered Wall: Invasion, Spectatorship, and the Early Modern
Stage
Chloe Kathleen Preedy
Abstract
This article explores how the fictional representation of siege and invasion in the
war dramas of the 1580s and 1590s enabled Elizabethan dramatists to reflect upon
the vulnerable state of their own theatre, threatened with invasion and destruction
by anti-theatrical authors and unruly spectators alike. Through consideration of
how the invasion of the city is portrayed in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays,
Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part Two and Heywood’s Edward IV, it demonstrates how
such martial discourse of invasion and conquest provided a vocabulary through
which these three playwrights explore different models of spectatorship: from
coerced, to antagonistic, to co-operative.
Key words: Marlowe, Henry VI, Heywood, anti-theatrical, war drama, spectatorship
As scholarly interest in the material conditions of early modern theatre gained
momentum, considerable attention was devoted to the self-referential drama of the Jacobean
period.1 While the plays of Jonson, Beaumont and Day contain some fascinating commentaries
on early modern theatre, however, their critical prominence has tended to obscure earlier and
later contributions to this trend. As recent criticism begins to re-assess the significance of
Caroline drama,2 it is time to recognise the contribution that Elizabethan drama also made to
the ongoing theorisation of spectatorship. In the same way that Elizabethan dramatists
anticipated their Jacobean counterparts in interrogating the theatre’s transactional relationship
with its audiences, as critics such as Thomas Cartelli have demonstrated,3 it was in the drama
of the 1580s and 1590s that such spectatorship was first conceptualised in spatial terms, as the
playwrights of the period explored audience dynamics through literal and metaphorical
reference to the performance space of the new amphitheatres.
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Banished from the City of London, the first purpose-built playhouses were located in
marginal regions such as Shoreditch or Bankside. The Curtain, Theatre and Rose thus occupied
areas that, positioned between London’s outer margins and its defensive fortifications, were
historically susceptible to occupation by a besieging army. The relative openness to invasion of
this expanding suburban locale was mirrored on a smaller scale by the theatres’ own
vulnerability. As the correspondence of Elizabeth I’s Privy Council and the London Mayors
William Webbe and Sir Stephen Slany suggests, official antagonism towards the playhouses
was often expressed in terms of invasion, rebellious conspiracy, or physical destruction. In
1595, for example, Slany urged the Privy Council to suppress playing on the grounds that ‘the
Theator & Bankside’ allow ‘evill disposed & ungodly people about this Citie…to assemble
together’; when the Privy Council sought to temporarily suppress the theatres in 1597, the
order instructed that ‘the owners of the Curtayne, Theatre or anie other common
playhouse…plucke downe quite the stages’.4
In his 1595 letter, Slany also criticised the physical structure of the Elizabethan theatres,
arguing that ‘they ar not to be permitted in a Christian Common wealthe specially being of that
frame & making as usually they are’ (my emphasis).5 His anxiety is presumably the
architectural affinity between the new playhouses and the pagan amphitheatres of classical
Greece and Rome. For the playing companies, however, the culturally prestigious design was a
defensive strategy that might appeal to the classically-educated patrons who protected them:
prose defences of the theatre, such as Thomas Lodge’s Defence of Poetry (1579), are similarly
concerned to establish an ancient lineage for English drama. Indeed, the anti-theatricalist
Stephen Gosson claimed that ‘they dare not abide the field, where the word of God dooth bidde
them battayle, but runne to Antiquityes’; Gosson adds that ‘I have give[n] them a volley of
prophane writers to beginne the skirmishe, and doone my indevour to beate them from their
holdes with their owne weapons’.6
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Gosson’s martial terminology, firing upon the theatre’s ‘holdes’, is characteristic of antitheatrical polemic during this period. Print opponents of English drama employed an
aggressive spatial discourse of invasion and conquest, regularly directed in imagination against
the fabric of the amphitheatre. In Playes Confuted (1582), for example, Gosson again
characterised his tract as ‘a volley’ fired against the theatres, so that ‘our divines…might batter
them thoroughly with greater shotte’; similarly, in a marginal note to his Mirrour of Monsters,
William Rankins predicts the destruction of the playhouses, though the players ‘thinke their
buildings so strong, that God cannot destroie them’.7 The playing companies are imagined as
enemy armies, their theatre a besieged fortress: Gosson describes ‘those Players, that come to
the scaffold with Drum & Trumpet to profer skirmishe’, and Rankin offers an extended
metaphor of theatrical performance as the ‘chappell Adulterinum’, accessed through ‘the
castell…whether men striue to go first to possesse a place to behold their pageants’. 8 Indeed,
such martial imagery suggests that the anti-theatrical polemicists were as alert as Slany to the
physical form of the playhouses they attacked: surrounded by encircling walls, accessed
through guarded gatehouses, and topped by flag-flying turrets that might hold a small cannon,
each purpose-built playhouse was effectively a fortified city in its own right.9
Designed to control access to the inner performance space, thus safeguarding entrance
fees, and even to provide some protection against a direct assault by the mobs of apprentices,
students, and young nobles that flocked to London’s suburbs, these playhouses reflected their
owners’ understanding of the theatre as a risky and embattled enterprise. That threat did not
cease at the gate, and Elizabethan dramatists were as alert as their Jacobean counterparts to the
possibility that unruly spectators might disrupt the performance, or even physically invade the
stage. The boundary between stage-space and audience-space often seemed dangerously
permeable: one contemporary anecdote suggested that extra devils had infiltrated an audience
to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus,10 while the performed violence of theatrical warfare threatened
to overrun the stage. In 1587, for instance, Philip Gawdy reports how a pistol misfired during a
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performance of Tamburlaine Part Two: ‘one of the players handes swerved his peece being
charged with bullett missed the fellowe he aymed at and killed a chyld, and a woman great
with chyld’.11
Such narratives of violent conquest and invasion, popular in the drama of the late
Elizabethan period, also echo contemporary theatrical concerns. Echoing the tactics of antitheatricalist authors, various Elizabethan war dramas seem to exploit the quasi-military
architecture of the outdoor playhouses to generate a spatial doubling of the besieged fictional
city with the theatre. Moreover, the extra-textual capacity of such doubling to comment on the
real-life vulnerability of the playhouses was apparently recognised and utilised by the
dramatists of the period, with scenes of performed invasion becoming carefully-managed
threats to the integrity of the stage. The result is a spatial dissonance in which the play’s
spectators may be the encroaching fictional army, a crowd threatening the stage platform, the
besieged citizens of an illusory town, or the defenders of a vulnerable imaginative sphere.
Within the first purpose-built theatres, then, a congruence between the assaulted cities of war
drama and the playhouse or stage enabled authors to reflect upon the sometimes adversarial
and sometimes co-operative relationship between performed spectacle and the witnesses to that
spectacle through a martial discourse of siege and invasion.
An Army of Spectators: Tamburlaine at the Theatre12
Thomas Cartelli, discussing Marlowe’s construction of theatrical fantasy, observes that
imaginative engagement with Tamburlaine guarantees more pleasure to the audience than
sympathetically suffering with his victims. While Cartelli rightly recognises the diverse
constitution and varied potential responses of an early modern audience, his interpretation is
broadly persuasive - especially since Marlowe’s script grants Tamburlaine almost effortless
command over the resources of the stage.13 Intriguingly, Tamburlaine’s control within the
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theatrical narrative seems to reflect the performance’s power over its attentive audience: the
spectators of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine are invaded and conquered by the protagonist’s
imaginative force in the same way that he subjugates fictional foreign kingdoms, utilising
martial strategies grounded in spectacle and oratorical prowess. Despite the aggressive imagery
of conquest, however, this relationship is not imagined as entirely adversarial. Instead the
audience are invited to submit willingly to the protagonist’s mighty words and looks, like
Tamburlaine’s former opponent and loyal lieutenant Theridamis (Part One 1.2.227-30).14
Marlowe’s stage, in theory at least, becomes a battleground in which spectators are seduced
into supporting the protagonist, their critical defences breached by exposure to and figurative
immersion in his poetic discourse and spectacular deeds.
The prologue to Tamburlaine Part One introduces this model of spectatorship.15
Dismissing the existing playhouse repertories, it promises Marlowe’s spectators a new era of
theatrical splendour:
We’ll lead you to the stately tent of War,
Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine
Threat’ning the world with high astounding terms
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.
(Part One, Prologue ll. 3-6)
The encounter between audience and actors is broadly inclusive; all shall gather together
within the ‘tent of war’. The internal dimensions of the octagonal Theatre, topped by flying
pennants, encourage an alignment of this fictional tent with the concrete reality of Marlowe’s
playhouse; the boundaries of imaginative space implicitly extend beyond the stage platform to
fill the whole ‘world’ of the theatre interior. As the audience join Tamburlaine’s fiction,
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however, the prologue also smoothly establishes their subordinate role, with the initial division
of ‘we’ll lead you’ revealing an underlying hierarchy. They will follow while Tamburlaine,
played by the company’s star actor Edward Alleyn, commands from on ‘high’: the perspective
attributed to the spectators is that of the “groundlings” and those seated in the lower circle,
gazing up at Alleyn from beneath the stage platform.
The inclusive but not entirely voluntary model of spectatorship outlined in Marlowe’s
prologue is reinforced by Tamburlaine’s authority over the fictional play-world in which the
audience are immersed. Early in Part One, for instance, Theridamis announces that
Tamburlaine’s ‘looks do menace heaven and dare the gods’, adding that ‘His fiery eyes are
fixed upon the earth, / As if he… / Meant to pierce Avernus’ darksome vaults’ (1.2.156-9). The
tripartite imagery of heaven, earth and hell conveys this war-lord’s mastery of both the
fictional sphere and the physical space of the theatre, which extends from the painted covering
over the stage, past the wooden planks of the stage platform, to the pit beneath that represented
hell. The real-life audience’s experience of seeing the unusually tall Alleyn striding across a
raised stage might, at least for those spectators below stage-level, replicate in physical terms
the spatial dominance that the play’s cosmographical imagery ascribes to his character
Tamburlaine;16 Theridamis, who is seduced by Tamburlaine’s words and appearance despite
his initial moral reservations, hints at the expected spectator response.
Tamburlaine’s control over the theatrical space is complemented by his thematic
association with airy vapours, lightning and thunder. Like Theridamis’ account, which exploits
the visual impact of Alleyn commanding a small stage, such effects could be realised in
concrete terms. In Part One, for example, Tamburlaine announces that
Our quivering lances shaking in the air
And bullets like Jove’s dreadful thunderbolts
Enrolled in flames and fiery smouldering mists
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Shall threat the gods more than Cyclopian wars;
And with our sun-bright armour as we march
We’ll chase the stars from heaven and dim their eyes
That stand and muse at our admirèd arms.
(Part One 2.3.18-24)
While the precise impact of this speech would depend on the weather, gaining a unique
resonance on cloudy days, the internal atmosphere of the theatre would always contribute to its
effect. With real powder used to fire pistols onstage, the ‘bullets’ anticipated in this speech will
generate ‘smouldering mists’: smoke that would drift out into the audience, dimming their
view of the painted stars above the stage and immersing them in the elemental experience of
Tamburlaine’s war. The protagonist himself would visibly gleam through the smoke, since the
property records of the Lord Admiral’s Men indicate that Alleyn wore a copper-lace coat: in
sunlight, its fabric would shimmer like ‘sun-bright’ gold. As inclusive pronouns invite the
audience to participate with Tamburlaine in an imaginative assault that projects forward from
the yard and surrounding gallery towards the back roof of the theatre, the spectators are
simultaneously dazzled by Tamburlaine’s bright, smoky progress.
Similar imagery abounds throughout Tamburlaine, as Marlowe consistently exploits the
conditions of theatrical performance to reinforce his protagonist’s stage presence.
Tamburlaine’s martial success within the fictional narrative is equated with control of the
imaginative sphere, as the special effects used to represent war even allow him to “occupy”
off-stage theatrical space. Stage directions indicate that the invasion of Babylon in
Tamburlaine Part Two would have been an especially striking example, with actors scaling the
balcony at the back of the theatre in a physical enactment of the city’s conquest (5.1.62 s.d.).
Mirroring Tamburlaine’s steady rise over the course of the two plays, this upwards invasion
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trajectory also illustrates the triumphant force of the protagonist’s imagination, which projects
forwards into the cities he intends to conquer as well as outward into the playhouse interior
(Part Two, 5.1.63-70). Yet, as Tamburlaine’s final act of conquest suggests, the scope of such
power can be threatening. Ordering that Babylon’s governor be hanged from the battered walls
and shot to death, Marlowe’s protagonist launches an assault that threatens the very fabric of
the building in which his history is performed. Moreover, the audience are made complicit in
this attack, which directs their attention to where, at the back of the Theatre, wooden boards
and perhaps a tattered curtain separated the stage from the tiring house in which the actors
assumed their fictional roles. Tamburlaine’s order suggests the vulnerability of this barrier and,
by implication, any symbolic or physical barricades that sought to divide the fictional sphere
from the real. While the permeability of the playhouse’s walls might cut both ways, perhaps
recalling the embattled state of the sixteenth-century theatres, Marlowe emphasises the
expansion of Tamburlaine’s sphere of imaginative authority: ‘So, now he hangs like Bagdeth’s
governor, / Having as many bullets in his flesh / As there be breaches in her battered wall’
(5.1.157-9).
In this vision of a breached theatre wall, Tamburlaine has become so powerful that the
fictional sphere of conquest threatens to swell beyond audience-space, even outside the
playhouse. During early performances at the Theatre, the illusion would have been further
reinforced by location: since the playhouse was close to Finsbury Fields, the martial spectacles
and sounds of Marlowe’s drama would have been mirrored and echoed by the drilling of
London’s militia.17 In these circumstances, it is fitting that a theatrical death cuts
Tamburlaine’s progress short, perhaps as the sun’s light dimmed at the end of the afternoon
and ‘hell and darkness pitch their pitchy tents’ (Part Two 5.3.7). Only the dramatic fiction can
halt Tamburlaine’s threatening expansion, and Marlowe’s audiences remain complicit in the
process: thanks to the auditory and sensory immersions that complement the performance, the
external and internal references of Marlowe’s drama operate in unison. The sphere of illusory
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conquest implicitly expands outwards to encompass the audience’s experience, inviting them
to share in a series of fictional triumphs that are also, at the same time, a victory for Marlowe’s
imagination.
Putting the Spectators in their Place: Henry VI Part Two
Tamburlaine’s model of spectatorship fits smoothly with its theme of war, of soldiers
united in victory by a commanding protagonist. Shakespeare’s 1599 war play Henry V displays
a similar interest in the theatre’s imaginative compact with its spectators, while acknowledging
the extent to which success relies on audience co-operation. If by the late 1590s Shakespeare
can square such dependence with a broadly companionate model of theatrical playing,
however, his earlier war drama is less confident: in the Henry VI plays, probably written
between 1591 and 1592,18 Shakespeare experiments with an adversarial model of
spectatorship. The precedent of Tamburlaine remains significant, with Shakespeare arguably
realising the threat of theatrical violence that was implicit in Tamburlaine’s imaginative
expansion.19 In Henry VI Part Two, however, the audience are no longer cast as the
protagonist’s hapless yet admiring supporters. Instead, they are more akin to Tamburlaine’s
enemies: rival performers who disrupt events with interruptions and counter-narratives, and
who must be silenced for the latter’s story to continue (Part Two 4.1.138-206).
The model of spectatorship that Shakespeare explores in his early histories is reminiscent
of that found in the later works of Ben Jonson.20 Like Jonson, and unlike Marlowe,
Shakespeare was reportedly involved with live theatre, acting in various minor roles. He may
have been more wary than his controversial contemporary of moralising polemicists such as
Philip Stubbes and Stephen Gosson: Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse and Stubbes’ Anatomy of
Abuses were published in 1579 and 1583 respectively, approximately eight years before
Shakespeare penned Henry VI Part Two (c. 1591). The apprentice riots that marked the early
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1590s may also be significant. Although the violence was mainly directed against official
figures such as the Lord Mayor, and institutions such as Lincoln’s Inn, such unrest might well
have alarmed the theatres: city apprentices and students from the Inns of Court regularly fought
at the playhouses, which were also a common target for apprentice-led vandalism during
London’s annual Shrove Tuesday celebrations.21 To add insult to injury, the City authorities
regularly accused the theatres of inciting such violence: in 1592, for example, Lord Mayor
William Webbe noted that apprentices rioting in Southwark had first gathered at a playhouse,
which ‘giveth opportunitie of committing these & such lyke disorders’; eleven days later, the
Privy Council ordered the temporary closure of the theatres to prevent further ‘mutynous and
foule disorder in Southwarke’.22 Confronted on the one side with anti-theatrical polemic and on
the other by the apprentice riots, the playhouses of the 1590s must have experienced a strong
sense of menace. Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part Two responds to this context, addressing the
dual threats against the theatre by coupling them as aspects of the rebel Cade’s insurgency, and
thereby discrediting both.
In Henry VI Part Two, as in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, the theatre’s relationship with its
paying customers is conceptualised through a discourse of siege and imaginative conquest. In
representing Cade and his followers, Shakespeare aligns anti-literary or anti-theatrical
aggression with social insurgency, pairing the theatre with the City of London as the
courageous yet vulnerable target of an almost demonic mob. Thus, throughout the play, Jack
Cade and his Kentish followers wage an unbalanced assault upon literacy that complements
their aggression towards London’s citizens. In Act 4, for instance, Cade’s mob sentence the
hapless Clerk of Chatham to death for his ‘monstrous’ skill at keeping accounts, reading, and
writing his name (4.2.80): abilities presumably shared by many of Shakespeare’s spectators.
The audience’s encouraged distrust of Cade is consolidated by the subsequent execution of
Lord Saye. The reasons Cade gives for condemning the latter parody opinions held by the
Puritan opponents of the Elizabethan theatre: his class-based assault on Saye’s Latin and
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French may caricature the anti-theatricalists’ antagonism towards pagan and foreign literature
(4.2.156; 4.7.54), while the charge that Saye has had prisoners hanged ‘because they could not
read’ alludes to the legal practice known as ‘benefit-of-clergy’ (4.7.41), opposed by extreme
reformers.23 Additional reports of Cade’s outlandish behaviour stress that his threats are
directed against sections of London society that were probably well-represented in
Shakespeare’s audiences: ‘All scholars, lawyers, courtiers, gentlemen, / They call false
caterpillars and intend their death’ (4.4.35-6). Cade’s pretensions to theologically-inflected
judgement,24 coupled with his anti-literate agenda, align such excessive, ill-informed and
unbalanced violence with the offstage polemical attacks of the anti-theatricalists; Shakespeare
discredits the latter by association, convicting them of intemperance, poor reasoning, and the
betrayal of London and her citizens.
Cade delivers many of his threats while physically assaulting the city of London. The
spatial doubling that enabled the walls of Shakespeare’s playhouse to represent the
fortifications of fifteenth-century London in performance casts Cade, troublingly, as both the
enemy within and the enemy without; a traitor to literary values who has breached the theatre
and the city’s defences.25 Once inside, he acts with unfettered violence, threatening to rape and
murder London’s inhabitants: ‘Kill and knock down! Throw them into Thames!’ (4.8.1-2). At
this point in Shakespeare’s drama, the linguistic skill that Cade has derided becomes his
downfall. His disjointed and ungrammatical exclamations establish a causal link between his
increasing aggression and his failing eloquence: a connection that is underscored when his
followers are seduced away by Lord Clifford’s patriotic rhetoric (4.8.10-54). The corollary that
Cade’s assault on the learned may be motivated by envy of his articulate adversaries is
suggestive: contemporary prose defences of the theatre stress the fact that the anti-theatricalist
Gosson had once been a playwright.26 The violent, envious assaults enacted by Cade’s
followers similarly recall contemporary demands to ‘plucke downe’ the stages, as well as the
actions of rioting apprentices during the 1590s: like their real-life counterparts, Cade’s forces
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seek to destroy ‘th’ Inns of Court’ (4.7.1-2), along with other educational institutions (4.7.2931).27
The audience’s encouraged response to the destruction of the English capital is very
different from the complicity they enjoyed with Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. Far from joining
Cade in an imaginative conquest of the city, Shakespeare’s London spectators are figuratively
positioned against the demonic rebel. ‘Shag-haired’ Cade is visually and verbally established
as a bestial, monstrous character (3.1.367).28 Introduced by York as ‘this devil here’ (3.1.36073), he would have presumably have made his first entrance through the stage trapdoor, rising
up from the space that conventionally signified hell. Cade’s emergence into stage-space via the
exposed underbelly of the theatre visually strengthens the symbolic impact of his assault on
London and the playhouse. These underworld associations are further complemented by the
staging of the invasion. Without Tamburlaine’s soaring verse, Cade’s assault is somewhat
sordidly confined to the ground underfoot: he advances through the dirty suburbs, remarking
on the ‘Pissing’ conduits below the streets (4.6.2-4), and hacks at city gates he cannot climb
(4.8.23). While Cade’s initial entrance from beneath the stage, at the same level as the yard
spectators, might recall the stage’s vulnerability to audience invasion, the implied link to his
demonic incursion warns unruly spectators to avoid the undesirable comparison: Cade becomes
an intrusive presence to be resisted and expelled.
The possibility that Shakespeare’s staging of Cade’s invasion is designed to keep
spectators in their place is strengthened when we consider Cade’s punishment. Deserted by his
followers, Cade seeks refuge in a walled garden, a microcosmic version of London. For this
invasion, he is punished by the suggestively-named Adam Iden, or Eden: stabbing Cade, Iden
exclaims, ‘So wish I I might thrust thy soul to hell’ (4.10.77-8). The penetration of Cade’s
body appropriately punishes this violator of spatial boundaries, as the ‘devil’ is cast down. Iden
reinforces this effect visually when he drags Cade’s body ‘unto a dunghill’ (4.10.80),
suggesting that the actor’s body is tumbled through the trapdoor. The thrusting of Cade’s body
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back into the pit below the stage utilises the physical layout of the playhouse to reinforce a
spectacle of rebellion punished; that Cade is also effectively banished from the stage suggests
an underlying repudiation of everything he represents. In this sense, Henry VI Part Two
engages in a more forceful effort to manage its audiences than Tamburlaine. Shakespeare’s
history aligns playhouse walls and London walls within a fiction of invasion in a way that
exposes the mob’s potential affinity with at least the yard-based part of its audience, only to
punish the demonised presumption of those who seek to rise above the stage and batter the
walls of London/the theatre. While in Henry V Shakespeare would subsequently appeal to the
imaginative compact between spectators and performance, in this early drama Shakespeare’s
awareness of the audience’s necessary role in sustaining theatrical illusion manifests in an
anxious and defensive form.
Managing the Crowd: Heywood’s Edward IV Part One
The historical story told by Henry VI is continued in Thomas Heywood’s two Edward IV
plays (c. 1599). These plays were apparently written for performance within London, perhaps
at the Boar’s Head in Whitechapel. If so, contemporary disputes over the revenue from this
new and unofficial playhouse might have heightened Heywood’s appreciation of the early
modern theatre’s vulnerability: the disagreement between the playing company and their
purported landlord culminated in a physical attack on the building’s fabric, when entrepreneur
Francis Langley broke through the walls of the main gallery to seize the gate receipts. 29
Heywood was equally aware of the polemical ‘volleys’ launched by anti-theatricalists. In his
Jacobean tract, An Apology for Actors (1612), he would later co-opt the martial discourse of
Rankins, Stubbes and Gosson to declare himself the theatre’s defender: ‘if these weake
habilliments of warre, can but buckler it from part of the rude buffets of our Adversaries, I
shall hold my paines sufficiently guerdoned’.30 Yet such concerns are already apparent in
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Edward IV, in which Heywood focuses especially upon questions of spectatorship. Echoing
Marlowe and Shakespeare, he crafts a fictional narrative of siege warfare that comments on the
audience’s contribution to theatrical illusion: Edward IV Part One is especially intriguing in
this regard, since it depicts the invasion of London within a play designed for performance in
London.
Edward IV Part One is strongly reminiscent of Henry VI Part Two. It too exploits the
spatial dissonance through which the playhouse might stand for both itself and the besieged
city of London: in fact, as Richard Rowland notes, Falconbridge’s staged rebellion is mapped
onto London with meticulous care. The latter’s supporters potentially recall the rioting
apprentices of the 1590s, just as Cade’s unruly followers had done, and Falconbridge invokes
the historical narrative of Shakespeare’s play when he identifies himself as an advocate for the
deposed King Henry VI.31 However, the latter claim introduces one notable distinction: while
Falconbridge seeks like Cade to invade London, he does so in the name of a king; standing at
the gates, he declares that ‘I crave entrance in King Henry’s name, / In right of the true line of
Lancaster’ (4.17-18). While Heywood’s plot is broadly sympathetic to the ‘brave, courageous
Londoners’ rather than Henry’s self-proclaimed champion (4.23), Falconbridge’s blurring of
the fictional lines of authority is worth noting. The brief uncertainty that is generated over who
has the best right to London, and from whom such right descends, effectively complements
Heywood’s nuanced consideration of spectatorship. Aware that invaders and invaded must be
simultaneously accommodated within the sphere of theatrical illusion demarcated by the
playhouse walls, Heywood explores the possibility of controlled permeability: a carefully
regulated release of imaginative power that can expand beyond the material stage without
Marlovian violence.
The concept that theatrical illusion can provide a controlled release for potentially unruly
spectators aptly anticipates Heywood’s An Apology for Actors, which envisages a regulatory
function for the theatre in promoting moral and social values.32 Within this context, the
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characterisation of the rebel Falconbridge in Edward IV Part One is significant. Heywood’s
protagonist is undoubtedly indebted to Tamburlaine and his stage successors; his thundering,
self-aggrandizing rhetoric mimics the speech-patterns of Marlowe’s warlord, as do the threats
he utters during the siege of London: ‘Behold! My warlike colours are displayed, / Which I
have vowed shall never be wrapped up / Until your lofty buildings kiss our feet’ (9.88-90).33 In
Heywood’s play, however, the seductive power of such speeches is undercut by the intrusive
chorus of Falconbridge’s followers:
Falconbridge:
True-hearted English, and our valiant friends –
All:
Ho! Brave general, i’faith!
Spicing:
Peace there, you rogues, or I will split your chaps!
(Part One 2.6-8)
While entertaining, such comic by-play disrupts the impact of Falconbridge’s speech.
Heywood’s staging of the army’s response distances the playhouse audience, who merely
observe, from the rebellious on-stage auditors; the potentially seductive influence of
Falconbridge’s rhetoric on Heywood’s spectators is carefully managed and contained.
Moreover, Heywood’s plot exposes the futility of Falconbridge’s threats in a way that
challenges Marlowe’s prior elevation of the aspiring rebel’s imagination. Falconbridge
optimistically declares, in terms reminiscent of Tamburlaine, that his army’s power ‘shall rush
like thunder through the walls’ of London (4.3), conflating this projected conquest with the
sexual possession of Shore’s wife Jane (4.46-7). But, in Edward IV, the poetic articulation of
desire no longer translates into practical results; however much Falconbridge asserts the power
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of his words to alter the material reality of the play-world, and rend London’s portcullises with
elemental force (4.3, 20), such invocations prove ineffective. We are a long way now from
Tamburlaine’s ‘working words’ (Part One 2.3.25), with their interventionist ability to revise
the theatrical narrative.
In this sense, Heywood circumscribes the fictional world of his drama more tightly than
his predecessor Marlowe. The plot of Edward IV Part One resists internal re-inscription by an
articulate protagonist, denying Falconbridge the opportunity to overstep the boundaries of
illusion with the connivance of an awe-struck audience. In addition, Heywood effectively
reverses the spatial policing that Shakespeare practised in Henry VI Part Two: while the
commanding aerial perspective is conceded to avaricious rebels such as Smoke, Heywood
celebrates the down-to-earth virtues of London’s citizens, especially (and characteristically) the
city’s apprentices. The loyalty of these apprentices in defending the city alongside their
masters, led by the Lord Mayor, indicates that London is united against Falconbridge and his
unruly followers. Rather than fashioning a cautionary tale for those who threaten the city/stage,
Heywood’s drama focuses on the exemplary heroism of London’s citizens, who resist
Falconbridge’s flamboyant but empty rhetoric.
Heywood’s vision of a London united against invaders who speak the Marlovian idiom
of popular war-drama might at first seem to play into the hands of the anti-theatricalists. Yet
the fact that this model is constructed within the realm of performance must give us pause.
Closer investigation reveals that the boundaries between the play’s spheres of illusion remain
more ambiguous, as Heywood’s play follows Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part Two in uniting
staged London with the London beyond the playhouse walls. When Falconbridge echoes
Tamburlaine’s desire to ‘ride in triumph through Persepolis’ (Part One 2.5.54), for instance,
his progress is tied to the city locale of the Boar’s Head, with conquest articulated through
landmarks familiar to the playhouse audience: ‘then we take the town, / And ride in triumph
thorough Cheap to Paul’s’ (9.18-19). Even when outside London, Smoke and his companions
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are able to peer over the walls, becoming immersed in the sensory world of the city (which is
imaginatively projected into audience-space). Smoke enjoins his fellow-soldiers to enjoy
London’s savoury aromas (2.85-6), perhaps while pie-sellers circulated among Heywood’s
spectators,34 and Falconbridge celebrates his army’s atmospheric proximity to the English
capital as an omen of victory: ‘Yet stand we in the sight of upreared Troy, / And suck the air
she draws. Our very breath / Flies from our nostrils, warm unto the walls’ (Part One 9.1-3).
The air shared by the city’s inhabitants and those who seek to occupy London echoes the
spatial doubling within the Boar’s Head, where the stage is both London-within and Londonwithout, as well as alluding to the playhouse’s real-life location a few feet outside the City’s
juridical limits. Such imagery also draws attention to the shared air of the amphitheatre,
breathed by actors and audience alike. Heywood may hint that there is no impermeable
boundary between stage-space and audience-space, but rather a continuous process of
reciprocal exchange between two intermingled spheres of experience. Indeed, the very idea of
enclosure is problematized in Edward IV Part One. London’s walls provide a defensive barrier
but the courageous Lord Mayor recognises that, to break Falconbridge’s siege, the citizens
must also control the marginal suburbs:
Set open the gates. Nay, then we’ll sally out.
It never shall be said, when I was Mayor,
The Londoners were shut up in the city.
Then cry, ‘King Edward!’, and let’s issue out.
(Part One 5.115-18)
Alert to Marlowe’s precedent, Heywood acknowledges the potentially dangerous power
of theatre in Tamburlaine’s fictional descendent Falconbridge, but manages the threat through
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a chorus of interjected commentary that mimics the responses of a supportive yet undisciplined
playhouse audience. This rebel mob’s disruptive spectatorship is as much comic as it is
threatening: Falconbridge’s followers, drawn from the lawless suburbs that surrounded the
real-life playhouses, caricature contemporary accusations that associated the theatre with social
unrest. Their positive counterparts are the loyal apprentices, who successfully convince
Falconbridge’s followers of their error, re-subsuming them into London society.
Such redemptive possibility relies on a continuum between spheres of fictional illusion,
allowing the defeated rebels to repudiate their former identity as invaders and be incorporated
into the community of London. This spatial permeability mirrors the dynamic that Heywood
apparently sought to generate between audience and players: the audience imaginatively
occupies stage-space even as the fiction extends outwards into audience-space, suggesting that
performance is a complementary and mutual process. In Edward IV Part One, it seems that
such controlled permeability is to be positively embraced: thus the Lord Mayor’s decision to
lead his forces through the gates of London, though potentially hazardous, successfully
guarantees their victory. From a performance perspective, the corollary is perhaps that the
actively participating audience will acquire the capacity to pass effective judgement, becoming
informed observers thanks to the theatre’s qualified sharing of imaginative control. The idea of
educating the playhouse audience, who are trained in Edward IV Part One to recognise and
repudiate Tamburlaine’s seductive model of spectatorship, would certainly accord with the
arguments Heywood developed in An Apology for Actors: thus Heywood’s theatre gains status
as an activity that can operate in mutually productive partnership with the city of London and
its values.
Conclusion: Models of Spectatorship
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This article has explored three influential reflections upon spectatorship within the drama
of the late Elizabethan period, as represented by Tamburlaine, Henry VI Part Two, and Edward
IV Part One. Exploiting an architectural and imaginative affinity between the threatened,
fortified theatre and the walled or besieged city, as developed in contemporary anti-theatrical
polemic, these plays utilise a discourse of invasion to theorise the imaginative contribution that
the paying customers who entered the outdoor playhouses made to the performances they came
to experience. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays explore the power of theatrical imagination; while
Part Two registers some reservations, Tamburlaine develops an overall model of spectatorship
in which the audience is seduced by an illusion that ultimately threatens to exceed the
boundaries of the fictional sphere. Whereas Tamburlaine predominantly exults in the force of
theatre, however, Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part Two registers anxiety about external threats to
the material, commercial and ideological integrity of the playhouses. Shakespeare seeks to
control the dangers represented by anti-theatricalist polemic and rioting apprentices by
associating these positions with the crude, anti-literate rebel Jack Cade, aligning his spectators
with the embattled citizens of his fictional London as joint defenders against a common threat.
Through demonizing Cade, and finally banishing him from city and stage-space alike,
Shakespeare implicitly aligns citizen loyalty and even patriotism with the defence of the
theatres. Finally, Heywood’s slightly later drama Edward IV Part One responds to these
competing models of the seduced or policed audience with a nuanced vision of collaboration
between the spectators and the performance. Repudiating the almost tyrannical invasiveness of
Tamburlaine, with its dominating and expansive model of fictional experience, as well as the
stringent demarcation of the illusory sphere and its boundaries suggested by Cade’s
banishment from Henry VI Part Two, Heywood depicts a controlled permeability of stagespace and audience-space, whereby the two spheres interact symbiotically. Anticipating the
subsequent theorising of audience contribution and performance space in Jacobean drama,
these plays of the 1590s contributed significantly to the early modern theatre’s
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conceptualisation of spectatorship through reference to the physical location and spatial
significance of the purpose-built playhouses, and their embattled and vulnerable position in
Elizabethan England.
See for example Jonathan Haynes, Social Relations of Jonson’s Theatres (Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1992); Julie Sanders, Ben Jonson’s Theatrical Republics (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1998); Jeffrey
Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1997).
2
See for example Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis 1632-1642 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984);
Joanne Rochester Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger (Farnham, Surrey, Ashgate, 2010).
3
Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1991).
4
‘40. 13 September 1595. Letter.’, in Carol Rutter (ed.), Documents of the Rose Playhouse (Manchester and New
York, Manchester University Press, 1999), 94-6; ’53. 28 July 1597. Privy Council Minute.’, in Carol Rutter (ed.),
Documents of the Rose Playhouse (Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, 1999), 115-17.
5
‘40. 13 September 1595…’, 95.
6
The Schoole of Abuse (London, Thomas Woodstock, 1579), D1r.
7
Playes Confuted in Five Actions (London: Thomas Gosson, 1582), B1v; A mirrour of monsters (London, John
Charlewood, 1587), B4r.
8
Schoole of Abuse…, A3v; Mirrour…, B4v.
9
The Curtain playhouse resembled a castle keep in shape, its name perhaps referring to the ‘part of the wall which
connects two bastions’ (n.1, 4a, Oxford English Dictionary). The martial connotations of theatre architecture were
echoed in the drums, trumpets and banners used to advertise performances. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan
Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1923), III, 547; Nick de Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War
(Aldershot, Ashgate, 1998), 115-16.
10
See Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester and New
York, Manchester University Press, 1993), 49.
11
Gawdy does not name the play, but his report of ‘a devyse…to tye one of their fellowes to a poste and so to
shoote him to deathe’ is usually associated with Tamburlaine. Philip Gawdy, ‘To his Father’, in Isaac Herbert
Jeayes (ed.) Letters of Philip Gawdy (London, J. B. Nicholls, 1906), 22-4.
12
The first recorded performance of Tamburlaine was at the Rose in 1594, but Julian Bowsher convincingly
argues for performances at the Shoreditch Theatre during the late 1580s. ‘Marlowe and the Rose’, in J. A. Downie
and J. T. Parnell (eds.), Constructing Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3040.
13
Economy, 36, 67.
14
Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, ed. J. S. Cunningham (Manchester, Manchester University Press,
1981).
15
Although we cannot be certain that these lines heralded Tamburlaine’s stage debut, they accurately match the
play’s tone.
16
See S. P. Cerasano, ‘Tamburlaine and Edward Alleyn’s Ring’, Shakespeare Survey 47 (1994), 171-9.
17
Thomas Fairman Ordish, Early London Theatres: In the Fields (London, 1899), 36. Cited by Somogyi,
Shakespeare’s Theatre…, 124.
18
The authorship of Henry VI is much debated, but it seems probable that Shakespeare was the primary author of
Henry VI Part Two. See William Shakespeare, Henry VI Part Two, ed. Roger Warren (Oxford and New York,
Oxford University Press, 2003), 67-74.
19
For a consideration of Marlowe as possible co-author, see Lisa Hopkins, Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life
(Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2000), 8-12.
20
See Sarah Dustagheer, ‘Anticipating the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse’, this volume, XX.
21
See Mihoko Suzuki, ‘The London Apprentice Riots of the 1590s and the Fiction of Thomas Deloney’, Criticism
38 (1996), 181-217; Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642, 4th edition (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 2009), 267; Marta Straznicky, ‘The End(s) of Discord in The Shoemaker's Holiday’, Studies in
English Literature, 36 (1996), 357-72.
22
‘17. 12 June 1592. Letter (extracts).’, in Documents of the Rose, 61-2; ’18. 23 June 1592. Privy Council Minute
(extracts),’, in Documents of the Rose, 62.
1
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23
See for example Gosson, Playes Confuted…, D5v; Phillip Stubbes, The theater of the Popes monarchie
(London, Thomas Dawson, 1585), F1v-F3v.
24
At 4.7, Cade condemns Lord Saye for having ‘men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb and such
abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear’ (4.7.36-8, my emphasis).
25
See Nicholas Collins’ discussion of York’s Irish army in ‘“This prison where I live”: Ireland takes centre stage’,
this volume, XX.
26
See for example Thomas Lodge, A Defence of Poetry, Music and Stage-Plays (1579) (London, Shakespeare
Society, 1883), 4.
27
Rioters reportedly attacked Lincoln’s Inn in 1590. Suzuki, ‘London Apprentice…’, 181.
28
Contemporary accounts suggest that Elizabethan devils were conventionally ‘shagge-hayr’d’. See John Melton,
Astrologaster (London, Barnard Alsop for Edward Blackmore, 1620), E4r.
29
See Thomas Heywood, The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV, ed. Richard Rowland (Manchester and
New York, Manchester University Press, 2005), 2-5.
30
An apology for actors (London, Nicholas Okes, 1612), A4r.
31
Rowland (ed.), 15, 19-23.
32
See for example An apology for actors…, B4r, C3r.
33
Compare Tamburlaine Part One 4.2.49-63; Part Two 5.1.63-8.
34
Gurr, Shakespearean Stage…, 162.
21