The Elizabethan Stage (Complete)
9781465676092
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
AT the close of the Middle Ages, the mimetic instinct, deep-rooted in the psychology of the folk, had reached the third term of its social evolution. After colouring the liturgy of the Church and the festival celebrations of the municipal guilds, it had attached itself, in an outgrowth of minstrelsy, to the household of the sovereign, which had now definitely become, with the advent of the Tudors, the centre of the intellectual and artistic life of the country. It will be manifest, in the course of the present treatise, that the palace was the point of vantage from which the stage won its way, against the linked opposition of an alienated pulpit and an alienated municipality, to an ultimate entrenchment of economic independence. On the literary side the milieu of the Court had its profound effect in helping to determine the character of the Elizabethan play as a psychological hybrid, in which the romance and the erudition, dear to the bower and the library, interact at every turn with the robust popular elements of farce and melodrama. It is worth while, therefore, to attempt to recover something of the atmosphere of the Tudor Court, and to define the conditions under which the presentation of plays formed a recurring interest in its bustling many-coloured life. In every court the personality of the sovereign is naturally a dominant factor. Who shall say with what bitter discretion learnt in the hard school of adversity, or with what burden of secret policy for the shaping of the nation's destiny in critical hours, Elizabeth mounted the steps of her throne when her summons came in 1558. Our concern, at least, is with externalities. Elizabeth, at twenty-five, was a young and attractive queen, with her full share of the sensuous Tudor blood, and of her father's early gust for colour and for amusement, for jewels and for pageantry. 'Regina tota amoribus dedita est venationibusque, aucupiis, choreis et rebus ludicris insumens dies noctesque,' wrote one of her own subjects in 1563; and the dispatches of the Spanish and Venetian diplomatists strike the same note. Although these things had their appeal for her to the end, she was perhaps not so utterly absorbed in them, even at the beginning, as the observers thought. Yet it was assuredly the love of excitement and spectacle, no less than the desire to win the heart of London, that led her to encourage by her presence the revived folk-festivals of the citizens and the lawyers, the morris dances and May-games by land and water, and the Midsummer watch, which she hurried from Richmond to behold incognita from the Earl of Pembroke's house at Baynard's Castle. There was much talk of marriage for her in these early years. Philip of Spain himself, incredible as it now sounds, the Kings of Denmark and Sweden, the Archdukes Charles and Ferdinand of Austria, the Duke of Nemours, the Earl of Arran, and of her own subjects, the Earl of Arundel, Lord Robert Dudley, Sir William Pickering, were some of the possible consorts whose names passed from mouth to mouth. The gaiety of Whitehall was enhanced by the outward show of courtship, the embassies and their trains, the gifts and compliments, the receptions and banquets. But it soon became apparent that, from policy or from temperament, the Queen had no serious intention of trusting herself in marriage. Gradually the troops of suitors faded away. Dudley alone was left, and with Dudley the Tudor lack of reticence, which had already brought Elizabeth into trouble as a girl, permitted familiarities wherein hostile and interested critics soon found material for a scandal. Whether her heart or her senses, now or at any time, were touched cannot be said.
