Subjects mean and barren: The drama of common life in the English Renaissance.

The appearance of domestic and city drama during the English Renaissance represents a crucial change in the aesthetic and critical relationship between the drama and its audience. For the first time, the people of England--their hopes, their anxieties, their daily lives--came to be seen as fit and proper subjects for the stage. At this time the dynamics of social life were changing drastically. These plays allowed the playwrights and their audiences to explore and to interrogate the contemporary perceptions of the relationship between the individual and his or her immediate community. The development of the drama of common life is directly linked to the political and social changes England was experiencing during the century after the Reformation. These changes created significant pressures upon the traditional understandings of marriage and family life, individualism, and nationalism. These issues were debated in virtually all of the public forums of the day and, not surprisingly, became vital topics for the stage as well. The family, the market place, and the close quarters of the crowded city all represented venues wherein the individual undertook his or her various roles, but those roles were changing rapidly. The drama of common life allowed the models of public behavior that were set forth in the non-dramatic literature to be played against each other. In this dynamic process, the underlying assumptions of those models became available for popular investigation. This eclectic group of plays represents virtually every major dramatist of the English Renaissance, and draws upon productions from both the public and private theaters, suggesting that the anxieties and interests which these plays addressed were those of a significant proportion of the theater-going public. For the Renaissance playwright, the drama of common life offered a response to the issues of the day that allowed for a more immediate and, in some ways, a more intimate treatment than he could realize otherwise. The better we understand that response, the more complete is our sense of the methods by which this culture depicted and realized itself.Ph.D.Communication and the ArtsEnglish literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsTheaterUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/128512/2/9023542.pd