Public men on public stages: the performance of state authority in popular drama, 1590-1610

This thesis explores the representation of the early modern English state in a selection of drama performed in London’s public theatres between 1590 and 1610. It examines nine plays that enact recognisable legal process and relationships between magistrate and community, to investigate how the public theatres manifested the state. The state has been of great interest to historians over the last twenty years, with social historians often relying upon the term ‘performance’ to articulate the way that magistrates needed to enact their legitimacy to those they attempted to govern. My thesis develops this historiography by conceptualising the exercise of magisterial authority as a performance that brought the state into being. While magistrates needed to perform legitimacy, they performed the state every time they successfully carried out their duties: they constituted a version of the state where the magistrate did have legitimate authority in the minds of witnesses. As such, I examine the plays in performance, partly by using practice-as-research workshops which stage the plays according to early modern production conventions. While these plays have largely been ignored as representations of the state, in performance they vividly manifest their own states, often presenting the state’s failings as the source of tragedy. These plays articulate concerns and debates about the state’s functioning and structure, often without expressing these ideas verbally: embodied action manifested the state for audience interpretation, the drama’s manipulation of genre and emotional response shaping praise and criticism of the state enacted onstage. This has profound historiographical ramifications. While ordinary Londoners might not use the terms in which jurists and monarchs debated the state, they could recognise the state processes enacted in the public theatres: the state was perfectly apprehensible by those audiences, and drama was a key participant in debate over the structure and functioning of the state.