A Play without a Stage: English Renaissance Drama, 1642-1660

A Play Without a Stage: English Renaissance Drama, 1642 to 1660, focuses on the production of early modern drama during the English Civil War and Interregnum, when commercial playing was outlawed. Despite the prominence of book history as a methodology over the last three decades, the era of the theatre ban – when performance declined but dramatic publication flourished – remains understudied. It is in this era, I argue, that the genre, indeed even the critical field, of early modern drama as we know it was created. While the prohibition on playing in many respects killed the English Renaissance stage – the theatres were closed, demolished, converted into tenements, and once famous actors and playwrights, now unemployed, died in poverty – the professional drama of 1576-1642 not only lived on, but thrived, in print. In the absence of contemporary performances, stationers presented pre-war plays as relics of an absent, idealized theatrical culture. The theatre ban prematurely aged the genre of English drama, but at the same time, sta- tioners began publishing previously unprinted Tudor and Stuart plays. These plays, at once new and old, were marketed in terms of novelty and finitude: they represented the latest offerings of a tradition that had drawn to a close. The era’s playbook publishers capitalized on theatrical nostalgia, but also looked ahead to the moment when the store of previously unprinted professional drama would run out. At that point, stationers turned to the project of anatomizing the whole corpus of English drama, printing the first dramatic anthologies and comprehensive dramatic catalogues in the 1650s. With chapters on royalist nostalgia, clandestine theatrical revivals, dramatic compendia and anthologies, the mysteriously small number of Shakespeare editions issued during the period and the critical conceptions of the theatre ban since the Restoration, A Play Without a Stage argues that the death of contemporary English theatre gave birth to English Renaissance drama. The seeds of this field – that is, of the modern canon, the editorial and performance traditions, and Shakespeare’s supremacy in all – were planted not in the eighteenth century, but in the mid-seventeenth century.Ph.D.2019-12-19 00:00:0