Richard Strauss’s last opera, Capriccio (1942), reflects on an issue that has preoccupied opera since its birth in the Italian courts of the late Renaissance. Which is more important, it asks, the words or the music? Is it ‘prima la musica, dopo le parole’ (first the music, then the words) or ‘prima le parole, dopo la musica’ (first the words, then the music)? Capriccio suggests that the answer lies in a genuine symbiosis that privileges neither, implying, with a wink, that the opera itself is a demonstration of that symbiosis. Things haven’t always been so harmonious. To its critics opera always seemed to lack the economy of means so treasured, at various historical moments, in verbal, musical and theatrical arts, while its apparently haphazard and bloated combinations suggested a forced marriage. Opera hasn’t even fared well in relation to other suspect hybrids like theatre. The term ‘theatrical’ has often encompassed negative associations with falsehood, superficiality and emotive excess, not least for the modernists, who, as Martin Puchner has shown, derided theatricality as a trope for everything that modern art disavows. Yet the victimized finds its own victim: in many theatrical circles musical forms of theatre, including opera, stand for something debased in relation to what is still referred to as ‘legitimate theatre’. Is it that too much is given away to music? Does music need to be kept in check to avoid swamping theatre’s heterogeneous mix of literary, gestural and visual components in a flood of homogenizing sound? Isn’t the opera house really a concert hall with scenery?

This is certainly one strand of the historical critique of opera, which is saturated with arguments for the reform of operatic practice in the name of drama and poetry, as though curbing the genre’s instinctive tendency to indulge music. Measured against the possibility of rediscovering a lost unity between poetry and music in Hellenic theatre – a conviction shared by so many of the theorists and practitioners of opera, from the Florentine Camerata through the eighteenth-century philosophers to Wagner – opera was always haunted by an ancient ghost and found wanting by comparison.

Flying machines

In the opening scene of Peter Sellars’s production of John Adams’s Nixon in China the audience derives special delight from a simply achieved scenic effect. After an opening chorus celebrating the successes of the Chinese Revolution – ‘the people are the heroes now’ – a two-dimensional painted replica of the front half of an aeroplane (The Spirit of ’76) is ‘flown’ into the stage. A three-dimensional and thus functional stepladder is wheeled into place so that when the figures of Richard and Patricia Nixon open the ‘door’ in the ‘plane’, they can step out of the simulated flying machine and into the solid real world of the playing space, pausing, of course, on the steps, to allow photographs to be taken and applause to be offered. This was a moment that gave this spectator particular pleasure at a performance of a revival of the production at English National Opera in 2006, nearly twenty years after its premiere at the opening of a new opera house in Houston, in October 1987. It would appear that this pleasure was also felt at the premiere, however, as the Los Angeles Times notes in its review of the opening night:

I want to start by trying to account for the particular, theatrical pleasure of this moment, as a way of opening out into a wider discussion of the technologies of opera production in the theatre. The theatrical technology at work in Sellars’s production is both an instance of and a comic reference to the stage technologies around which opera, as a public theatrical event, originally took shape. When opera emerged from the courts and into the public theatres of Venice in the 1630s it did so as a spectacular entertainment, in which the effects which could be achieved by means of stage technologies were as significant a part of the production as music or singing.

The one thing most scholars know about Thomas Heywood is his claim, included in his 1633 preface to The English Traveller, to have had ‘an entire hand, or at the least a maine finger’ in 220 plays. We don’t know if this is true, but it seems probable, given the length of Heywood’s career (he started writing in the 1590s and continued until his death in 1641), his productivity in many genres and his apparent penchant for collaboration. He was, for example, a probable collaborator in The Book of Sir Thomas More (1592–3) and a certain collaborator in plays such as The Witch of Edmonton (1621). A man of modest origins, Heywood was the son of a country parson, and his studies at Cambridge were cut short when his father died in 1593. Settling in London, he spent most of the rest of his life in the city, becoming in every way a man of London and of the London theatre world.

While the majority of Heywood’s writing was done for the theatre, he also wrote a number of works of poetry, including the early ‘Oenone and Paris’ (1594), a narrative poem resembling Shakespeare’s ‘Venus and Adonis’, and Troia Britannica (1609), a history of the world to the present; a defence of the theatre entitled An Apology for Actors (1607); two collections of prose stories about women, Gunaikeion (1624) and Nine the Most Worthy Women of the World (1640); and a rambling philosophical compendium entitled The Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels (1635). In the 1590s Heywood was associated with the theatrical enterprises of Philip Henslowe and wrote plays for the Lord Admiral’s Men at the Rose. In 1599 the Earl of Derby’s Men staged his two-part play, Edward IV, and soon thereafter he joined the Earl of Worcester’s Company, which metamorphosed into the Queen Anne’s Men after King James ascended the English throne in 1603. With the Queen’s Men, playing primarily at the Red Bull theatre in Clerkenwell, Heywood had a long and fruitful relationship.

The work of John Marston (1576–1634) has often been treated as if it possessed an almost solipsistic independence from and antagonism to, not just the dramatic establishment of his day, but the world at large. Marston is best known for a hostile attitude to an audience exemplified by the narrator’s declaration, in Certain Satires, that he will only write in the hope of causing offence:

1. If thys displease the worlds wrong-iudging sight,

2. It glads my soule, and in some better spright

3. I’le write againe. But if that this doe please,

4. Hence, hence, Satyrick Muse, take endlesse ease.

This hostility is further exemplified by The Scourge of Villainy (1598), dedicated ‘To everlasting oblivion’, by the dedication of Antonio and Mellida (1602) to ‘the most honorably renowned No-body’, and by the contemporary description of Marston himself in The Parnassus Plays as ‘Monsieur Kinsayder, lifting up [his] leg and pissing against the world’. Such comments have set the tone for much of Marston’s critical history. And yet, as writer, collaborator and theatrical shareholder, the ‘real’ Marston had complex constructive links to the theatrical culture of his day. Indeed, he also wrote for that most public, decorous and community-conscious of forms, the City of London civic entertainment. While aggressive hostility to all and sundry is undeniably part of the persona of what one might call the Marston brand, the factual reality is more complex, as this chapter will explore.

Preface

The contributors to this volume of newly commissioned essays introduce Shakespeare and a vast range of fellow dramatists in the early modern theatre, including John Lyly, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, John Marston, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, George Chapman, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, John Webster, John Ford and Richard Brome. The essays examine the lives of these dramatists and discuss their individual achievements in detail. The essays are, however, also mindful of the fact that close personal and professional relations existed between Shakespeare and the other dramatists in the early modern theatre. Attention, therefore, is also devoted to the multiple forms of interaction between them – involving tutelage and encouragement as well as occupational rivalry and collaborative authorship. This approach to Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists enhances our appreciation of the single-authored as well as the collaborative plays that together represent the most impressive body of drama in English stage history.

The essays in this collection introduce the playwrights and a number of their works in chronological order. They range from Arthur Kinney’s full account of John Lyly and the University Wits in the 1580s and 1590s – whose hyper-inventive use of the English language and experiments with dramatic representation left an indelible stamp on Shakespeare’s work – to Lisa Hopkins’s discussion of John Ford, whose ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1632) and Perkin Warbeck (1633) may be read as Caroline appropriations of Shakespearean models for tragedy and history. Kyd’s charismatic Spanish Tragedy, as Clara Calvo demonstrates, was an inevitable presence, a familiar text for nearly every dramatist of the period to quote, to revise, to imitate, to emulate, to parody, but never to ignore.

Philip Massinger (1583–1640) has long been a challenging subject for criticism. For many, he was definitively put to rest by T. S. Eliot’s notorious 1920 essay, which in no uncertain terms declared his work ‘inferior’ and accused him of having ‘initiated’ the historical split between emotion and intellect that Eliot was famously to dub ‘dissociation of sensibility’. Eliot’s description of a dramatist swayed by conventions while lacking emotions or imagination, whose verse suffered from ‘cerebral anaemia’ and whose dramatic skills revealed a lack of awareness of people, still resonates nearly a century later as a disincentive to encounter Massinger (especially on the page). However, this indictment was only one late but influential example of the alternating reactions that have accompanied Massinger’s work since his own time, revealing not only the instability of his reputation, but also his remarkable capacity to remain on the critical record.

The sheer facts of Massinger’s career show that he was unquestionably successful in his lifetime. He began, in the 1610s, by writing collaborative work (with John Fletcher and others), but went on to write independently and indeed became chief playwright for the King’s Men after Fletcher’s death in 1625. He is believed to have authored or co-authored over fifty plays, of which thirty-three have survived (fifteen of single authorship). He enjoyed significant stage triumphs, and may in fact have been ‘the most commercially successful dramatist of his day’. However, the reactions of his contemporaries set the tone for both the admiration and the opprobrium that he would later receive. Thomas Jay, in commendatory verses to The Roman Actor (1629; first performed 1626), praised Massinger’s elevated diction or ‘loftie straine’, and the performative qualities of his dramatic language, which ‘can / Giue Swords, and legions to domitian’; while the rival playwright William Davenant (in the context of theatrical quarrels of the 1630s) had no qualms in damning the supposedly ‘flat / dull dialogues’ of ‘this Mechanicke play-wright’ who offered ‘no Character entire’.

In the trilogy of university plays known as The Parnassus Plays, produced at St John’s College, Cambridge, between 1589/9 and 1602/3, a recurrent concern is expressed about the professional fate of the growing number of graduates the universities were turning out by the end of the sixteenth century. This includes a worry about the popularisation of modes of discourse that are considered in the plays more properly to be the province of the social and educational elite and, these being university plays, the drama comes in for specific attention. Gullio, a fool in The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus, is an admirer of Shakespeare and he draws his ‘shreds of poetrie’ from the theatre. It is a source of discomfort in the play that drama as a mode of literary writing that is ultimately the product of learning should be indiscriminately peddled in the marketplace of the public theatres. The play also contains the dramatisation of real figures from that theatre – Will Kempe and Richard Burbage – who in their turn criticise the dramatic writing of scholars:

The tradition of contrasting Shakespeare and Jonson as exemplifying nature and art, usually to Jonson’s disadvantage, began in the seventeenth century and remained critical orthodoxy throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To Milton in ‘L’Allegro’, Jonson is ‘learned’, where ‘sweetest Shakespeare fancy’s child’ can spontaneously ‘warble his native woodnotes wild’. Dryden includes an extensive comparison of these two ‘Rivalls in Poesie’ in his ‘Essay Of Dramatic Poesy’ (1667): Jonson is ‘the most learned and judicious Writer which any Theater ever had’, ‘deeply conversant in the Ancients, both Greek and Latine’, and ‘a most severe Judge of himself as well as others’, while Shakespeare, in contrast, ‘needed not the spectacles of Books to read Nature; he look’d inwards, and found her there’. Dryden continues:

Six years older than Shakespeare and Marlowe, Thomas Kyd (1558–94) shares with them the honour of being among the first writers of tragedy in English. Together, Kyd, Marlowe and Shakespeare turned the decasyllabic blank verse into the form of expression that gave English Renaissance drama its unique character. It is impossible to say if Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy precedes or postdates Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, but the more than generous attention it was soon to receive in revivals, editions, quotations, allusions and parodies, suggests that it was the first early modern blockbuster.

Kyd’s early life had much in common with Shakespeare’s. Both playwrights were born into a middle-class background, and their fathers enjoyed a good social status. Kyd’s father, a scrivener or court notary, served as Warden of the Company of Scriveners in 1580 and Shakespeare’s held municipal offices as alderman and bailiff. They differ, though, in one respect: whereas Kyd’s father was highly literate, Shakespeare’s signed legal documents with an illiterate man’s mark. Marlowe, George Peele, Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe and Thomas Lodge all had an academic background, but there is no indication that Kyd or Shakespeare attended university, even though they received a good secondary education. At the King’s New School in Stratford, Shakespeare was taught by two learned schoolmasters: Simon Hunt – who left Stratford in 1575 for the Catholic seminary at Douai and became a Jesuit – and Thomas Jenkins. Kyd attended one of the most advanced educational centres in London, Richard Mulcaster’s Merchant Taylors’ School, which also had Edmund Spenser and Thomas Lodge among its pupils. Both Kyd and Shakespeare may have done some play-acting at school, because performing Latin plays was part of the curriculum. Before becoming playwrights for some of the most successful companies of their time, they may also have worked as players, and both, without permanent success, looked for the patronage of a noble lord. Both have been suspected of Catholic sympathies without conclusive evidence.

Figures of rhetoric – figures of speech

Today John Lyly is the most neglected, underappreciated and misunderstood Elizabethan playwright. Lyly’s understanding of the world, and of language, came out of his own personal heritage which he honoured throughout his uneven career. He was the grandson of William Lyly (also spelled as Lily and Lilye), High Master of St Paul’s School and, with John Colet, author of the grammar school Latin text that was required at all Elizabethan schools and that survived as the fundamental Latin text well into the nineteenth century; the two men added ‘Godly Lessons for Chyldren’ which began with the central theme of all of John Lyly’s writings: ‘It is the fyrst poynte of wysedome, to know thy self.’ William Lyly was a member of the leading circle of humanists, including Erasmus and Thomas More, and his son – John’s father – was in turn a tutor in Canterbury or at the Queen’s School connected to the cathedral. John Lyly (c. 1554–1606) followed his grandfather to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he stayed an extra two years hoping for a teaching post there or for preferment under William Cecil, Lord Burghley. Instead, Burghley got him a position as secretary to his son-in-law, Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.

Humanism taught Lyly to love the classics. His first play, Campaspe (1583) came from Pliny and Plutarch’s Life of Alexander; it was phenomenally successful, going through three editions in a single year. His second play, Sappho and Phao, appeared two months later; it drew on Aelian and Ovid and immediately went through two editions. Lyly’s mode of writing, too – what his editor Carter A. Daniel calls ‘the ornately symmetrical prose style filled with fantastic similes and constructed in rhythmic swirls of alliteration and antithesis’ – is also classical.

The Oxford Middleton assigns thirty-two plays to Thomas Middleton either as sole author or co-writer or reviser. Middleton was a versatile playwright, who moved between different acting companies throughout his career, experimenting with the latest fashions in plays, from sharp comedies set in Jacobean London to baroque revenge tragedies. From James I’s accession to 1606, he wrote a series of comedies for the Children of Paul’s, tailoring his plays to an all-boy acting company performing in an indoor playhouse, and to the audiences that congregated in the fashionable theatre district. He was also selling plays to the King’s Men at this time, including A Yorkshire Tragedy (c. 1605), The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606), and Timon of Athens (c. 1606), co-written with William Shakespeare, whose Macbeth (1606) and Measure for Measure (1604–5) he also substantially revised, in 1616 and 1621 respectively. Middleton consolidated his reputation in the 1610s with The Roaring Girl (1611), co-written with Thomas Dekker, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613). The early 1620s were the high-point of his career: he wrote his major tragedies, Women Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), the latter co-written with William Rowley, and he regularly produced mayoral pageants for the City of London. His last play, A Game at Chess, was his most sensational play, and its popularity, coupled with its political topicality, meant that it was Middleton’s last play performed on the public stage.

What is most notable about Middleton when surveying the range of his works is his versatility. Middleton, jestingly, likened the playwright to the tailor who works with an eye to the fashion.

Performance history has much to contribute to scholarly engagement with, and understanding of, early modern plays, and this chapter is grounded in the belief that performed responses to the dramaturgical challenges posed by any Renaissance play are worth attending to, criticising and learning from. Even the most scrupulous reader or editor will struggle to understand the full theatricality of a play without the insights provided by performance: the real impression a silent character can make on stage; the effect of hearing a song rather than reading it; the comic impact of a skilfully performed chase sequence. In addition, character relationships can become clarified by asking pragmatic staging questions. For example in Richard Brome’s rarely performed play, The City Wit, Brome characterises the marriage of Sir Andrew and Lady Ticket as loveless. While the tiny, but telling, detail that the Tickets never speak to each other in the entire play is not obvious when reading this fast-moving comedy, the actors playing the Tickets in Kim Durban’s 2007 production of The City Wit identified this aspect of the Tickets’ relationship almost immediately, simply by asking pragmatic acting questions in rehearsals: ‘Who is my character speaking to? And who is my character not speaking to?’

As very few Renaissance plays apart from the set texts, the canonical plays by Marlowe, Jonson, Webster and Middleton, have had their performance histories attended to, there is still a real need for more performance-centred criticism in relation to most early modern plays. Some performance histories are sketched out in introductions to editions of plays, but provision is very erratic; most editors are not recruited on the grounds of their theatrical intelligence and some produce little more than dutiful, but dull, lists. The most critical question to ask here is ‘Why is this performance history being written?’ Is it being written because the general editor of the series insists it has to be done? Is it being written to speak to theatre practitioners and/or students and/or the general public and/or the scholarly community? Is it for an English literature or performance studies readership? Is it being assembled by a dramaturge for use by a director, performer or designer? Is it going to be published as a programme note or is it a PhD thesis?

Sick of fear

Shakespeare was haunted by Christopher Marlowe more than by any other Elizabethan writer. He may even have imagined their relation as a literal haunting, blaming this for his late start, and in the Sonnets asking whether it was ‘his spirit, by spirits taught to write / Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead’. Any account of Shakespeare’s debt to his almost exact contemporary therefore has to begin, according to Harold Bloom in The Anatomy of Influence, with his inferiority complex as an ‘unlettered clerk’ crying ‘Amen’ (85) while Marlowe’s ‘great verse … my verse astonishèd’ (86), in his own words, and he exerted ‘all his might, / To make me tongued-tied’ (80). Bloom identifies the author of Tamburlaine and Faustus as the Rival Poet of the Sonnets because no other writer held such uncanny power over an audience as ‘that able spirit’ (85): ‘I imagine the young Shakespeare attending a performance of Tamburlaine with fascination. The possibility of the sublime of power was born at the moment of Marlowe’s impact.’ With its hyperbolic rhetoric and exotic nouns, Marlowe’s writing fits the description of ‘variation or quick change … new-found methods’ and ‘compounds strange’ (76) that the Sonnets attribute to the poet said to be ‘by all the muses filed’ (85). But in lines that may allude to Marlowe’s shadowy circle of backers, these poems also picture the unnamed writer with ‘his compeers by night / Giving him aid’ (86), as if Shakespeare sensed and resented something extra-literary about such superhuman empowerment.

At the centre of The Antipodes, now his best-known play, Richard Brome (c. 1590–1653) stages an elaborate parade of London city types – lawyers, courtiers, statesmen – who present themselves and their preoccupations to one of the play’s central figures, Peregrine Joyless. One set of professionals is of particular interest to Peregrine: watermen and carmen, labourers whose courtesy and decorum stand in striking contrast to the unruly, brusque behaviour of the courtiers and gentry. As one of them announces to Peregrine, he is ‘humble, yet ambitious / In my devoir to do you best of service’.

Ambitious to be humble – such an ostensibly oxymoronic disposition aptly describes our playwright, who took special care to style himself as eagerly unassuming and deferential. In a commendatory epistle to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Comedies and Tragedies (1647), for instance, Brome asks to ‘retain still [his] wonted modesty’ amidst the other poets, the ‘large train of Fletchers friends’ for whom he wants only to serve as a ‘Follower’.