Julius Caesar • 2013 - Chicago Shakespeare Theater

Extremists on the religious right and left hated her rule and
wanted to see Elizabeth overthrown. She was declared a heretic
by Rome in 1569, and her life was endangered.
“Her combination of imperious will and femininity and her
brilliant handling of her many contending male admirers have
become legendary,” says David Bevington, and resulted in a
monarchy that remained secure in the face of religious and
political threats from many sides. In choosing not to marry,
Elizabeth avoided allying herself and her throne with a foreign
country or an English faction which might threaten her
broad base of power and influence.
Throughout Early Modern Europe, governments were centralized,
assuming the power that once belonged to citystates
and feudal lords. The rule of monarchs like Queen
Elizabeth I was absolute. She and her subjects viewed the
monarch as God’s deputy, and the divine right of kings was
a cherished doctrine (and became the subject of Shakespeare’s
history plays). It was this doctrine that condemned
rebellion as an act of disobedience against God, but could
not protect Elizabeth from rebellion at home, even from her
closest advisors, or from challenges from abroad.
Childless, Elizabeth I died in 1603. The crown passed to her
cousin James VI, King of Scotland, who became England’s
King James I. Ruling from 1603 to 1625 (Shakespeare died
in 1616), James I was responsible for overseeing the creation
of a new bible, which in its powerful cadence and poetry
would remain a legacy of this fertile time, just as Shakespeare’s
canon has. But his reign was troubled with political
and religious controversy. It would be James’s son, Charles
I, who was beheaded in the English civil wars of the 1640s
for tyrannically abusing what he believed was his divinely
ordained power. ✪
THE RENAISSANCE
THEATER
Aman who would later become
an associate of
Shakespeare’s, James Burbage,
built the first commercial theater
in England in 1576, not much more
than a decade before Shakespeare
first arrived on the London theater scene—a convergence of
two events that would change history. Burbage skirted rigid
restrictions governing entertainment in London by placing his
theater just outside the city walls, in a community with the unglamorous
name of “Shoreditch.”
Burbage was not the only one to dodge the severe rules of the
Common Council of London by setting up shop in Shoreditch.
His neighbors were other businesses of marginal repute, including
London’s brothels and bear-baiting arenas. Actors
in Shakespeare’s day were legally given the status of “vagabonds.”
They were considered little better than common criminals
unless they could secure the patronage of a nobleman or,
better still, the monarch.
Shakespeare and his fellow actors managed to secure both.
They provided popular entertainment at Queen Elizabeth’s
court as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and continued to enjoy
court patronage after King James came to the throne in
1603, when they became the King’s Men. Their success at
court gave Shakespeare and his fellow shareholders in the
Lord Chamberlain’s company the funds to build the Globe
playhouse in 1599. The Globe joined a handful of other theaters
located just out of the city’s jurisdiction as one of the first
public theaters in England.
Shakespeare may have developed his love for the theater
by watching traveling acting troupes temporarily transform
the courtyard of an inn or town square into a theater. When
he was a boy growing up in Stratford-upon-Avon, acting
troupes traveled around the countryside in flatbed, horsedrawn
carts, which did triple duty as transportation, stage,
and storage for props and costumes. Their horses pulled
the cart into an inn yard or the courtyard of a country estate
or college. People gathered around to watch, some leaning
over the rails from the balconies above to view the action on
the impromptu stage below.
Many of these traveling performances staged religious stories,
enacting important scenes from the Bible—the form of theater
that endured throughout the Middle Ages. During the Renaissance,
the enacted stories became more secular. Public officials
scorned the theater as immoral and frivolous. The theaters
just outside London’s walls came to be feared as places where
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