THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

the actable word deserved the distinction of being transmitted as the readable word. Nevertheless, when Sir Thomas
Bodley established his Library at the University of Oxford in 1602, he insisted that it should exclude the kind of
ephemera that he referred to as ‘idle books and riff raffs’ (by which he meant ‘almanacks, plays and proclamations’).
Modern drama, as Bodley appears to be recognizing, was as transient as it was popular. It was also likely to distract
the scholar from more fulfilling demands on his time.
In late sixteenth-century London, however, suburban theatres, outside the control of less than sympathetic City
magistrates, had begun to establish themselves as an essential, and internationally acknowledged, part of popular
metropolitan culture. They were visited and (fortunately for theatre historians) described and sketched by European
visitors; companies of English actors were, in turn, to perform plays on the Continent (Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy,
for example, was acted at Frankfurt in 1601 and at Dresden in 1626 when its popularity at home was waning). Such
prestige, even if qualified by an incomprehension of the English language as a medium, is testimony to the flourish
and flexibility of the public theatres and theatre companies of late sixteenth-century London. Both were relatively new
creations. A Royal Patent was granted to the Earl of Leicester’s men in 1574 and by 1576 James Burbage, a joiner
turned actor turned entrepreneur, had recognized the opening presented by royal and aristocratic favour and
established a permanent playhouse in Shoreditch. This playhouse, trumpeting its classical pretensions by calling itself
the Theatre, signalled the end of the rudimentary performances by actors in inn-yards. The Theatre was followed in
1577 by Burbage’s second purpose-built playhouse, the Curtain (also in Shoreditch), and by the more celebrated
structures on the south bank of the Thames, the Rose (1587), the Swan (1595), the Globe (1599), and the Hope
(1613). From what is known of these theatres, each probably followed a related, pragmatic, but rapidly evolving plan.
These wooden, unroofed amphitheatres were either polygonal or so shaped as to allow a polygon to pass itself off as a
circle (the ‘wooden O’ of the Globe referred to in Shakespeare’s Henry V). It is possible that, both in shape and in
orientation, the later playhouses, such as the Globe, contained echoes of the principles of theatre design established by
Greek and Roman architects, though the vagaries of the London weather required a roofed stage and unbanked tiers of
covered galleries in which richer spectators were seated.
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In 1597 Burbage attempted a new venture by leasing the remains of the domestic buildings of the disused Dominican
Friary at Blackfriars and requesting permission to convert it into an indoor commercial theatre. Although the move
was temporarily blocked by local residents, it was to the new Blackfriars Theatre that Shakespeare’s company, the
King’s Men, moved in 1609.
A Dutch visitor to Bankside in 1596 claimed that the Swan Theatre held as many as 3,000 people, a figure which
has been recently justified by estimates that the smaller Rose (the remains of which were excavated in 1989) could
hold some 1,937 spectators, a capacity which was increased to an uncomfortable maximum of 2,395 when the theatre
was rebuilt in 1592. Given London’s population of between 150,000 and 200,000 people, this implies that by 1620
perhaps as many as 25,000 theatre-goers per week visited the six playhouses then working. In 1624 the Spanish
ambassador complained that 12,000 people had seen Thomas Middleton’s anti-Spanish political satire A Game at
Chess. The theatres that these large audiences patronized were likely to have been richly decorated according to
current English interpretations of Renaissance ornament. Given the substantial income that these audiences brought
in, the professional actors they saw were expensively, even extravagantly, costumed. Surviving records indicate, for
example, that the wardrobe for Marlowe’s Tamburlaine contained scarlet and purple satin cloaks, white satin and
cloth-of-gold gowns for women characters and, for Tamburlaine himself, a particularly sumptuous doublet in copper
lace and carnation velvet; in 1613 the management of the Globe paid no less than £38 for a costume for Cardinal
Wolsey in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII (Shakespeare himself had paid £60 for his large house in Stratford). These
costumes may have set the actors apart from their audiences. They worked without sets but in close physical proximity
to a mass of spectators referred to by Jonson as ‘a rude, barbarous crew’. They would scarcely have expected the
reverential atmosphere of a modern auditorium. A company would initially have performed a new play a mere
handful of times, reviving it or adapting it only as occasion, public demand, or a wide repertory determined. Finally, it
should be remembered that the professional companies were composed exclusively of male actors, with boys or, as
seems more likely given the demands of certain parts, young men playing women’s roles.
The evolution of theatre buildings and companies in the last years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign was to some degree
paralleled by the rapid development of a newly expressive blank-verse tragedy. The key figures in this evolution were
Thomas Kyd (1558-94) and his close associate Christopher Marlowe. Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy: or, Hieronimo is
Mad Again, presented at the Rose Theatre in the early months of 1592 and published anonymously later in the same
year, proved amongst the most popular and influential of all the plays of the period. It introduced a new kind of
central character, an obsessive, brooding, mistrustful and alienated plotter, and it set a pattern from which a line of
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