Common representations: Jack Straw and literary history as cultural history on the early modern stage

Common Representations is a study of the relationship between literary history and other forms of historical knowledge. The study is focused on the particular problems that emerge in arguments about early modern cultural history through the study of early modern English drama. In particular, after changes in scholarship in recent years, there is a disconnect between the historical goals of much of the scholarship in literary studies and the texts called upon for these historical inquires. As such, this dissertation develops a model for the study of reception which emphasizes cultural and historical distance, rather than resonance, as the guiding parameter for literary historical inquiry. This dissertation develops its argument through a case study of a particularly interesting but largely ignored history play from the period to illustrate the way in which our ideas about the representation of rebellion and rioting on the early modern stage may be overly influenced by Shakespeare studies and a small collection of other traditionally privileged plays. In studying the early modern dramatic representation of Jack Straw, we see that the early modern theater in fact may have been a space sympathetically articulating radicalized political positions formerly thought to be silenced or political marginalized in popular performances.