Reality and representation: Symbolic performance and political power in England in the early 1590s

Literary critics and historians have often discussed the theatricality of Elizabethan culture and the ceremonialism of the Elizabethan regime, but have infrequently discerned that symbolic performance could be exploited by peripheral individuals and groups as a means of exercising power in relation to a central authority. This interdisciplinary dissertation analyzes event/texts in diverse "genres" involving different social classes in order to demonstrate that performance could be a potent political weapon, especially in times of crisis. The Introduction defines terminology and reviews various contemporary texts which disclose the importance of symbolic forms in English Renaissance culture. Chapter One focuses on an unpublished elite entertainment primarily to reveal that even aristocratic insiders (i.e., the Cecil family) employed symbolic performance to achieve political ends. Chapter Two analyzes a symbolically oriented politico-religious uprising in Cheapside which was countered by the government through an equally symbolic public execution. Chapter Three discusses the two major entertainments of the 1591 summer progress in order to suggest how two discontented, suspected, and marginalized aristocrats could negotiate a ceremonial encounter with queen and regime for their own political advantage. Chapter Four interprets Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus as a meditation on a decadent version of Imperial Rome; part of the tragedy's original urgency is its representation of a succession crisis which mirrors the contemporary Elizabethan problem, and the eventual settlement of this crisis reveals the state's vulnerability to improvisational manipulation by a peripheral character. The Conclusion argues that the regime's theatricality enabled challenges from the periphery in a culture limited primarily to performance and publication, and looks forward in history to posit a connection between the challenges of the sixteenth century and the English Revolution.