DRAMA OF A NATION: PUBLIC THEATER IN RENAISSANCE ENGLAND AND SPAIN

During the Renaissance, Europe experienced an international florescence of drama unequaled in its prior or subsequent history. Only in England and Spain, however, did major theaters emerge that possessed significant popular dimensions. Although the similarity of these two stage traditions has long been a commonplace, its nature and cause have escaped adequate theorization. The plays of late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century England and Spain uniquely synthesize popular and learned elements. This synthesis in turn depended on the evolution of the neofeudal absolutist state. By its inherent dynamism and contradictions, absolutism first created and then destroyed the public theater.;In England and Spain between 1490 and 1575, the early growth of capitalism and absolutism fostered professional acting troupes under circumstances that promoted the combination of popular and learned materials. In the late sixteenth century, a stable but incomplete absolutism made possible the consolidation of permanent, public commercial theaters in each national capital. The public theater had built into it a contradiction between the artisanal mode of production and the aristocratic ideologies that it produced. The major genres of the period, romantic comedy and the national history play, dramatize the adaptation of the nobility to the new conditions of its supremacy, a process critically qualified, however, by the workings of the popular tradition.;In the early seventeenth century, both countries entered periods of crisis that culminated during the 1640's in the virtual destruction of absolutism. The public theater was an attendant victim. Although the similarities of English and Spanish drama persisted after 1600, the greater prominence of the British bourgeoisie and the rise of the London private theaters led to increased generic divergences. Satiric comedy and heroic tragedy, both primarily English forms, portray the failure of the aristocracy to adapt to the rise of capitalism. The Spanish heroic play reasserts the nobility's traditional vocation, while British bourgeois tragedy and Spanish peasant drama reveal the divergent social directions of the two countries. The revolutionary potential of the popular dimension of the public theater is most evident in the peasant plays and Shakespeare's tragedies.;Subsequent forms draw less prominently on popular dramaturgy. Intrigue tragedy combines a loss of national perspective with a problematic view of moral action. Its subject is less the failure of the nobility to adapt to political change than the irrelevance of politics altogether. Tragicomic romance, on the other hand, asserts the future triumph of the aristocracy. Through this utopianism, the public theater made its last great contribution to the absolutist West, intimating a solution to the very conflicts that were then determining its own historical supersession.;The specificity of this theater is most visible against the general background of medieval and Renaissance European drama. In a curiously negative sense, medieval theater was a product of western European feudalism. The drama thrived in the village, church, and town, precisely those interstices of the feudal world that the parcellization of sovereignty prevented the nobility from fully penetrating. But the social basis of the Renaissance, with its fundamental debt to antiquity, was the transition from feudalism to capitalism and particularly the urban fusion of aristocracy and bourgeoisie. This fusion occurred only in Italy, France, Spain, and England. But in Italy the absence of an indigenous absolutism and in France an unusually rapid transition from a very weak to a very strong absolutism precluded syntheses on the Anglo-Spanish model.