Comedians Sans Frontieres: Theatre Beyond Borders in Early Modern Europe.
Studies of Shakespeare and English theatre history have long had a tendency to reinforce national delineations of one dramatic heritage from any others. Yet as Johan Huizinga pointed out in Homo Ludens (1938), Western Civilization and its various formations such as cultures or nations are “sub specie ludi,” that is, they come after play (173). Accordingly, playing in its various forms represents a pre-cultural field of exchange. Within recent studies of London playhouse culture, the idea that “a play” was a self-contained unit of dramatic entertainment has begun to erode. From puppetry to acrobatics, fencing to flyting, the leisure marketplace of early modern England comprised a wide range of options beyond drama. The overlap of playhouses with animal baiting arenas has long been presupposed but we now acknowledge that many other kinds of entertainments also competed and collaborated in these spaces. Playgoers could also take in penmanship and archery contests, watch stilt walkers and plate spinners, and participate in a game of chance or bowling. Dancing and rope-dancing performances by international troupes including women or trainers working alongside horses and baboons could be taken in for a small fee. These activities were sometimes embedded in plays through scenes of combat, gaming, or dancing, but were not contained by the expectations of stage drama.
The traffic between plays and other performance practices illustrates an entertainment environment defined by exchange, multiplicity, and an unstable line between representational and presentational forms of theater. The same is true when extended well beyond the city walls of London. Performers and theatre-makers of all kinds routinely toured the countryside but then also crossed international borders, and may have even been traded as a sign of the Renaissance princely ideal. Considering the variety and complexity of early modern entertainment types and places provides an opportunity to reassess the concomitant, imbricated role of theatre within the wider leisure industry, particularly the ways in which itineracy facilitated modes of artistic engagement beyond mere “contact” between the cultures or communities of a single national polity.
To examine a range of perspectives on play as a site of exchange and inter-play, this panel brings together scholars working across performance-based entertainment media—and themselves from different subject positions, career stages, and parts of the globe—to complicate the impact of different European performance traditions on the evolution of early English drama. By decentering drama as but one part of a complex ecosystem of victualling, hospitality, and leisure, as well as England as an implicit nexus of theatrical innovation, we hope to enliven a cross-disciplinary conversation exploring theatricality, entertainment, and the notion of “play”.
Lines of inquiry raised in this panel include:
• playing as a bridge between national contexts
• itineracy and international touring, official and otherwise
• collaboration between troupes from different national origins
• travel and/as performance
• varieties of play as modes of transgression
Dr. Hana Ferencová, Palacký University Olomouc, CZE
Borders and Confessions: English players in the Holy Roman Empire
While in Renaissance England the theatre was a highly developed entertainment industry, in Germany, English acting companies were entering a field that, at the time, was still in its infancy. Consequently, the theatre was conveyed to them in a modified form, reflecting the different cultural, and religious contexts. The paper focuses on the travels of English players through the Holy Roman Empire from a confessional perspective ca. 1590s–1650s. The objective is to identify the strategies employed by English touring companies to overcome religious boundaries in the confessionally divided Germany and to discuss the audience’s perceptions of their performances.
Professor Laurie Johnson, University of Southern Queensland, AUS.
“Com’st thou to beard me in Denmark?” — Playing as Englishmen and Strangers
A sense of dislocation marks Hamlet’s greeting to the players who have come not just to Elsinore but to Denmark. These evidently border-hopping players provide a tangible connection to those members of Shakespeare’s own company who had travelled to Germany with the Earl of Leicester in 1586, were gifted to King Frederick of Denmark and then sent to serve the Elector of Saxony. This paper considers player identity when, within England, provincial touring companies were defined in law as “foreigners or strangers,” but when they crossed borders while travelling in Europe they did so as “English” players.
Dr. Elizabeth E. Tavares, The University of Alabama, USA
Moving Metaphors: Tumbling in and across Early Modern Europe
Wending through a London bedecked, Mary I and Philip II were interrupted by a rope-dancer. With streamers ablaze, Peter the Dutchman sailed down from St. Paul’s weathervane with a series of risky somersaults to the surprise of the 1553 nuptial train. A “feat of activity” associated with women and international performers, tumbling was a feature of English Court, civic, and fair-going culture. This paper develops a history of tumbling in England as part of a Europe-wide re-interest in Olympic sports. Exploring the appeals of their dramaturgy affords a reconsideration of state-sponsored traveling theatre troupes across international borders and gendered boundaries.