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Staging Vice and Acting Evil: Theatre and Anti-Theatre in Early Modern England*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
This article revisits the relationship between dramatic production and religious change in the sixteenth century, specifically by examining the allegorical Vice figure - a dramatic embodiment of evil forces - that came to particular prominence during this period. It suggests that the professional actor became increasingly associated with this figure of moral evil. I propose also that understanding the moral ambivalence of the actor’s presence can inform our understanding of many plays in which no obviously coherent Vice figure is present, but in which possibilities of such an allegory are important. It would be impractical to present this argument across the range of dramatic examples it deserves, particularly since substantial contextual argument will be necessary if the article’s conclusions are to have any weight. It is partly for this reason that an examination of Shakespeare’s Hamlet concludes the paper, a play needing no introduction. It will be suggested that the play’s issue of conscience was mediated in important ways by the actor’s potentially Vice-like presence, defined as such by Tudor legislation as well as by a variety of anti-theatrical religious writings.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2012
Footnotes
*
I would like to thank in particular John Kerrigan, as well as Richard Beadle, Catherine Belsey, David Hillman, Raphael Lyne, Subha Mukherji and Daniel Wakelin, who encountered this argument in a variety of earlier or expanded forms, and offered many helpful comments.
References
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14 1 Jac. I c. 7, ‘An Acte for the Continuance and Explanation of the Statute made in the 39[th] yeere of the Raigne of our late Queene Elizabeth, intituled An Acte for Punishmente of Rogues, Vagabondes and Sturdie Beggars …’, in Statutes, 4: 1024.
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28 For example, note the allusion to a complaint of 1601 which had lamented ‘the inordinate resort and concourse of dissolute and idle people daiele unto publique stage plaies’: Minute of Letter from the Privy Council to the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London, 31 December 1601, repr. in ‘Dramatic Records of the City of London: The Remembrancia’, ed. E. K. Chambers and W.W. Greg, in Collections 1/1, Malone Society 6 (Oxford, 1907), 43–100, at 83.
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37 See esp. Jonson, Ben, The Devil is an Ass, ed. Happé, Peter (Manchester, 1994 Google Scholar), I. i. 40–6, in which the Vice ‘Iniquity’ is summoned ironically.