The Elizabethan Theatre XI

Barry Thorne is an associate professor of English at Queen’s
University.

This collection is more than just a record of a biennial conference: it
is also a reference handbook to English theatre of the 1580s. Its 12
articles cover the theatrical spectrum from specific works to the
decade’s language, the cultural conditions of writing and playing, and
the challenges of producing these plays in our own time.

Beginning with an overview, “The London Stage in the 1580s,” the
collection moves through studies of Cambridge University drama, the
tournaments of the times, the language of performance, and accounts of
directing Doctor Faustus in our own day. While Ann Jennalie Cook and
A.R. Braunmuller explore the social and legal dimensions of Elizabethan
plays, Mary Elizabeth Smith applies competing religious ideologies to
Marlowe’s plays, to discover that they encourage questioning and
debate.

As the editors note, the collection features “papers that revise
interpretation, papers historical and papers experiential, papers with
arguments cautiously developed and papers with bold affirmations . . .
papers on plays that precede the 1580s and papers on plays that follow
the 1580s, papers on themes, genres, specific authors and individual
plays.”

Primarily, this collection is an excellent reference to the period, but
it also reveals the integrity and importance of the decade itself. While
reminding us that records of the period are scant, it reveals that much
can be determined from what we have. As John H. Astington reminds us, we
should be increasingly wary of our facile metaphors of evolution and
development.

This volume will be a valuable addition to a personal library of
dramatic criticism or social history of the1580s and its framing
decades. Comparable density in substance and analysis is rarely found in
such collections.