Household Business: Domestic Plays of Early Modern England

Elisabeth Anne MacDonald-Murray is an assistant professor of English at
the University of Western Ontario.

Viviana Comensoli’s study of early modern English domestic plays
follows in the wake of an avalanche of postmodern criticism that seeks
to refute the assumption of the New Critics that the English Renaissance
was a period of relative cultural, social, and moral uniformity. In
response to earlier scholarship that has characterized domestic
dramas—a popular genre in the late 16th and early 17th centuries—as
didactic and dramatically inferior, Comensoli argues that they are, in
fact, part of a “multivocal genre ... a vast network of discourses
comprising early modern culture, which was marked by disparity and
contradictions.”

Tracing the literary roots of the domestic drama to native English
theatrical traditions and Medieval cyclical plays, Comensoli points to
the intertextuality between the Medieval and Renaissance forms, with
their common focus on the representation of the contemporary family
unit. However, she notes in the early modern drama an ambivalence
concerning the “myth of the orderly family,” as well as a resistance
to “traditional praxes.” She attributes this ideological reserve on
the part of the playwrights to the widespread social anxiety in
Renaissance England over dramatic shifts in the nation’s social and
political hierarchies—the result of increasing urbanization and
citizen mobility, as well as the redistribution of wealth and property.
The impact of these social upheavals on the family became the narrative
fodder for domestic dramas, both comedies and tragedies. At the same
time, an increased awareness of domestic violence and disintegration,
coupled with a new focus on the dominant-subservient dynamic in
male-female relationships, opened the way for dramatists’ depiction of
“the disturbing relation of marriage and power.”

Changing dramatic tastes and fashions in the mid-17th century led to
the decline of domestic plays, which eventually gave way to the
satirical and sentimental comedies of the Restoration. Yet Comensoli
concludes her text with the observation that echoes of the early modern
genre can be heard in the plays of Henrik Ibsen and Henry Miller,
thereby suggesting that domestic plays of the Renaissance might hold new
significance for a modern audience.