The wayward stage: Mobility and identity in early modern drama.

摘要

My dissertation, "The Wayward Stage: Mobility and Identity in Early Modem Drama," addresses the relationship between vagrancy and drama. It examines the respective controversies surrounding geographic mobility and the staging of plays and argues that both vagabondage and playing laid bare cultural anxieties centered on the mutability and mobility of social identity. Since the association of playing with vagrancy in early modern England was pervasive, I consider its effects upon not only theme and characterization, but also theatrical performance. Critical studies, to date, have made few distinctions between print and dramatic representations of masterless men and women, and have generally emphasized the popular theater's indebtedness to rogue literature and cony-catching pamphlets in its depiction of vagrants. This, I argue, limits our understanding of the extent to which playwrights incorporated the vagrancy controversies into their respective dramaturgies. While earlier print works such as John Adley's Fraternity of Vagabonds (1561) and Thomas Harman's A Caveat for Common Cursitors (1566) produced popular stereotypes of masterless men and women that influenced theatrical representations of poverty, playwrights oftentimes alluded to vagrancy in more indirect ways. In its exploration of inexorable force, for example, Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great Parts One and Two, which I examine in my first chapter, "Marlowe's War Machine," likens the fourteenth-century conqueror Timur the Great to a decommissioned soldier-turned-highway robber. The play thus acknowledges contemporary worries over the threat to civil order posed by veterans returning to England from its various campaigns in Ireland and the Netherlands in order to bolster its thematic concern with martial conquest and sedition. Subsequent chapters explore other nomadic figures---fallen apprentices in Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV, continental travelers in Jonson's Volpone, and cross-dressing women in Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl---that depart from the popular images of vagabonds while engaging official concerns over the transformative effect of geographic and semiotic mobility upon social identity. I conclude by arguing that both vagrancy and drama enabled playwrights to conceive of new forms of community receptive to the social, material, and religious changes that beset early modern England, and especially London, during the so-called "Age of Shakespeare."