Death and Domesticity: Reassessing Domestic Dramas of the Renaissance

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• Death and Domesticity: Reassessing Domestic Dramas of the Renaissance
• Brent Griffin (bio)

“[T]o call back yesterday; / That Time could turn up his swift sandy glass / To untell the days, and to redeem these hours” (13.48–50): Thomas Heywood’s poignant lines from A Woman Killed with Kindness provide a sentiment familiar to all those who seek the present moment through the sounds of the past, who hear the voices of yesteryear in the melodies of early modern poetics. Such are the recurrent chords played by Resurgens Theatre Company, a professional original practices troupe that performs rarely produced plays of the English Renaissance. The essays collected in this special issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination developed from their Death and Domesticity Conference at the Shakespeare Tavern Playhouse in Atlanta, Georgia, on September 28 and 29, 2018. The occasion marked Resurgens’ second academic conference on the verse dramas of Shakespeare’s contemporaries,¹ and called for submissions that examined some aspect of Renaissance-era domestic tragedies, including topics involving the effect of murder plays on performance and/or early modern print culture. Participants traveled from across the US, as well as the UK, each presenting diverse material that matched Resurgens’ deep-cut ethos admirably.²

Highly popular during the period, domestic dramas have been long since overshadowed by genres more typically associated with the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage, specifically, those derived from categories listed in Shakespeare’s 1623 Folio—comedies, histories, and tragedies. Indeed, the Bard’s status as the premier cultural paradigm for “not [only] an age, but for all time” continues to govern our institutionalized understanding of Renaissance drama (not surprisingly, with a substantial Shakespeare industry working nonstop to shape the content of our conferences, course offerings, journals, monographs, textbooks, etc.). Nevertheless, as these essays illustrate, recent scholarship suggests a move away from narrow bardocentric interests and toward a renewed examination of non-Shakespearean playwrights, playing companies, playing conditions, and types of plays. The busy workshops of early modern poet-practitioners—the numerous playhouses of London (more than just the Globe [End Page v] and Blackfriars, to be sure)—supply the inspiration and innovation necessary for generations of theatre artists to thrive, and a strong argument can be made that the greater dramatic influence belongs to Shakespeare’s rival dramatists, brand name recognition notwithstanding. At the very least, we cannot hope to evaluate the merits of their disparate output (or Shakespeare’s, for that matter) without analyzing the comparative traits and distinguishing aspects of each. And since domestic dramas are not represented in the 1623 Folio (with the arguable exception of Othello), the need to reassess the theatrical prominence of these plays during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, along with future repercussions heretofore obscured, becomes especially clear.

By definition, domestic dramas or bourgeois tragedies depict incidents drawn from everyday life—ordinary people placed in heightened circumstances, usually with tragic results. Private households furnish the setting for a new form of public entertainment, uniquely English in style and scope, that blurs the line between conventional notions of tragedy and its actual representation in period theatres. The Aristotelian/Senecan model that Shakespeare routinely follows (that is, the tragic blueprint requiring the fall of princes and the fate of nations hanging in the balance) hardly reflects the commonplace dynamic present in these slice-of-life plays. In the same spirit of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, which rejects the “courts of kings where state is overturned, / Nor in the pomp of proud audacious deeds” (Prologue 4–5), domestic tragedians, like Heywood in A Woman Killed with Kindness, direct their audiences to “Look for no glorious state; our Muse is bent / Upon a barren subject” (Prologue 3–4). This purposeful reduction in dramatic scale not only better conforms to the spatial and dramaturgical particulars of Renaissance playhouses, but also resonates more strongly with playgoers seeking relatable material reimagined from daily affairs—all portrayed with a remarkably un-Shakespearean attentiveness to the smallest detail (Heywood’s stage directions include the entrance of a character “brushing the crumbs from his clothes with a napkin, [as if] newly risen from supper” [8.22]). Predating Arthur Miller’s “Tragedy and the Common Man” by over three centuries...