To what extent did gender and/or sexuality stimulate dramatists working in and representing Early Modern London?

To what extent did gender and/or sexuality stimulate dramatists working in and representing Early Modern London?

The drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries is regarded by modern audiences as one of the supreme artistic achievements in literary history; in its own day, however, it was viewed by many as a scandal and an outrage—a hotly contested and controversial phenomenon that religious and civic authorities strenuously sought to outlaw. In 1572, in fact, players were defined as vagabonds—criminals subject to arrest, whipping, and branding unless they were “liveried” servants of an aristocratic household. Burbage's company and others used this loophole in the law to their advantage by persuading various lords to lend their names (and often little more) to the companies, which thus became the Lord Chamberlain's or the Lord Strange's Men. Furthermore, “popular” drama, performed by professional acting companies for anyone who could afford the price of admission, was perceived as too vulgar in its appeal to be considered a form of art. Yet the animus of civic and religious authorities was rarely directed toward other forms of popular recreation, such as bearbaiting or the sword-fighting displays that the populace could see in open-air amphitheatres similar in construction to The Theatre and the Globe. [1] The city regularly singled out the playhouses and regularly petitioned the court for permission to shut them down—permission that was granted only temporarily, most typically when such petitions coincided with an outbreak of plague. Elizabeth I liked to see well-written and well-rehearsed plays at court during Christmas festivities but was not inclined to pay for the development and maintenance of the requisite repertory companies herself. Her economy was inseparable from her political calculation in this instance, since the favour she showed the extramural playing companies served to keep the city of London—a powerful political entity on the doorstep of her own court—off-balance, properly subordinate to her own will and thus, as it were, in its place.[2]

The “liberties or suburbs” of early modern London bear little resemblance to modern suburbs in either a legal or a cultural sense. They were a part of the city, extending up to 3 miles (5 km) from its ancient Roman wall, yet in crucial aspects were set apart from it; they were also an integral part of a complex civic structure common to the walled medieval and Renaissance metropolis, a marginal geopolitical domain that was nonetheless central to the symbolic and material economy of the city. Free, or “at liberty,” from manorial rule or obligations to the crown, the liberties “belonged” to the city yet fell outside the jurisdiction of the lord mayor, the sheriffs of London, and the Common Council, and they constituted an ambiguous geopolitical domain over which the city had authority but, paradoxically, almost no control. Liberties existed inside the city walls as well—it was in them that the so-called private, or hall, playhouses were to be found—but they too stood “outside” the city's ...