Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Even with the earliest documented performances, the political dimensions of Elizabethan theater, and of Shakespeare's plays in particular, elicited powerful responses. His works engaged issues that preoccupied Renaissance political thinkers from Guicciardini and Machiavelli to Montaigne and Grotius. Yet it was not as political theorist, but as part owner and manager of a theatrical troupe, that the dramatist played an oblique, if for him no doubt alarming, role in Tudor intrigue: the most salient evidence of an Elizabethan play's effect remains the vigorous exception taken by the queen and her ministers to the timing of a revival, widely believed to have been a suitably modified version of Shakespeare's Richard II. On February 8, 1601, the day after its command performance at the Globe, those who had commissioned the performance (the most prominent participants in the Essex rebellion) were arrested for treason and the players sought for questioning. The queen's personal objection to the episode was later recorded by William Lambarde, Keeper of the Rolls: “I am Richard, know ye not that,” she is supposed to have said, adding, rather curiously, that “this tragedie was 40 tie times played in open streets and houses” ( Schoenbaum 1999 : 44, 49). It may then come as little surprise that modern adaptations of Shakespeare often assume a political edge, even attempting to shape public ... log in or subscribe to read full text