The period of literary history we call the English Renaissance has at its core the new commercial theatre of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While the term ‘Renaissance’ may initially call to mind courtly writings, such asThe Faerie Queene andAstrophel and Stella , it is the surviving texts of the commercial playhouses that have most strongly shaped our fascination with this period. So frequently are these plays edited, read, taught and performed, in fact, that they can seem freestanding monuments, dramatic stories left to history by the grace of a culture replete with literary talent. Yet in their own time, the dramas of such playwrights as Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton and Webster were commodities, and perishable ones at that. Far from the glorified, handsomely adorned things that we encounter in classrooms, and on stage and screen, they were instead part of a bustling new theatrical business that may with justification be called an ‘entertainment industry’.

At first blush, the term ‘industry’ may seem too formal for use in this regard. Given its sometimes rag-tag players, secondhand costumes, impoverished playwrights, noisome playhouses and uncertain conditions of employment, the business of theatre at this time seems to have been so unpredictable, and generally so financially unrewarding, that to call it an industry risks implying a stability it did not possess. When seen from historical distance, and from the perspectives of those who worked within it, however, the business of theatre in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was indeed an industry; on the whole it offered the commercial production and sale of theatrical spectacle in a regularised, highly competitive environment.

Two kinds of theatre were in a state of abeyance during the first year of King James's reign. The first was commercial performance in London, the playhouses having been closed when Elizabeth was dying in 1603, and remaining closed on account of increased plague deaths following James's accession. The second was ceremonial theatre, in that James's coronation pageant had to be postponed until the following year. This too was due to the plague, though it later became clear that James was also personally somewhat unwilling to take part in this public show. The reasons for this absence of theatre in 1603–4 tell us something about how theatre was perceived at the time. Closure on a monarch's death was a measure of the authorities' fearfulness of theatre as a potential instigator of disorder. Not only were plays liable to contain ‘dangerous matter’ (Henry Herbert's phrase; see again below) that might put ideas into people's heads; they also, regardless of their content, presented the occasion for very large assemblies of people to gather, including those at the lower end of the social scale. Any large gathering might be regarded in times of stress as a riot waiting to happen, and it was not uncommon for theatres to be closed at other times of unrest, as, for example, during the anti-alien riots of summer 1592. When James Burbage first tried to open the Blackfriars for public performance in 1596, residents voiced the same fear as the London authorities, and successfully petitioned against it on the grounds that it would lead to ‘the great resort and gathering together of all manner of vagrant and lewd persons that, under colour of resorting to the plays, will come thither and work all manner of mischief’.

Roman remains: the Phantom limb

Patients recovering from amputations often report that during post-operative healing – in some cases long after convalescence is over – they feel twinges of pain or itching from the lost limb, an odd misfiring in the central nervous system and cerebral cortex indicating that life continues to haunt what is now clearly empty space. This phenomenon, a medical condition commonly known as a ‘phantom limb’, compounds the body's wistful remembrance with something less than material fact. It may be a useful condition to keep in mind as we approach the Roman theatrical tradition in Britain from a place and time as far removed as the present. Like a phantom limb, Roman drama in Britain continues to send signals of its once vital life long after all but stony remnants of its presence have disappeared, long after the vast civilisation that spawned and nurtured it passed on into history. Our experience of the Roman theatrical tradition, poignant, incomplete, perhaps suspicious, has its roots in that vibrant, vanished, phantom culture.

Today, in the early dawn of the twenty-first century, the rise and fall of the phantom Roman empire and its cultural dominion, spanning five hundred years of British history over two millennia ago, seem far-off events in a sequence hard to imagine, hard to suggest as even tangentially important to a modern history of British theatre. The past is passed by so easily. With the single blink of an eye, a contemporary theatre aficionado with interests in scripts, stages and costumes might quickly by pass whole centuries of Roman invasion, occupation and cultural colonialism.

This choice of a single year in British theatrical history is rather like a geological transect which makes an arbitrary cut through different strata. In doing so, it leaves some doubt about exactly how far the evidence which emerges is a true reflection since the theatrical process under examination, rather like a geological one, is subject to continuities and changes which cannot be wholly understood by reference to the sample alone. There is also the problem of near misses, since we find that although some theatrical events certainly did occur precisely in the calendar year 1553 (new style), what happened in adjacent years ought to be taken into account if it colours what we know about the year in question.

The attraction of this particular year is partly that it marks a period of great political turmoil as Queen Mary came to the throne. Daughter of Catherine of Aragon, she had remained a Catholic, and her assumption of power meant a reversing of the increasingly Protestant tendencies of the brief reign of her brother, Edward VI (1547–53). She was proclaimed on 19 July, her brother having died thirteen days earlier, and the intervening period being marked by the attempt of the Duke of Northumberland to preserve the Protestant monarchy, and his own ascendancy, by proclaiming as queen his daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Grey. Alongside these momentous political events there are several theatrical items which can be definitely attributed to this particular year making it unusually rich in such occasions.

Twenty years ago, a volume on early modern theatre would not have contained an essay or chapter about household performances; very likely the term ‘household’ would not even appear in the index. But ironically, an awareness of household theatre and noble patronage has always silently haunted practically every volume about Renaissance drama. Whenever a performance at court is described, whenever a travelling troupe of players is mentioned, whenever minstrels are noted, whenever an interlude is analysed, whenever the antics of a fool are admired, household performance haunts the writing. So, it turns out we have been covertly discussing this topic for some time; all it takes is a slight shift of the lens, a change from background to foreground to produce this essay and other studies of patronage.

In our own time, the students and scholars of early modern theatre have focused primarily on the plays of the public stages, but long before the existence of the Blackfriars, the Rose, or the great Globe itself, private household auspices had offered cultural experiences that differed significantly from their vastly more famous progeny. Records of Early English Drama (REED) publications are verifying that during the peak years of the London stage, performances sponsored by noble patrons in the provinces, at households and towns, were increasing, which challenges the popular notion that the public stage replaced the private. So theatre historians, perhaps under the influence of New Historicism, have turned their attention to matters contextual to printed plays, and consequently such venues as the great households of England have become a focus of study rather than an incidental footnote.

The writing of a theatre history reveals almost as much about contemporary tastes and values as it does about the cultural world of the past. Historians tend to organise their material into familiar explanatory or narrative structures, most often, the rise, the fall and the rise and fall. If we consider the dramatic literature produced during the period 1540–1660, historians from the mid eighteenth century onwards have preferred a story of rise and fall. In their narratives dramatic literature charted an upward trajectory from the primitive dramatic texts of mummings, mysteries and moralities, blossomed into theatre proper embodied by the sophisticated genius of Shakespeare, before collapsing, exhausted, into Cavalier and Caroline degeneracy. An outspoken example of this kind of narrative from the eighteenth century is Chetwood'sA Short View of the Rise and Progress of the English Stage (1752). Chetwood cannot mourn the paucity of pre-Shakespearian theatrical literature:

Chetwood had little time for drama before or after Shakespeare and Jonson. While we might smile at his offhand dismissal of swathes of dramatic endeavour, his assessment of dramatic quality employed a model that remained a powerful truism in the literary study of early modern drama.

Thomas Middleton'sA Game at Chess was a phenomenon, being – by several criteria – the most successful play of the Tudor/Stuart era. It ran for nine consecutive days at the Globe, from 5–14 August 1624 (interrupted only by the standard prohibition against playing on Sunday 8 August), at a time when repertoires normally changed almost daily to provide fresh fare for playgoers. Even so, it played to packed houses. The indefatigable letter-writer John Chamberlain reported that it ‘has been followed with extraordinary concourse, and frequented by all sorts of people old and young, rich and poor, masters and servants, papists and puritans, wise men et[c], churchmen and statesmen … and a world besides’. John Holles also found daunting crowds when he rowed to the Globe: ‘which house I found so thronged, that by scores they came away for want of place, though as yet little past one; nevertheless loath to check the appetite, which came so seldom to me (not having been in a playhouse these ten years) & such a dainty not every day to be found, I marched on, & heard the pasquin’ ( Chess , 198). The Spanish ambassador, Don Carlos Coloma, reported ‘that there were more than 3000 persons there on the day that the audience was smallest’ ( Chess , 194), and it would have run even longer if he had not complained about it to King James, who then ordered the King's Men to cease playing altogether while the affair was investigated.

Of the 800 performers traced by Edwin Nungezer for inclusion in hisDictionary of Actors and of Other Persons Associated with the Public Representation of Plays in England before 1642 (1929), upwards of thirty can be identified as professional clowns or fools, but not one can be confidently said to have been both clown and fool. The first task of this essay is to distinguish between these two roles.

The clown

The word ‘clown’ is an Elizabethan importation to the English language. It came into currency because it usefully distinguished those who used it from those they used it about. ‘Clowns’ were rustic and therefore boorish, the polar opposites of the courtly sophisticates whose concern it was to establish anew a code of gentility for the great and the good in Elizabethan England. It is in this sense, for instance, that Robert Greene uses the word in the opening stage direction to the third scene ofFriar Bacon and Friar Bungay ( c. 1589): ‘Enter Margaret the faire Mayd of Fresingfield, with Thomas and Ione, and other clownes’; and it is in this sense that the mechanicals ofA Midsummer Night's Dream are all clowns. In the Elizabethan theatre, though, such generic definitions are of less use to the performers than to the tireman who must costume them. The lively encounter between actor and audience on the platform stage begins with the recognition that, unique among clowns, Bottom is the Clown.

Distinct from the history of drama, the history of theatre is signposted by transcendent performers, and the first great artist of the English stage was a clown. Richard Tarlton (d.1588) was qualified to speak for the rustic immigrants to the great city of London because he was one himself. Biographical information is scanty and contradictory (he was a swineherd in Shropshire; he was from Essex, where he learned the publican's trade; he was apprenticed to a water-carrier), but that is not surprising in the case of a man who was anecdotally mythologised during his own lifetime and in the decades immediately following his death.

Local dramatic activity

The dominant trend outside London from 1540 to 1642 was the disappearance of late medieval traditions of dramatic activity without the creation of new forms to replace them, so that by the time parliament prohibited public performing in 1642, very little remained. Economic distress in both provincial towns and rural areas contributed to the decline in dramatic activity outside the capital, but the Reformation had the greatest impact. In fact, to plot in space and time the suppression or abandoning of forms of entertainment ranging from biblical cycles and parish plays to king ales, maypoles and morris dancing is effectively to map the progress of the Reformation across the English landscape. That progress was gradual, at first affecting only those elements of the traditions that too obviously reflected Roman Catholic theology and practice. The feast of Corpus Christi was suppressed in 1548, forcing the biblical cycles to shift to Whitsun or some other convenient date, and some plays were dropped from the cycles around this time. The reign of the Catholic Mary Tudor briefly reversed the process in the mid 1550s, but when the Protestants returned to power with Elizabeth, they intensified their efforts to eradicate anything associated with the Roman church, eliminating the major cycle plays in the 1560s and 1570s. Other town- and parish-sponsored drama lasted as long, and often longer, especially in places remote from London. Eventually, however, the traditionalists gave way before the increasing numbers and power of those whom they called ‘puritans’, those who valued the sober industriousness of the individual and the preaching of God's word over the festive communal rituals provided by the old dramatic traditions.

If a complete list of playwrights for the commercial stage from 1580 to 1642 were to be discovered in a London archive, few students of early English drama would recognise many of the names. Until the mid 1580s, most commercial drama was written by players for their companies; while there are some lists of players in this period, there are no lists of those players who were also dramatists. After 1585 players continued to supply companies with plays: for example, Richard Tarlton, Robert Wilson, Robert Armin, Samuel Rowley, Charles Massey and Nathan Field. A few players became known chiefly as playwrights: William Shakespeare, Benjamin Jonson and Thomas Heywood. By the late 1580s there were also authors who devoted a significant part of their time to playwriting. Many came to London from the provinces (Robert Greene, John Day, John Fletcher); some were Londoners born (Thomas Dekker, James Shirley). Many had fathers in trade (Thomas Kyd, scrivener; Anthony Munday, draper), some were themselves members of guilds (Henry Chettle, stationer), and some were of gentle birth (Francis Beaumont). Many acquired a university education (George Peele, Oxford; Christopher Marlowe, Cambridge); some continued to an Inn of Court (John Marston and John Ford, Middle Temple). InPalladis Tamia , or Wits Treasury (1598), praising those authors best in tragedy and comedy, Francis Meres cuts across lines of class, education, commercial venue and professional commitment to include the player Wilson, the provincial Greene, the Londoner Dekker, the tradesman's son Kyd and the university graduate Marlowe, along with men with modest vitas such as Richard Hathaway and Henry Porter.

The sixteenth century was a time of great change. Inflation, expansion and new forms of mobility were challenging and displacing centuries-old patterns of social order, religious belief, political structure and economic value. The population of England and Wales grew by more than 45 per cent to over four million people in 1600. Land was enclosed, workers displaced and real wages for the poor declined; at the same time, more men had access to education, the state took control of religion without causing a full-scale civil war, and luxury goods poured in from newly accessible foreign lands. Interpreting the place of theatre within this flurry of activity is a complex task. To invoke an analogy popular among cultural critics, looking at sixteenth-century theatre is like looking at an anamorphic perspective painting such as Holbein'sThe Ambassadors : the first impression is one of profit and delight, but another image gradually emerges to complicate the picture. Viewed the more direct and obvious way, the last three decades of Elizabeth's reign inaugurated the great era of English drama. Professional theatre companies flourished and a remarkable variety of performance genres and styles came into being, producing great and memorable play scripts that have come to dominate the classical repertory of English-language theatre. But buried within this picture of artistic energy, productivity and innovation lies the skull, the reminder of what was dying and the sign of future problems that the rich surface could not entirely obscure.

One might suppose that the rise in Bible reading and the literacy it engendered during the English Reformation rendered obsolete the demand for popularly produced biblical plays. For centuries such plays had been among the few means by which the general populace learned about the Bible and its stories, the Catholic church having restricted reading it to those who knew Latin. Indeed, it is widely believed that biblical drama – most notably the ‘mystery cycles’ and other parish- and civic-sponsored scriptural plays – fell rapidly into decline largely because of Protestantism's reverence for thewritten Word of God and its growing hostility towards image-centred representations of sacred history. These factors, in conjunction with state censorship of religious issues in plays, the theory goes, hastened the drama's development towards secularisation which reached its height of achievement in the urban theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Without questioning Protestantism's significant role in the eventual cessation of religious drama as a popular pastime in England in the second half of the sixteenth century, we need to reconsider some of our assumptions about both Protestantism itself and religious – and here specifically biblical – drama. Protestantism was not a fixed, unchanging cultural entity; it produced a range of religious sensibilities and cultural attitudes, some characterised by excessive zeal and iconoclastic tendencies; others more conservative and accommodating of traditional beliefs and practices. This is especially important to keep in mind in the first phase of the Reformation's cultural formation, a period I would extend from about 1530 to 1580, when the relationship between medieval religious and early modern reformed values, beliefs and modes of worship wasnot everywhere characterised by conflict and opposition.

The London theatres had been active for barely eight months of 1642 when their operations were peremptorily halted by order of Parliament. On 2 September, a directive was issued from Westminster commanding that performances of stage plays should cease forthwith.

Even in an age suspicious of grand narratives, the European Reformation has somehow maintained its status as 'a decisive event' in the history of the West. It remains a lively and fascinating subject of study: something of the vitality and variety of fairly current scholarship on the subject - to say nothing of its sheer bulk - can be gauged by English readers from the four volumes of the recent Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation. All students of the early modern period, from social and economic historians to historians of art to students of literature, have sooner rather than later to engage with the impact on their field of the Reformation, and especially of its religious ideas. But how does one get to grips with what might strike the beginner as the least concrete aspect of the Reformation? This Companion, with contributions from the leading authorities in the area, is designed to be not only a stimulating collection of essays for theologians but also an accessible and reliable introduction to Reformation theology for non-specialists.

Until recently, it would have seemed eccentric to publish a companion to the theology of the Reformation. Towards the end of the twentieth century, theology came to be seen by many as marginal to Reformation studies. This was in part a reaction to the ‘great man’ approach to the past. In the same way that history in general was no longer primarily about what kings and queens did or what parliaments enacted, so the motivating force of religious history was not to be found in the writings of the ecclesiastical elite. Attention turned instead to the ‘simple folk’.

To the best of my memory, no monograph has ever been devoted to 'The Theology (or Theologians) of the Scottish Reformation'. The name most likely to spring to mind as theological animator of the movement is that of John Knox, yet, among the several roles he played in it, historians have not cast him characteristically as a theologian. James S. McEwen’s selective account is judiciously entitled The Faith of John Knox, and even Richard G. Kyle, the author of The Mind of John Knox, which is the nearest we have to a comprehensive exposition of his thought, had to grant that 'as a theologian Knox developed no dramatically fresh interpretations, nor will he ever be accorded the status of a first-rate thinker of the Protestant Reformation'.

Such a verdict would not have worried Knox himself, as is clear from his introduction to the only sermon he ever committed to print, indeed the only exposition of any portion of scripture thus preserved from over two decades of ‘al my studye and travayle within the Scriptures of God’.

INTRODUCTION

Martin Luther developed his theology in the course of a remarkable thirty-four-year career as professor of scripture at the University of Wittenberg and leader of the evangelical reform movement that became the Protestant Reformation. It is helpful to divide this career into three segments: (1) from 1512, when he began lecturing on the Bible, until 1522, when he returned to Wittenberg after appearing before the imperial diet at Worms and being declared an outlaw in Germany; (2) from 1522 until 1530, when Luther and his colleagues were busy shaping the new evangelical Christianity that became Lutheran with the confession adopted by most German Protestants at Augsburg; (3) from 1530 until his death in 1546, when Luther devoted most of his time to university work and to the practical questions of Protestant politics and church life. The distinctive Reformation themes of Luther’s theology were forged during the first period and then honed by the demands and disputes of the second and third periods. Interpreters are faced with the task of finding unity and coherence in a theology that contributed to such epochal change in church and society.