Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The humanism of acting: John Heywood's The Foure PP
- 2 Wit and Science and the dramaturgy of learning
- 3 Playing against type: Gammer Gurton's Needle
- 4 Time, tyranny, and suspense in political drama of the 1560s
- 5 Humanism and the dramatizing of women
- 6 The confusions of Gallathea: John Lyly as popular dramatist
- 7 Bearing witness to Tamburlaine, Part 1
- 8 Robert Green's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay: the commonwealth of the present moment
- Afterword
- Notes
- Index
1 - The humanism of acting: John Heywood's The Foure PP
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The humanism of acting: John Heywood's The Foure PP
- 2 Wit and Science and the dramaturgy of learning
- 3 Playing against type: Gammer Gurton's Needle
- 4 Time, tyranny, and suspense in political drama of the 1560s
- 5 Humanism and the dramatizing of women
- 6 The confusions of Gallathea: John Lyly as popular dramatist
- 7 Bearing witness to Tamburlaine, Part 1
- 8 Robert Green's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay: the commonwealth of the present moment
- Afterword
- Notes
- Index
Summary
To the extent that medieval morality plays reproduce a system of allegorical correspondences, they depend on straightforward acting: Good Deeds must demonstrate her name. Even when a work's meaning may signify in political or social rather than in exclusively religious terms, the moralities favor clarity of representation. But sixteenth-century drama's shift toward humanist and secular subjects privileged ambiguity in a character's presentation, evident in the enigmatic acting of both the Pardoner and the Palmer in John Heywood's The Foure PP (c. 1520s). That ambiguity invades the lying contest that forms the play's climactic action, for there the script obscures whether the victor has spoken falsely or truly. With acting and audience perception an implicit theme, The Foure PP manifests an unusual compl exity in the representation of truth and its didactic effect. Ambiguity of acting in secular humanist drama produces an unexpected openness of meaning, an effect with implications for English sixteenth-century theatre
While the protagonist of medieval dramatic allegory represents every man, Renaissance theatre inches away from fixed correspondences; interpretive possibilities begin to derive, at least partly, from the nature of theatrical experience itself. Sixteenth-century England, of course, struggled increasingly with the conflict between its habits of categorical thinking and the vagaries of experience, conscience, and historical fact. Against what they considered scholastic abstractionism, the humanists launched a return to historical context in philology, rhetoric, and biblical exegesis.
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- Theatre and HumanismEnglish Drama in the Sixteenth Century, pp. 25 - 48Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999