What is the cultural power of theatre? Defenders of the English Renaissance stage insisted on its instructional utility, but a more radical and unsettling idea had also begun to emerge by the late sixteenth century, that theatre can be, in an almost literal sense, true. That idea animates Thomas Heywood’s An Apology for Actors (1612), which tells the story of a woman who, having previously killed her spouse, watches the on-stage ghost of a murdered husband and blurts out, ‘Oh my husband, my husband! I see the ghost of my husband fiercely threatning and menacing me’. For this guilty spectator, the uncanny vividness of the stage ghost transforms it into far more than a moral reminder. Rather, the ghost acquires an immediate, personal reality: ‘so bewitching a thing is liuely and well spirited action’, says Heywood, ‘that it hath power to new mold the harts of the spectators’ (b4r. Qualities such as liveliness, well-spiritedness, and bewitchment express theatre’s virtual life; rhetorically, they recall the sense of vividness evoked in the Renaissance concept of energia, a term applied to an image, often visual, so striking that it conveys a special liveliness and memorability, the impression of its own reality. Thus the vivid claims proximity to the real.

In Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Part I, the hero succeeds by overcoming increasingly powerful opponents who refuse to grasp his inevitability and provenance. What resistance does the play overcome as a means to success in performance? Marlowe's piece apparently had the effect of conquest. According to Richard Levin, Elizabethan playgoers responded with wonder, conveyed in such language as “gapers,” “gazing,” “rauishes,” “dead stroke,” and “strike … dead with admiration.” Gaping, admiration, and ravishment occur elsewhere in descriptions of Renaissance drama, but they adhere to Tamburlaine insistently. Because not every Elizabethan stage warrior will strike spectators dead with admiration, the responses to Tamburlaine bespeak a certain transference, as if what Tamburlaine does to his opponents, the play does analogously to the audience. Part of the drama's originality lies there: Tamburlaine induces and then defeats audience resistance, as if Marlowe wills on his spectators the paradox of the vanquished Soldan: “And I am pleasde with this my overthrow” (I.i.482).

Criticism continues to turn on the question of whether Tamburlaine is repellent or admirable – or both. Wishing to discredit Tamburlaine's “hero ideology,” political critics see the play as exposing the protagonist's imperialistic strategies and pronounce auditorial disaffection an appropriate response. By contrast, theatrical criticism tends to treat the spectators' engulfment by Tamburlaine as normative – as Levin's historical evidence suggests. Engulfment can blur into approval, however, as the ideological critics fear, who are left insisting that “Though [Tamburlaine's] claims to divine sanction work on his onstage audiences, they should not work on us.”

Although Robert Greene is often derided as a theatrical hack and pastiche-maker, his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1589) demonstrates how commercial drama in the late 1580s could exploit humanist techniques of imitation, allusion, and analogy to attract repeat playgoers to an emergent fixed-venue theatre. Based on a prose romance, Greene's play recalls, imitates, and parodies contemporary plays, including those of Lyly and Marlowe; the earlier moralities and stage romances; his own previous dramas; and other literary and historical sources. The play's own characters and events mirror each other, too, so that actions resonate with multiple meanings; conversely, the heroine, Margaret, is developed in contrast to the literary metaphors and allusions that first define her. Such techniques help to cultivate a new public audience unified by a shared theatrical culture, so that commercial theatre now profits from humanist method. By affirming a knowledge accessible comparatively and theatrically, furthermore, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay suggests the limits of academic knowledge – and thus offers a critique of the humanist dream of learning. In Greene's play, the troubled relationship between experience and knowledge that pulses through sixteenth-century drama achieves poignant culmination.

In the late 1580s, conditions at the playhouses were dynamic. The advent of permanent venues meant that producers needed to attract repeat customers. Competition with other entertainments, such as bearbaiting, demanded that drama provide immediate stimulation and variety. In this fluid period the repertory acting system became temporarily unstable, as several adult companies “reshuffled membership.”

The dramaturgy of women that we have been considering brings us to the plays of John Lyly, who invests romance with a new, sophisticated dynamism. We have learned to think of Lyly as the archetype of the failed “humanist as courtier.” In that melancholy conception, the humanist endeavors to put his high ideals and intellectual skills to work for the court, only to discover that it values him solely as an entertainer. We can consider Lyly, however, from another, less familiar angle, that of the humanist as “popular playwright” who adds to the emotional power of public theatre. To do so calls into question once more the prevailing paradigm of sixteenth-century drama: that humanist plays differ from popular ones in that the former are intellectual, arid, and aristocratic while the latter are visceral, imaginatively arousing, and plebeian, and that consequently playwrights such as Lyly failed with the public because they wrote a static “drama of ideas.” Reappraisal of that reigning paradigm of Tudor drama involves recognizing a virtue in humanist plays exactly where they presumably fall short of popular ones, in the aspect of theatricality.

Toward that end, I offer two arguments about Lyly's drama, using the “court comedy” Gallathea (c. 1584) as my leading example. First, although Lyly's plays have been treated by modern critics as static and intellectual dramas of ideas, Gallathea generates emotional and visceral delight from, not exactly ideas, but a pleasurable “confusion” that displays theatrical values one expects from popular plays.

Medieval morality plays such as Mankind (c. 1470) or Medwall's Nature (c. 1495) present women as temptations to sin or as embodiments of virtue, but in sixteenth-century drama representations of women change from virgin and whore stereotypes to complex and engaging figures. How could that change happen? While Tudor popular theatre contains a full quota of bawds, shrews, scolds, and angelic virgins, its demonized or idealized women, a line of different, critically underappreciated female characters appears in humanist drama. Spanning the More circle interludes, the 1560s woman-centered plays, and the 1570s romances, these humanist theatrical works grant women personal and political influence, show them harmoniously combining male and female traits, and confer stage authority upon them. Stereotypical views of women permeate most sixteenth-century plays, but humanist dramaturgy nurtures female protagonists whose compelling stage presence – expressing griefs, doubts, private desires, and secret identities – contributes to the achievement in Renaissance theatre of individualized women characters.

Most critical discussions of women characters in “Renaissance Drama” limit themselves to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, dismissing earlier Tudor drama as patriarchal and repressive of women and postulating an Elizabethan misogyny whose “diverse legal, moral, popular, and medical discourses … link women's agency to transgression.” Those views contain considerable justice. The popular morality and saints plays, for example, typically divide women into the opposing categories of whore and virgin.

In the early sixteenth century, humanist pedagogues discovered in drama a useful vehicle to promote their educational ideals. While print helped humanist reformers to stimulate controversy and public interest, drama served well for countering resistance to humanist education and for shaping students to humanist values. Plays, of course, were widely read and performed in schools in England and across Renaissance Europe: Terence and Plautus were translated and morally explicated, and play-acting offered students practice in language, oratory, gesticulation, public presentation, and even boldness and discretion. Mid-century statutes at Eton, for example, memorialize the practice of teaching oratory and gesture through dramatic presentation, and Richard Mulcaster's Merchant Taylor's School in the 1570s and 1580s was remembered for instilling ‘“good behaviour and audacitye”’ through acting. Besides being heuristic, school theatre revealed itself as apt for promoting the humanist educational vision. That vision shapes John Redford's Wit and Science (c. 1530–47), and learning as a theme permeates numerous other plays, such as Henry Medwall's Nature (c. 1495), Youth (c. 1513), John Rastell's The Nature of the Four Elements (c. 1518), John Skelton's Magnificence (1519), Nice Wanton (1547–53), Lusty Juventus (c. 1550), Thomas Ingelend's The Disobedient Child (c. 1560), William Wager's The Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou Art (c. 1568), and Misogonus (c. 1570). What about early drama makes it so appealing to humanist learning?

For humanist reformers, drama promised to encourage the spectators' emotional embrace of the transformative vision of education through their engagement with the protagonist's self-discovery.

“Prove your invention! Write a Terentian comedy about a trifle!” Thus, scholars sometimes imagine, “Mr. S. M[aster] of Art” came to write Gammer Gurton's Needle (c. 1553), rising to a challenge by a fellow teacher at Christ's College, Cambridge. If Gammer Gurton's Needle was born in the admiration of Terence, all schoolboys have not felt that reverence, as a student of a later generation avers: “Terence, this is stupid stuff!” With Terence as explicated by Donatus, and Terence and Donatus as explicated by Melanchthon, thrummed and drummed into his brain, a young Tudor grammarian might have wondered: “Is life really like classical comedy?” To link Tudor experience and ancient art, Mr. S. infuses Terentian structure with adolescent anxiety, confusion about agency, and satire on academic rationalism: in humanist dramaturgy a formalist model becomes saturated with playful contradictions. Against the critique that humanist plays drift toward intellectualism, while popular morality drama accounts for early theatre's energy, immediacy, and sense of game, Gammer Gurton's Needle reveals humanist playmaking's under-appreciated theatrical vitality and inventiveness.

One virtue of Gammer Gurton's Needle is its open-endedness, a feeling of unpredictable possibility, even a burgeoning sense of emotional life and magic – qualities manifested in its impish sabotagings of form, expectation, logic, and stereotype. In Wit and Science, as we have seen, humanist drama develops its metaphoric richness and emotional voltage to advance rhetorical ends; in Gammer Gurton's Needle, didacticism now turns playfully ironic as the play explores theatre's emotional life.

English drama at the beginning of the sixteenth century registers as allegorical, didactic, and moralistic, yet by the end of the century theatre would be censured as emotional, fantasy-arousing, and even immoral. How could such a change occur? How does it happen that drama, which enters the century as a vehicle of spiritual enlightenment, becomes, by the 1590s, itself an object of emotion? To address such questions requires exploring the ways that Tudor drama engages feelings and sensibilities, the ways that it creates the Renaissance experience of being “moved”; it requires exploring, that is, dramaturgy and theatrical effect. Such an inquiry will suggest that influential theories of early Renaissance theatre – particularly the theory that Elizabethan plays are viewed best through the tradition of morality drama – need reconsidering to explain theatre's affective power. The excitement of the Tudor stage derives partly from a humanist dramaturgy that embroils feelings and emotions in the creation of meaning.

An overarching issue continues to be troubling: how to account for England's high tide of drama in the sixteenth century. Prior to the explosion of commercial theatre in Elizabeth's reign, plays had already taken firm hold. In the Tudor humanist educational program at grammar schools and universities, for example, students studied and performed plays to a degree difficult to explain.

Although this book is primarily about the drama of the sixteenth century, it is also about our contradictory perceptions of that drama in the twentieth century. Besides pondering the conflict between earlier humanist and later morality theories, present students of Tudor drama must face the problem of discussing literary history itself. While I have wanted to see sixteenth-century drama as exploring some characteristic dramaturgical problems throughout the era, I have also viewed drama, for certain purposes, as changing in the course of the century from one attitude to another. Thus, for example, while these chapters pursue recurring interests in enigma, doubt, and confusion, the discussion of female characters argues that a possibility in representation emerged by the end of the century that existed only inchoately at the beginning. I find myself wanting to claim that both perspectives – a certain repetition and a certain newness – are true. This paradox, I believe, can be defended logically – it may even be a way of making sense in the present intellectual climate – but it will really be plausible only as the chapters that advance it have been convincing.

At the outset of this project, I thought that I was simply writing about plays that seemed fascinating, but I now recognize that the “present intellectual climate” has affected the book far more than I first suspected. Somewhere along the line, challenging the thesis that the popular tradition was separate from, even superior to, the learned tradition came to possess a certain urgency.

The early 1560s mark a watershed in Tudor drama, when both popular and humanist theatre exploit an affective, psychological dramaturgy. In 1531, Sir Thomas Elyot, in The Boke named the Gouernour, argued that literary images of virtue can so inflame the heart as to stir readers to moral emulation. By the 1580s, however, antitheatricalists such as Stephen Gosson could charge that drama's excitement of spectators' passions outstrips its influence upon their ethics. That new distrust of drama's emotive power may have been well founded, for English playwrights in the 1560s elaborated audience-arousing strategies: variety; fantasy; wish fulfillment; spectacle; and, not least, time-related devices such as anticipation, retrospection, and expansion or compression of action – leading to a new quality of suspense. Emotional and psychological effects become increasingly important to theatrical meaning, a change that includes both popular and humanist drama and suggests that these presumably separate traditions may share affective common ground.

The 1560s, of course, mark a watershed in Tudor history: Elizabeth's ascension; the reinstitution of Protestantism; the end of religious burnings; the Marian exiles' return; the expansion of humanism; and the emergence of political, religious, and intellectual leaders of a new generation. These realignments encouraged political reconsiderations on the stage. Thus one common theme of early Elizabethan plays – including Cambises (c. 1561), Gorboduc (1562), Appius and Virginia (c. 1564), Damon and Pithias (1564), Jocasta (1566), Gismond of Salerne (c. 1566), and Horestes (S.R. 1567) – is tyranny.

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.