IDEAS. A HISTORY OF THOUGHT AND INVENTION, FROM FIRE TO FREUD by watson peter

Author:watson, peter [watson, peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: no cover, 1990, anobii, english, archivio inglese
Published: 2012-02-07T14:55:44+00:00

At more or less the time that Veronese was appearing before the Inquisition in Venice, and the camerata were meeting in Florence, something equally noteworthy was happening in London. ‘Contemporaries recognised it; foreign visitors marvelled at it, and in his Itinerary of 1617 Fynes Moryson identified it:

“there be, in my opinion, more Playes in London than in all the partes of the worlde I have seene, so doe these players or Comedians excel all other in the worlde.” What they were seeing was an explosion on the stages of London, an explosion that reflected a sudden creative flowering in all forms of literature: the drama of Shakespeare and Marlowe, the poetry of Donne and Spenser, and the translation of the Authorised Version of the Bible.’41 But it was drama in England that stood out most.

The defining point, Peter Hall says, was spring 1576, when James Burbage, a member of one of the great theatre companies, went outside the city limits, to Shoreditch, to build the first fixed home for drama and, in the process, ‘turned a recreation into a profession’. In only a quarter-century after that, the new idea had reached its culmination: Shakespeare and Marlowe had come and gone, their dramas making new and huge demands on actors, and the main traditions of the stage had evolved and coalesced. In a dozen new theatres something like eight hundred plays had been performed, though how many more have been lost simply isn’t known. What is known is that, in addition to Shakespeare and Marlowe, twenty other writers were responsible for twelve or more plays each: Thomas Heywood, John Fletcher, Thomas Dekker, Philip Massinger, Henry Chettle, James Shirley, Ben Jonson, William Hathaway, Anthony Munday, Wentworth Smith, Francis Beaumont.42 Heywood wrote that he ‘had a maine finger’ in 220 plays.

The explosion of drama reflects the fact that London was now following Florence as one of the most successful bourgeois cities of the time. Central to this, in London’s case, were the great sixteenth-century voyages of exploration, covered in the next chapter. The discovery of gold and silver in the Americas greatly increased the money supply in Europe, price inflation cheapened labour, and capitalists enjoyed super-profits. There was too a comparable increase in the professional classes. Enrolments to Oxford and Cambridge rose from 450 a year in 1500 to nearly a thousand a year by 1642, the cost increasing from

£20 a year in 1600 to £30 in 1660. Admissions to the Inns of Court, where lawyers were trained, likewise quadrupled between 1500 and 1600. ‘What happened between 1540 and 1640,’ says Richard Stone, ‘was a massive shift of relative wealth away from the Church and Crown…toward the upper middle and middle classes’.43 It was a similar change to that which happened in Florence. ‘The realm aboundeth in riches,’ said another account, ‘as may be seen by the general excess of the people in purchasing, in building, in meat, drink and feastings, and most notably in apparel.’44 This is a statement that recalls van Eyck’s portrait of the Arnolfinis.

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