‘How did the tragic theater of Shakespeare and his colleagues’, asks Norman Rabkin, ‘climb with such lightning rapidity out of the unpromising slime of mid-sixteenth-century tragedy?’ (Rabkin 1985: 28). This contrast between exhilarating ascendancy and obstinately earthbound matter is far from uncommon when the development of Renaissance tragedy is considered, even for an otherwise subtle reader of earlier drama like Rabkin. Yet the attempt to examine the relationship between midsixteenth-century works and the later canonical theatre is a useful one because it is so often neglected. A recent survey of Renaissance tragedy is not untypical in dismissing the precursors of Kyd and Shakespeare: ‘The early Tudor tragedies generally strike modern audiences as dull or crude or both, often labouring along in the verse form known as “fourteeners” [...] with predictable didactic morals and psychologically unbelievable characters’ (Watson 2003: 307). In fact, such plays are performed rarely, and when they are the result is not as drearily predictable as this judgement assumes (E. Hill 1992: 432). At the end of this chapter I would like to reconsider how Elizabethan tragic drama can be understood across the breadth of the period rather than simply at its end. Rabkin’s interpretation offers, unintentionally, a place to begin.
Rabkin’s thesis is that the artistic ineptitude of plays such as Cambises and Gorboduc is, paradoxically, their greatest strength. The dramatists of the early 1560s may attempt to compose genuinely edifying works but they are also inventive enough to explore some independent dramatic possibilities; these keep outwitting their best intentions. They become fascinated, for example, by the appeal of the immorality they should condemn or they grant equal weight to the role of destiny and individual choices in the onset of catastrophe. Consequently, these plays keep producing contradictions as well as problems of interpretation. Unwittingly, Rabkin suggests, such works made a truly tragic theatre possible, one that could range far beyond the scope of doctrinal teaching to explore more profound and irresolvable ethical problems and political conflicts. These rudimentary works demonstrated to more self-conscious and sophisticated tragedians that ‘there is no single and simple right answer to the problems’ tragic drama could explore and this brings them ‘prophetically close to the ethos of later Elizabethan tragedy’ (Rabkin 1985: 31).
The assumption in this reading that canonical plays realize their intentions whereas earlier ones only manifest their confusions is one that this chapter will contest. However, it has one important consequence: it breaks away from reading these works as theatrically animated homilies. In such accounts, Cambises is interpreted as a ‘dramatic illustration of the current Anglican doctrine of passive obedience’ (Armstrong 1955: 295) and the authors of Gorboduc as ‘working with generally accepted principles that were thoroughly orthodox’, in particular ‘the necessity for good counsel and for a single sovereign power in an undivided realm’ (Talbert 1967: 93,109). In contrast, Rabkin stresses that it is the play’s failure to teach such lessons clearly that is the key to their potential success as tragedies; this is a suggestion worth pursuing. We can follow it by considering the teaching offered by both plays and then by exploring how their tragic aspirations lead to a more unsettling understanding of political experience and, especially, of political sovereignty.
World History
