ABSTRACT
The Tower of London’s representations in English Renaissance culture turned on the hinge of historical drama. By the late-Elizabethan age, the castle’s oldest and largest building, the White Tower, was about five hundred years old, and the Tower of London complex occupied a space whose history visibly dated to the Roman occupation of Britain.1 The Tower had played a significant role in English culture up to Elizabeth I’s reign, and its symbolic meanings, having developed and evolved over the centuries, affected how Renaissance Londoners perceived and reacted to it as an icon. Then, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, twenty-four English history plays-twenty of which were most probably first presented between 1590 and 1624-represented the Tower, revolutionizing its cultural meanings.
