Buying and Selling So(u)les

For approximately two decades now, it has been a commonplace critical gesture to discuss the Elizabethan public playhouse as a “site of active and partisan ideological contestation” ¹ where many of the social dynamics that informed life outside the theater were represented in quasi-fictional terms, and where the emotions, concerns, interests, loyalties, and anxieties of potentially volatile assemblages of citizens representing every social stratum were replicated. Although the dimensions of its representations and replications, their “meanings,” are still the occasional subjects of debate, the idea of the stage as a site of contestation is well established. Those dimensions draw critical attention not only to what is being represented but also to how it is represented, with what degrees of approval or disdain, applause or condemnation. Oddly, in discussions of the first Shakespearean tragedy to be performed in Elizabethan London’s most celebrated public theater, it is sometimes forgotten that “the Elizabethan theater is an institution that is … a creation of the plebeian culture of the Renaissance.” ² Moreover, as Douglas Bruster has argued recently, “London’s playhouses were, of course, actual markets” where “plays [ … were] retailed in concrete, textual form … The plays people saw and heard spoke to them about their shared society … in ways more ordinary than radical.” ³