ABSTRACT
While many English Renaissance theatergoers’ personal histories would have predisposed them to receive the represented Tower as an emblem of royal hypocrisy, some Londoners evidently responded to a more intense, contingent interpretation. For these playgoers, the Tower’s portrayal onstage emblematized and encouraged resistance to the crown. In fact, several times during the years of Tower play production, repressed social groups, whose members attended plays, resisted their repression at the actual Tower of London. I propose in this chapter to establish that, in response to social and religious repression affecting apprentices, Catholics, and certain members of the nobility, the Tower’s onstage representations cultivated opposition to the crown among playgoers from these groups. At the apex of Tower play production, members of these social groups were empowered to stage major disorders involving the Tower, sometimes at the Tower itself. Representations of the Tower in other cultural texts produced at the height of the Tower plays were also oppositional, demonstrating that the Tower’s emergent meaning as an early modern national icon was located not in the monarch but in the populace and that its significance as an oppositional emblem was becoming widespread.
