ABSTRACT
During the English Renaissance, as scientific discoveries and other cultural advances were refining the ideas of human identity and English nationhood, several prominent English people defined themselves and Englishness through architectural structures, a process that, in turn, humanized the buildings by identifying them with humans and the history of the English people. Playwrights epitomized this phenomenon by humanizing the Tower, dramatically representing English history, English bodies, and English Protestant nationhood through the castle. In this chapter I argue for this additional, concurrent reading of the Tower plays-that, as a symbol of opposition to the crown, the Tower’s role onstage united theatergoers with one another and with the Tower itself as an English icon. Each Tower play audience being a community of largely English playgoers, seeing and hearing the Tower represented in historical drama would have reminded theatergoers, especially Londoners, of their communal past. The Tower playwrights apparently tapped into this idea by representing historic executions at the Tower in ways that privileged condemned English characters as victims worthy of audience sympathy and solidarity, often at the monarchy’s expense. Based upon spectators’ reactions at actual early modern executions, especially those following the 1586 Babington Plot, such representations in historical drama probably would have elicited intense audience compassion for the condemned characters, uniting playgoers emotionally as they gazed at the Tower onstage.
