ABSTRACT
By the time history plays represented the Tower of London spatially onstage, most playgoers had primarily experienced the actual Tower as the icon of royal tyranny that it had become during the Reformation. Its cultural meanings must have appeared to be non-negotiable, fixed by the crown to serve only royal interests. Imagine playgoers’ surprise, then, seeing and hearing the Tower repeatedly represented as a symbol whose meanings were unstable and thus up for renegotiation. I propose in this chapter to demonstrate, first, the crown’s ideology of the Tower from 1579 to c.1634, when twenty-four history plays represented the Tower; second that all twenty-four plays represented the Tower’s symbolic instability in ways that contradicted the royal ideology; and third, that the plays about Richard III were especially important for shaping the Tower’s cultural meaning, eliciting a struggle with the crown for the Tower’s ideology.
