ABSTRACT
This chapter explains about the nature of Renaissance theatricality and about the politics and/or cultural anthropology of Renaissance theater. In Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga practically dismissed the Renaissance notion of the theater of the world as an effete topos of Neoplatonism implicitly, as debilitated metaphysics even in its most worldly guise as political theater. The issue of subversion remained frequently if not always explicitly at stake in discussions of the political functioning of the English public theater, of the centrality of theatrical forms and practices to the cultural politics of Renaissance England, of role-playing and theatricalization of the 'self'. Puttenham's account implies a view of theater as a major hegemonic institution of the state; as one more important, in a sense, than the state's formal apparatus of legal, educational and bureaucratic institutions. The poetic form that Puttenham situates on the threshold between two worlds is the archaic hymn sung by the primitive community to its god.
