ABSTRACT
Heywood’s theatrum mundi analogy in his defense of the theater illustrates the same dangerous ambiguity for which actors were condemned. The figure is itself ambiguous. It distances humanity from the divine creator in emphasizing humanity’s dependence, their lack of control over their roles as assigned by an omnipotent God, the divine director and playwright. Yet in comparing great things to small, the figure brings a vast universe into the familiar microcosm of the theater, rendering it comprehensible, delimited by the borders of the stage, its mysterious processes displayed openly and plausibly, molded to fit the causal machinery of the play’s dramatic structure. Heywood uses this correspondence between theater and world, however, not to glorify the divine playwright or to make His ways comprehensible; instead he is defending his theater world and those who work in it. The figure enables the theater to borrow credibility and legitimacy from the “real” world that surrounded it: if all men and women are “merely players,” as Jaques claims, then the reverse also holds—the players deserve the same credence, and respect, as the people watching the performance. But Heywood goes even farther, hinting at a deeper, more dangerously far-reaching ontological correspondence between theater and world: “He that denies then theaters should be, / He may as well deny a world to me.” 2 The theater provided not only a world for Heywood, i.e., an occupation or livelihood; it also provided a way of understanding and confronting the reality of mundane existence; it offered a lens that could bring the intangible, the mysterious, the remote, and the powerful within reach.
