C HRISTOPH E HLAND The Stage Is Not Enough: Early Modern Drama and the Representation of Movement 1. Movement and Drama Famously, the prologue speaker of Shakespeare’s Henry V laments the limitations and shortcomings of the stage. When he poses the rhetorical question whether the “wooden O” of the theatre can accommodate the historical sujet of the play, his concerns are primarily the challenges of movement and space for the dramatic action. This essay will investigate the relationship between the stage and the representation of movement as a distinct generic problem and as a challenge to theatrical performance. In what follows, the discussion will combine paradigmatic inferences with a historical reading of two plays by Thomas Heywood and John Day. These texts have been chosen so that the discussion can start from the vantage point of literary and cultural history in the British Isles at a time when the medium of the theatre enjoys an unprecedented eminence and the experience of a widening global horizon is at its freshest. Like no other previous period in English history, the early modern age is characterised by the impact of the experience of mobility and the discovery of movement on a global scale. The particular vigour of this experience is often discussed with reference to the traces it left in early modern cartography and travel writing. In this context maps and travelogues represent means of ordering and arranging the experience. Within the English context, however, it seems necessary to give thought to yet another medium: the theatre. Despite the obvious problems and limitations of the stage in containing movement and mobility, theatrical praxis serves to communicate and propagate the geographical expansion in the early modern period. In fact, it is the unique propensity of the theatre not only to contemplate and reflect this experience but to make it tangible. With regard to this it is fair to say that it is the stage which makes the widening horizon of English society part of its popular collective consciousness. Beyond a content-oriented reading of early modern theatre it is useful to attempt to conceptualise the performative potential of the stage. The German sociologist Martina Löw has discussed the cultural processes by which space is created. She writes: C HRISTOPH E HLAND 96 Im Mittelpunkt [...] steht nun die Frage, was angeordnet wird (Dinge, Ereignisse etc.? ), wer anordnet (mit welchem Recht, mit welcher Macht? ) und wie Räume entstehen, sich verflüchtigen, materialisieren oder verändern und somit Gesellschaft strukturieren. 1 With regard to the theatre the immediate attraction and applicability of Löw’s idea of space as “eine relationale (An)ordnung von Körpern [...], die ständig in Bewegung sind” (153; “a relational arrangement of bodies which are constantly shifting,” my trans.) is evident. Transferring the sociological concept to theatrical practice, it becomes clear that the stage and the bodies that people it not only echo social experience but necessarily abstract from it. The stage must be seen as a tabula rasa, as it were, which requires with each performance that its practitioners give identity to those bodies and contexts they aim to represent. The unique propensity of the stage is its flexibility to acquire ever changing spatial identities and thus to allow it to relate to distant territories. Actors on the theatrical stage do not enter a pre-structured scene. It is their performance which generates the relational and hegemonic order of the imagined world. Narrowing this discussion down to the phenomenon of mobility and its representation on stage, it can be inferred that movement serves to foreground assumed relational orders and at the same time has the propensity to change them. As the discussion of two selected plays by Thomas Heywood and John Day will show, this notion is of particular relevance for our understanding of the social function of early modern theatre: in this period the stage provides a medium of space which not only allows the representation of the experience and practice of a new expansive ideology but also permits us to come to terms with the impact of new forms of mobility on English society. 2. Space, Expansion and Dramatic Action: Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West There is probably no other period in which English society was witness to a more profound geographical and cultural widening of its horizons than around the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. As Anthony Grafton has shown in New Worlds, Ancient Texts, for most European societies the period from 1550 to 1650 was marked by a revolution in their understanding of the world: real experience gradually replaced bookish conjecture and the scholastic tradition of the Middle Ages gave way to the 1 Martina Löw, Raumsoziologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 150. “Now the central questions are: what is being arranged (things, events, etc.? ), who arranges (according to what right or power? ), and how do spaces develop, disappear, materialise or change and thus structure society? ” (my translation). The Stage Is Not Enough 97 emergence of modern science. 2 If this transition is a pan-European phenomenon fostered by colonial expansion and fuelled by the experience of travel on a global scale, the English situation still deserves particular attention. While Spain and Portugal had firmly established their colonial territories in the Americas, England dreamt of rather than lived its colonial endeavours. Although much may have remained in the realm of dreams for the time being, books such as Richard Hakluyt’s The Principle Navigations (1589) not only give evidence for a form of colonial propaganda which Peter Mancall has called “[a]n Elizabethan’s obsession for an English America,” 3 but also, and most particularly, document the influx of novel experiences and the spread of new knowledge in English society. As London rapidly grew from a regional centre into one of European if not global significance, the English increasingly witnessed this influx from a privileged vantage point. 4 A striking example of the rapid modernisation of English thinking in this period is provided by the English translation of the German Faustbuch. Only five years after the original was published in Frankfurt in 1587 a translation of this notorious book was offered to the English reader. Despite the fact that contemporary translations were generally fairly free the departures of the translation of the English Faust Book from its source are still remarkable. This anonymous translation not only smoothes the fairly uncouth German text into an elegant narrative but also sets out to correct and expand what must have seemed scientific anachronisms to the English mind: cosmological imprecision is corrected and scientific and geographical data are carefully modernised and expanded. 5 2 Grafton writes: “This new understanding of the world grew from roots planted outside the realm of learning. And it drew much of its sustenance from one of them in particular: the movement, led by practical men rather than scholars, that Europeans called the discovery of the New World.” New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA/ London: U of Harvard P, 1995 (1992)), 5. The English Faust Book and its departures from its 3 Peter C. Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2007), subtitle. 4 Deborah E. Harkness captures the climate of the city in her book The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven/ London: Yale UP, 2007), 1-2: “London grew from a small urban center of some 50,000 in 1550 to the second-largest city in Europe by 1600, with more than 200,000 residents. […] Elizabethan Londoners were sophisticated and cosmopolitan, living cheek by jowl with immigrants from France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. The City’s residents included Africans, Ottoman Turks, and Jewish conversos. […] Life on the City’s streets, below the church spires and under the walkways of the Exchange, was both creative and competitive - the ideal environment for cultural and intellectual change.” 5 Cf. John Henry Jones’s critical edition of The English Faust Book (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), 11-34. C HRISTOPH E HLAND 98 German source epitomise the fact that the experience of modernity has taken a firm foothold in English society. Turning back to the role and function of the theatre in these transitional times, it seems fair to say that there has hardly been another phase in English history in which its society had a more innovative and versatile means of literary communication than this period and its theatre. The stage becomes the medium by which the new experience of the world is circulated and domesticated: “So extravagant was the geographical variety offered by the playhouses that Thomas Platter considered one useful service performed by the theatres for Londoners was that of learning at the play what is happening abroad.” 6 The Swiss physician Thomas Platter (1574-1628) is but one of the travellers who came to London to be astonished by the variety of theatrical activity in England’s capital. In his diary of his journey to England in 1599 he observes that the stage has become a local display cabinet, as it were, for international events. The theatre’s somewhat paradoxical role as simultaneously a cultural medium and a commercial product fosters the emergence of hybrid dramatic forms, such as the history play or the adventure romance. In fact English playwrights began searching for modes of representation beyond classical models of tragedy or comedy which allowed them not only to entertain their audience but also to give expression to contemporary experience. In this context belongs also the development of the genre of the adventure romance, which is characterised by a paradigmatic widening of the spatial structure of the dramatic action. Despite the obvious generic problems of such a development for the stage, the inspiration for these new plays was often taken from epic pretexts. If the majority of plays written between 1560 and 1590 dealt with classical or medieval subjects there is a notable shift from the 1590s towards current geopolitical affairs in adventure romances. 7 Popular romance in the early phase concerns heroes who are remote in every way; meanwhile court romance characteristically invites oblique application to real persons of the time while sustaining the fictional nature of the material. In the 1590s and later, forms of romance are evolved by the playwrights in which identifiable In this process the classical and mythological personnel are replaced by more or less contemporary English heroes. Brian Gibbons writes in this context: 6 Crystal Bartolovich, “‘Baseless Fabric’: London as a ‘World City,’” ‘The Tempest’ and Its Travels, eds. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (London: Reaktion, 2000), 16. 7 Cf. Brian Gibbons, “Romance and the Heroic Play,” The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, eds. Albert R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990), 215f. The Stage Is Not Enough 99 real persons of the past and the present are represented, their stories given in romantic form […]. 8 The continuous pressure of the ongoing war with Spain and the wave of patriotic relief after the failed invasion of 1588 can at least partly be held accountable for this development. Alongside such texts as George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar (around 1588) and John Day’s The Three English Brothers (1607), Thomas Heywood’s two-part play The Fair Maid of the West (first part between 1596 and 1603, second part probably around 1631) is representative of the later phase of the genre. Typically, these hybrid texts combine multifarious generic features: they are partly history play, partly heroic epic, partly romantic comedy. Although individual emphases may vary, all of them have in common that they domesticate the romantic hero. 9 In Heywood’s case the protagonist is even made middle-class and feminine. 10 In his preface to the reader in The Fair Maid of the West Thomas Heywood emphasises the mimetic principle of his work. He discriminates between the act of “private reading” and the “public acting” of the play: if the reader’s perusal of the text is meant to be merely “gracious” the performance has to be “plausible.” It is significant that Heywood refers not only to the credibility of the storyline but also to the comprehensibility of the stage production: The popular mixture of sentimental love story, exotic adventure and patriotic call to duty caters for the prevalent taste of the bawdier audiences on the South Bank. At the same time, however, one can detect traces of publicly sanctioned, early colonial propaganda. The shift towards English subjects in these plays goes along with a heightened mimetic demand on the representation of space and movement and the relational order they create. These Comedies, bearing the title of The fair Maid of the West, if they prove but as gracious in thy private reading, as they were plausible in the public acting, I shall not doubt of their success. […] I hold it no necessity to trouble thee with the Argument of the Story, the matter itself lying so plainly before thee in Acts and Scenes, without any deviations, or winding incidents. 11 With regard to this one should not dismiss Heywood’s text because of its popular genre but should rather pay attention to the particular accomplishments of its representation of the dramatic space. The love story between the simple barmaid Bess Bridges and the gentleman Spencer serves as a logical tie which keeps together the spatial expansion of the action and creates the necessary suspense. Their first meeting 8 Gibbons 1990, 215-16. 9 Cf. Gibbons 1990, 233. 10 The gender politics of the play are discussed by Claire Jowitt in her book Voyage, Drama and Gender Politics, 1589-1642: Real and Imagined Worlds (2003). 11 Thomas Heywood, “To the Reader,” The Fair Maid of the West. Or, A Girl Worth Gold. The First Part (London: Richard Royston, 1631), n.p. C HRISTOPH E HLAND 100 takes place in a tavern in the harbour of Plymouth. But soon the lovers are torn apart since Spencer kills a man in self-defence and has to flee the country. It will not be necessary to follow this plot in all its sentimental detail and calculated showmanship. With regard to the treatment of the spatial perspective of the play, however, one may note that the separation of the lovers provides a parallel to the opening up of the spatial setting between home and abroad. In what follows, this widening of the spatial horizon is maintained and allows the lovers to move gradually towards each other again until they are reunited in the North African city of Fez at the end of the play. With regard to Heywood’s representational strategies of space, one can see how he mobilises his characters - namely Bess and Spencer - to widen the geographical horizon of his play. On a more abstract level this means that the play rearranges bodies on stage so as to expand the scope of its reach within its ideological contexts. Almost paradoxically, the stabilisation of its known territory - that is England - is achieved through the attribution of new coordinates within an extended network of relational positions. As this shows, the moralising plot and the propagandistic tone of the play may not detract from the fact that Heywood systematically explores space and mobility. He deliberately varies the strategies of spatial representation in each of the five acts and thus achieves not only a gradual geographical expansion of the action but also a highly differentiated tableau of correspondences and contrasts between love story and spatial development in the play. Heywood turns movement into a constitutive part of his plot by relating the emotional tie between the protagonists to the play’s spatial expanse. The audience is thus allowed to experience distance as a category which is safely harboured in the local and the domestic. Thereby the representational strategies on stage depend on the characters as acting agents of spatial construction. This is apparent right from the beginning of The Fair Maid of the West when a casual street scene creates an atmosphere of movement and mobility: 1st Captain: When puts my Lord to Sea? 2nd Captain: When the winde’s faire. Mr. Carrol: Resolve me I entreat, can you not guesse The purpose of this voyage? 1st Captain: Most men thinke The Fleet’s bound for the Islands 12 Mr. Carrol: Nay, tis like. The great success at Cales under the conduct Of such a Noble Generall, hath put heart Into the English: They are all on fire To purchase from the Spaniard. If their Carracks Come deeply laden, we shall tugge with them 12 This refers to the English attack on the Spanish Azores in 1597. The Stage Is Not Enough 101 For golden spoil. 2nd Captain: O, were it come to that! 1st Captain: How Plymouth swells with Gallants! How the streets Glister with gold! You cannot meet a man But trick’d in scarffe and feather, that it seemes As if the pride of Englands Gallantry Were harboured here. [...] (The Fair Maid 1.1, 1-15) This opening scene is exemplary for the process by which the communication among the characters turns the tabula rasa of the stage into a specific place. Just as the talk of the mariners is integrated casually into the background of the play, so does the tone of the maritime activities set by this scene become a dominant factor in the action. Geographical allusions serve to put things into a wider context. In particular the references to England’s conflict with Spain (here the English raid on Cádiz in 1596 13 and the so-called “Islands Voyage,” the English assault on the Azores in 1597 14 As the scene quoted above illustrates, Heywood uses an atmospheric brushwork, as it were, to create for his play a differentiation between home and abroad which will provide the fundamental structure to his argument. If the conversation of the mariners initially serves to open up the domestic sphere, one can see that Spencer’s subsequent flight will complement the action with the dimension of the foreign and the distant. The positional relationship between England and the world beyond is systematically voiced and defines the scenery: symptomatically Bess’s question “is my Spencer gone? ” is answered in the play by “With speed towards Foy / There to take ship for Fayal” (1.3, 82-84). The image of a seafaring nation is painted: the talk of harbours, ships and mariners constitutes its attributes on stage. The reports of the comings and goings of the ships are displayed as the common discourse of a society which since the days of Richard Hakluyt has increasingly been looking beyond the shores of the ‘scept’red isle.’ ) give the action an acute political topicality. Beyond this, however, Heywood succeeds in this short dialogue in combining maritime milieu with local colour and thus in installing a scope of reference in his play that takes the local as its vantage point but directs the audience’s attention far beyond the English harbour city of Plymouth: distance and movement define the atmosphere of the scene but for the moment they are the background noise of another place overheard at the level of the local and the domestic. With regard to this the mariners are used as metonymical markers for a topography of a new, global experience. During the second act the direct representation of movement still remains in the background because the story first endeavours to establish the separa- 13 Cf. N.A.M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, 660-1649 (London: Penguin, 2004 (1998)), 2004, 284-86. 14 Cf. Rodger 2004, 287-88. C HRISTOPH E HLAND 102 tion of the lovers. In alternating scenes the two plotlines present contrasting localisations of the action, which depict Bess and Spencer in their different geographical places. In the second act then, the Cornish coastal village of Fowey, where Bess now lives, is set in contrast to Spencer’s exile in Fayal in the Azores. Once again one encounters the differentiation between the domestic and the foreign. Towards the end of the second act, however, this logic comes to an end when Spencer’s companion Goodlack sets out home to England because he erroneously believes his friend dead: Enter two Sailors. 1st Sailor: Aboard, aboard, the wind stands fair for England, The Ships have all weigh’d anchor. 2nd Sailor: A stiff gale blows from the shore. [...] Goodlack: This is the end of all mortality: It will be news unpleasing to his Bess. (The Fair Maid 2.4) In this scene Heywood not only uses a whole arsenal of maritime vocabulary but also makes the representation of movement from now on an integral part of his action. The fact that Spencer now also hurries home to England to catch his friend before the mistaken news can reach his beloved means that the distance between him and Bess is once again allowed to grow smaller. From this moment the ship becomes a moving place of action. Movement and mobility replace a static conception of space that so far basically relied on scenic contrasts for its spatial development. In the third act - as might have been anticipated - the mistaken news of Spencer’s death reaches Bess in England. The arrival of the depressing news in England has a further mobilising effect on the action since at this instant Bess sets out to search for the corpse of Spencer to bring him home. Given the emotional ties that exist between Bess and Spencer this departure seems logical; and the fact that Heywood now turns the female part among his protagonists into a mobile one deserves special attention. Andrew Hadfield reminds one of the fact that there is hardly any evidence of female travellers in the early modern period. On the contrary, they were “expressly forbid[den]” to travel. 15 15 Andrew Hadfield, ed., Amazons, Savages & Machiavels - Travel & Colonial Writing in English, 1550-1630: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), 2, 4. Bess’s plans to leave England for distant territories may therefore represent the typically fantastic material for romance. At the same time, however, this turn in the events of the play is particularly meaningful for Heywood’s exploration of mobility. With regard to the symbolism of Bess’s departure the political dimension of this - that is to say the implicit analogies between Bess and Elizabeth I and the inherent discussion of the concept of female rule - has been explored in detail by Claire Jowitt. The The Stage Is Not Enough 103 protagonist’s decisiveness and call to duty, as it were, heighten and surmount her gendered vulnerability in a typically Elizabethan logic. For Bess - “in her role as a stand-in for Elizabeth” 16 - movement allows her who has “the body of a weak and feeble woman” to develop “the heart and stomach of a king.” 17 Turning back to the spatial development depicted on stage, the following observation may seem rather macabre but one can see how Heywood uses the relation between two bodies - even if one of them is assumed to be dead - to virtually measure the geographical scope of his play. In a series of scenes set on ships he now begins to move his protagonists closer to each other again. The adventures at sea in the fourth act allow Bess and Spencer to gradually overcome the distance between them. At the same time, however, their distance from their home country is continually growing. If it holds true that the signification process in the text previously relied on contrasts and correspondences between different static settings, the ship must now take over as a dynamic facilitator of meaning. With regard to this, Bess’s seafights with Spanish ships and Spencer’s captivity on a Spanish warship introduce mobility into the fabrication of these contrasts. The direct confrontation with representatives of the arch-enemy Spain heightens the awareness of one’s national identity and belonging. Spencer’s valiant endurance under torture even impresses his Spanish tormentors: “These Englishmen / Nothing can daunt them. Even in misery / They’ll not regard their masters.” (The Fair Maid 4.1, 29-31) In fact, her mobility turns gender dependencies on its head: if at the beginning of the play she is the one who needs male protection when Spencer defends her against aggressive advances and establishes her at his property at Foy, her departure will eventually put the male characters in the play at her mercy. In Heywood’s play it becomes apparent that ‘Englishness’ is not necessarily bound to the collective place of a national community - as for example Shakespeare imagines it in Richard II when the dying John of Gaunt talks about England as the “scept’red isle” and as a “fortress built by Nature for herself” (2.1, 43). In The Fair Maid Englishness depends on a dynamic experience of otherness. In this context the chorus at the end of Act 4 is an important element in the argument. Peter Holland regards Heywood’s use of a chorus as evidence for his reflection on the limitations of stage representation (quoted in context): Thomas Heywood’s Chorus in The Fair Maid of the West is reduced to a lame apology for the theatre’s handicaps: Our stage so lamely can express a sea 16 Jowitt 2003, 61. 17 Elizabeth I’s speech at Tilbury in 1588 as quoted in Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, An Age of Voyages, 1350-1600 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005), 101. C HRISTOPH E HLAND 104 That we are forc’d by Chorus to discourse What should have been in action. and immediately goes on to use the word that, more than any other, demonstrates the problem: ‘Now imagine.’ Imagine this, suppose that, think the other: the vocabulary of the unactable journey comes easily to the Renaissance dramatist’s own imagination. 18 Of course, such a passage deliberately echoes Shakespeare’s famous Prologue in Henry V mentioned at the outset. Nonetheless, even in the case of Shakespeare one must be suspicious about the true purpose of such selfmortification. If Shakespeare calls upon the “imaginary forces” (Henry V, Prologue, 18) of the audience, Heywood seems to do the same. Holland suggests that the message of the prologue is to be taken literally: for him the chorus appears and speaks in an attempt to compensate for the inability of the stage to represent movement. In the case of Heywood, however, one might ask why the chorus appears so late in the play and does so on only a single occasion. This must seem strange in a play in which scenery changes constantly and in which from the third act onwards movement dominates the dramatic action. Until the appearance of the chorus it is quite clear that the play is able to develop and explain its different settings through the characters’ own words. One must therefore ask whether the sudden appearance of a chorus really reveals a dilemma on the part of the playwright. In fact, I would argue that the apologetic tone of the chorus is only rhetorical pretence in order to separate the action of the last act symbolically from the rest of the play. By doing so Heywood accentuates the strategies of differentiation he has developed before and contrasts them with those he uses for his last act. In particular his representation of distance and exile differentiates in its spatial classification between the European opponents of England and the exotic other. The maritime scenes in which movement is shown are strictly limited to the conflict with the Spanish. If it is thus true that the Spanish enemy is experienced in these scenes as a mobile power, the representatives of the Maghreb are on the other hand seen as static and bound to their place. Movement is thus elevated to a subtle instrument of characterisation, if not stigmatisation: the protagonists experience the overseas settings and their inhabitants as static whereas the Spanish are perceived just like the English as a mobile and expansive society. The implicit effect of this differentiation is that Spain is shown as a competitor of England whereas the North Africans are seen as the representatives of the exotic other and thereby as the objects of colonial desire. 18 Peter Holland, “‘Travelling hopefully’: The Dramatic Form of Journeys in English Renaissance Drama.” Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, eds. Jean-Pierre Marquelot and Michèle Willems (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 161. The Stage Is Not Enough 105 The entry of the chorus thus marks a watershed for the representation of the dynamic societies of the fourth act and the stasis of the Moroccan court in the fifth. The fact that the reunion of Bess and Spencer will eventually take place at the exotic court of the “amorous King of Fez” further emphasises the mobility of the English protagonists in direct contrast to their surroundings. Both English protagonists represent mobility and both are characterised by their movements: Spencer first merely drifts as an expat and later is taken against his will as a captive into far-flung places whereas Bess in search of her lover is willing to leave England and face the dangers of foreign parts. With regard to this differentiation of the experience of distance on the part of the two heroes it is fair to say that at the end of the play the rediscovery of Spencer by Bess appears almost as a reward for her mobility. In the inherent ‘lost and found’ logic of this plot development the play symbolically balances the losses and gains of mobility. In this sense the shifts between static and dynamic scenery in The Fair Maid of the West represent in their own right traces of an early colonial ideology. In this context Heywood’s play highlights the role of literary communication for the discussion and circulation of colonial strategies of differentiation. In the popular medium of the adventure romance, mobility is not only the driving force of the early colonial experience and propaganda but also the energiser of a recalibration of English national identity. The stage brings home an experience for which mobility becomes a national mission and allows the audience to partake in it. 3. Distance as Experience: John Day’s The Travails of the Three English Brothers It does not seem too far-fetched to claim that movement and mobility are the incitement of modernity. One has to come to accept movement as a premise of the modern perception of the world. Turning one’s attention to early modern texts and their representation of movement allows this phenomenon to be considered at the point in history when the acceleration is only beginning. Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West is a revealing example of the depiction of movement as an integral part of the formative processes of an expansive ideology in England. This becomes apparent not only in the theme and plot of the play but also in Heywood’s ability to combine opposing and at times conflicting developments into an apparently seamless narrative whole. For example, he puts on stage protagonists who in the course of the action will repeatedly prove their particular patriotic prowess. The text thereby somehow ignores the fact that earlier in the play the two were almost hastily bidding their home country farewell. The happy reunion of the lovers at the end of the play may detract from the fact that the constant movement of the heroes has increasingly separated them from England. The radical C HRISTOPH E HLAND 106 widening of the spatial horizon in the play and the shift from English home turf into exotic places are only superficially compensated for by the happy ending. Bess’s mobility may be symbolically rewarded in the end but with regard to the alienating consequences of the spatial distance which her movements create between herself and her home country the play remains silent. In fact, one might argue that distance must be seen as the key to an understanding of the epistemology of movement. Where Heywood can compensate for its potentially alienating effect by a plot which focuses the attention exclusively on the here and now of the lovers, other playwrights of the period find other means of dealing with it in their dramatic discourse. In the final section of this essay the discussion will focus on John Day’s adventure play The Travails of the Three English Brothers (1607). This crude dramatic adaptation of real events deals with the adventurous travel experiences of the three sons of the English politician Sir Thomas Shirley (1542- 1612). In its content, the play generally adheres to a travelogue entitled The Three English Brothers by Anthony Nixon which appeared slightly earlier in 1607. 19 With regard to the representation of space and movement on stage, Day’s play remains conventional: changes of scene mark shifts of setting. Movement is assumed by these shifts but not given particular attention. A chorus serves as a narrative instrument to tighten the extensive storyline and to facilitate the changes of place. In this way the play unfurls an almost confusing variety of activities on the part of the three brothers: Anthony Shirley (1565-1635? ) is shown in his role as an ambassador to the Persian and Spanish courts, Robert Shirley (? 1581-1628) appears as the military advisor to the Shah of Persia, and Thomas Shirley (1564-? 1630) enters the scene in the war against the Ottoman Empire and will be the only one among the brothers who is allowed to return to England. The individual scenes move from place to place and from brother to brother. The chorus connects the geographical expanse of the action - we witness the brothers travelling to Persia, Venice, Rome, Russia and Spain. Sandwiched between the narrative interventions of the chorus those events from the lives of the three brothers actually depicted on stage acquire exemplary significance. They offer John Day the opportunity to test and showcase a specifically English identity. The confrontations with other ethnicities, religions and nationalities - from Persian to Turkish to Italian and so on - serve to foreground a rather conventional English repertoire of differentiations. The play does not invest too much effort into hiding the fact that it is a kind of patriotic hagiography. The brothers serve as heroic vehicles for the propagation of features of Englishness which were destined to become part of English identity. From the stoic stamina of the Protestant faith in the face 19 Cf. Anthony Parr, Three Renaissance Travel Plays (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995), 7-8. The Stage Is Not Enough 107 of opposition to the technical superiority of the West, the whole arsenal of colonial chauvinism is present. 20 One may spare oneself the doubtful pleasure of dealing with these kinds of elements in this play in any more detail. At the end of the play, however, one encounters a peculiar scene: the three brothers are positioned in three different corners of the stage. Each of them holds a “prospective glass” - in this context most probably some kind of crystal ball - in his hands and seems to be able to discern his brothers in the instrument. 21 Enter three several ways the three Brothers, Robert with the state of Persia as before, Sir Anthonie, with the king of Spaine and others where he receives the order of Saint Iago, and other Offices, Sir Thomas in England with his Father and others. Fame gives each a prospective glass, they seeme to see one another, and offer to embrace, at which Fame parts them and so: Exeunt. In the quarto edition the stage directions explain this unusual pantomime in more detail: For the audience in the theatre the chorus provides the explanation of the strange action on stage: Into three parts deviding this our stage: They all at once shall take their leaves of you, Thinke this England, this Spaine, this Persia, Your favours then, to your observant eyes: Weele shewe their fortunes present qualities. This scene is as imaginative as it is clumsy. Nevertheless, the awkward conjunction of genius and daftness highlights the paradigmatic limitations for the representation of space and movement on stage. The division of the stage into three segments, which are supposed to depict Persia, Madrid and London, represents an almost desperate attempt to compensate by theatrical means for the spatial dimension of the play, as dictated by the historical and biographical pretexts. The prospective glasses which are introduced by John Day as instruments of communication pinpoint the difficulties contemporary dramatists encountered in the representation of the geographical expansion which challenged the worldview of early modern societies. The connotation of magic implied 20 One is reminded of the conventional armoury of a feeling of superiority, as it were, which Stephen Greenblatt has pinpointed to be the source of European colonial confidence: “The Europeans who ventured to the New World in the first decades after Columbus’s discovery shared a complex, well-developed, and, above all, mobile technology of power: writing, navigational instruments, ships, warhorses, attack dogs, effective armor, and highly lethal weapons, including gunpowder. Their culture was characterized by immense confidence in its own centrality” (Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992 (1991)), 9. 21 In Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe the protagonist also rescues a “prospective glass“ from the wreck. The editor of the 2010 Broadview edition of Defoe’s text assumes the uncommon instrument to be a telescope (Defoe 2010, 185 fn.). C HRISTOPH E HLAND 108 by the glasses bridges the distance which the history of the brothers’ international wanderings has created. In this context the theatrical problem of representing spatial-temporal simultaneity on stage is but secondary. The use of magic as the playwright’s last resort gives evidence of the fact that the problem of movement and mobility has - implicitly and possibly unconsciously - been recognised as one of uprootedness. At this very point the dramatic action is undercut by implicit doubt in the spatial order it has helped to create: once the action has moved the bodies of the three brothers with heroic gestures into a definite relational order to each other and to the depicted world, the dramatic argument begins to revolt against the logic of the inflicted separation. If movement throughout the play is propagated as heroic achievement, the final scene counteracts this message and unmasks propaganda for what it is. With regard to the early modern zeitgeist, John Day’s text is a particularly informative cultural specimen. Due to its sources it offers a case in which stage fiction is particularly closely dependent on the factual background of the lives of the protagonists. Since he cannot hide the effect of movement in a sentimental love story, as Heywood did, Day needs to find more than just a dramatic answer to the experience of distance and alienation created by mobility. His last scene visualises the potentially centrifugal forces of movement which affect literature and societies alike in the early modern period. As Day’s text exemplifies, not all authors manage to stabilise their epistemological apparatus against these centrifugal forces of movement. In the context of the discussion in this essay, however, it is precisely in these moments that the fissures caused by the force of mobility become visible under the surface of the text. Here one can detect the formation of a symbolic language of modernity, a language which will increasingly succeed in incorporating these horizons of experience in a new spatial and temporal logic. In fact, one can observe that the epistemological function of the static place is gradually transferred to movement itself. Anthony Giddens calls this “dis-location” the prime characteristic of modernity: [...] in pre-modern societies, space and place largely coincide, since the spatial dimensions of social life are, for most of the population, and in most respects, dominated by ‘presence’ - by localised activities. The advent of modernity increasingly tears space away from place by fostering relations between absent others, locationally distant from any situation of face-to-face interaction. 22 Not least because of this “dis-location” one may note that constructions of identity in the early modern period will eventually be transferred from the place-bound collective to the dynamic, that is to say, the self-moving and self-defining Cartesian individual. At the end one remains with the imperative of movement which authors such as Thomas Heywood and John Day 22 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990), 18. The Stage Is Not Enough 109 had to struggle with. The subtle problems in their plays give evidence of the culturally strenuous process by which the identity of modern man defines his environment and not vice versa. C HRISTOPH E HLAND 110 Works Cited Bartolovich, Crystal. “‘Baseless Fabric’: London as a ‘World City.’” ‘The Tempest’ and Its Travels. Ed. 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