Treatment of the rustic and the citizen in Elizabethan drama

Abstract

The Elizabethan dramatist "stood among substantial men and sang upon recorded action", (1) but the drama of this period is in many respects romantic. The pioneers of its early development, the giants of its prime, as well as the lesser writers of its decadence, look away from the life immediately around them, and treat of "high facinerous things great patriots, dukes, and kings" and if they deal with contemporary life, lay their scenes by preference in Italy. Not through contemporary and actual life, but through an ideal world of romantic story, the Elizabethan dramatist comes at his expression of the humour and tragedy of things, and finds heroes in Asia and Spain, Denmark and Italy, ancient Britain and ancient Rome. Both Haywood, embarking upon domestic tragedy in "A Woman killed with kindness", and Ben Jonson in "Everyman in his Humour" setting forth his comedy of humours to rival the old romantic stuff, recognize that their choice of subjects from contemporary life is exceptional, and feel it necessary to justify that choice. Nevertheless, the Elizabethan dramatists, bound upon romantic voyages as they were, rarely cut themselves completely adrift from the world of realism and actuality. The tradition of the Mysteries, the demands of the groundlings for comic realism, the urgent vitality of the stirring life around, and the dramatist's conviction of the reality of the life he depicted, combined to bring about the introduction into the drama of a mass of realistic stuff. Hodge and Rusticus jostle Orestes and Clytemnestra, a tragedy of London life is sandwiched in with an Italian tragedy by Robert Yarington. Shakespeare, the king of the Romanticists, put an English grave-dragger beside his Hamlet, a rustic clown beside his Cleopatra, and sets his Henry V in a London tavern. This infiltration of realism into romance may he illustrated by a study of the treatment of the Rustic and the Citizen in Elizabethan drama (1). Such a study should also throw light on the development of the English drama, and incidentally on the manners social conditions of the time. The various stages in the development of both types were by 1616 accomplished; investigation has therefore, not been carried beyond that date.