The history play and the post-reformation public sphere
This chapter argues that the public theatre most definitely sought to feed off, and in so doing to expand, the resulting ‘post-reformation public sphere’. Not, of course, out of a principled desire to disseminate or increase political knowledge or to inculcate civic virtue, but rather because the spread of such attitudes and interests was likely to increase the appetite for a certain sort of play and thus redound to the considerable profit of those providing such plays to the viewing and reading publics. On the face of it, one might think that that essentially parasitic, secondary role would be the extent of the public theatre's contribution to the development of the post-reformation public sphere. After all, plays were precisely not pamphlets or position papers. They neither made a case nor advanced or refuted arguments; plays merely told stories, the resolutions of which represented, not successfully clinched arguments, but emotionally satisfying endings.