In the Air

Few plays insist more adamantly upon a connection between travel and moral loss than The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Here it is argued that the play written by Christopher Marlowe was performed by the English Comedians in Frankfurt-am-Main as early as Autumn 1592, and that it remained in their repertoire throughout the 1590s—before an English play-text was published (in 1604), indeed before its first recorded English performance (in 1594). The play’s unique ability to reconcile a wide array of comic materials to a powerful moral lesson recommended it to itinerant theatre groups. Yet the tonal unevenness of the extant English editions has been an evergreen concern for editors and critics. Having established that the play was performed abroad and thus adapted for many different audiences and scenarios, this chapter suggests that the confusing middle of the extant text(s) represents the modularity of its structure in the 1590s. Marlowe’s ultimate source had been published in Frankfurt in 1587, and merchants at the city’s fair had practical interest and expertise in contracts of all kinds. The performance of the English play there raises many exciting new questions not only of literary interpretation but also of knowledge transfer in early modern Europe.

Out of Time

The arrival of travelling professional actors in many Imperial cities disrupted festive schedules protected for more than a century. Focusing on two case studies—Nuremberg and Ulm—this chapter examines how the performances of the English Comedians interacted with civic cultures and changed them. It shows how the difficulty in accommodating itinerant theatre and the perception that it inflicted financial losses on urban polities led directly to the establishment of permanent theatre-houses. The travelling players are registered in cultural histories of these cities largely as an absence or negligible detail because those histories have generally subserved accounts of political and constitutional evolution. Yet the players’ introduction of commercial festivity assisted in the suppression of festive traditions and the long-term absorption of local cultures into larger political entities. The English Comedians were therefore important midwives of historical change. Urban governors struggled to recognize and place them: that struggle persisted within later history writing because their activities pose serious challenges to habits of chronologization and localization.

Epilogue

The reception of the English Comedians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is connected to their representation in modern theatre histories by ideations of travelling theatre in Enlightenment theatre projects. Theatre-historical chronicles began to be written in the second half of the eighteenth century, by which time there was already a vocabulary for itinerant theatre ready to be applied to the English Comedians in order to understand their effect on national dramatic culture. Setting these relations next to the development of Theaterwissenschaft out of philology in early twentieth-century German universities, this concluding chapter reflects on the influence of disciplinary structure upon the investigation of controversial historical phenomena. Various sorts of patriotism and methodologism have distorted the comprehension of the itinerant theatre and concealed its involvement in the generation of dramatic art. The contemporary crisis within the discipline of theatre history is explained with reference to the underestimation of theatre professionalization, which was a profound discontinuity in the history of Western culture.

Out of Laughter

The Thirty Years’ War and its associated deprivations rapidly curtailed the activities of travelling players. In 1620, just as it began, plays explicitly associated with the English Comedians entered print for the first time. Meanwhile Martin Opitz and other poets began to emphasize the importance of rescuing a specifically German language and culture from the chaos that was said to be threatening it. This chapter shows how these new concepts of tragic purity, central to many of the achievements of German baroque drama, depended on implicit castigation and derogation of travelling theatre and the comic medley associated with it. Drawing on a wide range of mid-seventeenth-century social, literary, and visual sources, the long-term influence of the English Comedians is discovered like a photographic negative in the received picture of German baroque drama. The transformation of the English professional clown into a multimedia figure used for satire and travesty, and ultimately into a metonym for the entire tradition of itinerant theatre, is linked to eighteenth-century banishments of the the comic figure, banishments through which once again the alleged formal purity of the dramatic canon could be defended and refreshed. A close connection is established between high art in a German dramatic tradition and the imputed degradations thought to have been effected by the travelling theatre, linked as it was to the damage and misery inflicted by foreign mercenaries on central European populations during the Thirty Years’ War.

Moving Coin

Early modern itinerant theatre was associated with prodigality, debt, and economic malaise. Witnesses to the success of the English Comedians comment routinely on the heaps of coins they took with them out of the city. Permanent or semi-permanent theatre-houses arose in Germany not merely in appreciation of the English Comedians, but as a means of regulating and acquiring the money spent by citizenry on their entertainments. Focusing in particular on the English clown’s involvement in discourses of prodigality, and his representation in popular art as a dissolute figure conniving in national depredations, this chapter also shows how the finances of the English Comedians depended on early money markets, emerging financial instruments, patronage, and credit. It offers an original account of the economics involved in long-distance theatre, comparing the foreign troupes to joint-stock companies and exploring what their theatre was actually worth to them in the long run.

Moving Cloth

Clothes were the most important and expensive properties of an early modern theatre company. The first recorded performances of English professional actors on mainland Europe occurred in the context of a major crisis in the international cloth trade and efforts to form an international Protestant alliance. Known for their extravagant and luxurious clothing, the English Comedians took advantage of existing routes developed for the export and import of cloth. Extant dramatic adaptations of English plays associated with their tradition reflect the vital importance of textile stock to their performances and reception. Their reputation for sartorial extravagance involved the English Comedians in discourses of national loss: in the Holy Roman Empire, as in England, imported fine clothes were linked repeatedly to a diminishment of national treasure. Meanwhile, their comic tradition made extravagant use of the symbolic and physical properties of clothing. Although the formative importance of cloth economies to the early English professional theatre has been widely recognized, this chapter puts that dynamic into an international context for the first time.

Prologue

The virtues of theatre in a European tradition have generally been connected to its perceived success in concealing or graduating from its (allegedly) degrading origins in travel and movement. Scholarly pursuit of historical itinerant theatre has often been accompanied by evaluative criticism of its achievements, obscuring or misrepresenting the dependence of canonical drama upon transnational circulation of materials and the experience of travel. In the summer of 1592, the English theatrical scene in London disintegrated due to the plague. The Admiral’s Men split into several different groups. Some of its players embarked on tours of the English provinces. Others left England and established the first professional theatre tradition in northern and central Europe. Known as the English Comedians, this latter group would be the first to perform adaptations of Marlowe and Shakespeare abroad. Their tradition overturned ancient festive schedules of performance, with profound consequences for civic life in many Imperial cities. Finding some success, the tradition persisted unevenly for many decades and would assist in creating a lasting impression of theatre and its effect on values cultural, national, economic, moral.