‘Public’, ‘Private’ and ‘Common’ Stages, 1559–1600

Chapter 1 debunks one of the standard scholarly assumptions about the indoor playhouses: that they were described as ‘private’ in the sixteenth century. It shows that although ‘private’ might be used to refer to domestic performances and academic drama, it was not used in relation to the first set of Elizabethan indoor theatres. Instead, the chapter advances a more complex argument which accounts for the varying ways in which ‘public’ and ‘common’ were applied to sixteenth-century commercial playhouses. In doing so, it contextualises the early seventeenth-century emergence of the term ‘private’ in the discourse of commercial theatre. For the second set of indoor companies, the term appeared an attractive way of differentiating themselves from the ‘public’ playhouses.

Argument (complex analysis) · Art · Drama · Literature · Relation (database) · Set (abstract data type) · Chemistry · Classics · Computer Science · History · Philippine History and Culture

• ‘As it was, is, or will be played’

  Open Access•Gabriel Egan•From Performance to Print in…•2006

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