Breaches in a Battered Wall: Invasion,Spectatorship and the Early Modern Stage

Abstract

This article explores how the fictional representation of siege and invasion in the war dramas of the 1580s and 1590s enabled Elizabethan dramatists to reflect on the vulnerable state of their own theatre, threatened with invasion and destruction by anti-theatrical authors and unruly spectators alike. Through consideration of how the invasion of the city is portrayed in Marlowe's Tamburlaine plays, Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI and Heywood's Edward IV, it demonstrates how such martial discourse of invasion and conquest provided a vocabulary through which these three playwrights explore different models of spectatorship: from coerced, to antagonistic, to cooperative.