Szonyi-2020-Frances Yates and The Theatre of The World-Festschrift For Jerzy Limon

This Treasure
of Theatre
Shakespeare and the Arts
from the Early Modern Period
to the Twenty-First Century
Essays in Honour
of Professor Jerzy Limon
Edited by Marta Gibińska, Małgorzata Grzegorzewska,

Jacek Fabiszak, and Agnieszka Żukowska
Gdańsk 2020
[See the illustrations at the end of the paper!]
słowo/obraz terytoria
1145 - Limon _20-03-2020 _bez ilustracji.indd 3 20.03.2020 16:50:53

György E. Szőnyi
Frances Yates and the Theatre of the World
For Jerzy Limon
Introduction
It must be a heroic task to bring a theatre to life. You need a general

vision and a much more concrete concept, bearing in mind what phi-
losophy, ideology, and style you want to represent. Then you have to
be a managerial type to be able to collect experts around you, people
who know how to build, how to fulfil the technical requirements,
how to raise the money, how to handle the various contractors, how
to secure the legal aspects, how to recruit the best staff, directors, ac-
tors, auxiliary assistance—from top down to the usherettes. In the
meantime you must not leave the project, you have to devote all your
leisure year after year, you have to learn how to survive the mishaps
and catastrophes, and start again and again.
Jerzy Limon is such a person. He had a vision, he was living with it,
he was fighting for it for twenty-four years, at least if we count the
official gestation moment of the idea in 1990 and the completion of
the Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre in 2014. I took part in the annual
Gdańsk Shakespeare conference and festival in 2013, and following
the guidance of Professor Limon we marvelled at the rising building;
however, it was difficult to imagine that the playhouse could be
opened a year later (see my photograph, fig. 1). Since then the inter-
net is flooded with exciting pictures of the austere outside and the
fascinating inside of the “The Theatre of Two Times”1 but I’m proud
to share here a snapshot by my daughter who visited Gdańsk last year
(fig. 2).2 All this is admirable.
1 See Agata Grzybowska, ed., The Theatre of Two Times: The Gdańsk Shakespeare
Theatre (1635–2014) (Gdańsk: Gdański Teatr Szekspirowski, 2014).

2 I collated her photo with a detail of Claes Visscher’s 1616 London view show-
ing the Globe.

240 GYÖRGY E. SZŐNYI / FRANCES YATES AND THE THEATRE OF THE WORLD
James Burbage was a similar man. He built and in 1576 opened the
first independent public theatre in London, appropriately called The
Theatre. Although we have no visual memory of this playhouse, we
have surprisingly numerous documents about the circumstances of the
venture from his partnership with brother-in-law John Brayne, their
legal and financial arrangements and troubles; however, we know
much less about Burbage’s vision as well as the actual building pro-
cess. Sometimes Burbage is called a joiner, sometimes an entrepre-
neur. His brother, Robert is mentioned as a carpenter, and it is also
possible that the construction was a joint family affair.3 But what was
the source of Burbage’s plan? To what extent was he educated in ar-
chitecture or knowledgeable about the classical traditions of theatre
design?
Circle, Hall, Inn-yard?
It was E. K. Chambers who consolidated the possible origins and ty-

pology of Elizabethan playhouses. He did not connect these to the
pageants or the scaffold stages of the medieval festivals; but he point-
ed out the college refectories and aristocratic main halls where per-
formances could be staged. However, that would not explain the cir-
cular open structures of the public theatres, so he mentioned T. F.
Ordish’s suggestion (Early London Theatres, 1894) according to which
the baiting places and the Roman amphitheatres might have been
models; but he also immediately dismissed the idea by saying that
“a ring is so obviously the form in which the maximum number of
spectators can see an object, that too much stress must not be laid
3 On the history of Elizabethan playhouses (including the Theatre) I used the fol-
lowing works (in chronological order of their publication): Frederick G. Fleay,

A Chronicle History of the London Stage, 1559–1642 (New York: Burt Franklin,
1890 ); E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: The Clarendon Press,
1923); Lily B. Campbell, Scenes and Machines on the English Stage During the Re-
naissance: A Classical Revival (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1923); Glynne Wick-
ham, Early English Stages, vol. 2/1 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966 );
Richard Leacroft, The Development of the English Playhouse (London: Methuen,
1973 ); M. M. Reese, Shakespeare, His World and His Work (London: Arnold,
1980); Herbert Berry, Shakespeare’s Playhouses (New York: AMS, 1987); Andrew
Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574 –1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009), and several volumes of The Elizabethan Theatre, a book series pub-
lished by Macmillan Canada.

upon it as an evidence of folk ‘tradition’.”4 Furthermore, he empha-

sized the importance of the Tudor inn-yards. With that—although
with some qualifications—he followed Fleay and others, the former
laconically having claimed that “until 1576 public performances were
represented in inn-yards.”5
It is well-known that in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign, large Lon-
don inns, such as the Saracen’s Head, the Boar’s Head, the Bel Sav-
age, etc. regularly allowed dramatic entertainments in their yards, to
the great displeasure of the city council as well as the Puritan pastors.
These ventures were hard hit by strict regulations in 1574 which may
have led to the creation of dedicated playhouses by 1576, simultane-
ously opening The Theatre and The Curtain (by Burbage and Henry
Laneman respectively) while Richard Farrant adapted the abandoned
monastery of the Blackfriars for children’s performances in the same
year.6 Summing this up, Chambers eliminated the difference between
the public and the private houses by stating that “[T]he distinction
between ‘public’ and ‘private’ is an unessential one, depending prob-
ably upon some difference in the methods of paying for admission
necessitated by the regulations of the City and the Privy Council. The
performances in all the houses were public in the ordinary sense.”7
Contrary to Chambers, Glynne Wickham in his seminal study of the
early English stages registered an important differentiation of perfor-
mance philosophies between the public and the private theatres by
working out the concept of the “emblematic stage.” The novelty of
his approach was that, as if sharing the mistrust of post-structuralism
(still to come) in “grand narratives,” he rejected the evolutionist in-
terpretation of English theatre-history which tried to create a linear
and unbroken story of development from James Burbage’s primitive
public theatre to the complex, multimedial, scenery- and machinery-
aided contemporary playhouses. As he wrote,
It is this idea of the necessity of progression, which underlies all those re-
constructions of Elizabethan and Jacobean stagecraft that endow the actors,
dramatists and stage managers of the time with an ideal of self-consistency
in production techniques comparable to that current in more recent times.8
4 Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 2: 355n2.

5 Fleay, A Chronicle History, 35.
6 Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 2:357.
7 Ibid., 2:356.
8 Wickham, Early English Stages, 2/1:154–5.

In opposition to the above evolutionist approach he emphasized that:
This concept of progress and direct progression from the Elizabethan theat-
er into Restoration theater via the Court Masks is one which I feel obliged
to challenge in the sharpest way I can… Instead, I wish to argue that what
we are really confronted with is a conflict between an emblematic theater—
literally, a theater which aimed at achieving dramatic illusion by figurative
representation—and a theater of realistic illusion—literally, a theater seek-
ing to simulate actuality in terms of images. The former kind of theater
grew up spontaneously during the Middle Ages and, as I shall argue now,
reached its climax in the style of public building depicted by De Witt in his
sketch of the Swan.9
I am quoting Wickham at length because his opinion has direct links

to those important and novel approaches that during the 1960s start-
ed interpreting early modern theatres as a paradigmatic cultural rep-
resentation of that period. At this point we also ought to notice that
these intellectual historical works were not independent from the
structuralist world view of the 1960s and 1970s, a period which was
so much attracted to constructs based on binary oppositions. One can
find, no doubt, a certain amount of rigid dualism in Wickham’s mod-
el, too; however, his nonconformist standpoint paved the way for
a new research-trend which is still productive today.
In what follows I am going to deal with such approaches and inter-
pretations that have all been inspired by the theory of the emblematic
theatre, summarized by Wickham as follows:
[We are confronted here with] a head-on collision of two fundamentally op-
posed attitudes to art: the typically medieval contentment with emblematic
9 Ibid., 155. The paradox of the history of the English public theatre is that not one
fully authentic visual representation has survived about this type of theatre building,
in spite of the fact that around 1600 there were almost a dozen such institutions in
London. The only eye-witness representation, that is Johannes de Witt’s drawing,
has such a sketchy image of the Swan Theatre that historians have not settled up to
now the way how it should be understood. Wickham also had a voice in this debate,
actually rejecting the idea that the English Renaissance theatre buildings were the
descendants of the inn-yard playhouses. For these debates see R. A. Foakes, Illustra-
tions of the English Stage 1580–1642 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1985); Jill L. Levenson, “The Recovery of the Elizabethan Stage,” in Hibbard, ed.,
The Elizabethan Theatre IX, 205–30; F. D. Rowan, “Inns, Inn-Yards, and Other Play-
ing Places,” in Hibbard, ed., The Elizabethan Theatre IX, 1–21; and the works of An-
drew Gurr, e.g., The Shakespearean Stage (2009); and Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichi-
kawa, Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

comment on the significance of the visual world versus a new, scientific

questing for the photographic image. This search for the technical means to
reproduce actuality, as opposed to an almost exclusive concern with extract-
ing the significance behind outward appearances, is obvious enough in the
fine arts of Renaissance Italy; and, where the drama is concerned, nowhere
could this conflict of interest become more sharply and swiftly manifest than
in methods of scenic presentation.10
The study of the emblematic theatre makes us conclude that on the

Renaissance stage—following the traditions of medieval mystery
plays, moralities, and other spectacles of pageantry—artistic represen-
tation functioned as a stylized model of human and cosmic existence.
The great metaphors of order and hierarchy—such as the Neoplaton-
ic analogies, the theories about the dignity of man, and the notion
that the artist is like a creative god—were symbolically presented
alongside more subversive intuitions discussing the mutability of for-
tune, the unpredictability of life, or the inevitability of revenge. This
allegorical and emblematic way of thinking is well illustrated by the
following short poem of Walter Raleigh:
What is our life? A play of passion.

Our mirth the musicke of division,
Our mothers wombes the tyring houses be,
Where we are drest for this short Comedy.
Heaven the Iudicious sharpe spectator is,
That sits and markes still who doth act amisse,
Our graves that hide us from the searching Sun
Are like drawne curtaynes when the play is done,
Thus march we playing, to our latest rest,
Onely we dye in earnest, that’s no jest.11
10 Wickham, Early English Stages, 2/1:209. The tension between naturalistic and
symbolic representation mentioned by Wickham originally was elegantly discussed
in Erwin Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone Books, 1991).
A study of early modern Italian theatre in relation to the above dichotomy is Götz
Pochat, Theater und bildende Kunst im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance in Italien
(Graz: Akademische Verlag, 1990); Attila Kiss has discussed the same dichotomy
in Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre in his Contrasting the Early Modern and the
Postmodern Semiotics (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011).
11 This is the version that appeared in Orlando Gibbons’s First Set of Madrigals
and Motets (1612). However, more than forty variations of this poem survive in
prints and manuscripts of the seventeenth century. Michael Rudick established
a somewhat different and only eight-line long version to be Raleigh’s original. See
“The Text of Raleigh’s Lyric, ‘What Is Our Life’,” Studies in Philology 83.1 (1986):

The parallel in this poem is very similar to Shakespeare’s much more

widely known and quoted comparison between life and theatre in As
You Like It:
All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages… (3.1.139– 43)
Returning now to the question of the origins of the Elizabethan play-

houses, one should remember Lily B. Campbell’s 1923 study, Scenes
and Machines on the English Stage During the Renaissance: A Classical
Revival.12 She was the first, and up to now among the very few, who
strongly argued for a classical Renaissance influence in developing the
public theatre structure. In the first part of her book she looked back
to the revival of Vitruvius in the Renaissance, especially in Italy, and
how this revival influenced the development of theatre construction
based on the creation of perspectivic sceneries and the employment
of machinery invented in Antiquity and described by Vitruvius in his
De architectura (first century, AD).
The Latin author’s book was meant as a theoretical and practical guide
to architects; however, at that time architect referred to diverse occu-
pations: the architect was to be at home in drawing, geometry, optics
(lighting), history, philosophy, music, theatre, medicine, and law.13 The
work was rediscovered by Poggio Bracciolini in St. Gallen Abbey in
1414 and became the main source for Leon Battista Alberti’s De re ae-
dificatoria (1450), a basic Renaissance handbook on architecture. The
first known Latin printed edition was by Fra Giovanni Sulpitius in
Rome (1486 ). Translations followed in Italian (Cesare Cesariano,
1521), French (Jean Martin, 1547), English, German, and Spanish and
several other languages. The original illustrations had been lost and
the first illustrated edition was published in Venice in 1511 with wood-
cuts, based on descriptions in the text by Fra Giovanni Giocondo. Lat-
er in the sixteenth century, Andrea Palladio provided illustrations for
76–87. I stick to Gibbons’s version for being the most widely known in the early
modern period, and also because of my personal preference.
12 See Note 3, above.
13 On Vitruvius’s work, see Alexander McKay, Vitruvius, Architect and Engineer:
Buildings and Building Techniques in Augustan Rome (Bristol: Bristol Classical

Press, 1985).

Daniele Barbaro’s commentary on Vitruvius, published in Italian and

the original Latin versions.14
Book V of Vitruvius’s work dealt with public buildings, among them
theatres. Here he compared the Greek and Roman designs and talked
about scenery, perspectivic paintings, sound amplifiers, “machines,”
“engines,” and other auxiliary properties. Because of her specific in-
terest, Campbell paid the closest attention to scenery and props rather
than the buildings themselves and her analysis culminated with a dis-
cussion of the perspectivic masque designs of Inigo Jones after 1600.
However, her suggestion concerning the Vitruvian influence in Eng-
land caught the attention of Frances Yates, who presented fascinating
and much debated ideas in her book, The Theatre of the World in 1969.
And this book and its author is in the centre of my present paper.
Yates, Renaissance Magic, the Art of Memory, and the Globe
Recently a conference in Hungary advertised itself as being interested

in “Present–Perfect–Continuous” studies of Shakespeare and Renais-
sance theatre. Participating in this colloquium, I suggested to add one
more tense: “Past.” My argument for this was that, according to my
observation, even important results in scholarship tend to quickly go
out of fashion or become victims of oblivion, thus providing oppor-
tunities to new generations of scholars to reinvent the wheel again
and again. Very often, new and trendy ideas and viewpoints have
worthy predecessors which are neglected only to be revisited. I never
refrained from appreciating challenging propositions which from time
to time reconfigure scholarship; however, in my teaching practice and
scholarly writings I have always tried to pay tribute to our predeces-
sors in academia.
This is part of my motivation to bring Frances Yates back into the lime-
light. After a very successful career in the 1960s and 1970s, her work
for several decades was exposed to severe criticism, but finally the
pendulum has started swinging back and these days it is re-evaluated,
sorting out what she had a prescience about and that on which she
14 On Vitruvius in the Renaissance, see Alina A. Payne, The Architectural Treatise

in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). There are several English edi-
tions from different periods, I have used the very popular 1914 translation of
Morris Hicky Morgan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).

undeniably misfired. An additional aspect of my motivation is that she

devoted a considerable portion of her scholarship to studying Shake-
speare, his plays, and various intellectuals around him, yet, she is better
remembered as an enthusiast for Renaissance magic and the Hermetic
philosophy. Last but not least, I have a personal intake in talking about
her: she was a kind of master to me whom I met on several occasions
in London; and a few months before her death, during her last visit
abroad, I could be her guide and companion in Hungary in 1981.15
Who was this remarkable lady professor who in the early 1970s was
greeted enthusiastically to be one of the most influential researchers
of Renaissance intellectual history? Frances Amelia Yates was born in
1899 into a middle class family in Portsmouth. She became one among
that great generation of women academics who significantly contrib-
uted to the understanding of early modern English literature in the
first half of the twentieth century, such as Caroline Spurgeon (1869–
1942), Lily B. Campbell (1883–1967), Una Ellis-Fermor (1895–1958),
Madeleine Doran (1905–96), Helen Gardner (1908–86), and Muriel
Bradbrook (1909–93). Yates received her BA and MA from University
College in London and her early work focused on the Elizabethan the-
atre and the cultural connections of England with France and Italy.
Her first book in 1934 was devoted to John Florio (The Life of an Ital-
ian in Shakespeare’s England). Connected to this, in 1936 she published
A Study on Love’s Labour’s Lost, still continuing the examination of
Italian influence in the English Renaissance. In this, she touched upon
the mysterious intellectual circle around Walter Raleigh, usually re-
ferred to as the “School of Night.” This was partly a response to Mu-
riel Bradbrook’s book on this circle published in the same year.
From 1941, Yates worked at the Warburg Institute and became more
interested in the French Renaissance and Italian Neoplatonism. These
studies led her to the examination of Renaissance magic. The 1960s
brought international acclaim for her Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic
Tradition (1964) and The Art of Memory (1966), and she continued this
line of research into the 1970s with The Rosicrucian Enlightenment
(1972) and The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979).
Elsewhere I have written much about these works so now I would
15 My present paper was triggered by the Frances Yates memorial conference held
at the Warburg Institute in May 2019. There I talked about her influence on Hun-
garian Renaissance research but also noticed, in fact admitted with regret by the
organizers, that her work on Shakespeare was entirely missed out. Here I would
like to partially make up for this shortage of the presently ongoing rediscovery of
Frances Yates.

skip their review and also the debates which started around the so-
called “Yates theses” during the last decade of her life. But her death
coincided with the rise of New Historicism and poststructuralist cul-
tural theory, which did not do any good to her reputation. Quite sud-
denly she became dismissed as a proponent of all-encompassing
“grand narratives”; what is more, some philologists revealed quite
a few errors resulting from her enthusiastic empathy with her sub-
jects, which sometimes prevented her from objective and distanced
scientific judgements.
But how about her views on Shakespeare? As mentioned, her early
work was revolving around the Elizabethan theatrical world. At the
end of the 1960s, somewhat unexpectedly, she returned to this area
by publishing a book titled The Theatre of the World. This, actually,
strongly connected to her interest in Renaissance Hermeticism, just
as her last but one book, Shakespeare’s Last Plays: A New Approach
(1975 ). If we put together what and how much she wrote about
Shakespeare, we arrive at a diverse and substantial output. At this
time I only want to highlight one aspect: her explanation and concep-
tualization of the theatre-buildings of the day, especially that of the
Globe.
The main arguments of The Theatre of the World were as follows.
1/ First, Yates reminds that the true Renaissance spirit in architecture
appeared in close connection with the revival of the ancient Roman
author, Vitruvius. This work, popularized by the Italian Alberti, Bar-
baro, Palladio, and others, as well as the French Jean Martin and the
Spanish Juan Herrera, inspired the new temples, palaces, villas, and
theatres of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Alas, says Yates, no
such building was erected in England before the early seventeenth
century, until pioneered by Inigo Jones. Nevertheless, already in the
Elizabethan age, based on Vitruvius, John Shute introduced in English
the classical orders of columns in his Vitruvian treatise, The First and
Chief Grounds of Architecture (1563), and, more importantly, John
Dee in his famous English introduction to Euclid’s Elements (Math-
ematicall Praeface, 1570) cited extensively Vitruvius in order to argue
for the excellence and superiority of architecture:
Architectura (sayth Vitruuius)… is a Science garnished with many doctrines

& diuerse instructions. It followeth. Architecture, groweth of Framing, and
Reasoning. Reasoning is that, which of thinges framed, with forecast, and
proportion: can make demonstration, and manifest declaration… An Archi-
tect (sayth [Vitruvius]) ought to vnderstand Languages, to be skilfull of

Painting, well instructed in Geometrie, not ignorant of Perspectiue, furnished

with Arithmetike, haue knowledge of many histories, and diligently haue
heard Philosophers, haue skill of Musike, not ignorant of Physike, know the
aunsweres of Lawyers, and haue Astronomie, and the courses Coelestiall, in
good knowledge. [Vitruvius] giueth reason, wherefore all these Artes, Doc-
trines, and Instructions, are requisite in an excellent Architect.16
Then, Dee mentions theatres and their various devices:
And Musike he must nedes know: that he may haue vnderstanding, both
of Regular and Mathematicall Musike: that he may temper well … the Bra-
sen Vessels, which in Theatres, are placed by Mathematicall order, vnder
the steppes: and the diuersities of the soundes are ordred according to Mu-
sicall Symphonies & Harmonies.17
A peculiarity of Dee’s preface is that although he summarizes the the-

oretical notions of both Vitruvius and Alberti, he does not mention
even one concrete building save for the reference to the theatres, but
even that is not strictly architectural. We also do not have evidence
that he would have been interested in the Elizabethan theatres (unlike
his fellow “magician,” Simon Forman). On the other hand, in his vast
library he had a wide selection of classical Greek and Roman dramas;
what is more, as a student in Cambridge in the 1540s, he constructed
a stage machinery (a flying “scarab”) used in a school drama present-
ing Aristophanes’s Pax.18
2/ Yates then jumps forward to 1619. This is when the English mysti-
cal philosopher and medical doctor Robert Fludd (1574–1637) pub-
lished with the prestigious German printer Theodor de Bry one of the
volumes of his monumental natural philosophical compendium, Utri-
usque cosmi historia (The History of the Two Words, the Macro and
Microcosms). In this he devoted quite a lot of thoughts to the ars
memoria,19 and offered a memory theatre as a suitable device. Yates
picked out an important caveat of Fludd, according to which he
16 Dee, Mathematicall Praeface (1570), d.iiij.

17 Ibid.
18 See Dee’s library catalogues (edited by Roberts & Watson 1990) and Yates’s refer-
ences to them in The Theatre of the World, 11; on the production of Aristophanes see
Dee, Compendious Rehearsall, in Autobiographical Tracts, ed. J. Crossley ([Manch.]:
1851), 5–6.
19 On the ars memoria one of the definitive works is still Yates’s The Art of Memory
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).

warned against using imaginary theatres for the exercise of the mem-
ory instead of relying on real, existing buildings.
3/ Using the above two philological data Yates then bridged them,
suggesting that for Fludd the existing Vitruvian memory theatre could
be based on the contemporary English public theatres, especially the
Globe. It seems that reconstructing the Globe and its siblings was mo-
tivated by a usual Yatesian enthusiasm. As she wrote,
The argument which I am putting forward is that the Shakespearean type

of theatre represented as never before since antiquity the most important
aspects of the ancient theatre as described by Vitruvius, its aural, musi-
cal, and cosmic aspects, that the designers of this type of theatre knew
something of classical theory on these matters and produced an adapta-
tion of the ancient theatre which was actually closer to its spirit and
function as the vehicle of poetic drama than any other Renaissance
adaptation.
Certainly, this was a bold claim and quite against the mainstream of
interpretations, which, since Chambers and before, derived the public
theatre from the early modern innyard. As Yates pointed out,
A tradition maintained that the origin of these theatres was to be found

in the inn yard… Intensive modern study of street pageantry has been
brought to bear as an influence on the theatres. An enormous amount of
material of the utmost value for dramatic history has been turned up in
these researches but their general trend is to look backwards, to see the
Elizabethan theatres as in some sort a medieval survival, a movement
started by relatively uneducated players though in a more permanent
form… It seems very unlikely that the appearance of the Theatre and its
successors can be entirely explained as a prolongation of previous acting
conditions by ignorant players. The mind of some scholars seems to op-
erate in an opposite direction from that of a Renaissance observer like
de Witt. They are determined not to see classical influence, to see only
a popular theatre evolving from the medieval past, whereas de Witt has
almost to excuse himself for recording a popular theatre on the ground
that it resembles Roman work.20
Furthermore,
20 Frances A. Yates, The Theatre of the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1969), 102.

The very term “public theatre” is classical. “Omnia publica lignea theatra,”
says Vitruvius, when mentioning the fact that public theatres in Rome were
sometimes made of wood. The theatres of Rome were public theatres, pop-
ular theatres which could contain thousands of people. In its popularity, its
unroofed character, and its size, the Elizabethan or Jacobean theatre was
much closer to the great public theatres of ancient Rome than was the small
court theatre of the Italian Renaissance. In its aim of popularity and size
the English Renaissance theatre was not unclassical. On the contrary, these
aims might suggest that it was an adaptation of the ancient theatre made to
suit contemporary conditions, a popular adaptation moving in a different
direction and with a different purpose from a court adaptation, but not
necessarily on that account unaware of classical principles.21
(Re)constructing an English Renaissance Reception of

Vitruvius
I apologize for the long quotations, but I wanted to illustrate why the
author thought that her new approach would be highly unorthodox
among the received studies of the English Renaissance playhouses.
And, indeed, some of her formulations sounded rather far-fetched.
On the other hand, she put forward a number of insightful proposi-
tions which were based on sound observations and textual analyses.
While looking at the Renaissance reception of Vitruvius, she found
that while some interpreters tried to reconstruct the simple, cosmic,
and popular features of the Roman theatres, other, more aristocratic
interpreters, such as Sebastiano Serlio, inflated some details of Vitru-
vius, a move that pushed the whole concept toward a court-oriented,
perspectivic design, such as that of Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico. While
the latter design was introduced in England by Inigo Jones’s architec-
tural plans as well as his perspectivic sceneries for Ben Jonson’s
masques, Yates compared the original, Roman ideal, with the English
public theatres. This whole paradigm shift closely parallels what
Glynne Wickham, as cited above, more or less at the same time de-
scribed as the move from the emblematic theatre to the photographic
stage.
Yates had to struggle with several philological questions. First of all,
how could the revived classical architectural model influence the build-
er of the first public playhouse, The Theatre’s James Burbage? Here she
was in an easy, and at the same time difficult situation, since apart from
21 Ibid., 103.

numerous law-suit documents and business ventures we know almost

nothing about Burbage’s intellectual horizon. Usually he is described as
an uneducated man; as Reese summarized, he was “an unsuccessful
joiner who had become an actor with Leicester’s company.”22 Also we
know next to nothing about the education of Burbage’s master carpen-
ter of the project, Peter Street. Paradoxically supported by the lack of
evidence, Yates did not agree with the belittling remarks. On the con-
trary, she pinpointed Burbage as a possible audience of John Dee’s
Mathematicall Praeface which popularized humanist and classical sci-
ence in English, specifically addressing the middle class, the artisans,
and craftsmen with the aim to dissolve the atmosphere of sorcery and
privilege surrounding the sciences. As she announced,
And out of the area of that society there arose in 1576, six years after the
publication of Dee’s Preface, a building, as had not been seen in England
before, built by a man who united in himself the trade of the joiner or car-
penter and the profession of actor, an energetic man of exactly the type and
class to which Dee’s Preface appealed.23
Consequently, according to Yates, The Theatre initiated a movement

of building popular theatres which were inspired by the classical Vit-
ruvian model facilitated by John Dee’s intellectual transmission.
In Shakespeare’s Playhouses Herbert Berry tried to reconstruct Bur-
bage’s first house on the basis of a micro analysis of the surviving le-
gal and contracting documents. His result was visualized by C. Walter
Hodges, a professional illustrator and writer, author of the classical
Shakespeare’s Second Globe. His drawing, although the book does not
mention Vitruvius and is not concerned with architectural styles, is
not in opposition to how we can imagine the wooden amphitheatri-
cal structure of the Roman theatre (fig. 3). Not surprisingly, Yates also
used the famous description of de Witt, a Dutch traveling pastor, who
visited another London public theatre, the Swan, in 1596. In his de-
scription he mentioned that:
[T]here are four amphitheatres in London of notable beauty… Of all the thea-
tres, however, the largest and the most magnificent is that one of which the
sign is a swan, called in the vernacular the “Swan Theatre.” It accommodates
three thousand persons, and is built of a mass of flint stones, and supported
22 Reese, Shakespeare, 93.

23 Yates, The Theatre of the World, 40.

by wooden columns painted in such excellent imitation of marble that it is

able to deceive even the most cunning. Since its form resembles that of a Ro-
man work, I have made a sketch of it.24
Although de Witt’s original sketch has not survived, his fellow stu-
dent, van Buchell copied it into his own notebook which was discov-
ered in the University Library of Utrecht only much later.25 Since this
widely known and reproduced image is the only close-up representa-
tion of any Elizabethan public playhouse, the description as well as
the drawing has been subject to fierce debates. Andrew Gurr set up
a long list of anomalies in it and, without mentioning Yates’s book,
concluded that “It is perhaps inevitable that the work of the Roman
Vitruvius and his resurrection in the sixteenth century by Serlio as
a handbook for architects have elevated Roman architecture into an
assumed model for Elizabethan design. But … we must be cautious
about using Vitruvius or Serlio as any sort of precedent for the design
of these thoroughly home-made constructions using vernacular ma-
terials and domestic traditions for their building.”26
Yates’s other train of thought, as mentioned, was that she suggested

to reconstruct the Globe in a retrospective way, from Fludd’s picture
of the memory theatre, which, according to the English philosopher
had to be based on an existing building. Yates seemed to find this ex-
isting model being equivalent with the Globe and used Fludd’s illus-
tration to recreate the stage of Shakespeare’s theatre.27 On the com-
posite image (fig. 4) it can be seen that Yates “doctored” Fludd’s
original design, turning the square-shaped inside of the building into
something like a circular or polygonal one.
Yates’s book was not very well received. As often happens in scholar-
ship, one particularly problematic suggestion overshadowed the
whole venture. This was her claim that Fludd’s picture was based on
24 Quoted by Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 162, based on Joseph Q. Adams,

Shakespearean Playhouses: A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the
Restoration (London: Constable, 1920). In Yates’s translation (The Theatre of the
World, 99) the text is slightly different.
25 See “Shakespeare and the Swan,” Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht, https://
bc.library.uu.nl/shakespeare-and-swan (accessed December 10, 2019).

26 Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 162.
27 This is a composite image compiled by myself, showing Fludd’s Theatre (Utri-
usque cosmi historia, 1619), 2.1:55 and Yates, The Theatre of the World, Plate 21.

the Globe. Glynn Wickham ruthlessly rejected the lack of evidence;

I. A. Shapiro suggested that Fludd’s design was rather imitating the
Blackfriars than the Globe; Richard Bernheimer argued that it was
more like a temporary playhouse in Germany; Herbert Berry joined
him, attacking both Yates and Shapiro.28 Because of this controversy
two important insights of Yates soon became forgotten. Namely,
these were that the “provincial” and “anti-classical” English Renais-
sance might be connected to the Renaissance architectural revival of
Vitruvius, and that the English public theatre should be studied as
a moral emblem.
As for the first, her demonstration of the previously neglected im-

portance of Vitruvius in the English Renaissance, if it did not revo-
lutionize our thinking about the Elizabethan ways of theatre build-
ing, at least threw light on alternative, complementary traditions as
exemplified by John Dee’s enthusiasm for the Roman architect and
John Shute’s early popularization of classical buildings (fig. 5). Yates
also quoted Robert Stickells, a late Elizabethan and early Jacobean
architect, who claimed, “There are two sortes of byldings, the one
in sence, the other withowt sence; The antikes in sence, the mod-
darn witheout sence.”29 Yates’s early discovery was reaffirmed by
John Orrell in 1997 , when reconstructing the Fortune’s design he
pointed out that two features of Vitruvius/Barbaro have relevance
for the English playhouses, namely, that a fine building should be
proportioned according to simple commensurate ratios, and the in-
sistence on the use of an “architectural order” in the development
of the structure. The first was discussed by Robert Stickells in two
theoretical memoranda of 1595 and 1597 ; the second is the theme
of John Shute’s First and Chief Grounds of Architecture.30 Then Or-
rell adds,
The preference of Renaissance architects for simple mathematical ratios is

well known… Such thinking had become the common currency of Renais-
sance architectural theory, and in the 1590s was beginning to emerge in
London building practice. Robert Stickell’s theoretical notes contrasted
28 The critical controversies are well summarized in Charles H. Shattuck’s book
review of The Theatre of the World in The Journal of English and Germanic Philol-
ogy 69.4 (Oct., 1970): 671–75.
29 Yates, The Theatre of the World, 107.
30 John Orrell, “The Architecture of the Fortune Playhouse,” Shakespeare Survey
47 (1994): 20–21.

medieval geometric design practices—what he called “the moddarn”—with

the architecture of the Antiquity (“the Antikes”), which used rational
proportions.31
Before we leave the question of architectural design, I would mention

that while Frances Yates emphasized the diverging reception of the
Vitruvian theatre by claiming that Palladio developed it into a smaller,
aristocratic, and closed form as opposed to the English open and pub-
lic buildings, she might have been satisfied to realize that Palladio’s
famous Teatro Olimpico was his third such building, and that the pre-
vious two were made of wood and probably followed more closely
the original Vitruvian “Omnia publica lignea theatra.”32
Touching briefly upon the second mentioned theme, I would recall
that the last chapter of Yates’s book is entitled “The Theatre as Moral
Emblem.” By close reading of some parts of Thomas Heywood’s An
Apology for Actors (London, 1612) she highlighted an allegorical mo-
tive that reminds one of Shakespeare’s “All the world is a stage” max-
im as well as Walter Raleigh’s poem I quoted above:
The World’s a Theater, the earth a Stage,

Then our play’s begun
When we are born, and to the world first enter,
And all find exists when their parts are done.
If then the world a theater present,
As by the roundness it appears most fit,
Built with starre galleries of hye ascent,
In which Jehove doth as spectator sit…33
As a further demonstration for the early modern treatment of the the-

atre as the allegory or emblem of life, Yates referred to Jacques Bois-
sard’s Theatrum vitae humanae (Metz: Theodor de Bry, 1596), on the
31 Ibid., 21 . Orrell cites the original publication of the text, John Summerson’s
“Three Elizabethan Architects” (1957), but does not mention Yates’s earlier use
of this quotation.
32 “The Accademia Olimpica, a group of noblemen, artists and academics inter-
ested in the new learning [humanism] in Vicenza, initially presented theatrical

performances and entertainments in a moveable wooden theatre designed by Pal-
ladio.” Karen Newman, “The Environment of Theatre: Urbanization and Theatre
Building in Early Modern Europe,” in A Cultural History of Theatre in the Early
Modern Age, ed. Robert Henke (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019), 81.
33 Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (London, 1612 ), [13 –4], unnum-
bered. Yates (on 164–65) quotes from the Shakespeare Society reprint (1841), 23.

title page of which one finds an allegorical “theatre of human life”

(theatrum omnium miseriarum) resembling an amphitheatre with
a circular gallery system filled by the audience, having a royal box in
the middle, and in the centre of the arena a stage with an obelisk in
front of which an allegorical scene is performed: humans are tortured
by devils and death figures (fig. 6). No doubt, it is an emblem of the
human fate, showing something similar to the medieval moralities and
danse macabre performances in a Renaissance, neoclassical setting.
Yates used this image to suggest that the Globe and the Elizabethan
public theatres could create complex moral emblems for the contem-
porary audience—emblems to which they were accustomed in their
everyday life, transmitted by various cultural media, ranging from
verbal sermons to frescoes and stained glass windows, not mention-
ing the various forms of public rituals and punishments.34
As I have indicated above, this train of thought is very close to Glynne
Wickham’s 1966 explanation of the Elizabethan public theatre as
thoroughly cosmic and emblematic. Wickham, alas, was not im-
pressed by Yates’s ideas and Dame Frances determinedly counter at-
tacked him.35 The result was that they never cited each other’s works,
which actually had a lot in common.
Looking back from Andrew Gurr
Since the 1980s Andrew Gurr is the unquestionable authority about

the Shakespearean stage. His studies and interpretations were greatly
helped by the archaeological finds of the recent decades; the excava-
tions of the foundations of the Rose theatre and part of the Globe
clarified a lot of uncertain points; however, we still lack ultimate evi-
dence about the architectural details of the Elizabethan theatres.36 It
is strange, however, that in his extensive bibliography Yates’s book,
34 The literature on the early modern emblematic way of seeing is enormous. For
a summary, see my “The ‘Emblematic’ as a Way of Thinking and Seeing In Renais-

sance Culture,” E-Colloquia 1.1 (2003 ), http://ecolloquia.btk.ppke.hu/index.
php/2003/leader and “Political Iconography and the Emblematic Way of Seeing,”
in The Routledge Companion to Medieval Iconography, ed. Colum Hourihane
(London: Routledge, An Ashgate Book, 2017), 295–310.
35 This happened following Frances Yates’s publication of her “discovery” of the
Globe in an article in The New York Review of Books, back in 1966. See Shattuck’s
book review of 1970.
36 See for example Gurr’s detailed and very up-to-date chapter on the playhouses
in his 2009 version of The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, 139–209.

The Theatre of the World, could not fit, and, as I have quoted above,
he generally dismissed any likelihood of Vitruvian influence on the
playhouses. What reasons could be behind this silence?
Gurr’s direction of interest has clearly focused on the social and so-
ciological aspects of players and playgoing, the politics around the
theatres, and, as for the physical building projects, he has relied on
the archaeological diggings and finds. This has perhaps pushed him
in the direction of seeing the theatres as a growth of the popular late
medieval spectacles, as Yates said, by looking backward rather, not
forward. Reading Gurr it also becomes transparent that he has not
been particularly interested in intellectual history, nor concerned
with the concept of the Renaissance as such, and the possible influ-
ence of humanism and international cultural exchange fostering the
English theatres—at least not until the time of Inigo Jones and the
Jacobean age.
Contrary to Gurr, I have also quoted John Orrell, who in 1997 attest-
ed for certain aspects of the Renaissance enthusiasm for Vitruvius dis-
cernible among Elizabethan intellectuals. His examples were John
Shute and Robert Stickells—also mentioned by Yates in 1969. Should
we not be surprised that Orrell also neglected to cite the once so
much admired Dame? We might wonder if the pendulum will swing
back for a reassessment of the intellectual contexts of the English the-
atres of the world?
I think we should also give Frances Yates her due, at least along the
lines of Charles Shattuck’s verdict:
Although the main thrust of The Theatre of the World is once more to ad-
vance the Fludd-Globe hypothesis, the early chapters which discuss Vitru-
vius in sixteenth-century England are vastly more fruitful… But at least Dr.
Yates produces one solid truth of revolutionary significance: that the Vit-
ruvian corpus was available in England when “The Theatre” was planned
and built. Given this much, I see no reason not to agree to the claim of Vit-
ruvian influence upon Burbage’s Theatre and the later Globe. Insofar as it
proves the Elizabethan playhouse to have been a theatre for “hearing,” and
even insofar as it brings the “idea of the Globe” into harmony with Renais-
sance symbolic ideology, we may accept the Vitruvian portion of this book
as a genuine illumination.37
37 Shattuck, “Book review,” 674–75.

Epilogue
We have seen how the Elizabethan theatre emerged from a number of

traditions: medieval and Renaissance, domestic and international, lo-
cal craftsmanship and Classical models. The amphitheatre-like wood-
en playhouses and the closed hall-shaped theatres combined two
worldviews appealing to intuitive imagination on the one hand, and
satisfying the need for the pleasure of imitation on the other. The
Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre wonderfully unites these two traditions.
It is the Globe and the Blackfriars at the same time, all built on a fenc-
ing ground—it would be intriguing to know if its Italian architect,
Renato Rizzi, knew that Palladio’s first theatre was also set up in
a fencing school?
The scholar who becomes aware of these coincidences and also dis-
covers the vision behind all this can only wish longstanding success to
this venture and especially to Jerzy Limon, its “onlie begetter.”

Works Cited
Berry, Herbert. Shakespeare’s Playhouses. New York: AMS, 1987.

Boissard, Jacques. Theatrum vitae humanae. Metz: Theodor de Bry, 1596.
Campbell, Lily B. Scenes and Machines on the English Stage During the
Renaissance: A Classical Revival. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1923.
Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1923 (subsequent, updated edition, 1951).
Dee, John. Autobiographical Tracts. Ed. James Crossley. Vol. 24. Man-
chester: Chetham Society Publications, 1853.
---. Mathematicall Praeface [to The Elements of Geometry of Euclid of
Megara, tr. Henry Billingsley]. London: John Daye, 1570. Facsimile
edition and introduction by Allen G. Debus, New York: Science His-
tory Publications, 1975.
Fleay, Frederick G. A Chronicle History of the London Stage, 1559–
1642. New York: Burt Franklin, 1890.
Fludd, Robert. Utriusque cosmi historia. Tomi secundi tractatus primi,
De technica microcosmi historia. Frankfurt am Main: Johann Theodor
de Bry, 1619.
Foakes, R. A. Illustrations of the English Stage 1580–1642. Stanford,
Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1985.
Grzybowska, Agata, ed. The Theatre of Two Times: The Gdańsk Shake-
speare Theatre (1635–2014). Gdańsk: Gdański Teatr Szekspirowski, 2014.
Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage 1574 –1642 [1980 ]. 4th ed.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Gurr, Andrew, and Mariko Ichikawa. Staging in Shakespeare’s Thea-
tres. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Henke, Robert, ed. A Cultural History of Theatre in the Early Modern
Age. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.
Heywood, Thomas. An Apology for Actors. London: Nicholas Okes,
1612.
Kiss, Attila. Contrasting the Early Modern and the Postmodern Semi-
otics. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011.
Leacroft, Richard. The Development of the English Playhouse. Lon-
don: Methuen, 1973.
Levenson, Jill L. “The Recovery of the Elizabethan Stage.” In The
Elizabethan Theatre IX, edited by G. R. Hibbard, 205–30. Port Credit,
Ontario: P.D. Meany / The University of Waterloo, 1981.
McKay, Alexander. Vitruvius, Architect and Engineer: Buildings and
Building Techniques in Augustan Rome. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press,
1985.

Newman, Karen. “The Environment of Theatre: Urbanization and

Theatre Building in Early Modern Europe.” In A Cultural History of
Theatre in the Early Modern Age, edited by Robert Henke, 71 –92 .
London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.
Orrell, John. “The Architecture of the Fortune Playhouse.” Shake-
speare Survey 47. Edited by Stanley Wells, 15–28. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1997.
Panofsky, Erwin. Perspective as Symbolic Form [1927 ]. New York:
Zone Books, 1991.
Payne, Alina A. The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance:
Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Pochat, Götz. Theater und bildende Kunst im Mittelalter und in der
Renaissance in Italien. Graz: Akademische Verlag, 1990.
Reese, M. M. Shakespeare, His World, and His Work. London: Edward
Arnold, 1980.
Roberts, Julian, and Andrew G. Watson, eds. John Dee’s Library Cata-
logues [with facsimiles]. London: The Bibliographical Society, 1990.
Rowan, F. D. “Inns, Inn-Yards, and Other Playing Places.” In The Eliz-
abethan Theatre IX, edited by G. R. Hibbard, 1–2. Port Credit, On-
tario: P.D. Meany / The University of Waterloo, 1981.
Rudick, Michael. “The Text of Raleigh’s Lyric, ‘What Is Our Life’,”
Studies in Philology 83.1 (1986): 76–87.
Shattuck, Charles H. “Book review of Yates’s The Theatre of the
World.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 69.4 (Oct.,
1970): 671–75.
Szőnyi, György E. “The ‘Emblematic’ as a Way of Thinking and See-
ing in Renaissance Culture.” E-Colloquia 1.1 (2003 ). http://ecollo-
quia.btk.ppke.hu/index.php/2003/leader.
——. “Political Iconography and the Emblematic Way of Seeing.” In
The Routledge Companion to Medieval Iconography, edited by Colum
Hourihane, 295–310. London: Routledge (An Ashgate Book), 2017.
Vitruvius, Marcus Pollio. The Ten Books on Architecture. Translated
by Morris Hicky Morgan. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1914.
Wickham, Glynne. Early English Stages. Vol. 2/1. London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1966.
Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1966.
---. The Theatre of the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1969.

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This Treasure

Edited by Marta Gibińska, Małgorzata Grzegorzewska,

[See the illustrations at the end of the paper!]

1145 - Limon _20-03-2020 _bez ilustracji.indd 3 20.03.2020 16:50:53

Frances Yates and the Theatre of the World

For Jerzy Limon

It must be a heroic task to bring a theatre to life. You need a general

Theatre (1635–2014) (Gdańsk: Gdański Teatr Szekspirowski, 2014).

ing the Globe.

1145 - Limon _20-03-2020 _bez ilustracji.indd 239 20.03.2020 16:51:03

Circle, Hall, Inn-yard?

It was E. K. Chambers who consolidated the possible origins and ty-

lowing works (in chronological order of their publication): Frederick G. Fleay,

1145 - Limon _20-03-2020 _bez ilustracji.indd 240 20.03.2020 16:51:03

upon it as an evidence of folk ‘tradition’.”4 Furthermore, he empha-

4 Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 2: 355n2.

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In opposition to the above evolutionist approach he emphasized that:

I am quoting Wickham at length because his opinion has direct links

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comment on the significance of the visual world versus a new, scientific

The study of the emblematic theatre makes us conclude that on the

What is our life? A play of passion.

1145 - Limon _20-03-2020 _bez ilustracji.indd 243 20.03.2020 16:51:03

The parallel in this poem is very similar to Shakespeare’s much more

All the world’s a stage,

Returning now to the question of the origins of the Elizabethan play-

Buildings and Building Techniques in Augustan Rome (Bristol: Bristol Classical

1145 - Limon _20-03-2020 _bez ilustracji.indd 244 20.03.2020 16:51:03

Daniele Barbaro’s commentary on Vitruvius, published in Italian and

Yates, Renaissance Magic, the Art of Memory, and the Globe

Recently a conference in Hungary advertised itself as being interested

14 On Vitruvius in the Renaissance, see Alina A. Payne, The Architectural Treatise

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undeniably misfired. An additional aspect of my motivation is that she

1145 - Limon _20-03-2020 _bez ilustracji.indd 246 20.03.2020 16:51:03

Architectura (sayth Vitruuius)… is a Science garnished with many doctrines

1145 - Limon _20-03-2020 _bez ilustracji.indd 247 20.03.2020 16:51:03

Painting, well instructed in Geometrie, not ignorant of Perspectiue, furnished

Then, Dee mentions theatres and their various devices:

A peculiarity of Dee’s preface is that although he summarizes the the-

16 Dee, Mathematicall Praeface (1570), d.iiij.

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).

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The argument which I am putting forward is that the Shakespearean type

A tradition maintained that the origin of these theatres was to be found

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(Re)constructing an English Renaissance Reception of

1145 - Limon _20-03-2020 _bez ilustracji.indd 250 20.03.2020 16:51:03

numerous law-suit documents and business ventures we know almost

Consequently, according to Yates, The Theatre initiated a movement

22 Reese, Shakespeare, 93.

1145 - Limon _20-03-2020 _bez ilustracji.indd 251 20.03.2020 16:51:03

by wooden columns painted in such excellent imitation of marble that it is

Yates’s other train of thought, as mentioned, was that she suggested

24 Quoted by Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 162, based on Joseph Q. Adams,

bc.library.uu.nl/shakespeare-and-swan (accessed December 10, 2019).

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the Globe. Glynn Wickham ruthlessly rejected the lack of evidence;

As for the first, her demonstration of the previously neglected im-

The preference of Renaissance architects for simple mathematical ratios is

28 The critical controversies are well summarized in Charles H. Shattuck’s book

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