Abstract:
The English Reformation created a unique rift between English culture and the cultural tradition followed by a large proportion of a predominantly Catholic Europe. This religious change in England creates an opportunity for comparison with another country that still maintained its Catholic tradition, Spain. In this thesis, I explore English Renaissance drama’s increasing concern with the self on stage, contrasting it with Spanish Golden Age drama’s visual focus. Important terms used throughout this thesis to highlight the fundamental difference between English and Spanish drama are “external” and “internal”. While theatre is fundamentally an external medium, part of what makes English Renaissance theatre unique is its experimentation with depicting a character’s interior world. An interior theatre is a theatre where the characters explore their “selfhood” which, in turn, can inspire contemplation in the audience. This gives the illusion that the characters on stage are real human beings with thoughts processes and backstories of their own. To call Spanish theatre external, by comparison, is to talk of a theatre that has a visual focus; a focus that fully acknowledges the audience as simply a spectator enjoying the show rather than creating the illusion that the audience is engaged in a deeper relationship with the characters on stage. To fully explore this argument, this thesis is divided into three chapters. The first chapter compares the portrayals of fate and repentance in Antonio Mira de Amescua’s El Esclavo del Demonio with Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. The second chapter looks at participation and the portrayal of the religious other in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Lope de Vega’s El Niño Inocente de la Guardia and The Play of the Sacrament. The third chapter contrasts Shakespeare's Hamlet with Calderón de la Barca's El Purgatorio de San Patricio. A comparison between the portrayal of purgatory in Calderón and in Shakespeare demonstrates how the plays have to function within commonly accepted views of the period, emphasising the strong link between religious and theatrical practice.
