http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/796734874

Drama of a nation public theatre in Renaissance England and Spain

During the Renaissance, Europe experienced an international florescence of drama unequaled in its prior or subsequent history. Only in England and Spain, however, did major theaters emerge that possessed significant popular dimensions. Although the similarity of these two stage traditions has long been a commonplace, its nature and cause have escaped adequate theorization. The plays of late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century England and Spain uniquely synthesize popular and learned elements. This synthesis in turn depended on the evolution of the neofeudal absolutist state. By its inherent dynamism and contradictions, absolutism first created and then destroyed the public theater.

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