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Prologues to Shakespeare's Theatre: Performance and Liminality in Early Modern Drama.

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Prologues to Shakespeare's Theatre: Performance and Liminality in Early Modern Drama By Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann London and New York: Routledge, 2004

Given the high proportion of early modern plays that feature prologues, it's surprising how little attention they have received from theater historians and critics. Prologues pave the way for almost half the plays that survive from the period between 1558 and 1642. The popularity of the device peaked in the 1580s and dipped sharply from the 1590s onward, as Benvolio's refusal to countenance a "without-book prologue, faintly spoke / After the prompter" in Romeo and Juliet (1596) attests. Within a decade of that dismissal the "Prologus Laureatus" to The Birth of Hercules (1604) felt constrained to announce: "I am a Prologue, should I not tell you so / You would scarce know me; 'tis so long ago / Since Prologues were in use." In its heyday, however, this arresting theatrical ploy could boast of having spawned the dazzling manifesto that trumpets the advent of Tamburlaine (1587): "From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits, / And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, / We'll lead you to the stately tent of war." During its decline, paradoxically, Shakespeare produced the consummate instance of the art in Henry V (1599): "Admit me Chorus to this history, / Who Prologue-like your humble patience pray / Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play." And he was still eager to enlist its aid in Henry VIII (1613) at the close of his career: "Such as give / Their money out of hope they may believe, / May here find truth."

The reasons why the early modern dramatic prologue--with the exception of Shakespeare's most famous choruses--has suffered such critical neglect are not hard to discern. Prominent among them is what Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann perceive as a "reluctance to study conjunctures of dramatic form and social function" (2), a reluctance that anyone more interested in the plays themselves will readily understand. But the chief reason lies with the ostensibly extraneous, disposable nature of the device, whose archaic air of obsequious artifice only compounds the impression of redundancy. The prologue dwells in a paratextual twilight zone, at once beyond and yet within the boundaries of the play it precedes. Viewed from one angle, it's an integral part of the ensuing drama, the point at which...

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