The Uses of the Theatrum Mundi Metaphor
in Seventeenth-Century England

It is common knowledge that virulent antitheatrical movements spread in England during the Renaissance and Baroque periods, culminating in the closure of the theatres under the Commonwealth. These movements also tended to polemicize against ceremonial and representational institutions (especially the court, the Anglican and Catholic churches, and the marketplace) by associating or even equating them with theatres. Some Puritans and fervent Anglicans, reiterating Plato, insisted on a divine command according to which everybody was obliged to play exclusively the role which had been assigned to him or her by God and not to deviate from it. Yet, as can be ascertained by that very statement, these theologians were apparently unable to avoid resurrecting the theatre they were trying to entomb, at least on a metaphorical level: theatre was declared an undesirable competitor of God’s well-ordered world drama, an attempt to reduplicate and/or replace His cosmic staging in which the deity figured as sovereign author and spectator. Adopted by Luther and Calvin (echoing St. Paul as well as innumerable theologians and pagan philosophers), this topos of the world as playhouse pervaded early modern discourse, often allegorizing the deceitfulness and impermanence of this world as well as the futility of all earthly strife and pleasures. Thus, a vaguely affirmative, sacralized reference to the theatre was woven into the very argument against worldly amusements such as the stage.

The early modern dramatists often reacted to this development by appropriating the Theatrum Mundi metaphor, as is evidenced even by the motto of the Globe Theatre, “Totus mundus agit histrionem”. But that is not the whole story; in an ingenious twist, some playwrights also appropriated the metaphor’s anti-theatrical impetus. For example, one might call Ben Jonson and John Milton anti-theatrical dramatists. Early modern theatre seemed to discover a denial of its own theatricality at its very core; drama was found to succeed best when it staged itself as a great unmasking. One paradigmatic example of this development is Shakespeare’s Othello in which the two-faced deceiver Iago persistently uses anti-theatrical rhetoric and so illustrates that anti-theatricality might be the most subtle form of dramatistic staging. The anti-theatrical play thus both confirmed and, at the same time, subverted the Theatrum Mundi metaphor. Some natural philosophers and humanists of the era seemed to endorse the resulting ambivalence.

Why this persistence, even inevitability of the theatre and the Theatrum Mundi metaphor in seventeenth-century culture? Can it be considered an “absolute metaphor” in Hans Blumenberg’s sense? And how did it come to be so? Does its development among the Puritans relate to the Calvinist concept of predestination? And perhaps also to the development of capitalism and the new social fluidity it entails? Can conceptualizations such as Benjamin’s theory of allegory or Foucault’s designation of the Baroque as an “age of representation” help in understanding the phenomenon? To deal with these and similar questions, the workshop will examine the metaphorical uses of theatre in plays, epics, poems, treatises, pamphlets, official proclamations and other seventeenth-century texts.