Theatre of the World

Name: Theatre of the World
Author: Frances A Yates
ISBN: 0226950042

by Frances A Yates

Yes. Frances A Yates was one of the first people to look at the ideas behind the Elizabethan age. This book is about the ideas behind the Elizabethan theatre, specifically, which it puts into a European context, and shows that it wasn’t at all a provincial thing but was tied into the Classical world. There were ideas of geometry and proportion in the theatres, and there was this idea that the theatre was a miniature of the world. She puts all this across in a way that people hadn’t done before. The idea that the Elizabethan theatre was a conscious recreation of Roman theatres… people hadn’t thought about that. Perhaps she goes too far – there’s been quite a lot of criticism of what she did – but she was a very original mind. She was interested in the, not exactly the magic, but the Elizabethan ideas of magical connections. Her great hero was Dr John Dee, who Queen Elizabeth liked talking to because he was possibly a magician who could talk to spirits and so on. Frances Yates really resurrected him in this book; he’d been thought of just as an eccentric figure, but she went into his intellectual background and the fact that he had the biggest library almost in Elizabethan England, which was in Mortlake. She thought that he’d had a big influence on craftsmen in Elizabethan England, because he wrote the introduction to a book on Euclid, which has quite a bit about architecture in it (which she was one of the first people to notice). She thought that Elizabethan craftsmen, including the carpenters who built the theatres, used John Dee’s library, which was quite possible, I think. Frances Yates became the trendy person for English architects in the 60s, and in fact this book was very influential in Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter

Recommended by

Mark Girouard

"Yes. Frances A Yates was one of the first people to look at the ideas behind the Elizabethan age. This book is about the ideas behind the Elizabethan theatre, specifically, which it puts into a European context, and shows that it wasn’t at all a provincial thing but was tied into the Classical world. There were ideas of geometry and proportion in the theatres, and there was this idea that the theatre was a miniature of the world. She puts all this across in a way that people hadn’t done before. The idea that the Elizabethan theatre was a conscious recreation of Roman theatres… people hadn’t thought about that. Perhaps she goes too far – there’s been quite a lot of criticism of what she did – but she was a very original mind. She was interested in the, not exactly the magic, but the Elizabethan ideas of magical connections. Her great hero was Dr John Dee, who Queen Elizabeth liked talking to because he was possibly a magician who could talk to spirits and so on. Frances Yates really resurrected him in this book; he’d been thought of just as an eccentric figure, but she went into his intellectual background and the fact that he had the biggest library almost in Elizabethan England, which was in Mortlake. She thought that he’d had a big influence on craftsmen in Elizabethan England, because he wrote the introduction to a book on Euclid, which has quite a bit about architecture in it (which she was one of the first people to notice). She thought that Elizabethan craftsmen, including the carpenters who built the theatres, used John Dee’s library, which was quite possible, I think. Frances Yates became the trendy person for English architects in the 60s, and in fact this book was very influential in Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter"

Art and Culture in Elizabethan England · fivebooks.com