Fanfare for the common man. The origins of European commercial theater

Abstract

The plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries told their audience the story of Power on Display, as Leonard Tennenhouse’s title described it. In Madrid during the same period, Cervantes and his fellow dramatists produced La Numancia, Fuenteovejuna and El alcalde de Zalamea, works that have more in common with the governorship of Sancho Panza on the island of Barataria that with the historical dilemmas of the aristocrats of Shakespeare’s cast of characters. The complaints of Cervantes and Lope about the power of the crowd, the vulgo, in the Madrid corrales were a consequence of the financing of theatrical production, involving a bizarre combination of patrons in private neighboring houses and the groundlings, or mosqueteros.