Family rites: City comedy and the strategies of patriarchalism
Crucial to New Historicism was Foucault's claim that while modern power is internalised, early modern power was spectacular, an idea it employed to analyse the theatricality of power and the power of theatre in the Renaissance. This was the theme of Power on Display by the American critic Leonard Tennenhouse, which viewed the Renaissance stage as analogous to the scaffold as a place where the spectacle of state was acted out. But Tennenhouse departed from Cultural Poetics in his belief that 'such displays were not produced' to the degree that contest was ruled out. Just as a Tyburn crowd might stone the executioner, history would discredit the scenarios of Renaissance plays. In this extract, for example, he describes the tension between the patriarchal endings of Jacobean City Comedies and the teeming metropolis they held at bay. On the stage patriarchy overrules individualist paternalism as father gives way to grandfather or son; but the genre could not thereby represent the 'Jacobean city of night' with its volatile social mix. In stressing the limits of representation Tennenhouse shows how art is pressured by social reality: in this case the shift from the dynastic to the nuclear family, a favourite New Historicist topic. His book concludes that so far from dictating history, it would be history that would shut the London theatre down.