is a process rather than a presentation, and it takes place within the architectonic sociality of the playhouse.”81 Post-Reformation culture was continually re-created through the lived experiences of believers, and with particular flexibility through the virtual experiences of mixed-faith audiences.
The reiterative and adaptive nature of genre allows it to explore multiple variants of a cultural problem. A Game at Chess (see Chapter 4) was part of a larger vogue for plays set in Spain or dealing with the Spanish Match in the early 1620s. This dramatic fashion reflected, but also helped shape, how early modern Londoners thought and felt about this crucial matter of public interest. The Spanish Match subgenre flourished in part because the issue was of current concern, but it was also popularized by the repertory practices of theater companies. The King’s Men (KM) and the Lady Elizabeth’s Men (LEM) in particular offered competing Spanish plays that cultivated an appetite for drama on the subject that was likely profitable for both companies.82 These include The Spanish Curate (1622 KM), The Changeling (1622 LEM), the lost play “The Spanish Duke of Lerma” (1623 KM), The Spanish Gypsy (1623 LEM), and the lost “Spanish Viceroy” (1624 KM), among others. Whereas the stage craft of A Game at Chess produces tub-thumping ideological clarity that divides its audiences largely along denominational lines, the dramatic techniques of other Spanish Match plays generate more confessionally fluid fantasies that gather their mixed-faith audiences in shared imaginative and emotional exploration.
Theater helped condition the terms in which popular audiences conceived of Spain. I do not mean this subgenre “convinced” audiences that Spain was bad. While they do reinforce existing anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish stereotypes, these plays also involve forms of transposition and indirection that twist familiar narratives and fears into less recognizable forms. Dominant ideology reproduces itself through repetitions that are never self-identical. The reiterations on which hegemony depends are always (even if imperceptibly) changing. This constant process of re-creating the social world reinforces existing structures but also revises them. Representation changes a culture the way that waves redraw the shoreline that contains them over time.
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