This chapter considers how the epic underworld becomes accessible from the early modern London stage. It examines plays by Kyd, Dekker, and others, but the main focus is on Thomas Heywood’s The Silver Age (1613), where katabatic movement on stage successfully translocates the descent narratives of erudite classical poetry into popular dramatic performance. The Silver Age retells the myth of Proserpina’s abduction by Pluto but it reconfigures Ovid’s account to fit within an episodic drama based around the life story of the Theban hero, Hercules. Heywood’s play offers an unusually independent and sustained response to classical materials, and an additional literary interest in Statius will be proposed. The chapter also employs recent work by theatre historians to reflect on the collaborative nature of early modern dramatic production, and on the repertoire and specific skill-set developed at the Red Bull Playhouse in the early years of the Jacobean era.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.