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In this essay I wish to consider the strange symmetry that connects the two most successful periods of popular drama in the English-speaking world, the London public drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the Hollywood filmed drama of the twentieth century1 — a symmetry that, found under such clearly differentiated circumstances, may tempt us to believe that popular drama is a specific genre. But my aim is not to pursue such possibility; I seek only to present evidence and leave conclusions to look after themselves. I discuss the evidence under two headings: first I shall deal with the organisational structure of the drama in both periods and then I discuss what is derivative from this, the dramaturgy of plays produced inside the organisation.

Since the First Folio says that Shakespeare wrote history plays I think there is a great deal to be said for assuming not only that he did so but did so in the plays thus designated and no others; let evidence precede definition. It is true of course that the evidence available is mixed; Elizabethan generic vocabulary is notoriously spongy: contemporary title pages give us such hybrids as The Tragedy of Richard II, The Tragedy of Richard III, The History of Troilus and Cressida, The True Chronicle History of King Lear, A Pleasant Conceited History called The Taming of a Shrew. The Folio's generic divisions seem to belong, however, to a different mode of discourse: F1 is a company volume, and I have no doubt that its division of plays into Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies reflects company understanding of the repertory, and so, I take it, the understanding of that good company man, William Shakespeare. Academic critics inevitably prefer definitions to be less blandly empirical, for what space for dazzling reinventions, for pulling rabbits out of hats, not to mention a name in lights, is left available by so preconditioning an acceptance? As professional systematizers we like to be seen to generate our definitions from general principles and our first chapters from titles such as 'What is a history play? Some problems and answers'.

The original and substantive texts of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (the Quartos of 1604 and 1616) present the play completely without the punctuation of act division or scene enumeration. This is common enough in the play-texts of the period. Indeed it is much the commonest form in plays written for the public theatres. Shakespeare's Henry V and Pericles are without divisions in their quarto texts, but we know that they were written with a five-act structure in mind—the choruses tell us that.What is exceptional in the textual history of Doctor Faustus is not the lack of division in the original texts; it is rather the reluctance of modern editors to impose an act-structure on the modern texts. This is curious, but it seems possible to discern why the reluctance exists and a survey of the modern editions of Faustus throws some interesting light on critical attitudes to the subject matter of the play.