English Court Theatre, 1558-1642 & Theatre, Court and City, 1595-1610: Drama and Social Space in London. (Reviews).

MacDonald, Ronald R.

John H. Astington, English Court Theatre, 1558-1642.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xiv + 293pp. $59.95. ISBN: 0-521-64065-2.

Janette Dillon, Theatre, Court and City, 1595-1610: Drama and Social Space in London.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. x + 187pp. $54.95 ISBN: 0-521-661 18-8.

The two books reviewed here are both concerned with connections between court and city, the first with the material and practical relations between the burgeoning theatrical institution in England in the years from the accession of Elizabeth I to the closing of the theaters in 1642, the second with the relations between court and broader city matters, but particularly with the representation of those relations, not only in various theatrical venues, but on other spectacular occasions as well, such as Lord Mayor's processions, the dedications of new buildings, and coronation pageantry.

Of the two, Astington's is closer to the documentary record and, indeed, displays a mastery of historical detail which seems definitive from the point of view of both accuracy and completeness. Although Astington announces early on that his aim "is to concentrate attention on the physical and aesthetic conditions under which actors worked when they performed at the Tudor and Stuart courts" (7), this book is not merely a descriptive compilation of material facts (though it does end with an impressive forty-five-page appendix listing court performances over a period of eighty-four years by date, venue, sponsor; title, and, where known, author and performers). Astington's study -- is consistently alive to the complex interactions and mutual influences among the principals of the English court, its administrative arms, and the artists and artisans responsible for mounting all kinds of theater and theatricalized entertainments in a rich variety of spaces ranging from the great halls of Hampton Court and White Hall , through the much more intimate auditoriums available in St. James's Palace, to the banqueting houses and the converted Cockpit Theater of the Stuart years.

What Astington's argument recurs to throughout is continuity in apparent diversity and diversity in apparent continuity, as it steadily refuses oversimplification and the kind of illusory neatness so often found in historical reconstructions. The result is an account of theatrical practice both more and less continuous than we might expect, and in both the synchronic and diachronic dimensions. Astington reveals the actual diversity behind what we have come to accept as the model for staging in great halls, for instance, with the monarch and entourage at the "high" end of the room, the performers at the "low" end, using the screen for entrances and exits, the space behind it as tiring house. In fact, as Astington puts it, "no simple, unitary model can easily be made to fit the variety of late-medieval and Renaissance staging in England, whether at the court or elsewhere" (89), since plays were sometimes performed without screens and with a variety of seating patterns (though, not surprisingly, the monarch always seems to have had the seat where he could see and be seen to best advantage). Some plays even seem to have called for effects incompatible with the confines of a platform stage, requiring, rather, the use of the hall floor itself (102). And no simple evolutionary explanation seems entirely adequate: Astington sensibly stresses the complex of factors bearing on theatrical practice at court. It isn't simply, for instance, and as E.K. Chambers opined in The Elizabethan Stage, that the collapse of the Revels Office as a producing arm changed the character of plays staged before Elizabeth. The emergence of larger acting companies in the 1580s, with the concomitant increase in the complexity and richness of dramatic texts, must have been an influence as well (89).

This last suggests the continuity to which Astington's arguments bears consistent and eloquent testimony: the remarkable influence that the expanding institution of public theater exerted on the form and content of court entertainment. The reasons for this influence as Astington expounds them are complex, but the results are clear. Popular plays, acted repeatedly over the years, must have gone through many versions, casts, and spaces, and yet, as Astington observes, "the physical characteristics of the staging of the old Globe play Othello at Hampton Court on 8 December 1636 are likely to have been very similar to those of the Jacobean court showing of the play, at Whitehall in 1604," the basic physical requirements (tiring house, gallery, discovery space) remaining constant (210). "The notion of a radically different stylistic framework and governing concept for each new production of 'classic' plays is modern," Astington notes, "and has grown more exaggerated in its effects over the course of the second hal f of the twentieth century" (210-11). Once public theater had worked out a general mise-en-scene, the pattern spread and persisted, on the Bankside, on tour, and at court.

Janette Dillon's altogether interesting study, Theatre, Court and City, 1595-1610, similarly stresses interconnections and continuities, but with much more emphasis on social structure, the tensions between social classes, and the concomitant ambivalence felt by those who aspire to lofty position but retain a sense of loyalty to a separate identity, as well as those who occupy the lofty position but who are increasingly in need of the economic resources provided by the aspirers. Although Dillon early on announces her indebtedness to the theoretical work of Henri Lefebvre and his account of the way space is experienced and lived (6), her study more consistently and productively takes up the work of critics like Jean-Christophe Agnew, Douglas Bruster, and Frank Whigham and has largely to do with the commodifications attendant upon the rise of the City and the development of various proto-capitalist enterprises like the public theater and those grand shopping malls avant la lettre, the Royal Exchange and the New Exchange.

In her study of the expanding influence of the market economy and the sometimes rather complex and conflicted attitudes toward it, Dillon analyzes, among others, two especially telling commodifying trends, that involving the self and that involving language. The two are, of course, intimately related, and they intertwine in Dillon's cogent account in the commodified theatrical spectacle, which she sees as becoming, particularly with the plays participating in the War of the Theaters in the late 1590s, increasingly a performance of performance, a representation of a social world whose inhabitants are already actors, as they attempt to reinvent themselves, making use of the range of things, costumes, and manners readily available to anyone capable of paying the price. Theatrical spectacle is simultaneously merely one commodity among others and, as representation, a way of critically scrutinizing the very process of commodification in which it otherwise participates. The playwright, like the satirist who denounc es corruption even as he wallows in it, reproves the behavior he is also offering in response to public demand, as Dillon argues in her fourth chapter, appropriately entitled "The Place of Dirt."

Dillon caps her argument concerning the ambiguity of theater and the ambivalence of playwrights with a fresh look at Ben Jonson in two guises, first in her penultimate chapter as the commissioned author of the entertainment celebrating the opening of the New Exchange in 1609, then in her ultimate chapter as the author of Epicoene, first performed probably less than a year after the opening of Cecil's grand mall. The juxtaposition is striking. In the first instance, Jonson colludes in the project to mystify the market basis of Cecil's venture, as his entertainment seeks "to highlight the elevated status of all aspects of the enterprise... brushing the hard facts of buying and selling to one side for the occasion and blinding the courtly audience to that material reality through the spectacle of apparently unmeasured giving" (123). In the second instance, he mercilessly exposes the attempt on the part of his characters to rise to gentle status and suppress their City origins, and their connections with markets, trade, and commodities. In Epicoene, as Dillon points out, the emphasis is on "the mechanism rather than the miracle of transformation" (136), in a world where the ambitious Mrs. Otter, who is largely composed of cosmetics and prostheses, stores her constituent parts in twenty boxes at bedtime, to be reassembled on the morrow "like a great German clock." Dillon's canny juxtaposition shows as clearly as can be the conflicts in Ben Jonson and his contemporaries concerning the status and purpose of the theater and the theatrical.