Lucy Munro. Children of the Queen's Revels.: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory.

Curran, Kevin

Lucy Munro. Children of the Queen 'S Revels. A Jacobean Theatre Repertory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. xiii + 267 pp. $85.00.

That theatre is a collaborative enterprise is often remarked by critics of early modern drama, but rarely is the point argued with such focus and such scrupulous attention to documentary evidence as in Lucy Munro's masterful study of the Children of the Queen's Revels, one of the most innovative and politically daring playing companies of the early seventeenth-century. The Children of the Queen's Revels has suffered unfortunate scholarly neglect over the years, with far more sustained critical attention being directed toward Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men (later the King's Men). Munro's timely book not only succeeds in putting the Queen's Revels back on the map of theatre history, it posits a number of compelling broader arguments, concerning, for example, the need to attend more closely to playing companies, rather than just playwrights, as cultural agents; the impact of economics, acting practice, and audience taste on genre; and the intellectual utility of a hermeneutic that bridges gaps between traditional literary criticism, performance criticism, and textual studies.

After a succinct introduction, Munro presents a chapter devoted to what she calls the "company biography" (a clever borrowing from the vocabulary of author-centred criticism). A wide range of frequently overlooked manuscript sources are drawn on to reconstruct the evolution of the company between 1600 and 1613, as it moved through the various appellations of the Children of the Chapel, the Children of the Queen's Revels, the Children of the Revels, the Children of Blackfriars, and the Children of Whitefriars. Munro discusses the issuing and reissuing of patents, the coming and going of shareholders and patrons, troubles with the authorities, and the changing repertory. Particularly fascinating is the author's examination of the challenges involved in finding and retaining child actors as the increasing commercialization of London drama severed the children's companies' traditional links with the grammar schools and choir schools. By the end of Munro's "company biography," the reader is left with an acute sense of the intensely social nature of dramatic production in early modern England.

From here, the study is structured under genre rubrics: separate chapters are devoted to comedy, tragicomedy, and tragedy The idea, in Munro's words, is "to avoid the potentially reductive format of the chronological survey" (5). The approach works, and without sacrificing any of the thoroughness which is typically the chronological survey's virtue. Chapter 2, "'Proper gallants wordes': Comedy and the Theatre Audience," explores how plays like Eastward Ho! (Chapman, Jonson, Marston), Your Five Gallants (Middleton), and Epicoene (Jonson) used jokes to highlight the precariousness of social hierarchy, displaying a propensity for critique which set the Queen's Revels comedies apart from other examples of comedic theatre in the period. Chapter 3," 'Grief, and joy, so suddenly commixt': Company Politics and the Development of Tragicomedy," takes up what might be thought of as the trademark genre of the Queen's Revels. Munro's specific concern with tragicomedy is to identify the form's unique development in Queens Revels plays like The Malcontent (Marston), The Widows Tears (Chapman), The Isle of Gulls (Day), Cupids Revenge (Beaumont and Fletcher), and The Faithful Shepherdess (Fletcher). The Queen's Revels version of tragicomedy is traced from the point of view of the company as a whole, not just the authors who wrote the plays. By shifting the critical perspective in this way, Munro delineates an alternative approach to source study, one which breaks free from the "fundamentally limited" paradigm of the individual playwright "sitting alone in a study with books spread out on a table" (98). After all, as Munro is at pains to demonstrate throughout her book, this is not how dramatic production worked in early modern England: there are many "readers" to account for, besides just the playwright (actors, audience members, patrons, shareholders), many ways in which a source or influence could enter the repertory. The final chapter of Children of the Queens Revels, 'ttleronimo in Decimo sexto': Tragedy and the Text;' turns to "the most prestigious and, at times, most problematic of early modern dramatic genres" (134). George Chapman's Bussy DAmbois, Samuel Daniel's Philotas, John Marston's Sophonisba, Beaumont and Fletcher's Cupids Revenge, and a number of other tragedies formed a substantial, if frequently neglected, part of the Queen's Revels repertory. Munro shows how tragedy's common association with universal and immutable qualities falls apart when applied to Queen's Revels plays, which were constantly reshaping the protocols of tragic drama in response to the perceived tastes and interests of their audiences at the Blackfriars and Whitefriars theatres. Children of the Queens Revels is capped off with five valuable appendices. Here the reader will find a catalogue of all Queen's Revels plays; information pertaining to performances in London, the provinces, and at court; actor lists; and biographical descriptions of all those known to have been involved with the Children of the Queen's Revels in any capacity.

Lucy Munro has written the first book-length study of the Children of the Queen's Revels, and she has done so with careful consideration for structure and organization and an impressive degree of attention to detail and documentation. For this alone Children of the Queen s Revels deserves our praise and attention. Even beyond this, though, Munro manages to give her several interlocking arguments about the playing company broad enough scope to make her book of value to Renaissance drama scholars with a wide range of backgrounds and interests. Whether you seek an authoritative account of one of the most important playing companies in seventeenth-century London or a more general rethinking of the relationship between theatre and society in the early modern period, Children of the Queens Revels will deliver.

Kevin Curran

McGill University