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Performances at Court in the Age of
Shakespeare
Edited
by Sophie Chiari and John Mucciolo
Cambridge: University Press, 2019 Hardcover. xvi + 278 pages. ISBN 978-1108486675. £75
Reviewed by Louise Fang
Performances at Court in the Age of Shakespeare is
an engaging volume which reassesses the centrality of court performances following
recent developments in the field brought by the works of John H. Astington,
Richard Dutton and W.R. Streitberger, who have also contributed to the present
collection. Such performances have, until now, attracted less critical
attention than commercial theatres of the same period, with the exception of
court masques. The four sections of the volume provide valuable insight into
the specificities of these court revels as well as the interdependence of
courtly and public entertainments in early modern England. The opening
chapters deal with the political and economic aspects of representations at the
Elizabethan court. Richard Dutton discusses the 1566 performance of Richard
Edwards’s now lost play Palamon and
Arcite which took place in the queen’s presence. By confronting three
sources which amply describe this event, this study highlights the political
dimension such a performance could be endowed with in a courtly context. The following
chapter, by W.R. Streitberger, draws attention to the financial and aesthetic
issues at work in the organisation of Elizabethan court revels and explores the
reasons that may account for the increasing use of professional companies which
gradually superseded the Queen’s Player, and ultimately led to the rise of a
theatrical ‘triopoly’ [50] comprised of the King’s Men, the Prince’s Men and
Queen Anne’s Men at the Jacobean court. Roy Eriksen’s
contribution asks whether Doctor Faustus
– which has until now mainly been studied as a popular commercial play – could
have been intended for a court performance in the wake of the anti-Spanish
atmosphere of the late 16th century. This reading brings to light echoes and
parallels, in the B-text in particular, to contemporary international tensions
that might have been ideally suited to a courtly context. In the next
chapter, Janna Segal argues that the mechanicals’ scene at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream may be read as
a critique of the anxieties voiced by antitheatricalists. The study underlines
how the courtly patronage the mechanicals benefit from in the last scene of the
play is imitative of the theatrical practices of the Elizabethan court and
could also constitute a rebuttal to antitheatricalists. The second
part of the volume turns to Jacobean performances and offers new readings of
Shakespeare’s plays in light of this specific context. Murat Ögütcü’s studies Henry V’s performance at court during
the 1604-1605 season. As the only history play to have been represented at the
Jacobean court it may have been part of James I’s diplomatic agenda and
designed to gain the support of the nobility through its representation of
idealised masculinity. Jason Lawrence
takes a closer look at two other plays by Shakespeare that were also performed
at the Jacobean court in 1604: Othello
and Measure for Measure. This contribution
suggests that plays may have been premiered at court even after very few prior
performances on the commercial stage. Othello’s
status as a Jacobean play in particular has often been overlooked even though,
as Jason Lawrence argues, some of the additions in the play may have been made
in order to please the king. Measure for
Measure’s performance too seems to suggest that ‘the playwright was actively
seeking to engage with royal concerns’ [103]. In the
following chapter, David M. Bergeron discusses the way primary sources are used
and interpreted through the example of a 1619 letter by Gerrard Herbert about the
performance of Pericles in Whitehall
that same year. The way the information contained in this primary source was
handed down through the centuries through transcriptions and summaries has led
to many approximations or, sometimes, mistakes about performances at court. The
author therefore proposes his own transcription of the text to verify past
assumptions about this specific staging of Pericles. In chapter 8, Catherine
Clifford examines the architectural setting of All is True and its meaning for a court audience. She underlines
the symbolic significance of historic places mentioned in plays such as the
Tower of London which acts as a ‘memory palace’ [122] and shows how such spaces
trigger a dialogue between the audience and its collective remembrance of
history, especially as James I was at the time leading his own architectural
transformations in order to better symbolise his break from previous Tudor
rule. The third part
of this collection provides new thought-provoking perspectives on the Stuart
masque. In the opening chapter, Anne Daye argues that dancing was the defining
feature of the masque as an ‘elaboration of the court ball’ [138] and shows how
its expansion during James’s reign ultimately served the new political regime.
Dancing was also instrumental in diplomatic relations with foreign countries as
it could serve as ‘an important means of international communication’ [149]. In a
comparative study of Shakespeare’s The
Tempest and Jonson’s The Fortunate
Isles, the last masque staged in James I’s reign, Martin Butler discusses
the relation of both texts to one another as well as their engagement with the
wider courtly festive culture. This analysis leads him to wonder whether
Shakespeare’s use of the masque in his play may express a certain ‘scepticism
about the form’ [160] itself. In the next
chapter, Leeds Barroll asserts the essentially multi-dimensional nature of
courtly masques in reaction to the prevalent view of these performances as
literary objects. This literary dimension – which is not as present in French livrets for instance – is, he argues, the
result of a conscious strategy of authors who, like Jonson, sought to include masques
in their literary canon. Agnieszka Zukowska’s
contribution examines the dehumanisation of noble performers in court masques in
which they imitated human statues or self-moving devices that could only be
animated by the king in order to symbolise his quasi-divine power. This
mechanical appearance, albeit dehumanising, also glorified courtiers as
‘god-made objects’ [183] in performances which consequently deified the entire
court itself. The concluding
section of the volume shifts to the material conditions of performances at
court. William B. Long explores how commercial plays were adapted to the court
from the perspective of early modern players in order to correct anachronistic assumptions
about early modern performances. This leads him to reaffirm the dependence of
theatrical companies on court performances: ‘without the court, there was no
public playing anywhere’ [194]. John H.
Astington’s detailed study of the Banqueting House as a performance space
before its destruction by fire in 1619 gives an insight into the ways different
types of entertainment were staged for the Jacobean court. It provides crucial
information about the organisation of space and lighting used on such occasions,
hereby showing the unique space offered by this venue for plays such as The Tempest and Bartholomew Fair. In the next
chapter, Chantal Schütz brings to light the great variety of music performances
at court and the material conditions in which musicians worked at court. Music
performances, she shows, were far from restricted to formal political or
diplomatic occasions. In fact they were part and parcel of the courtiers’ and
royals’ daily life, in public as well as more private settings, in ways that
were emulated in commercial theatre to give the audience a glimpse of courtly
habits. The concluding
contribution by Rebecca Olson explores the material conditions of Stuart court
performances through their use of painted cloths. These accessories provided
for by the Revels Office offered a number of practical advantages for
performances, one of them being that they were made quickly and could be easily
customised to fit the play and the setting in which it was staged. As ‘a highly
paragonal medium’ [246], they also engaged a dialogue with other visual arts. This
stimulating volume, which also includes a very useful index, makes the reader
more attuned to the political, economic and material issues at stake in early
modern court performances as well as their complex relation to commercial
theatre.
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