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Reference
[Review of:] The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England (Amherst and Boston, 2006) /
Marta Straznicky (ed.)
ERNE, Lukas Christian
ERNE, Lukas Christian. [Review of:] The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England (Amherst and Boston, 2006) / Marta Straznicky (ed.). Shakespeare Quarterly , 2007, vol. 58, p. 546-48
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http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:14569
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tragedies make valuable contributions to criticism of these works. The study's participation in the growing area of the history of affect will make it an important book for many readers, and its engagement with issues of gender in the medieval and early modern periods should resonate with readers in various fields as well.
In its ability to "preserve, interrogate, and transform" (28) our encounters with medieval and early modern drama, this book is a critical Purgatory, in Goodland's definition of that term, a "space that preserves, interrogates, and transforms com- munal memory."
The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England. Edited by MARTA STRAZNICKY. Massachusetts Studies in Early Modern Culture. Amherst and Boston: Uni- versity of Massachusetts Press, 2006. Illus. Pp. x + 238. $80.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.
Reviewed by LUKAS ERNE
In her excellent introduction to The Book of the Play, Marta Straznicky argues that we need a comprehensive history of early modern play reading. Maintaining that printed plays have too long been treated as pale reflections of their performed counterparts, Straznicky astutely notes why the readerly reception of plays was neglected: the New Bibliography paid attention to playbooks as "a species of print culture" but "took no interest in plays as reading material" (2). Much twentieth- century criticism took an "intensely literary approach" to the study of drama, "but its fundamental ahistoricism meant that the matter of what Shakespeare's contem- poraries may have been doing with the words on the page was never raised" (3).
The New Historicism overcame the earlier ahistoricism but focused on "the inter- section at the level of content between writing and politics" and mostly ignored "the traces of cultural, commercial, and political contest that are embedded in texts as material objects, especially as books" (5). Thanks to important recent work on the text's historicity and materiality, it has become clear, Straznicky argues, that "the theater's impact on the public sphere ... was conducted through two congruent but distinct media, the playhouse and the printing house" (7). While New Historicism did much to assess the impact of the first medium, we are only just starting a full exploration of the second.
Straznicky's introductory manifesto is compelling not only for its astute aware- ness of the work that remains to be done but also because of its survey of important earlier scholarship on "printing conventions for early modern drama," "elements of typographic design," "marketing of plays," "business practices of certain print shops," "the commercial context of play publication generally," "attitudes to play- reading ... assembled from prefatory matter and from public and private library catalogues," and "the impact of print on advancing the authority of playwrights and the cultural status of drama" (5-6). Straznicky shows herself attuned to recent developments that relate to her project, notably, the "reassessment of the econom- ics of play publication" (6) and work that has "demonstrated that . . professional
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playwrights (including theater shareholders like Shakespeare) not only were not averse to seeing their plays in print, but also wrote plays with the intention of meet- ing the specific interests and requirements of readers as well as theatergoers" (7).
Her introduction presents a convincing case that "we can no longer assume that play-reading was simply an extension of playgoing" (16).
The essays that make up the rest of the collection do not amount to the "cohe- sive history of play-reading" the introduction evokes—"an enormous undertaking,"
which "may well never reach completion" (5). I hope Straznicky is wrong. What many of the essays do provide are incisive case studies. They are divided into two parts, of which the first focuses on "Real and Imagined Communities," either actual readers who left documentary traces or groups of readers as they are constructed in the prefatory material of playbooks. Straznicky's and Cyndia Susan Clegg's essays turn to the latter to analyze how dramatists and publishers conceived of their read- ers. While Straznicky focuses on female readers and reveals an insistence on "the corporality of women play-readers" (60), Clegg's analysis suggests that readers of playbooks were aligned not with theatergoers in pursuit of entertainment but with readers of —serious' literature ... intelligent and discerning," who "as co-creators of the literary dramatic text . . . possessed the capacity to assure the fame of play- wrights, and to ensure their perpetuity" (35). Lucy Munro's investigation of early seventeenth-century readers of Edward Sharpham's The Fleer similarly reveals the gap between the play as book and the play as performance: whereas Sir John Har- ington bound up his copy of The Fleer with other play quartos in a stately volume, another copy of the same play shows theatrical alterations with "extensive cuts and revisions, excising around one-third of the play and several characters" (39). Eliza- beth Sauer, finally, investigates a specific instance of the role of play reading "in the formation of political and communal identities" (81): the proparliamentary play Tyrannicall-Government Anatomized (1643), a translation of George Buchanan's Baptistes sive Calumnia (1577), ordered to be printed by the House of Commons Committee Concerning Printing in 1642-43 (83)—only months after the Puritan parliament had ordered the closing of the theaters.
The essays in the second part, grouped under the heading "Play-Reading and the Book Trade," examine the reception of playbooks from the angle of publica- tion. Zachary Lesser provides a welcome reevaluation of black-letter typeface in playbooks, which has too simplistically been seen as "an index to popular culture"
(101) but which in fact carried a variety of meanings, including a nostalgia for a unified "traditional English community" (107). Peter Berek convincingly demon- strates that "generic terms on title pages" of playbooks often had "relatively little to do with the shape of a plot or with literary meaning" but instead helped "printers and booksellers find a market for their wares" (160). Alan B. Farmer demonstrates that the rise of the news trade in the 1620s and 1630s had a significant impact on the reception of printed drama and that Ben Jonson was justified in fearing that the news trade would turn many plays into dramatic newsbooks. Finally, Lauren Shohet studies the masque as "a bi-medial form" (177), in which print made its policy debates available to readerships beyond the privileged circle of those pres- ent at performances, while Douglas A. Brooks returns to the subject of publica-
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tion and the formation of dramatic authorship in the context of Richard Brome's Antipodes (1640). By providing insights into manifold aspects of the reception of printed drama without quite cohering into a whole, the essays in The Book of the Play make valuable contributions to a burgeoning field. They also underline the need for a comprehensive history of play reading, which Straznicky's introduction so cogently articulates.
Treason by Words: Literature, Law, and Rebellion in Shakespeare's England. By REBECCA LEMON. Ithaca and London: Cornell Uni- versity Press, 2006. Illus. Pp. xii + 234. $39.95 cloth.
Reviewed by TERRY REILLY
Rebecca Lemon's Treason by Words: Literature, Law and Rebellion in Shake- speare's England follows texts by John Barrell and Karen Cunningham concerning English treason laws,' but her approach is noticeably different. Barrell and Cun- ningham focus on the imaginative aspects of treason (and the startling fact that simply thinking about treason was a capital offense in England after the 1534 Treason Act), while Lemon centers her discussions around treason's linguistic features, effectively tracing how circulation patterns concerning the discourse of treason change during and after significant cultural events—especially times of crisis and war.
Lemon's approach is twofold. First, she points out the important, yet over- looked, fact that despite the enormous number of treason cases—including arrests, detentions, convictions, and executions—during the late Tudor and early Stuart periods, treason never succeeded; it never manifested itself in the killing of a mon- arch. Instead, Lemon posits, the contemporary discourse of treason develops as
"subjects and monarchs report on and narrate the crime not as it materialized but as it might have been" (2). Early modern texts replay, again and again, the horror that might have happened, so that treason becomes, in Lemon's words, "doubly linguistic"—an event "created in the texts circulating after a plot" and a "form of speech that anticipates, or functions as, violence to the monarch" (3). The histori- cal cornerstones of Lemon's analysis are the Essex rebellion and the Gunpowder Plot, two events, she asserts, "that are never studied together" (13). Considering these two events side by side, Lemon argues, "opens up these otherwise obscured connections, and thus reveals the increasing growth of moderate Protestant and Catholic subjects loyal to the state but critical of its policies on treason" (15).
Lemon begins with a discussion of John Hayward's prose history of Henry IV, dedicated to the earl of Essex, noting that it was not considered seditious or treasonous when it first appeared in 1599. In fact, she observes, because Hayward practiced civil law, a profession whose members were "overwhelmingly" royalist John Barrell, Imagining the King's Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793-1796 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000); and Karen Cunningham, Imaginary Betrayals: Subjectivity and the Dis- courses of Treason in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2002).
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(44), the text may be read simply as a dialogic exploration of the "nature of sover- eignty in order to determine its prerogatives" (40)—a literary form not uncommon for contemporary civil lawyers. Unfortunately for Hayward, events of 1600 with regard to the earl of Essex caused an interpretive shift, and he became the "victim of a retrospective reading in which the earl's 1600 fortunes were read back onto the lawyer's 1599 history" (34). Such "sudden, violent shift(s) in the queen's inter- pretive practices," Lemon argues, "exposed the radical potential in texts that had formerly circulated in support of the monarch" (51). In short, the national crisis caused by the Essex rebellion and shifting definitions of national identity caused Hayward, an otherwise-loyal subject, to be interrogated and detained as a traitor.
In the next chapter, a discussion of Shakespeare's Richard II continues this thread concerning the role of loyal subjects whom circumstances conspire to name as traitors. Lemon begins by reiterating some of the age-old questions in the com- mentary on the play: "how . . . can subjects respond to bad or tyrannical rule?"
(54). "Where should we place our scholarly emphasis: on the culpable king who provokes and indeed justifies rebellion or on the anointed king who is martyred by traitors?" (60). Rather than tackle these questions head on, Lemon effectively argues that through nuanced representations of minor characters—Ross, Mow- bray, Gaunt, and York—Shakespeare shapes "an anatomy of resistance" (61), one that invites the audience "to recognize what Richard cannot: slavish loyalty and violent resistance are not our only political options" (66). In Lemon's reading, "it is through York, that, ultimately, the tragic effects of the chaotic political landscape become most evident, as a decent, moderate subject experiences increasing difficul- ties in a politically unstable commonwealth" (72).
One would expect the next chapter to continue with Shakespeare's Henriad, especially with the problematic representations of treason in 1 Henry IV and Henry V, but Lemon instead moves on to Macbeth, perhaps the first play Shake- speare wrote after the Gunpowder Plot. Lemon first deconstructs the Thane of Cawdor's scaffold speech and then focuses on Malcolm's evolving character to argue that Macbeth is an antididactic play, one that "explores the charismatic power of treason" (86). Malcolm learns from the various traitorous actors, acts, and speeches, Lemon posits, and his accession "tragically demonstrates that only by adopting the tools of the traitor can the king triumph" (103).
If this were a book solely on Shakespeare's plays, the next logical step would lead to Cymbeline (ca. 1610) and the Oath of Allegiance controversy. Instead, Lemon discusses the Oath of Allegiance alongside Donne's Pseudo-Martyr, a text she describes as a moderate response to the "hyperbolic rhetoric of divinity and treason" (115) that developed shortly after the Gunpowder Plot. James's insistence that all subjects take the oath or be subjected to severe penalties was counter- manded by a papal breve issued by Pope Paul V in 1606 forbidding Catholics from taking the oath (115). Lemon notes that a number of Catholics and moderate Protestants resisted this either/or proposition and points out that the oath divided Catholics as well. Moreover, she finds, "Catholic recusants could not be so easily converted or condemned, to the apparent surprise of James and his supporters"
(122). Written within this environment by John Donne, who had recently con-
