Recent studies in Tudor and Stuart drama.(Bibliography)

This year's publications continue important conversations about shared issues of concern to all of us in the field. Although I can discern no seismic break with criticism from last year, work that hitherto might have inclined in more narrowly theoretical directions has taken a decisively philosophical turn. There was, however, very little casting about for a new trend with a new label. The best books were the ones that had most thoroughly absorbed and integrated theory and new historicism. The handful of hardy and relentless souls still banging the drum for the "new" causes sounded hopelessly belated. A few authors came out fighting from the jungle, fulminating about the errors of ideological scholarship, apparently unaware that the war has been over for quite some time now. However, despite predictable differences in quality among the books received, some of the less polished monographs and collections below were successful nonetheless in putting forth a new idea or in attempting an experimental mode of inquiry.

In what follows, I have reviewed only books with a stated academic purpose, as opposed to books squarely aimed at the general reader. The categories in which I have placed the various volumes are necessarily somewhat arbitrary since some books could easily have fitted under more than one heading. I have privileged monographs over collections, anthologies, editions, and annuals on the grounds that despite the degree to which the latter now form part of the vanguard of the field, monographs still represent the most focused and sustained consideration of their literary and intellectual objects and demand commensurably higher powers of synthesis and consistency of argument.

MONOGRAPHS

Authorship and Print -- One of the most important current conversations is about the status of Shakespearean authorship and about whether Shakespeare should be regarded as a poet rather than, following other trends both in theater history and cultural materialism, as a prodigiously talented theater hack. In the forefront of this discussion is one of the best books this year. Lukas Erne's Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. His thesis is that texts are as much literary artifacts as performance-based scripts. Erne achieves nothing less than the complete undoing of our current understanding of Shakespeare as an author. Far from being indifferent to his own literary reputation, Erne maintains, Shakespeare wrote not just for the stage, but also for publication--his company was interested in play texts for print as well as for performance. This is why, Erne contends, Shakespeare so often wrote plays that were far too long for performance. One of the important ramifications of this argument is that hypotheses that have hitherto explained the often puzzling textual variants of Shakespeare's plays--the entire bad quarto/corrupt text hypothesis, along with the notion that some plays were taken to the provinces and emended for performance there--are replaced with the idea that the play had, from its inception in Shakespeare's creative imagination, a double life. The play was produced for maximum return and profit, both for the theatrical and for the literary purposes. The current emphasis on stage-centered Shakespeare, Erne contends, ignores the rise of the playbook, unheard of in the early years of the theaters, whose plays we only know of through the survival of their titles. Erne's treatment of hard evidence is particularly persuasive here. He notes that Thomas Heywood's Apology for Actors gives an astonishing glimpse of Shakespeare's view of his own authorship when Heywood tells us that Shakespeare was furious at William Jaggard's printing of Passionate Pilgrim, and notes that, indeed, Shakespeare's ire must have had some effect because the next edition of Pilgrim, published in the same year as Apology (1612), removes Shakespeare's name from the title page. That someone like Sir Thomas Bodley was not interested in playbooks, often adduced as evidence that they were ephemera, is shown to be the exception rather than the rule of book collecting. Erne makes a wholly convincing case for Shakespeare, not as a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century style author, but nonetheless as an author who was passionately interested in the printed outcome of what he wrote, who wrote in the age of the reader, for readers as well as for live audiences. While Erne concedes that there was no legislation regarding copyright until the eighteenth century, he provides incontrovertible evidence that the idea of copyright and the practice of insisting on literary ownership were well established in Shakespeare's day. Erne does not deny that Shakespeare was always concerned with performance, but argues that performance was always simultaneously literary in the most profound sense. This becomes especially clear when Erne summarizes the state of scholarly opinion so far: "Yet how could Shakespeare--as a participant in an entertainment industry in which competition was fierce--have afforded to be mindful of more than the immediate needs of the business in which he was a player? In reaction to earlier views of Shakespeare that removed him from the material pressures of the stage business in which he was involved, scholars habitually portray him as one among many playwrights writing for the public stage under similar circumstances" (pp. 18-9). What is missing from this perspective, Erne maintains, is

 
    the extent to which Shakespeare, as a shareholder in his company, 
    was what Susan Cerasano has called a "privileged playwright." While 
    we do not know how much Shakespeare was paid for the plays he 
    furnished his company, it is clear that the greatest part of the 
    handsome fortune Shakespeare had started to amass as early as the 
    1590s came from his share in the profits of his company rather than 
    from his plays. For Shakespeare's contemporary playwrights, the 
    situation must have been altogether different ... Shakespeare, 
    "privileged playwright" that he was, could afford to write for the 
    stage and the page. 
    (pp. 20-1)