Recent studies in Tudor and Stuart drama.

performances of Dream. That reservation voiced, I want to say that Calderwood has taught me much about a play I thought I knew well. His book will join David Young's Something of Great Constancy (1966) and T. Walter Herbert's Oberon's Mazed World (1977) as studies with which everyone working seriously on Dream will have to engage.

The widest ranging of the books dealing with distinct groups of Shakespearean plays is Shakespeare: The Elizabethan Plays by Susan Bassnett. In the interest of full disclosure, I need to note that she and I were once married and that her book is the companion volume to my own Shakespeare: The Jacobean Plays. As she considers twenty-one plays written before Elizabeth's death in 1603, starting with the Henry VI trilogy and concluding with Much Ado, Troilus and If ignorance is not knowing what one does not know, chances are good that I am less ignorant now than I was in early November of 1992 when the first packet of books from the SEL offices arrived, initiating a stream that would bring ninety studies to my attention before ceasing in mid-November of 1993. That total--ten more than the previous year's outpouring--testifies to the ongoing (onrushing? entrepreneurial?) vitality of a field, or subject area, or enterprise for which there is no longer an agreed name. Is it "early modern English" drama or "Renaissance" drama? Each term, as Leah S. Marcus has noted, puts forward an agenda, poses controlling questions: rebirth of what? early version of what?(1)

My title, which speaks of "Tudor and Stuart" drama, deviates from my predecessors' preference for "Elizabethan and Jacobean." The major advantage of my terminology is that its limitations are not those of either "Renaissance" or "early modern." A lesser advantage is that it permits me to draw attention to the habit, conspicuously at odds with the now widespread commitment to historicizing, of using "Elizabethan" (and far less often "Jacobean") in ways so loose as to verge on the metaphorical. What warrant is there for failing to distinguish between "Jacobean" and "Caroline" plays? or--to take but one example from the books received--for referring to the period from 1558 to 1642 as Elizabethan?

Working with and through ninety books posed an array of challenges. The most dismaying was devising a method for dealing with that many books within the confines of an essay that was not to exceed fifty double-spaced pages in manuscript. Should I say a short, necessarily inadequate something--little more than half a page--about every book? Or should I write at greater and less inadequate length about some, at the cost of saying very little or even nothing about others? I chose the latter approach, giving highest priority to books that are exclusively or predominantly non-Shakespearean in focus.

The decisive factor in determining that priority was that, collectively, this year's studies--like those of prior years--display a profoundly disproportionate concentration on Shakespearean plays. Among this year's studies, there are, for example, seven books devoted to individual Shakespearean plays but none to a non-Shakespearean play and only five focused on any other Tudor or Stuart dramatist. Jonson's plays are the subject of two books, and two is the number of catalogues of Shakespeare-related paintings published in 1903 as well as the number of books on Shakespearean romances, a kind of play not recognized in the First Folio. Two is also the number of annuals (one American, one Japanese) entitled Shakespeare Studies. There are two new editions of plays--Doctor Faustus and A Game at Chess--by playwrights other than Shakespeare and nine of Shakespeare's plays, including two of Romeo and Juliet. The particulars of such numbers will vary from year to year, of course, but the concentration on Shakespeare to which they testify (and to which I have contributed) is a longstanding feature that deeply distorts our vision of Tudor and Stuart drama by giving Shakespeare's plays a weight and prominence far exceeding any they had during the decades when they first came to life on the commercial stages of early modern London and found their way into print.

No book discussed in this essay receives the attention it deserves, but the priority I have established produces another imbalance in that, as a class, those devoted to Shakespeare are given less space than either their numbers or their merits fairly allow. Some, I recognize, are strikingly disadvantaged. One is Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being by Ted Hughes, England's poet laureate. Hughes's prominence makes his the book most likely to get the biggest play in the world beyond the realm of professional Shakespeareans (I came across a review of it in Commonweal [6 November 1992]), but it is also one that deserves their close scrutiny. Another I have disadvantaged is Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: Eastern and Central European Studies, edited by Jerzy Limon and Jay L. Halio, which is part of a project that seeks to add voices once muffled by the Iron Curtain to the current Shakespearean conversation. Two others are exemplary instances of cultural materialist analysis: Terence Hawkes's Meaning by Shakespeare and Richard Wilson's Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority. The former is a collection of seven essays (three published in earlier versions) dedicated to the proposition that "Shakespeare doesn't mean: we mean by Shakespeare". The latter offers eight essays (six previously published), the last of which--"A Constant Will to Publish: Shakespeare's Dead Hand"--compellingly interprets Shakespeare's will "as a paradigm of Shakespearean poetry, which . . . works to impress the identity of the single writer onto a nexus of genres, narratives, symbols, tropes and signs that had formerly been common heritage". Arthur Sherbo's Shakespeare's Midwives: Some Neglected Shakespeareans is far removed from the cultural materialist project, but it too improves our sense of the history of the Shakespearean enterprise by drawing attention to the contributions of seven little-known eighteenth-century amateur commentators. Brian Vickers's Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels, which takes rigorous stock of "the ideologies and systems" now dominating Shakespearean studies, among them cultural materialism, deserves attention I do not give it, as do two books by Maurice Charney: All of Shakespeare and a reissue of How to Read Shakespeare (1971).

As the basis for what gets performed, taught, and written, editing is at the core of the Shakesperean enterprise, and I particularly regret that the decision to privilege work not centered upon Shakespeare made it impossible to comment on the nine editions of individual Shakespearean plays I received. One is Holger Klein's critical edition of Much Ado About Nothing, one is from Oxford--Alan Brissenden's As You Like It--and three are from Cambridge: Jay L. Halio's The Tragedy of King Lear, Andrew Gurr's King Henry V, and Michael Hattaway's The Third Part of King Henry VI. Shane Weller's editions of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet for the Dover Thrift Editions and John Andrews's editions of Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream for Everyman Library are remarkably inexpensive, a quality to be appreciated in an era when the financial pressures upon students (and their parents) are increasingly severe. Andrews's editions are already somewhat controversial (see the Summer and Fall 1993 issues of The Shakespeare Newsletter) because in matters such as spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, he "departs . . . from the usual post-Folio approach to the presentation of Shakespeare's texts" (Dream, p. xxiv).

Jonathan Haynes's focus in The Social Relations of Jonson's Theater is on how, between 1598 (Everyman in his Humour) and 1614 (Bartholomew Fair), Jonson developed a "new kind of play"--affiliated with city comedy in ways that Haynes never quite brings into focus--"devoted to the themes of social competition and display, and staging with a new immediacy the space, time, and social behavior of its London audience". Drawing on Raymond Williams, Haynes provides a description of "Jonson's realism" and an account of its origins in the morality play, in new comedy, and in two plays of 1597: George Chapman's A Humorous Day's Mirth and William Haughton's Englishmen for My Money, "the first regular comedy deliberately to exploit the London setting". The longest chapter, which includes fairly extensive analyses of both Everyman plays and of Epicoene, examines "some of the specific mediations through which the social pressures in the audience burst onto the stage". They include "fashion competition in the audience that the stage satirizes but also plays to" and the presence of gentlemen on stage during performance. For Haynes, the theater for which Jonson wrote was "a place where real social conflicts were going on", and the social relation he emphasizes is that "between Jonson and his audience".

Among Haynes's best moments are those when he discusses the implications of "the fact that the audience literally as well as figuratively shared that stage with the actors". "At issue were the autonomy and social nature of the dramatic illusion, and finally the rival social claims of aristocratic audience and professional actors and playwrights to the space of the theater". Haynes concludes with separate chapters on The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair, both of which are--like the book itself--of high quality. I particularly admire the former, in which Haynes shows how, by imagining "an underworld no longer structured on the guild model, but on a capitalist one", Jonson provides a "formulation of criminality . . . subversive of the new therapeutic bourgeois category of criminal Otherness".

My admiration for this book sharpens my regret that Haynes did not do more with the convergence of the criminal and theatrical worlds in The Alchemist. "Acting is their essential professional skill", he says of Dol, Subtle, and Face, whose "'venture tripartite'" "looks like a joint stock company, the newest form of capitalist organization". That, I would emphasize, is the structure of the acting company that first performed The Alchemist. I might also point out that the phrase "Jonson's theatre"--which Haynes employs regularly and privileges by placing it in the title--is highly problematic, especially in a book avowedly committed to historicizing. Jonson wrote for different acting companies, in none of which he was a sharer, and they played in different theaters, in none of which he had an ownership interest. Thus, for him, as opposed to, say, Shakespeare, there was never a theater he could call his.

In the only other Jonson book among the ninety received, Licensed by Authority: Ben Jonson and the Discourses of Censorship, Richard Burt considers not a single phase of Jonson's career but its full scope, concentrating on certain "exemplary paradoxes", including the fact that in 1624 Jonson, who had himself been censored repeatedly, "stood in succession to become the official court censor . . . the Master of the Revels". For Jonson and his contemporaries, Burt argues, censorship was not a monopoly exercised by the court but a multiple, dispersed network of pervasive practices, productive as well as repressive, engaged in not just by the court but also by market--conditioned theater audiences along with "playwrights, theatrical entrepreneurs, printers, poets, courtiers, and critics".

The first chapter concentrates on "Jonson's contribution to an emergent discourse of literary criticism", which, Burt argues, functioned in the early modern era not as the antithesis of censorship but as a form of it. Chapters 2 and 3 "historicize Jonson's 'antitheatricality'" by challenging currently prevailing "assumptions about court censorship and about the theater as a site of cultural differentiation between elite and popular cultures". Those assumptions secure "differences between . . . Shakespeare and Jonson or between Jonson's Jacobean successes and his Caroline failures" that in turn structure our sense of "Jonson's place in literary history and the shape of his …