Chambers on the Revels Office and Elizabethan Theater History

Try to translate "bureaucratic" into sixteenth-century English.

-David Starkey

As soon as it appeared, E. K. Chambers's Elizabethan Stage² inspired awe and confidence in its original audience. One early reviewer described it as a monumental work and went on to declare prophetically that it would put "a period to the study of Elizabethan drama because it sums up the best knowledge of the subject."³ Indeed, research stagnated on many of the subjects Chambers treated. His views have dominated twentieth-century scholarship, and it is no exaggeration to say that he is the most important historian to have written on the subject of Elizabethan theater. Although much of his research dated from Victoria's age, The Elizabethan Stage, eighty-five years after its publication, is still "one of the central enabling texts"⁴ in the field of Elizabethan theater history. And it is likely to remain so, even though some of Chambers's assumptions and conclusions have been questioned, because it is the most convenient compilation of data through the early twentieth century.

In his preface to The Mediaeval Stage, Chambers explained that his goal as a historian was "to collect, once for all, as many facts with as precise references as possible."⁵ His methodology was empirical. History was a detached, scientific study of historical documents, not a philosophical or literary attempt to recreate a former time. The approach was known to Chambers through one of the most famous early twentieth-century handbooks on historiography, Introduction aux études historiques by Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Signobos, memorable among other things for its empiricist dictum-"pas de documents, pas d'histoire."⁶ The "remorseless ideal of the historian's duties"⁷ laid down in this work haunted Chambers's imagination, but around the time The Elizabethan Stage was published, a new generation of historians was raising objections to the method. J. B. Black, for example, argued that historians were inevitably present in their histories: "Direct observation of historical events is out of the question: they must always be seen indirectly, reflected, so to speak, in the mirror of the present."⁸ Despite Chambers's attempts at detachment, his Edwardian notions are omnipresent in his synthesizing narrative in The Elizabethan Stage, the most prominent of which is a belief in social evolution: "At the close of the Middle Ages, the mimetic instinct, deep-rooted in the psychology of the folk, had reached the third term of its social evolution"; drawing strength from church liturgy and the festival celebrations of municipal guilds, this instinct now attached itself to the royal household on the way to its "ultimate entrenchment of economic independence" (ES, 1:3; emphasis added).

Chambers was very much a product of his time. Few historians today would be content with this evolutionary view of the development of the drama, but everyone who has written on early modern theater and the court has been influenced by his account of the royal household and Revels Office, which is founded on the same notion. Generations of theater historians are indebted to him for the belief that the royal household was a hierarchical, bureaucratic organization and for the claims that the Lord Chamberlain traditionally oversaw the Revels Office, that the Master of the Revels was his deputy, that Burghley was almost single-handedly responsible for reforming the Revels Office after 1572, and that Walsingham was personally responsible for creating the new company of Queen's players in 1583. We are also indebted to him for the suspicion that the reduction in Revels Office responsibility for productions did not result in a savings to the Crown because these duties were taken over by the Offices of the Works and Wardrobe. These assumptions, claims, suspicions, and beliefs-all of which have become cornerstones of contemporary Elizabethan theater history-will not withstand scrutiny.

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Chambers should have inferred from Tudor sources that the royal household was divided into two parts or governments. The anonymous 14 94 Liber Niger that he often cited breaks it down into the "Domus Regie Magnificencie" and the "Domus Providencie"; in...