Shakespeare's Mystery Play: The Opening of the Globe Theatre 1599 (review)

Shakespeare's Mystery play: The opening of the Globe theatre 1599. By Steve Sohmer. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999. Pp. xii + 292. £14.99/$19.95 paper.

In Shakespeare's Mystery play: The opening of the Globe theatre 1599, Steve Sohmer presents an original and compelling thesis, and his underlying premise—that some of Shakespeare's plays allude to specific liturgical, calendrical, and ecclesiastical events—has important repercussions for Shakespeare studies. However, his book (which, in general, is meticulously researched) also contains a series of errors. While these lapses do not undermine the persuasiveness of the basic argument, they do significantly compromise the book's overall quality.

Sohmer argues that Julius Caesar was the first play performed at the Globe Theater and that it was specifically written for a 12 June 1599 performance. He uses a novel array of sources (including lunar phases, the axis of the Globe, the azimuth of sunrise, and hydrological tables) to elucidate textual clues in the play. Sohmer's argument is particularly fine in pointing out the specific contexts of a 1599 performance, contexts that have been overlooked by other scholars. For example, he explains the play's notorious mention of a three o'clock sunset by exploring how long it would take Elizabethan actors to get to these lines and what church bells Shakespeare's theatergoers would have heard when the lines were spoken on 12 June (96-98). Sohmer's greatest originality, however, lies in his use of overlooked calendrical and liturgical material. His argument is predicated on the idea that Elizabethan audiences had a keen ear for the associations between certain Bible verses and certain times of the year (25). For example, Caesar tastes wine with the conspirators on the Ides of March (2.2)—a detail that is not found in Shakespeare's primary source, Plutarch, and that is at odds with Caesar's proverbial abstemiousness. Sohmer points out, however, that English congregations read John 2 on the morning of March 15—a passage that narrates Christ at Cana turning water into wine (27). Sohmer provides other similar and persuasive instances of the play's many allusions to mid-June liturgical readings.

Sohmer interestingly sets these specific allusions within the larger context of calendar reform, and he argues that through manipulating the audience's awareness of "temporal markers," Shakespeare comments cogently on this incendiary issue. Gregory XIII reformed the Catholic calendar in 1579 by omitting ten days. England, however, rejected this reform, resulting in a disjunction between the English and Catholic calendars and, most significantly, in a series of dislocated holidays. The year 1599 was particularly catastrophic in this regard. Sohmer shows how the play pervasively alludes to the various mismatched holidays, such as the 1599 coincidence of the Catholic Easter and the Protestant April Fools' Day. He links the Gregorian calendar reform to Julius Caesar, who also reformed the calendar, including, for instance, the eponymous month July. Sohmer points out that "time is the subject of Shakespeare's story in Julius Caesar" (18). Many scholars have noted the play's preoccupation with time, but no critic before Sohmer has been able to resolve the various temporal dislocations—including a number of thorny textual cruxes—in so consistent and thorough a manner.

Elizabethans were "more alert to temporal symbolism" and to liturgical and calendrical correspondences than modern audiences are (61), and through using such associations, Sohmer argues, Shakespeare could comment in complex, covert ways on contemporary issues such as religious reform or the structure of the calendar. In this sense Shakespeare's Mystery play is more than a book about Julius Caesar, for it has interesting larger implications. Other Shakespeare plays can be substantially rethought in terms of their specific calendrical and liturgical allusions. Sohmer himself begins this work in his final two chapters, where he presents an intriguing investigation of how two later plays—Twelfth Night and Hamlet—have similar temporal markers...