Textual Patronage in English Drama, 1570-1640 (review)

Reviews377 Mary Rosenberg is equally persuasive when it comes to details. For instance , she tells us that Antony and Cleopatra had three children together, that Octavia was pregnant with the child of her deceased husband when she met and married Antony, and that,during their eight years ofmarriage,Octavia and Antonyalsobroughtchildren oftheirown intotheworld.Shakespeare,ofcourse, leaves all of this out. That he does so bolsters Marvin's position as a yea-sayer and, ironically, undercuts Mary's as a naysayer, although at the end ofthe book, she claims she "can now understand—and almost agree with—his [Marvin's] feeling that Anthonyand Cleopatra is as fine a play as Shakespeare ever wrote, if not his absolute greatest" (481). When students ofShakespeare and scholars discuss Antonyand Cleopatra, theyfrequentlytalkabout thepsychologyofaudience response (probablymore often than in discussions of other Shakespeare plays), largely because this play teases its readers and viewers, creating in them a desire to come to a clear resolution in understanding the characters,yet always refusing to satisfythat desire. The Rosenbergs know this and know as well that great artistic achievements resist easy categorization. Their book is most successful when it endorses this principle. Robert A. Logan University ofHartford David M. Bergeron. TextualPatronagein English Drama, 15701640 . Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Pp. ? + 248. $89.95. This challenging book explores the diverse commercial and cultural strategies through which dramatists and their stationers sought to disseminate printed texts of English plays between 1570 and 1640. Rather than assuming that the printing ofplaytexts was merely utilized as a means ofeking a few more financial rewards from a drama no longer required for performance, David M. Bergeron demonstrates that during this period the publication of plays was increasingly focused upon the benefits to be derived from court, city, and personal patronage, in ways that endowed the dedicatory epistles, addresses, and other preliminaries preceding the texts of the plays with special importance. Following an informative introductory chapter on "The Printing House and Textual Patronage" (which should become required reading for all students of early modern English drama and bibliography), seven other chapters investigate a wide range of related topics, including the publication of pageants and masques,thepatronage ofdramabywomen,theprinted circulation ofthe plays 378Comparative Drama ofJohn Marston,Ben Jonson,William Shakespeare,and Thomas Heywood, and the range of patronage sought by dramatists and their stationers during the 1630s. The evidence provided by dedications and prefatory addresses to patrons included in dramatic texts from the 1570s onwards offers a wealth of evidence for tracing a developing sense ofself-conscious concepts ofauthorship among playwrights, as well as confirmation ofthe growing potency oftheir stationers in responding to increasingly eclectic literary tastes among the book-buying public. By maintaining a dual focus on both influential patrons and individual book-buyers, Bergeron seeks to offer a much clearer definition ofthe "textual economies" of dramatic publication in early modern England. He is also especiallysensitive to the taxing question ofexactlyhow modern readers should interpret the often epigrammatic or lushly fulsome modes ofhigh-flown panegyrics so often found in dedicatory epistles. Throughout his chapters, he consistently seeks to tease out what kinds ofrewards and responses those who drafted these preliminaries hoped to elicit. Far from assuming that purely financial rewards were usually the primary desired objective, Bergeron makes a strong case for considering how playwrights grewto believe strongly in the less tangible efficacy ofaddressing the printed texts oftheir plays to prominent men and women. Above all, he demonstrates how issues of the social and cultural status of both dramatists and the theater lay at the heart of this increasingly thriving tradition ofdedicatory address. As an appendix, Bergeron includes a useful fourteen-page listing of all the plays, masques, and pageants with dedicatory epistles or addresses to readers discussed in the preceding chapters. Even a cursory glance at the earliest entries demonstrates the importance of female patrons during the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, beginning with Henry Cheeke's dedication in 1573 of his translation of Free Will to Lady Cheynie of Toddington; Abraham Fraunce's Amynfas'sPastora/(1591) andWilliam Gager's UlyssesRedux(1592),both dedicated to Mary Herbert, countess of Pembroke; Robert Wilmot's Tancred and Gismund (1591), dedicated jointly to Mary Lady Petre and Anne Lady...