Breaking Boundaries: Politics and Play in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (review)

279 circumstances require), the differences of personality that led W a l w y n to withdraw from Leveller activity at the crucial revolutionary m o m e n t at the end of 1648 suggest that the Levellers appeared to be a more coherent group to their opponents than historians should believe. Their denial of the title 'Levellers' (e.g. A Manifestation, p. 158) as a pejorative collective description distorting their message epitomises the problems of all such groups struggling to escape being pigeon-holed and marginalised as anarchists. They shared a doctrine of government operating by free consent of males, but their awareness of the shortcomings of fallen m e n reminds us of their religious justification for such authority, and no historian of the Early Modern period should ever underestimate the variety of individual religious responses to the world. However, if only because they opposed the tyrannical abuse of power by the established social hierarchy the Levellers still deserve to be read, and this fine edition will assist beginning students in that salutary task. Glyn Parry Department ofHistory Victoria University of Wellington Smith, Molly, Breaking Boundaries: Politics and Play in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, Aldershot, Ashgate, 1998; cloth; p 160; R.R.P. £39.50, AUS$107.00. Molly Smith explains that her study 'draws its impulse from new historicist revaluations of Renaissance cultures' (p. 5), but she focuses 'specifically on breaking boundaries between literary and cultural zones' (p. 14). This, in her view, can happen in more than one w a y and more than one direction. In her climactic final chapter she presents a vision of the execution of Charles I in 1649 as a 'cultural text' which offers us a ' f i n a l blurring of boundaries' (p. 13) in that 'by representing events as the ailmination of a communal desire felt by the nation, the drama [i.e. the execution] negated the sense of distance that separates spectator from spectacle, a criterion absolutely essential for the successful enactment of both theatre and festivity. The social drama thus enacted a destruction of theatre itself (p. 129). 280 Reviews But do w e really have to believe that for the participants—those w h o enacted this 'drama' as well as those w h o viewed it—the boundaries were blurred? Some of the evidence Smith offers for this contention is by no means compelling. For example, h o w can w e really tell what went on in Charles's mind when he put on two shirts before he mounted the scaffold? Smith sees him as 'conscious of the dramatic nature of his performance' in this: he did not wish to 'appear to shiver on that frosty morning' (p. 134). But even if the king was driven by a wish to present himself to the onlookers in a certain light, that does not mean that he saw himself as an actor in a play. Smith blurs her boundaries too readily. Similarly, she calls on Marvell's 'Horatian Ode' as evidence: the fact that Marvell supposedly 'cannot resist the theatrical metaphor' (p. 128) when writing about Charles as a 'royal actor' is to be considered as one reason for viewing the execution as 'eliding boundaries between theatre, carnival and punitive practice' (p. 135). A problem with this whole approach is that it tries to make out that things are to be seen as somehow blurred, merged, etc. even when the very evidence called on for this contention suggests otherwise. A metaphor is indeed what Marvell uses. H e does not, in fact, claim that Charles was a royal actor but that, figuratively, he was like one, but was not. A n d the mer fact that one can in some ways see the execution as staged still does not justify treating drama and life as interchangeable entities. All in all, I consider this book to be intellectually flawed and lacking in scholarly care. Simple mistakes are by no means infrequent. In one of her discussions of The Changeling, for instance, Smith quotes the complete Epilogue, which consists of eight lines, but refers to i t as '"Epilogue" 11.5-8' (p...