Politics, plague and Shakespeare's theater: the Stuart years (review)

132 Reviews 1322-1339. This volume must be placed alongside E. O. G. Turville-Petre's Origins ofIcelandic Literature (1953), not least since it complements the latter's attention to the religious literature of the early period, to the Sagas of the Bishops, and to the synoptic histories. But perhaps the greatest achievement of the Astas study is to show us one of the sequential prose modes following upon the classicaltextsof the thirteenth century. J. S. Ryan Department of English University of N e w England Bar roll, Leads, Politics, plague and Shakespeare's theater: the Stuart years, lihaca & London, Cornell University Press, 1991; cloth; pp. xiv, 249; R.R.P. US$34.95. As Leeds Barroll points out in the opening chapter of Politics, plague and Shakespeare's theater, Shakespeare's biography has remained remarkably untouched by the new methodologies which have refashioned our view of early modern England and its drama. The privileged 'lives' of the dramatist which explicitly or implicitly posit a narrative of progress and read the life in tandem with the plays and vice versa have not been substantially challenged by the new historicisms of literary studies, nor by the historical revisionism which has prompted considerable debate on the nature of biography itself. Barroll's study promises just such a challenge: an essay in Shakespearean biography which is partial but whose narratives are plural, which opts for a sense of the discontinuites of Shakespeare's professional life, and which engages with materiality and marginality. Politics, plague and Shakespeare's theater comprises six chapters and five detailed appendices. In the first half of the book Barroll argues that Shakespeare's writing was delimited by his exposure to a range of environmental factors. H e begins his assault on the still prevalent 'nineteenth-century daguerreotype of Shakespeare the dramatist' (p. 4) by demystifying the association between Shakespeare's company and King James. While Barroll, arguably, overstates the case, there is much of interest in his correctives to received views about James's penchant for plays and the place of the King's Servants in the court. Reviewing the documentary evidence, Barrollfindsthat during thefirstdecade of the Stuart era, Shakespeare and his fellows continued in the social and artistic marginality they occupied at the death of Queen Elizabeth. Marginality brings with it exposure to circumstances not generally considered in relation to Shakespeare and his writing. By choosing to pursue a career other than that suggested by the publication of Venus and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594), Shakespeare 'wedded himself to an artistic form whose conceptualisation could be delimited by social factors' (p. 16). Foremost Reviews 133 amongst these factors were restrictions on the theatres: Lenten closures, closures at times of state mourning and as a means of crowd control in political emergencies, and closures due to plague. Plague, the pathologies of ratflea,and bacillus and the public health measures used to contain their effects are the subject of Chapter 3, which adopts the annaliste method in examining the activities of Shakespeare and his fellows in 1603 when the great plague came to London. In the final three chapters, the focus shifts to a detailed consideration of bow die disruptive cultural conditions in which Shakespeare wrote actually determined his habits of composition. The main narrative of the book is a reconsideration of the 'order and tempo' (p. 15) of the writing of the Stuart plays, in which Barroll contends that Shakespeare did not write plays at all during times when the playhouses were shut and that long periods of inactivity were followed by periods of enormous productivity when stages again became available. Some of the premises on which Barroll bases his argument are open to dispute; for example, that the playhouses were closed when the daily plague toll rose to thirty deaths (not forty as is generally assumed), that thefirstproduction of a Shakespeare play followed very hard on its completion, and that a play is not likelytohave been performed at court twice in a four-month period (in the case of Lear) or in two consecutive Christmas seasons (in the cases of Othello and Measure for Measure). Barroll's revisionist chronology charts peaks and troughs of activity as theatres opened...