English Drama from 1586 to 1642: The Age of Shakespeare (review)

Reviews 173 Hunter, G. K., English Drama from 1586 to 1642: The Age ofShakespeare, Oxford Clarendon Press, 1997; cloth; pp. 623; R.R.P. A U S $ 90.00. Last year saw the publication of the final volume of the Oxford History English Literature, English Drama from 1586 to 1642: The Age ofShakespeare, by G. K. Hunter. It was a long time in coming. As far back as 1963, following the death of F. P. Wilson, Hunter had been asked to take over the volume, but apart from putting in order and seeing through the press what Wilson had already done, which appeared as a separate volume, English Drama 1485— 1586, he had declined. Asked again in the mid-80s to reconsider that decision, he undertook the work which has n o w appeared, and has provided an invaluable guide and stimulus to all w h o will work in the field. Indeed, one cannot even regret the delay, for not o m y must the author's experience, scholarship and critical judgment have developed in the interim, the passage of the thirty odd years has also enabled him to write with an awareness of the changes that have taken place in the theory and practice of the discipline. That being said, it must at once be added that this is not a book written with an eye to fashion. It remains true to the intention of the series: this is a history of literature, and it concerns itself primarily with the body of text that has come down to us. Although Professor Hunter knows more than most literary critics about the social, political and economic conditions of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, for him the 'conditions of production', the context that most matters in the production of the plays of the period, is the culture of the theatre. What the entrepreneurs and the theatre owners were doing, as were the actors and the writers, was trying to make money, and to do that they had to give their audiences what they wanted, within the limits of What the authorities would allow. Of course the operation of the theatres and the development of the drama is seen in a wider social context; but in contrast to some N e w Historicists, the author never sees society's pressures as simple and uniform, or as producing writing that is easily diagnostic of that society as a whole. References to the world outside tend to be specific, and confined in their bearings to the play being discussed. This is something of a relief, when one considers some of the wilder generalisations that current practice throws up, such as the notion of audiencesflockingto the theatres to experience the homoerotic frisson of seeing boy actors playing female characters, dressing as boys, and being wooed by men, and what this tells us about the sexuality of the society. It is good to be put in possession of some facts: 'Indeed, of the thirty-five surviving adult comedies between 1594 and 1606,1 find only two non Shakespearean page-boy disguises' (p. 392). Clearly, whatever Shakespeare m a y have been up to, it wasn't turning everybody on. All writing must in some sense be a response to the society in which it is created, but the surviving fraction of the plays considered here is astonishingly varied. The question asked of them, as the introduction makes clear, is not 'What is this play about?' but 'What is it like?'. Shakespeare is of 174 Reviews course, as the sub-title acknowledges, the towering figure of the age. Professor Hunter knows this, and can demonstrate it better than most, but here the argument is not designed to show that Shakespeare writes the best plays. Rather, it concerns itself with the way in which the whole dramatic culture of the time evolves, not with Shakespeare as the cause, but with his work as a vital part of the development. After setting out what are called 'the preconditions of production', the ways the theatres operated, h o w the profits were shared, what being an actor required, the various processes of writing for the stage and so on, the book...