The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (review)

Short notices 265 Lucrecia's place in sixteenth-century Spanish politics and society, her motives, like herfinalfate, remain unclear. Claire Walker Department of History University of Newcastle Mullaney, Steven, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1995; paper; pp. xiii, 178; 1figure;R.R.P. US$16.95. First published by the University of Chicago Press in 1988, Mullaney's study reads the Elizabethan stage as positioned on the periphery of English culture in such a way as both to confirm the dominance of particular ideologies at one level, and at another to challenge these by disturbing their premises and assumptions: 'Lodged on the margins of culture at a time when those margins were especially rich and polyvalent, the Elizabethan popular stage enjoyed a unique and complex ideological perspective—or rather, a complex choice of perspectives. A n emergent cultural formation, it also relied greatly upon those residual pastimes and practices that served as the conditions of its own emergence or possibility.' (p. 131). Mullaney's N e w Historicist approach enables him to uncover suggestive parallels and convergences: for instance, the connection between the Liberties girdling London, where much theatre of the time took place, and the lazar houses which likewise occupied a margin of the city and provided a boundary by which the city could be defined; or the relationship between the rhetorical figure of amphibology (ambiguity) and the social and political phenomenon of treason. However, in the interests of making arresting connections between text and social reality, Mullaney omits or neglects a range of other factors that render much more complex the relation of the Elizabethan stage to the culture from which it emerged. Such factors, as Douglas Bruster observes, include the commercial nature of the stage, and hence its responsiveness to changing tastes and desires in its audiences; and court patronage of the theatre, and therefore the latter's relation to court politics (Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 9-10). Indeed, such a simplification of the relation of the stage to the culture invites a certain scepticism about whether the people of the time, and especially those involved with the stage, could have been aware of the extraordinarily subtle subversiveness of this 266 Short notices medium of popular entertainment. Put crudely, did the average Elizabethan make the same connection as Mullaney between, for instance, the lazar house on the city's horizon and the theatre in the Liberties? Such questions apart, Mullaney's argument is rich and provocative, and his application to a study of the Elizabethan stage of notions of the city and its geography suggests that there is still much to learn about the stage and its ideological relationship to the city and to its culture. David Buchbinder School of Communication and Cultural Studies Curtin University of Technology Robbins, Keith, Canterbury Cathedral: Pilgrims and Tourists—Past and Present (The St George's Cathedral Lecture, No. 1), 1995; paper; pp. 11; R.R.P. AUS$5.00 (Postfree,order from Professor J. Tonkin, Department of History, University of Western Australia, Nedlands, 6907.) Of necessity, a short public address such as this will be general and 'chatty'. Keith Robbins covers a great deal in eleven pages: a history of Canterbury Cathedral from Augustine's mission in 597 to the present, concentrating on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the development of a concept of 'cathedral history' over the last few decades, and the intellectual problems inherent in such an activity; the relationship between the pilgrims of old and the tourists of today; and the relationship of the church to the political, social and economic realities of the world in which it operates. His style is lively and vivid, and certain parts of the lecture really sparkle: the detailed, witty portraits of Dean Henry Wace (1903-24) who 'appeared oblivious to the passing years' (p. 6) throughout the turbulent first and second decades of this century; Dean George Bell (1924-9), who encouraged the performance of 'biblical drama' (p. 7) and drew artists such as John Masefield, Christopher Fry and T. S. Eliot into the Canterbury environment...