Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (review)

Early Responses to Renaissance Drama makes an important contribution to discussion of the public sphere of early modern drama. To understand the multifaceted character of theater reception, Whitney assembles an amazingly disparate collection of materials from playgoers, play-readers, and those affected simply by the publicity of the theater. In his account dramatic reception is an extended and disbursed set of practices, and the allusions to and citations of the drama suggest that its public found it not so much aesthetic experience as equipment for living.

Whitney begins with the two parts of Marlowe's Tamburlaine and what may be the largest body of contemporary comment on any early modern play. Edward Alleyn's performance obviously contributed to what emerged "as the most sensational and challenging play yet performed" (18). His principal argument is that right away Tamburlaine "came to symbolize the power of the popular theatre itself" (20), a power at once delightful and disturbing. Though the plays continued to be performed, by 1606 their shock value had passed, and in 1623 John Taylor could refer jokingly to Tamburlaine in his chariot whipping on his "pampered jades of Asia" to dispraise hackney coaches.

By contrast, references to Falstaff began in 1598 and continue throughout the period. If Tamburlaine could lead audience members "into an abyss of primary masochism that ravishes the self, Sir John becomes the figure for the free play that such liberation from self can mean" (72). As with contemporary Elvis impersonators, Sir John was quoted, remembered, and ventriloquized, living on in audience members' speech and lives. Not that everyone approved of Falstaff, particularly those of the faction that were irritated by his original name, Oldcastle. But a mid-seventeenth-century allusion to Falstaff in the Cape Verde islands leads into an interesting discussion of nostalgia in relation to colonial practices, especially slavery, in Barbados.

The third chapter considers such diverse theater-goers as Simon Forman, John Davies of Hereford, Edmund Spenser, and young wits of the Inns of Court. While we see Davies participating in the discursive space of the public theaters, we don't get much sense of what he thought was going on in that space. Perhaps not all readers will be persuaded that the Masque of Cupid in The Faerie Queene can be read as a meditation on issues concerning theatrical representation. Still, there are some gems in the material, my favorite being Robert Tofte's grumpy verse account of trying to impress his "froward Dame" with a performance of Love's Labor's Lost, but then finding the title prophetic. What's amusing is that it's all about him: he faults the players for feigning and reads past the characters to apply the play directly to himself.

Because the amphitheater audiences were socially inclusive in their complement of the lower social groups, they constitute, Whitney suggests, "an important social formation opening a unique social space for public life in its aesthetic, moral, economic, and political dimensions" (161). The heart of the chapter on "common understanders" is the account of a Robert Norwood, who in Puritan middle age wrote of his frequenting of the theater in his unsettled and free-thinking youth, even of his playing a woman's part in a performance of Dr. Faustus. Whitney speculates intelligently on what may have been the shattering agony of Faustus's tragedy for youths who may have shared his trials.

While there is scant evidence of non-royal women's responses to individual plays before the Restoration, Whitney finds four significant examples of the ways women responded to plays and applied them, wittily, to their own circumstances. Perhaps the most interesting is that of Dorothy Osborne, future wife of William Temple, who in a letter to him alluded to Richard III to characterize her bullying brother's reproaching her with the suitors she had refused.

A final chapter compares the posthumous uses to which Jonson and Shakespeare were put in the years leading up to...