Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England by Michael D. Bristol (review)

108 LETTERS IN CANADA 1986 . through the material of natural language, and (b) history and society are composed of many other human activities that create our understandings ' (p 145). (ANNABEL PATTERSON) Michael D. Bristol. Carnival and Theater:Plebeian Culture and the Structure ofAuthority in Renaissance England Methuen '985. 237. £21.00, us $33.00 The notorious 'groundlings' who flocked to the plays of Shakespeare and other Elizabethan playwrights have long been part of the popular mythol- . ogy of the theatre and have often been referred to in order to explain Shakespeare's greatness (he embraced both high and low) or to explain away his regrettable violence and bawdry (both appealed to the vulgar). Especially since C.L. Barber's Shakespeare's Festive Comedies: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (1963), scholars and critics have more fully and seriously explored the traditions of these groundlings , in particular the love of festivity which found its fullest expression at Carnival time. David Bristol's important study, which draws on a wide range of recent critical and historical work, shows just how pervasive an effect Carnival had on the drama of the Renaissance and provides a new theory of how plebeian and 'high' culture interacted on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. Bristol beginS by arguing against two theories of Renaissance culture: that of writers like E.M.W. Tillyard and Norman Rabkin, who, different as they are, search for order and unity in any work of art, and that of writers like Stephen Greenblatt and Jonathan Dollimore, who see much Renaissance literature as allowing a demystification of the dominant ideologies of the age and who therefore think of art as subversive of order, both social and aesthetic, and as discontinuous rather than unified. The problem with both of these views, says Bristol. is that they concentrate on 'the image power has of itself as an infinitely resourceful center of initiative , surveillance and control' (p 6) and ignore the popular element in culture, which has its own ways of resisting and evading the power of hegemonic elites. Emile Durkheim and Mikhail Bakhtin point to the Carnival tradition as a primary expression of plebeian attitudes to life. This study shows how their insights can be applied to the Renaissance theatre, which as a social site, an extension of the streets and market place, is pervaded by the spirit of Carnival. In the second section of his book, Bristol examines some 'texts of Carnival: using this phrase to refer to the 'traditional scenarios, masks and dramatis personae of Carnival' (p 57), which were the media of communication for the common people, and to texts such as Nashe's Lenten Stuffe and Jacke-a-Lente, which 'situate themselves exactly at the frontier between elite and popular culture' (p 58). These texts reveal three often repressed attitudes of popular culture: first, the critique of privilege and an idealized hierarchical class system; second, an acknowledgment of conflict as essential to productive life; and third, an expression of the common people's desire for material plenty. Section three considers the theatre in terms of its relation to the structure of authority in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. It argues, very persuaSively, that the controversies over the morality or immorality of playhouses and actors was really a struggle about authority. Later attempts to explain the antitheatricalliterature as a failure to understand that value of art ignore the fact that the theatre represents 'a genuine rupture in the fabric of social authority' (p 110) because it embraces the clowning, mockery, and, above all, the 'uncrownings' characteristic of Carnival. This section also suggests that, as part of a 'project of legitimation ' (p "7) of the theatre, the prestige of authors was raised in order to combat the anonymous and improvisatory power of the players, who were closer to the fluid energies of popular culture. Not surprisingly, Ben Jonson is seen as central in this regard. I am puzzled, though, that Bristol does not comment on the Carnival anarchy of Jonson's plays, which is just as striking as their devotion to order and various forms of hierarchy. The concluding section of this study, called 'Carnivalized Literature: offers readings of 'minor...