Practicing Renaissance Scholarship: Plays and Pageants, Patrons and Politics (review)

In a scholarly world increasingly divided between spinners of ambitious theories and investigative gatherers of facts, David Bergeron proclaims his allegiance to the "brick-gathering scholars" (18). This collection of ten essays written over three decades (two from the 1970s, three from the 1980s, three from the 1990s, and two written for this book) celebrates his long and distinguished career of scholarly brick-gathering. But each, he points out, is primarily a study in the nature and interpretation of evidence, and the collection as a whole is designed to make us all "think anew about the hard work of brick-gathering scholars, engaged simultaneously in archeological excavations and in constructing edifices of thought and meaning" (18). To this end, he chooses essays that offer us bricks of scholarship—new (in 1978) manuscript evidence for Elizabeth I's coronation entry, for instance—and suggests interpretations that may legitimately be drawn from them, or he asks us to reconsider such seemingly well-established bricks as Sir Edward Hoby's letter of 1595, and he asks whether this evidence, such as it is, may reasonably bear the weight of the interpretative tradition that uses it to date the composition of Shakespeare's Richard II. Or he examines other interpretative generalizations—the "War of the Theaters" or the reputation of James's consort, Queen Anne, for stupidity and frivolity—and wonders what bricks have reared those interpretative edifices, in the process revealing them to be insubstantial constructions after all. Each essay centers on the bricks of scholarship, but each employs what Bergeron calls "interrogative metonymy"—interrogative because he takes the questioning of evidence to be the greatest of scholarly virtues, and metonymy because the construction of meaning from evidence depends, after all, on the associations (as he puts it) or contexts (as I would suggest) to which one subjects that evidence.

His opening essay on the use of external and internal evidence in Shakespeare's Richard II demonstrates at once the virtues and limitations of his book. Bergeron utterly demolishes the evidentiary value of Sir Edward Hoby's 1595 letter for the dating of Shakespeare's play. The trouble, as Bergeron himself points out, is that the value of Hoby's letter as evidence has already been twice demolished—by C. A. Greer in 1950 and by I. A. Shapiro in 1958—on almost exactly the same grounds that Bergeron himself uses to dismiss it. Since his own essay cannot therefore pretend to offer fresh scholarship, it necessarily becomes a sort of scholarly planctus, a catalogue of peccadilloes committed by scholars who have continued to build on the letter's plainly shaky evidence despite two definitive rejections of that evidence. As for the internal evidence, Bergeron seeks to demonstrate that there exists no credible evidence that the deposition scene in the play, which first appears in Q4 (1608), was removed from the first three quartos in an act of censorship. Rather, he convincingly argues that the added scene more probably represents an act of revision on Shakespeare's part. Here, Bergeron is obliged to admit that his own argument for revision and the traditional censorship argument are equally circumstantial and equally plausible. He thus persuades us not because evidence compels assent but because the hypothesis has neatly anticipated (in 1975) many ideas about revision that have preoccupied Shakespearean textual scholarship in the 1980s and '90s.

Eight of the ten essays are arranged in pairings that reveal Bergeron's attempt to view the same subject from slightly different angles. The first of two essays on James I's consort, Anne of Denmark, thus merely seeks to add a brick to an already well-established edifice. The thought that Bacon wrote his biography of Henry VII as a commentary on King James I is hardly new.¹ Bergeron's 1992 essay on this subject thus focuses on only one part of the larger analogy: that Bacon constructs Henry VII's relationship [End Page 95...