Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England (review)

When Philip Henslowe lobbied for the Mastership of the Bears in 1598, he sought the support of Lord Admiral Howard but gloomily guessed that he would do nothing. Howard may not have helped in this matter, but one important insight to emerge from Paul Whitfield White and Suzanne R. Westfall's timely collection (in a fine essay by Andrew Gurr) is just how helpful Howard was to the whole business of playing—not just as the patron of a successful troupe but as a negotiator for secure operating conditions for the major companies. If other aristocrats patronized companies, Howard may be said to have patronized the Elizabethan theatrical business.

Yet why he did this remains an enigma. He probably developed an interest in theatricals while preparing to be Lord Chamberlain, a post formerly held by his father and which carried ultimate responsibility for the provision of court entertainment. Yet Howard held the office only briefly and might well have forgotten theatricals altogether as he basked in the status of being Lord Admiral at the time of the Spanish Armada's defeat. That he did not do so materially affected the conditions of London playing as Shakespeare knew them, not least in the shaping of the profession as it emerged from the disastrous plague of 1593/4. Was he motivated by his Privy Council duty to his cousin, the queen? Did he feel protective toward the actors who wore his livery? Did he take pleasure in the reflected glory of actors who performed in his name? Is it possible that he was genuinely interested in plays?

We do not know. The evidence is not there, and this is true for most of his fellow aristocrats who were involved in theatrical patronage in the early modern era. We know that Elizabethan acting companies had patrons—and that the law made it increasingly important that these be men of social standing. It is much less certain why some aristocrats played along with these requirements. In a context-setting essay, Suzanne R. Westfall invokes Michel Foucault on "the useless dearness of the diamond" to ask why an activity that in itself was of little apparent value, and indeed bordered on the disreputable, should have attracted so many of the governing class. She reviews current thinking on the subject to show the derivation of many modern assumptions: that it added prestige or magnificence to the patron, that it was only a token relationship, or that it was a propaganda tool in the factional and religious politics of the day. The evidence for any of these is tantalizingly limited.

Part of the problem is that patronage as a wider phenomenon was in flux, not least in relation to the literary arts. The medieval economy, in which patronage was largely controlled by the aristocracy and the church, now coexisted with an early modern protocapitalism, in which a wider representation of consumers altered the relationship of artists to their work. So actors and dramatists served multiple patrons: those whose livery they wore (and, beyond them, the monarch) and the audiences who paid to see public performances (and, beyond them, those who read their plays in print). Any one form of patronage thus stood in an unstable relationship to the others.

A key virtue of Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England is that it does not pretend to have comprehensive answers to the questions raised here. It rather brings together a variety of localized studies of issues in theatrical patronage. David M. Bergeron focuses on the Herbert patrons of the First Folio and Paul Whitfield White on the patronage dimensions of Lord Cobham's brief tenure as Lord Chamberlain and their apparent legacy in the Oldcastle/Falstaff controversy. Leeds Barroll explores the unfashionable notion that some aristocrats may actually have been interested in plays as plays, finding evidence of this among both men and women. David Bevington and Milla Riggio compare theatrical celebrations...