Shakespeare's Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances (review)

Reviews111 copy of Grindal's inhibition, which is interesting because it does not express objections to religious plays per se. The Archbishop orders the mayor to halt the performance in 1572 because he has been told that the plays contain "sundryabsurd & gross errours &heresiesjoyned with profanation 8c great abuse of god's holy word," but he then adds that the inhibition is to hold until "your said plays shall be perused corrected & reformed by such learned men as by us shall be there unto appointed 8c the same so reformed by us allowed" (147). Chapter8,on the texts oftheWhitsun plays,discusses sources forthe plays, their structure and themes, among other matters. The last paragraph of the chapter reveals that it is intended to be a defense of the sophistication of the Chester plays against earlier critics' denigration of them as simple and dull. This is quite a rich chapter, one that not only talks about the content of the plays but also the ways that the plays and characters within them construct the city and the audience as Cesterians. The last two chapters are concerned with how the texts of the plays were preserved and edited and howthose textswere used later in revivals ofthe plays centuries after they had ceased tobe performed in Chester. In a postscript, Mills joins the growing consensus that the Gardiner thesis about the demise of the biblical plays is simplistic. He places the demise within the larger Cestrian reformation of civic ceremonial that begins early in the sixteenth century. Mills' book is a pleasant read. Much better than the Rogers' Brevarye, it is a noble history ofthe city and ofthe "lawdable exersises yearelye vsed within the Cittie ofChester" (from the 1609 Brevarye). Lawrence M. Clopper Indiana University ConstanceJordan. Shakespeare'sMonarchies:RulerandSubjectin the Romances. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Pp. ? + 224. $35.00. In Shakespeare's Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances, Constance Jordan sets out to revise the New Historicist assumption that Shakespeare's plays are "political." In so doing, she contests a tendency, in literary criticism after Foucault, to essentialize power. Jordan argues that power can be theorized , and that it was theorized in the Renaissance. The result is a careful and detailed account ofShakespeare's relation to political discussion in his culture. Chapter 1, "Shakespeare's Romances and Jacobean Political Thought," begins with the premise that"England's political culture during the early years of James I's reign exhibited what might be called a divided consciousness" (6). 112Comparative Drama Arguments for absolute rule affirmed the monarch's power and freedom from positive law; rebuttals focused on the contractual nature ofpolitical relations, on the people's liberties, and on the duties that cemented the bond between monarch and subject. Jordan argues that the deep fissures characterizing debate over absolute rule inform both the drama and theoretical writings about the monarchy. She seeks to describe paradigmatic relations between the texts and their contexts by insisting that monarchy, as an institution, was "represented according to different concepts which were thought to justify (more or less) its actual practices" (7). Shakespeare's romances, by dramatizing political concepts, become "hypothetical renderings" (7) of the debate over absolute monarchy that rely particularly on "tropes of ironic disjunction" (10). The metaphors that link plays and political discourse, accordingto Jordan, are familiarones: the bodypolitic and the nation as family.While she may seem to revisit familiar ground, an attentiveness to the ideological elasticity ofthese conceptual models makes Jordan's discussion ofthem particularly useful. Both metaphors can be deployed to stress vertical hierarchies ofabsolute power, but both can be used with equal ease to emphasize reciprocal relations. James I's The Trew Law ofFree Monarchies, for instance, stresses the monarch's duty to care for his "children," but defines that obligation in terms ofa promise rather than a contract. The King therefore has absolute power, and the unhappy subject's only recourse is a prayer for the monarch's reformation. Although James's strong version of the absolutist monarchy has garnered a disproportionate share of critical attention, Jordan argues for the importance of an opposing train ofthought, constitutionalist rather than republican and linked to feudal notions of reciprocity between lord and...