Shakespeare, the King's Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603-1613 by Alvin Kernan (review)

194Rocky Mountain Review political views that he "would have been ready for talk radio" (498)? Is the reader more likely to pick up Buddenbrooks, because Tony Buddenbrook's nostalgia for her love for Morten Schwarzkopf and his liberal views "is familiar to survivors of the 1960s" (97)? Who will rush out to buy a copy of The Magic Mountain because Hans Castorp "was made for the Internet" (398) or because his cousin Joachim Ziemßen is for Heilbut a pre-Word War I Oliver North? In perhaps the greatest disservice to Mann, Heilbut seems to suggest that the reader concentrate on the juicy homoerotic parts in Mann's novels and stories. Why not skip the reflective passages? Although Mann officially "deplored" such skipping, Heilbut argues that his "silent compact" with his readers may have been "that if they only trudged through the abstruse passages with Teutonic application, they'd be rewarded with Gallic escapades" (562-63). This at least tells us how Heilbut reads the novels. JENS RIECKMANN University ofCalifornia, Irvine ALVIN KERNAN. Shakespeare, the King's Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603-1613. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. 272 p. Alvin Kernan's self-described journey from formalist criticism to "construction theory" or "constructivism" has been a rewarding one, as evidenced by this lively and richly detailed account of Shakespeare's work as patronage art. Kernan acknowledges a debt for this transformation to several critics (e.g., Glynne Wickham, Roy Strong, and Stephen Orgel), social historians (e.g., Laurence Stone and Linda Levy Peck), and a number of "younger" New Historicists. Strong and Orgel's work, of course, has provided substantial and valuable background for this particular study of Shakespeare's place in the Jacobean court, a relationship often undervalued by scholars who hold the common and, as Kernan puts it, more "romantic" view of Shakespeare as a public playwright. Rather than an occasional venue, the court was a political site within which Shakespeare and his company were intensely involved: between 1603 and 1613 they performed at court no fewer than 138 times, a situation that Kernan sees as a strong shaping influence on Shakespeare's drama. Locating the plays in the political and social milieu of James' court also allows Kernan "to interpret [the plays], with a light hand, in an aggregated performance scene that comes as close as possible to the historical conditions of production"(xxi). Kernan counters the "received image" of Shakespeare as a "romantic artist writing, primarily out of his own creatively free imagination, plays designed for the public theater and a popular audience"(xv) with a virtual digest of data about the King's Men. This evidence is culled from a variety of sources, ranging from official information contained in the acting company's own performance records or the Calendar ofState Papers to the piquant detail gleaned from letter and diary entries about court life, written by foreign visitors or courtiers like Arbella Stuart. Kernan successfully shapes his Book Reviews195 solid research and dazzling array of minutiae into a delightfully readable vision of James' court that will please and enlighten scholars, and yet prove accessible to informed lay readers. Kernan also provides useful illustrations , reconstructions of seating arrangements at various aristocratic venues, an extensive bibliography, and a valuable appendix containing a theatrical calendar of court performances by the King's Men. The connections Kernan asserts between the circumstances of the royal family and the writing of Shakespeare's Jacobean plays involve a wealth of research and, in some cases, a good amount of speculation. Kernan never fails to offer intriguing premises, although some are less tenable than others . His treatment of Hamlet serves as a case in point on both counts. In a chapter entitled "Revenge in Elsinore and in Holyrood," Hamlet is conjectured to have been a "likely choice" for the season of plays at the elaborate Christmas festivities in 1603: the play was still fairly new at the time and particularly suitable for a noble audience, perhaps of particular interest to Queen Anne, herself a Dane. Even though no documentation exists to verify the production ofHamlet at court at this time, Kernan manages, by a complex process of elimination, to...