The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London: 1576-1642 by Ann Jennalie Cook (review)

288ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW and chapter nine, a competent summary of societal ills leading to The Lost Honor o/ Katharina Blum (pp. 182-197). The book contains numerous spelling errors and — especially in .the Bibliography — errors in syllabification. Theodor Plievier, whose name is misspelled in the text (p. 41), is not listed in the Index. RALF R. NICOLAI The University of Georgia Ann Jennalie Cook. The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London: 1576-1642. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. 317p. That a healthy number of those who thronged to the original productions of Shakespeare's plays were ordinary people — artisans, craftsmen, apprentices, and the like, such as the grocer in The Knight of the Burning Pestle — has been a longstanding assumption, though attitudes towards this presumed audience havevaried widely. For those molded by a Victorian sensibility, the presence of the vulgar explained Shakespeare's bawdy, an indecorous element otherwise incomprehensible in a poet of his ability. For those raised on the vision embodied in Alfred Herbage's Shakespeare's Audience (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), the reverse is true: the playwrights who aimed at the mass audience created a richer and more vital drama than did the playwrights of the elite and decadent private theaters. What Ann Jennalie Cook now suggests in The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London: 1576-1642 is that the underlying assumption of both visions is wrong, that those first privileged to see Shakespeare's plays were by and large those privileged with status, money, and leisure. Roughly a third of the book is devoted to defining the privileged and the forces that drew them to London. This discussion is a masterful synthesis of social, economic, and demographic data. Cook demurs that nothing in this would be unfamiliar to the social historian, but the consequences of these findings have been too little appreciated by students of the drama, a failing that this book will surely help rectify. The book then proceeds to analyse the theater-going habits of the privileged, the profits to be made by catering to this taste, and the non-privileged portion of the audience. That the plebian element in the audience was much smaller and much less economically significant than is usually assumed raises numerous questions about the portraits of playgoers which have derived from prologues to plays and attacks on the theater. It would seem that the critical use of such materials has often been less rigorous than it should have been. Accepting the notion of a non-artistocratic audience at the Red Bull, G.E. Bentley, in The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941-1968), is willing to dismiss contemporary accounts of aristocratic attendance at this theater as being in error (Cook, pp. 5, 266). Harbage includes evidence from the collapse of Paris Garden in his picture of the diversity of the Elizabethan audience, but much evidence suggests that the bearbaitingaudience differed from the theater-going audience (Cook, p. 269). Contemporary critics were more than willing to associate violence with the theaters, but on closer inspection, many such incidents are found to have occurred near theaters and not necessarily to have involved theatergoers, thus providing little insight into the composition of the audience (Cook, pp. 249-258). Our own cultural blinders are often in place; there has Book Reviews289 been a tendency to assume that accounts of rowdy or boisterous behavior is proof of the presence of the lower classes. Privilege and decorum need not be conjoint. One wishes, of course, that Shakespeare's audience could be defined with greater exactitude, but Cook gives a clear picture of the class that provided the bulk of its members. Not everyone will happily part with the notion of a mixed or vulgar audience at the public theaters as opposed to an aristocratic audience at the private theaters, and doing so will require a reexamination of many matters that had been conveniently explained by such an assumption. However, it is precisely to this reexamination that Cook convincingly and tellingly directs us. BRUCE E. BRANDT South Dakota State University Peter Elbow. Writing with Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. 372p. "This book taught me more about penguins than I wanted to...