Drama and the Transfer of Power in Renaissance England by Martin Wiggins (review)

Archival theater history and political historicism of any stripe do not always fit together neatly. Martin Wiggins is one of our most learned practitioners of the former: scholars of Tudor and Stuart drama owe him and his collaborators a great debt for their continuing progress on British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue (2013), which is destined to become a central resource for decades of future work. At the level of archival analysis and methodology, there is much to be learned from Wiggins's recent monograph, Drama and the Transfer of Power in Renaissance England (2012). As its title suggests, the book explores the role of drama (here, mainly masques, coronation pageants, and royal entertainments) at transitional moments during the reigns of Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I. At its best, the book fleshes out the picture of obscure, lost, or, in the case of Charles's coronation pageant, cancelled performances with evidence drawn mainly from contemporary reports and expense account-books. Along the way, some long-held assumptions about the facts of theater regulation—and specifically, about the closing of the theaters by Parliament in 1642—are held up for re-examination. There is much room for expansion in this brief monograph, and the reader interested in current critical conversations about the contours of the relationship between politics and early modern drama might be better served elsewhere. But if the discussion here occasionally seems incomplete, its brilliant elements should serve as a spur for further conversation and research.

The first chapter proper gives a good sense for what Wiggins does best. It begins with a reference in an ambassador's letter to a performance Henry VIII attended in 1535, in which a figure representing Henry cut off the heads of several priests. The "politics" of this performance are extremely complicated, but rather straightforwardly set out by Wiggins: Henry was in the process of consolidating his religious and political authority; the pageant refers to all this in a way that suited Cromwell, the King, and the project of Reform in England more generally. After pointing out that other scholars who have noted the performance have been unable to ascertain much about it, Wiggins directs us to the account books of the Skinners' and Ironmongers' companies, which list among the expenses for the 1535 Midsummer Watch performances five swords for a pageant staged for the King. (The relevant portion of the account book, along with a few other primary texts, is transcribed in a useful supplementary section at the end of the monograph.) This is a fascinating discovery. Absent any other direct evidence about the occasion, Wiggins fleshes out his analysis by exploring related performances, acts, and personalities. He goes over the roles played by the Livery Companies as they organized other Watch pageants. He describes Thomas Cromwell's interest in later performances meant to prop up Henry's policies. He offers a few guesses about Henry's tastes in political drama. Indeed, while the archival discovery and analysis that sits at the center of the chapter is illuminating, it can only prove so much. Wiggins fills in the rest of the chapter with likely suppositions and intriguing possibilities.

Wiggins skips over the reigns of Edward and Mary and picks up the thread in 1559, when Elizabeth oversaw her first set of Christmas entertainments. Again, a performance referred to only in letters and account books sits at the center of the chapter: the Twelfth Night masque of that year mocked Catholic prelates by staging crows, donkeys, and wolves in the costumes of priests, abbots, and Cardinals. Again, original and inspiring work is done as Wiggins draws out the archives' revelations about the details of the performance. Most strikingly, he is able to craft a reasonable argument about the size of the satirical costumes based on the amount of cloth bought for them. Noting the shift in Elizabeth's response to harsh anti-Catholic drama over the early years...