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

Martin Wiggins describes his subject as “the political agency and function of drama at a series of volatile moments in English history when supreme power passed from one regime to the next” (1). He does not provide very much discussion of how much agency drama actually had in shaping transfers of power, furnishing instead a close analysis of specific performances or theatrical events at five critical moments between 1535 and 1642. Only the last chapter focuses on plays written for the London stage; the remaining four concentrate on court masques and outdoor pageants associated with royal entries or London mayoral inaugurations. Virtually all are “lost” entertainments for which no text survives, but which can be partly reconstructed from other sources. Rather than a conventional work of literary historicism grounded in close readings of playtexts, this study employs a methodology more similar to that of historians, using a range of documents to tease out information about dramatic performances whose scripts vanished long ago.

Wiggins defends this procedure by pointing out that although literary scholars “tend to think about drama as something that is primarily made of words,” performances also consisted of “other components: props and costumes, music and sound effects, the bodies and voices of actors in motion; most fundamentally, though hardest to pin down precisely, drama is also made of narrative” (5). Even when a script survives, these other elements need to be supplied imaginatively on the basis of available sources, and when a dramatic text has not come down to us we may still be able to reconstitute the broad outlines of a performance from other evidence. The process, he comments, “is like extrapolating outwards from a dinosaur skeleton to reconstruct the whole beast: a procedure heavy with hypothesis and speculation, whose results are unavoidably limited and incomplete” (6) but nevertheless potentially illuminating. Wiggins is acutely aware of the inherent pitfalls in any attempt to reach conclusions about the past on the basis of fragmentary and problematic sources. This lends credibility to his analysis.

The first entertainment Wiggins examines was briefly described by Eustace Chapuys, the imperial ambassador to Henry VIII’s court, as a play performed at a private house dramatizing a chapter from Revelation. It took place at 2 a. m. on Midsummer Night, 1535, and Henry reportedly traveled thirty miles to see it, the last ten on foot. Chapuys also reported that during the performance an actor representing the King decapitated several clergymen and that Henry openly showed his approval of this action. But Chapuys supplies few other details, and historians have subsequently added no new information. Wiggins argues that the entertainment was actually produced by the London Skinners’ Company as part of the Midsummer Watch, a series of pageants and spectacles traditionally performed every year. Fortunately, accounts survive of “‘the King’s pageant, that is to say, the pageant made for the King’” (9), including a payment for the hire of five swords. He surmises that the chapter dramatized was Revelation 19, “in which a crowned horseman defeats the Beast and . . . then slays its followers with his sword,” and that this biblical story was glossed to provide a commentary on contemporary politics, especially the recent decapitation of Bishop John Fisher for opposing Henry’s break with the Roman Church (10). Unusually for a London pageant, the court lent costumes for this show, strengthening the presumption that it was indeed the entertainment Henry witnessed. It is not clear who commissioned the piece, but Wiggins reviews several possibilities including Thomas Cromwell and Henry himself.

The next chapter deals with court masques during Elizabeth’s first eight months on the throne, especially a virulently anticlerical Twelfth Night entertainment. Wiggins pieces together contemporary evidence, including eyewitness reports and a partial inventory of costumes and stage properties, to show that it featured Catholic clergy wearing heads of asses, dogs, and wolves. He traces this derisive imagery back to earlier anti-Catholic plays and entertainments from...