Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre by Richard Preiss (review)

How funny was the Elizabethan stage clown? Reading what we have left to judge that question does leave one wondering. As I write this review a cartoon in the current New Yorker shows a jester being dragged out of a throne room by a hooded executioner; he shouts back towards the king ‘What about the writers? Nobody ever blames the writers!’ This both is and isn’t Richard Preiss’s subject in this lively book, which pays serious and telling attention to early modern comic performance and how it altered, or was modulated, in the late Elizabethan period. His version of what the clown did is intimately related to what the audience did, and what we have left to decide that question is disproportionately antagonistic, so that it is hard to strike a balance in speaking or writing about early modern audiences today. This is particularly the case as the folk assumption has been that they were normally noisy, unruly, and interventionist, an assumption played up by both actors and some audience members at the modern rebuilt Globe, as if historical duty obliged them to. Preiss, then, immediately confronts two problems of evidence. In his introduction he writes that his book ‘has two axes of enquiry, an archival and a theoretical one’ (7), and that the first two chapters deal with the evidence. On the strength of my own reading of his book I would say that the division is not quite that sharp: the examination of the evidence begins with a strong hypothesis, and a theoretical approach is there from the beginning, while Preiss gives certain theoretical received wisdom a refreshing roughing up quite late in the book. I found myself wishing that other theoretical frameworks had been given a similarly cold eye, but Preiss advances his own arguments strongly, and for the most part clearly.

We begin with two clear claims, the first of which is unlikely to be contentious: ‘A playbook is not a performance: it is the retrospective fantasy of one, abstracted from the play’s synchronic and diachronic stage lives’ (6). Yes, certainly, but. The but I’ll return to, yet it is absolutely central to recognize that early printed dramatic books are not an easy key for unlocking early stage performances. For Preiss it is the emergence of the printed play as a common by-product of show business in the 1590s and thereafter that marks the important cultural movement in what he calls authorship, concretizing the shifting forms of theatre in authoritative black and white. As for the theatre itself, it was an agonistic space: ‘the playhouse environment was one of authorial competition, wherein spectators vied aggressively with both players and each other for possession of the stage’ (7). This is a more startling claim, but it is a refreshing idea, and gets at an important ingredient of what clowns probably did, and perhaps still do. So the contention over authorship might be taken as a war of the theatres which the book won and the audience lost: I over simplify drastically, but the cultural change that the arrival of published dramatic literature in English effected is a matter Preiss keeps in view.

The book, of course, — and here comes my but — was a thing very important to actors. Playing companies assembled two valuable commodities as the basis of their common stock, into which sharers bought: apparel, or costumes, and books, manuscripts of the texts they put on stage. For actors, books were prospective rather than retrospective and private rather than public. As ‘allowed books’, signed by an officer of the Revels, they were a passport to public performance, and possible profit. Given the enormous number of performances as against the relatively small number of plays printed between 1580 and 1640, there were once a great many more of such books than dramatic texts in print, and they were there from early on. In the early 1570s a (failed) writer called Rowland Broughton was contracted to write and...