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The Living Monument: Shakespeare and the Theatre of his Time by M. C. Bradbrook (review)
- Comparative Drama
- Western Michigan University
- Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 1977-1978
- pp. 353-355
- 10.1353/cdr.1977.0039
- Review
- Additional Information
Reviews 353 is still linked with the natural world). There is room for a good deal of speculation about the intrinsic character of these plays which might account for these findings. It is also challenging to observe that, ex cluding The Tempest and The Merchant of Venice, the romantic comedies have remained virtually unscathed by the Shakespeare cobblers, perhaps reflecting our want of understanding and the more elusive, less symbolic and prototypical appeal of these plays. The ideas prompted between the lines of this enterprising book suggest that there is more yet to recognize about the vital signs, the life rhythms, in a Shakespeare play. J. L. STYAN Northwestern University M. C. Bradbrook. The Living Monument: Shakespeare and the Theatre of his Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Pp. xvi + 287. $21.00. In recent years, skillful archeologists of the Renaissance stage have unearthed for us valuable information about theatrical conditions in the age of Shakespeare and, in the process, have usefully reminded us that the full richness of the drama is realized in performance rather than on the printed page. M. C. Bradbrook’s The Living Monument is similarly concerned with the theatrical context of the drama of Renaissance Eng land, but Bradbrook would extend the limits and significance of the work of scholars like Bentley, Hosley, and Wickham, eschewing their archeo logy for what she calls a “sociology of the theatre.” “Theatres are for people,” she writes, “so that extensive efforts to establish the nature of fabric and structure are significant only as these provided an environment where interaction between playwrights, actors, and audience eventually produced the work of the greater poet-dramatists” (p. vii). It is the interaction of this “triple bond” of playwright, audience, and actor that is the subject of The Living Monument. Bradbrook explores the process by which the plays of Shakespeare’s age emerge out of the playwrights’ awareness of one another, out of their responses to the different stages and dramatic companies for which they wrote, and out of their sensitivity to the expectations and needs of their audiences. “The subject,” Bradbrook admits, “is at once more elusive and more conjectural than that of theatre structure, but as the end of theatre study is to throw light on the drama and the age as a whole, such at tempts are essential if the enquiry, is not to degenerate into antiquarianism ” (p. 7). However elusive her subject, Bradbrook’s enquiry successfully avoids the danger of a sterile antiquarianism. In her account of developments in London’s theatrical history from the building of the Theatre in 1576 to the closing of the city’s playhouses in September of 1642, she focuses on the variety of ways in which the drama was responsive to and in part responsible for the cultural moment in which it flourished. The changing forms of Renaissance drama, Bradbrook argues, are intimately related to the changing structure of Renaissance society. It is indeed a suggestive thesis. “No part of literature,” de Tocqueville once remarked of drama, “is connected by closer and more numerous bonds with the current state of society,” and it is these bonds that Bradbrook energetically sets out to identify and examine in the theatrical experience of Renaissance England. She begins by presenting her con ception of a sociology of the theatre in the first section of the book, tracing the subtle interactions of audience, actor, and playwright in the theatrical offerings of the earliest London companies, the history plays of Shakespeare, Jonson’s masques, and the dramatic image of Jacobean London. In part two, she focuses on “the fully developed art of the Jacobean Shakespeare in the theatrical context which had evolved, and which was largely of his own making” (p. viii); and in the final section, which is really an epilogue, she treats the Caroline masque as it shapes and is shaped by the social and political climate of the England of Charles I. Bradbrook ranges across this vast territory with the agility, alertness, and good sense that has consistently distinguished her work throughout her remarkable career. She has valuable things to say about all she touches upon. Jonson’s court masques are especially well illuminated by...