The Children of Paul’s: The Story of a Theatre Company 1553–1608 by Reavley Gair (review)

REVIEWS Reavley Gair. The Children of Paul’s: The Story of a Theatre Company 1553-1608. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Pp. 213. $34.50. The announced aims of Professor Reavley Gair’s study have no modest limit. The book “is designed as a social and literary history of England’s first permanently based drama company and it seeks to challenge some of the orthodoxies about the theatre of the children.” In creating this history and throwing out his challenges, Gair studies “the physical con­ ditions of the playhouse and the cathedral itself; . . . the personalities of the masters, the actors, the musicians and dramatists; and . . . the audi­ ence, to determine not merely who they were but what the players expected them to know and recognize.” This effort is encompassed in a book of 175 pages of text, 12 pages of appendices (three in number), 14 pages of notes, 6 pages of bibliographical references, and a six-page index, the whole package offered to the public for $34.50. What should one expect from such a tidy and expensive bundle? I would argue that, at a minimum, one should expect a reasonably close approach to a fulfillment of the author’s aims. In the effort to achieve those aims, the author should provide new evidence cogently presented and familiar materials illuminated afresh in the context of his discoveries. He should conduct his argument in a manner that allows readers to check his sources and assess his use of them. He should be judicious in his use of earlier scholarship, rejecting or modifying it when necessary and acknowledging its value when it comes into play. Above all, he should be scrupulous in distinguishing inference and speculation from established fact. But these matters, of course, constitute only the sufficient conditions for an enterprise such as Gair’s; having satisfied them, he must arrange his materials in a way that seems both comprehensive and convincing. We must be persuaded that he has told the whole “story” of Paul’s from 1553 to 1608. By each of the criteria just listed, Professor Gair must be judged to have fallen short. In his second chapter, “Paul’s Playhouse,” he marshals the evidence on which he bases a detailed illustration labeled “The site of Paul’s playhouse and the arrangement of the stage at the time of Antonio’s Revenge, 1600/1” (p. 59). Ignoring for the moment Gair’s use of a misleading vocabulary that sees the playhouse reaching an “evolutionary apogee” (p. 60) when it embodies the details of his con­ jectural drawing, it is clear that his new materials take us nowhere near the certainty he claims. The Visitation Report of Bishop Bancroft, a major source of evidence in Gair’s argument, says nothing of a playhouse or of an area devoted to playing. Where H. N. Hillebrand years ago found only “baffling uncertainty,” Gair finds an “inescapable” conclusion; but he does this by substituting the specificity of his own interpretation of 82 Reviews 83 a single document for the mass of previously available evidence, which is wholly inadequate to demonstrate the precise location of the playhouse, let alone its design. The second criterion involves the use of sources. In some instances, as with the Visitation Report, checking is an easy matter, for Gair repro­ duces the relevant sections as Appendix I. One Richard Smythe, respond­ ing to a question, describes a “little howse . . . builte by Mr. Heydon . . . by the Consent of Mr. Benbowe.” This becomes, in Gair’s account, “the house . . . built by Mr. Haydon, with the connivance of Thomas Ben­ bowe.” This is a small example, but it is symptomatic. There are other problems with sources as well. In citing texts from the period, Gair refers to signatures even when trustworthy modem editions are available. Thus a reference to Guilpin’s Skialethia cites Diii whereas D. Allen Carroll’s edition gives Dvii; but in any event a reference by page number to Carroll would be less pedantic and more helpful to Gair’s readers. This is an even more relevant issue in the case of quotations from Marston and Jonson used in establishing key elements in the book’s argument. Marston is...