Children of the Revels: The Boy Companies of Shakespeare’s Time and Their Plays by Michael Shapiro (review)

REVIEWS Michael Shapiro. Children of the Revels: The Boy Companies of Shake­ speare’s Time and Their Plays. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Pp. vii + 313. $15.00. Michael Shapiro, whose essay on the acting styles of the boy troupes appeared in Comparative Drama, has written an important assessment of the children’s companies in their social setting. Shapiro’s thesis is that the children’s plays should be seen in ritualistic terms; they are part of a festal tradition, and in them survives the “courtly ambience” with its aristocratic celebration and saturnalian abuse. The young thespians, who were from ten to fifteen years old when they performed these plays, dazzled and sometimes discomforted courtly and private theatre audiences with their talented impersonations of mythological deities, pathetic heroines, young prodigals, and feckless courtiers found in their im­ pressively varied repertoire. As if influenced by Aristotelian causality— efficient, formal, and final— Shapiro presents his evidence in chapters on the companies, the occasion, the audience, the style, and the plays them­ selves. There are three appendixes—on song and music, performances, and repertoires; that on music and song should have been a separate chapter. In his first chapter, Shapiro traces the rise and fall of the leading troupes—the Children of Paul’s and the Children of the Chapel—against their ecclesiastical, financial, and royal backgrounds. Shapiro rightly and repeatedly cautions against overemphasizing the children’s commer­ cialism, for they exhibited “a familiar combination of profit and duty” (p. 19). As “purveyors” of royal entertainment, the children through necessary rehearsals increased and ennobled their audience. The chil­ dren’s courtly roots lead Shapiro, in his second chapter, to the “theatrical occasion.” In playhouses resembling Tudor banqueting halls, the children encouraged spectators to see themselves as part of the aristocratic circle and to participate in the courtly ceremony. Abuse and flattery were vital elements of that ceremony, and Shapiro follows their changing course from Elizabeth’s reign to James’s, concluding that abuse became increas­ ingly more frequent and personal as “anticourt satire yields to antilegal satire” (p. 53). In deftly analyzing some prodigal son plays (Trick to Catch the Old One; Mad World, My Masters), Shapiro reveals how corrupt and foolish authority figures are attacked and defeated, in true saturnalian fashion, by the young men whom they swindle. The most important part of Shapiro’s book is his section on the audience. Seeing them as “active participants rather than as passive spectators” (p. 67), Shapiro posits a highly perceptive (and ideal?) audience of aristocrats and those aspiring to power whose own roleplaying shaped the theatre and whose self-image the dramatist incor356 Reviews 357 porated into his plays. Boisterous and critical, this audience often staged their own “counter-performances,” and to control the audience, play­ wrights tried a variety of techniques. They used outright flattery; they created a sympathetic aristocratic ideal in the play; they lampooned foolish pretenders; and they included subplots to gauge courtly values. Marston’s Quadratus or Chapman’s Tharsalio embody the wit, boldness, and dedication pleasing to the audience whereas Jonson’s Morose is “the very antithesis of proper aristocratic conduct” (p. 84). Less convincing is Shapiro’s view that spectators would identify with Busy (the “comedic version” of whom is Tharsalio [p. 82]) whose virtues they found “con­ genial to their images of themselves” (p. 91). This excludes much that is disturbing in the play, and perhaps points to Shapiro’s overempha­ sizing the patron’s impact on Chapman’s tragedy. Also curious is Sha­ piro’s claim that “the plays acted by children’s troupes are largely satiric comedies” because they “channel the audience’s derision” toward fools in the play rather than at the play itself (p. 75). The audience’s own self-serving interests thereby eclipse satumalian and other literary influences. The following chapter on acting styles inevitably and persuasively follows from Shapiro’s remarks on the audience. He argues that the audience brought a “dual consciousness” with them to the theatre which enabled them to see the boy actor behind the character he played. Such a recognition further fulfills the audience’s desire to participate in courtly entertainment. Against those who restrict...