The Elizabethan Country House Entertainment: Print, Performance, and Gender by Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich (review)

The occasional nature and potential misfires of progress entertainments for Elizabeth I are neatly summed up by two incidents that took place during the pageants arranged for her in 1575 at Kenilworth Castle by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. The poet George Gascoigne must surely have suffered some disappointment when Elizabeth did not stay to listen to his farewell speech. Remarkably, rather than lose his chance to make his case as a poet worthy of the queen's attention, Gascoigne took to horseback, chased down the departing Elizabeth's horse, and shouted his plot at her as she receded into the distance (38). Earlier, the queen had upstaged the planned performance by wryly questioning the Lady of the Lake's speech welcoming her to Kenilworth with the words, "Doo you call it yours now?" (37). In discussing these and other moments, Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich reminds us of the difference between planning and enactment and, as she emphasizes, between the different printed versions of these entertainments that reinforced Elizabeth's position as the fulcrum around which these performances turned. The queen's hosts might attempt to praise or control her, as willing or unwilling spectator, but she could always break free from efforts to determine her response.

Kolkovich's rich study analyzes the competing discourses of entertainments for Elizabeth, setting them in their generic context and arguing for their significance to wider cultures of literature and performance. With the exception of a brief final chapter on seventeenth-century developments under the Stuarts, the book centers on the last quarter of the sixteenth century and, despite Elizabeth's centrality, it is essentially concerned with the plans and responses of hosts, printers, and subsequent readers. The question of genre is not straightforward; in claiming the country house entertainment as a genre in its own right, Kolkovich offers a careful analysis of its changing contours and internal contradictions through its shaping in print as either news or literature. The first section of the book is devoted to performance, the second to print history—and there Kolovich analyzes the varying, shifting readerships that publication constructed for these texts. For instance, she points out that the publication of the Bisham Abbey, Sudeley Castle, and Rycote Park entertainments in 1592 by Joseph Barnes, printer for the University of Oxford, downplayed the collaborative agency of female devisers, hosts, and performers. She makes it clear that, in the journey of these texts from the country estates managed by women into the printing houses and thence into circulation, female agency was elided in favor of the claims of male authorship or readership. While the book's structural division does on occasion, perhaps, prevent the full weight of analysis being brought to bear on a single text, this double focus is very productive overall. It allows the author to tackle early modern performance texts, "in the round," as it were, and to deal with the range of their iterations, audiences, and readerships.

This book holds much of interest for scholars of early modern women and gender in England. As suggested above, Kolkovich charts the contribution of female entertainment "devisers," authors, and performers, mapping out future directions for research into women's contribution to theatrical culture in early modern England. The term "deviser" turns out to be especially useful, referring, as in Elizabeth Russell's entertainment at Bisham in 1592, to the person who outlined and—on some occasions, as with Mary Sidney Herbert in 1599—wrote the pageants, when applied to the female head of the elite family. Additionally, it recognizes the agency involved in arranging and supporting the performances, hosting the queen's visit, managing the estate through which she would progress, calling in supplies, maintaining security, dealing with the court's advance parties, and negotiating local and courtly politics through the entertainments' symbolic encoding. Furthermore, it emphasizes the way in which progress entertainments make a case for the advancement of...