Shakespeare, Court Dramatist by Richard Dutton, and: Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theater and Performance by Robert Henke, and: Imagining Shakespeare's Original Audience, 1660–2000: Groundlings, Gallants, Grocers by Bettina Boecker

Three books touching different aspects of theater history are reviewed here, their interests ranging from Shakespeare as a Jacobean dramatist, to the topic of poverty and charity as expressed in a variety of dramatic settings, to a reevaluation of the imagined audiences of early modern playhouses.

Richard Dutton's Shakespeare, Court Dramatist is an exciting reconsideration of what occurred in the life of the best-known playwright of the King's Men following the reorganization of the company after Elizabeth I died and James I came to the English throne in 1603. Following upon his research into the Masters of the Revels, Dutton calls into question and substantially reconfigures much of what we knew regarding Shakespeare's career as a Jacobean playwright and the entire "Revels culture" that constituted the most significant part of entertainment at court. Dutton writes, "The argument of this book is simply stated: it is that Shakespeare's plays were frequently and specifically revised for presentation at the courts of Elizabeth I and James I. And that the texts which have come down to us often bear the marks of those revisions" (1). Furthermore, the courts of both monarchs "loomed much larger in Shakespeare's creative life than is usually appreciated" (286). It is Dutton's assertion that Shakespeare held a unique position among playwrights whose work was presented at court in that he was a shareholder in playing companies, a dramatist, an actor, and a householder in the Globe and Blackfriars. As an accomplished playwright and actor, Shakespeare was highly unusual as a reviser of plays for court performances.

Dutton describes his book as being divided into two halves. The opening three chapters examine "patronage practices governing Elizabethan theatre and how they … tied the most successful companies to the court and permitted an élite few to reap the commercial rewards of regular London playing" (8). In the first section, Dutton reexamines the history of the Revels Office, overturning (once and for all) the contention that the Masters were primarily government censors. Instead, he reminds us, they were central in determining which plays were performed at court, and Edmund Tilney especially—the Master with whom Shakespeare worked the most closely—altered the nature and functioning of the office extensively. Tilney not only reviewed playtexts but also kept the storehouse of costumes owned by the office; interfaced with dramatists and company managers; and, probably, helped to adapt and refine what would be performed at court. Interestingly, Dutton contends that "Shakespeare would have found Tilney much more knowledgeable than himself about the ways of London theatre when he first encountered him" (59). Tilney and his successor, Sir George Buc, were cultured men of letters who were well versed in theater as an art form.

There follows what Dutton refers to as a "hinge chapter" (8), entitled "The Revision of Early Modern Play Texts," wherein he investigates Shakespeare's multiple texts and the influences that might account for those revisions. In the second part of the book, Dutton considers several multiple-text plays: The Famous Victories of Henry V, 2 and 3 Henry VI, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. In the penultimate section, "Last Thoughts," Dutton first offers some glimpses into the texts of Titus Andronicus, Richard II, and 2 Henry IV. Brief sections pertaining to "the change of reign" (267), "Shakespeare's contract" (269), and "the length of Shakespeare's Jacobean plays" follow (280). A concluding section draws together Dutton's essential arguments and underscores his deduction that multiple texts are neither simple expansions nor amplifications of existing texts; nor are they artless abridgments or condensations. Rather, "in each case there has been a transformation at the level of plot or dramatic action which can only be accounted for by a purposeful imaginative re-engagement" (287).

One of the remarkable achievements of Dutton's book is that he so ably brings together conclusions drawn from his study of the Revels Office during the late sixteenth century with the new circumstances of the King's Men after mid-1603. Among the many fascinating arguments is his suggestion that Laurence Fletcher, an actor who performed for King James in Scotland, was brought into Shakespeare's company in order to provide a level of continuity in court entertainments as they transitioned to a new monarch. He speculates as well on the great number of plays that would have been required to entertain the new court. And he posits that because Shakespeare was an honorary Groom of the Chamber his plays were "acts of service" and they would have been part of his responsibility when he essentially became one of the "ordinary poets" to the court (272). As a result, Dutton notes, the change in patronage experienced by the former Lord Chamberlain's Men brought with it the burden of having to produce an increased number of plays, although it simultaneously raised the status of the company. Therefore, by extension, the top companies would have been attuned to the court and eager for preferment, not only because of the income that court entertainments generated, but also because performances before the nobility made companies all the more desirable as entertainers in London's public playhouses.

Owing to the sheer level of detail presented in the course of Dutton's book, no review can do justice to the significance of its arguments. And doubtless, some scholars will have much more to say regarding the specific texts of the plays under discussion. Nevertheless, rarely does a book do so much to realign our conception of the influences governing the ways in which Shakespeare worked as an artist, the professional conditions under which he worked, and the contractual arrangements he probably worked under—the latter setting up obligations that explain why so much of his published work occurred in the early portion of his career. Shakespeare, Court Dramatist is a major contribution to our understanding of Shakespeare as a mature playwright during the second part of his career.

Highlighting the opposite end of the social spectrum, Robert Henke's Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theater and Performance examines the interaction between dramatic (and nondramatic) representations of beggary and the support (or lack thereof) of the urban and rural poor in early modern Europe. The book is divided into six chapters, with an introduction that outlines the rationale for taking a transnational approach and the ways in which this extends and enhances our understanding of how the issues associated with mendicancy found their way into varying kinds of texts—from songs to pamphlets, and finally into drama.

In chapter 1 Henke traces the social, political, and theological attitudes toward beggary and the extent to which sizable portions of the western European population were either exposed temporarily to, or debilitated over the long term by, poverty. After the feudal system dissolved and the market economy took hold—which occurred along with the decimation of rural livelihoods by enclosure practices—poverty spread from the country into the cities while, concurrently, Protestant attitudes collided with earlier Catholic ideologies. Ultimately, a series of poor laws in England attempted to organize a system that could deal with problems locally. Nevertheless, by the end of the sixteenth century, across Europe charity took an assortment of forms (many of them informally managed). In this chapter Henke introduces the idea of the "king-turned-beggar," and he raises the reader's awareness concerning the pervasiveness of mendicancy literature.

In chapter 2, Henke discusses the alignment between continental beggar catalogues, a collection of German-based rogue books with their later English parallels, and the Poor Tom character of King Lear. Chapter 3 explores the contexts in which the "peddler-performer" appeared (60), demonstrating the ways in which the actual theater of poverty played out on the streets through singing as a form of begging or through songs, and their subsequent printing and dissemination, that focused on the plight of the poor. Chapter 4 introduces the Paduan playwright known as "Ruzante," whose works, examples of "virtuosic generic hybridity" (107), incorporate aspects of the conflicting relationships between the rich and poor. In chapter 5 readers will find echoes of Henke's earlier work on the commedia dell'arte, although here he concentrates on "the underside of the Comici" where "the hungry servant, stingy master, and related tropes became hardy perennials in the Arte repertoire, infused with new life" (109).

Chapter 6, focusing on Shakespeare's down-and-outs, will potentially interest readers of this journal more than material presented earlier in the volume; however, one of the major strengths of Henke's argument lies in his ability to entwine earlier social debates concerning poverty with Shakespeare's "ambiguous and nuanced thoughts and feelings regarding poverty and charity" (136). By ranging across borders Henke amasses an invaluable collection of responses to Shakespeare's poor and the western European poor who preceded him, both real and fictional. Along the way, he deepens his readers' understanding of issues surrounding poverty, as well as their understanding of how Shakespeare was influenced by a panoply of sources and attitudes.

Not actual, but invented communities of spectators are the focus of Bettina Boecker's Imagining Shakespeare's Original Audience, 1660–2000. Her central point is that, since the eighteenth century, the spotlight has been on what various critics have envisioned as Shakespeare's original audience—one that turns out to be largely a projection of the audience of the time in which those critics were writing. Moreover, Boecker writes, "Over the course of the centuries, criticism has produced many and often extremely controversial hypotheses about the social composition, intellectual abilities and emotional reactions of those who frequented the amphitheatres of early modern London" (3). During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, she suggests, emphasis fell largely on detailing the audience's faults, a result of their assumed lower-class status. Shakespeare—it was rationalized, by Alexander Pope and others—could not have been one of them. Instead, he must have fallen prey to the commercial demands that held sway over dramatists of the period. Such thinking set up a complex pattern for later years, ultimately colliding with the image of Shakespeare that developed into a symbol of the nation. Despite the fact that Coleridge tried to sidestep the issue altogether, imagining instead two audiences (one well-educated and another no more than an ignorant "mob," [35]), the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commentators invented a new group labeled "groundlings" to which they could attach whatever characteristics were convenient to their argument. Yet in the context of the times, this new sense of an audience consisting of all sorts of persons was more acceptable to many critics who saw it as a model in which conflicting visions of the audience could coexist. Boecker writes, "A genuinely 'popular' theatre, uniting all social classes in a shared theatrical experience, is a miniature model of the nation" (77).

During the latter part of this period, from 1890 to 1940, even as Shakespeare as "national poet" was being refashioned, the groundlings were both imagined as representing a diverse group of persons and (simultaneously) downplayed in scholarly conversation. In the decade following 1920, the groundlings were rehabilitated to "the judicious few" (99), although the invention of a new "Neo-Elizabethanism" (119) quickly followed. But instead of being disparaged, spectators were seen as cocreators of Shakespeare's plays and as a kind of bridge to the texts through which the author's "meaning" could be unearthed. Boecker's final chapter, focused on the second half of the twentieth century, delineates the ways in which envisionings of the audience persisted.

Imagining Shakespeare's Original Audience raises interesting questions about the varied inventions of Shakespeare's audience. Most important, perhaps, are Boecker's insights into the manner in which the imagined audiences shaped the critical commentaries of iconic critics—not only Dryden and Coleridge, but also John Dover Wilson, A. C. Bradley, and others.