The Masters of the Revels and Elizabeth 1's Court Theatre by W. R. Streitberger (review)

W. R. Streitberger's seminal 1978 article on the biography of Edmond Tilney, the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean Master of the Revels, pioneered a revived interest in the organization and development of the Revels Office and, in particular, its relationship to the nascent commercial theatre. Now, forty years later, Streitberger has written a comprehensive account of court revels—a narrative which encompasses biographies of the Masters and under-officers; the management and the evolution of the Revels Office; the production of masques, plays, tilts and jousts at court; and the patronage networks and alliances at court which shaped its entertainment. The study offers far more than an account of Elizabeth's court theatre, as Streitberger frequently backtracks to the reigns of Edward VI and Mary to chart the early careers of Elizabeth's officials and to better understand the constitution of the revels she inherited.

The subject of the first chapter is Thomas Cawarden, who had been conferred Master of the Revels by Henry VIII in 1545 and served Elizabeth in that role for less than a year. Under Cawarden, the Queen's revels were "elaborate and exuberant," but hardly novel as Cawarden drew on the devices, effects, and themes of the festivities he had overseen during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI. (As a reformer who had produced anti-Catholic revels at court during Somerset's protectorship, he was regarded with suspicion during the reign of Mary and spent some time under house arrest.) In contrast, Thomas Benger, Cawarden's successor—the subject of chapter 2—helped to negotiate Mary's accession and was knighted the day after her coronation. Serving as auditor to Princess Elizabeth's household at Hatfield House, though, Benger became implicated with John Dee and his allegedly black arts and spent some time in the Fleet prison. Benger's tenure of the revels under Elizabeth is presented as a period of mismanagement and escalating costs, although his innovative masques and triumphs—characterized by spectacle, surprise, and verisimilitude—forged a new style of court festivity. He was the first to use specially-designed, three-dimensional houses in his plays and, according to Streitberger, the first to use sophisticated lighting schemes. With no royal company to play at court, Benger responded by producing plays by boy companies—the children of the Chapel Royal and of Windsor Chapel and the children of Paul's and of Westminster School—although evidence of the plays they performed is relatively scant with only the texts of Damon and Pythias and Sapientia Solomonis extant.

A crisis arose in 1572 following Benger's death and the pressing need to have revels for the French embassy of the Duke of Montmorency, charged with negotiating a marriage alliance between the Queen and the Duke of Alençon. During what Streitberger titles the interregnum of 1572–78, highly placed courtiers, including the Queen's cousin, the Earl of Sussex, were appointed to oversee entertainments, while the practices and processes of the Office were scrutinized by the Privy Council with the idea of reform. Cost cutting was the objective and to this end a number of reformatory memoranda recommend exercises such as using cloth no longer considered serviceable in the various royal wardrobes for revels, and establishing a yearly budget for revels that the queen "will not pass."

Streitburger devotes two chapters to Tilney as Master of the Revels, focusing on the expansion of his powers and—as cost cutting led to the outsourcing of court entertainment to privileged companies—the transformation of the office. Tilney was a new kind of Master as his function changed from a deviser of inhouse entertainment to that of a producer and director of works produced by professional playwrights. Extensive work on the Elizabethan playing companies and on theatre censorship means that readers will be more generally familiar with these sections of Streitberger's narrative. Still, local details are telling. In the early Jacobean...