Children of the Queen's Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (review)

In Children of the Queen's Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory, Lucy Munro looks at "the most prominent, politically contentious and dramatically experimental" (ix) children's company of its day. Although their repertoire encompassed every available play type, from city comedies to travel dramas, the story of this company is one filled with political, financial, and social hazards. In addition to their risky repertoire, they performed women's roles as well as what Munro calls "age transvestism" (2). Munro contributes to a growing number of studies based on a repertory context, drawing attention to noncanonical works and production practices rather than authors and well-known texts, in the tradition of such scholars as Andrew Gurr, Roslyn Lander Knutson, Mary Bly, Scott McMillin, and Sally-Beth MacLean.

Chapter 1, "Raiding the Nest: A Company Biography," offers an overview of the Children of the Chapel and the Children of the Queen's Revels from 1600 to 1613, and then moves to a more specific analysis of personnel and production roles, culminating in a "model of collaborative authority" (54) among dramatists, shareholders, patrons, associates, actors, and publishers, influenced (not always productively) by censorship and patronage. One of Munro's more valuable conclusions in this chapter is to call attention to the importance of seemingly minor figures such as shareholders Kendall, Keysar, and Kirkham who "might have had an equally strong influence on dramatic production" (53) as the more well-known dramatists Jonson, Marston, and Chapman. Munro stresses the collaborative nature of early modern theatrical production in a lengthy diatribe against locating a "prime intelligence behind the plays" or a "central controlling presence" (53).

The three subsequent chapters analyze the activities of the Children of the Queen's Revels according to the generic categories of comedy, tragicomedy, and tragedy. In chapter 2, "'Proper gallants wordes': Comedy and the Theatre Audience," Munro revisits the question of whether the Queen's Revels audience was a "coterie," using an analysis of the function of jokes about social status to make her case. She argues that changing attitudes toward laughter among upper-class men affected the comic repertoire of the Children of the Queen's Revels. As upper-class men began to view laughter as "vulgar or indecorous," comic endings that combined contrition, reconciliation, and laughter produced conflicting results (94). Munro challenges Stephen Mullaney's view of comedy as a "contained form of social criticism." She argues for a lack of "stable social identity," pointing out that acting companies "could not depend on their audiences having a shared viewpoint and uniform reaction to jokes," making "a uniform interpretation virtually impossible" (95).

Chapter 3, "'Grief, and joy, so suddenly comixt': Company Politics and the Development of Tragicomedy," explores the way sources such as Sidney's Arcadia, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Guarini's Il Pastor Fido, and Lylyan tragical comedy were transformed into a distinctive brand of tragicomedy later adopted by the King's Men. Munro traces the origins of seventeenth-century tragicomedy to the collaborative practices of the Children of the Queen's Revels, specifically the way the company integrated source texts into their plays. Motivated by the desire to attract intelligentsia at the Blackfriars theatre, the company offered pastoral tragicomedies combining Italian and Spenserian models. Although English tragicomedies were successful, Munro attempts to answer the question of why Italian pastoral tragicomedies failed, positing that "perhaps the pastoral tragicomedy's fault in the eyes of the audience was that it was not pastoral enough, but too witty, too allusive, and too high-blown" (132) and ended up confusing the audience.

Munro's final chapter, "'Ieronimo in Decimo sexto': Tragedy and the Text," looks at the instability of tragic texts due to revision, censorship, and publication. While tragedies performed by the children's companies are often overlooked, Munro argues that the preponderance of tragedies in their repertory demonstrates that the Queen's Revels "were trying to outdo the adult companies in scope and ambition" (134). Adding to...