TY - JOUR
AU - Astington, John H
AB - The title of David Bergeron’s latest book is rather puzzling. First, what kind of hold did Shakespeare have on the imagination of the metropolis in 1613, as compared with 1599 and 1606, the foci of James Shapiro’s successful “yearbooks”? Second, the material of the book itself has principally to do with the Stuart court, with a good deal of attention paid to Prince Henry’s death, which occurred on the cusp of 1613, and the subsequent wedding of his sister Elizabeth early in 1613 proper (although still 1612 in old-style dating). A decade earlier Shakespeare certainly had been an active member of the King’s company of players, and perhaps, as Alvin Kernan called him, “the King’s playwright.” But by 1610, as E. K. Chambers suggested, Shakespeare devoted himself more fully to local matters in Stratford-upon-Avon. His plays, performed by his colleagues, were well represented before the court during the 1612–13 Christmas holidays and during the wedding festivities in February. Bergeron suggests that such cultural excitement must have acted as a gravitational field to draw Shakespeare back into the orbit he had once known: “It is hard to imagine that he chose to remain away in Stratford while all of this took place in Whitehall” (177). How hard depends on how one imagines; Arthur Rimbaud, the teenage meteor of modern poetry, gave up writing forever at the age of twenty-one, and did quite other things for the remaining half of his life. Although Shakespeare was not entirely inactive in both the theater and court circles in 1613, one could alternatively imagine that, following a professional lifetime of going here and there, he was quite content to stay at his comfortably large house in his native town for the remainder of his life. Shakespeare’s biography is not the book’s principal business. The first chapter begins with the burning of the Globe in late June 1613, one of the memorable markers of the London year, but soon sidesteps into what might be called backstory: the history of James Stuart as king of Scotland and subsequently of England, and particularly of one of his chief supporters and courtiers, his cousin Ludovick Stuart, second Duke of Lennox and Duke of Richmond (1574–1624), a participant in both masques and tilts. Lennox, fictionalized, subsequently serves as central observer of the events of the chosen year: “Looking at the burned-out hulk of the Globe Theatre and thinking about Henry VIII, Lennox had occasion to recall …” (44). History as romance, in short. The second and third chapters have to do with what came before 1613: Prince Henry’s last years and his death, and the reburial in Westminster Abbey of the body of James’s mother, Mary, Queen of Scots. This last chapter is short, but is followed by one four times longer, on the plays at court in the winter season of 1612–13. What a court audience might have thought of Philaster, for example, is of speculative interest, but one can do no more than speculate: there are no recorded reactions, either first- or secondhand. The chapter is rather bogged down by extensive recounting of the plays’ fictional events, and, while we probably need reminding what happens in The Merry Devil of Edmonton, most likely readers of such a book might be assumed to be familiar with The Tempest. The fifth chapter turns to the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick of the Palatinate, and the subsequent journey to Heidelberg in which Lennox acted as escort. The sixth surveys books published during the year, particularly playbooks, and culminates by discussing a publication contemporary with a live event—the year’s Lord Mayor’s Show, devised by Thomas Middleton. The final chapter takes as its subject one of the great Jacobean scandals, the divorce and remarriage, at the very end of 1613, of Frances Howard, along with the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury. The entire result is a miscellany of material, most of it with little connection to the author invoked in the book’s title. It is, moreover, material likely to be entirely or reasonably familiar to experienced early modernists: over the past few decades much has been written about court culture and entertainment, about Prince Henry, and about the wedding of Elizabeth Stuart and her subsequent life; a thorough treatment of the Frances Howard affair was provided by David Lindley in 1993. Scholars in the field are unlikely to discover new material here, and, while the plot summaries of plays might indicate that Bergeron was thinking of the needs of undergraduates, the book itself is too quirky to serve as an accessible introduction to Stuart London. The material on Lennox is, however, fascinating, and Bergeron successfully demonstrates that he is a figure to whom we should all probably pay more attention. © Folger Shakespeare Library 2019. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - David M. Bergeron. Shakespeare’s London 1613.
JO - Shakespeare Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/sq/quz007
DA - 2019-11-27
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/david-m-bergeron-shakespeare-s-london-1613-eqFpduvc0G
SP - 84
EP - 85
VL - 70
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -