Practicing Renaissance Scholarship: Plays and Pageants, Patrons and Politics. (Reviews).

David M. Bergeron, Practicing Renaissance Scholarship: Plays and Pageants, Patrons and Politics.

Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 2000. ix + 221 pp. $55. ISBN: 0-8207-0313-3.

Though it's not part of the alliteratively announced themes of the subtitle -- maybe "polemic" might have been added -- much of the energy of David Bergeron's essays in this collection derive from a sense of opposition or desire to set right the scholarly errors of both distant and recent past. Indeed, he introduces the collection by noticing that solid archival work, the kind of scholarship he practices, seems under threat and has been declared non-competitive in the academic marketplace by Gerald Graff, who notes that "the highest professional rewards have gone to work that advanced ambitious theories and broad cultural and interdisciplinary generalizations" (Graff's words). By contrast, scholarship based on original sources might be dismissed as mere "brick-gathering." No one who has been practicing Renaissance scholarship in the past twenty years can fail to take Bergeron's point, and to some extent sympathize with it, as theoretical constructions of literary history, some tendentious, have come to domina te the landscape. But Bergeron's own essays may persuade a reader that it was ever thus, that scholars have always taken much of their impetus from a desire to challenge what they see as the mistakes of their predecessors and contemporaries. And not a bad thing really -- what's new always appears to need sharpening on the whetstone of what's past.

This is not to say that there is anything grumpy about the essays collected here. They represent the solid scholarship of some twenty-five years -- hardly brick-gathering -- that Bergeron is known for. As would be expected, several of the essays center on civic pageantry. One (first published in 1978) treats manuscript evidence for Elizabeth's own hand in the preparations for her coronation pageant, the Queen ordering her master of the revels to provide costumes for the City's pageant. Another (1983) argues for the importance of Gilbert Dugdale's eyewitness account of the extravagant pageant staged by London for James I's official entry into the City. A third, a new essay well illustrated with reproductions of the original engravings, argues that Stephen Harrison, the architect and builder of the triumphal arches constructed for that entry; was the first architectural purveyor of the Renaissance style in England. Here Bergeron's stimulus is twofold, those who see Inigo Jones as single-handed in his later intr oduction of the new style from the Continent and those who, looking only toward Whitehall and the royal masques, would deny the importance of civic pageantry in the culture of England.

The earliest essay here, published in 1974-75, skeptically confronts the evidence that has been advanced for the date of Shakespeare's Richard II: does Edward Hoby's letter to Robert Cecil in fact tell us anything about when the play was composed, and is the lack of the deposition scene in the early quartos really evidence of censorship? Two essays concern patronage, one (from 1988) arguing that Thomas Heywood's dependence, in the 1630s, on the patronage of aristocrats and citizens as well as of London guilds should make us question whether paying audiences really replaced traditional sources of income for dramatists. Another (1981) surveys the role of 14 women in the patronage of drama.

Two essays center on James I's unhappy marriage to his queen, Anne of Denmark. One (1992) argues that Francis Bacon's Henry VII created a fiction of Henry's lack of regard for his queen, Elizabeth, to compliment James's notorious neglect of his own queen and thereby win a return to royal favor. The second (1995) suggests that a hundred years of masculinist bias have produced a view of Anne as frivolous and extravagant, lacking a serious grasp of statecraft. Though masculine views in the seventeenth century were sympathetic, it is not until Ethel Williams challenged later historical bias that favorable assessments of the queen's character could be developed. James himself appears to have set the stage for her treatment by historians, neglecting her even on her deathbed, then spending 10 weeks to find money for her funeral, which he didn't attend.

In two essays Bergeron considers the way nineteenth-century scholarly quarrels projected quarrels onto the subject of their scholarship, one (1996) on the alleged Middleton-Munday rivalry, which, in view of their collaboration on civic pageants, he doubts altogether. The other new essay in the volume asks whether a "War of the Theaters" actually occurred. While not the first to question whether a war was made of a skirmish, Bergeron does advance an interesting argument about the way early nineteenth-century scholars first concocted the idea, then furthered it in their own quarreling. He concludes that "skepticism must govern our approach to how earlier scholars understood the evidence of a war and how they constructed a narrative to fit it" (145).