Princes to Act: Royal Audience and Royal Performance, 1578-1792.

This book is a welcome addition to criticism on the relationship between the crown and the theater. Wikander avoids the worn out new historicist paradigm of subversion and containment, exploring instead the complex "interdependence" of monarch and actor. The book cuts across traditional national and disciplinary boundaries, including chapters on the French Kings, Louis XIV and XV, and on King Gustav III of Sweden. Elizabeth, James and Charles I's relationship to the theater is placed for the first time in a larger European context.

In a fresh reading of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Wikander notes the problems posed by the single queen for the writers of comedy whose plays inevitably present the benefits of marriage. The queen made known her distaste for pageants that suggested she should wed, most notoriously in her dismissal of Leicester's pageant at Kenilworth in 1575. Wikander finds in A Midsummer Night's Dream anxious defenses against a similar dismissal.

During the reign of James I a disturbing disjunction arises between the idealistic images presented in masques and the reality of court corruption. For example, by the time Jonson published Hymenaei, the joyful allusions to the Essex's wedding night clash with their scandal-racked marriage. Disjunction results also from the performative end. John Harrington relates with disgust how he saw the figures of Faith, Hope and Charity "sick and spewing in the lower hall" (91).

Under Charles I the King's happy marriage becomes the focus of court masque and popular drama. The convention of the King's two bodies is confused and complicated by the portrayal of the happy couple as one. The theater's emphasis on love in this era requires a double perspective on the part of the audience "which must perceive union where they also see two bodies before them" (98). The result is confusion and uncertainty.

By contrast with James and Charles, Louis XIV successfully fuses "theatrical and religious energy" (151). The French King is "an actor in the sense that an actor is an incarnation, an embodiment, playing the sacrificial role" (151). In France as well as in England antitheatricalism flourished because of fears that the theater interfered with "the audience's power to see things as they are" (150). This was particularly dangerous for the King. Corneille's Cinna, Moliere's Tartuffe, and Racine's Esther all attempt to create a positive image of the monarch which cannot be attacked for its theatricality.

Rude and obsessed with his own personal dignity, Voltaire was not able to play the part of court poet under Louis XV as successfully as Racine had under Louis XIV. Neither was he a success at the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia. After defying Louis and presuming upon Frederick's friendship, he invents his own fantasy kingdom at Ferney.

The final chapter focuses on King Gustav of Sweden, the player-king, a mild ruler, who took on roles associated with monstrous transgression and who was assassinated leaving a masked ball. Wikander rescues him from his reputation as a king lost in "a theatrical cloud cuckoo-land" by showing how Gustav's involvement with the theater has roots in the humanist tradition of princely education.

In each chapter Wikander achieves a sensitive balance between the occasional nature of the dramas he studies and their lasting influence. The result is a rich study that emphasizes the complexity of a relationship that changes with each monarch and each playwright.

Caroline McAlister SALEM COLLEGE, WINSTON-SALEM