Shakespeare, the King's Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603-1613.

In this readable and informative book, Alvin Kernan is interested in the circumstances of Shakespeare's professional employment once his acting company became, in 1603, the King's Men. They were honored with this accolade and royal patronage because by that time they were recognizably the premier acting company of the realm - owing in good part to the fact that Shakespeare was one of their number, and their leading playwright. To what extent was Shakespeare drawn by that patronage relationship into a role as playwright for the King? While he is careful to insist that Shakespeare certainly became no mere apologist for the crown, Kernan does focus on the court-oriented issues that loom large in some major plays from 1603 to 1613: the "right of due descent" (32) in Hamlet, the King's prerogative and the law in Measure for Measure, Jesuitical equivocation and royal fascination with witchcraft in Macbeth, the "theory of the absolute, unlimited authority of a king over his subjects" (93) in King Lear, corrupt styles of life and sexual power struggles at court in Antony and Cleopatra, militant values and confrontation in Coriolanus, state marriages and interest in the New World in The Tempest. Especially when Shakespeare's plays were taken to court, as they were with increasing frequency, the context of performance in Whitehall and Hampton Court becomes crucial to Kernan's attempt to "locate these plays in the social setting and the politics of the court of James I" (xi).

Kernan offers no elaborate claims of method or theoretical investigation; instead, he puts forward an attractively disarming self-portrait of one who grew up in a world of formalist reading of texts but who has since broadened his scope to see literature as profoundly involved in "the ongoing process of making culture" (xii). A born-again New Historicist or cultural materialist he is not; rather, his most recent work bears witness to a reconciling process that most of us can share, of responding to the critical revolutions of the past twenty years while still holding on to the humane breadth of view and deep involvement in the literary text that characterized the best work of mid-century scholarship. To the extent that the 1990s may be a time of consolidation and of synthesizing the perspectives of new critical approaches that understandably began their life in an agonistic mode, Kernan's book is an attractive monument to the spirit of inclusiveness and critical tolerance.

The organization and pace of this graceful book reflect the author's allegiance to dose reading in the context of political and dynastic political themes. History and cultural politics serve as the enabling mechanisms for an enriched comprehension of what is going on in each individual play. A brief and lucid chapter on "Art and Theater in the Service of the Leviathan State" serves chiefly to lay out recognizable truths about the new absolutist monarchies in Renaissance Europe, conflicts arising out of this newly centralized authority, the wish of divine-right kings to dictate the tone of national culture, the struggles of dramatists to adapt to claims of royal absolutism, the politics of patronage in relation to acting companies, difficulties about censorship, the physical conditions of acting at court, and the like. Thereafter, the book is essentially a series of discrete essays about the major plays mentioned above, each seen in its courtly political surrounding.

Kernan's analysis of Hamlet in these terms concerns the play not as it was written some time prior to the arrival of James as the new king of England in 1603, but as it was presumably seen by James's court that winter. (Hamlet is not mentioned in any court records of performance at that time, but, argues Kernan, it surely could not have been omitted.) The reading, then, is one of reception theory, not as the play might have been originally conceived in contemporary political terms. Read in this fashion, the bitter cold of the first scene proves aptly suited to the winter season at Hampton Court. The Danish setting turns out to be well chosen as a compliment to the Danish-born Queen Anne; she and James had honeymooned in Elsinore, at Kronborg. When the royal couple sat in the Great Hall, witnessing the play, they would have seen onstage, in the play-within-the-play, a mirror of their own royal status.

Under such circumstances, the play's fascination with issues of royal descent would have had a special relevance for a new king whose mother had been executed by Elizabeth and whose succession to the English throne had been anything but assured until the last moment. Such a reading of Hamlet, though uneasily resting on reception theory and thus uncertain as to what it implies, if anything, about the dramatist's own conception of his play, offers an enabling perspective on Claudius's attempts to legitimate his rule. Moreover, even though Hamlet was written too soon to have offered to James a "reprise" of the scandal surrounding James' mother Mary Stuart and the Earl of Bothwell (37), everyone knew about their conspiracy to murder Lord Darnley, James's legal father, and the whisperings that James was perhaps the son of Mary's Italian secretary, David Riccio. To think of Claudius, that "adulterate beast," as some figuration of Bothwell is to enrich the piquancy of revenge as a motive in Hamlet and to enliven our perception of what James may have seen in the play when he presumably witnessed it in 1603. Gertrude's degree of complicity becomes a matter of topical interest in relation to Mary's denial of any part in the murder and in relation to her being James's mother - the son on whom the duty of revenge was laid by the ethic of the revenge code.

Although most of this analysis is known to scholarship, the presentation by Kernan is vivid, and in such a way as to enliven a reading of the play. The other essays proceed in similar fashion. The historical material is popularized for the most part, consciously not scholarly in documentation, relying on secondary criticism, and given to truths that are sometimes approximate in their familiarity. The parallels are not always persuasive, as for example those proposed in Antony and Cleopatra between Octavius and Antony on the one hand and King James and Christian of Denmark on the other (121-22). James's carelessness with money sits oddly on the puritanical Octavius. On the whole, I found this the least successful chapter. Yet the book is one I would gladly recommend to any person wishing to capture the flavor of Shakespearean drama in an intensely political court. Especially those readers who are not conversant with Jacobean politics and with Shakespeare's place in that scene will, I expect, be struck by the extent and meaningfulness of Shakespeare's courtly connections. The plentiful illustrations help to give a graphic sense of who the great personalities of the time were, and what the spaces were like in which Shakespeare's mimetic representations of courtly intrigue were enacted.

DAVID BEVINGTON University of Chicago