The Elizabethan Underworld.

Peter Thomson's Shakespeare's Professional Career follows the playwright's life chronologically from his childhood and youth in Stratford-upon-Avon to his death in the same Warwickshire market town. The story is an attractive recapitulation of information and speculation about Shakespeare with the intended focus being his professional life as an actor and writer of plays. As such, the narrative avoids the political agenda so commonly encountered among New Historicist critics, though the milieu that is revealed is one filled with religious and social tensions.

In the initial chapter, there is an attempt to visualize the life of Stratford with its endemic poverty, its infant mortality, and its dominance by a ruling oligarchy, of which the future playwright's father, John Shakespeare, was a prominent member. When, however, Thomson turns to the potential contact between the young William Shakespeare and plays or players, the account becomes unnecessarily vague. He mentions (without documentation or reference to the printed town records in his bibliography) his father's role in hosting prominent acting companies in 1569 and also notes the visits of other companies to Stratford in 1573 and 1575. Additionally, he comments on the proximity of Kenilworth where in 1575 the queen was a guest of Leicester, who sponsored an entertainment that, it is suggested, might have influenced Oberon's lines in A Midsummer Night's Dream II.i. 148-54. The Whitsun Pastime, games supported in part by the Corporation of Stratford in 1583 (again undocumented by Thomson), are said to be reflected in the "Whitsun pastorals" of The Winter's Tale. The probability that Shakespeare was familiar with the Hock Tuesday play and the Corpus Christi plays at Coventry is not given any specific analysis in spite of the detailed knowledge that the playwright possessed concerning the practices involved in such amateur productions - knowledge reflected in the playlet of the "rude mechanicals" in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Much new information has recently come to light about the English traveling companies that toured the English countryside and about their routes. Such traveling companies often appeared in the towns and cities of the Midlands, and hence there would have been numerous opportunities for Shakespeare to encounter and learn the actor's craft. While Thomson mentions the Records of Early English Drama project which is collecting and publishing the dramatic records for the nation, he unaccountably makes no use of its resources. For the "lost years" he leans very heavily on the interesting speculations of E. A. J. Honigmann concerning Shakespeare's Roman Catholic connections stemming from his family (an argument surely complicated by the role, unmentioned by Thomson, of his father in the Protestantizing iconoclasm effected in the Stratford Guild Chapel early in 1564) and the Stratford grammar school which he presumably attended. There is still considerable doubt about the troupe or troupes with which Shakespeare was at first associated, and, granted that he may have retained Roman Catholic sympathies (in spite of the Protestant propaganda that appears in his early plays), we must note that Warwickshire had its share of Catholic households for which the accounts have not yet been fully searched - households where he might have served as a schoolmaster and come into contact with players. A priest hole is to be seen to this day at the Throckmorton family's Coughton Court, which was a hiding place for Father Garnet, accused of involvement in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 - treason reflected with revulsion in Macbeth, written when King James was benefiting from a surge of untypical popularity upon which Shakespeare was not unwilling to capitalize.

Since Shakespeare's playwriting was undertaken for the London companies, Thomson is able to survey his career in the context of the professional theater of the time in the national capital. The recent excavations on the south bank of the Thames which have discovered the foundations of the Rose and the Globe have provided much new information concerning the playhouses but have also teased us with the incompleteness of the evidence. With regard to his view of the proficiency of the actors in the best companies, I am convinced that Thomson is unfair; a different and stylized type of acting would not necessarily have been inferior to what sometimes passes for quality on today's stage.

The illustrations in Thomson's book are in many instances well chosen, but unfortunately in some cases (as in the reproduction of a Victorian painting of the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots on p. 21) represent the kind of choice with which we are familiar in coffee-table books.

The Elizabethan Underworld, reprinted with additional illustrations from the edition of 1977, is an impressionistic survey of marginal activities among the inhabitants of Britain in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Drawing on contemporary fiction as well as factual accounts and secondary sources, Gamini Salgado presents an entertaining picture of the disorder which was believed to threaten the stability of the realm. While his unfootnoted account is often influenced by the highly colored reportage of such Elizabethans as Robert Greene and is frequently based on secondary sources such as E. J. Burford's The Orrible Synne, he does succeed at times in evoking the spirit of a time when justice could be spotty and law enforcement by the secular authorities sporadic at best.

Salgado's survey ranges over such subjects as London low-life, the dangers of highway robbery and pickpockets, the arbitrariness of justice, and the terrors of incarceration, and he also discusses such marginal activities as alchemy, witchcraft, and astrology. It is important, however, to add the qualification that in the traditional society of the time the strong disapproval of one's neighbors and the judgment of the ecclesiastical courts both served to restrain behavior. We must not believe, for example, that sexual license, however much it was practiced by Simon Forman as revealed in his diary, was typical of the time, for we have the evidence of illegitimacy statistics that show remarkable restraint during a period when modern methods of birth control were not yet available. As Peter Laslett has reminded us, "it also looks as if it may be difficult to demonstrate that the wicked, worldly city of London, the despair of the earnest preachers, was, along with the other English towns, more given to sexual irregularity than the countryside" (The World We Have Lost, 2nd ed. [1973], 144).

Nevertheless, Salgado's narrative reveals how ordinary citizens and members of the aristocracy frequently did come into contact with marginal behavior and also how they engaged in acts of which the dominant society disapproved. For example, the connection between the theater and the bawdy house, insisted upon by Puritan divines, was not necessarily farfetched. That Philip Henslowe not only was owner of the Rose Theater but also had investments in property used for prostitution is less often remembered than the fact that the houses in which the prostitutes worked were under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Winchester - hence the appellation "Winchester goose" to designate a whore, as noted in the useful glossary of cant and underworld terms appended at the end of Salgado's book.

Unfortunately, though the woodcuts and other illustrations in this book are chosen with care for the presentation of the iconography of marginal behavior, they are inadequately identified. In most cases only the name of the library granting permission is revealed, and this surely is a disservice.

Clifford Davidson WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY