The Queen's Men and their Plays.

Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean. The Queen's Men and their Plays.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xvii + 13 pls. + 253 pp. $59.95. ISBN: 0-521-59427-8.

Steve Sohmer. Shakespeare's Mystery Play: The opening of the Globe theatre 1599.

Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999. xii + 292 pp. $59.95. ISBN: 0-7190-5544-X.

Here are two thoroughly researched studies of late Elizabethan theater. Both work from lengthy time spent in archives and old documents to novel and striking interpretations, informed by that research, of works of theater and drama. Working largely through the Records of Early English Drama at the University of Toronto, Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean construct a history of the performances and legacy of the Queen's Men, the company that dominated the professional English stages of the 1580s. Steve Sohmer, on the other hand, uses a vast array of information to illuminate the performance of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar that, he claims, opened the newly-built Globe Theatre in 1599.

McMillin and MacLean trace the beginnings of the Queen's Men in 1583 to the agenda of national consolidation of Sir Francis Walsingham, who assembled the "all-star" company in an attempt to appropriate and take control over the public theater in the name and service of the Queen's central government and its ideological concerns. Walsingham's motivations in this regard explain the importance of English history plays in the company's repertoire and also the prominence of touring the country in the company's activities (touring also being a product of Walsingham's use of the company as a cell in his extensive secret service and intelligence gathering apparatus). The authors also provide detailed investigations of the company's actors -- most notably the clown Richard Tarlton -- and playwrights, including Richard Greene and Robert Wilson. They also explore the dramaturgy of the plays of the Queen's Men, which included The Famous Victories of Henry V, The Old Wives Tale, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and Three Lo rds and Three Ladies of London: the "medley" of different genres in one play; the emblematic characterization and staging; the narrative "overdetermination"; and the preponderance of verse forms other than the blank verse that was to come to dominate the stage.

McMillin and MacLean end with a chapter on the relations of the Queen's Men to Marlowe and Shakespeare. They see the Queen's Men as undertaking an "anti-Marlowe campaign" in a war which they were ultimately to lose -- with Marlowe and Marlowe's plays standing for all the scepticism and iconoclasm the Queen's Men were incorporated to combat. Shakespeare, on the other hand, who might have begun his career with the Queen's Men, went about appropriating and transmuting the plays of the company: four of their nine extant plays were turned into six of Shakespeare's plays. That the authors end with Marlowe and Shakespeare shows where the interest in the Queen's Men will lie for the majority of readers: as precursors of the more renowned theater that was to follow. However, McMillin and MacLean have also supplied another valuable and detailed piece in its own right of our ongoing history of early English drama.

Sohmer's Shakespeare's Mystery Play is rich in esoteric research and arcane knowledge, and loaded with appendices. Sohmer argues that, among possible candidates, Julius Caesar was the play that opened the Globe theater; that, among possible dates, the Globe was opened on June 12, 1599, by the Julian calendar; that both the play and the date are significant; and that calendrical, astrological, and religious details of the period clarify and fix many aspects of the play's interpretation. In general, these details tend to render Shakespeare's play an apology for Caesar and a condemnation of Brutus and his republican conspiracy.

It is hard to find general fault with the breadth and density of Sohmer's research. One is much more troubled by the assumptions and conclusions of his methodology. According to Sohmer, only the "rare mind which combines the bona fides of Shakespearian, Latinist, classical historian, astronomer, astrologer and biblical scholar" (184) can understand Julius Caesar, since the play presents not only "a superficial, exoteric narrative with a minimum of puzzling cruces," but, more importantly it would seem, "a secondary meaning which has become impenetrable to modern audiences who do not live by the church and its calendar, and do not read the Bible" (185). Most people, therefore, even experts in the field, are incapable of reading Shakespeare properly. His work becomes the purview of very rare minds indeed. Moreover, Sohmer's Shakespeare produces work with very little play of meaning. He rejects the idea that the play is open to multiple interpretations, a view which renders the play "opaque" (185), and argues th at his own reading gets at "the heart of Shakespeaxe,s Julius Caesar." But there is nothing opaque about multiple interpretations; rather, it is the density and hieratic allusion of Sohmer's reading which renders the play opaque. Shakespeare's work becomes a highly involved puzzle accessible only to a handful of experts in its period-based arcana -- Shakespeare of an age and not for all time. Whether or nor Sohmer's position is right, it is hardly one for the rest of us to savor. Finally, Sohmer's book itself is rendered somewhat opaque not only by the density of its references but also by its lack of a clear sense of organization and development.

In his polemic, Sohmer points to the specialization of Shakespearians which defines not only a competency but also limitations. In these two books, The Queen's Men and their Plays and Shakespeare's Mystery Play, we see impressively displayed the competency of highly historicized and archival research, as well as, especially and strikingly in the book by Sohmer, who forecloses on a constructive partnership with those who study Shakespeare in a less arcane manner, the limitations of that approach.