The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade.

John Guy, ed. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xiv + 314 pp. $54.95. ISBN: 0-521-44341-5.

John Guy introduces this collection of thirteen essays by defining its organizing principle, the study of Elizabeth's "second reign" from c. 15851603. Here, as at the Folger Workshop on this topic in 1991, Guy argues that turnover in court personnel, radical changes in the distribution of royal patronage, and prosecution of the offensive war against Spain differentiate the Queen's last years from the first half of her reign. Most of the following essays illustrate rather than argue this thesis, although analysis of the role of factions in court politics (and especially their effect on patronage) unifies much of the collection in a minor key.

Simon Adams's essay on "The Patronage of the Crown" traces the history of Tudor royal patronage culminating in the Elizabethan shift from the "royal affinity," or rewards derived from the sovereign's own estate, to rewards financed by the commonwealth in such forms as export concessions and monopolies. Natalie Mears questions the existence of a "regnum cecilianum," asserting that Sir Robert Cecil's rise to power occurred only gradually during the 1590s as he exploited the Earl of Essex's absences and errors. Paul E.J. Hammer's study of Essex's career concludes that the latter-day factionalism at Elizabeth's court might have been largely avoided had the earl responded more positively to overtures from Lord Burghley and his son to work together in harmony. Instead, Essex championed an interventionist foreign policy inimical to the Queen and the dominant majority of her Council.

Linda Levy Peck returns to the patronage question with a Stone-esque statistical analysis of the plight of the peerage under Elizabeth. She demonstrates in detail that the Queen neglected their claims to office and reward in virtually every area except Garter appointments. Hiram Morgan's analysis of "The Fall of Sir John Perrot" concerns faction insofar as Morgan finds Burghley to blame for Perrot's treason conviction in 1592, the result of the Lord Treasurer's efforts to protect his own client, Sir William Fitzwilliam.

The next three chapters address ecclesiastical issues astutely, but with ever-diminishing emphasis on the court or Elizabethan culture. In chapter six, John Guy studies the prosecution of the deprived minister Robert Cawdrey to show how Archbishop Whitgift championed the Queen's "imperial," theocratic power despite contradictions with civil law, canon law, and Magna Carta. Next, Patrick Collinson suggests that the published responses to Martin Marprelate did more to spawn the stock Puritan of the popular stage and ballads than did the actual practitioners of this ill-defined movement. In chapter eight, Jenny Wormald contends that Richard Bancroft's attacks on the Scottish Presbyterians, far from ingratiating him with King James, ran afoul of the king's efforts to deal with his opponents in the kirk.

Jim Sharpe's analysis of late-Elizabethan economic conditions pairs years of faulty harvests with suspiciously corresponding upsurges in crime and capital punishment. The war with Spain and population growth likewise added to the destabilizing tendencies toward the end of the reign. This chapter might well have opened the book, given the overall context it provides for the other essays. Richard C. McCoy argues that court culture can shed light on court politics as illustrated in the courtly entertainments written by Francis Davison, including his poetic anthology, the 1602 Poetical Rhapsody. Alistair Fox assembles the evidence for an overall decline in literary patronage toward the end of Elizabeth's reign, including a handy summary of printed books dedicated to the Queen and her principal courtier-patrons from 1590 to 1603. Marie Axton sees in Thomas Nashe's Summer's Last Will and Testament the allegorization of fears that the anticipated Scottish succession to Elizabeth's rule would complete the suppression of seasonal festivities so vigorously prosecuted by the Elizabethan bishops. In "The Theatre and the Court in the 1590s," Fritz Levy uses the Earl of Essex's career to explore the irony of a courtier who played real-life roles before the Queen only to be played himself, posthumously and analogically, before the nation in Jonson's Sejanus and the plays of Chapman and Daniel, among others.

STEVEN W. MAY Georgetown College