The Elizabethan Theatre V. by G. R. HibbardReview by: Frank R. AndolinoThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Apr., 1977), pp. 123-124Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2540143 .

Accessed: 10/06/2014 03:47

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

The Sixteenth Century Journal is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TheSixteenth Century Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.45 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 03:47:24 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Book Reviews 123

The Elizabethan Theatre V. G. R. Hibbard, ed. Hamden, Conn.: The Shoe String Press, 1975. xvii + 158 pp. $10.00.

Seven of the eight essays in this book were originally delivered at the Fifth Inter- national Conference on Elizabethan Theatre, held at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, from July 23 to 28. About half of them are concerned with theatrical matters before 1576 while the other half trace the effects of these traditions on the works of Kyd, Lyly, Marlowe, and Peele. The collection is ordered logically as well as chronologically with the essays generally forming complementary pairs, so that a comprehensive view is followed immediately by a closer and more detailed analysis of specific issues.

In "Discontinuity in Medieval Acting Traditions" David Bevington provides impor- tant insight into the oft-revised process of development from liturgical to secular plays. In countering Glynn Wickham's thesis that the transition from Latin to cycle plays was gradual and involved the slow replacement of clerical actors by secular ones, Bevington establishes two major discontinuities - significant breaks with the past - between the Latin plays and the cycles and between the latter and the moralities. He attributes these breaks to a change in the acting traditions, including not only styles of acting, but also professional matters of organization and employment. Bevington believes that the devel- opment of a secular drama was stymied by timidity over the continuation of clerical acting, and hence it was not until the craft guilds of the 14th century took over the acting chores that the cycle plays were established. The second discontinuity occurred when the introduction of professional touring enabled the more flexible moralities to replace the Corpus Christi plays.

In the second article, "To find the players and all that longeth therto," R. W. Ingram attempts to answer Bevington's questions about the characteristics of the guild actors with a carefully detailed and documented treatment of The Company and Fellow- ship of Coppers and Feltmakers. He reproduces extensive lists of their expenses for dramatic properties which reveal the nature of their organization and productions, and he also discusses the ubiquitous master dramatic craftsman and playwright Robert Crown, whose sporadic and variegated career leads Ingram to conclude that there were two Robert Crowns.

The remainder of the essays are concerned in one way or the other with the relationship of staging techniques to other play elements including dramatic action, dialogue, and themes. In an article adapted from his recent book, The Staging of Plays before Shakespeare, Richard Southern details the effect on the Interludes of the introduc- tion of a "scaffold," a small rostrum about one foot high, placed before the center of one of the three screens in a Tudor hall and between the two 'doors' by which the players entered the acting area of the hall floor. With the appearance of a "stage," the audience was prepared for a dramatic action, and hence the Interludes, which were based on the idea of spontaneous action, lost their reason for being.

J. A. B. Somerset's "Fair is Foul and Foul is Fair .. ." traces the development of the Vice figure in the early period of the morality play between c. 1480 and 1540. Somerset's primary critical thesis involves the duplicitous nature of the standard vice comedy scenes. Arguing convincingly that the humor is not intended solely as comic relief, he shows that the power of evil is expressed by its ability to lure the hero into sin through the attraction of laughter and frivolity. Moreover, as the moralities became more interested in the psychological nature of the sinner's fall, they began to concentrate on the particular vice to which he was susceptible, and this innovation, along with the necessities created by small casts, caused the earlier vice group to be reduced in size and importance.

T. W. Craik and D. T. Rowan follow with some putative reconstructions of confus- ing or enigmatic scenes in Marlowe, Peele, and Kyd. For example, in IV.iii.11-13 of The Spanish Tragedy, when Hieronimo tells the King to throw the keys down, both scholars

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.45 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 03:47:24 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

124 The Sixteenth Century Journal

disagree with Philip Edwards by maintaining that the courtly audience to the scheduled marriage playlet is to be considered sitting above the stage in a locked gallery as the means of indicating their helplessness.

Finally, both Peter Saccio and Inga-Stina Ewbank provide well-argued treatments of the unity of staging, theme, action, and dialogue in the plays of Lyly and Peele, respectively. Saccio describes how the dream-like quality of Endimion makes it difficult for the critic to place it within the standard classification of Lyly's dramatic works and also how this quality is reflected in the undefined settings and the allegorical nature of the action. Ewbank points to the ceremonial and spectacular qualities of Peele's dramas, which are created by the coordination of the scene with the dialogue. Often the dialogue directs the audience to see the stage action as a spectacle devised for its viewing and interpretation, and in this way Peele creates a deeply satisfying sense of theatricality.

The value of this collection lies in its presentation of engaging and engaged views of the many complexities of the Elizabethan dramatic heritage and practice. The essays are less rigorously ordered and substantiated than standard journal articles and as such they pose more questions than they solve. But in scope of conjecture and deftness of interpretation they offer an excellent opportunity to gain a comprehensive view of recent theatrical scholarship and dramatic criticism. Frank R. Andolino Riverside, Cal.

The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe. Theodore K. Rabb. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. xvi + 171 pp. Theodore K. Rabb has attained one of the scholar's most elusive goals by writing a

book that is intelligent, readable, and short. It is an "essay," written "for students above all, but also for specialists. . ." to examine what has been accomplished, and to see if a comprehensive assessment is now possible of what has come to be known to post-World War II scholarship as "the general crisis of the seventeenth century." What makes this book so good is that it arose directly from the author's attempts to make the history and the historiography of Early Modern Europe intelligible to his students and his colleagues, an origin that gives the book a vitality and engaging directness that are rare enough in historical writing.

Rabb accepts the hypothesis of a European crisis between the early 1630s and the early 1670s, which saw "a change in direction more dramatic and decisive than any that occurred in a forty-year period between the beginnings of the Reformation and the French Revolution." The change was a "crisis" in that it was short-lived, distinct, and represented a worsening of pre-existing conditions followed by "resolution," and it was "general" in that the crisis extended itself to "almost all fields of human endeavor." The crisis was not so much a genuine change in the objective conditions of European life (indeed, Rabb admits that demographic, economic, and other social trends cannot be tailored to his periodization) as in sensibility and perception, as Europe moved from skepticism, unrest, striving, and doubt (all characteristic of the era which began about 1500) to a new calmness, confidence, a sense of order, and a feeling that things were under control - a liquidation, in other words, of the mental heritage of the Reformation (seen by Rabb under the rubric of a general "cultural malaise"). Rabb reviews the various sectors of human life - politics, diplomacy, social relations - but his heart clearly lies with the cultural transformation of the later 17th century, which here appears under the curious title, "Resolution in Aesthetics." As a possible explanation for these changes Rabb cites the Thirty Years' War, "the revulsion against the brutal excesses" of which ushered in a change from disequilibrium, from a perception of anarchy to one of order.

This is no book for the novice; it presumes a grasp of the twenty-year-old debate over the general crisis of the seventeenth century. Rabb summarizes the debate's litera-

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.45 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 03:47:24 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions