Renaissance Forum: Volume 1 Number 1, March 1996: Steve Longstaffe

Alvin Kernan. 1995. Shakespeare, The King's Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603-1613. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 288 pp. 30 illus. ISBN 0-300-06181-1. $27.00 / £18.50.

Alvin Kernan's book seeks to read some of Shakespeare's Jacobean plays, particularly the tragedies, within the context of their court performances by the King's Men, and in so doing to make a case for Shakespeare as a 'patronage artist', placing his work in the 'august company and tradition' of European patronage which includes Michelangelo, Molière, Mozart, Goethe, Palladio and Monteverdi. This tradition is of course not value-neutral; to belong, it is necessary for Kernan to show 'Shakespeare' as 'a dramatic poet with most elevated style and subject matter', whose style of writing was 'high baroque, at times near mannerist'. The stimulus for this project to (re)instate Shakespeare in a canonical line of transcendent artists comes from what Kernan identifies as the New Historicist tenet that Shakespeare was 'a deliberately subversive writer'. Against this 'methodology of the arcane', Kernan sets his own 'plain interpretations' of 'the literary work functioning in its place and times'.
Unfortunately for his deployment of this bracing commonsensical justification for his own readings, Kernan appears to be confused about just what 'meaning' he is attempting to elucidate. In one place he modestly, but vaguely, offers the prospect of 'some sense of what these occasions were like'; in another, 'interpretations that have a chance of coming fairly close to what ordinary attendants at court would have heard and seen in the Great Hall of the palace'. Yet he is uninterested in the visual impact of stagings of these plays at court, and too often falls back on the assertion that as James was a king, politician, and dispenser of mercy, he would have been interested in plays featuring kings, politicians, and dispensers of mercy. So for example, James would 'surely have been interested in' the 'dramatic analysis of rule' in Hamlet (which Kernan imagines playing at court at Christmas 1603), especially given the parallels between the power struggles of his own early years and the usurpation and revenge obsessions of Shakespeare's play. But after relating James's personal history, and pointing out its similarities to the plot of Hamlet, Kernan offers nothing more than the anodyne statement that 'there was nothing in Hamlet to embarrass the king, though much to intrigue him, but perhaps as he rose from the play ... he may have allowed himself a small "Ah, weel" '. As a reading of the ways in which James's patronage of the King's Men was a condition of their plays' production and/or reception at court, this kind of conclusion is inadequate, to say the least.
Some of Kernan's readings aim at illuminating the topicality of Shakespeare's plays at court; some link their 'meaning' to more general historical processes. Thus Measure for Measure is read in the light of the topicality of the trivial legalities of marriage following the Hampton Court conference, James's liking for participating indirectly in trials (such as that of the Witches of Lothian in Scotland), and the issues raised by Raleigh's trial and imprisonment. Macbeth, uncontroversially, is linked to equivocation, and the 'cosmicisation' of the Stuart Myth (the combination of the divine right of kings and James's royal lineage). Lear is read through the new 'absolutist' conception of monarchy gaining a Europe-wide currency in the early modern period; it contains Shakespeare's 'most magisterial image of the true king'. Antony and Cleopatra offers both James as Augustus and a vindication of court luxury by its transposition of it to Egypt and refiguration as vitality and magnificence. Coriolanus locates an image of a late-medieval military baron in a world of courtiers and politicians; the play is read through the crisis of a pre-Henrician concept of aristocracy. The Tempest, again derivatively, concerns Art and Empire.
Kernan's Shakespeare is a 'radical conservative' rather than a 'crypto-subversive'. None of these plays, he argues, can have offended king or court, 'otherwise he would not have remained in favour'. In order to construct this image of a Jacobean Shakespeare, Kernan admits he has been selective: he does not discuss The Merchant of Venice (a performance repeated at James's request), The Winter's Tale (with its topical links to Arbella Stuart, played at court in November 1611), and Timon of Athens, with its portrayal of 'patronage artists'. The inclusion of these plays would substantially modify Kernan's implication that the major tragedies' often generalised topicalities are the most substantial examples of Shakespeare's radically conservative patronage art.
When Kernan does deal with the 'words on the page', he makes little effort to relate them in detail to the environment of court performance. He instead offers what are basically New Critical readings of the plays. For example, he writes of 'the forward pressure of nature in time' in Macbeth, and of the way in which the world of Antony and Cleopatra is one where 'men and nations move like the waters of the Nile, spreading "slime and ooze" out of which new crops are bred and "strange serpents" emerge in the heat of the sun'. The hyperbole of these readings sits uneasily with Kernan's bluff historicism in relating the 'plain facts' of the plays' contexts, and points to a contradiction in his project, because the kind of patronage artist Kernan considers Shakespeare to be is necessarily not reducible to the mundanities of commission, permission, control , and context. To that end, the book ends with a consideration of presentations of 'patronage' in the sonnets and some Elizabethan plays, which seeks to demonstrate that they show that Shakespeare conceived of art - and performance - as transcending its conditions of production and the understandings of its early interpreters (though not, of course, its writer). The sonnets claim the writer's independence from the patron, and his reinscription as the subject of his own verse; Hamlet demonstrates that even with such an audience as the Prince, court performance is misunderstood (because Hamlet misses The Murder of Gonzago's focus on 'the helplessness of the human will in the undertow of fate that is the lot of everyone in Elsinore').
The Shakespeare Kernan wants to present can be neither too closely working for James, nor too much the Romantic artist, and definitely not a writer with a public outside the court, or with roots in popular theatrical traditions. Kernan's account of James's court is often interesting, though his grasp of the politics of the early modern period is sometimes shaky, and the book is nicely illustrated with pictures of many of the leading court figures. But the book's accounts of individual plays, and its readings of them within this court context, are too often derivative, simplistic, or ill-argued for them to be of use to the scholar of early modern drama.

STEVE LONGSTAFFE
ST MARTIN'S COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF LANCASTER