1. In the last two decades much work in Renaissance studies has been historically inflected. More recently critics have begun to return to the methods that characterise the 'old' historicism while retaining some of the insights afforded by the theoretical perspective of the 'new'. Indicative of this kind of approach is Curtis Perry's The Making of Jacobean Culture which, through a series of case studies, offers an impressively broad and varied examination of the fashioning of James's image in the literature of the period.

2. Despite Perry's intention to 'put historicist literary criticism back into dialogue with traditional historical narrative' (6) his book, like many new studies, bears some of new historicism's residual hallmarks particularly in its focus on the monarch. Many of the early new historicist texts were rightly criticised for their near obsession with and occasional glorification of power and the tendency to concentrate on the monarch as the centre of meaning. Perry is cautious about such claims, emphasising the different audiences and interest writers envisaged for their texts, though ultimately he creates the impression that the literary period we describe as the Jacobean has at its very centre the man it derives its name from.

3. Perry's book sets itself the ambitious task of interrogating ideas about what constitutes the Jacobean as a literary period. All period concepts are inevitably simplifying and problematic and are, in part, fashioned from and defined against what preceded them. Perry holds this to be true of the Jacobean period, observing that it is a 'critical commonplace to note marked differences between the cultural artifacts surrounding Queen Elizabeth and those produced under her successor'. (1) This transition is something which Jonathan Goldberg touches on in James I and the Politics of Literature, especially in the opening chapter which considers James's reported reaction to the allusion to his mother in Book Five of the Faerie Queene and later in his juxtaposition of James's public performance with that of his predecessor. Whereas Goldberg is interested in 'the symbolic of power, the contrasting discourses in which the affirmed themselves' (Goldberg 1983, 28), Perry is concerned with 'the process by which the transition from Elizabethan culture to the recognizably Jacobean' (1) occurs.

4. His study proceeds from this initial point to explore how writers responded to the change at the top and the accompanying shift in representational strategies this necessitated. Perry contends that the 'circulation of the king's public image was at every point mediated by its intersection with the expectations and habits naturalized under Elizabeth, and that these in turn brought with them assumptions about courtly performance, literary decorum, and the behaviour of kings' (1). Perry is, therefore, not simply concerned with stylistic variation but with the 'series of negotiation between Elizabethan expectation and Jacobean reality' (2) in a wide variety of texts from the first decade of James's reign. Enforcing such a restrictive chronological frame may give Perry's book its considerable focus but it precludes attention to the potential changes the production and reception of the king's image underwent in later years.

5. The use of that buzz-word of Renaissance studies, 'negotiation', immediately informs us of Perry's credentials. He adopts this model of cultural interaction because it allows for agency and therefore genuine opposition to the dominant order. Perry's emphasis on 'negotiation' is important for his rejection of Goldberg's 'top-down' containment analysis. In place of Goldberg's vision of the Jacobean period as a homogenous cultural system dominated by an absolutist James, Perry notes how contradictory versions of the king coexisted with more flattering views as hi image was constructed, contested and circulated. Consequently, whereas Goldberg describes a univocal Jacobean culture, Perry finds it to be polyphonic, insisting that 'James did not have – could not have had – full control over the received meanings of his own public image' (7).

6. Perry does not, however, deny the influence James exerted over that image and in Part One, 'Negotiation in Genre and decorum', he examines how James's public and literary performance impinged upon literary genres and fashions in the early years of the reign. The phenomenon of the poet-king complicated the reciprocal relationship between the poet and monarch and Perry traces the response to this new problem of royal address and the impact it had on Jacobean epideictic verse. From here the study moves to a different kind of influence: Elizabethan literary practice. This is dealt with initially in the analysis of how Jacobean writers adopted the pastoral, a distinctly Elizabethan genre.

7. Perry returns to the Elizabethan theme in the last part of his book, 'Structures of Feeling', which in its examination of the 'politics of nostalgia' (153) considers how the legacy of Elizabeth functioned initially as a 'mine of discursive resources for the glorification of the English throne and (by extension) of its new occupant' (155) but eventually as the catalyst for the expression of 'emergent dissatisfaction with James' (187).

8. Most of the texts discussed in The Making of Jacobean Culture are found to operate on a similar level: simultaneously celebratory and admonitory, staging authority but exposing its limitations. Perry's treatment of Sejanus, in a strong section on Jonson, Shakespeare, Marston and other dramatists, is symptomatic of this. Reading the play as Jonson's intervention in a perceived 'crisis of counsel' (105) Perry eschews a rigorous topical analysis in his desire to stress its 'admonitory tone' (105). As an exercise in 'self-advertisement' (104) the play, Perry argues, is asking the king to recognise that by accepting Jonson's 'good counsel' (106) he will avert a similar crisis to the one faced by Tiberius. Perry does not, however, elaborate on this analogy, glossing over the play's dramatisation of censorship in the scene where Cordus is questioned about his writings. Perry suggests that Cordus's arguments about the vulnerability of history to appropriation signifies the 'uselessness of suppression' (104). But if historical writing is, as Cordus maintains, so open to misinterpretation then surely it is more likely to promote a dangerous topicality which must in turn intensify the need for control. The scene closes with an order instructing the historian's books to be burnt. Perry underestimates the significance of this scene just as he too willingly accepts arguments for lenient censorship in the Jacobean period. The Privy Council's reaction to Sejanus and the censorship of plays like The Second Maiden's Tragedy indicates that Perry may be overemphasising the freedom playwrights possessed.

9. In his effort to contest some of the crucial assumptions about the interplay between power, authority and literature prevalent in recent criticism and in his eagerness to challenge Goldberg's thesis, Perry finds all texts to be equivocal. Texts do inevitably serve competing interests and ideologies but Perry is inclined to exaggerate this in his desire to locate resistance.

10. This becomes particularly evident in the fine Epilogue which focuses on Bartholomew Fair as a way of synthesising the principal arguments and intentions of the book. As a play that dramatises the complex relationship between authority and a subject's action Bartholomew Fair is a crucial text for Perry and he reads it as a microcosm of James's realm, not merely is its geographical heterogeneity but also in its social matrix. For Perry it is emblematic of Jacobean culture where order and disorder, obedience and disobedience coexist; it is also a culture that has no place for the madman Trouble-all who constantly demands all actions to be warranted. For some critics he represents the fantasy of total obedience and Perry even observes that Goldberg 'seems to describe some of James's actual subjects as Trouble-alls' (223). In Perry's interpretation of Jacobean culture, however, there is no place for such subjects because, as he maintains, they are ultimately 'a parody of the kind of impossibly docile subject posited by the absolutist rhetoric of supervision' (223). Indeed, Perry appears so intent on discovering ambiguity and recalcitrance in texts that his analysis becomes almost as totalising as the subversion-containment model of social interaction that he seeks to transcend.

11. Despite this, Perry's study demands that we re-evaluate this period. Mapping the circulation of James's image within and against Elizabethan precedence, it challenges assumptions about the king and the culture he shaped and was shaped by. Providing a multifaceted version of James, The Making of Jacobean Culture should enable us to revise our conceptions of the period we call the Jacobean.

STEPHEN O'NEILL
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN