Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean. 1998. The Queen's Men and their Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 253 pp. ISBN 0-521-59427-8. £40.

  1. The title of this book is plain, but its text is quite unexpectedly colourful. McMillin and MacLean, with generous help from the REED volumes, have assembled enough material to compile a drily definitive biography of the twenty-year life (1583-1603) of the Queen's Men, and then, with delightful perversity, written an enterprising and contentious one instead. The facts are here, but the whole emphasis of this lucidly argued volume is on the interpretation of those facts, an interpretation that reaches out, at times, towards the polemical. It is a development of the suggestion the authors make in the first paragraph of their Preface, 'that a new approach to Elizabethan drama can be opened by centring on the acting companies instead of the playwrights'. In broad terms, the story they go on to tell is this.

  2. Early in the politically troubled 1580s, it occurred to Walsingham that, despite his own dislike of the theatre, he might serve the interests of his Queen by assembling in her name a company of star players to tour the country with a repertoire of loyal plays. Such a company, he hoped, might be a single stone to kill many dangerous birds:

    1) By extracting from the emergent professional companies their leading players, the Queen's Men might trim the sails of these ambitious groups. (Court and city, the authors argue, were not so far apart on the dangerousness of theatre as has been conventionally argued.)

    2) With the authority of the Queen's name smoothing their passage through the shires, the company would be well placed to report provincial deviations from political or religious (were they different?) rectitude. (Walsingham's ambassadors were rarely innocent of espionage.)

    3) By representing, implicitly or explicitly, the virtues of a broadbottomed Protestantism, the Queen's Men would be simultaneously exposing the evils of Catholicism and the schismatic impulses of the radical Protestants. (The authors argue that Leicester, despite his radical tendencies, was Walsingham's ally even in this aspect of the enterprise. Hence his willingness to have his own company of players disrupted.)

  3. It may be that this retrospect allows to Walsingham a vision of cultural history that his biographers have denied him, but McMillin and MacLean are surely correct in proposing a larger political objective behind the formation of the Queen's Men than Elizabeth's desire to keep up with the courtly Joneses. It was, they claim, in pursuit of such an objective that the company became the popularisers of plays about English history. Because the Queen's Men lost favour in London, and at the Queen's own court, after 1592, London-centred theatre historians have assumed that their decline was as rapid as their rise. But that is quite false. As REED researches are revealing, they remained the leading touring company, often sub-divided to extend their regional range, until Elizabeth's death in 1603. There were, to be sure, ups and downs. They came off badly in the Marprelate controversy; but in 1589, when their anti-Martinist fingers were severely burned in London, they travelled to Ireland and Scotland in the Queen's name. And they sustained a popular repertoire of plays, of which clowns and clowning were a feature, in open opposition to the Marlovian blank-verse revolution, during the period that witnessed the London duopoly of the Chamberlain's and Admiral's Men. Against the poetic sophistication of the London companies, the Queen's Men operated under the slogans of plainness and truth. The surviving nine plays (the authors scrupulously confine their analysis to the only plays that they can confidently place with the company) may lack the literary quality of the best Elizabethan drama, but there is no evidence that they lacked popular appeal. McMillin characterises them as 'literalist' because, without ambiguity or disguise, they employ language and theatrical effects simply to reinforce the dramatic narrative. They are, he believes, straightforward playhouse texts, comparatively ill-served by publication, and destined, therefore, to lose out during the 1590s when plays were more regularly prepared for publication.

  4. This account of the book's narrative neglects the detailed study of known playing places in the provinces and the detailed analysis of the nine texts. It is typical of the authors' readiness to dispute that they reject the 'bad quarto' view of The Troublesome Reign and The Famous Victories, preferring to present them as accurate expressions of the Queen's Men's performance style - evidence of a dramaturgy ('meant to be seen rather than read', (169) distinct from the dramaturgy established during the 1590s by Marlowe, Shakespeare and others. They are prepared to argue about the size of the companies on the evidence of the texts, and to mount a claim for playhouse dictation as a likely provenance for the published versions of plays, particularly when those plays were being cut down for performance by reduced companies. McMillin and MacLean employ the authorial 'we', and its aura of consensus, with some subtlety, and they are not afraid of humour. (There is a nicely slipped in couplet during the discussion of the delivery of fourteeners in Clyomon and Clamydes 'when one knight crosses the stage, some point of honour to pursue, the knight for whom he searches will be found within a minute or two' [150], and the comment on the ascription of Selimus to Thomas Goffe, who was about four when the text was published, is 'It seems unlikely he wrote it' [95].)

  5. I cannot say fairer of the book than this: it was needed, it has exceeded expectation, it is, quite simply, very good.
PETER THOMSON
UNIVERSITY OF EXETER
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