Renaissance Forum: Volume 6, Number 2, Winter 2003: Martin Bainton

Martin Wiggins. 2000. Shakespeare and the Drama of His Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 149 pp. ISBN 0-19-871161-1. Ł25 (hb) / 0-19-871160-3. Ł12.99 (pb).

This short, incisive book comes as part of the OUP's acclaimed Oxford Shakespeare Topics series. Covering a broad range of works, Wiggins demonstrates how Shakespeare's plays are interrelated with those of fellow dramatists before, during and after his time. In an approximately chronological narrative, Wiggins traces the development of English drama and specific innovations to which Shakespeare responded. As such, it can be recommended alongside something like Julia Briggs's This Stage Play World to students who are interested in the cultural context of Shakespeare's dramaturgy. While being accessible and attractive to such readers – in modernizing all spellings, for instance – the book does not underestimate them. So Wiggins's discussion of generic and thematic continuities in the drama sandwiches references to Shakespearean drama unobtrusively between ones to other writers, not least because it assumes the kind of ready – but not forensic – familiarity with Shakespeare's plays which one could expect of an undergraduate or seasoned playgoer.
This may make the book seem of relatively little immediate concern for those who are more familiar with this narrative and these contexts (although Wiggins digs up enough satisfyingly obscure material to keep older hands engaged). However, this book is not merely a 'primer', it is also a thesis. The argument is a familiar one, though rarely so elegantly argued as it is here: it is that the singularity of Shakespeare in his own time has been overstated, and it does a lot of harm to our understanding of English Renaissance theatre to give him too much credit as an 'originator'. Wiggins argues that compared to his best contemporaries (Chapman, Marston, Marlowe, Jonson) Shakespeare is less an innovator than a developer of the theatrical vocabulary. The book therefore serves as a particularly precise and eloquent counterargument against bardolatry: his final conclusion suggests that, while Shakespeare's impact on his contemporaries and immediate successors is both impressive and undeniable, it was not necessarily benign – and arguably owed as much to his powerful role in the politics of the London theatre as to his artistic gifts.
Further, Wiggins makes critical points that refresh our understanding of crucial developments while being tethered to a solid narrative mercifully uncluttered by theoretical controversies. For instance, his chapter on tragicomedy challenges the disdainful attitude taken to the genre in traditional narratives. Far from being a genre where the emotional authenticity of tragedy is debased by ludicrous 'unmaskings' and catchpenny conservatism, tragicomedy, for Wiggins, most obviously displays the dramatist's skill in managing the inevitable discontinuities of tone and action.
Wiggins's use of non-dramatic primary sources is also exemplary: his opening chapter on the pre-Shakespearean professional theatre is sardonically bookended by the febrile anti-theatrical writings of Stephen Gosson, while his 'Afterword' bravely suggests that Robert Greene's deathbed whinge about Shakespeare's lack of originality (in Greenes Groats-worth of witte) later turned out to have a grain of truth in it. Elsewhere, he breaks off his genre-by-genre account with an illuminating chapter called 'How to Write a Play', which provides a brisk survey of the formal features of Elizabethan-Jacobean drama; the role of rhetoric, the configuration of character, the creation of illusion and so on. It also answers the kind of questions one inevitably hears from students about some of the confusing inconsistencies of plays from this era. It serves as an appropriate introduction to the chapter on tragicomedy that follows.
Wiggins points the way to complex interpretations of plays, and indeed of the development of early modern theatre – having provided, rather ironically, a fairly solid and clear narrative of that development in this book. Perhaps it is a gracious, if tacit, acknowledgement that a book of this size, on this subject and for this target audience can only really be a 'sketch' – or an introduction. Concise, contentious, and elegantly written, Wiggins' book is as good an introduction to Shakespeare's artistic context – and to intelligent critical practice – as could be wished.

MARTIN BAINTON
UNIVERSITY OF HULL