Abstract
In a poem of 1596, that culminates in praise of the ideal image of Queen Elizabeth and her court as the perfect work of history, we see her as the moon surrounded by a thousand sparkling stars, all moving in measure about her with an orderly variety of change so deft that it baffles the observer’s eye and understanding; and when for a moment she lays aside the business of her majesty to watch the revels of her court, she sees a dance ‘so full of State, Art, and varietie’ that once again the observer’s mind is entangled and deceived.1 The dance is both a particular activity of the court and an emblem of all its activities: an emblem that transforms the multifarious alliances and ruptures of its competitive life into harmonious pattern and fills the awkward distances and lacunae of time and space with plenitude. Penelope — the observer here, gazing into a prophetic glass — is spell-bound; the sublime and benign deception of the dance satisfies both her eye and reason by transcending their powers of apprehension. It sets her mind ‘in heaunly thoughts’, a response which is presented to the reader as a paradigm: for the just observer must always be drawn in, entangled and — won away from a dangerous, critical aloofness — find his fulfilment in the pattern of the whole. As Coleridge was to argue later, the particular glory of Elizabethan England was that ‘the people …. are in order to the state, rather than that the state exists for the sake of the people’.2 To Sir John Davies writing Orchestra, the rituals of the court lay at the centre of this mystery; for it was an institution ordained by God which, if fulfilled in the performance of the queen and her courtiers, would surely fashion the conduct and character of all its observers to the harmony of political obedience.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Sir John Davies, Orchestra, or a Poem on Dancing; all quotations from sts. 122–30, in The Complete Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London, 1876) vol. 1, pp. 207–10.
S. T. Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State According to the Idea of Each (Everyman’s University Library edn., 1972) p. 51.
Stephen Greenblatt notes of this poem that ‘the landscape is more psychological than literal’. See his Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and his Roles (Yale University Press, 1973) p. 69. The Tempest, and maybe Twelfth Night, similarly picks up this commonplace image of the castaway to explore the predicament of the person cut off from access to court.
Quoted in Greenblatt, ibid., p. 20.
This Latin tag is the epigraph of Marston’s first satire. See The Poems of John Marston, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool University Press, 1961) vol. 1, p. 67.
For Marston’s Castilio, see ibid., p. 68; for Sir Annual Tilter, see Jonson’s epigram ‘To Sir Annual Tilter’, which ridicules the knight for pretending to the witty device written for him by another. Shakespeare too, of course, was involved in this lucrative business, writing an impresa for the Earl of Rutland in 1613 for the fee of forty-four shillings in gold: see Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments by Alan Young (London: George Philip, 1987) p. 72.
La Bruyère, Les Caractères ou Les Moeurs de ce siècle, ed. Robert Garapon (Editions Garnier, Paris, 1962), De la cour, 99, p. 252. ‘In a hundred years’ time the world will still exist, just as it is, the stage and the sets will be the same, but not the actors. All those who now rejoice over a favour received, or grieve and lament over one denied, will have vanished from the boards. Other men are already stepping on to the stage, who will act the same parts in the same play; they will vanish in their turn; and those who do not yet exist will some day be no more; new actors will be there in their stead. What reliance can one place on a character out of a play?’ Tr. Jean Stewart (Penguin, 1970) p. 149.
Norbert Elias, The Court Society, tr. Edmund Jephcott (Basil Blackwell, 1983) p. 88.
John Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of ‘King Lear’ (Faber and Faber, 1949) p. 18.
Quoted, as an illustration of conventional wisdom in 1586, by David Loades in The Tudor Court (B.T. Batsford Ltd., London, 1986) p. 126.
Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (New Left Books, 1974) p. 18.
For a reading of the Essex story in this light, see Mervyn James, ‘At a crossroads of the political culture: the Essex revolt, 1601’, in Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in early modern England (Cambridge University Press, 1986) pp. 416–65.
W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (Macmillan, 1969) p. 107.
See Louis Montrose, ‘Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form’, in ELH vol. 50, no. 3 (Fall, 1983) pp. 415–59, and especially its conclusion where Montrose shows how ‘Elizabethan practice confirms that pastoral has an affinity for paradox’.
Michael A. R. Graves, The Tudor Parliaments: Crown, Lords and Commons, 1485–1603 (Longman, 1985) p. 149.
Ibid., p. 154.
See our readings of these plays in Shakespeare: The Play of History (Macmillan, 1988), especially pp. 85–8.
David Loades, op. cit., p. 2.
David Starkey, in David Starkey et al., The English Court: from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (Longman, 1987) p. 18.
Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (Methuen, 1985) p. 123.
C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton University Press, 1959) p. 15.
Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, ed. Jan van Dorsten (Oxford University Press, 1966) p. 66.
Bristol, op. cit., p. 138. I am much indebted in this paragraph to Chapter 9 of his book.
Philip Stubbes, The anatomy of abuses, 1583 (Johnson Reprint Corporation, New York, 1973). All these quotations come from the section entitled ‘Of Stage-playes and Enterluds, with their wickednes’.
John Davies, Epigram 159, ‘To our English Terence Mr. Will: Shakespeare’, from ‘The Scourge of Folly’, in The Complete Works of John Davies of Hereford, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (AMS Press, Inc., New York, 1967) vol. 2, k, p. 26.
Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton University Press, 1980) p. 123.
Clifford Geertz, ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’, in The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books, New York, 1973) p. 453.
William Wordsworth, ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’, in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford University Press, 1974) vol. 1, p. 148.
Copyright information
© 1990 Graham Holderness, Nick Potter and John Turner
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Turner, J. (1990). Introduction. In: Shakespeare: Out of Court. Contemporary Interpretations of Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20881-4_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20881-4_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-20883-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-20881-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)