The Masters of the Revels and Elizabeth I's Court Theatre by W. R. Streitberger (review)

Abstract

E.K. Chambers’s famous, four-volume study of The Elizabethan Stage is one of the books that has shaped our received wisdom concerning early modern drama as a set of institutions and practices. But for scholars of my generation — and especially for those, like me, who write about plays but are not primarily historians of theatre — its precise shaping influence upon disciplinary commonsense may no longer be obvious. I read Chambers in graduate school, and have subsequently consulted him on occasion, but I would not be able to produce off the top of my head a list of the things I think I know about Elizabethan drama that originated with The Elizabethan Stage. One of the great pleasures of W.R. Streitberger’s meticulously researched historical study of the Elizabethan masters of the revels is that it simultaneously makes aspects of our field’s debt to Chambers visible and subjects many of the verities received from him to rigorous, revisionary scrutiny. In particular, as Streitberger shows, Chambers’s understanding of the role of the revels office and its relationship to the flourishing of commercial theatre in Elizabethan London was distorted by a teleological idea of social evolution in which ‘the mimetic instinct, deep rooted in the psychology of the folk’ finds its way, with a nudge from a centralizing and bureaucratizing Tudor court, towards its ‘ultimate entrenchment of economic independence’.1 The Masters of the Revels and Elizabeth I’s Court Theatre offers, instead, a history of the Elizabethan Revels Office and its relation to commercial drama based upon an idea of the court as a dynamic institutional amalgam that develops in an ad hoc manner to cope with changing circumstances: the office of the master of the revels, which had been created as part the Henrician privy chamber, had to be reimagined under Elizabeth, whose privy chamber of course was staffed by women. Never a sinecure, the mastership of the revels thereafter required managerial and dramaturgical abilities as well as the savoir faire, elite social status, and patronage connections that would previously have been automatic for a gentleman of the privy chamber under Henry VIII. So, Streitberger argues, Edmund Tilney was chosen for the mastership in 1578 over Thomas Blagrave (a key figure in the mid-Elizabethan reorganization of the revels office, and one who had been who had been producing the revels with the earl of Sussex since 1573) because