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Cyndia Susan Clegg, The Masters of the Revels and Elizabeth I’s Court Theatre, by W.R. Streitberger, The English Historical Review, Volume 133, Issue 561, April 2018, Pages 417–420, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cey023
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Extract
Upon the 1923 publication of E.K. Chambers’s four-volume The Elizabethan Stage, A.R. Pollard observed that it stood to other treatises on the subject as the Dictionary of National Biography stood to other biographical dictionaries. One reviewer remarked that it brought together ‘practically all the discoverable evidence upon the various parts of the subject’ (New Statesman). Just as time took its toll and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) replaced Sidney Lee’s original, theatre historians (W.R. Streitberger among them) have extended the boundaries of the ‘discoverable’ to necessitate a reconsideration of Chambers’s work. Among the ‘cornerstones’ of Chambers’s Elizabethan theatre history was the vision of Elizabeth’s household as a hierarchical bureaucracy with the Revels Office and its master under the Lord Chamberlain. In this book, W.R. Streitberger challenges this ‘part’ of Chambers’s subject. According to Streitberger, Chambers ignored familial and patronage relationships and credited any successes of Elizabeth I’s government, including reforming the Revels Office and forming the Queen’s Men players, to ‘new men’ such as Burghley and Walsingham. Such a narrative, Streitberger reminds us, subscribed to a version of history, like J.E. Neale’s, that envisioned conflict rather than consensus—aristocrats versus new men, court versus city, humanism versus Puritanism. Referring to more recent work on Elizabeth I’s reign, including that by Patrick Collinson, Susan Doran, Paul E.J. Hammer, Felicity Heal and David Loades, Streitberger argues that, despite their differences, Elizabeth’s courtiers, called to court through a pattern of familial patronage relationships, shared an ethos of service to their monarch. Court revels were an instrumental part of Elizabethan government. They served first as ‘festive occasions hosted by the queen’ for ‘her own entertainment and for the delight of her courtiers, guests, and servants’ (p. 16) and second as a diplomatic device. As a ‘means of creating an image of the sovereign’s “estate”’, court revels ‘testified to her generosity, cultural refinement, religious preference, social ideals, interest in the arts’ (p. 16). The masters of Elizabeth’s revels, rather than merely serving as bureaucrats (as Chambers would have it) needed to be men sufficiently well connected within the networks of gift-exchange and patronage and ‘wealthy enough to undertake a court office’ (p. 92). Because of the importance of court revels, the masters answered directly to the Privy Council.
