Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play.

Lucas, Scott

Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play, by Dermot Cavanagh. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Pp. x + 197. Cloth, $65.00.

Dermot Cavanagh pursues two announced projects in Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play. First, Cavanagh seeks to "resuscitate" and to reconfigure the concept of the sixteenth-century history play as a critical category. Second, Cavanagh argues that the six Tudor dramas he studies each presents critical reflections upon the "topic" of "socially disruptive speech" (6). Cavanagh's pursuit of the first of these projects is successful and compelling; his pursuit of the second is often fruitful but at times raises more questions about his thesis than his relatively brief study can answer.

In the first of these endeavors, Cavanagh argues that critics should come to think of the genre of the sixteenth-century history play as "ideologically various, theatrically diverse, and as committed to political enquiry as much as to sermonizing" (3). Scholars should expand their sense of what counts as a history play beyond familiar chronicle histories to encompass any Tudor drama set in an English, Scottish, or early "British" past. The goal of this reconception is to bring all sixteenth-century plays that are set against British history into dialogue with one another, no matter if such plays are usually treated as tragedies, romances, or as some other generic form.

Following his own call, Cavanagh brings together several dramas not always grouped with one another, namely Bale's King Johan, Sackville's and Norton's Gorboduc, Greene's Scottish History of James IV, and Shakespeare's King John, Richard II, and Henry V. The chief element that links all of these works, Cavanagh argues, is their authors' interest in "socially disruptive speech," specific terms and modes of discourse that play key roles in the political conflicts these dramas portray. In his readings of these plays, Cavanagh shows how each playwright builds into his work recognizable modes of controversial political (or politicized) discourse. Such language, Cavanagh demonstrates, often plays key roles in the development of the action of these works and creates important tensions in and among the characters forced to confront such disruptive speech. Cavanagh's attention to the shared employment of "disruptive language" in these works persuasively bolsters his call to juxtapose works such as these and to study them as a group.

Cavanagh's true test case for his realignment of the history-play idea is Robert Greene's Scottish History of James IV. Greene's play is usually not considered to be a history play, since it has little other than its title of the actually "historical" in it. While acknowledging that the play gives itself over in great measure to comedy, jigging, and a "romantic," melodramatic plot that has nothing to do with the actual James IV's career, Cavanagh makes a strong case for its consideration as a "history play," one Greene consciously shapes to respond to the growing vogue for chronicle histories in the late 1580s and 1590s. As Cavanagh notes, even among his other matter, Greene incorporates much material into his play about the nature of international conflict, dynastic difficulties, the danger of malicious counsel, and the role of "monarchical speech in precipitating political crisis," themes the play shares with chronicle history plays (61). Greene counters the increasingly dominant chronicle-history form, however, by shaping James IV to address these concerns in specifically personal terms, embedding them in traditionally "romantic" situations involving matters such as love, lust, marriage, and the conflicts of the domestic sphere. With its strong emphasis on "private" matters, Cavanagh shows, the play makes its chief lesson that of the political importance of personal temperance and civility. In his study of the play, Cavanagh reveals how Greene handles many of the same important political questions treated by chronicle histories and thus convincingly shows why a "romance" such as Greene's should be thought of as a history play just as much as any of the chronicle histories of Greene's contemporaries.

While Cavanagh's first project is thoroughly compelling, his second critical endeavor is mixed in its success. Moving beyond identifying the presence of socially disruptive modes of discourse as a formal hallmark of the newly reconceived history play genre, Cavanagh argues that such language is present in many historically based works because the authors of these plays use their dramas as spaces for "critical reflection" on the very nature of such language (6). In his introduction, Cavanagh argues that each of the dramas he studies in Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play treat "disruptive speech" as a "topic" to be considered in a critical and often meditative manner in order to present to audiences truths about the very nature of the discourses the works portray (6).

Cavanagh's assertion of such a reflective dimension to the plays he examines seems convincing in his studies of Shakespeare's King John, Richard II, and Henry V. In the fourth chapter of his study, Cavanagh shows how Shakespeare's King John is marked by the scandalous subject matter and disruptive language associated in the early modern period with popular rumor. In King John, Shakespeare makes the sorts of unsubstantiated assertions, scandalous accusations, and wild, disruptive language that Tudor officers so often identified as producing disorder and discontent in the realm the very matter of high politics. The claims to the English crown advanced in this play are often asserted and contested through exchanges of libelous accusations and harsh invective, types of speech whose language, like that of popular rumors, can be deplored but whose charges cannot fully be refuted. Rumor swirls around all the events of the play, and even King John gains information about his own concerns through irregular, unconventional means. Cavanagh shows how Shakespeare employs facets of "disruptive" and often demonized speech in his drama and how, by placing such demonized patterns of speech at the very heart of power in England, provides audiences with a "searching account of how multiple forms of social, political, and religious authority are claimed and contested" (102).

In chapter 5, Cavanagh traces Shakespeare's employment of the language of treason and loyalty in Richard II to show the dramatic impact of the competing demands for loyalty between the erring and, later, deposed King Richard and the newly crowned King Henry. Noting that "there was no more devastating instance of injurious speech in early modem English than to be condemned as a 'traitor' and no clearer demonstration of the relationship between language and power than the ability to ascribe this term successfully," Cavanagh highlights the stakes of successfully imposing one's own definition of treason on others in the play (103). In portraying the competition over the definition of treason in Richard II, Shakespeare, Cavanagh asserts, presents viewers with important food for thought about the very notion of "treason" in itself. From the beginning of Richard II, Cavanagh shows, the nature of political betrayal is uncertain: is it a more general violation of "honour and fealty" or is it an offense specifically against the "king's person and will"? (105). The struggle later in the play becomes one over the ability to charge treason and, thereby, to constitute one's authority, as the new Henry IV must transfer the idea of loyalty due to a king from Richard II to himself, a man who earlier bore the stigma of being called a traitor. Throughout this work, Cavanagh convincingly suggests, Shakespeare does not define a controlling viewpoint, but lets audiences question the true definition of treason and to whom loyalty is properly owed.

Chapter 6 turns attention to Shakespeare's Henry V. Here, Cavanagh focuses on Shakespeare's interest in attempts to "reform" demotic and turbulent language. Shakespeare portrays the language of Henry V as an agent of reform for those under him, and presents in the play the spectacle of "the King's English triumphing over foreign or irresponsible speakers" (128). Yet Shakespeare builds into his work persistent ambiguities surrounding this triumph, as the speech of Henry's subjects throughout the drama serve to limit the authority of the monarch's dominant discourse. It is Henry's inspiring, elevated words, Cavanagh argues, that tempers the often excessive, "turbulent" impulses of the other characters and shapes them into proper subjects of their monarch. Yet the "disruptive" speech of such figures never quite leaves the play but persists as a reminder of the sometimes less-than-ethical events the king's discourse seeks to hide. Williams's portrait of the savagery of war and the often doubtful nature of a king's claims, for instance, continues to limit Henry's attempt fully to overwhelm the persistently questioning and even accusatory language of those under him. The demotic speech Shakespeare builds into his play offers an ethical critique of the privileged rhetoric of the "King's English" even as the play acknowledges the power of that language to dominate and to a great extent shape those who exist under the monarch who employs it.

While Cavanagh's readings of Shakespeare are often compelling, his studies of Bale's King Johan and Sackville's and Norton's Gorboduc are more problematic. Neither of these texts--nor Greene's James IV for that matter--presents itself on its face as particularly meditative or ambiguous in its treatment of the discourses it incorporates. Further, the "insights" Cavanagh suggests these works are meant to reveal to viewers do not always seem either insightful or revelatory, given the audiences to which they were directed.

In his chapter on Bale, Cavanagh sets out to examine what he calls the "paradox of sedition" in King Johan (16). Cavanagh argues that the Elizabethan text of King Johan (the revised version of Bale's original Henrician drama) reveals its author's "complex form of historical awareness," specifically Bale's "bitter understanding that the category of sedition can be used to incriminate godly speech" (17). Because of this knowledge, Cavanagh declares, "King Johan's polemical assurance is offset by Bale's insistent recognition of the power of catholicism" to demonize the godly in the eyes of others (30). Further, the chief antagonist Sedition's habit of revealing the "sinful and partisan" nature of the Catholic (or even Anglo-Catholic) Church conveys "an unsettling proximity between Bale's polemical intentions and the Vice's effects," since Sedition, a Catholic character, makes Bale's anti-Catholic points for him through his revelation of the malice and sins of the Church (20). By naming his character Sedition and having Sedition make the charges of evangelicals against Catholics for him, Bale, Cavanagh suggests, exposes "the ambivalent potential" of the concept of sedition itself and thus unsettles audiences even as he seeks to win them to his anti-Catholic side (38).

To be fully persuasive, both Cavanagh's suggestion that Bale's text presents the "ambivalent potential of sedition" and his assertion that Bale's polemic is undercut by having Sedition as one of its spokesmen need more support than Cavanagh provides. First, the power of the Catholic Church (or even the Anglo-Catholic Church) to demonize evangelicals as "seditious" would not seem to trouble the polemical assurance of Bale's play but instead would seem to reinforce it. It is precisely Bale's fervent belief in the ability of lying Catholics to seduce English kings into both undermining their own authority and into persecuting Christ's truly faithful (i.e., evangelicals) that leads Bale so fervently to seek to expose in King Johan the seditious depredations of the Church. Charges of sedition against the godly would not lead Bale to reflect upon the very concept of sedition, since for the supremely confident and remarkably unreflective Bale such charges are simply devilish lies, falsehoods that, even when endorsed by the monarch himself, have no relation to the true meaning of "sedition." Nor does the fact that Sedition reveals his own crimes seem to add ambiguity to Bale's play or work to unsettle Bale's intended audiences. Anti-Catholic literature of the time is full of Roman Catholic characters openly admitting their sins, a habit granted to them not only as a means to reveal secret crimes but also to suggest the brazen and even boastingly sinful nature of the "minions of the Pope." Finally, even if there were compelling evidence that Bale wishes audiences to muse on the "the ambivalent potential of sedition," one must simply wonder at what point in viewing this angry, insistent, and self-righteous work Bale thought audiences might stop to meditate upon such ambiguities. Throughout the play, Bale pulls out all the stops in creating his polemical attack on the Church and its alleged depredations. There seems to be little space for viewers to rest and to reflect in the endless hurly-burly, slander, accusations, and (toward the end) pathos his play provides.

Similarly problematic is Cavanagh's treatment of Sackville's and Norton's Gorboduc as a work designed to offer a deliberative exploration of the problems of counsel. Cavanagh begins his study of this tragedy by arguing against the idea of Gorboduc as a didactic work. Instead, Cavanagh insists, the play is a meditative exploration of the "topic" of "destructive political language" in the discourses of political counsel. In his reading of the play, Cavanagh correctly notes that much of Gorboduc is given over to lengthy speeches of advice by various characters, all of which seem entirely persuasive and well supported even as they contradict one another. The fact that each of the several different advisors who weigh in on the question of Gorboduc's succession plans seems to offer a compelling argument for his views highlights the difficulty faced by any ruler to distinguish between good political advice and bad or obtuse counsel. The problem is compounded, Cavanagh also notes, by the fact that unfolding political events can transform what was good counsel in an earlier set of circumstances into ill advice. Cavanagh argues that Sackville and Norton wrote Gorboduc to reveal to viewers such truths and to guide their audience to meditate upon them.

Once again, one must entertain questions about Cavanagh's assertions. First, one wonders for whom Sackville and Norton might have thought the "insights" Cavanagh ascribes to their play would be either new or revelatory. The authors' original audiences were composed of Inns of Court men, English magistrates, and Queen Elizabeth herself. Each audience member was highly trained in rhetoric and thus well aware of the ability of rhetoric to make contradictory views seem equally appealing. Further, those viewing the play had lived through the astonishing and often rapid ideological upheavals of the past decade, the wrenching changes England endured through the successive reigns of King Edward, Queen Jane, Queen Mary, and Queen Elizabeth. Which of the audience members would have needed Sackville and Norton to reveal to him or her the notion that changing historical circumstances can render what seemed good counsel in one set of circumstances suddenly bad? Finally, and most surprisingly, Cavanagh is able to mount his argument that Gorboduc is a meditative rather than a didactic or persuasive text only by ignoring the words of the Chorus, a figure who quite openly describes Gorboduc as seeking to teach a specific political lesson. It is difficult to read the Chorus's declaration in act 1 that "this great king, that doth divide his land / ... / A mirror shall become to princes all / To learn to shun the cause of such a fall" without concluding that Gorboduc seeks to teach its viewers proper courses of action through the negative exemplum of its erring king.

Indeed, if each of Gorboduc's advisors couches his advice about the succession in equally persuasive terms, as Cavanagh suggests, the play nevertheless provides a guide for choosing a course of action, namely, that when in doubt, a monarch should stick with the customary form of rule and succession. It is Gorboduc's abandonment of the traditional ideas of living out his reign and passing on his kingdom to a single heir that causes all of the problems that follow in the play and makes him an admonitory "mirror" to others. Remarkably, Cavanagh never confronts these words of the Chorus in his study; rather, in a three-sentence paragraph, he simply dismisses the messages of the Chorus and dumb shows alike as unimportant to viewers' reception of the deliberative process dramatized in the play (41). In his reading of Gorboduc, Cavanagh does offer a compelling description of how Sackville and Norton use the language of counsel to develop the tension and dramatic action of their play. However, his assertion that the play is best understood as a meditation upon the nature of counsel itself remains in need of more argument to become persuasive.

Cavanagh's book should be read for its call for a new understanding of the sixteenth-century history play and for its shrewd recognition of the centrality of modes of "socially disruptive speech" as a formal element in many plays incorporating historical material. While his assertion of critical reflection in several of the texts he studies in Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play is more problematic, his studies of Shakespeare's reflections upon recognizable modes of disruptive discourse will provide readers with valuable insight both into Shakespeare's plays and Shakespeare's thoughts upon language.

Reviewer: SCOTT LUCAS