Review of Janette Dillon, Theatre, court and city, 1595-1610: Drama and social space in
London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) ISBN 0-521-66118-8
'Practical deconstruction' might seem a contradiction in terms, but this excellent book
shows how poststructuralist thinking about binary opposites can produce sensitive dramatic
readings. Dramatizing an attack upon London, Thomas Heywood's Edward 4 focusses
on crucial boundary points (city gates and bridges) separating those 'within' from those
'without', but binary substitution (lord mayor for king, king for commoner, lady mayoress
for Jane Shore, Shore-as-wife for Shore-as-mistress) cannot sustain the grand theme that
loyalty to city equals loyalty to nation; the exchanges seem exploitative rather than
beneficent. Dillon offers a similarly poststructuralist reading of Love's Labour's
Lost, showing that the academy reproduces the very city evils it opposes: the men are
bound by oaths and signatures, are subject to surveillance and, finally, intrusion from
without. Even their oath mirrors the apprentices': for a fixed term they must 'live-in',
work hard, and not marry.
Dillon's reading of the War of the Theatre plays and of the Knight of the Burning
Pestle address the self-contradictory nature of satire--to expose filth one must
wallow in it--and the already-contained subversiveness of city-sanctioned excesses such as
the apprentice riots. Best of all are Dillon's readings of Jonson's newly discovered Entertainment
at Britain's Burse and of Epicoene. Robert Cecil intended the Entertainment
to stage a magical transformation whereby tawdry commerce acquires transcendent authority
by king James's presence in the shopping centre, but Jonson's heart lay the opposite way,
in bathetic revelation of the dross underlying impressive spectacle. Having compromised
for the Entertainment, Jonson expelled his bad feelings via Epicoene in
which the body-as-spectacle is shown to be a vile collection of shop-bought parts. Across
the period Dillon relates the plays to the shifting tensions between court and city, and
shows that the drama subtly, but unmistakeably, registers these changes.
Gabriel
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