Shakespeare's stage traffic: imitation, borrowing and competition in Renaissance theatre

Abstract

Shakespeare's Stage Traffic: Imitation, Borrowing and Competition in Renaissance Theatre, by Janet Clare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. 305+ xi. Hardcover. $99.00Shakespeare 's Stage Traffic starts by declaring its aim to be to explore interplay of imitation, borrowing, and competition in the ambience of Shakespeare's theatre, and is particularly interested in situating Shakespeare himself firmly within such networks of traffic and exchange rather than as any kind of unique exception-in seeing Shakespeare, in fact, as an adapter. Seeing plays as fundamentally in dialogue with each other, Clare understands the production of plays as an essentially mercantile activity. Such move is part of the Zeitgeist rather than critical revolution, but Clare is wellinformed, scholarly, and sensible, and it is after all part of her point that noth- ing is ever wholly new. Clare is particularly careful about her terms, giving nuanced accounts of borrowing, authorship, source study, intertextuality and imitation, in ways which combine to offer neat guide to the protocols and preferences of much of the current landscape of literary criticism of the early modern period, especially in the form of critical editions, although her primary aim in considering such matters is to tracje] the contribution of the often neglected pre-text to the interweaving of text, context, and performance event (24).The book has eight chapters which consider range of genres and move through Shakespeare's career in roughly chronological order. The first chapter, and the Dramaturgy of the Queen's Men, offers a close intertextual study of King John and Richard` which promises to capture something of the effect of the Shakespeare histories on members of an audience with prior experience of the plays performed by the Queen's Men (30). Despite its title there is very little Marlowe in this chapter, but Clare is insightful in her discussion of Peele, and there are some suggestive details in her argument that A True Tragedy influenced Richard III. The second chapter, Deposing Kings, reads Richard II in relation to Edward II and Woodstock. Of course there are issues of dating at stake here, and Clare's strategy for bypassing them is uncharacteristically disingenuous: ?Whether Woodstock was composed and performed in the 1590s; or written in the 1590s and revised in the 1600s, before Richard II; or written and revised in the 1600s, following Richard II, is in sense incidental' (63). The third chapter relates The Shrew to A Shrew and The Comedy of Errors to the wider context of the Gesta Grayorum as whole. argues that A Shrew is independent of The Shrew, though here again Clare has to be bit gung-ho about questions of dating, declaring It is preferable surely to jettison these vexed questions of derivation and listen, instead, to the dialogue between texts (99), which comes dangerously close to that old bread-and-butter exercise of compare and contrast. …