Staging Authority in Caroline England: Prerogative, Law and Order in Drama, 1625–1642 by Jessica Dyson (review)

Abstract

Jessica Dyson. Staging Authority Caroline England: Law and Order Drama, 1625-1642. Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2013. Pp. x + 224. $109.95. With its focus on often overlooked riches of Caroline stage and its attention to period's central political and legal debates, Jessica Dyson's Staging Authority Caroline England: Law and Order Drama, 1625-1642 makes a worthy contribution to recent scholarship on early modern theater. Dyson's work especially useful for its clear, efficient discussions of historical contexts as well as theoretical lineaments of Caroline disputes about monarchical and for its close readings of language and stakes of these debates period's drama. Dyson's introductory chapter effectively establishes her interest Caroline theater as a forum for period's competing articulations of royal and common law as they took shape against King Charles Is increasingly personal rule (2). She identifies her approach to drama as more oppositional than those of influential critics such as Martin Butler, but she careful to insist that playwrights such as Ben Jonson, Richard Brome, Philip Massinger, John Ford, or James Shirley offered challenges not to Charles's position as but rather to ability to act above, beyond or outside established laws of country (9). In these challenges, she adds eloquently, their drama diagnosed a dynamic by which Charles I, in over-asserting kingly and central authority, ... raise[d] possibilities of destabilization, fragmentation and disintegration of legitimate legal authority (13). Chapter 1, Rights, Prerogatives and Law: The Petition of Right, investigates acute constitutional issues driving 1628 Petition of Right and their enactment on stage. She reads petition, which crystallized competing interests of Parliament and King matters of taxation and martial law, as a symbol of widespread fear of royal absolutism and of a concomitant loss of traditional liberties. She then examines plays that juggle these concerns, arguing that Ben Jonson's The New Inn advocates balance of subjects' rights against a moderated, if not curtailed, royal prerogative (20) and that Richard Bromes The Love-Sick Court offers not only predictable critique of self-interested courtiers and their bad counsel--readings offered by Butler and Matthew Steggle--but also a more pointed political statement about the usefulness of parliaments and necessity of calling them (44). Chapter 2, Shaking Foundations of Royal Authority: From Divine Right to King's Will, surveys contemporary accounts of royal authority--theories of divine right, of designation, and of contract--and then charts Philip Massinger's representations, over course of three plays, of this and its relation to law. She traces an arc of declining divinity: from king as undeniably a god with extra-legal power The Roman Actor to king as undeniably mortal, willful, and fallible The Emperor of East and The Guardian. Although theoretical background here cogent, some of specific readings are overly literal ways that undermine idea of a declining divinity; it maybe true that Domitian The Roman Actor presented as a divine ruler and that his extra-legal is not denied (66), but play neither condones nor reinforces this position--it seems to put it into question order to insist on Domitians very human status and passions. Dysons treatment of The Guardian, which sees outlaw Severino as a critique of, rather than a substitute for, absolute power, more assured and convincing. The third chapter, Debating Legal Authorities: Common Law and Prerogative, sets common law center stage, as a legitimate alternative to will of monarch as foundation of realm. …