The Works of John Webster, vol. IV: Sir Thomas Wyatt, Westward Ho, Northward Ho, The Fair Maid of the Inn ed. by David Gunby, David Carnegie, and Macdonald P. Jackson

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Works of John Webster, vol. IV: Sir Thomas Wyatt, Westward Ho, Northward Ho, The Fair Maid of the Inn ed. by David Gunby, David Carnegie, and Macdonald P. Jackson Andrew Hiscock The Works of John Webster, vol. IV: Sir Thomas Wyatt, Westward Ho, Northward Ho, The Fair Maid of the Inn. Ed. by David Gunby, David Carnegie, and Macdonald P. Jackson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2019. xxiv+641 pp. £130. ISBN 978–0–521–76601–2. In this fourth volume of the works of John Webster published by Cambridge University Press, the reader is guided expertly through the collaborative and most neglected works of his output. The editors announce in their prefatory remarks to the volume that the series had originally been conceived as a triple decker, but as time elapsed they had cause to revisit this decision. Initially, there had been no editorial (or Press) inclination to supplement the extensive editorial work accomplished by Fredson Bowers for his Dramatic Works: Thomas Decker and Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon produced in the post-war decades. Nonetheless, when the third volume of their own series rolled from the presses in 2007, the critical lie of the land had changed so radically with regard to these co-written works that attention now turned to a fourth volume covering the period 1602–24. Throughout this volume, the theatre practitioner as well as the student and the lecturer will find ample editorial support for exploring these texts often overlooked even among those of collaborative authorship in the early modern period. Interestingly, this emphasis upon the performative has led the editors to offer greater detail of punctuation and stage direction than is to be found in the original texts. More generally, each of the plays is preceded with critical, theatrical, and textual introductions from the editors as well as a sustained commentary and brief discussion of possible sources. In this way, the reader finds him- or herself in safe hands throughout. The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat. With the Coronation of Queen Mary, and the coming in of King Philip is, to all intents and purposes, a distillation or abbreviated version of a two-part play dealing with the life of Lady Jane Grey, written by Webster, Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle, Thomas Heywood, and Wentworth Smith and published in 1607 (2nd quarto 1612). As David Gunby points out in the Critical Introduction, this kind of biographical history play may be more familiar to readers of early modern drama in the shape of Thomas of Woodstock or Sir John Oldcastle. In fact, in the surviving version of this work, Grey is not central to the dramatic action that concentrates on Wyattʼs rebellions: the first opposing her claim to the throne; the second opposing Philip II as royal consort (perhaps training the attention of the Jacobean audience upon the rather more recently attempted rebellion by the late Earl of Essex). The rather truncated text which has come down to us may result from 'clumsy abridgement or perhaps from [End Page 282] a muddled memorial reconstruction' (p. 9), but there are nevertheless elements worthy of attention. Gunbyʼs Critical Introduction is particularly useful here in carefully pointing out the unhistorical elements that are introduced in order to generate greater dramatic energy for the intrigue. As David Carnegie points out in the Theatrical Introduction, readers should not underestimate the potential for visual splendour in this production where there is a remarkable number of aristocratic roles (as well as some rustic clownery). The opening phases of the text clearly engage with the romance genre so evident in a wide number of plays surviving from the late Elizabethan period (Grey: 'What care I though a Sheep-cote be my Pallace | Or fairest roofe of honour' (ii. 16–17, p. 50)), but of most interest to this reader was the remarkably even-handed dramatization of Mary I, who enters in scene iii 'with a Prayer Book in her hand, like a Nun' (p. 51) and then declares at court in scene xi: Wee heere release unto our faithfull peopleOur intire Subsidie, due unto the CrowneIn our...