Theatre of State: Parliament and Political Culture in Early Stuart England, by Chris R. Kyle

Abstract

This is an important addition to our knowledge and understanding of early modern parliaments. The author, Chris Kyle, entitles it austerely as ‘early Stuart’, but in truth he ranges freely backwards across the sixteenth century and a little more constrainedly forwards. It is a book about communication and it has a thoroughly modern agenda, examining language and non-verbal communication; print and manuscript, including the physicality of the texts discussed; and both physical spaces and mental worlds. But it has a thoroughly traditional approach to researching these subjects: no reliance here on EEBO and online databases. The bibliography takes up more than ten per cent of the book, and lists manuscripts in thirty-six repositories. Kyle has got his hands dirty in some very remote archives. The book is in three parts: ‘inside the chamber’, ‘writing parliament’ (how much more of-the-moment can you be than with such a title?) and ‘permeable boundaries’—this third part being the longest. The opening chapters are illuminating on the de-emphasis on rhetoric (except for set-piece events such as the Speakers’ ‘disabling speeches’) and the emphasis on logic. But it is much more startling and illuminating on the ‘noise’ of politics—silence as a weapon and device, hissing, laughter, even timely farting (which is, however, and emphatically I suppose, a rhetorical not a logical gesture). The second part is perhaps the most familiar, except that it explores in depth the world of quills and ink, writing boxes and reading desks, the invention of the pencil, and the non-use of shorthand. Here Kyle could have interrogated more thoroughly the forms of note-taking: some diarists clearly set out to summarise what they heard; others to note only things they found useful or offensive or simply striking; others clearly integrated what they heard with the thoughts triggered in them. But Kyle’s major point is that something very interesting was happening by the 1620s, that note-taking was no longer a private act, pour mémoire, but was increasingly a public act linked to letting others know what had happened and why. Kyle’s section on the dissemination of information about what was said in debate is especially wide-ranging and nuanced. Thus he has impressive evidence of what a Cambridge don got to know in order to tell gentry in East Anglia what was happening in Parliament; and he has one example of what MPs were willing to pay for printed separates hot from the press (premium rates: 4 shillings and 6 pence for the Lord Keeper’s speech in 1628; 2 shillings for quite a short speech by Sir Robert Cotton).