Book Reviews 787

Plays of Persuasion: Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry VIII, Greg Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 244 pp., li30/%49.50, cloth.

Something of a sequel to Walker’s well-received John Skelton and the Politics of the IS2Os, this study encapsulates its thesis and topic in its title. Its first chapter describes the exhortative, intensively political nature of drama during the reign of Henry VIII and is followed by historical ‘close readings’ of, successively, Hick Scorner (1514?), Skelton’s Magnyfycence (15 19?), Godiy QueeneHester (1529?), John Heywood’sPlay of the Weather (1529-1530?), and John Bale’s K&g Johan (Christmas 1538-1539).

Walker defines his topic as ‘those dramatic texts written between 1509 and 1547 which contain specifically political material and engage directly. . . with contemporary political debates’ (p. 4) and, more generally, as ‘the ways in which individuals perceived the responsibilities of government’ (p. 231) in and around these plays. He follows David Bevington’s seminal Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (1968) in understanding them as ‘political documents’ (p. .5)-plays, that is, which, ‘both specific and occasional’ (p, 5), literally talk politics, much in the vein of Erasmus’s charge to educate the Christian Prince through fables, examples, maxims, and proverbs. If education gave way to exhortation, it was of a complex kind: ‘For playwrights like Skelton and Heywood’, Walker argues, ‘the aim was primarily to persuade those whp held power at the centre to use that power in certain ways, not to reach a wide audience or readership’ (p. 236). He suggests the patronage of acting troupes by noble families may, in fact, have had a source in the plays’ potential as instruments for political lobbying (pp. 7-8).

Walker locates these plays in specific political contexts and sometimes in specific buildings. Following Ian Lancashire, for instance, he reads Hick Scorner as concerned with issues surrounding Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk; it was probably performed at his Manor Place in Southwark, they argue, and in part reflected Brandon’s political interests by satirising Richard de la Pole, a pretender both to the English Crown and to the dukedom of Suffolk. In Magnyfycence, Walker sees Skelton staging the 15 19 ‘expulsion of the minions’ (influential and irresponsible favourites of Henry VIII) via an Aristotelian debate on the nature of kingship; throughout, the play concerns itself with the theory and practice of the royal household. In one of the study’s most original and provocative readings, Walker suggests that the anonymous Godly Queene Hester attacks Cardinal Wolsey for interfering with the religious houses and the prerogatives of the secular clergy and ‘casts in the role of the persecuted Jews the religious orders of the last years of the 1520s’ (p. 104). Heywood’s Play of the Weather is less specific, politically, in both examining ‘the role and responsibilities of those officers of the royal household who control access to the Sovereign’ and exploring ‘the role of the King as judge and guardian of his people’ (p. 138). While the least sophisticated of the plays examined here, John Bale’s King Johan, is focussed on issues of religious reform which occupied the governing powers during 1538-1539.

The question marks I have added to the dates of all but one of the titles above suggest how a historical reading of these plays finds its methodolo~ determined by great uncertainty of date and auspice: without the ‘Jocal’, one has to write historical criticism in the conditional mood. This in turn puts a burden of proof on the writer, for any suggestion as to reference (and, correspondingly, relevance) has to be supported by evidence and close argument: a difference of even two years in dating a play-and the range for most of the plays examined here is much larger-can alter the possibilities seen in them. It can even be said to alter what the plays are: as Walker realises, a Magnyfycence of 1519 is a very different play from a Magnyfycence dated 1515-1516.

A compelling example of what is often called-sometimes condescendingly, sometimes triumphantly-‘Old Historicism’, Plays of Persuasion helps to demonstrate (if only by implication) what New Historicism is, and where it draws its energies from.

788 Book Reviews

Walker does not say what historicism means to him, but his careful scholarship and elaborate recreation of the various environments of these plays suggest that not only is a New Historicist account of them impossible, but, correspondingly, that New Historicism depends on a comparatively exact date- a temporal ‘anchor’-as its first condition of possibility.

Walker closes this study by adapting a passage from Hamlet that points to a representative instance of his subject matter: ‘the play’s the thing/Wherein [to]. . . catch the conscience of the King’. Although Walker does not press the case, Hamlet’s specially commissioned drama-designed as it is to instruct, admonish, and even accuse members of an aristocratic audience-can be seen as a nostalgic memory of the often overtly didactic plays which preceded the commercialisation of theatre in sixteenth-century England and dominated the Henrician court.

University of Chicago Douglas Bruster

Eug&ne Varlin, Chronique d’un Espoir Assassin&, Michel Cordillot (Paris: Les Editions Ouvritres, IPPI), 263 pp., 125FF.

Eugene Varlin (1839-1871) was a self-educated bookbinder who became a central figure in the re-emergence of the Parisian working-class movement during the 1860s. He participated in the renaissance of the co-operative movement and was arguably the most effective propagandist for the fledgling First International Workingmen’s Association (AIT), organised in Paris in December 1864. He is most famous for his leadership roles during the siege of Paris by the Prussians in 1870- 1871 and during the tragic revolt known as the Paris Commune. It was probably because of this prominence that he was ruthlessly executed without trial by Versaillais troops on 28 May 1871, the last day of the semaine sanglan te.

Michel Cordillot has written a book that carefully traces Varlin’s tragic personal history, but such is his attention to the broader context, that what in effect is provided is a study of the organisational and ideological history of the Parisian working class between 1864 and 187 1. He demonstrates his mastery of the secondary literature and supplements it with new information gleaned from the archives in Paris, Lyon and Amsterdam.

In the pages devoted to the history of the AIT, Cordillot writes of the importance between 1867 and 1869 of La Commission Ouvrikre, an assembly of elected deputies from the corps de mCtier of Paris. This commission provided a forum for the young Varlin, who opposed the moderate stance of the early mutualist leaders of the AIT with his collectivist vision emphasising the need for both political and social emancipation and for the elimination of absolute private property. Cordillot convincingly argues that the Imperial government of Louis-Napoleon inadvertently assisted collectivists like Varlin when it prosecuted the moderate mutualist directors of the Parisian branch of the AIT in early 1868, leaving collectivists like Varlin and Benoit Malon largely unopposed to propagate their own more radical views, at least until they too were prosecuted and sent to Sainte Pelagic later in the same year.

Cordillot also suggests that government prosecution reinforced the ALT’s prestige among workers, because it eliminated the residual suspicions that surrounded the AIT in