ABSTRACT
A New Historicist reading of Parolles might begin by recounting a story that would help contextualize the mock torture scene near the end of Shakespeare’s famous problem play. For modern American readers today at least, this scene is too reminiscent of Abu Ghraib to evoke the kind of laughter it might have for its original audiences who were comfortable with the early modern playhouse’s macabre location in what has recently been called an “an all-purpose entertainment zone,” which included bear-baiting rings, “firing ranges, cockfighting pits. . . . [and] platforms upon which criminals were mutilated or hanged.”1As the story goes, on a Wednesday, the 18th of February 1601, Shakespeare’s acting company sent one of their own, Augustine Phillips, to answer some questions from Lord Chief Justice Popham concerning the recent performance of Richard II.2 The story of Essex’s rebellion inaugurates New Historicism as critical paradigm in Stephen Greenblatt’s Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (1982), though his focus is on queen Elizabeth’s response to William Lambarde, “I am Richard II. Know ye not that?” This part of the story attracts more critical attention than Phillips’ inquisition because it is a testament to the court’s anxiety about drama’s power to frame the audience’s perception of authority and law. Phillips knew the stakes were quite high. Richard II was at the time a relatively out-of-date play, and it had a curious history that placed it at the center of a debate about the power of the Elizabethan state to control representations of itself. A book by the antiquarian Sir John Hayward, The First Part of the Life & raigne of King Henrie the IIII (1599) had established the connection between Richard’s life and that of the ailing 3
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did the Lord Chamberlain’s players perform such an old play at the Globe, complete with the abdication scene, the day before the Earl of Essex attempted an armed rebellion to depose Queen Elizabeth? In effect, he would be asked, whose side are you boys on? Phillips may have imagined receiving some sharp questions on the established connection between Essex, his co-conspirator Hugh Wriothesley, the Earl of Southhampton, and the Chamberlain’s Men. Had not the company’s leading playwright – William Shakespeare – written some poems for Southampton? This connection itself, looking back, seems to place Phillips and his company squarely in connection with the failed coup.
