Writing and Reading Royal Entertainments is a welcome contribution to the burgeoning critical interest in what Gabriel Heaton calls “the wider entertainment culture” of early modern England (3). This lucid and authoritative book takes as its subject forms of theatricality that occurred side by side with those often better-known dramas performed in the playhouses. These entertainments further testify to the seemingly limitless appetite within early modern society for theater and spectacle. Its author was a research fellow on the John Nichols Project at the University of Warwick—which was in itself an important manifestation of this critical trajectory—and this volume bears all of the hallmarks of the careful scholarship that has emanated from the Project. The book also participates in a lively body of critical discussion of the centrality of collaboration in the making of early modern culture. Heaton’s account of the fascinating, complex stories that underlie the creation and reception of these royal entertainments is ably contextualized throughout.

Heaton’s book addresses the variety of dramatic entertainments produced for the monarchy in this period in venues ranging from palace yard to livery company hall to aristocratic mansion. His summary of the “clear division in style” between what he characterizes as the charming if homespun and whimsical Elizabethan royal entertainments and the more solemn and artistically ambitious productions for James and his family is neatly put and convincing (120–21). Heaton also goes some way toward revealing how intertwined court entertainments could be with civic entertainments, implicitly questioning the polarized court versus City narrative that has unduly dominated scholarship of this period (he stresses the court connections of some of the City oligarchs, such as John Swynnerton, for example). But he also outlines the crucial difference between a “corporate relationship based on fiscal policies and commercial advantages” and the more “personal” relationships at court (126). His discussion of the entertainment laid on at Merchant Taylors’ Hall for King James in 1607 thus emphasizes the economic imperative behind the lavish hospitality of the occasion, one that led to “a tension between the form and the message” (151). It is instructive to compare such ad hoc events with the annual Lord Mayor’s Show, although Heaton’s brief account of the shows overlooks the central role of the artificer working alongside the poet. In addition, he somewhat underestimates the level of interest in the shows from some members of the Jacobean royal family (e.g., Princess Elizabeth’s new husband, the Elector Palatine, attended the 1612 show) and overestimates the likely impact of the printed texts of the shows (a print run of 300 copies is not all that large, after all).

In general terms, though, Heaton attends to the specificities of these entertainments, reminding his reader that rather than the productions simply being designed passively to enhance royal prestige, the “hosts, authors, courtiers, and publishers [of the entertainments] all … had agendas of their own” (7). He produces a series of nuanced readings of royal entertainments that take us a long way from the view that they were unproblematic panegyrics. Instead, one can see in these works a complicated negotiation of “reciprocity and mutual love” on the one hand and a desire for “self-representation, self-promotion, or challenge of royal will” on the other (27–28). Such texts are manifestations of a culture that rested on subtle, sometimes minute, sometimes even apparently contradictory, positioning of both the monarch and the commissioner of the performance (and to a degree, of the authors). The agency of these occasions was therefore not exclusively monarchical: as Heaton argues, these productions enabled their protagonists to “script their own relationship” to the sovereign (48).

The book’s focus on material texts, both printed and scribal, and on the publishing history and afterlife of these works, is especially valuable, given that scholarship has for too long been content to rest on untested assumptions about how such works were produced, circulated, and consumed. In presentation copies of both printed books and manuscripts (in which Heaton has considerable expertise), we have evidence of the audience and likely reception of these performances, and Heaton’s research has reasserted the importance of presentation copies to the study of elite culture in this period. (A minor quibble: although there are naturally logistical problems when it comes to reproducing images of manuscripts, some of the illustrations here are too faint and too compressed in size to be legible.) Heaton gives prolonged and detailed attention to the materiality of these texts: one of George Gascoigne’s presentation manuscripts for Queen Elizabeth, for instance, reveals a “sophisticated use of various visual codes” evident in what might otherwise be regarded as incidental features of the text such as its page layout (46). Indeed, as with Heaton’s exploration of the use of the impresa in Elizabethan tournaments, these instances serve as salutary reminders of how very visual early modern culture could be, with its ubiquitous emblems, mottoes, heraldic devices, and so on. As with the discussion of “gift exchange” in the context of the 1607 Merchant Taylors entertainment, this study also foregrounds for us what is the strangeness—on an almost anthropological level—of some aspects of early modern culture.

As Heaton has shown, since one can trace the processes and people involved in the journey from manuscript to print so readily in many of these works, they can be seen to throw fresh light on the collective formation of authorship in this period, and they allow us access to the workings of the various parties involved in the realization of a printed book in ways that are often, unfortunately, impossible to determine in respect of professional drama. Heaton’s book will therefore also have considerable appeal to those working on “conventional” play texts, as well as to scholars of provenance and book collecting (his conclusion takes the study of the dissemination of entertainment pamphlets into quite new territory). Written in eloquent and assured prose and underpinned by copious scholarship, Writing and Reading Royal Entertainments is a signal achievement.