The Elizabethan Country House Entertainment: Print, Performance, and Gender by Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich (review)

Abstract

When Queen Elizabeth brought the court on progress to country estates, she would find herself accosted ‘spontaneously’ by satyrs, nymphs, shepherds, pining lovers, dairymaids, or wild men, characters who conscripted her to ‘perform’ in a sprawling theatrical landscape. Country-house entertainments were ephemeral, site-specific, interactive, collaboratively produced, and miscellaneous events with the feel of flash-mob ‘happenings’: they involved pageants, petitions, speeches, poems, props, and skits. In The Elizabethan Country House Entertainment: Print, Performance, and Gender, Kolkovich argues that these seemingly marginal entertainments were, in actuality, a coherent literary genre and an important site for political and ethical negotiation in the Elizabethan era, not least because they provided an opportunity for elite women to participate in political debate and policy-making. In presenting the first scholarly monograph to think comprehensively about the genre and to consider its evolving meanings in performance and in print, Kolkovich offers rich historical, literary, and social contexts for understanding a fascinating and under-read genre. Scholars have long recognized estate entertainments as occasions for news, gossip, and political self-promotion: hosts could air propaganda and make covert bids for advancement through the guise of extravagant praise for the sovereign. Kolkovich demonstrates, however, that these assemblages can be understood as more politically and culturally complex when considered in situ, whether in the setting of particular estates or as printed forms circulating in various book markets. She situates this genre as part of an emerging national literature that negotiated the boundaries of overlapping communities (region and nation) and the relative power afforded to monarch and competing authorities (including the host and the pageant ‘devisers’). By insisting on the crucial ‘locatedness’ of these negotiations as they materialized in performances and as circulating artifacts, Elizabethan Country House Entertainment succeeds in making a case for the significance and scope of a genre that almost defies categorization. After reading this book, the reader can immediately grasp the productive instability of these entertainments: as ephemeral performances that have to be reconstructed from partial and scattered evidence; as mutable book objects subject to multiple