Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England by Claire Sponsler

Abstract

REVIEWS capitals suggest that the ms. was decorated after leaves had been lost" (p. 99). His conclusion is vitiated by the error on which it is based. Other errors or inconsistencies riddle Seymour's description. He de­ scribes The Clerk's Tale as "unspaced stanzas, marked by parafs," without noting the inconsistency with which the program is carried out, and without noting a similar (inconsistent) program for The Man of Law's Tale. The boxed rubrics Seymour describes as "flamboyantly decorated" do not clearly belong to a later hand; they occur on fols. 32, 47 (not 41); and they involve calligraphic work with faces in profile on the ends of the boxes (see Scott, 1.61, noting such profile faces to be characteristic of fifteenth-century MSS; they also occur in the ascenders common in BL MS Lansdowne 851). Under glosses, Seymour reports "none, apart from auctor names in red f. 86"; but there are several abbreviated Latin glosses, partly trimmed off, for The Pardoner's Tale. Inconsistent reporting of glosses also affects Lansdowne 851: there Seymour reports glosses for The Man of Law's Tale under "Contents" (mystifyingly, he also reports "8 after 301"), but denies their existence under "Glosses." He also misses two small glosses for The Knight's Tale, fols. 15v and 26-and perhaps more. Getting details wrong cannot be deemed unimportant in a catalogue. High levels of error; faulty reasoning, often on the basis of error; and inconsistency destroy confidence in Seymour's catalogue. Any library or scholar who has not paid for this Catalogue should invest instead in Manly-Rickert, the CD-ROM Wife ofBath's Prologue, or Scott, and wait for more complete publication of Mosser's work. CHARLOTTE C. MORSE Virginia Commonwealth University CLAIRE SPONSLER. Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England. Medieval Cultures, vol. 10. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Pp. xvii, 209. $54.95 cloth, $21.95 paper. In Claire Sponsler's Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England, Michel Foucault's axiom "Where there is power, there is resistance" is both credo and organizing principle. By 385 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER asking searching questions about how the readers, viewers, and listeners of late-medieval official culture appropriated and transformed "disci­ plining" discourses through theatrical performance, Drama and Resis­ tance finally brings medieval drama scholarship into full, knowing dia­ logue with influential postmodern theorists of power, material culture, and spectatorship. But though Sponsler frequently invokes the cultural insights of Foucault, Bakhtin, and Elias, she is also the very model of resistance here, boldly critiquing both those theorists' formulations about spontaneous eruptions of peasant carnival and their facile con­ structions of a simple, devout medieval world docilely lying in wait for the self-fashioning, reforming, and civilizing impulses of the Early Modern. The late-medieval performance history Claire Sponsler is inter­ ested in telling in this book is one in which "within the licensed space of the theater, official scripts for living could be rewritten-no matter how fleetingly or contingently-to explore alternate possibilities of ac­ tion and being" (p. xv). The book's structure is a point/counterpoint of power and defiance. Chapters 1, 3, and 5 scrutinize late-medieval disciplinary discourses of sumptuary laws, conduct literature, and books of hours; chapters 2, 4, and 6 counter these with studies of the social and gender disguisings of the Robin Hood plays and ballads, the flamboyant unruliness of Vices in the morality plays, and the spectacular transgressions of the Corpus Christi pageants. In every case, Sponsler evades the easy conclusions such a dialectic might invite, exploring instead in arguments of consid­ erable complexity and subtlety the nuanced minglings of compliance and subversion in late-medieval theatrical performances. Throughout this book, Sponsler unabashedly uses the present as an instructing lens on the past. Chapter 1, on medieval sumptuary laws, for example, begins with an extended exemplary anecdote about a ban­ dana worn by an Mashpee Indian in a tribal court case in Massachusetts in 1976, an anecdote that Sponsler deftly weaves into an argument about the crucial role of garments in the constructing of self and community identity...