Drama, Play and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (review)

Abstract

Reviews 173 Parergon 20.2 (2003) Clopper, Lawrence M., Drama, Play and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2002; cloth; pp. 384; RRP US$45.00; ISBN 0226110303. Lawrence Clopper’s Drama, Play and Game is less a study of dramatic modes than a study of dramatic ‘communities’. It should be acknowledged, however, that the title of the book suggests a much wider field of study than what is truly offered. Clopper’s interest is clearly weighted toward medieval England and its attention to early modern culture is limited to the persistence of selected medieval dramas in the mid-sixteenth century. The success of this book lies in Clopper’s convincing challenge to traditional scholarly treatment of English drama as having undergone an ‘evolutionary’ development from biblical drama, through morality plays to Elizabethan popular theatre. The reader is left with a clear sense that medieval plays display a variety of styles, locations and performance imperatives that varied according to the communities through which they emerged, rather than a single course of linear evolution. The Introduction and first two chapters are concerned largely with the emergence of early medieval anti-theatricality, despite the absence of a theatre industry, or theatrum like that of ancient Rome. Clopper points to the fact that, while there was no theatrum in medieval England, there was enough anxiety about public display and festive culture to see theatrical terminology become stigmatising metaphors for immorality. Chapter Two explores how anti-theatrical discourse actually provided for the development of ‘legitimate’ theatrical modes such as biblical and morality drama by defining them against more undesirable forms of public display. The author insists that scholars must look beyond the fourteenth-century Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge. Through a process that is, by his own admission ‘tortured’, Clopper argues that, contrary to popular opinion, this is not the only anti-theatrical document surviving from medieval England (p. 105). Equally, anti-theatricalism was not restricted to scripted stage plays. The emergence of pejorative theatrical metaphors ‘does not point to the existence of an actual theatre or even necessarily a mimetic tradition’ (p. 54-5) but rather reveals a concern with spectacle and immoral display including Miracula, ludi inhonesti and Somergames. In short, the term theatrum worked as a stigmatising term because its definition was broad enough to draw associations with a wide range of contemporary activities. 174 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) Chapter Three shifts focus onto different types of sanctioned theatrical practice in late medieval England. True to his promise, the author places these developments in the context of ‘communities’. What becomes clear are the differences in, for example, lay and clerical practice, as well as what we might expect to see in different locations such as monasteries and Cathedral towns, as opposed to towns and parishes in which civic authority was more immediately in the hands of secular guilds. Chapter Four continues the emphasis on dramatic communities such as York, Newcastle, Beverly, Chester and East Anglia. Of importance here is Clopper’s argument that, while church authorities were eager to restrict drama to the enactment of biblical narratives, it was ‘the clergy’s inability to completely control lay activities that allowed an opening for dramatisation of vernacular biblical texts’ (p. 140). The result of which was the emergence, in lay communities, of instructional moral drama that was religious in content but not necessarily biblical. Clopper’s emphasis on communities is sustained by casting the cycle plays and other religious dramas in a civic context, arguing that drama progressed ‘from the church into the streets’ in different forms and at different times, depending on the kind of local government (p. 140). In medieval Lincoln and Norwich biblical stories constituted the bulk of dramatic narratives due to the predominance of the Cathedral over public activities. Meanwhile in other towns like Newcastle, Clopper identifies a much earlier emergence of moral, instructional drama presented by lay people. The chapter concludes with an excellent subsection on London, addressing the comparative lack of medieval drama produced therein. The important point is made that, due largely to the presence of the court nearby and its associated traditions of spectacular...