Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft: Remnants of the Mysteries on the London Stage by Kurt A. Schreyer (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft: Remnants of the Mysteries on the London Stage by Kurt A. Schreyer Horacio Sierra Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft: Remnants of the Mysteries on the London Stage. By Kurt A. Schreyer. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014; pp. 280. The stylistic divide between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is often portrayed as a chasm so wide that this artistic transition seems more like [End Page 764] a revolutionary coup d’état than a gradual development. This notion, popularized by Jacob Burckhardt’s seminal The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) and reaffirmed by many scholars and students of the Renaissance, has taken on the cast of nearly unquestionable truth. However, Kurt Schreyer is one of many recent academics to add nuance to our views of how medieval practices continued to influence Renaissance artists well into the seventeenth century. In this book Schreyer soundly argues that Shakespeare’s plays are deeply indebted to the late-medieval English mystery plays. This compelling argument is buttressed by a substantive analysis of the Chester Banns (a 1500s announcement of the performance of guild-produced religious drama), and by perceptive readings of stage properties in three plays (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, and Macbeth). Schreyer’s work is an excellent addition to studies that showcase the importance of examining Shakespeare’s innovative employment of medieval theatrical traditions, such as Michael O’Connell’s Blood Begetting Blood: Shakespeare and the Mysteries. More importantly, it augments a growing field of research that revises the temporal boundaries with which we frame cultural movements. The material theatre is rarely given critical notice in the study of Shakespeare (Andrew Sofer’s The Stage Life of Props is a notable exception) because so little of it is mentioned in his stage directions. One can think of the handkerchief in Othello or the crown in King Lear. Schreyer offers an examination of three elements he categorizes as stage props or materials: the ass’s head in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the space of Purgatory in Hamlet, and the knocking sound at the gate in Macbeth. He posits that each of these are remnants of medieval mystery plays with which the audience would have been familiar, and that as a dramatic craftsman acutely aware of theatrical history and the physical requirements of the stage, Shakespeare makes something new out of these traditional tools. Schreyer argues convincingly for the relevance of the mystery cycles of plays during the Renaissance by considering how the transient and temporary theatres of each era valued the visual and spectacle. Such a point seems obvious enough, but the expressed medieval/Renaissance dichotomy obscures spectators’ desire to see something flashy, whether in the thirteenth, seventeenth, or twenty-first century. After all, mystery plays featured angels, devils, wayward men, and biblical stars engaging in violent and miraculous events, from Noah and the Flood to Jesus’ harrowing of hell. Many imagine these portrayals to have been crude and simplistic, but Schreyer counters that medieval guilds spent considerable sums of money as producers and directors to showcase their craftsmanship, citing, for example, an early Banns’ call for goldsmiths to “‘magyfe’ their craft to deck out King Herod” and for the “‘3 kings Royall’ to look ‘worthy to appear’” (61). Similarly, he mentions Phillip Henslowe’s famed theatrical diary and its 1598 catalog of ornate and expensive props as a parallel to the pride the medieval artisans took in producing finely wrought items for the stage. In his first close analysis, Schreyer draws on the whimsical and comical delights of Midsummer, nowhere more apparent than in Bottom’s magical transformation into a man with the head of an ass. While many scholars have noted allusions to Ovid’s Metamorphoses in this play, Schreyer points us toward the talking ass from the story of Balaam in the Old Testament Book of Numbers, a narrative often portrayed in medieval drama, and offers more history of the personified ass through Protestant anti-Catholic propaganda featuring the pope as a monstrous hermaphrodite with an ass’s head. Again, Schreyer does not merely present the connection, but analyzes how Shakespeare makes new use of this tradition by appropriating it to...