The Erlau Playbook: Five Medieval German Dramas for Christmas and Easter. Trans. with an Intro. and Commentary by Stephen K. Wright. Early European Drama Translation Series, 4. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 511. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2017, xxxviii, 184 pp.

Abstract

With great enthusiasm and excitement I turned to this English translation of the Erlauer Spiele, magisterially done by Stephen K. Wright, Professor Emeritus of English at the Catholic University of America, and I was not disappointed. With great philological skills and great aplomb he tackles his task and makes available five major Christmas and Easter plays from fifteenth-century Carinthia, today in Austria, from the first half of the fifteenth century, in English. He introduces us in a very learned, yet also very lucid and clearly structured manner to the genre itself and the specifics of those five plays. Then follow the five plays themselves in translation, which are thoroughly annotated. Subsequently, Wright offers very brief excerpts from Erlau I (ll. 27–44), Erlau II (ll. 319–56), Erlau III (ll. 560–622), Erlau IV (ll. 330–70), and Erlau V (ll. 277–311). Those allow us to carry out at least a brief comparison between the original late medieval German text and the English translation. I can confirm that Wright has done an excellent translation job, although one could quibble over small matters here and there (V, 287: “so wirt guldein unser har” is: “so our hair will turn golden,” and not: “then our hair must be golden too!”). Those appendices, however, do not help us much at all to get a sense of the original works.