The Queen’s Dumbshows: John Lydgate and the Making of Early Theater by Claire Sponsler (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Queen’s Dumbshows: John Lydgate and the Making of Early Theater by Claire Sponsler Sheila Coursey Claire Sponsler, The Queen’s Dumbshows: John Lydgate and the Making of Early Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2015) 308 pp. Claire Sponsler’s The Queen’s Dumbshows: John Lydgate and the Making of Early Theater builds upon her 2010 TEAMS edition of Lydgate’s Mummings and Entertainments, and uses Lydgate’s “nonliterary” works to pose valuable questions about the field of early theater and the cannon of medieval English literary studies more broadly. Sponsler’s thesis is that theatrical history poses a needed provocation to secular, London-based and Chaucer-centric English literary history. Lydgate’s mummings and disguises demonstrate one body of work marginalized by such a “blinkered” view of literary history, and Sponsler’s book demonstrates how attention to the excluded “nonliterary” disrupts modern assumptions of medieval cultural production (1–5). Lydgate’s “dumbshows” are collaborative, mixed-media works that draw attention to the competition between poetry and performance as “forms of cultural prestige,” underscore the impact of religion in Middle English texts, bring new light to rethinking the vernacular, and consider the involvement of women in dramatic enactments (4–7). Sponsler foregrounds the varying foci of her chapter as attention to different types of “situatedness,” the position of a text between bodies and spaces when collaborated on, performed, read, or inscribed on various spaces (15). These different material crossroads of production and reception allow Sponsor to raise timely questions about the boundaries between literature and theater, the archive and the repertoire. Sponsler’s first and last chapters engage with the material records of early drama. Though these chapters deal the most with the hand of the scribe in shaping early theater. Sponsler makes sure that her reader never loses sight of the fact that the text belongs first and foremost to its material manuscript, including images of many discussed pageants in the subsequent chapters. Chapter 1 examines the scribal practices of John Shirley, the main copyist of Lydgate’s performative works, and the medieval paratext that he constructed around manuscript editions of playtexts. Sponsler uses the wide range of Shirley’s contextual terms for the text—“device,” “bill,” “ordinance”—to [End Page 303] demonstrate the “porosity of representational borders” in Lydgate’s works, and the slippery generic definition of a play (19–20). Chapter 8 returns to this consideration of scribal work with a “dearth of knowledge” rather than a “plenitude of knowledge; Sponsler makes a case for Lydgate’s authorship of The Mumming of the Seven Philosophers based on the manuscript’s possible connections to the “Shirley circle” in London (191–197). In doing so, Sponsler models the challenges of extrapolating from the archive of early theater. Both of these chapters demonstrate impressive original archival research, and provide concrete examples of Sponsler’s larger claim of the challenges and rewards of attempting to construct a performance repertoire in early theater. In between these two studies, Sponsler uses her observations in the archive to inform readings of Lydgate’s various performative events; chapter 2 engages with Lydgate’s role as vernacular poet, and his mummings as performances that re-inscribed political and civic identities and spaces. Sponsler terms Lydgate’s approach towards language “vernacular cosmopolitanism,” an orthodox form of the vernacular that relies on borrowings and assimilations (38). This form of English poetics, Sponsler argues, brings together in an imagined urban community fractured London factions in pageants such as the Mummings for the Mercers and Goldsmiths (38–39). Chapters 4 and 5 consider Lydgate as transcriber or glosser of other London performances: chapter 4 addresses Henry VI’s royal entry into London as a pageant of “inscriptive force,” mapping out “real or imagined relations” between the crown and town (122–123). Sponsler categorizes Lydgate’s verse as “transcription” capturing words, performance, and response to Henry’s royal event (131). This transcription demonstrates the collusion between inscription and performance in medieval pageantry, in comparison to the “textualizing” of Lydgate’s Procession of Corpus Christi that Sponsler studies in chapter 4. Sponsler argues that Lydgate’s Procession is based on an actual Corpus Christi Procession produced by the...