The Records of Early English Drama: Wales, ed. David N. Klausner.

Abstract

IN a period when the public thinks that the humanities, particularly the literary humanities, have wandered off into the dismal swamp of critical theory and delight in speculations of and about airy nothings, it is a bracing and hopeful thing that a volume such as this in a project such as this should exist. The Records of Early English Drama (REED) project was founded in 1975 and has, since its first volume in 1979 (York), published twenty-four collections of the dramatic records of regions (typically counties) of England, and now with the volume under review, Wales has been included. The project’s aim is ‘to locate, transcribe, and edit all surviving documentary evidence of drama, minstrelsy, and public ceremonial in England before 1642.’ This is about as far from critical theory as one could possibly get. It is undoubtedly the most important scholarly project in this field to be launched and carried forward with care and appropriate speed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The march of the red REED volumes (the series is uniformly bound in bright red cloth) along the shelves of reference collections and those of many scholars is a quite joyous event.