Medieval Drama Research Articles

Playing God: Authenticity in Fifteenth-Century English Drama

Years from now when an archeologist like Sir Arthur Evans discovers Boise, Idaho, she will find a great cathedral, with a gallery and with side chapels along the nave and the choir. At the east end, the holiest part of the great cathedral, she will find the largest and most glorious chapel of all dedicated to the goddess Bon Marche. Polymer statues of the goddess adorn every pedestal, and at their feet, gifts of clothing, the tribute of the people. There will be no need to provide evidence that this is a religious structure. Its cruciform design, the presence of the icons, the lavish piles of rich clothing all fit with everything known of the religious practices of western European and North American society. Yet we, who live in the decade when this great structure was built, would call it a shopping mall. The archeologist may be right when she suggests that shopping is a part of our religion in the twentieth century, but our view of the situation is very different. Our motivation for going to shopping malls, and our way of thinking about them and talking about them and using them is entirely different from what evidence in the future may conclusively prove. Our situation with regard to medieval English drama is not unlike this. We have a certain amount of evidence, and it seems to point a certain way, but increasingly scholars have recognized their inability to ascertain what theatre was like in fifteenth-century England. Combined with this uncertainty principle, however, has come a new thirst for historical authenticity in performances of medieval drama. As we have desired more and more to capture and reproduce the essence of medieval English drama, we have been forced to admit the impossibility of achieving that experience. Given this paradoxical combination of factors, scholars have adopted a number of approaches. William Tydeman's English Medieval Theatre 1400-1500 exemplifies an increasingly respectable approach: honest acknowledgment of a lack of irrefutable information combined with willingness to speculate based on what is known. But it is still possible to write with a minimum of speculation, as Martin Stevens demonstrates in Four Middle English Mystery Cycles, by refusing to deal with the performance question and instead addressing the cycles strictly as works of literature. Alternatively, by presenting a history of medieval play performance from the Middle Ages until today, John R. Elliott, Jr., in Playing God: Medieval Mysteries on the Modern Stage, shows that it is possible to present verifiable information about the plays while still considering actual production. These three books represent a range of responses to the problem of authenticity in fifteenth-century English drama.

Getting under the Aztec Skin: Evangelical Theatre in the New World

In NTQ16, Adam Versényi explored the theatricality of performance rituals in pre-Columbian Latin America. Here, he takes up a line started by Robert Potter in NTQ8, and examines the way in which the Spanish mendicant friars who followed hard on the heels of Cortés adapted Aztec rituals for their own pedagogic purposes. Less expectedly, the friars were also to some extent ‘adapted by’ those rituals, in moulding a performing medium that borrowed from the medieval cycle drama, yet also anticipated the later form of the auto sacramental - and which, intriguingly, combined an expression of the internal politics of conquest with its theatricalization of Christian baptism. Adam Versényi is currently preparing a study which parallels recent developments in Liberation Theology and Liberation Theatre in Latin America.

Wisdom Enthroned: Iconic Stage Portraits

Art history has provided an invaluable resource for modern directors of medieval plays. As an encyclopedia of style, medieval paintings, woodcuts, and doorway sculpture have helped to establish the historic credibility of recent medieval drama productions, for instance, at Bristol, Toronto, Leeds, Indiana, Michigan, and Western Michigan Universities. By verifying that clothing details shoe styles (blunted or pointed), headgear, length and fullness of sleeves or mantles accord with a specific date and a particular place, a costumer may avoid the unintended comedy of placing an Elizabethan courtier side-byside with a Chaucerian peasant, thus helping to dispel the lingering notion that history ceased to function during several medieval centuries. 1 Or a director of mystery plays can select historically appropriate anachronisms for instance, costuming a fifteenth-century Caesar Augustus as a medieval king rather than a Roman emperor. However, being aware of the ways in which art history can influence the staging of medieval drama means more than knowing whether Caesar should wear a Roman toga or an ermine robe. By visually representing the verbal symbols and allegorical figures of a morality or mystery play, props and costumes can serve iconographie functions similar to those of the medieval wall paintings and doorway sculpture to which they have been compared.2 Like verifying historically accurate costuming styles, drawing on art history as a source for specific iconographie portraits is one way of establishing a credible link between contemporary

Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers ed. by Laurie A. Finke, Martin B. Schichtman

REVIEWS ofhighly original inquiry. Some ofthe essaysmainlyinstruct, others mainly argue. Oftheformer, Brewer's, on TheReeve's Tale, for example, must have made a splendid lecture, while of the latter, Boitani's closely reasoned 56page mini-monograph particularly, while impossible to imagine absorbing aurally, presents important new research. There is much to profit by here, though it must be said that the volume is marred by more than a dozen annoying misprints and punctuation errors. JOHN BUGGE Emory University LAURIE A. FINKE and MARTIN B. SCHICHTMAN, eds. Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers. Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1987. Pp. ix, 264. $29.95 cloth, $12.95 paper. The baker's dozen of essays in this collection covers a variety of English and Continental European works not customarily considered within the covers of a single volume. This cross-Channel representation is most welcome and, perhaps more than any other single feature of the book, heralds the editors' determination to bring Anglo-American trained medievalists into fruitful rapprochement with postmodern Continental literary theory, whose chiefarchitects have had their base, when it has been in literature at all, in the literatures of Europe exclusive of England. Though medievalists have long paid homage to the international quality of medieval literature, including that in English, the traditional structure of many university departments, and the long emphasisboth on the historical developmentof the variousvernacularsand on minute attention to particular texts have too often combined in the past effectively to insulate the study of English medieval literature. After an introductory essay by the editors, which sets out the volume's goals and method of organization, the twelve contributors address a range of material, often from more than one vernacular literature. Thus Robert Hanning writes about glossing as "textual harassment" in some twelfth­ century French texts and in Chaucer, Martin Schichtman about the figure of Gawain in Wace and in Layamon, Peter Travis about the "affective" performance nature of medieval drama both in Latin and in English, and Alain Renoir about expectations engendered by "Oral-Formulaic Rhetoric" 221 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER in a wide variety of Germanic and romance literature composed before the twelfth century. In addition, RachelJacoffwrites about "Models of Literary Influence in the Commedia," Marina Scordilis Brownlee writes on the Spanish misogynistic satire Corbacho, and Sheila Delany criticizes Christine de Pizan as a medieval Phyllis Schlafly. Two contributors discuss Latin works that are not usually considered to be amenable to literary analysis: AlexandreLeupin takeson thePoetria nova of Geoffroi de Vinsauf (the French spelling is deliberate) and Louis Mackey Anselm's Proslogium (so is the Latinized). The three remaining essays are on English subjects, one by Laurie Finke on Piers Plowman and two on Chaucer-Marshall Leicester on "Texmality and Deconstruction" in Troilus and Chaucer's two tales, and Peggy Knapp on the Wife of Bath as a glossator. Though I have grouped them by nationality, that is by no means the principle of organization which the editors adopted. They employ a three­ fold structure, "Textuality, Intertextuality, and the Reader," which "re­ flect[s] what we consider three important emphases of contemporary criti­ cal thought" (p. )): deconstruction, new historicism, and reception theory. In focusing on these main currents in theory, they want "to disclose the underlying assumptions of the three basic concerns of traditional medieval scholarship: textual study, source study, and the historical situation of the reader in the Middle Ages" (p. '.>). They complain about the "modernist bias" ofpostmodern theorists but at the same time begin their book with a fictional caricature from David Lodge's novel Small World, the academic medievalist-as-dusty-philologist Liam McCreedy, claiming thesatire "is not without some justification," for "many medievalists have found contempo­ rary theory a strange and threatening field." The editors have set out to tame the threat and invited essays which will "bring together the Liam McCreedys ofour profession" and "initiate a dialogue between the skeptical and the converted" (pp. vii-viii). If their aim was to soothe, they have succeeded all too well, I think. The essays in the volume are of uniformly high quality, and all are exemplary explorations of interesting problemsconnected with the study of the text(s) which the authors...

The Mass on the Medieval Stage

The Mass is dramatized or provides a dramatic element in plays from all the main language groups of medieval drama. Two principal types of plays can be distinguished: the sacramental plays where the essential element is the Corpus Domini and the exegesis of the doctrine of Transubstantiation; and the biblical plays of the Last Supper with the types and figures of the Institution of the Eucharist on Maundy Thursday. There are, in addition, three plays which specify an actual on-stage re-enactment of the Mass.l

Prague

The prehistory of Prague, which won the 1987 Governor General’s award for drama, is something of a theatrical joke by now. John Krizanc was writing a play “Magnificat” which grew to about 300 pages or six hours long. Both the writer and his director and friend Richard Rose realized it was unrealistic to proceed. Reading a book about Vaclav Havel and the Charter 77 at the time, Krizanc got an idea how to save at least part of the original project. Havel always wanted to write about people determined to improve the human condition, whatever the costs. Krizanc decided to write a play about a theatre company rehearsing that medieval play, that oversized “Magnificat.” He believed he could reduce the original work to one historical act out of a three-act contemporary play. In the end, in Prague Krizanc used only several lines from “Magnificat.”

Beyond the picture theory: image and activity in medieval drama

This essay originally set out to answer the question ’What do you not know about mystery plays if you only read the script?‘s I had a fairly conclusive demonstration of what you could miss a couple of years ago when I slowly began to realize that an entire seminar reading the York Resurrection had not noticed that what is represented in figure 1 had occurred between lines 186 and 187. I suspect that this happens more often than we the ’experts‘s realize—possibly even to us ourselves. Setting aside the fact that Latin is not only unknown but apparently invisible to most modern undergraduates, some play-texts are more vulnerable than others because of what they do or do not decide to include in stage-directions. Medieval playwrights did not consider it their job to supply an exhaustive running commentary on the stage set, blocking, and business of a play. York is particularly notorious: in 47 surviving plays there are 30 stage directions, of which 20 are music cues.1 That does not of course mean that we do ...

The Rediscovery of Queen Margaret: ‘The Wars of the Roses’, 1963

For many theatregoers whose sensibilities were shaped by the new theatre writing of the late ‘fifties, the adaptation in 1963 of Shakespeare's first tetralogy of history plays into the three-play cycle The Wars of the Roses came as a startling revelation of the ‘political’ Shakespeare. Directed for the still-fledgling RSC by Peter Hall and John Barton, with the latter also responsible for the adaptation and revision, the sequence was perhaps most memorable for the performance by Peggy Ashcroft as Queen Margaret-Shakespeare's ‘first heroine’ –whose presence first illuminated and then haunted the production. Robert Potter, who now teaches in the Department of Dramatic Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, encountered the production while on a Fulbright scholarship to England, and here recollects in tranquility the disturbing impression of Ashcroft's performance, and its impact upon our understanding of the plays. Robert Potter, who as a practising playwright made his own adaptation of the Roses sequence in 1977, has also published widely in the field of medieval drama, and wrote on theAbraham and Isaac play as presented in Aztec Mexico in NTQ 8.

Comedic and Liturgical Restoration in Everyman

The two best accounts of the morality play Everyman are by Lawrence V. Ryanl and Thomas F. Van Laan.2 Both discuss the of the play, with Ryan elucidating the dramatic and emotional patterns and Van Laan describing the two-part structure of the action, which first descends and then ascends. Both show the way that Christian doctrine receives embodiment in the art of the play, and both examine the of theme, action, and character. I propose here to extend their discussions by offering the term comedy as the term proper for the rhythm of the action and by analyzing this comic pattern in the principal metaphors of the play. I shall also suggest the play's close connection to the rites of the Church: (1) O. B. Hardison indicates that the morality play depends on the and that the characters act as they do because a sacramental psychology requires them so to act;3 and Everyman brings most if not all of the seven sacraments into its structure. (2) Everyman participates in the same pattern of comic restoration which the Mass enacts. Futhermore, (3) the of the principal metaphors of the play is the same as that of one specific feature of the liturgy namely, the priest's prayers of preparation offered prior to saying Mass. Therefore, I shall suggest that Everyman is like much medieval drama in taking its origins (at least in part) in the liturgy. Ryan presents a fine summary of the theological concepts of the play, and I shall assume the perspective of these ideas as I write. Both Ryan and Van Laan limit their remarks to the English play; and so, too, shall I.

Defining the South English Legendary as a Form of Drama: The Relationship between Theory and Praxis

For those working in the field of drama, wedding theory and praxis together can be a challenge. Steeped as we are in a rich tradition of dramatic theory which stretches back to Plato and Aristotle, we feel a certain reluctance when we attempt to revise time-honored prescriptions concerning the dramatic experience to fit what we have found in our close analysis of individual texts. Indeed, the pressure of collective opinion, past and present, seems to work against us. And yet, if justice is to be done to the history of medieval drama (and by extension to certain classical, renaissance and modern plays), we must undertake the challenge of rewriting dramatic theory. Toward this end, an analysis of the South English Legendary might prove helpful in illuminating some of the voice-address problems to be confronted in our reassessment of dramatic form. In setting the stage for such a study, we might, therefore, begin by examining the work of Klaus P. Jankofsky and Thomas J. Heffernan.l Since they have expressed diametrically opposed views with regard to the subject of what dramatic value should be assigned to each text, with Jankofsky assigning that value to the South English Legendary and Heffernan limiting it to the Legenda Aurea, their debate affords us the perfect opportunity to re-evaluate how drama should be defined with reference to a specific text; since they have never addressed this problem in their own work, we can clarify the discussion by considering a model that members of

Four Middle English Mystery Cycles: Textual, Contextual, and Critical Interpretations

Martin Stevens examines the four extant complete cycles of Middle English mystery plays in light of the most recent research on the manuscripts, sources, and records relating to the medieval drama. The first comprehensive treatment of all four of the cycles, the book emphasizes the study of the surviving manuscripts as texts distinct from their performance history.Originally published in 1987.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Revels History of Drama in English. Volume I: Medieval Drama

The Revels History of Drama in English. Volume I: Medieval Drama

The Italian Shakespearians by Marvin Carlson

86Comparative Drama The cross-referencing necessary to study a dramatic subject seems inevitable in a volume of this sort, but the privileging of organization by county or site over a broader chronology is a harder choice to defend in terms of convenience for most users. To be sure, medieval drama is undeniably regional in character, and it is to reflect this important reality that Lancashire has chosen a scheme of organization not employed in any reference work since Chambers. In Appendix IV, moreover, he does give us a useful chronological list of salient dates and entry numbers that provides a year-by-year guide to dramatic activity in the context of British history and European drama. It should further be noted that the use of bold face and italic typeface to highlight the more significant numbers helps give a sense of priorities to the various numbering systems . A little practice will convince most users that the numbering systems are not as difficult as I may have suggested. What does this volume tell us that is new about the development of English drama? The answers to that question are chiefly still to come, for that is the point of providing an instrument of research. Even at the start, however, one can see important implications. For one thing the attention paid heretofore to the plays catalogued in Chambers and Harbage-Schoenbaum and the 5TC has produced an undue emphasis on extant morality drama. We need to be aware that many dramatic entertainments in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were not moral plays but scriptural drama, folk plays, and the like. Earlier, Roman influence on church and popular drama of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries can be seen to be greater than Chambers was willing to allow, not least of all in the pattern of dispersion among England's various urban centers that persisted until the centralizing influence of London and the universities made itself felt in the early Tudor era. Lancashire's work, together with the several volumes of the REED project, gives continuing support to the large-scale revision of early dramatic history we have seen in the last twenty years, beginning with the important correction given to the Whig-Liberal Darwinian assumptions of Karl Young, John Matthews Manly, and other historians of their era. Much remains to be done, and Lancashire is to be thanked for providing the topography or map that we need to plan and carry out our next moves. DAVID BEVINGTON University of Chicago Marvin Carlson. The Italian Shakespearians. Washington, D. C: Folger Books, 1986. Pp. 224. $28.50. Marvin Carlson's The Italian Shakespearians is one of those rare books that cross generic boundaries and provide unexpected pleasures to a variety of readers of markedly different interests. As a history it gives us a fair and thorough appraisal of one of the most curious phenomena of the nineteenth-century English and American theatre: the craze for beholding Italian actors (Ristori, Salvini, and Rossi) playing Shakespeare in Italian in the midst of what we now call a "pick-up company" of Eng- Reviews87 lish-speaking actors. The historian with interest in nineteenth-century theatre will be amply rewarded though never buried under the mountainous boredom of needless detail and repetitive quotations and footnotes of myopic scholarship. The reader who responds to the call of cultural anthropology will be as generously rewarded as the theatre historian, for this book not only addresses the difference between "things" Italian and "the ways" of the English or "northern peoples," but also reveals an even more important situation: the cultural passage from a neo-classic sensibility to that of the romantics. The importance of the three Italians who are the subject of Carlson's book lies precisely in their theatrical nationality. The neoclassical hold upon Italy was at once aesthetic and political, and when the Italians broke the shackles of French domination they did so with fervor that was more definite than that of the English who liked to think of themselves as independent of the French fashion. One is made keenly aware of the significance of this revolution in the first chapter of Carlson's book. I have seen the...

"Towneley Plays" or "Wakefield Cycle" Revisited

During the last decade, the traditional picture of English medieval drama has been unsettled by the systematic collection of dramatic records and relevant ecclesiastical art, by modern performances, and by exceptionally open and generous scholarly discussion. That traditional picture saw English medieval drama governed by the great Corpus Christi cycles, civic guild productions of a Creation to Doom biblical history performed processionally during the Corpus Christi festival some two months after Easter. 1 Such a tidy picture of the norm is not supported by the dramatic records surveyed to date: of some 630 plays or games with known titles or subjects not including London professional productions performed prior to 1642, at most some dozen could be considered cycles.2 Further work on the records no doubt will alter these numbers, which of course are only the extant fraction of a lost whole, but the sample clearly implies that cycles are a rare, peculiar phenomenon when measured against the preponderance of dramatic activity. Neither can one assume a norm of content or performance from the extant Corpus Christi dramatic records. Some towns displayed elaborate pageants without plays; some, plays without pageants; and some both, varying the activity from year to year.3 In Bungay, Suffolk, the pageants of heaven, the world, paradise, Bethlehem, and hell were carried about town on Corpus Christi day in the honor of the blissyd Sacrement until demolished in Riottous maner by the town bailiff and other evil advised persons. Great Yarmouth had a single

Abraham and Human Sacrifice: the Exfoliation of Medieval Drama in Aztec Mexico

Among the least expected (and least examined) aspects of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire in Mexico was its ‘export’ of a neo-medieval form of religious drama. The devastation wrought by the conquistadores upon an ancient civilization should not, however, blind us to the extreme cruelty involved in Aztec forms of worship; and in the following article, Robert Potter both outlines the ‘dramatic’ qualities of such sacrificial spectacles, and shows how the Spaniards, in their attempts to convert the Aztecs to Christianity, employed their own forms of ‘sacrificial drama’ for the purpose – utilizing, for example.The Sacrifice of Abrahamfor their didactic ends, while also assimilating some elements from the supplanted cultural forms. Robert Potter, who teaches in the Department of Dramatic Art in the University of California, Santa Barbara, is author ofThe English Morality Play(1975), and of many articles on medieval and renaissance drama. He prepared the present paper for the colloquium of the Societe Internationale pour I'Etude du Théâtre Médiéval at Perpignan in July 1986.

Homo, memento finis: The Iconography of Just Judgment in Medieval Art and Drama. (Early Drama, Art, and Music Monograph Series, 6.) Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1985. Paper. Pp. xi, 219; 27 black-and-white illustrations.

Homo, memento finis: The Iconography of Just Judgment in Medieval Art and Drama. (Early Drama, Art, and Music Monograph Series, 6.) Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1985. Paper. Pp. xi, 219; 27 black-and-white illustrations.

The Bible in Middle English Literature by David C. Fowler

R E V I E W S David C. Fowler, The Bible in Middle English Literature (Seattle: Univer­ sity of Washington Press, 1984). xiii, 326. $25.00 It is relatively rare among the scholarly labours of medievalists for a book to be produced that has evident appeal for the general academic reader as well as much value for the specialist. David C. Fowler’s latest book is, how­ ever, a notable exception to the rule, and it deserves a wide audience among general students of English literature. From the point of view of its scholarly plan, this is actually the second of a two-volume study which has occupied Fowler for many years, since his early and important work on Piers Plowman. Fowler has been a pioneer in the teaching of the Bible in Literature, and the study here brought to con­ clusion is a natural outgrowth of his combined interests. The first volume, The Bible in Early English Literature (1976) was in effect an introduction to the transmission of the Bible during the Middle Ages, from textual tradi­ tions to popular vernacular paraphrase and translation. It is an extremely useful study, containing central chapters on St. Gregory’s Moralia on Job, the Old English translation and paraphrases, and, in closer anticipation of this second volume, the Middle English “metrical Bible” or Cursor Mundi, Higden’s Polychronicon and the Wyclif Bible. With this background on the availability of biblical literature itself, Fowler pursues in his second volume the role of the Bible in those central works of Middle English literature with which, for the most part, non-specialists as well as specialists are quite familiar. Having in this brief fashion indicated something of the relationship of the two volumes, I want to say plainly that the present book can be read entirely on its own, without any sense of loss, and that in my opinion Fowler has been remarkably successful in his intention (signified by the absence of any formal indication that they are in fact “vol. I ” and “vol. I I ” ) to make it so. Furthermore, the book is admirably written, with the easy, almost conver­ sational grace of the mature scholar and teacher; Fowler’s prose and his old E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , x ii, 4, December 1986 humanist’s gift for the well-told story calls up those pleasures of reading an earlier generation of scholars were more careful to preserve for us, so serving as Sir Arthur Quiller-Gouch once put it, a literature which “is not, and should not be, the preserve of any priesthood.” This book offers, in fact both a worthy introduction to Middle English literature and a pleasurable reconnaisance of its rich resources and landscape. Chapter One is devoted to the medieval drama — particularly the cycle drama and morality play — and opens with an illuminating discussion of the Cornish Ordinalia, a lively and much overlooked English cycle play which, because of its relative concision among other values, allows Fowler to introduce liturgical influences on the structuring of adapted biblical narra­ tive. He goes on to locate the development of medieval drama in its theo­ logical and catechetical milieu, but with special attention to the role of narrative typology. Examples are drawn from Chester, Wakefield, and the Castle of Perseverance. The second chapter, “Medieval Lyrics and the Church Calendar,” is one of the most interesting in the book. Here Fowler’s discussion commences with influences of the Song of Songs, and “the harmony of sacred and sexual significance” in some exemplary Middle English lyrics indebted to the biblical poem for language and image, and moves on to suggest ways in which certain lyrics might be performed in connection with the annual schedule of Bible readings in churches from Christmas tide, with its lections from the prophets and Gospels, to Advent with its lections from the Apoca­ lypse of St. John, in an annual biblical cycle. This chapter, which offers attractive readings of several lyrics, contains a discussion of the role of Mary Magdalene — not only in the lyrics but also in the saints’ play which bears her name...

York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling ed. by Richard Beadle, Pamela M. King

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER RICHARD BEADLE and PAMELA M. KING, eds. York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1984. Pp. xxxiv, 279. $29.95, £5.95. Richard Beadle's York Plays (1982) was, following Lumiansky and Mills's Chester Plays (1974), the second new full edition of the great English cycles, which are beginning to receive modern editorial treatment in the wake ofthe vast strides in scholarship which have occurred since the major nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century editions of the mystery plays. Beadle has now, in collaboration with Pamela King, followed up his edition with that most valuable of commodities, a volume of selections which is accessible in terms of price on the one hand and presentation of text on the other, in which all the benefits of detailed and up-to-date scholarship are brought to bear. This edition is designed "with the general reader and the student of medieval literature and early drama in mind," and there is also the understanding that it should be able to serve as a production text. It becomes patently clear in both the introduction and the texts themselves that the varied requirements of this wide range of read­ ership are always kept in mind. The general introduction not only prefaces the York Cycle but is some­ thing ofa primer to the whole area ofmedieval scriptural drama. Written with the utmost clarity, yet avoiding oversimplification, it deals concisely with the most significant aspects, both dramaturgical and literary, of the drama. The idea, alas, not entirely dead, that medieval drama was the na:ive product ofsimple men, is effectively challenged by discussion ofthe various practicalconsiderations like the financialand topographical organi­ zation ofperformances and the development oftexts, as well as the many details of the mise-en-scene on which modern research has been able to shed some light, such as acting, scenery and decor, costuming, and the use ofmasks and music. Literary and general artistic aspects discussed include typology and iconography. Others, such as verse and rhetoric, are sensibly (considering the variations within the cycle) consigned to the headnotes preceding each play. In an edition clearly intended to help broaden the reception of both this cycle and medieval cycle drama in general, the editors are at pains to promote the notion of the plays as living drama rather than just literary or antiquarian pieces. This is achieved through not only lively discussion of the aspects already mentioned but also some consideration of their impact on and significance for their contemporary 164 REVIEWS audiences. There is also a useful discussion of modern productions, though, whereas the editors are willing always to find things of which to approve in these productions, their comments are otherwise uncritical, leaving one with the impression of gratitude for any production, perhaps unnecessary in this time of increasing interest in early drama. The selectionconsists of twenty-two of the forty-seven extant plays in the cycle, and they were chosen with an eye to intrinsic artistic merit and to give some idea of the nature of the cycle as a whole. There are accordingly clusters around the two most significant episodes, the Creation and Fall and the Passion of Christ. In any such undertaking there will inevitably be some regrets about omissions-a personal one is the noninclusion of Christ's Appearance to Mary Magdalene, with its emotional impact and dramatic revelation-and there is perhaps a slight imbalance in that the only play to represent the considerable post-Resurrection sequence is the LastJudgement. On the whole, however, the selection is judicious and useful. It is the more so, for teaching purposes, in being an addition to the small range of selections confined to a single cycle, like Maurice Hussey's Chester selections or A. C. Cawley's Wakefield Pageants. Few editors of the cycle plays, whether full collections or selections, extend the recognition of the individuality of the component pageants to the provision of headnotes to each one, perhaps through considerations of space. The headnotes in this selection are probably the best in any edition to date. Without being overlong, they manage to cover a wide range...

Flexible iconography: the experience of the spectator of medieval religious drama

Flexible iconography: the experience of the spectator of medieval religious drama

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism and Reviews, Vol I. ed. by J. Leeds Barroll III

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism and Reviews, Vol I. ed. by J. Leeds Barroll III