The salutary aim of this ambitious collection is to demonstrate the "breadth and accessibility" of non-canonical early English drama from the late fifteenth century to the late sixteenth century. Challenging standard period boundaries and canonicity, this volume contributes to recent efforts to map a dramatic universe in which the London stage represents one late and contingent development in what had long been a dynamic, politically and socially-contentious theater, interesting in "its own right." The new and established scholars of this volume attend to the texts and conventions of this earlier theater with a rigor usually reserved for Shakespeare, demonstrating that "Shakespeare was by no means the first Tudor dramatist to deploy performance to encode aspects of the fragmented and secret history of the times."
To orient students and scholars accustomed to more traditional approaches to pre-Shakespearean drama, the essays are arranged in four parts that gesture toward familiar topics. Part one focuses on the intersections between religion and the period's drama. Yet, the old search for passages of dramatized doctrine and their source has been abandoned in favor of inquiries into the way drama engages what Peter Happé characterizes as the "kaleidoscope of attitudes toward belief" in the period (each with its own complex relation to regional politics, economics and social conditions). The focus of part II concerns issues we might once have termed formal and historical. Unlike older accounts, the evidence points not to an inevitable, organic evolution of drama, but to the fitful starts and multiplicity that mark a period of intense experimentation in which the London stage is merely one development among many. In the fourth section, a venue traditionally overshadowed by the London stage--the classroom and its pedagogically inflected drama--are considered. Essays in Part IV share the thematic foci of "Desire and Danger in History and Theory."
In a move that appears to replicate a traditional approach to early English drama but actually subverts it, the opening essay looks at biblical cycle plays. Yet these cycles--process-oriented, shaped by conflicting religious and secular interests--are the least monolithic and paradigmatic to date. Peter Happé traces "the dynamic process of [the biblical cycles'] creation...sustained year after year" in relation to regional and national changes well into the sixteenth century. Rather than reduce their critical value (as some scholars of the cycles feared in the 1980s) this emphasis on diversity and revision in the plays augments it. Happé touches on a number of topics ripe for further investigation, from music's quasi-sacramental value in the plays to the ways individual plays were worked up for royal visits.
The second chapter extends this reevaluation of biblical drama through Karen Marsalek's study of one of the single-episode plays recently brought to attention by the REED project: the sixteenth-century Resurrection of Our Lord . Comparative readings of discrete passages reveal the play's complex engagement with Erasmus's widely circulated Paraclesis and Paraphrases on the New Testament. Marsalek reads Erasmus not so much as a source, but as a mediator between pre- and postreformation action in the play. This deft negotiation of doctrine leads Marsalek to propose (convincingly) Nicholas Udall as the playwright, and the circle of Katherine Parr as its primary audience.
Paul Whitfield White completes this first section with his nuanced and highly engaging reassessment of the relationship between Robin Hood folk games and sixteenth-century religious culture. Against received notions of folk culture's "carnivalesque" subversion of the established church, White invokes "the medieval tradition of the holy Robin Hood" to interrogate the boundaries commonly drawn between popular and elite, secular and religious parish culture. White assembles a solid case for the collaboration of parish religious guilds and churchwardens in the production of Robin Hood revels to fulfill pious as well as festive and commercial needs. The fourth essay tracks the uneven development of the presenter or prologue in sixteenth-century drama. Michelle Butler surveys a prodigious number of plays to support her argument that medieval expositor figures are special personages (with names like Poeta or Contemplacio) who are nevertheless always integrated in the play, while those of later plays--partly influenced by classical drama, partly by Donatus's fourth-century critical prescription for comic drama--are more "ambivalent" (inside or outside the play, or both). Less convincing is her attribution of distinction between the equally ambivalent prologues of Bale and all other playwrights. For Butler, while most sixteenth-century playwrights are struggling to incorporate classical patterns, Bale's prologues reflect his anxious negotiation of medieval authority.
Janette Dillon's investigation of the use of theatrical machinery in the exits and entries of supernatural characters yields surprising results in chapter five. Looking at documents from the earliest recorded mechanical descent in England (1392), to entries from records of the London stage, Dillon invalidates the critical "evolutionary" commonplace that the frequency and sophistication of stage technology increased with the advent of the public theaters. Her tremendous scope, including royal entries, civic pageants, and court disguisings, supports her claim about the practical nature of staging decisions; the use of machinery was guided far more by financial and logistical considerations than by a dramatist's consideration of classical precedent.
Alan Somerset's contribution augments our understanding of professional touring, with a new emphasis on the provinces. As Somerset's analysis of the records indicates, the prominent touring troupes we know most about, like the Queen's Men or Leicester's Men, are "anomalies": most troupes performed only locally, or for short periods of time. We need to expand our definition of "typical professional" playing to include seasonal performers, local troupes who never came to London, and/or troupes who toured under the auspices of little known patrons, or without patrons. Moreover, Somerset urges us to reconsider the idea that provincial troupes were necessarily inferior to the "more eminent competition."
In the seventh chapter, Ursula Potter examines the sixteenth-century classroom as a performance space, where delivery skills of voice and gesture were honed as a crucial part of a student's rhetorical training. Reading curricula and pedagogical practices along with the space of the schoolroom, itself, Potter renders a fascinating account of how Tudor education contributed to the reception of public theater through the creation of a certain type of knowledgeable consumer. While the essay is generally productive and well-grounded, Potter's mention of the shift to "a more secular education" would have benefited from a clarifying reference to the distinction between middling and elite education seen in studies like Mary Thomas Crane's, and Potter's effort to contrast features of academic acting with those of the common stage overlooks significant continuity with the popular Vice tradition.
Christopher Gaggero offers an immensely satisfying foray into the intersection between early modern print and theater culture for chapter eight. Centering his study on an underexamined prodigal son play by George Gascoigne, Gaggero explores its engagement with a number of key pedagogical and apologetic texts of the period, as well as its function as a "career strategy." Key to the latter interest is Gascoigne's adroit manipulation of print conventions to "renounce the pleasures of poetry through poetry." Gaggero's lucid reading of the play's attempts to reconcile conflicting ideas about humanist education extends to even the marginal annotations in a copy housed at the British Library.
In the ninth essay, Terry Reilly provides a welcome recontextualization of Gorboduc , a play typically acknowledged for its adumbration of Jacobean tragedy. Pushing beyond the tradition that the play was written as "royal advice" to the heirless Elizabeth, Reilly places the play in the broader context of contemporary debates about laws of inheritance. Demonstrating how the play's structure capitalizes on the "moot" and associated forensic practices at the Inns of Court, Reilly's reading holds exciting implications for how we view moral ambiguity in the plays of this period, and contributes to our understanding of the Inns of Court as a "cultural locus" with aesthetic significance.
Todd Pettigrew broadens interpretive possibilities for the school play, Wit and Science by revealing its participation "in the social dialogue that constitutes its cultural moment." With the aim of warning his boys away from idleness, John Redford, master of St. Paul's, drew on the symbolically-charged epidemic of syphilis to compose a narrative in which sinful excess (metynomically figured by "whoring") literally scarred the faces of the indulgent. Pettigrew brings both early modern science and morality to bear on Redford's yoking of disease to sin in order to show that the play engages a contemporary social crisis with far greater sophistication than has been hitherto recognized.
In the collection's final essay, Daniel Kline argues that Kyd's Spanish Tragedy develops a radical critique of "the possibility of all forms of representation." As the editors suggest, such a reading could help us to understand the play as "a bitter comment on the development of a logocentric theater, a theater 'of the book,' in the 1590's," but Kline's conclusions are never so specific. Instead, his often interesting treatment of the play as a Derridean revelation of "the absence of truth" or "the truth of absence" silently reaffirms the old critical saw that Kyd's Spanish Tragedy inaugurates a "mature" (because responsive to sophisticated theory?) Elizabethan theater. For some readers, Kline's theoretical insights might prove more helpful if they highlighted not The Spanish Tragedy 's similarity to all other radically "unstable" (modern?) texts but the particular historical conditions that made this instability legible to its sixteenth-century audiences.
In a similar fashion, Pamela King's otherwise helpful and richly informative postscript risks confirming--through her promotion of Kline's method as a "general and alternative principle for reading Tudor drama"--entrenched suspicions that plays before Shakespeare are marred by "inscrutable absences of meaning and understanding." It is, perhaps, an unfortunate irony of the times that an infelicitous effort to render something au courant can make it look dated, and this is one of the volume's few potential problems. A minor illustration of this can be seen in the volume's jacket design. While no doubt selected with an eye to retro-style, the cover has the unfortunate effect (given Tudor drama's critical association with seminal studies in the late 1950's and early '60's) of making a truly cutting-edge collection appear rather old-fashioned.
A more significant example of this problem surfaces in the collection's general deemphasis on generic distinctions. Given the number of essays whose methodology confounds the way early dramatic genres are typically perceived or produced in the classroom, the lack of overt discussion may be missed by some readers. The scarcity of discussion about the problems surrounding popular moral drama, for example, is surprising in view of the form's prevalence in the period, and its close relation to many of the plays here. In promoting pre-Shakespearean drama to the wider audience the editors imagine, it seems crucial to acknowledge standard habits of reception. Without sufficient foregrounding, the formal "diffusion" and "radical instability of texts" specialists find so stimulating can seem like euphemisms for the naïve and indiscriminate lack of artistry earlier scholarship once associated with the drama of this period. Fortunately, the findings of the essays themselves lay most of these concerns to rest.
Tudor Drama Before Shakespeare is a fascinating, and foreword-looking collection that scholars of early English drama will welcome. With energy and aplomb its authors shed light on an enormous amount of underexamined material to problematize standard accounts of periodization, secularization, and the development of drama in late fifteenth-century and sixteenth-century studies.