This volume promises to emphasize the "medieval footprint" or "medieval worldview" reflected in film and live performances of Shakespeare's Plays, as Dakin Matthews and Michael Almereyda put it, respectively, in the Foreword (1). The editors present the collection as "an introduction to reading Shakespeare's plays through the lens of the medieval works that inform them and...as a guide to Shakespeare and medievalism in popular culture" (8). Thus, it asks how performances reflect a dual view of the Middle Ages--the directors' apprehension of what is "medieval" and, in turn, their understanding of how Shakespeare regarded the medieval. That is a broad canvas, so considering "medievalism" as simply a matter of sources or settings may be a reasonable scope, yet at the same time, many essayists use the term loosely. The work of Leslie Workman refined our understanding of "the continuing process of creating the Middle Ages," [1] and much scholarship since the 1980s has considered that creative process in film and popular culture, although emphasizing Arthurian, Viking or Crusade motifs. [2] In that context, a consideration of how performances accommodate both Shakespeare's direct evocations and indirect allusions to the medieval is welcome.
The book opens with a Foreword entitled "The Skeleton in the Mirror," a "conversation" between Matthews (actor and dramaturg) and Almereyda (director of the 2000 film Hamlet). During this interchange, Almereyda asks a crucial question that is never really answered: What distinguishes that "medieval worldview from the cultural situation Shakespeare was writing in?" (1). With scholars now finding more continuity than collision between the late medieval and the Early Modern periods, the nuances of the question need to be explored, but here it tends to be treated with a broad brush. The editors gathered scholars of both periods "to select and examine medieval elements, to explore their filtering through Shakespeare, and then to discuss their impact (or not) on performance" (8). However, as they acknowledge, almost all of the plays are either "set in the Middle Ages" or "draw directly on medieval sources" (9), already suggesting continuity of cultural memory (filtered through England's reinvention of a post- medieval national identity), and recourse to the safety of retelling "an old tale" in parlous times. Indeed, perhaps Shakespeare is most "medieval" in his preference for "olde aproved storyes / Of holynesse, of regnes, of victoryes, / Of love, of hate, of othere sondry thynges" [3] for his plots.
The collection is divided into four parts, each introduced by one of the editors. The scholarly apparatus is exemplary, incorporating notes, bibliography, and filmography (including films mentioned only in passing) at the end of each chapter.
Part I, "Abstract and Brief Chronicles of Time: The Histories" examines two of Shakespeare's most physically present characters, Richard III and Falstaff, and the use of music to underscore directorial interpretations of the latter part of Henry V. Jim Casey's "'Richard's Himself Again': The Body of Richard III on Stage and Screen" surveys a dozen performances of Richard, arguing that "More agonizing has gone into considerations of Richard's appearance and corporeal representation than perhaps with any other character in Shakespeare" (27), and emphasizing the enduring influence of Laurence Olivier's 1955 portrayal. In Falstaff in America, Catherine Loomis charts the presentation of Falstaff to American audiences during three eras when social and political upheavals allowed a Lord of Misrule to displace "Puritan theology"--pre-Civil War, the Great Depression, and the 1960s. As malleable as Falstaff is in the plays, Loomis posits that he appealed to Americans in part because "he calls medieval ideals into question by mocking many of the same English feudal values America's European settlers rejected" (49).
Particularly interesting is Linda K. Schubert's "Scoring the Fields of the Dead: Musical Styles and Approaches to Postbattle Scenes from Henry V (1944, 1989)." Schubert discusses the two celebratory songs in the play, Non nobis and Te deum, noting that for Olivier's 1944 film, the British composer William Walton incorporated music from diverse musical periods, to "[evoke] a general impression of the time" (67), a sort of medievalism. For Kenneth Branagh in 1989, however, the score by Patrick Doyle was "to be of our own time...instantly accessible" (68), eschewing the "jingoism" of Olivier's images of victory. Nevertheless, Doyle scores the scene with theme and variations on Non nobis and Schubert provides an analysis of the music keyed to the onscreen action.
Part II: "Carnal, Bloody, and Unnatural Acts: The Tragedies" again focuses on two characters, Hamlet and Lady Macbeth, with an essay on the servants in Romeo and Juliet. If Richard III has provided seemingly infinite variations on a medieval stereotype, the peasant on film has also suffered pigeonholing. Carl James Grindley's "'We're Everything You Depend On': Filming Shakespeare's Peasants" explores social hierarchy in Romeo and Juliet and Shakespeare in Love, noting that "the role of the medieval peasant tends to contribute not to a definition of peasantry but rather to a characterization of a play's aristocrats." They are themselves "dramatically impotent," giving way to the "more serious although subtle challenges to [aristocratic] authority from the rising merchant class" (89). The argument is persuasive, but I take issue with the term "peasant" to serve interchangeably with "servant," and I wish Grindley had at least referred to medieval estates satire, which persisted into the 16th century in such works as Sir David Lindsay's Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estatis.
For Patrick Cook in "Medieval Hamlet in Performance," while Hamlet is more a Renaissance courtier than a medieval prince, his world is essentially Roman Catholic (105). Cook accounts for the strong "medieval" flavor of the play as a "combination of a rising interest in contemporary Denmark and a vividly remembered past of Danish oppression" (106). The latter is an example of Early Modern medievalism, with the proliferation of chronicles and histories inviting Englishmen to re-imagine their past. Film, he shows, paradoxically settles most often on allusion, from the "fusion" of design in Olivier's production to Ophelia's work on the Bayeux Tapestry in Zeffirelli's to details of set dressing, such as a print of St. Mark from the Book of Durrow hung above Hamlet's desk in Almereyda's.
Like Shakespeare's kings and courtiers, Lady Macbeth was an historical figure, but Sid Ray argues in "Finding Gruoch: The Hidden Genealogy of Lady Macbeth in Text and Cinematic Performance," her past, like Viola's, is mostly a "blank" in contemporary chronicles. Thus, her elusiveness affords "a view...much more multifaceted than scholars or students focused on reading rather than on performance might acknowledge" (117). By focusing on the historical queen, who bore a son and was caught up in the politics of succession in the 11th century, Ray argues that the Lady "should not be demonized for behaving the way the medieval system of monarchy molded her to behave" (119-20), citing both Orson Welles' and Roman Polanski's "shallow depictions" of her.
The essays in Part III: "Many Merry Men": The Comedies" examine A Midsummer Night's Dream through the lens of medieval romance; adaptations of Chaucer; and the iconography of the Madonna del Parto in All's Well That Ends Well. Ray's introduction suggests that "the medieval world is in the marrow of Shakespeare's funny bone" (138), although some of these plays are "comedy" by virtue of their uneasy journeys towards marriage, not their risibility. From the bulging grab bag of identified sources for Dream, Martha Driver draws attention to Chaucer's Tale of Sir Thopas and Huon of Burdeux as translated by Lord Berners in "Reading A Midsummer Night's Dream through Middle English Romance." Bottom's adventures reflect the travesty of the former as well as the "stylistic similarity" between "the repetitive and silly verses of 'Sir Thopas' and in the Pyramus and Thisbe play" (146). By "creating two characters out of one" from Huon--Oberon and Puck, "Shakespeare is again employing the doubling or twinning element that is also typically found in medieval romance" (143). Despite the Harry Baillys of the world who might deride "a play about fairies" for adults (in Peter Brooks's words), Driver shows that productions of the play succeed because of Shakespeare's and our own lingering affection for the fantasy world of medieval romance.
In "'Chaucer...the Story Gives': Troilus and Cressida and The Two Noble Kinsmen," Julia Ruth Briggs explores the failure of many productions to convey their medieval roots. Briggs economically shows how the shift from "chivalric" to technological warfare, as well as new fallout from conflict, such as the European appearance of syphilis, informs the "sordid" backdrop for both plays. Especially in the case of Kinsmen, critical commentary that might align it with plays that also depict disillusion with war has been scarce because of its marginal acceptance as the playwright's last word, "his final account of the human condition" (163). In both plays, war is a reality and love something of a game, but their different effects depend, Briggs concludes, on how Shakespeare situates his critique of war: in Troilus by "reducing its cast of heroes to deluded Trojan idealists and callous Greek machiavels" (171) and in Kinsmen, by the past and present losses and griefs of the mourning queens, Emilia, and the Gaoler's Daughter.
Gary Waller calls upon the visual representation of the Pregnant Virgin as exemplified in Piero della Francesca's fresco, as well as the popularity of the tradition in England, especially at the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham (suppressed at the height of the Reformation), to account for the "emotive power" of Helena's entrance in Act 5 of the play in "Shakespeare's Virgin Mother on the Modern Stage: All's Well That Ends Well and the Madonna del Parto Tradition." In recalling Mary's acquiescence to the annunciation that her vow of virginity would not be compromised in bearing the Son of God, Helena in an instant overturns "hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years of patriarchal presumptions about the control of women's bodies by men" (187) by enunciating her acquiescence only in the event of "her own liking."
Part IV: "Tragical-Comical-Historical-Pastoral: The Romances" focuses most on medieval themes and tropes. The essays examine Pericles from two different perspectives; suggest additional Chaucerian influence on The Winter's Tale; and identify Caliban with the Man in the Moon in The Tempest. Kelly Jones explores the "liminal figure" (203) of John Gower as Chorus in "'The Quick and the Dead': Performing Gower in Pericles." Confessio Amantis not only provided the story of Apollonius of Tyre, but the figure of the poet himself to represent both orthodox authority and an almost directorial agency, instructing the audience to understand the moral in the same way a personified abstraction from a morality play would. Yet as R.F. Yeager suggests in "Shakespeare as Medievalist: What It Means for Performing Pericles," the choice of Gower's version of the Apollonius story, specifically one of Thomas Berthelette's printings (1532, 1554), emphasizes what appealed to Shakespeare about Chaucer's contemporary: his modeling of English, his probity and learning, and, in Berthelette's biographical sketch, his Roman Catholicism. Yeager reminds us of the ubiquity of editions of Chaucer, with the encomium "moral Gower" prominent in Troilus and Criseyde. Yet its stage history seems to show that "the popularity of Pericles with audiences has increased as directors chose to diminish, either by transformation or excision, precisely those medieval elements that Shakespeare studied to put in" (223-4).
Even if Shakespeare never "place[s] himself in England's literary history" (232) as Chaucer did at the end of Troilus and Criseyde, Louise M. Bishop maintains in "A Touch of Chaucer in The Winter's Tale" that he recognized not merely a literary debt to the medieval poet, but that his later works (and the Folio) reflect his awareness of how a physical object--especially a deluxe collected edition of works--could "establish literary reputation and prominence" (233). As does Jones, Bishop points to Robert Greene's 1592 Greene's Vision: Written at the Instant of his Death, which engages himself, Gower, and Chaucer in a dream vision "colloquy on literary reputation" (236) pitting "moral Gower" against "tolerant" Chaucer, until Solomon intervenes to prompt Greene to reenact Chaucer's "Retractions" (although Bishop doesn't explicitly make that connection). Shakespeare "infused" Pericles with Chaucer's implicit defense of both "tales and...female eloquence as answer to false, even deadly masculine authority" (238), where Paulina echoes Melibee's Prudence, but endowed it with "the power of the (printed) word and its alliance with timeless art to effect reconciliation" (241).
Kim Zarins locates a medieval analogue to explain why Caliban falls so quickly under Stephano's "spell" in "Caliban's God: The Medieval and Renaissance Man in the Moon." The allusion is often underplayed or cut in performance, but in Zarins' view, the Man in the Moon offers a mythological counterpart to Caliban "in the role of the eternal outcast" (246). In the medieval myth, a worker is punished for stealing brushwood, and must bear forever what he stole, "an object lesson to the laborer" (248). Zarins' essay is far richer than I have space here to indicate; yet, like Bishop, she only nods at the importance of the Man in the Moon to performance.
What then, is the value of this volume? Most of the essays are thought-provoking, even if several are uneven. My main cavil is the decision to organize them according to genre. Medieval writers did not categorize their works that way, and even the First Folio does not separate out the so-called Romances. This structure prevents us from hearing a livelier dialogue between medieval and Early Modern. Could we understand how Shakespeare's works regard the increasing fluidity of social strata by examining them according to the three estates or orders of society? What would be the effect of probing his choice of the "matters" of Rome and Britain and neglect of the matter of France? These may be the quibbles of a medievalist (who teaches Shakespeare), but it is truly hard to distinguish common threads of "medievalism" in the collection as it is arranged. Readers might profitably seek to read the essays in different groupings, for example, choosing all those that look at Chaucer and Gower, or juxtaposing Loomis's Falstaff with Grindley's servants and Zarins' Man in the Moon, or examining the several that explore Shakespeare's familiarity with medieval romances and his awareness that his audience was too. Nevertheless, the collection has not only set a groundwork, but invites further discussion.
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Notes:
1. Leslie Workman, Preface to Studies in Medievalism 7 (1996), 2.
2. Among many others are the collection edited by David W. Marshall, Mass Market Medievalism: Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture (McFarland, 2007).
3. Geoffrey Chaucer, G-Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, lines 21-3. F.N. Robinson, ed., The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer 2nd ed. (Boston, 1961), p. 483. All subsequent references to Chaucer are to this edition.