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Shakespeare Quarterly 58.3 (2007) 392-394

Reviewed by
William W. E. Slights
REED in Review: Essays in Celebration of the First Twenty-Five Years. Edited by Audrey Douglas and Sally-Beth MacLean. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Pp. x + 272. $70.00 cloth.

This is a promotional book, not in the sense of trying to increase sales of the hefty red volumes of the Records of Early English Drama (REED) series, but rather of seeking to promote their use by historians of all stripes. It is also a celebration of the first quarter century of the robust megaproject dedicated to locating, editing, and reproducing archival records from all over Britain related to medieval and early modern theater. The participial titles of many of the collection's fourteen essays (e.g., "Birthing the Concept," "Crossing the Border," and "Thinking Outside the Bard") suggest the high-energy level of its staff, editors, contributors, and—crucially—its users. Although the rhetoric of sheer enthusiasm is sometimes over the top ("on the high road to success" [138], "will prove invaluable for many years to come" [191], "the future is now" [195]), the achievement is certainly worth broadcasting.

REED has done much to effect a paradigm shift in early theater studies, diminishing our obsession with city- and author-centered research by offering a wealth of information about anonymous, untitled entertainments performed in houses, churches, guildhalls, and market squares all over England, Scotland, and Wales. Presenting the records shire by shire has opened up fresh approaches to this early culture of entertainment—for instance, to multilevel patronage studies and carefully mapped theatrical tours—and has placed the special case of London theater and its preeminent playwright in a broad, highly informative cultural context. While direct references to Shakespeare's plays don't appear in REED records and only occasionally in this volume of essays (Suzanne Westfall does mention the possible Catholic shadings in Lear and Pericles that might have led Sir Richard Cholmeley's players to perform those plays for Sir John Yorke's household, ca. 1609–10), details about waits, ales, mummings, and the sophisticated tastes of at least some provincial playgoers (to mention just a few topics) have expanded the range of Shakespeare scholarship.

The essays by Alexandra F. Johnston, Sally-Beth MacLean, and Abigail Ann Young in the collection's first part, "Foundation and Methodology," carefully interrogate every aspect of the REED project from its outset, addressing such questions as: What constitutes a record? What are the useful and practical limits of the terms "early" and "English" in the series name? What constitutes "drama"? We learn that the initial decision to transcribe only civic records has since been expanded to include domestic ones as well. The volumes include everything from brief account-book entries to entire letters, some in English, some in Latin. The York volume, we are told, is to be updated with a new index. The terminus of 1642 established in 1973 has been nudged ahead. Other limits have also been pushed in the interests of inclusiveness. The term "player" and its Latin equivalents have [End Page 392] always allowed the inclusion of musical performers, as well as actors. The category of dramatic events encompasses such public ceremonies as eating a goose atop St. Peter's steeple in Chester, not to mention horseracing, wapponshawings (musters of arms), hoggling (fundraising), streaking (Query: Can we have a "guising" when the sole participant's costume is his birthday suit?), and other "paradramatic activity" (170) to be included in the forthcoming records of southeast Scotland.

In addition to the growing ranks of accomplished REED editors (inter alios, David George, Cameron Louis, Alan H. Nelson, J. Alan B. Somerset, and John M. Wasson) who have found creative ways to use the accumulated records in the classroom, as well as in their own research, the list of other scholars drawing directly on these materials in major articles is indeed impressive: Patrick Collinson, Peter Holland, John Marshall, Paul Werstine, and dozens more...

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