Theatricality and Narrative in Medieval and Early-Modern Scotland (review)

An important result of the publication to date of twenty collections in the series Records of Early English Drama has been a significant heightening of our awareness of the fringes of “drama.” Each REED collection has had to confront records which, though not concerned with a dramatic performance in the strict sense, are nonetheless “theatrical” in some sense of the word. John McGavin’s study of theatricality and narrative in early Scotland seeks to cast some light on the liminal state that such records occupy. He bases his study on the kinds of records any user of the REED volumes will recognize as problematic: chronicles and other narrative sources that describe events which, though not strictly dramatic in nature have some aspect of the theatrical about them. Every REED editor has wrestled with such documents in the process of deciding whether or not to include them.

McGavin approaches his records not (as some others have done) from the point of view of the involvement of mimesis in the events described, but from the way in which they imply “witnessing” or “spectatorship” on the part of the viewers. All the records he discusses involve public action, which McGavin defines as essential to the concept of the “theatrical.” The actions themselves vary widely, from assassination to preaching, and from the public presentation of self to the spectatorship of a tourist in foreign lands. Each of McGavin’s wellchosen examples provides a different view of the manipulation of spectator(s) by participant(s), for whatever reasons. In some cases, the survival of multiple narratives relating the same event allow McGavin to compare variant witnesses, in order to demonstrate that the account of a public event given by a spectator may well be as manipulative as the event itself. A case in point is John Knox’s description of the clerical interrogation of one Sandie Furrour who (after complaining that a local cleric was sleeping with his wife), was summoned to answer countercharges of heresy, a capital offense. Both Furrour and the examining bishops clearly recognized the theatrical aspects of his interrogation, but Furrour refused to play the “part” intended him by the church authorities and, essentially, hijacked the proceedings with what McGavin calls a “metatheatrical exposure of the church’s proceedings” (21), thus saving his own life.

The account in Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon of the murder of Thomas Knayton, marshal of the English garrison in Edinburgh in the late 1330s, by Robert Prendergest, a Scotsman who had been insulted and humiliated by Knayton, provides a different context. The humiliation was both racial and public, and clearly subsequent events depended heavily on the fact that the occasion had been witnessed. This context leads McGavin to consider the reported speeches as performative utterances, as speech acts. Although he does cite J. L. Austin at this point, as well as Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work on performativity, the analysis of speech acts would have been relevant to practically all of the records McGavin discusses. The Knayton/Prendergest case is particularly interesting in this regard; since Bower’s account is in Latin, it clearly does not preserve a verbatim account of what the spectators heard, though this does not affect the performative nature of the utterances.

A less bloody story demonstrates an understanding of the theatrical nature of virtually the entire public life of the king, as in 1390 the unharvested crops at Scone, Perthshire, were trampled by visitors eager to greet Robert III. Turned away by the king’s servants in his attempt to ask for compensation for the damaged crops, the granger of the monastery assembled a group of farmers “carrying basins and sticks” (71), led by someone bearing a corn dolly on a pole. The group approached the king’s bedroom early in the morning led by a trumpet player. Brought to the king’s presence to explain the din, the granger presented the event as a...