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Reviewed by:
  • Festivals and Plays in Late Medieval Britain
  • Norman Simms
Davidson, Clifford , Festivals and Plays in Late Medieval Britain, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007; hardback; pp. 216 ; 14 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £50.00; ISBN 9780754660521.

It has been a century or more since the great breakthroughs in the study of medieval drama began, with vast compilations of obscure data, such as that of E.K. Chambers (The Medieval Stage, 2 vols., 1903), following the lead of the Cambridge anthropologists, headed by Sir James Frazer, Jane Harrison, et. al. These books were also major attempts to generalize theories as to the progressive development of the theatre after a supposed catastrophic break with the ancient world caused by the emergence of Christianity. Some time in the eighth or ninth century, the scholars opined, hidden in the dark recesses of monasteries, a new germ was born. The proof? Two or three lines of Latin text in the chanting of the mass were acted out, first by voices, then by actions, and soon by special effects, such as costume, lights, and props. Quem quaeritis? Whom do you seek? And the response to these sacred seekers, from an angel guarding the now empty tomb of Jesus: The one whom you seek is risen. From that moment of tension and dialogue the idea of drama was secreted and gradually, year by year, century after century expanded until it became in the early fourteenth century the vast, lengthy and elaborate cycle drama of Corpus Christi. So for a hundred years the facts accumulated, the theories were refined, and the basic picture, somewhat modified, was taught to every student of the Middle Ages.

But from time to time in the last quarter of a century, someone has stepped forward to synthesize the data, recheck the facts, and express doubts about the validity of the grand narrative of Darwinian evolution of drama, including the notion of the huge gap between classical theatre and the rebirth of the idea in the liturgy of the Church. Perhaps urged along by the post-modernist distrust of all historical narratives and the ideological turn against big ideas, the latest series of studies have been marked by extreme caution, verging on a skepticism [End Page 202] that virtually questions the very existence of a medieval theatre at all, seeing, at most, unremarkable processions and spectacles, fragments, uncoordinated and incoherent dramatics, and occasionally – because caught between the Catholic Church's desperate grasping after an old faith in itself quickly dying away and the new Protestant iconoclastic distrust of the visual and the tactile – an early modern (for even the words medieval and renascence have become politically incorrect anachronisms and Eurocentric bromides) version of political propaganda.

Clifford Davidson's latest synthesis and revaluation is valuable precisely because the author, reflecting back on a half century of his own scholarly accomplishment, teases out from hundreds of journal articles and books a solid but still very cautious collection of data. Davidson surveys the dramatic history of late medieval Britain (more than England, because he includes Wales, Scotland and Ireland at times), within a light context of Continental analogies, winnowing out what seems to him the most likely history, matching the liturgical calendar to the relevant evidence from archival data, archaeological remains, and occasional antiquarian and artistic impressions. For the most part, the evidence confirms that extant information dates from the fifteenth and sixteenth century rather than earlier, so that our view of 'medieval drama' is really theatricality of the Reformation/Counter-Reformation period, and that within this not very coherent body of evidence there is little that can be generalized in a consistent enough form to warrant progressive developments of any sort whatsoever; rather, each city or town with some sort of record of drama shifted and reorganized its performances at irregular and sporadic intervals, mixing and matching available hardware (church architecture, city layouts, geographical features) with softer-ware (political and guild structures, talented amateurs and professionals, and the ebb and flow of famines, plagues, rebellions and economic success or failure).

However, beyond this aspect of the project – to collect, select, and evaluate the scholarship of the twentieth century – there are a number of other merits...

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