Wales: Records of Early Drama (review)

Reviews David N.Klausner, ed. Wales:Records ofEarlyDrama. Toronto: The British Library and University of Toronto Press, 2005. Pp.dxxviii + 528. $250.00 Coloring the map red now has a different, and more benign, meaning from that prevailing in the time ofthe British Empire.The Records ofEarlyEnglish Drama series has continued itsjourneyfrom the contiguous counties ofGloucestershire, Herefordshire,and Shropshire (soon to bejoined byCheshire) across that winding , disputed, and porous border west into Wales, where it has temporarily changed its name to Records ofEarlyDrama. That pragmatic willingness to be flexible about its own protocols in order to address the specificities ofpast culture is an attractive aspect of the REED project as it has moved between the records of cities and counties to this volume on a whole country. It is demonstrated most obviously here by an extension of the chronological span of the volume: the usual terminus set by the closure ofEnglish theaters in 1642 being irrelevant to the Welsh experience, Klausner has wisely carried the volume through to 1660,doing so not onlybecause this would include manylate records, but because the later date usefully reveals longevity in playing traditions.While he has retained the established structural division ofthe records by dioceses (a very short section) and thirteen counties, he has extended the boroughs and parishes subsection into"boroughs,parishes,and townships"(cxlvii) to acknowledge the specific demographics of a country that had a population by the mid-sixteenth century of only around quarter of a million. He also has a section on the "Principality" for records of relevance to Wales above county level. This is probably the most wide-ranging and varied of the REED volumes so far. IfCharles de Gaulle thought it hard to govern a countrywith fiftydifferent types of cheese, approaching Wales seems to require embracing even greater heterogeneity in a smaller space, looking less for pattern than variety, and expecting gaps, fissures, and ambiguities at every level ofthe enterprise. However, Klausner and his team have risen magnificently to the challenge of managing 365 366ComparativeDrama the play records of a country whose history, geography, language, culture, and documentation all pose major editorial and interpretative challenges.A simple description ofthe volume can serve to indicate the nature oftheir achievement. Its historical and critical introduction covers 66 pages and manages to make sense of a thousand years of independent, contested, and colonized culture. Its records come in Welsh, Latin, English, and French so the translation section runs to 88 pages; its three glossaries add another 32, and the fine index 46. To this one adds 44 pages of Klausners rich, economically phrased, and deeply researched notes,which are frequently a delight in themselves. This is the point at which to remember how much of a service this series performs for other scholars, who can now make critical hay out of the crop grown in these notes and records. The volume also has six appendices (one on forged and fictitious accounts of performance, which are apparently more common in Wales than England), and no fewer than 64 pages ofdescriptions ofthose documents that have yielded evidence for such a distinctivelyWelsh experience ofearly drama, ceremony, and secular music. Document descriptions, though possibly the least studied parts of REED volumes, are the bedrock of the enterprise, of course, and give a good indication ofthis volume's special character.Although the records ofearlyWales have mainly come to us through the mesh of English administration, the familiar document sources of English performance, such as churchwardens' accounts, the records of church or manorial courts, or boroughs are either missing or found in small numbers, or with major chronological gaps and geographical unevenness. On the other hand,the editor's knowledge and perceptiveness have revealed an extraordinarilydiverse range ofcompensating materials,some from the nativeWelsh traditions. Gildas and Gerald ofWales are both here, ofcourse, as well as early books ofWelsh Laws; English royal decrees; episcopal injunctions ; chronicles, such as the Brut y Tywysogion (Chronicle of the Princes); antiquarian and family histories; institutional formalization ofeisteddfods and the poetic culture ofbards shown in royal commissions, constitutions, licenses, fixed fees, and lists ofgraduates; travel journals, including a unique account of an itinerant bard's circuit through the country; notebooks, letters, anecdotes, and...