The Coventry Corpus Christi Plays (review)

218 Reviews In conclusion, then, this is an eclectic collection of essays that will surely have something of interest for every Early Modern scholar, and in particular for every scholar interested in w o m e n writers of the period. Kim Walker School ofEnglish, Film and Theatre Victoria University of Wellington King, Pamela M. and Clifford Davidson, ed., The Coventry Corpus Christi Pla (Early Drama, Art and Music Monograph Series 27), Kalamazoo, Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2000; paper; pp. x, 326; 7 b/w illustrations; ISBN 1580440568. During the 1440s Coventry was a large and wealthy city in which municipal guilds staged plays at the annual Corpus Christi fair, with themes on the life of Christ. This street theatre was part of the Coventry's civic identity, bringing 'no small advantage to the city'. Unfortunately, only two ofthese Corpus Christi plays survive, both in copies of 1535, the Shearmen and Taylors' pageant, which covers the Annunciation to the massacre of the Innocents, and the Weavers' pageant of the Presentation and Christ disputing with the learned doctors in the temple. Only someone who has actually prepared a m o d e m edition can appreciate the immense labour behind this valuable new volume. The manuscripts of two pageants are given in diplomatic transcription with full modern editorial apparatus, and there are four appendices comprising two fifteenth-century fragments of the Weavers' play, speeches inserted for royal visits, the songs and music for the Shearmen and Taylors' pageant, and extracts from the comparable York plays on Christ's disputation in the temple. The book also has a lengthy introduction, textual notes, commentary, bibliography and glossary. The introduction uses documentary records to show how the plays were organised. The master of the guild collected subscriptions from members, and the detailed planning was done by the pageant master, sometimes not a member of the guild but an outsider employed for his organising skills: he assigned tasks and arranged expenditure for the writing of play-books, repairs to equipment, purchasing and hiring costumes, false beards, angels' crowns, Herod's mask, gold and silver foil and other items, hiring and casting for actors, minstrels, and a prompter. The main roles were played by professional actors and minor parts by members of the guild, and sometimes other citizens w h o paid for the privilege. Reviews 219 The vehicles and equipment were housed in pageant houses, from which high carts made ofpainted oak planks, newly repaired, repainted and washed, emerged at Corpus Christi to move around the city from station to station, performing processionally for large crowds. They used the street for part of the stage, while behind them stood the wagons placed end to end, using their height to employ scaffolds, windlasses, pulleys and hooks to raise and lower actors between heaven and Hell's Mouth, to let Judas hang himself spectacularly, and (in the Cappers' pageant) to lift Christ and angels from the tomb. The introduction sets the plays in the context of Coventry's steady economic and demographical decline after 1400, when the guilds, confraternities and other contributors stretched resources and made other adjustments to enable the plays to continue. Also, King and Davidson demonstrate that the Reformation did not stop the pageants. Just as the city had saved the plays by adjusting to economic decline, so Coventry adjusted to ideological change. In 1535, when Robert Croo made the surviving copies of the two pageants he probably made judicious rearrangements to their biblical contents to accommodate the city's Protestant mood, and about the same time the guild diminished the Virgin Mary's role. Indeed, some Protestants actively supported the pageants and during the reign of Mary Tudor a Protestant was released from prison in order to act in one. Also, the new wealth and power of the Drapers' Guild, much given to sumptuous finery and stage props, may have protected the plays until the fiercely nationalist Protestantism of the 1580s precipitated the pageants'finallong decline. M y only reservation with this splendid volume is that its Introduction deserved redrafting to draw together three of its themes into firm conclusions. The first is the strong communal intimacy with which the theatrical...