Herefordshire, Worcestershire ed. by David N. Klausner (review)

78Comparative Drama David N. Klausner, ed. Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Records of Early English Drama. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. Pp. xii + 734. $125.00. The Records of Early English Drama project has produced another volume of dramatic records from regions outside the major civic or university centers of theatrical activity. Neither Herefordshire nor Worcestershire has been the focus of much scholarly effort to uncover its dramatic, theatrical, or minstrel history, and yet the records from these counties are invaluable even in their fragmentary state for what they tell us about such activity in these west-country areas so far removed from London. Just as historians are learning that their work should be extended to a study of the full social and political order instead of being confined to narrow national concerns such as royalty or the matter of political and military power, so also the historians of the theater and entertainment have come to realize that lesser cities, towns, and villages also are deserving of attention if we are to have a reasonably accurate picture of playing in England. David Klausner's book is therefore very much to be welcomed. There are many who will be disturbed by the information which these dramatic records fail to deliver. For example, the ambiguity of the term 'playing' means that we cannot know if disguise or mimetic action was involved in every instance that would seem to point toward drama. And the presence of costumes in inventories—e.g., the "gowne of frères," "Kings cloke of Tyshew," "womans gowne," and "2 Cappes and the devils appareil" listed at Worcester Cathedral in c.1576 (p. 447) —will not reveal to us exactly the use to which such costumes were put. Further, when in 1617 Thomas Waucklen, a painter, "acted a plaie with others vpon the saboath daie at tyme of eveninge praier" at Kingsland, Herefordshire, there is no mention of the subject dramatized (p. 141); was it a secular folk play intended purely as entertainment, or was it an attempt to replicate the kind of drama that appeared in the repertoire of the London companies? Likewise, what was the content of the playbook reported in the Hereford Mayor's Plea Book in c.1440 (p. 112)? Elsewhere plays are in fact named. The "comedie of midas" by John LyIy is identified among the books of Richard Evans of Bredon, Worcestershire, in his will of 1594 (p. 449), and, though Klausner indicates it only in his notes (p. 595), a copy of Terence apparently had been present in the library of Worcester Priory before the Reformation. Ultimately we may need to wonder that so much has survived by way of records of dramatic and musical activity. When we consider how much has been lost of the visual arts in England—losses which continued through the nineteenth century and, alas, into the present century—the preservation of extensive records seems rather remarkable, especially in the light of the carelessness with which they have often been housed until recent times. While even such a list of pageants as that preserved for Hereford in 1503—pageants reported to have been laid down by midcentury —cannot tell us whether these were tableaux vivants or actual dramatic skits on wagons, it provides important evidence for civic representations of sacred scenes, which in this case begin in HIo tempore with Reviews79 the Glovers' Adam and Eve but do not include a Doomsday scene though at least one pageant at the end, the Cappers' Seinte keterina, made visible a post-biblical event, the martyrdom of a saint. Whatever they were, the pageants were mounted at Corpus Christi, and their appeal was apparently local rather than, like the Coventry plays to which people are said to have come from all across England, national. For Herefordshire, morris dancing is frequently mentioned, though in no instance is there a sufficiently full description that we are able to reconstruct exactly what was involved in this spirited dance, perhaps the dance identified as a "deuilishe round" by the Puritan vicar Henry Page at Ledbury in 1638 (p. 144). Less information is given about the nature of the dance in the records than in the Betley window...