Records of Early English Drama: Somerset ed. by James Stokes (review)

HUMANITIES 179 Kratz, whose Mocking Epic (1980) treats the Alexandreis almost entirely as a study in the contradiction of epic and Christian values. Townsend's blank-verse translation nicely complements his reading of Walter's highlyintertextualliterary purpose. Itis castin a flexible, basically iambic pentameter which deliberately recalls not only Milton and Shakespeare but several stages in the development of English verse, 'sometimes reminiscent of Renaissance or Baroque practice, sometimes more akin to second-string Victorians like Swinburne, sometimes bearing the conversational and rhythmically freer stamp of twentieth-century poetry.' At every point where I have checked it, it is based on a clear tmderstanding of Walter's Latin, though it is often quite free, and Townsend frankly acknowledges that the reader in want of a trot may be better served byPritchard's prose version of1986. Itis a pleasure to read throughout , and its twenty-odd pages of notes are compiled with an intelligent eye to the non-specialist reader. Walter is unlikely to challenge Chretien de Troyes,buthe will certainly be read more widelyand appreciativelythanks to the appearance of this excellent book. (WINTHROP WETHERBEE) Records ofEarly English Drama: Somerset. 2 Volumes. Volume 1: The Records; Volume 2: Editorial Apparatus. Edited by James Stokes; Bath edited by Robert J. Alexander University of Toronto Press. xii, 1142. $175.00 The editorial procedure for these volumes is explicitly displayed in 2:594, where the editor declares, 'This collection attempts to include all known documentary references to dramatic, secular musical, and ceremonial or customal performances before 1642 within the bmmdaries of historic Somerset ... Performance has been broadly defined to encompass nearly every mimetic, musicaL or ritualistic form of play used to entertain or otherwise engage an audience.' The collection of records encompasses, mainly, the period from the late Middle Ages to the Civil War and, in the second volume, includes a section on the historical background, an overview of drama, music, and popular customs, a bibliographical study of the documents as artifacts, translations of the Latin entries, and a comprehensive series of explanatory notes, a bibliography and both Latin and English glossaries. Despite the most intensive efforts these records cannot be complete, for most of the surviving civic records are from Bath, Bridgwater, and Wells, and, in addition, many of the ecclesiastical court deposition books were too fragile to read and so were either only partially searched or not read at all. This is, of course, in no sense a criticism of the editors, whose monumental efforts in this compilation are wholly to be admired. 180 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 These volumes are much more than a simple list of mimetic forms of entertainment; theyrepresent asocialand, in some respects, a moral history of the region. Throughout the period covered by the records, a series of conflicts is evident between authority and populace. The legislating and licensing powers were continually at odds with the people of the local parishes, who were fiercely protective of their customary rights and privileges. It is a social war between those who saw themselves as reformers and those who felt they must protect ancient rights. There are many grounds for thls conflict; on the one hand, the local justices of the peace often felt that traditional entertairunents led to immoral conduct. Sometimes they were Clearly right, as in Broomfield in 1633 when a deposition described the conduct of Thomas Cornishe and Joan Cole: 'he had camall knowledge of her bodie against the parsonage wall ... and he had carnall knowledge of her bodie against the Sommer pole which made a bell hanging on topp of the pole to ring out whereby he was ... discovered .' Frequently the authorities were convinced that traditional forms of entertainment must be suppressed in the interests of improving public order, and, gradually in Elizabeth's reign, older forms of parish fW1d raising, such as Church Ales and hoggling (a door-to-door church fund collection), gave way, often with bitter resistance, to church rates, because 'they involved no traditional revelry or observance that might get out of hand and parish authorities preferred them because they replaced discretionary giving and disputable custom with a compulsory tax proportioned at least roughly to the ratepayer's wealth.' The conflict between...