Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents ed. by Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper, and Peter Holland, and: Shakespeare and the Medieval World by Helen Cooper, and: Recursive Origins: Writing at the Transition to Modernity by William Kuskin (review)

Nearly forty years ago, David Bevington opened his now-classic anthology, Medieval Drama, by dissociating his work from the “Protestant Whig-Liberal biases” that governed his predecessors’. Distinguishing his anthology from that of Joseph Quincy Adams’s 1924 Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas, Bevington sought to understand medieval drama as “an artistic achievement in its own right rather than as a historical antecedent to Elizabethan greatness.” He offered plays in their entirety, uncut and unbowdlerized, avoiding the temptation of his predecessors to “regard the medieval world as disfigured by Catholic superstition, ignorance, and coarseness.”¹

No one would now see the value of medieval drama merely as a precursor for Shakespeare. And no one would now see Shakespeare’s own work as wholly distant from the age of pre-Reformation “ignorance.” Nonetheless, Shakespeare’s relationship to the “Middle Ages” has long vexed scholars, teachers, and dramaturges, for while we still cling to the uniqueness of his craft and the brilliance of his age, we cannot dismiss the hold that vernacular theatrics, Catholic ritual, and Middle English poetry had on him and his contemporaries. Nor can we easily confront the place of history in the plays themselves: the presentations of King John and the Henrys, the appearance of John Gower in Pericles, and the fog of the deep past that shrouds the magic of Macbeth or the Ghost in Hamlet. Shakespeare, as the medievalist Derek Brewer avowed, may well be Britain’s greatest medieval writer—but it lies in the parsing of his terms (Britain, greatest, medieval, writer) that the most compelling of current scholarship goes on.²

A spate of recent studies of the “medieval Shakespeare” have affirmed the playwright’s debts to Middle English poets, confirmed the unease of his audience with ghosts fresh out of Catholic Purgatory, and illuminated his culture’s emerging definition of the “Middle Ages” itself. Shakespeare and his contemporaries lived and worked in a city in which Chaucer would have not been lost. Buildings and streets, markets and bridges, churches and palaces—all, at least from the outside, would have been familiar to a fourteenth-century traveler. As Bruce Smith notes in his contribution to Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents, Shakespeare’s own brother was buried in the same church as John Gower, and the playwright’s visit to that church may have inspired his imaginative necromancy of Gower standing up and orating in Pericles. A “medieval Shakespeare” has moved beyond the appreciations of how Chaucer’s plots informed, say, Troilus and Cressida or The Two Noble Kinsmen.³ It has embraced the fractures of religious life, the facts of institutional politics, and the everyday remembrances of people who had, by the end of the sixteenth century, lived through four monarchs and at least that many versions of the Church.⁴

Medieval Shakespeare lay not only on the street or in the chapel but also in the print shop. Movable type came into England in the 1470s, and the first books that William Caxton printed were the monuments of Middle English. Chaucer, Gower, Malory, Lydgate, the legacies of beast fable and romance—these were the staples of his press, and he effectively set up a canon of vernacular literature grounded in the fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century imagination. His successors, Wynkyn de Worde and Robert Copland, continued his project until Henry VIII’s thought machine effectively shut down the publication of any old books, save those of...