Fifteenth-Century English Drama by W. A. Davenport (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER and with little inclination to shout "Namoore of this, for Goddes dignitee!" WILLIAM F. POLLARD Maryville College W. A. DAVENPORT, Fifteenth-Century English Drama. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer; Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Lit­ tlefield, 1982. Pp. 152. $37.50. Despite greatly increased interest in medieval English drama, evident in numerous articles published over the past several years, relatively few studies have addressed themselves to problems of literary criticism. Instead, matters of social and theatrical history have dominated the annual lists of publications in this field. W. A. Davenport seeks to correct this imbalance, not for the whole field of Fifteenth-Century EnglishDrama, as his titleimplies, but rather, as his subtitle indicates, for "The Early Moral Plays and Their Literary Relations." The choice of title is no doubt deliberate. Davenport finds the growing tendency to insist on the generic categories of "mystery cycle" and "morality play" exerting an unfortunate influ­ ence on the way we think of the plays of the fifteenth century. For him the use of such classifications forces us "to look at kinds of drama rather than plays, so that individual works tend to be seen as versions of the archetype rather than as achieving effects in their own right" (p. 2). Thus the broad title is part of a general attempt to avoid as much as possible the use of the category "morality play" in the discussion of The Pride ofLife and the plays of the Macro manuscript that constitute the core of this study. Before I discuss the study's realstrengths, a word is in order on the question of generic distinctions and medieval drama. In the first place, no generic distinction adequately accounts for all the works of literature we seek to place in one pile as opposed to another. One has merely to reflect on the difficulties posed by the traditional categories imposed on Shakespeare's plays to realize how often plays 186 REVIEWS refuse to fit into the pigeonholes our neat critical minds wish to force them into. Genres are inadequate descriptors for real works of literature because a product of the human imagination can assume any form the author wishes, whereas the biological species for which genre classifications were developed cannot change from one gener­ ation to another. An osprey always begets an osprey; tragedies do not "beget" other tragedies. Second, the categories "mystery" or "morality" play were not used in the Middle Ages and only corre­ spond roughly to ideas of what constituted a play in that period. Despite these caveats, the generic principles proposed by V. A. Kolve for understanding The Play Called Corpus Christi and by Robert Potter for understanding The English Morality Play have enabled us to get at essential features of both civic religious plays and the moral interludes more effectively than did the categorical descriptions employed by earlier historians of medieval English drama who saw all early plays as rudimentary embodiments of later Renaissance forms. For those unfamiliar with actual performances of these often lively plays, the term "morality play" may conjure up images of dull, pedantic sermonizing, but the solution for this problem is not, as Davenport proposes in chapters 1 and 2, to substitute the anachronistic dramatic genres "tragedy" and "comedy." The strengths of Fifteenth-Century English Drama lie not in the attempt to force The Pride ofLife or Everyman into the mold of tragedy, or Mankindinto the mold ofmedieval comedy, but in the extended discussions of individual plays as conscious works of art whose style, form, and structure are worth serious consideration. Davenport's procedure is first to analyze the central play to be discussed in each chapter as a work of art important in its own right and then to suggest other works, both dramatic and nondramatic, with which it shows affinities. The intended audience for this book is not the small band of committed enthusiasts for medieval plays but rather those with a "general knowledge of the mystery plays, Everyman and a few others" but whose "acquaintance with medi­ eval literature is not extensive" (p. 1). Thus each discussion of a play is preceded by an interesting, economical summary of the main points of...