Two Moral Interludes: The Pride of Life and Wisdom (review)

The aim of the TEAMS Middle English Texts Series is succinctly stated in a general preface to each of its volumes, and this new edition by David N. Klausner of the morality plays The Pride of Life and Wisdom meets the aim with matching succinctness. He has provided a student-friendly edition of both of them.

It would have been interesting to know why he chose these two particular moralities before others (one can surmise, but it would still have been interesting to hear directly on that from the editor himself). It seems a fair guess that Wisdom commended itself because it was already closely familiar to him by virtue of his having produced it in 1991. The Pride of Life, of course, being incomplete, is hardly likely to be put into production in any regular sense, and is thus not likely to have been familiar to Klausner on the basis of any practical experience, so perhaps he simply chose it because of its place at the head of the morality tradition; it is, after all, generally agreed to be the earliest extant example of the genre and therefore might be considered of special interest if for no other reason than that. Although both plays are already available in other reliable editions, it is certainly convenient to have them brought together for comparison between one set of covers. Indeed, a case could be made for having all the plays that critics have assigned to the medieval morality genre brought together in a single volume, but that would require a separate undertaking.

Klausner's short introduction to his two chosen plays first describes the characteristics of morality drama in general before proceeding to give a summary of the action of each of his chosen plays, along with notice of where each is to be found and what its distinctiveness within the morality tradition may be considered to be. These summaries also note any known sources that the playwrights drew on, and indeed, some of these are published in appendix 1 (very extensively, in the case of Wisdom, more about whose sources is known than is the case with The Pride of Life). While advanced students of these plays might be expected to wrestle with their sources and the issues raised by them, it is a little difficult to imagine mere beginners wishing to persist with the contents of appendix 1, unless, of course, they are beginners of an exceptional sort. Thus Klausner's edition seems to me to aspire to do even more than the modest TEAMS brief would lead one to expect, and to facilitate, at least in this particular respect, both elementary and advanced readerships of these texts.

The play texts themselves have been reliably presented and annotated, though there is no reason why they should not have been, given previous extensive editorial effort devoted to them from which Klausner has been able to profit. His contribution, therefore, lies less in his edition's capacity for broaching new ground on the editorial front and more in its accessibility, and here he succeeds well. Moreover, for anyone contemplating a reconstructed performance of Wisdom, a play that requires much music, Klausner's appendix 2 will be invaluable. In it, he offers a monophonic plainchant score, based on contemporary Sarum Use, for each of the songs in the play that seem to call for plainchant performance, as well as scores for three polyphonic songs, two by known fifteenth-century composers and a third anonymous. The introduction to this appendix explains the reasons for some of the editorial adjustments that Klausner made to the way the music has been presented in places, and we are again left with the impression that this edition may have made available the fruits of earlier musical decisions that he made when he put his 1991 production together.

In some ways, the pairing of The Pride of Life and Wisdom...