Mankind (review)

All academics who teach university courses in medieval literature have cause to be grateful to the TEAMS series of Middle English Texts. As the series editors explain, “the goal of the TEAMS Middle English text series is to make available to teachers and students texts which occupy an important place in the literary and cultural canon but which have not been readily available in student editions.” Over the past twenty years the series has indeed gradually expanded the range of Middle English texts that are available to teachers and students, enabling both undergraduate and postgraduate courses to move beyond the canon of traditional printed student editions into creative and more fully representative engagement with the literature of the Middle Ages. The ready online availability of these helpfully edited and glossed editions has opened up new pathways into medieval literature and culture, while the printed versions that accompany some of the electronic editions enable close classroom study of individual texts.

Until recently drama was somewhat underrepresented in the TEAMS catalogue, so it is very welcome to see that this edition of Mankind is one of a range of recent and forthcoming editions of theatrical texts. Mankind is, as the editors point out, a play that has over the last thirty years or so forced its way from a position of neglect and critical contempt into a central role in the study of medieval drama. Its lively theatricality, comically outspoken bawdry, and sophisticated linguistic play have recommended it both to students of medieval drama and literature and to performers. Many undergraduates do now encounter the play, but modern, student-friendly editions tend to be in wider-ranging anthologies of drama that cannot give full editorial support to what remains a challenging text. This individual edition, with its online accompaniment, therefore fulfils a demand that has already developed.

Kathleen Ashley and Gerard NeCastro establish a clear and readable original text, very lightly regularized, with full notes and glosses, an extensive bibliography, and an informative introduction. They are able to take account of the critical interest in Mankind that has developed over recent years, resulting in an extremely useful teaching resource. The introduction draws on this scholarship to provide a rich context for the play, flagging up issues of patronage, locality and auspices, of analogous entertainment and generic theory, of social and economic factors, of devotional and especially linguistic patterns of meaning, and of staging and audience. Students at all levels approaching the play will be given a sense of its complex and sophisticated relationship with this range of contexts; the play is no longer a theatrical idiosyncrasy, but is embedded in the debates, dramatic strategies, places and concerns of its own time, and in the critical discussion of our own.

Perhaps in an effort to leave the text as open to teaching and interpretation as possible, the introduction can seem rather cautious about discriminating and mediating between the recent critical theories and scholarly studies, tending to describe rather than evaluate the debate about the play. This can, of course, be productive in presenting students with information that they are forced to interpret and evaluate for themselves; but at times a slightly firmer articulation of the issues might be helpful, especially for those coming fresh to medieval drama. Considering the venue and audience of the play, for example, the editors properly outline both the older critical position that its bawdy language and references must indicate rustic inn-yard audiences and the more recent work that demonstrates how the sophistication of its linguistic play and the particularity of its interaction with and definition of its audience points to household or institutional performance. But the introduction holds back from differentiating between the different critical evidence advanced and what particular settings might mean for the play, leaving students with the rather loose suggestion that it “could therefore be produced in a wide variety of settings.”

Other sections of the introduction show a similar tension between an excellent engagement of students in pertinent and revealing issues of...