Early Modern Academic Drama (review)

Early Modern Academic Drama, edited by Jonathan Walker and Paul Streufert, is a vital re-evaluation of the performance cultures of Early Modern educational institutions. This collection seeks to build on documentary foundations in this field (from Frederick Boas' University Drama in the Tudor Age [1914] to the recent research of the Records of Early English Drama project) to reposition the field of academic drama, examine how academic plays negotiate political, religious and economic issues and investigate the production of distinct academic and theatrical cultures.

It achieves this by bringing together essays that read specific plays or performances as 'sites of cultural contestation' (p. 2). With examples spanning the period from Elizabethan England to early eighteenth-century America, the content of this collection is wide-ranging in both chronological and geographical terms. It also seeks to open up the definition of academic drama to encompass a consideration of the cultural place of the academy, the technologies of theatre and the educative function of role-playing. As Walker acknowledges in his excellent introduction, the volume cannot engage exhaustively with this vast field. Yet the essays compensate for this through detailed analyses of examples that gesture towards larger trajectories.

The essays are grouped into four interconnected clusters addressing political and religious issues; challenges to the humanist tradition, the relationships between students and their academic environments, and the academic community's relationship with its surrounding culture. Taking Elizabeth I's request that the intellectuals at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge come to court to perform a comedy in 1592 as her starting point, Linda Shenk explores the shifting relationship between crown and gown during Elizabeth's reign. She links the perception of scholars as entertainers with representations of this figure on the professional stage in the 1590s, in addition to arguing for the political import of university productions at court. Paul Streufert's essay further considers the significance of university drama in sixteenth-century England through a reading of John Christopherson's Jephthah, performed at the University of Cambridge c. 1544. This play in Greek, Streufert suggests, blends biblical narrative and classical imagery to provide instruction in linguistic skills, ethical codes and in the formal elements of classical tragedy while offering a nuanced understanding of contemporary religious identities. The way in which drama functions as a pedagogical tool is a recurrent theme in this volume. By locating academic plays within the contexts of political, religious and economic affairs, the essays illuminate this often-explored issue in original ways.

The gap between humanist ideals and institutional practices is another topic that cuts across this collection and essays by Ursula Potter and Emily Bryan specifically address this. Potter's noteworthy essay proposes that Thomas Ingelend's mid sixteenth-century grammar school play, The Disobedient Child, participates in class-inflected debates on the merits of public education over private tutoring and on the production of gendered subjects via schooling, and persuasively argues that this play functions as the grammar school's means of interacting with the community. It is the only essay in the collection on grammar school drama and one of only two that consider educational institutions other than the universities.

Bryan's essay returns to university drama to focus on a production of George Ruggle's Ignoramus performed before James I at Cambridge in 1615. Like Potter's essay, Bryan interprets academic drama as providing communities of students, tutors and administrators with the opportunity to reflect on and challenge the humanist educational programme. Bryan's discussion of the play's satirization of the legal profession is located within an excellent consideration of mimesis in university drama and a remarkable analysis of the production history of the play.

Eric Leonidas' essay leads on from Bryan's as it considers the production of Gesta Grayorum at the Inns of Court during the Christmas revels of 1594/5. It reads this series of performances as an opportunity for students to put their training...