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  • Spectacle and Public Performance in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Robert E. Stillman , ed. Spectacle and Public Performance in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2006. xxiv + 258 pp. index. illus. tbls. bibl. $120. ISBN: 90–04–14928–7.

Probably the greatest virtue of this collection is the diversity of phenomena that it brings within the compass of spectacle and performance. The volume's eleven contributors examine both textual and visual culture; popular, civic, and court entertainments; the reception, publicity, and inwardness of theatricality; medieval, Renaissance, as well as contemporary performances; and, occasionally, the problems that attend the critical analysis of performance in premodern contexts. With only a few minor exceptions, the collection ably achieves for its audience a "heightened accessibility" to its subject-matter (xiv).

Richard K. Emmerson's opening essay, for instance, individualizes the apocalyptic figure of Antichrist by arguing that the medieval "page and stage" represented him not as a devil or a generalized symbol but as an actual human being. Focusing on Jour du Jugement (ca. 1335), a French manuscript play that depicts many of its scenes in miniatures, Emmerson demonstrates how the play's action and woodcuts utilize specific eschatological traditions in order to narrate Antichrist's life from conception to death. Taking a very different tack, Peter Cockett discusses the pre-Reformation performance conditions that heavily determined his 2004 direction of the Chester Coming of Antichrist. Cockett links his directorial choices, carefully informed by textual and historical evidence, to larger questions about theatricality's ability to empower and disempower certain characters within the audience's imagination. Sarah Beckwith's essay on Measure for Measure also takes up questions of theatricality and imagination, but, unlike Cockett's emphasis on practical dramaturgy, she explores the ways that theatricality confers on viewers both knowledge of others and self-knowledge, which then mediate one's relations with each. Although her reflections on the work of Stanley Cavell and Ludwig Wittgenstein do not always illuminate Shakespeare's play as vividly as they might, Beckwith's discussion of the epistemological problems that beset Isabella, Angelo, and Duke Vincentio is lively and incisive.

"Mapping Shakespeare's Britain" by Peter Holland strengthens the growing scholarship in literary studies on cartographic and chorographic materials. The richness of the relationships he charts between King Lear and a host of other plays is matched by Holland's facility to make maps speak in dynamic ways about early modern performance and spectacle. Because Shakespeare dominates the volume's discussions of popular drama, it is refreshing to see Nora Johnson engage with Anthony Munday's John a Kent and John a Cumber. In contrast to some recent studies that consider early modern manifestations of authorship as emergent forms that heralded the rise of the modern individual, Johnson aims to show how earlier theatrical traditions, like the magician character, provided exploitable models for self-styled authorial figures such as Ben Jonson and Shakespeare's Prospero.

Robert E. Stillman contributes a powerful analysis of Queen Elizabeth's coronation procession, situating the pageant's complex rhetorical strategies of [End Page 242] "persuading, celebrating, and advising" the new monarch within political and theological exigencies that were negotiated through the "rhetoric of accommodation" (51–52). The essay highlights how large cultural forces like humanism and the Reformation converged at specific moments of the procession to produce multidimensional constructions of the queen. Stillman's discussion of negotiation and accommodation is counterbalanced by Robert W. Barrett's account of civic strife and self-assertion in Chester's Triumph, a St. George's Day pageant instituted in 1610 to celebrate Henry Stuart's investment as Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester. Examining the political background of the pageant on national, Cestrian, and interpersonal levels, Barrett provides a considered analysis of the opportunistic competition for authority that the Triumph's composition and performance instigated. Equally considered is Tiffany J. Alkan's reading of Busirane's mask of Cupid in Spenser's Faerie Queene. Drawing on Victor Turner's theory of liminality and George Bataille's theory of eroticism, she argues that the Knight of Chastity becomes a complicit participant in Busirane's perverse exhibition, but that her complicity is organized by the logic of a rite of passage and necessitated by an erotics irreducible in this context to a purely chaste maidenly or marital sexuality. Richard C. McCoy's essay on Macbeth is quite suggestive about the capacity of contradiction, ambivalence, and equivocation to construct meaningful social relations. But after stating that "in Shakespeare's theater . . . [equivocation] can be a force for good" (149), he seems to equate the "good" with the effective political tactician à la "Machiavelli's prince" (152). While Malcolm may play the "good" here to Macbeth's "bad," McCoy's essay unfortunately enacts some of the equivocation that it scrutinizes.

Concluding the book are two pieces on court masques and entertainments. Tom Bishop's essay is a thoughtful and sleuthing qualification to an established critical belief, which has held that masque audiences customarily destroyed and pillaged the event's elaborate decorations and scenery. His examination of court entertainment records from Henry VII to James I offers a much more nuanced picture that locates the demolition of masque paraphernalia within an intricate but irregular system of unspecified license, but also of frugality, recycling, and royal largesse or payment. The case that Lauren Shohet makes for reading masques not just locally but in terms of reception is smart and convincing, though the turn she makes to books and genre is less clearly articulated in this regard (she also seems to place Ben Jonson's death prior to 1635 [243]). Yet even her treatment of books in masques is absorbing, and with her concentration on late, Caroline masques, Shohet's essay fittingly closes the book.

The thematic grouping of the essays serves the reader well by emphasizing continuities between the late medieval and early modern periods — and these continuities many of the discussions themselves underscore. The extensive name index is ample for this particular book, though a collected bibliography would have enhanced the reader's access to the material even more. Likewise, the editor's foreword might have been a more thoroughgoing contextualization of the volume's aims and subject-matter within recent criticism. But, individually and collectively, [End Page 243] these essays unquestionably challenge and advance our understanding of late medieval and early modern performance.

Jonathan Walker
Portland State University

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