Cheshire including Chester (review)

This, the latest contribution to the growing and impressive Records of Early English Drama collection, offers high standards of textual presentation and provides a rich insight into many aspects of dramatic activity in the city of Chester and the county in which it is situated. In spite of the uniformity of outward appearance, however, the individual volumes in the REED collection give very different insights into the individual counties and cities upon which they are focused, and it seems important to draw attention here to the strengths and particular emphases of this new volume.

One of the causes of such a variety of exposure must be the differences in the quality and quantity of the surviving evidence. While the Bristol records are plentiful in the details of payments to individual companies of visiting players, giving an impression that this was an important feature of public entertainment in that city over many years, for example, the Cambridge records yield a wealth of literary texts associated with performances, mostly under the auspices of the university. In each case the corpus of material offers a different window into the past, and drawing conclusions from them and making comparisons about them are delicate arts. But it must also be admitted that differences among the records of different areas might just as well be true reflections of the variable incidence of such local customs as Robin Hood plays or the popularity of rushbearing in certain places.

In the case of the present two-volume Cheshire collection, the window on the past is complicated by the fact that there was an earlier REED edition of material relating to the city of Chester in 1979, which has now been revised, enlarged, and incorporated into the new edition. This means that finds of new material have been embraced. The process of revision for the Chester material also rejects some items in the previous volumes. The grounds for such omissions are not always clear, perhaps leaving questions about why the original items now eliminated were there in the first place. More notable is the reordering of the material. Close sampling of the four years 1579–80 to 1582–83 reveals that in the new edition the sequence of entries in each of the four years differs comprehensively from that in the earlier edition even though the individual items common to both editions and the manuscript references cited are substantially the same.

The development of the new edition is also affected by some changes in editorial policy inevitable perhaps as the work of REED enters its fourth decade. There are some aspects of such a policy that raise questions, and there is also the underlying concern about what has been left out. This is not so much a matter of error, since REED’s editorial culture is very demanding of its contributors, as of decisions about what is desirable or appropriate to include to which I return below. Moreover, there may be some anxiety about the absence of context for individual items selected for inclusion.

Before further consideration of these aspects, however, we should pay close attention to the kinds of revelation about drama, the core of the enterprise, which are manifest here. This is not the first REED volume I have had the honor of reviewing, and I am very impressed by the quantity of detail this one presents. There is a very full introduction, surely a valuable advance on some of the earlier volumes, one of which stated quite specifically that there was no attempt to interpret the documents. That this is a conscious change going back some years has been made clear by Sally-Beth Maclean, the executive director of the series, in the recent celebratory volume.¹ There is a detailed list of the nature of the documentation from which the records are drawn. There are also several useful appendices, some of which are factual while others address critical issues such as the interpretation of the Breviaries of...