In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Late Medieval Interlude: The Drama of Youth and Aristocratic Masculinity
  • Victoria L. Weiss
The Late Medieval Interlude: The Drama of Youth and Aristocratic Masculinity. By Fiona S. Dunlop. Woodbridge, Suffolk: York Medieval Press in association with Boydell and Brewer, 2007. Pp. viii + 142. $90.

It has been more than half a century since C. S. Lewis was named the first Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge and used the appointment to argue that the customary scholarly boundary between [End Page 137] the medieval period and the Renaissance was artificial and misleading. In keeping with his contention, Fiona S. Dunlop in her slim but tremendously useful The Late Medieval Interlude demonstrates that the concerns with fashioning identity and one's place in the social hierarchy were preoccupations of male nobility a century before Shakespeare wrote. Dunlop carefully examines five late fifteenth/ early sixteenth-century interludes in an effort to show that "youth, masculinity, and nobility . . . were subject to complex processes of reformulation and debate in the late medieval period" (p. 2), long before the era in which Stephen Green-blatt, Frank Whigham, and others have shown these topics to be matters of great concern, particularly in Renaissance drama.

The five interludes are Henry Medwall's Nature and Fulgens and Lucres (both from the 1490s), The Worlde and the Chylde (ca. 1509), The Interlude of Youth (ca. 1514), and Calisto and Melebea (ca. 1525), each of which, as Dunlop notes, is about "a young nobleman or men in the process of growing up" (p. 2). In this book, Dunlop shows the debt which these interludes owe not only to the morality play tradition but also to the Ages of Man as presented in medieval iconography as well as medieval medical and scientific traditions, moral and devotional works, courtesy literature, and political texts of the late medieval period. These interludes mined these medieval traditions in order to explore the challenges facing young noblemen as they attempted to find their moral compass, assert their social status, manage their households, and begin to exercise political power. While the challenges involved in establishing oneself as a powerful aristocrat in Renaissance England have been well documented for the time of Shakespeare, Dunlop convincingly shows that the threats of an emerging class of "new men" were recognized and addressed in these interludes nearly a century earlier. Scholars have long written about the emergence of "new men" in the works of Chaucer in the late fourteenth century, but Dunlop's contribution to this exploration consists of her careful examination of the way in which medieval sources inform that particular genre which became so emblematic of the Renaissance—drama. She demonstrates that even in this late medieval period, the nobility recognized that "identity was something which had continually to be performed, especially if one was an aristocratic man" (p. 6).

Those familiar with the late Middle Ages will find her early chapters re-crossing some very familiar terrain—the didactic allegorical works of the late medieval period focused on right behavior, most often through allegorical presentations of the temptations facing young men of means. Proper behavior, gestures, and dress are all the stock-in-trade of morality plays, courtesy literature, and political instruction books. Dunlop carefully covers this familiar literature of "learned masculinity" (p. 39), calling attention to its assumptions that the young man is prone to sin, a propensity he must learn to combat if he is to rule himself and subsequently rule his household and eventually assume political power.

In Chapter Three when Dunlop turns to discussion of the five interludes with which she is concerned, she shows how each makes use of the moral didacticism outlined in other medieval texts in order "to focus on young noblemen as problems, as negative exempla of men who fail to make the proper transitions to the right kind of noble masculinity" (p. 54). She points to how often ignoble characters appear dressed in the fashion of the nobility, a point reinforced by the frequency with which sumptuary legislation was issued at the time. Appearances—clothes, gestures, manners, speech—often confuse the young noblemen who are the central characters [End Page 138] in...

pdf

Share