Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (review)

The past thirty years have witnessed a remarkable recovery of evidence about performance in premodern England, much of it gathered by scholars working under the auspices of the Records of Early English Drama project. Yet, as Lawrence Clopper observes, the results of REED's findings have been slow to displace received opinion about the origins, nature, and duration of English drama before Shakespeare. Drama, Play, and Game aims to set the record straight by offering a thorough reassessment of what we thought we knew about early English drama. Clopper's careful yet bold analysis of the extant evidence rewrites the history of early English theatricality and is certain to spark discussion among scholars of medieval and early modern drama.

As is well known, late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century historians of the theater espoused an evolutionary model of the development of medieval drama, positing that drama in the West was reborn in the Latin liturgy and then moved in a more or less chronological order from liturgical plays to the biblical cycles and morality plays, and on to the secular, commercial drama of Shakespeare's time. Although this model would now find few active advocates, it lingers on in introductions to early drama and theater histories. Clopper's interpretation of the extant evidence effectively shelves this model by showing that not only did liturgical representations not imitate classical drama and clerics not associate what they were producing with the classical theatrical tradition but also that, far from evolving out of liturgical drama, vernacular plays developed entirely separately. Focusing on various communities—lay and clerical, national and regional, urban and rural—Clopper discusses drama, which he defines in a deliberately circumscribed way as "enacted script," in the context of the larger "ludic arena" within which it took place. Among the more provocative of Clopper's claims are that vernacular drama developed in response to clerical attempts to suppress ludi that were regarded as unholy or immoral; that despite clerical antipathy toward unholy entertainments, there was no antitheatrical tradition in the Middle Ages; and that the so-called demise of medieval religious drama in the sixteenth century cannot be blamed on a concerted official attempt to ban it.

A reassessment of terminology forms an important part of this study, since it is Clopper's contention that we have misinterpreted the nature of medieval theatrical activity by misreading terms. In particular, Clopper claims that medieval commentators distinguished between "dramatic" and "theatrical" as we do not. Thus, when we see the word drama in a medieval text, Clopper asserts, "we ought not to think of a script for enactment by persons assuming roles; rather, we should think of it as a formal and visual presentation of responding voices" (9), that is, as a poetic mode in which there are only speakers (as, for instance, in the Song of Songs). Just as drama referring to a theatrical genre was absent from medieval vocabularies, so, too, were the Aristotelian categories of tragedy and comedy. The terms could be used to refer to forms of (past) classical theater or to designate specific style or content (as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales uses them), but they did not describe theatrical activities.

Building on the reinterpretation of terminology, chapter 1, "The Theatrum and the Rhetoric of Abuse in the Middle Ages," aims to describe what the notion of theatrum signified in late antique culture and in the Middle Ages. Clopper's claim is that theatrum came to be associated with obscene pagan practices and the games of the Roman circus, with the result that medieval clerics "lost the concept of 'drama'" as enacted script (21). As a consequence, when liturgical representations began to appear in the tenth century, clerics did not imagine themselves to be creating dramas, even though they labeled certain...