Sussex: Records of Early English Drama (review)

Reviews423 Cameron Lewis, ed. Sussex: Records ofEarly English Drama. Toronto: Brepols PublishersandUniversityofToronto Press, 2000. Pp. ex + 404. $150. This fifteendi volume of Records of Early English Drama fulfills yet one more important part ofthe project's overall mission "to find, transcribe, and publish external evidence of dramatic, ceremonial, and minstrel activity in Great Britain before 1642."1 The REED Project presumes to do it all geographically; every shire and city in Britain eventually will have its extant records available to scholars and researchers via diese substantial and impressive red volumes from die University of Toronto Press.2 Cameron Lewis has ably taken on the especially arduous task of finding and pulling together records from an entire English county, widi many towns and households, as opposed to a more manageable project such as my own Bristol: REED volume, which involved a single British city. Of the fourteen REED volumes published before Sussex, fully half encompass entire shires. In masterfully dealing with a large and historically significant part of Britain, Lewis has continued die important work begun in 1986 byAudrey Douglas and Peter Greenfield (for Cumberland,Westmorland, and Gloucestershire in REED 6), and lohn Wasson (for Devon in REED 7). In 206 pages of primary records, the Sussex volume includes the Diocese of Chicester, tiiirty-five boroughs and parishes, two religious houses, and nine households. Comprising 124 pages or 60 percent of die volume, Rye clearly plays a huge role in die REED narrative of Sussex, but as Lewis thoughtfully and carefully points out in his excellent introduction, the records have survived due to die whims of personality and history. Who recorded what, when, and widi what degree of detail? Who then preserved diat recording over time so mat REED researchers could make "discoveries" centuries later? Rye's having so many records relative to other Sussex towns, in other words, does not necessarily mean tiiat Rye was singularly the shire's center ofdrama, music, and minstrelsy in medieval and earlymodern Britain but radier that Rye's extant records ofsuch activity exist today and Lewis has found them. We all flirt with unwitting overconfidence when doing research based on die marvelous information contained in the REED volumes, quickly and easily convincing ourselves mat we are seeing it all and can tiierefore develop "sound" tiieories based on an apparent treasure trove of "objective facts." As thick and as fat as any REED volume may be, it nevertheless represents a dearth rather than a pletiiora of information from pre-1642, and it is essential for the volume editors to continue relentlessly to remind dieir readers of diat fact of REED life. When Lewis emphasizes die serendipitous nature of surviving records, he uses Hastings's lackofrecords as an example, an especiallyregrettable circum- 424Comparative Drama circumstance for a town so important to English history. But even when there are few records from any given town, such as Hastings, the ones that survive can be quite interesting. Indeed, one of the most interesting entries in Sussex: REED relates to the Battle of Hastings and to Tallifer, a juggler/minstrel/entertainer ofsome sort who seems dexterously to have begun the batde against the English. The records claim that the mounted Tallifer, variously referred to as a "mimus," "histrio," and "Iuglere" performed stunts with his lance before landing the first blow against the mesmerized English at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. He then repeated his "trickery" with his sword, only to die himself along with his horse when the English regained their composure. Lewis relegates the entries to an appendix and cautions that the accepted but embellished accounts of Tallifer may be more literary myth than dramatic record. If factual, the recounting of the tale of Tallifer and the Battle of Hastings is "without doubt England's first juggling and (possibly) musical performance of the Middle English period" (211), and thus Sussex: REED has the supreme distinction of containing the earliest performance account ofthe Middle English period, one which occurred at the very battle that gave the Normans control ofthe country and ultimately Middle (and modern) English to the world. Trying to decide if Tallifer were indeed a minstrel, a juggler, a trickster/ magician, or an actor/entertainer (or...