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Reviewed by:
  • Shakespeare and the Medieval World
  • Margaret Rogerson
Helen Cooper. Shakespeare and the Medieval World. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010. Pp. 272. £55.00; $100.00.

The melancholy Jaques of As You Like It has made the ancient metaphor of the “world” as “stage” a familiar one, although it is no less potent for this familiarity. Reading Helen Cooper's magnificent book from my perspective as a medieval theater historian, I find myself wanting to take up the world/stage reciprocity and rename her work “Shakespeare and the Medieval Stage.” This title could be less appealing to a general readership, but I contemplate it as a means of paying grateful homage to Cooper for what will stand as one of her major achievements in this publication: the rehabilitation not just of the “Medieval World” but also of the “Medieval Stage.”

Many fine studies of medieval theater have been published over the past half a century, but Cooper's book must surely take the prize for the most significant contribution to the appreciation of this drama since V. A. Kolve's work, The Play Called Corpus Christi 1966, opened up the field for serious attention. Cooper provides new starting points for reading Shakespeare, and, using the very plays that others have presented as benchmarks against which the earlier drama must be seen as inferior, has exploded the myth of that inferiority. She has shown that far from being a “foreign country,” the Middle Ages was a place with which Shakespeare was totally familiar in terms of the built environment in [End Page 311] which he moved, the literary and dramatic conventions that he and his audience understood, and even the religious culture that had crossed the divide of the Reformation.

Readers will find an elegant coherence to this book in which Cooper deftly returns to familiar ground throughout, reminding us of the “Englishness” of Shakespeare's output and of the grounding of that quality in pre-1500 literature and culture. The influence of the classical world is not dismissed, but it takes second place to the medieval. Even The Comedy of Errors, often studied productively alongside Plautus's Menaechmi, is shown to be indebted to John Gower's “Apollonius of Tyre” in his Confessio Amantis; while in Pericles, which returns to Gower and “Apollonius,” we can see Shakespeare's medievalism at its most overt, his appreciation of the Middle Ages most fully articulated.

Chapter 1 argues that those living in “Shakespeare's Medieval World” could recall the physical past, even when it had given way to the present. Attitudes to life and death were largely unchanged, and print made medieval literature widely available to the Renaissance readership, ensuring that the language and verse forms, particularly those employed by Chaucer, provided models for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In “Total Theatre,” we learn how the audience for Shakespeare's plays had been trained by their experience of medieval theater to use “imagination” in the ways that are enjoined by the Prologue of Henry V. Far from being classical in inspiration, the conventions of Shakespeare's theater are both native and medieval, with the well-known Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play offering the first surviving example of a subplot being used in English drama. Cooper speculates persuasively, albeit on circumstantial evidence only, that Shakespeare was familiar with the cycle plays of towns like Coventry. He alluded to them frequently, not just through the rude mechanicals of A Midsummer Night's Dream and the reference to out-Heroding Herod in Hamlet so often cited by other modern scholars, but also in plays such as 3 Henry VI, Titus Andronicus, and King Lear.

“Staging the Unstageable” takes the notion of the imagination further to consider the staging of the invisible, such as supernatural beings and nonterrestrial places, and of illusions of stage violence, both of which are inherited from the earlier religious theater. Cooper compares the use of monologues and expositor figures in medieval drama with similar techniques that Shakespeare used to prompt the audience to engage inwardly with the world of the play. Again, the staging tricks of [End Page 312] English medieval theater in the plays of the saints and in the mystery plays, rather...

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