Drama and Community: People and Plays in Northern Europe (review)

Reviews 205 ordinary people, the ae/e confusion would have made equus indistinguishable from aequus and therefore semantically precarious. And why did loquor fall by the wayside as the ordinary word for saying and speaking? Herman provides ample evidence that native Latin speakers were themselves confused by deponents (surely a reliefto many who struggle to leam Latin today!) and that a quite different word, parabolare, of Christian Greek origin but regular in conjugation, provided a substitute that was almost universally adopted. Ifthe present reviewer has one small criticism to make of Vulgar Latin it is that Herman sometimes appears over-cautious and slow to accept the consequences of his own argument. H e notes (p. 71) that *potere and *volere are unattested in writing, but infers that these forms must have replaced posse and velle in common speech, and he bases this inference partly on the existence ofthe forms potere and volere in Italian. Surely, after all that has been said before, these Italian verbs can be taken to be the very attestation he seeks. Is not Italian orthography, with its curious indifference to historical etymology (soddisfazione < satisfactione, avere < habere, rapporto < reporto, etc.), an attempt to record phonetically the spoken Latin ofthe people? But that is a minor quibble and probably an unfair one, for Herman is a cautious and sound scholar who quite rightly drives home his arguments by rational and factual evidence alone. This little book is highly recommended as an essential contribution to our knowledge of the development of Latin and the emergence of the romance languages. Itsfinalsection, especially 'The End of the History ofLatin', is an excellent survey. David Daintree Jane Franklin Hall University of Tasmania Hindley, Alan, ed., Drama and Community: People and Plays in Northern Europe (Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe 1), Turnhout, Brepols, 1999; board; pp. xi, 294; illustrated; R.R.P. EUR50.00; ISBN 2503507670. Is there anything more European than theatre? For those of us for whom the English mystery cycle dominates the medieval theatrical scene the range of communities and theatres discussed in this collection of essays, from twelfthcentury Dublin to sixteenth-century Nuremberg, will be instructive. The first 206 Reviews essay, by Lynette Muir, offers a whistle-stop tour, demonstrating a common European interest in drama as 'group activity'. Nevertheless, one of the pleasures of this collection is its display of local variations, creating distinctions that challenge belief that much was shared at all. M a n y contributors seem obliged to make a virtue of their collective necessity, loosely describing how different European theatres encouraged what Alan Knight calls 'social wholeness'; honouring the idea of community, if not explaining it. The nearest that Muir herself gets to a theory of community is the broad statement that 'Medieval man, like medieval society as a whole, was strongly "clubbable".'A few, however, do take up the problem quite seriously. Robert Clark examines French confraternity drama in light of Turner's work on ritual, and, having noted the extreme tensions between and within communities, questions whether any binding activity, however dynamic, could neutralise them. His answer is to find in the characteristic ambiguity and transgressiveness of this drama a space for subjectivity within the larger collective experience. This proves to be an individual spin on a repeated observation:firstly,the plays answered to authorities' needs to settle differences between local groups of various kinds, and, secondly, they gave scope to personal perception of social reality, especially in the composition of texts. That is to say, much of this collection, in honouring community, really celebrates the achievement of individual writers. The prime instances are the satirists, w h o necessarily also have society in mind. Frederick Langley offers a nice essay on A d a m de la Halle's Jeu de la Feuillee using the idea of community to save Adam's idiosyncratic play from those who have treated it as so personal that it becomes susceptible to psychological readings; at the other end of the middle ages, Sachs's Shrovetide plays seem to Konrad Schoell to go beyond conventionally camivalesque transgression to expression of individual consciousness. W i m Hiisken describes the plays of Everaert, who seems to have undertaken a personal mission, to train Bruges society's eyes upon itself. Pamela King offers perhaps the most interesting analysis of this type: she reads the trial plays in the York cycle to argue that the singular 'Realist' made his history intelligible by recasting Christ's trial in terms of local legal procedure, thereby giving voice to a regional perspective on Lancastrian government. A local sense ofjustice clearly does operate in these plays to create vital contrasts between earthly and heavenly power; contrasts, moreover, that come close to producing the functionally subversive ambivalence of carnival. Perhaps a key essay is the penultimate, in which Alexandra Johnston deals with the last medieval theatre in England, charting a cultural shift. Prior to Henry Reviews 207 VlH's break from R o m e , 'mimetic activities' were 'entwined in the life of communities in sometimes widely different ways'. In the post-Reformation period, however, drama tended to be employed 'polemically', various authorities sought to repress festivals, especially those 'associated with the catholic past', and the theatrical performer became professionalised. The effect was to take English drama in a 'radical new direction away from community and towards a market driven entertainment industry'. A disturbing nostalgia seems to infect these comments; religious repression impacted most on the English people, Johnston claims, since it 'affected their relationships with God and their neighbours'. What this fails to observe is precisely the European experience, where in country after country, at much the same time and regardless of state religion, community-based theatre lost its place to other forms of public entertainment. Alan Hindley examines Early M o d e m communities of players in France, describing increased professionalisation accompanied by cultural alienation, where the high ground was taken by the intellectual and the doctrinaire, leaving a popular theatre that was essentially a 'theatre of social recreation'. What surely counted most in this complex change was not community's anchor in faith, but economic conditions; the transition to a cash economy and the growth of early capitalism, proceeding inexorably but unequally through Europe, changed the public, changed the social rules, changed the idea of the neighbour. If some of these essays are content to do little more than introduce local forms of theatrical activity, the interest of the collection as a whole should not be discounted; the brief but packed encounter it offers with so many of Muir's 'variants' is peculiarly valuable. M u c h is fascinating and provocative. Above all, for me, Alan Fletcher's account of medieval Irish drama, which revealed a sophisticated structure of entertainment, operating across communities that differed markedly, according to their closeness to the English occupation forces. Fletcher details the resources available to Gaelic society, including the druth, the girner, the caintre (or satirist) and the braigetoiri (or farter), all possessed of roles and skills and accorded status and place within the household. B y comparison, English Dublin had to be content with the Pride of Life, Corpus Christi pageants and ceremonial events that were 'supervised by the corporation to celebrate the city's selfhood and to proclaim it in the face of whomever might be tempted to encroach upon civic jurisdiction and prerogatives'. A case like this, taking stock of competing modes of performance and production, and hostile but overlapping publics, demonstrates h o w layered, fragmented medieval societies (not unlike antipodean societies at this end of the millennium) achieved 208 Reviews distinction precisely because of differences that make community the most temporary and provisional - and desirable - of theatrical experiences. Roger Nicholson Department ofEnglish University ofAuckland Jackson, Richard A., ed., Ordines Coronationis Franciae: Texts and Ordines the Coronation of Frankish and French Kings and Queens in the Middle Ages, Vol. II (The Middle Ages Series), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995, 2000; cloth; pp. xii, 436; illustrations; R.R.P. US$69.95, £52.00; ISBN 0812235428. The coronation and consecration of a monarch was for many centuries and in most European kingdoms the critical element in the legitimation of certain powers, duties and responsibilities in the hands of a particular individual. The vital importance of the ritual reached its apex in France where monarchs dated their reigns from the day of their coronation, not from the date of their accession. Theritualdid not remain unaltered over the centuries and tracing the alterations tells us a great deal about the changing source and nature of royal claims to power and authority, their relationship to the established religion and the circumstances of the specific coronation. The constituent parts of the ceremony; the various additions made to it, including the insignia; the interaction of canon, Roman and customary law in its practices were not stable and the various different ordines show important shifts. The last Capetian ordo, selectively devised from a number of earlier ceremony provided the framework from 1250-1350 when it was replaced by the much-expanded ordo of Charles V designed in the context of the early Hundred Years War. Significantly, at the coronation of Charles VII, the older ordo was used again. In 1461 Louis XI's coronation ceremony was a mixture of the last Capetian and Charles V ordo, and in 1484 Charles VIII's ordo reintroduced some of the last Capetian features. There are over a hundred manuscript texts of the different ordines as well as supporting material such as expense accounts and music. Chroniclers, memoir and letter writers describe what they saw - or thought they saw. Historians from the sixteenth century onwards have written studies ofthe event. A complete, modem and scholarly printed edition of the various ordines has, however, been lacking. Richard Jackson, w h o has devoted most of his academic life to a ...