Medieval English Drama: A Casebook ed. by Peter Happé (review)

Reviews95 Peter Happé, ed. Medieval English Drama: A Casebook. London: Macmillan , 1984. Pp. 222. £20.00 hardcover. £6.95 paperback. I have to say at once that I think this book was ill-judged, mainly in scope but a little also in timing. The title implies that it covers medieval English drama. All the other titles in the series, even those covering "general themes," have a focus or a narrow range. They cover a limited period of time (the Thirties, "since Henry James") or look at a specific group of poets or a genre or theme. Medieval English drama even if it were narrowly treated would have to cover a span of a little over a hundred years, containing three great cycles of pageants and one large compilation of pageants and plays, one long and several shorter morality plays, two saints plays (one, again, long and complex), a group of noncycle pageants, around each of which cluster innumerable historical, textual and practical problems. If one expands a little and allows "English" to mean "England" then some liturgical and semi-liturgical drama and a varied group of plays from Cornwall are added, and the time span is increased by four centuries. Either of these would seem to me too large for adequate coverage in a single volume. But if one does not interpret medieval English drama narrowly but includes early Tudor (and even late sixteenth-century) drama, as is done here, then the chances of dealing satisfactorily with it evaporate. After an introductory essay which usefully sketches the history of criticism of the medieval drama and briefly sets the following pieces in context, the volume is divided up into two parts, though the first is no more than a four-page collection of "Early Documents": texts about and records of medieval drama. The bulk of the book is the second part, "Modern Criticism," divided into four sections: Introductory, The Corpus Christi Plays, Morality Plays and Interludes, and Aspects of Performance. Having been told in the first sentence of the Introduction that "The criticism of English medieval drama has not, on the whole, attracted the attention of major writers, or indeed of major critics," one might almost be surprised at how good the first essay (by David Mills) is. Though written in 1969 it is still a stimulating and thought-provoking introduction to the subject. The opportunity might have been taken of correcting one or two minor errors (the same is true throughout the collection) : Mak does not steal a lamb but a "fat wedir" (p. 47); there is no sign that the Ironmongers at York gave up their pageant (p. 49); and (perhaps more a matter of opinion) there is no evidence that there were any stagecrew or extras who carried the animal-images into the ark at Chester (p. 50). The next section is devoted to the Corpus Christi plays (no explanation is offered of why this term is used rather than "cycle plays" or "mystery plays") . It begins, understandably, with an extract from V. A. Kolve's The Play Called Corpus Christi (1966). There is no doubt that at the time this was a delightful and exciting book to read, but it was also an irritating one, and time has not lessened the irritation. Grand sweeping statement was and is part of the attraction—the reader is drawn along in the excitement—but so much that is assumption and exaggeration is put over as fact. Every paragraph (and often many statements within a paragraph) demand the caution "Yes, but. . . ." It is heady stuff but 96Comparative Drama sometimes thin on evidence. Too much alteration would obviously be wrong, but surely the more obvious slips could have been corrected. Noah in "every" cycle builds the ark before the audience, and "always" claims it is taking a hundred years (p. 65). In fact the ark is not built before the audience in N-town, and only in York does Noah comment in the course of it that it is taking him a hundred years. In Chester he comments much later that it took a hundred and twenty years, and in N-town also he comments on the hundred years after the ark...