The Saint Play in Medieval Europe ed. by Clifford Davidson (review)

Reviews295 A complete chronological listing of Victorian farces, with production dates and casts, would have added great value to this work, but no appendices are included. There are a few errors of fact (the old vaudevillian in Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys is Willie Clark, not Ben Silverman), but there are some excellent illustrations, especially a memorable photograph of Penley in Charley's Aunt. As a general survey of the plots, along with production histories of the plays, Late Victorian Farce is useful. But a definitive study of die nature and performance of farce, vintage 1875 to 1900, is still needed. JAMES FISHER Wabash College Clifford Davidson, ed. The Saint Play in Medieval Europe. Early Drama, Art, and Music, Monograph Ser., 8. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1986. Pp. ? + 269. $25.95; paper $15.95. Apart from being a substantial new addition to the Early Drama, Art, and Music project's interdisciplinary work on early drama, this collection of essays constitutes the first full-length study of a dramatic tradition which, in its own time, was far more significant than modern scholarly attention to the genre hitherto would suggest. The book is modestiy described by its editor as "an attempt at a collaborative survey" but though in some minor respects it does not fully satisfy the requirements of a survey, it is in other respects far more than this. The contributors have the latitude to pursue lines of specialist interest in their study of the drama as well as dealing with different periods or geographical areas; hence though some aspects or plays might fall slightly by the wayside, the book presents the reader with a wide range of scholarship, there is a sense of new ground being broken, and die result is of as much interest to the specialist as to the general reader or student seeking an introduction to the genre. The first essay is concerned with the music of the St. Nicholas tetralogy in the Fleury Playbook, specifically in its dramatic aspects, such as the extent to which it is able to distinguish and define "character" and the extent to which it allows for dramatic expression of speech. The essay illustrates the usefulness of the book's interdisciplinary approach in that the specialist knowledge of the music which its author, Clyde Brockett, is able to bring to the study of liturgical drama proves a useful way into an exploration of the dramatic qualities of the plays. The essay which follows moves the focus to the vernacular Middle English saint play and brings another specialist perspective to bear on the drama, that of iconography. In what is the book's focal and most substantial essay, Clifford Davidson utilizes his considerable expertise in the field of the relationship between the visual arts and early drama to construct an impressively full picture of a genre of which few examples are extant. He considers the cults of the saints and the visual representations to which these gave rise particularly in the form of such public examples as church murals and stained glass windows, putting these alongside the records of dramatic performances and, where this is available, material 296Comparative Drama from account books as well. The value of this method is that it provides a fairly objective and material basis for a conjectural reconstruction of a largely lost dramatic tradition, and it is made the more convincing by the caution with which Davidson handles his material. In discussing the lost York play of St. Denys, for instance, he points out that there is no solid evidence that any of the extant illustrations in the visual arts were influenced by theatrical presentations of the saint's life, and in considering a stained glass representation of the life of St. Lawrence he issues the caveat that its iconographie program is likely to follow the design of the window rather than including all the scenes which might have formed part of the drama. Despite all these difficulties about the handling of ihe evidence from the visual arts, it can, as Davidson points out in discussing the story of St. Catherine, be used to indicate how specific saints were visualized in the later Middle Ages. This may...