Unconventional Conventions in Theatre Texts ed. by Günter Ahrends and Hans-Jürgen Diller (review)

196Comparative Drama tive elements of the mock king pattern would appear to be the popular religious drama of the Middle Ages. Queen Margaret's mock crowning of York in 3 Henry Vl bears strong resemblances to the pageants of the buffeting and scourging of Christ, as Billington presumably means to suggest in comparing the scene to "Herod's mockery of Christ" (p. 146). Billington's analysis of Pericles, on the other hand, emphasizes Fortune and Erasmus' ideal prince (pp. 238-40), to the complete exclusion of the miracle play, which was the medieval dramatic form that most successfully adapted the pattern detailed in Mock Kings. Again, in the mystery plays Lucifer is a mock king in the pageants of his fall (boastfully presuming to sit in God's throne), and he provides the pattern for other mock kings in pageants that follow: Pharaoh, Herod, and Pilate. Though Billington alludes briefly to Christ as mock king in the Passion plays (pp. 25, 146), she does not relate this use of the pattern to its appearance elsewhere in the mystery plays, though the comparison might well prove fruitful, even for Renaissance drama. Nor does she reckon with the fact that medieval playwrights had adapted a popular festival custom to drama long before the same adaptation was made by Renaissance playwrights, and by the same token she does not consider how the two adaptations relate to each other or to her thesis about Tudor political containment. Her move from medieval society to Renaissance drama is illuminating, but it leaves almost entirely out of account the continuity between medieval drama and its successor. This is a substantial omission, and it seems to be related to her relative disinterest in popular culture in comparison to the learned world of the university and the court. JOHN D. COX Hope College l Stephen Greenblatt, "Invisible Bullets" in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1988), pp. 21-65. Billington cites an earlier version of the essay, as it appeared in Political Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 18-47. Unconventional Conventions in Theatre Texts, ed. Günter Ahrends and Hans-Jürgen Diller. Forum Modernes Theater, Schriftenreihe, 6. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1990. Pp. 191. DM 76.00. More often than not, collections of conference papers are more heterogeneous than their titles (which are sometimes as ingeniously chosen as the present one) might suggest. A brief review cannot possibly do justice to the wealth of critical insights and the variety of viewpoints assembled in such volumes. The collection under review here is no exception. It reprints a number of papers that were read in 1989 at a conference organized by the newly founded Institute for Theater, Film, and Television Studies at the University of Bochum. Because of a wellestablished partnership between the universities of Bochum and Cracow, the majority of the contributors came from one of these two institutions, which provided the welcome opportunity for introducing aspects of Reviews197 Continental European theater into a context of English and American Studies where they are often ignored. The special value of this collection lies in its emphasis on non-literary or subliterary conventions and their re-emergence in "mainstream" dramatic texts. The critical fallacy arising from an unfamiliarity with such conventions—or a deliberate disregard for them—has often led to misconceptions concerning a dramatist's purpose or achievement, and those papers that contribute to our understanding of such relationships are particularly to be welcomed. One of the difficulties arising from the variety of national approaches is of a terminological nature: some confusion stems from the semantic differences between seemingly identical terms in different cultures—e.g., melodrama, operetta, or pantomime which have quite different meanings in English, German, and French (and thus English pantomime cannot possibly be classified as a nonliterary convention, p. 7, although German Pantomime can). Regrettably, the comparative aspect is absent from most of the papers and must be supplied by the reader of the volume as a whole. This is particularly evident in an otherwise exemplary paper by Dieter Ingenschay on "The Birth of a Popular...