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Reviewed by:
  • John Lydgate: Mummings and Entertainments
  • Maura Nolan
John Lydgate: Mummings and Entertainments. Edited by Claire Sponsler. TEAMS Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010. Pp. vi + 182. $15.

This book is a small volume that should have a large impact across multiple late medieval fields. Claire Sponsler's excellent edition of Lydgate's dramatic works promises new perspectives for teaching and research on drama and theatricality in the fifteenth century—perspectives that will help to change our understanding of the emergence of secular drama between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. By collecting these dramatic works, Sponsler has made visible to a large audience [End Page 541] the theatrical quality of Lydgate's writing, particularly during the minority of Henry VI. This theatricality has been noted before, by figures like Walter Schirmer and Derek Pearsall, but in the absence of an accessible edition of Lydgate's dramatic works, the significance of his theatrical writing has not been appreciated outside the narrow world of Lydgate scholarship. Sponsler's edition provides a well-glossed, carefully transcribed, thoughtfully situated collection of poems whose affinities to each other provide a starting point for defining the theatrical aesthetic at work in fifteenth-century culture. Not all of the poems in the volume are obvious performances; quite often, there is no evidence that a given poem was intended to be performed, let alone actually performed at a particular time and place. Indeed, had Sponsler restricted herself to those poems that announce themselves as performance pieces or are described in performance, the volume would have been very short. Instead, she judiciously has surveyed Lydgate's body of verse and has chosen those poems that "were mimetic in some way and that featured both oral and visual display" (p. 1). She thus includes both poems that are identified as performance pieces (like mummings) and those that make use of theatrical conventions (like heralds or "pursuivants") or verbal gestures to a listening audience (like "Behold" or "Listen").

As a result, the volume includes a wide range of material, presenting a portrait of Lydgate as a poet for whom performance and spectacle played a central role. Sponsler's principle of selection allows her to assemble seventeen poems, ranging from mummings and disguisings to a royal entry, a saint's legend, a Corpus Christi procession, verses written to illustrate sugar sculptures, verses illustrating scenes on tapestries, and other occasional poems. Up until now, readers interested in these poems have had to use MacCracken's Lydgate's Minor Poems, volumes one and two, which lack the aids to reading that make Sponsler's edition such a superb achievement. Her volume begins with an introduction that provides crucial information about Lydgate, the historical background against which the texts were produced, the role of John Shirley in copying many of the poems, and the status of performance in the fifteenth century. Throughout, Sponsler pays careful attention to the manuscript sources for these poems, providing in the introduction and notes to each text a full discussion of its manuscript context, its print history, and the textual apparatus that accompanies it (glosses, rubrics, running headers, and the like). The date for each poem is fully considered, and Sponsler provides useful summaries of critical work on each text as well as a very thorough bibliography. Each text is glossed on the page and there is a helpful glossary at the end of the volume. Sponsler includes both explanatory and textual notes, beginning with the former, which explain allusions and references; these notes frequently point to arguments made by various critics about specific aspects of individual poems, give historical background for texts and performances, note records of performance that might be relevant, and provide other useful information. The textual notes helpfully and thoroughly identify emendations and provide alternate readings from various manuscript copies of the poems. In an appendix, Sponsler prints two additional performance pieces not currently attributed to Lydgate, but which helpfully flesh out the context for the other pieces in the volume, the "Mumming of the Seven Philosophers" and "Margaret of Anjou's Entry into London, 1445."

Taken as a whole, the apparatus that Sponsler constructs for the volume is inestimably...

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