Civic Ritual and Drama ed. by Alexandra F. Johnston and Wim Hüsken (review)

Reviews443 While Arnott and Walton rightly emphasize the extreme difficulty ofreconstructing Menander by looking at the Roman plays, any discussion of the importance of his dramaturgy for the later European tradition might profitably take advantage of its expression through the Latin sources. Instead, the chapter falls back on somewhat feeble comparisons of Menander's style to plays that are like his but whose authors could not have known his plays, and ultimately denies any serious influence at all. The upshot is that although I will be making use of the insights I found in this book from two men who have appreciated Menander's qualities through interaction with his scripts as live theater, I will probably send my students back to Sander Goldberg's stiffer but much more careful The Making of Menander's Comedy (1980) and for discussion of the ancient illustrations to David Wiles's The Masks of Menander (1991). ROBERT C. KETTERER University ofIowa Alexandra F. Johnston and Wim Hüsken, eds. Civic Ritual and Drama. Ludus: Medieval and Renaissance Theatre and Drama 2. Amsterdam : Editions Rodopi, 1997. Pp. vi + 201. $37.50. A relatively short review cannot do justice to the substance of this attractive and well-illustrated volume, which contains seven essays of high quality by specialists in late-medieval and renaissance civic display , and a useful Introduction by Alexandra F. Johnston. Civic Ritual and Drama fits well into the current pattern of publishing in the field in that it brings together scholars from North America and Europe, uses French and English, and, although not always directly comparative, establishes a matrix for future comparison between the urban rituals of different countries. It includes some of the fruits of Alan J. Fletcher's work on the records of early drama in Ireland; two essays on the interpretation of major London ceremonies, by Gordon Kipling and Anne K. Lancashire; Wim Hüsken shifting the religious drama of the Low Countries towards the foreground of the discipline; Jesse D. Hurlbut on French ceremonial entries (including an example from the Low Countries ); and two papers on Italy in a European context—from Nicholas Terpstra writing on Bologna in a development of his earlier work on the confraternities, and Giovanni Ricci, who looks at the funerary practices of the Dukes of Ferrara, and their emulation and adaptation of the French tradition. Combining analysis ofprimary records with an historicized interest in the negotiation and public expression of power, Civic Ritual and Drama is situated at the heart of current early-modem methodology and thematics. The work of the Records of Early English Drama project, now articulated with the developing interpretative tradi- 444Comparative Drama tions of New Historicism, has given impetus, detail, and sophistication to studies of how European societies configured urban time and space, how they represented themselves to themselves and to others, and how their institutions borrowed ceremonial practices from each other. The history which emerges from Civic Ritual and Drama, and volumes like it, is many-faceted since a wide range ofeconomic, social, political, and cultural variables are literally in play. Certainly it is a history of power: its acquisition, maintenance, and loss, and its changing institutional bases. But such a history need not always be a matter of contest or depredation : the essays in this volume offer valuable refinement on that theme of negotiated power which too often carries a patina of cynicism and functionality in modem scholarship. More usually, such civic display seems to have depended on institutional co-operation, favors (both personal and institutional) being called in, and the committee work which underpins most civic enterprises—even if it is not always as evident as in the London records charting the eleventh-hour attempt to put on an appropriate, balanced show for Anne Boleyn's entry to the city. In this vein Hüsken proposes that the impulse behind urban religious drama in the Netherlands was educational rather than political, and involved co-operation rather than contest between Church and State. Even though organization of the plays passed to the Chambers of Rhetoric, this joint institutional project continued until the Reformation, when it broke down regardless of the resulting religious color of the State. Nicholas Terpstra...