Prosody and Poetics in the Early Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of C.B. Hieatt ed. by M.J. Toswell (review)

HUMANITIES 323 Theory ofDrama in Education,1979) and chosen for his title: Towards aTheory. Indeed, I am puzzled that there is no mention of Bolton, one of the leading theorists in drama in education today, with five books and numerous articles to his credit. Bolton would have been 'right at home' in this book with its feeling, learning, and aesthetic theory. Dorothy Heathcote, another very important person in this field, is mentioned only briefly, in passing, as it were. This too is surprising. The book would benefit from some fine tuning in the editing and I would hope that this be done before its second printing. All this aside, Drama and Feeling: An Aesthetic Theory is well worth the reading, and the study, for the multitude of ideas and theories it contains. (MARGARET R. BURKE) M.J. Toswell, editor. Prosody and Poetics in the Early Middle Ages: Essays in Honour ojc.B. Hieatt University of Toronto Press. x, 226. $65.00 This volume represents a selection of twelve papers, revised for publication ,presented at a 1993 conference held in honour of the well-known medievalist at the University of Western Ontario, Constance B. Hieatt. The stated intention of this collection is to explore the nature of style in the poetry of theearly medieval period, particularlybId English poetry, an exercise which the editor notes has fallen into some neglect over the past few decades. The problem with discussions of style in medieval poetry, Taswell writes in the introduction (a useful review of the role of 'style' in OE scholarship), is that it is 'constituted differently in the approach and analysis of every student of the po_ etry ... [and] is not at all a transparent and eternal given.' The goal of criticism, one gathers from Taswell's introduction, should be somehow to resolve the various and individual discrepancies in the accounting of OE poetic style, to attain to a more coherent and objective approach. Prosodyand Poetics in the Early Middle Ages illustrates both this disparateness of treatment and interpretation, and the desired objectivity ofanalysis, whenit mighthave done something towards effecting, if not a unitary consensus (which seems unlikely), at least a more coherent dialogue and debate of the contending voices. There is, within the objective poetics implicit in the emphasis on metrics, a fairly broad range of discussion and analytic method, from distinguished scholars and those just embarking on their careers. It is all marked by a considerable erudition, with discussions from such differing spheres as phonology, performance, onomastics, orthography, translation, historiography , computer analysis, traditional text analysis,pragmatic theory, linguistics, and even intonation. Seven of the twelve essays concern themselves with prosodic issues, a weighting suggested in the collection's 32 4 LETTERS IN CANADA 1995 title, and for those with a particular interest in this somewhat dry and dauntingly statistical area, the pieces by Geoffrey Russom and James Keddie on the problematic nature of resolution in the metrical structure of OE verse lines can be especially recommended. Theplacementofthese twoessays in the volume, separated by some forty pages, however, indicates a shortcoming ofthe collection, a tendency to isolate each discussion and to dampenany dialogue such essays mightinitiate, a pattern repeated with other essays that by their subject one would expect to be paired together. Keddie and Russom hold some conflicting ideas about resolution, but it is difficult to see the area of conflict as they are placed. Essays on Andreas by J.M. Foley and Brian Shaw, on The Battle of Maldon by R.P. Creed and M.S. Griffith, and on Middle English prosody by Thomas Cable and Douglas Moffat are likewise set apart, and this tends to make the collection seemmore haphazard orheterogeneous than itactually is. Space being limited, I will conclude by conSidering the two essays I suspect will draw most attention to this collection. David Megginson's .contribution is a bright, orthographically founded reconsideration of the merits of the now widespread assumption of a general and separate poetic dialect in DE. In arguing against the orthographic evidence for the existence of such a dialect, Megginson provides a fascinating cautionary tale of the history and spread of an idea. He locates its benign and cautious beginnings in Kenneth Sisam...