The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama ed. by Thomas Betteridge and Greg Walker (review)

Edited by two leading scholars of Tudor literature, this excellent book provides a valuable distillation of up-to-date scholarship on the dramatic world out of which Shakespearean drama emerged. Only three of thirty-eight chapters consider Shakespeare plays, but the collection as a whole enables us to situate the Bard within “a long Tudor century from the 1480s to the 1600s” (15). While lacking a continuous argument, it nevertheless possesses a coherent flow, due to the chronological organization of its four parts. The end result is a historical overview of dramatic forms that flourished throughout the era of the Tudor monarchs. In conjunction with the 2009 Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603 edited by Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank, this book provides a very full and balanced overview of recent scholarship on a field that has received insufficient attention. The two Handbooks share the common goal of investigating “a single open-plan century of ‘Tudor’ literary endeavor” as a “useful corrective to models of periodization based on ever more intricate subdivisions: late medieval, early Tudor, Henrician, early Reformation, mid-Tudor, early Renaissance, high Renaissance, early modern, not to mention the minute division of the work of Shakespeare, into early, mature, late, and collaborative semi-retirement” (15–16).

Shakespeare’s achievement may be for all time, but this book bears witness to ways in which his dramatic achievement was very much of his age. The editors rightly oppose a teleological model that sees later and more complicated dramatic forms, such as those of Shakespeare’s plays, as the result of what came before. They and their many contributors instead embrace the integrity and complexity of the manifold forms of Tudor stagecraft and entertainment, most of which continued to thrive into Shakespeare’s lifetime. They include liturgical plays, mystery cycles, noncycle mysteries, morality plays, interludes of various kinds, pageants, disguisings, mummings, dumb shows, masques, and other entertainments developed under court auspices, such as Neoplatonic romances, royal entries, and tournaments. It takes little imagination to recall Shakespeare plays that contain many of these dramatic forms or integrate their characteristic conventions and techniques.

The editors identify three important cultural forces that shaped the development of Tudor drama: religious reform, the opening of playhouses in London, and humanism. The Tudor era witnessed a transition from the heterogeneous religious drama characteristic of the late fifteenth century in which sacred and profane elements commonly coexisted, to the emergence of antitheatrical attitudes or at least disapproval of overt dramatization of the sacred following the confessional divide consequent upon the Protestant Reformations. Although the heterogeneous dramatic forms that flourished during the Tudor age were notable for both continuity and change, they evinced an overall movement away from amateur performances of mystery cycles by the provincial guilds, ad hoc productions at colleges and other locales, and largely didactic performances by itinerant troupes toward more secularized productions by professionalized companies following the opening of the Red Lion in 1567. The advent of humanism allowed for more complicated and conflicted characterization in plays by Shakespeare, Thomas Kyd, and Christopher Marlowe.

Investigations of religious drama in the nine chapters of part 1 range from late medieval cycles at Chester (Sheila Christie), York (Greg Walker), and Digby (Vincent Gillespie), and the noncyclical Croxton Play of the Sacrament (Elisabeth Dutton) to morality plays and finally to David Lawton’s consideration of Dr. Faustus. Consideration of the cycle drama builds upon Paul Whitfield White’s insight that these plays continued to undergo expansion and revision under the impact of reformist religious ideas until late in the sixteenth century. These essays include Andrew Hadfield’s consideration of The Summoning of Everyman, which queries whether this quintessential morality play is as much engaged in propounding religious orthodoxy as it is in presenting a critique of late medieval religion, and James Simpson’s study of John Bale’s Three Laws, in which he...