The Queen’s Dumbshows: John Lydgate and the Making of Early Theater by Claire Sponsler (review)

Claire Sponsler demonstrates, in a series of convincing readings, that the practical theatrics of John Lydgate’s “performance pieces” (an especially astute term for his mummings and entertainments, used here at pp. 8, 11, 25, etc.) can and should be rigorously analyzed in their original performance contexts, despite a scarcity of reliably detailed evidence for staging. Sponsler approaches live performance as one among many other media to which Lydgate’s texts were attached: manuscripts, painted structures, tapestries, or desserts. In its attention to “situatedness” (p. 14), the book provides a much-needed “materially grounded” (p. 15) methodology through which scholars of medieval drama can better understand and teach Lydgate’s work—focusing “on audiences and readers as much as on authors and texts,” through the “analysis of the processes by which his work was embodied in particular performances and then circulated in various media” (p. 15).

The Queen’s Dumbshows is the bold and effective culmination of a project of canon revision already underway: the inclusion of Lydgate’s works in the recognized corpus of medieval English drama. Sponsler’s 2010 Middle English Texts Series edition of Lydgate’s Mummings and Entertainments, the first edition I know of that presents Lydgate’s performance pieces primarily as theatrical works, was instrumental in initiating that revision. In 2012, the new Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama included seven Lydgate pieces (when Sponsler rightly complains, at The Queen’s Dumbshows p. 7, that Lydgate “makes virtually no appearance in anthologies of medieval drama,” she does not take into account the 2012 anthology, nor the considerable impact of her own work). The timing of The Queen’s Dumbshows, then, allows Sponsler to confirm Lydgate’s placement decisively in the medieval drama corpus—which should result, as Sponsler argues in her excellent introduction, in “a rethinking of the development of vernacular literature in England” (p. 4) and “a cultural history of early English theater that situates theatricality at the hub of public culture” (p. 11).

The dense network of references in The Queen’s Dumbshows, emphasizing contemporary scholarship in particular, makes this book vibrantly au courant. A continual and respectful dialogue with medieval dramatists’ recent work on textuality and ephemera, especially that of Carol Symes and Lawrence Clopper (“How do we know what was a play and what was not?” p. 17), allows Sponsler to build productively on what has already been done. Even the subtitle of the book is a scholarly reference, cleverly positioning it in thought-provoking contrast to Maura Nolan’s 2005 John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture. Nolan’s nuanced consideration of Lydgate’s “performance pieces … not quite ‘poetry,’ nor yet ‘drama,’” asserted the primacy of the mummings’ textuality and “writtenness”; Nolan warns wisely against too-speculative extrapolations on “possible performance details and … audience responses” with “no basis in textual evidence,” cautioning readers of Lydgate to “look first at the words on the page” (see Nolan, pp. 71–72). Sponsler, following Nolan deliberately from there, thus makes clear—even where she provides room for some productive speculation—how and why her book will always begin and end with the words on the page: not only Lydgate’s, but also scribe and compiler John Shirley’s. The first chapter, punningly titled “Shirley’s Hand,” closely analyzes Shirley’s performance-oriented notes, with precise attention to their wording. Nearly all evidence for Lydgate’s live performance survives only through Shirley’s notation; that notation, as Sponsler reveals in an elegant paradox (p. 32), constitutes Shirley’s attempt to make those performance texts look nondramatic.

Shirley’s descriptions associate three of Lydgate’s mummings with specific locations or audiences in London; Sponsler also makes a good case that the performance of the Disguising at London was at Westminster (pp. 35–36 and 63–64). Chapter 2, “Vernacular Cosmopolitanism,” can thus read those four pieces “in relation...