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

As Sponsler points out at the beginning of her impressive study, “The standard history of medieval English literature is one in which dumbshows would not readily find a place” (1). Accordingly, the reader may expect Sponsler to challenge this by writing a performance history of the dumbshow as opposed to a literary history of the manuscripts, which she does. However, she does much more than this. In writing about the mummings, dramatic and commemorative poems, banquet entertainments and Queen Catherine of Valois’s dumbshows, Sponsler unearths a fascinating portrait of medieval cultural life. In doing so she challenges the standard histories and reveals a rich matrix of theatrical life in London where ideas of metropolitanism, economics, religion, politics, visual identity and gender form an important backdrop to the city’s entertainments.

Much of the study approaches the poet John Lydgate through the “voice” of John Shirley, the fifteenth-century scribe who copied Lydgate’s performance pieces, and the first chapter is spent on the issues of the manuscripts. From there Sponsler moves to an examination of the mumming plays Lydgate created for London’s guilds, pointing out the way in which “Lydgate’s entertainments for the Mercers and Goldsmiths can be seen as festive interventions into this complex set of relations between London and the continent” (44). Chapter Three focuses on an exploration of how manuscripts formed part of the visual medieval world, for example the displaying of the now lost Danse macabre at St Paul’s Cathedral, which John Stow’s Survey of London corroborates. Sponsler then turns to the processional dramas of a Corpus Christi pageant and the royal entry to London of Henry VI in 1432 which inscribed the streets as they were performed, and the subtleties which accompanied banquets and feasts. In the chapter on the Queen’s dumbshows, Sponsler reassesses the understanding of women’s involvement with medieval drama by potentially influencing texts and the spectatorship of them.

If I have any criticisms of the book, it is about the title. The focus on dumbshows and Lydgate may deter some more generalist readers. It would be a pity because the importance of the volume is communicated in its sub-heading. Such is the richness of the scope and detail here this book is really about “The Making of Early Theatre”.