Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft: Remnants of the Mysteries on the London Stage by Kurt A. Schreyer (review)

Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft joins other studies in opposing the strict periodization of drama into medieval/religious and early modern/secular, but it does so from a distinctive angle, that of the weight exerted on Shakespearean drama by the afterlife of material stage properties and practices from the medieval mystery plays. Professor Schreyer makes a strong case for medieval influences on Shakespeare’s stagecraft, especially for the scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, and Macbeth he discusses in detail, but the assumption that London audiences were unanimous in registering the import of the mystery cycles is less persuasive. Surely not all who saw the plays were new to the city; not all of those who were new came from cycle-producing towns; and some, young apprentices for instance, must have had their first experiences of plays in the public theaters. A more modest claim for a heterogeneous audience would have been more convincing, but it would have blunted the edge of the book’s major challenge to “that most sacred tenet of our discipline: Shakespearean authorship” and, more broadly, “assumptions about the relative superiority of the Renaissance author over the medieval subject” (3).

The material remnants of the subtitle are agents, not merely precursors, of the celebrated early modern public theater. Professor Schreyer’s focus on the crafts that produced these material agents and their hold on public imaginations is presented through close attention to the Chester Late Banns, a sixteenth-century edict testifying to the continued presentation of the mysteries in Protestant England by the Chester tradesmen, and defending the use of the costumes and props of the “old [Catholic] fashion” (6). In bringing the Banns into the discussion of the Catholic/Protestant divide, Schreyer makes a welcome contribution to our understanding late sixteenth-century controversies. His close study of the Banns finds them fully supportive of the traditional local crafts and production practices of the medieval plays, in contrast, he argues, to Hegel’s dialectical stance about the uses of past tradition to produce positive change. As a practical matter, the prohibition of the mysteries in 1585 freed their properties from the taint of the old faith, making them available for appropriation on a secular stage, “antiquating” them (8).

The best example of this combined respect for and practical deployment of an artifact is Shakespeare’s use of Bottom’s ass’s head in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Chapter 3). The head itself was fabricated for the Chester plays. Rather than recalling the ass’s ears of Ovid’s Midas story, Schreyer traces the head to the talking ass of the Chester Moses and the Law: Balack and Balaam from Numbers 22. The cappers are on record as having crafted the head, which must have produced a striking effect, since, except for the snake in Eden, the ass is the only talking animal in the mystery cycles. It is easy to see how an elaborate prop like the head could be adapted by a late sixteenth-century theatrical company for a non-biblical tale, but there is more to the story. Protestant iconography produced a widely dispersed image known as the “Popish Ass,” elaborated by Melanchthon and Luther and illustrated in a woodcut by Cranach, making use of a familiar Protestant polemic against the pope. In characterizing Bottom, then, the stage presence of the talking ass may have called up a variety of religious associations, and this rich history, Schreyer shows, enhances the play when we acknowledge it. It does not, however, reduce the impression of an authorial hand managing the intricacy of its deployment in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Chapter 4 is about purgatory, and it tackles one of the persistent problems in Shakespeare criticism: what is signified by the under-stage location from which the Ghost in Hamlet emerges. A medieval stage practice—the multi-level...