The Performance of Middle English Culture: Essays on Chaucer and the Drama in Honor of Martin Stevens ed. by James J. Paxson, Lawrence M. Clopper, Sylvia Tomasch (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER the uncomplicated clarity of Mills's scrupulous form of "empirical" scholarship that makes Recycling the Cycle such an admirable critical study in its own right. PETER w. TRAVIS Dartmouth College JAMES J. PAXSON, LAWRENCE M. CLOPPER, andSYLVIA TOMASCH, eds. The Performance ofMiddle English Culture: Essays on Chaucer and the Drama in Honor ofMartin Stevens. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1998. Pp. ix, 198. $75.00. The subject of the eleven essays in this collection in honor of Martin Stevens is, as James Paxson states in the introduction, "the theatrically charged world of late medieval England" (p. 1), a world in which theat­ ricality manifests itself not only in such obvious places as mystery and morality plays, feasts, tournaments, and other public spectacles but also, and more unexpectedly, in poetry, particularly poetry written by Chau­ cer. Implicitly echoing the handful of srudies of Chaucerian theatrical­ ity, Paxson argues that The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde "hinge on metaphors and images, explicit and implicit, of stagecraft, public spectacle, and histrionic or dramatic characterization" (p. 1) and are grounded in urban and civic ritual. The aim of the collection is to explore the cultural interdependence of the expressive forms dominant in late medieval England and to examine "the pervasive cultural macro­ metaphor of performance" (p. 2), which embraced productions as seem­ ingly opposed as Chaucer's writings and the York cycle plays. This is certainly an important goal, one with large consequences for our under­ standing of late medieval culture and the position of literary and dra­ matic production within it. While pursuing this goal, many of the essays unforrunately run afoul of entrenched disciplinary divisions. The result is that instead of consis­ tently bringing the textual into intersection with the performative, the literary into orbit with the dramatic, the essays tend unintentionally to reinforce the separateness of those categories. Thus, more or less on the drama side of the divide, we get a cultural reading of the York cycle 520 REVIEWS plays by Kathleen Ashley; an argument for redrawing the boundaries between "medieval" and "renaissance" drama by Richard Emmerson; an exploration of gender and power in Wisdom by Marlene Clark, Sharon Kraus, and Pamela Sheingorn; and a study of civic culture by John Ganim focusing on the descriptions ofLondon by William Fitz Stephen in the twelfth century and John Stow in the sixteenth. On the Chaucer side, we find Richard Daniels's reading oftextual pleasure in The Miller's Tale; Warren Ginsberg on Petrarch, Chaucer, and the construction ofthe Clerk's identity; Robert Hanning on the crisis ofmediation in Chaucer's Troilus andCriseyde; Peter Travis on the mock-exemplum opening of The Nun's Priest's Tale; and William McClellan on The Clerk's Tale and Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman." Although the essays by Ashley and Emmerson respond to the collec­ tion's call to examine the theatricality of late medieval English culture by rethinking prevailing interpretive paradigms and pointing to ways in which English drama can be productively read as part ofbroader cultural processes, the only essays to address explicitly the intersection ofliterary and theatrical cultures are Alfred David's examination of Noah's wife in The Miller's Tale and the cycle plays and Seth Lerer's analysis ofChaucer's deployment of theatricality. It is Lerer's essay that best lives up to the promises made in the collection's introduction and that best shows both how rich a vein the collection has tapped into and how much more work needs to be done to mine it. Lerer argues that Chaucer's references to theatricality, particularly in the Knight's and the Miller's Tales, serve to locate his project among "competing and potentially disruptive forms of dramatic public expres­ sion" (p. 60), including royal and provincial drama. Perhaps not unex­ pectedly, Lerer reads Theseus's tournament as an affirmation of a Ri­ cardian theatricality that was "public and consolidative in polemic, classicizing and dynastic in theme" (p. 62), and, more interestingly, sees The Miller's Tale as a provincial parody of civic pageantry and London royal specracles (p. 69). The silenced guildsmen of The General Prologue, Lerer claims, represent what...