The Medieval English Stage: Corpus Christi Pageants and Plays by Alan H. Nelson (review)

REVIEWS Alan H. Nelson. The Medieval English Stage: Corpus Christi Pageants and Plays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Pp. xiv + 274. $12.50. In his introductory chapter Alan Nelson states the thesis of his book as follows: “ I will argue from documentary evidence—much of it previ­ ously unknown—that the fifteenth-century English dramatic cycles de­ veloped out of fourteenth-century festival processions. A corollary of this argument is that the doctrinal relationship of the Corpus Christi dramatic play to the feast of Corpus Christi is almost entirely incidental” (p. 9). This thesis has hardly the revolutionary quality claimed for it by David Bevington on the dust jacket, particularly when the book in fact never discusses the plays themselves or their doctrinal content at all. Scholars at work in the field of medieval English drama have been saying for at least fifteen years, certainly since the appearance of O. B. Hardi­ son’s Christian Rite and Christian Drama in 1965, that the vernacular civic drama of England in the later Middle Ages represents a new begin­ ning, and is not to be understood in its formal aspects by describing it in terms of Latin liturgical plays. The efficient cause of such plays, to use Nelson’s own Aristotelian language, was certainly the context provided by the annual procession of Corpus Christi day. The value of this book lies in its continual insistence on the reality of that Corpus Christi procession, an event that has, in fact, been too often treated lightly. The records that Nelson cites from cities all over England remind those in protestant countries how impressive such a procession was, how involved were the preparations for its occurrence, and how much time and space it took. In pursuit of this interest Nelson traveled this past spring to Spain. His slides of one such procession shown at the conference on Medieval drama held at Leeds in September 1974 were a useful reminder as well of how much of an event the procession alone can be. Those already familiar with Nelson’s article on “Principles of Pro­ cessional Staging: York Cycle,” which appeared in Modern Philology in 1970 and was read at the Medieval Drama Seminar of the MLA meeting in 1969, which reappears here as Chapter II, will realize that more is at stake than simply a reinforcement of the connection between the Corpus Christi procession and the civic plays called by that name, whether pro­ duced then or on another occasion. In that article Nelson applied pure reason, using mathematical formulae, to the problem of what went on in York, and arrived at the conclusion that it was mathematically impossi386 Reviews 387 ble for the surviving York plays to have been put on in one day, let alone in a day which also contained a time-consuming Corpus Christi proces­ sion. It is likely that Nelson chose York as his point of attack because it has for so long dominated histories of medieval English drama as the paradigm of what happened throughout England. The immediate result of that article was to renew interest in the York records themselves. In “Two Studies of The York Corpus Christi Play” (Leeds Studies in English, 6 [1972], 63-111), Margaret Dorrell offered a rebuttal to Nelson’s argu­ ment, offering what to many has been convincing proof that, whether or not the plays could not have been done in one day at multiple stations according to the principles of logic, the fact is that that is exactly how they were put on. Nelson was thus himself forced back to the records if he was to sup­ port his attack on the traditional history of events in York. Thus his in­ sistence on his use of “documentary evidence—much of it previously un­ known.” Certainly he is to be commended for the labor involved in con­ sulting a wide range of documents, from an impressive number of towns and cities in England. Not only has he consulted the local records of such obvious dramatic centers as York, Beverley, Lincoln, Norwich, Coventry, Chester, and London, but in Chapter 11 he has amassed a con­ siderable body of material not easily obtainable before...