York ed. Alexandra F. Johnston, Margaret Rogerson (review)

REVIEWS Y o rk , ed. Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson. Records of Early English Drama, 1 and 2. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1979. Pp. xlix + 965. $69.95. These important volumes are the first to be published by Records of Early English Drama, the project which promises to lay the groundwork for as complete a picture as can be established of the conditions under which early drama flourished in England. Alexandra Johnston and Mar­ garet Dorrell Rogerson, who are to be commended for their zeal in ferreting out much previously unknown material, describe their purpose in their introduction: Our concern here is to provide sufficient historical and bibliographical context to allow others to understand and interpret material which can be, in itself, laconic and ambiguous. These documents are not a history of drama, ministrelsy and ceremonial as such; they are memoranda, minutes of council meetings, accounts, letters, wills, ordinances, and legal contracts which touch upon or illuminate practices of long-standing custom and ceremony, (p. ix) The result of their industry ought rightly to impress us all. While the completeness of such a collection of transcriptions of records can always be questioned—for example, they miss an important reference (the first anywhere) to the clavicym balu m or harpsichord, an instrument used presumably by minstrels, in the will of Robert Wolveden (1432)1—the significance of what they have collected cannot be underestimated. Naturally, records can often be enigmatic. When we read, for ex­ ample, that several companies of players in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries came to York and were refused permission to play — a refusal that usually cost the city twenty shillings or more—we are not normally able from the records to know w hy, though in March 1598 the reason was the prevalence of the plague in the area. The records, which become less sketchy only toward the end of the fourteenth century, do not even really uncover the date of the origin of the great civic drama in York; we know only that the feast of Corpus Christi was established by 1325 and that the pageants associated with that day are first noted in the York M em oran du m B ook in 1376. The evidence of the records, however, does appear to prove con­ clusively that the Corpus Christi play was performed at various stations through the city, beginning with the station at the gates of Holy Trinity Priory where at least in some years the city clerk was assigned to appear with the Register. While it remains an attractive theory to suggest that the pageants grew out of tableaux vivan ts associated with the religious procession on Corpus Christi, we no longer can seriously defend, I be79 80 Comparative Drama lieve, Alan H. Nelson’s revisionist theories about the staging of the York cycle indoors before the important persons of the municipality and their guests. However, Professor Nelson’s work did in fact present the kind of challenge that spurred the collection of as complete an edition of records as could be brought together, and hence scholarship in the field of medieval drama also owes him a great deal for thus stimulating original research in records. I have already commented on the role of devotion as a principal motive for the showing of the pageants in the streets of York (E D A M N ew sletter, I, No. 2). There are many hints that the devotional attitudes involved are to be seen in terms of the affective piety prevalent through­ out the Northern countries (e.g., the description of Jesus in the pageant of the Carrying of the Cross in the Ordo of 1415, which identifies him as “covered with blood” in accord surely with the stress on emotional response to the Passion). The devotional impulse is very clear also in the separate Corpus Christi procession (see the constitutions of the Corpus Christi Guild from the year 1408), and in 1422 the York M em oran du m B o o k speaks of the establishment of the play (“ludus”) , on Corpus Christi long ago “for the important cause of devotion and the reformation of...