English Drama: Forms and Development. Essays in Honour of Muriel Clara Bradbrook ed. by Marie Axton and Raymond Williams (review)

168 Comparative Drama atrical effects and plots, and about nineteenth-century tastes in theatre. The problems he encounters are multiple, but they are well overcome. JOHN EHRSTINE Washington State University Marie Axton and Raymond Williams, ed. English Drama: Forms and Development. Essays in Honour of Muriel Clara Bradbrook, Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Pp 263. $15.95. Lo, here is a Festschrift appropriate for and worthy of its dedicatee, not a gathering of casual and unrelated pieces. Its unusual cohesiveness derives from all contributors being former colleagues of Muriel Bradbrook in the Cambridge English Department; the book commemorates her official retirement. Raymond Williams’s Introduction goes far toward making the book into a manifesto of Cambridge English. He notes that the Cambridge “school” shares not only an emphasis on practical criticism, for which it has become known, but that, in spite of individual differences, three other features can be considered char­ acteristic: a correlation between literature and social history, a sensitivity to the relationship between imaginative literature and moral and philo­ sophical ideas, and a concern with dramatic forms and their conditions of performance. The latter feature, of course, has been dominant in Bradbrook’s own work, beginning with her prize-winning Cambridge undergraduate essay, Elizabethan Stage Conditions (1931), and her pioneering Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (1932); it has led up to such magisterial studies as Shakespeare the Craftsman (1969) and The Living Monument: Shakespeare and the Theatre of his Time (1976). Williams’s four components of the Cambridge school appear in various degrees and mixtures in the individual contributions. The first two essays are strong on social contexts. In “Folk Play in Tudor Inter­ ludes,” Richard Axton shows how the vanishing folk play left its traces in the “sub-texts” of humanistic or propagandists interludes. The author of Calisto and Melebea, subjecting the rich prize of the Spanish novel La Celestina to the cruder form of the interlude, availed himself of medieval analogues, such as Dame Siris, to make the story palatable and instructive to his audience. And John Bale still used the tune of Robin Goodfellow for the speech of Infidelity in A Comedy Concerning Three Laws. In “The Tudor Mask and Elizabethan Court Drama,” Marie Axton distinguishes between the essentially fluid Henrician masque forms, in which conventions for portraying the king’s divided self could be explored, and the Elizabethan masques, which began with wishful images Elizabeth’s courtiers created for her prospective marriage and led up to her apotheosis as Cynthia and Diana. Henry, participating in the disguises, could impersonate both forester and hermit, light-hearted youth and feeble old man on alternate occasions, so to express his Reviews 169 desires and fears. Elizabeth’s conception of herself could be challenged by her courtiers, such as by Dudley at Kenilworth; even Lyly’s court plays do not mirror merely the queen’s self-image but also courtly dis­ contents with it. Marie Axton thus reinforces Bradbrook’s characteriza­ tion of Elizabeth’s legend as not a static but a dynamic affair. In pointing up the affinity of Elizabethan masque and drama, this essay has a distinctly Bradbrookian flavor. Genre studies are represented by Leo Salingar’s “Comic Form in Ben Jonson: Volpone and the Philosopher’s Stone” and Ann Barton’s “He that Plays the King: Ford’s Perkin Warbeck and the Stuart History Play.” Salingar demonstrates his usual discernment in orienting a particular comedy toward various and contradictory traditions of comedy. I do not find persuasive, however, his suggestion of two specific sources for Volpone: Lucian’s dialogue Timon and Bacon’s Advancement of Learn­ ing. The passages quoted by Salingar lack the earmarks of a truly iden­ tifying imagery—that gold is called a fire by both Lucian and Jonson surely means nothing. Moreover, for reading Lucian’s satire as a source for Jonson’s, one must give it a not-evident particular twist, and for believing that Bacon’s warning against the subtle blandishments of alchemy was a source for Jonson, one must make the unprovable assumption that a metaphorical conception of alchemy was the germ not only for The Alchemist but also for Volpone. Ann Barton makes a good...