Medieval Theatre Performance: Actors, Dancers, Automata and Their Audiences ed. by Philip Butterworth and Katie Normington (review)

Recent archival discoveries, such as those from the Records of Early English Drama project, testify to the prevalence and variety of performance modes in the pre-modern era. But as much as documents can tell scholars, they often fall silent on the questions of what exactly performers did, and how they did it, when they brought their plays, dances, or automata in front of audiences. These are the types of gaps in knowledge Katie Normington and Philip Butterworth set out to address in Medieval Theatre Performance: Actors, Dancers, Automata and their Audiences. As they explain in their introduction, the editors challenged contributors to consider the nature, qualities, conventions, and audiences of early performances in an attempt to generate new ways of thinking about the most slippery questions critics of performance face. Their ten fellow authors embraced this challenge with gusto across this collection. Offering methodological insights that will inform future scholarship and discussions of historical practices that may be unfamiliar to readers, this publication has much to offer experienced scholars and newcomers to the field.

The strengths of the collection are nowhere more apparent than in the late Claire Sponsler's fine opening chapter on John Lydgate's mumming the Disguising at Hertford. With an aim to flesh out how this fifteenth-century performance happened, Sponsler takes influence from theorist Diana Taylor in promoting the embodied practices that constitute performance to a position of critical parity with the documents that record it. Sponsler's methods of tracing these practices include engaging in 'post-positive' readings based 'on plausible conjectures that can be developed through historical inquiry' (17). A point of particular interest for readers will be her discussion of the various methods of performance-centred research (here divided into 'practice as research', 'reconstructions' and 'practice-based research'), of which Sponsler offers an excellent critical overview.

Sponsler's chapter proves to be a touchstone across the volume. Bart Ramakers's study on intervals in Dutch zinnespel, sixteenth-century moral plays that were often lavishly staged, is an 'attempt to merge "careful scholarship and detailed research … with imaginative speculation"' (37). Ramakers presents zinnespel by asking what audiences may have seen, heard, and experienced at a performance. Taking influence from phenomenology and cognitive studies, this chapter offers not only insight into a national tradition little known outside of specialist scholarship, but also a methodology with direct applications for complementary fields of research. David Klausner poses the question of how to evaluate a historic performance that possesses neither text nor action. Klausner cautions that text-centred studies run the risk of eliminating practices that complicate standard definitions of drama. In line with Sponsler's post-positive approach, Klausner's speculative offering is that performances which were stationary or involved little to no dialogue may have accounted for a sizable amount of medieval practices. Jennifer Nevile echoes Sponsler's contention that embodied practice is in need of greater critical focus, and reflects on why existing records of dance are so few, and why they pose such interpretative difficulty. Nevile's discussion of how performer-audience relations worked at English, French, and Italian courts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries offers the important clarification that 'dance performances were overwhelmingly conducted by courtiers for courtiers' (125). The question of how audience knowledge affects this relationship is stimulating, and has significant implications for other areas of early performance studies.

The chapters of Katie Normington, Kathryn Emily Dickason, Tom Pettitt, and Nerida Newbingen foreground the importance of embodied skill and knowledge in their respective contributions. Normington investigates the relationship between body and costume in drama, informing us that costumes were often used in roles more times than individual players, giving clothing the 'stronger association with the part' (78). Her question of whether it is possible to determine how a part was played from records of costume is stimulating, but needs a wider-ranging study to work through the implications...