'The Best Pairt of our Play': Essays Presented to John J. McGavin. Medieval English Theatre ed. by Sarah Carpenter et al. (review)

As a colleague and mentor, John J. McGavin has had a profound impact on medieval drama studies. His interest in broadly defined performance, including ritual and ceremony; his detailed exploration of archival material in both England and Scotland; and his attention to spectatorship are all evident in the work of his students and peers in this second volume of Medieval English Theatre's Festschrift dedicated to him. The volume progresses from articles focusing on archival studies to those more concerned with audience and spectatorship. McGavin's attention to medieval performance outside of England influences the first four articles in the collection, which address material related to Scotland and Wales. Most of the other contributions address spectatorship more directly, leading the volume into discussions of direct address, performance circumstances, and more theoretical discussions around audience reception. The volume ends with a detailed analysis of a little studied sixteenth-century play, leaving the reader aware that there is still much to discover by following McGavin's interests and methods.

Eila Williamson, who first worked with McGavin as a research assistant, begins the volume with an excellent exploration of the Scottish Buccleuch family's records in order to provide a fuller account of the first Earl of Buccleuch's heraldic funeral in 1634. Williamson's thorough consideration of extant records significantly augments a seventeenth-century heraldic account, giving a fuller picture of the extent of funeral activities, including cost, personnel, and visual and aural presentation. She demonstrates the attention to detail that made this funeral a carefully orchestrated performance lasting for months, from formal displays in London and Leith to the eventual procession to the family home and vault. Williamson's discussion of the contemporary elegiac and dramatic references that make Buccleuch a figure of literary interest feels tacked on to the end of the article, but these references do serve to demonstrate the broader appeal of her subject. Alice Hunt's article moves the Scottish focus southwards, showing how James I's English coronation and contemporary commentary on the ceremony privileged performance over performativity; instead of a divine transformation, contemporaries understood the modified ceremony as 'symbolic gestures in [the] drama of kingship' (32). Sue Niebrzydowski and David N. Klausner move the volume's attention to Wales, respectively exploring the Welsh language Troelus a Chresyd and a possible Crucifixion play in early fourteenth-century Monmouthshire. Niebrzydowski provides a thorough introduction to the Welsh adaptation of the Troilus and Criseyde story, showing how the text amalgamates aspects of Chaucer's and Henryson's retellings. She dates the text to the turn of the seventeenth century, a time of theatrical interest in the story in London, but she notes that Troelus a Chresyd differs in narrative from other theatrical adaptations. Instead, the Welsh text's anonymous author most likely modeled his work on Thomas Speght's edition of Chaucer, which misattributes Henryson's version to Chaucer. Niebrzydowski's argument about Speght as the intermediary source is more difficult to follow and is not always convincing, in part because she is comparing Middle English and Scots to Welsh, but also because she does not clearly demonstrate the point she wants her readers to understand in her comparisons between texts. Her overall discussion of the play, nevertheless, provides a useful starting point for scholars interested in Welsh drama or the Troilus and Criseyde tradition. Klausner's discussion focuses on an archival allusion to performance in Bishop Orleton's letter outlining abuses identified during his visitation of the Benedictine Priory of St Mary at Abergavenny, Monmouthshire in 1320. Klausner expertly demonstrates the filters through which he interprets this allusion, and he draws on the practices of contemporary liturgical drama to suggest that Orleton's letter describes a Crucifixion play or tableau, possibly one that received regular performance. He concludes the article...