Early British Drama in Manuscript ed. by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill (review)

As the eagerly anticipated flagship volume of ‘British Manuscripts’, a new series published by Brepols under the editorship of A.S.G. Edwards, Early British Drama in Manuscript exceeds expectations and sets a high standard for future volumes. The essays in Early British Drama in Manuscript showcase the variety and vibrancy of research into early British dramatic texts, paratexts, and contexts using manuscript evidence. Along with twenty-one other contributors, Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill have produced a volume of scholarship that is interdisciplinary without being inaccessible and meticulous without stifling excitement for the material.

Scholarship often treats ‘manuscript’ as a ‘monolithic category’; as Atkin and Estill remind us in their Introduction, however, the term is ‘a catch-all’ in this context ‘for a variety of types of evidence’, including ‘playtexts, actors’ parts, onstage props, records, and other accounts that can be used to adduce performance’ (1). Essays attend to all of these types of evidence and, although there is frequent overlap, the collection divides into three sections — ‘Production’, ‘Performance’, and ‘Reception’. Given the cultural and disciplinary privileging of print, it is easy to forget that ‘the bulk of our knowledge of early performance necessarily comes to us from manuscript sources’ (2), a fact made all the more sobering in light of the low rate of manuscript survival from the period. Atkin and Estill admit, ‘for some plays, the only evidence we have that they once existed derives from manuscripts’ (2). This acknowledgement makes the absence of a chapter on lost plays ironically conspicuous from what is otherwise a comprehensive collection. Since manuscript evidence ‘is like a piece of a puzzle’ that will never be complete, our duty as scholars is to re-evaluate those pieces we have and be alert to the possibility of discovering and examining new ones, which, taken together, might allow us to better see ‘the shapes and colours of the original picture of early dramatic composition, performance, and reception’ (1).

Essays in the ‘Production’ section share an interest in exploring the status of playbooks and their relation to performance, whether real or imagined. In a departure from previous studies focusing on the Book of Brome (Yale Beinecke MS 365) in the context of its later additions and readership, Joe Stadolnik’s chapter (19–32) sets out to investigate ‘what kind of book Brome was first made to be’ by concentrating on ‘the manuscript’s earlier stage of production’ (21). Having demonstrated it to be ‘seemingly useless as a performance script’, Stadolnik concludes that ‘the Brome Abraham and Isaac is medieval drama as manuscript’, as ‘a textual genre circulating as an article for private reading’ (30). Pamela M. King’s chapter (33–54) offers a detailed codicological description of two manuscript witnesses to the Coventry Weavers’ pageant towards ‘a consideration of how radically different as a manuscript and functional material object a working playbook is from other compilations of plays’ (34). In one of my favourite essays in the collection, Alexandra Johnston embarks on a fascinating piece of literary detective-work into the provenance and nature of the Towneley plays (Huntington Library MS HM 1). Acting on a ‘hot tip’ from the late Malcolm Parkes (56), Johnston makes a persuasive case that the many quirks and faults of the Towneley manuscript can best be explained ‘if the document was compiled for legal purposes’, namely, the suppression of Catholic plays in the north (67–8). Matthew Sergi’s chapter (71–102) offers a reassessment of the evidence for dating the Chester cycle, combining ‘a series of interpretive glosses’ on seminal studies by Lawrence Clopper and David Mills that have come to represent two sides of a transatlantic scholarly dispute (72) with fresh analysis of the Antichrist text. Kirsten Inglis and Mary Polito’s chapter, ‘Noting Baiazet, the Raging Turk’ (103–22), makes a convincing argument that the manuscript of Baiazet (Arbury Hall MS...