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

Credit is due to Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill for wrangling these twenty fine-grained essays into an excellent collection on British dramatic manuscripts between 1400 and 1700. The editors compare the surviving evidence to an incomplete puzzle, and the same could be said of the best scholarship in this field: local, empirical, suspicious (from long experience) of grand narratives. Coaxing coherence out of discrete case-studies is a challenge. Yet Atkin and Estill frame their collection as fellow-work in progress: 'the more pieces we have, the better we can see the shapes and colours of the original picture of early dramatic composition, performance, and reception' (p. 1). The volume is the stronger for its 'multiple voices and viewpoints', unified by an inductive approach as careful with its primary evidence as it is hawkish towards scholarly nostrums that no longer pass muster.

The collection is divided into three sections: 'Production', 'Performance', and 'Reception'. 'Production' displays the volume's revisionary impulse and cross-period scope to best advantage. Essays by Joe Stadolnik on the Brome Abraham and Isaac, by Pamela King on the Coventry Weavers' playbooks, and a superb piece by Alexandra Johnston on the 'Towneley' manuscript, re-situate their materials in bureaucratic settings beyond the reflex expectation that manuscripts were produced for either reading or performance. Instead, these manuscripts are an 'imperfect index of a literary culture' (p. 21), as likely to be guild muniments and texts of legal record as they are to be literary texts for reading. James Purkis, too, gestures beyond old binaries when he shows that lacunae in the Alnwick manuscript of John of Bordeaux make sense neither as abridgement nor memorial reconstruction, while Matthew Sergi's filigree critical historiography argues that the Chester Antichrist in MS Peniarth 399 should be classed neither as medieval nor as early modern, but 'at once ancient and current, both preserved and revised' (p. 100). Into the early modern period, Kirsten Inglis and Mary Polito extend Tiffany Stern's work on 'note-takers' to show that a dramatic manuscript at Arbury Hall was the work of a team of ten note-takers at an early Oxford performance of Thomas Goffe's Baiazet; and William Proctor Williams argues that textual variants in Cosmo Manuche's collaborations with James Compton, third earl of Northampton, bear the signs of closet performance during the interregnum.

The more miscellaneous second section, 'Performance', maintains this focus on specific occasions and audiences. Louise Rayment proposes that a manuscript of John Redford's Play of Wit and Science was adapted for royal performance in the mid-1550s by choirboys at St Mary-at-Hill (though I would quibble that musical setting better explains the prosodic irregularity of the shorter poems in the manuscript than does quantitative verse, a fringe movement even during its efflorescence thirty years later and far from synonymous with 'Tudor understanding of poetry' (p. 160)). Sarah Carpenter identifies James VI's progress from Stirling to Edinburgh as the political impetus behind two presenter's speeches composed by Alexander Montgomerie for the Scottish court's Christmas disguisings in 1579. Returning to the professional London stage, Lucy Munro uses manuscript cast lists to show how comic parts for the King's Men in the early 1630s were composed for the particular skills of their two clowns, John Shank and Thomas Pollard. The scholarly community gathering in the field of performance history emerges in Jakub Boguszak's clever inverse reading of actors' parts, drawing on practical experiments in the classroom, for the negative evidence of the silences they record; as it does Daniel Starza Smith and Jana Dambrogio's work on letterlocking, which they applied in designing props for a 2016 production of the Merchant of Venice. A fascinating outlier in this section is Kara Northway's contribution: she finds in Henslowe's diary evidence of an 'actors' witnessing scheme' whereby...