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

The twenty essays in this volume introduce or newly interpret evidence of authorship, transmission, and performance in playscripts copied in England or Scotland from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, a period when printing had not wholly displaced handwritten texts. The authors explore records of performances before audiences who ranged from poor and illiterate to middle-class, scholarly, courtly, and regal. They show that scripts were preserved for entertainment, edification, and propaganda, and that the copyists were variously named or unnamed, amateur or professional, male or female. All the contributions advance understanding of early British drama, while a few radically revise received opinions.

Of the studies that explore the intentions of those who commissioned, transcribed, or preserved plays originating in the Middle Ages, essays by Pamela M. King, Alexandra F. Johnston and Gail McMurray Gibson are among the most innovatory. After describing Robert Croo's transcriptions of the Coventry 'Weavers' Pageant', the Presentation of the Virgin and Christ's Debate with the Doctors, King convincingly identifies the 'Richard' who copied a poem on the last folio of the longer of two Coventry Playbooks (CRO Acc. 11/2) as Richard Pixley, from a family closely associated with the guild. King goes on to conclude that playbooks were regarded by readers and performers alike as commodities to be shared complete or piecemeal across the country and replaced as they wore out. Johnston's pivotal study questions the consensus elaborated by Arthur Cawley and Martin Stevens (The Towneley Plays, Early English Text Society, 1994) that the Towneley plays emanate from Wakefield and that they form a cohesive cycle. Instead, she extends the late distinguished Malcolm Parkes's conclusion that the cycle's only surviving copy is a legal (as opposed to literary) record compiled between 1553 and 1558. Johnston specifies that the miscellany was probably authorized in 1559 by the Yorkshire knight Sir Thomas Gargrave for the Ecclesiastical Council of the North instituted under Elizabeth I. A perception of frequent adaptation of the Towneley and other cycles over time emerges from this research. Lastly, Gibson seeks to restrict the contentious term 'morality play' as a medieval genre to the plays preserved in the fifteenth century Macro manuscript, for example The Castle of Perseverance, Mankind, and Wisdom. Her account of this manuscript's intricate history incorporates new evidence from the Palgrave family papers (1782–1838) lodged in 2012 in the Norfolk Record Office.

Two essays, nevertheless, imply a warning against generalization. Based on jottings added to 'The Book of Brome' manuscript between 1499 and 1508, Joe Stadolnik develops Jessica Brantley's perception that the Brome Abraham and Isaac was copied not for performance, but for reading. Matthew Sergi examines MS Peniarth 399 as 'crucial evidence of the "continuity" of some fifteenth-century Chester play texts across the sixteenth century' (p. 72). Early copyists' objectives were clearly just as diverse as the texts they produced.

Most of this volume's contributions investigate the luxuriant handwritten undergrowth of printed Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Prominent among these is Kara J. Northway's study of the witnessing to theatrical loans in Henslowe's Diary (written by Philip Henslowe 1592–1609). In an essay on present-day political implications, Kirsten Inglis and Mary Polito compare Thomas Goffe's play, Baiazet / The Raging Turk (Arbury Hall MS A415), transcribed from a live performance c. 1619 by ten Oxford notetakers, with the printed version published in 1631, when English hostility towards the Ottoman Empire had hardened. Jakub Boguszak's speculations about 'parts'—manuscript copies of their lines distributed to individual actors—draw examples from plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Rowley, Dekker, Tourneur, Webster, and Ford. In an essay that pioneers the application of computers to handwritten annotations in printed and manuscript texts, Rebecca Munson reports preliminary outcomes of her project, Common Readers. That early readers enjoyed i Henry IV primarily as a comedy, and that readers...