‘Bring furth the pagants’: Essays in Early English Drama Presented to Alexandra F. Johnston (review)

As revisionist undertakings go, few scholarly endeavours have been as profoundly transformative as the Records of Early English Drama (reed) project has been for the field of early theatre studies. A steady march of hefty, red-covered books has toppled many an idol of earlier scholarship since the inaugural volumes for York appeared in 1979. And while reed has undoubtedly been so far-reaching in its implications precisely because the labour has been the joint effort of several almost superhumanly indefatigable researchers, founding director Alexandra F. Johnston has been throughout its history the guiding spirit of this enterprise. How fitting, then, that in order to celebrate her many achievements as a teacher, performer, and first-rate scholar, Professor Johnston’s colleagues, students, and fellow archive-trawlers should come together, under the direction of David N. Klausner and Karen Sawyer Marsalek, to produce a volume that stands as vivid testimony to the excitement and energy that continue to suffuse early drama studies thanks to Johnston and reed.

In its division into three unequal sections, ‘Bring furth the pagants’: Essays in Early English Drama Presented to Alexandra F. Johnston reflects its dedicatee’s own scholarly inclinations, with seven essays devoted to a consideration of the records, including some still awaiting publication, another five dedicated to a rereading of surviving English scripts, and a final two that look at Renaissance plays through the lens of medieval biblical pageants. In the opening essay of the collection, Barbara D. Palmer articulates what might be called the Johnston Doctrine, which, in Palmer’s formulation, ‘prefers unanswered questions to unquestioned answers.’ That approach motivates the fresh readings of records and scripts, both the familiar and the not-so-familiar, contained in this volume.

The essays on the records remind us that a wealth of documentary evidence for early performance remains to be mined. Thus Palmer and Alan Somerset’s essays both call attention to the understudied accounts, such as those kept by pantry stewards, of the provincial great houses of the gentry that cast the great houses as vital performance venues for itinerant companies of professional players. In another contribution on understudied venues, Caroline M. Barron shows that London Bridge served as an important site for staging extravagant royal pageants in the first half of the fifteenth century. Meg Twycross offers what is probably the biggest surprise of the book in her announcement that the main scribe of the York Ordo paginarum, perhaps the most famous document ever published by reed, was not, contrary to conventional wisdom, Roger Burton, the city’s common clerk in 1415. Twycross argues for Burton as Scribe B instead, an identification that may have further implications for our understanding of the Ordo as well as the state of the pageants of York in 1415.

The essays in the latter two sections of the book invite us to question what we think we know about scripts. In his stunning rereading of the Towneley plays, Garrett P.J. Epp examines the revisions made to that compilation’s Thomas Indie play, especially the ‘uniquely perverse’ and extra-biblical introduction of Paul as an apostle shortly after the Resurrection (and therefore well before his conversion as reported in Acts). Epp playfully suggests that the unconventional appearance of Paul, a figure for ecclesiastical misogyny, alongside Mary Magdalene, whose ‘witnes’ to the Resurrection was taken as authoritative, may function as ‘a calculated attempt to undercut the perceived anti-feminist authority of the church itself at its apostolic source.’ And the pair of essays by Karen Sawyer Marsalek and David Bevington with which the collection concludes demonstrate the importance of pre-Reformation biblical pageantry for Renaissance dramaturgy in, respectively, the final scene of The Winter’s Tale and the non-Marlovian (according to Bevington) B-text revision of Doctor Faustus.

All of the essays – including those not discussed for reasons of space but which equally merit...