‘Bring Furth the Pagants.’ Essays in Early English Drama Presented to Alexandra F. Johnston ed. by David N. Klausner, Karen Sawyer Marsalek (review)

REVIEWS 240 ‘Bring Furth the Pagants.’ Essays in Early English Drama Presented to Alexandra F. Johnston, ed. David N. Klausner and Karen Sawyer Marsalek (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2007) 329 pp. As a voluminous collection of critical essays produced by illustrious scholars in honor of a well-known or retired scholar in academia, festschrift collections are often ambitious and of varying degrees of success in terms of the materials they assemble. This volume, ‘Bring Furth the Pagants.’ Essays in Early English Drama Presented to Alexandra F. Johnston, dedicates itself to the memory of Alexandra Ferguson Johnston, who pioneered the founding of the REED (Records of Early English Drama) project with Margaret Rogerson in 1975. While critical devotion to the material and socio-cultural conditions underlying the production and consumption of English drama in specific locales like London, York, and various shires forms a large bulk of this collection’s focus, thematic studies in theological and aesthetic themes are important groundbreaking contributions to the field of drama too. Being itself a form of compilatio, the REED project amasses the immense resources provided not only by scholars based at the University of Toronto, but also across Canada, the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, and also, archival materials pertaining to the performance of drama, minstrelsy, and pubic ceremonial culture in England before the Puritan closure of the London theaters in 1642. The volume does well to single out specific material aspects of dramatic performance pre-1642, such as local patronage records outside of London and socio-legislative and political conditions conducive or anathema to the performance of public drama and pageantry. A case-in-point is Sally-Beth Maclean’s essay, “The Southwest Entertains: Exeter and Local Performance Patronage,” in which Maclean argues for the existence of a performance landscape in the locale of Exeter as asserted by patron families who created a demand for such performances at home during the period between 1362 and 1485, the year of Henry VII’s seizure of the throne. She uses guildhall records, including roll calls, to determine the identities of the prominent aristocratic families in late medieval Devon—including the Beaumonts of Combe and Heanton, the Bonvilles of Shute, the Bourchiers of Tawstock, the Carews of Haccombe and Mohun’s Ottery, the Courtenays of Tiverton—and plots the rise and decline of these families using available architectural evidence to attempt reproducing the performance conditions in fifteenth-century Exeter. Similarly, Peter Meredith’s essay, “‘Young Men Will Do It’: Fun, Disorder, and Good Government in York, 1555; Some Thoughts on House Book 21,” uses House Book 21 of the York City Archives—which includes materials like expenditure records as stipulated by the city mayor for entertainment during that year, and records of riotous occurrences such as summer games involving characters like the Luty brothers and William Hosyar—to recreate a possible landscape replete with characters who either awaited entertainment from the performing troupes or provided a possible anti-culture, frustrating the performances. Another important aspect of critical study in the festschrift pertains to the significance of editorial and paleographical methods in approaching early English drama itself. Meg Twycross’s essay, “The Ordo Paginarum Revisited, With a Digital Camera,” studies the Ordo Paginarum (Order of Pageants), a record of the pageants of the York Corpus Christi plays as kept by the York REVIEWS 241 civic authorities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and compiled for the A/Y Memorandum Book for the facts that it can tell us about the particular plays performed during the time of the register’s compilation. The purported use of editorial and paleographical methods in approaching the manuscript of the Order of Pageants is not without its flaws, since Twycross draws our attention to the manuscript’s nature as a palimpsest, with details updated and erased when the contents of the pageants changed. Nevertheless, as an aside to her own observations, the incorporation of digital photography technology has supplemented her research work in REED by allowing a possible “virtual restoration” (Twycross 113) of the manuscript instead of facsimile scans. The volume also explores the question of the vital relationship between faith, authority, and drama in late medieval and Renaissance...

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