Sussex: Records of Early English Drama ed. by Cameron Louis

$£VFEWS Cameron Louis, ed. Sussex: Records o f Early English Drama. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. 404. $150.00 cloth. Sussex, edited by Cameron Louis, is the latest volume in the Records of Early English Drama (REED) series published by the University of Toronto Press. The objective of the REED project, which began with the publication of the York records in 1979, is “to find, transcribe, and publish external evidence of dramatic, ceremonial, and minstrel activity in Great Britain before 1642” (vi). Fifteenth in the series, Sussex, with its sensi­ ble selection procedures, logical organization, and clear format, has all the editorial sophistication of its predecessors and is a welcome addition to the growing list of REED publications. The introduction is divided into sections that will be fa­ miliar to those who have read and used earlier volumes. In “Historical Background,” Louis gives concise descriptions of the physical geography of the area and its political, economic, and religious histories, as well as of its major towns. O f particular interest is his discussion of medieval and early modern Sussex roads, which were known for their poor state o f repair. Louis at one point speculates that complaints about road conditions may have been exaggerated, as they do not seem to have dis­ couraged royal visits (at least before the seventeenth century) or to have affected travelling players. In “Drama, Music, and Sea­ sonal Customs,” he notes the frequency of royal visits from 1199 and discusses at some length Elizabeth’s journey to the area in 1591, when she travelled through west Sussex to Portsmouth. The script for an entertainment presented to her at Cowdray survives in a printed source; it is included by Louis and dis­ cussed at some length in both his introduction and endnotes. Louis remarks, too, on the “great numbers of travelling min­ strels, players, animal keepers, jugglers, jesters, and musicians” that appear in the records and thus were not prevented by poor roads from touring the area (xxxvii). It seems that most of ESC 27, 2001 ESC 27, 2001 the documents in the collection make reference in some way to travelling performers. Those scholars interested in their his­ tory will, therefore, find the volume particularly valuable. It contains, for example, numerous records of payments to both individual performers and troupes as well as records of stops made along what were probably common touring circuits. The records show that, from the mid-fifteenth to mid-sixteenth cen­ tury, “typically companies of players were paid either 3s 4d or 6s 8d,” the relative amount “perhaps depending on the size of the group (which is never indicated) as well as the prestige of the patron, performers under members of the royal family usu­ ally meriting the higher payments” (xxxviii). Suddenly at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, these payments doubled to 6s 8d and 13s 4d; by the 1580s, they nearly doubled again, rising to 10s and 20s respectively. Since Louis makes special note of this steep increase, and especially since it coincided with an eco­ nomic decline experienced in port towns such as Rye in the late sixteenth century, I should have appreciated some further com­ ment. Louis credits the local recession for a notable reduction in visits to Sussex by travelling players, but he does not ade­ quately address the reasons for or impact of rapidly increasing costs, nor does he comment on general rates of inflation or the size of payments made in other counties. As for the routes these performers followed, Louis admits that “definitive conclusions about the itineraries of travelling performers will have to await the completion o f the REED project” (xxxix). He feels, however, that “there is already ample evidence that Rye was part of a circuit of southeastern and southern locations (and sometimes beyond) often used by travelling performers” such as the Earl of Leicester’s and the Queen’s men at least by the end of the sixteenth century (xxxix). Those interested primarily in civic drama might find the volume less useful simply because few documents about locally produced theatrical performances survive. Louis tries to explain this noticeable gap in the records by suggesting that in Sussex “there was...

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