<i>Elizabeth Baldwin, Lawrence M. Clopper, and David Mills,</i> Cheshire Including Chester<i>Cheshire Including Chester</i>. Edited by Elizabeth Baldwin , Lawrence M. Clopper , and David Mills . Records of Early English Drama. 2 vols. Toronto: Universityof Toronto Press, 2007. Pp. x+1231.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewElizabeth Baldwin, Lawrence M. Clopper, and David Mills, Cheshire Including Chester Cheshire Including Chester. Edited by Elizabeth Baldwin , Lawrence M. Clopper , and David Mills . Records of Early English Drama. 2 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Pp. x+1231.Theodore K. LerudTheodore K. LerudElmhurst College Search for more articles by this author Elmhurst CollegePDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe publication of the two-volume Cheshire Including Chester is a watershed event for the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project, directed out of Toronto by Alexandra Johnston and Sally-Beth MacLean, in that it is the first time that the REED staff have elected to reissue a prior volume.1 This fact has interesting implications for the future of the overall project as well as its methodology.Everyone working in medieval drama is familiar with the thick red REED volumes that constitute such a formidable presence on the shelves of major university research libraries. Since 1979, eighteen prior volumes have appeared, detailing the dramatic activity in English towns and counties ranging from York to Kent, Devon to Norwich. The REED project, for better or worse, has provided an inescapable backdrop to Anglo-American studies in medieval drama over the past thirty years, particularly in the sessions sponsored each year by the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society at Leeds, Kalamazoo, and the Modern Language Association convention. Critical paradigms—deconstruction, cultural studies and new historicism, the new textualism—come and go, but REED remains. Graduate students who want to get ahead in early drama studies would be well advised to include some references to the REED volumes in their conference papers and articles.This latest Cheshire set retains all the best features of prior volumes: introductory historical discussion of the Cheshire region, a summary of social and dramatic activity, meticulous treatment of the documentary sources of the "records" and of editorial procedures, and also, in this case, significant appendices discussing such matters as the Rogers Breviaries and the development of the plays. (It is harder to see why a selected list of musicians [app. 6] was felt to be necessary, especially since the REED methodology rather inexplicably excludes church music from its listings.) As in prior volumes, the Latin entries are nicely translated in the back of volume 2—here by Patrick Gregory. In fact, the introductory and appended apparatus here is some of the best in the series, possibly worthy of a volume in its own right. It is the stuff in the middle that is the problem: the predominant feature of each REED volume is a decontextualized year-by-year listing of what are counted by the editors as dramatic "records," from the earliest medieval beginnings to 1642.The goal of the REED project, barely changed from the initial York volume (1979) and stated in a single sentence in volume 1 here, appears deceptively simple: "The aim of Records of Early English Drama (REED) is to find, transcribe, and publish external evidence of dramatic, ceremonial, and minstrel activity in Great Britain before 1642" (vi). The need to reissue the earlier Chester volume is explained on the following page by the executive editor in equally simple terms: "At the time [1979] of publication a series policy for inclusion of diverse forms of entertainment records had not been agreed upon, and guidelines for a standard chronological approach to dating entries drawn from sources with different accounting systems had yet to be determined" (vii). Now, presumably, with these minor adjustments made, we will finally have all the facts—the definitive list of Chester, and Cheshire, "records."Yet herein lie a host of unexamined methodological problems. For one, a terminus ad quem of 1642 for the REED volumes makes most sense in a London context, as the traditional date of the "closing of the theaters," yet London is precisely the place where a REED approach is least tenable, given the fact that varied and sophisticated critical paradigms, most recently new historicism, have long permeated the field of Elizabethan and Jacobean urban drama studies. What good would it do, in view of this, to offer up a REED-like list of dramatic "records" in London? One could imagine what it might include, but the point is that such records only take on interest in the context of the interpretive discussions of imaginative, theoretically informed scholars (or, perhaps, at least bibliographers informed by the new textualism). "Records" do not exist, really, prior to interpretive discussions but only as they are contextualized by and within them. Yet the same problem inheres throughout the REED volumes.The project has the positivist feel of late nineteenth-century encyclopedic enterprises such as E. K. Chambers's The Medieval Stage, with its goal of recovering the "facts" from which "any [always deferred] literary history…must make a start"2—or the encyclopedia movement itself, as exemplified by Encyclopedia Britannica (now being eclipsed by the more socially constructed Wikipedia, whose significance is still underestimated in the academic community)3—or, more recently and insidiously, E. D. Hirsch's forays into "cultural literacy," with its spin-off attempts to map out and control the "facts" that should be learned at every stage in the educational process in preparation for entry into the cultural conversation, a project that self-destructed under the weight of its own bloated ambitions and flawed methodology.4 REED also has, occasionally, a disturbing tendency to colonize the work of other scholars, such as Alan Nelson's fine work on university drama (in the Cambridge [1989] and Oxford [2004] volumes), Diana Wyatt's work on Oxford (she is listed as a "City" editor in the Oxford [2004] volume), and, here, David Mills's excellent work on Chester.A few cases in point from the new Chester volumes. The Chester records end in 1642 with rather a whimper, "Item giuen the Musicke att Iohn Taylors 02 00," (614), making it unclear why 1642 is a particularly significant cutoff date here (or, one might think, in the rest of provincial England). Despite the fact that St. Werburgh's Abbey was a key performance site, the "records" exclude church music ("church music as such falls outside the scope of this study" [xlvi]) in favor of minstrels and waits, thereby presupposing the concept of a "secular drama." Also, we learn that "REED does not include documents detailing the civic reception of royal and noble personages unless these expressly involve drama or other aspects of performance" (lxxiii). Yet isn't what constitutes "drama or other aspects of performance" precisely what is at issue? Many critics and scholars of performance would argue that any royal entry was a highly "performative" activity, especially in a cycle (if I might still use that word) that included a play of entrance, the Entry into Jerusalem (in Chester's Whitsun plays, this action is incorporated into play 14). The collation of William Newhall's Proclamation in the REED edition (71–72) rather confusingly elides into a single version texts whose variations are highly significant with regard to the development or even potential reinvention of the cycle as a Protestant enterprise. The presentation of the separate versions in R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills's Chester Mystery Cycle is much more useful, as is the discussion there of potentially significant variants among the manuscripts containing the Late Banns.5 In an interesting exercise in circularity, the editors of the REED volumes, while cautioning readers that some items in the Rogers Breviaries may be unreliable since "they were written down some thirty-five years after the last performance" (xxxix), nonetheless cite modern-day productions of the Toronto-based Poculi Ludique Societas as proof that "a single carriage provides ample playing space for most plays in the cycle" (xlii).Conversely, a number of events in Chester associated with the developing Reformation—such as the visit of Bishop Rowland Lee and Richard Layton to St. Werburgh's in 1536 and the dissolution of St. Werburgh's in 1540 in preparation for its reinvention as the Cathedral of Chester in 1541, with John Bird brought in as its first bishop—are not represented at all since they are not precisely dramatic records. The year 1536 is represented only by the granting of patronage of the Chester minstrels to Sir Piers Dutton (74), and although the 1539–40 period is well represented by the Early Banns and other documents, nothing at all appears for 1541. Yet surely the effect of these major cultural and social changes on Whitsun performances, which everyone agrees took place before the Abbey gates, must have been almost incalculable.Some of the most interesting additions in the new Cheshire volumes involve the inclusion of material from the letter-book of one Christopher Goodman regarding the 1572 production of the Whitsun plays (143–47), and it is instructive to observe the trajectory by which Goodman's letters have become a dramatic "record." Nothing about Goodman appears in the 1979 edition of the records, where the 1571–75 period is represented by little more than one account book after another (90–109). As acknowledged in the preface of the current volumes, since 1979 "David Mills had discovered Christopher Goodman's Letterbook in a North Wales record office" (vii). In fact, Mills's own interpretive discussion of this material in his Recycling the Cycle is tremendously interesting, contextualizing as it does the Goodman material in social and political events surrounding the 1572 and 1575 productions.6 One thing that is at stake in these "records" is the status of certain changes that are reported as having been made, or needing to be made, within the plays. For example, the REED editors state: "The [1572] production thus becomes politicized as a touchstone for the tensions within the local society and also between local autonomy and Tudor centralism. Interestingly, the dean and chapter of the cathedral do not seem to have shared Goodman's concerns, since they paid for the construction of a mansion over the Abbey Gate and provided beer to the players" (xxxvii). Perhaps. What is unclear is whether the plays themselves represent local autonomy (presumably Catholic recusancy, as the editors seem to argue) or Tudor centralism (as perhaps might have been the intention of the earlier "changes" Goodman mentions). There is certainly more than adequate evidence of Protestant revisions to the cycle to reflect Tudor Reformation ideology, not to mention the moving of the performance itself to the Protestant holiday season of Whitsun, perhaps explaining the Dean's attitude toward Goodman's extremist concerns. As "record," the Goodman letters are silent on the matter. What is interesting is the interpretation, and it is hard to see what has been gained here by decontextualizing and colonizing the material as "record" that was not already present in Mills's fine discussion. In fact, it was prior interpretation that created the need for a new record—and this circular process could go on interminably with any of the REED volumes, thereby undermining the positivist methodology of the project itself.Theresa Coletti's "Reading REED: History and the Records of Early English Drama" is still the finest treatment of the problems with REED's methodology. In it, she argues that "documents have their own historicity, their own relation to the processes that produced them," seeing REED as a development of antiquarianism, flawed, like the projects of Halliwell-Phillipps and others (as perhaps those mentioned above), by its obsession with completeness and exhaustiveness.7 Now, eighteen years later, with the appearance of the reedited Chester volumes, these warnings seem prophetic—and still largely unheeded in the medieval drama community.8One of the facts elicited from the York "records" in the early stages of the development of the REED methodology was that of "true processional" performance in York—that is, performance of all forty-eight plays at each of twelve stations during a single day. This is a seemingly absurd proposition, as Martin Stevens argued, especially in years when the records designated sixteen or seventeen stations, yet one that was nonetheless played out in competing charts by Alan Nelson and Margaret Dorrell.9 More recently, Pamela King argued that we know almost nothing about the performance of the York cycle in the "fleeting cultural moment."10 She compares the state of our current knowledge to the metaphor of a torus: a figure with a hole in the middle. Ironically, the same metaphor might serve as a representation of the REED enterprise itself. Yet the persistence and influence of REED, despite this, is a tribute above all to the diligence, energy, and administrative prowess of its director and senior editors. One would have thought that the project would eventually run out of funding—or provinces—but now with the reissuing of former volumes, there seems to be no end in sight. Notes 1The Chester "records" were initially published as Chester, ed. Lawrence M. Clopper (University of Toronto Press, 1979).2E. K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1903), 1:v.3Interestingly, a 2008 Windows Live Web search for "Records of Early English Drama" turned up the Wikipedia entry on REED ahead of REED's own Web site.4E. D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).5R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills, The Chester Mystery Cycle: Essays and Documents (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 274–77.6David Mills, Recycling the Cycle: The City of Chester and Its Whitsun Plays (University of Toronto Press, 1998).7Theresa Coletti, "Reading REED: History and the Records of Early English Drama," in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 250; see also 260–61, 267.8As if the records themselves were not enough, we now have Elza Tiner's Teaching with the Records of Early English Drama (University of Toronto Press, 2006)—certainly a daunting approach at best to interesting new students in the drama, given the predominance of lists of accounting records in many of the REED volumes.9Alan Nelson compares the idea of true-processional production to a "Rube Goldberg invention" in The Medieval English Stage (University of Chicago Press, 1974), 33; for his chart demonstrating its problematic nature, see chap. 2, "Principles of True Processional Staging," 28–31. Margaret Dorrell defends the principle in a competing chart in "Two Studies of the York Corpus Christi Play," Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 6 (1972): 102–7. Martin Stevens's response may be found in his postscript to the same volume, 113–15.10Pamela King, The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City (Cambridge: Brewer, 2006), 4. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 108, Number 2November 2010 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/655861 Views: 138Total views on this site © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected] Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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