Laura Schechter
Book
Review
Claire
Sponsler, The Queen’s Dumbshows: John
Lydgate and the Making of Early Theatre. University of Pennsylvania Press
(Philadelphia, 2014), 305 pp. ISBN: 9780812245950
1> While the
wonderful Records of Early English Drama (REED) project has shed light on the
popularity of certain types of performance now often ignored—Robin Hood plays,
for example—also revealing that morality plays were less common than critics
have assumed, REED and the larger scholarly community have been unable to find
many new plays produced during the medieval period. In The Queen’s Dumbshows Claire Sponsler suggests that the search to
discover medieval drama has been hampered, quite simply, by parameters that are
far too narrow. John Lydgate, for example, usually associated with the stylized
sort of poetry enjoyed at the English court, also wrote several (now largely
forgotten) dramatic works. The problem for modern critics, Sponsler explains,
is that the works do not conform to our generic expectations for theatre.
2> Making use
of Lydgate’s less known oeuvre to illustrate her larger arguments, Sponsler
convincingly demonstrates that medieval performance should now be considered in
more flexible, capacious ways. She maintains that, by focusing on a Chaucerian
circle of male dramatists living in London, scholars of medieval performance
have failed to consider many popular works that “look distinctly nonliterary”
(1). The regularly studied, elite dramatists produced now canonical material,
the style and form of their works demonstrably favoured by the Tudors and
authors working under their rules; keeping critical attention focused solely on
these texts ignores co-authored and collaborative pieces, works in visual or
mixed media, and religious texts, however, not to mention works by less
privileged authors and material produced outside of London. Sponsler’s
examination of Lydgate’s more obscure pieces effectively shows the overlaps in
various types of media, also redirecting critical attention to medieval performance
as participatory and culturally mediated.
3> The
ephemerality of these popular works is a key consideration in Sponsler’s study,
and she deftly handles the challenges associated with researching largely
forgotten productions. The author takes up investigations of forms such as holiday
mummings for guildsmen and civic leaders, and disguisings produced for the
enjoyment of court audiences; poems intended to be read aloud; tapestries in
private and public spaces, and verses written on church walls; spectacles,
processions, and pageants; and subtleties served at banquets. Many of these
forms would have been accessible to and enjoyed by a broad audience, while
others were often limited to the political elite, and Sponsler attends to the
moments of intersection between the written and the oral, noting the number of
texts that would have received circulation through both print and spoken
performance. She focuses, then, on “situatedness,” on “a text’s positioning
between poets and artisans who together create a drama, its location in an
actual performance space such as a city street, its emplacement on a tableau or
painted cloth” (15). Where no scripts are extant, Sponsler makes use of
archival records of performances, including notations in ledgers and legal writing.
4> Importantly,
however, Sponsler points out that extant scripts are not always reliable
descriptions of performances, given how many pieces were written after the productions concluded.
Sponsler moves beyond the critical focus on the codex as the only site of
interest for written works, and she examines more ephemeral forms of text—poems
to be read in public spaces, and text integrated into tapestries, for
example—even as she acknowledges the contributions of John Shirley, the
fifteenth-century scribe who copied all of Lydgate’s dramatic pieces and
compiled them into three anthologies. Details included by Shirley were
essential for Sponsler as she attempted to reconstruct (or at least hypothesize
about) actual performances. Shirley’s
records give insight into some aspects of Lydgate’s work, but they leave other
questions unanswered. The scribe does not include much in the way of
information about the mise-en-scène, for example: costumes, stage directions,
and music are rarely noted. Sponsler also examines verses that were not included
in Shirley’s compilations, verses for which authorship is not entirely clear.
While Sponsler seems at times apologetic for these uncertainties in her
research, she effectively sets a framework for considering the material, in the
process demonstrating the understandable and expected gaps when one’s inquiry
centres on medieval culture. Sponsler’s work is an important contribution to
her field, and she convinces readers that looking beyond traditional generic
constraints is now necessary, as is a focus that moves beyond the urban borders
of Chaucer’s London.
5> In
broadening the field’s focus, Sponsler draws attention to the fluidity in
medieval genres, noting that written and visual media can easily bleed into one
another or be bound together, and she asks important questions about the
relationship between reception and interpretation. Lydgate most certainly wrote
pieces that were to be enjoyed alongside tapestries or other visual media;
indeed, some poems even include cues to examine these now lost materials. Lydgate’s
poetry was also written on various churchyard and chapel walls, and Sponsler
suggests that these displays would have worked to strengthen the didactic
content of the sermons given in these spaces. Similarly, Lydgate’s poetic Procession of Corpus Christi straddles
“visual spectacle and written exegesis, … ephemeral performance (open to
multiple meanings) and durable text (presenting a specific interpretation)”
(97). Sponsler offers helpful details about Corpus Christi plays outside of
London and the conditions that made them largely unheard of in the capitol
city, but she also describes the London parishes’ celebratory productions and
city pageants. Additionally, Sponsler productively engages the interplay of
spectacle, text, and cultural and political interests, an interplay that is
crucial to her examination of the pageants produced to celebrate Henry VI’s
entry into London as well as to her discussion of mummings and disguisings
produced in the 1420s to entertain the royal family. This later chapter is
particularly good for considering further women’s involvement in medieval
drama—as participatory audience members, certainly, but also as patrons and as
backstage technical assistants. In short, The
Queen’s Dumbshows is an exceptional piece of scholarship. It develops out
of Sponsler’s earlier work on medieval literature, performance, and culture,
providing a fascinating study of Lydgate’s contributions to a vibrant culture
of performance and challenging readers to look beyond geographical borders,
generic constraints, and other conceptual boundaries.
_____
Laura Schechter completed her
PhD at the University of Alberta, and she continues to teach in the Department
of English and Film Studies. Her interests include early modern gender, poetry,
court culture, and theater. She has been published in Renaissance and
Reformation, ESC: English Studies in Canada, and the edited
anthology Narratives of Citizenship.
_____
APPOSITIONS:
Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern
Literature and Culture,
http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992,
Volume Eight (2015): Dialogues & Exchanges
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