Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain: A Chronological Topography to 1558 by Ian Lancashire

Abstract

tioned, like a talisman, and though he lapses into jargon at some crucial times, as in the concluding sentence, the book is very readable. Stock’s style of historical analysis maintains the reader’s interest. Even the heavy docu­ mentation (there are more than 2,000 footnotes) is not daunting: it makes clear Stock’s own debt to previous scholarship, and at times suggests debates which have not yet ended. The Implications of Literacy is a significant book. Not only does Stock offer a fresh interpretation of some events and writers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, he is also aware that historical processes are not singular or easily summed up, but complex. He is keenly conscious of the temptation to see historical processes from a single point of view. Thus he writes in his introduction: Since the early nineteenth century . . . the field [medieval history] has been confounded from time to time by large hypotheses, which only accounted for one aspect of development by neglecting others. One has only to recall the various stage theories, the reduction of culture to an epiphenomenon of material change, or the still popular notion of periodic renascences. The present volume offers no palliatives for those in search of oversimplified pictures of historical growth, still less for those seeking to illustrate contemporary theories in the social sciences through the anecdotal use of medieval data. However, it does propose three perspectives on a seminal century and a half, which . . . has too long suffered from the complementary deficiencies of overspecialization and undergeneralization. (7) His central thesis is deceptively simple, its implications far-reaching and still open to testing. In his conclusion he explains that “such important topics as music, icongraphy, architecture, and Latin poetry were omitted: it was better, I felt, to say nothing than to offer a superficial treatment” (528). “Superficial” his treatment is not; rather, he has said a great deal, in the process pointing the way toward an entirely new kind of activity for historians of culture, in which the techniques of literary criticism and ideas of literary theory are blended with the methods of historical scholarship. w illiam sch ipper / International Christian University Ian Lancashire, Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain: A Chronological Topography to 1558 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984). lxxi, 633- $75-o° One of the daunting preliminary tasks facing any scholar working on dramatic records is to find out what has been published previously. More 95 often than not, the material is scattered throughout antiquarian writings, local history journals, literary histories, and much less probable sources. The appearance of this volume, which owes much both to the thoroughness and knowledge of its compiler, and to the efficiency of computer-assisted publi­ cation, will alleviate the agony of this task immeasurably. The first in the Studies in Early English Drama series, the book gathers together the surviv­ ing records of drama up to 1558. It includes records of play texts, and of dramatic performances, playing places, playwrights, visits by acting troupes, official acts of control over playing, as well as other evidence relating to plays and their production. Actually, Professor Lancashire’s net is even wider than his own modest words would suggest. For instance, he includes the references in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale to Absolon playing “Herodes upon a scaffold hye,” and the Miller crying out “in Pilates voys” (both listed as a reference under Ox­ ford) (no. 1244); Henry V III’s derision of the Pope, presumably because the terms he uses are compared to those used in “feasts and pastimes which are daily made” in a letter of the French ambassador (no. 288); the inclu­ sion of Greek dramatists on the university curriculum (e.g., n. 463); a prohibition against wearing visors to play at dice (no. 894) ; the procession of Dame Alice Perrers as lady of the sun (no. 896); the “ceremonial” ambush of King John of France by five hundred men in green, appearing as robbers (no. 891); the discovery of works by Plautus and Seneca in the library of the Oxford scholar William Grocyn in 1520 (no. 990); prohibi­ tions against the clergy attending plays (e.g., no. 1098) ; glossaries and dictionaries containing...