Mock Kings in Medieval Society and Renaissance Drama by Sandra Billington
1992; Western Michigan University; Volume: 26; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/cdr.1992.0016
ISSN1936-1637
Autores Tópico(s)Theatre and Performance Studies
ResumoReviews193 This tendency to misread the status of performance with dramatists like Beckett and Shepard, and even the slipperiness that plagues the terms "drama" and "performance" throughout the book, should not be overstressed: they may point as much to the difficulties involved in theorizing performance as they do to the book's unwillingness to define. It is probably true that contemporary drama is undergoing shifts that resemble those evident in performance theater (and in the work of individual performance artists like Carolee Schneeman and Rachel Rosenthal, or directors—like Akalaitis—who assume a deconstructive stance toward classic texts) even if Vanden Heuvel hasn't yet clarified the vocabulary for discussing this trend. That this book may finally be more secure with the subject of "Dramatizing Performance" than it is with the more vexed issue of "Performing Drama" does not invalidate its many achievements or the importance of the questions it raises. With Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance, Michael Vanden Heuvel has claimed a place among those theorists (Philip Auslander and Elinor Fuchs come to mind) who discuss the most challenging work in contemporary performance theater and who manage to engage theatrical issues that always seem to reside on the boundaries between disciplines. STANTON B. GARNER, JR. University of Tennessee, Knoxville Sandra Billington. Mock Kings in Medieval Society and Renaissance Drama. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Pp. xiv + 287. $79.00. Sandra Billington's book is set up in the same way that the "Yale dissertation" used to be set up in American graduate studies until about twenty years ago. After identifying a distinctive literary pattern, she traces it through several key texts, noting its permutation in each. In her case, the pattern is "the mock king pattern," and the texts are several Renaissance English plays, including some of the best known by Shakespeare, from the Henry Vl plays to The Tempest. This model for a comparative study of literature is exemplified by Thomas Greene's The Descent from Heaven and A. Bartlett Giammatti's The Earthly Paradise in the Renaissance Epic. Perhaps its best known representation in studies of English Renaissance drama is Howard Fclperin's Shakespearean Romance. Billington employs this classic critical model with admirable learning to illuminate her subject in some new ways. Though she knows C. L. Barber's Shakespeare's Festive Comedy and refers to it several times, she avoids covering the same ground and brings fresh insight to several non-Shakespearean comedies, especially Beaumont and Fletcher's A King and No King (pp. 188- 96). Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra are an unusual group, to say the least, but Billington's reading makes sense of them as "festive tragedies" that borrow from the mock kings of winter festivals (Christmas, St. Stephens, Twelfth Night, Epiphany), though for reasons explained below I think she makes more of some plays' associations with court festivities than evidence permits. Angelo as a mock king presiding over a world of misrule is a fresh 194Comparative Drama approach to Measure for Measure, while Billington's observation that "Every leading character who arrives on [Caliban's] island, apart from Ferdinand, fancies himself a king" (p. 248) is a new idea convincingly elaborated. Moreover, Billington does more than find a changing pattern in certain texts: focusing on medieval folk custom, she notes how it changed with social and political changes in the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. After a brief introduction, Part I of the book (four chapters out of eleven total) details the extent to which mock kings and lords of misrule were associated with actual political disruption in the late Middle Ages and then lost that association in the sixteenth century. What is noteworthy about her argument here is that it relates directly to Stephen Greenblatt's proposition about political subversion and containment , l For Billington points out that political use of the folk custom declined as the centralized power of the Tudors gained in effectiveness, while at the same time the pattern of the folk custom became increasingly frequent and sophisticated in drama. To put Billington's argument in Greenblatt's terms, the Tudors successfully contained real subversion (i.e., real political disruption), and the evidence...
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