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Records of Early English Drama: Civic London to 1558, ed. Anne Lancashire

2017; Oxford University Press; Volume: 132; Issue: 557 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ehr/cex164

1477-4534

Ian W. Archer,

Scottish History and National Identity

Previous volumes in this remarkable series have already covered the records of parishes and of the diocese of London, and of the inns of court. Now Anne Lancashire has edited the relevant records from the city government and from the livery companies. But, whereas the predecessor volumes took the story up to 1640, the sheer volume of material means that her labours come to an end in 1558, and one has to wonder how the project will cope with the exponential growth in material available in the civic archives thereafter. REED volumes have sometimes been criticised for their accumulation of material and the relative paucity of interpretation, but in this case the edition was preceded by Lancashire’s monograph, London Civic Theatre: City Drama and Pageantry from Roman Times to 1558 (2002). This means that some of her key insights from the records have already entered the scholarly discourse. She concentrates on the plays performed for the London guilds, and on the pageantry associated with grand civic ceremonials such as royal entries, the Midsummer watch and the mayor’s oath-taking. She shows that constructed pageants were elements of royal entries from at least 1357, that they appeared in the Midsummer shows from 1477 (though not necessarily taking place annually) and in the Lord Mayor’s shows probably from the 1520s. She is sensitive to the differences from provincial dramatic culture: one of the key themes to emerge is the interpenetration of courtly and civic forms of drama in the capital. Though the multi-day biblical plays performed at Skinners’ Well/Clerkenwell by groups of clerks may have resembled the Corpus Christi cycles found in provincial centres, there is only evidence for their performance between 1384 and 1409; thereafter dramatic energies were possibly transferred to the companies, which were sponsoring a lot of activity in the fifteenth century. Indeed, Lancashire’s ruthless empiricism and her constantly questioning and sceptical stance towards the evidence probably lead her to understate her case for the richness of dramatic culture in late medieval London. If modest crafts such as the bakers, founders and tallow chandlers (whose less wealthy element, known as the yeomanry, acted as patrons) witnessed regular plays, one can assume that dramatic performances were pretty pervasive.