Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period. (Reviews).

Lawrence M. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period

Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001. xi + 343 pp. $60. ISBN 0-226-11030-3.

In this closely argued book, Lawrence Clopper is concerned with a very large and complex question: how is it that a rich dramatic tradition emerged for a second time in Western civilization? The widely accepted answer to this question, the one I was taught as a graduate student, begins with a liturgical trope on the text of quem quaeritas and unfolds as a story of a popular religious drama sponsored by church authorities. What this standard account overlooks, according to Clopper, is the church's official condemnation of the ancient theatrum and its residual persistence in performances by the descendants of the mimi of the ancient world. Why then did the monastic choirs revive the very tradition of performance that they so vigorously denounced as a heathen obscenity? Clopper's answer to this question, very briefly stated, is that the liturgical and popular forms of dramatic representation developed separately and in an important sense antagonistically. In their denunciation of theatrum the clergy were not thi nking about a place where dramas were perform. What they had in mind was a broad stream of ludi inhonesti enjoyed at various times by the laity, what we have now become used to describing as popular festivity. The clergy did not consider their own liturgical performances as either dramatic or theatrical, nor did they have any wish to promote a vernacular tradition of plays or street performances by the common people. Instead, Clopper argues, the vernacular drama is created by the common people themselves as part of their own developing institutional life in the craft guilds, lay religious fraternities, and municipal corporations. Despite its religious content then, the late medieval dramatic cycles were primarily vernacular and secular in their concerns, often expressing opposition to domination by the clergy.

I hope this is an accurate summary of Clopper's argument, though it is difficult to do full justice to his remarkable treatment of the historical record. The discussion of the evidence is very richly detailed, which is hardly surprising given the author's extensive experience with historical records as editor of the REED volume for Chester. Clopper takes considerable pains to understand what his sources are really saying and his extensive philological background provides him with a valuable resource in the interpretation of medieval texts in both Latin and Middle English. He explores a very wide range of both ecclesiastical and secular ludi from varying social groups and locales. There is, it turns out, a lot to discuss -- mummery, wrestling and other competitive sports, the social psychology of laughter and a broad range of local holiday customs. He also considers the "matter" of the plays in considerable detail, reading many important texts against their doctrinal and theological as well as their social bac kground. Finally, his account avoids any partisanship in its consideration of the chronic tensions between laity and clerics. What Clopper has succeeded with in this volume is basically re-writing the institutional history of medieval drama in England. Interestingly, this is not history of the kind inspired by the "genealogical" projects of Michel Foucault and Friedrich Nietzsche. Clopper writes with a sober detachment that scrupulously avoids any dark insinuations of complicity and cover-up. I suppose one might view this style of historical discourse with a certain kind of genealogical suspicion, since it seems in a way very "old paradigm" -- but as a matter of fact I'm persuaded that Lawrence Clopper has got it right, and his conclusions are borne out in other recent studies of early modern drama that focus on developments in the later sixteenth century.

The standard of the scholarship here is very impressive, especially in the range of primary sources that provide Clopper with his most important evidence. But there are nevertheless some notable omissions in the list of secondary sources. Francois Laroque's encyclopedic study, Shakespeare's Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage (1991) is not mentioned nor is there any reference to the essays collected in A New History of the Early English Drama edited by John D. Cox and David S. Kastan (1997). To be fair, these, along with other recent studies of the public playhouses, fall outside the chronological limits of Clopper's project, but on the whole the findings developed in this body of scholarship tends to confirm, at least in broad terms, the general argument of Drama, Play, and Game. Also conspicuous by its absence is any consideration of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and other modern theorists of "festive culture" such as Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillois, or Natalie Zemon Da vis. I'm not sure these should be considered as sins of omission, just omissions. Even without this kind of theoretical support, Clopper's appreciation for the social complexity of games and plays is very sophisticated. As a discussion of festive culture the tone here is more serio than ludere -- one doesn't have much sense that anyone in the medieval towns and villages was actually having fun when they were supposedly playing. But maybe this is not a fair way to judge a work of scholarship. Drama, Play, and Game is a genuine contribution to knowledge, an admirably learned, patiently argued, and convincing explanation for the emergence of popular drama.