English Drama Before Shakespeare.

Peter Happe, English Drama Before Shakespeare

London and NewYork; Longman, 1999. xi + 291 pp. [pound]14.99. ISBN: 0-582-49374-9.

Peter Happe's English Drama Before Shakespeare offers a sound, thorough, and scholarly treatment of a variety of different dramatic forms from the fourteenth to the late sixteenth century. He provides clear, comprehensive introductions to mysteries, moralities, interludes, liturgical drama, and early classically-influenced comedies and tragedies, and brief but solid overviews of the literary careers of Henry Medwall, John Skelton, John Heywood, John Bale, Sir David Lindsay, Lyly, Kyd, Marlowe, Greene, and Peele. His accounts of plays are consistently enriched by his very considerable experience of modern productions of them (at one point he notes wryly that the gallery "was commonly used for musicians, though it might have been difficult to keep actors out of it if they thought it could be useful" [56]), and he is also able to draw on a comfortable familiarity with the REED project to flesh out our sense of the overall range of dramatic activity in the period; I found the chapter on "Other Dramatic Forms," w hich makes much use of REED research, particularly fresh and compelling.

When it comes to analysis and interpretation of the plays, Happe's interests are centered very much on stagecraft, modes of characterization, and dramatists' manipulations of audience expectations and sympathies. This attention to primarily technical matters has of course much to recommend it, but the concentration on the formal and aesthetic properties of the plays discussed does tend rather to mute the sense of their having any real impact or excitement of any other kind. From time to time we are told that a particular play negotiated politically sensitive territory or explored the emotional effect of having a woman's feelings voiced by a boy, but making us register the full force and potential of such moments is not Happe's forte (not least because he tends to refer readers to other discussions of moments of topical relevance rather than elaborating on them). Moreover, the emphasis on continuity and innovation within a tradition does tend to exercise a flattening effect on the discussions of individual dr amatists. I felt this particularly strongly in the case of Marlowe. Though we are told that he was rumoured to have been an atheist, there is no mention at all of his probable involvement with espionage or of the circumstances of his death, and the only hint about his probable sexual preferences comes in Happe's terse remarking of his "refusal to moralise either about Edward's homosexuality or about his political ineptitude" (221). I quite understand that Marlowe's own sexuality is by no means a matter of certainty and that some schools of thought would in any case regard it as irrelevant to his work, but it does seem to me that Happe offers a much tamer and, ultimately, a much less interesting Marlowe than many other accounts. Even Tamburlaine gets short shrift: we are told that we could neither like nor admire him, but that he has good verse. I really could have done with a bit more vim than this.

Issues of sex and gender are not only absent from the discussion of Marlowe, but are downplayed elsewhere. Obviously it would be extremely difficult (though I expect not impossible) to write a book about pre-Shakespearean drama in which sexuality and gender were at the forefront, but some backburners are on lower flames than others, and here, with the exception of the discussion of Lyly, such questions are on a very low flame indeed. I am by no means wedded to a model of criticism which would always automatically prioritize such issues, but they do at least provide something which twenty-first century undergraduates can latch onto, and my main reservation about this book is that it can tend to the dry. Students who read or refer to it will be impeccably well-informed about a commendably wide variety of drama from this period, but they may not be as easily convinced that these plays must once have been vibrant, urgent, transformative experiences.