Playing the Past: Approaches to English Historical Drama 1385-1600. .

Benjamin Griffin. Playing the Past: Approaches to English Historical Drama 1385-1600.

Woodbridge and Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 2001. xiii + 193 pp. index, append. bibl. $75. ISBN: 0-85991-615-4.

Rejecting popular functional models of the history play as homily, as providential advocacy, and as prototype for empire building (as in Michael Neill's recent Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama), Benjamin Griffin chooses to examine "native-subject" drama- plays portraying the lives of powerful individuals from the past of England and its neighbors - and to find its source in medieval drama. He also challenges the perspective articulated by G.K. Hunter and others that historicity is a defining feature of the English history play, demonstrating that the terms "history" and "story" were semiotically interchangeable for early modern dramatists. The distinction is useful in helping us to see a work such as Greene's James the Fourth (1598) as a history play- despite its incorporation of a subplot involving Oberon, King of Faeries, and its refusal to spoil the reconciliation of the King of Scots with his wife, Dororhea, ignoring the quarto's title page acknowl edgment that he was "slaine at Flodden."

Griffin argues that the combined suppression and evolution of medieval dramatic forms contributed in the English saint play to a kind of historical drama in which "the sense of commemoration takes precedence over the sense of presence (22), analogous to the Protestant conception of the eucharist that supplanted the Catholic conception in Reformation England. While the claim in chapter 2 that signification as a semiotic process is not intrinsically theatrical might be assisted by theoretical support from sources like Keir Elam's The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, it helps to clarify the emphasis on metaphorical representation in the reformed sacrament of the Lord's Supper, designed to avoid physical reiteration of Christ's sacrifice because it would conflict with the doctrinal integrity and perfection of the historical sacrifice. From here, Griffin demonstrates a conception of history in English saint plays that structurally encourages "multi-partition, bifurcation, and digression" (33), expanding hagiograph ic emphasis on martyrdom to include depiction of the saint's public life and a fluidity of structure akin to romance.

An ingenious reconstruction of a no longer extant Coventry drama, The Conquest of the Danes, performed for Queen Elizabeth in 1575 and depicting the Saint Brice's Night Massacre of 1002, opens the third chapter. In it, Griffin further displays the malleability of the history genre, noting the play's union of ritual/cyclical elements associated with festive drama in the provinces and of presentation of historical matter more concerned with spectacle in the present moment than with mimesis of events fixed in the past. The resulting "formlessness" is the subject of chapter 4, as the history play resists the restrictive genre definitions of tragedy and comedy and tends to favor one or the other depending partially on where the playwright decides to begin or to conclude the "micro-narrative in relation to its matrix-narrative" (78). While the history play has a beginning and ending, its historical subject exists in a continuum of time: Griffin demonstrates that the genealogical emphasis in many such plays encoura ges "integral history," extending beyond the play's conclusion to the present moment, provoking "necessities of response that are rooted in the experience of time" (92).

The concluding chapters discuss several 1 590s histories that resist clear beginnings or endings, thereby reflecting the anxiety of their audiences concerning their own pending history. He challenges Richard Helgerson's notion in Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England that "the contest between orality and literacy" (134) is particular to historical drama and a matter ultimately of authorial promotion, before tentatively associating the decline of the history play with Jacobean culture's awareness of historiography. Griffin adds to the usefulness of this thoughtful text by providing three appendices: "Plays on English History: to 1642" (which includes a tabulation of native-subject plays--with appropriate disclaimers--as a percentage of all plays, calculated in five-year segments from 1576-80 through 1606-10), "Printed Plays with 'History' in Title-Page, 1557-1642," and "Plays in Two or More Parts, 1495-1642." It is not clear why certain native-subject plays, like Arden of Feversham, the dram atization of a notorious murder in Kent, are not included in the list of plays on English history, but their absence is compensated by references to lost plays, drawn from the work of WW. Greg and Gertrude Marian Sibley.