Simon Barker and Hilary Kinds, eds., The Routledge Anthology of
Renaissance Drama (London: Routledge, 2003) ix + 457 pp. £16.99
pb.
David Bevington with Lars Engle, Katherine Eisaman Maus and Eric
Rasmussen, eds. English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology
(New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2002) lx + 1997 pp. £24.95
hb.
Simon Barker and Hilary Hinds have brought together an edited
collection of ten plays and one masque printed and performed in London
in the period between the 1580s and 1630s: Thomas Kyd, The Spanish
Tragedy, Arden of Faversham (anon.), Christopher Marlowe, Edward II,
Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness, Elizabeth Cary, The
Tragedy of Mariam, Ben Jonson, The Masque of Blackness, Francis
Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Ben Jonson, Epicoene,
Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl, Thomas
Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling, and John Ford, ‘Tis
Pity She’s a Whore.
The editors spell out the principles behind their selection: the wish
to make accessible a number of important non-Shakespearean plays, and
the decision to give priority to plays not currently available in affordable
editions (though a number, including the first-named are so available).
They have excluded widely-republished plays by playwrights such as
Marlowe and Jonson, and have chosen to include work by Heywood,
Middleton and Beaumont, presumably thinking these playwrights underappreciated; though it would be hard to argue that The Changeling and A
Woman Killed or even The Knight of the Burning Pestle are insufficiently
studied.
The plays are introduced and contextualised both by a general
Introduction, and by individual headnotes and discussion. A succinct
commentary, drawing on previously-published editions, is provided for
each text, and account is taken of textual variants. The result is a usable
collection bringing together an ample selection of playtexts.
There are caveats to enter, as is perhaps inevitable in a publication
as wide in its scope as this one. The edition is, quite properly, addressed
to those new to the study of early modern drama, so that some loss of
subtlety and nuance is bound to occur. The Chronology throws up
debatable assertions, such as attributing the date of Women Beware
Women to 1625, basing the dating on ‘the first known performance or,
where there is some doubt about this, the date the critics agree is the most
likely’, neither of which is true. A petition of 1619, complaining about
the nuisance of excessive use of carriages, quoted in the Introduction, is
too late to allow the inference drawn from it about the elevated social
composition of part of the audience. The influence of early Italian opera
on English theatre would, without some qualification, be a surprise not
only to its creators but to modern scholars, while the claimed influence of
Aristotle in the early modern period on ‘establishing the ideal form and
structure of a play’ is to say the least open to question. But it would be
wrong to undermine the general scholarship of the editors’ work, which
will stimulate new students to think more widely about the plays of the
period.
Bevington’s anthology with its four contributors is an even more
ambitious enterprise, incorporating 27 works of the period, including all
those in the Barker anthology, with the exception of A Woman Killed and
The Masque of Blackness, but adding in John Lyly, Endymion, Robert
Greene, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, three further plays by Marlowe,
Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, John Marston, The
Malcontent, three further, major, plays by Jonson, Francis Beaumont and
John Fletcher, The Maid’s Tragedy, Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize, two
single-authored plays by Thomas Middleton and one (The Revenger’s
Tragedy) of doubtful ascription, John Webster, The White Devil and The
Duchess of Malfi and Philip Massinger, A New Way to Pay Old Debts.
This mixture combines plays long considered part of the mainstream of
Renaissance drama with lesser-known works by Cary and Fletcher,
though the first of these has received a great deal of critical attention of
recent years and is included in the Barker anthology.
While the plays have been edited afresh from the most authoritative
early texts, the collection has been adapted to the needs of the
undergraduate reader by glossing even relatively familiar words and
phrases, and by offering explanatory footnotes the advanced reader will
not need. Spelling and punctuation have been modernised, though the
editors have adopted a conservative stance towards the original texts,
preferring to keep an early reading ‘where it makes sense’. Editors of
early modern plays will recognise the set of dilemmas Bevington and his
collaborators have faced and necessarily resolved. On the whole, there
will be general agreement that a highly responsible and scholarly edition
has been brought together, though sticklers for older language forms, and
some theatre scholars, may regret the decision ‘to use modern
conventions of punctuation to clarify for today’s readers the language that
early modern writers would have punctuated somewhat differently’.
Some theatre-wise readers may feel that such a policy corsets the freedom
of stage speech.
The collection’s General Introduction, by Katherine Eisamen Maus
and David Bevington, surveys with a light but authoritative touch the
scholarship of Renaissance theatre, beginning, encouragingly, with the
auditoria and playing companies. Readers may quibble about details, for
instance that the exterior measurement of the Globe was ‘probably’ about
100 feet across, a view contested in recent scholarship as being too large,
or that there was a decrease in extra-London touring during the later
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a statement which must now be
read in the light of Siobhan Keenan’s Travelling Players in
Shakespeare’s England. But not only is the scholarship widely
knowledgeable and up-to-date, many will welcome its independence in
recuperating non-Shakespearean drama in comparison with
Shakespearean. The editors place actors and acting in a social, political
and educational context that illuminates theatre business and provides
insight into the culture which nurtured the period’s explosion of talent.
They discuss theatre language and the influence of older theatre forms,
both native and classical, dress codes and assumptions about social class,
the development of commercial enterprise and consumption, sex,
marriage and gender, and the powerful but uncertain impact of religion on
the plays’ language and structures of belief. Finally, they consider the
relationship between playing, print and theatre attendance. Altogether,
this represents a comprehensive account of the state of English theatre in
the relevant period, wonderfully inclusive, individual without being
opinionated, and manifestly the work of scholars of the highest calibre.
Altogether this is a vastly useful anthology which may be given to
beginning readers of Renaissance drama with confidence.
Ronnie Mulryne
University of Warwick