Customer Reviews

Medieval Drama: An Anthology (Blackwell Anthologies)

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Most collections of medieval plays offer just a small selection of texts, usually concentrating on just one kind of drama (religious, secular, comic, historical, etc.) But this anthology really does have a comprehensive selection of all the best plays and pageants from the Mystery Plays to the Interludes of the mid-sixteenth century. It's even got David Lindsay's brilliant 'Satire of the Three estates' (in full!). It's very clearly laid out, and well-edited and glossed. By far the best volume I've read.

I wish I had gone with a different edition for these plays - it's a lot of money to spend on a book that is incredibly frustrating to use. I am using the book for my PhD exams in medieval literature and yet I find the glosses sparse and, as the other reviewer said, poorly keyed to the text. Each time you want to check a gloss, you have to do a decent bit of hunting to find the corresponding note and by that time, you've lost your place in the text. The format is very distracting and inhibits enjoyable reading. Further, the glosses could sometimes be more literal so as to emphasize the linguistic continuities between the earlier and the extant English vocabulary; the connections are rarely obvious in the translation choices, and that seems quite a wasted opportunity for undergrad students in particular who want to become more familiar with the original English of the plays.

These complaints voiced, I will say that there is a lovely introductory section at the beginning of each individual play to acquaint the reader with the history and/or context of the work. The attention spent on each of the introductions is nicely done and alerts the reader to key details, interpretive trends or other useful information regarding the following work. These intros would provide a helpful starting point for the newcomer to medieval drama.

I am using this anthology in an undergraduate classroom, and I have many complaints. It is expensive, unwieldy (without much space for marginal comments) and the editorial glosses are submerged at the bottom of the page, so poorly keyed to the words and phrases they reference that my students seldom can figure them out. The criteria of selection are mysterious: no Digby play, very few Old Testament episodes from the cycle dramas, and a clear bias for the York cycle make Bevington's 1975 edition a more more reliable resource. Plus, no ecclesiastical drama (thus, little sense of the theatre of the mass).

There is a nice selection of Interludes, but again, the glosses are hard to use and the type is so small that the whole thing is quite off-putting. I blame Blackwell: there should have been a lot more thought given to ease of use.