Please consider registering as a member of the International Spenser Society, the professional organization that supports The Spenser Review. There is no charge for membership; your contact information will be kept strictly confidential and will be used only to conduct the business of the ISS—chiefly to notify members when a new issue of SpR has been posted.

New Work on Shakespeare and the Medieval
by Kathryn Walls

Cooper, Helen. Shakespeare and the Medieval World.  Arden Critical Companions. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2012.  xii + 272 pp. ISBN 978-1-4081-7232.  $26 paper.

 

Morse, Ruth, Helen Cooper and Peter Holland, eds. Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. xiv + 263 pp. ISBN 978-1-107-01627-9.  $99 hardcover.

 

In my neck of the woods, English majors are no longer required to study Middle English literature.  We are producing PhD graduates, and thus university teachers, whose grasp of the foundations of the literature of the sixteenth century is superficial to say the least.  Shakespeare and the Medieval World, Helen Cooper’s substantial, intelligently-argued, and beautifully-written study, should remind Early Modernists and Departments of English in general of the fact that (to adapt Northrop Frye) no work of art is an invention. As Professor Cooper observes in her Introduction, Shakespeare’s indebtedness to medieval sources has been underestimated thanks in large part to the prejudicial assumptions implicit in the forward-looking terms “Renaissance” and “Early Modern.”  Although Cooper is not the first commentator to have recognized the connections between Shakespeare and (for instance) Chaucer, or to have suggested that Shakespeare was influenced by medieval drama, few if any commentators are as well acquainted with the relevant materials on both sides of the traditional (but, as Cooper describes it) “somewhat arbitrary” dividing line (7).

Cooper does not go in for bold claims of the “Shakespeare was a Catholic” variety. As appropriate to its status as a “Companion,” her book is organized around its subject rather than in the service of an argument. At the same time, however, it yields observations of profound significance.  Of these I would single out two.  The first is that Shakespeare’s plays derive their dramatic form and strategies from medieval plays, and in particular from the mysteries.  The mysteries—as Cooper puts it—“acted their action” (48), thus anticipating Shakespeare’s defiance of the classical unities.  They were, moreover, performed (as scripted) in a spirit of frank pretence, in this anticipating what might be described as the meta-theatricality of Shakespeare.  As Cooper suggests, Shakespeare’s indebtedness to the stagecraft of the mysteries has been obscured by our failure to recognize that medieval drama was alive and kicking when Shakespeare was a child (and still breathing when he was grown up).

Cooper’s second most important observation is one that she does not state as such. We may infer it, however, from the bountiful evidence that she packs into her final three chapters.  These chapters show that the contents of Shakespeare’s plays (and, in particular, their plots) are derived from non-dramatic (though still largely medieval) materials.  Shakespeare’s plays emerge as the marriage of two quite distinct medieval phenomena—dramatic form, and non-dramatic narrative.  But Cooper complicates what would otherwise amount to a rather neat paradox by arguing (in Chapter II) that not only the form but also the ethos of the medieval cycles is echoed by Shakespeare’s adumbration—over many plays—of history as providentially structured. This is a subtle argument that, though compelling at one level, requires qualification on several fairly obvious grounds (the independence of Shakespeare’s plays from each other in performance being one).  Cooper’s insistence (in Chapters IV and V) on Shakespeare’s allusions to the emblems of the moralities (Time, Death, Fortune and her wheel) carries, however, immediate conviction. 

Cooper’s book is rich in detail, not all of which is capable of being summed up in terms of the large themes that I have isolated here.  In the course of contextualizing Shakespeare as she does, Cooper produces a host of localized insights that are their own justification.  Some of these could be woven into very differently-oriented studies—studies, even, of Shakespeare’s modernity. 

Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents, a collection of twelve essays, edited by Helen Cooper together with Ruth Morse and Peter Holland, builds creatively on the foundations laid by Shakespeare and the Medieval World.  In her Introduction Cooper considers the origins of the “Middle Ages” as a derogatory classification that has proved detrimental to the appreciation of Shakespeare’s indebtedness to his forbears.  Noting that this classification originated with the Protestant historian John Foxe, Cooper is surely correct in describing it as “polemical” (2), and in urging upon us a less biased view. This having been said, the extent to which the Reformation conditioned (i) Shakespeare’s interpretation of medieval history, and (ii) his reception of medieval culture generally, could have received more attention from some of the contributors to this volume.

The notion of the sixteenth-century present as an improvement (to say the least) upon a relatively dark past was not confined to Protestant propagandists.  Sir Philip Sidney, even as he praises Chaucer, disparages his times—and upon what is surely a broader, even aesthetic, basis:  “Chaucer, undoubtedly, did excellently in his Troilus and Cressida; of whom, truly, I know not whether to marvel more, either that he in that misty time could see so clearly, or that we in this clear age walk so stumblingly after him.”[1]  It is rather puzzling, therefore, when Sidney goes on to proclaim his respect, not for Chaucer, but for the very past that he has just invoked as being inimical to his achievement:  “Yet had he [Chaucer] great wants, fit to be forgiven in so reverend antiquity.[2] Sidney’s seeming ambivalence about the medieval past is, as it happens, usefully contextualized here by Bart van Es.  In a carefully-argued essay, one of the very best in a consistently-interesting collection, van Es documents the reverence accorded to Gower in the sixteenth century (when he was seen as a sophisticated proto-humanist), and goes on to account for the almost comic representation of him in Pericles as the product of an early seventeenth-century re-conceptualization prompted in part by Cervantes.   

The volume as a whole is usefully organized into four parts.  Van Es’s essay is the second essay in Part I (“The Middle Ages in Shakespeare”). The first is an entertainingly free-wheeling excursion on the meanings of “middle” by Bruce R. Smith. Opening Part II (“Books and Language”), A. E. B. Coldiron discusses the phenomenon of variation among medieval texts.  There were, she notes, many significantly different versions of the fable of the belly.  If we are to appreciate Shakespeare’s use of it in Coriolanus, we should (as Coldiron persuasively suggests) consider the paths not taken.  Jonathan Hope is right to remind us that Shakespeare’s modernity is to some extent a mirage produced by latter-day editorial normalization.  I am not, however, convinced of Hope’s larger argument that neither Shakespeare nor his medieval forbears had a normative attitude to language.  One thinks immediately of Shakespeare’s treatment of the speech of the Welshman Fluellen in Henry V. Hope has dismissed such instances elsewhere on the grounds that the accents satirized by Shakespeare are national, not regional.  One wonders, however, how he would interpret Chaucer’s satire on the Northern accent of the Cambridge students John and Aleyn in The Reeve’s Tale, or the complementary contempt for the “Southern tooth” that surfaces in the second Wakefield Shepherds’ Play—when one of the good shepherds responds to the thief Mak (who has been assuming the style of a messenger from the court) by telling him to “take outt that sothren tothe, / And sett in a torde!”[3]

Part II concludes with Helen Cooper’s important elaboration of the “afterlife of personification,” which (recalling Chapter IV of her monograph) shows how insistently Shakespeare’s characters use personifications (as in medieval moralities and allegories generally) in order to explain themselves, others, and their existential predicaments.  Our contemporary need to distinguish between what we think of as realistic characters on the one hand and allegorical personifications on the other would, one suspects, have made little sense in the sixteenth century.  Sidney, for one, heaps praise upon the creators of fictional characters (his examples are mostly classical, although they include Chaucer’s Pandarus) whose “virtues, vices, and passions [are] so in their own natural seats laid to the view, that we seem not to hear of them, but clearly to see through [i.e., into] them.”[4]  We need to remember that a “character” was, originally, “[a] distinctive mark impressed, engraved, or otherwise formed; a brand, stamp” (OED character n. I. 1. a.).

Part III (“The British Past”) begins with an essay by Ruth Morse arguing—and convincingly so—that Shakespeare’s “British histories” were designed “to reconfirm the island identity of an ancient nation.”  At this point it is perhaps relevant to observe (pacé several contributors) that the historically-determined treatment of history in Shakespeare’s “history plays” sets them well apart from the cycles.  The cycles have an anachronistic vein that pretty much by definition reflects (and reflects upon) the present.  But their essential subject is, as Kolve has shown, the three advents of God.  The Corpus Christi Plays thus ignored the period between the Ascension of Christ and Doomsday.  This is the very period within which Shakespeare’s histories are mostly set—and here the exceptions prove the rule.  The most striking of these is surely King Lear, the subject of an utterly beautiful reading by Margreta de Grazia.  De Grazia, whose starting point is the play’s setting in a pre-Christian and bleakly pagan world, observes how the ghostly pre-figurations of redemption history contained within it function to remind the audience, with agonizing effect, of hope denied.  This is not at all how the Old Testament material in the cycles worked.  There, within each small play, the pattern of redemption (to be played out by the Cycle as a whole) was typified.

Part IV (“The theatrical dimension”) opens with Tom Bishop’s excavation of the motive of play as game as it appears in both medieval theatre and Shakespeare’s plays.  Bishop is illuminating, prompting us to reflect upon the purposes to which overt playfulness was put.  These are neither obvious nor necessarily consistent.  The audience of the mysteries was expected to believe that the action represented before them had actually taken place (or would, at the end of time, take place).  This was in spite of the frankness of the pretence that was scripted into the plays, and their anachronistic dimension. Shakespeare assumes no such expectation on the part of his audience.  The Christopher Sly induction of The Taming of the Shrew, for instance, seems designed to represent the play proper as hypothetical.

Michael O’Connell, author of the second essay in Part IV, invokes (as Cooper does in her monograph) the mid-seventeenth century anecdote of the preacher John Shaw concerning the old man who remembered seeing, in his childhood, a “Corpus Christi play, where there was a man on a tree, & blood ran down.”  O’Connell focuses on the real (albeit animal) blood that, as he puts it, “flowed on the mystery stage” (182)—and on into Shakespeare’s plays. He is convincing in his representation of many gruesome scenes in Shakespeare as afterimages of similar scenes in the mysteries.  Janette Dillon examines the evidence for the properties of the stage as such.  Her scrupulous approach lends conviction to her conclusion that, as she puts it, “the single greatest legacy of medieval theatre was its flexibility” (203).  Indeed, it could be that Shakespeare was parodying this very flexibility (or, perhaps, the lack of it?) in “Pyramus and Thisbe”—in the persons, of course, of Wall and Moonshine.  Peter Holland, concluding this fourth and final part of the volume, shines his critical spotlight on post seventeenth-century productions (from Charles Macklin’s to John Barton’s).  He focuses in particular on “visual style[s]” (204), and thus to a large degree on sets—although the latter were to Shakespeare as the piano was to Bach.  Holland, while interestingly opinionated, writes in full awareness of the difficulties attending on the definition, let alone the achievement of, “authenticity.”

David Bevington concludes the collection with an appropriately wide-ranging essay. Following Cooper (in her monograph, 97 ff.), Bevington defines Shakespeare’s history plays as a pair of “four-play historical sequence[s]” (230), and thus as structurally parallel to the cycles.  Admitting the impediment of their not having been performed in chronological order, Bevington notes (as Cooper also does in her book) that the prophecies contained within the plays serve to indicate that same order.  Arguing along lines established by de Grazia and O’Connell before him, Bevington interprets Richard III as a “beguiler beguiled” (230) reminiscent of Satan in the plays of Christ’s Descent into Hell.  Having reached this final essay in a collection designed to expose such connections, the reader is likely to be persuaded.  The editors are to be congratulated for bringing twelve such illuminating and stimulating essays together in a collection that manages to achieve both breadth of scope and coherence.  Medieval Shakespeare is bound to exert a strong and positive influence on Shakespearean scholarship.

 

Kathryn Walls

Victoria University of Wellington

 


[1] “An Apology for Poetry,” English Critical Essays, ed. Edmund D. Jones (London: Oxford University Press, 1922, rept. 1963), 1-54, 43-44 (italics mine).

[2] “An Apology,” English Critical Essays, 44 (italics mine).

[3] English Mystery Plays, ed. Peter Happé (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 265-94, 274.

[4] “Apology,” English Critical Essays, 16.

 

 

Comments

  • There are currently no comments

You must log in to comment.

43.2.40

Cite as:

Kathryn Walls, "New Work on Shakespeare and the Medieval," Spenser Review 43.2.40 (Fall 2013). Accessed March 28th, 2024.
Not logged in or