BEFORE SHAKESPEARE

Janette Dillon’s Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre is a nicely judged, sensibly structured, lucidly written introduction to medieval and early Renaissance drama, complete with a variety of illustrations and quotations from all kinds of relevant documents helpfully set off in shaded boxes. Every now and then Dillon judiciously breaks away from her main narrative to focus for a couple of pages on an exemplary piece of representative dramatic entertainment: Mankind (1465–70), The Death of Herod (1450–75), Tamburlaine Parts One and Two (1587–8), The Masque of Blackness (1605). These case studies are supplemented by shorter considerations of other plays: for example, The Lady of May (1578–9), King Lear (1605–6) and A Game at Chess (1624). The chronological arc of the book is only just noticeable as Dillon prefers to deal with her subject-matter under a number of mutually illuminating thematic links: genre and tradition, instruction and spectacle, actors and audiences, and the like. Overall it’s a lively, entertaining and stimulating mix, modelled, one might say, on the very material under consideration.

For we learn that this material is not easily pegged or sharply demarcated. It’s slippery stuff. There is an essential blurring of boundaries, categories, binaries and chronologies. The indispensable term here is the sixteenth-century mot juste, ‘mingle-mangle’. The history of early English theatre, Dillon claims, is far more mingled (and much less mangled) than we have up to now been led to believe. For one thing, the dramatic past continued into the dramatic present in all manner of ways. Continuities abounded. Indoor theatres, for instance, were mainly conversions of halls originally designed for other purposes. (It’s instructive to learn, by the way, that in 1525 there were more active playhouses than at any time in Elizabeth’s reign.)