Teaching with the Records of Early English Drama

Teaching with the Records of Early English Drama, edited by Elza C. Tiner. Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Pp. xxvii + 238. Cloth $75.00. Reviewer: Roslyn L. Knutson At the University of Arkansas at Little Rock library, the REED volumes stand on their shelves in an unbroken phalanx of big red books. Some years ago, I xeroxed sample documents, all from York: the 1433 inventory of the “Judgment” from the Mercers’ pageant documents, payments to professional players in 1593 and 1607, an entry from the town memorandum book in 1417 assigning sites around town for the wagons and scaffolds, and an entry in translation from the memorandum book in 1431-32 ratifying the transfer of the “Herod” play from the Goldsmiths to the Masons. I passed these out in my undergraduate class, English Renaissance Drama 4321, along with SallyBeth MacLean’s map of touring routes,1 and talked for awhile about the REED project and its impact on theater history. I ran out of time, of course; and my comments had no appreciable effect on my students’ understanding of medieval drama and the scholarly revolution precipitated by REED data. More recently, I have cut the handouts to the map and inventory, which I now accompany with a quasi- “translation,” that is, an excerpt from the middle of the document in modern type with bracketed glosses for the most unfamiliar words. This reduction takes less time in class but yields no better results. Since I’ve been presenting this REED material, I know of only one student who has gone to the library on his own initiative to consult one of the volumes. But all this is about to change. Fortuitously, I will be teaching the everybody-but-Shakespeare course again at University of Arkansas at Little Rock in the spring of 2008, and I will redesign the opening two weeks to incorporate what I have learned from essays in Teaching with the Records of Early English Drama, edited by Elza C. Tiner. The only problem I have now is choosing among the wealth of superb ideas offered therein. Teaching with the Records of Early English Drama contains thirteen essays that provide pedagogical advice for assignments in theater history, performance, dramatic and nondramatic literature, social history, and linguistics. The contributors address a variety of academic settings in departments in the humanities, including large sophomore-level lecture sections, enrollmentlimited senior seminars, and graduate courses; the contributions also embrace the diversity of students in the spectrum of institutions represented by my own satellite campus in a land-grant university system to premier private universifies in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. There are appendixes to each essay with specific assignments. In addition, there is a reference section by Rosalind Conklin Hays meant to allay the anxiety of working with nonliterary records for those only vaguely familiar with civic, guild, ecclesiastical, and legal documents. Editor Tiner provides an introduction, bibliography, and index. In section 1, “Vital Evidence: Theatre History,” Alexandra F. Johnston offers an exercise on provincial authence members, and David Mills focuses on the city of Chester and its Whitsun plays. For her exercise, Johnston creates three people who represent Tudor provincial life in class, gender, and vocation. One portrait is based on the real-life John Bachiler, a mercer of York who actually was a pageant master for his guild in 1536 and 1537. She invents additional details such as his membership in the city council and connections in trade with the Low Countries. A second portrait is the wholly fictitious Robert Millington, a gentleman to whom Johnston gives a provenance of Eton in 1550 (when Nicholas Udall was headmaster), King’s College Cambridge in 1554, and connections with various noble households and Elizabeth’s court. The third is the also fictitious Jane White, to whom Johnston assigns an early life in Reading but a later move to Shrewsbury with her husband in 1538.