The mission of the Records of Early English Drama (REED) is enormous: to locate, transcribe, and edit all documentary evidence dealing with drama, pageantry, and public ceremony in England before 1642. REED does so through a range of publications, including Web sites, a semiannual newsletter, and, most importantly, a series of twenty-four volumes that collect these documents along with critical introductions and editorial apparata. These publications stress both that drama can fruitfully be understood as a local phenomenon and that drama can—indeed, must—be considered according to its conditions of performance. Performance history asserts peculiar evidentiary demands, and REED has been instrumental both in foregrounding performance as an interpretive framework for early English drama as well as in stretching the boundaries around the object of study to include, for example, secular music, minstrelsy, and local court records.

Though REED claims to establish “the broad context from which the great drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries grew” (http://www.reed.utoronto.ca/index.html#what) one of the most important things REED has done is bring medieval drama to the forefront of literary and performance studies, understanding it in its own right rather than as a wan precursor to Elizabethan playwrights. Its collections of court documents, household accounts, and pageantry ephemera have done much to advance the study of non-Shakepearean drama before 1642. Such broad-based archival and editorial work, however, necessarily produces gaps and aporias. This volume seeks not to redress those gaps but to expose and explain them, thus beginning to respond to Theresa Coletti's famous appeal that REED acknowledge its own historicity (“Reading REED: History and the Records of Early English Drama,” in Literary Practice and Social Change, 1380–1530, ed. Lee Patterson [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990], 248–84).

In the first section, this volume outlines the beginnings of REED as an international collaborative effort. Alexandra F. Johnston depicts REED's beginnings as a series of colloquia and informal meetings, at which central questions regarding actual performance conditions emerged. She also includes a list of the founding players with short descriptions of their participation in REED. Sally-Beth Maclean tracks the variety of tasks required to bring this editorial project to fruition: for example, collecting manuscript data from Chester and York required reconstructing pre-1642 county divisions using early maps of England, which in turn required exploring spatial and conceptual boundaries among boroughs, parishes, and households. Abigail Ann Young emphasizes REED's polyvocality and the particular editorial demands that working across Latin, English, and Anglo-Norman creates. She points to the usability of REED volumes both for those whose Latin is weak and for those with more linguistic training; this usability is a result of REED's careful editorial policies, which Young enumerates.

The second section, “REED's ‘Performance’: Impact and Response,” details how REED archives have facilitated certain trends in scholarly research. For example, John Marshall argues that REED's collection of financial records from William More of Worcestershire demonstrates the existence of Robin Hood games in the county; more broadly, Marshall shows that financial documents such as these help us read the history of Robin Hood mythology as fundamentally rooted in shifting ideals of charity and modes of parish fund-raising. Paul Werstine credits REED with refusing “to accord Shakespeare the preeminence he otherwise enjoys in English drama” (101). REED's entrance into Shakespeare studies has allowed scholars to examine the itineraries of traveling companies as well as to revise theories about Shakespeare's “bad quartos.” REED has also influenced work in non-Shakespearean Elizabethan theater history, as Roslyn L. Knutson demonstrates. Her investigation of the move in Elizabethan drama studies to focus on patrons, tour routes, and other features of company life tracks this move to REED. Her discussion notably balances her sense that REED has provided crucial historical data but has also created some resentment among some over a turn toward archival research at the expense of other kinds of analysis.

The final section turns toward REED's future, concentrating particularly on the technological developments that will both facilitate archival research and change research practices. Some of these changes have already begun: for example, an ancillary project, Records of Early Drama, expands the geographic boundaries to include Scotland. As Eila Williamson and John J. McGavin show, these documents suggest that Scottish drama was more indebted to Continental influences than insular ones. Other changes are just on the horizon. Gervase Rosser persuasively argues that the inclusion of guild documents in the REED archive could illuminate the relationship between drama and everyday realities of labor and production. In another vein, Tanya Hagen imagines the possibility of a “repertory edition” of Elizabethan texts, akin to the multiple editions of Shakespeare's plays. This edition would be a hypertext archive and include a facsimile, an “old-spelling” rendering, and a modernized version. James Cummings explains the costs and benefits of such digitalization of archives and editions, emphasizing the need for standardized, free, and legible storage methods. Indeed, this section is devoted to considering how to make REED archives accessible to a broader audience. To that end, the volume concludes with John Lehr's select bibliography that provides “examples of scholarly work that has used or commented on REED texts” (237).

This third section begins to think about the blind spots in REED's archival and editorial work, and it provides some interesting remedies. Yet there is too little of this kind of investigation. While some contributors, like Suzanne Westfall and Jenn Stephenson, theorize the effects of the unavoidably fragmentary nature of the records as well as, in Westfall's words, the “impossibility of representing the past accurately from within the prisons of our own paradigms” (89), the volume as a whole turns away from such scrupulous self-analysis. It could potentially be useful as a meditation on the kind of archival work that underwrites medieval and early modern scholarship (literary, performative, or otherwise), but instead it shies away from digging into difficult questions of historical recovery, editorial interpretation, or archival analysis. The volume advertises itself as a celebration of REED's first twenty-five years, and it certainly succeeds as such. But the volume and its readers could benefit from a bit less celebration and a bit more self-examination.