This book is perhaps the most important recent book written about the fifteenth century or about early drama in England. No other book combines genres and disciplines to such an extent; no other book so thoroughly reflects the variegated quality of late medieval cultural life; no other book renders John Lydgate's full complexity as a dramatist and poet; no other book testifies so well to the deep imbrication of political, religious, and cultural expression in Lancastrian England. The Queen's Dumbshows is a truly scholarly book. It is thorough. It is very precise. It is wonderfully generous to other scholars. Above all, it treats scholarship as a craft based on evidence. At the same time, Claire Sponsler does not hesitate to deploy a certain interpretive intuition. Though nothing she argues is not rooted in the texts, records, and documents that she reads, she has a remarkable ability to see around corners—to rethink and reassemble the evidence, sometimes in startlingly new ways. The Queen's Dumbshows is a book of signal importance to medieval studies, to literary history, and to the history of drama; it is the kind of book that will be read and reread for many years to come.

Though every chapter examines texts by Lydgate, The Queen's Dumbshows is not fundamentally a book about Lydgate the poet or even Lydgate the dramatist. Rather, it is a book about the many intersections between drama and literature, theatricality and public culture, performance and textuality that characterized late medieval England. Sponsler's most significant claim, one with far-reaching implications for the study of medieval culture, is twofold: first, that theatricality—including not only drama but other kinds of performance, such as royal entries, processions, household banquets, mummings, feasts, pictorial displays, tableaux, tapestries, and sugar sculptures—was constitutive of public life and public culture in late medieval England. Second, coupled with this predominance of theatricality was a scribal tendency to turn theatrical texts into literary texts, drama into poetry. In the process, scribal markers that might indicate the performative nature of a given text were often left out, thereby obscuring the essential theatricality of the medieval literary canon.

Sponsler's first chapter focuses on John Shirley, the scribe responsible for preserving nearly all of Lydgate's performance pieces, and on the manuscript context for dramatic writing more generally. Chapter 2 examines Lydgate's “London mummings”: the Mumming for the Mercers, the Mumming for the Goldsmiths, the Mumming at Bishopswood, and the Disguising at London, which Sponsler argues reflect a “vernacular cosmopolitanism” through which Lydgate sought to make “fractured publics whole.” In the third chapter, Sponsler discusses a series of poems written to illustrate wall paintings or hangings, including Danse macabre, the Testament, the Legend of St. George, and Bycorne and Chychevache. These poems blur the boundaries between visual and textual representation; they also encode the idea of performance. Chapter 4 focuses on the Procession of Corpus Christi, in which Lydgate links a live performance with a written text, with the latter acting as a gloss upon the former in order to “actualize the ethical behavior of a reader.” The next chapter similarly addresses a procession, the 1432 royal entry of Henry VI, tracing Lydgate's poetic representation of the event through its many iterations in London chronicles and juxtaposing them to other forms of inscription associated with the entry—signs, bills, heraldic arms, blazons of the aristocracy, and other short texts. Sponsler argues that the interplay between ephemeral and durable written forms made performance and poetry fundamentally inseparable in late medieval England. Chapter 6 focuses on Lydgate's poems for subtleties, the sugar sculptures served at royal feasts. The appearance of Lydgate's verses in the London chronicles suggests that they might have been perceived as public texts to a greater degree than their commission for exclusive banquets would imply. Chapter 8 focuses on an unattributed poem, the Mumming of the Seven Philosophers, which Sponsler suggests may very well have been authored by Lydgate for performance. As she points out, being able to attribute the Seven Philosophers to Lydgate makes a substantial difference in the way we view it as a dramatic text, and raises crucial questions about authorship and medieval drama.

The pièce de résistance of the book is its penultimate chapter, “The Queen's Dumbshows,” which proposes a new way of seeing Lydgate's mummings at Hertford, Eltham, and Windsor that has profound implications for the history of English drama. In a brilliant stroke of historicist reading, Sponsler asks what difference it would make to imagine Queen Catherine—mother of Henry VI—as the audience for these three mummings. The answer is that it makes a profound difference, particularly to our reading of the Disguising at Hertford, the most well-known of Lydgate's performances. The spectacle of a king deferring judgment on unruly women issues a note of caution to a queen whose power depended utterly on her son, who was rapidly outgrowing her sphere of influence. When Sponsler turns our attention to Queen Catherine, it is as if she shines ultraviolet light on a page covered with invisible ink; a new vision of the text snaps into focus, one in which gender signifies in a very different way and tells a very different story than we have assumed. Recent attacks on historicism have been full of contempt for its perceived failings. But this reading shows us what historicism can do, and do so brilliantly: on the basis of evidence, it can both reveal new interpretations and point us in new directions for future research. In the Queen's Dumbshows, Sponsler conducts a master class in literary-historical research and its potentialities, driven by her patient, close work in the archive, her deep engagement with the historical moment, and, especially, her persistent questioning: Who owned Hertford Castle? When did the performance happen? Who was there? What was Catherine's status in 1424? 1427? 1431? The answers to those questions forge new pathways through the thicket of early drama. Indeed, as Sponsler suggests, Catherine's role may be just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to women's engagement in medieval performance; there is a strong possibility, for example, that the queen herself commissioned the Mumming at Eltham. Now that Sponsler has taught us how to read more objectively—how not to assume that men are the audience and the patrons of these texts—perhaps we will find out much, much more about women's roles in medieval drama than has been visible before.