In The Queen's Dumbshows, Claire Sponsler inquires into the nature of premodern theatrical experience and its relationship to what we would now call literary culture. Primarily historicist in its approach, Sponsler's argument relies on familiar methods that subject many different kinds of evidence—visual, poetic, documentary—to a reading practice that undermines distinctions of text and context, literary and nonliterary. But the book takes a further step by employing the method known as “material philology” to consider the development of English poetic culture. Sponsler explores spectacle's role in both fostering and destabilizing our sense of what this culture means and what it looked like to its medieval consumers. The poet John Lydgate plays a crucial role in Sponsler's inquiry, as he is a writer whose work exists at the intersection of poetry and performance, often revealing, as Maura Nolan has shown, both aesthetic and political implications of public spectacle for late medieval audiences.
Sponsler's chapters develop her material-philological approach by construing the materiality of theatre in different ways. For example, the first chapter uses the physical text to negotiate the categories of dramatic and literary object, capitalizing on the unusual and suggestive presence of a known copyist, John Shirley, of Lydgate's work. Shirley's copying practices frame Lydgate's works as poetic text more than spectacle even as these manuscripts raise questions about the “complicated relationship … between play-texts and enactment” (34). Chapter 2 moves from manuscript materiality to the urban materiality of London and its importance as a setting for Lydgate's mummings and disguisings. These spectacles reflect the porosity of London's multiethnic and international mercantile dynamics in this period while also attempting to reforge it as an Andersonian “imagined community” (39). The mummings' textual work in relation to the civic environment “create[s],” for instance, “a vision of cosmopolitan vernacularity in which foreign culture is made native” (44). The material arena with which Chapter 3 concerns itself, meanwhile, involves the architectural embellishment and visual art (including wall hangings) that incorporated or was accompanied by inscriptions of Lydgate's poetry. This shift to a more object-based materiality engenders a corresponding emphasis on the relation of reading to seeing and other modes of sensory and kinetic apprehension, an important theme for the larger inquiry into poetry and performance. Sponsler points out that multiple media informed this poetry and its reception by audiences.
The next two chapters juxtapose different possibilities for processional performance. Chapter 4 details the intersection of textual glossing and the structure of Corpus Christi performances as material practices, whereas Chapter 5 focuses on the more institutionally central royal entry of 1432. In this latter case, performance and inscription each contain the possibility of the other across the entry's various components. In Chapter 6, performance takes its most materially extreme form in the eating of “subtleties” (147), sculpted confectionary inscribed with Lydgatean ballades. While these banquet subtleties were inaccessible to most, their ability to be physically consumed emblematizes the broader consumption of their poetry through their inclusion in chronicle texts. The conceptual foundation laid by all these chapters underlies Chapter 7's analysis. Here, Sponsler enlists the complex materialities of performance and text to propose, unprecedentedly, a possible female audience—specifically, Queen Catherine (of Valois)—for certain performance texts of Lydgate's. These texts, such as the Disguising at Hertford, are traditionally thought to be aimed at her son, the young Henry VI. To complicate the perceived audience of a spectacle is, Sponsler asserts, to complicate the very nature of medieval performance as a cultural object.
As the book's title suggests, the chapter on Queen Catherine fulfills the analytic potential of Sponsler's conceptual preoccupations, demonstrating how a more careful look at the interactions of text and performance might change our historical understanding of a particular scene of spectacle. At the same time, I found myself most interested in the aspects of the book that deal with the mechanics of interaction between text and performance, as those excurses speak to a difficult but important question about not only the nature of medieval performance but also the issues that arise when we study a vanished archive. Sponsler acknowledges this question throughout her work. Both her eighth chapter and her afterword meditate on the need to understand the study of premodern performance not simply as an “act of salvage” (212) but rather as a site for theorizing representational aesthetics across a variety of media. Indeed, Sponsler has compellingly argued elsewhere that the obfuscating mediation of early performance (in that case, the morris dance) and its formal entanglement with later traditions through which it is filtered open a productive space in which to consider the nature of historical performance. I sometimes wondered if the analyses in The Queen's Dumbshows might benefit from applying this brand of close reading to formal textual detail—if, for instance, a more overtly formalist attention throughout to the poems' language (exemplified in Shannon Gayk's work on Lydgate) might uncover some signals that point toward the gender-based concerns emerging in the final chapters. But such questions merely indicate the breadth of engagement the book encourages. Its integration of an inquiry concerning literary culture, inscription, and performance into the theorizing of vanished spectacle makes it eminently worth the attention of Theatre Survey readers, both medievalists and—perhaps even more important to emphasize—performance scholars outside this historical field, who will benefit from this study's insights.
