This book is full of good things. The author's familiarity with and enthusiasm for medieval literature, especially in relation to theory and practices in the performance of drama, form the basis for extraordinarily penetrating insights. Her added familiarity with traditional Jewish and Christian exegesis adds a further dimension to her readings of medieval texts.
Defining Acts is a hard read but a deeply rewarding one. It is legible in the best sense of Derrida's usage, but it is not always very readable. Often resorting to the knotty vocabulary of theoretical discourse, Ruth Nisse allows her clear understanding to become opaque to the more general reader; and there is a concomitant tendency toward unnecessarily complex syntax. More problematic, however, is that her highly theorized interpretation has a tendency to impose surprising levels of self-awareness in the minds of an earlier time. To be sure, latent complexities in medieval understanding are made patent to us who live afterward, but in a way that takes us out of rather than more deeply into medieval cultural experience. While giving us a way of understanding medieval drama in twenty-first-century terms, Nisse renders our engagement with the thought-forms of late medieval minds on their own terms ever more problematic.
The first chapter, “Drama after Chaucer,” affords a brilliantly succinct account of similarities and disparities between the richly embodied, sportive language of Chaucer in the Miller's Tale and the thundering prose of the Wycliffite Tretise of Miracles Pleyinge. While the decision to concentrate on one tale affords space for detailed analysis, Nisse could well have adumbrated a wider assessment of Chaucer's role in the polemics of vernacular expression in the late Ricardian period. Although one is not looking for engagement with intriguing but elusive conspiracy theories such as that expounded by Peter Ackroyd in The Clerkenwell Tales (New York, 2003), a broader positioning of Chaucer's oeuvre would not have come amiss.
The next chapter, “Staged Interpretations: Civic Rhetoric and Lollard Politics in the York Plays,” further advances an admirable process of distinction and redefinition in relation to the meaning and purpose of the vernacular in spiritual and civic terms. Once again, oscillating between the religious and the secular domain, Nisse makes us aware of disparities in strategy and tensions between competing strategies within dramatic rhetoric. She abundantly fulfills her aim to offer “a new approach … to the York plays’ own vexing politics, especially ‘The Trials of Christ’ sequence's obsessive concern with images of bad government at the expense of more directly sacramental or devotional themes” (24).
One of the most resonant and provocative chapters, focusing on the York plays surrounding the life of Christ, is the one entitled “Naked Visions,” which mediates between the polarities represented by Procula, Pilate's wife, and Mary. Instead of centering her discussion on Christ himself, Nisse explores the meaning of the clothed and naked female body, both physically and metaphorically. Procula's dream is a “naked” text in that it participates within the discourse of female visionary writing: it is naked in the sense of being relatively unmediated by masculine conventions of expression, and clothed in the sense of covering its sexual allusiveness in spiritual significance. Exploring the apparent dichotomy between “learned” and “lewd,” Nisse considers the York plays’ account of female mystical experience and expression by contrast with the hermeneutics of The Cloud of Unknowing. She concludes that although the York Mary Play does little to counter distrust of women visionaries, at least “the Mary Play reconceives the Virgin's brief historical moment as the birth of the lay woman author” (74).
The York chapter is followed by a close study of the Wakefield Master, with particular reference to the First Shepherds’ Play (often in the shadow of the more famous Second Shepherds’ Play) and the Buffeting. The chapter's title, “Labor's End: The Wakefield Master's Poor Theater,” suggests an interaction with the ideas developed by Jerzy Grotowski in his landmark work of contemporary dramatic theory, Towards a Poor Theatre (New York, 1968), but surprisingly no connections are specifically made, though some seem to be inferred. Nevertheless, there are splendid insights into the working mind of the Wakefield Master, and rich parallels are drawn with the Piers Plowman tradition. Evident allusions to Virgil's messianic Fourth Eclogue are adduced to indicate the cultural breadth of what Nisse describes as a “specifically literary work” (91).
Given that Nisse's abiding concern in this book is with marginal people—Lollards, women, the poor—it is fitting that she should devote a chapter to the dramatic representation of the Jew in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. Although immensely well informed both in Judaic history and in critical reception of the Croxton play, this chapter is less innovative and fresh than the earlier chapters—until the last few pages, that is, where Nisse speaks movingly of diaspora experience in terms of ludic performance and of ludic performance as the evocation of alienation. This chapter and the final one, “The Mixed Life in Motion: On Wisdom's Devotional Politics” take a fine discussion of late medieval drama beyond the cycle plays and into the genre of the late morality play. Through Nisse's perspicacious eyes we see more clearly into how late medieval drama will invigorate and enrich the coming new age of secular drama during the sixteenth century.
