Every artefact or cultural practice has its genealogy. But while the conclusion that human activities and experiences isolated in time have complex relationships with the past is entirely intuitive and self-evident, thinking about, articulating, and understanding those relationships poses a rather different challenge. In the previous century, scholars of early English drama tended to think about the relationship between “medieval” and “Renaissance” dramatic production as one of stark contrast and discontinuity. Of course, the accepted narrative proposed a teleological process of evolution of medieval into Renaissance drama, but not without a radical evolutionary leap provoked by a disruptive event called the Reformation. For Felix Emmanuel Schelling, it was only during the reign of Henry VIII that English drama started to shake off its pre-Reformation status as a ‘handmaid of religion’, and, abandoning its previous stages of growth, started to evolve into ‘an art’.Footnote ¹ Charles William Wallace saw ‘the throwing off of Papal control in 1534, and the breaking up of the monasteries in 1536–39’ as essential to the tilling of ‘the soil in which the new drama should grow’.Footnote ² Even at the end of the century, when the narrative of secularisation was giving way, it was difficult for Stephen Greenblatt, in an otherwise brilliant essay on Samuel Harsnett and King Lear, to conceive of Shakespeare’s theatre as invested with any religious purpose.Footnote ³ For Greenblatt, Shakespeare appropriates Catholic culture and contemporary religious controversies only to empty them out of any sacred meaning or doctrinal claims. So for a good while it seemed that without England’s break with Rome, medieval religious drama would never morph into “secular art”, and that this new “secular art” existed almost in isolation from its contemporary society otherwise saturated with religion. In recent decades, however, the turn to religion in early modern literary studies and the growing critique of the established periodisation stimulated new perspectives on the history of early English drama.

Medieval Afterlives is part of this new critical force, offering a significant and timely contribution to our ongoing rearticulation of the relationship between the putatively “medieval” and “Renaissance” drama. In line with the recent scholarship, it underlines ‘the continuities of early English drama that persisted in the face of cultural and religious change’ (p. 4). The volume clearly avoids discussing the Reformation as a process complicit—to borrow Jay Zysk’s words—in an ‘uncomplicated secularization’ (p. 140) of theatrical practice in the sixteenth century. Predominantly, the authors of collected chapters approach the topic by addressing the matters of form and staging. The continuities between medieval and early modern theatrical cultures are understood as traditions, which may refer to anything from material conditions of theatre, stage conventions, to literary tropes, or the experience of drama in performance. However, according to the volume’s editors Daisy Black and Katherine Goodland, these shared traditions, which continue to inform and underpin early modern dramaturgy, mostly figure in later drama as the ‘sea-changed remnants’ (p. 1) of earlier practices – recognised as traditions, yet inevitably different.

Chapters are divided into ‘Prolegomena’ and three distinct parts: ‘Transforming space’, ‘Transforming character’, and ‘Transforming tropes’. Peter H. Greenfield’s useful data-driven prolegomena to the volume discusses the records of performance collected by the Records of Early English Drama project and stresses the persistence of medieval festive structures as well as popular resistance to reformers’ cultural agenda. He demonstrates that Renaissance drama and London professional theatres exist in a context that continues to be defined by pre-Reformation traditions. Taking the cue from Greenfield, Lawrence Manley opens the first part of the book with a rich and carefully researched piece. Starting from the detailed analysis of the surviving description of the painted screen decorating the great hall of Lathom House in Lancashire, the seat of the earls of Derby, Manley convincingly illuminates the connections and continuities between provincial theatrical traditions and the nascent public playhouses of London. The chapters by Daisy Black and Katherine Goodland, focus on metropolitan professional drama, Shakespeare’s and Wilkins’ Pericles and Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy respectively. Black, drawing on previous stage traditions, particularly Digby’s Mary Magdalene, minutely analyses the spectacular staging of the sea in Pericles and Mary Magdalen to enrich our understanding of Pericles’s medievalism. Goodland discusses the spectacle of torture in Kyd’s revenge tragedy. Thinking about Christian pleasure in God’s retributive justice as a kind of schadenfreude, Goodland argues that Kyd’s play satirises traditional structures of vengeance, showing how Elizabethan revenge tragedy could also critique rather than simply indulge contemporary audiences and their notions of justice.

Jay Zysk’s and Gina M. Di Salvo’s chapters discuss the character transformations in early drama. Zysk minutely and convincingly examines the function of stage priests. Rather than reducing them to figures without any dramatic substance and complexity, Zysk first establishes their peculiar role as ‘generic experimenters’ (p. 138) in late medieval drama before analysing how Shakespeare redeploys that tradition. Di Salvo, on the other hand, focuses on Saint Dunstan, a popular English saint, who makes appearances in two Elizabethan plays, the anonymous A Knack to Know a Knave (1594) and William Houghton’s The Devil and His Dame (c. 1600). In her fascinating account, Di Salvo stresses the role of theatricality in decoupling Dunstan from his hagiographic past. Crucially, however, this process is not limited to the post-Reformation professional stage. By reminding us of the ‘de-sanctification’ (p. 186) and repurposing of saints in pageantry of the fifteenth and the early-sixteenth centuries, Di Salvo disrupts our notions of the period divide and the totemic status of the Reformation. In the last chapter of this section, Katie Normington discusses costume, disguising, and self-awareness in early drama by juxtaposing the morality play Wisdom with Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

In the last section of the book, a concept-driven chapter by Matthew J. Smith links medieval Elevation liturgy with early modern drama to help us elucidate the mysterious workings of dramatic recognition scenes. Devin Byker discusses The Castle of Perseverance and Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta in the context of the persistent ars moriendi tradition, and Victoria Bladen guides us through the familiar medieval topoi which Shakespeare draws on in constructing his As You Like It. The book concludes with an insightful afterword by Theresa Coletti.

Medieval Afterlives succeeds in demonstrating that Shakespeare and his contemporaries owe a great deal to earlier theatrical cultures. It neatly complements the recent work of Helen Cooper and others on “medieval Shakespeare” by expanding the focus and offering useful perspectives and analytical tools.Footnote ⁴ Still, it is somewhat disappointing that most chapters consider transformations generated by the rise of the permanent commercial playhouse, a bias that implicitly reinforces the sense of a roughly unified, “medieval”, and static early Tudor stage. For example, chapters dealing with early humanist or polemical drama would be a welcome addition to the volume. The book’s biggest strength is its synchronic approach adopted by most contributors. Detailed engagement with the simultaneity and the overlap of traditions, institutions, performance contexts, and cultural geographies, as superbly demonstrated in Lawrence Manley’s chapter, for example, can indeed produce astonishing results. How exactly we label the layered present constructed by such an approach is difficult to say, but I think we ought to avoid considering the echoes of The Golden Legend in Shakespeare as conscious flashbacks. If hagiographic tropes in early modern drama, sea-changed or not, belong as much to the past as to the present, why call them medievalism? Perhaps the crucial point to take away from this stimulating volume is that what we identify as medieval past in early modern culture can often be better understood and interpreted as an integral part of its intricately layered present.