Renaissance Forum: Volume 3, Number 2, 1998: Mike Pincombe

Janette Dillon. 1998. Language and Stage in Medieval and Renaissance England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 272 pp. ISBN 0-521-59334-4. Ł40/$59.95.

This is wide-ranging survey of the ways in which English playwrights in the period 'From Mankind to Marlowe' (and a little later) dramatised the claims to various kinds of authority made on the one hand by Latin and on the other by a range of different registers in English (e.g. Latinate and 'plain' styles). There is also some discussion of the use of continental vernaculars in Elizabethan drama; but the main narrative here is along the lines of 'The Triumph of the English Language' – indeed, the triumphalism of English, when we come to certain nationalist plays of the 1590s (such as Haughton's Englishmen for my Money). There is no very strongly stated thesis, but the sequence of chapters is kept together perfectly well by a chronological and consistently methodical treatment of the main theme of language and authority: first a discussion of the historical background, then the general theatrical context with a glance at several plays, and finally the extended exploration of a key play. These (to give an idea of the range of the study) are Mankind, Bale's King John, Wager's The Longer Thou Livest, Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Shakespeare's Henry V and 2 Henry VI. The early chapters provide a good account of the Latin versus English theme from the Lollards to the Henrician reformers, and readers of Renaissance Forum may find much to learn here. Later chapters deal with more familiar territory: post-Armada drama and the early Shakespeare; but Dr. Dillon's sociolinguistic analyses of various well- and not so well-known plays of the 1590s always have something new and interesting to say.
However there seemed to be some uncertainty of purpose in the middle chapters on 'The Value of Learning' and 'Shaping a Rhetoric'. Dr. Dillon is mainly interested in the vernacular tradition, and therefore pays relatively little attention to the Latin or 'neo-Latin' tradition passed on in grammar-schools and universities and learned literature. So, for example, William Gager appears as 'John Gager' on p. 147. Gager (1555-1619) was an Oxford playwright, a contemporary and associate of Lyly's, and the author of a famous tragedy of Dido (ms. 1583) which Marlowe must have known when he wrote his own Dido play a few years later. It is a tiny but telling mistake (corrected, by the way, in a note on 257). I doubt whether Lyly or Marlowe would have got the name wrong, but Gager is part of a literary tradition which must appear a rather forbiddingly large and misty terra incognita to most modern scholars, whose Latin – inexperto credite – is usually rather shaky. This is not to point to a defect in Dr. Dillon's own command of the language: her translations from Latin seem accurate and fluent. Indeed, this makes her lack of detailed attention to the relations between Latin and vernacular dramas in Elizabethan England all the more puzzling. For this reader, the very best part of the study was a brief but brilliant explanation (154-7) of the dramatic use of Latin verses in a group of more or less 'minor' plays of the 1590s (including Marlowe's Dido as a matter of fact). After a dozen or so pages of worthy but by now rather predictable contextual variations on the main theme, these insights are quite startling. This is partly because they are so good, and partly because this is one of the relatively few moments in a study which 'focuses on drama in performance' (as the advertisement tells us) where the sense of theatre really moved centre-stage, so to speak, rather than hovering in the wings of a drama where the main players are politics and society. Yet, although we hear how Marlowe's Dido and Aeneas are 'given lyrical and tragic depth and re-anchored in "antiquity" through their five-line exchange in Latin at the moment of parting' (154), we are never told what those lines are. It is almost as if Dr. Dillon feels uncomfortable with moments such as these where Elizabethan drama declares its ineradicable allegiance to a frankly privileged world of literature and learning. Her own sympathies seem to lie with what she identifies as a 'democratic stand against elitist learning' (119). She is referring here to Elizabethan protestants (who would have heartily disagreed with the desirability of democracy in any area); but this formulation has a very modern ring. After all, Gager's plays are even more tainted by the stain of 'elitist learning' now than they were four centuries ago! (Actually, this is no longer quite true since the publication in 1994 of Dana F. Suttons' edition with English translation and commentary of Gager's Complete Works.)
In any case, this leads to my second cavil. This study tends to overstate the protestant resistance to Latin literary culture, as in: 'Latin has to be anathematised in order to validate the honour of the English language for its native speakers, to give them pride in their origins and to empower them to prove that English can compete with any language' (81). On the contrary, Latin had to keep its lofty status if the competition were to be worthwhile. And 'anathematised' is surely too strong? Here Dr. Dillon speaks with the accent of our own times, however, which still tends to impose a more or less crudely epigonous version of Greenblatt's 'theory' of otherness on Tudor protestantism. But a creed which, in Dr. Dillon's own view, can include the free-thinker George Puttenham and the crypto-catholic Thomas Nashe as well as the more obviously orthodox Richard Mulcaster ('Puttenham, Mulcaster and Nashe were Protestants', 143) deserves to be treated with greater circumspection.
However, although there are occasionally problems of perspective, as is only to be expected in a book which attempts to cover so wide and complex an area, Language and Stage in Medieval and Renaissance England is a very interesting compendium of, in the main, well-considered and well-presented material. It has a strong sense of history, and is full of illuminating documentary and anecdotal records, as well as some excellent analyses of individual plays and scenes, which will now, for me at least, never look quite the same again.

MIKE PINCOMBE
UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE