Medieval Drama

by David Bevington (Editor)

This reprint (with updated 'Suggestions for Further Reading') of the Houghton Mifflin edition makes David Bevington's classic anthology of medieval drama available again at an affordable price.

Genres: Drama, Medieval, Plays, Poetry, Classics, Anthologies, Historical

1104 pages, Hardcover

First published July 14, 1975

About the author

David Bevington was an American literary scholar.

Reviews

[Hannah C · Rating 3 out of 5]

i read like 800 pages of this, it counts

[JD Waggy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This thing is a tome, to be sure. Carrying this around campus will either build serious muscle or offer the possibility of chiropractic needs in your future--but it's worth it. Bevington has collected a serious range of medieval drama, from bits of early liturgy that have survived through the beginnings of the manners plays and early Renaissance plays. The glosses are solid, the headnotes are very informative, and most of the footnotes are helpful (some are either worded oddly or flat-out wrong, but that happens sometimes, especially as scholarship keeps moving forward). If you've an interest in medieval drama and how it changed over the years, this is your book--but it's not for the faint of heart, as all of the Middle English stuff assumes you know what you're doing with the language. All the Latin is glossed, though, so it's not insurmountable by any means.

[Lukerik · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has an English translation of the Jeu d’Adam. I’ve no doubt this is why this book is a perennial best-seller. Well, that’s why I came here, but I stayed for the rest of the liturgical drama. There’s a representative selection of very early texts and you can see the switch where the monks went from dramatic liturgy to liturgical drama. There’s other interesting stuff too, including two of the plays from the Carmina Burana manuscript, which was rather nice as I’ve just been to see that at the Royal Albert Hall.

In terms of the literary quality of what’s in here there’s the whole range from the scruffy Conversion of Paul from the Fleury manuscript to The Castle of Perseverance, one of the great classics of English literature. So I’ll just set aside those considerations and look at what the book is trying to do. It’s intention is to give you an overview of the whole of medieval drama with a focus on the English language stuff though a selection of representative texts, and it does this very well. There’s a section on the Mystery Cycles where you get the main beats of the story taken from the various surviving cycles. Then there’s morality plays and finally humanist drama as the Renaissance looks askance across the Channel. There are also good if brief introductions. I do think that some of the stuff here needs more space. The Castle of Perseverance in particular. And this is why I’m not going to use this edition for the humanist drama, though I’d like to read it. If nothing else I’m going to need better explanatory notes. For a lot of the stuff in here I’d recommend the EETS editions.

I’d recommend this to anybody (probably students) who need some context because they’re being forced to study a particular text, and also to people who are looking for some of those early pieces which are not easy to find in English translation.

[Lulu]

A PALM SUNDAY PROCESSION IN 4TH-CENTURY JERUSALEM BY THE LADY ETHERIA c. 382-384


MEDIEVAL FRENCH FARCE