2008/01/01 by Richard Rastall · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Medieval Literature and History
paper · doi:10.1353/mlr.2008.0080
openalex publication_date 2008/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
8o8 Reviews elitism and as non-political, with the exception ofMarco Martinelli's All'inferno! (Martina Treu concentrates on the function of thechorus), and Ronconi's Frogs (dis cussed by Francesca Schironi), which displeased the then Italian president Berlusconi (2002). The problems ofmodern English translations of such a topical text lead Sean O'Brien and Michael Silk to two diametrically opposed assessments. The former moved the scene fromAthens tohis home town ofNewcastle upon Tyne, and had to accept resulting inconsistencies inhis text.The latterdiscusses translation problems on the verbal and rhythmical level of language and considers how best to stage the musical elements ofOld Comedy. The volume concludes with a comprehensive list ofAristophanes' translations up to 1920 byVasiliki Giannopoulou. Aristophanic comedy, as the volume shows, is eminently capable of adaptation by opposing political, moralistic, or aesthetic ideologies, and it is tobe hoped that future volumes in this series will take account of the reception history of his other plays, again discussed by a broad fieldof contributors ranging from classicists to theatrical practitioners. UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS REGINEMAY Love and Conflict inMedieval Drama: The Plays and theirLegacy. By LYNETTE R. MUIR. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2007. xvi+ 294 PP. ?50. ISBN 978-O-52I-82756-O. In The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) Lynette Muir surveyed the biblical plays on which scholarly exploration of medieval drama had focused, discussing the communities that staged them and analysing theirnarrative variants. By then the corpus of non-biblical historical drama -the 'serious' plays as opposed to the fictional drama of comedy and farce-was also under scholarly examination. Here, in a companion volume, Muir studies this repertory of plays based on 'saints' lives and miracles, romances, epics and historical events from the siege ofTroy to theHundred Years War' (p. i), and adds material on a fewbiblical plays thatwere not available in 1995. The chronological focus is from the tenthcentury to the sixteenth, but the 'legacy' of the title iswhat the Middle Ages leftto laterwork: thus Muir not only deals with the largely anonymous medieval and sixteenth-century repertorybut also shows how themedieval narratives informed the work of laterplaywrights such as Shakespeare and Lope de Vega. Muir's interestwas in the stories themselves, and in studying some hundreds of plays she sorted theirnarratives into categories forming the fourmajor parts of the book, their constituent chapters, and sections. This allows her to discuss selected plays within groups of related stories, following the themes and different dramatic treatments through time and place. Thus her section on 'The Heroine in theHarem' (pp. 79-86) takes us from the Italian Santa Rosana to a large group of plays from the Low Countries, including two late fourteenth-century abele spelen that she discusses at length, toHans Sachs, and eventually toHeywood and Kyd, with many interest ing excursions to various countries on theway.While this treatment could lead to considerable confusion, Muir keeps a tight control of thematerial, discussing it in rigorously defined narrative categories even within each section. Such discussion makes one wonder just how many playsMuir read, forher reading was clearly extensive, thorough, and impressively disciplined. The preliminary ad vertisement mentions 'hundreds' of plays in the repertory (p. i),but there isno listof theplays thatwere read for this study.The firstpart of thebibliography, 'Plays cited up to I700' (pp. 265-7 1), listsmany plays individually but also listscollections. Thus there is no complete catalogue of relevant plays, and one cannot identify an edition MLR, 103.3, 2008 809 forevery individual play mentioned. Perhaps thiswould have been a lot to ask of an author dealing with a huge amount ofmaterial, and perhaps itsbenefitswould have been limited: but a classified listwould certainly be helpful, and could perhaps be a future research project. Muir's prose style is clear and readable. The presentation of the book is excellent, with some good woodcut illustrations of stories, an extensive bibliography, and amore than adequate index. There are a few typographical errors, but I found only two of any substance, both in thebibliography: an itembyGraham Runnalls indexed under Rennalls (p. 275) and an entry forRunnalls's Festschift under its title, Mainte belle ceuvrefaicte, rather than itseditors (Hue, Longtin, andMuir), who are...