The past generation has been an extraordinarily active one in medieval drama scholarship; our appreciation of the range of medieval drama has been significantly broadened, and our understanding of certain medieval genres—most notably, biblical drama—has been fundamentally altered. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature has been widely praised for the degree to which it has taken this scholarship into account in its selection of and presentation of medieval plays.
Now Broadview launches a new anthology that takes those plays as its base while expanding very substantially beyond them to represent the full range of drama in English (and, where strong connections exist, in French, Latin, Cornish, and Welsh as well) through to 1576. In all, over forty plays are included. Each work has been fully annotated and is prefaced by a substantial introduction. In many cases the language is to some extent modernized in order to make the plays more accessible to readers today.
Comments
“Fitzgerald and Sebastian, with their team of editors, have made a landmark contribution. The Broadview Anthology gives instructors a wealth of material to choose from, all excellently edited and presented. It is both solid and up-to-date in scholarship, and friendly and accessible to students. Its new approach to the presentation of texts and its thought-provoking selection of materials make it a most welcome addition to the field; it ought to remain the standard undergraduate text for many years to come.” — Chester N. Scoville, University of Toronto, reviewed in Early Theatre 16.1 (2013)
“The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama is an accessible, multi-lingual, and historical-boundary-crossing anthology that is remarkably well-informed by current Early English drama scholarship. Its emphasis on contexts and regional cultures, its inclusion of a wide range of translated and helpfully-modernized dramatic texts and sources (from early continental plays such as the German nun Hrosvitha’s Abraham, to the York Mercers’ Indenture document, to John Lydgate’s household mummings, to Tudor interludes such as Fulgens and Lucres), and, especially, its lively and engaging introductory comments on this trove of texts and their manuscript, print, and performance lives make it the ideal undergraduate text for demonstrating the teeming richness of the earliest British theatre.” — Gail McMurray Gibson, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English, Davidson College
“The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama is a worthy and welcome successor to the magisterial [work] by David Bevington that for nearly four decades has guided teachers and students of medieval English drama. Broadview’s major anthology by editors Fitzgerald and Sebastian combines Bevington’s wide-ranging approach to medieval English drama with informed commentary on current issues in medieval English drama scholarship. Impressively attentive to developments in the field and appreciative of the practical challenges of investigating medieval English drama, this anthology makes a major contribution to the study and teaching of early English drama.” — Theresa Coletti, Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, Department of English, University of Maryland College Park
