Reviewed by:

• Early English Performance: Medi Eval Plays and Robin Hood Games by John Marshall
• John T. Sebastian

Early English Performance: Medieval Plays and Robin Hood Games samples the writings of John Marshall, author, scholar, actor, director, and now senior research fellow at the University of Bristol. The book is a fitting celebration of a four-decade career spent studying, performing, and shaping our understanding of pre-modern plays and entertainments. This collection of nineteen essays and book chapters that were originally published during the period 1977–2017 has been carefully edited by Philip Butterworth as part of Routledge's series on "Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies." As such, it takes its place alongside similar collections of essays by pioneering scholars in the field, including Sarah Carpenter, Pamela M. King, David Mills, Peter Meredith, Meg Twycross, and Alexandra F. Johnston, as well as Butterworth himself.

The book is divided into four parts by themes that map onto distinctive periods in Marshall's career. Part 1 takes up some of Marshall's earliest scholarship with a focus on the Chester Whitsun plays. Across the essays gathered here, Marshall seeks to reconstruct the manner in which the Chester plays were produced through careful if admittedly speculative interpretations of various kinds of evidence, from guild accounts and witness testimonials to pageant-wagon schematics and contemporary depictions of stilt-walking. The sheer breadth of the knowledge on display here is impressive, with Marshall revealing that he is no less at ease with the mechanics of pre-modern engineering than he is with the medieval scholar's more traditional tools of trade, like codicology and paleography.

Part 2 shifts attention from the biblical cycle drama of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Chester to the handful of scripts commonly referred to as the Macro and Digby plays. The first two essays here excavate clues to performance from the marginal notations and stage directions appearing in the manuscripts, with two further essays looking for hints about the circumstances of the plays' earliest performances in the language of the texts themselves. A common methodological approach characterizes several of the essays comprising the first two parts of the book, with Marshall revisiting archives in order to challenge previous assumptions about performance auspices before offering up his own hypotheses about where, by whom, and for whom medieval plays were produced. Marshall readily acknowledges the conjectural nature of his surmises, while nevertheless arguing that his theories fit the evidence as well if not better than rival claims.

The three essays that launch the third part of the book collectively challenge a longstanding commonplace of early drama scholarship that holds that few if any pictorial representations of dramatic performance survive from the late Middle Ages in England aside from the singular stage plan that accompanies the sole surviving copy of the Castle of Perseverance. Marshall challenges that assumption by offering novel interpretations of several images to suggest that the problem may lie not in a lack of evidence, but rather in our failure to recognize depictions of performance when we see them. The final chapter in this section is a reprint of Marshall's essay on the history of modern productions of medieval plays first published in the Cambridge Companion to Medieval Theatre; I shall return to this essay below.

The final and longest section of the book reflects Marshall's more recent preoccupation with the variety of entertainments known to scholars of the period as "Robin Hood games." Marshall here deploys to dazzling effect the full range of the critical skills he has honed over an accomplished career. He examines letter collections, churchwardens' accounts, and woodcuts from the pre- and early modern periods alongside programs, ticket stubs, and other remnants of performances from the Victorian era in an effort to document and make sense of the enduring legacy of the famous Greenwood outlaw. The Robin Hood lurking about the last hundred and more pages of the book is a protean figure, one who might just as soon be called upon to make an...

审核人：

• 早期英语表演： John Marshall 的Medi Eval Plays 和 Robin Hood Games
• 约翰·塞巴斯蒂安

早期英语表演：中世纪戏剧和罗宾汉游戏约翰·马歇尔 (John Marshall) 的著作样本，他是作家、学者、演员、导演，现在是布里斯托大学的高级研究员。这本书恰如其分地庆祝了我们在研究、表演和塑造我们对前现代戏剧和娱乐的理解方面的四个十年职业生涯。这本包含 19 篇论文和书籍章节的合集最初于 1977 年至 2017 年期间出版，经过菲利普·巴特沃斯 (Philip Butterworth) 的精心编辑，作为劳特利奇 (Routledge) 系列“早期英国戏剧研究范式的转变”的一部分。因此，它与该领域的先驱学者的类似论文集并驾齐驱，这些学者包括莎拉·卡彭特、帕梅拉·M·金、大卫·米尔斯、彼得·梅雷迪思、梅格·特怀克罗斯和亚历山德拉·约翰斯顿，以及巴特沃斯本人。

这本书按主题分为四个部分，这些主题映射到马歇尔职业生涯中的不同时期。第 1 部分介绍了马歇尔最早的一些学术研究，重点是切斯特·惠特森 (Chester Whitsun) 的戏剧。在此处收集的所有文章中，马歇尔试图通过对各种证据（从公会账户和证人证词到选美马车示意图和当代对高跷的描述）的仔细（如果是公认的推测性解释）来重建切斯特戏剧的制作方式。这里展示的知识的广度令人印象深刻，马歇尔透露，他对前现代工程学的掌握程度不亚于他对中世纪学者更传统的贸易工具（如抄本学和古文字学）的掌握程度。

第 2 部分将注意力从 15 和 16 世纪切斯特的圣经循环戏剧转移到通常被称为 Macro 和 Digby 戏剧的少数剧本。这里的前两篇文章从手稿中出现的边注和舞台方向挖掘表演线索，另外两篇文章用文本本身的语言寻找关于戏剧最早表演环境的线索。本书前两部分的几篇文章均采用一种常见的方法论方法，马歇尔重新访问档案以挑战先前关于表演赞助的假设，然后提出他自己关于中世纪戏剧的创作地点、由谁以及为谁创作的假设. 马歇尔欣然承认他的推测是推测性的，

本书第三部分的三篇文章共同挑战了早期戏剧学术界长期存在的陈词滥调，即除了伴随唯一幸存的戏剧表演的单一舞台计划外，英国中世纪晚期几乎没有戏剧表演的图画表现。坚毅城堡副本。马歇尔通过对几幅图像的新颖解释来挑战这一假设，表明问题可能不在于缺乏证据，而在于我们在看到表演描述时未能识别它们。本节的最后一章是马歇尔关于中世纪戏剧现代作品历史的论文的重印，该论文首次发表于《剑桥中世纪戏剧指南》; 我将在下面回到这篇文章。

这本书的最后也是最长的部分反映了马歇尔最近对当时学者们称为“罗宾汉游戏”的各种娱乐活动的关注。马歇尔在这里部署了他在成就斐然的职业生涯中磨练出来的全部关键技能，产生了令人眼花缭乱的效果。他研究了前现代时期和早期现代时期的信件集、教堂管理员的账目和木刻，以及维多利亚时代的节目单、票根和其他表演遗迹，以努力记录和理解著名的格林伍德的持久遗产取缔。潜伏在这本书最后一百多页的罗宾汉是一个千变万化的人物，一个可能很快就会被要求做出...