Review: Early British Drama in Manuscript. Ed. by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill

Credit is due to Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill for wrangling these twenty fine-grained essays into an excellent collection on British dramatic manuscripts between 1400 and 1700. The editors compare the surviving evidence to an incomplete puzzle, and the same could be said of the best scholarship in this field: local, empirical, suspicious (from long experience) of grand narratives. Coaxing coherence out of discrete case-studies is a challenge. Yet Atkin and Estill frame their collection as fellow-work in progress: ‘the more pieces we have, the better we can see the shapes and colours of the original picture of early dramatic composition, performance, and reception’ (p.1). The volume is the stronger for its ‘multiple voices and viewpoints’, unified by an inductive approach as careful with its primary evidence as it is hawkish towards scholarly nostrums that no longer pass muster.