Katritzky, M. A.

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Open Research OnlineThe Open University’s repository of research publicationsand other research outputsImprovisation in the arts of the middle ages andrenaissanceJournal ItemHow to cite:Katritzky, M. A. (2006). Improvisation in the arts of the middle ages and renaissance. Early Theatre, 9(1)pp. 149–152.For guidance on citations see FAQs.c© [not recorded]Version: Version of RecordLink(s) to article on publisher’s website:http://www.earlytheatre.ca/Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyrightowners. For more information on Open Research Online’s data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policiespage.oro.open.ac.ukEarly TheatreVolume 9, Issue 1 2006 Article 13Book Review: Timothy J. McGee (ed).Improvisation in the Arts of the Middle Agesand Renaissance. Early Drama, Art and MusicMonograph series, 30. Kalamazoo: MedievalInstitute Publications (Western MichiganUniversity), 2003.M. A. Katritzky∗∗The Open University; University of Oxford, M.A.Katritzky@open.ac.ukCopyright c©2006 by Early Theatre. Early Theatre is produced by The Berkeley Electronic Press(bepress). http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/earlytheatreTimothy J. McGee (ed).Improvisation in the Arts of the Middle Ages andRenaissance. Early Drama, Art and Music Monograph series, 30.Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications (Western MichiganUniversity), 2003. Pp xii, 331.Especially in the humanities, where genuinely collaborative research is stillevolving sophisticated strategies and supportive infrastructures comparable tothose of the sciences, academic specialization and the increasingly rigid classi-fication of disciplines insulate numerous cross-disciplinary fields of enquiryonly too effectively from serious interdisciplinary investigation. Many avenuesof enquiry continue to be pursued in virtual isolation by different disciplines,without the benefits of shared data, insights or methodologies. This volumeearns musicologist Timothy McGee the gratitude of theatre historians, byfocusing the talents of a team of specialists on a cross-disciplinary area of centralsignificance to drama: the role of improvisation in the arts.The increasing multi-disciplinary academic attention being attracted byimprovisation is documented by publications such as Paul Berliner’s ground-breaking Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (1994); IngridMonson’s Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (1996); In theCourse of Performance: Studies in the World of Musical Improvisation (1998, edBruno Nettl); the Spring 2000 ‘Improvisation and the Arts’ issue of The Journalof Aesthetics and Art Criticism; Robert Henke’s Performance and Literature inthe Commedia dell’Arte (2002); Britta Brandt’s Das Spiel mit Gattungen beiIsabella Canali Andreini (2002); and Anne MacNeil’s Music and women of thecommedia dell’arte in the late sixteenth century (2003). McGee’s volume devel-oped from an interdisciplinary conference on improvisation in the arts of allperiods,  hosted in 1999 with  University of  Toronto  colleague ItalianistDomenico Pietropaolo. The volume’s focus is restricted to the pre-1700period, when ‘the idea of improvisation – the extent to which the performingartist was not only allowed but expected to improvise – was basic to the conceptof the performing arts ... to ignore improvisation is to distort the art in a majorway’ (McGee, xi). McGee, Pietropaolo, David N. Klausner, and Jane Freeman(University of Toronto) are joined by Toronto-based Leslie Korrick (YorkUniversity) and Randall A. Rosenfeld, four American scholars (Keith Polk,University of New Hampshire; G. Yvonne Kendall, University HoustonDowntown; Clifford Davidson, Western Michigan University; Linda MarieZaerr, Boise State University), Rome-based Barbara Sparti, and Jennifer Nevile(University of Sydney).Book Reviews 149Established in the fertile artistic soil of the mid-sixteenth century, whenEuropean performance culture encouraged and rewarded the pursuit of crea-tivity as much through improvisation as composition, commedia dell’artecombines both. Pietropaolo’s introductory overview of improvisation isgrounded in his deep knowledge of the Italian comedy. Taking as his startingpoint ‘two lessons from Gozzi, the one in historiography and the other inmethod’ (3), he considers the commercial pressures that moulded improvisa-tion on early stages, its relationship to rhetoric, literacy and composition, andits role in creation and supplementation. Another commedia dell’arte practi-tioner, Evaristo Gherardi, provides his concluding focus. Three essays address-ing music, and  three on dance, are by McGee (‘Cantare all’Improvviso:Improvising to Poetry in Late Medieval Italy’) and five further specialists inearly music and dance (Rosenfeld: ‘Performance Practice, Experimental Ar-chaeology and the Problem of the Respectability of Results’; Polk: ‘Instrumen-talists and Performance Practices in Dance Music, c.1500’; Sparti:‘Improvisation and Embellishment in Popular and Art Dances in Fifteenth-and Sixteenth-Century Italy’; Nevile: ‘Disorder in Order: Improvisation inItalian Choreographed Dances of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’;Kendall: ‘Ornamentation and Improvisation in Sixteenth-Century Dance’).Art historian Korrick, herself a practising instrumentalist, actor, and dancer,provides the single contribution on art (‘Improvisation in the Visual Arts: theview from Sixteenth-Century Italy’). Four essays addressing drama are byspecialists in English and  medieval studies. Davidson  studs his masterly‘Improvisation in Medieval Drama’ with a wealth of thought-provokinginsights. Defining drama with generous inclusiveness, he suggests that:the available evidence will allow us to ascertain much about the possibilities forimprovisation even when we cannot achieve the kind of certainty that we wouldwish to have. We can determine the range of the performance options, fromformulaic ceremony with dialogue to plays which make available very consider-able space for improvisation. (194)For him, the great civic mystery cycles are a relatively unfruitful source ofdramatic improvisation. My own researches, which have awakened me to theastonishing extent to which improvisation could permeate the dramatic strate-gies of the late medieval stage, highlight a striking example of ‘subversive’improvisation in civic religious drama. It is the routine addition to someGerman Easter mystery plays of optional unscripted quack episodes, relatingto the selling of unguents to the three Marys at the tomb of Christ. The150 Book Reviewsbreathtaking bawdiness, violence, and sheer length of the fully scripted quackepisodes of some Easter Play scripts undermine Davidson’s dismissal of theunintentional pitched battle between the actress and four actors playing Christ,the angel and the three Marys in the village Easter Play recorded in DylUlenspiegel’s fictional ‘thirteenth history’. Far from being merely an ‘undoubt-edly apocryphal ... tall tale’ (204), this description contains precious indicationsof actual performance circumstances. Its accompanying woodcut, reproducedby Davidson in the 1515 version, is a rare example of authentic late medievaltheatre iconography.In the light of performance issues arising from her modern productions of‘The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell’, Zaerr (‘Medieval andModern Deletions of Repellent Passages’) considers 14th to 16th centuryvariants of a medieval romance, ‘Sir Beues of Hantoun’. She finds that theheroine Josian’s role is consistently and progressively reduced from pro-active,self-supporting skilled medical practitioner and professional street musician todecorous princess, and concludes that some of these ‘modifications may havebeen motivated not by a scribe’s careful consideration but by a performer’sresponse to the urgent and concrete expectations of the audience’ (236). In‘Shakespeare’s rhetorical riffs’, Freeman draws on modern musicology to makeanalogies between early modern dramatic exchanges and the ‘fundamentalsociability’ and ‘strong and flexible aurality’ (254, 268, quoting Monson andBerliner) underpinning successful jazz jam sessions. For her, Shakespeare’sscripted improvisation is ‘both modeled on and a model of the extemporaneousdialogue of actual improvisation’ (247). A thorough knowledge of the role ofrhetoric in early modern schools and theatres informs her invigorating inves-tigation of specific examples of Shakespearian dialogue, in which characters vieto dominate each other by flaunting their superior wit, in competitive sparringmatches based on puns, figures of repetition, and a wide range of otherinteractive rhetorical devices. Klausner (‘The Improvising Vice in RenaissanceEngland’) examines planned and unplanned improvisation on the Englishrenaissance stage. Authorially sanctioned improvisation is indicated by descrip-tive stage directions such as Cooke’s ‘Here they two talk and rail what they list’of 1611, and the suggestive etcs punctuating so many early modern playtexts.Evidential sources for spontaneous improvisation include anecdotes in com-monplace books and actors’ jestbooks, but also play variants. Klausner quotessome of the former, and suggests that the far greater length of Hamlet’s speechadvising the players in the much shorter 1603 quarto ‘may well represent a notvery successful attempt at improvisation’ (278).Book Reviews 151Significant categories of dramatic improvisation necessarily elude the ap-proaches of one section of a single volume. One such, that incidentallyundermines Klausner’s sweeping claim that ‘planned improvisation was notinfluenced in any way by the Italian commedia tradition’ (283), is extendedvirtuoso solos of the type of Launce’s entry scene in Two Gentlemen of Verona,2.3. Also missing are two welcome components of multi-author interdiscipli-nary books: a bibliography, and brief details on individual contributors.However, the admirably comprehensive index guides readers through a volumein which every section illuminates aspects of improvisation’s mediation be-tween artistic creation and live performance. Of interest to scholars of theatreas a whole, as well as for its introduction and drama contributions, it unitesdistinguished scholars at the forefront of several disciplines in emphasisingthat, in the period before 1700, improvisation and orality underpinned amultiplicity of performance spheres. Their timely insights earn it shelf-spacein every serious library of early theatre.M.A. KatritzkyLaurie E. Maguire. Studying Shakespeare: A Guide to the Plays. Oxford:Blackwell, 2004. Pp 256.It is a good time to be teaching Shakespeare: films and books, pop culture andcurrent events seem to be conspiring to help us connect the plays with ourstudents and both with the world. From Branagh to Bart Simpson, the Westernworld is awash in Shakespeare references. And we also have a variety of goodacademic books aimed at an undergraduate Shakespearean readership: TobyWiddecombe’s Simply Shakespeare (New York, 2002), for example, or StudyingShakespeare: A Practical Guide (Hertfordshire, 1997) by Katherine Armstrongand Graham Atkin. Both propose in varying ways to make Shakespeareaccessible to students, to show them how to read, how to write, and in generalhow to stop worrying and love the Bard. Both are useful, but both start fromthe unstated premise that Shakespeare is some kind of obstacle that studentsneed a boost to o’erleap. For years, I’ve used Russ McDonald’s The BedfordCompanion to Shakespeare: an Introduction with Documents (Boston, 1996),with its introductions and examples of genre, text, performance, as a supple-mentary text in my second- and third-year Shakespeare courses; however,152 Book Reviews

Improvisation in the arts of the middle ages and renaissance

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