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COPYRIGHT 2006 www.wmich.edu/compdr
David N. Klausner, ed. Wales: Records of Early Drama. Toronto: The British Library and University of Toronto Press, 2005. Pp.clxxviii + 528. $250.00
Coloring the map red now has a different, and more benign, meaning from that prevailing in the time of the British Empire. The Records of Early English Drama series has continued its journey from the contiguous counties of Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, and Shropshire (soon to be joined by Cheshire) across that winding, disputed, and porous border west into Wales, where it has temporarily changed its name to Records of Early Drama. That pragmatic willingness to be flexible about its own protocols in order to address the specificities of past culture is an attractive aspect of the REED project as it has moved between the records of cities and counties to this volume on a whole country. It is demonstrated most obviously here by an extension of the chronological span of the volume: the usual terminus set by the closure of English theaters in 1642 being irrelevant to the Welsh experience, Klausner has wisely carried the volume through to 1660, doing so not only because this would include many late records, but because the later date usefully reveals longevity in playing traditions. While he has retained the established structural division of the records by dioceses (a very short section) and thirteen counties, he has extended the boroughs and parishes subsection into "boroughs, parishes, and townships" (cxlvii) to acknowledge the specific demographics of a country that had a population by the mid-sixteenth century of only around quarter of a million. He also has a section on the "Principality" for records of relevance to Wales above county level.
This is probably the most wide-ranging and varied of the REED volumes so far. If Charles de Gaulle thought it hard to govern a country with fifty different types of cheese, approaching Wales seems to require embracing even greater heterogeneity in a smaller space, looking less for pattern than variety, and expecting gaps, fissures, and ambiguities at every level of the enterprise. However, Klausner and his team have risen magnificently to the challenge of managing the play records of a country whose history, geography, language, culture, and documentation all pose major editorial and interpretative challenges. A simple description of the volume can serve to indicate the nature of their achievement. Its historical and critical introduction covers 66 pages and manages to make sense of a thousand years of independent, contested, and colonized culture. Its records come in Welsh, Latin, English, and French so the translation section runs to 88 pages;...
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