Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends. By Jody Enders. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002; pp. xxx + 324; 9 illus. $35 cloth.

Extract

Death by Drama is revisionist theatre history at its invigorating best. Taking her cue from modern studies of urban legends, Jody Enders treats theatrical apocrypha—such as the well-known account of a convicted heretic who was supposedly executed on stage during a performance of the drama of Judith and Holofernes in 1549 in Tournai—not as fact, as such stories have often unquestioningly been taken, but as medieval urban legends that reveal spectators' attitudes toward the theatre as a place of potential threat where the true and the false dangerously mix. Looking at such legends as expressions of a culture's specific hopes, fears, and anxieties, Enders examines the “ways in which early France told, retold, invented, and reinvented stories of the tenuous boundaries between theatre and real life, thereby helping audiences to confront the nature of artistic representation” (xxiv). Although Enders's focus is medieval French theatre, her reach extends to modern theatre, film, and media, and her impeccable historical scholarship is enriched by savvy recourse to contemporary critical theory and performance studies. The resulting book shakes up settled assumptions about “what really happened” on the medieval stage, while raising profound questions about theatre's social functions then and now.