The Innes Review

The importance of history to theatre and drama is well known to just about anyone with a school qualification in English: we are all familiar enough with Shakespeare’s indelible versions of Richard III and Macbeth to understand that. The reverse, however, has not generally been considered at length. There is the occasional throwaway remark, mostly condemnatory, implying a preference for narrative over accuracy in various distinguished medieval and early modern historiographers, but nothing sustained. This book chips away at that habit, and thus it raises and begins to explore important questions of how public action is performed and recorded in medieval and early modern Scotland, and how the expectations and experience of the witnesses affect its reception and its interpretation.

McGavin’s premise is that public action almost of necessity involves a degree of staging, that is, it requires witnesses and a form which is intelligible to those witnesses, thus allowing a correct interpretation. Those forms might be trials, royal entrances and exits, even public entertainment: what they share is occurrence in public space, with numerous witnesses and a narrative trajectory that lends itself to narrative. In some of the examples, the expectation is subverted; in others, only by applying a particular form of event, such as charivari, does action become interpretable. As McGavin notes in his introduction, however, we are of course at least one remove away from the original event, and in some cases, several: we are the recipients of the accounts of intermediary witnesses, who will have inevitably shaped the material to suit their own understandings. Being aware of this, however, may enable us to unpick [End Page 199] some of the layers, to understand the chronicler better, if not necessarily the originary event.

Chapter 1 concentrates on accounts of events in the sixteenth century, both found in John Knox’s Historie of the Reformatioun as well as subsequent narratives. These events, the trial of Sandie Furrour (pp. 20–6) and a threat to Mary, Queen of Scots (pp. 26–33) necessarily take on a political and religious edge. In his discussion of Furrour, McGavin points out the potential for public expressions of power – here particularly the Church refusing Furrour’s accusation of corruption – to go wrong. McGavin’s interest here lies in Knox’s presentation of the scene, in which he argues the theatricality of the original event is certainly supported and probably strengthened. The nature of McGavin’s second example, as with much to do with Mary, Queen of Scots, is far less clear – none of the chroniclers is entirely sure what happened and why; there is therefore a striking variation in interpretation. Here we find McGavin’s most detailed engagement with the tradition of historiography as a genre and a tradition, as he looks at the same episodes described by Knox, Buchanan, Calderwood and Spottiswoode. This study reveals not only that the Protestant writers – Knox and Calderwood – are as fluent in theatrical expression as the others – but also how the interpretation of events can be easily changed by focus on this kind of dramatic view. McGavin’s discussion, therefore, undermines some assumptions about Protestant positions regarding drama, and indicates how the use of theatricality can colour a narrative.

The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers refer and respond to formal dramatic performance, and expect their readers to do the same. Whether Walter Bower, or indeed his audience, had any equivalent experience of such formal drama is harder to gauge. There is no doubt, however, that Bower understood the power of drama and McGavin considers his representation of three public shows in chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 3 focuses on ‘Theatre of Departure’, where the king left a place where he had been resident. In the examples cited, one from the Lanercost Chronicle, the other from Bower, settling debts is the most crucial activity, but McGavin argues that even this has huge symbolic potential, since it demonstrates the sovereign’s responsibility to the poor, particularly...