"In Shakespeare's Medieval Craft: Remnants of the Mysteries on the London Stage, Schreyer explores physical continuities between medieval and early modern playmaking. . . .Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft offers a compelling vision of theatrical sustainability'old’ [artifacts] kindling the creative energies of playwrights, who fashion them into ‘new’ materials for eager audiences. It will no doubt spark further studies of these persistent, potent remnants."Karen Sawyer Marsalek,Oxford University Press, Review of English Studies (2015)
"Shakespeare's Medieval Craft makes a substantial contribution to the growing number of studies on the continuing influence of the mystery plays on Elizabethan theatre. Kurt Schreyer’s approach is both original and illuminating. . . .Schreyer’s large argument about the importance of spectacle, of things on both the pageant wagons and the public stage, and their capacity to transmit significance into a new age, is an important one, as is his plea for a recognition of the value of the past to the Elizabethans, a value made all the more urgent by the Protestant assault on it."Helen Cooper,Early Theatre(2015)
"Kurt Schreyer has given us a persuasive and innovative study of medieval theater's influence on its early modern English successors. . . .The major theoretical contribution of this monograph is its use of the Late, or Protestant, Banns of the Chester mystery cycle. These Banns, as Schreyer argues, offer a way of understanding the paradoxical yet direct way that older and potentially controversial medieval drama remained relevant to early modern audiences, revealing some medieval as well as self-consciously post-Reformational dimensions to Shakespeare’s plays."Matthew J. Smith,Speculum(July 2015)
"Shakespeare's Medieval Craft offers consistently creative and original analyses of a wide range of objects, including plays, theatrical spaces, paintings, civic documents, and ritual practices."Glenn Clark,Modern Philology(August 2015)
"Schreyer's book is rich in illustrative analysis…I learned a great deal from this book’s ability to address familiar topics with a great wealth of new data and insights." –David Bevington,Renaissance Quarterly(Volume 68, No 3, 2015)
"Schreyer consciously engages theories of history and of materiality, and. . . . makes a strong case for the relevance of his research to the fields of literature, theater history, and cultural studies. He has written a smart, readable, and lively argument that shows how the author function in "Renaissance" drama encompasses a crafting of diachronic language, history, and ovjects into a synchronic synthesis of both past and present."Tony Lilly, Sixteenth Century Journal (Summer 2015)
"Shakespeare's Medieval Craft marks an advance in the project of understanding the relation of Shakespeare to what has traditionally been understood as 'late medieval' theater, particularly the mystery plays. Kurt A. Schreyer has found a persuasive way to describe Shakespeare's relation to the most significant English drama that both preceded and survived into the early modern period. This book changes the ways we understand how Shakespearebricoleur, craftsman, 'mechanical'mined that drama for his own purposes."Michael O'Connell, University of California, Santa Barbara, author of The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early Modern England
"Shakespeare's Medieval Craft is a valuable and important book that ties the medieval play tradition with the work of Shakespeare and will be useful to a range of scholars."Carole Levin, Willa Cather Professor of History and Director of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, coauthor of Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds
"Kurt A. Schreyer's work advances and enriches scholarship on English literary periodization by demonstrating the enduranceand material memoryof medieval theatrical traditions on the early modern stage. This book's agile arguments and original readings should command wide attention."Theresa Coletti, Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher of English, University of Maryland, author of Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints