Karen Sawyer Marsalek, Oxford University Press:
"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."
Theresa Coletti, Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher of English, University of Maryland, author of Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints:
"Kurt A. Schreyer's work advances and enriches scholarship on English literary periodization by demonstrating the endurance—and material memory—of medieval theatrical traditions on the early modern stage. This book's agile arguments and original readings should command wide attention."
Matthew J. Smith:
"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."
David Bevington:
"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."
Glenn Clark:
"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."
Helen Cooper:
"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."
Tony Lilly:
"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."
