A Typology of Catalan Play Manuscripts from the Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Century

Abstract

In the study of textual transmission of medieval drama, an important focus of interest is the conservation of texts or stage books used in or related to performances. In the late 1980s, the different types of play manuscripts were classified by Graham A. Runnalls,1 Elisabeth Lalou and Darwin Smith2 and, more recently, Robert L. A. Clark and Pamela Sheingorn3 analyzed the performative dimension of illustrated play manuscripts. It is our aim to classify the extant Catalan plays from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century taking as a point of departure the typologies established for French drama from the same period.Belonging to the Carolingian empire, the territory referred to as Marca Hispanica - the future Catalonia - was drawn into European theatrical events at a very early stage, first of all with the composition and cultivation of liturgical plays, later on with more elaborate productions in the vernacular. Judging both from the surviving texts and the dramatic records, the Easter cycle is the liveliest and most prolific in medieval Catalan theatre and starts in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century with one of the earliest European Passion plays, whose traditional sequels have survived to the present day.4 The second important group of plays from Catalan culture is that of the Assumption of the Virgin,5 with four extant texts, the earliest of which dates from the late fourteenth century. Apart from these two seasonal centres of dramatic activity, the plays - still performed in the churches of Majorca at the end of the sixteenth century and preserved in the Llabres manuscript - provide a wide range of pieces, including New Testament material from the Nativity to the Resurrection, as well as plays based on the Old Testament, in addition to those with eschatological or hagiographie content.6 Another noteworthy type of performance with available play texts can be found in the late medieval Valencian Corpus Christi Mysteries,7 preserved in a seventeenth-century manuscript and staged in 2004 under the direction of Josep Lluis Sirera on the occasion of the 1 1th Colloquium of the Societe Internationale pour l'etude du Theâtre Medieval in Elx.8Until the present no major attempt has been made to examine the aforementioned plays with regard to the manuscripts in which they have been preserved. We hope that a closer look at the different types of manuscripts will provide a more comprehensive understanding of the Catalan play texts, their genesis, reception and transmission.The corpus of Catalan medieval and late medieval plays has come down to us in the three major types of manuscripts which, as Lalou and Smith point out,9 had to exist, in one form or another, for each text to be put on stage, i.e. the book used by the stage manager, organizers and those responsible for the stagecraft; the actors' roles and the complete text.The director's copy, classified by Runnalls as type E, contains the 'abbreviated text, a large number of stage directions and other information related to the actual performance'.10 This kind of writing, called consueta in Catalan,11 in which the dialogue practically disappears, helps the director and those in charge of the performance to harmonize the staging, mainly by supervising the actors' entrances, their gestures and movements, by prompting the first lines of the text and the musical tunes used for the interpretation of the roles, by introducing the musical interludes and by controlling the use of tricks and special effects. Among this type of manuscript we find the 'Notebook of the Secrets of a Provencal Stage manager', used in the staging of a late fifteenth-century Passion play,12 the French abregiets and livres de conduite published by Gustave Cohen,13 or the Frankfurter Dirigierrolle of the Passion Play of Frankfurt.14Only one example of a director's copy can be traced in the Catalan speaking area, in the Mystery of the Assumption of the Cathedral of Valencia. …