English Economies and Welsh Realities: Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Wales

Abstract

It has long been a commonplace of Welsh literary history that Wales had nothing to compare to the great proliferation of drama—public and private, amateur and professional, civic and parish—that flourished in England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In Wales, the subject has for the most part been dealt with by ignoring it. Thomas Parry’s History of Welsh Literature (1955) devoted three brief pages to drama; the multivolume Guide to Welsh Literature (1976–97) ignores the subject altogether, and Cecil Price’s English Theatre in Wales gives a short summary of the previous three centuries.1 Gwenan Jones’ edition of the two surviving biblical plays was privately printed in Bala in 1939 and has never been reprinted.2 It is not, on the whole, a subject that has sparked much interest. This is unfortunate since, although there is no question that the situation was very different in Wales from the extensive dramatic traditions east of the border, it suggests that drama was virtually unknown in early Wales. The records suggest otherwise: that while dramatic performance was never as vital and pervasive a part of the Welsh tradition as it was of the English, early Wales did have plays and performances, and that these were often quite different from plays in England. These plays were geographically widespread, from Llanelli to Beaumaris to Chirk, and in both Welsh and English. This chapter will survey the evidence for drama and dramatic performance in Wales up to the earliest anterliwtau, the first Welsh popular dramatic tradition.