The "Garbage Heap" of Memory: At Play in Pope's Archives of Dulness

Abstract

This article is a regular feature of Fifteenth-Century Studies. Our intent is to catalogue, survey, and assess scholarship on the staging and textual configuration of dramatic presentations in the late Middle Ages. Like all such dated material, this assessment remains incomplete. We shall therefore include 2007 again in the next listing. Our readers are encouraged to bring new items to our attention, including their own work. Monographs and collections selected for detailed review will appear in the third section of this article and will be marked by an asterisk in the pages below. On late-medieval in general we report that the periodical European Medieval Drama* in its seventh, eighth, and ninth volumes, highlights the thespian activities of many countries. Also, on a more theoretic note, an article in Comparative Drama and a monograph are devoted to the origins of theater. Steven F. Walker probes India and Greece before Christ and muses whether staging was a global phenomenon then, where actors performed scenic events in ritual or entertainment, watched by (passive) spectators. The monograph of Eli Rozik rethinks similar origins, where fictional human beings were imprinted upon real persons, a process beginning in rituals. Spontaneous image-making exploited the actors' mimetic faculties - in Rozik's book Roots of Theater. While Donnalee Dox studies the in Latin Christian times, beginning with Augustine's, Isidore of Seville's, and Rabanus Maurus's objections against the stage, she also considers attempts reworking pagan into Christian drama. William Egginton tells us how the world became a stage. In another articleJody Enders reviews rape and the violent foundations of medieval theater, and Kim Solga reports (on the same topic) that rapes are rarely seen on the stage but told (epically) by a person, at a safe distance. As for English stages, eight monographs were devoted to general aspects. Pamela A. Brown wrote on women, drama, and the culture of jest, and found that mostly lower-class women submitted to drunken husbands but gained a social validity within their communities. Alehouses became theater stages for dramas of sexuality, commerce, and violence. Sarah Carpenter and Meg Twycross viewed masks and masking, while Clifford Davidson pondered the subjects of history, religion, and violence on the stage in a collection of his past articles, showing several genres of English plays in their cultural settings. Peter Happe investigated the cyclic form of mystery plays, comparing them to continental and iconic counterparts - but holding new research in abeyance. His bibliography focused mostly on English scholarship. Furthermore, volume two of Minstrels Playing (Music) was brought out by Richard Rastall; critics discovered serious shortcomings in both volumes. John Elliott et al. brought out the Oxford Records of Early English Drama, the seventeenth volume of the Records series, covering 360 years from 1284 to 1642/43, while Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel studied From Script to Stage in early modern drama (methodology). Gender and Medieval Drama was probed by Kate Normington: women's roles in Corpus Christi plays were held by cross-dressed males, except for those of vulgar parts, i.e., the Chester ale wife and Mrs. Noah. Signifying Godby Sarah Beckwith viewed medieval York stagings (Corpus Christi plays) and their contemporary revival, complete with communal struggles and problems. In the Middle Ages, these festivities did not unify the citizens, she emphasized; and chief divisions between the merchants and the manufacturing guilds persisted, as did the tension between performers and ruling elites. However, sacramental thus made present the absence of Christ's body. Natalie Crohn Schmitt pondered numerology in York's creation sequence, with the first numerologist being God. She discussed the number five as structural symbol (to be compared, perhaps, to that number in the Old French Lfe fSt. …