Costume Changes Research Articles

Episodic Structure in Four Tudor Plays: A Virtue of Necessity

A decade ago, David Bevington showed in a major work of imaginative scholarship that structure of plays offered for to professional troupes in Tudor period is directly traceable to personnel of those troupes. 1 He explained episodic arrangement of Tudor morality play as a necessity for small professional acting companies forced to make efficient use of actors by doubling roles. The tendency of characters to disappear from action of Tudor morality plays either permanently or for long periods of acting time reflects, according to his convincing analysis, repeated costume changes made necessary by this doubling of roles. Bevington's achievement is to make us see practical causes for effects that once were generally attributed, quasi-mystically, to a putative medieval cast of mind which saw events as disjointed fragments of linear time.* For Bevington implications extend well beyond moralities and well beyond fact and cause of episodic structure. He suggests that criticism should look at the manner in which an indigenous structural heritage was employed and transformed by Marlowe, Greene, Dekker, Shakespeare, and their contemporaries (p. 199). Despite this implicit invitation, it still remains, largely, to explore aesthetic implications of Bevington's historical scholarship. One such implication is that though prescribed structure must control dramatic art it need not defeat it; in imagination of a highly talented dramatist necessity of episodic structure could become a thematic virtue. This paper will make such a claim for unknown author of Everyman,