Dramatic Entertainment Research Articles

Exploring Trends in Music Entrepreneurship for Human Capacity Development in Nigeria: the Inherent Risks, and Risk Management Strategies

Global trends in music, dance and dramatic entertainment entrepreneurship such as composing and production of music, online music streaming, and dramatic acts shared on various social media platforms; show the developments as promising areas for human capacity development in Nigeria. With the unprecedented economic downturn, insecurity, high population index, diminishing GDP index, youthful restiveness, unemployment, and the devastations of Covid-19 ravaging the country; it becomes imperative that some alternative means of economic sustenance, wealth generation, job creation, and youthful engagement, be pursued through such an enterprise as music and dramatic entrepreneurship. This paper explored the feasibility of establishing Music, dance and dramatic entrepreneurial centres across the country where individuals can engage in learning several ramifications of entertainment entrepreneurship that behove them; sharpening their skills, learning the concomitant risks; and risk management strategies, with the hope of getting sponsorship from the government, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), independent agencies, and private individuals after the completion of pieces of training. Data was sourced from accomplished entrepreneurs from the entertainment industry, youths, and the general public through questionnaires, interviews, and participant observation. Existing literature on music and drama entrepreneurship, Tik Tok also formed secondary data. The major Finding of this work shows that entrepreneurship in the entertainment sector can still foster despite the COVID-19 pandemic if stakeholders can draw on the unique opportunity of streaming via online platforms. It is recommended that entertainment content creators, investors, entrepreneurs, and managers should key into this window instead of continuing to bewail the pandemic.

New Journalism in Documentary Script Writing

The authoring of documentary scripts is frequently overlooked when judging a documentary’s quality. This could be because the documentary script is regarded as merely a tool that has little impact on the final output of the film. Documentaries in Malaysia are considered as sluggish, with a “soft culture” approach to documentary production, despite the fact that the world of documentary production has evolved to a “dramatic entertainment” approach. Researchers propose a literary device-based writing style called as New Journalism as a possible option for documentary writers across the country. In comparison to traditional types of writing, this style combines factual and fictional writing to produce literature that is more creative, new, and alive. It is intended that by using a new type of journalism to write documentary scripts, scriptwriters will modify their approach to producing works, resulting in documentaries that are more skilful, competitive, and relevant to the demands of today’s audience.

Burkert, Mattie. Speculative Enterprise: Public Theaters and Financial Markets in London: 1688–1763

Burkert, Mattie. <i>Speculative Enterprise: Public Theaters and Financial Markets in London: 1688–1763</i>

Sancho Panza in Eighteenth-Century English Theater: Disrupting the Path of the English Knight-Errant

Widely translated and adapted in eighteenth-century England, Don Quixote inspired some of the period's greatest fiction. Yet while literary adaptations of Cervantes's novel often render its humor “amiable” and accommodate it to polite society, dramatic adaptations instead accentuate its low comedy and farce. This paper argues that dramatic entertainments should factor into discussions of the novel's extraordinary influence in eighteenth-century England. Thomas D'Urfey's popular trilogy, The Comical History of Don Quixote (1694–95), and several of its successors augment the base characteristics of Sancho and employ physical violence and cruelty to women and lower characters, showing that low comedy thrived in not only marginalized genres like jestbooks and comic illustrations, but also popular drama.

Captive children: John Lyly, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and child impressment on the early modern stage

AbstractThe story of the stolen Indian Boy who is the subject of the dispute between Oberon and Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream has gained increasing critical scrutiny in recent years. In this article I examine this episode in the light of the practice of child impressment by all‐boy acting companies, which was common in the decade before the play was written. In particular, I explore a connection with John Lyly, whose play Galatea was an influence on A Midsummer Night's Dream. In Galatea Lyly makes a point of drawing attention to his boy actors, whose vulnerability and attractiveness are made conspicuous by means of plot lines about the capture of children. Shakespeare's story of the Indian Boy has much in common with those plot lines. Through it, I suggest, the playwright looks back at Lyly and his repertory and also at the history of child impressment, a practice that would revive before the decade was out. In the Indian Boy's narrative and in the linked episode of Titania's infatuation with Nick Bottom we see the perspective of an adult company shareholder who was threatened by but also implicated in dramatic entertainments in which children were compelled to act.

The Queen’s Dumbshows: John Lydgate and the Making of Early Theater by Claire Sponsler (review)

Reviewed by: The Queen’s Dumbshows: John Lydgate and the Making of Early Theater by Claire Sponsler Emma Lipton Claire Sponsler. The Queen’s Dumbshows: John Lydgate and the Making of Early Theater. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. vii + 308 + 7 plates. $65.00. Claire Sponsler’s admirable new book is a corrective to the vision of John Lydgate as a writer of court, monastery, and city that puts his dramatic entertainments at the center of inquiry. This focus is an alternative to the centrality of urban religious drama in recent medieval criticism and to the frequent omission of Lydgate from histories of early theatre, but Sponsler also has a more ambitious agenda. “Attending to theater history,” she argues, calls for a “rethinking of the development of vernacular literature in England” (4) and acknowledging a “conflict between poetry and performance as forms of cultural prestige in late medieval England” (5). The “London-based, secular, and Chaucer-centered canon,” she claims, represents “only a slim segment of the corpus of imaginative writings in Middle English” and does not account for the “many other works that were widely heard and seen—in mimetic performances, viva voce recitations, processional tableaux, wall hangings, or on the page of manuscript books” (4). Through analysis of Lydgate’s mixed-media productions, Sponsler puts “theatricality” rather than poetry “at the hub of public culture” (11). The Records of Early English Drama (REED) project has for decades encouraged and facilitated the expansion of archival work on the drama beyond the play texts themselves to consider a range of records documenting performance. Building on the research for her recent TEAMS edition of Lydgate’s mummings and entertainments, Sponsler employs a dazzling array of records and also theorizes the ways that “the materiality of both performances and their [End Page 381] written residue” (15) shapes drama studies. Ultimately, Sponsler uses the archive to produce not a history of performance but a cultural history of the meanings of performance. As Sponsler notes, Lydgate’s dramatic works are by a known author and a known compiler, John Shirley, who often added rubrics that spoke to details of performance, audience, and occasion, providing a unique and underutilized resource for studying early English theatre. In her first chapter, Sponsler observes that Shirley did not include markers of performance within the body of the text (such as costumes, gestures, staging), tending to emphasize the “literariness” of Lydgate’s dramatic works, rather than their theatricality, perhaps converting them into texts for private reading that could have been produced specifically for the Beauchamp household in the 1420s. She notes that the mise-en-page of Lydgate’s plays and poems in Shirley’s anthology are the same, suggesting the “flexibility of texts in this period” (25) and the fact that “the generic definition of a play was in flux throughout the premodern period” (30). While the book begins by emphasizing the unique archive of Lydgate’s performance pieces, the last chapter, “On Drama’s Trail,” by contrast, addresses the practical difficulties of drama research through a case study of A Mumming of Seven Philosophers, a moralistic poem contained in a miscellany (Cambridge, Trinity College Library MA R.3.19) along with selections from several works known to be by Lydgate. Through a study of scribal hand, language, style, thematic content, and records of court entertainments, Sponsler makes a tentative case for attributing this poem to Lydgate and for locating the performance venue in the court of Henry VI. Her larger purpose is to demonstrate the simultaneously essential and inconclusive nature of documentary research on the drama. The penultimate titular chapter is characteristic of the book’s movement among astute detailed readings of Lydgate’s texts, contextual documents, and large claims about dramatic history. For example, Sponsler quotes from the Parliamentary statute of 1427–28 stating that anyone marrying the dowager queen Catherine without the king’s permission would forfeit his land and possessions during his lifetime. This statute also established that the infant king could only give permission to marry his mother after he came of age. Similarly, at the end of the “Hertford Mumming,” the King defers judgment on a...

Dramatic Entertainments of a Mixt Kind: The Form of Mixture in Early English Pantomime

This essay challenges past scholarship’s emphasis on a two-part structure for early English pantomime by using quantitative data to stress the diversity of pantomime’s form. One curious example, the “intermixed structure,” merges rather than alternates its serious and comic elements, combining the classical and commedia dell’arte traditions in one plot, or even one body. Satires of pantomime focus disproportionally on this form of mixture in their critique of the genre, particularly when discussing pantomime in performance. Ultimately, this antipathy to merging traditions in pantomime is part of a general disquiet among eighteenth-century critics about the blending of incompatible kinds in literature, and perhaps also in culture more broadly.

The Meschianza: Sum of All Fêtes

Meschianza. What is it? asked a Philadelphian in May of 1779. Hannah Griffitts, a Quaker wit, provided a poetic answer:A shameful scene of dissipation,The death of sense and reputationA deep degeneracy of natureA Frolick, for the lash of Satire;A feast of grandeur, fit for Kings,Formed of the following empty things:Ribbons and gewgaws, tints and tinsel,To glow beneath the Historic Pencil.1We take up the Historic Pencil to render what it was. We presume that Griffitts was right: that there was something historic about the Meschianza, something that marked a crisis in Anglo-American culture. Did it murder sense? No-but it certainly assaulted it. Did it mean the death of reputation? Perhaps. Certainly reputation became such a theatrical matter that after the Meschianza who stood for what was open to question.One reputation very much in question was that of Sir William Howe, commander of the British Army during the Revolution. In an important respect, the Meschianza was for him, a party to assuage the pain of his resignation from command.2Twenty-two of his officers subscribed £3,312 to underwrite a pageant bidding him farewell and to distract him from the chorus of criticism sounding in the metropolitan gazettes. The solidarity of his subordinates in celebrating him, and the extravagance of their exertions, would testify that the failures of British armus in North America were not his failures. No incompetent could command so conspicuous a loyalty.The eighteen-hour extravaganza was held on the Wharton estate outside of British-occupied Philadelphia on May 18, 1778. It included a regatta, a costumed mock-medieval tournament, a fete cha mpetre, a feast, a ball, a fireworks display, and scripted testimonies to the departing commander.The name Meschianza attested to the mixed nature of the entertainment -it was a salmagundi of martial ceremony, theater, masquerade, political ritual, and heterosocial rite. It was quite literally the sum of all fetes, a performance that encompassed the entirety of the theater of British civility.Yet, that the performance could not be harmonized-that its disjunctions of symbolism and action prevented it from being identified as something other than a mixture-makes it the event par excellence where we can discover the crisis in manners that troubled Anglo - Armerican culture at the end of the eighteenth century. In the contradictions of parts and scenes we can find leads explaining What It Was.3Of the contradictions, the starkest was that of the British staging a mock fight-a chivalric tourney-precisely when critics were complaining that the British war effort in America was more charade than war. It was not the regatta that provoked their malediction. London had entertained itself each July since 1775 with annual aquatic processions up the Thames lauding the empire of the seas. No-the offense was the spectacle of British staff officers tricked out in French medieval court costumes (not armor, not English garb), formed into rival cohorts-the Knights of the Burning Mountain, the Knights of the Blended Rose-making passes at one another on horseback with lances, for the regard of rival groups of American girls, and fighting to a draw.4Whig critics, such as Israel Mauduit, wondered whether luxury and the officers' absorption with the cult of gentility had robbed them of both sense and manhood.5 There can be little doubt that the officers' choice of a tourney as the focal event of the entertainment was calculated. Their choice of an open-air event-a fete champetre-reflected a desire to be au courant with the latest rage in elite pastimes.6Indeed, one of their own, General John Burgoyne, was largely responsible for initiating the British fashion for fetes. His dramatic entertainment, The Maid of the Oaks (Drury Lane, November 5, 1774), first put an outdoor festival on stage. Novelties such as mock rustic games, a druidic masque, and ingenious scenery by Loutherberg won the piece much applause. …

The Queen’s Dumbshows: John Lyd-Gate and the Making of Early Theater by Claire Sponsler (review)

Reviewed by: The Queen’s Dumbshows: John Lyd-Gate and the Making of Early Theater by Claire Sponsler Lofton L. Durham The Queen’s Dumbshows: John Lyd-Gate and the Making of Early Theater. By Claire Sponsler. Middle Ages series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014; pp. 320. Claire Sponsler’s lucid, precise, and highly enjoyable book is the latest entry in a growing list of monographs intent on reconsidering the parameters of “early theatre” in medieval Europe. Focusing not on mystery, miracle, or morality plays, which have dominated discussion of early English theatre for over a century, Sponsler instead orients us to a heretofore neglected area of inquiry: John Lydgate’s role as writer, arranger, and deviser of courtly and civic dramatic entertainments in the early fifteenth century. She frames her book as a challenge to literary history, offering up her exhaustive analysis of Lydgate’s dramatic corpus in order to “expand and complicate our understanding of premodern literary and theatrical history [and] shed light on the complex ways in which late medieval poetry and performance fueled each other and, in so doing, ask us to rethink how we understand both of them” (16). She moves performance into the center of her analysis, demonstrating the material, conceptual, and actual intersection of “two words that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries refuse to stay separate—literature and theatre” (ibid.). Moving between these two words—worlds, really—requires Sponsler’s attention to textual and manuscript history; scribal practices and conventions; visual depictions of text; analysis of household, civic, and guild records; and imagination in reentering lost performance moments, as well as close textual and contextual readings of the content of Lydgate’s work. The breadth and variety of what is under discussion here alone justifies Sponsler’s focus, but her exemplary interdisciplinary work moving between the archive and the repertoire in fifteenth-century England provides both an enviable model to others and a thoroughly engaging trek into uncharted territory. Even for theatre scholars studying different eras, Sponsler’s scholarship deserves attention, if for no other reason than that it will change what “early English theatre” means to you. The book unfolds in eight chapters, with early chapters providing crucial wide-frame and narrow-beam contexts, and later ones developing her point of view on Lydgate’s oeuvre. Chapter 1, “Shirley’s Hand,” begins by unpacking John Shirley’s role in recording Lydgate’s dramatic texts, and how Shirley transformed them for a reading public. This opening allows Sponsler to set the terms of the debate by showing how careful attention to the details of the manuscripts themselves, as well as the contexts and conventions in which their creation occurred, taken together support the thesis about the overlapping worlds of literary and theatrical production. Chapter 2 takes us out of the scribal workshop into the wider world of cosmopolitan London, inviting us to see the close connections between private performances in guildhalls and the creation of manuscripts. After thoroughly setting the scene in these first two chapters, Sponsler then proceeds to more detailed discussion of what she is most interested in: Lydgate’s texts and their performance vectors. In chapter 3, she uses the oft-cited overlap of reading and hearing in medieval culture to show how several of Lydgate’s texts demonstrate the awareness that these poems were transmitted not only on the page, but also through visual display, as part of paintings or hangings. Her main goal here is to show how Lydgate was keenly aware of the performance dimension of his work, and that the reason why his extant manuscripts blur genre lines is that they show “the determinedly mixed-media form of these texts, a form modern critical categories have had difficulty recognizing” (93). Chapter 4 takes a different tack, using a more conventional kind of performance example—a Corpus Christi procession—in her discussion of Lydgate’s penchant for overlapping modes of communication. Sponsler hypothesizes a link between Lydgate’s “Procession of Corpus Christi” [End Page 147] and an actual procession held in Clerkenwell by the Skinners. Ultimately, she argues that Lydgate’s verses at a minimum operate as a devotional gloss on performance, as well as...

Irish Playwrights and the Dunedin Stage in 1862: Theatre Patrons Performing Civility

A mere 14 years after it was founded by Presbyterians as a distinctly Scottish city that was ―in the world but not of the world,‖ Dunedin possessed two splendid theatres that during their first decade of operation staged some 300 performances of Irish plays and plays by Irish playwrights. How did this happen? Why Irish plays? Why Irish playwrights? And why were two theatres, with capacities of 1500 and 1330 persons, opened in Dunedin a year before Otago Boys High School was founded, five years before the foundations of First Church were laid, and seven years before the Provincial Council turned its attentions to establishing a University? 1 Initially, it was the theatres that were a source of civic pride. According to an 1862 issue of the Otago Witness, Dunedin possessed ―two of the handsomest theatres in the Australian colonies.‖ 2 While there are doubtless many explanations for this rush to build theatres, the short answer is that the city was overtaken by the very world it had sought to isolate itself from. But this is an answer that invites explanation. First, it has to do with what was on offer on stage. It has been well established by theatre historians that Irish playwrights (particularly Dion Boucicault) and Irish plays (particularly comedy and melodrama) dominated the nineteenth-century stage—whether in Dublin or London or New York. 3 It is also well known that, by the time the Theatre Royal and The Princess Theatre were opened in Dunedin, the ―legitimate drama‖ 4 had become widely if not firmly established as the secular vehicle for social and cultural improvement. For example, the editor of the Daily Southern Cross assured his Auckland readers on 8 July 1856: ―Believing, as we do, that the drama in good hands, has an elevating, rather than a demoralizing tendency—that it is calculated to assist the moral and mental development of a community;— believing, also, that, a taste for dramatic entertainments having already been acquired, the people of Auckland would feel a deprivation, were the Theatre to be finally closed.‖ 5

THE UNVEILING GAZE AND THE SUPERSTITION OF SEXUALITY IN THE MONK

THE UNVEILING GAZE AND THE SUPERSTITION OF SEXUALITY IN THE MONK

Elevation in Response to Entertainment Portrayals of Moral Virtue

Media psychologists have long puzzled over how individuals can experience enjoyment from entertainment such as tragedies that often elicit profound feelings of sadness. The present research examines the idea that a focus on “meaningful” entertainment and affective responses identified as “elevation” may provide a framework for understanding many examples of sad or dramatic entertainment. The results of this study suggest that many types of meaningful cinematic entertainment feature portrayals of moral virtues (e.g., altruism). These portrayals, in turn, elicit feelings of elevation (e.g., inspiration) that are signified in terms of mixed affect and unique physical responses (e.g., lump in throat). Ultimately, elevation also gives rise to motivations to embody moral virtues, such as being a better person or helping others.

Performance-Aesthetics Survey of Traditional Dramatic Entertainments

Performance-Aesthetics Survey of Traditional Dramatic Entertainments

Creating Entertainments for Prince Henry's Creation (1610)

In exploring the dramatic entertainments that center on Prince Henrys becoming Prince of Wales in 1610, one could begin with a question: how does a culture create the of a Prince of Wales? We may refer to the official ceremony as the investiture, but most commentators in 1610 referred to Henrys event as the creation. Certainly Daniel Price, Henrys chaplain, had this in mind when he preached a sermon in Westminster Abbey on Trinity Sunday, 3 June, the day before the ceremony; for he took Psalm 51:10 as his text, and he translated it as Create in me a new heart.1 The entire sermon focused on the processes of creation and the renewal of a right and constant spirit. I will argue that Henrys came about partly through dramatic entertainments that in 1610 surrounded the actual ceremony in Parliament. I will pay particular attention to the river pageant on the Thames, devised by Anthony Munday, as the most public of the consciously planned dramatic entertainments. But first the English culture had to create the narrative and liturgy of the actual investiture ceremony. No royal son had been created Prince of Wales since 1504, when Henry, son of Henry VII and later himself Henry VIII, at the age of thirteen experienced the official installation. Only the monarch could bestow the titles Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester, but Robert Cecil insisted that Parliament play a role also. Pauline Croft has pointed out the extensive research that began, under the auspices of Cecil, to determine exactly how one creates a Prince of Wales.2 Croft reports, On the afternoon of Thursday 15 February 1610, Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury addressed a joint committee of the Lords and Commons, as sembled for the fourth session of James Is first parliament.3 Cecil had many motives, including trying to cajole Parliament into providing more

Nathaniel Woodes, Foxeian Martyrology and the Radical Protestants of Norwich in the 1570s

The Conflict of Conscience has been long dismissed as an anachronistic play by a country clergyman out of touch with the times. Taking note of the author's patronage under local magnates of Norwich, however, this article considers the political aspects of the play in terms of its Foxeian rhetoric and anti-Catholic antagonism. On the basis of new evidence suggesting that Nathaniel Woodes was under the aegis of the Puritan aldermen, it concludes the play could have had political significance in Norwich of the 1570s. "The Conflict of Conscience" was possibly one of the popular protests against the anti-Puritan campaign led by the Bishop of Norwich, Edmund Freke. Woodes appropriated Foxeian rhetoric to promote Puritan views and share among the audience awareness of the imminent danger. "The Conflict of Conscience" is probably the earliest case of Puritanism politically affiliated with dramatic entertainment.

Intellectual Property Law and Innovation – By W. van Caenegem

This is in several respects an attractive publication. In over 200 pages, a wealth of insights is offered to the reader about the legal instruments to support and protect industrial innovations. The text is supplemented by a list of acronyms, tables of statutes and cases, an extensive bibliography and an index. The focus on industrial innovation refers to the innovation in function (or ‘technological’ innovation) and in novel product appearance (or ‘product’ innovation). Areas like art, literature, dramatic and musical entertainment fall outside the scope of the book. Therefore, it might have been preferable to use the expression industrial property law in the title. The author, Professor of Law at Bond University, Australia, addresses the application of relevant legal instruments (IP law) to protect useful products and processes.

Cross-Channel Connections: Early Modern English Noblewomen's Familiarity with Continental Women's Literary and Performance Practices

In this article, I consider studies that allude to or explore connections between learned, English noblewomen and Continental women during the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. With the recovery of many women's works from this period, scholars have long recognized that fascinating parallels existed between the cultural milieux of learned English and Continental women. Beyond simply recognizing parallels, scholars are now interested in exploring the points of contact and sources of influence between these milieux. They find that English noblewomen's familiarity with Continental women, both of noble and lower classes, was facilitated in large part by the journeys of learned travelers, Continental players, dance masters, and musicians. In particular, I focus on works that illustrate ways in which tutors, ambassadors, scholars, and courtiers assisted in the spread of knowledge about learned English and Continental women, as well as how elements of dramatic entertainments featuring women, both for the court and the public stage, crossed national borders. Key questions in the study of early modern English women that interest scholars are, how much did English women know about their Continental counterparts, and what were their frames of reference? This article surveys scholarship that addresses these questions.

Putting the Mystery Back into Armchair Theatre

The point is this: the image of Armchair Theatre is really basically cockeyed. People seem to remember it as a lot of kitchen sinkery. It’s a lot of nonsense. We did a musical called ‘His Polyvinyl Girl’ ... we did murder mysteries, we did romances ... but underlying them all was a kind of a truth and a kind of an energy. (Sydney Newman interviewed in And Now For Your Sunday Night Dramatic Entertainment (Microcraze Productions for Channel 4, tx. 8/2/87))

An Open National Identity: Rutherford Mayne, Gerald McNamara, and the Plays of the Ulster Literary Theatre

During the early decades of the twentieth century, while Ireland's Abbey Theatre tried hard to create a unified image of nationhood in the figure of a West-of-Ireland peasant, a little theatre company in the North of Ireland addressed issues of national representation by very different means. The Ulster Branch of the Irish Literary Theatre, set up in 1902, brought plays from the Dublin-based dramatic revival on tour to Belfast. However, when William Butler Yeats, one of the leading forces behind the foundation of both the Irish Literary Theatre (1899-1901) and the Irish National Theatre Society (1903), heard about the Ulstermen's artistic project, he would not allow them to use one of his companies' names and forbade them from staging dramas he was in the process of copyrighting. (1) Bulmer Hobson and David Parkhill, the founders of the Ulster theatre, promptly changed the company's name well its creative focus. Damn Yeats, we'll write our own plays, was Hobson's response to Yeats's protective attitude. (2) The break with Dublin marked the start of the Ulster Literary Theatre. Ironically, the Belfast company's inaugural production in December 1904 took place during the same month when the Irish National Theatre Society moved into the Abbey Theatre. Between 1904 and 1915, the Ulster Literary Theatre staged twenty new plays and numerous revivals. (3) A number of these were dramatic failures, some of the dramas stood out, but most significant was this group's capacity to navigate between a range of conflicting identities: Ulster unionism and Irish nationalism, Catholicism and Protestantism, a northern versus southern identity. What I intend to argue in this article is that the Ulster Literary Theatre found its own surprisingly simple solution to negotiate such diverse political and cultural tensions. In particular the work of two playwrights, Rutherford Mayne and Gerald MacNamara, illustrates that the Ulster Literary Theatre explored Irish nationalism and Ulster unionism not political concepts but defining parameters of social and cultural identity. Their conclusion was not a separatist one. Identities are complex and ambiguous, Mayne's and MacNamara's plays suggest. Particular features and interests are never the sole property of one political, cultural, or religious faction, but are shared by a number of identifiable groups. The same applied to sectarian extremism: bigotry was a feature of nationalist militants well of unionist activists. MacNamara satirized such weaknesses in order to promote open-mindedness; Mayne fostered tolerance with his fair-minded portrayals of County Down life. For the formation of the new company in 1904, Parkhill and Hobson were joined by writers such Joseph Campbell and Rutherford Mayne, and by enthusiastic artists from the Belfast School of Art. The school's Sketching Club had already staged dramatic entertainments and showed a specific interest in elaborate stage design. (4) Much of this stemmed from the active involvement of Harry Morrow and his family. Morrow, who ran an interior design business that specialized in decorating, painting, and renovation, also lectured at the Belfast School of Art. His sons, Harry, Fred, Jack, Edwin and Norman Morrow, participated in the school's productions. (5) All had a talent for painting and sketching, but Harry and Fred would become major contributors to the Ulster Literary Theatre's stage design, repertoire and production standard. Delving into conflicting political identities in an objective manner would not be easy for any of them: Hobson, Parkhill and the Morrow family all shared a nationalist bias. The first two belonged to the Protestant National Association in Belfast and were interested in using Irish drama as a vehicle of propaganda. (6) Hobson was also a member of the Dungannon Clubs. The Morrow family produced anti-loyalist sketches at entertainments in their own home, and Jack and George would later draw anti-British cartoons for Hobson's paper The Republic. …

London Civic Theatre: City Drama and Pageantry from Roman Times to 1558 , and: Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England (review)

Anne Lancashire. London Civic Theatre: City Drama and Pageantry from Roman Times 1558. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xix + 355. $65.00. Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter. Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2002. Pp. [x] + 418. 47.50 [pounds sterling]. The two books under review represent important contributions the study of early English drama. Each is firmly based on the evidence of records of early performance, and neither engages in theoretical flights of fancy. Speculation, which is sometimes necessary, is always linked possible options rather than preconceived constructs. As Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter remark in relation their study, to adopt any single theoretical approach is run the risk of imposing rather than elucidating meaning (3). Anne Lancashire's survey of the civic theater in London begins with the Roman period, which has received interest recently following the find in 1987-88 of a Roman amphitheater in the city's center--indeed, underneath the yard of the Guildhall. Following the removal of the Roman legions from Britain in A.D. 410, there is circumstantial evidence that in London theatrical activity, broadly defined, continued. With the coming of the Anglo-Saxons, perhaps some of it might have been related the types of performers described in Terry Gunnell's The Origins of Scandinavian Drama (1995). After c.980 monasteries had the option of presenting rudimentary liturgical drama like the Visitatio Sepulchri included in the Regularis Concordia. Then, in the twelfth century, William FitzStephen's Description of London boasts that, in comparison with the drama of Roman times, the City was famed for holier plays, wherein are shown forth the miracles wrought by Holy Confessors or the sufferings which glorified the constancy of Martyrs (31). Dated c. 1170-82, FitzStephen's comments indicate already a tradition of saint plays, a genre that again would emerge most visibly in the St. Thomas Becket pageant borrowed by the Skinners' guild in 1519 from the parish of St. Giles for the City's Midsummer festivities. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, antitheatrical complaints in ecclesiastical and civic documents emerged, specifically in opposition inhonesti ludi in churchyards and the participation of clergy in or their presence at plays, and then against masking, especially during Christmas festivities. These of course do not suggest public rejection of drama but rather the opposite, for they would appear be indicative of widespread dramatic activity even though we do not have playtexts or full descriptions of performances. While the activities of the London puy, though discussed in Lancashire's book, might not be designated as dramatic entertainment, mummings and disguisings were also being presented. She gives the example of a mumming for Prince (later King) Richard in which 130 mummers in costume, some of them wearing black masks [visers nayrs] like devils (42), passed through the London streets a meeting with the young nobleman, who was allowed win at dice. More generous information is available about the sumptuous entries with which London formally greeted their kings and queens as well as high-ranking visiting dignitaries. These entries included adornment with amazing devices as early as 1207 and 1236 (44). At the entry of Edward II in 1308, London, with its hangings of gold, was intended resemble the New Jerusalem (44). The routes used for royal and other entries through the City are usefully listed in appendix A. But the most spectacular of the civic dramas may well have been the Clerkenwell plays, organized by the clerks of the City and performed during the summer over a three- five-day period. These included a play of the Passion of our Lord and Creation of the World as designated in 1390 when King Richard II and his queen Anne of Bohemia were in attendance (55). …