Early English Drama Research Articles

Review: Minstrels Playing: Music in Early English Religious Drama, ii

Review: Minstrels Playing: Music in Early English Religious Drama, ii

Music in early English religious drama: v.2: minstrels playing

Music in early English religious drama: v.2: minstrels playing

Evangelical ‘Enterluders’: Patronage and Playing in Reformation England

This paper underscores the propagandist aspects of Protestant players by examining the broader patterns emerging from the University of Toronto's Records of Early English Drama project (REED). While previous scholarship has noted the wealth of anecdotal evidence pointing to drama as a mechanism for religious change, evidence emerging from the REED material suggests that the use of interludes by the evangelical establishment was more extensive and programmatic than previously thought. A survey of every patron of drama in the Reformation period indicates that those most active in promoting the evangelical cause also sponsored the most active theatre companies. The touring activities of evangelical companies mirrored the progress of the Reformation in England. During periods of Reformation advance, travelling players flourished; while payments to companies all but disappeared during Mary Tudor's reign. The content of drama remained largely religious for most of the period, and there is little reason to doubt the use of printed polemical plays by a whole host of Protestant players to propagate the new gospel.

The Boy Who Would Be King: Court Revels of King Edward VI, 1547-1553

In the mean season, because there was a rumor that I was dead, I passed through London. (1) Many have commented on the coldness of the entries in the of the boy-king Edward VI, but few seem more chilling than this one (dated 23 July 1549). Partially because rumors were continually circulating about the precarious health of the king (rumors which were, shortly, to become fact), and partially because Londoners saw the young king far less frequently than they had watched his flamboyant father, the king's body was always a subject of concern. Indeed, at King Henry's death when the duke of Somerset took physical possession of the prince's body in order to ensure his own power, the performance of the Protectorate era began. Show the king, show the power. So when Edward needed to assure his people that his government was still functioning, his councillors put him on parade. The connections between aristocratic and royal patrons and the entertainments that they actually produced have been of increasing interest to theater historians during the past ten years. The Records of Early English Drama (REED) project has revealed hundreds of financial accounts that establish the quantity and frequency of patron theater, and we are now beginning to consider the aesthetic and organizational relationships between patrons and their revels. Do patrons, as does Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream, actively choose their ludi for specific reasons--taste, novelty, politics? Do patrons, as does Hamlet, actively interfere with texts? Do patrons, as does Don Vermandero in The Changeling, order up the local madfolk to dance for a three-day wedding celebration? For years, we have assumed that the nobility of early modern England retained entertainers as a sign of sophistication and wealth. We have assumed that the nobility retained entertainers in order to promulgate political or religious ideologies. We have assumed that the nobility retained entertainers because they were genuinely interested in the arts. We have assumed that they retained entertainers because they needed spies, messengers, processional fanfare, and martial signal corps. And we have evidence to support all of these assumptions, either all together or singly. (2) Increasingly in the last decade, patronage studies have become more important and more interesting. Interdisciplinary methodologies combined with the groundbreaking work of REED and the second-generation applications of the records are reconfiguring the geography of early English drama. As we shift our critical lenses from texts to contexts, we find that the culture and the stage inform each other, and that cultural studies can help us approach, if not recover, sixteenth-century theater. It is difficult enough to understand the complexities of patronage in our own time, almost impossible to conceive of largesse in the sixteenth century. We find it almost impossible to represent the past accurately because we must constantly strive to recover it from within the prisons of our own paradigms. Nevertheless, bearing in mind Foucault's cautions against presentism, I would like to examine Edward's revels, ultimately to compare his patronage to that of the other Tudors. Like all of the Tudors, Edward VI was surrounded by the stories, ceremonies, insignia formalities and appurtenances that Clifford Geertz suggests define and justify our cultural status and relationships. (3) But Edward's narratives and icons differ from those of the rest of his family--differences that lead me to suggest ways in which the idiosyncracies of a particular personality shaped the aesthetics of court theater. Clearly, specific information about a patron leads to more responsible conjectures about his or her motivations for maintenance. Consequently, as a case study I choose King Edward VI for a variety of obvious reasons. His rule was short and has often been ignored by historians, who consider him, with his sister Mary, as rather thorns between two Tudor roses--the sad remnant of Henry or the ragged rehearsal for Elizabeth; he acceded to the throne of England as a nine-year-old boy; he was, or definitely became, a radical Protestant by inclination and influence; and he authored the only autobiographical journal in Plantagenet, Tudor, or Stuart eras--the first diary in England, except for perhaps Margery Kempe's more problematic Booke. …

Sussex: Records of Early English Drama ed. by Cameron Louis

Sussex: Records of Early English Drama ed. by Cameron Louis

Material Culture & Medieval Drama

Illustrations Preface Material Culture, Writing, and Early Drama by Clifford Davidson Costumes and Vestments for the Medieval Music Drama by Dunbar H. Ogden The Providers of Pyrotechnics in Plays and Celebrations by Philip Butterworth Notes for the Staging of a Late Medieval Passion Play by Veronique Plesch Makers of Heaven on Earth: The Construction of Early Drama in Cornwall by Gloria J. Betcher The Sound of Civic Specatacle: Noise in Burgundian Ceremonial Entries by Jesse D. Hurlbut Musical Instruments in Early English Drama by Mary Remnan Index

Recycling the Cycle: The City of Chester and Its Whitsun Plays (review)

240 Reviews (pp. 53-55) and cites (quoting a 1987 study by M . Rubin) the example of the almoner of Christ Church, Canterbury 'who spent only half of one per cent of his income on external poverty relief in the period 1284-1373' (p. 57). In elucidating his thesis that, overall, monasticism's influence on the daily lives of 'the silent body of the medieval population' (p. 152) was more limited than has often been suggested, Milis offers some informative vignettes of monastic contributions to learning and to missionary activity in the early part of the Middle Ages, useful discussion of monastic reform movements and a lucid summary of the educational institutions of the period, all of which m a y be read apart from his main thesis. Its sceptical conclusion, namely that 'isolation and a reluctance to participate in society, rather than social involvement, were the most characteristic, and in fact, essential, features of medieval monasticism' (p. 151), m a y well be, as Milis himself admits, 'unacceptable' (p. xiii) to some readers, but nevertheless must remain a challenge to all readers. Elizabeth Moores Department of English University of Queensland Mills, David, Recycling the Cycle: The City of Chester and Its Whitsun Pla (Studies in Early English Drama 4), Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1998; cloth; pp. xiii, 281; R.R.P. $55.00 Recycling the Cycle represents the collected wisdom of one of the for scholars of early English drama. The book situates the corpus of plays known as the Chester Cycle within the broad historical landscape of their performance and within the vicissitudes of scholarly approaches to medieval drama since the nineteenth century. Chester and its play cycle stand as the point of convergence for this study of the interaction between politics, religion and drama in late medieval and Early Modern England. The focus on the cycle and its immediate social context provides a local but never a parochial perspective. David Mills synthesises a wealth of n e w and previously published material relevant to the study of the Chester cycle. Thebook draws onrecently discovered archival sources, most notably the letterbook of Christopher Reviews 241 Goodman held in the Ruthin Record Office whichrichlyillustrates the variety ofpost-Reformation attitudes to the performance ofthe cycle plays atChester and the events contributing to their cessation in 1575. Apicture ofChester as a developed and complex urban space emerges from the pages of this book, brought into view by the c o m m a n d with which the author marshals records ofcivic administration, personal correspondence, antiquarian accounts and historical studies. David Mills's contribution to the published scholarship on the Chester cycle is unparalleled. H e is the author of numerous articles on the cycle and the co-editor of the scholarly edition of the plays as well as of the in-progress Cheshire volume of the Records of Early English Drama project. He comments authoritatively on both textual and contextual issues and the implications for comprehending the dramatic merit and the sociological significance of the cycle. The body of the book, Chapters T w o to Nine, surveys physical and symbolic space in Chester; the city's mythologised account of its past; the range of ceremonial activity through which the city sought to understand and to promote itself; issues of religion and secularity; and sponsorship and control of dramatic products. Chapters Eight and Nine examine the creative integrity of the extant texts of the cycle together with the relationship they bear to their historical performances. Both are vexed issues. The Chester cycle is often held to lack artistic flair, and the significant gap between the last k n o w n performance in 1575 and the earliest extant manuscript of the plays, 1591, raises more than the usual questions about h o w faithfully the texts reflect those performances. The author addresses such problematic issues unperturbedly. H e subordinates the first to his understanding of the logic informing the cycle's uniform structure and the second to a detailed scrutiny of the stability and mutability of the text through various processes of revision, both prior to and subsequent to the last date of performance. The richness of the study...

:Records of Early English Drama: Dorset, Cornwall

:<i>Records of Early English Drama: Dorset, Cornwall</i>

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

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. …

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access DAVID MILLSRecycling the Cycle The City of Chester and its Whitsun Plays Pp xiv+282 (Studies in Early English Drama 4) Toronto University of Toronto Press, 1998 £40 PETER HAPPE PETER HAPPE University of Southampton Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume 50, Issue 199, August 1999, Pages 365–366, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/50.199.365 Published: 01 August 1999

A New History of Early English Drama

A New History of Early English Drama

The Heaven Singing: Music in Early English Religious Drama, 1.Richard Rastall

<i>The Heaven Singing: Music in Early English Religious Drama, 1.</i>Richard Rastall

A New History of Early English Drama

Reviewed by: A New History of Early English Drama Odai Johnson A New History of Early English Drama. By John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, editors. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997; pp. xiv + 560. $49.50 cloth, $25.00 paper. The influence of Stephen Greenblatt on the field of English Renaissance studies has marked an entire generation of scholars. Indeed Greenblatt—whose foreword stamps the collection—still offers a fine illustration of the complexity of the field with an opening image of Pieter Bruegel’s painting Children’s Games. This painting, writes Greenblatt, “contains many of the basic motifs of early English drama. . . . So many and various are the figures, so fragmentary and multifaceted the represented actions, that it would be virtually impossible to give a single, coherent account of what is happening” (xiii). In the painting’s play fights and tinseled crowns, Greenblatt finds a metaphor that reminds us that theatre is indeed only one game in a wide and rich field of play. “The artist seems to invite us to imagine a space, to attend to the peripheries as well as the center, to understand the complexity of the activities that go on within its confines, and to think about the institutions—church, inns, market stalls, and so forth—that frame these activities” (xiv). This attention to the “peripheries as well as the center” makes A New History of Early English Drama a useful work. This twenty-five essay collection about English theatre and theatre culture for the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is divided into three sections: “Physical Space”; “Social Space”; and “Conditions of Performance and Publication.” Within these arenas an impressive panel of contributors—including Michael Bristol, Ann Jennalie Cook, Richard Dutton, Kathleen McLuskie—map a highly detailed “deep culture” read that ultimately positions the business of playing as one of the many forms of theatre in a culture of play, performance, authority and spectacle. The first section features articles largely concerned with theatrical spaces. Though many of the subjects are familiar, what marks this history as “new history” is the positioning of its subject. The Oxford and Cambridge University stages, household occasional drama, the church as a theatrical space, as well as streets, fairs and markets, all stand alone, each receiving critical attention that is refreshingly unconcerned with the greater market of the public theatres. Only one essay in the first section, John Orrell’s “The Theatres,” deals directly with the theatres. It is just this ratio of playhouse to culture that gives the English stage its characteristic complexity. In the second section, “Social Spaces,” the theatre again recedes into the web of wider and intersecting spheres: court culture, print culture, religious, domestic, civic, popular. Only in the final section does the actual business of playing emerge, with essays on touring schedules, costume practices, personnel, audiences, patronage, censorship, script revision, repertory, etcetera. These articles treat the theatre as one form of performance in a far wider, and infinitely more complex culture. There is also much about the collection that is good old-fashioned scholarship, such as Roslyn Knutson’s repertory analysis, or Peter Blayney’s “The Publication of Playbooks.” What is new and remarkable about the collection is the backgrounding of the subject in a cluttered canvas whose genealogy is so extensive that even rather dominant playwrights recede. This backgrounding plays out in a no more telling way than the largely absent figure of Shakespeare. A brief survey of the index reveals more textual attention given to Philip Henslowe and Sir Thomas Bodley (a collector of plays) than to Shakespeare. Indeed, the work is at its best when it is not self-consciously “new.” The essays on costuming, censorship, relations to space, print and popular culture work better than the occasional deconstructions of mid-century Shakespearean scholarship, whose critiques are often unaccompanied by the acknowledgment of the magnitude of the original contribution. Nonetheless, the work is a major collection and an exciting volume that invites us “to attend to the peripheries as well as the center.” Odai Johnson University of Washington Copyright © 1999 The Johns Hopkins University Press

The Heaven Singing: Music in Early English Religious Drama by Richard Rastall

The Heaven Singing: Music in Early English Religious Drama by Richard Rastall

Records of Early English Drama: Somerset. Including Bath

Records of Early English Drama: Somerset. Including Bath

Bristol: Records of Early English Drama ed. by Mark C. Pilkinton

Bristol: Records of Early English Drama ed. by Mark C. Pilkinton

A New History of Early English Drama. Edited by John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997; pp. xiv + 565. $49.50 hardcover; $25.00 paperback.

A New History of Early English Drama. Edited by John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997; pp. xiv + 565. $49.50 hardcover; $25.00 paperback.

:A New History of Early English Drama

Introduction: Demanding HistoryWorld Pictures, Modern Periods, and the Early Stage, by Margreta de GraziaThe English Church as Theatrical Space, by John M. Wasson,A Commonty a Christmas gambold or a tumbling trick: Household Theater, by Suzanne WestfallThe Universities: Early Staging in Cambridge, by Alan H. NelsonEarly Staging in Oxford, by John R. Elliott, Jr.Streets and Markets, by Anne HigginsThe Theaters, by John OrrellRowme of its Own: Printed Drama in Early Libraries, by Heidi Brayman HackelTheater and Religious Culture, by Paul Whitfield WhiteWonderful Spectacles: Theater and Civic Culture, by Gordon Kipling,The Theater and Domestic Culture, by Diana E. HendersonEntertainments at Court, by Graham ParryThe Theater and Literary Culture, by Barbara A. MowatTheater and Popular Culture, by Michael D. BristolTouring, by Peter H. GreenfieldCloathes worth all the rest: Costumes and Properties, by Jean MacIntyre and Garret P.J. EppCensorship, by Richard DuttonAudiences: Investigation, Interpretation, Invention, by Ann Jennalie CookRogues and Rhetoricians: Acting Styles in Early English Drama, by Peter ThomsonPersonnel and Professionalization, by W.R. StreitbergerPlaywriting: Authorship and Collaboration, by Jeffrey MastenThe Publication of Playbooks, by Peter W. M. BlaneyPatronage and the Economics of Theater, by Kathleen E. McLuskie and Felicity DunsworthThe Revision of Scripts, by Eric RasmussenThe Repertory, by Roslyn L. KnutsonPlays in Manuscript, by Paul Werstine

:Shropshire (Records of Early English Drama)

:<i>Shropshire (Records of Early English Drama)</i>

From Page to Performance: Essays in Early English Drama. John A. Alford

<i>From Page to Performance: Essays in Early English Drama</i>. John A. Alford