Medieval Drama Research Articles

The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English (review)

Reviewed by: The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English Janet Hadley Williams Treharne, Elaine and Greg Walker, eds, with the assistance of William Green, The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010; cloth; pp. xiv, 774; 7 b/w illustrations (maps); R.R.P. US$150.00, £85.00; ISBN 9780199229123. Weighing in at one and a half kilograms, this substantial volume is not a handbook in the literal sense, but it fulfils many of the other requirements of the manual for guidance in a particular area. Besides Elaine Treharne's useful prologue, 'Speaking of the Medieval', which opens to scrutiny the continuities and changes of the long period from Old to Early Modern English, and Greg Walker's epilogue on the large question of when the medieval period ended, there are thirty-five scholarly essays, not all of which can be examined here. Aiming to cover 'key themes' (p. v), they are grouped in fives under the capacious and permeable headings, 'Literary Production', 'Literary Consumption', 'Literature, Clerical and Lay', 'Literary Realities', 'Complex Identities', 'Literary Place, Space, and Time', 'Literary Journeys'. An Index of Manuscripts, and a substantial general Index follow. The last has two entries, not cross-referenced, to Brunetto Latini (first and surname), both including Latini's Trésor, but giving different page numbers. Most of the essays are authoritative, yet also fresh and thought provoking. Some, such as Nicholas Perkins's 'Writing, Authority and Bureaucracy', Ralph Hanna's 'Literature and the Cultural Elites', and Thomas Bredehoft's 'The Gothic Turn and Twelfth-Century Chronicles', are innovative, in interpretation, material, and approach. A few, such as Nicola McDonald's on the primer, and Bella Millet's on the English sermon before 1250, draw helpful attention to understudied yet essential topics. Others, among them Gillian Rudd's 'Metaphorical and Real Flowers in Medieval Verse' and Alcuin Blamires's 'Individuality', offer alternative and recuperative readings. A. S. G. Edwards's 'Books and Manuscripts' is a highly competent opening to Part I. The chapter introduces core information on the coexistence of print, manuscript, and oral transmission; surveys the functions (administrative, literary, devotional) and locations of these activities (with reference to the most important productions), and examines the patterns of commercialization. There are brief footnotes in this essay (as in others) and a useful self-contained bibliography appended. (Not here, but in essays of others, there are a few footnotes without a corresponding bibliography entry, such as 'Treharne 2003', p. 5 and 'Pettit 1984', p. 380.) In 'Textual Copying and Transmission', Orietta da Rold takes an unusually direct look at manuscript-making processes and the agencies involved, which is extended [End Page 264] in Simon Horobin's lucid 'The Professionalization of Writing' and Elizabeth Evenden's informative 'The Impact of Print ... 1476-1575'. Within Part II, Siân Echard's 'Insular Romance' addresses the central matter of the non-English origins for works 'en romanz', and the generic difficulties of the term. John McGavin's 'Performing Communities: Civic Religious Drama' looks at both medieval performers and, especially, medieval spectators, pointing out most perceptively (via town records and the play texts themselves) the interdependencies in public community contexts over time. This is matched by Elisabeth Dutton's 'Secular Medieval Drama' (Part IV), which discusses carefully the lack of sharply defined boundaries between the dominating religious drama and the secular productions that began in the 1490s, then developed into the household dramas of the Tudor period. In Part III, Andrew Galloway's 'Visions and Visionaries', benefits from the Handbook's removal of the tight time-limits often given to the term 'Medieval', considering with illuminating amplitude the possibilities of the long and varying tradition of dream works, literary and non-literary. The topics of medieval individuality, autobiography, representation of identity (in terms of authority, race, religion, politics reputation, common or singular good, social status, nationality), occupy the authors of Part V, beginning with the wide and informed sweep of Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's 'Authority, Constraint, and the Writing of the Medieval Self'. Two essays, Kathy Lavezzo's and Samantha Zacher's, are concerned with the ambivalent presentation of Saracens and Jews in medieval literary texts; Jacqueline Stodnick's...

Elizabeth Baldwin, Lawrence M. Clopper, and David Mills, Cheshire Including ChesterCheshire Including Chester. Edited by Elizabeth Baldwin , Lawrence M. Clopper , and David Mills . Records of Early English Drama. 2 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Pp. x+1231.

<i>Elizabeth Baldwin, Lawrence M. Clopper, and David Mills,</i> Cheshire Including Chester<i>Cheshire Including Chester</i>. Edited by Elizabeth Baldwin , Lawrence M. Clopper , and David Mills . Records of Early English Drama. 2 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Pp. x+1231.

Mummings and Entertainments (review)

Reviewed by: Mummings and Entertainments Roger A. Ladd John Lydgate . Mummings and Entertainments. Ed. Claire Sponsler. Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010. Pp. vi + 186. $15.00. The desire to read or teach John Lydgate can be challenging because there are no current critical or student editions of much of his work. The Middle English Texts Series (METS) sponsored by the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages (TEAMS) has improved this situation with recent editions of Troy Book selections, The Temple of Glas, The Siege of Thebes, and now from Claire Sponsler [End Page 355] the Mummings and Entertainments. This edition is not purely a critical edition, as the Middle English Texts Series remains accessible to a student reader, but it has a reasonably complete textual apparatus, excellent and well-researched notes, and a thorough bibliography. Mummings and Entertainments effectively shows the growth of this series to an interesting compromise between student accessibility and scholarly thoroughness, while avoiding the incomprehensibility of many critical editions. Sponsler presents as readable a text as is possible, and there is no question that this particular group of documents might fit nicely into a number of possible courses—certainly this book would supplement an anthology in a medieval drama class, or could be more central in a course looking at the discourse of the Lancastrian affinity. If METS/TEAMS publish much more Lydgate, a dedicated seminar on the poet will also become possible. This edition will support further scholarship on these verses: the notes and bibliography provide an effective orientation to critical work on Lydgate's occasional poetry. Putting together this particular selection of mummings and entertainments represents interesting critical work on Sponsler's part, and it is clear from the quality of her supporting materials that she was a good choice to edit this volume. As she explains in her introduction, modern generic terms for performance do not align well with the "literate orality" (1) of the fifteenth century, and none of these selections are exactly plays in the sense the N-Town plays, Mankind, or the Digby Mary Magdalene (5), would be. In order to explain how this volume holds together, Sponsler creates her own definition: these verses all "seem to have involved some degree of mimetic activity and show signs of the use of impersonation, action or gesture, costuming, props, oral recitation, or visual display" (1). This volume includes recitations or inscriptions to go with decorative hangings ("Bycorne and Chychevache," "Legend of St. George," possibly "Mesure Is Tresure"), royal entertainments ("Disguising at Hertford," "Mumming at Eltham," "Mumming at Windsor"), entertainments for civic or other groups ("Disguising at London," "Mumming at Bishopswood," "Mumming for the Goldsmiths of London," "Mumming for the Mercers of London"), a poetic description of a royal entry or a procession ("Henry VI's Triumphal Entry into London," "A Procession of Corpus Christi"), and even verses to go with a course at a royal banquet ("Soteltes at the Coronation Banquet of Henry VI"). Some texts, like "Of the Sodein Fal of Princes in Oure Dayes" or the "Pageant of Knowledge," defy clear categorization. This selection replicates no existing anthology, and gives the reader a clear vision of the variety of occasional verse that could be commissioned from a well-known public poet in the fifteenth century. Sponsler gives us a selection of Lydgate's occasional work worth reading, and she should be praised for making this material available for scholarly and classroom use. [End Page 356] While perhaps some Lydgate specialists might have chosen a slightly different selection, the only aspect of this volume that invites critique is the inherent contradiction of a combined student and critical edition. Because it includes so many works that lack current critical editions, the Middle English Texts Series has increasingly embraced this contradiction, and Sponsler effectively seeks a manageable middle ground. The textual apparatus is thorough: the textual notes (135-56) methodically record every major manuscript variant of each text and articulate editorial choices. The textual notes also act as a strong corrective to the previous edition of most of this material, Henry Noble MacCracken's 1934 two-volume Minor Poems for the Early English Text Society (EETS). Sponsler...

Striking a Pose: Performance Cues in Four French Hagiographic Mystery Plays

Striking a Pose:Performance Cues in Four French Hagiographic Mystery Plays Vicki L. Hamblin (bio) While they approach medieval theater from different perspectives, modern theorists and theater historians nevertheless agree that theatrical texts are unlike literary texts in a variety of ways. Their most obvious difference lies in the fact that theatrical texts presuppose a supra-textual performance that may include gestures, décors, timing, costumes, props, intonation, simulated action, noise, and music. Players, musicians, painters, and staging supervisors are among those who amend the structural and thematic intention of the written words by providing any number of conventional, or improvised, creative acts. As theoretician Anne Ubersfeld has argued, this intentional relationship between a dramatic text's verbal (textual) and nonverbal (performance) elements is unique to theatrical works.1 From the historical perspective, Graham Runnalls's examination of French mystery play culture in the late medieval period confirms that a performance intention preceded in most cases the writing of an appropriate text; therefore, that intention would have been reflected in the resulting document.2 Accordingly, the written composition of any work intended for performance contains evidence of this unique relationship between a spoken narrative and its performance mandate. As a result of this internal relationship between spoken text and implied performance, plays are not simply characterized by written dialogue that carries a narrative forward, but by spoken words that rely on physical and vocal acts to amplify, or perhaps even complete, their narrative intention. If a dramatic character proclaims that "[t]here is the church I seek," he or she must follow through on those words by moving physically through space toward the appropriate décor or prop. If he or she fails to do so, the theatrical intention fails to achieve its communicative goal. [End Page 131] In other words, even if the narrative itself has been satisfied by such an announcement, the theatrical intention requires further interpretation. Theater's genesis as an art form, as Mercedes Travieso Ganaza reiterates, resides in the fact that it is "toujours liée, concrètement et virtuellement, à des configurations de mise en scène" (always linked, physically and purposefully, to the contours of performance).3 With regard to the mystery plays of the late medieval era,4 written records of their spoken texts dwarf in volume and in comprehensiveness any surviving production notes, whether the latter take the form of didascalias, post-production records, or witness reports. This state of affairs is the direct reflection of a medieval performance culture in which surviving theatrical texts are generally post-production souvenirs. Thus, unless they were created as commemorative copies of a singular event, the surviving texts tend to retain few recorded features, beyond the spoken text itself, which may have been relevant to performance.5 For this reason, when a surviving text does include some staging notations their purpose there seems to "play some part for a reader who through them can imagine how the action might take place," according to Peter Happé's work with the English Macro plays.6 That is, the surviving textual souvenir has become a performance prototype rather than an exhaustive account of a theatrical event because that event, even when carefully planned and executed by a team of professional poets, painters, and technicians, was not usually recorded in a single document. By reflecting how the action might take place rather than how it actually did take place, the "post-production" copy of a mystery play reflects only part of its original intention.7 This is as it should be, since any renewed performance would have necessitated re-evaluating the written souvenir text for its applicability to different circumstances, funding, or participants. Thus, in the propensity in modern times to imagine the surviving performance remnant of a medieval play as an actualized text we have tended to mistake the skeletal theatrical text for a full-fledged literary one. Consequently, it is not surprising that the rubrics, titles, and didascalias that punctuate the spoken dialogue of many medieval plays have sometimes been regarded by modern scholars as both unnecessary to the narrative and unhelpful to deciphering its performance requirements. A "speech then action" format, as I have maintained elsewhere...

Sex on the Stage (and in the Library) of an Early Medieval Convent: Hrotsvit of Gandersheim

Early medieval drama (in Latin) surprisingly focused very much on the theme of sexuality, as best illustrated by Hrotsvit of Gandersheim (10th century). She was most eager to compete with the Roman dramatist Terence and to create new Christian plays that were, on the one hand, basically determined by the theatrical strategies of Terence, and yet followed, on the other, early medieval Christian values as developed by the Church Fathers and desert hermits. Although Hrotsvit pursued strongly religious values throughout her works, she also revealed a keen interest in theatricality per se, irrespective of the religious paradigm characteristic of the Middle Ages. At the same time this tenth-century convent author demonstrated an incredible skill in exploring and utilizing a wide range of sexual themes in her plays and religious narratives. She consistently demonstrated a unique ability in creating theatrical works that aimed both for the basic entertainment of a convent audience and also for a fundamental clerical education that did not ignore the world of sexuality as a dangerous yet unavoidable aspect of human existence.1

The N-Town Play: Drama and Liturgy in Medieval East Anglia (review)

Reviewed by: The N-Town Play: Drama and Liturgy in Medieval East Anglia Douglas Sugano Penny Granger . The N-Town Play: Drama and Liturgy in Medieval East Anglia. Cambridge: Brewer, 2009. Pp. x+257+1. $95.00. D. S. Brewer and Granger have taken on a daunting task: publishing a scholarly, book-length commentary on the N-Town Plays. Such an ambitious work and approach is certainly welcome to late medieval drama. In the past decade there has not been one article devoted to the relationship between the N-Town Plays and liturgy. Granger bravely attempts to negotiate the various anomalies of N-Town (no existing dramatic records, no geographical home base, not being a civic cycle play, etc.) through a reading of the manuscript's use of liturgy, and, as she later argues, possible liturgical uses. This book is at its best when it clings closely to its stated goals but becomes problematic when it excludes current theory and what we know about theatrical and scribal practices. The book is divided into five chapters: "Setting the Scene," "Text in Context," "Liturgy in Play," "Other Connections," and "The Evolution of the N-Town Play and Its Audience." In the first chapter, Granger draws from Catherine Bell's Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions and notes that because of N-Town's extensive use of liturgy that N-Town appears to be a drama closer to "ritual performance." Granger's use of Bell and her insights about "ritual activity" are promising and could yield new insights about late medieval religious practices. On the other hand such an "all is ritual" approach can create confusion. In chapter 3, Granger oversimplifies N-Town's relationship to the church calendar by assuming that it is a Corpus Christi play because it is so laden with liturgy (121). N-Town scholars, for a while, have assumed that the Banns would more likely announce a Trinity Sunday event rather than Corpus Christi. There are other theoretical problems in the book that limit the readings for N-Town. From the beginning of the book, the author posits that N-Town may have been a closet drama, a liturgical, or devotional aid for reading, but ignores the fact that the manuscript has unmistakable prompt notes for production in the margins. When she does discuss staging, her readings are both limited and limiting. At one point in the first chapter (11), Granger notes that N-Town's place-and-scaffold staging provides "little opportunity for … simultaneous action" (3), an odd observation considering that simultaneous action is clearly indicated in several stage directions in Passion Play 2. At the end of the first chapter, she suggests an old notion which also reveals her theoretical approach to N-Town: The Quem Queritis trope, for example—became drama within liturgy and thence part of the liturgy itself.… Could it also be argued, then that N-Town, with its liturgy-within-drama, might be read as an evolutionary link between liturgy and secular drama? (29) Seeking an evolutionary link between liturgy and secular drama seems somewhat anachronistic: most early English drama scholars have moved beyond evolutionary [End Page 92] theories. In many regards, Granger's approach to N-Town operates in the vein of E. K. Chambers and O. B. Hardison. The similarities to other formalist and old historicist approaches continue in chapter 2 in which she observes that "Liturgy … cannot be viewed through the lens of cultural studies" (38). The chapter continues to read N-Town typologically and liturgically, sometimes arriving at unusual readings. The author typifies N-Town as a highly orthodox text, one that avoids references to heresy. This is a bizarre notion, considering that Jesus (in Passion Play 2) is called both a heretic and a "lollar." At other points Granger argues for the liturgical intent and textual unity of N-Town, confusing form with function when she states: "One has to assume here that the original intention was for the play to go round local communities and various liturgical pieces to be performed" (69). Even though Granger freely admits the piecemeal, anthological status of N-Town as a manuscript, she still maintains that the manuscript is a single play (or...

Shakespeare's Everyman: Measure for Measure and English Fundamentalism

The accession of James I triggered an outpouring of religious literature, including Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, which was performed before a royal audience on December 26, 1604. With over thirty biblical allusions and a conspicuously scriptural title, Shakespeare's most biblical play is also arguably his most medieval play, as its allegorical structure and homiletic themes mimic those of the medieval morality play. While Shakespeare's play participates in the religious celebration of the new monarchy, it does so with rich irony, revealing stark contradictions in English political culture. The play's medievalism and its biblical allusions critically expose the efforts of some English Protestants to authorize power on the basis of a fundamentalist reading of the Bible. The biblical interests of Measure for Measure also respond to the king's censure of the Geneva Bible, an act that reinforced the tight relationship between biblical interpretation and the foundations of authority.

Shakespeare's Theater Games

In Shakespearean drama, the conception of acting as “play” was shaped by an inheritance of medieval “player” routines and strategies and by the environment of the professional Elizabethan theater. Arguing from a theoretical and practical discussion of the role of “play” in medieval drama, using the example of Mankind, this essay examines how the actor, seen as engaged in both collaborative and competitive play, can illuminate certain strategies in Shakespeare's work. Examples drawn from Richard III, Twelfth Night, Much Ado about Nothing, and King Lear illustrate how different kinds of playerly routines register the actor's dramatic situation on stage and how these scenes are deployed for the poetic and dramatic ends of the works. These deployments register a distinctly premodern approach to the energies of the theatrical occasion, an approach that is submerged by later developments.

&lt;i&gt;The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre Claire Sponsler The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre. Edited by Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher. 2d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xxii + 400; 38 illustrations. $90 (cloth); $29.99 (paper). A glance at the Index to the second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatrehighlights some of the changes that have taken place in the field of early English drama studies since 1994, the year in which the original edition was published. Newly added entries covering such topics as animals in plays, audience, Boy Bishop, church ales, Clerkenwell, Lord of Misrule, suppression and decay of plays, transvestism, traveling companies, and Yiimimimangaliso—The Mysteries, chart a broadened field that includes more paratheatrical material, a wider geographic scope, and new areas of scholarly inquiry. These changes extend to other parts of the volume as well. The revised edition still contains twelve chapters, but there is an additional editor (Alan Fletcher, joining Richard Beadle), three new authors, one topic dropped and another added, several changed titles that reflect currently preferred terminology in the field, and updated and expanded discussions and bibliographies. Fresh content is provided for the introduction; a chapter on the Cornish drama has disappeared, replaced by one on "The Cultural Work of Early Drama"; and chapters on "The York Cycle," "The Towneley Cycle," and "Saints' Plays" are now renamed "The York Corpus Christi Play," "The Towneley Pageants," and "Saints and Miracles." The volume also includes a number of new illustrations, especially of modern productions, and a map of East Anglia showing places mentioned in the text. The bibliography and notes to individual chapters have been brought up-to-date, while new subheadings have been added throughout for easier reading. These deletions, additions, and expansions mirror recent work on medieval English theatre. The scholarly activity of the past decade and a half has led to a rethinking of the kinds of performances the extant dramatic texts represent (hence the change from "The Towneley Cycle" to "The Towneley Pageants"), has pushed beyond the well-known scripts of the Biblical plays to embrace texts that today look non-dramatic but may well have been performed, and has discovered performances for which no play-texts survive. At the same time, inquiry has shifted away from the two critical modes that dominated medieval drama studies in the 1990s—archival research and modern reenactments—and toward cultural studies approaches that are attuned to the complex relations linking past and present. Like its predecessor, this revised edition presents itself as a standard guide to [End Page 234]the field of English drama from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. Its chapters cover the major kinds of plays in the period—especially Biblical cycles and pageants, moralities, and saints' plays—while providing an introduction to key interpretive issues, extensive discussion of modern performances or medieval plays, and a guide to criticism. As we might expect from a volume that envisions itself as an authoritative handbook of the field, there is little that's cutting edge in this revised edition, but the material has been updated and accurately reflects current scholarship. Thus the wealth of new material that has been discovered about early theatrical conditions is for the most part adequately represented in this revised volume. The reediting of many texts of early English plays, work that has yielded important bibliographic information about the textual corpus, is frequently noted. Also making an appearance are results from the archival evidence that continues to be published (particularly under the auspices of the Records of Early English Drama [REED] project) and interpreted, as well as findings about original performance occasions that have been gleaned from modern revivals of early plays. To accommodate this fresh material, individual chapters from the first edition have been revised, some more extensively than others. These include "The Theatricality of Medieval English Plays" (Meg Twycross), "The York Corpus Christi Play" (Richard Beadle), "The Chester Cycle" (David Mills), "The Towneley Pageants" (Peter Meredith), "The N-Town Plays" (Alan Fletcher), "The Non-Cycle Plays and the East Anglian Tradition" (John Coldewey), "Morality Plays" (Pamela King), "Saints and Miracles" (Darryll Grantley), and "A Guide to Criticism...

Games Medievalists Play: How to Make Earnest of Game and Still Enjoy It

This essay extends Johan Huizinga’s analysis of the concept of play as expressed in language, with particular attention to the shifting semantics of the words “play” and “game” in English over the course of the Middle Ages. It also considers the relationship between playing and interpretation in Huizinga’s own work and in medieval literary studies influenced by him. If play is the way a society expresses its interpretation of life and the world (as Huizinga claims in Homo Ludens ), and if much medieval literature and art are the remains of medieval play and game (as he claims in The Waning of the Middle Ages ), then granting these texts the importance they deserve, interpreting them “seriously,” requires us to play their game: to draw a sort of magic circle around them, to play by rules, such as avoiding anachronism, and to play roles, such as trying to perceive as a person would at that time.

W. W. Greg and Medieval English Literature

Greg had a developed interest in medieval literature that can be seen in more than forty books, editions, articles, and reviews. These included writings on palaeography and codicology, the Middle English lyric, Chaucer, alliterative poetry, and medieval drama as well as on more general questions of editorial method. This body of material is a neglected aspect of his oeuvre. Given the extent of W. W. Greg’s achievements in the fields of Renaissance drama and textual criticism, it is perhaps understandable that relatively little attention has been paid to his work in other branches of scholarship. But the range of Greg’s interests extended more widely. And his work on medieval English literature was a preoccupation particularly in the earlier stages of his career. His examination of subjects in this area encompassed a number of different genres and topics in which he evidently had a serious interest. Since no adequate biography of Greg exists there is some value in trying to set this largely ignored aspect of his scholarly career in perspective. In his posthumously published Biographical Notes 1877–1947 Greg talks about his academic interests in the first decade of the twentieth century and observes that:

Angus McLaren, Impotence: a cultural history, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. xvii, 332, £19.00, $30.00 (hardback 978-0-226-50076-8).

Angus McLaren, Impotence: a cultural history, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. xvii, 332, £19.00, $30.00 (hardback 978-0-226-50076-8).

The Earliest Middle English Interludes

The Earliest Middle English Interludes Stephanie Thompson Lundeen (bio) The extant manuscripts of Middle English plays map the poles of medieval manuscript production. At one end stands the magisterial York Register (British Library, MS Additional 35290), a prodigious effort, as Clifford Davidson has shown, in terms of its costly material components as well as in its aspirations to determine the text of the York cycle.1 At the other pole lies another British Library manuscript (Additional 23986), a small roll of vellum measuring a mere twenty-four inches by three inches.2 Originally used to copy down an Old French poem praising Simon de Montfort and his barons (of which its recto side contains eighty lines), its verso side preserves eighty-four lines of a play with the heading "Hic incipit Interludium de clerico et puella." Identified by Andrew Taylor as among the few known "genuine working texts" of medieval performers, this fragmentary Interludium evokes a class of performances almost too ephemeral to have been recorded.3 Such performances—the interludes and other non-cycle plays of late medieval England—are those to which Darryl Grantley refers when he bemoans the "paucity of material" surrounding the origins of English theater, with "the problem being that play texts did not enjoy the status of literary, chronicle or devotional writing and were thus relatively unprotected from the depredations of time."4 As a result, Grantley can identify only two English-language dramatic texts that predate 1400. The first is the Interludium de Clerico et Puella, and the second, the fragmentary morality play Pride of Life.5 Historical records have, as yet, yielded no additional texts: while the Records of Early English Drama project has uncovered evidence of minstrel performances from this era that might arguably have included interludes, the project has not discovered any interludes per se. Recently, however, Allen J. Frantzen and Carol Symes [End Page 379] have each proposed methods by which additional early dramatic works might be identified. Drawing on both approaches, I demonstrate that the corpus of early English interludes should include three additional texts: Dame Siriz, De Clerico et Puella, and Harrowing of Hell. As a genre, the interlude proves difficult to define. Although Grantley expansively includes all non-cycle medieval drama in English under this rubric, I begin by following the definition of J. A. W. Bennett and G. V. Smithers. Noting that the term interludium appears in England alone during this period, Bennett and Smithers argue that "the nature and the origin of the kind must be deduced from English evidence."6 They conclude that the English interlude is the equivalent of the Old French farce, of which Le Garçon et l'aveugle from the late thirteenth century is an example. The earliest extant use of the anglicized form of the term supports their more specific usage. In the final stanza of the first fitt of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, King Arthur reassures his startled queen: "Wel by-commes such craft vpon Cristmasse—/ Laykyng of enterludez, to laӡe & to syng" (Such artistry is well suited for Christmastime—the performing of interludes, in order to laugh and to sing; 471–72).7 In occasioning laughter, the interludes referenced in these lines pull away from devotion and point toward farce. Such a description characterizes not only the Interludium but especially Dame Siriz (often labeled a farce) and De Clerico et Puella. The final text here under discussion is, however, a religious one, yet it is one that still fits under Grantley's expansive umbrella of non-cycle religious plays. The only further characteristic uniting the four plays is simply that, like the farces, Harrowing of Hell is short. Since a meaningful generic definition does not obtain, the texts' dramatic qualities must supply the evidence for their status as interludes. Modern generic definitions of drama tend to emphasize such properties as a stage, costumes, and designated roles for multiple actors. Allen J. Frantzen has recently argued that the critical emphasis on these aspects has distorted our view of medieval dramatic activity. Working from a semiotic perspective, he proposes the expansion of the category of medieval drama to include some poetic texts from the Anglo...

The History of Medieval Theatre / Theatre of Medieval History: Dramatic Documents and the Performance of the Past

AbstractTheatre history has long been a sub‐discipline of literary criticism or, more recently, performance studies; it is usually not the province of trained historians. While potentially problematic for the study of any period, this trend has had a particularly limiting effect on the study of medieval drama and its larger historical contexts. This article explains why, offers a brief overview of medieval theatre's modern history and the current state of intellectual inquiry, and then suggests some historical uses of dramatic texts and of performance itself as an analytical category.

Children's Play in the Later Medieval English Countryside

This paper presents the preliminary results of an investigation into the extent to which evidence for Late Medieval sub-seigniorial rural children's play might be observable in the archaeological record. It first considers whether children in the Medieval period are likely to have engaged in play, and where they spent their time. Drawing on evidence from a range of disciplines including history, art history, folklore and archaeology it then investigates the nature of the activities likely to have been carried out during play and considers their likely physical manifestations. Excavations of three rural settlement sites in southern England are then examined in order to establish whether any features recorded during excavation correspond to those which would be expected to result from the sorts of play engaged in by Medieval rural children. The paper concludes by affirming why the correct identification of evidence for children's activities is so important.

Remembering Doomsday: memoria in late medieval English drama and iconography*

Much critical attention has been devoted in recent years to the analysis of the medieval artes memorativae. The concern with the arts of memory, as exemplified by the recently collected translation...

Discursive Competition in the Towneley Crucifixion

1 All quotations from the Towneley Crucifixion are from Towneley Plays, ed. Martin Stevens and A. C. Cawley, 2 vols., Early English Text Society, s.s. 13 and 14 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 287-308. This and subsequent citations will be noted par enthetically within the text by stanza and line. manuscript, San Marino, CA, Hunting ton Library MS HM 1, recently has been dated to the mid-sixteenth century (Barbara D. Palmer, Recycling 'The Wakefield Cycle': Records, Research Opportunities in Renais sance Drama 41 [2002]: 88). MS most likely did not have any connection to actual per formance, and probably was copied from several exemplars (Stevens and Cawley, eds., Towneley Plays, xv and xxiv-xxv). 2 For the planctus's roots in both the Eastern and Western traditions, see Rosemary Woolf, English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 246 48; and Woolf, English Mystery Plays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 264-65. For further discussion linking the planctus with the Byzantine Marian lament, see George R. Keiser, The Middle English Planctus Mariae and the Rhetoric of Pathos, in Popular Literature of Medieval England, ed. Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville: Uni versity of Tennessee Press, 1985), 169. For a discussion of the relationship between the non-dramatic English planctus and the miracle plays, see George C. Taylor, The English 'Planctus Mariae,' Modern Philology 4 (1907): 605-37. discursive similarities and devotional motifs common between English medieval drama and the English religious lyrics of the late Middle Ages are far too numerous to be listed here, but see Taylor's The Relation of the English Corpus Christi Play to the Middle English Religious Modern Philology 5 (1907): 1-38; and Woolf's English Religious Lyric, passim, and English Mystery Plays, passim. 3 Scholars have long challenged the idea that the Towneley plays constitute a uniform cycle compiled by a single author/reviser. There is not the space here to detail the some times contentious debate concerning the authorship and provenance of the plays, but for an account of the major arguments, see Palmer, Recycling 'The Wakefield Cycle,'

‘Die judden sollen dis spiel in iren husen bliben! [The Jews should remain in their houses during this play]: The Ghettoisation of the Frankfurt Jews as Mirrored in Urban Plays

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The fact that Alec Parker's first article, published in his twenties, was on medieval drama is not in itself remarkable. A number of scholars made a good beginning as medievalists, but the seed pro...