Medieval Theatre Research Articles

Song in Morality Plays and Interludes by Peter Happé

264Comparative Drama tive and independent investigation. This is only one way in which the ideas contained in a bibliography like Brandt's could be used in classroom teaching as well as in personal research. For instance, students in courses on critical theory might read the section on Doctor Faustus with an eye not only for the different specific arguments each critic makes but also for the different theoretical assumptions each one takes for granted. To read Brandt's book is to be reminded that there are not only different arguments but different ways of arguing—not only, that is, different specific interpretations but different ways of reading. To be exposed to such differences in such rapid-fire fashion can be exhilarating or frustrating, but in either case it is enlightening. Not the least value of such a book is that it makes it easy to listen to many more voices, and consider many more possibilities, than one might otherwise seek out on one's own. Plowing through a work such as Brandt's can help keep a reader both current and alert, both honest and humble. The worth of a work like this depends mainly on its breadth, depth, and index. Brandt's work is strong in all three respects. All of Marlowe 's works are covered, and the annotations are almost always helpfully full and are usually very lucid. In addition, as Constance Brown Kuriyama notes in her "Foreword," "Professor Brandt has also been remarkably conscientious in sifting through works which do not take Marlowe as their primary subject, thus helping his colleagues locate pertinent material in places where they do not normally expect to find it" (p. ix). An intelligent introduction outlines the volume's scope and methods, and if the index inevitably misses some subjects covered in particular entries, such oversights are hard to fault. One might wish that dissertations were briefly described rather than simply listed; often some of the best work on any topic never finds its way into "permanent " print. But nit-picking is always easy; doing the kind of solid, lasting work that Brandt has accomplished is difficult. We owe him thanks. ROBERT C. EVANS Auburn University at Montgomery Peter Happé. Song in Morality Plays and Interludes. Medieval Theatre Monographs, 1. Lancaster: Medieval English Theatre, 1991. Pp. iv + 121. £12.00. If the importance of song in early drama needed verification, Peter Happé's Song in Morality Plays and Interludes would provide ample evidence. The author has studied sixty-one plays from 1425 to 1590, finding "219 occasions for song . . . , 147 texts or titles of songs, and a further 59 cues," along with the possibility of other songs that may Reviews265 have been performed. The number of songs suggests the wide repertoire available in dramatic productions; their uses range from expressing emotion, underlining plot, identifying characters (broomsellers, ratcatchers, barbers, among others) to accompanying the stage business of exits and entrances. The variety of songs indicates that music was one of the pleasures expected and provided in theatrical performances and that the players were accomplished and "versatile enough to sing frequently, in many different moods, and in many different combinations of voices." In fact, over twice as many part as solo songs can be distinguished, and the verse forms of the texts are of an "astonishing variety." All of this material is discussed in an introduction and organized in an alphabetical Index of songs, burdens, and titles and a chronological list by play of song texts and cues. One appendix provides a chronological list of plays, a second the texts of songs from Bèze's Tragédie of Abraham's Sacrifice, translated by Arthur Golding. The alphabetical Index and the two chronological lists are cross-indexed. Each entry in the Index of songs gives, where the information is known, the play's title, date, cues, singers, name of tune, surviving music, and other sources/analogues. Despite the seemingly methodical presentation, however, the book is in no way user-friendly. For instance, a reader wishing to study the songs in a particular play must know the date (drawn primarily, but with some puzzling and unexplained differences, from the 1964 edition of Annals of English...

Is the courtesan of Eguchi a Buddhist metaphorical woman? A feminist reading of a Nō play in the Japanese Medieval theater

(1992). Is the courtesan of Eguchi a Buddhist metaphorical woman? A feminist reading of a Nō play in the Japanese Medieval theater. Women's Studies: Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 431-456.

Rethinking Zeami: Talking to Kanze Tetsunojo

is a representative of one of the oldest and most influential families in noh theatre, a descendant of its pioneers-Kan'ami (1333-1384) and Zeami (1363-1443). Kanze is the name of the school he represents, while Tetsunojo is a hereditary artistic name of the masters in his branch of school. He works in a group named Tessenkai and is the eighth Tetsunojo-hasse (Master Tetsunojo). He is the grandson of Kasetsu (1884-1959) who, on his part, contributed greatly to the revival of noh following its breakdown at the end of the Igth century when Japan opened its borders to the outside world. In the '50s together with his two brothers, Hisao (died 1978) and Hideo-both outstanding noh actorsstarted another battle for the survival of noh which, as an art imbued with a nationalistic and militaristic spirit, was forbidden by American censors during the occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1951. The Kanzes started Hana-no kai (the Association of the Flower) in order to stage the best noh pieces and to discuss them in the context of Zeami's treatises. They also wanted to direct and stage the best Western classics (including ancient Greek drama) using the techniques of Japanese traditional performing arts and began to collaborate with Western-style theatres. Tessenkai was the first company to perform noh outside of Japan, at the Venice Biennale in I956. Hideo and Hisao played in several of Suzuki Tadashi's productions: in 1972, Agamemnon, and in 1978 The Bacchae. They opened their traditional stage in Tokyo to performances of French artists Jean-Louis Barrault in 1977 and Juliette Greco in 1983. Barrault participated in a symposium comparing techniques of noh to French pantomime. participated in theatrical experiments to a lesser degree than his brothers. Instead he devoted himself to educating young noh actors. From 1975 to 1979 I was Tetsunojo's first pupil from Europe and a zealous reader of Zeami's treatises. Thus my frequent meetings with were filled with conversations and discussions about tradition, medieval theatre theory, and its uses in contemporary culture.

The Staging of the Assumption in Europe

One of the most widely used plots in the late medieval religious theater and one that offers perhaps the greatest variety of staging throughout European countries is the Death and Assumption of the Virgin Mary. There are, of course, numerous and different staging solutions to the scenographie problems presented by this and other stories in different regions of the continent. Interestingly, in contrast to Northern Europe where the mythological past had been marked by terrible deities with a resulting tendency for drama to emphasize scenes of hell and its devils, the South, where the cultural background had been a previous classical mythology with an anthropomorphic and gentle Olympus, preferred displays involving Paradise and using bold aerial machines. These are two different theatrical emphases, both of which express from opposite cultural bases the great messages of the Christianity that after all had come into being as a religion within the classical Roman world.

John Gower: Recent Readings ed. by R. F. Yeager

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER inaccuracy is not high enough to prevent a general understanding of the play, it is sufficient to mislead the reader in certain details. Wright provides generally reliable translations of the passages quoted from his plays. In one instance, however, the misreading and faulty punc­ tuation ofthe editor have led him to misconstrue the text. In the quotation on p. 108 there should be a period after esforce, and, two lines ti. ·• .r nn should be ou. The corresponding translation should read: "They ,u:e ,1ot afraid ofmarried women; ifthey capture them, they rape them. They never cease cursing and renouncing [God] or blaspheming [him]." In another instance the wordpersonnages (p. 162) does not mean "worthy men" but is short for/eux de personnages ("plays"), which strengthens Wright's argu­ ment at this point. The following editorial errors distort the meaning of several quoted passages: p. 152, Romme should be comme; p. 167, the scribe deleted orguei/after grant; p. 175, veent should be beent ("desire"). We are greatly indebted to Stephen Wright for this penetrating study of a hitherto obscure domain of medieval theater. He sheds new light on a legendary theme that pervaded people's thinking in the late Middle Ages, and he teaches us that to ignore its dramatic expressions is to risk a serious misunderstanding of late-medieval culture. ALAN E. KNIGHT Pennsylvania State University R. F. YEAGER, ed. John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of theJohn Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-1988. Ka­ lamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1989. Pp. xv, 366. $15.95 paper. These thirteen essays continue the energetic enterprise of the John Gower Society to bring criticism of Gower and his poetry to the attention of the medieval sect. They evince such careful reading and such learning as to abash summary criticism, but that is the difficulty with reviews of collec­ tions. The two essays that I find most interesting are Yeager's own piece, "Did Gower Write Cento?" and Patricia Eberle's "Miniatures as Evidence of Reading in a Manuscript of the Confessio Amantis." Yeager raises the question whether Gower consciously endeavored to compose "cento" verse, 262 REVIEWS that is poems created by weaving together lines and line parts borrowed from the works ofrenowned poets ofearlier times. He cites examples ofthis sort ofcomposition as a formal art form inprefifth-century Latin and Greek and i:i the Renaissance and offers a good analysis of Gower's use of the technique in /iox Clamantis. But apropos the question in his title, he does not remark that composing in cento must have been a universal practice in learning to write LatinundertheEmpire and throughout the Middle Ages, as it continued to be until this century. (There is a lovely paragraph in Robert Graves's Good-Bye to All That about his entertaining himself in churchduring a sermon by manipulating the quantities ofwords in linesof Latin verse.) Writing this sort ofverses must have been standard practice in Gower's and Chaucer's education. These were not simply "schoolboy pla­ giarism" but a recognized technique employed by teachers to fix the values ofsyllables and rhythms in the minds ofstudents who were going to have to use them in the "cursus" rhythms that indicated phrasing in the ars dictaminis. Yeager's analysis ofthe process by which Gower wove borrowed lines ofLatin into personal statements is excellent. But his assertion ofthe uniqueness of Gower's method and the possible influence of A. Faltonia Proba's Cento "Vergzlianus remain to me open to question until we know more about the use of the cento method in teaching Latin composition. Yeager and Alastair Minnis are ideal people to tell us more about this. Patricia Eberle has produced a very interesting analysis of the way in which the 110 illustrations in MS Morgan M.126 display an understanding of the ordinatio and forma tractandi of the Confessio Amantis. She con­ cludes that, although they are by several artists, the miniatures evidence such faithfulness to the tales and awareness of the plan of the poem that they must have been commissioned by someone familiar not only...

Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture by Marvin Carlson

Reviews189 formance. The links between Elliott's pronouncements and the material available to him from the sources he explores in previous chapters often seem tenuous. The illustrations are clear and helpful although one would welcome more pictures from places other than York, and a photograph of William Poel in Everyman (not difficult to procure) would have been a pleasant tribute to one of the pioneers. Plate 5, claimed on page 90 to show Lucifer's expulsion from Heaven in the 1963 York production, is correctly captioned "Judi Dench as Mary, York Festival, 1957" on page xvi. There are also more typographical errors than might be expected from this prestigious publishing house. In a similar way this book from one of our most active and admired commentators on medieval theater leaves one wishing that Professor Elliott had not had to leave quite so many gaps in his lively account of mystery plays in a modern context, and that he had extended his final conclusions beyond what are on too many occasions no more than the expression of sound personal opinions. By doing so he would undoubtedly have drawn the practices he has observed and the theories he has formulated into an even closer relationship. WILLIAM TYDEMAN University College of North Wales Marvin Carlson. Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. Pp. 212. $36.95. A semiotic analysis of this volume suggests that it is calculated to impress. Entering the book is rather like the street approach to one of the ducal palace theatres that Carlson describes, with a "formal, regular, and powerful" (p. 25) vista preparing the way. The reader progresses from the attractive glossy cover with its crisply-reproduced painting of a medieval marketplace performance, through purple endpapers, to a list of eight books "also by Marvin Carlson" (which the theatre historian will recognize as seminal works), to the book's title emblazoned across two pages, over a bird's eye view of New York's Lincoln Center complex. Inside, the high-quality paper, wide margins, beautiful typeface, and 105 illustrations combined with on-the-page footnotes usually referring to out-of-the-way sources in foreign languages implies that the publisher was trying to have it both ways: a coffee-table book for casual readers and a scholarly book for academics. These signifiers in the book's design—which were presumably not a part of Carlson's own contribution—may have done him a disservice, for they inflate expectations of the book's importance. Does the text fulfill the promise of the presentation? Well, it does and it doesn't. Certainly, Carlson thinks and writes lucidly. He has something substantial to say to the specialist, and he couches it in language accessible to the layman. What the study does, it does elegantly. Like the entertainments in those ducal palaces, it dazzles its audience but ultimately leaves it wanting more. The purpose of this study of the physical theatre through the ages 190Comparative Drama is to explore "how places of performance generate social and cultural meanings of their own which in turn help to structure the meaning of the entire theatre experience" (p. 2). To accomplish this, Carlson's Introduction proposes and justifies a semiotic methodology. Chapter 1, "The City as Theatre," shows how and why the center of medieval theatrical activity moved about the entire city; it suggests further the political factors involved in the reshaping of cities from labyrinths of winding streets suitable for medieval processions to the wider vistas on a regularized grid that developed in the Renaissance along with the practice of royal entries. Chapter 2, "The Jewel in the Casket," juxtaposes two quite different manifestations of performance space embedded within private space: the self-congratulatory exclusiveness of court theatres, and the political defiance of private performances like Sir William Davenant's operas at Rutland House during the Commonwealth or the kind of "living room theatre" hosted by courageous dissidents in modern Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. The discussion of the theatre's placement within the city in Chapter 3, "The Urban Hub," is perhaps the most interesting, original, and wide-ranging (from classical Greek theatres to London's Barbican) section...

Playing God: Authenticity in Fifteenth-Century English Drama

Years from now when an archeologist like Sir Arthur Evans discovers Boise, Idaho, she will find a great cathedral, with a gallery and with side chapels along the nave and the choir. At the east end, the holiest part of the great cathedral, she will find the largest and most glorious chapel of all dedicated to the goddess Bon Marche. Polymer statues of the goddess adorn every pedestal, and at their feet, gifts of clothing, the tribute of the people. There will be no need to provide evidence that this is a religious structure. Its cruciform design, the presence of the icons, the lavish piles of rich clothing all fit with everything known of the religious practices of western European and North American society. Yet we, who live in the decade when this great structure was built, would call it a shopping mall. The archeologist may be right when she suggests that shopping is a part of our religion in the twentieth century, but our view of the situation is very different. Our motivation for going to shopping malls, and our way of thinking about them and talking about them and using them is entirely different from what evidence in the future may conclusively prove. Our situation with regard to medieval English drama is not unlike this. We have a certain amount of evidence, and it seems to point a certain way, but increasingly scholars have recognized their inability to ascertain what theatre was like in fifteenth-century England. Combined with this uncertainty principle, however, has come a new thirst for historical authenticity in performances of medieval drama. As we have desired more and more to capture and reproduce the essence of medieval English drama, we have been forced to admit the impossibility of achieving that experience. Given this paradoxical combination of factors, scholars have adopted a number of approaches. William Tydeman's English Medieval Theatre 1400-1500 exemplifies an increasingly respectable approach: honest acknowledgment of a lack of irrefutable information combined with willingness to speculate based on what is known. But it is still possible to write with a minimum of speculation, as Martin Stevens demonstrates in Four Middle English Mystery Cycles, by refusing to deal with the performance question and instead addressing the cycles strictly as works of literature. Alternatively, by presenting a history of medieval play performance from the Middle Ages until today, John R. Elliott, Jr., in Playing God: Medieval Mysteries on the Modern Stage, shows that it is possible to present verifiable information about the plays while still considering actual production. These three books represent a range of responses to the problem of authenticity in fifteenth-century English drama.

Playing God: Medieval Mysteries on the Modern Stage by John R. Elliott, Jr.

Reviews185 Russell Jackson's survey of Victorian Hamlets serves as prelude to Wilhelm Hortmann's analysis of Hamlet productions since Helmut Kohl and the Christian Democrats came to office in West Germany in 1983. Hortmann's essay is one of several that confirm Shakespeare's continuing status as a cultural institution not only in England and the United States but in other parts of the world as well. There are papers on Shakespeare in Germany (Klaus Bartenschlager), Czechoslovakia (Martin Proch ázka), India (S. Viswanathan), and Japan (Tetsuo Kishi), the last of particular interest to Shakespeareans preparing for the 1991 Congress in Tokyo. Royal Shakespeare Company director Adrian Noble concludes the volume with comments on his experience in directing As You Like It and on the challenges that face contemporary directors of Shakespeare's plays. His invitation to enter the Forest of Arden might have served as the prelude to this volume rather than its conclusion. For it lures us into the imaginary world of Shakespearean theater, a world celebrated by the Third Congress and by this volume, which will "live/ to bear his image and renew his glories." If I may be permitted one cavil—and that a personal one: it is a pity that the names and paper titles of all who participated in seminars were not included in the appendix, which lists lectures, papers, and seminars and their chairpersons. The Congress was fuller still than these proceedings suggest. JUNE SCHLUETER Lafayette College John R. Elliott, Jr. Playing God: Medieval Mysteries on the Modern Stage. Studies in Early English Drama, 2. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989. Pp. ? + 186. $45.00. As one of the few medieval theater scholars fortunate enough to have read the English cycle plays for the first time not as classroom texts but as dramas ripe for performance, I applaud the pragmatic thrust of Professor Elliott's new study. When Gordon Honeycombe was preparing to stage a life of Christ made up of episodes from the major sequences with a cast drawn from University College, Oxford, in the chapel of Pusey House during February 1960, I was one of the quartet of writers responsible for modernizing the Middle English originals. (We all then assumed that the texts had to be modernized for presentday audiences.) This presentation, staged by rather than at University College, as Elliott suggests, was repeated in the elegant Georgian church of St. Mary's, Edinburgh, as part of that year's Festival "Fringe." In 1962 I staged virtually the same plays in Bangor Cathedral in North Wales; ten years later I created my own unmodernized version of the cycles for performance by a cast of 120. I mention these productions at the outset not so much to augment Professor Elliott's account—his survey is necessarily selective—as to testify personally to the extraordinary impact the cycle plays have made on so many and such various Uves since their revival in per- 186Comparative Drama formance during 1951. What Playing God sets out to do is to chronicle the struggles and frustrations experienced by those British pioneers who sought to present medieval religious dramas in the United Kingdom between the nineteenth century and the 1950's, and to describe the principal cycle presentations staged up to 1980, a cut-off date which sadly fails to permit discussion of the National Theatre's The Mysteries in its entirety, logical terminus though this might seem. The opening chapter, "Mysteries Suppressed," succinctly traces the development of opposition to performances of scriptural drama in Britain, its roots in Protestant dogma, and its branches in Tudor legislation whereby the "cultural legacy" of Puritanism became embedded in governmental attitudes which helped to curtail theatrical freedom well into the present century. In accounting for the disappearance of cycle performances in mid-sixteenth-century England, Elliott steers clear of the complexities of competing theories and contents himself with the simplest explanation available, namely that reformist ardor alone brought about the demise of live representations. Prejudice against the plays there undoubtedly was, and his is a study in prejudice; whether or not it provides the sole key to the mysteries' end is left unexplored. After the passing of the Stage Licensing Act...

English Medieval Theatre 1400-1500

English Medieval Theatre 1400-1500

A Companion to the medieval theatre

A Companion to the medieval theatre

Drama and ceremony in early modern England: the REED project

In 1976 a medieval and renaissance theatre history project was launched under the masthead Records of Early English Drama (now more familiarly known as REED). The official launch had taken two years of planning by scholars from Britain, Canada and the United States, and was given assurance for the future through a ten-year major Editorial Grant from the Canada Council. REED's stated goal – then as now – was to find, transcribe and publish evidence of dramatic, ceremonial and musical activity in Great Britain before the theatres were closed in 1642. The systematic survey undertaken would make available for analysis records relating to the evolution of English theatre from its origins in minstrelsy, through the flowering of drama in the renaissance, to the suppression first of local and then of professional entertainment under the Puritans.

The Medieval Theatre (review)

The Medieval Theatre (review)

The Mist�re du si�ge d'Orl�ans as a Representational Drama

The Mistère du siège d'Orléans as a Representational Drama V. L. Hamblin Université de Haute Bretagne Since the rediscovery of its only known manuscript some 150 years ago, the Mistere du siège d'Orléans has provoked inquiry on two different though not entirely distinct levels: first, from scholars who gleaned from the text facts relevant to its historical narration; and second, from other scholars who dissected the text for clues pertaining to its composition and intended audience. In the first case, study was directed at the play's depiction of events in fifteenth-century Orléans and especially at the portrayal of a girl called "Jehanne la Pucelle." In both areas the text was judged to be historically accurate but of little interest because its chronological base was the contemporary history already recorded in the chronicles of the day. This chronicle in verse, as one historian called it (Quicherat 5: 79), was thereby relegated to the category of sociodrama . In the second case, study has been directed at the question of authorship as well as at the relationship between the text and the perennial celebrations held in Orléans. Like many other misteres, the Siège d'Orléans remains an anonymous composite with, in this case, sections deriving from about 1435 to the end of the fifteenth century. While evidence continues to build toward confirmation of its role in commemorative performances in Orléans, most interest has focused on problems encountered in dating the manuscript. In any case it is clear that the vast panorama presented on the folios of the Mistere du siège d'Orléans has attracted attention of a generally socio-historical nature, that is, in reference to what the play might reveal about the events themselves, about the 120 historical characters who parade through more than twenty sites, and about the customs and crises of the Orléanais population in the fifteenth century. All of the above are essential and valuable pursuits, but they have resulted in the trivialization of investigations into the dramatic or literary value of the text. In 1868, Henri Tivier reported that the Siège d'Orléans offered "une trame fort lâche et une singulière mobilité d'action" (175), because it dramatized events in an episodic or chronicle-like fashion. While Tivier conceded that the overall chronological plan provided a natural unity to the text (112) and that the author-compiler had successfully capitaliz >n the dramatic effect of the events (115), he added that "Ie principal intérêt consiste le plus souvent dans un rapport aussi exact que possible entre la chose et l'image qu'en offre la scène, où rien n'est donné à l'étalage de l'esprit, tout à la ressemblance pouss ée jusqu'à la plus fastidieuse exactitude" (116). One hundred years later, another analysis agreed that the Siège d'Orléans's "adherence to 61 62Rocky Mountain Review historical and chronological fact certainly mars the play as a literary work" (Krnacik 116). From such criticism it would appear that the drama's manipulation of facts, or more precisely the manner in which the historical facts are fictionalized, has disappointed scholars of medieval theater. This mistere is not alone on this count, of course, since critics have often lamented in other mysteries what they perceived to be naive presentation rendered interesting by complex staging. The Siège d'Orléans could be held guilty on both points. While the text contains some faulty poetry and is necessarily repetitive, it is spectacular in its production . Oceans, boats, break-away towers, bridges, and numerous dead bodies are only some of the many props and engins required by the action-filled scenes of this drama. However, it is precisely in its dependence on historical fact that the Siège d'Orléans departs from the standard subject matter of mystery plays. Rather than depicting a narrative selected from Biblical lore or the saints' lives, the authorcompiler chose contemporary events involving historical personages, some of whom may have participated in an initial performance of the drama. We might contrast this drama with another fifteenth-century play, the Mystère...

Medieval Theatre in the Lowlands: Secular Drama

Medieval Theatre in the Lowlands: Secular Drama

REVIEWS

REVIEWS English Medieval Theatre 1400–1500. By WILLIAM TYDEMAN. Pp xiv+ 222 (Theatre Production Studies). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986. £25 net DAVID MILLS DAVID MILLS Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 150, May 1987, Pages 239–240, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXXVIII.150.239 Published: 01 May 1987

Drama and its intellectual climate: the roles of Mary and Christ in some German miracle and eschatological plays

Drama and its intellectual climate: the roles of Mary and Christ in some German miracle and eschatological plays In late medieval German religious drama we find a number of plays which involve the intercession of the Virgin Mary on behalf of sinners who have asked her to represent them before Christ as the Heavenly Judge. The development of these heavenly court scenes is fairly similar in all cases, seeing that they are based on a common religious and dramatic tradition, and we find much the same motives and epithets for the Virgin recurring again and again. The outcome of these contests between Mercy and Justice differs however, depending on the theological problem or exemplum involved. Certain conditions must be fulfilled if a sinner is to be saved at all, and it would seem to have been unthinkable for the clerical authors to fly in the face of orthodoxy simply in order to provide their audiences with a happy ending. There is no point therefore in accusing the author of the Zehnjungfrauenspiel (i.e. the Ludus de Decern Virginibus, the "Play of the Ten Virgins")l of excessive severity in having the fatuae (the foolish virgins) consigned to Hell despite their own and the Virgin's pleas. The parable in Matthew 25:1-13, on which the play is based, is designed to warn us that there will be no second chance for those who have not prepared in time for the hour of judgement. Similarly, we may be amazed to see such abject sinners as Theophilus, who sold his soul to the devil, or the wicked Pope Joan, who died giving birth to her bastard child, admitted to the ranks of the blessed. But again it is not for us to argue against such unjustifiable clemency, but to acknowledge the fact that they repented in time and could therefore be saved. The questions we are entitled to ask though are: Why was a play as severe as the Zehnjungfrauenspiel staged at a certain time and place? Why was the theme of damnation developed quite so relentlessly; in other words, why introduce the Virgin as Mediatrix when her intercession was destined to fail? And conversely: What didactic point did the authors of the Theophilus or the Juttenspiel pursue in letting their audience witness the success of Mary's intercession, particularly in the case of Pope Joan, where such intercession and the sinner's salvation were by no means an integral part of the legendary tradition? Can we speak of a softening of attitudes between the early fourteenth century, when we first hear of the Ludus de Decern Virginibus having been performed,2 and the 1 Karin Schneider, Das Eisenacher Zehnjungfrauenspiel, Berlin, 1964 (hereafter, Schneider). All references to the text in this paper are based on this edition. 2 Ibid., 8. 118 E. von der Helder late fifteenth century, when the Pope Joan play was written?3 I do not presume to give an answer to all these questions, but I hope to throw at least some light on the issues involved. One of the major difficulties we encounter in trying to establish the presence or absence of "trends" in German medieval theatre, particularly with respect to plays written before the last quarter of the fifteenth century, is the very uncertain information we have to rely on. Only a few manuscripts have been preserved; most of them are corrupt, and we can only guess at a play's original form and the time and place of its first staging, not to mention the anonymous author's motivation in producing it, or the audience's response. Chance references in chronicles or other contemporary sources tend to concentrate on some incident or mishap connected with the occasion rather than on the play itself, and they provide few clues concerning the extent and popularity of dramatic activity in the localities concerned. We have in fact very little to go on in deciding whether a given play is in any way typical of its time or region, and in what way it contributed to subsequent dramatic developments. It is all the more regrettable, therefore, that so little advantage appears to have been derived from the one...

Theater of Impotence: The One-Act Tragedy at the Turn of the Century

Although the one-act play has enjoyed its florescence during the last hundred years, the roots of the genre go back much further. Precursors of the form may be found in the short, comic scenes produced by the medieval theater, particularly in Spain and England, and in the Shrovetide plays popular in Germany during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In its modem form the one-act play first appeared in seventeenth-century France, where it was cultivated by Moliere and others, and it proliferated in Germany during the following century. Yet throughout these years and even down through most of the nineteenth century, the one-act play was a subsidiary form. Its subject matter was rarely serious, and it was most often performed either as a "curtain raiser" or prelude to a longer play, as an intermezzo to entertain the audience while scenery and costumes were being changed, or as an afterplay, for example to cheer up viewers following a tragedy.

The Play of Wisdom and the Abbey of St. Edmund

English literature has a venerable tradition of poems inspired by piles of old stones. But medieval drama historians too must be moved to curiosity by the ruins and ciphers that remain to hint at the lost coherence of a past we want to know. Indeed, such clues point us at a past we must know, for medieval theater in its time performed functions as immediate and practical - as grounded in human need, festival, and community - as medieval Christendom itself. The registers of dialogue that survive can only become resonant when they are reunited with the spectacle that made them art and with the contractual purpose and context that made them exist at all. The drama historian's search for the coordinates of time and place, for dramatic provenance and motive, is neither empty academic exercise nor gossip but is, I believe, central to the assumption that to know the medieval theater means to know it as fully as we can in its human particularity. This article begins with a play in search of a place, the fifteenth-century morality play called Wisdom - and with a pile of old stones. These stones, these ruins (fig. 1) must stand for a monastic house that for over five hundred years was one of the great cultural centers of England, where learned Benedictine monks copied manuscripts and wrote sermons and saints' lives, supervised their vast estates, quarreled with the grasping merchants

The Staging of Twelfth-Century Liturgical Drama in the Fleury Playbook

1 COMPARATIVE drama Volume 18 Summer 1984 Number 2 The Staging of Twelfth-Century Liturgical Drama in the Fleury Playbook David Bevington In what sense do the ten plays of the so-called Fleury Playbook employ a common theatrical tradition of staging and presentation? Do they share, among themselves and with other twelfth-century church dramas at Beauvais and elsewhere, cer­ tain assumptions about the architectural church interior as stage space, or is their approach to staging the haphazard result of varying sources and redactions?1 Did the Benedictine brethren who mounted these plays have in mind a common method of dramaturgy for their productions? What conventions of pre­ sentation can be adduced from regarding the Fleury play texts collectively as scripts indicative of theatrical performance? Through what sort of figurative language do gesture and stage movement convey meaning? These are the questions I should like to pursue here, much as Bernard Beckerman, John Styan, Ann Slater, and others have recently looked at Shakespeare’s DAVID BEVINGTON, Professor of English at the University of Chicago, has published extensively on both the medieval theater and Renaissance drama. He is the editor of Homo, Memento Finis, a collection of essays on the Last Judgment in drama and art to be published by Medieval Institute Publications. 97 98 Comparative Drama play texts as primary indications of how the plays were per­ formed.2 The method of analysis is a fairly recent one, even for Elizabethan and Jacobean drama,3 and has been applied only seldom to medieval church drama.4 The clear advantage of doing so is that play texts and their stage directions or rubrics in any age both explicitly and implicitly contain vital informa­ tion about staging not always reliably available through iconographical or other external sources. To move from the now-familiar terrain of stage-oriented analysis of Shakespeare’s plays into twelfth-century church drama, on the other hand, is to encounter immense differences in the very concept of stage “action” and the symbolic meaning of gesture. Medieval religious drama began with no clearly recognized view of itself as dramatic spectacle. The earliest tropes and dramatic ceremonials celebrated as part of the order of worship for Easter, in various monastic communities of the tenth and eleventh centuries, derived their language from the liturgy and their visual images from ritual practice. From a theatrical point of view, the language is repetitive, characteriza­ tion is often inadequately motivated, and gesture is ceremonial. Even though some rubrics encourage the participants to use affective gesture, as in the Regularis Concordia at Winchester where three brethren dressed as the three Marys are to move haltingly to the sepulcher “in the manner of seeking for some­ thing” as though in imitation (ad similitudinem) of the women coming to anoint the body of Jesus,5 the event remains liturgical rather than theatrically mimetic. In such a liturgical milieu, we need to be cautious about assuming that “performance” could aim at expressive use of gesture or arrangement of theatrical space in any consciously theatrical sense. The concept of an “audience” was essentially foreign to the conditions under which the early ceremonials were performed: monastic brethren chanted an office among themselves, even when tropes of a dramatic character were added. In the choir where they assembled, they had little occa­ sion to worry about “sight lines.” The structures and properties they employed were by and large liturgically determined. Be­ cause the story being presented was so well known and the occasion it celebrated so close at hand, their very texts need not concern themselves with consistency of characterization or motivation.6 The lines of sung dialogue in Easter dramatic ceremonials were to be found in the liturgy, and were ultimately David Bevington 99 based on scriptural account. Bearing such sanction, they did not require further elucidation. Nonetheless, as liturgical drama began to achieve self-aware­ ness of its potential for theatrical performance, it inevitably needed to deal with such considerations of dramaturgy as audience, stage movement, employment of properties and struc­ tures, and the like. This essay proposes that the Fleury Playbook gives evidence of such increased theatrical awareness. The Fleury Playbook holds a key position among collections...

St. Francis and Medieval Theatre

St. Francis and Medieval Theatre