Records Of Early English Drama Research Articles

The Wells Cordwainers Show: New Evidence Concerning Guild Entertainments in Somerset

The Wells Cordwainers Show: New Evidence Concerning Guild Entertainments in Somerset James Stokes Very little information survives concerning craft guild enter­ tainments in Somerset. The records of the guilds themselves seem to have disappeared, and few references occur in other civic records. One of the substantial pieces of evidence is the well-known list, in a Wells Corporation Acts Book, describing six guild shows staged for the Queen on 20 August 1613 during her visit to Wells (see transcription in the Appendix to this paper).l According to that list, the masters and wardens of six Wells companies representing fifteen local occupations prepared shows which included presentations of their respective company arms, several morris dances, and a variety of pageants. While the brief descriptions survey the broad features of the shows, they provide few details concerning the entertainments— the number of actors, the staging, the content, the nature of the presentations themselves. In the absence of further evidence, the list of shows is cryptic at best. Fortunately, a series of original guild accounts prepared by the Wells Cordwainers, one of the six companies who staged the shows in 1613, has come to light at the Somerset Record Office.2 The accounts, which encompass the period from 1606 through 1720, contain several references to the Cordwainers’ show for the Queen.3 Thus they provide clarifying details concerning not only some features of one of the shows on the list but also what may be the only contemporary guild descrip­ tion by the participants themselves of a guild performance held JAMES STOKES is Assistant Professor of English at the University of WisconsinStevens Point. He is editor of a volume-in-preparation, The Dramatic Records of Somerset, for the Records of Early English Drama. 332 James Stokes 333 in Somerset. The accounts additionally contain information concerning the organization and practices of Somerset craft guilds in the early seventeenth century. In these several respects, they provide a much needed contribution to our understanding of guild entertainments in Somerset. According to the list in the Corporation Acts Book, the Cordwainers were: The Ffowerth companie The Cordyners who presented St. Crispian and [sic] both of them sonnes to a kinge and the youngest a shoemaker who married his Masters daughter they allsoe presented a morrice daunce and a Streamer with their armes.4 While this summary identifies three elements—a morris dance, a streamer and arms, and a presentation involving St. Crispin and St. Crispianus, the patron saints of their company—it tells little else about the nature of the show.5 The Cordwainers’ accounts add a number of helpful details, beginning with the costs of the show. The first entries relevant to the entertainments occurred at the company’s annual account­ ing on St. Crispin’s Day, 25 October 1613, two months after the Queen’s visit. Outgoing master John Crese reported expenses of vjh js jd for an “Item layd out when her maiestie Came to wells as by to severell billes it dothe a pere. . . .”6 The incoming master, John Eddicott, reported an additional 5s. “payd to John Crese towardes his Charges when the quenes maiesties Came to wells”7 and an Item dealivered to phillipp stille in mony ijs iiijd.8 The combined expenses of £6 8i. 5d., though relatively modest compared to what might have been spent by a wealthy company, were the largest ever recorded in the Cordwainer accounts and depleted nearly all the company’s current funds. Only lOy. 10d. remained in the accounts when Crese declared his account in October 1613.9 All other references to the show occur as a narrative section of the subsequent account which was made 25 October 1614. The scribe began by reporting that the company had Reseaued more in goods that our master John bukstone hathe in his kustody The wiche was boughte to make the shoue for the master shoumakers againste the queans [ane] Cumminge to wells wiche was shouen before queane ane the twentye day of auguste 1613 of our kings Raine. . . .10 334 Comparative Drama Apparently, the “severell billes” and “charges” were primarily for this new playing gear. Bukstone (Buxton) was elected master on 25 October 1614. One of...

Records of Early English Drama: Newcastle-upon-Tyne ed. by J. J. Anderson

Records of Early English Drama: Newcastle-upon-Tyne ed. by J. J. Anderson

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access Records of Early English Drama: Coventry. Edited by R. W. INGRAM. Pp. lxxvi + 716. Toronto: University Press; Manchester: University Press, 1981. £55 net. ANNE HUDSON ANNE HUDSON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XXXV, Issue 140, November 1984, Pages 522–524, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXXV.140.522 Published: 01 November 1984

Records of Early English Drama. York

Records of Early English Drama. York

Malone Society Collections XI: Records of Plays and Players in Norfolk and Suffolk, 1330–1642 ed. by David Galloway, John Wasson

82 Comparative Drama Malone Society Collections X I: Records of Plays and Players in Norfolk and Suffolk, 1330-1642 [ed. David Galloway and John Wasson], The Malone Society, 1980/1. Pp. xxii + 224. This volume, a handsome and useful addition to the Malone Society Collections series, is the distillation of an immense effort on the part of the editors David Galloway and John Wasson. (Galloway is responsible for the records of Great Yarmouth and Wymondham, Wasson for the rest.) Although much of the material has been printed before, much new material is added, and we may be fairly confident that, with the excep­ tions noted below, the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk have been searched with all the thoroughness which could reasonably be expected given the current state of archives. Professor Wasson, who is responsible for the Introduction, notes that generally speaking Norfolk and Suffolk do not possess archives which have been carefully maintained and jealously guarded over the years (cf. Kent), but rather broken series, fragments, and occasional documents which have survived more by luck than by design. The surviving Nor­ folk and Suffolk records are therefore of an extremely miscellaneous nature, and can give only a hint of the rich traditions of minstrelsy, folk plays, civic entertainment, and professional drama which characterized East Anglia prior to 1642. Nor are the records orderly enough for us to extrapolate in a systematic fashion normative patterns of civic production or standard itineraries of travelling players. Furthermore, the volume is incomplete for its geographical area by design. First, it does not reproduce material from Aldeburgh, Ipswich, and Stoke by Nylands which, in the editors’ judgment, has been published satisfactorily elsewhere; nor does it include the extensive records of Norwich, which are scheduled to be published by Records of Early English Drama in several volumes, one of which (1540-1642) has already been announced. (Note Wasson’s article, “Records from the Abbey of St. Benet of Hulme, Norfolk,” REED Newsletter, 2 [1980], 19-21, in which he publishes material discovered too late to be included in Collections XI.) Second, the editors have excluded repetitive entries concerning civic waits, material which would probably have been included if the volume had been published by REED. In spite of these limitations, the volume is a rich one and will be found of interest to every scholar of medieval and Renaissance drama. Of special significance are records from private households (Felbrigg, Hunstanton, and Hengrave); prolific records from King’s Lynn, Snettisham , Swaffham, Thetford, Wymondham, Bungay, and Ipswich, all testi­ fying to remarkable community interest in music and drama; and such individual items as extensive pageant lists from Ipswich, numerous references to the “Game place” from Great Yarmouth (beginning in 1492/3), and detailed provisions concerning musical instruments for the waits of King’s Lynn. Also of great value is Professor Wasson’s Introduction, which is packed with useful observation and caveats. The volume does have a distinct flaw in its nearly total absence of bibliographical apparatus. Although many excerpts have been printed previously and although these publications must have been useful to the Reviews 83 editors in identifying documents and entries, no attempt is made to acknowledge in a systematic or even perfunctory way the contributions of earlier scholars. It is also quite unclear which entries have long been known and which are printed for the first time by the present editors. Other problems arise also. Since Aldeburgh is not given a separate listing, the reader is left to wonder, in the absence of a bibliography, where to look for the records of this town. (The information is buried on p. 206 in a note entitled, “List of Companies by Patrons and Places of Origin.”) No assistance is given to the reader who may want to know more about the Great Yarmouth “Game place,” even though a number of articles have appeared on the subject, including Richard Beadle’s “The East Anglian ‘game-place’: a possibility for further research,” REED Newsletter, 3 (1978), 2-4, which cites Professor Galloway’s own ‘The ‘Game Place’ and ‘House’ at Great Yarmouth, 1493-1595,” Theatre Notebook, 31 (1977), 6-9. I assume that the editors must have debated whether to...

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access Records of Early English Drama: Chester. Edited by LAWRENCE M. CLOPPER. Pp. lxxiv+592. Toronto: University Press; Manchester: University Press, 1979. £35 net. ANNE HUDSON ANNE HUDSON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XXXIII, Issue 131, August 1982, Pages 313–314, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXXIII.131.313 Published: 01 August 1982

Chester ed. by Lawrence M. Clopper

284 Comparative Drama there are layers and dimensions of Ibsen’s art that call upon the resources of our learning but, unless that learning keeps in mind both the great traditional function of the theater and the transformation of that func­ tion by Ibsen into radical purposes as large and as profound, Ibsen scholarship will be of interest only to a small coterie of specialists. BRIAN JOHNSTON London, England Chester. Ed. Lawrence M. Clopper. Records of Early English Drama, Volume 3. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1979. Pp. lxxiii + 591. $40.00. Lawrence Clopper’s edition of the Chester dramatic records is an extremely impressive addition to the Records of Early English Drama series. Like the two earlier REED volumes (on York), Chester is admirable in its every aspect. Handsomely bound, attractively printed, it is a volume which has been researched, edited, cross-referenced and proof-read with meticulous care. There is little doubt that Clopper’s edition will stand indefinitely as the authoritative collection of Chester’s dramatic records. However, because this volume has had to be a compilation of more than just dramatic records, it suffers from one obvious problem—an imbalance in the entries it includes. It is REED's design to publish for each pertinent English city, from the “beginning” to 1642, evidence not only of all dramatic activities but of “minstrelsy” and “ceremonial” as well. Since these three areas are at times interrelated and in some docu­ ments are well-nigh indistinguishable, this is a generally sound editorial policy. It works extremely well with Chester’s records up through 1575, the last year of the cycle’s performance. Soon after this date, however, the records show all local public dramatic production coming to a halt, while minstrel and ceremonial activities continue to thrive and surviv­ ing records of them continue to increase. The result is that Chester’s is a lop-sided collection of data, more than two-thirds of which represent those many non-dramatic festivities produced annually after the cycle’s demise and up through the closing of the nation’s theaters in 1642. It is conceivable that some historians will find Chester’s non-dramatic records for these years quite interesting, and will be richly rewarded by tracing sixty-seven years’ expenditures on, say, the ribbons for the shoes worn by the Child in the Midsummer Show. Most readers, however, will browse through these late entries and will concentrate instead on the earlier documents relating directly to the production of plays in Chester. The main reason for the institution of the REED series is that medieval English dramatic records have until now been showing up piecemeal, often supplied by less-than-impartial scholars to support their own theories of how the plays were originally produced. Before any definitive dramatic history could be written, it was felt that all pertinent documents had, once-and-for-all, to be found, edited, and made avail­ Reviews 285 able to all scholars. Clopper’s volume performs this service for Chester with extraordinary thoroughness and care. Testimony to the breadth of Clopper’s research is the fifty-page introduction to the documents con­ sulted. These documents include city assembly books, mayors’ books, city treasurers’ account rolls, mayors’ lists, sheriffs’ lists, the cycle banns (early and late), various ecclesiastical records, the records of two dozen guilds, and hundreds of sixteenth-century antiquarian collections and compilations. A number of these records have never before been con­ sulted for this purpose; the entries taken from them all have for the most part never before been published. Proof of the care with which these items have been untangled, transcribed, dated, and identified is found in Clopper’s extensive end-notes. These notes offer further infor­ mation about many entries, candidly explaining difficulties that still pertain to some; they cite all appearances of items previously published, note errors of earlier transcriptions, and correct earlier misinterpretations of the evidence. The more one consults these end-notes, the more confident one becomes of the reliability of Clopper’s general editorial procedures and the care with which his thousands of individual judgments have been made. The glory of the volume is of course...

Records of early english drama and the computer

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the role of computer in the preservation of records of early English drama. Since 1790, when Edmond Malone printed excerpts from the diary of Philip Henslowe, the major Elizabethan theater owner, literary antiquarians, and theater historians have eagerly searched for early English dramatic records. After the Malone Society was founded in 1907, partly to publish records of the professional theaters of Renaissance London, much information became available in its collections volumes, but many medieval provincial records were left unedited. In 1975, Records of Early English Drama (REED) was created by a team of researchers to edit and index documentary evidence for all performance and performers of drama, minstrelsy, and ceremony throughout Great Britain from the beginnings to 1642. Computer technology has already been helpful in editing. A Toronto program, Concordance Generation System (COGS), has produced, for the volumes of the York and Chester records, concordances that have been invaluable in verifying, glossing, and indexing texts by hand.

Records of Early English Drama

Records of Early English Drama

Records of Early English Drama, Devon;<br>Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain: A Chronological Topography to 1558

Records of Early English Drama, Devon;<br>Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain: A Chronological Topography to 1558

Records of Early English Drama: York. Volume 1: Introduction, The Records. Volume 2: Appendices, Translations, End-notes, Glossaries, Indexes

Records of Early English Drama: York. Volume 1: Introduction, The Records. Volume 2: Appendices, Translations, End-notes, Glossaries, Indexes

Chester: Records of Early English Drama

Chester: Records of Early English Drama