Early Theatre

Mrs Noah and Didactic Abuses by Jane Tolmie

Abstract

This essay returns to the issue of female recalcitrance in the Noah plays from York, Chester and (in particular) Towneley, with an eye to postmodernism’s emphases on (1) the importance of violence to the begetting of culture and (2) the impossibility of representing so-called real violence onstage as it is inevitably contained by representation. Given that Mrs Noah is beaten or forced onto the Ark in all three plays, this article also addresses the question of whether and how violence against women in farce plays can ever be real or serious, and also of whether and how female resistance to this violence, or female violence, can be real or serious in its turn. In York and Chester, Mrs Noah raises her voice in mourning for friends and relatives, and in the Towneley play insists on remaining behind to work. The story of the Ark has its obvious cruelties; the inclusion of Mrs Noah’s resisting voice is one way of making these cruelties present and real for the audience. But much of interest remains to be said about a feedback loop that makes it possible for female rebellions in themselves to justify displays of force within these plays.

Biography

Jane Tolmie has a DPhil in medieval theatre from University College, Oxford, and a PhD in medieval studies/English from Harvard. She has particular interests in gender theory, theatre, and the comparative study of vernacular texts. She is currently a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows where she is writing a book called The Female Exception, which juxtaposes two familiar critical categories, the strong woman and the romance heroine, in the context of a larger exploration of female exceptionalism in a range of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century texts.

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The Certainty of Uncertain Knowledge: The Collaborative Authorship of The Changeling by Richard Nochimson

Abstract

This essay argues against the passive acceptance of received wisdom about collaborative authorship of plays in early modern England, focussing on The Changeling as an example of a play for which the extremely limited availability of external evidence concerning the authorship of the play makes reliance upon so-called ‘internal evidence’ equally problematic. It notes that, in discussions of this and other plays, there is a tendency to disregard potential complexities such as the possibility of scribal or compositorial intervention or the possible existence of an additional, unnamed collaborator. The essay argues against the persistent, often unstated, assumption that collaboration usually consisted of individual work on separable portions of a play, demonstrating that we have no evidence — certainly not in Henslowe’s Diary, where many scholars assume it exists — that separate composition of individual acts of a play by different playwrights was the normal method of collaboration by the professional dramatists of the period. With regard to The Changeling, the essay’s conclusion is that the ways in which the different parts of the play fit together with each other suggest the possibility that this unified and successful play was created by collaborators who, in one way or another, worked together rather than separately.

Biography

Richard L. Nochimson , Professor of English at Yeshiva University in New York City, is the author of articles and papers on the plays of Shakespeare and on Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. He is the general editor of the Pegasus Shakespeare Bibliographies, a series of annotated bibliographies published by Pegasus Press of the University of North Carolina at Asheville (five volumes published so far, out of a projected twelve volumes).

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Playhouse Calls: Folk Play Doctors on the Elizabethan Stage by Richard F. Hardin

Abstract

The English mumming play (formerly “Saint George play”), though of uncertain age, has many analogues in European countries, some dating before 1500. The doctor with his cure recurs in these analogues and in some plays of the Tudor era. Plays by Dekker, Chapman, and Middleton-Rowley are added to the list, as well as plays by Shakespeare with doctor and cure. The cure perhaps evokes a ritual of social healing linked to a folk doctor of English oral tradition.

Biography

Richard F. Hardin is Professor of English at the University of Kansas. His most recent book is Love in a Green Shade: Idyllic Romances Ancient to Modern (2000) which in part attempts a reception history of Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe. Most of his scholarship has dealt with English Renaissance literature. The interest in comedy that led to the article in this volume has also developed into his current longer project, a study of the reception of Plautus in the sixteenth century.

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The Performance of Disguise by Peter Hyland

Abstract

Assuming that on the early English stage there must frequently have been the need to distinguish a disguised character from a doubled character, this note considers the problems arising from time constraints and the pressures exerted upon a company’s wardrobe, to make some suggestions about how disguise might have been performed. It suggests that frequently disguised identity could not have involved a change of costume as such, but must have been signalled by some kind of costume shorthand.

Biography

Peter Hyland , Professor of English Literature at Huron University College, has published Disguise and Role-Playing in Ben Jonson’s Drama (1977); Discharging the Canon (ed. 1986); Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida (1989); An Introduction to Shakespeare: The Dramatist in His Context (1996). He is currently completing a book on Shakespeare’s non-dramatic poetry.

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Kathleen Ashley

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Deborah Cartmell is Subject Leader and Principal Lecturer in English Literature at De Montfort University, Leicester. She is co-editor of the Film/Fiction series and has published on Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare and film, and literary adaptations. She is currently working on a book on film adaptations of children’s literature.

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Peter Happé is a Visiting Fellow in the English Department at Southampton University. He has edited mystery plays, moralities, and interludes, including works by John Heywood and Bale, and has recently published John Bale (Twayne) and English Drama before Shakespeare. He has just completed a study of The English Cycle Plays. He has also edited two plays by Jonson for Revels and is a contributing editor to the New Cambridge Jonson.

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David Hickman is a research fellow at the University of Sussex. His recent publications include Lincoln Wills 1532-1534 , Publications of the Lincoln Records Society, 89 (2001), and ‘Religious Belief and Pious Practice among London’s Elizabethan Elite’, Historical Journal 42 (1999), 941-960.

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James Hirsh is a Professor of English at Georgia State University. He is the author of The Structure of Shakespearean Scenes (Yale UP) and of critical commentary in The Ben Jonson Quarterly, Modern Language Quarterly, Essays in Theatre, EnterText, PMLA, Shakespeare Quarterly, and elsewhere. He has edited New Perspectives on Ben Jonson (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press) and English Renaissance Drama and Audience Response (the Spring 1993 issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination).

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Peter Hyland , Professor of English Literature at Huron University College, has published Disguise and Role-Playing in Ben Jonson’s Drama (1977); Discharging the Canon (ed. 1986); Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida (1989); An Introduction to Shakespeare: The Dramatist in His Context (1996). He is currently completing a book on Shakespeare’s non-dramatic poetry.

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Joan Larsen Klein , before her retirement in June 2001, was for many years Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She has published articles on Boccaccio, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, and edited Daughters, Wives, and Widows: Writings by Men about Women and Marriage in England, 1500-1640 (1992). She is currently working on dramatic re-creations of demonology and witchcraft by Shakespeare and other early modern playwrights.

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Linda McJannet , Professor of English at Bentley College in Waltham, MA, is the author of The Voice of Elizabethan Stage Directions: The Evolution of a Theatrical Code (1999). She has published essays in Shakespeare Quarterly, Theatre Research International, The Journal of Theatre and Drama, and College Literature and is currently working on representations of the Ottoman Empire in early modern history and drama.

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Raymond Rice is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maine at Presque Isle, where he teaches Shakespeare, World and Postcolonial Literatures, and Literary Theory. An essay on John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge is forthcoming in Studies in English Literature (Spring 2004).

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‘Arden Winketh at His Wife’s Lewdness, & Why!’: A Patrilineal Crisis in Arden of Faversham by Randall Martin

Abstract

This paper explores a cluster of critical and performance problems in Arden of Faversham: Arden’s apparent unwillingness to end his wife and Mosby’s affair; his permissive attitude towards the lovers’ meetings in his house; and his paradoxical outbursts of violence and friendship towards Mosby. The playwright ignored explanations offered by historical sources for Thomas Arden’s complacency as the overweening desire for material gain or social influence. Instead he interprets Arden’s motives differently, although these are not stated directly (and perhaps could not be, given Arden’s goals) and they are left implied by comparison with the wider social context and with other characters’ ambitions for property, status, and lineage. In a situation recalling that of his historical benefactor, Henry VIII, Arden’s urgent need is for a male heir to inherit his new wealth, and to establish his still-contingent gentle status. He therefore connives at his wife’s adultery in the hope that it will produce the heir he desires. At the same time, Arden publicly condemns Alice and Mosby so that a son will be regarded as legitimate. He must therefore perform in several opportunistic roles: ‘winking’ at, and thus passively enabling, the affair; melancholy and enraged by sexual jealousy. Arden’s dynastic ambitions, whose origins lie in the political ideology of primogeniture and the culture of early modern masculinity, blind him to his wife’s plans. They also lead to a deeply divided and improvised subjectivity, as he responds tactically to the threat of patrilineal extinction.

Biography

Randall Martin is Associate Professor and Acting Chair of the Department of English, University of New Brunswick. His most recent work includes Women Writers in Renaissance England (Longman, 1997) and Henry VI Part Three for the Oxford Shakespeare and Oxford World’s Classics, as well as articles on the First Tetralogy for The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare; the latter two volumes will be published this summer. He is currently preparing Women’s Crime Pamphlets and News Broadsides,1500-1700, for Series III of The Early Modern Englishwoman, a Facsimile Library of Essential Works (Ashgate / Scolar Press), and an edition of Every Man Out of His Humour for the Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson.

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Patrons and Travelling Companies in Warwickshire by Elza C Tiner

Abstract

Documentary evidence from the REED Warwickshire collection in progress (ed. Alan Somerset) provides the basis for analysis of regional ties of patrons of touring companies in Warwickshire prior to 1642. This analysis shows that the majority of patrons whose companies performed in Warwickshire also had large landholdings there or in neighboring counties. Payments to travelling companies suggest the relative importance of the patron’s rank and local influence. Evidence of payments to travelling companies survives in records from Maxstoke Priory, civic accounts from Stratford and Warwick (ed. Alan Somerset), the city of Coventry (ed. R.W. Ingram), and the household accounts of Henry, 7th Lord Berkeley (ed. Peter Greenfield).

Biography

Elza C. Tiner is Geraldine Lyon Owen Professor of English at Lynchburg College, Lynchburg, VA, where she teaches courses in medieval literature and in composition. Her publications include articles about law and rhetoric in the York Plays; medieval poet John Lydgate as a songwriter; and biographies of patrons of traveling companies for the following REED collections: Cambridge (ed. Alan Nelson); Cumberland/Westmorland/Gloucestershire (ed. Audrey Douglas and Peter Greenfield); Coventry (ed. Reginald Ingram); Devon (ed. John Wasson); York (ed. Alexandra Johnston and Margaret Rogerson); and in progress, Warwickshire/Staffordshire (ed. Alan Somerset). She has also published papers on applications of classical and medieval rhetoric in composition instruction.

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‘The Precious Body of Christ That They Tretyn in Ther Hondis’: ‘Miraclis Pleyinge’ and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament by Heather Hill-Vasquez

Abstract

In the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, Christ’s Passion, despite its fortunate result for humanity, emerges as the ultimate, condemning result of humans assuming an irreverent access to the divine–an irreverent access (resulting, in this case, in the torture of divine flesh at human hands) that both writers of the text describe as a chief characteristic of ‘miraclis pleyinge.’ Similarly, in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, cursory treatment of Christian doctrines, disregard for Church leaders, and assumed access to the divine–embodied in the sacred object of the host–result in a bloody version of Christ’s Passion, marked by human mishandling of sacred objects and topics. Offered in this paper as a point of comparison to the issues raised in the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament stages and illuminates a number of the chief points of the Tretise writers. Carefully shepherded and controlled by Church representatives who invoke the very doctrines and embody the very structure that the writers of the Tretise see as threatened or undermined by ‘miraclis pleyinge,’ what seems an irreverant reenactment of the Passion becomes in the Croxton Play an opportunity for redemption. What the writers of the Tretise see as the dangerous precedent of ‘miraclis pleyinge’–inappropriate human engagement of sacred objects and topics–the Croxton Play embraces as potential site for indulging spiritual desires and exploring religious belief, while reassuringly asserting the fundamental stability and authority of Christianity.

Biography

Heather Hill-Vásquez holds a Ph.D. from the University of Washington and is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Dayton. Her work focuses on early English drama, medieval women religious, and twentieth-century women writers, and gender studies. Her most recent work includes articles on the Chester Cycle, the Life of Christina of Markyate, and the Digby Killing of the Children.

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Timing Theatrical Action in the English Medieval Theatre by Philip Butterworth

Abstract

This paper examines the nature and role of timed action in the English medieval theatre. Analysis of the phenomenon is conducted through the explicit stage direction and conditioned by the needs of the performer. Notions of ‘instantaneousness’, ‘simultaneity’, ‘readiness’, and requirements ‘to wait’ as contained in explicit stage directions are investigated. The relationship between timed action and staging conventions is discussed through requirements for ‘stillness’, ‘silence’, ‘waiting’ and ‘walking about the place’. Additionally, the relationship between ‘acting’ and ‘not acting’ as witnessed by an audience is also discussed.

Biography

Philip Butterworth is Reader in Medieval Theatre and Dean of Research in the newly created Faculty of Music, Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Leeds. He has published articles on stage directions, staging conventions, and pyrotechnics. His book Theatre of Fire was published in 1998 for The Society for Theatre Research, London. He is currently working on two books: Theatre of Magic and Staging English Medieval Theatre.

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‘Once More Unto the Breach’: Katharine’s Victory in Henry V by Corinne Abate

Abstract

Needing to marry someone who can legitimate his aspiration for a foreign throne, Henry aligns himself with Katharine Valois, French princess, integral political figure, and emerging bilinguist, who provides Henry with the legitimacy his claim is heretofore without. This article interrogates Katharine’s role in allaying Henry’s anxiety of creating rightfulness–both with the power she possesses as a member of and pivotal place holder in the French royal family, and in her willingness to learn English–all while retaining an individual and solvent center of power, agency intact. Further, through a discussion of the Salic Law and its (ir)relevance to the final act of Henry V, the article attempts to explain why Henry inflicts his fervent wooing upon a woman with whom, many scholars have argued, he need not have bothered. Henry, therefore, a man engrossed with the idea of playing the role of king, needs Katharine to authorize his vision of familial justification that would both help erase the recent unscrupulous actions of Henry IV, and make a more peaceful, potentially smoother, and rigorously legitimized transition for Henry VI to ascend the thrones of both countries.

Biography

Corinne S. Abate holds a doctorate from New York University and has published articles on Paradise Lost, John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, and The Merchant of Venice. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Montclair State University and is currently completing an essay on filmic interpretations of The Merchant of Venice.

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Daniel Rabel and the Grotesque by John Astington

Abstract

This note examines some aspects of the iconography of the costume designs of the chief designer for the French ballets de cour in the 1620s and 1630s, locating a tradition of caricature and grotesquerie at least a hundred years old, with its origins in German graphic art.

Biography

John H. Astingtion is Professor of English and Graduate Drama at the University of Toronto. His publications include English Court Theatre, 1558-1642 (1999), and the chapter on “Playhouses, Players, and Playogers in Shakespeare’s Time” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies (2001). His work on the intersection between theatrical and visual culture has been published in various books and journals; other essays on this subject are forthcoming in Theatre Survery and The Oxford Middleton.

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Reading Acting Companies

Scott McMillin

Abstract

This collection of three papers, selected by Scott McMillin, highlights new scholarly work on the repertory of Strange’s Men, Pembroke’s Men, and Queen Anne’s Men.

Biography

Scott McMillin is Professor of English at Cornell University, where his courses cover the history of English Drama, Shakespeare, and American Musical Theatre. His books include The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, 1583-1603 (co-authored with Sally-Beth MacLean) and The Elizabethan Theatre and the Book of Sir Thomas More.

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Lawrence Manley

Abstract

The repertory of Strange’s Men, as it is represented in Henslowe’s records of their 134 performances at the Rose Theatre in 1592/3, contains an unusually large number of plays involving pyrotechnics, possibly including the staging of human immolations. Though pyrotechnics were a familar feature of traditional dramaturgy, such effects were used by Strange’s Men to represent acts of cruelty and judicial punishment that had an edge of topical relevance to English history and politics. The theatrical daring of pyrotechnics in the Strange’s repertory may thus have been part of a ‘company style’ that readily accommodated the politically daring and dramatically innovative work of Marlowe in The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at Paris and of the young Shakespeare in 1 Henry VI.

Biography

Lawrence Manley , Professor of English at Yale University, is the author of Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (1995). His current project, “Reading Repertory,” deals with relationships between Shakespeare’s plays and the company repertories of which they were a part.

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Roslyn Knutson

Abstract

Although Pembroke’s Men in 1592/3 had talented (if youthful) players and a patron in good standing with the queen, the company reportedly fell on hard times. No one knows why. Here I consider whether the problem might have been the repertory, which I explore in terms of the four plays known to be theirs (Edward II, 1 Contention, The True Tragedy, and A Shrew), or their touring schedule.

Biography

Roslyn L. Knutson , Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, is the author of The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Time, 1594-1613, (University of Arkansas Press, 1991) and Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Her essays have appeared in publications including Shakespeare Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Survey, and Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England.

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Mark Bayer

Abstract

In 1616, Queen Anne’s Men, under the management of Christopher Beeston, moved theatrical operations from the Red Bull, a large public playhouse in Clerkenwell, to the Cockpit, an indoor hall on the increasingly fashionable Drury Lane. The success of this move was overshadowed by a riot on Shrove Tuesday, 1617, in which apprentices damaged the new theatre, forcing the company to return temporarily to the Red Bull while the Cockpit was under repair. Narratives of this event tend to describe it either as an indiscriminate episode of civil unrest or, more cogently, as demonstrating a specific animosity towards Queen Anne’s Men because they were now playing the Red Bull repertory at a prohibitively expensive venue. In an effort to revise these received interpretations, I argue that the reasons for the riot go well beyond the release of aggression and issues of cost. The profit-driven motives of the Queen Anne’s Men violated communal principles of fair dealing and their abandonment of the Red Bull and Clerkenwell affected a more intangible sense of loss and indignation, placing pressures on local businesses that relied on the daily theatre traffic, and severely weakening charitable efforts within the parish.

Biography

Mark Bayer is a doctoral candidate at the Ohio State University, completing a dissertation on theatrical companies during the reign of James I. His awards include a Huntington Library Fellowship and a research grant from the Renaissance Society of America. “Is a Crown Just a Fancy Hat?: Sovereignty in Richard II” is forthcoming in Explorations in Renaissance Culture.

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Roberta Barker is Assistant Professor at Dalhousie University. She recently completed a doctoral dissertation at the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham on gender in recent performances of early modern tragedies.

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David Bevington is the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He has written extensively on medieval and Renaissance theatre, and is currently senior editor of an anthology of Renaissance drama for Norton.

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A. R. Braunmuller is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Recent publications include the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Macbeth and a critical book on Chapman’s tragedies. His New Penguin edition of Merchant of Venice appeared in 2000, to be followed by Hamlet in 2001.

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Lawrence Clopper is Professor of English at Indiana University and has written widely on medieval literature and drama.

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Garrett Epp is Associate Professor of English at the University of Alberta. He has published articles on various aspects and forms of early English drama, from cycle plays to stage sodomites.

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R. A. Foakes is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has edited texts by Shakespeare, Middleton, Henslowe, and Coleridge, and published on a wide range of subjects, including Elizabethan stages, cultural politics, nineteenth-century poetry, Marston, Tourneur, and of course, Shakespeare. Shakespeare Performed: Essays in Honor of R. A. Foakes, edited by Grace Ioppolo, appeared last year.

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Peter Hyland , Professor of English Literature at Huron University College, has published Disguise and Role-Playing in Ben Jonson’s Drama (1977); Discharging the Canon (ed. 1986); Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida (1989); An Introduction to Shakespeare: The Dramatist in His Context (1996). He is currently completing a book on Shakespeare’s non-dramatic poetry.

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William Ingram is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the author of many studies of the Elizabethan theatre, most recently The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theatre in Elizabethan London.

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Phebe Jensen is Assistant Professor of English at Utah State University. She has published articles on Renaissance literature and culture in Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance and Reformation, Criticism, and Literature and History. She is currently completing a book-length study of Catholicism and nationhood in early modern England.

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Roslyn Knutson , Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, is the author of Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (2001) and The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, 1594-1613 (1991). She is currently co-director of a production of The Tempest on the UALR campus.

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Marta Straznicky teaches in the English Department at Queen’s University. She has published articles on women’s closet drama in early modern England and has an essay on “Closet Drama” forthcoming in The Blackwell Companion to Renaissance Drama.

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Judith Weil is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Manitoba. She is author of Christopher Marlowe: Merlin’s Prophet, as well as various essays on Peele, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Webster. With Herbert Weil, she is co-editor of the New Cambridge King Henry IV, Part One. Her current projects include a book on service and dependency in Shakespeare’s plays, and a study of women’s anger in classical and Renaissance tragedy.

Early Theatre 3 (2000): The York Cycle
Then and Now
Articles
Introduction by Alexandra Johnston
Map of York
The City of York and Its ‘Play of Pageants’ by Peter Meredith
Places to Hear the Play in York by Eileen White
The Medieval Pageant Wagons at York: Their Orientation and Height by John McKinnell
Raging in the Streets of Medieval York by Margaret Rogerson
The Pageant Wagon as Iconic Site in the York Cycle by Ralph Blasting
High Places and Travelling Scenes: Some Observations on the Staging of the York Cycle by
Martin Walsh
Seeing and Hearing: Looking and Listening by Pamela King
Verbal Texture and Wordplay in the York Cycle by Richard Beadle
‘His langage is lorne’ (31/190): The Silent Centre of the York Cycle by Alexandra Johnston
Directors’ Notes
YORK 1998: What We Have Learned by Alexandra Johnston
PLAY 5: The Temptation and Fall by Garrett P J Epp
PLAYS 14-15: The Nativity / The Adoration of the Shepherds by Michael and Susan Barbour
PLAY 19: The Slaughter of the Innocents by Roland Reed
PLAY 33: The Judgment of Christ by Jonathan Herold
PLAY 38: The Resurrection by Karen Sawyer
PLAY 41: Christ’s Appearance to Thomas by Gwen Waltz
PLAY 42: The Ascension by Terri Cain
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PLAY 47: Last Judgment by Stephen Johnson
Overview on the York Cycle Performance by Joel Kaplan
WORKS CITED: A York Cycle Bibliography
Article Abstracts
The City of York and Its ‘Play of Pageants’ by Peter Meredith
Abstract
This paper first presents a brief overview of York’s physical growth and status as a mercantile
city and a county in its own right, and its relationships with the monarchy as they appear in royal
entries. It then moves on to examine the emergence of its Play from obscure beginnings in the
late fourteenth century, and to investigate the changing nature of the Play during its nearly 200-
year existence. The paper concludes with an investigation of the demise of the Play in the late
sixteenth century. Throughout, the paper emphasizes the instability of the evidence and the
necessity of open mindedness, and suggests that this essential absence of closure maintains the
value of the continued scholarly investigation .
Biography
Peter Meredith is Professor Emeritus of Medieval Drama at the
University of Leeds, England. His main area of research within medieval drama has been the NTown
manuscript of plays from which he has edited The Mary Play and The Passion Play. Most
recently he has produced an acting edition of Mankind. His primary interest has been and
remains in the practice of drama – he co-directed Mankind (1996) and directed Everyman (1997)
at Camerino and for the Leeds Medieval Congress. He is at present working on a full modernspelling
edition of the Towneley Plays, and on the liturgical drama section of the Cambridge
Documentary History of Theatre. He directed Play 20: Christ and the Doctors in the Temple at
the Toronto York Cycle.
Places to Hear the Play in York by Eileen White
Abstract
The unusual custom of using a procession of pageants playing at a series of preassigned ‘stations’
was the common practice in York. The route and each station can be ascertained from external
evidence. Bringing to bear historic and modern evidence from the actual spaces that survive on
the streets of York, the paper measures and describes each of the stations. Recent performances
in the streets of York are also considered and questions raised about the nature of the historic
performances.
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Biography
Eileen White holds a doctorate from Leeds University and is a private scholar working on
aspects of the local history of the West Riding of Yorkshire. She has done extensive research
into the records of the city of York and its playing places. When not recreating playing spaces
she recreates medieval banquets. She is a Research Associate of Records of Early English Drama
undertaking archival checking in many repositories in England.
The Medieval Pageant Wagons at York: Their Orientation and Height by John McKinnell
Abstract
This article considers some physical aspects of the medieval pageant wagons used for the York
Cycle. Many modern reconstructions have assumed that the pageants played side-on, but this
view rests on assumptions derived from modern theatre, medieval two-dimensional art, or the
demands of the open campus locations where many modern performances have taken place.
Comparative European evidence (drawings of early ommegang wagons, and surviving Spanish
pageant wagons) suggests pageants designed as three-dimensional pieces of street architecture,
transpicuous wherever possible, and aligned toward the front or the rear. The narrowness of
York’s streets and practical experiments in 1988 and 1992 at some of the most popular medieval
performance places strongly support this model; side-on performance in these places makes it
impossible for much of the audience to see the pageants and would sometimes involve placing
the property of the stationholder backstage, from where no view would be possible. Medieval
pageants were probably higher than most of those used today, with wagon decks five to six feet
from ground level and any upper storeys at least eight feet above the lower ones. Large pageants
like the Mercers’ Doomsday need a total functional height of over twenty feet, excluding spires,
pinnacles, etc.; and even this looks modest beside some drawings of ommegang wagons. The
larger wagons used a good deal of machinery; study of one type of machine, the functional lift,
suggests that it needed grooved pillars, pulleys and a drum winch. Such a machine could be more
safely and effectively mounted on an end-facing wagon than a side-facing one. The York wagons
were technologically and artistically ambitious, and our modern efforts have yet to match their
inventiveness or their flamboyant magnificence.
Biography
John McKinnell is Reader in Medieval Literature at the
University of Durham; he directed PLAY 22: The Temptation of Christ in the 1998 production at
Toronto and is editing the REED volume for County Durham. His work on early drama includes
modern-spelling editions of the Chester Cycle Moses, Balaak and Balaam, the York Cycle Mary
Plays and the English Mary of Nemmegen; articles on reconstructive productions of the Digby
Mary Magdalen and the York Mary Plays; and monographs and articles on early drama in
Durham (eg The Sequence of the Sacrament at Durham, Teesside, 1998). Videos are available of
his productions of the York Assumption of the Virgin (1988), Mary of Nemmegen (1989),
Cambises (co-production with David Crane, 1992), Dame Sirith and Calisto and Melebea
(1996), and Everyman (1999).
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Raging in the Streets of Medieval York by Margaret Rogerson
Abstract
In the processional performance mode that was the norm for biblical cycle plays in several
English towns in the Middle Ages, the area of the pageant wagon stage was a restricted one.
Modern ‘original staging’ experiments have shown that off-wagon performance has advantages of
additional playing space and the enhanced contact between performance and audience
occasioned when the actors appropriate the space otherwise occupied by the observers. A stage
direction in a sixteenth-century pageant text from Coventry indicates that off-wagon
performance was used in some performances of the Nativity pageant, where Herod was seen
‘raging in the street’. This article examines the possibility that the Coventry practice was followed
in York. It begins with a review of the records of the stage history of Herod, from Chaucer to
Shakespeare. From the evidence available, we can learn about the use of rhetorical gesture and
props in the expression of the tyrant’s rage, but not about movement around the stage area or into
the audience space. The discussion considers the common tendency of scholarly investigators to
assume that off-wagon playing was widely employed in York, and outlines evidence for it in
implicit stage directions in the York texts. It also explores the advantages and appeal of
performances confined to the pageant wagon stage. It draws on modern ‘original staging’
experiments with the York texts in 1992 and 1998, and the work of Shakespearean scholars as
well as medievalists. It concludes that we should keep an open mind about the viability of onwagon
performance and should not privilege off-wagon playing in our thinking about the York
Play.
Biography
Margaret Rogerson is a Senior Lecturer at the
University of Sydney. She co-edited the REED volume for York (1979) and has written a
number of articles on the York and Coventry plays and other aspects of early English drama. She
is currently working on a project to investigate the modern staging traditions of the the York Play
in York.
The Pageant Wagon as Iconic Site in the York Cycle by Ralph Blasting
Abstract
Theories of pageant-wagon dramaturgy have ranged from viewing the wagons purely as
processional tableaux with no intention of mimetic performance to investing them with all the
complexity of place-and-scaffold staging. This is especially true for the York Plays. The paper
examines specific uses of the street as platea in the York Cycle, arguing that such use was limited
specifically to its function as a contrast to the iconography of the wagon stage. Characters leave
the wagon or approach it as a means of interrupting or re-establishing the iconic moment
represented by that pageant. The dramatic effect on the audience derives from the disruption or
reconfiguration of the stasis of the site.
ET 3 5
Biography
Ralph Blasting is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department
of Theatre Arts at Towson University in Maryland. He has participated as a designer, director, or
technician in all four of the English cycle plays at the University of Toronto, most recently as
director of Towson’s production of the two Noah plays, Plays 8-9: The Building of the Ark and
The Flood, in the 1998 York Cycle. He has published numerous articles on the civic/religious
drama of medieval Germany and England; his review of Larry West’s translation and edition of
the Alsfeld Passion Play recently appeared in the Early Drama, Art, and Music Review.
High Places and Travelling Scenes: Some Observations on the Staging of the York Cycle
by Martin Walsh
Abstract
An argument for a more expanded use of the platea in staging certain (earth-bound) plays of the
York Cycle, based on the experience of producing Abraham and Isaac for the 1998 Toronto
project. Extended ‘travelling scenes’ focusing upon a high point (naked hill or elevated temple or
castle) are found throughout the Cycle, suggesting that significant playing at street-level with a
culminating action on the wagon-top was a distinct possibility for many plays of the Cycle.
Biography
Martin W. Walsh is Head of the Drama Concentration at the Residential
College and an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre & Drama at the University of
Michigan. He is widely published in medieval studies, particularly in the area of early German
theatre and popular culture. He is co-editor and translator of the Dutch Morality Mariken Van
Nieumeghen (1994). He is currently pursuing research on the carnivalesque aspects of the
festival of Martinmas as well as on the traditional characters of the contemporary Carnival in
Trinidad. Prof. Walsh founded ‘The Harlotry Players’ at Michigan in 1983 and has regularly
participated in the Cycle projects at the University of Toronto. The group has also produced
several original translations of German Carnival plays, Dutch farces and, most recently, a Polish
Easter play. He directed Play 10: Abraham and Isaac and Play 30: The Dream of Pilate’s Wife in
the Toronto York Cycle.
Seeing and Hearing: Looking and Listening by Pamela King
Abstract
This paper speculates about what modern reception theory, focusing as it does on assumed
cultural norms, can and cannot offer the student of medieval drama. It can, for example, throw
into relief the fundamental question of what we can know about medieval reception, so that we
avoid foregrounding the evident literary simplicity of some of these texts at the expense of
acknowledging their cultural complexities. The student of medieval theatre does well to proceed
with caution in speculating on or theorizing the relationship between medieval plays and their
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audiences. The relationship between speech and action deserves at least to be problematized.
Beyond that lies the wider challenge of reconstructing the differences between medieval and the
modern audience assumptions about the cultural event in which they are participating and its
relationship to the world they inhabit. The paper suggests, drawing examples from the York
Cycle, that a modern audience member cannot avoid imposing upon the plays contemporary
ways of seeing, particularly when it comes to scenic arrangement; the paper, therefore, avoids
closure.
Biography
Pamela M. King is a graduate of the Universities of Edinburgh (MA) and
York (DPhil). She taught at Westfield Colege, then Queen Mary and Westfield, in the University
of London, before taking up the post of Head of English at St Martin’s College, Lancaster, where
she holds a personal chair and is currently Associate Dean of Arts Humanities and Social
Sciences. Her work on medieval theatre includes a modern spelling selection from the York
Cycle (with Richard Beadle, Oxford, 1984) and a forthcoming critical edition (with Clifford
Davidson) of the two surviving Coventry Plays (Kalamazoo, 2000), as well as numerous articles
on English religious drama including the chapter on ‘The Morality Plays’ in the Cambridge
Companion to Medieval Theatre (ed Beadle, 1994). She is co-director (with Meg Twycross) of
the York Doomsday Project , working on a number of
electronic projects related to medieval drama. She also writes on contemporary Spanish religious
spectacle, on other English medieval literature, and on medieval tomb sculpture, and has recently
brought out the York Notes Advanced on ‘The Miller’s Tale’ (York Press, 1999).
Verbal Texture and Wordplay in the York Cycle by Richard Beadle
Abstract
A preliminary overview of the verbal texture of the York Cycle is developed with reference to
several broad contexts: the physical circumstances of processional production; the ‘audiate’
culture of the audience; the aural (as distinct from literate) nature of the script, and its close
relationship to late 14th- and 15th-century northern homiletic verse, likewise designed for oral
delivery. Use is made of the ranking-frequency listings in G.B. Kinneavy’s Concordance to the
York Plays in order to characterize their comparatively restricted lexical range, which is seen as a
function of their essentialist and universalizing tendencies, and their preference for performative
and deictic language that closely integrates word and action. The presence of wordplay in this
environment is explored through a range of examples taken from across the cycle as a whole.
Biography
Richard Beadle is Reader in English Literature in the Faculty of English,
University of Cambridge, and Fellow and Director of Studies in English at St John’s College,
Cambridge. He was general editor of The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre
(1995) and is currently revising and enlarging his critical edition of The York Plays (1982) for
republication by the Early English Text Society.
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‘His langage is lorne’ (31/190): The Silent Centre of the York Cycle by Alexandra Johnston
Abstract
In their portrayal of the character of Christ, the York playwrights exploited the concept of logos.
In the plays of the ministry and again in the post-resurrection plays, he is indeed, ‘The Word on
the Street’, actively teaching and preaching the ways of holy living openly, colloquially,
humanly. But at the centre of the sequence, in the hands of his enemies, Christ, the logos, falls
silent. The playwrights understood Christ to be the Word and the Word to be Truth. The action
of the trial plays is based on deceit and lies, reflecting Peraldus’ exposition of the ‘peccata
linguae’. All the Word needs to do is stand silent, to be the ‘still centre’ and even as they
condemn him his enemies condemn themselves out of their own mouths.
Biography
Alexandra F. Johnston is a professor of English at the University
of Toronto and has been director of Records of Early English Drama (which she was
instrumental in founding) since 1975. She is co-editor with Margaret Rogerson of the first of the
REED series, the Records of York (1979) and is also co-editor of the Oxford University and City
records to be published soon. She has written extensively on many aspects of early drama. Since
1974 she has been closely associated with the Poculi Ludique Societas and is presently chair of
the PLS Board. She convened the symposium mounted in association with the production of the
York Cycle in 1998.
Directors’ Notes
ALEXANDRA F. JOHNSTON
YORK 1998: What We Have Learned
Alexandra F. Johnston is a professor of English at the University
of Toronto and has been director of Records of Early English Drama (which she was
instrumental in founding) since 1975. She is co-editor with Margaret Rogerson of the first of the
REED series, the Records of York (1979) and is also co-editor of the Oxford University and City
records to be published soon. She has written extensively on many aspects of early drama. Since
1974 she has been closely associated with the Poculi Ludique Societas and is presently chair of
the PLS Board. She convened the symposium mounted in association with the production of the
York Cycle in 1998.
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GARRETT P.J. EPP
PLAY 5: The Temptation and Fall
Garrett Epp is an Associate Professor of English at the University of
Alberta. He was the Artistic Director for the PLS production of the Towneley Plays in 1985,
while working on his dissertation on the York Plays; he is currently engaged in research on early
English drama and sexuality.
MICHAEL AND SUSAN BARBOUR
PLAYS 14-15: The Nativity / The Adoration of the Shepherds
Michael and Susan Barbour work at Le Moyne College in
Syracuse, NY; Michael as Assistant Director of Theatre and Susan as an Instructor in the English
Department. Both are graduates of the Graduate Theatre Program at The Catholic University of
America. Together they have worked as director and dramaturg, respectively, on a variety of
medieval plays staged at the University of Toronto, including the N-Town Noah (1988), The
Apple Tree (1992), and Man’s Desire and Fleeting Beauty (1995).
ROLAND REED
PLAY 19: The Slaughter of the Innocents
Roland L. Reed , Associate Professor of Drama at The Catholic
University of America, has directed the Graduate Playwriting Program at Catholic University,
the directing and playwriting programs at The University of South Carolina and The University
of North Carolina – Charlotte. He has directed more than 100 major productions as well as many
staged readings and workshop productions of new plays. He is Playwright in Residence for the
Stanislavski Theatre Studio in Washington, DC. Six of his plays have been produced: Vera was
produced by Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia; Wearing Louie was produced off-off
Broadway, and the others received student productions. He has conducted site visits for NEA
Expansion Arts Theatre and served on its national panel.
JONATHAN HEROLD
PLAY 33: The Judgment of Christ
Jonathan Herold holds a BA in History from the University of
Wisconsin – Milwaukee and is currently a graduate student at the Centre for Medieval Studies at
the University of Toronto. Prior to pursuing his interest in medieval history at university,
Jonathan worked as an actor and stage combat choreographer in the United States. His longest
theatrical affiliation was with Tony Award-nominated American Players Theatre in Spring
Green, Wisconsin, where he appeared in productions, including Titus Andronicus, The Comedy
of Errors, Romeo and Juliet, Taming of the Shrew, Tamberlaine the Great Part I, The Merchant
of Venice, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Merry Wives of Windsor, Loves Labours Lost, and A
Midsummer Night’s Dream from 1982 to 1987. Jon worked as a stage combat instructor both
ET 3 9
independently and with Bradley Waller, teaching stage combat techniques at schools, colleges
and universities in Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota. He choreographed stage violence
for productions of Macbeth for the University of Wisconsin and Oklahoma! for Children’s
Theater of Madison (with Brad Waller), Love and Death in Verona and The Yearling for CTM,
Macbeth for First Stage – Milwaukee and Carmen for Milwaukee’s Florentine Opera Company.
KAREN SAWYER
PLAY 38: The Resurrection
Karen Sawyer worked at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota
and studied medieval literature at Oxford University before coming to the University of Toronto
to unite her practical and academic interests in early English drama. She produced, performed in,
and directed productions for Poculi Ludique Societas while pursuing her Ph.D. Her interest in the
York Resurrection play was sparked in part by her dissertation, an edition and study of the
sixteenth-century Protestant play The Resurrection of Our Lord. She now teaches in the English
department at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.
GWEN WALTZ
PLAY 41: Christ’s Appearance to Thomas
Currently an independent scholar, Gwendolyn Waltz is working
on Our Mutual Cousin: The Shared Stage of American Multi-Media Performance, a book based
on her research of theatre and cinema confluence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. As a director in the 1998 York Cycle, she completed a two-year Visiting Assistant
Professorship at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan.
TERRI CAIN
PLAY 42: The Ascension
Terri Cain graduated MDiv from Yale University – Institute of Sacred
Music. She works as a director, choreographer, and performer for stage and film, with special
interests in early drama and liturgy. Recently she directed for the Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library the modern premiere of The Play of the Burgher’s Son, a St. Nicholas play
from Beineck Library MS 841, a rare Franco-Provencal manuscript (late 14th or early 15th c.).
She is devoted to bringing theatre to the streets. What will ever compare to the wonderful
experience at York ’98!
ET 3 10
STEPHEN JOHNSON
PLAY 47: Last Judgment
Stephen Johnson teaches in the Graduate Centre for Study
of Drama and in Erindale College’s Theatre and Drama Program at the University of Toronto. As
a scholar, he has published in (among other journals) TDR, CTR, Essays in Theatre, Theatre
Topics, Nineteenth Century Theater, and Theatre Research in Canada, for which he has acted as
co-editor for the past nine years. He was the artistic director of the Environmental Theatre
Workshop in Hamilton and of Handmade Performance in Toronto, for which he wrote/adapted
and/or directed Juba, The Insect Play, The Last Judgment, A Little Grief, and Dr Faustus (in coproduction
with CREED and the Drama Centre). His radio adaptation of Juba, produced by the
CBC, was nominated for the Writer’s Guild of Canada Top Ten Award. He is a member of the
WGC and the Playwrights Union of Canada.
JOEL KAPLAN
Overview on the York Cycle Performance
PLAY 2: Creation to the Fifth Day/ PLAY 39: Christ’s Appearance to Mary Magdalene
Joel Kaplan is Professor of Drama and Head of Department of
Drama and Theatre Arts, University of Birmingham. His research areas are nineteenth- and
twentieth-century British theatre, especially the Victorian and Edwardian periods; Oscar Wilde;
medieval drama; theatre and cultural history; and performance reconstruction. His recent books
include: (with Sheila Stowell) Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes
(Cambridge, 1994) and (with Michael Booth) The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance
and the Stage (Cambridge, 1996). His current projects focus on the theatre of the 1890s, Oscar
Wilde, and Noel Coward.
Site created and designed by Saul Rich, 1998.
Redesigned by Gloria J. Betcher, Department of English, Iowa State University, 2002.
Maintained by CRRS Publications, 2001-

Early Theatre 2 (1999)
Articles
The Meaning of Thunder and Lightning: Stage Directions and Audience Response by Leslie
Thomson
Play Houses: Drama at Bolsover and Welbeck by Lisa Hopkins
Saints on Stage: An Analytical Survey of Dramatic Records in the West of England by Sally-
Beth Maclean
The Donington Cast List: Innovation and Tradition in Parish Guild Drama in Early Elizabethan
Lincolnshire by Stephen K. Wright and James Stokes
Issues in Review
Saints Plays by Lawrence M. Clopper, Clifford Davidson, and Elizabeth Baldwin
Article Abstracts
The Meaning of Thunder and Lightning: Stage Directions and Audience Response by Leslie
Thomson
Abstract
The focus of this study is ‘thunder and lightning’, a stage direction used regularly by early
modern playwrights and bookkeepers, which highlights several important issues related to the
original performance and reception of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. More particularly, the
argument of this paper is that the original purpose of these directions in a playtext was essentially
practical: ‘thunder and lightning’ was the conventional stage language for the production of
effects in or from the tiring house that would establish or confirm a specifically supernatural
context in the minds of the audience. This approach necessarily requires acknowledgement of an
implicit contrast between modern attitudes to the supernatural and the perceptions and
expectations of early modern spectators: to generalize, most of us do not believe and most of
them did. An awareness of that audience’s different conception is therefore useful when
considering stage directions that call for effects consistently linked to the supernatural. The
related issues of audience expectation, theatrical practice, and thematic implication are thus
concerns in the article.
Biography
Leslie Thomson is Associate Professor of English at the
University of Toronto. She has published articles on early modern stage directions and staging
and is the editor of Anything for a Quiet Life (Middleton/Webster), in the forthcoming Oxford
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2
edition of Middleton’s Works. Most recently, she and Alan C. Dessen have completed A
Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580-1642 for Cambridge University Press,
1999. She is currently curating an exhibition on Fortune for the Folger Shakespeare Library,
which will run from January to May 2000.
Play Houses: Drama at Bolsover and Welbeck by Lisa Hopkins
Abstract
Between 1590 and 1634, a period more or less exactly coterminous with the great age of English
Renaissance drama, a group of remarkable houses took shape in the north Midlands of England,
on the borders of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. All of them were connected with members of
the Cavendish family, and two of them in particular, Bolsover Castle and Welbeck Abbey,
passed into the possession of William Cavendish, Earl and later Duke of Newcastle. They thus
became not only the principal homes of a leading patron of the drama, but also the settings of a
distinct and very interesting group of plays, which can almost be termed country-house drama:
Love’s Welcome to Bolsover, The King’s Entertainment at Welbeck, and Lady Jane Cavendish
and Lady Elizabeth Brackley’s The Concealed Fancies. Additionally, Newcastle and his wife,
Margaret Cavendish, wrote plays both during and after the Civil War that can also be associated
with the values and philosophies embodied in the architecture and traditions of the Cavendish
houses. This paper explores ways in which these Cavendish houses acted as a setting and a
stimulus to drama, and the ways in which the resulting plays were shaped by their physical
settings.
Biography
Lisa Hopkins is a Senior Lecturer in English at Sheffield Hallam
University. Her previous publications include John Ford’s Political Theatre (1994) and The
Shakespearean Marriage: Merry Wives and Heavy Husbands (1998).
Saints on Stage: An Analytical Survey of Dramatic Records in the West of England by
Sally-Beth Maclean
Abstract
This essay provides an analysis of the known surviving records relating to mimetic
representation of non-biblical saints in a broad region of western England, from the north
(Cumberland, Westmorland) to the southern tip of Cornwall. The question of how many of these
references can be considered ‘scripted’ drama is addressed, and other categories (pageant,
costumed guild ridings, and festive customs such as boy bishop ceremonies) proposed.
Biography
Sally-Beth MacLean is the Executive Editor of the Records of Early
English Drama series. She has published on the topics of the politics of patronage, playing
companies, parish drama, festive customs and the dramatic records of the county of Surrey. Her
ET 2
3
most recent publication, with Scott McMillin, is The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (Cambridge,
1998). She is presently at work on a history of regional theatre in England before 1642, a 4-
volume project with Alexandra F. Johnston.
The Donington Cast List: Innovation and Tradition in Parish Guild Drama in Early
Elizabethan Lincolnshire by Stephen K. Wright and James Stokes
Abstract
The Donington cast list (Lincolnshire Archives, Donington-in-Holland, Parish, 23/7) is a onepage
fragment dating from around 1563 that lists the dramatis personae and the names of the
performers for a lost parish play. The purpose of this article is to provide an accurate
transcription of the document and to determine what it has to tell us about the nature of the play,
the reasons for its performance, and the identities and social relations of the actors. The list of
roles indicates that the play dramatized a unique subject, namely, the biblical story of
Nebuchadnezzar and the Three Hebrew Children. In terms of both theme and stagecraft, the
work apparently resembled the typical parish plays of rural Lincolnshire, but one can also argue
that the story of the rescue of the young martyrs from persecution may have been understood as
an oblique commentary on the controversial religious policies of Edward VI or Elizabeth.
Finally, archival evidence indicates that the play was produced by a prosperous group of
parishioners with many of the characteristics of a religious guild. Although such guilds had been
abolished and their properties confiscated by the Chantries Act of 1547, the Donington cast list
demonstrates that parish drama, and the guilds that sponsored it, may have been far more
resilient than traditional histories suggest.
Biographies
Stephen K. Wright , Professor of English and Director of the Comparative
Literature Program at the Catholic University of America, is the author of The Vengeance of Our
Lord: Medieval Dramatizations of the Destruction of Jerusalem and of numerous articles on
early English, German, French, Latin, and Swedish drama.
James Stokes is Eugene Katz Professor in Letters at the University of
Wisconsin-Stevens Point. He edited the REED volume for Somerset (1996), is presently editing
Lincolnshire, and is the author of numerous articles on early drama and traditional
entertainments.
Issues in Review Abstracts
Saints Plays by Lawrence M. Clopper, Clifford Davidson, and Elizabeth Baldwin
Abstract
This review article surveys points of view on the existence and performance of saints plays in
England and includes reviews of the most recent work on saints plays as presented in panels at
the Leeds Medieval Conference, July 1999.
ET 2
4
Biographies
Lawrence M. Clopper is Professor of English at Indiana University.
His books include REED: The Dramatic Records of Chester 1399-1642 (Toronto, 1979); ‘Songes
of Rechelesnesse’: Langland and the Franciscans (U Michigan P, 1997). He is co-editor with Jim
Paxson and Sylvia Tomasch of The Performance of Middle English Culture: Essays on Chaucer
and the Drama in Honor of Martin Stevens (D. S. Brewer, 1998). His recent essays on the drama
include ‘English Drama: From Ungody Ludi to Sacred Play’, in Cambridge History of Medieval
English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 739-66. and ‘Communitas’: The
Play of Saints in Late Medieval and Tudor England,” in Medieval and Early Renaissance
Drama: Reconsiderations, ed. Martin Stevens and Milla Riggio, Mediaevalia 18 (1995, for
1992): 81-90. He is currently working on a book entitled Drama, Play and Game: Festive
Culture in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period.
Clifford Davidson is Professor of English and Medieval Studies at
Western Michigan University, where he directs the Early Drama, Art, and Music project. His
books include From Creation to Doom: Illustrations of the Stage and Acting in England to 1580;
Technology, Guilds, and Early English Drama; The Wall Paintings of the Guild Chapel at
Stratford-upon-Avon, and others. He is editor of and contributor to The Saint Play in Medieval
Europe and other volumes, most recently Material Culture and Medieval Drama. He is also the
author of numerous reviews and articles on early drama and theater that have appeared over
nearly four decades, and recently he retired as an editor of Comparative Drama. His experience,
with his wife Audrey Ekdahl Davidson, in play production is surveyed in a recent monograph,
Performing Medieval Music Drama.
Elizabeth Baldwin is currently teaching at the
University of Leeds in the School of English. She is co-editing the REED: Cheshire volume with
Professor A. D. Mills and preparing a monograph on ‘Music and Musicians in Cheshire’ for Early
Drama, Art and Music. She is also working on an edition of an unknown, anonymous, and
untitled seventeenth-century comedy she discovered while researching the Cheshire material.
This play, probably written by someone in the Jonson circle between 1609-1626, will be
performed at the University of Lancaster Shakespeare Conference in July 1999 under the title
Musophilus, or Wise Men Have Fools About Them.
Site created and designed by Saul Rich, 1998.
Redesigned by Gloria J. Betcher, Department of English, Iowa State University, 2002.
Maintained by CRRS Publications, 2001-
.

Early Theatre 1 (1998)
Articles
The Kirk, the Burgh, and Fun by John J. McGavin
Romeo and the Apothecary by Dominick Grace
Henry Hardware’s Moment and the Face of Puritan Reform by Robert Tittler
Devising the Revels by W. R. Streitberger
The Waits in Lincolnshire by James Stokes
Theatrical Citings and Bitings by Loreen L. Giese
Note
Where Have All the Players Gone? A Chester Problem by David Mills
Issues in Review
The York Cycle in Performance by Barbara Palmer, David Bevington, Garrett Epp, Ralph
Blasting, Peter Meredith, and David Mills
Article Abstracts
The Kirk, the Burgh, and Fun by John J. McGavin
Abstract
‘The Kirk, the Burgh, and Fun’ is based on work done in the sixteenth and very early
seventeenth-century burgh and kirk records of Haddington in Scotland. It seeks to use these
records to qualify sabbatarian pronouncements, which were intended to occlude the individual
but were forced constantly to confront it. It argues for the messiness of cultural movements as
they are lived and uses the records as a means to avoid silencing the motives, rebellions,
resentments, self-deceptions, and aspirations of the individuals and institutions which were
seeking to promote or defend their interests during a time of change. Sabbatarian pressure
against a wide range of recreational activities is shown to be a means of negotiating institutional
power between a variety of groups; a device for resolving secular problems; a trick for deflecting
attention from erring ministers, and a tactic for preserving urban interests against the country.
This complex web of interests and principles produces individual ironies, and the paper contrasts
the activity of Haddington’s one-time schoolmaster and play director, James Carmichael, who, as
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the reformist minister of the town, was chosen to subdue the author of a local May play (here
named for the first time).
Biography
John J McGavin graduated MA/PhD from the University of Edinburgh and
now works in the English Department at the University of Southampton, where he co-founded
the Wessex Medieval Centre and convenes the MA in Medieval Culture. He is the designated
REED editor for the provincial drama records of Scotland, but also has publications in the area
of Chaucer, rhetoric, dramatic prosody, and a forthcoming book (Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press) on ‘Chaucer and Dissimilarity’.
Romeo and the Apothecary by Dominick Grace
Abstract
Romeo and Juliet 5.1, the apothecary scene, makes at best a minimal contribution to the forward
action of the play. If the apothecary’s function is to be a plot device to provide Romeo with
poison, why devote so much space to him? If we consider the scene as a whole, as a dramatic
unit enhancing the structure of the play and clarifying Romeo’s character development; if we
consider the thematic links between the action here and elsewhere; and if we consider the casting
of the apothecary, we can discover the importance of the scene. A key point is that the
apothecary is linked to Friar Lawrence. The two characters function as foils and as thematic
contrasts, serving to clarify our understanding of Romeo’s actions.
Biography
Dr. Dominick M. Grace is an Associate Professor of
English at Algoma University College in Sault Ste Marie, Ontario. He earned his PhD at the
University of Western Ontario. His primary teaching areas are medieval and Renaissance
English literature, with a focus on theatrical texts. Other areas of interest include Canadian
literature, nineteenth-century literature, science fiction, fantasy, children’s literature, and film.
Henry Hardware’s Moment and the Face of Puritan Reform by Robert Tittler
Abstract
Henry Hardware has become familiar to many theatre historians as the mayor who destroyed the
traditional processional figures in the Midsummer Show in Chester, and thus as an exemplar of
anit-theatrical activity amongst the Puritan magistracy of the time. A closer look at both
Hardware and the condition of Chester itself suggests some of the complexities behind such
activity.
ET 1 3
Biography
Robert Tittler , Professor of History at Concordia University,
teaches and writes on the political, urban, and cultural history of early modern England. His
latest book is The Reformation and the Towns in England: Politics and Political Culture, 1540-
1640 (Oxford UP, 1998).
Devising the Revels by W. R. Streitberger
Abstract
The term “device” in the sixteenth century might still refer to a written document that explained
in detail the creative idea and overall conception of a project. Only one such device survives for
a court revel, “Devices to be shewed before the quenes Matie by waye of maskinge at
Notthingham castell” [1562]. This device together with evidence from the Revels accounts
illustrates how the suppression of individual egos by devisers, artists, and writers in the
collaborative production of revels could be considered an exercise in the art of service to a
prince.
Biography
W.R. Streitberger , Professor of English at the
University of Washington, is author of Court Revels, 1485-1559 and a number of other books
and articles on Renaissance literature, drama, history, and culture.
The Waits in Lincolnshire by James Stokes
Abstract
Most research into Lincolnshire dramatic records has focused on religious drama in the city of
Lincoln and selected other towns and villages, but considerable information also survives about
civic-sponsored entertainments of other kinds, including the sponsorship of waits by Lincoln and
six other substantial towns. Drawing on records in Lincolnshire and elsewhere, this article
describes what can be known about the Lincolnshire waits: the nature of civic sponsorship that
supported them; the identify of the waits; their numbers and responsibilities; their patterns of
travel and performance; their status in the towns; and something of their repertoire. The article
demonstrates that the waits were an important element in the fabric of sponsored entertainments
in Lincolnshire, that they had a more complex performance life than might be thought; and that
they and their performances seem to have thrived, unlike many other forms and entertainers,
right through the Puritan takeover of town governance and the Civil War. The article argues that
while recognized as having been skilled musicians, the waits have not been sufficiently
appreciated as professional, respected, companies; that they seem to have been an institution
associated with the growth and development of certain important towns; that they were found to
be valuable by both reform-minded and traditional officials alike; that they provide useful
insights concerning the nature and purpose of civic sponsorship and of the considerable
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networking that occurred among companies of waits. Their presence is an essential element in
the emerging picture of early drama and music in Lincolnshire.
Biography
James Stokes is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin -
Stevens Point. He edited the REED volume for Somerset (published 1996), is presently editing
Lincolnshire, and is the author of numerous articles on early drama and traditional
entertainments.
Theatrical Citings and Bitings by Loreen L. Giese
Abstract
The most-often-cited London Consistory Court record in relation to early modern London theatre
history is the record of the playgoing of Marion Frith, or Moll Cutpurse. The London Consistory
Court depositions from 1586-1611 contain still more rich information about players and
playgoers – information, as far as the author has been able to determine, that has not yet appeared
in print. These records in particular further confirm our understanding of contemporary attitudes
toward women’s playgoing, contribute to our knowledge of the Duke of York’s (Prince Charles’s)
company, and provide extremely illuminating information concerning John Newton, both as a
player and sharer in the Duke of York’s company and as the plaintiff in a matrimonial
enforcement suit full of suspicious circumstances, which suggest that the marriage contract was a
confidence game.
Biography
Loreen L. Giese is an Associate Professor of English at Ohio
University. She edited London Consistory Court Depositions, 1586-1611: List and Indexes for
the London Record Society (1997 for 1995) and is currently completing a book whose working
title is “Treacherous Attempts: Women, Shakespeare, and Marriage Law,” which is under
contract with St.Martin’s Press.
Note Abstract
Where have all the players gone? A Chester Problem by David Mills
Abstract
Evidence for travelling companies performing in Chester in the later 16th-early 17th.centuries is
sparse. Drawing upon both published REED material and documents recently discovered, David
Mills suggests that, while the political situation within the city fluctuated between support for
and opposition to such visits, there is nevertheless good reason to believe that Cestrians had
opportunities to watch professional performances.
ET 1 5
Biography
David Mills co-edited, with R.M. Lumiansky, the EETS edition of
Chester’s mystery cycle (EETS ss 3 (1974) and 9 (1986)) and produced a modern spelling edition
of the cycle (Michigan, 1992). He has published extensively on medieval drama and ceremonial
is currently co-editor, with Elizabeth Baldwin, of REED’s Cheshire volume. His book, Recycling
the Cycle: The City of Chester and Its Plays, will be published by UTP in the SEED series in
July 1998.
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