Early Theatre 2

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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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
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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.
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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.
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