Volume 5

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