The City of York and its ‘Play of Pageants’
By Peter Meredith
Early Theatre, Vol 3 (2000)
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.
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11 Jun 2010
Tags: Drama, England, Urban Studies
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Medievalism and Joan Grigsby’s The Orchid Door
Brother Anthony
Medieval and Early Modern English Studies, Volume 17 No. 1 (2009)
Abstract
The Celtic revival of the 1890s and the opening years of the 20th century was marked by a series of works, poems, fiction and dramas, published under the name of Fiona MacLeod, supposedly a peasant woman living in the Hebrides. In 1905 it was revealed that the author had in fact been William Sharp, a Scottish writer with no Celtic credentials. Joan Rundall, who grew up in the Scottish Lowlands, published poems in her Peatsmoke volume of 1919 that seem clearly to have been influenced by the works ascribed to Fiona MacLeod. Moving to Japan, then to Korea, she published further volumes as Joan S. Grigsby, first a collection of poems in part inspired by a medieval Japanese legend and finally a collection of medieval Korean poems. She was not the translator of these latter, but had adapted translations made by James Gale. Joan Grigsby’s poems show a clear relationship with Celtic medievalism, and at the same time they demand to be approached in a feminist perspective. There proves to be a close relationship between the two categories.
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6 Jan 2010
Tags: Celtic, Drama, Medievalism, Poetry, Scotland, Women’s Studies
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Commentary: Troubling “Troubling Gender and Genre in The Trials and Joys of Marriage”
Lee, Jongsook
Medieval English Studies, vol. 11 (2003) No. 1
Abstract
Thank you for your wonderful lecture. I wish I could just say that by way of response, and leave you alone. But since I have to perform my own part, as you just have done yours, I’ll try to be a little bit more critical than just saying thank-you, or rather a little bit more explicit in my thanks. Please allow me, then, to trouble your “Troubling Gender and Genre” just a little. The major trouble I have with your paper is the title, “Troubling Gender and Genre.” It is not because it does not accurately reflect what the paper as a whole has to say, but because it seems to suggest that the two categories, gender and genre, could be brought together by juxtaposing them, by identifying them with each other, or by turning them into metaphors for each other, when in fact they interinvolve (or, to use a more tendentious term, interpellate) with each other in a most complex way.
In the theoretical framework section of your paper, you have identified “the trouble with gender with the trouble with genre.” The trouble with genre (or with the discourse of it) is that it is “encoded in terms of heteronormativity and sexual difference,” and the trouble with gender is that it is regarded as a “given or cultural attribute” (p. 3). The trouble in both cases is the emphases placed on the rigid, traditionally defined boundaries. Using Judith Butler’s discussion on gender and gender performativity, you have maintained that gender is able to change in the process of repeating gender performance, and so is genre.
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1 Jan 2010
Tags: Drama, Fifteenth Century, Fourteenth Century, Gender, Literature, Middle English, Social History, Thirteenth century
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Troubling Gender and Genre in The Trials & Joys of Marriage
Salisbury, Eve
Medieval and Early Modern English Studies, vol. 11 (2003) No. 1
Abstract
The subject of gender has been the focus of a considerable amount of scholarship in the West in the last fifteen years. Feminist medievalists in particular have done much to disclose the dynamics of gender, particularly in relation to the dominance of masculine discourses in medieval European culture. Many have focused on the nature and operation of such discourses identified as chivalric, ecclesiastical, and legal as reinforcing the androcentric structures that undergird key social and political institutions.) A brief perusal of the Medieval Feminist Forum bibliography, the Internet Medieval Sourcebook, and various other online bibliographies of recent work on women’s roles, men’s roles, constructions of sexuality, and marriage in the Middle Ages provides further evidence of recent work in this area. Others have looked to Chaucer’s work to provide readings that illuminate masculine puissance and its relation to the roles that women play in various kinds of power games.)
Genre is as troubling a matter as gender in the Middle Ages particularly when unstable or newly emerging categories or even well-established ancient categories could become something else or could resist easy identification. So, for instance, a text that might be considered a romance could also present itself as Breton lay; an epic could appear to be a chanson de geste, a history could be a romance, a homily could be a “merry tale,” a fabliau could be moral exemplum, and a work of advice could be satire or scientific treatise. In other words, any medieval genre could contain within it motifs resembling something else yet at the same time retain its membership in a large generic family. The term “genre” itself suggests communal or kinship affiliation. Related to the Latin genus for “kind, species, or class” it defines a group of like individuals or family members; related to genere, gignere, “to beget” or in the passive “to be born” genre connotes the potential for generation, regeneration, growth and change (Cohen 267). Derived from the same root as “gender,” “genre” is etymologically akin, its relatedness literally embodied in the word.
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1 Jan 2010
Tags: Drama, Fifteenth Century, Fourteenth Century, Gender, Literature, Middle English, Social History, Thirteenth century, Women’s Studies
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The Significance of the Eucharist Scenes in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament
Kang, Ji-Soo
Medieval English Studies, vol 9. (2001) No. 2
Abstract
Over the years much of the critical attention given to the Croxton Play of the Sacrament was merely for its historical significance, typically as a “rare specimen of the early drama” (Brook, 29). That a crucial textual error was corrected only in 1970 with the publication of Norman Davis’ Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments is witness to the fact that this play has not enjoyed much attention, let alone much critical acclaim (lxxi).1) This 15th-century dramatization of a legend that concerns the abuse of the Host by a group of Jews who buy a sacramental wafer from a Christian merchant is, to begin with, difficult to categorize. Although usually listed under “saints’ play,” the absence of a saint in a supposed saints’ play mandates an awkward apology which precedes many of the discussions.2) Those who tried to evaluate its artistic or dramatic significance rarely had positive things to say.3) The consensus seems to be that the sensational events of the play, namely the torture scene, are so gory and excessive that they verge on being farcical, and the intentional comic scene of the quack-doctor episode is irrelevant or very loosely-tied at best.4) Recent critics who attempted to shed more favorable light on this work have been busy addressing and making excuses mainly for the objects of these complaints, the violent scenes of torture and the “tiny folk play inserted in the main story” which “accomplishes nothing” as has been asserted by a well-known critic (Craig 326-7). Unfortunately, not much critical effort has been made so far to read this play as a whole in any favorable light. Few critics have even vouched for a thematic coherence, much less an artistic integrity of the work.
In this paper, I would like to propose a reading of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament according to well-known structural schemes of medieval sermons. The proceedings of the solemn procession at the end and the bishop’s speeches lead me to believe that this play may have been written by someone who is familiar with liturgical ritual and preaching. Moreover, by recognizing the echoes of the Eucharist in important scenes other than in the highlighted scene of desecration of the Host by the Jews and the climactic singing of O sacrarum convivium at the end, namely in the quack-doctor scene, I would like to propose a reading much more coherent than hitherto has been acknowledged.
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1 Jan 2010
Tags: Drama, Ecclesiastical History, Fifteenth Century, Hebrew and Jewish Studies
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Christ as a Worker in the Towneley Conspiracy
Gusick, Barbara I.
Essays in Medieval Studies, vol. 9 (1992)
Abstract
As a central character in the Corpus Christi plays, Christ has generated surprisingly little controversy among scholars of medieval drama. Certainly researchers have approached Christ from a variety of vantage points, attempting to determine whether he is more human or more divine; whether he is colorless and utilitarian or dynamic and symbolic; whether he is distinctly historical or contemporaneously medieval; whether he speaks the words of the Church or the language of the townspeople. But critics have not yet launched a full-scale study of this sacred character, whose presence extends throughout two-thirds of the Corpus Christi plays. A multifaceted character whose complexity is grounded in biblical narrative, Christ is represented both in an immediate theatrical sense and in an ongoing soteriological sense. Because of his exceedingly complex nature, we must acknowledge the contradictions which arise as we explore the polysemous ways in which Christ signifies.
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19 Dec 2009
Tags: Drama, Literature
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Woman as Termagant in The Towneley Cycle
Freier, Mary P.
Essays in Medieval Studies, vol. 2 (1985)
Abstract
The woman characters in the cycle plays are usually interpreted as termagants or saints, and the quality of these characterizations is usually denigrated as merely stereotypical, with the emphasis on presenting women negatively. However, a close and dispassionate reading of the Towneley Cycle shows that women are neither more nor less negatively presented than are men, and that the critics, in their zeal to convict others of misogyny, have in fact been reading with double standards. Most critical attention has been paid to Noah’s wife in Noah and Gill in The Second Shepherds’ Play. But little critical attention has been paid to the other woman characters in the cycle, characters who ought to be important to any interpretation of women’s roles in these plays or any production of the cycle. These women include the Virgin Mary, the mothers of the slaughtered innocents, and Mary Magdalene. These women have been virtually ignored as women, although the mothers of the innocents have been commented upon as part of the grotesque in medieval comedy (Billman 413-414).
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3 Dec 2009
Tags: Drama, England, Women’s Studies
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The medieval construct of demonic evil: an inverted incarnation
By Margaret Raftery
Acta Academica, Vol. 39:2 (2007)
Abstract: This article explores the concept of inversion as an essential ingredient in the medieval understanding of Good and Evil. It argues that demonic evil is often, but here specifically in the Dutch rederijker drama Mariken van Nieumeghen, constructed and represented as an inversion of the incarnation of Christ. Christ is the true Logos, or Word, made flesh, offering love and reconciliation, teaching knowledge of the Father, and bringing salvation; the drama’s Moenen is the devil disguised in scholarly garb, offering Mariken wealth and pleasure as well as to teach her all languages and the seven liberal arts, but leading her ultimately to damnation. The inversion technique is structural in a further sense, as Mariken’s initiation into the world of evil is analysed as involving a series of inversions of the Catholic sacraments, all of which were either instituted by Christ or founded on the Church’s interpretation of events during his incarnation. Issues of power (including gendered power) attendant upon the dichotomy of inversion of the forces of Good and Evil in the play are also discussed.
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12 Apr 2009
Tags: Drama, Low Countries, Philosophy, Theology
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Playing a Part in History: The York Mysteries, 1951–2006
By Margaret Rogerson
University of Toronto Press, 2009
ISBN: 9870802099242
The York Mystery Plays are a cycle of originally performed on wagons in the city. They date from the fourteenth century and Biblical narrative from Creation to Last Judgment. After nearly four hundred years without a performance, a revival of the York Mysteries began in 1951 when local amateurs led by professional theatre practitioners staged them during the festival of Britain. Playing a Part in History examines the ways in which the revival of these plays transformed them for twentieth- and twenty-first-century audiences.
Considering such topics as the contemporary popularity of the plays, the agendas of the revivalists, and major production differences, Margaret Rogerson provides a fascinating comparison of medieval and modern English drama. Drawing extensively on archival material, and newspaper and academic reviews of the plays in recent years, Playing a Part in History is not only an illuminating account of early English drama, but also of the ways in which theatre allows people to interact with the past.
University Profile of Margaret Rogerson
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3 Mar 2009
Tags: 2009 Books, Drama, England, Medievalism
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The Role of Music in Medieval Shepherds’ Plays
By Vicente Chacón Carmona
Societe Internationale pour l’etude du Theatre Medieval – XIIth Colloquim (2007)
Introduction: Music, song and, to a certain extent, dance, feature in all medieval shepherds’ plays, even if they are not musical dramas proper. A series of English, French, and Spanish2 Nativity plays, composed and/or put into writing in the 15th and early 16th centuries, in which shepherds feature as relevant characters, are here studied in order to ascertain the role that music plays in them. The following dramas are analyzed: The Chester Painters’ Play; the Towneley First and Second Shepherds’ Plays; The Coventry Shearmen and Taylors’ Pageant; The York Chandlers’ Play; Arnould Gréban’s Le Mystère de la Passion de Notre Sauveur Jésus-Christ; Marguerite de Navarre’s Comédie de la Nativité de Jésus-Christ; Fray Íñigo de Mendoza’s Vita Christi; Juan del Encina’s Égloga Representada en la Mesma Noche de Navidad; Lucas Fernández’s Égloga o Farsa del Nascimiento de Nuestro Redemptor Jesucristo and Auto o Farsa del Nascimiento de Nuestro Señor Iesu Christo and Gil Vicente’s Auto Pastoril Castellano, Auto de los Reyes Magos, Auto de los Cuatro Tiempos. The authors of these plays employ musical turns for a series of purposes; mainly, to mark the climax and determine the pace and development of each drama, to define the moral quality of characters, and to help explain the spiritual changes undergone by certain characters.
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26 Dec 2008
Tags: Drama, Music
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The City of York and its ‘Play of Pageants’
