ABSTRACT
The Macro manuscript of the play is well-known for its quite considerable marginal notation which ranges through protestations of ownership, drawings of dragons and men, ballad fragments, ciphers and ‘kis min arcs knave’ written backwards, none of which seem to be theatrically motivated. In 1981 the Medieval English Theatre meeting held at Westfield College was ‘concerned with what manuscripts could tell us about theatre through stage directions’. The need for marking in such apparently obvious places may be explained by the fact that in the Macro manuscript of Wisdom the stage directions are not rubricated and although in common with each speech they are lineated they tend, at first glance, to merge with the spoken text. More surprising though no less comforting is the evidence that development in production-text notation over the last five hundred years has been only marginal.
