ABSTRACT
Covering a period of nearly 40 years’ work by the author this collection of essays in the Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies series brings the perspective of a Drama academic and practitioner of early English plays to the understanding of how medieval plays and Robin Hood games of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were performed. It explores why, where, when, and how the plays happened, who took part, and who were the audiences. The insights are informed by a combination of research and the public presentation of surviving texts. The research included in the volume unites the early English experiences of religious and secular performance. This recognition challenges the dominant critical distinction of the past between the two and the consequent privileging of biblical and moral plays over secular entertainments. What further binds, rather than separates, the two is that the destination of funds raised by the different activities maintained the civic and parochial needs of the institutions upon which the people depended. This collection redefines the inclusive nature and common interests of the purposes that lay behind generically different undertakings. They shared an extraordinary investment of human and financial resources in the anticipation of a profit that was pious and practical. (CS1081).
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|64 pages
Dating, Staging, and Playing the Chester Whitsun Plays
chapter 1|10 pages
The Chester Whitsun Plays: Dating of Post-Reformation Performances from the Smiths’ Accounts
chapter 2|7 pages
Players of the Coopers’ Pageant from the Chester Plays in 1572 and 1575
chapter 3|27 pages
‘The Manner of these Playes’: The Chester Pageant Carriages and the Places Where they Played
chapter 4|5 pages
Nailing the Six-Wheeled Waggon: A Sideview
chapter 5|13 pages
‘Walking in the Air’: The Chester Shepherds on Stilts
part II|84 pages
Who, Where, When, and Why: Non-Cycle and Single Episode Plays in Performance
chapter 6|6 pages
Marginal Staging Marks in The Macro Manuscript of Wisdom
chapter 7|33 pages
‘Her Virgynes, as Many as a Man Wylle’: Dance and Provenance in Three Late Medieval Plays; Wisdom/The Killing of the Children/The Conversion of St Paul
chapter 8|28 pages
‘Fortune in Worldys Worschyppe’: The Satirising of the Suffolks in Wisdom
chapter 9|15 pages
‘O ȜE Souerens Þat Sytt and ȜE Brothern Ȝat Stonde Ryght Wppe’: Addressing the Audience of Mankind
part III|57 pages
Archiving the Ephemeral: Contemporary Depictions of Performance and Modern Productions of Medieval Plays
chapter 10|7 pages
The Medieval English Stage: A Graffito of a Hell-Mouth Scaffold?
chapter 11|8 pages
‘The Crowning with Thorns and the Mocking of Christ’: A Fifteenth-Century Performance Analogue
chapter 12|18 pages
A Scene from the Life of St Edmund: Dramatic Representation in an English Medieval Alabaster
chapter 13|22 pages
Modern Productions of Medieval English Plays
part IV|141 pages
Robin Hood Games: Customary Performance and Raising Funds