ABSTRACT

Sir David Lindsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis is the most dramaturgically innovative and historically celebrated theatrical text of the Scottish Reformation. Formally highly stylized, thematically daring and politically sophisticated, the play is the masterpiece of Scotland’s Reformation culture. With its heady combination of complex secular commentary, profound sacred drama, poetical sophistry and with the addition of knockabout farce it transcends modern genres and defies categorisation. However, despite the fact that literary scholars can readily claim it as an unrivalled high point of the nation’s drama, the play has only a precarious foothold in the producing repertoire of theatre in Scotland – and, beyond the academy, is ignored elsewhere.1 Radically satirical in its day, the play’s very contemporaneity – along with its late-medieval dramaturgical form – meant that it fell quickly out of ideological and theatrical fashion and, when the play was finally revived, the values it sought to represent and promote were very different from the play’s particular and political purpose at the sixteenth-century Scottish court. Instead of a play seeking to influence contemporary policy-making and policy-makers, its twentieth-century impact has been very different. Reviewing the play’s modern stage history, one encounters a series of productions readier to draw on the values of heritage culture than of political theatre with this potential conservatism marked in staging, costuming and casting choices,

1 This essay draws on materials held in the Scottish Theatre Archive (STA), part of the Department of Special Collections of the library of the University of Glasgow. This collection holds a significant collection of primary material relating to the several twentieth-century productions of Ane Satyre … including programmes, miscellaneous press cuttings, photographs and related correspondence, as well as some of the other publications and materials referred to in this essay.