A Cultural History of Theatre in the Middle Ages Volume 2 9781474208161, 9781472585707

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Sharon Aronson-Lehavi is a senior lecturer of theatre and performance studies at the Department of Theatre Arts, Tel Aviv University, Israel, and a member of the Israel Young Academy of Sciences. She is the author of Street Scenes: Late Medieval Acting and Performance (2011) and Gender and Feminism in Modern Theatre (Hebrew; 2013). She is editor of Wanderers and Other Israeli Plays (2009) and co-editor of Performance Studies in Motion: International Perspectives and Practices in the Twenty-First Century (2014). Kathleen Ashley is Distinguished Professor (emerita) at the University of Southern Maine, Portland. She has published extensively on medieval drama and cultural performance, cultural theory, literature, hagiography and interdisciplinary history. Her books include a TEAMS edition of the morality play Mankind (2010), Being a Pilgrim: Art and Ritual on the Medieval Routes to Santiago (2009), and Writing Faith: Text, Sign and History in the Miracles of Sainte Foy, co-authored with Pamela Sheingorn (1999). She has edited or co-edited numerous essay collections including Moving Subjects: Processional Performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (2001), Victor Turner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism (1990), Medieval Conduct (2001) and Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society (1990). Bruce R. Burningham is Professor of Hispanic Studies and Theatre at Illinois State University. He specializes in medieval and early modern Spanish and Latin American literature, Hispanic theatre and performance theory. He is the author of Radical Theatricality: Jongleuresque Performance on the Early Spanish Stage (2007) and Tilting Cervantes: Baroque Reflections on Postmodern Culture (2008). He is Editor of Cervantes, the journal of the Cervantes Society of America.

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Seeta Chaganti is an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, and the author of The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance (2008). She is also the editor of the essay collection Medieval Poetics and Social Practice (2012). Her essays have appeared in PMLA, New Medieval Literatures, Exemplaria, Dance Research Journal, Romance Studies and other journals and edited volumes. Donnalee Dox is Associate Professor at Texas A&M University, where she holds joint appointments in Performance Studies and in the Interdisciplinary Program in Religious Studies. Her research focuses on contemplative practices, spirituality and the human body. In addition to The Idea of the Theatre in Latin Christian Thought: Augustine to the Fourteenth Century (2004), she has published articles on Middle Eastern dance, modern postural yoga, neoshamanism and contemporary spiritual performance. Her work has appeared in Theatre Journal, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, The Journal of Religion and Theatre, Theatre Research International, Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Ecumenica and TDR as well as in collections of essays, including Acts of Faith: Religion, Theatre, and Performance. Her most recent monograph is Reckoning with Spirit in the Paradigm of Performance (2016). Jody Enders, Distinguished Professor of French at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of four books on the medieval theatre: Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama (1992), winner of the inaugural Scaglione Prize from the Modern Language Association; The Medieval Theatre of Cruelty (1999); Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends (2002), winner of the Barnard Hewitt Prize from the American Society of Theatre Research; and Murder by Accident (2010). She has also written two books of performance-friendly literary translations destined for medievalists, historians, theatre practitioners and classic comedy lovers: The Farce of the Fart and Other Ribaldries: Twelve Medieval French Plays in Modern English (2011); and Holy Deadlock and Further Ribaldries: A Second Dozen Medieval French Plays in Modern English (2017). A past editor of Theatre Survey and Guggenheim fellow, she has published numerous essays on the interplay of rhetoric, medieval literature, performance theory and the law. Noah Guynn is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle Ages (2007) and of numerous articles on medieval literature and theatre. He is currently completing a monograph devoted to ethics, politics and religion in late medieval and early modern French farce. Erith Jaffe-Berg is a Professor in the Department of Theatre, Film and Digital Production at the University of California at Riverside. She is the author of Commedia dell’Arte and the Mediterranean: Charting Journeys and Mapping

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‘Others’ (2015) and The Multilingual Art of Commedia dell’Arte (2009). She has also published in Theatre Survey, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Early Theatre, Translation Perspectives and The European Studies Journal, among other journals and anthologies. Katie Normington is Professor, Vice Principal and Dean of Arts and Social Science at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has written extensively on gender and medieval theatre, and contemporary productions of medieval drama. Her books include Gender and Medieval Drama (2004), Modern Mysteries: Contemporary Productions of Medieval English Cycle Dramas (2007) and Medieval Drama: Performance and Spectatorship (2009). With Philip Butterworth she has edited European Theatre Performance Practice, vol.1., 1400–1580 (2014). Glending Olson is Professor Emeritus of English at Cleveland State University. He wrote Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (1982), co-edited, with V.A. Kolve, the Norton Critical Edition of selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1989, 2005), and has published various articles on medieval thinking about theatre and literature. He is a past fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation. The late Claire Sponsler was a Professor of English at the University of Iowa. She worked in the areas of medieval culture, literary history and performance studies. Her publications include Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America (2005) and The Queen’s Dumbshows: John Lydgate and the Making of Early Theater (2014), as well as other books and articles on medieval drama, popular culture and the history of reading. Carol Symes is Associate Professor of History, Theatre and Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Educated at Yale and Oxford, she subsequently trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and pursued an acting career while working toward her PhD at Harvard. Her first book, A Common Stage: Theatre and Public Life in Medieval Arras (2007), won four awards, including the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association and the John Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy of America. She is the co-editor, with Caroline C. Goodson and Anne E. Lester, of Cities, Texts, and Social Networks: Experiences and Perceptions of Medieval Urban Space, 400–1500 (2010); and co-author of a best-selling college textbook, Western Civilizations (W.W. Norton & Co.). In 2014, she became the founding editor-in-chief of a new journal, The Medieval Globe, and she is now editing the medieval volume of Bloomsbury’s forthcoming A Cultural History of Media. Laura Weigert is Associate Professor of Art History at Rutgers University. Her scholarship addresses the interaction between diverse media in the fifteenth

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and sixteenth centuries as a means to probe questions of representation, spectatorship and meaning making during this period. She has published essays on manuscript illumination, prints, panel painting, textiles, theatre, the ephemeral arts and theories of performance. Her books include Weaving Sacred Stories: French Choir Tapestries and the Performance of Clerical Identity (2004) and French Visual Culture and the Making of Medieval Theater (2015).

SERIES PREFACE

A Cultural History of Theatre is a six-volume series examining a cultural practice that emerged in antiquity and today encompasses practically the whole globe. Theatre is generally acknowledged to be the most social of artistic practices, requiring collectives to both produce and consume it. Theatrical performance’s ability to organize and cohere markers of cultural belonging, difference, and dissonance are the hallmarks of social life. Its production and reception have, however, altered significantly over the past two-and-a-half thousand years. Despite these changes, the same chapter headings structure all six volumes: institutional frameworks, social functions, sexuality and gender, environment, circulation, interpretations, communities of production, repertoire and genres, technologies of performance and knowledge transmission. These headings represent significant cultural approaches as opposed to purely regional, national, aesthetic, or generic categories. This allows for comparative readings of key cultural questions affecting theatre both diachronically and synchronically. The six volumes divide the history of theatre as follows: Volume 1: A Cultural History of Theatre in Antiquity (500 BC –1000 AD ) Volume 2: A Cultural History of Theatre in the Middle Ages (1000–1400) Volume 3: A Cultural History of Theatre in the Early Modern Age (1400–1650) Volume 4: A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Enlightenment (1650–1800) Volume 5: A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Empire (1800–1920) Volume 6: A Cultural History of Theatre in the Modern Age (1920–2000+) Christopher B. Balme and Tracy C. Davis, General Editors

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EDITOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

If theatre is a collaborative venture, so too is its historiography. Individually and collectively, it is a great pleasure to acknowledge the magnanimous collaboration of a great many interlocutors who regularly helped us to stretch the intellectual boundaries of our own historical imaginations. For their insights and assistance at a very early stage of the project, we are grateful to Leo Cabranes-Grant, Glenn Ehrstine and Karen Sullivan. Above all, I am forever in the debt of three scholars who have long shown me exceptional generosity: David Bevington; and the team of E. Catherine Dunn and O.B. Hardison, Jr., with whom I had the privilege of studying at the Folger Shakespeare Library many years ago. Their life-altering seminar on medieval drama continues to inspire me to this very day.

IN MEMORIAM On 29 July 2016, contributors to this volume received the devastating news of the sudden passing of a cherished colleague, Claire Sponsler. It is with grief but also with gratitude that we engage in a last dialogue with our generous, accomplished, enlightened interlocutor, who was as gentle of spirit as she was trenchant of mind. Along with the sad privilege of publishing her now posthumous essay on the peripatetic medieval theatre comes nevertheless the endless delight of reading her. The page comes alive with the sights, sounds, dynamism, physical presence and verve of what she so eloquently called a theatrical ‘medium on the move’, just as her readers are moved by a brilliant and imaginative innovator of our field. Like her beloved theatrical object of inquiry, Claire herself will move through time, space and place, her own remarkable legacy unforgettable and everlasting.

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Introduction Medieval Theatre Makes History JODY ENDERS

Imagine that the year is 1350. Slowly but surely, feudal lordships have given way to burgeoning urbanization; the Crusades are over but their legacy lives on; a shift in Japanese political power moves the shoguns to Kyoto; Ottoman Turks have been expanding their territory; the plague ravages Europe as France and England fight the Hundred Years’ War; romance is more popular than epic even as troubled times inspire miracle plays praising the Virgin Mary; there are signs of humanism in the Italian city states; Ibn Battuta has been travelling throughout Asia and Africa since leaving his birthplace of Tangier in 1325; and, somewhere in the medieval world, a person pretends to be someone else for the pleasure and edification of an audience. Who is the performer? What does he or she say or do (or fail to say or do)? What kind of cultural knowledge and experience precedes what is said and done? What does this performance look like? Where does it take place and for whom? What does it sound like (if it sounds like anything at all)? Is it a gesture? A chant? A song? A prayer? An act? An event? And is it theatre? If so, have any of its words or actions been preserved in a written account that can be trusted? And how on earth might we recover something so ephemeral today? From the fall of the Roman Empire to the advent of Christianity to the Protestant Reformation; from Byzantium to the Middle East to Western Europe; from feudal life to a bourgeoisie to emerging nationalism, piecing together the puzzle of medieval theatre requires an act of imagination that is also an act of history.

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Depending on how historians construct the often arbitrary chronologies of periodization, the Middle Ages normally spans, as it will here, the ten centuries between 500 and 1500, a millennium’s occupation of the literal ‘middle age’ or medium aevum, the long denigrated space ‘in between’ the so-called apogees of Greco-Roman Antiquity and a liberated Renaissance. Not surprisingly, that ‘middle age’ has suffered the anxieties of countless influences as medieval people came to grips contemporaneously with their classical heritage and as future scholars read their own past upon them. On the one hand, Petrarch invoked the ‘dark ages’ as early as the quattrocento; in his seventeenth-century Art poétique, Nicolas Boileau dismissed the medieval poets of ‘those vulgar centuries’ (ces siècles grossiers); in the nineteenth century, frustrated socialists and nostalgic Romantics on both sides of the Channel rediscovered medieval life as they looked back longingly but anachronistically at what seemed the communal spirit of their forebears; and twentieth-century patriots fighting the Nazis helped to give birth to the field of medieval studies.1 On the other hand, early ‘millennials’ had already struggled with anachronism in their own day. In one of the premier pedagogical texts of the European Middle Ages, the seventhcentury Etymologies, Isidore of Seville famously misunderstood the events of the classical amphitheatre; and the authors of fifteenth-century Passion plays regularly projected Christian doctrine onto Old Testament narratives whose Jewish protagonists could not have known of the coming of Christ.2 On the whole, medieval intellectuals waged numerous battles – theological, political and pedagogical – as they grappled with the theory and practice of translatio studii, which denoted the transfer, transmittal or translation of knowledge from one culture to another.3 And those intellectual battle scars remain visible in a modern medievalist politics that has given rise to the Old vs the New Medievalism and the Old vs the New Philology of the 1980s, to the founding of the first scholarly journals explicitly devoted to medieval cultural studies – Exemplaria in 1989 and New Medieval Literatures in 1997 – and to the revolutionarily inclined blog ‘In the Middle’ (hosted by the Babel working group), or to the journal The Medieval Globe.4 That dynamic, cross-cultural conversation between past and present constitutes the mission of this book. Following the historian Jacques Le Goff’s seminal insight that medieval culture as a whole displayed a widespread tendency to theatricalize itself,5 it is fair to say that theatre was everywhere. Those undertaking to write its history must look to the myriad spaces where medieval people came together to revel in spectacles that had the potential to be repeated, formalized and committed to writing as the textual entity that we now dub ‘drama’.6 We must look not only to scripted plays but to the multiple spectacular practices of multiple performers: to the poetry and songs of scops, bards and jongleurs (among the earliest ‘solo-performers’), to the tour-de-force oratorical displays of lawyers, priests, professors and politicians, and to such community festivities as folk

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dancing, processions and religious rituals. In public squares and in increasingly private spaces, singers of epic shared fictional and nonfictional tales of heroes; poets waged lyrical battles, competing against one another for the best song and engaging in the ‘jongleuresque performances’ discussed by Bruce Burningham in this book’s Chapter 7; and the antiphonal singing of the medieval liturgy materialized as an embodied dialogue for the faithful. Meanwhile, declaimers of romance plotted course upon course of love obstructed, thwarted or fulfilled; acrobats tumbled, dancers danced and mimes communicated nonverbally, their now static choreography extant in paintings and sculptures. Members of professional guilds vaunted their wares in grand civic processions and, as Kathleen Ashley emphasizes in Chapter 2, penitents participated in expiatory ones as they celebrated – or were made to celebrate – holidays religious and secular.7 Royal coronations were elaborate staged affairs; town councilmen and costumed lawyers – the French Basochiens and the Dutch Rederijkers – played at mock trials and real trials; politicians did likewise at the English Inns of Court as Spanish rhetoricians perfected the art of the political harangue (ars arengandi); and, especially in Italy, the moveable rhetorical feast known as the rhetorical art of letter-writing (ars dictaminis) involved ceremonial delegations parading through the streets to deliver their communications.8 Scholastic disputations and university examinations unfolded as educational rites of passage;9 royal decrees and papal bulls were proclaimed before citizens; the death penalty comprised a public spectacle; and the very dissemination of knowledge through teaching, preaching (the ars praedicandi) and courtesy manuals repeatedly modelled social conduct. Therefore, the challenge and the delight, as much of this Introduction as of this entire volume, is to make a scholarly virtue of what was indisputably an aesthetic virtue (albeit an ever-changing one). It is to isolate for analysis and interpretation a ubiquitous, ever renewable theatricality that signals both a literary genre and, as for Michel de Certeau, Alan Read and many others, a practice of everyday life.10 We scan the evidence of texts, architecture and the beaux arts in the hope of picturing and, perhaps, performing anew the theatrical past. And, as we recuperate data from sparse, biased, incomplete or corrupt accounts that often guard their secrets, our sources can be made substantially more trustworthy when we ask the right questions of medieval performance culture. Lest we create tautologically the very subject that we seek, I initiate our threefold approach below with ‘Lost in Translation: Textual Politics and the Nature of the Evidence’. This section takes up the deceptive simplicity of the canonical journalistic questions of Who? What? Where? and When? as we ask: What documents preserve the cultural history of theatre? Who created the theatre of the Middle Ages? Where and when did they perform? Next, in ‘Bodies of Knowledge and Knowledge of Bodies: A Living Archive’, I turn to

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the predicaments of assessing the static, written record of an oral, bodily theatrical experience. Recuperating the medieval theatre of individuals and collectives requires, I suggest, that we literally get the body into the act. That re-navigation of the record then facilitates a consideration of ‘Taxonomic Troubles and Performance Studies: How to Do Things with Theatre’. There, I argue that the interdiscipline of performance studies presents a particularly propitious access point to a holistic art that does, will and should resist some of the archaeologies of knowledge that we now hold dear (including the taxonomies that organize the chapter divisions of this very series). That is why so many of the authors here assembled dare to disrupt, contradict and unsettle what past historiographies have identified as a theatre. Ultimately, if those taxonomical difficulties highlight the historiographical how, we conclude with a meditation on the medieval theatrical why. Why did medieval people take to representational practice in the first place? What contributions has theatre itself made to cultural history and cultural history to theatre? We shall see that, in its millennium-long encounter with philosophy, theology, politics, science, pedagogy, music and the arts, the medieval theatre worked tirelessly toward a deep cultural understanding of the ways in which the imitative creatures known as humankind play out their relationships with history, ‘mythistory’ and ‘metahistory’.11 Through theatre, medieval or modern, they ponder the interplay between truth and lies, authenticity and inauthenticity, fact and fiction, truth and verisimilitude. They learn about their past from a medium that has always helped to make history.12 In the ten chapters that follow, we too stand to learn as much about the medieval past as about our own as we ponder the future of that history.

LOST IN TRANSLATION: TEXTUAL POLITICS AND THE NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE In demarcated spaces throughout the medieval world, all manner of social actors regularly made theatre happen. But their manifold performances might never have been recorded at all or, when they were, they have survived in texts that we no longer recognize as plays.13 Floods, fires, wars and the ravages of time have taken their toll on books, manuscripts, contracts and correspondence as well as on sets, props, costumes and playing spaces, such that beloved plays are lost forever to the very history they shaped. For example, we learn of the existence of a given play because an author mentions its title, come to find that all other traces of it have vanished. Elsewhere, a medieval play is elevated by modern readers to an importance that it likely never enjoyed in its own day. Yet elsewhere, as with so much of history, another play comes to our attention solely because of misdeeds committed by bad actors: a thief is arrested while playing a devil in a Passion play; a sotto voce by a comic actor launches

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accusations of heresy or lèse-majesté.14 Additionally, due to the conditions under which texts were written, transcribed and reproduced, what history there is tends to be that of the victorious. Most of the plays that have come down to us were authored by Western European men – much less frequently by women – who were of sufficient social power and privilege to have been instructed to read and write or to have been to university to study law, politics or theology.15 Ecclesiastical practices of preservation and transmission also shaped and determined any theatrical message deemed worthy of preservation and propagation (a point articulated with luminous clarity in Glending Olson’s Chapter 6 and Carol Symes’s Chapter 10). Consequently, to study the medieval past is to be ever cognizant of the historian’s limitation, to admit that any cultural history of the medieval theatre is likely to be informed as much by the empowerment of presence as by the disempowerment of absence. Beyond the perils of selective preservation, the record is as rich and varied as it is daunting. It also expands daily as medievalists review works of literature, music, history, theology, philosophy, science, law, folklore and politics along with university records, contracts, courtesy books, memoirs, trial summaries, legal depositions, and so on.16 Teams of researchers involved in the REED project (Records in Early English Drama) continue to scour the archives that dot the British countryside; a long-lost manuscript might be rediscovered with the restoration of Nazi plunder; a mysterious box at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, might turn out to house seventy-two hitherto unseen plays.17 Nor are the ‘texts’ that safeguard the history of the medieval stage necessarily texts in the conventional sense. Non-linguistic testimony abounds: a painting, a sculpture of a body no longer in motion, a costume, a doll, a prop, a piece of jewellery, a shard of pottery, a chalice, a crumbling architectural ruin, a piece of textile (as for Laura Weigert in Chapter 4).18 From that kaleidoscopic range of extant artefacts, we may yet recover the theatrical artistry of aural, oral, visual, gestural and linguistic communications that have been lost to history. We may yet recreate a whole that is infinitely more than the sum of its parts. Comparable in many respects to their classicist colleagues, medievalists locate relatively few ironclad facts regarding the author, provenance or date of a given playtext. To counter that paucity of information, they ordinarily commence by deliberating about the material state of the evidence, all with the specialist’s attention to detail. While such precision need not preoccupy us extensively in a series such as this, it is paramount to acknowledge that we are in possession of a reliable historical record precisely because others trained in Latin, the medieval vernaculars, palaeography, codicology, diplomatics and other disciplines have asked their questions and answered them responsibly. Does the text survive in a manuscript? How old is that manuscript? Is it illustrated? Does it have capacious or empty margins (which might

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signify – vellum and parchment being expensive – the wealth of the person or persons who commissioned it)? Is the play part of a book, a manuscript book (codex) or of what the French call a recueil factice (a loosely bound compilation)? If so, who bound the pages together in accordance with what organizational principle? Who copied it and when? What does the handwriting look like? Is the copyist known? Is the text in good condition? Does it appear to have been read frequently? Infrequently? Not at all? Do we possess multiple copies of a play (which indicates that it struck a chord with a particular community at a particular time)? Mostly, though, we endeavour to answer those journalistic questions of Who? Where? and When? When? In a culture of manuscripts and performance, establishing a date is vexing. As a rule, an extant medieval play is older – sometimes decades, even centuries or more older – than the manuscript, codex or early printed book that conserves it. Furthermore, fifteenth-century plays were performed well into the sixteenth century, cohabiting with both Shakespeare and the commedia dell’arte.19 Nor did medieval theatrical activity cease in the wake of such widespread efforts to censor it as the ban on Passion plays in France in 1548 or the reams of anti-theatrical polemic by John Foxe in England.20 Far from it. In a nascent print culture, plays were among the first literary works to attract early publishers; and, as far east as the Ukraine in a Harrowing of Hell, medieval theatre pieces were still being imitated, published and circulated well into the seventeenth century.21 Indeed, they continue to be performed in the present day with re-enactments of the Passion in Oberammergau, the Philippines and the United States or with such re-conceptions and revivals as Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play or, off Broadway, the reimagined medieval cycle of The Mysteries (2014).22 If, typically, the Middle Ages per se are limited chronologically, medievalism is not. Needless to say, this complicates the matter of who and where. Who? Inasmuch as most medieval plays are anonymous, authorship implies another central question: in what language? Medieval theatricality is attested in Latin, Hebrew and Arabic – witness the treasure trove of comic puppet plays by Ibn D¯aniy¯al (1248–1311)23 – as well as in all the European vernaculars: Old and Middle English, Old and Middle French, Old Provencal, Old High German, Old Norse, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Russian, etc. Moreover, as is readily apparent from Isidore’s encyclopaedic Etymologies, to access etymology was to access an entire culture and its history (even when, like us, he occasionally gets it wrong). Language is more than an artistic choice: it is a political choice often cast in political terms. When a medieval vernacular supplanted Latin or when François Villon wrote a ballad in Old French only to reveal that, by the fifteenth century, he no longer knew its grammar: those were inflected acts.24 Similarly, when contemporary medievalists from either side of the Channel refer to one and the same language as Old French or Anglo-Norman, or when English

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becomes the lingua franca of the Internet: those are inflected acts today, even though their political ramifications easily elude us in postmedieval editions and translations. That is to say that early editors did considerably more than reselect from an already pre-selected canon: through language, they intervened politically upon those works. Faced with evolving grammars and unstable orthography, they followed largely nineteenth-century editorial conventions, customarily homogenizing, normalizing and sanitizing the language of the written record.25 They effaced dialectal markings, corrected errors and perceived errors of spelling, grammar and syntax (to say nothing of obscenities); and they made necessary decisions about authorial intent as they opted for the so-called best reading (normally the lectio difficilior or ‘the most difficult reading’). In so doing, they also effaced key information about playwrights, audiences and readers, creating a collateral damage of misinformation that endures even in modern scholarly editions. Particularly nefarious has been the loss of the signature bilingualism and macaronic language of the medieval theatre. Consistent with a companion tradition in medieval preaching, a Middle English translation might be inserted into a Passion play after a citation from Scripture, hinting at possible spectatorial trouble with the Latin.26 In France, a character from fifteenth-century farce speaks with a heavy foreign accent or creates a linguistic muddle of French, Latin and Italian (which I have termed flatin and fritalian).27 In other comedic offerings, a stage direction in Latin – plorando (‘weeping’) – demonstrates a wife’s sexual frustration.28 And, as early as the twelfth century, a lengthy didascalic commentary in Latin painstakingly sets the scene for the Garden of Eden in the Play of Adam that unfolds in the vernacular.29 When more than one language is written or spoken in a given play, it means something. Be that as it may, we find nary an editorial disclosure – not even in William Tydeman’s otherwise brilliant compilation of archival evidence – that two languages have been translated.30 Hundreds of extant medieval playtexts challenge us, therefore, to consult the original sources, the better to recover what has literally been lost in translation. Where? However compromised by editorial politics, texts still contain invaluable clues to their identities. Naturally, the choice of language also tells us something not only about who authored a play but where it was (or was to be) performed. In what I can only think to call a kind of ‘preglobal’ studies, medieval theatre appeared in every future European nation, from Greece to Portugal, the Ukraine to Switzerland, Scandinavia to the Middle East, and in the East too (notwithstanding the preference of many scholars of China, Japan, and India to reject the nomenclature ‘medieval’).31 The Middle East also served as a critical conduit for the transmission of knowledge from the Greco-Roman world, even though the likes of Plato, Aristotle and Quintilian are generally held to be virtually without major literary influence in Europe until the fifteenth

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century. Cultural cross-pollination was as important as the country of origin, which never tells the whole story. Among the more dazzling instances of the phenomenon: a philological mystery in Hispano-Arabic lyric poetry (a key medieval performance genre intimately connected to theatre32). After decades of mystification surrounding a variety of seemingly incomprehensible phrases in Arabic, enter Samuel Stern. He figured out that the phrases were not in Arabic at all; rather, they were transliterated lyric insertions from Old Provençal troubadour song.33 Eureka. To borrow Claire Sponsler’s elegant phrase from Chapter 5, the medieval theatre was ‘a medium on the move’: so much so that Robert Potter spoke of its ‘illegal immigration’ to California.34 Likewise on the move were those who wrote, performed and consumed it. People were born in one town or country, eventually to study in another; they travelled throughout Europe, returning to practise their arts in their homelands. In this volume, we follow their paths, recharting the chronological, geographical and ideological reach (and overreach) of the Middle Ages, remapping the intellectual geography of the era’s historiographies. Even when the historical record is silent on the success, failure, miscommunication or indifference related to theatrical culture, it is the business of theatre to make silences speak.

BODIES OF KNOWLEDGE AND KNOWLEDGE OF BODIES: A LIVING ARCHIVE Despite much progress in recent years with digitized collections, when medievalists debate the archive, they are usually sitting in an actual archive of the dusty – not the digital – variety. But a medieval manuscript is teeming with life. Worm-eaten piles of parchment or vellum still clamour for reanimation. On the one hand, they host the vivid remnants of intense dialogues conducted by early readers who marked their codices with elaborately sketched index fingers, flagging key passages much as we do nowadays with highlighter pens. On the other hand, manuscript illuminations and historiated initials in cobalt blue and glorious gilt establish another sort of artistic dialogue while, at the margins, a space of contestation and subversion opens up in which pious moralizing is answered by farting apes at the bottom of the page.35 The manuscript page was – and is – a pale shadow of the dynamic events that it records, a space of limitless potentiality. It consigned past words, deeds and performances to the collective memory as much as it anticipated future performances. Thus, the cultural historian need scarcely have waited for Wolfgang Iser to take the 1970s literary critical world by storm to posit a literal ‘act of reading’.36 Early reading meant reading aloud, an act that generated not only imaginary sights and sounds (virtual and actual) for the spirit but also action for the body.37 Consider the fascinating if little studied Farce Nouvelle de Digeste Vielle et Digeste Neufve,38 where two embodied law books actually take

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to the stage to debate one another as characters in a play. Centuries before Michel de Certeau ever opined that ‘books are only metaphors of the body’ – an individual and collective body branded by the Law with a ‘red-hot iron’ – the principle had already made its mark by exemplifying a bookish controversy as red-hot comedy.39 Whether it be a romance, a poem, a Book of Hours or a play, reading entailed the aural and visual imagining of a dramatic scene, a learned practice that had been nurtured by centuries of mnemotechnical theory.40 Reading also presupposed the presence of an audience even if, as for St Augustine in his fourth-century Confessions, that audience appeared only in a personal, cognitive space of meditative prayer: ‘though my tongue be quiet, and my throat silent, yet can I sing as much as I will’ (et quiescente lingua ac silente gutture canto quantum volo).41 Jessica Brantley even goes so far as to speculate that ‘the individual’s quiet encounter with the static book itself [is] a species of sacred performance’.42 Elsewhere, Brian Stock urges that we ‘listen for the text’; Emma Dillon makes sense of sound; and Graham Runnalls wonders whether medieval theatre audiences were ‘listening or watching’.43 Given that medieval speech and action formed, for Stock, a ‘cohesive whole’, theatre has always called for both and more, inspiring the likes of Carol Symes to ‘treat all premodern texts as potential participants in a culture of performance’.44 Although infinite performances have been lost in translation, theatre itself is always a translation, a vision of and for action. It morphs into something else, finds itself again, makes sense and nonsense, makes meaning and makes and remakes history. So we listen and we look, re-tracing the many channels between oral and written, sight and sound, stasis and motion, word and deed, idea and gesture, picture and prayer, reading and song, script and print, voice and mime, thought and action and, for our present purposes, page and stage. We do so because, as any practitioner of theatre knows full well, performance changes everything. Be it virtual or actual, performance is ever mutable and of the moment. It regularly transforms the religious into the sacrilegious, the sublime into the grotesque, the tragic into the comic. It is both ephemeral and repeatable – and repeatable in many different modes and media (such as those discussed by Symes in our Chapter 10).45 Fortunately, numerous verbal and visual prompts survive in the rare acting manual46 as well as in the predominant medieval traditions of rhetoric and musicology, both of which permit responsible reimagination of the move from the page to the stage and back again. Among those who help us to listen is Geoffrey of Vinsauf, author of the twelfth-century Poetria nova. Geoffrey clarified that ‘the voice is as it were the image (imago) of the thing. . . . As the subject exhibits itself (recitator), so the speaker exhibits his voice’.47 The exhibition is long gone but its virtuality remains, analogous in many respects to the processes of linguistic, grammatical and musical notational

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systems. For another twelfth-century theorist, for instance, John of Salisbury, letters constituted ‘shapes indicating voices . . . [which] speak voicelessly the utterances of the absent’ (et frequenter absentium dicta sine voce loquuntur).48 But if the letter spoke ‘voicelessly’, then in what fashion did the eventual voicing occur? Was the verbal enactment of the imagistic script to be spoken? Chanted? Sung? As Guido d’Arezzo had remarked in his Micrologus (c. 1025): ‘just as everything which is spoken can be written, so everything that is written can be made into song. Thus everything that is spoken can be sung.’49 In light of such observations, the maverick musicologist Leo Treitler asserted that the Middle Ages made no terminological distinction between speaking, singing and chanting (cantare and dicere).50 And yet, by the thirteenth century, the anonymous romance (and the only extant chantefable) Aucassin and Nicolette clearly distinguishes between verse to be recited and songs to be performed, while the Play of Robin and Marion stands as a genuine musical comedy complete with notation for the melodies.51 Dramaturgically and historiographically speaking, indeterminacy is welcome, not unwelcome inasmuch as the same speaker might choose chant for one performance, speech for another, song for a third, a combination of any or all of those and so on. At stake is a tremendous ‘textual’ instability – mouvance for Paul Zumthor, variance for Bernard Cerquiglini52 – that is appropriately reflective of heterogeneous performance practices, a living hypertext. But if, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the performance medium was the message, then how do we read such multisensory events at so many years remove?53 Take the medieval literary predilection for list-making. Whereas oralformulaic epics had enumerated the names of fallen warriors, fifteenth-century farces do the same for the panoply of parodic saints of Holy Deadlock or the veritable thesaurus for ‘head’ and ‘ass’ of Shit for Brains;54 and, in the published book of Gargantua (1534), the great François Rabelais gleefully provides a laundry list of the impressive implements with which the young protagonist ‘cleaned his ass’ (torche-cul).55 I contend that such lists make sense only when we make room for the possibility that they functioned as call-outs for performance, texts to be enlivened by mime, texts fully integrative of reading, speaking and acting and which could revive what Rabelais dubbed ‘frozen words’.56 So it was that medieval performance culture insists, again quite literally, that we get the body into the act. When it comes to an art form that is historically, socially, theologically, philologically, rhetorically and musicologically contingent, the archive is alive, demanding the immediate revision, as for Donnalee Dox in Chapter 8, of such postmedieval terminology as ‘closet drama’ or ‘nondramatic’ or ‘paradramatic’ in favour of what I once called ‘protodramatic’.57 So, as we listen, we also look for signs of ‘liveness’, bearing in mind Aristotle’s principle from the De Anima that ‘the soul never thinks without a mental picture’58 and that that picture is a matter of embodiment.

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With or without the accompanying sights and sounds of verbal language, the medieval body itself was a medium that signified, a body that also comprises a body of evidence. Indeed, for Keith Thomas, the body is ‘as much a historical document as a charter or a diary or a parish register’.59 Corporeal communication had long been codified by thousands of years of paintings, sculptures, illustrations and artefacts as well as by the fifth rhetorical canon of delivery (actio, pronuntiatio or hypokrisis), which elucidated the interplay among gesture, voice, intonation, tone, facial expression, movement, modulation, impersonation, histrionics, costume and staging.60 Hand in hand with a raft of exciting ‘new technologies’ addressed by Katie Normington in Chapter 9, they demonstrated the validity of Le Goff’s statement that that ‘the body provided medieval society with one of its principal means of expression. . . . Medieval civilization was one of gestures’.61 Thomas agrees that ‘there is no attribute of the human body, whether size, shape, height, or colour, which does not convey some social meaning to the observer’.62 In that sense, a body of theatrical knowledge means a knowledge of theatrical bodies: the body politic, the body of law, the body in pain, Christ’s body, the King’s two bodies,63 the overblown farcical body that explodes as a huge head on one end and a giant derrière on the other, shitting, farting and erupting all over late-medieval public squares and marketplaces.64 Knowledge – theatrical or other – was a pictorial script, a dictionary of symbols that was deeply embedded in and reflective of cultural literacy. For Kenneth Burke, ‘the body is an actor . . . [that] participates in the movements of the mind, posturing correspondingly’; for Judith Butler, it is ‘a materiality that bears meaning, if nothing else, and the manner of this bearing is fundamentally dramatic’.65 But long before Butler ever spoke of ‘corporeal style’, Quintilian, for instance, one of the most understudied theorists of acting, had invoked ‘physical eloquence’ and ‘styled action’ in the first-century Institutio oratoria. There existed, he maintained, a universal body language: ‘though the peoples and nations of the earth speak a multitude of tongues, they share in common the universal language of the hands.’66 Whether it be the moving pictures of manuscript illuminations and marginalia, the verbal pictures of the gesticulating and gendered body of the rhetorical tradition (and from Sharon Aronson-Lehavi’s Chapter 3), or a medieval troupe’s extraordinary ability to master pantomime so exquisitely that, in 1424, they performed protocinematically ‘without speaking or movement, as if they were images raised against a wall’: at issue is one and the same preoccupation with the theatrical performance of visual signs.67 Cultural sign language thus enables a more nuanced understanding of the media and multi-media that informed what Pamela Sheingorn christened the ‘visual syntax’ of medieval drama.68 What emerges, when we listen and watch, is a bona fide theory and practice of social role-play that is consistent with performance studies.

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TAXONOMIC TROUBLES AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES: HOW TO DO THINGS WITH THEATRE Typically, medieval plays do not introduce themselves sporting the handy generic monikers by which we recognize drama today. Nor do these frequently untitled works subdivide conveniently into dramatic and non-dramatic or comedy and tragedy (the tragic ethos almost unheard of even for such a genre as the Passion play).69 True, they occasionally tell us what they are by means of such designations as ludus, mystery, interlude, moral or morality play, procession, miracle, farce, fool’s play, dialogue, debate, discourse or allegory.70 But, if anything, the category of ‘dramatic literature’ has tended to obscure the rich sociocultural settings in which medieval theatre happened. Following Le Goff’s insistence on an omnipresent medieval theatricality or Paul Zumthor’s on theatre as the most ‘social of all the media and the most receptive to changes in the social structure’, it proves far more profitable to approach a fungible medium with the more fungible language of ‘theatre’, ‘performance’, ‘media’ or ‘theatricality’. The mysteries of the culture that gave us the mystery play may thereby come to light, newly exemplary of the interdiscipline that we now dub ‘performance studies’.71 Even in the Middle Ages, an epoch wont to taxonomize, medieval drama is so tricky to identify that its very name is interspersed liberally with spectacle, sport, tournament, ritual, battle play, trial, pageant, parade, procession, preaching, politics, proclamation, scholastic disputation, oratory, music, dance, song, pantomime and protest. Belying a hermeneutic instability akin to T.S. Eliot’s later confusion des genres,72 it is a shape-shifter, an embodiment of mouvance at the level of genre. Already in the Etymologies, Isidore of Seville had grouped together sixty-nine cultural events under the heading ‘Of War and Play [ludus]’. In a veritable primer for performance studies, he included warfare, forensic rhetoric, gladiatorial combat, horse racing, dice games, religion, the circus, the amphitheatre, comedy and tragedy based on their shared affinity for displaying in privileged spaces what Johan Huizinga would go on to term ‘glorious exhibitionism and agonistic aspiration’.73 It is no coincidence that, in his stellar review article for New Medieval Literatures, ‘Medieval Literature and Cultures of Performance’, Bruce Holsinger turns to anthropology and ethnomusicology, broaching Richard Schechner’s foundational question: ‘Is there anything outside the purview of performance studies?’74 Much as I once argued for a performance continuum, Holsinger advocates that we ‘conceive of oral-formulaic studies and performance studies as two ends of a methodological continuum’.75 It is along such a continuum that our ten chapters now take shape, each one tending to broaden and blur rather than to narrow and sharpen the standard taxonomical distinctions. Like the art form that they study – and starting with the fittingly collaborative Chapter 1 by Seeta Chaganti, Noah Guynn and Erith Jaffe-Berg – they routinely cross borders and push real and

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imagined boundaries that seem especially coterminous for the Middle Ages. To summarize the situation another way: there can be no historically informed study of, say, the social functions of theatre (Chapter 2) independent of a concomitant inquiry into medieval institutions (Chapter 1), gender (Chapter 3), the material environment of performance (Chapter 4), circulation and touring (Chapter 5), interpretation (Chapter 6), theatre-making communities (Chapter 7), repertoires (Chapter 8), available technologies (Chapter 9) and of performance media (Chapter 10). Our chapters are intertwined and inseparable, the better to encourage a much-needed re-examination of some of the teleologies that have dominated medieval theatre studies. In 1965, O.B. Hardison laid bare the Darwinian evolutionary model for medieval drama that undergirded the formative work of E.K. Chambers in The Mediaeval Stage (1903) and of Karl Young in The Drama of the Medieval Church (1933), the former primarily concerned with popular folk traditions and the latter, with literate liturgical ones.76 Hardison exposed the false binary of Christian vs secular with a simple but compelling analogy: if a student of zoology were to classify a whale as a fish, the origins and development of the species would be forever flawed, the fruit of a poisonous family tree. Ever the literary zoologist, Hardison rebaptized medieval drama a ‘many-headed beast’ whose origins were to be sought in the unexpected places that we now identify as the province of performance studies.77 Issuing a clarion call that the twain between Christian and secular meet, he objected to the bizarre teleology according to which medieval drama had lain dormant throughout the so-called Dark Ages until arising ex nihilo as troping, the interpolation of music and gesture into the liturgy. At Easter, the Visitatio sepulchri, better known as the Quem quaeritis trope, had functioned historiographically as a kind of Christianized Thespis legend and as ground zero for medieval theatre studies. Quem quaeritis in sepulchri Iesu? (‘Whom [or what] do you seek in the tomb of Jesus?’) That is the question asked of three women before an empty tomb as they search for the disappeared body of a resurrected Christ. But, now that we understand troping not as the sole origin of medieval drama but as one of many possible protodramatic activities within a performance culture writ large, we might respond with a question of our own: Quem quaeritis in theatro?78 Given the marked medieval preference for the theory and practice of embodiment, the quintessential story of a sacred body lost and found facilitates a new apprehension not only of what theatre is but what it does. As we have seen, as the medieval theatre negotiates the pathways between thought, image, writing and site-specific action, it also demonstrates forcefully that speech is action – and in ways that the ordinary-language philosopher J.L. Austin would much later characterize as ‘performative’.79 In a world where medieval vassals swore oaths to their overlords in highly public ceremonies, where popes issued bulls before spectators, where legal edicts were read aloud

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to alert the public of current policies, where the cure for a strep throat likely involved saying a number of Hail Marys, where a convicted criminal was allegedly executed during the performance of a biblical play in 1549, theatre did things.80 As for Austin it ‘did things with words’ but, of equal significance, it did things with action. Simply put, theatre is as theatre does. And it does a lot as it moves transhistorically and cross-culturally throughout the world at a moment when everything is in flux, when tradition and continuity are matched by evolution and revolution. Many readers will be familiar with the expression that ‘we are what we do’. They might even have heard it invoked to explain away an alleged defect of medieval characters who sometimes strike readers as flat or lacking in psychological complexity. Not so. In the dramatic events that shaped the medieval world, there was a great deal to do as theatre-makers grappled with the key trends that held sway over pan-European thinking. As they thought through theatrically such pillars of civilization as the most effective form of government, the maintenance of a just and orderly society or the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next, they returned time and time again to questions of authenticity, appearance and representation, perhaps nowhere more so than when they engaged Church doctrine. Although Hardison’s paradigm-shifting argument relied on the insight that religion was not antagonistic to the creative instinct, if anything has cast a giant shadow, if not always a pall, over the cultural history of the medieval theatre, it has been the unprecedented influence of religion in general and of Catholicism in particular.81 In the massive cultural debate that would define the transitional moment between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, theologians contemplated the issue that would likewise dominate the turbulent years of the Reformation: the symbolic vs. the literal interpretation of Transubstantiation. As such astute theatre scholars as Huston Diehl, Michal Kobialka and John Parker have shown so convincingly, the debate about Transubstantiation was, in many ways, a highstakes debate about theatre.82 Medieval Catholics believed that, when a priest celebrating Mass took the Host and cup of wine in his hands and said ‘this is my body, this is my blood,’ a bona fide re-enactment of the Last Supper occurred performatively (in the strict Austinian sense). Reformers countered that this was a symbolic act – albeit a powerful one – of what had happened to Christ’s body during Transubstantiation. Both sides ruminated about the primordial theatrical question of what was real, what was pretend and what was pretence. Both sides pondered whether religious congregants were spectators witnessing realism or participants bearing witness to reality. Was the ritual imbued with truth? Lies? Probability? Verisimilitude? Some combination thereof? In a word, theatre captured perfectly a moment of phenomenology that was also a moment of theology, generating pan-European political pieties that were also ‘theatrical

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pieties’. Those theatrical pieties spoke then and must speak now to historiographical pieties inasmuch as both are devoted to acts real and represented. While not all medieval persons took part in that debate, and while Jews and Muslims were often explicitly excluded from it, it is no exaggeration to state that everyone would have been affected by controversies about the Eucharist. A responsible history requires, moreover, that we cease essentializing ‘The Church’ as a monolithic entity to which one cleaved or against which one rebelled. As Jo Ann McNamara has reasoned, regardless of how centralized doctrinal teachings might have been at any given historical moment, there was no such thing as ‘the medieval Church’. Instead, there were highly diverse ecclesiastical communities headed by diverse figures exercising diverse types of power at diverse times.83 At all times, though, the ideological, artistic, pedagogical and philosophical ramifications of religious habits of thought proved an irresistible ideological foil against which to fathom what theatre was and was not. Not surprisingly, this made for an eminently self-conscious medieval theatricality and a dramatic repertoire that was ensconced in metacommentary about the very nature of artistic representation. Medieval plays of every ilk gravitate obsessively toward matters of costuming, role-playing, impersonating and physical or psychological mirroring and doubling. Passion plays like Arnoul Gréban’s hold up a mirror to humankind; silly farcical characters are described in Jekyll-and-Hyde terms; morality plays splinter the psyche; and mystery plays are informed by the dualities of body and soul, life and afterlife.84 They think through the very nature of verisimilitude as they make visible the normally invisible mysteries of a sacred spirit indivisible from the corporeal secrets of the carnal body. The miracles of religious drama, for instance, call for the classic theatrical suspension of disbelief. After all, it is not reasonable, not verisimilar, not in keeping with the logical operations of the universe that a Saviour could multiply loaves and fishes, walk on water, or be resurrected from the dead.85 By the same token, farce upon farce displays a different yet compatible vision of verisimilitude. A stolen sheep passes for the Christ child in the Second Shepherds’ Play; men pretend to be pregnant – convincingly, no less, in the Galant qui a fait le coup – and others are beaten to a pulp, only to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and start all over again. In one of the more sacrilegious offerings of the medieval French stage, a certain Long John Silver recounts the hullabaloo that he has allegedly witnessed in Paradise; he purports to have risen Christ-like from the dead, returning resurrected to his family with a cry of ‘Here I am!’86 Ecce homo. Ecce theatrum. This is a profoundly philosophical theatre intent on fashioning a dialogue about the rationality and irrationality of life as experienced by believers and nonbelievers alike. In the final analysis, the medieval theatre does an incredible job – and a credible one – of emphasizing and incarnating what theology is meant to emphasize and incarnate: the need to look beyond any apparent truth of

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appearances. Whether those appearances are magnified beyond all measure in comedy or re-enacted as history in religious drama, theatre creates a new vision – a re-vision of the real: a re-creation that is recreation. We can never recover what has not endured; but medieval theatre endures. Pitfalls of historiography notwithstanding, the future of the theatrical past demands the restoration of that living, breathing archive of extant evidence that is so often lost in translation. In that way, the rich culture of the medieval stage, one of the most social media of its day, may itself rise anew from the dead.

CHAPTER ONE

Institutional Frameworks SEETA CHAGANTI, NOAH GUYNN AND ERITH JAFFE-BERG

In the medieval history of theatre, we might expect institutions to function as static and monolithic structures. But a more apt figure for the medieval institution would be a phrase of movement, complex and patterned: in essence, choreography. To elaborate on this assertion, we must first acknowledge the discrepancies between medieval and modern uses of the word institution itself. In many medieval languages, institution primarily signifies the act of setting a process in motion or installing a person in office. It only secondarily denotes civic, social, political and religious structures and the sets of rules they seek to impose. This is not to say that medieval social and cultural practices were never governed by entities that we would see as similar to modern institutional bodies. It is, rather, that medieval cultures were highly attuned to the fact that institutions were not simply static entities regulating behaviours and shaping beliefs. They were also living, moving organisms constituted by means of performance: modes of doing as well as being. The social theorist Michel de Certeau conveys this characteristic of the modern institution by calling it both ‘place’, meaning a physical location and cultural programme governed by imperatives of conformity and continuity, and ‘space’, meaning the unsettling of those imperatives by the unpredictable ‘actions of historical subjects’.1 But we need a different metaphor to describe the medieval institution, one that foregrounds its particular kinetic quality. As Jody Enders argues, medieval theatre existed in orchestrated motion: it impelled ‘itself through time and space before the eyes of spectators’, affording them opportunities for investing familiar places with ‘meanings old and new’ and for exposing or disrupting the ideologies attached to them.2 We might therefore characterize the medieval institution, in its relationship to theatre, as choreographic, noting that the

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medieval world often conceived of its institutions in terms of the mobile, even terpsichorean, elements of medieval theatre itself. Put another way, the complex kinetic patterns of medieval theatrical culture reflected the fluid mobility, intertwining oppositions, syncopated structure and other choreographic qualities of medieval institutions. In making this claim, we challenge deterministic accounts of institutional frameworks as sites of ideological containment and of public performance as a mechanism for imposing cultural hegemony. Until fairly recently, scholarly consensus held that medieval theatre was concerned with maintaining ‘the wholeness of the social order’ and promulgating a worldview in which ‘the individual’ was subsumed ‘to the collectivity and to its conception of social morality’.3 Indeed, it is still common to read that medieval performances, including those that depict hierarchical inversion and social revolt, are ultimately oriented toward the ‘acceptance of sacrosanct values’ and the ‘restoration of the status quo’.4 The problem with such assertions is that they confuse the theatrical figuration of ideology with its actual operations, whereas (to quote Pierre Macherey) ‘no ideology is sufficiently consistent to survive the test of figuration’.5 They also rely on a theory of passive consumption that is ill suited to medieval practices of spectatorship, which were notoriously rowdy and interactive.6 Perhaps most seriously, these assertions overlook abundant evidence that medieval performances, as for Claire Sponsler, were ‘social events . . . within which various contested cultural issues could be acted out’;7 that, as for Carol Symes, they were (often quite literally) staged in a ‘marketplace of ideas’ that put ‘entrenched and institutionalized’ discourses in tense dialogue with a range of other discursive modes;8 that, as for Sara Beam, they ‘directly challenged the authority that religious and royal officials enjoyed’ and regularly gave rise to ‘fighting, law suits, and complaints of slander’;9 and that efforts by ruling elites to control the stage through patronage, propaganda and censorship were only ever partially effective.10 Under such circumstances, theatre could not impose values or restore a status quo; instead, it set in motion interactions between institutions and spectators, places and spaces, ideological figurations of social order and everyday tactics of consumption. Keeping these negotiations in mind, we inquire here into a variety of institutional settings in which medieval theatre flourished. While it has been traditional in canonical criticism to confine such inquiry to Christian Europe and to neglect continental theatre in favour of English traditions, we focus on four main categories of institutions across a broad geographical and cultural ambit: sacred (including Christian and Jewish, ecclesiastical and monastic milieus); educational (by which we mean especially colleges and universities); political (notably civic, regional and royal governments); and fraternal, vocational and festive (guilds, confraternities and chambers of rhetoric, as well as parallel Jewish and Arab institutions). Our goal in documenting these institutions is to situate them socially and historically

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while simultaneously indicating the ways in which they escape their apparent ideological frames by bending and breaching the boundaries that contain them, effectively transforming place into space. The four categories should therefore be understood as heuristic rather than absolute. We shall emphasize this point by drawing attention to the inevitable overlap between them as well as to the ‘shadow’ institutions they incorporate but also conceal: minority groups who influenced theatrical culture but whose historic footprint is, for a variety of reasons, less effectively illuminated than it should be. This point also reminds us that our very act of writing these histories resonates with the figure of choreographed motion that we use to describe institutional dynamics. That is to say, the elusiveness, silence or invisibility of some of these institutional categories foregrounds the difficulty of recapturing this past – a quintessential historiographical dilemma – in much the same way as do the gestural, non-verbal and otherwise uncodified components of medieval performance. In each section of this chapter, we address this issue by incorporating into our analyses evidence that speaks non-verbally – including visual, architectural and bodily forms of historical witnessing.

SACRED INSTITUTIONS If any single institution has dominated modern perceptions of medieval theatre, it is the Catholic Church, which produced virulent anti-theatrical polemics but also exploited the inherent theatricality of its sacred texts and ritual observances in order to attract audiences and earn converts. Traditional histories have often misrepresented the relationship between religion and drama, however, notably by adhering to a teleological, or, as it sometimes called, ‘evolutionary’, model of development. According to this hypothesis, medieval drama developed out of Latin liturgical tropes after a period of dormancy following the decline of the Roman Empire. As mimetic elaborations on the liturgy acquired aesthetic autonomy and self-consciousness, performers abandoned church buildings for marketplaces and courtyards, and increasingly sought independence from clerical oversight. Gradual processes of secularization, commercialization and vernacularization eventually paved the way for playwrights and performers to recover the aesthetic canons and theatrical techniques of antiquity, to translate and adapt ancient plays, and to inaugurate the truly modern drama of the Renaissance, which had divested itself of its institutional origins in the medieval Church. Despite the fact that critics of medieval drama have long recognized the fallacies underlying this evolutionary model, its influence has persisted. Chief among these fallacies is the model’s failure to acknowledge the heterogeneous nature of the Church itself, which was hardly free of pagan, theatrical and commercial influences; which was riven with internal divisions that belie any claims to monolithic uniformity; and which exhibited all the complex, strategic patterns of mobility that allow us to define medieval institutions as choreographic.

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Another significant fallacy is the insistence upon what Michel Foucault calls ‘the pursuit of the origin’: ‘an attempt to capture the exact essence of things’ by disguising the reality that ‘they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms’.11 As John Parker observes, the synoptic gospels and early apologetics were themselves highly adulterated cultural forms, influenced as they were by pagan antecedents and analogues, including ‘dramatic convention’.12 Although Church Fathers like Tertullian and Augustine stridently denounced pagan theatre, even they were not immune to its influence and sought ‘knowingly or otherwise . . . to arrogate [its authority] to Christian scripture and ritual’.13 The eventual development of a sacred drama out of the Roman liturgy in the tenth century should therefore be perceived as part of a continuous tradition rather than a radical innovation; and here, too, we should avoid a mystifying discourse of origins. There is no question that the Easter trope Quem quaeritis or Visitatio sepulchri (in which the angels at Christ’s tomb inquire of the Three Marys, ‘Whom do you seek in the sepulchre, O followers of Christ?’) contains instructional language indicating an impulse toward theatrical elaboration (see Figure 1.1); nor should we doubt that Quem quaeritis exerted pivotal influence on the liturgical drama of the Church in the Romanesque period.14 However, it is another thing entirely to assert, as does Glynne Wickham, that this liturgical drama reflects an institutionally confined culture that was ‘unsullied by any of the vulgar considerations that stem from human exhibitionism and egocentricity or from doubts about its likely audience appeal and consequent box-office receipts’.15 In fact, the liturgy (and especially the Mass) was from the outset self-consciously theatrical, and (according to Parker) so tied to mercantile practices that soteriological metaphors of cost and debt were readily literalized in ritual practice, ‘whether in the Offertory, tithes, the trade in relics, Mass stipends, or the indulgence’.16 In analyzing the theatrical culture of the medieval Church, we should thus emphasize what Parker calls ‘the hybrid genealogy of any cultural form’, by which he means both the ‘cross-purposes to which [the form has] been put’ and the internal ‘antagonisms’ that constitute it.17 Among other things, this means remembering that ‘the “framework of medieval Christianity” is no singular entity and is sometimes not even significantly “Christian” ’; that the ‘evolution’ of medieval drama is ‘a mixed process, full of holdovers and semiautonomous niches’;18 and that the Church was not a singular, circumscribed, ideologically centred institution but a polymorphous, unbounded, internally divided one. The Quem quaeritis example mentioned above renders this idea concrete: a ‘surprising resemblance’ between Jewish liturgical chants (including the piyyut and several hymns in the prayer book known as the Mahzor) and Christian tropes and antiphons (including the Quem quaeritis) introduces unexpected porousness into the boundaries delineating the two religions, and allows us to

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FIGURE 1.1: Quem quaeritis tropus, from the Hartker Antiphonary, c. 990–1000. St Gallen Stiftsbibliothek, St Gallen, Switzerland, Cod. Sang. 391, fol. 33r.

imagine that the institutional origins of medieval drama might not have been as exclusively Christian as scholars have supposed.19 Moreover, as Robert Bonfil reminds us, in Italy and elsewhere, Christians and Jews often occupied the same civic locations, notably during feasts: In the narrow confines of medieval towns, the pre-modern tendency to blur the borderline between private and public could on those occasions only be

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amplified, particularly when Jews, usually expected to remain invisible as much as possible, were celebrating. On such occasions the limited space normally allocated to them would inevitably encroach upon the Christian public space and provoke attention and rejoinder according to the complex set of conditioning preconceptions and actual perceptions of everyday life side by side – at times friendly, sometimes hostile, mostly a paradoxical mixture of both.20 In short, religious and cultural practices of all kinds were affected by what de Certeau would call the spatial practices of everyday life – practices that agitated the physical, organizational and institutional structures serving to confine populations and promote ideological conformity. The indeterminacy of sacred institutions asserts itself still more urgently when we confront the extant archives relevant to medieval theatre. In addition, these archives further undermine the teleological grand narrative of conventional theatre history. As Jelle Koopmans argues on the basis of Latin, French, Flemish and German sources, there were no singular origins for medieval drama, no straightforward trajectories for its aesthetic development and no easy distinctions between stagy rituals and so-called real theatre. To begin with, Koopmans asks that we reconsider the nature of the documentary record itself, which emanates almost exclusively from, and pertains almost exclusively to, ecclesiastical institutions. What originated in the Church was therefore not theatre itself so much as what Koopmans terms a ‘mise en écrit’ of records of theatrical performance.21 The documentation of performance expanded considerably in later periods, as record-keeping became increasingly central to clerical culture; however, these new protocols – the execution and preservation of legal, financial and contractual records of all sorts – attested to bureaucratic expansion rather than theatrical resurgence. Nor should we overlook the fact that extant documents fail to corroborate claims about the secularizing ‘transfer’ of theatrical performance from chancel to marketplace. Numerous records attest to late medieval and early modern performances within church buildings, including stagings of irreverent genres like comedy and farce. It appears that even monks and nuns were getting in on the action. As Carol Symes postulates, the large and widely disseminated corpus of Latin comedies (which includes six martyrdom plays based on Terence by the tenth-century German canoness Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim) calls into question ‘the Church’s [supposed] hostility toward theatre in general and levity in particular’ and points instead to ‘cross-pollination between its official, Latin liturgy and the garden-variety entertainments with which it competed’.22 This doesn’t mean that medieval societies failed to acknowledge the dividing lines between secular and spiritual institutions or sacred and profane sites, but rather that those lines were not as clearly demarcated or as rigorously defended as we might imagine. Indeed, the

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theatrical culture of religious institutions was often strikingly worldly in its scope and ambitions, as witnessed by the fact that religious houses were regularly used to stage plays, and that monks and nuns were known to perform profane genres en travesti for large public audiences.23 As these examples indicate, the particular contingencies of medieval culture compel us to acknowledge how profoundly heterogeneous sacred institutions were in this period. Medieval traditions could not, and did not, articulate clear ideological investments free of ambiguity. Rather, performance engaged, negotiated with and even capitalized upon the complexities of the sacred institutions with which it was entwined. The result was a theatre whose representations of space, time, community and belief capitalized upon the diversely animated patterns and structures of institutionalized medieval religions.

EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS Just as performance traditions expose sacred institutions as tangled networks of cultural alliances and antagonisms, so, too, do they reveal educational institutions as constructed worlds of knowledge that could not be fully circumscribed and as sites of cultural dialogue that could not be effectively controlled. The comparison is far from incidental, as sacred and educational institutions were intimately tied to one another. Monks, clergymen and others affiliated with the Church delivered nearly all formal instruction, and, concomitantly, education oriented itself toward religious inquiry, with theology widely recognized as the Queen of Sciences. Moreover, from the grammar classroom to the monastic school to the faculty of theology, the influence of theatre was fundamental and pervasive. All levels of instruction relied heavily upon interlocutionary methods like disputation and dialogue, and these methods translated readily into curricular and extracurricular, intramural and public performances. As components of an institutional category, then, medieval schools, colleges and universities should be considered another key set of ‘origins’ for medieval drama. And as with the liturgy, academic programmes of study should be construed as hybrid formations, assembled as they were from a variety of supposedly ‘alien’ cultural sources, including the ancient liberal arts curriculum and the festive and ludic activities that proliferated in urban settings.24 In fact, even when academic institutions sought to cordon themselves off from adjacent communities by insisting upon the high seriousness of their intellectual mission, the actual instruments of learning displayed a tonal variety that belied these claims. On the one hand, the word university itself performed a certain kind of ideological validation, in that it referred to a segregated, independent community of teachers and scholars (universitas magistrorum et scolarium) whose focus was the entirety of the created world (universitas rerum)

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and the God who created it. Moreover, university instruction was offered exclusively in scholastic Latin, which was a prestige language of the elite. The core curriculum, which consisted of the three overlapping language-arts disciplines known as the trivium (grammar, dialectic and rhetoric) and the four equally overlapping mathematical arts of the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music), conferred immense social distinction and power upon those who completed it. On the other hand, all of these disciplines, and especially the trivium, were intertwined with theatrical play and lent themselves to processes of aesthetic elaboration and popular appropriation. Grammar, the art of correct Latin usage, was taught in schools through recitation, chanting, storytelling and role-playing,25 and was also frequently mimicked as dog Latin or latin de cuisine, a barbarized language of false erudition that the learned could use to mock the unlearned and vice versa. Dialectic, the art of sound reasoning leading toward the discovery of truth, was devoted to colloquy and debate (as its etymological meaning of ‘conversation’ suggests), and could be transposed into refined and unrefined, serious and parodic cultural practices.26 Finally, rhetoric, the art of verbal persuasion, was the most inherently theatrical element of the curriculum, in that it required skills in delivery, gesture, imitation and impersonation. As a tool for persuading and motivating listeners, it was a requisite for all institutions of high culture; and at the same time it was highly amenable to vernacularization, vulgarization and aestheticization. In its forensic, homiletic and theatrical forms lay immense popular appeal.27 If the liberal arts are implicitly theatrical, this theatricality can take specific form as carefully arranged movement dynamics. Such movements are evident in Philips Galle’s engraving of Bruegel the Elder’s Temperance (see Figure 1.2), a postmedieval image that is nonetheless highly attuned to the potential of the medieval curriculum to evolve into engrossing and even indulgent aesthetic forms. The trivium is depicted as a set of collective allegories that are, literally or effectively, theatrical scenes. Grammar (bottom right) is rendered as a group of young boys immersed in the pleasures of reading and oblivious to the world around them; dialectic (centre right) consists of a tense agon in which the disputants turn their backs on book and lectern in order to give free rein to polemics and histrionics; and rhetoric (top left, with, tellingly, music immediately adjacent to it) is fully aestheticized as a stage play, in which elegantly attired aristocrats are goaded by an impish fool with his bauble while an enthralled audience looks on. If Bruegel caricatures the scholastic curriculum for its inherent theatricality and material excesses, he also accurately registers the ways in which the medieval university had permanently transformed the broader culture, most notably the drama. As Alex Novikoff notes, the ‘institutionalization of disputation’ in the thirteenth-century university soon gave rise to performance practices that were designed to attract large, diverse audiences and to keep them entertained.28 Indeed, as one historical witness

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FIGURE 1.2: Philips Galle after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Temperentia (Temperance), c. 1560. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands.

attests, the disputatio de quolibet genre, which deliberately targeted specialists and non-specialists alike, often resembled a cockfight, with professors ‘pecking and clawing at each other’ to the delight and derision of the crowd.29 With its inherently combative, suspenseful nature, disputation found parallels, and no doubt sources of inspiration, in overtly theatrical compositions like a fictional exchange between Albertus Magnus and the devil disguised as a student;30 in dialogical genres of music and poetry, for instance the polyphonic motets of the Notre Dame School, the jeux-partis of the northern French trouvères and the partimens and tensos of the southern French troubadours;31 in boisterous and raunchy student productions at Oxford, Cambridge and elsewhere;32 in farces and morality plays that are substantially indistinguishable from the university polemics that gave rise to them;33 in public debates held throughout Europe between Catholics and heretics, and especially Christians and Jews (see Figure 1.3, which depicts a public debate between Christians and Jews, with both groups using gestures evocative of scholastic method);34 and in Latin and vernacular tractates, dramatic narratives and theatrical set pieces that pitted such characters as Ecclesia against Synagoga, and thereby Old Testament prophecy against Christian revelation.35

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FIGURE 1.3: Disputation between Christians and Jews, 1483. Woodcut in Johann von Armssheim, Der Seelen Wurzgarten (Ulm: Konrad Dinckmut, 1483), fol. 21v.

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In certain instances, communities could also co-opt hegemonic educational structures and organizations in order to register objection and doubt, using the very protocols of academic inquiry to resist institutional and ideological control. In keeping with the point-counterpoint structure of medieval disputation, for example, Christian polemics generated responses from the Jewish community, notably in fifteenth-century Italy, where there is ample evidence of Jewish theatrical activity. While Jews were vilified by dint of the mistaken belief that they ritually murdered Christians, as in the infamous case of Simon of Trent (1475), they also found ways to stage Old Testament stories to highlight Jewish valour and virtue and to offer an implicit retort to anti-Semitism.36 For instance, a 1489 performance in Pesaro of the story of Judith and Holofernes fulfilled these aims;37 and recent archival work points to the likelihood that there were similar performances staged even earlier.38 The Mantuan Jewish community might also be said to have pursued institutional disruption through the creation of its own corporate institution: the Università degli Ebrei. While the term may seem, at first glance, to suggest a ‘Jewish University’, this was not entirely the case. In actuality, Università was closer in meaning to the English word ‘universe’, and the community’s primary aim was to govern the civic, religious and cultural life of Jews. Thus its name and presence destabilized the conventional sense of a university as a centre for learning and a means of disseminating ideas. Even more crucially, the Università represented the Jewish co-optation of the Christian structure of the university in order to promote the Jewish community’s autonomy as a corporate institution. The Università accomplished this aim by negotiating with Christian authorities and representing the entire Jewish community’s interests in those negotiations. In this way, the Jews capitalized upon the apparatus of the Università to signal their community’s existence as a universe unto itself within the larger Christian world of Mantua. From the scholastic universitas magistrorum et scolarium to the Università degli Ebrei (a university that was not one), educational institutions, in their flexibility, produced a malleable sense of what performance meant and in what contexts it could appear. If our discussion of sacred institutions has focused on manifestations of performance that were recognizably theatrical for their ritualistic or ludic capacities, in educational practice we find a responsiveness to acts of performance in a broad variety of communicative encounters. But their surprising, multifarious natures continue to develop our larger point that performance enacted and reflected the most complicated and ambiguous gestures of the institutions hosting it.

POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS While modern political institutions are defined by secure geographic frontiers, bureaucratic governmental agencies and legally codified notions of citizenship, medieval ones were far more variable, ambiguous and contingent. They typically

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incorporated overlapping allegiances, many of which were local, vocational, communal and interpersonal. This does not mean that the Middle Ages lacked ideas of nation and nationality, citizen and citizenship; indeed, medievalists have disputed the premise that the Enlightenment invented these categories and can alone lay claim to the identity formations they engender.39 That said, in a medieval setting the meaning of the word nation was complicated by a web of local and contingent relations, including kinship networks, social rank, professional identity and regional origins. Likewise, the word subject, with its clear implications of subordination to ruling authority (an employer, guild, civic leadership, feudal court or ruling monarch), was a more broadly relevant category of identity than citizen, which referred largely to the inhabitants of a particular municipality. It was also a more obviously equivocal one, in that (to quote Foucault) ‘men’s subjection’ signifies ‘their constitution as subjects in both senses of the word’, i.e., as subjects of power and as empowered subjects.40 The mobile and shifting nature of performance practices and venues allows us to grasp the corresponding mobility of political institutions in the medieval period, as well as the ways in which ideological places (in de Certeau’s sense of a ruling elite’s attempt to subject a location and population to social and political control) could be transformed into counter-ideological spectacles. While elites often attempted to conscript performance occasions to assert their own power and control, what they ultimately revealed to their viewers were the vagaries of medieval practices of political space and the unpredictability of power more generally. That unpredictability is nowhere more obvious than in the ritualized performances associated with civic and religious feasts. As Edward Muir puts it, ‘Political ritual or ritualized politics tends to camouflage tensions, especially by representing more political harmony than may actually exist . . . Despite the representations of harmony in political rituals, they always take place within a social context of disharmony’.41 Carnival, the feast of excess celebrated throughout Europe in anticipation of Lent, was well known for its constitutive ambiguities. In a Certaudian manner, Carnival rituals imposed conformity while at the same time enabling the unpredictable actions of the participants in the ritual – actions that had the potential to unsettle that very order. Carnival celebrations in Venice reflected this dichotomy between social unity and social strife in a dangerous feat known as ‘The Flight of the Turk’ (Il volo del Turco), which is attested in 1565 but likely began much earlier and reflects a strongly medieval, pan-European tradition of festive ritual and political performance.42 As Muir observes, ‘The performance challenged daredevils, usually Turks, to walk on ropes strung from the bell tower in the Piazza San Marco to boats in the lagoon’ (see Figure 1.4).43 To its viewers, the Turk’s suspended perambulation allegorically traced a boundary between water and land and between the north-eastern Mediterranean

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FIGURE 1.4: Il volo del Turco (The Flight of the Turk), 1816, after the original of c. 1548. Museo Civico Correr, Venice, Italy. 2016 © Photo Archive – Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia.

(Byzantium and later the Ottoman domain) and the north-central Mediterranean (the Venetian Republic). The symbolic position of the acrobat – between earth and sky, water and land, East and West, audience and performer – recalled to spectators the precariousness of the Turkish foreigner, who was both welcomed and disparaged in Venice. Thus, within a ritual that celebrated the power of the Doge and the economic hegemony of the Republic within the Mediterranean, the presence of the theatrical body of the Turk also metaphorically figured the body politic of another economic empire within the Mediterranean, one that could (and eventually did) eclipse Venetian domination within the Mediterranean. Equally, the acrobat’s vulnerability signalled the tenuousness of Venetian power. While the Doge and the government imposed ideas of social harmony, in reality, the audience’s perspective on the spectacle belied that harmony. As historian Erik Dursteler has argued, the Venetian audience brought specific associations to this spectacle that helped to shape its appearance. In their minds, ‘the Levant continued to occupy a place of primacy in their collective imagination, and many believed [. . .] that their city’s fortunes were still inseparably tied to the east’.44 The inclusion of the Turk might have been intended to cement a picture of Venetian domination over the entire Mediterranean (with its eastern extremity figured in the Turk in Figure 1.4), but that self-same inclusion might also have caused the audience’s attention to

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wander away from confidence in the monolithic power of the Doge and the Republic, remembering instead the waves of defeat of the Venetians in the hands of the Ottomans beginning with the Siege of Thessalonica (1423). Public executions offered another theatrical mechanism for the expression of institutional and political power, albeit one that was equally subject to appropriation and distortion in the field of reception. As David Nicholls argues, the ‘exemplary’ nature of the execution of heretics in early-sixteenth-century Rouen ‘depended on the victim as main actor fulfilling his or her role in the prescribed manner and on the audience reacting in a correct way to the spectacle presented’. Yet things did not always transpire as authorities anticipated they would, with condemned heretics managing to communicate pathos, defiance and even joy to onlookers, who often came to admire the heretics’ courage and to resent the cruelty of those who had condemned them.45 These problems were inherited from the Middle Ages, which (as Enders has argued) were deeply familiar with the unavoidable slippages between theatrical and penal performance and with the unpredictable and reversible nature of ritualized performance.46 Both phenomena can be discerned in the case of the 1355 execution of the tribune Cola di Rienzo, arguably one of the more esteemed leaders of late medieval Rome.47 As Amy Schwartz argues, he carefully engineered his popularity, “incorporat[ing] every known traditional and contemporary ritual to manufacture his assumed authority’.48 Joëlle Rollo-Koster and Alizah Holstein have demonstrated that emotional responses to spectacles within the Roman city in the late Middle Ages allowed such spectacles to reflect urban inhabitants’ attitudes toward political changes occurring after the papacy had moved from Rome to Avignon in 1304. Known for his use of performance-based vehicles, Cola’s own demise proved equally spectacular. His body was dragged throughout the city, subjected to the humiliation of city residents, before being incinerated by the city’s Jews, who had been ordered to destroy what remained in a final denigration of a once popular leader whose own rise from simple origins reflected tremendous innate leadership capabilities.49 A self-proclaimed reformer, Cola introduced changes to the laws, taxation system and treatment of the poor, only to be thwarted in his mission by the wealthy Roman nobility led by the Colonna family, who considered these policies a threat directed at reducing the power of the elites.50 Ironically, the very spectacles Cola deployed to augment his fame during his career proved fatal to him when he lost control of them: ‘the manner of Cola’s death and humiliation parallels the public spectacles that had made him famous during his political career and consequently would have evoked those recent memories among observers.’51 The ritualistic handling of his death makes clear the self-awareness with which the elite public deliberately turned Cola’s strategies against him. The late medieval English tradition of mumming reminds us as well that political performance not only symbolically undermined hegemonic structures

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but also orchestrated negotiations between monarchs and civic bodies, giving urban leaders verbal and visual languages in which to express ideals of coherence in their communities. While the name mumming suggests mute pantomime, in practice it seems to have been more multifaceted, encompassing both folk and elite associations. Mumming often involved disguised performers portraying some form of obeisance to the English king.52 At the end of the fourteenth century, such performances represented, as Maura Nolan puts it, ‘festive resolutions to political problems’.53 The performance of the mumming, she suggests, played a role in resolving financial conflict between Richard II and his London citizenry.54 Richard II exemplifies the kind of medieval monarch who capitalized on the political possibilities of performance, arranging highly elaborate pageantry throughout his reign, including a lavish funeral ceremony for his wife Anne of Bohemia in 1394.55 The urban mumming developed in the fifteenth century, particularly in the poet John Lydgate’s hands, to assert symbolic cohesion – expressed through mayoral governance – in what Claire Sponsler characterizes as an intractably diverse and competing set of populations in London.56 In Venice and Rome, performances told one story in the eyes of their creators, and another in the eyes of their audiences; or else they co-opted techniques for asserting power in an aristocratic bid to retain control. While aspects of these dynamics were almost certainly at work in Richard II ’s public performances as well, the mumming represents an alternative model for understanding the relationship of politics to performance in which the ambiguities of each could exist in a collusive relationship. These practices reinforce our claim that medieval performance enacted what were the complex and mobile choreographies of political institutions themselves. The Flying Turk, Cola and Richard II reveal with particular force the manipulation of spatial scale as a crucial factor in the agendas of political performances. The events run the spectrum from a spectacle flung across a city to one that takes over a defined civic space in order to engage the public, to one that symbolically addresses the singular and specific audience of the monarch. This range indicates an awareness, across different medieval cultures of performance, of the need for ideological places to expand and contract in order to do both subversive and legitimating work.

FRATERNAL, VOCATIONAL AND FESTIVE INSTITUTIONS Our final institutional category reveals the extent to which later medieval drama, as a largely mass-media phenomenon, addressed itself directly to common folk, was suited to their tastes and interests and reflected the increasingly diverse, disorderly and conflictual nature of the urban settings in which they lived and worked. Confraternities, guilds and festive societies were formed to articulate

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and defend the collective interests of specific segments of the population in the increasingly stratified and competitive environment of the medieval metropolis. Theatre was a crucial component of their institutional mission, in that public performances, usually scheduled for feast days, offered a mechanism for expressing collective identities and asserting political priorities within a cacophonous public sphere. Despite this emphasis on cohesion and solidarity, however, these institutions moved around in time and space, reacting to and accommodating what they encountered, and forming the kinds of patterned partnerships and oppositions that we would call choreographic. In so doing, they reflected practices of everyday life in which conventional boundaries were constantly being breached, including geographical obstacles and regional and national frontiers. Indeed, given the importance of trade routes for urban populations, and especially for the merchants whose interests were represented by guilds, we should think of fraternal, vocational and festive institutions as more broadly transnational than their cultural activities and immediate spheres of influence would seem to indicate. Moreover, parallels between Western institutional frameworks and non-Western ones allow us to speculate that the expansive reach of mercantile activity enabled dialogue and influence to occur across vast terrestrial expanses and cultural divides. We therefore emphasize not only the various cultural and ideological cross-currents at work within European institutions, but also the ways in which these institutional paradigms reverberated throughout North Africa, the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. The ethos of the guild and confraternity emerges clearly in institutional archives throughout Europe, from the Laudesti and Scuole Grandi in Italy to the trade guilds performing Corpus Christi cycles in England, from the Meistersingers in Germany to the Chambers of Rhetoric in the Low Countries. The two examples we will cite both emanate from late medieval France: the Basoche, which was an association of law clerks and apprentices linked to the Parlement of Paris, and the Abbaye des Conards, which was Rouen’s most prominent festive society.57 The Basochiens were former university students who worked in subaltern, ad hoc capacities within the judicial system. They sought to defend their collective interests by ‘acting like a corporation or guild’ and by performing plays that were infamous for their ‘satirical audacity’ and were often censored as a result.58 The Conards were ‘artisans, minor officials, and small-scale merchants’ who were responsible for much of Rouen’s prosperity but enjoyed only limited influence in municipal politics.59 Each group banded together to protect its mutual interests, and each performed boisterous, subversive plays, using the stage to criticize civic elites, to defend their own institutional prerogatives and to speak out on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised. As members of the middling sort, they occupied a liminal status in the urban world, aspiring toward wealth and social standing despite their alignment with the urban underclass. The liminality of the Basochiens and

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Conards finds parallels in their theatrical culture, which was strictly regulated and censored and therefore developed tactically ambiguous modes of expression, many of which were nonverbal. Thus the Conards used noisemaking and rough music to draw audiences, incite crowds and intimidate civic officials; they used rich costumes and flamboyant masks to express pride in their craftsmanship and encroach upon aristocratic sumptuary privileges; and they used elaborate set construction to glorify Rouen as a bastion of civic virtue and to appropriate civic achievements as their own.60 Add to this the fact that the throngs that assembled to view their performances were drawn from all levels of urban society, and it swiftly becomes clear that the indeterminacy of performance closely matched the indeterminacy of the social order and political power. Confraternal theatre did not dissipate social tensions so much as cast them into relief and offer a venue for enacting and negotiating those tensions using the shared language of festivity. Similar claims can be advanced with regard to fraternal, vocational and festive institutions throughout Europe; and indeed the similarities among institutional frameworks across a broad geographical area suggest substantial cross-cultural and transnational influences. At the same time, these unexpected trajectories between East and West further our argument about the nature of institutional complexity and its reflection in performance culture. The writing of theatre history texts is no longer mute concerning the cross-currents of theatre history, and recent research on Middle Eastern theatre has suggested the possibility, first, that theatrical guilds may have existed in the Muslim world and, second, that there may have been connections and influences between Muslim and Christian theatrical traditions. Li Guo notes that the ‘prevailing view holds “guilds” were nonexistent in Cairo, Damascus, and Aleppo’; he counters, however, that at least one art historian has identified ‘a guild-like network, or monopoly, of immigrant craftsmen from Northern Mesopotamia’ and that the Islamic shadow play tradition (Khaya¯l al-Zill) represented in its dramas a ‘confraternity of tricksters’ known as the Ban¯u S¯as¯an, which was active in the tenth century in Iraq, the eastern Mediterranean and later Cairo.61 Is there perhaps justification for imagining some sort of influence of the Ban¯u S¯as¯an on the Christian performers who were beginning to codify liturgical drama in this same period; or, for that matter, of the great master of the shadow puppet tradition, Ibn D¯aniy¯al (1248–1310), on the Corpus Christi drama of later medieval England?62 We lack precise evidence to indicate exact points of contact between the two traditions; however, trade routes and crusader trajectories offered many opportunities for cultural exchange, as did long periods of captivity for crusaders and more casual forms of contact in the context of trade. Even the content of the performances themselves points to possible sources of intercultural influence. For example, the Khaya¯l al-Zill tradition makes ample reference to the Crusades; and Shmuel Moreh documents

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depictions of ‘battles fought on land and sea’ that seem to refer to the actual conflicts of the Third Crusade.63 Eventually, the shadow plays would migrate to the Ottoman world and influence the development of the Karagöz comic shadow puppet tradition there. The Ottoman tradition in turn found many common features with comic performances in the West, such as the commedia dell’arte. The theatre made by these groups reverberates with similarities to the Conards, who were also artisans and small-scale merchants wielding a limited degree of power in local and municipal politics. The dramas in the Khaya¯l alZill tradition were likewise boisterous and at times profane, directed towards criticizing local civic leaders in the manner of the French counterparts. Given the contacts between West and East that were facilitated through conflict or exchange, how could there not have been some degree of mutual influence in performance traditions? If, in the political arena, medieval theatrical spectacle enacts the ambiguities of power structures in premodern societies, the performances of festive and fraternal institutions instead comment upon the nature and effects of their multicultural influences. Indeed, the very structures that link professional functions and performance making are not inherently European, as we might think, but instead represent significant cultural plurality. Festive and fraternal institutions thus not only reflect cultural diversities within their own features and idioms, but in addition, this plurality creates kinetic dimension and complexity in the interplay of theatre and mercantile institutions.

CONCLUSION: INSTITUTIONAL CHOREOGRAPHY Having opened by suggesting choreography as a metaphor for medieval institutions, we conclude by embodying this metaphor through an instance of medieval danced performance. Our final example not only enacts and comments upon institutional complexities but also emblematizes the challenges of medieval theatre historiography itself. The danced performance in question appears in an exemplum known as the ‘cursed carolers of Colbek’ in Robert Mannyng’s fourteenth-century work Handlyng Synne.64 By figuring the dynamics of institution through choreographed movement, this dance expands our sense of how medieval performance and institutionality spoke to and explicated each other, illustrating that performance-based commentary on institutions occurred in modes that we might not expect. The dance ultimately suggests that we might augment our understanding of medieval performance and institution through the very lacunae that characterize the vanished performance objects of premodernity. It must first be acknowledged that those lacunae – in this case the dance’s nontextual nature and lack of notational practice – render it unrecoverable in any specific way. For this reason, our example not only illustrates the problem

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of medieval dance, but also figures the problem of historiography in medieval performance. In this story, a dozen unruly revellers dance in a churchyard on Christmas night, inciting the ire of the priest, Robert, who lays a curse on them that consigns them to dance with their hands grafted together for a year. At the end of the year, they are freed and disperse, but each is still doomed to continue dancing in his corner of the Holy Roman Empire. Compounding the oddness of the story itself is the way that it both specifies and, at the same time, further obscures the form of its own performance ‘reality’. It does so largely through the poetic text accompanying the carol in Mannyng’s version, which he presents first in Latin and then in his vernacular Middle English; we provide a Modern English translation below: Equitabat beuo per siluam frondosam, Ducebat secum merswyndam formosam, Quid stamus, cur non imus. ‘By þe leued wode rode beuolyne, Wyþ hym he ledde feyr merswyne. Why stonde we, why go we noght?’65 [Through the leafy wood rode Bevolyne, He led with him the beautiful Merswyne. Why do we stand, why do we not go?] On the one hand, the final line describes conventional carol choreography in a straightforward way: the company typically moves in a circle while the leader sings a stanza, and then everyone stops to sing what is known as a burden, a refrain presumably represented in this final line.66 On the other hand, these lines leave unanswered many questions concerning the specificities of carol choreography: was it always in a circle, or sometimes in a straight line? How were its measures counted? In which direction did its dancers travel? What did its steps look like?67 More particularly, what does the resistant comment about standing signify? Does it correspond to the movement practice of the burden, or is it a less literal sense of standing, a feeling of static entrapment in a moving dance? Within what appears to be illuminating description, then, we confront what is in fact highly occluded choreographic detail. The kinetic shape and pattern of this dance are unfixed and could take many forms, and as such the dance reminds us how inescapable such doubts are – or should be – in the discussion of many premodern performances. But what if, rather than feeling stymied by such choreographic uncertainty, we capitalized upon it? What if, for instance, we were to consider this gap to offer the point of entry to a specific account that allegorizes the workings of medieval institution? Indeed, as a medieval entity, institutional space reflects its

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FIGURE 1.5: Carol scene, from Le roman de la rose, c. 1425. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, Austria, MS 2568, fol. 7r.

own uncertainties, and these often articulate themselves as questions not only of space but also of configuration. The medieval institution, for instance, interrogates its own boundaries, whether in the categorization of sacred and secular locales or in the impulses both to construct and to dissolve spaces for cultural others within and without the dominant paradigm. Danced movement can enact the dynamic of the medieval institution as seemingly reified but

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actually closer to what we might term quixotic. Institutions, like the carollers’ dance, involve inscrutable or unpredictable configurations of space and time that move beneath and within apparently ordered patterns. Figuring institutions thus as a kinetic phenomenon, dance alerts us to the spectrum of ways that performance and institution might investigate each other. When the carollers ask, ‘Why stonde we, why go we noght?’ they inquire into the dialectic of being and doing on which, as we have seen, medieval institution rests. Institution, that is, requires self-conscious shifting between the performative process of institutionalizing and the acknowledgment of structures that always already proclaim power and efficacy. The carollers’ query about standing and not going emblematizes this dichotomy, creating an uncertain oscillation between the senses of becoming and of standing (the latter implicit in institution’s etymological origin in sto, ‘to stand’). Standing in place while singing about an impulse to move – in whatever inscrutable fashion – the dancers demonstrate the unique fitness of performance to articulate the problem of the medieval institution. Hand in hand, seemingly still and mobile at once, always implicitly raising questions about how they move, the dancers perform a medieval consciousness of institutions as both codifying and destabilizing communities. The carollers capture this paradox in their act of standing within time, standing within process, and moving to a choreography that exists but cannot be fully known. In this capacity, they reveal medieval performance’s potential to theorize – through its very form and its inaccessible spaces – the complexities of its relationship to medieval institutions.

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CHAPTER TWO

Social Functions KATHLEEN ASHLEY

To consider the question of why and how a medieval person attended a dramatic performance, we must abandon almost all of our modern Western assumptions about theatre-going. For the typical person considering an evening at the theatre in the twenty-first century, the choice of when and where to go and what to see is primarily an individual and optional one, driven by a desire for leisure-time entertainment. Traditionally the post-medieval audience has gathered at one permanent site – the ‘theatre’ – where a scripted play was enacted by professionals (paid, trained actors) for an entrance fee. In the new world of contemporary technologies, however, live drama competes for audiences with a plethora of other entertainment media. The result is that a very small proportion of any Western society’s population now attends plays in a theatre, that individual motivations for both production and attendance vary widely, and that, above and beyond entertainment, the ‘social functions’ of drama are difficult to identify. By contrast, live public performances in the Middle Ages had a prominent and visible role in all Western societies and theatricality permeated the ways in which medieval people thought about their world and created their own place in it. The cultural historian might well identify the period’s most consistent trait as the expectation of performance at every social occasion, with performance as a major marker for the significance of a given event. As we shall see, entries of royalty and other notables into a town typically featured multimedia performances – a procession accompanied by music and featuring speeches, tableaux or plays at stops along the route. A period of affliction like the plague would certainly have called for a procession or even a St Sebastian play. Many large towns staged complex dramas that attracted regional audiences or they

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designed literary competitions for which plays were written. A favourite postprandial entertainment of corporate groups from convents and craft guilds to noble households was a play addressed to their special interests, such as a patron saint’s life or a political allegory. Seasonal festivities from Carnival to Midsummer brought forth a variety of improvised local performances, and most liturgical celebrations from Christmas to Corpus Christi were marked by dramatized religious scenes. The aristocracy across Europe, too, turned their martial exercises into theatrically stylized chivalric games. The sheer volume and variety of medieval performances make any single generalization about social functions problematic but that plenitude at the same time compels us to scrutinize dramatic events for their social meanings. The centrality of performance to cultural life during the Middle Ages raises fundamental questions: what were the aims of dramatization, and how did the performances function to produce specific social effects? This chapter will take an anthropological approach to medieval performance in order to explore relationships between sponsoring structures and symbolic frames of experience, between group identities and individual responses of participants. While scripted ‘plays’ form a subset of materials to be discussed for our period, the medieval tendency to turn every occasion into a ritual or performance means that we must take a wider cultural view of the dramatic. It was the ‘convergence of anthropology and theatre’ that created the discipline of performance studies, as Marvin Carlson has pointed out.1 More broadly, the anthropologist Milton Singer defines ‘cultural performances’ as occasions on which a society dramatizes its collective myths, defines itself and reflects on its practices and values. Such occasions are concretely located in time and space, have sponsors, performers, audiences and intended purposes.2 The social function of a medieval performance depended upon the interrelations of these elements. For anthropology, the scenes to be studied include religious, political and social rituals and ceremonies, folk play, game and other improvised activities, as well as written scripts for speech, song and dance. In fact, it is difficult to imagine writing a genuine ‘cultural history’ of medieval ‘theatre’ without including that range of performances in the discussion. In examining the functions of different kinds of cultural performance for participants in the events, this chapter will introduce an analytic frame – the model of ‘grid/group’ discussed by the anthropologist Mary Douglas as a way of systematizing the cultural constraints on participant experience.3 Douglas wanted to illuminate the relation of individuals to their society, in particular how social values are perceived and affect behaviour. One dimension of assessment was ‘group’, the strength of allegiance to membership in a group with defined external boundaries. Another dimension was ‘grid’, the extent of social distinction, regulation or prescribed behaviour within a social context. Both commitment to the group and social differentiation can range from low to

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high; as vectors (from low grid/low group to high grid/high group), they provide necessary nuance to our understanding of the social functions of performance (Figure 2.1). Generally, the line between medieval participants in performances and the audiences for those performances was blurred – because both participants and audiences belonged to the larger community within which performances were meaningful. However, insofar as it pays attention to distinctions in strength of group affiliation and in individual differentiation, the ‘grid/group’ model gives us a more precise picture of participant experience and of the diverse roles that performance could play in specific medieval contexts. In cultural performances like processions, for example, those marching tended to be far more invested in the significance of the ritual than the spectators at the event – with the interesting

FIGURE 2.1: Grid-group model of culture.

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exception of processions that were petitions to God, where spectators were transformed into participants with a stake in the outcome and therefore a stronger ‘group’ affiliation. Likewise, in the context of performance by and for a closed lay or religious group, the performers and audience shared values and goals; but when the performers were professionals with other goals (such as making money), then the functions of the event for members versus performers could differ. Concepts of ‘grid’ and ‘group’ provide an heuristic for making these distinctions within the crowded medieval landscape of cultural performances.

PROFESSIONAL ENTERTAINERS Although we often speak as if ‘professional theatre’ were a post-medieval phenomenon that depends upon a fixed performance space with commercial goals, in fact almost every known society in history has people who are recognized as specialists in artistic performance. Beginning with the Odyssey’s Demodocus and Phemios, the ancient ‘singers of tales’, and their twentiethcentury successors in the Serbo-Croat region or the griot figure in African cultures, most tribal societies identify individuals with the specialized skill of singing or reciting the group’s central tales and myths.4 In the terminology of symbolic anthropology, such performers are both ‘marginal’ and ‘central’ – that is, although often relegated to the margins of the social group by their lifestyle, they play a symbolically central role in sustaining the culture through their art. Known as minstrels, harpers, mimes, players and jesters, the professional wordsmiths and performers appear in documents and texts throughout the Middle Ages. Some have stable patronage at a ruler’s court, as the bards do at King Hrothgar’s mead hall, Heorot, in the Anglo-Saxon heroic epic Beowulf. More often during the later Middle Ages, these performers were mobile in search of patrons or performance venues, and they formed loose professional organizations based on their skills. In Ireland, as Alan J. Fletcher has shown, there were performing artists in the various ethnic communities (Gaelic, AngloIrish, English) voicing the values and identity of the sponsoring community. However, the artists were primarily ‘a likeminded confederation, a microsociety with allegiances principally to themselves and finally beyond the provincial claims of any particular ethnic, political or regional faction; and they were peripatetic, active seekers of sponsorship from communities elsewhere’. Fletcher terms this a kind of ‘social amphibiousness’ of the performer class.5 In the grid/group model of society, these performers are both ‘low grid’ and ‘low group’ – that is, they operate as relatively autonomous individuals outside hierarchical status rankings and lack deep identification with a larger group or broader social ideology.

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We do see, especially in the later Middle Ages, the formation of loose bands of entertainers who travel together to performance venues although information about their activities is difficult to find. As Alan Hindley comments, ‘[p]recisely when entertainers started to band together into companies is one of the imponderable questions of the history of European theatre’.6 Account books provide the most reliable data on the existence of early professional performers. Monasteries often hired these entertainers to support the abbot’s obligation to provide hospitality to visiting notables and to local elites. Sheila Lindenbaum estimates that in England ‘monasteries must have been one of the three or four most significant sources of employment’ for musicians and other players.7 The entertainers paid by Abbot John Islip of Westminster for Christmas festivities in 1509–10 included the Queen’s minstrels; the King’s waits; the King’s trumpeters; the waits of London, a less illustrious band of loud shawms and trumpets; the King’s players, known to have performed moral interludes; the Abbey’s singing men and singing children; little John the luter; the King’s bearkeeper; and the Lord of Misrule.8 Players participating in local parish festivities like the folk play of Robin Hood also appear in monastic accounts.9 In the case of monastic entertainments, the performances had the function of supporting the honour of the religious community and its members and would be considered ‘low grid/high group’. However, they had another meaning to the hired players who participated in the festivities only as professional individuals making a living by their performances, and therefore exemplified the ‘low grid/low group’ category.

SEASONAL FESTIVITY: CHRISTMAS AND CARNIVAL Before the development in the late Middle Ages of urban settings with complex cultural performances, medieval society throughout the year marked significant liturgical and seasonal events with festivity. The feast days of the Christian calendar were celebrated at the behest of the Church, often incorporating folk myths and rituals.10 The most striking examples of calendrical performance took place during the Christmas season, with its multiple festive celebrations, and during Carnival, which was celebrated in the streets by the general population but understood to be part of the liturgical year as preparation for Lenten abstinence.11 The seasonal festivities of both Christmas and Carnival could verge on the scandalous, but both were, if not always tolerated by authorities, able to survive and thrive for centuries – typically within the context of churches and communities whose explicit value systems were diametrically opposed to the practices of the festivity. The historical persistence of both kinds of seasonal cultural performance has perplexed scholars determined to see the Middle Ages as monolithically, soberly religious, or repressively controlled by ecclesiastical or civil authorities.

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To address the puzzle of medieval festivity, Russian theorist of language and culture Mikhail Bakhtin proposed that Carnival represented the culture of the ‘folk’ or common people, which he argued was always opposed to the sober official culture of the ruling classes;12 this folk culture was so powerful that it broke through at certain times of the year and authorities had no choice but to license festivities like Carnival. Bakhtin’s overarching thesis was challenged by such scholars as Max Gluckman, LeRoy Ladurie, and Clifford Flanigan,13 but his irresistible presentation of folk-festive forms of entertainment – epitomized by the term carnivalesque, which has entered the cultural lexicon – has been influential with subsequent theorists of cultural performance. For Bakhtin, popular festive culture is characterized by laughter, by the language of street and marketplace (billingsgate, curses, insults, nonsense), by disorder and violence, and most of all by grotesque body imagery emphasizing the materiality of the lower body (overconsumption and evacuation, copulation, etc.). The festive forms analyzed by Bakhtin are found within most kinds of medieval cultural performance, even the liturgical drama. In his own discussion of festivity, Don Handelman has called attention to a type of play, ‘rituals of reversal’, that are common worldwide in periods of transition during the calendrical cycle:14 ‘Symbolic reversals are marked by the mockery, mimickry and ridiculing of one category of one person by another, or by a category commenting upon itself. Often this is done in a spirit of play, which may be characterized by more overt expressions of conflict, hostility or aggression.’ He adds that ‘reversal and inversion carry unnatural connotations: these are conditions of abnormality . . . So ideas of normal order are inherent in temporary modes of reversal’.15 Significantly, in both ‘low grid/high group’ and ‘high grid/high group’ contexts, the temporary reversal does not challenge the external boundary of the group nor does it fundamentally question the validity of roles in the existing order. The lengthy Christmas season – that began in early December and sometimes ended as late as 2 February with the feast of Purification – was celebrated in churches with liturgical rituals and in private households with ceremonies and games that were based on feasting, gift-giving, disguises, masking and cross-dressing.16 Handelman argues that seasonal performances of small social groups featuring festive reversals should be considered ‘low grid/high group’. He also discusses the village youth groups of sixteenth-century France, the ‘Abbeys of Misrule’ documented by Natalie Zemon Davis, which used symbolic modes of reversal (charivaris) to punish those who violated the local norms of domestic behaviour. Marriages between an aged and a young person – a violation of generational norms – were often met by night-time demonstrations of noisy music in the street outside the couple’s house, and spousal abuse might result in parading the offending party to verbal insults. The Youth Abbeys’ festive punishments (whose violence occasionally got out of hand) were ritual

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reminders of community norms of marital relations that functioned to defend village group identity.17 In part because of protests by bishops, we know the most about the parodic festivities involving clergy and generally known as the ‘Feast of Fools’. On various dates during the twelve days after Christmas, the lower orders of clergy and the choir boys in many churches indulged in reversals of status and decorum based on the biblical verse, ‘He has put down the mighty from their seat and exalted the humble’ (Luke 1:52). Official condemnations of the festivities claimed they were parodies of the Mass itself, as sausages and puddings were eaten on the altar and water dumped on the celebrant. There were reports of dancing and noisy music in the church, masked and fur-coated revellers,18 and a cleric facing backward riding an ass up the church aisle. The festivities might be presided over by a boy bishop or in some places by a cleric called ‘Herod’.19 There were Herod games and plays in eastern Belgium, eastern France, Switzerland, Austria, Germany and Italy.20 The ecclesiastical festivities took the pattern of reversal that anthropologists find at seasonal transitions and, as with village festivity, the clerical communities used their symbolic reversals to playfully neutralize their internal hierarchies from choir boy to bishop – to poke fun at abuses within the group while reinforcing the external boundary of the ecclesiastical community. Warmer weather festivities – with a carnivalesque incorporation of food, sex and mock violence – had a long folk history, especially in rural areas.21 St John’s (or Midsummer’s) Day eve was celebrated by villagers with bonfires while Midsummer Day featured improvised plays and games with a mock ruler representing misrule. In England, Hocktide after Easter was a time for genderreversal rituals also popular in Carnival festivity. Sally-Beth Maclean concludes that Hocktide was ‘predominately a woman’s festival, with the sexual roles reversed and the women in command: organizing, pursuing, and feasting’.22 ‘The world upside-down’ – the most familiar organizing trope of popular seasonal festivity until the seventeenth century23 – thus depended upon a clear set of shared norms that could be reversed without challenging the group’s coherence. The use of reversals in ‘low grid/high group’ settings, in fact, usually functioned to strengthen community identity.

PROCESSIONS The procession was without a doubt the most ubiquitous performance medium during the entire Middle Ages and beyond.24 A procession on a religious feast day or the entrance of a new ruler normally moved between symbolically significant urban locations (town gates, churches, town hall etc.) with the town’s elite, garbed in their official regalia and marching in hierarchical order, participating in a demonstration of their vital power (sacral and political). Seen

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as ‘cultural texts’, processions may be read for their principal message: these are the places, the events and the people that matter in this community. For historian Edward Muir, processions, triumphs and entries project ‘the image of a perfectly harmonious government’.25 In making visible the power structures of the society with their differentiated ranks, processions were ‘high grid’. However, those who only observed may have sensed their own low rank and relative powerlessness; for such onlookers, the performance would be low in ‘group’ identification. We should not forget, however, that one of the major functions of rituals like processions was action on behalf of the whole community by those whose power was predicated on their ability to access and control the sacred – the clergy. Drawing from first-century gospel texts, Catholic theology created a tradition of ‘sacerdotalism’, the spiritual elevation of the priesthood – controllers of the sacraments – over the ordinary believer.26 Liturgical processions organized by churches and religious orders were the among the most frequent manifestations of the claim by religious authorities to sacerdotal powers of intercession for the laity. The Catholic Church had a hegemonic role during the Middle Ages in dramatizing the central myths of Christianity through ceremonies at Christmas, Easter and Corpus Christi as well as other feasts in the liturgical calendar.27 Usually, these performances were conducted inside the church building, but when moving from the outside of a church through the town such processions could transform an entire route into a liturgical space. The royal entry, which developed in the late Middle Ages to mark the transition to a new ruler, was for the local political elites a ritual of negotiation designed to ensure the rights and responsibilities of both ruler and subjects but also functioned as a ‘high grid’ event to establish the social hierarchy within the city.28 Royal entries used religious metaphors of Christ’s multiple ‘advents’ – which included his Incarnation as a human, his entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, his ascension to the heavenly Jerusalem and his triumphal Second Coming to judge the world – with the king playing the role of spiritual and political Saviour.29 In his study of political entries, Gordon Kipling argues that: ‘[t]hroughout northern Europe in the late Middle Ages, princes enter cities transformed into earthly or celestial Jerusalems. Reflecting one or more of the liturgical modes of Advent, they come in humility bringing redemption or they come in majesty bringing judgment.’30 In accepting the Christ-like role, the king then acted in imitation of Christ, typically freeing condemned prisoners as part of the entry ceremonial.31 As Kipling puts it, both king and citizens performed their roles in an ‘embodiment of an ideal political order’ that the anthropologist Clifford Geertz has termed ‘the theatre state’, by which Geertz means a ‘theatre designed to express a view of the ultimate nature of reality and, at the same time, to

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shape the existing conditions of life to be consonant with that reality . . . to make it happen – make it actual’.32 Entries and many other processions may have been spectacles of the powerful with relatively passive observers, but, for the more active participants – the nobility, the civic elites, the clergy – they were means by which the social order could be displayed, confirmed and renewed.33 Nevertheless, as Miri Rubin notes in her study of Corpus Christi rituals, ‘[r]ituals can go wrong . . . for their planners’.34 The deployment of powerful symbols and the participation of powerful people creates the opportunity for contestation, especially in processional ritual which attempts linear order but which ‘possesses an inherent destabilizing element . . . By laying hierarchy bare it could incite the conflict of difference even more powerfully sensed in a concentrated symbolic moment’.35 Processional performance is often interpreted as representing a unified community, but the documentary record reveals that, because status and hierarchy were prominently displayed, such ‘high grid’ events could also provide the occasion for tension and rivalry among participants.36 The sponsoring officials generally understood their obligation to participate in social performance as action for the common good. Processions, like many rituals, could have a ‘performative’ role in the sense understood by the ordinary language philosopher, J.L. Austin.37 In a time of severe drought, plague or war, processions functioned as petitions to God for relief, a kind of prayer-inmovement. Participants included not just the organizers (church or civic officials) but as much of the population as could be recruited – or conscripted – to join in the ritual. For the act of prayer, numbers counted; and it seems that the ‘group’ affiliation of the public with the processional performance was stronger when petitioning – and thus capable of subordinating the spectacle of hierarchy typical of other ‘high grid’ processions.

CORPORATE DRAMA If a major function of ‘high grid’ processions was to display structures of power and collective symbols to the wider community, the ceremonies and performances of many smaller groups were turned inward to consolidate their specific group identity. In the closed performative context of a noble household, a convent, a confraternity or a craft guild, both actors and audience were usually members of the same community that watched a dramatization of their central beliefs to sustain their corporate identity. Such exclusive groups are best understood as ‘low grid/high group’ contexts. That is, their internal differentiation or regulation (‘grid’) is low, but the boundaries that separate members from outsiders (‘group’) and the allegiance of members to the group are high. A society like a guild or confraternity would

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tend to have ideological uniformity, with mechanisms such as identifying rituals and livery creating group solidarity. As Susan Crane has insisted, studying clothing is one of the most productive avenues to understanding ‘selfperformance’ and symbolic function in medieval society.38 After the voluntary act of joining such an exclusive group, a member’s participation in the rituals was almost always mandatory, with many ‘high group’ societies levying fines for absence from an event, since commitment to the whole was basic to their functioning. Dramas created and played within the boundaries of monasteries and convents for those in holy orders offered an ideology based on explicit values shared by the insiders. For example, the plays written by Hrotsvitha, an erudite tenth-century canoness at Gandersheim in Germany, celebrated the nuns’ own values of purity, courage and intelligence in the face of male oppression.39 No information about performance survives, and the plays are usually analyzed purely as texts, but they were clearly written for reception by celibates and would have been performed by the nuns themselves.40 Although we have broadened our view of the audience for such plays to the aristocratic patrons of Gandersheim outside abbey walls, one can imagine the delighted reception of this drama by Gandersheim’s audience of well-educated canonesses, for whom the dramas reaffirmed their ideological commitments to celibacy and education. In the preface to her dramas, Hrotsvitha claims to be appropriating the style of Terence but substituting and celebrating her monastic values.41 But it might surprise modern readers to learn that the two dramas based on female martyrdom legends – Dulcitius and Sapientia – are particularly comic in their portrayal of male lechery and violence, which is ultimately doomed to fail just as the female martyrs are guaranteed the joys of heaven. Perhaps as significant as Hrotsvitha’s glorification of virginity, which was ideologically fundamental to monasticism, is the demonstration of her classical education. Gandersheim was a powerful abbey whose members were daughters of the aristocracy and, like many early medieval religious houses, it was a centre of learning and culture.42 Plays celebrating the intelligence of holy women were thus ideologically pertinent to the Gandersheim convent. Paphnutius opens with a holy hermit explaining the mysteries of the celestial harmonies to his followers, while in Sapientia the mother of the three martyrs demonstrates the ignorance of the tyrant Hadrian, whom she calls a ‘fool’, by a lengthy mathematics lesson based on Boethius’ De Instituto Arithmetica.43 Mother Sapientia’s disquisition on numbers ends when Hadrian comments ‘What a thorough, perplexing lecture has arisen from my simple question concerning the children’s ages!’ and Sapientia replies ‘Praise be thereof to the supreme wisdom of the Creator/and to the marvellous science of this world’s Maker’. In her demonstration of holy erudition, Sapientia models one of the ideals of

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Hrotsvitha’s community, which included the canonesses as well as noble patrons. Ulrike Wiethaus argues that Hrotsvitha writes at the ‘nexus of imperial politics and religion’, and that the celebration of female celibacy which ensured patrilinearity would have been of paramount interest to aristocratic Ottonian patrons outside the convent as well as to the noble canonesses inside who might have formed the primary audience for any performance.44 The patrons and the canonesses all participated ideologically as members of the ‘high group’ performative context. In the lay world, confraternities and craft guilds were also examples of ‘low grid/high group’ contexts where members played for the in-group’s pleasure and profit. Typically, the corporate body had a yearly feast that included a performance tailored to the group’s interests. Sheila Lindenbaum has termed such performances ‘rituals of exclusion’, arguing that the ceremonial activities and membership practices of most English religious guilds supported the interests of an exclusive group.45 She suggests that these lay-controlled groups, whose members often belonged to the urban elite, sponsored morality drama with its inculcation of proper behaviour. Both guild ordinances and morality plays stressed a similar ideology – the profitable outcomes (both social and spiritual) of good conduct.46 While medieval fraternities or guilds were primarily organized to respond to the spiritual and social needs of members, their founding values usually included a role in the wider community. For members, the fraternal organization provided funeral services and burials, supported widows and the ill, and organized religious devotions or lavish celebrations on feast days at their local church or the guildhall. The fraternity also promoted group interests outside the association by undertaking works of charity in the community since, to a great extent, public welfare in the late medieval and early modern periods was a responsibility of confraternities.47 One of the best documented French confraternities was the fourteenthcentury Paris Confrérie Saint-Eloi, the guild of the goldsmiths that, from approximately 1340 to 1382, produced a yearly miracle play for performance by guild members after the group’s annual feast. Graham Runnalls has described the performance context of the miracle play L’Enfant Resuscité in terms that fit a ‘high group’ profile. The members of the all-male guild: walked in procession to the local church, where they had a chapel, and attended a High Mass, sung in honour of the Virgin Mary and of their patron saint, Eloi (Eligius). They then moved on to their Guildhall, where a banquet took place, after which was held the annual election of the six gardes who were to control the Guild during the next twelve months. Then, for a couple of hours, they watched the performance of a miracle play. The play was performed by a dozen actors, all male, on a simple stage in the main hall

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(salle) of the society, in front of the members and their families, perhaps less than a hundred people all told.48 The forty plays of the goldsmith’s guild were collected in a manuscript, the Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages, and Robert Clark has argued that an important theme in the plays is the necessity of almsgiving. The annual performances thus reinforced the fraternity’s core values, the basis of its identity both for members and for the general public.49 However, Clark has also shown how such ‘low grid/high group’ cultural performances need not be considered one-dimensional. His analysis of the normative reversals and striking transgressions in this unique collection of miracle texts highlights how the women characters, both sinned against and sinning (like the pregnant abbess, the murderous wife, the cross-dressers) and the violent or greedy male characters play out the society’s deepest fears about gender and socio-economic distinctions. Ultimately, though, the dramas miraculously resolve ‘what seems to be irreversible situations’ and affirm the status quo – thus legitimizing the ‘economic hegemony’ of the male, Christian, urban bourgeois subject.50 An important public role played by such corporate groups was participation in processions organized by the clergy or civic leaders. Garbed in the livery of the confraternity or guild, the members displayed their group identity to the community. Jody Enders has called attention to the theatrical costuming of the law students who belonged to the Basoche, the guild for lawyers-in-training during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. By 1500, there may have been 10,000 Basochiens in Paris and many more in towns across France. Although they had a legal function of litigating in small claims court, one of their primary duties was participation in comic entertainments – a role that developed into sponsorship of plays with other confraternities. Legal garb was particularly colourful and each member of the Basoche had a costume specific to his rank, so that when invited to participate in a procession the effect was of spectacle: ‘the Basochial officers of the Châtelet came out by the hundreds in their ceremonial red and black silks, marching to military music and carrying such props of military justice as the helmet, breastplate, and gauntlet.’51 Whether displaying rhetorical flair in their courtroom or flamboyantly exhibiting their group identity in public procession, the performance of the Basoche blurred the line between law and theatre and illustrated the theatricalization that permeated late medieval social life. Male youth groups were also common in Italy, and their social functions almost always involved dramatic activity. In Florence, the Compagnia della Purificazione e di San Zanobi and the Compagnia dell’Archangelo Raffaello, youth associations for males aged thirteen to twenty-four, played leading roles in performances of the city including marching in public processions.52 The young men were dressed in white gowns signifying angelic purity. Founded ‘to

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promote the spiritual edification of the city’s youth’, the Purificazione ‘saw to the ritualization of the youths’ behavior through prayer, the singing of laude, and the sacred plays the brethren themselves performed’.53 The corporate identity of the youth in the brotherhood was expressed by their communal residence in the Dominican convent of San Marco, which they occupied between 1444 and 1506.54 The Purificazione youth had a special role in celebrating the liturgical feast of the Purification, which in 1416 had become the main feast of Florence Cathedral, supplanting the feast of the Annunciation. Candlelit processions to the cathedral, with the youth in white robes, re-enacted the presentation of candles by Mary and Joseph at the Temple after the birth of Christ – an iconography always associated with the Purification ritual, as we see in this scene from a wall painting in Eton College chapel, England (Figure 2.2).

FIGURE 2.2: Purification/Candlemas procession, scene 6 (c. 1477–87) on north wall of choir in Eton College chapel. Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College.

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At the cathedral, the youth performed a lavish Purification play featuring twenty-one prophets, three sibyls and a narrator-angel.55 Originally offered in their own oratory only for confraternity members in a typical ‘low grid/high group’ context, the Purification play and other sacre rappresentazioni received authorization from Archbishop Antonine in 1448 for performance in wider civic rituals.56 Without changes to the content of the plays, their inclusion within the urban festival frame represented a shift in the social function of this confraternity drama as the values symbolized by the youth group were appropriated by the city as a whole.

URBAN FESTIVALS By contrast to ‘high grid/low group’ processional performances displaying hierarchy to the entire community or ‘low grid/high group’ corporate drama expressing the values of an exclusive group, many towns staged large performances in the urban centre that social theorists have termed ‘festivals’. As defined by Alessandro Falassi, festivals are: periodically recurrent, social occasions in which, through a multiplicity of forms and a series of coordinated events, participate directly or indirectly and to various degrees, all members of a whole community, united by ethnic, linguistic, religious, historical bonds, and sharing a worldview. Both the social function and the symbolic meaning of the festival are closely related to a series of overt values that the community recognizes as essential to its ideology and worldview, to its social identity, its historical continuity, and to its physical survival, which is ultimately what festival celebrates.57 Festivals occur in cultures throughout the world, but here we focus on those taking place across Europe in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in cities including Brussels, Antwerp, Lille, Arras, Frankfort, Lucerne, Toledo, York and Chester. These late medieval festivals in urban centres were usually complex structures with multiple sponsors, and therefore differed from processions or corporate performances typically organized by one main producer. In addition to civic authorities, sponsors included traditional religious institutions, neighbourhood and craft organizations or commercial entrepreneurs, and their performers were the male citizens. In featuring a wide variety of towndwellers from many different socioeconomic backgrounds and professional groups, the festivals would certainly be classified as ‘high grid’, that is, high in internal social differentiation. In addition to diversity, the urban festival simultaneously represented the whole community’s identity, symbolizing the town’s distinctiveness in the surrounding region, which would make the event not just ‘high grid’ but also ‘high group’.

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Scholars note that these large festivals took place where civic authorities exercised substantial – although not exclusive – power. Lawrence Clopper argues that the vernacular religious drama appeared in regional English cities that had strong governments founded on trade guilds, including York, Chester, Coventry, Norwich, Beverley and Newcastle.58 The seriousness with which such performances were treated may be deduced from the detailed contracts producers drew up, which usually mandated fines for players who did not attend rehearsals.59 Lynette Muir’s useful survey of European urban dramas includes the many guilds and confraternities that offered a play based on their own patron saint on a single civic occasion, often being paid for the performance.60 Although she does not distinguish between a corporate performance done by and for the ingroup and one (perhaps the same play) performed for the general public, I would call attention to the potential for differences in social function in the two contexts. As the corporate production moved out of its original space in a church or guildhall to address a wider urban audience, the primary function of its message was no longer primarily in-group solidarity. Confraternities devoted to theatrical performances for the public – like the Arras Carité of jongleurs, the Parisian Confrérie de la Passion founded by royal charter in 1402, or the Roman Gonfalone that performed Passion plays on Good Fridays at the Colosseum and Resurrection plays at a church – were primarily functioning as part of urban festivity with its combination of religious message and popular production for a mass audience.61 In the Low Countries (now the Netherlands and Belgium), literary guilds called Rederijkerskamers (Chambers of Rhetoric) developed out of confraternities and retained some of the traditional services for members.62 However, they specialized in the composition of poetry and drama (especially morality plays) and the production of plays for civic contexts, including the religious processions for Easter and Corpus Christi and secular celebrations of rulers. Their elaborately staged plays dominated festivals in their region. The Rederijkers’ or Rhetoricians’ most distinctive social function was the encouragement of literary competition between Chambers of different towns, with ever more lavish organization and prizes. Elsa Strietman notes that when the Rhetoricians participated in these regional competitions it is clear ‘they were representing their town as much as their own Chamber’.63 In other words, they were functioning primarily as part of a civic festival rather than their individual Chamber’s festivity. As with the Florentine Purification play, the same Rhetoricians’ play performed in the larger civic context gave the identical text a new social function. In the urban festival, performances by diverse groups existed within a single frame. Often that frame was supplied by a procession, within which plays and tableaux were performed: in the phrase of Peter Burke, they are ‘performances within performance’.64 The well-studied English cycle plays of Chester and

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York used an annual processional performance extending over several days, during which the cities’ craft guilds – thirty-two in Chester and forty-eight in York – each contributed a play to the narrative of biblical history from Creation to Last Judgment. By the fifteenth century in Lille, as Alan Knight notes, the annual procession founded in 1270 by the Countess Margaret of Flanders had developed into ‘a great civic and religious spectacle in which all social groups and institutions of the city took part’.65 A canon from the collegiate church of St. Peter, who had been appointed the ‘Bishop of Fools’ to organize public performances, invited neighbourhood youth groups to stage plays written for the occasion – a religious play for the procession and then a farce for performance later. Each year the best plays were given prizes. A manuscript collection of seventy-two of Lille’s winning plays, discovered in a German library and edited by Knight,66 highlights the importance of Lille’s dramatic competition and festival. The quality of the manuscript is indicated by the fine illustration of the opening Adam and Eve play (Figure 2.3). Knight points out that the male youth groups came from quarters of the city organized around streets or squares, not parishes, and that they existed in a ‘constant state of rivalry’. He suggests that the municipal authorities devised the dramatic competition as part of the traditional procession to control the youth violence of the late Middle Ages, and he traces a similar move by the town council in response to Lutheranism in the sixteenth century.67 The ‘high grid/high group’ performance structure of festival thus allowed the authorities to negotiate diverse socio-cultural identities within an overarching frame of civic affiliation. Festivals do not just perform the beliefs and myths held by an urban society, but have the potential for acknowledging and playing with the community’s various social categories through satire, humour, and imaginative alternatives.68 The claim that such urban festivals could represent both unity and diversity has generated considerable controversy among scholars seeking to understand their social functions. A generation of cultural historians focused on religious and social ritual as the means by which unity was created in a society, in this case an urban setting.69 Subsequent social theorists, however, have challenged the assumption that ritual performance was the mechanism by which societies created a unified identity by pointing to the existence of contestation and conflict in many ritual or festive situations as the different groups involved vied for control.70 For example, the liturgical Corpus Christi celebration of Mass added a clerically organized procession soon after its establishment, and when plays by lay and civic elites were developed for Corpus Christi performance in York they came into conflict with the established liturgical procession.71 The anthropological model that would see medieval festival as characterized by strong role specialization and rank distinction but also by a clear identity of the whole event (‘high grid/high group’) introduces an unsettling paradox into

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FIGURE 2.3: Miniature of Adam and Eve illustrating first play, ‘La Création d’ Adam et Eve’, in the processional plays of Lille (Mystères de la Procession de Lille, c. 1480) – Guelf. 9 Blankenburgensis Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Germany. Reproduced by permission of the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, Guelf 9 Blankenburg.

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social analysis – but it is just that coincidence of opposites that characterizes festival as a cultural performance. The festival frame enabled multiple agendas, ideologies and dramatic modes to be performed, with diverse participants establishing different relationships to the occasion and its dramatic displays. The complex festivals of large towns thus incorporated the performances of many socio-economic groups and included both serious subjects and comic or satiric subjects that might appeal to their disparate audiences. Humorous scenes drawing from carnivalesque modes of play and seasonal role reversal were juxtaposed with didactic, serious, or spiritual ones within the festive temporal and spatial framework.72 At a civic festival, typically a play on a religious topic would be followed by a farce. Modes and moods could shift radically within the festive frame. It is worth noting that audiences at ‘high grid/high group’ festival performances were often made up both of urban dwellers and of those who had come into town for the production. The latter – unlike the citizen performers, who were invested in the success of the festival and were therefore ‘high group’ – had considerable freedom in deciding whether or not to attend. For them, the event was ‘high grid’ but ‘low group’. When the town of Seurre in Burgundy planned to produce a mystère of St Martin their patron saint, the professional playwright Andre de la Vigne wrote not just the 10,500-word saint play but two short farces. On the eve of the performance there was a downpour and the audience, drawn from surrounding villages, started to leave; the civic organizers decided to play one of the farces, which persuaded the villagers to remain in town until the next day. The incident shows the freedom of festival attendees who were not townspeople to choose their entertainment, as well as a pragmatic reason for producers to have diverse genre options when designing for a mass audience in a festival context.73 One of the most interesting ideas suggested by semiotic theorists of play, game and festivity is that the conjunction of opposites, the juxtaposition of differences, creates self-reflexivity in the social unit. The community in festival mode is able to look at itself (be reflexive) and create a mock model of social order that can be instructive, parodic or satirical.74 Social categories that structure ordinary existence (gender, rank, economic status, profession) can be critically examined75 or playfully deconstructed – hence the centrality of the fool character to such cultural performances and the popularity of the farce genre. Barbara Babcock calls clowning ‘sanctioned disrespect’ that ‘paradoxically institutionalizes doubt and questioning’.76 Late medieval urban Carnival takes this reflexivity to grotesque extremes, as the many studies of the Nuremberg Shrovetide Schembart and this illustration of a Wild Man clothed in leaves from a Schembart festival manuscript attest (Figure 2.4), but even the most religious plays performed at ‘high grid/high group’ urban festivals often incorporated comic or parodic characters.77

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FIGURE 2.4: Wild Man of the Woods (Schembartsbuch) from Nuremburg Shrovetide Carnival (1449–1539) – MS . Douce 346 f. 262r, Bodleian Library, Oxford, England. Reproduced by permission of The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

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CONCLUSION Each kind of medieval cultural performance thus functioned to dramatize social identities for the whole community or for a sub-group, but those dramatizations were never static. We might be tempted to see the different features in the ‘grid/ group’ model as dependent upon one type of drama that had one social function. The closest we can come, perhaps, is the ‘low grid/high group’ setting of an in-group where participants shared values that their performances clearly dramatized. Whether Robin Hood games in villages at Midsummer, plays about virgin martyrs in a convent, moralities about virtuous (and successful) behaviour in a craft guild, or the biblical story of Mary’s purification in a religious youth confraternity, the connection between the drama and the goals of the group are striking. However, each genre of drama could appear in other performative settings, where their social functions were much less obvious. For example, most every type of performance discussed in this chapter, from the most liturgically intense to the most carnivalesque, made its appearance at ‘high grid/ high group’ urban festivals with their complex productions, where diverse socio-economic groups, both townspeople and outsiders, participated in myriad unpredictable ways in the experience. Drama could do its ideological work during the Middle Ages only by virtue of both its inevitability and its dynamism – an imbrication in a given social structure but at the same time the ability to reshape meaning and mode for every performative occasion.

CHAPTER THREE

Sexuality and Gender SHARON ARONSON-LEHAVI

INTRODUCTION In the second play of the late medieval Chester cycle (c. 1467), The Drapers’ The Creation and Adam and Eve, God creates Eve out of Adam’s rib. Adam is awakened by God to take notice of this new creation. Rising up, Adam says: I see well, Lord, through thy grace, bone of my bone thou her mase, and fleshe of my fleshe she hase, and my shape through thy saw. Therefore shall she be called, I wis, Virago, nothing amisse, for out of man taken she is, and to man shall she draw.1 The term virago used to mark Eve in this Middle English play originates in the Vulgate, Genesis 2:23: ‘Dixitque Adam hoc nunc os ex ossibus meis et caro de carne mea haec vocabitur virago quoniam de viro sumpta est.’ (‘And Adam said: This now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man.’) In all the biblical versions (Hebrew, Latin and English) there is a phonetic, even sonoric, connection between the male and the female: ish–isha (‫אישה‬-‫)איש‬, viro–virago and man–woman. In this play, however, ‘man’ is paired with virago, calling attention to the difference. Indeed, in addition to the Latin biblical reference, virago was a well-known concept

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during the Middle Ages, used to denote a ‘manly woman’. Isidore of Seville writes that ‘A “heroic maiden” (virago) is so called because she “acts like a man” (vir + agere), that is, she engages in the activities of men and is full of male vigor.’2 According to the Middle English Dictionary, virago was indeed the name given by Adam to Eve but the first meaning it gives is more complex: ‘(a) A manly or heroic woman; also, a woman who usurps man’s office, an unwomanly woman – used as term of contempt.’ Dependent theatrically on how the actor playing the Chester Adam performs this speech act, the term virago has the potential to refer simultaneously to Eve’s positive and negative qualities and, hence, to the gendered identity of women more generally. On the most basic level, following the Bible and its Latin meaning, it literalizes an identity of a female gender that was conceived through that of the male one, and is therefore subordinate to it. In its Middle English meanings, it characterizes Eve positively precisely because of her masculine qualities while simultaneously hinting negatively at Eve’s subversive act to come. Notably, the positive characterization of Eve is quickly undermined as the serpent in the Chester version is explicitly gendered female by Eve herself: ‘This adder, lorde, shee was my foe, and sothelie deceaved me thoe.’3 Finally, virago, a manly woman, might also have contained a meta-theatrical reference to the fact that the figure of Eve was performed by a man. As can be discerned from this brief example, the medieval theatre was a lively cultural site in which medieval constructions of gender were performed, foregrounded and problematized. In this chapter, I analyze four ways in which the theatre not only made visible medieval concepts of gender and sexuality but also served as a liminal cultural arena in which the complexities and indeterminacies of gender constructions were performed: In the first section on cross-dressing, I discuss the cultural sources and meanings of the theatrical practice of men playing women’s roles. Starting with the stage directions of the tenth-century Quem quaeritis liturgical trope that explicitly demand the use of this practice, I turn to two cases of biblical vernacular drama – the York Joseph’s Trouble about Mary and the Chester’s Noah’s Flood – to argue that crossdressing was used in two main, if contrary, ways: the first to create respectable, distanced and sexually neutralized representations of holy women; and the second to evoke comic, exaggerated and demeaning representations of lay women.4 A second section is devoted to women’s voices in the theatre. True, men played women’s roles in a majority of theatrical enactments throughout the Middle Ages, but – in addition to scattered references of female performers – there are specific contexts in which women performed, especially within allfemale communities. For example, performances of the fourteenth-century Quem quaeritis trope at Barking Abbey reveal preparations and performance practices that are unique to a female society. Similarly, Hildegard of Bingen’s twelfth-century Ordo Virtutum (Play of the Virtues) is a religious drama that

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expresses both devotional content and concerns that are specific to women who lived an abstinent life in the convent. Finally, a play such as the fifteenth-century Ein schön Spiel von Frau Jutten (The Play of Lady Jutta), which reworks a familiar medieval theme about a woman who disguised herself as a man and became a female Pope, gives voice to Lady Jutta’s strong passion for learning and knowledge. Despite her transgression, she receives support from none other than the Virgin Mary herself. The third section examines the ways in which the theatre dealt with the complex meanings that were attributed to the gendered body of Christ in performance, particularly in scenes of the Passion. Focusing on two Crucifixion episodes from Arnoul Gréban’s Mystère de la Passion (The Third Day) and The York Crucifixion Play – and drawing on such theories as Caroline Walker Bynum’s of the medieval gendering of the body of Christ to include feminine attributes in the late Middle Ages – I argue that these performances took part in this discourse and evoked a multi-referential gendered identity of the body of Christ, which was constructed as both masculine and feminine. In the concluding part of the chapter I look at the subversive qualities of secular plays and popular performance practices in which marital norms and sexual desires are negotiated. Such farces as The Edict of Noée or The Dead Man (a Fastnachtspiel play by Hans Sachs) exemplify the power of theatre not only to reveal the social norms of daily married life but also, at least temporarily, to question, ridicule and subvert those norms. All four topics reveal the enduring tendency of the medieval theatre to embody profoundly dualistic conceptions of the body, sexuality and cultural performance of gender. That tendency is grounded in the liveness of the theatre and in its ability to signify simultaneously on many levels. Although the liveness of the theatrical medium is not uniquely medieval, this premise held special significance within the medieval theatre because of its governing pre-illusionist aesthetic that comfortably exposed the simultaneous if differentiated identity of the performers and the characters they impersonated.5 Accordingly, Judith Butler’s articulation of gender as a performative practice, as ‘an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts’,6 finds its expression not only in contemporary performance practices that aim to reveal the constructedness of gender but also, for different reasons, in medieval ones.7 Gender, it should be emphasized, is constructed not only through a binary set of stereotypical ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ qualities, but also through social categories such as class, and, within the medieval cultural context, one’s religious social status and affiliation. Thus, for example, the gender of learned, abstinent or lay women or men was constructed differently in each case. Such coded social references and performative behavioural patterns taken together with the unhidden identities of the performers and the enacted identities of the portrayed characters led to a multi-vocal theatricality that readily destabilized any preconceived polar masculine and feminine identities.

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The late medieval anti-theatrical tract, The Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge (c. 1380–1425) does not specifically address gender constructions in the theatre but expresses its fear of religious theatre’s tendency to refer to life in the present and hence to divert spectators’ attention from devotional content. It thus acknowledges the uniqueness of the theatre as a live artistic medium as opposed to religious paintings: ‘for painting is a dead book, the other is alive’ [for this is a deed bok, the tother a quick].8 What was the ‘live’ model of femininity that was used for the performance of the Virgin Mary? What kind of gestures, movements and bodily performance were imitated? How did audiences respond to the dramatization of such gender stereotypes as Noah’s shrewish wife, Joseph’s self-declared ‘unmanliness’, or Christ’s complex gendered identity? The fact that medieval theatre, in all its forms – monastic, civic, festive, lay and secular – conveniently mixed religious subject matter with references to daily life turns the theatre itself into a significant resource for reconstructing the complex cultural history of gender and sexuality in both theological and earthly contexts.

THE CONVENTIONS OF CROSS-DRESSING One of the conventions that governed the medieval stage was that of crossdressing: men playing women’s roles. In the Etymologies, Isidore of Seville writes that ‘Actors (histriones) are those who, dressed as women, would represent the deeds of shameless women.’9 ([H]istriones sunt qui muliebri indumento gestus inpudicarum feminarum exprimebant.)10 A second, if quite different, explicit mentioning of this practice appears in the stage directions of the Easter liturgical trope, the Visitatio sepulchri or Quem quaeritis (‘Whom do you seek?’) in the tenth-century Regularis Concordia: While the third lesson is being recited, let four brethren vest themselves. [. . .] While the third responsory is being sung, let the remaining three follow, all of them vested in copes [. . .]. These things are done in imitation of the angel seated on the tomb and of the women coming with spices to anoint the body of Jesus. [Aguntur enim haec ad imitationem angeli sedentis in monument atque mulierum cum aromatibus venientium, ut ungerent corpus Jhesu].11 In these two documents, there is a substantial difference in attitudes toward cross-dressing and the performative context in which it is used. Whereas Isidore connotes acting and cross-dressing in order to define a theatricality that presents obscene female behaviour, most likely referring to evidence about the Roman theatre as it has come down to him,12 there is certainly nothing ‘shameful’ about the liturgical representation of the holy figures of the Marys who came to

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anoint Jesus’ body at the tomb. Comparing these two sources teaches that while the custom of cross-dressing in theatrical contexts was familiar and well known, it was used in different ways depending on the performative context. I suggest that in the late medieval vernacular biblical plays, for example, the use of crossdressing reflected this variety of theatrical possibilities: cross-dressing could be used in a serious manner, referring to liturgical rituals, on the one hand, or it could be used in an earthly manner echoing popular performances and theatricalities that included ridiculing representations of the feminine gender on the other. In other words, the gendered stage persona that was evoked by the fact that a male actor played a female role did not signify a unanimous or even coherent idea of the feminine gender. Although historians of the medieval theatre have long abandoned the evolutionary model of the development of medieval religious theatre – and rightly so13 – the convention of cross-dressing might well have its sources in such liturgical drama. Such a connection between medieval (and Renaissance) theatricalities and ritualistic characteristics of liturgical performance suggests that cross-dressing, the performative display of gender as a construct, is foundational to the interpretation of the theatre as a cultural agent. In other words, for spectators of a variety of forms of medieval theatre in which men played women’s roles, masculine voices or bodies in the roles of women were part of a familiar and rooted concept of theatricality. In addition, it is important to remember that liturgical performative practices continued to take place throughout the medieval era simultaneously with the rise and development of other theatrical genres, and therefore continued to be a source of reference for them. Thus, for example, in a letter from as late as 1557 the abbot of the Weingarten monastery in Germany to Konrad von Bembelberg asks to borrow a garment for the enactment of the Virgin Mary in a performance of the Passion on the feast of Corpus Christi: Since however I do not have any clothing or garb for our Lady the mother of Christ, I request you in friendliest fashion with particular urgency not to hesitate in again lending me the blue satin robe which belongs to the statue of Our Lady at Ehingen and to send it to me with this servant of mine.14 Indeed, the enactment of holy female figures such as the Virgin Mary demanded a very careful and respectful performance. Whereas within liturgical and monastic contexts we can imagine a very conventionalized mode of enactment, in the vernacular biblical drama this seems to be more complex. The thirteenth episode of the York cycle, Joseph’s Trouble about Mary, is an intriguing test case of how such an enactment was carried out, especially because of the way this episode deals with the subject of Joseph’s suspicious

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reaction to Mary’s Immaculate Conception. Such an episode about Joseph, a sort of farcical intermezzo within the grand biblical narrative (in York this play is framed by The Visitation and Annunciation which precedes it and followed by The Nativity, both written in a serious and elevated tone) seems to verge on profanity as a result of Joseph’s misunderstanding of Mary’s pregnancy. Theatrically it points simultaneously at Mary’s holiness and at her feminine identity and the social characterizations of a woman’s role in society. In the play Joseph discovers Mary’s pregnancy and repeatedly asks her and her maids about the identity of the father. He testifies to the fact that it is not and could not have been himself, because of his old age and impotence: ‘thase games fra me are gane’ (these games from me are gone)15 and suggests instead that he has been cuckolded. Although by the end of the play he fully repents and learns his mistake, this episode is an example of a liminal theatrical event which problematizes insecurities related to gender in both early marital and theological contexts. An extremely short yet powerful drama shows how the theatre, even when performing one of the holiest mysteries of the Christian faith, was used as a cultural site to refer to issues related to gender and sexuality, including male impotence, marital relations and the feminine pregnant body. Rather than a dramatic indoctrination and stabilisation of this foundational doctrinal event, the theatre is used as a site that enables moments of destabilisation of gendered roles since Joseph (the man) is marked lower in status than his wife although the episode is constructed as a piece of domestic drama. At the very end of the play, after Joseph realizes his mistake he apologizes to Mary, and she answers back on behalf of all the women: ‘Forgiveness, sir, let be, for shame; such words should all good women lack.’16 How, in such a dramatic context, is the figure of Mary enacted and how does the male embodiment of her character contribute to maintaining her holy stature? According to the play, when Joseph enters their home, one of the serving girls describes her mistress in terms that are iconographically consonant with the position typical of pious women in convents: ‘Certainly, Joseph, you shall understand / that she is not very far away from you. / she sits at her book fully captured in prayer / for you and us, and for all those / that are in need.’17 Sitting in the posture of praying, with a book, might suggest that not only religious paintings but also real abbesses or nuns served as live models for the enactment of holy figures. Furthermore, if Mary were to have been played by a male actor, that might have further enhanced the liturgical setting for spectators. Religious figures such as abbesses and nuns, whose abstinence and dedication to religious life positively differentiated their gendered identity from that of lay women, has led medievalists to argue for them being members of a ‘third gender’: a construct according to which medieval women moving along a gender continuum might ‘improve’ to manhood by leading abstinent lives.18 Whereas Joseph is associated in the play with such stereotypical female

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attributes as loquacity and insecurity, Mary parries with such male attributes as curtness and confidence, suggesting an authoritative presence and control of the scene. Finally, somewhat ironically, whereas Mary’s respectfulness is achieved by having a male actor impersonate her, there are indications in this play that Joseph’s character was constructed in terms that hinted at his feminization, suggesting a complex playfulness of a cross-gendered performance. Mary’s positive qualities are signified by her ‘manly’ gestures, yet Joseph is ridiculed by his womanly characteristics. Clearly, the major reason for this is to emphasize the fact that Joseph could have not impregnated Mary. However, the terms that are used for this characterization refer specifically to medieval ideas of the feminine gender. When Joseph complains at the outset in a direct address to the audience that he has been ‘begiled’ (beguiled) he says that he has been crying: ‘Her works have made my cheeks all wet’ [Hir werkis me wyrkis my wonges to wete].19 Similarly, in the Chester cycle, Joseph who sees Mary’s ‘great belie’ testifies that ‘myne it is not, be thou bolde, for I am both old and colde’.20 These adjectives refer not only to Joseph’s impotence, but more specifically to his unmanliness as part of a veritable ‘science’ of performing gender within the medieval cultural context. In her Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science and Culture, Joan Cadden writes that ‘women were especially associated with cold and moist humor, phlegm, and one medical text even refers explicitly to women and phlegmatic men as associated types’.21 In Hildegard of Bingen’s twelfth-century Causae et Curae (Causes and Cures), we similarly read about the reasons women menstruate: ‘Indeed, woman is made such that she must receive and retain man’s semen with her blood. Therefore she is also weak and cold, and the humours in her are infirm.’22 Similarly, writing on ‘phlegmatic men’ Hildegard explains that ‘these men cannot be virile, because their blood vessels are cold, their semen is thin and unconcocted like foam, and they cannot retain it until the right moment’.23 Therefore, Joseph’s self-characterization as wet or cold deepens our understanding of the nuanced and multi-layered references to gender constructions in such an episode, which on the face of it seems to be ‘merely’ a ‘comic relief’ used as a form of didacticism amidst the biblical drama of the sacred history. This episode turns out to reveal how theatre was used in order to problematize (and solve) for its audience a theological issue in contemporary terms of gender constructions and how cross-dressing was used complexly to perform gender. Such a play is a striking example of the ways gender was conceptualized as a social construct and how both masculinity and femininity were not performed as stereotypical binaries, but rather as variations on a gender continuum. It is worth noting that in Arnoul Gréban’s Mystère de la Passion, for example, this issue is dealt with differently. Mary expresses her wish to Joseph that,

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as a married couple, they take the vows of chastity and lead an abstinent married life: Joseph Beloved wife, I have learned about your vow through the excellent power of God, who has advised me. You have chosen the role of conserving virginity. Our Lady My dear Sire, it is all that my heart desires. Joseph Then I vow to our Lord God that I will equally conserve mine as long as I live.24 Although this example differs markedly in tone, Gréban’s play also emphasizes the need to explore theatrically the question of the Immaculate Conception in terms familiar to the audience. While chaste marriage was anachronistic for Joseph and Mary, Dyan Elliott has shown that intra-marital chastity was a known practice throughout the Middle Ages.25 Thus, both examples show how medieval theatre, as suggested above, reconceives and reenacts gender through the conflation of play, contemporaneity and fluidity. Whereas male enactments of figures such as the Virgin Mary would have accentuated her respectability and stature, in the case of theatrical impersonations that referred to lay women such as Noah’s wife there was more theatrical freedom, leading to performances that verged on farcical mocking of the feminine gender. In the Chester Noah’s Flood, for example, Noah’s wife, who refuses to board the ark, clings to a few of her women friends. This scene offers the spectators a literal embodiment of the sinners who are about to drown in the flood and who are associated with the female gender. When her friends (‘good gossips’) express their fear of the nearing flood, Noah’s wife offers them to drink together: ‘and let us drink ere we depart, for often times we have done soe; for at a draught thou drinkes a quarte, and so will I doe ere I goe.’26 Eventually, Noah’s wife agrees to board the ark but s/he ‘takes the stage’ hitting Noah, ‘And have thou that for thy note! (She gives him a blow [et dat alapam vita])’,27 suggesting a comic performance that could be enhanced by her embodiment by a male actor in the role. Similarly, in the York episode of the Flood, Noah’s wife refuses to board until being forced to do so through a performance of domestic violence: ‘Wife: What? You think that you’re going just yet? No, by my faith, you’re getting a clout!’28 There are a number of ways to interpret such theatrical moments. The physical and vocal dominance of Noah’s wife just before s/he becomes submissive again (once she boards the ark her character almost completely disappears in the plays) suggests that crossdressing was used both to exaggerate and ridicule a stereotypical image of the lay feminine gender and to hint at an unstable dynamic of power relations between husbands and wives, much like that which takes place in farces and carnival plays that are mentioned at the end of this chapter.

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Taken together, the bodily gestures and use of voice and characterization required here suggest a male enactment of the feminine gender that is much closer to Isidore’s ‘shameless women’ than to the noble Marys of liturgical tropes. However, the restrained enactment of the Virgin Mary or Mary Magdalene was another matter: a gendered performance based on a different referential system, most likely that of the social performance of abstinent abbesses and nuns.29

WOMEN’S VOICES IN THE THEATRE Although men played women’s roles in a majority of performances throughout the Middle Ages, women’s voices were indeed heard then and may yet be heard today. Side by side with male cross-dressed Easter liturgical performances, in convents or double monasteries women played the roles of the Marys who came to visit the empty tomb at the event of the Resurrection. These performances are similar but not identical to records of such male-performed liturgical episodes, and reveal unique patterns such as the women’s preparations for the performance and the rituals that were linked to the performances. The very existence of such theatrical performances within female communities leads to further questions about the specific concerns of women who lived in those communities and the ways they expressed those concerns in the theatre they created. Hildegard of Bingen’s devotional Ordo Virtutum, for example, includes dialogues that imply a dramatic and perhaps real conflict regarding abstention from sex and childbearing. However, in addition to performances in which women participated, there were also plays in which women’s voices were heard, even if they were played by men. As we shall see, the latter is the case for Dietrich Schernberg’s The Play of the Lady Jutta (c. 1485). In Gender and Medieval Drama Katie Normington convincingly argues for the significant roles women held as members of the production of the plays, spectators and characters, but generally not as performers.30 Although there are documents attesting to the presence of women performers in the medieval theatre in general,31 nowhere is their presence more central than in all-female religious communities (including in double monasteries in which male and female communities cohabited if separately). For example, in Barking Abbey, a Benedictine house of nuns, Katherine of Sutton (abbess, 1358–76) took charge of the Easter celebrations ‘with the unanimous consent of the sisters’ and out of a desire ‘to get rid of the said torpor completely and the more to excite the devotion of the faithful towards such a renowned celebration . . .’.32 She designed a detailed performance in which both the men and the women participated, with women in the roles of the Marys. The description of the performance is long, detailed and nuanced and reveals how internal politics were encoded in the performance. According to the description the abbess

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selects the three sisters who will perform the holy characters of the Marys. This, we can assume, is based on their vocal qualifications but might also mark their position within the convent as superior to others. In addition, the performance is an opportunity for the sisters to exhibit their meticulous craftsmanship in preparing the delicate costumes that are used in the performance, and which differentiate such female performances from ones in which there was a need, as mentioned above, to borrow a garment for the male enactment of the Virgin Mary in the German Corpus Christi Passion play. Here the performance brings to a culmination the everyday work and craftsmanship of the women within the abbey and thus, the devotional performance reflects their own creativity just as it is an opportunity for them to literally express their voices: These things having been performed, three sisters selected by the lady abbess shall come forward, and, having taken off their black vestments in the chapel of the Blessed Mary Magdalene, they shall put on the most beautiful surplices, snow-white coverings being placed over their heads by the lady abbess. Thus prepared, therefore, and bearing silver jars in their hand, they shall say their confession to the abbess, and, absolved by her, they shall take their stand in the appointed place with candles. Then she who represents the person of Mary Magdalene shall sing this verse: ‘At one time of God.’ And when that is finished, the second, who signifies Mary Jacobi shall reply with the second verse: ‘Drawing near, therefore, alone.’ The third Mary, having the part of Salome, shall sing the third verse: ‘I am allowed to go with you.’ After proceeding to the quire, they shall sing these verses together, with weeping and humble voice.33 This is only the beginning of what leads into a much more elaborate liturgical performance, followed by the Quem quaeritis, the discovery of the empty sepulchre, after which Mary Magdalene ‘shall take the sudary (napkin) which was over his [Christ’s] head, and shall carry it with her’. This is followed by the Magdalene’s dialogue with the gardener who sits on the tomb and who turns out to be Jesus (here named The Persona), and eventually, the performance concludes with the following gesture by the Magdalene: ‘With her finger she shall point out the place where the angel was sitting, and shall hold out the sudary for them [the participants] to kiss, adding this verse: “Christ our hope has risen”.’34 The voices of the nuns in the roles of the Marys create an experience entirely different from that of the Gregorian chant of the male performances of these scenes. This is enhanced by the explicit indication of their ‘weeping and humble voice’, indicating yet another form of gendered cultural performance, and yet it is a form of weeping that is received in an utterly different way than Joseph’s

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behaviour mentioned above. Dunbar Ogden discusses twenty-three such known episodes of the Visitatio sepulchri in which women performed.35 For Ogden, female renditions of the trope such as that of Barking Abbey involved female performers undergoing a rite of purification (confession) before they could perform the roles of the Marys: ‘it is a rite that not a single member of the male clergy underwent before playing in a liturgical drama – a rite that links to numerous religious acts where women must be cleansed in some special way before participating in a sacred observance.’36 This detail tells us a great deal about not only women’s liturgical performances but the centuries-long association of the female sex and feminine gender with impurity. Rather than overlook these performances as representative of an isolated or relatively small phenomenon, they call for extensive research into the performance practices of all-female communities in the medieval era. In general, it seems that too little attention has been given to ‘liturgical drama’ in theatre histories of the Middle Ages, which have largely favoured the study of vernacular and civic forms of religious or secular theatre. Notwithstanding the attention paid to the absence of women performers from the medieval stage,37 it is high time that women’s voices from thriving religious communities be restored to theatre history, much as they have been for two of the period’s better-known German female dramatists, Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) and Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim (c. 935–1002). Regularly studied as exceptions that prove the rule, both medieval women left scripts of ‘dramatic plays’ per se that allowed for their inclusion in theatre history. But, even here much of the discussion revolves around the question whether these plays were ‘actually performed’ or ‘merely read’. Widening the concept of theatre and performance history by including analyses of rituals, dance or other performative practices might further broaden the field. Whereas Hrotsvitha is well known for her adaptation of Terence’s comedies into Christian themes,38 perhaps most exciting of all for a cultural history of theatre, is such a piece as Hildegard’s Ordo that sheds new light on what might almost be regarded as a kind of medieval écriture feminine avant la lettre as the term was coined and developed by French feminist philosopher and playwright Hélène Cixous.39 In a manner similar to much later morality plays, the Ordo depicts through a set of personifications the struggle of Anima and her companion souls with the Devil. The play features roles for sixteen virtues, which represent human qualities and cosmic forces.40 The final scene of the play, scene four, depicts the virtues’ defeat of Satan, a face-to-face fight, and reveals, I suggest, a dramatic conflict that might well have been shared by the nuns regarding their abstinent lives and giving up childbearing. In this scene, the virtues bind Satan and finally Victory rejoices: ‘the age-old snake is bound!’41 Then Chastity addresses the Devil, declaring his defeat: ‘therefore you are laid now, with all your plunder; and now let all who dwell in heaven rejoice, because your belly has been

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confused’ [quia venter tuus confuses est].42 This line suggests that the Devil is lying on the floor, and participants’ or spectators’ gaze is deictically directed to his abdomen. Chastity’s reference to the Devil’s ‘belly’ [venter] provokes him to do the same, to deictically point at hers: Devil: You don’t know what you are nurturing, for your belly is devoid of the beautiful form that woman receives from man; in this you transgress the command that God enjoined in the sweet act of love; so you don’t even know what you are! [quia venter tuus vaccus est pulcra forma de viro sumpta (. . .) unde necis quid sis!].43 These lines seem to refer quite explicitly to pregnancy and to sexual life. Obviously the Devil’s role is to tempt Chastity to break her vows, but the repetitive performative emphasis on the belly, the reference to the transgression of God’s command ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ (Genesis 1:28), and the offensive accusation ‘you do not know what you are’, suggest that the play refers to real theological dilemmas and their effect on the nuns’ lives and their gendered identities.44 In turn, this is the kind of dilemma and conflict that can be performed within the (female) community, in its attempt to bring to air, so to speak, contested issues. At the end Chastity (obviously) dismisses the Devil’s offence, ‘How can what you say affect me? Even your suggestion smirches it with foulness’,45 expressing her overcoming of the world’s temptations. However, it is the theatre as a cultural site which readily lends itself to conflict and it is the susceptibility of performance to human dilemmas that create space for such scenes. Drama and theatre are sites of cultural dilemmas, dualities and ambiguities and as such the meaning of psychomachia should not be seen as an abstract medieval metaphor of the struggle between good and evil, spirit and earthliness, but rather, as in this theatre, as an opportunity for collective contemplation on one’s real life, including daily practices that are related to sexuality and gender. The Devil’s line ‘so you don’t even know what you are’ is intriguing and reconnects us to the ambiguous concept of the ‘third gender’ which scholars such as Herdt, Cadden and others have contextualized with medieval religious abstinent life.46 Even though the speech is attributed to the Devil, it was written by women, enabling us to hear their voices and thoughts. In this play, Hildegard deploys women’s voices not only to represent dramatic allegorical characters, but, to paraphrase Cixous, to offer a medieval version of ‘writing the body’.47 Another example of a play that permits women’s voices to be heard is Dietrich Schernberg’s The Play of Lady Jutta (c. 1480–85), which recounts the popular story of a woman who became Pope by disguising herself as a man:

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Jutta My friend your counsel is good. Now I will become your companion and servant. Now I will take off my clothes, and I will not be ashamed of it, and I will dress in men’s clothing, and I will leave this place with you.48 Although men played all the roles, this scene creates a theatrical situation – familiar to us from William Shakespeare’s later As You Like It (1599) – in which a man plays a woman who then plays a man. Therefore, the instability and indeterminacy of gender performance is inscribed not only into the plot of the drama but also into its theatricality.49 The cross-gendered figure of Lady Jutta is an embodiment of women whose desire for learning was regularly thwarted by medieval universities. Jutta, disguised as a man, makes rapid and successful intellectual progress, impressing her teacher and peers enough over time to become Pope. Furthermore, although the entire play is framed by an account of Lucifer’s knowledge of Jutta’s (mis)conduct, the play itself emphasizes that Jutta is an agent, responsible for her own deeds. Once she is Pope, however, Unversün the Devil interferes and reveals the secret: ‘Now listen to me, one and all, everyone gathered in this hall: the Pope is carrying a child. He is a woman, not a man.’50 This revelation quickly leads to a long, detailed and gruesome set of torments, culminating in Death’s appearance to her, promising that her soul will be tormented forever and accusing her: ‘because you have acted against his will, and you have gone around dressed as a man, and you have caused such Chaos in Christendom, and you have not stayed among the womenfolk, and also because you did not take care of yourself so that now you have a pregnant belly.’51 However, in spite of these severe accusations, the play throughout leads the spectators to identify with the character of Jutta, owing in no small part to the protection she receives from the Virgin Mary. Once Jutta prays to the Virgin as she is about to give birth, Mary demands that her soul be saved. She even authorizes her son, Christ, to do so – ‘Beloved child, I beseech you that you might grant my prayer for this poor sinner who lies there in terrible pain’ – and she asks Christ to remember the authority he gave her to intercede for a sinning person who pleads with her. Through very long speeches she encourages even stronger empathy for Jutta until, at the end of the play, Jutta’s soul is welcomed by the Saviour, Christ, to ‘rejoice with me in my heavenly kingdom’.52 Significantly, the alliance between Jutta and the Virgin Mary gives voice to a medieval protofeminism that militates against the ideological framework at work and according to which Jutta’s actions are both an insult to and a transgression of social order. The three examples discussed in this section originate in different places and dramatic contexts. However, they all attest not only to the multiple ways in which the theatre was able to give voice to women but more importantly to the very existence and sophistication of women’s creativity, desires and dilemmas.

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THE GENDERED TORTURED BODY OF CHRIST IN PERFORMANCE One of the central and most defining theatrical characteristics of the late Middle Ages was, as Rebecca Schneider has termed it in an utterly different context, ‘the explicit body in performance’. The most important body was that of Christ, decisive to theatrical culture in performances of the Passion and the Crucifixion. Although the male figure of Christ was enacted by male actors, as Caroline Walker Bynum and others have argued, the gender of Christ was conceptualized complexly as both masculine and feminine, his blood signifying his nurturing and life-giving powers alongside his suffering and death. This dualistic gendered characterization is significant for understanding spectators’ experiences as they watched and reacted emotionally to scenes of the Passion as well as to the understanding of the embodiment and gendered construction of this unique dramatic character vis-à-vis the enactment of other male figures in the plays. I suggest that the model of masculinity that was constructed through the theatricalized body of Christ referred simultaneously to contemporaneous identities of bullied or punished social outcasts and to the sacred and positive meanings of the bloody and tortured body, and which were achieved through its feminization.53 Although it was mostly the male body that was displayed, tortured and visually consumed in public forms of religious theatre, we do well start with the interpretation of one of the central documents in almost any history of medieval theatre, Jean Fouquet’s miniature The Martyrdom of St Apollonia (c. 1452– 1460) (Figure 4.11; see p. 103). Scholars have repeatedly focused on the figure of the ‘director’, the man with the book and wand in his hand, whereas in the very centre of the image, a tortured body of a woman is on full display.54 Indeed, the medieval theatre often writes gender on the human body through the intensive use of violence. Four men, each on one side of a board, pull ropes that harshly torture ‘Apollonia’, who is attached to the board. The two men on the bottom strongly pull the final set of ropes in order to attach her legs to the board, while the one above her head violently pulls out her long hair, and the one on her left pulls out her teeth. While the four men are all in some kind of movement (the one on Apollonia’s right, in the front of the image, balances himself by forcefully pulling the board with his foot), St Apollonia endures the tortures quietly. Her tranquillity and stillness stand in stark contrast to the lively audience depicted in the background, many of whom are making noise by blowing horns. This ‘staging’, of the four men around the tortured body, is reminiscent of the staging of Crucifixion episodes such as those of the York cycle. In this play, the main action focuses on the four soldiers who complain about their task as they tie Jesus to the cross and make an effort to lift it up. As in the miniature, the soldiers are each positioned on one of the four sides of the

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cross, and throughout the first half of the play they are busy pulling Jesus’ hands and legs and tying his body to the cross while Jesus remains almost completely silent.55 The similarity between the miniature and the play might indicate that, while the re-enactment of the martyrdom of St Apollonia reflected the contemporaneous brutality and torture inflicted upon bodies of men and women alike, it likewise reflected metatheatrically the ways in which the iconography and performance of the Crucifixion constructed gendered and sanctified identity through extreme endurance and violence.56 The blood and flesh of Christ, recalls Bynum, are regularly gendered female, with multiple allusions to depicted lactation and giving birth.57 ‘We do not have to extrapolate at all’, she writes, ‘in order to conclude that theologians saw the wound in Christ’s side as a breast and emphasized his bleeding/lactating flesh as a symbol of the ‘humanation’ of God. Theologians did not discuss Christ as a sexual male; they did discuss Jesus as mother.’58 This characterization of feminine aspects of Christ’s gendered identity is significant for the analysis of theatre performances of the Passion. First, it helps to distinguish the masculinity of Christ from representations of lay masculine identities such as those of the soldiers who surround him. In addition, although the violence that dominated the performances of the Passion referenced contemporaneous forms of bullying and punishment,59 the symbology of Christ’s blood and pain complexifies reception. Blood in this context was understood to be a symbol of death which is life, associated with Christ’s nurturing identity that the medieval theatre was at pains to display. Rather than the negative associations readers of the twenty-first century tend to have with visual representations of blood, in the medieval theological context its sacrificial association with nurturing and life was positive.60 Let us take for example Arnoul Gréban’s The Mystery of the Passion: The Third Day. Over a period of some hundred years, there are records throughout Northern France of seventeen productions of this monumental fifteenthcentury Passion play.61 The Third Day of four focuses on the trial and Crucifixion of Christ, in which Christ’s unique gender construction is illustrated. Throughout the scenes of the trial, torture and Crucifixion, there seems to be a highly dichotomous mode of spectating the tortured body. As long as Christ’s bodily endurance is described from the point of view of the tormentors, detailed emphasis is placed on extreme violence and cruelty. Once the description shifts, however, to the point of view of the female gaze, a much softer ambience obtains, as if the body were being embraced by their lines. Throughout the scene, Christ is almost silent, a body in pain. Christ’s tranquillity is a well-known characteristic typical of Passion plays and Crucifixion episodes, delineating his receptive endurance, often, as mentioned, in sharp contrast to the noisy, loud and humiliating behaviour of the soldiers and bloodthirsty crowd. The performative power of this tranquillity defies language as

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Elaine Scarry’s cultural analysis The Body in Pain makes clear,62 and yet it also turns the performing body of Christ (and of the actor) into an object of fascination, which readily absorbs complex and even contrasting meanings simultaneously. For example, as long as his suffering and bleeding body is referred to by the tormentors, his pain is devoid of feminine markers: ‘He’s taken so much blood from him that you can’t tell his ass from his head’ (lines 22,777–80), or ‘his gushing blood that bloodies his muzzle’ (22,947–8), or ‘his robe holds firmly together and sticks to his back so tightly that it must be torn off by force’ and ‘it’s like flaying a sheep, the skin comes off with the garment’ (23,850–4). When the women describe the brutality, however, especially in the extremely long monologue of the Virgin Mary, we are confronted with a different range of associations. After stripping Jesus naked (24,589) and before laying him on the cross, the Virgin Mary, Mary Jacobi and Mary Salome address the body. The stage direction says that ‘Our Lady puts a cloth in front of Jesus while saying these lines’ (24,627) and lamenting the tortured body she says ‘I kiss you, since I cannot do better’ (24,642); later on Mary Magdalene calls him ‘a sweet fountain of harmony’ (24,736). Still later, the Virgin Mary cries ‘One body, one blood, and one life demand to be ravished by one death. We are thus, you do not deny it. I know it well. We are one body, for yours is from mine. I hold your pure blood engendered by me. [Ung corps sommes, car le vostre est du mieu, vostre pur sang de moy engender tien] Now it flows until there is nothing, O what distress’ (25,237–44).63 These expressive cries and deictic pointing at the blood are a way to write the feminine gender on the tormented body of Christ that, only moments earlier, was framed in de-humanizing and animalistic terms. The dramatic and theatrical vacillation between the two perspectives, which can be conceptualized almost as two ‘choruses’ quarrelling over the image of the tortured body, is dramatized through a nuanced gendered division. Whereas the masculine perspective of the violent torturers and their earthly macabre humour enhances the brutality of the event, the women’s lines accentuate the gentleness of the body in pain. Blood is thus simultaneously death and life, suffering and redemption. Meanwhile, there remain important questions that underlie theatrical culture: at what gendered body are the spectators looking when the torturers inflict the pain and continuously refer to daily life? And what gendered body are they visually ‘consuming’ when Mary claims to ‘hold the pure blood’? Is it a body of a thief, a rascal, or is it a nurturing body? This liminality that results in the close attention given to the wounds in this Passion play and in numerous others brings to mind Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject as the liminal state of life which is death, death which is life. Not coincidentally, she invokes a theatrical analogy: A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. [. . .] No, as in true theater, without makeup or

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masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death.64 I submit that a reading of the blood, wounds and the tortured dying body through Kristevan liminality offers new possibilities for a feminist approach to the cultural history of the body in pain in the medieval theatre. Following the crude labour of the soldiers, and toward the end of the York Crucifixion play mentioned above, it is the body of the Crucified Christ that speaks. Held up high on the cross, it addresses the spectators directly: ‘All men that walk by way or street, take heed that you miss none of my suffering. Behold my head, my hands, and my feet, and fully feel now, ere you pass.’65 The body on display that the spectators are asked to behold signifies divine humanity not only because of its bleeding and suffering, but also because of its complex and singular gender construction. Finally, even the most unstable elements of the violent or nonviolent construction of gender can themselves be reversed, negotiated and subverted, offering yet another example of how the medieval theatre problematized gender roles and norms. Whereas most of the examples in this chapter are related in one way or another to forms of religious theatre, popular performance practices such as farces and carnival plays were opportunities not only for excessive and explicit expressions of sexual desires, but also for temporary reversal of gender roles and hierarchies. In these plays and performative events, carnivalesque qualities, topsy-turvy behaviour and sexual permissiveness took over. For example, one of Hans Sachs’ (1494–1576) carnival plays, The Dead Man (1554), deals with a married couple in which the wife questions her husband’s love for her. This leads Hans, the husband, to test her love for him. She promises she loves him so much she’d happily die for him and in the case that he dies first she would faithfully ‘have them bury you in my coat, the one’s that rosy-red, like the lilac bush I have’.66 When Hans decides to play dead, however, his wife starts to party. She eats and drinks, and ‘throws out a pig’s skin’67 to cover the body, designating her rosy-red coat for her future wedding, and spares the money of the procession to church because ‘he’s dead and can’t see anyway’.68 The ‘dead’ husband ‘awakens’ and yells at his wife but she, smarter still, ends the play by saying she knew all the time he was just pretending to be dead. This short and seemingly simple and vulgar play manages to conflate Eros and Thanatos as an expression of the power relations between a husband and a wife in a daily domestic setting. Another example is Sachs’ Carnival play, The Farmer with the Blur (1554), in which the character of Heinz complains to the audience that he goes out early in the morning to work, only to return home and discover his wife ‘stark naked lying in bed with the priest’.69 In order to save herself from Heinz’s anger, the next time he returns from work his wife Gretta addresses

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him as if there were two men in front of her; she thus convinces him that ‘often you see plain double’.70 It is through the topsy-turvy context of carnival times that the play ends with the cuckolding wife proving the audience her superiority over her husband. An opposite example is a French farce such as The Edict of Noée [Farce des Drois de la Porte Bodès], in which a husband and a wife quarrel over the duty of shutting the door. Their disagreement leads them to court, where the wife eventually presents as evidence a document titled ‘the edict of Noée’ that lists women’s chores attributed to men. The judge proclaims her ‘victory’: ‘Henceforth, I shall enforce the laws of Noée in this jurisdiction. [That’s Noée! Noée! No way!]’,71 reinforcing the patriarchal dominance of the husband. These plays, like numerous others, negotiate through humour, exaggeration and grotesque laughter real marital tensions, power-relation struggles and gender hierarchies. Their performativity enables the temporary liberation of prohibited sexual desires and reversal of gender roles, and reveals the medieval theatre yet again as a lively cultural site in which polar gendered norms are negotiated and problematized. In conclusion, from the creation of Eve out of Adam’s rib, foundational biblical stories have led throughout the years to a binary concept and construction of male and female and masculine and feminine genders and gendered identities. We have seen, however, that the medieval theatre constituted a complex and multi-vocal cultural arena for the exploration of gender and sexual constructions. The plays and performances discussed here often worked in different ways, intentionally or not, against the masculine/ feminine binary. Perhaps more than any other medieval cultural arena, the medieval theatre with its profound use of anachronism and simultaneous exposure of the enacted content and liveness of the theatrical event, was able to convey complex and at times ambiguous messages regarding the instability and liminality of gendered identity.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Environment of Theatre LAURA WEIGERT

My point of departure for this chapter is the conviction that many historians of theatre have been looking in the wrong places for medieval theatre. In seeking to find ‘it’ represented in a picture or between the pages of a play script, they have often missed what was innovative, sophisticated and unique about the variety of performance events that happened in the Middle Ages. Locating ‘its’ physical remains in the ruins of antiquity, the sculpted portals of churches, or the halls of guilds and the nobility, they have tended to neglect evidence for performances that took place outside of these permanent structures. It seems that when it comes to the quest for evidence of medieval theatre’s location, even the most innovative cultural historians are guided by a definition of theatre as an architectonic enclosure in which plays are staged. I suggest that we shift the terms of this inquiry. Rather than asking where medieval theatre took place, the question I ask here is: how did a configuration of players, a site, a temporary display of structures and artefacts, or a combination of the above, create viewing environments for performances? A cultural history of theatre that attends to ‘viewing environments’ is not tethered to the ‘environment’ within or in proximity to an existing building but explores the ways in which spaces become theatricalized and makes room for the agency of social actors in this process. To begin to respond to this question requires expanding our discussion beyond written texts that incorporate what we recognize now as performance indicators (dialogue preceded by speech-prefixes, stage directions and lists of dramatis

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personae) and beyond the limited range of images that have served as visual evidence for this tradition. Medieval performance culture also included church rituals, processions organized by ecclesiastic and civic officials and festivities held at courts. The way their participants and audiences experienced these varied performances cannot be isolated within the walls of a theatre or captured in a picture. Material artefacts not usually associated with the theatre, however, preserve a vestige of the viewing environments of these diverse performances. The chronologic boundaries of this chapter span the ninth to the sixteenth centuries, a period when what would be recognized today as theatres were associated with the ancient past, rather than with a living performance tradition. The word ‘theatre’ could refer to the buildings of antiquity or to the activity that took place within them.1 A woodcut included in the first printed version of Terence’s Comedies, produced in Lyon in 1493, provides an example of how medieval viewers conceptualized such theatres (Figure 4.1). As we see here, the theatrum is a walled enclosure designed for and associated with plays, like the ones Terence composed; it contains a stage designated for performers that is separate from the area reserved for the audience; and it is an object that can be represented. Pictures like this one helped solidify the legacy of a particular understanding of theatre that assumes the existence of structures with fixed boundaries both within and around them. However, this antiquarian understanding of what makes for theatre coexisted with a more expansive, colloquial meaning of the word.2 Drawing on its derivation from the Greek thea, or view, the alternate sense of the word referred more generally to a site in, at or from which people gathered to view an event. Mary Marshall’s detailed study of the word theatrum concludes, ‘any place indoor or outdoors, where public and secular entertainments were given, might be called a theatre’.3 The Greek theatron could refer in Byzantium to a gathering of people to see a public reading or recitation of texts.4 In contemporary colloquial use, theatre could designate a city square or marketplace, an open-air site temporarily designated and designed for communal viewing, a structure or series of platforms created for viewing or to be viewed, a place for viewing, or simply – and perhaps most germane to the present cultural history of theatre – a viewpoint. Medievalists have long recognized the anachronism and limitations of the antiquarian use of the term for a history of medieval theatre. As Gordon Kipling and Meg Twycross have pointed out, medieval performances did not take place in buildings made for the purpose of viewing; organizers adapted existing structures and sites for a particular performance occasion.5 The earliest studies in English, German, Italian and French by E.K. Chambers, Max Hermann, Alessandro d’Ancona and Petit de Julleville, as well as more recent Englishlanguage surveys by William Tydeman, Janette Dillon and Glynne Wickham,

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FIGURE 4.1: Theatrum from Terence, Comoediae (Lyon: Johan Trechsel, 1493), a4v. Reproduced by permission of the National Gallery of Art, Department of Prints and Drawings.

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enumerate the diverse and varied locations in which medieval performances happened, from churches, guild and banquet halls, inns and taverns; to city streets and squares; to fields on the outskirts of cities.6 We can pinpoint with greater specificity where medieval performances were located in certain cities thanks to recent studies by Susanna Crowder on Metz, Carol Symes on Arras and Marie Bouhaïk-Gironès on Paris.7 Drawing on a rich body of existing scholarship, this chapter focuses on how viewing environments were created in these diverse sites. Each of these environments, as I will propose, constituted and was constituted by a series of relations, such as those between places within the imagined world of a performance; those between the imagined world of a performance and the lived world of the audience; or those between performers and audiences. A small selection of artefacts – linen cloths, metal crosses, drawings in commemorative accounts of performances and tapestries – provides overlooked evidence with which to isolate and describe some of the distinctive features of these viewing environments and the processes whereby they came into being.

CLOTHS The origin of medieval theatre is often identified in the moment the liturgy incorporated the enactment of expanded episodes in the Christian narrative. Foremost among such episodes is the arrival of the three Marys at the empty tomb of the risen Christ. There they meet an angel, who initiates a dialogue beginning with the question: ‘Whom do you seek?’ (Quem quaeritis?) Although the trope is first preserved in texts dating from the ninth and tenth century from Germany, France and England, performances of the event probably took place in those regions and in other communities even earlier; they continued through the late Middle Ages and beyond. The Quem quaeritis trope was one of numerous additions to the liturgy during the Lenten season and Holy Week that included what E.K. Chambers and Karl Young, in their detailed studies of the trope, consider to be distinctly dramatic: monks or priests and congregants assuming the roles of characters from the Gospels and the presence of dialogue.8 Aethelwold, Bishop of Winchester’s tenth-century compendium of monastic ritual, the Regularis Concordia, is a rich source of evidence for early performances of the trope. The text is, however, frustratingly mute on the subject of where in the church the performance should take place. Carol Heitz, Élie Konigson and David Parsons have offered various alternatives for its location – choir, crypt, transept, nave, or west entrance.9 Aethelwold’s account doesn’t settle this debate but it does supply details about how a performance setting should be created.

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‘Let a likeness of a sepulchre be made in a vacant spot by the altar, and a veil stretched on a ring hang there’, he writes in the directives for preparing the ceremonial adoration of the cross on Good Friday.10 This succinct statement is Aethelwold’s only instruction for fabricating the holy sepulchre. What should be made exactly is not specified; what we do learn, however, is that it should be concealed by a cloth. Aethelwold concretizes thereby a compelling and ubiquitous metaphor for what theatre does: it masks as it unmasks.11 This cloth continues to play a principal role in Aethelwold’s account of the Easter celebration. After the angel sends the three Maries to spread the good news: He, seating himself again, should say an antiphon as if he were calling them back: ‘Come and see the place where the Lord had been laid, alleluia.’ While he is saying this he should stand up and lift the curtain and show them the place which is empty of the cross.12 Here too Aethelwold is silent about the sepulchre’s physical properties and location in the church. The only identifying feature of it that he includes is the cloth. As this cloth was lifted, viewers saw that the ‘place’ (locum) was empty. Whereas Aethelwold leaves all other attributes of setting to either interpretation or convention, he is emphatic about the role of the cloth for situating the performance at the holy sepulchre. The display of the cloth called attention to and demarcated the area in the church where the Easter ceremonies would be performed. But more than that, it served to identify a particular site as that of the holy sepulchre. Aethelwold describes this site merely in terms of an absence: ‘a vacant spot’, ‘the place where the Lord had been’ or ‘the place which is empty’. Because it was close to the altar on which God’s sacrifice was ritually enacted in the Mass, this site referred, by association, to Jesus’s death, burial and resurrection. When the cloth was displayed, the signification of this site changed: it became his tomb. The cloth’s dismantling, in turn, revealed the absence of Jesus’s body from the tomb; the action thereby rendered visible the intangible mystery of the Resurrection.13 While in the tenth century an open ‘spot’ near an altar might be veiled and unveiled in such a way as to represent the holy sepulchre, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the latter was represented by elaborate monuments that looked like or even served as actual sepulchres. Pamela Sheingorn’s study of temporary and permanent sepulchres in England charts the development of these structures that were the focus of lavish donations to a church.14 Textiles remained central to the representational function of these sepulchres during Resurrection performances. The act of displaying a cloth around or across the sepulchre preceded and introduced the sequence of events that followed; its removal revealed Jesus’s physical absence from the sepulchre, thereby making participants in the performance witnesses to the Resurrection. The materials of

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these cloths ranged from the luxurious fabric ‘all covered with red velvett and embrodered [sic] with gold’15 of Durham’s abbey church to the modest mended and patched linen of St Mary at Hill in London. The sixteenth-century accounts of this church include a payment ‘for an ell of fine linen to mend the sepulchre cloth where it had been eaten by rats’.16 Few sepulchre cloths have survived, not only due to the ravages of rodents, but also because of their general fragility and susceptibility to the elements. For a visual trace of these objects we must turn to a group of linen cloths that have been preserved from as early as the thirteenth century, called veli quadragesimale (cloths of the forty days [of Lent]), or veli templi (veils of the temple), after the temple veil that ripped at Jesus’s death.17 The monumental painted linen made in 1472 for the church of St John in the northern German city of Zittau (Figure 4.2) provides a particularly vivid example, given its location and excellent state of preservation.18 It depicts ninety episodes, separated into individual square units, from the creation of the world in the upper left corner through to Jesus’s resurrection at the bottom right. The immense size of the cloth meant that it entirely covered the archway dividing the choir of the church from the transept and nave at its west. The tempera paintings are composed primarily in muted tones of grey and brown, highlighted with passages of vibrant red. The choice of palette, pairing sombre shades with the colour of Christ’s blood, conforms to an aesthetics of mourning. The use of linen, as opposed to a more opulent fabric, is in line with the humility expected during the Lenten season. Its current display in the Church of the Holy Cross in Zittau, which became a museum in 1999, gives us a sense of how such cloths would have transformed medieval churches. Spanning the entire width of the nave and extending almost to the springing of the vaults, the cloth conceals the chapel situated behind it (Figure 4.3). As we have seen in the case of the sepulchre cloths, Lenten cloths activated a specific setting for the ritual commemoration of Jesus’s death during the forty-day period of mourning in the Christian calendar. The moment they were hung on either Ash Wednesday or the first Sunday of Lent signalled the beginning of this period.19 The placement of the cloth before the rood screen or across the entrance into the choir, or a side chapel, deprived the congregation of a view of the altar, an abstention that was considered part of their penance during Lent. The action of taking down the cloths participated directly in the liturgy on Holy Wednesday. As the celebrant read the words from the Gospel of Luke, ‘and the sun darkened over and the veil of the temple was torn in two’, the cloth was lowered.20 This action introduced a dramatic pause in the Passion narrative, as it allowed viewers to witness in real time the tearing of the veil that, as Luke describes, occurred at the moment Jesus died. The dismantling of the cloth at this moment in the performance heightened the resemblance between the succession of events in the past and their enactment in the present.21

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FIGURE 4.2: Großes Zittauer Fastentuch (Zittau, Germany, Museum Kirche zum Heiligen Kreuz); 8.20 × 6.80 metres, 1472. Reproduced by permission of AbeggStiftung (Christoph v. Virág).

The extensive textual and material evidence for Resurrection and Lenten ceremonies allows us to envision a viewing environment that departs from the antiquarian idea of theatre at the time. Early Christian commentators relied on this idea both to praise and to critique the increasingly elaborate performances that took place within churches. Honorius Augustodunensis in his Gemma animae (1100) favourably compared the gestures of the celebrant in the ‘theatre of the church’ to those of the ancient tragedians.22 Aelred of Rievaulx

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FIGURE 4.3: Display of Großes Zittauer Fastentuch in the Church of the Holy Cross museum, Zittau, Germany. Reproduced by permission of René E. Pech.

(1110–67), however, complained that the histrionic gestures of singers were ‘suitable not to the houses of prayer, but to the theatre, not to praying, but to viewing’.23 Honorius and Aelred’s use of the word theatre conjures up the buildings of antiquity, where people went to see plays. Unlike the fixed contours of these structures, the permanent walls of or within the church building did not define or demarcate the parameters of Resurrection and Lenten performances. The display and dismantling of Lenten and sepulchre cloths determined to a large extent the temporal limits and spatial contours of a distinct representational frame in which events in Jesus’s death and rebirth could be perceived. During the performances that occurred in Holy Week or lasted through Lent, they transformed a section of the church, a stone sepulchre or the rood screen. Whereas at other times of the year these sites and components of the church furnishings referred symbolically to the historic places of the temple in Jerusalem or Jesus’s tomb, during the performance they were understood as if they were the sites themselves. The geographic and temporal distance between biblical events and the moment of their performance in a particular church diminished; observers of the performance became participants in the action. When the cloths were removed, the place that had been transformed into the temple or the sepulchre returned to its everyday status as a part of the rest of the church interior. For the duration of each performance, a viewing environment was thereby created in which the

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Passion and Resurrection could be made visible to, and incorporate, medieval communities.

METAL CROSSES From the foundation of the same churches in which such Lenten and Easter ceremonies took place, processions that moved within and around churches and through urban communities produced another kind of viewing environment. The spatial contours of these processions were not limited to their fixed and predetermined routes within a church or through a city. As the detailed case studies in a recent volume edited by Kathleen Ashley and Wim Hüsken, and in another edited by Nicholas Howe, show, the structure, organization and function of this type of performance must be understand in relation to the broader medieval and early modern communities in which it took place.24 Processions were complex communicative events, in which participants and bystanders engaged and interacted and through which the perception of ecclesiastic and civic spaces was shaped and negotiated.25 Made specifically to be carried in processions, wood and metal crosses contributed in distinctive ways to the experience of these performances. The earliest known processional cross dates to the fifth century; several ornate examples inlaid with precious gems survive from the eighth and ninth centuries; the many extant fifteenth- and sixteenth-century crosses are either simply or sumptuously adorned. Focusing on two examples that span our chronologic period, we can begin to imagine certain features of the viewing environment that medieval processions created and in which they were perceived. The first comes from a Byzantine church and dates from 1000–1050 (Figure 4.4). Formed from thin strips of silver and silver-gilt, it is decorated on the front with the faces of the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist, who announced God’s Incarnation, and those of the archangels Michael and Gabriel; Jesus’s face appears at the point where the four arms meet.26 The back includes a medallion with the bust of the physician saint, Thalelaios, and an inscription, identifying the cross as a gift from a bishop Leo. A more ornately adorned fifteenth-century cross of gold and enamel was made in Florence, Italy (Figure 4.5). Around the image of the body of Jesus are twenty smaller images depicting episodes from the story of Christ’s Passion. A cavity in its centre housed a piece of the cross used in Jesus’s crucifixion, thereby recalling even more directly for viewers this central event in the Christian narrative. The sombre tones of its enamel niello ornamentation, moreover, are associated with an attitude of mourning for God’s sacrifice. The gold and bronze metal on these crosses would have sparkled in natural daylight or in the flames emitted by candles at night. Ornamented on the front and back, they would have been equally impressive from both sides.

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FIGURE 4.4: Byzantine processional cross, c. 1000–1050 (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1993 (Accession #: 1993.163)). Reproduced by permission of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Imagining these two objects in motion we can begin to understand how crosses contributed to determining and demarcating the contours of processional performances. Their visibility and directionality would have helped orient and structure the linear format of the procession. The position of each one could signal either the beginning, end or middle of a procession and create and call

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FIGURE 4.5: Italian processional cross, 1460–80 (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917 (Accession #: 17.190.499)). Reproduced by permission of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

attention to a hierarchy within it, based on a participant’s proximity to the cross. The symbolic meaning of the cruciform shape, as well as the detailed pictures our two examples include, introduced the Christian story into the procession and proclaimed the religious commitment of its participants. But the crosses were also directed at the bystanders on the sides of the procession, who

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unlike its participants, were able to glimpse both sides of these ornate objects. Whereas participants in a procession moved with the cross, spectators could measure the progression of this object in relation to their own fixed location. The crosses were thereby essential to differentiating between these two viewpoints, while bringing the individuals who occupied them into a shared event for the duration of the performance. The first example highlights how crosses contributed to the perception of church space that medieval processions shaped. Byzantine crosses like this one were used in conjunction with the celebration of Mass and in processions outside of and around the church building that accompanied feast days, the translation (ritual transferral to a new location) of relics or the commemoration of certain events, like the survival of an earthquake or a disease. The prominence of St Thalelaios on one of this cross’s central medallions suggests that it might have been used for this last purpose. But it also might have been used in one of the processions of clergymen which preceded the celebration of Mass at the altar in the central apse of the church. These processions began in the prothesis, the apsed chamber located from the sixth century on the north side of the sanctuary. The cross was carried with the gospel book in the first of two processions, called the First or Little Entrance. Members of the clergy carried the chalice and paten, the containers for the wine and bread that became the body and blood of Christ in the Mass ceremony, in a second procession, the Entrance of the Mysteries. According to Patristic commentaries, the appearance of the cross and gospel book in the first procession announced the Incarnation, Christ’s arrival into the world.27 In centrally planned Byzantine churches, each of these processions took the shape of a ‘U’ as it moved from the entrance on the north side of the church, through the nave, before deposing the objects on or near the altar at the eastern end of the church. The trajectory of the processions would have both heightened an awareness of the modular parts that comprised these architectural structures and linked the prothesis to the sanctuary within them.28 When carried in the processions that took place outside of the church building, crosses maintained their association with this sacred site. Through these objects, the sacrality of the church permeated and expanded into the setting through which the procession moved. The cross probably made for the Florentine order of Poor Clares, in turn, provides a tangible remnant of how processions shaped the perception of urban space for medieval communities.29 Its expensive materials and ornate decoration resemble the other crosses that diverse religious groups in the city contributed to the bishop’s entrance into Florence, a procession that, as M. Miller has shown, remained fundamentally unchanged from the early thirteenth through to the end of the sixteenth century.30 The procession began at the southern gate into the city, where the bishop met members of the secular and religious clergy. As a form of greeting, he kissed the processional crosses through which each

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religious institution could be identified. These groups, holding their crosses, then accompanied the bishop to the episcopal palace, stopping at different churches along the route. Within this scenario, the crosses served not only to differentiate between participating groups in the procession, but also to associate those groups with a specific church building or monastery along its route. As the procession moved through the city, it mapped a geography of Florence that was constituted through the connections between sites and institutions in the city and outside of its walls. Two-dimensional maps that trace the trajectory of individual processions cannot capture the expansive and shifting spatial contours of this type of medieval performance. Focusing on crosses helps us move beyond the itineraries of processions – where they took place – and begin to imagine the viewing environment they created and in which they were experienced. The contours of this environment encompassed participants and bystanders, as well as the churches and streets along the procession’s route. Moreover, as the procession moved through these places, it shaped the perception of urban and ecclesiastic space for participants and bystanders: defining the parameters of a city or a church, establishing connections between locations within them and reconfiguring the meaning and significance of these sites or institutions in relation to and within a sacred geography.

AN ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT OF A PRINCESS’S CEREMONIAL ENTRY The spatial dynamics of processions became even more complex towards the end of the thirteenth century as they incorporated staged performances of biblical, mythological and historical events. These performances within the larger processional performance took place either on moveable or fixed platforms. Moving platforms on wheels developed with greater frequency in Britain and Ireland than on the Continent with the events in Jesus’s life, death and resurrection that were performed during the festival of Corpus Christi and on other feast days. The actors on each wagon repeated their parts in the play for audiences situated at different stations along a predetermined route in the city. Platforms affixed to the ground were more common on the Continent (France, Germany, Flanders and the Netherlands), where they emerged as part of the adornment of processions that accompanied noble entry ceremonies or religious festivals.31 Here, the movement of the procession propelled audiences from one constellation of figures to the next. The viewing environment to which these stagings contributed departs in significant and instructive ways from that of the stage understood in antiquarian terms and depicted in the Terence woodcut (Figure 4.1).32 As opposed to the singularity of this stage and its fixed location in the theatre building, these performances took place on multiple platforms or wagons that could be organized in various ways.33 Medieval performances could incorporate

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any number of such structures of different lengths and widths. The annual Bruges Holy Blood procession included twenty-four platforms; the Corpus Christi cycle in Chester included twenty-five pageant wagons.34 In both cases, structures were added or subtracted, according to the particular manifestation of an annual procession, as in Bruges, or the projected identity of an individual ruler. The stagings of individual figural groups, moreover, could be rearranged to create alternate or overlapping narratives; the addition of platforms could expand the geographic scope of a performance. The events performed within an individual platform or pageant wagon were independent from but also part of a performance that included both other platforms and wagons and the procession itself. Along these lines, the Corpus Christi plays in Britain and Ireland use the word ‘pageant’ for both a wagon and the performance that took place on it. The latter was considered to be just one episode in a larger cycle, which was called at the time, a ‘play’.35 In some cases a coherency between individual stagings was determined by a succession of platforms containing events that were chronologically or causally linked. Such an ordering was by no means dictated by the nature of these processional performances. More common to the fixed platforms of entry and festival processions was, in fact, a distribution of related events at different parts of the city rather than their juxtaposition next to each other. Within both types of platform staging, the imaginary fictional realms of mythic and historic events were framed in relation to the civic realm in which the processions were situated. A manuscript made for the Spanish princess Joanna of Castile on the occasion of her entry into Brussels in 1496 helps us begin to imagine the viewing environment such platforms helped create.36 The manuscript describes in text and image twenty-eight platform structures, whose subject matter dealt primarily with the actions of virtuous women in the distant and recent past.37 The text refers to the temporary structures, which were distributed throughout the city, as ‘scaffolds,’ or ‘platforms’. The anonymous authors also clarify that these structures were enclosed and elevated and contained groups of posing, gesturing, or speaking figures. The miniatures included in the manuscript vibrantly capture the details of these material frames for each event (Figure 4.6). Here, three richly clothed and bejewelled figures, identified only as ‘three virgins’, are seated within a narrow box-like structure. As in the other miniatures, the platform is constructed with massive planks of wood, nailed together and forming three or, in one case, four sets of supports for the action. Textiles, consisting of fabric in black, vibrant shades of blue, gold or red, or, as in this case, of an ornate multicolour motif, hang in front of the wooden support on all four sides. In another mode of the veiling and unveiling that structured Resurrection and Lenten performances, curtains affixed to the sides of the platforms determined when and for how long viewers saw the figures.

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FIGURE 4.6: Miniature of Three Virgins, processional staging for Joanna of Castile’s entry into Brussels, 1496 (Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, MS . 78 D 5, fol. 56). Reproduced by permission of Joerg P. Anders, bpk, Berlin/Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany/ Art Resource, New York.

The text and miniatures make clear that these combinations of wooden and textile materials were not empty containers prefabricated to house the enactment of a chosen theme but were an integral part of how viewers perceived both each staging and the series as a whole.38 They served to differentiate an event or cluster of events from other figural groups along the route and circumscribed the limits of the geographic and chronologic location within which each particular constellation of figures acted. At the same time, the

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similarity of their textile and wooden materials encouraged viewers to interpret them as a coherent grouping of individual narrative units. The series of platforms as a whole served to glorify the princess and to celebrate her recent marriage to the Habsburg Archduke Philip the Handsome.39 The miniatures in Joanna’s manuscript also help us imagine how the fictional realm of the event that each platform housed would have interacted with the city street around it. In the case of the staging of the ‘three virgins’, for instance, we see the platform from a side angle, a compositional format that allows the artists to emphasize how the pole holding the crown extends beyond the curtains’ frame (Figure 4.6). In so doing the picture confirms the permeability of the boundary between the geographic and chronologic location in which the three figures act and the city street on which the platform was placed. The miniature reveals, moreover, that the interaction between these two realms was vital to the performance. One of the three figures stretches out a pole on which hangs a dove holding a crown. This gesture suggests that the figure placed a crown on Joanna’s head as she rode past, making the princess a necessary element in the denouement of the scenario. As the scaffoldings brought individual events within a larger processional performance into focus, they provided a viewing environment in which performers and audiences moved flexibly between the temporal and spatial parameters of the imaginary worlds of events and that of the city in which they were situated.

DRAWINGS IN A PASSION MANUSCRIPT The introduction of such figural adornment into processions at the end of the thirteenth century paralleled the earliest evidence for performances in Britain and on the Continent in which such fixed scaffolding or wagons were arranged in the central marketplace of a city or in a neighbouring open area. The most common English term to refer to this type of staging, as Meg Twycross points out, is ‘place and scaffold’.40 In this type of staging, actors moved between a central playing area and house-like structures standing for different geographic or cosmic locations in the narrative. Such a spatial and functional demarcation between a central playing area and the elevated structures around it draws on contemporary sources: Latin differentiates the platea from the locus; in English, the place from scaffolding; in French, the lieu from the mansion. Yet as Graham Runnalls showed, the precise meaning of these terms in medieval documents is ambiguous and other terms appear with equal frequency in conjunction with the staging of such plays.41 The continued use of this distinction to characterize the staging of large-scale outdoor performances, however, seems to reinforce an idea that the relationship between individual scaffoldings and the ground for action was static and consistent in all performances. Two diagrammatic sketches of the setting for a Passion play performed in the city of Lucerne in the mid-sixteenth century underscore the varied and flexible

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FIGURE 4.7: Renward Cysat, diagram for day 1 of the Lucerne Passion play, 1583. Reproduced by permission of ZHB Luzern Sondersammlung (Eigentum Korporation).

spatial dynamic that the arrangements of scaffolding or wagons could produce (Figures 4.7 and 4.8). Composed by the municipal clerk who oversaw the production, Renward Cysat, the drawings present detailed ground plans of the market square in the city during two different days of the performance. The indicators of specific places, buildings or monuments are identified by extensive inscriptions and locate the geographic or architectural site in which different events took place. Resembling folded-down images in a pop-up book for children, these visual references provide a bird’s eye perspective on the different places for the action within the performance. Clearly discernible, for instance, is the Hell Mouth signalling the realm of Satan, the tree where Judas committed

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FIGURE 4.8: Renward Cysat, diagram for day 2 of the Lucerne Passion play, 1583. Reproduced by permission of ZHB Luzern Sondersammlung (Eigentum Korporation)

suicide, the Temple building in Jerusalem, the site of Lazarus’s grave and the three crosses of the Crucifixion. The fabricated structures indicating places, buildings or monuments are not situated around the periphery of a central playing area: they populate both the edges and the middle of the market square. As the action moved between these locations, it related individual structures situated across and diagonally from each other. Furthermore, the drawings belie any neat division between the outer limits of the performance created by a series of scaffoldings and a central playing area. The fabricated structures at the periphery and those closer to the centre of the square are on the same level and there is no ‘centre’ to this playing

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area, which forms more the shape of a trapezoid. Consequently, the action was not equally perceptible from points around a centre but agglomerated around one side of the market area. Finally, as we move from one drawing to the other, we become aware of the transformation of the setting from one day of performance to another. The structures that housed and framed the action, as well as their relationship to individuals participating in and observing the play, varied on each day of the performance. Individuals assuming the guise of historic characters in the Passion play and those retaining the garb of contemporary burghers would have intermingled in this viewing environment. In such large-scale urban productions spectators could gather either on the ground, on raised scaffolds, or in the rooms of the houses with windows looking out onto the action. A similar structure could house those participating in the action of the play, those watching it, or both; players and spectators moved alternately into the site occupied by the other. Scenes that required more space and a greater number of actors moved the action onto any remaining open areas, effacing a clear distinction between those spectators on ground level and those engaged in the performance itself. The Lucerne drawings thereby represent vividly the lack of separation between audience and actors that Meg Twycross and Martin Stevens, among others, have defined as fundamental to the orchestration of medieval Passion plays.42 The drawings, however, underscore the significance of this Passion performance’s situation in the city of Lucerne in particular. Rather than masking the contemporary façades and structures in the city’s Weinmarkt, the drawings retain identifiable references to the everyday function of the buildings that serve as backdrop for the action. There is no indication that these buildings were decorated consistently to resemble the location in which events in the Passion story transpired. Heaven is situated before the city hall, whose turrets, windows and flags stand out in the plans. The Hell Mouth is a discrete structure that protrudes into the square. The drawings incorporate the arched entrances into the marketplace and the fountain in the middle of one end. The inscriptions that identify individual buildings around the square call attention to their status outside the world of the play. Moving downwards on the left of the city hall, appear the courthouse, the house of the town clerk, the apothecary and Sebastian Krab’s house; on the right we see Jörg Kramer’s house, the butcher’s shop and the house of the late mayor, Helmlin. The juxtaposition of references to the sites of the imaginary world of the play with those to the everyday world of the city created a viewing environment that was, for the duration of the performance, both Jerusalem and Lucerne. As documents of a specific performance, Renward Cysat’s drawings provide vital information for how this performance was to be remembered. What we see in them is not a representation of a Passion play that happened to take place

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in Lucerne but of a performance whose meaning relied on its situation in this very city. The Lucerne Passion play incorporated both the location of biblical events and the structures situated within and around the marketplace in the city, both the biblical characters and the individuals who lived in the city. This dynamic interplay between geographically and temporally distant locations and people was crucial to the contemporaneous significance of the play. The drawings vividly make the case that a historically informed study of theatre’s environments must be attuned to specific sites of performance.

TAPESTRIES Performances that took place within architectural enclosures were equally sitespecific and the boundaries between participants and spectators were just as permeable. Scholars of medieval theatre have devoted limited attention to the specificity of such performance sites because their spatial characteristics seem to resemble those of modern theatre buildings. The way permanent structures were used theatrically, however, brings into relief the experiential dynamic that many medieval viewing environments prompted. The most lavish and well documented of indoor performances were those that accompanied festive occasions in European courts. Within the banquet halls that housed these events, animate and inanimate figures on temporary platforms, and in ornamentation of various kinds, represented themes from biblical, mythological and chivalric legends. Over the course of the banquet the fictional worlds of these legends merged with the immediate world of the participants in the festive occasion itself. Tapestries are overlooked sources to help us imagine the viewing environments of banquet interludes and other court festivities. From the beginning of the fourteenth through to the sixteenth centuries, they transformed the banquet halls of princely and noble courts during important occasions. This tradition of display emerged first in the courts of the French kings and Burgundian dukes and was adopted in other European courts. The themes chosen for such tapestries varied but they frequently focused on the exploits of the heroes of historic and mythic legend. Hung around the walls of a banquet hall during a particular occasion, the tapestries surrounded viewers and created a textured enclosure within which the celebratory events took place. The fragments of a monumental series of the Nine Worthies currently housed at the Cloisters are among the earliest surviving examples of such woven display (Figure 4.9). A common theme of texts, images and performances beginning in the thirteenth century, the Nine Worthies, which existed in both male and female versions, were composed of three groups of three heroes from Christian, Hebrew and pagan legend. The largest fragment in the Cloisters’ collection includes two of the Hebrew Worthies: Joshua and David hold swords; David

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FIGURE 4.9: Joshua and David, fragment of Nine Worthies tapestry, c. 1370. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

holds a book. The woven figures appear within ornate gothic niches and are flanked by smaller figures, clad in ecclesiastic vestment or noble garb. The architectural apparatus around Joshua, David and their attendants differentiates the place in which the woven figures appear from that of a viewer standing before them. Yet the precarious posture of Joshua and David, the tilt of the tiled floor before their feet and their fluttering drapery suggest that they might broach the implied limit of the realm in which they sit. Even in its fragmentary state, the Cloisters’ panel provides a sense of the continuous textured surface individual tapestry panels would have created when they were juxtaposed around the walls of a room. References to tapestries in the accounts and inventories of European princes and kings underscore their architectural function by referring to woven ensembles like the Nine Worthies as salles (halls) based on their destination in the halls of the courts of the nobility.43 During the celebration of important occasions, these princes and their advisors chose tapestry sets from amongst their vast collections to adorn the halls of banquets and other festivities. The immense panels did not simply decorate a pre-existing space within the walls of the hall; their display around its edges instead defined the limits of a new environment for feasts and their accompanying entertainment. At the same time, the woven figures that

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populated the tapestry surface contributed to the narrative content of these performances. One of the most lavish tapestries in the collection of the Burgundian dukes adorned the temporary hall constructed in Bruges for the banquets held over the course of the ten-day celebration of Charles the Bold’s marriage to Margaret of York in 1468. According to the court chronicler, Olivier de la Marche: ‘The ceiling of the said hall was covered with a hanging of blue and white wool and around the sides were hung a sumptuous tapestry composed of the story of Jason, where it is recounted the tale of the Golden Fleece.’44 He also describes the extravagant interludes (entremets), those animate, inanimate and edible displays that were brought into the hall and either circulated amongst the guests or were placed on the tables situated along the length of the hall, on the T-shaped table of honour at the head, or on the lozenge-shaped buffet at the centre. These displays ranged from – on the first banquet – a female dwarf on a singing lion, to the griffon spewing birds from its mouth on the second day, to a performance of Hercules’ Twelve Labours that took place over the course of multiple banquets on a curtained platform at the left end of the hall. Underneath two castle-shaped chandeliers on either side of the hall ‘were seven extremely large mirrors, so well crafted that one could see in each one everything that was done in the said hall’.45 In Olivier’s description all components of the adornment of the banquet hall, both permanent and ephemeral, contributed to the overall mise en scène of the event. Hercules might become the focus for these banquet-goers, when the curtains opened and the platform was unveiled. But even when they watched Hercules in action, they also saw the rest of the hall’s ornamentation and themselves, reflected in the fourteen mirrors of the chandeliers. When the curtains closed on that platform, the banquet-goers’ attention shifted elsewhere: to the singing lion and other moving performers, or to the woven life-size figures of Jason and the Argonauts that told the story of the mythic origins of the chivalric Order of the Golden Fleece. The form in which the Labours of Hercules and Jason’s exploits appeared to viewers was reversed at Philip the Good’s elaborate banquet, the Feast of the Pheasant. There, the duke’s tapestries of the Labours of Hercules spanned the walls of the banquet hall, while figural arrangements on a curtained platform depicted the story of Jason.46 Incorporating the materiality and spatial properties of tapestries into our reading of the Cloisters’ Nine Worthies, and other tapestries like them, provides a glimpse of the dynamic relationship that such a viewing environment could create between fictional and lived worlds. The legendary events enclosed viewers within a fictitious realm populated by woven figures. Yet the position of a spectator was not fixed outside of this imaginary world. The texture and surface pattern of the fabric called attention to the viewers’ relation to the

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materiality of the tapestries. Rather than perceiving a distinct world distant from their own, they were reminded of the fabricated nature of this fictitious world. Viewers experienced the figures and their actions, in turn, as physically surrounding them, reminding them that they are bodies in space. Their situation in relation to the events depicted in tapestry vacillated therefore between various positions: viewers perceived themselves as within, outside or surrounded by the realm in which the woven figures acted. Although the banquets hosted for the Burgundian dukes in the fifteenth century were among the most extravagant and certainly the most expensive of indoor performances in the Middle Ages, they allow us to visualize how diverse kinds of actors and adornment could create viewing environments within other kinds of buildings and enclosures. Within the banquet hall, figures in various media, both animate and inanimate, moved around the banquet-goers and performed behind, before, beside and above them. The size of the woven figures equalled or surpassed that of human actors. Situated around the edges of the hall, tapestries created an enclosure constituted by the fictional world they represented. In this respect, the spatial distribution of woven figures resembled the arrangement of human beings, props and place locators around and within the marketplace in Lucerne and in other late medieval cities. The viewing environments of both urban and court performances brought the distant worlds of the fictional action into play with the immediate present of participants in the spectacle. As tangible remnants of these performances, tapestries help us to understand even today an elusive feature of such urban productions: that the action took place not just in front of but also around the body of the viewer. In so doing, they expose why our cultural history of theatre needs a reception theory that accommodates not just viewers’ ocular experience but also their corporeal encounters with human and non-human actors.

CONCLUSION Material images and artefacts, like those described in this chapter, contributed to the construction of the spatial contours and experience of medieval performances. They did so by activating a building, room, structure or open site, transforming it into a setting in which events in the past could be perceived as if they were happening in the present. They did so by orienting the composition and trajectory of processions, thereby contributing to the perception of the spaces through which they moved. They did so by demarcating the geographic and temporal boundaries of an event or constellation of figures, while situating them in the everyday present of a particular community. They did so by enclosing and engaging spectators in the imaginary worlds they depicted. The viewing environments within which diverse performances were seen and to which they contributed shared certain features.

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First, medieval viewing environments were neither static nor permanent; they changed according to a variety of factors, including the requirements of a particular performance’s subject matter and location. For instance, the pageant wagons that accompanied Corpus Christi processions could move into an open area within or near the city, where their placement established a new relationship between the events framed within each wagon and the audience for the performance. As the differences between the two Lucerne drawings make clear, the arrangement of the structures referring to biblical locations could even change from one day to the next of a performance. Moreover, the same temporary platforms could be used for both processions and large-scale urban plays. Like the display of tapestries, the arrangement of these temporary scaffoldings created a performance environment that was not confined to a set of pre-established spatial types. Second, medieval viewing environments constituted and promoted multiple and flexible viewpoints for their audiences. Unlike modern theatregoers, whose seats fix their position before and below action that is directed toward them, medieval audiences often moved over the course of a performance in order to perceive the action. The scale of these performances and the distribution of place marks around viewers meant, moreover, that they could never survey the story in its entirety but perceived a partial view of events that were, in turn, segmented into the numerous viewing periods of the performance. Watching a performance required audiences constantly to shift the focus of their attention. Participants in entry or religious processions watched both the moving components of the procession and the stable structures that were situated along its route; the action of performances set in marketplaces, open areas and in the halls of banquets took place both in the open area outside or within a hall, and on the scaffolds constructed within them and around their edges or walls. The degree of participation of this audience vacillated between the positions of spectators to that of performers. Third, what emerges from this brief overview is that the viewing environment of medieval performances was always localized and site specific. The orientation of processions emphasized the topography of a city and the shape and volume of particular buildings within it. The moving or fixed platform structures were arranged according to the requirements of the physical contours of the city in which a performance took place. The engagement of large-scale urban productions with the topography of urban communities was in many ways similar to that of dramatic events that accompanied processions into a city.47 Both kinds of performances moved through and within a given city and incorporated this immediate setting into the fictional setting of the stories they told. The location of a performance in a particular city or court contributed to the meaning the performance generated. The final and related point is that these performance environments prompted an awareness of the workmanship, labour, artistry, craft and materials that went

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into turning an existing site into a ‘communal beholdying place’. Performers and audiences might imagine themselves in another time and place from that of their immediate and everyday surroundings but they were always reminded of the fabricated nature of this realm and of the labour and expertise that went into its making. What they perceived was not just the product of those individuals responsible for composing words and gestures but also of the diverse artisans who contributed to the orchestration of the performance as a whole. Even as the specialized skills of the chambers of rhetoric in Flanders and the Netherlands, or the Puys, as they were known in France, assumed a greater role in the production of late medieval plays and processional drama, these groups continued to rely on a range of other craftsmen and women to help create the environment in which the words, songs and gestures they composed could be seen. These characteristics of medieval viewing environments lead us to re-evaluate the small selection of pictures that have provided evidence for the existence of medieval theatres. Richard Southern and Henri Rey-Flaud relied on the diagram of the Castle of Perseverance and Fouquet’s miniature of the martyrdom of St Apollonia (Figures 4.10 and 4.11) to show that the ditch we see in the former, and the series of platforms depicted in the latter, served the same function as the permanent walls of a theatre building: to house and contain the performance of plays.48 Yet as Nathalie Crohn-Schmitt argued long ago the Castle drawing does not indicate that the performance was enclosed or confined by a circular barrier but expanded beyond its edges.49 Or, as Gordon Kipling suggested recently, Fouquet’s miniature visualizes the antiquarian conception of a theatre building in order to condemn the type of activity it houses, a cultural activity associated with the distant past but not with the present.50 Even when theatre historians think that they have found evidence for medieval theatres, it seems that their vision has been distorted by our assumptions of what theatre is: a cultural activity that happens within an enclosed structure designed for that purpose. My hope is that we can stop looking at medieval performance traditions through the lens of an anachronistic theatregoing experience. By returning to images familiar to historians of theatre and incorporating new artefacts into our study of the past, we can begin to acknowledge and account for the range and richness of the visual environments in which medieval performances happened and which they, in turn, produced. Shifting the terms of our inquiry from locating the place in which performances happened to identifying and describing the processes that created visual environments brings the study of medieval performance practices up to date with that of cultural critics and theorists who have contested a notion of space as a bounded static container. Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau have shown, for instance, that a series of ephemeral and shifting relations – social, communicative and aesthetic – constitute individuals’

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FIGURE 4.10: Castle of Perseverance from the Macro Manuscript, c. 1400–1425. Washington D.C., Folger Library MS V.a.354. Reproduced by permission of the Folger Library.

perception of space and determine in different ways their notion of place.51 Engaging a relational conception of space will also force us to interrogate how a limited conception of theatre has served to regulate and confine the cultural practices that are associated with it and the potential of these practices to engage audiences within and outside its walls. Finally, I propose that we break down another wall: between Art History and Theatre History. Our conversation

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FIGURE 4.11: Jean Fouquet, ‘The Martyrdom of St Apollonia’, Heures d’Etienne Chevalier, c. 1445 (Chantilly, Musée Condé Ms Fr. 71). Reproduced by permission of Art Resource.

can then move beyond the anachronistic and artificial categories of ‘art’ and ‘theatre’ that have defined two separate disciplines to one about visual culture in the broad sense.52 It is this conversation that can help us tell a more historically accurate and nuanced cultural history of theatre.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Circulation A Peripatetic Theatre CLAIRE SPONSLER

Hell Houses, Passion plays, the musicals Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar; Holy Week processions, Mardi Gras, John Canoe festivals; mummers’ parades, morris dances, Three Kings ceremonies. As this list demonstrates, traces of medieval performances can be found, even today, across Europe, the Caribbean, the Americas and elsewhere, if we know where to look for them. These survivals and revivals of a cultural form often assumed to have vanished are fascinating in their own right, but they also serve as a reminder of the wide-ranging circulation of medieval drama. Such a reminder is especially important since it is easy to be misled by the extant evidence – printed editions of plays or manuscripts and other documents stored in archives and libraries – into thinking of premodern theatre as dull, drab and inert. That would be a mistake: in actuality, medieval drama was lively, full of sensory experiences and nearly always on the move. One of the challenges of a performance history of the years from the fall of Rome to the start of modernity is to unfreeze performances now located primarily in books and archives, so as to return them to the processes of circulation in which they once participated and to trace their surprisingly expansive movement across spaces, cultures, media and more. Not confined to purpose-built spaces such as the ancient amphitheatre or the modern proscenium stage, medieval plays could take place nearly anywhere that actors could be seen or heard and audiences could gather. Plays went on tour; they were recycled and repurposed; they moved from one medium to another; they were

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adapted for new audiences and changed contexts; and they were broadly disseminated, in sometimes unexpected ways. In his encyclopaedic Didascalicon (c. 1125), Hugh of St Victor recounted the many places where playing could take place, such as temples, halls, arenas, amphitheatres, gymnasia and public buildings; some fifty years later, William FitzStephen’s Descriptio Nobilissimi Civitatis Londoniae (‘Description of London’, c. 1173) described the variety of performance activities that took place across twelfth-century London, such as jousts, processions, carnival plays and summer and winter games. Today, we may associate drama with paid productions mounted on an indoor stage, but during the medieval period it was a medium in motion. An intriguing case reveals just how far medieval drama could roam. Each year, the community of Alcalde in New Mexico puts on a play called Los Comanches in which costumed performers on horseback enact the historic defeat of a Comanche chieftain by a Spanish army. The oldest known play-text of Los Comanches dates to 1864, but the basic contours of the performance can be traced back to the 1770s and to conflicts between Spanish/Mexican settlers and nomadic Comanches. The performance’s sources are even older, however, since it is a version of the conquest dramas that were performed across Spanish territories in the Americas starting in the sixteenth century. The earliest such drama in what is now the United States took place on September of 1598, when soldiers in the expedition of Juan de Oñate rode up the Rio Grande river from Mexico and took over a Pueblo village. To commemorate their conquest, they staged a mock battle modelled on the medieval Spanish moros y cristianos (Moors versus Christians) plays. With its artillery fire and military skirmishes, the play reportedly caused so much fear among the Puebloans watching it that they surrendered to Oñate the next day. From the twelfth to the twenty-first century and from Europe to the Americas, the history of the moros y cristianos play suggests the essentially roving nature of medieval drama.1 To think of theatre in terms of circulation involves recognizing the degree to which performances are able to escape the bounds of the local and to move to new places, times and material forms. That escape was seldom predictable. In fact, the idea of circulation works against simple patterns of source and influence or of teleological development. Circulation implies not an orderly, linear, oneway route, but variously fast or slow movements that involve detours, circlings back, meanderings, plunges off cliffs and even dead ends. Medieval performances could circulate person-to-person, by word of mouth, embodied in performers, embedded in memory, written down in prompts and scraps of play scripts or in official or commemorative copies, or transferred to other representational forms. They could also stop circulating forever (unplayed, uncopied, forgotten, lost) or halt and then begin again (recollected or reconstructed, sometimes by displaced persons who created a diaspora of medieval performances that ranged

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FIGURE 5.1: Matachines dancers in their annual Christmas dance at the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, New Mexico, 25 December 2010. Photo by Robert Alexander / Getty Images.

across geographic and temporal borders). Today, we can see traces of these movements in material objects (such as the costumes and props of the matachines dancers of Mexico and the southwestern United States that echo medieval morris and morescos performances), in written records (such as in the traces of twelfth-century Latin comedies that show up in early modern plays) and in visual images (as in the tapestries that depict scenes from the medieval play known as The Vengeance of Our Lord).2 If we grant the mobility of medieval theatre, then we need to address several questions. When a widely shared and characteristic feature of dramatic activities is that they move to different locations and audiences, what, then, is intrinsic to the performance? How far can a performance travel before it becomes something entirely new and unrecognizable? Are there defining qualities that mark the circulation of medieval performance as distinct from the theatrical migrations of other historical periods; or, to put it another way, within a cultural history of performance, what difference does the circulation of medieval drama make to a larger narrative of theatre’s emergence, recombination, exportation, influence and contact across cultures? Where, in other words, does medieval drama fit in the history of theatrical circulation?

AUDIENCES AND PERFORMERS ON THE MOVE Élie Konigson once noted that there was no separate theatre space in medieval Europe; until the middle of the sixteenth century, all performances occurred in

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spaces designed for other uses. From the perspective of circulation, he aptly describes the ad-hoc and opportunistic use of borrowed locations for early performances.3 To an extent not found in the traditions of Western theatre that preceded and followed it, medieval drama involved perambulation, whether of actors, spectators or the performances themselves. Unconfined by the spatial configurations imposed by an amphitheatre of the sort used in classical theatre or a playing house of later eras, the actors within medieval plays were relatively free to improvise their movements within a playing space, adapting their actions to the size, shape and layout of the indoor or outdoor location in which they performed. They could take advantage of the placement of doors and hall screens if performing in a great hall, staging entrances and exits or moving among seated diners as happened in interludes in England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They could use the aisle, apse and other architectural features of a church interior as in twelfthcentury troping in cathedrals across Europe. They could move from ground level to pageant-wagon level when acting in street pageants, as probably occurred in a number of the mystery plays that call for movement between various levels (including earth to heaven or hell) or they could walk from mansion to mansion in an open field if performing a play such as the Digby Mary Magdalene, which was designed for place-and-scaffold production with a large number of stages arranged around a field. It even included a ship in which actors travelled around the platea or open playing space as part of the performance. Nowhere was the essentially perambulatory nature of medieval drama more obvious than in the street performances that took place throughout cities and towns across Europe, especially during warm seasons. Cycles of biblical-history plays were performed on pageant wagons that were drawn or pushed through the streets of York and elsewhere. In northern France, Belgium and the Netherlands, the Ommegang pageants – from a Dutch word meaning ‘to walk around’ – started in the fourteenth century and featured processions through the streets of such cities as Antwerp and Brussels. Summer watches, holy day processions including those on Rogation days and during Easter week, and perambulations around city or church walls used the movement of actors and participants to ritually mark out or consecrate territory while celebrating an occasion. The cultural functions of these rituals of walking or riding through towns and cities included the tying together as well as the demarcating of spaces, making visible the patterns of inclusion as well as exclusion in the local community.4 In many processional performances, especially those that included pageants that were enacted at various spots along the route, the performers moved while audiences stayed in place, gathering at spots along the route from which

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FIGURE 5.2: Procession of the Ommeganck at Brussels in 1615, by Denis Van Alsloot (1570–1626). Oil painting. Belgium, early seventeenth century. Victoria & Albert Museum).

they could watch the procession as it went past. That typical pattern was made more complicated in royal entries, in which an honoured guest – a king, queen, or other important visitor – was welcomed into a city and rode through the city’s streets with an entourage made up of guests and hosts (mayors and other high-ranking citizens), pausing to watch enactments at pageants that had been set up along the way. In royal entries, the actors remained in place, singing or miming, as townspeople watched from along the route, while, for their own part, the honoured guests and hosts rode or walked from performance site to performance site, tracing out the actual and symbolic spaces of the urban setting. Evidence suggests that in some cases, it was the audience that moved, not just the performers. Hubert Cailleau’s stage design for the Valenciennes Passion play of 1547 shows a series of ‘mansions’ arrayed in a line, in the pattern of open-air production known as place-and-scaffold staging. The spectators at the Valenciennes performance presumably moved from one stage or mansion to the next where the various scenes of the play were performed in sequence. Likewise, the drawing that accompanies the only surviving copy of the Castle of Perseverance seems to point to a performance in the round that may have employed a similar sort of place-and-scaffold staging that required the audience to move around in order to follow the drama as it unfolded. Spectators did more than just move from stage to stage; they also travelled, perhaps going quite a long distance, to see performances in a village or town not their own. The Book of Margery Kempe offers a striking case in point from the year 1413, when Margery Kempe and her husband stop to rest on a hot summer day as they are returning from York to their home in East Anglia. Although we cannot be certain, it seems highly likely, given the date, that Margery and her husband had watched the York biblical plays during their visit.5 Plays attracted spectators from surrounding areas as well as those who, like the Kempes, were willing to travel longer distances in order to take in a performance.

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TOURING As far as we can tell, some plays were made for a specific locale and remained there. For instance, some dramas were performed just once for a specific occasion, such as the entry of a prominent visitor into a city (as in the wellknown joyeuse entrée developed by the dukes of Burgundy in the fifteenth century). Other entertainments were devised for holidays at court, such as John Lydgate’s Mumming at Windsor, which was performed for the English king Henry VI during a Christmas season c. 1429–30. Yet other performances, however, were part of a touring circuit, and itinerant performers appear in the earliest records of European towns and households. Travelling minstrels were plying their trade as early as 1277 at Canterbury, 1307 at Leicester and 1377 at Worcester, and accounts show ample evidence of minstrel troupes on provincial English roads in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (although the terminology for early performers makes it difficult to know whether these minstrels performed plays and little is known about their repertoires before the fifteenth century).6 In 1425 two men from Shrewsbury were paid for performing an interlude in a noble household in Shropshire, and the players of the town of New Romney performed in the church at Rye in 1474–75.7 Taking plays on the road had an impact not only on staging, but on content as well, since any drama mounted by an itinerant troupe had to be scaled down so as to be both portable and playable by just a few actors. Touring companies apparently kept stage props to a minimum, so that they could be easily carried from place to place. Their repertoire was in all likelihood designed for a small troupe – (records suggest that the size of troupes varied, from two to six, or more) – and probably consisted of a few plays that they learned by heart or could improvise without the need for written scripts.8 It is frustratingly difficult to link specific plays to travelling troupes, but some evidence exists of what they may have performed. One of the best-known reminders of the fact that plays toured is embedded in the N-Town Plays, whose modern name comes from a reference in the N-Town banns, the proclamation or advertisement spoken by three vexillators (flag-bearers) who in 528 lines of rhyming verse describe the content of the play and announce an upcoming performance of it on ‘A Sunday next, yf that we may, / At six of the belle we gynne oure play / In N. town’ (‘Next Sunday, if we may, when the bell tolls six we will begin our play in N-Town’, lines 525–27). Like other banns, those from N-Town would have toured local villages in order to drum up interest in the play. The ‘N’ in the vexillators’ announcement presumably stands for nomen, the Latin word for ‘name’. In this instance, it seems to indicate that, as in contemporary legal boilerplate, the name of whatever town in which the plays were going to be performed could be inserted when the banns were spoken. While the surviving manuscript of the N-Town plays is a composite

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that in all likelihood was never performed in its entirety or meant to be, most scholars now believe that the portion of the N-Town plays to which the banns refer was intended for touring production, probably somewhere in the East Anglian villages around the border of Norfolk and Suffolk in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The play Mankind (c. 1467–70) is an anonymous East Anglian play that was probably used by a touring company playing in open fields, marketplaces, village halls or other available spaces. The extant play-text of Mankind contains evidence that suggests that it was performed in a space that could accommodate both standing and seated socially mixed audience members who are addressed as ‘ye soverens that sytt and ye brothern that stonde ryght uppe’ (‘you sovereigns who sit and you brethren who stand’, line 29), and from whom money was collected (as in the moneygathering scene of lines 457–74). Records from Cambridge register the complaint that common players were coming to the university to recite interludes and plays.9 Similarly, The Conversion of St Paul (which dates from the first quarter of the sixteenth century) may have been a travelling play as well as a town play with East Midlands origin; it seems to have been designed for outdoor production and features three ‘stations’ that may have been pageant wagons or fixed scaffolds.10 Some touring companies were associated with the household of a wealthy patron, but earned a large part of their income by going on the road and performing wherever they could find a paying audience. The players of Henry Algernon Percy, fifth earl of Northumberland in northern England, were paid by King Henry VII on 7 January 1493, presumably for having performed on Twelfth Night the previous evening, and they are known to have performed in other noble households as well; records offer evidence of other noblemen’s acting troupes in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.11 Because social anxieties were aroused by travelling players – who could seem to resemble the ‘masterless men’ who wandered about the country as vagabonds and thus were thought to be prone to criminal activity – acting troupes often sought the patronage of a noble household from which they could acquire legitimacy and protection. Itinerant actors continued to dominate the performance of medieval plays well into the sixteenth century, both spatially and chronologically on the move, expanding periodization as much as they do geography. While some performances remained bound to one place, the expectation of most actors was that vernacular plays could be taken on the road, along with a few props and the minimal costumes that were all that many plays apparently required. Judging by the surviving play-texts, a relatively small troupe of players supplied with a selection of basic items of stagecraft would have been perfectly capable of mounting a play successfully in a variety of venues. Only in the late sixteenth century was there a shift away from touring, as the commercial and professional

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theatres with their purpose-built stages became increasingly central to the dissemination of drama.

EXPORTATION AND MIGRATION ACROSS GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES Because the modern study of medieval European drama arose in the nineteenth century in tandem with nationalist impulses that encouraged a focus on individual national histories of medieval theatre – French, English, German, and so on – charting the geographic circulation of medieval performances requires the stitching together of those separate histories.12 Fortunately, in the last forty years increasing numbers of scholars have attempted to understand medieval drama as a pan-European phenomenon and have called attention to the many resemblances among the performance traditions of England and the countries on the continent.13 Those studies show that some plays migrated within a fairly narrow geographic range. For instance, the two large-scale fifteenth-century Passion plays by Arnoul Gréban and Jean Michel, originally performed in Paris, were so well known that they were adapted for performance in other towns in northern France for almost a century, as can be seen in the Passion de Troyes that was staged over the course of three days in the late fifteenth century in the city of Troyes.14 The York plays in all probability never went on tour, but they appear nonetheless to have influenced another biblical cycle associated with northern England, the Towneley plays. Although we know little about how the plays now gathered in the sixteenth-century Towneley manuscript might have been performed, scholars have hypothesized that they might have been linked to the northern town of Wakefield, not far from York. Whether that conjecture is accurate or not, most scholars agree that there are resemblances between some of the York and Towneley plays, resemblances that suggest that whoever wrote the Towneley plays had access to York’s pageants and borrowed from them. Such echoing of parts of plays perhaps points to the sharing of play-texts between towns. We can only guess at the reasons for such regional sharing, which might have included the desire to make use of existing written plays out of simple expediency: it is easier to adapt a play-text than it is to create a performance from scratch. Some plays may also have circulated regionally because of the renown of their site of origin. The thirteenth-century play known as Courtois d’Arras, which was originally performed in Arras, subsequently circulated as a favoured performance among the jongleurs, perhaps not just because it was an especially portable play that could be enacted by a single jongleur or expanded into parts, but also because its association with Arras made the play popular as a stereotype of alluring urban decadence.15 Similar associations with a place of origin may explain the

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regional movement of other medieval plays as well, and prompt speculation that in circulation a play did not necessarily lose all traces of its original performance venue. While some plays circulated regionally, other plays crossed the English Channel and moved across continental borders. The fifteenth-century English morality play, Everyman (c. 1519), described at its outset as a ‘treatise . . . in the manner of a moral play’, is thought to be a translation of the late-fifteenthcentury Dutch play, Elckerlijc, a product of the Dutch Rederijkers or ‘rhetoricians’ who performed in their Chambers of Rhetoric.16 The sixteenth-century Historie van Jan van Beverley is a prose and verse version of what was probably a Dutch play that may have derived from an earlier Middle English play from the town of Beverley in Yorkshire.17 The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, which dates to the second half of the fifteenth century and has been linked to East Anglia, resembles various continental plays including a Dutch play performed in Breda around 1500 as well as sixteenth-century French and Italian versions of the host-desecration story.18 Mankind, too, may have continental auspices, as a kind of English Fastnachtspiel (a carnival play performed during the pre-Lenten season) that was influenced by performances from the Low Countries.19 Italy can be glimpsed behind the English play Fulgens and Lucres (c. 1497), which was probably performed in the great hall at Lambeth Palace under the patronage of John Morton as part of a banquet, was largely based on Buinaccorso da Montemagno’s De Vera Nobilitate (c. 1428), and was translated by John Tiptoft and printed by Caxton in 1481, but with English elements.20 The migration of medieval plays could be surprisingly far-flung, sending them well beyond the borders of Europe. Three shadow plays written by the thirteenth-century playwright Ibn D¯aniy¯al in Cairo show familiarity with the Aristophanic tradition as well as with material used by European folk entertainers and storytellers.21 Crossing the Atlantic, sixteenth-century Europeans brought to the Americas performances that continued a medieval tradition. When Sir Humphrey Gilbert sailed in 1583 from Plymouth, England, to Newfoundland, he took along ‘morris dancers, Hobby horses, and Maylike Conceits’ for what he described as the ‘allurement of the savages’ and the ‘solace of our people’.22 Franciscan friars who arrived in New Spain in 1524 brought a repertoire of religious performances that they used to convert indigenous peoples and to remember rituals they had left behind. Like the English and Spanish, the early Dutch settlers in New York imported and then adapted their own performance traditions, as did the French in the Great Lakes region. An example of the kind of hybrid performance that could result from this importing took place in 1679, when a Three Kings pageant was enacted at the Huron Mission at St Ignace de Missilimakinac, which had been established by French Jesuits in what is now northern Michigan. On the Feast of the Epiphany

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(6 January), the Huron divided themselves into three groups and chose three chiefs, costumed with crowns, to take gifts to the infant Jesus as was traditional in a Three Kings play. The three groups marched into the mission’s church where the three chiefs kneeled and placed their crowns at the foot of the cradle in a show of homage and subordination.23 Although the Jesuits did not participate in this performance, they must have stage-managed parts of it, such as the kneeling and offering of crowns to the infant Jesus, actions that probably derived from medieval drama rather than from Huron culture. Across the Americas, in streets, markets, plantation yards, religious campgrounds, summer gardens and museums, continuations of a medieval dramatic tradition can still be found.24 These legacies of a medieval dramatic tradition reveal the complicated interplay at work in the circulation of premodern performances, including what is lost in the process of cultural transmission as well as what remains. In most cases, hybridity, contextual specificity and the resilience of cultural forms shape the various new world performances that harken back to a medieval tradition.25 Far from being imported unchanged, medieval performances were reshaped and adapted to fit new circumstances, often in ways that allowed for the creation of alternate meanings that spoke to the changed contexts in which imported plays were enacted.

INFLUENCE AND MIGRATION ACROSS CHRONOLOGICAL BARRIERS Even when medieval dramas did not cross geographic borders, they often moved through time, influencing later plays and reaching chronologically distant audiences. The biblical plays from England or continental Europe may have stayed in a home city, but they migrated temporally by way of annual performances that could span decades or even centuries. The effects of such chronological mobility can sometimes be seen in extant play-texts and other records. The York Register shows evidence of having been used as a master copy by means of which the corporation of York could maintain control over its annual biblical plays and assure that performances remained faithful to a preferred standard. In the case of the Chester biblical plays, the six surviving manuscript copies of the plays, which all date from the sixteenth century or later, show that while the Chester plays began as a Corpus Christi cycle that was performed on that feast day each summer, by the early sixteenth century the plays had become associated with the feast of Whitsun, presumably in response to religious reform. As in other cities across Europe where a civic performance has far extended its historical range, we find the Misteri d’Elx, which is usually assumed to date to the second half of the fifteenth century, and which continues to be performed in the Spanish town of Elche today.26

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Attesting to the temporal reach of medieval drama, the English biblical plays were still in circulation in the 1570s, despite growing reformist and other doubts about them. Coventry performed its Corpus Christi plays annually through the 1560s, with the last performance occurring in 1579, after Archbishop Grindal had taken action against the biblical plays that had been mounted at Chester, York and Wakefield; Chester performed its plays on an irregular basis in the 1560s and 1570s, with the last performance in 1575 (one year before James Burbage built the Elizabethan playhouse called ‘The Theatre’ outside London); and York seems to have sponsored at least four cycles in the 1560s. The final unsuccessful attempt to stage the York Corpus Christi play was in 1580. Some of the English cycle plays continued to be performed in censored or modified forms that met new religious standards. Such was the case for the Norwich Grocers’ Temptation pageant, which in 1565 was ‘renewed’ to conform to scripture; similarly, at York the Marian plays were dropped from 1548–53 and again from 1561 to the cycle’s last performance. Expense, as much as religious reform, may have been a factor in their decline, since cities had long complained about the cost of the pageants and had forced citizens to underwrite the productions of the sponsoring guilds. Whatever the cause of their abandonment, the English biblical plays circulated well into the era of the purpose-built commercial theatre. While some plays moved temporally through performances that continued in the same or nearby locales, for others, it was rediscovery and adaptation that extended their influence to later historical periods. The six religious plays modelled on Terence’s comedies written by the canoness Hrotsvitha (c. 935– 1002), for instance, were apparently never part of a medieval dramatic repertoire, but after her plays were published in 1501, they had a strong influence on the didactic and religious drama of the sixteenth century. Another early play, the medieval Latin comic play Querolus (The Complainer) perhaps written in the early fifth century in Rome or Gaul, was adapted in the twelfth century by Vitalis of Blois in his Aulularia.27 More broadly, evidence suggests that the drama produced in the tenth through sixteenth centuries under the auspices of the medieval church freely shared literary and liturgical influences: the 500–600 plays in Karl Young’s Drama of the Medieval Church consist chiefly of variations on just sixteen different dramas.28 As is well known to theatre historians, Protestants in England adapted the medieval saint play and early modern tragedy had medieval roots.29 The printing press also helped spread plays and opened them to wider adaptation. The interlude Youth (1513–14) was probably written for performance by an itinerant troupe at Christmas or Shrovetide in a household in northern England. Despite its highly topical and regional nature, after it was published by Wynkyn de Worde around 1530, the play entered the repertoire of sixteenth-century interluders and apparently was staged up to the reign of

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Elizabeth I. More astonishingly, some parts of Youth also appear in the folk performance known as the Revesby Mummers’ Play, which was written down in 1779.30 Youth cropped up in performance yet again when it was revived in 1905 by Nugent Monck’s English Drama Society at Bloomsbury Hall in London.31 One of the four Middle Dutch abele spelen (‘noble plays’, that is, secular, not religious) that are extant in a manuscript of around 1410 has a similarly long run. The plays might have begun as dramatized dialogues performed by travelling players, but the only record of performance notes that the play of Lanseloet was performed in Aachen on 14 August 1412 by the company of Diest, a town in Brabant. Lanseloet seems to have had a long performance life: it not only survives in two print versions, but was performed in a slightly different version as late as the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century.32 As these dramatic enactments suggest, whether through continued performance, the passing down or publishing of play-texts, or as part of cultural memory, medieval drama exerted an influence into the early modern period and beyond. No less a figure than the playwright most closely associated with the development of the modern stage came under the sway of earlier plays: Shakespeare himself may have seen the final performances of the Coventry biblical plays while a boy in Stratford and his debt to medieval drama has been increasingly acknowledged.33

FIGURE 5.3: Gilles in the Binche Carnival on Shrove Tuesday, 17 February 2015. Photo by Benoit Doppagne, Getty Images.

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Even when medieval plays stopped being performed, they reached later audiences through revival and reconstruction. In England, as a result of the Lord Chamberlain’s politically and theologically motivated ban on dramatic representations of God, medieval religious plays dropped out of the theatrical repertoire after the sixteenth century, but entered the performance repertoire once again when the impresario William Poel managed to slip Everyman past the censors in 1901.34 Following Poel’s success, individual pageants from the English biblical cycles were occasionally performed in England and America, and in 1951 Martin Browne produced the York Plays for the Festival of Britain. In the years since, the English biblical plays have been frequently staged, often as tourist attractions linked to the heritage industry. The same holds true for other medieval European plays, such as the Carnival of Binche in Hainault, which has been designated a UNESCO heritage event. Such revivals have become a part of the marketing of history as well as a source of income for festival cities.

CONTACT ACROSS CULTURES AND GROUPS Medieval performances were closely linked to the publics that sponsored them, so much so that the history of premodern theatre is almost impossible to separate from the history of social groups.35 Although medieval drama was deeply tied to communities, it was nevertheless a relatively open-access form of cultural activity. Before playhouses limited plays to paying audiences and forced conformity to the standards of humanists and censors alike, drama could be experienced by people from different social and economic levels. There were some exceptions, such as court or institutional performances, which were restricted to those who had entrance to the household, or large-scale plays in France, which required spectators to pay.36 For the most part, however, the tendency of medieval performances to take place wherever audiences could gather resulted in a great deal of diversity among the individuals who made up those audiences. The result was that while plays and their sponsoring communities were interdependent, drama could in many cases reach beyond a narrow-gauge spectatorship either by engaging the community at its broadest or by circulating outside its instantiating audience. When plays travelled, they inevitably reached new groups, whether in a neighbouring town or, in the case of plays performed repeatedly in the same location, in the form of a new influx of residents and visitors, whose needs and interests might vary from year to year. The effects of shifting audiences over time can be seen in changes made in plays that were performed on an annual basis, as when the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin plays were struck from the York cycle in 1561 or in the Tudor revision of the Chester and Towneley plays. Such changes reflect the altered attitudes of those

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involved, whether performers, sponsors, or governing bodies. As plays reached new or reformulated audiences, the function and messages of the play were transformed, perhaps substituting one set of local concerns for another or becoming less regional and more national in outlook. One case in point dates from the 1970s and 1980s when, in the National Theatre’s Mysteries, Bill Bryden and Tony Harrison transformed the medieval York plays’ religious focus into a modern political response to problems facing workers in Thatcherite Britain.37 Thinking about circulation from the perspective of contact across cultures and groups involves a consideration of the phenomenon of appropriation. The word appropriate, ‘to make one’s own’, from the Latin proprius, ‘proper’ or ‘property’, describes how material from one culture can be reused by another. Inspired by postcolonial theories of culture, scholars have turned to ideas of reworking, improvisation and parody to describe how objects, events and texts can acquire fresh meanings when in the hands of new audiences or users. The idea of appropriation is especially useful for the study of premodern drama, since scholars of medieval drama often focus primarily on the original performance rather than on processes of cultural contact and transmission. Looking beyond original performances to routes of transmission raises useful questions about medieval drama and its cultural workings. For example, the sole surviving copy of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament is now in Trinity College, Dublin, in a compilation once owned by John Madden (d.1703), a man who in the late seventeenth century was president of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland. The worn condition of the outer pages of the play suggest that it originally existed separate from the Trinity compilation for some years: from its handwriting and watermarks, this copy of the play appears to have been made in the mid-sixteenth century (although the date of composition was probably earlier, sometime after 1461, which is the date mentioned near the close of the play).38 In light of the fact that one of the central scenes of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament is a drunken doctor’s comic attempt to heal the dismembered hand of one of the play’s main characters, there would appear to be an interesting story linking Madden the physician and the play. If scholars zoom in too narrowly on the Croxton’s play’s original performance context – if they limit themselves to hypothesizing why fifteenthcentury East Anglia might have proved an especially hospitable home for a play that deals with doctrinal issues, conversion of the Jews, or religious orthodoxy – then an equally important history risks being overlooked. That other history is one in which the play-text leaves East Anglia, enters Ireland, and comes into the possession of a man whose chief interest in the play may have had less to do with religious controversies than with the pleasure of reading about a quack doctor.39

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THE MOVEMENT OF PLAYS AS WRITTEN DOCUMENTS As the Croxton play reveals, an important way in which medieval performances circulated was as part of the written record, in manuscript and, eventually, in print. The relationship between the extant copies and the performances to which they relate is far from simple, which means that we cannot always follow any given path from performance to written record. Some surviving play-texts seem to be actors’ parts, others are prompters’ or directors’ copies. Many are presentation or commemorative copies made after, sometimes long after, the performance. Others are included in literary collections or are inserted into official chronicles. Some are illustrated and some include stage plans (as in the Cornish Ordinalia) or notes that provide clues to how they were once enacted. Yet others may never have been performed and exist solely as written texts. Complicating the situation is the fact that there are many more mentions of performances in accounts and records than there are surviving play-texts. That may be due to the ad-libbed or mimed nature of many early performances for which a script may not have been necessary. It may also be attributable to the lack of a perceived need to set down performances in writing since, in the predominately oral cultures of medieval Europe, those performances were an integral part of public life that could be recalled readily through memory, whenever recalling might be necessary. With some exceptions, such as the amply documented liturgical drama that was copied into service books, what entered the historical record was often the result of either technological change, such as the spread of writing, or loss, such as the commemoration of a fading tradition.40 Technological change helps to explain the growing proliferation of play-texts starting in the fifteenth century, as literacy spread and the demand for written material increased; loss may lie behind the sixteenth-century copying of earlier play-texts such as the Towneley manuscript, which were made at a time when the performances they memorialized were disappearing. Play-texts suffered the same fate as many other medieval manuscripts, which were lost or destroyed over the years, but they had an even more abysmal survival rate due to the fact that many were probably originally in forms that were never meant to be preserved. Those play-texts that did enter the documentary record not only moved dramas into another medium, one not particularly well suited to capturing the sensory experience of a live performance, but also removed plays from their local settings. When plays were written down, they reached broader audiences – readers this time, not spectators – some of whom may have seen the original performance (as was perhaps the case for some readers of John Shirley’s copies of Lydgate’s mummings and disguisings), but most of whom had not. In entering the written record, these plays inevitably took on a different look. Many extant medieval plays owe their survival to the fact that they were able to infiltrate

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poetry collections in the fifteenth century, but that inscription into poetic contexts resulted in a shift away from the social and performance contexts that had once animated and given meaning to those plays.41 That said, we should be careful about assigning too stark a divide between performance and writing in the premodern period. Writing itself was performed, read aloud as proclamations and offered up as spectacle in medieval towns. The public display of important documents could involve the ringing of bells, the gathering together of town officials, and the assembling of spectators to witness the event.42 Writing might have moved plays to new circuits of consumption, making them available to readers who were at a potentially distant remove from their original performance contexts, but written texts themselves were highly performative, read aloud and ceremonially enacted in ways that blurred the line between writing and playing.

THE CONSEQUENCES TO THEATRE AND ITS CONSUMERS One morning in 1510, the newly crowned Henry VIII and twelve other noblemen startled his wife, Queen Catherine of Aragon, by bursting suddenly into her chamber. According to a chronicle account, Henry and his men carried bows and arrows and were dressed to resemble outlaws from a Robin Hood play.43 This escapade hints that one consequence of the circulation of medieval performances is their ability to show up in surprising (as well as predictable) places and to be adapted even by those far removed from the performance’s original auspices. That made them exceptionally useful as bearers of cultural meanings. When a Tudor king’s play-acting can appropriate parish festivities for royal ends, the degree to which medieval performances could circulate is made clear as is the extent of their value. Like coins in a purse, medieval performances were portable forms of symbolic capital that could be used when and as a situation demanded. What the circulation of medieval drama perhaps most strongly underscores is that the history of theatre is less a story about unbroken continuity than about complicated historical processes of appropriation, invention and revival. The patterns of circulation of medieval drama show its mobility and malleability as performances toured, were adapted, and reached diverse audiences. Although definitive answers to this essay’s opening questions about what remains intrinsic to a performance as it is set in motion and how far it can travel before it becomes something entirely different and unrecognizable remain elusive, the evidence strongly suggests that premodern performances were marked by flexibility and adaptability, such that they could bend very far before breaking. Some dramas must have benefitted from their association with an initial source, as was the case with Courtois d’Arras and its subsequent branding by jongleurs as an

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illustration of urban decadence. Others may have been less moored to a previous location, and freer to acquire altered meanings, as in the case of the Huron Three Kings pageant. If premodern performances were to a remarkable degree in transit, one result was that theatre was a much more broadly shared aspect of communal life than it has become today. When an itinerant troupe mounted a play in a village marketplace, when a procession traversed a city’s streets, when a town staged an annual biblical play, when a proclamation was read aloud in a town square, a ceremony enacted in church, or a ritual performed around a city’s walls, then and there, theatre was made part and parcel of daily life. Because medieval performances circulated so widely, they were integrated into public life and its daily and seasonal rhythms in ways that the commercial theatre of the following centuries would not be. Tracing the shifting patterns of circulation that characterized medieval drama is a challenge, but the reward is a fuller understanding of drama’s involvement in nearly every aspect of premodern life. Medieval drama was a cultural activity on the move, making and remaking meanings as it crossed times, places and media.

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CHAPTER SIX

Interpretations GLENDING OLSON

How did people in the Middle Ages interpret theatre? What ideas guided their reactions to it? What sorts of issues did it raise? Of one thing we can be sure: for more than a thousand years, they did not think of theatre in terms of a collection of scripted plays meant to be performed. No university offered a major or even a course in theatre; no manuscript contained a textbook-like anthology of Greek, Roman and contemporaneous plays; no one made a living as a drama critic. Medieval people knew, or thought they knew, many things about ancient theatre, and as the chapters in this volume show, they lived in a world with all sorts of performance and rich theatricality; but none of their thinking about that took place within a conceptual framework that included ‘the fine arts’ or ‘the performing arts’ as a primary category. (By ‘they’, of course, I mean people whose opinions were written down and are available to us now – mostly a small educated minority, largely male, functioning within the institution of the Catholic Church, and usually writing in Latin or Greek. But we can at times hear from other interpretive communities, and, as we shall see, not all clerics thought alike.) At the broadest level, medieval people thought about theatrical performance as physical activity, specifically activity done in play, whether for purposes of amusement or devotion or both.1 They understood that play (ludus) had a distinctive status. Thomas Aquinas says that contemplation is like play in two respects: ‘We enjoy playing (ludus delectabilis est)’, and ‘playing has no purpose beyond itself; what we do in play is done for its own sake’.2 The concerns they had about theatre were those they had about all forms of play: how does such pleasurable, seemingly self-contained activity relate to our ordinary non-playful lives? What are its dangers or its benefits, for both those who play and those

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who watch others playing? Or to use the medieval language regularly applied in introductions to books of all sorts, what is its usefulness (utilitas)?3 Today people regularly ask such social, ethical or religious questions about certain playing or viewing experiences (football, video games, 24-hour news channels, pornography), but not usually about the performing arts, although sometimes social issues override artistic ones, as in the 2014 controversy concerning the New York Metropolitan Opera’s production of The Death of Klinghoffer.4 People in the Middle Ages asked ethical and religious questions first about all play activity, including theatre. While a lot of anti-theatrical opinion circulated throughout the period, so did assertions of the value of imitative play, on physical, psychological and instructional grounds. This chapter looks at four important strands in the tapestry of medieval interpretation: the largely antitheatrical judgments of the early Middle Ages; the idea of theatrica initiated in the twelfth century; the influence of Aristotle’s treatment of play in his Nicomachean Ethics; and the implications of the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, a late medieval English attack on vernacular religious drama. In these early centuries as well as in our own, thinking about theatre always involved thinking beyond theatre, to the religious, legal, ethical and even medical principles within which, and sometimes against which, human bodies performed. To focus on theatre as play is not to suggest that people were unaware of its distinctive features. They discussed them, but often in nontheatrical contexts. Rhetoric taught that there were three modes of writing, one in which the author alone speaks (as in lyric poetry), one in which both author and characters speak (Virgil’s Aeneid was the favourite example), and a ‘dramatic’ mode in which only the characters speak. Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636) says that ‘comedies and tragedies’ use the dramatic mode, but the comment does not prove that he is thinking of scripted plays; he could instead, or also, be thinking of solo recitation or private reading of texts written in dialogue form. A number of medieval philosophical treatises are ‘dramatic’ in this sense.5 Theological discussions of the ‘persons’ of the Trinity referred to theatre to help explain the term persona. Boethius (c. 480–c. 526) derives the word from personando, ‘sounding through’, specifically the resonant sounds coming from the masks that actors wore when they ‘represented’ a character. Later commentaries on this passage often elaborated on his explanation, some dwelling particularly on mimetic concerns: the ability of actors to use varied gestures to portray people of different ages, genders and temperaments. Even so, exploration of mimesis was not central to medieval thinking about theatre. One author discussing persona says that the term refers to an actor who, by altering his appearance, ‘represents something on stage either through speaking (loquendo) or bodily movement (gesticulando) or both’.6 Passages like this have frustrated some theatre historians because they appear not to attend much to the differences between recitation, mime and drama as methods of representation. The problem

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here, and also in determining a precise meaning for brief references to ludi (scripted plays? minstrelsy? improvised mockery? dancing? games?), is the result of the medieval tendency to think of theatre first as a kind of play and only subsequently as a certain kind of imitation.

ANCIENT THEATRE AS LIES AND VOYEURISM The most influential early medieval interpretations of theatre arise from Christian hostility to it. At the start of the fourth-century Divine Institutes, Lactantius briefly summarizes the evils of the stage. Comedies present ‘the defilement of virgins and the love of whores’, tragedies the deeds of ‘wicked kings’. Actors, particularly when they ‘walk like women and dress like women’, provoke ‘lustful desires’. In acting out ‘adultery’, a mime ‘shows what is to be done in real life’.7 Here, as in so much anti-theatricalism, the assumption is that representations of bad behaviour invariably prompt audiences to want to replicate it. A century after Lactantius, the greatest of the early Christian theologians took that position too, though he analyzed Roman theatre and audience response much more extensively. St Augustine (354–430) wrote The City of God after the sack of Rome in 410. He begins by refuting charges that Christianity is responsible for Rome’s current miseries, and he frequently mentions theatre as a symptom of paganism’s worthlessness. An earlier historian of Rome, Marcus Varro, had distinguished between poetic theology (legendary stories of the gods, including their staged versions) and civic theology (religious ceremonies), criticizing the first but accepting the second. Augustine demolishes Varro’s distinction: those lying stories performed in theatres about the gods’ corrupt behaviour – their foul language, their deceits, their fornications –simply repeat what pagans believe and worship. Varro, Augustine says, saw the stupidity of paganism but lacked the courage to challenge its practice. In fact the Roman gods are demons who love to turn human beings toward evil. No true divinity would behave wickedly or tolerate a stage representation of that wickedness. Paganism, he counters, did not cause the success of the Roman Empire and does not lead to eternal life, the only significant goal human beings should have. As a branch of paganism, theatre lies about reality and corrupts morals by holding up degenerate actions as divinely sanctioned.8 Augustine talks in detail about that corruption in a chapter of the Confessions (3.2) that looks back on his youthful sinfulness. Theatrical presentations (spectacula theatrica) provided him with fictitious images or imitations (imagines) of his own desires, so he identified with lovers making love, cried at tragic scenes, and paradoxically took pleasure in the resulting sadness. He disparages the pity he felt for characters on stage, a kind of involvement that leads observers not to help others but only to participate in a feigned sorrow. The chapter moves constantly between ‘then’ and ‘now’, his older Christian self

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assessing the emotional roller coaster of his youth. It is hard to imagine more vivid testimony to the affective power of theatre, but unlike the Aristotle of the Poetics, Augustine finds no beneficial resolution of or catharsis from the emotions stirred by theatrical imitations. Plays arouse passions, then leave you to wallow sinfully in them.9 When Augustine wrote his two most famous works, what was presented on stage had changed since c. 200 CE , when Tertullian wrote the first major Christian attack on plays, De spectaculis. Constantine legitimized Christianity in 313, Theodosius I made it the Empire’s official religion in 380, and subsequently authorities worked to lessen the paganism of plays and games. Theodosius’ two young sons, joint emperors for Western and Eastern Christendom, issued a law in 399 forbidding ‘any sacrifice or any accursed superstition’ at public festivals, while maintaining that entertainments for ‘the common pleasure of all’ would remain, as the public demanded. This and other decrees helping to regulate – and thus to perpetuate – various forms of play were incorporated a few decades later into the book of laws known as the Codex Theodosius. Still, Augustine’s major arguments against Roman theatre echo Tertullian’s: it is theologically false and morally corrupting. His eastern contemporary John Chrysostom wrote similarly about theatrical representation inducing in its audience the same wicked passions they see depicted.10 About two centuries later, long after the fall of Rome, Isidore of Seville wrote the first great encyclopaedia of the Middle Ages, the Etymologies.11 Book 18 treats ‘War and Games’ (De bello et ludis), but as Jody Enders observes, between these two topics Isidore includes a long chapter on legal disputes (18.15). What links all three endeavours is competition: struggle (agon), whether physical or verbal, staged within privileged spaces.12 In a remarkably detailed survey and critique of ancient forms of play, Isidore derives the word ludus from the ancient Lydian people, who ‘established spectacles in the name of their religion’. Since the origin of playing is thus ‘idolatry’, Christians should not ‘consider as good what took its origin from evil’ (18.16). This blend of information and condemnation continues throughout. Isidore describes four types of games: gymnastic (e.g. jumping, wrestling); gladiatorial (man against man, man against beast); circus-located (horse, foot and chariot racing); and theatrical. Here he first explains what kind of building a theatrum is, adding that ‘a theater is the same as a brothel’ and ‘is likewise called a whorehouse’ because after the plays prostitutes offered themselves there (18.42). Then follow short chapters on the stage building (scena) and the orchestra, a platform where dancers, actors and mimes performed, and where poets spoke while others made appropriate movements representing the action being narrated. Isidore’s notion that ancient plays involved a narrator reciting a story while actors mimed it became standard in the Middle Ages, as can be seen in Figure 6.1, a twelfth-century illustration of a (hypothesized) performance of a play by Terence.

INTERPRETATIONS

FIGURE 6.1: A play of Terence staged with a reader, mimes and surrounding audience. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS Arsenal 664, fol. 1v.

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Isidore continues with chapters on tragedians, who sang about ‘the ancient deeds and lamentable crimes of wicked kings’; comedy writers, who told about ‘the defiling of virgins and the love affairs of courtesans’; musicians; actors (histriones) who, ‘dressed as women, would represent the deeds of shameless women’; mimes; and dancers (18.43–50). A final chapter reminds us that the gods Liber and Venus were the patrons of the theatrical arts involving ‘gesture and sinuous bodily movement’. Other pagan gods patronized vocal and instrumental music. ‘Christian, you should hate any spectacle whose patrons you hate’ (18.51). For Isidore theatrical playing, like other playing, involves bodies in action, but instead of athletic competition or combat, the actions described or implied are chiefly sexual. Elsewhere in the Etymologies, in a long chapter on ancient poets, Isidore offers more thorough and respectful descriptions of comedies and tragedies and their writers (8.7); here the focus is on the violence and lustfulness of their plots. Everything seems filtered through an Augustinian anti-pagan lens. Concluding his discussion of the four types of playing, he takes a parting shot. Not only human sinfulness but demonic instigation brought forth such spectacula: ‘Therefore Christians should have nothing to do with the madness of the circus, the immodesty of the theater, the cruelty of the amphitheatre, the atrocity of the arena, the debauchery of the games.’ To participate in play of this sort is to renounce Christ and follow the Devil (18.59). The Divine Institutes, the City of God and the Etymologies were respected texts throughout the Middle Ages; their anti-theatrical interpretations had great influence. Other evidence from the fourth to the eleventh centuries shows continuing clerical disapproval of secular entertainments, notably church council condemnations of vulgar performers and performances, many later incorporated into canon law restrictions on clerical participation in theatre.13 Justifications of the stage in these centuries are rare and therefore interesting. The ‘Epitaph on Vitalis the Mime’ is a brief, anonymous, hard-to-date poem. The speaker, ostensibly Vitalis, stresses how he turned his audience’s sadness into laughter, relieved their anxieties, and brought pleasure even when performing tragedies. Whereas Lactantius and Isidore speak contemptuously of actors in women’s dress, the speaker writes proudly of the shock of recognition from both men and women observing his accurate imitations of them. A more substantial defence of mimes, who were as popular in eastern as in western Christianity, comes from the sixth-century rhetorician Choricius of Gaza. He too wants respect for those who can skilfully imitate a wide range of people, and he argues that charges of sexual immorality ignore the way some plays do not merely depict adultery but implicitly judge it. Opponents also fail to appreciate the tone of what they see: ‘the thing is just in fun . . . everything has been contrived for relief and leisure.’14 Choricius’ defence implies a more subtle

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understanding of sexual comedy than the Christian claim that imitating immoral acts encourages audiences to commit them. Both these works suggest that mimes’ performances, beyond providing laughter and pleasure, are ‘true to life in characterization’ and accurately depict ‘the image of life and custom’, claims made for comedy in the fourth century by the grammarians Evanthius and Donatus.15 It’s unlikely, however, that most mimed entertainment had insightful representation as a serious goal. Choricius admits that miming can be disreputable; and even if the chronicler Procopius, in his Secret History (c. 550), is lying about the Byzantine empress Theodora and her early life as a mime, his account suggests how pornographic some stage shows could be and why Christian priests would denounce them.16 For hundreds of years, Isidore’s discussion of theatre provided what was considered reliable information, but it became possible to borrow his definitions and details without repeating his censure. The most popular later medieval guidebook to Rome, written in the twelfth century, has a short chapter listing seven ‘theatres’ in the city, but we would not use that word today for most of them. Two names probably refer to what was left of the theatres of Pompey and Balbus, but others refer to different kinds of sites, like the Circus Maximus and the racetrack now known as the Piazza Navona.17 Ancient theatres in this context are tourist destinations to be marvelled at, not censured. After a visit to Rome in the middle of the fifteenth century, the English canon John Capgrave added some historical/cultural notes to the guidebook’s list: ‘These emperors also had certain places which they called theatra, and that means in our tongue a place in which men stand to see plays or wrestlings or such other exercises of might [strength, prowess] and solace. Some of these places were called ampheatrum [sic], that was a place all round such as we have here in this land; some were called theatrum, and that was a place that was like half a circle, of which there were seven in Rome.’18 Capgrave knows the difference between amphitheatres and theatres, but neither he nor his guidebook source distinguishes the kinds of playing likely to have occurred in each. Both are seen as places for activities that displayed physical skill and provided entertainment. The amphitheatres of Capgrave’s England presumably serve the same purposes, which could include drama, as indicated by the famous manuscript drawing of the theatre-in-the-round setting for the morality play, The Castle of Perseverance (Figure 4.10). A similar evasion of early medieval anti-theatricalism appears in the writings of the Dominican friar and scholar Nicholas Trevet (d. c. 1334). Asked by a bishop to clarify the obscurities in a manuscript of Seneca’s tragedies, he obliged with a detailed line-by-line explication. His letter to the bishop and the prologue to his commentary reveal that he knows the tragedies were written for ‘the theatre’, and he borrows material from both Augustine and Isidore to provide historical background while downplaying or ignoring their disapproval. He

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uses Isidore’s definitions of comic and tragic writers and of the three modes of writing (above) to establish Seneca as a tragic poet, ‘a mature scholar’ who decided to write tragedies in order to provide ‘tender minds’ with ‘ethical teachings wrapped in pleasant stories’,19 the Horatian combination of pleasure and profit so often invoked as the goal of poetry. Medieval definitions of tragedy and comedy usually focus on aspects of plot and characterization, showing little concern for whether the work is drama or narrative. For Trevet, Seneca’s plays in verse are texts, poetry in its dramatic mode, and poetry was associated throughout the Middle Ages with one or another of the liberal arts trivium (grammar, rhetoric and logic), the core of medieval education, which gave it greater intellectual standing than theatrical play. So too Albertino Mussato (1262–1329), after writing a Latin verse tragedy, was crowned poet (not playwright) laureate; and even though his play was performed, both it and Mussato’s commentary on Seneca show more interest in the literary than the theatrical aspects of tragedy.20 To see how these later uses of Augustine and Isidore could respect their authority without adopting their condemnations we need to return to the early twelfth century, to the first major rethinking of Isidore’s attitude toward ancient forms of play.

PERFORMANCE AND THE USEFULNESS OF PLEASURE Hugh of St Victor, a theologian writing in Paris in the 1120s, repeats some of Isidore’s information about ancient games and their venues, but in a much more philosophical context. The Didascalicon, a treatise on secular and sacred learning, says that because of our fallen nature, ‘the end and the intention’ of all human acts should be either ‘the restoring of our nature’s integrity’ or ‘the relieving of those weaknesses to which our present life lies subject’.21 We restore our integrity in two ways: theology and other theoretical arts lead to ‘the contemplation of truth’, while practical arts like ethics lead to ‘the practice of virtue’. We relieve our weaknesses through seven types of ‘mechanical arts’, which provide ‘necessities’ for our bodies and remedies for what harms us (1.7–8; 54–55). Hugh divides these arts into a trivium and quadrivium analogous to that of the liberal arts in medieval education (2.20; 74–75). Textiles, armament (which includes buildings), and commerce supply protective ‘external cover’. Our ‘internal’ needs are met by agriculture, hunting, medicine and – surprisingly – theatrics (theatrica). The idea of the mechanical arts was not new, but Hugh’s septet certainly is, and he devotes a chapter to each art, explaining what kinds of activities and products it includes. What he says about his most striking innovation, theatrics, deserves to be read at length, for it is crucial to understanding how the Middle Ages interpreted the value and the risks of public play and thus of theatre, and remarkable in its anticipation of the field of performance studies.

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The science of entertainments (scientia ludorum) is called ‘theatrics’ from the theatre, to which the people once used to gather for the performance (ad ludendum): not that a theatre was the only place in which entertainment (ludus) took place, but it was a more popular place for entertainment than any other. . . . In the theatre, epics were presented either by recitals or by acting out dramatic roles or using masks or puppets (in theatro gesta recitabantur vel carminibus, vel personis, vel larvis, vel oscillis); they held choral processions and dances in the porches. In the gymnasia they wrestled; in the amphitheatres they raced on foot or on horses or in chariots; in the arenas boxers performed; at banquets they made music with songs and instruments and chants, and they played at dice; in the temples at solemn season they sang the praises of the gods. Moreover, they numbered these entertainments among legitimate activities because by temperate motion natural heat is stimulated in the body and by enjoyment the mind is refreshed (laetitia animus reparatur); or, as is more likely, seeing that people necessarily (necesse) gathered for occasional amusement (ad ludendum), they desired that places for such amusement might be established to forestall the people’s coming together at public houses (conventicula), where they might commit lewd or criminal acts. (2.27; 79) Like Isidore, Hugh groups all forms of play together and looks back to ancient games and buildings for his examples – this is the only one of his mechanical arts described primarily in the past tense. Like Isidore, he associates a particular kind of building, the theatrum, with what today are known as performing arts (recitation, impersonation with or without masks, puppetry). But unlike Isidore, he offers an interpretation of the benefits of playing. Ancient culture justified ludi because physical activity is good for the body and the pleasure of playing is good for the soul. Hugh apparently accepts those reasons, and they are consistent with what he says in his chapter on medicine; but he also speculates that the more probable motive for constructing play-spaces (loca ludendi) was ethical/political: to contain or defuse whatever violence or passion might flare when people gathered for entertainment. He sees a potential for social disruption in play, but, as if in quiet rebuttal to Isidore, he treats the theatrum and other venues not as sites that encouraged bad behaviour but that discouraged it, in contrast to existing conventicula. That term is challenging to translate. In medieval usage it is often pejorative, describing partial, suspicious or illicit congregations. Isidore uses it twice in the Etymologies, once to contrast the universal Church with factional groups, ‘like a small association of heretics (conventicula haereticorum)’ (8.1.1) and once when discussing different schools of ancient philosophy that took their names from the sites of their meetings (8.6.6). If conventicula tended to encourage bad behaviour, why did the ancients tolerate such gatherings? Because people ‘necessarily’ came together for

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entertainment. The word echoes Hugh’s earlier reasoning: mechanical arts remedy the weaknesses that have beset human beings since Adam and Eve fell, and theatrica responds to one such weakness by reenergizing mind and body. The Didascalicon describes ancient venues and games in the past tense but puts their therapeutic functions in present tense, implying that similar contemporary activities would have similar results. Playing does not help people theologically or ethically, but it has useful physical and psychological effects. For hundreds of years, as literacy rates remained low and all entertainment was live, that seemed to many an adequate justification of theatrical experience. In the next chapter Bruce Burningham surveys the different medieval communities that produced theatre – institutions like the church, professionals like the troubadours, and civic groups enjoying their holidays. Theatrica accommodates them all. The common denominator of drama, singing, playing an instrument, dancing, juggling and wrestling is the artfully appropriate movement of the body in play; the common goals are pleasure and refreshment. The Didascalicon circulated widely, as did its contention that all forms of knowledge remedy human defects.22 Likewise, the idea of theatrica lasted for several centuries, though it was by far the most controversial of Hugh’s mechanical arts – accepted by many, omitted by some, and in one case publicly challenged.23 In his own treatise on divisions of knowledge Robert Kilwardby (d. 1279), a Dominican scholar and, later, the Archbishop of Canterbury, faithfully summarized Hugh’s chapters on the mechanical arts but then proposed one substantive change: ‘It does not seem to me that theatrica ought to be given a place among Catholics, but rather detested and fought against.’ To support this opinion Kilwardby simply repeats a chapter from Isidore’s Etymologies saying that Christians should have nothing to do with ‘the madness of the circus, the immodesty of the theatre’, and so on.24 However, he makes one concession: ‘I believe that portion of play which is licit for Catholics, such as [playing] the cithara, trumpet, pipes, and so on, in accord with time and place, can be reduced to medicine and put within that part of it which considers occasions.’ Hugh had briefly mentioned the ‘occasions’ of medicine; Kilwardby identifies a number of them: air, sleep and waking, and the ‘accidents of the soul, such as anger, happiness, sadness’.25 These are among a standard group of six factors involved in well-being that are frequently discussed in medieval regimens of health, which often advise listening to pleasant stories or music as means of attaining the best possible mental disposition.26 An illustrated version of one medieval regimen, the Tacuinum sanitatis, depicts various kinds of performance – singing in church, instrumental music and dancing – as activities that can contribute to good health (Figures 6.2 and 6.3). Kilwardby accepts and even expands on Hugh’s assertion of the medical benefits of play, but for him this mechanical value must be obtained in a theologically acceptable way, and only music can do that.

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FIGURE 6.2: From the entry on singing (cantus) in an illustrated manuscript of the Tacuinum sanitatis (Tables of Health). Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, MS 4182, fol. 203.

About the same time that Kilwardby censored theatrics, the Franciscan St Bonaventure (1217–74) gave it more prominence. In the second part of his inaugural sermon as a master of theology, he surveys all the arts; that part, with some changes, later circulated separately as a treatise called Retracing the Arts

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FIGURE 6.3: From the entry on music and dancing (sonare et ballare) in an illustrated manuscript of the Tacuinum sanitatis. Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, MS 4182, fol. 201.

to Theology. It posits four gifts from God that give us knowledge: ‘mechanical skill’; ‘sense perception’; ‘philosophical knowledge’; and ‘grace and . . . Holy Scripture’. The first and lowest gift consists of Hugh’s mechanical arts, named but not described. Whereas he divided them into a trivium and quadrivium,

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Bonaventure says six provide ‘comfort’ or benefit by eliminating ‘want’ and one provides ‘consolation’ by eliminating ‘sorrow’. He cites two famous lines in Horace’s Ars poetica (333, 343) that say poets want either to profit or to delight and the most successful do both. The art that aims at solace and delight (ad solatium et delectationem) is theatrics, ‘which embraces every form of entertainment, be it song, music, drama (figmentis), or pantomime’.27 Of course Hugh’s view of ‘every form of entertainment’ was much wider. Bonaventure narrows theatrica to performing arts and distinguishes its usefulness from that of all the other mechanical crafts. He focuses on its psychological benefits: solace, removal of sadness, and the pleasure that Horace says poets try to provide. All this is in the present tense, without any of Hugh’s historical information. Early in the fourteenth century, the Dominican friar John of San Gimignano gives theatrics the most vigorous endorsement I have seen. His Liber de exemplis et similitudinibus rerum is a large collection of examples, comparisons, and allegories for preachers to use in sermons, divided into ten books that draw their material from different parts of the created world (animals, stones, plants, etc.). Book Nine takes its examples and comparisons from the works of artisans, craftsmen (artifices); Hell, for example, is compared to a labyrinth. John’s preface to this book discusses the liberal and mechanical arts, and he brings a new dimension to Hugh’s analysis when he introduces Aristotle’s distinction, in the sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, between two intellectual virtues: art, the use of reason to make something, and prudence, the use of reason to do something (6.4–5). John says the mechanical arts, ministering to human needs, are examples of making, and his survey of them expands on Hugh’s inventory, adding among other artisans the craftsmen who contribute to the making and illustrating of manuscripts. All these products provide either necessities, advantages, or solace, and like Bonaventure John gives this third function exclusively to theatrics: There are certain artisans whose efforts and studies are directed toward people’s amusement and solace (ad ludum et solatium). If they work decently and moderately, observing the proper circumstances of person, time, and place, they lighten the weariness of this mortal life, reinvigorate the mind (animos recreant), delight the senses, strengthen the weak, console the sad, and bring many other benefits to mortal lives. And so the ancients made use of diverse solaces or games (solatiis sive ludis) in diverse places.28 John repeats Hugh’s long list of ancient forms of play and their venues, then returns to the present tense: ‘But today practically all the histrionic or musical art that strives for people’s solace operates through gesture, song, or the sound of

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instruments.’ He notes that ‘representations’ make use of gesture, specifies a number of musical instruments, and then concludes with more general Aristotelian thoughts on the purpose, order, and dignity of the works of artificers.29 John explicitly contemporizes Hugh’s account of theatrics to establish an equivalent of ancient entertainment and to give it the same usefulness. On the condition that their play is decent and appropriate, he grants valuable psychological effects to the work of actors, singers and musicians (identified as artifices rather than the often pejorative ioculatores) and suggests the exhilaration that performance can create. By putting theatrics into the context of ‘art’ as not only a mechanical craft but an Aristotelian intellectual virtue, he enhances its status as a product of reason, and invites thinking about mimetic or musical performances not just as physical activities but as thoughtfully created works. Of course, not all later adaptations of Hugh move in this performing arts direction. We know, for instance, that there was a set of wall paintings of the liberal and mechanical arts in a library in Brandenburg. According to a description written in the 1460s, the picture illustrating theatrics included representations of stone-throwing, jousting, women dancing and people playing musical instruments.30 But we can see in some rethinkings of theatrica its narrowing to performers and musicians, with a consistent justification of their activities on the grounds of the restorative pleasures they provide.

THE ETHICS OF PLAYING The Didascalicon inaugurated an important strain of thought about theatre. A similar and even more influential approach began in the second half of the thirteenth century following the first full Latin translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the standard source for the teaching of ethics in the later Middle Ages. Aristotle enumerates a number of moral virtues and vices, defining each virtue as a mean between the vicious extremes of excess and deficiency. Liberality, for example, is the virtue in regard to the use of wealth; spending excessively is the vice of prodigality, spending insufficiently the vice of miserliness. Three of Aristotle’s virtues deal with how people should interact socially, one of them in regard to playful speech and action. Relaxation and amusement are a necessary part of human life, he says, enabling us to attend to our serious affairs with renewed vigour; therefore, it is appropriate to explore the ethics of such behaviour. Playing may be easy, but playing the right way is not. To have no sense of humour, no willingness or ability to participate in levity, is the vice of boorishness; to do anything to get a laugh is the vice of buffoonery; the mean is eutrapelia, often translated as ‘wittiness’ but verbal cleverness is only one part of this virtue of playful yet decorous conviviality.31 The pervasive medieval concern with virtue and vice, best seen theatrically in morality plays, generally used Christian categories of sins and virtues; Aristotle’s

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eutrapelia, in some of its medieval adaptations, became a virtue directly related to the morality of theatrical playing itself. To help define the difference between vicious and virtuous jesting, Aristotle contrasts the vulgar language of old Greek comedy with the more refined language of new comedy. This theatrical allusion, together with the term ludus in the Latin translation to indicate the behaviour being analyzed, encouraged medieval commentators on the Ethics to treat its analysis of play as relevant not only to conversational banter but to performance. Albert the Great says that comedies and tragedies were intended to provide a rest for the spirit after intense study and thus belong to the genus of play (in genere ludi). Gerald Odonis illustrates Aristotle’s distinction between liberal and illiberal amusement by contrasting the play of noble persons, which brings solace (solacium) in a suitable way, to the play of hystriones, which is intended only to please in order to get money. What in Aristotle is an ethical contrast becomes here a social one as well, a reflection of the role of entertainment in courtly and clerical circles. (A superb example of theatre in this social context is the manuscript illustration of a performance of the siege of Jerusalem at a banquet hosted by the French king Charles V; see Figure 6.4.) Gerald associates actors/entertainers with the vice of excessive play, indicating that their financial motives override their sense of decency. His contemporary, the philosopher John Buridan (c. 1300–c. 1360), has a more lenient but no less socially based interpretation. Do histriones play excessively? Not necessarily, says John. Playing is how they earn their living, ‘so even if they play frequently and at length they do not exceed the rational mean; but they would exceed it if they used vulgar language (turpiloquio) in their playing, or if they played beyond the desires of those whom they serve’.32 This ethics of entertainment supports the powers of patronage. Thomas Aquinas also wrote a commentary on the Ethics, and eutrapelia is central to his discussion of play in the Summa theologiae. The context is a set of questions on the cardinal virtue of temperance. Part 2-2, question 168, concerns modesty in bodily movement. The first article affirms that reason can control bodily actions, so they are a fit subject for ethical judgments. The remaining three articles explore play and are organized around Aristotle’s categories of the mean and extremes.33 Can there be a virtue in play? Yes, says Thomas, explaining (at greater length than Hugh of St Victor did) that human weakness necessitates restoring one’s energy and that just as rest reinvigorates the body, pleasure reinvigorates the soul. Playful words and actions provide that restorative pleasure. He immediately qualifies this point by noting that the play must be decent, controlled and suitable to the circumstances. Play that meets these criteria is virtuous, modest. The reference to proper ‘circumstances’ (factors not part of an act itself but related to it) entails important considerations that have a long and continuing

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FIGURE 6.4: The conquest of Jerusalem performed at a royal feast at the court of Charles V. Grandes Chroniques de France de Charles V. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS fr. 2813 (1375–1380), fol. 473v.

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history in ethical, rhetorical, legal, and confessional contexts. Thomas devotes an entire question of his Summa to the subject (1-2.q7), arguing that any thoughtful evaluation of an act needs to address such circumstances as ‘person,’ ‘time’ and ‘place’. We have just seen John of San Gimignano invoke these three as criteria for his approval of actors and musicians. Typical medieval circumstantial judgments involved in the ethical analysis of play include the following: as to ‘person’, clerics may not participate in some play permitted to the laity, and princes should have more dignified tastes in play than commoners; as to ‘time’, joking during a church service is worse than joking at a feast; as to ‘place’, keep your parties and dances out of the church and off its property. Boccaccio playfully reasons through all of these circumstances in the epilogue to the Decameron to justify the sometimes indecent stories his invented narrators have told. Less obviously but more seriously, a Franciscan friar, William Melton, thinks circumstantially in regard to the series of biblical pageants played on the feast of Corpus Christi in York, England. According to an entry in a civic document dated 1426, Friar Melton maintained in sermons that the play ‘was good in itself and most laudable’ (bonus erat in se & laudabilis valde). But he also noted that circumstantial factors had created some problems: citizens and visitors not only watch the lengthy sequence of pageants each year but become more intent on ‘feastings, drunkenness . . . and other wantonness’ than on the various religious services of that holy day, and missing the church rituals deprives them of papal indulgences. He proposed moving the cycle performances to another day so that more people would attend church on Corpus Christi; the civic authorities agreed. This circumstantial adjustment in time, they believed, would allow something ‘good’ to become even ‘better’.34 After establishing the conditions for virtuous play, Aquinas turns to the question of excessive play. Following Aristotle as well as traditional Christian thinking, he finds it sinful. Here the discussion turns explicitly to theatre. Performers (histriones) are the people who play the most. Does that mean they and those who watch them are in a state of sin? In a well-known response, Thomas asserts that the profession of acting (officium histrionum) is not inherently vicious (non est secundum se illicitum), since providing solace (solatium) meets a legitimate human need, assuming the playing qualifies as virtuous. Beyond their professional duties actors have a separate, serious side of themselves in their relationship to God. Likewise, those who support actors in due measure commit no sin. This is certainly not the first medieval effort to make ethical distinctions among entertainers. Much earlier in the thirteenth century an English cleric, Thomas of Chobham, marked three kinds of histriones: those who distort their bodies through movement or masks, those who circulate around courts making derisive comments about others, and those who play musical instruments to please people. Then he divided this third group into those who sing songs that

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provoke lecherous thoughts and those who, avoiding indecency, ‘sing the deeds of princes and the lives of saints and bring solace (solatium) to people in their sickness or their distress’. Only this last type can be tolerated; the others are to be condemned.35 Aquinas is equally concerned with approving only decent entertainers, but his Aristotelian framework provides more thorough grounds for that approval, and he gives more respectful attention to actors as Christian individuals. Thomas of Chobham’s discussion is in a treatise on confession, advising priests how to deal with penitents whose professions are totally or partly sinful; histriones appear alongside prostitutes and mercenaries. The popularity and authoritativeness of the Summa theologiae ensured that its more sympathetic attitude toward the acting profession became widely known and that ethical questions about actors and performance would continue to be raised within a context of the use of the body in play.36 In fact Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is more relevant to medieval thinking about theatre than his Poetics. A direct translation of the Poetics into Latin survives in only one manuscript. More popular was a Latin translation of an Arabic commentary on the Poetics by Ibn Rushd (1126–98), known to the Christian Middle Ages as Averroës. He knew no ancient Greek drama, and Islam had no comparable theatrical tradition, so the commentary frequently veers far from Aristotle’s meanings. It does not discuss any dramas, using instead examples from Arabic poets and the Quran, and gives all poetry an ethical function: either to praise what is good or condemn what is bad and to move the passions of its audience in the appropriate direction. It retains Aristotle’s idea that a person ‘instinctively rejoices and takes pleasure’ in representations, even of ‘things which we do not enjoy when we experience them’, but in language that does not restrict itself to dramatic mimesis.37 Aquinas, however, is thinking theatrically when he cites this idea in the Summa theologiae just before he discusses play. The issue is whether the sin of curiosity (an inappropriate desire for knowledge) is involved in knowledge obtained through the senses. One example concerns watching entertainments (in inspectione ludorum): in Confessions 6.8, Augustine relates that his student Alypius was dragged off to gladiatorial games by some friends. He tried not to look, but when one of the combatants fell, the shouts of the audience and his own ‘curiosity’ drew Alypius into watching the cruelty. However, Aristotle’s Poetics says that people naturally delight in representations, so viewing such play-action would appear not to be sinful. Aquinas reconciles these two authorities by saying that watching spectacles becomes sinful to the extent that the observer becomes prone to the vices of lust or cruelty (2-2.q167.a2). In addressing the morality not only of play but also of watching plays, he treats an important principle of the Poetics in light of a Christianized ethics, as did the later Middle Ages generally, where performing or watching theatre, particularly morality plays, invited reflection not only on a play’s meaning but on the actions of performing and watching it.

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THEATRE AND DEVOTION: THE DEBATE Around 1400, in the central midlands of England, one or possibly two authors wrote an anti-theatrical diatribe that, in the only known manuscript, is titled A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge.38 It has prompted scholarly debate in part because of the range of possible meanings for the term miraclis. In places, the author seems to be thinking about irreverent mockery, like the Feast of Fools, in which the lower clergy often indulged around the twelve days of Christmas. Elsewhere the target is clearly broader. References to ‘men and women’ in costume (96), to the buying, selling and feasting that goes on during the ‘days of playing miracles’ (111), and to the subject of the plays as ‘the passion of Christ and his other actions’ (113) point to substantial stagings of biblical material, something like the surviving later texts of the English cycle drama.39 Whatever performances the author of the Tretise saw or knew about, he hated them because he believed, in contrast to Friar Melton, that such representational ‘playing’ profaned Christianity. Augustine found Roman theatre false because it depicted false gods; the Tretise finds Christian drama equally false because imitation in play falsifies spiritual truth. The tract constantly opposes ‘playful’ to ‘earnest’, ‘idle’ to ‘effectual’, flesh to spirit. Christ lived and died earnestly and effectually to save our souls. Imitation of that constitutes a lie in that it reduces God’s spiritual meaning to bodily forms. The Tretise enables us to see how the Middle Ages generally interpreted religious drama, for it lists six arguments in defence of plays about Christian history and then proceeds to refute each one. I echo its point/counterpoint format while commenting on the arguments, in order to gives both sides a voice in a debate that continues today in regard to the relationship between the spiritual and physical images of it. Defenders of miracle-playing, says the Tretise, claim that they ‘play these miracles in the worship of God’ (97). This point invokes the common understanding of the usefulness of religious drama, whether produced as part of church liturgy or outside it. Pope Innocent III had condemned irreverent playing in church during the Christmas season, but a gloss on his pronouncement in canon law states that he did not intend to prohibit representations that stir religious feeling, a goal often identified in references to or requests for religious plays throughout medieval Europe.40 The Tretise responds that the plays are really meant to please the world rather than God; they are only (false) signs of piety, not true worship. It repeats a familiar medieval point that the Bible never mentions Christ laughing (95, 105) and expands it by claiming that the Bible never shows Christ playing or approving any form of play (98–99, 101). Therefore neither should a good Christian. The Tretise says that defenders of miracle-playing claim that ‘men and women, seeing the Passion of Christ and his saints, are moved to compassion and devotion, weeping bitter tears’ (98). We have seen earlier testimony to the affective power of theatrical representation. The Tretise responds that such

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weeping is not true or meritorious, not for one’s ‘own sins’ or faith but for what people see outside themselves, whereas Christ told the women weeping for him they should weep for their own and their children’s sins (102; cf. Luke 23.27–28). A thousand years after Augustine’s meditation on the superficiality of his own emotional involvement with characters on stage, this similar view insists that the only spiritually productive response to Christ’s Passion is selfexamination, not empathy for an imitation. The Tretise says defenders claim that people have to have ‘some recreation’ and that playing miracles is preferable to playing jests or tricks (98). Here the physical/psychological arguments for all forms of play are incorporated into the understanding of religious as well as secular theatre. Biblical plays claim to be both spiritually profitable and pleasurable, a combination that would seem most applicable to dramas, like the Second Shepherds’ Play, that have clearly comedic elements within their plots. But given the Aristotelian view that audiences delight in imitation of even tragic subjects, the recreational claim could be made as well for thoroughly serious representations. The Tretise attacks this argument by hurling part of it back at the supporters. Play is always inferior to seriousness: recreation is justifiable only if it restores one’s energy to ‘accomplish greater works’. But the people who see the plays, the Tretise says, don’t subsequently do any greater Christian work. Their interest remains in the ‘body’, not the ‘spirit’, so their play-going recreation must be ‘false and worldly’. Better for them just to watch some vulgar horseplay than to think that their viewing of miracles offers any spiritual gain (103–104). The Tretise says that defenders claim that since it is allowable to paint the miracles of God, it should be equally allowable to play those miracles. Playing helps people to ‘understand the will of God and his marvellous works’ better than painting does and to retain that understanding longer in the mind. A play is a living book, painting merely a ‘dead book’ (98). This argument alludes to Pope Gregory the Great (c. 540–604), who wrote that images in church are books for those who cannot read, a way of teaching Christian history and doctrine. They are for instruction, however, not for adoration. Gregory’s assertion became central to defences of visual representations and images throughout the Middle Ages.41 It was applicable not only to painting but to sculpture and stained glass, as well as to medieval devotional theatre that had mimetic if not precisely dramatic elements, like processions and pageants. From such a perspective, religious drama can be thought of almost cinematically as images that move, in more ways than one. The Tretise responds that painting can be like a book if it is suitably restrained, truthful, and not an occasion for idolatry. But since miracle-playing is ‘more to delight men bodily than to be books to illiterate people’, it will only lead them to wickedness, not goodness (104). In sum, the Tretise views the Christian theatre of late medieval England through an austere logic not unlike Plato’s rejection of imitation as inherently untrue to

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ultimate reality. The majority view emerges inferentially in the combination of claims by the defenders: its worshipful intentions; the didactic and spiritual benefits communicated through performance, a medium of affective power that lasts longer in the mind than painted images do; all of this presented in recreational imitative play that is both pleasing and necessary to audiences. Many religious dramas in the later Middle Ages, and references to them, invoke one or more of these qualities; the Tretise unintentionally allows us to infer a full-scale medieval argument for the value of Christian theatre. Such an argument helps us understand how the church could both support certain religious performances and criticize others. For example, in thirteenth-century Padua, directions for a Boy Bishop ceremony over the Christmas holidays (in which a young choirboy dressed as a bishop leads other children in imitating certain liturgical practices) indicate that a conversation between the play-bishop and the real one should contain a number of ‘jests’; but in England in 1360 a bishop condemns churches that present this and other Christmas ‘entertainments (ludos)’ whose ‘mocking behaviour and jeering laughter’ distract audiences from their intended devotions.42 When does the balance between devotional and recreational goals become sufficiently upset to warrant criticism or prohibition? This is not a question about tension between religious and secular attitudes but about differences within a complex religious view by individuals whose opinions of theatre could vary as much as Kilwardby’s does from Bonaventure’s or the Tretise author’s from Friar Melton’s.

CONCLUSION There is, then, no single medieval interpretation of theatre. Even in this chapter’s limited survey we have seen anti-theatrical opinions, from Augustine through to Isidore, Kilwardby and the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, some focusing on the pagan origins of theatre and the moral dangers of representing sinful actions, another taking any mimetic display of Christian history as untrue to its spiritual meaning and therefore sinful. Such interpretations are not exclusive to the Middle Ages and can be found in any subsequent historical period.43 There are also interpretations that affirm the value of theatre as play activity in meeting the human need for relaxation and refreshment. Within that framework some thinkers focus on ethical issues involved both in playing and in watching play. These views, too, are not uniquely medieval. The idea of recreational play, including theatrical representation, continued throughout the early modern period, at times becoming a reflexive element within drama itself.44 Religious and didactic performances could and did claim, in addition, educational benefits and affective power; these and related arguments have also continued throughout the history of thinking about theatre. Although medieval interpretations generally entail a broad view of play, some narrow their scope. Hugh of St Victor disagrees with Isidore on the

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value of ancient games, but he follows him in associating a single building, the theatrum, with music, dance and mimetic action; some subsequent writers restrict his idea of theatrica to these sorts of stage presentations. More formal definition of the performing arts comes later, following upon conceptions of the fine arts and of aesthetics, but a de facto recognition of theatre as a distinct kind of play runs throughout the Middle Ages. Another, less prominent, aspect of medieval thinking lies in the reference by John of San Gimignano to Aristotle’s distinction between art and prudence, making and doing (Ethics 6.4–5). An artisan has prudential, ethical goals as a human being, but as a maker aims at making a good product. To the extent that theatre becomes associated not with bodies in action but with works of ‘art’ thoughtfully created, it gains a certain ‘artistic immunity’, opens itself to formal judgments, and extends responsibility to audiences for its use.45 All of this thinking evolved within the varied institutional contexts of Roman Catholicism, royal and ducal courts, schools and civil governments. We have seen how the language of interpretation reflects theological, ethical, social and scientific premises and interests, and it is obvious how much of the theorising aims at controlling and regularizing what people do with their bodies and what words come sounding through their mouths. But it never denies that human beings need to play and to watch others play, and that too is more than a medieval assumption. Richard Schechner would replace the idea that theatre emerges historically out of ritual with a more complicated model, one that finds elements of play within ritual in all cultures and variations along a continuum of performance from the ritually efficacious to the entertaining. Robert Fagen considers play and its functions biologically and evolutionarily, noting parallels between nonhuman and human play, including possible therapeutic effects.46 Play may be for its own sake, as Aquinas noted, but those who think about it, medieval or modern, find it has effects beyond itself. Whatever medieval interpretations of theatre as play may neglect, they share an intense interest in its social role, what it does to and for its audience.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Communities of Production BRUCE R. BURNINGHAM

In addressing the topic of ‘communities of production’, my project in this chapter is essentially to ask the question, ‘Who produced theatre during the European Middle Ages?’. I answer this question by insisting that, between 500 and 1500 CE , everyone produced theatre and that, in one way or another, everyone participated in one or more communities of production that overlapped and intersected. I recognize that such a bold declaration might seem extreme, but it is no less sweeping in scope than would be an attempt in these few pages to account in any comprehensive way for the myriad communities of production that spanned ten centuries and a multicultural geography extending from Iceland to Turkey, from Russia to Portugal, and all points in between. Thus, while I indeed argue here that everyone produced some kind of theatre, I make no attempt to offer an exhaustive treatment of this rich temporal and spatial terrain. Instead, I trace the basic outlines of several interrelated communities while providing sufficient detail to lead interested readers on to more thorough sources. Before an examination of these interrelated communities of production, a brief review of the standard narrative of theatre history is in order because much of what follows will challenge many of the assumptions created by the standard historiography. Traditionally, our definitions of theatre have been tied to notions of ‘dialogue’ between discrete actors whose function is to represent individual literary characters. Such notions, which have been recycled endlessly in a wide variety of discussions on the ‘birth’ or ‘rebirth’ of this or that theatrical tradition,

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have their source in the supposed origins of Western theatre in the mid-sixth century BCE when, according to legend, an ancient Greek dithyrambic choral leader named Thespis separated himself from the rest of his chorus in order to engage its members in a dialogic exchange that was new to such ritual performances. With Thespis’ introduction of dialogue into the dithyramb, the ritual supposedly became ‘theatre’ and, from there, it was only a short series of steps to the works of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides. Thus established, ancient Greek and (later) Roman theatrical forms endured until the fall of the Roman Empire in the mid-fifth century CE , after which European theatre is said to have ceased to exist for some four hundred years until it was again ‘reborn’ with the addition of dialogue to a previously monologic ritual performance. In place of Thespis, traditional theatre history credits the ‘rebirth’ of theatre to the medieval Catholic monks whose antiphonal songs became increasing more ‘dialogic’ as the centuries progressed until they culminated around 925 CE in the Quem quaeritis trope. Subsequently, as with the earlier development of theatre in ancient Greece, the evolution from the Quem quaeritis to the complex plays of William Shakespeare, Ana Caro and Molière is seen as a next logical progression.1 There are at least three problems with this traditional approach to theatre history. First, such traditional narratives fail to account for why so basic a human impulse as performance would somehow disappear from Europe during a period of nearly five hundred years. Second, these narratives privilege the extant archive of residual play scripts as the prima facie (if not exclusive) evidence of theatrical activity, implying that entire geographical regions are devoid of theatre in the absence of such residual literary documents.2 And third, such narratives fail to account fully for the activities of a whole range of performers, both professional and amateur, who continued to perform their arts from well before the fall of Rome up through the supposed rebirth of European theatre in the liturgical singing of the Quem quaeritis. In fact, from the perspective of the traditional, dialogue-based definition of theatre, the clowns, mimes, acrobats, jugglers, mountebanks, scops, troubadours, singers and storytellers who were ubiquitous throughout the Middle Ages would not qualify as practitioners of theatre at all. Instead, their work is generally seen as music or oral poetry or medical quackery, while the performers themselves are excluded from the larger community of theatrical production because what they ‘produce’ is, by definition, not theatre. As I have argued elsewhere, however, given the nature of medieval culture, spectators generally did not experience literature, music, and theatre in performance as the separate disciplines we define today; rather, for most medieval spectators ‘literature was music was theater’.3 Moreover, recent developments in the fields of performance theory and cultural studies can help us to see theatre in places and among people whom we often have overlooked, allowing us to disentangle their acts of performance, especially theatrical performance, from the kinds of dramatic literary texts that

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scholars have historically used to document theatre history. In the introduction to his ground-breaking Performance Theory, for instance, Richard Schechner differentiates ‘ritual’ from ‘theatre’ not by the presence or absence of dialogue but as a function of their relative positions on what he calls an ‘efficacyentertainment braid’.4 Schechner thus describes theatre as ‘only one node’ on a continuum of performance that includes (among others) ‘play, sports, theater, dance, ceremonies, [and] rites’.5 Going even further, Peter Brook distils the definition of theatre to something even more basic: ‘I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.’6 Building on Brook’s notion of ‘empty space’, Hollis Huston describes the performative poetics of what he calls the ‘simple stage’ and its concomitant ‘contract of the street’: ‘The stage is the sign of a contract, and exists for precisely that length of time during which the contract is fulfilled. I will watch, says the viewer, as long as you do something that is worth watching. I will do something that is worth watching, says the actor, as long as you watch.’7 Jody Enders echoes this notion when she says, ‘theater has a legal double called the theatrical contract: an implicit social contract between those making it and those watching it’.8 What each of these theorists demonstrates is that theatre does not depend on a dialogic relationship between actors (and certainly not a dialogic relationship between literary characters) but on a reciprocal relationship between performers and spectators who, in the words of Schechner, ‘co-create’ performance events in whatever form they may take.9 (And, at least for Huston, it is the performance that creates the community rather than the other way around.) It is this dialogic relationship between performer and spectator that constitutes the core of all communities of production.

OFFICIAL COMMUNITIES After the Roman emperor Constantine issued an edict in 313 CE proclaiming tolerance for the once persecuted religion of Christianity, a second edict proclaiming Christianity the official state religion of the Empire was issued in 380. The next hundred years would see the Empire finally and officially split into two (a western, predominantly Latin-speaking half, and an eastern, predominantly Greek-speaking half), before seeing the complete dissolution of the western half in the late fifth century following several waves of invasions by one or another Germanic tribe. This latter event has long been called the ‘Fall of Rome’ (even though the eastern half of the Empire continued to exist for another thousand years before falling to the Ottoman Turks in the mid-fifteenth century) and marks the generally accepted start of the medieval period.10 With the disappearance of the western Roman Empire came the putative disappearance of theatre (as defined by the standard theatre history glossed

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above). The reasons given for this disappearance have generally involved the hostility toward theatre makers of the one institution that still exercised a continent-wide authority at the time: the Roman Catholic Church. On the one hand, the Church Fathers took great offence at the violent persecution of Christians that was a favourite spectacle in the Roman amphitheatres. On the other hand, the often obscene nature of both the Roman theatre and the performers who participated in it were elements that the Church Fathers clearly wanted to suppress. While such ecclesiastical opposition did not actually cause the complete disappearance of all theatrical activity, the Church’s antagonism did effectively block nearly all forms of institutional theatre during the early centuries of the post-classical period. Still, and despite its official opprobrium, the Church ironically provided fertile ground for the development of several subsidiary communities of production whose members created theatre even while engaging in their other, official duties.11 Thus, the most obvious medieval communities of production are those that I would call ‘official’ communities connected to some organized entity such as the Church, a university, or a trade guild. In discussing these particular communities, I am aware that there will necessarily be some overlap with the ‘institutional frameworks’ discussed in Chapter 1. To a certain extent, this overlap is unavoidable given the nature of medieval culture. For just as ‘medieval mental culture . . . makes no separation between “sacred” and “secular”’,12 medieval society likewise did not distinguish between social groups based on our modern concept of ‘communities’ as quasi-public/quasi-private entities tied together by shared affinities or ideologies. It is therefore important to acknowledge the foundational importance of these ‘official’ communities at the same time that we distinguish between the institutions themselves, whose primary function may not have been theatrical at all, and the theatre-makers who came together (perhaps coincidentally) under their official auspices. Consider the members of the medieval monastic communities. Following the collapse of Rome, the monasteries thrived as both sites of spirituality and centres of erudition throughout the Middle Ages. Alongside their official, devotional duties, generations of monks and nuns painstakingly collected, read, glossed and copied as many manuscripts as they could acquire. It is therefore not surprising that perhaps the first medieval attempts to produce literary drama occur within the monastic communities themselves. For example, during the very same century that saw the rise of the Quem quaeritis, Hrosvitha of Gandersheim (c. 935–c. 1002 CE ), who was affiliated with the German abbey of the same name, penned a series of six plays based on her study of classical drama. From this early date (and for centuries thereafter as the Middle Ages slowly gave way to the early modern period), the monastic communities continued to serve as a source for literary experimentation and, specifically, as spaces that offered unprecedented opportunities for women, as the later work

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of the Spanish nun St Teresa of Ávila (1515–82) and the Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–95) make clear. And while it is unlikely that Hrosvitha and other early members of these monastic communities wrote their plays with performance in mind, we do know that Sor Juana (who authored a substantial corpus of plays, poetry and essays) oversaw a performance of her play Los empeños de una casa that took place in the private residence of Fernando Deza in Mexico City in October 1683.13 In this way, we can trace a line that connects Hrosvitha and Sor Juana not just as ‘sisters’ in the Church, but also as playwrights whose common theatrical activity is ultimately grounded in a medieval community of production that was nominally incidental to their official status as nuns. Another community of production that ultimately grew out of the Church was comprised of the students and faculty members of the numerous medieval universities that were founded beginning in the eleventh century. Like the monks and nuns of the monastic communities, the various members of these subsequent university communities also experimented with what became known as ‘school drama’. Eventually, as humanism later swept through the universities, study was increasingly devoted to reading and discussing the works of classical playwrights like Seneca, Terence and Plautus. These discussions soon led to literary experimentation on the part of the members of these latemedieval communities all across Europe. From around 1315 CE , when the Italian Albertino Mussato wrote a Latin tragedy titled Eccerinus, to 1499, when the Spaniard Fernando de Rojas wrote the Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea (better known as Celestina), school drama influenced a whole generation of playwrights who not only composed literary drama but who also began to see their works performed in the emerging Renaissance theatres of England, France, Spain, Germany and Italy. People who might initially have created theatre only as an avocation began to experiment with a variety of forms that, while often labelled ‘nondramatic’ or ‘semi-dramatic’ today, were instrumental to the cultural history of theatre. Activities such as writing, imitation, and scholastic exercises in church settings helped to identify these communities (both to themselves and to us) as makers of theatre whose ‘avocation’, as we now realize, was much more than just a sideshow.14 Thus, as the Church itself became less and less hostile to the concept of theatre, and as its embedded theatre makers began to see the didactic potential of performances geared toward teaching both doctrine and practice to a largely illiterate population, the institution not only stopped opposing theatre but actually embraced it in the form of the liturgical dramas. Such a move precipitated new alliances between the official community associated with the Church and a whole series of groups that facilitated the staging of religious plays. These new, affiliated communities of production included numerous town councils (such as those that sponsored the well-known Chester, York and

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Wakefield cycles in England or that of the city of Valladolid in Spain) as well as the guilds and confraternities that underwrote the costs of production (notably the sets, costumes and props) and often supplied amateur actors as part of an ongoing philanthropic mission to raise funds for one good cause or another.15 Of all the official communities discussed so far, the guilds and confraternities are the most ‘theatrical’ in the traditional sense of the word. Whereas the monks and nuns who belonged to the various religious orders were primarily engaged in devotional practices, and whereas the students and faculty of the universities were primarily interested in a much larger pedagogical mission within which school drama was but one component, the late medieval guilds and confraternities (at least in Western Europe) existed, in part, to sponsor the staging of the mystery and morality plays that were such an important part of the annual celebrations of their local communities. As we have seen in earlier chapters, members of these guilds and confraternities were drawn largely from local tradespeople and were mainly focused on activities related to those trades. Guilds ‘were usually spontaneous and local organizations devoted to fostering the welfare of the employers in a particular craft or business’, notes Steven Epstein, such that their existence made ‘the business or trade of its members more secure and profitable’ by ‘regulating entry into their business, maintaining standards of quality, and managing to some extent the competition among them for business’.16 Shakespeare lampooned the amateur nature of these trade guild members in the form of the ‘mechanicals’ who perform ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ in the final act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the real world, as Lynette Muir points out, the relationship between the guilds and the religious confraternities was generally fluid: ‘An interesting account of a Passion play in Avignon in 1400 is contained in a letter by a factor of the Italian merchant house of Datini . . . The fact that the performers are described as craftsmen but without any guild references suggests some kind of general group, perhaps linked by a religious confraternity such as the Confrérie de la Passion just about to be founded in Paris [1402] or more likely the flagellant groups.’17 The confraternities in particular were heavily involved in public charity, and thus often made deliberate use of theatre in order to advance the larger charitable mission to which they owed their social existence.18 As the Middle Ages began to give way to the early modern period, these guilds and confraternities also began to transform themselves from amateur charitable organizations that produced theatre as a means to an end into quasi-professional and, later, professional theatre guilds whose primary focus was making money on the commercial stages of London, Paris and Madrid. Nevertheless, even though these quasi-professional communities of production became more and more proficient, local variants of these organizations continued to exercise a religious mission, particularly in the Spanish-speaking world (where the earlier tradition of liturgical drama had not been as strong as it was in northern Europe). For example, Catholic missionaries in colonial Mexico saw the same didactic

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value in the kind of mystery and morality plays that earlier English and French authorities had identified; except in this case, rather than produce plays in order to emphasize and strengthen religious belief among a population that had long been officially Catholic, Spanish colonial communities of production staged plays in order to evangelize the New World indigenous populations.19 Likewise, back in Spain, and in response to the perceived heresy of Protestantism, practitioners embraced a tradition of staging the auto sacramentales: short, allegorical plays that emphasized Catholic doctrine and showcased the importance of the Eucharist. Such autos sustained the confraternities well into the late seventeenth century and beyond. Indeed, to this day, Spain’s Holy Week and Corpus Christi processionals continue a religious community of production that can trace its roots back to the Middle Ages.20 Finally, one last official community of production is worth mentioning. Throughout the Middle Ages, Christianity’s relationship to Judaism and Islam remained both troubled and synergistic, especially on the Iberian Peninsula following the Muslim establishment of Al-Andalus in 711 CE . After 800 years of Christian ‘reconquest’, and coming on the heels of the surrender of King Muhammad XII of Granada to Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1492, Spain’s so-called ‘Catholic Monarchs’ and their successors eventually decreed the expulsion of every Muslim and Jew who refused to convert to Christianity.21 In the wake of these expulsions, Iberian kings and their newlyestablished inquisitions went to great lengths to root out heresies of any kind, including crypto-Judaism, crypto-Islam, Lutheranism and ‘witchcraft’. Thus, in addition to the kinds of tournaments and jousting matches that various courts had long sponsored, the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions (which exported their autos-da-fé to colonial communities around the world) staged elaborate public performances of religious ritual, legal trial, personal confession and public execution that lasted well into the nineteenth century. In doing so, they ironically re-established the same kind of violent public spectacles of torture and death that had caused the Church to abolish Roman theatre a millennium before.22

JONGLEURESQUE COMMUNITIES While the performers affiliated with the official communities described above have long been viewed as important figures in the supposed ‘rebirth’ of theatre, an alternate narrative exists that emphasizes cultural continuity over disjuncture. In other words, just because the collapse of Roman political authority allowed the Church and the emerging Germanic warrior-nobility to shut down the complex theatrical institutions that had sustained the Roman stage does not mean that ad hoc communities of both professional and amateur performers simply abandoned their practices. A variety of itinerant street performers of both sexes not only survived the dissolution of the Empire but genuinely thrived

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throughout the period between 476 and 1453 CE . Elsewhere I have characterized this continuing performance tradition as ‘jongleuresque’, but I should stress that my definition of this term is not limited to the theatrical activities of performers specifically identified as jongleurs.23 Instead, the jongleuresque is really a mode of performance that involves everything from epic singing to storytelling to prestidigitation to clownery to acrobatics.24 Thus, from the mid-fifth century CE onward, as the European landscape turned into a geopolitical palimpsest that continually readjusted its borders and feudal power structures, a whole array of jongleuresque performers fanned out across the continent, some related to Antiquity, some arriving with the invading Germanic armies, some arriving from the East. Such performers, long dismissed by literary critics and traditional theatre historians alike as nothing more than the ‘pitiable’ remnants of a once-great classical tradition of theatre,25 moved from town to town and from court to court as opportunities arose, creating Huston’s ‘simple stage’ anywhere they might gather an audience. Along the way, the members of these jongleuresque communities also embedded themselves in the political culture of the emerging feudal kingdoms, seeking the kind of patronage that would provide stable employment over longer periods of time. Various scholars have documented the specific presence of jongleurs in the courts of Attila the Hun; Clovis the Frank; Theodoric, the Visigothic king of Gaul; King Alphonse X the Wise of Castile and King Federico of Messina.26 Most of the time, these performers were primarily engaged in providing entertainment at court. Nevertheless, once established in the employ of the nobility, they occasionally provided service that went beyond making theatre. For instance, during the siege of Messina by Duke Roberto in 1300, King Frederic used one of his jongleurs as an emissary to negotiate the terms of surrender.27 Of course, for a variety of reasons, archival evidence related to these types of performers is not as ample as evidence for the official communities described above. In the first place, as a very loose collective of ambulant street performers scattered across Europe, and as severely marginalized members of a society that often considered them to be no better than prostitutes and other undesirables, most of the members of this enduring community of production remain anonymous to this day. Moreover, given the ad hoc and multiform nature of their performance events – which included the singing of epics like Beowulf, the Song of Roland and the Poem of the Cid – their theatre left behind very few, if any, residual written documents, much less the kind of documents that look like plays to modern scholars trained in literary criticism. Benjamin Bagby’s well-known performance reconstruction of Beowulf demonstrates just how deeply theatrical the medieval epics really are.28 In this regard, if the members of the official communities discussed above prefigure what Diana Taylor has called the theatrical ‘archive,’ then the jongleuresque performers represent its corresponding ‘repertoire’.29

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Still, the performance traditions of these jongleuresque communities did work their way into other medieval documents. For instance, numerous illuminated manuscripts contain images of such performers at work (Figures 7.1 and 7.2).30

FIGURE 7.1: Juggler from an eleventh-century French tonary. © The British Library Board. MS . Harley 4951, f. 298v.

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FIGURE 7.2: Sword dancer flanked by musicians from the fourteenth-century ‘Smithfield Decretals’. © The British Library Board. MS . Royal 10.E.IV , f. 58.

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Likewise, literary texts such as the thirteenth-century romance Flamenca contain vivid descriptions of these jongleuresque performers in action (see also this book’s cover image). Then the minstrels [li juglar] stood up; each one wanted to be heard. Then you would have heard resound strings of various pitches. Whoever knew a new piece for the viol, a song, a descort, or lay, he pressed forward as much as he could. One played the lay of the Honeysuckle, another the one of Tintagel; one sang of the Noble Lovers, and another which Yvain composed. One played the harp; another the viol; another, the flute; another, a fife; one played a rebeck; another, a rote; one sang the words; another played notes; one, the sackbut; another, the fife; one, the bagpipe; another, the reed-pipe; one, the mandora and another attuned the psaltery with the monochord; one performed with marionettes, another juggled knives; some did gymnastics and tumbling tricks; another danced with his cup; one held the hoop; another leapt through it; everyone performed his art perfectly.31 Of course, given the sheer variety of performance activities depicted in works like Flamenca, the question of nomenclature naturally arises. Modern scholars have long grappled with this problem, attempting to establish clear distinctions between one type of performer and another.32 Such preoccupations, however, are somewhat misdirected. In the first place, while each of the individual types of performance activity described in Flamenca differed from the others, there is no reason to see these disparate activities as somehow theatrically unrelated. Moreover, while this or that individual performer may have specialized in one or another jongleuresque activity, there is no reason to think that individual performers always and forever engaged in one – and only one – type of activity throughout their careers. There is, however, one distinction between these various performers that is perhaps worth noting: the traditional difference between jongleurs, who are

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viewed as low-cultural performers, and troubadours, who are viewed as highcultural poets.33 The word ioculator – which is etymologically related to both jongleur and juggler – surfaces during the medieval period in the writings of Isidore of Seville and others as early as the sixth century. The word ‘troubadour’ arose much later and is usually associated with the region of Provence in what is today southern France. Scholars have long debated the origins of the word troubadour. However, as María Rosa Menocal has persuasively argued, a strong case can be made for connecting the verb ‘trobar’ to the Arabic-speaking world through Muslim Spain (Figure 7.3).34 Such a connection is important because it demonstrates that the European jongleuresque tradition was not limited in its scope to just residual Roman

FIGURE 7.3: Muslim and Christian musicians from the thirteenth-century Cantigas de Santa María, Cantiga 120. Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial. © Patrimonio Nacional.

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and Germanic traditions. As Shmuel Moreh indicates, that tradition was every bit as rich in the medieval Islamic world as it was in Christian Europe, and this Islamic jongleuresque impacted Europe in a number of significant ways: ‘The Arabic word for buffoon was maskhara [. . .], a term which originally meant a laughing-stock. [. . .] [I]t was used later on in Spanish as mascara, in French as masque and in Italian as masschera.’35 Glynne Wickham has remarked that it was advantageous for jongleurs and troubadours to work together: ‘the entertainers (known collectively in France as jongleurs and in England as tregetoures) depended on the social standing of the trouvère to gain entry to the homes of the nobility, while the trouvère himself gained and maintained his prestige through the reputation of his troupe.’36 Still, the critical separation of the poet-troubadours from the performer-jongleurs is an indication of the literary tradition’s first attempts to distinguish between ‘dramatists’ and ‘actors’ and thus to bifurcate these communities of production along literary lines. As a discrete troubadour tradition began to spread across Europe, the figure of the writer-performer began to take hold during the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance – eras far too often arbitrarily divided in modern historiography. And, as the generally ad hoc nature of the larger jongleuresque tradition began to revolve increasingly around traditionally literary forms, we start to see the beginnings of what would become early modern professional performers whose work centres around someone else’s pre-written word.37 For instance, Adam de la Halle (c. 1237–1306? CE ), a trouvère from the French town of Arras who belonged to its Confrérie des jongleurs, is considered one of Europe’s earliest secular playwrights with his Jeu de Robin et Marion (among other works).38 Likewise, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Juan del Encina joined the Iberian court of the Duke of Alba, where, as both musician and poet, he experimented in the performance of newly rediscovered classical forms such as the ‘eclogue’.39 Of course, nowhere is the impact of these various jongleuresque communities more evident than in the rise of the commedia dell’arte, where Italy’s stillthriving tradition of medieval street performance coalesced into modern Europe’s first real professional theatre. Indeed, the commedia dell’arte can be viewed as the professional culmination of the medieval jongleuresque tradition writ large.40 As Kenneth Richards and Laura Richards note in their discussion of the antecedents of the commedia dell’arte: ‘Many suggestive general correspondences are traceable between the figures, and the stage and staging techniques of the improvised drama, and those of the itinerant entertainers of Carnival, fairs and market places . . . These peripatetic entertainers included masked mimes, clowns, instrumentalists, singers, dancers, rope-dancers, jugglers and acrobats.’41 Forming themselves into companies with names like the Gelosi and the Confidenti, and led by such performers as Carlo Goldoni and Zan Ganassa, these Italian commedia companies toured throughout

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continental Europe beginning in the late sixteenth century and had a profound influence – whether directly or indirectly – on the work of Lope de Rueda in Spain during the mid-1500s CE and Molière in France a century later.

QUOTIDIAN COMMUNITIES The final type of community of production to consider here belongs to the category of what I call ‘quotidian’ communities. I employ this term in part to avoid the critical baggage still attached to the term ‘folk’ and in part to connect these communities to the kinds of activities (such as games and storytelling) explored by Michel de Certeau in his Practice of Everyday Life. One way of identifying these communities is to look for them at work in the various festivals that were so important to daily life throughout the year. These could involve such feast days such as May Day, the Feast of Fools and the Feast of St John (also called Midsummer Day in England), among others. Such festivals were often religious in nature, relating to specific dates on the liturgical calendar, but could also involve residual aspects of pagan culture. Carnival (or Mardi Gras) is perhaps the best known of these annual festivals, but as Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter note, carnival itself is indebted to an earlier popular tradition of masking, mumming and dancing: ‘Carnival, throughout most of Europe, was the most striking and spectacular of the late-medieval masking traditions. Yet masking was only one element in a winter playtime that spread right across countries and classes, sometimes for weeks at a time.’42 Mikhail Bakhtin coined the term ‘carnivalesque’ to describe the performances associated with such festivals and developed an entire theory of medieval popular culture around these public activities. In Bakhtin’s assessment of these carnivalesque communities of performers, popular culture stands in opposition to the kind of authoritarian culture represented by the official communities discussed above: ‘In the Middle Ages folk humor existed and developed outside the official sphere of high ideology and literature, but precisely because of its unofficial existence, it was marked by exceptional radicalism, freedom, and ruthlessness.’43 In other words, it is precisely through the performance of carnival that medieval culture perhaps comes closest to our modern notion of ‘community’ by creating a separate space outside of – though still related to – official spheres. Still, carnival and other festivals are not the most ubiquitous and important elements of these quotidian communities. Instead, their real theatrical impact can be found in the simple pastimes created by everyday people. As I argue elsewhere, ‘not all acts of theatre are public events; not all acts of theatre take place on recognized stages; not all acts of theatre involve performers who see themselves as performers’.44 To appreciate the importance of this quotidian performance tradition, we do well to focus on the kind of performers that Albert Lord famously called ‘singers of tales’.45 The dynamics of this simple theatre are

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not just germane to the jongleuresque performers examined in the previous section; they are also at play in the most intimate and personal of performance events. In a world without the kind of electronic entertainment readily available today, and at a time when far lower literacy rates meant that most people could not simply read a book for pleasure (assuming that they could even afford to acquire one), the vast majority of people had to make their own entertainment. And such personal, quotidian performances existed within two spaces: workspace and leisure space. (We shall see, however, as Certeau himself notes, that these two spaces are ultimately inseparable because ‘these two areas of activity flow together’ effectively working to ‘repeat and reinforce each other’.)46 Of course, both spaces (which are clearly related to the kinds of issues discussed in Chapter 4 on the environment of theatre) must be defined functionally, given that a clear, conceptual distinction between the two was not prevalent prior to the Industrial Revolution. For my purposes here, ‘workspace’ refers to any space within which someone is actively working. Such places can include interior spaces like rooms or patios where people might be engaged in weaving, cobbling, mending, cooking, etc., or exterior spaces like open fields or riverbanks where they might be harvesting crops, chopping firewood, or washing clothes. ‘Leisure space’, for its part, does not differ materially from the abovementioned work spaces; rather it differs solely by virtue of the fact that the people inhabiting what might otherwise be considered a workspace have ceased their labours and have turned their attention to more relaxing pursuits. In either case, this physical space served to contain a great deal of theatrical activity if for no other reason than the fact that the kind of manual labour required to sustain pre-industrial societies left a great deal of mental space that needed to be filled. Thus, where performance theorists like Huston have allowed us to see the relationship between jongleuresque theatricality and the ‘simple stages’ that were a product of the performance itself, cognitive theorists like Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart have allowed us to see the important relationship between quotidian theatricality and the mental space of cognition. For instance, what opened up opportunities for quotidian performance in the workspace was something that modern cognitive scientists call ‘procedural memory’.47 Intimately and corporeally connected to Chapter 10 on cultural memory, procedural memory is the nearly unconscious body of knowledge that allows us to engage in routine tasks – once having learned them – without consciously thinking about them. Much of the physical labour produced during the Middle Ages was exactly the kind related to procedural memory: sowing, reaping, cobbling, washing, mending, etc. Thus, during long stretches of time, medieval labourers of both sexes were engaged in tasks that essentially ran on autopilot. And to fill the long hours of boredom they engaged in a whole set of performance-oriented tasks – i.e. singing songs and telling stories – that helped to pass the time.48 The Irish ballad tradition and Spanish Romancero tradition

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(not to mention the Eastern European guslar tradition studied by Albert Lord and Milman Parry) were sustained well into the twentieth century by people who continued to perform these songs during working hours long after the rise of both the Gutenberg galaxy and the invention of electronic media.49 Along the way, these quotidian communities relied on such ongoing acts of personal theatre to transmit the communal memory, cultural values and collective identity of their particular communities from one generation to the next. Witness the rise of a worldwide Sephardic Romancero in the wake of the Spain’s expulsion of its Ladino-speaking Jews in 1492 CE .50 Within medieval leisure spaces, people had all the more reason to create their own entertainment, although in moments of leisure their practices could now include not just an oral component but a more robust physical component as well. Thus, on the one hand, quotidian communities would engage in deliberate acts of storytelling such as those depicted in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, where the various characters embedded within the frame tales pass the time by performing narratives for each other.51 On the other hand, freed from the physical demands of the manual labour of the workspace, these quotidian communities of production could also engage in any number of participatory performance events such as games of tag, hide-and-seek and blind man’s bluff.52 Thus, to the extent that medieval people regularly sang songs, told stories and played games, they were involved in the production of these small moments of personal theatre that may have involved a contingent ‘community’ of only one or two people sitting around a work bench. To paraphrase Brook: a woman sings a song while another embroiders lace, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged. One might complain, of course, that such an expansive conception of a quotidian community of production stretches the definition of theatre beyond its capacity. However, within Schechner’s efficacy-entertainment braid, there is no such thing as pure ritual, pure sport or pure theatre. Oral storytellers and singers, whether professional or amateur, engage in voicing and gesture whenever they perform narrative as they assume – if only temporarily – the mantle of the character they are vocally portraying.53 Moreover, as cognitive cultural studies has demonstrated, all of these performance activities are inextricably linked because the cultural worlds we inhabit cannot be separated from our perception of these worlds.54 Such performances, then, whether effectuated by professionals or amateurs, trigger the same kinds of synaptic activity in the brains of others that ‘legitimate’ theatre does, evoking the same kinds of ‘rich images’ in the minds of listeners.55 Thus, while the artistic talents and skills of the kinds of performers affiliated with both the ‘official’ and ‘jongleuresque’ communities were undoubtedly much higher than those of the everyday people, such talents and skills were functionally no different for the members of the quotidian communities whose performances were every bit as theatrical.56

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CONCLUSION Having essentially ‘disentangled’ these three broad categories of performance communities from Schechner’s efficacy-entertainment braid, it is important here to ‘re-braid’ them because none of these communities, much less their constituent members, existed in isolation. The official communities frequently depended on the participation of the quotidian communities in local feast day events, while, as William Tydeman has argued, the Church itself often co-opted the members of the jongleuresque communities in the production of their liturgical plays: ‘The mimi became respectable servants of the Church; the Church had the satisfaction of seeing its drama professionally staged.’57 Meanwhile, as Sharon Aronson-Lehavi notes, the popular games of the quotidian communities influenced the very cycle dramas and mystery plays that were sponsored by the official communities and performed by jongleuresque actors.58 Where Bakhtin argues that ‘carnival does not know footlights’,59 closer inspection reveals that jongleuresque footlights continually ‘pop in and out of existence and move from place to place as the performative markers “actor” and “spectator” float from the Boy Bishop to the juggler to the heckler at the back of the crowd’.60 Likewise, the jongleuresque communities themselves not only depended on the official support of both the Church and the nobility in providing regular employment, but absolutely depended on the presence of the individual members of the quotidian communities as contingent audiences who helped co-create the very street theatre that comprised the core of their performance tradition. At the same time, the quotidian communities not only depended on the official communities to organize and authorize the various feast days that offered so much entertainment during the year, but also ‘borrowed’ the techniques and tropes of the jongleuresque performers when it came time for them to create their own personal theatre at home. In fact, one theory on the rise of the medieval ballad tradition in Spain involves the fragmentation of the epic tradition at the hands of regular people who began to repeat their favourite sections of longer, full-length songs.61 At base, medieval theatrical culture constituted an ongoing phenomenon that was always messy, always protean, always interactive and always contingent. And because all of its various multiform performance events were necessarily constructed in and through the ongoing negotiation that occurs between live performers and their audiences, such medieval theatre consisted of a thousandyear, triangular feedback loop through which production was as much responsible for the creation of discrete cultural communities as the performance communities were in the production of discrete performance events. Thus, it is not a stretch to say that during the Middle Ages everyone produced theatre.

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Medieval plays cultivated in their audiences social habits for recognizing and responding to representations of emotion. Here I suggest organizing genres in the medieval repertoire around this fundamental quality of drama: its ability to create sympathetic emotion or affect. Theatrical representation specifically allows us to see this reciprocity between performed character and audience.1 Affect in turn has the distinct historiographical advantage of providing a tutorial for identifying medieval responses to a theatrical repertoire, which was more culturally cohesive than modern genre divisions imply. Furthermore, affect shows medieval drama to exclude people not already schooled in specific emotive responses. This approach identifies productive correspondences among plays frequently separated by conventional genre classifications.

AFFECT AND MEDIEVAL GENRES As D.W. Robertson pointed out in 1962, passions normative in earlier cultures may not map onto our own. They may be ‘stimulated and elaborated’ and, in drama, simulated and represented, differently.2 Modern psychology recognizes five basic emotions – anger, fear, disgust, sadness and happiness – and construes theatrical affect as an individual, internal experience of emotions. In contrast, classical and medieval philosophies of emotion tend to be object-oriented and collective.3 St Augustine’s schematic organization of emotions in Civitate Dei, later refined by St Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica (c. 1265–74),

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offers a template for re-thinking genre as a function of the emotions that plays represent. In Civitate Dei, Augustine identifies passiones (involuntary, gross movements of body and soul), affectus and affectiones (acts of will), and motus animae (movements of the soul), and defines emotion as a wilful movement (motus) towards or away from something. His categories derive from Stoicism – delight (laetitia), desire (libido/cupiditas), distress (dolor), fear (metus/timor) – and from the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition: irascible (repulsive) and concupiscible (attraction).4 Augustine directed five emotions outward towards an object: compassion for others (caritas), contrition in the act of repentance and confession, fear of God’s wrath, anger at sinners, and joy in the assurance of salvation from sin. This organization of emotional responses may apply more broadly than Augustine’s theological orientation might suggest. Notwithstanding his antipathy in Book III , Chapter 2 of the Confessions to the emotional excesses of Roman theatre, his organization of religious feeling offers a dramaturgical guide for reading emotion in medieval plays. The resulting dramaturgy need not rely on canonical characteristics of dramatic genres – comedy vs. tragedy, sacred vs. secular, Latin vs. vernacular, professional vs. amateur – but on differentiations in affect guided by a play’s philosophical, theological and rhetorical treatment of emotion. The ways in which dramatists directed these emotions in the course of a plot offers a model for constructing genre as somewhat different from, but not exclusive of, the now familiar genre classifications. The question is what a play’s overall affect reveals about the ontological roots of familiar genres. What might be gained from reading plays for the ways their plots and themes transform emotions and the objects towards which they are directed? Once we cease to refer to existing criteria for genre, especially a telos-driven plot ending in a comic or tragic ending, we can better see the movements of affect (in characters, dialogue and scenarios) from moment to moment. This movement also required fluidly connected responses from an audience, culminating in an overall affect. An approach through emotion and affect shows that plays that we might classify as belonging to different genres – liturgical music-drama, cycle play, vernacular, comedy, tragedy, farce and so forth – resonate with each other. This approach to genre enables investigations into how theatre schooled medieval playgoers to respond emotionally within (and perhaps, without) the ideological framework of Christianity. But how might we expand the assumption that people have an emotional response to drama in order to consider medieval sensibilities underlying those responses? How might we recognize a configuration of emotions that does not map directly onto the emotional realism characteristic of modern, Western drama? What other kind of sense might medieval dramas be making of human emotion, and how might that sensibility apply across what we have come to accept as ‘genres’ in the repertoire of medieval plays?

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Drawing on three exemplary works that incarnate the breadth and depth of medieval theatre in time and space – Hildegard von Bingen’s twelfth-century Ordo Virtutum, the Wakefield Second Shepherds’ Play, and the French Confession Lessons from the fifteenth or early sixteenth century – I suggest that such a model does considerably more than correct anachronistic readings of medieval genres. It reveals that plays of seemingly different style, purpose and context often co-exist within a single canonical genre. These three plays would likely be classified today with other plays that share certain characteristics: allegorical liturgical music-dramas (the Ordo Virtutum), civic plays that combine vernacular and religious elements (the Second Shepherds’ Play), and professionally performed farces (Confession Lessons). Re-thinking genre through affect shows corresponding patterns of emotions represented in each play. These patterns suggest an ontology for medieval theatrical genres that derives from structures of feeling rooted in medieval culture. The first move towards these readings is re-framing the criteria for genre.

RE-FRAMING GENRE Theatre is a communal practice, a form of social interaction in which mimesis is the mode of transmission. Between the theatrical traditions of ancient Greece and Rome to the ‘re-invention’ of tragic and comic drama in the European Renaissance, the Middle Ages produced a wide variety of dramas known broadly in their time as forms of play: ludi, jeu, Spiel or, in Spain, auto (act). They were performed in churches, monasteries and marketplaces, noble halls and taverns, on wagons and on trestles set up in courtyards. When medieval drama became an object of study in the early twentieth century, scholars referenced structural and linguistic characteristics of these plays to familiar dramaturgical conventions.5 Modern genre descriptions for the medieval repertoire have thus depended on the structure of a play’s plot (comedy, tragedy, tragicomedy), its didactic or social purpose (morality play, miracle play, cycle play, Passion play), its performance context (cycle play, corrales, mummings, masques), its literary and performance style (allegory, music-drama, realistic) and its relationship to ritual or ceremony (Christmas, Easter plays).6 These frameworks for constructing genre were derived largely from early twentieth-century Aristotelianism and the neo-Aristotelianism of the 1970s, anthropological models that sought ritual roots or primordial impulses in medieval drama,7 and literary models that sought drama’s continuity in the classical heritage of literary genres.8 Mimesis, expressed in impersonation of characters and dialogue, emerged as one prominent criterion for defining theatricality.9 Plot structure, how the order of events moved towards a comic or tragic narrative ending, also became a prominent criterion.10 These criteria allowed scholars to make the case for the artistic integrity of the medieval

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repertoire11 and to make sense of comic elements in otherwise serious religious drama.12 Not surprisingly, then, genre classifications tended to reveal what they promised: plot, purpose, performance context and style. They presume specific emotional effects to be inherent in the narrative structure of medieval plays: comedy equates with an ending in joy, fecundity and union; and tragedy ends in anguish, death and isolation. They may expect realistic imitation of action in character, dialogue and representation. They may presume a developmental model in which religious ritual evolves into secular theatre. Finally, they assume (contra postmodern and poststructuralist deconstructions) the need for classification systems by which plays might be productively grouped with other plays. Foundational interpretations of medieval drama drew a distinction between religious drama and secular theatre, the former purportedly reinforcing serious religious belief and the latter imitating everyday life and tending towards humour. This sacred–secular distinction obscures more fine-grained distinctions between the ceremonial or liturgical elements in Passion plays, mystères, miracle plays, and vernacular farces. The question of repertoire as culturally situated thus compels us to consider the commingling of genres of ‘play’ in a way that does not occlude the ontological aspirations of such playing by passing over the sensibilities medieval audiences might have brought to their perception and reception of performed drama. The significance of affect is already deep in the foundations of conventional genre classifications. In his readings of Amalarius of Metz (c. 800) and Honorius of Autun (c. 1100), O.B. Hardison emphasized the emotional quality inherent in the medieval liturgy, concluding that people experienced the Mass itself as dramatic representation. D.W. Robertson had pointed out three years earlier that, while affect may indeed define dramatic representation, medieval spectators were caught between a model of Aristotelian catharsis, in which drama purges pity and fear, and Augustine’s ethical concern that drama binds people by a kind of fictive entrapment in emotion.13 Northrop Frye, following a traditional telosdriven model for literary genres, famously observed that Christianity, with its dying and rising hero at the centre of its narrative, follows a more general ritual pattern of comic catharsis, in which the threat of death is reversed by the promise of resurrection.14 Moving beyond a framework that accepts affect as a characteristic of drama, we can see what work affect does for people and view affect as a structuring principle for the medieval repertoire. Though medieval dramas likely reinforced patterns of emotion rooted in the religious aspirations of the early liturgically inflected dramas, they were not necessarily bound to those soteriological aspirations. Patterns of outwarddirected emotion in medieval plays give us an architecture that suggests more ontological links among plays with different plot structures, social purposes, performance contexts, topics or themes and literary or performance styles.

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Teresa Brannan perceived that ‘waves of affects generated by different cultural constellations could lead to a different and altogether more interesting characterization of group phenomena’.15 When we read medieval plays for these waves of affects, the borders of genre begin to dissolve. At the level of affect, identifying borders that divide, for example, religious ceremonies from comic folk plays only diverts attention from patterns of emotion at work across the repertoire. In particular, tracing movements of feeling reorganizes the telos-driven structures of ‘comedy’ and ‘tragedy’.16 We tend to think of comedy and tragedy as plots moving through time, comedy ending in a happy return to the status quo and tragedy ending in its rupture. In the course of performance, medieval plays produce affect-driven responses moment by moment, scenario to scenario. The Christian worldview suspended humans between creation and the second coming of Christ. In such a worldview, medieval plots play out more like the modern Waiting for Godot than the classical Oedipus. Reading the movement and direction of emotions, whether or not they are explicitly theologically oriented, allows us to see the ontology of medieval drama as wholly human and humanly flawed.

THE PLAY OF EMOTION A cultural history of medieval theatre thus involves examining the ways medieval people were accustomed to respond to the world around them, as well as the stylistic conventions that governed how they represented their world. Augustine describes emotions in broad terms: passiones (the involuntary, gross movements of body and soul), affectus and affectiones (acts of will), and motus animae (movements of the soul).17 I suggest here that medieval drama presents human emotion as Augustine understood it, the movement (motus) of human will towards something. Ideally, the object is the good (caritas): in the Christian worldview, God. Most prominent in the medieval organization of emotions are compassion for others (caritas), contrition in the act of repentance and confession, fear of God’s wrath, anger at sinners, and joy in the assurance of salvation from sin. Medieval plays were constituted in conventions of feeling that came through the theological tradition, but were not necessarily bound to religious practice or thought. For example, caritas (love of others) and cupiditas (love of worldly things) are evident in all three plays discussed below, though represented differently. Augustine also acknowledges that the body registers emotion and is the medium for how we recognize transient emotional states in other people.18 For Augustine, the awareness of emotion we might recognize in ourselves by our feelings and, in others, by the performance of physical gestures (a face contorted in grief, a fist clenched in anger, a smile of pleasure or joy) also requires the cognitive capacity of reason.

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Ceremonial re-enactments of biblical events in the Easter and Christmas liturgies, from short music tropes to fully realized dramatizations of visitations to Christ’s empty tomb or nativity cradle, are often considered the ‘kernel’ of dramatic activity in medieval Europe. Augustine’s theological template gives us a new point of entry for this early ‘theatre’. The most well-known early liturgical ceremony is documented in the tenth-century Regularis Concordia from Winchester, which prescribes the performance of monastic rituals. One such performance is the musical trope Quem quaeritis? (‘Whom do you seek?’) from the Easter Matins ceremony. The rubrics describe three monks imitating three women carrying spices to anoint the dead body of Jesus after his crucifixion. Outward signs of emotion transmit affect, and performers direct emotion towards visible signs of God. According to the rubrics, they approach the altar ‘haltingly in the manner of seeking for something’. They appear to wander, as people deep in grief might move aimlessly, towards the compassionate act of anointing a body. At the altar/tomb, a fourth monk representing an angel sings ‘Whom do you seek?’ in a sweet and moderate voice (incipiat mediocri voce dulcisone cantare), offering consolation. The angel announces that Christ has risen from death and compels them to announce the resurrection of Christ’s body to the world. They display the empty shroud to the congregation and sing the antiphon, ‘The Lord has risen’. The rubrics leave space for registering the fear of God in the discovery that there is no body, but the prior delivers the expression of the joy of assured salvation, ‘rejoicing with (the women/monks) at the triumph of our king’, and leads the communal hymn Te Deum Laudamus (To God, we give praise).19 The outward signs of Augustine’s compassion, fear and joy are built into this short ceremony. In the plot-driven taxonomy of genre familiar to scholars of literature and drama, this quasi-dramatic trope reads as a tragic death reversed by the discovery that the person is alive, ending with the happiness characteristic of a comedy.20 With affect as a structuring principle, however, the ontology of conventional genres relies on how characters move through emotional responses to the death and resurrection as they move towards God and God’s community. They direct their emotions first towards the tomb/altar, then towards the monastic community, as theatrical mimesis gives way to the ritual symbolism of the Matins liturgy in the Te Deum. Through Augustine’s lens, these emotions constitute a kind of re-directed will (voluntas), and the dialogue itself moves people from aimless wandering towards union with God, represented in the felt union with the community of other humans.21 With Augustine’s organization of emotion as a template, the movement of emotion and affect reveals structures of feeling that reorganize the medieval repertoire. The limited emotional range displayed in the Quem quaeritis trope carries over into other types of drama such as farces, and allows us to see fluid movement between laughter and tears within one play as well as how affect registered people’s devotional capacity. As

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we analyze plays according to vectors of characters’ emotions, structures of feeling rooted in a soteriological framework also reveal how theatre excluded members of medieval society not oriented to feel their way towards the Christian God, and also served political and ideological aims.

STRUCTURES OF FEELING Each of the three plays discussed below falls into a different ‘genre’ based on the objects towards which emotion is directed: towards God and away from the world in the Ordo Virtutum, towards the integration of worldly life and transcendence or salvation in the Second Shepherds’ Play, and towards physical desire (for sex, for food, and for bodily harm) in Confession Lessons. At the same time, the movement of emotions links contrition with joy. Hildegard von Bingen’s mid-twelfth-century Ordo Virtutum is most obviously classified as a quasi-liturgical music-drama because it was likely intended for performance in Hildegard’s convent at Rupertsberg.22 But a genre classification is not that easy. The earliest text of the Ordo is part of a collection of Hildegard’s mystical writings, Scivias, which situates the drama in the emotive traditions of mysticisms longing for God.23 The Ordo’s dramatic narrative is a psychomachia, a poetic form derived from Prudentius and used in the style of later morality plays such as Everyman (c. 1485) and The Castle of Perseverance (c. 1425).24 Barbara Newman credits Hildegard with inventing ‘the full-fledged morality play’, which classifies it not only by style but by theme with The Castle of Perseverance, which features the Four Daughters of God counselling a lost human soul.25 Through Augustine’s template, we can see how the human dimension of Christian longing, moral failings and praise work as the ontological structures underneath various genre classifications. The central theme of the Ordo Virtutum opposes a spiritual life of Christian virtue with life lived in the material, carnal world. The plot shows a soul’s temptation, contrition and union with God. Through Augustine’s lens, the play juxtaposes caritas (the morally good love in which a person’s will, soul and body align with God) and cupiditas (love of the world and the desire for happiness in the world).26 Throughout the play, the happiness of a virtuous life (marriage to Christ, regali talamo), is diametrically opposed to an unhappy life of sensual delight and sin (carnal desires, delectatio carnis).27 In this play, a person’s emotions correspond to her moral qualities. As we shall see, that correspondence does not apply at all in Confession Lessons, where moral judgment is in the minds and hands of people, not God. In a soteriological framework, the Ordo Virtutum’s scenes represent contrasting emotions to distinguish salvation from damnation. Characters express emotion through embodied action or gesture, as we saw in the Quem quaeritis trope, but also in reasoned dialogue delivered by chant. The plot is

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straightforward. Anima, the female soul, sings her happy desire for God (felix Anima) along with the chorus of Virtues: Humility, the queen of the Virtues, Charity, Obedience, Hope, Innocence, Fear of God, Contempt of the World, Love of Heaven, Discipline, Modesty, Mercy, Discretion, Patience and Victory. The Virtues embody human feelings as much as they represent Christian morals, in particular Fear of God, which is one of Augustine’s prime emotions. Anima finds her will drawn towards worldly pleasures that turn her attention, and with it her happiness, from God’s will. Anima’s vulnerability cues the entrance of the Devil, a comic figure in some later dramas, but who here follows medieval hagiographies in which a male devil threatens a female soul. The Devil’s arguments for the pleasures of a carnal life persuade Anima to abandon the Virtues, who confront the Devil with parallel arguments for the merits of a virtuous life. The soul is not lost. Anima returns from her experience in the world contrite and repentant to do battle against the Devil’s influence. Anima and the Virtues triumph, joining a roster of Christian Patriarchs, prophets and souls still imprisoned in human flesh to praise God in song. The affective potential of the Ordo Virtutum’s plot is evident in its first fifty lines. The woeful lament of a chorus of fallen souls who long for salvation contrasts with Anima’s joyful anticipation of transcending her earthly body. Anima, too, sighs longingly, her emotion directed towards the Virtues (ad te suspiro). The Virtues recognize Anima immediately as a soul whose highest wisdom knows God and whose love is directed towards God (multum amas). Anima joins with the Virtues willingly and joyfully (O libenter veniam ad vos); her emotions encompass a spiritual and physical love of the heart (osculum cordis). But Anima’s love and happiness change direction. Happiness becomes sadness (gravata) as she laments the grievous labour of her own sinful corporeality (carnem pugnare). The Virtues see the display of Anima’s sorrow in her display of tears, and Anima herself cries out in a dramatic lament, ‘o woe is me’ (O ve michi).28 Anima’s very human emotions move from happy (felix) before line 23 to unhappy (infelix) by line 36 as she veers towards cupiditas. The two classical categories of emotion, the concupiscible and irascible passions emerge in the play’s representation of human desire for bodily pleasure. The Devil’s appetite for Anima embodies Augustine’s sense of passiones as unreasoned emotion as he turns her from alignment with God. His temptation, ‘Look to the world, it will embrace you’ (Respice mundum, et amplectetur te . . .) sends the Virtues deep into their own sorrow as they see that Anima’s longing for God reveals her hidden desire for sensual delight (in qua delectatio camis se latenter abscondit . . .).29 The Devil and Anima register cupiditas, both directing their emotions to the satisfaction of self-focused desire. The Virtues’ affinity for God elicits in highly emotive language. Humility calls all the Virtues to rejoice (gaudete, ergo, filie Syon!), but instead they lament

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over Anima’s departure into the carnal world (plangamus et lugeamus). When Anima returns from her excursion into the world, contrite and penitent (penitentis), her body stinking of gangrenous wounds inflicted by the ‘serpent’ (quoniam in vulneribus feteo quibus antiquus serpens me contaminavit), the Virtues meet her contrition with compassion. They assure her repeatedly of God’s redemption once she returns (veni, veni ad nos, et Deus suscipiet te) and offer her the embrace of virtue instead of the world. In the final moment of the plot, Anima’s re-alignment of her will with Christian virtue and the assurance of forgiveness and salvation yield the love that Augustine indicates is the quality common to all other Christian emotions, caritas extended by God through the Virtues: ‘Almighty Father, from you flowed a fountain in fiery love: guide your children into a fair wind . . .’30 The play’s overall affect lands in caritas and the assurance not only of salvation but of perpetual, transcendent love unmatched by anything in the everyday, carnal world. The Ordo’s affective movement oscillates between passiones and affectiones. This movement is evident in the structure of the play’s plot as well as in the allegorical presentation of characters. The Ordo’s structure distinguishes the Devil as the only personification fully committed to fleshly passiones and without a will towards the good from the Virtues, who articulate the higher affectiones by setting the falseness of everyday speech against divinely inspired sung melodies.31 Though medieval terms for vocal production in liturgical chant such as cantare and dicere do not map directly onto modern terms for singing and speaking, the Ordo’s text suggests that the male Devil is the only role spoken rather than sung.32 Following Margot Fassler, Bruce Holsinger suggests that this distinction in vocal production contrasts the Devil with the female characters while simultaneously grounding him in the flesh that obscures heavenly music. The Ordo’s fluidity of emotion, within its soteriological framework and monastic environment, offers a remarkably thorough map of religious feeling. Shifting emotions – joy, sadness, love, fear, courage, and contrition – the play invites a religious community to move through these same emotions. Characters in the Ordo Virtutum are moved by incompatible desires for God and for the world, an affective valence which the inhabitants of Rupertsberg may well have felt in their daily lives. Here, a play’s emotional trajectory reveals how people were socialized to respond to desires that imperil a monastic way of life. Confession Lessons later situates these same emotions and desires in domestic life, where they appear as comedy absent the serious consequences of imperilling one’s soul. Affect, then, shows us what moved people and allows us to see how a specific range of emotions governed outward expressions of emotion in medieval plays. If we use affect as a way of re-organizing the medieval repertoire, we can see how other criteria for genre – tragic or comic plot, social and religious purpose,

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performance context and style – emerge from the way a play directs emotion. The Ordo Virtutum directs emotions towards salvation; its theatrical power resides in its representation of human responses to this highly abstract theological problem that, for the women of Hildegard’s convent, was all too real. The Wakefield Second Shepherds’ Play and Confession Lessons refract emotional responses through situations with more secular resonances. These plays are grounded in people’s concerns about food, shelter and sex. In the Second Shepherds’ Play, three shepherds bemoan their feudal poverty and marriages; in Confession Lessons, a wife accuses her husband of adultery. Through Augustine’s lens, however, a civic cycle play from England and a street farce from France share an emotional ontology with the Ordo Virtutum. These plays offer their audiences exaggerated physicality, though the performers themselves are not physically hurt, and the satisfaction of watching characters take justice into their own hands.33 They differ in the objects towards which the plots channel characters’ emotion – towards salvation in the Second Shepherds’ Play, and towards domestic retribution in Confession Lessons. Still, the emotional trajectories in both plays reinforce the emotions supported by a Christian worldview – compassion for others (caritas), contrition in repentance, fear (awe) of God, anger towards sinners, and the joy of assured salvation – by recontextualizing them. These plays show characters who lack compassion, fake contrition, are indifferent to God’s anger, and direct their own anger at people who break the social rules built on God’s commandments. Both plays assume an audience’s religious literacy to make sense of the humour even as they oscillate between sacred and profane. The soteriological stakes for a non-Christian are high in the Second Shepherds’ Play, which expects from spectators the devotional joy Amalarius found in the Mass. Confession Lessons derives much of its humour at the expense of the Church, clergy and the faithful. How these plays represent Christian emotions undergirds the characteristics that we usually associate with genre: plot, theme, literary style and characterization. Beyond providing general categories for classifying medieval plays, cultural context and the social purpose of performance here guide an assessment of overall affect. The Second Shepherds’ Play from the Wakefield/Towneley Corpus Christi cycle dramatizes the birth of Christ. The question of genre usually focuses on this play’s shift from a quotidian comedy about a stolen sheep disguised as a baby to a scene intended to recreate the historical Nativity in a then-present moment. Here, we view the play as a series of affect-driven responses that are not necessarily predetermined by the anticipated Nativity scene, but rather take their meaning from the objects towards which characters direct emotion. The beginning of the play sets a highly emotive tone. Three shepherds, Col, Gib and Daw, tell woeful tales of high taxes, freezing floods, scant food, thin clothes and

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wives as oppressive as the local lords. Until the entrance of Mak the thief, the shepherds direct their lachrymose feelings towards the lack of basic human necessities – clothing, warmth, kindness and food – concerns likely shared by the play’s audience. A modern reading of dramatic genres might suggest that Mak’s entrance sets in motion a comic crime plot. Reading affect shows the shepherds’ emotional trajectory shifting from lament to a quotidian version of Augustine’s ‘anger at sinners’ as the shepherds suspect Mak’s integrity and motives. Mak does indeed steal a sheep and hides it in a cradle in his house. When the shepherds arrive, they first believe their stolen sheep to be a human baby. Their reconciliation with Mak should signal the end of a comic plot (‘for we are all one’). However, their fury at discovering that the ‘child’ is really their own lost sheep moves them to threaten Mak with his life, though Mak’s confession elicits a more carnivalesque punishment – they ‘cast him in canvas’. The sheettossing effectively closes a little morality play in which simple folk triumph over wickedness and get the last laugh along with the audience.34 The characters’ emotions have been directed to the concerns of the everyday world: the shepherds’ compassion reveals Mak’s crime, the shepherds take swift action in their anger, Mak’s fear for his life dissolves in a far easier punishment, and the shepherds return to their lives of hardship. Cycle plays characteristically move between the ‘real’ time of the present moment and the biblical history the plays inscribe and embody. In the York cycle crucifixion play, for example, affect moves from morbid humour as the carpenters’ struggle to build a proper cross dramatically prolongs the execution of Christ. In the Second Shepherds’ Play, the Nativity scene described in the Gospel of Luke begins as the sheep-stealing narrative closes. The angel of the Nativity appears to announce the birth of Christ. The shepherds’ poverty suddenly fits into the prophesies in the Hebrew Bible, and the shepherds’ fifteenth-century reality dissolves into Christian history. Their emotions are no longer directed at everyday petty lies, thefts, and retribution, but flow towards the transcendent joy of eternal salvation, a second affective reconciliation. This redirection of affect shows the play to be complex in its depiction of human relations in ways a standard genre classification cannot reveal. The entrance of the sweet-voiced angel35 is usually read as a shift in tone, style, and genre. There is certainly a change from the everyday topics of comedy to the serious theological abstraction of salvation. The angel redirects emotion towards ‘everlasting joy’.36 Mary’s words that the birth will kepe you fro wo!37 relieves with transcendent compassion the all too human suffering pronounced at the beginning of the play. In response, the shepherds’ escalating joy replaces the earlier escalations of anger at Mak and complaints about life in general. The shepherds receive their charge to take the news of salvation from sin and woe to the world.38 As in the Ordo Virtutum, the Second Shepherds’ Play ultimately

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directs joy outward to the community, expressed theatrically in a song (To sing are we bound).39 The overall affect, as in the Ordo, is the joy shared by Christians and extended as an ultimate act of compassion. Vectors of emotion move from fear (awe) of God, to joy in knowledge of salvation, and finally the compassion for others that comprise Augustine’s template. The movement of emotion and the overall affect in Confession Lessons, in contrast, stays within the boundaries of the everyday world of human interaction. Confession Lessons, or, The Farce of the Lusty Husband Who Makes His Confession to a Woman, his Neighbor Who is Disguised as a Priest, a selfdescribed farce nouvelle from fifteenth-century France, is a farce on the order of the Roman plays Augustine so virulently criticized. Scrutton reinforces the point that for Augustine, ‘emotion itself is morally neutral, but how it is instantiated in the human being makes it good or bad’.40 The emotions on display in Confession Lessons are easily recognizable as bad versions of contrition, fear and anger. The characters’ anger at sinners, the overriding emotion in this play, does not align their Christian souls with God, but instead drives people to blows. The play holds out joy as the unfulfilled promise of marital bliss, and caritas seems entirely out of place in a play that features beatings in three of its six scenes. The farce concludes with the expected formulaic statement of the performers’ intended affective effect, ‘We hope that you’ve enjoyed our play’ (Prendre en gré nostre esbatement),41 a reminder that on the stage, domestic violence, false confessions, fierce anger and the emotions of desire are indeed all about joy. By any conventional classification, Confession Lessons has little in common with the generic characteristics of liturgical allegory or devotional cycle plays. Farce distances its crude topics, buffoonish characters and exaggerated physicality from the sympathetic emotion of affect we saw in the Ordo Virtutum and at the end of the Second Shepherds’ Play. In this play, objects of desire, even the desire for confession, are set solidly in the material, social world (cupiditas). This play offers no deceiving Devil or manipulative rogue to be defeated, only a philandering husband destined to be taught a lesson by the two women he has shamed. All the characters trade in deception and disguise, in a ludic dance of false emotions performed as a commentary on anger, sexual urges, and violence otherwise hidden in the private zones of the home and confessional. Yet as the play transforms mimicry of human behaviour into stage mimesis, the basic repertoire of emotions in Confession Lessons maps onto Augustine’s schema. The involuntary, gross movements of the soul (passiones) drive the play’s humour. The Wife suspects her husband of adultery in the first scene. A furious argument immediately invites spectator pleasure in violence rendered comic. In a stage trick that prevents injury to the performers, the Husband (Le Mary) hits the Wife (La Femme) in full view of the audience. The staged spectacle of private life simultaneously exposes and normalizes gendered

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domestic violence in the Husband’s self-satisfied commentary, perhaps directed at the audience and in Enders’ translation: ‘POW ! Right in the kisser!’ The Wife, apparently unbruised and with all her teeth, yells back her accusation, ‘Are you tryin’ to kill me? Goddamn, lousy, stinkin’ wife beater!’ The spectacle of domestic violence blurs the boundary between spectators’ home lives and the stage representations that re-inscribed that violence on performers’ bodies, and the self-satisfied Husband leaves the mise en scène allegedly to talk to a business colleague, ordering his Wife to ‘keep an eye on the house’. She defiantly refuses to stay at home, and sets the plot in motion.42 The play represents emotionality as the governing conditions of human behaviour, barely held in check by social conventions such as the ritual of confession, much less fear of God’s wrath or reason. On the pretence that to save his soul he must confess his sins to a ‘priest’, the Husband will admit his infidelity to his wife’s confidant Colette, who is disguised as a priest. The faked confessional yields a true confession: the Husband’s paramour is Colette’s own daughter (Jamette), whose virginity is long gone. Here Colette unleashes anger hotter than the Wife’s: ‘God damn him, girl! You’ll never guess how that lyin’ schemin’, two-timin’ prick has shamed me and brought dishonor (grant honte et grant diffame) to my household!’43 The base desires, mockery of religion and ribald beatings this play puts on display in the conventions of comedy end not with mirth but with contrition. Colette and the Wife take it upon themselves to assign the Husband his penance, by which the Husband will supposedly ‘receive God’s forgiveness and escape the vile inferno reserved for you and all your kind’. The last scene reverses the gendered punch of the first scene. The Wife and Colette deliver a sustained and decidedly more effective beating with switches (stage direction, elles le batten), which leaves the Husband bruised (Je suis tout cassé) and realizing ‘the joke’s on me’ (Las, je me rens). As in the sheep-stealing plot of the Second Shepherds’ Play, the ends of distributive justice justify the means of punishment. The beating the women mete out elicits a confession, but yields the contrition of a trickster tricked, a deceiver deceived. The Husband publically confesses to stupidity, not cupidity. In Enders’ translation, ‘It’s all for naught/If you’re so dumb that you get caught’. Even as the plot turns on the falsely elicited truth of the Husband’s infidelity, the play mocks the Christian promise of confession’s rewards. The characters let their emotions run amok as they game the theological system. Ironically, it is the Husband’s emotional indifference to breaking his marriage vows and his inability to produce a defence from the script itself that pushes Colette to command him to ‘strip naked and ask your wife (. . .) for mercy’. The sin of adultery breaches the God-sanctioned marriage contract, but it is the women, driven by anger, who take matters in their own hands.44 The emotions in this farce are not directed towards the transcendent, eternal moral system undergirding Augustine’s parsing of emotion, but social behaviour.

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Carnal desires (delectatio carnis) are on display as characters act on their bodily urges for sex and food (libido), and let loose jealousy, anger and indignation. The temporality of mortal life in the Husband’s repeated (and unsatisfied) desire for food and wine overlaps the Christian promise of transcending that life in Colette-cum-priest’s admonishment to consider the glories of the paradise that awaits penitents, which finally coerces him into the confession.45 True to comic form, the play’s concerns are how people deal with base human needs. Yet there is also a transcendent aspect to the play in its all too familiar violent imagery: the transgressing body is flogged as Christ was whipped, the confessional does produce a true confession, and the women purge their own anger, pity and fear as they thrash the Husband. Comedy notwithstanding, God’s justice is meted out in full view of the audience. Beyond the standard genre description of ‘farce’, this play uses theatre to do significant cultural work by offering a metacommentary on how easily emotions can be faked and manipulated by changes in facial expression and gesture. When the conventions of standard genre classifications are lifted, the medieval repertoire begins to reveal a consciousness of how theatrical representation can operate as a critical tool. Here, the critique moves from domestic violence to the violence inherent in the process of Christian salvation. In Scene Three, the Wife practises a display of coercive distress: perhaps too common a strategy for getting one’s way in ‘real life’. She gets ‘into character’ by crying, flailing and pretending to be ‘worried sick’ about her husband (Il me fauldra mon semblant faindre/Tantost, et souspirer et plaindre/Faingnant d’avoir le cueur mar’).46 She fumbles a Latin blessing as she tries to instil in her husband enough fear of God (which no character in this play seems to possess) ‘to make a little bit of a confession’.47 Early in the play, she cries in a show of false concern, ‘You’re in a lot of pain, aren’t you, my darling?’48 By Scene Five, however, the Husband is in ‘real’ pain inflicted by his Wife, who no longer uses emotion to manipulate, but rather to fuel violent justice. Mercy, forgiveness and pain are the emotions of contrition, but the public, self-centred repentance in Confession Lessons is not the sincere repentance of Anima’s return to God in the Ordo Virtutum. The Ordo invites its audience to abandon the pain of sinning against God and accept the assurance of divine love; Confession Lessons delivers a playful warning to people who sin against others: don’t get caught. Watching a trickster tricked provides the moral lesson. In this send-up of Christian belief and ritual, however, salvation from sin does not produce the joy described in Augustine’s schema; instead, it produces a catharsis and a warning. The approach to genre through affect taken here also reveals how people negotiated sacred and everyday experience. The two serious devotional plays move towards transcendent joy that extends specifically to communities of Christians. The Ordo Virtutum and Second Shepherds’ Play, both devotional in intent, situate their audiences in a world of temptations and evils from which

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people might find relief in God’s transformative love or Christ’s transcendent salvation if they direct their emotions properly. That relief is hard won for Anima and the Shepherds. In the farcical Confession Lessons, emotions seem to have no salvific function at all except to drive characters to violence and deception. However, this play actually delivers a serious moral lesson that applies in the world of temptation and evils. The non-devotional, comic play is less concerned with salvation than with survival, and God’s justice is an individual responsibility. Dramatic affect shows us the medieval repertoire as consubstantial with a Christian worldview, with the symbolic acts of art, liturgy and life overlapping.49 Emotion and affect open a way to read these plays for the humanity staged in dramas produced from a worldview different from our own, and structured in ways we have yet to fully appreciate. The practice of doing and seeing drama, I have suggested, organized feelings associated with a world understood simultaneously as sacred and profane; plays thus oriented people’s emotional responses not only to religious behaviour and belief, but also to negotiating everyday life.50 Theatre did the typological work that allowed people to participate emotionally, physically and intellectually in Christianity’s soteriological aspirations as a matter of daily life practice. There is an ideological problem in recognizing the typological work of the medieval repertoire. A palette of emotions rooted in a dominant and pervasive religious orientation excludes cultural others. Either/or, this/that discussions of genre occlude this problem, whereas an approach to the medieval repertoire through analysis of affect makes that exclusion obvious. The fifteenth-century Croxton Play of the Sacrament, a controversial East Anglian drama, for example, has long challenged generic classification. In this play, five Jewish characters convert to Christianity after a ‘real’ staged Christ appears to them when they try to test the doctrine of transubstantiation. The emotional trajectory of the Play of the Sacrament reminds us that the Christianity of contrition and caritas was also a Christianity of crusade and cruelty. This play can be read in its context as comedy with a serious soteriological point. However, this contextualization brings to the fore the fact that that this play did its emotional tutoring at the expense of cultural and religious others, who were subject to the slippage of stage pain into their all too real everyday lives.51 Even as the staged conversion of Jewish characters assured Christians of their own salvation, it reinforced an ideology of religious intolerance. That intolerance and its implications for Jews, Muslims, and other non-Christians in medieval Europe is easily overlooked in familiar systems of genre classification (comedy, tragedy, morality play, etc.). Using the movement of emotion to shape genre allows us to see more clearly how medieval Christian drama defined cultural difference by showing ‘wrong’ emotional responses. Sarah Beckwith shows in her study of the York pageant play cycle, Signifying God, how we

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inevitably find the emotional dramas of our modern selves mirrored in medieval Europe’s public and liturgical plays as we try to imagine and recreate the conditions in which medieval minds and bodies felt religious devotion. Those conditions, however, relied on the religious literacy of the time. Medieval dramas provided people with the opportunity to feel themselves in relation to a religious view of the world – or obliged them to do so with varying degrees of coercion. In the final analysis, organizing the medieval repertoire by plot, purpose, style and performance context diverts us from the culturally situated content of the repertoire. There is a wholly human dimension to these plays. That dimension shows how the emotions basic to a dominant cultural orientation in Christianity – compassion, contrition, fear, anger and joy – underpin the shifts and changes in plots. Medieval drama might be read as an emotional palette, each emotional response registering a way of experiencing the world as sacred and profane depending on the vector the emotion takes. Medieval plays authorized repertoires of feeling, including the emotions underlying the violence that is virtually ubiquitous in medieval theatre. The Ordo Virtutum will remain a liturgical music-drama, the Secundum Pastorum a civic cycle play with comic and serious elements in a high literary style, and Confession Lessons a bawdy farce. Reading through emotion and affect opens these conventional classifications to considerations of what might have been important prior to the Renaissance interest in Aristotelian dramaturgy. But using affect as a structuring principle for medieval plays also reveals the ontology of medieval drama to be rooted in culturally sanctioned emotional responses. These should inform our taxonomic organizations of medieval drama. While the familiar taxonomy of our classification of medieval plays continues to serve, this approach enables us to uncover the ways medieval writers and audiences felt their way into dramatizing the sacred and the everyday. With affect as the structuring principle, theatrical scenarios we might first read as comic or farcical illuminate the soteriological worldview with the same clarity as they do the everyday.

CHAPTER NINE

Technologies of Performance KATIE NORMINGTON

The eighth pageant of the York Corpus Christi play opens with God asking Noah to use his skill to build an ark. It is a commission that Noah initially refuses given his age, but then at God’s insistence he agrees to construct the vessel. God is emphatic about the construction arrangements for the ark and, in following the text of Genesis, He specifies the type of tree to select, the size of the vessel and the method of construction, which includes covering the ark with pitch to bind the seams. It is uncertain as to how the building of the ark was represented in the pageant staging, but the Chester text comes closest to a clear suggestion. Here Noah’s wife, sons and daughters are sent off to gather various materials and we are told they ‘make signs of working with different tools’.1 It is also at Chester that Noah details further construction effects, noting that he will make a mast tied with cables and include a topcastle and bowsprit, both types of platforms on the deck.2 It is well worth considering such extensive attention to the building of the ark. Given that the pageants were often sponsored by trade guilds, theatre gave them the opportunity to display their skills: perhaps Noah was played by a shipwright, a member of the guild that sponsored the pageant at York. But above all, this moment also speaks to the link between emergent technologies and medieval performance. For medieval Britain, as for other countries, the matter of shipbuilding was one of important strategic and economic concern insofar as trading capabilities were core to the health of a country. Medieval times saw the technology of shipbuilding evolve from clinker-built boats in which the order of the construction of the boat

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was that the outer shell was built initially. New building techniques evolved in which an inner skeleton was instead developed first and the outer planking then hung off this; in effect a reversal of the old boat-building techniques. It is possible that the plays refer to this method of construction; at Chester Japheth makes a ‘pin’ or peg and speaks of how he can hammer these in, thereby indicating that boards were attached to a skeleton.3 During the flood scenes of the Royal National Theatre production of Tony Harrison’s Mysteries (1977 and 2000), Noah’s ark was made of a central plank, or spine, with rib-like curved braces extending from it; it echoed the skeleton build of medieval shipmanship.4 Medieval drama provided an opportunity for audiences to witness the technological advances that were being made. Indeed, my central argument in this chapter is that the spectacle of medieval theatre was one that drew upon the skills, knowledge and advances of contemporary technology and craft. Those responsible for staging myriad medieval entertainments including street dramas, civic plays, royal processions and private household dramas understood that the use of grand spectacle made events attractive to audiences. There are plentiful contemporaneous eyewitness descriptions of elaborate costumes and masks; and the enthusiasm for pyrotechnical displays oozes from the extant records of entertainments. Innovative stage effects were utilized whereby earthquakes could be simulated, or sleight-of-hand optical illusions were employed to create such desired effects as blood spurting from a body, or limbs adhering to external objects.5 There was nothing naïve or restrained about the staging of medieval drama; clearly audiences loved a large, impressive display as evidenced by the numerous records, discussed below, of processions containing large-scale puppets or humans dressed as animals. For the purposes of this chapter, ‘technologies of perfromance’ shall be taken to mean the use of scenic machinery such as trapdoors, hoists, and other mechanical devices, lighting and pyrotechnics, masks, puppets and properties. Although the term ‘technology’ was unknown until the seventeenth century, the origins from the Greek words tekhnologia (systematic treatment) and techne (craft or art) suggest a relevance to medieval culture where trade craft lay at the heart of innovation, and where the purpose of invention was to find an immediate daily application. This chapter will consider how developments in art, science and invention affected the representation and development of the production elements within medieval European theatre. Evidence of the precise use of technology within performance is, of course, limited. Some indications of how dramatic performances were presented come from extant records, household books, eyewitness accounts and treatises. These records are often unstable; eyewitness accounts may be partial, misremembered or misrecorded. There are only occasional stage directions in surviving play books. Even so, it is difficult to interpret these fragments of evidence. It is unclear whether some stage directions

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were utilized during every performance, or utilized at all, or whether they simply recorded one year’s event. For example, the English Corpus Christi plays were staged over a two-hundred-year period and any recorded example might pertain to the particular year in which the text was set down rather than a tradition that was played every year. The performance material discussed in this chapter is wide-ranging. It spans Europe from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries. It includes early church Latinate drama; dramas played within convents and monasteries; street dramas, such as the English Corpus Christi plays which told the life of Christ through individual pageants; outdoor Continental semi-liturgical plays; royal entries for monarchs; civic festivities; and private indoor theatricals sponsored by households. This range demonstrates the numerous ways in which entertainment found its way into various aspects of medieval life. In addition to shipbuilding, within medieval Europe there were significant technological advances linked to the development of timepieces and clockwork mechanisms, industrial compound pulleys and windlass systems, and advances in gunpowder to be used in warfare. All these technologies found their way to the stage.6 These industrial developments were reflected in the complex systems which produced the effect of moving waves and water in Italian drama, the smoking hellsmouth scenic piece at Valenciennes, and the pulley systems that raised God to heaven in the English pageant wagon productions, as documented in the York Mercers’ 1433 inventory.7 In fact, the sponsoring of the pageant plays at York by trade guilds shows how closely industrial development, labour and drama were entwined. Whether medieval theatre was played on the streets or in noblemen’s halls, or whether it was a formal court entertainment or impromptu street entertainment, it shared the convention that playing was about representing rather than about foregrounding realism in accordance with modern-day theatrical conventions. That is to say that, rather than stage a mimetic recreation of events, medieval theatre frequently used technology to capture imaginative and fanciful presentations. This can be seen through the portrayal of devils on stage, who appeared masked, drawing their visual representation from the many gargoyles that adorned churches, with horns and large animal ears, fangs and bulbous noses. The masks used the technology of the day and could sometimes emit fire or smoke. Twycross and Carpenter argue that masking allowed the disguised performer liberties that would not otherwise be afforded to unmasked players,8 but masks also allowed for a theatre which rebuked any attempt at verisimilitude which drew instead upon interpretative codes built around the imaginative depictions of such phenomena as a hell with the explosive colours, smoke and gargoyle-like characters to be found in medieval paintings, carvings and illustrations.9 It is this convention which underpinned the dramatic spectacles of the Middle Ages and I argue that it is one which drew

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upon the technology of the day and was ultimately brought into question as Renaissance invention changed the aesthetic values of the stage. I submit that technological advancements affected the systems of representation in medieval theatre as contemporary inventions that reached the stage created particular stylistic codes. It was however, further innovations that were to challenge medieval codes of representation and to lead to their gradual supplanting with a new set of values. The development of linear perspective painting was widely regarded as being created by Italian Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446). This advance was crucial as it caused the gradual development of a theatre associated with verisimilitude or a type of lifelike representation; conventions fundamental to the Renaissance. It shows how the technology of production – affected by the scientific, artistic and philosophical concerns of an age – was crucial to the definition of a theatrical epoch. The use of stage design defined medieval theatre with its largely symbolic theatrical systems, while the oncoming Renaissance, with its developing strategies of verisimilitude, formed a differing aesthetic. In short, technological development radically reshaped accepted theatrical codes.

MEDIEVAL STAGE TECHNOLOGIES The semi-liturgical French twelfth-century play, Le Jeu d’Adam, reveals how stage technologies – originally employed to develop agricultural and industrial productivity – can be combined to suggest an effective theatrical language. Set in three parts, the play details the biblical episodes of the Temptation and Fall of Mankind, the Cain and Abel episode and the Procession of the Prophets. The Jeu d’Adam is unusual for drama of the time as it contains a large number of stage directions in Latin within the Old French/Anglo-Norman text. From the textual directions it is clear that the technologies of scenic design and special effects were used to enhance the production, if indeed the textual directions are to be taken as evidence that the play was staged in that manner. At the start of the play it is evident that scenic design is a very effective part of the performance, for example the depiction of Eden is created through visual means: ‘let sweet-smelling flowers and foliage be planted; within let there be various trees, and fruits hanging on them, so that the place may seem as delightful as possible.’10 Were the play staged within medieval times, something of which we cannot be sure, it would have called for elaborate construction of the garden by skilled craftsmen. The play uses other scenic devices; it is later noted that ‘Then a serpent, artfully constructed [artificiose compositus], arises alongside the trunk of the forbidden tree’.11 Presumably to create this effect an articulated puppet serpent was fashioned through the use of pulleys or strings so that it could move along the tree. Other staging effects are created by a pulley and spring system. After Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden they work the land, something with which many of the audience would identify.

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While Adam and Eve rake and dig to clear the land, the stage direction reveals that the devil sows thorns and thistles [‘spinas et tribulos’] and that, through the use of a scenic mechanism the weeds immediately spring up on stage.12 I shall discuss the relationship between stage effects and the mechanical development of pulleys for warfare and timekeeping later; but the invention of the weighted catapult prior to 1200 demonstrates that such technological innovations were in existence at the time of writing the Jeu d’Adam. Overall, the play calls for the complex use of mechanisms and constructions which would draw upon the skills of local craftsmen and bring together the worlds of work and entertainment. Pyrotechnic stage effects are also used within the play. At the end of the Fall of Mankind sequence, Satan appears with four other devils and puts shackles around Adam and Eve and drags them to Hell: ‘And therein they will cause a great smoke to arise, and they will shout to one another in hell, rejoicing, and they will bang together their pots and caldrons [caldaria et lebetes].’13 The technical method of producing smoke within early performance has been examined in detail by Philip Butterworth. He draws upon evidence from the sixteenth-century Lucerne Passion play to suggest that smoke was created without gunpowder and through a combination of sulphur and saltpetre.14 Within the Jeu d’Adam it is evident that the stage relied upon the advancements of medieval times. For example, the shackles used for Adam and Eve drew upon artisanal skills in ironmongery, while the scenic mechanisms used to create the effect of growing weeds or the mechanical Satan puppet were developed from industrial pulley and spring systems. While this is just one example of how technology influenced scenography, it is clear that other developing technologies migrated to the stage.

DEVELOPMENTS IN MEDIEVAL TECHNOLOGY: GUNPOWDER Lynn Townsend White argues that ‘[t]he later Middle Ages, that is roughly from AD 1000 to the close of the fifteenth century, is the period of decisive development in the history of the effort to use the forces of nature mechanically for human purposes’.15 Amongst the developments included in this statement are water power, gunpowder and the like. In addition to these developments, White notes the rapid transmission of ideas that occurred during this time, meaning that new inventions travelled quickly from place to place. For example, seven years after their first appearance in Yorkshire in 1180, windmills were to be seen all over Europe.16 White asserts that ‘[b]y the latter part of the fifteenth century, Europe was equipped . . . with an arsenal of technical means for grasping, guiding, and utilizing such energies which was immeasurably more varied and skilful than any people of the past had possessed’.17 Many of these inventions were to travel from medieval working life to create effective spectacle on the stage.

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One of the more successful advances was in the use of gunpowder. The previous efficiency of gunpowder was a concern since it was composed from a mixture of loose materials; these tended to separate during transport and became ineffective or had to be hand-loaded into a firearm, which was risky and slow. In 1420 the invention of corned gunpowder – a mixture of large ‘corns’, or kernels, of the component parts of the chemical mixture – meant that much of the inefficiency was eliminated since the mixture was now more effectively bound together and the larger kernels had greater gaps between each corn which allowed an enhanced flow of oxygen which was necessary for successful ignition. Because of this new technology, corned gunpowder had larger explosive properties. This technology, undoubtedly of most use on the battlefield, also spread its sphere of influence to festivities such as preparations for the Midsummer Show at York in 1584. Recorded expenses include: ‘to mr brooke sherife for one dosen corn powther for the shott with the paginate xiiijs.’18 Mr Brooke was pageant master of the Mercers’ Guild in 1570 and later chamberlain of the city of York and probably purchased gunpowder in bulk for the use at city festivities. Fireworks were used liberally in medieval performances. As indicated above, these could be within civic festivities or as part of the spectacle of staged plays. It is often the devils who are associated with smoke and fire. For example, in the fifteenth-century Castle of Perseverance the stage direction says of Belial that ‘he that schal pleye Belyal loke that he hace gunne powder brennynge In pypys in his hands & in his eris & in his ars whanne he gothe to battlel’.19 The effect of having various parts of the body on fire is similar to that at Bourges where two devils belched fire from their mouths and horns, and had sparks flying from their hooves.20 One scenic piece particularly associated with smoke and fire was that of hellsmouth. The representation of Hell was found in many religious and secular dramas of the time and could be depicted by an area below the main performance platform or a scaffold to the side. Although it was sometimes just shown through a cordoned-off space entered via iron gates, it frequently had a mechanism which allowed players to descend from heaven or earth to reach hell. The hellsmouth often had a perpetual fire which could be stoked at apposite moments to produce billowing smoke. At Coventry a 1558 record shows that the Drapers paid fourpence ‘for kepyng of fyer at hell-mothe’.21 The advances made in the development of gunpowder were just one way in which technological invention affected the medieval stage, enabling a more spectacular and safer delivery of pyrotechnical displays through the adoption of corned gunpowder.

PULLEYS, COUNTERWEIGHT AND CLOCKS Alongside the development of gunpowder, the use of counterweights became increasingly important for warfare in medieval Europe. By 1200 a catapult, or

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trebuchet, had been developed which used a weighted system. As shown in Figure 9.1, this weighted catapult used principles of force and counterweight to increase the power of propulsion. This invention, designed to aid victory in warfare, is believed by Lynn Townsend White to have led to further technological developments as the weighted system aided improved clock mechanisms. Such advancement can be seen in the elaborate gearing of Giovanni de’ Dondi’s 1364 clock, which incorporated not only a time mechanism but also a perpetual calendar of all religious feasts and the movement of five planets and the sun and moon. The adoption and transmission of technology was again rapid and by the late fourteenth century, around eighty European cities had added public clocks to their town centres.22 Thanks to emerging clock technology new skills were brought to craftsmen and this knowledge of mechanical devices and weighted mechanisms found its way to the medieval stage. This is exemplified in scenic pieces that utilized a pulley system, such as the growth of the weeds in the Jeu d’Adam, which was written at the same time as the trebuchet came into being. Meanwhile knowledge of mechanical workings allowed the development of complexity amongst automata and puppets. These devices could be found in stand-alone pieces or integrated into larger entertainments, and as Groenevald has argued the automata were a product not just of artistic intent but were individualized by the makers charged with their craft and construction.23 An example of a standalone piece can be found at Boxley, Kent, in the ‘Rood of Grace’, a crucifix with an internal mechanism that allowed the eyes and mouth to move.24 The mechanism was created through the use of ‘stringes of haire’, lengths of hair used for their fineness and strength which when pulled enabled the mechanism to move the eyes and mouth of Christ.25 Mechanically articulated joints were also found in a number of other medieval entertainments. These frequently made use of pulleys, springs, counterweights, ropes and clockwork mechanisms. For example, the London Midsummer Shows in the 1540s included giant puppets which were presumably jointed since they reportedly moved as if they were alive: ‘Gyants marching as if they were aliue, and armed at all points, but within they are stuffed full of browne paper.’26 Similarly, the civic entry of Henry V and his wife, Katherine of Valois, to London in 1421 had ‘giants of a huge statute ingeniously constructed to bow at the right moment, lions which could roll their eyes and make other appropriate gestures’.27 Figure 9.2 shows the splendour of another royal entry, that of Henri II into Rouen, France. The king’s entry to the city is accompanied by a water convoy which represents Neptune with sea nymphs, dolphins and other fantastical creatures that must have been carved by local artisans. Other evidence suggests that trade craft was used to create special effects within medieval entertainments. Some texts called for water to spring from the

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FIGURE 9.1: Trebuchet. Woodcut from Roberto Valtmio, De Re Militari (Paris, 1534). Science and Society Picture Library. Getty Images.

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FIGURE 9.2: Nautical festivities in Rouen, on the occasion of the arrival of Henri II and Catherine de Medici. Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal. Paris, France, 1550. Getty Images.

earth, such as the late fourteenth-century Cornish ordinalia. The Lucerne Passion Play gives some indication of how this might have happened. Here there is a note to the producers of the play: the rock is to be made artificially, namely a container (beheb) which will take a good amount of water under a cover, arranged and made so that it looks like a rock with at three or four places glass or brazen bungs (zapffen) sticking out which Moses strikes out when the water is in flow.28 The rock is constructed in such a way that after Moses dislodges the secret plug that initiates the flow, the appearance is of water flowing from the rock. The use of technologies developed from industrial advances demonstrates how systems such as pulleys and clockwork-type mechanisms could be utilized on stage to create effects which appeared to the audience as if created by magic. However, the secret to this magic lay in the skill of the craftsmen employed to create the effects. While it is possible to see the effects of technological advances on the medieval stage, it is impossible to track the transmission of the development of the innovation from the point of invention to the innovation reaching the stage. The case of the development of clockwork mechanisms

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shows this. For example, while it has been noted earlier that by the end of the fourteenth century many European cities had town clocks, the rise of the craft was slow. A clockmakers’ guild did not exist in Paris until 1544. What emerges is a pattern of innovation created through networks and incremental advancement with clockmakers often evolving from apprenticeships with Smiths; given they needed both metallurgical and mechanical skills this was perhaps not surprising. Epstein notes that, ‘Guilds incubated technological innovations and could claim some credit for these technological advances’.29 The pattern of the development of innovation through the umbrella of broader trade guilds meant that the transmission of ideas and skills was incremental, although the mobility of skilled workers meant new ideas often travelled across Europe rapidly. Such patterns of adoption mean it is difficult to pinpoint the exact transmission of new innovations to specific medieval plays, but records of production indicate that the advancing technologies were doubtless incorporated into stage effects at some point.

LIGHT AND MIRRORS The notion of candles as symbols of purity, life and hope were embedded in the liturgy and would be well known to medieval parishioners, who were used to carrying a blessed candle during religious ceremonies such as the Purification and at Candlemas. Candles or tapers used as part of the church ceremony easily transferred to liturgical dramatic settings. For example, in the Fleury Visitatio the angel at Christ’s tomb holds a branched candelabrum in his right hand, while at Coutances the angels carry hollow rods stuffed with candles which denote the lightning at the sepulchre. As William Tydeman notes, some of the most interesting stage effects in liturgical plays stemmed from the use of fire and light.30 The Middle Ages brought in changes to established candle-making. Previously candles were made from tallow and emitted black soot when they burnt, ruining most of the wall coverings. From the twelfth century onward, however, dipped pure beeswax candles were produced which led to the establishment of a guild of beeswax chandlers in the fourteenth century, and to the introduction of strict protection laws to maintain the purity of the candles. Figure 9.3 shows a stall displaying a variety of dipped candles for sale. Given the purity of candles and the lack of damage caused by the flame, churches now embraced their use. The 1529 inventory from Long Melford Church in Suffolk reveals that an astonishing seventeen candlesticks were owned by the church, which indicates that candles were used on a grand scale.31 The power of the candle was particularly known to the shepherds of Holbeach, East Anglia, who founded a guild of the Blessed Virgin. They argued to local officials that, having guarded their sheep during the night, they could

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FIGURE 9.3: Selling medieval candles. Tacuinum Sanitatis (fourteenth century, Italy). Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, MS 4182, fol. 30 [XXX ].

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not attend early Mass and instead maintained the torches at the church.32 This link between shepherds and candles was also found in the English Corpus Christi plays. At York, the medieval guild of candlemakers, the Chandlers, were assigned the Annunciation to the Shepherds pageant with a stunning opportunity to create the star that signals the birth of Christ. The text gives some key to the spectacle; the Second Shepherd remarks that they are to await a star: A sterne shulde schyne and signifie With lightfull lemes like any day.33 The stage action of the shepherds spotting and following the star gave the Chandlers an opportunity to exhibit their wares.34 It is possible that they used wires to create the effect of a floating star – such illusions were commonplace at the time and are captured by Sir Hugh Plat in Delights for Ladies, first printed in 1609 where he describes state-of-the-art candle techniques: 40. How to hang your candles in the ayre without a candlestick. This will make strange shew to the beholders that know not the conceit. It is done in this manner: Let Virginall wyar bee conveied in the middest of every week, and left of some length above the Candle, to fasten the same to the postes in the roof of you house; & if the room be any thing high roofed, it will be hardly discerned and the flame though it some the tallow, yet it will not melt the wyer.35 Plat suggests that long wires were passed through the wick of each candle and then attached to a high beam in the room so that they appear to float in the air as they burn. A similar wire technique might have been used by the Chandlers in the Annunciation to the Shepherds to create the star. The use of reflective materials was often combined with light within staged drama so that the greatest dramatic effect could be achieved. The Transfiguration at Revello in 1483 included the use of reflection to create an image of the transfiguration of Christ: And when Jesus is on the mountain let there be a polished bowl which makes the brightness of the sun striking the bowl reflect on Jesus towards his disciples. Then Jesus shall let fall his crimson garment and appear in white garments. And if the sun is not shining, let there be torches and some other lights.36 The use of technology to fashion the effect of a halo of light surrounding Christ shows how innovation could be used to create a stunning consequence for the audience. As Fleckenstein notes, the flourishing of mirror-making technologies

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at the time led to an increase of decorous spectacle in the performance arena.37 It is clear that the medieval stage quickly adopted these practices and used light and reflection to great effect. The metaphor of light was central to the religious message that was conveyed by much medieval drama, and the use of light and mirrors enabled the production of a sense of heavenliness and holiness.

SCENIC PAINTING AND STAGE PROPERTIES Numerous records show how everyday craftsmen were employed in medieval times to utilize their trade skills to create large stage pieces. Records often show the employment of local artisans to construct set and property pieces and to paint backdrops. The community staging of The Mystery of the Great Judgement of God in Modane, France, in 1580 reveals that a contract was issued to local painters Thomas Mellurin Sr and Jr in which they were instructed: First, they shall undertake to paint Hell and the sea on cloth or heavy fabric of such size as they are instructed. To paint the sky with stars, the sun, the moon with such skill that they said sun shall appear black to those watching and the moon red . . . they will make several limbs that look like the limbs of people killed in the battle with the semblance of blood on those thus killed and wounded.38 This description is telling as the instructions set up a symbolic world in which the sun appears black and the moon red to signify destruction within the scene. It is apparent in descriptions like these that the craft of the workers brought together technological knowledge to create a stage idiom that signified elements of the drama and created a symbolic language on stage. Moreover, as Pamela Sheingorn has argued, the fundamental visual nature of medieval drama is often lost on modern interpreters who are unfamiliar with the symbolism of medieval stage iconography.39 The indoor drama performed at the Household of Miguel Lucas de Iranzo at Jaen in 1461 details elaborate stage effects: In front of the place where they Countess was seated, there then appeared the head of this huge dragon (serpiente). It was made of painted wood, and a device inside it (su artificio) propelled the boys out through its mouth one by one, and it breathed huge flames at the same time. And the pages, whose tunics, sleeves, and hoods were soaked in spirits (arguardiente), came out on fire, and it seemed that they were really being burned up in flames.40 The use of technology to create the giant dragon that spewed fire whilst also having a mechanism that caused the boys to be ejected, reveals how medieval

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theatre brought together spectacle and innovation to create an impressive showpiece. Here the skill of the makers had to accommodate both the mechanism to eject the boys and the spectacle of fire through which they appeared unscathed. Many dramatic moments required properties that were specially adapted for the stage. This is particularly evident in the false knives that were needed to accomplish a piece of stage action. For example, the effects for the Mystery of the Acts of the Apostles (Bourges, 1536) were itemized as follows: ‘There must be a fake (faincte) knife for the Bishop of India with which he shall strike St. Thomas in the stomach and kill him.’41 Meanwhile the Volume of Secrets of a Provençal Director’s Book (Il quaderno di segreti d’un regista provenzale del Medioevo), indicates that trick knives for the stage were often filled with pockets of liquefied vermillion so that a show of blood could be made after a stabbing.42 Often the blood was held in pigs’ bladders which served as bags to contain the liquid until they were pierced. Jean Michel’s Mystère de la Passion (1486) includes a stage direction that instructs: ‘here Judas bursts at the belly and the guts fall out and the soul comes out.’43 It is interesting to note the way in which the producers or recorder see physical stage action (the bursting of the gut) as also symbolizing the release of the soul. This shows that the stage language is received as something other than literal. Other bloody stage effects are in evidence elsewhere, for example, the St George Play in Turin in 1429 included severed heads on the property list.44 The use of large-scale set pieces, gigantic puppets and pyrotechnics created for the audience the sense of a world other than their own. This staging in which blood spurted forth, or black suns and red moons appeared, enabled the development of a symbolic stage language that allowed a stylized signification of the events. It was a world in which humans were set alongside more fanciful representations, drawn from the rich iconography to be found in medieval carvings, paintings and illustrations. This notion of entwining the human and symbolic dimensions was amplified by the frequent presentation of God and Christ either as masked or painted in gold. As Twycross and Carpenter point out, gold leaf could have been applied directly to the face with adhesive to create the effect of painted gold, and records bear this out.45 The Chester Smiths’ pageant of Jesus and the Doctors in the Temple included a child Jesus with his face painted gold. At Chester a gilded Christ also rode into Jerusalem in the Entry to Jerusalem.46 A particular feature of medieval theatre, as noted earlier by Twycross and Carpenter, is that masked and unmasked characters shared the same stage.47 There appears to have been a convention in the English Corpus Christi plays that the human, earthly, characters were unmasked but that God, Christ and the devils were masked, although the York Mercers’ record shows that the good souls were also masked in The Last Judgement. Masks worn by devils

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were traditionally black so that at a mumming for Richard II in 1377 there were ’8 or 10 arrayed and with black vizerdes like devils appering nothing amiable’.48 The masks for devils were often grotesque with bulbous features, fangs, tusks or uneven teeth, had warts, large animals ears or horns (see Figure 9.4), and reflected the skill of the artisan craftsman who would have made these masks from leather, paper or wire. They were, in effect, part human and part animal (see Figure 9.5). This combination of human and animal forms was extended further, and some entertainments had whole animal heads as masks; for example, at Toledo there was a donkey’s head recorded alongside

FIGURE 9.4: Grotesque mask with distorted features with acorns and oak leaves. Cornelis Floris, Italy (1560). V & A collection 2006AW 2547-01.

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FIGURE 9.5: Actor wearing a devil costume. Miniature from the Renaud de Montauban cycle, France, fifteenth century. Getty Images.

masks for the devils.49 This use of a hybrid performing mode with masked and unmasked characters alongside each other shows how medieval theatre drew upon a rich visual language to symbolically represent the dimensions of heaven or hell.

ADVANCING TECHNOLOGIES: CORPUS CHRISTI PLAYS Perhaps nowhere is the link between technological advance within medieval trade and theatrical representation more compelling than in the English Corpus Christi plays which are thought to have been played in ten or more cities in medieval England. There are, however, only two extant text cycles that remain

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which are clearly linked to specific places of performance: those at Chester and York. It is York that provides the clearest model for possible performance. The plays, performed in a cycle of forty-eight to fifty-two individual pageants, were produced and enacted by local craft guilds. They were staged on Corpus Christi Day, a moveable date between mid-May and mid-June, and one which is notably close to Midsummer Day with its long daylight hours. The intrinsic link between the plays and work guilds can be seen through a series of remaining documents. The Ordo Paginarum dates from 1415 and is a catalogue listing the name of the pageant and the trade guild responsible for the production of the plays. This does not fully match the Register of plays thought to have been compiled somewhat later, around 1460–70. This mismatch between these two records demonstrates the malleability of the plays as it is likely that over time some guilds became unable to produce plays and others took them over. The Chester texts are less stable records, given that the extant play texts were transcribed after the plays ceased production in the sixteenth century. However, the pre-Reformation Banns of around 1500–20 list the pageants and their owning guild and give some sense of the vestimentary splendour attached to the production. For example, records for the Mercers’ production read: With sondry cullors it shall shine Of velvet, satten and damaske fine.50 The method of production of the plays further cemented the relationship between the city, the guilds and the dramas. At York the plays were performed on wagons that were pulled around the city, stopping at between ten to sixteen ‘stations’ or places. In this manner the plays offered a demarcation of the city and its trading boundaries, defining those that fell within its boundary as legitimized parts of the working city. The relationship between trade and the plays was found not only in the method of staging but also in the material content of the texts. Both the York and Chester cycles show how the tenet of work is central to the communication of the Creation to Doomsday plays. The cycle begins with God’s labour to create the earth and the Old Testament plays that follow emphasize trade and craft through pageants such as Noah’s flood, which as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, includes the building of the ark. Similarly, the Nativity primarily focuses on the episode from the point of view of the shepherd’s toil. The Second Shepherds’ Play from the Towneley cycle pays particular attention to the lowly working status of the shepherds: Bot we sely shepardes that walkys on the moore, In fayth we ar nere handys outt of the doore.

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No wonder, as it standys, if we be poore, For the tylthe of oure landys lyys falow as the floore.51 The control of production by the trade guilds and focus of the plays upon the theme of labour do much to crystallize the notion that work and its associated technologies is inextricably linked to the plays. Kathleen Ashley takes this relationship further in her analysis and sees that the emphasis on work throughout the cycles sets up a further dynamic: Throughout the first seven plays of the cycle, which depict the Creation of the world and falls of Lucifer, Adam, Eve, and Cain, God establishes the importance of work by describing himself as the perfectionist master craftsman, continually seeking recognition for his accomplishments.52 The display of master craftsmanship was in evidence at the finale to the York cycles, The Last Judgement. As the wealthiest guild in York the Mercers, merchant traders in high-end goods, fittingly staged the last pageant and used the opportunity to display their wealth and technical innovation. A surviving document, the York Mercers’ 1433 Indenture, lists the requirements of their pageant. It is evident that their pageant wagon was two-storeyed, with a higher level for God, and it had a hellsmouth, probably located underneath the wagon. Further evidence of master craftsmanship was displayed through the use of the many nuanced stage properties: the angel wings are tipped with iron to support them, there is a timber-constructed rainbow, and a shirt painted with the wounds of Christ. Most inventively, God ascends to the top storey of the pageant wagon on a seat operated by four pulleys. Heaven is a splendid affair with red and blue clouds, sun beams of gold and a mechanical set of rotating small angels which can ‘renne about in þe heuen’.53 It is clear that local craftsmen were used to create these stage effects; the Mercers’ pageant documents two years later show payments to a blacksmith for the ironwork and to painters for their labour.54 The York Crucifixion pageant was staged by the guild of Pinners, or nailmakers, who had a grotesque time of displaying the effectiveness of their product as they nailed Christ to the cross. In fact the pageant is presented as a gruesome black comedy as the soldiers stretch, pull and hammer Christ’s body onto their ill-fitting cross. While Christ’s body is probably horizontal on the floor for most of the action, it is the inept workers who take centre stage as they try to show their competency: ‘So þat oure wirkyng be noght wronge.’55 Indeed, the whole crucifixion scene centres on the suffering and strain that stretching and lifting Christ’s body causes to the workers. The first attempt to lift the cross fails, but by the second, they drop it into the mortice with such a jolt that they note, ‘þis fallyng was more felle/ þan all the harmes he hadde’.56 Even then, the mortice is too wide for the cross and they are forced to wedge it steady.

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The production of the Crucifixion pageant was in later years additionally supported by the Painters, who had opportunity to create the bloody effects needed for the Christ’s death. There are, however, no records that pertain to this, nor the mechanism by which Christ was held on the cross, although they may have used techniques similar to that at Provence. Butterworth notes that the late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century publication, Volume of Secrets of a Provençal Stage Director’s Book, cited above, reveals records from staging the Provençal Resurrection: It is necessary that the mechanism of the cover, when it will be lifted [bored?], should be equipped with a pulley on its lower part and that the cover be rigged at a spanna [unit of measurement – relating to the span of a hand?] from its end, and the actor should pull a rope when he will want to lower it, and when he will want to raise it he will let go.57 Here a pulley system is used to enable the raising and lowering of Christ’s body. Overall, the production of the Corpus Christi plays brought together the trade guilds who, through the staging of their pageants, were able to utilize their working skills and technological innovation as the wagons were pulled through the trading centre of the city. The journey of the wagons through the city served as an elaborate metaphor for the manner in which the plays united industrial innovation, craftsmanship and theatrical representation.

CONCLUSION Be it Church Latinate drama, civic religious plays or household entertainment, the staging of medieval drama was heavily influenced by the working practices and the advances in the technology of the time. Nowhere was this clearer than in the English Corpus Christi plays, which were sponsored by trade guilds to demonstrate their wares. Dramas were inspired by the economic productivity of the time to create their spectacles through gunpowder, pulleys, weighted and sprung mechanisms. The many payments to craftsmen in the records that pertain to English cycle plays show how engaged the trades were in producing the plays. Needless to say, any essay on stage technologies in medieval times necessitates marshalling evidence in order to create a coherent picture and, in so doing, signalling the way in which medieval theatre differs from other theatrical idioms. The very process of doing this establishes the use of periodization as a dominant force. It is this concept on which I would like to dwell for these final moments. Interestingly, in Must We Divide History Into Periods? Jacques Le Goff explores the reasons why historians have divided time into epochs. His

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argument is that periodization did not emerge until the Middle Ages.58 Le Goff believes that there was in fact a ‘long Middle Ages’ which runs from late antiquity (between the third and seventh century) to the mid-eighteenth century and that the Renaissance was an integral component of this period, rather than a separate entity.59 It is Le Goff’s contention that, while there was a change during this period in which interest developed in humanism and the exploration of new worlds led to an emergent globalism, that change was not significant enough to herald the establishment of a separate Renaissance but rather, a number of smaller renaissances, or launches of new ideas. Le Goff draws on evidence to support his case from a wide range of disciplines, that of art history, philosophy, religion and navigation, to name a few. But from the standpoint of the development of theatre, which Le Goff does not consider, there is a quite clear demarcation between medieval and Renaissance drama. One had no purpose-built theatres, or professional actors and frequently focused on religious material and therefore depicted God, devils, angels and the like on stage. The other was often performed in playhouses by an increasingly professionalized body of actors and writers and centred on the human being rather than religious material. These differences were also apparent in the underpinning technologies that influenced their theatrical idioms. From the Renaissance came a different way of viewing and representing life. The development of linear perspective painting discovered by Brunelleschi in the fifteenth century was based upon lines called ‘othogonals’, created by applying principles of Euclidean geometry. The developing artistic focus on perspective, also influenced by Vitruvius’s De Architectura (1486), found its way to theatrical creation and a production of Ariosto’s La Cassaria in Italy in 1508 is the first recorded use of perspective scenery. From this development came a technology, which led to a new aesthetic on the stage, one based in verisimilitude and a growing interest in humanism that demanded a different set of ideologies and technologies in its representation from that of the symbolic world of the Middle Ages. Theatre and technology, as they change over time, remind us that scientific developments are often a catalyst in creating the representational ideologies of an epoch.

CHAPTER TEN

Knowledge Transmission Media and Memory CAROL SYMES

The challenge of knowing about medieval theatre is similar to that of recovering any improvised, oral, or undocumented performance tradition – including those of the present day. But this particular challenge is compounded by the uniquely narrow ways that medieval sources have been interpreted for the past five hundred years. Ever since ‘the Middle Ages’ became an object of study, its modes of performance have been deemed largely irrelevant to the history of theatre. Medieval Europeans did not build structures defined as ‘theatres’ and few communities in any part of the medieval world produced texts recognizable (to us) as dramatic scripts. Indeed, we do not possess much explicit evidence of theatre until the later fourteenth century, so the archive on which most scholars rely represents only a small and very recent fraction of a millennium’s theatrical activity.1 Most of what we ‘know’ about earlier varieties of medieval theatre is what certain proscriptive texts critiqued or forbade.2 The combination of these factors has given rise to a powerful narrative of medieval ignorance and artistic censorship. As this story has it, proponents of the newly powerful Christian religion uprooted the flourishing dramatic culture of pagan antiquity, replacing it with a puritanical round of religious rituals; the few trained actors who managed to survive this purge were anathematized and persecuted. Eventually, the story continues, clerics began to invent a distinctive species of medieval drama fashioned from the liturgy, but this drama remained staid and conservative until it evolved enough to spill into the streets of some medieval towns: hence the texts that become more prevalent in the fifteenth

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century. These medieval dramatic organisms, in turn, would be rendered extinct by the professional theatre of the sixteenth century, with its purpose-built playhouses and proper plays. By the logic of this narrative, the only reason to study the residue of medieval ‘theatre’ is in order to understand how classical traditions were eradicated and how the truly theatrical genres of modernity ultimately triumphed. Although this narrative has been frequently challenged in the past few decades, notably by the contributors to this volume, the assumptions sustaining it still undergird all standard accounts of theatre’s history and they continue to determine the research agenda of medieval theatre studies, which remains largely confined to the study of scripted plays produced in the two centuries prior to Shakespeare, and which is overwhelmingly focused on England.3 So before we can ask how medieval theatre practitioners themselves transmitted knowledge, we need to address crucial epistemological problems. I begin by reassessing what early Christians knew about the theatre of antiquity. I then turn to the ways that classical dramatic texts and ideas were received in the Greek-speaking eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) and Latin Christendom (Western Europe). Next, I examine the problematic relationship between performance and documentation in an era that prized and trusted oral and embodied media of communication, and which has therefore yielded few surviving scripts and very little direct evidence for the trade secrets – the mysteries – that constituted practical theatrical knowledge. Only a better understanding of the frameworks (cultural, social, institutional) that generated and constrained such sources will generate new knowledge about medieval theatre. New narratives based on this knowledge will be able to show how medieval dramatic praxis sustained and enhanced many elements of the classical inheritance while developing its own innovations. Not only did medieval theatre provide the essential ingredients of early modern (Renaissance) drama, its spirit was reborn in the postmodern theatre of the twentieth century.

MEDIEVAL KNOWLEDGE OF ANCIENT THEATRE Apart from occasional archeological discoveries or the recent reconstructions of ancient theatres, everything we know about the drama of antiquity comes from medieval sources. Those who tout the negative effects of medieval ignorance have ignored the fact that all surviving classical texts were transmitted through the labours of medieval scribes, commentators, teachers and literati.4 Medieval people, clerical or lay, therefore played no part in the ‘demise’ of ancient drama. The tragedies and comedies created in Athens during the fifth century BCE were already becoming obsolete in Aristotle’s time, as the conventions of theatre changed throughout the Hellenistic world. By the second century BCE , a few of these classic dramatic texts were lauded as canonical because they were literary fossils, not scripts supporting a living tradition.5

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Moreover, the entertainments enjoyed in the popular theatres of the Roman Empire, or in private houses, were very different from those classic texts.6 And early Christian leaders were understandably critical of these entertainments because they were linked to the dominant religions and mores of the day.7 The theologian Tertullian (Tertullianus, c. 160–c. 225), for example, circulated a pamphlet ‘About theatrical shows’ (De spectaculis) during a period when his fellow Christians were being persecuted by the Roman governor of Carthage; not unreasonably, he discouraged them from attending dangerous, politically charged performances. It is from this single source – composed more than a century before Christianity became legal – that most references to the ‘medieval’ intolerance of theatre are derived. A careful contextualization of anti-theatrical rhetoric in subsequent sources reveals the Church fathers actually striving to compete with popular theatrical genres by replacing them with equally compelling Christian forms of entertainment. It is not a coincidence that the great preachers of the day, Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and John ‘Golden Mouth’ Chrysostom (347–407), were famous for their showmanship.8 Meanwhile, their non-Christian contemporaries were also vigorously decrying the decadence of contemporary theatre, and some of these critics wielded powers that no Christian bishop could hope to exercise. In 363, the pagan emperor Julian (r. 361–63) was so disgusted by ‘the licentious theatrical shows’ of his realm that he forbade (pagan) priests to attend them. In a letter to the (pagan) High Priest of Asia, the emperor wished that ‘it were possible to expel such shows from the theatres altogether, and to give back purified offspring to Dionysos’.9 But it was not. Despite the total absence of evidence, the myth that Christian leaders closed down theatres remains extremely influential. According to the prominent classicist Stephen Halliwell, hostility toward entertainment was inherent in Christianity, whose ‘antigelastic tendencies’ (hatred of laughter: gélos) ‘contributed to a long medieval inheritance’ of mirthlessness.10 On the contrary: scholars of the early Church are now emphasizing the myriad ways that Christian scripture and ritual were deeply indebted to popular genres of Greco-Roman theatre, including comic ones.11 And as Christianity’s status became more secure within the Roman and post-Roman world, the shared cultural vocabulary of theatre became more and more positive.12 By this time, of course, not even the most learned of intellectuals had any direct experience of classical drama in performance. But luckily, thanks to these same intellectuals, the legacy of classical dramatic traditions would be revived and remodelled to suit the changing times.

TRANSMITTING AND ADAPTING CLASSICAL DRAMA IN THE MEDIEVAL WORLD In the medieval eastern Roman Empire, the surviving works of revered Athenian dramatists circulated more widely than before the spread of Christianity, in

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both collected editions and anthologies of literary excerpts (florilegia). A dozen would attain special prominence, the ‘Triads’ of a given poet’s most esteemed works: for Æschylus Prometheus Bound, Persians, Seven against Thebes; for Sophocles Ajax, Electra, Œdipus the King; for Euripides Hecuba, Orestes, Phoencian Women; and for Aristophanes Wealth, Clouds, Frogs. These were the texts that every minimally educated person was expected to know.13 At the same time, the terminology of classical drama was being applied to a whole range of new comic and tragic genres, whether lyrical or didactic, rhetorical or religious.14 In the ninth century, scribes began to develop techniques that would assist unskilled readers in the performance of all these texts, including character designations and didascaliae (stage directions). These editorial efforts became all the more necessary as classical Attic meter (quantitative, based on the length of vowels) had to be reconciled with newer Greek meters (based on stress). These organic changes led to the proliferation of further aids: epitomes (summaries), marginal glosses, prefaces and scholia (commentaries), all designed to help the reader-performer come to grips with texts that were both familiar and strange.15 The status of Shakespeare’s plays in our own culture is analogous: most people find them difficult, yet they are still widely studied and performed; they have also yielded a significant percentage of our everyday vocabulary. For although the number of classical plays in circulation was modest, the ways they could be recycled were infinite. A favourite practice was to compose a cento, a poetic ‘patchwork’ made up of dramatic quotations rearranged to tell a different story. The resulting effects were dependent on the audience’s shared memory of the quotations in their original contexts – and appreciation of the witty or lascivious meanings imparted by their new settings. While overtly mimetic representations were technically unacceptable within the purview of the Orthodox Church – a tenet that had led to a ban on the veneration of icons during the seventh and eighth centuries – certain kinds of classically inflected drama flourished even during this time of controversy. For example, highly competitive solo acts were staged in venues called theatra: gathering places that included classrooms, lecture halls and courts. These one-man shows derived from ‘spoken word’ (ethopoeia) exercises central to the scholastic curriculum, in which students composed and performed speeches ascribed to iconic characters in dramatic situations, such as What Death might have said in reaction to the raising of Lazarus? or What a sailor might have said seeing Icarus flying high?16 Long dismissed as ‘merely’ rhetorical exercises, these dramatic tours de force are now the object of significant re-assessment.17 Again, we can find an apt analogy in the crossover between the practitioners of schoolroom or university drama and those of professional theatre in the later medieval and early modern periods. In Western Europe, received knowledge of ancient dramatic traditions was indelibly stamped on public life through the rituals of the Roman Church and

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through the rhetorical arts of preaching, persuasion, letter-writing, legal discourse, and storytelling.18 The reception of Greek drama, specifically, was limited – a trend that had begun long before the Middle Ages, as we have already noted, and which had been exacerbated in the western Roman empire by polices like those of Augustus Cæsar (27 BCE –14 CE ), who had vigorously promoted the literary prestige of Latin and encouraged poets to eschew or surpass Greek models. (While some well-born Romans of late antiquity continued to regard Greek as the gold standard of cultivation, most of them did not attain it; a brilliant teacher like Augustine could secure a prized academic post with only a rudimentary knowledge of that language.) But just as the received canon of Athenian drama was at the core of Byzantine education, the main vehicle for learning Latin was the corpus of comedies by the Roman playwright Terence, based closely on the New Comedy of Menander and Apollodoros.19 Students not only read the plays, they performed them. Before that, they were taking in bits and pieces of Terentian comedy through the grammatical exercises of Donatus, who had been the tutor of St Jerome (c. 347–420) and who thus (indirectly) influenced Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible, the chief source of raw material across all theatrical media and artistic genres in the medieval West.20 Terentian comedy’s role as a cultural bridge between classical antiquity and the medieval West became even more vital as the relationship between classical Latin and emerging medieval vernaculars became more and more distant – meaning that formal education had to begin with learning Latin from scratch. This is illustrated by the number of Terentian manuscripts in circulation. One of the oldest extant codices – that is, a book consisting of pages bound between covers, rather than a scroll – is an incomplete copy of the plays dating from around the year 400, decorated with fluid pen-and-ink drawings.21 A book similar to this one would have provided the exemplar for the many deluxe copies of Terence made at the court of the Frankish king and ‘Holy’ Roman emperor Louis the Pious (r. 814–40).22 The most famous of these, the Vatican Terence (Figure 10.1), is clearly based on a late antique model and is lavishly illuminated with scenes that replicate performances of the plays, by actors wearing masks.23 These are undeniably the closest approximations of late Roman stage practice that have come down to us.24 As in Byzantium, the texts most frequently taught in Western Europe proliferated; others were copied very seldom, making them scarce. But at the end of the eighth century, a remarkable group of scholars and artists were assembled at the court of Charlemagne (r. 768–814) and were charged to standardize Church ritual and to increase the quality of classical texts in circulation. New forms of musical notation and a new type of handwriting – the Carolingian miniscule you are reading now – made the copying of texts faster, while word separation and punctuation facilitated reading and performance.25

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FIGURE 10.1: Page from an early medieval manuscript of Terence’s comedies, copied from a late antique Roman exemplar. Rome, Biblioteca apostolica Vaticana MS lat. 3868, fol.4v (detail). Reproduced by permission.

All of these efforts fuelled teaching and learning in princely and episcopal households, as well as in monasteries: hence the large numbers of Terence manuscripts.26 Classroom exercises and courtly entertainments alike attest to a passion for classically influenced plays shared by schoolboys and saints, clerks and kings. Archbishop Bruno of Cologne, brother of Emperor Otto the Great (r. 936–73), especially encouraged the performance of comic plays in his court, and it was this milieu that nurtured the first known female playwright in world history; for when Hrotsvitha (c. 935–1002) and her friend Gerberga (the

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emperor’s niece) entered the abbey of Gandersheim, they brought these pursuits with them.27 Over the ensuing centuries, accordingly, dozens of Terenceinspired Latin comedies were composed, some circulating in hundreds of manuscripts, testifying to their perennial popularity. Meanwhile, received knowledge of ancient tragedy explicitly informed an array of religious and didactic texts and practices. The theologian Gerhoh of Reichersberg (1093–1169) compared the drama of Scripture to that of ancient theatre. Honorius Augustodunensis (1075/80–c. 1156) envisioned the priest’s role in the performance of the Mass as that of the tragic protagonist in the theatre: a metaphor that became the basis for a new theology of pastoral care. The playwright and theologian Peter of Blois taught that sympathy for the suffering of tragic characters, like Arthur or Tristan, prepared the soul to experience the suffering of Christ. Indeed, Peter was referring to popular genres of vernacular entertainment that were also indebted to classical models and often produced by authors trained in cathedral and monastery schools.28 To be sure, direct access to the texts of ancient Greek drama would remain rare in the Latin West – until a flood of refugees and their books arrived in Italy during the fifteenth century, in the course of the Ottoman conquest of Byzantium.29 Yet many Greek-speaking communities remained in the Mediterranean and in Italy, and some continued to read and produce Greek texts: there was, for instance, a copy of Aristophanes’ comedies at a monastery near the pilgrimage centre of Bari on the Adriatic coast.30 There is even evidence that entertainers from northern Europe were learning about classical dramatic genres through increased contact with their Mediterranean counterparts.31 Indirect knowledge also spread through Latin translations of Arabic texts, most notably the commentary on the first (and only surviving) book of Aristotle’s Poetics, authored by the Andalusian scholar Averroës (Ibn Rushd, 1126–98). It was widely disseminated by Hermannus Alemannus (fl. 1240–56), a Germanborn member of the School of Translators in Toledo, and is still extant in some two dozen manuscript copies. And it was as confusing as it was influential, because Averroës applied Aristotle’s categories to very different Arabic genres, making ‘tragedy’ synonymous with mad¯ı h., a term Hermannus rendered as encomium.32 Those Europeans who read Hermannus’s translation, then, came to conceptualize tragedy as a high poetic style suitable for praise, as opposed to comedy as a vehicle for ridicule. This creative (mis)interpretation has since been the focus of most scholarship on the medieval transmission of classical genres, cementing the stereotype of medieval ignorance.33 But the impact of the Averroës-Hermannus reading of Aristotle was actually greatest among Italian ‘Renaissance’ humanists like Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406) and Benvenuto da Imola (c.1320–88), who both struggled to apply it to the Commedia of Dante Alighieri (c. 1265–1321).34

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Dante’s own notion of these genres can be gleaned from an unfinished Latin treatise, unknown to his early readers. In his De vulgari eloquentia, the ‘tragic’ and the ‘comic’ were again redefined; but for Dante, these were not generic forms, they were styles for achieving certain poetic effects. The tragic was an elevated (superior) style, the comic a lower (inferior) style. Tragedy, according to Dante, should be reserved for the most magnificent, weightiest subjects. As for the comic, Dante says that he will discuss it in a further book – which was never written.35 We are left to conjecture, based on his later experiment with a Christian Commedia, what that style could achieve. While we have already noted that the copying of classical dramatic texts had a continuous history in Byzantium, this process gathered momentum under the influence of Michael Psellos (1017/18–1078?), leader of a Hellenistic revival that yielded the manuscripts on which all modern editions of classical Greek texts are based.36 But interest in drama had never waned in the eastern Roman Empire, even during times of profound change and upheaval. Perhaps the most suggestive evidence is furnished by a remarkable but little-known manuscript fragment: a digest of what appears to be the (lost) second book of Aristotle’s Poetics. Known as the Tractatus Coislinianus, it was copied in the tenth century but based on an exemplar from the sixth. It was probably made at the monastery of Great Lavra on Mount Athos, where it is preserved in a codex featuring a number of texts by Aristotle and his late antique commentator, Porphyry (c. 234–c. 305 CE ).37 Materials found in this epitome are also found in an introduction to the comedies of Aristophanes that survives in several other manuscripts dating from the late eleventh century to the end of the fifteenth.38 This means that more copies of it once existed, or that knowledge of Poetics II circulated in other forms (textual, oral, practical) that have yet to be discovered. This tantalizing source underscores both the fragility of the textual tradition and the tenacity of medieval transmission. (It also refutes the conspiracy theory popularized by Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose: if Aristotle’s discussion of laughter was anathema to medieval monks, we would not have this text, which was copied and kept in a monastic library.) In addition to showing that Aristophanes was being read through an Aristotelian lens, it reveals that comedy, like tragedy, was considered a dramatic art designed to produce catharsis. As the fragmentary treatise puts it, tragedy ‘takes away the soul’s fearful passions through compassion and awe’ and is born of pain; literally, ‘it has sorrow for a mother’. Comedy ‘is an imitation of an act laughable and lacking in grandeur’ which ‘through pleasure and laughter accomplishes the purifying of the same passions [as tragedy does]; it has laughter for a mother’.39 The treatise goes on to list the types of speech and action that provoke laughter; in the related Aristophanic prologue, this list is embellished with bits of comic business from the plays – referenced so briefly and elliptically that readers’ intimate knowledge of them is assumed.

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In short, the Tractatus strongly suggests that Aristotle’s Poetics had more of an impact on Byzantine theatre than has yet been acknowledged. Indeed, it provides a context for understanding the extraordinary Christos paschon (Suffering Christ), usually described as a ‘closet drama’ and the only witness to Byzantine theatre’s allegedly arrested development.40 Profoundly influential in its own time, it survives in an astonishing number of manuscripts and early printed editions.41 It was probably composed in the late eleventh or twelfth century, at the time of the Hellenistic revival promoted by Psellos, but it was impressive enough to pass as the work of the fifth-century theologian Gregory of Nazianzos.42 It is the story of Christ’s Passion ‘according to Euripides’: a gospel, as it were, κατʼ Εὐριπίδην, wording that ranks this favourite tragic poet among the evangelists. It was clearly inspired both by the cento tradition and the burgeoning Orthodox cult of the Virgin, who is the drama’s central character.43 In the Christos paschon, Mary’s grief calls to mind not only the suffering mothers of Euripides (Agave, Hecuba, Andromache) but the Aristotelian metaphor of tragedy’s birth in the digest of Poetics II: Christ himself is the tragic figure who ‘has sorrow for a mother’ and whose broken body is stylistically rendered through the author’s dismemberment of Euripides’ verses, which describe the divinely inspired dismemberment of King Pentheus. The effect is to sanctify and sublimate the Dionysian cruelty of the original, in a thoroughly Dionysian manner.

DOCUMENTING MEDIEVAL THEATRE If the knowledge of ancient theatre was transmitted through a variety of media, what do we know about contemporary varieties of medieval theatre? The answer to this very basic question is still frustratingly incomplete, and not merely due to lack of evidence. The research agendas of the past two centuries have often yielded superficial, anachronistic, and decontextualized readings of a small range of sources; they have usually been guided by the expectation that medieval theatre should resemble either that of the classical past or of the late sixteenth century. When this made-up medieval theatre proves elusive, the fault has been attributed to the era rather than to the flawed modern construct. Furthermore, modern scholars’ insistence on the medieval Church’s hostility toward entertainment has not only skewed the interpretation of sources reflecting the classical tradition, it has created another myth: the myth of the unbridgeable divide between secular and religious performances. What went on in churches, we are told, was not drama. At best it was liturgical drama, quasidramatic or quasi-liturgical. It was not theatre. But theatre and liturgy were not two separate categories. In fact, the category of ‘the liturgy’ did not exist during the Middle Ages: it was invented in the sixteenth century, when Catholic and Protestant apologists alike needed a

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vocabulary for attacking one another’s attitudes toward the ceremonial and material culture of worship.44 The subsequent separation of secular and sacred performance traditions has thus prevented us – up till now – from being able to exploit the more voluminous archive of sources created to support the theatre of worship. And yet important caveats still apply to assessing the relationship between extant ecclesiastical texts and actual performance practices, since monastic communities (in particular) passed on most practical knowledge of performance orally and bodily.45 Indeed, when a performance was committed to writing, it was often an attempt to rein in innovations or abuses. This is what gave rise to early texts like that of the Quem quaeritis (‘Whom do you seek?’) office for Easter matins. The moment of inscribing a format for the visit to the sepulchre, and insisting on the decorous conduct of the actors, was not the moment of medieval drama’s ‘birth’; it was an effort to control a longstanding tradition that had gotten out of hand.46 Even when a community did create a new performance, it could be decades before it was formally documented. For example, the Anglo-Norman historian Orderic Vitalis (d. c. 1142) helpfully describes how the office for his own abbey’s patron saint was created. First, a famous cantor of Chartres cathedral ‘brought it forth’ orally (ediderat). Next, it was transmitted to two young monks from the abbey, who had been sent to Chartres to record his singing by ear. They then conveyed the office orally to their brethren, who continued to sing and transmit it from memory for at least a generation. Finally, it was ‘completed’ (perfecit) when a new monk with formal scholastic training ‘set it down’ (condiderat).47 But even when monastic and clerical performers had a text, they were not using the huge, elaborately illuminated codices that survive today, but fragile little libelli: booklets which ‘can so easily vanish by stealth or theft’ as one monastic librarian lamented.48 Anyone who studies indigenous performance cultures, street theatre, devised drama, or improvisational comedy will hardly be surprised by the absence of a textual record for these types of theatrical activity. Medieval performers – especially professionals – likewise learned their crafts from one another, and they either performed without the aid of scripts or with scripts that were so fragile that none have survived. Vernacular entertainments in particular have left virtually no trace in the textual record prior to about 1100, apart from sporadic vilifications of them, all of which attest to the pervasiveness of theatre – not to its successful suppression. Nor is there any hard evidence to prove that plays were actually forbidden in Byzantium; all we know is that Orthodox theologians were reluctant to see Biblical dramas performed in churches.49 The very ubiquity of theatre in a world with no purpose-built spaces to confine it means that medieval theatre, by definition, encompassed a huge range of activities that would be hard to regulate: activities closely bound up with all aspects of public life and all forms of social interaction.

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These facts present us with two related problems. First, the variety and strangeness of medieval theatre means that we do not necessarily recognize it; if something is medieval, it is ipso facto Other, and therefore unfamiliar. Second, everyday information about theatre, like information about any normative activity, becomes visible only when something goes wrong and prompts someone to describe it: a boy falls out of a tree while watching a play; costumes borrowed for a play are accidentally incinerated; missionaries stage a play that turns into a riot.50 Little of this richly anecdotal evidence can be matched with any supplementary documentation until the turn of the fifteenth century; where we have the texts of plays, we have no records to corroborate their performance, and vice versa. And none of these essential problems is adequately addressed by initiatives like the Records of Early English Drama (REED ) or by anthologies of excerpted documents that extract and display seemingly self-explanatory evidence.51 Such projects are premised on the notion that theatrical activity will proclaim itself unambiguously and, when it does not, can be deemed non-existent. Hence the man who appears in one document as a minstrel will be classified as a performer, but the same man who appears in a different document as a falconer or a herald will not – even though all of these skills were equally valued by his princely employer and may have been considered equally theatrical.52 To complicate matters further, texts recognizable to modern eyes as playscripts are not necessarily the most representative form of medieval theatricality. When vernacular performance texts begin to appear at the turn of the twelfth century – among which I would count ‘literary’ texts such as epic poetry, troubadour song, chivalric romance, fabliaux, etc. – these usually survive in formats far removed from the moment of performance. No medieval actor (or early modern actor, for that matter) would have learned his or her part from the full text of a play, nor would actors have had access to copies of plays preserved in expensive books. We know that some medieval dramatic texts took the form of rolls or scrolls, like the actors’ rolls of the Elizabethan playhouse, but none have come down to us – not even the Elizabethan ones, of which there would once have been many thousands.53 We can infer why they don’t from three of the five surviving texts of the twelfth-century Latin comedy Babio, which were used in the medieval schoolroom of Lincoln cathedral and are so dog-eared and manhandled that they are falling apart.54 Like the libelli used daily in churches, most utilitarian performance texts have disappeared. Moreover, medieval performance practices tended to be scripted only under certain circumstances, as noted above: such as when someone in authority was attempting to control what was staged; when a living tradition was threatened with extinction; or when a new recording technology – like musical notation – enabled the transmission of information across space and time. We have many more texts of plays and records of performance from late-medieval Europe precisely because late-medieval states and the later medieval Church

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were in a better position to police theatrical activities. The performers of the commedia dell’arte actively resisted this trend and refused to allow the scripting of their trademark gags and plots; but most urban guilds, professional troupes, and wandering entertainers dependent on patronage were under increasing scrutiny.55 Characteristically, the best account we have of medieval stagecraft is a pamphlet condemning it, the Tretise of Miraculis Pleying.56 And while the printing press may have made the circulation of some plays easier, it also made them easier to suppress.57 All of this indicates that tough questions need to be asked about the gap between what was scripted and what was actually performed. In Byzantium, one figure who certainly had a hand in limiting theatrical performance and documentation is the emperor Justinian (r. 527–56), whose obsession with pagan religions and Christian heresies led to the closure of the academies and gymmasia that had been central to elite education in the Hellenistic world. He also cut state funding for the training of professional singers and other performing artists. These measures almost severed the last remaining and most vital link with ancient theatrical practices: music. Our own fixation on texts can obscure the fact that tragedy and comedy were fundamentally sung, poetic genres. The knowledge of how a choral ode should be performed, or a great lyric passage delivered, was embodied knowledge. Although there were ancient systems of musical notation, it still required specialized training to move from these written records to performance.58 Fortunately, however, this tradition was finding another outlet in the rich performance of Orthodox worship. Ongoing study of Byzantine sacred music should accordingly yield extremely valuable insights into the choral singing of tragedy.59 We can also glean especially useful evidence about medieval theatre, and the chancy nature of its documentation, from the study of preaching. One extraordinary source, recently discovered, is the Latin diary kept by an anonymous Franciscan friar who chronicles how he honed his craft as a performer over a period of twenty-three years. Active in both northern and southern Italy in the late fifteenth century, this itinerant preacher made notes, copied model sermons, and recorded his daily successes and failures. He included information on the lengths of his sermons (from a little over an hour to almost four), what took place around them (a mystery play, on at least one occasion), the unforeseen forces that prevented preaching (severe cold, civil unrest), and frank appraisals of his own performances: ‘a good little sermon’; ‘not as passionate a sermon on this subject as it should have been’; ‘really boring and badly preached’; ‘it was the best and most effective sermon, [delivered] with passion and in a ringing voice’; ‘it was a devout sermon and they burst into tears.’ Although he borrowed some material, he always adapted and improvised as the occasion demanded: ‘you said everything, but briefly, because there wasn’t time’; ‘it was the usual, but you changed some parts’. His

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coup de théâtre came on Passion Sunday, when ‘you showed a dead man’s skull’: a bit he had learned from a famous colleague.60 In this light, Hamlet’s address to Yorick looks less like modern existentialism and more like medieval evangelism.61

NEW WAYS OF KNOWING Knowing about medieval theatre has usually been confined to literary analyses of surviving texts. But these texts are complex historical artefacts, and the work of ‘reading’ them involves placing them in a larger landscape of visual and material culture as well as within a specific sonic and spatial environment. It also means studying every variety of medieval performativity, from rituals of homage to the tricks of beggars.62 Without a building to define theatre, the task of the theatre scholar becomes not only more challenging but more important. Not only does medieval theatre deserve to be researched on its own terms, it offers alternative models of theatricality and agency that are directly applicable to many contemporary performing arts and which mirror the revolutionary social and cultural movements of the mid-twentieth century.63 In recent decades, cultural anthropology, postmodern critical theory, performance studies, and insights from neuroscience and kinesiology have provided us with new tools for the study of theatre. Information about premodern performance practices is also being inferred from the built environment and from recent attempts to revive past plays through the implementation of ‘original practices’. All of this work should continue. But it remains troubling that most attention remains trained on a handful of play-scripts from late-medieval England and a small number of civic or religious dramas from well-studied regions of the Continent. The Latin comedies that shaped the political and diplomatic training of medieval bureaucrats have been almost completely ignored. The theatricality of the multicultural, multilingual Mediterranean littoral has received little scrutiny.64 The uses of theatre to promote medieval missionary and imperial projects is another underexplored area.65 Further research on Byzantine theatre is desperately needed, and could open the way for studies of theatre in early Rus’, the Adriatic, and the Aegean. Beyond this, we need more studies of the travelling entertainers, often enslaved, who were crucial conduits for the transmission of knowledge throughout the wider medieval world and who fostered cross-cultural exchanges at every level. In short, we need to invest in the serious study of theatre in the drastically understudied millennium before 1350. Rather than assume that there is nothing to know, we need to expand our scrutiny of the media through which people communicated with one another, and ask how theatre functioned through those media. Theatre was at the heart of medieval life; the Middle Ages should be at the heart of theatre studies.

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Introduction: Medieval Theatre Makes History 1. Boileau n. d., v. 117; Dakyns 1973; Chandler 1970; Nichols 1996. Increasingly, historians question such terms as ‘feudalism’ and ‘bourgeoise’. 2. Paxson 1995. 3. Exemplary are Copeland 1991; Copeland 2001. 4. See, e.g., ‘The New Philology’ issue of Speculum (1990); Brownlee, Brownlee and Nichols 1991; Exemplaria was founded by R.A. Shoaf and New Medieval Literatures by Wendy Scase, Rita Copeland and David Lawton. See also ‘In the Middle’, www. inthemedievalmiddle.com; and ‘The Medieval Globe’ at http://arc-humanities.org/ series/arc/tmg/. 5. Le Goff 1995, 360–361. 6. For space, helpful places to begin include Hanawalt and Kobialka 1999; Konigson 1975; Southern 1975; and Crohn-Schmitt 1969. 7. Sponsler 2004, e.g., Chap. 6; Ashley and Hüsken 2001; Knight 1983, 117–140; Kipling 1998. 8. Within the scope of a study such as this, it is impossible to do justice to the voluminous scholarship but helpful initiations to civic performance culture include Ashley and Hüsken 2001; Kramer 1996; Arnade 1996; Brown 2011; Knight 1997; Donavin and Stodola 2015. 9. Ong 1971, Chap. 4; Enders 1993. 10. de Certeau 1984; Read 1993. 11. Wagner 1986; Mali 2003; White 1973. 12. Enders 2004. 13. Enders 1992b, Chap. 1; Symes 2007, Chap. 1. 14. For more on these incidents, see Enders 2002, Chap. 7. 15. Significant exceptions include, e.g., the tenth-century writings of Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim and Hildegard of Bingen or the fascinating convent dramas of Antonia

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Pulci (even if the latter are considered ‘Renaissance’). See Hrotsvit of Gandersheim 1989; Hildegard of Bingen 1994; Holsinger 2001, Chap. 3; Pulci 1996. 16. Space does not permit an extensive enumeration of all the lists of extant plays and performances compiled; but for a huge array of primary sources translated into English, see Meredith and Tailby 1983; Tydeman 2001; and Stern 2009. 17. Medieval manuscripts are frequently lost and found, e.g., in attics; and I speculate elsewhere that their rediscovery might owe to the restoration of items looted by the Nazis (Enders 2011, 39–41); the Lille Plays discovered in Wolftenbüttel were published as Knight 2001–11. 18. Weigert 2016; Gertsman 2010. 19. See, e.g., Schreyer 2014. 20. See esp. Barish 1981; Epp 1997. 21. Makaryk 1989. The latest seventeenth-century ‘revival’ I’ve encountered is Marriage with a Grain of Salt (Enders 2017, Chap. 12). 22. For postmedieval reenactments, see esp. Sponsler 2004; Trexler 2003; Harris 2000; Enders 1998, 197–198. 23. Georg Jacob (1862–1937) discovered these plays detailing street life in medieval Egypt; the first English translation appeared as Ibn Da¯niya¯l 2013. 24. In the ‘Ballade en Vieil Langage François’ (Villon 1965, 61–63), the poet-singer no longer masters the case system of the inflected language, Old French. 25. Hanawalt 1998; Viollet le Duc refuses to transcribe the Middle French word for testicles in a farce (1854–57, vol. 1, 375): see Margot’s Confession, my translation of which is in progress for a third volume of farces. 26. Wenzel 1994. 27. Among the better known examples: the delirium scene of the Farce of Master Pierre Pathelin, trans. Mandel 1982. For flatin, see Birdbrain, Enders 2011, Chap. 12; and for fritalian, see The Jackass Conjecture in Enders 2017, Chap. 5; for similar macaronics in Italy, see Dal Molin 2015. 28. See Wife Swap, Chap. 9 of Enders 2017. 29. Bevington 1975, 80–81; Enders 1990. 30. Tydeman 2001, 150; Symes remedies the issue in Symes 2012b. For two reviews to that effect, see Kobialka 2003; and Enders 2002b. 31. For these relatively understudied vernacular traditions, see, e.g., for Germany, Ehrstine 2002; for Spain, Stern 1996 and Burningham 2007; for the Low Countries, Prins 1999 and [Hüsken and Ashley] 2001; and for Portugal, Massip 1992. 32. Herington 1985. 33. On Stern 1996 and his tour de force on the kharjas of the medieval Hispano-Arabic muwashshahat, see Menocal 1987, 83–85. 34. Potter 1989; Dal Molin 2015 on similar Franco-Italian migrations. 35. The key work is Camille 1992, expanding considerably on Baxandall 1985. 36. Iser 1978; Enders 1992b, 35–44; compare, e.g., with Jewish traditions of davening. 37. See, e.g., the groundbreaking work of Saenger 1982; as well as Stock 1990; Clanchy 1979; Coleman 1996.

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38. This farce appears in Cohen 1949, 333–40; my translation is projected for a future volume tentatively entitled That’ll Teach You: A Fifth Dozen Medieval French Farces in Modern English. 39. de Certeau 1984, 140. 40. See, e.g., Sylvia Huot 1997; Bestul 1996; Sheingorn 2008; Pizarro 1989; Carruthers 1990; Enders 1992b, 44–54; Enders 1999, Chap. 2. 41. Augustine 1912: bk. 10, Chap. 8. 42. Brantley 2007. 43. Stock 1990; Dillon 2012; Runnalls 1994. 44. Stock 1983, 15, 1; Symes 2007, 2; for a later period, see also Peters 2000. 45. Schechner, 1985; Symes, 2018. 46. See esp. a fourteenth-century Old Provençal acting treatise edited by VitaleBrovarone 1984; Elliott 1989a; Plesch 1994–95; Plesch 1999. 47. Geoffrey of Vinsauf 1971, vv. 2044–45. 48. Cited by Clanchy 1979, 202; Treitler 1981, 490. 49. Cited in Stevens 1986, 384; Enders 1992a, 459–602; Holsinger 2003, 272–282. 50. Treitler 1981; Enders 1992a. 51. See, e.g., Aucassin et Nicolette, as translated by Kline 2001. 52. Zumthor 1972, 65–72; Cerquiglini 1989. 53. McLuhan and Fiore 1967. 54. Jeay 2006; Burningham 2007 on jongleuresque performance; Enders 2011, Chap. 8; Enders 2017, Chap. 7. 55. Frame 1991, 34–37. 56. Rabelais, Fourth Book, Chaps. 55–56; Frame 1991, 556–559. 57. Enders 1992b, intro., Chap. 1. 58. Auslander 1999; Aristotle 1935, 432a. 59. Thomas 1991, 11. 60. On the translation of memory imagery into theatrical practice, see Enders 1992b, 44–68. Compare the phenomenon with the exquisite novelistic rendering of Unsworth 1995. 61. Le Goff 1995, 357; 360–361. 62. Thomas 1991, 1. 63. Enders 1999, 170–192; Scarry 1987; Beckwith 1994; Kantorowicz 1957. 64. See e.g. Shit for Brains and The Farce of the Fart in Enders 2011, Chaps 1 and 8 respectively; and Bitches and Pussycats in Enders 2017, Chap. 8. 65. Burke 1973, 130; Butler 1990a, 272. 66. Butler 1990a, 273; Quintilian 1920, XI , 3.1–2; Enders 1992, 56–66. 67. Sans parler ne sans signer, comme se ce feussent images eslevees contre ung mur; cited by Petit de Julleville 1880, 2: 190. 68. Sheingorn 1989. 69. See Kelly 1993; and Kerr 1967. As we await the work of the new editorial team that was to have been Sponsler’s A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Middle Ages, her vision now preserved by Coletti, Enders, Sebastian and Symes, enlightening here is Steiner’s view that the compensating heaven of Christianity forestalled the medieval tragic (Steiner 1961).

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70. From a vast bibliography on the instability of genre, especially useful places to start include Hardison 1965; Clopper 2001; Crane 2002. 71. Le Goff 1995, 360–361; Zumthor 1972, 447; Enders 2009a, 318–323. 72. Fittingly, Eliot was alluding to the congegrant who was more interested in the drama of the Mass than in its religious import (Eliot 1932, 35–36; Enders 1992b, 110–113). E. Catherine Dunn was also a performance theorist avant la lettre in her brilliant work on liturgical dance (1989, Chap. 5). 73. Isidore 2006, 359–371; Enders 1992b, 77–89; Huizinga 1950, 146; compare with Ong 1971, Chap. 4. 74. Schechner 1998, 360–361; cited by Holsinger 2003, 274, who draws on the work of Lord 1960; Ong 1982; and Foley 1989. 75. Zumthor 1990; Stock 1983; Enders 1992b; Holsinger 2003, 276–277. 76. In addition to Chambers 1903 and Young 1933, see Hardison 1965; Warning 2001; Gurevich 1988; Propp 1984; Bakhtin 1984. 77. Hardison 1965, ‘Darwin, Mutations, and the Origin of Medieval Drama’, 1–34. 78. From a vast literature on troping, see, e.g., some of the primary texts in Bevington 1975, 9–29; the seminal discussion by Hardison 1965, Chaps 2, 5, 6; Dunn 1989; and the rhetorical reconciliation of Enders 1992b, 54–57. 79. Austin 1962. I prefer to reserve the term ‘performative’ for the strict Austinian use, but most of the contributors to this volume employ it in the more expansive sense of ‘performed’. 80. Enders 2002, Chap. 14. 81. Hardison 1965; also Prosser 1961. 82. Diehl 1997, Chap. 4; Kobialka 1999, Chap. 1; Parker, 2007; Beckwith 1994, 2001; Sofer 2003; and, for the early Middle Ages, Dox 2004. 83. This idea recurs throughout McNamara 1998. 84. I discuss these phenomena and the related scholarship in Enders 1992b, 170–182; Enders 2017, Chap. 11; and Enders 2015. 85. Enders 1993. 86. My translation of that play is projected for a third volume tentatively entitled Immaculate Deception: A Third Dozen Medieval French Farces in Modern English: see The Resurrection of Long John Silver [Farce nouvelle très bonne et fort joyeuse de la résurrection de Jenin Landore]. See also in that projected volume The Resurrection of Jonny Palmer [Farce nouvelle et fort joyeuse de la Resurrection Jenin à Paulme].

Chapter One: Institutional Frameworks 1. De Certeau 1984, 118. 2. Enders 2002a, 70. 3. Phythian-Adams 1980, 69; Konigson 1979, 26; cited and discussed in Sponsler 1992, 17–19. 4. Massip 2007, 10; Hayes 2010, 13. 5. Macherey 1978, 195. 6. See Enders 2002a, 105–117. 7. Sponsler 1997a, xvi. 8. Symes 2007, 278, 279.

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9. Beam 2007, 7, 31. 10. See Koopmans 2002; Beam 2007; Guynn 2012. 11. Foucault 1998, 371. 12. Parker 2007, 12. 13. Parker 2007, 11. 14. For an influential treatment of the Quem quaeritis trope, see Kobialka 1999. 15. Wickham 1987, 54. 16. See Parker 2007, 103. 17. Parker 2010, 13, 22, 23. 18. Parker 2010, 13, 14, 16; citing Hardison 1965, 15; and Chambers 1903, 2: 109. 19. Fleischer 1984, 26–27; cited in Bonfil 2009, 147. 20. Bonfil 2009, 148 21. Koopmans 2011, 4, 5. 22. See Symes 2003, 31. 23. See Koopmans 2011, 32–37. 24. See Ong 1971; and Ong 1983. 25. See Ziolkowski 2009; and Copeland and Sluiter 2009. 26. See Novikoff 2013 27. See Enders 1992b; and Copeland and Sluiter 2009. 28. See Novikoff 2013, 133–171. 29. Novikoff 2013, 144, citing Haimeric de Vari, who was chancellor of the University of Paris. See also Enders 1992a, 95. 30. See Novikoff 2013, 145. 31. See Novikoff 2013, 147–155. 32. See Inglis 2014, 129–130, citing Nelson 2009, 281. 33. See Koopmans 2012. 34. See Novikoff 2013, 172–221. 35. See Novikoff 2013, 174, 212–14. 36. See Simonsohn 1977; Jaffe-Berg 2013. 37. See Jaffe-Berg 2015, 125. Also see Simonsohn 1977 and Jaffe-Berg 2013. 38. The archival work in the Medici Archives Project (MAP ) has been undertaken under the direction of Edward Goldberg, who is in the process of publishing these findings in a book entitled Carnival Blood: Jews and Italian Renaissance Theater. 39. E.g., Lavezzo 2004. 40. Foucault 1978, 60. 41. Muir 2005, 253. Emphasis in original. 42. For a recent study of the medieval origins of such rituals, see Ruiz 2012. 43. Muir 1981, 171. 44. Dursteler 2006, 4 45. Nicholls 1988, 65. 46. See Enders 1998. 47. See Rollo-Koster and Holstein 2010, 150. 48. Schwartz 2007, 64. 49. See Rollo-Koster and Holstein 2010, 150–57. 50. See Rollo-Koster and Holstein 2010, 151. 51. Rollo-Koster and Holstein 2010, 158.

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52. See Nolan 2005, 71. For a recent elaboration on Lydgate’s fifteenth-century mummings, see Sponsler 2014, esp. Ch. 2. 53. Nolan 2005, 81. 54. See Nolan 2005, 83. 55. See Bowers 2001, 156. 56. Sponsler 2014, 39. 57. See Enders 1992; Reid 2002; Bouhaïk-Gironès 2007; and Beam 2007, 77–110. 58. Beam 2007, 78, 77. 59. Reid 2002, 151. 60. See Reid 2002, 152–159. 61. Guo 2012, 25, 26. 62. For a recent translation into English, see Ibn Da¯niya¯l 2013. 63. Moreh 1987, 49. 64. See Miller 1996, 622, for the argument that this scene illuminates ideas about ‘the interiority of sin’, the condition of the agent and the possibilities for readerly reflection upon this condition. 65. Mannyng 1983, 226, lines 9051–9056. 66. See Greene 1977, xlv. 67. See Mullally 2011; Chaganti 2008; Chaganti 2015; and Reichl 2005. During the fifteenth century, notational technologies began to emerge that allow historians access to a greater degree of specificity to medieval danced practice. The Continental dance manuals for basse danse and bassadanza provide important examples of both notation and narrative description of dance. See Chaganti 2012.

Chapter Two: Social Functions 1. Marvin Carlson 1996, 19. 2. Singer 1959, xiii. Singer’s definition was central to the next generation of anthropologists; see essays in MacAloon 1984; also St John 2008. 3. Douglas’s edited volume (1982) brings together discussions of the grid/group model by scholars from many fields. For useful analysis of her key contributions to cultural theory, see Wuthnow et al. 1984, 77–132. 4. On the composer of oral formulaic heroic verse in both the Homeric and the SerboCroatian traditional epic, see Lord 1960. 5. Fletcher 1999, 195. 6. Hindley 1999, 79. 7. Lindenbaum 1988, 411. 8. Lindenbaum 1988, 415–416. 9. Lindenbaum 1988, 418. 10. Early studies of ‘folk drama’ such as Chambers 1903, while valued for their historical data, have been criticized for over-emphasizing sources of festivity in pagan antiquity and evolutionary models of theatre history. More recent cultural theorists have been influenced by structuralism in interpreting types of performance as meaningful primarily within social structures of their own day. 11. Harris 2011; also Eisenbichler and Hüsken 1999. 12. Bakhtin 1984.

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13. For a concise summary of key objections to ‘the limitations of [Bakhtin’s] Shrovetide populism’, see Ehrstine 2002, 54–57. He references anthropologist Max Gluckman, historian LeRoy Ladurie and literary scholar C. Clifford Flanigan. 14. Handelman 1982, 173. 15. Handelman 1982, 173. 16. Twycross and Carpenter 2002. 17. Handelman 1982, 182. See Davis’s analysis of ‘The Reasons of Misrule’ (1975, 97–123); also her discussion of charivari (1984, 42–57). 18. The carnivalesque habit of turning fur outward to mimic an animal coat was well known in German regions; Kinser 1999, 43–87, connects the costume with the Wildman and woman figures in popular festivity of German cities during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. 19. Harris 2011, 6, concludes that in the early centuries of these parodic ceremonies the church authorities tolerated them. Only in the fifteenth century did the sustained efforts to suppress them begin, and those continued into the sixteenth century. On the collegiate church of Notre Dame in Beaune, where the canons annually elected one of their members as the ‘Herod’ or festivity organizer, see Ashley 2005, 153–165; when the Bishop at Autun began to restrict their festivities, the Beaune canons identified the election of Herod and his festive mandate as central to their collegiate identity. 20. Harris 2011, 42. 21. Johnston 1994, 37–56. Blackburn and Holford-Strevens 1999, 258–265. 22. Maclean 1996, 238. 23. Burke 2009, 255–286. 24. See Ashley and Hüsken 2001. 25. Muir 1997, 262. 26. Morrison 1987, 177–178. 27. Campbell 2005, 565–587. 28. On Burgundian Joyous Advents in Bruges, see Murray 1994, 137–152. 29. Kipling 1998. 30. Kipling 1998, 21. 31. Kipling 1998, 27. 32. Geertz 1980, 104 as quoted in Kipling 1998, 47. 33. For analysis of the entries of Burgundian dukes using the ritual theories of Victor Turner, see Hurlbut 2001, 155–186. 34. Rubin 1991, 265. 35. Rubin 1991 265, 266. 36. Issues of precedence plagued processional drama according to McRee 1994, 189–207. For rivalry over the Florence Corpus Christi processions, see Newbigin 2010, 87–109; see also trouble triggered by processions of Sainte Foy in Ashley and Sheingorn 1996, 419–446; and Ashley and Sheingorn 1992, 63–85. 37. In the terminology of Austin 1962, verbal performatives are statements that make something happen. 38. Crane 2002, 6. 39. Wilson 1998. 40. Wiethaus 2004, 41–63.

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41. Wilson 1998, 41. 42. Wilson 1998, 5–9. 43. Wilson 1998, 84–86. 44. Wiethaus 2004, 47. 45. Lindenbaum 1996, 54–65. 46. Lindenbaum 1996, 61. 47. See Weissman 1991, 201–20, on the confraternities’ ambivalent positioning at the intersection of private and public obligations 48. Runnalls 1999, 20; see also Runnalls 1970, 257–287. 49. See Maddox and Sturm-Maddox 2008; also Clark 1987, 359–369. 50. Clark 1999, 55–56. 51. Enders 1992b, 137, quoting Adolphe Fabre, Les Clercs du Palais, 1875. On the Basoche as sponsors of and players in theatrical events, see also Bouhaïk-Gironès 2007. 52. Eisenbichler 1998; Ahl 2000, 52–58. 53. Ahl 2000, 47. 54. Machette 2000, 75. 55. Ahl 2000, 53, 56. On candles as symbols of lay devotion and the role of candles in civic festivity, see Thompson 2005, 160–74. 56. Ahl 2000, 59. 57. Falassi 1987, 2. 58. Clopper 2001, 138–168. On the changing socio-economic roles of York and Chester cycles, see Rice and Pappano 2015. 59. For examples see Meredith and Tailby 1983, 35–61. 60. Lynette Muir 1999, 1–17. 61. On the medieval role of the Carité de Nostre Dame des Ardents in Arras, see Symes 2007, 69–126. 62. Strietman 1991, 225–252. In French speaking areas, the literary guilds were termed Puys. See also Parsons and Jongenelen 2012. 63. Strietman 1991, 239. For the very long list of towns that had multiple Chambers of Rhetoric in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, see Strietman 1999, 126–147; she lists Amsterdam, Bruges, Brussels, Dordrecht, Hague, Haarlem, Leuven, Mechelen, Oudenard and Ypres, among others. 64. Burke 1986, 207. 65. Knight 1999, 100. 66. Knight’s five-volume critical edition (2001–2011). 67. Knight 1999, 102, 104, 108. 68. Handelman 1982, 162–190. 69. The anthropologist Émile Durkheim (1915) classically articulated the ‘functionalist’ view of ritual. For the argument that diverse performances could yield civic unity, see James 1983, 3–29. 70. See Arlinghaus 2010, 215–232. He points out the importance of smaller geographical units in the German city and in many other cities across Europe, with the suggestion that it was more important for the city dwellers ‘to highlight the autonomy and individuality of the different quarters and to reveal the hierarchies that governed them’ (228).

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71. The issue of whether the procession or the plays would have precedence on the feast day is discussed by Johnston 1973–74, 55–62. 72. Veltruský 1996, 270–278 explores the role of the carnivalesque Czech apothecary that parodies the Resurrection; see also her 1985 full-length study of similar comic figures in European religious drama. 73. For the playwright/producer’s 1496 account, see La Vigne 1979, 117–122. 74. Handelman 1982, 166. Also Babcock 1980, 1–14. 75. See Ashley 1998, 9–24. 76. Babcock 1984, 107. For an interpretation of the Nativity play shepherds as ‘sacred clowns’ in their deconstructive clowning, see Ashley 1988, 123–135. 77. See DuBruck 1988, 105–120; and de Roos 1996, 167–179.

Chapter Three: Sexuality and Gender 1. Deimling 1968, 26; my emphasis. 2. Isidore of Seville 2005, 242. 3. Deimling 1968, 32. 4. See also Normington 2004, 55–70. 5. Aronson-Lehavi 2011a. 6. Butler 1990a: 270. [Original emphasis.] 7. For the modern context, see Diamond 1997. 8. Davidson 1993, 98. Translation mine; see Aronson-Lehavi 2011a, 132. 9. Isidore of Seville 2005, 369. 10. Ibid. (Liber XVIII ; XLVIII . DE HISTRIONIBVS ). 11. Bevington 1975, 27; my emphasis. For a full English translation of the Regularis Concordia, including the rituals that precede and follow the Quem quaeritis trope, see Symons 1953. 12. See Dox 2004, 29–42. 13. See Hardison 1965. 14. Qtd. Tydeman 2001, 361. 15. Davidson 2011, 91. 16. Davidson 2011, 94. 17. Davidson 2011, 88. Translation mine. 18. See Cadden 1993; Murray 2008. 19. Davidson 2011, 87. 20. Deimling 1968, 110. 21. Cadden 1993, 184. 22. Berger 1999, 80. 23. Ibid. 62. For the notion of the ‘third gender’ in cultural history, see Herdt 1996; in the medieval context, see Cadden 1993; McNamara 2002; Murray 2008. 24. The Nativity by Arnoul Gréban, trans. Shelley Sewall 1991, 27; Le Mystère de la Passion, Paris and Raynaud 1970, 46 (lines 3579–3590). [Joseph: Tres chere espeuze, j’ay congnue et secu assés pres vostre entente par la puissance precellente de Dieu qui m’en a advert: vous avez choisi le party de conserver virginité. Nostre Dame: Mon cher sire, il est verité; s’est tout ce que mon cueue desire. Joseph: Or je voue a

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Dieu, nostre sire, que pareillement garderay la myenne tant que je vivray: par ce point serons d’une sorte.] 25. Elliott 1993; see also McGlynn and Moll 1996. 26. Deimling 1968, 57. See also Normington 2004, 119–141. 27. Ibid., 58. 28. Davidson 2011, 53. 29. The sexuality and theatricality of the figure of Mary Magdalene is a significant and rich issue for the discussion of gender and sexuality in medieval theatre, but is beyond the scope of this chapter. For this subject, see Coletti 2004. 30. See Normington 2004, 35–54. 31. See, for example, Tydeman 2001, 306–307. 32. Qtd. Tydeman 2001, 84. 33. Ibid., 84–85. 34. Ibid., 86. 35. Ogden 2002, 143. 36. Ibid., 146. 37. See Normington 2004, 31–34. 38. For Hrotswith of Gandersheim, see Dronke 1984; Carlson 1998; Brown, McMillin and Wilson 2004. 39. See Cixous 1976. 40. See Dronke 1994, 147–157; Dronke suggests that this number correlates to the number of the nuns in the convent. See also Sheingorn 1992. 41. Dronke 1994, 179. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. On the theological debates for and against marriage, see Karras 2005, 36. 45. Ibid. 46. Herdt 1996; Cadden 1993. 47. Cixous 1976. 48. Wright 2002, 170. 49. See Wright 1999. 50. Wright 2002, 186. 51. Ibid., 194. 52. Ibid., 218. 53. See Koopmans 1997. 54. Philip Butterworth questions whether this miniature in fact documents a real performance, but the public display of penance rituals and martyrdoms. See Butterworth 1998a. 55. See Aronson-Lehavi 2011b. 56. See Enders 1999; Merback 1999; and McCracken 2003. 57. Bynum 1992, 82. 58. Ibid. 59. See Enders 1999, 193–194. See also Gatton 1991; Davidson and White 2013. 60. For a discussion of the medieval gendered meanings of blood, see McCracken 2003, especially Chapter 3, ‘The Gender of Sacrifice’. 61. See Giuliano 1996, xiii–xiv.

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62. Scarry 1987. 63. English translations are from Giuliano 1996; for the French, see Paris and Raynaud 1970, 331. 64. Kristeva 1982, 3. 65. Davidson 2011, 300. 66. Sachs 1990, 83. 67. Ibid., 85. 68. Ibid., 86. 69. Ibid., 60. 70. Ibid., 61. 71. Enders 2011, 86–106; 105.

Chapter Four: The Environment of Theatre My thanks to Sheila Crane, Sharon Gerstel, and Caro Pirri for their insightful comments on this chapter and to Jody Enders – editor extraordinaire – whose persistence, perspicuity and enthusiasm for our broader project guided its improvement. 1. Dox 2004; West 2002. 2. Marshall 1950, 1–39 and 366–389; Bigongiari 1946, 201–224. 3. Marshall 1950, 382. 4. Marciniak 2007, 277–279. 5. Kipling 1999; Twycross 2008. 6. Chambers 1903; Hermann 1914; d’Ancona 1891; Petit de Julleville 1880; Dillon 2006; Wickham 1987; Tydeman 1978. 7. Crowder 2008; Symes 2007; Bouhaïk-Gironès 2002. 8. Chambers 1903; Young 1933. 9. Heitz 1980; Konigson 1975; Parsons 1975. 10. Regularis Concordia (ed. Symons) 1953, 44; Sheingorn 1987, 19, 21. 11. Enders 1998, 71–82. 12. Regularis Concordia (ed. Symons) 1953, 50; Sheingorn 1987, 20, 22. 13. Enders 1998, 71–82. 14. Sheingorn 1987. 15. Chambers 1903, vol. 2, 311. 16. Tydeman 2001, 78. 17. Braun 1924, 148–154; Emminghaus 1981, 830–832. 18. Mennekes 1998. 19. Emminghaus 1981, 830. 20. Luke 23:45. 21. Weigert 2003, 212. 22. Dox 2002, 43. 23. Hoste and Talbot 1971, vol.1, 98. 24. Ashley and Hüsken 2001; Howe 2007. 25. Hanawalt and Kobialka 1999. 26. Evans and Wixom 1997, 62–63. 27. Cotsonis 1994. 28. Carruthers 2010; Crossley 2010.

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29. See www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/193506. 30. Miller 2007, 237–248. 31. Lecuppre-Desjardin 2004, 259–291; Guenée and Lehoux 1968, 68; Kipling 1998, 292–318. 32. Weigert 2013. 33. Weigert 2013, 32–33. 34. Ramakers 2005, 163. 35. Twycross 2008, 39. 36. Blockman and Donckers 1999, 81–111; Weigert 2015, 27–73. 37. Blockman and Donckers 1999, 81–111. 38. Weigert 2015, 35–45. 39. Blockman and Donckers 1999, 81–111. 40. Twycross, 2008, 56. 41. Runnalls 1981, 385–393. 42. Twycross 2008; Stevens 1971. 43. Weigert 2008, 325. 44. Beaune and d’Arbaumont 1885, 3: 118. 45. Beaune and d’Arbaumont 1885, 3: 118–19. 46. Beaucourt 1864, vol. 2, 131, 144–151. 47. Knight 1983, 117–140. 48. Southern 1975; Rey-Flaud 1973. 49. Crohn-Schmitt 1969. 50. Kipling 1999. 51. Lefebvre 1991; de Certeau 1984. 52. Weigert 2015.

Chapter Five: Circulation: A Peripatetic Theatre 1. For an overview of the Los Comanches play and a translation of the play-text, see Taylor and Townsend 2008, 94–102; for a discussion of conquest dramas such as the moros y cristianos play, see Harris 2000, esp. 163–164. 2. See Sponsler 2004; Symes 2003; and Weigert 2009. 3. Konigson 1975, 78. 4. For a useful discussion of issues related to processions, see the essays in Ashley and Hüskens 2001. For the ways in which processions can both demarcate and link, see Rubin 1991, 267–269. Koopmans 1997, 41–96, discusses rituals of exclusion, such as the charivari. 5. Windeatt 1985, 305n1, believes that Margery and her husband probably witnessed the York plays in 1413. 6. Greenfield 1997, 252. 7. See, respectively, Records of Early English Drama: Shropshire (Somerset 1994, 354), and Records of Early English Drama: Sussex (Louis 2000). 8. For the size of troupes, see Bevington 1962, 71; and Wasson 1984. 9. Nelson 1989, 1: 348. For N-Town and Mankind, see, e.g., Bevington 1975, 257; 904. 10. See Baker, Murphy and Hall 1982, 153–166.

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11. For the Earl of Northumberland’s players, see Chambers 1903, 2: 184–185n2, and 2: 257; other examples include the Earl of Shrewsbury’s players in 1496 and 1510, cited in Chambers 1903, 2: 251. 12. For an overview of the modern construction of medieval studies as a discipline, see the essays in Bloch and Nichols 1996. 13. Among the most useful is the survey of the various traditions in Simon 1991. 14. See Knight 1991, 160. 15. Symes 2007, 18. 16. Mills 1996. 17. Parsons and Jongenelen 2012b. 18. The definitive study of host-desecration narratives in medieval Europe is by Rubin 1999; for a discussion of the Croxton play and its relation to European plays on the same theme, see Sebastian 2012, ‘Introduction’. 19. See Pettitt 1996. 20. See Nelson 1980, 20–23. For discussions of cross-channel migration, see Muir 1989 and Potter 1989. 21. See Mahfouz and Carlson 2013, xiii–xxvi. 22. Hakluyt 1598–1600, 8: 47. For a discussion of Gilbert’s cargo and the use of drama in the English colonies, see Sponsler 1998. 23. Thwaites 1896–1901, 61: 114–117. 24. For a general survey of these performances, see Buckley 2006. 25. See Roach 1996 and Sponsler 2004 for a discussion of old world performances in the Americas. 26. Surtz 1991. 27. For an English translation, see Duckworth 1942, 2: 891–952. 28. See Vince 1984, 131–132. 29. Happé 1986 and Farnham 1936. 30. Bevington 1962, 114–116, identifies Youth as having been written for an itinerant troupe; Lancashire 1980, 21, 25–26, 48–49, and 258–259, discusses the date and location of the play, as well as its printing by de Worde and its appearance in the Revesby play. 31. Lancashire 1980, 30. For modern revivals, see Elliott 1989. 32. Strietman 1991. 33. For a recent discussion of Shakespeare’s links to the medieval past, see Cooper 2012. 34. Elliott 1989b, 17–18, 42–44, discusses the ban on dramatic impersonations of God and the loopholes that Poel exploited to satisfy the censors; Horner points out that there was no law per se, only the Lord Chamberlain’s ban. 35. Symes 2007, 7. 36. Muir 1989, 68–72, who discusses the development of a professional and commercial theater in France, as early as 1402. 37. See Normington 2007, 81–91. 38. For the date and provenance, see Davis 1970 and, for a recent reassessment of the manuscript’s relation to printed drama, Atkin 2009. 39. Although Master Brandyche, the physician of the Croxton play, is often described as a quack doctor, he may instead be a parody of the shortcomings of actual physicians, as Voigts 2011 has argued.

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40. Symes 2007, 16. 41. For a discussion of Lydgate and dramatic texts included in anthologies of poetry, see Sponsler 2014. 42. Henry was crowned in 1509. See Bedos-Rezak 1994, 42–43. 43. Hall 1547, 520.

Chapter Six: Interpretations 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

The pioneering study along these lines is Kolve 1966, 8–32. Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great 1988, 527. Minnis and Johnson 2005, passim. Ross 2014. Salmon 1961; Clopper 2001, 6–9. Marshall 1950, quotations at 472–473, 478. Text and translation in Kelly 1993, 20–22. Augustine 1950, chiefly books 2, 4, 6. The discussion of Varro is in 6.2–9. Latin in Augustine 1955. Augustine’s usual term for the theatre is ludi scaenici, stage plays, presumably a subset of all the ludi Romani that the gods loved; see 4.26. Fuller discussion in Dox 2004, 11–29. 9. Augustine 1912, 1: 100–105. 10. Barnes 1996; Puk 2013, quotation at 26. 11. Isidore of Seville 1911 (Latin); Isidore of Seville 2006 (translation). Parenthetical references are to book and chapter numbers. On Isidore’s understanding of theatre, see Kelly 1993, 36–50; Dox 2004, 29–42. 12. Enders 1992b, 69–89. 13. Chambers 1903, 1: 1–41. On the importance of canon and civil law to the history of theatre see Bouhaïk-Gironès et al. 2011. 14. Duff and Duff 1935, 636–639; White 2013, quotation at 54 n. 33. 15. Preminger et al. 1974, 303, 306. 16. Procopius 1935, 102–113. 17. Gardiner 1986, 10, 43, and notes. 18. Capgrave 1911, 17–18. I have modernized the Middle English text. 19. Minnis and Scott 1988, 316, 325–328, 340–346; Kelly 1993, 129–134. 20. Gillespie 2005, 217–222. 21. Hugh of St Victor 1961, 1.5; 51–52. All parenthetical citations are to book and chapter numbers, then page numbers of this translation. Latin text in Hugh of St Victor 1959. 22. de Rijk 1967, 8–15. 23. Olson 1986. 24. Isidore of Seville 1911 (Latin); Isidore of Seville 2006 (translation); 18.59. 25. Kilwardby 1976, 127–133. 26. Olson 1982, 39–89. 27. Text and translation of the Retracing in Bonaventure 1940, 38–41. Sermon version and background in Benson 2012. 28. John of San Gimignano 1497, fols. 341v–343v. For another fourteenth-century incorporation of Aristotle’s distinction between art and prudence into Hugh’s theatrics, see Gerald Odonis 1500, fols. 125–125v.

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29. Ibid; emphasis added. 30. Schlosser 1896, 331. 31. NE 4.8, in Aristotle 1995, 2: 1780–1781. 32. Latin texts in Olson 1995, 198–200. On the development in medieval courts of values related to cheerfulness and playfulness, see Jaeger 1985, esp. 155–175. 33. Thomas Aquinas 1964–81, 44: 210–227. Subsequent parenthetical references to the Summa Theologiae are to this edition. 34. Johnston and Rogerson 1979, 1: 42–44, 2: 728–730. 35. Thomas of Chobham 1968, 291–293. Partial translation in Tydeman 2001, 47–48. 36. Examples in Olson 1995, 199–202. 37. Minnis and Scott 1988, 277–307, quotation at 293. 38. Davidson 1993. Parenthetical references are to page numbers. I have modernized the Middle English. 39. See Kolve 1966, 17–29; Barish 1981, 66–79; Davis 1990; Olson 1995, 205–213; Clopper 2001, 63–107. 40. Tydeman 2001, 114 (for the gloss), 238 (England, 1422), 357 (Germany, 1534), 572 (Spain, 1488) and passim. 41. Minnis 2005, 259–64. 42. Tydeman 2001, 107–109, 115. For documentation of Boy Bishop performances, see Chambers 1903, 1: 336–371; for interpretation, Kolve 1966, 135–137. 43. Barish 1981. 44. Arcangeli 2003; Peterson 1988; Bishop 2010. ‘Honest Recreation’ is a character in John Redford’s morality play, Wit and Science (c. 1530–1548), in Bevington 1975, 1029–1061. 45. Trimpi 1983, esp. 382–390, although he does not discuss theatre in this context. 46. Schechner 1988, 106–152. Fagen 1992, esp. 53–54, updating Fagen 1981, 361–363.

Chapter Seven: Communities of Production 1. On the ‘Thespis Myth’, see Burningham 2007, 13–49. On the Quem quaeritis trope, see Hardison 1965. 2. I refer here to the longstanding debate regarding the existence of medieval theatre on the Iberian Peninsula in the absence of an abundant archive of extant medieval play scripts. See Morrison 1989; Surtz 1979; and Stern 1996. 3. Burningham 2007, 59. On medieval music, see Everist 2011; Page 1997; Ribera 1970; Stevens 1986; Treitler 2007; and van Deusen 2011. 4. Schechner 2003, 112. 5. Schechner 2003, xvii. 6. Brook 1984, 9. 7. Huston 1992, 75–76. 8. Enders 2009b, 123. 9. Schechner 2003, 229. 10. For many scholars, the two major events that mark the beginning and the end of the medieval period are precisely the fall of Rome in 476 CE and the fall of Constantinople in 1453. However, defining the ‘Middle Ages’ as the thousand-year period between the fall of these two European polities (or, alternatively, between European Antiquity

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and a decidedly European Renaissance) creates problems for the theatre history of non-European countries. For, while theatre was certainly produced in Japan and India and other places between 476 and 1453 CE , to label this theatre ‘medieval’ is to superimpose (at the very least) a European ‘in-between-ness’ on cultural practices that were anything but that. 11. Ironically, the Mass itself existed as a kind of theatrical event and can perhaps be viewed as the earliest and most ubiquitous form of theatrical performance of the early Middle Ages. See Kobialka 1999 and Sofer 2003. As Andrew Sofer has argued, the ‘unconsecrated eucharistic wafer (oble) is the ur-prop of post-classical Western European drama’ (2003, 31). 12. Van Deusen 2011, 66. 13. Johnson 2001, n. p. 14. On preaching as performance, see Denery 2007; and Waters 2004. On the connection of medieval rhetoric to theatre, see Enders 1992b. 15. See also Beadle and Fletcher 2008; King and Davidson 2000; Richardson and Johnston 1991; and Robinson 1991. 16. Epstein 2009, 111. 17. Muir 1999, 5. See also Davidson 1997a; and Eisenbichler 1991. 18. See Terpstra 1999. 19. See Sell and Burkhart 2004, particularly essays by Viviana Díaz Balsera (1: 85–111) and Elizabeth Wright (3: 3–34). 20. See also Audrey Ekdahl Davidson 1990. 21. Granada officially fell to Ferdinand and Isabella on 2 January 1492 CE . By 31 March, in an effort to consolidate Spain as a single nation with one language (Castilian) and one religion (Catholicism), the Catholic Monarchs issued their first expulsion order and eventually set a deadline of 2 August as the date by which all unconverted Jews had to leave the country. (Ironically, when Christopher Columbus set sail on 3 August on what would be his first voyage to the Americas, he was forced to leave from the rather sleepy port city of Palos de la Frontera because larger and more convenient ports – like Cádiz – were still full of people trying to comply with the expulsion order.) And while the terms of Granada’s surrender stipulated that Spain’s remaining Muslim population would be free to practise Islam, reality did not match the rhetoric. By 1502 Spain’s official tolerance for Islam had melted away, as the Spanish Inquisition spent the next century pressuring (if not outright forcing) Muslims to also convert to Christianity. Such policies of ethnic and religious cleansing culminated on 9 April 1609, when King Philip issued another expulsion order aimed at the (now nominally Christian) Moriscos. See Menocal 2002. 22. On the connection between torture, pain and theatre, see Carlson 2010; and Enders 1999. 23. My use of the term ‘jongleuresque’ as a generic descriptor of this performance tradition comes from Radical Theatricality: Jongleuresque Performance on the Early Spanish Stage. I have adopted this adjective following the work of Ramón Menéndez Pidal, who characterized the jongleurs as all those who made their living performing for the public (1962, 12). For other studies of this tradition, see also Butterworth 2005; Katritzky 2007; Milá y Fontanals 1966; Preiss 2014; and Willeford 1969.

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24. Modern variants of the jongleuresque include vaudeville and stand-up comedy. 25. Chambers 1903, 2: 2. 26. See, for example, Milá y Fontanals 1966. 27. Milá y Fontanals 1966, 235. 28. Bagby 2006. 29. Taylor 2003. 30. See also Davidson 1991, 65–127. 31. Blodgett 1995, 35. 32. See Allegri 1988, 59–79; Baldwin and Mills 2002; and Tydeman 1978, 185–221. 33. See Milá y Fontanals 1966, 36–38; Falvy 1986, 25–28; Haines 2004, 52; and Huot 1987, 118–123. 34. Some scholars have argued that the court of King Alphonse X the Wise, whose ‘school of translators’ brought together an impressive group of Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars, thus making ancient Greek and Roman writings accessible to European readers for the first time in nearly 1,000 years, was one of the principle catalysts for the Renaissance. See Menocal 1987. 35. Moreh 1992, 72. See also Harris 2007, 139–141. 36. Wickham 1974, 159–160 (my emphasis). 37. On the increasing division between oral and written traditions, see Huot 1987. See also Stern 1996, 145–189. 38. See Smith 2009; and Symes 2007. 39. See Surtz 1979. 40. On earlier attempts by Italian jongleurs to professionalize, see Robins 2015. 41. Richards and Richards 1990, 16. See also Henke 2002; and Nicoll 1931. 42. Twycross and Carpenter 2002, 52. On masking in England, see pages 14–51. 43. Bakhtin 1984, 71. 44. Burningham, 2016, 105. 45. Lord 2000. On ‘singers of tales on simple stages’, see also Burningham 2007, 50–89. 46. Certeau 1984, 29. 47. Eagleman 2012, 56. 48. On the quotidian performance of medieval narrative, see the various essays published in Vitz, Freeman Regalado and Lawrence 2005. See also DuBois 2006. 49. See McLuhan 1962. 50. Romancero is the term used to refer to the total collection of medieval and early modern Spanish ballads (called romances in Spanish), particularly those related to one or another Iberian oral tradition. Ladino (or Judeo-Spanish) is the language of the Sephardic communities whose culture and oral traditions were dispersed throughout the world in the wake of the 1492 expulsion decree. 51. Chaucer 2011; and Boccaccio 2016. 52. See Clopper 2001. 53. On gesture, see Davidson 2001; and Jousse 1990, 7–92. 54. On theatre and cognitive science, see McConachie and Hart 2006. 55. Hart 2006, 42. 56. On cognition, reception and the performance of the chansons de geste, see Leverage 2010.

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57. Tydeman 1978, 190. 58. Aronson-Lehavi 2011a, 40. 59. Bakhtin 1984, 7. 60. Burningham 2007, 115. 61. Chandler and Schwartz 1961, 37–38.

Chapter Eight: Repertoires and Genres: Emotions at Play 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Gebauer and Wulf 1996, 61–62. Robertson 1962, viii. Illouz 2008, 13; 34. Scrutton 2011, 36; King 2010, 169, 171; Knuuttila 2004, 156; Wetzel 2008, 354–355. E.K. Chambers (1903) and Karl Young (1933) organize the medieval repertoire as an evolution. Chambers’ genres are minstrelsy, folk drama, religious drama and interludes. Young’s creates genres of devotional plays by theme and plot structure. O.B. Hardison (1965) identifies thematic genres in the church year. Glynne Wickham (1974) divides medieval plays into ‘theatres of worship’ and ‘theatres of recreation.’ William Tydeman (1978) considers pagan and folk rituals (qua Hardison), and opposes humanist classicism with Christian religiosity (qua Chambers, Young and Wickham). He classifies plays by performance context: ‘indoor theatre’, ‘street theatre’ and ‘open-air theatre’. David Bevington (1975) separates religious from non-religious plays chronologically: ‘Liturgical Beginnings’; ‘Twelfth-Century Church Drama’; ‘The Corpus Christi Cycle’; ‘Saints’ Plays or Conversion Plays’; and then ‘The Morality Play’ and ‘Humanist Dramas’. 6. Postmodern critiques in the 1980s emphasized the arbitrariness of categories, ideological agendas in organizations of knowledge, and the power of discursive formations (such as genre) to construct knowledge. Some rendered genre obsolete. See Kobialka 1999. 7. See Tydeman 1978 and Hardison 1965. 8. See Frank 1954. 9. Tydeman 1978, 4. 10. Bevington 1975, 5. 11. See Hardison 1965 and Frank 1954. 12. See V.A. Kolve 1966. 13. Robertson 1962, 39. For the anti-theatrical prejudice, see Barish 1981 and Davidson 1997b. For mimesis, see Gebauer and Wolf 1996. 14. Frye 1957, 214–215. 15. Brennan 2004, 51. 16. Bevis 2013, 110. 17. Scrutton 2011, 36. 18. Augustine 2003, 14.15. 19. Bevington 1975, 27, 28. 20. See Norton 1991 and Petersen 2004. 21. Augustine 2003, 14.6; King 2010, 170; Knuuttila 2004, 159; Wetzel 2008, 361. 22. Hildegard was first in a double house in Disibodenberg, then established her own women-only convent at Rupertsberg in 1148 or 1150 (depending on the source) as abbess. She completed the Ordo probably in 1151.

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23. See Fassler 2011, 376–381. 24. For the Four Daughters of God as female counsellors who intervene on behalf of mankind after the Fall, see Johnston 2001. 25. Newman 1998, 80. 26. Scrutton 2011, 39. 27. Dronke 2008, 167, l. 76; 164, 1.53. 28. Dronke 2008, 160, 1. 19; 160, 1. 21–22; 162, 1. 23; 162, 1. 24; 162 1. 26–28; 162, 1. 30; 162, 1. 39. 29. Dronke 2008, 162, l. 23, 36; 164, 1. 48; 164, 1. 53. 30. Dronke 2008, 172, 1. 158; 172, 1. 159; 170–173, 1. 161; 172, 1. 165; 179, 1. 249. 31. Holsinger 2001, 94. 32. Macardle 2007, 93ff. 33. See Enders 1999, 60–61; 66. 34. Bevington 1975, 402, 1. 566; 404, 1.623; 406, 1. 707. 35. Bevington 1975, 405, 1. 638. 36. Bevington 1975, 405, 1. 668. 37. Bevington 1975, 407, 1. 742. 38. Bevington 1975, 408, 1. 743–745. 39. Bevington 1975, 408, 1. 753. 40. Scrutton 2011, 43. 41. Enders 2011, 143; Cohen 1949, 51, l. 616. 42. See Enders 1992, 199; Enders 2011, 113; 141; Cohen 1949, 3 l. 24–25; Enders 2011, 113; 115; Cohen 1949, 6 l. 63. See Gebauer and Wulf 1996, 131. 43. Enders 2011, 136; Cohen 1949, 39, l. 464. 44. Enders 2011, 138; Cohen 1949, 44, l. 532ff; Enders 2011, 200; Cohen 1949, 47, l. 574, 571; Enders 2011, 143; Cohen 1949, 51, l. 610ff; Enders 2011, 138–39; Cohen 1949, 45, l. 541ff. 45. Enders 2011, 122, 129; Cohen 1949, 14, l. 170–171; 29, l. 361–362. 46. Enders 2011, 119; Cohen 1949, 12, l. 150ff. 47. Enders 2011, 120; Cohen 1949, 13, l. 167–168. 48. Enders 2011, 122; Cohen 1949, 13, l. 162. 49. Burke 1941, 119; see Gebauer and Wulf 1996, 130–131; see also Enders 2002. 50. Knight 1983, 17. 51. Enders 1999, 199–200.

Chapter Nine: Technologies of Performance 1. 2. 3. 4.

See Happé 1975, 121, l. 81. Happé 1975, 122, l. 93. Happé 1975, 112, l. 61. For a production photograph of the ark, see www.arenapal.com/imageflows2/ ?s=%7B%22lid%22%3A%2256e7e86042065ba018000000%22%7De. Accessed 26 March 2016. 5. For details of the earthquake created by the Drapers at Chester, see Meredith and Tailby 1983, 107–108. See also Butterworth 2005, 166 for the effects of blood spurting as described in Provençal. The Croxton Play of the Sacrament (c. 1461)

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requires a dummy hand so that a limb can remain attached to the Host; see Bevington 1975, 773, l. 516. 6. I use the term ‘stage’ here, although medieval theatre had few formal stages. 7. For further information on Italianate drama machinery, see the guide published by the British Library: www.bl.uk/treasures/festivalbooks/stagingtheatre.html. For an image of the smoking hellsmouth at the Valenciennes 1547 play, see https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Valenciennes-stage-bnf-ms-fr-12536-f1v-2.jpg; the York Mercer’s record can be found in the digitized Records of Early English Drama: York, vol. 1, 55–56. https://archive.org/stream/yorkREED 01johnuoft#page/ n111/mode/2up/search/1433 (both accessed 18 January 2016). 8. Twycross and Carpenter 2002, 213. 9. See, for example, the illustration of Hell in the Hortus deliciarum manuscript of Herrad of Landsberg (about 1180). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell#/media/ File:Hortus_Deliciarum_-_Hell.jpg. Accessed 26 March 2016. 10. The Play of Adam, Bevington 1975, 80. 11. The Play of Adam, Bevington 1975, 94. 12. The Play of Adam, Bevington 1975, 103. 13. The Play of Adam, Bevington 1975, 105. 14. Butterworth 1998b, 47–48. 15. White 1962, 79. 16. White 1962, 87. 17. White 1962, 128–129. 18. Johnson and Rogerson 1979, 1: 410. The record translates as ‘Mr Brooke, Sheriff, for one dozen corn powder for the shots with the pageants, 13 shillings’ (a shilling was an English payment worth about 12p – although the value of this transaction today is likely to be hundreds of pounds). 19. Bevington 1975, 797. A literal translation of this would read: ‘He that shall play Belial look that he have gunpowder burning in papers in his hands and in his ears and his arse when he goes to battle.’ 20. Tydeman 1978, 173. 21. Ingram 1981, 478 22. Bradbury and Collette 2009, 353. 23. See Groeneveld, forthcoming. 24. It is not clear from when the Rood dates. William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, notes in 1524 that the mechanism was ‘much sought from all parts of the realm’ (quoted in Butterworth 2005, 123) which suggests it existed from the late fifteenth century. 25. Groeneveld 2007, 14. 26. Butterworth 2005, 113–114. 27. Butterworth 2005, 114. 28. Meredith and Tailby 1983, 103. 29. Epstein 1991, 230. 30. Tydeman 1978, 167. 31. Strong 2007, 34. 32. Duffy 2005, 96–97. 33. Beadle 1982, XV, 15–16. Translated into modern English this reads: ‘A star should shine and signify/With light rays like any day.’

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34. There is some indication, however, that the Chandlers were not a thriving guild and by 1563 it is noted that a percentage of the Innkeepers’ pageant silver was to be given to support the Shepherds’ play (Johnson and Rogerson 1979, 1: 341). 35. Plat 1609, no page number. 36. Meredith and Tailby 1983, 114. 37. Fleckenstein 2009, 112. 38. Stevens 2013, 11/12. 39. Sheingorn 1989, 173. 40. Wickham 1958, 326. 41. Meredith and Tailby 1983, 103. 42. Cited in Butterworth 2005, 166. 43. Meredith and Tailby 1983, 113; Enders 2002a, 174–181. 44. Meredith and Tailby 1983, 111–112. 45. Twycross and Carpenter 2002, 314. 46. See Clopper 1979, 32, 36, 67, 70, 75. 47. Twycross and Carpenter 2002, 99. 48. Twycross and Carpenter 2002, 202. 49. Meredith and Tailby 1983, 120. 50. See Happé 1975, 44, lines 69–70. This literally translates as ‘With assorted colours it shall shine/Of velvet, satin and damask fine’. 51. Happé 1975, 14, lines 10–14. In modern English, the sense of this is: ‘We are but poor husbandmen that walk on the moor/In faith, we are nearly homeless/No wonder, as things stand, that we are poor/ For the arable fields are all as fallow as the floor.’ 52. Ashley 1998, 18. 53. Johnson and Rogerson 1979, 1: 55–56. This translates as ‘run about in heaven’. 54. RJohnson and Rogerson 1979, 1: 58. 55. Beadle 1982, 35: 26. In modern English this reads ‘so that our work not be wrong’. 56. Beadle 1982, 35: 225–226. In modern English, the meaning is ‘His falling was heavier/ Than all the harms he had (done to him)’. 57. Cited in Butterworth 2005, 78. The Metz Passion of 1437 shows the dangers of on stage hangings: ‘And in this play was yet another priest called lord jehan de Missey who was chaplain of Mairange, who took the part of Judas: and because he was left hanging too long, he was also unconscious and seemed dead, for he had fainted; therefore he was swiftly taken down and carried to a place nearby where he was rubbed with vinegar and things to restore him’ (Meredith and Tailby 1983, 116). For a further discussion of the Metz Passion, also see Enders 2005, 55–66. 58. Le Goff 2015, 13. 59. Le Goff 2015, x.

Chapter Ten: Knowledge Transmission: Media and Memory 1. See Symes 2011b. For a recent example of the prevailing narrative, see e.g. Brockett and Hildy 2007: 69–104 2. On this problem, see Symes 2002 and 2011a. 3. For a cogent and pointed overview of the problem, see Enders 2009a.

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4. E.g. Garland 2004: 65–85. 5. Recent studies include Falkner 2002; Ceccarelli 2010; Bosher 2012. I review the ancient evidence fully in Symes 2010b and 2016; the latter provides a fuller account of the process summarized here. 6. Easterling and Hall 2002. 7. Barnes 2010. 8. Symes 2010b. On the circumstances in which anti-theatrical rhetoric flourishes, see Barish 1981. On Augustine and his contemporaries as performers, see Hall 2002. 9. Epistle 89, ed. Bidez and Cumont 1922, 172–3 (τοῖς ἀσελγέσι τούτοις θεάτροις [. . .] καθαρὰ γενóμενα). All translations in this chapter are my own. 10. Halliwell 2008: 518–19 11. See the resources and excellent bibliography of the Biblical Performance Network www.biblicalperformancecriticism.org/ [accessed 7 August 2015]. 12. Dox 2004; but see the rather different reading of the evidence in Symes 2010b and 2016. 13. Marciniak 2004. 14. Puchner 2002. 15. Treadgold 1981; Reynolds and Wilson 1991: 58–66. 16. Cited by Bourbouhakis 2010: 184. 17. Papaioannou 2010. 18. E.g., the important arguments of Pizarro 1989: 1–61; Enders 1992b: 12–18, 69–128. 19. Holloway 1992: 40. 20. Mayvaert 1973; Symes 2003. 21. Rome, Biblioteca apostolica Vaticana MS lat. 3266. 22. The term ‘Holy Roman Empire’ was not coined until the mid-twelfth century. 23. Rome, Biblioteca apostolica Vaticana MS lat. 3868; see Wright 2006. 24. Dodwell 2000; Lateiner 2004. 25. Parkes 1993. 26. E.g., McKitterick 1977; Bischoff 1994. 27. Symes 2003. 28. Dox 2004: 74–85; Symes 2007: 168–174; Symes 2010b: 359–365. 29. On the revival of Greek literacy in Western Europe, see Botley 2002. 30. Weiss 1958. 31. Symes 2007: 251–253. 32. Kelly 1979. 33. It is central to the argument of Kelly 1993: xiii, 36, 111. 34. Kelly 1989: 48–59, 89; Kelly 1993: 144–157; Holloway 1992. 35. Dante, De vulgari eloquentia II .4 in the edition of Botterill 1996 (my translation). 36. Kaldellis 2007: 225; Symes 2016. 37. The manuscript is now in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France MS Coislinianus 120 [C], fols. 248v–249v. See Symes 2016. 38. Janko 1984: 2–20; Watson 2012. 39. Tractatus, in the edition of Janko 1984: 22 and 24 (my translation). 40. The recent study of Vakonakis 2011 offers no fresh analysis. 41. E.g., the edition of Tuilier 1969. See Parente 1985 on its humanist reception.

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42. Brambs 1885: 25; Livanos 2010; White 2010. 43. Sticca 1974. 44. The classical Greek λειτουργία (performance of public service) was used by the translators of the Septuagint to denote worship in the Temple. Its Latin cognate, liturgia, appears nowhere in the Latin Vulgate and there are only seven instances of its use in the Patrologia Latina. See Symes 2015. 45. Boynton 2011. 46. Symes 2011 and 2015. 47. Orderic, Ecclesiastical History III .3, ed. Chibnall 1969–1980: vol. 3, 108 (my translation). 48. Burchard of Michaelsberg in Dengler-Schreibe 1979: 184. On libelli, see Palazzo 1990 and Symes 2016. 49. White 2006. 50. See Symes 2011a and 2013. 51. E.g., Lancashire 1984. The REED project is based on an avowedly evolutionary and teleological model: MacLean 2006. It has been the object of critique since its inception: e.g. Coletti 1990b; Sponsler 1997; Symes 2002 and 2011a. 52. See Symes 2007: 246–250 and 2014 (reviewing Peters 2012). See also BouhaïkGironès 2010, trans. Symes 2011c. 53. Symes 2002; Stern 2009. 54. Symes 2003 and 2012a. 55. On the relationship between clowning and documentary control, see Preiss 2014. 56. Aronson-Lehavi 2011a. 57. This paragraph condenses the arguments of Symes 2002, 2003, 2011a, and 2013. 58. West 1992; Symes 2016. 59. White 2006 and 2010. 60. The manuscript is Foligno, Biblioteca communale, MS C. 85, 87. It consists of 87 haphazardly gathered paper folios and booklets, measuring about 222 × 75 mm. See Kimura 2014 for these excerpts from the manuscript (my translations). 61. On Shakespeare as a fundamentally medieval dramatist, see Cooper 2010; Perry and Watkins 2009; Morse, Cooper, and Holland 2013. 62. Symes 2007 and 2010a. Exemplary recent studies that contribute to a more capacious study of medieval theatre include Gertsman 2010; Dillon 2012; and Weigert 2015. 63. As Enders (2002 and 2009b) has richly demonstrated. 64. A notable exception is Öztürkmen and Vitz 2014. 65. Symes 2013.

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INDEX

abject, abjection, 74 abstinence, abstinent, 61, 64, 66–7, 69–70 accidents of the soul, 132 acrobats, acrobatism, 146, 152, 157 actors and acting, 60, 62–6, 72, 74, 105, 108–11, 119, 145, 147, 150, 157, 161, 199–200, 209 acting companies, troupes, 9, 43, 111, 157 moral evaluations of, 125, 128, 135–7, 139–40 professional players, 39, 42–3, 146, 150–1, 157, 160–1, 200, 208–9, 229 n.40 see also play and playing Adam and Eve, 54, 55, 59–60, 76, 182–3 adaptation, 8, 69, 106, 108, 112–15, 119–20 admission fees, 39 Adoration of the Cross (ceremony), 81 Advent, 46 Aelred of Rievaulx, 83–4 Aeschylus, 146, 202 Aethelwold (Bishop of Winchester), 80–1 affect, 70, 163–7, 171–4, 176–8 as structuring principle, 165 in theatre, 163–4 waves of, 167 affectus/affectiones, 164, 167 al-Andalus, 151

Alphonse X, the Wise, 152, 229 n.34 altar, 81, 88, 168 Americas, 6, 8, 106–7, 113, 117, 120–1, 151, 228 n.21 amphitheatre, 2, 12, 129, 131, 148 anachronism, 2, 76 André de la Vigne, 56 anthropology, 40, 45 anti-Semitism, 2, 15, 27, 151 anti-theatrical polemic, 6, 62, 83–4, 101, 125–8, 141–3 Apollodorus, 203 appropriation, 118, 120 Aquinas, Thomas, 123, 137–40, 163 Arabic language, 6, 156–7, 205 literature, 8, 140 tradition, 156 Aristophanes, 113, 205–7 Aristotle, 7, 10, 124, 126, 135–40, 200–2, 205–7 Nicomachean Ethics, 124, 135, 136–40 Poetics, 126, 140, 205–7 Arthur, 205 Athens, 200–2 Aucassin et Nicolette, 10 audience, 1, 7, 9, 13–14, 62, 65–6, 72, 75–6, 106–9, 111, 117, 166, 172 effects of theatre on, 41–2, 123–44 moral responsibility of, 140, 144

273

274

participation, 29–31, 41, 80–1, 84, 87–9, 92, 95–6, 99–101, 152 response, 56, 161, 167–8, 172, 177–8 Augustine of Hippo, St, 20, 125–6, 128, 129, 140, 142, 163, 167–8, 201, 203 City of God, 125, 128 Confessions, 9, 125–6, 140, 164 Augustus Caesar, 203 Austin, J. L., 13–4, 47 auto-da-fé, 151 auto sacramental, 151 Averroës (Ibn Rushd), 140, 205 Babcock, Barbara, 56 Babio, 209 backdrop, 82, 84, 90, 95, 98–9 Bagby, Benjamin, 152, 228 n.28 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 44, 158, 161, 229 n.43, 229 n.59 ballads, balladry, 159, 161, 229 n.50 banns, 110–11 banquet, banqueting, 49, 96–9, 113, 137–8 Banu ¯ Sa¯ sa¯n, 33 Barking Abbey, 60, 67–9 Basoche, 3, 32, 50 see also confraternities battle play, 12, 106 Belgium, 45, 53, 108, 117 Beowulf, 42, 152 Bible, 60, 141 Bible, Vulgate, 45, 59, 202–3 bilingualism, 7, 229 n.34 Bishop of Fools, 54 blood, 82, 180, 192 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 139, 160, 229 n.51 body, 10–2, 44, 61–4, 70, 72–5, 128, 130–2 Boethius, 48, 124 Bonaventure, St, 133–5 books, 4–6, 8–9, 159 Boy Bishop, 45, 143, 161 Brook, Peter, 147, 160, 227 n.6 Bruegel the Elder, Pieter, 24, 25 see also Galle, Philips Brunelleschi, Filippo, 182, 198 Bruno of Cologne, 204–5 Butler, Judith, 12, 61 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 61, 72–3

INDEX

Byzantine/Eastern Roman Empire, 126, 128–9, 147, 201–3, 205–7, 209 Cadden, Joan, 65, 70 Cailleau, Hubert, 109 Candlemas (Purification), 51, 188 candles, 68, 188–190 Cantigas de Santa María, 156 caritas, 164, 167, 169, 171–2, 174, 177 Carnival, carnivalesque, 28, 40, 43–5, 56, 66, 75–6, 113, 116–7, 157–8, 161 Caro, Ana, 146 carol, carolers, 34–37 Castle of Perseverance, 101, 102, 109, 129, 184 catharsis, 126, 166, 176 Catholicism, 146, 148, 150–1, 228 n.21 Catholic Monarchs (Ferdinand and Isabella), 151, 228 n.21 post-Reformation, 207–8 Roman Catholic Church, 14–15, 19–23, 46, 123–44, 148–9, 151, 161, 199–200, 207–8 Celestina, see Rojas, Fernando de censorship, 6, 115, 117, 199–200 cento, 202, 207 Certeau, Michel de, 3, 9, 17, 22, 28, 101, 158–9, 229 n.46 Chambers, E.K., 16, 78, 80, 227 n.42, 228 n.25 chambers of rhetoric, see Rederijkers chansons de geste, 152, 161, 229 n.56 characters, character development, character psychology, 14–15, 61, 65–8, 70–3, 75, 145, 168–9, 171–2, 174, 176–7, 202 charivari, 44 Charlemagne, 203–4 Chartres, 208 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 160, 229 n.51 Chester Plays, see cycle plays, Chester chivalric games, 40, 151 Christianity, Christ, 1–2, 13, 18, 19–23, 25, 27, 33, 64, 69, 123–44, 147–8, 151, 156, 157, 177, 199–203, 205–7, 228 n.21, 229 n.34 see also Catholicism; Protestantism Christmas, 35, 40, 43–5, 107, 110, 115, 141, 143, 165, 168

INDEX

Christos paschon, 207 Chrysostom, John, 126, 201 Church Fathers, 20, 148, 201–203, 207 Cixous, Hélène, 69, 70 see also feminism clergy, 23, 46, 123–44, 199–201 clockwork mechanism, 185, 187–8 closet drama, 10 clothing, 48, 63, 71, 150 clowns, clowning, 56, 146, 152, 157 coincidence of opposites, 56 colonialism, postcolonialism, 118, 150–1 Columbus, Christopher, 228 n.21 comedy, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 22, 48, 128–9, 137, 165–8, 171–3, 175–7, 200–7, 228 n.24 commedia dell’arte, 6, 34, 157–8, 209 commemoration, 80–2, 84, 95–6, 106, 119 commentaries, 136–9 confession, 68–9, 151, 175 Confession Lessons, 165, 176–8 Confidenti, 157 confraternities, 18, 31–4, 47, 49–50, 52–3, 150–1 Abbaye des Conards, Rouen, 32–3, 34 Carité of jongleurs, Arras, 53, 157 Confrérie de la Passion, Paris, 53, 150 Confrérie Saint-Eloi, Paris, 49–50 Compagnia della Purificazione e di San Zanobi, Florence, 50–2 Compagnia dell’Archangelo Raffaello, Florence, 50 Gonfalone, Rome, 53 see also Basoche convent, 40, 47–9, 61, 64, 67–8, 149 conversion, 111, 113, 118, 151, 228 n.21 Constantine, 126, 147 Constantinople, 202–7, 227 n.10 Conversion of St Paul, 111 Cornish ordinalia, 187 Corpus Christi (festival), 40, 47, 54, 63, 68, 89–90, 100, 114–15, 139, 151 costumes, 3, 4, 5, 11, 45, 48, 50, 68, 106, 107, 111, 114, 150 craft, craftsmanship, 68, 100–1, 150, 179, 183, 185, 187–8, 191, 193, 195–7 crime, criminal activity, 14, 120 Cross, 72–5, 80–1, 85–9, 94, 196–7 cross-dressing, 23, 44, 50, 60, 65–7, 125, 128

275

cross-gender, 65, 71 Croxton Play of the Sacrament, 113, 118–19, 177 crucifixion, staging of, 72–5, 93–5, 168, 173, 196–7 cultural performance, 40, 61, 68, 159–61, 227 n.10 cupiditas, 164, 167, 170, 174 cycle plays, 32, 108, 113–17, 141, 150, 164–5, 172–4, 178 Chester cycle, 53–4, 59–60, 65–6, 90, 116–7, 149, 179, 180, 192, 195 Corpus Christi cycle, 32, 33, 151, 179, 181, 190, 192, 194–7 Coventry plays, 116, 184 N-Town plays, 111 Towneley plays, 113, 117 York cycle, 53–4, 60, 61, 63, 64, 66, 72, 75, 113, 116–17, 139, 149, 174, 179, 181, 190, 192, 195–7 dance, 34–7, 40, 69, 132, 134, 147, 155 dancers, 34–7, 105–7, 113, 134, 155, 157 sword dancing, 154 Dante Alighieri, 205–6 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 44 death penalty, 3, 151 de Dondi, Giovanni, 185 de la Halle, Adam, 157 devil, devils, 4, 69–71, 181, 183, 184, 193 di Rienzo, Cola, 30, 31 didascaliae, see stage directions differentiation, 61 Dionysos, 201, 207 disguise, disguising, 44, 61, 71, 95 disputation, 3, 12, 23–7 dithyramb, 146 Donatus, 203 Douglas, Mary, 40 drama, 148–9 ancient, 42, 125–32, 146, 199–207 biblical, 58, 63, 177, 203, 205, 209 closet, see closet drama Dutch, 53, 108, 113, 116 see also Belgium English, see cycle plays; England French, 7, 8–9, 10, 12, 15, 49–50, 54, 56, 108–9, 120–1

276

Greek, 146, 200–7 Latin, 48, 115, 127, 129–30, 149, 199–211 liturgical, see liturgical drama; Quem quaeritis trope music-drama, 178 religious, 19–23, 141–3, 150–1, 166, 182–3, 203–8 secular, 166 Western, 39, 164, 228 n.11 see also theatre dramaturgy, 164, 178 early modern period, 107, 115–16, 150, 157, 207 Easter, 13, 62, 67, 80–5, 108, 165, 168, 207–8 ecclesiastical communities, 15, 48–9, 148 Eco, Umberto, 206 economic considerations, 115, 117 elites, civic, 18, 30, 32, 45–6, 49, 158 embodiment, 10, 14, 64, 66, 71, 72 see also body emotions, 72, 125–6, 141–2, 163–77 Encina, Juan del, 157 England, 6, 32, 33, 106, 109–20, 129, 141–3, 149–50, 157–8, 200, 209, 227 n.40, 229 n.42 see also drama, English entertainers, 42–3, 98–9, 124–40, 147, 152, 157, 159–61 entry ceremony, royal, 46–7, 89–92 epic, 10, 152, 161 epistemology, 199–211 ethics, 124, 136–40 and circumstances, 137–9 and playing, 136–40 Eucharist, 14, 81, 88, 151, 228 n.11 Euripides, 146, 202, 207 Everyman, 113, 117 fabliaux, 209 fairs, 157, 174–5, 178 farce, 7, 8, 10, 12, 15, 22, 25, 56, 61, 66, 75–6 fascination, 74 Fastnachtspiel, 61, 113 Feast of Fools, 45, 141, 158

INDEX

feminism écriture feminine, 69 femininity, 62, 65 proto-feminism, 71 festivals, festivity, 105, 117, 158 religious, 43, 80–4, 88–90, 158 secular, 96–8 urban, 28–9, 52–8 feudalism, 1, 152 fiction, fictionality, 95–6, 98–9 Flamenca, 155, 229 n.31 Flight of the Turk (Il volo del Turco), 28–9, 31 folklore, 159–60 folk, volk, 158 folk culture, 13, 44, 158–61 folk play, 40, 43 forgiveness, 171, 175–6 Foucault, Michel, 20, 28 Fouquet, Jean The Martyrdom of St Apollonia, 72–3, 101, 103 frame analysis, 53, 56 France, 3, 6–8, 10, 15, 32–3, 44, 54, 112, 149, 151, 153, 156–8 Franciscans, 210–1 Galle, Philips, 24–5 see also Bruegel the Elder Ganassa, Zan, 157 games, 12, 64, 106, 126, 130–1, 158, 160–1 Gelosi, 157 gender construction of, 59–76 reversal, 45 third gender, 64, 70 genre, 12, 56, 58, 164–78 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, 9 Gerhoh of Reichersberg, 205 Germany, 45, 48, 56–7, 148–9, 227 n.40 gesture, 12, 62, 65, 67, 68, 124, 126–8, 160, 169, 176, 229 n.53 God, 59, 70, 73, 179, 196 Goldoni, Carlo, 157 Granada, Kingdom of, 151, 228 n.21 Gréban, Arnoul, 15, 61, 65, 66, 73–4, 112 Greece, 146, 200–2 Greek language, 147, 201–7, 229 n.34

INDEX

Gregorian chant, 68 Gregory of Nazianzos, 207 grid-group model, 40–3, 41, 58 Guido d’Arezzo, 10 guilds, 31–4, 40, 47, 49, 53, 58,115, 148, 150, 179, 188, 190, 195 gunpowder, 183–4 guslar, 160 Handelman, Don, 44 Hardison, O.B., 13–14, 227 n.1 Hebrew, 6, 59 Hellenism, 201–7 Hell Mouth, 93, 95, 181, 184, 196 Henri II, of France, 185 Henry V, 185 Henry VI, 110 Henry VII, 111 Henry VIII, 120 heresy, 5, 30, 151 Hermannus Alemannus (Herman the German), 205 Herod, 45 hierarchy, 45, 47 Hildegard of Bingen, 60, 65, 67, 69–70, 165, 169 Causae et Curae (Causes and Cures), 65 Ordo Virtutum (Play of the Virtues), 60, 67, 69–70, 169–178 historiography, 1–2, 4, 8, 13–16,145–7, 152, 157, 227 n.10 Hocktide, 45 Holsinger, Bruce, 12 Holy Sepulchre, 80–4 Holy Week, 80–4, 90, 151 Honorius Augustodunensis, 83–4, 205 Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, 22, 48–9, 69, 115, 148–9, 204–5 Hugh of Saint Victor, 106, 130–6, 143–4 Huizinga, Johan, 12 humanism, humanists, 1, 117, 149, 205–7 Huston, Hollis, 147, 152, 159, 227 n.7 hybrids, hybridity, 113–14 Ibn Da¯niya¯l, 6, 33, 113 iconography, 64, 73 identity, 28, 60, 61, 62, 64, 73, 76 civic, 53, 54, 88–9, 95–6 community, 45, 52, 160

277

corporate, 40, 47, 49, 50 episcopal, 88–9 ideology, 18–9, 28, 48, 52, 56, 58, 71, 148, 150 impersonation, 11, 15, 61, 65, 66, 124, 128, 165 improvisation, 108, 110, 115, 118, 157 India, 227 n.10 Inquisitions, 151, 228 n.21 institutions, 17–37 educational, 23–7, 149 festive, 31–4, 50–2, 159 fraternal, 31–4, 49–50, 150–1 political, 27–31 sacred, 19–23, 148–9 vocational, 31–4, 150 interludes, 98, 108, 110, 111, 115 ioculator, 136, 156 Ireland, 42, 118 Isidore of Seville, 2, 6, 12, 60, 62, 67, 124, 126–9, 131–2, 143–4, 156 Islam, 33–4, 151, 156–7, 156, 228 n.21, 229 n.34 Italy, 2–3, 21, 27, 28–29, 32, 45, 50–2, 113, 149, 157, 205 Japan, 227 n.10 Jerome, St, 203 jesters, 42 Jeu d’Adam, 182–3, 185 see also Play of Adam jeux-partis, 25 Jewish liturgical chants, 20–1 Jews, see Judaism John of Salisbury, 10 John of San Gimignano, 135–6, 139 jongleurs, jongleuresque performance, 2–3, 112, 120–1, 151–7, 159–61, 228 n.23, 228 n.24, 229 n.40 Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, 149 Judaism, 2, 15, 20–1, 27, 118, 151, 160, 228 n.21, 229 n.34, 229 n.50 jugglers, juggling, 146, 153, 155–7, 161 Julian the Apostate, 201 Justinian, emperor, 209 Kempe, Margery, 109 Khaya¯l al-Zill, 33–4 see also shadow play tradition

278

Kilwardby, Robert, 132–3 Kristeva, Julia, 74–5 Lactantius, 125, 128 Ladino, 160 Latin language, 5–7, 24, 59, 60, 110, 147 Dog Latin (latin de cuisine), 24 scholastic Latin, 24 laude, 32, 51 laughter, 44, 56, 128, 136, 143, 201 law, 3–5, 8–9, 13–4 see also crime, criminal activity legislation against theatre, 128, 199–201 Le Goff, Jacques, 2, 11, 12, 197–8 Lent, 28, 80–5, 90, 113 Lenten cloth, 80–4 liberal arts curriculum, 23–4, 130 Lille plays, 54 liminal, liminality, 32, 60, 64, 74–5, 76 literacy, 6, 9, 159, 203, 207–11 liturgical drama, 3, 13, 19–20, 44, 63, 67–70, 80–4, 88, 149–50, 161, 168–9, 178, 199 liturgy, 19–20, 80–4, 90, 115, 166, 168, 177, 199, 207–10 liveness, 10, 61, 76, 119–20, 161 Lord, Albert, 158, 160, 229 n.45 Louis the Pious, 203 Low Countries, see Belgium; drama, Dutch Lucerne Passion Play, 92–6, 93, 94, 100, 183, 187 Lydgate, John, 31, 110 macaronic language, 7 Mankind, 111 Mannyng, Robert, 34–5 mansions, 92, 108–9 manuscripts, manuscript studies, 5–6, 8, 11, 15, 110–12, 114, 116, 118–20, 148, 201–11 Marche, Olivier de la, 98 Mardi Gras, see carnival, carnivalesque marionettes, 155, 185, 191 martyrdom, 72–3 Mary, Virgin Mary, 60, 61, 62, 63–7, 68, 71, 74, 207 Mary Magdalene, 68, 74, 108 Marys, 62, 67–9 masculinity, 65, 72, 73

INDEX

masks, masking, 44–5, 75, 81, 124, 131, 157–8, 181, 192–4, 229 n.42 Mass, 14, 20, 81, 88, 205–7, 228 n.11 see also Eucharist May Day, 158 mechanical arts, 130–6, 150 medieval, Middle Ages, definitions of, 1–2, 145, 147, 199–200, 227 n.10 medievalism, 2, 6 Mediterranean, 28–9, 32, 33, 205 Meistersingers, 32 memory, mnemotechnics, 8–9, 116 Menander, 203 mercers, 181 metatheatricality, 4, 15, 60, 73 Mexico, 149–50 see also Americas Middle English, 59, 60 midsummer shows, 40, 45, 184, 185, 158 mimes, miming, 3, 9–12, 42, 119, 124, 126–9, 146, 157 mimesis, 124–5, 140, 165, 168, 174 minstrels, 42, 43, 110, 155 miracle plays, 1, 12, 15, 49–50, 141–3, 166 Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages, 50 mirrors, 15, 190–1 modernity, 105, 199–200 Molière, 146, 158 monasticism, monasteries, 23, 43, 48, 62, 63, 67, 148–9 monks, 22–3, 146, 148–50, 199–200 monasteries, 23, 206–8 see also Franciscans morality plays, 12, 15, 49, 53, 150–1, 169 Moriscos, 228 n.21 morris dancing, 105, 107, 113 see also dance, dancing motus animae, 164, 167 Mount Athos, 206–7 mountebanks, 146 mummery, mummings, 30–1, 105, 110, 115–16, 158 music, 4, 5, 9–10, 12, 13, 24, 25, 33, 43, 131–6, 146, 154, 155–7, 156, 203–4, 208–9, 227 n.3 as medicine, 132–4 as theatre, 131–6, 146, 154 Mussato, Albertino, 130, 149

INDEX

Mystère de Saint Martin, Seurre, 56 mystery plays, 6, 12, 15, 61, 65, 73–4, 108, 118, 150, 200 see also cycle plays; Passion plays nationalism, 2, 5, 112, 118 Native Americans, 113–14, 151 Nine Worthies, 96–8, 97 Ogden, Dunbar, 69 orality, 1, 4–5, 9–11, 120, 160, 199, 229 n.37 oral poetry, 10, 159–61, 229 n.50 Orderic Vitalis, 208 Orthodox Church, 202–8 Otto the Great, 204–5 Ottoman Empire, 205 pagan performance practices, 20, 125–32, 158, 199–201 pageant, pageant wagons, 89–90, 92–3, 100, 108, 111–13, 115, 117, 121, 195 pain, 71, 73–5, 151 pantomime, see mimes, miming parody, 45, 56 Passion, of Jesus Christ, 82, 85, 95, 205–7, 210 passiones, 164, 167, 170–1, 174 Passion plays, 2, 4, 6–7, 12, 15, 61, 63, 65, 68, 72–4, 92–6, 109, 112, 150, 170–1, 179, 181 see also mystery plays patronage, 18, 42, 48–9, 111, 113, 137, 152 pedagogy, 3, 23–5, 150 performance studies, 2–4, 9, 11–15, 40, 147, 161 performativity, 14, 76, 147, 161 performers, 42, 60, 61, 67, 69, 147–8, 150–3, 155–61, 209 see also actors, players periodization, 1–2, 111, 148, 150, 152, 197–8, 227 n.10 persona, 124 personification, 69 perspective, 198 Peter of Blois, 205 philology, 2, 6–8 piyyut, see Jewish liturgical chants

279

platforms (movable wagons; stationary), 89–93, 100 Plato, 7, 142–3 Plautus, 149 play and playing, 42, 60, 69, 123–44, 147, 160 mean and extremes in, 136–9 physical/psychological benefits of, 130–7, 142 see also actors Play of Adam, 7, 182–3, 185 Poem of the Cid, 152 politics, 2, 3, 4, 5–7, 11–12, 14–15, 27–31, 117–8, 151–2, 214, n.17 popular culture, 13, 158–61 prayer, 9 preaching, 3, 210–1, 228 n.14 prestidigitation, 152 priests, 14 printing press, 116 procession, 3, 39, 41–2, 45–7, 50–1, 53–4, 75, 85–92, 100, 151 processional cross, 85–9 Procopius, 129 props, 4, 5, 107, 110, 111, 150, 191–2, 196 Protestantism, 1, 14, 54, 115, 151, 207–8 Psellos, Michael, 206–7 pulley, 182, 184–5, 197 Purification feast, 44, 51–2, 51 quackery, 146 quadrivium, 24, 192, 197 Quem quaeritis trope, 13, 20–1, 60, 62–3, 68–9, 80–1, 146, 148, 168–9, 207–8, 227 n.1 Quintilian, 7, 12 quotidian communities, 158–61, 229 n.48 Rabelais, François, 10 Read, Alan, 3 realism, 14, 181 reception, 48, 125–32, 166, 229 n.56 of ancient drama, 125–32 Rederijkers, Rederijkerskamers, 3, 18, 32, 53, 113 REED, Records of Early English Drama, 5, 209

280

Reformation, see Protestantism Regularis Concordia, 62, 80–1 Renaissance, 2, 14, 19, 63, 149, 157, 182, 198–202, 205–7, 227 n.10, 229 n. 34 repertoires, 110, 113, 115, 117, 152, 166–8, 171, 174, 177–8 as culturally situated, 178 of feeling, 178 resurrection, 15, 67, 80–2, 84, 90 revivals, 6, 117–18 rhetoric, 3, 11–12, 24, 124, 228 n.14 Richard II, 31, 193 ritual, 2, 3, 12, 14, 19–20, 22, 28–30, 40, 46–8, 54, 63, 67, 69, 108, 113, 121, 146–7, 151, 160, 168, 175, 176, 199–200 of exclusion, 49, 203 of reversal, 44–5, 50 Robin Hood games, 43, 58, 120 Rojas, Fernando de, 149 Romancero, 159–60, 229 n.50 romances, 1, 3, 9, 10, 229 n.50 Roman Empire, 125–8, 146–8, 151, 200–7 Rome, 30, 31, 62, 125, 129, 146–8, 203–4, 227 n. 10 royal entries, 39, 46–7, 89–92, 109, 185 Rubin, Miri, 47 Rueda, Lope de, 158 Rupertsberg, 169, 171 sacerdotalism, 46 Sachs, Hans, 61, 75 sacrifice, sacrificial, 73 Saint John’s Day, 45, 158 Saint Sebastian play, 39 satire, 54, 56 Scarry, Elaine, 74 scatology, 9–11 Schechner, Richard, 12, 144, 147, 160–1, 227 n.4, 227 n.5, 227 n.9 Schernberg, Dietrich, 67, 70–1 Ein schön Spiel von Frau Jutten (The Play of Lady Jutta), 67, 70–1 school drama, 149–50, 202–3 school of translators, 205, 229 n.34 scops, 146 Scuole Grandi, 32 seasonal festivity, 43–5

INDEX

Second Shepherds’ Play, 15, 142, 195–6, 165, 172–6 Seneca, 129–30, 149 Sephardic culture, 160, 229 n.50 sexuality, 7, 59–76 see also gender shadow play tradition, 32–4 see also Khaya¯l al-zill, Shakespeare, William, 6, 71, 116, 146, 150, 200, 211 shipbuilding, 179–180 Shrovetide Schembart, Nuremberg, 56, 57 Singer, Milton, 40 singers of tales, 42, 158, 229 n.45 Song of Roland, 152 song, singing, 2–3, 8–10, 12, 132–3, 145–6, 148, 152, 155, 157, 159–61, 209, 229 n.45 Sophocles, 146, 202 space, 2–4, 8, 9, 12, 17–19, 22, 28, 35–7, 77–8, 100–2, 107–8, 165 civic, urban, 28–29, 31, 45, 85, 88–90, 95–6, 195, 197 as container, 101, 147, 158 ecclesiastical, church or monastic, 19–23, 48, 82–5, 88 empty space, 147 liturgical, 46, 108 as mapping, 89, 195 permeability of, 92, 96, 98–9, 152 playing spaces, 49, 53, 94–5, 150, 152, 159 as relations, 37, 94–5, 101–2, 147 sacred, 88, 148 Spain, 3, 106, 114, 149–51, 156, 158, 160–1, 205, 227 n.40, 228 n.21 special effects, 180 spectators, 41–2, 78, 84, 87, 90, 95, 98–9, 101 146–7, 161 see also audience sponsors, 40, 42, 47, 52, 149–51, 161 stage, 9, 62, 66, 78, 126, 150, 157, 228 n.23 platform, 89–95 simple, 147, 152, 158–9, 229 n.45 see also theatre stage directions, 7, 60, 62, 74, 78, 182, 192, 202

INDEX

storytelling, 146, 152, 158, 160 symbols, 11, 14, 109, 120 symbolic inversion, 44–5 symbolic reversal, 44–5 tapestry, 80, 96–9 taxonomy, 4, 12–13, 168, 178 technology, development of, 119, 179–83, 187, 188, 197–8 telos, teleology, 13, 164, 166–7 Terence, 22, 20, 48, 69, 78, 79, 126–7, 149, 202–4 Teresa de Ávila, Saint, 149 Tertullian, 126, 201 textiles, 80–4, 96–9 texts, textuality, 146, 155, 199–200, 207–11 cultural, 46 instability of, 106–7, 207–11 see also manuscripts theatre, 164–9 as absent presence, 81, 199–200, 207 buildings, in the round, 101, 126–7, 129, 131 Byzantine, 78 definitions and conceptions of, 77–8, 80, 101–2, 145–7, 159–60, 199–200 modern conceptions of, 39, 181, 199–211 playhouses, Elizabethan, 200 purpose-built, 108, 148, 200 secular, 123–40 theatrica, 130–6 theatrum, 78, 79, 126, 129, 131 theatre studies and scholarship, 147, 160, 199–201, 207–8 theology, see Catholicism; Judaism; Protestantism Thespis, 13, 146, 227 n.1 Thomas of Chobham, 139–40 torture, 72–5, 151, 228 n. 22 touring, tourism, 105–6, 110–12, 116–7, 121 Tractatus Coislinianus, 206–7

281

tragedy, 12, 115, 128, 129–30, 137, 149, 164–7, 177, 200–7 translatio studii, 2 translation, 7–9, 113, 205–6, 229 n.34 Transubstantiation, 14 trebuchet, 185 Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, 141–3, 209 Trevet, Nicholas, 129–30 Tristan, 205 trivium, 24, 130 troping, see Quem quaeritis trope troubadours, trouvères, 8, 26, 146, 156–7 Tudors, 120 Tydeman, William, 7, 161, 188, 229 n.32 Università degli Ebrei, 27 universitas magistrorum et scolarium, 23–4 university, 3, 5, 23–5, 27, 148–50 urban life, urbanization, 1, 120–1 veiling/unveiling, 81, 90 verisimilitude, 4, 14–16, 182, 198 vernacular, 6, 60, 63, 69, 164–6 viewpoint, 78, 84, 88–9, 98–101 see also perspective violence, 44, 66, 72–3, 148, 151 mock violence, 44, 45 virago, 59–60 virgin martyrs, 48, 58 virtuality, 8–10 virtue, virtues, 136–7 Visitatio sepulchri, 20, 62, 69, 80–1, 188 see also Quem quaeritis trope voice, 63, 67–71 weeping, weeping voice, 68 wild man/woman, 56, 57 world upside-down, 45, 158 Young, Karl, 13, 80 youth groups, 44, 50–2, 54 Zumthor, Paul, 10, 12, 115

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