REED in Review: Essays in Celebration of the First Twenty-Five Years 9781442627383

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REED IN REVIEW: ESSAYS IN CELEBRATION OF THE FIRST TWENTY-FIVE YEARS

STUDIES IN EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA 8 General Editor: J.A.B. Somerset

REED in Review Essays in Celebration of the First Twenty-Five Years

Edited by Audrey Douglas and Sally-Beth MacLean

U N I V E R S I T Y O F TO RO N TO P R E S S Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2006 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-3827-2 ISBN-10: 0-8020-3827-1

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication REED in review : essays in celebration of the first twenty-five years / edited by Audrey Douglas and Sally-Beth MacLean (Studies in early English drama) Includes index. ISBN 0-8020-3827-1 1. Records of Early English Drama (Firm). 2. Theater – England – History – Research. 3. Performing arts – England – History – Research. 4. Theater – England – History – Sources. 5. Performing arts – England – History – Sources. I. Douglas, Audrey W., 1935– II. MacLean, Sally-Beth III. Series. PN2583.R43 2006

790.2'072

C2006-900940-6

The editors gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance provided by a grant from the Victoria University Senate Research Committee. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Dedicated to Scott McMillin (1934–2006), who thought that the best seat in the house was standing with the groundlings and who deeply appreciated those from Shakespeare to Sondheim who succeeded in combining the popular entertainment of their day with high art.

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Contents

Abbreviations ix Introduction 3 audrey douglas and sally-beth maclean PART 1: FOUNDATION AND METHODOLOGY The Founding of Records of Early English Drama 21 alexandra f. johnston Birthing the Concept: The First Nine Years 39 sally-beth maclean ‘Practice Makes Perfect’: Policies for a Cross-Disciplinary Project 52 abigail ann young PART 2: REED’S ‘PERFORMANCE’: IMPACT AND RESPONSE Gathering in the Name of the Outlaw: REED and Robin Hood 65 john marshall What Hath REED Wrought? REED and Patronage 85 suzanne westfall Margins to the Centre: REED and Shakespeare 101 paul werstine

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Contents

Everything’s Back in Play: The Impact of REED Research on Elizabethan Theatre History 116 roslyn l. knutson PART 3: WHITHER REED? REED and the Record Office: Tradition and Innovation on the Road to Access 131 sylvia thomas Roles in Life: The Drama of the Medieval Guilds 140 gervase rosser Crossing the Border: The Provincial Records of Southeast Scotland 157 eila williamson and john j. mcgavin REED and the Possibilities of Web Technologies 178 james cummings Herodotus in the Labyrinth: REED and Hypertext 200 jenn stephenson Thinking Outside the Bard: REED, Repertory Canons, and Editing Early English Drama 216 tanya hagen Using REED: A Select Bibliography 236 john lehr Contributors 251 Index 255

Abbreviations

Please note: full bibliographic details for citations are provided in the main text and notes with the exception of books and articles included in John Lehr’s Select Bibliography, which are referred to by short titles.

EETS ET MLA MLR NEH NHEED OED PLS PMLA RED REED REEDN SAA SEED

Early English Text Society Early Theatre Modern Language Association Modern Language Review National Endowment for the Humanities A New History of Early English Drama Oxford English Dictionary Poculi Ludique Societas Publications of the Modern Language Association Records of Early Drama Records of Early English Drama REED Newsletter Shakespeare Association of America Studies in Early English Drama

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REED IN REVIEW

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Introduction audrey douglas and sally-beth maclean

In 1978, almost two years after its foundation, REED convened a scholarly gathering that in part marked its first publication, two volumes for York, edited by Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Dorrell Rogerson: this collection primarily focused on the organization and presentation of the city’s late medieval cycle drama. A number of those attending the gathering were actively associated with REED; others had a long-standing interest in exploring the various problems that a project dedicated to the transcription of early dramatic records must needs solve. Papers, comments, and wide-ranging discussion at this bravely titled ‘First Colloquium’ were thus marked by a mixture of anticipation and speculation tempered by caution and received wisdom.1 It was not until 2002, however, that what might be termed the second such colloquium was held, as part of REED’s by now regular participation in the International Medieval Congress at Leeds University. In this year the REED sessions were designed to allow critical reflection on the past, present, and future of the project as it marked the passing of its twenty-fifth year. Essays amplifying the content of selected papers given at that time form the major part of the present volume, which in turn follows the same tripartite organization. Particular efforts were made in the conference sessions to detail the founding and early years of REED (Part 1); to assess REED’s impact on recent and current scholarship (Part 2); and to provide informed and creative input on matters touching conceptual or developmental matters relating to the project’s future (Part 3).2 Obviously, by 2000 much water had passed under the bridge and the direction of its eventual flow was not entirely anticipated by those who made up the First Colloquium. The hopes and concerns expressed on that occasion, firmly embedded in REED’s founding circumstances, are detailed by Alexandra Johnston in her opening essay; Sally-Beth MacLean and Abigail Young go on to explain the challenges faced in the project’s first decade. As Johnston explains, advances in the

4 Audrey Douglas and Sally-Beth MacLean

field of medieval drama over the previous decades – especially a growing interest in the texts themselves as well as their staging for public performance – brought an international group of scholars to the realization that the time had come for the publication of early English dramatic records based on a thorough and systematic archival search. Such a project would not, for example, follow the ruthlessly selective method pioneered by E.K. Chambers and J.T. Murray, important as their work had been in opening up the field,3 nor ever rely unquestioningly on antiquarian accounts; and it would not be bound by the time frame of a Malone Society publication, although the guidelines for transcription jointly agreed upon with Richard Proudfoot, the Malone Society general editor, were to provide a solid foundation for the fledgling series. Instead extensive research, backed by specialized support and carried out on a topographical basis, would have as its goal the publication of all surviving performance records up to and including the year 1642, thus crossing the old traditional divide between medieval and Renaissance studies to establish one undiscriminating continuum up to the closing of the public theatres in London. By late 1976, in an enlightened period that fostered the establishment of megaprojects such as REED, solid funding from the Canada Council had established the project on a sound financial footing, at least for the next decade. Scholars who had collaborated in REED’s foundation continued to lend welcome support in its formative years (see below, Johnston, Appendix, pp. 32 – 5). Recent doctoral graduates with targeted skills were recruited as staff members, bibliographic research under Ian Lancashire’s valuable and experienced direction was in place, and a supportive university press in Toronto provided welcome encouragement to the end goal of publication. The expectation, then, at the First Colloquium, was a keen research impetus that would eventually uncover and publish records able to throw light on a variety of questions pertaining to early drama – everything from the relationship between text and performance to the smallest details of performance practice, such as acting styles, the payment scale for actors, and the determination of their status as professional or amateur. At the same time, however, experienced scholars at the First Colloquium voiced their concerns about the nature of the research and editorial process: for instance, the importance of defining the primacy of particular classes of records for research purposes; of acknowledging and investigating both the documentary and topographical contexts of transcribed records (in spite of research time constraints); of producing accurate transcriptions, informed by context and scholarship; and of finding ways to deal, especially in translation, with the confusing plethora of Latin terms the records throw up in relation to performers. There was general agreement that the nature of the evidence in most cases was, and would be, quantitative, ‘not primarily theatrical and only obliquely informative – the perennial

Introduction 5

account book’ (Astington, 93); hence the need for informed but distanced analysis and an overview that would, among other things, integrate ‘the received wisdom about the late medieval drama as a scholarly discipline with factual data found in the Record Office’ (Coldewey, 120). Most of the points dealing with research and editing brought out at the First Colloquium, briefly summarized here, remain at the forefront of every REED researcher’s consciousness. Now, however, there are guidelines and principles for these processes, which were put in place in the early years of the project (see below, MacLean, Young). These measures expanded upon principles initially handed on by REED’s Executive Board, although they were tempered with a flexible pragmatic approach responsive to the project’s particular needs. Thus a meaningful and practical set of strategies was provided for staff and editors alike, always respecting the priority of the original manuscript. The particular talents of staff members – for instance, the happy conjunction of Latin language and computer language skills – were ably put to work. As a result, once located, records can now be transcribed, checked, concorded, and glossed, on the one hand and, on the other, systematically integrated into a chronological framework for publication, with footnotes, translations, endnotes, list of patrons and travelling companies, index, and a four-part introduction addressing the historical, dramatic, documentary, and editorial aspects of the records. The collaborative team approach taken by REED in the processing of the records, both in the office itself and in unusually supportive staff assistance to the research editor in the field, is crucial in maintaining the high standard of quality control that REED long ago set itself; such a cooperative approach fulfils in fact an early Colloquium hope that researchers would ‘always recognize how important the supporting mechanism is that has been set up to guarantee quality in the final product’ (Kahrl, 101). In addition, adjunct publications, such as Abigail Young’s articles on Latin performer terms relative to REED’s use of hitherto unexplored nonliterary sources, have made a constructive and original contribution to the field of early drama studies. But while the practical concerns of the First Colloquium have engendered positive outcomes, expectations that reflected the participants’ predominant research interest have met with a more mixed fate. Certainly, building on the Colloquium emphasis, the project’s early years were marked by a creative focus on late medieval civic drama, especially with the subsequent publication, for example, of Chester (1979), Coventry (1981), and Newcastle upon Tyne (1982) – cities where a rich yield of information was available for a study of long-term civic drama and its concomitant ritual and ceremonial. A concurrent widespread interest in the staging of medieval dramatic texts also lent excitement to the research scene. As Johnston acknowledges, Alan Nelson’s provocative hypothesis concerning the timed length of the original staging of the York cycle of biblical plays in part prompted its

6 Audrey Douglas and Sally-Beth MacLean

performance in 1977 in Toronto, where university and local drama groups came together to mount a sequence of forty-eight plays on pageant wagons with performances at three stations on the University of Toronto campus; this event also provided a wider testing ground for acting, design, and production principles, in some cases cued by the records themselves. Crucial to this staging – and to the subsequent mounting in Toronto of all the surviving major texts of cycle drama – was the Poculi Ludique Societas (PLS ), under the artistic directorship of David Parry, which also brought other medieval play texts to public performance in various locations.4 By the mid-1980s, however, this energy and this focus were in need of pastures new – that is, in REED terms, fresh bodies of evidence to exploit. Every research initiative is of course initially framed by a certain set of assumptions that dictates the overall thrust of its primary stage. Colloquium scholars, largely in terms of their own training and experience, anticipated first and foremost a cumulative series of records that would promote research in the areas of civic drama – especially play cycles – and saints’ plays or seasonal plays, for which evidence had already been uncovered. But circumstances were to play out differently. As we now realize, few cities and towns could sustain or organize a cycle drama such as York or Chester displayed – most lacked the rich guild infrastructure to produce and link a multiepisode performance. As for specific lacunae in existing research, no real solution, based on fresh record evidence, has yet to be offered for such questions as those that beset the Towneley and N-Town ‘cycles.’ 5 In 1986, however, the inescapable shift to county collections was made with the publication of Cumberland/Westmorland/Gloucestershire. With this move the need to broaden the research basis to include family and household records was also recognized – something that had been strongly mooted at the First Colloquium (Rastell, 3–21). Subsequently, with a widening search – perhaps not entirely foreseen at its foundation – REED has moved into Wales, and now, as chronicled by Williamson and McGavin in Part 3, has ventured into provincial Scotland. While First Colloquium hopes for substantial findings for saints’ and seasonal plays are so far unfulfilled, a steadily enlarging field of research for the counties in the west of England has enabled John Marshall to analyse cumulative evidence from civic and parish records for a reassessment of the play, or game, of Robin Hood, which he documents, with definitive comment, in his essay in Part 2. Even here, though, we may hark back to a prophetic voice of the 1978 gathering, which emphasized the importance of assessing the recurring ‘commercial aspect’ of plays as performances intended to raise money, and of the researcher’s being alert to the possibility of information extraneous to the actual dramatic record that may document this fact (Coldewey, 121). Marshall’s essay is illustrative of the significance of this injunction; his convincing data shows that, thus far, in the counties he has

Introduction 7

covered, the appearance of Robin Hood in a record is a de facto indicator of a fund-raising event – in view of the evidence he has collected and analysed the onus would now be on any researcher in these locations to demonstrate otherwise.6 Marshall’s approach is, again, an example of what can be achieved, twentyfive years on in the life of REED: drawn from published collections of records, his cumulative data is here combined with contextual study and an understanding of performance texts to produce fresh revisionist scholarship in the field of late medieval and Tudor drama. In a parish context, using the mythic properties of the outlaw to compel giving for local projects is revealed as an important part of a wider spectrum of fundraising that may, for example, include ales, sometimes in conjunction with named or unnamed ‘plays,’ dancing days, and Hocktide activity. Sorting out and identifying such events – and if and how they relate to the REED mandate – has made parish records (chiefly churchwardens’ accounts), named early on as a potentially rich source (Wasson, 131), a bread-and-butter staple of REED research. In addition, REED has discovered the importance of other ecclesiastical documents – statutes, mandates, and court records – and in their wake responded to new challenges in transcription, translation, and glossary (see below, Young). These challenges have enlarged research experience and results, and, just as important, enabled a growing awareness of the breadth of drama-related activity to be found in the records. The enlarging spectrum of REED research, encompassing within counties a growing number of hitherto neglected provincial towns, has even brought the urban record – yes, still ‘the perpetual account book’ – back into renewed prominence as, in conjunction with household and family records, it yields up its riches in new ways. Again, this development was heralded in 1978 when routine payments to players’ troupes, minstrels, and waits, found in civic and household account books from various locations, were linked to the potential establishment of players’ itineraries, an area of research where, it had been noted, ‘much more needs to be learned’ (Wasson, 136). Over the intervening years such entries have indeed enabled the construction of players’ itineraries: a simple three-dimensional styrofoam map, produced in a local school for Sally-Beth MacLean’s purposes, and sprouting a variety of coloured location pins, went on to find expression in a performance database; it in turn has yielded to a new REED web site that brings together, with other contextual data, a range of performance details. This piecing together of itineraries, however, has produced an unexpected twist – a substantial revision of Elizabethan theatre history, a product of REED research not envisaged in its extent twenty-five years ago, although fondly hoped-for by David Galloway, the one Shakespearean specialist amongst the founders. Thus, REED’s initial primary concern with civic drama in the late medieval period has, for the present,

8 Audrey Douglas and Sally-Beth MacLean

given way to a Renaissance or early modern focus, taking in such matters as the professional theatre, Shakespearean scholarship, and patronage studies – a records-led shift, enthusiastically embraced by scholars, that is making its mark in academic literature. The lesson here, perhaps, is that rather than asking the research oracle direct questions of our own devising, we may sometimes have to shape those questions to the replies that it is capable of delivering. Details of this temporal and topical shift are laid out in the remaining three essays in Part 2, where the authors – Suzanne Westfall, Paul Werstine, and Roslyn Knutson – provide both an analysis of recent REED research and an examination of its impact on the wider scholarly world. Though working with different sources – late medieval and early modern household records – Westfall shares Marshall’s emphasis on the need for contextual study of the dramatic evidence assembled by REED editors. Westfall’s own work on early Tudor household drama is informed by a rich interdisciplinary mix of original documentary research, cultural theory, performance practice, and social history; with Paul Whitfield White she has collaborated in fruitful ways to stimulate the exploration of theatre patronage in early modern England.7 Aware of the complex tapestry that must be woven from the threads of the past, she acknowledges REED’s solid contribution to contextual studies even as she laments the inevitable omission of all the salient details of household life that can illuminate the occasional performances that enlivened their daily routine. Westfall correctly recognizes the painful awareness that REED editors bring to their detective work: no ‘dream of wholeness’ can possibly be realized, given the fragmenting of the sources and our own twenty-firstcentury limitations – more especially, as MacLean earlier points out, when coupled with the intractable, inescapable problem of extracting ‘dramatic records’ from highly detailed, diverse, and voluminous sources. The REED series does much to lay the groundwork for more specialized studies but, as Westfall emphasizes, ‘it is crucial that scholars consult the entire record and supplement their searches with other types of evidence’ (p. 91). Westfall’s essay is the first of several in this collection to highlight the most important impact of REED’s work on early theatre studies to date: the uncovering of the roots of theatre in the provinces and of the continuing cultural links between the increasingly dominant city of London and the urban centres and private residences across the kingdom. Those members of the aristocracy and gentry who hosted performances in their country seats were not isolated from the cultural life of the capital: through their own travels, book purchases, and patronage activities they guaranteed more sophisticated audiences and more congenial indoor theatre spaces in the country than is often recognized. In the 1990s, it should be noted, REED’s own audience expanded to include Shakespearean scholars. In fact, their recognition of the relevance of REED’s

Introduction 9

published volumes to Elizabethan repertory and professional playing practices has in turn played a significant role in the project’s survival. Even in the twenty-first century, the economic imperative must be acknowledged: REED’s ongoing struggle to maintain its funding has been somewhat eased by the positive assessments of Renaissance scholars consulted during the unrelenting cycle of competition for humanities research grants. Writing from the perspective of a Shakespeare textual editor, Paul Werstine picks up the theme of REED’s decentring of the long-established norms of London theatre histories in his imaginatively titled ‘Margins to the Centre’ essay. He lauds the project’s systematic approach – its ‘methodicalness’ – as its editors trek across the English landscape, privileging no single playwright or inherited agenda in their survey of surviving documentary evidence, county by county, city by city. In the process, as Werstine elucidates, old myths propagated by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century bardolators have been shattered even as new problems surface for the reanalysis of the ‘bad quartos’ of the Bard himself. The issue of provincial audiences is relevant here – so much playing in the provinces makes it ‘difficult to sustain the belief in debased provincial tastes that would be satisfied with performances of what Greg called wretched texts’ (p. 109). As Werstine’s essay suggests, REED’s focus on the provincial context of early English theatre somewhat ironically, even inadvertently, has thus ultimately led back to the texts of the central playwright, a challenge now being addressed afresh by the author and others. Paul Werstine was one of several panelists invited by Roslyn Knutson to participate in a landmark plenary session at the 1990 Shakespeare Association of America meeting in Philadelphia titled ‘“Horses, a Wagon, and Apparel New Bought.”’ Knutson herself was one of the first London theatre historians to recognize REED’s potential contribution to the field. Through her own scholarship and organizational initiatives she has widened its impact. Her 1990 panel for the annual Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) meeting brought provincial touring by professional companies to the foreground and her 1999 SAA seminar, ‘Theatre History on the Web,’ offered the first opportunity for REED to invite response to its new Patrons and Performances Web Site project.8 Her analysis of the project’s impact on Elizabethan theatre studies reviews some of the more substantial topics demanding reconsideration: the diversity and significance of provincial playing venues, notably the indoor spaces both favoured and available in town and country residence; traditions of patronage and the politics of playing; and the ‘paradigm shift’ from dramatists and plays to companies and repertories – a shift signalled by The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, a study based in part upon what Knutson calls ‘The Matter of REED.’ 9 As Knutson regrets, however, there are some research topics that the records resist: ‘on issues of repertory, text, and commerce, the data of REED has been either too quiet or too coy’ (p. 124). The civic

10 Audrey Douglas and Sally-Beth MacLean

and household account books which provide so many clues about the performance itineraries, reward systems, entertainment venues, and local economies rarely yield play titles or performance descriptions. Knutson’s survey further indicates that new initiatives must be taken to extend the project’s outreach to a wider audience and to disseminate its research findings through classrooms and standard theatre histories of the period. Nevertheless, as her work shows, an indicator of substantial progress lies in the growing recognition of REED in the scholarly media and the increasing consultation of REED publications by students of Elizabethan drama during the past decade. While Westfall, Werstine, and Knutson single out REED’s undoubted achievements, it is also true that REED’s mettle has been tested – and its calibre hardened – in its struggle for credibility. Doubts have been expressed most forcefully, for instance, about a methodology that facilitates the construction of what amounts to a ‘record-within-a-record,’ whereby REED defines its own drama-related record within an original document, and then excerpts that record to be put at the centre of its own edited text. The limitations this methodology is seen to place upon the preservation of context is a particular lament. A related question also arises as to the possibility of REED itself preserving a scrupulous objectivity, since the establishment of particular criteria for the selection of records and guidelines for the editorial process must in some sense shape the course and outcome of research, and because, initially at least, research editors were not encouraged to make conjectural comments or wide-ranging interpretations based on their published records (see below, Johnston). In all fairness to REED, however, any goal of objectivity is more perceived than actual – the project itself strives above all for accuracy in transcription, with as broad and comprehensive a sweep of surviving documents as possible. And clearly, even to satisfy the demands of administrative and historical contexts, it would be physically impossible to transcribe each of those documents in its entirety. Since such criticism was first voiced, however, primarily in respect of the earliest volumes,10 REED – like any other research undertaking that learns from experience – has gone some way to meet its demands: the initial policy opposing editorial comment on records has softened; and, properly managed, the present detailed supporting apparatus (introduction, footnotes, and endnotes) can be made to supply a measure of context – albeit the reader may be required to make an effort to integrate these various parts of the volume. At the same time REED has recognized the expression of critical concerns by making appointments to its Executive Board from a wider range of disciplines, with editors themselves pushing the boundaries of their own understanding into other fields in order to contextualize and enrich the presentation of records. Perhaps then the way is now open for an overt and full rapprochement between the twin aspects of REED

Introduction 11

publications – a collection of performance records transcribed and published with meticulous accuracy and an apparatus of introduction, notes, and appendices that already accommodates, and increasingly begs for, interpretive discussion. If so, this would be largely a result of engagement with historians – urban, political, social – who in turn may find themselves profiting from a wider acquaintance with REED and the richness of its records – however fragmentary.11 What then of REED’s future? This is the question broadly addressed in Part 3. An intriguing material component of what is to come lies in the exploration by Eila Williamson and John McGavin of a qualitatively new body of records, as the project steps northward into Scotland to document drama for the Lothian and Borders region. Among other distinguishing characteristics, Scotland had (until 1603) its own monarchy, a religious reformation indebted to Calvinism, and its own legal and educational system. As the editors explain, the majority of their records come from the late fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, ‘a time when Scotland was a place of shifting power, alliances, influences, ideologies, and traditions’ (p. 158) and subject to the vagaries of international interests and internal antagonisms. A greater role than in previous REED research is played here by narrative sources and memoirs on the documentary side and, for instance, by horse races and guisings on the content side, not to mention a striking instance of ‘gypsy’ involvement in a series of Robin Hood events – preliminary findings that already set this material apart as a major and possibly distinct area of REED investigation (though the shifting nature of the border may also eventually throw up some similarities with northern English counties). Moreover, the editors are pushing beyond the accepted REED terminus ad quem (1642) to the end date of 1645 – further indication that their research will raise new challenges for editors and staff alike as they bring the first volume of Scottish records to publication. REED research, as Williamson and McGavin’s work reminds us, will continue to be beholden to British archives and to the unfailing solid assistance offered in national, regional, and county record offices throughout the United Kingdom. It is not too much to say that without their existence, the professional skills of their staff, and the amenities offered, the breadth and scale of REED research and accompanying demand for photocopies or microfilm for subsequent checking purposes would have been almost impossible to achieve. Nevertheless, like all other disciplines, archive keeping is subject to change, especially as economic and technological considerations come increasingly into play. Insights into the future of the profession in Britain and the documents it cares for are offered by Sylvia Thomas. As an experienced archivist, Thomas traces the concept of archives as a professional discipline to postwar circumstances; hence it is distinguished by the ‘tradition of public service, frugality, scholarship, and hard work’ (p. 132) that characterized that period. She also notes that the notion of ‘dusty’ archives persists in

12 Audrey Douglas and Sally-Beth MacLean

the popular mind – with a very small minority indeed exploiting the opportunities that the local record office affords. Recently, however, government initiatives and policy objectives formulated by the profession itself have combined to set archives on a twenty-first-century path with policies that address a broad range of considerations, from public access and modernization to education and the recognition of regional and cultural factors. The achievements eventually established as a result of such policies will certainly impact on the scholarly researcher, with technological access, for example, allowing work to be carried out more efficiently and economically. Articulate support for the current far-reaching endeavour detailed by Thomas is perhaps one way that REED can continue to recognize, and in part repay, the debt that it owes to British archivists. As already indicated earlier in this introduction, dramatic records research in England, thanks in large part to REED, has fostered a shift in more recent years towards new directions in the study of Renaissance professional theatre. The project’s original goal, however, as witnessed by its first volumes, was to uncover and publish records relative to medieval civic drama. Gervase Rosser’s essay, based on extensive research on guilds and confraternities, takes us back to that earlier period, critically expanding upon REED’s founding vision with a provocative analysis of the relationship between England’s social and religious guilds and late medieval drama. In essence, Rosser urges the strict alignment of our recovery of the role and context of the latter with informed exploration of contemporary medieval society. Like Tanya Hagen, therefore, whose essay concludes this volume, Rosser wants us to get behind the old teleological obsession with ‘early’ or preElizabethan drama: he points out that we have not only ignored distinct differences over the long term in the historical context of ‘drama,’ but have been preoccupied with the anachronistic application of conceptual models, drawn from the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, to medieval phenomena. Thus Rosser asserts that what have been singled out as the guilds’ dramatic performances – hitherto drawn into the exclusive sphere of stage historians – are better understood as events which, ‘lying on a dramatic continuum,’ are not easily or categorically set apart from everyday life, more particularly, from those ritualized activities, characteristic of guild membership, by which the late medieval guilds educated men and women ‘in the use of drama … to create new social and moral relationships’ (p. 141). For theatre historians in general, and for REED in particular, Rosser’s richly documented thesis, drawing on interdisciplinary insights from English and continental materials, offers a challenging new perspective on the relationship between ritual and drama in late medieval life, and also raises important questions for the future breadth and direction of dramatic records research. Three essays in this last section address the future from the viewpoint of a new generation of young scholars – James Cummings, Jenn Stephenson, and Tanya

Introduction 13

Hagen – all with graduate or postgraduate experience in early theatre research at REED or elsewhere. Opportunities offered by computer technology, already reshaping the nature of British archives, are here explored in relation to both the development and destination of REED research. The conclusions offered have potential implications for not only the widening accessibility of REED records and almost limitless provision of related contextual information, but also a radical new research and editorial thrust building on REED’s own achievements to date. James Cummings brings to the question of encoding REED texts his recent experience with both an online resource of liturgical texts, developed by the British Cursus project, and the Oxford Text Archive. Cummings shares some of Thomas’s concerns in targeting a number of key points that any humanities project – especially one that is archivally based – must in the long term seriously address: the lasting and secure preservation of textual records in digital form; their continuing accessibility in the face of changing technology; and ways in which they can be manipulated to facilitate a broad overall range of detailed inquiry. Textual examples are brought into Cummings’s discussion to illustrate how the use of XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) can provide solutions in these areas and make of the encoded text, once linked to other related sources, a rich scholarly tool, capable, if properly organized, of anticipating the needs of interdisciplinary research. Cummings also alerts us to areas of technological advance that will, sooner rather than later, affect online ways in which research is not only stored and made available, but also framed for dissemination through other media. With the launch of the pilot Patrons and Performances Web Site (September 2003), REED records have of course already made their online debut in a format designed to enable custom-designed research.12 Those who have worked to bring information together from indices and patrons’ lists in the published volumes, or indeed those privileged to use the older database, will appreciate the ease and accessibility offered by the new REED site. Performance records, which may be searched by patron, event, troupe, and venue – or simply by keyword – are hyperlinked to antiquarian and interactive maps; those who log on, for example, may construct itineraries for particular troupes, investigate details of their patrons, and in many cases obtain detailed illustrative information on playing places where troupes performed. In her essay addressing the particulars of the site, Jenn Stephenson substantially enlarges on structural aspects of a web presentation and its relationship to the construction of theatre history. Her analysis shows how information offered and gathered through such online means essentially breaks down the linear patterning of thought framed by the printed text of a book. Instead, a ‘branching hypertext,’ consisting of lexia (blocks of information) and hyperlinks (pathways), forces the user to make optional ‘navigational choices’ in the retrieval of information. This in turn allows a less predetermined exploration of data and

14 Audrey Douglas and Sally-Beth MacLean

hence the possibility of a more open-ended analysis. Stephenson goes on to examine ways in which the web presentation of information – for example, its fragmentary nature, permeability of record, and nonteleological organization – are well suited to the essential nature of REED performance records. In a striking image, the ‘branching’ user process is likened to the itinerant progress of players’ troupes, so that ‘the reading experience doubles the original journey’ (p. 211). Tanya Hagen comes at the crucial role of computer technology in REED research from a distinct literary perspective, with her fundamental critique of the history of early dramatic text editing. Whereas Westfall and, in particular, Werstine show how the notion of the centrality of London theatre has been undermined by REED’s publication of provincial performance records, Hagen turns her attention primarily to the monolithic and overshadowing presence of the dramatic textual canon. Here, her envisaged decentring and abolition of marginality draw strength and inspiration from those same records, culminating in her call for the development of a ‘hypertext archive’ of dramatic texts, based in a repertory context, which would have ‘the advantage of grounding our methods in historical circumstance, rather than in Romantic notions of authorship,’ and enable the possible discovery of ‘the historical playwright working in collaboration with his fellow actors and playwrights’ (p. 228). Thus, building on the new interest in companies and repertories identified in Knutson’s essay, Hagen proposes a dynamic and fresh approach to the editing of texts outside the Shakespearean canon. An online resource with this twenty-first-century editorial perspective could provide a level or undifferentiated medium for the introduction and publication of dramatic texts as well as creative links with the richness of REED’s records and contextual research. Here again, in unexpected ways, the study of dramatic records in the provinces has led back to hitherto unassociated play texts, but Hagen’s vision encompasses works that have been left to languish in the corridors of literature rather than in the spotlight. While essayists in Part 3 may hypothesize, directly or indirectly, on what the future holds for REED, we, on the other hand, must briefly conclude with a look at the project’s foreseeable future. It is of course a given that systematic research and publication of performance records – the project’s core activity – will continue, primarily pursued in the east of England and, now that the Welsh records are published, in the RED volumes for Wales and Scotland. Matters for speculation here are whether the eastern region, notably East Anglia, will yield any of the originally anticipated records of medieval saints’ and biblical plays, and whether research for the potentially relevant volumes will in fact shed further light on surviving medieval play texts. A major step will be taken during the next decade when the project itself moves from the margins to the centre, as the London area collections reach publication. Computer technology will of course continue to play a key role

Introduction 15

in most areas of REED activity: just as Alan Nelson’s computer calculations on processional staging in York were an important factor in bringing about the foundation of the project, so unfolding electronic advances, unimaginable in 1976, will continue to influence REED’s research and publication methodology. Electronic publication of the records, for instance, will be part of REED’s eventual mandate, even though the encoding of REED semi-diplomatic texts is an expensive and complex challenge to meet. The Patrons and Performances Web Site will also see creative new developments: in particular, the site will eventually be linked with the records texts and expanded to cover the whole series of volumes; and it will continue on the path of interdisciplinary collaboration where research requires, for example, the insights of historical geography and building archaeology. It must be emphasized, however, that if the REED volumes remain on library shelves as reference material for a limited group of readers, or if, similarly, the web site is consulted only by REED cognoscenti, then the records will barely have left their archival provenance. Most important of all, therefore, will be the development of educational initiatives related to REED resources that will enliven and enrich the teaching of early theatre and expand and diversify the REED audience. To this end REED must not only continue to build on its interdisciplinary links within the scholarly world but strive ultimately for an outreach that will enable it to find a relevant place in the wider nonacademic world.

NOTES 1 For a record of the First Colloquium, held at Erindale College, University of Toronto, 31 August–3 September 1978, see Dutka, Records of Early English Drama: Proceedings of the First Colloquium; in the discussion that follows names and page numbers in parenthesis refer to this publication. 2 In order to obtain an arms-length critical response from contributors, papers given in 2002 by REED editors themselves were not considered for inclusion in Parts 2 and 3 of the present volume. The sole exception is the essay by Eila Williamson and John McGavin (Part 3) which represents a new direction for REED research. Gervase Rosser’s essay, ‘Roles in Life: The Drama of the Medieval Guilds’ (Part 3), was generously contributed to the present volume at the editors’ invitation. 3 E.K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903) and The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923); John Tucker Murray, The English Dramatic Companies, 1558–1642 (London: Constable, 1910). 4 In the later 1970s, when the The York Cycle was produced, PLS artistic direction was shared by David Parry and his wife Caroline. Subsequently David became sole artistic director for The Castle of Perseverance (1979), The Toronto (N-Town) Passion Play

16 Audrey Douglas and Sally-Beth MacLean

5

6 7

8

9

10

11

12

(1981), and The Chester Cycle (1983). Further information about the PLS is available on the troupe’s web site . Research by REED editors is still in progress for the regions traditionally associated with these unlocated ‘cycles.’ Not yet published are the Yorkshire West Riding collection edited by Barbara D. Palmer and John M. Wasson or the several collections for the East Anglian region, the likely provenance of the N-Town play manuscript; James Stokes’s work on the Suffolk records is in progress for the REED series. It remains to be seen whether this circumstance can be demonstrated for the Robin Hood material uncovered in Scottish records by Williamson and McGavin (Part 3). Westfall and White have collaborated on the organization of seminars in related topics at the Shakespeare Association of America meetings and, most notably, in the collection of essays, Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage. As Knutson outlines in her essay (Part 2), Alan Somerset and Sally-Beth MacLean each participated in the 1990 panel, later returning as collaborators in 1999 with the electronic presentation ‘The REED Patrons and Travelling Companies Database.’ Scott McMillin’s specialized work on the repertory of the Queen’s Men is also of fundamental importance to the study of the troupe, written in collaboration with Sally-Beth MacLean and published by Cambridge University Press in 1998. In a discursive critique of REED written when the project was ten years old, Theresa Coletti, for instance, saw a ‘social and historical decontextualizing of the drama’ where the priority given to the REED record ‘disregards the informing principles, contexts and motivations that endow that evidence with value’ (‘Reading REED,’ 271– 2). Greg Walker echoes Coletti’s dissatisfaction with the ultimate divorce of record from documentary or overall archival context (‘A Broken REED?’ 44–6). Peter Greenfield, in a detailed instance of such a rapprochement, responds to the challenge of New Historicist criticism by demonstrating how a historical narrative may be constructed for waits’/musicians’ records by understanding them as documents representative of urban power and authority (‘Using Dramatic Records,’ 76–95). Theresa Coletti comments further on REED’s selection of records in her ‘Fragmentation and Redemption,’ 5–13, essentially a review of Klausner, ed., Herefordshire/Worcestershire; with a slight warming to REED, perhaps, she explores ‘the kinds of stories that might be told about [the volume’s] fragments’ (although she also comments, p. 11, on ‘obstacles to storytelling which they represent’). More generally, Greg Walker (‘A Broken REED?’) anticipates an increasingly fruitful relationship between, for example, REED and political history, emphasizing that REED’s original mandate – that substantial data be gathered before any analysis takes place – must ‘continue to be abrogated by editors and readers alike, to enable a continuous dialogue between records and analysis to develop’ (47). The pilot site, featuring data for the county of Lancashire, offered a rich sampling of a more ambitious project – to upload all performance and patrons’ biographical

Introduction 17 details relating to the provincial activities of travelling medieval and Renaissance ‘professional’ performers, linked with interactive maps and new image-based architectural research on performance venues, the ‘alternative theatres’ of the provinces. The Patrons and Performances data for the first eighteen volumes published in the REED series will be online by early 2006 at .

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PART 1 Foundation and Methodology

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The Founding of Records of Early English Drama alexandra f. johnston

The major impetus behind the establishment of Records of Early English Drama in 1976 came from an international group of scholars who were trying to understand the native tradition of English playmaking that apparently flourished in late medieval provincial towns. From the beginning the project was the creation of many people: those who served in advisory or editorial capacities, and those who, once hired by the project, gave their skills and experience to building its foundation. My part in the narrative is to place the project within its scholarly context and to chronicle the steps that led to its founding; its first decade is reviewed by SallyBeth MacLean, executive editor, from a general editorial standpoint, while Abigail Ann Young, Latinist and palaeographer, analyses key issues dealt with in the areas of transcription, translation, and technology as various collections were brought to publication.1 By the late 1960s, scholarly understanding of early English drama had come to the point where only the recovery of surviving records of performance could resolve the seeming contradictions that had arisen. Glynne Wickham had published the first two of his three-volume analysis of English theatrical practice before 1660.2 His highly original and provocative arguments grew from his own sense of the theatre but his work was based largely on printed sources with only a few excursions into manuscript sources in his appendices. His work and the work of others raised fundamental questions about the performance conditions of drama before the Elizabethans. How did wagon stages work? What was the relationship between the professional entertainers and the civic and guild performers? What was the relationship between aristocratic and civic ceremony and playmaking? Fundamental questions about the performance conditions and history of the four major ‘cycle’ plays were unresolved. Did the ‘Chester Cycle’ date from 1325 or the sixteenth century? Where was ‘N-Town’ – the generic place named in the banns of what was then erroneously called the ‘Ludus Coventriae’? Did the plays in the

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Towneley manuscript belong to Wakefield? And perhaps the most pressing and complex question of all at that time – was the cycle of biblical plays at York performed in procession from pageant wagons at appointed stations or only once before the mayor and council after a procession of pageants? The answers to these questions could not be found in the printed sources. In order for advances to be made in the field, further archival research was needed. Active new scholarship in the field was barely a generation old. Unknown except by local antiquarians until the mid-nineteenth century, the religious drama of the late Middle Ages had long been dismissed as a mere precursor to the great flowering of English theatre in the 1590s with the plays of Kyd, Marlowe, and Shakespeare. However, two major strands of nineteenth-century intellectual history created a new interest in this neglected field. The first originated in lively academic response to the creation of a standard dictionary of the English language based on historical principles, and the second in the pre-Raphaelite movement that sought to recapture what its proponents believed to be the artistic and philosophical splendour of the Middle Ages, based on a partial historical understanding of the period and a passionate commitment to its surviving art and architecture. The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary was a massive undertaking, with scholars transcribing virtually all the late medieval literary manuscripts in the public repositories in Oxford, Cambridge, and the British Museum to be used by the lexicographers to track the historic meanings of all the words in English.3 This monumental task brought the wealth of late medieval literature to scholarly attention, and eventually much of the material was published in the Early English Text Society. By the end of the nineteenth century most of the English medieval biblical plays were available to anyone who could read the dialect.4 But it was the pre-Raphaelite movement and the various twists on medievalism that it spawned that are more important to our narrative. In particular, the imagination of the British travelling middle class was caught by the Passionspiel (Passion Play) at Oberammergau, a small village in the Bavarian Alps. English tourists flocked to the play every tenth year, to a performance which they believed to be a ‘genuine relic of the Middle Ages.’ 5 For those with any knowledge of their own early drama, the German play was a far more decorous, reverent example of dramatic technique, much to be preferred over the edgy, sometimes bawdy, and certainly more violent plays found in the new EETS editions. Unfortunately, although no one set out deliberately to deceive, the village of Oberammergau never had a medieval play; the play the Victorians so admired was the creation of the early nineteenth century. The overwhelming impression created by the Bavarian production was dignified contemplation of the history of salvation. The extensive use of tableaux vivants created the indelible impression of pious stasis achieved by an acting style that was deliberately antitheatrical, conveying a strong sense of peasant faith

The Founding of Records of Early English Drama 23

and simplicity to the audience. Vigorous efforts were made to bring this production to England but were ultimately unsuccessful in the face of opposition from the Lord Chamberlain. He was mindful of the Reformation prohibitions against the portrayal of the godhead on stage, and of the opinion of Queen Victoria herself who felt that it would be quite unsuitable to display the simple piety of the Oberammergau players on the London stage. Although these attempts were unsuccessful, the idea that religious drama had a place on the public stage did take root in England. Before and during the First World War, Nugent Monck and other playwrights, unable to bring the great German play to England and unwilling to use the native plays, wrote and produced their own plays on religious subjects.6 But the real impetus that led not just to the performance of religious plays but to renewed interest in the original medieval texts and their stage-worthiness came from within the Church of England itself. Although many in the church had been, and again would be, opposed to using drama for religious purposes, George Bell, bishop of Chichester, championed the idea. He formed what came to be called the Religious Drama Society, dedicated to ‘fostering the art of drama as a means of religious expression.’ 7 A key figure in this movement was E. Martin Browne. During the twenties and thirties he was at the centre of a group of enthusiasts – some amateur, some professional – that included such leading cultural figures as Gustav Holst, Dorothy Sayers, T.S. Eliot, and later Benjamin Britten. These artists and intellectuals did not share the contempt of their predecessors for the native drama but studied it with care. Sayers’s radio play, The Man Born to Be King, aired on the BBC in the early years of the Second World War, has some of the edgy grittiness of the original texts. After the war, Britten wrote his charming Noyes Fludde (1957) based closely on the Chester play of Noah. But the most important production of medieval drama that Browne spearheaded was the legendary performance of the York cycle plays in the ruins of St Mary’s Abbey, just outside the walls of the city of York, for the Festival of Britain in 1951. A modernization of the text had been prepared by Canon J.S. Purvis,8 and Browne set about to shape the forty-seven or forty-eight separate episodes of the original into one flowing narrative. The production values of York 1951 owed more to the spirit of Oberammergau than to the medieval original as Browne deliberately emphasized spectacle and reverent stasis, but the words, though mediated through a modernization, were the words of the original. The effect of the plays in performance on scholarship in the field was electric. Suddenly the texts that had been studied in the academy were no longer inert religious tracts but living theatre with a surprising ability to move an audience. Professor Arnold Williams of Ann Arbor was so taken by the plays in performance that he established a regular seminar at the annual meetings of the Modern Language Association devoted to the discussion of early drama, especially in performance.

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This seminar became a meeting place for those who were changing the face of early drama scholarship. The first major academic study of early drama of lasting significance had appeared in 1903. Sir Edmund Chambers published his encyclopedic Mediaeval Stage twenty years before his Elizabethan Stage was to appear.9 Drawing heavily on analogous continental material, Chambers established the cultural significance of the form and, more important, compiled a comprehensive appendix listing all the then published external evidence for early drama gathered from antiquarian sources and the work of the Historical Manuscripts Commission. Very soon after, W.W. Greg published what appeared to be the definitive bibliographical study of the surviving play manuscripts.10 Modest teaching anthologies provided texts of individual episodes of the biblical plays, largely from the Old Testament, that became part of the standard courses in English and North American universities devoted to the study of drama to 1642.11 Scholars began to work on comparative studies and individual collections of plays. Before 1930, still working within the paradigm of cultural evolution, they explored the possibility of a ‘parent cycle’ that was believed to have existed before the present versions, largely based on the perceived relationship between the two Yorkshire collections of plays in the York and Towneley manuscripts.12 During the 1930s and 1940s Mendal Frampton, among others, published a series of articles on the Towneley cycle and the Scottish scholar Anna J. Mill brought out new studies based on the York archives.13 In 1946 Father Harold Gardiner published his Mysteries’ End describing the suppression of this drama by the Protestant authorities at the end of the sixteenth century.14 All this work culminated in the publication of Hardin Craig’s magisterial English Religious Drama in 1955.15 Seemingly the last word on early drama had been said. But new directions were being taken. In 1961 Eleanor Prosser’s Drama and Religion in the English Mystery Plays provided a study of the plays in the context of the Corpus Christi celebrations.16 Her work stimulated a still ongoing contextual study by setting these texts beside parallel texts of sermons, lyrics, and didactic poems that constitute the important output of the movement of lay affective piety in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. As we have seen, Glynne Wickham was proposing new staging paradigms. In 1966 V.A. Kolve published The Play Called Corpus Christi, a stimulating examination of the plays from the perspective of game theory.17 In a more conservative vein, new editions were produced and planned. Arthur Cawley brought out his importantWakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle in 1958 followed by a new edition of Everyman in 1961.18 The Early English Text Society began commissioning new highly professional editions of the canon and a new edition of the York plays was prepared by Richard Beadle.19 Most important for our story, in 1955, the same year that Craig’s English Religious Drama appeared, F.M. Salter published his Medieval Drama in Chester,

The Founding of Records of Early English Drama 25

a revolutionary study of the Chester cycle based on a new consideration of the records evidence.20 In the 1960s a whole new generation of scholars turned to this field and found much work to be done in different areas. Arnold Williams’s Modern Language Association seminar began to provide a forum for an annual exchange of ideas that were not limited to early drama in modern performance. The questions raised about the revival of early drama inevitably raised questions about early performance conditions. Little hard evidence of the details of the wagon stages, beyond a few fugitive accounts from Coventry and the two sets of banns in the material from Chester, was available. Speculation was rife with many people arguing from the ‘proletarian’ nature of the productions that the staging must have been quite unsophisticated. Clearly more information was needed. Taking the lead from F.M. Salter and the work Giles Dawson had done for the Malone Society in Kent, young scholars headed for archives newly professionalized by the British government and ready to welcome serious scholars.21 Stanley Kahrl,22 inspired by a performance of the ‘N-Town Plays’ in Grantham in 1966 that claimed the text came from Lincoln, went to the Lincolnshire Record Office seeking corroboration;23 and dramatic records research for Chester, Norwich, and Coventry was also under way.24 From a wider perspective, Alan H. Nelson25 undertook a survey of the record offices known from Chambers’s 1903 work to contain surviving evidence. Nelson’s research led him to the quite proper conclusion that the Corpus Christi or other summer processions of pageants in most English cities such as Hereford and Worcester never did develop ‘true drama’ from the pageant wagons.26 However, he extrapolated from that information questions about the way in which the York cycle of biblical plays was performed, putting forward a whole new interpretation of the York evidence. This was first presented at the MLA seminar in 1968 and subsequently published in 1970 in Modern Philology.27 His new interpretation was based on a computer model where he estimated the playing time of each episode in the surviving York text, and the time he thought it would take for each wagon to get from station to station and set up and strike the wagon set; he put this information into a computer, asking how long it would take to perform the fortyseven or forty-eight plays twelve times. The answer he received was far in excess of the traditional assumption of seventeen to eighteen hours. He concluded that the cycle could not have been performed as scholars had always assumed it had been and he turned to a more detailed analysis of the York records to find a solution to this conundrum. Based on his understanding of the records and the ‘proof ’ of his computer modelling, he proposed that York had a procession of wagons depicting the scenes and then performed the series of plays once, indoors, for the limited audience of the mayor and council. His negative evidence seemed so compelling that his basic premise was accepted by many in the field. Martin Stevens,

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another leading American scholar, took up the premise but suggested that there was a procession and then a single outside performance on the Pavement – a large open space, by York standards, and the site of the last station. In the course of his research for his article on the performance of the York cycle, Stevens had attempted a new transcription of the famous Ordo Paginarum, the play list compiled in York in 1415. The pages containing the Ordo in the York ‘AY’ Memorandum Book were badly damaged through apparent mutilation in the late sixteenth century and subsequent damage from the flooding of the River Ouse, when water seeped into the basement of the York Guildhall where the records were kept.28 Stevens asked his friend and later coeditor of the EETS Towneley edition, Arthur Cawley29 of Leeds, for assistance in deciphering the text. Professor Cawley in turn asked a young graduate student from Australia, Margaret Dorrell,30 if she would help Professor Stevens with the transcription. It was while she was working on that transcription that Dorrell changed her dissertation topic from the professional player in the Middle Ages to an edition of the surviving records of the York Corpus Christi play. Paradoxically, her conclusions that supported the traditional view of the performance of the York cycle plays – in procession through the streets of York from pageant wagons – were published in Leeds Studies in English in 1972 in the same issue as Stevens’s article arguing for a single performance on the Pavement.31 My own interest in early drama had been theological and contextual, my doctoral dissertation having been a comparative study of the Christ figure in the ‘four English cycles.’ 32 In 1970–1 a research leave brought me to York to read manuscripts relating to the York cycle. It was here that Bernard Barr, the librarian of York Minster library, showed me a letter from the archivist of the Borthwick Institute of Historical Research to Bernard Johnson, the honorary archivist of the Merchant Adventurers. Attached to the letter was the transcription of a document dated 1433 that began, ‘This endenture made in e feste of Corpus Christi in the 33 3ere of oure lorde god ml. CCCC xxxiij …’ Made between the master and constables of the Company of Mercers and their pageant masters, the indenture went on to enumerate the properties of the wagon for the last episode in the cycle, ‘Judgment,’ complete with double-faced masks for the devils, a hoisting device to take God from one level to another, lavishly painted curtains, and no fewer than twenty artificial angels including ‘ix smaler Aungels payntid rede to renne aboute in e heuen A lang small corde to gerre e Aungels renne about.’ 34 This document had been found among the legal papers of the present-day Company of Merchant Adventurers (the descendant of the powerful medieval and early modern Mercers Guild) in the vault of the solicitors who had served the company for centuries – Grey’s Solicitors in Duncombe Place. The firm had uncovered the document and two other property deeds belonging to the Mercers

The Founding of Records of Early English Drama 27

in response to a call from the city council to all firms and institutions in York to search for historic material in their possession that might bear on the celebration in the coming year (1971) of the 1900th anniversary of the Roman foundation of York or Eboracum. The document was sent to professional palaeographers for transcription; they in turn sent it to Bernard Johnson, who then forwarded it to the Minster library. Ultimately, this chance discovery – why it was not returned to the company centuries before will always remain a mystery – of a document with manifold details of a medieval pageant wagon was to change forever the notion that medieval staging was unsophisticated. During my first interview with Bernard Johnson when he showed me the original document, I was made aware of the work on the York material of Margaret Dorrell. Dorrell had contacted Mr Johnson with a request to see surviving Mercers’ documents, just at the time that I was made aware of the newly discovered document. I asked Mr Johnson for her address and wrote to her suggesting we share the discovery of the new document. Our shared work on the document was the beginning of seven years of close collaboration and a life-long friendship. Comparing notes, we established that I had been working on a parallel line of investigation with the material of the Corpus Christi Guild and other dramatic and musical entries not directly related to the York biblical cycle itself. Dorrell and I agreed that she would carry on with her doctoral project while I collected other material and that we would publish our findings jointly. We were in agreement that the accumulated evidence we were gathering could sustain only one conclusion – that the traditional method of production for all three large plays in York (the biblical cycle, the ‘Creed Play,’ and the ‘Pater Noster Play’) was in procession from wagons that played and then moved on to the next station. Our conclusion, based on all the evidence, was that the alternate theory propounded by Alan Nelson was not correct. During that year, encouraged by Arthur Cawley, the then editor of Leeds Studies in English and Dorrell’s thesis director, we began working on two articles detailing the indenture, first of all, and then the history of the Mercers’ wagon.35 Later, in Toronto, Dorrell finished writing the analysis for her dissertation and I prepared several articles of my own on the Creed and Pater Noster Plays and the procession of Corpus Christi.36 We were able, however, to convey news of the discovery of the indenture to the scholarly community before the published articles actually appeared. Stanley Kahrl was so excited by the document and its implications that he arranged for Dorrell and myself to present it at the MLA seminar in New York at Christmas 1972. At that meeting, scholars in the field began to grasp what material might survive undiscovered and also how many people had independently taken up records research. Plans were laid for the next meeting in 1973 in Chicago to bring

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together all those who were known to be collecting external evidence of performance. Meanwhile, in November 1973, at a conference concerning the editing of Renaissance drama texts, I renewed my acquaintance with a senior Canadian Renaissance drama scholar, Professor David Galloway of the University of New Brunswick,37 and learned of his work on the records of Norwich. The support of Arthur Cawley, Stanley Kahrl, and David Galloway for the work Dorrell and I had undertaken and their continuing support through the years of the founding of REED were key to the success of the enterprise. Although I was a member of the English Department at the University of Toronto, I was still very young and had no research record. Indeed, Dorrell, although still a graduate student, had published more than I had at this time. These three men gave us standing in the British, Canadian, and American scholarly community. Professor Galloway had also been invited to be a member of a panel at that year’s meeting of the MLA along with Dorrell and myself and Lawrence Clopper 38 from Indiana who had been working on the records of Chester. At that meeting we also learned of the work of Reginald Ingram39 of the University of British Columbia on Coventry. It was now clear that major bodies of performance evidence at four British locations were being investigated, three of them by Canadians. The ultimate question – of publication – remained a problem. The only available publishing vehicle seemed to be the Malone Society, based in London, a learned society funded by the subscriptions of its members and dependent upon the energy and dedication of its ‘honorary secretaries’ who act as editors. Its focus is the professional theatre and the publication of Elizabethan drama texts. While the Society had published some other records – indeed the medieval records of Lincolnshire collected by Stanley Kahrl almost a decade before were awaiting publication – there was still serious resistance to publishing evidence of community theatre or paratheatrical activities. Nor were there any clear guidelines for the Society’s editors, nor any consistent policies across Malone collections for transcription, what classes of documents should be searched, or what activities should be noted. Something new had to be brought into being. The meeting in Chicago in 1973 also made clear that a project to publish dramatic records could not end, as Dorrell and I had planned for York, with the suppression of religious drama in the last decades of the sixteenth century. To begin with, the date could not be fixed but varied with the zeal of the local ecclesiastical authorities. Furthermore, as David Galloway’s work showed, there was a major subfield of Renaissance drama, the activities of the travelling companies in the provinces, that also needed a new and coordinated research approach. Earlier research beginning with J.T. Murray’s English Dramatic Companies (1910) and continued in such works as E.K. Chambers’s four-volume Elizabethan Stage (1923) had not been consistent in the way the dates of the visits were calculated, leading

The Founding of Records of Early English Drama 29

to strange contradictions in what should be quite straightforward information.40 The dates of the major project that was thus beginning to take shape in our minds were determined as the first occurrence of performance in any given location and the closing of the London public theatres in 1642, an event that created a hiatus in the English dramatic tradition until the theatres reopened in 1660 at the restoration of Charles II.41 A further reason for extending the dates of the proposed project to the closing of the professional theatres in 1642 came from an entirely different direction. The Hollywood actor and director Sam Wanamaker had first gone to London in 1949 in search of the original Globe Theatre and had found only a plaque on the wall of a brewery. Twenty years later he took up his crusade to rebuild the Globe on Bankside in earnest and in 1970 founded the Globe Playhouse Trust with the expressed goal of creating an authentic recreation of Shakespeare’s theatre. The effect of Wanamaker’s scheme on Renaissance drama scholarship was similar to Browne’s production of the York cycle plays in 1951. The scheme caught the attention of the public and professional theatre, and theatre historians were quick to respond. In 1972 the first theatre history session was organized at the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America. Wanamaker encouraged scholars in the field to take part in the planning and design of the new Globe and, as the fund-raising campaign got underway in 1972, the first permanent museum of Renaissance drama was established close to the south end of Southwark Bridge where the new Globe now stands.42 Theatre history and the recreation of historic playing conditions had become, for many, both a popular and scholarly obsession by the early 1970s. Meanwhile, the struggle was under way to launch the far less glamorous project of records editing. David Galloway and I became aware of the possibility of significant financial support for such a project. The Canada Council had announced a new grant program called the Major Editorial Grant Program that, for the first time, was prepared to fund research projects in the Humanities and Social Sciences at a similar level to that afforded the Sciences. Since three of the four collections of dramatic records in waiting had Canadian editors, there was the possibility of sufficient support in Canada to launch a project not only to publish the research already under way but to initiate new research in other British locations. Galloway and I joined forces. Our first step was to enlist the support of other Canadian scholars working in medieval and Renaissance drama. We sent a prospectus of the scheme to all our colleagues who listed an interest in early drama in the annual report of the then Association of Canadian University Teachers of English and invited them to a meeting we planned to convene at the annual meeting of the organization in Toronto in June 1974. That gathering gave us their blessing and, more significantly, also gave us Professor Anthony Petti of Calgary,43

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a brilliant expatriate British Renaissance palaeographer who, some years later, just before his untimely death, published what has become the standard book on English vernacular palaeography. Anthony Petti, David Galloway, and I were named by the group at the Toronto meeting as a steering committee to get the project off the ground. During the summer of 1974, I was once again in York, this time collecting all the city records between 1580 and 1642. Galloway was also in England working in Norwich and in July he came north where I introduced him to Arthur Cawley and his junior colleague, Peter Meredith,44 who had earlier given enthusiastic support to Margaret Dorrell and me when we were working on the Mercers’ material. Meredith was excited about the project and lent his own impeccable scholarly judgment to the plans. The next step was a meeting during the first colloquium of what was to become the International Society for the Study of Medieval Theatre held in Leeds early in September of that year: among those attending were Arthur Cawley, Stanley Kahrl, Peter Meredith, Anthony Petti, and myself, as well as Richard Proudfoot of King’s College, London, then the editor of the Malone Society,45 and Alan Nelson, whom I then met for the first time. Together we identified certain technical decisions that had to be made before the eventual publication of any documents, the most urgent being agreement on uniform rules of transcription and an inclusion policy. These decisions, we agreed, could be the subject of the project’s founding meeting, for which I returned to Toronto to seek funding. I also needed to find out if the University of Toronto Press was interested in being our publisher. The University of Toronto Press, the largest university press in Canada, had a respectable list of publications in the medieval and early modern periods. In addition, it had experience with long-term, multivolume editions such as the translation of the collected works of Erasmus and the works of John Stuart Mill. The acquisitions editor for the Humanities, Prudence Tracy,46 was immediately enthusiastic about the scheme and proved an enormous help to us, convincing her colleagues that this project was important. Once the Press had agreed to the concept, the services of their experts in design and the new emerging print technologies were made available to us so that, as we considered how we wanted to present the records, we knew that it was technically possible to do so. Meanwhile, plans for the inaugural meeting of the project were under way. It now became vital to enlist the help of my colleagues in the English Department and the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto as well as the support of the university research community as a whole.47 Two more key Toronto people were added to the team at this stage of REED’s development: Ian Lancashire,48 whose own bibliographical project, the gathering of printed notices of early drama, gave him a wide knowledge that was to have a major impact on the evolution of REED’s bibliographical strategy; and JoAnna Dutka49 (formerly a student of F.M.

The Founding of Records of Early English Drama 31

Salter at the University of Alberta), who was to become the editor of the REED Newsletter. The Newsletter, a semiannual publication, chronicled activities in the critical early years before the collections for York and Chester were published, and continued to be an important organ for dissemination of new research until 1997. For the founding meeting the Canada Council provided a grant that was large enough to bring to Toronto Arthur Cawley, Peter Meredith, and Richard Proudfoot from Britain, the two distant Canadians, David Galloway from New Brunswick and Anthony Petti from Calgary, and Lawrence Clopper and Stanley Kahrl from the United States. At that meeting many of the key editorial decisions that have governed the REED project ever since were made. The group was clear that the goal of the editor, always with the centrality of performance in mind, should be to provide all the information to the user that he or she could obtain in the record repository. No detail should be omitted that might help a scholar understand the nature of the evidence. We also recognized that, since the English word ‘player’ and its various Latin equivalents could mean both an actor and a player of a musical instrument, the concept of the project had to expand to include minstrelsy and secular music. Document descriptions in some form would be part of the apparatus and the complexities of the dating of the evidence would be explained fully. But the most important and far-reaching decisions made on that occasion were those related to what have become the REED ‘Guidelines for Transcription,’ a set of principles drawn up by Anthony Petti and debated at the meeting, though with few substantive changes made at that time.50 Three other decisions were made at that meeting that have since been substantially altered. These were that the text should be allowed to speak for itself; that editorial apparatus in the body of the text should be kept to a minimum; and that the introduction should include a short interpretation by the editor of the significance of the documents. David Galloway was a strong voice at the meeting and he was a Malone Society man to the bone. He was insistent that we should not spoon-feed our readers but adhere to the Malone Society policy of little or no apparatus. Others at the meeting agreed with him, including Stanley Kahrl, whose Malone Society edition had recently appeared and who was familiar with the minimalist approach of that series. Moreover, as we have seen, the records from York were being processed during a period of active controversy between those (including Dorrell and myself ) who supported the traditional view of the production of the York Cycle and those who supported Alan Nelson’s revisionist understanding. It was argued that any defence of our position in the introduction might prove to be ephemeral. We were urged to continue to publish our detailed conclusions in articles and not to load the edition with our interpretations. At the end of the founding meeting, I was asked to apply first for a personal grant for York as a pilot project and then to apply for a Major Editorial Grant for

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the proposed series. When the first grant was awarded, I was able to visit Margaret Dorrell in Australia in the summer of 1976 so that we could complete our work on the York collection. But the most important result of the personal grant was the ability to hire research staff. It was at this time that Sally-Beth MacLean – the scholar who has guided the editorial policy of REED ever since – joined us. When the first Major Editorial Grant was awarded to the project in late 1976, Records of Early English Drama was firmly established. The five years between the discovery of the Mercers’ indenture and the provision of a sustaining grant for the fledgling editorial project were extraordinary ones. All those involved were, of course, busy doing other things – establishing or furthering academic careers, having children, and generally getting on with our lives. Yet together we were creating something new that has been an integral part of the revolution in the way the history of the English theatre is understood in the twenty-first century. Many of those who were central figures in the story of REED’s founding – Arthur Cawley, David Galloway, Reginald Ingram, Stanley Kahrl, Anthony Petti, and Prudence Tracy – have died. Others have withdrawn from active involvement. But their places have been taken by other colleagues equally committed, equally qualified, and equally collegial whose wisdom and advice have brought us to the academic standing REED enjoys today. We have also gathered around us a group of lay supporters who have guided our way through the financial crises that have plagued the project since 1986. REED is indeed a collegial enterprise. None of us could have done what has been done without the circle of support that has sustained the enterprise since that day in the Merchant Adventurers’ Hall in Fossgate in York when I first saw the document that triggered the series of events that has rewritten the history of English theatre.

APPENDIX This list summarizes information about people referred to in this essay who continued their active association with REED after initial involvement in its foundation. Those described as senior advisors either served on the original Advisory Board or are now acting in a personal capacity as advisors to REED. A.C. Cawley Formerly a member of the Department of English at the University of Leeds, and the senior British scholar in medieval drama in the mid-twentieth century; close ties with colleagues in the United States where he attended sessions of the Medieval Drama Seminar at the MLA; editor of Leeds Studies in English in the early 1970s; attended the founding meeting of REED in February 1975; a senior advisor until his death in 1993.

The Founding of Records of Early English Drama 33

Lawrence Clopper A member of the Department of English at Indiana University; worked extensively on the Chester records before becoming part of the REED planning process after the meeting of the MLA Seminar in Chicago in December 1973; attended REED’s founding meeting in February 1975, continuing as a senior advisor since that date; edited the dramatic records of Chester as the second REED publication (1979); currently working with David Mills of the University of Liverpool on a revised edition of the Chester city records to be published with the records of Cheshire. Margaret Dorrell Graduate student of Arthur Cawley in the early 1970s; coeditor of the records of York, the first REED publication (1979); now a member of the Department of English at the University of Sydney with extensive publications under her married name, Margaret Rogerson; see also below, p. 43. JoAnna Dutka A member of the Department of English at the University of Toronto, now retired; attended the founding meeting of REED in February 1975; acted as coinvestigator for REED’s first Major Editorial Grant from the Canada Council in 1976; member of the REED Executive Board until 1995 when she became a senior advisor; editor of the REED Newsletter 1976–97; convenor of the first REED Colloquium at Erindale College in 1978 and editor of its proceedings; currently preparing the medieval dramatic records of Norwich for publication. David Galloway Formerly a member of the Department of English at the University of New Brunswick; closely associated with the annual Elizabethan drama conference at the University of Waterloo in the 1960s; took part in the planning process after the meeting of the MLA Seminar in Chicago in 1973, being instrumental in getting support for the project from Canadian colleagues and funding agencies; REED Executive Board member and chair during the early years; edited the records of Norwich 1540 –1642 as the fifth REED publication (1984); he died in 1994. Reginald Ingram Born in Coventry, he taught at the University of British Columbia in the Department of English; extensive work on the dramatic records of Coventry before joining the REED Executive Board soon after the founding meeting in 1975, remaining a member until his death in 1989; edited the records of Coventry as the third REED publication (1981).

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Stanley J. Kahrl A member of the Department of English at Ohio State University in the early 1970s; a key member of the planning process in 1973 at the MLA meeting, providing a strong American connection; member of the REED Executive Board until 1986, subsequently a senior advisor; in 1979 instrumental in establishing the ongoing funding arrangements in the U.S. with the American National Endowment for the Humanities; the first American to hold a grant from NEH on REED’s behalf; he died in 1989. Ian Lancashire A member of the Department of English at the University of Toronto; attended the founding meeting in February 1975, bringing his valuable early drama bibliography project to REED in 1976; coinvestigator for the Canada Council editorial grant in 1976; member of the REED Executive Board until the mid-1990s when he became a senior advisor; see also below, p. 43. Peter Meredith A member of the Department of English at Leeds University in the 1970s, with a keen interest in the developing REED project; attended the founding meeting in February 1975; member of the Executive Board (for some years the only representative from the United Kingdom) until his retirement in 2000, and subsequently a senior advisor. Alan H. Nelson A member of the Department of English at the University of California at Berkeley; attended what was to become the first meeting of the International Society for Medieval Theatre in Leeds in September 1974, taking part in the accompanying discussions about the proposed records project; a key member of the assessment team for the Canada Council editorial grant in 1976; member of the Executive Board since 1986; the second holder of NEH grants on REED’s behalf; edited the Cambridge records as the eighth REED publication (1989); coedited Oxford University’s records for the REED Oxford volumes (2004); currently completing an edition of the dramatic records of the Inns of Court, for the REED series. Anthony Petti Came from the University of London to teach at the University of Calgary, before attending the session convened by Galloway and Johnston at the meeting of the then Association of Canadian University Teachers of English in Toronto in June 1974; named by the meeting as the third member of the planning group for

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the project; attended the meeting in Leeds in September 1974, agreeing, as a distinguished palaeographer, to draw up transcription guidelines for discussion at the founding meeting in February 1975; member of the Executive Board until 1983; subsequently a senior advisor until his death in 1984; see also below, p. 50 note 2. Richard Proudfoot A member of the Department of English at King’s College London until his retirement; strong Toronto connections included a year at Victoria College 1966–7; honorary secretary of the Malone Society in the mid-1970s and a key British figure in the REED planning process; attended the Leeds meeting in September 1974; came to Toronto in February 1975 for the founding meeting and in 1976 for the finalization of the transcription guidelines; a senior advisor from REED’s inception. Prudence Tracy As an editor at the University of Toronto Press, instrumental in persuading the Press to agree to publish the REED series in 1974; attended the founding meeting in February 1975; significant contributor to the project’s well-being before the publication of the volumes for York and Chester in 1979, facilitating the collaboration between REED staff and Will Rueter, the designer at the Press, in the production of pages that were both readable and faithful to REED’s scholarly objectives; member of the Executive Board until her death in 1993.

NOTES 1 See below, pp. 39– 51, 52–62. 2 Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages 1300–1660, vol. 1 (1300 –1576 ) and vol. 2, (1576 –1660 ), pt 1 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959–63). 3 For a lively and popular account of the creation of the OED see K.M. Elisabeth Murray, Caught in a Web of Words: James A.H. Murray and the ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). 4 See Lucy Toulmin Smith, ed., The York Plays: The Plays Performed by the Crafts or Mysteries of York on the Day of Corpus Christi in the 14th, 15th and 16th Centuries (Oxford, 1885); Hermann Deimling, ed., The Chester Plays, pt 1, EETS, ES 62 (London, 1893), and pt 2, Dr Matthews (an otherwise unknown scholar), ed., EETS, ES 115 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, and Trübner, 1916); George England, ed., and Alfred W. Pollard, introduction, The Towneley Plays, EETS, ES 71 (London, 1897). The last complete manuscript to appear was the one now known as ‘N-Town,’ edited

36

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13

14 15 16

Alexandra F. Johnston by Katharine S. Block as The Ludus Coventriae or the Plaie called Corpus Christi, EETS, ES 120 (London: Oxford University Press, 1922). John Elliott, Playing God: Medieval Mysteries on the Modern Stage, SEED (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 26. Ibid., 44 –7, 65–70. Ibid., 55. See also Browne’s own account in E. Martin Browne (with Henzie Browne), Two in One (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). J.S. Purvis, The York Cycle of Mystery Plays: A Complete Version (London: SPCK, 1957). E.K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903) and The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923). W.W. Greg, Bibliographical and Textual Problems of the English Miracle Cycles (London: A. Moring, 1914). The most widely used was that prepared by Alfred W. Pollard, English Miracle Plays, Moralities and Interludes (Oxford, 1890). Other studies include the following: Charles Davidson, Studies in the English Mystery Plays (n.p.: Yale University Press, 1892); H.E. Coblentz, ‘A Rime-Index to the “Parent Cycle” of the York Mystery Plays and a Portion of the Woodkirk Conspiracio et Capito,’ PMLA 10 (1895): 487– 557; F.W. Cady, ‘The Liturgical Basis of the Towneley Mysteries,’ PMLA 24 (1909): 419–69; ‘The Passion Group in Towneley,’ Modern Philology 10 (1912–13): 587–600; and ‘Towneley, York and True-Coventry,’ Studies in Philology 26 (1929): 386–400; Marie Lyle, The Original Identity of the York and Towneley Cycles, Studies in Language and Literature 6 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1919); and ‘The Original Identity of the York and Towneley Cycles – A Rejoinder,’ PMLA 44 (1929): 319–28. Mendal G. Frampton, ‘The Brewbarret Interpolation in the York Play Sacrificium Cayme et Abell,’ PMLA 52 (1937): 895–900; ‘The Date of the Flourishing of the “Wakefield Master,”’ PMLA 50 (1935): 631–60; ‘The Processus Talentorum (Towneley XXIV),’ PMLA 59 (1944): 646–54; ‘The Towneley Harrowing of Hell,’ PMLA 56 (1941): 105–19; and ‘Towneley XX: Conspiracio (et Capcio),’ PMLA 58 (1943): 920–37; Anna J. Mill, ‘The Stations of the York Corpus Christi Play,’ Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 37 (1948–51): 492–502; ‘The York Bakers’ Play of the Last Supper,’ MLR 30 (1935): 145–58; and ‘The York Plays of the Dying, Assumption, and Coronation of Our Lady,’ PMLA 65 (1950): 866–76. Harold C. Gardiner, Mysteries’ End: An Investigation of the Last Days of the Medieval Religious Stage, Yale Studies in English 103 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946). Hardin Craig, English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955). Eleanor Prosser, Drama and Religion in the English Mystery Plays: A Re-evaluation, Stanford Studies in Language and Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961).

The Founding of Records of Early English Drama 37 17 V.A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966). 18 A.C. Cawley, ed., The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958), and Everyman, Old and Middle English Texts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961). 19 Robert M. Lumiansky and David Mills, eds, The Chester Mystery Cycle, 2 vols, EETS, SS 3 and 9 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974–86); Stephen Spector, ed., The N-Town Play, 2 vols, EETS, SS 11–12 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Arthur C. Cawley and Martin Stevens, eds, The Towneley Plays, EETS, SS 13 –14 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Richard Beadle, ed., The York Plays (London: Arnold, 1982). 20 Frederick M. Salter, Medieval Drama in Chester (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1955). 21 Giles E. Dawson, ed., Collections VII, Malone Society (Oxford: Malone Society, 1965). 22 See Appendix to this essay below, p. 34. 23 For a description of that early attempt to ‘recreate’ early drama, see Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘Medieval Drama in England – 1966,’ Queen’s Quarterly 74 (1967): 78–91. 24 See below, p. 41. 25 See Appendix, p. 34. 26 For the details of the pageants in Hereford and Worcester, see Klausner, ed., Herefordshire/Worcestershire, 11–12. 27 Alan Nelson, ‘Principles of Processional Staging: “York Cycle,”’ Modern Philology 67 (1970): 303 – 20; and The Medieval English Stage: Corpus Christi Pageants and Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). 28 For a description of the condition of the Ordo gathering, see Johnston and Rogerson, eds, York, vol. 2, 869, endnote for p. 16. 29 See Appendix, p. 32. 30 See Appendix, p. 33. 31 Martin Stevens, ‘The York Cycle: From Procession to Play,’ and Margaret Dorrell, ‘Two Studies of the York Corpus Christi Play,’ Leeds Studies in English, ns 6 (1972): 37–61 and 63–111. 32 Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘The Christ Figure in Ministry Plays of the Four English Cycles’ (PhD dissertation: University of Toronto, 1964). 33 Johnston and Rogerson, eds, York, vol. 1, 55. 34 Ibid., 56. 35 Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Dorrell, ‘The Doomsday Pageant of the York Mercers, 1433,’ Leeds Studies in English, ns 5 (1971): 29–34; and ‘The York Mercers and Their Pageant of Doomsday, 1433–1526,’ Leeds Studies in English, ns 6 (1972): 10 – 35. 36 ‘The Procession and Play of Corpus Christi in York after 1426,’ Leeds Studies in English, ns 7 (1973–4): 55–62; ‘The Plays of the Religious Guilds of York: The

38

37 38 39 40

41

42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50

Alexandra F. Johnston Creed Play and the Pater Noster Play,’ Speculum 50 (1975): 55– 90; and ‘The Guild of Corpus Christi and the Procession of Corpus Christi in York,’ Mediaeval Studies 38 (1976): 372 – 84. See Appendix, p. 33. Ibid. Ibid. John Tucker Murray, The English Dramatic Companies, 1558 –1642 (London: Constable, 1910); E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923). The end-date has proved to be permeable. Wickham was perhaps more prescient taking his history to 1660. Significant documents have been found that are dated after 1642. These regularly appear as appendices in REED volumes. See the web site, Shakespeare’s Globe . See Appendix, pp. 34 –5. See Appendix, p. 34. See Appendix, p. 35. Ibid. The continuing support of the University of Toronto and my own college, Victoria – where REED has been housed since spending much of its first year on the fourteenth floor of the Robarts Library – has been vital through the life of the project. See Appendix, p. 34. See Appendix, p. 33. Basic REED guidelines for transcription are summarized below, pp. 40 –1.

Birthing the Concept: The First Nine Years sally-beth maclean

The Records of Early English Drama has been long established as an international humanities research project and the format of its big red volumes is familiar to a widening circle of users. Although each new publication in the series yields its own surprises, the basic framework of REED research and editorial methodology has been solidly grounded for almost two decades. Alexandra Johnston has outlined above the stages in the dynamic conception of REED, culminating in the award of a ten-year Major Editorial Grant from the Canada Council to form a research team of scholars and to launch the first volumes of a multivolume series. The year of REED’s founding, 1976, was a year of excited hope, bold plans, and immediate challenge. Only the broadest editorial guidelines were in place and the twin heaps of York and Chester transcripts were just that – typescript pages of transcribed records collected independently according to differing principles and not yet edited for publication. There were some other editorial suitors eager to join the project but the division of research projects across the kingdom and the strategies for coordinating the simultaneous work of many awaited definition. My purpose here is to pick up the narrative and to provide a glimpse into the early years of the REED project as its key research and editorial strategies were established. In the fall of 1975 I was hired to assist in editing the York collection for publication. I had just arrived back in Canada with a fresh doctorate from Harvard though I had spent the previous three years living in England, juggling babies and books, not far from Chester. The focus of my graduate studies had not been medieval or Renaissance drama, though theatre of any period has always been one of my keen interests. I had done two interdisciplinary theses, both in the AngloSaxon period, one of them a critical edition of the poems in the Old English Chronicle. If there were any connections between my student past and what was to come it was the interdisciplinary approach taken and the apprentice experience in editorial theory and its practical application which I brought to the fledgling

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REED. And like others hired during the early years, I brought no assumptions or established opinions to the field of early theatre history, which meant that everything was open to question as together we struggled to define what a REED edition would be. As a ’60s kid I also nurtured cooperative ideals, so REED’s goal of organizing a collaborative team of scholars to share in pioneering historical research held great appeal. The perspective I bring to bear on recalling the earliest years is therefore that of junior editor, eager to wrestle with the basics of establishing editorial policies for diverse and somewhat unpredictable collections of dramatic records that would stand the test of time. Some key elements were already in play: most importantly, the fundamental decision that transcriptions made by research editors from original documents would be rigorously checked by others with palaeographical training; agreement on a research time span, running from the earliest records available to a terminal date of 1642 that ignored the traditional divide between medieval and Renaissance scholarship; a draft set of guidelines for semidiplomatic transcription approved at REED’s founding meeting; and a collaborative model of scholarship with an active editorial board rather than a lone guru as general editor. Although what would now be termed a mission statement was not yet phrased to everyone’s satisfaction, the founders had identified the range of their intellectual focus: ‘to locate, transcribe and publish systematically all surviving external evidence of dramatic, ceremonial and minstrel activity in Great Britain before 1642.’1 As Johnston notes above (p. 31), the inclusion of minstrelsy and secular music was the result of a discussion of the various ambiguous terms used in late medieval Latin and early modern English to refer to players or, more broadly, entertainers. Because our narrower definition of actor could not often be found with ease or confidence in documents of the period, REED would therefore widen its search to embrace performances of many kinds. The eventual establishment of REED’s own set of transcription guidelines took about a year, as staff working on York tossed up for consideration some of the anomalies that Anthony Petti’s rules, originally for the transcription of literary manuscripts, did not address.2 Richard Proudfoot, the Malone Society’s very own guru, had a key role here, bringing his years of dramatic records experience to bear on this set of guidelines that were henceforth to serve both Malone and REED. Further clarifications have been added over the years as REED encountered new classes of archives, notably ecclesiastical court records, but the time taken at the start to address transcription issues laid a solid foundation that REED editors and palaeographical staff have depended on ever since. The approach is essentially conservative: all editorial expansions (which can sometimes be interpretive) are clearly represented by italic type; ambiguous forms (e.g., ‘ministrall’ without a numeric modifier in Latin accounts) are kept in their abbreviated state with an

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apostrophe to indicate the mark of suspension; the special characters of medieval English orthography are preserved (e.g., thorn or yogh) as well as the original spelling; and manuscript damage, interlineations, and erasures are indicated. Some of the most fiery debates involved a necessary evil of the REED editing process – the practical application of ellipsis dots. If REED was to manage the publication of a series, there was no escape from their use, much as many editors would prefer to edit full texts of their documents. Anyone who has worked with a full set of city chamberlains’ accounts, an ecclesiastical court book, or their equivalent in length and complexity will appreciate that a series focused primarily on early drama records could never be funded or finished if it published full transcriptions from every archival source used. The historical sources for any given city or county are numerous and complex, full of fascinating details that may serve the deeper analysis of the cultural life of communities, but they do not all provide relevant context for the study of performance, which remains a REED editor’s central purpose. The core of REED volumes has always been the records texts, transcribed according to a consistently applied set of guidelines. However, there was also early recognition of the need for an introduction and glossaries for these editions, though the details remained to be worked out as the first collections for York and Chester were checked and developed for publication. Alexandra Johnston has already mentioned (p. 31) the loathing for spoon-feeding expressed by some of the most senior members of the Executive Board. Nonetheless, even the early city volumes, still showing some of the influence of the well-established Malone Society editions, have elements that differ significantly from their precursors. It took some careful thought before the components of the introductions were established. The editors of the first volumes –York, Chester, and Coventry – had written important articles on their records in widely read journals, so the Executive Board’s preference for a minimalist approach and certainly an avoidance of interpretation was not controversial at the time. The result was introductory material containing what now seems all-too-brief sections on drama, music, and ceremony; optional historical background (understandably, given that the editors were literary scholars by training rather than historians); and editorial procedures. Those familiar with the first REED volumes will have noticed an exception to the anorexic approach adopted elsewhere in the introductions. Uninfluenced by Malone conventions, I lobbied for a section dedicated to full-bodied document descriptions and proposed another set of guidelines for acceptance (though not always with joy) by the editors. The document descriptions are in themselves an attempt to foster further exploration of the sources by those who wish to dig deeper into the broader context of the dramatic records that REED was formed to extract and publish. Not only do the descriptions seek to clarify details that

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have sometimes been misleadingly represented in antiquarian sources but they also provide relevant information about date ranges, damage, format, and present location for anyone wishing to do further research on the original manuscripts. And perhaps the document descriptions of these thousands of records are a small service in return for those of the archivists whose organizational efforts have supported REED editors in record offices across the country since the early 1970s. The inclusion of glossaries – Latin, English, and Anglo-Norman as needed – was uncontroversial. But were glossaries enough for the needs of an increasing number of students unfamiliar with Latin, not to mention a wider readership utterly lacking in Anglo-Norman skills? Alan Nelson, catalyst in some ways for the series, was a member of the Canada Council site visit team in 1976. As an observer at the time, I recall that the strength of his argument in favour of translations for the volumes is what won acceptance for that increasingly essential section of the editorial apparatus – and what led to the hiring of a Latinist, Abigail Young, whose essay, below, deals with these sections of the REED volumes. Another area of innovation was Ian Lancashire’s development of bibliographical research for the project. With a team of graduate and postgraduate research assistants, he coordinated and searched countless books, historical journals, and bibliographies for printed notices of drama, music, and public ceremonial before 1642. This research initially assisted the editors of REED collections who were regularly sent packages of bibliographic index cards from the office files, arranged on a county by county basis, to start up their individual projects. During the preparation of York and Chester it became apparent that bibliographers must be involved in the end game as well. One example should suffice. Several sets of churchwardens’ accounts from York parishes surfaced during bibliographic backup research, furnishing a new source of information on civic entertainment that had been unlooked-for in the search for notices of civic and guild-sponsored drama. Yet such parish records held promise of a wealth of revolutionary evidence still to be discovered across the kingdom, not only for the study of Robin Hood games, single biblical plays, church ales with modest musical and dance activities, and other parish customs such as Hocktide, but also for the interdisciplinary analysis of the progress of the English Reformation at the local level, a subject of increasing interest for historians at the close of the twentieth century.3 From those early years therefore, bibliographers have joined the later stages of the editorial process to review editors’ work with printed sources and to chase down overlooked items. By 1984 Ian Lancashire’s own work was to benefit a wider audience, culminating in the publication of Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain to 1558, the first volume in the affiliated Studies in Early English Drama series.4 The role of a published bibliography in the REED volumes was debated as well. Would it be select? Comprehensive? Annotated? In the end, more guidelines

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ensued, both for inclusion and format, and a choice was made for a select bibliography to immediately follow the introduction, compiled after a thorough check of relevant printed sources for the city or county concerned. Key standard reference works such as the Victoria County Histories are included as well as any books and articles that print original transcriptions from documentary sources quoted in REED collections. This policy obviates the need to cite previous transcribers of the same data at length in endnotes and allows graceful acknowledgment of earlier scholars’ and antiquarians’ work without outlining every variation or error in transcription unless significant confusion or misinterpretation could result when comparing REED’s version with theirs. Ian Lancashire was an early adopter of technology and has since gone on to become a Canadian leader in computing in the humanities. His introduction of computer concording of texts for the York Latin and English glossaries launched REED into an ongoing pursuit of ways in which modern technology can expedite the editorial process. It should be acknowledged that optimism about technology’s usefulness led to an experiment in indexing the York volumes which did not stand the test of time. York is the only publication in the series where names and subjects are segregated into separate indexes and it remains unique in depending for its identification of topics solely on where words appear in a strictly limited context. Very briefly, indexing from concordances of Latin, Anglo-Norman, and early modern English cannot identify subject topics reliably or consistently and can hamper recognition of an individual masquerading under variant surname spellings. Separation into two indexes also led to further complications, such as whether a play character should be allocated to the name or the subject index, sometimes yielding diverse and conflicting results. By the time Chester was in final production, however, I had time to concentrate on what a REED index should be, with the help of R.F. Hunnisett’s Indexing for Editors and constructive criticism of the York Index by Peter Meredith, who rapidly became the Executive Board member to consult about the editorial details of early collections. 5 A merged, reformatted index model for interdisciplinary users was then established for the series, over the years becoming increasingly sophisticated in its presentation. Recent good news is that Margaret Rogerson, coeditor of York, has taken up the challenge of reindexing York to make its index compatible with the rest of the series. And now there was time to reflect on comparative analysis of records across a series of volumes. How could it be managed, if there were no basic principles of selection established for the many editors who were at work in record offices across the country searching for records of locally produced or ‘professional’ dramatic activity? That seems an easy enough selection process on the surface, but where and when, if ever, does liturgy cross the border into drama? Or music – does that

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include the playing of any instrument, even a church organ? And public ceremony – a treacherously vague term that had allowed in the entry featuring the eating of a goose on top of St Peter’s steeple in Chester.6 One of my early memos to the Executive Board highlighted a question arising from a comparison of as yet unpublished collections: should the contents of each volume be left to the editor’s discretion or should a list of essential subjects for inclusion be provided, with a definition of REED’s research limits? The Board debated the issues and another set of guidelines was outlined for the collaborative research team, though each volume in the series continues to present its own anomalies for further debate. The keyword for inclusion of activities was agreed to be ‘mimetic,’ especially in the case of ceremonial customs. A broader range of folk activities connected to local customary calendars across the kingdom therefore became relevant – inversion of order ceremonies especially, from the boy bishops and Robin Hood games of the later medieval period to post-Reformation mimetic mockery by the disaffected of varying religious persuasions. Another keyword was ‘secular.’ Editorial policy would exclude purely liturgical music and ceremonial, in recognition that the records of early English liturgy could be an important project in itself, ideally for specialists in that field. Thus, routine parish payments for watching the Easter sepulchre, an observance which was part of the Sarum rite for Holy Week, have been omitted, although in the rare early instances of reference to a sepulchre play, REED editors are encouraged to follow along the path scouted by Karl Young in The Drama of the Medieval Church, a seminal work (although Young’s sources were primarily continental) defining the various types of liturgical drama that REED would wish to include should evidence be found.7 Purely liturgical processions outside a church, whether on Palm Sunday or at Corpus Christi, have also been excluded, their vital function in the life of the parish or urban community recognized as complementary to, but mostly segregated from, secular theatrical or musical activities that occurred, especially at Corpus Christi, as festive extensions across the country.8 Decisions of this kind have not been easy to construct or impose over the years, as REED editors (and I, as series editor) would agree. Wherever possible, when the sense of a record is opaque but possible to interpret as referring to a dramatic or mimetic activity, it is included if the editor is prepared to write an explanatory endnote in its defence. There were other new horizons to scan during the early 1980s as the editorial challenges for the series continued. By 1981 Alexandra Johnston had been elevated to the demanding position of principal of Victoria College, a senior administrative post that she held for the next ten years. This brought me the responsibility of coordinating the work of the international team of REED scholars and the Toronto staff, adding the direction of research to editorial oversight of the volumes. Johnston and I had recently collaborated on REED’s Handbook for Editors, a sort of editorial

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primer that made available in compact form the various sets of editorial and typescript submission guidelines developed between 1976 and 1980.9 Johnston and the rest of the Executive Board had by this time recruited an impressive list of collaborating editors for the project, many of whom had been delegated to research counties rather than major cities. So, while we had defined the process for researching and editing civic volumes, we had yet to master the county collections, with their broader diversity of materials. That was the focus for what I think of as the remaining four years of birthing the series as we now know it. Always a map lover, one of my first pleasures in 1981 was sorting out the historic county boundaries that seemed to make better sense for the organization of records collections than the post-1974 modern county redefinitions, some of which have since been further adjusted (for REED at least, Rutland never ceased to exist). The Executive Board soon agreed on pre-1642 county divisions as the primary basis for defining most of the remaining county collections. For example, the new county boundaries of Cumbria were ruled out for REED purposes: the Furness peninsula was returned to Lancashire for David George’s volume, along with a small part of west Yorkshire, both of which had been grafted on to Cumbria in 1974. Thus the former counties of Cumberland and Westmorland were resurrected by REED and their records were edited by Audrey Douglas as one of the first county collections. Douglas has made a stimulating contribution to REED over the years as she brought a historian’s perspective to the task of editing dramatic records. Her introduction was the first to include a more generous analysis of the historical context for dramatic activity, but it was also the first of many where the editor was dealing with largely unfamiliar records that had not been extensively previewed in widely read journals and books. The pattern established for Cumberland/Westmorland has been followed since, often aided by generous advice and helpful bibliographies from Robert Tittler, the Tudor urban historian who now chairs the REED Executive Board.10 A new design was developed to sort Douglas’s records for Cumberland and Westmorland and Peter Greenfield’s records for Gloucestershire, which shared the same volume. The integrity of each location was respected but within each location the records from civic, cathedral, parish, secular, and ecclesiastical court or other miscellaneous sources were chronologically sorted, much as they had been in the city volumes. There were major divisions into Boroughs and Parishes; Monasteries; and Households, each section with its locations sorted in alphabetical order. General diocesan and county records with broader application were segregated too, in chronological order. These divisions contained a roll call of some of the research challenges to be faced: how to track the widely dispersed records of monastic houses, for example, or how to gain access to the often uncatalogued family papers still in private hands? Were all surviving parish accounts at county record offices or could they be

46 Sally-Beth MacLean

tracked down still in the custody of local churchwardens? We were also becoming aware of new archive classes that were relevant, even essential, for county research – the records of the county quarter sessions and the ecclesiastical courts, for instance. Ian Lancashire by this time had moved on and there was a new bibliographer in place, Theodore De Welles. Together we reviewed the approach to bibliographic support research and extended the original parameters beyond the search for printed notices of drama, music, and ceremony to look for notices of surviving documents that might yield such records if they were systematically searched for the first time. And so De Welles and his assistants, working on behalf of a team of almost forty editors now, searched PRO Lists and Indexes, Historical Manuscripts Commission Reports, and major library catalogues, as well as annual bibliographies and archival reports for promising manuscript references, and the stream of index cards posted from the office continued.11 Such broad-based support from the central office is an ongoing REED tradition and has been essential in expanding the coverage of the county editions. The card, and latterly electronic, catalogues in the bibliographers’ office have also served a variety of needs for other scholars and students visiting REED headquarters in Toronto. The collaborative approach to bibliographic support for editors also stimulated a rethinking of an early decision made by the Executive Board when their primary focus – and experience – was associated with city collections. In an effort to control what seemed an impossibly large research initiative, the Executive had determined to exclude monastic and family archives from REED’s systematic survey of pre1642 records. However, in opening up research projects at the county level, this early decision was subject to debate and the young idealists of the office did not draw back from the challenge. We believed that county research must include the records of households outside the boroughs – whether monastic, noble, or gentry – especially because of the touring entertainers who were known to have played in such locations. These household records are often more difficult to trace (monastic documents especially have been scattered beyond their original county location) or to gain access to if they remain in private hands. However, centralized bibliographic research by REED staff could systematically track and sort by county those manuscripts that had strayed into the collections of national archives or libraries, or that had merged through marriage or mishap with privately held collections located in other parts of the kingdom. Furthermore, David George’s Lancashire research was showing that in his county at least there were far more dramatic records in surviving gentry accounts than in the meagre remains from the towns of Liverpool and Manchester, which had not yet become the prosperous urban centres of the post-1642 period. The case for the inclusion of monastic and family records was argued successfully in the early 1980s with the result that every county editor in the REED series has been encouraged and supported in the search for them.

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By the time that the fifth city collection, Norwich 1540 –1642, went into production in 1983 REED was moving in many ways into a new era. This volume was the last to be edited by a founder of REED and it was the first that was predominantly Renaissance in its focus. The editor, David Galloway, was less interested in medieval biblical cycles than in the professional Elizabethan stage. It was his influence that had led to the extension of REED’s mandate to the date of the closing of the London public theatres in 1642. When his time came, Galloway had strong opinions about the dating style appropriate for the REED volumes and spoke eloquently about the rhythms of the agricultural year, the relative insignificance of our New Year’s Day in the Elizabethan calendar, and the importance of reflecting the Michaelmas – Michaelmas style of civic accountants not only in Norwich but in many other towns across the country. This is not the place to go into the complexities of documentary dating that REED editors must contend with in merging records from many sources, but anyone interested in the subject should make note of the shift in editorial approach that occurred when Norwich was published in 1984. Before that the volumes either adjusted the records to fit into an anachronistic modern calendar year or, in Chester’s case, opted for an idiosyncratic year organized around the Midsummer festival that was the focal point for the city’s customary calendar. In Norwich records were presented in a way that respected the accounting year of the majority of original documents, a decision that has been our editorial strategy ever since. At the same time, the editorial apparatus that accompanied each volume of records was extended to include a new feature, one that led to an editorial overlap with the REED research process itself and first introduced computer technology as a necessary research tool. The Norwich volume, with its wealth of information about touring professional companies, seemed to call for more than a cursory flagging of such troupes in the index. A major question that REED research might address was whether a patron’s range of political or regional influence had any impact on his or her entertainers’ choice of tour routes and performance venues. Thus, as an adjunct to the index for Norwich, it was decided to identify clearly, and compile information for, each patron named in the volume, selecting biographical data from standard reference works to illustrate possible patronage links with specific locations. Information on principal peerage titles and national offices, for instance, was listed along with regional or local appointments and properties held. In addition, key information – the type of entertainer, and the year of performance – was extracted from each REED record in which players or entertainers were named in relation to that patron, and printed out, with the page number, in standardized form. In subsequent volumes, performance records were also extracted for municipal waits, musicians, or other entertainers and listed under the cities and towns that employed them along with the locations they visited. The gradual

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accumulation of such performance records, together with patrons’ biographies, had a twofold value, enabling the construction of both players’ or other performers’ itineraries and, in most cases, unequivocal identification of those patrons who sometimes appeared in the records under their office rather than their title (for example, the players of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester and lord steward of the household, were recorded at Exeter identified by his title in 1586–7 and by his office in 1587–8).12 It was clear that both research paths might become easier with the development of a computer program that would organize all biographical information and extracted performance records in searchable form. With this goal in mind, Audrey Douglas (then teaching herself Basic) and I collaborated on the development of the first REED database for use in the office, the precursor of what was destined to become part of the Patrons and Performances Web Site which now makes available to a wider public professionally designed interactive maps linked with REED patrons and company data, as well as entirely new architectural details and images for the study of theatrical spaces used in the provinces.13 Another development during these years that has had lasting significance for the production of REED volumes was the introduction of computers to the editorial process itself. Two of the pioneers in the humanities who helped us on our way were Alan Nelson, who held a small meeting in 1982 on the fringes of the annual medieval congress at the University of Western Michigan at Kalamazoo for those of us intrigued by his proposal that editors should submit their transcriptions in computerized form, and Willard McCarty, who developed the system of codes used for such submissions and masterminded purchase of the first microcomputer and professional typesetting system in 1983.14 Soon the pioneers were joined by other REED editors who were encouraged, perhaps even goaded, into acquiring their own microcomputers and learning to convert their pencil transcriptions to ASCIIcoded texts for submission to the office in the form of floppy disks rather than typescripts (see further, pp. 57– 9). And so, by 1985 REED had published five city collections and was moving four county collections into final production. The Norwich volume included all the components that readers have come to expect in a REED volume and its introduction and notes were more generously detailed than those of its predecessors. By this time REED had departed from the very sparing approach taken by the Malone Society towards provincial records editing. Not only is the period of coverage longer and the range of entertainment searched for broader, but wherever possible all entries that might connect with or shed light on a performance record in a particular account are included, and for single documents such as a letter, full transcription is encouraged. While the concise textual footnotes on records text pages are directed primarily at the extent of manuscript damage or scribal error, the discursive endnotes have expanded in nature since the earliest volumes: for example, they may

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provide biographical details for those named; identify obscure places; explain complex court procedures; or augment the records text with information from original or later sources that may shed further light on the passage concerned. Sometimes it is also appropriate to explain in the endnotes why material has been omitted from a particular text, and the editorial staff are vigilant in their review of editors’ submissions to ensure that such attention to detail is observed. Perhaps the most obvious demonstration of the variations and differences between a Malone Society county collection and a REED county collection is found in the 242 pages of Giles Dawson’s Collections VII for Kent (‘Records of Plays and Players in Kent 1450 – 1642’) in the Malone Society series and James M. Gibson’s Kent: Diocese of Canterbury, a three-volume (1899 pp.) set of records in the REED series.15 In summary, the end of REED’s ‘birthing’ period in 1985 saw an international team of approximately forty scholarly editors, each with a defined historic county or city collection to research, and an experienced editorial staff in Toronto working collaboratively to provide bibliographic materials; check transcriptions; translate, gloss, and index texts as required; conduct research on patrons; assist in the editing of complex records from a wide range of manuscript, early printed, and antiquarian sources; and produce typeset camera-ready pages for printing, binding, and marketing by the University of Toronto Press. The time taken in the early years to establish research and editorial guidelines and to develop a strong support network for the team of REED editors would ensure, as much as humanly possible, the steady production of a series with clearly articulated standards and, it was hoped, an ability to adjust prudently to the rapidly changing modern world of technology. Ironically perhaps, it was in the following year that REED received its ‘winddown’ grant from its primary granting agency, now known as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The study of patrons then took on urgent new contemporary meaning. The funding crisis of 1986 opened a new chapter in REED’s history, a turbulent and challenging period during which Alexandra Johnston and I learned to collaborate in a different way in our search for funding to ensure the survival of the project and the publication of the research so well begun by so many dedicated scholars. That we have survived to tell the tale is a tribute to the commitment of our editors and staff, the generosity of our donors, and the increasing use that has been made of the REED series by those working in the field of early modern studies.

NOTES 1 The phrasing quoted comes from Johnston and Rogerson, eds, York, vi. The statement was modified in later volumes in the series.

50 Sally-Beth MacLean 2 Petti would soon publish his important study English Literary Hands from Chaucer to Dryden (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), where his palaeographical principles were delineated in full detail. 3 See, for example, two influential works: Patrick Collinson’s Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Macmillian, 1988), and Ronald Hutton’s Rise and Fall of Merry England, both by historians who make extensive use of REED publications. 4 Ian Lancashire, Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain to 1558, SEED (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984). 5 Indexing for Editors, Archives and the User, No. 2 (Leicester: British Records Association, 1972). 6 An antiquarian Mayor’s List entry for 1489–90: Clopper, ed., Chester, 20. 7 Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933). 8 Some community activities that could be described as ‘para-liturgical’ are outlined in my essay ‘Festive Liturgy and the Dramatic Connection: A Study of Thames Valley Parish Ceremonial,’ Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 8 (1996): 49 – 62. 9 The Handbook for Editors was published informally by REED in 1980, primarily for circulation to our editors although we received requests during the subsequent decade from other interested scholars. In the early 1990s I revised and updated the opening sections, with special attention to bibliographical support, principles of selection, advice on approaching manuscript repositories, and guidelines for transcribing, dating, and describing documents; however, there was no funding to print the Handbook at this time. The revised sections have been circulated electronically to new editors and support staff only as needed in recent years. 10 Bob Tittler has played one of the most active advisory roles for REED since he joined the Executive Board in 1995. Some of the research for his seminal book Architecture and Power was done in the 1980s using the civic microfilm and photo-reproduction resources at the REED office. As a historian he has broadened our network of interdisciplinary contacts through collaborative conference sessions and individual exchanges, and from 1985, when he was first appointed to the REED Editorial Advisory Board, he has also acted as a constructive critic for the historical essays that have become an integral part of REED volumes. 11 See further, on REED bibliographic organization, Theodore R. De Welles, ‘Bibliographic Resources and Research at Records of Early English Drama,’ REEDN 9.1 (1984): 16– 20. 12 Wasson, ed., Devon, 164. 13 A pilot version of the Patrons and Performances Web Site featuring data for Lancashire was uploaded in the summer 2003. The cumulative databases of patrons’ biographical and performance event details from the first eighteen volumes published in the

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REED series were combined with new research data for performance venues and maps for inclusion in the second stage of development, and uploaded in 2005 (). For the uses of REED patrons and travelling company data, please see the essays in this volume, pp. 85–100, 200–15. 14 Reports on computer initiatives at REED appeared in 1983 and 1984 issues of the Newsletter. See further Alan H. Nelson, ‘Computer Texts for REED,’ and Willard McCarty, ‘A New Computer Typesetting System for REED,’ REEDN 8.2 (1983): 11–19 and 19–24, and McCarty, ‘Evidence of Things Promised: A Progress Report on the REED Computer Editing and Typesetting System,’ REEDN 9.1 (1984): 13 –15. 15 Giles E. Dawson, ed., Collections VII, Malone Society (Oxford: Malone Society, 1965). Gibson’s research for a further volume for Kent: Diocese of Rochester is in progress.

‘Practice Makes Perfect’: Policies for a Cross-Disciplinary Project abigail ann young

Alexandra Johnston and Sally-Beth MacLean have earlier in this section told the REED story up to the point where, in the mid-1980s, a publication series was established with overarching policies and guidelines. An important part of that journey was the need, recognized and grappled with from REED’s early days, to effectively ensure the quality of the collections through the transcription and translations guidelines. In these early years REED benefited also from fortuitous timing – unbeknownst to its founders, developments in humanities computing applications and computer technology were at hand that would assist the project’s goals. While the basic guidelines for all REED transcription were laid down at the founding meeting (see p. 31 above), they have necessarily been refined over the years – whether in response, for example, to issues raised in dealing with new classes of documents or to detailed practical concerns arising in the course of transcription. From the beginning, the York records gave a central role in the development of REED’s editorial principles to Latin vocabulary and Latin transcription; as we shall see, the latter underwent major changes with the widening scope of the county collections. From my point of view, however, the unique quality of the enterprise lay in the fact that REED required an editorial policy that addressed the consistent presentation of texts in Latin, English, and Anglo-Norman over a considerable range of time. The circumstance has perhaps always struck me particularly because, nearly alone among those who were involved in REED’s early years, my background included no training in English language or literature. It is therefore appropriate at this point to say a bit about my own training and formation in classics at the University of Texas at Austin, since it was that that informed my approach to the tasks with which I was presented at REED in the 1980s. From the mid-1960s on through the mid-1970s the Classics Department at Austin, in its journal, Arion, was challenging and expanding the boundaries of the

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discipline in many directions, from a unique approach to the pronunciation and metre of Greek verse to a bold new style of translating ancient literature.1 For the training of a REED Latinist, perhaps the most valuable aspect of the department’s approach to Latin was that it embraced a holistic approach to Latin literature – the full range of that literature was grist to the mill, whether preclassical, classical, Silver Age, medieval, or Renaissance. Furthermore the department provided me with an early brush with humanities computing, when I was recruited to take part in an abortive attempt to concord Apollonius Rhodius’s Argonautica, which, along with the intensive training in reading, writing, and teaching Latin, provided invaluable preparation for later work with REED’s computer systems. Thanks to my university training I could bring to the task at hand, in addition to a long-term interest in translation and in philology, a broad exposure to Latin literature and a willingness to explore new approaches to the language. Paramount to the task then in hand of crafting guidelines for Latin transcription and translation were two considerations: a desire to make the transcription practice for Latin compatible and consistent with REED’s vernacular transcriptions, and a formative concern to avoid unnecessary or intrusive editorial interpretation. These considerations led to a semidiplomatic transcription policy that was very unusual in modern editions of Latin texts. Specifically, REED editions stand out for their indication of expansions in Latin words while preserving a reticence to expand when context is ambiguous about such matters as the number of a noun or verb. Seeing a page of semidiplomatic REED text is a surprise to someone from a classics background for whom only epigraphers or papyrologists concern themselves over which letters are expressed explicitly, or how much damaged text is actually missing. Practically speaking the wisdom of the practice is inescapable: it would clearly be unacceptable to apply a different practice of transcription and expansion to the Latin texts than that applied to those written in English, and thus present two different styles side by side on the page. More importantly, though, the semidiplomatic style allows the authentic voices of the clerks and accountants, bishops’ chanceries, and guild officers to be heard. Because of the nature of medieval education and the international system of Latin abbreviation, it is almost always possible to know what word was meant by an abbreviation, or what case it should be in. So the indication of expansions is seldom needed to alert the reader to the possibility of excessive editorial intervention in the text. But the guidelines do ensure that, unlike many editions of Anglo-Latin or other medieval texts, REED editions do not pretty up medieval or Anglo-Latin texts with classical or neo-Latinate orthography and constructions or silently correct medieval ‘errors.’ And when there’s no way to tell when a word should be expanded to the singular or plural, the guidelines ensure that ambiguity is preserved. That may sound like a small thing, but when dealing with payments to

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travelling entertainers it is important to signal when it is unclear whether the reference is to an individual or a group. The translations and glossary for the Latin texts in York were a proving ground for guidelines still waiting to be worked out in practice, with few principles already in place. This was the task to which I first set myself (although the written guidelines did not appear for several years) before beginning the actual translations. York was certainly a learning experience (someday I hope the opportunity presents itself to revise the edition’s translations and glossary in the light of all that has been learned since that time). As the guidelines slowly began to take shape, the foremost consideration that was passed on to me was that the translations should be as literal as possible; the principle of avoiding unnecessary interpretation held sway here too. An equally important consideration was that translations should be an aid to readers working their way through the Latin texts – a polite way of saying that they should be able to function as a ‘crib.’ In the course of subsequent collections, the first principle was refined to specify that the translations would be literal but not word-for-word. Idiomatic translation was brought within the guidelines (within reason) – a great relief for any translator. But I have tried very hard to stick with the second principle; I still strive in each collection, whether I am making the translations or checking them, to see that a reader with small Latin could use the translations and the glossary to work his or her way through the text. To quote the beginning of REED’s in-house Latin translation guidelines: The following guidelines represent a sort of tightrope walk between our ideal principles and the reality of translation. On the one hand, we are committed to a particular style of literal translation, whose ideal is that every word found in the Latin should have a corresponding English word in the translation and in which there should be as little interpretation imposed on the texts as possible. On the other hand, we must produce clear, readable, comprehensible English.

One suggestion that the Executive Board did not take up was the addition of a short, basic Latin lesson to each collection, which would not assume any knowledge of the language in the reader. I understand only too well why such a suggestion might occur – Latin has dropped quite far off the radar screens of many students, even graduate students, including those interested in medieval literature and history. But how to decide what was basic? Or what was short? Fortunately, the idea was dropped before anyone attempted the impossible task of condensing an introductory Latin course into a usable form. In fact, between the translations and the glossary that REED provides for each edition, I think that users without a previous knowledge of the language as well as those who read Latin are well served: the

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translations are aimed primarily at those users without a strong Latin background, whereas the glossaries are primarily addressed to those users with sufficient Latin background to want a closer examination of the vocabulary and usage of the texts. One of the first problems that reared its head was what to do when interpretation was unavoidable – for instance, when it was not clear what the text said, what a specific word meant, or when a way was needed to translate a term without unduly restricting its range of potential meanings. In particular, what did some of the most common terms for performers actually mean? Terms like ‘histriones,’ ‘ministralli,’ or ‘mimi’ were difficult to translate at the beginning, since the kind of data that would help to determine their connotations and denotations in various contexts had yet to be collected. Although ‘ministrallus’ is an entirely postclassical development, ‘histrio’ and ‘mimus’ were originally items of classical vocabulary whose meaning in the context of Roman theatre and entertainment is well established – charting their course in medieval Anglo-Latin was to prove an interesting challenge. But even apparently simple words are often not so simple. A ‘lusor’ is a man who plays, but what did he play? If a ‘fistulator’ is etymologically a man who plays a pipe, does that make all ‘fistulatores’ pipers? Nevertheless, it was still necessary to translate the particular texts of each collection as it came in, without the benefit of a long-term view. The first step was to establish neutral ‘translation equivalents’ – terms that could be used both in the translations and in the index of travelling companies – for the most common Latin performance words. In the translations, every ‘histrio’ is an entertainer, every ‘mimus’ a performer, every ‘ministrallus’ a minstrel and so on.2 The various senses and ranges of meanings, however, are represented in the glossary for each volume. The analyses in those glossaries have been refined and improved as each new collection increases the available evidence for usage. The culmination of this enterprise is a composite Latin Glossary, currently incorporating the evidence from the records for Cambridge (1989) through Oxford (2004), which provides an invaluable resource from which to begin constructing the glossary for each new collection.3 In the beginning, however, working out the list of translation equivalents (of which ‘histrio,’ ‘mimus,’ and ‘ministrallus’ were the core) took time, since the task had to be grounded in a painstaking analysis of the performance words, based on the available range of published and unpublished REED collections, collections published by the Malone Society, and the usage reflected in early English-Latin lexica. Aware of the advantages that computer-generated concordances had brought to the task of writing the Latin glossaries, I keyed in the various citations I found of my chosen vocabulary and used the university’s mainframe computers to sort them for analysis. Writing up my results led to a two-part article for the REED Newsletter in 1984 and 1985, with the definitions derived from the usage found in Malone Society and REED collections presented in the first part and a

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discussion of the early English-Latin lexica in the second. As far as I know, no other such detailed examination of this Latin vocabulary has ever been carried out. With that foundation to build on, the definitions in individual glossaries could be shorter and more succinct for the most part and the translations simpler and easier both to produce and to use. Over the last seventeen or eighteen years the definitions and discussions in those articles have maintained their relevance. Although more details and greater clarifications have emerged, only one definition has needed to be completely rethought, that of ‘ministrallus,’ which I reexamined in another piece in REEDN in the mid-nineties.4 Looking back now, I think it is important to remember how many of the Latin resources now taken for granted either did not exist or were incomplete twentyfive years ago. For REED’s first few Latin glossaries, the selection criteria were based on the classic nineteenth-century lexicon of classical Latin (Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary), because the Oxford Latin Dictionary (OLD), which was intended to replace it, was not yet complete.5 Neither the Dictionary of Medieval Latin nor theThesaurus Linguae Latinae 6 had advanced so far into the alphabet as each has now done. REED has profited as much from these improved tools as from my own basic research in the specialized terminology at the core of REED’s endeavours. The Latin glossaries are based on the OLD and, unlike the translations, aimed at those users with a strong basic knowledge of Latin syntax and accidence. The single selection criterion for a glossary entry is very simple and deceptively straightforward – if a word appears in the texts excerpted for a REED collection in a meaning that has remained essentially unchanged from classical usage (as defined by the OLD), it is not glossed. So if a word does not appear in the OLD at all (such as ‘ministrallus’), it needs to be glossed. If a word has changed in its meaning over the centuries (such as ‘cithara,’ referring in classical texts to the ancient lyre but in medieval texts to a harp), it needs to be glossed. But the most common Latin words used in medieval or early modern texts (like ‘esse,’ the verb ‘to be’) seldom require glossing since the range of meaning that they bear tends to have remained constant over time. Deciding when usage is essentially unchanged is not always easy and I have usually erred on the side of inclusion if the shifts in meaning that have taken place since the classical period involve entertainment terminology, costume, or now vanished or archaic institutions. From the start, REED committed itself to the use of computer-generated concordances for glossarians to work with and they proved to be an invaluable tool in devising an efficient and accurate procedure for creating the Latin glossary in particular.7 The close connection thus created between REED’s Latin and REED’s use of computers also provided a link in my own work between the production of Latin translations and glossaries and an involvement in the project’s overall use of computers for text processing and analysis. The advantages of having an end-user

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of the concordances involved in creating them soon became clear and this led me deeper into the development of REED’s computer typesetting system when Willard McCarty moved on to other endeavours in humanities computing after setting up the initial system (above, pp. 48 and 51 note 14). Unfortunately REED’s computer-generated concordances at first created a fundamental problem in text production. At REED the transcribed records text is carefully compared with and checked by the palaeographers on staff against reproductions of the original manuscripts to produce a text that represents the originals as accurately as possible. The ideal procedure, and one which computer technology now makes possible, would be to keyboard the records text once, check it, correct it, and then use the resulting file to produce both page proofs and the concordance needed for the Latin glossary. But at the time REED’s early volumes were being produced, computer typesetting of the sort with which we are familiar today was not yet available. So if there were to be concordances, the records text had to be keyed twice: once into a file stored on the university mainframe to be concorded there, and then into an electronic composer (a machine similar to an electronic typewriter). However carefully the two keyings-in were done, typographical errors would be introduced into the text and the two keyed versions would be identical neither with one another nor with the original typescript from which they had been entered. In the 1980s the computer technology needed to create REED’s ideal procedure became both available and affordable. Unfortunately the technology that solved one problem – how to have both a computer-generated concordance and a typeset text without multiple keyboarding – also brought with it a new problem: how to indicate typographic conventions for representing expansions, special characters, and editorial symbols in the computer files of records text. Traditionally this has been done with mark-up symbols, written down on the pages as a guide to the compositor and the proof-reader. Most academics are familiar with those symbols: underlining to indicate italics, a wavy line for boldfacing, doubleunderlining to indicate small caps, and so on. In computer typesetting, as with computer word-processing, a few keystrokes insert electronic codes in text files to create italic, boldface, or small cap text. But if REED used software designed for computer typesetting, the proprietary electronic codes devised by the developers of that particular software would make the resulting file unusable by software designed to produce concordances, while the coding used to prepare texts for computer concordances would be meaningless in computer typesetting. Since there was no one piece of software that could both generate a concordance and format text for typesetting, a way had to be found to create files of text that could be edited by a word-processing program (to allow the text to be keyboarded and then corrected after palaeographic checking); imported and manipulated

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by concordance software; and finally imported into a computer typesetter or typesetting software. For such program exchange to be possible, those files of text had to be in plain (that is, unadorned ASCII)8 text, containing no embedded proprietary coding. The solution was to develop a form of generic, nonproprietary coding that would function like traditional mark-up without being specific to any one particular software application, a ‘one-size-fits-all’ mark-up of the text. At that time, the state of play with computer mark-up for encoding textual editions, especially semidiplomatic editions like REED’s, was in as much flux as the state of Latin lexicography. A Standard Generalized Mark-up Language (SGML) had been in development since the late 1960s (SGML is perhaps familiar to contemporary computer users as the basis of the Hypertext Mark-up Language [HTML] in wide use on the World Wide Web). SGML addressed many of the basic problems of marking up texts for presentation in computer-generated formats – how do you code indented text, or notes, or changes to italic and boldface? But it did not offer a standard coding for mark-up that met all the needs of textual editions. So REED invented its own mark-up language, known as the REED ‘at-sign codes.’ They are so called because most of the codes were introduced by the at-sign character (@) and closed by the use of a backslash (\), although the beginning and ending of italics (used to signal expansions) were marked off by curly brackets ({}). These characters were chosen because they are never used in the edited records in a REED volume. SGML and related systems use angle brackets () as coding delimiters. Since these brackets have a specific function in REED’s edited text, it seemed preferable to avoid them in constructing a coding system. For example, the text which is encoded fatebat{ur} t{ame}n q{uo}d sciret legere anglicum. & nu{m}q{ua}m scolatizauit. et q{uo}d nullos libros anglicanos habuit nec aliquib{us} hui{us} libris ^@a\anglicanis@a \ vnq{ua}m vsus est nisi t{antu}m libris anglicanis de interludijs. An{gli}ce Ordinals for pleyes.

appears in type as fatebatur tamen quod sciret legere anglicum. & numquam scolatizauit. et quod nullos libros anglicanos habuit nec aliquibus huius libris ^LanglicanisJ vnquam vsus est nisi tantum libris anglicanis de interludijs. Anglice Ordinals for pleyes.9

It is a testimony to the foresight with which the mark-up was designed that REED is still using an updated and improved version of the original system of coding, as described in McCarty’s final report on the system.10 I collaborated with both McCarty and Bill Rowcliffe, our typesetter at the time, in implementing the

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system, by writing software to convert our mark-up into the particular coding that is appropriate for each application, whether typesetting or concordance production. I also produced other pieces of software that check the mark-up to be sure that the codes have been entered correctly. The original hardware described by McCarty in 1984 is long, long gone and has been replaced by more modern, more powerful, and faster-running machines. REED’s software resources have also changed tremendously and now include Microsoft Word for Windows, Quark XPress, and an HTML editor, rather than the WordStar word-processing program and MS-DOS operating system of the original system.11 By the mid-1980s, all the central components – hardware, software (whether commercial or developed in-house), and coding system – were in place and ready to roll. But it was a hard sell – conversion to computer typesetting meant encouraging the editors who had yet to submit their records not just to use computers to enter their transcriptions but to use REED’s mark-up language and coding. And it meant revision of the REED Handbook, with guidelines on the preparation and submission of an editor’s final typescript replaced by those that instead detailed submission of electronic text on disk. Although a great deal of the energy for change came from editors who had embraced the new technology and its benefits, not everyone in the office or in the field was comfortable with the new process. Much time was spent not just on designing the new procedures but also on explaining and documenting them. But it was time well-spent – integration of the various tasks for which computers were used made for greater accuracy and greater speed, freeing up more energy for actual editing and research. New procedures for computerizing the transcriptions led to improvements in concordance generation and thus improved the process of glossary making. But the biggest impact on REED’s Latin in the 1980s was achieved through the new areas of research being opened up by the county collections that were coming along at that time. In the city collections to that date, most of the Latin had occurred in civic accounts. These are important – most of the work that informed my analysis of performance terminology was based on Latin civic accounts – but for the translator and perhaps for the reader as well such accounts quickly become dull. There is a limit to the number of times that ‘Likewise 3s 4d to the king’s minstrels this year’ can be translated from the Latin without mental anguish. And the vocabulary is, to say the least, repetitive. With the advent of county collections Latin records from more varied sources began to arrive in the office, the most interesting and important of which were canonical and episcopal documents, like statutes and mandates, and ecclesiastical court cases. The language was more challenging to translate and to gloss, and the content was more intrinsically interesting. Instead of repetitive annual series of payments to minstrels, players, or waits, there were scurrilous libels exchanged at an entertainment or next to the maypole;

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parishioners dancing who should have been in church; and bishops thundering denunciations against the Christmas misrule of choirboys and subdeacons with their boy bishops and feasts of fools.12 Canonical and episcopal documents proved more straightforward to work with than would the court cases. The concerns that led to the condemnation of Christmas misrule in churches and chapels or secular activity, such as dancing or playing in churchyards, were part and parcel of an important series of reforms embracing a wide concern with sacred persons and sacred space. Here REED was dealing with areas of canon law and church history that had been and continue to be studied by specialists in those areas. Thus initial selections from letters and mandates, and their analysis and translation, benefited from the foundations already laid. In addition, however complex their prose, the vocabulary was standard and the manuscript traditions and the hand that was employed usually clear. Unfortunately this was not so for ecclesiastical court cases; no matter what the diocese, these were recorded in what has to be the worst handwriting and the most impenetrable style of abbreviation in any class of records in a REED collection. The court procedures and style of abbreviation had not been so well studied in the past, since the importance of these records as sources for local and social history was slow to be recognized. The ways in which the post-Reformation church courts carried on so much of the procedure and language of the pre-Reformation system seemed paradoxical at times, making the entries sometimes hard to understand or expand. So both understanding the canonical system with its blend of pre- and post-Reformation practice and concerns and expanding the abbreviations used in ecclesiastical court cases were challenging. To meet this challenge, I produced notes on court books and procedures and lists of the most common specialized abbreviations for editors to take with them into the field. Through these new sources, the vocabulary of medieval reform theology and that of early modern canonical process joined those of medieval English administration and of performance in REED’s Latin glossaries. My purpose in this review of change and growth during this period at REED has been in large measure to highlight the value of the guidelines that were worked out during the early years. By providing both firmness in principle and flexibility in practice, they prepared REED for changing circumstances in more ways than could at that time be imagined. There remains a great deal of work to do with records that are awaiting publication or those still to be researched. There are areas, such as the Latin translations and glossary for York, which require revision. But the success in developing basic policies and principles offers strong encouragement. The guidelines for transcription and for translation were able to take REED into new Latin sources that were both more literary (episcopal letters and mandates) and more technical (reports of ecclesiastical court sessions) than those previously encountered. The guidelines for computer coding and the computer

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system to which they were fundamental have survived great changes in computer technology and programming for typesetting and concordance generation. It seems not unreasonable to hope that these guidelines will, with further adaptation to future challenges, provide a consistent and steady course for the second twentyfive years.

NOTES 1 Arion: A Quarterly Journal of Classical Culture, 1st ser, 1–9 (1962–70). Characteristic of the spirit of the short-lived first series was the occasional appearance of portions of Christopher Logue’s adaption/translation of the Iliad, e.g., ‘The Fight for Patroclus Part 2 (First Draft) from Iliad 18,’ Arion, 1st ser, 8 (1969): 465–76. 2 These translation equivalents were first used in Wasson, ed., Devon; see 315–17 for discussion and list. 3 An interim version of the composite Latin Glossary is being prepared for web publication; the letters A–H were made available during the summer of 2005 and the remainder of the alphabet should be complete sometime in 2006 at . 4 Abigail Ann Young, ‘Plays and Players: The Latin Terms for Performance,’ in 2 parts, and ‘Minstrels and Minstrelsy: Household Retainers or Instrumentalists?’ The sources used for the original analysis are listed in ‘Plays and Players,’ pt 1, 58. The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (London: Oxford University Press, 1975– 2003), published as a series of fascicles, and by 2003 complete to the letter O, is based on R.E. Latham’s Revised Medieval Latin Word-list from British and Irish Sources (London: Oxford University Press, 1965): the definition in the M fascicle of the Dictionary of Medieval Latin (London: Oxford University Press, 2001) agrees in all essentials with the analysis that I proposed for ‘ministrallus’ in 1995 – that the term emerges from general household usage and is thereafter specifically applied to entertainers. 5 Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1879) has continued to be brought out in new impressions but without revision. The Oxford Latin Dictionary was published in a series of fascicles (London: Oxford University Press, 1968 – 82). 6 For the Dictionary of Medieval Latin, see note 4, above. The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae began publication in parts in 1900 and has now reached ‘pronuntiatus – propositio’ (vol. 10, pt 2, fasc. 13). Research (which began in 1894) and publication are proceeding under the auspices of a consortium of German universities. It will be the most complete as well as the most authoritative study of classical and late ancient Latin yet conceived. 7 Although the concordances are also used to prepare English glossaries, they are not as

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9 10 11

12

Abigail Ann Young fundamental to the process of writing an English glossary as they have proven to be in writing Latin glossaries. MacLean has also noted above (p. 43) that the early experiment in concordance-based indexing did not encourage REED to continue along those lines. An acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, one of the basic formats for encoding text written in the roman alphabet. Text written in ASCII contains no stylistic formatting. Stokes with Alexander, eds, Somerset including Bath, 1:251. Willard McCarty, ‘Evidence of Things Promised: A Progress Report of the REED Computer Editing and Typesetting System,’ REEDN 9.1 (1984): 13 –20. I have occasionally been asked why we did not abandon the REED mark-up system in favour of SGML and the Text Editing Initiative protocols when they became available. This question always puzzles me: we certainly would not have ‘reinvented the wheel’ in the early 1980s, had a suitable wheel been available to us. But, by the time it was, we had a system that worked for us, and editors hard at work entering transcriptions used it. It would have been quite disruptive to that enterprise to make so major a change. In the essay ‘REED and Language Teaching’ in the forthcoming Teaching with the Records of Early English Drama, edited by Elza C. Tiner in the SEED series, I discuss the value of such texts for instructing students in medieval Latin.

PART 2 REED’s ‘Performance’: Impact and Response

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Gathering in the Name of the Outlaw: REED and Robin Hood john marshall

The myth of Robin Hood endures, not least, because of its capacity for transformation. This propensity for reinvention has seen the outlaw hero shift over time from ruthless yet courteous antiauthoritarian yeoman, through genteel but dispossessed nobleman, to Green Lord of the Wildwood, the spirit of Spring.1 Apart from the essential attraction of a champion of justice and freedom, Robin Hood retains his popular appeal, unlike some other outlaws, because he lacks historical certainty and the confinement of biography. He becomes what each age demands of him, shaped by the social and political desires and anxieties of each generation. As Stephen Knight has observed, ‘what is notable about these periods of increased Robin Hood activity is that they are all times when government has been overtly and consciously repressive.’ 2 The most recent flurry of Robin Hood activity occurred during the 1980s and coincided with and responded, often blatantly, to the oppressive monetarist and antitrade union policies of the Reagan and Thatcher administrations. Such time-specific expressions tend to shape a generation’s view of Robin Hood and his meaning. For most people under the age of thirty, for example, Robin Hood is Kevin Costner, Prince of Thieves. This ability of Robin Hood to embody the zeitgeist is not limited to popular culture. The spirit of the age has also coloured the interpretation of the myth and its cultural manifestations by historians and literary critics. By far the most influential study of the Robin Hood activity of immediate interest to REED is David Wiles’s book on the early plays and games.3 Published in 1981 it displays critical and political sympathies in keeping with the age and in many ways anticipates, and may have influenced, the television and cinema versions of the myth that followed. More substantial has been its impact on Robin Hood studies. To a large extent the major conclusions, rather than the accuracy of some of the evidence, have gone unchallenged and acquired the status of authority.4 Wiles’s interpretation of Robin Hood games may be summarized in three statements:

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• Robin, in the guise of the Mock King or Summer Lord, is the emblem or incarnation of Spring • the games allow for a carnivalesque release of the suppressed political tendencies of the people • plays are key to and generically define the activity. Although some of this, particularly the first statement, can be traced back to E.K. Chambers and the influential impact of the popular but nonhistorical ideas of James Frazer,5 the emphasis on the cultural function of the games says more about the impact of critical theory and the desire for an effective political opposition in the late 1970s and early 1980s than it does about the possible meaning of Robin Hood games 500 years earlier. The late twentieth-century preoccupations with the spirit of carnival, distrust of established religion, concern for the environment, and resistance to the perceived threats to social democracy could all find expression in the shape of Robin Hood. In much the same way and for similar reasons if for different purposes, Richard Carpenter’s Robin of Sherwood, made for HTV in 1983, also combined magical allegiance to the natural world with the political awareness and resistance of a freedom fighter. Barely disguised allusions to the Falklands’ war, the miners’ strike, keeping your nose clean and head down, and a Tory minister’s exhortation to the unemployed to ‘get on your bike’ left few viewers in doubt about the contemporary relevance of a medieval hero.6 Artistic interpretations of the myth that invent and pick and mix narrative elements from the past in order to engage with the present are part of the tradition of Robin Hood literature. The interpretation of cultural performance, on the other hand, depends on evidence. Colourful views of Robin in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century games as inheritor of a pagan spirit or figure of carnival mock-rule are only possible where that evidence is partial and selected. In many respects, of course, evidence is always going to be partial, given the serendipity of survival, and selective in pursuit of an argument. David Wiles did not have the benefit of REED volumes when preparing his book on the Robin Hood plays/games. Instead he relied on a limited number of antiquarian transcriptions of churchwardens’ accounts, mainly from the Thames Valley. Such imposed selectivity inevitably affects the outcome of interpretation. A revision of The Early Plays of Robin Hood would look very different today, not only because of the changing times in which we live but because of the emergence of REED. The publication of REED volumes began in 1979 but it was not until 1986 that the first reference to Robin Hood appeared in the collection for Devon. From then to 2004 REED has published a further ten volumes. Of these all but Cambridge and Oxford make reference to Robin Hood activity. Collectively and individually these works and their editors have done much to revise thinking about

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the games.7 Based on close analyses of the records, more and fitting stress has been placed upon their social function and fund-raising role. It becomes increasingly possible to place the Robin Hood games in the context of displays of parish unity, social exchange, and financial administration. This more parochial view is a necessary antidote to the generalized theoretical overview that tends to blur regional and period differences. However, the REED volumes so far do perpetuate, perhaps unconsciously, what might turn out to be yet another Robin Hood myth. Not surprisingly, given the editorial remit of REED, all but one of the volumes with more than a single reference to Robin Hood has an index entry to ‘Robin Hood plays’ and refers to them as such in the introduction.8 It is true that in the first of these volumes, John Wasson alerts the reader to the danger ‘in concluding that all of these references are to actual drama.’ 9 Similar reservations can be found in some of the other volumes but there is always the impression that some form of drama is central to the outlaw gathering. Unlike the records from Kingston-upon-Thames and the Thames Valley, yet to appear in REED, there is no incontrovertible evidence in the records published to date of Robin Hood plays in the sense of a scripted and rehearsed enactment. That is not to deny the possibility of other kinds of performance involving costumed imitation, processions, cowl-staffing, physical contests, or improvised dialogue and action but to call them ‘plays’ may be to misclassify these events and potentially mislead REED users. If the accumulation of index entries and editorial references to ‘plays’ might unduly influence their interpretation by over-defining the activity and underplaying the evidence for local variation, the publication of the records themselves provides the best opportunity yet for a systematic regional study of Robin Hood gatherings. Although REED volumes for Surrey, Berkshire, and Oxfordshire, as well as the Records of Early Drama volumes for Scotland, yet to come, will add considerably to our knowledge of Robin Hood games nationally, as well as providing material for further regional surveys, those published so far make possible an analysis of activity in southwest England. Although the rest of this essay will concentrate on the counties of Bristol, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, and Somerset, it will for completeness look very briefly at the other counties where Robin Hood activity has been discovered and published by REED. The basic information provided by the records is shown in Table 1. The first column indicates the place where the activity originated. In most cases this is also the place where the activity occurred. Where it is clear that it happened elsewhere, the location appears in the ‘Period of Accounts’ column indicating the source of the evidence. For example, the parish records from Colyton in Devon do not survive but those of the churchwardens of St Michael’s, Honiton, record a visit from their neighbours’ Robin Hood in 1572. It follows that Robin Hood activity probably took place in Colyton as well, possibly in the same year, but without the

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Honiton accounts nothing of it would be known. The inference of an occurrence at Colyton is interesting but, obviously, not sufficient proof for it to be counted in the statistics for Robin Hood activity, whereas that of the recorded visit to Honiton legitimately forms part of the calculation. The tabulation of the Worcestershire records is an exception to this rule of place and is discussed below. The second column registers the period of the accounts from which the records of Robin Hood activity are taken, in most cases those of church or guild wardens. Other records may exist for a particular place but if they do not contain information about Robin Hood they are not included in the table. A catalogue of all records pertinent to the REED project can be found in ‘The Documents’ section of individual volumes. The dates given in the table are termini and do not signal lacunae found in some of the accounts. Details of actual coverage are also noted in ‘The Documents.’ The period during which the games or gatherings occurred shows the dates of the first and final references to Robin Hood within the period of the accounts. The number of gatherings that may be inferred from the records appears in the next column. Given the idiosyncrasies of early English accountancy some of the figures given are open to interpretation and should be compared with the records themselves. It is assumed, for example, that if a costume is repaired or replaced it is reasonable, but by no means certain, that it is in preparation for or a consequence of activity that year. A similar difficulty arises with the names of characters mentioned in the accounts. A game or gathering named after Robin Hood implies his physical presence and has been recorded as such in the table; it need not, of course, any more than a St George celebration requires a man with a lance on horseback. References to items of costume and to properties and/or setting are recorded in the final two columns. Accounts presented in this way, although lacking some of the distinctive detail, can be very revealing. The striking thing about the counties of Kent, Lancashire, Shropshire, Sussex, and Worcestershire is that none of the references to Robin Hood, with the possible exception of the Worcester parish of St Helen’s, appears more than once. In spite of some Robin Hood activity providing the channel for violence or the settling of scores, it seems improbable that in each of these cases once proved once too often. It is more likely that other events were either unrecorded, because no expense was incurred or income received, or became hidden in the accounts by the use of a generic term like ‘game’ or ‘ale.’ In Shrewsbury, for example, where the Robin Hood game was under civic sponsorship, May games, sometimes called the Abbot of Marham game, were held during the mid-sixteenth century, and unnamed players were occasionally rewarded during Whitsun week. Might Robin Hood have figured in these events without featuring in the accounts? It hardly makes much economic sense for the bailiffs to have spent nearly £3 in 1553 on coats and other clothes for Robin Hood if he and his company wore them only once.10 Nonetheless, taken at face value, the evidence of these counties raises

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Table 1: Robin Hood gatherings recorded in REED volumes, 1979–200411 Place

Period of Accounts

Period of Number & Gatherings Name of Gatherings

Characters Named

Costume

Properties and/or Setting

Robin Hood Gatherings in Bristol Bristol St Nicholas’

1520–1604 1526–? (‘several years’)

1+

Robin Hood ‘hosyn’ Little John and ‘lyning’

4 1 poss. 2 ‘gaderyng’

Robin Hood Robin Hood

Robin Hood Gatherings in Cornwall Antony Bodmin

1538–84 1505–6

1554–8 1506

Mawgan

St Breock 1529–98 1591 St Breock 1529–98 1573 St Columb 1584–1909 1595 Major St Columb St Ives Minor 1570–1638 St Breock 1529–98 St Ives 1570–1638 Stratton 1512–77

1 1 1

Robin Hood Robin Hood Robin Hood Robin Hood

1588

1

Robin Hood

1590

1

Robin Hood

1584 1536–9

1 3

Robin Hood Robin Hood

2 1 ‘pastime’ 3

Robin Hood ‘tunica’ Robin Hood

‘clothes’ (loaned out in 1588)

‘the wode of Robyn hode is howse’ sold in 1544

Robin Hood Gatherings in Devon Ashburton 1479–1580 1526–41 Barnstaple 1389–1649 1559 Braunton

1554–1611 1561–4

Chagford

1530–99

1554–64

Chudleigh 1561–1677 1561 Colyton Exeter: poss. St John’s Bow

Honiton 1572 1570–1651 1304–1642 1427

Robin Hood ‘cote’ Little John ‘cote’ Robin Hood ‘cote(s)’

7 ‘howdes-men’ 1 Robin Hood ‘cottes ’ ‘gathering’ Little John 1 Robin Hood 1 ‘lusum ’

Robin Hood

‘sylver arrowe’

1lb of ‘powdar’

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Table 1 (continued) Place

Period of Accounts

Period of Number & Gatherings Name of Gatherings

Exeter St John’s Bow Farway Honiton Woodbury

1412–1598 1488–1554 3 ‘lusione’

Robin Hood ‘Tunice’ Little John

1564–1678 1567 1570–1651 1577 1537–1792 1541–77

Robin Hood Robin Hood Robin Hood ‘cott’ Little John ‘cott’

1 1 4 ‘ale & gatheringe’

Characters Named

Costume

Robin Hood Gatherings in Dorset Bridport

1555

1555

Netherbury 1455–1640 1567–8 Poole

1490–1578 1508–10

1 Robin Hood ‘Robynhode Ale’ 2 Robin Hood ‘Church ale’ Little John 3 Robin Hood

Robin Hood Gatherings in Kent Hythe

New 1533 Romney 1381–1635

1

Robin Hood

Robin Hood Gatherings in Lancashire Burnley

1580 (letter) 1579

‘Robyn hoode Robin Hood and the May games’

Robin Hood Gatherings in Shropshire Bridgnorth 1550–1642 1588 Ludlow 1466–1635 1567 Shrewsbury1269–1642 1553

1 1 1

Robin Hood Robin Hood Robin Hood ‘tunicis’ & ‘vestimentis ’

Robin Hood Gatherings in Somerset Croscombe 1475–1548 1476–1526 18 ‘revel’ ‘sport’ Glastonbury1366–1626 1501 1

Robin Hood Little John Robin Hood ‘tunica’ & ‘caligarum ’

Properties and/or Setting St Edmund’s arrow

‘Roberte Hoodes Howse’

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Table 1 (concluded) Place

Period of Accounts

Period of Number & Gatherings Name of Gatherings

Tintinhull

1433–1612 1512

Wells

1378–1625 pre 1497 & 1607

Weston Zoyland Yeovil

1607–8

1607

1516–1644 1516–78

1 ‘robyne hoodes All’ 2 ‘Maygames’ ’Churchales’ 1 ‘par ishe Alle’ 22 ‘churche ale’

Characters Named

Costume

Properties and/or Setting

Robin Hood

Robin Hood ‘rayed in ‘gallantes ’ greene’

‘bowe & arrowes’

Robin Hood Robin Hood ‘Reband Little John lace’ Sheriff ‘silke Rebyn’

‘arrowes’ ‘horne’

Robin Hood Gatherings in Sussex Rye

1405–1643 1511

1 ‘visitaci on’

Robin Hood

Robin Hood Gatherings in Worcestershire Worcester Worcester City Parish: 1518–35 poss. St Helens Worcester Worcester St Helens 1518–35 Worcester Worcester/ Claines or Battenhall St Helens? 1518–35 Cleeve Crowle Prior 1518–35 Ombersley Battenhall 1518–35

1519

1 ‘gether yng’

Robin Hood

1529

1

Robin Hood

1530

1 ‘the box’

Robin Hood

1531

1

1535

1

Robin Hood Maid Marion Other Robin Hood Little John

the possibility that in some places the Robin Hood games were occasional in the infrequent as well as in the seasonal sense. In the cases of Ludlow and Bridgnorth in Shropshire and Rye in Sussex, payments to Robin Hood may be singular because they were to visiting ‘players’ or to ales in neighbouring parishes rather than to their own. This appears to have been the case in the Kent town of New Romney where the only reference to actual Robin Hood activity occurs when the chamberlains contribute to the Robin Hood of Hythe.12 This type of relationship might also

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explain the difference in the records between fees expended on Robin Hood and money received from him or his gathering. The Robin Hood records from Worcestershire reveal a rather different relationship between activity and patron. Without the survival of William More’s weekly account book, there would be no evidence of Robin Hood activity in the county.13 The prior of Worcester Cathedral Priory is rewarding games or gatherings from parishes with which he has some personal or official connection on an apparently rotational basis. It would, perhaps, be surprising if these parishes limited their Robin Hood activity exclusively to occasions patronized and recorded by the prior. Unfortunately, confirmation of this has been lost with the respective churchwardens’ accounts. Moreover, it is not always possible to tell from his accounts which parish he is rewarding, where the activity took place, and whether he was in attendance. In addition to the Priory, More occupied three principal residences in the manors of Battenhall, Crowle, and Grimley, none more than four miles distant from the Cathedral. In 1519, from Worcester, he gives the rather generous sum of 3s. 4d. to ‘Robyn whod & hys men’ who were ‘getheryng to tewkesbury bruge,’ presumably King John’s Bridge, formally known as the ‘long bridge’ that carries the Gloucester to Worcester road across the Mill Avon. Who they were and where they came from is not recorded. It is possible that they were from Tewkesbury and were encountered by the prior on his way to Worcester. Alternatively, the city location of the payment might suggest the parish of St Helens, collecting beyond their boundary, which he did reward during Whitsun week 1529 when dividing his time between Worcester and Battenhall. Similarly, the same parish may have benefited from the 12d. the prior donated ‘to e box of Robyn hood’ in 1530. It is, though, possible that in this instance Robin Hood is from the Worcester parish of Claines whose dancers immediately precede Robin Hood in the expenses record for the week of 12–18 June. Over the two days of 25–6 July 1531, the prior was at Crowle and his account book records the reward to his tenants of Cleeve Prior for ‘pleying with Robyn Whot Mayde Marion & other.’ Cleeve Prior is some thirteen miles southeast of Crowle, further by road, and it is not clear whether Robin, Marion, and the others travelled to Crowle to entertain the prior (perhaps the most likely) or whether the prior visited his tenants. A similar situation arises in 1535 when the prior was at Battenhall in early June and made a payment to Robin Hood and Little John of Ombersley. The village is about five miles north of Battenhall and, again, it seems probable that the outlaws visited the prior. The uncertainty of the detail makes it difficult to reduce the payments to place names for the purpose of the table. The solution adopted is to put what appears to be the originating parish in the first column and the location of the payment as the likely venue for the activity (with the possible exception of the 1519 reference to Tewkesbury) in the second.

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In much the same way that the frequency of activity may be concealed by nonspecific terminology or the intent of the record, the listing of characters, costumes, and properties is only going to occur where payment is involved. The near total absence of such payments in the counties of Kent, Lancashire, Shropshire, Sussex, and Worcestershire can be explained by the fact that only the Shrewsbury account refers to the making of a Robin Hood game. The remainder, with the possible exception of Rye, appear to be extraneous payments unlikely to include production costs. In respect of characters, it is worth pointing out that William More’s account of his payment to the tenants of Cleeve Prior is the only reference published so far that actively associates Maid Marion with Robin Hood, although more will follow. A rather different picture emerges from the records of southwest England where the majority of accounts refer to the generation rather than to the receiving of games. Even so, a glance at Table 1 will show that, with the exception of Croscombe and Yeovil in Somerset, none of the parishes records more than a handful of events.14 In part, explanations already given may hold good here, as, for example, in the case of Ashburton in Devon. The extensive churchwardens’ accounts, spanning a century, mention Robin Hood only twice: in 1526–7 and 1541–2.15 Both instances register the buying of costume. The lack of any other reference to Robin Hood, including funds raised by him, might suggest that his activities were accounted for elsewhere. As well as a Corpus Christi play or pageant, a ‘play ale’ in 1487– 8 furnished Ashburton churchwardens with money; receipts from the sale of ale are recorded from the beginning of the accounts in 1479–80. Is Robin lurking silently within, only to be heard from when he needs new clothes? Or should the records be trusted in recording that Ashburton called upon him just twice? It is perhaps too easy to explain infrequent reference by inconsistent accountancy. In fact, two games per parish works out to be the average of the records published to date. Although statistically crude, Table 2 lists the number of Robin Hood ales or gatherings that can be inferred from the REED volumes so far, and the number of places (parishes in most cases) where they occurred. The location to event ratio is 1:2.57. Although this figure conceals the extremes of the relatively high number of gatherings at Croscombe and Yeovil and the majority of places where only a single event is certain, it is, by any reckoning, a much lower incidence of the outlaw than most studies would lead us to believe. As with any average it is unusual to find it matching an actual example although Devon at 1:2.27 is very close. This match makes the breakdown of the relationship between Devon parishes, extant accounts, and Robin Hood games in the county all the more instructive. For the REED Devon volume 430 parishes were checked, out of which forty-three, or 10 per cent, had records surviving.16 Of these, ten, or 23 per cent, recorded Robin Hood activity.17

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Table 2: Number of location and event references to Robin Hood gatherings in REED volumes 1979–2004 REED Volumes

Locations

Events

York (1979) Chester (1979) Coventry (1981) Newcastle upon Tyne (1982) Norwich 1540–1642 (1984) Cumberland/Westmorland/Gloucestershire (1986) Devon (1986) Cambridge (1988) Herefordshire/Worcestershire (1990) Lancashire (1991) Shropshire (1994) Somerset including Bath (1996) Bristol (1997) Dorset/Cornwall (1999) Sussex (2000) Kent (2002) Oxford (2004)

– – – – – – 11* – 0/5 1 3 6 1 3/8* 1 1 –

– – – – – – 25 – 0/5 1 3 45 1 6/15 1 1 –

Totals

40

103

* Includes parishes for which accounts are not extant but whose Robin Hood receives payment from parishes where they survive.

Although it would be unwise to build a theory on the basis of these calculations, it does seem sensible to consider whether long runs of Robin Hood games were the exception rather than the rule. The figures certainly challenge the notion that Robin Hood had any ritual ‘Spring’ meaning where annual evocation would seem to be a fundamental condition. Similarly, the suppressed political tendencies of the people would need a rather more regular conduit for expression, one would think, than Robin Hood was apparently providing in southwest England. If it was not pagan spirit or subversive activist that the people were looking for in Robin, what function did he serve? His role as a parish fund-raiser has been acknowledged for some time, but if he was such a successful money gatherer it is difficult to explain why he was called upon infrequently in some parishes and not at all in others. If the Devon records can be believed, he was used sparingly by those who employed him – seven times at the most (Chagford), for the rest four or less. More remarkably, four in five Devon parishes with extant records seem to have declined his services altogether. Indeed, to discover in what circumstances

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Robin Hood would be required, it might be useful to ask why, as a renowned figure, so many communities in the southwest had no need of him. Two examples from Somerset are particularly informative. The relatively large parish of Yatton undertook, during the period of the extant churchwardens’ accounts (1448–1601), a fairly extensive program of rebuilding, refurbishment, and decoration of the church.18 Money was raised from gifts, bequests, the hire of the church house, and church ales, especially those held at Whitsun. In spite of the heavy expenses incurred, the accounts never show a deficit during this period. In every year a surplus was handed over to the incoming wardens. The customary arrangements for giving were sufficient to meet the desire for improvement without the added encouragement of Robin Hood. On a smaller scale, but no less self-sufficient, was the village of Pilton. It, too, had no need to resort to the outlaw during the thirty-two years of relevant surviving accounts (1498–1530), even though successive churchwardens must have been aware that, during the same period, their neighbours in the village of Croscombe often did.19 Collections, gifts, bequests, and the hire of parish stock were adequate to cover all necessary expenses and the installation of a rood loft at the turn of the century. Parishes like Pilton and Yatton, it seems, could prevail upon the piety and charity of their members without relying on the outlaw’s powers of persuasion. Croscombe, though, was different and held Robin Hood revels or sports eighteen times in fifty years between 1476 and 1526. This appears to conform to the assumed model of an active and regular sequence of Robin Hood games. Close inspection of the churchwardens’ accounts, though, reveals a telling and businesslike relationship between Robin Hood and an ambitious church building program. Although the Robin Hood revels are spread over fifty years, the majority of occasions cluster around two periods: the 1480s and the early 1500s. The first of these coincides with the building of the church house (illustration 1) and the second with the erection of the St George Chapel and the two-storey vestry. Although the maintenance of votive lights and other day-to-day expenses of the church were met by the highly organized system of annual guild collections, rents, gifts, and bequests found elsewhere, they were never large enough to cope with a major building project. It is clear from the churchwardens’ accounts that without the additional income from Robin Hood revels the wardens’ stock would have been in deficit or the extensions to the church not built.20 Croscombe was by no means alone in resorting to Robin Hood when the cost of a project might exceed customary income. Glastonbury and Tintinhull in Somerset have long runs of churchwardens’ accounts but each records Robin Hood only once.21 In both places, money raised went on new church pews. Those of St Margaret in Tintinhull still survive (illustration 2). At Braunton in Devon three ales in four years paid for the same.22 The proceeds of a Robin Hood gathering in

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Bodmin, in 1506, were destined for the Berry Tower Building Fund (illustration 3).23 Also in Cornwall, the parish of St Andrew in Stratton met some of the expense of installing a new rood loft with money raised by Robin Hood and his company. The year after the final payment was made to the carpenter, receipts from Robin Hood ceased and, four years later, the wood from his ‘house’ was sold.24 With the exception of Braunton, all of these projects precede the impact of Reformation injunctions on parish churches that brought about their physical decline. Following the dissolution of religious guilds much of the traditional institutional framework for fund-raising disappeared. In some places Robin Hood emerged or reemerged as an alternative incentive for giving. In Chagford, Devon, for example, there were upwards of eleven guilds in 1531 supporting the maintenance and services of the parish church. By 1551 there was one. In 1554 the wardens and receivers of charitable gifts for the poor were raising funds through the sale of ale, tin, wool, and the churchyard grass, the hire of the church cauldron, and the rate levied on the Quarters of the parish; it was not enough. On 24 August 1554, bells and other necessary things of the parish church are described as being manifestly in decay. That year the guild of Young Men, in the guise of Hoodsmen, is first recorded as contributing 10s. to church funds. Two years later they raise the much larger sum of 53s. 4d. out of which they take 26s. to buy new service books in line with the return of Catholicism. The remainder they hand over to the Four Men responsible for administering church funds.25 Whether in response to the pre-Reformation growth in wealth and the desire to rebuild, extend, and embellish church buildings as a display of collective piety, or as a secularized reaction to the post-Reformation abolition of ales and stores dedicated to saints, the hero rises up in the time of special need. It becomes apparent that, in the southwest at least, an ale with a Robin Hood flavour signals the expectation of exceptional generosity, a prospect that, according to the evidence of the returns, was invariably met. In these circumstances, it seems that the adoption of Robin Hood was a matter, not of his pagan spirit, nor, necessarily, of his resistance to oppression and injustice, but of his legendary prowess as a thief and redistributor of wealth to deserving causes. What more efficient way to encourage lavish giving than in the context of a game where to give was to side with the good outlaw in becoming a ‘merry man’ and to refuse or fall short to be identified with the miserly and corrupt world of the abbot and sheriff? A gatherer in any other guise looks too much like the tax collector. And the giving was certainly lavish. Robin Hood games frequently outstrip all other kinds of fund-raising. At Croscombe, for example, Robin Hood sports regularly raised more than twice as much as the alternative gatherings of the King’s Revel and the St George Ale held in other years.26 Money and its proper distribution is a major theme of the Little Gest of Robin Hood and of the early ballads but it is not the only feature that makes the outlaw an appropriate captain of the game. The church ale with its emphasis on feasting

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and fraternity, competition and cordiality is evocative of greenwood hospitality and the ideal of ‘good fellowship’ that partaking promotes. In addition to these values, the church ale already provided an institutional structure for charitable giving within a festive atmosphere. The embracing of Robin Hood as the fictional framework to focus these activities must, at least to some, have seemed only too natural. Moreover, how fitting, in this context, that the language of Robin Hood’s record should be that of the accountants. The records of southwest England may be instructive in seeing a relationship between Robin Hood and types of fund-raising but they are less helpful in discovering how, and with what level of performance, he went about it. Some clues may be found in the various names used to record the activities. These tend to emphasise different aspects of the game by focusing on the central figure (Robin Hood ale), the season (May game), institutional auspices (church or parish ale), or social and financial purpose (gathering). Croscombe highlights the role of entertainment in describing them as ‘revels’ or ‘sports.’ None of the descriptions, though, refer to them as ‘plays.’ Even the Latin terms used in the Exeter Receivers’ Account Roll (‘lusoribus ludentibus lusum Robyn Hood’)27 are not specific enough to be sure what type of ‘playing’ was involved. Fortunately, the detail within the records is a little more forthcoming than the terminology. It is evident that the expense most commonly incurred by a Robin Hood gathering, as can be seen from Table 1, was for costume. This implies an accent upon iconic presentation. Robin Hood and his company must not only be instantly recognizable but able to connote visually the qualities of conviviality and charity that the myth embodies. The game and its principles must be clear for all to see. In this respect, Robin Hood is rather like Father Christmas. The costume, and what it signifies, is the primary means of communication. The quality of the ‘performance’ is of some consequence but secondary to appearance. The few properties mentioned in the accounts, mainly bows and arrows, reinforce the identification.28 From this position of high visibility, the chosen Robin Hood can undertake his role of money gatherer without repeated and intrusive explanation. If performance is to emerge from, rather than be imposed upon, this activity then it is likely to come from his encounters with parishioners. The characters named in the ales rarely extend beyond the double act of Robin Hood and Little John. Only in the case of Yeovil, and then comparatively late in the day (1572), is there, in the figure of the sheriff, the potential for dramatic conflict. The friar who was part of the St Columb Major morris dance might also have provided a challenge to Robin in the manner of the ballad and play of Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar. 29 In the general absence of fictional antagonists, Robin and Little John may meet their match (a plot motif common in the ballads that may well derive from the games) in their confrontation with grudging contributors. Anyone who has seen a decent production of Mankind will be aware of the enormous potential for improvization and audience

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1. St Mary the Virgin, Croscombe, Somerset: church house dating from the late fifteenth century and built with money raised by Robin Hood revels (photos by John Marshall)

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2. St Margaret, Tintinhull, Somerset: pews and bench ends installed in 1511/12 and partly funded by a Robin Hood ale

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3. Church of the Holy Rood, Bodmin, Cornwall: Berry Tower constructed between 1501 and 1514 with money contributed to the building fund by Robin Hood gatherings

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participation there is in the episode where the three Ns gather money as a prerequisite for the appearance of Titivillus: newguise Yea, go thy way! We shall gather money unto, Else there shall no man him see. Now ghostly to our purpose, worshipful sovereigns, We intend to gather money, if it please your negligence, For a man with a head that [is] of great omnipotence. nowadays Keep your tale, in goodness I pray you good brother! He is a worshipful man, sirs, saving your reverence, He loveth no groats, nor pence of tuppence. Give us red royals, if ye will see his abominable presence. newguise Not so! Ye that mow not pay the ton, pay the tother. At the good-man of this house first we will assay. God bless you, master! Ye say as ill, yet ye will not say nay. Let us go by and by, and do them pay. Ye pay all alike, well mote ye fare!

(ll. 457–69)30

Without the hyperbolic references to Titivillus, it is possible to see how this episode, in keeping with the satirical tone of the play, may be an intentional parody of fund-raising events. One can easily imagine the banter, challenge, and counterchallenge that may have accompanied Robin’s and Little John’s demand for money. Such encounters are not only likely to provide amusement for other parishioners but embryonic material for ballads and plays. A playful refusal to contribute may lead to a challenge in the manner of the meeting of Robin Hood and the Potter.31 Whether in archery, wrestling, or sword fighting, the content of the ballads and the nature of the games with their code of good fellowship demand that Robin meet his match and by so doing assimilate his opponent into his band. The impulse to perform is inherent within the structure of the game. The romantic, somewhat sentimental view of Robin Hood popular today is a byproduct of his gentrification. His characterization as a carnivalesque spirit of nature is a more recent transformation. As represented by the Little Gest and the early ballads and plays of Robin Hood, contemporary with the games, Robin may be a courteous and hospitable yeoman but he is also a ruthless and quarrelsome leader.32 He adopts extreme, often violent means to achieve what he sees as justifiable, pragmatic ends. His strategy is a kind of ‘tough’ charity. Who better to preside over a game that combines giving and feasting, collective obligation and communal

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celebration? In the southwest, at least, REED has shown that it is not just the May that brings in Robin; it is the money that Robin brings in.

NOTES 1 The latter is the title given to Robin Hood in John Matthews, Robin Hood: Green Lord of the Wildwood (Glastonbury: Gothic Image Publications, 1993), and reflects the late twentieth-century adoption of Robin Hood by elements of the green and new-age movements. For the other manifestations of Robin Hood from ballad to Hollywood, see Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003). The preparation for this essay was undertaken during a period of research leave funded by the University of Bristol and the Arts and Humanities Research Board. 2 Knight, Robin Hood, 207. 3 David Wiles, The Early Plays of Robin Hood (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1981). 4 But see Johnston, ‘The Robin Hood of the Records,’ especially 29 – 30. 5 E.K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage (London: Oxford University Press, 1903), 1:160 – 81; and James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 13 vols (London, Macmillan, 1890). 6 Robin of Sherwood, written by Richard Carpenter, produced by Paul Knight (HTV Production in association with Goldcrest Television, 1983). 7 In addition to the introductions of individual REED volumes, see John Wasson, ‘The St George and Robin Hood Plays in Devon,’ METh 2.2 (1980): 66– 9; Stokes, ‘Robin Hood and the Churchwardens in Yeovil’; MacLean, ‘King Games and Robin Hood: Play and Profit at Kingston-upon-Thames’; Alexandra Johnston, ‘Summer Festivals in the Thames Valley Counties,’ in Thomas Pettitt and Leif Sondergaard, eds, Custom, Culture and Community in the Later Middle Ages (Odense: Odense University Press, 1994), 37–56, and, more broadly, ‘The Robin Hood of the Records’; and Greenfield, ‘The Carnivalesque in the Robin Hood Games and King Ales.’ 8 Only in Stokes with Alexander, eds, Somerset including Bath, are they referred to as ‘games’ throughout. 9 Wasson, ed., Devon, xxv. 10 Somerset, ed., Shropshire, 1:203. 11 Klausner, ed., Wales has no references to Robin Hood. 12 There is another reference to Robin Hood in the Kent records but it does not refer to a specific event. It is a general prohibition made at Dover against ‘Robyn hoodes pley’ and other entertainments by the warden of the Cinque Ports (Gibson, ed., Kent: Diocese of Canterbury, 2:426–7). 13 See Klausner, ed., Herefordshire/Worcestershire, and the editor’s article ‘Parish Drama in Worcester and the Journal of Prior William More,’ in Johnston and Hüsken, eds,

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15

16 17

18

19 20

21

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English Parish Drama, 119–35. In the Herefordshire/Worcestershire volume there is another reference to Robin Hood that I have excluded for the purposes of this essay. In a pamphlet called ‘Old Meg of Herefordshire,’ published in 1609, there is description of a remarkable morris dance. In eulogistic prose a number of notable relationships are invoked to extol the virtues of a Herefordshire morris dance. The last of these claims that, ‘nor euer had Robin Hood a more deft Mayd-Marian’ (126). In spite of the pamphlet identifying Old Meg with Maid Marion there is no evidence that Robin Hood ever took part in the Hereford morris described in the pamphlet. Bristol may be another exception. The parish records of St Nicholas did not survive the bombing of the city in the Second World War. An early twentieth-century antiquarian account of them, however, notes that ‘hosyn for Robyn hoode & lytyyll John’ were provided in ‘several years.’ See Pilkinton, ed., Bristol, 276. The date given for Bristol in Table 1 is taken from a nineteenth-century antiquarian transcription of the records (Bristol, 37). Devon Record Office: 2141A/PW1, in Wasson, ed., Devon, 21, 25. See also Alison Hanham, ed., Churchwardens’ Accounts of Ashburton, 1479–1580, Devon and Cornwall Record Society, ns 15 (Torquay, 1970). Wasson, ed., Devon, xxi. If the Robin Hood ‘players’ who appeared before the mayor of Exeter in 1427 were from the parish of St John’s Bow, as is possible, the number of parishes would be reduced to nine with a corresponding reduction in the percentage to twenty-one. The difference between the number of parishes recording Robin Hood activity (10) and the number given in the table (11) is explained by the Robin Hood of Colyton, where churchwardens’ accounts for the period do not survive, visiting Honiton. Somerset Record Office: D/P/yat 4/1/1–4. The records are published, up to 1560, in Edmund Hobhouse, ed., Church-wardens’ Accounts of Croscombe, Pilton, Yatton, Tintinhull, Morebath, and St. Michael’s, Bath, Ranging from A.D. 1349 to 1560, Somerset Record Society 4 (London, 1890), 81–172 (Yatton). Somerset Record Office: D/P/pilt/4/1/1. See also Hobhouse, Church-wardens’ Accounts, 51–77 (Pilton). The Croscombe churchwardens’ accounts no longer survive but were transcribed and published by Hobhouse, Church-wardens’ Accounts, 3–48 (Croscombe). For a detailed analysis of the Croscombe records of Robin Hood, see Marshall, ‘“Comyth in Robyn Hode.”’ Glastonbury (1500–1): Somerset Record Office: D/P/gla.j. 4/1/35, in Stokes with Alexander, eds, Somerset, 1:126. Tintinhull (1512–13): Somerset Record Office: D/P/tin 4/1/1, in Somerset, 1:231. For a discussion of these records, see Katherine French, ‘Parochial Fund-Raising in Late Medieval Somerset,’ in Katherine L. French, Gary G. Gibbs, and Beat A. Kümin, eds, The Parish in English Life, 1400–1600 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), 115–32 and, in a broader

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23

24

25

26 27 28

29

30 31

32

John Marshall context, the same author’s The People of the Parish: Community Life in a Late Medieval English Parish (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). Braunton (1561–4): Devon Record Office: 1677A/PW1a, in Wasson, ed., Devon, 52. See also J.C.D. Smith, Church Woodcarvings: A West Country Study (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1969), 57. Bodmin (1505–6): Cornwall Record Office: B/Bod/314/1/6, in Hays and McGee/ Joyce and Newlyn, eds, Dorset /Cornwall, 471. Only the ruin of the Berry Tower, once part of the Church of the Holy Rood, still survives on the outskirts of Bodmin. Stratton (1536–9): BL: Additional MS. 32,244, in Hays and McGee/Joyce and Newlyn, eds, Dorset /Cornwall, 521–2. See also R.W. Goulding, ed., Records of the Charity Known as Blanchminster’s Charity, in the Parish of Stratton, County of Cornwall (Louth: J.W. Goulding & Son, 1898). Chagford (1554–64): Devon Record Office: 1429A add/PW1 and PW2, in Wasson, ed., Devon, 54–6. See also Francis Mardon Osborne, ed., The Church Wardens’ Accounts of St Michael’s Church, Chagford 1480–1600 (Chagford: privately printed, 1979). For obvious editorial reasons the REED volumes do not always give the destination of the funds raised by Robin Hood activity, as in the case of the service books in 1556. This tends to obscure the close relationship, in the southwest, between Robin Hood and targeted fund-raising. See Marshall, ‘“Comyth in Robyn Hode,”’ 350–2. Exeter (1426–7): Devon Record Office: ECA in Wasson, ed., Devon, 89. There is no absolute certainty that the ‘sylver arrowe’ recorded in the property column for Chagford, Devon, in Table 1 belonged to the Robin Hood game. It is mentioned in the Hoodsmens’ payment accounts for the year 1587–8, some twenty years after the last reference to Robin Hood. Given the prominence of precious arrows as prizes in the myth it seems likely that the guild may have held on to a valuable property after the reason for its existence had gone. See the St Columb Major entry in Hays and McGee/Joyce and Newlyn, eds, Dorset / Cornwall, 507–13, for references to the friar’s involvement in the morris dance and for the inventories that refer to his ‘coate.’ Other locations in the region where Robin Hood may have been associated with a morris dance are the Devon parishes of Chudleigh, Woodbury, and St John’s Bow, Exeter. For the association of Robin Hood with the morris dance, see Forrest, History of Morris Dancing, especially chapter 6. Peter Meredith, ed., Mankind: An Acting Edition (Leeds: Alumnus, 1997). See both ballad and play of this episode in Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, eds, Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), 57–79, 281– 95. In both, the Potter’s refusal to pay Robin ‘pavage’ or a toll to pass through the forest leads to a fight with the outlaw, a narrative action suggestive of the levy imposed by Robin upon those attending his game. For the Gest of Robyn Hode and the early ballads, see Knight and Ohlgren, eds, Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, 31–183.

What Hath REED Wrought? REED and Patronage suzanne westfall

When the REED project was first conceived in the mid-1970s, few of us realized how significantly it would affect so many disciplines. Obviously, the collection of all references to theatrical activities to be found in civic and guild accounts, churchwardens’ accounts, private family papers, and other such archives would contribute to our understanding of early modern theatre history, but REED research has also influenced art history, music history, social history, performance studies, cultural studies, and literary history. In fact, as the York volumes emerged, patronage studies, my particular interest here, also began to develop, in great part due to the REED project. As scholars began working with the records, after others had done the grunt work of collecting, we discovered that theatrical activity was not only more diverse than we had believed, but also much less homogeneous, less urban-centred. As each REED volume emerged, we identified more patrons, more troupes, more touring patterns. We began to explore how theatre could create and contribute to cultural communities, how provincial touring patterns could enlighten us about political connections amongst the aristocracy, how new data about the frequency of theatre in the provinces would challenge the primacy of the public theatre of London, how contexts might challenge texts as a focus for scholarship, and how financial details of production could affect contemporary staging of early modern play texts. REED editors have long believed that theatre history is a unique field, far different from literary history. Ronald Vince suggests in ‘Theatre History as an Academic Discipline’ that ‘historical investigation as normally practiced proceeds in two stages: the collection, organization, and description of data, selected on the basis of hypotheses or assumptions either conscious or unconscious; and the interpretation of data at the level of “cultural-historical integration,” a concept drawn from the science of archaeology.’ 1 And indeed, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars dedicated themselves to fulfilling the first part of Vince’s process, wading serendipitously through the archives and personal papers

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of various repositories. Publishers such as the Roxburgh Club, as well as local history journals like the Antiquarian Repertory, printed these studies, often for limited memberships, frequently including quotations from unpublished letters and account books, biographies or family histories, and occasionally drawings or blueprints of manors that no longer exist. Later projects such as the Malone Society and the Victoria County Histories continued the work. We are indeed fortunate that these antiquarians felt a need to preserve a record of English life (particularly aristocratic life) as reinforcement for the politics of empire. Rather than contextualizing or analysing their discoveries, however, many were content to preserve records of the public and private lives of members of the upper classes, and occasionally, like Joseph Strutt, the customs and entertainments of the lower.2 Although these publications were not called at the time ‘patronage studies,’ such antiquarian works clearly began to collect information that would develop into the more detailed studies of social history, cultural studies, and, most important here, theatre history.3 All of this leads directly to the Records of Early English Drama. For many years, performances that lacked text, or lacked text explicitly identified as ‘drama’ – such as civic pageantry, ceremonies, folk dramas, and rituals – were generally ignored, although some, like Glynne Wickham and Sydney Anglo, began to analyse these forms.4 Scores of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century plays (interludes, moral plays, mysteries, and miracles) were considered boring, simplistic, and didactic primarily because textual analysis was privileged over cultural context. At the same time, however, scholars like E.K. Chambers had begun to turn our attention to performance and to the contexts of performance. Even the data that supports Chambers’s analysis was printed, ironically, in his appendices. REED volumes and Newsletters reflect the priorities of late twentieth-century scholars, making what was once material for appendices into primary concerns. Firmly based on records, chronicles, and histories, patronage studies can now move to process and context, particularly as we turn from the theatrical event itself to the conditions of its creation. In fact, many of us in patronage studies believe that play texts are intimately connected with the auspices of composition and performance, that these entertainments express the philosophies of and serve the interests of patrons (whether the city of York or the earl of Leicester).5 Consequently, REED’s work on patronage – whether civic, ecclesiastical, or aristocratic – has prompted many to reconsider staging practices. Beginning with the Poculi Ludique Societas (or, as it supposedly originated, ‘Professor Leyerle’s Seminar’) and spreading to academic institutions all over England, Canada, and the United States, REED’s influence on theatrical productions has recently turned out to be extensive; in a sense, many early modern productions are three-dimensional projections of REED source documents,

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experiments in the interpretation of financial accounts. For example, the ‘Last Judgment’ wagon built for the 1977 Toronto York Cycle was based specifically upon the records that Alexandra Johnston and Margaret Rogerson had discovered and edited for York. From the double-decker construction to the design for the hangings and the workings of the pulley system to hoist Christ, wainwrights Reed Needles and Steven Putzel worked from the manuscript descriptions of the York wagons.6 Since 1977, REED’s relationship with the PLS has resulted in many meticulously researched restagings of early English drama, most notably The York Cycle (1977 and 1998), The Castle of Perseverance (1979), the N-Town Passion Play (1981), the Chester Cycle (1983), the Towneley Cycle (1985), the N-Town Pageants (1988),Wisdom who is Christ (1991), the Assumption of the Virgin (1992), and the Digby Mary Magdalene (2003). The 2006 season will include another milestone in theatre history and patronage studies, an exploration of the repertory of the Queen’s Men, first discussed as such by McMillin and MacLean. As a director and dramaturge at the University of Toronto Drama Centre, I had always been concerned primarily with text before my experience with REED and PLS. There, I learned that sometimes the play is not as important as the process. In 1979 I produced an example of patron theatre in A Winter’s Revels, based on Ian Lancashire’s edition of an ordinance from the Percy Household in 1510, preserved in the ‘Second Northumberland Household Book,’ Bodleian Library: MS Eng. hist. b. 208.7 A close community of spectators and performers (such as those who lived in the Percy household or attended the University College Great Hall production) make theatre of their own, quite separate from the text. Since we strove to produce not just the play that the ordinance prescribes for the evening but also the concert, disguising, ceremonial procession, feast, and ambiance, we were able to experiment with how performance activities contributed to and reflected the community identity of the household. Working closely with dramatic records has taught me that, at least as far as patronage studies is concerned, often the play is decidedly not the thing. Besides concretizing the relationships amongst patrons, audiences, household staff, and theatre artists, any historically accurate production requires that directors use contextual materials – ordinances, biographies, household financial accounts, heraldic treatises, cookbooks, ceremonalia, reconstructions of sixteenth-century music, masque, dance, and debate – to suggest to audiences in the twenty-first century what household revels might have been like to audiences in the sixteenth. Thus, REED records have provided the small details with which we build more accurate productions. REED has been patron to endeavours besides theatre productions and the volumes of local records. Elsewhere in this volume Roslyn Knutson has surveyed many of the applications of REED records that have appeared as articles and monographs that explore players, repertories, and playing practices. Patronage studies has, to a

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certain extent, been established, or at least significantly expanded, by REED scholars and materials. Ian Lancashire’s Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain: A Chronological Topography to 1558, a bibliography published as the first volume in the REED-inspired SEED series, provided us with an extraordinary vantage point from which to view the geography of patronage.8 Lancashire’s essay on patronage in this volume inspired Mary A. Blackstone’s ‘Notes towards a Patrons Calendar’ (published in the REED Newsletter in 1981) which extended Lancashire’s work; Blackstone has continued to contribute regularly to the literature of patronage studies, particularly in the Marian era, by exploring how the records describe cultural communities.9 After just three REED collections were published, Blackstone began to explore some possibilities for using these records to advance our understanding of patronage and touring patterns, and suggested a model we might follow in structuring the information for publication. Sally-Beth MacLean’s intimacy with the REED records (as the executive editor of the REED project she has parsed every sentence, approved every semicolon, and championed inclusion of household accounts) has led to some of the fundamental work in the field of patronage studies. Her early article, ‘The Politics of Patronage: Dramatic Records in Robert Dudley’s Household Books,’ set the tone and style for much of the work that would be carried out in the following decade, and served as the foundation for her collaboration with Scott McMillin in The Queen’s Men and for her essay in White and Westfall, eds, Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England.10 Using the records, combined with her extensive knowledge of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, she examines not onlywhere his troupes travelled, thereby establishing spheres of geographical influence (whilst demonstrating that touring was a precise rather than careless endeavour), but also what they were travelling with: their repertoire of plays. Before the publication of the REED series, we could only guess at the routes that travelling players followed, as I did in my 1981 doctoral dissertation, published in 1990.11 Once the records had been compiled and closely examined, and period maps and records consulted (and a few back roads travelled), we could actually map routes.12 The complexities of touring, not only with respect to circuits but also to motives and methods, are another fertile line of inquiry that REED has opened for us. Peter Greenfield, editor of Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama and of the Gloucestershire dramatic records for REED, has completely reoriented our attitude towards travelling troupes by challenging the myth of unsystematic tours and tattered players to expose the ‘antiprovincialism’ that led to this myth. The availability of the records has allowed Greenfield to explore how payments to patron troupes were codified in account books and how local politics and power intersected with aristocratic and national interests to control the timing and ideology of entertainments, often paying troupes not to perform.13 Records also indicate

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venues, an addition to our knowledge that has allowed Alan Nelson to challenge the popular conception of playing spaces that had been suggested in books such as Richard Southern’s The Staging of Plays before Shakespeare.14 Kathleen McLuskie and Felicity Dunsworth continue in this vein to explore how patronage affected the economics of theatre as a whole.15 Since Lancashire and Blackstone’s early contributions to the field, REED itself has continued the work. Cumberland/Westmorland/Gloucestershire, edited by Audrey Douglas and Peter Greenfield, was the first to include family records, and household as well as civic and ecclesiastical accounts; and the REED List of Patrons and Travelling Companies appeared as an appendix to the Norwich 1540 –1642 volume. Elza Tiner and Janet Ritch have since supplemented the earliest REED volumes with lists of patrons and travelling companies in York, Chester, Coventry, and Newcastle upon Tyne.16 In one of the most exciting developments, REED has also reached into cyberspace with Sally-Beth MacLean and Alan Somerset’s longawaited Patrons and Performances Web Site (); REED’s cumulative patrons and performers’ itinerary databases are now available to scholars in the form of a searchable web site, considerably smoothing the way for patron studies. This project makes the records searchable by patron, event, venue, or troupe, as well as providing interactive maps that allow scholars to trace the movements of patron troupes, biographies of major patron families, and historical notes on their properties. Besides making the database available to international scholars who may not have easy access to REED volumes, the site enables scholars to use the information collected in REED publications in more efficient and interesting ways. The interactive database combines the records with visual materials to allow users to navigate smoothly through various resources in order to confirm or confound ideas about how, why, and where patron theatre was produced. But as we celebrate the new and improved tools that REED is presenting us with, those who use the REED volumes are certainly sensitive to Foucault’s ‘presentism,’ fully aware of the impossibility of representing the past accurately from within the prisons of our own paradigms (especially those of us who direct theatre).17 In addition, we are painfully aware of the fragmentary nature of the records, and sometimes find ourselves in despair over some piece of information omitted from the REED volumes.18 REED editorial practices certainly acknowledge that our results are often determined by our methodologies, and the published volumes may not yield the information that each and every scholar desires. To be in good faith, we must not only continually ask ourselves, ‘What is REED leaving out?’ We must also continually admit that we reconstruct early modern performances by contemplating the relationship between our present and their present. These ‘omissions’ tend to affect patron theatre studies in particular. Early

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REED volumes focused on cities and therefore on urban, usually civic, accounts; these volumes naturally contained few household records, since aristocratic patrons tended to live in the country. Although the records from ecclesiastical, gentry, and aristocratic households were not included in the original mission of the project, since the launching of the first county collections, Cumberland/Westmorland/ Gloucestershire and Devon, in 1986, REED editors have systematically searched for family papers. Consequently, now all volumes examine private and public archives, such as national repositories and libraries, in search of the papers of local families, including accounts, letters, and various personal papers. Specific family accounts now published in REED volumes are too numerous to mention, but a few merit special attention to demonstrate some of the ways these records affect patronage studies. Herefordshire/Worcestershire, for example, includes the records of Joyce Jeffreys, an unmarried woman of independent means who ran her own royalist household and is one of the few non-noble female patrons in the records. Her 1637–42 accounts record payments to waits and fiddlers, and the purchase of a copy of ‘verses upon Benjamin Ionsons death’ in 1639.19 In Kent: Diocese of Canterbury we find that the Dering family owned hundreds of playbooks, including two volumes of Shakespeare’s plays, and a cast list for The Spanish Curate; Sir Edward Dering paid several times for having his playbooks bound, a fact that makes us rethink the relationship between playing and publishing, analyse the value of bound texts, and wonder about the evolution of private reading practices in the early modern period.20 A Cornwall record mentions that Francis Tregian of Golden Manor hosted an interlude that led to his trial and conviction for recusancy, alerting scholars to the influence of religious ideology on patronage and playing.21 The Lancashire volume has been important for family records, since one of the most interesting sections of the collection survives from the households. Somerset records are also particularly noteworthy. A 1634 letter to Sir Robert Phelips includes a detailed description of a ‘newe comedie at the globe called “The Witches of Lancasheer,”’ which capitalized on the London trial of the witches and preserved many of the folk beliefs about their powers, not to mention the audience’s concepts about the genre of ‘comedie.’ 22 A 1625 letter from Katherine Gorges, preserved in the papers of Sir Hugh Smyth, describes the lady’s attendance at a masque ‘acted by the Queens seruants all french, but it was disliked of all the English for it was neither masque nor play, but a french antique’; Gorges follows the description with unflattering remarks about the ugliness of the Queen’s French and papist attendants. Such accounts of audience response enlarge our understanding of the class and aesthetic sense of the audience, as well as demonstrating how closely in touch the provincials could be with the court – and, of course, that francophobia is not a new phenomenon. A 1613 letter in the Weekes family papers describes the burning of the Globe.23

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Contemplating the dearth of payments to players in Chester, David Mills notes a letter from local Puritan Christopher Goodman (a private citizen, not a civic official) to the earl of Derby in 1575 that suggests that the town would like to save the £40 it generally spent on troupes with patrons, but that some people were apprehensive, ‘partly fearinge the displesure of such noble personages’ to whom entertainers ‘doe appertaine and weare their lyveries,’ a piece of concrete evidence that confirms what we have long suspected: that offending a powerful patron could cause repercussions, that civic authorities were aware of the possibility, and that private citizens felt confident enough to address the aristocracy when their ideologies or pocketbooks prompted them.24 While the printing of gentry and noble household documents is extremely helpful, their isolation from possibly illuminating material in the rest of the family papers is, however, problematic. We cannot know, for example, whether Dering’s trove of playbooks was extraordinary since we do not know the size of his entire library; we cannot decide whether Joyce Jeffreys spent substantially more on music than on clothing. Here, as I mention above, it is crucial that scholars consult the entire record and supplement their searches with other types of evidence. Nevertheless, all these examples encourage us to turn our attention to the local gentry as well as to the larger, more powerful families of aristocrats; for the first time we are beginning to form a picture of how extensive entertainment in the provinces was, and how various the venues and motivations were for hosting entertainers, how quickly and closely the lines of communication worked. Cameron Louis’s introduction to Sussex follows the model set in earlier volumes for discussing in detail how patron ideologies were linked with local history, for delineating family properties, and for tracing passage of properties from family to family.25 Such information helps us to explain some facets of local entertainments – as in Cornwall, where Catholic families may have retained older customs – or explain geographical connections, since Catholic families tended to stay in the north and west. Louis also includes references to local gentry, whom theatre historians have often slighted in favour of the more documented upper nobility, just as they have often slighted provincial theatre in favour of London theatre. Once again, REED records allow us to expand our ideas about auspices and theatrical tastes, to be less elitist, exclusive, and sexist in our considerations. Since 1984, when Sally-Beth MacLean proposed to the REED Executive Board that REED volumes include household papers, most family collections have been logically sorted by the county where their principal residence was located. In many cases, of course, the family papers that do survive amount to only a few pages when transcribed, so individual volumes of major family household records, analogous to REED collections organized by shire, would be impractical. The Patrons and Performances Web Site will make these records searchable in a variety of ways and thus easier to use than hard copy would be at any rate. Private

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family records have also been canvassed and edited by REED editors for other publications.26 Systematic collection of references specific to entertainment in private households is certainly vital to patron studies, but by removing these references from their contexts, the accounts are inevitably diminished. No longer can we compare the costs of performance to the household costs for food, for example. No longer can we discern relationships between the purchase of certain supplies and ceremonial occasions, which may not at first glance appear to be significant to theatre history. It is also difficult to map the movements of households without access to the complete record, to see for ourselves if patrons are travelling with their entertainers, although the volumes admittedly do provide locations of payments on the road in editorial subheads and note if the performers are travelling with their patrons. Ideally, researchers in patronage studies should be able to familiarize themselves with the culture of each family in a more general sense, to become social historians, in order to more fully understand how theatrical tastes and politics fuse with public life. REED volumes have inspired and enabled us to broaden our temporal and theoretical horizons, to unseat the dramatic text as the principal document of inquiry, to recover marginalized entertainers, to blur the division between medieval and Renaissance, to appreciate forms of entertainment that twenty-first-century viewers might not even comprehend as entertainment, in short to contextualize early modern theatre and to speculate anew about how these patterns affected aesthetics, political power, and ideological state apparatuses in the past. This contextualization, particularly in the discipline of theatre patronage, has encouraged us to challenge what used to be fundamental assumptions of theatre history. For example, during the 1950s and 1960s, academics often spoke of early modern theatre in terms of ‘development,’ from the supposedly simplistic liturgical plays to the sophistication of Shakespeare, further suggesting that the religious plays were forcibly ejected from ecclesiastical auspices when they became too comic or too lavish, in a sort of ‘big bang’ or Darwinian theory of theatre development. But rather than plays being forcibly evicted from the patronage of the church, rather than more sophisticated plays somehow ‘evolving,’ rather than civic patronage suddenly ending, REED records have shown that devotional plays were still being performed in the same years as court-patronized interludes, that Catholic plays, sometimes staged in recusant noble households, survived the Reformation, that plays were performed even during the interregnum in private households. Similarly, university courses in Renaissance drama used to focus almost exclusively on the London public theatre and on the playwrights and texts associated with it, what I call the ‘black hole’ of London, which many scholars simply assumed had become the sole centre of theatrical activity in the late sixteenth century.

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The numerous references in REED records have clearly challenged that assumption, and inaugurated renewed scholarly interest in regionalism, religion, and noble patronage, recently represented by the 1999 Lancastrian Shakespeare Conference and the subsequent 2003 volume Region, Religion and Patronage: Lancastrian Shakespeare.27 As we focus more intently on the provinces, we are also beginning to attribute extant texts to great households. Recently, in ‘The York Cycle and the West Riding,’ Alexandra Johnston has put together various sources to connect the Savile and De Lacy families of Thornhill both geographically and artistically with the Wakefield and York Cycle plays.28 As I have written at length elsewhere, I have long believed that ‘The Second Shepherds Play,’ which indicates winter indoor performance and refers specifically to local villages and streets, is a household piece;29 perhaps we have found evidence that local families did indeed commission or produce such plays, as Ian Lancashire suggested when he noted that the earl of Northumberland’s almoner was a ‘maker of interludes.’ 30 The critical landscape is changing; we are shifting to privilege theatre in the shires and in private households as well as in public theatres in London, to consider the producers with the plays. We no longer view provincial patrons (many of whom travelled frequently and owned houses in the city) as country bumpkins; we no longer assume that liveried touring players made a poor living in the shires, nor that their audiences were less sophisticated than the urban populations. Perhaps one of the most important consequences of the REED project is a revision of our view of hierarchical power amongst the nobility of Tudor England. Ground-breaking work like Richard Dutton’s Mastering the Revels suggests that the Revels Office under Elizabeth, rather than acting as a censor and controller for dramatic content, really facilitated the relationship between the crown, the patronage networks, and the player troupes to produce the most profit and pleasure for all. Roslyn Knutson’s Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time has challenged previous assumptions about player rivalries, suggesting instead that players, as well as patrons, cooperated as much as they competed.31 We are beginning to shift our view of power at the Elizabethan court from Tillyard’s ‘trickledown’ model to a ‘lexia’ or network model. McMillin and MacLean’s The Queen’s Men and Their Plays seems to indicate similar conclusions about Leicester’s and Queen Elizabeth’s patronage – that power circulates; rather than reflecting a hierarchy of royal political control and a unity of ideological perspective, Tudor England was characterized by epicentres of power, complex multiplicities of alliance, and elastic relationships amongst aristocrats, civic authorities, and artists. Systematic examination of the collections allows us to demonstrate the frequency and pattern of patronized troupes’ visits to cities and households, and to learn more specific information about specific entertainers. We are on surer ground

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when we map the routes particular troupes tended to follow. MacLean’s work with contemporary mapping and Peter Greenfield’s exploration of touring practices have demonstrated not wandering minstrels but routes that include manors, castles, and abbeys that might offer a night’s welcome in return for a performance.32 Although the extant records are by no means comprehensive, nevertheless we can speculate with more authority about how the amounts of payments reflected special relationships, how disagreements and suspicions affected the welcome the troupes received. Chester records reveal, for instance, that even after the cycle plays were suppressed, the city continued to reward entertainers attached to patrons, and the accounts reflect a hierarchy of payments depending on the stature of the troupe’s patron: the standard fee for entertainers attached to the queen was 20s., whilst rewards to noblemen’s troupes ranged from 2s. to 10s.33 In addition, we find that in 1602 Francis Coffin and his troupe tried to play in Chester when theatre was being suppressed and the mayor was aware that Coffin’s warrant had been revoked. Later, in 1606, Lord Hertford’s Men (having learned, no doubt, that they could not fool Chester authorities with glib rhetoric and leftover livery) asked the earl of Derby for a letter of introduction to Chester.34 In Malden, about 1593, the ‘Towne was brought into contempt with noble men’ when a troupe dared to perform on the sabbath at night.35 This sort of information dislodges the rather romantic (and feudal) assumption that civic authorities always lived in fear of powerful aristocrats or that players were the least intimidated by the law, or that aristocrats continually conformed to royal views. In the Catholic north, for example, Sir Richard Cholmeley’s players, who performed King Lear and Pericles for the household of Sir John Yorke c. 1609–10, got into serious trouble with the Star Chamber for their recusant interpretations of plays, suggesting that Shakespeare’s plays might be construed in ways sympathetic to the sufferings of the northern Catholics.36 Clearly by this time (unlike the 1575 worries of Christopher Goodman) the townspeople who complained about Sir John’s household were not quaking in their boots at the thought of offending a knight, and the gentry were not overcome by fear of their monarch, at least if the monarch was far away. In my own recent work with the court calendar of King Edward VI, in which I examine the relationship between patronage and taste, I have been strongly influenced by what I have learned from working with REED records and editors over the past twenty years. It seems to me that King Edward is unique and that his revels might be more easily distinguishable from those of his profligate father and those of his older (and extremely dissimilar, both to him and to each other) sisters. Presumably, the entertainments produced in ‘the boisterous atmosphere of the household of a young king on the verge of his majority,’ as John Murphy has called the era, would be distinctive.37

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Indeed, much of the evidence I have collected from various sources seems to indicate that Edward’s tastes did affect his revels. The young king’s revels show a child’s fondness for animal fights and bear-baitings, for sports and games. Repetitious accounts for Moors, Irishmen, wild men, jesters, and hobby horses might seem banal to those seeking masterpieces of drama, but they are absolutely appropriate for the taste of a little boy. Edward’s diary indicates that he loved to watch staged battles (not unlike Queen Elizabeth II at the Portsmouth Naval Yards in her Jubilee year), and accounts of the coronation show that during the five-hour ceremonial procession, Edward stopped the entire parade for a long period of time to watch a tumbler.38 The Prince’s Players were touring Cambridge, Devon, and Bristol (with a foray into Cornwall) in 1537/8, when their ‘patron’ was one year old, and continued the circuit until his accession as king.39 In 1543, when the prince was only six years old, his players began travelling to Norwich as well.40 Although Edward (often considered a prodigy) was a conservative Protestant who wrote sermons and welcomed preachers at court, it is highly unlikely that he used his players as polemical mouthpieces at such a tender age. Perhaps his eight privy councillors, whose troupes also travelled during his reign, used performers more politically, as Mary Blackstone has conjectured.41 At Edward’s accession the King’s Players were formed, probably simply upgraded from the Prince’s Players and combined with his father’s interluders. At Mary’s accession, Edward’s players (George and John Birche, Richard Cooke, Richard Skinner, Thomas Sowthey, and John Browne) became hers, even though several had been implicated in plots against her. Two players in the Edwardian records (Robert Hinstock and Henry Harriott) disappear from the accounts by 1553, and Cooke, Sowthey, and John Birch vanish after 1556. Edward had appointed these last three players, along with Skinner and Browne. George Birch had been appointed under Henry. William Hunnis, gentleman of the King’s Chapel, Thomas Cawarden, master of the revels, and his assistant Sir Thomas Benger were staunch Protestants but continued to serve the Catholic court under Philip and Mary, which suggests that continuity rather than personal taste or religious polemics determined the members of royal player troupes.42 Apparently neither monarch considered actors as static ideological mouthpieces and understood that alliances with patrons were broken as easily as they were made. Just as royal preferences did not always determine player employment, so performances might not always compliment a patron or a sovereign. In Devon, for example, 1546–7 accounts show that the people of Plymouth were celebrating the distant coronation of the child king in London, not mourning the death of his father.43 Even at court, revels could be unnerving; Edward viewed a ‘Maske of deathes,’ with players costumed in double masks of living and dead faces, their

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shields decked with dead animal heads.44 Initially this seems simply macabre but the occasion was Easter and just three months before the long-suffering and obviously ill king finally died. And while Edward lay on his deathbed, his jester, a type of entertainer traditionally thought quite intimate and consequently resident with his or her patron, was on the road.45 All these facts indicate that the relationship between patron and retained entertainer, at least in Prince and King Edward’s case, was not very close. Nevertheless, these players, travelling mostly in the southeast within easy reach of court, created a ‘cultural neighborhood,’ as Blackstone puts it, perhaps an informal channel for locally reinforcing royal authority. It is interesting that the touring pattern was focused and generally avoids the Midlands and the north (where Catholic interests were stronger). But if the troupe had been active when their patron was a babe-in-arms, how accurately could they possibly reflect his tastes and ideologies? In contrast, the Queen’s Men appear to have been much more closely allied with the political agendas of their patron and her closest advisors. The most compelling questions about patronage, in my view, centre on the political and aesthetic relationships between patrons and their troupes. Consequently, individual troupe stories must be told, as MacLean and McMillin have begun to do. Scholars combining REED records with other materials have made all sorts of interesting discoveries. Mary Blackstone, contextualizing records with local histories, has noticed that Queen Mary’s entertainers tended to show up in cities at times of ideological stress (such as at her marriage to Philip) and near the same time as Protestant ‘martyrs’ were being imprisoned, tried, and burnt.46 As spies? As diversions? As celebrants? Feminist studies of early modern drama have also benefited from patronage studies. Leeds Barroll has recently found that after Lord Strange briefly became the 5th earl of Derby, his players, the company that Shakespeare likely joined and certainly wrote for, were temporarily ‘adopted’ by Alice Spenser, the dowager countess of Derby, an active patron of the arts and relative of Edmund Spenser. In 1594, between her husband’s death and the players’ assumption of a new patron, the lord chamberlain, it seems that the countess was shepherding her players into a comfortable livery, perhaps because her brother-in-law, the new earl of Derby, already retained his own troupe.47 It has been almost a quarter of a century since Richard Rastall asked that REED ‘aim to collect the documentation for particular households.’ 48 The Patrons and Performances Web Site will continue to be a work-in-progress that is clearly structured, extremely user-friendly, and content-rich. Although we theatre historians may have seemed in the 1970s and 1980s to have been marginalized, at the ‘Welsh Marches of … English literature,’ as Peter Greenfield has so wittily put it, our work in the twenty-first century indicates that we are relocating to the centre of social history and cultural studies.49

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At the International Congress of the European Middle Ages at the University of Leeds in July 2002, John Wasson suggested that Records of Early English Drama rename itself ‘Records of Early English Entertainment’ to indicate the inclusiveness with which the project has been collecting references in local accounts. REED has indeed changed the way we talk about early theatre in all its various manifestations, and about patronage in particular. No essay or book produced in the past decade could afford to ignore the records that have been thus far collected, although no scholar worth her salt would ever imagine that the REED records in isolation provide enough evidence to explore any critical or historical issues. This brief overview, combined with Knutson’s more extensive discussion below (pp. 116– 28), indicates many areas in which REED has significantly affected our specific study of patronage in early modern England. We are now able to speak with much more certainty about the politics and economics of patronage, to challenge previous visions of hierarchy and monolithic power structures, to chart movements of patrons’ troupes with some accuracy, to reconsider our concepts about the relationship between London and the provinces, and, ultimately, to more fully understand the function of theatrical art in the early modern era.

NOTES 1 R.W. Vince, ‘Theatre History as an Academic Discipline,’ in Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A. McConachie, eds, Interpreting the Theatrical Past (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), 14 –15. 2 Joseph Strutt, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England: Including the Rural and Domestic Recreations (London, 1855). 3 I use the term ‘patronage studies,’ basing it on Robert Evans’s concept ‘patronage theatre,’ in reference to Ben Jonson. Evans says: I do not, for instance, want to call Jonson a ‘poet dependent on patronage’ … [for] it stresses his dependency in a manner that fundamentally simplifies the complex nature of his relations with superiors. I want to suggest that he was a writer whose life and works were radically conditioned by a culture rooted in hierarchical relations, and by using ‘patronage’ as an adjective throughout this book, I want to imply that patronage during the English Renaissance was more than a matter of economic give-and-take, that it was basic to the period’s life and psychology and crucially shaped Jonson’s attitudes and experience. (Robert Evans, Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage [Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1989], 9.) Evans provides one of the most thorough surveys of the literature on patronage theatre; see page 269, notes 1 and 2. 4 Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages, 3 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,

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Suzanne Westfall 1959 –72); Sydney Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). See, for example, David M. Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); Anglo, Spectacle; T.W. Craik, ‘The Political Interpretation of Two Tudor Interludes Temperance and Humility and Wealth and Health,’ Review of English Studies, ns 4 (1953): 98 –108; Gwen Ann Jones, ‘The Political Significance of the Play of Albion Knight,’ Journal of English and German Philology 17 (1918): 267– 80; Ian Lancashire, ‘The Auspices of The World and the Child,’ Renaissance and Reformation 12 (1976): 96–105, and Two Tudor Interludes: ‘The Interlude of Youth,’ ‘Hick Scorner’ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). More recently, Richard Dutton has examined the close political relationship amongst patrons, texts, and the Revels Office in Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991). In a more patron-specific study that REED records are making increasingly possible, Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean have explored the relationship between Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, and his players in The Queen’s Men; MacLean continues her exploration of Leicester’s players in ‘Tracking Leicester’s Men: the Patronage of a Performance Troupe,’ in White and Westfall, eds, Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage, 246–71. Steven Putzel and K. Reed Needles, ‘The Pageant Wagons,’ Medieval English Theatre 1.1 (1979): 32 – 3. Ian Lancashire, ‘Orders for Twelfth Day and Night circa 1515 in the Second Northumberland Household Book,’ English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 7– 45. The Percy dramatic records are being transcribed and edited for REED by Robert Alexander. Ian Lancashire, Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain: A Chronological Topography to 1558, SEED (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984). Mary A. Blackstone, ‘Notes towards a Patrons Calendar,’ REEDN 6.1 (1981): 1–11; ‘Theatrical Patronage and the Urban Community during the Reign of Mary,’ in White and Westfall, eds, Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage, 176– 220; ‘Lancashire, Shakespeare and the Construction of Cultural Neighbourhoods in Sixteenth-century England,’ in Dutton, Findlay, and Wilson, eds, Region, Religion and Patronage, 186– 204. MacLean, ‘The Politics of Patronage: Dramatic Records in Robert Dudley’s Household Books,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 44.2 (summer 1993): 175– 82. Suzanne R. Westfall, Patrons and Performance: Early Tudor Household Revels (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). See MacLean, ‘Tour Routes’; ‘Players on Tour’; and ‘Records of Early English Drama and the Travelling Player,’ Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 26 (1983): 65–71. Greenfield, ‘Touring,’ 251–68.

What Hath REED Wrought? REED and Patronage 99 14 Richard Southern, The Staging of Plays before Shakespeare (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1973); Alan H. Nelson, ‘Hall Screens and Elizabethan Playhouses: CounterEvidence from Cambridge,’ in John Astington, ed., The Development of Shakespeare’s Theater (New York: AMS, 1992), 57–76; and Nelson, Early Cambridge Theatres. 15 Kathleen McLuskie and Felicity Dunsworth, ‘Patronage and the Economics of Theater,’ in Cox and Kastan, eds, New History of Early English Drama, 423 – 40. This entire volume, as Roslyn Knutson explains below (pp. 118–19), would certainly not have been conceived or executed without the revolution in early drama that REED has produced. 16 Elza C. Tiner, ‘Patrons and Travelling Companies in York,’ REEDN 17.1 (1992): 1–36; ‘Patrons and Travelling Companies in Coventry,’ REEDN 21.1 (1996): 1–37; Janet K. Ritch, ‘Patrons and Travelling Companies in Chester and Newcastle upon Tyne,’ REEDN 19.1 (1994): 1–15. 17 See Michael S. Roth, ‘Foucault’s History of the Present,’ History and Theory 20 (1981): 32 – 46, and the special issue on Foucault of Humanities in Society 3 (winter, 1980). 18 Theresa Coletti has discussed the limitations of REED records in ‘“Fragmentation and Redemption.”’ See also her ‘Reading REED.’ 19 Klausner, ed., Herefordshire/Worcestershire, 189–93. 20 Gibson, ed., Kent: Diocese of Canterbury, 2:913–22. 21 Hays and McGee/Joyce and Newlyn, eds, Dorset /Cornwall, 531–3. 22 Stokes with Alexander, eds, Somerset including Bath, 1:416. 23 Stokes with Alexander, eds, Somerset including Bath, 1:417, 421. 24 David Mills, ‘Where Have All the Players Gone? A Chester Problem,’ Early Theatre 1 (1998): 129 – 37, especially 132–3. 25 Louis, ed., Sussex, xxxi – xxxv. 26 For example,, Peter H. Greenfield, ‘Entertainments of Henry, Lord Berkeley, 1593–4, 1600 – 5,’ REEDN 8.1 (1983): 12 – 24; ‘Using Dramatic Records’; ‘“All for your delight/We are not here”: Amateur Players and the Nobility,’ Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 28 (1985): 173–80. 27 Dutton, Findlay, and Wilson, eds, Region, Religion and Patronage. 28 I thank Alexandra Johnston for allowing me to read a draft of her article. 29 See my extended discussion of this play in Patron and Performance, 49 – 52. 30 Lancashire, ‘Orders,’ 13. 31 Dutton, Mastering the Revels; Roslyn Lander Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 32 MacLean, ‘Tour Routes,’ and Greenfield, ‘Touring.’ 33 For the Queen’s Players see Clopper, ed., Chester, 159, 162, 166 (when they received 40s.). The 20s. reward appears frequently in Shrewsbury and Ludlow (Somerset, ed., Shropshire, 1:20, 89, 206, 209, 248 [40s.], 284, 285), and once in Exeter (Wasson, ed., Devon, 150). The company were regular visitors at St Mary’s Guildhall in Coventry,

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where they also received 20s. and often 40s. (Ingram, ed., Coventry, 313, 317, 320, 324, 328, 332 [30s.], 336, 338, 341, 346, 348, 358 [30s.]). For noblemen, see Clopper, ed., Chester, 59, 60 (8d. and 12d. respectively to the baron of Kinderton’s minstrels), 135 (2s. to the earl of Essex’s players), 166 (2s. to the earl of Essex’s musicians). Clopper, ed., Chester, 178, lviii, 219. Mary A. Blackstone, ‘Notes Towards a Patrons Calendar,’ REEDN 6.1 (1981): 1–11, especially 4 – 5. John Southerden Burn, ed., The Star Chamber: Notices of the Court and its Proceedings (London, 1870), 78. John Murphy, ‘The Illusion of Decline: The Privy Chamber, 1547–1558,’ in David Starkey, ed., The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (London and New York: Longman, 1987), 119–46. See also Starkey’s introduction, p. 7. John Gough Nichols, ed., Literary Remains of King Edward the Sixth (London, 1857), 1:ccxc. Nelson, ed., Cambridge, 1:115, 119, 130, 149, 154; Hays and McGee/Joyce and Newlyn, Dorset /Cornwall, 473; Pilkinton, ed., Bristol, 50, 51; Wasson, ed., Devon, 40, 227, 228, 229, 231. Galloway, ed., Norwich, 6, 13, 14, 20. Blackstone, ‘Theatrical Patronage and the Urban Community,’ 196. See Blackstone, ‘Theatrical Patronage and the Urban Community,’ 206; Andrew Ashbee, ed., Records of English Court Music (Aldershot, Hants.: Scholar Press, 1986–96), vol. 7, 1485–1558, especially 313, 315, 320, 422–3; E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 79–83; C.C. Stopes, William Hunnis and the Revels of the Chapel Royal (Louvain: A. Uystpruyst, 1910), 58, 64; and W.R. Streitberger, Court Revels, 1485–1559, seed (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 208 –10. Wasson, ed., Devon, 232. Albert Feuillerat, ed., Documents Relating to the Revels at Court in the Time of King Edward VI and Queen Mary (the Loseley manuscripts) (Louvain: A. Uystpruyst, 1914), 130, 133 – 4. Nelson, ed., Cambridge, 1:115, 184. Blackstone, ‘Theatrical Patronage and the Urban Community,’ 208. Leeds Barroll, ‘Shakespeare, Noble Patrons, and the Pleasures of “Common” Playing,’ in White and Westfall, eds, Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage, 111–15. Richard Rastall, ‘Minstrels and Minstrelsy in Household Account Books,’ in Dutka, ed., Proceedings of the First Colloquium, 3–21. Greenfield, ‘Using Dramatic Records,’ 76.

Margins to the Centre: REED and Shakespeare paul werstine

The chief feature on which I wish to focus in this essay is REED’s methodicalness.1 The project methodically targets all the cities and counties of the UK without regard for their reputation for theatrical activity or for their associations with particular playwrights. REED’s own metaphors for its processes are military, rather than literary. As Sally-Beth MacLean wrote in 1983, REED’s is ‘an ambitious battle plan … In the recurring military metaphor of our general editor, Alexandra Johnston, REED editors are assigned locations and sent into the field, armed with uniform editorial guidelines and sharp pencils for transcription. The booty retrieved from local record offices is sent to REED headquarters in Toronto for assessment.’ 2 In carrying out this ambitious battle plan, REED methodically refuses to accord Shakespeare the preeminence he otherwise enjoys in early English drama. In this regard, REED departs widely from those who went into the field before it – from James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, who, according to the late S. Schoenbaum regarding Shakespeare biography, ‘has no peer in the nineteenth century,’ 3 and even from the great Edmund Kerchever Chambers, for these scholars were intensely and explicitly devoted to Shakespeare as the focus of their research. From this difference between REED and its predecessors arises a seductively neat paradox that I would like to explore. It can be formulated as follows: by focusing relentlessly on Shakespeare, REED’s predecessors provided early twentieth-century Shakespearean textual scholars with the data that would mislead them into a mistaken belief that persisted for most of that century about the provincial origins of some early Shakespeare texts, such as the earliest quartos of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet; but then REED itself using a method that, in contrast to that of its predecessors, systemically refuses to grant Shakespeare any pride of place would furnish the data that, combined with research conducted by Peter Blayney and Laurie Maguire among others, would disabuse Shakespeareans of their mistaken belief and free them again to confront the fascinating and challenging problems

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of these quartos in all of their as yet irreducible difficulties. However, this paradox will turn out to be too neat wholly to stand up to sustained and detailed scrutiny. It will turn out that while some of REED’s predecessors were crippled by a Shakespeare-centred agenda, others were hampered in quite different ways. And while REED’s method is free of any bardolatrous distortion, one can still find an interest in Shakespeare among the explicit motives of one of REED’s founding fathers, David Galloway, first chair of REED’s Executive Board. Nonetheless, subject to such qualifications, the paradox may have some pertinence. After all, in spite of his Shakespearean interests, Galloway was no James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, for whom, as Marvin Spevack has recently detailed at some length, Shakespeare’s biography became an obsession.4 Dubbed by REED editor Alan Somerset ‘the first REED researcher,’ 5 Halliwell-Phillipps published his REED-like gleanings in The Visits of Shakespeare’s Company of Actors to the Provincial Cities and Towns of England, illustrated by extracts gathered from corporate records (1887).6 Tellingly, on the half-title page he called the pamphlet Shakespeare’s Tours. His ‘Preface,’ as well as the form of most of his transcriptions of the records, testifies to his exclusive focus on Shakespeare. In the ‘Preface’ he wrote as follows: The name or names of the company or companies to which Shakespeare belonged previously to the twenty-sixth of December, 1594, are unknown; but, from that day to the end of his theatrical career, it is certain that he was one of the Lord Chamberlain’s actors, a body that was distinguished as the King’s Servants soon after the accession of James. Every entry, therefore, respecting the Lord Chamberlain’s Servants bearing date between December the twenty-sixth, 1594, and May the seventeenth, 1603, and every one respecting the King’s Servants between the latter day and the year 1614 or thereabouts, are of a definite Shakespearean interest … for although it cannot be absolutely inferred from any of [the entries found in these intervals] that the great dramatist himself was present, there is not one which is not in itself a very strong presumptive evidence that he was. He is mentioned as a leading member of the company as early as the year 1594, and it is incredible that he should not, as a rule, have accompanied his colleagues in their provincial excursions. (6–9)

To reinforce his fantasy of Shakespearean presence he also introduced most of his quotations from the records with sentences beginning ‘Shakespeare’s Company visited …’ ([11], [15], [19], etc.). He had no interest whatsoever in the future discovery of any records from years preceding those in which Shakespeare was known to be active, or in the location of any records besides those of what he called ‘Shakespeare’s companies.’ Instead, he urged that ‘[t]he able workers under the Historical Manuscripts Commission … might perchance be enabled to add occasionally to the interest of their Reports by a special scrutiny for notices of [the

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Lord Chamberlain’s or King’s Servants between 1594 and 1614], those referring to other companies being generally of little or no value’ (7). Only in one sentence did he indicate an interest beyond 1614, when he acknowledged that it also would be ‘desirable [although only] in those towns where the records anterior to the year 1615 are not preserved, that search should be made for notices of the King’s Servants up to the end of the reign of Charles the First’ (7). While in the present context these severe limits to Halliwell-Phillipps’s curiosity may seem perverse, his pertinacity in searching for records within these limits may well elicit awe. As Schoenbaum records, ‘when [Halliwell-Phillipps] discovered an old well, choked with refuse, in the Shakespeare country, he had it opened up and the rubbish sifted four times in hopes of unearthing some trifle, maybe a scrap of paper, associated with the Immortal Bard. “Up to the point of our visit,” a melancholy pilgrim reported in 1875, “there were no results to show”’ (405). His successor in the field, J.T. Murray, is both far less colourful than HalliwellPhillipps and inconveniently unsuitable to my paradox. To judge from his ‘Preface,’ Murray shared Halliwell-Phillipps’s bardolatry, for Murray writes of ‘the brilliant national drama which culminated in the supreme work of Shakespeare.’ 7 Yet Murray did not allow bardolatry to straiten his research, the aim of which was ‘to trace the history of English dramatic companies in London and the provincial towns from 1558 to 1642, from the accession of Queen Elizabeth to the closing of the theatres by the Puritans’ (vii). In contrast to REED researchers, Murray’s work suffers chiefly from a bad fit between his conception of his project and the time required to complete it. He recognizes that ‘several lifetimes would be required if one person were to thoroughly examine all the records of even a few of the more important towns’ and then thanks Harvard for enabling him ‘to devote an unfettered year to the examination of the English town records’ (viii, xi–xii). Almost twenty years ago, David Galloway demonstrated a number of other faults in Murray’s method, one of which was a susceptibility to mistranscription.8 In Murray’s favour it can be said that in defining the scope of his interest, he seems to have transcended his age’s narrow obsession with Shakespeare to an extent that exceeds what was achieved by the much greater scholar E.K. Chambers, who depended on Murray’s work. It was only shortly after Murray published his 1910 two-volume work and thereby brought the phenomenon of provincial performance into some prominence, at least in the scholarly world, that Shakespearean textual critics and editors began concertedly to bring this area of research into relation to one of the most puzzling problems in Shakespeare’s texts. This problem concerns a handful of printings of Shakespeare plays offering texts that are much shorter than the ones we are used to reading but that nevertheless are far from uniform in their abbreviation of the familiar texts in that they sometimes reproduce substantial

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passages in their familiar form, and sometimes radically cut or telescope the texts; sometimes the dialogue is recognizable, but sometimes it is almost entirely different from what we know. One of these printings, the Henry V published in 1600, contains only scenes that are also to be found in the 1623 First Folio text (but not all the Folio scenes), although sometimes it alters the roles represented in particular scenes, as when Bourbon replaces the Dauphin at Agincourt, and sometimes it changes the order of scenes. Others among these rather strange texts introduce even more changes as well. These include the first printed texts of 2 and 3 Henry VI, known as The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster (1594), and The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke (1595), as well as Merry Wives of Windsor (1602), which differs significantly from the Folio in the play’s last act, Hamlet (1603), and Romeo and Juliet (1597). This last, for example, is very close to the familiar 1599 Romeo and Juliet throughout most of the first two acts, although there are some major cuts, but then concludes Act 2 with an altogether different representation of the scene in which Romeo and Juliet meet at Friar Lawrence’s cell in order to marry and, after that, the dialogue of the 1597 version rarely manages to get as close to the 1599 one as it did earlier in the play. This class of Shakespeare texts is, if Pericles of 1609 is added in, the one that has suffered under the designation ‘bad quartos’ for almost a hundred years since A.W. Pollard so christened it in 1909.9 Before Murray published his work on provincial performances, the so-called ‘bad quartos’ were, according to prevailing scholarly opinion, regarded as either source texts for Shakespeare’s plays – a view that held into the 1920s for the earliest printed versions of the Henry VI plays – or texts partially taken down in shorthand from performances witnessed by London playgoers and later fleshed out by so-called hack poets. But right after the Great War, Pollard and his young disciple J. Dover Wilson drew provincial performance into a detailed account of some of these texts’ origins. In a 1919 TLS essay entitled ‘The “Stolne and Surreptitious” Shakespearian Texts,’ Pollard and Wilson declared:10 These abridgments can only have been made for audiences in the provinces, where the conditions of performance and the smaller number of actors, as compared with the fuller London companies, compelled drastic excisions … [S]uch abbreviation would of necessity involve a certain amount of adaptation, since after a rent had been made in the text, it would generally be necessary to stitch the ends together, however roughly. (18, 30)

Pollard and Wilson’s case for associating ‘bad quartos’ with the provinces was always a weak one. It depended entirely on the presumption that playing in the provinces was comparatively rare: ‘The company for which Shakespeare wrote

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and … also acted did not often go on tour,’ except, according to Pollard and Wilson, when the plague forced closure of London playhouses for an extended period, as, for example, in 1592–4. Since, on this presumption, the provinces had scant experience of London theatrical fare, players on tour could afford, Pollard and Wilson thought, to skimp on both the quality and quantity of their presentations in ways no London audience would have tolerated: ‘the groundlings of a London theatre would have had a good deal to say if, after paying for an afternoon’s entertainment, they had been fobbed off with anything less’ (18), and ‘abridgments made for provincial representation … would be useless for London performances’ (30). The hint of antiprovincial bias in Pollard and Wilson is probably at least in part the consequence of their necessary reliance on Murray’s spotty and incomplete record of provincial performance by the Lord Chamberlain’sKing’s Men – a record that would encourage Shakespeareans among his readers to think of touring as an expediency undertaken only rarely and only in desperation. The bias becomes stronger in Pollard and Wilson’s elaboration of their narrative of origin for the ‘bad quartos.’ Unlike Halliwell-Phillipps, Pollard and Wilson cannot imagine Shakespeare himself as suffering what they regard as the indignity of having to tour the provinces. Instead, Pollard and Wilson imagine the company setting off into the provinces with an abridged version of an old play that Shakespeare has only begun to revise, leaving Shakespeare himself in London to continue work on his revision. (This detail in their narrative is, of course, designed to explain why some ‘bad quartos,’ like those of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, for example, are so much closer to other surviving texts of the same plays in the first and second acts than thereafter.) When the company is able to return to London and resume playing, Shakespeare, Pollard and Wilson imagine, has finished his revision, and therefore the text that the company took on tour is, as both that of an old play and only an abridgement, doubly inferior to the text that they will now be able to perform on the London stage. Once Shakespeare’s own text is on that stage, it is such a hit that the London Stationers will do anything to put it into print. So a small-part actor who had performed both in the provinces and in the later London production of the wholly Shakespearean version acquires, on behalf of a stationer, the text used in the provinces, which is no longer wanted by the players, and, depending on his faulty memory, he tries to bring it into accord with the Shakespeare play that is now a hit in London. According to this marvellously complicated narrative, then, a ‘bad quarto’ reproduces what was performed on the provincial stage only to the extent that the small-part actor responsible for its text fails to recall Shakespeare’s much more desirable revision. Pollard and Wilson’s story of the origins of the bad quartos was too poorly grounded to command scholarly assent and was replaced only three years later in 1922 by W.W. Greg’s much more straightforward account in his Two Elizabethan

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Stage Abridgements: The Battle of Alcazar & Orlando Furioso.11 Nonetheless, Pollard and Wilson’s antiprovincial bias exercised considerable influence over Greg’s interpretation of the Alcazar and Orlando quartos. There is no surviving documentary evidence to link the Shakespeare ‘bad quartos,’ the Alcazar quarto, or the Orlando quarto to provincial touring, and Greg frankly admits as much about the quartos that are the objects of his study when he writes that ‘the occasions or circumstances of their production remain largely matter of speculation, and no direct proof of their alleged provincial origin has been attempted in these pages’ (5). Yet he asserts that there is ‘some plausibility to the provincial hypothesis. It can hardly be without significance that both these plays … were first printed [in 1594] just as the companies were returning to London after their long wanderings during the years of plague [i.e., 1592–4]’ (5). And Greg’s choice of adjective would indicate that his contempt for theatrical performance outside of London was even greater than Pollard and Wilson’s, for he writes of the Alcazar quarto as follows: there is an intrinsic improbability in supposing any company of standing to have performed on the regular London stage such an eviscerated drama as that presented in the quarto of 1594. The obvious inference is that it belongs to the years of the dispersal, and was prepared for the use of that section of the company which maintained itself by acting in the provinces. (16, italics mine)

It is Greg’s account of the genesis of the Orlando quarto that became so influential for twentieth-century editorial narratives about the Shakespeare ‘bad quartos.’ Here is the story Greg told from comparing the only two extant witnesses to the Orlando text – the manuscript part for the lead role, which Greg generally took as an index to what Robert Greene originally wrote, and the quarto of 1594: The text printed in the quarto of 1594 represents the play as it had come to be performed on the stage. This version differed considerably from that originally composed [by Robert Greene] … The Queen’s men presumably acquired Greene’s play of Orlando Furioso in the autumn of 1591 … There is no doubt that the company was in very low water at the time, and they disappeared from London shortly afterwards. In their embarrassed state they seem to have parted with several of their plays, and the manuscript of Orlando (together of course with the actors’ parts) passed into the hands of Edward Alleyn … But once away from London they saw no reason for discontinuing their performance of the play even though they had parted with the manuscript and presumably with all rights in the piece … As their fortunes sank lower they were forced to part one by one with the hired men who had accompanied them into the country, and this necessitated a constant cutting and readjustment of the text with a view to more intensive doubling or the elimination of subordinate parts. But

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the alteration was busy in another direction as well. Greene’s heroics had enjoyed but indifferent success upon the London stage, they were even less successful in the country, and the only scenes that proved really popular were frankly comic episodes … This suggested the development of the more boisterous side of the play … The result was that considerable impromptu accretions gradually crystallized around and athwart the original scenes … The play was now fairly attractive to the audiences of provincial towns and had won a recognized place in the repertory. Meanwhile, however, it was undergoing continual modification of another kind, for the absence of a promptcopy made it impossible to check the progressive corruption to which constant repetition by indifferent actors naturally led … [But] the lines, however corrupt, were so to speak rubbed smooth with use … The time came, however, when the absence of a prompt-copy proved too inconvenient … All the members who had a working knowledge of the play met together and, having secured the services of a ready writer, proceeded in turn to dictate their parts as well as their memories would allow … The company was once more provided with a prompt-copy … [This] play would have been of little use to them in London probably … [T]he manuscript became the printer’s … and the strange abortion saw the light. (351–7)

Greg retains but usually varies the principal narratives employed by Pollard and Wilson: (1) the company tours only out of desperation, when ‘in very low water … an embarrassed state’; (2) it performs an abridged text, although for Greg, in contrast to Pollard and Wilson, the abridgement is not achieved at a single time and with a single purpose; instead, as the impoverished company repeatedly shrinks in size, there is ‘constant cutting and readjustment of the text with a view to more intensive doubling or the elimination of subordinate parts,’ as well as ‘development of the more boisterous side of the play’ in deference to inferior provincial taste, combined with ‘progressive corruption’; (3) the London stationers are hungry for plays to publish, although for Greg, unlike Pollard and Wilson, the stationers are so undiscriminating that they will publish not just London stage successes but scripts degraded for provincial performance. Greg’s account of Orlando appeared to be grounded in documentary evidence – the printed quarto contrasted with Alleyn’s manuscript part of the lead role – as well as in the detailed history of a theatrical company.12 It inspired confidence in the editors who assimilated it to the Shakespeare ‘bad quartos’ that we could know how these texts had come to be. Editors responded in different ways to this putative knowledge, and their responses affected what they printed as Shakespeare. Some editors repudiated the ‘bad quartos’ as the bases for editions or even as the sources of emendations to texts based on other early printings.13 Yet as the twentieth century wore on, other editors, interested more in what was performed than in what Shakespeare himself may have written and relying on the knowledge that Greg

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seemed to provide about the theatrical origins, albeit provincial theatrical origins, of the ‘bad quartos,’ began to resort to these texts more and more to supplement the so-called good quartos or Folio versions of such plays as Henry V, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and 2 and 3 Henry VI.14 Then REED made an entrance onto this Shakespeare editorial scene. At first its entrance was slow and stately. Since its early volumes, York and Chester in 1979 and Coventry in 1981, were associated with cities noted for their cycle drama and since the project’s director, Alexandra Johnston, was a medievalist, REED initially failed to attract much attention from Shakespeareans. But as its research and publications accumulated sufficiently to support generalizations about the provincial tours of theatrical companies in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, Shakespeareans began to register REED’s impact. We might mark the turning point in 1990 when Roslyn L. Knutson organized a panel at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in Philadelphia that included, among others, Sally-Beth MacLean, Alan Somerset, William Ingram, and myself. MacLean, in a paper later published as ‘Tour Routes: “Provincial Wanderings” or Traditional Circuits?,’ showed that the London companies did not take to the road only when the London playhouses were closed in time of plague or when the companies’ London fortunes were otherwise reduced. Instead touring was a regular and customary activity for these companies, which did not aimlessly ‘wander,’ to use Greg’s demeaning term, but followed itineraries that can be traced along the main roads, the highways of the period, from which the players strayed only when they could be assured a welcome at an outlying household with a tradition of entertaining their troupes. (In an important article in Shakespeare Quarterly, Barbara D. Palmer presents data gathered from the extensive domestic records of the Clifford and Cavendish families to show that sometimes travelling companies appear to have profited more from playing at such households than they did playing in the cities and towns, and that travelling companies, rather than wandering, may well have planned their tours on the basis of information concerning the precise whereabouts, among a multitude of widely dispersed estates, of the families who would welcome them.)15 Ingram’s findings, later published as ‘The Costs of Touring,’ reinforced this perspective, as he calculated how much it would cost for a company to travel, showing that a substantial investment was required at the beginning of a tour, something that the Queen’s Men, if they had been as Greg had imagined them ‘in very low water at the time,’ simply would not have been able to afford. Finally, Somerset, in a paper published in 1995 as ‘“How Chances it they Travel”: Provincial Touring, Playing Places, and the King’s Men,’ challenged head-on two of the assumptions foundational to Greg’s account: first, that on tour a company’s fortunes would necessarily sink lower and lower, forcing more and more cuts of their scripts in order to eliminate roles as their poverty cut into their own numbers; second, that only companies who were

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struggling in London would resort to touring. Contradicting the first of these assumptions, Somerset demonstrated there was money to be made on tour, for the records then available to him in 1994 indicated that touring players found a welcome at their destinations over 95 per cent of the time. In response to the second assumption, Somerset showed that in the immediate case of the King’s Servants, Shakespeare’s company, touring became more regular once they had achieved preeminence in London through their sponsorship by James himself in 1603.16 Beyond these particular findings based on REED’s accumulated data, the sheer mass of the data began to register on Shakespeare editorial scholarship. Written from the perspective of a Shakespeare editor, my own contribution to the panel, eventually published as ‘Touring and the Construction of Shakespeare Textual Criticism,’ first called attention to the relevance of REED to the ‘bad quartos’-provincial performance narratives.17 So much evidence of playing in the provinces has made it difficult to sustain the belief in debased provincial tastes that would be satisfied with performances of what Greg called wretched texts. So much evidence of civic regulation of players, combined with and sometimes, as Andrew Gurr has argued, in competition with centralized regulation through the Master of the Revels, has told very much against Greg’s accounts of players wandering to whatever centres they chose in whatever numbers they could muster during times when the entire nation was terrified by plague epidemics.18 I am particularly impressed by the mass of Norwich records that show civic concern for the spread of infection through playgoing and that meticulously scrutinize the validity of documentation carried by players, often listing the players by name so as apparently to hold them individually accountable for their conduct while in the city.19 In bringing into question the assumptions behind the Pollard-Wilson-Greg narrative about ‘bad quartos’ as provincial touring texts, REED’s findings combined with the scholarship of both Laurie Maguire and Peter Blayney. Maguire has shown that the memorial-reconstruction hypothesis may – and only may – apply to one or two of the Shakespeare ‘bad quartos.’ 20 Blayney, in his turn, has successfully disputed the anachronistic view that stationers in Shakespeare’s day were as hungry to put his plays into print (in whatever form) as publishers later became; instead, Blayney shows that stationers would choose, from among the great number of plays that acting companies might like to see published in order to advertize themselves and their wares, those plays from which the stationers might hope eventually to realize a profit.21 While Pollard, Wilson, and Greg regarded the ‘bad quartos’ as unfit for London consumption, stationers who were risking precious capital on the books thought otherwise. There is now little left of Greg’s story of the genesis of ‘bad quartos’ as memorial reconstructions of provincial performances. It may even be that in one respect at least Greg’s antiprovincial bias is the reverse of that felt by the players early in Shakespeare’s time. As Andrew Gurr has

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suggested from trawling through the REED records, the players may have preferred provincial playing places to those of London. He writes: ‘To a large degree the London practice of using the open suburban amphitheatres must have felt to the professional players like a reversion to market-place playing. [Elizabeth I’s] 1559 Proclamation gave the players access to the largest room in town for their [provincial] performances, and they exploited this privilege to the full … That helps to explain why they clung so tightly to playing at city inns in London up to 1594, once they had become used to playing indoors in all the regional towns.’ 22 So although REED has yet to unearth from any record office a previously unknown scrap of paper indicating Shakespeare’s presence in a provincial town for a particular performance or, so far as I know, even one indicating a particular public performance of one of his plays, REED can nonetheless teach Shakespeare editors and textual critics much that is valuable. In helping to knock down the assumptions that supported Greg’s long-accepted account of the ‘bad quartos’ origins, REED teaches us that we know a good deal less about the relation of these texts to other printed versions of these plays than we thought we did. The impact of REED on the editing of Shakespeare is perhaps most striking in connection with Henry V. By mid-century Greg’s account of the play’s ‘bad quarto’ was becoming entrenched. In a 1947 edition for the Cambridge University Press New Shakespeare series, J. Dover Wilson could write: ‘On the subject of the Quarto text there is fortunately by now also fairly general agreement, viz. that it is a “reported” version, probably supplied by traitor-actors, of performances – perhaps in a shortened form for provincial audiences – of the play as acted by Shakespeare’s company’ (112). J.H. Walter, writing in his Second Arden edition of 1954, has very little doubt about the rightness of Greg’s view: ‘the Q version may well be based on a cut form of the play used by the company for a reduced cast on tour in the provinces’ (xxxix). By 1979 Gary Taylor is working out in meticulous detail just how and how much this cast has been reduced for the tour so that he can distinguish between, on the one hand, changes from the Folio to quarto texts of the play necessitated by this reduction and, on the other, changes allegedly introduced by Shakespeare after he had completed the Folio version. His investigation indicates a confidence in Greg’s theory of origin for the ‘bad quartos’ so strong that the theory can serve as the basis for elaborately detailed further discoveries.23 In 1992 Andrew Gurr, editing the Folio text for the New Cambridge series, still finds it necessary to allow for the possibility that Greg may have been right, even though he thinks ‘[a]ll such ideas … speculative’: ‘Players who had left Shakespeare’s company might well have made use of their memories to write out a playbook … for future performances … [A] shortened version for fewer players would have a use on tour’ (221). Editing Henry V for the Third Arden series in 1995, T.W. Craik is severe in repudiating Taylor’s elaborate extension of Greg’s hypothesis, but nonetheless

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allows that ‘The Quarto may reconstruct a shortened version of the play intended for taking on tour when the company was not playing in London’ (24 – 5). However, when Gurr edits the quarto version of the play for the New Cambridge series in 2000 after his visit to the REED offices in 1993, he completely excludes Greg’s story of the quarto’s genesis as a provincial touring text. Others among today’s editors are wary of following their immediate predecessors’ practice of combining in one way or another the ‘bad quarto’ texts with Folio or ‘good quarto’ texts of the same plays. If we know that we do not know how multiple texts of the same plays came to differ from each other – something that Greg and his followers tried to persuade us that we can know – we know that we have little chance of judging among the variants and producing a so-called critical edition of the plays. What we see as a consequence are editions of versions of these plays: thus the Oxford Shakespeare series has recently included a Romeo and Juliet, edited by Jill Levenson (2000), that begins with an edition of the second or ‘good’ quarto and concludes with the first or ‘bad’ quarto. The same series includes an edition of 3 Henry VI by Randall Martin (2001) that has virtually no recourse to The Tragedy of Richard of York; Martin explicitly rejects the view that The True Tragedy represents ‘a deliberate abridgement, or “acting version”, of F, probably made for touring performances in the provinces when the plague closed the London theatres for most of 1592–4’ (114). John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen, who have edited the same play for the Third Arden series (2001), frankly admit that the origins of the variant texts are beyond recovery (175–6). Precisely the same scepticism marks Janis Lull’s 1999 edition of the Folio Richard III for the New Cambridge series (209) and John Jowett’s 2000 edition of the Quarto for the Oxford series in spite of the great confidence expressed earlier in the twentieth century that the quarto version of that play arose on the occasion of a provincial tour. According to Jowett, ‘[p]recise diagnosis of the origin of Q1 [the first quarto of 1597] may prove impossible’ (127) and ‘my own provisional conclusion would be that Q1 was probably not reconstructed by actors on tour’ (124). The Third Arden series will include a Hamlet that encompasses editions of all three of the early printed versions. The extent to which these editors have been influenced by REED, as Gurr certainly was, is not entirely clear. None of them cites REED or acknowledges its impact on their work, as is hardly surprising because the vast scholarship on Shakespeare editing serves to insulate editors from almost everything else. Nonetheless, I am pleased to record that both Levenson in her Romeo edition (123n5) and Cox and Rasmussen in theirs of 3 Henry VI (163) acknowledge an impact on their work of the essay in which I first registered how REED had unsettled Greg’s narrative about the provincial auspices of ‘bad-quarto’ texts. Thus, even if sometimes only at one remove, REED has made a difference in several recent important editions of Shakespeare’s plays. Through the sheer luck of my having REED researcher Alan

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Somerset as a valued colleague, Barbara A. Mowat and I were aware of REED’s work and of its importance to Shakespeare editing even before we began editing the New Folger Shakespeare in July of 1989; thus we were fortunate enough not to be encumbered by Greg’s narrative of the provincial origins of the ‘bad quartos.’ Nor is there now much to fear that Greg’s narrative will enjoy a resurgence in the next generation of Shakespeare editing, because Greg’s account depends entirely on there being a significant difference between the tastes of provincial audiences and those in the capital. Against this view REED researchers have found documentary evidence that some of the same people who went to plays in London also went to them in the provinces. James M. Gibson’s three-volume Kent: Diocese of Canterbury, published in 2002, contains entries from Sir Edward Dering’s household accounts recording his attendance at performances, sometimes in London, sometimes elsewhere (2:913 – 26). REED also shows that the occasion for provincial performances could arise from the invitation of a patron of the London theatrical industry to a company to perform at his house in the provinces. As Alan Somerset has discovered, one Thomas Puckering, of the Priory House, Warwick, saw a play in London on 6 April 1620. Then his account book contains the following entries for the next Christmas season: 28 December, ‘Giuen to the lo具rd典 Dudley his Players for playing a play in my house this night … 20 s.’ and, 11 January, ‘Giuen on the 6 of this moneth to the Queene of Bohemia’s Players playing that night in my house … 22 s.’ 24 Barbara D. Palmer’s research for REED among the Clifford and Cavendish family records has turned up well over a dozen comparable examples; these lead her to a stinging repudiation of long-standing scholarly opinion: ‘If seen as an isolated phenomenon, provincial gentry’s London playgoing is dismissed as the rare treat for Andrew Aguecheeks up from the country, a perception which owes more to Restoration comedy than to social history. Instead, London playgoing needs to be recognized as part of a much larger, highly mobile communication network.’25 The standards of provincial performance can scarcely ever again be thought to differ from those of London theatre when the audiences for both contain some of the same people. It is quite remarkable how documents contained in the REED volumes so precisely contradict Greg’s prejudicial construction of a difference between London and provincial tastes in drama. For Greg, only ‘frankly comic episodes … the more boisterous side of the play’ had a chance to succeed on the provincial stage, where serious ‘heroics’ had no place. But in the letter, now to be read in REED’s 1996 Somerset volumes, in which Nathaniel Tompkyns, an official in the queen’s council, describes in some detail to his provincial uncle, Sir Robert Phelips, the London staging of the play we now know as Thomas Heywood’s and Richard Brome’s The Late Lancashire Witches, Tompkyns assumes that his correspondent, in spite of being located in the provinces, will share a respect for ‘art’ and a contempt for low

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comedy: ‘there be not in it (to my vnderstanding) any poeticall Genius, or art, or language, or iudgement … or application of vertue but full of ribaldrie and of things improbable and impossible’ (1:416).26 And what seem to have stuck in the minds of provincial playgoers from Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays, to judge from a satirical poem written at Wells in 1607, now also to be read in the Somerset volumes, were not the ‘fond and friuolous Iestures’ that the plays’ 1590 publisher, Richard Jones, tells us he left out as ‘far vnmeet for the matter’ (sig. A2), but the heroic poetry, because the poem borrows this line from the play: ‘What holloe hoe, ye pampred Azyan Iads’ (2:716; Tamburlaine 2, 4.3.1: ‘Holla, ye pamper’d jades of Asia’).27 By way of concluding, I need to confess that in the course of this essay I have sometimes chided some of our late great predecessors in the study of early modern drama for their all too exclusive interest in Shakespeare. But I have to admit that while I would not dare to compare myself to them in any other way, I do compare in the narrowness of my Shakespeare-centredness. Although I have also made much of how REED does not share these limitations, I am happy to find in David Galloway’s 1977 Waterloo Conference on Elizabethan Drama paper about REED some hankering after Shakespeare. He remarked that ‘with so many provincial records unavailable … we should not abandon hope of finding some names – even, perhaps, the names of some of Shakespeare’s plays – until the records of REED are complete.’ 28 He may then have shared my delight in David George’s discovery of the nine young men who went up into the loft of Gregory Harrison of Warrington during the time of divine service on a Sunday in May 1632 to perform a play ‘Called Henery the Eaight.’ 29 Perhaps then I have to abandon my paradox about how REED scholarship, in contrast to earlier work, teaches us about Shakespeare by ignoring Shakespeare. Rather it seems that REED has taught us about Shakespeare through its methodicalness, the willingness of REED staff to have, in SallyBeth MacLean’s words, ‘their hearts … now engraved … with the recurring phrase ‘“Item to ij minstrels v d.”’ 30 REED’s continuing success in the attempt to ‘locate, transcribe, and publish systematically all surviving external evidence of dramatic, ceremonial and minstrel activity in Great Britain before 1642’ 31 is what has begun so startlingly to illuminate Shakespearean textual criticism and editorial practice.

NOTES 1 This paper is a collaborative effort. Nicole Campbell, formerly of REED, and Anne Joldersma of King’s University College at the University of Western Ontario have made substantial contributions to the research on which it is based. 2 MacLean, ‘Players on Tour,’ 55.

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3 S. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 407. 4 Martin Spevack, James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps: The Life and Works of the Shakespearean Scholar and Bookman (New Castle, DE, and London: Oak Knoll Press & Shepheard-Walwyn, 2001). 5 J.A.B. Somerset, ‘James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps and his Scrapbooks,’ REEDN (1979:2): 14. 6 It was published in Brighton: For Private Circulation and for Presents only. 7 John Tucker Murray, English Dramatic Companies 1558–1642, 2 vols (London: Constable, 1910), xi. 8 David Galloway, ‘Records of Early English Drama in the Provinces and What They May Tell Us about the Elizabethan Theatre,’ in G.R. Hibbard, ed., The Elizabethan Theatre VII: Papers given at the Seventh International Conference on Elizabethan Theatre held at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, in July 1977 (Port Credit: P.D. Meany, 1980), 88. 9 Alfred W. Pollard, Shakespeare Folios and Quartos: A Study in the Bibliography of Shakespeare’s Plays 1594–1685 (London: Methuen, 1909). Pollard did not include the 1594 Contention or 1595 True Tragedie in his initial classification. 10 Times Literary Supplement (9 and 16 January 1919): 18, 30. 11 This was published in Oxford: Malone Society, 1923 (for 1922). 12 For a different account of the Queen’s Men, see McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays. 13 See, for example, Richard Hosley, The Corrupting Influence of the Bad Quarto on the Received Text of Romeo and Juliet (Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Press, 1970). First published in Shakespeare Quarterly 4 (1953): 11–33. 14 See, for example, Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, et al., William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 175– 208 (2 and 3 Henry VI ), 288 – 302 (Romeo and Juliet ), 396– 411 (where these editors document in detail how they incline now to the reading of the Second Quarto of Hamlet, now to the reading of the First Folio, depending on which reading is supported by the First [or ‘bad’] Quarto, understood as deriving from performance). Regarding Henry V, see Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, Modernizing Shakespeare’s Spelling (with Three Studies in the Text of Henry V ) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). 15 Palmer, ‘Early Modern Mobility.’ I am most grateful to Dr Palmer for sharing the excerpts from her piece relevant to my argument prior to publication in SQ. 16 See Shakespeare Survey 47 (1995): 45–60. 17 Published in Laurie E. Maguire and Thomas L. Berger, eds, Textual Formations and Reformations (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 45–66. 18 Andrew Gurr, ‘The Loss of Records for the Travelling Companies in Stuart Times,’ REEDN 19.2 (1994): 2–19.

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19 Galloway, ed., Norwich 1540–1642, 65–6, 175, 218. 20 Laurie Maguire, Shakespeare’s Suspect Texts: The ‘Bad’ Quartos and Their Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). I have supported her case through a different approach in ‘A Century of “Bad” Shakespeare Quartos,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 50 (1999): 310–33. 21 Peter Blayney, ‘The Publication of Playbooks,’ in Cox and Kastan, eds, A New History of Early English Drama, 383–422. 22 Gurr, ‘The Loss of Records,’ 6. 23 Wells and Taylor, Modernizing Shakespeare’s Spelling. 24 I am most grateful to Dr Somerset for his private communication of these records, which are to be published in a future REED volume. 25 Palmer, ‘Early Modern Mobility,’ 278. 26 This letter was first printed and discussed by Herbert Berry in ‘The Globe Bewitched and El Hombre Fiel,’ Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 1 (1984): 211– 30. 27 I am most grateful to Dr James Stokes, editor of Somerset, for directing my attention to these places in his work but I must take responsibility for the uses to which I have put them. 28 Galloway, ‘Records of Early English Drama in the Provinces,’ in Hibbard, ed., The Elizabethan Theatre VII, 93. 29 George, ed., Lancashire, 96. 30 MacLean, ‘Players on Tour,’ 56. 31 Quoted by Galloway, ‘Records of Early English Drama in the Provinces,’ in Hibbard, ed., The Elizabethan Theatre VII, 84.

Everything’s Back in Play: The Impact of REED Research on Elizabethan Theatre History roslyn l. knutson

In 1989, at the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) in Austin, Texas, Barbara Palmer, John Wasson, and Suzanne Westfall were in a seminar entitled ‘Shakespeare’s Soliloquies and Their Audiences’; Alan Somerset was in a seminar entitled ‘History, Historiography, and Theater’; Alan Nelson and Anne Lancashire were in one entitled ‘Theater Historians as Storytellers.’ SallyBeth MacLean and Peter Greenfield were not on the program at all. Although about half of the volumes now in print in the project known as Records of Early English Drama (REED) had come out by 1989,1 and although the REED Newsletter was in its fourteenth volume of semiannual issues, clearly REED research and researchers such as those named above had not then acquired the visibility within some media for the dissemination of information about – and analysis of – Elizabethan drama that they have acquired now that the REED project has passed its twenty-fifth anniversary. The emergence of REED research in the media routinely consulted by scholars of Elizabethan drama, the degree to which that research has become the default position in scholarship on early modern theatre history, and the ways in which REED data and its interpreters have challenged old verities – putting everything back in play – are the subjects here. The conclusion anticipates the future of REED research as a resource for theatre historians by surveying its fruitfulness in several recent publications.2 If the ‘Matter of REED’ and its scholars were scattered across non-REED-centred programs at the SAA in 1989, the same was not true in the subsequent decade.3 In 1990 a session entitled ‘Horses, a Wagon, and Apparel New-Bought’ was featured on the selective, refereed part of the conference program. This session, prompted by the increased availability of REED research at conferences and in print, addressed aspects of touring and featured scholars at the heart of REED activities, namely Alan Somerset and Sally-Beth MacLean, as well as others at some remove, namely Paul Werstine, William Ingram, and Laurie Maguire. Coincidentally

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in 1990 the REED project received its most substantive criticism in print: Theresa Coletti, in an essay entitled ‘Reading REED: History and the Records of Early English Drama,’ interrogated the premises of REED’s methodology, expressing scepticism that REED data were as ahistorical as the project appeared to claim, as well as anxiety that such dedicated archival research would further marginalize the study of medieval literary texts in context.4 Coletti’s concerns notwithstanding, throughout the 1990s at annual meetings of the SAA, scholarship based on and interpreting REED data became ubiquitous in seminars on theatre history in general and provincial venues in particular, for example, Suzanne Westfall and Paul Whitfield White’s seminar in 1991, ‘Entertainers on the Road in Early Modern England’; Barbara Palmer’s seminar, ‘Professional Performance in the “Provinces”’ in 1995; and Peter Greenfield’s seminar in 1997, ‘Center and Margins in Theatre History: London and the Provinces.’ Another measure of the impact of REED scholarship has come in recent years in the range of publications that characterize a scholarly field. One such category is the ‘Companion’ series by major presses (Cambridge, Blackwell’s, Oxford). Of these, Blackwell’s Companion to Renaissance Drama (2002), edited by Arthur Kinney, has the highest incidence of REED Matter; it includes essays by Peter Greenfield on travelling companies and Suzanne Westfall on performances in great households. Another category is reference works. Andrew Gurr’s The Shakespearian Playing Companies, published in 1996, appends a chunk of data on touring to each miniessay on company history; in addition, Gurr devotes a chapter to the subject of travelling, which draws heavily on entries in REED volumes. In a reference work published in 2000 entitled English Professional Theatre: 1530–1660, for a section called ‘Players Travelling in the Provinces,’ coeditor William Ingram includes documents that both duplicate and supplement REED materials. Of the eleven items in this section, six are also transcribed in REED volumes; in one multipart item, eight of the twelve parts duplicate REED transcriptions. Still another reference work, volume one of the three-volume Cambridge History of British Theatre (2004), includes an essay by Peter Greenfield on drama outside London, 1540–1642. Also, several monographs published recently owe a substantial debt to the Matter of REED: Early Cambridge Theatres: College, University and Town Stages 1464– 1720, by Alan H. Nelson (1994); The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, by Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean (1998); Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England, by Siobhan Keenan (2002); and Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, edited by Paul Whitfield White and Suzanne R. Westfall (2002).5 Journals and annuals routinely consulted by scholars of English Renaissance drama have a spotty record in the dissemination of REED-based scholarship. Predictably, the REED Newsletter (REEDN ) and its successor, Early Theatre (ET ),

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are dedicated sources; also, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama (RORD) regularly publishes REED-data-based essays. The Elizabethan Theatre series, a publication of the International Conference on Elizabethan Theatre (University of Waterloo, Ontario) has a good record of disseminating REED-based research. Essays from this venue in 1983, published in 1988 as Elizabethan Theatre X, edited by C.E. McGee, have proved the foundation of much later work: for example, Sally-Beth MacLean, ‘Players on Tour: New Evidence from Records of Early English Drama’; Peter Greenfield, ‘Professional Players at Gloucester: Conditions of Provincial Performing’; Alan Somerset, ‘The Lords President, Their Activities and Companies: Evidence from Shropshire’; and Mary Blackstone, ‘Patrons and Elizabethan Dramatic Companies.’ Also, the annual Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England (MRDE) has been publishing essays based on REED data since its inception. Its maiden volume included John Wasson’s essay, ‘Professional Actors in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance’ (1984), and subsequent volumes have included essays by scholars formerly or currently prominent in REED research including Herbert Berry, Lawrence Clopper, Jane Cowling, Clifford Davidson, John R. Elliott, Jr., Ian Lancashire, Sally-Beth MacLean, C.E. McGee, Barbara Palmer, Alan Somerset, James Stokes, and Paul Whitfield White. In contrast, of the premier names among journals in Shakespeare scholarship, Shakespeare Quarterly (SQ) has published only ‘The Politics of Patronage: Dramatic Records in Robert Dudley’s Household Books’ by Sally-Beth MacLean (1993), and Shakespeare Survey (ShS ) has published only ‘“How chances it they travel?”: Provincial Touring, Playing Places, and the King’s Men’ by Alan Somerset (1994). This substantive activity notwithstanding, there might still be a question about the impact of REED research on the field of Elizabethan theatre history if it were not for a festschrift published in 1997 honouring Professor David M. Bevington of the University of Chicago. This anthology, entitled A New History of Early English Drama (NHEED), was edited by John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. The essays in NHEED with a theatre history bent are revisionist in large part because of the influence of REED data; these include not only an essay by Peter Greenfield on touring but also essays by scholars intimately associated with the archival retrieval and/or the application of that data: John Wasson, Alan Nelson, Suzanne Westfall, John R. Elliott, Jr., Garrett Epp, and Paul Whitfield White. Further, NHEED includes topics on which REED materials have had a significant revisionist impact; an example is the subject of patronage, addressed by Kate McLuskie and Felicity Dunsworth in their essay, ‘Patronage and the Economics of Theater.’ Also of long-term impact on the visibility of REED research, the bibliography of the New History includes every REED volume published to date and numerous unpublished transcriptions (not to mention articles by REED-associated scholars). This fact – that REED research permeates what has become the new history of

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early English drama – establishes REED research as the new default position in theatre history. Even so, all the news is not good. In Blackwell’s Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, edited by Michael Hattaway and published in 2000, Hattaway himself has a boilerplate essay entitled ‘Playhouses and the Role of Drama’ in which the coverage of provincial playing is negligible. In the new Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare edited by Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (2001), John Astington, in an essay on theatre history, does devote a paragraph to ‘other playing places’ besides the London theatres; in that paragraph there is one sentence – albeit a lengthy one – that addresses the issues of touring and performance on provincial stages. The obviously enforced brevity of Astington’s suggestions for further reading permits citation only of Alan Somerset’s essay in ShS, ‘“How chances it they travel?”’ In Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life (2002), Constance Kuriyama has nothing specific to say about the drama Marlowe might have seen at Canterbury as a youth or at Cambridge as a student, ignoring Giles E. Dawson’s ‘Records of Plays and Players in Kent, 1450–1642’ in Malone Society Collections VIII (1965) as well as Alan Nelson’s Cambridge and Early Cambridge Theatres. Among the handbooks coming out, Arthur Kinney’s Shakespeare by Stages (2003) has little to say about Shakespeare’s provincial stages. However, there is a four-page section on touring, which draws on now-definitive essays by Alan Somerset in ShS and Sally-Beth MacLean in MRDE. In a handbook for students on plays in performance, Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres (2000), editors Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa omit significant treatment of research based on REED data. They remind readers from time to time that plays had to be playable at different venues including the provinces, but their exemplary performance is a conjectural production of Hamlet at the Globe. One conventional bibliographical tool in Elizabethan theatre history, the annual bibliography of Shakespeare Quarterly, has an unsatisfactory record in cataloguing REED-based scholarship; a relatively new resource, the online bibliography of the Modern Language Association (MLA), is much better. Armed with the keyword of ‘touring,’ students who turn to the SQ bibliography for 1989 and later will find nothing in the subject index until 1993, when Sally-Beth MacLean’s article on touring players published in MRDE is referenced by ‘touring companies.’ In 1994, the SQ bibliography indexed two items by that heading. One, the Cambridge University Press Titus Andronicus edited by Alan Hughes, suggests that the bibliographers at SQ were thinking of ‘touring texts’ when they compiled items, in that the Hughes edition raises the issue of the adaptation of the text for use by a touring company. This thinking is further suggested by the indexing in 1996 of Peter Davison’s edition of the 1597 quarto of Richard III for Cambridge University Press, the editorial matter of which discusses the issue of Q1 as a memorial

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reconstruction made for touring. The second item in 1994 should have indicated a break-through for REED-based scholarship, but it does not. This second item is Andrew Gurr’s ‘Loss of Records for the Traveling Companies in Stuart Times’ published in REEDN and thus a welcome recognition of articles in REEDinspired publications. However, the SQ bibliographies through 2002 include no further items from REEDN and none from the newsletter’s 1998-born descendent, Early Theatre. In 1995 the SQ bibliography indexed Alan Somerset’s article in ShS, ‘“How chances it they travel?”’; in 1996 it itemized Andrew Gurr’s The Shakespearian Playing Companies but did not include it in the subject index under ‘touring,’ though its blurb in the entry specifies ‘touring places’; similarly, in 1998 it itemized Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean’s The Queen’s Men and Their Plays but did not include it in the index, though its blurb specifies ‘tours’; in 1999 it itemized S.P. Cerasano’s essay, ‘The Chamberlain’s-King’s Men’ in A Companion to Shakespeare (ed. David Scott Kastan) in the subject index under ‘patronage’ but not ‘touring,’ even though its blurb specifies coverage of touring as well as patronage. The book by Gurr, and that by McMillin and MacLean, continue to be included in the bibliography in the years following their publication, but they remain absent from the subject index under ‘touring.’ Volumes for 2000 and 2001 include ‘Commerce and Patronage: The Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s Tour of 1597’ by Peter Davison in Shakespeare Performed: Essays in Honor of R.A. Foakes (ed. Grace Ioppolo, 2000) and its revision for Talking Shakespeare: Shakespeare into the Millennium (ed. Deborah Cartmell and Michael Scott, 2001). Many students and faculty have replaced their use of the hard-cover MLA bibliography with its online version. If researchers search this electronic database by the keyword ‘touring,’ they will find many more items than those in the SQ bibliography, but there are still distressing omissions. In the database for 1989 – 2003, for example, there is a healthy selection of items from REEDN: Elza Tiner’s ‘Patrons and Travelling Companies in York’ (1992), David George’s ‘Population and Players in Jacobean Lancashire: A Caveat for REED Editors’ (1992), Janet Ritch’s ‘Patrons and Travelling Companies in Chester and Newcastle upon Tyne’ (1994), Andrew Gurr’s ‘Loss of Records for the Travelling Companies in Stuart Times’ (1994), Patricia Badir’s ‘Un-Civil Rites and Playing Sites: Some Early Modern Entertainment Records from Kingston-upon-Hull’ (1995), C.E. McGee’s ‘A Performance at a Dorset Inn’ (1995), and Elza Tiner’s ‘Patrons and Travelling Companies in Coventry’ (1996). But missing is the two-part treasure trove by Mary Blackstone, ‘A Survey and Annotated Bibliography of Records Research and Performance History Relating to the Early British Drama and Minstrelsy for 1984–8,’ that fills both issues of REEDN in 1990. The MLA online bibliography includes two essays in Early Theatre, David Mills’s ‘Where Have All the Players Gone? A Chester Problem’ and Tiner’s ‘Patrons and Travelling Companies in

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Warwickshire’ (2001), but not the URL-rich essay by Suzanne Westfall, ‘“Go sound the ocean, and cast your nets”: Surfing the Net for Early Modern Theatre’ (2002). The MLA online bibliography duplicates the SQ bibliography in including MacLean’s MRDE article, Somerset’s ShS article, McMillin and MacLean’s The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, but not Gurr’s Shakespearian Playing Companies. It duplicates the SQ bibliography in Peter Davison’s ‘Patronage and Commerce: The Lord Chamberlain’s Tour in 1597’ but not its revision. New to this search engine and welcome are Peter Greenfield’s ‘Touring’ in NHEED, William Ingram’s ‘Costs of Touring’ in MRDE (1993), and Paul Werstine’s ‘Touring and the Construction of Shakespeare Textual Criticism’ in Textual Formations and Reformations (ed. Laurie E. Maguire and Thomas L. Berger, 1998).6 Thus, between the SQ bibliography, and the MLA online bibliography, researchers will get plenty of leads to publications based on the Matter of REED, as well as the names of the scholars responsible for its dissemination, but neither resource provides all of the important scholarship. And neither includes the REED volumes themselves, crucial to any new work on provincial issues. Even though the bibliographic climate has not been ideal, scholars associated with REED and their research have profoundly affected the field of Elizabethan theatre history. Here, in an admittedly superficial way, is a survey of topics on which REED data and REED-based research have encouraged theatre historians to rethink their sense of just about everything. Perhaps the broadest of these topics is that of playing venues. At the inception of the REED project a quarter-century ago, most theatre historians referred confidently to ‘the village green,’ an innyard, or some hastily constructed scaffold in the street as the site where provincial players and London companies on tour customarily performed. However, such images of crude stages came more from literature than from mayors’ books and wardens’ accounts. Ben Jonson, in the play Poetaster, provided the seminal quip, in which a braggart captain browbeats a player about hiring an unemployed playwright. Tucca, the captain, says, ‘If he [the playwright] pen for thee [the player and his company] once, thou shalt not need to travel with thy pumps full of gravel any more after a blind jade and a hamper, and stalk upon boards and barrel heads to an old cracked trumpet.’ 7 The impact of REED scholarship has been to expand the list of provincial playing places beyond Jonson’s ‘boards and barrel heads.’ Peter Greenfield provides an overview of those places in his essay on touring in the Cox and Kastan New History of Early English Drama. Greenfield lists ‘halls of noble households, churches, churchyards, streets, [indoors at] inns, private houses, and even a purpose-built theater’ in Bristol (264); he also revises our sense of priority among these places by adding that the ‘most common location for a touring performance … was the town hall’ (264). Demonstrating both the variety and significance of provincial

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venues, Siobhan Keenan organizes her survey of professional touring in Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England by way of chapters devoted to categories of playing places. Focusing on households, Suzanne Westfall provides an overview of household drama generally in ‘“A Commonty a Christmas gambold or a tumbling trick”: Household Theater,’ for NHEED. Alison Findlay, Lisa Hopkins, and Barbara Palmer explore specific great houses as sites. A sample of their scholarship includes Findlay’s ‘“She gave you the civility of the house”: Household Performance in The Concealed Fancies,’ in Readings in Renaissance Women’s Drama (ed. S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, 1996); Hopkins’s ‘Play Houses: Drama at Bolsover and Welbeck,’ Early Theatre (1999); and Palmer’s ‘Playing Indoors: Blackfriars and the Gentry Great Hall [Hatfield House],’ Blackfriars Conference, Staunton, VA (October 2001). John Wasson, in ‘The English Church as Theatrical Space’ (NHEED), shows the frequency and ordinariness of English churches as performance spaces for professional players. Alan Nelson and John Elliott address schools as sites in NHEED essays collected under the rubric, ‘The Universities,’ and entitled ‘Early Staging in Cambridge’ and ‘Early Staging in Oxford,’ respectively. In Early Cambridge Theatres: College, University, and Town Stages, 1464–1720 (1994), Nelson discusses more fully the architectural demands of performance at various town and gown playing places. In The Queen’s Men and Their Plays Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean enumerate and describe the sites where the Queen’s Men performed; those sites, illustrated with exterior and interior photographs and floor plans, include the Leicester Guildhall, the Norwich Common Hall, the York Common Hall, the Sherborne church house in Dorset, Christ Church Hall at Oxford, and Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire. Thus, in addition to expanding our notion of how many different sites were in use for provincial playing, the REED data and researchers have called attention to the indoor space as the norm. Scholars such as Andrew Gurr are therefore in an awkward position when they argue that a London playing company such as the King’s Men actually preferred their Blackfriars playhouse to the Globe, because the Blackfriars was an indoor house,8 for the corollary of that argument, which Gurr himself does not pursue, is that the King’s Men would also have preferred touring because in the provinces they would play in indoor spaces. That concept – that a company would have ‘preferred touring’ because of the playing spaces available to them – would have seemed ludicrous to theatre historians before the Matter of REED showed how the idea might be credible. After playing spaces, perhaps the greatest impact of REED data and research on Shakespearean theatre history has been in terms of playing companies. In the pioneering two-volume English Dramatic Companies, 1558 –1642 (1910), John Tucker Murray identified scores of companies hitherto unknown; the REED research has identified more, added data, and provided context for the operation

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of those companies. Whereas Murray organized his sections by companies, the organization in REED volumes by chronology and location has shown how seamlessly the London-based companies – with their fancy repertories and experienced players – blended in with an already busy schedule of theatrical activity throughout the year in provincial towns. For example, in Coventry in 1583, ‘Lord Mungeys [Mountjoy’s] players’ were listed in the accounts of the wardens alongside players with patrons of higher rank and London visibility such as the earl of Sussex and earl of Oxford (these accounts were audited in November but covered the year previous).9 In 1589–90 in Gloucester, the relatively obscure company of Lord Beauchamp appears in a list of payments along with the Admiral’s Men,10 who enjoyed considerable visibility in London, perhaps at James Burbage’s Theatre, no doubt because they had recently acquired the talents of Edward Alleyn and plays by Christopher Marlowe. It is not an exaggeration to say that REED data and the resulting scholarship have accomplished the near-impossible, and that is a paradigm shift from dramatists and plays to companies and repertories. The Queen’s Men and Their Plays is evidence of and model for this shift, integrating the commerce of the company with the political motives of their patron. As McMillin and MacLean show, the key to the success of both was the dual venues of London and the provinces, combined with a repertory that promoted nationalism and Protestantism. Incorporating the map of tour routes developed by MacLean from REED records of performance, McMillin and MacLean show that life on the road for the Queen’s Men was purposeful and profitable. The histories soon to be written of Tudor and Stuart player organizations will have to address an aspect of company life made de rigeur by REED, namely, touring. Another impact of REED data and research is to make theatre historians pay more attention to who the patrons of companies were, why they were patrons, and what their patronage meant besides a livery and a licence to play. REED scholars have taught us that the far-reaching effect of the companies maintained by the lesser lords, and even the greater ones, was not in performances at the Tudor court but at towns and great houses in the provinces. Peter Greenfield and Alan Somerset are examples of REED scholars who have shown (respectively) that noblemen such as Lord Berkeley and holders of the office of lord president of the Council in the Marches of Wales were more interested in maintaining companies at some periods of their lives than at others and that the standing of the lord at court as well as his residences in London and the country influenced the frequency and circuits of his company’s touring.11 Thus REED data and research have expanded our understanding of and appreciation for the politics of playing, as further evidenced by the essay on patrons by Mary Blackstone in Elizabethan Theatre X and the discussion by McMillin and MacLean of the roles of Sir Francis Walsingham and the earl of Leicester in the formative charge of the Queen’s Men.

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The most recent harvest of REED-based scholarship on patronage is Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, edited by Paul W. White and Suzanne R. Westfall. A measure of the impact of REED is evident in the presence of essays by scholars at the heart of the REED project such as Alexandra F. Johnston and Sally-Beth MacLean, as well as those long identified with REED such as the editors and Mary Blackstone, but, by their very inclusion in the volume, the influence extends to scholars not previously associated with REED-based research such as Leeds Barroll, David Bevington, and Milla Riggio.12 Furthermore, the REED research on patrons combines with that of venues to revise our idea of provincial audiences. When we thought that such plays were revised and abbreviated for performance on the village green, we thought as well that their audience was made up largely of the village idiots. Now, due to the Matter of REED, we know that while one idiot or two might have swelled their crowd, the players expected the political and social elite of a town to attend their shows: the mayor and his council, commercial wheelers and dealers in the community, and the members and guests of noble households. Such an alteration of the composition of audience affects our sense of everything, including playing places, companies, repertories, and texts. On issues of repertory, text, and commerce, the data of REED has been either too quiet or too coy. Theatre historians would like to follow a company such as Pembroke’s Men in the spring and summer of 1593 and be able to tell from the evidence of their performances what they played on tour and why they broke up sometime in the middle of July, as Philip Henslowe indicated that they did in a letter to his son-in-law, Edward Alleyn, in September 1593.13 Pembroke’s Men have been famously associated with several so-called bad quartos, the category of text that scholars still too often assume was the staple of touring companies. The REED data, in part by rarely providing the title (or hint of a title) of texts played by provincial and touring companies, will not allow us to settle issues about the nature of the tour text (if there was such a thing). It will not tell us how many or what kind of texts were performed by provincial companies, or what repertory a London-based company took on tour. In the one case where a document does name a play – that is, a letter from Edward Alleyn to his wife, Joan, written from Bristol and putatively dated 1 August 1593, in which Alleyn refers to a performance of the now-lost play, ‘Harry of Cornwall’ – the surviving records from Bristol do not have a corroborating entry. In scholarship complementing the revisionist work of REED researchers, textual scholars are interrogating the premises on which texts were labelled memorial reconstructions and/or revisions specifically for touring. Scott McMillin has studied the doubling patterns of short versions of a given text, not always finding – as in the case of The First Contention, one of Pembroke’s so-called bad quartos – that abbreviation makes a text more tour-worthy.14

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Laurie E. Maguire, in Shakespearean Suspect Texts, reduces the number of plays in the category of memorial reconstruction by three-fourths, taking in this reduction most of the texts that we have thought were flawed because they were tour versions.15 Paul Werstine, in ‘Touring and the Construction of Shakespeare Textual Criticism,’ examines the persistence of the belief arising in the early twentieth century out of scholarship by A.W. Pollard, J. Dover Wilson, and W.W. Greg that the ‘bad quartos,’ renamed ‘suspect texts’ by Maguire, were constructed by players from memory specifically to be played on tour.16 As Werstine shows, scholars whose own research exposes the errancy of this belief still cling to parts of it. Some ideas are too powerful even for REED scholarship to dislodge. Several pieces of recent scholarship bode well for the continuing positive impact of REED data and research on the discipline of Elizabethan theatre history. One is an essay by Peter Davison entitled ‘Commerce and Patronage: The Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s Tour of 1597,’ published in 2000 in a festschrift for Professor Reginald Foakes edited by Grace Ioppolo (cited previously). Davison returns to the records of Marlborough, a popular town for London-based touring companies, and observes (as do many REED scholars on playing venues) that the ‘attraction of Marlborough was … the neighboring great estates, specifically Tottenham House … owned by the Earl of Hertford … and Wilton,’ home of the earl of Pembroke.17 But he notes in addition that among the nondramatic records of Marlborough are entries showing ‘that the Lord Chief Justice, Sir John Popham, was provided with wine in 1597’ and another payment was made ‘for his “diet” at the Michaelmas Sessions’ (65). Davison asks whether the Chamberlain’s Men might have played at Justice Popham’s own house, Littlecote, just east of Marlborough. Davison’s contribution here is to include a member of the London justice system in the category of privileged noblemen who attracted London-based companies to their country homes for a performance. In addition, he addresses an implication of the criticism of Theresa Coletti (for one) that scholars using the REED volumes might be tempted not to contextualize the data they find therein. Another fruitful use of REED scholarship is Tiffany Stern’s Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (2000). In the chapter, ‘Rehearsal in the Theatres of Peter Quince and Ben Jonson,’ Stern traces not only the term ‘rehearsal’ but also the descriptions of theatrical preparation in a range of primary sources, prominent among which are the volumes in the REED series. What is salutary is her extraction of REED data to serve an argument that implies the application of provincial theatrical practice to theatrical practice generally. Stern gets value on points of language as well as procedure; for example, she points out that ‘rehearse’ was a noun in Coventry records from 1450 (the earliest date in the OED is 1490), and that companies prepared their performances in a very short time, perhaps even without all players present.18 A third exemplar of REED data in use is ‘Theatre without Drama:

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Reading REED’ by Peter Holland. At one level, the paper is an assessment of the influence of REED research, as is this essay, and like the author here, Holland represents the spread of REED influence among scholars who have not been archivists and editors with the project. Like Davison, Holland emphasizes the larger context of REED data, for example, in the revelry known as the ‘Wells Shows’ in 1607, which is complicated by figures in authority such as Constable Hole. And like Stern, Holland applies the Matter of REED to general issues of theatre history, arguing that by ‘understanding the local, theatre historians will re-read London plays, its theatres, and its audiences as no longer being general truths.’ 19 Anne Lancashire was president of the Shakespeare Association in 1989 when it met in Austin, Texas (this was the same meeting where REED scholars were scattered across three or more seminars). For her presidential address, Lancashire brought to the podium stack upon stack of records to be incorporated into her forthcoming REED volumes on the London livery companies and Corporation to 1558, plunking them down with the kind of resolution one has when gathering a large and significant pile of stuff to go through. Her opening gambit in the speech was to identify the records as raw REED data that she intended to read from as her speech. This news was greeted by nervous laughter. Lancashire, of course, went beyond her mischievous ploy to say meaningful things about the SAA and its work, but her introduction of the Matter of REED into this forum of Elizabethan drama studies was prescient. It marked a period of seminal influence for REED data and research. As the REED project celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary, it may also celebrate the visibility of its research in digests and surveys of Elizabethan drama, the increasing catalogue of REED-influenced essays in standard research engines, and its centrality to revisionist as well as innovative narratives in Elizabethan theatre history.

NOTES 1 The following volumes were published at Toronto by the University of Toronto Press by 1989: York and Chester, 1979; Coventry, 1981; Newcastle upon Tyne, 1982; Norwich 1540 –1642, 1984; Cumberland/Westmorland/Gloucestershire and Devon, 1986; Cambridge, 1988. 2 The focus of this survey initially was 1976–2002, but I have extended the scope to include 2003. 3 Excluded here are conferences on the medieval period such as the International Congress on Medieval Studies, University of Western Michigan in Kalamazoo, Michigan; and the International Medieval Congress at Leeds, England; at both, the ‘Matter of REED’ has been generously represented.

The Impact of REED Research on Elizabethan Theatre History 127 4 Coletti, ‘Reading REED.’ 5 Drama, Play, and Game, by Lawrence Clopper, and London Civic Theatre, by Anne Lancashire, are also REED-based, but they are excluded here because their chronological frame is not primarily Elizabethan. 6 It is encouraging that the number of items entered in the MLA online database has more than doubled from 2002 to 2003; in 2002, the keyword ‘touring’ called up ten items; in 2003, it called up twenty-one. Five items from the 2003 batch are not included in the discussion here because of their remove from REED-based research. One of those items illustrates again the quirkiness of bibliographical tools. Jerzy Limon’s ‘English Players “Beyond the Seas”: Staging Problems,’ Elizabethan Theatre IX (1986) is called up by the MLA online search engine, but not the Blackstone, Greenfield, MacLean, and Somerset essays from Elizabethan Theatre X (1988). 7 Ben Jonson, Poetaster, ed. Tom Cain, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), III.4.170–4. 8 Gurr argues specifically for the preference of indoor spaces in ‘The Authority of the Globe and the Fortune,’ in Lena Cowan Orlin, ed., Material London, ca. 1600 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 251–67, especially 255. 9 Ingram, ed., Coventry, 300. 10 Douglas and Greenfield, eds, Cumberland/Westmorland/Gloucestershire, 311. 11 Greenfield, ‘The Occasional Patronage of “Lord Henry the Harmless,” or, A History of Lord Berkeley’s Men,’ SAA, 2001; Somerset, ‘The Lords President, Their Activities and Companies.’ 12 Both the White-Westfall volume, and MacLean’s essay in that volume, turn up in the MLA online bibliography in a search using the keyword ‘patronage.’ 13 In the letter, dated 28 September 1593, Henslowe told Alleyn that Pembroke’s Men were ‘all at home and hauffe ben t 具his典 v or sixe weackes for they cane not saue ther carges 具w典th trauell … & weare fayne to pane the 具r典 parell for ther carge.’ See R.A. Foakes and R.T. Rickert, eds, Henslowe’s Diary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 280. For a discussion of their touring and repertory, see Roslyn L. Knutson, ‘Pembroke’s Men in 1592 – 3, Their Repertory and Touring Schedule,’ Early Theatre 4 (2001): 129–38, which the MLA online bibliography omits. For a discussion of plague as a possible reason for their demise, see Somerset, ‘The Lords President, Their Activities and Companies,’ 102–6. 14 McMillin, ‘Casting for Pembroke’s Men: the Henry VI Quartos and The Taming of A Shrew,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 23 (1972): 141–59; and ‘Casting the Hamlet Quartos: The Limit of Eleven,’ in Thomas Clayton, ed., The Hamlet First Published (Q1, 1603) (1992), 179 – 94. 15 Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 324 – 5. 16 Werstine, ‘Touring and the Construction of Shakespeare Textual Criticism,’ in

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Thomas L. Berger and Laurie E. Maguire, eds, Textual Formations and Reformations (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 45–66. 17 Davison, ‘Commerce and Patronage: The Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s Tour of 1597,’ in Grace Ioppolo, ed., Shakespeare Performed: Essays in Honor of R.A. Foakes (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 56–71, especially 63; subsequent quotations are cited in the text. 18 Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 25, 31–2. 19 Holland, ‘Theatre without Drama: Reading REED,’ in Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel, eds, From Script to Stage in Early Modern England, 43–67, especially 63. Initially, this paper was delivered at a conference at the Huntington Library entitled ‘Redefining British Theatre History: From Script to Stage,’ 28 February–1 March 2003.

PART 3 Whither REED?

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REED and the Record Office: Tradition and Innovation on the Road to Access sylvia thomas

The broad pattern of public archive provision in England is on the whole well suited to the county-based approach taken by REED. As a result of the way in which it originated, this provision has largely developed along topographical rather than thematic lines and has produced today’s picture of local record offices covering defined administrative areas. Archivists and their staff based in these localities are often able to build up a deep and wide-ranging knowledge of the resources in their care, which they are enthusiastic to share with users. This approach may be helped by the fact that local record offices are usually quite small in terms of staffing, so that regular users will quickly become personally known. The importance of this for REED is that the system has provided relatively straightforward access, both physical and intellectual, to the nuggets of information so often buried within large collections of family archives – passing references in kitchen accounts to visiting players being fed along with the rest of the household, or incidental references to players in manorial court rolls – which in a private collection could lie undetected indefinitely. The efforts of archivists to draw in archives from their area has over the last fifty years made an almost infinite variety of material available in one place, a huge bonus for the time-limited academic researcher. Having said this, as an archivist in Yorkshire, I am well aware that the picture of public archive provision locally is still in many ways extraordinarily complex and inconvenient. However, as I shall describe later, it is through the collective efforts of the present generation of archivists in public record offices (at national and local levels, and in both local authority and university-based locations) that a way through this maze is being plotted. The celebration of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002 resulted in a rash of reminiscence including a reshowing of old footage of how Britain used to be in the 1950s – slightly amateur, make-do-and-mend, but with a conviction that, if everyone worked hard enough, the future would be a better place. The road along

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which the archive profession has travelled thus far began very much in that worthy postwar tradition of public service, frugality, scholarship, and hard work. The last fifty years has seen the period during which the concept of archives as a professional discipline has taken shape in this country, its later history happily coinciding with the founding and successful development of REED’s archivally based goals. This is not to say that archives were not kept prior to the 1950s. Of course they were, but apart from the records of government, the conditions of their preservation were a much more hit-and-miss affair, quite often dependent upon the interest, or lack of it, felt by those who happened to have charge of them. Too much interest could sometimes be as harmful as too little. It is interesting that the court rolls for the manor of Wakefield, which survive at the level of one or more per year for almost the whole period from 1274 to 1925, happen to be missing for the most interesting years – such as 1381 (the year of the Peasants’ Revolt) and 1460 (the year of the Battle of Wakefield) – almost certainly because someone thought, ‘I’ll just take that home to look at,’ and failed to bring it back.1 For the researcher a consequence of the insecurity of archives in the prewar period can be illustrated from a known local instance where a scholar has published a text, based more perhaps on wishful thinking, or possibly confusion, than on what the document actually contains. I refer here in particular to references to the ‘Wakefield Mystery Plays’ published by J.W. Walker in 1929 as part of the Wakefield Burgess Court Rolls, but subsequently shown to be an interpolation.2 The whereabouts of the original rolls, which are now known to be in private hands, was unknown for many years, making it impossible to check the accuracy of the published version. In those earliest days, much of the impetus for archive keeping stemmed from the antiquarian traditions of the nineteenth and earlier centuries, fostered by public school Latinists with leisure to browse amidst the solicitor’s tin boxes or in the muniment rooms of great houses, resulting in learned articles in the journals of local societies, and solid volumes of county history. The professional approach to archive preservation sprang from a rather different source – one which has had a profound effect on the attitudes of archivists to the present day – i.e., that the archive function is an administrative tool of its organization; and that any historical or antiquarian interest in the materials preserved is consequent upon its administrative value, rather than being its raison d’etre. In the local government tradition archivists were usually appointed, in the first instance, as part of the Clerk’s Department, to oversee the care of the authority’s own records. The role as custodian of archives deposited by other organizations and individuals was one that came afterwards, although it was one that local authorities, to their credit, usually took on with a fairly good grace. However, despite the position of the archivist at the heart of his or her organization

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in terms of providing its collective memory, the besetting problem has always been an overall lack of status, and therefore lack of funding priority, given to archive services. On the whole, most organizations felt, and in many cases still feel, that if they have appointed an archivist, and given him or her an office and stores to work in, they have done their duty and need do no more. The fact that so much progress has been made in developing the art and science of archive keeping in the years since the Second World War is due very largely to the dedication and enthusiasm of the practitioners, usually by this stage professionally qualified, who founded their own professional society in 1947.3 The last fifty years of effort has achieved a very great deal in bringing about a fully fledged body of professionals, with wellformed ideas and standards, and just as much dedication and enthusiasm as ever. What has not yet quite been achieved, however, is the successful leap in the public’s perception of archives and the archivist from the image of the earnest lady in a long cardigan, or the pale, balding, middle-aged man with leather elbow patches, poring over mounds of dusty parchments to produce reams of detailed and largely tedious information on long-dead topics. References to archives in the press are frequently prefixed by the adjective ‘dusty,’ even to the extent that here in West Yorkshire local television brings its own dust when filming in the county’s archives, to make sure the atmosphere fits their preconceptions. Archivists are seen as probably lovable, but largely irrelevant, eccentrics, brought out of obscurity from time to time, when something amusing turns up, but then put back in their box. In terms of popular use of archives, this is probably not surprising. Figures gathered in West Yorkshire show that, of a population of over two million, fewer than 20,000 a year use the archives, or less than 1 per cent. Other research shows that, nationally, almost 50 per cent of users of archives are aged over sixty and 3 per cent are under twenty-four.4 This is the barrier that must be broken through in order to move archives forward in the twenty-first century. A genuine crossroads has been reached, but a point where a decision must be made not just to take one road, but to go in a number of new directions at once. In the course of the journey so far those who work in archives have acquired a devoted following among users – people who appreciate the personal attention and depth of specialist knowledge which can be found in the archives. In travelling on, and looking to new horizons, the archives profession must be careful also to take these traditional supporters along with it. The future needs to be not just bigger, but better for everyone. The catalyst for this change is primarily technological, the last twenty years having seen immense improvement in potential for access to information as a result of computerized indexing and cataloguing – something which West Yorkshire archives pioneered from 1983 onwards because of the needs of its own decentralized service. Similarly, the internet subsequently opened up further possibilities,

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both for the dissemination of information about archive collections and in the potential to provide remote access to the documents themselves. A further breakthrough came in 1999 with the publication of Government Policy on Archives. Before this time, archives on a national scale had never been the subject of an overall government policy; what was lacking was a coordinating view – a sense of direction implying commitment at a high level. A particular problem had been the piecemeal growth of archive legislation and the permissive, rather than statutory, nature of its requirements. Archives are, or have been, governed by, among others, the Lord Chancellor, the Master of the Rolls, the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (now superseded), and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. Professional advice was originally offered by the Public Record Office and the Historical Manuscripts Commission. Now, however, it comes from The National Archives, formed in April 2003, when a further government initiative brought these two bodies together, with the Keeper of Public Records taking on the additional office of sole Historical Manuscripts Commissioner.5 At last the government recognized what archivists have known all along: that record keeping is a vital activity for everyone – ‘all human life is there’ – and that many of the policy objectives the government has set itself cannot be achieved without a bedrock of archival provision. These objectives, set out in the 1999 policy document, may be summarized as: public access for everyone to unique and irreplaceable primary sources; modernization of public services through proper management of digital records; open and accountable government encompassing the creation of reliable records and arrangements for their retrieval when required, whether through the establishment of policies for freedom of information and data protection or, in general, more open government; education for schoolchildren, students, and lifelong learners; social inclusion providing access to information for all, irrespective of income; economic regeneration based on the fact that archives contain information of use to business, creative industries, and tourism; and regionalism, that is, establishing stronger regional groupings for the cultural sector, including archives.6 A new strategic body, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (formerly known as Resource), was set up in April 2000 as successor to the Museums and Galleries Commission and the Library and Information Commission. The new Council has been at work formulating action plans and offering support and advice both to government and to the museum, library, and archive sector to enable it to begin implementing the stated objectives. The inclusion of archives alongside libraries and museums in all this strategic planning is crucial to the successful achievement of greater support and recognition of the archival role. The government is determined to break down existing barriers between the three domains; these can be very real, as there certainly has been rivalry, misunderstanding, and duplication of effort in the past.

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Here in Yorkshire we have embraced this concept of cross-domain working with open arms, and the new Yorkshire regional Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (YMLAC) was one of the first tranche of such bodies to come into existence in November 2002. What we as archivists have to do, though, is keep our end up, as both museum and library interests are so much more prominent that, if we don’t, we could sink without trace. The other point that we must bear in mind, in welcoming the support for our contribution to the cultural life of the nation, is to remember our origins (as said earlier) and continue to provide for administrative needs as well. The existence of a stated government policy, with its emphasis on the importance of record keeping for organizations, and on its new legislative requirements for information audit, should help preserve this balance. There are even plans for national archives legislation in the next couple of years, to replace the bewildering array of rather unsatisfactory laws which operate at present. If this were done properly, comprehensively, to cover archives in public and private hands, with sufficient rigour actually to require, rather than simply allow, proper provision to be made (and with definition of what ‘proper’ means), it would be of huge benefit. Encouragingly, a public consultation document was issued during 2003, so there is hope for some progress. Turning to practicalities, the main catalyst for change, as said above, was technological. However, there is also another vital ingredient without which the archive world would be largely unable to develop the potential benefits offered by information and communication technology (ICT), and that, of course, is funding. Archives are now firmly embedded in a bidding culture, chiefly to bodies such as the Higher Education Funding Council (for university-based archives) or to the National Lottery. Provision of such grant aid is the principal route by which increased government support for its objectives of social inclusion, lifelong learning, and seamless service can be delivered where it is needed. Examples of progress which has been made locally here in Yorkshire include the Access to Archives project, entitled ‘Yorkshire Signpost,’ which West Yorkshire Archive Service led on behalf of the region as a whole. Access to Archives (A2A) is one part of the growing national archives network of online information about archive collections – complementary to the ‘Archives Hub’ for higher education bodies and the Scottish, Welsh, and London networks. It is administered and coordinated by a central team, based at The National Archives in London and funded by the government’s ‘Invest to Save’ budget. This team arranges the mounting of data supplied by various archival organizations. Every English region has devised at least one project, mostly based on particular themes, and aims to make available detailed catalogues of collections of source material relating to those themes: for example, the South East Region’s ‘From Landlord to Labourer,’ or the North East’s ‘Picks and Pistons’ on industrial sources. The idea is that the typescript catalogues are submitted to

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the central team, who dispatch them to Mauritius to be economically rekeyed in a format suitable for mounting on the internet. The funding for each local project has come mainly from the Heritage Lottery Fund, although partnership and participant contributions are also needed. Needless to say, here in Yorkshire we did things a bit differently. The Regional Archives Council discussed at length what would be most useful for researchers in this part of the world, and decided that by far the best use of such a project would be a comprehensive ‘one-stop shop’ guide to archives throughout the region, whatever kind of repository they are in – whether archive, museum, or library – so that users can see at a glance where they need to go for a particular record. Without such a finding aid the complexity of archive provision in this area, where boundaries and jurisdictions have changed so much and so bafflingly over the centuries, could easily defeat all but the most dogged of researchers. It took some doggedness on our own part to persuade the central team to let us do this, as the collections would clearly have varying levels of detail, each requiring its own rekeying criteria. However, a flexible approach was taken, and we were able to set up ‘Yorkshire Signpost’ with £147,000 (75 per cent of requirement) of Heritage Lottery funding in July 2001. Work was completed in 2003. In addition to the retroconversion of existing guides, time has been spent searching out new information and preparing it to international standard in electronic format for direct mounting on the internet. The information is available on the A2A section of The National Archives web site, and can be searched by keyword or phrase, focused indexes and dates, theme, location of records, or region.7 Projects like A2A (and our own Archive Listings Access Project, which earlier did the same sort of thing just for West Yorkshire, also with Heritage Lottery funding) are rapidly increasing the availability of information about archives.8 But what about the archives themselves? The next logical step is the digitization of images of the actual documents to provide remote access. This can be done at a number of levels, more or less mediated. The New Opportunities Fund (NOF, subsequently renamed The Big Lottery Fund), another arm of the National Lottery, has encouraged the development of bulk digitization of archive and specialist library materials, and has seen an enthusiastic take-up from all over the country. Again, bids have had to be themed. All the projects have snappy titles, designed to fire the imagination of the assessors. In West Yorkshire we have been involved in two NOF projects (totalling in value almost half a million pounds): one with The National Archives on immigration, entitled ‘Moving Here: 200 Years of Migration to England’; and the other on women’s history, entitled ‘From History to Her Story: Yorkshire Women’s Lives Online, 1100 to the Present.’ 9 The theme imposes an element of selectivity on what is digitized. However, it is not such a straitjacket as it might seem, as the underlying

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emphasis is on bulk. Even though, for example, a series of West Riding Lunatic Asylum casebooks might be included for the light they throw on the social conditions of women in the nineteenth century, because they are a comprehensive series they are equally useful to medical historians and others looking at quite different questions. In terms of consequences for REED and for researchers in all fields, the significance of these developments lies in the opportunities for acquisition by cashstrapped repositories of equipment and expertise for the future. There is no way that most archives could achieve this kind of advance solely from their own resources. In many cases they are still hampered because participation in the bidding culture entails an enormous input of time and energy by individuals, and this may well be beyond the resources of smaller institutions. It also, inevitably, diverts staff from other work priorities, such as basic cataloguing. And yet, realistically, I believe it is the right thing to do at this time. If we miss the boat now we shall never catch up. Larger and better-resourced institutions should work in collaboration with the smaller ones to help them to participate, a strategy already actively encouraged by the government through its funding bodies, which will also be enhanced by the new support afforded by single regional Museums, Libraries and Archives Councils. The pace of change in ICT is so intense that we can be certain of very little, except that in ten years’ time people will expect to have research materials available at the click of a button anywhere in the world, and that the non-computerliterate user will be a declining breed. Finding ways to deliver this whilst continuing to care for and produce the originals in optimum physical conditions is the challenge which faces archivists today. All this is very much in the forefront of my mind at the moment as West Yorkshire is currently looking for funding on a hitherto unprecedented scale to accommodate its collections, which are at present housed in eight separate buildings in five metropolitan districts. To achieve this we have to produce some exceptionally exciting, outstanding, and innovative schemes, which will tackle the questions not only of providing excellent physical storage and user facilities but also of enabling remote access, encouraging a new user base, and exploiting the technological potential to the full. One of the spin-offs from our digitization projects will be the knowledge we gain from them. This will, I am confident, enable us in a few years’ time to offer digitization on demand, in the same way that we now offer microfilming. We also have to find ways of improving local contacts, by building up a team to foster educational and outreach activities. We need to provide a personal presence away from our offices on a regular basis, and to work with schools and colleges and with local groups and societies. We shall also continue and expand the local provision, through library and other community outlets, of original material

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on microfilm. This is already in place for frequently used archives such as sources for family historians, and we are currently increasing the range of material available and the number of outlets. I make no apology for describing our own ideas in this way, because I feel that the issues they throw up are the crucial ones which all archives have to face, one way or another, at this stage of our history. These issues are (1) maintaining and improving standards of preservation and access, without which all the rest is meaningless; (2) increasing national profile; (3) grasping and exploiting the opportunities offered by advances in technology; (4) breaking out of the ‘minority interest’ straitjacket by fostering the warmth already felt by those for whom archives are at the heart of their community, and extending this to a majority of the population. We must not lose momentum now. The practical outcome of tackling these issues will be crucial to the future of REED’s archival research, potentially opening up new information about possible sources, and enabling both the transmission of archives online or on CD for research purposes and the creation of banks of online searchable material. This must inevitably mean that research can be carried out more efficiently and economically, so that precious time for working with the originals is not squandered – whether it be looking at irrelevant documents, or searching through an enormous collection only to find what you are looking for on the last afternoon, ten minutes before closing time. Imagine being able to call up the archive remotely, speak to the archivist, and ask to look at a particular item, without the need to travel at all. Of course all this is not going to happen overnight, but we are at least in the starting blocks. Organizations such as REED can help us by taking every opportunity to encourage and support initiatives for archives in Britain, particularly now that the government has begun to see archives as something the nation itself wants. We who are archivists must rise to the challenge, grasp the opportunities offered to us, and ensure that in the twenty-first century we really are on the high road to success.10

NOTES 1 Leeds, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Archives: MD 225. 2 Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Miscellanea, vol. 2, ed. John William Walker, Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Record Series 74 (1929); for a summary of the evidence for interpolation, see Barbara D. Palmer, ‘Recycling “The Wakefield Cycle,”’ Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 41 (2002): 88–130. 3 The Society of Local Archivists, later to become the Society of Archivists. 4 National Council on Archives, Changing the Future of Our Past (Sheffield, April 2002);

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5

6 7 8 9

10

see the web site for the PDF file containing the report. All references to electronic resources are accurate at the time of going to press. The structure and function of the Advisory Council on National Records and Archives that informs the Lord Chancellor is outlined on the NRA web site . Government Policy on Archives (Cm 4516) (London: HMSO, 1999). A2A, Access to Archives: The English Strand of the UK Archives Network . West Yorkshire Archive Service, for the District Councils of Bradford, Calderdale, Kirklees, Leeds, and Wakefield, 2004 . ‘Moving Here: 200 Years of Migration to England’ ; and ‘From History to Her Story: Yorkshire Women’s Lives Online, 1100 to the Present’ . In March 2004 the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council issued the report of its Archives Task Force, Listening to the Past, Speaking to the Future; see the web site for the PDF file containing the report. The key recommendations of this report focus on increasing access, especially through digital means, repositioning archives as contributors to social and economic objectives, enhancing the role of archives in education and learning, improving community participation in archive activities, encouraging business, private, and specialist archives to develop as part of the national heritage, supporting development of moving image, sound, photographic, and digital archives, and modernization of service management, with improved workforce development opportunities.

Roles in Life: The Drama of the Medieval Guilds gervase rosser

‘All the world’s a stage.’ Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2.7

A great merit of the Records of Early English Drama project celebrated in this volume has been the editors’ decision to broaden their scope beyond the range of activities conventionally categorized as ‘theatrical.’ 1 While many of the events whose records have been tirelessly transcribed in the REED volumes had little or no staging, costumes, or spoken parts, few would deny that a dramatic element informed the choral processions, pageants, and Hocktide binding of men by women that are chronicled throughout late-medieval England. I should like here to propose that we widen still further our horizon on the dramatic qualities of life in the Middle Ages. The gains to be made by adopting a more inclusive perspective are twofold. In the first place, there is still much to be learned about the ways in which the acquisition and performance of roles helped to structure social relations at each stage of life in the past. And second, if we wish to explore the still unresolved question of the origins of the staged and scripted vernacular theatre that appeared in the later medieval centuries, this drama of everyday life needs to be taken into consideration no less than the more elaborately ritualized secular and sacred ceremonies that have normally been cited as precedents. The particular focus of this discussion of social drama is upon the associations known variously as confraternities, fraternities, or guilds. It is well known that some of these guilds, especially those linked to the different crafts of certain northern towns, developed a significant role in the planning and direction of plays once dramatic narrative cycles began to appear in such places as Chester and York in the later fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries.2 The argument to be presented here concerns a different aspect of the fraternities. It will be proposed that the many ritualized activities of the guilds amounted to an education in the use of drama,

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understood in a wide sense, to create new social and moral relationships. It is further to be argued that this theatricality of the guilds should help us to reconsider the various rites and dramatic performances which have hitherto been regarded as lying within the purview, whether more or less broadly defined, of historians of the stage. Rather than hiving such performances off from other forms of social interaction, we may better understand them as lying on a dramatic continuum that crossed all aspects of life, one in which the guilds played a crucial part. Despite the best efforts of recent contributors to the literature, the subject of the medieval theatre in England continues to be hedged about by inherited assumptions that in turn hamper a clear and balanced understanding. Two of these assumptions are noteworthy here. The first is a teleological notion that all dramatic activity prior to the watershed which is reified as ‘the Elizabethan theatre’ was in a state of evolution towards that goal. The primary culprit for the creation of the evolutionary model of English drama is E.K. Chambers, who, while he did little to analyse either the surviving texts or the historical contexts of late-medieval plays, bundled them into formal categories and a chronological sequence in which he was greatly influenced by James Frazer’s The Golden Bough.3 Recent scholarship, alongside modern performances, has done much to liberate the pre-sixteenthcentury evidence from this straitjacket, and to acknowledge both the historical importance and the aesthetic value of the earlier drama in its own right. The Records of Early English Drama project, both in its collections of primary materials and in related analytical publications, deserves recognition for its major contribution to this achievement. Yet there still remains the problem of Shakespeare. The retrospective shadow cast by the Bard remains difficult or impossible for students of the earlier theatre to avoid. There is irony in the fact that the author of the epigraph to this essay has helped, unwittingly, to create an obstacle to our appreciation of the functions of drama in everyday life. Not only do such expressions as ‘early English drama’ carry vestigial, yet insidious, reference to the old teleology, but the very concepts of ‘drama,’ ‘theatre,’ and ‘plays’ which we bring to the medieval evidence continue to be heavily influenced, for all the attempts by the best recent writers to question these definitions,4 by models derived from what we think we know about the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. And this despite our awareness of the fact that the aesthetics of the drama, the social and political context of patronage and censorship, the changing religious culture of the country, and the commercialization of the theatre all signal a profound difference between this period and that which preceded it. A separate, yet closely related, misapprehension which besets the field is the clear distinction generally assumed to exist between ‘drama’ – or whatever word is used by scholars to describe the very miscellaneous performances taken to comprise ‘the medieval theatre’ – and the rest of life.5 Granted that saints’ plays or biblical

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drama were not everyday events, we may nonetheless be mistaken if we assume that to produce, act in, or witness such occasions were experiences of an entirely different order from those of daily social intercourse. We should recall that, like other forms of social relationship, every dramatic event was willed into being by its participants, who in turn were variously altered by the experience, in ways both predicted and unforeseen. These strategic and potentially transformative aspects of dramatic performance – defined in the very broadest sense – have tended to be overlooked. It is a consequence of these socially creative and disruptive qualities that medieval drama of all kinds – whether sacred drama, vernacular theatre, children’s games, or other rites – was unpredictable, surprising, and at times disconcerting. We should note the voices of anxiety and criticism, which can be heard for centuries before the Puritan attack on the Jacobean and Caroline theatre. What caused concern to a long line of medieval critics was not sacred drama per se: in the proper place, and performed with due decorum, there was no objection to religious ‘representations’ – repraesentationes as they were called, for example, in Innocent III’s decree which distinguished between these and ‘theatrical games,’ ludi theatrales.6 What the pope condemned under the latter category was a range of secular amusements characterized by masks, disguisings, and buffoonery. Even here, criticism was normally targeted not at the entertainments in general, but at the dangers which ensued when clerks and priests took part. But the moral warning addressed to the clergy was revealing of a recurrent anxiety about the carnivalesque features of secular ‘games,’ ludi. 7 The early and often cited reproof by Tertullian 8 was taken up by a number of later medieval English writers. Underlying the critique of profane miracula – ‘shows,’ ‘wonders,’ or ‘spectacles,’ as we should say – by these authors was a deep suspicion of the ways in which such roisterous events seemed to them to threaten the divine order, either through the fiction of mask wearing or by the associated drunkenness that also led to a confusion of personal identity. Already at the start of the fourteenth century, Robert Mannyng of Brunne condemned in verse the sinful abominations which, in his clerical eye, profaned the performance of miracula in public streets and squares.9 The moralist author of the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge around 1400, who allowed the representation of biblical stories in their due place, expressed hostility, on the other hand, to the ‘disguises’ worn at spectacles of various kinds, and to any suggestion that the mere acting out of the lives of Christ and the saints could bring performers closer to God, for this was but ‘feinyd holiness’: ‘no man may be convertid to God but onely by the ernestful doynge of God and by noon vein pleyinge.’10 The hostility of this statement, echoed by other writers in this vein, was directed against fictions that were felt to threaten sincerity and truth. This momentous argument carried the weighty support of St Augustine, who had denounced the element of pretence that was intrinsic to all the visual arts:

Roles in Life: The Drama of the Medieval Guilds 143 If … it is a carnal form of slavery to follow a sign divinely instituted for a useful purpose rather than the thing that it was instituted to represent, is it not far worse to accept as things the humanly instituted signs of useless things? If you relate such signs to the actual things signified by them, you will still not be free from the oppression and the delusion of this servile and carnal condition.11

The later medieval critics also evinced alarm at the potential of diverse mummings and plays to excite passions and subvert order. It was on such grounds that the Franciscan friar William Melton in 1426 urged the citizens of York to separate their Corpus Christi procession from the production of their cycle of biblical plays: he may not have disapproved of the plays in themselves, but their profanity, in his view, was polluting the feast day.12 And that, indeed, such events had the capacity to engage with, to disturb, and to transform the lives of their participants is not hard to demonstrate. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was kindled into life during the feast of Corpus Christi;13 an insurrection in early fifteenth-century Norwich was led by one costumed for a dramatic show as ‘the king of Christmas’;14 violent controversy over religious reform was precipitated at York in about 1540 by the production of a play of St Thomas the Apostle;15 Kett’s Rebellion in 1549 was triggered during a theatrical performance commemorating Thomas Becket at Wymondham.16 We should be conscious that medieval drama, in all its many forms, could be dangerous.17 Indeed, the vital engagement of drama with the lived realities of its participants goes a good deal further than a few particular incidents which happen to have entered the national record. We shall continue to underestimate this vitality so long as we continue to think of drama as a form of ‘ritual,’ objectified as a performance which takes place in a realm apart from everyday life. Instead, following the anthropological studies of Victor Turner and Catherine Bell, we can perceive that formalized or ‘ritualized’ behaviour arises from the immediate concerns and conviction of those who make it happen.18 We may be reminded also in this context both of Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens 19 and of Mikail Bakhtin’s work on the world of Rabelais,20 which can help us to see the ‘plays’ (ludi) as a serious human strategy which served to objectify and revise social relationships. Finally, recent studies of childhood in the Middle Ages have acknowledged the importance of children’s games in the process of socialization.21 On all these grounds, the clear separation between life and drama may be collapsed. Indeed, if drama (in all its forms) is life, the reverse is no less true. A review of human life as a whole reveals that it is, in its entirety, performative. The work of Judith Butler on the construction of gender, in particular, has brought into perspective a more general truth: that the social individual, like the gendered individual, is not a form of nature, but must create her or his identity through a variety of strategies for living.22 The artifice of these strategies makes them all, to some degree, theatrical.

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To position ‘the medieval stage’ on a spectrum extending across the entire gamut of human expression and behaviour is not to deny that the men and women who, on occasion, devoted themselves to the production of theatrical events made use of language and techniques particular to the genre. Common to most of the shows conventionally classed under the heading of ‘medieval drama’ is an element, however minimal, of spoken dialogue. This is perhaps the primary way in which the theatre, in any epoch, engages the active sympathy and involvement of the audience, who are at once provoked to question the validity of one viewpoint distinguished from another, and thus identify with one or another of the performers. Whether we consider the earliest known liturgical dramas of the tenth and eleventh centuries,23 or the use of actors to display human qualities in the later medieval biblical play cycles24 – where human beings are rarely shown as wholly good or bad, but reveal traits with which viewers could readily identify – the medieval theatre set to work, not so much to get ‘inside’ characters of the imagination, as to get ‘under the skin’ of the contemporary beholder. This creative ambiguity is one of the theatre’s most potent resources. By such blurring of moral boundaries, the viewer can find him or herself made uncomfortably aware of the relativity of attitudes previously taken for granted. Moments of disturbing moral ambiguity occur in the York cycle, for example, in the ‘Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise,’ in which the question of blame is very much to the fore; in the witty refusal of Noah’s wife to fall in with his plan and God’s in the play of ‘The Deluge’; in the moving dialogue between Abraham and Isaac, when the latter understands that God has ordered his father to kill him; in Joseph’s initial denunciation of his wife when her pregnancy is discovered; in Judas’s mournful repentance.25 When Antichrist, in the Chester plays, misappropriates to himself characteristics of Christ in a parodic ‘Descent into Hell,’ the beholder is challenged to rethink his or her responsibility to engage honestly with Christ’s example: not as a remote image of divine power, but as a sharply pointed moral imperative requiring complete honesty about the personal motives which determine present action or indifference.26 That the saints, and even Christ himself, could appear in these performances as townspeople of Coventry or Chester was not a gauche blasphemy. Rather, it was a deliberately disturbing strategy intended to provoke participants – whether actors or audience – to engage with, and potentially to be transformed by, the moral issues raised in the narrative of the plays.27 Much of the rich recent literature on medieval drama has been devoted to the clarification of typological distinctions that differentiate theatrical forms: between ‘clerical’ and ‘secular’ dramatic traditions; between single plays and dramatic ‘cycles’; between historical narratives and ‘morality plays’; between shows with complex personalities and ‘pageants’ in which characterization is relatively stylized and simple.28 Yet we should beware of becoming victims of our own generic categories.

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It might instead be suggested that what is most significant about the extremely miscellaneous activities that we classify as ‘medieval drama’ is not so much the different labels under which we can group them as the common motive which brought them all into being. For if the various forms of medieval drama approximated, in calculated and unsettling ways, to the daily lives of contemporary spectators, it is equally true that medieval life approximated in a myriad of different ways to the drama. From the moment of birth (or better, conception), the medieval individual was both an active and a passive participant in a dramatic process of personal and social formation. This is not just a form of words. Cultural historians of medieval childhood, education, clothing, and gesture have contributed valuable pointers towards a new history of medieval life as drama.29 The arguments in a larger perspective of such social anthropologists as Mary Douglas (that ‘it is impossible to have social relations without symbolic acts’) and Judith Butler (that gendered identities are not natural but cultural formations) indicate that this is a valid approach to medieval as much as to any other period of history.30 As C. Stephen Jaeger has written, in relation to medieval notions of civility, ‘No act or gesture is random’; 31 and indeed, recent studies of gesture in the same centuries by Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Claude Schmitt have analysed numerous instances of gestures, such as hand-clasping or kissing, whose acquisition and performance (or nonperformance) were invariably charged with significance in the wider context of the bringing-up of youth, the formation of social or religious bonds, or the negotiation of political relationships.32 Jody Enders has mounted a convincing argument that the origins of medieval drama should be sought, in part, in the techniques transmitted by the classical and medieval tradition of formal rhetoric.33 The suggestion made here is that those origins may also be sought in the ‘rhetoric’ – in a non-technical sense of the word – of daily life, in which all gestures, and (as J.L. Austin demonstrated) all words, are performative: signs acted or enunciated as strategies employed to express a point of view and to engage actively with that of others.34 This is the context in which the medieval guilds made their own particular and significant contribution to the development of drama. As recent studies have indicated, social and religious guilds or fraternities were ubiquitous in late medieval Christendom: no region seems to have been without them.35 Numerous as they were – the tally in fifteenth-century England probably ran to 30,000 – there is a risk that we may take their existence for granted.36 As with the theatre, there is a need to recognize their purposive nature. Each one of these diverse associations was a point of intersection of strategic moves on the part of their members, male and female, young and old, clerical and lay, who combined and sustained a collective identity in order to further a variety of interests. Like the theatre, the medieval guild existed only in action. This essential characteristic is captured in one of the earliest references to a guild meeting in medieval England, when the members of a twelfth-century

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fraternity at Winchester were said to meet together ‘to drink their guild.’37 More than a noun, the guild is a verb. Through the variously ritualized activities of the fraternities, members negotiated both important rites of passage in their lives and diverse relationships with elders, neighbours, friends, and partners in business. More voluntary than the family, usually more coherent than the neighbourhood, the guild offered its participants the opportunity to act out a variety of personal and social roles, whether defined in relation to age, sex, profession, or moral responsibility within the local community. In every case we can discern in these associations a mixture of pious and sociable intentions. This intermingling of the sacred and the secular is the basis of the guilds’ uniquely important role in fostering social and religious drama. Their festive aspect earned these fraternities an ambiguous reputation. Clerical suspicion and hostility was most vociferous in the early medieval centuries: Carolingian capitularies excoriated the allegedly depraved excesses of guild feasts.38 By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, the guilds had largely won the grudging acceptance of the ecclesiastical hierarchy,39 and episcopal licences for their creation proliferated. These organizations came thus to acquire enormous significance as legitimate settings for the socialization and the religious formation of their members. Given the suspicion with which both clerical and secular authorities tended to regard all forms of ludic and carnivalesque entertainment, the guilds played an important role by offering a more-or-less respectable context for some of these activities. In one aspect, the guilds exemplify that recurrent theme in the history of the Christian church which is the appropriation and translation of universal doctrines by particular communities. Through their variously differentiated dedications and rituals, these associations gave expression to a desire for a religion rooted in local experience and concerns. The pattern is epitomized in the ‘gesyn,’ or Christmas crib, which was the focus of a special cult at King’s Lynn, where it was cared for by a guild of the Holy Trinity: in this community the universal feast of Christ’s birth acquired a highly particularized significance.40 This is a further manifestation of that dramatic tendency which made Christ, on occasion, a citizen of York, or which turned Chester, for the duration of a play cycle, into Jerusalem.41 From another viewpoint, the fraternities were formed in response to the perceived pressures of social change. At the level of social groups, shifts in the scale and distribution of the population created new configurations of settlement to which official units of administration, such as parishes, were slow to respond. At the level of individuals, the experience of personal migration created for innumerable young men and women the daunting challenge of finding new points of social reference and material support in a strange town. The formation of surrogate families of ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters,’ small moral communities bound by promises of mutual trust and support, can in large part be explained in terms of such widely felt pressures as these.42 The

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guilds also had a particular relevance to the incorporation of growing children into their community, either by the formation of fraternities of youth 43 or by the recruitment of the young with their parents into general fraternities.44 Once again, the invention and enactment of personal roles, charged with ethical responsibilities, in the guilds approximates closely, both in form and in function, to those performances which are conventionally classified as drama. The adoption of roles and the experimentation with dramatic techniques informed every aspect of the life of the guilds. Their Christian ethic, which touched both on the liturgy of the church and on the conduct of social life, was typically expressed in the declared aims of a guild founded at Upwell in Norfolk in 1327, as they were recorded in the returns to a royal survey of national fraternities in 1389. The members would devote their resources to the decoration of the Virgin Mary’s altar in the parish church with pictures, carvings, altarpieces, and candlesticks, and would meanwhile apply themselves to the generation of fraternal love and charity between one another, ‘as behoved good Christians.’ 45 At the same period the members of a guild at King’s Lynn in the same county cited St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: ‘Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.’ The same society introduced its call to charity with a reference to the exemplary story of the Good Samaritan.46 That sermons were a stimulus to the development of medieval theatre was proposed by Owst; 47 in the King’s Lynn example the parable of the Samaritan is an explicit source, mediated in this instance by a guild, for the drama of everyday life. The moral imperative of the guild had also, like any community, its exclusive aspect, cast once again in terms of social roles. The following example from London occurs in the survey of 1389: If any man be of good estate and use him to lie long in bed, and at rising of his bed he will not work to win his sustenance and keep his house, and go to the tavern, to the wine, to the ale, to wrestling, to shooting, and in this manner fall poor and lose his chattels in his default, [then] for succour and trust for to be helped of the fraternity, that man shall never have good nor help of the company, neither in his life nor at his death, but he shall be put off for evermore of this company. 48

The artifice of the characters and relationships either adopted or rejected by the guilds, which is here identified as their theatricality, was occasionally criticized by contemporaries. A Wycliffite critic of the guilds tried to counterpose the assumption of the identities of sworn brothers and sisters to what he held to be natural human charity: ‘All new fraternities or guilds … conspire to bear up each other, yea, in wrong, and oppress other men in their right by their wit and power. And all the goodness that is in these guilds each man ought for to do by common fraternity of Christendom.’ 49 Yet this was to miss the existential point that the creation

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of all human relationships involves a degree of just such artifice as the guilds employed, which enabled the individual to try out and appropriate certain roles, and to eschew others. The fraternity member’s assumption of a new identity was marked by costumes, gestures, and staged ceremonies whose subtlety and complexity can only partially be discerned in the surviving records. New brothers or sisters of the London guild of Holy Trinity, in the church of St Botolph Aldersgate, exchanged a kiss with each of the other members present at the meeting.50 In a guild at Bury St Edmunds, the incorporation of new members was accompanied by the singing of hymns.51 A society of St John the Baptist at Baston in Lincolnshire demonstrated its harmonious aspirations through the Midsummer dances of its female members.52 Commonly new initiates put on either a robe of the guild’s particular design, or livery, or a badge, to mark their change of life. The fraternity feast – a regular staging of confraternal identity – derived part of its dignity from its emulation of the ecclesiastical drama of the liturgy. The likeness of the meeting place or guildhall itself to a chapel was strengthened by theatrical decorations, such as the splendid tapestry of the Assumption of the Virgin made in the fifteenth century for the Holy Trinity guild of Coventry, where it still hangs at the dais end of the hall. The lighting of great candles, the recitation of prayers, the singing of hymns, and the circulation of the loving cup are all further examples (which could be multiplied) of this creative translation of dramatic forms by which guild members sought to work the alchemy of building new personal and social relationships.53 In the light of what is here argued to be the intrinsic theatricality of the guilds, it is entirely comprehensible that these societies should on occasion have put on dramatic representations whose degree of elaboration has brought them, more or less, within the scope of official histories of the theatre. The fact that many of the shows organized by fraternities were stylized, allowing little scope for complex characterization or dramatic realism, is arguably of relatively small significance for their potential to engage the thoughts and emotions of both audience and participants. The heightened expectations of the religious festival, to which sermons, processions, and even commercial opportunity all made their contributions, prepared beholders to respond even to a highly simplified dramatization of Christ’s Passion or the martyrdom of a saint. In the same way, given the right context for prayer, the devout Christian may respond – and, in the earlier Middle Ages, did so repeatedly – with intense and anguished identification to an image of the crucified Christ which is, in aesthetic terms, nonnaturalistic. The thirteenth century has repeatedly been noted as the period in which records of theatrical performances, specifically described as ludi of various kinds, begin to proliferate in the historical record. Yet in a broader perspective, we should acknowledge at this same period an increasingly sophisticated use throughout society of a

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great variety of dramatic practices or techniques, deployed to intensify the mutual engagement between Christian belief and life in the world. The increased incarnational emphasis of that century and those that followed was inaugurated jointly by Innocent III’s proclamation of the dogma of the eucharist (1216) and by the contemporary life of St Francis of Assisi (d. 1226). This emphasis became a dominant cultural motif (even for those, such as the Cathars, who rejected it), which informed all aspects of human life. The model of Christ was now held to offer a part, not merely to an exclusive elite of those in holy orders, but to every Christian. The example of St Francis, who remained a layman throughout his life, was a pattern of Christian life in the world that was expressed in daily action. Francis repeatedly drew attention to the parts people play throughout their lives, and to the need for these to be consciously subverted and replaced by others in order to achieve moral growth. His stripping off of his fine garments in the public square in rejection of his family by birth is a paradigm of such theatrical behaviour. Later, wishing to reprove his adopted brothers of overindulgence one Christmas, he borrowed the clothes of a beggar and sat on the ground below their table. 54 It was above all through the surrogate brotherhoods and sisterhoods of the mendicant third orders and the confraternities or guilds that such examples of morally constructive dramatization were absorbed and disseminated throughout Christian Europe. For these, as hardly needs to be stressed, are European phenomena. Regional particularities are naturally to be distinguished; but in the present context it may be argued that these are of less significance than the broader trends. It may be, indeed, that the insularity which has continued to characterize much scholarly writing about the theatre between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries has hampered its interpretation. The thirteenth century saw the Christian church extend its call to penitence, with far greater emphasis than ever before, to all the laity. It is striking how many of the new fraternities of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries laid a strong emphasis on repentance, on the part of both their members and others, with repeated reference to the salvific significance of the Passion of Christ.55 For the same theme was no less prominent in contemporary drama. The earliest known vernacular religious plays in Italy were simplified dramatizations of the Passion, enacted in a few documented cases before 1300 by members of compagnie, or confraternities; from these developed the sacre rappresentazioni, performed in subsequent centuries by both guilds and other groups.56 In the Italian context from the fifteenth century onwards it is also evident that the regular carrying in procession of a cassa processionale, a more-or-less elaborate image of the crucified Christ or of a patronal saint, fostered within the confraternities a dramatic aspect with an evident didactic and moral purpose, frequently linked to a general call for repentance.57 Instances can be cited from medieval England, such as the ritualized washing of the feet of poor people

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by members of a guild at Ipswich, in memory of Christ’s washing of the feet of the apostles before his execution; 58 the pageantic representation of the finding of the Cross by St Helen, enacted by a guild of that dedication at Beverley; 59 the play of Christ’s Ascension put on by a fraternity at Sleaford; 60 and the play put on at the feast of Corpus Christi by a guild of that dedication at Bury St Edmunds; 61 to which we must add the centrality of the Passion to the grander cycles partly organized by guilds at York and elsewhere – these all point up the importance of this intersection between confraternal and dramatic invitations to a change of life. Complementing the penitential theme of many guilds was another, more celebratory aspect, devoted to the praise of the Virgin Mary and the saints. Again, some of the earliest examples are recorded in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy, as confraternities of laude or hymns to the Virgin.62 Once more, we should not underestimate the dramatic potential of such collective celebratory performances. An English case in point is the evocative procession orchestrated by a guild of the Purification of the Virgin Mary at Beverley, founded in 1355. A male member of the society was chosen to go, ‘most nobly and decently attired,’ like the Virgin, in solemn procession to the parish church of St Mary. Others played the parts of two attending angels, Joseph, and the high priest Simeon, while ‘Mary’ was accompanied by the female and male members of the guild, separately grouped. As in the Italian cases, the scene was enhanced by a choral celebration of the Virgin.63 The towns of northern France have also left traces of relatively elaborate poetic and musical drama, orchestrated once more by local guilds, here known as chambres de rhétorique. Their lay members drew on secular traditions of poetic and musical improvisation to compose plays, songs, and poems, usually religious in theme, which were judged and performed either at feasts or on carts in the public street.64 Across the Channel, the London guild of the Puy, which is documented around 1300, was a similarly sophisticated cultural gathering, in which new compositions in verse and music by members were submitted to experienced judges and then performed in a context which was redolent of the theatre.65 A number of provincial English guilds also cultivated a creative musical tradition, such as a guild of the Virgin Mary at Boston in Lincolnshire which enjoyed a national reputation for the quality of its choral performances.66 In such multifarious ways as these, the guilds acted as catalysts for the dramatic involvement of their members. The concern to vindicate the medieval theatre, previously deprecated by students of Shakespearean and later drama, has naturally encouraged an emphasis upon the more complex play texts which have come down to us from the later Middle Ages – an attention which is in any case merited by the artistic quality of some of these compositions. Differences of scale and structure will continue to be useful criteria for the distinction of the more from the less elaborate kinds of dramatic experience cultivated in the medieval period. There is, however, a gain to be made from taking a more inclusive view of drama, which acknowledges its function at

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every stage of human life. On that wide spectrum, the medieval guilds performed a particular and significant role in the complex process of assisting their members, young and old, male and female, to negotiate their integration into a Christian society and their construction of a rewarding identity within it. The contribution of the fraternities to medieval drama is, therefore, only in part to be judged on the basis of their production of particular spectacles, significant though these were. More broadly and more profoundly, the theatrical importance of the medieval guilds lay in the fact that, within the same context of a dominant Christian culture as informed the contemporary plays, these societies educated their members in a range of ritualized strategies for the formation of personal identity and social bonds. The medieval plays, conventionally so-called, invite our further study, not as awkward prototypes of later dramatic forms, but as the forgers and the expressions of medieval social and moral relationships. Ideal contexts for the building of those relationships, the medieval guilds helped to foster new kinds of theatrical performance by the way in which they continually recast the drama of everyday life.

NOTES 1 Successive editors’ introductions to the various published county volumes of the REED project have made clear the desire to spread the net wide. I am grateful to three anonymous readers for their helpful comments on this essay. 2 A recent discussion with earlier bibliography can be found in Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, 138 – 68. 3 E.K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903). Chambers’s debt to James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (London, 1890), was first analysed by O.B. Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin and Early History of Modern Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965). See also Peter Happé, ‘A Guide to Criticism of Medieval English Theatre,’ in Richard Beadle, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 313, 318. 4 See inter alia Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game. 5 The extreme position, not merely assumed but forcefully argued, is represented by Peter Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama, trans. Michael Hays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), who in his analysis of the theatre insisted on defining what he called ‘absolute drama,’ a distinct medium that he held to acknowledge nothing outside itself. Perhaps few would subscribe to such a view today, yet it may be helpful to cite it as a marker at the opposite pole from that of the present essay. 6 Lawrence M. Clopper, ‘Miracula and The Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge,’ Speculum 65 (1990): 878 – 905.

152 Gervase Rosser 7 That the Latin word ludus was used in the Middle Ages to signify both a theatrical event and a game was first underlined by John C. Coldewey, ‘Plays and “Play” in Early English Drama,’ Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 28 (1985): 181– 8. 8 Tertullian, De spectaculis, trans. Gerald H. Rendall, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA, and London: William Heinemann, 1931), especially 242–69: the games, theatrical and others, were declared to be ‘idolatrous,’ because inviting the admiration of false gods; 280–1: the charge of loss of self-control by spectators. 9 F.J. Furnivall, ed., Robert of Brunne’s Handlyng Synne, A.D. 1303, EETS os 119 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trübner, 1901), 155, ll. 4637– 60. 10 Clifford Davidson, ed., Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, rev. ed., Medieval Institute Publications (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1993): citations at ll. 119–20, 313–14. See the introduction to this text for a review of debate on its authorship and context. That it was neither a Lollard text, nor a general polemic against all plays, has been convincingly argued by Lawrence M. Clopper, ‘Is the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge a Lollard Tract against Devotional Drama?’ Viator 34 (2003): 229 –71. 11 Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, ed. and trans. R.P.H. Green (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 144 – 5 (Bk. III.vii.11). 12 See Johnston and Rogerson, eds, York, 1:42–4. 13 Margaret Aston, ‘Corpus Christi and corpus regni: Heresy and the Peasants’ Revolt,’ Past and Present 143 (1994): 3–47; Paul Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 33–56. 14 Rodney Hilton, ‘Status and Class in the Medieval Town,’ in T. Slater and Gervase Rosser, eds, The Church in the Medieval Town (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 1998), 16–18, with references. 15 Johnston and Rogerson, eds, York, 2:649–50. 16 Barrett L. Beer, Rebellion and Riot: Popular Disorder in England during the Reign of Edward VI (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1982), 83. The theme of the performance, which recalled the translation of Becket’s remains, surely contributed to an atmosphere already tense with hostility to a royal government locally perceived as unjust. 17 The point has been made admirably by Jody Enders, Death by Drama and other Medieval Urban Legends (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 18 Victor W. Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), and From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play, Performing Arts Journal Publications, Performance Studies Series 1 (New York, 1982); Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 19 John Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge, 1980). 20 Mikail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984). 21 Jean-Michel Mehl, Les jeux au royaume de France du XIIIe au début du XVIe siècle (n.p.:

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22 23

24

25 26 27

28 29

30

Fayard, 1990), 417– 55 (‘Jouer, c’est d’abord imiter,’ p. 418); and briefer discussions in Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, trans. Chaya Galai (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 103–5; Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001); Barbara A. Hanawalt, Growing up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). For a concise introduction to this argument, see Sarah Salih and Judith Butler, eds, The Judith Butler Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 90–118. Both the degree to which the early Quem Quaeritis? and Visitatio representations should properly be considered dramatic, and their relationship to later vernacular theatre, have been much debated. But that they drew upon biblical narratives to present human characters in dramatic situations, and sought thereby to engage the sympathies of those present, is evident from the sources. Influential statements of the importance of the liturgy in the evolution of the medieval drama remain Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933); and Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian Drama. More qualified views have tended to prevail in the recent literature. A recent discussion is in James M. Gibson, ‘Quem Quaeritis in presepe: Christmas Drama or Christmas Liturgy?’ in Clifford Davidson and John H. Stroupe, eds, Drama in the Middle Ages: Comparative and Critical Essays, 106– 28 (New York: AMS Press, 1991). A combative review of this issue, emphasizing the conceptual trap which historians create for themselves by first defining ‘drama’ and then drawing into it materials which fit their definition of the category, is provided by Johann Drumbl, Quem Quaeritis: Teatro sacro dell’alto medioevo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1981), 17–72. Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1972), is one critic who attached great importance to the representation of character in the cycle plays. Approaches to the treatment of character in the plays are briefly reviewed in Beadle, ed., The Cambridge Companion, 334–5. Lucy Toulmin Smith, ed., York Plays (Oxford, 1885), 32–4, 48–9, 62–5, 108, 311–12. David Mills, ‘The Chester Cycle,’ in Beadle, ed., The Cambridge Companion, 130–2. V.A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966); for further discussion, in relation to the construction of images of the city, see Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, 138–68; and Gervase Rosser, ‘Myth, Image and Social Process in the English Medieval Town,’ Urban History 23 (1996): 5– 25. For example, Beadle, ed., The Cambridge Companion is structured around such categories. For example, Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages; Konrad Eisenbichler, ed., The Premodern Teenager: Youth in Society, 1150–1650, Essays and Studies 1 (Toronto: Victoria University, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2002); Francine Piponnier and Perrine Mane, Dress in the Middle Ages, trans. Caroline Beamish (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). See also notes 31 and 32 below. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo,

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31

32

33 34 35

36

37

38

39

Routledge Classics (London: Routledge, 2002), 78; and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). C. Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 939–1210 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 258; the phrase is cited in a recent discussion of the subject by J.A. Burrow, Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 48 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 185. Jacques Le Goff, ‘The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage,’ in his Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 237– 87; Jean-Claude Schmitt, La raison des gestes dans l’Occident médiéval, Bibliothèque des histoires (Paris: Gallimard, 1990). Jody Enders, Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama, Rhetoric and Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). See J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, The William James Lectures (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). An important collection of regional studies is Le Mouvement confraternal au Moyen-Âge: France, Italie, Suisse, Collection de l’École française de Rome 97 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1987). This crude estimate of numbers is based on a minimal average of three to four fraternities in each of approximately 9,000 parishes. Naturally, such an impressionistic figure is subject to qualifications: guilds came and went over time, and their distribution was by no means even across the late medieval landscape. See Gervase Rosser, ‘Going to the Fraternity Feast: Commensality and Social Relations in Late Medieval England,’ Journal of British Studies 33 (1994): 431. Frank Barlow et al., Winchester in the Early Middle Ages: An Edition and Discussion of the Winton Domesday, Winchester Studies 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 335. Further on the strategic functions of guilds see Gervase Rosser, ‘Crafts, Guilds and the Negotiation of Work in the Medieval Town,’ Past and Present 154 (1997): 3 – 31; and Gervase Rosser, English Medieval Guilds 900–1600, in course of preparation. For discussion of the early clerical criticisms of the guilds, see Otto Gerhard Oexle, ‘Gilden als soziale Gruppen in der Karolingerzeit,’ in H. Jankuhn, W. Janssen, R. SchmidtWiegand, and H. Tiefenbach, eds, Das Handwerk in vor- und frühgeschichtlichen Zeit, vol 1, Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen, PhilologischHistorische Klasse, Dritte Folge, No. 122 (Göttingen, 1981), 284 – 354. An instance of the hostility in an English context is found in a letter of Alcuin to Archbishop Aethelhard of Canterbury (AD 793–804): ‘illa conventicula, in quibus deceptus est populus, aecclesias relinquentes et montana petentes loca, ibi non orationibus, sed ebrietatibus servientes …’ Alcuini sive Albini Epistolae, ed. E. Dümmler, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae (Berlin, 1895), 4:448. From the thirteenth century, guilds gained legitimacy as agents of the Catholic church

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40

41 42

43

44

45 46

47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54

against the dangers of heresy. Gabriel le Bras, ‘Les confréries chrétiennes,’ reprinted in his Études de sociologie religieuse (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1956), 2:452. Stanley J. Kahrl, ‘Secular Life and Popular Piety in Medieval English Drama,’ in Thomas J. Heffernan, ed., The Popular Literature of Medieval England, Tennessee Studies in Literature 28 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 89–90. Martin Stevens, Four Middle English Mystery Cycles: Textual, Contextual, and Critical Interpretations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 106–28. Gervase Rosser, ‘Solidarités et changement social: les fraternités urbaines anglaises à la fin du Moyen Âge,’ Annales – Économies, sociétés, civilisations 48 (1993): 1127–43, and ‘Communities of Parish and Guild in the Late Middle Ages,’ in S.J. Wright, ed., Parish, Church and People: Local Studies in Lay Religion, 1350 –1750 (London: Hutchinson, 1988), 29–55. For example, Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 104; Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York and London: Academic Press, 1980), 381–5; Nicholas Terpstra, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 21–3. Rosser, ‘Communities of Parish and Guild,’ 34; J. Harvey Bloom, ed., The Register of the Gild of the Holy Cross, the Blessed Mary and St. John the Baptist, of Stratford-uponAvon (London: Phillimore, 1907), 13, 42, 69. The National Archives [TNA]: Public Record Office [PRO], C 47/44/337 (1388–9, referring to a fraternity founded in 1327– 8). Norwich, Norfolk County Record Office: King’s Lynn, Gd81; the quoted reference is to 1 Cor. 10:31. Although organized by clerks of King’s Lynn, this guild included lay members, both male and female. G.R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 471–547. Laura Wright, ‘The London Middle English Guild Certificates of 1388–9,’ Nottingham Medieval Studies 39 (1995): 123 (spelling and punctuation modernized here). ‘The grete sentens of curs,’ in Thomas Arnold, ed., Select English Works of John Wyclif (Oxford, 1871), 3:333 (spelling and punctuation modernized here). R.W. Chambers and Marjorie Daunt, eds, A Book of London English, 1384 –1425 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), 50–1; for this fraternity, see also Patricia Basing, ed., Parish Fraternity Register: Fraternity of the Holy Trinity and SS Fabian and Sebastian in the Parish Church of St Botolph without Aldersgate, London Record Society Publications 18 ([London]: London Record Society, 1982). TNA: PRO C 47/46/404. TNA: PRO C 47/39/76. Rosser, ‘Going to the Fraternity Feast.’ Thomas of Celano, ‘First Life of St Francis,’ in Marion A. Habig, ed., St. Francis of Assisi: Writings and Early Biographies (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1973), 241;

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55

56

57

58 59

60 61 62 63 64

65

66

and ‘The Writings of the Three Companions of St Francis,’ in R.B. Brooke, ed., The Writings of Leo, Rufino and Angelo, Companions of St. Francis, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 144–7. See also Lawrence G. Craddock, ‘Franciscan Influences on Early English Drama,’ Franciscan Studies 10 (1950): 399 – 415. Gilles G. Meersseman, Ordo fraternitatis: Confraternite e pietà dei laici nel medioevo, Italia sacra: studi e documenti di storia ecclesiastica 24 (Rome: Herder, 1977), 1:265– 512. On the beginnings of religious drama in Italy, see Alessandro D’Ancona, Origini del teatro italiano, 2 vols, 2nd ed. (Turin, 1891); and Emilio Faccioli, Il teatro italiano, vol 1, Dalle origini al Quattrocento (Turin: Enaudi, 1975). For instances of such collective dramatization of the call to repentance, see Daniel E. Bornstein, The Bianchi of 1399: Popular Devotion in Late Medieval Italy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993). For an example of a region of Italy – Liguria – particularly rich in the processional and dramatic manifestations of its confraternities, see Fausta Franchini Guelfi, Le casacce: arte e tradizione (Genoa: Fratelli Pagano, 1974); and G. de Moro, ‘Ipotesi sulla storia delle confraternite liguri,’ in Musica popolare sacra e patrimonio storico artistico etnografico delle confraternite nel Ponente ligure, 67 (Imperia, 1986). John Wodderspoon, Memorials of the Ancient Town of Ipswich (Ipswich, 1850), 161–3: ordinances of 1325. Toulmin Smith, ed., English Guilds: The Original Ordinances of More Than One Hundred Early English Guilds … from Manuscripts of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, EETS (1870; repr. London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 148– 9. Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, 1:395; the recorded performance took place in 1480. TNA: PRO C 47/46/401; the performance is described as interludum. In 1388–9 the guild was said to have been in existence for ‘time without memory.’ For a recent local study of both penitential and laudesi groups, see J. Henderson, Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). TNA: PRO C 47/46/448. Henri Liebrecht, Les chambres de rhétorique (Brussels: Renaissance du Livre, 1948); Jan van der Stock et al., La Ville en Flandre: culture et société 1477–1787, Notre passé 2 (Brussels: Crédit Communal, 1991), 172, 538–9, with references. Anne F. Sutton, ‘Merchants, Music and Social Harmony: The London Puy and Its French and London Contexts, circa 1300,’ London Journal 17 (1992): 1–17, and ‘The “Tumbling Bear” and Its Patrons: A Venue for the London Puy and Mercery,’ in Julia Boffey and Pamela King, eds, London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages, Westfield Publications in Medieval Studies 9 (London: Centre of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, 1995), 85–110. Thomas Hearne, ed., The Itinerary of John Leland, vol 7, part 1 (London, 1744), 37.

Crossing the Border: The Provincial Records of Southeast Scotland eila williamson and john j. mcgavin

The Records of Early English Drama project has crossed the border into Scotland and has courteously adjusted its title to Records of Early Drama: Scotland (RED:S) – an appropriate gesture on entering a different country, which remained a separate monarchy until 1603. While exporting the seat of its long-established dynasty to England, it continued thereafter to maintain its own institutions of state and its own system of law, education, and church government. From the latefifteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, Scotland was a relatively poor country, about 90 per cent rural (though with enjoyment of land more unevenly distributed than in England). Its population, while much smaller than that of its neighbour, was on the rise, especially in Edinburgh, a rapidly developing capital city. The north was Norse-influenced; the west Gaelic-speaking, and even the east and south were not monocultural, with Gaelic, French, and English influences. As Michael Lynch writes, ‘There was no such thing as a typical sixteenth-century burgh; towns were as varied in their structure then as now.’ 1 This was also a time of aristocratic and gentry antagonism, which was not always expressed through the law or in the politics of the court. Scottish kings still had to work hard to make their writ run in the north and west and in the borders, especially in the middle and west marches of the kingdom. Local feud was a regular excuse for failure to meet the central demands of kirk or state. Scotland’s trade and political alliances with Europe reflected the practical advantages of financial engagement with the nearby Baltic states and a long history of European religious and cultural relations at the ecclesiastical, aristocratic, and royal levels. While Scottish independence had been formally accepted by England, it could only be maintained by making powerful alliances abroad. Even so, the two countries were intermittently at war, with varying degrees of national consequence. Scotland’s Reformation was itself inspired by continental models, especially Calvinism, and its reforming ministers had sustained contact with the continent,

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where they often gained educational and pastoral experience. The Reformation made even more complex the relationship with England. In 1540, inspired by the interlude version of the Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, King James V revealed his sense of Henry VIII’s more aggressive form of reformation, when he threatened to send his unreformed Scottish Catholic hierarchy to his ‘uncle of England’ for exemplary correction.2 Later, Scottish reformers voluntarily sought exile across the border; but England was also an episcopalian country which never embraced Presbyterianism, and so one finds the paradox of Scottish Presbyterian ministers taking refuge in episcopalian England from their episcopalian sovereign, James VI, before he became king south of the border. By 1638, however, when Scotland’s National Covenant rejected the English prayer book, the earl of Rothes could describe England as ‘but half reformed.’ 3 Nevertheless, Protestant men, including the king, might have Roman Catholic wives; both the Catholic and reformist gentry of Scotland sent their sons abroad for periods of education, to the Catholic countries of France and Italy in the main; and everyone had to keep on making a living somehow, the mundane activity which can easily get forgotten in the heady atmosphere of politics and theology. The known wealth of civic and ecclesiastical records on the more densely populated east side of the country necessitates a division of the records between RED:S volumes for the southeast and northeast of the country. The former is jointly edited by the present writers.4 This volume covers a geographical area south of the River Forth largely equivalent to the modern Lothian and Borders regions. It takes in the Forth valley including Linlithgow and Stirling, both sites of important royal activity but surveyed here from a position outside the court – a volume of royal records, including Edinburgh because of its close archival and institutional relations to the court (however itinerant), will be edited by Sarah Carpenter.5 The life of the region was characterized by its proximity to Edinburgh and to England: it suffered destruction of its towns and interruption of their civic records (most significantly for the current project in the late 1540s), border lawlessness, and the loss of much preReformation record material. However, it was also close to the institutions of government and to the developing Reformation kirk, whose leading lights (such as John Knox himself ) were often natives of the area and retained close connections with it and with each other. It contained literally hundreds of gentry houses (though these were in the hands of a small number of families) and some pre-Reformation church establishments, and it was the seat of many of the most important political players in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It had strong economic links with northern Europe and cultural links with the Low Countries, France, and Italy. The bulk of this RED:S volume, therefore, will come from a time when Scotland was a place of shifting power, alliances, influences, ideologies, and traditions, played on by international interests – sometimes invited, sometimes resisted –

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with antagonisms sometimes calmed, sometimes exacerbated by personal friendships or family ties. It will be no surprise then that the records will show both similarities and dissimilarities from the pattern established in the English collections. In particular, we must adjust our expectations about the levels, extent, and nature of play; about what degree of discontinuity in play can nevertheless be incorporated within the notion of a ‘tradition’; and about what institutional bases of play could be developed within a country having a small, relatively dispersed and poor population. We must also revise our expectations about the capacity of such a country to give play anything like the organized audience dimension found in the playhouses of Elizabethan England. Research for this volume suggests that, at the higher levels of the aristocracy, there was regular patronage of music rather than drama, and that such patronage involved both specific instances of in-house entertainment and public engagement with the official pipers and drummers of local burghs. A lord touring the estates of his friends or moving between his own different properties could expect regular evenings of entertainment in which his own servitors or the children of his host might take part. He could also expect to encounter a variety of musical experiences at his gates, en route, or in the castles and burghs he was visiting: singers, Irish and Scottish clarsach (the Highland harp) players, trumpeters, drummers, violers (paid at higher rates than mere fiddlers), itinerant or semiestablished English pipers (both individually and in trios), harp players, and retained fools.6 Possibly entertainment in aristocratic houses, without royalty present, involved more elaborate events than music or fooling, but whether such activity will be substantially reflected in the manuscript evidence is less clear.7 Inventories in the National Register of Archives (Scotland) reveal a greater interest in the legal processes by which a family could establish itself, as seen in sources such as charters and sasines. It is no coincidence that many of the surviving houses date from the same period as these records.8 This was a landed society on the make, and the archivally noted ‘miscellaneous papers with no common factor,’ which appear sporadically among voluminous legal and estate records of southeast Scotland, may show a provincial interest in recording payments for pipers, but none in sponsoring players, or purchasing masquing clothes. It is the aristocratic family accounts or discharges which have given most evidence of private entertainment and these documents are much less prevalent than the ubiquitous land transactions. It is in the gentry context that we can place the development of horse racing, for the impulse and the ability to take part, together with the benefits of winning, were initially individual rather than communal; racing’s socio-economic base, comprising individuals of property, was less susceptible to tensions, recessions, or direct assault; it permitted spectatorship without commitment, and offered vicarious success from gambling. Horse racing could nonetheless provide quasi-theatrical

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experiences to supplement the decline in traditional drama in the late sixteenth century. Keith Brown has written: ‘The sociability and the competitive edge of racing, usually accompanied by betting, generated keen rivalry in a theatrical setting.’ 9 The power of location in contributing to the effect and meaning of this play should not be underestimated, and can still be sensed from the old racecourse of Peebles, which was from Nether Horsbrugh to the East Port of the burgh, now a modern road. Aristocratic and civic sites of power flank the course: Horsbrugh Castle on the left-hand side, and the mercat area of the burgh just beyond where the East Port lay.10 Racing was not immune from class tension,11 but as an activity it was well placed to flourish, as it did, in either Catholic or post-Reformation Scotland. It is one of the two REED activities (the other is guising, that is, seasonal disguising, often involving cross-dressing) for which this volume will have a disproportionate amount of information compared to other published REED volumes. Burghs which evidence horse racing in the region are Haddington, Peebles, Jedburgh, Selkirk, and Stirling. The vast majority of these records relate to municipal racing in which members of the nobility played a leading role. The races were occasions for the display of status and power and while many competitors were from locations close to the burghs, such as the Murrays of Blackbarony near Peebles, others were prepared to travel a greater distance to take part. In 1644 the Peebles race was advertised in Selkirk, Lanark, Lauder, and Biggar as well as being proclaimed at the burgh’s own mercat cross.12 When racing began in Jedburgh in 1625 there was an expectation that English competitors would participate; indeed the fee for the English horses was to be double that for the Scots animals. No doubt there were economic benefits to be had too. By 1637 Jedburgh’s race was deemed so important that the fees of the provost, bailies, and clerk were to be used as funds in the future for the purchase of the silver cup – the main prize in this burgh – since the weight of the existing cup was considered too small.13 The evidence for racing varies according to the type of document in which it is found. In council minutes we find information on preparations for races, such as rules for new races or courses, repairs to roads, and advertisement of the races. Burgh accounts can provide us with details of entrance fees and the purchase of prizes. The fullest records on the sport come from Haddington and Peebles, where evidence is extant from 1552 and 1569 respectively; the burgh court books have proved to be a particularly useful source as they detail terms of cautionary for the return of trophies. In Haddington these contractual documents were thus recorded up until the late 1570s when the record was transferred to the sheriff court. For much of our period burghs share racing characteristics: for example, a linear racecourse ending at one of the burgh’s ports and the main prize a silver bell, which was augmented by a gentry or aristocratic winner before its return. The nature of racing varied over time with a greater formalization occurring in

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the 1620s and 1630s. The Jedburgh and Selkirk material begins only in 1625 and 1642 respectively; in the former it seems that a new race was being established but in the latter there was clearly a revival. In both these burghs silver cups (unlike the bells, nonreturnable) and saddles were the prizes; there were entrance fees, and for Selkirk handicap weights are mentioned. Weights were also used in Peebles, showing up in one of the most informative records.14 This concerns the 1624 race and describes a field of seven horses, with the names of the owners, of those presenting the horses, and of the riders. Each owner paid an entry fee of one crown of the sun (French gold écu), the exception being the 1623 winner, John Stewart, lord of Traquair. It would unbalance this chapter to discuss in detail all aspects of the sport on which our records have given information: for example, other types of prizes, secondary races, the new racecourse at Peebles in the mid-1640s, and so on. Suffice it to say that horse racing has proved to be a rich topic and its records not only provide information on the practicalities of the sport and its development over time, but also raise questions concerning municipal control, status, and economic benefits. In addition, of particular interest in a REED context, there can be noted the similarities which appear in northern English records such as the entrance fees and returnable silver bell mentioned in records of racing in Liverpool, or the writing of articles for the silver-gilt cup in 1620 –1 in Carlisle, and the use of weights and a scale there in the 1630s.15 If the mass of manuscript evidence is indicative, then Scottish lairds seeking celebrity from play relied on horses rather than men. We are confident on the evidence we have seen from the southeast that the aristocracy did not consider players to be valuable advertisements of their power, and did not export play through patronage of companies, as was common in England.16 Scotland appears to lack this rich tradition, and the civic records of the places which might have received the players do nothing to dispel this impression. Local material in the southeast region has not so far produced any record of civic authorities welcoming players (Scottish or English) or paying them to go elsewhere, as occurs so frequently in England. A company of English players, including Lawrence Fletcher, later of the King’s Men, and Martin Slater, did perform in Scotland in the period 1589 – 1601, but the recorded activity is restricted to the towns of Edinburgh, Dundee, and Aberdeen. Strikingly, the prospect of a tour gave occasion for political argument at the highest level between kirk and king, thus reinforcing the sense one gets from the records that it was an infrequent activity, and as alien as it was claimed to be by the kirk.17 Scotland did not develop commercial playhouses, and the evidence of its aristocratic records so far suggests that a gentleman could not expect to enjoy much theatrical activity, outside his connections with royalty, or at times other than major events such as marriages or royal progresses. He could expect substantial experience of ceremonial, however, whether it be in the form of elaborate heraldic

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funeral processions like those of the first earl of Buccleuch in 1634 and of Lord Ker in 1643, or the welcoming occasion when eleven-year-old Alexander Seton, flanked by masters of arts and pedagogues, gave a Latin oration ‘with a gesture suitable to the purpose’ to Charles I at the gate of Seton.18 This last had its analogues in England, for example, in Winchester School orations, and at other royal progresses. One disappointment so far has been the relative lack of correlation between the local burgh and royal records. There were some famous dramatic episodes in the region, from the probable masquing at Linlithgow to dissuade James IV from war, to various lavish royal baptisms for which the texts survive, but these palace- or castle-based events do not find much corresponding detail in the records of the relevant burghs. Furthermore, although there is much evidence in the lord high treasurer’s accounts of royal visits in the region, the provincial records do not furnish many details. The records of Haddington mention preparations for the visit of James VI in 1617, while those of Linlithgow record similar preparations for the visit of Charles I in 1633.19 In both burghs arrangements were made regarding housing and stabling as well as purchasing clothing for burgh officials, including two drummers in Linlithgow. On the other hand, in Stirling we do get a glimpse of the activities involved, an example being the master player who danced with his company before King James in 1617.20 One misses in the provincial archives (though there is evidence for other towns such as Edinburgh, St Andrews, and Aberdeen), the elaborate royal entries attested on the continent; 21 and, with Edinburgh and Stirling excluded, there is nothing in the southeast region to compare with the detailed account of Elizabeth I’s visit to the provincial town of Worcester or that of James VI’s queen to the theatrically advanced city of Bristol.22 On the other hand celebrations of royal events do feature. Stirling council records establish prices and housing expectations for the time of Prince Henry’s baptism in 1594.23 In June 1630 Linlithgow council records a fee paid to the town drummer on the celebration of the birth of the royal prince, and for the years 1631 and 1632 Linlithgow accounts show payments to the burgh piper and drummer on the occasion of the King’s Night celebrations on 5 November. This was accompanied by bell ringing, bonfires, and drinking of wine at the mercat cross. For the years 1637, 1638, and 1639 there are also payments for 5 August, commemorating James’s supposed escape from the Gowrie conspiracy.24 One can ‘triangulate’ such records with instances from private aristocratic archives, such as Lord and Lady Elphinstone’s payments to the town drummers and pipers of Stirling and Linlithgow, on the King’s Nights of 1618, at which time they also purchased tar barrels.25 In terms of civic records it is the burgh council minutes, common good accounts, and, to a slightly lesser extent, burgh court proceedings that have provided the most valuable information, rather than the extant records of craft incorporations and minutes of sheriff and other local courts.26 The former group of records

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supply us with our information about the region’s civic playing. The earliest misrule records are those which concern John Morchoson, abbot of unrest in Peebles in 1471–2. Details of the roles of these officials, who were responsible for organizing public entertainment, are not given as fully as in other parts of Scotland, Aberdeen for example, but a study of Morchoson’s career in the Peebles records indicates that his appointment as abbot of unrest was to an important position in burgh life. He was already a burgess of long-standing prominence in the burgh, and his opinion had been sought often for the welfare of the community. A few years after his term as abbot he was to become a bailie.27 One of our most unusual finds is that of a sasine regarding the exchange of land ownership for the building of an almshouse. This is dated 17 June 1471 and among the witnesses it lists Morchoson, termed ‘abbot of vnrest in ye tym.’ 28 The appearance of such a designation in a sasine is unique in our experience. Haddington, though one of the leading burghs in the region, suffered years of procrastination, prevarication, and outright resistance in its attempts to appoint an abbot of unreason. The Haddington crafts were similarly dilatory in supplying their pageants, first for Corpus Christi Day and then Midsummer in the 1530s and early 1540s, and it is still open to question whether the burgh’s pageants were processional hagiographic tableaux, or were scripted – or even both. If these are the vain clerk plays, i.e., biblically-based theatre, which George Wishart complained would customarily attract two or three thousand in Haddington, there is little evidence in the burgh records to support his claim.29 Evidence from this burgh suggests that the early years of the sixteenth century placed strong economic pressures on play even before Reformation sentiments threatened the traditional forms.30 However, around this time in other parts of the region, but closer to the king, there were also the first substantial productions of a reforming theatre: in Stirling, where Friar Killour put on before James V the History of Christ’s Passion, drawing direct parallels between the Jewish priests and Pharisees and the Catholic priests of his own day, and was burned for this in February 1538/9; and in Linlithgow in 1540, where the royal palace saw the early interlude version of Lindsay’s Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis.31 Neither event shows up in the extant local records. The southeast volume has no texts of biblical plays or clear evidence of play cycles such as at Chester or York. Craft processions likewise do not feature strongly in the region’s records, though we know that they will be much more prominent in the volume on northeast Scotland. Haddington tried again to have a burgh-sponsored play in 1574 and 1575, in late July, under the control of James Carmichael, schoolmaster, minister, and leading reformer. Play clothes were bought; a trumpeter, drummers, painters, and unspecified equipment were hired and scaffolds erected; but the play was shortlived, blighted by political factionalism, ideology, and problems with human and financial resources.32 The Stirling presbytery records also indicate an efflorescence

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of ‘clark plays’ promoted by two local schoolmasters in 1583. These plays came to grief because they were offered in direct competition with sabbath preaching.33 There is a possible reference to a school play in Linlithgow – in April 1593 the schoolmaster was paid 6s. 8d. to give to the pipers who ‘playit to the bairns.’ But it is not mimetic staged play that figures most strongly in the provincial records of the southeast of Scotland. Other respects in which we differ markedly from the north of England are that we have found no regional references to rush-bearings, and only one reference to what seems the staple diet of the northwest of England, animal-baiting (of a bull in Stirling on St Cuthbert’s Day or the Sunday following, 1529).34 By contrast, we have much information on folk plays, particularly May plays, some of which involved the character of Robin Hood. One record from Jedburgh presbytery names ten men in connection with a folk play in May 1609.35 At Cranston in 1590 thirteen men, of whom the first three named were the authors and devisers, took part in a play reported to have lasted less than an hour,36 suggesting a structured, even scripted, event comparable with the very popular Trik (i.e., ‘play’) of Samuelstoun, written in the 1590s by John Brounsyde.37 The script for May activity did not always need to be written, of course. In 1641 we find ‘Johne Heriot and James broun in the westertoun delated [i.e., accused] for carrying of wands out of the wood vpoun Pasch day,’ a tradition (shared with locations in England as far south as the Isle of Wight) that had survived eighty years of Scottish reformation.38 We also have evidence of other rural customs such as the St Stephen’s Day creel-carrying rite at Lauder (1617), the ceremonial joining of all the village ploughs, known as ‘yokings,’ at Auldcambus, and customary January plough feasts (1596).39 Margo Todd discusses the 1619 exchange in which James Cathkin reported to an irate James I how the kirk had long preached against traditional holy days such as Christmas.40 The records of southeast Scotland bear out his claim, but they also reveal a commensurate obstinacy and longevity in the festive traditions tied to ‘superstitious’ days. Twenty years after Cathkin’s pointed statement to the king of what he knew already, the Haddington presbytery was suspicious about the town of Haddington, which seemed to have changed the date of a committee meeting to avoid it falling on Yule Day (an issue the presbytery had also raised with Haddington forty years previously); 41 and the kirk session at Aberlady recorded that ‘The Minister ordained euerie eldar In our Parochin to gang throw yair quarteris vpoun fryday Nixt being 3oole day and yat thair be no superstitious feasting bot yat all persones be at yair work as at vyer tymes.’ 42 If anything, what is remarkable about the latter record is not the fact that such celebrations were still real possibilities in the puritan Scotland of 1640; it is that telling use of the word ‘our’ in the phrase ‘our Parochin.’ Use of the first person, with its claim of authority implying opposition, is largely absent from the earlier session records of the region, and it suggests

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here the assertive puritanical mood of the years after the National Covenant (1638). Todd reminds us ‘that for “puritans” to exist at all, they must have a group of recognisable “ungodly” to measure themselves against and … to corral into the kirk for sermons and to subject to discipline, on the supposition that there could well be some elect among them, and that holy writ had in any case commanded it.’ 43 There is a burst of recording either directly or indirectly inspired by the Covenant close to and beyond the usual terminus of REED. Aberlady had at least seven ‘gysartis … vpoun hansall monday’ (the equivalent of the English ‘Plough Monday’) in 1640; nearby Prestonpans had had them earlier, on Yule Day; guisers were also recorded in Meikle Blackburn in 1645. 44 In 1647 the Haddington presbytery, ‘heiring yt ther Playidays keipt in severall of ther congregations,’ ordained the faithful ‘to use diligenc for suppressing them: And esspeciallie to tak heid they be not keipt on the old saints days.’ This ordinance was promulgated late in May of the year so it is possible that it was both a response to uncurtailed May activities and an early warning to prevent Midsummer or Yule play. 45 All this is in addition to late records on activities such as attending ‘kirking’ feasts (held after a first return to church after baptism or marriage); penny bridals, which certainly involved music and dancing, even if these were not always specified in the records condemning them; 46 and the obviously non-REED activities of drinking, gaming, playing at football, curling, bullets, caitch, nine-stones, or, in one case, ‘bogill about the stakes,’ which flourish throughout the period and are similarly condemned.47 While the closing of the theatres in England may have suggested 1642 as an appropriate terminus ad quem for English REED volumes, the National Covenant of 1638 ensured a later flurry of references to play activity in Scotland. In any case, there were play traditions which continued through and beyond the 1640s, were not susceptible to proscription, and hence not dependent on it for being recorded. For example, a burgess entry of £1 4s. is paid by the lord provost of Linlithgow to Lord Lindsay’s fool in accounts for 1643,48 and the records of horse racing in Peebles continue throughout the 1640s.49 Consequently, the editors have pushed the boundary of this volume closer to 1645, with entries suggesting REED activity continued beyond the date that allows most direct comparison with English volumes into a period which might indicate an eventual link with the mass of records available from eighteenth-century Scotland. The guising records which we have discovered for this volume will add greatly to the corpus of material which REED has been finding for folk disguisings. Our references emanate mainly from presbytery and kirk session minutes, though aristocratic material is beginning to give an alternative insight into the activity. Not only do the ecclesiastical records provide information as to who the guisers were, how they were dressed, what they were doing, and when and where guising took place, but they can also reveal the attitudes of the guisers to the authorities and

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vice-versa. In southeast Scotland guising or, as the kirk might put it, ‘dissembling’ oneself, was often a group activity involving one or both sexes, and members of the same family or servants of related families; it took place especially, but not exclusively, in the Yule season. Anna Jean Mill claimed that guising ‘was still in the hands of adults,’ and the records she includes in her volume tend to support that. In our region, though, examples of children and young people can be found too. John and Helen Porteous, presumably a brother and sister, are described as ‘bairnis’ in a Newbattle record from 1620. Similarly, in Tyninghame, Yule guisers were described in February 1616 as being ‘3ong and fulische ladis.’ 50 Cross-dressing was a feature common to many of the cases. Indeed a group of young women brought before the kirk session of Tyninghame in February 1616, at the same time as the lads, claimed that they had not been guisers in the Yule season ‘for they did not put on meinis clothing.’ The Newbattle records in particular are quite descriptive, especially about the items of female clothing worn by men. In February 1620 Andrew Bowie was described as wearing ‘a wyfs busk [woman’s headdress] and a wemen’s cot.’ A year later a mixed group appeared, having been guising on St Stephen’s Day at night. One of the females wore ‘dowblat & breaks’ while one of the males wore ‘a womans gargell and a courtchey [woman’s cap] vpon his heid.’ Although headgear is mentioned in the southeast Scotland records there is no mention of facial disguise, such as the blackened faces or the wearing of masks, that occurs in records from elsewhere in Scotland, for example, Elgin and Aberdeen. Our Scottish records, while sharing some of the aspects of English ‘mumming’ records, are more comparable to those for English local disguisings such as the case before the consistory court of Chichester in 1621 involving the cross-dressing of young people who danced in two houses at Shrovetide.51 There is little to indicate that any dramatic performance took place. However, there is evidence that music was often a feature as pipers can be found amongst the guisers. The Martinmas guisers cited before Newbattle kirk session in February 1620 had hired and lodged John Neilson, a piper from Aberlady. Furthermore, at a meeting of Linlithgow presbytery on 29 December 1613 Mr George Inglis, minister of Bathgate, reported that there had been guisers in his parish on the night of 25 December. The eight males who were named by him included William Smythe, James Gewin, and John Magawye. These three may have been pipers as, earlier in the year, in July, the presbytery had begun to investigate a Midsummer celebration which had taken place at a cornstack in Torphichen parish. At this celebration there had been piping and dancing ‘In gryt multitudes.’ On 4 August William Rae, a piper in Falkirk, appeared before the presbytery, confessed to his piping, and named other pipers who had been present. Along with Sanders Samuell were William Smythe of Ecclesmachen, James Giwen, and John Magarwye of Bathgate.52 Were the guisers merely celebrating a traditional custom or were they deliber-

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ately trying to be provocative? Those in the Newbattle area seem to have met up outdoors between their settlements, possibly in an open nonresidential location. The Tyninghame guisers pleaded that their crime was not so reprehensible as they had gone to only two or three obscure houses, implying that they did not seek to disturb important people within the town. However, those disguised individuals who went out into the streets of towns, as did James Edgar in Melrose on the sabbath day at the beginning of May 1607, may not have been so concerned with being noticed and were thereby challenging the authorities.53 That is not to say that they were not upholding traditional customs at the same time. Further exploration in the records can help us. For example, although not reappearing as a guiser in the register, Alexander Jackson, one of the Tyninghame lads, does make several appearances as a troublemaker. On 18 August 1616 he was charged with playing nine-holes (skittles) on the sabbath before the afternoon sermon. Between 1616 and 1619 an Alexander Jackson was before the session for fighting and scolding but by 10 October 1619 it was reported that he ‘was past off ye towne in ane schip to ye Ilis.’ He seems to have returned, though. On 17 June 1621 he was charged with menacing his father in his drunkenness, troubling the family, and fighting with ‘sik as came to stay him.’ Other cases against him include drunkenness and disorder, slander, and sabbath breaking by the inbringing and selling of herring.54 Nevertheless, guising was not necessarily an act of rebellion or engaged in by those who expected criticism. In at least one significant case, it is evident that guisers could expect a good response from a man of the highest status: on 31 December 1617 a Hogmanay guising was offered to Lord Elphinstone, probably at Elphinstone castle, by a ‘number of gyisseris that come out of airth’ (the nearby town of Airth where Elphinstone also had a residence). They received the substantial sum of £6 13s. 4d., and this suggests that the number of guisers was either ten at 13s. 4d. or twenty at 6s. 8d. Either number is possible, but the level of his payment suggests that Lord Elphinstone considered this an important way of maintaining his status in the local community and, together with the likely numbers involved, it further suggests that the guisers knew that he would not let them down.55 One topic where we add significantly to the English records is that of the relationship between gypsies and popular culture.56 The Scottish volumes will include records of gypsies indubitably engaged in REED activity; the editors have also noted places where their playing does not fall within REED guidelines, but it is also true that records are not always clear. However, the southeast volume does offer a fascinating and unique antiquarian account linking gypsies, Robin Hood plays, and the aristocracy. Father Richard Augustine Hay, prior of St Piermont, who, around 1700, compiled a genealogy of the Sinclair family of Roslin (partly from manuscripts which were subsequently lost), wrote of the benevolence of Sir William Sinclair towards gypsies in the late sixteenth century:

168 Eila Williamson and John J. McGavin [Sinclair] was made Lord Justice-General by Francis and Marie King and Queen of Scotland, in 1559 … He was confirmed in his office of Justiciarie in 1570 … he delivered once ane Egyptian from the gibbet in the Burrow Moore, ready to be strangled, returning from Edinburgh to Roslin, upon which accoumpt the whole body of gypsies were, of old, accustomed to gather in the stanks of Roslin every year, where they acted severall plays, dureing the moneth of May and June. There are two towers which were allowed them for their residence, the one called Robin Hood, the other Little John.57

As regards the timing of the plays at Roslin, May and June was the usual time for May, Pasch, and Robin Hood activity, and a series of plays in the same place was not unusual. For example, in May 1588 Edinburgh’s burgh drummer was jailed and put in irons for ‘passing on the Sondayes at his awin hand to the May playis in Kirklistoun.’ 58 However, the question arises whether the plays themselves were Robin Hood plays, which may be suggested by the naming of the residential towers, Robin Hood and Little John. The fact that the towers were ‘allowed them for their residence’ suggests that these were existing towers – presumably of the castle – rather than temporary structures comparable to the arbours or houses which feature in English records of Robin Hood activity, such as Robin Hood’s house in Woodbury, Devon, in 1574–5 and in Stratton, Cornwall, in 1543–4.59 Certainly in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a range of buildings and towers modified and extended the original fourteenth-century keep at Roslin. Naming an existing tower ‘Robin Hood’ has a parallel in York. As Holt states, ‘The tower on the city wall at York which appears as Robin Hood’s Tower in 1622 was called Frost Tower in 1485.’ 60 Roslin Castle sits on a steep sandstone bank above the River Esk and has a defensive ditch on one side. An early sixteenth-century definition of the word ‘stank’ is ‘a moat’ and this would appear to indicate that the plays took place close to the castle. Whether the towers then featured symbolically as part of the play can only be conjectured. The naming of one of the towers as ‘Little John,’ though, is particularly noteworthy. As is seen in an Edinburgh example allocating specific duties to him in 1518, Little John played a significant part in the tradition.61 The two towers may have helped to represent an oppositional element between the two characters, perhaps providing a backdrop for a scene of combat; or alternatively they may have conveyed a sense of Robin and John’s physical separation, as in the earliest ballads in which one has to rescue the other. The plays are reported as being performed every year. Sinclair’s death in January 1584 may give us a date ante quem, although it is not certain from the record whether the proceedings continued only during his lifetime. Presbytery records indicate that there were still May plays at Roslin in 1613 and 1616 but do not specify participation by gypsies. The scale of the event must have been fairly considerable. The ‘whole body of gypsies’ is mentioned and they were coming, presumably in

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celebratory mood, to Roslin to express gratitude to Sinclair and commemorate his previous benevolence. Whether their numbers were swelled by locals we cannot say. At the May play of nearby Samuelston in 1598, ‘ye haill countrey’ was reported to have convened.62 William Sinclair’s connection with Robin Hood goes further as his annotation of a version of Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon makes clear. 63 But the wider significance of the Roslin episode needs to be considered. Stephen Knight has noted that ‘a conflict over authority’ is at the heart of the Robin Hood tradition, and here we have several conflicts at play. Statutes against resetting (harbouring), and consorting with, Egyptians can be found in the records of both secular and ecclesiastical local authorities.64 Sinclair’s patronage of gypsies gave a certain respectability or legitimacy to a social grouping who were outlawed by society at large. Sinclair, as lord of the barony, was not only asserting his own secular authority but was also challenging higher secular authority. However, there was also conflict between the Sinclairs and ecclesiastical authorities. In the records of Dalkeith presbytery there are many instances of church censure against this Catholic family, in particular, orders (not carried out) to destroy their elaborate and intricately carved chapel. At the beginning of January 1584 the presbytery ordered the principal persons of Roslin to be warned for not attending the kirk, and in April 1593 the laird was summoned before the provincial synod for his nonattendance.65 But if the laird was, for his own purposes, reaching out to a marginalized group, it was reaching out to established theatrical forms; by taking on Robin Hood, the gypsies were adopting an old civic tradition as their own, perhaps in the same way as the itinerant chapmen of the area mimicked civic ceremonial and government in their annual convention.66 As in published REED volumes, there is a lot of information on secular musicians. At the top of the provincial pile, though below royal or aristocratic musicians, there was the song-school master who doubled up with religious duties but was primarily employed by the burgh to teach music to its children (and adults), with additional fee income from country folk if they wished to use him. Payments in arrears to burgh pipers and drummers for their responsibilities in town life can be found fairly frequently, and these reach contractual formality, allowing us to trace the development of the posts over time. The responsibilities of these town officers could include sounding the curfew, making proclamations, attending common ridings and wapponshawings (musters), and playing at weddings. Furthermore, we have records of payments to buy clothing for town musicians, and evidence for the purchase and repair of drums. In common with some of the English towns, such as Chester, families of such musicians can be found – for example, the drummer Robert Thomson and his son in Peebles in 1572, or the Browns and Scougalls in Haddington – and these men seem to occupy an ambivalent position as both civic officials and also free agents who might become temporary embarrassments to

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their masters. Trumpeters were a rarer commodity than pipers, more likely to appear in aristocratic contexts, and they might have had to be specially hired for provincial purposes. What we do not seem to have evidence for, however, is a system of official waits following the English model. Consequently, there is none of the contractual evidence for longevity, stability of sponsorship, and variety of activity, which James Stokes persuasively cites as grounds for the value of waits to the cultural historian of England.67 It seems more likely that groups of men were informally known to be pipers or fiddlers (and could always therefore be followed up by a church court), and they would be sought by whoever wanted them, for a range of purposes, some of them nefarious and some not, such as civic events, weddings, feasts, important visits, guising, or just making a noise sufficient to irritate someone in authority.68 They are frequently found profaning the sabbath, usually by serving the interests of those who wished to engage in other activities such as dancing. Musicians were ubiquitous and necessary to the varied life of the region; perhaps that is why they did not need to be bound formally into institutional contracts, even if they were sometimes identified with a specific burgh. As we have seen, the burgh records do not always integrate with other archive material as we would like, but other forms of record also carry challenges along with their interpretive opportunities. Although evidence of play and paradramatic activity in Scotland comes primarily from burgh, kirk, or domestic accounts, the country appears to have a greater proportion of evidence from contemporary chronicles, histories, and memoirs than does England.69 While this is true for the whole period before 1642, such individually authored resources are even more important for the earlier years: first, because low rates of record survival from that time mean that most of the relevant civic and ecclesiastical records date only from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and second, because the chronicle records, with their varied agendas, stylistic choices, and fuller narrative scope, offer rich opportunities for interpreting the place of mimetic activity in Scottish culture. Conversely, since they do reflect the interests of a learned elite, it is rarely possible to integrate them with the practical administrative records which are the staple source of information on local events and traditions.70 All of the ecclesiastical records of value to the project have proved to be minutes of the various courts of the post-Reformation church – kirk session, presbytery, or general assembly – and many of these extant minutes date only from the seventeenth century. As with English records, they reveal the complexity of institutional relations during the Reformation. They also suggest that play could enjoy considerable longevity because, while it might involve substantial numbers of people, organization, and skill, it did not always need institutional support. Instead it could find protection in numbers, secrecy, tradition, legislative ambiguity and change, interinstitutional tension, or merely recognition by some local authority that there

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was marginally more to be gained than lost through the events taking place. Viewed through the lens of official records, play proves to be a central concern for a culture undergoing change but does not always bear a direct relationship to the formal pronouncements of church or state. Just to take, as example, a five-year period in one presbytery area, we find in Jedburgh between 1607 and 1612 bonfires on Midsummer Eve; a minister who was deprived of office for sexual activity, violence, and guising; a man who entered the kirk with a knapsack on his head like a soldier and defended himself by saying that this was the custom in Tweeddale where his friends came from; two men who defended themselves for playing in the kirkyard on a Sunday by saying that it was the custom for people to play after noon; ten named men who were involved in a May play; women and men (including the provost of Jedburgh) dancing and piping through the town; the schoolmaster replaced for fornication; and, more significantly, another provost of the town who, with the town drummer and probably the town piper, led a great number of youths through the town and then, having admitted the actions, ‘most obstinatlie refused to mak anie Sattisfactioun yairfoir ather publick or private for the sam.’ 71 Some kirk records explicitly lament the continuity of playing, but it is important not to interpret their silence elsewhere as evidence that play is not taking place. Sporadic criticism of play invites us to recognize that, as regards the continuation of play traditions, paradoxically, no news may be good news. Where instances of what we know to be traditional play occur after years of silence in a particular body of records, the later events may not be reinventions of tradition, although they may contain changes, and there is nothing to say how sporadically the tradition has been represented in the intervening years. Many of our records concern infringement of the sabbath but how many play activities were taking place at other times of the week? Retrospective references can indicate the prior existence of an activity not otherwise recorded: for example, the declaration in Selkirk council minutes in March 1642 that horse racing was to recommence ‘this 3eir as in formar 3eiris.’ 72 Similarly play is signalled by incidental references: the only reason we know that there was a play day at Crichton in May 1636 is because of the streaker George Allane who decided to expose himself in front of a group of females and subsequently had to appear, presumably fully dressed, before Dalkeith presbytery.73 Even when we have finished publishing the play records of Scotland, that will not be the whole story – but all REED editors know that. In conclusion, the provincial records of the southeast region of Scotland have distinct characteristics. Although in some areas comparison with the bordering English counties can be made, most notably in the institutions of horse racing, there are other marked dissimilarities. Of these the most striking is the relative lack of postmedieval drama records below the level of the royal court, although preReformation societies, such as Haddington, had civic religious playing comparable

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with England. Conversely, the region is particularly rich in records of secular music, a form of entertainment that seems to have been ubiquitous, varied, and open to visitors from across the border. With some exceptions, this volume has more to say to historians of music, and popular culture, than of organized theatre. However, that does reflect the provincial nature of the volume: when the Edinburgh and royal records are edited, Scotland will appear to have a more recognizably European Renaissance culture.

NOTES 1 See Michael Lynch, Scotland: a New History (London: Pimlico, 1992), 171, and R.A. Houston and I.D. Whyte, eds, Scottish Society 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 3. Houston and Whyte state that actual population figures for this period can be ‘based on little more than educated guesswork,’ but suggest a total population for Scotland as between 700,000 and a million. 2 This is reported in William Eure’s letter to Bellendon, the lord privy seal, 26 January 1540, BL: MS Reg.7.C.xvi, ff. 136–9, edited in Greg Walker, Medieval Drama: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 538–9. 3 John, earl of Rothes, A Relation of Proceedings concerning the Affairs of the Kirk of Scotland from August 1637 to July 1638, ed. David Laing (Edinburgh, 1830), 10. 4 This work has been carried out with financial assistance from the Modern Humanities Research Association and a five-year award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The editors gratefully acknowledge this support. 5 Meradith McMunn’s earlier work on this body of material, with her related publications, is gratefully acknowledged. 6 This can be gleaned from the records of ‘Discharges’ of the family of Elphinstone, currently the subject of a separate study: Edinburgh, National Archives of Scotland: GD156/31/3. It is hard to be sure when a clarsach player is genuinely from Ireland or from the Gaelic-speaking west of Scotland, but the Elphinstone records appear to distinguish countries of origin. 7 The most recent discussions of Scottish aristocratic culture include Keith Brown, Noble Society in Scotland: Wealth, Family and Culture, from Reformation to Revolution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), especially 203–27, and Maureen M. Meikle, A British Frontier? Lairds and Gentlemen in the Eastern Borders, 1540 –1603 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2004). 8 Martin Coventry, The Castles of Scotland, 3rd ed. (Musselburgh: Goblinshead, 2001). 9 Brown, Noble Society in Scotland, 215. 10 Compare the semiotics of place discussed in Mills, Recycling the Cycle, and in Stokes, ‘Landscape, Movement, and Civic Mimesis.’

Crossing the Border: Provincial Records of Southeast Scotland 173 11 Eila Williamson, ‘Horse-racing in Scotland in the Sixteenth and Earlier Seventeenth Centuries: Peebles and Beyond,’ Review of Scottish Culture 14 (2001– 2): 31– 42, especially 31 and 38 – 9. 12 Ibid. 13 Jedburgh Council Records 1618–62, Hawick Council Offices: 1/1/1, pp. 34 (1625), 104 (1637). 14 4 May 1624: Peebles Court Book 1623–49, National Archives of Scotland: B58/9/1, unfoliated. 15 George, ed., Lancashire, lii, 44–5; Douglas and Greenfield, eds, Cumberland/Westmorland/Gloucestershire, 26, 98, 116, 121. 16 Greenfield, ‘Touring,’ 251–68, especially 256–9. 17 See Anna Jean Mill, Mediaeval Plays in Scotland (1924; repr. London: Benjamin Blom, 1969), 299–306. The confrontation is described both in the records of the General Assembly and, with different interpretations, in the histories of the episcopalian Archbishop Spottiswoode and the Presbyterian David Calderwood. 18 William Fraser, The Scotts of Buccleuch (Edinburgh, 1878), 1:262–6. A substantial number of financial documents relating to Buccleuch’s funeral have been transcribed from the manuscripts of the Buccleuch muniments in the National Archives of Scotland: GD224 (publication subject to permission); John Sawer, ‘painter’s account,’ Duns Public Library: Watson Collection, Large Folio Folder 1; Sir Richard Maitland, The History of the House of Seytoun to the year M.D.LIX; with the Continuation by Alexander Viscount Kingston, to M.D.C.LXXXVII (Glasgow, 1829), 81. 19 8 May 1617: Haddington Council Book 1616– 24, National Archives of Scotland: B30/13/4, f. 13v; Linlithgow Council Minutes 1620 – 40, National Archives of Scotland: B48/9/1, pp. 256, 262–3. 20 Stirling Common Good Account 1616–17, National Archives of Scotland: RH15/96/1, Folder 6.2, f. 10v. 21 See, for example, Gordon Kipling, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Jesse D. Hurlbut, ‘Immobilier et Cérémonie Urbaine: Les Joyeuses Entrées Françaises à la Fin du Moyen Age,’ in Alexandra F. Johnston and Wim Hüsken, eds, Civic Ritual and Drama (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 125– 42. 22 Klausner, ed., Herefordshire/Worcestershire, pp. 425–44, and Pilkinton, ed., Bristol, pp. 173 – 95. 23 Stirling Fragmentary Council Records 1561–97 [and] 1608, Stirling Council Archives: B66/15/5, ff. 9 – 9v. 24 Linlithgow Council Minutes 1620–40, National Archives of Scotland: B48/9/1, p. 190; Linlithgow Burgh Treasurer’s Accounts, National Archives of Scotland: 1630 – 54, B48/13/1, pamphlets 1630 –1, 1631– 2; 1636–7, B48/13/2; 1637– 8, B48/13/3; 1638 – 9, B48/13/4 – all unfoliated.

174 Eila Williamson and John J. McGavin 25 Elphinstone family of Carberry, Discharges 1616–19, National Archives of Scotland: GD156/31/3, ff. [139v], [140], and [155]. 26 Some types of record, most notably protocol books, sasine books (land transfer records), legal instruments of various kinds, and rentals are clearly unproductive for REED purposes, but the value of wills and testaments is still to be tested for Scotland, given the presence of some musical instruments in English wills. See Baldwin, Paying the Piper, 64, 78, 95– 6, 102 –5, 135– 6, 138 –9, 187– 94. 27 Eila Williamson, ‘Drama and Entertainment in Peebles in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,’ Medieval English Theatre 22 (2000): 127–44, especially 128–30. There was a limit, of course: Francis Bothwell used aristocratic patronage to get out of being Little John in Edinburgh, the earl of Arran asserting that Bothwell was a man to be ‘vsit hiear and gravar materis’ (Mill, Mediaeval Plays in Scotland, 220). 28 Peebles Court and Council Book, National Archives of Scotland: B58/8/1, f. 82. 29 David Calderwood, The History of the Kirk of Scotland, ed. Thomas Thomson (Edinburgh, 1842), 1:192–3. 30 In this respect Scottish evidence contrasts with that cited for England in Johnston, ‘English Community Drama in Crisis: 1535–80.’ 31 The reference to Killour’s play comes from John Knox, and is quoted in Mill, Mediaeval Plays in Scotland, 291. The documentation relating to the Linlithgow interlude is published in Greg Walker, Medieval Drama: An Anthology, and discussed in Walker, The Politics of Performance in Early Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 134–62. 32 See John J. McGavin, ‘Drama in Sixteenth-Century Haddington,’ European Medieval Drama 1 (1997): 147–59. 33 21 May, 28 May, 11 June 1583: Stirling Presbytery Minutes 1581–9/90, Stirling Council Archives: CH2/722/1, unfoliated. The actual infringement happened geographically outside the area of the southeast volume but fell under Stirling presbytery jurisdiction. 34 3 September 1529: Stirling Court and Town Council Records 1519 – 30, Stirling Council Archives: B66/15/1, unfoliated. 35 24 May 1609: National Archives of Scotland: CH2/198/1, unfoliated. 36 Dalkeith Presbytery Minutes 1582–1630, National Archives of Scotland: CH2/424/1, f. 119v. 37 See John J. McGavin, ‘The Kirk, the Burgh, and Fun,’ Early Theatre 1 (1998): 13–26, especially 23 – 4. 38 2 May 1641: Records of the Kirk Session of Salton 1, National Archives of Scotland: CH2/322/1, f. 12, col. b. 39 15 January 1617: Thirlestane Castle: Lauder Burgh Court Book, f. [31r] (National Register of Archives [Scotland] 0832/55/11); The Hirsel: Account of the Mains of Auldcambus 1596, Box 6, Bundle 2, item 2, p. 16 (National Register of Archives [Scotland] 0859). We are grateful to the Thirlestane Castle Trust for permission to

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40 41

42 43 44

45 46

47

48 49

50

51

52

consult the Lauder Burgh Court Book, and to the Douglas and Angus Estates for permission to consult the Auldcambus records. Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (London: Yale University Press, 2002), 407–8. 20 January 1640: Haddington Presbytery Records: Register 1639–48, National Archives of Scotland: CH2/185/5, f. 40v, and 29 December 1602: Haddington Presbytery Minutes 1596–1608, National Archives of Scotland: CH2/185/2, unfoliated. 20 December 1640: Aberlady Session Minutes 1632–45, National Archives of Scotland: CH2/4/1, f. [30v]. Todd, Culture of Protestantism, 406. 26 January and 2 February 1640: Aberlady Session Minutes 1632 – 45, National Archives of Scotland: CH2/4/1, ff. [24–4v]; ‘Important details in the life of K[irk] S[ession] of Prestonpans by Dr. Struthers’ (antiquarian), National Archives of Scotland: CH2/307/28, p. 37; Livingston Kirk Session Minutes 1641–7, National Archives of Scotland: CH2/467/1, p. 43. 26 May 1647: Haddington Presbytery Records: Register 1639–48, National Archives of Scotland: CH2/185/5, f. 181. Minstrels at baptisms and marriages are indeed specified in a Dunbar prohibition of 1645 but, interestingly, the kirk session presents its complaint against them in terms of danger from the plague rather than directly in religious terms: 25 June 1645: Haddington Presbytery Records: Register 1639–48, National Archives of Scotland: CH2/185/5, f. 139. The Concise Scots Dictionary notes ‘bogill about the stacks’ as a form of hide-and-seek recorded from the nineteenth century (1985; repr. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), 52. Our research pushes this sense back to the mid-seventeenth century, reminding us that play traditions may survive for many years unrecorded. November 1643: Linlithgow Burgh Treasurers’ Accounts 1642–3, National Archives of Scotland: B48/13/1, unfoliated. The long-standing traditions of Scottish play in this region are discussed in John Burnett, Riot, Revelry and Rout: Sport in Lowland Scotland before 1860 (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2000). Mill, Mediaeval Plays in Scotland, 16, passim. 13 February 1620: Newbattle Kirk Session Minutes 1617–28, National Archives of Scotland: CH2/276/1, unfoliated; Tyninghame Kirk Session Minutes 1615– 50, National Archives of Scotland: CH2/359/1, f. 4v – ‘ladis ’ is substituted for the original ‘3outhis.’ Tyninghame Kirk Session Minutes 1615–50, National Archives of Scotland: CH2/359/1, f. 4; 6 February 1620 and 21 January 1621: Newbattle Kirk Session Minutes 1617–28, National Archives of Scotland: CH2/276/1, unfoliated; Louis, ed., Sussex, 179–80, 287. Linlithgow Presbytery Minutes 1610–17, National Archives of Scotland: CH/242/1, ff. 81, 65v, 68.

176 Eila Williamson and John J. McGavin 53 5 and 12 May 1607: Selkirk [recte Melrose] Presbytery Minutes 1607–19, National Archives of Scotland: CH2/327/1, f. 7. 54 Tyninghame Kirk Session Minutes 1615–50, National Archives of Scotland: CH2/359/1, ff. 8, 15, 31v, 41v, 68 –70v. 55 31 December 1617: Elphinstone family of Carberry, Discharges 1616–19, National Archives of Scotland: GD156/31/3, f. [92]. 56 As an endnote in the REED Cornwall collection states, ‘Customarily REED volumes do not include entries concerning Egyptians, since there is no necessary connection between them and performance in our period’ (Hays and McGee/Joyce and Newlyn, eds, Dorset /Cornwall, 608). The editors nevertheless discovered valuable records of gypsies for this collection. 57 Genealogie of the Sainteclaires of Rosslyn by Father Richard Augustine Hay Prior of St Pieremont, Including the Chartulary of Rosslyn (Edinburgh, 1835), 136. 58 Mill, Mediaeval Plays in Scotland, 224. 59 Wasson, ed., Devon, 221; Hays and McGee/Joyce and Newlyn, eds, Dorset /Cornwall, 522. 60 J.C. Holt, Robin Hood (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982), 108. 61 Mill, Mediaeval Plays in Scotland, 220. Stephen Knight also recognizes this function in Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 83. 62 24 May 1598: Haddington Presbytery Minutes 1596–1608, National Archives of Scotland: CH2/185/2, unfoliated. 63 In his family’s possession was the manuscript now known as Extracta e Variis Cronicis Scocie [Extracts from Various Chronicles of Scotland], a recension of Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon. This was published by the Abbotsford Club in 1842. In the introduction the editor, William B.D.D. Turnbull, notes that on the flyleaf at the beginning of the manuscript volume, and in other places, is written ‘W. Sanctclair of Roislin, knecht,’ as in the Hay passage which Turnbull then quotes. Furthermore, Turnbull also mentions annotations made throughout the manuscript by William Sinclair (x–xiii). The Robin Hood passage in Extracta only consists of Bower’s story of Robin’s veneration of the Mass and links Robin and other outlaws with Simon de Montfort’s rebellion. Against this passage Sinclair has written ‘1255. Robert Hwd and Lytell Jhon ves alywe in Bernesdall and Plwmden Park. Anno Domini 1265. Robert Hwyd wes forfaltit for fechten in batell aganes the kyng of Ingland at Heweshame’ (107). Thus it can be surmised that Sinclair was interested in the ‘historical’ Robin Hood as well as having some familiarity with the Bower passage concerning the celebration of the Mass. 64 Knight, Robin Hood, 4. For example, Linlithgow Sheriff Court in 1601 required the prior consent of the sheriff and his deputies for lodging gypsies; in the following decade, Lasswade kirk session threatened fines for the resetter, and banishment for ‘suspect personeis namlie sick as ar called Egeptianes.’ Linlithgow Sheriff Court Book

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65

66

67

68

69 70

71 72 73

1596–1602, National Archives of Scotland: SC41/1/7, f. 142v; Lasswade Kirk Session Minutes and Accounts 1615–37, National Archives of Scotland: CH2/471/1, f. 3. Dalkeith Presbytery Minutes 1582–1630, National Archives of Scotland: CH2/424/1, ff. 91–1v; Records of the Synod of Lothian and Tweeddale 1589 – 96, National Archives of Scotland: CH2/252/1, ff. 53–3v. The annual meeting, which shifted from St Jerome’s Fair, 2 October, to 2 July, and from a field near Preston to the town itself in 1732, elected a provost (preses), depute, clerk, treasurer, six bailies, and several councillors for the itinerant chapmen of the Lothians region. After the election, they processed with music to the Cross, drank some wine, and then returned. This is a clear mimicking of civic functions and ceremony and may have its origins in the REED period (The Statistical Account of Scotland Drawn up from the Communications of the Ministers of the Different Parishes, Sir John Sinclair, comp. [Edinburgh, 1796], 17:79–80). Although Sinclair’s informant, Rev. John Trotter, did not know when the custom began, he says that in 1636 the chapmen had ‘acquired a right’ to the Cross in Preston but that, following the town’s decline, this cross now stood in a field. James Stokes argues for waits as ‘one of the best (but least utilized) keys to understanding the history of performance traditions in early England,’ in ‘The Waits of Lincolnshire,’ Early Theatre 1 (1998): 75. For a close case study of a Scottish town, see McGavin, ‘Secular Music in the Burgh of Haddington, 1530 –1640,’ 45– 56. Baldwin, Paying the Piper, is a substantial English study. The principal authors in this respect are Bower, Wyntoun, Boece, Pitscottie, Buchanan, Knox, Rev. James Melville, and Calderwood. One rare case from St Andrews, where we can link burgh records with a memorial account, suggests error in the latter: John J. McGavin, ‘Skipper Lindsay and the Language of Record,’ Medieval English Theatre 24 (2002): 15– 31. These records all come from the period 1 July 1607 to 15 April 1612. See Jedburgh Presbytery Minutes 1606–21, National Archives of Scotland: CH2/198/1, unfoliated. Scottish Borders Council Museum Service: Walter Mason Collection, Selkirk Court Record and Council Book 1635–1704, f. 362. 2 and 16 June 1636: Dalkeith Presbytery Minutes 1630–9, National Archives of Scotland: CH2/424/2, unfoliated.

REED and the Possibilities of Web Technologies james cummings

In attempting to locate, transcribe, and edit surviving documentary evidence of drama, minstrelsy, and public ceremonial activity, REED is dependent on the fortunate survival of those manuscripts in which these records are found. These manuscripts have been preserved, whether by design or chance, through the centuries and are fascinating resources for documenting the history and culture of society. It is only through the preservation of such documents that projects like REED are able to provide source material for the contextual investigation of early drama. One of the inherent aims behind the transcription and editing of early drama records is their further preservation and dissemination to a wider audience. As many projects move into the realms of digitization and provide their publications or related resources online, this continuing issue of preservation is central to the decisions that they face. If humanities projects, such as REED, do not take adequate steps to preserve the resources they create, they too will disappear in the same way as those manuscripts whose loss we bemoan, or even worse, those whose entire existence is completely unknown. A widely reported example of the loss of digital material is the modern computerized self-styled ‘Domesday Book’ compiled by the BBC in 1986.1 Unlike the medieval counterparts, which remain readable in spite of technological developments, continued accessibility of electronic data is dependent on the technology by which it is viewed and maintained. The ‘Domesday Book’ data was not lost, but was completely unreadable. Hundreds of thousands of pieces of data – place names, maps, pictures, datasets, video, and text about the United Kingdom compiled from all sorts of sources, including everything from children’s school projects to complex geographical data – were inaccessible. The loss of this data was lamentable considering the overall effort of its production. Problems such as this one highlight issues related to the preservation of the intellectual effort taken in producing modern electronic resources.

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The ‘Domesday Book’ data had been stored on twelve-inch video discs in a proprietary binary format mixing both digital and analogue media. This format was efficient in storing the data, and the custom-made programs designed to read it were effective in displaying it, given the technology available at the time. However, the programs able to interpret this material were no longer available, and the special computers that they were designed to run on became obsolete and consequently unable to be repaired. Fortunately, the CAMiLEON project jointly based at the Universities of Leeds and Michigan has since enabled this data to become accessible again through the creation of a program emulating the original hardware.2 While this project was able to secure funding for the research that allowed the bespoke rescuing of this data, most academic projects do not have this luxury. As such, concerns about the longterm preservation of electronic resources are being recognized by many projects and institutions that produce or store data in electronic form. Problems relating to the preservation of digital data are becoming more prevalent as society as a whole becomes more computer literate, and, following on, undertakes the digitization of academic resources. Many academic projects struggle with determining the appropriate forms of digitization, and the best way to achieve the expected results given limited funding. As REED intends to undertake a conversion of its legacy data (preserved in both printed and electronic form) to a usable electronic format, then it is a good example to use in exploring the issues of providing for the long-term accessibility of this data, which, for such a historically aware project, must be a prime concern.3 And yet, how can we, using only the technology available to us today, ensure that the precious data compiled by REED and other projects will continue to be usable in the future? One method is to avoid encoding that data in highly individualistic or proprietary binary systems such as that chosen for the ‘Domesday Book.’ The problem with many commercial or otherwise proprietary formats is not only that often large, multinational, conglomerate companies control the structure and nature of the encoding schemes, but also that such formats are often unreadable except in those programs that the companies have marketed. Moreover, these programs only continue to exist and remain compatible with earlier versions if commercial pressures dictate a necessity for them to do so. Since REED data is at its heart textual in nature, surrendering any form of control over the electronic encoding of this text to a third party that does not have the same academic interests is self-defeating. Instead, any electronic version of REED data should rely, wherever possible, on publicly standardized, free, human-readable storage methods in order to ensure its preservation. The World Wide Web Consortium, which produces the specifications for web technologies such as HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language, the language most web pages are written in), is an example of a public body formulating

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such internationally accepted recommendations.4 The storage format must be free, not only in the sense that use of the format itself does not cost the project money, but also in the much looser sense that any project is free to modify the format for its own needs. To enable greater preservation and future accessibility, the data should be stored in a human-readable format. By this, it is meant that the organization of the data should be intelligible in its plain textual form to someone with a basic understanding of the human language in which it was encoded. To see an example of a problem that might otherwise occur, open a database created in a proprietary system (for example, Microsoft Access) in a plain text editor (for example, Microsoft Notepad).5 While some text may be visible, the system by which it is encoded is binary and closed to users of the program. This data can only be used in the manner envisioned by the program designers, a condition that severely hampers any possibility of interoperability between this electronic resource and others. Moreover, in some formats (such as compressed data), the files can become unreadable if even a single character is corrupted.6 The World Wide Web Consortium’s recommendation for encoding electronic textual information in an accessible and preservable manner is Extensible Markup Language (XML). This format of encoding texts, based on structure and not on presentational aspects, has been widely adopted by all levels of the international community. To speak of XML as an ‘emergent technology’ (as this article did in its original abbreviated form as a conference paper) is already extremely dated. Examples of content providers currently using XML somewhere in the production of their online resources include not only hundreds of small academic projects, but also those with greater commercial concerns and wider audiences like the BBC, Amazon Books, Sony, and numerous mobile phone companies.7 Although this is not really intended to be a primer for learning XML, a significant amount of background information is necessary for any further discussion. XML is very similar to HTML, the simple language in which most web documents are currently written. Here is an example of a very basic HTML page:

Title of the Web Page

This is a level one heading

This is a very short and quite boring paragraph.

This is another paragraph.

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This example uses some basic HTML elements to convey the title of the document, a first level heading, and two short paragraphs. The names of elements denoted by these start tags (

) and end tags (

) are fixed as part of the HTML standard. A markup language usually defines a fixed set of elements, which describe a fixed number of aspects of the text in question. These developed, historically, from the various methods of annotation used by publishers to instruct a printer how a text should be organized or emended for printing. However, XML does not define a fixed set of tags and instead allows a project to create its own tags based on its own requirements. XML is in reality a markup language used to describe other markup languages themselves. In this sense it is a metalanguage, allowing the formulation of new markup systems, all of which follow the same basic rules of construction. Historically, HTML and XML are both subsets of an ISO Standard – SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). HTML was originally designed to facilitate scientific document interchange, and so developed structural tags for headers, paragraphs, and lists. These defined that a particular body of text was, for example, a paragraph, but had no interest in the layout of that paragraph. As HTML gained popularity, and mostly as a result of commercial competition between companies marketing web browsers, many presentational markup extensions for font and style tagging were introduced by these companies. This is an immensely important deviation because it detailed not what the document was, but how it was to appear in the web browser. HTML has now become so overloaded with varying and competing presentational and stylistic elements that there are many web pages that will only work in specific browsers. In order to help rectify this by encouraging an important separation of concerns, the World Wide Web Consortium has formulated the most recent version of HTML, called XHTML, as an XML vocabulary. This removes any presentational aspects from the structural markup of HTML, and instead promotes the use of external Cascading Style Sheets (another standard) for designating the presentational aspects of the encoded text.8 The removal of style information from the content allows many benefits, including the use of different styles of presentation for different media (e.g., computer screen, print, mobile phone, etc.) and the easy modification of the presentation rules for an entire web site, possibly numbering hundreds or thousands of individual pages. This increasing separation of content from presentational aspects has been fundamental for the interoperability and flexibility that makes XML so valuable. What does XML look like? It has the same basic appearance as HTML elements, but with the ability for a project to define its own elements that make sense within the structure of the documents it wishes to encode. But what do we mean by a document’s structure? Consider, for example, the first stanza of a poem by Chaucer, as set out below:

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Womanly Noblesse Balade That Chaucier Made So hath myn herte caught in remembraunce Your beaute hoole and stidefast governaunce, Your vertues al and yowre hie noblesse, That you to serve is set al my plesaunce. So wel me liketh your womanly contenaunce, Your fresshe fetures and your comlyness, That whiles I live myn hert to his maystresse You hath ful chose in trewe perseveraunce Never to chaunge, for no maner distresse.9

The structure of this poem is fairly straightforward. The first two lines of this text make up the title (or title and subtitle) of the poem, which has stanzas that in themselves contain lines of verse. If this text were to be marked up structurally in XML it would make sense to have certain elements that corresponded to the structure of the poem as we understand it. A very basic skeletal outline of this markup might appear thus:

Geoffrey Chaucer Womanly Noblesse Balade That Chaucier Made

So hath myn herte caught in remembraunce Your beaute hoole and stidefast governaunce, Your vertues al and yowre hie noblesse, That you to serve is set al my plesaunce. So wel me liketh your womanly contenaunce, Your fresshe fetures and your comlyness, That whiles I live myn hert to his maystresse You hath ful chose in trewe perseveraunce Never to chaunge, for no maner distresse.

…

This document has some easily distinguishable features. Firstly, although it is

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human-readable, if someone in a few hundred years understands what the words ‘author,’ ‘poem,’ ‘title,’ ‘subtitle,’ and ‘stanza’ mean, then they could probably guess that ‘l’ in this case is an abbreviation for ‘line.’ Notice that the document is declared to be an XML document through what is known as an XML processinginstruction on the first line. There is a single ‘poem’ element whose beginning is marked with a ‘’ tag and whose end is marked with an XML closing tag ‘.’ This element encloses the entire document and is referred to as the root or document element. Inside this there are ‘,’ ‘,’ ‘’ elements, and the first ‘’ containing a number of ‘’ child elements. The ‘author’ start tag contains an attribute indicating an identification number of some sort, possibly for use in retrieving information concerning the author or other texts they have written. There are many other aspects of this example that could be marked up. Common features that we could encode about this poem include not only the text of the poem, its (modern) punctuation, variant spellings, and other linguistic data, but also textual glosses, additional information incorporated in a more rigorous header, or the inclusion of this poem inside the larger structure of an anthology. One of the requirements of XML is that an XML document must be ‘wellformed.’ Amongst other things, this means that all start and end tags must be properly nested under the root node and inside each other without overlapping.10 One of the reasons XML has been so well received is not only its freedom to create new tags but, very importantly, that any software must stop processing it if the document is not well-formed with all the beginning and ending tags supplied in the right places. This avoids the problem of deviation from the specification that happened with HTML. Web browsers parsing HTML frequently ignore the omission of a particular closing tag, and decide for themselves what was intended, with all web browsers deciding slightly different things. There are at least three characteristics that make XML stand out from other markup languages for use by academic projects. First, its emphasis is on descriptive structural content rather than procedural or presentational markup. Nothing in the encoding of the poem above indicates anything about the media through which it is to be displayed, or the style that it will take. Second, it allows the definition of particular document types, such as, in REED’s case, a letter, court case, or churchwardens’ account, and validation against a formulated vocabulary of that type of document. With the example of the poem above, all files containing poems could be required to have titles, or ‘author’ tags with id attributes. Moreover, lines (‘l’) could be constrained to being allowed to appear only inside stanzas, or stanzas required to have at least one line. Having many similar documents validated against a single defined structure means that they can be confidently processed for whatever requirements a project might have. Third, XML is free and independent of any single proprietary hardware or software system. It can be used on almost any

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computer, and because it is entirely text-based, edited with even the most rudimentary text editor. As these three aspects of XML are central to its suitability as a preservation format for the data of textual humanities projects, they deserve further investigation. XML concentrates on encoding document structure, not final presentational aspects of a document: it is important that this is the third line of the first stanza of a poem, but what is not important in the consideration of an encoding system is that it will eventually be displayed in twelve point, right-justified, Times New Roman font for one particular use. By marking up the document’s actual structure, instead of either simply extracting predetermined information from that document or encoding the final presentation mode of the document, XML allows a greater degree of flexibility in the use of the document and thus also helps ensure its continuity. The separation of the concerns of the textual content, the processing of that content, and the final presentation of that content allow greater use (and re-use) of the document itself. With the example of the poem above, if it was in a collection of other poems, the processing stage might not only transform the poem into an HTML file to display on the web, but also simultaneously add the first line of the first stanza to a first line index or the title of the poem to a list of the author’s works. The presentational aspects of the poem – not only the font, but also whether line numbers were to be displayed or not – could also be controlled given this markup. The same XML content could be used to create camera-ready typesetting files for print publication or numerous other formats. One common transformation of XML is into another XML structure for specific applications. The form of XML that the content is kept in can easily be converted to the form another program uses.11 This allows interactions between programs that both understand XML even if they require it in a different structure, or are in different parts of the world. In the perpetual future tense of computing, a text marked up structurally in XML should be transformable to the requirements of whatever new software developments or hardware innovations arise. As summarized above, the second aspect of XML that makes it attractive to academic projects is that it allows the design of markup languages specific to the discipline that is creating the documents. This means that any project could create its own markup vocabulary based on the structure of the texts that it is digitizing. As various fields such as chemistry, mathematics, and music develop their own XML vocabularies, they do often codify them, and yet there is no requirement for any individuals or projects to use a particular specified XML vocabulary if it does not suit their needs. They can invent their own elements based on the structure of the document they are encoding, and in a nomenclature that fits their particular project. No one understands REED extracts better than the REED project itself, and no body for standardizing document encoding could

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hope to have their experience with the particular documents that REED uses and produces. Nevertheless there are helpful organizations like the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), which have codified some very popular generalized principles of XML markup.12 They have done so to enable humanities projects to adopt their suggestions, use them as a base to build their own, or even just to see what concerns should be taken into consideration when marking up a specific type of element, such as names, gaps in a manuscript, or the degree of certainty an editor has concerning, for example, an expansion of a Latin abbreviation. Even if the TEI guidelines do not suit all the types of documents that a project such as REED encounters, their markup principles are extensible and customizable to a project’s individual needs. This is the extensible bit of XML – rather than wait for elements to be recognized and formalized by some other standards body, a project can invent its own tags which make sense within its own discipline. Well-formed XML documents do not necessarily conform to any particular formulated vocabulary. However, if a project plans to encode many similar types of document in XML, then it is beneficial to have a Document Type Definition (DTD) of some sort to facilitate the creation of documents that are not only wellformed, but also valid instances of that type.13 A DTD enables the validation of consistency. If, for example, every REED document hypothetically encoded in XML must have a header giving information about the document, the date if known, and the person who was responsible for transcribing it, then the validation process would produce an error if any of the required elements were missing. While the process will not understand whether the transcription of medieval Latin is correct or not, it can warn that no folio number was supplied for that particular extract. With the example of a poem given earlier, the DTD could require that all ‘author’ elements have an identification code, and would produce an error if this code did not appear in the list of authors it knew about. This functionality could be used not only to relate larger structural items, such as a particular extract, with the detailed document descriptions or endnotes concerning it, but also relate recorded hand changes to a list of known scribes. That XML allows the flexibility and creation of any number of valid Document Type Definitions means that an academic project is able to use the nomenclature with which it is already familiar in the encoding structure of its documents. This means that the documents are not only human-readable but also preservable in the very conception of their format, helping to ensure both their long-term survival and the ability to repurpose the original documents into countless formats or uses. The third aspect of XML that benefits academic projects is that it is independent of any single proprietary hardware or software system. There are no restrictions

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on the operating system or hardware platform on which XML is used. It does not matter if a project is simultaneously using a combination of DOS or Windows computers, a Macintosh, a Unix Server, a Linux desktop, a mobile phone, or some operating system yet to be invented for some unknown type of computer hardware. XML can be used on almost any computer, and as it is in an entirely textbased format it could be edited with the most basic of text editors. One of the benefits of this is that it helps to avoid the situation mentioned at the beginning of this essay – that of needing to emulate a virtual machine to be able to access those unreadable Domesday video discs. XML is a freely available specification of the World Wide Web Consortium, and can be used on any type of hardware and with innumerable software systems. Following on from this free basis, much of the software that people use to manipulate XML is free, open-source, and often community-programmed. This does not mean that there is not also a large amount of expensive proprietary software out there for manipulating XML. For example, the most recent versions of Microsoft Office allow the ability to save documents in a form of XML and Microsoft is increasingly relying on XML as a storage and interchange format between most of its own (as well as other people’s) applications.14 However, one of the most important benefits of freely available software is that academic projects, which often have minuscule software budgets, can still use some of the most powerful XML editing applications and environments available without any significant financial outlays. Moreover, they are not limited to a single tool or locked into that application’s native format, but could use any number of software packages on their existing computers. Where the financial burden will always exist is in the time spent actually converting any project’s legacy data.15 While large parts of such a conversion can be automated, there will always be a need for informed and careful proofreading. REED has always led the way with its acceptance of the uses of electronic resources, whether for editing, bibliographic research, or typesetting. That the project is already part of the electronic age is not in question; REED’s Patrons and Performances Web Site demonstrates the wonderful benefits of being able to search and manipulate such material.16 Moreover, since REED volumes are so useful, the very fact that REED plans to digitize them is not surprising. What is important is that this electronic data is stored in a way that not only makes it flexible in its use and presentation, but also ensures its computer platform-independence, and hence its survival through the evolving world of technology. As illustration let us take three payments to entertainers, which I transcribed from the LeStrange household accounts (Hunstanton, Norfolk) while working on my doctoral dissertation.17 These might appear as follows if translated into the print format of REED publications:

REED and the Possibilities of Web Technologies 1537 LeStrange Household Accounts nro: Lestrange P/3 p 591 (4 January) Item in reward the iiijth day of Ianuarie to the players that Cam from Wyndham … Item in reward the same day a Minstrell that Cam from Dereham … p 591 (8 January) … Item in reward the viijth day of Ianuarie to the Mynstrelles of lyn

ij s.

187

5

xij d. 10

v s.

If REED had actually published these records, then they would have also been created in the REED electronic coding system (itself qualifying as a limited markup language), as is shown below:18 @h\NRF!1537!@j\LeStrange Household Accounts@j \ @k\nro@k \: Lestrange P/3\! @w\p 591 {(4 January)}\! It{e}m in reward the iiijth day of Ianuarie to the players that Cam from Wyndham @[ij s.! …! It{e}m in reward the same day a Minstrell that Cam from Dereham @[xij d.! …! @w\p 591 {(8 January)}\! …! It{e}m in reward the viijth day of Ianuarie to the Mynstrell{es} of lyn @[v s.! Although there are a limited number of REED editors who will find this familiar and readable, it would not generally be considered human-readable. This is not to suggest that REED editors are a different form of life, simply that, without specialist knowledge of REED material or procedures, the average person would not be able to understand the intended meaning of these codes. And while this is a form of markup, it is entirely focused on the conversion of these accounts for typesetting, not structuring the information they contain. Although a fairly simple processing script could take this and convert it to basic XML markup, there are certain aspects that are difficult to distinguish. This is owing to the presentational nature of the markup: for example, no distinction is made between the code used for an

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abbreviation (coded as ‘{text}’) and the date of the accounts since these both appear in an italic font in the printed publication. While it is possible to count the number of instances of italic font, it would be difficult for a computer to interrogate this file reliably in order to ascertain how many abbreviations were used in a section or the date of a particular extract, since the presentational value of dates and abbreviations is identical. If the REED typesetting files for a given edition exist, then conversion of this file to a very basic XML format is certainly possible, but the resulting file would have to be significantly corrected. Nevertheless, these problems occur at predictable places (such as the start of extracts) and a system of automated conversion and proofreading could transform such existing files. If this passage was then further marked up in some simplified XML form, it might look something like the following example:

LeStrange Household Accounts NRO: Lestrange P/3

Item in reward the iiijth day of Ianuarie to the players that Cam from Wyndham ij s. Item in reward the same day a Minstrell that Cam from Dereham xij d.

Item in reward the viijth day of Ianuarie to the Mynstrelles of lyn v s.

The root node of this XML file is a ‘document’ element and is followed by a ‘header’ element, two ‘extract’ elements, and a so-called empty element ‘gap’ between the two indicating an omission of material in the transcription.19 Each extract has ‘item’ or more and in this case the unit and value of any amounts are also marked up. This is generally human-readable; the semantic value of each part of the document is understandable from its tags. In these examples the tags are shown in bold typeface simply to highlight their addition, and the layout and white space have

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no appreciable meaning in themselves. This could be written in any text editor or, if using more sophisticated XML authoring environments similar to many HTML editors, those entering the data might never even need to see these markup codes. These extracts provide the date in an ISO standardized format, but could also have indicated date ranges or feast days amongst other chronological variants.20 But this simplified markup scheme does not encode much meaning.21 In the slightly expanded version that follows, however, the document header provides a greater granularity of bibliographic information:

LeStrange Household Accounts of Hunstanton

NRO Lestrange P/3 Norfolk Record Office, Norwich

Records of Early English Drama

Dr James Cummings Encoder



Document was changed somehow

The header element still gives only a few of the possible details about the source, the edition, and the revisions made to it. A much more complete header could be formulated that linked to the document descriptions, the necessary metadata concerning the REED volume it came from, and the creation of the electronic version. Luckily, the Text Encoding Initiative has already considered many of the issues surrounding the recording of such header information, and the TEI Header is used by many projects worldwide and would provide an even better structure to record this information.22

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REED scholars may be more interested in possibilities for encoding information about the extract itself. For example, one entry reads, ‘Item in reward the iiijth day of Ianuarie to the players that Cam from Wyndham - ijs.’ Textual features that might be important to consider would include the retention of abbreviations, the encoding of dates and the names of people and places, and probably the provision of regularized spellings of words such as ‘Ianuarie,’ ‘Cam,’ and the place name ‘Wyndham.’ 23 The marking up of details about entertainers could include their numbers (if known) and other details, including patrons.24 Likewise, geographical data could be stored in each element indicating place names, allowing the user to click on that name and instantly be taken to a map showing its location amongst other possibilities. Similar links based on the structure of REED volumes would be to glossary entries, translations, endnotes, and all the other lists that are the academic mainstay of REED’s publications. A hypothetical method of recording this kind of information in the first extract (with new tags and attributes added shown in bold) might appear as below:

Item in reward the iiijth day of Ianuarie to the players that Cam from

Wyndham

ij s.

Item in reward the same day a

Minstrell that Cam from Dereham

xij d.

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It is obvious from this example that XML markup is not intended to be concise. The verbosity, and the resulting complexity of deeply encoded XML documents, is both one of its weaknesses and one of its strengths. It is an intentional design feature, as any form of digitization is only as good as the metadata it simultaneously encodes. For example, we have not recorded any information concerning the location of the unit of currency (for example, as being either superscripted, inline, or right-justified). Unless we did so, we would not be able to query our records about this aspect if we should wish to do so at a later point for whatever reason. Moreover, the manner in which this markup has been conceived does not record the page layout of the printed REED volume. This is, of course, a possibility, but is unnecessary, as by prioritizing the structure of the extract itself it is possible to reproduce the extracts in an almost identical camera-ready format as the REED print volumes. In addition, even with this skeletal granularity of encoded metadata, we could easily create lists of entertainers whose ‘type’ attribute has been set to ‘minstrel’ with the places and amounts they were paid. Such resources would be interoperable, the list of minstrels (and their patrons) being created dynamically from the encoded extracts, but simultaneously linking back to these extracts, if a user wanted to see the original record in its entirety, to files encoding more information about the performers, or to other web sites such as REED’s Patrons and Performances Web Site. It is not that looking through indices (whether printed or in database form) of extracted information is problematic. Most people reading this have probably consulted REED indices on a regular basis. They are superb examples of indexing and will prove invaluable for many years to come. In addition to any theoretical concerns, however, the problem with static indices is just that – they are static. A structured electronic encoding allows the instantaneous creation of a variety of sub- or cross-referencing indices based on the user’s query. Not only is the encoded information always up to date when new records from other documents are added, but also it does not lock the user into a single flat-form way of looking at things. For example, a list of minstrels, including those designated as waits, could suddenly be changed to a list of only minstrels with named patrons, or players without patrons. If information is only extracted from a REED record (itself an extract) and placed in the fixed form of a database, then this is necessarily limited to the data selected and the structure of fields chosen for that particular database.25 While this can be wonderful for specific instances where only a limited scope of the extracted information is desired (such as with the REED online patrons database), if a markup schema were to be developed for REED volumes as a whole, then extracting what is currently viewed as (a subset of ) the relevant information from a REED record would be an extremely limiting form of overall digitization. A single fixed

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database of information is in many ways a terminus ad quem. With sufficient XML encoding of legacy data, the necessary information could be extracted to create any number of limited-scope databases depending on what the user wanted at that particular instant. It is not only indices or subsets of the data that can be assembled dynamically in this way, but the content itself that can be manipulated based on user-interrogation. One of the well-known problems with static REED volumes is that sometimes a reader might want the extracts for a particular town organized chronologically, regardless of what document they originate from, but at other times organized by document in folio order. With a printed REED volume it is impossible to provide both instances for this user. However, if the document extracts were marked up in adequate structural encoding, it would be fairly straightforward to provide this user at one time with his desired REED extracts in overall chronological order and in another instant in document folio order. Similarly, a user could choose views of individual documents with or without the italics that characterize abbreviations in the print volumes. Words of more debatable meaning, such as ‘ludus,’ ‘histrio,’ ‘player,’ whether in translation or not, could themselves be linked to the glossary entry for that word. Additionally, a user could choose to view simultaneously a REED transcription along with its translation. With the increasing digitization of manuscript images by archives, some projects are already providing comparative views of transcriptions and translations alongside images of the original manuscripts. There are many exciting possibilities. Once initial conversion has taken place, increasingly more meaningful levels of markup could always be added at a later date. The capability for rapid dynamic content generation of XML documents is one of its most attractive features for many current users. For example, the majority of up-to-the-minute news sources on the web, including the BBC, use some form of XML as a format for their news articles. This is, of course, invisible not only to the end user, but also to the reporters submitting their articles. The dynamic manipulation of XML documents also means that a resource is not limited only to the types of queries which we envision today. If someone uninterested in early drama wanted to study palaeographical trends in a town’s guild accounts, REED records may provide a large enough corpus to be representative of the accounts themselves. Since the REED expansions would also be marked up in XML, a single simple search could find out how many times words ending in ‘-orum,’ for example, were spelled out compared with how many times an abbreviation was used.26 It does not matter why someone would want to know this, but it raises one of the most beneficial points of XML – that users can query it in ways that the original encoders had not expected. Searching for political aspects could be just as easy. A user may wish to compare, for example, the number of times

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players were recorded as being paid to play, versus being paid to go away. They could then correlate this against both known plague years and the elections of puritan local governments. The extensibility of such queries is limited only by the granularity of the original markup. Since XML is only a markup language the manner in which a project makes use of it is really up to that project. It can be delivered by a web server as dynamic HTML web pages, it can be stored in or even used to dynamically create a database, it could be sent to a user’s mobile phone, viewed as a Word document, or printed as PDF files, or manipulated, searched, or queried in any number of other ways.27 The point is that if the document extracts themselves were marked up according to their own structure then these files could be easily used to produce all the other ancillary files that REED currently uses, including camera-ready typesetting documents, bibliographic databases, and concordances for assisting in the production of print indices (or if encoded sufficiently, the indices themselves). Given the time and money required to encode documents by their structure, once done, those documents could then be relatively easily transformed into almost anything a project or user might need. Whatever the initial cost of adequately encoding REED documents would be, it is offset by the enormous savings of having such flexible and reusable data available. The method through which XML documents are most often transformed is through the application of Extensible Style Sheet Language Transformation (XSLT). These files declare the rules by which the content will be created and allow XML documents to be transformed into many different output formats while simultaneously allowing the selection of different textual nodes for dynamic content generation. Given the rigour of the XML format, the XSLT files used to transform them into other formats (such as HTML, PDF, RTF, or other XML structures amongst many other possibilities) are also themselves written in XML.28 There would be little difficulty involved in transforming adequately encoded XML of REED volumes to a very similar layout as that preserved in the print publications, using the same fonts and conventions. This is not to imply that XML is completely free of drawbacks. These include not only the problems of its creation but also of its eventual transformation. As already mentioned, XML has been intentionally designed to be extremely verbose. Binary solutions or individualized markup schemes such as the REED typesetting codes are less generalized but certainly more compact. However, this does make them less human-readable and so less easily preserved. XML’s verbosity results in highly structured texts having an often overly complex structure. It is for this reason that encoding decisions and modifications to the overall encoding schema should be taken carefully and with as much advice as possible. XML encoding of structured documents requires a significant hierarchy of nested elements, and in

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order for the document to be well-formed these must be properly nested. This means that it cannot accommodate overlapping hierarchies, and the resulting creation of complex structures shifts the problem away from the text encoder (which could be argued to be a good thing) and onto the programmer developing the scripts for processing. While this retains the inherently simplistic nature of textual encoding, it necessitates an increase in the complexity of its processing applications. As with any other electronic text format, there are many other benefits and drawbacks to XML. However, the majority of problems that a text-based humanities project will face have been dealt with before, and various sources of advice and communities of best practice exist to help.29 The key for any project intending digitization is to get a significant amount of advice and to do so before undertaking the project or even its funding application. The advice that such organizations give concerning the recommended practices in a particular discipline are also likely to increase a project’s likelihood of obtaining funding for digitization.30 Increasingly the requirements of funding bodies are that projects should strive to encode machine-readable data in a preservable way – one of the things XML has been designed to do. Every project has different requirements as to the mode of publication and limits of resources available for digitization. Some projects concentrate on the creation of digital images of their original source material. Since the REED project is a primarily textual undertaking, it would have to negotiate with archives for the legal right to display these images, resulting in an overly time-consuming undertaking. In fact any project moving to digitization is liable to find the complex task of establishing copyright and intellectual property rights a significant stumbling-block.31 With projects that have a large amount of primarily textual material, conversion to a proper preservation format is recommended. The issue with such projects is often how fine a granularity of markup should be applied in the first instance. As more markup inevitably means more time, deciding which features are most important for a project to encode is crucial. One of the benefits of structural encoding for academic projects is that the textual markup can be added in successive layers, perhaps as the result of consecutive funding grants, building up increasing layers of granularity as more funding becomes available. And yet, a drawback of structural encoding is that it is best done by those with specialist knowledge of both the project’s subject area and the markup technologies themselves.32 Another option that many print-based projects often consider is simply to digitize images of their print publications as PDF files. And while this is an initial step with less investment needed, it traps the data in a binary proprietary format developed originally for printing, which is highly unsuitable for long-term preservation and does not allow the benefits discussed above.

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In just the same way that there are archives which hold manuscripts, electronic text archives also exist for the purpose of preserving our electronic heritage. The oldest of these is the Oxford Text Archive, which now also hosts the UK’s Arts and Humanities Data Service for Literature, Languages, and Linguistics, and routinely advises electronic resource creators of best practice in textual encoding. Taking advantage of such archives’ free long-term preservation and curation is in the best interest of most projects, even if the resource creators choose to impose restrictions on the use or distribution of their material. As anyone working with historical documents is well aware, the preservation of multiple copies of a source in multiple archives will help to ensure its continued survival. All of the same dangers that physical objects face (for example, physical damage, economic priorities, and social upheaval) also apply to digital objects. In addition to the changing nature of technology, digital resources often suffer from the unstable climate under which funded academic projects produce resources and preserve them once the project, and funding, has ceased. Academics retire and servers die; eventually those directly involved with the production of any electronic resource will retire; and as the technology which houses it grows antiquated, the servers themselves may need replacing. Proper institutional involvement in the management and preservation of academic projects with significant digital output is an initial recommended step. However, the depositing of resources with external institutions concerned primarily with the proper archival curation and preservation of digital objects is also highly advisable. It is not only the proper preservation of a project’s output that funding bodies are now requiring. Increasingly, as funding organizations become aware of the preservation limitations of commercial products, there is often a requirement for research projects to attempt to use, wherever possible, nonproprietary software solutions. If electronic resources are stored in a database that uses a commercially proprietary format (Microsoft Access, for example), this goes against the openness that such funding bodies are trying to promote, since the format used is closed and controlled solely by a commercial organization (e.g., Microsoft Corporation). There is no implicit suggestion that such projects should necessarily evolve into some form of freely available, open source community, but instead that they should build upon such open standardization bodies as the World Wide Web Consortium in order to preserve and enhance their electronic materials. In concluding this exploration of some of the issues that projects such as REED face in undertaking to make their material available in electronic form, I am reminded again of those inaccessible ‘Domesday’ video discs. REED must avoid having to rescue its own electronic records in the future, in the same way that REED now helps to rescue references to early drama from manuscript archives. The time to act to preserve our electronic records for the future is now.

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NOTES 1 See for various press reports concerning the need for the CAMiLEON project and the BBC ‘Domesday Book.’ All references to electronic resources are accurate at time of going to press. 2 See for more information on the project itself. Since the virtual machines this project has created are based on platformindependent principles, this should greatly assist any further migration to more advanced systems in the future when today’s hardware becomes outdated. Emulation of the original machines was considered a better solution than recasting the material in a more mutable format, since the archiving of the original format (and its methods of delivery and presentation) was seen as equally important – if the record is changed, it is not the record. This international project was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee , and National Science Foundation . 3 This article and my various experiments in encoding REED material in XML have concentrated mainly on the conversion (and preservation) of REED legacy data. A further issue concerns that material which has yet to be transcribed or published. Here the organization of material from initial collection and editing would certainly be done not in a chronological order across documents but in document folio order. However, if this information were marked up structurally in XML, the automatic reorganization of this material from document folio order to chronological order across documents (or vice versa) would be straightforward. Examples given in this article generally assume an initial organization of document folio order. 4 See for more information concerning the World Wide Web Consortium’s many internationally accepted recommendations. 5 The versions of the programs referred to are those for Office XP or earlier. Microsoft Access, Microsoft Notepad, and Office XP are registered trademarks of the Microsoft Corporation. 6 While there are some compressed formats which would only suffer minimal loss of data if a single byte were missing, for many binary formats such as serialized Java objects this could potentially be catastrophic. 7 The headlines on BBC News web pages and much of their content management system is XML-driven. The same is true of Amazon’s document-based approach to online book retailing. There are numerous high-profile companies making use of XML in their content-management, business-to-business, and online presences. 8 The use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is another World Wide Web Consortium recommendation. 9 Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘Womanly Noblesse,’ in Larry D. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 649. 10 To be ‘well-formed’ (as the term implies) simply means that a file adheres to XML

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specification in its format. As discussed below, if the document validates against a DTD (see note 13) or schema that constrains the number, order, or contents of the elements, then the document is considered not only well-formed but a ‘valid’ instance of that document type. There are numerous ways in which to transform XML but XSLT (Extensible Style Sheet Language Transformation), recommended by World Wide Web Consortium, is most commonly used. See for more information concerning the Text Encoding Initiative and its guidelines. The TEI is one of the most popular encoding guidelines adopted by humanities projects worldwide. DTD is used here in the loosest sense of Document Type Definition, implying not only traditional DTDs but also XML-based schema. As schema are themselves written in XML, this enables not only XML documents to be dynamically created but also self-generative validation procedures. The XML format produced by most word processors is only marginally useful in the conversion of documents to XML since it represents only the presentational aspects of the document, and not its intellectually understood structure. I have experimented with this and have already converted the ‘Wells’ section of REED’s Somerset volumes to XML (Stokes with Alexander, eds, Somerset including Bath). Processes could be developed to speed the translation from typesetting files or scanned text to XML, but a significant portion of human proofreading and other checking will always be necessary. The flexibility of an electronic document is inherently related to the granularity of the metadata that it encodes, and any estimates of the cost of conversion will always be dependent on this granularity. However, there is a real ecological cost in the creation and maintenance of any form of metadata and as such this has led to significant interest and developments in the automation and simplification of such processes. See REED’s Patrons and Performances Web Site , which provides an online database of patrons and performance locations, searchable not only by keyword, but by event, patron, troupe, and venue. The site also allows these locations to be viewed on old or modern maps. These records had also previously been transcribed in David Galloway and John Wasson, eds, Collections XI, Malone Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 22. However, these are fresh transcriptions based on my doctoral dissertation (James C. Cummings, ‘Contextual Studies of the Dramatic Records in the Area around The Wash, c. 1350–1550’ (PhD dissertation: University of Leeds, 2001), 483. No claim is made for the exact accuracy of these codes, since REED has not published these records. REED ASCII codes are used to submit transcripts for checking and eventual conversion via an in-house program for typesetting in QuarkXPress. For simplicity this extract is given in document folio order rather than in a chronological manner across documents for the same location. As indicated above (note 3),

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with sufficient encoding of dates and folios these two formats are easily electronically interchangeable. Dates, names of people and places, document information, abbreviations, and regularized spellings are some of the most important aspects of any potential REED encoding and have already been explored in depth by the TEI. While not all TEI guidelines might suit REED’s particular needs, their in-depth consideration of the issues could certainly profit REED’s electronic endeavours. None of the hypothetical markup given in these examples is actually suggested as a proposed taxonomy for REED encoding. Instead this is a simplified version of one of many possible multilayered encoding structures, used here solely to demonstrate the nature of XML markup and the issues and benefits of the structural encoding of REED data. The TEI’s ‘teiHeader’ element is one of the most carefully constructed aspects of the TEI content model. This header is designed to contain all the numerous possibilities of structured bibliographic information and contextual information needed for creating a profile of not only the original document and the subsequent electronic file itself, but also the relationship of this encoding to the original text and its revision history. It is internationally recognized as one of the most complete systems for the formulation of structured metadata and document description concerning a text and its various incarnations. Although they can also be used for the dynamic assembling of glossaries, the capability to provide regularized spellings at the point of divergence is not simply to provide assistance to readers, but to enable easier searching of the texts. This is one possible content model. There are certainly other possibilities, some of which might include the provision of summary metadata for each ‘item’ being transcribed, indicating how and why the item fits REED’s principles of selection. That kind of structure, however, becomes problematic when there are multiple or nested references to several different entertainers (or different types of entertainer) in the same extracted record. A content model that allows the encoding of these references as and when they appear, with as little or as much information as they provide, is more effective in final processing and manipulation of the texts. In addition, it is not only the limitation of the data selected or the initial structure of the database that is problematic. In a flat form relational database there is little provision for nested metadata – the application of metadata to only certain parts of a specific field’s value or the addition of successive layers of metadata. XML document repositories provide one solution to this, enabling very sophisticated structure-aware searching of the XML documents they contain. Much more sophisticated data models exist for recording manuscript abbreviations and their expansions than the simplified method used in these LeStrange extracts. For example, see M.R. Driscoll, Encoding Old Norse-Icelandic Primary Sources Using TEIconformant SGML/XML: A Handbook which has a whole chapter on the encoding of abbreviations.

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27 It should be noted that although encoding in XML enables the conversion to these (and many more) formats, there is of course no requirement to do so and REED could still maintain as much control over the use and manipulation of its electronic texts as it has with its print volumes. This could also create possibilities of new revenue streams for the project. 28 There is not space in this article to even scratch the surface of XSLT, currently in its second version, as this has become a very functional XML-based programming language in its own right. More information concerning XSLT can be found on the World Wide Web Consortium’s web site (amongst many others) or in numerous print publications such as Jeni Tennison, Beginning XSLT (Birmingham: Wrox Press, 2002) or Michael Kay, XSLT 2.0 Programmer’s Reference, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing, 2004). However, as always with the inevitable forward momentum of such technologies, any print publications, even those as highly esteemed as these two, will soon become outdated. 29 These include electronic mailing lists, such as that for the Text Encoding Initiative, as well as those groups attempting to foster and codify best practice for specific communities such as the Digital Medievalist project. See for more information. 30 The Oxford Text Archive, as part of the UK’s Arts and Humanities Data Service, not only provides advice to those applying for humanities funding in the UK, but also assesses the technical aspects of these applications for the funding bodies themselves. The intention behind this is the creation of a green circle of best practice, with funding more likely to go to projects that have, from the outset, taken technical aspects and preservation strategies into account. 31 Copyright legislation differs between countries, and in the case of REED where the manuscripts are governed by UK copyright law but the administration of the project is in Canada, this might cause additional problems. The implications of developments in electronic copyright and intellectual property rights legislation is a notorious minefield. REED is exceptional in having negotiated the electronic rights to the project’s output, but where possible it should still seek legal advice and the written cooperation of all archives and institutions involved. 32 This is not to imply that the outsourcing of the digitization of a project’s resources is not possible. However, in cases where the information and arrangement of the textual data is of a highly specialized nature, such as with REED volumes, this will need a carefully arranged and tested agreement with the conversion company and substantial proofing by the project itself. The Early English Books Online – Text Creation Partnership is an example of the outsourcing of large amounts of scanned texts for conversion to a very light TEI XML that is then significantly proofed and corrected by project staff. This project is a result of a partnership between the University of Oxford, the University of Michigan, and a commercial company. See for more information.

Herodotus in the Labyrinth: REED and Hypertext jenn stephenson

I, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, am here setting forth my history, that time may not draw the color from what man has brought into being, nor those great and wonderful deeds, manifested by both Greeks and barbarians, fail of their report, and, together with all this, the reason why they fought one another.1

An act of resistance against the bleaching of time that draws the colour from past human experiences, the writing of history is itself an act that directly shapes the past that it attempts to preserve. Seeking to transmit the past, to make it available across the distance of time, history is a subsidiary document of the original experience. And from this distanced observational stance at one stratum removed from the original, history necessarily involves the interpretation and condensation of that lived experience for its later reification. Given this inherent reconstitution, the choice of apparatus used for historical recording and representation is critical. The means whereby we recount history shapes our understanding of the past as history. In taking up his pen, Herodotus (c. 484–c. 425 BCE) as the first ‘historian’ declares that his purpose is to promote the survival of knowledge of the past into the future. Through the selected recording medium of writing, he achieved his aim. Compared to transmission by oral repetition, written history is less susceptible to the corrosion of time that Herodotus sets himself against. At that time, the medium of the written word offered a particular set of conditions for the conveyance of knowledge, one of which was durability. Likewise in recent decades, electronic hypertexts present a new medium for recording history by arranging words and images in a weblike network. Inevitably this new arrangement carries with it another set of potentially transforming conditions concerning not only the longevity of historical knowledge but also its reception and comprehension. It is in this cognitive aspect of reception and comprehension of history that the new medium of hypertext offers perhaps the most significant impact.2

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As other writers have shown with regard to the print revolution of the midfifteenth century, significant cognitive shifts are associated with new forms of information processing.3 The process-innovation of printing using moveable type and the associated product-innovation of the bound codex form shaped human thoughts through the staging of words and ideas in a particular technology – the book. Over the past five centuries, readers in Western societies have assimilated the codex form so successfully that we tend not to think about books as technology. As an arbitrary framework for holding words together, the printed book is a cultural tool that has definite facilitating and restricting characteristics that shape the presentation of language and so the understanding of its meaning. In not so subtle ways since the moveable-type revolution, the preeminent framing technology of the book has influenced the thoughts that readers are capable of thinking in print. Hypertext as a new framing technology generates a recurrence of the same revolutionary potential to think new thoughts in links and lexias. With the launch of the pilot Patrons and Performances Web Site in July 2003, the Records of Early English Drama as a corporate entity is dipping its metaphorical toes into the water of the hypertext revolution.4 As REED’s first foray into electronic publishing, this web site marks a major departure from the established format of the series of weighty red volumes which has long been a hallmark of the project. This strong association with the codex form makes the introduction of a new nonphysical medium by this research group all the more notable. Given the potentially radical cognitive shift implied by a move to a new communication medium, the question, then, with which this essay is concerned is the nature and significance of REED’s fledgling hypertext enterprise; and through this first enterprise, as REED transforms its historiographical method from ems to bytes, what consequences can be discerned in the writing of hypertext history for theatre studies in general and for REED-derived research in particular.5 The appearance of the Patrons and Performances Web Site as a hypertext is the result of two disparate sets of goals concerning access to the selected data. In the beginning, the impulse to move to a hypertext format for this novel REED publication was generated by an interest in the particular records concerning the patronage of touring performers. Cutting across the established geographical division between volumes, this research focus served to highlight restrictions implicitly imposed on the records by the conditions of their publication in printed volumes. Typically, each REED volume (or part thereof ) contains the relevant excerpts from primary source material for a given location. After this first division, for example, by county, there are within each volume further geographical divisions according to the provenance of the records.6 Then, each grouping of records is listed chronologically. So although there is some tertiary chronological sorting, the project privileges the site of the records’ performance location as the organizing principle

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at the primary levels. Records indicating payments to a single troupe in a single season might be scattered across several volumes as the players travelled from town to town. And also like troupes of players, patrons’ interests also crossed geographical boundaries, as they frequently held seats and regional offices in several locations, so the notation indicating a performance (whether it be a payment, or a deposition in a court case, or a diary entry) that occurred at one seat may be recorded in manuscript accounts preserved at another. The result is that with this segmented structure in place, tracing the travels of an individual company of players is a line of inquiry that works against the grain of the established organizational method, requiring laborious cross-referenced searching through every volume in the series. The first accommodation made to facilitate this interest in professional touring was in the inclusion of a patrons appendix in Norwich 1540–1642, published in 1984. Here, each patron entry lists selective personal data for the patron, along with the most significant titles and regional appointments that the patron held. Another section lists the seats and properties that the patron is known to have held. The last section provides an index of known performances by the patron’s company of players or other entertainers in the city, with page references to the full record entry. This became a standard feature for all succeeding volumes. The second accommodation to research on the itineraries and performance habits of touring players was the consolidation of all the available county data in one place in a searchable electronic format. At first, the database was constructed using BASIC. As technology advanced, the database migrated from dBase II to dBase IV. In 1998 the patrons’ information was converted to MS Access format and housed principally on a computer at the REED office. 7 During this time, the database operated as an internal resource used by REED scholars and visitors. One limitation to a broader readership for the database, even in Access format, was the level of technological knowledge required to generate a search query and extract the desired information. Now that electronic searching had made the data accessible in one way, a new goal arose to make the data available to a larger user base. It was at this point that the formerly private database was reconceived as an online publication accessed via a free URL. Throughout the evolution of the technological frame for the touring data the concern has been with how reading scholars access information, but the focus shifted slightly over the two stages. In the early stage, when the content material was first being assembled, considerations concerning information processing took precedence over issues of the medium of transmission and reception of that information. In the later stage, the ease of front-end reader access became the priority. Gradually through the progressive moves to indexing, to electronic searching, and finally to hypertext, the reader’s engagement with the changing media of the records data has become as important as the records themselves.

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Now publicly accessible on the Internet, the Patrons and Performances Web Site is composed of four modules – patrons, events, troupes, and venues. A search tool permits readers to pose directed queries and to sort the records data based on these four primary fields. At the core of the web lies the original events database, where it appears in Event Details pages. These pages break down the information from the REED transcription of the manuscript record into a number of data fields listing the troupe, its patron, the location of the event, the type of the event (usually a performance but also occasionally an appearance in court or a bequest), and the payment received. From here, readers can link to the other three modules for more information on the patron, the venue, or other events involving the same troupe. Through the links to the venues or patrons modules, the events records text has been augmented with biographies listing patrons’ titles, offices, and land holdings, and detailed venue descriptions. Although the underlying programming structure for the venues branch simulates a database format with individual entry fields, the resulting presentation is one of fixed nonsearchable pages.8 The venues pages consist of an encyclopedia-style entry describing the location, history, and current condition of the performance site, augmented by architectural plans and historical and contemporary images. Associated with the venues module is a powerful mapping tool which enables the reader to view any venue’s location along with medieval and Renaissance roads, topographical features, and nearby towns or villages. The combined result of these modules is a hybrid hypertextual form fusing an informational database that responds dynamically to reader queries with static supplemental pages. Having achieved the explicitly targeted pragmatic characteristics of searchability and simplified user access, the web site is also shaped in terms of the user reception experience by other implicit characteristics inherent in the chosen hypertextual medium, characteristics which are not manifest in printed materials, at least not to the same degree. It is these stylistic qualities that function to shape the readerly experience of hypertext and thereby control the kinds of messages that might be communicated by this electronic medium. So in tandem with the capability of processing data about patronized players and their travels, the rhetorical strategies of hypertextual stylistics underlying that data shape the reading experience in ways that are radically distinct from traditional print rhetoric. A term coined by Theodor (Ted) Nelson in the 1960s, ‘hypertext’ describes ‘nonsequential writing – text that branches and allows choices to the reader.’ 9 The branching hypertext is composed of two basic elements: blocks of information (composed of words, images, music, or any object that can be delivered electronically) called lexias; and pathways connecting these blocks of information to each other called links. As a single block of information, be it visual or aural, textual or pictorial, the lexia is the primary atomic component of hypertextual writing. This is where the hard content of a hypertext resides. Lexias are akin to a single paragraph

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or single page in a conventional book. This equivalency means that despite the rhetoric of nonlinearity that pervades hypertext theory, conventional reading habits persist at this atomic level within each lexia. Moreover, the layout of disjointed lexias is not entirely new to hypertexts. Footnotes, for example, are linked lexias – a separate block of text physically removed from the main line, linked by a parenthetical reference or superscript numeral. In a hypertext environment, digressions of this kind may be multiplied exponentially through the insertion of links. Connecting the lexias, links can proceed in a single linear path, lining up the lexical blocks head to tail like a line of elephants. Used in this manner, links resemble nothing so much as the turning of pages in a book. However, hypertextual links need not be limited to one-to-one linkages proceeding sequentially or to simple back-and-forth asides in footnotes and marginalia. To open up the branching capabilities of hypertext, one-to-many and many-to-one links are created. In this ideal text, the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable …10

When turning the page is no longer an automatic action, when the reader is compelled to make an associative curious choice as to what to read next, the entire nature of the reading experience changes. Although some electronic books are simply replicas of conventional books where choice is restricted and the text proceeds in a fixed linear fashion, the electronic components of lexias and links make other structures possible. The dominant structural characteristic of hypertext is that it is nonlinear. This nonlinearity is made possible by the multiplicity of linkages. Each time more than one link appears in a lexia another branch is created, activating another possible reading pathway. And so hypertexts are nonlinear in that there is no predetermined single path. The reader is continually confronted with navigational choices. These choices are not hierarchical, with one privileged over another. As a result, conflicting statements can coexist in a hypertext without cancelling each other out. For example, in afternoon, a hypertext novel by Michael Joyce, a car crash both is and is not fatal.11 A second related hypertextual stylistic characteristic that arises as a factor of branching links is fragmentation. Because the reading order is not fully controlled, each lexia must stand as a relatively independent entity, capable of being coherent in a variety of reading contexts. To make this comprehension possible, each lexia may contain only one or two main ideas. And so hypertexts tend to become atomized as a result of the shortness of the lexias. The result is hypertextual webs that are made

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of many small pieces. What was once ‘the text’ becomes ‘texts.’ The effect of the dispersal of the formerly single unitary text into many smaller texts is fragmentation. Fragmentation, however, need not be synonymous with chaos. Although a strictly linear order is abandoned by hypertextual writing, a new order derives from the juxtapositions of the fragments. The fragments that lie in close proximity form constellations of meaning. Another stylistic aspect resulting from fragmentation and nonlinearity is that the multiple networking of disparate pieces prevents hypertexts from possessing either a stable centre or a determined end point. Whereas printed books emphasize a teleological frame of mind with a fixed beginning and ending, hypertexts are nonteleological, actively resisting this kind of linear singular arrangement. Creating patterns of lexias, the branching connections of links emphasize the value of the margins. As the reader travels through the hypertextual network, the centre keeps shifting and as a result so do the margins. What is at the centre becomes a matter of perspective, determined as relative to the reader’s current position. J. Yellowlees Douglas has written about the possibility of hypertextual closure in fiction and the conclusion that she draws indicates that closure is dependent on the reader’s goals – how the text establishes those goals and at what point they can be said to have been fulfilled.12 Finally, hypertexts are also permeable. Links can connect any available electronic information13 and so hypertexts are not bound between covers as books are.14 The optimal realization of this interlinked blurring is concretized in the idea of the hypertextual docuverse where all texts would be interlinked electronically.15 With these identified four principal characteristics of hypertextual style – nonlinearity, fragmentation, decentredness and nonteleology, and permeability – the first question is how does the REED Patrons hypertext fulfil or deny these basic characteristics? And second, given the placement of the Patrons and Performances Web Site on the spectrum of rhetorical tendencies between print structures and hypertext structures, how do its formal hypertextual qualities support the reader’s experience of the data? Drawing on the diverse entries from the foundational records text in the REED volumes, the web site is naturally constituted of fragments. Through its database core, it is founded on records excerpted from an original manuscript context and reassembled in the volumes, still in their fragmentary state. The preservation of these data fragments as fragments is sustained and promoted by the framework of the project as a database composed of thousands of individual records and by the hypertextual organization of linked lexias. Fragmentation here can be seen to be a distinct advantage to the project’s hypertextual situation since there is no pressure exerted by the medium to unify, to create a cohesive pattern. Structural fragmentation permits and encourages the cautious and thoughtful maintenance of gaps in the record.

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The relation of the Patrons and Performances Web Site to the red REED volumes also speaks to the characteristic permeability of the hypertext. The first source that the web site draws on is the red volumes with the original manuscript records standing behind. At a number of points inside the web site, reference is made to the page and volume location of the printed record, linking the hypertext to its print ancestor. Ultimately, the seemingly natural extension of this linkage in hypertextual terms would be to make those records available electronically, possibly also with facsimile scans of the original manuscript documents. And although this massive digitizing project is within the sights of REED’s organizational thinking, the reality is some way off. 16 However, at this time, even without full permeability to the records text, the Patrons and Performances Web Site actively forges connections to selected extant electronically enabled documents. The maps, hosted by the Geography Department at the University of Toronto, on a different server than the rest of the patrons data archive, are perhaps the most intimate of these crossings. Reaching outside the core site, many of the performance venue overview pages feature links to official Internet sites, where available. On the other hand, quotations on the site use a conventional citation system rather than following targeted links to a whole secondary text. This bibliographic circumscription continues in the print tradition preventing more sophisticated permeability to the docuverse. However, given the current lawless and ephemeral state of the World Wide Web docuverse, the idealistic goal of fully permeable text is perhaps not compatible with academic priorities.17 In that light, a conscious philosophical decision was made on the part of the directors to attempt to maintain some kind of boundary of scholarly accountability around the REED site. In this way, exhibiting a selective permeability, the Patrons and Performances Web Site is still an early hypertextual endeavour enmeshed in print structures and cultural ideas about print. And until online publication in the hypertextual docuverse reaches the level of respectability accorded to books from scholarly presses this boundary is likely to stay in place.18 Regarding the stylistic lack of centre or conclusion, the modular geographic organization of the original REED volumes is well suited to the nonteleological noncentred characteristics of hypertext. Few people read the volumes from start to finish. Rather they are ‘grazed.’ In this manner, the volumes can be seen as protohypertexts and as such the migration of the data to a hypertextual decentred medium is quite fluid. The web site (like the books) features an entry page (as do most web sites) but from that initial page the options are myriad. Hypertext, where there is no expected conclusion or end page, is ideal in this respect for the REED web site directors who intend to continue to expand the Patrons and Performances Web Site in the future as new volumes are published and new research is made available for inclusion. The hypertext can be published and continually republished at frequent intervals as fresh data become available without any suggestion

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of incompleteness.19 In this manner, the three secondary characteristics of being fragmented, permeable and noncentred, and nonteleological merge well with the REED web site, supporting both its content and its development. However, it is the dominant hypertextual characteristic of nonlinearity that has the most significant rhetorical consequences for the web site and for the lived experience of the reader. From this structural situation that shapes the reading experience, hypertexts are commonly described as labyrinthine journeys. The name ‘web’ is also particularly descriptive of hypertextual nonlinearity, conjuring images of spidery networks. Since hypertexts resist the imposition of single meaning delivered in a linear fashion, meaning arises through the organization of these networks and clusters set by the author(s) and through the unpredictable juxtapositions made by readers’ choices. In addition to the new ways of reading content through searching, sorting, and collecting, made possible by hypertexts, it is also possible to read hypertexts through their structures, through the macrolevel arrangements of their links and lexia. Communicative patterns at this level function as hypotexts,20 lying below the surface of words, generating meaning through structural organization. By tracing the possibilities for reading hypotexts in the Patrons and Performances Web Site, two different kinds of reading experiences emerge – one in which the innate structure of the web site exposes something that is lost and one in which another aspect of the same particular substructure of this site highlights what is gained. Joseph Donohue has written on a couple of occasions about the role of computers in the discipline of theatre history.21 In an article on the storage of evidence in an electronic format, he looks at the use of databases and considers the extent to which the medium of data storage affects the eventual interpretation of that data. He asks, ‘How does one construct a database of theatre history so as to take into account features of the subject that may not be amenable to description in a database?’ 22 The primary inhospitable feature of databases that he identifies revolves around the recording of the performance experience. Donohue phrases the problem this way: Placed in the context of theatre studies [the] charge is, in plain language, that the computer database of theatrical history does not invoke any of the experiential contexts – artistic, social, cultural – that make the theatre profitable and interesting to study in the first place. That is, computers do not really help us to get at the real life of the form, the theatre itself, that the database purports to be about.23

Donohue assigns this argument to those who resist coming to terms with the limitations of computing in the humanities. Critics of the computer database as a research tool target as its primary weakness a failure to reify the theatrical event. They say, ‘A computer database is no substitute for experience.’ 24 Donohue for his

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part simply asks that as scholars of theatre history we not overextend our expectations of the computer. Whether electronic or print, no secondary communication can adequately represent the lost ephemeral theatrical event. This is one of the basic problems of performance studies in general, whether the medium of historiography is printed or electronic. However, hypertext historiography does offer one novel insight into the issue of the lost performance. Certain types of theatrical historiography come closer to reifying the original object-experience than others, depending on what that original object is. For example, in one very common form of theatrical hypertext – the annotated script – the text under discussion is itself incorporated into the hypertext. And so, both the object of analysis and the analysis share the same constitutive medium. Even in print, literary criticism retains this advantage over performance criticism. In theatre history, the event-object can never share the same medium as the criticism unless the criticism itself takes the form of a performance and even then the original performance still remains inaccessible, locked in the past, unable to occupy the same mediated environment as the assessment. What happens therefore is that the lost performance renders a hole, an inevitable absence, in the centre of any theatrical historiography. Given the preeminence of the hypotextual structure as a locus of meaning in hypertextual writing, this hole becomes a defining characteristic for hypertextual historiography. Hypertext historiography, therefore, whatever its other hypotextual characteristics, will always be some kind of a torus, where the critical lexias encircle through their critical linkages the referenced as a central but absent performance.25 In terms of the lived performance experience that is always already lost in the study of theatre history, hypertext writing makes that loss immediately apparent and actualizes the performative lacuna in its structures. So although the reader cannot experience the lost performance, through his active engagement as a reader in the hypertextual environment he can experience the phenomenon of loss. Through this enactment of loss, the Patrons and Performances Web Site as a representative hypertext reiterates in its structure this characteristic of all theatre historiography. The experience of the absent performance relates generically to all works of hypertext theatre historiography, but in terms of what might be gained experientially in the use of hypertext to tell theatre history, the REED Patrons and Performances Web Site benefits in a very specific and serendipitous way. In Writing Space, Jay David Bolter describes the role of a networked lexia: ‘Each paragraph [lexia] has become a unitary sign. Whatever else the first paragraph means as prose, it now has an added meaning as the source of a textual connection, and the second paragraph now takes on the meaning of destination.’ 26 This rhetoric of the hypertextual docuverse as a series of destinations, a space to be navigated, or a journey to be undertaken, pervades theories of hypertext discourse. But in addition to the individual roads

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taken, the docuverse can be read as a static map. Every hypertext presents two maps. One is a fixed virtual map indicating all potential reading paths, depicting every lexia and every link out of those lexias. This map, which is often invisible to the reading experience in a hypertext environment by virtue of its vastness and complexity, is the map of the author. The second map is instantiated by the reader. This is the map that arises as the result of a particular reading experience. Both of these patterns – the virtual and the actual – can be analysed for hypotextual significance. In this constellation, each lexia forms a single unit of meaning, functioning just as a letter or word does. These individual units are strung together in lines or webs to articulate ideas in sentences or in hypertextual environments. Meaning is determined by the spatial relationship of one semantic unit to another. If the printing press is a letter processor, hypertext is a paragraph processor. And so rather than constructing an argument as a lengthy chain, hypertext lends itself more to argument built in related clusters. Unconventional as the building blocks of a scholarly argument, this approach of constructing complex meaning in clusters finds its kin in organic chemistry as the building blocks of life. David Kolb, in a seminal essay for hypertext theory, ‘Socrates in the Labyrinth,’ attempts to test the idea of an argument constructed in clusters. In the first sentences of this early hypertextual article, he asks, ‘Can we do philosophy using hypertext? What kind of work might a philosophical hypertext do?’ 27 This essay (and its hypertextual ancestor) asks the same questions about history, and specifically about theatre history, and so Kolb’s insights are central. On the one hand, the simple lexia is too small to develop a complex argument. The granularity of content at the lexical level ‘makes it difficult to show two units co-constituting each other.’ 28 Yet on the other hand, the web at the macrolevel is too detailed to read, too vast. The map structure is too dense. What Kolb ultimately suggests is the employment of meaningful structures which exist at a level above the individual lexia and below the total map of the docuverse, using what he calls ‘intermediate forms’ to construct arguments. ‘We need to understand better the ways in which links and paths can enact forms and figures … that bring pressure to bear on the “internal” being of individual lexias.’ 29 Beyond this intriguing invitation, Kolb himself, however, does not engage in a specific discussion of what these intermediate forms or structures might be. By organizing lexias into clusters, short linear paths, circles, or other rhetorical patterns yet to be devised, hypertextual meaning shifts away from the individual lexical units. Meaning is translated to a higher order. The patterning of arguments determined by intermediate structures creates a kind of metacriticism. Criticism still exists at the lexical level but it is overlaid by a second set of cues for reading meaning. So although we live in what Jay David Bolter calls ‘the late age of print,’ 30

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here in the infancy of hypertextual writing, it is difficult to say exactly what this will entail. To some extent, this new mode of communication functions similarly to reading the argument of a print essay purely from its paragraph structure. Does it proceed linearly? Or does it present two options, evaluating one against the other? Or is it circular? If the pattern is sufficiently complex it can possess an autonomous meaning, transmitting messages in spatial metaphors. Residing at the level of intermediate forms, just below the overall macrostructure of the docuverse, meaning can be designed and discerned among the patterns of links and lexias. To date, this kind of spatial metaphor has been used primarily in works of hypertext fiction. In Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, one section of the nonlinear narrative is structured spatially as a quilt with multicoloured lexias generating their own patterns.31 These patterns, not always apparent at the surface, invoke a ‘metasense of pattern recognition.’ 32 Swimming just below the surface of the large-scale web structures, these patterns form a hypotext. To effectively write/read hypertext, both authors and readers will need to develop a secondary literacy, to be aware not only of the meaning embedded in the lexias but in the hypotextual meanings created by the links. ‘No fixed center, for starters – and no edges either, no ends or boundaries. The … line vanishes into a geographical landscape or exitless maze, with beginnings, middles and ends being no longer part of the immediate display.’ 33 Robert Coover picks up the common analogy of hypertext as a maze or labyrinth and aligns it here with the ‘geographical landscape.’ This is where the nonlinear aspect of hypertext connects on a thematic level to the geographic organizing principle of the REED Patrons and Performances Web Site. In the REED site, a strong metaphor of journeying through geography pervades the hypertext, fusing the content to its structure. Branching pathways from lexia to lexia mimic the criss-crossing tours of the players across England. At the level of the fixed author-structure, the overall patterns of both the hypotextual structure and the data adhere to the map metaphor. At an intermediate level located in the reading experience, however, both the lexical structures and the data become linear. The reader moving through the web experiences a linear journey. Likewise, the scholarly reader works to trace a linear path in the attempt to reconstruct the travels of itinerant performers. In this manner the two maps coexist. Linear threads will emerge as the players’ itineraries are developed, but the overall structure continues to be maplike in its tracery of linkages. The maps included in the REED Patrons and Performances Web Site are central to the web’s structure and to its philosophy. Geography has always been an organizing factor in the REED project, through the assignment of editors and the production of the red volumes of performance records. The covers of each volume replicate the county divisions, creating boundaries amongst the data. By transferring

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the patrons data to a hypertextual format, it is possible to transcend these particular geographical limits. And yet, there is no escaping from geography. On the one hand, the project as hypertext breaks down arbitrary boundaries by enabling searching across geography – and so the travels of Leicester’s men as they trooped across the country can be accessed easily without resorting to browsing multiple volumes of records. On the other hand, because the focus of the project is touring, that is, travelling through geography, geography remains a central theme. Geography in the form of maps is the central organizing motif of the Patrons and Performances Web Site. The map both in its incarnation as a physical entity reproduced through interactive and antiquarian maps and as a structuring principle of the reading experience pervades the project. The map metaphor which is so frequently applied to hypertexts is very exciting in conjunction with the REED Patrons and Performances hypertext because the maps are not merely a metaphor. This aspect of the data is transmitted through the hypertextual structure of the data in the web. Maps also structure the patrons database side of the web. Patrons as individuals are keyed to geography through their land holdings, regional offices, and through the journeys of their players. At a thematic level, the REED Patrons and Performances Web Site with its affinity for maps and journeys is a perfect match for hypertext with its linked lexical destinations and readers navigating branching journeys. The details of the individual performance events and performance venues function as stops in a journey like lexias in a web. The idea of journeying through a field of information is replicated in the journeys of the players. This lived kinship between the original theatrical events under study and the mode of representing the fragmentary data concerning those events helps to defray the charge that works of theatre history, and databases in particular, are unable to reify history. Here, the reading experience doubles the original journey. Reading and writing with an awareness of the underlying hypotextual structures and the sense that everything is connected and that meaning resides in those connections instigates a kind of ‘creative paranoia.’ 34 Meaning resting in the links between the lexias encourages readers to connect the dots, to create constellations out of seemingly random groupings of stars. In a lexia called ‘speak memory’ from afternoon, Michael Joyce tries to describe the experience of accumulating knowledge:

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NOTES 1 Herodotus, The History, trans. David Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 33. 2 This essay was originally conceived and executed as a hypertext, comprised of approximately 100 multiply linked text segments. The ‘unravelling’ of this work into a strictly linear traditional print form has had a significant impact on the thesis which attempts to illustrate the communicative potential in the unique interdependent relationship between form and content in electronic media. So whereas in its previous form the text was able to both show and tell, it is now limited to simple telling. 3 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962); Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982). Although Eisenstein, McLuhan, and Ong all describe a profound impact of the technological revolution in communication on the intellectual and cultural development of Western society, they take opposing stances regarding the causal relationship between the new technology and subsequent cognitive change. Whereas McLuhan and Ong are technological determinists, seeing new forms directly affecting meaning (‘the medium is the message’), Eisenstein perceives print technology as augmenting or distorting already extant intellectual characteristics. Rather, it was the speed and the scope of change in the arrangement and dissemination of knowledge made possible by the advent of the printing press that acted as a social catalyst. 4 The site can be accessed from its home page located at . 5 At this early stage in its development, the state of electronic publications in the field of theatre history is very like a toddler – energetic in its diversity but unrefined in its presentation. The scholarly sites take a variety of forms. The two most basic forms are encyclopedia-type sites (Perseus Digital Library , image collections and gateways, e.g., Mr William Shakespeare and the Internet ) and electronic journals (Early Modern Culture and Renaissance Forum ). Both present material in a predominantly linear fashion, using links for footnotes and for navigating between static pages. Annotated texts offer a more sophisticated use of hypertextual technology, applying the linking ability of the web to create multiple nonhierarchical editions (among the best of these are the Internet Shakespeare Editions, Michael Best, general editor ). In this company, the REED Patrons and Performances Web Site is certainly at the forefront of the field in terms of the integration of hypertextual capabilities to make possible the presentation of original data.

Herodotus in the Labyrinth: REED and Hypertext 213 6 For example, in the Lancashire volume, the records showing the extant sections of the journal of Nicholas Assheton which recount the visit of James I to Hoghton Tower in August 1617 immediately precede the 1581 will of Alexander Hoghton providing consideration for several players then living in his household, including one ‘William Shakshafte’ (George, ed., Lancashire, 154–6). 7 In the fall of 2004 the data migrated once again from MS Access to a new database management system called MySQL. As the vehicle responsible for handling all the site requests, this new system is better suited to manage greater amounts of data as the web site expands both its content and user population. My thanks to Sian Meikle for her explanations of these technical issues. 8 Currently, the venue pages can only be searched directly by ‘name.’ However, because of the database substructure of the venues pages, the potential exists for future expansion(s) of the search capability to include the sorting of performance venues by particular characteristics such as size or other architectural features. 9 Theodor Holm Nelson, Literary Machines: The report on, and of, Project Xanadu concerning word processing, electronic publishing, hypertext, thinkertoys, tomorrow’s intellectual revolution, and certain other topics including knowledge, education and freedom (South Bend, IN: Distributors, 1981), 0/2. 10 Roland Barthes, S /Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 5– 6. 11 Michael Joyce, afternoon, a story (Environment: Storyspace. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 2001). 12 J. Yellowlees Douglas, ‘“How Do I Stop This Thing?”: Closure and Indeterminacy in Interactive Narratives,’ in George P. Landow, ed., Hyper/Text /Theory (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 159–88. 13 If the hypertext is made ‘live’ and uploaded to the Internet, then any item on the World Wide Web could be incorporated into any other text. 14 Despite the boundaries of a book’s covers, which appear on the surface to promote a closed environment, Foucault observes this quality of permeability through connectedness in printed books: ‘The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut’ because ‘it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences’ (The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith [London: Tavistock Publications, 1972], 23). So, whereas the physical entity of a book suggests self-containment, the understanding of its signs presupposes links with other signs and other texts. In general the distinctions between reading structure in books and in hypertexts are far from absolute, since the differentiating characteristics of hypertexts do sometimes manifest in books. One such example is Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar (trans. Gregory Rabassa [New York: Pantheon, 1969]) which offers different reading paths among the numbered short chapters. And print characteristics do also leak into hypertexts. A single lexia is often an uninterrupted linear block presenting a traditional reading experience within each segment.

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15 The term ‘docuverse’ – a universe of documents – was coined by Theodor Nelson (Literary Machines, 4/15) as part of his conceptualizing of the Xanadu project, the goal of which was to collect all available electronic information in one place. Currently, the most comprehensive docuverse exists in the World Wide Web. But despite the extensive nature of the content accessible on the Internet, the ideal of a complete docuverse encompassing all materials, past and present, in an immense electronic library, is a long way from realization. 16 Recently, REED has struck an electronic text subcommittee to generate a blueprint for this digitizing project. Beyond the primary obstacles of the cost of such a project and the need for increased staff with electronic expertise, hypertext mark-up protocols will need to be developed to preserve the detailed orthographic, linguistic, and historical data embedded in each record. See above, pp. 178–99. 17 ‘Link rot’ (broken links resulting in a ‘page not found’ message) is a significant problem for hypertextual publications that take advantage of this characteristic of permeability and reach out to external sites. The World Wide Web is a shifting landscape and sites which are viable on one day may disappear the next. 18 It is a very realistic possibility that hypertextual permeability will never reach the zenith of its stylistic promise. Whereas the unlegitimized nature of much online material is an obstacle to the scholarly confidence that we place in printed books, the ‘lawlessness’ of the web is to many one of its most attractive and positive characteristics. However, I can imagine at some future point that other alternate docuverses may come into being and that these might be subject to gate-keeping in the same manner as the contemporary print publishing industry. 19 This characteristic of noncentredness applies to the catholicity of the documents published by REED as a whole. See below, pp. 216–35, on REED’s role in the development of alternative dramatic canons beyond Shakespeare and beyond authorship. In contrast to the non-London, non-Shakespeare orientation of the accumulated records, the image of Shakespeare on the Patrons and Performances Web Site home page linking to the Shakespeare ‘feature’ performs the opposite function by overtly aligning REED with this symbol that marks the ‘centre’ of early modern theatre history. 20 That is, ‘… the way nodes are divided to accommodate the data structures and display strategies, or the types of linkage available and the ways they are apparent to the reader.’ Stuart Moulthrop, ‘You Say You Want a Revolution: Hypertext and the Laws of Media,’ in Eyal Amiran and John Unsworth, eds, Essays in Postmodern Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 87. 21 Joseph Donohue, ‘Evidence and Documentation,’ in Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A. McConachie, eds, Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), 177–97; ‘Theatre Scholarship and Technology: A Look at the Future of the Discipline,’ Theatre Survey 22.2 (1981): 133 –9.

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Donohue, ‘Evidence and Documentation,’ 187. Ibid., 189. Ibid., 190. A torus is a geometrical object resembling a doughnut. In its original hypertextual form, this essay was importantly in one sense not a doughnut in that the primary object under discussion is itself a hypertextual object, the Patrons and Performances Web Site. However, the web site is a torus, manifesting the ephemeral medieval and Renaissance performances at its core as absent. And so from that point of view, the hypertextual version of ‘Herodotus in the Labyrinth’ was also a doughnut. Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991), 60. David Kolb, ‘Socrates in the Labyrinth,’ in George P. Landow, ed., Hyper/Text/Theory (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 323. Although the citations to Kolb’s article here refer to a printed version of this work, ‘Socrates in the Labyrinth’ was first published electronically using Storyspace, a primitive hypertext authoring system which predates the widespread use of HTML. Kolb, ‘Socrates in the Labyrinth,’ 333. Ibid., 336. Bolter, Writing Space, 2. Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl (Environment: Storyspace. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1995). Moulthrop, ‘You Say You Want a Revolution?’ 82. Robert Coover, ‘The End of Books,’ New York Times Book Review, 21 June 1992: 23. This phrase originates in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973), 638. Since then it has been widely circulated in writings about hypertext theory as a particularly apt description of the overstimulating experience of living life in hypertextual environments. Joyce, afternoon, a story.

Thinking Outside the Bard: REED, Repertory Canons, and Editing Early English Drama tanya hagen

The kingdom has been divided, but Shakespeare reigns supreme …1

Shakespearean textual scholarship has recently passed through a period of radical upheaval. Poststructuralist theory, in conjunction with the ascendance of electronic media, has been instrumental in generating new and almost invariably controversial models for editing early English drama.2 Amidst lively debate over the decentring of Shakespeare’s authority, the larger part of the early English dramatic canon languishes – undervalued, underexamined, and underedited. Such critical and editorial negligence is an effect, paradoxically, of the same process of decentring that has been so productive for Shakespeare studies. As Shakespeare’s texts multiply (a Shrew, two Lears, three Hamlets), they consume increasingly more disciplinary and textual space. In the end, the less salubrious impact of poststructuralist textual practice has been to reify the posthumous centrality of a well-known few at the expense of the still obscure many.3 I do not mean here to sound the increasingly familiar lament that new approaches to editing early English drama have usually meant more editions of Shakespeare, and that what we need to do now is get to work on the other plays and playwrights (we do, but this comes later). My point, rather, is that the myriad interventions which have made such a difference to Shakespearean textual scholarship have largely passed over the rest of the canon.4 Much as we have come to recognize the Shakespearean text as the historically embedded product of diverse and often conflicting investments (scholarly, theatrical, commercial, nationalist), we have yet to give any serious attention to the similarly mediated textuality of non-Shakespearean drama. As we look towards a posttheoretical age of scholarship in early modern drama the editorial community has still to contend with some of the more recalcitrant legacies of the pre-theoretical era. To develop models for editing early

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English drama that respond productively and inclusively to the work of the past few decades, we must confront the ideological and narrative structures that inform the ways in which editions of early English plays have traditionally been produced. As we seek alternatives to models that prove ill suited to certain plays or types of drama, moreover, we must also be ready to find inspiration from sources that do not seem to have an immediate or obvious bearing on textual traditions: in places where the theatre takes priority over the drama, and the printed play is one (if the key) witness among many documents testifying to past performance(s). One such source of inspiration, I believe, presents itself in the work of the Records of Early English Drama project. REED’s practical contribution to the field of early modern theatre history needs little acknowledgement here. The many recent studies in early English drama to incorporate REED material speak eloquently on this behalf. 5 Beyond placing new evidence at our disposal, however, REED research has pushed the conceptual bounds of our inquiry: beyond London and its stages, and beyond the printed texts and authorial canons that too often claim our discursive space.6 In urging us to rethink the narratives that govern our reading of the period, REED presents much the same challenge to theatre historians that poststructuralist editors have issued to Shakespearean textual critics. REED is particularly radical in its systematic refusal to accord Shakespeare any pride of place in the history of early drama: in its repudiation, that is, of orthodoxies that keep Shakespeare (and by extension the singular author) at the centre of the early modern stage. 7 But what are the implications of REED’s distinctive take on early English theatre history for future textual scholarship? How might the ‘red army’ of REED volumes and its radical historiography lead to editorial experimentation? Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean’s The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, which unites REED archival research with the revisionist bibliography of the New Textualists in an analysis of the nine plays they attribute to the Queen’s Men company, offers, I believe, both a direction and a template for a new kind of editorial project. Drawing on evidence provided by the REED project, McMillin and MacLean reconstruct the historical context in which the Queen’s Men toured and performed. Situated against the complex theatrical and political culture of England in the 1580s, the plays associated with the queen’s ‘all-star troupe’ of players find new and creative interpretation. As the Queen’s Men travel the provinces, they disseminate a royalist and Protestant political agenda, expressed in the dramatic recreation of episodes from English history, and styled according to humanist principles of ‘truth’ and ‘plainness.’ To acknowledge the plays as the repertory of a large company that toured actively, and for this purpose occasionally split into smaller groups, also helps to dispel the mythos of ‘corruption’

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woven around the surviving texts by the New Bibliographers. Casting analyses of the plays make sense of garbled passages and narrative inconsistencies. Dramaturgical readings grounded in both a knowledge of early modern performance conditions and practices, and in a particular sense of the political and religious context in which the plays were disseminated, also shed light on perceived problems of narrative overdetermination, staging, and versification. As the Queen’s Men repertory comes to life in McMillin and MacLean’s dynamic readings, we come to a new understanding of the subsequent careers of Marlowe and Shakespeare. McMillin and MacLean observe that ‘print-culture and the Queen’s Men were not a good match … [t]heirs was not primarily a literary drama.’ 8 Critical scholarship has not been kind to plays that are weighed in the measure of contemporary works by Marlowe and Shakespeare. When considered at all, such plays are too easily dismissed as nothing more than source texts or ‘bad’ quartos. Collected and interpreted under the auspices of a theatrical repertory, however, the plays gain new literary and historical interest: they offer much that delights and engages the reader, and, importantly, they also tell us something about performance history and England’s theatrical past. In a recent essay, Richard Proudfoot questions ‘the reluctance of publishers and readers to contemplate other criteria [for play collections] than the sometimes slippery one of authorship,’ and proposes instead that we consider such criteria as ‘the plays associated with particular acting companies, or with particular playhouses, or with particular moments in theatrical history.’ 9 Proudfoot’s vision, realized in the context of the McMillin and MacLean study, points towards a repertorybased edition as a potential and stimulating alternative to current models for editing English drama. We will need to come much farther in our knowledge of the individual repertories before such an edition can be possible. A good deal of the work towards this (or any new) model must, moreover, take place in the editorial as well as the theatrical archive. The present study, then, has a twofold purpose. The longer part of the essay presents an anecdotal history of non-Shakespearean textual scholarship.10 Some of the problems that attend editorial approaches to early English drama, I suggest, originate with the tradition of the eighteenth-century ‘old play’ collection. The particular interests and biases eighteenth-century editors bring to their work still resonate in the textual treatment of such plays as those attributed to the Queen’s Men company. The survey concludes with a brief proposal for a repertory-based, hypertextual edition of the Queen’s Men plays as an alternative to conventional handlings. The theoretical, archival, and technological work of the past few decades issues, I believe, a clear mandate to the next generation of textual scholars in early English drama. The time to respond to this challenge – as the brazen head of Friar Bacon urges – is now.

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The Materiality of the Non-Shakespearean Text The tradition of editing Shakespeare is often said to be a long and distinguished one.11 The editorial tradition of Renaissance drama is not long nor – save in recent years – is it distinguished.12

There are four dramatic collections published in England during the eighteenth century that focus exclusively on English drama before 1700:13 Robert Dodsley’s twelve-volume A Select Collection of Old Plays (1744); Thomas Hawkins’s The Origin of the English Drama (1773), in three volumes; John Nichols’s two-volume Six Old Plays (1779), and Isaac Reed’s second edition of Dodsley (1780).14 Together, these collections account for the publication of eighty-eight plays, and fifty-one named playwrights – as well as a further fifteen unattributed plays – ranging from the late fifteenth to the late seventeenth century. Taking into account differences in scope and method, as well as developments between Dodsley’s and the latter three editions (all produced within the same decade), we may identify a number of salient features among the four collections which constitute them as an emerging paradigm for editing early English plays, distinct from the Shakespearean model. As the editions have not received sustained attention elsewhere, it is worth considering briefly here the individual projects of the successive editors. The 1744 Select Collection is the most commercial and comprehensive of the four. Produced at a time when Shakespeare’s reputation as the first playwright of the English stage had yet to be sealed, Dodsley’s edition also shows the least interest in providing the contexts for a specifically Shakespearean dramatic tradition.15 Notably, Dodsley is also alone among the editors in suggesting that the plays in his collection may still enjoy a theatrical currency, ‘[s]everal of these being not unworthy the present, nor indeed any Stage.’ 16 Framed as an attempt to redeem ‘some of the best Pieces of our old Dramatic Writers from total Neglect and Oblivion,’ and to offer his readers an assortment of ‘elegant Entertainment[s],’ the collection prints sixty-one plays, presented in a rough attempt at chronological order, and covering a period between 1544 and 1680.17 As the work is intended for a polite, rather than necessarily scholarly readership, there is no commentary or textual apparatus; the editor does, however, provide short biographical notices of the playwrights he has been able to identify, as well as a lengthy prefatory essay on the development of the English stage, and an unattributed reprint of James Wright’s 1699 theatrical treatise, Historia Histrionica. In the interest of showing ‘the Progress and Improvement of our Taste and Language,’ Dodsley preserves ‘the very Original Orthography’ of the first seven plays in the collection.18 The texts of the remaining plays are modernized.

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Where Dodsley expresses a general interest in reclaiming a range of sixteenthand seventeenth-century plays from potential obscurity, Hawkins’s Origin is more explicitly concerned with providing the early contexts for Shakespeare’s rise to greatness on the English stage. The project, he notes, is born of his recent labours on the new edition of Hanmer’s Oxford Shakespeare, during which ‘he was naturally thrown into a course of reading the productions of our first dramatic writers, in order to explain and illustrate the obsolete phrases and allusions to ancient customs, which occur in the works of our great poet.’ 19 The fourteen plays in the collection, ranging from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth century, serve an illustrative and documentary purpose: they are selected for their capacity to elucidate a tradition – as delineated in Hawkins’s introductory essay – that culminates in the Shakespearean drama. In addition to a historical introduction, the collection furnishes short prefaces to each play, as well as limited philological notes, and a list of textual variants at the bottom of each page. Following Dodsley’s practice, Hawkins maintains the original spelling of the earliest plays, but modernizes the later. John Nichols’s Six Old Plays, comprising exclusively Shakespearean source texts, and formatted as a companion to the Origin, furthers Hawkins’s illustrative project.20 Published at the request of George Steevens, the collection is intended to furnish complete texts of plays Steevens refers to in the latest edition of Shakespeare.21 Apart from their capacity to shed light on Shakespeare’s works, Nichols observes, the plays have no intrinsic literary merit; rather, ‘[t]heir claim to be preserved is built on their having suggested such plans as his superior genius and judgment enabled him to improve.’ 22 Amongst the four editors, Nichols is the most conservative in his approach to the texts: as the plays are meant to serve a wholly elucidatory function, Nichols observes that he has ‘undertaken to publish them without departure from the original copies.’ 23 More properly documents than literature, the plays serve their purpose best, that is, insofar as they are maintained in their unmediated state. The edition represents more than anything else an act of historical preservation. Reed’s second edition of the Select Collection, while it maintains the broad character of Dodsley’s earlier work, attests to a greater awareness of Shakespeare’s centrality to the early English dramatic tradition. It is also manifestly a more scholarly effort. Reed jettisons some of the mid-seventeenth-century and Restoration material (primarily the works of the aristocratic amateurs Dodsley favoured); the replacement texts instead flesh out the decades representing the active years of Shakespeare’s career. Massinger, recently published in a succession of works editions, no longer appears.24 Errors in dating are corrected, and the plays are reorganized accordingly. In three instances – The Spanish Tragedy, Albumazar, and Fuimus Troes – Reed supplies attributions for plays unattributed in the first edition. Where Dodsley had based his text on whichever copies came to hand – often the most recent

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edition – Reed collates as many editions as are available to him. He does not, however, provide a table of variants. Pointing to the problems inherent in Dodsley’s practice of improving on ‘barbarisms,’ and introducing conjectural emendations into the texts, Reed emphasizes his own more conservative method: except in a few instances, he has not departed from the original text, and never without notice of the change.25 The editor, finally, provides a modest commentary. In this, Reed observes, his readers will recognize the collection’s debt to the last edition of Shakespeare, ‘[as] it cannot be expected that many will become purchasers of these volumes who are not possessed of that work.’ 26 Differences in method aside, perhaps the signal departure of Reed’s second edition is in the assumption that the plays can have no broad appeal beyond their Shakespearean interest.27 In assessing the impact of these collections on subsequent treatments of early plays, we might begin with the broad principles governing their production. The works edition, organized around the figure of a singular (or, in the case of Beaumont and Fletcher, dual) authority, takes as its central mandate the complementary notions of completeness and inclusiveness. The collections of Dodsley, Hawkins, and Reed, conversely, are constructed according to a principle of selection and exclusiveness. Rather than focusing on a specific playwright, they offer a sampling of exemplary texts, culled either for their illustrative qualities – Lusty Juventus as moral interlude; Gorboduc as the first ‘regular’ English tragedy – and/or for their status as the ‘best’ of an early tradition.28 The biographical emphasis of the brief commentaries that preface each play in the Select Collection(s) and the Origin attests to an investment in authorship, but one that occupies a lower place in the hierarchy of literary merit. The collections effectively supply a bibliographical context for the dissemination of plays that do not warrant separate volumes – whose authors, for the most part, have not recently – or ever – appeared in works editions.29 If the collected format provides a venue for texts that might otherwise not see republication, it also serves as an index of canonical worth: printed here, a play becomes defined by its representative, aggregate status. On the other hand, to the extent that ontologically such large multivolume collections as Dodsley’s mimic the production values of works editions, they also (however erroneously) give the impression of completeness – of having established the (rather than simply a) canon. Much as the broad format of the dramatic collection provides a bibliographical equivalent for the works edition, furthermore, the titles under which the collections are produced stand in for discrete authorial rubrics. Offered to the public as ‘old plays’ or exempla of ‘origins,’ the texts are identified first and most visibly by their collective antiquity, and only after this by their respective playwrights, if they are known. In this vein, the three larger collections’ prefatory essays on the history of the early stage also stand in for the increasingly lengthy biographical and critical essays attached to the century’s works editions of Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Jonson, and,

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later, Massinger. As the latter narratives are concerned to explicate the works of a single dramatist, or pair of dramatists, the former chart the development of a theatrical tradition and of a national literature. Implicitly, then, historical interest takes precedent over literary value. Bibliographical context mandates, on a number of levels, the editorial treatment of the text. From a wholly practical standpoint, the scope of the collected edition tends to diminish the possibility of sustained attention to any one piece: as Dodsley notes in his preface, ‘it is more difficult to give a correct Specimen of so many Writers, than a correct Edition of any one.’ 30 Granted, the degree of editorial labour expended also depends on the perceived value of the text at hand: a value measured, in large part, by the status of the author with whom the play is associated. Because – particularly in the case of the later editions – the plays serve foremost an illustrative purpose, there is less of an urgent perception that the texts themselves are in need of elucidation. Because, moreover, the authors of these plays are – by virtue of their place in such a forum – lesser playwrights, what investment there is in explication or textual reconstruction is proportionately less than it would be in the case of such a prominent figure of the early stage as, for example, Jonson. There is, furthermore, as Dodsley comments in his preface to the reader, the issue of dealing with so many different authors [b]ecause, when an Author’s Manner is once known, it will very often help to rectify or discover the Meaning of corrupted or intricate Passages; whereas the reading of so many different Stiles and Manners of Writing will be apt, without great Care, to confound and mislead the Judgment.31

The polyphony of voices represented in such a forum, and the absence of any single clearly articulated authorial persona, presents a serious methodological problem for the intentionalist editor. Without a clear sense of the ‘Author’s Manner’ to facilitate and justify the process of emendation, the most prudent course is towards conservatism. The most radical realization of such a stance is in Nichols’s collection, where anonymity – whether deliberately or not – is equated with a policy of nonintervention. In good measure, of course, such conservative textual practice also owes much to the historicist emphasis of the collections: the greater the editorial investment in the artefactual status of the play, that is, the greater the impulse towards preservation. I do not wish to suggest that contemporary editions of non-Shakespearean plays descend in an unbroken line of descent from the eighteenth-century ‘old play’ collection. The transmission history of the early English dramatic canon is complex and multifarious, and demands significantly more explication than the present overview can provide. And yet the logic according to which editions of early

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drama are now produced owes more than we have acknowledged to the mediations of eighteenth-century editors, and to their particular investments in authorship and historical narrative. In the work of Dodsley and his successors we discover not only the familiar constituents of a contemporary canon, but also methodological sensibilities that inform the present textual condition of non-Shakespearean drama. Dividing the Kingdom: Works and Documents Every edition, every textual investigation, represents an assertion of value.32

Underlying the pragmatic issue of how editions of early English plays get produced, I would suggest, is an impulse now associated with Anglo-American theories of textual criticism, but first articulated in eighteenth-century editorial projects: the need to distinguish between the work and the document.33 The work/document dichotomy, Margreta de Grazia has observed, is rooted in our notions of authorship: a work is authored; a document is not.34 Where a text falls in this divide determines how it should be edited: whether it should be reconstructed or reproduced. To edit a work is to redeem the intangible from the exigencies of the physical; to edit a document is to retain as much as possible the traces of its materiality. The first is a literary, the second, a historical project. This perceived difference manifests in an ontological gap between the critical text of a ‘major’ playwright in a works edition, and the diplomatic text of a Shakespearean cognate play printed in a collection of source materials. In the disparate physical and methodological values according to which plays are reproduced, we mark the canonical polarities of, on the one hand, the literary, dynamic, and transcendental, and, on the other, the documentary, static, and historically contingent. As we move away from the ideal – from the author-function that most closely approximates to the Shakespearean model – the degree of editorial intervention in the text becomes proportionately lighter. Plays appear in anthologies, selected and ordered to fit a teleological reading of the early English stage.35 At its furthest remove, the non-Shakespearean text achieves an essentially documentary status. Divested of intangible worth, it becomes wholly contingent on the production of the Shakespearean canon: a static text in the dynamic narrative of Shakespeare as transcendent author. The editorial history of the nine plays McMillin and MacLean attribute to the Queen’s Men company exemplifies this principle of divided – and diminishing – editorial investment. According to the logic of our dominant models for editorial production, we may divide these into three discrete groups: (1) plays of undisputed authorship; (2) Shakespearean cognate plays; (3) doubtfully attributed plays and minor works. Under the first category, we find Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and George Peele’s The Old Wives Tale. The second group comprises The

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Famous Victories of Henry V, King Leir, The Troublesome Reign of King John, and The True Tragedy of Richard III. The final group of plays includes Selimus, first attributed to Greene by Alexander B. Grosart in his Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Robert Greene (1881–6), and Clyomon and Clamydes, occasionally given to George Peele, and printed in both the Dyce and Bullen editions of Peele’s works (1829 – 39; 1888), and Robert Wilson’s Three Lords and Ladies of London.36 Friar Bacon and The Old Wives Tale, the accepted works of ‘major’ playwrights are the most frequently edited of the nine plays. While both have appeared in works editions during the twentieth century, The Old Wives Tale fares better than Friar Bacon in this respect. Peele’s collected œuvre is treated most recently in the Yale Life and Works of George Peele, produced between 1952 and 1970 under the general editorship of Charles Tyler Prouty. Greene, conversely, has not appeared in a new works edition since J. Churton Collins’s 1905 Plays and Poems of Robert Greene. Condemned by Greg as a gross insult to English scholarship, the edition is not only inadequate, but now seriously out of date.37 Both plays, furthermore, appear in modernized critical texts as part of major scholarly series. Friar Bacon is edited by Daniel Seltzer for Regents in 1963, and The Old Wives Tale by Patricia Binnie for Revels in 1980, and the plays have also appeared in New Mermaids editions. Neither Seltzer nor Binnie devotes particular attention to the performance contexts of the plays; Binnie subscribes to the New Bibliographical orthodoxy that the printing of the play was occasioned by the Queen’s Men company’s financial difficulties.38 The plays owe their ‘most frequently edited’ status, however, not to works or individual editions, but to dramatic collections. Both are staples of large period surveys and of smaller ‘best of’ or genre-based collections.39 Within these parameters, the plays figure most commonly as specimens of a rustic native drama. Friar Bacon is positioned in relation to the nascent tradition of chronicle plays, and the Old Wives Tale looks back to folk legends and rustic traditions of dance and song. Both furnish the raw stuff that Shakespeare later fashions into romantic comedy.40 If repeated publication in dramatic collections guarantees the plays’ continued visibility in the canon, it also entrenches them within set historical patterns and generic roles. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Shakespearean cognate plays boast the longest editorial history of the Queen’s Men repertory. Only the True Tragedy, first reprinted in Boswell’s 1821 Variorum Shakespeare, is not edited during the eighteenth century. The Troublesome Raigne appears in John Bowles’s 1764 Miscellaneous Pieces of Antient English Poesie, King Leir in George Steevens’s 1766 Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare, and the Famous Victories, along with the first two, in Nichols’s Six Old Plays. While their relationship to the Shakespeare canon has granted these plays more sustained editorial attention than many contemporary works prized at a higher literary value, such representation serves, if anything, to emphasize the plays’ liminal status within the larger canon of early drama. The plays are not featured

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in standard anthologies of early English drama. They appear, rather, in large collections of source materials such as Geoffrey Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (King Leir andTroublesome Raigne), or in more focused authorship and source studies: The Famous Victories in, for example, Seymour M. Pitcher’s The Case for Shakespeare’s Authorship of The Famous Victories, or more recently, Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge’s The Oldcastle Controversy. The plays are also not picked up for consideration by series like Regents and Revels; instead, they owe their twentieth-century transmission as individual texts primarily to dissertation and facsimile editions. The Troublesome Raigne and King Leir fare best here: both have been published in Garland editions within the last four decades, F.J. Furnivall’s 1913 edition of the Troublesome Raigne is reprinted in 1978, and Sidney Lee’s critical edition of King Leir in 1971. Lee’s assessment of the play – offered up, by virtue of the reprint, to another few generations of students – echoes in substance Nichols’s much earlier dismissal: Apart from its Shakespearean associations, the drama only deserves attention as a specimen of the humble average fare which commended itself to the Elizabethan playgoer. On its own merits, it is an undistinguished unit in that pedestrian category of dramatic endeavour which found in the Elizabethan playhouse singularly warm welcome, even during the active careers of the Elizabethan giants of drama. 41

King Leir has been most recently published in the Globe Quarto series, the explicit mandate of which is to offer widely accessible modernized texts of the 400 some-odd plays that survive for the period 1567 to 1642.42 Given her potentially broad audience, it is not surprising that Tiffany Stern’s editorial introduction to the Globe Leir focuses almost entirely on the play’s relationship to Shakespeare’s Lear: ‘[w]hatever the nature of the connection,’ she notes, ‘Leir is a source for Shakespeare, and in reading it we can see the raw material Shakespeare was inspired to work on.’ 43 If the anonymous play appears here in new garb, unfortunately, it has yet to divest itself of the narratives that have traditionally attended its publication. Republication does not, that is, inevitably allow for reevaluation. To the final group belong plays celebrated for neither their centrality to the tradition of early English drama, nor their relationship to the Shakespearean canon. None of these plays has recently appeared in major series. Alexander B. Grosart edited Selimus for Temple Dramatists in 1898; Betty J. Littleton’s dissertation edition of Clyomon and Clamydes was published in 1968 as volume 35 of the Studies in English Literature series; and, similarly, H.S.D. Mithal’s edition of The Three Lords and Three Ladies appeared in 1988 in the Garland series of dissertation reprints.44 Among the three, Selimus alone has claimed a measure of canonical interest for its relationship to Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, and only it has appeared in a collection during

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the twentieth century. Clyomon and Clamydes, as far as I have been able to ascertain, has never been anthologized. Three Lords and Three Ladies differs somewhat in this respect. Whereas the other two plays owe their early publication histories to nineteenth-century works editions, Three Lords appears during this period exclusively in dramatic collections. John Payne Collier’s Five Old Plays (1851) marks the play’s first ‘modern’ appearance, and it is picked up shortly thereafter by Hazlitt for the fourth edition of Dodsley’s Old Plays (1874–6; repr. Benjamin Blom, 1964). In large part, all three plays depend on facsimile editions for their twentieth-century transmission. Among the nine Queen’s Men plays, then, only Friar Bacon and The Old Wives Tale are reasonably well served by existing editorial models. The others claim, to varying degrees, the textual inheritance of the eighteenth-century ‘old play’: they remain locked within a range of forms that bespeak a lesser authorship, a contingent value, an essentially documentary status. The problem here is not in the material forms of the editions per se, but in the burden of evaluative assertion that attaches to plays produced only within this range, and in the interpretive limitations the conditions of production impose upon the texts. The emphatic materiality of a facsimile, diplomatic, or old-spelling text, as opposed to that of a heavily annotated and modernized critical edition, conveys to the reader an implicit judgment about the comparative æsthetic and literary value of a play not edited elsewhere. And while all plays have a documentary and historical importance that should – indeed must – be acknowledged, this kind of materiality reflects properly only certain aspects of a play’s historicity: an old-spelling text preserves only the linguistic code of the original (and even then, only the linguistic code of the copytext of the original selected); a facsimile is a document of the printing house, not the playhouse. The predominance of the documentary form in the editorial histories of the Queen’s Men plays means there has been little opportunity to consider the plays as performance texts, or to establish filiations within the larger canon of early English drama, beyond the plays’ direct association with ‘major authors’ – that is, beyond other textual, and textualized dramatic traditions.45 For plays which, as McMillin and MacLean suggest, do not belong to a convention of ‘literary’ drama – plays that come to life fully only in performance (as, arguably, all plays written for the stage do) – the implications of such treatment are dire. If King Leir can only be weighed in the same balance as Shakespeare’s Lear, then it cannot be read as more than ‘raw material’: the interpretive horizon of the text stops at the level of the footnote. Produced within an editorial tradition that takes the bibliographic Shakespeare as both the primary locus and model of value for textual production, the anonymous Leir is destined to languish on the margins of our taught and performed canons. There is little scope within our existing range of models – and, more crucially, within our current system of textual value – for an edition of Leir that might take into account, for example, the kind of archival material the REED project has placed at our disposal. There

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is little opportunity here, that is, for new editions to offer genuinely new readings of old plays. Reconciliation? REED, Repertories, and a New Direction for Editing Early English Drama Potential solutions to problems in the editorial treatment of early English drama are not to be found in more editions that are produced along the lines of traditional models, or even necessarily in texts more responsive to recent developments in Shakespearean editing. If the next generation of textual scholarship is to accommodate – in a productive and inclusive way – the myriad offerings of the early English stage, then we need to look beyond existing models. At the beginning of this essay, I suggested the possibility of an edition centred around repertory canons. Using the Queen’s Men study as a rough template, then, I would like to bring the present discussion to a close by considering what a repertory edition might look like, and how it might address some of the concerns raised in this paper. Given the scope of the project, the amount and nature of the material it includes, and the practical limitations inherent in the codex format (not the least of which is financial), I conceive of the project, first of all, in the form of a hypertext archive. The nine Queen’s Men plays constitute the basis of the edition. As we are working in a commodious electronic environment, we do not fix on a single text. Instead, we offer the plays in three manifestations: as facsimile, in old-spelling, and in a modernized text. In addition to separate critical introductions to each play, the edition furnishes a general introduction. Following McMillin and MacLean’s example, this introduction focuses first on the historical record of the theatrical company, and then addresses textual, dramaturgical, literary, political, and cultural issues. The introduction is connected to the texts, and the texts to each other, through a series of hypertextual links. A discussion of the ‘bad quarto’ theory and memorial reconstruction, for example, takes the reader to passages in The Old Wives Tale which are considered to furnish evidence of ‘corruption.’ Such passages link, in turn, to a discussion of doubling practices in the company, and from there to a casting analysis of the play. The word ‘propaganda’ leads to passages that reflect a Protestant political agenda. A discussion of kingship connects to pointed representations of good and bad rule in, for example, Selimus,The Troublesome Raigne, and The True Tragedy. A further system of links then connects both texts and introduction to the third major part of the edition, the records. Among these we find transcriptions of Privy Council and city government documents, household accounts, records of court performances, actors’ wills, records of musical and acrobatic acts which may have toured with the company: in short, the full range of documentary material made available through the REED collections. This component of the edition also

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comprehends visual material, as, for example, route maps of the company’s travels through the provinces, as well as floor plans, sketches, and, where possible, photographs of the spaces in which the company is known to have performed. It is possible to imagine, of course, that we have already at our disposal an electronic version of the REED records texts. In this case, there is no need for the third component: the repertory edition and the electronic records text are linked to each other. This kind of edition cannot accommodate every play equally well – there is, for example, the problem of what to do with plays that cannot be assigned to a specific company – but it has advantages for texts that are not well served by present models. A repertory edition has the capacity to reclaim plays which have suffered neglect because of their authorial status: anonymous or doubtfully attributed plays, as well as the works of playwrights not adjudged sufficiently important (or lucrative) to merit sustained editorial treatment. Such an edition also levels the distinctions between major and minor playwrights, between canonical texts and plays – like the anonymous Leir – that have traditionally received attention only for their relationship to more significant works. A reconfiguration of plays according to repertories establishes filiations between texts which, segregated into authorial canons, have not been considered in relation to each other. In this respect, a repertory edition has the potential to generate new readings of both canonical and noncanonical works. Insofar as the repertory edition locates authority in the collaborative efforts of the theatrical company, rather than in the figure of the singular author, it takes us away from the vexed issue of intention. Instead of expending energy on recovering the unrecoverable, we focus on what may be reclaimed: on available evidence regarding the production and performance contexts of the plays. While such evidence can only ever be partial – a performance, in the end, is quite as ephemeral as an intention – it has the advantage of grounding our methods in historical circumstance, rather than in romantic notions of authorship. The historicized text here gains a new value: insofar as each play is part of the historical record of the company, the work/document binary no longer applies. In the context of a repertory edition, finally, we find the means to reconcile the divided canon: to efface artificial distinctions between Shakespeare and ‘Non,’ to put to rest the transcendent genius that haunts the pages of our editions, and to discover (perhaps) the historical playwright working in collaboration with his fellow actors and playwrights.46

NOTES 1 Jonathan Goldberg, ‘Textual Properties,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 214. 2 For a recent discussion of this debate, see Margaret Jane Kidnie and Lukas Erne’s

REED, Repertory Canons, and Editing Early English Drama 229 recent edited collection Textual Performances (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 3 David Scott Kastan engages with this problem in Shakespeare After Theory (New York: Routledge, 1999), as does Gary Taylor in a number of articles. See particularly ‘The Renaissance and the End of Editing,’ in George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams, eds, Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 121–49, and ‘What is an Author [not]?’ Critical Survey 7 (1995): 241–55. 4 I am grateful to Douglas Brooks for calling my attention to the projected Cambridge Jonson edition as an exception here, and for pointing out the similarities between the plans for this edition and my own suggestions for an electronic repertory edition (see below). Produced under the collaborative editorship of David Bevington, Martin Butler, Ian Donaldson (general editors) and David Gants (electronic editor), the edition looks to supersede Herford and Simpson’s still-authoritative Oxford Works edition. As described in the web-based introduction (), the edition is to be published in print and electronically: the print version will provide a fully modernized text, which will feature in the electronic version alongside ‘a range of early manuscripts and print texts.’ Hypertextual links between the modern and original-spelling editions will enable readers to make their own textual comparisons. The electronic edition will also offer archival material, ‘including life records, stage history, masque records, and early allusions,’ as well as a ‘comprehensive Jonson bibliography.’ Rather than dividing the canon according to genre, the Cambridge Jonson will present the texts in chronological order. It will take as its copytexts ‘the editions most closely supervised through the press by Jonson, and will evaluate the authority of revisions in later editions on a text-by-text basis.’ In this, the editors make a case against the absolute authority of the 1616 folio. Notably, the edition will devote serious attention to staging and performance, and so dispense with the mythos of antitheatricality that convention has woven around the Jonsonian text. If the Cambridge Jonson remains firmly entrenched within an author-centred editorial tradition, its radical stance on questions of form, canon, and text holds some promise for future editions of less canonical early modern plays. For more extended discussions of the project, see Bevington, ‘Why Re-Edit Herford and Simpson?’ in Martin Butler, ed., Re-Presenting Ben Jonson (New York: St Martin’s, 1999), 20–38; Donaldson, ‘A New Edition of Ben Jonson?’ Ben Jonson Journal 2 (1995): 233–1; Donaldson, ‘The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson,’ and Gants, ‘The CUP Ben Jonson: Ruminations on an Electronic Edition,’ Ben Jonson Journal 5 (1998): 257– 69 and 271– 81. For an overview of recent work on Jonson and textual studies, see Brooks, ‘Recent Studies in Ben Jonson (1991–mid-2001),’ English Literary Renaissance 33 (2003): 146–51, especially section VI, ‘Canon and Text.’ 5 See, for example, essays in Cox and Kastan’s New History of Early English Drama; many of the contributions to the recently launched Early Theatre, edited by Helen Ostovich

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6

7 8 9 10

of McMaster University; as well as book-length studies by Janette Dillon, Reavley Gair, Anne Lancashire, Suzanne Westfall, Paul Whitfield White, and numerous others. There is, of course, a long-standing tradition of research on provincial performance in early modern England, as variously exemplified in the work of E.K. Chambers, John Payne Collier, James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, and the successive editors of the Malone Society Collections (to name only a very few). REED is exceptional, however, in the scope and rigour of its approach to provincial records. See above, p. 101. McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, 85. Richard Proudfoot, Shakespeare: Text, Stage and Canon (London: Thomson Learning, 2001), 70. The most recent and substantive account of a non-Shakespearean editorial tradition appears in David Greetham’s Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research (New York: Modern Language Association, 1995), a collection of essays on the history (or histories) of textual scholarship. The volume dedicates two chapters to early English drama: ‘English Renaissance: Non-Shakespearean Drama’ and ‘Shakespeare,’ the former contributed by Trevor Howard-Hill and the latter by Paul Werstine. The need to deal with several centuries of editorial history and an entire canon – excluding one playwright – in a few thousand words imposes certain acknowledged constraints on Howard-Hill’s survey. As the discussion is to centre on the large-scale editorial enterprises of the twentieth century, Howard-Hill focuses on similar compilations from previous centuries: that is, primarily large collected works editions (‘Non-Shakespearean Drama,’ 231). Space limitations reduce the canon to the twenty-three playwrights singled out for major entries in Terence P. Logan and Denzell S. Smith’s four-volume Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama (‘Non-Shakespearean Drama,’ 232). Howard-Hill points the reader towards Werstine’s extended consideration of eighteenthcentury Shakespearean editorial projects in the volume’s companion chapter, as a historical and methodological context for the discussion of contemporary non-Shakespearean editorial efforts. He confines his own remarks on the eighteenth-century tradition to some general observations, an enumeration of editions of collected works produced during the period, and an acknowledgement of Dodsley’s 1744 Select Collection and its three subsequent editions, one produced during the eighteenth, and two during the nineteenth centuries. For those of us who see the issues now confronting editors of early English drama as rooted in a traditional emphasis on author-centred textual models, these restrictions raise concerns. There is no place in Howard-Hill’s narrative for anonymous or doubtfully attributed plays, or for playwrights whose collected œuvre is insufficiently large or important to warrant either a works edition, or more than cursory notice in bibliographic surveys such as Logan and Smith’s. There is also no room for extended consideration of alternate textual models, particularly of dramatic anthologies, which, if

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11 12 13 14

15

16

less scholarly rigorous than works editions, nevertheless constitute a significant part of the editorial history of early English drama. And while Howard-Hill is right in pointing out that ‘eighteenth-century collected editions of Shakespeare … were the inevitable models for editors of the works of Shakespeare’s fellows,’ this holds true only to the extent that the history of eighteenth-century textual scholarship is the story of major playwrights and works editions (‘Non-Shakespearean Drama,’ 232). Insofar as HowardHill’s survey includes such eighteenth-century editions as Dodsley’s Select Collection, however, a discussion of Shakespearean editorial practice will not do. Dodsley’s collection does not fall within the parameters of a Shakespearean model. It represents a parallel and distinct editorial tradition, and one that has influenced profoundly the formation of an early modern dramatic text and canon. Werstine, ‘Shakespeare,’ 253. Howard-Hill, ‘Non-Shakespearean Drama,’ 231. The first dramatic anthology proper to be published in England was Thomas Osborne’s A Collection of the Best English Plays (London, 1711–12). Dodsley is the first to print only plays published before the turn of the eighteenth century. For a discussion of the development of the play collection in eighteenth-century England, see Richard Andrew Russell, ‘Dramatists and the Printed Page: The Social Role of Comedy from Richard Steel to Leigh Hunt’ (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford, 1995). Russell, notably, does not include in his study any of the four collections I discuss here. I have not included for consideration William Chetwood’s Dublin-printed collection of six plays, entitled A Select Collection of Old Plays (1750). For a discussion of the rise of Shakespeare’s reputation during the eighteenth century, see particularly Robert D. Hume’s ‘Before the Bard: “Shakespeare” in Early EighteenthCentury London,’ English Literary History 64 (1997): 41–75. Robert Dodsley, ‘Preface,’ A Select Collection of Old Plays (London, 1744), 1:xxxvi. Brevity precludes an extended discussion here of the impact of post-Restoration theatrical revival on the textual transmission of early modern non-Shakespearean plays. For such established dramatists as Beaumont and Fletcher and Jonson, unquestionably, continued stage popularity during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries fed the publication of new editions, and vice versa. In a more limited capacity, revival and adaptation on the post-Restoration stage may also have helped to shape the eighteenthcentury canon of ‘old plays.’ Of the handful of early modern dramatists other than Shakespeare, Jonson, or Beaumont and Fletcher whose works (or distant versions thereof ) played on the English stage between 1660 and 1744, nearly all feature in Dodsley’s Select Collection. Even so, a cursory glance at the London Stage suggests that by 1700 most of the plays in Dodsley’s collection had dropped out of the active repertory (William Van Lennep, Emmett L. Avery, Arthur H. Scouten, George Winchester Stone Jr, Charles Beecher Hogan, eds, The London Stage, 1660–1780, 5 pts in 11 vols [Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960 –]). Samuel Tuke’s The

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17 18

19 20

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Adventures of Five Hours alone continued to be performed in substantially unadapted form during the early decades of the eighteenth century, while Richard Brome’s A Jovial Crew, revived in a more spectacular version as The Jovial Crew, saw forty-five performances between 1700 and 1744. A further smattering of Dodsley titles retained some ties to the popular stage either as adaptations, as source texts for, or by titular association with, new plays: Middleton’s The Mayor of Quinborough as The History of Hengist, the Saxon King of Kent; Massinger’s The Guardian in Cowley’s adaptation; The Revenge; or, a Match at Newgate as A Match at Newgate; or, The Vintner Trick’d, or by association with The Woman’s Revenge; or, A Match in Newgate; Robert Wilmot’s Tancred and Gismunda through James Thomson’s Tancred and Sigismunda; Fulke Greville’s Mustapha through David Mallet’s eighteenth-century play of the same title. Dodsleian optimism aside, however, I would suggest that one of the early distinguishing features of an ‘old play’ was the expiration of its active career on the stage. Dodsley, Select Collection, xxxv. Dodsley, Select Collection, xxxvi. In choosing to print these seven pieces in old-spelling versions, Dodsley implicitly denied their suitability for contemporary performance. A theatrical culture that preferred the works of the triumvirate in modernized and adapted form was unlikely to tolerate, even as a curiosity, the revival of a wholly unaltered – not to mention comparatively obscure – sixteenth-century play. As editorial method differently applied in works editions and anthologies distinguished between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ dramatists, then, it also established more subtle hierarchies within the emergent canon of ‘old plays.’ Not all old plays, clearly, were created equally archaic, and at least the partial measure of a play’s antiquity was in its distance from an active performance tradition. By the latter decades of the eighteenth century, however, this hierarchy was considerably less pronounced: the assumption that the plays they edited would not be performed again, I would suggest, licensed the more radically noninterventionist policies of Dodsley’s editorial successors. Thomas Hawkins, Origin of the English Drama (London, 1773), xvi. The six plays are as follows: Promos and Cassandra, The Menæchmi, The Taming of a Shrew, The First and Second Part of the Troublesome Raigne of King John, The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, and The True Chronicle History of King Leir. Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, eds, Plays, 10 vols (London, 1778). John Nichols, ‘Advertisement,’ Six Old Plays (London, 1779), 1:iv. Ibid. Thomas Coxeter’s The Dramatic Works of Mr. Philip Massinger appeared in 1751; a second edition followed in 1761. Coxeter’s work was generally considered a poor effort, and John Monck Mason’s revised third edition was published less than two decades later, in 1779. Isaac Reed, ‘Preface,’ A Select Collection of Old Plays, 2nd ed. (London, 1780), 1:xviii–xix.

REED, Repertory Canons, and Editing Early English Drama 233 26 Ibid., xix. 27 Richard Proudfoot points to another and compelling inference here. In associating his collection with the most recent Shakespeare edition, Reed is also using Shakespeare as bait to draw the interest of readers possibly unacquainted with the plays within. 28 Many of the plays cited as exemplary texts in such collections were already familiar through critical and historical accounts of the early English stage from the seventeenth century onward, as put forward by Gerard Langbaine, Thomas Rymer, James Wright, and, later, Edward Capell, Thomas Percy, and Thomas Warton. Literary biographies and theatrical dictionaries during the period also served to establish certain titles as canonical mainstays. 29 A few of the playwrights in the collection had appeared in works editions in recent memory: Sir John Suckling’s Works, for example, had been reissued by Jacob Tonson in 1719. 30 Dodsley, Select Collection, xxxviii. 31 Ibid. 32 Gary Taylor, ‘The Renaissance and the End of Editing,’ in Bornstein and Williams, eds, Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, 130. 33 G. Thomas Tanselle has identified the ‘effort to grapple with the distinction’ as one of the unifying forces in the field of twentieth-century textual scholarship (‘Issues in Bibliographical Studies since 1942,’ in Peter Davison, ed., The Book Encompassed [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992], 35): What textual criticism … has always implied is that the texts of documents are to be distinguished from the texts of works: since language is intangible, works made of language are intangible, and the tangible texts we find in written and printed documents are the potentially flawed attempts to transmit such works … 34 ‘The distinction between a work and a document appears quite obvious. A work has an author, a document does not … [t]he distinction between the two has been fundamental to disciplinary boundaries: literary studies deals with works; historical studies with documents.’ See Margreta de Grazia, ‘What Is a Work? What Is a Document?’ in W. Speed Hill, ed., New Ways of Looking at Old Texts (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies and Renaissance English Text Society, 1993), 199. 35 Arthur F. Kinney’s Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) and David M. Bevington’s English Renaissance Drama (New York: Norton, 2002), the two most recently published major anthologies of early English plays, offer their readers modernized texts. In this, the collections depart from the dominant twentieth-century tradition, as exemplified by Brooke and Paradise’s English Drama, 1580–1642 (Boston: Heath, 1933). Both, however, adhere to an essentially chronological order, and neither strays particularly from the familiar anthology canon. Kinney’s Blackwell collection is slightly more radical in this respect, as it incorporates a number of entertainments and civic pageants.

234 Tanya Hagen 36 Daniel J. Vitkus, the play’s most recent editor, accepts this judgment in Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). As an example of the way in which editorial scholarship continues to labour in the service of the elusive author – even in the context of an edition which does not take the author as its central organizational principle – Vitkus’s rationale for assigning the play to Greene is worth quoting in full (‘Introduction,’ 17): The 1594 quarto does not specify the authorship, but an attribution to Robert Greene was established at the end of the nineteenth century by Alexander Grosart and this has never been convincingly refuted. The evidence in favor of Greene, both internal and external, is strong, especially in the appearance of two passages from Selimus that are identified as Greene’s in Robert Allott’s England’s Parnassus (1600). This evidence, however, is not incontrovertible, and the play’s attribution to Greene will always be, in some sense, ‘doubtful.’ Furthermore, we cannot be certain that Greene wrote the entire play himself; it is quite possible that sections of the play were written by other playwrights working with Greene or by other authors who revised and perhaps added to the manuscript that went to the printer. Given the (acknowledged) degree of uncertainty attendant on the attribution, one questions why it is that Vitkus then provides a biographical summary of Greene, rather than turning immediately to his much more useful discussion of the play’s historical and performance contexts. 37 Review of W.W. Greg, The Plays and Poems of Robert Greene, rev. ed. J. Churton Collins, Modern Language Review 1 (1905–6): 251. 38 Patricia Binnie, ‘Introduction,’ The Old Wives Tale (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 5. 39 By my rough count, Greene’s play has been published in twenty-two separate anthologies and smaller collections, and Peele’s in sixteen. 40 For Brian Gibbons, The Old Wife’s [sic] Tale typifies an ‘Elizabethan popular comedy’ in which ‘[d]ance, song and colourful spectacle augment dramatic narratives rooted in the traditions of an old-established, predominantly rural, culture: such as folk-tale, popular romances and jest books’ (Elizabethan and Jacobean Comedies [Tonbridge: Ernest Benn, 1984], viii – ix). David Bevington compliments Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay on ‘suggest[ing] a formula for native English romantic comedy that proved invaluable to Shakespeare’ (English Renaissance Drama [New York: Norton, 2002], 129). 41 Sidney Lee, ed., ‘Introduction,’ The Chronicle History of King Leir: The Original of Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’ (New York and London: Duffield, 1909; repr. Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Library Editions, 1971), xviii. 42 Tiffany Stern, ed., ‘Editor’s Introduction,’ King Leir (London: Nick Hern Books, 2002), iv.

REED, Repertory Canons, and Editing Early English Drama 235 43 Ibid., ix. 44 Hans Edouard Furnow also edited the play in 1885 for a German series entitled Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des englischen Dramas. 45 The Globe Educational Centre’s Read not Dead series promises to do much to amend this situation. In operation since 1996, the project will by its end have mounted staged readings of the entire surviving corpus of pre-Restoration drama. It is a revelation to see plays that have all but dropped from the critical register (and entirely from a contemporary repertory) hold the stage so remarkably well – and this with only a brief rehearsal, minimal costumes and props, and an uncut performance text. 46 I would like to thank Sally-Beth MacLean, both for the invitation to present an earlier version of this paper as part of REED’s twenty-five-year retrospective at the Leeds International Medieval Congress 2002, and for her encouragement and support during the revision process. Warm thanks also to Douglas Brooks, Paulina Kewes, Richard Proudfoot, and Paul Werstine for their very helpful comments and suggestions.

Using REED: A Select Bibliography john lehr

The following select bibliography offers readers examples of scholarly work that has used or commented on REED texts. It is by no means comprehensive. In fact, I have made an effort to keep the list down to a moderate size on the assumption that a well-pruned list of representative books and articles will be less intimidating and more useful to someone interested in models for using the REED volumes than an exhaustive list. I have also emphasized scholarship of the past decade since, as the series has added records collections over the years, it has become proportionally more attractive to a wider range of scholars. Selection has been a ticklish process, especially since I can claim no authoritative knowledge of the various aspects of history where REED has proven useful. I have sought advice from my colleagues at the REED office, from past REED editors as well as those currently working on collections of records, and from others including John Craig, Katherine French, Ronald Hutton, Carolyn Litzenberger, Peter Marshall, Richard Rastall, and Robert Tittler. The ultimate selection, however, has been mine to do. I have tried to choose work that clearly states, either in the main text or in notes, the role REED has played in the work’s underlying research. Because of REED’s early place in the scholarly process, it often fails to appear in finished essays or books, except perhaps as an entry in a bibliography. Katherine French, a historian who works on ‘the religious culture and practices of late medieval English parishioners,’ has explained that she has ‘found the project to be of most use as a tool for locating manuscripts. The overlap between drama and religious practice makes [REED volumes] ideal for me, and I have used them extensively and regularly, particularly as I have written about hocktide and women’s guilds/stores … REED has saved me a great deal of time and money by showing what parish documents are rich and descriptive about parish activities. Those records that tend to have material of interest to REED tend to be detailed in other ways as well, and I have used

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that as a guide to what records I should look at. They also provide a quick and easy way of starting comparisons of parishes and parish practices, once I have started turning my own raw data into “history.”’ In essays and books resulting from such scholarly work, one usually finds, instead of references to REED volumes, direct references to archival records, which the researcher may have been guided to by the records and apparatus of a REED volume. This direct citing of archives also relates to the REED collections’ limitations for local historians who need to see more of a document than REED typically provides. As French explains, ‘I have often found the lack of context [in a REED collection] frustrating; some of the references hang out there with no other information. But I also know that that is both the nature of the project and the nature of many of these sources’ (personal correspondence, 16 September 2004). These limitations will be touched on below. Historical writing where REED’s part in the scholarly process has become invisible, however, will not tell the reader much about REED’s usefulness, so I have preferred to list here articles such as Patrick Collinson’s ‘The Shearmen’s Tree and the Preacher’ where references to REED have a clearly stated place. The exception is the work of REED editors using records that they have collected for future publication in a REED volume. In such cases, preference has been given to those writings that have not been superseded by introductory or explanatory material which eventually appeared in the published collection. Editors of published volumes are noted in the list of REED publications that precedes the bibliography; editors of future collections whose work appears here are Elizabeth Baldwin (Cheshire), Anne Brannen (Cambridgeshire), Anne Lancashire (London Corporation and Guilds), Sally-Beth MacLean (Surrey), John McGavin (RED: Scotland), David Mills (Cheshire), and Barbara D. Palmer (Derbyshire/Yorkshire West Riding). Occasionally, a scholar has made use of unpublished materials in the REED office. Such was the case of Andrew Gurr who, at the beginning of the ninth chapter of his Shakespearian Playing Companies, describes his ‘anticipatory trawl of the current evidence’ in Toronto. Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean also took advantage of unpublished collections of records at the REED office for their book on touring companies The Queen’s Men and Their Plays. Appendix A of their book takes a close look at these sources of information. Naturally theatre history, the discipline which spawned REED, dominates this bibliography. As the essays in this book by Roslyn Knutson, Suzanne Westfall, and John Marshall have shown, the REED project has helped to reconfigure our understanding of touring companies of players, patronage, and local entertainment. Knutson limits her survey to early modern drama since most of the evidence for touring comes from post-1550 records; however, Sally-Beth MacLean’s seminal essay ‘Tour Routes,’ as well as her ‘A Family Tradition’ and ‘At the End of the Road,’

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take account of earlier records. Suzanne Westfall’s essay in this volume provides a guide to the bibliography on patronage. More information on both of these subjects will be increasingly available on REED’s Patrons and Performances Web Site: . In general, theatre scholars have become attentive to REED’s capacity to change the historical landscape. In a recent review of the second volume of Richard Rastall’s Music in Early Religious Drama, for example, David Bevington has compared Rastall’s work to the REED project, and the comparison neatly summarizes what new vistas the project has opened up: … this volume shares many of the rewards and frustrations of the REED project at the University of Toronto … [It] is interested in similar sorts of data and with the same view to commendable thoroughness of coverage. So many records in both collections are repetitious, telegraphic, tantalizing in what they do not tell us. At the same time, the exhaustive thoroughness makes for a book that scholars will want to use, and theater directors as well. Important new perspectives on medieval drama are being constructed out of the REED volumes, some of them potentially revolutionary in reassessing the nature of that drama. Much is still being learned about traveling players, about venues for performance, about what sort of plays were the dominant fare of dramatic entertainment across the British countryside. (Speculum 79 [2004], 279; see also Claire Sponsler’s ‘Drama in the Archives: Recognizing Medieval Plays,’ in Holland and Orgel, eds, From Script to Stage, pp. 111–12)

For a view of how our knowledge of performance venues outside of London has expanded, a visit to the Patrons and Performances Web Site mentioned above would be in order. But Alan Nelson’s pioneering Early Cambridge Theatres would also be essential, as well as John Elliott’s ‘Early Staging in Oxford,’ Herbert Berry and James Stokes’s ‘Actors and Town Hall,’ and Paul Whitfield White’s ‘Drama “in the Church.”’ The related area of staging, including special effects and costume, has also benefited from REED-related work: see Philip Butterworth’s Theatre of Fire and Jean MacIntyre and Garrett Epp’s ‘“Cloathes worth all the rest.”’ Amateur theatricals outside of university settings are the focus of Peter Greenfield’s ‘Festive Drama’ and Suzanne Westfall’s ‘“A Commonty a Christmas gambold or a tumbling trick.”’ Meanwhile, Philip Butterworth pursues his interest in spectacle to the realm of magic in ‘Brandon, Feats and Hocus Pocus.’ Few assumptions about English theatre history have gone unchallenged in recent years, and REED figures largely in these reexaminations. For example, REED editors Lawrence Clopper and Anne Lancashire in their latest books (Drama, Play, and Game and London Civic Theatre) have both taken an interest in the Clerkenwell Plays though their conclusions are not in lockstep. There does seem to be a

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consensus, however, gathering around Barbara D. Palmer’s reassessment of the Towneley manuscript, otherwise known as the Wakefield Cycle, seeing it as more of a dramatic miscellany than a unified performance text for a single cycle of plays (Palmer, “‘Towneley Plays’” and ‘Recycling “The Wakefield Cycle,”’ and Epp, ‘The Towneley Plays’ and ‘“Corected & not playd”’). The potential for revolution that Bevington speaks of has certainly been realized here. Bevington’s juxtaposition of Richard Rastall’s book with REED actually brought two old friends together, for Rastall’s association with the REED project goes back to his contribution to REED’s first colloquium, whose Proceedings were edited by JoAnna Dutka. Rastall was able to use REED in both volumes of Music in Early English Drama, since music, as an important aspect of popular entertainment, has always had a place in the REED collections. In fact, records of musicians, musical performance, instruments, and instruction make up the greater part of David Klausner’s collection of Welsh records. Considering the potential usefulness of the REED material, however, the number of studies in music history actually using REED seems small. Besides Rastall’s work, one finds Elizabeth Baldwin’s Paying the Piper, which focuses on Cheshire, Peter Greenfield’s ‘Using Dramatic Records: History, Theory, Southampton’s Musicians,’ Timothy McGee’s ‘The Fall of the Noble Minstrel,’ and David Mills’s ‘Music and Musicians in Chester: A Summary Account.’ In Music and Musicians in Renaissance Cities and Towns, edited by Fiona Kisby, one finds John McGavin’s ‘Secular Music in the Burgh of Haddington,’ Beat Kümin’s ‘Masses, Morris and Metrical Psalms,’ and James Saunders’s ‘Music and Moonlighting.’ More recently David Klausner’s ‘Civic Musicians in Wales and the Marches’ appeared. Music and civic festival often twine together as subjects of historical interest. Festival also captures the interest of folklorists and local historians, and, where REED is concerned, folklore and parish history have no clear boundary between them. John Marshall’s look at Robin Hood entertainments in this book exemplifies this and contains important bibliographical references. More generally, Ronald Hutton’s The Rise and Fall of Merry England and The Stations of the Sun have profoundly brought folk custom into the historian’s purview. Hutton cites REED occasionally, but more importantly, reminiscent of what Katherine French has said, he has affirmed REED’s role in his preparatory research: ‘REED was hugely useful to me … especially in the case of corporation and legal records and household accounts, through which I would simply not have had the time to work. The late medieval sections of the books would have been hopelessly, instead of badly, dependent on parish documents and antiquarian editions of other classes of source had it not been for the existence of the series … and those were early days’ (personal correspondence, 9 September 2004). John Forrest’s The History of Morris Dancing, a more specialized study, can also serve as an example of REED’s usefulness in studies of

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folk custom. Articles listed below by Patricia Badir, Elizabeth Baldwin, Sandra Billington, Jane Cowling, Sally-Beth MacLean, and James Stokes also contribute to this area of study. As we move away from the history of public entertainment and towards political and religious history, it is good to recall French’s comment on the frustrations of REED records. Her comment harks back to a controversy first introduced by Theresa Coletti about the selective nature of the records collected in REED volumes. Peter Greenfield (‘Using Dramatic Records,’ and ‘“But Herefordshire for a Morris-Daunce”’) and Greg Walker (‘A Broken REED?’) responded to Coletti and took a closer look at the evolving policies of REED and the practices of REED editors. Certainly caution must be exercised when using records because of the fragmentary view they give us of the past. As Bevington says, they are ‘tantalizing in what they do not tell us.’ A salutary awareness of our relationship to early records and the past which they are traces of can be gained by reading, for example, Part One of William Ingram’s The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan London (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), or the appendix on sources and methodology in Caroline Litzenberger’s The English Reformation and the Laity: Gloucestershire, 1540 –1580 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), which comments in detail on the use of wills as historical documents. These books do not use REED records and, thus, are not listed in this bibliography, but their admonitions are important for both REED editors and REED users. Local historians interested less in folk custom and more in political and economic organization and activity have made good use of REED as well. An example would be Robert Tittler, whose book Architecture and Power, particularly the fifth and sixth chapters, has found a reciprocal interest among REED editors and theatre historians. Clive Burgess’s and Beat Kümin’s related essays (‘Pre-Reformation Churchwardens’ Accounts’ and ‘Late Medieval Churchwardens’ Accounts’) also make REED-related contributions in this area. REED editors, such as Audrey Douglas (‘“Parish” and “City”’) and Alan Somerset (‘The Lords President’), have also brought their REED research to bear on parish history. The Reformation and its social repercussions at the local level show up clearly in REED records, and many historians interested in religion and society have begun to mine REED for their work. Patrick Collinson is at the forefront of these scholars. (An interesting comparison of two people using the same records for different purposes might be made by looking at Alan Somerset’s ‘New Historicism: Old History Writ Large?’ and Patrick Collinson’s ‘The Shearmen’s Tree and the Preacher.’ The relevant records may be found in Somerset, ed., Shropshire, 1:249–76, 281–3.) And, again, REED editors have used records they have gathered to study the intersection of religion and society: for example, Alexandra Johnston and Sally-Beth MacLean’s ‘Reformation and Resistance’ or David Mills’s ‘“Some Precise Cittizins.”’

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The absence of Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992) from the following list may seem an oversight, but Duffy’s influential book has actually been of more use to REED than REED was to it. His more recent book The Voices of Morebath, on the other hand, contains valuable commentary on REED records. Philology and lexicography were among the disciplines that REED’s founders assumed would benefit from the project. The dearth of philological studies using REED, therefore, has been disappointing. The main scholarly activity here has come from REED editor Diana Wyatt and REED’s Latin palaeographer and associate editor Abigail Young. Similarly, economic historians have not shown much interest in REED, but Meg Twycross’s ‘The York Mercers’ Lewent Brede’ shows that REED records may start a thread in that area of study as well. Collections of REED-centred essays have been published from time to time. A collection thematically related to the present one is volume 17 (1995) of Medieval English Theatre, titled ‘Using Early Drama Records.’ A handy introduction to the work of REED editors interpreting the records they themselves have gathered may be found in the essays brought together by Alexandra Johnston and Wim Hüsken for English Parish Drama. The Elizabethan Theatre X, edited by C.E. McGee, celebrated the quarter-centenary of the founding of the Queen’s Men with essays mostly centred on REED research. The REED Newsletter, publishing articles relevant to REED, came out twice a year from 1976 to 1997. In 1998 it was superseded by the journal Early Theatre. The contents of these two publications make a good supplement to the select bibliography here. With a few exceptions, the articles they contain have not been listed individually in the following bibliography; they are easily located through the Early Theatre web site . A link to this web site may also be found on the REED web site . REED has for many years encouraged the use of its records research in both public and university education. A few teachers have already used REED in their classrooms. John Craig of Simon Fraser University reports that he has used REED volumes with his fourth-year undergraduates and has been pleased with the results (personal correspondence, 6 October 2004). The REED web site should make REED even more user-friendly for classrooms. It contains links to modernized performance texts of some popular late medieval and early modern plays as well as links to other web sites relevant to early theatre research. The link to REED’s Patrons and Performances Web Site should prove especially useful since it can easily be searched for records of events and performing troupes as well as profiles of patrons that have appeared in REED volumes. It can also be searched for descriptions of performance venues, and the related visual materials, such as interactive maps and illustrations of venues, should help to bring REED records to life for students. Further ideas for using REED in the classroom will be found in the

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forthcoming Studies in Early English Drama volume Teaching with Records of Early English Drama, edited by Elza Tiner. A list of REED publications precedes the select bibliography. Each volume contains introductory and explanatory material that deserves to be considered along with the items listed in the bibliography itself. York, ed. Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, 2 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979. Chester, ed. Lawrence M. Clopper. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979. Coventry, ed. R.W. Ingram. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981. Newcastle upon Tyne, ed. J.J. Anderson. Toronto and Manchester: University of Toronto Press and Manchester University Press, 1982. Norwich 1540 –1642, ed. David Galloway. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984. Cumberland/Westmorland/Gloucestershire, ed. Audrey Douglas and Peter Greenfield. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986. Devon, ed. John M. Wasson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986. Cambridge, ed. Alan H. Nelson, 2 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. Herefordshire/Worcestershire, ed. David N. Klausner. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. Lancashire, ed. David George. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Shropshire, ed. J. Alan B. Somerset, 2 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Somerset including Bath, ed. James Stokes with Robert J. Alexander, 2 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Bristol, ed. Mark C. Pilkinton. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Dorset /Cornwall, ed. Rosalind C. Hays and C.E. McGee/Sally L. Joyce and Evelyn S. Newlyn. Toronto and Brugge: University of Toronto Press and Brepols Publishers, 1999. Sussex, ed. Cameron Louis. Toronto and Brugge: University of Toronto Press and Brepols Publishers, 2000. Kent: Diocese of Canterbury, ed. James M. Gibson, 3 vols. Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press and The British Library, 2002. Oxford, ed. John R. Elliott Jr. and Alan H. Nelson (University)/Alexandra F. Johnston and Diana Wyatt (City), 2 vols. Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press and The British Library, 2004. Wales, ed. David N. Klausner. Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press and The British Library, 2005. Badir, Patricia. ‘“In this all other townes, thou doest, and Citties ore’shine”: Textuality, Corporeality, and the Riding of Yule in York.’ Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 29 (1998): 19 – 34.

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Baldwin, Elizabeth. ‘John Seckerston: The Earl of Derby’s Bearward.’ Medieval English Theatre 20 (1998): 95–103. – ‘Rushbearings and Maygames in the Diocese of Chester before 1642.’ In Johnston and Hüsken, eds, English Parish Drama, 31–40. Baldwin, Elizabeth, with David Mills. Paying the Piper: Music in Pre-1642 Cheshire. Early Drama, Art, and Music Monograph Series 29. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002. Berry, Herbert, and James Stokes. ‘Actors and Town Hall in the Sixteenth Century.’ Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 6 (1993): 37–55. Betcher, Gloria J. ‘Minstrels, Morris Dancers, and Players: Tracing the Routes of Travelling Performers in Early Modern Cornwall.’ Early Theatre 6.2 (2003): 33 – 55. Billington, Sandra. Mock Kings in Medieval Society and Renaissance Drama. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Blackstone, Mary A. ‘Patrons and Elizabethan Dramatic Companies.’ In McGee, ed., The Elizabethan Theatre X, 112 –32. – ‘Performance and the Intertextual Negotiation of Community: The Example of Elizabethan Leicester.’ Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 43 (2004): 75–105. Brannen, Anne. ‘Creating a Dramatic Record: Reflections on Some Drunken Ghosts.’ The Early Drama, Art, and Music Review 20 (1997): 16–24. Briscoe, Marianne G., and John C. Coldewey, eds. Contexts for Early English Drama. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989. Burgess, Clive. ‘Pre-Reformation Churchwardens’ Accounts and Parish Government: Lessons from London and Bristol.’ English Historical Review 117 (2002): 306– 32. Butterworth, Philip. ‘Is There Any Further Value to be Gained from Re-Staging Medieval Theater?’ Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 43 (2004): 1–11. – Magic on the Early English Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. – Theatre of Fire: Special Effects in Early English and Scottish Theatre. London: Society for Theatre Research, 1998. Clopper, Lawrence. Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. – ‘London and the Problem of the Clerkenwell Plays.’ Comparative Drama 34 (2000): 291– 303. Coldewey, John C. ‘Plays and “Play” in Early English Drama.’ Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 28 (1985): 181–8. Coletti, Theresa. ‘“Fragmentation and Redemption”: Dramatic Records, History, and the Dream of Wholeness.’ Envoi 3 (1991): 1–13. – ‘Reading REED: History and the Records of Early English Drama.’ In Lee Patterson, ed., Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, 248–84. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1990.

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Collinson, Patrick. ‘Elizabethan and Jacobean Puritanism as Forms of Popular Religious Culture.’ In Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales, eds, The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560 –1700, 32–57. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1996. – ‘From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: The Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation.’ In Peter Marshall, ed., The Impact of the English Reformation 1500–1640, 278– 308. London, New York, Sydney, Auckland: Arnold, 1997. – ‘The Shearmen’s Tree and the Preacher: The Strange Death of Merry England in Shrewsbury and Beyond.’ In Collinson and Craig, eds, The Reformation in English Towns, 1500 –1640, 205– 20. Collinson, Patrick, and John Craig, eds. The Reformation in English Towns, 1500 –1640. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. Cowling, Jane. ‘The Wood Eaves.’ Medieval English Theatre 17 (1995): 20 – 8. Cox, John D., and David Scott Kastan, eds. A New History of Early English Drama. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Davidson, Clifford. ‘Improvisation in Medieval Drama.’ In Timothy J. McGee, ed., Improvisation in the Arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 193–221. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2003. Douglas, Audrey. ‘“Owre Thanssynge Day”: Parish Dance and Procession in Salisbury.’ In Johnston and Hüsken, eds, English Parish Drama, 41–63. – ‘“Parish” and “City” – A Shifting Identity: Salisbury 1440–1600.’ Early Theatre 6.1 (2003): 67– 91. Duffy, Eamon. The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Dutka, JoAnna, ed. Records of Early English Drama: Proceedings of the First Colloquium. Toronto: Records of Early English Drama, 1979. Dutton, Richard, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson, eds. Region, Religion and Patronage: Lancastrian Shakespeare. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003. Elliott, John R., Jr. ‘Early Staging in Oxford.’ In Cox and Kastan, eds, New History of Early English Drama, 68 –76 – ‘Four Caroline Playgoers.’ Renaissance Drama in England 6 (1993): 179 – 93. Epp, Garrett P.J. ‘“Corected & not playd”: An Unproductive History of the Towneley Plays.’ Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 43 (2004): 38 – 53. – ‘The Towneley Plays and the Hazards of Cycling.’ Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 32 (1993): 121–50. Forrest, John. The History of Morris Dancing, 1458 –1750. Studies in Early English Drama 5. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Gair, Reavley. ‘Takeover at Blackfriars: Queen’s Revels to King’s Men.’ In McGee, ed., The Elizabethan Theatre X, 37–54. George, David. ‘The Playhouse at Prescot and the 1592–94 Plague.’ In Dutton, Findlay, and Wilson, eds, Region, Religion and Patronage, 227–42.

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– ‘Rushbearing: A Forgotten British Custom.’ In Johnston and Hüsken, eds, English Parish Drama, 16– 29. Gibson, James M. ‘“Interludum Passionis Domini”: Parish Drama in Medieval New Romney.’ In Johnston and Hüsken, eds, English Parish Drama, 137– 48. Greenfield, Peter H. ‘“But Herefordshire for a Morris-Daunce”: Dramatic Records and the New Historicism.’ Envoi 3 (1991): 14–23. – ‘The Carnivalesque in the Robin Hood Games and King Ales of Southern England.’ In Konrad Eisenbichler and Wim Hüsken, eds, Carnival and the Carnivalesque: The Fool, the Reformer, the Wildman, and Others in Early Modern Theatre, 19 – 28. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. – ‘Festive Drama at Christmas in Aristocratic Households.’ In Twycross, ed., Festive Drama, 34 – 40. – ‘Parish Drama in Four Counties Bordering the Thames Watershed.’ In Johnston and Hüsken, eds, English Parish Drama, 107–118. – ‘Professional Players at Gloucester: Conditions of Provincial Performing.’ In McGee, ed., The Elizabethan Theatre X, 73–92. – ‘Regional Performance in Shakespeare’s Time.’ In Dutton, Findlay, and Wilson, eds, Region, Religion and Patronage, 243–51. – ‘Touring.’ In Cox and Kastan, eds, New History of Early English Drama, 251–68. – ‘Using Dramatic Records: History, Theory, Southampton’s Musicians.’ Medieval English Theatre 17 (1995): 76–95. Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearian Playing Companies. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Hays, Rosalind C. ‘Crossing County Boundaries: Sixteenth-Century Performance and Celebration in Yeovil, co. Somerset, and Sherborne, co. Dorset.’ Early Theatre 6.2 (2003): 73– 95. Holland, Peter. ‘Theatre without Drama: Reading REED.’ In Holland and Orgel, eds, From Script to Stage, 43–67. Holland, Peter, and Stephen Orgel, eds, From Script to Stage in Early Modern England. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Humphrey, Chris. The Politics of Carnival: Festive Misrule in Medieval England. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001. Hutton, Ronald. The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. – The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Ingram, William. ‘Costs of Touring.’ Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 6 (1993): 57– 62. – ‘The Early Career of James Burbage.’ In McGee, ed., The Elizabethan Theatre X, 18–36. Johnston, Alexandra F. ‘The City as Patron: York.’ In White and Westfall, eds, Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, 150–75.

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– ‘English Community Drama in Crisis: 1535– 80.’ In Alan Hindley, ed., Drama and Community: People and Plays in Medieval Europe, 248–69. Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe 1. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1999. – ‘The Feast of Corpus Christi in the West Country.’ Early Theatre 6.1 (2003): 15– 34. – ‘“It pleased the Lord to discover his displeasure”: The 1652 Performance of Mucedorus in Witney.’ In Sarah Carpenter, Pamela King, and Peter Meredith, eds., Porci ante Margaritam: Essays in Honour of Meg Twycross, Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 32 (2001): 195– 209. – ‘The Robin Hood of the Records.’ In Lois Potter, ed., Playing Robin Hood: The Legend as Performance in Five Centuries, 27– 44. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998. – ‘Summer Festivals in the Thames Valley Counties.’ In Thomas Pettitt and Leif Søndergaard, eds, Custom, Culture and Community in the Later Middle Ages: A Symposium, 37–56. Odense, Denmark: Odense University Press, 1994. – ‘“What Revels are in Hand?” Dramatic Activities Sponsored by the Parishes of the Thames Valley.’ In Johnston and Hüsken, eds, English Parish Drama, 95–104. Johnston, Alexandra F., ed., Editing Early English Drama: Special Problems and New Directions. New York: AMS, 1987. Johnston, Alexandra F., and Wim Hüsken, eds. English Parish Drama. Ludus: Medieval and Early Renaissance Theatre and Drama 1. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996. Johnston, Alexandra F., and Sally-Beth MacLean. ‘Reformation and Resistance in Thames/ Severn Parishes: The Dramatic Witness.’ In Katherine L. French, Gary G. Gibbs, and Beat A. Kümin, eds, The Parish in English Life, 1400–1600, 178 – 200. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997. Keenan, Siobhan. ‘Patronage, Puritanism and Playing: Travelling Players in Elizabethan and Stuart Maldon, Essex.’ Theatre Notebook 58 (2004): 48–70. – Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. King, Pamela M. ‘Records of Early English Drama: Reflections of a Hardened User.’ Medieval English Theatre 17 (1995): 52–7. King, Pamela M., and Meg Twycross. ‘Beyond REED? The York Doomsday Project.’ Medieval English Theatre 17 (1995): 132–48. Kisby, Fiona, ed., Music and Musicians in Renaissance Cities and Towns. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Klausner, David N. ‘Civic Musicians in Wales and the Marches, 1430–1642.’ In John Haines and Randall Rosenfeld, eds, Music and Medieval Manuscripts: Paleography and Performance: Essays Dedicated to Andrew Hughes, 279 – 99. Aldershot, Hants, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. Kümin, Beat. ‘Late Medieval Churchwardens’ Accounts and Parish Government: Looking beyond London and Bristol.’ English Historical Review 119 (2004): 87–99.

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– ‘Masses, Morris and Metrical Psalms: Music in the English Parish, c. 1400–1600.’ In Kisby, ed., Music and Musicians in Renaissance Cities and Towns, 70 – 81. Lancashire, Anne. London Civic Theatre: City Drama and Pageantry from Roman Times to 1558. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Lancashire, Ian. ‘History of a Tradition: Review Article.’ Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 3 (1986): 277– 88. MacIntyre, Jean, and Garrett P.J. Epp. ‘“Cloathes worth all the rest”: Costumes and Properties.’ In Cox and Kastan, eds, New History of Early English Drama, 269 – 85. MacLean, Sally-Beth. ‘At the End of the Road: An Overview of Southwestern Touring Circuits.’ Early Theatre 6.2 (2003): 17–32. – ‘A Family Tradition: Dramatic Patronage by the Earls of Derby.’ In Dutton, Findlay, and Wilson, eds, Region, Religion and Patronage, 205–26. – ‘Hocktide: A Reassessment of a Popular Pre-Reformation Festival.’ In Twycross, ed., Festive Drama, 233 – 41. – ‘King Games and Robin Hood: Play and Profit at Kingston upon Thames.’ Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 29 (1986–7): 85–93. – ‘Marian Devotion in Post-Reformation Chester: Implications of the Smiths’ “Purification” Play.’ In Scott and Starkey, eds, The Middle Ages in the North-West, 237–55. – ‘Players on Tour: New Evidence from Records of Early English Drama.’ In McGee, ed., The Elizabethan Theatre X, 55–72. – ‘Tour Routes: “Provincial Wanderings” or Traditional Circuits?’ Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 6 (1993): 1–14. Marshall, John. ‘“Comyth in Robyn Hode”: Paying and Playing the Outlaw in Croscombe.’ In Sarah Carpenter, Pamela King, and Peter Meredith, eds, Porci ante Margaritam: Essays in Honour of Meg Twycross, Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 32 (2001): 345– 68. McGavin, John J. ‘Secular Music in the Burgh of Haddington, 1530–1640.’ In Kisby, ed., Music and Musicians in Renaissance Cities and Towns, 45–56. McGee, C.E. ‘Puritans and Performers in Early Modern Dorset.’ Early Theatre 6.1 (2003): 51– 66. McGee, C.E., ed., The Elizabethan Theatre X: Papers Given at the Tenth International Conference on Elizabethan Theatre Held at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, in July 1983. Port Credit: P.D. Meany, 1988. McGee, Timothy J. ‘The Fall of the Noble Minstrel: The Sixteenth-Century Minstrel in a Musical Context.’ Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 7 (1995): 98 –120. McLuskie, Kathleen E., and Felicity Dunsworth. ‘Patronage and the Economics of Theater.’ In Cox and Kastan, eds, New History of Early English Drama, 423 – 40. McMillin, Scott. ‘The Queen’s Men and the London Theatre of 1583.’ In McGee, ed., The Elizabethan Theatre X, 1–17. McMillin, Scott, and Sally-Beth MacLean. The Queen’s Men and Their Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

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Meredith, Peter. ‘The City of York and Its “Play of Pageants.”’ Early Theatre 3 (2000): 23 – 47. – ‘The Fifteenth-Century Audience of the York Corpus Christi Play: Records and Speculation.’ In Michel Bitot, Roberta Mullini, and Peter Happé, eds, ‘Divers toyes mengled:’ Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Culture in Honour of André Lascombes, 101–11. Tours: L’Université François Rabelais, 1996. Mills, David. ‘The Chester Mystery Plays and the Limits of Realism.’ In Scott and Starkey, eds, The Middle Ages in the North-West, 221–36. – ‘Chester’s Midsummer Show: Creation and Adaptation.’ In Twycross, ed., Festive Drama, 132 – 44. – ‘Music and Musicians in Chester: A Summary Account.’ Medieval English Theatre 17 (1995): 58 –75. – Recycling the Cycle: The City of Chester and Its Whitsun Plays. Studies in Early English Drama 4. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. – ‘“Some Precise Cittizins”: Puritan Objections to Chester’s Plays.’ Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 29 (1998): 219– 33. Nelson, Alan H. Early Cambridge Theatres: College, University, and Town Stages, 1464–1720. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. – ‘Early Staging in Cambridge.’ In Cox and Kastan, eds, New History of Early English Drama, 59 – 67. Palmer, Barbara D. ‘“Anye disguised persons”: Parish Entertainment in West Yorkshire.’ In Johnston and Hüsken, eds, English Parish Drama, 81–93. – ‘Corpus Christi “Cycles” in Yorkshire: The Surviving Records.’ Comparative Drama 27 (1993): 218 – 31. – ‘Court and Country: The Masque as Sociopolitical Subtext.’ Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 7 (1995): 338–54. – ‘Early English Northern Entertainment: Patterns and Peculiarities.’ Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 34 (1995): 167–82. – ‘Early Modern Mobility: Players, Payments, and Patrons.’ Shakespeare Quarterly 56 (2005): 259 – 305. – ‘Recycling “The Wakefield Cycle”: The Records.’ Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 41 (2002): 88 –130. – ‘“Towneley Plays” or “Wakefield Cycle” Revisited.’ Comparative Drama 21 (1987–8): 318 –48. Rastall, Richard. Music in Early English Religious Drama. Vol. 1, The Heaven Singing ; Vol. 2, Minstrels Playing. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1996–2001. Rogerson, Margaret. ‘Living History: The Modern Mystery Plays in York.’ Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 43 (2004): 12–28. – ‘Provincial Schoolmasters and Early English Drama.’ Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 29 (1998): 315– 32.

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Saunders, James. ‘Music and Moonlighting: The Cathedral Choirmen of Early Modern England, 1558–1649.’ In Kisby, ed., Music and Musicians in Renaissance Cities and Towns, 157– 66. Scott, Tom, and Pat Starkey, eds, The Middle Ages in the North-West. Oxford: Leopard’s Head Press and the Liverpool Centre for Medieval Studies, 1995. Somerset, J.A.B. ‘The Lords President, Their Activities and Companies: Evidence from Shropshire.’ In McGee, ed., The Elizabethan Theatre X, 93 –111. – ‘New Historicism: Old History Writ Large? Carnival, Festivity and Popular Culture in the West Midlands.’ Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 5 (1991): 245– 55. Stokes, James D. ‘Bull and Bear Baiting in Somerset: The Gentles’ Sport.’ In Johnston and Hüsken, eds, English Parish Drama, 65–80. – ‘Landscape, Movement, and Civic Mimesis in the West of England.’ Early Theatre 6.1 (2003): 35– 49. – ‘The Lost Playing Places of Lincolnshire.’ Comparative Drama 37 (2003): 275– 95. – ‘Musicians and Performance in Lincolnshire.’ The Early Drama, Art, and Music Review 24 (2002): 121–51. – ‘Processional Entertainments in Villages and Small Towns.’ In Kathleen Ashley and Wim Hüsken, eds, Moving Subjects: Processional Performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 239–57. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2001. – ‘Robin Hood and the Churchwardens in Yeovil.’ Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 3 (1986): 1– 25. Tiner, Elza C., ed., Teaching with the Records of Early English Drama. Studies in Early English Drama 7. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Tittler, Robert. Architecture and Power: The Town Hall and the English Urban Community c. 1500 –1640. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. – ‘Early Modern British History, Here and There, Now and Again.’ Albion 31 (1999): 190 – 206. – ‘Political Culture and the Built Environment of the English Country Town, c. 1540– 1620.’ In Dale Hoak, ed., Tudor Political Culture, 133–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. – The Reformation and the Towns in England: Politics and Political Culture, c.1540 –1640. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. – Townspeople and Nation: English Urban Experiences, 1540–1640. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. (In particular, chapter 6: ‘Henry Hardware and the Face of Puritan Reform in Chester.’) Twycross, Meg. Festive Drama: Papers from the Sixth Triennial Colloquium of the International Society for the Study of Medieval Theatre, Lancaster, 13–19 July, 1989. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1996. – ‘The York Mercers’ Lewent Brede and the Hanseatic Trade.’ Medieval English Theatre 17 (1995): 96–119.

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Walker, Greg. ‘A Broken REED?: Early Drama Records, Politics, and the Old Historicism.’ Medieval English Theatre 17 (1995): 42–51. Wasson, John M. ‘The English Church as Theatrical Space.’ In Cox and Kastan, eds, New History of Early English Drama, 25–37. – ‘A Parish Play in the West Riding of Yorkshire.’ In Johnston and Hüsken, eds, English Parish Drama, 149 – 57. – ‘Records of Early English Drama: Where They Are and What They Tell Us.’ In Dutka, ed., Proceedings of the First Colloquium, 128–44. Westfall, Suzanne R. ‘“A Commonty a Christmas gambold or a tumbling trick”: Household Theater.’ In Cox and Kastan, eds, New History of Early English Drama, 39 – 58. – ‘“The useless dearness of the diamond”: Theories of Patronage Theatre.’ In White and Westfall, eds, Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, 13 – 42. White, Paul Whitfield. ‘Drama “in the Church”: Church-Playing in Tudor England.’ Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 6 (1993): 15–35. White, Paul Whitfield, and Suzanne R. Westfall, eds. Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Wright, Stephen K. ‘“The Historie of King Edward the Fourth”: A Chronicle Play on the Coventry Pageant Wagons.’ Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 3 (1986): 69 – 81. Wyatt, Diana. ‘REED and the Oxford English Dictionary.’ Medieval English Theatre 17 (1995): 120 – 31. Young, Abigail Ann. ‘Minstrels and Minstrelsy: Household Retainers or Instrumentalists?’ REED Newsletter 20.1 (1995): 11–17. – ‘Plays and Players: The Latin Terms for Performance.’ REED Newsletter 9.2 (1984): 56– 62. – ‘Plays and Players: The Latin Terms for Performance (part ii).’ REED Newsletter 10.1 (1985): 9 –16.

Contributors

James Cummings works for the Oxford Text Archive at the University of Oxford but is also directly involved with the Text Encoding Initiative and Digital Medievalist projects. His research interests straddle the fields of early English drama and humanities computing with specific concentration on the transcription and digitization of medieval manuscripts. Audrey Douglas joined REED as a bibliographic researcher in 1976, and went on to edit the Cumberland and Westmorland records (1986). She is currently preparing Salisbury’s records for publication in the forthcoming Wiltshire volume. Tanya Hagen is working on a study of the eighteenth-century transmission of preRestoration English plays and playbooks (excluding Shakespeare’s), emphasizing particularly the impact of the physical circulation of the texts during this period on the development of a ‘modern’ tradition of English theatre historiography. Her special pet at REED is the London Theatres Bibliography, a database project that aims to record and digest all transcriptions of documents relating to early modern London’s professional theatres published since 1642. Alexandra F. Johnston is Professor Emerita of English, University of Toronto, Cofounder and Director of Records of Early English Drama. She recently coedited with Diana Wyatt the civic records for Oxford (2004) in the REED series; her current projects include an edition of the dramatic records of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, and Oxfordshire. Roslyn L. Knutson is a Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. In addition to many articles in journals and annuals, her publications include The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, 1594 –1613 (1991) and Playing

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Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (2001). She is currently researching the lost plays of the Admiral’s Men noted in Henslowe’s Diary. John Lehr is currently REED’s bibliographer. He compiled the ‘Patrons and Travelling Companies’ section in the REED collections for Sussex, Kent, and Oxford. Sally-Beth MacLean is REED Associate Director, Executive Editor of the series, and Professor of English, University of Toronto. She is coauthor of The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (1998) and codirector of the REED Patrons and Performances Web Site (2005). With Lawrence Manley she is currently working on a book on Lord Strange’s Men. John Marshall is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol. He has written extensively in the areas of medieval English drama and Robin Hood in performance. John J. McGavin is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Southampton and the author of Chaucer and Dissimilarity (2000). He has also written on Sir David Lindsay; he has a monograph on Scottish narrative witnesses to theatricality in final preparation for Ashgate Press, and a related study of aristocratic travel to the Low Countries forthcoming from Rodopi. With Eila Williamson he is editing the Southeast Scotland volume of the Records of Early Drama: Scotland collections and is looking forward to being involved in editing other Scottish volumes. Gervase Rosser is a Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Oxford and a Fellow and Tutor of St Catherine’s College. He is presently completing a monograph on English medieval guilds, on which he has published a number of articles. He contributed a chapter, ‘Urban Culture and the Church 1300–1540’ to The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. 1, ed. D. Palliser (2000). With Jane Garnett, he is writing a book on the cult of miraculous images in the Mediterranean world, 1500 – 2000. Jenn Stephenson is Assistant Professor of Drama at Queen’s University, Kingston. Her primary research interest is in Renaissance drama and metatheatre. Recent articles have appeared in Shakespeare Bulletin and Theatre Journal. Sylvia Thomas was head of West Yorkshire Archive Service until her early retirement in late 2004. Since then she has continued her close involvement with the Yorkshire Archaeological Society, where she was archivist for twenty-one years until 1997 and has begun a happy association with REED, working on Cheshire

Contributors

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material. From 1987 to 1998 she was Hon. General Editor of the Yorkshire Archaeological Society’s Record Series. Paul Werstine teaches English at King’s University College at The University of Western Ontario. He specializes in early modern English drama in both manuscript and printed forms and is coeditor, with Barbara A. Mowat, of the Folger Shakespeare Library Edition of Shakespeare (1992–), and co-general editor, with Richard Knowles, of the Modern Language Association’s New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, to which he will contribute a volume on Romeo and Juliet. Suzanne Westfall is Chair of the Department of English and Theater at Lafayette College. She is the author of Patrons and Performance: Early Tudor Household Revels (1990) and the coeditor, with Paul W. White, of Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England (2002). At present she is working on a court calendar for King Edward VI and an edition of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Internet Shakespeare Editions. Eila Williamson is a Research Fellow for the Arts and Humanities Research Council Survey of Dedications to Saints in Medieval Scotland project based in Scottish History, School of History and Classics, University of Edinburgh. Along with John J. McGavin she is joint editor of the forthcoming Southeast Scotland volume of the Records of Early Drama: Scotland collections. Abigail Ann Young is Senior Research Associate at the REED project, where she has worked, in a variety of roles, since 1976. In 2005, her essay on Rupert of Deutz and Hildegard of Bingen appeared in James R. Ginther and Carl N. Still, eds, Essays in Medieval Philosophy and Theology in Memory of Walter H. Principe, CSB: Fortresses and Launching Pads. Current projects include expansion of the web version of REED’s Composite Latin Wordlist.

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Index

abbots of misrule, 68, 163 actors and acting. See players ales, church, 7, 42, 68, 70–1, 73, 75–7, 79, 165 Alleyn, Edward, 106–7, 123–4; Joan, wife of, 124 Anglo, Sydney, 86 Anne, Queen, wife of James I, 162 anthropological studies, 143, 145 antiquarians, 22, 132; records of, 4, 20, 24, 42 – 3, 66, 83n14, 86, 102–3, 167–8, 176n63, 239 architecture, 22, 240. See also venues archives, 11–13, 40, 85–7, 90, 101–3, 110, 131–9, 237; chronicles and histories in, 170; diaries in, 95; ecclesiastical, 7, 40, 46; educational initiatives for, 137– 8; electronic initiatives for, 13, 133–8, 139n10, 194– 5; family, 6, 45–6, 90, 131, 138, 213n6; funding for, 12, 133, 135– 8; guild, 26–7; legislation for, 12, 134 – 5; letters in, 90–1, 94, 112–13, 124, 127n13; literary, 22; in the media, 133; monastic, 45–6, 72; preservation of, 132, 137– 8, 178, 195; professional standards for, 25, 42, 132–3, 138; research strategies for, 4–6, 22, 46, 117,

239; Scottish, 159, 165, 170, 174n26; wills in, 174, 227, 240. See also archives, U.K.; civic records; ecclesiastical records; family records; and churches, records of; guilds and confraternities, records of archives, U.K., 11–12, 132–7; funding sources: Big Lottery Fund, 136; — Heritage Lottery Fund, 136; — Higher Education Funding Council, 135; — ‘Invest to Save,’ 135; — National Lottery, 135; — New Opportunities Fund (NOF), 136–7; governing and advisory bodies: Historical Manuscripts Commission, and Commissioner for the, 24, 102, 134; — Lord Chancellor (office of ), 134, 139n5; — Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, 134, 139n10; — National Archives, 134–6; — Public Record Office, and Keeper of the, 134; — regional councils, 135–7; West Yorkshire archives: Access to Archives (A2A), projects of, 135–6; — Archives Listing Access Project, 136; — Yorkshire Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (YMLAC), 135–6 aristocracy, 8, 46, 85– 6, 90 –1, 94, 220;

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performances for, 21, 87, 92, 121, 123, 159, 162 (see also Scotland, horse racing); residences of, 8, 167; Scottish, 157, 159–60, 162, 165, 167–9. See also family records; household drama; patrons; patrons and travelling companies; and under venues, private residences Arts and Humanities Research Board, U.K., 82n1 ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). See under information technology, REED’s adoption of Association of Canadian University Teachers of English, meeting of (June 1974), 29 – 30 Astington, John H., 5, 119 audiences, 87, 144; London, 90, 104–5, 112–13, 126; provincial, 9, 93, 104, 107, 110, 112–13, 124; Scottish, 159–60, 169. See also readers and reading Augustine, Saint, 142 authorship, 223, 226, 233n34, 234n36. See also playwrights Austin, J.L., 145 Badir, Patricia, 120 Bakhtin, Mikail, 143 Baldwin, Elizabeth, 237, 239–40 ballads. See under Robin Hood Barr, Bernard, 26 Barroll, Leeds, 96, 124 Beadle, Richard, 24 Bell, Catherine, 143 Bell, George (bishop of Chichester), 23 Benger, Sir Thomas, 95 Berger, Thomas L., 121 Berry, Herbert, 118, 238 Bevington, David M., 118, 124, 238–40 biblical plays, 5–6, 14, 16n5, 21–2, 24–5,

42, 93, 108, 125, 132, 140 – 2, 144, 150, 239; characterization in, 144, 148, 153n24, 163; in Scotland, 163. See also York cycle; and under Chester; Coventry bibliographies, for theatre history, 118–20, 217–18, 221–2, 236–50; online, 119– 20, 127n6, 229n4. See also REED, bibliographic research for Billington, Sandra, 240 Binnie, Patricia, 224 biographies, 221, 233n28. See also patrons; Patrons and Performances Web Site Blackstone, Mary A., 88, 95–6, 118, 120, 123–4 Blayney, Peter, 101, 109 Bodmin (Cornw), 76, ill. 80 Bolter, Jay David, 208–10 Boswell, James, 224 Bowles, John, 224 boy bishops, 44, 60 Bristol, 67, 82n1, 83n14, 95, 121, 124, 162 British Cursus Project, 13 British Museum, 22 Britten, Benjamin, 23 Brome, Richard, 112 Browne, E. Martin, 23, 29 Brown, Keith, 160 Bullen, A.H., 224 Bullough, Geoffrey, 225 Burbage, James, 123 Burgess, Clive, 240 Butler, Judith, 143, 145 Butterworth, Philip, 238 Calvinism. See under Scotland, religion in Cambridge, 55, 95, 114, 122 CAMiLEON project, 179 Campbell, Nicole, 113n2

Index Canada Council (Canada Council for the Arts), and REED funding, 4, 29, 31–4, 39, 42. See also NEH Carlisle (Cumb), 161 carnivalesque activities, 146. See also games and play; Hocktide customs; mimetic customs; Robin Hood Carpenter, Richard, 66 Carpenter, Sarah, 158 Cartmell, Deborah, 120 Carwarden, Thomas, 95 Catholicism, in England, 91–2, 94–6. See also under Scotland, religion in Cavendish family, 108, 112 Cawley, Arthur, 24, 26– 8, 30–3 censorship, 93, 141 Cerasano, S.P., 120 ceremony and ritual, 44, 50n8, 60, 86–7, 95; in Scotland, 161– 2, 169, 171, 177n66. See also games and play; Robin Hood; and under guilds and confraternities, activities of Chambers, E.K., 4, 24–5, 28, 103; Frazer’s influence on, 141; and performance contexts, 86; REED’s divergence from, 101; and Robin Hood studies, 66 chambres de rhétorique, 150 Charles I, king, 103, 162 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 182 Cheshire, 237, 239 Chester, 28, 31, 39, 44, 237; biblical plays in, 6, 21, 23 – 5, 87, 94, 108, 140, 144, 146, 163 (see also Britten, Benjamin); customary calendar of, 47; musician families in, 169; touring performers at, 89, 91, 94 Chichester (Suss), 166 children, in entertainment, 143, 166; music for, 169. See also schools; Yule customs chronicles and histories. See under archives

257

churches, parish, 150; activities of, 72, 165, 236–7, 239; altars in, 147; church houses, 75, 78, 122; fund-raising, 75–6, 84n25 (see also under Robin Hood); as performance venues, 121–2; records of, 6–7, 42, 45–6, 60, 66–77, 83nn14, 17, 20, 121, 236, 239; refurbishment of, 75–6, 79–80; rood lofts in, 75–6 Church of England, and religious plays, 23 churchyards, performing in, 60, 121 civic entertainment, 5–7, 12, 21, 42, 108, 123, 126, 239; in Scotland, 163. See also biblical plays civic music, 159, 170. See also waits civic records, 6, 41, 46, 103, 227; accounts, 7, 9–10, 59, 71, 77, 88–90, 123, 125–6; Scottish, 158, 160 – 2, 170 Clerkenwell plays, 238 Clifford family, 108, 112 Clopper, Lawrence, 28, 31, 33, 118, 238 Coldewey, John C., 5– 6 Coletti, Theresa, 16n10, 117, 125, 240 Collier, John Payne, 226 Collins, Churton, 224 Collinson, Patrick, 237, 240 Colloquium, First (REED). See under REED, key stages in comedies, 90, 112 –13, 224, 234n40 computers. See information technology confraternities. See guilds and confraternities Coover, Robert, 210 copyright. See under information technology, electronic publishing Corbin, Peter, 225 Corpus Christi, feast of, 26, 143; and game theory, 24; plays at, 24, 26, 73, 150, 163; processions at, 25, 27, 44, 145 (see also processions) Corpus Christi Guild. See under York, institutions in

258

Index

costumes: for guild processions, 150; for guisings, 165–6; liveries, 162, 169; for masques, 159; for plays, 163, 238. See also under Robin Hood court, royal: English, 90, 92–3, 95, 123, 227; — calendars of, 94; Scottish, 157– 8, 162 – 3, 171– 2 Coventry, 28, 148; biblical plays in, 5, 108, 125, 144; ‘Ludus Coventriae,’ 21; travelling players at, 89, 123 Cowling, Jane, 118, 240 cowl-staffing, 67 Croscombe (Somers), 73, 75–7, ill. 78 cross-dressing, 166 Cox, John D., 111, 118, 121 Craig, Hardin, 24 Craig, John, 236, 241 Craik, T.W., 110 cultural studies, 8, 66, 89, 145 Cummings, James, 12 –13, 189 Cursus project, 13 dance, 7, 42, 60, 72, 83n13, 87, 148, 166; in Scotland, 162, 165, 170–1. See also morris dancing databases. See under information technology, data storage; patrons and travelling companies Davidson, Clifford, 118 Davison, Peter, 119–21, 125–6 Dawson, Giles, 25, 119 de Grazia, Margreta, 119, 223 De Lacy family (Thornhill, Yorks, WR), 93 De Welles, Theodore, 46 Derby, earl of, 94 Devon, 66–7, 75– 6, 95 dictionaries, 22, 233n28 digitization. See REED, digital text; and under dramatic records; information

technology: languages; Text Editing Initiative disguisings, 87, 142, 166. See also Scotland, guisings Dodsley, Robert, 219– 22, 226 ‘Domesday Book’ (1986), 178 – 9 Donahue, Joseph, 207– 8 Dorrell, Margaret. See Rogerson, Margaret Douglas, Audrey, 45, 48, 240 Douglas, J. Yellowlees, 205 Douglas, Mary, 145 drama, definitions of, 12, 140 –5, 151n5, 152n7, 153n23 dramatic records: context for, 6– 8, 10, 16nn10, 11, 41, 45, 48 – 9, 85, 87, 91– 2, 125–6, 217, 237; dating difficulties of, 28–9; digitization of, 178, 183, 186–7, 195, 199n32, 206 (see also REED, digital text and under information technology, languages); evidence of, 4–7, 21, 25–7, 86, 90, 94, 97, 112–13, 126, 202, 217; gaps in, 6, 9–10, 68, 89, 170, 205, 208, 240; publications of, 24–5, 86, 101–5, 117; and Robin Hood, 67; research strategies for, 9, 102 – 3; transcription problems in, 3, 8, 41; web site uses of, 13–14, 203, 227– 8 (see also Patrons and Performances Web Site). See also plays; REED; and under Scotland dramatists. See playwrights drums, 169 Duffy, Eamon, 241 Dunsworth, Felicity, 89, 118 Dutka, JoAnna, 30 –1, 33, 239 Dutton, Richard, 93 Dyce, Alexander, 224 Early English Books Online (EEBO), 199n32

Index East Anglia, 14, 16n5 Easter sepulchres, ritual activity, 44 ecclesiastical records, 7, 41, 59–60, 90; Scottish, 158, 165– 6, 170 editors, textual, 107–13, 114n14, 216–35. See also plays Edward VI, king, 94–6 EETS, 22, 24, 26 Eliot, T.S., 23 Elizabeth I, queen, 93, 103, 110. See also travelling companies, individual, Queen’s Men Elizabeth II, queen, 95, 131 Elizabethan drama. See Renaissance theatre Elliott, John R., Jr, 118, 122, 238 Enders, Jody, 145 entertainers. See performers entries, royal, 162 Epp, J. Garrett, 118, 238–9 Exeter (Devon), 83n17, 84n29, 99n33 Extensible Markup Language (XML). See under information technology, languages family records, 6–8, 10, 45–6, 87–92, 96, 108, 111–12, 131, 138, 186–7, 213n6, 227; Scottish, 159, 161, 165, 170 feasts, 60, 148, 150, 164 –5, 170. See also ales Findlay, Alison, 122 First Colloquium (REED). See under REED, key stages in Fletcher, John, 221, 231n16 Fletcher, Lawrence (English player), 161 Foakes, Reginald, 125 folk customs, 44, 86, 164 –5, 239 Forrest, John, 239 fragmentation, 204 –7, 211, 240 Frampton, Mendal, 24 Francis, Saint, 149 Frazer, James, 66, 141

259

French, Katherine, 236–7, 239 – 40 Friar, in morris dance, 77, 84n29 fund-raising, 7, 81, 135–7. See also under REED; Robin Hood Furnivall, F.J., 225 Galloway, David, 7, 28–33, 47, 102–3, 113 games and play, 6, 7, 66, 159, 164 – 5; game theory, 24; seasonal, 6–7, 66, 164; — inversion of order (misrule), 44, 60, 142– 3, 163 (see also ceremony and ritual); — May games, 71, 77; — in Scotland, 164 – 5, 167– 9, 171; theatrical games, 142 – 3, 152nn7– 8. See also dance; Midsummer events; music and musicians; performers; Robin Hood; sports; Whitsun; and Scotland, celebrations in Gardiner, Fr Harold, 24 genealogists, 138, 167 gender studies, 143, 145 gentry, 8, 46, 90–1, 94, 213n6; playgoing by, 112; residences of, 8, 125, 158; Scottish, 157–60. See also family records; household drama; patrons; patrons and travelling companies George, David, 46, 113, 120 George, Saint, celebrations of, 68, 76 Gibson, James M., 112 Globe Theatre. See under London glossaries. See under REED, editorial practice of Goodman, Christopher, 91, 94 Grantham (Lincs), 25 Greenfield, Peter, 16n11, 88, 93, 96, 116– 18, 121, 123, 238– 40 Greg, W.W., 24, 105–12, 125, 224 Grosart, Alexander B., 224 – 5 guildhalls, 122, 148. See also town halls

260

Index

guilds and confraternities, 6, 27, 126, 145– 50, 154– 5n39; activities of, 12, 75–6, 140, 145–51, 236; charitable acts of, 147– 8; clerical hostility to, 146–7, 153n38; dress of, 148, 150; ecclesiastical approval for, 145; feasts of, 148; locations for, 75– 6, 145–50, 156n57, 237; membership of, 154n36, 155n46; pageants and plays of, 12, 148, 150 (see also Chester, biblical plays; Corpus Christi, plays; York cycle); performative aspects of, 12, 140 –56; records of, 87, 147, 192; Robin Hood records of, 68, 75; social and moral relationships of, 141–2, 146–8, 151; suppression of, 76; youth participation in, 147, 151 Gurr, Andrew, 109–11, 117, 119–22, 237 gypsies. See under Scotland Hagen, Tanya, 12–13, 14 Halliwell-Phillipps, James Orchard, 101–3, 105 Hardwick Hall (Derbys), 122, 237 Hattaway, Michael, 119 Hawkins, Thomas, 219–21 Henry VIII, king, 95, 158 Henry, Prince, son of James I, 162 Henslowe, Philip, 124 Hereford, 25, 82n13 Herodotus, 200 Hertford, earl of, 125 Heywood, Thomas, 112 historians, 10 –11, 16n11, 42, 45, 50n10, 60, 85, 236–7, 239– 40 historical geography, 15, 203, 210–11 Historical Manuscripts Commission. See under archives, U.K. history, discipline of, 200. See also theatre history Hocktide customs, 7, 42, 140, 236

Holland, Peter, 126, 238 Holst, Gustav, 23 Holt, J.C., 168 Hopkins, Lisa, 122 horse racing. See under Scotland household drama, 6–8, 10, 45–6, 87–96, 108, 111–12, 117, 122, 161, 186–7, 227 HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). See under information technology, languages Hughes, Alan, 119 Huizinga, Johan, 143 Hunnis, William, 95 Hüsken, 241 Hutton, Ronald, 236, 239 hypertexts. See under information technology, electronic publishing Ichikawa, Mariko, 119 information technology (see also Patrons and Performances Web Site) – and archival organization, 12–13, 133–8 – data storage: databases, 202– 3, 207– 8, 213n7; issues, 57, 178–80, 185–6, 193, 195, 207; REED’s use of, 7, 47–8, 191– 3, 202–3; discussion of, 13, 178 – 9, 195, 199n32 – electronic publishing: books, 204, 210, 215n27; hypertexts, 13 –15, 200 –1, 203–11, 212n2, 213n14, 214nn16, 17, 18, 20, 215nn25, 34, 218, 227– 8; and PDF files, 193 – 4; REED publications, 15, 178, 199n31, 201–3, 214n15; rights, 194, 199n31 – languages: BASIC, 202 – mapping, 203, 206, 209 –11 – markup languages, use of; HTML, 58, 179–81; SGML, 58, 62n11, 181; XML, 13, 180–94, 196nn3, 7, 196–7n10, 197nn11, 13, 14, 15, 198nn21, 25,

Index 199nn27, 28, 32. See also information technology, Text Editing Initiative; REED, digital text – online resources, 13–14, 16n4, 119–21, 127n6, 135–8, 138 – 9n4, 139nn5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 178, 180, 192, 195, 196nn1, 2, 4, 197n12, 199nn28, 29, 32, 206, 212n5, 214n15, 229n4 – Oxford Text Archive, 13, 195, 199n30 – REED’s adoption of, 5, 25, 43, 46, 48, 59 – 61, 186; ASCII codes 48, 57– 9, 62nn8, 11, 187–8, 197n18; concordances, 5, 43, 55– 9, 61, 61–2n7, 193; and possibilities for, 12 –15, 178–99; software, proprietary, 178–9, 183, 185– 6, 195, 196n5, 202, 213n7; typesetting, 48, 57– 9, 61, 184, 186– 8, 193. See also under information technology, data storage and electronic publishing – Text Editing Initiative, 62n11, 185, 189, 197n12, 198nn20, 21, 22, See also information technology, markup languages, XML Ingram, Reginald, 28, 32–3 Ingram, William, 108, 116–17, 121, 240 Innocent III, Pope, 142 inns and innyards, 110, 121 intellectual property rights. See under information technology, electronic publishing interludes, 90, 92 – 3, 95, 158, 163, 221. See also morality plays International Medieval Congress (2002). See under University of Leeds International Society for the Study of Medieval Theatre. See under University of Leeds Ioppolo, Grace, 120, 125 Ipswich (Suff ), 149 –50 itineraries, of travelling companies, 88,

261

92–6, 108, 159, 202. See also Patrons and Performances Web Site Jackson, Shelley, 210 Jaeger, C. Stephen, 145 James IV, king (Scotland), 152 James V, king (Scotland), 158 James VI (Scotland) and I (England), 158, 162, 164 Johnson, Bernard, 26–7 Johnston, Alexandra F., 101– 2, 107, 239, 241; and founding of REED, 3 – 4, 30, 34, 44–5, 49, 124; and York cycle, 5, 93 Joldersma, Anne, 113n2 Joseph, Saint, in procession, 150 Jowett, John, 111 Joyce, Michael, 204, 211 Kahrl, Stanley, 5, 25, 27– 8, 30– 2 Kalamazoo (Michigan). See University of Western Michigan at Kalamazoo Kastan, David Scott, 118, 120 –1 Keenan, Siobhan, 117, 122 Kett’s Rebellion (1549), 143 Kinney, Arthur, 117, 119 Kirby, Fiona, 239 kirk. See under Scotland, religion in Klausner, David, 239 Knight, Stephen, 65, 169 Knox, John, 158 Knutson, Roslyn, 8–10, 14, 87, 93, 108–9, 237 Kolb, David, 209 Kolve, V.A., 24 Kümin, Beat, 239–40 Kuriyama, Constance, 119 Kyd, Thomas, 22 Lancashire, 16–17n12, 45– 6, 50 –1n13, 68, 73, 90

262

Index

Lancashire, Anne, 126, 237– 8 Lancashire, Ian, 46, 118; and bibliographic research, 4, 30, 34, 42; and computer technology, 43; and patronage studies, 87–9, 93 Lancaster University, Lancastrian Shakespearean Conference (1999), 93 Lee, Sidney, 225 Le Goff, Jacques, 145 Leicester, earl of, 91, 93 letters. See under archives Levenson, Jill, 111 lexicography, 22, 55–6, 58, 61n6, 241. See also REED, editorial practice of, glossaries libels, 59 libraries, 90 –1, 134, 136–7, 214n15. See also archives licences, 123 Lincoln, 25 literacy. See readers and reading literary sources, 24, 40, 53, 60, 66, 90, 117, 121 Littlecote (Wilts), 125 Little Gest of Robin Hood, 76, 81 Little John. See under Robin Hood, characters in Littleton, Betty J., 225 liturgical drama, 43– 4, 144, 153n23 liturgy, 13, 43 – 4, 147, 149, 153n23 Litzenberger, Carolyn, 236, 240 Liverpool (Lancs), 46, 161 Logan, Terence P., 224 London, 119, 126, 237– 8; closing of theatres in, 4, 29, 103, 105–6, 108, 111; Globe Theatre, 29, 90, 119, 122; guilds in, 147–8, 150; provincial links with, 8, 97, 112, 125; and theatre history, 9, 103, 217; theatres in, 14, 23, 85, 91–3, 105– 12, 122 –3, 126, 159, 217 Lord Chamberlain, 23

Louis, Cameron, 91 Ludlow (Shrops), 68, 99n33 ‘Ludus Coventriae,’ 21 MacIntyre, Jean, 238 MacLean, Sally-Beth, 3, 7–8, 93, 96, 108, 116–22, 124, 240; and REED office, 21, 32, 89, 91, 94, 101, 113. See also travelling companies, individual, Queen’s Men magic, feats of, 238 Maguire, Laurie, 101, 109, 116, 121, 125 Maid Marion, 83n13. See also under Robin Hood, characters in Malone Society (London), 31, 40, 55, 86, 119; editorial conventions of, 28, 41, 48 – 9; publications of, 25, 28, 119, 230n6. See also Proudfoot, Richard (honorary secretary) Manning, Robert, of Brunne, 142 manuscripts, 201. See also archives maps. See information technology, mapping; and under patrons and travelling companies marketplaces, 110 markup languages. See under information technology Marlowe, Christopher, 22, 113, 119, 123, 218, 225 Marshall, John, 6– 8, 236–7, 239, 252 Mary, Saint, 150 Mary Stuart, Queen (Scotland), 168 Mary Tudor, Queen, 88, 95–6 masques, 87, 90, 95– 6, 142, 159, 162 Massinger, Philip, 220–2 May games. See also Robin Hood; and under games and play McCarty, Willard, 48, 57–9 McGavin, John, 6, 11, 15n2, 16n6, 237–8 McGee, C.E., 118, 120, 238, 241

Index McLuskie, Kathleen, 89, 118 McMillin, Scott, 93, 96, 120–2, 124. See also travelling companies, individual, Queen’s Men medieval drama, 3–7, 14, 21–4, 73, 86, 92–3, 150–1, 152n7, 238; characters in, 144; forms of, 142 –4; guild, 12, 148, 150; opposition to, 142–3, 152n10, 156n56; origins of, 140–1, 153n23; staging of, 4 – 6, 23; used in teaching, 24. See also biblical plays; interludes; liturgical drama; morality plays; players Melton, William, 143 Mercers Guild. See under York, institutions in Merchant Adventurers. See under York, institutions in Meredith, Peter, 30 –1, 34, 43 Midsummer events, 47, 148; in Scotland, 163, 165– 6, 171 Mill, Anna J., 24, 166 Mills, David, 33, 91, 120, 237, 239–40 mimetic customs, 11, 86, 142, 238–9. See also boy bishops; disguisings; Hocktide customs; Robin Hood; Scotland, guisings; and under games and play minstrels, 59, 175n46; terms for, 31, 40, 55–6, 61nn2, 4; travelling, 7, 94, 186–7, 191. See also music and musicians; songs and hymns; waits miracula, 142 misrule. See ceremony and ritual; and under games and play Mithal, H.S.D., 225 MLA: and early drama seminars, 23–5, 25 (1968), 27 (1972), 27– 8, 32, 33 – 4 (1973); online bibliography of, 119 –21 monasteries, records of, 45–6, 72 Monck, Nugent, 23

263

morality plays, 77, 81, 144. See also interludes More, William, 72 – 3 morris dancing, 77, 83n13, 84n29, 239–40 Mowat, Barbara, 112 mummings, 143, 166 Murphy, John, 94 Murray, J.T., 4, 28, 103 – 5, 122 – 3 museums, 134– 6 music and musicians, 16n11, 42 – 4, 47, 87, 90 –1, 148, 211, 227, 238 – 9; liturgical, 43– 4; terms for, 31. See also minstrels; songs and hymns; waits; and under Scotland National Archives, The. See under archives, U.K. Needles, Reed, 87 NEH, and REED funding, 34. See also Canada Council Nelson, Alan H., 30, 89, 116–19, 122, 238; and computer technology, 48; and Corpus Christi pageants, 25; and document translations, 42; and playing spaces, 34; and York cycle, 5, 15, 25, 27, 31 Nelson, Theodor, 203 Nichols, John, 219 – 20, 222, 225 Northumberland, earl of, 93 Norwich, 28, 47–8, 95, 109, 122, 143, 202 N-Town plays, 6, 16n5, 21, 25 Oberammergau (Bavaria), Passion Play at, 22–3 Old Meg of Herefordshire, 83n13 orations, 162 Orgel, Stephen, 238 Owst, G.R., 147 Oxford English Dictionary, and EETS, 22 Oxford Text Archive, 13, 195

264

Index

pageantry, civic, 86, 163 pageants, 140, 144, 150, 233n35; pageant wagons, 6, 21– 2, 25–7, 87, 150 palaeography, 30, 40, 50n2, 57. See also dramatic records, transcription problems in; REED, editorial practice of Palmer, Barbara D., 16n5, 108, 112, 116– 18, 122, 237–9 parishes. See churches Parry, Caroline, 15n4. See also PLS Parry, David, 6, 15n4. See also PLS Passion plays, 22, 149 – 50. See also biblical plays patronage, 141; political connections, 85– 6, 88, 91– 6, 123, 202, 217; Scottish, 159, 161, 169, 174n27; studies of, 7–8, 49, 85–100, 118, 120, 124, 237– 8 patrons, 47–8, 85–7, 89, 91, 93–6, 202– 3, 211; female, 90, 95–6; invitations from, 112; itineraries of, 92, 159; motives of, 123, 217; performances for, 202; status of, 94, 123 Patrons and Performances Web Site, 7, 9, 13 –15, 89, 91, 96, 186, 191, 197n16, 238, 241; assessment of, 205–7, 210–11, 212n5, 214n19, 215n25; development of, 48, 203–4; mapping for, 203, 210–11; pilot site, 13, 16n12, 50–1n13, 201 patrons and travelling companies, 201; database for, 7, 13, 47–8, 50–1n13, 89, 202 – 3; economics of, 91, 94, 99– 100n33; encoded metadata for, 191; joint travels of, 92; maps for, 7, 13, 17n12, 48, 51n13, 88–9, 94, 123, 190, 197n16, 228; published lists of, 5, 13, 55, 89, 202 Peasants’ Revolt (1381), 132, 143 Pembroke, earl of, 125 penitence, 149 – 50

performance practice, 8–9, 23, 86–7, 119, 125, 162, 218, 238; conditions of, 21, 25, 104, 226; descriptions of, 10, 121; processional staging, 5–6, 15, 21–2, 25–7, 31; rehearsals, 125; scaffolds, 163. See also under pageants performers, 4–5, 21, 31, 55, 61n2, 87, 91–2; acrobats, 227; fools, 60, 159, 165; for Edward VI, 95–6. See also music and musicians; players; travelling companies Petti, Anthony, 29– 32, 34 – 5, 40 philology, 53, 241 philosophy, 209 Pitcher, Seymour M., 225 plague, 105–6, 108– 9, 111, 127n13, 175n46, 193 play. See games and play players, 4, 59, 131, 159, 227–8; named, 95, 109, 161, 213n6; terms for, 31, 40; as text-transmitters, 105, 107, 110, 125. See also performance practice; repertories; travelling companies playhouses. See under London; theatres plays, 85–7, 90 – 2, 94, 101–13, 123 – 4, 164, 238; casting of, 90, 218, 227; editions of, 219; — 18th c., 218 –24, 226, 230nn10, 14, 231–2n16, 232nn18, 24; — 19th c., 224 – 6; — modern, 222 – 6, 230n10, 233n35, 234n36; — new directions for, 218, 227–8, 229n4; performances of: 18th c., 231n16; — 19th c., 22; — modern, 4–6, 23, 25, 29, 85–7, 141, 235n45; prompt-copies, 107; rehearsals, 126; scripts, 208; special effects, 238; texts: ‘bad quartos,’ 9, 101–11, 114n14, 124, 218, 227; — doubling of, 124; — First Folio, 104, 108, 110 –11, 114n14; — non-canonical, 216–35; — touring, 9, 101–8, 110–11, 119–20,

Index 124–5; textual studies, 9–10, 14, 101– 13, 124 –5, 216– 35; — A.W. Pollard and J. Dover Wilson, 104–7, 109–10, 125; — W.W. Greg, 24, 105–12, 125. See also medieval drama; publishers; repertories; Robin Hood plays, individual: Albumazar, 220; The Battle of Alcazar, 106; Clyomon and Clamydes, 224 – 6; Creed Play, 27; The Famous Victories of Henry V, 223–5; Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, 223–4, 226, 234n40; Fuimus Troes, 220; Gorboduc, 221; Hamlet, 101, 104–5, 108, 111, 119, 216; Henry V, 104, 108, 110 –11; Henry VIII, 113; History of Christ’s Passion, 163; King Lear, 94, 216; King Leir, 224 – 6; The Late Lancashire Witches, 112; Lusty Juventus, 221; Mankind, 77, 81; Merry Wives of Windsor, 104; The Old Wives’ Tale, 223–4, 226–7, 234n40; Orlando Furioso, 106; Pater Noster Play, 27; Pericles, 94, 104; Poetaster, 121; Quem Quaeritis, 153n23; Richard III, 111, 119–20; Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar, 77; Romeo and Juliet, 101, 104 –5, 108, 111; Selimus, 224–6, 234n36; St Thomas the Apostle, 143; St Thomas Becket, 143, 152n16; Second Shepherds’ Play, 93; The Spanish Tragedy, 220; Tamburlaine, 113, 225; The Taming of the Shrew, 216; The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, 224–6; Titus Andronicus, 119; Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, 142, 152n10; The Troublesome Reign of King John, 224–5, 227; The True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of York, 104, 111, 224, 227; 2 & 3 Henry VI, 104, 108, 111; Visitatio, 153n23 playwrights, 9, 14, 92, 101, 104, 112, 121, 123, 164, 216, 218 – 24, 228, 230n10,

265

231–2n16, 233n29; Beaumont, Francis, 221, 231n16; Brome, Richard, 112; Fletcher, John, 221, 231n16; Greene, Robert, 106–7, 223 – 4, 234n36; Heywood, Thomas, 112; Jonson, Ben, 121, 125, 221– 2, 229n4, 231n16; Marlowe, Christopher, 22, 113, 119, 123, 218, 225; Massinger, Philip, 220–2; Peele, George, 223–4; Wilson, Robert, 224. See also schools, masters of; Shakespeare, William PLS, 6, 15–16n4, 86–7 poems, 113, 150, 181– 3. See also Robin Hood, ballads of politics. See under patronage; Robin Hood Pollard, Alfred W., 104 –7, 109, 125 Popham, Justice, 125 poststructuralism, 216–17 pre-Raphaelite movement, 22 Presbyterianism. See under Scotland, religion in privy councillors, 95, 227 prizes, 84, 160–1 processions, 44, 95, 140, 148–150, 156n57, 162– 3. See also under Corpus Christi proclamations, 149, 169 professional theatre, 8–9, 12, 47, 93, 106, 123. See also under London, theatres in progresses, royal, 161–2 Prosser, Eleanor, 24 Protestantism, in England, 95–6, 123, 217–18, 227. See also Puritans Proudfoot, Richard, 4, 28, 30 –1, 35, 40, 218, 233n27. See also Malone Society Prouty, Charles Tyler, 224 Public Record Office. See under archives, U.K. publishers: Elizabethan, 90, 105, 107, 109, 113; markup methods of, 181; and print

266

Index

revolution, 201, 212n3; of theatre history, 28, 30, 86, 225 Puritans, 91, 94, 103, 142, 164–5, 193. See also Goodman, Christopher Purvis, Canon J.S., 23 Putzel, Steve, 87 Randall, Martin, 111 Rasmussen, Eric, 111 Rastall, Richard, 96, 236, 238–9 readers and reading, 200–11, 213n14, 219 record offices, 5, 11–12, 22, 25, 45, 131–9. See also archives; libraries recusancy, 90 –2, 94 REED (Toronto) – bibliographic research for, 4, 30, 34, 42 – 3, 46, 186, 193, 206 – collaborative strategies for, 5, 10–11, 21, 28 – 32, 39 –40, 45– 6, 49 – collected records of: civic, 39, 41, 45–6, 48, 90, 108; county, 6–7, 45–6, 48–9, 59 – 60, 74, 90 –1, 201–2, 210–11; London area, 14; see also below, RED records – criticism of, and response to, 10–11, 16nn10 –11, 117, 125, 237, 240 – digital text: editors’ submission of, 48; encoding for, 13, 15, 43, 48, 57– 9, 179 – 94, 196n3, 197nn15, 18, 198nn20 – 4, 199nn27, 32, 214n15 – early expectations of, 6 – editorial practice of: apparatus, 31, 41– 2, 47– 8, 190; county boundaries, 45; dating of records, 29, 31, 38n41, 40, 47; glossaries, 5, 7, 41–3, 54–7, 60, 190, 192, 198n23; Handbook for Editors, 44 – 5; indexing, 43, 47, 67, 191, 193, 202; methodology, 4 – 6, 8–11, 15, 28, 31, 39, 44 – 5, 47– 9, 50n9, 59 – 61, 62n11, 91, 117, 186, 201–2, 210–11;

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–

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and Scottish collections, 158, 165; selection principles, 8, 10 –11, 16nn10, 11, 30, 40–1, 43– 4, 49, 89 – 91, 96, 198n24, 237, 240; transcription: challenges of, 4, 7, 10, 52 – 3, 60; — guidelines for, 4, 5, 10, 28, 30 –1, 40–1, 52–4, 101; — sources for, 43, 103, 117; translation, of Latin, 4, 7, 31, 42, 52–6, 59 –60, 61nn2 – 3; see also REED: digital text; Executive Board Executive Board: members of, 33–5, 43, 45, 102; recent appointments to, 10; role of, 5, 41, 43–5, 91 funding strategies for, 9, 29–32, 39, 49, 186, 193–5, 197n15, 199n30, 214n15 future development of, 3, 10–15, 116, 138, 178–235 graduate students, contributions of, 42, 46 impact of: in the classroom, 10, 15, 241–2; on scholarship, 3, 5–10, 12, 15, 66–7, 85– 97, 101– 2, 108–13, 116– 28, 141, 214n19, 217, 226, 236–42 key stages in: appointment of steering committee (June 1974), 29 – 30; prefoundation scholars’ meeting (Sept. 1974), 30, 34–5; project’s foundation (1975–6), 3– 5, 15, 21– 40; REED’s First Colloquium (Toronto, 1978), 3–6, 33, 239; SSHRC’s ‘wind-down’ grant (1986), 49; 25th anniversary REED sessions, annual International Medieval Congress (University of Leeds, 2002), 3 publications of: Early Theatre, 117, 241; REED Newsletter, 31– 3, 86, 117, 241; REED series, 242; see also Patrons and Performances Web Site; patrons and travelling companies

Index – recent development of, 6–7, 9–11, 13 – RED records, Scotland and Wales, 14, 67, 157–77; see also under Scotland – research strategies for, 39, 42, 45, 49, 60, 101, 113, 132, 138 – senior advisors to, 32 – 5 – staffing of, 4–5, 32, 42, 49, 59, 214n15 – and U.K. archives, 11, 131, 137–8 – and University of Toronto: Centre for Medieval Studies, 30; English Department, 28, 30; Geography Department, 206; Robarts Library, 38n47; Victoria College, 38n47, 44; University of Toronto Press, 4, 28, 30, 32, 35, 49 Reed, Isaac, 219 –21 Reformation, in England, 23, 42, 60, 76, 92, 170, 240–1. See also under Scotland, religion in rehearsals, 125 religious drama, 3, 22 – 3, 28, 92, 142, 171–2; Italian, 149, 156nn56, 57; liturgical plays, 44, 92, 153n23; opposition to, 142; prohibition of, 23; in Scotland, 163. See also biblical plays Religious Drama Society, The, 23 Renaissance theatre, 4, 12, 90, 92, 109, 116, 141– 2, 171. See also plays; playwrights; Revels Office; Shakespeare, William repertories, Elizabethan, 9–10, 14, 16n9, 87, 123–5, 127n13, 218, 227–8, 229n4; of Leicester’s Men, 88; of Queens’ Men, 87, 106–7, 123. See also plays residences. See under aristocracy; venues revels, 76–8, 87, 94–5, 126 Revels Office, 93, 95, 109, 123 Riggio, Milla, 124 Ritch, Janet, 120 roads, 72, 108, 160, 203, 208–9 Robin Hood, 83, 176n63; ballads of, 76–7,

267

81, 84n31, 168; in modern popular culture, 65–6, 82n1; in morris dance, 84n29; myths of, 65–7, 74; political uses of, 65–6, 74; prohibited, 82n12; in Scotland, 11, 16n6, 67, 164, 168; scripted plays of, 67, 77; terms for, 77, 82n8; towers named after, 168 Robin Hood, game or play of, 6–7, 42, 44, 65–7, 76–7, 83n17, 239 – characters in: Friar, 77; Little John, 69– 72, 77, 81, 168, 174n27; Maid Marion, 71–3; Potter, 81, 84n31; Robin Hood, 66–76, 81, 164, 168; Sheriff, 71, 77 – costumes for, 67–71, 73, 77, 83n14 – English locations for, 69–71, 74; Berkshire, 67; Bristol, 67, 82n1, 83n14; Cornwall: Bodmin, 76, ill. 80; — St Columb Major, 77; — Stratton, 76; Devon: Ashburton, 73; — Braunton, 75; — Chagford, 74, 76; — Chudleigh, 84n29; — Colyton, 67–8, 83n17; — Exeter, 77, 83n17, 84n29; — Honiton, 67– 8, 83n17; — Woodbury, 84n29, 168; Dorset, 67; Gloucestershire: Tewkesbury, 72; Herefordshire, 82–3n13; Kent: Dover, 82n12; — Hythe, 71; — New Romney, 71; Lancashire, 68, 73; Oxfordshire, 67; Scotland, 67; Shropshire: Bridgnorth, 71; — Ludlow, 68; — Shrewsbury, 68, 73; Somerset: Croscombe, 73, 75–7, ill. 78; — Glastonbury, 75; — Pilton, 75; — Tintinhull, 75, ill. 79; — Yatton, 75; — Yeovil, 73, 77; Surrey: Kingston upon Thames, 67; Sussex: Rye, 71; Thames valley, 50n8, 66–7; Worcestershire: Battenhall, manor of, 72, ill. 80; — Cleeve Prior, 72; — Crowle, manor of, 72; — Grimley, manor of, 72; — Ombersley, 72; — Worcester, 68, 72

268

Index

– fund-raising role of, 6–7, 67– 82, 84n25 – properties for, 68 –71, 73, 76–7, 84n28, 168 Rogerson, Margaret, nee Dorrell, 3, 28, 30, 43; and York plays, 26–7, 31–2, 87 Roman Catholicism. See Catholicism Rosser, Gervase, 12, 15n2 Rothes, earl of, 158 Rowcliffe, Bill, 58 – 9 Rueter, Will, 35 rush-bearing, 164 SAA, meetings of: 16n7; 29 (1972); 116, 126 (1989); 9, 108, 116 (1990); 117 (1991, 1995, 1997); 9 (1999, theatre history seminar) sabbath, profaning of, 94, 164, 167, 170–1 saints, 6, 14, 141– 3, 148, 150 Salter, F.M., 24 – 5, 30 –1 Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, 158, 163 Saunders, James, 239 Savile family (Thornhill, Yorks, WR), 93 Sayers, Dorothy, 23 Schmitt, Jean-Claude, 145 Schoenbaum, S., 101, 103 schools, 122, 162 – 4; masters of, 163–4, 169, 171 Scotland, 237 – celebrations in: baptisms, 175n46; bell-ringing, 162; bonfires, 162, 171; Gowries night, 162; King’s Night, 162; play days, 165; royal births, 162; weddings, 169 –70, 175n46; see also games and play; Yule customs; and under ceremony and ritual; Robin Hood – cities: Aberdeen, 161–3, 166; Dundee, 161; Elgin, 166 – guisings, 11, 165–7, 170 – gypsies, 11, 167– 9, 176nn56, 64

– horse racing, 11, 159 – 61, 165, 171; racecourses, 161 – music in, 159, 162–6, 169–72, 174n26, 177n66; drummers, 159, 162–3, 168–9, 171; fiddlers, 159, 170; Highland harpists, 159, 172n6; pipers, 159, 162, 164, 166, 169–71; trumpeters, 159, 163, 170; violers, 159 – musters, 169 – plays: clerk, 163–4; guild, 163; school, 164 – regions of: Lothian and Borders, 11, 158; northeast, 158, 163; southeast, 158 –9, 161–4, 166–7, 171, 174n33 – religion in: Calvinism, 11, 157– 8; Catholicism, 158, 160, 163, 169; Presbyterianism: kirk, 157, 161, 165–7, 169– 71; — kirk records, 163–4, 168, 170–1; — ministers, 158, 164, 166; — National Covenant, 158, 165; see also Reformation, in England Scotland, RED records, 6, 11, 14, 157– 76 – locations in, Lothian and Borders: Aberlady, 165, 166; Airth, 167; Auldcambus, 164; Biggar, 160; Blackbarony, 160; Burrow Moore (Boroughmuir), 168; Cranston, 164; Crichton, 171; Dunbar, 175n45; Ecclesmachen, 166; Edinburgh, 157– 8, 161–2, 168, 172; Elphinstone Castle, 167; Esk, River, 168; Haddington, 160, 162–4, 169, 171; Horsburgh Castle, 160; Jedburgh, 160–1, 164, 171; Kirklistoun, 168; Lanark, 160; Lasswade, 176–7n64; Lauder, 160, 164; Linlithgow, 158, 162–5; Livingston, 175n44; Lothian, 177n65; Meikle Blackburn, 165; Melrose, 167; Nether Horsburgh, 160; Newbattle, 166–7; Peebles, 160–1, 163,

Index 165, 169; Prestonpans, 165; Roslin, 167–9; Roslin Castle, 168; St Andrews, 162; St Piedmont, priory of, 167; Salton, 174n38; Samuelstoun, 164, 169; Selkirk, 160 –1, 171; Seton, 162; Stirling, 158, 160, 162–4; Torpichen, 166; Tweeddale, 171, 177n65; Tyninghame, 166–7 – persons in: Allane, George, 171; Bower, Walter, 169; Bowie, Andrew, 166; Broun, James, 164; Brounside, John, 164; Brown family, 169; Buccleuch, 1st earl of, 162; Carmichael, James, 163; Cathkin, James, 164; Edgar, James, 167; Elphinstone, Lady, 162; Elphinstone, Lord, 162, 167; Gewin, James, 166; Hay, Fr Richard Augustine, 167; Heriot, John, 164; Inglis, George, 166; Jackson, Alexander, 167; Ker, Lord, 162; Killour, Friar, 163; Lindsay, Lord, 165; Magawye, John, 166; Morchoson, John, 163; Murrays, the (Blackbarony), 160; Neilson, John, 166; Porteous, Helen, 166; Porteous, John, 166; Ray, William, 166; Samuell, Sanders, 166; Scougall family, 169; Seton, Alexander, 162; Sinclair, Sir William, 167– 9; Smythe, William, 166; Stewart, John, Lord of Traquair, 161; Thomson, Robert, 169; Wishart, George, 163 Sedge, Douglas, 225 Seltzer, Daniel, 224 sermons, 24, 95, 147–8 SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). See information technology, markup languages Shakespeare, William, 22, 29, 90, 92, 94, 96, 141; bardolators, 9, 101–3, 113; Shakespearean studies, 6–9, 101–15, 118, 216– 35. See also Renaissance theatre

269

Shrewsbury (Shrops), 68, 73, 98–9n33 Shrovetide customs, 166 Simeon (high priest), 150 Slater, Martin (English player), 161 Smith, Denzell S., 224 Somerset, Alan, 89, 102, 108–9, 111–12, 116, 118–20, 123, 240 songs and hymns, 150, 159. See also minstrels; music and musicians; waits Spencer, Edmund, 96 Spevack, Marvin, 102 Sponsler, Claire, 238 sports: bear-baiting, 95; bull-baiting, 164; football, 165; see also games and play; Scotland, horse racing SSHRC, 49 Star Chamber, 94 Stationers Company, 105. See also under publishers, Elizabethan Steevens, George, 220, 224 Stephenson, Jenn, 12–14 Stern, Tiffany, 125, 225 Stevens, Martin, 25–6 Stokes, James, 16n5, 118, 170, 238, 240 Stratton (Cornw), 168 Strutt, Joseph, 26 summer lords and ladies, 66 taverns, 147 Taylor, Gary, 110 technology, computer and print. See information technology Tertullian, 142 Text Editing Initiative. See under information technology text encoding. See under REED, digital text textual criticism, 223, 233n33 textual studies. See under plays Thames valley, 50n8, 66–7

270

Index

theatre history, discipline of, 85–6, 91–3, 96, 101–15, 201, 207–8, 214n19, 216, 237–9; publications of, 116–28, 212n5, 230 –1n10, 233n28, 236–50 (see also under REED) theatres, 55, 121, 161. See also Renaissance theatre and under London Thomas, Sylvia, 11–13 Tiner, Elza, 120, 242 Tintinhull (Somers), 75, ill. 79 Tittler, Robert, 45, 236, 240 Todd, Margo, 164 – 5 Tottenham House (Wilts), 125 touring. See Patrons and Performances Web Site; patrons and travelling companies; travelling companies Towneley plays, 6, 21–2, 24, 93, 132, 239 town halls, 121. See also guildhalls Tracy, Prudence, 30, 32, 35 tragedies, 221. See also plays, individual travelling companies, 9–10, 28–9, 46, 71, 85, 88, 93 –7, 102 – 5, 122 – 3, 237– 8; antiprovincial bias, 103 –5, 109, 112, 119; difficulties of, 105–7; economics of, 53 – 4, 91, 94, 108 –9, 123–4, 192–3; licences of, 109, 123; provisions for, 131; Scottish evidence for, 161; tours of, 7, 108 –10, 112, 116– 25, 127n13, 237. See also Patrons and Performances Web Site; patrons and travelling companies; play texts travelling companies, individual: Admiral’s Men, 123; Beauchamp’s Men, 123; Countess of Derby’s Men, 96; Derby’s Men, 96; Dudley’s Men, 112; Francis Coffin’s Troupe, 94; Hertford’s Men, 94; King’s Men, 102–3, 105, 109–11, 122, 161; King’s Players, 95; Leicester’s Men, 88, 211; Lord Chamberlain’s Men, 102– 3, 105, 110–11, 125; Mountjoy’s Men,

123; Oxford’s Men, 123; Pembroke’s Men, 124, 127n13; Prince’s Players, 95; Queen of Bohemia’s Men, 112; Queen’s Men, 106, 108, 123, 224, 227, 237, 241; — repertory of, 16n9, 87, 106–7, 123, 217–18, 223–8; — tours of, 217– 18; Queen’s Players, 95– 6; Sir Richard Cholmeley’s Players, 94; Strange’s Men, 96; Sussex’s Men, 123 Tudor drama. See plays; Renaissance theatre Turner, Victor, 143 Twycross, Meg, 241 University of Bristol, 82n1 University of Leeds, 179; International Medieval Congress at (2002), 97; International Society for the Study of Medieval Theatre, first colloquium at (1974), 30, 34, 35 University of Michigan, 179 University of Waterloo, Conference on Elizabethan Drama, 113 University of Western Michigan at Kalamazoo, Medieval Congress (1982), 48 University of Toronto. See under REED Upwell (Norf ), 147 venues, for performance, 9, 13, 17n12, 47– 8, 51n13, 89, 91, 94, 117, 119, 121– 3, 125, 203, 206, 211, 213n8, 228, 238; churches and churchhouses, 122; indoor, 110, 121–2, 127n8; outdoor, 26, 121, 150; private residences, 9, 93, 108, 112, 121–3, 125; schools, 122; Scottish, 159, 167; town halls, 121–2 Victoria, Queen, 23 village greens, 121 Vince, Robert, 85 visits, royal, 162, 170, 213n6

Index waits, 7, 16n11, 47, 59, 90, 170, 177n67, 191. See also minstrels; music and musicians; songs and hymns Wakefield (Yorks WR), 21–2, 93, 132, 239. See also Towneley plays Wales, RED collection for, 6, 14 Walker, Greg, 16nn10, 11, 240 Walker, J.W., 132 Walsingham, Sir Francis, 123 Walter, J.H., 110 Wanamaker, Sam, 29 Wasson, John M., 7, 16n5, 67, 97, 116, 118, 122 Wells, Stanley, 119 Werstine, Paul, 8 –10, 14, 116, 121, 125 Westfall, Suzanne, 8, 10, 14, 16n7, 116– 18, 122, 124, 237– 8 West Yorkshire archives. See under archives, U.K. White, Paul Whitfield, 8, 16n7, 117–18, 124, 238 Whitsun, 68, 72, 75 Wickham, Glynne, 21, 24, 38n47, 86 Wiles, David, 65– 6 Williams, Arnold, 23– 5 Williamson, Eila, 6, 11, 15n2, 16n6 Wilson, J. Dover, 104–7, 109, 110, 125 Wilson, Robert, 224 Wilton House (Wilts), 125 Winchester (Hants), 146 Winchester School, 162 Woodbury (Devon), 84n29, 168 Worcester, 25, 68, 72–3, 162 Worcester Cathedral Priory, 72 World Wide Web, 58, 181, 207, 214nn15, 17. See also information technology, online resources; Patrons and Performances Web Site World Wide Web Consortium, 179–81, 186, 195, 196n8, 199n28

271

Wyatt, Diana, 241 Wymondham (Norf ), 143 Wynne-Davies, Marion, 122 XML (Extensible Mark-up Language). See information technology, markup languages York – institutions in: Borthwick Institute, 26; city council, 27; Corpus Christi Guild, 27; Grey’s Solicitors (Duncombe Place), 26; Mercers Guild: indenture of, 26, 30, 32; — wagon of, 27; Merchant Adventurers, 26 (see also Johnson, Bernard) – locations in: Common Hall, 122; Fossgate, 32; Frost Tower (1485), 168; Guildhall, 26; Merchant Adventurers’ Hall, 32; Minster library, 26 (see also Barr, Bernard); Pavement, the, 26; River Ouse, 26; Robin Hood’s Tower (1622), 168; St Mary’s Abbey, 23 – plays in: Corpus Christi play, 26; ‘Creed Play,’ 27; ‘Pater Noster Play,’ 27 – travelling players at, 89 York cycle, 3, 5– 6, 15, 22 –7, 29, 31, 87, 93, 108, 140, 143 –4, 146, 150, 163; performative aspects of, 12, 140 – 56; records of, 87, 147, 192; social and moral relationships of, 141– 2, 146– 8, 151; suppression of, 76; youth participation in, 147, 151 Yorke, Sir John, 94 Yorkshire, 24, 45, 131, 133, 135–7, 237 Young, Abigail, 3, 5, 21, 42 Young, Karl, 44, 241 Yule customs, in Scotland, 164 –6