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DRAMA AND DIALOGUE IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY: THE SCENE OF CYNEWULF'S JULIANA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2007

Allen J. Frantzen
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Extract

In The Semiotics of Performance, Marco de Marinis notes that the field of performance studies has greatly expanded the traditional categories of drama and theatre. “It is obvious,” he writes, “that we are dealing with a field that is far broader and more varied than the category consisting exclusively of traditional stagings of dramatic texts, to which some scholars still restrict the class of theatrical performances.” A few scholars of early theatre history have embraced expanded categories of performance. Jody Enders's “medieval theater of cruelty,” for example, rests on a concept of “a theory of virtual performance” that translates “into actual medieval dramatic practice.” Carol Symes's study of the “dramatic activity” suggested by medieval French manuscripts identifies “a vital performative element within the surrounding culture.” Both writers have shown how new ideas of performance enlarge the category beyond the “traditional stagings” described by de Marinis.

Type
Research Article
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , May 2007 , pp. 99 - 119
Copyright
Copyright © The American Society for Theatre Research, Inc. 2007

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References

ENDNOTES

1. De Marinis, , The Semiotics of Performance, trans. O'Healy, Áine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 49Google Scholar; his emphasis. From among several important and roughly contemporaneous semiotic studies of drama, readers should also consult Fischer-Lichte, Erika, The Semiotics of Theater, trans. Gaines, Jeremy and Jones, Doris L. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and Alter, Jean, A Sociosemiotic Theory of Theatre (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990)Google Scholar. Very useful in putting these studies into perspective is Paul Bouissac's review of works by de Marinis, and Fischer-Lichte, , “The Theatre of Semiotics,” Semiotic Review of Books 4.2 (1993): 10–12Google Scholar.

2. Enders, , The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1999), 11, her emphasisGoogle Scholar; see also her Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).

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4. Bouissac, “Theatre of Semiotics,” 11. I take “institution” here in the most general sense of a “cultural institution,” not a building or organization.

5. Fischer-Lichte divides “theatre science” into three parts: theory of theatre, theatre history, and the analysis of performance; see Semiotics of Theater, 12. “Drama” can be seen as a text used in any of those domains.

6. John M. Ganim proposes a metaphor of “theatricality” to replace that of “drama” in reference to the Canterbury Tales; his reading, however, emphasizes “a governing sense of performance, an interplay among the author's voice, his fictional characters, and his immediate audience,” a mode he describes as “primarily stylistic rather than sociological”; see Chaucerian Theatricality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 4–5. See also Leonard Michael Koff's rejection of the narrator's performance as theatre in Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 118; and Gittes, Katherine S., Framing the “Canterbury Tales”: Chaucer and the Medieval Frame Narrative Tradition (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991)Google Scholar, where she describes the General Prologue “as a drama,” 131–2.

7. Drama is not mentioned by Wrenn, C. L. in A Study of Old English Literature (New York: Norton, 1967)Google Scholar or by Greenfield, Stanley B. and Calder, Daniel G. in A New Critical History of Old English Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1986)Google Scholar. Nor is there an entry for drama in The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed. Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) or in A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature, ed. Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). In The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Michael Lapidge et al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), Lucia Kornexl's entry on the Regularis concordia briefly mentions the “Quem quaeritis” (389). In Medieval England: An Encyclopedia, ed. Paul E. Szarmach, M. Teresa Tavormina, and Joel T. Rosenthal (New York: Garland, 1998), with the exception of the Regularis concordia, the entries on vernacular drama concern only later medieval texts (242–9).

8. Anderson, , The Literature of the Anglo-Saxons, rev. ed. (1949; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 207CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. It has long been argued that Milton became acquainted with the heroic monologue of Satan in Genesis B through his friendship with Franciscus Junius, who published the poem in 1655. See Peter Lucas, “Genesis,” in Blackwell Encyclopedia, ed. Lapidge et al., 200–1.

10. Hardison, O. B., Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965), 110–15Google Scholar. Commentators include Barbara C. Raw, “Biblical Literature: The New Testament,” in Cambridge Companion, ed. Godden and Lapidge, 227–42, and Bjork, David A., “On the Dissemination of Quem queritis and the Visitatio sepulchri and the Chronology of Their Early Sources,” Comparative Drama 14 (1980): 46–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11. See Symons, Thomas, ed. and trans., Regularis concordia Anglicae nationis monachorum sanctimonialiumque: The Monastic Agreement of the Monks and Nuns of the English Nation (London: Thomas Nelson, 1953)Google Scholar; on the textual tradition, see Kornexl, , Die “Regularis concordia” und ihre altenglische Interlinearversion (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1993)Google Scholar and, for the reference to “the beginnings of liturgical drama in England,” see Kornexl, “Regularis concordia,” in Blackwell Encyclopedia, ed. Lapidge et al., 389; also cited by Bedingfield, M. Bradford, The Dramatic Liturgy of Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002), 3Google Scholar.

12. That idea was first proposed by Dumville, David N., “Liturgical Drama and Panegyric Responsory from the Eighth Century? A Re-examination of the Origin and Contents of the Ninth-Century Section of the Book of Cerne,” Journal of Theological Studies 23 (1972): 375–406Google Scholar. See a summary of the argument in Bedingfield, Dramatic Liturgy, 146–9.

13. See also Minnis, A. J., Medieval Theories of Authorship (London: Scholar Press, 1984), 57–8Google Scholar, and Minnis's discussion of the classification of texts “on the basis of the personae employed therein,” a tradition that includes Bede and Origen among other early authors.

14. Clopper, , Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 4–6Google Scholar. See also Clopper, , “English Drama: From Ungodly Ludi to Sacred Play,” in The New Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. Wallace, David (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 740Google Scholar.

15. Clopper thus narrows the sense of drama found in Jones, Joseph R., “The Song of Songs as a Drama in the Commentators from Origen to the Twelfth Century,” in Drama and the Classical Heritage: Comparative and Critical Essays, ed. Davidson, Clifford, Johnson, Rand, and Stroupe, John H. (New York: AMS Press, 1993), 29–51Google Scholar.

16. Woolf, , The English Mystery Plays (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), 28Google Scholar.

17. Janet M. Bately, ed., The Old English Orosius, Early English Text Society, Extra Series 6 (London: Oxford University Press, 1980), 3/25; 111/10; 134/30; 83/10 (pages followed by line numbers).

18. Dox, , The Idea of the Theater in Latin Christian Thought (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19. For recent commentary, see Wailes, Stephen L., “Beyond Virginity: Flesh and Spirit in the Plays of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim,” Speculum 76 (2001): 1–27Google Scholar.

20. Dodwell, C. R., Anglo-Saxon Gestures and the Roman Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 101Google Scholar. See also Enders, , “Of Miming and Signing: The Dramatic Rhetoric of Gesture,” in Gesture in Medieval Drama and Art, ed. Davidson, Clifford (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001), 1–25Google Scholar.

21. For a discussion of Benedictine gestures, see Dodwell, 145–7.

22. In Anglo-Saxon Oral Poetry: A Study of the Traditions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), Jeff Opland twice distances the scop from the harp (166; 253). He associates the use of musical instruments with the gleoman but argues that even the latter did not necessarily perform to music (253).

23. Orosius, 213n to 23/23–4.

24. Glossaries giving comicus as scop are cited by Bately in Orosius, 294n to 107/28. Such links also extend beyond poetry to ecclesiastical settings, including the delivery of sermons. Enders points out that in “De scena,” a chapter of the Etymologies, Isidore describes the “pulpit” as the place “where the comic and tragic poets sang and actors and mimes danced”; see Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama, 85, and further comments, 77–88.

25. Davies, , “‘He was the Best Teller of Tales in the World’: Performing Medieval Welsh Narrative,” in Performing Medieval Narrative, ed. Vitz, Evelyn Birge, Regalado, Nancy Freeman, and Lawrence, Marilyn (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1985), 15–26Google Scholar.

26. Tudor, “Preaching, Storytelling, and the Performance of Short Pious Narratives,” in Performing Medieval Narrative, ed. Vitz et al., 141–54, at 145, in reference to Cigman, Gloria, “Le Dramaturge malgré lui: Les Voix nombreuses du prédicateur lollard,” in La Littérature d'inspiration religieuse: Théâtre et vies de saints, ed. Buschinger, Danielle, Göppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik 493 (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1988), 49–60Google Scholar.

27. Magennis, “Audience(s), Reception, Literacy,” in Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature, ed. Pulsiano and Treharne, 84–101.

28. Schaefer on the views of Rainer Warning in “Hearing from Books: The Rise of Fictionality in Old English Poetry,” in Vox Intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages, ed. A. N. Doane and Carol Braun Pasternack (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 117–36, at 124. Schaefer cites Zumthor, , La Lettre et la voix: De la “littérature” médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 21–2Google Scholar.

29. Bagby, “Beowulf, the Edda, and the Performance of Medieval Epic: Notes from the Workshop of a Reconstructed ‘Singer of Tales,’” in Performing Medieval Narrative, ed. Vitz et al., 181–92, at 186.

30. Bauman, , ed., Verbal Art as Performance (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1977), 38Google Scholar; quoted by Coleman, in Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 28Google Scholar.

31. The best description of “the reading process” is Iser, Wolfgang, The Implied Reader: Patterns in Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 274–94Google Scholar.

32. Quoted from Klaeber, Fr., ed., Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, 3d ed. with supplements (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1953), 40Google Scholar, lines 89–90. Citations from Beowulf are from Klaeber's edition and are given parenthetically by line number. All translations from the Old English here and elsewhere are mine.

33. See also Klaeber's argument, in his discussion of the Finnsburg episode, that the text, originally a “short heroic epic lay,” was adapted to a subordinate role in the Anglo-Saxon poem (236). See also Opland, 192–9, for a discussion of the narratives within the poem; he suggests that there might have been three performers, a scop (who does not sing), a harper, and “someone who tells (in prose) the story of the creation” (193), and thus the lines quoted here could refer to two of those figures, the scop and the gleoman.

34. Elam, , The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 2d ed. (1980; New York: Routledge, 2002), 126–7Google Scholar.

35. Ohmann, , “Literature as Act,” in Approaches to Poetics, ed. Chatman, Seymour (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 81–107, at 89Google Scholar.

36. Pizarro, , A Rhetoric of the Scene: Dramatic Narrative in the Early Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 13Google Scholar.

37. Shakespeare, William, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, ed. Greenblatt, Stephen, The Norton Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 1997), 1708–17, at 1713, lines 217–21Google Scholar.

38. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, 8–9.

39. See Klaeber, Beowulf, 76, line 2039, for the capital O and the editorially inserted fitt numbers (XXVIIII–XXX).

40. Hines, , Voices in the Past: English Literature and Archaeology (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), 97Google Scholar.

41. O'Keeffe, O'Brien, Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 162–3Google Scholar.

42. All references to the poem are from Woolf, Rosemary, ed., Juliana (New York: Appleton–Century–Crofts, 1966)Google Scholar, and are given by line number in the text. For recent scholarship, see the essays in Bjork, Robert E., ed., The Cynewulf Reader (New York: Routledge, 2001)Google Scholar and, more fully, idem, The Old English Verse Saints' Lives: A Study in Direct Discourse and the Iconography of Style (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985). Like most scholars of this and other hagiographic verse, I assume that the poet addressed an educated audience (not necessarily different from the aristocratic audience of Beowulf, although the settings in which these two poems were performed might have been quite different).

43. For a strong figural reading, see Wittig, Joseph, “Figural Narrative in Cynewulf's Juliana,” Anglo-Saxon England 4 (1974): 37–55Google Scholar, reprinted in Bjork, ed., Cynewulf Reader, 147–69. See also Hill, Thomas D., “Sapiential Structure and Figural Narrative in the Old English Elene,” Traditio 27 (1971): 159–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in Bjork's Cynewulf Reader, 207–28; and Earl, James W., “Typology and Iconographic Style in Early Medieval Hagiography,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 8 (1975): 15–46Google Scholar.

44. Eco, , “Semiotics of Theatrical Performance,” Drama Review 21 (1977): 107–17, at 110CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45. See Elam, 93, on the “possible worlds” of drama.

46. On parody, see Calder, Daniel G., Cynewulf (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), 95Google Scholar; and, on the penitentials, see Hermann, , Allegories of War: Language and Violence in Old English Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), 169Google Scholar.

47. “A Prayer” offers parallels to two key phrases in the devil's prayer in Juliana: ic þec halsige, “I entreat you” (446), and þu miltsige me, “(that) you be merciful to me” (449). See van Kirk Dobbie, Elliott, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records 6 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), 94–6Google Scholar.

48. Judith presents a contrast to the power that Juliana has manifested in her defeat of the demon. See, e.g., van Kirk Dobbie, Elliott, ed., “Beowulf” and “Judith,” Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records 4 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), 101Google Scholar.

49. Elam, 2.

50. For an introduction to these sources, see my Literature of Penance in Anglo-Saxon England (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 1–18.

51. This text is known as the Old English Introduction and is quoted from Die altenglische Version des Halitgar'schen Bussbuches (sog. Poenitentiale Pseudo-Ecgberti), ed. Josef Raith, Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Prosa 13 (1933; repr. with new introduction, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1964), xli. The text is also edited by Spindler, R., Das altenglische Bussbuch sog. Confessionale Pseudo-Egberti (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1934), 170Google Scholar.

52. “Ðonne man to his scrifte gange, þonne sceal he mid swyðe micelum godes ege and eadmodnysse beforan him aþenigan, and hine biddan wependre stefne, þæt he him dædbote tæce eallra þæra gylta þe he ongean godes wyllan gedon hæbbe”; in Die altenglische Version, ed. Raith, xli.

53. Anderson, 206–7.

54. See Pope, John C., “Dramatic Voices in ‘The Wanderer’ and ‘The Seafarer,’” Franciplegius: Medieval and Linguistic Studies in Honour of F. P. Magoun, Jr., ed. Bessinger, J. B. and Creed, R. P. (New York: New York University Press, 1965), 164–93Google Scholar; and the response by Greenfield, Stanley B., “Min, Sylf, and ‘Dramatic Voices’ in ‘The Seafarer,’” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 68 (1969): 212–20Google Scholar.

55. Fiebach, , “Theatricality: From Oral Traditions to Televised ‘Realities,’” SubStance 31.2–3 (2002): 17–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56. Craig, , English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 4–5, 9Google Scholar.