No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
The Medieval Theatre in the Streets
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2009
Extract
In 1957 Richard Southern published a book dedicated “to the memory of Bertolt Brecht and to the Berliner Ensemble.” It was written, as he says in his Foreword, from the point of view “of a practising scene designer” enthusiastic about his “discovery of how the ‘new’ open stage demanded a new form of auditorium and implied a new form of theatre.” His book, while historical in subject, was a gesture towards “joining the avant-garde who stand on the threshold of a new world.” Since 1957 new worlds have come and gone. In contrast, The Medieval Theatre in the Round has become for some theatre historians a fixed star by which to plot their interpretations of the surviving evidence of late-medieval stagecraft.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1973
References
Notes
1 Most comprehensive is Schmitt, Natalie Crohn, “Was There a Medieval Theatre in the Round?” Theatre Notebook, XXIII (1968–1969), 130–142Google Scholar; XXIV (1969–70), 18–25. Miss Schmitt is strongest, I think, in her rebuttals of Southern's use of his evidence and analogue. Her own idea, that the moated circle is a scenic unit only and that the audience did not surround the acting area, fails to take seriously the primary function of the ditch or paling as a barrier, reinforced by “stytelerys.” I see no reason to doubt that, for The Castle, the audience arrangement was indeed circular.
2 Dodd, Kenneth M., “Another Elizabethan Theater in the Round,” Shakespeare Quarterly, XXI (1970), 125–156CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Natalie Crohn Schmitt's discussion of these presents a case with which I fully agree.
4 Any amateur production of The Castle may or may not have toured and may or may not have charged money. But like those of The Castle, the Banns of the Ludus Coventriae leave the place of performance unspecified (“N-town”), and it is virtually inconceivable that any given production of that huge mystery cycle could have traveled from town to town. The history of such accumulative scripts as the Mercadé-Gréban-Michel passionplay (or even the York plays in the Wakefield cycle) suggests the way an admired play could survive through a series of independent local productions, and it is possible that this is what the scribe had in mind when he refrained from naming a town.
5 Hosley, , Theatre Survey, XII (1971), 1–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Villar, , Theatre Notebook, XXV (1970–1971), 64–68Google Scholar.
7 Furnivall, F. J., ed., The Digby Mysteries (London, 1882)Google Scholar; Manly, J. M., ed., Specimens of Pre-Shakesperian Drama (Boston, 1897, 1903), I, 215ff.Google Scholar; latter edn. reprinted by Adams, J. Q., Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas (Boston, 1924), p. 212ff. Line references are to the Manly edn.Google Scholar
8 Nicoll, Allardyce, Masks, Mimes, and Miracles (New York, 1931), p. 203Google Scholar.
9 Chambers, , The Mediaeval Stage (Oxford, 1903), II, 429Google Scholar.
10 Adrian, , Die Bühnenanweisungen in den englischen Mysterien (Münster, 1931), pp. 19–20Google Scholar.
11 Adams, p. 219n.
12 Adams, p. 222n.
13 Adams, p. 212n., 220n.
14 It is possible, of course, that Magdalene is the earlier play, even though the extant copy is necessarily the product of a later scribe than the one who penned the extant Paul and Innocents. On dramatic grounds alone I would judge this most unlikely.
15 Miss Villar is vague here. She says, “It is possible that the word ‘station’ is used here [in the rubrics] … to mean a section of the play rather than a scaffold.” Then, a few lines later, “The intervals do not correspond to episodes of the action, for there is more than one episode in each section, nor do they correspond to different scaffolds, for the action appears to require more than three scaffolds, or perhaps the re-use of scaffolds to represent different locations. Since a scaffold had no scenic decor [sic] it could presumably be used early in the play for one location, later for another.” Finally she lists five “scaffolds”: “the temple at Jerusalem, the house of Ananias, the house on the Street Called Straight where Saul prays for three days, and the Temple at Damascus where Saul preaches to the Jews …” and also heaven. She places the ostler scene and the Belial scene in the “Place” (p. 67).
16 Wickham, Glynne, Early English Stages 1300 to 1660 (London, 1959), I. See especially his IntroductionGoogle Scholar.
17 E.g., Hosley's demand (in “Three Kinds …”) for “theatrical relevance” in note I (contra Schmitt) and for an “analogue in the staging of medieval drama” in note 38 (re. St. Paul), pp. 29, 33. Not only Wickham but also Kernodle, George, by his method in From Art to Theatre (Chicago, 1944)Google Scholar, clarified the interrelation of “theatrical” and “non-theatrical” evidence in this period.
18 Kendall, Paul Murray, The Yorkist Age (New York, 1962), pp. 75–76Google Scholar.
19 Kendall, p. 75.
20 Weiser, Francis X., Handbook of Christian Feasts and Customs (New York, 1952, 1958), p. 262Google Scholar. New Catholic Encyclopedia, XIII, 662ffGoogle Scholar. The practice seems to have evolved from the “stational churches” in Rome, to which, during Lent and Easter week, a “diocesan liturgy” (pontifical Mass) was brought, a new church being visited each day.
21 The Book of Margery Kempe, trans. Butler-Bowden, W. (London, 1936; New York, 1944)Google Scholar.
22 Huber, Raphael M., O.F.M., , A Documented History of the Franciscan Order (Washington, D.C., 1944), pp. 909–910Google Scholar. Weiser, , p. 180. New Cath. Encyc., XIV, 832–834Google Scholar. See also Thurston, H., S.J., , The Stations of the Cross (1906)Google Scholar.
23 Dickinson, J. C., Monastic Life in Medieval England (London, 1961)Google Scholar. Knowles, M. D., The Religious Orders in England: The End of the Middle Ages (London, 1955), vol. IIGoogle Scholar.
24 Wickham, I, 59–64.
25 For the last, cf. the moated “mydyl-erd” arrangement for The Castle, or the “Roman” enthusiasm seemingly embodied in the productions of Les Actes des Apôtres in Bourges, 1536, and Paris, 1541. (The earlier production used the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre; the Parisian revival apparently attempted in some way to reproduce a Roman theatre of wood.)