session 7

1: English Traditions:

Pamela M. King

University College of St Martin, England:

York Plays and the Feast of Corpus Christi: A Reconsideration.

David Mills

University of Liverpool, England:

"Who are our Customers?" Targeting the Cherster Audience.

Alan Somerset

University of Western Ontario, Canada:

"Beginning in the middle...": Warwickshire Localities and Families, as Audiences for Early Modern Music and Drama.

session 8

2: French Traditions:

Graham A. Runnals

The University of Edinburgh, Scotland:

The influence of printing on the circulation and use of French mystery play texts.

Janet Ritch

Paris, France:

The Play Would be the Thing Wherein to Catch the Attention of the King.

session 16

3: Performance Perspectives:

James R. Erb

University of Oregon, USA.:

Crossdressing and Audience Reception in the Nuremburg Fastnacht Tradition.

Femke Kramer

Groningen:

Assholes, Bitches, Cheaters, [...] Wheedlers, Xantippes, Yard Dogs, Zhlubs. A different reading of a disturbing ABC.

Sarah Carpenter

The University of Edinburgh, Scotland:

The sixteenth century court audience: spectators or performers?

session 18

4: Social Perspectives:

F. Huerta

Universitat Autonoma Barcelona, Catalunya:

The Plays of the Catalan Nativity Cycle and their connection with the audience.

Ignacio Escarcega

Escuela de Arte Teatral, Mexico:

The social satira in La danza Torito (Torito's dance) at Marfil, Guanajuato.

Robert L.A. Clark

Kansas State University, USA:

Ideology, Land and the Laity: Towards a Sociohistorical Analysis of the Anglo-Norman Adam.

Elsa Strietman

Cambridge, England:

Playing the Peacock:the representation of powers in some Rhetoricians' plays.

session 19

5: Indoctrination and Subversion:

Lenke Kovács

Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Catalunya:

Indoctrination and Festivity. The Neustift Assumption Play of 1391.

Chris Humphrey

University of York, England:

The politics of carnival: towards a new methodology for the study of medieval misrule.

Max Harris

Wisconsin, USA:

Greasing the Baptist, Beheading the Moor: Celebrating the Martyrdom of John the Baptist in Zacatecas, Mexico.

King, Pamela M.

York Plays and the Feast of Corpus Christi: A Reconsideration.

The correlation between the English cycles of mystery plays in general and the celebration of the feast of Corpus Christi is, correctly, no longer accepted uncritically as a given. York's, the earliest cycle, is the only one which is consistently associated with the feast, yet even here the relationship remains anomalous, chiefly because the cycle predates the formation of the York Corpus Christi Guild.

This paper reviews the nature of the evidence for and against reading York's cycle as "Corpus Christi plays", drawing evidence together to reinstate the cycle's distinctiveness in this regard from two fronts. Firstly it looks at the fashionability of devotions to Corpus Christi amongst the personnel involved with the cycle, by considering patterns of devotional bequests and Corpus Christi guild membership amongst the civic power groups during the period between the 1415 Ordo Paginarum and the recording of the plays in the Register during the late 1460's. Secondly, looking at the registered pageants themselves, it draws attention to patterns of liturgical and para-liturgical resonances across the whole cycle which are consonant with its reception as a celebration of the mystic union between God and man contained in the eucharist.

Top of page

Mills, A.D.

"Who are our customers?" Targeting the Chester Audience.

Sponsors of medieval plays had a product to sell and a market in mind. This paper will consider some of the evidence for such a marketing plan, focusing upon the external evidence available for the drama and dramatic activities in Chester. Chester's plays were repeatedly re-packaged and launched with a new image, directed towards a changing customer-base. A further factor in this repackaging was the competition provided by rival products offering Cestrians greater convenience at less risk and lower cost. The inability to innovate and modernise in the changing market-place contributed to the withdrawal of the older forms of drama during the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Read Paper | Top of page

Somerset, Alan

"Beginning in the middle ...": Warwickshire Localities and Families as Audiences for Early Modern Music and Drama.

My half-line from Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida is chosen with two things in mind. First it is not just entirely coincidental that this paper deals with Shakespeare's home county, Watwickshire, but in a different way from much earlier research. Much of that hasbeen "Shakespeare-centred", asking what we can learn about Shakespeare from the records of his environment, and concentrating upon records related to him or his family. I've been concerned with a different strategy, of surveying the Warwickshire environs from as early a date as possible, with an emphasis on the shire considered for itself. I chose the line from Troilus for a second reason: Warwickshire is "middle". It contains Meriden, a town whose name conveys the belief that it is the geographical centre of the country. Its major city, Coventry (really a corporate entity separate from Warwickshire) located as a major crossroads for trade and travel, was a major attraction for travelling performers throughout the period. Warwickshire was also home to a number of remarkable families, both among the great and titles (the Beauchamps and Dudleys, earls of Warwick) and among the gentry - families such as the Sheldons, Throckmortons, Lucys, Puckerings and Newdigates. They were among the middling to lower gentry - often untitled, landowning (but not excessively so) or mercantile, and with family assets concentrated within the county but not limited to it. They were cultured, well-travelled and intelligent, a locus of power and influence in the county. For numbers of them, as well as for other "household" type establishments such as monasteries, records of their recreational and cultural activities survive. These do a great deal to illuminate the day-to-day activities of professional and local entertainers, their usual audiences and the reception afforded to their entertainments.

Read Paper | Top of page

Runnalls, Graham A.

The influence of printing on the circulation and use of French mystery play texts.

The period when French mystery plays were at their most popular, 1450-1550, overlaps in part with the spread of the printing industry in France; it is thus not surprising that, of the approximately 170 French complete mystery plays which have survived, almost 40 are conserved in printed form, in a large number (over 100) of different editions. The production and function of manuscript versions of mystery plays were quite distinct from those of printed mystery plays. Editions of printed mystery plays therefore deserve separate study.

The present paper, based on an analysis of a Repertoire containing all the surviving editions of these plays, sets out to deal with a number of questions specific to printed editions:

a) how manuscripts were turned into printed editions;
b) which French printers specialised in play editions;
c) how these editions circulated throughout France;
d) what were their print-runs and retail prices;
e) what was the function of these editions (reading or performances?);
f) why certain plays were printed and others not;
g) to what extent documented performances used printed editions.

Time will probably not allow me to tacjkle all these questions, but I aim to deal with several of those which touch on the questions of printed mystery plays' circulation, their (reading) audience and their accessibility to the public at large.

Read Paper | Top of page

Ritch, Janet

The Play Would be the Thing wherein to Catch the Attention of the King.

Encouraged by Duncan Robertson's recent survey of The Medieval Saints' Lives: Spiritual Renewal and Old French Literature (1995), I would like to consider audience response to late medieval French mystères, from the fifteenth century to their terminus ad quem of c. 1550, as an ongoing process, with particular attention to the Résurrection de Jésuschrist (B.N. fr. 2238) by Eloy du Mont (c. 1535), which is currently in prepartion for publication. The reception of this playtext up to the present day has not changed substantially in over 400 years. The king to whom it was originally presented, François I, seems to have locked it safely into a library shelf to gather dust. Since then, all royal patronage has been curtailed along with the very religious piety which inspired the play in the first place. The playtext itself continues to deteriorate on a shelf in the Bibliothèque Nationale. In this light, or lack of it, I would like to tackle the problem of the play's relevance to the modern world.

Would it be possible to re-awaken French interest in the dramatic aspect of their pre-Renaissance cultural heritage? Or is it not rather an ongoing question of funeral processions for God and the author (in the general as well as the specific sense)? If France itself languishes in disinterest, are the monarchists across the channel any likelier to give the play a warm reception? Can one culture adopt a neighbour's heritage, just as Shakespeare adopted Hamlet from an Old Danish legend? In the case of late medieval France and England, are the two neighbours so widely diverse? In short, is there any hope for a re-birth of tragedy in another divine comedy?

Read Paper | Top of page

Erb, James R.

Crossdressing and Audience Reception in the Nuremburg Fastnacht Tradition.

The late fifteenth-century Fastnachtspiele of the imperial city of Nuremburg were performed by wandering troupes of young men, who acted in both male and female roles. Theatrical cross-dressing is, of course, a medieval commonplace. Yet medieval audiences' reception of cross-dressed performances were certainly immense and varied, and are consequently difficult to reconstruct without resorting to cavalier speculation. This paper attempts to elaborate a concrete approach to reconstructing reception in general by reconsidering the case of the Fastnachtspiele in particular.

As with other carnival traditions, the plays performed during Nuremburg's Fastnacht are "highly gendered", that is they thematize gender and sexual relations in a colorful vocabulary of ribaldry and wit. This makes them particularly attractive for gender analysis and thus for examining the implications of crossdressing on audience reception. In my paper, I will first establish a general model of the plays' performance practice in their historical setting (there are over 114 separate texts in this tradition), I will then focus on the interpretation of one play in particular, Der Hannentanz, that provides an understanding of performance and reception not revealed by other documentary sources.

Der Hannentanz is rather unique in the Fastnachtspiel genre in that it is structured as a parody of the larger performance tradition. It explicitly critiques the practice of cross-dressing and yet is a cross-dressed performance itself. In effect, Der Hannentanz alludes to the ironies and conundrums that inhere to cross-dressing in its medieval theatrical context. For contemporary scholars, it provides new insight into how cross-dressing and gender were understood by audiences in late fifteenth-century Nuremburg.

Top of page

Kramer, Femke

Assholes, Bitches, Cheaters, [...] Wheedlers, Xantippes, Yard Dogs, Zhlubs. A different reading of a disturbing ABC.

Whatever ABC of farce ingredients one draws up, be it of characters, themes or intrigues, a disturbingly sinister catalogue of disagreeable elements will invariably appear. Considering the contemporary genre definitions of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Dutch esbatementen (farces), swindle, violence, and deceit must have been laughing matters, as the self-proclaimed aim of the plays was tvolck tot lachen te berueren (to make the people laugh).

Literary historians currently read farces as a world upside down with an elevating, civilizing intention. The world represented in farce is the opposite of the world the producers and consumers of the plays desired for themselves. Farces may display "a mimesis of the fallen world" (Knight 1983), but their message is: make our world a better one.

The theory of laughter implicit in this world upside down reading of farces rests on some questionable premisses about the nature of laughter. Laughter, according to this theory, menaces and degrades; it is the relic of "the roar of triumph in an ancient jungle fight" (Rapp 1951). Or, as Thomas Hobbes put it:

Sudden glory is the passion which makes these grimaces called laughter; and it is caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleaseth them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing or another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves. (Leviathan, 1651)

Few literary historians seem to realize that laughter can express something completely different. Though some forms of laughter can be equated with a triumphant roar, others more likely express sheer enjoyment and pleasure, unaccompanied by hostile intention.

I intend to argue for a reading of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century farces in the line of this other way of thinking about laughter; a reading which, moreover, seems to fit the contemporary distinction between humour and derision.

Read Paper | Top of page

Carpenter, Sarah

The Sixteenth Century Court Audience: Spectators or Performers?

Students of early drama have always known that the stage-audience relationships encountered in the medieval and Tudor periods do not fit easily with the models offered by twenieth century theatre. Even the recent interest in participatory drama, which recognises an "interactive relationship between theatre production and reception" (Bennett, 1990) does not fully accomodate the open, fluid, often active role assigned to those who attended dramatic events in, for example, the early sixteenth century.

The object of this paper is to consider the complex role(s) of the audience in one specific evening of Tudor entertainment: the shows mounted in Henry VIII's specially constructed "hows of revelles" in May 1527. The building and events have been meticulously reconstructed by Sydney Anglo: my aim is to elucidate the very particular and intricate relationship with the original audience on which this entertainment, like others of its time, depended.

The audience consisted of Henry himself, ambassadors from the French King with whom Henry was involved in peace and marriage negotiations, various other diplomats and male and female members of the royal court. The shows involved a Latin oration, choral singing, an allegorical debate between Love and Riches culminating in a combat at barriers, a spectacular pageant disguising with dances, and a mask in which the King himself took part. It is clear that the shows largely gained their meaning from the particular occasion and spectators: although by no means the most striking example they illustrate well the ways in which early sixteenth century theatre could be used to enact and create, as well as to reflect upon policy. The mixed and fluid nature of the entertainment also relies on an equally mixed and fluid relationship with the audience, in which the demarcation between "performer" and "spectator" throughout the evening is thoroughly elusive and sometimes non-existent.

This evening, in which the elite community of Henry's court attended a theatrical entertainment for, about, and largely by, itself offers a vivid and precise illustration of the complexity of sixteenth century theatre events, and of the multiple relationships they could establish with their audiences.

Read Paper | Top of page

Huerta, F.

The Plays of the Catalan Nativity Cycle and their Connection with the Audience.

In the Catalan-speaking area, during the late Middle Ages, the Plays of the Nativity Cycle underwent a process of expansion which is really very similar to the one that took place in the Medieval French Drama. The Plays of the Sybille, of the adoration of the Shepherds, of the three Kings, of Herod and the slaughter of the Innocents, etc., had reached by the middle of the XVI century a stage of development which clealy showed a relationship of great interdependence between the texts and the paraliturgical church celebrations of the Christmas season feasts. The nature and extension of the episodes included in the texts preserved prove that there was a clear popular feature of these church performances which didn't exist in the Plays of the same subject belonging to the early Middle Ages. One only needs to compare two pieces, written within only a century of difference between them, and staging the same scenes, to see how the influence of the audience tastes and interests have strongly conditioned the composition of the plays.

As my forthcoming critical edition of Catalan Christmas Plays intends to prove, these are things such as legendary episodes, popular songs, a special kind of staging, etc., which have changed the Nativity scene in late Medieval Catalonia. Most of the texts included in the mentioned volume are at present still unpublished or incorrectly edited and they belong to the XV and XVI centuries. The comparison between the older Plays and the more recent texts brings us to the evidence of how the audience and its reception of the performances have deeply affected the contents of the later dramatized Nativity episodes.

My paper will address these differences between the two different epochs and what these differences mean in relation to the audience-performance pair as an element of text-composition.

Top of page

Escarcega, Ignacio

The social satire in La danza del Torito (Torito's dance) at Marfil, Guanajuato.

The second half of XIX Century, was very important for articulate a clear idea of "mexicanity" that assume the mixture as a basis of identity.

Many of theatrical dances of the Central Region from that time, incorporate a new gamma of characters to the dances tradition that began at XVI Century (Evangelization dance and drama), that only were an adecuation of representational forms of Medieval Age, especifically the popular farse.

With this vision is being studied La Danza del Torito (Little Bull's Dance) that consist in a parody of spain colonous society. The characters that participate are: El torito (little bull), el "caporal" (the man), la doncella (the lady), la borracha (the drunk woman), el jorobado (the hunchback), el viejito (the old man),el diablo (the demon) and la muerte (the dead). Everyone use clothes and masks.

The music, the popular "sones", ilustrate the different moments of the party. The evil, represented as an animal, the bull, that defeats the "caporal" (the man), the beauty and the movement (the lady and the drunk woman). Only the Sanity, represented by an old man, can defeat him.

Top of page

Clark, Robert L.A.

Ideology, Land and the Laity: Towards a Sociohistorical Analysis of the Anglo-Norman Adam.

The feudal vocabulary of the Jeu d'Adam is one of this text's most noted features but it has yet to receive the kind of rigorous analysis that it deserves. Certain scholars who have devoted attention to the play's feudal aspects have tended to either downplay their social implications (Muir 1973) or to overextend the lord-vassal relationship to all relationships in the play (Accarie 1978). The best such analysis to date (Morgan 1982) uses a generic model of feudalism and makes only tentative gestures towards an historical contextualization of the text and its audience.

I propose to reexamine the play's ideological message from a sociohistorical perspective, making use of recent scholarship on feudalism in Anglo-Norman England and of the recent revisionist study by Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (1994). Rather than concentrating on the "feudal relationship" between Adam and God, as scholars have most often done, the paper will focus on specific issues involving land tenure as these are represented in the play. God's granting of Paradise to Adam and Adam's loss of this gift will be examined in the light of English customary law, as recorded in the codifications of Glanvill and Bracton. The latter have been used to shed light on the text's treatmet of treason (Mickel 1991) but have to my knowledge never been invoked to understand the legal issues surrounding the granting of land in the Adam. Although the focus of this paper is relatively narrow, the analysis of the ideological implications of land tenure and its obligations as set forth in the Jeu d'Adam enables a fuller understanding of this key text and a more certain identification of its intended audience.

Top of page

Strietman, Elsa

Playing the Peacock: The representation of power in some Rhetoricians' plays.

The question "Who was the audience and what was the reception of this play?" is one of the most elusive in the study of the medieval and post-medieval drama as it is in other studies of the past. To try and envisage a possible answer we have to use the methods of investigation and the sources available to historians and art historians: for instance, town documents and paintings or drawings might be able to shed light on the venues, the financial aspects, the staging, decor, costumes and gestures of the performance of a play. Literary historical research might unearth references to a play, playwright, performance, audience and reception in another play or another text.

In this paper I would like to address some issues which are represented in plays as well as in many other documents, verbal and visual: how is power, as invested in and represented by kings and princes as well as by non-royal authorities, such as town governments and religious leaders, represented on the stage and what can we deduce about the (intended) audience and the (possible) reception of such plays?

I intend to use a number of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century plays from the Low Countries as source material and to see whether they can provide us with some insights into the manner in which the representation of power might have been received by a contemporary audience.

Top of page

Kovacs, Lenke

Indoctrination and Festivity: The Neustift Assumption Play of 1391.

The Neustift Mystery Play of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary is one of the most exceptional and interesting examples of medieval religious drama in German, not only because of its age but also because of its length and complexity. Conserved in a manuscript of 1391 at the University Library of Innsbruck (codex 360) with two other dramas, an Easter Play and one of the Corpus Christi, it is also known as one of the Innsbruck Plays. Yet there is no doubt about its vinculation with the Tyrolian monastery of Neustift, where the manuscript was kept at least from 1445 to 1808.

The drama contains five episodes: beginning with the formulation of the apostolic Credo, it continues with the Dormition of the Virgin Mary in presence of the Apostles, proceeds through the event of her sepultation, goes on to her glorious Assumption and Corontation and finishes with the siege of a Jewish castle, representing Jerusalem, by a pagan king, identified as Titus.

In spite of the lack of information regarding concrete performances of the Neustift Assumption Play, the text allows us to draw conclusions about the way such a performance could have taken place either in the monastery itself or in an open space performed both by members of the monastic community and by laymen. The performance which, as the text indicates, lasted two days and required the participation of at least about 60 actors, was undoubtedly one of the most joyful religious and festive events in the liturgic year. It combines a strictly doctrinal aim with the splendour and vivacity typical of medieval drama, thus creating an exciting mixture of indoctrination and festivity.

Read Paper | Top of page

Humphrey, Chris

The politics of carnival: towards a new methodology for the study of medieval misrule.

A distinctive subset of late medieval drama are those customs which involved an element of subversion or inversion on the occasion of an important calendar feast. Associated with Easter were the continental Carnival at Shrovetide and the English custom of hocking, whereby the women of a parish were able to bind and ransom men at Hocktide, several weeks after Easter. The practice of vegetation-gathering, in which flowers and branches could be stripped from private land without retribution to provide decoration for summer festivals, is found in England and France in May and in the summer whilst the custom of electing a boy-bishop for St Nicholas' Day was popular in English cathedrals and parish churches at this period. These customs, which may be generically labelled "misrule", have long been a source of interest to antiquarians, local historians and students of medieval drama, theatre and popular culture. One particular issue which has dominated more recent discussions of medieval misrule is the subversion/containment debate, that is, whether these kind of incidents represented a direct challenge to the status quo, or whether by temporarily challenging authority they merely reaffirmed it in the long run.

This paper has two principal aims. The first is to argue that since occasions of misrule could have many different kinds of meanings and consequences in the medieval period, from harmless diversion to direct political confrontation, the abstract question of subversion versus containment is a pointless one to pursue. I suggest that if we are serious about understanding the relationship between misrule, politics and social structure in this period then we need to adopt an approach which permits us to work at the level of the specific example, to investigate those cases where enough primary source material survives to enable this relationship to be ascertained. Only after these examples have been examined is it realistic to try to offer any generalisations about the function of misrule in medieval society. The second aim of this paper is to set out such a new methodology and to present some of my findings as regards the function of misrule in the English towns of Bristol, Coventry and Norwich in the fifteenth century. Approaching misrule as an instance of symbolic inversion, which allows functionalist terms like "safety-valve" to be replaced by a neutral language that does not prejudge the function of a custom, I am able to show that misrule could indeed play a part in local change as part of a wider campaign of resistance in the late medieval town.

Top of page

Harris, Max

Greasing the Baptist, Beheading the Moor: Celebrating the Martyrdom of John the Baptist in Zacatecas, Mexico.

The medieval Spanish tradition of quasi-dramatic mock battles between Moors and Christians was introduced to Mexico by the conquistadors. Since the Aztecs had also incorporated elaborate (and sometimes deadly) mock battles into their own calendar rituals, colonial Mexican moros y cristianos were an intriguing mixture of late-medieval Spanish and precontact indigenous traditions. The historical referents varied from intertribal battles between "civilized" Aztecs and "barbarous" Chichimeca to European Catholic victories over the Ottoman Turks, such as that at the battle of Lepanto, a spectacular reenactment of which took place in Mexico City in 1572.

The tradition remains popular in Mexico. The largest extant Mexican moros y cristianos takes place each year during the last week of August outside the city of Zacatecas. It is staged by several thousand members of the Confraternity of St John the Baptist. Beginning with a simple ceremony during which two statues of John the Baptist are lovingly wiped with hand cream and dressed for the fiesta, it continues through four days of outdoor masses, processions honoring the Baptist and a visiting Virgin, a coloquio called "The Beheading of John the Baptist", military parades through town, and mock battles that are said to represent both the battle of Lepanto and the heroic adventures of Charlemagne and the twelve peers of France. For three days, the festivities adhere to a "public transcript" of Catholic triumphalism. On the fourth day, however, references to precontact rituals of human sacrifice by decapitation come to the fore. Groups of matachines dancers perform in front of the chapel of John the Baptist, led by "clowns" who carry cloth dolls and wear masks on their costumes as well as over their faces. One clown told me that the masks pinned to his costume represented the heads of past victims and that his doll was an imminent victim. The dancers were warriors bringing victims to the sacrificial stone. The final battle involved a massive assault by thousands of Christians on the Moorish castle, cannon fire from the surrounding hills, the burning of the castle and, as the climax of the whole performance, the beheading of the Moorish king under the tree at the centre of the plaza. Since the Aztec festival of Ochpaniztli, which also fell at the end of August, involved the sacrificial beheading of captured warriors, the Zacatecas moros y cristianos would appear to make reference to indigenous ritual as well as to the Christian victories of Lepanto and Charlemagne and the martyrdom of John the Baptist. I will show slides and video footage from the 1996 fiesta.

Top of page