Medieval afterlives: Transforming traditions in Shakespeare and early English drama

By Daisy Black

A collection of essays which show how early drama traditions were transformed, recycled, re-used and reformed across time to form new relationships with their audiences. Medieval afterlives brings new insight to the ways in which peoples in the sixteenth century understood, manipulated and responded to the history of their performance spaces, stage technologies, characterisation and popular dramatic tropes. In doing so, this volume advocates for a new understanding of sixteenth-seventeenth century theatre makers as highly aware of the medieval traditions that formed their performance practices, and audiences who recognised and appreciated the recycling of these practices between plays.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9781526172129

Book preview

Medieval afterlives

Series editors: Anke Bernau, David Matthews and James Paz

Series founded by: J. J. Anderson and Gail Ashton

Advisory board: Ruth Evans, Patricia C. Ingham, Andrew James Johnston, Chris Jones, Catherine Karkov, Nicola McDonald, Haruko Momma, Susan Phillips, Sarah Salih, Larry Scanlon, Stephanie Trigg and Matthew Vernon

Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture publishes monographs and essay collections comprising new research informed by current critical methodologies on the literary cultures of the global Middle Ages. We are interested in all periods, from the early Middle Ages through to the late, and we include post-medieval engagements with and representations of the medieval period (or ‘medievalism’). ‘Literature’ is taken in a broad sense, to include the many different medieval genres: imaginative, historical, political, scientific and religious.

Titles available in the series

44. Medieval literary voices: Embodiment, materiality and performance

Louise D’Arcens and Sif Ríkharðsdóttir (eds)

45. Bestsellers and masterpieces: The changing medieval canon

Heather Blurton and Dwight F. Reynolds (eds)

46. Hybrid healing: Old English remedies and medical texts

Lori Ann Garner

47. The heat of Beowulf

Daniel C. Remein

48. Difficult pasts: Post-Reformation memory and the medieval romance

Mimi Ensley

49. The problem of literary value

Robert J. Meyer-Lee

50. Marian maternity in late-medieval England

Mary Beth Long

51. Fantasies of music is nostalgic medievalism

Helen Dell

52. White before whiteness in the late Middle Ages

Wan-Chuan Kao

53. Literatures of the Hundred Years War

Daniel Davies and R. D. Perry (eds)

54. Approaches to emotion in Middle English literature

Carolyne Larrington

55. Fantastic histories: Medieval fairy narratives and the limits of wonder

Victoria Flood

56. Medieval afterlives: Transforming traditions in Shakespeare and early English drama

Daisy Black and Katharine Goodland (eds)

Medieval afterlives

Transforming traditions in

Shakespeare and early English drama

Edited by

Daisy Black and Katharine Goodland

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2024

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 7213 6 hardback

First published 2024

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover: Photo by Ashley Taylor of Push Creativity

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

List of figures

List of contributors

Introduction – Daisy Black and Katharine Goodland

Prolegomena

1‘Where the peaze is, shee shalbe Queene’: REED and the continuing life of medieval dramatic traditions – Peter H. Greenfield

Part I: Transforming space

2The Lathom screen and the Magian plays of the Derby companies – Lawrence Manley

3Promising a storm: anticipation, spectacle, and the ship in the Digby Mary Magdalene and Shakespeare and Wilkins’ Pericles, Prince of Tyre – Daisy Black

4‘Ay, these were spectacles to please my soul’: satirizing schadenfreude in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy – Katharine Goodland

Part II: Transforming character

5Shakespeare’s priests – Jay Zysk

6Transforming Saint Dunstan on the Elizabethan stage – Gina M. Di Salvo

7‘Fals conjecture’: how costume transformed ‘player’ to ‘disguiser’ in late medieval and Renaissance drama – Katie Normington

Part III: Transforming tropes

8Transforming recognition: The Winter’s Tale, Pericles, and the Elevation of the Host – Matthew J. Smith

9Under the castle, inside the counting house: shelter and exposure on the deathbed in The Castle of Perseverance and The Jew of Malta – Devin Byker

10The forest palimpsest in As You Like It and the medieval imaginary – Victoria Bladen

Afterword – Theresa Coletti

Index

Figures

2.1© British Library Board (Randle Holme MS, BL Harley 2027, fol. 300v)

2.2‘Sapiens Dominabitur Astris’, from George Wither, A Collection of Emblemes (1635), courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

9.1Stage Plan, Castle of Perseverance, Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library MS V.a.354 (Macro), f. 154

10.1Image of Robin Hood and Little John from the title page of William Copeland’s A Mery Geste of Robyn Hoode (1550), Early English Books Online, courtesy of the British Library

Contributors

Daisy Black is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Wolverhampton, where she teaches medieval to modern drama and medieval and Renaissance literature. She has published chapters and journal articles on gender, race, time, space, and authority in medieval drama, set dressing and the senses, and medievalism in modern board gaming. Her monograph Play Time: Gender, Anti-Semitism and Temporality in Medieval Biblical Drama came out with Manchester University Press in 2020, and she has recently edited a special edition of the Medieval Feminist Forum. Her latest research project looks at food on the medieval stage. She also works as a theatre practitioner and storyteller.

Victoria Bladen teaches in literary studies and adaptation at the University of Queensland, Australia, and has twice received a Faculty award for teaching excellence. Her publications include The Tree of Life and Arboreal Aesthetics in Early Modern Literature (Routledge, 2021); seven Shakespearean text guides in the Insight (Melbourne) series, including The Taming of the Shrew (2022), The Merchant of Venice (2020), and Much Ado about Nothing (2019); and eight co-edited volumes, including Shakespeare on Screen: Romeo and Juliet (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Hamlet in the 21st century (Belin/CNED, 2022), Onscreen Allusions to Shakespeare: International Films, Television, and Theatre (Palgrave, 2022), and Shakespeare and the Supernatural (Manchester University Press, 2020). Recent projects include the co-edited volume Shakespeare on Screen: Romeo and Juliet (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Devin Byker earned his PhD in English at Boston University in 2016, with a focus on medieval and early modern drama. He taught as Assistant Professor of English at the College of Charleston, South Carolina, for four and a half years, before deciding to pursue a non-academic career. He is currently Manager of Instructional Design at GroupM. His essays and reviews on medieval and early modern drama have been published in The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Shakespeare Studies, Exemplaria, and other edited collections.

Theresa Coletti is Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher-Emerita at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Naming the Rose: Eco, Medieval Signs, and Modern Theory (Cornell University Press, 1988) and Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints: Theater, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), editor of The Digby Mary Magdalene (Medieval Institute Publications, 2018), and co-editor of A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Middle Ages (Bloomsbury, 2021). Her articles and book chapters on topics ranging from Chaucer and Christine de Pizan to modern reinventions of medieval drama have appeared in many journals and edited collections.

Gina M. Di Salvo is Associate Professor of Theatre History and Dramaturgy and Associate Director of the Marco Institute at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of The Renaissance of the Saints After Reform (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Katharine Goodland is Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, CUNY. She is the author of Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama (Ashgate, 2006, reprinted by Routledge, 2016) and co-editor of the three volume Directory of Shakespeare in Performance in Great Britain and North America (Palgrave, 2007, 2010, and 2011). Her book, Shakespeare in the Theatre: Tina Packer (Bloomsbury, 2024) is forthcoming.

Peter H. Greenfield is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Puget Sound. His edition of the dramatic and musical records of Hampshire for Records of Early English Drama Online was published in 2020, and he is now lead editor for REED: Norwich. Other recent publications include ‘Touring Companies and Their Plays before 1570’, in The Routledge Research Companion to Early Drama and Performance (Routledge, 2017); and, with Sandra L. Dahlberg, an article on Robert Armin and the representation of poverty in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England (2016).

Lawrence Manley is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English Emeritus at Yale University. His recent publications include Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays, co-written with Sally-Beth MacLean (Yale University Press, 2014); ‘Lost Plays of Lord Strange’s Men’, in Lost Plays in Early Modern England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); ‘Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool: Shakespeare and the Love Duet’, in Face to Face in Shakespearean Drama (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), and ‘Adaptation and Intersectionality in Aoibheann Sweeney’s Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking’, in Liberating Shakespeare (Bloomsbury, 2023).

Katie Normington is Vice Chancellor of De Montfort University, UK. She previously served as Senior Vice Principal at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published on medieval drama, with an emphasis on gender, performance practices, and contemporary reenactments. Her major publications are Gender and Medieval Performance (D. S. Brewer, 2004), Modern Mysteries: Contemporary Productions of Medieval English Cycle Dramas (D. S. Brewer, 2007), and Medieval Drama: Performance and Spectatorship (Polity, 2009). She has also published co-edited volumes with Philip Butterworth, including Medieval Theatre Performance: Actors, Dancers, Automata and Their Audiences (Boydell and Brewer, 2017) and European Theatre Performance Practice (Ashgate, 2014).

Matthew J. Smith is the author of Performance and Religion in Early Modern England: Stage, Cathedral, Wagon, Street (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019) and co-editor of Face-to-Face in Shakespearean Drama: Ethics, Performance, Philosophy (Edinburgh, 2021) and Literature and Religious Experience: Beyond Belief and Unbelief (Bloomsbury, 2022). He is also Associate Editor of Christianity & Literature. Smith serves as President of Hildegard College in California.

Jay Zysk is Associate Professor of English and Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, where he also serves as Director of the Office of Faculty Development. He specializes in early English drama, Shakespeare, and the literary history of the Reformation. Zysk is the author of Shadow and Substance: Eucharistic Controversy and Early English Drama across the Reformation Divide (University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), has co-edited (with Katherine Steele Brokaw) Sacred and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare (Northwestern University Press, 2019), and has published several articles and book chapters.

Introduction

Daisy Black and Katharine Goodland

Full fathom five thy father lies,

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes,

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.¹

Prospero’s sprite Ariel sings these words to Ferdinand, a son distraught at having seen his father wrecked at sea. The young prince understands the song as an act of remembrance – ‘this ditty does remember my drowned father’ – yet he fails to notice that the sea changes in the verse transform, rather than erase or ‘fade’, the figure of his father.² The blazon of the King of Naples’ body moves delicately between past and present tenses. Ferdinand’s father ‘lies’ and his bones ‘are’, and yet pearls are already in the place of what ‘were his eyes’. Replaced and reformed with different substances, the father’s body is refigured as a new habitat that sustains different forms of life. Human flesh and bone become coral and pearl: hard formations of calcium carbonate that protect the vulnerable bodies of marine organisms. Likewise, this volume attends to a sea change in the theatrical and dramaturgical traditions of early English drama. Transformed, recycled, and reworked, elements of early English drama informed later drama by shaping and adapting to thrive in new performance contexts. The chapters in this volume explore how later dramatists employed earlier modes of staging, characterization, dramaturgy, tropes, and images. These sea-changed remnants variously performed as acts of commemoration, made political and religious statements, and pushed the limits of genre, as well as parodying and reforming the earlier performance traditions from which they emerged.

In their work Anachronic Renaissance, Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Woods generate a striking concept of ‘anachronic objects’: artefacts which ‘move freely in time’ yet also constantly require re-presentation to new recipients.³ Their study examines the influence of ‘medieval’ artwork after the Renaissance and stresses the sense of belatedness attached to these works, which were neither true survivors nor copies of originals. Yet unlike physical objects of art, the more transient natures of performance cultures are more suited to practices of adaptation than re-presentation. Diana Taylor notes that in some cases, like the grieving Prince Ferdinand, these cultures play on nostalgia and notions of ‘tradition’; yet they also depend on the living cultural and embodied memories of their performers and audiences.⁴ This means that these reworked dramatic forms and motifs are not merely anachronisms that have somehow outstayed their original performance cultures or uncanny, belated objects dislocated from both past and present. Marvin Carlson writes that theatre engages in a ‘complex recycling of elements, [which] far from being a disadvantage, is an absolutely essential part of the reception process. We are able to read new works … only because we recognise within them elements that have been recycled from other structures of experience that we have experienced earlier.’⁵ However, ‘recycling’, in the modern sense of the word, involves breaking down an object into its basest materials, to be processed and later turned into something that is often unrecognizable as the original object. The performance tropes considered in this volume often relied on their still bearing the recognizable traits of their earlier uses. They are sea-changed: washed, abrased, and flung back on to the beach, their forms strange but still recognizable. Like Ariel’s figuring of the drowned King of Naples, they retain the shape of the objects they once were while accruing new meanings and materials. They have become exoskeletons: structures offering support to new theatrical life. Yet the structures remain, offering the potential for awareness, reflection, or emotional response if they were recognized. One of the challenges for contemporary scholars is gaining the theatrical literacy that early modern audiences took for granted in this regard. The goal of this volume is to close this literacy gap by illuminating key traditions that were recycled and thereby transformed in their new contexts.

This book explores dramaturgical and cultural traditions that shaped and were shaped by early English drama until the closing of the theatres in 1642. Its contributors examine how dramatic traditions were transformed over time, as well as the inherent capability of the traditions themselves to transform space, audience, time, and belief. With a focus on theatrical self-awareness and the conscious adaptation and borrowing from other performance traditions, this approach aims to deepen our understanding of the richness and singularity of early English drama across the period divide: its copiousness, versatility, and playfulness. The contributors to this volume bring together rarely studied records with more well-known texts, covering materials as diverse as Robin Hood and the Green Man; Magian plays and occult knowledge; disguise and recognition; surprisingly secular priests; stage ships and stormy seas; nice places to die; and visions of Hell and a saint who sends the devil packing. Together, they demonstrate how English drama exploited theatrical self-awareness and encouraged playgoers to experience theatre in a fluid movement of time and place, eliciting a mingling of emotional engagement and intellectual distance.

Between the middle of the fourteenth century and the closing of the theatres in 1642, theatrical activity in England underwent significant change. At the beginning of this period, there were no dedicated playhouses, nor was there a profitable business in the publishing of plays. Yet England had a thriving, durable performance tradition, encompassing pageantry, games, tournaments, street theatre, folk plays, ales, festivals, royal entries, civic-sponsored biblical cycles, and liturgical church drama. These theatrical practices were not only local and regional but were also carried across the island by touring companies before and after the emergence of professional theatres. These deeply ingrained, vibrant customs of playing were integral to the success of the professional theatres. Over the past twenty years, advances in research have increasingly demonstrated that the diachronic, teleological approach implied by conventional period categories limits our understanding of the complex theatrical landscape of England during this time. Work on repertory companies, the Masters of the Revels, and recent scholarship on the Digby, Towneley, and Hegge manuscripts all show that these traditions existed simultaneously, as practices of touring, staging, and performance continued, and in some cases increased after the advent of the professional playhouses in London. These traditions were also bound in complex ways with the religious alliances of their patrons.

Over the past twenty years, the usefulness of these period categories has been challenged. Gordon McMullan and David Matthews, and, more recently, James Simpson, address the question of periodization in detail, exploring the ways in which early moderns themselves read the medieval, thereby becoming both products and producers of the medieval as a period category.⁶ The propensity of artistic and literary cultures to resist easy categorization within this binary model has long been explored.⁷ Meanwhile, scholars such as Kathleen Davis, Kathleen Biddick, John Dagenais, and Margaret R. Greer note that periodization, whether intentionally or not, becomes a tool of oppression that obscures certain histories, making them more difficult to study.⁸ The consequences of this expansive temporal turn for drama studies are becoming increasingly clear. Recent publications based on the Records of Early English Drama (REED) and other archival research note that persistent periodization combined with a focus on an assumed all-male, London professional stage have created critical blind spots. Melinda J. Gough and Clare McManus argue that these assumptions have obscured the considerable performance labour of civic and rural communities outside London: by those for whom performance was not a chief part of their income; by religious and trade guilds; by itinerant performers and by women.⁹ Claire Sponsler has also noted exclusions in early drama historiography – of collaborative and anonymous writing, of women theatre makers, of performances outside London, and of diverse and seasonal forms of performance practice.¹⁰ These, she argues, have been formed by too narrow a definition of what medieval drama was, as well as by periodization. In order to move beyond these long-standing biases imposed by period categories, this collection frames its argument in terms of traditions, thereby addressing the continuities of early English drama that persisted in the face of cultural and religious change. In thinking across this divide, this volume aims to focus not merely on the survival of earlier performance forms but on the ways their aesthetic, mechanical, and representative functions informed, underpinned, and made later drama possible.

As our opening chapter by Peter H. Greenfield shows, specialists now widely accept that the theatrical, festive, and performance traditions native to England continued to shape the plays produced after and throughout the onset of religious reform and the emergence of purpose-built theatres. For example, Janette Dillon’s The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre demonstrates continuities in playing spaces, audiences, actors, genres, and dramaturgy.¹¹ In particular, she highlights the use of the scene as the key building block of later plays, as well as the inclination of later playwrights to favour variety over unity in their plays. Several recent collections have demonstrated that Shakespeare’s works are immersed in the ‘medieval’, including Curtis Perry and John Watkins’ Shakespeare and the Middle Ages, Ken Jackson and Arthur F. Marotti’s Shakespeare and Religion, and Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper, and Peter Holland’s collection Medieval Shakespeare, Pasts and Presents.¹² Several monograph-length studies also emphasize how deeply Shakespeare’s plays were underpinned by the tropes, themes, and practical staging considerations of what have until recently been considered earlier performance forms. Helen Cooper’s Shakespeare and the Medieval World demonstrates the pervasive influence of medieval ideas about death, the world, language, and place in Shakespeare’s plays, as well as the direct influence and adaptation of theatrical forms such as moral interludes, religious drama, and dumbshows.¹³ Moreover, three recent monographs indicate the direction of further research. Erika T. Lin’s Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance establishes a useful theoretical framework for analyzing how the later drama adapts and transforms earlier representational (locus) and presentational (platea) modes,¹⁴ while Kurt A. Schreyer’s Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft demonstrates the importance of medieval stage properties as shaping agents in the dramaturgy of Shakespeare’s plays.¹⁵

Medieval Afterlives: Transforming Traditions in Shakespeare and Early English Drama builds upon this scholarship by considering the cultural work embodied in and performed by continuities. The chapters gathered here look to traditions that were passed on, subverted, and transformed in and through early English drama. Some of these, such as The Castle of Perseverance, Mankind, the Digby Mary Magdalene, Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Shakespeare’s Pericles, and Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, are familiar, yet resonate in new ways when set in dialogue with lesser-known texts, including The Pride of Life, A Knack to Know a Knave, and Grim the Collier of Croyden. Our study begins with Peter H. Greenfield’s discussion of how the REED project demonstrates the persistence of ‘medieval’ performance forms well into the early modern period. Greenfield conducts a careful review of evidence brought to light through the REED project for dramatic activities from which no texts survive, using this information to examine when and how performance cultures were influenced by the Reformation. His findings highlight the problem of sorting performance cultures into rigid periods and categories. Greenfield places the much-studied commercial London stages alongside a diverse range of seasonal, parish, and local performances, plays, games, ales, festive traditions, and events with music and dance, which were performed throughout the country. Noting that these events often raised considerable amounts of money for the communities producing them, Greenfield also demonstrates how the popular king plays influenced Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV and The Winter’s Tale. Moreover, he shows that the pastoral outdoor progress entertainments of country houses, such as those performed at Sudeley Castle in 1592, paralleled these seasonal festivities while providing further work for the writers and performers who were also employed by the London theatres.

With Greenfield having laid our groundwork, the subsequent chapters are organized into three parts, each of which focuses on the transformative capability in and the transformation of traditional modes of staging, characterization, and tropes. Part I, ‘Transforming space’, focuses on the versatile traditions of establishing setting through the use of stage properties, textual allusion, and sound. In ‘The Lathom screen and the Magian plays of the Derby companies’, Lawrence Manley unearths a screen of the great hall in Lathom House, which was the seat of the Derby Earls before it was destroyed during the English Civil War. The chapter explores connections between the Lathom screen, depicting ‘the course of heaven and erthe’, and the performances hosted in the great hall by Elizabethan professional companies, as documented in the Derby Household Book. Manley, like Greenfield, examines how the family used their patronage of players and hosting of performances in their hall as political and social tools to advance their interests and standing. He argues that the screen’s scientific and occult subject matter attests to the family’s fascination with magic in the plays they hosted, while it also illuminates a wider legacy of early traditional performance practices. Manley’s chapter thereby invites consideration of new types of source material for understanding the symbiotic relationship between theatrical production in the provinces, touring companies, and the London stage.

Where Manley focuses on a static piece of hall scenery, Daisy Black’s chapter focuses on the dynamic possibilities of scenes staging ships and the sea. Noting that the introduction of a ship in medieval and early modern plays created a sense of anticipation in the audience, Black explores the transformative and spectacular properties of stage ships in the Digby Mary Magdalene and in Shakespeare and Wilkins’ Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Black finds that the later play makes full use of a recycled remnant of medieval stage machinery and of the embodied theatrical conventions that accompanied it. Ships, whether represented by spectacular scenery or through the movement and speech of the performers, tended to alter power dynamics between characters and between actors and audiences. The chapter argues further that theatrical sea journeys create a new sense of time and place, where, for the short space and time of performance, audience and players come together. This chapter thereby reads both plays as acts of collaborative theatre making between set, speech, performers, and their remembering audiences.

The third chapter in Part I, Katharine Goodland’s ‘Ay, these were spectacles to please my soul: satirizing schadenfreude in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy’, proffers a new reading of the play’s infamous ghost, whose delight in response to Hieronimo’s spectacular revenge prompted Philip Edwards to exclaim ‘Marlowe never wrote a less Christian play’. Drawing on the tradition of dream visions of Heaven and Hell, Goodland uncovers the Christian contours of Don Andrea’s ghost. She suggests that in the long-standing debates over the ghost’s function in the play, we may be taking Kyd’s ghost too seriously on the one hand and not seriously enough on the other. She takes her cue from the ghost of Andrea’s passage through the gates of horn ‘in twinkling of an eye’ to consider how language transforms theatrical space into an otherworldly dream vision that takes satirical aim at the Christian dogma that justified the excessiveness of divine vengeance and its attendant Earthly pleasures.

The second part of this volume, ‘Transforming character’, examines the symbiosis of character in relation to setting, genre, and costume. Jay Zysk traces the transformation of priests in early English drama from defenders of orthodoxy, to targets of anti-clericalism, to men of the cloth who test the boundaries between tragedy and comedy. Opening with an anti-Catholic figuring of the priest’s clerical robes as a stage costume, Zysk identifies a shift away from the earlier alignment of liturgical celebration as a form of ‘rememorative drama’ while noting the persistent presence of the priest onstage throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Comparing the bishops in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, The Pride of Life, and Mercy in Mankind with the clerics of Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado about Nothing, and Twelfth Night, Zysk reads these later stage priests as metatheatrical agents more interested in pushing the conventional boundaries of dramatic genres than they are in theology and liturgical activities.

Ecclesiastical theatricality is also a concern in Gina M. Di Salvo’s chapter, which examines the portrayal of Saint Dunstan from medieval hagiography to ambiguous stage magus. This chapter examines the production of alternative hagiographies, cultural pastimes, and miraculous theatricality in two Elizabethan plays featuring Saint Dunstan and the devil: the anonymous Knack to Know a Knave (1594) and William Houghton’s Grim the Collier of Croyden (c. 1600). Here, she examines how hagiography and theatricality mix, with medieval legends informing spectacular stage practices. These set the saint outside the context of reformist ecclesiastical history by refusing to acknowledge a Reformation between the times of King Edgar and Queen Elizabeth. This discussion of the sustained association between dramatic sanctity and spectacular staging demonstrates how medieval narrative and stage practices were used both as a means of folk revision and as a form of cultural archive.

Where Zysk and Di Salvo focus on men of the cloth, Katie Normington’s chapter explores the concept of cloth more broadly in looking at how costume creates character on both sides of the period divide. Normington argues for continuity in the use of clothing as a visual code in medieval and Renaissance theatre. Noting the problematic dominance of post-realist, modern theatre terminology in discussing performance, Normington identifies a culture in which clothing was a symbolic medium that relied as much on its audience to interpret its meaning as it did the physical characterization of the body wearing it. With close attention to Herod’s attire in the biblical drama as well as that of the characters in Wisdom and Twelfth Night, she identifies how costumes encourage spectators to see both character and player. She argues that, where Wisdom uses disguise to bring about spiritual order, Twelfth Night focuses on how social decorum and order are created through the ploy of the disguised individual.

Part III, ‘Transforming tropes’, explores how later drama adapts earlier tropes, genres, visual traditions, and rituals. The section begins with a case study of characters that embody the limits of worldly experience and ends with an examination of characters that chart the boundaries of genre. Matthew J. Smith invites us to reconsider the trope of recognition in Shakespeare. Although scholars have conventionally read recognition scenes such as Hermione’s resurrection, the restoration of Marina to Pericles, and the many reunions in the last scene of Cymbeline as a form of classical anagnorisis, Smith shows that this trope also derives from a tradition of spiritual awakening in early English biblical drama. Smith situates Shakespeare’s recognition scenes, which posit the recognizer as the recipient of a gift of revelation, within a wide context of liturgical and dramatic traditions surrounding the recognition of Christ in the Elevation of the Host. Smith’s exploration of a distinctly Christian tradition of recognition in Shakespeare is complemented by Devin Byker’s examination of the significance of physical space for dying well. Byker navigates the tensions between the sheltered and exposed environments that structure the event of dying in The Castle of Perseverance and in Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. Bringing together ars moriendi consolation literature with discussions of physical space, he finds that these plays reflect increasing lay participation in the rites of dying, a literary preoccupation with the Craft of Dying, and an understanding that the significance of death, like other performance forms, could be manipulated and communicated by the use of setting.

Environment and space are also key in Victoria Bladen’s examination of the forest as palimpsest in medieval and early modern imagery and its influence on Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The contrary, ludic yet threatening natures of Shakespeare’s forests have long been noted. Bladen situates these phenomena within an inheritance encompassing constructions of the forest in diverse literary genres, performance, art, and folklore. In doing so, she identifies an Arden seeded from medieval secular and spiritual lore. Her chapter explores Robin Hood games and performance traditions, the imagery of the Green Man, and narratives and drama concerning the expulsion from Eden, the death of Adam, and the Tree of Life. Theresa Coletti’s Afterword reflects on how the chapters in this volume illuminate key shaping traditions of early English drama and meditates on how medieval English drama continues to shape new theatrical experiences on page and stage.

In his recent study, Permanent Revolution, James Simpson argues that the reluctance of Anglo-American medievalists and early modernists to ‘traverse the boundary line’ of the 1534 Act of Supremacy have made ‘the chasm between the Catholic Middle Ages and the Protestant Reformation … the deepest cultural divide in English literary historiography’.¹⁶ He notes that even late medievalists who venture forward and early modernists who look back still risk ‘being paralysed within the logic of a Catholic / Protestant contest’.¹⁷ Yet drama scholars on both sides of the boundary are particularly well equipped to address the polemics of periodization, and we hope the following chapters inspire and provoke more research in this rich and growing field of inquiry. Our volume brings together medieval and early modern drama scholars to stand together on the period divide, as it were, looking both ways as we cross it together. Our collective work shows that these performance cultures overlapped: borrowing from and informing each other while sharing spaces, costumes, physical movement, and tropes. This versatile, copious, playful drama sustained its underlying ethos while manifesting the advent of humanism, embracing classical forms, and negotiating and adapting elements of religious and cultural reform. Where The Tempest’s Ferdinand laments the father he believes he has lost, this volume charts the thrill of diving for pearls that are still, also, the eyes of a king.

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Dagenais, John, and Margaret R. Greer, ‘Decolonizing the Middle Ages’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 30.3 (2000), 431–48.

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Perry, Curtis, and John Watkins, eds., Shakespeare and the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Schreyer, Kurt A., Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft: Remnants of the Mysteries on the London Stage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014).

Simpson, James, Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).

Sponsler, Claire, The Queen’s Dumbshows: John Lydgate and the Making of Early Theater (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), pp. 1–16.

Stokes, James, ‘The Ongoing Exploration of Women and Performance in Early Modern England’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 33.1 (2015), 9–31.

Taylor, Diana, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

Notes

1William Shakespeare, The Tempest , ed. by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (London: Arden/Bloomsbury, 2013), 1.2, pp. 395–402.

2Shakespeare, The Tempest , 1.2, p. 406.

3Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), p. 13.

4Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 20.

5Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003), p. 6.

6See Gordon McMullan and David Matthews, Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) and James Simpson, Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).

7See, for example, Alexander Nagel, Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time (London: Thames and Hudson, 2012).

8See Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Kathleen Biddick, The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); and John Dagenais and Margaret R. Greer, ‘Decolonizing the Middle Ages’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies , 30.3 (2000), 431–48.

9See Melinda J. Gough and Clare McManus’ excellent dissection of the formal and generic exclusions, periodization exclusions, and geographical exclusions which have limited theatre studies across this period in ‘Introduction: Gender, Cultural Mobility, and Theater History Inquiry’, Renaissance Drama , 44.2 (2016), 187–200 (188–90) and the work of James Stokes, ‘The Ongoing Exploration of Women and Performance in Early Modern England’, Shakespeare Bulletin , 33.1 (2015), 9–31.

10 Claire Sponsler, The Queen’s Dumbshows: John Lydgate and the Making of Early Theater (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), pp. 1–16.

11 Janette Dillon, The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

12 Curtis Perry and John Watkins, eds., Shakespeare and the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Ken Jackson and Arthur F. Marotti, eds., Shakespeare and Religion: Early Modern and Postmodern Perspectives (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011); and Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper, and Peter Holland, eds., Medieval Shakespeare, Pasts and Presents (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

13 Helen Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval