(Major Field)

Markets, Theatres, Cultures 1350-1650

RATIONALE

PART I: 1350-1550

In my investigation of the central genres of medieval drama—saints' plays, morality plays, and cycle plays—I will inquire into how various social frictions in late medieval culture, such as religious dissent, gender struggle, and conflict over social place and rank, translate into fictions of truth on the stage (Strohm 30-1). I want to investigate how the market-specifically, the guild system-influences the structure of the drama in the cycles from Chester, York, and Towneley. For example, in the representation of the relationship between masters and servants or between women and work, do the cycle plays stage subjects who "anticipate", to use Richard Halpern's terminology, the forms of subjectivity that populate Early Modern city comedy (9)? Does medieval cycle drama capture modes of subjectivity in transition, or does it adhere to distinct notions of self and society, notions that are particular to its socio-economic context? How is gender struggle represented in the cycle plays compared to other forms of Medieval drama, such as "A Mery Play Betwene Johan Johan the Husbande, Tib his Wife, and Sir Johan the Preest," "The Digby Mary Magdalen," and Lydgate's Disguising at Hereford's Castle? In what ways do the generic conventions of medieval cycle drama serve as the scaffolding upon which John Bale constructs his series of Protestant plays—"God's Promises," "John Baptystes Preachynge," "The Temptation of our Lord," and "Three Laws"—in the early sixteenth century? In turning to saints' plays and morality plays, I want to analyze how merchants, consumption, and market values are represented in "The Croxton Play of the Sacrament," "The Castle of Perseverance," "Mankind," and "Everyman." The other morality and saints plays, including "Wisdom," "The Digby Conversion of St Paul," "The Digby Mary Magdalene," "The Digby Killing of the Children," and Skelton's "Magnyfycence," broach the question of how dramatic texts represent political authority and sovereignty in the transitional period between the Medieval and the Early Modern eras. Finally, after investigating the origins of medieval drama and its relationship to the late medieval marketplace, I want to return to the 'problem' of the cycle drama's eventual demise in various towns in the late sixteenth century. In grappling with this matter, I want to re-consider the role religion, economics, and politics played in the theatre's move, as a literary-social institution, from its parcellization in distinct urban productions throughout England to its centralization in London.

PART II: 1550-1650

One of the ways to approach the issue of the transition from the Medieval to the Early Modern is to ask the question: How does Early Modern drama recycle the Medieval past? In order to answer this question, I will examine the plays I Sir John Oldcastle; Shakespeare's Henry VI, Parts I, II and III; Henry IV, Part II; Troilus and Cressida; Pericles, Prince of Tyre; and Heywood's King Edward IV, The First Part. My expectation is to consider how Early Modern dramatists re-fashion the past and re-envision religious dissent, royal politics, and medieval literature. The Comedy of George A Green, A Pinner of Wakefield, Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday, Heywood's The Four Apprentices of London and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream will enable a discussion of the representation of the middling sort, especially artisans, and their relationship to the marketplace and theatre as sites of socio-cultural contest. Another cluster of plays—Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Dekker's The Honest Whore, Dekker and Middleton's The Roaring Girl, Heywood's If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part II and The Fair Maid of the Exchange, Jonson's Bartholomew Fair and Epiocene, or The Silent Woman, Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and Shakespeare's King Lear and Measure for Measure—opens a host of questions on the representation of property and personhood. Specifically, this group of plays offers different representations of modes of subjectivity, specifically rank and gender identities, in an urban setting that are in contest under the forces of a commercializing culture. The selected pageants from Thomas Heywood's Pageants, as well as the interludes Nice Wanton and Impatient Poverty and Wilson's Three Ladies of London and Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, offer an opportunity to reflect on the development of the above themes in other theatrical genres—the pageant and interlude—especially in contrast to their exploration in city comedy.

Works Cited

Halpern, Richard. The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.

Strohm, Paul. Hocken's Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992.

PART I:  MARKETS, THEATERS, CULTURES: 1350 - 1550
PRIMARY READINGS

Anonymous. "A Mery Play Betwene Johan Johan The Husbande, Tib His Wife, and Sir Johan the Preest" (1520 - 33). In Medieval Drama. David Bevington, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1975: 970 - 989.

-----. "The Castle of Perseverance" (c. 1405 - 25). In Medieval Drama. David Bevington, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1975: 794 - 900.

-----. "The Croxton The Play of the Sacrament" (c. 1461). John C. Coldewey, ed. Early English Drama: An Anthology. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993.

-----. "Everyman" (1528 - 35). John C. Coldewey, ed. Early English Drama: An Anthology. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993.

-----. "Wisdom" (c. 1465 - 70). John C. Coldewey, ed. Early English Drama: An Anthology. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993.

-----. "Mankind" (c. 1465 - 70). John C. Coldewey, ed. Early English Drama: An Anthology. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993.

-----. "The Digby Conversion of St. Paul". John C. Coldewey, ed. Early English Drama: An Anthology. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993.

-----. "The Digby Mary Magdalene." John C. Coldewey, ed. Early English Drama: An Anthology. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993.

-----. "The Digby Killing of the Children" (c. 1512). John C. Coldewey, ed. Early English Drama: An Anthology. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993.

-----. Henry VII's Entry into York. In York: Records of Early English Drama. Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, eds. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979

Bale, John. "God's Promises", "John Baptystes Preachynge", and "The Temptation of Our Lord" (1547). In The Complete Plays of John Bale. Volume II. Peter Happe, ed. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985.

-----. "Three Laws" (1548). In The Complete Plays of John Bale. Volume II. Peter Happe, ed. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985.

Beadle, Richard, ed. The York Plays. York: York Medieval Texts, 1982.

Davidson, Clifford, and Pamela King, eds. The Coventry Corpus Christi Plays. Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000.

-----. A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge. Medieval Institute Publications. 19. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1993.

----- and Peter Happe, eds. The Worlde and the Chylde (1522). Early Drama, Art, and Music Monograph Series 26. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1999.

Heywood, John. A Critical Edition of 'The Play of the Wether' (1533). Robinson, Vicki Knudsen, ed. The Renaissance Imagination. Volume 27. New York and London: Garland Library, 1987.

Lydgate, John. Lydgate's Disguising At Hereford's Castle: The First Secular Comedy in the English Language. Derek Forbes, trans. West Sussex: Blot Publishing, 1998.

Maidstone, Richard. "Richard II's Entry Into London" as narrated in Concordia Facta Inter Regem Richardum II et Civitatem Londonie: Per Fratrum Riccardum Maydiston, Caremelitan Sacre Theologie Doctorem, Anno Domine 1393. Charles Roger Smith, trans. and ed. Ph.D. Dissertation Thesis. Princeton University, 1972.

Mills, David, trans. and ed. The Chester Mystery Cycle: A New Edition with Modernized Spelling. East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1992.

Skelton, John. John Skelton, Magnyfycence. Paula Neuss, ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980.


SECONDARY READINGS

Beckwith, Sarah. Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in York's Corpus Christi Plays. Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 2001.

Bills, Bing D. "The 'Suppression Theory' and the English Corpus Christi Play: A Re-Examination." Theatre Journal. 32 (1980): 157 - 68.

Chambers, E. K. The Medieval Stage. London: Oxford University Press, 1903.

Coldewey, John C. "The Last Rise and Final Demise of Essex Town Drama." Modern Language Quarterly. 36 (1975): 293 - 60.

-----. "Some Economic Aspects of Late Medieval Drama." Contexts for Early English Drama. Marianne G. Briscoe and John C. Coldewey, eds. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1989: 77 - 102.

Coletti, Theresa. "Paupertas est donum Dei: Hagiography, Lay Religion, and the Economics of Salvation in the Digby Mary Magdalen." Speculum. 76.2 (2001): 337 - 378.

Crane, Susan. The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing and Identity During the One Hundred Years War. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

Davidson, Clifford. Technology, Guilds and Early English Drama. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1996.

Dobson, R. B. "Craft Gilds and City: The Historical Origins of the York Mystery Plays Reassessed." In The Stage As Mirror: Civic Theatre in Late Medieval Europe. Alan E. Knight, ed. D. S. Brewer, 1997: 91 - 105.

Enders, Jody. Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.

-----. The Medieval Theatre of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory and Violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.

Gardiner, Harold C. Mysteries' End: An Investigation of the Last Days of the Medieval Religious Stage. Connecticut: Archon Books, 1967.

Gibson, Gail Macmurray. The Theatre of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989.

Higgins, Anne. "Works and Plays: Guild Casting in the Corpus Christi Drama." In Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England. Volume 7. Leeds Barroll, ed. London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1995: 76 - 97.

-----. "Streets and Markets." A New History of Early English Drama. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, eds. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997: 77 - 92.

James, Mervyn. "Ritual, Drama and Social Body in the Late Medieval English Town." Past and Present. 98 (1983): 3 - 29.

Justice, Alan. "Trade Symbolism in the York Cycle." Theatre Journal. 31 (1979): 47 - 58.

Kermode, Jennifer. Medieval Merchants: York, Beverly, and Hull in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Kipling, Gordon. Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.

Kolve, V. L. The Play Called Corpus Christi. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966.

Mills, David. Recycling the Cycle: The City of Chester and Its Whitsun Plays. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.

Reid-Schwartz, Alexandra. "Economies of Salvation: Commerce and Eucharist in the Profanation of the Host and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament." Comitatus. 25 (1994): 1 - 20.

Rubin, Miri. Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Sponsler, Claire. Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods and Theatricality in Late Medieval England. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1997.

Swanson, Heather. "The Illusion of Economic Structure: Craft Guilds in Late Medieval English Towns." Past and Present. 121 (1988): 29 - 48.

-----. Medieval Artisans: An Urban Class in Late Medieval England. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

White, Paul Whitfield. "Reforming Mysteries' End: A New Look at Protestant Intervention in English Provincial Drama." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. 29:1 (Winter 1999): 121 - 147.
PART II:  MARKETS, THEATERS, CULTURES: 1550 - 1650
PRIMARY READINGS

Anonymous. The Comedy of George a Green, A Pinner of Wakefield (1599). F. W. Clarke, ed. Malone Society Reprints. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911.

Anonymous. A Critical Edition of I Sir John Oldcastle (c. 1600). Rittenhouse, Jonathan, ed. The Renaissance Imagination. Volume 9. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1984.

Beaumont, Francis. The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Michael Hattaway, ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.

Dekker, Thomas. The Shoemaker's Holiday. Anthony Parr, ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990.

----- and Thomas Middleton. The Roaring Girl. London: W. W. Norton, 1997.

-----. The Honest Whore. New York: Theatre Arts Books/Routledge, 1998.

Heywood, Thomas. "King Edward IV, The First Part." The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood Now First Collected With Illustrative Notes and a Memoir of the Author in Six Volumes. Vol 1. London: John Pearson York Street Convent Gardens, 1874.

-----. Thomas Heywood's Pageants: A Critical Edition. David More Bergeron, ed. New York: Garland Publishers, 1986. (Selected Pageants)

-----. "The Four Apprentices of London." The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood Now First Collected With Illustrative Notes and a Memoir of the Author in Six Volumes. Vol 1. London: John Pearson York Street Convent Gardens, 1874.

-----. "If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part II." The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood Now First Collected With Illustrative Notes and a Memoir of the Author in Six Volumes. Vol 1. London: John Pearson York Street Convent Gardens, 1874.

-----. "The Fair Maid of the Exchange." The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood Now First Collected With Illustrative Notes and a Memoir of the Author in Six Volumes. Vol 2. London: John Pearson York Street Convent Gardens, 1874.

Jonson, Ben. "Bartholomew Fair." Five Plays. G. A. Wilkes, ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

-----. Epiocene or The Silent Woman. Holdsworth, Roger, ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990.

Middleton, Thomas. A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Alan Brissenden, ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988.

Shakespeare, William. Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III. (1590 - 95) Sylvan Barnet, General Ed. Signet Classic Shakespeare. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1989.
-----. A Midsummer Night's Dream. (1595 - 96) Sylvan Barnet, General Ed. Signet Classic Shakespeare. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1998.

-----. Henry IV, Part Two. (1597 - 98) Sylvan Barnet, General Ed. Signet Classic Shakespeare. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1988.

-----. Troilus and Cressida. (1601 - 02) Sylvan Barnet, General Ed. Signet Classic Shakespeare. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2002.

-----. Measure for Measure. (1604) Sylvan Barnet, General Ed. Signet Classic Shakespeare. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1998.

-----. King Lear. (1605 - 06) Sylvan Barnet, General Ed. Signet Classic Shakespeare. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1998.

-----. Pericles, Prince of Tyre. (1607 - 08) Sylvan Barnet, General Ed. Signet Classic Shakespeare. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1986.

Stow, John. A Survey of London (1602). Volumes I and II. Charles Lethbridge Kingsferd, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.

Tennenhouse, Leonard, ed. The Tudor Interludes 'Nice Wanton' and 'Impatient Poverty' (1560). The Renaissance Imagination. Volume 10. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1984.

Wilson, Robert. Three Ladies of London (1584) and Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (1590). H. S. D. Mithal, ed. Volume 36. The Renaissance Imagination. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1988.


SECONDARY READINGS

Agnew, Jean-Christophe. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought, 1550 - 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Bartolovich, Crystal. "Inventing London." In Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere. Mike Hill and Warren Wong, eds. London and New York: Verso, : 13 - 40.

Beier, A. L. Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560 - 1640. London: Methuen, 1985.

Bevington, David. From Mankind to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962.

Bruster, Douglas. Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

De Grazia, Margreta. "The Ideology of Superfluous Things: King Lear as Period Piece." In Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

-----. Playgoing in Shakespeare's London. Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Halpern, Richard. The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.

Harris, Jonathan Gil. "Properties of Skill: Product Placement in Early English Artisanal Drama." In Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002: 35 - 65.

Howard, Jean. "Competing Ideologies of Commerce in Thomas Heywood's If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Part II." In The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England. Henry S. Turner, ed. New York and London: Routledge, 2002: 163 - 82.

-----. The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Jankowski, Theodora A. "Historicizing and Legitimating Capitalism: Thomas Heywood's Edward IV and If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody." Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England. 7 (1995): 305 - 37.

Jones, Ann Rosalind and Peter Stallybrass, ed. Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Kastan, David Scott. "Workshop and/as Playhouse: Comedy and Commerce in The Shoemaker's Holiday." Studies in Philology. 84.3 (Summer 1987): 324 - 337.

Knights, L. C. Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson. London: Chatto and Windus, 1937.

Leinwand, Theodore B. The City Staged: Jacobean City Comedy, 1603 - 1613. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986.

Manley, Lawrence. Literature and Culture in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

McDonald, Marcia A. "The Elizabethan Poor Laws and the Stage in the late 1590s." Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England. 7 (1995): 121 - 44.

Mullaney, Steven. The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Weimann, Robert. Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function. Robert Schwartz, ed. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Wright, Stephen K. "The Historie of King Edward IV: A Chronicle Play on the Coventry Pageant Wagons." Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England. 3 (1986): 69 - 81.