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Medieval English Theatre

  • Editorial

  • Edited by Meg Twycross, Lancaster University, Sarah Carpenter, University of Edinburgh, Elisabeth Dutton, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland, Gordon L. Kipling, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Book:
    Medieval English Theatre 44
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    10 January 2024
    Print publication:
    13 June 2023, pp 1-2

  • Summary

    The forty-fourth meeting of Medieval English Theatre in 2022 was the third held online, as COVID restrictions continued. The conference took the theme of Editing and Adapting, being held in memory of Peter Happé and Martial Rose, two recently lost eminent scholars of medieval theatre, especially in the fields of editing and modern performance. Hosted by Jodi-Anne George from Dundee, the meeting was generously enabled by Clare Egan when the pandemic struck down its host. A tribute having been offered to Peter Happé last year, the day opened with a memorial from Phil Butterworth, recalling Martial Rose's influential and ground-breaking production of ‘The Wakefield Plays’ at Bretton Hall (1958) and at the Mermaid Theatre in London in the early 1960s, and sharing vivid extracts from his correspondence.

    Several papers addressed early and recent issues in the editing of texts of medieval theatre. Meg Twycross gave a wide-ranging account of the problems confronting would-be editors in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, from lack of access to the manuscripts to an anti-Catholic mindset that inevitably distorted their narrative. Garrett Epp brought home the importance of modern editors’ sensitivity to performance, as well as text, in supplying stage directions for early playscripts, while Diana Wyatt opened up the very different editorial techniques needed to unpack the theatrical implications of the record evidence gathered by the REED project. Pamela King offered an insight into the importance of detail in editing as she explored the potentially revealing meanings in just two words of the Towneley Noah.

    On adaptation, Bart Ramakers and Elsa Strietman reported on a major project to stage a fascinating Dutch tafelspel, and the fundamental questions it poses about engaging modern audiences with historically based performance. Eleanor Bloomfield and Tom Straszewski each considered modern adaptations of York plays, Eleanor addressing the revivals since 1951 that engage the plays with contemporary concerns, and Strasz the bricolage shaping of a site-specific production of the plays of Our Lady for the church of All Saints, North Street, York. Hilariously visual – and thought-provoking – entertainment was provided by Jeffery Stoyanoff's ‘TikTok-ing The Fall’.

    The papers in this volume take forward a number of rich, often interlocking, strands and themes that have been developing in recent Medieval English Theatre issues and conference meetings.

Medieval English Theatre 44

Medieval English Theatre
  • Edited by Meg Twycross, Sarah Carpenter, Elisabeth Dutton, Gordon L. Kipling
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    20 December 2023
    Print publication:
    06 May 2022
  • Medieval English Theatre is the premier journal in early theatre studies. Its name belies its wide range of interest: it publishes articles on theatre and pageantry from across the British Isles up to the opening of the London playhouses and the suppression of the civic mystery cycles, and also includes contributions on European and Latin drama, together with analyses of modern survivals or equivalents, and of research productions of medieval plays.

    This edition combines, perhaps unexpectedly, royalty and games. Games of all kinds, from jousting and 'Christmas games' to those usually associated with children, are shown, it is suggested, to be more than they at first appear. Apparently run-of-the-mill entertainments, when presented to the court by the Londoners, by the court to a visiting emperor, or by the retainers of royalty and nobility to the general public for commercial gain, turn out to have unexpected political resonances; while the potential underlying sadism of children's games gains a horrific immediacy when diverted to the torturing of Christ. In the process we learn a great deal more about the detail of these games, from the maskerie costumes of James VI and Anna of Denmark to the elaborate fantasy challenges of the jousters in 1400/1401, which incidentally suggest that fourteenth-century court culture, whose language was Anglo-French, is a major missing link in the history of what is usually treated as purely English literature.

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