Medieval Drama and Performance-Based Pedagogy: Difference between revisions
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== Striking monologues from medieval plays, for performers == | == Striking monologues from medieval plays, for performers == | ||
While the casting suggestions given here are gender- and age-normative, directors may want to think about mixing up these conventions for special effect and/or to suit their | While the casting suggestions given here are gender- and age-normative, directors and actors may want to think about mixing up these conventions for special effect and/or to suit their needs. | ||
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Revision as of 13:59, 14 March 2018
This article is under construction
This article is associated with the Folger Institute's 2016-2017 year-long colloquium on Teaching Medieval Drama and Performance, which welcomed advanced scholars whose research and pedagogical practice explore historical, literary, and theoretical dimensions of medieval drama from the perspective of performance.
Introduction
Medieval drama truly comes alive in performance.
This is, of course, a statement true of all works in the dramatic genre. However, it is especially true of medieval drama, which frequently addressed in embodied form large and ultimate questions about humanity's place in creation and the scheme of history, and did so in direct and explicit relation to its audiences, with extraordinary emotive and affective range from the obscene to the exalted.
Medieval drama is integrated into the curriculum for theatre majors at most universities in the United States. However, there, rather than being part of acting technique or performance-based courses, or of staged productions, the subject is most often studied only very briefly in lecture courses like Theatre History. Meanwhile, in departments of literature, medieval drama is sometimes included as a topic in a broader medieval or British literature class or as a minor prequel to the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but it is seldom given much time or attention, and its performative nature is largely neglected.
But we would argue that medieval drama is accessible, exciting, adaptable, and inspirational to interested communities of all ages and abilities - from lower grade levels to highly-trained practitioners - for drama itself is the ideal synesthetic and interdisciplinary vehicle for community formation and differential learning. There is also contemporaneity in medieval drama: humor, music, and fun, as well as metaphor, allegories, and subtexts which speak to who we are today. And while the task of accessing this excitement may seem daunting, in this article we have put together a set of resources - combining language, action, and spectacle - to get you started.
The first step in bridging the gap between performance and literary study is alerting students and teachers to the new wealth of readily-available textual and general scholarly resources for these plays, which reach far beyond the frequently anthologized Everyman or the de-contextualized bit of a biblical cycle play.
Ten Performance-based Lesson Plans
The second step is to make at least a beginning at "putting the plays up on their feet." To that end we have supplied a series of ten performance-based Lesson Plans which build up from the rich relationship of word and thing, to considering the symbolic shape of an action, to preliminary training toward full performance and modern adaptation. While these Lesson Plans are designed as a sequence to support extended work, they may also be sampled and adapted strategically for shorter teaching units. Suitable for all kinds of students from the novice to the budding professional, they follow the format of the famous Folger Shakespeare Set Free teaching manuals, namely "What's On for Today and Why?," "What to Do?," and How'd It Go?" They offer some suggestions for how to capture the vitality of medieval drama in short time and limited space, and build on some of the best continuing scholarship in the field. They imply, as well, an on-going engagement in the developing interdisciplinary field of Performance Studies, which combines interest in the performing arts and literary theory with the fields of anthropology and sociology.
Verba et Res/Words and Things: The Speaking Picture of Medieval Drama
Lesson Plans 1 through 4
In the Biblical account that underwrites medieval drama, God gave man the power of naming, and thus united words and things. But in the world we inhabit today, words are frequently separated from actions, and we are shy or disempowered, and read privately or do not know how to connect our words with what we do. In order to move toward a fully embodied understanding and performance of the speaking picture that is medieval drama it can be helpful initially to separate its forceful but often seemingly unfamiliar language from its physical embodiment as images and things, to detach these words and things at first from their plots so as to familiarize them through defamiliarization before reintegrating them as performance. Put simply, novice actors can speak, enjoy, and come to understand some words and phrases, or appreciate a concrete and symbolically-laden prop or a freeze-frame moment, as a preparation for integrating these words and things into a lively action. Try some of these exercises with your students, and see how they will begin to become comfortable with some of the key words and things informing medieval drama, and begin as well to bond together into a company of players.
Setting the Medieval Stage
Lesson Plans 5 through 7
The spaces of medieval drama were various, labile, and indeed often mobile. The York Biblical cycle plays processed annually on pageant carts into and about the city to stop at York Minster and end on the market Pavement; small travelling companies acted other plays, performing in open spaces, inn yards, or great houses. Later, as plays retreated into manuscript, they might have been brought out for occasional declamation. Plays of such sharp moment and open engagement could, in theory, take place anywhere on this middle earth. As Peter Brook famously began his 1968 classic, The Empty Space, “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and that is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged,” and modern revivals of medieval plays have utilized halls, cloisters, hillsides, city plazas and streetscapes, as well as more formal stages. These three Lesson Plans encourage you to find a suitable space for your play exercises, from a classroom with the desks pushed back to the more formal stage to the outdoor green space which might draw in community passers-by. Then we offer you a selection of monologues and especially powerful scenes to help develop the craft of your ensemble.
Performing Medieval Drama: Audiences, Communities, and Adaptations
Lesson Plans 8 through 10
Medieval drama engaged and hoped to transform its audiences with its biting and cathartic humor, its pointed social observation, its religiously inflected heights and depths, and its joy, and it forged community in its gatherings. These are goals to which we can aspire in our teaching, and we can do this with youngsters and oldsters as well as formal students and professionals, and in our street and cities as well as in our classrooms and regular theaters. Some of us are fortunate enough to be theatre professionals, and to do this as the core of our vocation. Others do it more occasionally, or aspire to do something like it in our communities. In these final three Lesson Plans we invite you to think hard about the audiences whom you hope to reach in your work, and we offer you the inspiring account of two younger academics from our group who have had the training, creativity, and institutional support to mount entire student productions, in one case for a large public university Honors College seminar filled with STEM students, and in another at a liberal arts college embedded in a large city.Finally, we encourage you to take the tradition of street performance of medieval drama and the example of some modern adaptations to think about its transformative potential for pressing modern needs such as increased civic engagement, social justice, and ecological awareness.
Medieval and early English drama, print and on-line editions
Print editions
The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama. Christina M. Fitzgerald and John T. Sebastian. Broadview, 2012.
Medieval Drama: An Anthology. Greg Walker. Wiley-Blackwell, 2000.
Three Late Medieval Morality Plays. G.A. Lester. New Mermaids, 2002.
York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling. Richard Beadle and Pamela King. Oxford University Press, 2009
Early English Drama: An Anthology. John C. Coldewey. Routledge, 1993.
Medieval Drama. David Bevington. Hackett, 1975.
The Arden Early English Drama series of texts from the late fifteenth to the late seventeenth centuries currently includes Everyman and Mankind. Douglas Bruster and Eric Rasmussen. Methuen Drama, 2009.
On-line editions
Online editions vary considerably in quality. Below are some that we have found to be well edited for both scholarly and pedagogical purposes.
Modernized
Unmodernized
Striking monologues from medieval plays, for performers
While the casting suggestions given here are gender- and age-normative, directors and actors may want to think about mixing up these conventions for special effect and/or to suit their needs.
| Play Title | Role | Gender Age | Context/Action | Text of scene | Print Edition | Online Edition | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play | Coll (First Shepherd) | Male
Middle-aged |
This speech opens the play. Coll complains about the conditions that poor men like himself have to endure and the ways they are abused by rich men. The speech is important in its sympathy for the plight of the medieval working class, and also thematically: after Coll speaks, it is easy to understand why salvation in the form of the baby Jesus is needed to come into the world. | Lines 1-54 | Medieval Drama: An Anthology. Ed. Greg Walker. Blackwell, 2000. | Modern English translation |
| 2 | Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play | Gib (Second Shepherd) | Male
Middle-aged |
This is the second speech of the play. Gib complains about the difficulties of being married, and how much he regrets it, but it’s too late. This speech is important for its insight into medieval humor (for better or worse, the ‘take my wife, please’ vein of jokes has been mined for a long time); thematically, it establishes that salvation is needed in the world because humans, in particular the sexes, are at odds. | Lines 55-108 | Medieval Drama: An Anthology. Ed. Greg Walker. Blackwell, 2000. | |
| 3 | The York Fall of the Angels | God | Eternal | This speech opens not only this individual pageant but the York cycle as a whole. It sets the scene for both pageant and play, laying out themes that will recur throughout: the nature of God, the nature of creation, the nature of faith, thenature of worship, the consequences of disobedience. | Lines 1-34 | Medieval Drama: An Anthology. Ed. Greg Walker. Blackwell, 2000. | |
| 4 | The York Crucifixion | Jesus | Male
33 |
This is Jesus’ speech from the cross after the soldiers finally manage to get him stretched and nailed to it. | Lines 253-264 | Medieval Drama: An Anthology. Ed. Greg Walker. Blackwell, 2000. | |
| 5 | The York Last Judgement | God | Eternal | This speech opens the final pageant of the cycle. It harkens back to the first pageant and reminds the audience of all that happened between then and now, explaining the need for an end to be made and judgement given. | Lines 1-64 | Medieval Drama: An Anthology. Ed. Greg Walker. Blackwell, 2000. | |
| 6 | The York Last Judgement | Jesus | Male | In this speech, Jesus addresses the human characters but, of course, also the audience, explaining why the judgement is going down as it does. | Lines 231-300 | Medieval Drama: An Anthology. Ed. Greg Walker. Blackwell, 2000. | |
| 7 | ChesterThe Fall of Lucifer | God | Eternal | This speech opens not only the pageant but the cycle as a whole, laying out its important themes. | Lines 1-51 | Medieval Drama: An Anthology. Ed. Greg Walker. Blackwell, 2000. | |
| 8 | N-town Passion Play 1 | Satan | Super-natural | This speech opens the Passion Play in the N-town manuscript. It is an important example of the ‘boast’ type of speech, common in medieval and early modern drama, where a villain or tyrant tells the audience who he is and that he is up to no good. [Shakespeare’s Richard III’s opening speech is a grandchild of this genre]. | Lines 1-124 | Medieval Drama: An Anthology. David Bevington. 1975. | |
| 9 | Digby Mary Magdalene | Mary Magdalene | Female | In this speech, Mary Magdalene preaches about the creation of the world to a heathen king, hoping to persuade him to leave his pagan ways. | Lines 1481-1526 | Medieval Drama: An Anthology. Ed. Greg Walker. Blackwell, 2000. |
Challenging scenes from medieval plays, for acting classes
under construction
Some productions of medieval plays, online
You can access an extensive YouTube playlist of medieval drama online. Additionally, here is a resource list for some titles:
Everyman
You can find digital versions of various productions online, including a 2012 Everyman production at the Portland Community College Performing Arts Center which utilized large-scale puppets and a 2016 Everyman production by the Laurier Historical Society at Wilfrid Laurier University . The play has been adapted as a commercial film twice in recent years in modernized (2002) and period (2007) productions.
Mankind
The 1999 Mankind staging by Duquesne University Medieval and Renaissance Players
University students staged an improvisatory modernized production of Mankind as a final course project in 2016.
Biblical cycle plays and passion plays
The Blackhills Passion plays were performed in Spearfish, South Dakota from 1939 to 2008, and at their winter home in Lake Wales, Florida from 1953 to 1999.
The Mormon Hill Cumorah biblical pageant in Palmyra, New York has been performed since 1935.
The 2013 Chester Noah play performed by the Liverpool University Players.
The Chester Mystery plays were performed in a 2008 modernized musical version.
The Oberammergau Passion Play has been performed continuously in that Bavarian village since 1634. The trailer for the 2020 production.
The Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play has long been a favorite Christmas holiday production, and was recently revived at the Folger Theater in 2016.
Yiimimangaliso: The Mysteries, a version of the Chester mysteries, was staged in South Africa and London in 2001 and has been revived since.
The York cycle plays, England: Videos from recent York mystery plays are available on-line at several sites. See, for example, York Mystery Plays 1973, York Mystery Plays 2010, and York Mystery Plays 2016.
The York cycle plays, Toronto: 2010 “Crucifixion”.
The Poculi Ludique Societas, or PLS in Toronto, has for over 50 years now sponsored productions of early plays, from the beginnings of medieval drama to as late as the middle of the seventeenth century.
Selected Bibliography
Albin, Andrew. “Sonorous Presence, and the Performance of Christian Community in the Chester Shepherds Play.” Early Theatre 16.2 (2013): 33-57.
Aronson-Lehavi, Sharon. Street Scenes: Late Medieval Acting and Performance. Palgrave MacmIllan, 2011.
Beckwith, Sarah. “The Present of Past Things: The York Corpus Christi Cycle as a Contemporary Theatre of Memory.” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 26.2 (1996): 35-79.
Beckwith, Sarah. Signifying God: Social Relations and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays. University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Bevington, David. From “Mankind” to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England. Harvard University Press, 1962.
Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. Routledge, 1997.
Carlson, Marvin. “Medieval Street Performers Speak.” TDR:The Drama Review, 57.4 (2013): 86-94.
Chaganti, Seeta. “The Platea: Pre- and postmodern: A Landscape of Medieval Performance Studies.” Exemplaria 25.3 (2013): 252-64.
Clopper, Lawrence. Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period. Chicago, 2001.
Coletti, Theresa. “The Chester Cycle in Sixteenth-Century Religious Culture, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37.3 (2007): 532-47.
Coletti, Theresa. Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints: Theater, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval England. University of Pennsylvania, 2004.
Coletti, Theresa. “Medieval Biblical Drama in Post-Apartheid South Africa: The Chester Plays in Afterlife.” Transformations in Biblical Literary Traditions: Incarnation, Narrative, and Ethics. Eds. D.H. Williams and Philip Donnelly, Notre Dame University Press, 2014. 268-88.
Coletti, Theresa. “Medieval Drama: 1191-1952.” Exemplaria 28.3 (2016):264-76.
Coletti, Theresa. “Reading REED: History and the Records of Early English Drama.” Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380-1530. Ed. Lee Patterson, University of California Press, 1990. 248-84.
Davidson, Clifford, ed. Gesture in Medieval Drama and Art. Medieval Institute, 2001.
Elliott, John R., Jr. Playing God: Medieval Mysteries on the Modern Stage. University of Toronto Press, 1989.
Emmerson, Richard. “Dramatic History: On the Diachronic and Synchronic in the Study of Early English Drama.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35:1 (2005): 39-66.
Emmerson, Richard K. “’Nowe Ys Common This Daye’: Enoch and Elias, Antichrist, and the Structure of the Chester Cycle.” Homo, Memento Finis: The Iconography of Just Judgment in Medieval Art and Drama. Ed. David Bevington, et. al. Medieval Institute, 1985. 221-57.
Enders, Jody. The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence. Cornell University Press, 2002.
Gardiner, Harold. Mysteries’ End: An Investigation of the Last Days of the Medieval Religious Stage. Yale University Press, 1946.
Hardison, O.B., Jr. Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin and Early History of Modern Drama. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965.
Holsinger, Bruce. “Analytical Survey 6: Medieval Literature and Cultures of Performance.” New Medieval Literatures 6 (2003): 271-311.
James, Mervyn. “Ritual, Drama, and Social Body in the Late Medieval Town.” Past & Present 98 (1983):3-29.
King, Pamela, ed. The Routledge Research Companion to Early Drama and Performance. Routledge. 2017.
King, Pamela. The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City. D.S. Breer, 2006.
Kolve, V.A. The Play Called Corpus Christi. Stanford University Press, 1966.
Lerud, Theodore. Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Normington, Katie. Gender and Medieval Drama. D.S. Brewer, 2004.
Normington, Katie. Modern Mysteries: Contemporary Productions of Medieval English
Dramas. D.S. Brewer, 2007.
Normington, Katie. Medieval English Drama: Performance and Spectatorship. Polity Press, 2009.
Parker, Andrew, and Eve Kosofsky Sedwick, eds. Performativity and Performance. Routledge,1995.
Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Methuen, 1982.
Overlie, Mary. Standing in Space: The Six Viewpoints Theory and Practice. Fallon Press, 2016.
Rogerson, Margaret. Playing a Part in History: The York Mysteries, 1951-2006. University of Toronto Press, 2009.
Sergi, Matthew. Work-in-progress on Play Texts and Public Practice in the Chester Cycle, c.1421-1607.
Schreyer, Kurt. Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft: Memories of the Mysteries on the London Stage. Cornell University Press, 2014.
Soleo-Shanks, Jenna. “Resurrecting Callimachus: Pop Music Puppets, and the Necessity of Performance in Teaching Medieval Drama. Teaching Medieval and Early Modern Cross-Cultural Encounters. Eds. Karina F. Attar and Lynn Shutters, Palgrave Macmillan 2014. 199-213.
Sponsler, Claire. “The Culture of the Spectator.” Theater Journal 34 (1992): 15-29.
Sponsler, Claire. Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America, Cornell University Press, 2005.
Stevens, Martin. Four Middle English Mystery Cycles. Princeton University Press, 1987.
Stevenson, Jill. Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture: Sensual Piety in Late Medieval York. Palgrave MacMillan, 2010.
Travis, Peter W. Dramatic Design in the Chester Cycle. University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. PAJ Books, 1982
Westfall, Suzanne R. Patrons and Performance: Early Tudor Household Revels. Clarendon Press, 1990.
Page written by
Barbara J. Bono, University at Buffalo, SUNY
Maria S. Horne, University at Buffalo, SUNY
Michelle Markey Butler, University of Maryland