Medieval Drama and Performance-Based Pedagogy
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.
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.
Lesson Plan 1: Playing around with medieval language
Lesson Plan 2: The twenty props you need to put on any medieval drama
Lesson Plan 3: Typology, or medieval living history
Lesson Plan 4: Typology, or medieval living history and tableau vivant
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.
Lesson Plan 5: Stages for medieval drama
Lesson Plan 6: Filling the space. Medieval monologues and the power of words
Lesson Plan 7: Creating and inhabiting the space. Scenes from medieval drama
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.
Lesson Plan 8: Determining your audience for medieval drama
Lesson Plan 9: Performance of medieval drama
Lesson Plan 10: Adaptations of medieval drama
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, a compiled list
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 company members.
Some productions of medieval plays available for online viewing
You can access an extensive YouTube playlist of medieval drama online. Additionally, here is a resource list on 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 as their 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 modernized musical version in 2008: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRthPA2nJyw
The Oberammergau Passion Play has been performed continuously in that Bavarian village since 1634. The trailer for the 2020 production can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KeVtnndSsc
The Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play has long been a favorite Christmas holiday production, and was recently revived at the Folger Theater in 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RomR1sxDlus
Yiimimangaliso: The Mysteries, a version of the Chester mysteries, was staged in South Africa and London in 2001 and has been revived since: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/34991
York cycle plays, England: Videos from recent York mystery plays are available on-line at several sites. See, for example, from 1973, http://www.yorkshirefilmarchive.com/film/york-mystery-plays-1973 ; from 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nyFLOlEupM;+from+2016,+https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_IE4izf_6c
York cycle plays, Toronto: You can see the 2010 “Crucifixion” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIImNnV1Ty0
See also the website of the Poculi Ludique Societas or PLS in Toronto, which 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: http://groups.chass.utoronto.ca/plspls/front-page/
Page written by
Barbara J. Bono, University at Buffalo, SUNY
Maria S. Horne, University at Buffalo, SUNY
Michelle Markey Butler, University of Maryland