Early Theatre Volume 4

‘Arden Winketh at His Wife’s Lewdness, & Why!’: A Patrilineal Crisis in Arden of Faversham by Randall Martin

Abstract

This paper explores a cluster of critical and performance problems in Arden of Faversham: Arden’s apparent unwillingness to end his wife and Mosby’s affair; his permissive attitude towards the lovers’ meetings in his house; and his paradoxical outbursts of violence and friendship towards Mosby. The playwright ignored explanations offered by historical sources for Thomas Arden’s complacency as the overweening desire for material gain or social influence. Instead he interprets Arden’s motives differently, although these are not stated directly (and perhaps could not be, given Arden’s goals) and they are left implied by comparison with the wider social context and with other characters’ ambitions for property, status, and lineage. In a situation recalling that of his historical benefactor, Henry VIII, Arden’s urgent need is for a male heir to inherit his new wealth, and to establish his still-contingent gentle status. He therefore connives at his wife’s adultery in the hope that it will produce the heir he desires. At the same time, Arden publicly condemns Alice and Mosby so that a son will be regarded as legitimate. He must therefore perform in several opportunistic roles: ‘winking’ at, and thus passively enabling, the affair; melancholy and enraged by sexual jealousy. Arden’s dynastic ambitions, whose origins lie in the political ideology of primogeniture and the culture of early modern masculinity, blind him to his wife’s plans. They also lead to a deeply divided and improvised subjectivity, as he responds tactically to the threat of patrilineal extinction.

Biography

Randall Martin is Associate Professor and Acting Chair of the Department of English, University of New Brunswick. His most recent work includes Women Writers in Renaissance England (Longman, 1997) and Henry VI Part Three for the Oxford Shakespeare and Oxford World’s Classics, as well as articles on the First Tetralogy for The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare; the latter two volumes will be published this summer. He is currently preparing Women’s Crime Pamphlets and News Broadsides,1500-1700, for Series III of The Early Modern Englishwoman, a Facsimile Library of Essential Works (Ashgate / Scolar Press), and an edition of Every Man Out of His Humour for the Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson.

Patrons and Travelling Companies in Warwickshire by Elza C Tiner

Abstract

Documentary evidence from the REED Warwickshire collection in progress (ed. Alan Somerset) provides the basis for analysis of regional ties of patrons of touring companies in Warwickshire prior to 1642. This analysis shows that the majority of patrons whose companies performed in Warwickshire also had large landholdings there or in neighboring counties. Payments to travelling companies suggest the relative importance of the patron’s rank and local influence. Evidence of payments to travelling companies survives in records from Maxstoke Priory, civic accounts from Stratford and Warwick (ed. Alan Somerset), the city of Coventry (ed. R.W. Ingram), and the household accounts of Henry, 7th Lord Berkeley (ed. Peter Greenfield).

Biography

Elza C. Tiner is Geraldine Lyon Owen Professor of English at Lynchburg College, Lynchburg, VA, where she teaches courses in medieval literature and in composition. Her publications include articles about law and rhetoric in the York Plays; medieval poet John Lydgate as a songwriter; and biographies of patrons of traveling companies for the following REED collections: Cambridge (ed. Alan Nelson); Cumberland/Westmorland/Gloucestershire (ed. Audrey Douglas and Peter Greenfield); Coventry (ed. Reginald Ingram); Devon (ed. John Wasson); York (ed. Alexandra Johnston and Margaret Rogerson); and in progress, Warwickshire/Staffordshire (ed. Alan Somerset). She has also published papers on applications of classical and medieval rhetoric in composition instruction.

‘The Precious Body of Christ That They Tretyn in Ther Hondis’: ‘Miraclis Pleyinge’ and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament by Heather Hill-Vasquez

Abstract

In the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, Christ’s Passion, despite its fortunate result for humanity, emerges as the ultimate, condemning result of humans assuming an irreverent access to the divine–an irreverent access (resulting, in this case, in the torture of divine flesh at human hands) that both writers of the text describe as a chief characteristic of ‘miraclis pleyinge.’ Similarly, in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, cursory treatment of Christian doctrines, disregard for Church leaders, and assumed access to the divine–embodied in the sacred object of the host–result in a bloody version of Christ’s Passion, marked by human mishandling of sacred objects and topics. Offered in this paper as a point of comparison to the issues raised in the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament stages and illuminates a number of the chief points of the Tretise writers. Carefully shepherded and controlled by Church representatives who invoke the very doctrines and embody the very structure that the writers of the Tretise see as threatened or undermined by ‘miraclis pleyinge,’ what seems an irreverant reenactment of the Passion becomes in the Croxton Play an opportunity for redemption. What the writers of the Tretise see as the dangerous precedent of ‘miraclis pleyinge’–inappropriate human engagement of sacred objects and topics–the Croxton Play embraces as potential site for indulging spiritual desires and exploring religious belief, while reassuringly asserting the fundamental stability and authority of Christianity.

Biography

Heather Hill-Vásquez holds a Ph.D. from the University of Washington and is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Dayton. Her work focuses on early English drama, medieval women religious, and twentieth-century women writers, and gender studies. Her most recent work includes articles on the Chester Cycle, the Life of Christina of Markyate, and the Digby Killing of the Children.

Timing Theatrical Action in the English Medieval Theatre by Philip Butterworth

Abstract

This paper examines the nature and role of timed action in the English medieval theatre. Analysis of the phenomenon is conducted through the explicit stage direction and conditioned by the needs of the performer. Notions of ‘instantaneousness’, ‘simultaneity’, ‘readiness’, and requirements ‘to wait’ as contained in explicit stage directions are investigated. The relationship between timed action and staging conventions is discussed through requirements for ‘stillness’, ‘silence’, ‘waiting’ and ‘walking about the place’. Additionally, the relationship between ‘acting’ and ‘not acting’ as witnessed by an audience is also discussed.

Biography

Philip Butterworth is Reader in Medieval Theatre and Dean of Research in the newly created Faculty of Music, Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Leeds. He has published articles on stage directions, staging conventions, and pyrotechnics. His book Theatre of Fire was published in 1998 for The Society for Theatre Research, London. He is currently working on two books: Theatre of Magic and Staging English Medieval Theatre.

‘Once More Unto the Breach’: Katharine’s Victory in Henry V by Corinne Abate

Abstract

Needing to marry someone who can legitimate his aspiration for a foreign throne, Henry aligns himself with Katharine Valois, French princess, integral political figure, and emerging bilinguist, who provides Henry with the legitimacy his claim is heretofore without. This article interrogates Katharine’s role in allaying Henry’s anxiety of creating rightfulness–both with the power she possesses as a member of and pivotal place holder in the French royal family, and in her willingness to learn English–all while retaining an individual and solvent center of power, agency intact. Further, through a discussion of the Salic Law and its (ir)relevance to the final act of Henry V, the article attempts to explain why Henry inflicts his fervent wooing upon a woman with whom, many scholars have argued, he need not have bothered. Henry, therefore, a man engrossed with the idea of playing the role of king, needs Katharine to authorize his vision of familial justification that would both help erase the recent unscrupulous actions of Henry IV, and make a more peaceful, potentially smoother, and rigorously legitimized transition for Henry VI to ascend the thrones of both countries.

Biography

Corinne S. Abate holds a doctorate from New York University and has published articles on Paradise Lost, John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, and The Merchant of Venice. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Montclair State University and is currently completing an essay on filmic interpretations of The Merchant of Venice.

Daniel Rabel and the Grotesque by John Astington

Abstract

This note examines some aspects of the iconography of the costume designs of the chief designer for the French ballets de cour in the 1620s and 1630s, locating a tradition of caricature and grotesquerie at least a hundred years old, with its origins in German graphic art.

Biography

John H. Astingtion is Professor of English and Graduate Drama at the University of Toronto. His publications include English Court Theatre, 1558-1642 (1999), and the chapter on “Playhouses, Players, and Playogers in Shakespeare’s Time” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies (2001). His work on the intersection between theatrical and visual culture has been published in various books and journals; other essays on this subject are forthcoming in Theatre Survery and The Oxford Middleton.

Reading Acting Companies

Scott McMillin

Abstract

This collection of three papers, selected by Scott McMillin, highlights new scholarly work on the repertory of Strange’s Men, Pembroke’s Men, and Queen Anne’s Men.

Biography

Scott McMillin is Professor of English at Cornell University, where his courses cover the history of English Drama, Shakespeare, and American Musical Theatre. His books include The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, 1583-1603 (co-authored with Sally-Beth MacLean) and The Elizabethan Theatre and the Book of Sir Thomas More.

Lawrence Manley

Abstract

The repertory of Strange’s Men, as it is represented in Henslowe’s records of their 134 performances at the Rose Theatre in 1592/3, contains an unusually large number of plays involving pyrotechnics, possibly including the staging of human immolations. Though pyrotechnics were a familar feature of traditional dramaturgy, such effects were used by Strange’s Men to represent acts of cruelty and judicial punishment that had an edge of topical relevance to English history and politics. The theatrical daring of pyrotechnics in the Strange’s repertory may thus have been part of a ‘company style’ that readily accommodated the politically daring and dramatically innovative work of Marlowe in The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at Paris and of the young Shakespeare in 1 Henry VI.

Biography

Lawrence Manley , Professor of English at Yale University, is the author of Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (1995). His current project, “Reading Repertory,” deals with relationships between Shakespeare’s plays and the company repertories of which they were a part.

Roslyn Knutson

Abstract

Although Pembroke’s Men in 1592/3 had talented (if youthful) players and a patron in good standing with the queen, the company reportedly fell on hard times. No one knows why. Here I consider whether the problem might have been the repertory, which I explore in terms of the four plays known to be theirs (Edward II, 1 Contention, The True Tragedy, and A Shrew), or their touring schedule.

Biography

Roslyn L. Knutson , Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, is the author of The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Time, 1594-1613, (University of Arkansas Press, 1991) and Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Her essays have appeared in publications including Shakespeare Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Survey, and Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England.

Mark Bayer

Abstract

In 1616, Queen Anne’s Men, under the management of Christopher Beeston, moved theatrical operations from the Red Bull, a large public playhouse in Clerkenwell, to the Cockpit, an indoor hall on the increasingly fashionable Drury Lane. The success of this move was overshadowed by a riot on Shrove Tuesday, 1617, in which apprentices damaged the new theatre, forcing the company to return temporarily to the Red Bull while the Cockpit was under repair. Narratives of this event tend to describe it either as an indiscriminate episode of civil unrest or, more cogently, as demonstrating a specific animosity towards Queen Anne’s Men because they were now playing the Red Bull repertory at a prohibitively expensive venue. In an effort to revise these received interpretations, I argue that the reasons for the riot go well beyond the release of aggression and issues of cost. The profit-driven motives of the Queen Anne’s Men violated communal principles of fair dealing and their abandonment of the Red Bull and Clerkenwell affected a more intangible sense of loss and indignation, placing pressures on local businesses that relied on the daily theatre traffic, and severely weakening charitable efforts within the parish.

Biography

Mark Bayer is a doctoral candidate at the Ohio State University, completing a dissertation on theatrical companies during the reign of James I. His awards include a Huntington Library Fellowship and a research grant from the Renaissance Society of America. “Is a Crown Just a Fancy Hat?: Sovereignty in Richard II” is forthcoming in Explorations in Renaissance Culture.

Roberta Barker is Assistant Professor at Dalhousie University. She recently completed a doctoral dissertation at the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham on gender in recent performances of early modern tragedies.

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David Bevington is the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He has written extensively on medieval and Renaissance theatre, and is currently senior editor of an anthology of Renaissance drama for Norton.

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A. R. Braunmuller is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Recent publications include the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Macbeth and a critical book on Chapman’s tragedies. His New Penguin edition of Merchant of Venice appeared in 2000, to be followed by Hamlet in 2001.

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Lawrence Clopper is Professor of English at Indiana University and has written widely on medieval literature and drama.

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Garrett Epp is Associate Professor of English at the University of Alberta. He has published articles on various aspects and forms of early English drama, from cycle plays to stage sodomites.

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R. A. Foakes is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has edited texts by Shakespeare, Middleton, Henslowe, and Coleridge, and published on a wide range of subjects, including Elizabethan stages, cultural politics, nineteenth-century poetry, Marston, Tourneur, and of course, Shakespeare. Shakespeare Performed: Essays in Honor of R. A. Foakes, edited by Grace Ioppolo, appeared last year.

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Peter Hyland , Professor of English Literature at Huron University College, has published Disguise and Role-Playing in Ben Jonson’s Drama (1977); Discharging the Canon (ed. 1986); Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida (1989); An Introduction to Shakespeare: The Dramatist in His Context (1996). He is currently completing a book on Shakespeare’s non-dramatic poetry.

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William Ingram is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the author of many studies of the Elizabethan theatre, most recently The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theatre in Elizabethan London.

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Phebe Jensen is Assistant Professor of English at Utah State University. She has published articles on Renaissance literature and culture in Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance and Reformation, Criticism, and Literature and History. She is currently completing a book-length study of Catholicism and nationhood in early modern England.

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Roslyn Knutson , Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, is the author of Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (2001) and The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, 1594-1613 (1991). She is currently co-director of a production of The Tempest on the UALR campus.

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Marta Straznicky teaches in the English Department at Queen’s University. She has published articles on women’s closet drama in early modern England and has an essay on “Closet Drama” forthcoming in The Blackwell Companion to Renaissance Drama.

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Judith Weil is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Manitoba. She is author of Christopher Marlowe: Merlin’s Prophet, as well as various essays on Peele, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Webster. With Herbert Weil, she is co-editor of the New Cambridge King Henry IV, Part One. Her current projects include a book on service and dependency in Shakespeare’s plays, and a study of women’s anger in classical and Renaissance tragedy.

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