Medieval Theatricality
- ‘no such thing as casual theatregoing: each of these plays were the centre piece of a special occasion for a close-knit community’ Twycross p.37
- No performances in purpose-built theatres
- Indoor and outdoor: city streets, churches, playing fields, college halls, private houses
- Pageant wagons and place-and-scaffold – audience-performer relationship was different
- Religious subject-matter, plays were both religious festivals and a tourist attraction
- Pieces where picked from the old testament
Religious subject matter
- Medieval biblical drama: the mysteries
- The bible was always printed in Latin or handwritten
- It was a sacred text -the source and centre of Christianity
- It was always filtered through priests and clerks who read it aloud in sermons (mostly everyone else was illiterate)
Mystery cycles
- Sequence of plays performed once a year or occasional performances on saint’s feast days etc
- 13th-16th centauries in many towns in England notable prosperous wool towns such as York Chester and Wakefield
- Public outdoor performance in central location town, cathedral or market square or passing through towns on wagons with stops at specific locations
- Separate stories selected for doctrinal and narrative importance but made lively and involving: a quick (living) Book
- The stories varied from Creation to doomsday
Who and Why?
- Educated clerks associated with church but not priests (several writers working on a cycle of biblical stories, added to/rewritten over the years)
- Sponsored by city guilds (quasi-religious confederations of craft workers e.g. weavers)
- Celebration of new summer feast of corpus Christi
- Collective celebration of the town and its people – signified prosperity and devoutness; brought in visitors from country and further afield
- Bringing the bible alive to the audience/connecting it with their lives
Questions regarding performance
- Acoustics? Alliteration, rhyme
- Acting Style
- Different actors playing major roles, no star presence
- The actor, as image, does not become but represents the person he plays
- No captive audience – mobile, action replay and repetition
- Singing by the cathedral choirs
- Special effects and pyrotechnics
- Relationship between performance conditions and the text
Abraham and Isaac
- Designed for performance by local citizens, many of whom couldn’t read, therefor simple colloquial language, alliteration, rhyme etc
- Contemporizing of story – connecting it with everyday life and local refernces
- Uncertainty over which cycle it is part of, could be a lost cycle
- Old testament story of obedient sacrifice – prefigures christs sacrifice on cross
- Invoking of emotion in order to bring home lessons of obedience to the will of god
Extract:
locus is localized space. Usually, a locus is representational,if not illusionary, in nature. It is a manmade object or structure fashioned within a clearly defined stage space. Each locus represents-in both space and time-a well-defined fictive place or institution: … On the other hand, the platea is unlocalized, nonarchitectural, and nonrepresentational space. Inmost cases the platea or "the place" is constituted by, rather than constructed on, a natural setting or a permanent structure: the village green or a city square. It is part of both the audience's everyday life and the play's staging. For this reason, the platea easily bridges the divisions between the fictional or historical past of the characters and the real or actual present of the spectators, and thus between ludus and reality. The platea is flexible enough to contain them all. In the English drama, the rich and the powerful appear on the loca, which are often raised scaffolds that reflect social elevation, while the common men of the drama, along with Christ and his saints and apostles, are found on the platea. Usually, we can name the locale of a platea scene: the sea, the Holy Land, the desert, or, for those of us who love abstractions at any cost, the 'space between' two local. The words and actions of the actors identify these very vague locales, but the locales, which the platea by turns contains, change radically, even elementally. Habitable land becomes water and, finally, desert. In the Digby Mary Magdalene the platea is the acting place as opposed to the resting space, the place where characters respond typologically to the historical presence of Christ. (pp.139-40)
Comments