Meg Twycross

The theatricality of medieval English plays

Medieval plays were not written for the theatre. They were put on in city streets, in churches, on playing fields, in college halls and in private houses, and they exploited each of these venues in its own distinctive way. The shape and acoustics of the venue, the skills of the actors, the nature of the audience and of the occasion, all presented certain constraints and certain opportunities. Add to this a variety of types of subject matter, and we have not one but a whole range of theatricalities. Plays are for performing, and one recent branch of medieval theatre research has specialised in the informed ‘recreation’ of medieval performance conditions. This has been an eye-opening and salutary exercise. Because medieval theatre is so different from modern commercial theatre both in setting and intention, we modern investigators have had to break down our prejudices about the practical limits of staging and acting style. We have discovered, among other things, that actors can perform on a stage eight feet by ten feet; that twenty-foot-high pageant wagons are not necessarily doomed to overbalance; that long rhetorical speeches are not by definition ‘boring’; that spectacle can speak more strongly than words; that it is possible to look the audience full in the face. Above all we have learnt to trust the plays themselves: that if we take them seriously as theatre, they will work. Medieval theatre has emerged not as childlike or primitive, but as different, and often highly sophisticated.

Beyond the picture theory: image and activity in medieval drama

This essay originally set out to answer the question ’What do you not know about mystery plays if you only read the script?‘s I had a fairly conclusive demonstration of what you could miss a couple of years ago when I slowly began to realize that an entire seminar reading the York Resurrection had not noticed that what is represented in figure 1 had occurred between lines 186 and 187. I suspect that this happens more often than we the ’experts‘s realize—possibly even to us ourselves. Setting aside the fact that Latin is not only unknown but apparently invisible to most modern undergraduates, some play-texts are more vulnerable than others because of what they do or do not decide to include in stage-directions. Medieval playwrights did not consider it their job to supply an exhaustive running commentary on the stage set, blocking, and business of a play. York is particularly notorious: in 47 surviving plays there are 30 stage directions, of which 20 are music cues.1 That does not of course mean that we do ...