Sally-Beth MacLean

Patrons and performance : early Tudor household revels

Part 1 The chapel: administration and facilitiies performance - plays, pageants and disguisings play-texts. Part 2 The minstrels: heraldic minstrels soloists consorts - resident and travelling minstrels in performance. Part 3 Playwrights and players: playwrights players - duties and privileges players and household administration the advantages of patronage touring. Part 4 Plays: characterizations structures ideologies.

At the End of the Road: An Overview of Southwestern Touring Circuits

This essay analyzes the southwestern touring circuits used by medieval and Renaissance performers, drawing upon the dramatic records found in the region by REED editors. The most common source of information is the financial records kept by towns and parishes – especially the extensive records for Exeter, which attracted a remarkable range of touring entertainers from outside the immediate region. Clearly the southwest was not regarded as too remote to visit by entertainers coming from London or from other town or private household bases across England. The essay suggests some of the reasons why the southwest attracted touring performers: Exeter alone would have been a lure as the provincial capitol ranking fifth or sixth in the kingdom in wealth and population and at the hub of several major roads. A map traces the principal routes in the period to Bristol, Exeter and other populous regional centres. The routes apparently preferred by touring performers are considered and a few broad patterns are identified. Touring by entertainers to prosperous towns along main roads in the southwest was evidently an established tradition by the later Middle Ages and Renaissance. Although Bristol must have been the most powerful lure to the region, Exeter, Barnstaple, and Plymouth drew many further south although few seem to have ventured beyond into Cornwall. But the southwestern circuit became one of the least rewarding early in the seventeenth century. It is possible that a hardening of attitudes to public entertainment on the part of local civic oligarchies contributed to this notable change. It would seem that in most of the important towns of the southwest suppression of longstanding entertainment traditions followed hard upon the success of Elizabethan reformation of the church.

The Queen's Men and Their Plays

1. The London theatre of 1583 2. Protestant politics: Leicester and Walsingham 3. The career of the Queens Men 4. The Queens Men in print 5. Casting and the nature of the text 6. Dramaturgy 7. Marlowe and Shakespeare Appendices Notes Bibliography Index.

Drama and ceremony in early modern England: the REED project

In 1976 a medieval and renaissance theatre history project was launched under the masthead Records of Early English Drama (now more familiarly known as REED). The official launch had taken two years of planning by scholars from Britain, Canada and the United States, and was given assurance for the future through a ten-year major Editorial Grant from the Canada Council. REEDs stated goal – then as now – was to find, transcribe and publish evidence of dramatic, ceremonial and musical activity in Great Britain before the theatres were closed in 1642. The systematic survey undertaken would make available for analysis records relating to the evolution of English theatre from its origins in minstrelsy, through the flowering of drama in the renaissance, to the suppression first of local and then of professional entertainment under the Puritans.