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Full Description
Newest research into drama and performance from the Middle Ages and the Tudor period.
Medieval English Theatre is the premier journal in early theatre studies. Its name belies its wide range of interest: it publishes articles on theatre and pageantry from across the British Isles up to the opening of the London playhouses and the suppression of the civic religious plays, and also includes contributions on European, Latin and other cognate drama, together with analyses of modern survivals or equivalents, and of research productions of medieval plays.
This volume explores issues of performance and audience-engagement across a wide range of theatrical texts and genres. It opens with a question of sensibilities. An analysis of the French blindman farces examines their now deeply unsettling scenarios of slapstick violence against the vulnerable. Rather than simple callousness, did their staging rely on diverting the audience's attention from the action performed to the skills of the performer?
Two essays arise from performances as research. One production, of the Dutch Rhetoricians' play Man's Desire and Fleeting Beauty, drew on its audiencesto evaluate how far prologues, epilogues, and theatrical frames might affect responses to the "message" of a play. Another explored how the implicit performativity of a fifteenth-century narrative poem, The Life of Job, might be realised through the astonishing skills of acrobats. A review of a third production, of the Tudor interlude of Godly Queen Hester, further attests to the current vitality of research through performance.
Three new play translations, from Europe and beyond, introduce English speakers to richly varied, and highly actable, performance practices. Two are of 1530s Rhetoricians' plays from Bruges which directly address the economic woes of their home city. The first, censored by the authorities, was replaced by the superficially less critical second; but both address the plight of workers in a recession, in disarmingly comic detail with disconcertingly present-day resonances. The third introduces readers to how the Iranian Taʿziyeh drama movingly stages the struggle between Satan and the prophet Ayoub (Job), presenting an unfamiliarly sympathetic view of the sufferings of Job's Wife.
Contents
Gordon Lee Kipling: An Obituary
Marla Carlson
Blindman Farces as Slapstick: Gallebois, Masoupé, and their Guides
Charlotte Steenbrugge and Elisabeth Dutton
Framing the Stage and Staging the Frame: Man's Desire and Fleeting Beauty
Elsa Strietman and Charlotte Steenbrugge
Cornelis Everaert: The Play of The Fluctuating Currency: a Translation
Mandy L. Albert
Cornelis Everaert: The Play of Great Labour and Meagre Profit: a Translation
Elisabeth Dutton and Cathy Hume
Staging The Life of Job: a Performance Experiment
E. Lucy Deacon
The Taʿziyeh Episode of The Noble Prophet Ayoub: a Translation
Reports of productions
Jacob Ridley
Edward's Boys: The Enterlude of The Godly Queen Hester, Christ Church College, Oxford, Friday 28 March 2025
Editorial Board and Submissions
