Medieval Drama

MW4 CAC - PROF CHISM

Prerequisites: English 101, 102, or 103; Writing Program 101, 102, or 103.

During the medieval period, drama had not yet become a profession, yet all over Europe and England for 500 years before Shakespeare, plays and spectacles were a crucial part of social life. Liturgical dramas and mystery cycles, cautionary allegories, and festive interludes were seasonally performed, often at great expense and with elaborate props, costumes and stage effects.  For two hundred years the Corpus Christi cycles were staged yearly by guilds of merchants and artisans, counterposing artisanal, mercantile, clerical, and popular interests.  At the same time, there were no institutionalized theaters with invisible walls to separate the actors from the audience, but rather mobile stagings that could take the itinerary of Christ’s life or the shape of human history and lay it like a web over an entire city. 

This class explores the beginnings of English drama with attention to recent developments in gender studies, performance theory, and cultural studies.  What are the most profitable theoretical approaches to a drama that predates realism and falls between the abstractions of allegory on the one hand and the absorptions of individual psychology on the other, between the spectacular and the domestic?   How do the plays negotiate the relationships between the material objects and bodies upon the stage, the historical and biblical narratives they embody, the verities they signify, and the conflicting social urgencies of their audiences. What civic spaces are realigned by these itinerant dramaturgies?  What institutional orthodoxies are perplexed by the scandalous spectacularization of Christ’s wounded body or Mary’s virginal, pregnant body?   How can a theater be both popular and sacramental?  How were the plays materially produced, and with what itineraries, stage-machines, censorships?  How does the distinction between theater and performance break down when audiences went not only to watch but to participate? How did sixteenth-century humanism, the English reformation and the gradual professionalization of the theater affect the many forms of medieval drama and what continuities can we trace into subsequent periods? 

Beginning with liturgical and twelfth-century church drama, centering on the Corpus Christi cycles, the saint’s and morality plays, and pursuing its line through the Reformation with sixteenth-century humanist drama and the beginnings of the English professional theater, this course explores the way medieval society performed itself at some of its most contested cultural intersections.  The textbook will be David Bevington’s Medieval Drama (which can be purchased very cheaply online if you look around for a used copy) and assorted readings may include articles by Sarah Beckwith, Peter Travis, Mervyn James, Anthony Gash, Theresa Coletti, Ruth Nisse, and Donnalee Dox.
Requirements: 2 short (5 p.) papers (40%), weekly very short (1 p.) response papers (30%), an oral presentation or creative staging (10%), and lively class discussion (20%)