New Approaches to Drama Records: East Anglian Play Texts and Nearby Archives
Sponsoring Organization(s)
Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society (MRDS)
Organizer Name
Matthew Sergi
Organizer Affiliation
Univ. of Toronto
Presider Name
Matthew Sergi
Paper Title 1
The Conversion of Saint Paul: Can the Play Text and the Archival Records Have a Mutually Illuminating Conversation?
Presenter 1 Name
James Stokes
Presenter 1 Affiliation
Univ. of Wisconsin-Stevens Point
Paper Title 2
East Anglian Staging(s) of The Conversion of Saint Paul
Presenter 2 Name
Gordon Kipling
Presenter 2 Affiliation
Univ. of California-Los Angeles
Paper Title 3
Mayoral Entries in Late Sixteenth-Century Norwich: Shillings, Staging, and Civic Pride
Presenter 3 Name
Colin Rowley
Presenter 3 Affiliation
Univ. of Toronto
Paper Title 4
Kingmaking and Playmaking in Fifteenth-Century East Anglia: Records of Drama and Performance during the War of the Roses
Presenter 4 Name
John A. Geck
Presenter 4 Affiliation
Memorial Univ. of Newfoundland
Start Date
12-5-2017 3:30 PM
Session Location
Schneider 1280
Description
So much of the known corpus of medieval English dramatic texts can be traced to East Anglia that literary historians have assumed that the area’s local performance conventions were typical of all premodern English performance. However, thus far no records from nearby archives have yielded evidence of any live production of the extant play texts. The plays include some prescriptive cues for live performance, but there is no corresponding descriptive record of how or whether those cues were enacted. Meanwhile, for the rich array of live productions that East Anglian and nearby archives do describe, neither dialogue nor stage directions survive. Early drama scholars who study East Anglia must consider plays and records in uneasy relation to each other, or at least in relation to a broader range of local traditions and practices within which both playscripts and productions were conceived. Our paper session, timed with the upcoming publication of new Records of Early English Drama for Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, will think through that methodological crux, considering how we might read the archives through the plays and the plays through the archives.
Frank M. Napolitano
New Approaches to Drama Records: East Anglian Play Texts and Nearby Archives
Schneider 1280
So much of the known corpus of medieval English dramatic texts can be traced to East Anglia that literary historians have assumed that the area’s local performance conventions were typical of all premodern English performance. However, thus far no records from nearby archives have yielded evidence of any live production of the extant play texts. The plays include some prescriptive cues for live performance, but there is no corresponding descriptive record of how or whether those cues were enacted. Meanwhile, for the rich array of live productions that East Anglian and nearby archives do describe, neither dialogue nor stage directions survive. Early drama scholars who study East Anglia must consider plays and records in uneasy relation to each other, or at least in relation to a broader range of local traditions and practices within which both playscripts and productions were conceived. Our paper session, timed with the upcoming publication of new Records of Early English Drama for Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, will think through that methodological crux, considering how we might read the archives through the plays and the plays through the archives.
Frank M. Napolitano