Abstract
This article gives new insights into how non-verbal performances of women’s labor reimagine joy and judgement in the Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play. It presents a movement-based method of reading that speculatively recenters actions occurring offstage or without scripted cues in early English dramas. I posit that feminine non-textual movements, like wool-spinning, in this mystery pageant sharpen our view of the threads between its secular and sacred registers. In turn, gendered labor economies and spatial relations compel readers to reevaluate characters’ embodied agencies while illuminating new knowledge-making pathways between textual and readerly performances. The ethical stakes of this imaginative mode of reading thus lie in how it invites characters and readers to recognize bodies’ capacities for reshaping spaces (and futures) that initially appear unaccommodating to marginalized figures. Acknowledging movement-based forms of meaning making consequently celebrates the ways early dramatic texts revel in (unperformed) performances’ multifaceted possibilities and the unexpected joys their genre affords.
Recommended Citation
Owada Welk, Sydney
(2026)
"“Ill spon weft”: Joy and Judgement in the 'Second Shepherds’ Play',"
ROMARD: Vol. 62, Article 9.
Available at:
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/romard/vol62/iss1/9
