All Things Medieval

The last transitional stage in England between medieval and modern theater (counting Shakespeare as the start of the modern) was the rise of touring theater companies. There were two types, the sponsored kind that we think was involved in Shakespeare’s productions, and the small town independent company.

Touring companies consisted of no more than six men, often with a boy mixed in so that he could play women’s parts without needing to shave. They carried everything they needed, so they developed minimal props and costumes: a few masks, a few specific props like a sword, axe or cup. They could perform a play with more roles than they had actors, since it was possible to double up roles with quick costume changes.

Records of companies like this go back to the 14th century, with the early traveling players of Exeter College, Oxford. They probably began mostly as musicians, and gradually switched over to acting with the introduction of morality plays that gave more scope to invention. In the 15th and 16th centuries, many of these groups were funded by aristocrats as a base bankroll, but they took in fees as they traveled. They stayed at other aristocratic houses to defray travel costs, or they took in the pennies of the common folk at mid-play collections. We hear of “Leicester’s Men” performing a play for Queen Elizabeth in 1561; there were also the Earl of Arundel’s Players, and Prince Edward’s Players. The theater companies with sponsorship like this could afford to be larger, and probably had more gear.

In East Anglia, the town parishes often set up theater productions during the 1400s and early 1500s. The groups seem to have declined after 1530, that is, after Henry VIII’s Reformation conflicts made the landscape more dangerous. It’s possible that the aristocrat-backed theater companies did better then, since many of the aristocrats who survived were supporters of the Tudor family’s Protestantism. So as the parish players were declining, sponsored companies increased.

In their heyday, though, the parish companies of East Anglia were very active in putting on plays. People from nearby towns would come to see the productions, but they also traveled within a 50 mile range (at most). Men from Wittersham, Kent were paid to put on a play at New Romney in 1426. In Herefordshire, the town of Bishop’s Stortford put on a play every few years, and in off years, contributed to neighboring towns’ plays. In 1503, their play required a dragon “made of hoops and covered with canvas” that we still find in the town’s financial records. The aristocratic-patronage companies also traveled in this area; the Earl of Arundel’s Players were paid at Dover in 1477.

Two questions emerge from these details: why would aristocrats become patrons of traveling theater companies? And why was East Anglia more active in putting on town plays? It’s possible that the first question is tied to the Reformation conflicts; the governmental structure at local levels was tied more closely to the lords than to the Crown. One way to keep the country quiet and loyal was to maintain personal loyalty to the Earl or Duke. So these plays may have been what we’d call goodwill-ambassadors.

Why East Anglia? probably because there was more travel to and from France, where plays had gone in a secular, comic direction. In York, they could settle into their local customs and forget the outside world, but Dover’s main business was acting as the gateway to France. The Thames River was the main highway for all international travel to London. Probably the fishing villages of the entire Channel coast had a frequent interchange with French fishermen and merchants, just as the Channel Islands had a French-speaking population. There would have been many residents who went back and forth, seeing French culture.

East Anglia was also the Puritan stronghold, though I can’t say why the Reformation values were adopted there so much sooner and more strongly than in the north. (In Albion’s Seed, David Hackett Fischer explains New England’s Puritan population by pointing to their common origin: East Anglia.)

The morality play “Mankind” was first played in 1465, and its script was still active in 1470, during the War of the Roses, because one of the Vices cites a legal document dated “anno regni regis nulli,” the year of no king. But we can find clues not only for its time, but also for its geographical place. Various places in East Anglia are mentioned, locating it near Cambridge and King’s Lynn. “Mankind” might have been a good choice for a touring company, since the devil Titivillus wore a full head mask—-allowing the role to be doubled with any other in which the actor’s face showed. Its props are simple, like Mankind’s shovel.

As we move into Tudor times, the patron-sponsored traveling companies may still have played an older work like “Mankind,” but they probably moved toward the secular Interlude plays. And that brings us right up to Shakespeare and the modern age—early modern of course, but modern. Plays have only changed somewhat since Shakespeare’s five-act format. You can see in the pre-Shakespearean plays some of the models and stock characters he used, like the “sot” fool speaking truth to power, or the rural clown who’s trying to cover up for something like stealing a sheep. We see monologues and puns as in Heywood’s Interludes, but more refined and mixed with serious material.

So thus ends the series: how European drama got from the early stages of acting out pagan ritual and reading Latin comedies, to Shakespeare, Johnson and Marlowe.

with thanks to “Touring Players and their Plays before 1570” by Peter Greenfield, in The Routledge Research Companion to Early Medieval Drama and Performance.

The pre-eminent name in early Tudor plays is John Heywood’s. Heywood was part of a leading intellectual family, at a time when London had a wealth of aristocratic scholars, when Renaissance learning was at a fever pitch. Heywood himself was from an obscure family and rose by his own musical talent to be master of the royal choir school. But he married into Sir Thomas More’s family, by means of niece Jane Rastell. Jane’s father John Rastell had a dedicated theater built into his London house; he too wrote plays, while his wife sewed costumes. The entire family seems to have been crazy for the stage, translating French farces and writing original plays.

John Heywood and his family remained Roman Catholic during the early Tudor Reformation years. Sir Thomas More, as Lord Chancellor, was required to follow the King’s lead in rejecting the Roman church, but he refused and was executed. Rastell and Heywood were not apparently under the same pressure. Heywood served four Tudor monarchs, which means he survived the Edward-Mary-Elizabeth transitions. His son Jasper became a Jesuit priest, and a fellow of Merton College, Oxford, while the daughter Elizabeth married John Donne of the Ironmongers guild. Elizabeth’s son John, the poet, became the most famous literary light of the family.

John Heywood, his son Jasper, and eventually grandson John Donne all had to make difficult choices about religion. John Heywood participated in a plot against the Archbishop of Canterbury and barely escaped conviction. When Queen Mary I came to the throne, Heywood’s place was secure again. He remained in the court of Elizabeth I for a short time, but increasing restrictions against Catholics pushed him into exile in Belgium, where he died. His son Jasper, the priest, left England for an academic career in Rome and Germany, and eventually was formally exiled as well. John Donne, in his turn, reluctantly accepted ordination in the Church of England.

In “The Play of the PP,” or as we would say, the “P’s,” four medieval figures beginning with the letter P match wits to determine which of them has the best path in life. There’s no real action here, no duels or intrigues or discoveries. Each presents his case and debates the others, finding the weak points in each argument. The first thing a reader notices, coming straight from the morality and passion plays, is that the elaborate verse schemes are gone. This Interlude rhymes, but in a straight, simple way: it’s in couplets, AA BB CC DD etc. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales had led the way in a narrative verse style that had the charming sound of rhyme but could be much less artificial, and the Tudor comedies followed this model.

The Palmer is a pilgrim extraordinaire; his palm leaf insignia declare that he has been to Jerusalem. He claims to have been to every shrine foreign and domestic, including Noah’s Ark in Armenia. The Pardoner’s trade was to carry relics about and offer to use them as a means of grace for forgiveness of sins, in exchange for a donation.  He challenges the Palmer to the claim of most merit, since the pilgrimages were to obtain pardon for sins, which his relics could have provided without all the voyages.

Then the Pothecary enters, and he claims superiority to both of them. It’s about sending souls to heaven, is it? Why how does the soul leave the body without the apothecary’s trade, which can kill them? The Pardoner asks him, “If ye killed a thousand in an hour’s space, when come they to heaven, dying [away] from state of grace?” The Pothecary raps out his answer, “If a thousand pardons about your necks were tied, when come they to heaven if they never died?”

Now enters the Peddler, and he claims that since only his wares can keep women happy, the other three are useless. But if they want a competition, he suggests that all of them need skill in lying, so let’s see who can tell the biggest lies.

The Pardoner starts them off by showing his relics. He claims to have the blessed jawbone of All Hallows, the big toe of the Trinity, the buttock-bone of Pentecost, and a slipper from one of the Seven Sleepers. The Pothecary declares them all smelly and disgusting, saying that the slipper must have stepped in a turd. But wait, there’s more! The eye-tooth of the Great Turk, a box of humble-bees that stung Eve in the garden, and the glass that Adam and Eve drank a toast from at their wedding!

The Pothecary has a pack of wares too, all lies: he has a little box of rhubarb to purge bile, and a lot more things with preposterous made-up names: syrapis de Byzansis, diagalanga, blanka manna, mercury sublime, and alikakabus—this last, to cure your dog of mange. Each one has health claims: take this, and you will be as strong as a cripple! Be pain-free for life! In truth, he says, the cures are as good for him as for his customers, since they make him rich.

But the play then moves to story-telling. Which of them can tell the biggest whopper? The Pothecary claims that he once cured a young lady of epilepsy by putting an explosive plug into her anus and firing it off: it flew ten miles and blew up a castle, and cured the young lady too!  The Pardoner takes up the challenge: once, to help a dead friend, he sought her soul in Purgatory, and even in Hell! When Lucifer heard it was a woman he sought, he gave him carte blanche to take her back. Margery Coorson (rhymes with “whoreson”) is in Hell’s kitchen, turning a spit, and when the Pardoner leads her out, the demons all cheer to see the last of her. Lucifer begs him: please, please send all the women to heaven! One woman is more trouble than ten men!

The Palmer’s lie is short and simple: in all the lands he’s traveled, never once has he seen a woman in a bad temper. The Peddler, in judging this whopper to be the biggest, challenges them to line up women:

Three of the youngest and three of the oldest,
Three of the hottest and three of the coldest,
Three of the wisest and three of the shrewdest,
Three of the chastest and three of the lewdest,
Three of the lowest and three of the highest,
Three of the farthest and three of the nighest,
Three of the fairest and three of the maddest,
Three of the foulest [foul-mouthed] and three of the saddest [most serious],
And when all these threes be had asunder,
Of each three, two, justly by number,
Shall be found shrews: except this fall
That ye hap to find them shrews all!

I give you his entire patter not for the misogyny, but for the music of the words. It’s not the music of the earlier alliterative verses, it’s a newer sound. Not new to modern ears, but quite different from the speeches of Noah and Joseph. The meter falls into the jog-trot of anapests: THREE of the HOTtest and THREE of the COLDest. We know that the future of narrative verse was in iambs, and we’re not there yet, not quite. But getting closer, for example, “shall BE found SHREWS: exCEPT this FALL” does fall into four iambic feet.

The play closes with the Peddler’s sudden awareness that they’ve been talking in large and loose ways, and it’s time to come back to earth. In fact, he says, the Palmer and Pardoner are both on the right path: pardon for sins is a good thing. Let us try to be virtuous. The Pothecary disclaims any virtuous merit, but the Peddler won’t hear it. He, too, can try to follow the example: and so may we all. In fact, he closes with an apology to the audience:

Then to our reason God give us His grace
That we may follow with faith so firmly
His commandments that we may purchase
His love, and so consequently
To believe his Church fast and faithfully;
So that we may, by his promise,
Be kept out of error in any wise.
And all that hath ‘scaped us here by negligence,
We clearly revoke and forsake it.
To pass the time without offense
Was the cause why the maker did make it;
And so we humbly beseech you to take it:
Beseeching Our Lord to prosper you all
In the faith of his Church Universal!

Note: I followed here the text as edited and modernized in spelling by John Gasner, in Medieval and Tudor Drama (New York: Applause Theater Books, 1963).

Late medieval English comedies are called “Interludes,” a name that suggests they were playful interruptions to something else more serious, like a banquet or a longer devotional play. The name seems to suggest most strongly festivities at a banquet, perhaps like the early French play about Adam de la Halle attempting to leave the city during the annual Arras banquet. We see the word used in royal household accounts; in 1427, some money was paid to players for “jeuues et entreludes.” The games portion might have been juggling or mock jousting, but the “entrelude” was almost certainly a play, short enough to be put on while the servants were clearing away before the next course.

Interludes were a step away from devotional theater, but they still overlapped with it in themes. Like the Second Shepherds’ Play, they showed vice at work to achieve comic effect. It wasn’t moral to laugh at good people, but bad people were fair game. Morality plays had been about temptation, and interludes could be similarly allegorical. I don’t know if there’s a bright line between morality plays and interludes, but my sources say that interludes gave a lot more air time to vice. If they did the Prodigal Son’s story, they’d have a whole mini-plot for the time when he’s fallen into sin and then poverty, gleefully showing the gaudy sins and bitter downfalls.

Some interludes had a bit of political commentary, but kept very moralistic and general, for safety. “The Cradle of Security” showed a wicked prince, who spends the play being rocked in a cradle. But it’s allegorical, lest anyone think the play was pointing to a Tudor sovereign. Three ladies are with the cradled prince: Pride, Covetousness, and Luxury; and two old men judge him, representing the doom at the end of the world. We see in “The Cradle of Security” another feature of interludes: they had much smaller casts than the passion or morality plays. The whole play required just these six roles, though it also needed some special props, like a mask with a pig’s snout and a giant cradle. We don’t really know much more about this play, as the script was lost and we must rely on a contemporary memoir that describes it.

Smaller casts were better for traveling players, as I’ll cover in a later entry. With the interludes, we enter the early modern era of theater, in which we see plays acted over and over, not just once a year, and written by playwrights with real names. Lewis Wager was a Franciscan friar in the period when King Henry VIII banned monasteries. He seems to have carried on in ministry as was possible, becoming a parish priest under the new system and apparently fathering a son who also wrote interludes.

Lewis Wager’s best-known work was “The Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene,” published in 1566 after his death. Mary, the Biblical character and friend of Jesus, is depicted as a contemporary young woman in early Tudor England. Much of the play was a satire on the excesses of the rich, as allegorical figures of vice teach Mary how to be a proper rich young lady. That’s where it was fun: not only did vices teach Mary how to paint her face and look down on the poor, they also showed her how to cover up sins by renaming them. The vice “Infidelity” demonstrates by changing his name to “Legal Justice,” which sounds like a page right out of today’s satires.

The play also gives us a glimpse of the way some theater was funded: mid-play, the vices take up a collection, as they also do in some Morality plays. In “Mankind,” the demons tell the audience that they can’t see the chief devil, Titivillus, until enough money has been taken up. They play up how really terrific the devil is, how truly worth seeing, until they have enough cash to bring him in.

Some interludes turned entirely away from religious imagery and language, though they stayed strictly moral. Henry Medwall, who worked for King Henry VII’s Chancellor, wrote a very early interlude that presented only humanist values. Now we’re stepping back in time; Medwall’s play is one of the earliest interludes, having as its source a translated Latin treatise printed by William Caxton, England’s first movable-type printer. Medwall took the treatise, in which the Roman Senate must decide whether an idle patrician or a worthy plebeian is a better match for a Senator’s daughter, and turned it into a real story. “Fulgens and Lucres” has the first comic subplot in English theater. Servants of the Roman nobles discuss the story as a play they’re going to watch, then they vie for the affections of Lucrese’s maid Joan.

There are more interludes than I can touch on, and the next entry will look in detail at one known as “The Four P’s.” A YouTube channel called “Beyond Shakespeare” reads through and discusses many of these plays, including the ones I’ve written about here. You can look for “Dives and Lazarus,” “The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom,” “The Play of the Weather,” or “Enough Is As Good As a Feast.”

We have something like four hundred examples of 15th century comic theater from France. We usually call these comedies “Farce,” from Latin “farcire,” to stuff. But at the time, they called the plays farce, sottie, or even moralité. A “sot” was a fool who made witty, satirical commentary throughout the play. Some farces gave sharp social satire, so it was important to disguise the most pointed barbs by putting them in the mouth of the “sot.”

The earliest French farce is “Le Garçon et l’aveugle,” which may have been performed during the 13th century. A blind man is begging in the city of Tournai, and a boy tells him that he’s about to fall into a cellar. The blind man asks the boy to be his guide as he begs in the city, putting himself in the power of rogue who likes to play tricks. Neither the blind man nor the boy was supposed to be a virtuous man, so it was fair game to laugh at their vices and follies.

The medieval French farce was not devotional or instructive, as English interludes tended to be. Rather, the plays poked fun at everyday life situations. They may have been consciously modeled on the Latin plays of Terence, whose plays were used to teach fluent Latin. They seem to have drawn also from the same cultural roots as The Decameron, whose stories are rife with slapstick and sexual humor. In this world, priests were lecherous, wives were unfaithful, and husbands were routinely fooled. Children are insolent, wives are domineering, husbands are henpecked, and fathers are tyrants. In “The Washtub,” a henpecked husband is forced to do housework until he falls into the washtub, from which his wife will only extricate him if he agrees that she is master of the house. Further, soldiers are cowards, students are stupid, and lawyers cheat everyone. In Maître Pathelin, a lawyer cheats a cloth merchant, but he is then cheated in turn by a clever shepherd.

In Italy, those same roots produced the “farsa rusticale,” a play set in the rural area around Naples and other cities. We have fewer examples of Italian farces than of the French ones, but we know some of the important writers. Pietro Antonio Caracciolo wrote in Neapolitan dialect during the late 1400s, but my source says he also wrote “in Italian” which probably means “in the dialect of Rome.” In both France and Italy, language was far from standardized, and into the 19th century it was often difficult for peasants to understand each other across a distance of ten miles. These plays tended to be made for local production, using the local speech of Siena, Padua, or Asti. Culture and language around the Mediterranean was not sharply delineated; Italy, southern France (Provence), and northern Spain were similar, and ideas and trends flowed among them. Spain, too, had late medieval farces in the Italian and French manner.

Farces in medieval France were sometimes staged as part of a series of plays, with the other productions being serious or devout. In Northern France, they used pageant wagons for staging, as we saw across the Channel. But stages were most often trestle platforms set up in the marketplace or public square, or even in a great house’s courtyard. Production was by amateur but dedicated theater groups called confréries. A society of law clerks called the Basoche wrote and performed farces in Paris, and other cities had similar clubs: the Cornards of Rouen, the Infanterie of Dijon, and the Suppôts de la Coquille of Lyon. These confréries wrote, planned and produced plays for feast days and other special occasions. 

As the late medieval period merged into early modern (parallel to Tudor times in England), the plays became more secular. We have the most examples from France, but in Germany and the Lowlands, there were also guilds and societies producing similar plays. They probably raised money ahead of time and collected money during the performance, much like amateur theater companies in our time.

with thanks to The Medieval French Drama. Grace Frank. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960.

Modern comedy begins to emerge from medieval piety in the Yorkshire town of Wakefield’s passion play cycle. We don’t know as much about the production at Wakefield, which may have been on wagons as at York. But certain of the plays in that collection stand out as productions of someone’s creative genius. We don’t know his name, so he’s just know as the Wakefield Master. We assume that the five plays that share a poetic structure are all by the Wakefield Master, as if it’s his signature.

I’ll mark the rhymes, including internal rhymes. Notice the long lines in the first quatrain, then the very short C line. The meter is accentual, like nursery rhymes, with two strong beats (“my LEGS they FOLD”). Notice the alternation of long and very short lines:

Lord, what these weders ar cold! A / and I am yll happyd [dressed]; B
I am nere hande dold, A / so long haue I nappyd, B
My legys thay fold, A / my fyngers ar chappyd, B
It is not as I wold, A / for I am al lappyd, B
In sorow. C
In stormes and tempest, D
Now in the eest, now in the west, D
wo is hym has neuer rest D
Myd day nor morow! C

This meter and rhyme scheme carries through the entire play, sometimes split up in dialogue. There is some alliteration, but much less than in York’s plays. It would be too much, on top of the elaborate structure already imposed on the dialogue.

The most famous play is called the Second Shepherds’ Play. It was, literally, the second play in the collection in which shepherds go to see the baby Jesus. But in this one, most of the play is an unrelated comedy, and only at the end do the angels come out singing “Gloria in excelsis Deo!” and telling them to go to Bethlehem (“Bedlem”), where they meet Mary. Instead, mostly the play is about a local thief named Mak and his attempt to get away with stealing a sheep.

The three shepherds open with comic speeches in which they complain about the weather, poverty, the oppression of the rich, and what a pain it is to be married. They are freely anachronistic, even by the standards of medieval Yorkshire. Never mind that they were dressed in contemporary clothing, they go further and frequently swear on Christ’s cross and such, in the same play where they go to see the newborn babe! Mak even casts a sleeping spell on the shepherds by using the name of Pontius Pilate in hocus-pocus nonsense: “ffro my top to my too, Manus tuas commendo, poncio pilato, Cryst crosse me spede!”

The play depicts a parody mother and baby scene for the shepherds to discover, but this one is Mak’s attempt to cover up his theft. Mak’s wife Gill (Jill?) bundles up the ewe in swaddling clothes and pretends to be in labor with the twin, while the “newborn son” lies in his cradle. It’s an unbelievable situation to the audience, but the three shepherds nearly go away, fooled. Then one skeptic says “Wait, we must go back and give the baby a gift,” which allows him to lift the blanket off the “baby’s” face as he gives a sixpence and a kiss for luck. And lo! it’s a sheep. Mak and his wife even then carry on their cover story, reeling with horror at how some elf has turned their bouncing baby boy into this monster!

Medieval audiences loved violence on stage, but in this play, it was softened down to just tossing Mak around on a canvas, bouncing and jolting him until they’re tired. And that’s when the angel appears, as they are walking away. Mak has no role in visiting the infant Jesus, since he’s a rogue. But the three shepherds meet Mary and each gives the baby a gift: a bag of cherries, a bird, and a ball. The play ends in sweet harmony, with nobody much hurt and everyone cheerful.

There are some good versions of this play on YouTube, though I could not find the short film made in 1961. The Met staged and filmed it at The Cloisters in 1954 (this IMDB link might be it), and about ten minutes of the play is posted. The Folger Shakespeare Library has produced the play at Christmas, and in 2016, they filmed it. They have not posted the whole play on YouTube, but just the trailer. It’s worth watching; they do a lovely job with adding period music. The opening scene, and later the sheep-discovery scene, from an indie movie production in 2016, present a more natural-looking setting. There are countless amateur versions on YouTube, from university drama departments to families putting on a short play in the neighborhood.