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Understanding the Blanket-Toss in Medieval Drama: The Case of Een Cluijt van Lijsgen en Jan Lichthart
- Edited by Meg Twycross, Lancaster University, Sarah Carpenter, University of Edinburgh, Elisabeth Dutton, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland, Gordon L. Kipling, University of California, Los Angeles
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- Book:
- Medieval English Theatre 44
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 10 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 13 June 2023, pp 48-90
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Summary
This article, and the translation appended to it, will explore one of the most enduring riddles in medieval English drama: the significance of the canvas-tossing episode in the Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play. As the play itself makes clear, the offences of the sheep-thief and black magician Mak, and of his wife and accomplice Gill, should by rights prompt their victims to ‘do thaym to dede’; even Mak himself admits that the shepherds are entitled to ‘gyrd of my heede’. However, for some undisclosed reason, the group instead decide to ‘cast hym in canvas’. Although the shepherds’ change of heart clearly shows justice tempered with mercy, why they should moderate their punishment along these exact lines has proven difficult to determine. Criticism has struggled to know precisely what to make of the canvas penalty, generating a range of suggestions but little consensus. It has been seen as a sign of ‘contempt for an unworthy adversary’, a method of inducing miscarriage, and a reference to sifting grain that in turn evokes the Apocalypse. Even the most commonly cited interpretation, Chidamian's claim that it evokes a ‘traditional way of hastening childbirth’, has attracted as much scepticism as support. The problem is exacerbated by the lack of analogues in the theatrical record. Although there are tantalising references to the practice in popular culture more widely, as we will discuss in due course, English drama contains no scene that replicates Mak's punishment and which might provide a clue to its larger meanings; indeed, it features on the English stage in only a few passing allusions from Greene, Shakespeare, Dekker, and Jonson. To echo Jean Goodich, in the absence of any basis of comparison, the Towneley tossing is likely to remain a ‘moment that always puzzles’.
Yet, despite the absence of similar scenes in English theatre, instructive parallels can be found by looking to the continent. Especially relevant is the rich body of comic performance that emanated from the cities of the Low Countries. This rederijker (rhetorician) drama has a close kinship with medieval English performance: the two literatures overlap with one another at a number of points, to the extent that some commentators have been able to consider them aspects of a ‘common tradition’; medieval Yorkshire, in fact, seems to have been a particularly important node in this interchange, owing to its longstanding trade links with the Low Countries.
6 - Ten Poems from the Gruuthuse Songbook (c.1462)
- from Essays
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- By Bas Jongenelen, Fontys University of Professional Education, Ben Parsons, University of Sheffield (Parsons)
- Edited by Edelgard E. DuBruck, Marygrove College in Detroit, Barbara I. Gusick, Troy University-Dothan, Alabama
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- Book:
- Fifteenth-Century Studies
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 05 September 2013
- Print publication:
- 01 February 2009, pp 93-112
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Summary
One of the most valuable manuscripts in Dutch literary history is the Gruuthuse Songbook. This volume, copied five times during the last quarter of the fourteenth century and soon after, contains a series of 147 Middle Dutch lyrics, complete with musical notation. No other lyric texts from the period and before are known to preserve their original melodies; this gathering is the oldest complete collection of Dutch songs in existence. The current article presents a selection of ten poems from the Songbook, lyrics we translate into English verse; most of these songs have never appeared in English before and take the name from Gruuthuse, their collector. The sequence of poems resembles material of the cancionero genre found in Spanish literature.
Lodewijk de Gruuthuse was one of the most remarkable book-collectors of the Middle Ages; because of his interesting life and our gratefulness for his having preserved these poems, we devote the next paragraphs to his biography. Part of the personal library of Lodewijk (a key player in the political life of Flanders in the late fifteenth century), the Songbook gives insight into the oldest lyric tradition of Dutch literature. Lodewijk was born in c.1427 to a wealthy Bruges family who had moved from the merchant classes into the minor nobility during the previous century: these mercantile origins are reflected by the family's name, which is derived from the spices or gruit that the Gruuthuses once traded.