Theresa Coletti reflects on what the findings of this volume mean for future discussions of theatre history. She argues that the chapters of this volume challenge the normative boundaries upon which early English drama’s periodization narrative long depended, and looks forward to the continuation of this work as more evidence emerges from the REED drama project and the work of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century antiquarians and recusants in preserving early drama is recognised. The Afterword also looks at how these translations of medieval stages, characters, and tropes to early modern English texts and venues anticipate the deliberate and frequent reinvention and adaptation of medieval dramatic traditions that continue to this day.

Between the middle of the fourteenth century and the 1642 closing of the theatres, performance activity in England underwent significant change. At the beginning of this period, there were no dedicated playhouses, nor was there a profitable business in the publishing of plays. Yet England had thriving and durable performance traditions, encompassing pageantry, games, tournaments, street theatre, folk plays, festivals, royal entries, civic biblical cycles, and liturgical church drama. These theatrical practices were not only local and regional but were also carried across much of the island by touring companies before and after the emergence of professional theatres. Without these deeply ingrained, vibrant customs of playing, the professional theatres would have had little chance of success. Over the past twenty years, advances in research have increasingly demonstrated that the diachronic, teleological approach implied by the conventional period categories limits our understanding of the complex theatrical landscape in England during this time. Work by repertory companies, Records of Early English Drama (REED), and scholarship on the Digby, Towneley, and Hegge manuscripts shows these traditions were ‘synchronic’, as earlier practices of touring, staging, and performance continued, and in some cases increased after the advent of London’s professional playhouses. These traditions were also bound in complex ways to the religious alliances of their patrons. The chapters in this volume explore how later dramatists employed earlier modes of staging, costuming, props, characterization, dramaturgy, and tropes which variously performed commemoration, made political and religious statements, pushed the limits of genre, parodying and reforming earlier performance traditions.

The forest in the medieval and early modern imaginary comprised a rich palimpsest of various layers, intersecting and often contradictory. Forests were threatening spaces yet also offered rich resources for use and exploitation. Forested space was linked to royal bodies and subject to the King’s control, yet it was also the sphere of the outlaw and exile. In the forest, nature could be readable as divine text or present an indecipherable labyrinth, a zone of disguise and invisibility, of inversion and confusion. As Robert Pogue Harrison has demonstrated, civilization defined itself against the forest, carving out its identity by ‘opening’ up the forest, yet wild nature haunted civilized humanity, holding up a mirror to human nature. In Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1603), the forest is a silent yet resonant character that facilitates exile, disguise, gender role reversal, pastoral impulses, meditative contemplation, eco-empathy, and an alternative centre of political power. All of these factors, this chapter argues, are indebted to a complex medieval inheritance that encompassed constructions of the forest in diverse literary genres, performance, art, and folklore, one that included the figures of Robin Hood, the Green Man, and the iconography of the Tree of Life. Our reading of Shakespeare’s forest is rendered more nuanced and less opaque when placed in dialogue with the medieval arboreal imaginary.

Part of what is involved in tracing the tropological and dramaturgical traditions of early English theatre is the challenge of identifying so-called native traditions from classical ones in works that involve both. While it is not unusual for scholars to describe Hermione’s resurrection, the restoration of Marina to Pericles, and the many reunions of Cymbeline as moments of recognition in the vein of classical anagnorisis, Smith demonstrates the influence of an earlier English variety of recognition. As seen in the Chester, York, and N-Town plays, civic performances of the episodes following Christ’s resurrection – particularly Cleophas and Luke on the Emmaus road and Jesus’ appearance to Thomas – establish a thematic pattern of recognition, portraying it as the subject's response to the revelation of the other. Someone with strong faith, such as St Mary and Luke, is more responsive to obscure signs of God’s revelation; while someone of lesser faith, like Thomas or the midwife at the Nativity, only grasps the conspicuous signs. This form of faith-as-sensitivity, Smith argues, also characterizes the recognition scenes of Shakespeare’s late plays. In both the civic and commercial theatrical contexts, such early English recognition blends the religious with the social, representative of Peter Berger’s concept of ‘alienation’. Such scenes present characters whose recognition of the other involves a suspension of socially destructive acts like betrayal and distrust and a corresponding openness to the other’s benevolence – a self-conscious interpretive focus that performs faith in the other.

This examines the production of alternative hagiographies, cultural pastimes, and miraculous theatricality in two Elizabethan plays featuring Saint Dunstan and the devil, the anonymous Knack to Know a Knave (1594) and Grim the Collier of Croyden (c. 1600) by William Houghton. While the former is a morality play and the latter comedy, both imagine Dunstan within an English landscape of miracles, magic, and traditions. Di Salvo shows how these plays read against John Foxe’s defamed account of Saint Dunstan in the Book of Martyrs without outright reverting to the pre-Reformation version archived in such collections as Caxton’s Golden Legend and Mirk’s Festial. Knack depicts Dunstan as a virtuous counsellor to the King whose ability to control the devil helps to rid England of vice and knavery. Grim begins by referencing Dunstan’s place in medieval legendaries and his canonization as a saint, but he is quickly upstaged by the devil he once conquered. In negotiating Dunstan’s vita into the plots of Knack and Grim, there is no acknowledgment of a Reformation between the time of King Edgar and Queen Elizabeth. However, the remixing of Dunstan’s legend suggests a folk revision enabled by the Reformation’s assault on the cult of the saints. In depicting Dunstan outside the context of reformist ecclesiastical history and through the repertoire of early theatricality, Knack and Grim archive a sustained association between dramatic sanctity and spectacular staging. These plays might not stand against reformation, but they do enact a mix of hagiography and theatricality that performs beyond it.

Seventeen of Shakespeare’s plays alone contain at least one clerical figure, ranging from the ‘churlish priest’ of Hamlet to the domineering Cardinal Wolsey in All Is True. These priests manifest a decided disinterest in the matters of theology, ecclesiology, liturgy, and soteriology that characterize their forebears in earlier dramatic traditions. Instead, they have more worldly, secular concerns which push the conventional boundaries of dramatic genres. In doing so, Shakespeare’s priests also explore the shifting function of the priest in Reformation England as a figure that retains ecclesiastical authority but whose theological agencies and liturgical activities differ markedly from priests of old. The first section examines clerical figures in late medieval and early Tudor English drama, including bishops from the Croxton Play of the Sacrament and The Pride of Life, the character Mercy from Mankind, and Five Wits from Everyman. If these late medieval plays characterize priests as defenders of orthodoxy and repudiators of vice, Tudor plays such as Bale’s King Johan and Three Laws and Heywood’s The Four PP recast priests as the target of a vituperative anti-clericalism that sponsors the reformist drama in England. The second section focuses on Shakespeare, whose plays chart a shift away from priests as invested primarily in religious concerns and towards priests as generic experimenters whose secular investments blur the lines of tragedy and comedy. These priests include Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet, Friar Francis in Much Ado about Nothing, and the figure of Sir Thopas the curate in Twelfth Night.

Harley MS 1927 contains a poem, signed July 1576, by Thomas Chaloner of Chester, a heraldic painter and genealogist, and titled ‘A coppie of the demonstractiones of parkers worke for the right honoyrable my good L. thEarle of Derbie’. The poem describes an elaborate decorated screen in the great hall at Lathom. This chapter explores possible connections between the Lathom screen, which depicted ‘the course of heaven and erthe’ (or the matter of ‘Astronomye … and Astrologie’), and performances by Elizabethan professional companies in the great hall of Lathom, as documented by the Derby Household Book. Manley examines the role of occult knowledge and magic in the plays of companies patronized by the fourth and fifth earls of Derby (specifically, The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, John of Bordeaux, and A Knack to Know a Knave) and speculates on some traditional performance practices (in mystery plays, saints’ plays, and post-Reformation biblical pageantry) that may have contributed to the Magian plays of the Derby companies, to the decorations of the Lathom hall, and to the possible synergies between them.

This chapter focuses on Wisdom and Twelfth Night to examine the transformation of how costume creates character. Despite the similarities of the use of costuming and disguise within the transition from medieval to Renaissance drama, it is evident that Wisdom uses disguise to bring about spiritual order; disguise is used as a temptation. Meanwhile, Twelfth Night is more concerned with how social decorum and social order can be brought about through the ploy of the disguised individual. An examination of the use of disguise on stage provides an excellent methodology through which to examine the use of costume to create ‘a double jeopardy’ in which the costumed character, an already disguised player, is further disguised on stage. The use of disguise in the late-fifteenth-century morality play Wisdom makes an ideal comparison with Shakespeare’s early-sixteenth-century Twelfth Night. Both plays use costume extensively to create ‘disguise’ and are thus useful comparators in assessing how they undertook Weimann’s notion of ‘(dis)closing the gap between the representation of character and the practice of role playing’ and the effect of that on the use of costume within these two plays more widely.

This chapter shows how The Castle of Perseverance and Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta take on a shared exploration of the environments of dying well – in other words, the places in which we find or situate ourselves (such as a bed, a scaffold, or an open field) as we breathe our last breaths. While this area of consideration is traditionally investigated by the English ars moriendi, a genre of consolation literature that explores the art of dying well, late medieval and early modern drama both explore and build on its claims by investigating the circumstances of dying in embodied, physical space. As they situate themselves within the scene of dying, both plays explore the enduring significance of shelter in relation to dying, navigating the tensions between the distinct environments of shelter and exposure that structure the event of dying. The two plays discussed here are engaged in a shared conversation about the possibilities and risks that lie in and around the space, architecture, and furniture of dying.

The introduction of a ship into medieval and early modern plays created a sense of anticipation in the audience because the vessel was likely to end up in a storm. Like the tempests that engulfed them, stage ships held transformative as well as spectacular properties in both the late-fifteenth-century Digby Mary Magdalene and in Shakespeare and Wilkins’ Pericles, Prince of Tyre. In the Digby play, the ship physically links the actions among a number of dramatic loci, most significantly, Jerusalem, Marseille, and Heaven. The sea journeys in the play also create a new sense of time and place in which, for the ‘shortt space’ of performance, the audience and players come together. The characters on the ship undergo a series of sea changes which trouble and alter their authority. These properties are amplified in Shakespeare’s employment of the ship in Pericles, which, via the medieval poet-narrator Gower, re-crafts aspects of the Digby Mary Magdalene. This chapter compares the use of the ship and the power dynamics in the storm scenes of these two plays, contending that, in being the vehicle that shapes their episodic narratives, it also becomes a space whereby relationships between men and women, player and spectator are transformed.

This chapter proffers a new reading of the play’s ghost, whose delight in response to Hieronimo’s spectacular revenge prompted Philip Edwards to exclaim ‘Marlowe never wrote a less Christian play’. The tendency to see Andrea’s ghost as filled with non-Christian (Senecan) revenge has an enduring history, yet he does not adhere to the Senecan model whereby it appears to the protagonist to command blood revenge. Goodland argues that Don Andrea’s ghost confounds categories. It is not completely outside the action of the play, neither is it limited to the frame, nor does it intervene in the play’s action to call for vengeance. Instead, the ghost undergoes an emotional journey to revenge as it witnesses, in the manner of a dream vision, the play’s spectacles of torment. Drawing on dream visions of Heaven and Hell, Goodland unis the Christian contours of Don Andrea’s ghost. She takes her cue from the ghost’s passage through the gates of horn ‘in twinkling of an eye’ to consider how language transforms theatrical space into an otherworldly dream vision that takes satirical aim at the Christian dogma that justified the excessiveness of divine vengeance and its attendant Earthly pleasures. While the ghost’s pleasure at witnessing the suffering of the play’s wrongdoers feels unchristian by today’s standards, it is aligned with the dogma promulgated by Gregory the Great, which made its way into the tradition of dream visions that inform the ethos of reversal in Kyd’s play.