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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2009
During the late Middle Ages and until after the middle of the sixteenth century, outdoor production of the British drama took place, in general, in three different kinds of temporary theatre. These are the theatre of a circular platea or Place surrounded by “scaffolds”; the theatre of pageant-wagons each performing part of a scriptural cycle at successive “stops” throughout a town or city; and the theatre of a booth stage set up in a marketplace or on a village green. In recent years much new information has accumulated about each of these three kinds of theatre; new problems have been defined; and it is now possible to advance some new evidence and some new interpretations of old evidence. This article is therefore an attempt to sum up the state of our present knowledge about the three major kinds of outdoor theatre in Britain before the age of Shakespeare. Since that knowledge is in some respects still imperfect and tentative, I shall deal chiefly with questions of physical form, since here, thanks to a fortuitous abundance of pictorial evidence, our information is fuller and more precise than in the case of origins or of use.
1 The Medieval Theatre in the Round (London, 1957)Google Scholar. Southern's general position has recently been challenged by Natalie Crohn Schmitt, who interprets the Castle of Perseverance drawing not as a plan for a theatre but as a design for a set consisting of a castle surrounded by a moat or very low wall; “Was There a Medieval Theatre in the Round?”, Theatre Notebook, XXIII (1968–1969), 130–142; XXIV(1969–1970), 18–25Google Scholar. The argument is unconvincing. The author, while conceding(p. 25) the existence of a general class of round medieval theatres such as that reconstructed by Southern, makes strained interpretations of the text of the Castle drawing, adduces much literary and iconographical evidence of no demonstrable theatrical relevance, and neglects much pictorial evidence of patent theatrical relevance such as the Ordinalia and Meriasek plans and Fouquet's “Rape of the Sabine Women.” She also leaves her reconstruction conveniently vague through failing to illustrate its dimensions and the relationship of its parts in a plan or sketch.—Another recent article challenging details of Southern's position is by Merle Fifield, “The Arena Theatres in Vienna Codices 2535 and 2536,” Comparative Drama, II (1968–1969), 259–282Google Scholar. This is a discussion of seven early sixteenth century miniatures depicting allegorical castles. The assumption of theatrical relevance seems unwarranted.—Important new evidence for the use of a round earthwork theatre in Elizabethan times has recently been published by Dodd, Kenneth M.. “Another Elizabethan Theater in the Round,” Shakespeare Quarterly, XXI (1970), 125–156CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Reproduction in Halliday, F.E., tr., The Legend of the Rood (London, 1955), p. 27Google Scholar.
3 The word there is presumably here used in the now archaic sense of “where” (in reference to Place).—I have wondered whether the word water could here be used in the sense of “ditch,” in which case it would be possible to assume that a dry ditch might be in question. However, the OED cites no evidence that would support interpretation of the term water in the sense of “ditch” (whether filled with water or not); and the traditional literal interpretation of the term is borne out by the fact that the presence of the “water” (an essence that must be contained) is dependent upon the condition that a “ditch” (a potential container) be “made.” Despite the very real difficulties of filling so large a ditch with water, it appears that the Castle plan does indeed call for a water-filled ditch. The easiest way of filling such a ditch would have been to divert a nearby stream. It need hardly be added that, since the chief purpose of the water-filled ditch would have been to control the access of audience to the show, production in a round earthwork theatre does not require the ditch to be filled with water.
4 It had happened before. Maumbury Rings at Dorchester, originally a round “henge monument” of the Bronze Age, was converted in Roman times into an oval amphitheater. See Dewar, H.S.L., “Maumbury Rings,” Dorset Monographs, IV (1968)Google Scholar. The use of an Iron Age hill fort as a fairground in the nineteenth centurn is described by Thomas Hardy in Ch. 50 of Far From the Madding Crowd.
5 Fox, Aileen, South West England (Ancient Peoples and Places, London, 1964), p. 125Google Scholar; Holman, Treve, “Cornish Plays and Playing Places,” Theatre Notebook, IV (1949–1950), 52–54Google Scholar; Nance, R. Morton, “The Plen an Gwary or Cornish Playing-Place.” Journal of the Royal Institute of Cornwall, XXIV (1935), 190–211Google Scholar.—In the summer of 1969 Perran Round was used for a performance of the Cornish Ordinalia by the Drama Department of the University of Bristol. The production is described by Roddy, Kevin, in “Revival of the Cornish Mystery Plays in St. Piran's ‘Round,’“ New Theatre Magazine, IX (1968–1969) 16–21Google Scholar.—Other examples possibly suitable for use as a theatre are Castle Dore hill fort, Golant, Cornwall, and Resugga hill fort, St. Stephen-in-Brannel, Cornwall; photographs in Fox, Plates 69 and 72.
6 Borlase's entrances to Perran Round are too small, and the ends of the hill, as depicted in the plan, are not properly rounded off; the entrances look like an afterthought, as if drawn incorrectly from memory.
7 Fox, South West England, p. 40; Thomas, Stanley, Pre-Roman Britain (London, 1965)Google Scholar; Ashbee, Paul, The Bronze Age Round Barrow in Britain (London, 1960), Ch. 9Google Scholar; Joseph, J.K. St., “Air Reconnaissance in Britain,” in Recent Archaeological Excavations in Britain, ed. Bruce-Mitford, R.S. (London, 1956)Google Scholar.
8 The Satire was performed at Linlithgow in 1540, at Cupar in Fife in 1552, at Edinburgh in 1554, and (probably) at Perth. See Mill, Anna J., “Representations of Lyndsay's Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis,” PMLA, XLVII (1932), 636–651Google Scholar, and MacQueen, John, “Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estatis,” Studies in Scottish Literature, III (1965–1966), 129–143Google Scholar. The chief source of the text is the Charteris quarto of 1602, EETS, No. 37 (London, 1869), from which quotations (modernized) are taken. There is another substantive text in the Bannatyne Manuscript, ed. W. Tod Ritchie, Scottish Text Society (Edinburgh, 1928–1933).
9 The Bannatyne Manuscript eliminates the option: “Here shall John run to loup o'er the water. And he shall fall in the midst of it.”
10 “Henge as Theatre,” forthcoming in Theatre Notebook.
11 Southern does show ladders in a preliminary sketch of a small hill-and-ditch theatre whose scaffolds are fronted with a shallow forestage.
12 Extant plays performed in a Place-and-scaffolds theatre are The Castle of Perseverance, the N-Town Cycle, the Cornish Orlinalia, the Digby Herod, the Digby Mary Magdalene, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, The Life of St. Meriasek, Duk Moraud, A Satire of the Three Estates, The Pride of Life (probably), and the Digby Conversion of St. Paul (probably; see note 38 below).
13 Color reproductions in Laver, James, Isabella's Triumph (London, 1947)Google Scholar, and Hartnoll, Phyllis, The Concise History of Theatre (London, 1968), No. 37Google Scholar.
14 A complete set of reproductions in Even, Edward van, L'Omgang de Louvain (Brussels and Louvain, 1863)Google Scholar, and Kernodle, George R., “The Medieval Pageant Wagons of Louvain,” Theatre Annual, II (1943), 58–62Google Scholar.
15 The “medieval” wagons of Figures 9–12 may be compared with the “baroque” wagons illustrated in Hodges, C. Walter, The Globe Restored (London, 1968), Plates 31 (the Brussels Isabella wagon), 40, 42Google Scholar; Roeder-Baumbach, Irmengard von, Versieringen bij Blijde Inkomsten (Antwerp, 1943), passimGoogle Scholar; and Nagler, A.M., Theatre Festivals of the Medici (New Haven, 1964), passimGoogle Scholar.
16 Text (modernized) from Chambers, E.K., The Mediaeval Stage (Oxford, 1903), II, 388Google Scholar.
17 Text (modernized) from Greg, W.W. and Salter, F.M., The Trial and Flagellation with Other Studies in the Chester Cycle (London, 1935), pp. 147, 166Google Scholar.
18 My thanks are due to Professor Alan H. Nelson for privately communicating this point.
19 It should be added that Rogers' description has sometimes been interpreted as implying a two-story structure set on the wagon bed, the expression “all open on the top” being understood in the sense of without a roof. However, the adherents of this interpretation do not take into account that the “lower” or firststory “room,” being conceived of as a tiring-room, would have had to be closed off from view of the audience. The interpretation may have been influenced by evidence for the use (though in a fashion altogether different from the English style of production) of two-story pageant-wagons in Spain in the seventeenth century (see note 22, below); and by Strutt's, Joseph fantastic account in his Manners and Customs of the English People (London, 1776), III, 130Google Scholar, to the effect that “when the sacred mysteries were the only theatrical performances, what is now called the stage did then consist of three several platforms or stages raised one above another,” etc. Further on, it becomes clear that Strutt's conception is in accordance with his fanciful notions regarding the structure of the Elizabethan stage, which he understands as developing from the postulated three story medieval structure.
20 Rogers has a bad reputation as a source of information, in part because of historical confusion exposed by Salter, F.M. in Mediaeval Drama in Chester (Toronto, 1955)Google Scholar. However, Rogers appears to be generally reliable in his description of the form of the pageant-wagons and also in his account of how they were used in stop-to-stop production.
21 Early English Stages, p. 173. Wickham's theory is challenged in an article by Young, M. James entitled “The York Pageant Wagon,” Speech Monographs, XXXIV (1967), 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This article contains useful information but is vitiated by the author's failure to employ pictorial evidence, his dubious assumption (in view of descents to the ground called for in the plays) that the several locales sometimes required by a given play were to be found on a single wagon, and his use (p. 11) of a modern editor's stage-direction as though it were original text.
22 Shergold, Norman D. and Varey, J.E., “Autos Sacramentales in Madrid, 1644,” Hispanic Review, XXVI (1958), 52–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Varey, J.E., “La mise en scène de l'auto sacramental à Madrid au XVIe et XVIIe et XVIIe siècles,” in Le Lieu théâtral à la Renaissance, ed. Jacquot, Jean (Paris, 1964), pp. 215–225Google Scholar.
23 Extant plays performed in accordance with the technique of stop-to-stop production are the Chester Cycle, the York Cycle, the Wakefield Cycle, the two surviving plays of the Coventry Cycle, and the Norwich “Creation of Eve.”
24 Southern, Richard, The Open Stage (London, 1953)Google Scholar; Hodges, C. Walter, The Globe Restored (London, 1953)Google Scholar; Wickham, Glynne, Early English Stages (London, 1959)Google Scholar.
25 Illustrative drawings in Hodges, The Globe Restored, Reconstruction Sketches Nos. 1–2, and Hosley, R., “The Playhouses and the Stage,” in A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed. Muir, Kenneth and Schoenbaum, S. (Cambridge, 1971), Figs. 2–3Google Scholar.
26 Numerous examples of such language have been collected by Huganir, Kathryn, “Medieval Theatres,” Theatre Annual, XXIII (1967), 34–45Google Scholar, and Marshall, Mary H., “Theatre in the Middle Ages: Evidence from Dictionaries and Glosses,” Symposium, IV (1950), 1–39Google Scholar.
27 Reproductions in Nicoll, Allardyce, The Development of the Theatre (London, 1927), Figs. 72, 74Google Scholar.
28 The Seven Ages of the Theatre (London, 1961), pp. 120–121, 161Google Scholar. See also Bieber, Margarete, The History of the Greek and Roman Theater, 2nd ed. (Princeton, 1961), Ch. 10, esp. p. 146Google Scholar.
29 Extant plays suitable for performance on a booth stage are Mankind, Everyman, a number of moral interludes, farces such as John John, Tib, and Sir John, and plays such as Cambyses and Gammer Gurton's Needle—if, in each case, the play in question was indeed performed outdoors.
30 Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656); text (modernized) from Chambers, , The Mediaeval Stage, II, 360Google Scholar.
31 The Wakefield Mystery Plays (London, 1961)Google Scholar, Introduction. Joseph, Stephen, in The Story of the Playhouse in England (London, 1963)Google Scholar, has (apparently) illustrated Rose's theory of grouped wagons in an attractive drawing. (But some of the theatrical structures shown in this drawing cannot be authenticated from contemporary sources.) Temperate skepticism regarding Rose's theory, insofar as it relates to the Wakefield Cycle, has been expressed by A.C. Cawley in a paper on “Presentation of the Wakefield Plays” presented at the 1969 meeting of the MLA Medieval Drama Seminar.
32 The time problem is even more acute than Rose suggested, as has been pointed out independently by Alan H. Nelson in a paper on stop-to-stop production at York presented at the 1968 meeting of the MLA Medieval Drama Seminar and by Ruth Gaede in an unpublished study of pageant-wagon staging (see following note). Nelson's paper has now been published as “Principles of Processional Staging: York Cycle,” Modern Philology, LXVII (1969–1970), 303–320Google Scholar.
33 “The Theatre of the English Pageant Wagons, with Particular Attention to the Cycle Plays of Chester and York” (diss., Brandeis University, 1970)Google Scholar.
34 The term station-to-station production would be more “medieval,” since individual stops were sometimes called stations (they were also called places), but the terms station and station-to-station do not immediately suggest recent or imminent movement of a wagon as do the terms stop and stop-to-stop. Moreover, it is convenient to reserve the term station for particular theatrical positions: upper station, curtained station, music station, audience station, etc.—For what I have called stop-to-stop production Alan H. Nelson uses the term true-processional production (op. cit., p. 303). This term will, of course, serve as well as another as an arbitrary convenience to designate the thing itself. Nevertheless, the term true-processional has a disadvantage. The adverb true distinguishes what I have called stop-to-stop production from processional (what I have called moving) production. In the sense of procession between performances stop-to-stop production is more truly “processional” than moving production. But in another sense—procession during performance—moving production is more truly “processional” than stop-to-stop production. One could (depending on the specific sense attributed to processional) apply the term true-processional (or false-processional) to either mode of production.
35 As at Brussels in 1496; see Borcherdt, H.H., Das europäische Theater im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance (Leipzig, 1935), p. 140Google Scholar.
36 As at Coventry in 1498; see Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, ed. Craig, Hardin, EETS, ext. ser., No. 87 (London, 1902), p. 117Google Scholar.
37 As at Madrid in 1623; see Evans, M. Blakemore, “‘An Early Type of Stage,’” Modern Philology, IX (1911–1912), 121–126Google Scholar.
38 Still another mode of production may be involved in the English saint's play The Conversion of St. Paul, where spectators are apparently invited to proceed with the actors from one station to another. But I doubt whether the usual interpretation of this text is correct. Such a theatrical technique would be pointless, since the only purpose of procession, whether of actors or of audience, is to bring the moving show to successive different stationary audiences or successive different moving audiences to the stationary show. Moreover, the technique is without any analogue in the staging of medieval drama that I am aware of. A full discussion of the problem, together with the suggestion that The Conversion of St. Paul was staged in accordance with the Place-and-scaffolds technique, may be found in the article by Mary del Villar. “The Staging of The Conversion of St. Paul,” forthcoming in Theatre Notebook.
39 This article is based on a paper presented at the 1964 meeting of the MLA Medieval Drama Seminar. I am indebted to Professor Norman Sanders for a very helpful suggestion, and I am especially grateful to Dr. Richard Southern for making the drawings which illustrate the article.
