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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 February 2009
In 1976 a medieval and renaissance theatre history project was launched under the masthead Records of Early English Drama (now more familiarly known as REED). The official launch had taken two years of planning by scholars from Britain, Canada and the United States, and was given assurance for the future through a ten-year major Editorial Grant from the Canada Council. REED's stated goal – then as now – was to find, transcribe and publish evidence of dramatic, ceremonial and musical activity in Great Britain before the theatres were closed in 1642. The systematic survey undertaken would make available for analysis records relating to the evolution of English theatre from its origins in minstrelsy, through the flowering of drama in the renaissance, to the suppression first of local and then of professional entertainment under the Puritans.
1 This aspect of the Canada Council funding was taken over in 1978 by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. REED has also received vital support in recent years from the US government's National Endowment for the Humanities and from the University of Toronto.
2 At about the same time, Charles Phythian-Adams published his framework for the systematic study of folk customs in the influential booklet Local History and Folklore (1975).Google Scholar His introduction (p.6) shares a theme in tune with REED's founding guidelines: “The sources for such a study are so scattered that only through a continuous and disciplined effort on the part of many local historians will it be possible even to approach a reasonable coverage of such customs for different communities, regions and periods.’
3 As might be expected of England's dominant metropolis, London is the most complex area of study. Research has been organized along pre-1642 boundaries: the Cities of London and Westminster, Middlesex (excluding the two cities) and Surrey (including Southwark and the South Bank). London has been further subdivided into corporation and guild records, and ecclesiastical records. In addition, there will be an Inns of Court collection.
4 The idiosyncrasies of manuscript survival largely dictate the town, villages and households included in REED volumes. See, for example, Wasson, John M., ed., Devon, REED (Toronto, 1986)Google Scholar, which has substantial entries for the city of Exeter, as well as Barnstaple, Dartmouth, Plymouth and several smaller towns and villages, but virtually no entertainment records from Totnes, the principal household of the Courtenay family, or the religious houses of Plympton Priory and Tavistock Abbey (cf. ‘Gaps in the Records’, Devon, xxvii–xxviii). On the other hand, entertainment must sometimes be studied primarily in private households or parishes in counties such as Lancashire or Derbyshire, where urban development came later.
5 See, for example, Devon, pp.86–96 (for Exeter, 1417–40), and Ingram, R.W., ed., Coventry, REED (Toronto, 1981), 327–56 (for 1590–1600).Google Scholar For a fuller discussion, see my paper, ‘Players on tour: New Evidence from Records of Early English Drama’, in McGee, C.E., ed., The Elizabethan Theatre, (Port Credit, 1988), 55–72.Google Scholar
6 Murray, , English Dramatic Companies 1558–1642, vol 1 (1910), viii.Google Scholar Murray's solution was to ‘select for examination only the more promising records in each town’ and in some instances to rely upon antiquarian printed transcripts (often inaccurate or selective). Murray's work is still used as a standard reference work by many, although REED volumes, published and in progress, supersede the evidence that he collected.
7 Murray, op. cit., and E.K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage, 2 vols (1903), and The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (1923).
8 See Douglas, Audrey and Greenfield, Peter, eds, Cumberland/Westmorland/Gloucestershire, REED (Toronto, 1986), 122, 129–32, 202, 204, 208.Google Scholar
9 For the Richard II performance, see Schoenbaum, S., William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (New York, 1975), 160.Google Scholar
10 The records of four counties, Kent, Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, have already been published by the Malone Society. Of these, Kent will definitely be researched further by REED (with Giles Dawson's approval) in two parts, east and west of Medway.
11 It is important to distinguish between the sixteenth-century Whitsun play cycle which survives in several manuscripts, and the Corpus Christi play (possibly a passion play), first referred to in the Coopers' records (loose papers) in 1422. See Clopper, Lawrence M., ed., Chester, REED (Toronto, 1979), liii–livGoogle Scholar, and Clopper, , ‘The History and Development of the Chester Cycle’, Modern Philology, 75 (1978), 219–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
12 The 1503 list of twenty-seven pageants for the annual Corpus Christi procession in Hereford's Mayor's Book (Herefordshire County Record Office, folio 176) and other sixteenth-century civic documents give no indication that the ‘pageants’ were dramatized in the manner of the York cycle (see Klausner, David, ed., Herefordshire/Worcestershire, forthcoming).Google Scholar
13 See Devon, p.77 ff. Exeter had the same number of town waits (three) as York in this period, but an attempt to establish a Corpus Christi play produced by guilds ‘pro maiori comodo & honore Ciuitatis’ similar to the York or Coventry model apparently met with failure in the early fifteenth century. The number, organization and finances of Exeter guilds at the time probably could not compare with those of York or Coventry and the Corpus Christi play proposed may never have been more ambitious than episodes of a passion play. However, there was also local obstruction by the Skinners' guild which traditionally mounted a play on Corpus Christi as their special feastday (op. cit., 82–3).
14 See All Saints' churchwardens' accounts, KG2/2/1, on deposit at the Surrey Record Office in Kingston upon Thames. Kingston falls into the first tier of communities showing urban characteristics as defined by Clark, Peter and Slack, Paul, eds, Crisis and Order in English Towns 1500–1700: Essays in Urban History (1972), 4.Google Scholar
15 See, for example, Dawson, Giles, ed., ‘Records of Plays and Players in Kent 1450–1642’, Collections, Malone Society, vol. 7 (1965), 182–6.Google Scholar
16 See Chester, 65–117.
17 Phythian-Adams, Charles has convincingly assessed Coventry's decline in Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages (1979).Google Scholar But see Ingram's, R.W. discussion of the continuity of the cycle's performance until 1579 (Coventry, xviii–xix).Google Scholar
18 Carlisle's was probably the earliest, with a tradition extending back into the late sixteenth century (Cumberland/Westmorland/Gloucestershire, 26 and 52, note 39). Chester's St George's Day race was established in 1610 (Chester, 258–62) and Newark's by 1619 (Chamberlain's Receipt, Newark Museum: Bundle D6.75/C 40 no. 257, to be published in John C. Coldewey, ed., Nottinghamshire collection for REED).
