INTRODUCTION

Critics of medieval drama locked into an evolutionary thesis of dramatic development that valued 'realism' and 'comedy' as marks of later and more highly developed dramatic 'organisms' found Chester's less exuberant style reflective of a primitive, undeveloped form of drama characteristic of an early date of composition. They were strengthened in this view by a persistent tradition in Chester that the plays were the oldest in England. Since the 1950s, however, the myth of early composition has been exposed and, after re-examining the internal and external documentary evidence relating to the plays, recent critics believe that Chester's cycle in its present form was the product of the sixteenth century and hence probably the latest of the English cycle texts. Moreover, there are indications in the prefatory Banns of the post-Reformation period that the cycle was even then considered different both from 'sophisticated' contemporary drama and from the cycle plays of other towns that were falling under disapproval because of their association with Roman Catholic doctrine.

Chester's distinctive interpretation of cyclic form and function should therefore be recognised as a conscious creation with its own goals and strengths. Freed from the condescension of earlier critics, Chester's achievement can now be appreciated as an attempt to articulate the mystery cycle as a coherent dramatic genre rather than as a conveniently loose chronological framework for the containment of dramatic and thematic diversity.

Medieval plays were not written for the theatre. They were put on in city streets, in churches, on playing fields, in college halls and in private houses, and they exploited each of these venues in its own distinctive way. The shape and acoustics of the venue, the skills of the actors, the nature of the audience and of the occasion, all presented certain constraints and certain opportunities. Add to this a variety of types of subject matter, and we have not one but a whole range of theatricalities.

Plays are for performing, and one recent branch of medieval theatre research has specialised in the informed 'recreation' of medieval performance conditions. This has been an eye-opening and salutary exercise. Because medieval theatre is so different from modern commercial theatre both in setting and intention, we modern investigators have had to break down our prejudices about the practical limits of staging and acting style. We have discovered, among other things, that actors can perform on a stage eight feet by ten feet; that twenty-foot-high pageant wagons are not necessarily doomed to overbalance; that long rhetorical speeches are not by definition 'boring'; that spectacle can speak more strongly than words; that it is possible to look the audience full in the face. Above all we have learnt to trust the plays themselves: that if we take them seriously as theatre, they will work. Medieval theatre has emerged not as childlike or primitive, but as different, and often highly sophisticated.

The casual reader of academic journals given over to medieval matters could be forgiven for thinking that more medieval drama has been produced in the twentieth century than was in its own time. Notices of future and reviews of past productions occupy a significant section of journals such as Medieval English Theatre (METh) and Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama (RORD) in proper recognition of the current academic and theatrical interest in the performance of medieval plays. Although the casual reader's impression is almost certainly false, created as much by the modern exercise of practical criticism as by the limited number of surviving medieval texts and records of performance, it is true that this century has seen an unprecedented interest in the revival of medieval drama. Indeed, the committed theatre-goer, as opposed to the casual reader, could probably have seen, within the last decade or two, a performance of almost every extant medieval English play text.

The occurrence of medieval drama revivals in the twentieth century may seem an historical phenomenon that encapsulates in time a single purpose, but it would be misleading to assume that the motives of revivalists were always the same, even though it may be possible to detect three generally distinct phases within the movement. The earliest productions of William Poel and Nugent Monck owed much to the antiquarian spirit of the time and the desire of these two actor/producers to extend their practical exploration of Elizabethan theatre texts and conventions of staging into what they and scholars of the time saw as the period of Shakespearean ancestry.

The bibliography is intended to serve two purposes: first, to support the system of brief reference used in the text and in many of the notes to the chapters; and second, to give a classified overview of the more important current work in the field of medieval English theatre. The arrangement of the bibliography is determined largely by the structure of the book and the likely needs of the majority of its users. Systematic bibliographies of medieval drama, general surveys, listings of documentary materials, editions and ancillary research works, such as facsimiles and concordances, are followed by a series of sections which reflect the bibliographical underpinning of the chapters on the plays themselves, in the order in which they appear. A series of special sections towards the end, such as 'Folk drama', Staging, Music and drama, Art and drama, and so on, answer to the topics discussed in chapter 12.

The bibliography includes all the works cited by bracketed serial number within the text, together with many other significant items, most of them published since around 1970. The detailed bibliographies in the first section provide ample reference to earlier work. For the editions of the plays cited within the text see pp. xviii-xix.

The earliest surviving dramatic use of Cornish is part of what may or may not be a play written on the back of a charter dated 1340, and the last is a single line in Richard Brome's The Northern Lasse, printed in 1632. The latter need not delay us; the somewhat garbled Cornish is used simply as something foreign. The former, however, has been seen as evidence for early secular drama in Cornwall and in England. In forty-one lines of rhymed strophic verse similar to that of later plays, a speaker offers a young lady to someone as a wife, and then the girl herself is given some advice on handling a husband: agree to his wishes without any intention of carrying them out. It has been suggested that the Charter Fragment represents the bawd's part in a comedy, but there is too little of it for any certainty, and even the inclusion of a Cornish place-name is not particularly helpful. There is evidence for the performance of genuinely secular plays (most notably of Robin Hood) in Cornwall, but texts have not survived and what language they were performed in is unclear.

Any attempt to consider medieval saints' plays as a genre is fraught with difficulty because of the paucity of extant examples, the ambiguity or incompleteness of records relating to auspices and to lost plays and the inherent difficulty of arriving at some sort of definition of form. A number of theorists have attempted to define this drama. J. M. Manly, in presenting a challenge to the evolutionary theory of drama, saw the saint's play as a spontaneous coming together of the drama and the saint's legend, which was a regular feature of the church sevice (32, pp. 585-6). legend was defined by G. H. Gerould as:

During the last few decades, the 'new theme' of medieval English theatre may be said to have swelled beyond all expectation. In the place of the modest harmonious arias of a few soloists we now confront a mighty but not totally co-ordinated anthem issuing from a many-throated chorus. In the past thirty years the status of medieval plays has been transformed, not merely through the advocacy of academics, but by the enthusiastic response of students and, even more remarkably, spectators. Much of the main repertory is accessible on the shelves of libraries and bookshops; civic and county archives are being scrutinised for practical details of local organisation and presentation. Periodicals and volumes replete with competing theories are announced frequently; live performances of medieval plays now seem as predictable a feature of the British summer as rain-threatened stagings of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Today there is probably greater awareness of the existence, nature and appeal of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English drama than at any time since its creation.

Almost certainly the most anthologised of all medieval English dramatic pieces is the so-called Second Shepherds' Play, containing the double story of Mak the sheep-stealer and the visit of the shepherds to Bethlehem. Through this public exposure, not only the play but the 'name' of the author also has become familiar – 'The Wakefield Master'. Not everyone who knows of the Second Shepherds', however, will automatically connect it with the thirty-two short plays (better called 'pageants') that together make up the Towneley cycle, or realise that it is not so much the 'second' as an alternative Shepherds' pageant: Alia eorundem (another of the same). Even knowing the relationship between the pageant, the Wakefield Master and the Towneley cycle does not, however, take you very far; why, for example Wakefield Master, but Towneley cycle?

'Wakefield' refers to the smallish industrial town in what used to be the West Riding of Yorkshire, once the centre of the extensive medieval manor of Wakefield. Since early in this century it has been claimed, with varying degrees of certainty, as the original home and place of performance of this cycle of pageants (76, p. xxxv; 75, p. xxviii). As the York play was to York, so, it was said, the Towneley cycle was to Wakefield. The name 'Wakefield Master' was hence created as a convenient reference name for the anonymous author of a strikingly original group of pageants within the cycle.

The predominance of East Anglia over all other regional theatrical traditions in late medieval England, as evidenced by the sheer number of recorded performances and by the variety of associated play texts, has been apparent since the time of Chambers. This fact, however, has ordinarily been obscured by the critical and historical attention (not undeserved) lavished upon the great civic cycle plays that flourished elsewhere in the country. Chambers, drawing together 'Representations of Mediaeval Plays' in Appendix W to his monumental The Mediaeval Stage, (23, vol. 11, pp. 329-406), listed all known towns and villages sponsoring or partaking in some kind of dramatic performance. Forty-eight of his total of 127 locations, spread over thirty-four counties of England, Ireland and Scotland - that is, nearly forty per cent - were located in the four counties, or parts of counties, that comprised East Anglia. More recent scholarship has of course identified many other such theatrically inclined towns and villages since Chambers compiled his data at the beginning of this century, and the total for East Anglia, now easily double or triple the number he turned up, simply reaffirms its primary position (252). Chambers himself puzzled over his figures, noting that although 'a vigorous and widespread dramatic activity throughout the length and breadth of the land ... naturally finds its fullest scope in the annually repeated performances of several amongst the greater cities, yet it is curious to observe in what insignificant villages it was from time to time found possible to organize plays'. (23, vol. 11, p. 109).

The question of Ibsen's relationship to feminism, whether one is referring specifically to the turn-of-the-century women's movement or more generally to feminism as an ideology, has been a vexed one. The view supporting Ibsen as feminist can be seen to lie along a spectrum of attitudes with Ibsen as quasi-socialist at one end and Ibsen as humanist at the other. Proponents of the first stance might point to an amateur performance of A Doll's House (1879; dates following plays refer to publication) in 1886 in a Bloomsbury drawing room in which all the participants were not only associated with the feminist cause but had achieved or would achieve prominence in the British socialist movement: Eleanor Marx, the daughter of Karl, in the role of Nora; her common-law husband Edward Aveling, who played Helmer; William Morris's daughter May, portraying Mrs Linde; and, as Krogstad, none other than Bernard Shaw. Together with Aveling, Eleanor Marx (who learned Norwegian to enable her to translate Ibsen) also produced The Lady from the Sea (1888) in London in 1891. Looking at Ibsen's advocates in terms of political groups, one may safely claim that his strongest supporters were found in socialist circles.

In a 1983 interview Michel Foucault characterized his work by connecting it with the complicated status of formalism in twentieth-century thought, claiming that the latter marked “one of the most powerful and complex forces in twentieth-century Europe” (FL, 234). Included under this rubric were a wide variety of expressions and esthetics, rational and political – all infinitely disrupting the continuities of tradition. The emergence of structuralism itself was equally aligned with this trend in an attempt to clarify its status (ibid., 235). The complicity between Michel Foucault's authorship and such formalism (like that with “structuralism,” equally itself a complex force ceaselessly claiming a mathematical base) is longstanding, and his major works attested to it from the outset (see OT, 384). It doubtless too figures Foucault's own complicity with modernism. Indeed, from the beginning to the end of his work Foucault was concerned with what he called in 1967 “the complex relations of forms” (FL, 27). Even his notorious denial of the subject for the sake of a certain authorial anonymity would not only be identified by him with the “revolutionaries” of esthetic modernism like Mallarme or Roussel but also with the discoveries of Bourbaki.

What ultimately distinguishes Michel Foucault's own commitment to formalism was doubtless its complexity: one uniting the complexity in the play between syntax and semantics, figure and constraint, discourse and event. Unlike the structuralists, who had platonized structure - and yet unlike the positivists, with whom he was, initially in any case, too often aligned — Foucault realized that were the analysis of language and language-like entities in terms of their formal properties to be carried out, the success of such projects depended upon realizing, as he had put it as early as 1967, that “discourses are unities of function” (FL, 26)

In retrospect the 1840s appear relatively undramatic in Norwegian literary history. Writers were mostly cultivating collective memories and giving written form to folk tales and popular ballads and in other ways working on the construction of a national mythology, in historical studies as well as in poetry. There was no permanent theatre established in the country, although several towns by this time had more or less appropriate theatre buildings where itinerant theatre companies, mostly Danish, could perform vaudevilles and plays according to the popular taste of the small bourgeois audiences.

Theatrical activity in Norway was nothing more than a pale reflection of a Danish tradition which seemed to be losing the vigour it had enjoyed in the early decades of the century. Under such circumstances it was understandable that practically nobody in Norway was giving much attention to the art of writing for the theatre. In Grimstad the young assistant pharmacist Henrik Ibsen had no chance to acquaint himself with the standards and techniques of professional theatrical performance, but he must have been an avid reader of classical and contemporary literature. His reading in those early years included dramatic works by Shakespeare, Schiller, Ludvig Holberg and Adam Oehlenschlager, and his literary talent and ambitions were clearly recognized by his few intimate friends. At this point it was not Ibsen's primary intention to earn his living as a writer. In his spare time he was busy preparing himself for the entrance examination to the University of Christiania, where he hoped to be accepted as a student of medicine.

Belles letters has become a vague term, collecting so broad a reference that it now designates the whole of “humane letters” (litterae humaniores) – that is, all imaginative literature or all writing evincing “literariness.” Prior to the term's semantic expansion in the 1760s, it had a precise employment, naming a mode of writing that subordinated the traditional tasks of edification, revelation, and memorialization to the work of stimulating social pleasure. Belles lettres was characterized more by its effects than its forms. “Ease” and “agreeableness,” qualities adjusted to the taste of the “gentle reader,” were the primary belletristic virtues.

Edmund Waller imported the mode from France into the literary communications of the Stuart court. Belles lettres flourished in England in conjunction with the rise of urban sociability in the 1670s. New communities based on shared taste, friendship, or common interest formed in postfire London and in the burgeoning resorts. In the mixed-sex assemblies at the spas and in the male tavern clubs of the metropolis, aspirants to gentility embraced the court's new sociable manner of wit. Writing served talk in these circles, providing scripts for oral performance (club disquisitions, vers de société) and recording memorable sallies of wit (bon mots, toasts, impromptus, epigrams). Belles lettres disavowed writtenness, adopting the guise of conversation. Concomitantly, conversation assumed great weight in thought about society and letters. As the preamble to the 1728 constitution of the Harvard Philomusarian Club declared, conversation was “The Basis of Friendship, The fundamental Principle of Society, The Great Prerogative of Mankind.”

The single most comprehensive reference work for the English-speaking student of Ibsen's plays is the eight-volume The Oxford Ibsen (1960-77). Edited by James McFarlane, the set comprises translations by McFarlane and others of all of Ibsen's plays, based on the Norwegian texts in the standard edition: Henrik Ibsen, Samlede Verker, Hundreårsutgave, Oslo, 1928-57 (Henrik Ibsen, Collected Works, Centenary Edition), and includes translations of extant drafts, fragments and the 'Epic Brand'. As well, each volume begins with a lengthy, authoritative critical essay by McFarlane, situating its plays in Ibsen's life and times and setting out significant lines of interpretive inquiry. Each volume concludes with appendices and a selected bibliography. The appendices include for each of the plays in that volume: discussions of dates of composition; draft manuscripts; some relevant comments by Ibsen and his contemporaries; and contemporary reception of book sales and play productions.

All of Foucault's major works are histories of a sort, which is enough to make him a historian of a sort. The challenge is to determine what sort of history he does and thus what kind of historian he is. It is fortunate that Foucault has adopted distinctive terms for his specific approaches at different phases of his career. His early works, the ones that earned him his reputation, were called “archaeologies,” the subsequent ones “genealogies”; and the volumes on the history of sexuality that appeared at the time of his death he called “problematizations.”

These approaches do not exclude each other. Rather, like successive waves breaking on the sand, each is discovered after the fact to have been an implicit interest of the earlier one, for which it served as the moving force. Thus Foucault insists that the question of power relations, which characterizes his genealogies, was what his archaeologies were really about and, subsequently, that the issue of truth and subjectivity, the explicit focus of his final works, had been his basic concern all along. Although these avowals reveal a greater desire for consistency and coherence than Foucault is supposed to have possessed, much less to have been able to warrant, they hypothesize a unity among the three approaches that enables us to present each in more than sequential order. Accordingly, after a survey of these three modes of “history” in their turn, I shall address four issues that give Foucault's approach to history its distinctive character, namely, the topics of nominalism, the historical event, the spatialization of Reason, and the nature of problematization.

Rebecca, Ellida, Hedda: the three heroines of Ibsen's plays from this period, Rosmersholm (1886), The Lady from the Sea (1888) and Hedda Gabler (1890), have names which have a similar ring to them; all sound slightly unfamiliar to a Norwegian ear, have an air of 'otherness' which marks them off from convention. The centrality of the heroines in these plays is underlined by the fact that two of them give the plays their titles, the only Ibsen plays where this occurs apart from the early Lady Inger (1857) - whereas as many as ten plays refer to the names or functions of male characters in their titles (Catiline, OlafLiljekrans, The Pretenders, Brand, Peer Gynt, Emperor and Galilean, An Enemy of the People, The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman).

The otherness of these heroines is apparent from the beginning of the action; all are outsiders in their society, at odds with the mores of the community in which they find themselves, unhappy with an environment which forces them to live inauthentically. They have all to a greater or lesser extent tried to conform, but at the cost of the repression of their 'wild side'. They are pagans living in a Christian society. All are passionate women who, it could be argued, have got themselves involved with the wrong man. Neither Rosmer, Wangel nor Tesman are as their partners would have them be; they lack the passion to respond to their women's needs. As a result all three women have focused their sensuality on a substitute figure. Rebecca has invented for herself an idealized 'Rosmer' who bears little resemblance to the actual man, Ellida recalls her dream lover from the past and Hedda turns her energies to rekindling her highly charged relationship with Lovborg. The clash between aspiration and reality drives them all to breaking point.

'I have to keep working - creating one work after another - until the day I die.' When Ibsen gave these words to Arnold Rubek, to define what it means being an artist, he did not know, nor intend, that When We Dead Awaken was to be his last play - the Epilogue to the whole long row of 'one work after another' created over fifty years. To us the irony is twofold: Rubek is to die that very night, in his attempt to awaken, as a man and as an artist, from the 'dead'; Ibsen was to become too ill or frail to keep working until the day he died. For all that, Rubek's words may serve as a paradigm of the extraordinary drive which was an essential part of Ibsen's creativity, which had resulted in a regular output of 'contemporary' plays from Pillars of Society (1877) onwards, and which did not slacken when he returned to live in Norway in 1891, there to produce that series of plays which he somewhat grudgingly admitted to having had in mind when he used the term 'A Dramatic Epilogue': The Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolf (1894), John Gabriel Borkman (1896) and When We Dead Awaken (1899).