This chapter examines the pinnacles of Black British theatre from the 1950s to the 2020s. It attempts to reconstruct the historiography of Black British theatre in a way that emphasises Black practitioners who wielded agency in hostile environments and contributed to reconfiguring what it means to work in British theatre. It builds on existing scholarship that acknowledges the social, political, and economic issues faced by the theatre industry to offer an analysis of how issues of belonging and nation are reflected in work produced. It traces the key historical trajectories of Black British theatre over three generations organised by similar concerns rather than time periods. It begins exploring the first generation of Black playwrights and the impact of the written play text. Its examination of the second generation acknowledges the development of Black theatre companies in the 1980s, focusing on the role state subsidy played in these companies’ deeply uneven longevity. Lastly, its focus on the third generation explores the structural changes pursued by Black makers, performers, directors, designers, producers, and audiences that demand that we renegotiate what is invoked by ‘Black British theatre’.

This chapter examines the newly expanded and transformed theatre ecology enabled by the post-war rise of central government subsidy to the arts. It explores subsidy’s ambitions, achievements, and benefits, but also its turbulence and the ideological risks embedded in its deeply ambivalent objectives to foster elite arts but also democratise the arts. The chapter begins by giving a history of British theatre subsidy and considers its contribution to the development of theatre as one of Britain’s great cultural assets through its visionary promotion of such things as artists’ independence, the expansion of theatre infrastructure, and a conception of theatre as a civic right. The chapter then considers some of the hazards arising from how theatre subsidy has been practised by the Arts Council of Great Britain (and successor organisations), especially its tendency to reinforce elite privileges of metropolitanism, class, and whiteness. The chapter critiques the elitism of British arts subsidy’s legacy and proposes transformation of its practices to become more accountable, more democratic, and more dispersed, helping to make British theatre and culture more diverse and better informed by a greater variety of imaginations.

This chapter presents a history of directorial practice in the post-war British theatre to argue that directors have been able to assert their authority over the sector thanks to their operation at the intersections of art and finance, organisation and creativity. This analysis of the work of directing owes a great deal to Ric Knowles’s development of ‘materialist semiotics’, and to Stuart Hall’s readings of the politics of cultural production and reception. The chapter extends Knowles’s and Hall’s insights into theatre production through three parallel accounts of theatre directing in the post-war period. These focus on the managerial and administrative position of the Artistic Director (key examples include Michael Buffong, Stephen Daldry, Peter Hall, Paulette Randall); ‘auteur’ directors who create theatrical ‘performance texts’ (Joan Littlewood, Simon McBurney, Katie Mitchell, Emma Rice), and directors whose artistry is to be found in social production, the shaping of relations between people in public space (Geraldine Connor, Jenny Sealey, Lois Weaver). Through this analysis of a wide range of directorial practices, the chapter aims to concretise the multiple forces and interests that govern the theatre sector, and thereby expose the social relations that shape its creative practices, and the political interests that govern them.

This overview of Iceland’s medieval history is divided into three phases: firstly, from settlement in the ninth century to 1096−7, which marks the emergence of the Icelandic Church; secondly, from the appearance of Iceland’s earliest written historical sources to the ceding of independence to Norway in 1262/4; and finally, to the end of the fourteenth century. It shows how Iceland’s marginality to the rest of Europe, its lack of a centralized authority and the blurring of historicity and fiction in its most prominent texts have affected understanding of Icelandic history and problematized its historiography. The chapter begins with discussion of the two primary native sources, Ari Þorgilsson’s Islendingabók (The Book of Icelanders) and Landnámabók (The Book of Settlements), their accounts of settlement and conversion, and the value of archaeology as a source. The second phase details the growth of the church and monasteries as places of learning, and how the church’s increasing power led to clashes with the secular elite, resulting in the chaos and violence of the Sturlungaöld. The final phase concerns Iceland’s loss of independence, economic condition and relations with Norway.

Court poetry is the label given to skaldic poetry in dróttkvætt (court metre) or one of its many variations, delivered as praise of rulers by Icelandic, Norwegian and Orcadian poets. This chapter discusses its typical content, including battle, voyages, praise, self-referential allusions to poetry, and mythical and religious references, both Christian and pre-Christian. The characteristic techniques of skaldic poetry – complex metre, diction (especially kennings) and word order, including clause arrangement – are described in detail. The three main forms of skaldic poetry, the drápa, flokkr and vísur, are distinguished, and subgenres of skaldic poetry such as ekphrasis, genealogical and historical poems, and eddic-style praise poems are described. Other types of court poetry, not straightforwardly encomiastic, are also considered. The social context and purpose of court poetry is explained, and the chapter concludes with a survey of the transmission, influence and modern reconstruction of court poems. Court poetry was such a useful medium for entertaining warrior elites that it endured for four centuries, and the continued inventiveness of court poets is noted.

The Introduction describes the distinctive character of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, arguing that in range, quality and originality this body of literature rivals anything produced elsewhere in the Middle Ages. Highlighting the enduring importance, influence and popularity of this unique corpus of literature, it sets out the rationale for a volume providing a comprehensive account of its history and development. It then outlines the reasons for organizing the chapters of this volume primarily by the time and place of their texts’ setting, rather than any putative order of composition, in order to emphasize the fundamental intertextuality of Old Norse-Icelandic literary genres and the diversity of genre, style and worldview which these texts encompass. After this, the contents and approach of each section of the History are introduced in turn.

This chapter deals with the fornaldarsögur (sagas of olden times), defined as legendary sagas about events in Nordic countries before the settlement of Iceland. It sets out the evidence of their popularity and describes the extent of their geographical settings. After noting their stylistic similarities to Íslendingasögur, the discussion moves on to place them within the larger European and heroic tradition, outlining the material they share with Old English and Middle High German literature and their links to eddic and skaldic verse. The influences of French courtly literature, religious literature and classical sources are explored. The folkloric dimension of the fornaldarsögur is pointed out, and the possibility of classifying the sagas as generic hybrids is suggested. Next the transmission of fornaldarsögur is discussed, followed by a reassessment of how the corpus might be divided into subgroups. The chapter then discusses possible composition dates and provides an analysis of the emergence of the genre, including the influence of Saxo’s Gesta Danorum. It ends with a discussion of fantastical narrative elements, which led to the label lygisögur (‘lying sagas’).

This chapter introduces the wide-ranging textual culture which grew up in medieval Iceland and generated the enormous variety of Old Norse-Icelandic written texts. It details the present-day locations of the major collections of Icelandic manuscripts and gives an account of how these manuscripts were preserved and what proportion of them may have been lost. An account of the origins of manuscript production in Iceland and its subsequent history follows, with criteria for dating manuscripts and discussion of different scripts. The effect of the introduction of the printing press is noted. Recent new approaches to manuscript studies, including codicology and greater attention to paper manuscripts and the physical processes of manuscript-making, are also covered. The chapter moves on to address digitization and the standardization of online texts, and concludes with discussion of what the future may hold for manuscript studies, including collaboration between palaeographers and scientists such as geneticists, ecologists and chemists, and the emergence of a new discipline of biocodicology, enabling a holistic examination of the interplay between many different environmental factors.

This chapter provides an overview of the riddarasögur as a genre, beginning with the first transmission of romance material to Norway in the thirteenth century. It describes how this material was translated, adapted and reworked in Old Norse-Icelandic literature, giving rise to a blossoming literary tradition in Iceland which drew on the translated riddarasögur but featured a uniquely local perspective and narrative emphasis. The chapter discusses the relationship of the translated and indigenous romances to other genres within the Old Norse-Icelandic literary corpus, and argues that the romances introduced an ‘emotive script’ which offered a means of exploring concepts such as masculinity, femininity, honour and identity in a different way from existing genres. It surveys current scholarly interest in the sagas, looking in particular at their attitude to emotion, gender and agency – focusing on the so-called maiden king romances – as well as the geographic expansionism of the works, which offered their readers a vision of the world far beyond the borders of Iceland, informed by contemporary cosmographical learning.

This chapter opens with a detailed definition of the Íslendingasaga, or ‘family saga’: stories about the lives and deeds of people living in Iceland from the Age of Settlement to the early eleventh century. The sagas’ mode of narration is described, with its thick description of the material culture and mental landscape of the saga world and its characters, its topographical specificity and apparently naturalistic depiction of saga society. The link between saga characters and the audience for whom the sagas were originally written is illustrated. An analysis follows of the emergence and development of Íslendingasögur and how they first came to be written down. The sagas are assessed as works of literature, with analysis of narrative voice, structure, themes and methods of characterization. The conclusion draws attention to how distinctive and innovative these sagas are, their appearance of reality disguising a highly selective manner. It is pointed out that although they are now amongst the best-known texts in Old Norse-Icelandic literature, they were not the first to be known outside Iceland, and the recent appreciation of ‘post-classical sagas’ is noted.

This chapter deals with the konungasögur, the sagas of the Norwegian and Danish kings. Taking a chronological approach, it outlines the development of the genre from the Icelandic, Danish and Norwegian histories of the twelfth century through to the major compilations of the thirteenth century (Morkinskinna, Fagrskinna and Heimskringla) and the substantial manuscript collections of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, such as Flateyjarbók. It stresses the diversity of the sources which the authors of the kings’ sagas incorporated within their works, emphasizing the fundamentally intertextual nature of the konungasaga genre. In discussing the growth of the genre, it highlights the variety of voices, sources and modes contained within these sagas, exemplified in their different approaches to the skaldic verses quoted within their prosimetric structure. Placing Old Norse-Icelandic historiography within the context of historical writing in medieval Europe, the chapter argues that the kings’ sagas offer a polyphonic history of the medieval north, and in doing so explore the process of history-writing itself.

The focus of this chapter is the samtíðarsögur (contemporary sagas) included in the compendium Sturlunga saga, compiled around the beginning of the fourteenth century, which contains narratives dealing largely with the history of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Iceland. The chapter opens by placing Sturlunga saga in the context of other Old Norse-Icelandic historical writing, considering why the distant past of the saga age attracted more attention from Icelandic writers than the period of relatively recent history covered by Sturlunga saga. It outlines what is known of Þórðr Narfason, often identified as the compiler of Sturlunga saga, and describes his interaction with Sturla Þórðarson in 1271−2, considering the possible role of Sturla in the compilation and offering a brief discussion of Sturlu þáttr. The content, structure and themes of the narratives within the compilation are then discussed in turn. The chapter closes with a brief outline of the compilation’s manuscript history, modern editions and critical reception.