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c h a p t e r 7 The Queen’s Dumbshows During a Christmas season in the late 1420s, Henry and members of his household joined his mother Catherine of Valois at her castle at Hertford. In the course of the holiday festivities, if Shirley can be believed, they were entertained by a short performance by Lydgate. The Disguising at Hertford seems an odd choice for a young boy. Addressed to Henry and apparently requiring his participation, the disguising is a satire that dramatizes the complaint of a group of rustic men about their wives’ tyranny, followed by the wives’ vigorous self-defense, and then the king’s decision to grant the women another year of their customary rule over men while he deliberates and further questions the parties involved. Its final statement is a warning to men to avoid marriage, which, the disguising cautions, leads to lifelong servitude and imprisonment. On two other occasions, at Eltham and again at Windsor , Lydgate’s mummings formed part of the royal household’s Christmas entertainments. The Mumming at Eltham enacts a gift-giving ceremony in which the gods of antiquity bring gifts of “Pees, vnytee, plentee and haboundaunce ” (l. 58) to the young king and his mother. The Mumming at Windsor, performed just after Henry’s coronation in London and before his departure for Paris, where he would be crowned king of France in the upcoming year, describes how France was converted in Clovis’s time through St. Clotilda, emphasizing that the golden ampulla from which Clovis was anointed will soon be Henry’s “by tytle of right” (l. 91). Whatever the appropriateness of these performances for a small boy, Henry is their ostensible focus: it is his person they flatter, his behavior they try to influence, his aspirations they champion, and his political fortunes they seek to increase. Yet Henry was not their sole witness, since members of the household and guests would also have been present as spectators. More 168 chapter 7 pointedly, the holiday performances may have had yet another target, I would like to suggest: Catherine, who was present at all three and is directly addressed in—and might even have commissioned—one of them. Catherine would certainly have been a more suitable recipient of these entertainments than her young son: as an adult, better able to appreciate and understand them; as a widowed queen caught in a complicated relationship with the court, more in need of their cultural and ideological work. Although Catherine ’s centrality to these performances may have been obscured by a tendency to view them as directed solely to Henry, Lydgate’s royal disguising and mummings have, in fact, quite a lot to say about the queen as in turn victim, manipulator, and tool of Lancastrian political efforts, each of which she seems to have been on successive occasions in the 1420s. In these performances, we can not only trace Catherine’s changing fortunes but also witness the workings of late medieval courtly ceremony, particularly as it attempts to grapple with the problem of what to do with the queen. In pulling back the curtain on Lancastrian queenship, Lydgate’s royal disguising and mummings more broadly encourage a reassessment of the extent of women’s involvement in both performance and reading, and of their patronage of ceremonies as well as literary works. My aim in this chapter is both focused and broad. At one level, I hope to show how Lydgate’s holiday entertainments for the court revise our understanding of women’s involvement in medieval performances. More broadly, as the decision to borrow this chapter’s title for the title of my whole book signals, I want to foreground the most striking of the many remarkable ways in which Lydgate’s performance texts expand and complicate theater history and, by extension, the histories of late medieval literature and culture as well. That Lydgate wrote plays for the queen upends much of what we think we know about the place of women in the making of medieval culture and points to why it is worth paying attention to Lydgate’s performance texts—with their many surprises about early drama. Evidence for the participation of women in drama and ceremony before the modern period is limited and, where it exists, ambiguous. That scarcity and indeterminacy have led to the widely shared assumption that women played almost no role in public performances, with all parts, including those of female characters, being played by...

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