The Queen's Dumbshows: John Lydgate and the Making of Early Theater

Afterword

a f t e r w o r d Although I have argued in these chapters that Lydgate deserves attention given the important information about the histories of early theater and literature he offers—information seldom available from other sources—his greatest contribution may in the end be not the answers he provides but the questions he raises. I began this book by noting the unusual circumstances surrounding Lydgate’s writing of verses for and about performance. Those circumstances—a known scribe who copied and disseminated the performance pieces, an author who is not anonymous, information about patrons and venues—all make Lydgate an important focus of inquiry for scholars interested in how early English entertainments and ceremonials were commissioned , made, and put on. Lydgate seems, in short, to promise a way around the impasse that usually greets investigations into medieval drama, an impasse created by a lack of play-texts and of information about how plays came into being and were experienced and understood. Yet, that promise is not entirely fulfilled by the traces of Lydgate’s work discernible in the historical record. As I have aimed to show, even though we know a remarkable amount about Lydgate’s involvement with ceremonies and entertainments in the fifteenth century, many puzzles remain. How, for instance, did the commissioning process work, who approached Lydgate for the verses he wrote for performances, and how was he compensated? Who performed or recited lines in the entertainments he crafted? Who collaborated on the productions, and did Lydgate have any contact with those artisans and performers? What reactions did audiences have? What determined which performance pieces circulated in written form after the performance was done? And so on. While I have suggested answers to some of those questions , what we know about even the relatively well-documented performances such as those in which Lydgate was involved is at best partial. Moreover, for better or for worse and inevitably or not, all of what we know is shaped by the motives and practices of those who recorded it, including 212 afterword John Shirley and the other scribes who copied Lydgate’s verses, and is dimmed by the long vista separating past and present. Hans-Robert Jauss’s challenge to literary theory with which I began this book rests on an awareness of the constantly shifting status of texts, as they inevitably become unmoored from their original contexts and encounter successive generations of readers (if they were lucky enough to survive that long) who reshaped not only their meanings but also their very nature, so that it becomes difficult not just to discern what original audiences and readers made of those texts but even to make out what those texts are—poems meant for silent reading, play-texts to be enacted, prologues to introduce a performance, guidelines for craftsmen and actors, or any of the range of possibilities that the forms of existing texts suggest. Recognition of the extent to which texts are reshaped and reappropriated once they move beyond an original audience has led cultural critics to turn to the notions of mimicry, improvisation, revision, translation, citation, and parody to describe how new meanings develop for already existing objects, events, and texts. While that turn has been invigorating in many ways, especially by refusing to view texts as static and unchanging entities or audiences and readers as passive consumers, it has not always been of use in furthering our understanding of past cultural practices, as the originalstaging movement as well as other attempts to recapture original textual artifacts and performance contexts have implicitly asserted. There are of course problems inherent in any attempt at recapturing past practices. As has been pointed out, the study of medieval European culture has often taken the form of a recuperative project preoccupied with beginnings , sources, and the recovery of lost originals. Sixteenth-century antiquarians set the early terms of that project as they tried to preserve in writing the remnants of a fast-disappearing recent past. It is notable that one of those antiquarians, John Stow, found it worth copying a number of Lydgate’s performance pieces, thus adding them to his archive of preserved cultural moments . This tendency to treat the making of literary and theater history as an act of salvage was intensified following the medieval revival of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when medieval studies became a specialized discipline. In those centuries, scholars involved in such projects as, in England, the Early...