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

Introduction: Theater History as a Challenge to Literary History

i n t r o d u c t i o n Theater History as a Challenge to Literary History The standard history of medieval English literature is one in which a queen’s dumbshows would not readily find a place. That history enshrines a written (in verse) canon fashioned in the fifteenth century around the works of a group of (male) London writers who followed in Chaucer’s footsteps. According to this account, the formation of that canon began with the inner circle of Chaucer’s fellow civil servants and writers and was given a boost by the promotional efforts of England’s Lancastrian rulers and London elites, who were interested (for not entirely identical reasons) in the establishment of English as a prestige language in the years after Chaucer’s death. The works that resulted were disseminated through William Caxton’s press and put to use by the Tudors for their program of nationalist propaganda, going on to shape the contours of early English literary history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In calling this book The Queen’s Dumbshows, I aim to underscore the fact that durable though this history has proven, it tells only part of the story of literature and culture in the years before and around the invention of the printing press. As recent work has begun to show and as evidence from the period demonstrates, this literary history rests on a blinkered view of the generic, regional, and thematic scope of imaginative writings in Middle English. From within a modern classification scheme that defines the literary as written poetic texts, many Middle English texts look distinctly nonliterary : that is, they took the form of collaboratively produced performances, visual representations, or mixed-media productions, rather than single-authored poems. Additionally, because their audiences and, in some instances, authors 2 introduction included women or males who were not elite, they were not always noted by those with the power to record and transmit literary works; when they entered the written record, they often did so in a scattered and fragmentary fashion. Their circulation in provincial communities in northern and southeastern England also often put many texts in Middle English beyond the purview of scribes and book-sellers in the metropolis. Finally, since their themes were often religious rather than secular, many of these works, including a great deal of Lollard writings, did not mesh with postmedieval understandings of literariness and thus were excluded from the literary history of the period. Chief among the excluded texts are the dramatic performances that were part of the seasonal calendar of religious and governmental ritual, performances that included unscripted entertainments such as mimed and improvised dumbshows and mummings that were created and performed on the periphery of London-centric poetic literary production. Often anonymous, nearly always ephemeral, and typically collaborative, those performances— and especially play-texts related to them—have survived only haphazardly and in numbers that belie their popularity. We know of those performances chiefly through brief mentions in various kinds of public records, including chronicles, legislation against disturbances associated with them, and expenditure accounts by guilds and households. Those records offer tantalizing glimpses of a wider world of public and private ceremonies, plays, and dramatic enactments beyond that revealed in the handful of surviving scripts (such as those of the biblical cycle plays) or the few examples of morality and miracle plays (including the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, the Digby Mary Magdalene, and Mankind). Acquiring access to that wider world while grappling with the theoretical and practical complexities posed by the spotty archive of medieval performances has motivated some of the best recent work in early theater studies. As a result of such archival projects as the Records of Early English Drama (REED), which was begun in the 1970s at the University of Toronto, scholars of early drama now have at their fingertips detailed information about performances that never took, or did not survive in, the form of a play-script. With help from REED and similar archival work in European countries, we can now balance the paucity of surviving scripts of plays with the abundance of records documenting public and private, indoor and outdoor, performances on a variety of occasions and for a range of audiences throughout the year. Even if most of those records (with the exception of records from England) introduction 3 are still unpublished, scholars...