From Page to Performance: Essays in Early English Drama

Introduction

Introduction It is a truism that reading a dramatic script is like reading a musical score. Whatever impression may be conveyed by the printed page, the only measure of worth that matters ultimately is performance. The point hardly needs stating in the case of modern drama. The Importance ofBeing Ernest or A Streetcar Named Desire are stock repertory because of their proven appeal as theater, and more people are likely to have seen these plays than to have read them. The reverse is true of our knowledge of earlier drama. Generally speaking, our only experience of a liturgical play like the Beauvais Daniel, or a Tudor morality like Fulgens and Lucrece, or even some of Shakespeare's plays, has come through books. The letteraturizzazione of early drama-to borrow George Kennedy's term for the process undergone by another oral art, rhetoric, as it moved from the forum to the schoolroomI-has had profound consequences for criticism. Until recently it controlled our artistic judgments of these plays. Tucker Brooke's assessment of Merbury's Marriage between Wit and Wisdom (ca. 1579) provides a fair sample: "The poet has managed to get into the piece enough of irrelevant farce and melodramatic interest to make it tolerable reading."2 Critics nowadays are less likely to speak in such terms. The fact that our knowledge of these older plays still comes primarily from reading continues to affect our critical judgments, of course, but the subtler challenges are now in the area of critical interpretation. The improper application of literary methods to dramatic works has resulted in interpretations that would be difficult or impossible to sustain in any actual performance. The late Arnold Williams was especially sensitive to the confusion of literary and dramatic methodologies. One instance that came under his scrutiny was typological criticism. Williams readily conceded that 1 2 From Page to Performance the cycle playwrights' choices of particular biblical stories might have been determined by typology-a standard tool of medieval biblical exegetes, who assumed, for example, that Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac was intended to be a "type" or prefiguration of the sacrifice of Christbut he questioned how far this interpretative method could be pushed within individual plays. [Mledieval drama ... was produced in conditions almost strictly analogous to those governing a modern film or television program. There was no way by which anyone could experience the Second Shepherds' Play except by witnessing it.... The kind of typology such an audience could effectively absorb had to be simplified, common, obvious. It will not do to cite Irenaeus, Tertullian, Augustine, Aquinas. These are as remote to the medieval audience as are Robert Graves or Maud Bodkin to the television viewer of today, and remoter than Marx or Freud.... I am persuaded that most typologists forget this. They are suggesting meanings appropriate for literary texts but inappropriate for the stage.3 Williams was not opposed to typological interpretation as such. "If any suggested typology is capable of representation on the stage, and if it enhances and deepens the meaning of the piece, let us accept it" (1968, 681). From his own experience, however, he was convinced that more often than not "the use of typology produces bad theater" (683). In drama the ultimate test of meaning, as of artistic value, is performance. For Williams, therefore, the modern production of medieval drama was, among other things, a research tool, a form of inquiry no less important than the study of its cultural context and history; and much of his career was given to promoting the performance of these old plays. His classes in medieval drama at Michigan State University, where he taught from 1939 until 1974, often involved the blocking and acting out of scenes, and sometimes culminated in full-scale productions open to the public. A few of these (Mankind and the Wakefield Second Shepherds' Play), directed by his student William Marx, were presented before even wider audiences at annual meetings of the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo). It was also Williams's thoughts on the value of performance, delivered at a meeting of the Modern Language Association in 1965, that inspired John Leyerle to organize his first graduate seminar at the University of Toronto around the production of a medieval play-the beginning, as it turned out, of the Poculi Ludique Societas, for many years the most active medieval and Introduction 3 Renaissance play group...