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c h a p t e r 8 On Drama’s Trail This book began with John Shirley and the evidence his copies—and especially their headnotes—provided about the essential questions related to theater history: authorship, patrons, locations, dates, media, and performance practices. It ends with verses that are exactly the opposite of what Shirley’s hand gave us: these verses come with no hints about authorship, patrons, or any of the other things that would allow us to say who wrote them, on what occasion, and for what audience they were performed, if indeed they were ever performed at all. While Chapter 1 delighted in a plenitude of information, the present chapter grapples with a dearth of knowledge. By ending this book with an examination of verses not linked to Shirley, verses not even definitively associated with Lydgate, and verses for which the performance context remains murky, I extend my argument about Lydgate’s importance for theater history to a larger consideration of the challenges faced by anyone who studies early theater. The scribal work of John Shirley is part of what makes Lydgate’s surviving body of verses for performances so useful for scholars of premodern drama, but as this chapter will demonstrate, so too and even more fundamentally are the editorial decisions that ascribe authorship, establish and reproduce texts, and identify dates and venues. To a large degree, such interventions are what create a canon and thus make a body of texts available for readers and critics, as has been happening for medieval English drama from the sixteenth century onward. No one disputes the importance of Cambridge, Trinity College Library MS R.3.19, a miscellany of verses and one prose piece produced in the London area between 1478 and 1483, for early English poetry. Twenty-one Middle English verse texts are unique to it, and it contains eight almost unique texts whose only other surviving copies are in manuscripts written by the 192 chapter 8 working partner (the so-called Hammond scribe) of the main scribe of R.3.19 or by John Stow. Trinity MS R.3.19 was used by Wynkyn de Worde around 1498 and by John Stow, who owned and wrote in the manuscript in the midsixteenth century, drawing on it for his 1561 edition of Chaucer. In addition to its significance for the Chaucer canon, R.3.19 contains valuable information about the taste for advisory literature, about political and ethical concerns, and about the metropolitan interest in courtly literature; it also includes what appears to be the rare occurrence of a courtly love poem written by a woman and thus is notable for what it says about gender and writing. Even though R.3.19 is not an essential manuscript for Lydgate’s poetry, it contains a number of his works, including extracts from the Fall of Princes, selections from his Testament and Fables, the poem “Horns Away,” and a copy of Bycorne and Chychevache. Although it has seldom been written about, the text in Trinity MS R.3.19 that is most crucial for the history of early drama is the first item in the first of the thirteen booklets that make up the manuscript, a unique copy of a twelve-stanza moralistic poem that has been printed by Carlton Brown and Rossell Hope Robbins as A Mumming of the Seven Philosophers. A rubric at the top of the poem in the hand of the scribe who wrote the first booklet of the manuscript, and a number of the other booklets as well, reads Festum Natalis Domini; what follows are verses that appear to have been designed for performance on 25 December, to commemorate, as the first stanza notes, the “byrthe thys day” of Jesus (l. 2). The verses include what appear to be parts for nine actors (seven philosophers plus a “Nuncius” and a Christmas king) in a performance that would apparently have featured short speeches, mimed action, singing, and gift giving, if only of the intangible, advisory sort (see Figure 6). Beginning with an opening stanza that establishes the occasion, an unnamed speaker, who is presumably the “Nuncius” of the last stanza, brings the greetings of Senek, “rewler of all wyldernesse” (l. 9) to his “brother” (l. 11), the King of Christmas, to explain the duties of the royal estate to which the Christmas king has been “so sodenly” called (l. 14) and to introduce him to “olde expert men” (l. 24) who will...

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