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c h a p t e r 1 Shirley’s Hand Unlike other fifteenth-century writers of short poems, Lydgate appears not to have kept a portfolio of his shorter verses, including those for performance, or to have supervised its circulation in authorized collections. In fact, the survival of Lydgate’s dramatic texts is due almost entirely to John Shirley, who included them in three anthologies he compiled between the late 1420s and the late 1440s. Whether or not Lydgate played any role in Shirley’s compilations , and there is no evidence that he did, in copying Lydgate’s performance pieces, Shirley provided crucial information about the circumstances of their original performance as well as their afterlife. The decisions Shirley made about what to copy and how to present it on the manuscript page say a good deal about what happened when a visual and aural form such as drama entered the written record. His copies also include information that helps piece together the circumstances of their original performance and written afterlife. Shirley’s copies also help answer questions about the nature of the textual evidence for drama before print. What do manuscripts tell us about early performances? Should the canon of early theater be expanded to include texts that do not look like plays but may have been performed? How does the archive of written scripts and references to performances relate to the plays people in medieval England put on and watched? How do we know what was a play and what was not? The place to which scholars have usually turned in trying to answer these questions has not been Shirley’s compilations but rather the Toronto-based Records of Early English Drama (REED) project, whose goal since its inception in the 1970s has been to identify and publish all extant external references to early drama in Britain. It is no exaggeration to say that REED’s findings have radically revised scholarly assumptions about medieval drama. REED 18 chapter 1 has shown, for instance, that the so-called Corpus Christi cycles were in most cases loosely put-together, episodic biblical dramas that could be performed on Corpus Christi but also at Whitsun; that folk dramas, such as Robin Hood plays, were the most frequent kinds of performances; that folk and other secular plays often took place on holy days and in religious settings; that the distinction between “medieval” and “renaissance” drama is hard to maintain (with a roughly 200-year performance span, the biblical plays of Coventry, Chester, and York lasted until 1575 or longer, while the manuscripts in which the biblical plays survive are chiefly Tudor documents, and “medieval” morality plays flourished alongside sixteenth-century school plays); and that the commercial theater, in the form of companies of traveling players, existed well before the age of Shakespeare. REED has also shown that surviving play-texts do not accurately reflect the kinds and amounts of early drama: the large-scale biblical cycle plays such as York’s, for instance, which have long been taken as the quintessential form of medieval drama, in actuality represent only a small fraction of extant performance records (David Bevington estimates it at 16 percent), and morality plays were even rarer. In the midst of all these surprises, perhaps the most unexpected finding is what REED has not discovered: new texts of plays. After years of diligent archival work, the corpus of Middle English drama still consists of the same long-known handful of texts from northern and southeastern England, as well as Cornwall. That handful includes four extant collections of biblicalhistory plays from the north: the York Register, which contains forty-seven pageants (1460s to 1470s through the mid-sixteenth century), the Towneley manuscript (mid-sixteenth century), two pageants from Coventry (both of them revisions by Robert Croo dated 1534), and five manuscripts of the Chester cycle (1591–1607). The plays from the southeast, while more diverse than those from the north, are for the most part contained in three manuscripts. They are the Digby plays (Mary Magdalene, dating to the end of the fifteenth century; The Killing of the Children, ca. 1512, a farcical Slaughter of the Innocents ; The Conversion of Saint Paul, 1500–1525; and a fragment of Wisdom, ca. 1470–75, all in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 133, owned in the mid-sixteenth century by Myles Blomefeld, a collector of books), the Macro plays (Castle of Perseverance, 1400–1425; Mankind, 1474–79; a complete version of Wisdom...

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