Abstract
Before the establishment of professional theatres, plays were staged in spaces the primary purposes of which were activities other than play-acting: dining halls, city streets, courtyards of taverns. Perhaps inevitably, other activities — eating, drinking, journeying, commerce — which shared these spaces with the plays performed had an impact on the plays and their reception. Put differently, performances in these non-playhouse venues did not occupy spaces, where space is ‘a blank that is filled out by human activity’, but places which had been already defined, ‘created through acts of naming as well as the distinctive activities and imaginings’ associated with them.2 The meaning of a medieval interlude in performance must surely have been inflected, if not largely defined, by the activities through which, pre- and post-performance, the playing ‘space’ was particularized as ‘place’. Medieval drama is thus importantly ‘site-specific’, if site-specific theatre is theatre that reads the world in which, and from which, it is taking ‘place’.
I would like to thank the editors, and Julie Sanders and Scott Scullion for their invaluable comments on drafts of this chapter.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin and Gill Valentine (eds), Key Thinkers on Space and Place, 2nd edn (London: Sage Publications, 2004) 4–5. Hubbard and others trace the numerous definitions and redefinitions by which philosophers and human geographers have refined the distinction between place and space, but demonstrate the continuing importance of this distinction to the discourses of spatial theorists.
For a clear characterization of locus and platea staging, see Janette Dillon, The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 4–5. The locus is ‘any specifically demarcated space or architectural feature’ made to represent a specific location for a period, however brief: the platea is fluid and ‘frequently non-representational’; it is not necessarily always connected to the fiction of the play but can be a space ‘in which performance can be recognized as performance rather than as the fiction it intermittently seeks to represent’.
Henry Medwall, Fulgens and Lucres, Medieval Drama: An Anthology, ed. Greg Walker (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) 304–47. All subsequent references are to this edition of the play, and lines will be cited using parenthetical references.
John Skelton, Magnyfycence, Medieval Drama: An Anthology, ed. Greg Walker (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) 348–407. All subsequent references are to this edition of the play, and lines will be cited using parenthetical references.
Fulgens and Lucres is recognized as offering commentary on the ‘new men’ of Henry VII’s reign; Magnyfycence is read as satirizing both Cardinal Wolsey and the dangers of Henry VIII’s reliance on the French minions. For full studies of politics and play-writing at the Tudor court, see Greg Walker, Plays of Persuasion: Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and The Politics of Performance in Early Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
See Greg Walker (ed.), Medieval Drama: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) 456.
For a full discussion of John Heywood’s biography, particularly his family connections to the Rastells and the family of Thomas More, see Richard Axton and Peter Happé, The Plays of John Heywood (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991) xi-10. Citations from The Play of the Weather will be from the edition in this volume, and line numbers given in parenthesis.
Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) 112.
See K. W. Cameron, John Heywood’s Play of the Wether (Raleigh, NC: Thistle Press, 1941) 20.
M. J. Ashe-Jones, ‘An Edition of Two Plays by John Heywood: Four PP and Play of the Wether’, MA thesis, Oxford University (1975) 49.
Lucian, Lucian, vol. 2, trans. A. M. Harman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1915) 313.
See John R. Elliot (ed.), Records of Early English Drama: Oxford, vol. 2 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2005) 608–12. That such performances used stages extending across rather than down the length of the hall also challenges the use of the traverse in Play of the Weather.
Peter Happé, ‘The Vice and the Folk-Drama’, Folklore 75.3 (1964): 161–93.
John McGavin, ‘Alliterative Place Name Lists in Early Drama’, Medieval English Theatre 30 (2008): 45–62.
For discussion of the project’s presentation of the figure of Jupiter himself, see Paul Walker, ‘Jupiter’, Staging the Henrician Court, 2010. http://stagingth-ehenriciancourt.brookes.ac.uk/research/jupiter.html (accessed 1 January 2013).
Copyright information
© 2014 Elisabeth Dutton
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Dutton, E. (2014). John Heywood, Henry and Hampton Court Palace. In: Performing Environments. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137320179_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137320179_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-45765-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-32017-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Theatre & Performance CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)