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 of Being ErnestorA Streetcar Named Desireare 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, ouronlyexperience of a liturgical play like...

Some ministers of religion who have seized on the dramatic possibilities of conducting services in order to win over the hearts and minds of their parishioners have attracted criticism. For instance, in a poem entitled “In Church” Thomas Hardy writes about a preacher who is seen by one of his parishioners after he has gone into the vestry after a service:

The door swings softly ajar meanwhile,

And a pupil of his in the Bible class,

Who adores him as one without gloss or guile,

Sees her idol stand with a satisfied smile

And re-enact at the vestry-glass

Each pulpit...

The continuity of the native dramatic tradition from its popular roots to the drama of Shakespeare has been given less theoretical attention over the years than the subject commands. In part, I believe, the problem has resulted from the narrow periodization and specialization that has drawn hard and fast boundaries between the culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in England.¹ In part, it results from the widespread tendency to associate Shakespeare with high culture and medieval drama with low culture, an estimate that is surely out of touch with the temperament of postmodern criticism. In this essay I...

Characters asleep onstage are not especially common in ancient and modern drama. The few examples one can find do not suggest a thematic or dramaturgic pattern. Strepsiades, in Aristophanes’The Clouds,finds his horse-loving son Pheidippides asleep one morning, farting happily under the blankets, but the device serves only to characterize a lazy adolescent who must be routed out of bed and set to some kind of profitable schooling. The ghost of Clytemnestra berates the Eumenides for sleeping at the start of Aeschylus’s play, though we do not see these chorus figures asleep once they enter. Professor Serebriakov dozes briefly...

The founding almost thirty years ago of thePoculi Ludique Societas, the medieval and Renaissance play group of the University of Toronto, can be attributed directly to the enthusiasm of Arnold Williams for the production of early drama. At a meeting of the seminar which he founded in association with the Modern Language Association, John Leyerle caught his excitement and returned to Toronto to make the production of a medieval play (inevitablyEveryman) part of his first graduate seminar. Two years later Professor Leyerle’s Seminar (PLS) became independent of the course and the rather pretentious Latin words that fitted the...

As a student thirty years ago in Arnold Williams’s graduate course in Middle English literature, I heard him discuss the performance aspects of cycle drama and moralities in a way that was quite unfamiliar to me and, I suspect, to the other members of the class. Although this class was engaging in many ways, with wonderful readings aloud of texts and many memorable digressions on such things as how to smoke a salmon and make Anglo-Saxon mead with angelica flavoring, the moments of the semester that have stayed in my mind over the years were those in which Williams emphasized...

Directors who approach the ChesterNoah’s Floodplay may find themselves intimidated by the character of Mrs. Noah.¹ She sits at the very center of the play, apparently an implacable, sharp-tongued shrew. She disputes the judgment of her husband and abandons the family’s boat-building labors to carouse with her gossips. She rebuffs Noah’s entreaties and those of her sons, and refuses to board the ark. She boxes Noah’s ears as she is wrestled aboard the ark, and then as one last rebuke to her tormented husband spits out her final line in the play: “Have thou that for thy note!”...

Everymanoccupies a special place in the revival of medieval drama in England in the twentieth century. The success it has enjoyed since the time of Edward Poel’s revival of the play at London’s Charterhouse in 1901 has not only made it, in the words of Arnold Williams, “the morality play best known and most widely performed in modern times”;¹ its repeated revivals have also shaped the popular idea of the morality play and set a standard by which other plays in that nebulous genre are judged. Students of medieval drama, however, accept thatEverymanis, as Williams said, “decidedly...

The first known example of masquerading vice in a morality play appears in the work of “the first positively known English dramatist,” Henry Medwall’sNature(ca. 1500):¹

PRIDE

My name is Worship.

MAN

Worship? now, surely,

The world told me it was my destiny

To come to Worship [ere] I die.

PRIDE

Truly, I am the same.²

Pride’s assumption of the name Worship is only the first in a series of virtuous pseudonyms taken by the vice figures in this play in order to deceive Man or, as one of them says, “to blear his eye” (81). Pride’s retinue, the...

The recent publication of the records of dramatic activity at Cambridge University by Alan H. Nelson has made available a large amount of evidence, much of it appearing in print for the first time, about the extensive part that drama played in the education of Cambridge students, particularly during the high tide of humanism in sixteenth-century England.¹ Beginning in the 1540s drama at Oxford, largely following the model provided by Cambridge, also played an increasingly important role both in college life and in the public life of the university, until by the time of the Stuart monarchs Oxford actually eclipsed...

The murder of the king, weapon in hand, struck down (probably with a poleaxe) by Sir Pierce of Exton, in Shakespeare’sRichard II(1595) is remarkable for several reasons. It shows a decisive aspect of Richard’s character that is free of any sense of resignation or passive fatalism—in his last moments theroi fainéantbecomes a man of action imbued with “desperat manhood” (as a marginal note in Holinshed puts it), who refuses to “go gentle into that good night.” Derek Traversi characterizes the murder as “no more than a pedestrian piece of melodramatic writing,”¹ but a consideration of...

Trained by productions and informed by dreams, we can find, in the images of Shakespeare’s stage, emphases, patterns, and connections that reside deeper than words. Reading the stage images ofTitus AndronicusandThe Winter’s Tale,for example, we realize that these plays are strange but not distant relations, works born of the selfsame psychic issues. Consider, first, these visual patterns.

InTitus Andronicus,act 4, scene 2, a black man and two white men relax onstage, laughing. To them enters a nurse with an infant. The nurse, a woman alone among men, shows the infant’s face to the black...

Immediately before the start of fencing competition during whichHamletwill receive the wound that kills him, Claudius commands, “And you, the judges, bear a wary eye” (5.2.277).¹ “The judges” to whom he speaks are onstage, but the call to “bear a wary eye” applies also, in ways I intend to explore in this essay, to those who as members of theater audiences or as readers—as students, critics, teachers, scholars, or devotees of Shakespeare—find themselves engaged in judging and interpretingHamlet, Prince of Denmark.

These days it does not take an unusually “wary eye” to ascertain thatHamlet...