Here is the next installment -- keep those cards and letters coming in!
 
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Euel Bailey, Teaching Assistant
Dept of English, Northern Illinois University
 
My academic interests include the drama of the English Renaissance,
particularly the textual and performance issues that surround the plays.
I will soon begin work on a dissertation about 'Troilus and Cressida.'
After finding REED-L on the BITNET LISTSERV list, I decided that it would
not only be helpful to my academic progress, but would probably make for
interesting reading every morning.
 
Thank you for the opportunity to join the list.
 
Euel Bailey <[log in to unmask]>
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Richard Rastall
 
Currently senior lecturer in Music, University of Leeds. Started
musicology courses at Leeds, 1967: teach early music, notation,
editing, counterpoint, harmony, etc.  Founding member of the Manton
Consort of Viols.
Research interests: Music in early English drama (various
publications: book for Boydell and Brewer nearly complete);
minstrelsy (PhD dissertation on minstrelsy in Englan: Manchester,
1968: various articles published, and working on volume with
Rosalind Conklin Hays and Andrew Taylor); musical sources (founding
general editor, Boethius Press, 1973-82) and notation (_The Notation
of Western Music_, 1983).  Director of Music for productions of
medieval drama, including all of Jane Oakshott's productions of
biblical cycles (1975, 1980, 1983, and 8 York pageants in York, 10
July 1994): also actor (Adam, 1975; Moses, 1980; Ezekiel 1983: will
soon be old enough to play God--or Joseph).
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Postal: Dept of Music, U of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, England.
 
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Terry Gunnell
Hamrahlid College/ University of Iceland (Folkloristics)
[log in to unmask]
 
Regarding my background, I was born in Brighton, England in 1955, and
finished my BA Hons in Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of
Birmingham in 1977. I then went on to become a sixth form teacher of
Drama and English, first in Birmingham and then since 1979, in
Iceland. In 1991, I finished my doctorate in Icelandic Studies at the
University of Leeds in England, writing a research thesis on the
origins of drama in Scandinavia. The thesis, which Boydell and
Brewer plan to publish this autumn (if I can get the revised work to
them in time), contains not only a complete examination of the
archaeological and literary evidence for ritual drama having taken place
in pre-Christian Scandinavia, but also a detailed examination of the
performance difficulties of the dialogic poems of the Elder Edda and
the way they are recorded in manuscript. The conclusions are not only
that these poems (like Dame Sirith for example) have to be performed
dramatically to make sense to their audience, but also that the system
of writing speakers' names in the margin of the manuscript which is used
in the Eddic MSS was only being used in MSS of dramatic works at this
time in Europe. The recorded versions of the dialogic poems of the Edda
would thus seem to be among the earliest recorded dramatic works in the
vernacular in Northern Europe, and a valuable link with pagan ritual.
 
I have since directed an outdoor performance of Skirnismal on the
midwinter solstice here in Iceland (snow, fire, and candle light).
 
In Leeds, I was lucky enough to get to know Peter Meredith, and
Lynette Muir and my own studies have naturally involved a lot of work
with medieval drama. When I got onto the Internet through the school I
am teaching at, and happened to come across Reed-L, I thought this
would be an ideal way of hearing what is going on in this field. I
woud be very grateful to join, if only to listen in to the academic
discussion.