Early Theatre will be mailed out
to
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want to establish a subscription, I hope the following table of
contents for this next issue will encourage you to do so.
Our website, www.earlytheatre.ca , has information on how to subscribe
by contacting our publisher, CRRS Publications. People who want to
write book reviews should contact our book review editor, Roberta
Barker (Dalhousie); and writers of articles and notes for upcoming
issues should contact the editor, Helen Ostovich (McMaster). Email
addresses are available online on the webpage. All issues are
available online by subscription through ITER; your subscription
includes full access to articles in the REED Newsletter,
1976-1997.
ARTICLES
Children, Costume, and Identity in the Chester Midsummer Show
Susannah Crowder
ABSTRACT
This essay focuses on the performances of children in late medieval and
early modern Chester, using questions about gender identity and fashion
to unpack the intricate social meanings of their representations in the
Chester Midsummer Show. Roles for children in the Show changed
drastically in the decades before and after 1600, when depictions of
boys in performance shifted from representing them as uncivilized and
outside the social order to imagining them as a symbolic merchant
‘nobility’. Earlier roles, such as the ‘naked boys’ who attacked a
dragon, slowly gave way to luxuriously dressed ‘lords’ who rode for
each guild. Unlike the naked boys, who were chosen on the basis of
talent and/or specific skills, evidence reveals that the lords were
played by the sons of prominent local officials. Given the context of
historical unrest in Chester, these familial connections suggest that
the desire for imagery of the ‘insider’ came to surpass that for the
‘outsider’. By the seventeenth century, the body of the child no longer
represented a sexual and societal blank slate, but instead recreated
the social order of the civic elites through aristocratic clothing that
drew on sumptuary law to safely express social distinction, social
aspiration, and legitimized local authority.
The Reasons of Misrule Revisited: Evangelical Appropriations of
Carnival in Tudor Revels
Robert Hornback
ABSTRACT
The argument here synthesizes an evangelical strategy statement,
costume inventories and performance records, a treatise by Martin
Bucer, studies of revels at the inns of court, and descriptions of
Edwardian Lord of Misrule George Ferrers by an ambassador and a diarist
to demonstrate that Tudor occurrences of such Lords emerged and
appeared most frequently at court, colleges, and the inns under the
zealously iconoclastic influence of Thomas Cromwell and Edward VI.
Evidence in fact reveals a marked anti-papist polemical focus in
misrule of the Reformation era, belying stubborn, anachronistic
applications of a proto-puritan sobriety to the often raucous
entertainments of early evangelicals. Consistent with these findings,
much evidence reflects a crackdown on misrule under Mary I. Such an
examination ultimately complicates our understanding of when, how, and
why many puritans subsequently came to reject misrule and laughter
alike.
The Work of Elizabethan Plotters and 2 The Seven Deadly Sins
Andrew Gurr
ABSTRACT
Little attention has been paid to the 'plotter', the men who drew up
the plots for early companies, and the terms of their work. A
re-examination of the evidence suggests a number of fresh
considerations. In particular, David Kathman's theory that the plot for
2 THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS was prepared for the Chamberlain's Men in
1597-98 is called in question, as is the idea that boy players were
routinely apprenticed to their masters in the same way as the
handicraft apprentices.
Mary Frith at the Fortune
Mark Hutchings
ABSTRACT
Much ink has been spilt on the significance of the representation of
gender and gender politics in The Roaring Girl (1611), Middleton and
Dekker’s play about Mary Frith, a figure well known to playgoers at the
Fortune playhouse and beyond. Yet scholars have paid surprisingly
little attention to the evidence that Frith herself attended, and
participated in, the Prince Henry’s Men play. Whatever the nature of
this ‘role’ (if it was such), arguably it is central to the issues
critics have aired, and raises important questions about the play’s
reception in 1611. This essay examines the surviving evidence of this
tantalisingly suggestive episode, speculates about its precise
circumstances, and explores its implications for our understanding of
The Roaring Girl in performance. It will be proposed that whatever
textual strategies the playwrights used in the quarto published in 1611
to account for Frith’s appearance, Frith was unlikely to have been a
wholly comfortable collaborator. Indeed, to those well-documented
accounts of Frith’s rejection of authority may be added this
intervention at the Fortune, which represents a specific act of
resistance to the playhouse’s attempt to contain and redefine her.
Thus it is Mary Frith, rather than the actor playing ‘Moll Cutpurse’,
who in taking to the stage plays out current critical concerns.
The Red Lion and the White Horse: Inns used by Patronized Performers
in Norwich, 1583-1624
Jennifer Roberts-Smith
ABSTRACT
Two Norwich inns, the Red Lion and the White Horse, are known to have
been used by patronized performers between 1583 and 1624. The
non-theatrical documentary and material records presented here
elucidate the inns’ locations, functions, and dimensions; ownership,
status in the community, and relationship to the city government;
popularity as performance venues; and fates in later centuries. At
their heights, the inns were respectable, lucrative, reliable venues,
well-managed, well-appointed, and individually stable for decades. They
represent what was likely a thriving and long-lasting entertainment
industry, supported by city government but operating outside of
official civic auspices.
BOOK REVIEWS
Jonathan Burton. Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama,
1579-1624. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005.
Reviewed by Matthew Dimmock
Celia R. Daileader. Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Reviewed by Virginia Mason Vaughan
Julie Hankey (ed). Shakespeare in Production: Othello.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Reviewed by Louise Denmead
Lucy Munro. Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre
Repertory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Reviewed by David Nicol
Chester N. Scoville. Saints and the Audience in Middle English
Biblical Drama. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.
Reviewed by Katharine Goodland
James Shapiro. A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599.
New York: HarperCollins, 2005.
Reviewed by Sister Lucia Treanor
Frances A. Shirley (ed). Shakespeare in Production: Troilus and
Cressida. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Reviewed by Peter Hyland
Marta Straznicky. Privacy, Playreading, and Women’s Closet Drama,
1550-1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Reviewed by Yvonne Bruce
Garret A. Sullivan, Jr. Memory and Forgetting in English
Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Reviewed by Chris Ivic
Judith Weil. Service and Dependency in Shakespeare’s Plays. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Reviewed by Linda Anderson
Richard Wilson. Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion
and Resistance. Manchester and New York: Manchester University
Press, 2004.
Reviewed by Ian McAdam
