/Early Theatre /will be mailed out to subscribers in June. If you
haven't yet renewed your subscription, or 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
