Overview
Newest research into drama and performance from the Middle Ages and the Tudor period. Medieval English Theatre is the premier journal in early theatre studies. Its name belies its wide range of interest: it publishes articles on theatre and pageantry from across the British Isles up to the opening of the London playhouses and the suppression of the civic religious plays, and also includes contributions on European, Latin and other cognate drama, together with analyses of modern survivals or equivalents, and of research productions of medieval plays. This volume explores issues of performance and audience-engagement across a wide range of theatrical texts and genres. It opens with a question of sensibilities. An analysis of the French blindman farces examines their now deeply unsettling scenarios of slapstick violence against the vulnerable. Rather than simple callousness, did their staging rely on diverting the audience's attention from the action performed to the skills of the performer? Two essays arise from performances as research. One production, of the Dutch Rhetoricians' play Man's Desire and Fleeting Beauty, drew on its audiencesto evaluate how far prologues, epilogues, and theatrical frames might affect responses to the ""message"" of a play. Another explored how the implicit performativity of a fifteenth-century narrative poem, The Life of Job, might be realised through the astonishing skills of acrobats. A review of a third production, of the Tudor interlude of Godly Queen Hester, further attests to the current vitality of research through performance. Three new play translations, from Europe and beyond, introduce English speakers to richly varied, and highly actable, performance practices. Two are of 1530s Rhetoricians' plays from Bruges which directly address the economic woes of their home city. The first, censored by the authorities, was replaced by the superficially less critical second; but both address the plight of workers in a recession, in disarmingly comic detail with disconcertingly present-day resonances. The third introduces readers to how the Iranian Taʿziyeh drama movingly stages the struggle between Satan and the prophet Ayoub (Job), presenting an unfamiliarly sympathetic view of the sufferings of Job's Wife.
Full Product Details
Author: Sarah Carpenter ,
Elisabeth Dutton ,
Meg Twycross ,
Cathy Hume (Customer)
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Imprint: D.S. Brewer
Edition: Paperback original
ISBN: 9781843848011
ISBN 10: 1843848015
Pages: 192
Publication Date: 30 June 2026
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming
Availability: Not yet available, will be POD
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon it's release. This is a print on demand item which is still yet to be released.
Author Information
SARAH CARPENTER is Honorary Fellow in English Literature, School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh. ELISABETH DUTTON is Professor of Medieval English at Fribourg, Switzerland. MEG TWYCROSS is professor Emeritus of English Medieval Studies at University of Lancaster CATHY HUME is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol. ELISABETH DUTTON is Professor of Medieval English at Fribourg, Switzerland.
