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In this interdisciplinary study of drama, arts, and spirituality, Gail Gibson provides a provocative reappraisal of fifteenth-century English theater through a detailed portrait of the flourishing cultures of Suffolk and Norfolk. By emphasizing the importance of the Incarnation of Christ as a model and justification for late medieval drama and art, Gibson challenges currently held views of the secularization of late medieval culture.

God's creations of man in a lyrical dramatization; Noah's cantankerous and hilariously funny wife refusing to leave without her friends; the Massacre of the InnocentsMiracle Plays were a popular form of entertainment throughout the Middle Ages, and part of the poetic and dramatic tradition on which Shakespeare drew.Everymandiscovers what you can't take with you when you go. He beseeches in turn friends, family (one pleads 'cramp in my toe'), possessions ('I follow no man in such voyages'), and finally falls back on moral and religious values.The most comprehensive paperback edition available, with introduction and extensive notes.

The drama of the English Middle Ages is perennially popular with students and theatre audiences alike, and this is an updated edition of a book which has established itself as a standard guide to the field. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, second edition continues to provide an authoritative introduction and an up-to-date, illustrated guide to the mystery cycles, morality drama and saints' plays which flourished from the late fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries. The book emphasises regional diversity in the period and engages with the literary and particularly the theatrical values of the plays. Existing chapters have been revised and updated where necessary, and there are three entirely new chapters, including one on the cultural significance of early drama. A thoroughly revised reference section includes a guide to scholarship and criticism, an enlarged classified bibliography and a chronological table.

Product Description: This new edition of The Towneley Plays (c. 1500) replaces the edition by George England and Alfred W. Pollard published nearly one hundred years ago by the Early English Text Society. Apart from the corrections of errors in the transcription of the text, the new edition offers a comprehensive introduction, body of notes, and glossary...read more

Product Description: A time of great changes after nearly a century of foreign wars and civil strife, the Tudor era witnessed a significant transformation of dramatic art. Medieval traditions were modified by the forces of humanism and the Reformation, and a renewed interest in classical models inspired experimentation...read more

Provides a cultural and historical context for medieval popular drama.In Drama and Resistance, Claire Sponsler explores the intertwined histories of bodily subjectivity, commodity culture, and theatricality in late medieval England. In a fascinating consideration of popular drama in the period from 1350 to 1520, she argues that many types of performances during this time represented cultural evasions of the imposition of disciplinary power.The medieval theater was a social site where resistance, masked from the full scrutiny of authority by theatricality, was practiced, articulated, and enacted. Sponsler examines three key discourses of authoritarian bodily and commodity control -- clothing laws, conduct literature, and Books of Hours -- and pairs them with three kinds of theatrical performances that enact resistance to disciplining codes -- Robin Hood performances, morality plays, and Corpus Christi pageants. She considers the contradictions and inconsistencies in the repressive official discourses and analyzes the ways in which the staging of forbidden acts like cross-dressing, social and sexual misbehavior, and violence against the body challenged these discourses.Drawing on recent social theory, Drama and Resistance is an important contribution to medieval studies and the history of theater.

Product Description: Located on the Avon which drains into the Severn estuary on the West Coast of England, Bristol was, from its very early days, a trading, manufacturing, and religious centre. Made an independent county in 1373 by Edward III, Bristol maintained a high and prosperous profile throughout the Middle Ages and for much of the Renaissance, being a seaport from which such explorers as John Cabot set out to discover the New World...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: A history of English drama incorporating postmodern theories of analysis by examining its subject in terms of "sites of meaning" rather than concentrating on authors or authorial intent. The 26 scholarly essays delve into the physical and social spaces of drama, viewing the English Church as a theatrical space, describing staging in universities, streets and markets, entertainments at court, the conditions of touring, audience response, and the literary production of plays in manuscript...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

This is the first major study of the use of other languages in medieval and Renaissance English drama. For the period 1400 to 1600 Janette Dillon examines why other languages increasingly invade English plays, and how their significance is illuminated by developments in church and state, in particular the advancing Reformation and expanding English nationalism. In marked contrast to other related studies, Dillon focuses on drama as performance and employs a wide range of works, from the mystery cycles to The Spanish Tragedy, and finally Shakespeare.

Product Description: A consciousness of the past has been an essential determinant of community in the city of Chester, England. This awareness and fascination has been bolstered by a strong civic tradition of drama. In particular, the city's Whitsun Plays have been a vehicle for communicating the myth of the city's medieval heritage, helping to reinforce the sense of history that is part of Chester's identity...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

A new edition of the Coventry plays, comprising the Shearmen and Taylors' and Weavers' plays, which were staged by the town guilds at Corpus Christi. Following an introductory overview, the editors present The Pageant of the Company of Shearmen and Taylors in Coventry and The Weavers' Pageant , followed by textual notes and a lengthy commentary. Appendices include entertainments added on the occasion of late 15th-century royal visits and versions of The Doctors Pageant . (view table of contents)

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Product Description: Insults, abuse, oaths, scatological and bawdy language - these form the subject of Lynn Forest-Hill's study on "bad" language in the late Middle Ages. She demonstrates how, in mediaeval mystery plays and morality plays, dramatists used outrageous language with great sophistication and subtlety to create characterizations and define characters' moral status, to reflect on social conditions, to condemn social evils, and to comment upon sensitive cultural, political and religious topics of the 16th century...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: In 2000, a sixteenth-century manuscript containing a copy of a previously unknown play in Middle Cornish, probably composed in the second half of the fifteenth century, was discovered among papers bequeathed to the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth...read more

Product Description: This study argues that late medieval English 'mystery plays' were about masculinity as much as Christian theology, modes of devotion, or civic self-consciousness. Performed repeatedly by generations of merchants and craftsmen, these Biblical plays produced fantasies and anxieties of middle class, urban masculinity, many of which are familiar today...read more