Festive Enterprise

Jill P. Ingram

Description

Festive Enterprise reveals marketplace pressures at the heart of dramatic form in medieval and Renaissance drama.

In Festive Enterprise, Jill P. Ingram merges the history of economic thought with studies of theatricality and spectatorship to examine how English Renaissance plays employed forms and practices from medieval and traditional entertainments to signal the expectation of giving from their audiences. Resisting the conventional divide between medieval and Renaissance, Festive Enterprise takes a trans-Reformation view of dramaturgical strategies, which reflected the need to generate both income and audience assent. By analyzing a wide range of genres (such as civic ceremonial, mummings, interludes, scripted plays, and university drama) and a diverse range of venues (including great halls, city streets, the Inns of Court, and public playhouses), Ingram demonstrates how early moderns borrowed medieval money-gatherers’ techniques to signal communal obligations and rewards for charitable support of theatrical endeavors. Ingram shows that economics and drama cannot be considered as separate enterprises in the medieval and Renaissance periods. Rather, marketplace pressures were at the heart of dramatic form in medieval and Renaissance drama alike.

Festive Enterprise is an original study that traces how economic forces drove creativity in drama from medieval civic processions and guild cycle plays to the early Renaissance. It will appeal to scholars of medieval and early modern drama, theater historians, religious historians, scholars of Renaissance drama, and students in English literature, drama, and theater.

Utilizing festive forms to convey controversial messages was of course not unique to either medieval festive events or early modern drama, as demonstrated by scurrilous broadsides, libelous ballads, and fifteenth-century “mock testaments” that willed relics to dead popes in Hell. Yet what emerged post-Reformation in England was a growing literate populace and a burgeoning public theater audience that meant the explosion of the market for such messages. Larger audiences attracted politicized groups who mobilized particular “publics” to win over opinion to their positions. In such efforts, newly ascendant groups aimed for an ideological and discursive hegemony which gave them control over the parameters of legitimate public speech. My book’s final chapter examines such an aim in the late sixteenth-century phenomenon of the satirical Martin Marprelate Tracts (printed and circulated 1588-89). The anonymous Marprelate tracts pitted an anti-episcopal message against the bishops’ anti-Martinist writers, using a clandestine printing press to produce thousands of copies—with an output of twenty tracts in two years—to appeal to a popular readership. The festive form of Marprelate (written in a popular mode of garrulous, gossipy satire, and frequently alluding to festive figures such as Maid Marian, morris dancers, and gatherers) was employed in order to sell more pamphlets, and thus was rooted in its ability to be widely marketed. Just as the economic basis of festivity’s efficacy for the Marprelate writers—ensuring the pamphlets’ popularity—made it marketable, that same marketability made it aesthetically a failure. The pamphlet’s festive scurrility was overly personal, libelous, and singularly vulgar. I examine that artistic failure through Shakespeare’s play Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594), which engages with the Marprelate controversy through the play’s implicit commentary on the misuses of festive railing satire. Shakespeare pens characters who echo utterances from Marprelate: libel, ad hominem attack, and mockery, all festive modes employed with the intent to harm personal reputation. The play suggests that such strategies do not serve festive entertainers, because they betray the festive license given to them by their public. There are limits to the usefulness of the festive exchange: the limits, Shakespeare suggests, are market-driven. In some cases, the fight to mobilize a public could fracture communities. I conclude my study with a consideration of how types of festive excess, appealing to different types of publics, serve consumers while degrading the quality of artistic output.

The festive enterprise I trace throughout this study operates through a language of form and gesture and within the structure of a social commerce that nonetheless contains limits. The boundaries not only of what is “sayable,” but the manner in which it is said, becomes adjudicated by a marketplace of paying customers. I trace a festive model more pervasive than previously acknowledged—a model that shaped the drama’s form but that also served as a vehicle for grievance: economic, religious, and aesthetic. Yet festivity’s primary function, because it was largely rooted in solicitations to give, was in its power to appeal to the good will of spectators, offering them an agency in creating and approving of performances. When that function was applied to the early modern stage, it exposed the power of the marketplace. Market-driven entrepreneurs such as John Taylor, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare understood the fact that prosperity—of a jest, of a playhouse, or of a solicitous line of dramatic poetry—lay in the judgment of the audience. They wrote that understanding into the structure of their works, where reminders of their debts—not only to their audiences, but to original festive fundraising practices—reveal the social pressures upon both satire and commercial practices alike.

Introduction

1. The Festive Gatherer and the Empathetic Thief: The Genealogy of a Character

2. Forms of Investment: Mummings, Prologues and Epilogues

3. Reconciliation in The Winter’s Tale: Devotion and Commerce from Guilds to Church Ales

4. The Mobile Entertainer: John Taylor’s Penniless Pilgrimage

5. Coding Complaint in Gesta Grayorum and The Christmas Prince

6. “A Jest’s Prosperity”: The Market, Marprelate, and Love’s Labour’s Lost

Conclusion

Sujets

• Shakespeare
• Medieval
• Theater
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Idioma inglés
• Idioma galés
• Edad Media
• Theatre
• Middle Ages
• Irish
• English
• Great Britain
• William Shakespeare
• European
• Welsh
• Scottish
• Musique irlandaise
• Anglais
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 mars 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268109103
• Langue: English

Extrait

Festive Enterprise
ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern
S ERIES E DITORS : D AVID A ERS , S ARAH B ECKWITH, AND J AMES S IMPSON
R ECENT T ITLES IN THE S ERIES
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Ryan McDermott
Volition’s Face: Personification and the Will in Renaissance Literature (2017)
Andrew Escobedo
Shadow and Substance: Eucharistic Controversy and English Drama across the Reformation Divide (2017)
Jay Zysk
Queen of Heaven: The Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin in Early Modern English Writing (2018)
Lilla Grindlay
Performance and Religion in Early Modern England: Stage, Cathedral, Wagon, Street (2019)
Matthew J. Smith
Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play (2019)
Julie Paulson
Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Modern Eras (2019)
Nancy Bradley Warren
Versions of Election: From Langland and Aquinas to Calvin and Milton (2020)
David Aers
Fifteenth-Century Lives: Writing Sainthood in England (2020)
Karen A. Winstead
Festive Enterprise
The Business of Drama in Medieval and Renaissance England

JILL P. INGRAM
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright © 2021 by the University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020950366
ISBN: 978-0-268-10908-0 (Hardback)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10909-7 (Paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10911-0 (WebPDF)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10910-3 (Epub)
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
FOR CLAIRE AND LUCY
CONTENTS List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction ONE The Festive Gatherer and the Empathetic Thief: The Genealogy of a Character TWO Forms of Investment: Mummings, Prologues, and Epilogues THREE Reconciliation in The Winter’s Tale : Devotion and Commerce from Guilds to Church Ales FOUR The Mobile Entertainer: John Taylor’s Penniless Pilgrimage FIVE Coding Complaint in Gesta Grayorum and The Christmas Prince SIX “A Jest’s Prosperity”: The Market, Marprelate, and Love’s Labour’s Lost Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
FIGURES Figure 1.1. Hobbyhorse with gathering ladle, from “Tollet’s Window.” Figure 1.2. Gatherer, morris dancers, and hobbyhorse, from The Thames at Richmond , with the Old Royal Palace . Painting, unknown. Figure 3.1. Procession and stage play, The Kermis of St. George . Etching, after Pieter Bruegel. ca. 1560. Figure 3.2. Representation of a pageant vehicle, from Thomas Sharp, A Dissertation on the Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries Anciently Performed at Coventry , 1825. Figure 4.1. Depiction of an English acting troupe, 1605–6, from Travelling players in the friendship album of Franz Hartmann . Figure 4.2. Title page from The Scourge of Baseness , by John Taylor, 1624.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book began its life with an interest in the lord of misrule as part of my doctoral work at the University of Virginia. I am grateful for those early discussions on the figure with Katharine Maus, Clare Kinney, and Gordon Braden, even as my dissertation left festivity behind. Following the lord of misrule to university drama years later, I learned from Kenneth Fincham, Peter McCullough, and Peter Lake of the resistance to festivity from early seventeenth-century evangelical forces. I am thankful for Lake’s generosity as respondent to my panel on “Contextualizing Marprelate” at the Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference in 2012. I also acknowledge most gratefully the help of Alan Nelson, who shared prepublication drafts of his REED: Inns of Court volume. Bradin Cormack’s insight into legal nuances within the Inns’ entertainments were a tremendous aid. Early drafts of chapters benefited greatly from faculty colloquia at Ohio University, the Newberry Library’s Center for Research in Festive Culture, and Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) annual meeting seminars. The SAA seminars especially fruitful were “Redefining Theatre History” (2011) directed by Susan Cerasano, and “Re-theorizing Shakespearean Comedy” (2012) led by Pamela Allen Brown and Kent Cartwright. Discussions with Joseph Navitsky on Marprelate enriched my chapter on Love’s Labour’s Lost , which also benefited from an interview with Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre director Dominic Dromgoole in 2009 during its production. I am grateful for librarians’ efficient assistance at the Folger Library and the Widener Library. Faculty Fellowship Leave at Ohio University and a grant from the Earhart Foundation allowed me productive research time. I want to thank students Henry Craver, Carly Campbell, and Michael Spalding for their research assistance.
My most eye-opening experiences with festive performances have occurred in Durham, England, where I was fortunate to participate in the SITM/REED-NE Colloquium at Durham University in July 2016, run expertly by Barbara Ravelhofer and John McKinnell. Conversations there with David Klausner and Gaspar Jakovac enriched my project. I am grateful for McKinnell’s help on intricacies of the boy bishop, shared in conversation in 2014, where I delivered a talk to the Department of English Studies at Durham. Feedback has improved this project through the years, especially that from Margie Ferguson, Caitlin Finlayson, Sarah Skwire, David Urban, Hillary Eklund, and Zach Long. Patrick Griffin has been an invaluable source of faith and professional advice at many turns. At Ohio University, Linda Rice is a beacon of goodwill, and I am blessed in her friendship. I am thankful for the friendship of Tania Meek, and my garage gym Crossfit team: Lauren Hill, Michelle Raines, Julie Owens, Misa Hata, and Tosh Hayes.
I would like to thank the external readers for University of Notre Dame Press whose advice for revision strengthened this project. I am indebted to the ReFormations series editors James Simpson, David Aers, and Sarah Beckwith for their cogent suggestions. Rachel Kindler was especially helpful in preparing the manuscript, and Stephen Little supervised the editorial process. I am grateful for Scott Barker’s eagle eye in copyediting. I thank Stephen Wrinn for his belief in the project.
Portions of this book appeared in earlier forms as articles in journals. Part of chapter 3 appeared as “‘You ha’done me a charitable office’: Autolycus and the Economics of Festivity in The Winter’s Tale ,” Renascence 64, no. 2 (2012). Part of chapter 5 appeared as “Avant-garde Conformists and Student Revels at Oxford, 1607–88,” Anglican and Episcopal History 80, no. 4 (2011). I thank the editors of those journals for permission to include previously published material here.
I thank Mom and Dad for their patient inquiries into the book’s progress, which helped keep me working. Glynn Ingram forgave me for missing family trips to Nashville to stay home and write. Kathryn Thompson’s gift of the pellet stove offered a motivational hearth through the final winter’s writing. Finally, the book would not have been completed without the encouraging heart of my husband, Robert Ingram. Years of observing his obsessive work ethic finally rubbed off. I am grateful too for my daughters’ support: Lucy’s energetic, insistent distractions offset by Claire’s independence offered the right balance of hush and clamor. My emotional patrons, my family buoyed me out past the tidal pull of procrastination. To them I say, “For this relief, much thanks.”
INTRODUCTION
Festive celebrations—devotional, calendrical, and recreational—animated English life from the thirteenth century onward. English “festivity” involved ceremonies and pastimes of either liturgical or customary significance, from Shrovetide feasts and village revels to saints’ plays. Festivity marked communal occasions: the installation of a mayor, a parish ale to raise funds, a guild procession to celebrate its patron saint, a monarch’s progress through a town, or St. Peter’s Eve bonfires. Participants enjoyed Corpus Christi Day processions, boy bishop ceremonies, misrule mock courts, Robin Hood games, pageant plays, and the like. The Reformation complicated that, for during the 1530s and 1540s, Henry VIII and Edward VI tried to suppress festive rituals associated with aspects of late medieval religious life. 1 Towns, guilds, and parishes had long cemented broad communal ties or strengthened small group loyalties at such events: the Henrician and Edwardian antifestive measures threatened to wipe away these older modes of public worship and expression. And yet, festive entertainments persisted, if often transformed. 2 Late sixteenth-century civic processions celebrated mayoral inaugurations instead of Corpus Christi Day, guilds shifted their patron saint observances on the calendar and renamed themselves, and banns criers Protestantized their town play themes. In both city and countryside, the older festive rituals were modified to serve many of the same social and civic ends they had done for centuries past. 3 One of the most crucial of those ends was to excite donation and to gather money.
This book is about festivity and the theater. Previous studies of festive drama have made two broad arguments. First, some have highlighted the ways that the theater appropriated festive entertainments. 4 Playwrights, for instance, penned scenes of sheepshearing festivals, lords of misrule, and morris dancers, scenes interpreted as compensation for lost traditional religious spectacle and ritual. 5 Second, other scholars have found in the playwrights’ repurposing a “commodification” of the original communal festive experience. They ass