Performance and Religion in Early Modern England

Matthew J. Smith

Description

In Performance and Religion in Early Modern England, Matthew J. Smith seeks to expand our view of “the theatrical.” By revealing the creative and phenomenal ways that performances reshaped religious material in early modern England, he offers a more inclusive and integrative view of performance culture.

Smith argues that early modern theatrical and religious practices are better understood through a comparative study of multiple performance types: not only commercial plays but also ballads, jigs, sermons, pageants, ceremonies, and festivals. Our definition of performance culture is augmented by the ways these events looked, sounded, felt, and even tasted to their audiences. This expanded view illustrates how the post-Reformation period utilized new capabilities brought about by religious change and continuity alike. Smith posits that theatrical practice at this time was acutely aware of its power not just to imitate but to work performatively, and to create spaces where audiences could both imaginatively comprehend and immediately enact their social, festive, ethical, and religious overtures.

Each chapter in the book builds on the previous ones to form a cumulative overview of early modern performance culture. This book is unique in bringing this variety of performance types, their archives, venues, and audiences together at the crossroads of religion and theater in early modern England. Scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and those generally interested in the Renaissance will enjoy this book.

Judging by contemporary complaints accusing jigs of inciting social disorder and distracting audiences from the dramatically advanced content of the play, early modern jigs might be considered as the farthest removed in performance culture from the expressly religious events of Christmastide and sermon performances. Yet while jigs were part of the new commercial drama, their theatrical ancestry reaches back to modes of integrating drama and religion that predate the Reformation. And thus, I want to suggest that their function in this new commercial setting was to reinforce the greater, trans-Reformational religious context of the playhouse and of performance culture as a whole.

Famous stage jig performers like Richard Tarlton were known for bantering with the audience and improvising speeches. The Chamberlain’s Men’s Will Kemp was known for his dancing and dramatic clown roles and then after 1599, when he left the company, for the “Nine Days Wonder” during which he danced from London to Norwich. Jigging was physical, musical, improvisational, and sometimes even acrobatic. Roger Clegg notes that in this way the jig was atmospherically characteristic of the “rowdy proto-capitalist playhouse” where “music, singing, and dancing mingled with the variously evolving branches of slapstick, sword-play, bawdy, satire and farce, a dramatic heritage more physical than literary.” Later in the seventeenth century the term “jig/jigg” would contain a host of related meanings—from music and dance, to dialogue and sex—but in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods, its home was on the stage. Some early modern writers opposed play companies’ uses of jigs at the end of the final act, as when Thomas Dekker memorably judges that the “Sceane after the Epilogue hath beene more blacke (about a nasty bawdy jigge) then the most horrid Sceane in the Play was.” Still, as the opening to Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great attests, others embraced the jig’s place as an idiom, as it were, of the greater play event: “From iygging vaines of riming mother-wits, / And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay / Weele lead you to the stately tent of War.”

Furthermore, according to Philip Massinger’s account, jigs were so central to audiences’ expectations of the playhouse routine that they even threatened the spirit of the play that preceded it: “If the gravity and height of the subject distaste such as are onely affected with Jigges, and ribaldrie (as I presume it will,) their condemnation of me, and my Poem, can no way offend me: my reason teaching me such malicious, and ignorant detractors deserve rather contempt, then [sic.] satisfaction.” In some ways, the dramatic jig is on the opposite end of the performance culture spectrum from liturgical and sermon events like boy bishop festivities and cycle plays, but in other ways, they elaborately cull from the performative nuances afforded by the theatrical milieu of trans-Reformational England. Thus, more than a possible distraction or base entertainment, the jig acts as a kind of theatrical intermediary between these explicitly religious performance types and the play that precedes it.

Descriptions of the jig variously as “ribaldrie” and as “nasty bawdy” notwithstanding, the majority of jigs that survive today are cohesive dramas. Such dramatic jigs are short yet complete stories with characters, plots, and tunes; and the recycling of staple character types and themes among them, as in ballads, suggests that jigs constitute an advanced genre. Dramatic jigs normally take the form of a dialogue between two or more characters. Typical themes include sexual seduction, pranks, and the mixing of social levels. At the end of a play performance, the company clown would reenter the stage, perhaps with one or two more players, and then perform his song. And indeed, the dramatic jig is more a dialogue song than it is a dance, tough dancing frequently accompanied it.

To watch a jig performed after a play may well have had a jarring effect, especially if it followed a tragic catastrophe, but it is worth pointing out that jigs share many of their thematic and theatrical elements with even the bleakest of early modern tragedies—music, dancing, sexuality, rampant wordplay, deception, conspicuous reliance on particular stage properties, thwarted ambition. And this partial list does not account for how the postlude jig reprises the musical and farcical activities that frequently occurred before plays and between acts.

To close the comparative study of Stage, Cathedral, Wagon, Street with a jig has a similar effect to ending a play with a jig: it does not terminate the event but expands it. The jig extends the play into the audience, other performance forms, and a common playhouse vocabulary. It extends forward into future plays and, in many cases, into future audiences, since in the Elizabethan period new audience members would enter the playhouse after the play ended in order to see the jig specifically. Postlude jigs even stretched into future performance events, taking form in broadside print and being sung by new performers in alehouses and market stalls—we might imagine, for example, at the entrance to the premier of a new play. Conversely, early modern jigs were nostalgic and also looked backwards in time. In a sense, jigs were “born old”: they made sure that a time past persisted into the time present through their folk characters, music, and wooing dramas, and by invoking May games, Morris dancing, wedding plays, interludes, pastorals, and the role of the medieval Vice.

(excerpted from postlude)

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Prelude

1. Early Modern Theatricality across the Reformation

2. The Real Presence/Absence of God in the Chester Cycle Plays

3. Henry V and the Ceremonies of Theater

4. God’s Idioms: Sermon Belief in Donne’s London

5. Performing Religion in Early Modern Ballads

6. The Devils Among Us: Intertheatricality in Doctor Faustus and its Afterlives

Postlude: Ending with a Jig

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Medieval
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Idioma inglés
• Idioma galés
• Edad Media
• Renaissance theatre
• Middle Ages
• Irish
• English
• European
• Welsh
• Scottish
• Musique irlandaise
• Anglais
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 décembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268104689
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

PERFORMANCE AND RELIGION IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern
S ERIES E DITORS: D AVID A ERS , S ARA B ECKWITH, AND J AMES S IMPSON
R ECENT T ITLES IN THE S ERIES
The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution (2012)
Alice Dailey
Transforming Work: Early Modern Pastoral and Late Medieval Poetry (2013)
Katherine C. Little
Writing Faith and Telling Tales: Literature, Politics, and Religion in the Work of Thomas More (2013)
Thomas Betteridge
Unwritten Verities: The Making of England’s Vernacular Legal Culture, 1463–1549 (2015)
Sebastian Sobecki
Mysticism and Reform, 1400–1750 (2015)
Sara S. Poor and Nigel Smith, eds.
The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England (2015)
Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano
Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England, c. 1350–1600 (2016)
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
MATTHEW J. SMITH
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2019 by University of Notre Dame
Published in the United States of America
Names: Smith, Matthew J., 1983- author.
Title: Performance and religion in early modern England : stage, cathedral, wagon, street / Matthew J. Smith.
Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. | Series: Reformations: medieval and early modern | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018043817 (print) | LCCN 2018050418 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268104672 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268104689 (epub) | ISBN 9780268104658 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268104654 (hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: English drama—Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600—History and criticism. | Christian drama, English—England—History and criticism. | Mysteries and miracle-plays, English—History and criticism. | Liturgy and drama—England. | Rites and ceremonies in literature. | Religion in literature. | Theater—England—History—16th century.
Classification: LCC PR658.R43 (ebook) | LCC PR658.R43 S65 2018 (print) | DD 822/.309—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043817
∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper) .
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 Ashley
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Prelude
Chapter One
Early Modern Theatricality across the Reformation
Chapter Two
The Real Presence/Absence of God in the Chester Cycle Plays
Chapter Three
Henry V and the Ceremonies of Theater
Chapter Four
God’s Idioms: Sermon Belief in Donne’s London
Chapter Five
Performing Religion in Early Modern Ballads
Chapter Six
The Devils among Us: Intertheatricality in Doctor Faustus and Its Afterlives
Postlude: Ending with a Jig
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
F IGURE 2.1. Bakers at work, in Ordinary of the Company of Bakers in the city of York , ca. 1600
F IGURE 2.2. Cena Domini and Manna Datur Filiis Israel , in Speculum Humanae Salvationis , 1375–1400
F IGURE 2.3. Feast of Corpus Christi, in Missale ad vsum insignis ecclesie Sarisburiensis , 1555
F IGURE 4.1. Wenceslaus Hollar, Interior of Old St. Pauls , 1656
F IGURE 4.2. St. Paul’s Cathedral Precinct , copperplate map of London, 1559
F IGURE 4.3. Wire frame image of the acoustic model, Paul’s 165 Churchyard, the Cross Yard
F IGURE 4.4. John Gipkyn, Old St Paul’s (sermon at St Paul’s Cross) , 1616
F IGURE 5.1. Ballad, “The Heartie Confession of a Christian,” 1593
F IGURE 5.2. “The order for the buryal of the dead ,” in The boke of common praier , 1573
F IGURE 5.3. The Holy Gospel of Iesus Christ according to Iohn , Geneva Bible, 1602
F IGURE 5.4. Ballad, “A Song of Syon of the Beauty of Bethell,” 1642
F IGURE 5.5. Ballad, “The Dying Tears of a Penitent Sinner,” 1678–80

F IGURE 5.6. Ballad, “Great Brittains Arlarm to Drowsie Sinners in Destress,” 1672–96
F IGURE 5.7. Ballad, “Some Fyne Gloues,” 1560–70
F IGURE 6.1. Master of the Holy Kinship, Mass of St . Gregory , 1486
F IGURE 6.2. Ballad, “The Judgment of God shewed upon one John Faustus,” 1686–88
F IGURE 6.3. Ballad, “The Just Judgment of GOD shew’d upon Dr. John Faustus,” 1640
F IGURE 6.4. Ballad, “The Judgment of God shewed upon one John Faustus,” 1686–88
F IGURE 7.1. Ballad, “Frauncis new Iigge,” 1617
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As I write these words to the people who have helped me create this book, I think first of those who have contributed over many years to my learning so as to make academic study possible and desirable for me in the first place. I want foremost to acknowledge my parents, Richard and Janice, for their support and steering from what has seemed to me time immemorial.
I’m eager also to recognize certain teachers whose words, wiles, and gambits I remember well and often repurpose for my own students—David Albertson, Virginia Doland, Deborah Harkness, Joseph Henderson, Cynthia Herrup, Tony Kemp, Clare Costley King’oo, Aaron Kleist, Greg Kneidel, Jeffrey Lehman, Robert Llizo, Marc Malandra, Ed McCann, Todd Pickett, Tom Recchio, John Mark Reynolds, Mary Robertson, David Rollo, Meg Russett, Fred Sanders, Melissa Schubert, Greg Semenza, Paul Spears, and Dan Yim. This book covers numerous types of performance, each with its own history, archive, and body of criticism; and consequently, these different genres and events are tied in my mind to distinct individuals I’ve named. I wonder now if this breadth has been a blessing or a curse, but, at any rate, the book now exists as a mnemonic index of my many wonderful teachers.
I am grateful to Heather James and Rebecca Lemon for their invaluable notes and guidance, especially during the earliest years of this project. I am proud, moreover, of the singular influence that Bruce Smith has had on my intellectual habits and proclivities. Whatever small portion of creativity and interdisciplinarity made its way into this book is gleaned from his advice and encouragement.
Many other literary scholars have helped me to think more carefully about the ideas in this study, and surely their influence has been more encouraging and constructive for me than they realize. Sometimes such help has come through friendship, correspondence, collaboration, translation assistance, or reading; other times it has come by way of disagreement, critique, or simply an insightful post-talk question. I would like to thank Sarah Beckwith, Rebecca Cantor, Roger Clegg, Kevin Curran, Ramon Elinevsky, Lori Anne Ferrell, Gavin Fort, Patricia Fumerton, Lowell Gallagher, Penelope Geng, Diane Glancy, Jim Kearney, John Kennedy, James Knapp, Kent Lehnhof, Naomi Liebler, Larry Manley, Meghan Davis Mercer, Christopher Perreira, Debora Shuger, Patricia Taylor, and Thomas Ward. A particularly wonderful and unexpected blessing in these early years of my career has come in the friendship, collaboration, and mentorship of Julia Reinhard Lupton. Her intellectual generosity has been unparalleled.
I thank my colleagues and friends at Azusa Pacific University and especially in the Department of English. I’m particularly indebted to Mark Eaton and Caleb Spencer, my friends and coeditors, for their continual audience and confidence in me. So much rests on keen and dependable conversation. I’m grateful as well to my deans, Jennifer Walsh and David Weeks, and to the institution as a whole for research support. My students at APU have been a source of inspiration, and I want to thank Jeremy Byrum, John Eliot Reasoner, and Emma Lee for their help with formatting.
Research for this project was made possible and enhanced by the financial support of several institutions, including a research grant from the Renaissance Society of America, a graduate research grant at the Huntington Library, a Francis Bacon Fellowship in Renaissance Studies at the Huntington Library, and the J. Leeds Barroll Prize from the Shakespeare Association of America. The Huntington Library, its Early Modern Studies Institute, and the Renaissance Literature seminar—organized by Heather James and Heidi Brayman Hackel—in particular have provided vital intellectual community. I’d be remiss without also recognizing the outstanding resource of the Early Broadside Ballad Archive at the University of California Santa Barbara, without which this book would have taken much longer to write. And the captions accompanying my illustrations acknowledge the help of the museums and libraries who have provided images.
An earlier and shorter version of chapter 3 was published in Studies in English Literature as “The Experience of Ceremony in Henry V ” (2014); and a version of chapter 4 was published in English Literary Renaissance by that chapter’s same title (2016).
This book would not have been possible without the sort of support that only family can provide. For helping to make my life smoother, sustainable, and richer, I want to acknowledge