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"Chester plays."
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The civic cycles : artisan drama and identity in premodern England
\"The civic religious drama of late medieval England--financed, produced, and performed by craftspeople--offers one of the earliest forms of written literature by a non-elite group in Europe. In this innovative study, Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano trace an artisanal perspective on medieval and early modern civic relations, analyzing selected plays from the cities of York and Chester individually and from a comparative perspective, in dialogue with civic records. Positing a complex view of relations among merchants, established artisans, wage laborers, and women, the two authors show how artisans used the cycle plays to not only represent but also perform their interests, suggesting that the plays were the major means by which the artisans participated in civic polity. In addition to examining selected plays in the context of artisanal social and economic practices, Rice and Pappano also address relations between performance and historical transformation, considering how these plays, staged for nearly two centuries, responded to changes in historical conditions. In particular, they pay attention to how the pressures of Reformist governments influenced the meaning and performance of the civic religious drama in both towns. Ultimately, the authors provide a new perspective on how artisans can be viewed as social actors and agents in England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. \"The Civic Cycles is an outstanding take on the urban dramas of medieval York and Chester, complementing previous historicist scholarship on these plays while expanding the political frame of reference. This volume is poised to become a major book in early English drama studies, a text that coordinates and assimilates all of the revisionary historicist work on the cycles from the previous two decades even as it takes that historicism to the next level of complexity.\" --Robert Barrett, Jr., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign \"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Recycling the Cycle
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.
Building up the material in REED: Chester , David Mills has produced a detailed study of Chester's Whitsun Plays in their local, physical, social, political, cultural, and religious context. A continuum has survived between the Middle Ages and the present day, providing not only an understanding of the plays themselves, but a narrative of the ways in which manuscripts survive and the functions that they serve. The continued performance of these plays is significant of modern play revivals as a political and sociological phenomenon, demonstrating the power that these rituals and plays still hold.
>Recycling the Cycle is not only a look at how medieval and Renaissance cultural traditions developed and were maintained over centuries, but an insight into how those traditions can stay fresh and relevant, even today.
eBook
The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture
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.
eBook
The Tudor Origins of Medieval Drama
This chapter contains sections titled:
The Chester Cycle
The Towneley Plays
References
Further Reading
Book Chapter
Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft
InShakespeare's Medieval Craft, Kurt A. Schreyer explores the relationship between Shakespeare's plays and a tradition of late medieval English biblical drama known as mystery plays. Scholars of English theater have long debated Shakespeare's connection to the mystery play tradition, but Schreyer provides new perspective on the subject by focusing on the Chester Banns, a sixteenth-century proclamation announcing the annual performance of that city's cycle of mystery plays. Through close study of the Banns, Schreyer demonstrates the central importance of medieval stage objects-as vital and direct agents and not merely as precursors-to the Shakespearean stage.
As Schreyer shows, the Chester Banns serve as a paradigm for how Shakespeare's theater might have reflected on and incorporated the mystery play tradition, yet distinguished itself from it. For instance, he demonstrates that certain material features of Shakespeare's stage-including the ass's head ofA Midsummer Night's Dream, the theatrical space of Purgatory inHamlet, and the knocking at the gate in the Porter scene ofMacbeth-were in fact remnants of the earlier mysteries transformed to meet the exigencies of the commercial London playhouses. Schreyer argues that the ongoing agency of supposedly superseded theatrical objects and practices reveal how the mystery plays shaped dramatic production long after their demise. At the same time, these medieval traditions help to reposition Shakespeare as more than a writer of plays; he was a play-wright, a dramatic artisan who forged new theatrical works by fitting poetry to the material remnants of an older dramatic tradition.
eBook
Two Screenplays by Charles Burnett: Bless Their Little Hearts (1984) and Man in a Basket (2003)
No filmmaker has been more committed to showing that black lives matter than Charles Burnett, whose wide-ranging work has been devoted to such issues as urban poverty, police killings, slavery, and African revolution. Best known as the director of Killer of Sheep (1977), To Sleep with Anger (1990), The Glass Shield (1994), and Nightjohn (1996), Burnett is in fact a total filmmaker who has often written, photographed, and edited both his own films and those of his compatriots in the “L.A. Rebellion.” This essay concentrates on his relatively neglected talents as a writer, using two projects as examples: Bless Their Little Hearts, written for director Billy Woodberry, and Man in a Basket, which Burnett hopes someday to direct. The first might be described as an equally powerful companion to Killer of Sheep, and the second is arguably the finest screen adaptation of the black crime novelist Chester Himes.
Journal Article
Fifteenth-Century Studies 36
The fifteenth century defies consensus on fundamental issues; most scholars agree, however, that the period outgrew the Middle Ages, that it was a time of transition and a passage to modern times. ‘Fifteenth-Century Studies’ offers essays on diverse aspects of the period, including liberal and fine arts, historiography, medicine, and religion. Essays within this thirty-sixth volume treat a wide range of topics: the importance of manuscript culture as reflected in ‘Cárcel de amor’; the wanderings of René d'Anjou and Olivier de la Marche as reflected in literary texts; the art of compiling in Jean de Bueil's ‘Jouvencel’; a diplomatic transcription of Princeton MS 153 (reception and compilation practices of the ‘Rose’); historical approaches in the chronicles of Jean le Bel and Jean Froissart; the Fairfax Sequence in Bodleian MS Fairfax 16; anticlerical critique in the Croxton ‘Play of the Sacrament’; the Chester cycle of mystery plays; the conquering Turk in Carnival Nürnberg: Hans Rosenplüt's ‘Des Turken Vasnachtspil’; and Tolkien's eucatastrophe and Malory's ‘Morte Darthur’. Book reviews conclude the volume. CONTRIBUTORS: Ethan Campbell, Emily C. Francomano, D. Thomas Hanks, Jr., Theodore K. Lerud, John Moreau, Gerald Nachtwey, Mariana Neilly, Marco Nievergelt, Michelle Szkilnik, Martin W. Walsh. EDITORS: BARBARA I. GUSICK is Professor Emerita of English at Troy University, Dothan, Alabama; MATTHEW Z. HEINTZELMAN is curator of the Austria/Germany Study Center and Rare Book Cataloger at Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, Saint John's University, Collegeville, Minnesota.
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