Recent studies by scholars of drama, including Tamara Atkin, Rebecca Davis, and Emma Lipton, and formalist scholars of multimedia performance, such as Seeta Chaganti, Mariana Lopez, and Jesse Rodin, have shown what compelling readings can emerge from combining sensitivity to questions of form and poetics with attention to conditions of performance. A deeper examination of the language of Middle English drama can enrich the study of these texts and give fuller credit to their metrical and stanzaic complexity, their wordplay, and their connections to kindred literary forms. How do we bring such questions of form fully into dialogue with questions about reception, historical situation, and community formation that these plays also raise? And what happens if we think of ME drama in connection with non-dramatic forms that may share aspects of its poetic commitments?
This session will include 3 papers, each of 15 minutes in length, leaving about 20-25 minutes for unstructured discussion after the presentations. The selection of our panelists supports a diversity of voices by incorporating presenters across rank, especially pre-tenure scholars (two doctoral candidates and one tenure-track junior faculty member), and by incorporating a range of methodological approaches to performance (poetics, formalism, theory, language and materiality).
In relation to the N-Town Mary Play, Telford argues that moments of prayer are carefully delineated as poetic units, separated from surrounding text by shifts in language, rhetoric, and form. One could go as far as to describe the structure of the Mary Play as a series of prayers connected by dialogue and action, or, more specifically, fulfilled by the dialogue and action. Removed from their dramatic context, the prayers resemble much of the Middle English lyric poetry circulating at the time the N-Town plays were likely being read or performed. In what ways are the spaces of prayer created within the script of the plays similar or dissimilar to those of lyric poetry? By placing these dramatic prayers in conversation with the lyrics they so closely resemble, she aims to explore the unique correspondence between prayer, poetry, and marvelous effect that arises from the carefully constructed poetry of the N-Town Mary Plays.
Svadkovskaia explores how alliteration and formulaic language combine with stage direction in the play Castle of Perseverance to produce meaning through an immersive bodily experience. The extant stage directions provide some information about how the play may have been performed, suggesting it was a conglomerate of sensory occurrences which affectively transmitted allegorical concepts. The language itself, she argues, emphasizes the corporeality of sin – such as when Satan says “blowe your brode baggys” - the alliteration in this case amplifying the connection between bagpipes and lechery through a heavy rhythmic beat. In this way, the Castle creates meaning through a complex weaving of intertextualities – with the visual dimensions projecting the abstract aspects of allegory while the auditory effects simulated by spoken language enhance the physicality of temptation.
Examining the play Mankind, Cushman argues that through a combination of wordplay, striking imagery, and performance, the play stages a kind of metabolic rift between its human protagonist, the field laborer Mankind, and the soil in which he labors. Although Marx and Foster describe the process of soil depletion that resulted from industrialized agriculture, nevertheless, soil depletion that resulted from urban consumption and extraction from rural areas was already an active concern in fifteenth-century England, one that is an unexamined animating concern in Mankind. The issues of the urban-rural divide, the extraction of rural labor and resources, and the alienation of human labor from the natural world is encoded in Mankind's poetry.