Staging, Playing, Pyrotechnics and Magic: Conventions of Performance in Early English Theatre

Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies

Philip Butterworth, Peter Harrop, Peter Harrop

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000531787
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

In this selection of research articles Butterworth focuses on investigation of the practical and technical means by which early English theatre, from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century, was performed. Matters of staging for both 'pageant vehicle' and 'theatre-in-the-round' are described and analysed to consider their impact on playing by players, expositors, narrators and prompters. All these operators also functioned to promote the closely aligned disciplines of pyrotechnics and magic (legerdemain or sleight of hand) which also influence the nature of the presented theatre.

The sixteen chapters form four clearly identified parts—staging, playing, pyrotechnics and magic—and drawing on a wealth of primary source material, Butterworth encourages the reader to rediscover and reappreciate the actors, magicians, wainwrights and wheelwrights, pyrotechnists, and (in modern terms) the special effects people and event managers who brought these early texts to theatrical life on busy city streets and across open arenas.

The chapters variously explore and analyse the important backwaters of material culture that enabled, facilitated and shaped performance yet have received scant scholarly attention. It is here, among the itemised payments to carpenters and chemists, the noted requirements of mechanics and wheelwrights, or tucked away among the marginalia of suppliers of staging and ingenious devices that Butterworth has made his stamping ground. This is a fascinating introduction to the very 'nuts and bolts' of early theatre.

Staging, Playing, Pyrotechnics and Magic: Conventions of Performance in Early English Theatre is a closely argued celebration of stagecraft that will appeal to academics and students of performance, theatre history and medieval studies as well as history and literature more broadly. It constitutes the eighth volume in the Routledge series Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies and continues the valuable work of that series (of which Butterworth is a general editor) in bringing significant and expert research articles to a wider audience. (CS 1105).

Part 1STAGING AND STAGING CONVENTIONS

1THE YORK MERCERS’ PAGEANT VEHICLE, 1433–1467Wheels, steering, and control

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195740-3

[‘The York Mercers’ Pageant Vehicle, 1433–1467: Wheels, Steering, and Control’, from Medieval English Theatre, 1:2 (1979), pp. 72–81.]

The discovery of the 1433 York Mercers’ indenture¹ has provided us with insights into the composition and construction of the Mercers’ XVth century pageant vehicle that were hitherto obscure, and much is owed to Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Dorrell for their initial work on the document.² This 1433 indenture is the earliest of the documents that relate to the Mercers’ Doomsday Pageant within the Corpus Christi Cycle at York.

1 The indenture was discovered in 1971 among documents in the possession of Grays Solicitors, Duncombe Place, York. It is now in the archives of the Company of Merchant Adventurers of York. 2 See Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Dorrell, ‘The Doomsday Pageant of the York Mercers’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 5 (1971), 29–34 (hereafter ‘Doomsday Pageant’). For further discussion see Johnston and Dorrell, ‘The York Mercers and their Pageant of Doomsday, 1433–1526’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 6 (1972), 10–35, (hereafter ‘York Mercers’).

In 1501 a vehicle, described as ‘newe substancialie’, was to be constructed by Thomas Drawswerd, carver, as condition of his acceptance into the ‘broderheid of the fraternitie’.³ Between the years 1467 and 1501, records that might furnish us with additional evidence of the pageant vehicle have not survived.⁴ The documents under consideration therefore date from between 1433 and 1467. In this article I propose to draw on evidence outside these dates when considering evidence relating to mechanical principles.

3 The York Mercers and Merchant Adventurers 1356–191, ed. by Maud Sellers, Surtees Society, 129 (London: Whitehead & Son, 1918), pp. 104–5. 4 The records that have survived are contained in ‘York Mercers’, Appendix I. It may be conjectured that the vehicle referred to in the 1467 document was replaced by Drawswerd’s vehicle.

‘Byndyng of a paire of whelys’

The 1433 indenture informs us that the pageant vehicle had four wheels. Another document, initially published by Sellers,⁵ and later reproduced by Johnston and Dorrell,⁶ records payment for the pageant vehicle as follows:

Item, for byndyng of a paire of whelys, js.

5 Sellers, York Mercers and Merchant Adventurers, p. 72. 6 Johnston and Dorrell, ‘York Mercers’, Appendix II. They date the document 1464 and record it as now lost.

The reference to such a payment is unique in the York Mercers’ documents, although similar references are to be found in guild expenses at Coventry and Chester.⁷ The term ‘byndyng’ refers to the process of fastening an iron tyre to the rim of a wheel.⁸ The process of binding wheels became common practice during the XVth century, as the following extract from the York Civic Records shows:

The same day it was ennacted and established fermely herafter to be observed that a proclamacion shal be maid in the opyn market that every denysen and foreyn that bryngez waynez or carts bound with yren and loden with any maner stuff, except the Kyngs carriage and comez within this Citie opon the Payvement whiche of newe is maid to the gret coste and charge of the Citie shall fro nowfurth pay for every tyme xijd to the comon well of this Citie; and thei that bryngs wollen on unbound waynes or cartez and without any naylez with any maner stuffe to be welcome and to have fre entre and passage.⁹

9 York Civic Records 2, ed. by Angelo Raine, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series, 103 (1941), p. 132. Similar orders were passed at Beverley in 1367, 1369, and 1391. See Beverley Town Documents, ed. by Arthur F. Leach, Selden Society, 14 (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1900), p. 20. 7 J.O. Halliwell-Phillips, Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, 5th edn (London: Longmans, 1885), p. 299; F. M. Salter, Medieval Drama in Chester (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1955), p. 73; Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, ed. by Hardin Craig, Early English Text Society, ES87, 2nd edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), Appendix III, p. 109. 8 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘Bind’ v.8 ‘To secure with a border or edging of some strengthening material’; English Dialect Dictionary, ‘Bind’ 2 ‘To put the tyre on a wheel; to shrink a band of hot iron on any article’.

The record is dated 28 April 12 Henry VII (1497), and seems to have been revoked in 1517 (possibly because it was an unrealistic piece of legislation), when it was ‘Agreed that no money from hensforthe shalbe taken of any man for any yren bounde waynes comyng to this Citie with any wode or any other thyng at any of the barrez by any of the officerz of this Citie or ther servaunts during thre yerez next insuyng the date herof’.¹⁰ Clearly, prohibitive measures of this kind did not affect the shoeing of the Mercers’ vehicle in 1464.

10 York Civic Records 3, ed. by Angelo Raine, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series, 106 (1942), p. 67.

The reference to ‘waynez or carts bound with yren’ either refers to a continuous iron-tyre that was heated and shrunk onto the rim of the wheel, or to a number of iron-bars formed around the felloes and nailed into place.

The requisite technology for producing spoked wheels is known to have existed in Roman Britain, but evidence of the utilisation of such skills in the XVth century is scant. Pictorial details provide some indications of construction, but are not entirely to be relied upon, since the details under examination are often visually ambiguous.¹¹ The continuous or hoop iron-tyre is known to have been fitted both to the solid wheel and the spoked wheel, whilst iron-bars were only nailed to the felloes of spoked wheels: these iron-bars were later known as strakes.¹²

11 See Jean Jules Jusserand, English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages (XIVth Century) (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1889), for illustrations from the Luttrell Psalter p. 93, p. 97; R. H. Lane, ‘Waggons and their Ancestors’, Antiquity, 9 (1935), 140–50, pl. III (p. 144); A History of Technology, ed. by Charles Singer etc. 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), II, pp. 547–50; J. Geraint Jenkins, The English Farm Wagon: Origins and Structure (Newton Abbott: David and Charles for the University of Reading, 1972), pp. 5–10. 12 Oxford English Dictionary ‘Strake’ sb.1, ‘A section of the iron rim of a cart-wheel’. See Lane, ‘Waggons and their Ancestors’, p. 142; J. R. Willard, ‘Transportation in England during the Fourteenth Century’, Speculum, 1 (1926), 363; J. Geraint Jenkins, Agricultural Transport in Wales (Cardiff: National Museum of Wales, Welsh Folk Museum, 1962), pp. 73–8; James E. Thorold Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England, 7 vols 1259–1400 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1866), I, p. 544; George Sturt, The Wheelwright’s Shop (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923). Sturt suggests that hoop-tyres were only beginning to supersede straked-wheels in his workshop in the late XIXth century, pp. 104–146; Sir Cyril Fox, ‘Sleds, Carts and Waggons’, Antiquity, 5 (1931), 185–99 (p. 185).

‘Without any naylez’ in the 1497 ordinance is possibly tautological, since ‘unbound waynes’ would be unlikely to have the felloes studded with nails, thereby qualifying for a ‘xijd’ fine and at the same time foregoing the benefits of being shod with strakes. It is possible, however, that fitting ‘unbound waynes’ with large-headed nails might have helped to improve traction.¹³ It seems likely that the nails thus referred to were large-headed strake nails.¹⁴ The function of these nails, with tapered-shanks, was essentially to hold the strakes in position even though the nail-head and strake would eventually become worn.¹⁵ The number of strakes used on a wheel often corresponded to the number of felloes, and the relationship was such that the strakes overlapped the felloe joints, thereby serving to strengthen the overall tension of the wheel.¹⁶ The ‘naylez’ were generally distributed unevenly in order to avoid splitting the grain of the felloes. A strake was normally fastened by eight to twelve strake-nails, so that a new pair of wheels would require between 96 and 144 nails.¹⁷

13 Jenkins suggests that strake-nails prevented the vehicle from slipping; this may well be the case, but ‘unbound’ felloes studded with strake-nails may have weakened t...