Performing Environments

Site-Specificity in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama

S. Bennett, M. Polito, S. Bennett, M. Polito

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137320162
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137320179
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

This ground-breaking collection explores the assumptions behind and practices for performance implicit in the manuscripts and playtexts of the medieval and early modern eras, focusing on work which engages with performance-oriented research.

Part I
Building Frameworks

1

‘The whole past, the whole time’: Untimely Matter and the Playing Spaces of York

Patricia Badir

In 1967, a survey of York Minster revealed that parts of the cathedral, in particular the central tower, were on the verge of collapse. A major restoration project, lasting five years and costing over £2,000,000, was undertaken. A serendipitous result of the refortification of the central tower was the discovery of Roman ruins beneath the cathedral’s Norman foundations. Today visitors ‘journey through time from the first to the twentieth century’ as they descend from the south transept of the Minster into the undercroft, where the archaeological results of the restoration are on display.¹ In one space, visitors see the substantial remains of the Roman fortress (second century); part of the west wall of the Norman transept (c. 1070) made of reused Roman stone; the foundations of the west wall of the Gothic south transept (c. 1220) as well as the modern concrete collar (c. 1970). Above them, of course, is the magnificent structure of the Gothic cathedral – itself a polychronic construction with features representing three distinct architectural styles.²

The exhibition also features movable displays of things – carved stones, bosses, vessels, plate, painted glass – from the Roman, Saxon, Norman and late medieval periods as well as from modern times. Visitors do not encounter these objects in a place that is historically defined; an object cannot inhabit the Roman principia without simultaneously inhabiting the Norman foundations or the modern restoration. The particularly conscientious guest, guided by the Minster’s literature, will ‘check [his] bearings every now and then with reference to the building above [him]’ and will see the collection in an even thicker context.³ The undercroft objects are thus acknowledged as inhabiting a space of accumulation in which the present experience adds to stratified layers of synchronized pasts.⁴

In order to bring the objects on display in the ‘untimely’ space of the York Minster undercroft into line with the project of this collection of contributed works, I want to turn to Jonathan Gil Harris’s recent interrogation of the ‘time of material culture’. Harris would call the things gathered in the undercroft exhibits ‘ethnographic curio[s]’ – essentially valued because they ‘materialize […] moment[s] unfamiliar to us’.⁵ More crucially though, for an exhibition that floats so oddly in a temporally stratified space, Harris proposes that historical artefacts can challenge conventional models of temporality and historicity, according to which any object or phenomenon has ‘citizenship’ in a singular historical moment. Drawing on recent philosophy of science, Harris suggests that objects are never of a single moment; they are instead ‘untimely matter’, bringing together several or many historical periods at one time. The exemplary instance of the polychronic object is, for Harris, a palimpsest: a multiply marked surface that is not just polychronic (that is, of many times) but also (to use Michel Serres’s term⁶) multi-temporal in that it can prompt many different understandings and experiences of temporality – ‘that is, of the relations between now and then, old and new, before and after’.⁷

The model of history proposed by Harris, and I think exemplified by the York Minster undercroft exhibit, is a model that I would like to propose for the consideration of the artefacts of site-specific performance in the medieval and early modern periods. My suggestion is that the objects discoverable in archival projects like the Records of Early English Drama have a palimpsest-like quality that becomes evident as they resurface upon the same site at different moments in time. I also want to propose that the untimely qualities of these objects affords us some insight into our own enduring fascination with the vestigial traces of site-specific performance – the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’ of local theatre history.

In what follows, I will be describing three medieval ‘things’ drawn from Alexandra Johnston and Margaret Rogerson’s ground-breaking edition of the Records of Early English Drama for the city of York.⁸ My purpose here is to show how these exemplary things resurface in post-medieval performance records, drawing their pasts into a dynamic and evolving urban environment. Each of these objects, I contend, moves across time and space accruing meaning – meaning that is never exactly a-historical, or without connection to particular moments in history, but rather that is multi-temporal or textured by the many histories in which the thing has participated. Each thing is never an isolated thing, but rather a social thing whose significance is conditioned by its relation to a multitude of other things, including other archives, accounts, manuscripts and texts. And, these things ask us, in turn, to rethink the spaces that house them, to reconceptualize buildings (like York Minster), as well as city walls, gates and streets, into surfaces and containers that foster what Harris describes as ‘networks of agency’.⁹ Ultimately, the multi-temporal depth afforded by a consideration of untimely matter allows us to see how civic distinction – the honour of the city – is the effect of a dynamic set-up of people and things in movement, over time, upon a particular urban landscape. As anyone who has walked its streets knows to be true: the city of York is a palimpsest if ever there was one.

Thing One: The Mercers’ Pageant Wagon

In 1971 Johnston and Rogerson published a transcription of an indenture, dated 1433, belonging to the York Mercers’ guild.¹⁰ This document provided the first glimpse of the play materials in the possession of the guild, including the wagon that supported the performance of the Last Judgment pageant – the final pageant of the Corpus Christi play performed in York from the second half of the fourteenth century to the latter half of the sixteenth century.¹¹ It is the closest thing to a description of a pageant wagon that we have, and its survival has greatly enhanced our understanding of what guild drama looked like. The indenture provides the following inventory:

iiij Wheles helle mouthe […] a cloud & ij peces of Rainbow of tymber […] A grete coster of rede damaske payntid for the bakke syde of Þe pagent ij other lesse costers for ij sydes of the Pagent iij other costers of lewent brede for Þe sides of Þe Pagent A litel coster iiij squared to hang at Þe bakke of god iiij Irens to bere vppe heuen iiij finale coterelles & a Iren pynne A brandreth of Iren Þat god sall sitte vppon when he sall sty vppe to heuen With iiij rapes at iiij corners A heuen of Iren With a naffe of tre ij peces of reded cloudes & sternes of gold langing to heuen ii peces of blu cloudes payntid on bothe sydes iij peces of rede cloudes With sunne bemes of golde & sternes for Þe hiest of heuen With a lang small border of Þe same Wurke vij grete Aungels gilted holding Þe passion of god Ane of Þame hs a fane of laton & a crosse of Iren in his hede giltid iiij smaller Aungels gilted holding Þe passion ix smaller Aungels payntid rede to renne aboute in Þe heuen A lang small corde to gerre Þe Aungels renne aboute ij shorte rolls of tre to putte forthe Þe pagent.¹²

Here is supposed a platform, set on wheels, with a superstructure consisting of four iron poles upon which was bolted a roof made of wood set in an iron frame. The back and sides of the stage were formed by curtains and the wagon was also equipped with a mechanism for lifting God to Heaven. Moreover, there were painted clouds and as many as twenty artificial angels. A Hell mouth, also included in the inventory, appears to have been a separate property. Supplementary records, dating from 1433 and 1467, show that a number of repairs were made to the wagon and provisions were made for its storage in a pageant house.¹³ In 1463, the Mercers appear to have added another piece (or perhaps created a separate entity): a ‘now pagand yat was mayd for ye sallys to ryse owtof’ (a new pageant for the souls to rise out of).¹⁴ The Mercers’ account rolls of 1501 suggest that the guild eventually scrapped the wagon of the 1433 indenture and commissioned another ‘pagiant of the dome belonging to the mechauntes newe substancialie in euery thing Þervnto belonging’.¹⁵ An inventory from 1526 lists a pageant door, a Hell door, a Trinity and a Trinity house, four windows, an iron seat, some rigging, angels and a cloud, along with ropes, nails and other pieces of miscellaneous hardware.¹⁶

The Mercers’ records rematerialize the wagon (or wagons) for us, revealing them to be actors in the history of the wealthiest and most influential guild of medieval York.¹⁷ Moreover, as the playing spaces for the pageant are identified, the wagons become moveable features upon the topography of the medieval city, articulating its narrow streets and bustling marketplaces – particularly at the city’s centre of commerce, the Pavement marketplace, which would have been the last station for the Corpus Christi play and the final playing place for the Mercers’ pageant. The Last Judgment, preserved in the York Register, is a drama of marvellous proportions, derived from Christ’s revelation of the eschatological mysteries in the gospel of Matthew. It is steeped in the iconography of the late Middle Ages and serves, from the perspective of the present, as a finale of sorts; the pageant not only forms the concluding chapter of the York play, it also works, on a magnificent scale, to reconcile the past with the present and the future. The records of the Mercers’ guild localize this cosmic drama by affording a glimpse of untimely objects, like the Mercers’ wagon, acting as ‘material anchors’ linking epic time and universal space with lived hours and familiar places.¹⁸

In 1537, after the quelling of the Pilgrimage of Grace, Henry VIII was advised to make a visit to York; he didn’t get there until 1541.¹⁹ The records show that upon his arrival, the king was treated to a speech acknowledging the authorities and inhabitants of the city as having ‘greuously heynously and traitoryously offendyd [his] high invyncible and moste Royall maiesty [his] imperyall crowne and dignitye in the most odious offence of traterus rebellyon’. The city begged for the king’s ‘moste gracyous and charytable remissyon frank and ffree pardon’ and pledged its citizens’ ‘bodyes withoute murmur or grudge in the seruyce of [his] moste Royall Maiestye at [his] most gracious preceptes and commaundmentes to the vtter effucion of [their] heartes blode’.²⁰ Lavish entertainments were staged: Henry Smith, clerk of St William’s chapel, devised shows of ‘syngyng and oyer mellody after the best facion’; scaffolds, castles, turrets, towers and battlements out of timber and canvas were constructed as well as ‘goodly faynes’ bearing the arms of the king, queen and prince.²¹ Most significantly, however, was the playing of the ‘the merchauntes paieaunt’ at Ousegate end.²² The pageant was chosen, one supposes, to show that York itself was not above the judgment of higher powers. And yet, because the pageant is the only pageant in the York play that speaks of future time, it always gestures to an uncertain and precarious future as much as it apologizes for a past that stands at the king’s judgment. The drawing out of the Mercers’ wagon could not have been read as an unequivocal gesture of submission. This object, of all things, would speak to the wealth, prosperity and autonomy of both guild and corporation. Even if stripped of its ornamentation, the wagon was a thing inextricably bound to the feast of Corpus Christi, a feast that had been the hallmark of civic distinction in the later Middle Ages. The wagon’s pres...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Thinking Site: An Introduction
• Part I Building Frameworks
• Part II Travel and Topography
• Part III Psychic Spaces
• Part IV Crossing Boundaries
• Selected Bibliography
• Index