Performance and Religion in Early Modern England

Stage, Cathedral, Wagon, Street

Matthew J. Smith

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780268104665
  9780268104658
• eBook ISBN:
  9780268104689
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

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.

Chapter One

EARLY MODERN THEATRICALITY ACROSS THE REFORMATION

THREE VIGNETTES

I begin with three brief performance scenes: the boy bishop festival, Elizabeth I’s coronation procession, and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. These vignettes represent several corners of the field of early modern performance culture. The boy bishop festivities, also known as the episcopus puerorum, were locally organized community celebrations that punctuated the Christmas season’s theme of social subversion. While they involved many different forms of performance, including plays, liturgical offices, visitations, and sermons, they existed in house, as it were, produced by and for a relatively small community. Boy bishop festivities were explicitly religious performance events. By contrast—and occurring not long after the episcopus puerorum was phased out in England—Elizabeth’s coronation progress through London was primarily political in its aims, and its scope was enormous. Despite being sponsored by her regime, the event was staged and performed by multiple parties as well as by the queen herself, creating an atmosphere that juxtaposed a central political theme with copiousness of spectacle and the dispersal of perception across time and space. Twelfth Night contrasts with both of the previous performances by its later date and commercial setting, but I’ve chosen the play because it invokes aspects of the theatricality found in these earlier events. Its first recorded performance was in house at Middle Temple and had the feeling of an intimate festival occasion; and yet it also enjoyed tremendous success with commercial audiences.

In these three vignettes, we see numerous integrated performance types—liturgy, sermon, visitation, dance, procession, pageant, allegory, speech, indoor hall play, school revel, Christmas festival, and love lyric. I offer these scenes as cumulative illustrations of the intertheatricality of early modern performance culture and also as introductory examples of the central performative move that I will describe in this chapter and that recurs in different forms throughout this book: a dialectical exchange between theatrical self-exposure and an audience response that performs and sometimes reproduces the drama’s themes in ordinary life.

Episcopus Puerorum

The boy bishop festivities that were celebrated throughout England and on the Continent in the medieval and early modern periods were inherently intertheatrical. As is apparent even in the brief description that follows, the occasion’s various performances and especially the capstone event of the chorister’s sermon constituted an interactive spectacle that utilized its performative capabilities to integrate its different modes of festival, sermon, liturgy, and play. That is, the performance event acknowledged and made dramatic use of its own theatrical constraints by blurring the lines between which elements were mimetic expressions of saturnalia and which made real demands on the audience by way of devotion and ritual.

The boy bishop practices flourished in the Middle Ages and continued in England’s cathedrals, parish churches, colleges, and grammar schools into the sixteenth century. They were generally associated with several other religious festivals of social inversion between Christmas and Lent. Most prominently, during the Feast of the Holy Innocents, on December 28, the bishop would vacate his ceremonial place in the liturgy and instate the elected boy (typically a chorister), who wore the bishop’s vestments and miter and who carried his crosier. On the eve of Holy Innocents, known as Childermas Eve, multiple choristers attending the boy bishop would process and sing an antiphon drawn from scriptural passages relevant to Herod’s slaughter of the innocents; the boy bishop would offer a blessing to his canons and assistants both gesturally and through a dramatized call and response.¹ While the boy would not celebrate an entire liturgy or administer the sacrament, he would direct some significant liturgical action and deliver a sermon. Three boy bishop sermons survive from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including one written by Erasmus.² The ceremony and sermon were followed by a feast, or sometimes a series of feasts, and finally by visitations. During Christmastide, on their allotted days (the deacons on St. Stephen’s, the priests on St. John the Evangelist’s, the choristers on Holy Innocents, and the subdeacons on the Circumcision) members of the cathedral or parish would hold feasts and visitations, the most elaborate and sometimes controversial of which was the boy bishop, who visited community members with gifts and songs in the spirit of St. Nicholas.

The events of the episcopus puerorum demonstrate the varied and subtle ways that church festivals expanded into the outright theatrical world of plays and games. Variations on the festivities of Holy Innocents and its theatrical renditions abound. Boy performers were in costume, as numerous records detail the significant cost of elaborate vestments for the boy bishop as well as his extravagant feasts. There is also some evidence of the choristers performing plays during their festival—in one example wearing masks.³ In another instance, a record in the late fifteenth century tells of the choristers at Winchester dressing as girls and dancing for nuns at St. Mary’s convent, and across late medieval England the boy bishop festivities were multiple times censured for burlesque.⁴

Generally speaking, the boy bishop practices derived their intertheatrical energy from the Christmas season and its institutionalized revelry. This season of play included the Feast of Fools while it lasted, the especially raucous parties of the subdeacons, and the dances and entertainments that the appointed Lord of Misrule would facilitate at court, manor houses, and schools. The boys were viewed as performers, and some became famous. Francis Massingberd speculated in 1842 that Ben Jonson’s verse commemorating a Queen’s Chapel chorister named Salathiel Pavey refers not only to his playacting but also to his renown as a particularly talented boy bishop:

He did act, what now we moan,

Old men so duly,

That the three sisters thought him one,

He played so truly.⁵

“Old men,” and Jonson among them, remember the performance roles that were “played” by choristers before they became famous for their masques.

The boy bishops’ theatrical personas were aggregate forms of character composed of their own actions as well as those of clergy, household staff, play audiences, worshippers, and sermon writers. The performative facility of the boy bishop to represent his mimetic role and yet also to disclose his strategies for doing so—all in one action—is most apparent in his sermon, which was essentially a ventriloquized speech. And it is here that we get a clear sense of the performance event deploying its physical and illocutionary constraints to create an opportunity for the audience to respond to the performance’s spiritual themes in the theatrical event itself.

The latest extant sermon was delivered by a chorister named John Stubs at Gloucester Cathedral in 1558. It exposits Jesus’s command in the Gospel of Matthew, “Except yow will be convertyd and made lyke unto lytill children, you shall not entre in to the kyngdom of heaven.”⁶ Several times, the sermon’s author, Richard Ramsey, refers to the boy’s physical appearance and young voice as a way of simultaneously reinforcing his authority and exposing the homiletic and ceremonial artifice behind it, as when at the end of the sermon the boy bishop prays: “Consideryng my tendre age and infansy, I am constrayned to complayn with the wordes of the prophete Jeremy, . . . Lord God, behold I kan not speke, . . . because I am but a child.”⁷ The intertextuality and performativity of this scene (indeed, it is a scene) are impressive. The boy bishop addresses God in a prayer, citing his own youth while quoting a biblical prophet who only rhetorically calls himself a child, and in this procedure the boy purports to empty himself of any self-produced rhetorical ability or prophetic power. He then exploits and repurposes his ad hominem self-critique by drawing attention to this ceremonial—that is, theatrical—authority: “What then, good people? Because I kan not speake perfectly and eloquently shall I speake nothing at all? Why am I set up in this place? Why is this message committed unto me?”⁸ In effect, the young homilist treats the theatrical scenario as a kind of icon, exposing and rhetorically rejecting the Christian festival’s strategies of mediation and then offering his own preadolescent voice and bodily presence as a symbol for the audience to imitate in order to be “made lyke unto lytill children.”

By drawing attention to his body, voice, and artificial ecclesial position, the boy bishop substitutes one form of mediation for another, ceremony for bodily immanence; but in the course of the scene, the two forms merge to performative effect, as they apply the power of the biblical prophecy to the very moment of the feast. We might extend the performative logic of this sermon—the festival’s most direct self-description—to its other theatrical forms, including its liturgy, feast, visitations, dances, and even plays. Each, we can speculate, can be understood to compel audiences through the boy bishop’s theatrical and self-effacing gesture. The message is clear: the festival transcends the moment through its symbolic presentation of time, liturgy, and prophecy, but it simultaneously appears in the form of a common chorister and contracts itself to the scope of the audience at hand.

What the episcopus puerorum represents (the biblical lesson) in this one event is duplicated in its theatrical medium (the festival) and reduplicated in the boy’s performative gesture (his self-reference)—as well as potentially in the audience’s reception (their imitation of childlike faith). This way of making meaning out of theatrical conditions is an example of the performative move that I examine in this book. These are echoes of meaning that rebound through the audience and event and are caught again by the performer in a move that may well remind us of modern performance art. It is a strategy that has its roots in medieval Christian practices and that persisted after the Reformation in evolving theatrical forms.

The Progress (and Regress) of Elizabeth I

Elizabeth I’s 1559 coronation procession is another early modern performance that remained prominent in cultural memory through the lifetime of Shakespeare and elaborated a performance genre passed down from previous decades. The event has received scholarly attention as an inaugural statement of hoped-for political and religious stability and as an attempt to adjudicate the divergent ecclesial messages presented at the respective coronations of Edward VI and Mary I.⁹ Many have noted the event’s use of multimedia—speeches, pageants, texts, banners, coats of arms, fabrics, prayers, attendants, trumpets, and object symbols. While I do not presume to make any comprehensive statements about the procession’s use of media here, I do want to briefly consider its inheritance from the same theatrical tradition that includes the boy bishop festival. At least as inflected by Richard Mulcaster, Elizabeth’s progress demonstrates how such a political event shares in early modern performance culture’s strategies, first, for creating the effect of a political and theological whole that is greater than its parts and, second, for theatrically dismantling this transcendent whole to make an opportunity for particular audience engagement. Like the boy bishop’s performative stripping away of ceremony, the procession builds its copiousness of spectacle to the point where it becomes obstructive, and it is through its participants’ navigation of the spectacle itself that queen and subject become present to one another in the mode of the theatrical—that is, within the holistic event’s dispersal of meaning throughout its audience, role players, ornaments, scripts, and physical movements.

Like the boy bishop events, Elizabeth’s procession took place in the greater Christmas festival season, on January 14, 1559. During the Christmas and Epiphany seasons leading up to the coronation, Elizabeth was in Whitehall, where the festival period was in full swing despite Mary’s recent passing. Local maskers and choristers would have been in practice through the activities of the post-Christmas feast days (including Twelfth Night, which I discuss below), preparing for the spectacular scene of the progress. No doubt, the festival context was utilized thematically, as Elizabeth’s royal office was “inextricably bound up with the Church’s ritual calendar, and the king’s [or queen’s] ordinary household ceremonies [were] infused with liturgical symbolism to such an extent that reformed doctrine would find hard to touch.”¹⁰ Moreover, although a foremost aim of the progress was to reinforce England’s return to Protestantism, it used theatrical devices from before and after the Reformation and even, I suggest, attempted to harness the productive tension perceived between Catholic and Protestant expressions.

For instance, the second device of the process at the Conduit in Cornhill included personified virtues and vices as in morality drama. This allegorical drama effectively integrated newer theatrical trends such as representing historical figures and having them and Elizabeth herself appear with older mimetic character types of morality virtues and vices. William Leahy reads the episode as “virtue being seen to reside in the Protestantism supplanting the Catholicism associated with Mary’s reign.”¹¹ Yet the persistent thread of old theatrical forms that ran through the performance—concluding with a mostly Catholic Mass at Westminster—suggests less a supplanting of one religious aesthetic by another than an integrated adoption of nostalgia and theatrical innovation, perhaps coloring the entire event as a “calculated exploitation of (Catholic) ceremonial theatrics in order to promote coherent Protestant policy and majesty.”¹²

The procession included five pageants written by four prominent citizens and recorded by Mulcaster, among others. Its pageants lacked a single master author, and the event had the festival effect of interchanging performers and audiences. The event dispersed audience attention across time, spectacles, and sounds but also attempted to shape this attention into a vision of England’s political and religious future, for ruler and subject alike. The performers included the queen, her attendants, members of the church, and “gentlemen, barons, and other [of] the nobility,” as well as the thousands of spectators that lined the streets behind wooden barricades, manned pageant stages, and covered entire buildings with colorful fabric and tapestries.¹³ We learn from the Corporation of London in 1558 that the city was to take on the costs of adorning Elizabeth and her company as well as the streets and stages themselves; the path from Whitehall to Westminster was to be “seemly trimmed and decked for the honor of the City against the coming of our Sovereign Lady the Queen’s majesty . . . with pageants, fine paintings, and rich cloths of arras, silver and gold” so as to surpass the coronation celebration for Mary I.¹⁴ Understandably, scholars frequently compare such processions to the Corpus Christi Feast procession.¹⁵

The first pageant was a politically and religiously charged one: “The Uniting of the Two Houses of Lancaster and York,” housing a triple-decked platform of three generations of monarchs, including Anne Boleyn. It was positioned near the Tower of London on Gracechurch Street, often the first stop on coronation entries. This is also where Queen Anne memorably paused during her own coronation process to see a Hans Holbein pageant of Mount Parnassus. In The Queen’s Majesty’s Passage Mulcaster describes a child at the “forepart” of “The Uniting” who was tasked with declaring “the whole meaning of the said pageant.”¹⁶ Mulcaster adds, “The two sides of the same were filled with loud noises of music. And all empty places thereof were furnished with sentences concerning unity. And the whole pageant garnished with red roses and white.” The image is one of copious decoration—flowers, tapestries, fabrics, and sententiae filling every available space. The panorama of visual yet textual commentary especially in sententiae may aptly remind us of religious illustrations and title pages in the period, where engraved windowpanes and available spaces are filled with compendious scenes of preachers before congregations or sometimes raucous crowds destroying sacred images, appended with word scrolls protruding from figures’ mouths. Perhaps not coincidentally, the “Uniting” scene particularly resembles the title pages of The Great Bible of 1539 and of the Geneva Bible first prin...

Table of contents

• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Prelude
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Postlude: Ending with a Jig
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index