Editing, Performance, Texts

New Practices in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama

Jacqueline Jenkins, Julie Sanders

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137320117
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

The essays in this volume challenge current 'givens' in medieval and early modern research around periodization and editorial practice. They showcase cutting-edge research practices and approaches in textual editing, and in manuscript and performance studies to produce new ways of reading and working for students and scholars.

1

What the Beauchamp Pageant Says about Medieval Plays

Claire Sponsler

The Beauchamp Pageant, an illustrated biography of Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (1382–1439), is a uniquely useful yet neglected resource for the study of late medieval drama. The basic facts about the Pageant have been established. It is made up of 53 line drawings with brief accompanying comments describing each drawing, all part of a stand-alone work of 28 leaves (British Library MS Cotton Julius E. iv, reproduced in facsimile three times).¹ It dates to the reign of Richard III, and was probably commissioned somewhere between 1483 and 1492 by the earl’s daughter Anne Beauchamp, who may have envisioned it as a chivalric exemplar for Prince Edward, her grandson.² The content and structure of the Pageant revolve around her father, the fifth earl, whose life from birth to death it recounts, with an emphasis on events and actions that set him up as a model of pious and chivalrous behaviour.

Although it has been overlooked by scholars, and especially theatre historians, the Beauchamp Pageant deserves attention, given what it can tell us about medieval drama and about the broader narrative, visual and performative cultures within which plays were staged and recorded in the fifteenth century. While the Pageant does not in all likelihood record a mimetic entertainment (although one scholar has suggested that its illustrations are sketches for another project, such as a series of tapestries, a form often linked to drama), it mixes the visual with the verbal and distinctively uses the language of shewing, terminology often applied to mimetic performance, to describe its drama of a personal life.³ In this chapter, I ask what the Pageant says about the visuality of medieval performances and about the tendency of medieval dramatic records to use words not images to transmit plays (the manuscripts of medieval English plays, with only a few notable exceptions, were almost never illustrated, unlike continental ones). I also consider the question of generic labels: what do the terms used in the captions of the Pageant that echo contemporary descriptions of performances – such as pagent, shewe and processe – suggest about medieval drama, its connections to other forms of display and its transmission? As I hope to demonstrate, a close examination of the words and images of the Pageant reveals how tightly coupled reading, looking and performing are in the late medieval period and sheds light on the connections between live performances and written or pictorial texts.

Such an examination is important, I believe, especially given the recent and exciting work in medieval drama studies that aims to re-examine the connection between actual performances and documents and other artefacts that describe them. While a gap nearly always and inevitably divides records from lived experience, the span is especially large for medieval drama. Records of dramatic enactments for the centuries before Shakespeare are sparse, because many kinds of performances – whether mystery plays, royal entries, rituals and ceremonies, tableaux, mummings or seasonal games – were ephemeral in nature and never documented. On those relatively rare occasions when they were recorded, medieval performances can be hard to recognize, since they do not always exhibit the markers of drama; they often have no speaker tags, stage directions, incipits or other signs that would make them readily classifiable as plays. The result is that surviving playscripts or accounts of theatrical events are less than fully satisfactory as evidence for performance practices.

Coming relatively late in the history of performances in England, yet still before there was much market for playscripts as a form of literature or much interest in reading plays as a form of private entertainment, both of which were developments ushered in by print, the Beauchamp Pageant invites examination for what it says both about cultural understandings of drama and about the relation between actual performances and the written, visual or other material forms in which they survived. The techniques used by scribe and artist for recording the earl’s life, I argue, shed light on the circumstances surrounding, and dilemmas facing, the recording of other sorts of performances.

The Beauchamp Pageant is biography presented as drama. Each of the 53 pages features a scene from the life of Richard Beauchamp, beginning with his birth and ending with his burial, depicted in line drawings beneath (and on one occasion above) brief written elaborations on the visual scene. In between, the artist provides a visual chronicle of the central events of the earl’s life, many of them chivalric in nature, but others concerned with religious and political undertakings; two pages of genealogy follow at the end. In nearly every image, the figure of the earl is the focal point and actions are staged around him, often densely so, with figures crowded in and movements spilling beyond the central event. The idea of life as a drama was not unknown to authors or readers in the Middle Ages, as witness, for example, the Digby Mary Magdalene and other plays about saints, but using visual as well as verbal media to represent it was.

With its mingling of words and images, the Beauchamp Pageant may be a unique kind of medieval biography, but if we move beyond the boundaries of that genre we can see that it resembles other illustrated manuscripts, including illustrated romances (such as the Alexander romances), picture bibles (such as the Morgan Bible), and the occasional illustrated dramatic text.⁴ Whether because of cost or lack of skilled artists for the making of illustrated playtexts, or because of subsequent censorship, few illustrated dramatic texts can be found today.⁵ The surviving examples, rare though they may be, demonstrate that infrequent though they may have been, pictorial representations of plays existed.

An instructive example is Thomas Chaundler’s Liber Apologeticus de Omni Statu Humanae Naturae (Trinity College MS R.14.5; c. 1457–61). Like the Beauchamp Pageant, the Liber Apologeticus has been a neglected work for the study of medieval theatre. Although its existence has been known for over a century, it has not been a part of the history of early drama and was not discussed in the seminal studies by Young, Chambers or Craig, presumably because it appears to be a philosophical treatise rather than a play. Doris Shoukri, who edited the Liber in 1974, believes that the surviving work is a presentation copy of a drama read aloud or performed in Hall. Noting its debts to the debate tradition, Shoukri also points to its links to late medieval vernacular drama and to the humanist plays of Medwall, Rastell and others.⁶ As Thomas Meacham observes, works related to the ars dictaminis could be performed and medieval letters were designed to be read aloud in public; Trinity MS R.14.5 shows that letters could be ‘presented within the framework of performance and preserved for pedagogical and entertainment value’.⁷

What makes the Liber Apologeticus of particular interest in light of the present discussion is its illustrations. The Trinity College manuscript contains both the Latin prose play and, preceding it, 15 full-page drawings with captions in Latin at the bottom of each page. After a first drawing in which Chaundler is shown presenting his book to Bishop Bekynton, the remaining captions describe the actions the drawings illustrate; the drawings are immediately followed by the text of the Liber Apologeticus. M. R. James has compared the drawings’ ‘indelicacy’ and date with those in the Beauchamp Pageant as well as the frescoes in Eton College Chapel (c. 1477) and in the Lady Chapel at Winchester (c. 1498–1524).⁸ Alexandra Sinclair makes a similar connection between the two works, noting the resemblance of the Continental-influenced tinted outline drawings of the Liber Apologeticus to the Beauchamp Pageant along with their incorporation of narrative illustrations of secular themes.⁹

Although Chaundler’s dedication to Thomas Bekynton, bishop of Bath and Wells, with which the book opens, never describes the Latin prose text as a play (Chaundler refers to it as ‘opusculum’ or ‘libellus’) and makes no allusion to the pictures, both the drawings and the Latin prose text represent a play. The Latin prose text is divided into four acts, with incipits and explicits for each act. At the beginning of each act a marginal rubric lists the characters who appear in the act; rubrics throughout take the form of stage directions (for example, ‘Creator homini dicit’, ‘Mors Homini minatur iam proxima’, ‘P. dat Orbem aureum’, ‘Prud. Hominem instruit’, etc.). Each drawing, in turn, is labelled by actus at the top of the page.

The drawings and following Latin play are also clearly linked with each other. The Table of Contents (reproduced by James) lists the contents as including: ‘Ymagines historialiter figurate pandentes ordinem processum q:/Apologeticic libri de omni statu humane nature docentis/Item prefatus Apologeticus liber in quatuor actus diuisis’, and while not explicitly stating that the one illustrates the other, the two are clearly being thought of as joined. Beyond their connection by shared narrative and proximity in the manuscript, the drawings are fused with the following Latin play by one caption which, after describing how God gives Man a scourge, spade and coat of skin, adds ‘quorum misteria clarius ipsa littera pandit’ (‘the text explains the secret meaning of these things more clearly’); unless ‘littera’ refers to a source text more generally, the caption is pointing the viewer of the drawing to the following play for fuller elaboration of the matter shown by the artist.

The drawings in the Liber illustrate the Latin prose play in a way that suggests familiarity with staging techniques. James thinks that the ninth illustration and the five other scenes showing interiors may be ‘adopting medieval stage effects’, since they resemble ‘mansions’ or pageant tableaux, and even suggests that Chaundler’s source may be a continental play.¹⁰ Additionally, the captions, which appear at the bottom of each illustration, hint at the ‘scriptures’ that were often inscribed on the tableaux in street pageantry, such as royal entries, as verbal explanations of the meaning of the scene being portrayed.

If we look at the key features of the Beauchamp Pageant with this general background – including the example of the Liber Apologeticus – in mind, we can better see what the Pageant says about medieval drama in performance and in transmission. Scholars have begun to re-examine the relation between reading and performance in medieval culture (Jessica Brantley, Joyce Coleman) on the one hand, and writing and performance on the other (Carol Symes), while others have mapped the intersection of visual images (including iconography) and drama (Jeffrey Hamburger, Pamela Sheingorn).¹¹ The Beauchamp Pageant offers fresh evidence for the ways in which all of those forms were linked, and reveals characteristic habits of thought that shaped both reading and spectating in late medieval England.

Terminology

Perhaps the best place to start is with the terminology used by the author of the written captions in the Beauchamp Pageant. While the terms used in the captions are not always easy to interpret with precision, they nonetheless position Pageant within a theatrical context. The word that gives the book its title, pagent, appears four times in the captions. Its first and most prominent appearance is in the caption that accompanies the opening scene in the earl’s life (fol. 1); there the word is used to refer first to the illustration at hand (‘This Pagent sheweth the birth of the famous knight Richard Beauchamp […]’) and subsequently to the illustrations that follow (‘whose notable actes of chivalry and knightly demenaunce been also shewed in the pagentis hereafter ensuying’). The term appears two more times, in the eighth illustration (fol. 4v), which is once again described as a ‘pagent’ (‘In this pagent is shewed howe the noble Erle Richard was made knight […]’) and once again makes reference to the following scenes (‘as by the pagentes hereafter folowyng more pleynly is shewed’), but is found nowhere else in the book.

Despite its sparing use in the book, the word pagent sheds light on how the caption-writer understood the scenes of the earl’s life assembled in the Pageant and reveals ties to visual, written and theatrical display. The Middle English Dictionary (MED) cites a range of meanings for pagent that are associated with visual as well as written representation. It could refer to an ornamental hanging, a story or a tale, and as a variant form of the word ‘pagine’ it could mean a page or leaf of a book, all of which are meanings that would be applicable to the Beauchamp Pageant.¹² Sinclair notes that the OED definitions of ‘pagent’ do not include ‘picture’ (nor do those in the MED), but concludes that is ‘clearly one of the meanings’ of the word, a point supported by A. S. G. Edwards’s analysis of the term.¹³ Pagent was also, and more commonly, used to describe more explicitly theatrical events such as enactments and mimetic representations. The first meaning cited by the MED, in fact, is a play in a mystery cycle, with secondary meanings that included the wheeled platform on which a play was presented, or a scene in a triumph. Used with the word pleien, the word pagent could also refer to the acting of a part or the playing of a role, including the practice of deceiving someone. In his discussion of the terminology of medieval performances, Lawrence Clopper observes that initially ‘pageant’ meant ‘show’, and more specifically referred to something painted or ornamented; its use to refer to drama in the sense of mimetic enactment is a derived meaning.¹⁴

What these definitions of the Middle English word pagent add up to is a blurring of representational media related in some fashion to sight. One could encounter a ‘pagent’ by viewing a painting or wall-hanging, reading ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: New Practices
• Part 01 Enabling Manuscripts to Speak
• 1 What the Beauchamp Pageant Says about Medieval Plays
• 2 Reading Images, Drawing Texts: The Illustrated Abbey of the Holy Ghost in British Library MS Stowe 39
• 3 The Towneley Manuscript and Performance: Tudor Recycling?
• 4 Performing the Percy Folio
• Part 02 Performance Traces in the Archives
• 5 London Commercial Theatre 1500–1576
• 6 The Revision of Manuscript Drama
• 7 Playing Ghismonda for ‘fooles’ and ‘noble freinds’: Revising for Performance Between Glausamond and Ghismonda
• 8 Cressida’s Letter: Readings and Performances in the Shakespearean Archive
• Part 03 Editing Through Performance
• 9 (Un)Editing with (Non-)Fictional Bodies: Pope’s Daggers
• 10 Influencing Editors, Influencing Performers: The Page to Stage Relationship
• 11 Actors and Editors: A Feature of the Edition
• Index