Presents examples of folk drama, and morality plays, and the early tragedies and comedies following classical models

Drawing on broad research, this study explores the different social and theatrical masking activities in England during the Middle Ages and the early 16th century. The authors present a coherent explanation of the many functions of masking, emphasizing the important links among festive practice, specialized ceremonial, and drama. They elucidate the intellectual, moral and social contexts for masking, and they examine the purposes and rewards for participants in the activity. The authors' insight into the masking games and performances of England's medieval and early Tudor periods illuminates many aspects of the thinking and culture of the times: issues of identity and community; performance and role-play; conceptions of the psyche and of the individual's position in social and spiritual structures. Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England presents a broad overview of masking practices, demonstrating how active and prominent an element of medieval and pre-modern culture masking was. It has obvious interest for drama and literature critics of the medieval and early modern periods; but is also useful for historians of culture, theatre and anthropology. Through its analysis of masked play this study engages both with the history of theatre and performance, and with broader cultural and historical questions of social organization, identity and the self, the performance of power, and shifting spiritual understanding.

This wide-ranging volume explores relationships between drama and pedagogy in the medieval and early modern periods, with contributions from an international ?eld of scholars including a number of leading authorities. Across the medieval and early modern periods, drama is seen to be a way of dissemi-nating theological and philosophical ideas. In medieval England, when literacy was low and the liturgy in Latin, drama translated and transformed spiritual truths, embodying them for a wider audience than could be reached by books alone. In Tudor England, humanist belief in the validity and potential of drama as a pedagogical tool informs the interlude, and examples of dramatized instruction abound on early modern stages. Academic drama is a particularly preg -nant locus for the exploration of drama and peda-gogy: universities and the Inns of Court trained some of the leading playwrights of the early theatre, but also supplied methods and materials that shaped professional playhouse compositions.

Reading Drama in Tudor England is about the print invention of drama as a category of text designed for readerly consumption. Arguing that plays were made legible by the printed paratexts that accompanied them, it shows that by the middle of the sixteenth century it was possible to market a play for leisure-time reading. Offering a detailed analysis of such features as title-pages, character lists, and other paratextual front matter, it suggests that even before the establishment of successful permanent playhouses, playbooks adopted recognisable conventions that not only announced their categorical status and genre but also suggested appropriate forms of use. As well as a survey of implied reading practices, this study is also about the historical owners and readers of plays. Examining the marks of use that survive in copies of early printed plays, it explores the habits of compilation and annotation that reflect the striking and often unpredictable uses to which early owners subjected their playbooks.

This is the first comprehensive study of Tudor drama that sees the long 16th century from the accession of Henry Tudor to the death of Elizabeth as a whole, taking in the numinous drama of the 'Mystery Plays' and the early work of Shakespeare. It is an invaluable account of current scholarship and an introduction to the complexity of Tudor drama.

How was it possible for drama, especially biblical representations, to appear in the Christian West given the church's condemnation of the theatrum of the ancient world?In a book with radical implications for the study of medieval literature, Lawrence Clopper resolves this perplexing question. Drama, Play, and Game demonstrates that the theatrum repudiated by medieval clerics was not "theater" as we understand the term today. Clopper contends that critics have misrepresented Western stage history because they have assumed that theatrum designates a place where drama is performed. While theatrum was thought of as a site of spectacle during the Middle Ages, the term was more closely connected with immodest behavior and lurid forms of festive culture. Clerics were not opposed to liturgical representations in churches, but they strove ardently to suppress May games, ludi, festivals, and liturgical parodies. Medieval drama, then, stemmed from a more vernacular tradition than previously acknowledged-one developed by England's laity outside the boundaries of clerical rule.

Ovidian Bibliofictions and the Tudor Book examines the historical and the fictionalized reception of Ovid’s poetry in the literature and books of Tudor England. It does so through the study of a particular set of Ovidian narratives-namely, those concerning the protean heroines of the Heroides and Metamorphoses. In the late medieval and Renaissance eras, Ovid’s poetry stimulated the vernacular imaginations of authors ranging from Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower to Isabella Whitney, William Shakespeare, and Michael Drayton. Ovid’s English protégés replicated and expanded upon the Roman poet’s distinctive and frequently remarked ’bookishness’ in their own adaptations of his works. Focusing on the postclassical discourses that Ovid’s poetry stimulated, Ovidian Bibliofictions and the Tudor Book engages with vibrant current debates about the book as material object as it explores the Ovidian-inspired mythologies and bibliographical aetiologies that informed the sixteenth-century creation, reproduction, and representation of books. Further, author Lindsay Ann Reid’s discussions of Ovidianism provide alternative models for thinking about the dynamics of reception, adaptation, and imitatio. While there is a sizeable body of published work on Ovid and Chaucer as well as on the ubiquitous Ovidianism of the 1590s, there has been comparatively little scholarship on Ovid’s reception between these two eras. Ovidian Bibliofictions and the Tudor Book begins to fill this gap between the ages of Chaucer and Shakespeare by dedicating attention to the literature of the early Tudor era. In so doing, this book also contributes to current discussions surrounding medieval/Renaissance periodization.

English drama between the late fifteenth century and the late sixteenth centuries is as diverse as it is engaging; this anthology brings together eighteen of the most interesting and important dramatic works from the period. The plays have been chosen to give a broad view of the drama produced in Tudor England. They testify to the eclectic tastes of sixteenth-century audiences, ranging from morality plays (Mankind, Everyman), to comedies inspired by the Roman plays of Terence and Plautus (Ralph Roister Doister), to tragedies inspired by the plays of Seneca (Gorboduc, Cambises). In later plays, morality plots rub shoulders with slapstick comic business (The Longer Thou Livest The More Fool Thou Art, The Three Ladies of London), and classical gods intervene in the affairs of England’s regions (Gallathea). While some of the plays offer pure entertainment, others have a clear political agenda. King Johan is presented as a prototype for English resistance to Rome’s Catholicism; Gorboduc’s decision to abdicate and divide his kingdom highlights the vexed question of the English succession under a childless queen. Other plays comment more obliquely on contemporary events. Play of the Four Elements reflects on England’s nascent maritime expeditions to the New World, while The Three Ladies of London comments topically on immigrant overcrowding in England’s port towns, and the dangers of England’s trade in the Mediterranean. Some plays push the boundaries of what the theatre can do in staging violence (Cambises) and questioning gender roles (Gallathea). Designed for undergraduate use, the anthology includes extensive explanatory annotations and a substantial introduction to each play; spelling and punctuation have been partially modernized in the interests of making the texts more accessible to students. In all this, the anthology follows principles similar to those developed for Christina M. Fitzgerald’s and John T. Sebastian’s Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama; several of the plays from that anthology are also included here, while the rest have been newly edited for this volume, under the supervision of General Editor Alan Stewart.

The past generation has been an extraordinarily active one in medieval drama scholarship; our appreciation of the range of medieval drama has been significantly broadened, and our understanding of certain medieval genres—most notably, biblical drama—has been fundamentally altered. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature has been widely praised for the degree to which it has taken this scholarship into account in its selection of and presentation of medieval plays. Now Broadview launches a new anthology that takes those plays as its base while expanding very substantially beyond them to represent the full range of drama in English (and, where strong connections exist, in French, Latin, Cornish, and Welsh as well) through to 1576. In all, over forty plays are included. Each work has been fully annotated and is prefaced by a substantial introduction. In many cases the language is to some extent modernized in order to make the plays more accessible to readers today.