Download or read book The N Town Plays written by Victor I Scherb and published by Medieval Institute Publications. This book was released on 2007-05-01 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 1400s in eastern England, a scribe was in the process of compiling a large dramatic manuscript of over two hundred vellum folios. The manuscript contains components of an independent Mary Play, parts one and two of an independent Passion Play and an independent Assumption of Mary Play, as well as ten play subjects that appear in no other English cycles - the killing of Lamech in the Noah Play, the Root of Jesse, the story of Joachim and Anne, the Presentation of Mary in the Temple, the Parliament of Heaven, the Trial of Mary and Joseph, the scene of Mary and the cherry tree in the Nativity Play, the Death of Herod, the scene of Veronica's handkerchief in the Procession to Calvary, and the appearance of the risen Christ to the Virgin Mary in her Assumption Play. This edition acknowledges the N-Town compiler who took plays from various contexts and integrated them into an existing cycle of plays, thus treating the manuscript as if it were a superstructure whose parts could be replaced, renovated, and supplemented without altering the fundamental coherence of the overarching design.
Download or read book The N town Play written by Stephen Spector and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These volumes are one of the four extant Middle English cycles of mystery plays. A collection of unknown origin, N-Town contains forty-one plays, dramatizing divine history from Creation to Doomsday and illustrating ways of reading, supplementing and altering biblical accounts. The collection is rich in textual information testifying about the alteration and expansion of the text. The language of the plays advance knowledge of the history of English. The plays provide instructions in the fundamental elements of medieval Christianity and explain much about forms of consolation and self-fortification that were available in the late Middle Ages.
Download or read book The Mary Play from the N Town Manuscript written by Peter Meredith and published by Longman Publishing Group. This book was released on 1987 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mary Play is a beautiful and engaging piece of late medieval stagecraft. It is rich in music and spectacle, and is the only English play which deals with the parents of the Virgin Mary and with her early life; the only play which centers on a prayer, the Ave Maria; the only play which in its devotional intensity reflects the central concerns of the late fifteenth century lay piety.
Download or read book The Chester Mystery Plays written by Maurice Hussey and published by . This book was released on 1957 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The N town Plays written by Peter Meredith and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The York Corpus Christi Plays written by Clifford Davidson and published by Medieval Institute Publications. This book was released on 2011-10-01 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The feast of Corpus Christi, celebrated annually on Thursday after Trinity Sunday, was devoted to the Eucharist, and the normal practice was to have solemn processions through the city with the Host, the consecrated wafer that was believed to have been transformed into the true body and blood of Jesus. In this way the "cultus Dei" thus celebrated allowed the people to venerate the Eucharistic bread in order that they might be stimulated to devotion and brought symbolically, even mystically into a relationship with the central moments of salvation history. Perhaps it is logical, therefore, that pageants and plays were introduced in order to access yet another way of visualizing and participating in those events. Thus the "invisible things" of the divine order "from the creation of the world" might be displayed. The York Corpus Christi Plays, contained in London, British Library, MS. Add. 35290 and comprising more than thirteen thousand lines of verse, actually represent a unique survival of medieval theater. They form the only complete play cycle verifiably associated with the feast of Corpus Christi that is extant and was performed at a specific location in England.
Download or read book The N town Play written by Stephen Spector and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Castle of Perseverance written by Anonymous and published by Franklin Classics. This book was released on 2018-10-07 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book Functions of Medieval English Stage Directions written by Philip Butterworth and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-07-29 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When we speak of theatre, we think we know what a stage direction is: we tend to think of it as an authorial requirement, devised to be complementary to the spoken text and directed at those who put on a play as to what, when, where, how or why a moment, action or its staging should be completed. This is the general understanding to condition a theatrical convention known as the 'stage direction'. As such, we recognise that the stage direction is directed towards actors, directors, designers, and any others who have a part to play in the practical realisation of the play. And perhaps we think that this has always been the case. However, the term 'stage direction' is not a medieval one, nor does an English medieval equivalent term exist to codify the functions contained in extraneous manuscript notes, requirements, directions or records. The medieval English stage direction does not generally function in this way: it mainly exists as an observed record of earlier performance. There are examples of other functions, but even they are not directed at players or those involved in creating performance. More than 2000 stage directions from 40 or so plays and cycles have been included in the catalogue of the volume, and over 400 of those have been selected for analysis throughout the work. The purpose of this research is to examine the theatrical functions of medieval English stage directions as records of earlier performance. Examples of such functions are largely taken from outdoor scriptural plays. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre, medieval history and literature.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre written by Richard Beadle and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-07-10 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The drama of the English Middle Ages is perennially popular with students and theatre audiences alike, and this is an updated edition of a book which has established itself as a standard guide to the field. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, second edition continues to provide an authoritative introduction and an up-to-date, illustrated guide to the mystery cycles, morality drama and saints' plays which flourished from the late fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries. The book emphasises regional diversity in the period and engages with the literary and particularly the theatrical values of the plays. Existing chapters have been revised and updated where necessary, and there are three entirely new chapters, including one on the cultural significance of early drama. A thoroughly revised reference section includes a guide to scholarship and criticism, an enlarged classified bibliography and a chronological table.
Download or read book Festivals and Plays in Late Medieval Britain written by Clifford Davidson and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2007 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most comprehensive survey to date of medieval festival playing in Britain, this study presents an inclusive view of the drama in the British Isles. It offers detailed readings of individual plays-including the little studied Bodley plays, among others - as well as a summary of what is known of their production. Organized around the rituals of the liturgical seasons, the book clarifies the relationship between liturgical feast and dramatic celebration.
Download or read book Music in Early English Religious Drama Minstrels playing written by Richard Rastall and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 1996 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: MEDIUM AEVUM says of Heaven Singing, the general discussion of the subject from which the present volume follows on with examination of the individual plays: 'A formidable achievement, indispensable for any serious and comprehensive study of early English drama.'
Download or read book Affections of the Mind written by Emma Lipton and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Affections of the Mind argues that a politicized negotiation of issues of authority in the institution of marriage can be found in late medieval England, where an emergent middle class of society used a sacramental model of marriage to exploit contradictions within medieval theology and social hierarchy. Emma Lipton traces the unprecedented popularity of marriage as a literary topic and the tensions between different models of marriage in the literature of the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by analyzing such texts as Chaucer's Franklin's Tale, The Book of Margery Kempe, and the N-Town plays. Affections of the Mind focuses on marriage as a fluid and contested category rather than one with a fixed meaning, and argues that the late medieval literature of sacramental marriage subverted aristocratic and clerical traditions of love and marriage in order to promote the values of the lay middle strata of society. This book will be of value to a broad range of scholars in medieval studies.
Download or read book Morality Play written by Barry Unsworth and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book In medieval England, a runaway scholar-priest named Nicholas Barber has joined a traveling theater troupe as they make their way toward their liege lord’s castle. In need of money, they decide to perform at a village en route. When their traditional morality plays fail to garner them an audience, they begin to stage the “the play of Thomas Wells”—their own depiction of the real-life drama unfolding within the village around the murder of a young boy. The villagers believe they have already identified the killer, and the troupe believes their play will be a straightforward depiction of justice served. But soon the players soon learn that the details of the crime are elusive, and the lines between performance and reality become blurred as they discover, scene by scene, line by line, what really happened. Thought-provoking and unforgettable, Morality Play is at once a masterful work of historical fiction, a gripping murder mystery, and a literary work of the first order.
Download or read book Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms written by Jessica Brantley and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2022-11-22 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms, Jessica Brantley offers an innovative introduction to manuscript culture that uses the artifacts themselves to open some of the most vital theoretical questions in medieval literary studies. With nearly 200 illustrations, many of them in color, the book offers both a broad survey of the physical forms and cultural histories of manuscripts and a dozen case studies of particularly significant literary witnesses, including the Beowulf manuscript, the St. Albans Psalter, the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, and The Book of Margery Kempe. Practical discussions of parchment, scripts, decoration, illustration, and bindings mix with consideration of such conceptual categories as ownership, authorship, language, miscellaneity, geography, writing, editing, mediation, illustration, and performance—as well as of the status of the literary itself. Each case study includes an essay orienting the reader to particularly productive categories of analysis and a selected bibliography for further research. Because a high-quality digital surrogate exists for each of the selected manuscripts, fully and freely available online, readers can gain access to the artifacts in their entirety, enabling further individual exploration and facilitating the book’s classroom use. Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms aims to inspire a broad group of readers with some of the excitement of literary manuscript studies in the twenty-first century. The interpretative frameworks surrounding each object will assist everyone in thinking through the implications of manuscript culture more generally, not only for the deeper study of the literature of the Middle Ages, but also for a better understanding of book cultures of any era, including our own.
Download or read book Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England written by Simon Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-17 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a new, interdisciplinary account of early modern drama through the lens of playing and playgoing.
Download or read book Virgin Whore written by Emma Maggie Solberg and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-15 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Virgin Whore, Emma Maggie Solberg uncovers a surprisingly prevalent theme in late English medieval literature and culture: the celebration of the Virgin Mary’s sexuality. Although history is narrated as a progressive loss of innocence, the Madonna has grown purer with each passing century. Looking to a period before the idea of her purity and virginity had ossified, Solberg uncovers depictions and interpretations of Mary, discernible in jokes and insults, icons and rituals, prayers and revelations, allegories and typologies—and in late medieval vernacular biblical drama. More unmistakable than any cultural artifact from late medieval England, these biblical plays do not exclusively interpret Mary and her virginity as fragile. In a collection of plays known as the N-Town manuscript, Mary is represented not only as virgin and mother but as virgin and promiscuous adulteress, dallying with the Trinity, the archangel Gabriel, and mortals in kaleidoscopic erotic combinations. Mary’s "virginity" signifies invulnerability rather than fragility, redemption rather than renunciation, and merciful license rather than ascetic discipline. Taking the ancient slander that Mary conceived Jesus in sin as cause for joyful laughter, the N-Town plays make a virtue of those accusations: through bawdy yet divine comedy, she redeems and exalts the crime. By revealing the presence of this promiscuous Virgin in early English drama and late medieval literature and culture—in dirty jokes told by Boccaccio and Chaucer, Malory’s Arthurian romances, and the double entendres of the allegorical Mystic Hunt of the Unicorn—Solberg provides a new understanding of Marian traditions.
