Informations du cours

Proseminar: The N Town Plays

A proseminar course aimed at 2^nd and 3^rd year BA students

 The study of ‘medieval drama’ is dominated by the scriptural mystery cycles.  While these plays sought to teach about scripture and salvation, they were not drily didactic teaching tools but were full of humour, humanity, and spectacle.  Medieval literary theories connected enjoyment and learning, so it is possible that the comedy was the sugar to help the educational medicine go down: however, modern revivals of medieval plays have repeatedly demonstrated that their human power is far more than a sweetener, and in the twentieth century scholars applied theories of carnival to demonstrate medieval theatre’s potential to be politically and socially subversive.  Theatrically they are highly innovative, particularly in their self-conscious exploration of the nature of performance and the relationship between actors and audiences. 

This course will comprise in-depth study of the N Town Plays, which, though not formally a ‘Cycle’ in the way that for example the York Plays are, have nonetheless been compiled in a manuscript to resemble a civic Cycle. The plays will be considered as scripts for performance, as vehicles for political polemic, and as part of a verbal and visual culture by which the medieval world explored its relationship with the divine.