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Proquest Dissertations UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY The City Speaks: Site-Specificity and Performance in the York Corpus Christi Play by Tamara Haddad A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH CALGARY, ALBERTA AUGUST, 2011 ©Tamara Haddad 2011 Library and Archives Bibliotheque et 1*1 Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington OttawaONK1A0N4 OttawaONK1A0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-81430-7 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-81430-7 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non­ L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, prefer, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distribute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non­ support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la these ni des extraits substantias de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privee, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondaires ont ete enleves de thesis. cette these. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. 1+1 Canada Abstract The basis of this study is to examine the relationship between the York Corpus Christi Play and its medieval performance sites in York, focusing on how the place memory of particular locales can enrich the audiences' reception of the pageants. After tracing through the medieval performance history of the Play, the thesis explores the concept of site-specific performance which is followed by two case studies that articulate how place and memory can inform a viewing of two pageants: The Entry into Jerusalem and The Last Judgement. The final section takes up the modern reproductions of the Play in York and how relocating the performances to sites in the city that are not on the medieval cycle route can conjure place memories that emphasize the coterminous realities of the pageants. 11 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr. Jacqueline Jenkins for her immeasurable patience during the course of my research, and especially for her invaluable feedback throughout the writing process. Without her support this project would not be where it is today. I would also like to thank Dr. Susan Bennett for her critique of a very preliminary version of this project. Many thanks go to Joy Cann, the York City Archivist, who uncomplainingly extracted hundreds of records from the York City Archives during my research travel in July 2010, and to the Department of English and the University Research Grants Committee for providing me with a travel grant to supplement my expenses in York. An unsuccessful effort was made to determine the copyright holder of the map included in Appendix A in order to request permission to reproduce the map. Any information on the copyright holder should be directed to me. in TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Table of Contents iv Epigraph v Chapter One: Critical and Theoretical Foundations 1 The Documentary Evidence 2 The Social History 10 The Mechanics of Performance 19 Defining Place 28 Placeness and the Memory Process 29 Chapter Two: Locating the Drama 43 Micklegate Bar and the Skinners' Entry into Jerusalem 43 Pavement and the Mercers' Last Judgement 64 Chapter Three: Relocating the Drama: York's modern Revivals 84 Bibliography 105 Appendix A 113 iv We do not live in an abstract framework of geometric spatial relationships; we live in a world of meaning. We exist in and are surrounded by places - centers of meaning. Places are neither totally material nor completely mental; they are combinations of the material and mental and cannot be reduced to either. Tim Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place1 'Pg. 13 V 1 Critical and Theoretical Foundations Since its first complete publication by Lucy Toulmin Smith in 1885, the York Corpus Christi Play has been the major focus of the research on medieval English drama and, since the revival of its performances in the mid-twentieth century, has been a vehicle through which literature and performance studies scholars have sought to understand how such a play might have been produced in its time. With reference to specific pageants, this study will take up the relationship between the stations on the cycle route in the city of York and the Play1, focusing on the possibilities of audience response to the performance through the lens of human geography and, briefly, memory. Because the pageants were performed in an urban context outside of a traditional proscenium arch theatre, the places of performance - important in day-to-day civic life in York - provided medieval audiences with a rich palimpsest of history and daily practices that are brought out through the performance of the Play. In particular, I will discuss the relationship between two pageants and two sites: The Entry into Jerusalem and Micklegate Bar, the first station on the cycle route; and The Last Judgement2 and Pavement, the final station. In this chapter, I will provide a review of some of the most important avenues of scholarship on the Play in order to contextualize my own work within such a vast field of research. First, I will examine the work done on the textual and documentary evidence of the Play beginning with the editions of the play-text, followed by a brief overview of how theatre historians have situated York within the context of its performance history by 11 will be following the standard convention of referring to the whole cycle as the 'play' and to the individual skits within the cycle as 'pageants' (see Walker 5). 2 Scholars have also referred to this pageant as Doomsday, as Richard Beadle does in his most recent edition of the Play. 2 using archival evidence. I will then discuss the social history of medieval York and the role of the Play in civic and guild culture throughout the duration of its medieval performance history, taking into account the multifaceted audience of the production through an examination of scholarship on gender, identity, the religious context and the politics of a secular performance of a religious text. Lastly, I will look at the research on the mechanics of the performance that has become popular in recent years as a result of the modern reconstructions by performance studies scholars. I will then take these explorations of the Play one step further by discussing the concept of site-specific performance and its potential for informing audience reception of the Play. The Documentary Evidence The surviving text of the Play is found in two separate manuscripts: London British Library Additional MS 35290 (also known as the Register) which contains the text of 47 pageants from the cycle; and York City Archives Ace. 104/G.l (the Sykes Manuscript), which consists of what is believed to be a prompt copy of the Scrivener's Incredulity of Thomas (pageant 41).3 Scholars have dated the early history of the Register to sometime between 1463 and 1477 from internal markings and external evidence based on the ownership of certain pageants by various craft guilds in the city (Beadle, 2009 31 only intend to provide the reader with a brief outline of some of the important features of these two documents; Beadle's discussion of both in his introduction to the most recent edition of the Play provides a more detailed exploration (Beadle, 2009 xi-xxxiv) while the introduction by Beadle and Meredith to the facsimile of the Register provides an intensive study of the Register. Lucy Toulmin Smith also discusses the Register in the introduction to her edition of the Play (Smith xi-lx). Research by Smith, Beadle and others has shown similarities between some of the pageants in these copies and San Marino, California Henry E. Huntington Library HM 1 (the Towneley Manuscript), which contains the text of the Wakefield cycle. Five pageants from Towneley have been closely associated with the York cycle (pageants 1, 20, 37, 38, and 47; Beadle, 2009 xi). For further details on the Towneley manuscript see Beadle, 2009 xxxiii - xxxiv. 3 xii).4 The Sykes Manuscript was completed sometime between 1525 and 1575 and might have been copied from the same source as the Register's version of the pageant (Beadle, 2009 xxxii). An official order for the compilation of the Register is not known to have survived but Richard Beadle's examination of the ordinance of 3 April 1476 in York House Book I suggests that the Play was compiled in its present form during the last quarter of the fifteenth century. The text of the ordinance addresses a filtering process by which pageants and actors would be chosen for performance each year: "bat yerely in be tyme of lentyn there shall be called afore the Maire for be tyme beyng iiij of be moste Cownyng discrete and able players within bis Citie to serche here and examen all be plaiers and plaies pagentes thrughoute all be artificers belonging to corpus chr/sri Plaie" (Johnston and Rogerson 109).
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