Direct Address in Early English Drama, 1400-1585 Michelle Markey Butler
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Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations Spring 2003 "All hayll, all hayll, both blithe and glad": Direct Address in Early English Drama, 1400-1585 Michelle Markey Butler Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Recommended Citation Butler, M. (2003). "All hayll, all hayll, both blithe and glad": Direct Address in Early English Drama, 1400-1585 (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/371 This Immediate Access is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “All hayll, all hayll, both blithe and glad”: Direct Address in Early English Drama, 1400-1585 Michelle M. Butler A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Director: Dr. Anne Brannen Duquesne University 2003 Brian— “I do love nothing in the world so well as you—is not that strange?”—Much Ado About Nothing 2 Acknowledgements My debts are legion. I want to thank my dissertation committee, Dr. Anne Brannen (chair), Dr. Jay Keenan, and Dr. David Klausner for serving on this committee and for their helpful comments on this work. I would also like to thank Dean Constance Ramirez and the Duquesne English Department for arranging for David to attend my defense, and of course David himself both for being willing to serve on my committee as an outside reader and for personally attending my defense. Jay’s help is also deeply appreciated, both on this project and as a drama production mentor. My debts to my committee chair are almost innumerable, but perhaps chiefly I appreciate the freedom provided to pursue this atypically broad project and crucial guidance in constructing it. I would also like to thank Dr. Alan Somerset for sending me a photocopy of a relevant chapter in his dissertation. Thanks as well to Jen Roderique, who shared the completion of every chapter by phone, encouraging and excited. Thanks to my children, Paul, who sympathized, “That sounds like a lot of work, Mama,” when I described what I still needed to do with my dissertation, and Sam, who has literally been with me during the entire project. Many thanks and much love to Brian. I also want to thank and recognize my parents, who I suspect aren’t entirely certain what I do for a living but are proud of it anyway. Dragonlady and Quasimodo (don’t ask, it’s a long story) are due for some kind of parenting medal. They sent four of seven kids not only to college (first generation) but graduate school — Mia: Ph.D., Duke University; Michelle: Ph.D., Duquesne University; Molly: Ph.D. (ABD), Harvard University; and Margie, Pharm.D. Candidate, University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy — from a thousand-person farming- and-factory town in Illinois. We are grateful that they were willing to allow us to make use of educational opportunities offered to us. I also thank these three younger sisters for their encouragement and support, enjoying with me Fun From Early Drama during my reading time, when we were surprised and pleased to find in two separate sixteenth-century plays a version of something we remember being told as children (“thou horesone goose/ Thou woldest lysse thyne arse yf it were loose” Jack Juggler 618-19). I found, however, no cursed brooms, nor the manual cleaning of turkeys, so those, apparently, belong to our family alone. 3 Table of Contents CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................................................5 CHAPTER 2: ASIDES ...............................................................................................................................................................29 CHAPTER 3: DIRECT ADDRESS BY SPECIAL PERSONAGES ............................................................................71 CHAPTER 4: COMPOUND DIRECT ADDRESS ......................................................................................................... 100 CHAPTER 5: DIRECT ADDRESS BY CHARACTERS IN MEDIEVAL DRAMA............................................ 123 CHAPTER 6: DIRECT ADDRESS BY CHARACTERS IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY DRAMA ................. 163 CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION .............................................................................................................................................. 205 WORKS CITED: PRIMARY TEXTS (BY PLAY TITLE) ........................................................................................ 210 WORKS CITED: PRIMARY TEXTS (BY AUTHOR)................................................................................................ 218 WORKS CITED: PRIMARY TEXTS (B Y EDITOR).................................................................................................. 222 WORKS CITED: PRIMARY TEXTS (BY EDITION TITLE) ................................................................................. 226 WORKS CITED: SECONDARY SOURCES ................................................................................................................. 231 4 Chapter 1: Introduction “Now will I praise those godly men, our ancestors, each in his own time... All these were glorious in their time, each illustrious in his day. Some of them have left behind a name and men recount their praiseworthy deeds” (Sirach 44: 1, 7-8) Direct address is widely acknowledged as a fundamental technique in early English, particularly medieval, drama. The observation that early English drama does not have the convention of the ‘fourth wall,’ and frequently speaks directly to and interacts with the audience would not be news to scholars of this drama; many have mentioned it. A.R. Braunmuller, for instance, in 1990, says that “[s]uch later-Tudor Vices as Ambidexter (Cambises) or Revenge (Horestes) continue the medieval drama’s easy familiarity with the audience. Directly addressing the spectators or commenting ‘aside’ to them, these characters elide or obscure the differences between play and spectator” (83). Meg Twycross, in 1994, notes the preponderance of direct address in medieval plays, saying, “The true amount of direct address in these plays becomes apparent only when they are performed” (55). Suzanne Westfall, in 1997, comments that “early modern theater is full of what modern readers would consider breaches of fourth wall in the form of prologues and epilogues, verse designed to contact the audience directly with recommendation for their behavior, pleas for applause and reward, and straightforward flattery” (53). The sources in which these comments appear — The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, A New History of Early English Drama, and The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama — demonstrate how accepted these ideas are among scholars of early English drama; edgy or highly controversial suggestions, areas of intense scholarly debate, do not tend to make it into the introductory guidebooks that we construct for our fields. The position of direct address as a foundational, widely used technique in early English drama is 5 solid, perhaps as firmly in place as an assumption of our scholarship as it was in the dramaturgy in which it figures so prominently. Since the understanding that direct address is a fundamental technique in early English dramaturgy is widely held, it is therefore surprising that almost no scholarship exists that focuses upon direct address. Doris Fenton’s 1930 study, The Extra-Dramatic Moment in Elizabethan Plays Before 1616, is the sole full-length consideration of this issue. Even if this study were thoroughly brilliant and preternaturally insightful about the uses of direct address, given how much we have learned about early drama since its publication, the time would assuredly be ripe for a reconsideration of its conclusions. As it is, Fenton’s consideration of direct address is disappointing in several ways. It focuses largely upon Elizabethan plays, providing only a cursory examination of medieval and Tudor plays, while nearly all contemporary scholars would agree that direct address is far more common in the earlier drama. In addition, Fenton’s analysis is solely formalistic. She describes and categorizes the purposes for which direct address can be used, but provides no further analysis. Moreover, the conceptual understanding of direct address underlying her study — that direct address is by definition ‘extra-dramatic’ — is problematic; as we now know, there is no reason to assume that early English drama conceived of direct address as something that occurs ‘outside’ the normal drama. As David Klausner has noted, “This [characterization of direct address as extra-dramatic] can now be seen as a gross over- simplification of a device which both implies and provokes a considerable range of relationships between actor and audience” (2). Demonstrably problematic in concept, and analytically challenged in scope, Fenton’s study nonetheless has remained the last word on direct address for over seventy years. 6 While Fenton’s is the only study that focuses upon direct address, other scholars consider direct address in some detail as a secondary focus, because their central topic of study is closely related to direct address; discussions of soliloquy, interaction with the audience, and improvisation all tend to contain some contemplation of direct