Crime, Community, and Audience Engagement in Late Medieval and Early Modern Theater
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Crime, Community, and Audience Engagement in Late Medieval and Early Modern Theater by Sheila Coursey A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2019 Doctoral Committee: Professor Catherine Sanok, Chair Professor Peggy McCracken Professor Steven Mullaney Professor Theresa Tinkle Sheila Coursey [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0001-7924-9711 © Sheila Coursey 2019 Dedication For my family, who always expected me to grow up and find the Ark of the Covenant: this will have to do. -SC ii Acknowledgements First and foremost, I’d like to thank my dissertation committee for their generous feedback and patience as I made my way through the ever-evolving and sometimes surprising narrative journey of this project. Steven Mullaney, Peggy McCracken and Tessa Tinkle have been invaluable sources of support and critique, pushing me when I most needed it and adding richness and nuance to my writing and thought. I could not ask for a more brilliant, supportive, incisive, and generous chair than Cathy Sanok; her mentorship and guidance over the past six years has been my greatest gift as a graduate student. The research for this project has been carried out with the financial assistance from the English Department at the University of Michigan, the English Department Writing Program, the Center for European Studies, the Early Modern Conversions Project at McGill, and the Folger and Newberry Libraries. My thanks to the staff in the English department and the EDWP, particularly Senia Vasquez, Jan Burgess, Lisa Curtis, Denise Looker, and Thea Bude. I have been so lucky to have brilliant and deeply generous mentors across my educational career. My thanks to Carol Blejwas for her remarkable patience, both in cultivating my love for writing and in valiantly attempting to cure me of my laissiez-faire use of punctuation. James Kee presided over both my very first and very last English class at Holy Cross, and his feedback, encouragement, and pedagogical brilliance were essential to me. Helen Whall’s energy made Shakespeare come alive for me, and she went out of her way to support and guide me as I faced graduate school applications. I am so profoundly grateful for the mentorship and guidance Sarah iii Stanbury, without whom I would not be the half of the half-medievalist that I am today, and who continues to support and advocate for me long after I’ve left the Holy Cross nest. This project has also benefitted from the generous feedback, guidance and support from a number of people within of University of Michigan. The medieval and early modern community, including the Medieval Reading Group, Early Modern Colloquium, and Forum on Research for Medieval Studies, has served as an invaluable space for me to share my drafts. Special thanks to Megan Behrend, Rebecca Huffman, Eliza Mathie, Amrita Dhar, Annika Pattenaude, Nicholas Holterman, Laura Romaine, Margo Kolenda, Lauren Geiger, Jeremy Glover, Michaela Kotziers, Laurel Billings, Rebecca Hixon and Karla Taylor. The Drama Interest Group has also served as a wonderful discursive community; my thanks to E.J. Westlake and Hannah Bredar for helping me create spaces to have such fruitful discussions about performance. Outside of Michigan, I also owe thanks to Kara McShane, Stephen Spiess, and Marjorie Rubright, who repeatedly went out of their way to offer support and feedback to my emerging project. Loomis Chaffee has been a second home to me over the past eight years; it remains the space where I grew the most as an educator. My thanks to Jeff Scanlon and Jim O’Donnell, who have always been the most supportive of teaching mentors, and have modeled a mode of administrative care and thoughtfulness that I will always aspire to. My thanks also to Jake Smith, Jordie Smith, Meghan Farrell, and Claire Paulson: my respect for you as colleagues is only outmatched by my gratitude to have you as my friends. My family has been a constant source of support over the last six years, and I owe them so much gratitude for their unwavering confidence in me. Their insistence on a “three sentence iv rule” when talking about books in 2005 was also probably one of my best early preparations for graduate school. Finally, my deepest thanks to my friends, colleagues and ‘academic coven,’ Lauren Eriks-Cline, Joey Gamble, Maia Farrar, Laura Strout, Anne Charlotte Mecklenberg, and Amanda Greene. They are my fiercest advocates, emotional lifelines, and personal heroes. This dissertation would not have been written without their support, patience, and amused tolerance of my tendency towards weird and spiraling metaphor. I love you all. v Table of Contents Dedication ....................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iii List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... vii Abstract ........................................................................................................................................ viii Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 : Quiet Resistance: Beholding the Margins of the York Corpus Christi Plays ............ 23 : “And for his sake to helpe his neighbor”: Tudor Moral Interludes and Neighborhood Surveillance................................................................................................................................... 69 : Crowdsourcing Justice: Two Lamentable Tragedies and True Crime Publics in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy ......................................................................................................... 103 : Bann(ed) Economies: Framing Audience Negotiation in Early Modern Playhouse Prologues..................................................................................................................................... 141 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 180 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 190 vi List of Figures Figure 1: Cain Killing Abel With a Scythe (c.1403). Bible historiale. British Library, MS Harley 4381,f.10r ...................................................................................................................................... 69 Figure 2: Neighborhood Watch Sign 1 ......................................................................................... 82 Figure 3: Neighborhood Watch Sign 2 ......................................................................................... 83 Figure 4: Map of Beech’s Body .................................................................................................. 120 vii Abstract Crime, Community and Audience Engagement in Late Medieval and Early Modern Theater addresses forms of audience engagement that are revealed especially by early English dramatic performance of narratives of crime. Spanning late fifteenth-century biblical drama to early seventeenth-century playhouse prologues, this project focuses on onstage communities that react to the threat or presence of crime by working to surveil, solve, redefine, or avoid it. These crimes require the renegotiation of community structure and norms, a process that is often explored through audience engagement. These plays therefore often represent or reimagine crime in contemporary terms, creating a sense of asynchrony that heightens the stakes of engagement by removing historical, allegorical, or geographical difference. As audiences are called to be participants in, proxies for, or mirrors to these onstage communities, their response is imbued with a sense of ethical or social responsibility. Each chapter focuses on a form of engagement— beholding, witnessing, voyeurism, investment— and its corresponding affect in performances of different genres. Chapter 1 tracks minor characters in the York Corpus Christi plays who offer modes of quiet resistance to tyrants such as Herod and Pilate. While the York audience is beckoned into playful defiance of these tyrants, these minor characters offer opportunities for the audience to behold their distress with empathy. Both comic subversion and compassionate beholding cast theatrical engagement as a form of resistance against tyranny. Chapter 2 examines Nice Wanton, The Tide Tarrieth No Man, The Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou Art, Like Will to Like, and Enough is as Good as a Feast, moral interludes that replace an omniscient God with neighborhood surveillance. Using viii the surveillance pedagogy of American Neighborhood Watches as a conceptual lens, this chapter argues that these plays teach their audiences prospective witnessing as a way to police and persecute suspicious bodies. Chapter 3 draws on contemporary debates about the ethical work of true-crime entertainment to argue that the domestic tragedy Two Lamentable Tragedies confronts its local audience as complicit in the creation and dissemination of the crime narrative that it dramatizes. Chapter 4 addresses playhouse prologues as negotiations of audience investment,