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As scholarship of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama turned towards questions of politics in the 1980s and 1990s, many commentators turned to Bertolt Brecht for a theoretical vocabulary to describe a socially engaged theater of the early modern era. Jonathan Dollimore opened his groundbreaking Radical Tragedy (1984) with an epigraph from Brecht's The Exception and the Ride, insisting (a few pages later) that "Brecht in fact figures prominently in my argument to the effect that a significant sequence of Jacobean tragedies, including the majority of Shakespeare's, were more radical than has hitherto been allowed." (1) Brecht, in other words, was essential in illuminating this important and underappreciated aspect of Shakespearean drama. For materialist critics like Dollimore, turning to Brecht offered an extraordinarily cogent and enormously productive critical agenda. After all, Brecht himself was interested in Shakespeare's history plays and saw in them a precursor of his own theatrical experiments. Just as Brecht sought to save the German theater from the bourgeois aestheticism that had come to permeate it in the early twentieth century, so Dollimore's generation of critics sought to save Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists from an arid formalism that ignored the social and political energies of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. Although I don't wish to repudiate this productive line of inquiry, I want to suggest that the application of Brechtian principles to early modern drama is considerably more complicated. To locate traces of what we now perceive as Brechtian dramatic techniques in the drama of this period, I want to do more than examine the plays for moments of artistic discontinuity, ideological rupture, and self-conscious theatricality. Instead, I want to think about the positioning of early modern audiences in relation to the drama they witnessed. How were specific groups of spectators affected by these plays? How did theatrical performance interrupt their daily lives, enlisting them in the production of theatrical meaning that resonated with their shared experiences? I will argue that the early modern theater in several important ways resembled what Brecht would later call the "epic" theater, but that we might more easily recognize that theaters contributions to a socially resonant dramatic praxis by looking beyond Shakespeare and the Globe to Thomas Heywood and the Red Bull. Specifically, I want to look at the five-part cycle of plays known as the Ages (c. 1609-13) that draw on classical epic to trace Roman mythical history from the birth of Jupiter to the fall of Troy. (2) Examining the Ages, and the venue at which they were staged, according to Brechtian precepts gives us a new way to appreciate these frequently disparaged plays while marking a significant contrast with Shakespeare's much more acclaimed history plays. When evaluated according to twentieth-century critical tastes, the Ages didn't measure up to the canonical plays with which they were compared; the action and spectacle that are Heywood's plays' most prominent features pale next to the linguistic density, vivid characterization, and literary merits of Shakespearean drama. (3) Understanding these plays historically, however, we must recognize that their differences have less to do with abstract aesthetic standards and more to do with the different expectations and tastes of the audiences that the two playwrights catered to. According to James Wright's retrospective account in 1699, the Red Bull was "mostly frequented by citizens, and the meaner sort of people," (4) a group perhaps best placated by nostalgic tales, visual effects, and the exploits of larger-than-life classical heroes--audiences who enjoyed nothing but "drums, Trumpets, Battels and Hero's," according to that theater's detractors. (5) Thomas Dekker, writing for the Red Bull in 1612, realized that audiences at this playhouse required a different kind of play, that the playwright's "Worthy friends Muse . …

Sarah E. Johnson. Staging Women and the Soul-Body Dynamic in Early Modern England. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014. Pp. xi + 185. $104.95. In Staging Women and the Soul-Body Dynamic in Early Modern England, Sarah E. Johnson interrogates early modern dramatic tropes of gender inequality to illustrate the multiple and surprising ways in which representations of women being manipulated or mistreated onstage can in fact reveal transgressive and empowering portrayals of women and the feminine. Chief among these dramatic tropes is the dynamic of soul and body, which was not only gendered (men were aligned with the rational, divine soul; women with the capricious, earthly body) but also hierarchized, in that the soul was placed above and thus governed the body in all things. By reframing the "soul-body hierarchy" as the "soul-body dynamic," Johnson makes the persuasive case that many metaphors typically associated with gendered control can ultimately generate, on the stage, "empowering ideas of women" (5). That is, once we consider alternate power dynamics between soul and body, we can view afresh other relationships that appear hierarchized in the same manner. Over the course of four chapters and a brief conclusion, Johnson examines two tragedies, two comedies, several masques, and a religious treatise from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England. Her reading of the dramatic works in terms of the soul-body dynamic and its analogues unsettles and productively challenges scholarly thinking on the seemingly trenchant binaries that organized representations of men and women on the early modern stage. For Johnson, the perception of a power struggle between soul and body animates familiar tropes of gendered conflict in early modern drama, and thus each chapter focuses on a particular relationship manifest in one or more plays: puppeteer/puppet, tamer/tamed, ghost/haunted, and observer/spectacle. For each relationship, the author explores how hierarchized thinking about who is controlling whom gives way, on stage, to more complex representations of power and social critique. The puppet, for example, might be seen as a soulless, empty "body" brought to life only by the hand, voice, and will of the puppeteer. In gendered terms, the staging of a man using a woman like a puppet reinforces the analogue between soul over body and masculine control of women. In performance, however, the puppet almost always takes on a "life" of its own, commenting upon and even critiquing the will of the puppeteer. Early modern puppetry, the author notes, often capitalized on the uncanny ability of the puppet to subtly (or uproariously) undermine the labors of its "master." While, metaphorically, puppets represent (feminized) subordination, onstage they have a "disruptive feminizing power" that "holds positive implications for the representation of women more broadly" (27). In chapter 1, which focuses on this relationship between puppeteer and puppet, Johnson notes multiple early modern dramatic examples of men turning women into puppets. The most famous example is to be found in Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, in which Katharina specifically scolds her husband for attempting to make her into a puppet. Her final speech, for Johnson, reveals both a puppet-like performance (throwing her cap on the floor, placing her hand beneath Petruchio's boot) as well as the "disruptive" power of this puppetry (since her commendation of husbands' duties may be read as parody). Many examples feature men displaying and animating women's corpses; these macabre displays have been much discussed in terms of the volatile signifying power of the stage property. By analyzing Gloriana's skull in Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy as a puppet--not a prop--Johnson affirms the more active role Gloriana plays in the tragedy: "As Vindice unloads his contempt for women onto Gloriana's skull and celebrates his ingenuity in suiting her up for the Duke, her perpetual, gruesome grin could very easily produce the effect of seeming to silently mock Vindice himself. …

S. I. Salamensky. The Modern Art of Influence and the Spectacle of Oscar Wilde. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. 201. $90.00. In this wide-ranging study, S.I. Salamensky asks how Oscar Wilde (the author) and "Oscar Wilde" (the spectacular cultural presence) scripted and embodied what has come to mean "modernity"--both in his own day and in our own. Her study ranges from representations of Wilde in largely forgotten late-Victorian novels; to Wilde's own use of contemporary debates surrounding Jewishness and hysteria in his dramatic representations of "modern" female sexuality; to Wilde's emphasis on the "modernity" of language in what Salamensky terms his "fin-de-siecle talk" plays; to, finally, representations of Wilde's at turns dangerous or revelatory modernity as exposed in the dialogic moments of Dorian Gray, in transcripts of his courtroom trials, and in a number of recent dramatic and filmic adaptations of his life. From the introduction on, Salamensky remains true to her early assertion that this "is a book not only for scholars but for students, artists, and others intrigued by the elegance and decadence of the fin de siecle, the explosive advent of the brave new world that is our own ... and [Wilde's] 'splendid and indeterminate life'" (3). Salamensky presents her material in an open, clear and engaging style. Her study regularly balances a tricky rhetorical line: she is able to present overviews of biographical details, texts and contexts detailed enough for the reader unfamiliar with Wilde's life, but brief enough so as to avoid seeming tedious to Wilde scholars. This, in itself, is quite a feat--and one that makes her study valuable to a number of audiences: those interested in dramaturgical questions arising from plays that seem at once "period pieces" and distinctly modern; those interested in fin de siecle drama and its complex cultural contexts; and those interested, first and foremost, in Wilde: his life, his work, his numerous and dizzying incarnations in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century culture. Salamensky's overarching claim--and the line of inquiry that seeks to unite her study--is that Wilde was constantly looking for ways to incarnate "the modern" in language. "Captivated by the fantastical propensity of words to effect their own realities" she writes, "[Wilde] strove, especially in his four 'society comedies'--Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest--to make that magic work on audiences, in turn" (3). Her first chapter, "Wilde Ways: The Modern Art of Influence and the 'Professor of Aesthetics," focuses on representations of Wilde as an influential, and in some cases dangerously seductive, talker in the drama and literature of his day. After a quick gloss of Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, in which the Wilde-inspired "parodic double" Bunthorne is presented as a "going thing," an aspect of fin de siecle (i.e. "modern") culture "that, it was hoped, would go away" (6-7), Salamensky juxtaposes Henry James's The Tragic Muse and that novel's ambivalent attitude towards its seductive, effeminate talker Gabriel Nash, against two lesser-read novels that similarly employ a Wildean talker as narrative instigator--Julia Constance Fletcher's Mirage and Rhoda Broughton's Second Thoughts--to demonstrate the varied ways in which the "Wilde figure" served as either warning against or prophet of a seductively queer modernity. Significantly, in all three of these fin se siecle novels, seduction is accomplished not through the physical but through the verbal, the linguistic, and the aural. Fletcher's "loquacious, effete, but sympathetic Claude Davenant" (13) is less of a threat to heteronormative social order than James's Gabriel Nash, but he shares with that more dangerous dandy a presence more aural than bodily: his "voice materializes before his appearance is described" and the text "elaborate[s] . …

Of the nine plays completed by Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Tell (1804) is probably the most well known to general theater audiences and students of theater history. The annual outdoor presentations of the play in Interlaken, Switzerland, attract wide audiences with the delightful Alpine setting of the theater, the opportunity to see a medieval costume drama, and, as the Interlaken production is performed by local amateurs, the chance to see the Swiss performing in a play that deals with their country's origins. In America the annual outdoor productions in New Glarus, Wisconsin, likewise emphasize medieval spectacle and Swiss heritage. (1) Wilhelm Tell provides the opportunity for good summer stock theater. Yet Schiller engaged in more than just writing an entertaining costume drama. As a playwright Schiller was deeply concerned with philosophical and political problems, as well as with history, aesthetics, and poetics. Indeed, Schiller stands among the most contemplative poets to write for the stage in the past two hundred years. In his plays one notices recurring questions about abuses of political power and the possibility and necessity for individual action in the face of tyranny and oppression. Schiller's lifelong quest to reach toward a better world in his writings is part of his legacy to modern civilization. In Wilhelm Tell Schiller localizes a particular manifestation of the quest for liberty in the Swiss fight against the Austrians, a quest that the character Tell brings to a climax with his assassination of the tyrannical Austrian governor Gessler. Characters in the play and audiences at the theater hail Gessler's death; there is not much to like about him, and with Gessler dead the way is clear for a happy ending. However, Schiller's text includes reference to another political assassination in act 5, the murder of the Hapsburg emperor Albrecht I by his own kinsman, Duke Johann of Swabia. In Schiller's text Tell encounters the duke, thereafter referred to as Johannes Parricida, in the play's penultimate scene. This juxtaposition of Tell and Duke Johann complicates the otherwise festive ending of the play. Might this be why the scenes with Duke Johann are sometimes excised from productions? In the contemporary political landscape where the boundary between "freedom fighter" and "terrorist" is often obscure, the time seems right to emphasize the importance of the entirety of act 5 of Wilhelm Tell in light not only of Schiller's dramaturgy, but of his aesthetics and ethics as well. Beginning around 1791, Schiller, intrigued with philosophy since his student days, became very interested in studying Kant, especially the Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgment). This interest in aesthetics continued throughout the first half of the decade and culminated in the publication of the Uber die Asthetische Erziehung des Menschen in eine Reihe von Briefen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters [1796]). (2) While Schiller's interest in aesthetics frequently receives attention, the connection between his aesthetics, his ethics, and his plays does not always receive the emphasis it deserves. The moral purpose that Schiller envisioned for dramatic literature and theatrical presentation needs emphasis both when reading the plays and when staging them. Beginning with his early writings, such as the address given at the Mannheim Theater in 1784, "Die Schaubuhne als eine moralische Anstalt betrachten" (The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution), (3) Schiller outlined a program for German drama and theater which he subsequently put into practice in his plays and in his collaborations with Goethe in the Weimar Theater. (One may observe that Schiller's theory and practice of the theatrical arts with its strong ethical component prefigures Brecht's Lehrstucke without being as didactically heavy-handed.) In "The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution," Schiller considers especially the educative function of theater. …

Since at least 1912 when Hardin Craig wrote his first essay on Lincoln, most major scholarship on early drama in the county of Lincolnshire has focused its energies in what might be called "The Quest for Cycle Drama in the City of Lincoln," either supporting or, more often, rejecting Craig's thesis that Lincoln was home to the N-Town Cycle. (1) While the assembled dramatic records (gathered for the forthcoming Records of Early English Drama volume) offer considerable evidence of early religious drama and procession in Lincolnshire, very little, if any, of that evidence suggests cycle drama of the kind seen in, say, York or a few other large cities. However, the records, together with topographical evidence, do indicate that Lincolnshire had many performance traditions and many playing places, some apparently used for the production of large fixed-site plays (similar to those found elsewhere in the eastern regions), others for the mounting of traditional customs, games, sports, and ceremonies. As a way of making sense of the many playing places that have been revealed, I am classifying them initially as dedicated or nondedicated. I am taking dedicated playing places to mean those whose primary use was for play of one kind or another, or those which were so habitually used for a particular kind of entertainment or spectacle that the name of that entertainment attached itself to the place, meaning that people used the spot for a specific event recurringly and traditionally. By nondedicated playing places I mean those (both indoor and outdoor) that were occasionally used as playing venues but whose principal uses ranged from worship to commerce to habitation, and that were not normally identified by a name associated with performance. Dedicated playing places of several kinds are documented in the records. Archaeologists have identified the location of what they think was a theater in Roman Lincoln, but during the period covered by the records (the twelfth through the seventeenth centuries) Lincolnshire had no working purpose-built theaters. (2) The earliest dedicated playing places to turn up are large, open-air spaces that had originally been sites for trials by combat but which, by the thirteenth century, had evolved into venues for hastiludi (jousting) and for common recreations, including plays. One of them, the Battle Place in Lincoln, was a croft immediately west of the castle, "abutting towards the north on [the] cemetery of St. Bartholomew." (3) In 1274, a hundred roll described it as an area of two acres "where the citizens customarily come to play, the friars to preach, and all to have their easements" (ubi homines de Lincolniensis solebant ludere fratres predicare & alia aisiamenta habere). (4) It was also described as a"Common pasture called Bataylplace." (5) In 1393-1394, the cathedral chapter accused the dean, Dr. John Shippey, of judging wrestling and attending shows on the commons outside the city, presumably this same site. (6) Lincoln also used a second large open-air space as a playing place, an area known as Broadgate, a piece of ground in the lower city, next to the king's ditch in the parish of St. Augustine, very near to the River Witham and to the playing field of the grammar school (if it was not indeed the playing field itself). In 1564, the city ordered that "a standing play of some Storye of ye bibell schall be played ij days this Sommer tyme," in July, "in broadgate in the seid Cyty" and in 1566 the city ordered the same play to be played again "in whytson holye days." (7) As described in the Corporation Minute Book, the play, having nine or ten stations representing different cities, would have required considerable space to perform. So, Lincoln had at least two large open-air playing places, one a permanent site atop the hill, the other at its foot. The fenlands market town of Spalding had a similar open-air playing place. A Corem Rege Roll of 1397 refers to "a certain site called 'the Playing Place'" in the town. …

In an article in PMLA in October 1998, W. B. Worthen declared "a conceptual crisis in drama studies." (1) Over the last two decades, the field of performance studies has coalesced around assertions of the primacy of temporal performance over the presumed authority of the written text; thus drama studies, from which performance studies emerged, has been left in a critical quandary. The essential problem, Worthen says, is that "the burgeoning of performance studies has not really clarified the relation between dramatic texts and performance." (2) Also in 1998, Derek Forbes staged Lydgate's Mumming at Hertford at Hertford Castle, the location of its original performance, and then published his adapted text along with an account of the production under the title Lydgate's Disguising at Hertford Castle: The First Secular Comedy in the English Language. (3) The subtitle is erroneous, but Forbes's production was the first stage presentation of this or any of Lydgate's mummings since their original performances in the late 1420s. (4) To accomplish his restaging, however, Forbes had to make numerous alterations to Lydgate's text beyond simply updating the language--including having an actor in the role of King Henry VI, and providing dialogue for players who were originally mute. Like theater in the twenty-first century, Lydgate's fifteenth-century mummings inhabit the interstices between drama and performance, between performance and text. They have dramatic qualities without seeming to qualify fully as drama. They are performance texts, but the relationship of the text to the performance is deeply vexed. Are they the scripts of a performed work, or do they commemorate a spectacle and therefore belong to that great "other" category of literature, the "occasional" work? But though they exist in a critical twilight, they are significant to theater history, if primarily as textual evidence of rudimentary early drama. (5) To literary criticism, they are virtually invisible. It is axiomatic that literary history is biased toward high art at the expense of popular culture; that it chooses the elite over the demotic; that it favors the secular over the religious; that it prefers the capital to the provinces. Nonetheless, The New History of Early English Drama has index entries neither for "Lydgate" nor for "mumming," while William Tydeman, writing in the recent Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, mentions the mummings only to dismiss them in a single paragraph as associated with the"sterile pageants in aureate verse" that Lydgate produced for ceremonial occasions. (6) The "mumming" has a complex and often obscure history of shifting generic boundaries. An essential feature, as the name implies, is silence, and a "mumming" most often describes a dumb-show, a performance by nonspeaking actors; as such it is an ancient form that survives today in English Christmas mummings. The courtly entertainments known as mummings constitute the prehistory of the celebrated Stuart masque. (7) Theater historians have hypothesized that they derive from the quete, the ancient custom in which groups of masked individuals would enter noble households for impromptu and often coercive exchanges of gifts,"a practice that lies somewhere between seeking donations and holding people to ransom." (8) This disorderly custom, it is said, was eventually overtaken, stylized, and controlled by the aristocrats themselves. (9) Lydgate's mummings comprise seven texts that appear exclusively in two manuscripts by John Shirley, six in Cambridge, Trinity College MS. R.3.20, and one in Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 59, part 1. (10) The central and intractable question is the relationship of these texts to the occasions from which they arise. Since they are texts, the designation "mummings" increases the generic confusion, and Shirley's typically loquacious introductions only muddy the water further. …

The images of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacres of 1572 continue to shock, even in a twentieth century familiar with the atrocities of Nazi Germany, the Khmer Rouge, and the Bosnian Serbs, and even in a Foucauldian academic discussion concerned with the politics of torture and physical trauma. In contemporary reports of the massacre, Catholics gather Protestant infants in a large basket and throw them into a Seine overflowing with corpses.1 A renowned Protestant beauty, already wounded and struggling amidst the same bodies, desperately clings for safety to the pillars of a bridge, only to be stoned to death by the mob overhead; her hair becomes entangled in the bridge's foundations and her body floats there, rotting, for days.2 The killing spree which began in the sultry August streets of Paris and radiated throughout the urban centers of France horrified even those accustomed to fierce religious conflict. This slaughter differed significantly from the spectacle of burning heretics, the bonecrushing terrors of the Inquisition, and even the illegal execution of prisoners of war. Here, a king sanctioned the mass execution of the nobles who, weeks and even days before, had been his boon companions and confidants; here, individuals took up instruments of everyday domestic life to bludgeon, stab, and drown their neighbors;3 here, Protestant lawyers, doctors, merchants, city officials men of wealth and power were herded by the hundreds into halls where they watched bands of local butchers kill their friends and families with the same axes that had long prepared their daily meat.4 Here, so it was reported, Catholic children gleefully slaughtered Protestant babies.5 The accounts of the massacres are of varying credibility, ranging from reports by eyewitnesses to pamphlets by propagandists to disavowing letters from King Charles IX.6 Whatever the reliability of such individual narratives, at the end of the day (or

There is a strange moment in Othello when lago seems to step out of the play and make a general comment on the basis of the play's action about male-female relations in actual life. Worked up to a pitch of jealous hysteria, Othello has fallen into a fainting fit. lago stands over his prostrate body, prefiguring the spectacle at the play's end. lago now speaks in what could be termed a soliloquy but is clearly a comment addressed to the audience

An Elizabethan dramatist whose early memories of theater centered on annual productions of a mystery cycle would unconsciously think of serious drama as driving teleologically toward an eschatological resolution. This is an artistic cause and effect which apparently operated in William Shakespeare's life;l it seems very likely that he learned how to think about plays from seeing what was shown with defiant civic commitment and special emphasis in the streets of Coventry in the last years of the Corpus Christi cycle there. And a substantial number of plays in his canon include eschatological scenes, usually in Act V.2 To understand how Shakespeare, as an impressionable boy, might have felt about the annual event, one should recall that though it may have been somewhat subdued in its last years because of official opposition and economic depression, the Coventry cycle was once so proud a spectacle that it lent its name to the very genre.3 People, including royalty, came from all over England to see the famous plays; there is a pleasing historical irony in the modern analogy whereby visitors flock annually from all over England (and the world) to Stratford, drawn by the RSC productions of Shakespeare's plays in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre where there is a box set aside for the Royal Family. The Coventry cycle was finally suppressed in 1580, when Shakespeare was sixteen years old.4 He may

The Poet is the neerest Borderer upon the Orator, and expresseth all his vertues, though he be tyed more to numbers; is his equall in ornament, and above him in his strengths. And, (of the kind) the Comicke comes neerest: Because, in moving the minds of men, and stirring of affections (in which Oratory shewes, and especially approves her eminence) hee chiefly excells. What figure of a Body was Lysippus ever able to forme with his Graver, or Apelles to paint with his Pencill, as the Comedy to life expresseth so many, and various affections of the minde? (Discoveries 2528-37; VIO, 640-41)1

Although dramatic representation has been said to have been first developed with agricultural rituals, semi-professional and professional acting and theatrical performance cannot be imagined without the development of an urban society and independent town life which established production and trade at a distance from agriculture. Such social conditions, of course, characterized ancient Athens as well as the medieval cities, which were centers of Greek drama and mystery festivities respectively. When the dramatic spectacle is homogeneous, intuitive, and unchangeable, it is nothing more than a ritual. Theater begins with a specialization which generates detached institutions of acting and staging and presupposes an audience and a demand for combining moral teaching or other elements with entertaining matter. Theater means competition. The basis for all these conditions is town life or urbanization with a considerable population, rival guilds, and a cultural atmosphere influenced by monasteries, schools, or aristocratic centers. Theatrical activity requires not only an economical and cultural basis, but also stable political conditions as well. Medieval Hungary was not provided with the ideal conditions for the development of drama present in such countries as England and France. Among the tribes of the Great Migration, the Hungarians had arrived last in Europe. When they occupied the basin of the Carpathian Mountains, they encountered an existing social and cultural system, to which they adapted themselves as a condition of their survival. While the reform of Cluny and the ars nova stirred up Western intellectual life, the Hungarian Church still found that it must occupy itself with the suppression of latent pagan rites among the natives. It was

English literature has a venerable tradition of poems inspired by piles of old stones. But medieval drama historians too must be moved to curiosity by the ruins and ciphers that remain to hint at the lost coherence of a past we want to know. Indeed, such clues point us at a past we must know, for medieval theater in its time performed functions as immediate and practical - as grounded in human need, festival, and community - as medieval Christendom itself. The registers of dialogue that survive can only become resonant when they are reunited with the spectacle that made them art and with the contractual purpose and context that made them exist at all. The drama historian's search for the coordinates of time and place, for dramatic provenance and motive, is neither empty academic exercise nor gossip but is, I believe, central to the assumption that to know the medieval theater means to know it as fully as we can in its human particularity. This article begins with a play in search of a place, the fifteenth-century morality play called Wisdom - and with a pile of old stones. These stones, these ruins (fig. 1) must stand for a monastic house that for over five hundred years was one of the great cultural centers of England, where learned Benedictine monks copied manuscripts and wrote sermons and saints' lives, supervised their vast estates, quarreled with the grasping merchants

The great advantage of the study of iconography in relation to early drama is that it ruptures the usual self-contained structures that literary criticism has consistently attempted to impose on individual plays and on quasi-dramatic forms. Careful and systematic study of the iconography quickly determines that the dramatic structures being observed are not at all self-contained, and that instead they involve a careful focusing of our attention that paradoxically denies the unity of the dramatic action. Indeed, the concept of unity, which is still being applied to such plays by some American critics, is surely the most inaccurate conception that could possibly be utilized as a device to describe the "action" of early drama, which was never intended to be viewed as a self-sufficient art form. The religious plays in particular have their roots in cultic experience, and are deeply influenced by the manner in which the cult looks at religious scenes in the visual arts as well as in imagination. When we turn specifically to the medieval religious music drama as well as to the quasi-dramatic rituals to which it was so closely related, the purpose of the spectacle is quite easily distinguished; in the words of Dom Odo Casei appropriately quoted by C. Clifford Flanigan in a study of the Quem queritis trope, "God has made it possible for us, even in this life, to enter into the divine present."! Iconography therefore leads quite naturally to phenomenology and the recognition that perceived experience and observable structures need to be the focus of our attention as

The title of this paper might have been "Of Truth of Clouds," as Ruskin entitled one of the sections in his Modern Painters. But that would be to put the emphasis on romantic representation of cloud phenomena, rather than on clouds as hieroglyphics in the seventeenth-century court masque, which is my immediate subject. Nevertheless, there are points of contact between the two. If the romantic painters, such as Constable, and the romantic poets, such as Wordsworth, studied clouds, it was not solely out of scientific curiosity; we can guess that part of the fascination for them of the ever-changing cloud shapes was, in Goethe's words, to bestow "form upon the formless" and thereby reveal something of the mystery of nature. 1 Not for nothing did Wordsworth praise as Sir George Beaumont's supreme pictorial achievement his depiction of clouds

The date 1672 is generally regarded as an important one in the history of the Russian theatre, for it was on the seventeenth of October of that year that the first performance of the play Es fir or Artakserksovo deistvo was given in the specially built theatre at the village of Preobraghenskoe near Moscow before the Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich and his court. Esfir has often been referred to as "the first play of the Russian theatre." It was commissioned to celebrate the birth of Aleksei Mikhailovich's son, the future Peter the Great, and it appears to have been a tremendous success. It is said the Tsar watched engrossed for ten solid hours. Certainly we know from contemporary bills that no expense had been spared, either on the construction of the theatre or the preparation of the costumes. Many expensive materials were used for the latter brightly coloured Persian silks, Turkish satin and fine cloth from Germany and they were lavishly decorated with silver and gold braid, lace and embroideries. Real ermine was used for Artaxerxes' robes. It was probably the lavish spectacle and the sheer novelty of the occasion which impressed the court rather than the skill of the actors, for the cast was composed of untrained clerks, artisans, and shop-keepers from the German quarter of Moscow. They knew little Russian and were gathered together for rehearsal approximately one month before the performance by the German pastor Gregory whom Alexsei Mikhailovich had approached with his proposal for the play. The Tsar's enjoyment of the first play he had ever seen had a certain importance for the development of theatre in Russia. Its popularity at court was ensured for many years to come

I have limited this discussion to a pair of late O'Neill plays which transcend melodrama by means of their comparable plots, themes, and characterizations. They are similar chiefly in that both begin with formulaic melodramatic intrigues which are spoofed or actually displaced as the plays develop. I intend in time to explore this theme in all O'Neill's later drama. Melodrama, just about everyone is agreed, is indefinable, though that has not stopped people from attempting to define it.l In Europe of the mid-nineteenth century, it meant a serious play with much scenic spectacle, musical background, a set of "stock" characters (which usually included a hero, heroine, and a villain), and an ending in which the "right" (the definition of which was not subject to discussion) always triumphed. Later, it was broadened to include any play, serious or comic, which was built around an elaborate set of intrigues; which contained a good deal of secrecy, deception, and evasion; in which the dialogue was full of explosive outburst and unexpected revelation; and which was peopled by the old stock characters

The representation of the. resurrection in medieval drama is the focal point of contemporary scholarly efforts to reassess long-established views concerning the origin, development, and critical evaluation of the earliest religious theater in the West. For early historians of the theater, the dramatization of the resurrection in the Latin church drama was regarded as the kernel or nucleus out of which evolved a vernacular drama that encompassed the whole of Christian redemptive history. The earliest Latin plays of the resurrection were said to be not only different from, but dramatically inferior to the vernacular plays which purportedly refined them by supplying more elaborate dialogue, characterization, and spectacle; indeed, the Latin plays could hardly be distinguished from the liturgical rites that supposedly gave birth to them and within which they were originally incorporated. Contemporary scholars have reversed this notion of the evolution of religious drama and the judgment implicit in it. O. B. Hardison, V. A. Kolve, and, most recently, Rosemary Woolf have, in their extended treatments of the subject, denied that there is any organic connection between the Latin drama of the church and the Corpus Christi plays or their vernacular antecedents, the Anglo-Norman plays of the twelfth century. Arguing that the Latin and vernacular plays belong to two distinct theatrical traditions, they have provided a basis for evaluating each type of drama according to criteria proper to it. Distinctions between the Latin and cycle plays are not only quantitative the scope of the latter is immeasurably greater but, even more significantly, qualitative: the original liturgical plays are decorous and formal in their iconic quality of representation, processionally stylized mode of performance, and use of sung dialogue borrowed from Scripture and the liturgy; the

Actaeon the hunter was a visionary. Not content with the limitless pursuit of game at his pleasure, Actaeon envisioned the ideal hunt, a spectacle in which he would assemble the most adept of hunters, the finest breed of dogs and the most noble stag to undertake a chase upon a meadow of pastoral splendori Months of intense training focused upon the moment when his vision would be fulfilled. Each aspect of the performance had been rehearsed. He had selected the setting, trained his men to follow their cues, and even his large supporting cast of hounds he could call by name and birth. They had all conned the script. What now remained was simply to await the morrow when the actual performance would be realized. In the interim Actaeon wandered into the valley to view the sets and to delight in anticipation of the reality of his vision. The vision after all was father to fulfillment, and the hunt to him was now as much alive as it would be when the scene would be performed. Actaeon meandered among his dreams. So well had he chosen his setting among the pineapple and cypress groves that his visions intersected with those of the gods. As Ovid informs us, these luscious props were the favorite haunt of Diana. Actaeon the visionary was a trespasser. Dreams are rarely concerned with private property. The offended Diana nonetheless did not interfere, but took active part in Actaeon's spectacle. She transformed him into a stag, precisely at the moment when dawn drew the curtain on the grand event. The hunt went on as planned. As one of the huntsmen rejoined, this was the grandest chase of all. Was it not a pity that Actaeon was not there? Absurdly ridiculous! No one is ever absent from his own dream. The presence of hunters, the locale the pathless woods dotted by bubbling streams the hounds of Crete and Sparta, the furious pursuit, the thirsty desire were

Jocelyn Powell has rightfully observed that critics have wrongfully made excuses for Christopher Marlowe's stagecraft in that they have failed to recognize his plays as drama of spectacle. They have failed to realize that in his plays he tried to fuse "the timeless and soul-searching of the morality with the relentless progress of the chronicle."l They have failed to realize also that in making such fusion he pays most "careful attention to visual effects made by each scene in action, and contrives that the movement of actors, their properties, costumes and background against which they appear, shall combine to form a picture as representative as words."2 And only within the last decade have they noted that Marlowe integrates his pageantry with blank verse to set forth his ethical values objectively and not as if they were exempla in a sermon.3 These observations represent a part of the recent defense of Marlowe as an effective and sensitive stage dramatist, not a miscast lyric poet.4 Now the spectacle of Marlowe's plays is provided mainly by pageantry, and integral parts of the pageantry are ritualistic and ceremonial actions. It seems that critics have ignored or deprecated the appearance of rites and ceremonies in his plays quite as much as they have generally made excuses for spectacle in them.5 They have not systematically observed the extent and variety of these phenomena or their dramatic function. I believe such observation may lead to still better understanding of what Marlowe was trying to do as a stage dramatist and therefore make possible a better appreciation of his plays as works to be acted, not merely read as fine poems. I am not here concerned with the play as ritual in itself, however much one might discover similarities between the structure of certain rites and the structure of certain plays; rather I am concerned with the appearance of recognized rituals and cere