Early Performance: Courts And Audiences: Shifting Paradigms In Early English Drama Studies (variorum Collected Studies)

These essays of Sarah Carpenter have been selected to reflect her career's close focus on the relationship of performance and audience. They are drawn from the last 25 years of her writing, and this has enabled the editors to organise them not chronologically but rather to develop her central theme through a range of genres, including morality plays, the interlude, court entertainments, international political spectacle, and the public 'performances' of natural and maintained fools. As a scholar who also has experience of acting and of production, Carpenter is particularly sensitive to the implications of location for creating meaning and generating audience reaction. The essays are focused on a relatively short time-span of 120 years, from the late fifteenth to the turn of the seventeenth century, and thus nuance a period traditionally divided between the late medieval and the early-modern, and between Catholicism and Protestantism. Carpenter shows how the dynamics of theatrical engagement in which the roles of audience and performer are frequently mixed or even reversed offer a more creative route to understanding how the individual and society respond to change. Cover 1 Half Title 2 Series Page 3 Title Page 6 Copyright Page 7 CONTENTS 8 Introduction 10 PART I Courts 14 1 Plays and playcoats: a courtly interlude tradition in Scotland? 16 2 ‘To thexaltacyon of noblesse’: a herald’s account of the marriage of Margaret Tudor and James IV 34 3 ‘Gely wyth tharmys of Scotland England’: word, image and performance at the marriage of James IV and Margaret Tudor 49 4 (with Graham Runnalls), The Entertainments at the marriage of Mary Queen of Scots and the French Dauphin François, 1558: Paris and Edinburgh 61 5 Performing diplomacies: the 1560s court entertainments of Mary Queen of Scots 74 6 Love and chastity: political performance in Scottish, French, and English courts of the 1560s 106 7 Dramatising ideology: Monarch, State, and People 119 PART II Audiences 132 8 New evidence: Vives and audience-response to biblical drama 134 9 Verity’s Bible: books, texts, and reading in Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis 142 10 Towards a reformed theatre: David Lyndsay and Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis 155 11 The sixteenth-century court audience: performers and spectators 174 12 ‘My Lady Tongue’: Thomas Tomkis’s Lingua 184 13 The politics of unreason: Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis and the practices of folly 194 14 Laughing at natural fools 206 15 The places of foolery: Robert Armin and fooling in Edinburgh 220 Sarah Carpenter: bibliography 233 Index 236 courtly,interlude;,Scotland,England;,Entertainments;,Performing,diplomacies;,Dramatising,ideology;,sixteenth-century,court;,politics,of,unreason courtly interlude,Scotland England,Entertainments,Performing diplomacies,Dramatising ideology,sixteenth-century court,politics of unreason