Wednesday 26th May
Panel 1: Aurality
Drew Keane — The Usefulness of the Oral Qualities of the Prayer Book Catechism (1549—1604)
My paper examines the Catechism provided in the Book of Common Prayer, not only the most printed text in early modern England, but also the most performed. It takes the form of interrogatory instruction, a scripted dialogue between a teacher and a child intended for memorization and public performance in church to demonstrate readiness for confirmation. I explore how the language of the Prayer Book Catechism (first written in 1549) contributes to its usefulness, particularly for children who could not read. It is characterized oral communication patterns, like redundancy, copiousness, and agonism, features which focus on involvement over abstract conceptualization. Rather than a script to facilitate an illusion, a child playing a part, it is designed to equip children for their part or role in life and the community to which they belong.
Aleksandra Throstrup – Auricular poisonings
While playwrights staged literal and figurative cases of auricular poisonings – done, Claudius-style, by pouring actual poison into actual ears, or Faustus-style by overdosing on that alluring mind-altering drug, language – Puritan opponents of the theatre sought to bend the ears of legislators to their concern about the physical and moral corruption that would enter the body of the ‘audience’ attending the playhouse, and the medical writers conceived of the inner ear as the point where mind and world met. The ear was an open passage whereby that which was outward could become inward. Rhetoric sought to persuade by using ‘figures’ that would work upon the pliable matter of the imagination, but the contemporary non-literary writing posed the disturbing thought that the metaphor of the altered, re-moulded mind should be understood all too literally.
Panel 2: Contracts and courts
Lucy Clarke — ‘And he shall make three ‘oyes’ for silence’: interrogating performance and spectatorship in common processes of authority
Some of the most common processes of authority practiced by early modern English magistrates involved a call for silence and attention: this paper investigates how that call might work in practice.
While some historians, such as Michael Braddick, have made reference to Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of ‘state magic’ to explore the ways in which magistrates ‘performed’ their own authority, few have considered the value of an approach drawn directly from performance studies. This paper seeks to illuminate the ways that ordinary Englishmen were able to effectively or ineffectively imbue themselves with ‘state magic’, by examining arrests and proclamations as performances.
Through attention to textual sources, including archival material and legal handbooks, I will explore how these performances aim to transform the quotidian into a controlled moment of performance, where officers hold the right to perform, and where public become an audience, from whom a specific response is needed. It will also develop these conclusions with the findings from several practice as research workshops, where actors will perform arrests and proclamations: it will thus explore both how audiences are created, and affected, by performances of authority. In paying close attention to the modalities of these performances, this paper will shine new light upon the experience of authority in early modern England.
Niall Allsop – Interregnum Marriage Rites: Ceremony and Allegiance in William Davenant and Margaret Cavendish
Margaret Cavendish and William Davenant were respectively the wife and client of William Cavendish, the Marquis of Newcastle. Newcastle’s patronage circle was a significant forum for the reception of Ben Jonson, including his literary codification of wedding ceremonial in Hymenaei (1606), but also of Thomas Hobbes, whose discussion of civil religion in Leviathan (1651) offered scope for royalist absolutists to engage with the reform of religion and public ceremony then underway in Cromwellian England. The paper will draw on Davenant and Cavendish’s theoretical writings on the public functions of literary ceremony. But it will focus on two neglected works written for public performance on ceremonial occasions: Davenant’s ‘Epithalamium, the Morning after the Marriage of the Earl of Barrymore and Martha Lawrence’ (1656), and Cavendish’s sequence of ‘Marriage Orations’ in her rhetorical textbook Orations of Divers Sorts (1662). Both texts foreground eloquent speakers—a Jonsonian poet-priest and a Cavendishean female orator—who adapt literary conventions to reflect on the function of public ceremonial writing in shaping communal
Thursday 27th May
Panel 3: Composition and Commonplacing
Mary Morrissey – Donne’s missing pages
Izaak Walton tells us two useful things about Donne’s method of sermon composition. We know that he used ‘secondary sources’ when composing his sermons, he would ‘consult the Fathers. We also know that Donne had two methods of taking notes: The first was to annotate books he owned. The other was to summarise authors, and Walton alleges, ‘the resultance of 1400 Authors’ were to be found ‘abridged and analysed with his own hand’. Annotating Donne sermons verifies Walton’s observations here. By tracing the source of quotations, we can see when Donne worked closely with a printed text. On other occasions, the errors in his quotations and citations strong suggest that he was working from his own summaries. This paper will examine what we can infer about Donne’s notebooks and commonplaces books, the pages that built his sermons but are now missing. It will also discuss more generally the principles of following error in the editing process as a means to discover more about texts that are longer extant. Can we reconstruct something of Donne’s notebooks from his misquotations? And what can we learn about Donne’s reading and study habits through this attempt to reconstruct something of his missing notebooks.
Beatrice Montedoro – Recovering Dramatic Extracting in Performance: Playgoers, Preachers and Commonplacing in Seventeenth-century
This paper links the main topics of the conference—stage, page and pulpit—by focusing on the practice of commonplacing, or, specifically, dramatic extracting. The first part of this paper is dedicated to dramatic extracting as it was practised in the theatre by playgoers, drawing on examples of dramatic extracts which might have been recorded during performances, such as the alleged case of the Othello extracts in Edward Pudsey's manuscript miscellany, as well as literary representations of playgoers taking notes at the theatre. Here I reflect on the direct and indirect evidence which allows us to imagine those ephemeral moments when dramatic extracting took place, and the methodological issues raised by working with such rare and largely lost material. The second part of the paper looks at how dramatic extracts were used in practice for other types of non-theatrical performances, such as delivering sermons. I consider the influence of dramatic texts on Henry King's sermons, and I explore examples of manuscript miscellanies that belonged to other clergymen, such as Abraham Wright's miscellany, or the anonymous MS Eng. misc. d. 28, and discuss evidence within them which also suggests how dramatic extracts might have been used in the composition of sermons.
Dana Kovarik — “Gathered out of sundrie writers, Englished and moralized”: Commonplacing on the Sixteenth—Century Stage
Reversing the trend of hunting for scraps of performances recorded in sixteenth-century manuscript commonplace books, this paper explores how the aphorisms of commonplacing were incorporated into the didactic plays of Lewis Wager, William Wager and Thomas Lupton. This paper begins by exploring a convention of medieval morality drama, whereby a character of virtue or authority offered (in Latin) a line from Scripture and then glossed it in Middle English for the edification of the audience. This paper then explores how the post-Reformation suppression of religious material on the popular stage led these later playwrights to reconsider their use of authoritative sources and to incorporate lines from Classical authors instead. Thus, the learned tone of Latinity was kept alive in this dramatic convention whilst substituting the stuff of humanist learning for the biblical exposition that now ran afoul of the censors. Finally, this paper will analyse the specific source texts used by Wager, Wager and Lupton to suggest that they borrowed not only from print works popularly mined for commonplacing, but that they may have incorporated material from their own manuscript commonplace books into their moral plays.
Panel 4: Performance, Text and Object
Anna Reynolds — ‘“Oh, sweete Doctor Almanacke”: Paper Props in Middleton’s Masques
It has gone largely unnoticed that Thomas Middleton is obsessed with almanacs. In addition to composing the mock- Owl’s Almanac in 1618, a number of Middleton’s plays heavily feature the cheap, ephemeral, and widely read ‘calendars and prognostications’. More than an occasional point of reference, almanacs make up the very fabric of two plays in particular, propping up their preoccupations and meanings, and more literally appearing as props. No Wit/No Help Like a Woman’s; Or, the Almanac (1611) contains a dining table in the shape of an ‘Anatomical Man’, as well as a character in a masque who wears ‘a coat made like an almanac’. In his Masque of Heroes (1619), Middleton again anthropomorphises the almanac, replicating the typographical layout of the popular calendar with the players’ bodies onstage: Doctor Almanac directs a masque of ‘three Good Days’, ‘three Bad Days’, and ‘Indifferent Days’, all carrying ‘inscriptions on their breasts’. This paper will argue that Middleton goes far beyond parodying naïve almanac readers, as the limited scholarship on these plays has suggested. Instead, Middleton thinks deeply with almanacs. These paper objects, in combination with the masque form, prove a rich space, material, and prop with which to consider the intersections of printed text, performing body, and the passage of time.
Eva Lauenstein — Reading after death: The book on the Post-Reformation Funeral Monument
What do prayer books on tombs disclose about the relationship between text and devotional objects in post-Reformation belief? In Hainton, Lincolnshire, the effigy of the deceased William Heneage reads Psalm 51 engraved into the pages of a sculpted book. Commonly known as the ‘neck verse’, this penitential psalm illustrates the secular and divine power of words. However, by reproducing verse and book as decorative objects, the monument reminds its viewers that benefiting from the edifying quality of words necessitates an engagement with conspicuously material ‘things’.
Taking the lead from the inscribed monumental books on the Heneage tomb, this paper investigates how early modern men and women negotiated the materiality of religious text in shared public spaces. By exploring the monumental tomes in the context of the book’s use as a stage property in the works of John Webster and Thomas Dekker, I seek to show that tombs and books played a central role in the development of protestant attitudes to the image in the reformed place of worship.
Panel 5: Pulpit and Stage I
Richard Meek — Empathy on the Stage and in the Pulpit
Simon Smith — Action, accent and audience: rethinking early modern playhouse culture through sermons and sermon—going'
In broad terms I'll be charting ways in which sermon-going and play-going were conceptualised and discussed as cognate activities in the period; in particular, I plan to focus on the rhetorically-derived skills of action and accent that underpinned both preaching and acting, and to present evidence that in both contexts, audiences were engaged with and censorious of the preacher/performer's technical capabilities, essentially bringing a mode of judgement honed at sermons to bear whilst in a playhouse, and possibly vice-versa.
Panel 6: Page and Stage I
Stephen Watkins – Chasing Tempests
The Tempest took Restoration London by storm. First adapted in 1667 by William Davenant and John Dryden, it was later elaborated into a dramatic opera in 1674. Both productions led to a flurry of paper engagements, ranging from playscripts, music scores and songbooks, to personal diaries, miscellanies, and even a prose romance. This paper proposes to track The Tempest, as it were, ‘on the move’: as it migrates between different media, from performance to print and back again. By charting non-theatrical iterations of the play, we can more accurately gauge the theatre’s reach beyond the physical environs of the playhouses themselves. Finally, the paper offers new research relating to the song ‘Dorinda’s Lament’. Rather than an original lyric composed by James Hart for the 1674 Tempest, as scholars have previously assumed, I demonstrate that the words are in fact those of a broadside ballad printed some years earlier. This prompts us to rethink the relationship between street culture and elite opera in Restoration London. Hart’s musical setting later makes the return journey—from theatre to street—emerging as a popular ballad tune in the 1680s, revealing the intriguing interconnections and exchanges between different performance cultures in late seventeenth-century London.
Jennifer Kraemer – Adapting Witchcraft: True Crime and Bigamy in Henry Goodcole’s Discouerie of Elizabeth Sawyer, a Witch and Rowley, Dekker, and Ford’s The Witch of Edmonton
True crime was serious business in early modern England. Salacious murders like Alice Arden’s (1551) and Walter Calverley’s (1605) provided fodder for ballads and pamphlets but also for plays like Arden of Faversham and A Yorkshire Tragedy. Plays cross-pollinated with other popular works to capitalize on public appetite for true crime. Rowley, Dekker, and Ford’s The Witch of Edmonton is one such play, drawing from the much-publicized trial of Elizabeth Sawyer. Occurring only a few months before the play’s first performance, the trial spawned ballads so sensational, that Newgate Prison chaplain Henry Goodcole wrote a tell-all pamphlet to set the record straight. Rowley et. al. draw heavily from Goodcole for their plot but depart in their characterization of the witch herself. In reality, Sawyer’s story serves as the secondary plotline in a play that is ultimately about bigamy, wife-murder, and inheritance. The playwrights are clearly seeking to exploit the news of the day to argue an additional point about the breakdown of community. This paper will examine how The Witch of Edmonton both appropriates Goodcole’s pamphlet and argues beyond it to litigate early modern cultural anxieties about the individual and the community.
Friday 28th May
Panel 7: Pulpit and Stage II
Maria Salenius — “God made this World his Theatre”: John Donne Preaching on the Role of Princes
The aim of this paper is to discuss John Donne’s representation of kingship and of the role of the monarch, in his sermon on 24 March 1616/17, mainly within the context of the plays Richard III and Henry VIII by William Shakespeare, and a treatise on King Richard III by William Cornwallis. The aim is to show how Donne seeks to encompass both the idea of a Machiavellian prince and that of a Christian leader in his perception of the actions and expectations of a monarch. For Donne, both the unquestionable power of authority and supremacy, on the one hand, and the acts of benevolence and mercy, on the other, are crucial elements of successful kingship. In this sermon, applying the semantic field familiar from contemporary dramatic and historical depictions of past monarchs, Donne creates a conceptual framework for reconciling both these roles with the Elizabethan legacy of King James I. Donne assigns his congregation as an audience for the monarch’s performance, while also challenging them with the responsibility of acting the compassionate judge. In a world where “all parts are play’d, and all play parts,” Donne wants to ensure society is in the hands of the best possible king.
David Fletcher — “A Stage—Sermon, Or A Pulpit—Play”: Theatricality and the liminality between the stage and in the pulpit, 1660—1714
The new plays of the late Stuart period included many portrayals of disreputable and hypocritical clerics. This anti-clericalism was one of the main concerns for those who saw the stage as a threat to the morality and religion of the nation and, in 1698, the Non-Juror cleric Jeremy Collier provoked a full-scale pamphlet war with A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage. One of the ironies of the controversy was that antitheatricality became an obsession for a man who himself lived a very dramatic life. William Congreve, one of the playwrights attacked by Collier, blurred the edges of the worlds of the pulpit and the stage by asking us to ‘take a View of Mr. Collier, as he appears upon the Stage’ as he ‘has Eloped from his Pulpit and Strayed within the inclosures of the Theatre’. Collier was not the only cleric with a dramatic reputation and, in 1710, the High Church firebrand Henry Sacheverell was giving such powerful performances that eventually he drew audiences away from the theatre. This paper will explore how these clerical performances and performing clerics contributed to a liminality between the pulpit and the playhouse.
Panel 8: Performance and the Page
Rachel Stenner — Performative Modes in William Baldwin’s The Canticles or Balades of Salomon, Phraselyke Declared in Englysh Metres (1549)
William Baldwin’s barely-studied metrical rendering of the Song of Songs has many claims on our attention. It is one of the earliest printed works of Petrarchan lyric in the English language, and it prominently features a woman of colour as protagonist and desiring speaker. Not overtly a theatrical text, this collection of poetry engages dramatic modes and contexts in a manner that, I argue, creates an entirely dissonant notion of performance. In the gospelling line of Sternhold and Hopkins’ metrical Psalms, printed only two years earlier and also dedicated to Edward VI, Baldwin establishes a performance context for his poems that is both courtly and congregational. They will be recited with ‘psalmes and himnes’ and sung before the king and all his subjects. Yet while Baldwin draws on the Great Bible text, his alterations to the form and mode of Song of Songs are staggering: Petrarchan lyric delivers Biblical paraphrase, dialogue stages characterisation, and prose interjects to narrate action and effect scenic transition. Baldwin’s book creates an experimental dramatic mode that is so challenging to the reader that it borders on chaos.
Tom Rutter — John Donne's Playgoing
Jane Rickard — ‘Plays or works?’ Ben Jonson's Workes (1616) as theatrical text
My current thinking is to centre the paper on Jonson's 1616 folio and to discuss the early annotations in several different copies as suggesting that readers treated the plays even in this context as theatrical texts (as I mentioned before, there is one where one play has been extensively marked up as if for performance but there are others where, for example, stage directions have been added in). I'd want to use this archival evidence to argue not that these readers were resisting or subverting Jonson's attempt to remove his plays from the context of the theatre (which is how critics have often talked about his folio) but rather that that the relations between the theatre and print were fluid and two-way, and that Jonson himself recognised and sought to exploit this.
Panel 9: Page and Stage II
William Green — Fake News, 1624: English Corantos of the 1620s in the Drama of Thomas Middleton
During the early 1620s, as King James I persisted with a policy of non-intervention in the Thirty Years’ War, periodical news-sheets or ‘corantos’ detailing noteworthy events on the continent came to serve as a popular source of information among the English public. This wave of readily available printed news caused considerable unease among the English establishment: as early as January 1621, the King even requested a ban from the States General of the Netherlands on the export of corantos to his country. Alongside these publications, Thomas Middleton produced a series of works demonstrably inspired by this freshly available source of news. While past scholars have noted Middleton’s engagement with the contemporaneous issue of the ongoing war, however, few have observed how Middleton’s output during the early 1620s clearly shows a sustained interaction with these non-theatrical sources of news as a means of producing theatrical vehicles for the (biased) reinterpretation of the material contained therein. This paper will explore this argument further, reading such major Middletonian works as A Game at Chess and his adaptation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure in order to show how each work disseminates oppositional, pro-Protestant commentary upon even the most recent coranto publications.
Jean David Eynard — “A curious kind of perspective”: Gondibert and the visual politics of the early modern masque
In his famous ‘Preface’ to Gondibert, William Davenant explains that the structure of his poem has been inspired by English drama: ‘I did not only observe the Symmetry [of the five acts] but all the shadowings, happy strokes, secret graces, and even the drapery (which together make the second beauty)’. Taking this remark as its point of departure, this paper aims to highlight the affinity between Davenant’s epic poem and his dramatic output, focusing specifically on the idea of perspective. As Hobbes pointed out, Gondibert is a highly anamorphic text written in ‘a curious kind of perspective’, whereby supposedly discordant details merge to form a coherent picture if observed from the right point of view. I argue that this technique is remarkably similar to the use of perspective in early modern masques, and especially Davenant’s, which stood out for their highly Baroque use of anamorphosis. In my paper, I begin by analysing Davenant’s critical remarks on theatrical perspective—both in his prose writings, and in lesser-known works such as The First Dayes Entertainment. I then go on to show how he exploits a similar anamorphic technique in Gondibert, taking Canto 5 of Book II as a revealing case study. I contend that Davenant’s anamorphic art not only has great political implications (as Hobbes’s and Marvell’s early comments suggest), but also offers a great example of the connection between epic and dramatic genres in the early modern period.
Panel 10: Violent Performances
Laura Doak — ‘Last words’ and ‘Final Testimonies’: re-performing executions in seventeenth-century Scotland
The theatricality of early modern public executions has long been noted. For Scots, ‘stage’ and ‘scaffold’ were interchangeable words. Reaching the page, the final words of a condemned man or woman simultaneously became both a dramatic and non-dramatic text. When a criminal faced censorship on the scaffold, they negotiated a complex set of rules prescribing their final moments, deeds, and words. A fabricated ‘last speech’ could rewrite an individual’s final moments; a pre-written ‘final testimony’ could invent a performance that had not taken place. In all guises, these texts embraced the performative nature of public executions, suggesting the physical presence of the condemned upon the public platform of the scaffold, and appealing directly to an audience of ‘auditors’, ‘witnesses’, and ‘spectators’.
This paper will examine the ‘last speeches’ and ‘final testimonies’ of condemned militants in seventeenth century Scotland. It will consider their exploitation of the scaffold’s physically performative nature and their negotiation of dramatic textual convention. It will argue that although not conventionally considered as theatrical texts, such sources can provide significant insights into the status of performance in early modern culture as a whole.
Andy Kesson – Early Modern Bear Bating
Cheryl Birdseye — Performative Confessions: Lessons in (in)sincerity
T. Platte’s Lamentation of Anne Wallen (1616) presents a first-person confession from Wallen’s perspective of her petty treason charge, for which she was burned and vilified by contemporaries. Despite broad condemnation of Wallen, a letter from John Chamberlain – witness to her trial and testimony – offers another view of the shame-filled killer of Platte’s ballad, describing the beaten, distressed wife he had observed, mortified at her act of self-defence.
The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries witnessed increased intrigue into dysfunctional domestic experiences. The rise of domestic tragedies reimagined transgressive behaviours of notorious criminals, supported by trial pamphleture, ballads, and transcribed confessional speeches. Confessional tracts presented their own issues, however, particularly through their necessarily ventriloquised voice – penned and performed by male intermediaries. Confessions were not neutral; rather, they fulfilled an expected, performative, element of criminal trials – stylistically situated somewhere between didactic pulpit proclamation and dramatic spectacle – by offering closure to the authorities and wider public. John Chamberlain’s letter urges discussion of the voices of women for whom confession, not defence, proved the only accessible option: this paper will interrogate the unique lens of Renaissance domestic tragedy in interacting with the (in)sincerity of early modern confession, and its subsequent challenges to modern audiences.
Panel 1: Aurality
Drew Keane — The Usefulness of the Oral Qualities of the Prayer Book Catechism (1549—1604)
My paper examines the Catechism provided in the Book of Common Prayer, not only the most printed text in early modern England, but also the most performed. It takes the form of interrogatory instruction, a scripted dialogue between a teacher and a child intended for memorization and public performance in church to demonstrate readiness for confirmation. I explore how the language of the Prayer Book Catechism (first written in 1549) contributes to its usefulness, particularly for children who could not read. It is characterized oral communication patterns, like redundancy, copiousness, and agonism, features which focus on involvement over abstract conceptualization. Rather than a script to facilitate an illusion, a child playing a part, it is designed to equip children for their part or role in life and the community to which they belong.
Aleksandra Throstrup – Auricular poisonings
While playwrights staged literal and figurative cases of auricular poisonings – done, Claudius-style, by pouring actual poison into actual ears, or Faustus-style by overdosing on that alluring mind-altering drug, language – Puritan opponents of the theatre sought to bend the ears of legislators to their concern about the physical and moral corruption that would enter the body of the ‘audience’ attending the playhouse, and the medical writers conceived of the inner ear as the point where mind and world met. The ear was an open passage whereby that which was outward could become inward. Rhetoric sought to persuade by using ‘figures’ that would work upon the pliable matter of the imagination, but the contemporary non-literary writing posed the disturbing thought that the metaphor of the altered, re-moulded mind should be understood all too literally.
Panel 2: Contracts and courts
Lucy Clarke — ‘And he shall make three ‘oyes’ for silence’: interrogating performance and spectatorship in common processes of authority
Some of the most common processes of authority practiced by early modern English magistrates involved a call for silence and attention: this paper investigates how that call might work in practice.
While some historians, such as Michael Braddick, have made reference to Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of ‘state magic’ to explore the ways in which magistrates ‘performed’ their own authority, few have considered the value of an approach drawn directly from performance studies. This paper seeks to illuminate the ways that ordinary Englishmen were able to effectively or ineffectively imbue themselves with ‘state magic’, by examining arrests and proclamations as performances.
Through attention to textual sources, including archival material and legal handbooks, I will explore how these performances aim to transform the quotidian into a controlled moment of performance, where officers hold the right to perform, and where public become an audience, from whom a specific response is needed. It will also develop these conclusions with the findings from several practice as research workshops, where actors will perform arrests and proclamations: it will thus explore both how audiences are created, and affected, by performances of authority. In paying close attention to the modalities of these performances, this paper will shine new light upon the experience of authority in early modern England.
Niall Allsop – Interregnum Marriage Rites: Ceremony and Allegiance in William Davenant and Margaret Cavendish
Margaret Cavendish and William Davenant were respectively the wife and client of William Cavendish, the Marquis of Newcastle. Newcastle’s patronage circle was a significant forum for the reception of Ben Jonson, including his literary codification of wedding ceremonial in Hymenaei (1606), but also of Thomas Hobbes, whose discussion of civil religion in Leviathan (1651) offered scope for royalist absolutists to engage with the reform of religion and public ceremony then underway in Cromwellian England. The paper will draw on Davenant and Cavendish’s theoretical writings on the public functions of literary ceremony. But it will focus on two neglected works written for public performance on ceremonial occasions: Davenant’s ‘Epithalamium, the Morning after the Marriage of the Earl of Barrymore and Martha Lawrence’ (1656), and Cavendish’s sequence of ‘Marriage Orations’ in her rhetorical textbook Orations of Divers Sorts (1662). Both texts foreground eloquent speakers—a Jonsonian poet-priest and a Cavendishean female orator—who adapt literary conventions to reflect on the function of public ceremonial writing in shaping communal
Thursday 27th May
Panel 3: Composition and Commonplacing
Mary Morrissey – Donne’s missing pages
Izaak Walton tells us two useful things about Donne’s method of sermon composition. We know that he used ‘secondary sources’ when composing his sermons, he would ‘consult the Fathers. We also know that Donne had two methods of taking notes: The first was to annotate books he owned. The other was to summarise authors, and Walton alleges, ‘the resultance of 1400 Authors’ were to be found ‘abridged and analysed with his own hand’. Annotating Donne sermons verifies Walton’s observations here. By tracing the source of quotations, we can see when Donne worked closely with a printed text. On other occasions, the errors in his quotations and citations strong suggest that he was working from his own summaries. This paper will examine what we can infer about Donne’s notebooks and commonplaces books, the pages that built his sermons but are now missing. It will also discuss more generally the principles of following error in the editing process as a means to discover more about texts that are longer extant. Can we reconstruct something of Donne’s notebooks from his misquotations? And what can we learn about Donne’s reading and study habits through this attempt to reconstruct something of his missing notebooks.
Beatrice Montedoro – Recovering Dramatic Extracting in Performance: Playgoers, Preachers and Commonplacing in Seventeenth-century
This paper links the main topics of the conference—stage, page and pulpit—by focusing on the practice of commonplacing, or, specifically, dramatic extracting. The first part of this paper is dedicated to dramatic extracting as it was practised in the theatre by playgoers, drawing on examples of dramatic extracts which might have been recorded during performances, such as the alleged case of the Othello extracts in Edward Pudsey's manuscript miscellany, as well as literary representations of playgoers taking notes at the theatre. Here I reflect on the direct and indirect evidence which allows us to imagine those ephemeral moments when dramatic extracting took place, and the methodological issues raised by working with such rare and largely lost material. The second part of the paper looks at how dramatic extracts were used in practice for other types of non-theatrical performances, such as delivering sermons. I consider the influence of dramatic texts on Henry King's sermons, and I explore examples of manuscript miscellanies that belonged to other clergymen, such as Abraham Wright's miscellany, or the anonymous MS Eng. misc. d. 28, and discuss evidence within them which also suggests how dramatic extracts might have been used in the composition of sermons.
Dana Kovarik — “Gathered out of sundrie writers, Englished and moralized”: Commonplacing on the Sixteenth—Century Stage
Reversing the trend of hunting for scraps of performances recorded in sixteenth-century manuscript commonplace books, this paper explores how the aphorisms of commonplacing were incorporated into the didactic plays of Lewis Wager, William Wager and Thomas Lupton. This paper begins by exploring a convention of medieval morality drama, whereby a character of virtue or authority offered (in Latin) a line from Scripture and then glossed it in Middle English for the edification of the audience. This paper then explores how the post-Reformation suppression of religious material on the popular stage led these later playwrights to reconsider their use of authoritative sources and to incorporate lines from Classical authors instead. Thus, the learned tone of Latinity was kept alive in this dramatic convention whilst substituting the stuff of humanist learning for the biblical exposition that now ran afoul of the censors. Finally, this paper will analyse the specific source texts used by Wager, Wager and Lupton to suggest that they borrowed not only from print works popularly mined for commonplacing, but that they may have incorporated material from their own manuscript commonplace books into their moral plays.
Panel 4: Performance, Text and Object
Anna Reynolds — ‘“Oh, sweete Doctor Almanacke”: Paper Props in Middleton’s Masques
It has gone largely unnoticed that Thomas Middleton is obsessed with almanacs. In addition to composing the mock- Owl’s Almanac in 1618, a number of Middleton’s plays heavily feature the cheap, ephemeral, and widely read ‘calendars and prognostications’. More than an occasional point of reference, almanacs make up the very fabric of two plays in particular, propping up their preoccupations and meanings, and more literally appearing as props. No Wit/No Help Like a Woman’s; Or, the Almanac (1611) contains a dining table in the shape of an ‘Anatomical Man’, as well as a character in a masque who wears ‘a coat made like an almanac’. In his Masque of Heroes (1619), Middleton again anthropomorphises the almanac, replicating the typographical layout of the popular calendar with the players’ bodies onstage: Doctor Almanac directs a masque of ‘three Good Days’, ‘three Bad Days’, and ‘Indifferent Days’, all carrying ‘inscriptions on their breasts’. This paper will argue that Middleton goes far beyond parodying naïve almanac readers, as the limited scholarship on these plays has suggested. Instead, Middleton thinks deeply with almanacs. These paper objects, in combination with the masque form, prove a rich space, material, and prop with which to consider the intersections of printed text, performing body, and the passage of time.
Eva Lauenstein — Reading after death: The book on the Post-Reformation Funeral Monument
What do prayer books on tombs disclose about the relationship between text and devotional objects in post-Reformation belief? In Hainton, Lincolnshire, the effigy of the deceased William Heneage reads Psalm 51 engraved into the pages of a sculpted book. Commonly known as the ‘neck verse’, this penitential psalm illustrates the secular and divine power of words. However, by reproducing verse and book as decorative objects, the monument reminds its viewers that benefiting from the edifying quality of words necessitates an engagement with conspicuously material ‘things’.
Taking the lead from the inscribed monumental books on the Heneage tomb, this paper investigates how early modern men and women negotiated the materiality of religious text in shared public spaces. By exploring the monumental tomes in the context of the book’s use as a stage property in the works of John Webster and Thomas Dekker, I seek to show that tombs and books played a central role in the development of protestant attitudes to the image in the reformed place of worship.
Panel 5: Pulpit and Stage I
Richard Meek — Empathy on the Stage and in the Pulpit
Simon Smith — Action, accent and audience: rethinking early modern playhouse culture through sermons and sermon—going'
In broad terms I'll be charting ways in which sermon-going and play-going were conceptualised and discussed as cognate activities in the period; in particular, I plan to focus on the rhetorically-derived skills of action and accent that underpinned both preaching and acting, and to present evidence that in both contexts, audiences were engaged with and censorious of the preacher/performer's technical capabilities, essentially bringing a mode of judgement honed at sermons to bear whilst in a playhouse, and possibly vice-versa.
Panel 6: Page and Stage I
Stephen Watkins – Chasing Tempests
The Tempest took Restoration London by storm. First adapted in 1667 by William Davenant and John Dryden, it was later elaborated into a dramatic opera in 1674. Both productions led to a flurry of paper engagements, ranging from playscripts, music scores and songbooks, to personal diaries, miscellanies, and even a prose romance. This paper proposes to track The Tempest, as it were, ‘on the move’: as it migrates between different media, from performance to print and back again. By charting non-theatrical iterations of the play, we can more accurately gauge the theatre’s reach beyond the physical environs of the playhouses themselves. Finally, the paper offers new research relating to the song ‘Dorinda’s Lament’. Rather than an original lyric composed by James Hart for the 1674 Tempest, as scholars have previously assumed, I demonstrate that the words are in fact those of a broadside ballad printed some years earlier. This prompts us to rethink the relationship between street culture and elite opera in Restoration London. Hart’s musical setting later makes the return journey—from theatre to street—emerging as a popular ballad tune in the 1680s, revealing the intriguing interconnections and exchanges between different performance cultures in late seventeenth-century London.
Jennifer Kraemer – Adapting Witchcraft: True Crime and Bigamy in Henry Goodcole’s Discouerie of Elizabeth Sawyer, a Witch and Rowley, Dekker, and Ford’s The Witch of Edmonton
True crime was serious business in early modern England. Salacious murders like Alice Arden’s (1551) and Walter Calverley’s (1605) provided fodder for ballads and pamphlets but also for plays like Arden of Faversham and A Yorkshire Tragedy. Plays cross-pollinated with other popular works to capitalize on public appetite for true crime. Rowley, Dekker, and Ford’s The Witch of Edmonton is one such play, drawing from the much-publicized trial of Elizabeth Sawyer. Occurring only a few months before the play’s first performance, the trial spawned ballads so sensational, that Newgate Prison chaplain Henry Goodcole wrote a tell-all pamphlet to set the record straight. Rowley et. al. draw heavily from Goodcole for their plot but depart in their characterization of the witch herself. In reality, Sawyer’s story serves as the secondary plotline in a play that is ultimately about bigamy, wife-murder, and inheritance. The playwrights are clearly seeking to exploit the news of the day to argue an additional point about the breakdown of community. This paper will examine how The Witch of Edmonton both appropriates Goodcole’s pamphlet and argues beyond it to litigate early modern cultural anxieties about the individual and the community.
Friday 28th May
Panel 7: Pulpit and Stage II
Maria Salenius — “God made this World his Theatre”: John Donne Preaching on the Role of Princes
The aim of this paper is to discuss John Donne’s representation of kingship and of the role of the monarch, in his sermon on 24 March 1616/17, mainly within the context of the plays Richard III and Henry VIII by William Shakespeare, and a treatise on King Richard III by William Cornwallis. The aim is to show how Donne seeks to encompass both the idea of a Machiavellian prince and that of a Christian leader in his perception of the actions and expectations of a monarch. For Donne, both the unquestionable power of authority and supremacy, on the one hand, and the acts of benevolence and mercy, on the other, are crucial elements of successful kingship. In this sermon, applying the semantic field familiar from contemporary dramatic and historical depictions of past monarchs, Donne creates a conceptual framework for reconciling both these roles with the Elizabethan legacy of King James I. Donne assigns his congregation as an audience for the monarch’s performance, while also challenging them with the responsibility of acting the compassionate judge. In a world where “all parts are play’d, and all play parts,” Donne wants to ensure society is in the hands of the best possible king.
David Fletcher — “A Stage—Sermon, Or A Pulpit—Play”: Theatricality and the liminality between the stage and in the pulpit, 1660—1714
The new plays of the late Stuart period included many portrayals of disreputable and hypocritical clerics. This anti-clericalism was one of the main concerns for those who saw the stage as a threat to the morality and religion of the nation and, in 1698, the Non-Juror cleric Jeremy Collier provoked a full-scale pamphlet war with A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage. One of the ironies of the controversy was that antitheatricality became an obsession for a man who himself lived a very dramatic life. William Congreve, one of the playwrights attacked by Collier, blurred the edges of the worlds of the pulpit and the stage by asking us to ‘take a View of Mr. Collier, as he appears upon the Stage’ as he ‘has Eloped from his Pulpit and Strayed within the inclosures of the Theatre’. Collier was not the only cleric with a dramatic reputation and, in 1710, the High Church firebrand Henry Sacheverell was giving such powerful performances that eventually he drew audiences away from the theatre. This paper will explore how these clerical performances and performing clerics contributed to a liminality between the pulpit and the playhouse.
Panel 8: Performance and the Page
Rachel Stenner — Performative Modes in William Baldwin’s The Canticles or Balades of Salomon, Phraselyke Declared in Englysh Metres (1549)
William Baldwin’s barely-studied metrical rendering of the Song of Songs has many claims on our attention. It is one of the earliest printed works of Petrarchan lyric in the English language, and it prominently features a woman of colour as protagonist and desiring speaker. Not overtly a theatrical text, this collection of poetry engages dramatic modes and contexts in a manner that, I argue, creates an entirely dissonant notion of performance. In the gospelling line of Sternhold and Hopkins’ metrical Psalms, printed only two years earlier and also dedicated to Edward VI, Baldwin establishes a performance context for his poems that is both courtly and congregational. They will be recited with ‘psalmes and himnes’ and sung before the king and all his subjects. Yet while Baldwin draws on the Great Bible text, his alterations to the form and mode of Song of Songs are staggering: Petrarchan lyric delivers Biblical paraphrase, dialogue stages characterisation, and prose interjects to narrate action and effect scenic transition. Baldwin’s book creates an experimental dramatic mode that is so challenging to the reader that it borders on chaos.
Tom Rutter — John Donne's Playgoing
Jane Rickard — ‘Plays or works?’ Ben Jonson's Workes (1616) as theatrical text
My current thinking is to centre the paper on Jonson's 1616 folio and to discuss the early annotations in several different copies as suggesting that readers treated the plays even in this context as theatrical texts (as I mentioned before, there is one where one play has been extensively marked up as if for performance but there are others where, for example, stage directions have been added in). I'd want to use this archival evidence to argue not that these readers were resisting or subverting Jonson's attempt to remove his plays from the context of the theatre (which is how critics have often talked about his folio) but rather that that the relations between the theatre and print were fluid and two-way, and that Jonson himself recognised and sought to exploit this.
Panel 9: Page and Stage II
William Green — Fake News, 1624: English Corantos of the 1620s in the Drama of Thomas Middleton
During the early 1620s, as King James I persisted with a policy of non-intervention in the Thirty Years’ War, periodical news-sheets or ‘corantos’ detailing noteworthy events on the continent came to serve as a popular source of information among the English public. This wave of readily available printed news caused considerable unease among the English establishment: as early as January 1621, the King even requested a ban from the States General of the Netherlands on the export of corantos to his country. Alongside these publications, Thomas Middleton produced a series of works demonstrably inspired by this freshly available source of news. While past scholars have noted Middleton’s engagement with the contemporaneous issue of the ongoing war, however, few have observed how Middleton’s output during the early 1620s clearly shows a sustained interaction with these non-theatrical sources of news as a means of producing theatrical vehicles for the (biased) reinterpretation of the material contained therein. This paper will explore this argument further, reading such major Middletonian works as A Game at Chess and his adaptation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure in order to show how each work disseminates oppositional, pro-Protestant commentary upon even the most recent coranto publications.
Jean David Eynard — “A curious kind of perspective”: Gondibert and the visual politics of the early modern masque
In his famous ‘Preface’ to Gondibert, William Davenant explains that the structure of his poem has been inspired by English drama: ‘I did not only observe the Symmetry [of the five acts] but all the shadowings, happy strokes, secret graces, and even the drapery (which together make the second beauty)’. Taking this remark as its point of departure, this paper aims to highlight the affinity between Davenant’s epic poem and his dramatic output, focusing specifically on the idea of perspective. As Hobbes pointed out, Gondibert is a highly anamorphic text written in ‘a curious kind of perspective’, whereby supposedly discordant details merge to form a coherent picture if observed from the right point of view. I argue that this technique is remarkably similar to the use of perspective in early modern masques, and especially Davenant’s, which stood out for their highly Baroque use of anamorphosis. In my paper, I begin by analysing Davenant’s critical remarks on theatrical perspective—both in his prose writings, and in lesser-known works such as The First Dayes Entertainment. I then go on to show how he exploits a similar anamorphic technique in Gondibert, taking Canto 5 of Book II as a revealing case study. I contend that Davenant’s anamorphic art not only has great political implications (as Hobbes’s and Marvell’s early comments suggest), but also offers a great example of the connection between epic and dramatic genres in the early modern period.
Panel 10: Violent Performances
Laura Doak — ‘Last words’ and ‘Final Testimonies’: re-performing executions in seventeenth-century Scotland
The theatricality of early modern public executions has long been noted. For Scots, ‘stage’ and ‘scaffold’ were interchangeable words. Reaching the page, the final words of a condemned man or woman simultaneously became both a dramatic and non-dramatic text. When a criminal faced censorship on the scaffold, they negotiated a complex set of rules prescribing their final moments, deeds, and words. A fabricated ‘last speech’ could rewrite an individual’s final moments; a pre-written ‘final testimony’ could invent a performance that had not taken place. In all guises, these texts embraced the performative nature of public executions, suggesting the physical presence of the condemned upon the public platform of the scaffold, and appealing directly to an audience of ‘auditors’, ‘witnesses’, and ‘spectators’.
This paper will examine the ‘last speeches’ and ‘final testimonies’ of condemned militants in seventeenth century Scotland. It will consider their exploitation of the scaffold’s physically performative nature and their negotiation of dramatic textual convention. It will argue that although not conventionally considered as theatrical texts, such sources can provide significant insights into the status of performance in early modern culture as a whole.
Andy Kesson – Early Modern Bear Bating
Cheryl Birdseye — Performative Confessions: Lessons in (in)sincerity
T. Platte’s Lamentation of Anne Wallen (1616) presents a first-person confession from Wallen’s perspective of her petty treason charge, for which she was burned and vilified by contemporaries. Despite broad condemnation of Wallen, a letter from John Chamberlain – witness to her trial and testimony – offers another view of the shame-filled killer of Platte’s ballad, describing the beaten, distressed wife he had observed, mortified at her act of self-defence.
The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries witnessed increased intrigue into dysfunctional domestic experiences. The rise of domestic tragedies reimagined transgressive behaviours of notorious criminals, supported by trial pamphleture, ballads, and transcribed confessional speeches. Confessional tracts presented their own issues, however, particularly through their necessarily ventriloquised voice – penned and performed by male intermediaries. Confessions were not neutral; rather, they fulfilled an expected, performative, element of criminal trials – stylistically situated somewhere between didactic pulpit proclamation and dramatic spectacle – by offering closure to the authorities and wider public. John Chamberlain’s letter urges discussion of the voices of women for whom confession, not defence, proved the only accessible option: this paper will interrogate the unique lens of Renaissance domestic tragedy in interacting with the (in)sincerity of early modern confession, and its subsequent challenges to modern audiences.