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Meg Twycross; Sarah Carpenter; Elisabeth Dutton

Medieval English Theatre is an international refereed journal publishing articles on medieval and early Tudor theatre and pageantry in all its aspects (not confined to England), together with articles and records of modern survivals or equivalents. Most issues are illustrated. Contributions to be considered for future volumes are welcomed: see end of this volume and website for further information:

<www.medievalenglishtheatre.co.uk>

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This chapter is an extract from Medieval English Theatre 47, edited by Meg Twycross, Sarah Carpenter, and Elisabeth Dutton

This chapter is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons licence CC BY NC-ND. Arts and Humanities Research Council grant AH/Y005112/1. The raw questionnaire data is available at https://osf.io/bk38c/.

First published 2026

D. S. Brewer, Cambridge

ISBN 978 1 84384 801 1 paperback

ISBN 978 1 84384 815 8 ePDF

ISSN 0143–3784

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Medieval English Theatre 47

Stable URL:https://openaccess.boydellandbrewercms.com/?id=-325848

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Medieval English Theatre is the premier journal in early theatre studies. Its name belies its wide range of interest: it publishes articles on theatre and pageantry from across the British Isles up to the opening of the London playhouses and the suppression of the civic religious plays, and also includes contributions on European, Latin and other cognate drama, together with analyses of modern survivals or equivalents, and of research productions of medieval plays.

This volume explores issues of performance and audience-engagement across a wide range of theatrical texts and genres. It opens with a question of sensibilities. An analysis of the French blindman farces examines their now deeply unsettling scenarios of slapstick violence against the vulnerable. Rather than simple callousness, did their staging rely on diverting the audience's attention from the action performed to the skills of the performer?
Two essays arise from performances as research. One production, of the Dutch Rhetoricians' play Man's Desire and Fleeting Beauty, drew on its audiencesto evaluate how far prologues, epilogues, and theatrical frames might affect responses to the "message" of a play. Another explored how the implicit performativity of a fifteenth-century narrative poem, The Life of Job, might be realised through the astonishing skills of acrobats. A review of a third production, of the Tudor interlude of Godly Queen Hester, further attests to the current vitality of research through performance.
Three new play translations, from Europe and beyond, introduce English speakers to richly varied, and highly actable, performance practices. Two are of 1530s Rhetoricians' plays from Bruges which directly address the economic woes of their home city. The first, censored by the authorities, was replaced by the superficially less critical second; but both address the plight of workers in a recession, in disarmingly comic detail with disconcertingly present-day resonances. The third introduces readers to how the Iranian Taʿziyeh drama movingly stages the struggle between Satan and the prophet Ayoub (Job), presenting an unfamiliarly sympathetic view of the sufferings of Job's Wife.

Chapter 5 is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons licence CC BY NC-ND. Arts and Humanities Research Council grant AH/Y005112/1. The raw questionnaire data is available at https://osf.io/bk38c/.

Author

Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter and Elisabeth Dutton

PublisherD.S. Brewer

Print publication date Jun, 2026

Print ISBN 9781843848011

EISBN 9781843848158

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Copyright

Medieval English Theatre 47

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