List of Illustrations

Meg Twycross; Sarah Carpenter; Elisabeth Dutton

ILLUSTRATIONS

Elisabeth Dutton and Cathy Hume: ‘Staging The Life of Job’

Fig. 1: San Marino CA: Huntington Library MS HM 140, fol. 93v. 122

Fig. 2: The Winterbourne Barn audience seating. Photo credit Camilla Adams. 125

Fig. 3: The Lecture Theatre where the METh workshop performance took place. Photo credit Camilla Adams. 126

Fig. 4: The Winterbourne Barn playing space, showing Job’s feasting table and the collapsed house. Photo credit Camilla Adams. 127

Fig. 5: Le Port playing space. Photo credit WOMARD. 127

Fig. 6: Winterbourne Barn: the Angel on the unicycle with, behind, the ‘God’ ladder with LED halo. Photo credit Camilla Adams. 131

Fig. 7: The stepladder house. Photo credit Camilla Adams. 132

Fig. 8: Le Port playing space with Satan moving ‘Lyke a furiouse Tyger and wode serpent’. Photo credit WOMARD. 133

Fig. 9: Winterbourne Barn: the confrontation between Satan and God. Photo credit: Camilla Adams. 140

E. Lucy Deacon: ‘The Taʿziyeh Episode of The Noble Prophet Ayoub’

Fig. 1: Ayyûb (Job) talks with the angel Jibrâ’îl, who comes to minister to his afflictions. The New York Public Library, Spencer Collection Persian MS. 1, Qisas al-Anbiyâ, fol. 119r detail. 148

Full credit details are provided in the captions to the images in the text. The editors, contributors, and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and persons for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

Details

Medieval English Theatre 47

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

Open Access license

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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List of Illustrations

Medieval English Theatre 47

Chapter illustrations ()