Abstract
The stage diagram found on the reverse of folio 91 of MS V.a.354, the manuscript that features The Castle of Perseverance (Figure 1.1), has an instruction, written above an image of a central crenelated tower, that no person should sit there, “for lettynge of syt, for ther schal be the best of all.”1 While revealing something of how medieval audiences may have vied for the best position at the risk of impinging on the action, this note complements instructions on the placing of scaffolds on the cardinal points, the color of the costumes for the Four Daughters of God, the use of fireworks, the construction of a ditch (or the alternative “barring” of it), and the positioning of “Coveytyse copbord.” There is a clear concern for the look of the playing area; it is essential to make the play work. Yet, the diagram’s preoccupation with “lettynge of syt” also gives us a glimpse into this play’s wider concern with vision as a process that can be interrupted, hindering an ideal outcome. Newhauser has written that “to ask epistemological questions in (and of) the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is to query the senses.”2 He also notes that:
On the one hand, in a (broadly speaking) Platonic tradition, the realm of ideas could be reached only by clearly circumscribing and surpassing the sensual. On the other hand, in the Aristotelian tradition sensation was directly connected to conceptualization, for the very basis of thought was sensory perception, as Aristotle states explicitly in a number of works.
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Notes
David N. Klausner, ed., The Castle of Perseverance (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010). All references to this edition.
Richard G. Newhauser, “Foreword: The Senses in Medieval and Renaissance Intellectual History,” in The Senses and Society Special Issue: Pleasure and Danger in Perception: The Five Senses in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Corine Schleif and Richard G. Newhauser (volume 5, issue 1, March 2010), 6.
Michael Camille, “Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late Medieval Practices of Seeing,” in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 209.
See also Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Richard Marks, Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2004), 17.
Peter De Bolla, “The Visibility of Visuality,” in Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, ed. Theresa Brennan and Martin Jay (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 65.
Theodore K. Leraud, Memory, Images and the English Corpus Christi Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
For example, Clifford Davidson, Visualizing the Moral Life: Medieval Iconography and the Macro Morality Plays (New York and London: AMS Press, 1989);
Merle Fifield, “The Assault on the ‘Castle of Perseverance’; the Tradition and the Figure,” Ball State University Forum, 16.4 (1975), 16–26;
Joan Steffeck and Clifford Davidson, “A Late Pictorial Analogue to a Scene in the Castle of Perseverance,” Early Drama and Music Review, 12 (1990), 31–33;
Alan J. Fletcher, “‘Coveytyse copbord schal be at ƿe ende of the castel be ƿe beddys feet’: Staging the Death of Mankind in The Castle of Perseverance,’” English Studies, 68 (1987), 305–312.
Stanley Fish, Is there a Text in this Class? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).
Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theatre of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
P. Lasko and N. J. Morgan, Medieval Art in East Anglia 1300–1520 (Norwich: Jarrold and Sons, 1973). They write that East Anglia was “one of the great centres of artistic creation in late medieval England,” 6.
Frederick James Furnivall and Alfred W. Pollard, eds., The Macro Plays. 1: Mankind, Wisdom, The Castle of Perseverance (London: Keegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1904), xxxi–xxxii;
Mark Eccles, ed., The Macro Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), also discusses the MS in his introduction.
Jacob Bennett, “The Castle of Perseverance: Redactions, Place, and Date,” Medieval Studies, xxiv (1962), 151, 152. See also his unpublished thesis, “A Linguistic Study of The Castle of Perseverance,” (Boston University, 1960).
Discussions can be found in Charles M. Gayley, Plays of Our Forefathers and Some of the Traditions upon which the Plays Were Founded (London and New York: Duffield, 1908), 281, 293; W. K., Smart, “The Castle of Perseverance: Place, Date and a Source,” Manly Anniversary Studies in Language and Literature (1923), 42–53. Beadle agrees with Furnival’s suggestion that the play must have been copied before 1450, citing orthographical features such as the fact that “their” is always “her(e),” them is “hem,” and give is “3ive”; see Richard Beadle, “The Medieval Theatre of East Anglia: Studies in Dialect, Documentary Records and Stagecraft,” 2 volumes (DPhil thesis, University of York, 1977), 82. One does wonder whether in the context of the play the reference to “crack- ows” is a joke on Humanum Genus, in that he wears what he thinks are fashionable shoes but his pride prevents him from seeing the truth. The likely copying of the play in around 1440 may help support this conjecture or suggest how that line may have been read later in the play’s life.
John C. Coldewey, “The Non-Cycle Plays and the East Anglian Tradition,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, Cambridge Companions to Literature, 2nd edn, ed. Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 211–234;
Alexandra Johnston, “Parish Playmaking before the Reformation,” Harlaxton Medieval Studies, 14 (2006), 322–338.
See also John C. Coldwey, “The Last Rise and Final Demise of Essex Town Drama,” Modern Language Quarterly, 56 (1975), 239–260;
John C. Coldewey, “Playing Companies at Aldeburgh 1566–1635,” Malone Society Collections 9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977 [for 1971]).
Robert R. Wright, “Community Theatre in Late Medieval East Anglia,” Theatre Notebook, 28 (1974), 24–39.
David Mackenzie Parry, “The Castle of Perseverance: A Critical Edition” (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 1982), 27.
Barbara D. Palmer, “Early Modern Mobility: Players, Payments and Patrons,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 56.3 (2005), 259–305.
John C. Coldewey, “That Enterprising Property Player: Semi- Professional Drama in Sixteenth-Century England,” Theatre Notebook (1977), 5–12. A Study of the Castle of Perseverance, Mankind and Wisdom (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979); Michael R. Kelley, “Fifteenth- Century Flamboyant Style and the Castle of Perseverance,” Comparative Drama, 6 (1972), 14–27. , 60–64.
M. G. Wilkinson, “On Site and Insight: A Reading of The Castle of Perseverance and Its Staging Diagram in Situ” (unpublished MA, University of Saskatchewan, 2007); a full discussion of Latin lines is found in Parry, “The Castle of Perseverance,” 40–61. See also Mark Eccles’s introduction to The Macro Plays; W. K. Smart, “Place, Date and a Source”; Jacob Bennett, “Redactions, Place, and Date”; and the introduction to the fac simile, The Macro Plays: The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom, Or Mind, Will and Understanding, Mankind, ed. David M. Bevington (Washington and New York: Folger Shakespeare Library; Johnson Repr. Corp, 1972).
Natalie Crohn Schmitt, “Review of Castle of Perseverance,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 22 (1979), 144. Quoted in appendix of David Parry, “The Castle,” 348.
Peter Meredith, “Review of Performances of The Castle of Perseverance, May 23–27, 1978, at St Bartholemew the Great, Smithfield, London; and June 3–24, 1978, on tour,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 21 (1978), 101.
The Chester Mystery Cycle (volume 1), ed. Robert M. Lumiansky and David Mills (London: Early English Text Society, 1974). All references to this edition.
Peter Brook, The Empty Space (London: MacGibbon and Kee Ltd., 1968), 9.
Jacques Ranciere, “The Emancipated Spectator,” Artforum International, 45.7 (2007), 271–280, 277.
Quoted in Helen Freshwater, Theatre and Audience (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 17.
For a discussion of this issue, see Katie Normington, Medieval English Drama: Performance and Spectatorship (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 1.
Dallas G. Denery II, Seeing and Being Seen in the Later Medieval World, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: Fourth Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 7.
McGavin, “Medieval Theatricality,” 196. On “management” see John J. McGavin, “Performing Communities: Civic Religious Drama,” in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English, ed. Elaine Treharne and Greg Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 209.
Katherine H. Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham: Optics, Epistemology and the Foundations of Semantics 1250–1345 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988), introduction, xvi.
St John of Damascus: Three Treatises on the Divine Images, trans. A. Louth (New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 96.
Saint Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram, trans. John H. Taylor (dissertation, St Louis University, 1948), Book XII, xi, 22,
cited by Anne Marie Mahler, “Medieval Image Style and Saint Augustine’s Theory of Threefold Vision,” Mediaevalia, 4 (1978), 283.
“Let each and every person enter the house of his conscience and consider Christ’s wounds with the eyes of the mind, so that in his own small measure he might conform himself to the suffering Christ.” Peter of Limoges, A Moral Treatise on the Eye, trans. and ed. Richard Newhauser (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2012), 61. All further references to this edition (cited with page numbers).
C. Babbington, ed., The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy by Reginald Pecock, 2 volumes (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1860), 167.
P. H. Barnum, ed., Dives and Pauper (London: Early English Text Society, 1976), 82.
Roland J. Teske (S.J), ed. and trans, Saint Augustine, On Genesis: Two Books on Genesis Against the Manichees; And, on the Literal Interpretation of Genesis, an Unfinished Book (The Fathers of the Church 84) (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1991), 159.
Robert Grosseteste, On Light, trans. Claire C. Riedl, Medieval Philosophical Texts in Translation (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1942, repr. 2011), 10.
Cited by James McEvoy, Robert Grosseteste (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 94.
Suzanne C. Akbari, Seeing through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 28.
Nicholas Temple, “The Bishop’s Eye: Robert Grosseteste and the Architecture of Light,” Architectural Theory Review, 9 (2004), 1–18;
Robert A. Scott, The Gothic Enterprise: A Guide to Understanding the Medieval Cathedral (Berkley: University of California Press, 2011): “The medieval builders’ ideal is exemplified by the interior of Chartres or Canterbury Cathedral, where the glass is coloured in deep primary tones. As a result, even though the interiors are filled with light, the spaces acquire deep and rich colour tones. The attempt to combine these two things—increased light and deep colour—impelled the builders to reach for greater and greater heights. The aim was to transform the interior spaces into a semblance of the Heavenly Jerusalem” (110).
The Digby Mysteries: Killing of the Children; Conversion of Saint Paul; Mary Magdalene; Christ’s Burial and Resurrection, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (London: For the New Shakespeare Society by N. Trubner, 1882, repr. by Kessinger Publishing Legacy Reprints), 48. All play references to this edition.
Theresa Brennan, “The Contexts of Vision from a Specific Standpoint,” in Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, ed. Theresa Brennan and Martin Jay (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 219.
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I, Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co, 1991), 215.
Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 5.
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 96.
See also Peter Travis, Dramatic Design in the Chester Cycle (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 14–19.
David Aers, “The Sacrament of the Altar in Piers Plowman and the Late Medieval Church in England,” in Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image, ed. Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 63–80, 65.
David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler, Chicago History of Science and Medicine (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 2.
Jay Martin, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth- Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 9.
Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997);
Pamela King, “Seeing and Hearing, Looking and Listening,” Early Theatre, 3 (2000), 155–166.
Accounts of this performance in Rose Lee Goldberg, “Here and Now,” in The Artist’s Body, ed. Tracey Warr (London: Phaidon, 2000);
Peggy Phelan, “On Seeing the Invisible: Marina Abramović’s ‘The House with the Ocean View,’” in Live: Art in Performance, ed. Adrian Heathfield (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), 17–27.
Alice Rayner, “The Audience: Subjectivity, Community and the Ethics of Listening,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 7.2 (1993), 3–24, 4.
Quoted in Freshwater, Theatre and Audience (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 6.
Robert S. Sturges, Medieval Interpretation: Models of Reading in Literary Narrative, 1100–1500 (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 6.
Sharon Aronson-Lehavi, Street Scenes: hate Medieval Acting and Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Judith Ferster, Chaucer on Interpretation (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
A Middle English Treatise on the Playing of Miracles, ed. Clifford Davidson (Washington: University Press of America, 1982), 40, lines 236–243.
Marvin Carlson, “Theatre Audiences and the Reading of Performance,” in Interpreting the Theatrical Past, ed. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce McConachie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), 85–86. Quoted in Freshwater, Theatre and Audience, 15.
Victor I. Scherb, Staging Faith: East Anglian Drama in the Later Middle Ages (Cranbury: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001), 54.
Mary J. Carruthers, “Invention, Mnemonics, and Stylistic Ornament in Psychomachia and Pearl,” in The Endless Knot, ed. T. Tavormina and R. F. Yeager (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 202.
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© 2015 Andrea Louise Young
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Young, A.L. (2015). Vision, Visuality, and the Audience. In: Vision and Audience in Medieval Drama. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137446077_1
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