A Cultural History of Theatre in the Middle Ages by Enders Jody;

Author:Enders, Jody; [Enders, Jody]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2019-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

* * *

Communities of Production

BRUCE R. BURNINGHAM

In addressing the topic of ‘communities of production’, my project in this chapter is essentially to ask the question, ‘Who produced theatre during the European Middle Ages?’. I answer this question by insisting that, between 500 and 1500 CE, everyone produced theatre and that, in one way or another, everyone participated in one or more communities of production that overlapped and intersected. I recognize that such a bold declaration might seem extreme, but it is no less sweeping in scope than would be an attempt in these few pages to account in any comprehensive way for the myriad communities of production that spanned ten centuries and a multicultural geography extending from Iceland to Turkey, from Russia to Portugal, and all points in between. Thus, while I indeed argue here that everyone produced some kind of theatre, I make no attempt to offer an exhaustive treatment of this rich temporal and spatial terrain. Instead, I trace the basic outlines of several interrelated communities while providing sufficient detail to lead interested readers on to more thorough sources.

Before an examination of these interrelated communities of production, a brief review of the standard narrative of theatre history is in order because much of what follows will challenge many of the assumptions created by the standard historiography. Traditionally, our definitions of theatre have been tied to notions of ‘dialogue’ between discrete actors whose function is to represent individual literary characters. Such notions, which have been recycled endlessly in a wide variety of discussions on the ‘birth’ or ‘rebirth’ of this or that theatrical tradition, have their source in the supposed origins of Western theatre in the mid-sixth century BCE when, according to legend, an ancient Greek dithyrambic choral leader named Thespis separated himself from the rest of his chorus in order to engage its members in a dialogic exchange that was new to such ritual performances. With Thespis’ introduction of dialogue into the dithyramb, the ritual supposedly became ‘theatre’ and, from there, it was only a short series of steps to the works of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides. Thus established, ancient Greek and (later) Roman theatrical forms endured until the fall of the Roman Empire in the mid-fifth century CE, after which European theatre is said to have ceased to exist for some four hundred years until it was again ‘reborn’ with the addition of dialogue to a previously monologic ritual performance. In place of Thespis, traditional theatre history credits the ‘rebirth’ of theatre to the medieval Catholic monks whose antiphonal songs became increasing more ‘dialogic’ as the centuries progressed until they culminated around 925 CE in the Quem quaeritis trope. Subsequently, as with the earlier development of theatre in ancient Greece, the evolution from the Quem quaeritis to the complex plays of William Shakespeare, Ana Caro and Molière is seen as a next logical progression.1

There are at least three problems with this traditional approach to theatre history. First, such traditional narratives fail to account for why so

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.