Unlike other fifteenth-century writers of short poems, Lydgate appears not to have kept a portfolio of his shorter verses, including those for performance, or to have supervised its circulation in authorized collections.1 In fact, the survival of Lydgate’s dramatic texts is due almost entirely to John Shirley, who included them in three anthologies he compiled between the late 1420s and the late 1440s. Whether or not Lydgate played any role in Shirley’s compilations, and there is no evidence that he did, in copying Lydgate’s performance pieces, Shirley provided crucial information about the circumstances of their original performance as well as their afterlife. The decisions Shirley made about what to copy and how to present it on the manuscript page say a good deal about what happened when a visual and aural form such as drama entered the written record. His copies also include information that helps piece together the circumstances of their original performance and written afterlife. Shirley’s copies also help answer questions about the nature of the textual evidence for drama before print. What do manuscripts tell us about early performances? Should the canon of early theater be expanded to include texts that do not look like plays but may have been performed? How does the archive of written scripts and references to performances relate to the plays people in medieval England put on and watched? How do we know what was a play and what was not?
The place to which scholars have usually turned in trying to answer these questions has not been Shirley’s compilations but rather the Toronto-based Records of Early English Drama (REED) project, whose goal since its inception in the 1970s has been to identify and publish all extant external references to early drama in Britain.2 It is no exaggeration to say that REED’s findings have radically revised scholarly assumptions about medieval drama. REED has shown, for instance, that the so-called Corpus Christi cycles were in most cases loosely put-together, episodic biblical dramas that could be performed on Corpus Christi but also at Whitsun; that folk dramas, such as Robin Hood plays, were the most frequent kinds of performances; that folk and other secular plays often took place on holy days and in religious settings; that the distinction between “medieval” and “renaissance” drama is hard to maintain (with a roughly 200-year performance span, the biblical plays of Coventry, Chester, and York lasted until 1575 or longer, while the manuscripts in which the biblical plays survive are chiefly Tudor documents, and “medieval” morality plays flourished alongside sixteenth-century school plays); and that the commercial theater, in the form of companies of traveling players, existed well before the age of Shakespeare.3 REED has also shown that surviving play-texts do not accurately reflect the kinds and amounts of early drama: the large-scale biblical cycle plays such as York’s, for instance, which have long been taken as the quintessential form of medieval drama, in actuality represent only a small fraction of extant performance records (David Bevington estimates it at 16 percent), and morality plays were even rarer.4
In the midst of all these surprises, perhaps the most unexpected finding is what REED has not discovered: new texts of plays. After years of diligent archival work, the corpus of Middle English drama still consists of the same long-known handful of texts from northern and southeastern England, as well as Cornwall. That handful includes four extant collections of biblical-history plays from the north: the York Register, which contains forty-seven pageants (1460s to 1470s through the mid-sixteenth century), the Towneley manuscript (mid-sixteenth century), two pageants from Coventry (both of them revisions by Robert Croo dated 1534), and five manuscripts of the Chester cycle (1591–1607).5 The plays from the southeast, while more diverse than those from the north, are for the most part contained in three manuscripts. They are the Digby plays (Mary Magdalene, dating to the end of the fifteenth century; The Killing of the Children, ca. 1512, a farcical Slaughter of the Innocents; The Conversion of Saint Paul, 1500–1525; and a fragment of Wisdom, ca. 1470–75, all in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 133, owned in the mid-sixteenth century by Myles Blomefeld, a collector of books), the Macro plays (Castle of Perseverance, 1400–1425; Mankind, 1474–79; a complete version of Wisdom, all in Washington, D.C., Folger Shakespeare Library MS V.a.354, which was owned at some point by a monk named Hyngham of Bury St. Edmunds), and the N-Town plays (a compilation of plays originally of separate and earlier origin brought together by a scribe-compiler in or after the last decade of the fifteenth century, contained in London, British Library MS Cotton Vespasian D.8; the N-Town plays are also sometimes, confusingly, referred to as the Ludus Coventriae because of a flyleaf note giving them that name and are also sometimes called “the Hegge manuscript” based on the name of a family that once owned the manuscript).6 Along with a few other fragments and single-pageant manuscripts, these constitute for the most part the same body of medieval plays in English identified by nineteenth-century scholars and antiquarians.
What these manuscripts suggest is that in most cases, the scripts of Middle English plays survived only under unusual circumstances, often involving antiquarian or recusant interests, and that they were recorded in the form in which they were preserved for posterity after—sometimes long after—they had been performed. Before the end of the fourteenth century, as Alexandra Johnston has noted, and indeed for much of the fifteenth century as well, nearly all of the evidence for the existence of theater in England is incidental, and that evidence for the most part does not include scripts of plays.7
One reason for the lack of surviving scripts is that many early plays probably originally existed in forms that were bad candidates for preservation, such as part sheets, roles, or performance copies not often of a status deemed worth preserving.8 Dramatic texts may have been treated as ephemera, to be disposed of once the performance was over, no matter how elaborate or expensive that performance had been. That might explain why we find incidental mention of performances in account books, chronicles, and other public and private records but infrequent copying of the spoken lines. Another reason for the lack of surviving play-texts might be that mimetic dramas featuring spoken lines may have been relatively rare; miming, dumbshows, tableaux vivants, and other types of visual spectacle, perhaps accompanied by music, may have been the predominant forms of performance for most of the medieval period, rather than what we would now identify as plays structured around dialogue.
It is also possible, however, that more plays have survived than we suspect and that they lie hidden within manuscripts that conceal their distinctively performative features. At least since the time of Karl Young, who in his monumental Drama of the Medieval Church considered as dramas only those texts that contained rubrics explicitly describing costume and action, scholars have relied on overt signs of staging to identify early plays.9 But agreeing on what constitutes signs of a performance has proven hard. Lawrence Clopper, for instance, has raised questions about references to saints’ ludi that are often taken to signal plays but that in his view point to games, processions, or other nondramatic activities associated with the saint’s day rather than plays proper.10 If terminology and genre definitions are a problem for the identification of medieval dramas, as Clopper suggests, so too are scribal techniques that do not always differentiate speaking parts or include stage directions, much less descriptions of costumes or stage properties, with the result that plays do not always look distinctively like plays. The upshot, as Ian Lancashire has said, is that at times “what is and what is not dramatic is not obvious.”11
The case of Lydgate is instructive in thinking about what is and is not a play. When Shirley made his copies of Lydgate’s mummings and entertainments, he often included rubrics describing them as specific kinds of performances and mentioning the occasions and audiences for which they were designed. This information is crucial, since while internal evidence sometimes allows us to guess at some sort of performance context, without Shirley’s rubrics, few of these texts would today be identified as performances of any kind. Take away Shirley, and we would have little reason for thinking that Lydgate had ever turned his hand to writing verses for theatrical events.12 Shirley’s copies of Lydgate’s short performance pieces serve, then, as crucial documents of performance that provide us with our best sense of how, why, where, and for whom Lydgate wrote his verses for ceremonies and entertainments. They also serve as good support for David Scott Kastan’s assertion that “the material form and location in which we encounter the written word are active contributors to the meaning of what is read.”13
Despite identifying them in his headnotes as having been performed at specific times and places and before specific audiences, Shirley does not generally preserve markers of performance in his copies of Lydgate’s mummings and other dramatic works. That his copies do not appear to present dramas reflects Carol Symes’s observation that in most cases, “the formats of plays were as flexible as those of other texts, which were routinely tailored to conform to the overall presentation of the parent codex.” Shirley’s anthologies show such tailoring, a tailoring that was shaped by his aims in compiling them. The layout, rubrication, and extra-textual material in Shirley’s copies of Lydgate’s play-texts also support Symes’s broader claim that such features “indicate that the generic definition of a play as such was in flux for most of the Middle Ages.”14 Shirley’s copies reveal how the fluid relations that drama had with other cultural forms—such as liturgy, literature, and games—were transferred to the physical appearance of performance pieces when they were copied into manuscripts. His copies also demonstrate how the aims of individual scribes and the intended uses of specific codices could influence the look of dramatic works copied into them.
The manuscript matrix of Lydgate’s performance pieces, with their mise-en-page at Shirley’s hand, offers another instance where manuscript contexts have been inadequately examined or misunderstood. As Jessica Brantley has shown in her perceptive analysis of the meditative dramas in British Library MS Additional 37049, careful scrutiny of page layouts and the interplay of various features of the text and illustrations can help us envision how various forms of religious and secular writing were used by their readers.15 Similarly, recent studies of the English dramatic manuscripts copied by Tudor and Stuart antiquarians and recusants, including the Towneley family and the scholars who made the five copies of the Chester plays, have drawn attention to peculiarities in those manuscripts and have reshaped knowledge about the processes of revision and transmission that gave us the surviving texts of medieval biblical plays in England.16 Painstaking examination by Peter Happé, Barbara Palmer, and Malcolm Parkes of the “idiosyncratic assemblage of material from a variety of sources” that constitutes the Towneley manuscript has shown, for example, that the manuscript is not the scripts from a medieval cycle play from Wakefield but a Tudor dramatic anthology from Lancashire and Yorkshire. Similarly, the textual analyses of R. M. Lumiansky, David Mills, and Lawrence Clopper have revealed the strong desire to preserve and recuperate the city’s past that animates the Chester plays.17 As this and other work on manuscript formats and contexts has demonstrated, how we identify medieval texts and how we reckon with how they were received often hinge on how well we interpret the evidence left on the manuscript page.
Shirley’s importance as a preserver and disseminator of English literary texts is well established. A number of Middle English poems are known only from his manuscripts, and attributions and contexts are available for other texts only on the basis of information contained in his headings and marginal glosses. Shirley is especially crucial for establishing the Lydgate canon and is the sole authority for a number of Lydgate’s minor poems, including nearly all of his dramatic texts (among the few that do not survive in Shirlean manuscripts are the 1432 entry of Henry VI into London, the subtleties for Henry’s 1429 coronation banquet, and the Pageant of Knowledge).18
Although there is agreement about Shirley’s crucial role as a disseminator of texts, the precise nature of his scribal activities has been a matter of debate; some scholars view him as a commercial publisher with a London scriptorium, while others see him as an antiquarian who copied books chiefly for his own pleasure.19 Margaret Connolly has convincingly argued, however, that Shirley was neither a commercial publisher nor an antiquarian book lover but instead a compiler working within a context formed by the “culture of service” that shaped his long career in the household of Richard Beauchamp, the earl of Warwick.20 It was from inside this culture of service that Shirley compiled his anthologies, with the assumption that they would be read by “bothe the gret and the commune” of Beauchamp’s household, as Shirley states in the preface to the first of the anthologies.
Shirley’s goal of producing compilations that would appeal to members of Beauchamp’s household is evident in his choice of texts for inclusion in them. It is apparent from their contents that, far from being an antiquarian collector of authors from the past, Shirley was interested in copying the writings of contemporaries and especially the work of Lydgate. All three of Shirley’s anthologies contain a substantial number of poems by Lydgate, along with other items of verse and prose in French, English, and Latin. The earliest (London, British Library MS Additional 16165, compiled in the late 1420s) contains fourteen poems by Lydgate, none of them apparently designed for performance, as well as some forty-five texts that encompass works by John Trevisa; Chaucer; Edward of Norwich, duke of York; and Beauchamp. Shirley’s second anthology (Cambridge, Trinity College Library MS R.3.20) was compiled in the early 1430s and contains twenty-six pieces by Lydgate out of some seventy-five texts, among them six of Lydgate’s mummings along with the Procession of Corpus Christi, the Legend of St. George, and Bycorne and Chychevache. The actual proportion of work by Lydgate included in this anthology is even larger than these numbers suggest, since twenty-seven of the non-Lydgatean pieces are short, anonymous poems in French; the other named authors in the anthology include Chaucer; William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk; Thomas Hoccleve; and Thomas Brampton. Shirley’s last anthology (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 59), compiled in the late 1440s, contains thirty-five pieces by Lydgate, including the Mumming at Bishopswood, out of around eighty texts, among them works by John Gower, Henry Scogan, and Chaucer.21
The contents of these three anthologies hint at Shirley’s motives in compiling them and at his reasons for including poems by Lydgate. With the exception of the Temple of Glas (which appears in BL MS Add. 16165), all of the works by Lydgate in the three anthologies are short—deliberately so, it seems, as suggested by the fact that Shirley copies, for example, extracts from the Fall of Princes but not the entire poem. Additionally, almost all of the Lydgate poems appear only once and are not recopied in Shirley’s other anthologies. Combined with this lack of duplication, the emphasis on short pieces suggests that Shirley’s aim was to collect and preserve Lydgate’s shorter works, including those like the mummings that were occasional in nature and might otherwise have disappeared; having once done so, Shirley apparently had no reason to recopy the same poems again elsewhere. While there is some evidence that Shirley loaned out his anthologies, thus implicitly making Lydgate’s works available for others to copy should they wish, there is no hint that Shirley himself was engaged in making multiple copies of Lydgate’s poetry for commercial gain or circulation among readers. The choice of texts, while apparently designed to gather and save Lydgate’s short, ephemeral texts from oblivion, seems also to have been motivated by the tastes of Shirley’s intended audience—particularly so in the case of Trinity MS R.3.20—that is, readers within the Beauchamp household who formed the milieu for Shirley’s efforts when, in the 1420s, he first turned his hand to copying literary texts.22
Why did Shirley copy so many poems by Lydgate? Connections and acquaintance presumably played a part. There is no direct evidence that Shirley knew Lydgate, but because both men moved in the same aristocratic and civic circles, it is likely that they were acquainted. Shirley (ca. 1366–1456) was roughly the same age as Lydgate (ca. 1370–1450) and, like Lydgate, had close ties to the Lancastrian affinity, through his attachment to the household of Beauchamp, who was appointed tutor to Henry VI in 1428. Beauchamp was Shirley’s employer and one of Lydgate’s patrons: records show that Shirley was in Beauchamp’s retinue in France and England from 1403 until the late 1420s, and London, British Library MS Harley 7333, folio 31, points to Lydgate’s connection to the earl.23 Some degree of acquaintance between the two can be inferred from John Stow’s copy of what was presumably Shirley’s preface (now missing) to his second anthology, which suggests that Shirley had an interest in promoting Lydgate. The preface praises the poet and includes a plea that he be rewarded financially for his poetic efforts.24 It also locates Lydgate within an imagined aristocratic/gentle social milieu, calling him a purveyor of “morall mater and holynesse / of salmes and of ympnes expresse / of loue and lawe and of pleyinges / of lordes of ladies of qwenes of kynges,” precisely the kind of instructive yet pleasing courtly poetry that could be expected to suit the tastes of readers associated with the Beauchamp household.
It is unlikely that Shirley was to Lydgate what Adam Pinkhurst was to Chaucer, a scribe who turned Lydgate’s “foul papers” or wax drafting tablets into fair copies of his work, but the example of other poets indicates that such collaboration, had it happened, would not have been unusual. Signs of supervisory direction in some copies of the Confessio Amantis, for example, imply that Gower may have supervised his own scriptorium in Southwark at the Priory of St. Mary Overy, where he lived at the end of his life. While Hoccleve wrote out copies of his works in his own hand (because he was too poor for a scribe or perhaps did not trust one), John Capgrave both wrote some copies in his own hand and supervised others at the scriptorium of his friary in Lynn.25 Some scribes apparently specialized in the texts of one author, such as Pinkhurst, who worked for Chaucer; the Beryn scribe, who made five copies of the Brut as well as copies of Chaucer and Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady; and the scribe working in the region near Bury St. Edmunds, who specialized in copying Lydgate.26 The tendency of scribes to specialize in one author may imply that authorial employment or supervision was an accepted practice.
Whether he worked closely with Lydgate or not, Shirley evidently copied the performance pieces out of a desire to preserve Lydgate’s short texts and to please a coterie audience of readers, some of whom might have seen Lydgate’s entertainments when they were first performed. Although Shirley took pains to note the original performance context, he apparently had little interest in conveying details about the performance itself. With only a few exceptions, Shirley gives no indication of the costumes, special effects, gestures, actions, vocalizations, or musical accompaniments that would have featured in the staging of these performances. The result is that in Shirley’s hands, Lydgate’s dramatic pieces do not look much like plays.
Perhaps Shirley omits details of the productions because he did not witness or have access to full information about them, although given Beauchamp’s close ties to the court, Shirley might well have been present for at least some of the entertainments, especially the royal mummings.27 Or perhaps the omission reflects the fact that, as Gordon Kipling has argued, Lydgate’s role was often that of a “deviser” who was responsible merely for the written text or “device” (i.e., the design instructions) for the performance, which is what we find recorded in Shirley’s manuscripts.28 Or perhaps Lydgate was, as Clopper has argued, “a presenter not a playwright,” whose art “is presentational rather than representational” with characters who seldom speak in their own voices, little interaction between characters, and a predisposition toward “reading” rather than performing; in other words, the mummings and other entertainments may be literature, not theater.29 Or perhaps the lack of detail about the original performances derives from the difficulties of recording aural and gestural material within the medium of writing.30 Or, finally, perhaps the nondramatic appearance of so many copies of Lydgate’s performance pieces may result from Shirley’s intent to create codices for readers, an intent that led him to erase signs of live performance.
Many of these uncertainties about authorial agency, dramatic terminology, modes of presentation, and scribal habits that are aspects of the preservation of Lydgate’s performance pieces in Shirley’s manuscripts are shared by other medieval and early modern dramatic works and have been addressed by scholars alert to the difficulties involved in studying an ephemeral and embodied art form. Work on the aural, the gestural, and other sensual or phenomenological features of early performances has attempted to reintroduce what audiences would have heard, seen, felt, smelled, or even touched in the course of watching a performance.31 The findings of this scholarly work have usefully reminded us of what the manuscript page does not do a good job of capturing: the experience of being in the audience at a performance. While I draw on this work in subsequent chapters, I also agree with Sheila Lindenbaum that despite the widespread assumption in medieval drama studies that “plays become fully accessible only in the moment of performance,” the “privileging of performance over text” does not have to be “the inevitable corollary of drama study.” It would be unreasonably blinkered to ignore performance, but especially in this chapter, I share Lindenbaum’s perspective that “a play belongs first and foremost to its material manuscript and manuscript context.”32
The ease with which Shirley could reshape live performances as poems to be read underscores Symes’s point about the flexibility of texts in this period, a flexibility that is evident in the terms Shirley uses in his headnotes to describe the nature of Lydgate’s role. The phrase Shirley most often uses in headnotes to the mummings and other entertainments to describe Lydgate’s creative activities is “made by,” although he also twice uses “devysed” (Disguising at Hertford and Bycorne and Chychevache) and once “ymagyned by . . . and made” (Legend of St. George). Other fifteenth-century documents use variations on make to refer to orchestrators or organizers of mummings, but Shirley’s headnotes do not make clear whether he is similarly referring to Lydgate as the mastermind behind the whole performance or more restrictedly designating him as just the author of an accompanying text.33 The word devise had a range of meanings, of which the most relevant for Shirley’s usage include the acts of designing, constructing, or composing. Used technically, devise referred to the drawing up of the specifications for the visual and verbal subject matter (the “device”) for a painting, pageant, or sculpture. Yet the technical and general senses of “devising” were not mutually exclusive, as suggested by Shirley’s headnote to the Legend of St. George, which describes the verses as the “devyse of a steyned halle . . . ymagined by Daun Johan . . . and made with the balades” at the request of the armorers of London. In the same way, making and devising were not necessarily unrelated activities, as implied by Chaucer’s description in the “Knight’s Tale” of Theseus’s employment of every available craftsman “to maken and deuyse” the tournament.34
While making could be used, as these examples show, to describe the work of mounting a performance, it could also apply to the labor of crafting a written text. “Made by” is the phrase Shirley most often employs to describe Lydgate’s authorial activities in relation not just to his dramatic verses but to his nondramatic poems as well. Just once does Shirley say that Lydgate “wrote” the following verses, although in another instance he combines the acts of writing and making, saying that Lydgate “wrote & made” a poem for Queen Catherine.35 Shirley seems to have thought of making as an act of original composition, since he tends not to use made by when describing verses that Lydgate translated.36
Whether referring to performances or texts composed for reading, when he designated Lydgate a “maker” of verses, it is probable that Shirley was reflecting the notion of courtly makyng that informed understandings of late medieval literary activity. Courtly makyng, as Anne Middleton notes, involved the creation of work that was “conceived as a performance in the current scene of polite amusement and secular ritual.”37 Deliberately re-creative and highly aestheticized, courtly makyng produced texts that served the ideological needs of and socially reproduced the late medieval aristocracy. As Lee Patterson has observed, the courtly “maker” “offered a ritualistic rehearsal, with minute variation, of familiar tropes of socially valuable modes of speaking and feeling” that “played an important role in the project of aristocratic self-legitimization.”38 What is perhaps most important in regard to Shirley and Lydgate is that courtly makyng implied that the texts thereby created were public and meant in some way to be performed. When Shirley used the phrase “made by” to express Lydgate’s authorial role, he was presumably signaling that the accompanying poem, like courtly poetry in general, was designed for public airing, whether in the form of verses offered as a gift (as appears to have been the case for the “Ballade on a New Year’s Gift of an Eagle,” which Shirley says was “gyven vn to” Henry VI and his mother Queen Catherine and was perhaps read aloud on that occasion), a pictorial display (such as the “Ballade on the Image of Our Lady,” which contains internal clues suggesting it accompanied a painting), or a mumming or disguising.39
In any case, Lydgate’s makyng of verses for performance was complicated by its location within the collaborative process, common then and now, of putting on a play. Although terms such as play-maker or playwright or even poet may obscure the degree to which a performance text was stitched together and into the creative activities involved in mounting a show, the fact of collaboration was widely recognized. As Tiffany Stern has shown, authors of early modern English plays were often called play-patchers, a term that acknowledged the shared and often piecemeal work of the theater.40 Although that phrase was not current in fifteenth-century England, what it describes was far from nonexistent.
Like the terms Shirley uses to describe Lydgate’s authorial efforts, the labels he applies to Lydgate’s verses designed for entertainments suggest a porosity of representational borders. In various headnotes, Shirley calls them variously ballades, letters, bills, ordinances, and devices. While these terms are performance charged, they also call attention to the way that these verses, in Kipling’s words, “represent themselves self-consciously as texts.” Kipling reads this textual self-consciousness as evidence of Lydgate’s limited role in creating dramatic performances, believing that Lydgate was asked to provide texts that served as “actual documents used in performance.”41 But since the choice of labels is Shirley’s, this textual self-consciousness can also be seen as a part of his efforts to convert Lydgate’s publicly performed works into texts meant to be read privately, especially by members of Beauchamp’s household.
When we turn from Shirley’s headnotes to the texts they introduce, we can see the same genre blurring combined with the act of adapting texts to private reading. Several of the performance pieces contain rubrics or glosses that point to dramatic actions. The Disguising at Hertford, for instance, introduces the reply of the wives to their husbands’ complaint with the line “Takeþe heed of þaunswer of þe wyves.” And marginal glosses in Latin and English in the same text (e.g., “i. demonstrando vj. rusticos,” “demonstrando þe Tynker,” “distaves”) seem to indicate the appearance of the various actors who performed it. The Disguising at London contains similar notations, such as “Nowe komeþe [or “sheweþe”] here,” followed by the name of the character. More frequently, however, the text and marginalia stress reading over performance, while also underscoring Bernard Cerquiglini’s assertion that the medieval vernacular text was always unstable: “open and as good as unfinished,” the handwritten text “invited intervention, annotation, and commentary.”42 In the Mumming for the Mercers, for example, extensive glosses in English and Latin explain the various classical gods mentioned in the text (e.g., “Mars is god of batayle”). The Disguising at London and the Mumming for the Goldsmiths also include explanatory glosses that appear to be in Shirley’s hand, such as a comment describing Julius Caesar as “a bakars seon” (Disguising at London, at l. 67). Presumably, Shirley copied these glosses from his exemplars, although he might have supplied at least some of them himself.43 Whether originating with Shirley or not, the glosses provide information that aids understanding of the written text rather than imaginative re-creation of the performance; they are notes intended to explain references and allusions in Lydgate’s poetry and, as such, enhance the reading experience rather than (in most instances) conjuring up the performances for which the verses were written.
Within each of Shirley’s anthologies, the mise-en-page of Lydgate’s performance pieces is virtually indistinguishable from that of the rest of the manuscript’s contents. In Trinity MS R.3.20, for instance, they resemble the other poems in size, ink, and position on the page, blending into them without any use of features that would set them apart. As in the example on page 40 from that manuscript—which contains the ending of the Mumming at Eltham, with its “Lenvoie,” and, immediately afterward, the start of the Disguising at Hertford—headers appear in bolder script in spaces left for them between the texts (see Figure 1). Running titles were added by Shirley in blacker ink, preceded by what appears to be an n for nota. Shirley began individual texts with three-line black-ink initials that feature his distinctive style of decoration, including lozenges, foliage or geometric patterns, wide otiose strokes, long descenders, and occasional crosshatching.44 Most of the texts in the Trinity manuscript are in single columns, centered on the page. Lydgate’s performance pieces are interspersed among other short poems in French and English and are in no way visually differentiated by format or rubrication, and they include few or no stage directions, speech tags, or other signs of the performance for which they were originally made.45
Figure 1. Example of Shirley’s hand. Mumming at Eltham (last two stanzas) and Disguising at Hertford (headnote and first stanza). Cambridge, Trinity College Library MS R.3.20, p. 40. By permission of the library.
This intermixing can be seen in the second and third quires of the Trinity manuscript, which contain seven short French poems, as well as five poems by Lydgate, among them the mummings at Eltham and Hertford, as well as the brief “Balade de bone counseyle,” which is also thought to be by Lydgate. The fourth quire is made up of poems by Lydgate, including the mumming at London, and three French lyrics. It is not certain where Shirley acquired his exemplars for the French poems in the Trinity manuscript, and Margaret Connolly and Yolanda Plumley suggest that Shirley himself was the conduit through which these poems reached England, either through his travels to France or, indirectly, through Warwick’s household.46 Connolly and Plumley observe that a number of the French lyrics Shirley copies were song-texts, but it is impossible to tell whether Shirley knew them as songs and perhaps transcribed them from aural memory since there is little “which might be construed as evidence of aural transmission.”47 As with Lydgate’s mummings, these lyrics lose their musical markers when Shirley copies them, although their connection with the musical repertoire can be established from their presence in musical manuscripts as well as textual ones, such as Trinity MS R.3.20.48
What, then, do Shirley’s copies of Lydgate’s performance pieces tell us? First, they demonstrate that dramatic texts, when copied into textual manuscripts, do not always signal that they were meant for performance. Without Shirley’s headnotes, there would be little to suggest that Lydgate’s performance pieces were anything other than nondramatic poems. This lack of visible difference between poetic and dramatic texts is by no means unique to Shirley’s manuscripts and, as Symes has argued, the appearance of a text in a manuscript context “may have little to do with whether or not it was performed or regarded as a play.”49 The same is true for songs, which can appear as lyrics in textual manuscripts or with notation in musical ones. Particularly before 1300, formats of plays were fluid and altered to suit the pattern of the whole codex; different versions of pieces suggest they could be changed to suit different textual contexts or the needs of different readers.
Moreover, layout and rubrication indicate that the generic definition of a play was in flux throughout the premodern period. Since plays were recorded through scribal techniques borrowed from other sources—musical, didactic, scholastic, and poetic—many do not look like plays when viewed in their manuscript contexts. Somewhat disconcertingly, especially for attempts to decide on a corpus of medieval drama, texts now regarded as plays are not always accompanied by a dramatic apparatus in their manuscript contexts, while texts not currently viewed as plays are laid out and rubricated in the same way, and those seemingly nondramatic texts are also often juxtaposed with identified plays, thus suggesting that they might have been performed.50 That generic definitions were in flux can be linked to a similarly fluid continuum of performance practices, in which mumming blends into disguising into tableaux or other visual spectacle and beyond. In other words, the fluidity of terms that were used to describe performances corresponds with an analogous mutability of kinds of performances, as the range of ceremonies and entertainments to which Lydgate contributed so clearly shows.
Shirley may have seldom recorded features of performance, such as stage directions or details about costumes, for the same reasons he does not include musical notation for the French songs he copied: lack of knowledge of a standard method of transcription of performance texts as well as a desire to create a manuscript for use by readers, rather than practitioners of the performance arts. Shirley does, however, take pains to situate Lydgate’s dramatic works in their social milieu, telling us for which powerful patron and on what ceremonial occasion they were performed.51 That Shirley noted these details of provenance is understandable given his apparent interest in promoting Lydgate’s writings, since they associate the poet with influential patrons and important ceremonial occasions.
Whether deliberately or not, Shirley’s scribal practices tended to emphasize the literariness of Lydgate’s dramatic works, not their theatricality, and thus represent a move away from the earlier situation identified by Michael Clanchy in which literary works, especially vernacular ones, “were frequently explicitly addressed by the author to an audience, rather than to readers as such.”52 As with the French songs he copied, Shirley adapted them to a specifically literary—that is, a writerly and readerly—aesthetic. In doing so, Shirley followed the pattern that Seth Lerer has argued defined Chaucer’s writings, as Chaucer attempted to stake out a place for his new kind of poetry against the then dominant cultural forms of courtly spectacle and civic religious drama.53 Chaucer’s search for authorial autonomy, in Lerer’s view, takes him away from public theatrics toward a place where spectators become solitary, private readers and performances become fictions. Unlike Chaucer, however, Lydgate did not define himself as a poet in opposition to theater and spectacle and in fact appears to have embraced them, judging by the frequency with which he turned his hand to the crafting of pieces designed for public ceremonies. Lydgate’s career was founded on the production of a courtly and civic poetry that enthusiastically included spectacle and ceremony.
It is certainly possible that Shirley’s omission of markers of drama was inadvertent, the result of a lack of scribal conventions needed to replicate qualities of performance on the manuscript page. It is also possible that he did not know enough about the original performances to reproduce them and was working from exemplars that contained only the written text. But the omission is also consistent with Shirley’s larger purposes in his anthologies, especially in the Trinity manuscript, to preserve Lydgate’s performance pieces for literary culture. Shirley takes what were originally courtly or civic ephemera—entertainments designed for a one-off performance on a specific occasion and not expected to have much afterlife—and converts them into enduring poetry that will be continually accessible through the act of reading. It was presumably a similar impulse that prompted Robert Reynes, a churchwarden from the village of Acle in Norfolk, to copy play extracts into his commonplace book in the late fifteenth century as a way of remembering, as well as making available for repeated reading, performances that would otherwise be fleeting, and the same may be true of some copies of other medieval plays.54 If Shirley is to be credited with preserving knowledge of Lydgate’s involvement in the production of dramas, he is also answerable for obscuring details of the live enactment, including their visual, mimetic, and aural aspects.55 It is in this regard understandable that scholars might view Lydgate’s performance pieces—at least in the form in which they have come down to us—as nondramatic, because that is what Shirley made them.
Even though they were written for a coterie audience within Beauchamp’s household, Shirley’s three surviving miscellanies owe their survival, as Linne Mooney notes, “to their usefulness as exemplars for the book trade in London and their intrinsic interest to bibliophilic antiquarians in London in the century when many paper manuscripts were being discarded for the more ‘modern’ printed copies of the same texts.”56
A noteworthy path of dissemination leads through John Vale, to whom Shirley was linked through family and other connections. Shirley’s second wife, Margaret, was the sister of the wife of Avery Cornburgh, who owned the manor of Gooshayes in Havering, Essex, and was thus a neighbor of Thomas Cook (the younger), whose secretary was John Vale. We know that Shirley knew Cornburgh, since in one of the manuscripts he copied, Shirley wrote, “Iste liber constat Aluredo Corneburgh de Camera Regis.” Cook was a prosperous draper and influential former mayor of London who had literary ties: Robert Fabian, the future chronicler, was Cook’s apprentice at the time of Cook’s arrest for treason in 1468. Cook also had lands at Bury St. Edmunds and, at some point in the 1460s, moved to a large house adjoining the Austin friars, in the parish of St. Peter the Poor.57 Shirley, too, may have had connections with Austin friars after he moved to the close of St. Bartholomew’s Priory; Estelle Stubbes notes that Shirley is associated with a number of manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales and that BL MS Harley 7333, which seems to depend on Shirley-influenced exemplars for some texts, was mainly produced at a house of Augustinian friars in Leicester.58 The Austin friar John Lowe was confessor to the young Henry VI and part of the royal household when Warwick, with Shirley along, was tutor to the king; Lowe was a friend and colleague of Capgrave.
Vale had other connections to Shirley and possibly Lydgate as well. He knew John Baret, the wealthy clothier from Bury and close associate of Lydgate, whose will of 1463 included a reference to payment of a monetary “recompence” to Vale, apparently for a piece of cloth (or possibly plate); Vale’s father Thomas was a dyer who owned property in Bury, where Vale may have been educated.59 Three of the manuscripts written by the copyist known as the Hammond scribe contain a monogram of John de Vale, including the Shirley-derived miscellany, London, British Library MS Harley 2251. The London stationer John Multon, from whom Vale purchased Harley 2251, may be identical with the Hammond scribe, which would give Vale a personal connection with Shirley and an interest in Lydgate. Vale was probably an important intermediary between Shirley’s books and the sixteenth-century antiquarian Stow.60
In the case of many of Lydgate’s performance pieces, the conduit leading from Shirley to Vale and then to Stow was especially important. Six of the mummings exist only in copies made by Shirley and Stow. Bycorne and Chychevache survives in Shirley’s Trinity MS R.3.20, as well as in Trinity MS R.3.19, BL MS Harley 2251 (owned by Vale), and Stow’s London, British Library, MS Additional 29729; the Procession of Corpus Christi and the Sodein Fal survive in Trinity MS R.3.20, BL Harley 2251, and Stow’s copy; and the pattern is repeated for a number of Lydgate’s other entertainments. Unlike the household members Shirley envisioned as the audience for MS R.3.20, Vale and readers were far removed from the original performances that Shirley copied into that manuscript, and their interest in them would have had little to do with recollection of a once watched entertainment.
Not all of Lydgate’s poems for public ceremonies and entertainments were transmitted through Shirley (most notably, those poems associated with civic-royal events such as the coronation and entry of Henry VI into London, which were copied into London chronicles). But those that were survive in forms shaped first by Shirley and later by the London book circles through which they subsequently passed. That history of copying and transmission left marks on Lydgate’s dramas that color any attempt to envision how they had been performed.
Shirley’s hand, then, not only helped preserve a record of Lydgate’s mummings and entertainments but also fashioned them into forms that partake of and reveal the complicated relationship that existed in late medieval England between play-texts and enactment. “Everything about medieval literary inscription,” Cerquiglini has written, “seems to elude the modern conception of the text.”61 Although Cerquiglini is thinking about spelling and punctuation in particular, his comment nonetheless calls attention to the larger sense of alterity that exists between the handwritten codex and the printed book. It is by looking at the medieval paratext or formatting decisions and conventions involved when a scribe puts spoken words into the space of writing that we can discover the nature of medieval textuality and recognize that “the written word is not simply a deposit of knowledge; it is above all an incomparable means of classifying and retrieving it.”62 While less ephemeral than the performances they record, Shirley’s copies of Lydgate’s entertainments and ceremonies remind us that the act of inscription, whereby performances become written texts, involves choices and omissions. Thanks to Shirley, we can glimpse something of the ceremonies for which Lydgate created texts, even if in the act of preserving them Shirley erased most of the details that would offer a full sense of what they were like as live entertainments.
