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The morality play is a genre of medieval and early Tudor drama. The term is used by scholars of literary and dramatic history to refer to a genre of play texts from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries that feature personified concepts alongside angels and demons, who are engaged in a struggle to persuade a protagonist who represents a generic human character toward either good or evil. The common story arc of these plays follows "the temptation, fall and redemption of the protagonist".
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1696.
British literature is literature from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, and the Channel Islands. This article covers British literature in the English language. Anglo-Saxon literature is included, and there is some discussion of Latin and Anglo-Norman literature, where literature in these languages relate to the early development of the English language and literature. There is also some brief discussion of major figures who wrote in Scots, but the main discussion is in the various Scottish literature articles.
John Lyly was an English writer, playwright, courtier, and parliamentarian. He was best known during his lifetime for his two books Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and its sequel Euphues and His England (1580), but is perhaps best remembered now for his eight surviving plays, at least six of which were performed before Queen Elizabeth I. Lyly's distinctive and much imitated literary style, named after the title character of his two books, is known as euphuism. He is sometimes grouped with other professional dramatists of the 1580s and 1590s like Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, George Peele, and Thomas Lodge, as one of the so-called University Wits. He has been credited by some scholars with writing the first English novel, and as being 'the father of English comedy'.
David Martin Bevington was an American literary scholar. He was the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities and in English Language & Literature, Comparative Literature, and the college at the University of Chicago, where he taught since 1967, as well as chair of Theatre and Performance Studies. "One of the most learned and devoted of Shakespeareans," so called by Harold Bloom, he specialized in British drama of the Renaissance, and edited and introduced the complete works of William Shakespeare in both the 29-volume, Bantam Classics paperback editions and the single-volume Longman edition. After accomplishing this feat, Bevington was often cited as the only living scholar to have personally edited Shakespeare's complete corpus.
Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye or Recueil des Histoires de Troye (1464) is a translation by William Caxton of a French courtly romance written by Raoul Lefèvre, chaplain to Philip III, Duke of Burgundy. It was the first book printed in the English language.
Christopher Page is an English expert on medieval music, instruments and performance practice, together with the social and musical history of the guitar in England from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. He has written numerous books regarding medieval music. He is currently a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge and Emeritus Professor of Medieval Music and Literature in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge.
Campaspe is an Elizabethan era stage play, a prose comedy by John Lyly based on the story of the love triangle between Campaspe, a Theban captive, the artist Apelles, and Alexander the Great, who commissioned him to paint her portrait. Widely considered Lyly's earliest drama, Campaspe was an influence and a precedent for much that followed in English Renaissance drama, and was, according to F. S. Boas, "the first of the comedies with which John Lyly inaugurated the golden period of the Elizabethan theatre".
Horestes is a late Tudor morality play by the English dramatist John Pickering. It was first published in 1567 and was most likely performed by Lord Rich's men as part of the Christmas revels at court that year. The play's full title is A new interlude of Vice containing the history of Horestes with the cruel revengement of his father's death upon his one natural mother. It has been proposed that John Pickering is likely to be the same person as lawyer and politician Sir John Puckering.
Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance: a play, opera, mime, ballet, etc., performed in a theatre, or on radio or television. Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been contrasted with the epic and the lyrical modes ever since Aristotle's Poetics —the earliest work of dramatic theory.
Fulgens and Lucrece is a late 15th-century interlude by Henry Medwall. It is the earliest purely secular English play that survives. Since John Cardinal Morton, for whom Medwall wrote the play, died in 1500, the work must have been written before that date. It was probably first performed at Lambeth Palace in 1497, while Cardinal Morton was entertaining ambassadors from Spain and Flanders. The play is based on a Latin novella by Buonaccorso da Montemagno that had been translated into English by John Tiptoft, 1st Earl of Worcester and published in 1481 by William Caxton. The play was printed in 1512–1516 by John Rastell, and was later only available as a fragment until a copy showed up in an auction of books from Lord Mostyn's collection in 1919. Henry E. Huntington acquired this copy, and arranged the printing of a facsimile. The play is an example of a dramatised débat.
Elaine Treharne MArAd FSA FRHistS FEA FLSW was born in Aberystwyth, Wales, in 1964. She is a Senior Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and the Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of the Humanities, Professor of English, Courtesy Professor of German Studies and of Comparative Literature, and a Bass Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. She was at the University of Leicester for eighteen years as a lecturer, then professor, head of department, and dean, before emigrating to the USA. She is a Welsh medievalist, focusing on Manuscript Studies, Early English literature, and the History of Text Technologies, particularly of the handmade book. She led Stanford University's online courses on manuscript study entitled Digging Deeper. She is a qualified archivist, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and an Honorary Fellow of the English Association, for whom she was also the first woman chair and President from 2000 to 2005. Treharne was made a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales in April 2020. She is the President of the Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland (2022-2025).
William John Blair, is an English historian, archaeologist, and academic, who specialises in Anglo-Saxon England. He is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History and Archaeology at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford. He gave the 2013 Ford Lectures at the University of Oxford.
Wisdom is one of the earliest surviving medieval morality plays. Together with Mankind and The Castle of Perseverance, it forms a collection of early English moralities called "The Macro Plays". Wisdom enacts the struggle between good and evil; as an allegory, it depicts Christ and Lucifer battling over the Soul of Man, with Christ and goodness ultimately victorious. Dating between 1460 and 1463, the play is preserved in its complete form in the Macro Manuscript, currently a part of the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library. A manuscript fragment of the first 754 lines also belongs to the Bodleian Library. Although the author of Wisdom remains anonymous, the manuscript was transcribed and signed by a monk named Thomas Hyngman. Some scholars have suggested that Hyngman also authored the play.
Alice Curwen was an English Quaker missionary, who wrote an autobiography published along with correspondence as part of A Relation of the Labour, Travail and Suffering of that Faithful Servant of the Lord, Alice Curwen (1680). Her maiden name and parentage are unknown. She came from Baycliff in the Furness district of Lancashire, and spent part of her life as a missionary and social activist in New England and the Caribbean.
The Play of Wyt and Science is a mid-sixteenth-century English morality play written by John Redford. It is notable as one of the earliest plays to develop a moral thesis as part of a nominally unrelated plot. Redford was best known as a composer of keyboard music, and the play was written to be performed by the children's choir of St. Paul's Cathedral. The play concerns itself with education rather than salvation, stemming from Redford's role as a teacher rather than as a preacher. The character Wit initially sets off with naive enthusiasm to learn by his own initiative, but eventually gains appreciation for the guidance of instruction in a narrative that contains elements of chivalric romance. Elements of the play may also imply a reference to Henry VIII's marriage to his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves.
The Interlude of the Student and the Girl is one of the earliest known secular plays in English, first performed c. 1300. The text is written in vernacular English, in an East Midlands dialect that suggests either Lincoln or Beverley as its origin, although its title is given in Latin. The name of its playwright is unknown. Only two scenes, with a total of 84 lines of verse in rhyming couplets, are extant and survive in a manuscript held by the British Library, dated to either the late twelfth or very early thirteenth century. Glynne Wickham provides both the original text and a rendering in modern English in his English Moral Interludes (1976). In tone and form, the interlude seems to be the closest play in English to the contemporaneous French farces, such as The Boy and the Blind Man, and is related to later English farcical plays, such as the anonymous Calisto and Melibea and John Heywood's The Foure PP. It was most likely performed by itinerant players, possibly making use of a performing dog. In Early English Stages (1981), Wickham points to the existence of this play as evidence that the old-fashioned view that comedy began in England with Gammer Gurton's Needle and Ralph Roister Doister in the 1550s is mistaken, ignoring as it does a rich tradition of medieval comic drama. He argues that the play's "command of dramatic action and of comic mood and method is so deft as to make it well-nigh unbelievable" that it was the first of its kind in England.
Vincent Gillespie, FEA is Emeritus J. R. R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford. He was editor of the Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies Series from 2002 until 2023, and was the Honorary Director of the Early English Text Society from 2013 until 2023, having previously served as its Executive Secretary from 2004 until 2013. His major research area is late medieval English literature. He has published over sixty articles and book chapters ranging from medieval book history, through Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, to the medieval mystics such as Richard Rolle and, most recently, Julian of Norwich. He has a special interest in the medieval English Carthusians, and in Syon Abbey, the only English house of the Birgittine order. In 2001, he published Syon Abbey, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues 9, an edition and analysis of the late-medieval library registrum of the Birgittine brethren of Syon Abbey. He is the author of Looking in Holy Books, and the forthcoming A Short History of Medieval English Mysticism. He is the co-editor, with Kantik Ghosh, of After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England, with Susan Powell of A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain, 1476-1558, with Samuel Fanous of The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Mysticism, and with Anne Hudson of Probable Truth: Editing Medieval Texts from Britain in the Twenty-First Century.
Greg Walker is Regius professor of rhetoric and English literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is a graduate of the University of Southampton. His specialist field is the history of literature and drama in the late-medieval period and the sixteenth century. Before taking up the Regius Chair he was the Masson Professor of English at Edinburgh. Before that he was Professor of Early-Modern Literature and Culture and Director of the Medieval Research Centre at the University of Leicester. Between 1986 and 1989 he was a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Southampton and has also taught at the Universities of Queensland and Buckingham. He was the Head of Edinburgh's School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures between 2008 and 2011.
Helen Fulton FRSA FSA FLSW is a Professor of Medieval Literature at Bristol University.
References
- 1 2 "Meg Twycross". Lancaster University. Retrieved 24 July 2020.
- ↑ "Editorial Board". Medieval English Theatre journal. Retrieved 24 July 2020.
- ↑ "2004 Bevington Award for Best New Book". Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society. Retrieved 24 July 2020.
- ↑ "Quakers". Lancaster University. Retrieved 24 July 2020.
- ↑ "Prof Margaret Twycross". Society of Antiquaries of London. Retrieved 24 July 2020.
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