“If any ditch may be made, there it shall be played”: Staging Late Medieval Moralities
In 1936, Joseph Quincy Adams, then director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, purchased a manuscript from the antiquarian firm of Bernard Quaritch for $5,625 (adjusted to ~$104,000 in 2020 dollars). Adams later remarked his disbelief at the low cost of this document, of which he said, in his judgment of its monetary value, “$25,000 would not be unreasonable.” $25,000 in 1936, after accounting for inflation, is roughly $465,000 in 2020. This manuscript that caused such a stir among the leaders of the Folger Library in the 1930s is now know as the “Macro Manuscript(s),” named after Reverend Cox Macro, who collated and bound together three Medieval Morality Play manuscripts along with other, non-dramatic manuscripts (Macro Manuscripts - Folgerpedia). This “Macro Manuscript” contains three of what are often called “Morality Plays,” named so because they often contain themes and conflicts of different issues pertaining to morality, writ large. The morality plays contained within the Macro Manuscript are The Castle of Perseverance, Mankind, and Wisdom. In this essay, which I envision as the beginning of a longer, more detailed research agenda, I will be examining the Medieval staging of The Castle of Perseverance and of Mankind. In doing so, I hope to provide a new frame through which we can envision the relationships between entertainment, knowledge, and urban environs in East Anglia during the fifteenth century.
Several dramatic aspects make Morality Plays, of which about sixty are extant, particularly interesting and rife with scholastic capacity. One of these aspects is their mobility. Many of the moralities have few props, few special staging needs, and few rigid location-specific references, making them the ideal candidates for travelling showings. Mankind, for example, has several explicit references to specific people and the towns in which they live. Some scholars suggest that these lines of dialogue could easily have been changed to suit the needs of various locations. The Castle of Perseverance has multiple lines of dialogue that suggest it also could have been played at different locations. These morality plays are also interesting due to their subject matter. They deal heavily with ethics, different conceptions of different moralities, as well as religious identities and ideals. In studying the Morality Plays holistically, new evidence about the moral systems by which some medieval Britons lived can be found. Additionally, glimpses of different models of entertainment and, occasionally, professions are readily accessible through these texts.
Mankind’s place
The first staging that I will be examining is that of Mankind. Several pieces of textual evidence in this play suggest that it was performed in East Anglia towards the second half of the fifteenth century. Mankind is generally regarded as a typical Morality play, in that its protagonist, a farmer named Mankind, meets various personified morals. The antagonists of the play are Mischief, Newguise, Nowadays, and Nought. “Mischief,” in the fifteenth century, rather than denoting the relatively harmless pranks it does today, denoted “Evil plight or condition; ill-fortune; trouble, distress” (“Mischief, n.”). Newguise here represents new guises, that is to say, new fashions. Nowadays similarly represents a preeminent focus on the present without regard for the past or the future. Nought represents nothing, that is, Nought represents the absence of things. Nought here is the physical presentation of a lacuna. Mankind also, however, features Mercy, who is by all accounts the “good guy” of the play. Mercy is the one who doles out good advice to both Mankind and mankind—the character as well as the audience.
As previously mentioned, one of the benefits that comes with having few staging requirements that the Morality Plays benefit from is their extreme mobility. Mankind, for instance, has a total of twenty-one stage props, including: a spade, a bag of grain, writing utensils, a rosary, a net, board, weeds, a scourge, a weapon, fetters, a dish, a plate, a rope, and gallows, a flute, purses, and a noose. Out of all of these props, the largest is the gallows, but even that could realistically fit in a large enough wagon. These props, as well as the minimalist costumes, could all easily fit into a wagon or cart to be transported around to different towns. There are, however, some ambiguities about in, precisely, which towns this play was performed, as well as when in the year it was played. G. A. Lester, editor of one of the more mainstream modern editions of the Morality Plays, states that the temporal setting of the play was obviously winter, due to various dialogic references to winter, but that “it is not clear whether it is Christmas, as implied by the ‘Christmas song’ (line 332), or Shrovetide, the pre-Lenten period of merrymaking, when the playing of football (cf. line 732) was one of the ways of enjoying a final fling before the austerities to come” (Lester xxxvi). Lester also claims that “various places of performance have been suggested—notably inns, innyards, and the halls of private houses. On balance, an interior setting seems a little more likely, but the allusions to place need not be taken literally, and out-of-doors performance also seems possible” (xxxvi).
In terms of physical location for stagings of this play, the most compelling pieces of textual evidence offered by the play places it in East Anglia. Roughly five hundred lines into the play, Newguise says that “First I shall begin [to look for things to steal from] Master Huntington of Sawston. / Fro thence I shall go to William Thurlay of Hauxton, / And so forth to Pichard of Trumpington” (Mankind, ll. 505-508). Nowadays and Nought rattle off more names and places in the following lines. W. K. Smart neatly outlines how each of the names the three characters mention are men of local prominence in East Anglia, particularly in the areas surrounding Cambridge (Smart 49).
Additionally important to consider is the question of who the players are. Unlike in Early Modern playtexts, the Dramatis Personae in these Late Medieval Morality plays do not include a record of who played which character. All that are accessible are the list of characters. From this, several possibilities arise. First, the possibility that a single set of (possibly professional) actors “toured” through the towns of East Anglia playing Mankind is a popular one. However, with the scarce information on either the playing practices of this play or with professional playing troupes in fifteenth century England, it is also just as plausible to suggest, as Neville Denny does, that there “Just as easily… could have been a group of local amateurs performing within a single parish. We have no means of telling” (Denny 253). There are a total of seven named characters in Mankind, aside from the “mynstrellys” who occasionally played music at different points in the play. Denny suggests that Mankind has many connections with “Mummers’ Play” that came before the Moralities. In doing so, Denny posits that one of the marks of the Mummers’ Play—that the performers move with a “bizarre, semi-comic artificiality or ‘unnaturalness’ [in] their movement,” that they spoke with a “half-comic, half-eerie artificiality,” and that “they dance, strut, prance, gesticulate, [but] never merely walk or gesture in any normal, everyday sense”—would also have been present in the Morality Plays (Denny 257). This emphasized artificiality suggests that the actors would have been just those—actors. They would have been acutely aware of their “stage” presence, even if their stages were little more than a circular space in an innyard. So too would the audience.
In terms of audience seating arrangements, there are textual suggestions of visual demarcations between the different classes watching the show. In his opening speech, Mercy states “In good works I advise you, sovereigns, to be perseverant,” and also exclaims “O ye sovereigns that sit and ye brothern that stand right up, / Prick not your felicities in things transitory” (ll. 25-30). That the “sovereigns,” suggested to be wealthier individuals, would get to sit down while the “brothern,” the less wealthy audience members, would stand suggests that there would be limited pre-arranged seating surrounding the playing space, which in turn suggests that there would be at least some level of planning involved in putting on these shows. If this show was indeed played either inside inns and private residences, or outside in more public spaces, such as innyards or near churches, then it can be assumed (but not confirmed, due to the overwhelming lack of evidentiary material) that the players would be in communication with nearby businesses. If they were, indeed, communicating, then it would also not be too far of a stretch to suggest that the nearby businesses may have, in exchange for some of the profits, directed their customers toward the show.
In order to better visualize a staging of Mankind, I have created a (currently very rough) render of a possible version of the play (Figure 1). Due to hardware and funding limitations, this early version of the rendering is only meant to provide a general view of how I imagine the stage of this play to have been in an urban context in the fifteenth century. With further time and resources, a model of a staging of this show in an innyard or private residence could be created to show a more detailed view of Mankind. In this model, a crowd of audience members create a circle wherein the actors would play out their play with no physical barriers demarcating the two different spaces.
What is certain, despite all these ambiguities, is that money would have exchanged hands during showings of Mankind. Roughly halfway through the show, Newguise says “Now,” directed toward the audience, “ghostly to our purpose, worshipful sovereigns, / we intend to gather money” (ll. 459). While it is unclear exactly how much this collection gathered, it does show several significant details about the financial aspects of late medieval theatre. First, it shows that these plays would have garnered at least some financial support. These lines also show one possibility for how the plays received their money—through a collection. Dialogue occurring during this suggests that the collections had a sort of sliding scale. Nowadays references several different amounts of money, preferring the “red royals” (gold coins) to the “groats and tuppence” (coins worth relatively smaller amounts). The wealthier patrons—those seated—are through dialogue almost shamed into paying more. Newguise, however, offers another option for the standing audience members: “Ye that mow not pay the ton, pay the tother,” which, as the glosses suggests, means that those who cannot pay with red royals should instead pay with groats and tuppence (l. 464). This collection also posits a certain level of voluntary payment. Which is to say that the fact that this is a collection taken roughly halfway through the show, which likely would have occurred in a public urban space, suggests that individuals could have shifted in and out of the audience as they wished. This model of audience is far removed from our current model of theatre-going, outside of several important exceptions. We must imagine an audience for these plays that shifts and shuffles, with people joining and leaving as they see fit, of members talking and joking both with each other and with the players—we must imagine this play to be played, with all the levity that this word entails.
The castle of The Castle of Perseverance
Where Mankind fits many of the typical tropes involved in Morality Plays—sparse props, coarse and vulgar language, low staging requirements—The Castle of Perseverance does not, despite their shared housing in the same “Macro Manuscript.” The latter is significantly longer (roughly 3,650 lines to Mankind’s 913), contains far more named characters (thirty-five to Mankind’s seven), and contains the earliest extant stage plan (a drawing of a castle surrounded by a circle, with textual labels throughout). It is on this final difference—this extant stage plan—that this section will focus. This stage plan has been an object of controversy for theatre historians for quite a time. Some scholars suggest that it is purely a symbolic drawing. Others that it is an actual plan that would have been followed for each showing of the play. Even within this latter understanding—that it acts as a stage plan—there is still great variance of interpretations of the plan.
In a recent article, Richard Beadle’s historical reproduction of the entire Macro Manuscript locates the origins of this manuscript both in time and place. In this reproduction, Beadle states that “The scribe was likely to have been at work in the second quarter of the fifteenth century, and his orthography… proves to be typical of south central Norfolk,” placing this manuscript’s origins in East Anglia in the fifteenth century, much like Mankind. However, where Mankind was incredible mobile, The Castle of Perseverance is not.
The stage plan, pictured in Figure 2 in both original and modernized formats, depicts a castle with a bed at the base, surrounded by two concentric circles. Each cardinal direction is labeled outside the circles, with south being the uppermost label.
Within the concentric circles are the following directions: “This is the water about the place. If any ditch be made, there it shall be played, or else that it is strongly barred all about. And let not over many stytelerys be within the place” (Castle). These three sentences speak volumes about the physical locations required by the play, but they also lack one crucial element: dimensions. We know that, ideally, a water-filled ditch surrounds the castle, but we do not know how wide this ditch is or how large the circumference of the ditch must have been. We know that there are backup options for this ditch, which provide several possible motivations for the ditch itself. “If any ditch be made,” the directions say. Otherwise, there must be at least some sort of barrier in a circle around the “place.” This, along with several pieces of dialogue that reference towns/locations with words such as “at (so-and-so) [a location],” suggests that the play may have performed by a travelling troupe around East Anglia. However, even with this leniency regarding staging requirements, there are still large buildings that must be assembled and disassembled before and after each location, which would have been a massive undertaking. Accordingly, it would also have been possible that the play would have had one or a few long-term locations, possibly changing locations at different times in the year. Unlike with Mankind, there are no direct references to seasonal effects in The Castle of Perseverance. Due to the lack of records, we must assume either possibility, or even the possibility that this play was never performed at all and existed only as a piece of symbolic text, to be as plausible as the other. What is certain, though, is that the two concentric circles are meant to represent some type of barrier. They serve as a reminder to create a divide between the inside and outside of the “place.” Richard Southern suggests that the audiences would be free to sit within the barriers, but, as shall be more explicitly made clear soon, that assumption relies on current conceptions of how theatre is consumed now, rather than how it might have been consumed in East Anglia in the fifteenth century.
In the innermost area of the plan is a drawing of the castle. Above the castle are these words: “This is the Castle of Perseverance that standeth in the midst of the place, but let no man sit there for letting of sight, for there shall be the best of all” (Castle). Here again are more suggestions about where the audience might have been located while watching this play. The directions provided in the stage plan state that no person should be standing within the immediate surroundings of the Castle, because they would be blocking the view for everybody else, despite the fact that it is the “best [sight] of all.” Richard Southern states that “about the audience we can say two important things: 1. they are all enclosed within the place, 2. they form a complete circle, looking on at the actors from every side” (Southern 58). One of Southern’s main arguments for placing the audience “within the place,” that is, inside the ditch/barrier, is that any other configuration would be “very bad for business, for it means, of course, that you must give your show [for] free. You cannot control entrance; anyone may get in” (53). This assertion, however, is obviously untrue when considering the “collection” method used by actors in Mankind, which is, as a text, housed within the same manuscript, and as a play would have been performed in similar temporal and physical locations. Southern’s argument, here, relies on current conceptions of revenue generation for theatrical performances that were not necessarily the standard in fifteenth century East Anglia. If collections were sent around in Mankind, it is also extremely probable that The Castle of Perseverance relied on similar methods of generating revenue. There is simply no evidence suggesting that The Castle of Perseverance’s showings were hidden from non-paying members of the audience.
The castle itself, placed within the “midst of the place,” also offers an intriguing object of inquiry for the staging of the medieval Morality Play. The castle, as drawn in the stage plan, has bricks drawn into the upper half with a parapet at the top. The outside walls are drawn with a convex curve and are wider at the bottom than the top. In the lower half of the castle, a bed is drawn. The text under the bed reads: “Mankind’s bed shall be under the Castle, and there shall the soul lie under the bed till he shall rise and play” (Castle). Several aspects of the staging of this show may be gleaned from this part of the drawing and these buts of text. That the bed exists “under the Castle” inheres that the castle have a space in which the bed may exist. From this combined with the drawing, the castle can be assumed to have been placed on a system of stilts and support beams. To help visualize this portion of the stage, I have provided another rough rendering of what the castle could have looked like (Figure 3). The render shows the castle from the east, outside of the ditch. While not to any particular scale, this render depicts both the raised castle as the bed from which the soul would rise and play.
The render also shows the penultimate aspect of the staging requirements for this play as outlined by this plan: the scaffolds. At each cardinal direction, as well as in the northeast area, bisecting the north and east, are five scaffolds. Each scaffold “belongs” to a different character. To the south is Flesh’s scaffold, to the west, Mundus’s, to the north, Belial’s, the northeast, Covetous’s, and the eastern scaffold is Deus’s. In future examinations, more scholarship may be done to examine the relationship between location and religion, particularly in East Anglia. It seems important that Deus, or God, to have their scaffold in the east under this plan. It also seems important that all of the cardinal directions are labeled in this plan—with further research into the plot and dialogue of the play, connections may be formed between religion, location, and also morality, particularly in urban contexts. Southern suggests that these scaffolds were used as types of tertiary stages, where the characters would perform at times such that the performers “can be watched by more spectators below” (Southern 93). This explanation is satisfactory, and brings to mind the tertiary stages often used in contemporary concerts, where the performers move from the main stage to other stages that are more immediate to the audiences. I here provide my interpretation of these scaffolds, again not to scale. One feature of this render that I would like to make explicit is its placement of the audience. I differ greatly from Southern in where I envision the audience watching the play. Where Southern places them within the “place,” or inside the space that the ditch (here represented by the raised concentric circles) marks, I place them outside this ditch. My reasons for doing so are several. First, by placing them outside the ditch, I envision the audience as one similar to those watching Mankind, as shifting throughout the show. If an audience member could not see what they wished to from one vantage point, they could easily walk to the other side of the “place” to view from a different angle. Second, this does not rely on back-reading current models of profit-making in that it does not assume that the players actively bar entry to those who have not paid. Third, the ditch acts as the demarcation between crowd and audience, which, combined with the height offered by the scaffolds, allows for the audience less-hindered views of the show. Fourth, the ditch, particularly if filled with water, as the stage plan suggests, offers a level of protection.
Why, exactly, protection might have been necessary for this show is indicated by the final important stage direction in the plan: that of Bilial’s pyrotechnics. In the bottom right corner of the plan, outside the circles and to the right of the text indicating Belial’s scaffold are these words: “And he that shall play Belial look that he have gunpowder burning in pipes in his hands and in his ears and in his arse when he goeth to battle” (Castle). While this direction suggests much about the plot of the play—there will be a battle, and in that battle Belial (the embodiment of wickedness/worthlessness) will have pipes of fire in his hands, his ears, and coming out of his “arse” (of which I am still trying to find an academically-appropriate synonym)—it also indicates a possible reason for the ditch, and in doing so further invalidates Richard Southern’s placement of the audience. The ditch, which as specified earlier is filled with what is identified as “the water about [around] the place,” serves here as a backup plan for if Bilial’s “arse-flames” get out of control. It also serves as another marker keeping the audience out of the “place.” Southern, despite his imperfect readings, provides a compelling translation of the “stytelerys” of which not over many are within the barriers, claiming that they act as “umpires” who intervene between the crowd and the players as needed (Southern 83). These interventions, I suggest here, would also include both keeping audiences outside the ditch as well as helping Belial should his flames grow uncontrollable.
My final qualm with Richard Southern’s accounting of the staging of the play has to do with his interpretation of the scale of the stage. Southern, again assuming that the purpose of the ditch was to keep out those who didn’t pay for the show—which, as I have already shown, is not necessarily the case here—posits that the size of the ditch is “10 ft. [wide] by 5 ft. deep” (Southern 59). Southern also posits several different scales for this stage, all still relying upon his notion that there was, indeed, a hill just inside the ditch that would have blocked the view of passersby, including one with a 126 ft. diameter, and one with a 50 ft. diameter (126-127, Figure 5). These scales, though, are all predicated upon possibly-incorrect notions of even the purpose of the center area inside the ditch. Here, research can be done with archaeologists, theatre historians, and urban historians to provide a more accurate scale for showings of this play. However, one assertion may be made: if Southern is incorrect in his staging of the play, the stage becomes much more mobile. If the ditch is, to use Southern’s smaller scale stage as a baseline, even half the dimensions Southern provides (5 ft. wide by 2.5 ft. deep, still large enough to demarcate the players from the audience and to provide the necessary protection for Belial’s fire, and with a 25 ft. diameter), then the Castle itself would only need to be half the size, thus making it far more mobile. The only size requirement, then, for the castle, would be that it must be large enough for a fully-grown man-sized bed to fit underneath. I believe that, with the easily-tweaked dialogues, and with the smaller scale, this play could easily have been incredibly mobile—enough, even, to be performed in (or possibly just outside of) different East Anglian towns. Along with these tweaks in dialogue, I believe that the stage directions for Bilial’s fire could also have been tweaked—if there was no ditch filled with water, and instead only a small barrier, then the audience would be in much greater danger than they would otherwise have been. Thus, Bilial’s flames may not have been used in spaces with greater fire risk, and the ditch of water may not have been necessary at all.
Looking forward
While most of this paper has been focused on two different staging models for Morality Plays, there are still other examples of stages. The pageant plays, for instance, would have been played in and on wagons. If we were to extend the definition of plays, even parades and other civic ceremonies could provide deeper insights into entertainment in Medieval urban spaces.
I have shown, I hope, if not wholly then at least partially new models through which we may view the stagings of two of the sixty extant Morality Plays. In doing so with The Castle of Perseverance, I aim to have provided a rebuttal to several of Richard Southern’s more anachronistic assumptions about the staging of this play. I also suggested that using new technologies, such as three-dimensional modeling, may provide new and interesting ways in which these stages may be shown on page. With further practice and better resources, these models may also prove to be useful educational tools in the teaching of these types of plays.
For this project, however, I envision a deeper examination of the affective affordances of the different staging models. Affect theorist Teresa Brennan has provided interesting insights into the contagion of affects, suggesting that emotions are conveyed in groups not just by the individual members of the group, but also by the group as a whole, feeding into and off each other. There was been limited research done on the affects involved in Early Modern Theatre, so I think that shining a new, affective light on Medieval drama could fill an intriguing (and novel) lacuna in the literature. Alternatively, deeper dives into the Records of Early English Drama to see if there are any records of where and when these plays were performed. If future scholars are able to place, exactly, the location of some of these possible stages, then more can be confidently said about the relation of the urban environment, including the demographic makeup of the audiences, to early drama. What can be said for certain is that this manuscript was well worth what Joseph Adams paid for in 1936.
Image sources
Figure 1: My own model of a possible staging of Mankind
Figure 2: Maryse Gabrielle Wilkinson. On Sight and Insight: A Reading of The Castle of Perseverance and its Staging Diagram in situ. September 2007. University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon. (https://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/SSU/TC-SSU-10012007133730.pdf)
Figure 3: My own model of a possible staging of The Castle of Perseverance
Figure 4: ibid.
Figure 5: Southern, Richard. The Medieval Theatre in the Round: A Study of the Staging of the Castle of Perseverance and Related Matters. Faber and Faber, 1957. p. 126.
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