A guest post by Dr Tom Lawrence
The launch of Kent’s ‘Cultures of Performance’ research cluster was a fascinating experience to be a part of. The interactive workshop presented the audience with three premodern texts that are not typically associated with performance: Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale (1380-1390s); John Northbrooke’s A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes, with Other Idle Pastimes (1577); Anthony Munday’s A Breefe and True Reporte, of the Execution of Certaine Traytours at Tiborne (1582). It would go on to reveal the innately performative aspects of these texts and the demonstrable value of thinking about them through the lens of performance.
James Cavalier and Francisca Stangel performing an extract from John Northbrooke’s A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes, with Other Idle Pastimes (1577).
While each case study was illuminating in its own way, the performances of John Northbrooke’s Treatise resonated with me most profoundly. I had not encountered the text prior to seeing it performed, but its literary genre was immediately familiar. Reminiscent of medieval allegorical debate texts, the Treatise stages a dialogue between the learned and spiritual authority, Age, and his curious student, Youth, on the topic of idle pastimes. The dialogic structure of the text anticipates a compliant reader who, like Youth, is interested in, and receptive to, Age’s moral guidance. Yet the performances of the Treatise were effective in showing how the audience’s experience and expectations of the text can be altered considerably by an actor’s delivery; their pace, tone, expressions and gestures. For example, in one performance, the actor playing Age spoke solemnly as if he were preaching a sermon and his delivery seemed in keeping with the didactic aims of the text: to advise against vice. Whereas, in another rendition, the actor adopted a different persona, speaking to Youth in a warm and conversational manner that seemed to trivialise, satirise and even parody the complaints levelled against plays, players and playgoers. In this context, Age’s lengthy speeches – full of criticisms, warnings and moral exhortations – seemed overblown, melodramatic and comical in nature. The character of Age seemed less of a spiritual and intellectual authority and strangely reminiscent of William Shakespeare’s Malvolio, at once ‘a kind of puritan’ and an object of ridicule.[1]
Having witnessed several performances of Treatise, the author of the text was revealed to have been John Northbrooke, a churchman and outspoken critic of the theatre, and the value of approaching the text through performance became clear. While our awareness of the author and the historical context in which the Treatise was written might lead us to interpret it as an overt work of didacticism, it is also true (and ironic) that Northbooke’s moral agenda can be so readily undermined through dramatic performance.
[1] Twelfth Night, 2.3.118 in The New Oxford Shakespeare: Modern Critical Edition, eds. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 1825-1889.