'"Now wole I a newe game begynne": staging suffering in King Lear, the mystery plays and Grotius's Christus Patiens

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Annual, 2007 by Beatrice Groves

24. William Prynne, Histrio-mastix (London: Michael Sparke, 1633), 111. Although Prynne is speaking of biblical theater in general here, he seems to have mystery plays in his thoughts shortly afterward when he writes of the blasphemous theatrical productions of popish priests (112, 115).

25. Siegfried Wenzel, "SomerGame and Sermon References to a Corpus Christi Play," Modern Philology 86.3 (1989): 274-83; Clopper, Drama, Play and Game, 74.

26. Thomas Wright, ed., The Political Songs of England, from the reign of King John to that of Edward II (London: Camden Society, 1839), 336 (line 285).

27. V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966), 13.

28. Ibid., 186.

29. Games are also central to continental Passion plays: Woolf, English Mystery Play, 254; Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 175-77.

30. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "foul." The games alluded to in King Lear include bowls (2.2.145), football (1.4.84), handy dandy (4.5.149), primero (1.1.123-24), and tennis (1.4.82).

31. James P. Lusardi and June Schlueter, Reading Shakespeare in Performance: King Lear (London: Associated University Presses, 1991), 82. See also Carol Rutter, "Eel Pie and ugly Sisters in King Lear," in Lear: From Study to Stage; Essays in Criticism, ed. James Ogden and Arthur H. Scouten, 201-5. (London: Associated University Presses, 1997).

32. Macbeth uses almost the same words for his predicament: "They have tied me to a stake. I cannot fly, / But bear-like I must fight the course" (Macbeth, 5.7.1-2).

33. Quoted in S. P. Cerasano, "The Master of the Bears in Art and Enterprise," Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 5 (1991): 196. For other contemporary descriptions of bearbaiting as "play" and "game" see ibid., 199; C. L. Kingsford, "Paris Garden and the Bear-baiting," Archaeologia 20 (1920): 168.

34. Cf. Satiromastix, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 5.2.244; John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities: Chiefly Illustrating the Origin of our Vulgar Customs, Ceremonies and Superstitions (London: Chatto and Windus, 1877), 533; Kingsford, "Paris Garden and the Bear-baiting," 162; Walter W. Greg, ed., Henslowe Papers: Being Documents Supplementary to Henslowe's Diary (London: A. H. Bullen, 1907), 106. My thanks are due to Tiffany Stern for alerting me to this final example.

35. The quarto's Gloucester has a stronger sense of the connection between human suffering and the situation of hunted animals. He suggests that humans are baited like tethered animals when he says, "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They bitt us for their sport" (4.1.35) (Cf. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "bitt"). And when he accuses Regan of bestial treatment of her father--"In his annointed flesh rash boarish fangs"--he uses a hunting term from the stroke made by a wild boar with his tushes.

36. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: King Lear, ed. Horace Howard Furness (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1880), note to 3.7.66; Plays in Performance: King Lear, ed. J. S. Bratton (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1987), 157. Modern critics have felt very differently to Coleridge about the importance of staging this scene: cf. Richard Strier's excellent discussion of the staging of Gloucester's blinding as essential to gaining the audience's sympathy for the action of the servant; Richard Strier, "Faithful Servants: Shakespeare's Praise of Disobedience," in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture, ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier, 119-20 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).