Staging disorder: charivari in the N-Town Cycle

Comparative Drama, Summer, 2001 by Richard I. Moll

NOTES

(1) Joseph Allen Bryant Jr., "The Function of Ludus Coventriae 14," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 52 (1953): 341. Colin Fewer argues that "Den's inventory of the members of the `rowte,' Sawdyr Sadelere, Thom Tynkere, Perys Pottere, and so on, is of course an allegorization of the network of occupations that constitutes the East Anglian civic polity" ("The `Fygure' of the Market: The N-Town Cycle and East Anglian Lay Piety," Philological Quarterly 77 [1998]: 130), and Cindy L. Carlson assumes that Den is summoning those called to court: "His victims, judging by their names that include `Thom Tynkere' and `Symme Smalfeyth,' are small fry indeed" ("Mary's Obedience and Power in the `Trial of Mary and Joseph'," Comparative Drama 29 [1995]: 355). Both of these interpretations, however, account for a very limited number of the names called.

(2) Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 161. The N-Town cycle has been known by many names to modern scholarship. For clarity's sake I have standardized usage.

(3) Peter Meredith, The Mary Play from the N. town Manuscript (New York: Longman, 1987), 1-19. K. S. Block also argued that this material should be separated in her edition of the text. See: Ludus Coventriae, or, The Plaie Called Corpus Christi, ed., K. S. Block, EETS, e.s. 120 (1922; reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1974), xxi-xxv.

(4) Eleanor Prosser, Drama and Religion in the English Mystery Plays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), 96.

(5) Joseph L. Baird and Lorrayne Y. Baird, "Fabliau Form and the Hegge Joseph's Return," Chaucer Review 8 (1973): 159-69.

(6) Louise O. Vasvari, "Joseph on the Margin: The Merode Tryptic and Medieval Spectacle," Mediaevalia 18 (1995): 163-89. Vasvari specifically examines the N-Town cycle on pp. 170-172.

(7) The N-Town Play, ed. Stephen Spector, EET S, s.s 11-12 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). This edition will be referred to throughout by play and line numbers.

(8) Woolf, English Mystery Plays, 173.

(9) Woolf, English Mystery Plays, 176. See also Vasvari, "Joseph on the Margin" 171-72.

(10) See: Baird and Baird, "Fabliau Form," passim.

(11) For an overview of chaste marriage, see Margaret McGlynn and Richard J. Moll, "Chaste Marriage in the Middle Ages: `It Were to Hire a Greet Merite'," in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York and London: Garland, 1996), 103-22.

(12) Dyan Elliott, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 139. For debate on the chaste marriage of Mary and Joseph, see Penny Gold, "The Marriage of Mary and Joseph in the Twelfth Century Ideology of Marriage," in Sexual Practices and the Medieval Church, eds. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York: Prometheus Books, 1982), 102-117.

(13) Elliott, Spiritual Marriage, 162.

(14) Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton, 1987), 10.946.