The Physician and His Servant in the Croxton <i>Play of the Sacrament</i>

Authors

  • Jillian Linster University of South Dakota

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.12745/et.20.2.3028

Keywords:

physician, servant, medical treatment, banns, comedy

Abstract

The Croxton Play of the Sacrament features a physician who has regularly been characterized as a quack and buffoon. This paper combines the play’s historical and cultural context with a close reading of the text to argue that the doctor himself is a legitimate medical practitioner; the combined clowning of his servant and the foolishness of his patient make the physician appear comical. By considering possible performance choices and the relationship of the audience to the play’s action, I suggest a more complex reading of a scene and character that have previously been too readily dismissed.

Author Biography

Jillian Linster, University of South Dakota

Jillian Linster (jillian.linster@usd.edu) is an instructor of English at the University of South Dakota. Her recent dissertation project examined representations of physicians in popular texts such as plays and ballads to explore the relationship of print publication to the cultural status of medical doctors in early modern England. She is currently at work on an article about the attempted control of women’s bodies through the censorship of print media in seventeenth-century London and a monograph that tells the story of Helkiah Crooke's Mikrokosmographia (1615), the first comprehensive anatomy manual published in the English vernacular.

References

‘The Play of the Sacrament’, Norman Davis (ed), Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments (London, 1970)

David Lawton, ‘Sacrilege and Theatricality: The Croxton Play of the Sacrament’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33.2 (2003), 284, https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-33-2-281

R.J.E. Tiddy, The Mummers’ Play (Oxford, 1923)

Sir Edmund Chambers, The English Folk-Play (Oxford, 1933)

Neville Denny (ed), Medieval Drama (New York, 1973)

Richard Axton, European Drama of the Early Middle Ages (Oxford, 1974)

David Bevington (ed), Medieval Drama (Boston, 1975)

Greg Walker (ed), Medieval Drama: An Anthology (Oxford, 2000)

Linda Ehrsam Voigts, ‘Fifteenth-Century English Banns Advertising the Services of an Itinerant Doctor’, Florence Eliza Glaze and Brian K. Nance (eds), Between Text and Patient: The Medical Enterprise in Medieval & Early Modern Europe (Firenze, 2011)

Elisabeth Dutton, ‘The Croxton Play of the Sacrament’, Thomas Betteridge and Greg Walker (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama (Oxford, 2012)

Norman Davis, introduction, Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments (London, 1970)

Gail McMurray Gibson, Theater of Devotion (Chicago, 1989)

Tamara Atkin, Drama of Reform (Turnhout, 2013)

Tamara Atkin, ‘Playbooks and Printed Drama: A Reassessment of the Date and Layout of the Manuscript of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament’, Review of English Studies 60.244 (2008), https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgn100

Hardin Craig, English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1955)

Wim Hüsken and Peter Happé (eds), Staging Scripture: Biblical Drama, 1350-1660 (Leiden, 2016), 247, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004313958_012

Lawrence I. Conrad, Michael Neve, Vivian Nutton, Roy Porter, and Andrew Wear, The Western Medical Tradition: 800 BC to AD 1800, (Cambridge, 1995)

Matthew Sergi, ‘Beyond Theatrical Marketing: Play Banns in the Records of Kent, Sussex, and Lincolnshire,’ Medieval English Theatre 36 (2014)

Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge, 1973)

Middle English Dictionary Online. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/

Gail McMurray Gibson, ‘On the Performance of Medieval Drama’, Medieval Perspectives 14 (1999)

E.K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage (Oxford, 1903)

Victor I. Scherb, ‘The Earthly and Divine Physicians: Christus Medicus in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament’, Bruce Clarke and Wendell Aycock (eds), The Body and the Text: Comparative Essays in Literature and Medicine (Lubbock, 1990)

Downloads

Published

2017-12-15

Issue

Section

Articles