Early Theatre

Introduction: Queer and Trans Issues in Medieval Drama

Jeffery G. Stoyanoff — 2024-12-17

This essay provides a landscape of queer and trans theoretical approaches, particularly as applied to medieval studies. Despite queer studies having been practiced since at least since the 1980s, medieval drama studies has seen fewer queer (and now trans) readings of medieval dramatic texts and bodies with few exceptions until recent years. Such approaches are more important now than ever given the ongoing assault against LGBTQIA individuals around the globe. Medieval drama is a fecund field for work in queer and trans studies, and through doing such work, we may indeed learn much about ourselves in the twenty-first century.

‘Lely-wyte, clene with pure virginyté’: The N-Town 'Nativity', the Virgin Mary, and Trans Misogyny

Nat Rivkin — 2024-12-17

This article examines how the Virgin Mary’s immaculate childbirth in the N-Town ‘Nativity’ illuminates recent scholarship on trans misogyny. I argue that the N-Town ‘Nativity’ diagnoses Mary’s enduring virginity after childbirth as itself a form of gender variance, and the play punishes the doubtful midwife Salomé for her lack of faith in another’s claim to womanhood. Moreover, this early Christian drama allows scholars today to contest the hostile myth that trans misogyny is at once natural and biblically sanctioned. Mary’s durable yet opaque virginity generates the anatomical scrutiny too often evoked by contemporary trans femininities.

On Unstable Ground: Trans-Civic, Trans Gender Fluidity in Chester’s ‘Play of the Flood’

Gillian Redfern — 2024-12-17

This article explores potential audience reception of the character Uxor in the Chester ‘Play of the Flood’ in relation to the notion of gendered place in medieval Chester. After discussing the implications for divergent readings of Uxor according to cis-centric understandings of place of performance, I interrogate the possibilities of trans places and people in medieval Chester in order to trouble the historically cis approach to Uxor’s performance and potential reception. Ultimately, I posit that Uxor inhabits a trans identity that in a necessarily contingent and temporary way allows trans-Uxor to secure spiritual, if not physical, salvation for those denied access to the ark.

Lesbians, Drag Kings, and Pregnant Queens: The Digby Mary Magdalene’s Queer Relationships

Daisy Black — 2024-12-17

This article argues that the Digby Mary Magdalene’s biblical, hagiographical, and allegorical characters support performance registers that provide a fertile space for queer relationships to emerge. It begins with Mary’s seducer, the lesbian-like Lady Luxuria, whose amiable tongue follows patterns more common to heterosexual seduction scenes. It then examines the Gallant’s parodic man-about-town, who wears courtly love as insincerely as his tight clothing and anticipates the flamboyant gender performances of modern drag kings. The article examines the lingering implications of these interactions on Mary’s post repentance plot with the Queen of Marseilles and on the play’s medieval and modern audiences.

'Be You Never So Gaye': A Queer Everyman

Matthew W. Irvin — 2024-12-17

The late medieval play Everyman might seem to exclude queerness, but its religious challenge to secular temporality is the very place to find the queer body of the past. Using Giorgio Agamben’s concept of ‘messianic time’ and queer theoretical interventions by Michel Foucault, J. Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz, this paper argues that Everyman creates a time for friendship as a way of life. That time is a ‘gaye’ time; though the theology of the play may foreclose that time of fellowship and pleasure, the performance of the play produces a time outside the grip of theological order.

Introduction: Gascoigne from the Margins — Mediations, Translations, Appropriations

Silvia Bigliazzi — 2024-12-17

This introduction presents the essays in the Early Theatre Issues in Review ‘Gascoigne from the Margins — Mediations, Translations, Appropriations’, placing them in the context of current criticism on Gascoigne and bringing them into a conversation on his dramatic works looked at from the ‘margins’.

‘A Tragedie Written in Greeke’: How Jocasta was Made ‘Classical’

Silvia Bigliazzi — 2024-12-17

Critics often take for granted that Dolce’s Italian translation of a Latin version of Euripides’s Phoenician Women provided Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh with a ready example for composing a ‘classical’ drama for an English Renaissance audience. However, the choice of an Italian play with a Greek story for the performance of the first Greek tragedy in England at Gray’s Inn in 1566 remains a sidelined question. This article argues that one reason for their choice of Dolce’s play resides in his treatment of the Euripidean material in ways that attuned it to contemporary dramaturgical as well as cultural and political circumstances while scattering signposts throughout, suggesting belongingness to classical antiquity. One of these features was the female lament shared by the chorus and Antigone in the last act, which, while absent from Euripides, was a model that could be recognized as Euripidean and, more broadly, Greek.

‘To Coosen the Expectation’: George Gascoigne’s Moral ‘Poses’ in Supposes

Silvia Silvestri — 2024-12-17

Supposes, based on Ludovico Ariosto’s Suppositi, found its way into print twice during George Gascoigne’s lifetime: first, in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573); then, in The Posies of George Gascoigne, a 1575 revised version of Flowres. In Posies’s prefatory letters, Gascoigne presents the collection as the ‘undoubted proof’ of his reformation, advertising the ‘morall discourses and reformed inventions’ it harbours. Recent criticism questions these claims, arguing for the marginality and inconsistency of Gascoigne's revisions, yet gives little consideration in this respect to the actual works featured in the miscellany, including Supposes – a play rich in sexual innuendos, left unamended in Posies. This article addresses this gap by reconsidering Supposes as functional to Gascoigne’s deceptive fiction of reformation as set forth in Posies’s paratexts.

Between the Stage and the Page: Printed Marginalia in Gascoigne’s Supposes

Cristiano Ragni — 2024-12-17

This article analyzes printed marginalia in the 1573 and 1575 editions of Gascoigne’s Supposes, highlighting their liminal dimension, typical of early modern English playbooks, between printed and performative textuality. The printed marginalia in the 1573 edition not only are annotations that speak from the margins of the possible performance of the text but can also be read as a sign of cross-fertilization between coexisting types of drama. The marginalia in the 1575 edition clearly aim at readers of the playbook rather than at spectators of future performances. In this sense, they are unlikely Gascoigne’s originals, but the result of interventions by those involved in the volume’s printing. The article explores how the printed marginalia in these two editions of Gascoigne’s Supposes suggest intriguing relations between the play’s textual and performative dimensions.

The Anglo-Catholic Perspective of George Gascoigne’s 1572 Masque of Montacutes

Emanuel Stelzer — 2024-12-17

When considering Gascoigne’s 1572 masque, scholars often point out the poet’s ingenuity in connecting the surname of his patron with the Montagues and Capulets of the Romeo and Juliet story and in interweaving that fictional feud with two historical events which had recently taken place in the Mediterranean: the siege of Famagusta and the Battle of Lepanto. Building on this work, this essay revisits the sociopolitical premises of Gascoigne’s text, emphasizing their transnational character and considering how the triangulation of Englishness, Catholicism, and the dehumanization of the Turks fit into the Elizabethan cultural context.

Through the Looking Glass: Reflections of the Prodigal Daughter

Carla Suthren — 2024-12-17

This contribution examines the submerged prodigal daughter plot within the dominant ‘prodigal son’ drama of Gascoigne’s Glass of Government (1575). Jerry Aline Flieger has suggested that we might reimagine the prodigal daughter not as merely ‘going beyond the fold of restrictive paternal law, only to return’, but as ‘lush, exceptional, extravagant, and affirmative … to be prodigal in this sense is to alter the law, to enlarge its parameters and recast its meaning’. Instead of marginalizing and banishing the prodigal daughter, this article suggests that it may be worth passing through Gascoigne’s looking glass to imagine an alternative space for her to occupy.

Editorial

Melinda J. Gough — 2024-12-17

This editorial for Early Theatre issue 27.2 (December 2024) introduces the issue's two Issues in Review sections and outlines additional journal-related news, including new initiatives regarding digital accessibility.