Love and Conflict in Medieval Drama
The Plays and their Legacy

A detailed study of the stories dramatised in Europe before 1500.

Lynette Muir (Author)

9780521153454, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 10 June 2010

312 pages
23 x 15.3 x 2 cm, 0.51 kg

This book provides a detailed survey of the hundreds of non-biblical serious plays which survive from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries. The performers vary from civic groups and literary societies to courts and convents: mainly amateurs, but they left a legacy of stories that was drawn upon by the writers for the professional theatre companies of Elizabethan England, Golden Age Spain and the rich baroque theatre of France. Stories from the Golden Legend and collections of Marian miracles appear side by side with folk tales and traditional stories brought from the Middle East by merchants, pilgrims and other travellers. Muir considers what she terms the 'legacy' of these tales: when playwrights for the public theatres such as Shakespeare and Lope de Vega retain the situations and settings of the older stories but transform them by the emphasis on psychology and the gradual disappearance of the religious element.

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations and short titles used in the text and notes
Introduction: staging the stories
Part I. War in Heaven: Saints and Sinners: 1. The noble army of martyrs
2. White martyrdom: the hermits
3. Soldiers of Christ: the Church militant
Part II. Miracles of Salvation: 4. Miraculous conversions of Jews (and a few pagans)
5. Sacrament plays
6. Your adversary the Devil: the sacred and the damned
7. Who sups with the Devil: the rash bargain
Part III. Conflicting Relationships: Love, Hate and Marriage: 8. Happily ever after: friends and lovers
9. Premarital problems
10. The falsely accused queen and other suffering wives
11. Domestic dramas
12. The wager
13. Hell hath no fury: the woman scorned
14. Family feuds
15. The theatre of cruelty
16. Le coeur mangé and other culinary surprises
Part IV. Power, Politics and Patriotism: 17. The siege of Troy
18. The siege and destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70
19. Early Christian Europe: Constantine to the crusades
20. Christianity goes west
21. The worthy, the proud and the popular
22. Pride and the wheel of Fortune
23. Affairs of state
24. Patriots and popular heroes
Conclusion: from Queen of Heaven to Fairy Queen
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Theatre studies [AN]