Conference Presentations by Daisy Black
The ship on the medieval and renaissance stage holds much in common with Chekov’s gun. That is, ... more The ship on the medieval and renaissance stage holds much in common with Chekov’s gun. That is, it is rarely put on stage unless it’s going to be caught in a storm. The introduction of a ship into a play therefore invokes a tacit agreement between players and spectators that, at some point in the narrative, it is either going to suffer through a tempest or be wrecked.
However, stage ships held transformative, as well as spectacular, properties. In the late fifteenth century Digby Mary Magdalen play, the ship physically links the actions between a number of dramatic loci, including places in and around Jerusalem, Marseilles and heaven. The three sea journeys establish a new performance space which, for a ‘shortt space’, bring audience and players into the same space and narrative. It also sees the characters carried in the ship undergo a series of sea-changes, which trouble and alter their authority, gender roles and bodily status as female characters give birth during a storm, die and are thrown overboard.
These properties are amplified in Shakespeare’s later employment of the ship in Pericles, Prince of Tyre, which, via the medieval poet-narrator Gower, re-crafts many of the aspects of the Digby Magdalen narrative. At the same time, a familiarity with the medieval narrative, coupled with audience anticipation of the storm, sets certain expectations on the characters of Pericles, Thaisa and the sailors.
Comparing the use of the ship in the two plays and the power dynamics at play in the storm scenes, this paper contends that the ship is not merely a useful contrivance in continuing a linear narrative by transporting the characters from A to B, but also a place in which relationships between men and women, player and spectator, are subject to sea-change and shift.
While director Peter Brooke sees empty space as a place of theatrical and spectatorial potential,... more While director Peter Brooke sees empty space as a place of theatrical and spectatorial potential, the medieval performance space was never empty. It was constantly full of movement, objects and associations which simultaneously contributed to performances and injected tension into them. For the religious plays performed in civic centres such as York, these were spaces in which the guildsmen-actors usually performed very different activities, including eating, praying, trading, butchering, building and executing.
The ambiguities of these living, working and playing spaces are frequently exploited by the dramatic personae tasked with opening each of the pageants. Characters such as Herod, Annas and Caiphas crave spectatorship – physically and vocally ‘filling’ space with movement and noise. However, these characters frequently cannot sustain audience attention. Their scopic authority is undermined by those who do not demand, yet command, spectatorship – often through silence or stillness.
Examining the energetic persecutors and the still and largely silent figure of Jesus in the trial plays of the York Cycle, this paper argues that certain figures’ ability to redirect and hold audience gaze disrupts some of the assumptions made about the presentation of female or queer figures in medieval art and drama as ‘stepping stones to advance the male protagonist’s subjectivity’. It contends that such personae hold the ability to challenge the subjectivity of those persecuting them – reducing them, at best, to mere words. Furthermore, this paper finds that these figures tend to queer the dramatic spaces they inhabit, contesting conventional readings of York’s streets as masculine. The activities of York’s women (in roles as diverse as spectators, traders, costumers) while their menfolk were performing suggest that the plays formed a temporary space in which women were not only invited to look at men, they were invited to look with the authority of men.
Extending the recent work of Peter Meredith, Claire Sponsler, John McGavin and Greg Walker concerning space, spectatorship and cognitive engagement, this paper examines how medieval drama formed temporary queer spaces within usually carefully defined civic spaces, and how this queerness is exploited by the narratives performed.
Before Prospero’s vanishing feast provoked Alonso’s contrition in The Tempest, feasting had long ... more Before Prospero’s vanishing feast provoked Alonso’s contrition in The Tempest, feasting had long performed as a dramatic device in the staging of sin and salvation. In late medieval religious plays, feasts frequently occur at points of dramatic crisis: illustrating a character’s moral depravation, marking their contrition or constituting punishment for sin.
This paper argues that, while feasting is frequently examined within discourses concerning reproduction and nourishment, in medieval drama the feast is more often associated with death and annihilation. It examines two plays and their protagonists’ relationships with feasting: the Digby Mary Magdalen the N-Town Death of Herod. These plays stage lavish feasts, with descriptions aiming to engage their audiences with the table’s pleasures. Yet the characters consume in response to death: Magdalen indulging simultaneously in gluttony and lechery as she grieves her father and Herod feasting to celebrate his massacre of Bethlehem’s children. Food and annihilation are juxtaposed throughout, with Herod snatched away mid-feast by Death (who claims he will now provide food for worms) and Magdalen’s conversion hinging on her eschewal of worldly food. Furthermore, the plays’ feasts have the effect of ‘queering’ their protagonists. Herod’s raises the spectre of medieval blood libel fantasies constructing Jews as cannibalistic, emasculated and prone to infanticide, while Magdalen’s feast (and later renunciation of food) facilitates her performance of roles conventionally coded masculine.
Engaging with discourses concerning female masculinity and medieval constructions of Judaism, this paper interrogates feasting’s relationship to death and the feast’s ability to ‘queer’ characters indulging in it.
The late fifteenth century Digby Mary Magdalen play has long been noted for its complex use of sp... more The late fifteenth century Digby Mary Magdalen play has long been noted for its complex use of space and place. The action moves through a number of dramatic loci, including places in and around Jerusalem, Marseilles and heaven. While scenes from the holy lands and Marseilles are staged sequentially – almost in dialogue with one another – in the second half of the play the sea between them comes into prominence.
The play contains three sea journeys. In the first, which sees Mary Magdalen travel to Marseilles, the sea is established as a masculine place. Access to and passage across the waters lies within the control of the bawdy shipman and his boy. However, their masculine agency is interrupted in the second voyage, in which the newly-converted King and Queen of Marseilles travel to the holy land. During the voyage, the pregnant Queen dies giving birth to a child. The staging of the childbirth scene temporarily shatters the sailors’ control over both seas and ship – a control they attempt to regain through insisting that the disruptive Queen’s body and her child are left on a rock. During the final voyage, the rock is revisited and the Queen and her child discovered alive, uncorrupted, and having miraculously accompanied the King on his tour of the holy land.
Engaging with recent works on queer times and spaces, this paper argues that the Queen’s troubled sea crossing queers the hitherto masculine waters. While Magdalen’s voyage might be read as the final stage in her baptism and bodily purification, the Queen’s body changes the nature of the seas. This journey also queers literary periodisation, with the abandoned Queen holding rather more in common with the seaborne wanderers of Anglo-Saxon elegy than with the sea-faring women of the play’s more contemporary romance and hagiographical narratives. At sea, she floats somewhere between death and life, apocryphal and medieval times as well as between the set physical places of scenery and the more fluid, indeterminate spaces of the audience. Her voyage therefore transforms the sea itself into a queer body which flows between elegiac forms, medieval performance spaces, a rock in the ocean and the stations of the cross.
18th May 2016: Hull and District Theological Society, University of Hull.
11th May 2016: Modes of Spectatorship from the Middle Ages to 1700: A Symposium in Honour of Pro... more 11th May 2016: Modes of Spectatorship from the Middle Ages to 1700: A Symposium in Honour of Prof. John J. McGavin, University of Southampton.
22nd – 25th March 2016: Popular Culture Association National Conference, Seattle.
25th January 2016: Institute for Medieval Studies Medieval Group Seminar Series, University of Le... more 25th January 2016: Institute for Medieval Studies Medieval Group Seminar Series, University of Leeds (by invitation).
8th – 10th Sept 2015: Editing and Interpretation Conference, University of Hull.
4th – 5th June 2015: Symposium by the Sea (The Medieval and Early Modern Garden: Enclosure and Tr... more 4th – 5th June 2015: Symposium by the Sea (The Medieval and Early Modern Garden: Enclosure and Transformation), University of Swansea
6th – 9th July 2015: International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds.
14th – 17th May 2015: 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies, University of Western Mich... more 14th – 17th May 2015: 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies, University of Western Michigan, Kalamazoo.
9th Feb 2015: University of Hull Department of English Research Seminar
7th – 9th Jan 2015: Gender and Medieval Studies Conference 2015 (Gender, Dirt and Taboo) Bangor U... more 7th – 9th Jan 2015: Gender and Medieval Studies Conference 2015 (Gender, Dirt and Taboo) Bangor University.
16th – 17th Sept 2014: ‘Is Gender Still Relevant?’ Conference, University of Bradford.
Uploads
Conference Presentations by Daisy Black
However, stage ships held transformative, as well as spectacular, properties. In the late fifteenth century Digby Mary Magdalen play, the ship physically links the actions between a number of dramatic loci, including places in and around Jerusalem, Marseilles and heaven. The three sea journeys establish a new performance space which, for a ‘shortt space’, bring audience and players into the same space and narrative. It also sees the characters carried in the ship undergo a series of sea-changes, which trouble and alter their authority, gender roles and bodily status as female characters give birth during a storm, die and are thrown overboard.
These properties are amplified in Shakespeare’s later employment of the ship in Pericles, Prince of Tyre, which, via the medieval poet-narrator Gower, re-crafts many of the aspects of the Digby Magdalen narrative. At the same time, a familiarity with the medieval narrative, coupled with audience anticipation of the storm, sets certain expectations on the characters of Pericles, Thaisa and the sailors.
Comparing the use of the ship in the two plays and the power dynamics at play in the storm scenes, this paper contends that the ship is not merely a useful contrivance in continuing a linear narrative by transporting the characters from A to B, but also a place in which relationships between men and women, player and spectator, are subject to sea-change and shift.
The ambiguities of these living, working and playing spaces are frequently exploited by the dramatic personae tasked with opening each of the pageants. Characters such as Herod, Annas and Caiphas crave spectatorship – physically and vocally ‘filling’ space with movement and noise. However, these characters frequently cannot sustain audience attention. Their scopic authority is undermined by those who do not demand, yet command, spectatorship – often through silence or stillness.
Examining the energetic persecutors and the still and largely silent figure of Jesus in the trial plays of the York Cycle, this paper argues that certain figures’ ability to redirect and hold audience gaze disrupts some of the assumptions made about the presentation of female or queer figures in medieval art and drama as ‘stepping stones to advance the male protagonist’s subjectivity’. It contends that such personae hold the ability to challenge the subjectivity of those persecuting them – reducing them, at best, to mere words. Furthermore, this paper finds that these figures tend to queer the dramatic spaces they inhabit, contesting conventional readings of York’s streets as masculine. The activities of York’s women (in roles as diverse as spectators, traders, costumers) while their menfolk were performing suggest that the plays formed a temporary space in which women were not only invited to look at men, they were invited to look with the authority of men.
Extending the recent work of Peter Meredith, Claire Sponsler, John McGavin and Greg Walker concerning space, spectatorship and cognitive engagement, this paper examines how medieval drama formed temporary queer spaces within usually carefully defined civic spaces, and how this queerness is exploited by the narratives performed.
This paper argues that, while feasting is frequently examined within discourses concerning reproduction and nourishment, in medieval drama the feast is more often associated with death and annihilation. It examines two plays and their protagonists’ relationships with feasting: the Digby Mary Magdalen the N-Town Death of Herod. These plays stage lavish feasts, with descriptions aiming to engage their audiences with the table’s pleasures. Yet the characters consume in response to death: Magdalen indulging simultaneously in gluttony and lechery as she grieves her father and Herod feasting to celebrate his massacre of Bethlehem’s children. Food and annihilation are juxtaposed throughout, with Herod snatched away mid-feast by Death (who claims he will now provide food for worms) and Magdalen’s conversion hinging on her eschewal of worldly food. Furthermore, the plays’ feasts have the effect of ‘queering’ their protagonists. Herod’s raises the spectre of medieval blood libel fantasies constructing Jews as cannibalistic, emasculated and prone to infanticide, while Magdalen’s feast (and later renunciation of food) facilitates her performance of roles conventionally coded masculine.
Engaging with discourses concerning female masculinity and medieval constructions of Judaism, this paper interrogates feasting’s relationship to death and the feast’s ability to ‘queer’ characters indulging in it.
The play contains three sea journeys. In the first, which sees Mary Magdalen travel to Marseilles, the sea is established as a masculine place. Access to and passage across the waters lies within the control of the bawdy shipman and his boy. However, their masculine agency is interrupted in the second voyage, in which the newly-converted King and Queen of Marseilles travel to the holy land. During the voyage, the pregnant Queen dies giving birth to a child. The staging of the childbirth scene temporarily shatters the sailors’ control over both seas and ship – a control they attempt to regain through insisting that the disruptive Queen’s body and her child are left on a rock. During the final voyage, the rock is revisited and the Queen and her child discovered alive, uncorrupted, and having miraculously accompanied the King on his tour of the holy land.
Engaging with recent works on queer times and spaces, this paper argues that the Queen’s troubled sea crossing queers the hitherto masculine waters. While Magdalen’s voyage might be read as the final stage in her baptism and bodily purification, the Queen’s body changes the nature of the seas. This journey also queers literary periodisation, with the abandoned Queen holding rather more in common with the seaborne wanderers of Anglo-Saxon elegy than with the sea-faring women of the play’s more contemporary romance and hagiographical narratives. At sea, she floats somewhere between death and life, apocryphal and medieval times as well as between the set physical places of scenery and the more fluid, indeterminate spaces of the audience. Her voyage therefore transforms the sea itself into a queer body which flows between elegiac forms, medieval performance spaces, a rock in the ocean and the stations of the cross.
However, stage ships held transformative, as well as spectacular, properties. In the late fifteenth century Digby Mary Magdalen play, the ship physically links the actions between a number of dramatic loci, including places in and around Jerusalem, Marseilles and heaven. The three sea journeys establish a new performance space which, for a ‘shortt space’, bring audience and players into the same space and narrative. It also sees the characters carried in the ship undergo a series of sea-changes, which trouble and alter their authority, gender roles and bodily status as female characters give birth during a storm, die and are thrown overboard.
These properties are amplified in Shakespeare’s later employment of the ship in Pericles, Prince of Tyre, which, via the medieval poet-narrator Gower, re-crafts many of the aspects of the Digby Magdalen narrative. At the same time, a familiarity with the medieval narrative, coupled with audience anticipation of the storm, sets certain expectations on the characters of Pericles, Thaisa and the sailors.
Comparing the use of the ship in the two plays and the power dynamics at play in the storm scenes, this paper contends that the ship is not merely a useful contrivance in continuing a linear narrative by transporting the characters from A to B, but also a place in which relationships between men and women, player and spectator, are subject to sea-change and shift.
The ambiguities of these living, working and playing spaces are frequently exploited by the dramatic personae tasked with opening each of the pageants. Characters such as Herod, Annas and Caiphas crave spectatorship – physically and vocally ‘filling’ space with movement and noise. However, these characters frequently cannot sustain audience attention. Their scopic authority is undermined by those who do not demand, yet command, spectatorship – often through silence or stillness.
Examining the energetic persecutors and the still and largely silent figure of Jesus in the trial plays of the York Cycle, this paper argues that certain figures’ ability to redirect and hold audience gaze disrupts some of the assumptions made about the presentation of female or queer figures in medieval art and drama as ‘stepping stones to advance the male protagonist’s subjectivity’. It contends that such personae hold the ability to challenge the subjectivity of those persecuting them – reducing them, at best, to mere words. Furthermore, this paper finds that these figures tend to queer the dramatic spaces they inhabit, contesting conventional readings of York’s streets as masculine. The activities of York’s women (in roles as diverse as spectators, traders, costumers) while their menfolk were performing suggest that the plays formed a temporary space in which women were not only invited to look at men, they were invited to look with the authority of men.
Extending the recent work of Peter Meredith, Claire Sponsler, John McGavin and Greg Walker concerning space, spectatorship and cognitive engagement, this paper examines how medieval drama formed temporary queer spaces within usually carefully defined civic spaces, and how this queerness is exploited by the narratives performed.
This paper argues that, while feasting is frequently examined within discourses concerning reproduction and nourishment, in medieval drama the feast is more often associated with death and annihilation. It examines two plays and their protagonists’ relationships with feasting: the Digby Mary Magdalen the N-Town Death of Herod. These plays stage lavish feasts, with descriptions aiming to engage their audiences with the table’s pleasures. Yet the characters consume in response to death: Magdalen indulging simultaneously in gluttony and lechery as she grieves her father and Herod feasting to celebrate his massacre of Bethlehem’s children. Food and annihilation are juxtaposed throughout, with Herod snatched away mid-feast by Death (who claims he will now provide food for worms) and Magdalen’s conversion hinging on her eschewal of worldly food. Furthermore, the plays’ feasts have the effect of ‘queering’ their protagonists. Herod’s raises the spectre of medieval blood libel fantasies constructing Jews as cannibalistic, emasculated and prone to infanticide, while Magdalen’s feast (and later renunciation of food) facilitates her performance of roles conventionally coded masculine.
Engaging with discourses concerning female masculinity and medieval constructions of Judaism, this paper interrogates feasting’s relationship to death and the feast’s ability to ‘queer’ characters indulging in it.
The play contains three sea journeys. In the first, which sees Mary Magdalen travel to Marseilles, the sea is established as a masculine place. Access to and passage across the waters lies within the control of the bawdy shipman and his boy. However, their masculine agency is interrupted in the second voyage, in which the newly-converted King and Queen of Marseilles travel to the holy land. During the voyage, the pregnant Queen dies giving birth to a child. The staging of the childbirth scene temporarily shatters the sailors’ control over both seas and ship – a control they attempt to regain through insisting that the disruptive Queen’s body and her child are left on a rock. During the final voyage, the rock is revisited and the Queen and her child discovered alive, uncorrupted, and having miraculously accompanied the King on his tour of the holy land.
Engaging with recent works on queer times and spaces, this paper argues that the Queen’s troubled sea crossing queers the hitherto masculine waters. While Magdalen’s voyage might be read as the final stage in her baptism and bodily purification, the Queen’s body changes the nature of the seas. This journey also queers literary periodisation, with the abandoned Queen holding rather more in common with the seaborne wanderers of Anglo-Saxon elegy than with the sea-faring women of the play’s more contemporary romance and hagiographical narratives. At sea, she floats somewhere between death and life, apocryphal and medieval times as well as between the set physical places of scenery and the more fluid, indeterminate spaces of the audience. Her voyage therefore transforms the sea itself into a queer body which flows between elegiac forms, medieval performance spaces, a rock in the ocean and the stations of the cross.