Description
Cambridge Love and Conflict in Medieval Drama The Plays and their Legacy 2015 Edition by Lynette Muir
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. Table of contents :- 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 mange 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.