"The Sanctuarie is become a plaiers stage": Chapel Stagings and Tudor "secular" drama.(Report)

WHEN Anthony Munday issued his oft-cited rebuke of players and theater in A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theatres (1580), the use of the church as a playing space received particular attention. While he railed against traveling household players who "are privileged to ... publish their mametree in euerie Temple of God, and that through England, vnto the horrible contempt of praier [; s]o that now the Sanctuarie is become a plaiers stage," (1) the sometime-playwright seemed to be implying that such a use of sacred space was "now" a new and troubling Elizabethan phenomenon. Despite Munday's relatively marginal status as a minor playwright and pageant-maker in the era, this pamphlet and another of his works have had an enormous influence on the narrative of theater history. As the principal author of The Book of Sir Thomas More (ca. 1590), his treatment of a play within a play given by "My Lord Cardinalls players" (11. 918-37) is one of the primary sources informing David Bevington's analysis of the popular tradition. Munday is thus frequently cited as an authority for both emerging anti-theatrical sentiments and the argued link between professional players and the traveling interluders and halls. (2) And yet, at least in regards to the use of churches for playing, he is occasionally misleading. His implication that church playing was a novelty appears to be particularly inaccurate, for plays were certainly being performed in "sanctuaries" long before 1580.

Surviving records suggest, for instance, that between 1339 and 1642 (3) for "some sixteen villages and towns, ... the church seems to have been the normal playing space" (4) for performances by local and traveling players, and performances of religious plays like The Assumption or The Coronation of the Blessed Virgin occurred in major cathedrals both before and after the Reformation even in London, including at Lincoln Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, and some eleven other churches. (5) Paul Whitfield White has found that churches were such "a popular venue for Reformation dramatic performances" (6) that in many villages the preferred site for evangelical drama was the local church and that such uses continued throughout the Reformation. (7) Church performance for quasi-religious drama thus actually persisted long after a critically assumed evolution from sacred to secular popular drama--that is, the imagined linear journey from the church to the courtyard to the inn yards, halls, and theaters--supposedly occurred. Indeed, John M. Wasson's finding that "it is arguable that far more than half of all vernacular plays of the English Middle Ages and Renaissance were in fact performed" in such religious sites, (8) only buttresses White's assessment that there was no "steadily evolving progress from the sacred to the secular in sixteenth century English theatre." (9) And, in fact, a closer scrutiny of Munday's pamphlet confirms that the theater that most preoccupies him is not yet that of the London public stages. Rather, the would-be reformer's repeated references to boy actors ("yong boies ... trained vp in filthie speeches, vnnatural and vnseemlie gestures, ... brought up by these Schoole-maisters in bawderie, and in idlenes"), (10) to household servants and traveling players, to schools, and to chapels, as well as his likening of theater to "the Schoolehouse of Satan and chapels, as well as his likening of theater "the Schoolehouse of Satan and chappel of il counsel," (11) point to a much more complicated context, one for which the traditional description "popular" theater may be an anachronistic imposition.

Reviving an early critical tradition suggesting that the anonymous Godly Queen Hester (ca. 1525-29) and John Heywood's comedies The Pardoner and the Frere and The Play of the Wether (ca. 1519-33) were staged within a chapel, while drawing on recent research in theater history and approaches looking to the text as evidence of stage practice, (12) I want to question such assumptions. I will argue that not only these plays, but two other moral interludes from the early Henrician era, ca. 1513-14--the anonymous Youth and Hick Scorner--long considered "household plays" performed by small professional troupes in halls and deemed "unquestionably" part of the popular canon by Bevington, (13) bear signs of performance by household chapel personnel in a chapel setting. Notably, Youth and Hick Scorner reference chapel furnishings, decor, church rituals, and vestments, and, like the apparent household chapel plays of Heywood and Godly Queen Hester, they allude to child performers and chapel personnel. Though possibly within the "popular" tradition, these plays are not purely secular.

More importantly, that earlier performance context is one in which such distinctions as "sacred" and "secular" may not yet apply. Rather, given the significant overlap between touring players and the professional repertory, and the ongoing difficulties authorities in the provinces had determining which dramas were free of questionable religious doctrine, the idea that chapel or church stagings involved only religious drama is increasingly on unsafe ground. (14) Among Wasson's findings, for instance, is the discovery of the use of parish churches for performances by professional players whose repertories did not include overtly religious plays: "the Records of Early English Drama project has identified sixteen different professional companies who performed in churches," thus far. Notably, Queen Elizabeth's Players "appear seven times in four different churches" and Leicester's Men "were paid 20 shillings 'for playing in the Churche' at Doncaster." (15) In his discussion of traveling players, Peter H. Greenfield conjectures that their "[p]erformance in inns, churches, and private houses may have occurred just as often" as in town halls, "and perhaps even more frequently, but have gone unrecorded unless connected with legal action." (16) Moreover, the Elizabethan children's company, Children of Paul's, who in the early years of Elizabeth's reign appeared more frequently at court than any other company, appear to have rehearsed and performed "either in the Cathedral ... or in the small church built next to it, St. Gregory's, where the singing school had been housed since the twelfth century." (17)

The chapel remained associated with student performances in the universities as well throughout the period. While interpretations of surviving records from the universities appear to suggest that the use of a hall was a more likely site for a performance than the chapel--e.g., "There can be little doubt that performances [at King's College] were in the college hall"--it is nonetheless true that clear evidence of such "is lacking." (18) Meanwhile, although references to performances at Jesus College in Cambridge are "extremely sparse," Alan H. Nelson finds that "[t]he college chapel is the only sixteenth-century Cambridge performance site still regularly used for plays." (19) Evidence of this tradition also appears in entries for 1568-69 in which "two fellows of the college received [pounds sterling]4-6-0 'spent at the playes in the chappell,'" and a payment from 1567-68 for "'glasse for the chappell after the playe.'" The specificity of a related reference dated 1578, which indicates an alternate playing space when that year's play was instead "pleyed publiklie in the Hawlle," (20) may suggest, ironically enough, that the hall staging was the exceptional use. A Marian entry for "Candelles waxe & linckes for the chapell and hall for the showes in christmas," (21) from Trinity College in 1553-34 suggests, moreover, that both the chapel and the hall were used for its Christmas "showes."

Assimilating such a context into our understanding of playing in the period, however, has not proved easy. Although the use of churches for non-liturgical playing was acknowledged in seminal studies by E. K. Chambers and Bevington, (22) for most contemporary scholars, even those who long ago "abandoned the 'big bang' theory that secular drama was expelled from nave to market-place because of its comic coarseness," (23) a church performance renders a play outside the bounds of discussions of the critically favored professional drama, so much so that if "those sites most neglected by twentieth century scholars for performance of early English religious drama have been the churches themselves," (24) neglect is all the more pronounced for the performance of drama not identified as "religious." After all, Suzanne Westfall's observation that "Protestantism discouraged clerical dramatic performances and isolated the chapel as a space dedicated solely to worship" (25) only be- comes true after English reformers had successfully employed the staging of plays, even iconoclastic ones, in churches and chapels. Nevertheless, even though concerted resistance to church playing such as that expressed in Munday's tract was, as White has shown, a late development, there is little willingness to consider the possibility that sacred spaces might have influenced the imaginations of Tudor playwrights and players. (26) Certainly, earlier, passing suggestions that a few extant Tudor plays may have been performed in churches or chapels have been allowed to dwindle away as they have been replaced by an emerging consensus, reflected recently in Greg Walker's anthology of Medieval Drama (2000), that all surviving influential "secular" interludes were designed for a vague, nonspecific playing space, such as a hall. (27) Indeed, even as most scholars of the period remain aware of church stagings, household productions, and even the use of chapel players--both children and gentlemen--in dramatic performance, any particular attribution of an interlude, at least some of which appear to have been written by household chaplains or chapel personnel, (28) to a chapel or church setting has been challenged or questioned. Westfall doubts, for example, whether sufficient evidence still exists to support Bevington's and Chambers's suggestion that the Henrician era biblical play Godly Queen Hester would have been staged in a chapel, and Ian Lancashire, curiously, finds the notion of staging of the moral interlude Youth in a church setting an uninformed anachronism. (29)

Wasson's assessment that only a "stubborn" critical reluctance prevents us from integrating evidence of church stagings into our current narrative of the drama may indeed be true. However, Westfall's unwillingness to read surviving secular interludes with a church or chapel setting in mind in her study of household performances--she denies the possibility of a chapel location to any extant secular plays (30)--may be due less to stubbornness than to her having restricted her claim that the early Tudor household chapel "could also be exploited for theatrical effect[,] the choirs and lofts providing] playing space, and the aisles an ease of movement and scope for ceremonial processions" to liturgical drama so that the chapel itself became a stage only when "the Chapel could stage religious plays; vestments became costumes, chapel structures became sets, and hangings became backdrops." (31) Although she finds it more likely that sacred plays--Nativity plays, Shepherd plays, and Easter plays of the Resurrection--were performed in the chapel itself and non-sacred ones, such as the conventionally secular chapel-produced Shrove Tuesday plays, were staged in the hall, the basis for such a distinction reflects her tacit assumption of late Protestant, even post-puritan attitudes toward theater as profane. When she argues, for instance, that the early morality Mankind does "not suit Chapel performance" partly because "the irreverence of the vices and the lewdness of the music are inappropriate to Chapel style which, while it could be boisterous, was usually not bawdy," (32) her analysis echoes not only those late Reformation ideas expressed in Munday's diatribe against abuses of the sanctuary, but those of an intriguing pamphlet issued in 1569 objecting that the "pretty vpstart youthes" of Elizabeth's Royal Chapel (later the first occupants of the Blackfriars) were frequently "profan[ing] the Lordes day" by "feigning bawdie fables gathered from the idolatrous heathen poets"--that is profane secular plays--" ... in her maiesties chappel." (33) Oddly enough, she accepts the late puritan valuation while overlooking the acknowledgment of church stagings of secular drama in their pamphlets.