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In an article in PMLA in October 1998, W. B. Worthen declared "a conceptual crisis in drama studies." (1) Over the last two decades, the field of performance studies has coalesced around assertions of the primacy of temporal performance over the presumed authority of the written text; thus drama studies, from which performance studies emerged, has been left in a critical quandary. The essential problem, Worthen says, is that "the burgeoning of performance studies has not really clarified the relation between dramatic texts and performance." (2)
Also in 1998, Derek Forbes staged Lydgate's Mumming at Hertford at Hertford Castle, the location of its original performance, and then published his adapted text along with an account of the production under the title Lydgate's Disguising at Hertford Castle: The First Secular Comedy in the English Language. (3) The subtitle is erroneous, but Forbes's production was the first stage presentation of this or any of Lydgate's mummings since their original performances in the late 1420s. (4) To accomplish his restaging, however, Forbes had to make numerous alterations to Lydgate's text beyond simply updating the language--including having an actor in the role of King Henry VI, and providing dialogue for players who were originally mute.
Like theater in the twenty-first century, Lydgate's fifteenth-century mummings inhabit the interstices between drama and performance, between performance and text. They have dramatic qualities without seeming to qualify fully as drama. They are performance texts, but the relationship of the text to the performance is deeply vexed. Are they the scripts of a performed work, or do they commemorate a spectacle and therefore belong to that great "other" category of literature, the "occasional" work? But though they exist in a critical twilight, they are significant to theater history, if primarily as textual evidence of rudimentary early drama. (5) To literary criticism, they are virtually invisible. It is axiomatic that literary history is biased toward high art at the expense of popular culture; that it chooses the elite over the demotic; that it favors the secular over the religious; that it prefers the capital to the provinces. Nonetheless, The New History of Early English Drama has index entries neither for "Lydgate" nor for "mumming," while William Tydeman, writing in the recent Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, mentions the mummings only to dismiss them in a single paragraph as associated with the"sterile pageants in aureate verse" that Lydgate produced for ceremonial occasions. (6)
The "mumming" has a complex and often obscure history of shifting generic boundaries. An essential feature, as the name implies, is silence, and a "mumming" most often describes a dumb-show, a performance by nonspeaking actors; as such it is an ancient form that survives today in English Christmas mummings. The courtly entertainments known as mummings constitute the prehistory of the celebrated Stuart masque. (7) Theater historians have hypothesized that they derive from the quete, the ancient custom in which groups of masked individuals would enter noble households for impromptu and often coercive exchanges of gifts,"a practice that lies somewhere between seeking donations and holding people to ransom." (8) This disorderly custom, it is said, was eventually overtaken, stylized, and controlled by the aristocrats themselves. (9)
Lydgate's mummings comprise seven texts that appear exclusively in two manuscripts by John Shirley, six in Cambridge, Trinity College MS. R.3.20, and one in Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 59, part 1. (10) The central and intractable question is the relationship of these texts to the occasions from which they arise. Since they are texts, the designation "mummings" increases the generic confusion, and Shirley's typically loquacious introductions only muddy the water further. They are all associated with festive occasions (to use a deliberately vague phrase) for the royal court or for the wealthiest representatives of the London merchant class. But on the few occasions when scholars have analyzed the mummings at any length, they have been hard pressed to explain the exact nature of the performances and the exact function of the texts. (11) The text known as the Mumming at Bishopswood is, according to Shirley, a "balade ... sente by a poursyvant to the Shirreves of London." The Mumming at Eltham is "a balade" by Lydgate "for a momyng tofore pe kyng and pe qwene." The Mumming at London is a "devyse of a desguysing," and the Mumming at Windsor a "devyse of a momyng." (12) It is most likely that most of these poems were deictic texts read aloud by a herald while disguised performers mimed allegorical scenes, as is suggested by Shirley's heading to the Mumming for the Mercers of London: "And nowe filowepe a lettre made in wyse of balade by Daun Iohan, brought by a poursuyaunt in wyse of mummers desguysed to fore pe mayre of London, eestfeld, vpon pe twelffepe night of Cristmasse, ordeyned ryallych by pe worthy merciers, citeseyns of London." (13) The syntax is convoluted (what is the antecedent of the second "in wyse of"?), but it seems clear enough that "daun iohan" wrote the "balade" and the "poursuyaunt" read it aloud while members of the Mercers Guild acted out the scenes that the poem described. What follows, however, is a third-person narrative account of the pursuivant's journey from Asia to London in which he is bearing a letter--presumably the "balade" itself--from Jupiter for the Lord Mayor. One would expect the text to describe the performance; instead, it seems, the performance describes the text. (14)
Lydgate's mummings, then, are texts that bear some ill-defined relationship to performances that verged on the dramatic. I would not claim that they suffered or responded to any kind of dramatic "crisis," but I do think that they link performance and text in a way that speaks to the concerns of contemporary performance theory and drama studies. I propose that the seemingly rudimentary theatrics of the mummings as well as the enigmatic relationship of the texts and the performance are not due to a failure to achieve full dramatic expression. Rather, the mummings represent a mode of courtly performance that resists drama, intentionally eschews the conventional expectations of dramatic form. I borrow the term"resistance to drama" advisedly from Claire Sponsler's analyses of medieval drama and performance. Sponsler imports the idea of "resistance" from cultural studies. There it connotes the putative power of an audience to resist and recast the ideological content of popular entertainment. (15) It assumes, therefore, top-down cultural production and bottom-up resistance. I, on the other hand, am speaking of resistance at the top social echelon to dramatic conventions commonly found in popular drama. But the motivations for the resistance I am postulating are also political, and, while they may be antithetical to the more common type, I think that ultimately they are related. This is clearest when we look at the most recognizably dramatic of the mummings.
From Shirley we learn that the Mumming at Hertford was commissioned of Lydgate by the controller John Brice and performed for Henry VI at Hertford Castle at Christmas; the year has been established to be 1427. (16) The plot of the mumming depends on the presence of the king. It takes the form of a legal petition in which a group of "hynes," rustic laborers, plead to the king for relief from the tyranny of their wives. It presents Hobbe the Reeve, who comes home from the fields to find his wife, Beautryce Bittersweete, drunk with no dinner prepared; if he complains she beats him with her distaff....
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