Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.
The N-Town Plays and the Politics of Metatheater by William Fitzhenry HE N-Town plays are a scribal compilatio, written down and com- piled in East Anglia during the second half of the fifteenth cen- Ttury, that self-reflexively meditates on the range and effects of vernacular drama. The preoccupation of these plays with the limits and potential of vernacular dramatic activity implicates them in the con- temporary political debates about the appropriate role of the vernacular in late medieval English culture. In his efforts to define the parame- ters of vernacular drama, the N-Town scribe-compiler enacts a sort of theatrical self-analysis through his depiction of the complex interaction between two contrasting theatrical models: the monologic and the dia- logic. The first or monologic model conceives of theater as a resolutely Alan Fletcher provides a fine assessment of the N-Town plays as a scribal compila- tion in his ‘‘The N-Town Plays,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. For an incisive account of these debates, see Nicholas Watson, ‘‘Censorship and Cul- tural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitution of ,’’ Speculum (): .
Studies in Philology – University of North Carolina Press
Published: Feb 24, 2003
Read and print from thousands of top scholarly journals.
Already have an account? Log in
Bookmark this article. You can see your Bookmarks on your DeepDyve Library.
To save an article, log in first, or sign up for a DeepDyve account if you don’t already have one.
Copy and paste the desired citation format or use the link below to download a file formatted for EndNote
Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
All DeepDyve websites use cookies to improve your online experience. They were placed on your computer when you launched this website. You can change your cookie settings through your browser.