• "As Above, So Below: Staging the Digby Mary Magdalene"

    Author(s):
    Matthew Davis (see profile)
    Date:
    2016
    Group(s):
    CLCS Medieval, GS Drama and Performance, Interdisciplinary Approaches to Culture and Society, LLC Middle English
    Subject(s):
    British literature, Drama, English language, Literature, Medieval, Religion
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    digby Mary Magdalene, Hagiography, place-and-scaffold, staging practice, Medieval literature
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6DC8P
    Abstract:
    With thirty-seven named locations, the Digby Mary Magdalene is rightfully considered to require the most elaborate staging of the Middle English dramatic corpus. In this article, I re-examine the manuscript to find evidence of how the various locations in the play can be grouped into what I term staging complexes. Beginning with the division of Mary Magdalene’s vita into three parts—the vita evangelica, the vita apostolica, and the vita eremetica—I examine the list of locations mentioned in either the stage directions or dialogue of the play in order to determine whether each location must physically exist in the performance space, taking note of any specifics regarding the location or construction of the particular item. By doing this, I am able to group the locations into complexes in a manner that reflects the importance of Mary Magdalene’s vita, the conception of the world depicted by the orbis terrarum or T-O map, and the ability to produce the play at a reduced expense. Furthermore, the introduction of staging complexes allow portions of the stage to stay geographically discrete, while still making the character interaction easy for an audience to follow, reduces the complexity of the performance for the actors when compared to other proposed interpretations of the play’s staging, and reinforces the concepts of penance and pilgrimage in the text.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Publisher:
    Society for Theatre Research
    Pub. Date:
    2016
    Journal:
    Theatre Notebook
    Volume:
    70
    Issue:
    2
    Page Range:
    74 - 108
    ISSN:
    0040-5523
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    7 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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