Like many scholars, I have previously considered medieval English stage directions to work like modern stage directions in directing players as to how, when, where and why their actions, staging and resultant performance should take place. Certainly, this understanding is common among people who take part in theatre and those who write about it. But, as I pointed out in the Prelude to this work, the term ‘stage direction’ is not a medieval one. It appears that assimilated use of the eighteenth-century term, ‘stage direction’, has been inaccurately attached to those medieval observations and descriptions of staged action recorded in play manuscripts. This, no doubt, is because the medieval records and sometimes incomplete observations of action, separated from the textual dialogue, appear to represent the more modern separate instructions to players and their action that we refer to as ‘stage directions’. The term and modern concept of the ‘stage direction’ have been imposed upon the separated records and descriptions of action in medieval play manuscripts. Thus, the prevalent assumption concerning the purpose of so-called medieval English stage directions has been that they were directed towards players. Given this belief, it has been further assumed that these stage directions are often incomplete and poorly constructed for directing players. One of the central questions that I have posed in this work has been designed to determine the reason why medieval English stage directions are considered to be incomplete in directing players and their actions. In pursuing this question, it has become clear that medieval English stage directions were not addressed to players. The function of records and descriptions of staged action began to change when individual authors were declared in print as recognisable authors of their plays. This change in convention occurred around 1560.
Apart from the early example of Skelton’s Magnyfycence, stage directions recorded before 1560 are not concerned with guiding, instructing or requiring action from players. Nor do they exist in order to determine future activity. Some play manuscripts, such as those at Chester, the use of which straddled the 1560 demarcation appear to contain both pre-1560 stage directions that operate as records of observed action and post-1560 stage directions that identify stage management-type functions directed towards production. These different functions recorded in the Chester manuscripts appear to have developed as accretions formed over the extended period of the Cycle’s performance.
The pre-1560 range of functions performed by the so-called explicit stage directions in these plays and cycles have been identified as: (a) recording observed action; (b) locating action in the narrative and its staging; (c) clarifying and qualifying narrative requirements; (d) duplicating the biblical narrative; (e) commenting on the narrative; (f) creating order and sequence; (g) identifying staging conventions; (h) reminding of impending action; (i) preparing states of readiness; (j) recording movement, light, sound, place, signs and simultaneous action; (k) differentiating kinds of coming, going and remaining; (l) describing conventions of walking about the place, personages going home, riding, parading, pomping and boasting; (m) recognising and determining attire; (n) articulating staging options; (o) recording equipment, ornaments and scenic details; and (p) prescribing group response.
These functions are ones made recognisable as abstractions from records of observed action. They represent a collectivity that creates definition of the principal concerns and attributes of medieval English theatre and establish the didactic nature of it.
There is often a subliminal resistance to the task of examining early forms of theatre for fear of unexpected outcomes that do not match modern preconceptions or practice. There are practices discussed in this work that are quite different from post-1560 ones, and it is the authority provided by explicit stage directions derived from observation of previous performance that confirm such practices. And, while some of these practices and conventions may seem strange when viewed through the prism of modern understanding, they are clearly fundamental to the nature and purpose of pre-1560 English theatre. Although these stage directions provide empirical evidence of didactic practices such as exposition, conveying, using signs, permitting visible preparation for action, moving about ‘a little’, taking action or inaction for ‘a little while’, creating ‘a little space’ and waiting, they are not systematic conventions to be so described in post-1560 English theatre.
Recognition of pre-1560 explicit stage directions as records of earlier performance further enhances the authority of these stage directions and the quality of evidence that they provide. Indeed, their contribution to evidence of medieval theatre practice may not be very different from the authority afforded by the more commonly recognised and valued eye-witness account. What is this kind of observation, recorded by the explicit stage direction, if it is not the same as or equivalent to the eye-witness account? A more accurately determined term to describe the ‘medieval stage direction’, which is aligned to the eye-witness account, is the ‘medieval record of performance’. This term ought to replace the mistakenly used description ‘medieval stage direction’.
With the development of printed plays promoted by named authors whose intentions were to publish their work for performance, there emerged a greater alignment of purpose between the text and the extant term ‘stage direction’ to accurately and meaningfully service the text. And, if those so-called pre-1560 stage directions, or more accurately designated ‘medieval records of performance’, are reconsidered to function as eye-witness accounts, then further examination of the panoply of explicit medieval English records of performance is necessary. To this end, I present a catalogue of the major extant records of performance, hitherto termed ‘stage directions’, that may be further reassessed in respect of these reasserted functions.