Landscape, Movement, and Civic Mimesis in the West of England

Abstract

Because of the survival of four English mystery cycles, it has been usual to think of those civic and guild-sponsored entertainments as being the exemplar form in cities and towns that sponsored drama by amateurs between Whitsuntide and Midsummer Day. 1 And, indeed, surveys of medieval drama by what they do not talk about generally imply as much. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, for example, opens with an overview of medieval theatre, then presents chapters on the four Middle English cycles, the non-cycle plays, the Cornish cycle, moralities, and saint's plays. But all the English cycles that happen to survive are from the north. Evidence from the southwestparticularly in Somerset -suggests that while communities there also mounted civic-sponsored entertainments, those events seem to have had a different form that, I would suggest, deserves to make its way more centrally into discussions of civic-sponsored drama. And because that form is replicated at the city, town, and village level, it presents what is in some ways a more coherent picture of entertainment traditions within the context of local and regional culture than do the cycles, which appear to be associated only with large urban centers.As the title of this essay suggests, one way to understand that form is to explore its mobile nature and its use of the local landscape; to those I would add its recurring structural use of a combat metaphor. This study begins such an exploration by analyzing dramatic records from Somerset that I collected during research for REED: Somerset, published in 1996. 2 The bulk of those records, dating as they do from the 1530s through the Civil War, reflect the political, social, and religious conflicts that characterized the period. Many of the records are from courts (local, county, ecclesiastical, Star Chamber), where references to entertainments occur because so much of the struggle to preserve or to change traditional culture crystallized in efforts to preserve or abolish traditional customs, entertainments, and ceremonies. Because the records mirror those societal stresses, they not only give useful descriptions of the entertainments themselves, they provide evidence relevant to issues of social history that have been much debated during the past decade. Did differing

Green Hell: Detention, art, and activism in an English landscape

“…Nonetheless, the practice did embody some aspects of rural self-determination which were lost by the enclosure movement that commenced with the Tudors in the late 16th century and accelerated into the industrial and colonial periods. The enclosure movement and its effects on rural life provoked religious, political and performative activism (King, 1976, Stokes, 2003.…”