Public lecture: Why the Arts matter

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Jonothon Neelands (a professor at Warwick Business School) is giving a public lecture at the University of Auckland on "Culture, Creativity and Growth: Why the Arts matter."

Where: Owen G. Glenn Building lecture theatre 092, Grafton Road, University of Auckland.
When: Monday 7th December, 6pm.

See more: http://www.creativethinkingproject.org/jonothan-neelands-fellow/

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Book lover

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"The deep/Moans round with many voices"

                              Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die. 
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides, and though 
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are:
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.

From Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses," l. 56-60, in Three Victorian Poets, ed. Jane Ogborn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Annual ballet concert

I know this is nothing to do with Middle English, but whatever :D 

Come along to see my twinkies (dancing Friday/Saturday) and Isabel being the Wicked Witch of the West. "How about a little fire, scarecrow?"

Remembrance Sunday

Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
That men call age; and those who would have been,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.

Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.
Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
And nobleness walks in our ways again;
And we have come into our heritage.

Rupert Brooke, "The Dead," in In Flanders Fields and Other Poems of the First World War, edited by Brian Busby (London: Arcturus Publishing, 2005), 15.

Where did the mystery plays come from?

The short answer is... nobody knows.

The long answer is... very long indeed!

One branch of scholarship suggests that the mystery plays had a strong didactic element - that they were, alongside the churches’ stained glass windows, the means of teaching the illiterate masses their faith. Robert Huntingdon Fletcher’s take on medieval congregations and the development of the mystery plays is gloriously patronising and quite startlingly simplistic:

We must try in the first place to realize clearly the conditions under which the church service, the mass, was conducted during all the medieval centuries. We should picture to ourselves congregations of persons for the most part grossly ignorant, of unquestioning though very superficial faith, and of emotions easily aroused to fever heat. Of the Latin words of the service they understood nothing; and of the Bible story they had only a very general impression. 

(Robert Huntingdon Fletcher, A History of English Literature (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1916), accessed at http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/medievaldrama.htm.)

For such poor ignorami it was necessary “that the service [the Mass] should be given a strongly spectacular and emotional character,” which led slowly but inevitably to “the process of dramatizing the services.” Two very common forms of liturgical drama were Easter sepulchures (the church crucifix, after it had been venerated on Good Friday, would be 'buried' beneath the altar to symbolise Christ's death, then 'resurrected' on Easter morning and restored to its rightful place, either above the altar or on the rood screen) and the Quem Quaeritis trope (this was a dramatisation of the angel's speech to the three Marys at the empty tomb - 'Quem Quaeritis' means 'whom do you seek?'). Parts of the Christmas liturgy were also dramatised, but the Easter ceremonies were the main ones.

These dramatisations of the liturgy, says Fletcher, morphed gradually into the complete vernacular cycle of Bible stories when “the people... ceased to be patient with the unintelligble Latin." Originally also part of the liturgy and performed inside the churches, eventually

the churches began to seem too small and inconvenient, the excited audiences forgot the proper reverence, and the performances were transferred to the churchyard, and then, when the gravestones proved troublesome, to the market place, the village-green, or any convenient field. [...] Gradually, too, the priests lost their hold even on the plays themselves; skilful actors from among the laymen began to take many of the parts; and at last in some towns the trade-guilds, or unions of the various handicrafts, which had secured control of the town governments, assumed entire charge.

This evolutionary approach, very popular in the early to mid twentieth century, is today seen as somewhat outdated, although it lives on in popular culture (i.e. Wikipedia entries). And Fletcher's over-simplistic take on medieval drama (published in 1916) is, worryingly, still used by the Luminarium website as a general introduction to medieval plays.

Most scholars now suggest that liturgical and vernacular drama developed separately but in tandem, each influenced by the other but each with its own particular purpose and function. Although both were forms of worship, liturgical drama belonged to the church and the mystery plays to the city. The structure of each reflects this. Liturgical drama used only the ecclesiastical Latin and was played by the church hierarchy; suiting the enclosed, sacred space of the church, it was highly ritualised and fairly static. The vernacular mystery plays, whose cast and playing space was the entire city, had far greater scope for colour, movement and theatrical energy. 

And why were the plays called mystery plays? No one really knows that either, but here are the main theories:

• In Latin - the language of the church - mysterium meant "mystical or religious truth" (OED Online: mystery, n.1). Because religious truths were a main focus of the plays, the Latin may have been anglicized to mystery and associated with the plays. 

• There is a very similar Latin word, misterium, which originally meant "duty, service, office" (OED Online: mystery, n.2), but which by the Middle Ages meant "occupation, trade" (ibid) in association with the craft guilds. Since the guilds were the primary producers of the plays, this may be why the plays became known as mystery plays. 
  

 Which is correct? Take your pick!

Mystery plays were not uniquely English; they were widespread throughout Europe. The four main English cycles are those from are York, Chester, Wakefield, and the so-called N-Town; three Cornish plays also survive. On the continent, France, Germany, Spain and Italy all had their own plays.

Bonfire Night

The Gunpowder Plotters, via

Remember, remember, the fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason, and plot.
I see no reason 
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

These are the first lines of an old English folk ballad commemorating the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, when English Catholics famously tried to blow up the Protestant King James I and the Houses of Parliament. Also famously (or infamously), Guy Fawkes was caught lighting the fuse to the gunpowder, which was the end of the plot and also (eventually, after chase, capture and torture) of Guy (or Guido, as he was also known) and the other Gunpowder Conspirators.  

The Protestants were (and continued to be) highly gleeful about the failure of the plot and the conspirators' ignominious ends. The rest of the above rhyme, which dates from the latter half of the nineteenth century, runs

Guy Fawkes and his companions
Did the scheme contrive,
To blow the King and Parliament
All up alive.
Threescore barrels, laid below,
To prove old England's overthrow.
But, by God's providence, him they catch,
With a dark lantern, lighting a match!
A stick and a stage
For King James's sake!
If you won't give me one,
I'll take two,
The better for me,
And the worse for you.
A rope, a rope, to hang the Pope,
A penn'orth of cheese to choke him,
A pint of beer to wash it down,
And a jolly good fire to burn him.
Holloa, boys! holloa, boys! make the bells ring!
Holloa boys! holloa, boys! God save the King!
Hip, hip, hooor-r-r-ray! 

via http://www.potw.org/archive/potw405.html


Today most people only remember the first few lines, just as they remember Bonfire Night only for the fireworks, forgetting the bitter political and religious struggles which spawned it.

The last third of Jessie Child's book God's Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England deals with the Gunpowder Plot, a thorough and scrupulous account of the conspiracy from a Catholic perspective. Like the rest of the book, it is fair, just and unsentimental. Well worth a read!

Here is poor old Guy Fawkes laying the gunpowder:

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being tortured on the rack:

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and finally being hung, drawn and quartered:

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Guy Fawkes was from York; he was baptised here in April 1570, in St Michael le Belfrey, which is in High Petergate, right next door to the Minster. Alas, I neglected take a picture of the whole church while I was in York, but here is a very nice one of its doors:

Was the baby Guy carried through these doors on his way to baptism?

Across the street is a row of houses, one of which claims to be his birthplace:

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But there are at least two other buildings in York claiming the same thing!
 

All Souls' Day

Pleasington Priory, Lancashire

Dies irae, dies illa,
Solvet saeclum in favilla,
Teste David cum Sibylla.

Quantus tremor est futurus,
Quando judex est venturus,
Cuncta stricte discussurus!

Tuba mirum spargens sonum
Per sepulchra regionum,
Coget omnes ante thronum.

Mors stupebit et natura,
Cum resurget creatura,
Judicanti responsura.

Liber scriptus proferetur,
In quo totum continetur,
Unde mundus judicetur.

Judex ergo cum sedebit,
Quidquid latet, apparebit:
Nil inultum remanebit.

Quid sum miser tunc dicturus?
Quem patronum rogaturus?
Cum vix justus sit securus.

Rex tremendae majestatis,
Qui salvandos salvas gratis,
Salva me fons pietas.

Recordare, Jesu pie,
Quod sum causa tuae viae,
Ne me perdas illa die.

Quarens me, sedisti lassus,
Redemisti crucem passus:
Tantus labor non sit cassus.

Juste judex ultionis,
Donum fac remissionis,
Ante diem rationis.

Ingemisco tamquam reus:
Culpa rubet vultus meus:
Supplicanti parce Deus.

Qui Mariam absolvisti,
Et latronem exaudisti,
Mihi quoque spem dedisti.

Preces meae non sunt dignae;
Sed tu bonus fac benigne,
Ne perenni cremer igne.

Inter oves locum praesta,
Et ab haedis me sequestra,
Statuens in parte dextra.

Confutatis maledictis,
Flammis acribus addictis,
Voca me cum benedictis.

Ora supplex et acclinis,
Cor contritum quasi cinis:
Gere curam mei finis.

Lacrymosa dies illa,
Qua resurget ex favilla
Judicandus homo reus.

Huic ergo parce Deus:
Pie Jesu Domine,
Dona eis requiem. Amen.

Sequence from the Mass of All Souls.

All Saints' Day

The East Window of All Saints Pavement, York (19th century) - see key below

Gaudeamus omnes in Domino, diem festum celebrantes sub honore Sanctorum omnium: de quorum solemnitate gaudent Angeli, et collaudent Filium Dei. Exsultate, justi, in Domino: rectos decet collaudatio.

Introit of the Mass of All Saints


York has two churches named All Saints - one in North Street and one on the Pavement. Both have beautiful stained glass but that of All Saints North Street is particularly famous, mainly because of the Pricke of Conscience Window and the Corporal Acts of Mercy Window, but also because of the Great East Window (also known as the Blackburn Window, after its donors) and the Nine Orders of Angels Window:

The Nine Orders of Angels Window (c.1410-20) in All Saints North Street, York

 (The nine orders, or choirs, are angels, archangels, thrones, dominations, principalities, powers, virtues, cherubim and seraphim.)

 

This panel shows a man wearing medieval spectacles! This is very unusual (and very uncomfortable they look too...)

Key to the All Saints Pavement East Window:

Moses, Abraham, Noah                            Risen Christ             St Lawrence, St Agnes, St Stephen

Isiah(?), St David, John the Baptist  Mary Magdalene, BVM, St John   St Paul, St Peter, St Andrew

St Catherine, St Margaret               St Augustine, St Ambrose       St Hieronymus, St Benedict

Aidan, Wilfrid, Paulinus          Oswald, Alban, St George       V. Bede, William of York, St Cuthbert 

The nine saints in the bottom row were popular English saints throughout the Middle Ages, and (apart from St George, who despite being England's patron saint from the very early Middle Ages never set foot on this damp and foggy island) all have close links with Yorkshire or York in particular.