Merchant Hall Moralities and the Early Tudor State

• In Event: Medieval Drama and Its Early Modern Afterlives

Abstract

This paper discusses the surge of popularity of the morality play in the turbulent milieu of early Tudor London. Plays such as Skelton’s Magnificence and the Rastell and Heywood production Gentleness and Nobility may have been performed in merchant halls like those of the Drapers’ Company, whose records note regular payments for professional players at their August election feast until 1541. Morality drama is still seen as flat and dull. However, to read these plays as feast days performances is to see how the sedimentation of universal concepts involved in the genre – especially its deployment of personified concepts localized in the body of an actor -- was mobilized to explore specific problems of governance and social order. These interludes appear above all as experimental, open-ended debates, engaging concerns of jurisdiction and corporate citizenship newly urgent to the city’s elite citizens as they worked to respond to the Crown’s centralizing demands.

Author

• Amy Appleford, Boston University