When modern scholars seek to describe human behaviour theatrical metaphors are, it seems, rarely far from their thoughts. Social anthropologists now talk comfortably of ‘social dramas’ and ‘cultural performance’, psychoanalysts of ‘the family drama’ and ‘the primal scene’, literary theorists of the ‘performativity’ of texts. Academia collectively seems to have belatedly come around to thinking, with Jacques in As You Like It, that ‘All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players’. This ‘performative turn’ in cultural criticism has created both opportunities and obstacles for those of us who study early drama as an end in itself. The opportunities lie in the wider array of critical and theoretical tools now available with which we can analyse the plays; the obstacles in the fact that we need to be careful when we talk across disciplines and historical periods about what exactly we mean when we use crucial terms such as ‘theatre’, ‘stage’, ‘actor’, or ‘performance’. Each of these words means different things to different people, and each has changed its meaning or implications in the five or six hundred years between the heyday of medieval drama and the present. Very different ideas about what constitutes a performance or by what criteria it might reasonably be assessed can be concealed beneath the apparent consensus of a common vocabulary.

In one sense the idea that all the world is a stage would have made perfect sense to a resident of fifteenth-century England. In a society without purpose-built playhouses, drama could, and often did, happen almost anywhere, turning city streets, inn-yards, churches or open fields into temporary stages for the purposes of a performance. As Meg Twycross’s chapter demonstrates, ‘theatre’ did not wait for audiences to come to it, but rather went directly to them, to villages and towns, rural manor houses and the London Inns of Court, settling readily into the public and private spaces that it temporarily inhabited and using the social and cultural meanings already encoded in them to inform and enhance its own effects.

The predominance of East Anglia over all other regional theatrical traditions in late medieval England, as evidenced by the sheer number of recorded performances and by the variety of associated play texts, has been apparent since the time of Chambers. This fact, however, has ordinarily been obscured by the critical and historical attention (not undeserved) lavished upon the great civic cycle plays that flourished elsewhere in the country. Chambers, drawing together ‘Representations of mediaeval plays’ in Appendix W to his monumental The Mediaeval Stage (33, vol. 11, pp. 329–406), listed all known towns and villages sponsoring or partaking in some kind of dramatic performance. Forty-eight of his total of 127 locations, spread over thirtyfour counties of England, Ireland and Scotland – that is, nearly forty per cent – were located in the four counties, or parts of counties, that comprised East Anglia. More recent scholarship has of course identified many other such theatrically inclined towns and villages since Chambers compiled his data over a century ago, and the total for East Anglia, now easily double or triple the number he turned up, simply reaffirms its primary position (307). Chambers himself puzzled over his figures, noting that although ‘a vigorous and widespread dramatic activity throughout the length and breadth of the land … naturally finds its fullest scope in the annually repeated performances of several amongst the greater cities, yet it is curious to observe in what insignificant villages it was from time to time found possible to organize plays’ (33, vol. 11, p. 109).

Almost certainly the most anthologised of all medieval English dramatic pieces is the so-called Second Shepherds' Play, containing the double story of Mak the sheep-stealer and the visit of the shepherds to Bethlehem. Through this public exposure, not only the play but the ‘name’ of the author also has become familiar – ‘The Wakefield Master’. Not everyone who knows of the Second Shepherds', however, will automatically connect it with the thirty-two short plays (better called ‘pageants’) that together make up the Towneley manuscript, or realise that it is not so much the ‘second’ as an alternative Shepherds’ pageant: Alia eorundem (Another of the same). Even knowing the relationship between the pageant, the Wakefield Master and the Towneley manuscript does not, however, take you very far; why, for example Wakefield Master, but Towneley Mysteries or Plays – the titles of the earliest editions?

‘Wakefield’ refers to the industrial town in what used to be known as the West Riding of Yorkshire. In the Middle Ages, Wakefield was the centre of the extensive manor of Wakefield, and it later became the county town of the West Riding. Since early in this century it has been claimed, with varying degrees of certainty, as the original home and place of performance of this series of pageants (113, p. xxxv). As the York play was to York, so, it was said, the Towneley pageants were to Wakefield. The name ‘Wakefield Master’ was hence created as a convenient reference name for the anonymous author of a strikingly original group of pageants within the collection.

Medieval theatre is unlike the English drama of any later period in that it lacks a continuous or nearly continuous tradition of performance. All modern productions of medieval plays are (or should be) experimental, therefore, either in attempting to rediscover the original staging and production methods of the play one is producing, or in trying to find modern ‘equivalents’ to those methods.

Beginnings

After performance of plays on traditional religious subjects was forbidden by Queen Elizabeth I's Privy Council, attempts at revival gradually became impossible, even in remote areas. Increasing censorship, combined in some areas with puritan prejudice against drama of any sort, tended towards confining the theatre to the few professional companies who enjoyed royal protection, so that large-scale amateur productions of non-cycle plays also ceased to be possible, although some morality plays performed by professionals survived until Shakespeare's time. Thus began a long eclipse which did not end until about 1900, when antiquarian interest and scholarly curiosity about ‘pre-Shakespearean’ drama led to a few revivals. Even so, most early scholars studying medieval drama had probably never seen a performance of any medieval English play.

Among the genres of early dramatic writing, the saint's play is paradoxically both one of the most interesting and circumscribed. Part of its interest resides in its bifurcated focus, suggested by Mary del Villar's definition of the genre as, ‘a play that has a saint as its protagonist or a miracle as its main action’ (393, p. 84). Its dramatisation of the lives (or aspects of lives) of saints, makes it one of the last manifestations of a once strong and mostly non-dramatic tradition of hagiographical literature, and provides models for later theatrical writing that focus on exemplary biography. Its other principal feature, the staging of miracle, though sometimes effected through performance alone, often involves quite remarkable stage technology that endows this genre of drama with considerable interest for historians of early stage practice. The description of the genre as circumscribed simply reflects the fact that there are few examples of it extant, as the Reformation put a full stop to plays that dramatised the lives of recognised saints, though the tradition can be seen as continuing in the dramatic representations of other biblical figures in similar terms, as in Godly Queen Hester (1525–9) and Thomas Garter's Virtuous and Godly Susanna (1563–9).

It is subject matter rather than form that defines this particular category as it embraces a range of early dramatic forms, from liturgical drama to moral interlude. In the course of this discussion an attempt will be made to discern what common ground there is in this drama that might help to establish an idea of the genre, and a number of characteristic preoccupations will be identified and discussed, but these are based on the small number of extant plays and can only have conjectural application to the genre as a whole.

In 1955, two books on early English drama were published. One, Hardin Craig's English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages (36), was thought to be the summation of all that could be known about the subject. The second, F. M. Salter's Medieval Drama in Chester (241), struck off in an entirely new direction. Salter's fresh approach to external evidence for the drama – that is, not the play texts themselves, but evidence for play production and dramatic activity in municipal and guild records – coupled both with new scholarly editions of all the surviving play texts and with modern productions of these plays, have, fifty years later, revolutionised our understanding of dramaturgy from the late fourteenth century to the late sixteenth century. The fruits of this new understanding are reflected in the essays that follow, the majority of which are naturally concerned, in the main, with the surviving canon of medieval English dramatic texts. This introduction is intended to outline the religious and social context in which that drama had its being.

The beginnings

Although intensive research over the last few decades has clarified much about late medieval drama in Britain and Ireland, its origins and relationship to the liturgical mimetic ceremonies that preceded it and to the entertainment patterns of classical antiquity remain an area of scholarly uncertainty and contention. The old theories argued an evolution along Darwinian lines from mimetic tropes associated with the Mass, to representational Latin plays on religious themes, to a vernacular religious drama performed by the laity that became increasingly secularised until it finally yielded to the polemic drama of the sixteenth century. Such theories will not stand in the face of our increasingly sophisticated understanding of western medieval culture and the cross currents of the politics and theology of the western Church.

As research advances, the old familiar and traditional boxes in which critics have tried to contain the resisting diversity of much late medieval English drama have come to look increasingly unequal to the task. Terms like ‘Corpus Christi plays’ or ‘cycle plays’, once thought useful generic labels, now seem less so. Of course, the perceived need for such pigeon-holing has a long pedigree. Whoever wrote ‘The plaie called Corpus Christi’ on the first page of the play manuscript that concerns this chapter, British Library MS Cotton Vespasian D. viii, is the earliest known member of this critical family tree. He would hardly have foreseen that his sixteenth-century attempt to sum up the plays in front of him and reduce them to a generic order that he at least found satisfactory would have provided the title for one of the most successful studies of medieval drama in recent years, a study whose equally unforeseen consequence has been the perpetuation of some homogenised ways of thinking about what a ‘Corpus Christi cycle’ might be thought to be (168). The fact is, however, that the plays of Cotton Vespasian D. viii are not tidily compliant, and resist the totalising, one-size-fits-all project that the idea of a ‘Corpus Christi cycle’ has over the years risked becoming. Their resistance strikes at a number of the most basic of the old assumptions. There is no evidence that these plays ever had anything to do with Corpus Christi, at least not in the most fundamental sense of their having been performed then; on the contrary, some were originally intended for performance on a Sunday.

In chapter 12 of the book of Exodus, God's final vengeance upon the Egyptians for the enslavement of the children of Israel is the death of the firstborn. Called upon to mention the incident in the pageant of Moses and Pharaoh, a writer in medieval York chose to substitute ‘grete pestelence’ for the biblical episode. This was a striking alteration to the canonical source, for in later medieval England ‘the grete pestelence’ had come to be the customary way of referring to the Black Death of 1348–9. Upon hearing the grim words, the tyrannous and verbose Rex Pharaoh is immediately deflated, capitulates and orders the release of the Israelites – in performance, a moment of chill stasis after the pell-mell black comedy with which the reports of the preceding plagues of Egypt would probably have been presented. When the pageant was new, this may also have been a moment of remembrance for survivors of the Black Death and those born in the succeeding generation, for the York Hosiers' pageant of Moses and Pharaoh was probably composed when the memory of this, the most destructive of all the plague's visitations, was still a living memory. The earliest possible documentary reference to the existence of a cycle of Corpus Christi pageants presented by the crafts of York dates to 1377, though our extant copy of Moses and Pharaoh was not set down until much later.

Most Chinese are extremely proud of their long and continuous historical civilization, which some claim extends for five thousand years. But for much of the twentieth century, Chinese revolutionaries had a very ambivalent and mostly negative view of these millennia, believing that they produced a slavish and feudal mentality. The vicissitudes of modern historical consciousness in China closely reflect the kind of nation and society that regimes and intellectuals battled over in their search for a new China and an identity for the Chinese people. In other words, if we want to understand how Chinese leaders and people see their society and their role in the world, we need to consider their changing views of history. For much of the last hundred years, one of the central historical questions that has preoccupied scholars and statesmen seeking to make sense of China's present relates to the transition from a Confucian, imperial society to a modern nation-state. In contrast to many other non-Western societies, imperial China possessed several characteristics that would facilitate this transition - as well as several that would hinder it. The former included the existence of a unified bureaucratic state, a politicized gentry elite with a sense of societal responsibility, a relatively open society largely free of ascriptive roles, and a highly developed preindustrial economy and entrepreneurial expertise.

Ethnic identity is never static; nor is it a consistent social category. This very fluidity accounts for the presence of competing postures within a community. The internal conflict between individuals as private selves and as members of groups can result in the expansion, however momentary, of group affiliation and consciousness. Left unchecked, the assertion of group identities, especially ethnic identities, can tear a nation-state apart. In contemporary China, the central government actively promotes the nation-state as the primary source of emotional transference and personal identification. In making the nation the paramount reality the state hopes to subsume alternative, potentially competing forms of identity under the umbrella of nationalism. The Chinese state has demonstrated a willingness to use severe negative sanctions on those who challenge its authority in an effort to buttress national unity at the expense of ethnic identity. The origins, meanings and expressions of Chinese ethnicity are intertwined with the central government's ethnic policies that, in so many ways, are in conflict with ethnic identity. The dichotomy arises from pursuing cultural models that are anchored in the contradictory principles of multi-culturalism and mono-culturalism. These competing ideals are constantly demonstrated in the state's policies toward ethnic minorities in China. Striving to uphold these two ideals results in the promotion of certain policies that support an ethnic minority's interests while at the same time implementing policies that undermine minority cultural values. This chapter will examine each of these models in turn.

A recent estimate put the number of native speakers of Chinese globally at 1,110 million in 1995, with English a distant second at 372 million; more significantly, the same estimate put the number of native speakers of Chinese aged 15-24 in 2050 at 166 million, and the number of speakers of English at 65 million, after Hindi/Urdu (73.7 million) and Arabic (72.2 million). These statistics derive from the fact that Chinese is the official language of the most populous country on earth - China, with a population of 1,300 million in 2006 - and is also used by overseas Chinese communities scattered extensively around the world, with a total population estimated to be in the vicinity of 30-40 million. What we know as Chinese, however, comprises dozens or hundreds of mutually unintelligible dialects. These fall into nine major groups, each of which in turn consists of a number of subgroups. The names of the major groups of Chinese dialects, their populations and geographical distribution in China are presented in Table 1. As Table 1 shows, Mandarin is by far the largest group of Chinese dialects in terms of population and geographical distribution. All of the other dialects apart from Jin - notably Wu, Cantonese, Min and Hakka - are often referred to as Southern dialects because they are mostly spoken in areas south of the Yangtze River. The origin and path of evolvement of the Chinese dialects is currently a field of robust research in historical linguistics and dialectology, and there are still many unresolved issues and unanswered questions.

This chapter discusses the rituals and beliefs of the Han Chinese majority, their local communities, indigenous popular religious sects, Daoism and Buddhism, as well as Roman Catholic and Protestant Christianity. After many years of suppression, since the 1980s these traditions have been revived in many areas of the country, community festivals in honour of local gods are again being carried out, Daoist and Buddhist clergy are once again being ordained, and there are more Protestant and Roman Catholic Christians than ever before. As for Confucianism, its ethical principles permeated late traditional Chinese culture, and have had considerable influence on the beliefs and values of the practitioners of other religious traditions and on the veneration of ancestors by families and lineages. In Taiwan there are still temples dedicated to Confucius, and some popular sects for which he is the chief deity, but during much of the twentieth century he was attacked on the Mainland as a symbol of all that was out-moded and backward. In recent decades, however, there has been an attempt by some intellectuals in China to rediscover his teachings, and the shrine and tomb in his hometown in Shandong Province have been restored. Before we explore these religions, however, a few words should be said about Islam in China. Muslim merchants reached China by both land and sea by the late seventh century, and eventually settled in many parts of the country, mostly in the northwest.

For some people, Confucianism, a philosophy that looks to a mythical past as an ideal for inspiration, has become obsolete as societies historically under Confucian influence modernize. However, reports of the death of Confucianism are premature. While it has been eclipsed by Western thought and practice for significant periods, Confucianism has undergone a revival in many East Asian societies in the last few decades. Many people continue to identify Confucianism as the mainstream, even the definitive core, of Chinese culture. Confucianism has played many different, sometimes contradictory, roles in modernization, which is understood here as social progress through technological advancement, new modes of production, distribution and exchange for sustained economic growth, new social differentiation and rationalized organizations, increased social mobility, equality, and political participation in sovereign nation-states.