A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras

by Carol Symes

Medieval Arras was a thriving town on the frontier between the kingdom of France and the county of Flanders, and home to Europe's earliest surviving vernacular plays: The Play of St. Nicholas, The Courtly Lad of Arras, The Boy and the Blind Man, The Play of the Bower, and The Play about Robin and about Marion.

In A Common Stage, Carol Symes undertakes a cultural archeology of these artifacts, analyzing the processes by which a handful of entertainments were conceived, transmitted, received, and recorded during the thirteenth century. She then places the resulting scripts alongside other documented performances with which plays shared a common space and vocabulary: the crying of news, publication of law, preaching of sermons, telling of stories, celebration of liturgies, and arrangement of civic spectacles. She thereby shows how groups and individuals gained access to various means of publicity, participated in public life, and shaped public opinion. And she reveals that the theater of the Middle Ages was not merely a mirror of society but a social and political sphere, a vital site for the exchange of information and ideas, and a vibrant medium for debate, deliberation, and dispute.

The result is a book that closes the gap between the scattered textual remnants of medieval drama and the culture of performance from which that drama emerged. A Common Stage thus challenges the prevalent understanding of theater history while offering the first comprehensive history of a community often credited with the invention of French as a powerful literary language.

Genres: Nonfiction

344 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2007

About the author

Carol Symes is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She received the Ph.D from Harvard and became a member of Actors’ Equity in the same year. Fundamentally, her research focuses on histories of communication and transmission: the means by which people of the past exchanged ideas and information; and the processes by which artifacts and understandings of the past are transmitted to future generations.

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely amazing read. I may be a bit biased, since Symes was my thesis advisor, but there is no denying that she is a brilliant writer, and a phenomenal historian. She deconstructs prevailing notions, both within the general public and academia, about medieval theatre, especially in the Francophone world, and its relation with the common people, contemporary politics, religion, and day-to-day events. In the process, she runs the gamut from explaining the separation between church, abbey, and town jurisdictions and how those tensions are reflected in the dramatic literature, to the connections between the famous playwright/bard Adam de la Halle, eminent political figures of the time, and the campaigns/politics in Sicily and Italy. More importantly, she shows how all people, especially the common folk, interacted with each other, political powers, and their own sense of self through and with theatrical activities in various common forums: market, church, square, halls. Unlike in any other work I've ever read, Symes manages to be exhaustive in her research, clear in her explications, far-ranging in her connections and syntheses without reaching, and also captivating with her writing. A must read for anyone interested in medieval theatre, in the history of medieval Flanders/Artois area, in the idea of a public space and how it is used, or in just having a stimulating, fascinating, fun read.