Festive Enterprise: The Business of Drama in Medieval and Renaissance England

By Jill P. Ingram

Festive Enterprise reveals marketplace pressures at the heart of dramatic form in medieval and Renaissance drama.

In Festive Enterprise, Jill P. Ingram merges the history of economic thought with studies of theatricality and spectatorship to examine how English Renaissance plays employed forms and practices from medieval and traditional entertainments to signal the expectation of giving from their audiences. Resisting the conventional divide between medieval and Renaissance, Festive Enterprise takes a trans-Reformation view of dramaturgical strategies, which reflected the need to generate both income and audience assent. By analyzing a wide range of genres (such as civic ceremonial, mummings, interludes, scripted plays, and university drama) and a diverse range of venues (including great halls, city streets, the Inns of Court, and public playhouses), Ingram demonstrates how early moderns borrowed medieval money-gatherers’ techniques to signal communal obligations and rewards for charitable support of theatrical endeavors. Ingram shows that economics and drama cannot be considered as separate enterprises in the medieval and Renaissance periods. Rather, marketplace pressures were at the heart of dramatic form in medieval and Renaissance drama alike.

Festive Enterprise is an original study that traces how economic forces drove creativity in drama from medieval civic processions and guild cycle plays to the early Renaissance. It will appeal to scholars of medieval and early modern drama, theater historians, religious historians, scholars of Renaissance drama, and students in English literature, drama, and theater.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9780268109103

Jill P. Ingram

Jill P. Ingram is associate professor of English at Ohio University. She is the editor of the New Kittredge edition of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and author of Idioms of Self-Interest: Credit, Identity, and Property in English Renaissance Literature.

Book preview

Festive Enterprise

ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern

SERIES EDITORS: DAVID AERS, SARAH BECKWITH,

AND JAMES SIMPSON

RECENT TITLES IN THE SERIES

Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England, c. 1350–1600 (2016)

Ryan McDermott

Volition’s Face: Personification and the Will in

Renaissance Literature (2017)

Andrew Escobedo

Shadow and Substance: Eucharistic Controversy and English Drama across the Reformation Divide (2017)

Jay Zysk

Queen of Heaven: The Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin in Early Modern English Writing (2018)

Lilla Grindlay

Performance and Religion in Early Modern England: Stage, Cathedral, Wagon, Street (2019)

Matthew J. Smith

Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play (2019)

Julie Paulson

Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Modern Eras (2019)

Nancy Bradley Warren

Versions of Election: From Langland and Aquinas

to Calvin and Milton (2020)

David Aers

Fifteenth-Century Lives: Writing Sainthood in England (2020)

Karen A. Winstead

Festive Enterprise

The Business of Drama in Medieval

and Renaissance England

JILL P. INGRAM

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2021 by the University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020950366

ISBN: 978-0-268-10908-0 (Hardback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-10909-7 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-10911-0 (WebPDF)

ISBN: 978-0-268-10910-3 (Epub)

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

FOR CLAIRE AND LUCY

CONTENTS

FIGURES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book began its life with an interest in the lord of misrule as part of my doctoral work at the University of Virginia. I am grateful for those early discussions on the figure with Katharine Maus, Clare Kinney, and Gordon Braden, even as my dissertation left festivity behind. Following the lord of misrule to university drama years later, I learned from Kenneth Fincham, Peter McCullough, and Peter Lake of the resistance to festivity from early seventeenth-century evangelical forces. I am thankful for Lake’s generosity as respondent to my panel on Contextualizing Marprelate at the Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference in 2012. I also acknowledge most gratefully the help of Alan Nelson, who shared prepublication drafts of his REED: Inns of Court volume. Bradin Cormack’s insight into legal nuances within the Inns’ entertainments were a tremendous aid. Early drafts of chapters benefited greatly from faculty colloquia at Ohio University, the Newberry Library’s Center for Research in Festive Culture, and Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) annual meeting seminars. The SAA seminars especially fruitful were Redefining Theatre History (2011) directed by Susan Cerasano, and Re-theorizing Shakespearean Comedy (2012) led by Pamela Allen Brown and Kent Cartwright. Discussions with Joseph Navitsky on Marprelate enriched my chapter on Love’s Labour’s Lost, which also benefited from an interview with Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre director Dominic Dromgoole in 2009 during its production. I am grateful for librarians’ efficient assistance at the Folger Library and the Widener Library. Faculty Fellowship Leave at Ohio University and a grant from the Earhart Foundation allowed me productive research time. I want to thank students Henry Craver, Carly Campbell, and Michael Spalding for their research assistance.

My most eye-opening experiences with festive performances have occurred in Durham, England, where I was fortunate to participate in the SITM/REED-NE Colloquium at Durham University in July 2016, run expertly by Barbara Ravelhofer and John McKinnell. Conversations there with David Klausner and Gaspar Jakovac enriched my project. I am grateful for McKinnell’s help on intricacies of the boy bishop, shared in conversation in 2014, where I delivered a talk to the Department of English Studies at Durham. Feedback has improved this project through the years, especially that from Margie Ferguson, Caitlin Finlayson, Sarah Skwire, David Urban, Hillary Eklund, and Zach Long. Patrick Griffin has been an invaluable source of faith and professional advice at many turns. At Ohio University, Linda Rice is a beacon of goodwill, and I am blessed in her friendship. I am thankful for the friendship of Tania Meek, and my garage gym Crossfit team: Lauren Hill, Michelle Raines, Julie Owens, Misa Hata, and Tosh Hayes.

I would like to thank the external readers for University of Notre Dame Press whose advice for revision strengthened this project. I am indebted to the ReFormations series editors James Simpson, David Aers, and Sarah Beckwith for their cogent suggestions. Rachel Kindler was especially helpful in preparing the manuscript, and Stephen Little supervised the editorial process. I am grateful for Scott Barker’s eagle eye in copyediting. I thank Stephen Wrinn for his belief in the project.

Portions of this book appeared in earlier forms as articles in journals. Part of chapter 3 appeared as "‘You ha’done me a charitable office’: Autolycus and the Economics of Festivity in The Winter’s Tale," Renascence 64, no. 2 (2012). Part of chapter 5 appeared as Avant-garde Conformists and Student Revels at Oxford, 1607–88, Anglican and Episcopal History 80, no. 4 (2011). I thank the editors of those journals for permission to include previously published material here.

I thank Mom and Dad for their patient inquiries into the book’s progress, which helped keep me working. Glynn Ingram forgave me for missing family trips to Nashville to stay home and write. Kathryn Thompson’s gift of the pellet stove offered a motivational hearth through the final winter’s writing. Finally, the book would not have been completed without the encouraging heart of my husband, Robert Ingram. Years of observing his obsessive work ethic finally rubbed off. I am grateful too for my daughters’ support: Lucy’s energetic, insistent distractions offset by Claire’s independence offered the right balance of hush and clamor. My emotional patrons, my family buoyed me out past the tidal pull of procrastination. To them I say, For this relief, much thanks.

INTRODUCTION

Festive celebrations—devotional, calendrical, and recreational—animated English life from the thirteenth century onward. English festivity involved ceremonies and pastimes of either liturgical or customary significance, from Shrovetide feasts and village revels to saints’ plays. Festivity marked communal occasions: the installation of a mayor, a parish ale to raise funds, a guild procession to celebrate its patron saint, a monarch’s progress through a town, or St. Peter’s Eve bonfires. Participants enjoyed Corpus Christi Day processions, boy bishop ceremonies, misrule mock courts, Robin Hood games, pageant plays, and the like. The Reformation complicated that, for during the 1530s and 1540s, Henry VIII and Edward VI tried to suppress festive rituals associated with aspects of late medieval religious life.¹ Towns, guilds, and parishes had long cemented broad communal ties or strengthened small group loyalties at such events: the Henrician and Edwardian antifestive measures threatened to wipe away these older modes of public worship and expression. And yet, festive entertainments persisted, if often transformed.² Late sixteenth-century civic processions celebrated mayoral inaugurations instead of Corpus Christi Day, guilds shifted their patron saint observances on the calendar and renamed themselves, and banns criers Protestantized their town play themes. In both city and countryside, the older festive rituals were modified to serve many of the same social and civic ends they had done for centuries past.³ One of the most crucial of those ends was to excite donation and to gather money.

This book is about festivity and the theater. Previous studies of festive drama have made two broad arguments. First, some have highlighted the ways that the theater appropriated festive entertainments.⁴ Playwrights, for instance, penned scenes of sheepshearing festivals, lords of misrule, and morris dancers, scenes interpreted as compensation for lost traditional religious spectacle and ritual.⁵ Second, other scholars have found in the playwrights’ repurposing a commodification of the original communal festive experience. They assert that whereas medieval playing was devoid of commercial interests and was offered free of charge, early modern professional drama was profit-driven, with income from performances going to sharers in playing companies.⁶ Professional drama, we are assured, stripped festive events of their communal and charitable significance by staging them for profit in the marketplace.⁷ This book rejects both the compensation and commodification models, seeing instead a theatrical and a commercial continuum between medieval festive events and later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dramatic productions. The economic exchange at the heart of early medieval festive ritual was as significant in joining performer and donor as it would be in joining early modern actor with audience. Instead of an alienating, commodifying effect, many early modern plays registered instead—in their forms, themes, and dramaturgy—a sociable commerce familiar from medieval festive rituals. That commerce, even in the later, more centrally profit-driven marketplace, recalled communal obligations and rewards.

Festive Enterprise takes the developments from late medieval to early modern drama and places them against the backdrop of a changing society. Despite undeniable societal changes—the Reformation being the central, massive change that affected all others—there were deep continuities in drama and playgoing. The reason we find continuities lies in the shared practice of money-gathering. Plays needed to make money in the early modern theater just as they did in the centuries preceding them. York and Chester pageant plays had a commercial orientation because their guilds were taxed if they lost money.⁸ The shared economic goal affected their dramaturgy, and it is in tracing the development of dramaturgical devices salutary to money-gathering that this book is devoted. For only by discovering how playwrights shaped their plays so that audiences paid for them can we do justice to the process of change by which community-directed medieval festive drama became the product staged in London’s public playhouses in the late sixteenth century. I will concentrate on a few key questions: How did plays motivate audiences to value entertainments? What shape did that motivation take? What were the social repercussions of those efforts?

Many medieval festive entertainments were designed to gather money. They often served as village or parish fundraisers. Whether needing £3 to repair the church steeple, funds for players’ expenses, or money for a silver censer, parishes and villages deployed festivities as a dependable source of income.⁹ Religious, trade, and craft guilds hosted feasts and plays; villages produced May games, Robin Hood games, and ales. And larger municipalities took advantage of the great festivals of the summer season, such as Midsummer and Whitsun, to draw paying participants. The economics of festivity drew participants to moments of exchange, social and monetary, revealing an acceptance of a commercial ethos in medieval festive drama that continued through to the early modern stage. Medieval festive dramatic plots might have pilloried greed in the marketplace, but festive drama built a marketplace too. Those producing events took care to ensure their financial success: guilds required members to buy liveries for a procession, churchwardens charged for ale, village officials sold ribbons for entry to a fair, and town play producers sent fundraisers to nearby towns with banns. Medieval festive entertainments often depended on such purchases, just as early modern dramatic productions depended on entry fees. Economic pressures led organizers from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries to design festive entertainments with an eye toward motivating viewers and participants to help defray costs. That same economic imperative shaped dramatic structure.

The fundraising element of festivities is important because money-gathering shaped the events’ aesthetics, which in turn affected subsequent dramatic form. Fundraising was the purpose of many early parish and civic festivities, but the method of fundraising also structured them. Gatherers—often role-playing costumed characters—solicited donations from spectators and participants. When professional playhouses rose up in London in the late sixteenth century, echoes of the older gathering rituals remained: in plotlines, in language concerning charity, in epilogues soliciting applause for longer theater runs, in lists of donors scripted into university plays, and in individual entrepreneurial schemes. To ignore the existence of money-gathering remnants is to miss a fundamental semiotic means through which playwrights mobilized their audiences. Late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century plays carry language from late medieval money-gathering rituals: the interaction relying on audience buy-in to produce the events themselves. Medieval festive entertainments, folk and religious, often sprang from ceremonial rituals with their own set of signs, from fertility symbols in Maypole ceremonies to the body of Christ in Corpus Christi processions. Thus festive entertainments trafficked in coded utterances generally, a symbology to which participants and viewers alike were accustomed. Often gatherers used coded objects or costumes to signal solicitations, such as the Robin Hood outfit or the morris dancer’s ladle into which donors dropped their pence. Early modern audiences inherited a sensitivity to festive symbol, recognizing the festive forms passed down. When Thomas Nashe penned a ladle-gathering scene in his play Summer’s Last Will and Testament for Archbishop Whitgift’s 1592 Croydon entertainment, for example, Whitgift and the assembled audience would not have been dumbfounded by the reference.¹⁰ Such a theatrical vocabulary of the remnants of gathering rituals has not been set out explicitly. To shine a light on a gathering-inflected aesthetic—a festive economics of form—is to illuminate the influence of commercial ambition on dramatic artistic expression. What the contours of that influence show is that festive drama was neither constituted by nor determinate of commercial relationships. Instead it served as a conduit for participants’ expression of their desires and concerns. Producers needed spectator support, and the cultural marketplace responded, positively or negatively. In other words, paying audiences determined the value of dramatic entertainments.

Entertainers’ pursuit of audience support can be situated within the historiography of markets generally across the medieval and early modern periods. Individual agents within those markets conventionally have been viewed through either a Marxist or a classical liberal theoretical lens: Marxists stress exploitative property relations and class conflict; classical liberals stress markets’ liberating potential. The history of festive entertainments requires joining together both approaches, as commercial conflicts drove marketing innovations often beneficial to participants. Entertainers navigating nascent commercial urban environments that privileged burgess rights, for example, could find markets and fairs conducive to small-scale efforts at making a livelihood.¹¹ Twelfth- and thirteenth-century marketing transformations, described by R. H. Britnell, encouraged new patterns of commerce and itinerant marketing.¹² This was the case despite the fact that such markets were often developed by property owners and local governments to serve their own interests. In other words, the story is not one of unbridled exploitation. According to Rodney Hilton, the leading social forces in medieval peasant movements were those most in contact with the market.¹³ Marketplace pressures and interactions often brought the advantaged and disadvantaged together into negotiations. Entertainers—often at the disadvantaged side of the scale—worked creatively to gain advantage, aided by marketplace dynamics that necessitated collaboration.

Like markets, festive events often served the economic interests of propertied and moneyed groups, whether ecclesiastical or civic, such as powerful trade guilds. Some claimed that market competition among urban guilds exacerbated inequality, but Gervase Rosser’s research on the 30,000 guilds operating in England between 1350 and 1550 shows that the pressures of commercialized society actually led to new levels of association and cooperation.¹⁴ What held for guild productions, such as Corpus Christi plays and processions, held true for festive entertainments more generally: requirements for sociability only intensified during the early modern period, when the credit-driven society became even more dependent on networks of trust.¹⁵ The range of associational strategies employed by late medieval and early modern festive entertainers to access those networks also reveals a significant scope for agency. The provisional, improvisatory efforts amateur actors employed, for instance, proved perfectly suited to a marketplace audience. By insinuating themselves into networks of association, producers of festive drama pitched messages to smaller publics.¹⁶ Fragmented and varied, these different publics were invited to respond to festivity according to their particular concerns.

To study the modes of festive enterprise that persist through the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries is to chart appeals to these various publics. It is also to follow the creative ways in which such messages were pitched. Since licensing and censorship exigencies (both in vagabond laws against itinerant entertainers and in the censorship of plays) placed controls on entertainers and their messages, festive utterances worked to find fissures in those controls. Festivity reflected a creativity at the heart of the culture: the creativity was spurred, largely, by economic motivation. Form as reflective of culture has lain at the center of festive culture scholarship since its inception.¹⁷ Anthropologically informed literary treatments of festivity, for instance, have highlighted ways in which formal elements reflected calendrical customs or expressed political discontent.¹⁸ Refined formal analysis from scholars of elite festivities—such as the royal entry, civic pageantry, and court masques—have linked symbolic imagery with ritual function.¹⁹ Literary critics have attended more carefully to festive form as a response to historians’ more detailed analysis of festive culture.²⁰ Yet few have investigated the formal or aesthetic effects on late medieval drama of economic exigencies. Entertainers often faced contested circumstances, whether it was guild precedence in a procession, civic approval for a town play, or ecclesiastical distrust of idolatry. To examine festive forms is to reveal an artistic mechanism with which entertainers navigated a world of economic, political, and ecclesiastical struggles for power.

Whereas some historians, such as Eamon Duffy, have minimized the effect of networks of power upon popular festivity, others have recognized their influence. Leah Marcus’s The Politics of Mirth (1986), for instance, highlights royal and ecclesiastical advocacy of Stuart public mirth as a tool of official policy.²¹ The entertainments I have featured in Festive Enterprise operate within power networks, yet most often without directly expressing or rejecting any official policy. Most evade, in fact, a functionalist reading that finds a perfect correspondence between social structure and a unifying, expressive form, as Sarah Beckwith has argued with regard to liturgical drama.²² Rather, festivity is used to negotiate nuances of social status, to identify sources of income, and to pursue property rights and liberties among different groups, often groups in the same local community. Fifteenth-century mummings gave London burghers a place to stage political advice to the mayor; in 1478, Bristol Weavers sought favor from sheriffs with festive house visits; and early sixteenth-century performances of the Digby Mary Magdalene play brought a commercial ethos—staging the value of maritime business and the benefits of inherited property—to a devotional genre. Early seventeenth-century London public theater playwrights responded to evangelical hostility that at times threatened their livelihood by crafting festive scenes that drew on late medieval liturgy without placing them too fully in the religious register.²³ James Simpson’s analysis of Shakespeare’s careful deployment of potentially idolatrous material in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest reveals formal innovations that allayed fears of the performance of sacramental magic.²⁴ Simpson’s is a story of the gradual constriction of theatrical play, but Festive Enterprise traces a narrative of creativity within those constrictions. That creativity is most visible in the subtleties of formal adjustments required to negotiate slippery social and political networks.

Much of the New Economic Criticism focuses not on form, but instead on the explicit content of plays and poems as expressing attitudes toward market conditions. Those looking at economic matters while also attending to aesthetics often draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of a symbolic market when examining the interrelation of commercial and artistic endeavors. These contributions have complicated the history of economic thought in interesting ways.²⁵ Yet the limitation of these approaches is to make symbolic what is more fundamentally material: practical concerns of making the business of playing profitable in the marketplace of theater.

The enterprise foregrounded in this book’s title addresses those practical concerns. The noun enterprise denotes a bold or difficult . . . undertaking, as financier Philip Henslowe or James and Richard Burbage could attest of their playhouse ventures in late sixteenth-century London.²⁶ Bold as it was, the business of playmaking was no different from many other business endeavors facing uncertainty in the growing economy at the time, having to contend with the influx of foreign artisans, inflation, and periodic outbursts of plague.²⁷ Enterprise was risky but it could bring reward. Writers attached this profiteering notion to enterprise in treatises on navigation and merchant travel, such as Richard Eden’s 1553 translation of Sebastian Munster’s Cosmography, which details how worldly riches are obtained as the rewarde of noble and honeste enterpryses.²⁸

Enterprise as a transitive verb, however, carried a more clearly martial sense. In its early use, one would enterprise upon an enemy, or enterprise a battle, as when Trystram enterprysed the bataylle to fight for the trewage of Cornwayl in Caxton’s 1485 translation of Malory’s Morte Darthur.²⁹ The verb implied physical engagement, with an added meaning to take on, tackle.³⁰ Festive gatherers were not soldiers, but their face-to-face physical solicitations, the directives for processors on Corpus Christi Day, or the efforts of pageant putters might resonate in this material context. Both those who enterprised and those who created enterprises faced similarly unsteady economic environments. John Lydgate wrote his 1430 mumming for London Mercers amidst a controversy over foreign workers: foreigners reviled as unfair competition for guild members’ jobs, for example. The intransitive enterprise—meaning to make an attempt, or to work toward a goal—perhaps best joins the impetus of a Lydgate with the drive of a Shakespeare.³¹ Enterprise signified persistence, and it signaled a belief that economic actors could manage the vicissitudes of the market. It was the very changeability of economic forces and factors, not their stability, that drove the opportunism that is partly the story of this book. Festive gatherers had to procure a yes where onlookers might have thought no. Festive enterprise means the creative ways that producers of festive entertainments, for hundreds of years leading up to and through the opening of London’s public playhouses, attempted and worked to finance their productions. A will to improvisation drove those early efforts, serving as a model for later innovators seeking income for their own enterprises.

Many scholars have imagined profit-seeking, however, as a point on the far end of an ethical spectrum that stretched from communal to self-interested concerns. Keith Wrightson finds medieval economic culture antagonistic to individual economic freedom: medieval agents considered economic activity in terms of moral imperatives, and thus subordinated market activity to ethical considerations, in his view.³² Indeed moralizing, ethically based arguments against exploitative trading practices were rooted in medieval Scholastic arguments regarding just price and concern for the commonalty as against self-interest.³³ Some economic historians even contend that the moral economy of medieval England was essentially an antimarket ideology.³⁴ Yet late medieval market morality incorporated pragmatic financial concerns. As Joel Kaye has shown, medieval economic thought was sophisticated in adapting ideas to the changing realities of the marketplace.³⁵ Writers formulated the notion of a self-ordering market system through which equality resulted as a product of willed inequalities. Commentators such as Jean Buridan argued in the fourteenth century that the quest for personal advantage was the natural condition of just exchange.³⁶ Parish moneymaking strategies should be viewed within this context.

Indeed, critical approaches to religion and drama that identified income-generating practices within the Church as indicative of increasing secularization have been conclusively refuted by Paul Whitfield White and others.³⁷ As I hope to show in this book, plays often joined efforts of commerce with salvation, a pattern visible both in medieval festive productions and in festive scenes in later public theater. Many fundraising ventures offered believers spiritual benefits in exchange for charitable efforts at seasonal celebrations.³⁸ Almsgiving was a mode of promised expiation for daily sin, and festive entertainments were often extensions of liturgical practice.³⁹ Marchers in Rogation processions would bless crops in exchange for God’s mercy, monastic and morality plays staged heavenly returns for charitable activity, and pious motives attended many mimetic games sponsored by parish guilds.⁴⁰ Structurally aligned with the sacred, some pageantry patterned itself on earlier biblical models. When a city’s mayor and aldermen presented the sovereign with money or a gift during a royal progress, for instance, viewers witnessed a parallel with the Epiphany gift.⁴¹ The Feast of the Holy Innocents was a popular event in the medieval Church, in which the boy bishop led a procession of youths to the altar at the beginning of the service, celebrating the Innocents as examples of God’s saving grace.⁴² Early modern dramatists translated these benefits, and the attendant social grace conferred upon festive participants, who often solidified social ties at feasts or fairs, as an acceptance of festive commerce, either in the approval of the exploitative peddler of wares or the itinerant entertainer, both examples of stage versions of the festive gatherer. Public theater playwrights penned this social incorporation (and its opposite, the expulsion of the villainous fraud) to dramatize the entertainer’s debt to his audience. The ultimate arbiter of the festive player’s success was the spectator.

Patron approval was possible, however, only when patrons grasped the import of the performer’s festive expression. Successfully staging festive language—the gestural language of a morris dance, a ballad’s refrain, or a Lord Mayor’s Show’s procession of mythological figures—relied on the audience’s interpretive skill. That ability had been honed through drama’s roots in liturgical expression, which necessarily operated through sign, offered as a way to comprehend holy mystery. By appealing to that ability, writers offered spectators a sense of their own participation in creating meaning.⁴³ Festive language thus cast the spectator as the agent of meaning in the festive exchange.⁴⁴ Given such agency, audiences responded to moments of funding solicitation—charitable and hostile alike—with a sense of investment. Those solicitations, in medieval festive events or in epilogues on the early modern stage, created an immediacy between actor and audience. In such moments, early modern plays integrated the audience with the early modern performance rather than commodifying the experience.

Participants in medieval festive rituals may not have thought that they were agents in the performances they experienced. Yet their economic commitment to the events made those events possible. The nature of this commitment varied widely. Traditional processions and some pageants did not charge spectators: when St. Cuthbert’s banner was carried through Durham on Corpus Christi Day from the fifteenth century onward, for example, spontaneous donations were not expected.⁴⁵ Yet all occupations were required to process with their banners and their own lights, thus essentially paying their own way to participate in the celebration.⁴⁶ Durham residents were expected to pay for candles, torches, and banners, thus signaling—both symbolically and materially—their membership in the guild or corporation. With the Host carried through town, citizens and guild members were also sometimes obligated to money-gather for the procession and pageants. For other pageants in large towns, craft guilds often employed their own rent-gatherers responsible for