FULGENS & LUCRES
by Henry Medwall
a free live Zoom performance
Sunday 30 May 2021
in conjunction with
Stanford Renaissances Focal Group
post-show discussion with Greg Walker,
Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature
University of Edinburgh
by Henry Medwall
a free live Zoom performance
Sunday 30 May 2021
in conjunction with
Stanford Renaissances Focal Group
post-show discussion with Greg Walker,
Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature
University of Edinburgh
Henry Medwall’s late fifteenth-century play Fulgens and Lucres is a play of several firsts
The earliest secular play in English, the earliest English play to which we can assign a named author, and the earliest English play to feature a sub-plot, it inaugurates numerous formal aspects which develop over the sixteenth century into Shakespeare’s theatre and beyond
Yet Fulgens, with its rich deployment of performed debate, its imaginative reinterpretation of its classical setting, and its seemingly ad hoc composition – perhaps for performance at Lambeth Palace, as a two-part theatrical dessert to dinner and supper – is also the inheritor of traditions and practices developed in the literature of medieval Europe
At its center, Fulgens and Lucres foregrounds the choice of a woman (Lucres) over two suitors: one notable for virtue (Gayus), and one notable for lineage (Cornelius). But Medwall frames this rather formal, and emphatically humanistic, deliberation with the bawdy and sloppy goings-on of two characters with the curious names of A and B, playful ciphers on the make and on the hunt for employment, amusement, and “love” broadly construed
At the beginning of Medwall’s play, A emerges from the audience, looks about the room, and wonders what all these silent people are doing standing around. “Shall here be a play?” he asks. The answer, of course, is yes, but what ensues is a play the likes of which no one had ever seen before . . .
The earliest secular play in English, the earliest English play to which we can assign a named author, and the earliest English play to feature a sub-plot, it inaugurates numerous formal aspects which develop over the sixteenth century into Shakespeare’s theatre and beyond
Yet Fulgens, with its rich deployment of performed debate, its imaginative reinterpretation of its classical setting, and its seemingly ad hoc composition – perhaps for performance at Lambeth Palace, as a two-part theatrical dessert to dinner and supper – is also the inheritor of traditions and practices developed in the literature of medieval Europe
At its center, Fulgens and Lucres foregrounds the choice of a woman (Lucres) over two suitors: one notable for virtue (Gayus), and one notable for lineage (Cornelius). But Medwall frames this rather formal, and emphatically humanistic, deliberation with the bawdy and sloppy goings-on of two characters with the curious names of A and B, playful ciphers on the make and on the hunt for employment, amusement, and “love” broadly construed
At the beginning of Medwall’s play, A emerges from the audience, looks about the room, and wonders what all these silent people are doing standing around. “Shall here be a play?” he asks. The answer, of course, is yes, but what ensues is a play the likes of which no one had ever seen before . . .
cast
A - Leo Wan
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B - James Askill
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Gayus - Ammar Duffus
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Cornelius - John Hopkins
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Fulgens - Tim Frances
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Lucres - Emma Denly
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Joan - Frances Marshall
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Directed by James Wallace Supported by Renaissance Worldmaking Workshop, Stanford University English Graduate Student Council, The Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies |