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    • 2021 - Fulgens & Lucres
    • 2019 - The Misfortunes of Arthur
    • 2017 - The Woman in the Moon - Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
    • 2015 - Samuel Daniel & John Danyel
    • 2014 - The Woman in the Moon - Rose Playhouse
    • 2014 - The Massacre at Paris
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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

​

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 . . .

cast

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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

Directed by James Wallace


​Supported by

Renaissance Worldmaking Workshop,
Stanford University English Graduate Student Council,
The Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies

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