Dissertation Narration

Every now and then I am reminded that I am here for a reason that is not theatre, or everyday drama, that I am here to get my MA and write my dissertation. That this should not be the thing central to my heart isn’t terribly surprising; people have always been at the core of my heart and I have never been very good at diversifying my attentions or affections. While my friends here continue to be more important than it, the friends to whom I was the closest have left, and so the dissertation has moved up in the ranks of importance.

That’s not to say that I wasn’t working. Actually, I was doing a ton of reading and trying to work up my lit review. The trouble is that the thing was metastasizing all over the place, and I choose that word very deliberately, because it was strangling itself off. You can’t very well talk about the mystery plays without talking about the guilds, but how much is enough? It’s important to acknowledge Continental sources of comparison, but they aren’t truly analogous and it’s hard to determine how much to put in and how much to leave out. Can I safely assume that my reader knows about the Corpus Christi rituals, or do I need to get into a lot of religious history? Because my natural tendency is to assume that people are either monumentally daft or that my topic is sufficiently obscure as to require a great deal of explanation, I probably erred heavily on the side of caution and got myself going in a thousand different directions at once. The thing is, there are so many ways you can look at the mystery plays. Unfortunately, none of them are archaeological.

That was the conclusion I was finally forced to face. What’s been done from an archaeological angle, albeit by literary scholars or historians, mostly, is about all that can be done. Having scraps of (theoretically) proper archaeological training won’t offer up that much different of a perspective, because there’s just nothing left. You could theorise till the cows come home, and maybe come up with some different theories, but they would forever remain in the land of fantasy I had suspected this, but as I finished my readings I realised that it really was true, and there were no ways for me to go at things differently. Nothing had been overlooked, even though archaeology has really ignored the mystery plays. Actually, archaeology has ignored medieval theatre pretty much totally. there is a lot done with prehistoric “theatre”, almost invariably meaning presumed ritual practice (‘when in doubt, it’s ritual’, is sort of a statement we joke about in archaeology, but there is a lot of truth to it), which is incredibly speculative. But we’re okay with being speculative from very little when it comes to prehistory- we haven’t any other way to be. There is also a big trend toward archaeology of modern and historic theatre, primarily the former. In this case, we have enough material or documentation to make it comfortable, particularly with contemporary productions that can be recorded. Medieval theatre lives in a limbo between the two- too documented, too historically close for anyone to be comfortable imposing potentially inaccurate assumptions on the period, but without enough left to make really educated statements, either. And since medieval theatre was pretty decentralised in terms of performance space (the mystery plays being on wagons, for example) there’s nothing to be dug up or retrieved. Materially, they might never have existed.

Well, you have to go where the data leads you, and in this case it was telling me that the medieval productions were a pretty dead end. Having to go in and talk to Kate, my supervisor, about this had me terrified, because in a way it’s like saying my entire dissertation is dead. I also didn’t have much to show her on paper- I had started writing the lit review, but the problems of its sprawl tendency and the niggling suspicion that a lot of my reading was going to prove irrelevant, given the brick wall, were not encouraging me to write much. The conclusion I kept reaching was that the only remaining avenue was to look at the modern productions, and how could I justify that as medieval archaeology?

Kate proved a saint for not bawling me out for not having been in touch sooner- I tend to curl up and go into hiding when I get upset about things, preferring infinitely to lick my wounds in private and find my way alone, applying the theory of ‘it will either get better or kill me’ that I also use with illness. It was silly of me to be so unnerved, though, because Kate is both infinitely rational and extremely kind, and she was completely amenable to my plan to look more closely at the modern plays. I will say this for myself- I went in there with the problem, and a game plan, and a timetable; I did my homework as best I could, and I had questions all laid out, so that it didn’t seem as if I’d done nothing for the past three months, even though tangibly that would be an easy conclusion to draw.

The general upshot is that now I’m looking almost exclusively at modern productions of the mystery plays. Through interviews with people who have involved, I’m hoping to address some of the experiences that might say something about the material possibilities of the Middle Age productions; but the bigger question will be about how they reflect the changing perception of medieval culture throughout the twentieth century. I’m not sure I see any archaeology in that part of it, but that is perfectly fine with me. I just hope it will be acceptable to the readers who have to grade it. That’s the sort of question that really interests me, though, so it’s a little easier to get enthused about my work now than it was when I was beating my head against an unproductive wall.

I’m still not sure if I like my dissertation or not- I’m rather exhausted with it, and looking forward to doing something else for a while, looking forward to a break from academia. But I’m not sure that equals the passionate loathing I was feeling earlier into things. It’s a love-hate relationship, I guess. Maybe when it’s all done I’ll look back on it with a certain fondness. Then again, maybe I’ll be happy to flip a copy of it onto the coals in the barbecue. We’ll see.