Welcome to ENG 1007 — Medieval Drama: Morality Plays.

Dramatic players can embody (and in embodying, personify) ideas, tendencies, and emotions as readily as they can take on realistic human characters—so readily, perhaps, that morality plays may be taken less as a distinctively medieval genre than as a reflex of dramatic performance toward psychomachic allegory more generally. 

Our course, in its coverage of English-language morality plays c. 1350–c. 1530, will resist critical tendencies that assume any continuous, coherent tradition underlies the extant works, as much as it makes mutual influence among some of those works plainly visible. It will demonstrate the obvious effects of proto-Protestant reforms (and resistances to them) on morality plays, even as it rejects a critical tendency to reduce these plays to their instrumentality in broader movements. In our approach to those works, we will concentrate on newer secondary readings (i.e. published within the last fifteen years) that have brought forward the moralities’ mutual influence with literary and religious culture, while at the same time deploying performance studies and practice-based research—yes, participating in live recitation and staging will be a requirement of the class—to hone in on what makes these plays, and their outward embodiment of internality, performative.

A note from Prof. Sergi:

During the coming term, since there are only six of us, and since we’ll be meeting in such strange circumstances, I’d like to try making our course as flexible and adaptable as possible.  That doesn’t mean you won’t be expected to produce high-quality contributions, nor that my assessment of your work won’t be rigorous—but the way we do these things will be flexible and adaptable.

I’ve done away with the quiz mentioned in the course description and loosened up the performance/recitation assignments. I’ve pared down my usual syllabus here, too, and included a list of core readings for us to proceed through without attaching them to dates.  That way, at the end of each session, we can decide together where we think it best to go next.  I’ll also leave it up to each student (within some parameters) when they’d prefer to give their two presentations, for which I’ve given a few options. One thing I’ll insist upon: I always prefer to keep the amount of assigned reading low (I’m not interested in the usual grad class idea that reading more is reading better; I am interested in close reading and in-depth discussion).  

ENG 1007 Class Times/Zoom Links/Attendance:

Our course will be online only for the Winter 2021 term. Every Monday morning, from 11am to 1pm, we’ll meet for two hours on Zoom. All of our sessions will be audio-recorded, but only for uses internal to our class (see below).

Zoom link for class meetings:
https://zoom.us/j/94490336818?pwd=bG9jc1F2aXZwbTNLczNrYjZUQTdoQT09
Meeting ID: 944 9033 6818 | Passcode: 2R4PD5

Google Drive file for class materials (including audiorecordings):
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1rNEMwOHbtZ11t9S63wDaYHZBhkIsLcjp?usp=sharing

If you miss any sessions, or if you join our course late, you must listen to the audiorecording of that day’s session as soon as possible, then email our course list to let us know your thoughts on the session. I have no attendance policy other than that: in order for me to assign you a passing grade for this course, I require that every course session be either attended in real time or listened to, and commented on by email, after the fact. I’ll upload grades a week after our final meeting — make sure you’ve covered every class session by then.

[NB: The current structure of our course is built on the assumption that Toronto public elementary schools will remain open throughout term. If Toronto public elementary schools shut down again, with no childcare available, I will have to modify and simplify our course in order to cover childcare responsibilities for my daughters. Should that happen, I will ask for your patience, understanding, and flexibility with changes to our course.]

ENG 1007 Course Requirements/Marking Weight:

Engagement and Participation in Zoom sessions
(or, if necessary, in substantial email commentary after the fact), 20%

Two 15-Minute Presentations during a class Zoom session,
15% each (totalling 30%)

Conference-Length Research Paper (with option to extend length),
delivered at the final class meeting in mock-conference style, 40%

Contributions to Public-Facing Document, 10%
(no individual grades assigned for this—it will be a collaborative effort)

ENG 281 Assignments:

I. You’ll have to give two 15-minute presentations during term. As long as you present one at some point during weeks 3 through 6, and the other at some point during weeks 7 through 10, it’s fine by me—just give me a week’s advance warning when you’re ready. We’ll be able to accommodate up to two presentations in any given class session (or three if truly necessary). You can choose any one of the following three prompts for your presentation (and yes, you can use the same prompt twice):

Option 1: choose any academic article or chapter we’ve already been assigned (it doesn’t have to be one we were assigned on the day you present) and present an informal (but well-prepared and well-organized) 15-minute critique and analysis of that chapter. Your aim is to provoke conversation; it will be your job, after your presentation, to moderate your fellow students’ discussion for about 20 further minutes.

Option 2: choose any five-minute passage from a play we’ve already been assigned (it doesn’t have to be one we were assigned on the day you present), memorize it, and perform it as a dramatic piece (you can do so in the original early English, or in a light adaptation/translation). After that, offer us an informal (but well-prepared and well-organized) 10-minute close reading and analysis of that passage. (You can also do analysis first, then performance).

Option 3: seek out, and read, any morality play that is not already on our list of readings. Present an informal (but well-prepared and well-organized) 15-minute lecture on that chapter, which includes a rough summary, basic historical contexts, an original bit of analysis, and at least short passage of the text to be read aloud (it doesn’t have to be dramatic reading; you can also prompt us to read dialogue with you). Please prepare an “electronic handout” for us that includes any text that will be read aloud, as well as anything else that might be useful for your lecture.

II. Produce a conference-length research paper (20 minutes) that takes any one of the plays on our syllabus as its primary subject. 20-minute conference papers are usually about 2000-2500 words long, but it is up to each student to determine the best length (by practicing the paper aloud). Each student will present their conference paper during our final class session (Week XII) From there, you will have two options for handing in the final written document:

Option 1: At our in-class conference, immediately before presenting, you may email me your final polished draft, about 2000-2500 words. That will be your final paper of the semester, due on the day of the mock-conference. I will do much of the marking during and immediately following your delivery of the paper, taking into account your handling of the Q&A (and the quality of the Q&A that your paper provokes), then send you a summary of my comments by email soon after.

Option 2: After our in-class conference, you may return to your ongoing research and produce a longer article-length paper, about 5500-7500 words, due by email exactly two weeks after our final class.

We’ll work together in class sessions to develop our ideas.  It is up to you, over the course of the term, to determine — in dialogue with me and with your classmates — which critical questions and hypotheses will form the core of your project, and whether that project is most appropriate for a conference paper or for a longer work.  Each student is required to meet with me at least once, for a one-on-one Zoom session in Week 7 or earlier, to informally propose their research paper; depending on the quality of that proposal, I may withhold approval of the project and require further work and a subsequent meeting.  Research papers will not be accepted unless they have been proposed to me in person and received my approval; however, it is acceptable for papers to evolve and change, deviating significantly from the initial proposal if necessary.

III. During term (probably starting in Week 3), we’ll all work together to produce and edit a public-facing document, something that a layman might find while Googling “morality play” — to put it simply, I want us to work together generate a replacement for the current Wikipedia entry on “morality play.” We’ll locate our collaborative effort on a public page of this website, but we’ll also actually replace the Wikipedia entry with our text. I’m hoping that, among other things, we can come up with a comprehensive list of morality plays prior to a given year. My goal is to mobilize us as scholars to influence public conversation about and perceptions of early English drama, literature and culture (if not us, who?). I won’t assign individual grades for this—it’s an informal, collaborative effort (I’ll help too!) that we’ll return to every couple of weeks, until we feel it’s ready to post.

Let’s begin our efforts by editing the Wikipedia text in our own Google Doc — click here.

ENG 281 List of Readings:

When we need to upload and share materials for class, we’ll use our ENG 1007 Google Drive file: right-click or command-click here to access the file.

If you are interested, do take a look at our Macro plays in manuscript! Click here.

As I mention above, I have not assigned dates to most of these items; we can proceed through this list in order from week to week if we wish, but I invite suggestions for switches, changes, additions, or deletions. (They’re subject to change from my end, too!)

I have done my best to limit our readings to editions that are easily accessed from your home computer. Many of the early modern editions are currently TBA — I’m still shopping around for good online matches at the moment (check back for updates); I may also share scans from the REED library when next I can access it. The only book I may ask you to purchase is Julie Paulson’s Theater of the Word, because it is essential cutting-edge reading in the field, and it seems a perfect fit for this class (indeed, it inspired it!), but for now the U of T Library has not secured access to the online version — I’m going to keep working on this when we get back from break, so hold off on buying it for now.

What we’ve completed so far:

UNIT 1 (first day): The Pride of Life.
We’ll read through the TEAMS Middle English edition together in class, translating and discussing as we go — and hypothesizing about the portions of the text that are lost; in so doing, we’ll figure out where we all stand in terms of Middle English, while working through a rough definition of morality plays. It’s okay if it turns out our Middle English skills are new (or rusty)—we will simply slow down the pace of our further readings, and eliminate some secondary readings, in order to make the course as valuable to its students as possible.

UNIT 2: Wisdom; also read Klausner’s TEAMS introduction and Klausner’s Appendices, and King’s “Morality Plays”.

UNIT 3: Mankind; also read Garrison’s “Mankind and the Masculine Pleasures of Penance” and  Steenbrugge’s “Morality Plays and the Aftermath of Arundel’s Constitutions”.

UNIT 4: The Castle of Perseverance (through line 1601).

UNIT 5: The bulk of The Castle of Perseverance (lines 1602-3649); Young’s Vision and Audience in Medieval Drama, Chapters 2 and 5.

Units remaining:

Fri 26 Feb: Klausner’s TEAMS introduction to Wisdom; review Wisdom; read Johnson’s Staging Contemplation, Introduction and Chapter 5 (on Wisdom). Start thinking about your term paper.

Mon 1 Mar: Everyman; also read Davidson’s TEAMS introduction and Little’s “What Is Everyman?”

Mon 8 Mar: Paulson’s Theater of the Word (full book).

Mon 15 Mar: Beadle’s article and edition of Occupation and Idleness; EETS ed of Reynes Fragments; Brantley’s Reading in the Wilderness, Chapters 6 and 7.

Mon 22 Mar: Medwall’s Nature, Blake, “Allegorical Causation”; The Interlude of Youth

Mon 29 Mar: Skelton’s Magnificence

Fri 9 Apr, 2pm-6pm: Presentation of student conference papers.

What we likely won’t have time to read:

Riggio’s “The Allegory of Feudal Acquisition in The Castle of Perseverance”;

Lucidus and Dubius

Bale’s King Johan (edition TBA) and Three Laws (Blackwell edition, pdf coming soon); also read Paulson’s Theater of the Word Chapter 5 and Conclusion.

UNIT 10: and

[Important: Because of a scheduling conflict with my undergraduate class, I’ll be asking you to work with me to schedule our final class session at a different time than usual. We’ll use a Doodle poll to set the time.]

If you are new to Middle English, I'm happy to share with you some handy materials I've used for my undergrads.

ENG 1007 Ongoing Student Feedback:

If you there is any element of ENG 1007 that you would like to see improved, changed, or removed, you don’t need to wait until the end of term to give your opinion. In fact, I welcome ongoing feedback about this class throughout term, which you can offer in three ways:

  1. Bring it up in class discussion! I don’t have a thin skin and I don’t mind dedicating some class time to course housekeeping — and I love talking through solutions to make the course better. If you feel comfortable doing so, feel free to just bring your issue up in class discussion so that other students can share their opinion too.

  2. Email me.

  3. Comment anonymously at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/KVW7TLS — I’ll receive an email with your comments, which will not reveal your identity. Note: if you wish to leave anonymous comments more than once, SurveyMonkey may try to prevent you from doing so (I haven’t yet figured out how to turn that setting off, though I’ve tried). If that happens, you can try opening the survey in a different browser, or using your browser's incognito/private function. Or, failing that, use my second survey link — https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/HX9N367 — same questions, but technically a new page.

From there, I’ll either respond to you directly (if possible), bring up the proposed change in class, or start a quick anonymous student survey in which fellow students can vote on whether to make the proposed change to our course.

Online meetings still happen in real spaces with real voices and bodies,

so I still acknowledge that anyone who is participating in this class while on campus does so on the shared territory of many First Nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Wendat, and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, under the Dish With One Spoon Treaty, and under Treaty 13 between the Mississaugas and subsequent settlers; those of us participating while in Scarborough/Toronto east of Woodbine Avenue (including me, usually) do so on lands additionally covered by the Williams Treaties, signed with multiple Mississaugas and Chippewa bands.