“Jests, stolne from the Temples Revels”: the Inns of Court revels and early modern drama

O'Callaghan, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6084-0122 (2015) “Jests, stolne from the Temples Revels”: the Inns of Court revels and early modern drama. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature, 31. pp. 227-252. ISSN 0940-0478

Abstract/Summary

The repertoire of the boys’ companies in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is characterised, in part, by experiments with a burlesque style and an aggressive mode of intertextuality that testifies to a sustained dialogue with the performance culture of the Inns of Court revels. A subgenre of serio ludere, serious play, the revels are a hybrid form that freely mixes ceremonial structures with bawdy farce and the rites of violence. By entering into a conversation with the Inns of Court revels, the boys’ companies advertised their shared pedagogic performance culture at a time when their own educational links were becoming increasingly attenuated. Borrowing jests from the revels therefore provided a means of claiming shared educational capital. The mode of fraternity promoted within these all-male pedagogic institutions relied on rites of violence, which incorporated satire and burlesque, to assert institutional privilege and to fashion elite corporate identities.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/66759
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > Early Modern Research Centre (EMRC) Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Literature and Languages > English Literature
Publisher	Gunter Narr
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