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Popular Culture Review
The REED project has not yet published dramatic records for
Lincolnshire, but the earlier compilation of dramatic records published by the
Malone Society, though less inclusive than most REED volumes, provides much
infonnation about Lincolnshire performance activities. Those records suggest
that several Lincolnshire towns staged plays. This can be inferred from
payments in several town records to bann criers from other towns for which no
records are extant. While indirect, these references hint that there was a lively
tradition of town plays in Lincolnshire during the fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries. These payments to bann criers suggest that at least seven Lincolnshire
towns consistently advertised their plays in other towns, and perhaps took them
there on tour {Malone Lincoln 1-95).
Extant dramatic records from Boston, Lincolnshire’s second most
important town, are fragmentary, but they show the town spending money for a
Noah play as early as 1518. No script of the play, however, survives. The
records note expenditure for gunpowder in that same year; Richard Proudfoot,
the editor of the volume, suggests it may have been used to create sound effects
(thunder) for the play {Malone Lincoln xxii, 3). The Noah play next appears in
Boston’s records for 1538, when expenses for repairing Noah’s ship are listed
{Malone Lincoln 4). Though these two scant items are our only extant records of
Boston’s Noah play, the payment for repairs to Noah’s ship suggests an on
going production. Due to the fragmentary nature of the records we cannot know
if the play was performed after that year, for the next reference to a play in
Boston comes from records dated 1567. That year a schoolmaster was paid for
his play, but neither the title nor the matter of the schoolmaster’s play is
described. Whatever the play may have been, and whether it was repeated we do
not know, and in 1578 Boston ceased producing any plays. That year the town
council prohibited the performance of plays or “interludes” in the town’s church,
chancel, guildhall, or schoolhouse {Malone Lincoln 5). What these fragmentary
records, and their dates, may tell us is that the religious reforms of Henry VIII
and Edward VI may have led city authorities in Boston to suspend its religious
play. And the payment to the schoolmaster for a new play in 1567 parallels
efforts in other towns to find a dramatic vehicle that would meet Elizabeth’s
injunctions—like York, which in 1578 also hired a schoolmaster to draft a new
play (REED Tor/: 417-23). The total ban on dramatic performances in Boston in
1578 suggests that by this time the city fathers decided “to throw in the towel,”
abandoning any attempt to shape the town’s theatrical traditions into a form
acceptable to Elizabeth’s government.
Records from the city of Lincoln dating back to 1390 indicate that the
city had a long tradition of play production. The first reference is to a
Resurrection play produced by the Cathedral canons. In records from 1397 we
find the city staged a Pater Noster play {Malone Lincoln xiv, 36-8). Throughout
the fifteenth century the extant records show a pattern of plays produced
sometimes by the city, sometimes by the Cathedral, but the surviving records are