Popular Culture Review Vol. 18, No. 2, Summer 2007 | Page 110

106 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