Poculi Ludique Societas

An Introduction

PLS (Poculi Ludique Societas) sponsors productions of early plays, from the beginnings of medieval drama to as late as the middle of the seventeenth century, and for over four decades has been in the forefront of the rediscovery of the dramatic riches of this period

The foundations of Poculi Ludique Societas ("the cup and game society") were laid in a seminar in medieval drama given over forty years ago at the University of Toronto. A group of graduate students, fascinated by the theatrical power and the skilled stagecraft they found in the play they were required to produce as a seminar project, went on to experiment with and present more plays as an independent company.

Since its beginning PLS has been associated with the university's Centre For Medieval Studies, and maintains strong links with the University of Toronto-based research project 'Records of Early English Drama', and the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama, As a community theatre company it also reaches out to a wide non-academic audience. PLS has performed extensively throughout Canada and toured by invitation to England, Ireland, Italy, and much of the United States.

PLS has been at the forefront in the production of some of the largest-scale medieval plays and play-cycles, shows which have extended over several days and attracted thousands of spectators from all over the world.

PLS: The scholarly context

In 1954, a magisterial volume was published by Oxford University Press that was to be the summation of all that was known or needed to be known about the drama before Shakespeare. This was English Religious Drama by Hardin Craig. That same year an equally senior scholar, F.M.Salter of the University of Alberta delivered the Alexander Lectures at University College, University of Toronto, and launched a revolution in the scholarship of early drama that continues to gather momentum more than forty years later.

Central to this revolution has been the recreation of early drama on the stage. The unofficial ban on presenting the godhead on stage in Great Britain was lifted only in 1951 with the revival of a condensed version the York Cycle in York for the Festival of Britain. Once the ban had been lifted, however, interest grew in the performance of this material. Productions of many kinds sprang up all over England spurring more and more interest in the stage-worthiness and power of a long neglected art form. The interest among North American academics was high and in 1961 Professor Arnold Williams convened a session at the Modern Language Association meeting in New York to allow those who had seen this drama in modern performance an opportunity to discuss what they had learned. That seminar/discussion session became a fixture of the MLA meetings and was, for many years, the most important forum for the exchange of ideas and information in the field.

Professor John Leyerle, whose own scholarly interests were in fifteenth-century drama, attended those early sessions at the MLA. When he joined the graduate department of English at the U of T in 1964, he offered a course in early drama (the first such ever given at Toronto). Influenced by the MLA seminar discussions, he encouraged his students to perform a play as well as study it. From the experience of that class, the PLS was born.

PLS: The Early Days

The group made its mark very early in scholarly circles. The 1966 production of Rafe Roister Doister was performed for the Medieval Academy of America meeting in Toronto that year. The next year the Towneley Cain and Noah was performed for the MLA seminar meeting in Chicago. In 1968 the group took Like Will to Like to a medieval conference in McGill and a group of plays from N-Town to the Third Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies in Binghamton, New York.

During the first decade of its life, the group concentrated on performing in Middle English. The language of the plays and the verse form released from the confining limits of the page were central to the experimentation. Stage conventions were less carefully considered since the conventional wisdom, at that time, was that nothing could really be known about the stage practices and therefore it was perfectly legitimate to perform the plays, for example, as "studio" productions with modern lighting, make-up and music.

However, from the late 1960's on there was an increasing interest in attempting to recreate the original staging conditions. One of the first such attempts was made by a local group in Grantham, England who performed an abridged N-Town Cycle in 1966 outside using the parish church as the backdrop. However, the most important staging reconstruction was that of the late Neville Denny of Bristol University who staged much of the Cornish Ordinalia in an authentic Cornish Round. Denny's production was significant because he deliberately made the plays as big as they must have been under the original performance conditions and, because his text was in Cornish, he used a good translation that made the production accessible to the public. Here, for the first time, scholarly reconstruction was joined with popular appeal. Denny's untimely death cut off what might have been a long standing series of historically-based productions using the splendid resources of the Bristol Drama Department with its strong ties to the BBC.

Central to this interest in reconstructing the original staging was the renewed archival research into the external evidence for medieval and renaissance staging practice. In 1969, Alan Nelson of Berkeley read a paper at the MLA session in which he refuted, on the basis of a computer analysis, that the York Cycle could have been performed on separate wagons in procession. Professor Arthur Cawley, one of the senior British scholars in the field, heard the paper and went home to Leeds disturbed by the speculative basis of the argument to find a new research student from Australia on his doorstep eager to work with him. He sent her to York to work on the civic records where I met her in the fall of 1971 over the discovery of the single most important document in English medieval stage history, the description of the Mercers' Judgment wagon from 1433. We were only two of a number of scholars who were working in archives all over Britain discovering new evidence of performance practice. From this group of scholars came Records of Early English Drama.

When REED was founded in 1975, the PLS was at a transition point. The first generation of graduate students had passed through the system and the second was well on its way towards establishing careers elsewhere. Professor Leyerle, though still Director of the Medieval Centre, was becoming more and more involved in the wider life of the university and his role in the group was greatly diminished. He taught his last seminar in early drama during the academic year 1974-75. That was the year I became a member of the graduate school and the academic leadership of the group fell to me.

To the symbiotic relationship between REED and PLS has been added essential insights derived from detailed analyses of the manuscripts of the plays. The editorial work on the manuscripts has been done by British and American scholars in close co-operation with REED and with a conviction that the plays must be allowed to be played in as close to historical conditions as can be provided. David Parry came to Toronto in 1974 and soon was attracted both to the PLS and to the idea of writing his doctoral thesis based on a production. The historical reconstruction of the Castle of Perseverance mounted in 1979 became the basis of the acting edition of the Castle of Perseverance that was his dissertation. Other students have used their experience in the PLS in their graduate work for the Centre for Medieval Studies, the Drama Centre and the English Department.

David Parry was made the artistic director of the company in 1975. Under his dynamic leadership, PLS became the major company for the exploration of the texts in performance in the world. Although colleagues in Britain and the United States have mounted important productions, only the PLS has managed to continue producing significant productions over a sustained period of time. The major productions of the York Cycle (1977 and 1998), Castle (1979), the N-Town Passion Play (1981), the Chester Cycle (1983), the Towneley Cycle (1985), the N-Town Pageants (1988), the Anniversary Play Festival (1992) and the festival of plays associated with the meeting of the Société pour l’Étude du Théâtre Mediéval in 1995 have all had major impacts on scholarship. An important academic colloquium was convened in conjunction with the 1998 York production. Many of the papers delivered at that time along with a selected number of “Directors’ Notes” comprised an enlarged third volume of Early Theatre, an academic journal associated with REED. Of the production, the first mounted in a single day since 1569, Robert Potter of UC Santa Barbara wrote,  "The magnitude of Toronto’s achievement in finally realizing a full multi-station pageant wagon production of the the entire York Cycle can scarcely be overestimated. After centuries of neglect, and decades of scholarly speculation over whether such a performance was feasible or ever had been, the full glory of the York plays as a theatrical and theological extravaganza has now begun to dawn on us. … Only when the last actor’s voice fell silent, deep into the Toronto night, did any of us truly realize what had been accomplished. Before, in their totality, the York plays only existed in theory. Now the word had become flesh and dwelt among us."

PLS Recent History:

The next big production after the York Cycle in 1998 was the Digby Mary Magdalen in 2003. This was the first production directed by Peter Cockett and was, like Castle and the N-Town Passion, mounted exclusively by the PLS.

Following this the company decided to seek a more permanent status within the University of Toronto as a research unit. The unit called the Centre for Performance Studies in Early Theatre (CPSET) was approved by the Governing Council of the University of Toronto in 2007.

By 2009 it had become clear that although  PLS had found its academic home in the Centre for Medieval Studies in 1965, a more natural ‘fit’ had become the Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama. Today the company is ‘split’ with its office, costumes props and archives in the same building as the Medieval Centre but an administrative home in the Drama Centre.

In May 2010 PLS remounted the Chester Cycle with colleges and universities across North America taking part. This production set out to explore the issues of the stability of medieval texts. A text based on the ‘eye witness’ account of the 1575 production recorded by Christopher Goodman, a Protestant divine in Chester, published in REED’s Cheshire including Chester was created that is unlike any other version of the Chester plays. The three day production was again in conjunction with an academic conference. A collection of essays based on the conference has been accepted for publication by Ashgate. Work continues on the video version of the production and the creation of teaching tools based on the production.

2011 has seen a production of New Custom, a radical Protestant propaganda play from the 1560s, the first of a planned series of experiments with rarely performed plays that were central to the debates of their day. In 2012 PLS plans a production of A Christian turned Turk for a conference studying trade and cross-cultural tensions in the late sixteenth century.