Bare Ruined Choirs - Lisa Hopkins - diskuze

The book argues that these plays show us a society haunted by the unquiet burials of Anglo-Saxon saints and kings and the destruction of shrines and churches during the English Reformation, and peopled by crossover figures who inhabit both the spiritual and the secular realms. It begins with an introduction which sets out the distinction between spiritual and temporal overlordship of lands, glances at the ways in which sacred and secular spheres of influence could be brought into conflict in plays from the late-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and explains that the book is interested not only in the extent to which those spheres of influence map onto actual territory but also in the ways in which land is perceived as retaining memories of uses to which it has been previously put. This was particularly the case when royal or saintly bodies had been buried in it, even if the actual burials had been disturbed or lost completely, but other kinds of spaces and places could also carry with them a sense of an ineradicable past (often a specifically pre-Reformation past). When plays claim to represent such richly suggestive sites as holy wells, abbeys built before the Norman Conquest, or places where martyrdoms or miracles have occurred, they simultaneously suggest the power and appeal of such memories and yet also acknowledge their loss and inaccessibility, not least because what the audience sees is not the place represented but bare boards of the stage standing in for it
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