Staging and Representing the Scottish Renaissance Court

This project brings together an interdisciplinary team of scholarly researchers and theatre and film professionals to research the cultural significances of Sir David Lyndsay's seminal drama 'Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis'. Lindsay's play is the most important dramatic text produced in Scotland before the 20th century, and arguably the most important pre-Shakespearean dramatic work produced in the UK. Its influence on Scottish dramatic culture has been immense, not least because, unlike most British drama, it is as much an intervention in political, national and social history and an exploration of the role of the monarch and the performative 'drama' of politics, as it is a piece of entertainment.

Ane Satyre is known to have been performed three times in the course of the 16th century, in three different political and social situations, physical spaces and under different auspices. The first version, which is attested to by an eye-witness report, was performed in the Great Hall (Lion Chamber) at Linlithgow Palace in 1540, before James V, and led to a heated debate between the king and his clergy about the corruption of the church. The second and third versions, for which a variously imperfect text survives in printed and manuscript form, were performed outdoors in the burgh of Cupar, Fife (1552) before civic dignitaries and townsfolk, and on Calton Hill, Edinburgh (1554) before the regent Mary of Guise, the council, nobility and people of the Scottish capital.

Each version raises profound questions about the nature of Renaissance monarchy, the role of the popular voice in Scottish politics, the nature of Scottish civic, national and religious identity, and the moral fabric of civil society - but does so before different social and cultural constituencies. In the first, the production was part of the ceremonial culture of the Stuart court, a performance both to and for the king, addressing issues of political and religious reformation of immediate concern to James and his council. In the second and third, performed during the minority of Mary Queen of Scots, the play raised potentially subversive issues about the nature of kingship ('what is ane king?), nationhood and individual and collective responsibility for reform before a much more diverse and potentially conflicted audience of all social classes. And the play itself stages the stresses that discussion of such questions would clearly have evoked in a hierarchical society, by repeatedly staging disruptive incursions into the stage space by representatives of the popular voice (John the Commonweal and Pauper) and subversive personifications of social forces such as religious evangelism (Veritas), Deceit, Folly, Folly, Public Oppression and Common theft.

Recent research on Ane Satyre has added substantially to our understanding of its role in early-modern Scottish history. Building on Mill (Medieval Plays in Scotland (1927)) and Kantrowitz, (Dramatic Allegory: Lindsay's 'Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis' (1974)), Edington (Court and Culture in Renaissance Scotland (1994) and Walker (1989, 1998, 2007, 2008) have explored both its courtly and urban cultural contexts and its radical dramatic and political dynamics; while McGavin (2007) has brought a new sophistication to analysis of performance in the culture of pre-Modern Scotland more widely. An equally powerful strand of interest in the play has focused on its modern implications, since the Tyrone Guthrie revival for the Edinburgh Festival (1948), which stressed the resonances between its impact in the 1550s and its implications for post-War Scottish society, editors (Lyall (1989), Walker (2000)), and directors have situated the play at the nexus of a dialogue between contemporary Scotland and its past. This project intends to provide definitive richness of research detail to that dialogue for a new century and in the context of debates about the Scottish past in a newly devolved United Kingdom.

The project involves close collaboration with the research, curatorial and interpretive departments of Historic Scotland (HS). This collaboration will facilitate extensive knowledge exchange between HS and the project researchers in English and Scottish Literature, Drama, Art History and Film. The performances at Linlithgow and Stirling will add research by practice to the range of research and interpretive skills available to HS for investigating the material and cultural history of these palaces and their built and decorative environments, and for making the fruits of that investigation available to the public in readily accessible and engaging ways. In addition (as our experience on the earlier project at Hampton Court has demonstrated) the investigation and rehearsal process itself, which will take place in the great halls while they are open to the public, will engage public interest in the project, the palaces and the artistic and cultural history we are researching on an ongoing basis, making the rehearsal process both iterative in research terms and an 'impact outcome' in its own right.

In addition to creating new intellectual and social capital, the performances will have considerable cultural and economic impact. The 'interlude' performances will draw audiences from the local region and further afield to Linlithgow and Stirling, adding to the footfall in these palaces and encouraging public engagement with Historic Scotland's curatorial and interpretative mission among groups and individuals who might not otherwise visit these sites. By engaging the local community in rehearsing and performing the 'outdoor' play in Linlithgow the project will add significantly to local and regional engagement with civic and cultural history and the knowledge economy and promote local community cohesion through a shared involvement in the recreation and investigation of aspects of local history which are also central to Scottish national history and cultural identity. By combining the performances with a major conference linked to the Stirling Heads and the 'relaunch' of Stirling Castle to visitors, the project will also add to the cultural impact of the castle's new interpretive agenda, facilitating visitor engagement with the site in new and innovative ways.

The film and media resources created by the project, and the on-line debates about the creation and use of public history they will promote, will engage creative and cultural industrial practitioners with new texts and content in innovative and productive ways, while fostering a wider public debate about the role of these industries in the creation of 'history' which will inform both community users and policy makers in the field of public history. This on-line debate will have specific and timely resonance for Scottish history, as it will enable users to evaluate afresh a number of key foundational texts, periods and spaces in the canonical version of Scottish political and cultural history at a time when Scottish national identity is again a live political issue. But it will also have wider implications for the public understanding of and engagement with the role of the media in creating history more generally across the UK and beyond.