Records of Early English Drama: The North-East

'Records of Early English Drama North-East' (REED-NE) is part of a massive international project to assemble a complete record of surviving sources for medieval and early modern performance in Britain. REED volumes are to scholars in literature and theatre what Pevsner is to architects and art historians. REED's main office at the University of Toronto coordinates a team of researchers who trawl Britain's archives by region and edit their findings to an internationally recognized scholarly standard. The volumes which have already appeared have revolutionized our understanding of British performance history, replacing a view based largely on conjecture with one derived from detailed factual information about performers and the social and financial organisation of performance. REED volumes have redressed the London-centric imbalance of research obsessed by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and drawn attention to the many forms of anonymous performance in regions which have often been unjustly seen as 'marginal'. REED-NE, the latest stage in the series, will find and edit all records pertaining to drama, music and ceremonial in England's North-East, from the earliest sources (around 9th century) to 1642.

REED-NE will cover Yorkshire (excluding the city of York, whose records have already appeared), Durham and Northumberland, in a collection of five or more volumes published by Boydell. To date, discoveries include:
1. A medieval sequence of liturgy and drama about the Sacrament which linked the lay community with their ecclesiastical city governors (Durham).
2. Child drama and misrule ceremonies (Boy Bishops and Lords of Misrule from Durham and West Yorkshire).
3. The earliest known evidence for three types of folk drama: the Stag Ceremony (before 1280, abolished 1315); the Plough Ceremony (from 1378); and the Man/Woman performer (1433-4) (all Durham).
4. New evidence relating to mystery cycles in at least four cities (Beverley, Doncaster, Durham and Newcastle). This will reduce the reliance of scholars on the probably untypical cycles from York and Chester.
5. A major stand-alone biblical play (Hull's 'Noah').
6. Rare evidence for a Paternoster play (Beverley).
7. Performance traditions in noble households, including the Percies (Northumberland), the Ingrams, Talbots and Wentworths (West Yorkshire), and in the houses of lesser gentry in all North-Eastern counties.
8. An important body of information concerning illegal recusant drama in North Yorkshire. This will transform the historical understanding of the polemic use of drama by Catholics in provincial England.
9. A wealth of evidence about town waits, travelling performers, and patrons; we hope to discover and map performance circuits and locations from at least the later Middle Ages onwards.

The REED-NE volumes will be accompanied by a Companion volume discussing the historical and cultural significance of our findings.

Our findings will also be linked to an interactive map of provincial England on the REED Patrons and Performances website at Toronto. Geo-coding is only now being adopted for literary projects. Visualising research data with GIS mapping will offer a new perspective on historical performance in England and contribute to the advancement of the Spatial Humanities.

A summer festival in Durham in 2016 will showcase our research to academics and the wider public with a conference and an exhibition of objects and manuscripts pertaining to religious and secular drama at Durham's World Heritage Site. Based on our collected records, we will stage medieval and Renaissance repertoire at Durham Castle and the Cathedral. For the first time since the 9th century, the Lindisfarne 'Harrowing of Hell' - probably Britain's oldest surviving drama - will be performed. All events will be freely accessible. We expect our work to have a major impact, on our discipline worldwide, and also on regional communities and their awareness of their heritage.

We shall make the research results of REED-NE accessible to the general public through an exhibition, a performance festival and public talks. These will all be publicised through libraries, cultural centres, the Friends of Durham Cathedral, and the Little Theatres Guild of Great Britain. The University's PR Officer and the Director of the World Heritage Site will liaise with regional and national media. There will also be a designated, freely accessible project website, hosted by the Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Durham University, to give observers an opportunity to follow the progress of our research, and to publicise associated local initiatives; a comments facility will encourage feedback.

We expect specific opportunities to arise from REED-NE for a number of institutions and commercial interests in the North-East of England. For the third sector, a fuller picture of the history of performance in the region will be of benefit to museums and other institutions involved in cultural history (including those within Durham University, where our 2016 REED-NE exhibition will build on the successful 1992 University Library exhibition on Early Drama in Durham). The Durham World Heritage Site already enthusiastically supports the project (see their supporting letter). Our plans for an exhibition and a performance festival (see 'Objectives' and 'Summary' above) give an idea of possible third-sector activities elsewhere in the North-East. We expect this beneficial effect to extend beyond obviously historic towns like Durham and Beverley, to places whose importance to the history of performance is at present virtually unknown, such as Doncaster and Newcastle (which both had mystery cycles, including a surviving Newcastle play about the building of the Ark) and Hull (where an unusual Mariners' Play of Noah was once performed).

Secondly, there will be an opportunity to increase commercial activity by developing new tourist and performer-based attractions in the North-East. Some historically-based events already exist in the region (e.g. early music festivals in York and Hexham; the Lumière Festival in Durham, which is inspired by Northumbria's Lindisfarne Gospels; and Durham's Mystery Plays of 2000 and 2010, which partly relied on work already done for the Durham REED volume). In Durham, the organisations which will benefit from an increase in visitor numbers during the festival include the Cathedral, the University (through lettings of college rooms), and hotels and other businesses in the city. There is undoubtedly scope for further comparable projects in other places throughout the North-East, but they are unlikely to spring up unless local communities can gain access to a better knowledge of their own cultural history. REED-NE will help to achieve this.

The project's most important legacy will be to give the communities of the North-East a heightened awareness of their own cultural past. We have already established links with local parishes and major churches, especially Durham Cathedral, where the Dean and Chapter have given the project warm support (see the accompanying letter from the Dean of Durham); the Cathedral Friends have hosted open lectures on the ongoing research for REED-NE, and are keen to hear of more discoveries. There are obvious opportunities for similar links to be developed with other major churches, such as Beverley, Hexham, Selby and Wakefield, and with local dramatic societies and other groups of performers. We have already given a popular open lecture to the annual conference of the Little Theatres Guild of Great Britain (2010), and are eager to pursue further opportunities of this kind.

In short, local response to REED-NE has been enthusiastic. Performance history is a crucial part of the heritage and collective memory of England's North-East, and the volumes published by REED-NE will provide ready access to that heritage for generations to come.