(Re)creational Activities: Performance, Animation, and Selves in Medieval Literature and Drama

Abstract

Attempts to define play have highlighted its complexity, making it a difficult concept to fully pin down, particularly in its relationship to game. However, the focus on transformation and creation remain consistent within the body of scholarship. This dissertation examines how medieval texts that seem to emphasize playing and performance exemplify the “creative” aspect of play—what I call (re)creation to highlight the focus on action and construction of another self. While the case studies are from disparate genres (a romance, a drama, and a meditation), they share a similar focus on the transformation of self within—and, arguably, without—the text. While the focus on playing in medieval literature has been on texts with overt games that act as a frame for the narrative space, this project sheds light on how to consider “playing” more broadly within other genres and textual examples. Each case study in this project—the Old French Roman de Silence, the allegorical play Wisdom, and the Wohunge of Ure Lauerd—provides a glimpse into how play has a transformative function and how the deployment of structural logics and framing create spaces for play.

While definitions of play vary, critics agree that play is closely connected to performance and ritual in its transformative potential that can reach outside of Johan Huizinga’s “magic circle,” as critics have refined his influential articulation of play’s function in society. The “transformation” occurs within a creation of a space, including rules, customs, and affordances, that construct the player while, at the same time, the player constructs a self out of these affordances. The logics that create these spaces, as well as invite participation within them, vary within each chapter while still finding areas of overlap. This project weaves in dynamics of performance including visuality, animation, and musicality to show how texts open up spaces of play, and how selves become actualized within these spaces. At the same time, I examine how these “spaces” have also invited participation from readers and critics to “play” with and within these texts up to the present day.