A Common Stage

A Common Stage challenges the prevalent understanding of theater history while offering the first comprehensive history of a community often credited with the invention of French as a powerful literary language.

Carol Symes is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Carol Symes analyzes five of Europe's earliest vernacular plays created in the medieval town of Arras.... She entertains and educates in this most revealing book, making interesting connections between the public sphere and the creation and performance of plays.... Symes seamlessly melds multiple disciplines, utilizing text analysis as well as drawing upon the historical record to create a unique English-language interpretation of the role and meaning of theater in medieval life.

Claire Sponsler, University of Iowa:

What a welcome addition to the history of early theatre! A Common Stage is a richly detailed examination of the drama of medieval Arras, one of the most important sites of early drama and one that has long needed the in-depth study in English that Carol Symes has now provided. Grounded in painstaking archival work and drawing on the insights of cultural history and performance studies, this book achieves the holy grail of a penetrating historical analysis combined with nuanced interpretation of the wider cultural implications of the Arras performances. Every scholar of early drama will want to own it.

Paul Strohm, Anna S. Garbedian Professor of the Humanities, Columbia University:

In a double emancipation, Carol Symes views medieval theater apart from the bondage of modern printed editions and without reliance upon the privilege we assign to medieval manuscripts that codify theater in forms most like modern scripts. Her medieval theater lives in a rich array of practices sustained by an urban culture that was always and inherently 'theatrical.' I haven't seen a book about medieval theater that displays so much fresh thinking since Kolve's Play Called Corpus Christi, more than forty years ago. Provocative insights abound, not just in every chapter but on virtually every page.

William Chester Jordan, Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Princeton University:

A Common Stage is the kind of book one hopes for. It is a tour de force, a rare combination of erudition, elegant prose, and brilliance. On every page the author offers new and penetrating insights into the history of medieval drama and theatrical culture in thirteenth-century France and into their political, economic, and religious contexts in the cities of the north. Because, as she forcefully demonstrates, the performative was central to nearly all aspects of social interaction in this period, her book is also a profound meditation on the nature of medieval urban life.

Donnalee Dox, Texas A&M University:

A Common Stage is an impressive and sophisticated exploration and application of primary source material—Carol Symes constructs a more holistic picture of theatrical activity in late-medieval Arras than has heretofore been available in English. Symes goes far beyond the scholarly tradition of analyzing play texts to develop a cultural history of public performance. In her view, familiar plays function as sites through which a stunning variety of cultural practices and information circulated.

Daniel Lord Smail, Harvard University:

A Common Stage combines the intimate texture of a social and institutional history with the sparkle of a cultural and literary study. Gently exposing the mythology of the rise of vernacular drama, Carol Symes sets several plays squarely in the town of Arras, and brings both town and play to life in the process. A historian as well as a dramaturge, Symes has pulled aside the thin and insubstantial barrier separating theater from everyday life. The play is revealed as lived reality, and life itself as a public performance.