Farces and Sotties Performance Practice, Print Practice, Manuscript Practice

At the heart of our enquiry is the debate about what we can really learn from documentation about medieval theatre. Pleased as they may have been to uncover some traces of this production, historians of medieval theatre have not sufficiently considered the nature and the logic of these documents nor how representative they might be. What documents have come down to us and why they have been preserved determine, however, what we can and cannot say about the subject. What is actually documented by our sources? The main problem is the inconsistency of our sources and their relationship to what has been lost. For example, a printed play is an anomaly that needs explication; it is not a gift from heaven. Thus, when someone writes down a play, we need to explain why it happened, keeping in mind that archival sources speak of theatre only when something went wrong or when there was some financial matter to be settled.