Resumen de Staging Enmity: Performance Strategies in Wartime
This article explores local traditions of public performance during a period of political polarization, focusing on the independent francophone city of Metz, in what is now northeastern France. It examines a collection of contemporary texts created during the early fourteenth-century Guerre des Quatre Seigneurs, a war in which Metz faced devastating attacks from regional powers as well as an internal uprising of its own citizens. These works, when studied within their early, performed context, reveal a shared framework of performance practice within the city and an oral and embodied approach to public debate. This article details the distinct performance characteristics and conventions of the Metz pieces, and argues that theatre and drama scholars are well-positioned to illuminate the understudied performance aspects of urban environments and medieval urban history more generally.
