Satire, Performance, and English Rustic Comedy in Harley 2253

The scribe of Harley 2253 evidently had access to something more than just other manuscripts, culling matter also from a swirl of ephemera like loose leaves, rolls, perhaps even scrawled remnants of performance, or from authors themselves. The presence of five colorful English verse satires in Harley invites questions of performance not just of specific pieces, but also of sequenced entertainments seguing from one style, genre, and/or language to another and targeting for ridicule the monoglot English. In the phenomenon of the mocked English rustic in Harley 2253, we may glimpse a sophisticated style of entertainment in medieval halls that emerges later in the fine manner of comic low humor prevalent in Tudor and Elizabethan drama.