Scholarly interiority in the Parnassus trilogy

Abstract

The Parnassus trilogies are perhaps the most well known of all university drama, Written by anonymous authors and performed at St John's CoIlege, Cambridge, between 1598 and 1601, these three plays focus upon the early modern educative process and the fate that befalls the scholars that that process creates. In this paper I will suggest that in dramatizing the cultivation of learning and the quest for a form of expression commensurate to that learning, the plays bear witness to the inauguration of what I will refer to as scholarly interiority In undertaking this task, I will make reference both what scholarly interiority means in the plays, and what it might have meant to the Cambridge students that witnessed those plays