"It was then, I think, that I discovered that the best way of bringing a medieval subject home to my generation was not to be medieval in its treatment"
About this Quote
Housman is admitting a small heresy: if you want the Middle Ages to matter, you can’t cosplay them. The line has the quiet snap of a practitioner who’s watched “authenticity” turn into a museum rope - accurate, inert, untouchable. His intent isn’t to trash medieval material; it’s to rescue it from the deadening pieties of period treatment. The best bridge to the past, he suggests, is built out of present-day nerves.
As a playwright writing across the fin de siecle and into modernity, Housman is positioned at the moment when medievalism was both fashionable and suspect: Pre-Raphaelite lushness on one side, a sharper, more socially alert theatre on the other. His generation had new appetites - for irony, for psychological motive, for political subtext - and “medieval in its treatment” often meant pageantry without pressure, chivalry without consequence. He’s declaring allegiance to translation over transcription.
The subtext is about craft and power. Drama isn’t a history lecture; it’s a machine for identification. If you stage a medieval subject with medieval habits of mind - stylized morality, emblematic characters, reverent distance - you risk flattering the audience’s sense of cultured nostalgia. If you treat it with contemporary tools, you can make the past indict the present: feudal hierarchies echo modern class, crusading zeal resembles modern nationalism, courtly purity exposes modern hypocrisy. Housman’s insight is that anachronism, used deliberately, isn’t an error. It’s the method by which the old story lands like a current one.
As a playwright writing across the fin de siecle and into modernity, Housman is positioned at the moment when medievalism was both fashionable and suspect: Pre-Raphaelite lushness on one side, a sharper, more socially alert theatre on the other. His generation had new appetites - for irony, for psychological motive, for political subtext - and “medieval in its treatment” often meant pageantry without pressure, chivalry without consequence. He’s declaring allegiance to translation over transcription.
The subtext is about craft and power. Drama isn’t a history lecture; it’s a machine for identification. If you stage a medieval subject with medieval habits of mind - stylized morality, emblematic characters, reverent distance - you risk flattering the audience’s sense of cultured nostalgia. If you treat it with contemporary tools, you can make the past indict the present: feudal hierarchies echo modern class, crusading zeal resembles modern nationalism, courtly purity exposes modern hypocrisy. Housman’s insight is that anachronism, used deliberately, isn’t an error. It’s the method by which the old story lands like a current one.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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