Recycling the Cycle: The City of Chester and Its Whitsun Plays (review)

Abstract

240 Reviews (pp. 53-55) and cites (quoting a 1987 study by M . Rubin) the example of the almoner of Christ Church, Canterbury 'who spent only half of one per cent of his income on external poverty relief in the period 1284-1373' (p. 57). In elucidating his thesis that, overall, monasticism's influence on the daily lives of 'the silent body of the medieval population' (p. 152) was more limited than has often been suggested, Milis offers some informative vignettes of monastic contributions to learning and to missionary activity in the early part of the Middle Ages, useful discussion of monastic reform movements and a lucid summary of the educational institutions of the period, all of which m a y be read apart from his main thesis. Its sceptical conclusion, namely that 'isolation and a reluctance to participate in society, rather than social involvement, were the most characteristic, and in fact, essential, features of medieval monasticism' (p. 151), m a y well be, as Milis himself admits, 'unacceptable' (p. xiii) to some readers, but nevertheless must remain a challenge to all readers. Elizabeth Moores Department of English University of Queensland Mills, David, Recycling the Cycle: The City of Chester and Its Whitsun Pla (Studies in Early English Drama 4), Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1998; cloth; pp. xiii, 281; R.R.P. $55.00 Recycling the Cycle represents the collected wisdom of one of the for scholars of early English drama. The book situates the corpus of plays known as the Chester Cycle within the broad historical landscape of their performance and within the vicissitudes of scholarly approaches to medieval drama since the nineteenth century. Chester and its play cycle stand as the point of convergence for this study of the interaction between politics, religion and drama in late medieval and Early Modern England. The focus on the cycle and its immediate social context provides a local but never a parochial perspective. David Mills synthesises a wealth of n e w and previously published material relevant to the study of the Chester cycle. Thebook draws onrecently discovered archival sources, most notably the letterbook of Christopher Reviews 241 Goodman held in the Ruthin Record Office whichrichlyillustrates the variety ofpost-Reformation attitudes to the performance ofthe cycle plays atChester and the events contributing to their cessation in 1575. Apicture ofChester as a developed and complex urban space emerges from the pages of this book, brought into view by the c o m m a n d with which the author marshals records ofcivic administration, personal correspondence, antiquarian accounts and historical studies. David Mills's contribution to the published scholarship on the Chester cycle is unparalleled. H e is the author of numerous articles on the cycle and the co-editor of the scholarly edition of the plays as well as of the in-progress Cheshire volume of the Records of Early English Drama project. He comments authoritatively on both textual and contextual issues and the implications for comprehending the dramatic merit and the sociological significance of the cycle. The body of the book, Chapters T w o to Nine, surveys physical and symbolic space in Chester; the city's mythologised account of its past; the range of ceremonial activity through which the city sought to understand and to promote itself; issues of religion and secularity; and sponsorship and control of dramatic products. Chapters Eight and Nine examine the creative integrity of the extant texts of the cycle together with the relationship they bear to their historical performances. Both are vexed issues. The Chester cycle is often held to lack artistic flair, and the significant gap between the last k n o w n performance in 1575 and the earliest extant manuscript of the plays, 1591, raises more than the usual questions about h o w faithfully the texts reflect those performances. The author addresses such problematic issues unperturbedly. H e subordinates the first to his understanding of the logic informing the cycle's uniform structure and the second to a detailed scrutiny of the stability and mutability of the text through various processes of revision, both prior to and subsequent to the last date of performance. The richness of the study...