Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays by Sarah Beckwith (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS??? detour or distraction from the serious business undertaken by such knights such as Lancelot and Tristram. His rather demonstrates the enduring ability of Camelot to fire the imagination of an adventure writer such as Roberts, and his stories are an amusing glimpse in to the way it things may have really happened in the age of chivalry. MICHELE D. BRAUN Northeastern University Sarah beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation andSymbolicAct in the York Corpus Christi PUys. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.Pp. xviii, 294. isbn: 0226 -04134-4. $35 (cloth). The foundational premise ofSignifying God is that '[i]ftheatre and sacrament teach us anything, it is surely that neither is an object to be known, but rather a process that demands our participation and our willingness to be known in the contingencies ofour own biographies' (xviii). Here Beckwith is invoking Stanley Cavcll's observation that '[n]othing can be present to which we are not present' in order to construct a theory of ritual that underscores the importance of presence as a means of grasping and, in fact, remembering the York plays. Beckwith's boldest claim hinges the sociality of presence to the symbolic act she calls sacramental theatre. The York plays are thus read as profoundly collective activities in which knowledge of Christ is made real in the presence of community. In the second and third chapters, the business of signifying God is shown to involve the ritualization ofthe city, and yet this process is specifically not 'about the imposition ofa homogenous kind ofunity on to the city but rather an implication ofits webs of signification' (38). One such web is the organization oflabor within the guild structure responsible for producing the plays. Taking advantage of recent research in guild history to support her reading of the Crucifixion play, Beckwith concludes that '[t]hrough the culture's central symbol ofdesire and suffering, the very limits ofthe satisfaction that the system ofsocial labor provides are marked' (55). The social tensions Beckwith sees as the generative force behind the York play are then summoned as support for the paradoxical claim that the plays are themselves sacrament. The fourth chapter argues that theatre's phenomenality makes every performance ofthe Passion plays sacramental because they are 'encounter and action, relation and transitus rather than object or thing' (59). Even more controversially, in the plays' sequential and repetitious resemiotization ofChrist's body (or, arguably, bodies), eucharistie piety is wrested from clerical and doctrinal hands in order to fulfill 'its most generously Utopian aspirations to cause what it signifies, to perform a bond of love in the community ofthe faithful' (60). The fifth chapter turns to the Resurrection plays in order to explore them as 'drama of appearances and disappearances' which ask a further question central to sacramentality: '[h]ow do we encounter the glorified God who has withdrawn himselffrom our sight?' (73). Like the Magdalen to whom Christ cannot be present until such times as she is present to him, the plays' Christs cannot 102ARTHURIANA be present to an audience without some knowledge, on the part ofthat audience, of their own structures ofrelations or communities ofbelief. The plays 'can only take place, not as a fetishised memorial to an event that is already supposed to have happened, but by perpetually relived and always present enactment.' (88) A chapter on penance and justice finishes offthe core of the book. Here Beckwith reads the plays against Lollard and Wycliffite texts, not to argue that the plays were partisan, but rather to illustrate the radical challenges they uttered to the Church. Chapter 7, then, looks at the demise ofthe plays in order to suggest that Protestant reformers instigated an irrevocable distinction between theatre and devotion by assuring that the former became the venue of disguise: '[i]n these new conventions, the sign is something that we look past, behind or through and not at' (155). The study ofmedieval modes ofsignification is bookended by an examination of twentieth-century revivals of the mystery plays. The first chapter considers the production of the York plays, amidst the bombed-out ruins of St. Mary's, for the 1951 Festival of Britain. Four more recent revivals are addressed at the...