Reviewed by: Practical Cues and Social Spectacle in the Chester Plays by Matthew Sergi Pamela M. King (bio) Matthew Sergi. Practical Cues and Social Spectacle in the Chester Plays. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. Xi + 318. $88.30 cloth, $36.00 paper, $28.50 e-book. In this distinctive study of the Chester Plays, one of whose strengths lies in its minutely detailed observation of text, Matthew Sergi recommends that readers have a copy of the text at their elbows. The book is, however, much more than a "companion" to the plays. Sergi approaches criticism from the point of view of one familiar with the practical realization of early play texts in performance. His study focuses on the extra-verbal cues for action which singularly abound in the Chester Plays, and he opens by contending that these cues are "crucial symbols in themselves, around which the texts' verbal meaning is often organised" (1), that is "the primary bearers of meaning framed by (and evidently fossilized in) insubstantial poetry" (2). The declared approach has far-reaching implications for reading the plays beyond what-happened-on-stage. Notably also Sergi convincingly proposes new ways of approaching the extant manuscripts, all of which post-date the final performance, that can cut through simple chronology via Cestrian cultural memory, including that of the scribes—Bourdieu's theory of "habitus"—to authenticate records of actual performance. In the fifth chapter Sergi offers a reprise of the work's agenda: Each of my previous chapters has attempted to reveal in Chester's practical cues habitual engagements with, and prompts directed toward, real Cestrian bodies: play-fighting, moving freely through streets, eating and drinking, gathering into interactive masses, aging and reproducing. Haunting each of those engagements is the volatility of bodies themselves. (208) He reminds the reader of the "camp anti-narrative" he identifies in the Introduction that "allows biblical signifiers to be reconfigured as amusements in public thoroughfares" (208). This section focuses on the Waterleaders' Noah, drawing out what will become a recurring observation that much of Chester's dialogue is "strategically instrumental: a matter of getting performers' bodies into the right place at the right time" (19). The moments the author focuses on are the blow delivered by Noah's wife to Noah, and the moment when the sons bring the wife forcibly on to the ark. He discusses the relationship between Chester's sparse stage directions; the complaints of late sixteenth-century protesters, such as Christopher Goodman, that the play-texts do insufficient to control performers; and copyists' subsequent attempts to facilitate readers' understanding of live performance by the addition of stage directions, which can contradict practical cues embedded in dialogue. This is what he describes as "practical reading," a method whereby "a close analysis of extant text excavates implicit clues" and [End Page 540] arranges them alongside any explicit clues, in, for example, stage directions, as well as "in relation to the physical necessities of real bodies, moving through real space in real time" (25). Chapter 1 then takes the Chester Goldsmiths' pageant to explore further how extra-verbal cues "create spatial relationships born of the practical necessities of performing on a mobile stage" (29). Here the reader finds a convincing forensic analysis of the pageant's double exits that puzzled the latest editors of the cycle. The test case is also used to demonstrate how, in the violent action between the mothers and the soldiers, dialogue is better for choreographing comic timing than any stage direction. Most arrestingly, however, it is here that Sergi fully introduces his astute borrowing of "camp" as a term from modern theatre practice, where horrific material is treated in a way which is used both "as a flippant rejection of narrative solemnity and as an amplification of emotional power" (31). The approach bears fruit in generating a thoroughly convincing tonal assessment of the effectiveness of this version of the massacre within the constraints of the performance circumstances. There is one strange omission in the close analysis of the episode, however: Sergi is silent on the probability that the women were played by men. "Festive Piety: Food, Drink, and Recreation-as-Devotion" aptly...