Reviewed by: Practical Cues and Social Spectacle in the Chester Plays by Matthew Sergi Carla Neuss Matthew Sergi. Practical Cues and Social Spectacle in the Chester Plays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. xi, 318. 25 illus.; 9 tables. $90.00 cloth; $30.00 paper; $29.99 e-book. In Practical Cues and Social Spectacle in the Chester Plays, Matthew Sergi's object of study is the extra-verbal elements of performance that can be discerned from the textual remains of the Middle English Chester Cycle. His analytical lens, which he terms "practical cues," derives from his own extensive experience as a theatre practitioner, yielding a thorough and common-sense reading of the Chester plays that offers compelling new insights. Defining "practical cues" as "the manuscripts' verbal prompts for extra-verbal action" (2), this work demonstrates a method of "practical reading" (25) that deductively reconstructs key aspects of Chester's staging, performance, and spectatorship that have been previously deemed opaque by other scholars of medieval drama. In this way, Practical Cues aims to shift the scholarly discourse on medieval performance away from one in which "the texts' relationship to live performance tends to be treated as an utterly unknowable and irrevocably conjectural backdrop to other putatively mappable modes of local signification"; it instead approaches surviving medieval dramatic texts "as an apparatus for, and a verbal manifestation of, local playmakers' coherent, consistent, practical imagining of live performance" (12). While its methods and interventions are typical of much historiographic research in performance studies, Practical Cues and Social Spectacle in the Chester Plays usefully models new approaches to medieval drama scholarship that recenter embodied performance in relation to textuality and the medieval dramatic archive. [End Page 422] Sergi's analysis unfolds across five chapters that offer close readings of the majority of the Chester Cycle's surviving twenty-six plays, making this book—as the author himself suggests—a useful companion to reading or teaching the cycle as a whole. Chapter 1 focuses on the Goldsmiths' performance of the Slaughter of the Innocents in an analysis of its use of space through the lens of camp. In challenging Robert Lumiansky and David Mills's reading of certain inconsistencies within the play's stage directions (an argumentative move that is repeated in subsequent chapters), this chapter posits that puzzling moments such as the double-exit of one of the Soldiers from the playing space illuminates key aspects of the negotiation of space across pageant wagons and the platea within the episode. Cautioning about anachronistic assumptions derived from modern notions of realist performance, the argument proceeds by explicating the "visual logic" (41) of the murderous Soldiers and the beset Mothers, offering compelling insight based on the architecture of medieval Chester's streets and Rows to assert that the episode functions more visually than verbally (47), ultimately creating an immersive performance environment wherein actors commingled with spectators (53). The evocative application of Susan Sontag's notion of camp convincingly rereads the pathos of the episode's staging of infanticide as simultaneously bridging "hilarious vulgarity and the sudden, stunning rawness of emotional realness and embodied presence, which illusory realism can never reach in the same way" (69). The second chapter expands on Sergi's 2009 article in Medieval English Theatre through its focus on food and festive piety. In tracing the consumption of food and drink across the entirety of the cycle (which, he notes, is featured in eleven of the twenty-five extant plays), Sergi seeks to reappraise Chester's performance of commensality beyond traditional Eucharistic readings. Drawing on surviving expense accounts of medieval guilds' dining practices, this chapter speaks to the staging of consumption across the Shepherd's Play, The Last Supper, and the Play of the Antichrist to argue for a form of "secular commensality" (86) that asserts the performers' "membership in the community of Christian onlookers" (99). In negotiating the "paradoxes of sacred gluttony and festive piety" (112), this chapter suggests that Chester's food plays function as "ritualized public acts of eating [that serve] to affirm alliance and inclusion" beyond Eucharistic signification. While the evidentiary links between "secular commensality" and notions of "community" and "inclusion" (103) are perhaps underarticulated...
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Jan 1, 2023
Yanfei Yang + 16
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