Practical Cues and Social Spectacle in the Chester Plays
Amid the crowded streets of Chester, guild players portraying biblical characters performed on colorful mobile stages hoping to draw the attention of fellow townspeople. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, these Chester plays employed flamboyant live performance to adapt biblical narratives. But the original format of these fascinating performances remains cloudy, as surviving records of these plays are sparse, and the manuscripts were only written down a generation after they stopped. Revealing a vibrant set of social practices encoded in the Chester plays, Matthew Sergi provides a new methodology for reading them and a transformative look at medieval English drama.
Carefully combing through the plays, Sergi seeks out cues in the dialogues that reveal information about the original staging, design, and acting. These “practical cues,” as he calls them, have gone largely unnoticed by drama scholars, who have focused on the ideology and historical contexts of these plays, rather than the methods, mechanics, and structures of the actual performances. Drawing on his experience as an actor and director, he combines close readings of these texts with fragments of records, revealing a new way to understand how the Chester plays brought biblical narratives to spectators in the noisy streets. For Sergi, plays that once appeared only as dry religious dramas come to life as raucous participatory spectacles filled with humor, camp, and devotion.
The recipient of an honorable mention for the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society’s David Bevington Award for Best New Book and another honorable mention for New York University’s 2022 Callaway Prize for Best Book on Drama and Theatre, PCSS is available in paper, cloth, or electronic format from the University of Chicago Press — click here to buy a copy.
Praise for Practical Cues and Social Spectacle
“Sergi is able to derive an impressive amount of mileage from such fleeting pieces of evidence, and his command over his own methodology makes for a reading experience that feels a bit like witnessing virtuosic detective work… the reader comes away from this book with the sense that something new and important has been forged,” writes Mariah Min in the April 2022 issue of the Journal of British Studies. Min praises PCSS as “a compelling account of what the Chester plays must have been in performance” that “models a transformative approach for engaging with early drama”: “This is not a book that many people could have written. Sergi combines his extensive firsthand experience as director and performer with his academic expertise in early drama scholarship, and the result is a thoroughly convincing work that not only contributes in fundamental ways to how we ask questions of these texts but carries immense pedagogical implications… I also found the way that he navigates these two disciplinary ends of the field—what might broadly be called commitments to literature and documentation, respectively—to be fascinatingly adroit.”
Sarah Salih, in Speculum’s July 2022 issue, calls PCSS “a thoroughly enjoyable book about the enjoyments of Chester’s biblical drama” whose “thoughtfully nuanced argument… does not deny, but decenters, other well-established functions of the plays such as local pride, guild aggrandizement, and religious didacticism.” Salih describes the book’s opening establishment of its approach as “persuasive and enriching” and summarizes the book’s “coherent model” for understanding the plays (in doing so she contends with two minor points, one practical and one logical, quite astutely); she concludes that PCSS is “a remarkably accomplished first book. Its prose is clear and vigorous; it is deeply knowledgeable about its material and persuasive in its reconstructions. It will be of interest to anyone who works on medieval drama, and indeed to anyone concerned with the history of theatrical possibility.”
In the Winter 2021 issue of Comparative Drama, Pamela M. King calls PCSS a “distinctive study of the Chester Plays” whose approach has “far-reaching implications” and whose “genuinely original observations” and “radical insights” make “a major intervention into a continuously evolving conversation about the performance evidence associated with premodern drama.” In her generous, thoughtful review of the book (which includes some welcome critiques as well as high praise), King describes various parts of PCSS as “arrestingly… astute,” “strong,” “subtly presented,” “convincingly propose[d],” “convincing,” and “thoroughly convincing.”
Carla Neuss, in the 2022 issue of Studies in the Age of Chaucer, finds in PCSS “a thorough and common-sense reading of the Chester plays that offers compelling new insights.” She continues: “In its acute close reading, detailed analysis, and comprehensive use of archival sources,” PCSS “presents welcome and refreshing insight into the plays… [and] offers compelling evidence for the role of play, carnival, and spectacle operating alongside the devotional, economic, and political impetuses observed by previous scholars of Cestrian performance…. Sergi’s centering of the ‘practical’ within his interventions of ‘practical cues,’ ‘practical reading,’ and ‘practical logic’ demonstrates how considerations of the embodied and material aspects of performance can radically reinform our understanding of extant texts that ultimately can only point to the rich performance tradition that was the Chester Cycle.”
Christina M. Fitzgerald writes in the 2021 issue of Studies in the Age of Chaucer that PCSS is one of three “recent books that reexamine and overturn conventional wisdom about early English drama” (alongside Julie Paulson’s Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play and Daisy Black’s Play Time: Gender, Anti-Semitism and Temporality in Medieval Biblical Drama), making our current moment “a particularly good time for books on early drama.” Fitzgerald has also provided book-jacket praise for PCSS: “Sergi’s deeply erudite but also ebullient book on the Chester plays reminds us why we call such things ‘plays’ in the first place. Combining the expertise of a theater practitioner, a scholar, a performance theorist, a textual detective, and a close reader par excellence, Sergi deftly uncovers how much meaning and merriment is to be found in the ‘practical cues’ for action and spectacle in the Chester play texts and their archival contexts. Both playful and profound, this book overturns so much conventional wisdom that it should be required reading for anyone interested in premodern performance or who needs a convincing case for why they should be.”
Theresa M. Coletti, on that same book jacket, writes: “It’s not often that a scholarly book has the potential to transform and reorient the corner of the field that it addresses. Sergi’s Practical Cues and Social Spectacle in the Chester Plays is one of those books. It will be recognized for its major interventions in early drama studies.”
And the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society 2021 Bevington Award committee, in giving PCSS an honorable mention for Best New Book of that year, commented that “Sergi’s Practical Cues seems to be the fullest answer to the promise contained within David Bevington’s From Mankind to Marlowe, that performance is part of the bones of what remains of medieval play-texts like the Chester cycle. This book speaks to both theatre-makers and theatre-scholars about the types of embodiment these play-texts afford or ‘cue.’ Sergi balances close reading of texts and records with practical questions about embodied performance, putting to use his own experience as both a practitioner and a scholar. Particularly in his use of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, Sergi’s book suggests exciting avenues for more work that engages Performance as Research in early theatre studies.”