Title Practical cues and social spectacle in the Chester plays / Matthew Sergi

Published Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2020

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Description 1 online resource (xi, 318 pages) Contents Introduction: The Waterleaders' Noah -- Porousness and Diffusion in the Chester Goldsmiths' Mise-en-Scène -- Festive Piety: Food, Drink, and Recreation-as-Devotion in the Chester Plays -- Cestrian Collaborations: Creating Texts, Casting, and Moving en Masse -- In the Long Run: Practical Time in the Chester Plays -- For the Lewd Standing Here: Chester's Athletic Spectacles and Unruly Fans -- Conclusion: The Clothworkers' Portents Summary 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 Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Description based on print version record SUBJECT Chester plays. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79073642 Chester plays fast Subject English drama -- To 1500 -- History and criticism English drama -- Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600 -- History and criticism Mysteries and miracle-plays, English -- England -- Chester -- History and criticism English drama -- England -- Chester -- To 1500 -- History LITERARY CRITICISM / General. English drama English drama -- Early modern and Elizabethan Mysteries and miracle-plays, English England -- Chester Genre/Form Electronic books Criticism, interpretation, etc. History Form Electronic book Author Walter de Gruyter & Co. De Gruyter University Press Library (UPL) 2020 ISBN 9780226709406 022670940X

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