Binding: Paperback
Description: 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.
Title: Practical Cues And Social Spectacle In The Chester Plays
Author(s): Sergi Matthew
Publisher: The University Of Chicago Press
Barcode: 9780226709376
Pages: 296 Pages
Publication Date: 10/19/2020
Category: Literary Studies: Plays & Playwrights