UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Play Texts and Public Practice in the Chester Cycle, 1422-1607 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3d1457v9 Author Sergi, Matthew John Publication Date 2011 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Play Texts and Public Practice in the Chester Cycle, 1422-1607 By Matthew John Sergi A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English and Medieval Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Maura Nolan, Chair Professor Jennifer Miller Professor Carol Clover Spring 2011 Abstract Play Texts and Public Practice in the Chester Cycle, 1422-1607 by Matthew John Sergi Doctor of Philosophy in English and Medieval Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Maura Nolan, Chair Play Texts and Public Practice in the Chester Cycle, 1422-1607 investigates how the Chester cycle‘s scripted action engages playfully with the unscripted practices that surrounded it, especially on the feast days that occasioned its fifteenth- and sixteenth-century civic performances. From the dissertation‘s series of close readings emerges a new vision of cycle drama, in which the revelers who perform and watch the cycle actively exert developmental influences on the form and content of the texts. I show that the extant texts are mirrors of Cestrian public recreation and festivity, enacting feasts, games, intercultural commerce, and civic ceremonies with surprising frequency. Not only do the plays reflect public practice, I argue, but they constitute it: the texts inscribe real guild ceremonies and celebrations into a repeatable dramatic tradition. The Chester plays are inextricable from the holiday festivals that occasioned them, so a close literary analysis of the extant play texts requires an understanding of the circumstances within which the live performances developed. Those circumstances are only fully visible when the mises-en-scène imagined by the extant texts are taken into account as meaningful symbols inseparable from the poetic lines. Throughout Play Texts and Public Practice, I not only combine new readings of archival data with on- site research into Chester‘s live performances and urban topography, but I also treat the play texts themselves as accretive records of performance, allowing me to excavate from them previously unnoticed vestiges of performance cues and circumstances. In turn, I incorporate those cues and circumstances back into my formal analysis, to comprehend the open-ended space and time of street theater as medieval Cestrians played it and understood it. A rigorous performance-based approach allows me to read the extant texts as indices of ongoing community-based practice—a set of local festivities in which the literary subtleties and embellishments of Chester‘s texts play a crucial role. The form and content of the cycle, integrating real festivities with the symbolic representation of those festivities, create a complex conceptual space within which the relationships between secular and religious practice can be negotiated and explored. The fifteenth- and sixteenth-century performance conditions make their real environment radically visible, rather than trying to darken it; the local spectators and architecture that crowded in on the plays‘ productions were absorbed into their texts—so that the extant texts, having developed during that immersive and collaborative performance process, resonate aesthetically and symbolically with the Cestrian community and its city. 1 For Ara Glenn-Johanson on our tenth anniversary and for every other theater-maker who remembers why we call these things plays. i Contents Acknowledgments iii List of Tables v List of Abbreviations, with a Note on the EETS Edition of the Plays vi Introduction: Theater of Darkness, Theater of Daylight 1 Chapter One Playing Through the Chester Cycle: Recreation and Resistance 25 Chapter Two The Cestrian Community in Time 59 Chapter Three Festive Piety: Food and Drink in the Chester Plays 107 Chapter Four Tourism and Hospitality at Chester‘s Port 130 Conclusion 156 References 158 Bibliography 192 ii Acknowledgments It is primarily because of Maura Nolan‘s care and counsel that the process of writing this dissertation has been as satisfying as the completion of the final product. Every email, every chat, every one of my missteps and misadventures has become, thanks to Maura‘s honest guidance, a source of wisdom about the business and art of academics. My wife and I will always be grateful to Maura for the attention she has devoted to drafts of my work and to my growth as a scholar. I cannot imagine how Maura manages to do everything she does; I cannot imagine how I would have managed without her. At Berkeley, I have worked with professors whose standards are rigorous, whose opinions are diverse, and whose senses of style are highly refined. The late Nicholas Howe, my first advisor here at Berkeley, trained me as a young writer, nurturing my good questions and breaking my bad habits. My subsequent writing benefited immensely from dialogue with and guidance from Jennifer Miller, who encouraged me to develop my earliest ideas on the Chester plays and gave me a safe space to test them as a scholar and as an instructor. Steven Justice, Katherine O‘Brien O‘Keeffe, and Carol Clover also provided astute feedback that was invaluable to this dissertation. Professors are not the only Berkeley scholars to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude. I have tested multiple drafts with the Graduate Medievalists at Berkeley, a cluster of interdisciplinary reading and working groups run by graduate students. In particular, my dear friends and supportive colleagues Andrea Lankin, R.D. Perry, and Benjamin Saltzman have been around for the whole ride. I am proud to consider my fellow graduate medievalists my intellectual siblings: we have grown up as scholars together and I look forward to when our paths cross again as professors. An undergraduate scholar, Hannah Len, signed on in the final year of this process as my Research Assistant, generously helping me track down citations and find last-minute references. Hannah has been an exemplary student and will be, I am sure, a formidable graduate medievalist herself soon. I am also grateful to the institutions that provided me with support for living and research expenses at Berkeley: the Peter and Megan Chernin Mentoring Fellowship, the UC Berkeley Dean‘s Normative Time Fellowship, and the UC Berkeley English Department‘s Block Grant. The community of medieval drama specialists in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom is very hospitable to its emerging scholars; I consider myself lucky to be one of them. Part of Chapter One received important input from David Klausner, Helen Ostovich, and Jessica Dell in preparation for inclusion in their upcoming book project. I received especially useful commentary on Chapter Three, which will eventually appear as an article in Medieval English Theatre, from Meg Twycross and Gordon Kipling, as well as an anonymous editor. Helen Fulton, Robert Barrett, and Catherine Clarke allowed me access to pre-published material in preparation for Chapter Four, while providing comments and advice that helped shape that chapter. Theresa Coletti and Gail McMurray Gibson also provided me with access to pre-published material on Tudor scribal traditions. David Klausner, Alexandra Johnston, and Jennifer Roberts-Smith made it possible for me to meet (and eventually join in!) with the participants in the Chester 2010 cycle performances at Toronto—and they even helped me with rides and lodging. Linda Phillips of Poculi Ludique Societas, along with all of the participants in Chester 2010, especially the cast of Emmaus from Redeemer University, talked through my research questions with me and helped me uncover some unexpected answers, while carrying off some very impressive performances. With the gracious support of a Schallek Grant from the Medieval Academy of America and the Richard III Society, I was able to visit the citizens of Chester during their own community-based performances of the Chester Mystery Plays in 2008, to examine an early manuscript fragment of the cycle, and to deliver an early version of Chapter Four to colleagues at the New Chaucer Society. iii Seeing the Cestrian revival of the Chester cycle, and hearing the participants‘ thoughts on their own plays, was easily the most inspiring part of my process in developing this dissertation. I offer sincere and humble thanks especially to Cestrian performers Ronno Griffiths, Brian Pearson, and Ieuan Griffiths Pearson, who in 2008 and 2011 generously took an exhausted American postgraduate under their wing and gave up their time, their stories, their powerful and honest performances, their impromptu tours, their delicious food, and the use of their spare room. That latter research trip in 2011 was funded by the Anglo-California Dissertation Grant from UC Berkeley‘s Center for British Studies. It allowed me to cement my work with some experiments involving sight-lines along Chester‘s streets, and with advanced archival research at the Chester Records Office, through Cheshire Archives and Local Studies. To finally hold Rogers‘ 1609 Breviary in my hands made this whole process feel complete. My sincerest thanks go to the Center for British Studies and to the Archive Assistants at the Record Office for making that possible. I am also grateful to my family for innumerable reasons. When I found myself stranded at the Manchester International Airport at the end of my research trip in 2008, it was my mother, Adrienne Hernandez, who kindly provided my plane ticket home—in so doing, she became an accidental provider, in a way, of another of the travel grants that made this dissertation possible. My mother accompanied my sister, Marissa Hernandez, to Chester 2010 in Toronto, where I had taken ill; if they hadn‘t cared for me there, I would never have been able to stay for the performances and symposium.