The York Mystery Plays: Performance in the City (review)

Margaret Rogerson, the editor of this valuable collection of academic, critical, and practice-based studies, has been a leader in the field of medieval drama for many years now. With Alexandra F. Johnston, she edited the inaugural Records of Early English Drama on York (1979), and she returns to the York plays here in a volume revealing the still-vibrant life of a topic that has held the attention of different academic and non-academic communities alike over many years. In an expertly managed set of papers, Rogerson makes a virtue of the eclecticism that now more than ever characterizes the field, taking the reader from manuscripts to the material exigencies of wagons; from the unavoidable cognitive blending of reality and fiction in the spectator’s mind to the dutiful piety of late medieval believers imagining the events of Christ’s Passion; from the complex communities that originally produced the plays to the varied goals of those who now perform them half a millennium later. The voices that join company in this collection come from many different directions—from the academy, theater, heritage, festival culture, church, engineering, guildry—and from Australia, Canada, the UK, the United States, and Israel.

The interpretative matrix of the volume is correspondingly wide, so that cognitive theory rubs shoulders with medievalism in one essay (Jill Stevenson), and, in Rogerson’s own academic contribution (in addition to an excellent introduction), Stanislavski’s demands on actors prove less alien to the world of medieval drama than previously thought, if linked to those of affective piety. Mike Tyler’s essay joins traditional literary criticism with Edgar Schein’s theory of cultural organizations to explain the effect of familial forces in the Noah play. Pamela M. King, taking a line that archeologists will recognize, valuably nuances the festivity of medieval confraternity by turning to a cognate contemporary event, the Siena Palio. There are also tightly analyzed accounts of document, context, and institution included here. For example, in a chapter that will be required reading for anyone interested in the documentary bases for interpreting the public scene, Richard Beadle expertly locates the construction of the York Register in a Ricardian political setting, while Sheila K. Christie takes on definitions of genre, and guild and civic jurisdiction, impressively mapping the history of the Masons’ changing involvement in York plays onto their aspirations and ability to work out of religious rather than civic liberties. Rogerson is one of those thoughtful editors who does not balk at providing an index for an essay collection, and so one can find there Artaud and Augustine; the Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament and Merleau-Ponty, and many other intriguing entries to demonstrate the uniquely varied hold of medieval drama on the modern imagination.

Literally and symbolically at the center of the volume is a set of papers (some in the form of edited testimonies) from thirteen practitioners addressing the theoretical, physical, and dramatic challenges of putting such plays before a public that might or might not share the faith of those who originally wrote and watched them. These varied and thought-provoking accounts introduce the reader to the practical problems of dealing with physical performance: space, timetabling, nesting owls, alien language, commerce, health and safety, and licensing; but they also engage with wider cultural issues such as how the “live energies” (Gweno Williams) or the “tension and contrast” (Alan Heaven) necessary to drama can be achieved for the modern audience, and what theories of drama or verse-speaking, and what kinds of music, might promote that theatrical success. Drawing both on theory and a particular production in Tel Aviv, Sharon Aronson-Lehavi bridges the worlds of interpretation through textual analysis and performance in a study of how the York Crucifixion text makes explicit the practical necessities of production, bearing witness to the aesthetic and diachronic priority of staged activity over the written account, and to “gestural, pretextual theatricality as a characteristic of the York...