Street Scenes: Late Medieval Acting and Performance by Sharon Aronson-Lehavi (review)

Sharon Aronson-Lehavi’s Street Scenes: Late Medieval Acting and Performance, published in 2011 under Palgrave’s The New Middle Ages series, posits the question: “Was late medieval religious theatre created in relation to a theoretical discourse about performance, a discourse that might have led to a specific theatre language and acting style that best served the unique characteristics of performing holy subect matter?” (p. 1). Aronson-Lehavi concludes that, while much work has been done on medieval performance, “there is no systematic articulation of a governing late medieval acting concept based on a concurrent theoretical discourse” (p. 14). Over the book’s three chapters, she finds evidence for such a concept primarily in the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge and the York plays, while she draws heavily on Brecht’s epic acting and Artaud’s total acting to give anachronistic but useful terminology to this aesthetic.

Chapter One provides an explication of the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge. Aronson-Lehavi focuses on the text’s structure and key words, such as the highly contentious miraclis and less debated games, in order to demonstrate the treatise’s tentative, possibly analogical connection to cycle drama. She also uses the text’s summary of arguments in favor of “miraclis pleyinge” to characterize cycle drama as both devotional and ludic. According to Aronson-Lehavi, these two often competing impulses in the plays produce an aesthetic discourse that must accommodate both the reverence for the historical and holy subject matter as well as the immediate, “live” events of the actors.

Chapter Two discerns four specific qualities of this late medieval religious performace theory: contrariety and simultaneity, signification and efficacy, emotionality, and communality. Aronson-Lehavi quotes heavily from the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge to demonstrate how each of these qualities were articulated and defended by the plays’ supporters.

Chapter Three grounds these qualities in specific examples from the York plays. It is here also that she develops her discussion of Brecht in connection to such late medieval drama conventions as masking, splitting single roles between many actors, and ritualized gestures, as well as of Artaud in connection to the use of violence. She feels that epic acting and total acting, “the first emphasizing performative self-consciousness and the second denoting a theatre of presence, in fact typify the dominant modes of this religious theatre” (p. 126). She concludes with a call for further research along these lines: “The connections between a religious, prehumanist theatre and a secular, posthumanist one might be stronger than we would assume” (p. 126).

Street Scenes: Late Medieval Acting and Performance does fit with The New Middle Ages series’ mission of multidisciplinary approaches to medieval studies; however, it aims at a broader audience than the series’ usual one, medieval specialists. Instead, the book appears geared toward a more popular audience than medieval drama scholars—most of the Middle English passages are translated into modern English and the book includes a translation of the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge in an appendix as well. It does show some distance from the most recent scholarship on late medieval drama, noticeably in its privileging of a large cycle, such as York, over what emerging research shows were more popular, individual Biblical plays performed in more rural parishes. It also repeats many points that have been commonplace in the admittedly small field of medieval drama studies, but it does articulate and synthesize them well for those outside the field.

The book’s strengths, though, are many. Aronson-Lehavi’s argument is rooted in close, contextual reading, of both her primary texts (the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge and the York plays) and the historical documents surrounding them. She further contextualizes her argument with references to other late medieval devotional texts, such as The Book of Margery Kempe, and early modern commentaries on medieval drama, such as Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry. She also alludes to modern...