The Chester Cycle in Context, 1555–1575: Religion, Drama and the Impact of Change ed. by Jessica Dell, David Klausner, and Helen Ostovich (review)

This collection of essays addresses a range of religious, textual, and performance-based issues that surround the last large-scale productions of the Chester cycle. Several of the contributors (especially Erin Kelly, Kurt Schreyer, and Heather S. Mitchell-Buck) reflect on the historical tensions informing these performances in ways that offer new and provocative theoretical paradigms. Others (especially Alexandra F. Johnston, Paul Whitfield White, and Mark Faulkner) provide new readings of texts and performances through their careful analysis of specific historical documents. The volume also makes room for essays that are largely speculative (especially those by David Mills and Margaret Rogerson), hinting at not just the challenges but also the freedoms afforded by the relative inaccessibility of these performances. The collection holds obvious value for anyone interested in the Chester cycle and religious history, but it also exceeds this focus through its overarching interest in performance and the range of approaches to performance that it models.

The introduction offers a nuanced historical context for the Chester cycle’s process of revision leading up to its final performance in 1575, with emphasis on local influences and the “difficulty of pinning down sectarian drama.” The subsequent eleven essays are grouped into four parts: “The Chester Script,” “Faith and Doubt,” “Elizabethan Religion(s),” and “Space and Place in Chester.”

To begin part 1, Alexandra F. Johnston’s analysis of the 1591 manuscript in conjunction with Christopher Goodman’s 1572 eyewitness account leads her to conclude that the 1572 performance clustered episodes in ways that differ from any surviving manuscript. David Mills’s brief and more narrowly focused contribution examines the staging of movement in the opening speech of The Fall of Lucifer to argue that its distinctness from other play cycles suggests a local resistance to changing royal policies.

The four essays in part 2 consider more precisely the ways in which performative elements of the Chester plays enabled an experiential exploration of questions of faith and doubt. Addressing the question why Protestant ministers stopped writing religious dramas after 1580, Erin Kelly surmises that drama may have been viewed as “too unpredictable a medium for disseminating straightforward doctrinal points.” The Chester plays, she argues, demonstrate the contrasting possibility that doubt might strengthen faith by inviting multiple interpretations and engendering a diverse audience response.

Matthew Sergi’s thought-provoking essay discusses the dice game in Chester’s Passion to consider the ways that performance complicates the representation of chance, producing an effect of comic artifice that clashes with the fatalism of the scene. John T. Sebastian’s provocative, though less performance-oriented, essay considers the theological, salvific implications of The Ascension’s heightened attention to Christ’s blood. Much more speculatively, Margaret Rogerson suggests that the popular practice of affective piety, exemplified in the private devotions of Margery Kempe, might have offered a “method” for the Cestrian actors to memorize their lines and prepare for their roles.

The two essays that constitute the third section of the volume, “Elizabethan Religion(s),” turn to the well-worn question of the relationship between the Whitson Cycle at Chester and religion. Addressing Chester’s complex relationship to the Reformation, Paul Whitfield White’s main contribution lies in his detailed account of Chester’s diverse religious sensibilities. Kurt Schreyer’s insightful essay revisits a different critical question – that of periodization and the place of pre-Reformation plays in the history of early English drama. For Schreyer, the Late Banns’ location of the Whitsun plays in “a remote and ignorant time” does not simply impose a diachronic medieval-Renaissance divide but rather imparts a synchronous view of history that preserves the past “in the present.”

Part 4 – “Space and Place in Chester” – contains three essays that address the cycle’s relationship to Chester’s urban space and local concerns. Considering the plays’ largely positive depictions of...