The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England by Nicole R. Rice and Margarete Aziza Pappano (review)

This heady and poignant volume gathers and revises a number of important essays on the Civic Cycles by Nicole R. Rice and Margarete Aziza Pappano, peers and pioneers in studying the social history of the genre. Parts of three chapters are rooted in journal articles written individually or by both authors, now expanded and revised with much completely new material, making this volume not only a welcome coalescence of the authors’ past work on the pageants, but also an occasion for thoughtful and thorough elaboration upon issues of joint concern. The chapters progress with consistent rhetorical energy, as the voices of these critics blend harmoniously, displaying what must have been some substantial collaborative effort at crafting a unified tone and rhetoric.

The volume offers a trenchant appreciation of artisan labor and play production, arguing for the inherent physicality of both, wrought by real men at work, acting, in all senses of the term, with the body, even “resort[ing] to physical brawls to express dissatisfaction over their placement in the procession” (50). No less was at stake, the authors reveal, than civic pride, professional dignity, and a display of communal charity, imperatives that both inspired and resulted from the productions. And since their civic identities were bound up to their work of performance, artisans simultaneously asserted their separateness from both the laboring and the merchant classes. The authors tell the story of this work without needing to theorize the body fancifully or to display arcane, elite jargon that often, ironically, corrupts such studies by desiccating work and worker into dry abstractions. At every turn the authors display respect for labor and laborers, revealing what it meant in social, personal, and spiritual history for a group, bound in purpose and pleasure, to imagine, create, organize, cast, produce, and perform plays. The introduction explains, for example, the feats of acting, now lost to recorded history, that must have been part of evolving play production:

While the artisans may have hired clerks or other literate persons to rewrite their pageants, it seems more probable that the contents of the plays evolved through the process of performance, adapting to changing historical circumstances, shifting production conditions, and the various actors who played the roles… It may be that many of these changes were never written down but were passed down orally within the guild, as with craft knowledge. The knowledge of the part inhered in the body of the artisan and was realized, created, and recreated in yearly performance … The process of innovation through practice, so essential to artisanal work and play production, meant that authority came to rest in the craftsman’s body.

(27)

And later: “the artisans exploited their pageants to promote their identities as master craftsmen, performers of civic devotion, and guardians of local culture” (33). Such energetic critical thought and confident lyrical prose runs throughout the book.

Chapter 1, “New Beginnings,” explores the Corpus Christi feasts at York and Chester, asserting a “new explanatory paradigm” for the plays that involve light imagery (the Fall of the Angels, the Fall of Lucifer), associating their content with the struggle for “guild precedence represented by the bearing of the torches in the liturgical procession” (41). The Tanners in each city used the plays to assert their struggles with other crafts and their relations to local politics. Thus in York they align themselves with the good angels, displaying themselves as agents of harmony, while in Chester they use the play to allude to “interguild struggles of the past,” casting the feast as previously “marred by dissent” (43), in order to “foster increased visibility” and the prominence of their own guild. By engaging the “social meaning of angelic discord” (63) the Tanners, exploiting the tools of their trade—“leather costumes and the boiling cauldrons of hell” (43)—employ the themes and imagery inherent in the pseudo-Biblical episode to respond to the competitive world...