Vision and Audience in Medieval Drama: A Study of The Castle of Perseverance by Andrea Louise Young (review)

In Vision and Audience in Medieval Drama: A Study of The Castle of Perseverance, Andrea Louise Young reconstructs the dynamic visual mise-en-scène that underlies The Castle of Perseverance, identifying cues for live performance and stage design during a sustained beginning-to-end close reading, which emphasizes references to vision across the play. Young claims that "vision—as a physical, moral, and cognitive process—is the organizing principle that informs the play's staging, structure, and narrative, and its constantly shifting actor/audience relationships" (3). Not an organizing principle, but the organizing principle: she asserts that "once and for all. . .the play is both about, and is driven by, vision" (129). Young isolates and examines a set of common conceptions about vision that, she argues, undergirded all medieval drama in performance—conceptions that Castle's unusual staging, realized within the booming material culture of East Anglia, exploits particularly well: "The Castle of Perseverance attempts to enact different kinds of gazes from the spectators as part of its moral and visual training. The playing place becomes, in effect, a training ground for the audience—a place where they will learn how to see" (8).

Chapter 1, "Vision, Visuality, and the Audience," introduces Young's primary thesis on vision training. It includes, in a series of subsections, summaries of medieval writing on ocular biology and optics, most usefully from Peter of Limoges, who identifies the eye as a moral organ ("the eye must be educated to look in the correct way, and, by looking on the correct things. . .[it] receive[s] further training," 10). A section on "Extramission and Intromission" (14–17) is especially well done: Young describes then-opposing beliefs on whether vision enters into or emanates from the eye, then demonstrates that Castle's versatile staging encompasses both sides at once. A final section, on "Being an Audience" (18–22), thinks through the slippery heterogeneity of spectator viewpoints.

Chapter 2, "Staging The Castle of Perseverance," begins with a comprehensive (and collegially critical) survey of modern interpretations of the abstract stage diagram that survives in the Castle manuscript, including a superb against-the-grain analysis of David Parry's landmark 1979 PLS production of the play (32–33). Young then offers a Castle staging diagram of her own (35), this one drawn to scale with crisp clarity by Phil Kiel, dotted with numbered points that correspond to Young's Appendix A, a systematic scene-by-scene collation of apparent visual cues in the text—thus mapping out the reconstructed staging to which she refers throughout the remainder of the book. Young makes a decisive case for "actor-audience fusion" (that is, for actors and fully mobile spectators to interact fluidly and continually in the same space during a performance), both as an assumed convention across extant medieval drama (31) and as an essential part of Castle. She includes a list (36) of the various physical positions which spectators seem likely to have occupied or passed through during the show. The play-space in toto becomes a "castel town" (41), resonating with specific architectural features of East Anglia, so that the "main tower. . .could be interpreted as evoking the construction of a parish church" (43). The chapter resolves into a running commentary on the first three scenes of the play (lines 157–274), demonstrating how efficiently Young's visual model works for the various implicit staging cues in Castle's text.

The remaining chapters continue that running commentary across the rest of the Castle text. Chapter 3, "Angelic Visions," covering Castle lines 275–1237, identifies positive lessons in how to see (against the negative examples from the first three scenes) and in how to participate in the "communal vision" (66) of good society, of which the real gazes of fellow spectators become the most prominent symbol (Pride's directive for Humanum...