Matthew Sergi's book title, Practical Cues and Social Spectacle in the Chester Plays, immediately maps a large geography and alerts his reader to the terrain ahead. He challenges some long-held theories that constrain these texts within the relative and exclusive isolation of the merchant guilds themselves. Sergi is intent on connecting the surviving play scripts with a broader societal engagement in the development of the texts, as well as in the productions of the 1466–1578 performance window, an engagement which, he argues, has a greater implication for their contiguous influence on Cestrian quotidian culture in the late Middle Ages.
Sergi declares a theoretical affinity early in this work to individual views promoted by Bourdieu, Overlie, and Sponsler concerning matters ranging from deconstruction to the logic of practice, which he then utilizes to reinforce his social and staging conclusions. Sergi's particular focus is on the natural accretion to the plays of the implicit as well as inscribed cues, stage directions, and textual prompts, all of which “slide easily between margin and main text” (129) of the Chester plays and by extension indicate stage actions that were signals for direct engagement with generations of audiences. Well attuned to the scope and breadth of contemporary scholarship, Sergi proficiently negotiates the territory of the five surviving versions of the Chester cycle of mystery plays with a profound understanding of the array of original materials. These primarily consist of guild records, varying scribal histories, as well as Rogers's 1609 Breviary, and even more crucially, A Stanzaic Life of Christ and the Peniarth Antichrist, both of which he knows comprehensively and consults often.
Using a five-chapter structure including an introduction and a conclusion, which respectively focus on the Waterleaders’ Noah and the Clothworkers’ Portents, Sergi investigates all twenty-four surviving plays as well as the missing Assumption. An episodic structure is eschewed in favor of thematic groups, which in turn probe the porousness and diffusion of playing spaces in Chester mise-en-scène; the festive piety of food and drink employed in a recreation-as-devotional manner; collaborative text creation in relation to casting as well as to moving large masses of performers; the consideration of real and compressed time in the plays; and the spectacle of athleticism and its effect on audience behaviors and reactions. From his examinations, Sergi reasons that these “readings allow for the literate, didactic, devotional, economic, and political to coexist in these multivocal plays comfortably alongside the camp, carnal, communal, and childish amusements encoded in their practical cues” (208).
With superb acuity as a close reader, Sergi excels at etymological differentiations—English and equally well in Latin—and the careful consideration of performance probabilities deriving from them. Repeated instances of this precision characterize the nine tables that display meticulous patience with the minutiae of variant spellings and great skill in comparative analysis of textual incongruities. Astutely and conveniently, he has compiled his interpretations in parallel with Lumiansky and Mills's authoritative transcription of the plays and in close consultation with their Essays and Documents. This welcome arrangement provides a consistency and ease of reference that is both clear and concise.
In supporting some of his findings, Sergi's methodology is enhanced considerably by his admittedly limited production experience, some of which latterly with Poculi Ludique Societas, or PLS, as Sergi acknowledges the renowned medieval performance troupe. However, this is not to suggest that Practical Cues and Social Spectacle in the Chester Plays straddles an exploration of practical aspects of early English play production by an academician with an examination of textual evidence by a practitioner. Rather, from this favorable vantage, although he reports his conclusions as an initiate, Sergi examines his evidence with instinctual acumen as a director. Much of the theoretical thrust of his paradigm hinges on his clear understanding of the exigencies of practical performance. While it is a thoroughly scholarly work, it also enjoys solid footing in a lived appreciation of theater practice. He employs his intuitions from these experiences and his comprehensive analytical skills using a finely ground lens that picks out textual as well as extra-textual detail in a precise manner.
In Practical Cues and Social Spectacle in the Chester Plays Matthew Sergi presents compelling arguments for engaging “the plays’ unexamined practical cues to illuminate the sociocultural mise-en-scène that has already been imagined for these plays, and often to recalibrate or challenge modern interpretations of that mise-en-scène” (240). This formidable monograph contributes important new research that enhances foundational works such as Records of Early English Drama: Chester (ed. Lawrence M. Clopper [1979]). Sergi's robust scholarship has added a worthy companion volume to the front ranks of early English theater studies.
