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Performing Environments: Sitespecificity in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama ed. by Susan Bennett and Mary Polito

2015; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 67; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tj.2015.0099

1086-332X

Robert W Barrett,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

Reviewed by: Performing Environments: Sitespecificity in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama ed. by Susan Bennett and Mary Polito Robert W. Barrett Jr. PERFORMING ENVIRONMENTS: SITESPECIFICITY IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ENGLISH DRAMA. Edited by Susan Bennett and Mary Polito. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; pp. 288. Editors Susan Bennett and Mary Polito open their collection of essays on early English drama by explicitly eschewing “London-centric” public theatre plays in favor of “‘outsider’ performances” located beyond the capital. “Conceived about and for a particular community in a particular place,” these dramas merit the label “site-specific” (1). Their performance sites frequently bear the traces of other, nondramatic uses—quotidian practices that inflect theatre, even as theatre inflects them right back. Bennett and Polito are quick to locate their project in a scholarly genealogy comprised of not only the localized attentions of the REED project, but also the historicist contextualizations of such scholars as Claire Sponsler, Jean Howard, and Janette Dillon. Provincial England is the primary locale in many of the collection’s twelve essays; of secondary importance are the “various elsewheres” of Wales and Scotland (4). Site-specific drama takes on a mnemonic character in the volume, exploring the ways in which early performance instantiates the past while simultaneously interpreting it anew for contemporary audiences. Performing Environments is divided into four sections. The first of these, “Building Frameworks,” explores the “multi-perspectival” spaces in which performance takes place (6). Patricia Badir opens the section with a palimpsestic reading of late-medieval York that focuses on three objects related to the cycle plays—the Mercers’ pageant wagon, the Sykes Manuscript of the Scriveners’ Thomas play, and the civic corporation’s ceremonial sword—to demonstrate how “civic distinction” is “an effect created by site-specific interactions between people and things over time” (31; emphasis in original). Next, Elisabeth Dutton examines a 2009 revival of John Heywood’s Play of the Weather at Hampton Court, arguing that the royal presence crucial to so many readings of the interlude was more likely a royal absence, a spatialized “dramaturgy of deferral” of authority that creates an opening for Merry Report’s antics as Vice (38). Kim Solga ends the section with an investigation of Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling as a deliberate intersection of architectural space and female gender, a tragedy “in which site figures as character” alongside Beatrice Johanna (57). The second section, “Travel and Topography,” contains essays focused on touring. Jim Ellis starts with Elizabeth I’s 1575 visit to Kenilworth Castle, seeing Leicester’s relocation of various local games and shows (especially the Coventry Hock Tuesday play) as more of a dislocation, an “overwriting of the local” that seeks to produce “a new version of England” (80). Helen Ostovich follows up with a study of the problematic reconciliation of “site-specificity” and the “hazy never-never lands” of romance (100), using the Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men project’s 2008 production of Clyomon and Clamydes on a variety of stage types as her test case. Julie Sanders concludes with an account of a Caroline “cross-flow” between the professional plays of John Brome and Ben Jonson and the household-centered efforts of such Midlands families as the Newdigates, Willoughbys, and Cavendishes (119). “Psychic Spaces,” the third part of the book, devotes itself to the memory work of site-specific drama. Kevin Teo begins with a discussion of the York Crucifixion and Death of Christ pageants, showing how the plays force the Pinners and Butchers performing them to redefine their understanding of the quotidian work they carry out in the environs of the city both before and after Corpus Christi. Clare Wright’s essay views the Croxton Play of the Sacrament through a cognitive theory lens, teasing out the ways in which the play’s place-and-scaffold performance outside Croxton All Saints “shapes audience experience” by blurring the boundaries between staged actions and liturgical memories (160). Finally, Sarah Crover demonstrates how Edward Seymour uses pageantry to obliterate the site-specificity of his Elvetham estate during Elizabeth’s [End Page 571] 1591 visit, replacing historically contingent locality with a wholly portable “pastoral neverwhere” (180). The last section of the collection...