How much do we leave unexamined, when we assume that the entirety of a text is what survives on the page? In Practical Cues and Social Spectacle in the Chester Plays, Matthew Sergi provides a compelling account of what the Chester plays must have been in performance: a multivocal, hyperlocal, temporally layered, unrestrained expression of Cestrian life in all its vibrant disorder. In doing so, he models a transformative approach for engaging with early drama through a process of deductive reconstruction, built on the understanding that much more happens in the production of a play than what we find recorded in extant manuscripts.
“Practical cues” are Sergi's access pass into this reconstructed world. Defined as “verbal prompts for extra-verbal action” (2), practical cues function as clues in the task of piecing together how the Chester plays might have been performed. For instance, a character proclaiming “Ouch!” suggests that they have just been struck, even in the absence of an explicit instruction for one actor to strike another. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of practice, Sergi mines the Chester scripts for these practical cues, which produce action by calling upon the unarticulated knowledge of local convention. That is—to extend the example—those involved in the production of the play recognize that A hits B here because they have seen it happen before.
Sergi is able to derive an impressive amount of mileage from such fleeting pieces of evidence, and his command over his own methodology makes for a reading experience that feels a bit like witnessing virtuosic detective work. Antirealistic mise-en-scène and redundancy are found to be responses to the necessities of mobile street performance; onstage gluttony is a form of raucous lay piety that embraces its own sinful valences; erratic variations in stage directions are the sedimented trace of multiple collaborators leaving their marks throughout performance history. As comprehensive and eclectic as the targets of analysis are, they all unfailingly speak to the larger redemptive project that galvanizes this book; what appears to be erroneous, slipshod, or drab in the Chester plays are better considered practical choices, answering to the specific demands of their performance contexts. Rather than judge the Chester plays for failing to adhere to an inapplicable programmatic of aesthetic coherence or pious solemnity, Sergi proposes that we meet them on their own terms: as examples of mercurial and exuberant cultural output from a city held together by its love of spectacle, populated by guild laborers and alewives and Shrovetide football hooligans, by bodies that drink and shout and age and sweat.
This is not a book that many people could have written. Sergi combines his extensive firsthand experience as director and performer with his academic expertise in early drama scholarship, and the result is a thoroughly convincing work that not only contributes in fundamental ways to how we ask questions of these texts but carries immense pedagogical implications. The attention to practical cues that Sergi demonstrates can be used to reorient how we teach early drama, moving away from making the texts interesting for our students toward recovering what must have been interesting about something that a huge number of people enjoyed as entertainment.
In a sense, Sergi offers practical cues—both the book and the concept—as the solution to a problem: What do we do with the Chester plays? If literary analysis can find nothing in them complex enough to merit a second look, and if the Records of Early English Drama cannot supply documentary evidence detailing how they were staged, what is there to say about them? Practical cues are put forward as a path out of this stalemate, restoring interpretable energy to stale poetry and disclosing the evidence of performance inscribed within themselves. In addition to appreciating Sergi's conclusions about the Chester plays, I also found the way that he navigates these two disciplinary ends of the field—what might broadly be called commitments to literature and documentation, respectively—to be fascinatingly adroit. Sergi takes an “on the shoulders of giants” approach to previous scholarship, as he readily acknowledges the grounds he builds upon, but he is also confident in his assertions that practical cues reveal things about the plays that other methods cannot. His goal in this monograph is to “decode” (17).
Sergi is careful to distinguish possibility from positivist surety, referring to practical cues as “not . . . what performers have done, but rather what they might do” (5, Sergi's emphases). Nevertheless, in his stated intent that this approach to the plays “move beyond hunches or associative comparisons, focusing instead on evidence excavated directly from the play texts and records” (82), there is an undeniable investment in veracity. Practical cues are not just another intriguing interpretive framework among countless others but a privileged lens with which to make sense of the Chester plays. This conviction is an element that initially gave me some pause, as someone who prefers to err on the side of literary indeterminacy; but it is no simple charge to argue for the utility of any innovative methodology, and this is one that merits a forceful defense. Certainly, the reader comes away from this book with the sense that something new and important has been forged.
