Comparative Drama

Rice and Pappano’s careful diachronic study of the civic cycles of York and Chester argues that “the plays became the major means for artisans to participate in civic polity, and the drama served as a vehicle through which local artisans made public claims to status” (4). Although drama critics have long seen the guilds and civic government as key to understanding the civic cycles, previous work has emphasized the role of the merchant. By contrast, this book argues that “artisans, rather than being the tools of the merchant body or indistinguishable from it, were capable of recognizing and articulating their own sets of interests” (4). The authors develop a nuanced picture of urban society, arguing that artisans distinguished themselves from both merchants and unenfranchised workers. For Pappano and Rice, “‘artisanal ideology’ is [made] manifest not only in manufacture, or in the production of Christ’s body on stage, but in claims to enfranchisement, skill, and localism that run throughout the cycle” (33).

Especially compelling is the book’s use of evidence of changes in performance—such as payments in the guild records for costumes for unscripted characters—over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as an interpretive strategy. These changes are used to support the book’s larger argument that artisans shaped the meaning of the plays. The authors argue that the “prominence of artisanal themes [in the York and Chester cycles] leads us to believe that craft workers supervised their composition from the earliest days, engaging in a complex form of constantly evolving, collaborative authorship” (23). Using an innovative model of authorship that blends making, acting, and [End Page 153] invention, the authors claim that the plays “represented collaborative enterprises in which artisans, though neither fully authors nor scribes, created and revised their own self-representations in regular theatrical events that endured for two centuries” (3).

Rice and Pappano’s study is based on extensive original archival research that goes well beyond the reach of the Records of Early English Drama (REED) volumes, which have long shaped studies of the drama’s relationship to the city, and includes detailed rhetorical analysis of both published and unpublished guild ordinances, court records, and other documents. The focus on both York and Chester cycles in the context of the distinctive local artisan culture in each city is a welcome deviation from other studies of the drama which have tended to focus either on one cycle’s local culture or range more broadly across the plays. This double-authored book is the product of a 2011–13 ACLS collaborative research fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Although it is tempting to connect the collaborative authorship with the book’s diachronic aspect, the preface indicates that both authors worked on the York and the Chester materials, with some of the chapters being single-authored and others collaboratively written.

Chapter 1 analyzes the light imagery in the York Fall of Angels and Chester Tanner’s Fall of Lucifer pageants, arguing that their depiction of competition over brightness should be understood in the historical context of the guild controversy of 1474–75, when actual “bearers of light” fiercely defended their positions in the urban hierarchy by disputing their placement in the Corpus Christi procession (66) and which featured a rivalry between Tanners and Cordwainers in York. When the Chester play was transferred in 1521 from Corpus Christi to Whitsunday, it became the first pageant of expanded cycle, and a “self-conscious production of artisan history” (64). The authors argue that, in contrast to the path of the procession of Corpus Christi, the “mobile pageant wagons traced out urban spaces dominated by commerce, areas in which craftsmen themselves lived, worked, and retailed” (46).

Also linking specific artisan practices to play texts, chapter 2 argues that York’s Herod and the Magi should be understood to...