Staging, Playing, Pyrotechnics and Magic: Conventions of Performance in Early English Theatre by Philip Butterworth (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• Staging, Playing, Pyrotechnics and Magic: Conventions of Performance in Early English Theatre by Philip Butterworth
• W. B. Worthen (bio)

Staging, Playing, Pyrotechnics and Magic: Conventions of Performance in Early English Theatre By Philip Butterworth and edited by Peter Harrop. London: Routledge, 2022. Pp. xiv + 346.

Philip Butterworth's illuminating Staging, Playing, Pyrotechnics and Magic, a collection of essays largely published since the 1990s, casts an attentive eye to the handmade technologies supporting a crucial aspect of medieval English culture: the vivid strain of artistic and social performances—annual religious cycle pageants, civic and royal spectacles—animating city life, and suggestively, their descendants in modern restorations of medieval drama. For historians of technology, Butterworth offers detailed accounts of the making of specific tools, of the purveyors of theatrical technology (props, costumes, fire), and of the intertwining of representational technologies—especially the pageant wagon or carriage—with medieval social life. The opening essay treats the 1433 York Mercers' Indenture, discovered in 1971, which contracted craftsmen to build one of the most important wagons in the York Corpus Christi cycle, that series of forty-eight Biblical narratives tracing history from the Creation to the Last Judgment, performed processually at a series of stations throughout the city on a single day (the Feast of Corpus Christi, late spring). Each was financed by a trade guild: the wealthy Mercers were awarded the climactic finale of the forty-eight pageants, Domesday. "Item, for bynding of a pair of whelys": Butterworth traces the then-short history of spoked wheels in England and the necessary practice of binding the rim with a thin band of iron. This process, though, suggests the importance of the Mercers and of what was called "the Play of Corpus Christi," as it required an exemption from a city ordinance banning iron-bound wheels as damaging to the pavement. Similarly, describing the complex axle structure and steering mechanism, and the indenture's mention of instruments used in storing the disassembled wagon, Butterworth turns to Chester, where a sixteenth-century collapsible wagon provides insight into the ways the Chester guilds—the Coopers and the Smiths—may have stored and maintained their wagons for their single yearly use. Butterworth gives similarly evocative attention to the making, supply, and use of props, the staging of hellmouths and hell fire, pyrotechnics, and to a signal variety of tricks and magic acts.

The annual staging of the Corpus Christi pageants, as well as the various civil (the Lord Mayor), aristocratic, and royal progresses and pageants, involved construction (of wagons or temporary stages, as for the entry of Elizabeth Woodville into Norwich in 1469); the payment of craftsmen, tailors, performers, and suppliers; special effects; and often negotiation with city officials. Where would the "stations" of a pageant cycle be located—an issue [End Page 424] of considerable interest, say, to publicans? How would the wagons negotiate the narrow streets, further narrowed by second-story overhangs, which could reach halfway across the street? Could a protruding shop corner be taken down to facilitate the wagons' turning? (Yes.) Prior to a performance, street vendors were moved, jutting signs taken down, and the "dung, and other filth and nuisances, boxes, empty tuns, and other articles, lying and placed in the streets and lanes," as a 1357 London proclamation put it, were cleared, suggesting that such performances were understood to burnish the "reputation of the City as seen through the eyes of outsiders and foreigners" (pp. 69–70).

What can we learn, not least about the effectiveness of their technological apparatus, by doing these plays today? Butterworth has been directly involved in an emerging strain of drama and theatre pedagogy: using performance—whether in modern terms or through informed reconstruction of earlier (ancient Greek, Shakespearean, etc.) theatrical technologies—as a means both of teaching and of research. His canny essay about actor-audience interaction in the performance of the York Crucifixion anticipates "Is There Any Further Value to Be Gained from Re-Staging Medieval Theatre?" Passing over productions that engage "an existing text in terms that are overtly modern" (p. 330), Butterworth argues that taking reconstructed performance as "research" should require a careful "articulation of the aims and objectives in given productions...