In Shakespeare's Medieval Craft, Kurt A. Schreyer explores the
relationship between Shakespeare s plays and a tradition of late
medieval English biblical drama known as mystery plays. Scholars of
English theater have long debated Shakespeare s connection to the
mystery play tradition, but Schreyer provides new perspective on
the subject by focusing on the Chester Banns, a sixteenth-century
proclamation announcing the annual performance of that city s cycle
of mystery plays. Through close study of the Banns, Schreyer
demonstrates the central importance of medieval stage objects as
vital and direct agents and not merely as precursors to the
Shakespearean stage.
As Schreyer shows, the Chester Banns serve as a paradigm for how
Shakespeare s theater might have reflected on and incorporated the
mystery play tradition, yet distinguished itself from it. For
instance, he demonstrates that certain material features of
Shakespeare s stage including the ass s head of A Midsummer Night s
Dream, the theatrical space of Purgatory in Hamlet, and the
knocking at the gate in the Porter scene of Macbeth were in fact
remnants of the earlier mysteries transformed to meet the
exigencies of the commercial London playhouses. Schreyer argues
that the ongoing agency of supposedly superseded theatrical objects
and practices reveal how the mystery plays shaped dramatic
production long after their demise. At the same time, these
medieval traditions help to reposition Shakespeare as more than a
writer of plays; he was a play-wright, a dramatic artisan who
forged new theatrical works by fitting poetry to the material
remnants of an older dramatic tradition."
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