Street Scenes: Late Medieval Acting And Performance Hardcover

Sharon Aronson - Lehavi

Street Scenes reconstructs performance theory of religious vernacular theatre in the late medieval period through a fresh and original reading of Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge.

9780230606654

English

Palgrave Macmillan

183

SHARON ARONSON-LEHAVI Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies in the Department of Comparative Literature at Bar Ilan University, Israel. She is a Fulbright grantee and recipient of a Dan David postdoctoral award.

In this slender but illuminating book, Sharon Aronson-Lehavi applies Bertold Brecht's preferred performance aesthetic, outlined in a famous essay on 'The Street Scene,' to the acting style on display in the Middle English 'street scenes' of the York Corpus Christi cycle and other community-sponsored pageants. This is not a new comparison; V.A. Kolve drew it long ago, as she acknowledges. But Aronson-Lehavi wants to go beyond comparison, to argue that there was an indigenous and sophisticated medieval theory of performance that undergirded contemporary practices and that long predated the theatrical trends of the mid-twentieth century. The Medieval Review