Body, Site and Memory in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament

Abstract

Prior to the opening of the playhouses in the mid-1500s, drama was by nature site-specific, or at least site-conscious. Whether created for a specific location, a specific event, a particular audience, or designed to be adapted to changing performance conditions, there are few (if any) medieval English playtexts that seem completely disconnected from the site of performance. Whether or not the term ‘site-specific’ is used explicitly, early drama scholars are therefore acutely aware of how medieval plays fit with and respond to their various performance environments, and the social, political and cultural aspects of space and place are now central to the study of pre-playhouse drama. But theatre scholars who study site-specificity in various historical periods highlight, as does Fiona Wilkie in her work on early twenty-first-century theatre, how such performances approach their sites ‘as lived spaces, working to a greater or lesser extent with or for those who inhabit them’.¹ Meaningfulness, then, is created in a site as much by the embodied action of people, their sensory experiences, their corporeal, emotional and functional relationship with it as it is through any semiotic signs of the site’s position in a community or as an institution. A place then

owes its character to the experiences it affords to those who spend time there — to the sights, sounds and indeed smells that constitute its specific ambience. And these, in turn, depend on the kinds of activities in which its inhabitants engage. It is from this relational context of people’s engagement with the world, in the business of dwelling, that each place draws its unique significance.²