Absent Presences: The Theatre of Resurrection in York
The dead come to life in the bodies of the living – not just in resurrection but also in theatre. Corpus Christi theatre fully understands the complexity of this interrelationship in the palpable apparitions of Christ-the-actor to audiences in the Resurrection sequences of the York cycle. The earliest Middle English forms of the word “theatre” identify it as “a place for viewing, sight or view”; likewise the word for vision is during the very period of the performance of the York cycle, going through crucial changes, from meaning the “action or fact of seeing or contemplating something not actually present to the eye, a mystical, supernatural insight” to the “act of seeing with the bodily eye; the exercise of the ordering of the faculty of sight.” The origins and development of the “quem queritis” dialogue, so ostentatiously revisited in the York Resurrection play, are obscure and the evidence complex and contradictory.
