ABSTRACT
This study will take a closer look at a specific feature of medieval theatre and pageantry particularly prominent in outdoor, urban space: the relative movement of performers and spectators in immediate connection with performance. 1 In so doing I shall be exploring more closely a topic I touched on only briefly, and, it transpires, uncritically, in the paper I presented to the 2001 Groningen Colloquium of the Societe Internationale pour I' Etude du Theatre Medieval (SITM), "The Morphology of the Parade," since published in European Medieval Drama.2 Such movement, I assumed and said then, was both thematically and dramaturgically significant. I am now less confident this is the case, and in retrospect, and seen from a broader perspective, I am not altogether surprised: in its fully dramatic manifestations theatre of this kind was somewhat local in its incidence, rather short-lived, and dramaturgically pretty awkward.
