ABSTRACT

In the gospels, the Roman crucifiers' gambling for Jesus' seamless garment at the foot of the cross is an act of the utmost profanity. Like the Towneley plays and other contemporary variations on the scene, the Chester Passion renders the scriptural 'miserunt sortem' as a dice game. The Chester dice game provides a useful example of the value of such a reconstruction, because it reveals discontinuities between the written scene and its implicit comic staging. It locates Matthew's portentous sense of prophecy and fulfillment in the medium of drama itself, aligning the divinely preordained with the theatrically pre-scripted, and opposing both to the limited logic of worldly happenstance. The Chester Group Manuscripts' dice rolls, as the Jews interpret them, seem to count purposefully upward though they do so in a way that is disconnected from any attested usage of the terms.