Roland Barthes's essay on "The World of Wrestling" draws
analogically on the ancient theatre to contextualize wrestling as a
cultural myth where the grandiloquence of the ancient is preserved and
the spectacle of excess is displayed. Barthes's critique -- which is
above all a rewriting of what was to understand what is -- is useful
here insofar as it may be applied back to theatre as another open-air
spectacle. But in this case, not the theatre of the ancients, but the
Middle English pageant presents the locus for discussing the sport of
presentation, or, if you prefer, the performance of the sport. More
specifically, what we see by looking at the Harrowing of Hell -- the
dramatic moment in the cycle plays that narratizes doctrinal redemption
more graphically than any other play in the cycle -- as spectacle offers
a matrix for the multiple relationships between performance and audience
and the means of producing that performance which, in turn,......
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