Daisy Black's Play Time explores the representation of time in late medieval drama from a variety of theoretical perspectives, including supersession, queer futurity, and Michel Serres's articulation of topological time. The study is particularly interested in how nonnormative, nonlinear experiences of time in the plays work to shape the representation of gender and race. “The idea that certain arrangements of time act to obfuscate the times of others is particularly pertinent to this study,” she writes, “as it rests at the intersection of gendered and racial histories of exclusion” (20). Ultimately, Play Time argues that medieval biblical drama offered alternatives to the ideology of supersession that shaped Christian imagination of the figure of the Jew. Each chapter pairs a theory of temporality with a biblical episode as it plays out across the cycle dramas.

The introduction begins with a meditation on the nature of time via David Bowie and Saint Augustine. It argues that human and divine experiences of time were not solely the theoretical purview of theologians but were also practical questions embodied in late medieval cultures of performance; it is attentive to the ways in which the practicalities of performance inflect the plays’ theological concerns. Each chapter proceeds by reorienting conflicts between characters in the plays that have mostly been attributed to gender or race, attributing these conflicts instead to the characters’ differing experiences of time. Thus, the first chapter, “The Old Man and the Pregnant Virgin: Linear Time and Jewish Conversion in the N-Town Plays,” begins with the Incarnation, considering the Marian plays of the N-Town manuscript. Reconsidering the question of Joseph's doubt, Black argues that his disbelief that his virgin wife is miraculously pregnant is meant not only to provide humor at the expense of the elderly cuckold but also to demonstrate how Joseph cannot be reconciled to the new world order that Mary's pregnancy purports to call into being. Joseph's doubt is therefore Jewish doubt that remains to trouble supersessionist theories of time.

Like Joseph, Noah's wife is a figure who feels left behind by the new Christian dispensation. Chapter 2, “Grave New World: Fantasies of Supersession and Explosive Questions in the York and Chester Flood Plays,” pits her against her husband, who reads his experience of the Flood through a supersessionary model of time, in which the past will be utterly replaced. Noah's wife, however, resists this narrative, insisting on the inclusion of the past within the present. In this regard, Noah's wife finds a kindred spirit in Gyll of the Second Shepherd's Play. In chapter 3, “Time Out of Joint: Queering the Nativity in the Towneley Second Shepherd's Play,” Black reads the Second Shepherd's Play alongside Lee Edelman's theory of queer futurity, which resists the valorization of heteronormative reproduction. Here, Black points to the substitution of the stolen sheep for a human child in the cradle, and suggests that Mak and Gyll's marriage is (despite Mak's assertion of the contrary) childless, arguing that the episode of the stolen sheep in this play temporally, but temporarily, disrupts the linear timeline of the Nativity narrative.

Chapter 4, “Passion Meets Passover: Temporal Origami in the Towneley Herod the Great,” similarly finds women resisting the temporal narratives in which they are forced to play their role. This chapter reads the mothers’ resistance to the soldiers in the Towneley Massacre of the Innocents plays through the topological theory of time of Michel Serres. Serres's model analogizes topological time to a crumpled handkerchief, in which distant and unrelated points might come briefly into contact. Black argues that the mothers’ resistance is one such moment, that holds past and present together, even as Herod fruitlessly believes himself able to rupture time to prevent the fulfillment of prophesy. A conclusion turns to the Cornish play Gwreans an bys (The creation of the world) to put pressure on temporal models of periodization that draw a line between medieval and early modern theater, characterizing periodization as itself supersessionist.

The great strength of this book lies in its elegant integration of multiple approaches to temporality in its discussion of medieval drama. For this reader, it opened up provocative questions about the time of race: the terms race and anti-Semitism are used to describe the representation of Jews in the drama without much discussion of these terms. The primary mode of thinking about the figure of the Jew here remains typological, even as drama calls it into question. Given that modern discussions of medieval race are similarly crosscut by the question of time, might the discussions here offer new ways to think about the intersections of religious and racial alterity? Overall, Play Time provides compelling new ways to think about how late medieval drama intersects with questions of temporality, alongside a timely reminder of the power of performance to challenge dominant cultural narratives.