Egeria, a late fourth century Christian pilgrim to Jerusalem, describes a dramatic ritual on the morning of Good Friday. This text is remarkable on several counts: it is written by a female, it has an early date (soon after Constantine’s initiatives in establishing Christian pilgrimage) and it provides a wonderfully detailed description of the areas visited in Jerusalem during Holy Week. She and the other pilgrims venerate the wood of the cross, the inscription over Jesus’s head, the horn used to anoint the kings of Israel, and the ring of Solomon. Throughout her account, Egeria stresses the importance of pilgrims being assured of the truth of their faith by encountering physical landscapes and tangible objects. Theatrical studies in dramaturgy and stagecraft affirm the role which props play in helping actors activate memory and achieve a rich performance. This chapter examines the network of symbols in these artifacts using ritual studies, theatre analysis and space and place theory, demonstrating how these objects were used as props in a complex ritual drama, which offered material, sensory and embodied experiences for religious pilgrims.

The corporeal dimensions of prayer before icons are often attributed to superstition, antiquated beliefs, or a “graced” function of metaphysical participation. In contrast to this, I develop a phenomenological analysis of corporeal substitution as a real possibility of ordinary experience, for an absent person we love strongly can come to presence in a thing before us and provoke a corporeal response. Guided by the story of the acheiropoieton, the “icon made without hands,” I show how the structure of this ordinary human practice is altered when elevated to prayerful substitution, and through its repetition over time, this allows the icon to serve as a means of communion for the believer across both visual and corporeal dimensions.

Explores the pervasive contemporary discourse that described playbooks as the “remains” or “relics” of the dead theatrical past. Argues that this metaphor captures English printed drama’s cultural elevation in the wake of the theatre closures. Shows how the marketing of printed plays that flopped onstage (consumed exclusively by literate audiences) prefigured the marketing of plays after the theatre closures, with similar consequences for drama’s perceived value. Describes the royalist analogy between the regicide and the theatrical prohibition, where King Charles I and English theatre were both murdered by the same political opponent. Much like the martyrdom of the late Charles I, the fact and threat of dramatic destruction similarly accorded new status to both dramatic texts and the absent theatre. The playbook staved off further loss and acquired new respectability through its ties with a longed-for medium. Theatre’s absence added to the cultural cachet of English drama: the playbook was physically separated from the absent theatre but drew ever closer to the idealized theatre of the nostalgic imagination. As the living fragments of a dead practice, printed relics perpetuate the essence of the theatre for eternity, producing an English literary drama equally rooted in the theatrical and the material.