Reading Texts for Performance and Performances as Texts: Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies (Variorum Collected Studies) [1 ed.] 9780367441180, 9781003007739, 0367441187

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VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES

Reading Texts for Performance and Performances as Texts

Pamela M. King Edited by Alexandra F. Johnston

Reading Texts for Performance and Performances as Texts Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Alexandra F. Johnston; individual chapters, Pamela M. King The right of Alexandra F. Johnston to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of Pamela M. King for the individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: King, Pamela M, author. | Johnston, Alexandra F., 1939- editor. Title: Reading texts for performance and performance as texts: shifting paradigms in early English drama studies/Pamela M. King; edited by Alexandra F. Johnston. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2021. | Series: Variorum collected studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020028746 (print) | LCCN 2020028747 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367441180 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003007739 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: English drama–To 1500–History and criticism. | Theater–England– History–Medieval, 500-1500. | Mysteries and miracle-plays, English–History and criticism. | Christian drama, English (Middle)–History and criticism. | Spanish drama– To 1500–History and criticism. | Theater–Spain–History–Medieval, 500-1500. Classification: LCC PR641 .K495 2021 (print) | LCC PR641 (ebook) | DDC 822/.109–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028746 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028747 ISBN: 978-0-367-44118-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-00773-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES SERIES CS1096

CONTENTS

List of images List of figures Introduction by Alexandra F. Johnston

ix xi xii

Part 1: English scriptural plays 1.

Faith, reason and the prophets’ dialogue in the Coventry Pageant of the Shearmen and Taylors

2.

Playing Pentecost: Transformation and texts

13

3.

Lament and elegy in scriptural drama: Englishing the planctus Mariae

26

4.

The end of the world in medieval English religious drama

38

5.

The early English Passion Play

52

6.

Medieval English religious plays as early fifteenth-century vernacular theology: The case against

69

3

Part 2: Drama and poetry 7.

Dunbar’s The Goldyn Targe: A Chaucerian masque

8.

‘He pleyeth Herodes upon a scaffold hye’?

102

9.

Drama: Sacred and secular

117

vii

89

CONTENTS

Part 3: Revivals, survivals and audiences – mostly about Spain 10. La Festa D’Elx: The festival of the Assumption of the Virgin, Elche (Alicante)

141

11. Elche again: The Venida and the Semana Santa

169

12. The Festa d’Elx: Civic devotion, display and identity

184

13. Corpus Christi, Valencia, 1993

199

14. Corpus Christi: Valencia

203

15. Confraternities and civic ceremonial: The Siena Palio

229

16. Twentieth-century medieval drama revivals and universities

250

Part 4: Ideology and performance 17. Spatial semantics and the medieval theatre

269

18. Minority plays: Two interludes for Edward VI

280

19. Rules of exchange in medieval plays and play manuscripts

293

Pamela M. King’s bibliography Index

311 315

viii

IMAGES

10.1a

General view of Santa Maria, Elche, showing housing for winding gear 10.1b Roof terrace, angels dressing rooms and scenery storage 10.2a Mangrana descending and opening 10.2b Mangrana descends to Virgin 10.3a Araceli ascends with the image 10.3b The Coronation of the Virgin 10.4a ‘Jews’ and Apostles fight 10.4b Araceli descends with the soul 10.5a Trinity prepares to descend 10.5b Heaven – manipulating the mangrana 10.6a Festa – funeral of the Virgin 10.6b Erecting the railings around the tomb after the vespra 10.7a Effigy being taken from araceli after the Assumption 10.7b Manipulating the ropes for araceli and Trinity, fan ducting for gold flakes 10.8a Vespra – Virgin and attendants progressing past the chapels on the andora 10.8b Dressing room, San Sebastian, Elche 10.9a Operating the winches on the roof terrace 10.9b Funeral procession of the Virgin, Festa morning 11.1 Cantó leads the procession 11.2 The Virgin rescued from the sea 11.3 Heralds of the Venida 11.4 Palms at the Romería 11.5 Christ of the resurrection 11.6 Virgen d’Elx and aleluyas 14.1 The ‘roca’ of Faith. This and all images in the chapter by the author, Corpus Christi, Valencia, 1994 ix

146 147 149 150 151 152 154 155 156 157 160 160 161 162 163 164 164 165 178 179 180 180 181 182 214

IMAGES

14.2 14.3 14.4 14.5 14.6 14.7 14.8 14.9 14.10 14.11

The ‘roca’ of Fame A wheeled dragon Giants Dancing dwarf Hobby horse dance Vice and Virtue Wild men dancing Maypole dance The host in the pomegranate St Michael leads the procession with one black and one white soul 14.12 The spies with grapes from the Promised Land 14.13 Jonah and his whale 14.14 The play of Herod and the Magi 14.15 St Margaret’s Tortoise, St Martha’s Tarasc 14.16 The ‘Mule’ and the ‘Angel Idiot’ 14.17 The Host 14.18 Audience throwing rose petals 14.19 Solomon and the Queen of Sheba 14.20 The floral Host 15.1 Siena. Piazza del Mercato with the racecourse set up 15.2 Occupational banners, pre-race procession 15.3 Bruco’s victory procession

x

215 216 217 218 219 219 220 221 221 222 222 223 223 224 224 225 226 226 227 230 236 241

FIGURES

10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 13.1

Horizontal arrangement of cadafalc Horizontal arrangement of cadafalc Vertical arrangement Concealed exchange of ‘live’ Virgin and image View of the front axle and shafts of the waggon of the Immaculate Conception, first constructed in 1542. The yoke for the horses is laid across the front shafts when parked, and the draught pole is raised 13.2 Side-on view of front shafts and axle. Nb. head of centre pole in recess between axle bed and bolster 13.3 Back view of front axle and shafts, from under waggon. Nb. crosspiece

xi

148 149 158 159

200 201 201

INTRODUCTION Alexandra F. Johnston

Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies brings to a wider scholarly and student readership some of the most important twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury scholarship on English medieval drama/theatre. In the second half of the twentieth century there were some fundamental shifts in our knowledge of medieval theatre and its practice. First of all, these decades saw an increased understanding and appreciation in the universities on both sides of the Atlantic of late fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury English society, its vernacular theology and, especially, the religious literature that grew from that theology. The non-dramatic writings provided the context for the surviving religious drama. Secondly, although a few episodes from the Nativity and the Old Testament had been performed early in the twentieth century, it was not until 1951, during the Festival of Britain, that the scriptural drama including the life and death of Jesus from York and Chester was publicly performed for the first time since the late sixteenth century. In 1576 the Ecclesiastical Commission of the North had banned a performance of a play in Wakefield, Yorkshire. The order read in part that ‘in the saide playe no Pagant be vsed or set further wherein the Maiestye of god the father god the sonne or god the holie ghoste […] be counterfeited or represented.’1 Although this never became enacted in law,2 Lords Chancellor through the centuries forbade any such public performances until they were persuaded to do so, in 1951, for performances of the York Plays and the Chester Plays in their home cities as part of the festival celebrating the survival of Britain from the Second World War. These performances demonstrated the power of the plays on stage and stimulated discussion and other performances all over the English-speaking world. Thirdly, in 1974, at the University of Leeds, scholars interested in early European drama held the first gathering that would become the Société Internationale pour l’étude du Théâtre Médiéval (SITM) in 1977. SITM has now had sixteen tri-annual colloquia to discuss European drama including, of course, English drama. Fourthly, excellent new editions of all English early drama texts and facsimiles of the manuscripts have appeared that have allowed us to better understand the nature of the few manuscripts that have come down to us. New teaching texts have been prepared that give undergraduate students a much better understanding of the true nature of xii

INTRODUCTION

the plays than the small selection available to earlier generations of students. And finally, since 1975, the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project based at the University of Toronto has been providing editions of external information about all types of secular performance in Britain before 1642, showing clearly that the texts that have survived are only a very small sample of what once existed. This volume of papers by Pamela M. King reflects all these changes. Her doctorate at the University of York with its strong medieval studies programme and faculty gave her a deep understanding of the late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England and its cultural, religious and social life. Her dissertation ‘Contexts of the Cadaver Tomb in England to 1500’ was an interdisciplinary study that has provided her with a wealth of information about the context of drama. Much of her interest is in the performance of the plays and is deeply represented in these presentations. She has been involved with SITM from early in its existence and served as its president for the years 2001–2004. She organized the 2004 colloquium that brought the society to the town of Elche in Spain where the production of the Misteri d’Elx, the early Catalan play of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, a survival from the late Middle Ages, was the centre of the conference. That play is much discussed in Part 3. She has also been active in the North American Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society, serving as its only non-North American president from 2012 to 2014. She has herself been an editor of a new scholarly edition of the plays of Coventry with Professor Clifford Davidson of Western Michigan University and, although she has not herself been an editor for the REED project, she has used its editions in her scholarship particularly, in this collection in ‘The early English Passion Play’ in Part 1, in her lively discussion of the Passion Play at New Romney in Kent, for which there is no text but extensive records. Professor King has been a dedicated teacher of early English and Scottish literature outside drama. Her publications include a monograph Medieval Literature 1300–1500 (2011) and student texts on Chaucer (1999 and 2004) and the Metaphysical Poets (2001). Part 2 of this selection is made up of three chapters connecting drama to the poetry of the Scottish poet Dunbar and Chaucer and to general poetics. This close knowledge of other forms of early English literature allows her to make relevant connections between drama and other literature of the period, both making comparisons and, as in the last chapter in Part 4, contrasting the poetry of drama in its strong emotive qualities with other poetry. Another reason why this collection of chapters is an important one to include in the Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies series is that almost half of the chapters included here were not written for early drama/theatre journals but for books and journals dedicated to other forms of literature, sources that are unfamiliar to many drama scholars, particularly in North America. Many of these chapters begin with a short statement that the history of early drama that still appears in general histories of drama is half a century out of date. These chapters allow drama scholars to see how their work relates to the work being done, both in other fields and, as the three chapters in Part 4 show us, in other ‘theoretical’ frameworks. xiii

INTRODUCTION

Professor King’s teaching career began as a temporary lecturer, first at the University of Warwick and then back at the University of York. She then taught at Westfield College London and then Queen Mary and Westfield College from 1981 to 1993. In 1994, she was appointed Head of the English Department at St Martin’s College, Lancaster (now the University of Cumbria), and taught there, moving into managerial roles, until 2005 when she went to the University of Bristol as Director of Medieval Studies. There she became chair of the management committee of Bristol Theatre Collection. This important archive forms the basis of the last chapter in Part 3 that examines the cooperation between the universities and the professional theatre in the production of early drama before 1951. In 2013, she left Bristol to return home to Scotland to take up a chair in Medieval Studies on a fractional contract at the University of Glasgow. The scholarship she has published or facilitated for other scholars since that time (see her bibliography) clearly shows she has not begun to retire from the profession. The four parts of this collection are ‘English scriptural plays,’ ‘Drama and poetry,’ ‘Revivals, survivals and audiences – mostly about Spain’ and ‘Ideology and performance.’ Part 1 ‘English scriptural plays’ she understands to be companion pieces to her major work on early English drama The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City (2006), which won her two major prizes for the best book on early drama in North America in 2007 and the best book on early literature in the UK in 2008. There are six papers in this part on what has commonly been called ‘The English Mystery Plays’ (now an outmoded terminology), written between 1990 and 2014. In them, she looks at a number of episodes in their contemporary biblical-exegetical contexts. The last two papers open out further debate by pointing to the limitations of the old paradigms and understandings of medieval scriptural drama in English. All also attend to matters of performance and performability. The first paper, ‘Faith, reason and the prophets’ dialogue in the Coventry Pageant of the Shearmen and Taylors,’ published in 1990, discusses the relationship between the unique ‘Prophets’ dialogue’ in the Coventry play and its sources in the non-dramatic debates between the supporters of Aristotelian logic in Christian belief (Prophet 1) and the supporters of ‘fideistic theology,’ belief by faith alone (Prophet 2). ‘Playing Pentecost: transformation and texts,’ published eighteen years later in 2018 in one of the issues of Medieval English Theatre in honour of David Mills, contrasts the way the episodes of Pentecost in York and Chester (both likely products of the third quarter of the fifteenth century) are sharply different. She argues that York relies heavily on liturgical and traditional theological understandings of the feast while the theme of Chester is evangelical and based on a more contemporary writing such as the Stanzaic Life of Christ and influenced by the earlier Chester author Ranulf Higden’s Polychronican. ‘Lament and elegy in scriptural drama: Englishing the planctus Mariae,’ written in 2010, emphasizes the importance of the Virgin Mary in the late medieval understanding of her special co-redemptive powers. Her ‘planctus’ is central to xiv

INTRODUCTION

the liturgy of the Good Friday mass and was one of the most emotive liturgical sequences in the late Middle Ages. Professor King describes the ‘planctus’ and a performance she saw in 2006, when the fourteenth-century planctus Mariae from Cividale, near Venice, presented at the Kalamazoo conference in a translation by the late Audrey Davidson. She then goes on to discuss the dramatic adaptations of the ‘planctus’ in all the English versions, including the one in the Burial of Christ in the Bodleian manuscript, showing how the source is adapted to fit into plays that also include the action of all the crucifixion stories. ‘The end of the world in medieval English religious drama,’ published in 2012 for a non-early drama publication, sets the pageant of the Last Judgement in the York Plays in the context of other examples of the Last Judgement in York, especially in stained glass in the Great East Window of York Minster and the windows in the small parish church of All Saints North Street and their donors. This paper sets the York Plays in the context of its city and the devotional practices of its citizens in the fifteenth century and speaks forcefully to those who know and love that city where Professor King spent her years of graduate work. ‘The early English Passion Play’ published in 2013 was written for an early drama audience and makes clear with our new understanding of the manuscripts referred to above and the evidence of the REED project has done away with the notion that all scriptural drama was written to be performed in biblical sequence from pageant wagons on narrow city streets. She analyzes the texts and detailed stage directions of Passion Plays 1 and 2 from the N-Town manuscript from East Anglia, detailing how the plays were performed in a large open space with many playing places with actors going to and fro from place to place as the story unfolds. She then takes the equally detailed records from the town of New Romney in Kent from the REED Kent: Diocese of Canterbury collection and suggests comparisons that allow us to speculate on the English Passion Play as a ‘lost’ genre. The last paper in Part 1, ‘Medieval English religious plays as early fifteenthcentury vernacular theology: the case against,’ was published in 2014 in a book centred on devotional culture. Professor King picks up on the concerns of many drama scholars that drama was not included in an important article by Nicholas Watson in Speculum in 1995 that discussed the vernacular theology of the late fourteenth century. She looks closely at the dating of the manuscripts that have come down to us and argues the possibility that the pageants from York described in the city’s Ordo paginarum (1415) may well not be descriptions of plays with developed scripts but rather elaborate displays on the wagons of the episodes in the Bible. She suggests that if the text of the York Plays, written down in the civic register that has survived from the 1460s, were developed much closer to that date, then it is unlikely the plays were in fact part of the ‘vernacular theology’ of several generations earlier. She suggests that the scripts of the pageants may have been part of the influence of returnees from the Council of Constance where a theme was education of the laity – such men as Thomas Beckington (Bekynton) (who died in 1465), bishop of Bath and Wells and secretary to Henry VI, one xv

INTRODUCTION

of the subjects of her unpublished doctoral thesis from the University of York (1987). Part 2 ‘Drama and poetry’ has three papers that are concerned with the crossover between the study of late medieval poetry and drama. The first paper in this part, ‘Dunbar’s The Goldyn Targe: a Chaucerian masque’ appeared in Studies in Scottish Literature in 1984. Much is made of the court life of James IV of Scotland and his love for tournaments and masques. She sees The Goldyn Targe as a ‘poetic masque’ – a poem that reflects the courtly past and anticipates the masques of Ben Jonson. The second paper in this part explores the well-known ‘lampoon’ of scriptural drama in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale published in Leeds Studies in English in 2001. The play in the Miller’s Tale is to take place in ‘Oxenford.’ Early in the piece Professor King acknowledges that in 2001 there was no real evidence of scriptural plays being performed in the south. However, since the REED project published the records of Berkshire online in 2017, there is now evidence of scriptural plays in the village of Sonning, not far south of Oxford, in 1389.3 Professor King argues that Chaucer learned a great deal about performance – both tournaments (the subject of the Knight’s Tale that comes just before the Miller’s Tale) and scriptural drama – from the hot summer of 1390 when he was working on the tournament scaffolds at Smithfield near London, where scriptural plays were also being performed by parish clerks. The paper provides much information about the nature of the position of a parish clerk building up the character of Absolon, but also suggests fundamental theatricalities formerly unacknowledged in the text. The third and final paper in this part, ‘Drama: sacred and secular,’ was published in 2010 in a volume on English medieval poetry. In it, Professor King argues that the poetry of the drama is more various and accomplished than is often understood. It was by turns designed to move the audience, to create empathy choosing episodes that are familiar from the liturgy (such as the planctus) and echoing the lyricism of the liturgical chant in the verse forms used, but could also manipulate rhetorical register in highly stylized ways as well as imitating natural speech. This theme is picked up again in the chapters in Part 4. The third and longest part ‘Revivals, survivals and audience – mostly about Spain’ contains seven papers unique to the scholarship of Pamela King who has turned her attention to the ‘living’ tradition of scriptural drama in southern Europe that has survived through the centuries, especially in Spain, comparing its themes and modes of presentation to the ‘dead’ Anglophone drama that was suppressed by the Reformation in the sixteenth century. It all began when a Spanish student in one of Professor King’s classes mentioned one day that there was still a play on the Death and Assumption of the Virgin in her home town of Elche in Valencia. This began the friendship between Asunción Salvador-Rabaza and Professor King. The first paper in Part 3 is a long joint chapter written by the two of them, with Ms Salvador-Rabaza writing a history of the play in Elche and Pamela’s description of the first performance of it she saw in 1985. It was published in Medieval English Theatre in 1986. The second paper in this part is xvi

INTRODUCTION

another discussion of the performance tradition in Elche, adding two more major events that celebrate the Virgin Mary during the calendar year. The first, the Venida de la Virgen, happens in December with an enactment of the legend of the arrival of a statue of the Virgin from the sea, possibly in 1370. The second is the way in which the statue of the Virgin – also important in the celebration of the play in August – is an important part of the ceremonies of Semana Santa, Holy Week, culminating in the meeting of the procession of the Virgin and the procession of the resurrected Christ on Easter Sunday. The chapter not only describes the events but provides their history tracing the way in which these festivals have evolved historically. It was published in Medieval English Theatre in 1990. The third chapter on Elche, ‘The Festa d’Elx: civic devotion, display and identity,’ was published six years later in Festive Drama, a volume of essays edited by Meg Twycross. This paper explores the relationship between civic-religious drama and the community looking at aspects of its economic organization, the personnel involved in it and its non-mimetic festive context. The most intriguing part of this chapter for me are reports of interviews with the participants in the play – all of whom must have been born in Elche – both the boys playing angels who swing down from the tower and the men who play the adult males, two of whom have died since the interviews. The next two papers in Part 3 are concerned with the Corpus Christi procession in Valencia. The first one, ‘Corpus Christi, Valencia, 1993,’ published in Medieval English Theatre in 1995 is chiefly concerned with the wagons that are used in the procession that have survived from the early sixteenth century with descriptions and sketches suggesting how these may inform research into the English pageant wagon. The second one, ‘Corpus Christi: Valencia,’ published in European Medieval Drama in 2000 is a detailed description of the complex and varied procession witnessed by Professor King in 1994 and 1995 and how it is regulated by the city. The sixth paper in this part takes us to Italy. ‘Confraternities and civic ceremonial: the Siena Palio’ is about the confraternal culture and elaborate processions which surround not a play but the famous horse race. It was published in 2010 in a collection of articles edited by Margaret Rogerson, The York Mystery Plays: Performance in the City. Professor King analyzes the way the Palio has come down from the late Middle Ages and argues that seeing a living civic festival, however changed it is from its medieval beginning, is the only way to experience how ‘a whole city’s social life’ is ‘driven by its festive tradition.’ The paper compares the long-standing organization of the Palio with all its regulations and restrictions and the tight loyalty to each competing ‘contrade’ to the organization of the scriptural plays at York and Coventry. The last paper in Part 3, ‘Twentieth-century medieval drama revivals and the universities,’ published in Medieval English Theatre in 2007, takes us back to the English-speaking world. It begins with citations from Theatre in Education, a slim journal that was published in April, 1951, reporting on the early drama that was to be produced as part of the Festival of Britain in the summer of that year. xvii

INTRODUCTION

Professor Glynne Wickham had kept a copy of the journal that is now part of his archive at the University of Bristol. An astonishing number of early plays were to be produced in the festival. In the paper, Professor King uses the archive material in Bristol to trace the activities of people all over the country interested in early drama in the universities and the professional theatre who planned such a large number of productions for 1951. Pursuing interest in early drama in performance began in the1920s and by 1951 had established early drama as a viable art form despite the misunderstandings, both of the texts and of the nature of the original productions. The final part in this collection is called ‘Ideology and performance.’ These three papers involve more ‘theorized’ experiments in the textual criticism of early plays, ranging from early work on the semiotics of space to later thoughts on their cognitive reception. Two of the three papers are not published in early drama publications, and all of them provide either a modern spelling edition for citations or translations of the Middle English. The earliest paper, ‘Spatial semantics and the medieval theatre,’ published in Themes in Drama, Volume 9, The Theatrical Space in 1987, looks first at wagon productions in procession and then moves on to the open round depicted in the sketch of the set of the Castle of Perseverance. Professor King examines how the processional plays in York and Coventry all have two ‘locations’ – the wagon or ‘locus’ that is a definite space with a set and the street or the ‘platea’ which acts as a variable space for movement, often encountered between members of the audience and the players. She then turns to the Castle and argues that the moat is around the castle itself, separating it from the audience but that the audience could move freely around the other ‘sedes’ representing World, Flesh, Covetousness, Hell and Heaven. Her final point is that the processional plays have two wagons depicting the beginning of time (Creation) and the ending (Judgement) that represent both Heaven and Hell and ‘enclose’ the other wagons. She suggests that the audience, knowing the action of the plays, would remember the set of the Creation of the Angels and anticipate the set of the Judgement as the ‘framing icons which render the world of the play intelligible.’ The second paper in Part 4, ‘Minority plays: two interludes for Edward VI,’ published in Medieval English Theatre in 1993, turns attention to two ‘Tudor morality plays’ that are also ‘Prodigal Son’ plays – Lusty Juventus and Nice Wanton. Professor King argues that both were used particularly by Edward Seymour, the Lord Protector, to ‘contribute to a historical reading of the reign of Edward VI, or to the reconstruction of his inscrutability.’ She suggests that Nice Wanton, in particular – performed at the court – echoes the lesson that the dominant faction at court wanted Edward to learn about being a good Protestant king. Professor King sees him as a young boy without power, whose public character was being ‘fashioned’ by the elders around him as alternative parents. The last paper in Part 4, and so in the collection, is ‘Rules of exchange in medieval plays and play manuscripts,’ published in 2014 in Dialogic Analysis: Literature as Dialogue, takes examples from the N-Town manuscript, some of xviii

INTRODUCTION

which have been discussed in other papers but analyzes them from a different perspective. The emphasis here is on the important use of familiar liturgical elements, particularly in the use of the planctus of the Virgin in the N-Town Passion Plays and the Gradual Psalms in the N-Town play of the Childhood of Mary. Professor King argues forcefully that the use of these familiar liturgical chants complements the simple didacticism of ‘telling the story’ by drawing members of the audience and, in the case of the N-Town manuscript, readers into a spiritual engagement from their personal experience of the liturgy of the late medieval church. The papers in this collection are varied and far reaching and explore the body of early English drama and its context with learning and judgement.

Notes 1 The most easily available transcription of this document is found in A.C. Cawley, ed., The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1958), Appendix I (b) p. 125. 2 cf Olga Horner, ‘The Law That Never Was: A Review of Theatrical Censorship in Britain,’ Medieval English Theatre 23 (2001), pp. 34–96. 3 Alexandra F. Johnston, ed., The Berkshire Records, https://ereed.library.ca, from the register of John Waltham, bishop of Salisbury, 1389.

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Part 1 ENGLISH SCRIPTURAL PLAYS

1 FAITH, REASON AND THE PROPHETS’ DIALOGUE IN THE COVENTRY PAGEANT OF THE SHEARMEN AND TAYLORS From: James Redmond, ed., Themes in Drama vol. 12, Drama and Philosophy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990) pp. 37–46. © Cambridge University Press 1990 In its retrievable form, the Coventry cycle appears to have been the most ambitious of all the great cycles. It was seen by Queen Elizabeth I and other visitors from London throughout the late Middle Ages, and, quite possibly, the Herod of the Shearmen and Taylor’s play was the inspiration for Hamlet’s advice to the players. It is, therefore, unfortunate that only two play texts of true Coventry plays survive from the original cycle of mysteries, The Pageant of the Shearmen and Taylors and The Pageant of the Weavers.1 These two and a remarkably complete set of records of production are sufficient to show how different the Coventry cycle was to those of York or Chester.2 Nothing compares with the two surviving plays in terms of range and length. The Shearmen and Taylors’ play deals with all the events from the Annunciation by Gabriel to Mary to the Massacre of the Innocents by Herod’s troops, including in passing the visit of the shepherds, the Nativity itself and the coming of the Magi. The material is equivalent to that of five separate plays in the Chester cycle or eight in York. Surviving records suggest that Coventry had only ten plays as opposed to York’s forty-seven.3 Far from implying a less ambitious production, the surviving texts indicate a very different style of production. For all its structural success as a performance text, the evidence is that the Shearmen and Taylors’ play evolved over several generations of rewriting, as did the other long plays. The section referred to as “the prophets’ dialogue” is part of a final rewriting of the 1530s, thinly disguising the join between the two chief units of dramatic action. Metrical analysis of the whole play text4 has led to the conclusion that the play probably consists of several archaeological layers with, for example, the Annunciation, a formal piece of stylized action without much potential for lively embellishment, being one of the older elements. It is safe to assume that the play was, in fact, at a later stage in its development, two – the Shearmen, appropriately, would have staged the story of the Annunciation, 3

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Nativity and shepherds, whereas the Taylors, able to produce sumptuously tawdry robes, would have been responsible for the part concerning Herod. The redactor of the present version, one Robert Croo, finished his manuscript referring to it as “tys matter nevly correcte be Robart Croo”.5 The Weavers’ manuscript has a colophon which states, “tys matter nevly translate be Robert Croo”.6 Corrected or translated, what Croo was actually doing was bringing over or realigning what was already a paste-up of old material and embellishing it by the addition of his own verse, characterized by its ponderously intricate metres. Certain aspects of the resultant composite play, with multiple locations of action, give advantages over the usual, York-style sequential pattern. In particular, the problem of how to present the birth of Christ in front of an audience without causing theological or aesthetic offence is overcome and the audience is, in fact, cheated of the central event, as the play moves from stable to shepherds in the fields then back to stable after the child has been born. In all other cycles, the two simultaneous events, birth and angels’ appearance to shepherds, have to be treated sequentially in separate plays. On the other hand, the long play apparently caused problems for its redactor when it came to welding the two major sections together, for he inserted the prophets’ dialogue,7 an apparently dull and static discussion of preceding events between two so-called prophets. At first glance, it appears to represent no more than an uninspired attempt to paper over a crack. Robert Croo’s limitations as a poet are nowhere more evident than here; but for Robert Croo, the odd-job man and dramatist I should like to spare a second thought. The prologue of the play, delivered by Isaiah8 and also newly written by Croo, requires to be considered along with the dialogue. Both elements, taken in their performance context, are designed for delivery at street level, initially to clear space and later to cover up the entry of Herod and his court, and possibly the setting up of a second vehicle. Functionally necessary, they perform the same task as the diversions of circus clowns while the lions’ cages are being erected. Isaiah’s first speech is an elaborate prologue, delivered by an Old Testament figure most famous for his prophesy of the birth of Christ (Isaiah 7:14). If for the sake of argument one assumes that Coventry had some Old Testament plays, this prologue effectively bridges the gap from the last of these to the Nativity, thereby smoothing over another join. The established tradition of liturgical Latin drama was to precede the Nativity with a non-dramatic Processus Prophetorum, a solution borrowed by the compiler of the N-Town plays. The Chester cycle favours a single episode in this position, a play about Balaam and Balaak (Numbers 22:23– 30), focusing on prophecy but with the more dramatic diversion of a miraculously speaking donkey. Thereafter there are seven non-dramatic prophecies. The Towneley cycle includes a play of only four prophets, including the Sibyll from Vergil’s fifth Eclogue. So Isaiah in the Shearmen and Taylors’ pageant appears to fulfil an established linking function. But Isaiah here is only a dramatized historical figure in part; he is also partly a non-dramatic prologue, priest or teacher. His speech is part visionary revelation, 4

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…Ecce virgo consepeet – Loo, where a reymede schall ryse! Be-holde, a mayde schall conseyve a childe… (lines 22–4) part commentary, Now be myrre eyuere mon For this dede bryffly in Isaraell schalbe done, And before the Fathur in trone, That schall glade vs all (lines 33–6) The prophets’ link passage has much in common with this role. They seem simply to describe what the audience has just seen happen, to present in dialogue a retelling of the story of the Nativity, which unbalances the dramatic action and destroys both atmosphere and illusion. So who are these prophets? They do not predict, so they are not in the narrowest received sense prophets at all. The term has, however, a more complex semantic range than is conventionally granted. In Christian history, although the predictive qualities dominate, the prophet can also simply be a paradigm, and his oracular properties merge to some degree with the exemplary. The predicting role is mentioned as secondary in The Oxford English Dictionary, the prime meaning being given as: “One who speaks for God or for any deity, as the inspired revealer or interpreter of his will; one who is held or (more loosely) who claims to have this function; an inspired or quasiinspired teacher”. This specific function, especially the last element, is crucial to understanding what Croo is doing in dramatic terms with this section of the play. These are no mysterious visionaries; they serve to explain precisely, to interpret, the significance of the preceding revealed but apparently miraculous event, the Incarnation. II PROFETA. A wondur-full marvell How thatt ma be, And far clothe exsell All owre capasete: How thatt the Trenete, Of soo hy regallete, Schuld jonyd be Vnto owre mortallete! I PROFETA Of his one grett marce, As ye shall se the exposyssion, Throgh whose vmanyte All Adamis progene Reydemyd schalbe owt of perdyssion. (lines 360–72) 5

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The key lies in the word “exposyssion”. The Chester cycle includes a non-dramatic character, called the Expositor, whose appearances are interspersed chiefly among figurally significant Old Testament episodes, to expound hidden meaning to the audience. This is the chief apparent function of the dialogue in the Shearmen and Taylors’ play. Croo has not given the Expositor’s job to a single speaker, but has framed it as a dramatic dialogue, a dialectic investigation of the revealed truth which has preceded. What has just been presented to the audience as revelation is now subjected to the rigours of reason: Syth man did offend, Who schuld amend But the seyd mon and no nothur? For the wyche cawse he Incarnate wold be And lyve in mesere asse manis one brother. (lines 373–8) The entire substance of this little section of school-matter turns out to be an object lesson in the age-old debate between fideistic theology and the methods of Aristotelian logic. This debate has a long and complex history in the western Middle Ages. The argument goes back to St Paul: Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ (Colossians 2:8) …it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe, For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness… (I Corinthians 1:21–3) St Augustine made an influential statement of the primacy of reason, as he argues in the Confessions9 that man should never try to move from reason to faith, but from faith to reason, that revealed truth was the starting point for rational knowledge. Amongst his followers, St Anselm of Canterbury10 in the eleventh century subjected Christian revelation to the methods of philosophy, proving the Incarnation of Christ in his Cur Deus Homo. Anselm also coined the epithet which characterizes the rational fideist argument: neque enim quaero intelligere ut credam, sed credo. (“For I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand”.) He refused to submit Holy Scripture to dialectics but saw faith as a given point from which to start. But conversely, he took a stand against those who refused to submit their faith to dialectics, seeing no objection to striving to understand rationally what he believed. Not to probe 6

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belief by rational enquiry was for St Anselm a form of spiritual negligence. His principles are similar to those suggested by Prophet I, who reproves Prophet II for apparently doubting what he has seen, but suggests that doubt be constructively employed as the basis for rational exploration. Prophet II, on the other hand, is a pure fideist: II PROFETA Syr, vnto the Deyite, I beleve parfettle, Onpossibull to be there ys nothyng; How be yt this warke Vnto me ys darke In the opperacion or wyrkyng. Peter Abelard,11 whose writings actually predate the acquisition of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, wrote in his Sic et Non as early as the 1120s, a logical speculation founded upon grammar, that doctrine could be confirmed by subjecting it to dialectic: “by doubting we arrive at questions; by questioning we grasp the truth…” Or, in the words of the “prophets”, II PROFETA. Yet dowtis oftymis hathe derevacion. II PROFETA Thatt ys be the meynes of comenecacion Of trawthis to haue a dev probacion the same dowts reysoning. (lines 388–91) which translates, “Yet doubts are often productive”. “That occurs when the truth is communicated, being given appropriate examination by means of applying reason to the same doubts”. For Abelard, faith was there to be found by reason, whereas for the orthodox Augustinians, faith might be supported only by logic. The thirteenth century saw increasing polarization of theologians and philosophers, as certain philosophers in the University of Paris asserted the primacy of Aristotelian reason over theology. Rationalism gained ground, thereafter, for two principle reasons. The first was the assimilation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Ethics into logic. Thus, as logic was part of the trivium, the foundation of the masters’ degree, and theology was a higher degree, students came to theology already infected by a more extensive and scientific Aristotelian methodology.12 Secondly, there was the assimilation of the writings of the Spanish Arabian philosopher Averroes (d. 1198).13 To Averroes, Aristotle was the source of absolute truth. He argued that the power of the Koran to raise the barbarian to civilization derived from the fact that the majority of common people were incapable of pure philosophy, but needed to have their imagination fired by revelation. Divine revelation was, therefore, simply a way in which the Creator rendered truth accessible to those of lower intelligence. Above them are those who need dialectical justifications of the probability of their faith, that is theologians, but higher still are those who are unable to accept anything which 7

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cannot be rationally proved. They, the highest human minds, are the philosophers. Averroes produced what is, in the present context, a very interesting justification for the existence of prophets as those divinely inspired to know just what quantity of truth can be taken in by a given audience and how to catch the ear of that audience. Theology was, therefore, for Averroes at any rate, merely a popular approach to pure philosophy: Aristotelis doctrina est summa veritas, quoniam us intellectus fuit finis humani intellectus. Quare bene dicitur, quod fuit creatus et datus nobis divina providentia, ut sciremus quidquid potest sciri. These views presented problems in Moslem Spain and worse ones in a university run by the ecclesiastical authorities. The proponents could not maintain openly that Aristotle possessed ultimate truth. Many were forced into a position of blind fideism in their theology, simultaneously with philosophical scepticism. What was considered much more dangerous was that there were those, notably Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia, who, when their writings were examined closely, revealed a fundamental lack of belief.14 This may seem strange to those used to seeing the Latin Middle Ages as a period without atheists. So serious was the influence of these Latin Averroists, pure philosophers, held to be, that the bishop of Paris was moved in 1270 and 1277 to list hundreds of propositions borrowed from Averroes and to condemn them. What they have in common is that they challenge the status of divine revelation as pure truth.15 The fideist backlash found its most eloquent proponent in St Bernard of Clairvaux, who asserted that there was little value in the profane sciences.16 The way to truth was, for him, Christ; the method by degrees: first humility, then compassion, third the fervour of contemplation. The pure fideists ran into the problem that it is difficult to condemn dialectics without employing them. Yet the target was frequently the unreliability of dialectics; good servant but bad master, as they could be used by the clever practitioner to prove anything. St Bernard’s chief target was Abelard. St Thomas Aquinas attempted to demonstrate that theology and philosophy were not incompatible or rival disciplines, but effectively symbiotic. Faith implies the assent of the intellect to that which cannot be proved. An act of faith cannot be proved by rational evidence, since if it can be, it no longer requires that faith by definition: “it is impossible that one and the same thing should be believed and seen by the same person”.17 In other words observation deletes the necessity of belief. In history, however, man can see that some things were revealed which could have been obtained by natural reason, but that was because all men were not philosophers. The Incarnation, the Trinity and the Redemption, however, had to be articles of faith properly, as they surpass human reason. Yet, although reason could not prove these things to be true, it could not prove them false either. In other words, no harm can come from subjecting articles of faith to reason; for, if the conclusions of the two conflict, this means simply that there is something wrong with your philosophy. The later history of scholasticism was fraught with schism as to, for instance, which truths and how many were beyond the reach of rational understanding, but such nuances are well beyond the scope of the prophets’ dialogue in the Coventry play. What we have, in The Pageant of the Shearmen and Taylors, it seems, are 8

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two “prophets”, in the sense of teachers, who are party to revelations of the deity, but who are also theologians and dabblers in logic. Although Prophet II initially asserts a stance of pure fideism, he quickly moves to adopt the role of pupil or questioner in the ensuing debate (lines 395–427), for example: II PROFETA Yett can I nott aspy be noo wysse How thys chylde borne schuldbe with-owt naturis prejudyse. I PROFETA Nay, no prejvdyse vnto nature I dare well sey; For the kyng of nature may Hawe all at his one wyll. (lines 406–10) After line 427, there is a further gear change into prophecy in the more normally understood sense of prediction and revelation, preparing for the next enacted piece of Christian mystery, for example: I PROFETA Nothur in hallis nor yett in bowris Born wold he not be, Nother in castellis nor yet in towris That semly were to se; But att hys Fathurs wyll, The profeci to full-fyll, Be-twyxt an ox and an as Jesus, this kyng, borne he was. Heyvin he bryng us tyll! (lines 455–63) Not only does dialectic, therefore, supply a dramatic means of exposition, the approach mimics the favoured scholastic method which was the staple of medieval education. Dialectic was a means by which reason could be employed to establish truth; the well-worn debate was about the degree to which it could be applied to, or was appropriate to, revealed truth. In the midst of the play, illusion is shattered as the audience is wrenched from the essentially emotional world of enacted revelation, the star, the ox and the ass, back to the classroom. This can be seen as an insensitive breaking of “mood” of the play which has to be re-established, or it can be seen as calculated for didactic purpose. Unity of emotional engagement is quite alien to this play’s process. Even the elements of the play which consist of enactment rather than commentary conform to two contrastive styles of presentation. The Annunciation and Nativity are remote, miraculous and ceremonial, presented as living icons, but there are also burlesque scenes involving Joseph and the shepherds which serve to shatter that icon and merge the world of the play with the world of the everyday. The central debate offers a paradigm for the very methodology of didactic drama which is to engage its audience through direct revelatory experience, then to disengage 9

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them sufficiently to extract the lesson which that experience offers. Certainly, the major figures from the history of medieval thought whom I have introduced were remote to the 1530s, but they are also mainstream and their ideas had the status of conventional wisdom. There is nothing to suggest that Croo entertained other than well-worn schoolroom notions of such ideas, or that he grasped, or saw fit to promulgate, the finer points of the argument. If Croo does not have anything startling to offer in the venerable debate on faith and reason, the inclusion of such material in the play does, perhaps, shed a little more light on the intriguing figure of Robert Croo. No play, not even a crafts-guild play, is performed most efficiently by a co-operative of amateurs. The performance of all the individual tasks requires a decision-making process, which demands some indication of who acted as director/producer/stage manager. Both Glynne Wickham18 and Reg Ingram19 have identified men who were heavily involved in Coventry’s pageant organization, without necessarily either being a member of the guild concerned or of a craft directly related to the job they are employed to perform. These are the quasi-professionals whose names emerge from the records, the pageant masters of whom Croo was one. In the world of the crafts guilds where everything was organized by committees, if the form of the drama was to develop, there had to be some unifying initiative, for reasons of efficiency and for aesthetic considerations. To identify these “pageant masters”, however, is not to define them or the extent to which their duties were in any sense regularized. Their origins, talents and involvements seem to have been entirely ad hoc. The first was Thomas Colclow, a skinner employed by the Smiths from 1450, who seems to have had a flair for theatrical organization. His appointment carried an honorarium. Another name which appears later on in the records is that of James Hewet, leader of the waits. Although we do not have evidence that he had a controlling involvement such as Colclow’s, the scattered occurrences of his name suggest an eclectic interest and a roving brief concerning chiefly professional musical services. In the same category, we may place those like Thomas Linacer, who held in his custody, on his death in 1567, all the “pageant vestures” of the Cappers which had to be inventoried and handed on to another “wardrobe master”. Robert Croo presents the most interesting case of sustained extraordinary individual involvement. He gained unprecedented control of more than one pageant. And his role as named redactor of texts is unique. His particular involvement with the Drapers’ Domesday play in the 1550s and beyond provides the most interesting commentary on areas of pageant organization beyond the spoken text. The now missing play as redacted by Croo appears to have had built into it a changed focus – Croo moved the Drapers from “actors’ theatre” into “directors’ theatre”, casting himself as director. The Drapers effects are well known – the jobs of keeping the windlass and hellmouth, clearly both mechanical operations requiring the operation of pulleys, went together at 16 pence; 16 pence also was paid for opening and shutting doors and windows on the pageant, probably as part of some transformation 10

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scene. There are also annual payments for setting fire to three worlds, which were replaced annually by Croo himself, and for tending the barrel of the earthquake. A production with this evident focus on effects is impossible to conceive of as being produced by a guild-actors co-operative. Croo clearly wrote himself a job.20 He was not contracted for a lump sum, but was paid in individual sums for his various scenic contributions and script redactions. He could do everything from making a hat for a Pharisee to preparing a script, and he also played God for the Drapers, for which he received 3 shillings 4 pence. In 1563 God was paid for his “welke”, which is a problematic entry, probably meaning “welkin”. Perhaps Croo used the part of God in his play as a visible vantage point from which to direct operations, so that on his command in dual role as deity and artistic director the welkin, the display of heavenly pyrotechnics signifying the end of the world, could take place. If we add to that his evident familiarity with schoolroom grammar and logic, one may be led to speculate that Robert Croo was one of the substantial army of schoolmasters who wrote and directed plays not only for the Chapel Royal and the boys of Pauls, but throughout the country in the early sixteenth century.

Notes 1 The manuscript of The Pageant of the Shearmen and Taylors was lost in a fire at the end of the last century, but the text is preserved in Thomas Sharp, A Dissertation on the Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries Anciently Performed at Coventry (Coventry, 1825), republished with a new foreword by A. C. Cawley (Wakefield: E. P. Publishing, 1973), 83–124. The manuscript of The Weavers’ Pageant is Coventry City Record Office Acquisition I 1/2. Both plays are edited in Hardin Craig, Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, Early English Text Society, e.s. 87 (1902; 2nd edn., 1957). 2 R. W. Ingram, Coventry, Records of Early English Drama (University of Toronto Press, 1981). 3 Hardin Craig, Two Coventry Plays, pp. xxv–xxix. 4 Ibid., p. xxiv. 5 Ibid., p. 31. 6 Ibid., p. 70. 7 Ibid., pp. 12–16 (lines 332–474). 8 Ibid., pp. 1–2 (lines 1–46). 9 Etienne Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages (New York and London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950), p. 11. 10 Ibid. 11 Sheila Delany, Chaucer’s “House of Fam”: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism (University of Chicago Press, 1972), quoting L. M. De Rijk ed., Petrus Abelardus, Dialectica (Assen, 1956). 12 John F. Wippel, “The Condemnations of 1270 and 1277 at Paris”, The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 7 (1977), pp. 2, 169–201, 172. 13 Gilson, Reason and Revelation, chapter 2 passim. 14 Ibid., 52–680; Wippel, “Condemnations”, p. 174. 15 Ibid., passim. 16 Gilson, Reason and Revelation, p.11. 17 Ibid., p. 74; F. Sartiaux, Lafoi et la raison dans le moyen age occidental (Paris: Editions Ernest Leroux, 1924), pp. 16–18.

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18 Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages 1300–1660, I 1300–1576 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980) p. 299. 19 Reginald W. Ingram, “‘Pleyng geire accustumed belongyng & necessarie’; guild records and pageant production at Coventry”, Records of Early English Drama: Proceedings of the First Colloquium, ed. Joanna Dutka (University of Toronto Press, 1979), pp. 60–92, 76–7. 20 Ingram, Coventry, p. 225 (l.10), p. 476 (l.1), p. 221 (l.10), p. 237 (l.20), p. 221 (l.28), p. 217 (l.31), p. 237 (l.23).

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2 PLAYING PENTECOST Transformation and texts From: Medieval English Theatre, 29, Essays in Honour of David Mills edited by Philip Butterworth, Pamela King, and Meg Twycross 2008, 105–30 Pentecost or Whit, coming close to midsummer and to Corpus Christi, is a traditional time of feasting, sports, and merrymaking, accompanied by plays.1 The feast commemorates the Descent of the Holy Ghost to the Apostles fifty days after the Resurrection of Christ. Since the first century, it has terminated the Paschal season: St Paul refers to his intention to stay on at Ephesus until Pentecost in I Corinthians 16:8. Its origins are also associated with an ancient Jewish feast, the ‘feast of weeks’, an occasion for making thank-offerings to God referred to in Exodus 34:22 and Deuteronomy 16:10. The alternative popular name for the feast, ‘Whitsunday’, arose because it was one of the traditional occasions of baptism in the liturgical calendar of the early Church, and those presenting themselves for baptism wore white garments. Pentecost has special liturgical rank second only to Easter, and the Monday and Tuesday in the week are, like those of Holy Week, both Double feasts of the First Class. Rosemary Woolf, admirable in a number of respects but not notable for her theatrical imagination, remarked that the episode is ‘difficult to dramatise’.2 Accordingly, she believed that the N-Town dramatist was ‘prudent’ in compressing the entire event into forty lines of doxology recited by the Apostles, the expression of scepticism by attendant Jews, and a sermon by Peter. Woolf’s approach was rigorously comparative, based on the now discredited premise that the English Mystery Plays of her title constituted a coherent genre of dramatic writing. Her simple model, privileging and homogenising mystery-play cycles, is now rejected as a consequence of the work on manuscripts and records which has been undertaken in the intervening thirty-five years. This does not mean that a comparative approach is no longer viable, but it does mean that any comparison has to attend to what is known of the discrete circumstances of production of each text. In what follows, I propose to explore how the treatment of Pentecost in York’s Corpus Christi Play and Chester’s Whitsun Play reflects the distinct devotional contexts and climates from which they survive.3 Fortunately, for the purposes of this paper, there is no Pentecost pageant in the Towneley manuscript, or this essay would be a great deal longer. 13

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The brief N-Town episode need not detain us long either except in distinction to York’s. Both are fifteenth-century survivals, and both reflect liturgical practice. The N-Town episode is decorously constructed from the core fabric of liturgical worship – prayer and preaching – as counters to scepticism. It thus, like the rite of worship, simply bears witness to the effect of the intervention of the Spirit, as it is understood to have operated since Pentecost, rather than recreating the moment. In York, on the other hand, a pageant evolved which sets out to re-enact the historical moment of the Descent of the Holy Spirit comprehended through mainstream theological commentary and mediated to the audience through the deployment of scriptural and liturgical textual resonances, as well as by theatrical effect. In the climax to his Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, Nicholas Love calls Pentecost a ‘swete and louely feste. … For þis is þe feste of him þat is loue properly, as seynt gregour seiþ þat þe holi goste is loue’.4 He tells of how the Trinity determined to send the Holy Ghost to the Apostles, how it was done with ‘a wondirfull noys in brennyng tonges vpon a hundret & twenty disciples’ strengthening and empowering them, and of how through loving prayerfulness the individual can come to emulate the Apostles’ condition. In an earlier section of the book, in his counterblast against Lollards and their doubts about transubstantiation, Love also connects the feeling of taking the sacrament of the altar with the influx of the Holy Ghost: And it semeþ þat ioyful felyng in þe body is like to þat þat holi chirch singeþ of þe Apostles & disciples at þe feste of Pentecost, when þe holi goste was sent to hem sodeynly in þe likenes of fire without forþ, & vnspekable ioy in hir bodies withinforþ, þat is þat hir bowels fillede with þe holi goste ioyede souereynly in god.5 Love offers a cue, apt in time, place, and ecclesiastical politics, to the significance of Pentecost in the York Corpus Christi Play. In the play, it is a bridge between the pageants which recollect apparitions of Christ in scriptural history, and Corpus Christi itself, which occurs only eleven days after the Whitsun feast in the annual festal calendar. It emphasises the transformational powers of the Holy Spirit. The York Pentecost pageant is attributed to the Potters in both the 1415 Ordo Paginarum and in the later Register from which the texts of the pageants as we have them are derived.6 The association between craft and subject is apt. The Golden Legend calls the Apostles ‘clean receptacles’,7 drawing on long patristic tradition, including for example Chrysostom’s commentary on how the effect of the influx of the Spirit at Pentecost is to ‘make men of gold of men of clay’.8 St Ambrose, a particular authority on the Holy Spirit, comments: Unde et illud quando Gedeon superaturus Madian, trecentos viros jussit hydri as sumere, et in hydri is faces accensas habere, et in dextris tenere tubas (Judie. VII, 16); ita nostri acceptum ab apostolis servavere majores, quad hydriae sunt corpora nostra, figurata de limo quae timere 14

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non norunt, si fervore gratiae spiritalis ignescant, et Iesu Domini passionem canora vocis con fessione testentur. [For the same reason was it that when Gideon was about to overcome the Midianites, he commanded three hundred men to take pitchers, and to hold lighted torches inside the pitchers, and trumpets in their right hands. Our predecessors have preserved the explanation received from the apostles, that the pitchers are our bodies, fashioned of clay, which know not fear if they burn with the fervour of the grace of the Spirit, and bear witness to the passion of the Lord Jesus with a loud confession of the voice.]9 The guild attribution supports an understanding of the episode, characteristic of the York Play, as one of the series of theophanies which drives the cycle. A focus on transformation of course makes some demands on special effects in staging, about which it is fun to speculate. The moment of epiphany is, however, most clearly marked out by music, as angels sing Veni creator spiritus, a hymn commonly attributed to Hrabanus Maurus, with special Pentecostal resonances. This was the seminal commentary on the account in Acts of the Descent of the Holy Ghost, ‘assigned in the Roman Breviary to Vespers (I and II) and Terce of Pentecost and throughout the octave’. The hymn is one of the most enduring in the liturgy, associated with any occasion on which the special intervention of the Holy Spirit to assist human judgement was sought, most notably the ordination of priests.10 What occurred during the singing in the Potters’ pageant we can only guess at, but Peter says: I myght noʒt loke, so was it light (l. 111) And His holy goste here haue we hente; Like to þe sonne itt semed in sight. (ll. 114–5) The producers of indoor Latin plays of the Church used incense to create clouds of smoke and sparks, and sometimes released live doves.11 All these effects would be considerably more challenging to produce on a pageant waggon in broad daylight. Moreover, doves were not strictly necessary, as the manifest epiphany at Pentecost properly involves only tongues of flame. The Golden Legend, digesting earlier commentaries, is most particular on the point: the dove belongs to the Baptism: It is to be noted that the sending of the Holy Spirit was shown by five kinds of visible signs. Firstly, he appeared in the form of a dove over 15

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Christ at his baptism … Secondly, he came as a shining cloud around Christ transfigured … Thirdly, he came as a breath … Fourthly, as fire, and Fifthly, in the shape of a tongue; and in this double form he appeared on this day.12 Rushing wind and fiery tongues are the subjects of commentaries illustrating the vehemence of the action of the Spirit at Pentecost.13 The York Pentecost thus belongs to the list of pageants which somehow contrived lighting effects in broad daylight at midsummer in the streets – mirrors, candles, oil-lamps, or flares – if no birds!14 The effect of the influx of the Spirit is the gift of tongues. In a number of liturgies, though not in the York Use, this was represented by the addition of Greek and Hebrew words to the Latin.15 The pageant intersperses the English verse-text with Latin quotations from the liturgy of the Pentecostal season to produce macaronic stanzas, but this effect is not confined to the moment after the Descent of the Holy Ghost. Some of the Latin, written in red ink in the Register, is integrated into the stanza form, whereas at other times the lines are hypermetrical. Peter speaks the words of the Gospel reading for the Tuesday following Pentecost, Acts 10:42–8: Nobis precepit dominus praedicare populo, et testi fiacre quia prope est iudex viuorum et mortuorum. 13–4 [‘And he commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that … the Judge of the living and of the dead [is at hand].’]16 John’s speech which follows is also completed by two hypermetrical lines – John 14:26, the Gospel reading for Mass at Pentecost, which is taken up as the verse antiphon for the following Sunday: Cum venerit paraclitus Docebit vos omnia. (ll. 35–6) [‘But the Comforter [when he shall come] will teach you all things.’] James then speaks the first fully macaronic stanza, incorporating the adaptation of John 16:7–8, which forms the Vespers antiphon for both the Ascension and Pentecost:17 3a, certaynely he saide vs soo, And mekill more þanne we of mene: ‘Nisi ego abiero’, Ϸus tolde he ofte-tymes vs betwene. 16

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He saide, forsoth, ‘But if I goo Ϸe holy goste schall not be sene, Et cum assumptus fuero Ϸanne schall I sende ʒou comforte clene’ (ll. 37–44) Immediately after the Descent of the Holy Ghost, the First Apostle glosses the nocturn sung by the angels: ‘Veni creator spiritus, Mentes tuorum visita’. Ϸei praied þe spirite come till vs And mende oure myndis with mirthis ma … (ll. 135–8) The Third Apostle continues by glossing the words of one of the weekday antiphons that follow after Easter, again an adaptation from John 16:20–1: ‘Tristicia impleuit cor vestrum’ – Firste sorowe in herte he vs hight; ‘Sed conuertetur in gaudium’, Sen saide he þat we schulde be light. (ll. 147–50)18 Thus, the York dramatist foregrounds the text from John 16 which is embedded in the Pentecostal liturgy, giving a particular emphasis to the pageant’s clarification of the episode. This is the text in which the Evangelist reports the effect of the coming of the Holy Spirit and affirms that Christ has ascended to the Father. The significance of Pentecost, as recounted by John, is as the fulfilment of Christ’s promise of enlightenment, too burdensome to be taught by the Son but to be made known through the agency of the Spirit. The Apostles decorously use the Latin of the liturgy to confer a flavour of the gift of tongues, but also simultaneously recount and enact Christ’s promise as reported by John. As in the N-Town play, it is left to the Jewish ‘Doctors’ to comment on how the Apostles ‘leris langage of ilk a lande’ (158). The sequence is completed by Peter, who explains their error, finishing with Joel’s prophecy (2:28) of the events which the audience has just witnessed, also taken from the liturgy of the season: Et erit in nouissimis diebus, dicit dominus, effundam de spiritu meo super omnem carnem. (ll. 193–4) [‘And it shall come to pass after this, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh …’]19 The Golden Legend discusses why the Holy Spirit should have taken the form of tongues of flame.20 The tongue is the member that is particularly difficult to 17

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control, but ‘because the tongue is very useful if well-controlled, it needed to have the Holy Spirit as its controller’. Voragine in turn quotes Bernard’s explanation of the tongues of fire as arming the Apostles with the confidence to speak fierily, to modulate what they say according to the different capacities of their hearers, to speak usefully for edification and for benefit. Translated by the Church from which the York Play emanates, this amounts to the power to use the Latin of the scriptures and to gloss it intelligibly in the language of the audience. There are examples elsewhere in the pageants of unruly tongues, notably in the inspired dialogue of Herod’s court in Pageant 31. The use of liturgical Latin on the other hand pervades the York Play. Its function is as a proleptic and authorising sign of enlightenment throughout the pageants. To speak the Latin of scripture and liturgy is to bear witness to the Resurrection and to have received the gift of the Holy Ghost. York’s Pentecost pageant has, then, a characteristic liturgical lyricism, which combines with special visual effects and music to create a version of the episode redolent of the transformational powers of the sacral. But it is the Chester pageant of Pentecost which earns special mention from Rosemary Woolf. Like York’s pageant, it opens with the replacement of Judas with Matthias, which draws on Acts 1. It also incorporates the composition of the Creed, a translation of the hymn Veni creator spiritus, and, to Woolf, most ‘startling’, a scene in the heavens in which the whole Trinity organises the Descent of the Holy Ghost.21 What Woolf does not remark upon is the possible significance of the Pentecost pageant in a play cycle designed for performance at Whitsuntide, both before and after the Reformation. The post-Reformation Banns of the Chester Play remark on Pentecost’s special status as the final canonically sound episode: This of the oulde & newe testamente to ende all the storye which oure author meaneth at this tyme to haue in playe, yow ffishemongers to the Pageante of the holye goaste well see That in good order it be donne as hathe bine allwaye / 22 ‘Been always’, that is, despite the objections of the Puritan watchdog of the play, Christopher Goodman, who in 1572 had noted the following ‘absurdities’ in the pageant: Peter onely is said to create Matthias an Apostle The Angell bringeth the Holy ghost to the Apostles The Creed made in 12 Articles by 12 Apostles every one their portion. Matthews words these. And I believe throgh godes grace soche beleffe as holy church has that godes bodie granted us was & to use in forme of bred Simons words. And I beleve with devotion, of syn to have remission throgh penance & contrition, & heven whan I am dead.23 18

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The surviving text does indeed exhibit all these ‘vices’, so does not show signs of having been significantly protestantised. And yet it is very different in character from York’s heavily liturgical version of the event. For the Chester dramatist, Pentecost is both about the history of evangelism and a demonstration of evangelism. It works through lessons on the power of intercessory prayer and of the preaching vocation, on the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and on the articles of the Creed. Prayer is particularly a driving mode within the pageant and is constructed from the Gospel passages which predict the coming of the Holy Ghost. The praying culminates in the singing of Veni creator spiritus which triggers the holy conversation in the Trinity, enacting the answer to the question, who sent the Holy Spirit. The Golden Legend cites Pope Leo’s sermon for Pentecost as its authority, identifying the Father as merciful, the Son as profitable, but the Holy Ghost as sent to inflame humankind.24 This is what supplies the cue to the author of the Meditationes Vita Christi, to Nicholas Love, and to their Bernardine sources, to present the debate in heaven as an exemplum of pure love.25 The heavenly debate in Chester is, however, not notably affective, but is used as an occasion to reprise the cause of the Fall and Redemption and to itemise the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. The debate is followed by a long stage direction: Tunc Deus emittet Spiritum Sanctum in spetie ignis, et in mittendo cantent duo angeli antiphonam ‘Accipite Spiritum Sanctum; quorum remiseritis peccata, remittentur eis’ etc. Et cantando projicient ignem super apostolos. Finitoque Angelus in caelo dicat … (ll. 238–9) [Then God shall send out the Holy Spirit in the form of fire, and as it is sent, two angels shall sing the antiphon.26 ‘Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whose sins ye shall forgive, they are forgiven them’ etc. And as they sing they shall throw fire upon the apostles. And when this is done, an Angel in heaven shall say …] Clearly, although we still have no idea how this was done, the effect was intended to be spectacular. Then angels tell the Apostles what is happening to them, and the Apostles respond by telling one another and the audience what has happened to them. Hence they bear witness to their own transformation rather than enacting it. There is no attempt here to reproduce the gift of tongues directly, although it is reported both by the Apostles and by two observing ‘foreigners’. There is, however, macaronic dialogue, this time not drawing on the Pentecostal liturgy but on the words of the Creed. For the episode finds a further didactic opportunity in the traditional understanding that the Creed was formulated by the Apostles at Pentecost.27 Whatever its origins, which remain obscure, the Creed, delightfully described by Augustine as ‘These words which you have heard are in the Divine Scriptures scattered up and down: but thence gathered and reduced into one, that 19

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the memory of slow persons might not be distressed’,28 is, with the Lord’s Prayer and the Ave Maria, the mainstay of medieval catechesis. Between 1471 and 1521, the annual performance of the Chester Play was moved from Corpus Christi to Whitsuntide, and, as David Mills has pointed out, there is in fact very little evidence of what it was like prior to this move.29 The move of the play to Whitsun changed what he calls the ‘weighting of the ceremonial year’, giving it three ‘mutually defining genres’: Corpus Christi, which involved the Church and the City; the Whitsun Plays, which belonged to the City but were devotional in content; and the Midsummer Show, which belonged wholly to the City and was secular in content.30 The Post-Reformation Banns reassure the audience of the continuation of the plays, although as David Mills points out, by this time, they alternated with the Midsummer Show. He concludes, ‘The plays are thus nominally attached to a religious function, though not specifically directed to the period of Whitsun’, and points out that the Proclamation of the plays does not mention either Corpus Christi or Whitsuntide, but ‘the avowed spiritual aim is confirmatory and educational, an act of evangelism’.31 The Chester pageant could, therefore, be the product of the cycle’s reorientation as a Whitsun celebration, and can, but need not, be read as a signature inclusion. The Chester Pentecost pageant is clearly very different from the equivalent pageant from the York Corpus Christi Play, but it is important at this juncture to remember too that there is no evidence that this is because it is significantly later in date. The terminus ad quem for the latter is the date of the York Register, that is some time in the late 1460s, whereas the terminus a quo for the former, if it is connected to the move to Whitsun, is 1471, although we cannot discount the possibility that it could be earlier still. Certainly to connect its didactic elaboration with nascent Protestantism would be to misread anachronistically its theological emphasis. Both plays belong to the fifteenth-century vogue for vernacular Gospel harmonies. In the case of York, as we have seen, Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Life of Christ is a specific and localisable influence. York also shows the influence of elements of the very different Stanzaic Life of Christ, but not to the extent of the very close affinities between this text and the Chester Play. David Mills has observed that the Stanzaic Life lacks ‘the Franciscan empathy’ of Love’s Mirror, ‘but offers a plain style that deals primarily in narrative and exposition and holds the audience at a contemplative distance from the account’.32 To explain the character of Chester’s Pentecost pageant further, rather than going into the methodological detail of the Stanzaic Life of Christ, I want to wind the clock back to Ranulf Higden, monk of St Werburgh’s, one-time candidate for authorship of both the Play and the Life. The author of the famous Polychronicon is no longer considered likely to have been the author of either, but Higden, immensely influential locally, offers some important clues to the textual environment from which the Chester Play emanated. Higden’s passage on Pentecost in the Polychronicon is brief but telling:33 like all of his New Testament narrative and commentary, it is embedded in his account 20

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of imperial Rome. In chapter 5, he breaks off to provide definitions of the various appearances of Christ: Epiphania, Theophania (the Baptism), Bethphania (the Marriage at Cana), and Phagophania (the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes). The first three of these, and probably also the fourth, he notes following The Golden Legend, all occurred on the same date. Then, in chapter 6, he inserts into his discussion of the reign of Emperor Augustus the following account of a further theophany: Hoc quoque anno post electionem Mathiae, et etiam post missionem Spiritus Sancti, apostolic[i] antequam dispergerentur in mundum, convenientes apud Ierosolimam ediderunt symbolum apostolicum. Et Stephanus septimo kalendis Ianuarii lapidatus est … [Also in that year after the election of Matthew, and also after the sending-forth of the Holy Ghost, the Apostles, before they were dispersed into the world, gathering together in Jerusalem, published the Creed. And Stephen was stoned on the seventh day after the Kalends of January …] Higden selects from the events of the first two chapters of Acts, the dispersal of the Apostles and the composition of the Creed, both of which are the focus of the Chester pageant.34 Furthermore, the status of the Polychronicon is such that Higden’s pastoral writings are not so well known. All belong to a particular evangelical tradition. In addition to an exposition on Job, and another on Canticles, he wrote an Ars componendi sermones (‘Art of Composing Sermons’), which has been described by its editor as a foolproof manual for preaching in the thematic mode, with divisions and subdivisions.35 The same editor notes in particular his dislike for strident or emotional preaching. He also wrote a Speculum curatorum which belongs squarely within the movement for pastoral renewal, and leans on similar handbooks, especially the Summa confessorum of John of Freiburg but also William of Pagula’s Oculis Sacerdotis and the Manipulis curatorum of Henry of Ghent.36 G.R. Owst noted reprovingly that Higden’s debt to William of Auvergne amounts to shameless plagiarism. The Speculum, commonly dated to 1340,37 deals with the Articles of the Faith, the Ten Commandments, vows, tithes, the Lord’s Prayer, the gifts of the Holy Ghost, the Beatitudes, the virtues, the vices and their remedies, and the Sacraments. The Speculum demands closer inspection in relation to the detail of the Chester Play and the Stanzaic Life because all appear to share a particular evangelical approach to scriptural material. One side effect of this was to set Higden up as a candidate for proto-Protestantism in the post-Reformation Banns, although the pre-Reformation detail of none of these works would have passed the gimlet eye of Christopher Goodman. What all three hold the secret to is not, ultimately, shared authorship, but shared reading, probably the contents of the now lost library of St Werburgh’s Benedictine Abbey. It is known that there were 21

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twenty-six monks in the abbey in 1381 at a period of decline, so it is surmised that in Higden’s day the number would have been greater. It is also known that many of the works Higden drew on came from the bequest of Richard of Chester.38 What Richard of Chester’s will testifies to is a predominant taste in works within the standard pastoral tradition.39 A copy of the will (28 April 1343) survives in the Chapter Acts of York Minster, where he ended his life as a canon. After making provision for the burial of his body in the Minster and attendant elaborate funerary arrangements, he swiftly moves on to itemise the books destined for the abbot and monks of St Werburgh’s: books of decretals and glosses; a Bible; the Moralia on Job, Moralia on Ezekiel, homilies and the Pastoral Care, all by Gregory; the Meditationes of Bernard; Paul’s Epistles with glosses; a book called Catholicon (possibly the Catholicon or Summa Grammaticalis by the Italian grammarian John of Genoa, alias Johannes Balbus, who died c. 1298); Hugutio of Pisa’s (floruit 1200) Derivationes; Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae; a book called Bruitone (probably Radulphus Brito, c. 1270–1320) on grammar; a concordance of the Bible; a work recorded as summam de vices et virtutibus, possibly the very manuscript of William of Auvergne which Higden had at his elbow as he worked;40 and a book of abbreviations.41 Finally there follow a number of books of Sentences, presumably Peter Comestor, and a copy of Augustine’s De civitate dei. This core collection of itself provided Cestrian authors with much of what Pantin characterised as the typical reading materials of a fourteenth-century religious community. To summarise then, we appear to have an argument to account for the different treatments of Pentecost in the near contemporary pageants from York and Chester. York’s mediation of the theophany of Pentecost is heavily dependent on the Whitsun liturgy and perhaps even analogies with transubstantiation, whereas Chester’s draws its inspiration from evangelical writings, particularly those associated with the Creed. That difference cannot be tied to a particular date, chiefly because we have no idea at what date either pageant was written – certainly in their present form. York’s is a product of the period between the 1415 Ordo Paginarum but is unattested prior to the 1460s, whereas Chester’s, although surviving in late manuscripts, could date from the 1470s or earlier. Attributing the difference to the occasion of performance, Corpus Christi as opposed to Whitsun, is more attractive, but requires caution: although Chester’s elaborate Pentecost pageant provides a fitting signature episode for a Whitsun cycle, it is not invoked as such until the excuses of the Post-Reformation Banns – post hoc ergo propter hoc. And York’s pageant on its own would work equally well at Whitsun. The only secure ground for discussion of the distinction between the two, and for the apparent, though illusory, more Protestant ‘feel’ of the Chester Pentecost, rests in reading them as products of particular intertextualities born of the available reading materials in the respective locations of composition. In the case of York, although we know of major medieval library collections in that city,42 we need look no further than at the influence of Nicholas Love, the practices of vernacular theology, and the scriptural texts mediated in the liturgy. Chester’s is the more ‘bookish’ pageant, but again behind that may lie 22

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the mediation of one influential local luminary, Ranulf Higden, magpie of the pastoral tradition. In other words, we, like Rosemary Woolf, really need look no further than at the sources but in more material terms than she conceived, by considering which books were actually available locally to the likely authors of the plays. That is surely most likely of all to account for the particular take on fifteenth-century theological orthodoxy that each digests for audiences which were relatively comparable in character.

Notes 1 See further on F.G. Holweck at www.newadvent.org/cathen/156146.htm 2 Rosemary Woolf, English Mystery Plays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) p. 284. 3 Respectively Richard Beadle, ed., The York Plays edited (London: Edward Arnold, 1982), Pageant 43, pp. 380–5; David Mills, ed., The Chester Mystery Cycle (East Lancing: Colleagues Press, 1991), Play 21, pp. 357–73. All references are to these editions. 4 Michael G. Sargent, ed., Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition (Exeter University Press, 2005), pp. 218–20. 5 Love, Mirror, p. 153. 6 Notably Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, eds., York 2 vols., Records of Early English Drama: (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978) pp. 23, 26; Beadle, ed., York Plays, pp. 380–5. 7 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints translated by William Granger Ryan, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) 1 pp. 306. 8 St John Chrysostom, Homily 4 on the Acts of the Apostles translated by Kevin Knight, www.newadvent.org/fathers/210104.htm 9 St Ambrose of Milan, De Spirito Sancto lib. 1. cap. 14, para. 147, in Sancti Ambrosii Mediolanensis Episcopi Opera Omnia vol. 2 edited Migne PL 16 (1845) col. 738; Ambrose, Three Books … On the Holy Spirit translated by H. de Romestin and others, Book I, Chapter 14.167, in Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, eds., St. Ambrose: Select Works and Letters (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers 2:10; New York: Christian Literature Company and Oxford: Parker, 1896) 1 p.12, online at www.newadvent.org/ fathers/34021.htm 10 Hugh Henry on Veni Creator Spiritus in the online Catholic Encyclopedia at www. newadvent.org/cathen/15341a.htm, or see ‘Veni Creator Spiritus’ in New Catholic Encyclopaedia 17 vols. (1964), pp. 14, 600; Breviarum ad usum insignis Ecclesiae Eboracensis (York Breviary) S.W. Lawley, ed., 2 vols. Surtees Society Publications p.71 (1880 for 1871) and p. 75 (1883 for 1882) l col. 503, and see further on Henry at www.newadvent.org/cathen/1534la.htm 11 See e.g. Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,) 1933, l, pp. 489–91; Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400-1580 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992) pp. 459–60. 12 Voragine, Golden Legend, translated Ryan, l, p. 300. 13 E.g. St John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles: Homily 4, online at www.newadvent.org / fathers/210104.htm 14 Though the dove does not appear in the written sources, it often appears in the iconography of Pentecost, presumably as a generalisation of the dove from the Baptism. 15 Young, Drama of the Medieval Church, l p. 489; but see W..G. Henderson, ed., Manuale et Processionae ad usum insignis Ecclesiae Eboracensis (York Manual and Processional), Surtees Society Publications 63, (1875), pp.187–8.

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16 W.G. Henderson, ed., Missale ad usum insignis ecclesiae Eboracensis (The York Missal), 2 vols., Surtees Society Publications 59 (1874 for 1872) and 60 (1874 for 1872), l, p. 154; Acts 10: 42: And he commanded us to preach to the people, and to testify that it is he who was appointed by God, to be judge of the living and of the dead 17 York Breviary, 1, cols 475, 497, translated as: Unless I go away the Holy Ghost will not come: when I have ascended He will be sent to you. 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26

York Breviary, 1, col. 457. York Missal, 1, p. 161. Voragine, Golden Legend, translated Ryan, l, p. 306. Woolf, English Mystery Plays, p. 285–6: ‘while there is an unexpected touch of sublimity in the design, the execution is clumsy’. There are two starting points, Christ’s words in John 14:16, part of a lectio and response in the liturgy for the vigil at Pentecost, and the Pseudo-Bonaventurian Meditationes, in which this text is developed into a brief scene. Elizabeth Baldwin, Lawrence M. Clopper, and David Mills, eds., Cheshire Including Chester, 2 vols. Records of Early English Drama (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press and the British Library, 2007), 1, p. 339. Cheshire Including Chester, 1, p.148. Voragine, Golden Legend, translated Ryan, l, 299. Love, Mirror, 218. The antiphon, from John 20:22–3, 22. When he had said this, he breathed on them; and he said to them: Receive ye the Holy Ghost. 23. Whose sins ye shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained.

occurs not only in the liturgy for Lauds at Pentecost (York Breviary col. 502), as the antiphon for the Gospel, but is also part of the sacrament of Ordination to the priesthood: see www.newadvent.org/cathen/11279a.htm 27 According to St Ambrose, the Creed was ‘pieced together by twelve separate workmen’, the probable origin of the legend of its composition by the Apostles at Pentecost. Herbert Thurston, Origin of the Creed, in the online Catholic Encyclopaedia at www. newadvent.org/cathen/01629a.htm, quoting Migne PL 17 col. 671: Arbitror illam duodecim artificum operatione conf1atam; duodecim enim aposwlorum symbolo fides sancta concepta est, qui velut periti artifices in unum convenientes, clavem suo consilio conflaverunt. 28 Ista verba quae audistis, per divinas scripturas sparsa sunt: sed inde collecta et ad unum redacta, ne tardorum hominum memoria laboraret: Augustine of Hippo, Sermones: De Symbolo Ad Catechumenos, Migne PL 40 cols 627–36, at 627; A Sermon to Catechumens on the Creed (De Symbolo ad Catachumenos) translated Rev. C.L. Cornish, in Philip Schaff, ed., St. Augustine: On the Holy Trinity, Doctrinal Treatises, Moral Treatises (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 1:3; Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887) 369–75, at 369. Online at www.newadvent. org/fathers/1307.htm 29 David Mills, Recycling the Cycle: The City of Chester and Its Whitsun Plays (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), p. 111.

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30 31 32 33

34 35 36

37

38 39 40 41

42

Mills, Recycling the Cycle, p. 111. Mills, Recycling the Cycle, p. 115–6. Mills, Recycling the Cycle, p. 47. J.R. Lumby, Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Monachi Cestrensis; together with the English translations of John Trevisa and of an unknown writer of the fifteenth century, vol. 4 (Rolls Series 41D; London: Longman & Trübner and others for HMSO, 1872), pp. 334–7. Polychronicon, p. 356. Margaret Jennings, ed., The ‘Ars componendi sermone’ of Ranulph Higden OSB (Davis Medieval Texts and Studies 6; Leiden and New York: Brill, 1991) p. xxxvi. The text is commented on in detail in G.R. Owst, ‘Sortilegium in English Homiletic Literature of the Fourteenth Century’ in J.C. Davies, ed., Studies presented to Sir Hilary Jenkinson edited (London: Oxford UP, 1957) pp. 272–303, and in Leonard Boyle ‘William of Pagula’ (unpublished PhD thesis; Oxford, 1956). W.A. Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge UP, 1955), p. 203. In the surviving manuscript of the Speculum, Durham Cathedral MS B iv, 36, there is a two-column index on fol. 3r contemporary with the manuscript’s compilation, which itemises the full pastoral agenda covered by the MS. York Minster Library, MS f. Hl/2, The Chapter of Acts, fols 17r and v. York Minster Library MS f. Hl/2, fol. 17r. Owst, ‘Sortilegium’, p. 287. I cannot read this sufficiently well to be certain of the author. It is not the standard Marius Victorinus, but appears to begin with ‘sc’ and to end with ‘nas’, so could be a copy of the scotica manus, the handbook to ecclesiastical Irish abbreviations, at any rate a small volume sub rubeo coreo ligat. I am not here disputing the value of Alexandra F. Johnston’s ongoing work on the putative connections between the library collections of York and the York Play, as outlined, for example, in her important paper ‘John Waldeby, the Augustinian Friary, and the Plays of York’, delivered at the 2000 International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo. See Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘The York Cycle and the Libraries of York’, in The Church and Learning in Late Medieval Society: Essays in Honour of Barrie Dobson, Harlaxton Medieval Studies XI, Caroline Barron and Jenny Stratford eds. (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2002) pp. 355–70.

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3 LAMENT AND ELEGY IN SCRIPTURAL DRAMA Englishing the planctus Mariae From: Catherine Emerson, Mario Longtin, and Adrian P. Tudor, Performance, Drama and Spectacle: Essays in Honour of Alan Hindley (Louvain: Peeters, 2010), pp. 239–52 The probable source of the Virgin Mary’s lament at the base of the Cross is the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh chapters of the Speculum humanae salvationis (1324). The potential of the so-called planctus Mariae for vernacular adaptation in turn derives from translations of the Speculum, for example, into Middle English verse as The Mirour of Mans Saluacioune.1 It contributed to the elaborations of the Passion narrative which supplied the affective focus for Franciscan spirituality, as well as to the growing cult of the Joys and Sorrows of Our Lady.2 It became a common free-standing paraliturgical lyric, as well as an integral element in lives of Christ, in both Latin and vernaculars. Biblical exegesis connects the planctus with Simeon’s prophecy in Luke 2 that the Virgin would share in her son’s suffering on the Cross, which supports the medieval Church’s understanding of her special co-redemptive powers,3 and by the late Middle Ages, the planctus Mariae had become an iconic element in popular representations of the Passion, fully embedded in the experience of worship on Good Friday throughout Europe, and an obligatory inclusion in devotional compendia. Its basic form and content lends itself particularly well to dramatic representation, and Karl Young believed that it provided the starting point for the Latin tropes of the Passion which developed as early liturgical plays.4 Certainly, its widespread interpolation into ceremonies of the Adoration of the Cross in Good Friday liturgies bears witness to its prominence as part of the understood narrative detail of Christ’s Passion. Moreover, this prominence was well established by the period in which the story was being retold in the late medieval vernacular Passion Plays.5 Good Friday worship had a very special character. In many respects its stripped altars, its absence of lights and images, gave it a dramatic starkness. Many of the customary formulae of the Mass, for example, the invitatory, versicles, hymns, chapters, were also absent. There was no consecration: a specially reserved host, consecrated on Maundy Thursday, was used. The act of worship was, however, also 26

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elaborated in a number of ways, with special prayers, reproaches (Impropreria), and adorations, each with their own special musical settings. The focus was the veneration of the Cross, and in many places, this included particular ceremonies involving the burial of a cross and/or the host and/or an image of Christ. For the laity, worship on this day must have been memorably different and designed to move participants to penance through inciting their emotions. It was also one of the few occasions in the year on which participatory action was encouraged, as worshippers followed the clergy and crept barefoot to the Cross on their knees and kissed it in ritual acknowledgement of sinful humanity’s debt of gratitude for the pain of the Passion6. The planctus, and in particular the stylised lamenting of the women at the base of the Cross, supplied a ritualised model of appropriate behaviour. It also, by reminding the worshipper of St John’s special relationship with Christ and the Virgin Mary, supplied an additional validatory dimension to John’s Gospel which was read in its entirety as part of the Good Friday liturgy. A modern audience of medieval liturgy and drama specialists had the opportunity in the spring of 2006 to experience for themselves how the planctus Mariae worked for a lay audience when the fourteenth-century planctus Mariae from Cividale, near Venice, was performed at the fortieth International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo. This version preserves the trope in its most dramaturgically developed form, and so offered the audience the opportunity to understand what vernacular dramatists may have taken from their own experiences of worship when they reset this element in the Passion story in plays which were fully detached from their liturgical contexts.7 What survived the radical translation from Latin to English, Italian male choristers to a cast of American women students, was, precisely, direct evidence of how the planctus Mariae works its audience into the required emotional state. The dramatic technique by which the trope actively achieves what prose writers in the affective tradition exhort their readers to aspire to seems very simple, and can be explained using the crudest linguistic toolkit. The focus of the scene is the Cross. If Christ’s body is on it, he is not required to speak nor to move, so he can be represented by an icon, as was the case in this production. What the singing characters do insistently is to demand that the congregation looks at the Cross, as they arrange themselves around it demanding, ‘Behold!’ and, presumably, gesturing towards it. The tone is not one of evangelical enthusiasm; it understands that emotionalism is not stirred up by instruction but by empathy. Empathy (sharing feelings) as opposed to sympathy (understanding feelings) is now generally associated with naturalism in art. According to the ‘system’ of Constantin Stanislavski, we have to be convinced of the emotional authenticity of the performance before we can participate in those emotions.8 What liturgical performance demonstrates is that this is emphatically not the case. This highly stylised mode of performance demonstrates that the speech act can be the unit of empathy. A speech act is an utterance which has illocutionary force.9 In this context, speech acts work firstly through an accumulation of illocutionary consistency, secondly through being specifically perlocutionary – that is, 27

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designed to persuade, convince, scare, insult, getting the addressee to do something, and thirdly by also being prepositional in that the speaker models the desired behaviour by enacting it him or herself. The singing characters – the Virgin Mary, Mary Jacobus, Mary Magdalene, and St John – build up illocutionary consistency by interacting in a stylised way. They are the deictic centres of their own utterances modelling emotion, but the pattern of the outward deixis of their various addresses is then very complex and varied. Mary Jacobus, Mary Magdalene, and St John address one another in Audrey Davidson’s translation of the Cividale text: Oh brothers and sister, Where is my hope? Where is my consolation? They address Christ on the Cross: Blameless body, beloved by the world, why do you thirst Upon the altar of the cross, A sacrifice for sin?’ They address the Virgin Mary: Why do you quail at the memory, Mother of the crucified? Why are you consumed with sorrow, our sweet sister? This is how it was meant to happen, as the psalmist foretold. And they address the audience: Who is here who does not weep At seeing the mother of Christ in such anguish? The Virgin Mary also interacts with the others and addresses Christ, but is distinguished by speeches which, although they could be directed at the audience, are non-specific in the direction of their address: Unhappy scene Of cross and lance! The seal enclosed In the virgin soul Wounds me deeply. 28

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This is not specifically directed to any of the other characters present, nor to the audience, but is an overheard outpouring of grief of non-specific deixis. The way in which each speech demands a response generates a pattern of verbal action rounded by formal gesture and accompanied by reaction. Each speech is, therefore, both prepositional and perlocutionary. The congregation is by turns witness to the interaction of utterance and response, included in by invitation and finally moved to volunteer for inclusion (empathy) by the non-specific declarations of grief made by the Virgin Mary. Or, as Mary Farsler observed after we had watched the play, ‘Mary is telling us how to feel, how to act, taste, know and understand’. All liturgical telling progresses in a formal pattern of lesson, response, and versicle; so too in this play, every utterance is balanced by a response. This is, simply, how the planctus works. What the present essay will go on to explore is how the substance and mode of the planctus is exploited in English vernacular drama. In particular, it will consider what difference it makes if an actor playing Christ is hanging on the Cross as part of a spectacle within a public secular space. It will be argued from a number of English examples that, despite the different performance circumstances envisaged for vernacular plays of the death of Christ, there is no fundamental difference in affective power or in the means understood by the dramatists to achieve it, no real departure from the original Latin trope’s alternative ‘method’. The Bodley Burial of Christ, written to be played on Good Friday in an unknown location, may still belong to an ecclesiastical context, but, being in English, seems to be directed at a lay audience10. It is entirely devoted to lamenting the death of Christ. It draws its inspiration from pieta images, but uses the verbal techniques of the planctus. This playwright took the dramatic decision of not having the Virgin present from the beginning of the action, but of using the first third of the 864-line play – a dialogue between the three Marys at the base of the Cross and Joseph of Arimathea – as a warm up act for her eventual appearance. As Mary Magdalene reports: Many men spekes of lamentacion Off moders, & of their gret desolation Which that they did in-dure When that their childer dy & passe; But of his peteouse tender moder, alasse, I am verray sure The wo & payne passis all other … (vv. 163–69) Mary Magdalene and Joseph of Arimathea recount the events of the Crucifixion in affecting detail in a dialogue interpolated with personal expressions of sorrow and injustice. The audience is strategically drawn in when, for example, Joseph draws directly on the O vos omnes of the Good Friday liturgy: O, all pepill that passis here-by Beholde here inwardlee with your Ees gostly, 29

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Consider well & see, Yf that euer ony payn or torment Were lik vnto this which this Innocent Haves suffert thus meklee! (vv. 277–82) Or when the Magdalene asks, Who may refrain/ who may bot wepe, These bludy streymys to be-holde? (vv. 365–66) The Virgin finally makes her entrance after the other Marys intervene to suggest that they find a way to take Jesus to his tomb. By this time, Nicodemus has already appeared, and the deposition has taken place. Arguably this is not a planctus at all, as the Virgin is absent from the base of the Cross. She comes in on the line, A, A, my dere sone Iesus! A, A, my dere sone Iesus! (v. 450) This makes way for a second dialogue, between the Virgin and John, in which he attempts to offer comfort by explaining the wider meaning of events, while she dwells on the past, going back to the Annunciation and recollecting Simeon’s prophecy at the Purification that the sword of sorrow would enter her heart. When John asks the other women to lead her away, she asks (v. 594) to hold her son’s body in her arms once more, setting up the play’s central tableau. The Virgin, with the body of Christ in her lap, then speaks a sustained 179-line lament in which she alternates between recollecting his childhood, drawing attention to and kissing his wounds, and berating the Jews for their actions. Through all this, she addresses those around her, the three Marys, John, Joseph, and Nicodemus, while sometimes directly addressing the corpse, but with single lines, such as v. 725, which are addressed outwards to the audience: Who that can not wepe, com and lern at mee! The play is brought to its conclusion swiftly as the body is taken from her and laid in the grave, and the characters prepare to disperse, Mary Magdalene to buy ointments, and Joseph offering final words of consolation in anticipation of the Resurrection. The whole speech (vv. 612–791) asks for a virtuoso performance, difficult to deliver as it begins at such a pitch of emotion and provides little opportunity for light and shade, nor for rising to any further climax. It is all exclamation and question, but it has a formal perlocutionary force which does not require any other kind of dramatic characterisation. The play, unlike the others we now move on to, is self-sufficient, building in contextualising accounts of Christ and the Virgin’s lives, and is also tightly directed at the occasion of its performance for Good Friday. 30

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The two Passion Plays, embedded in the N-Town Plays, have wider narrative scope.11 The playing context of the original plays is unknown, but the larger cycle in which they are embedded in their surviving form is a large public spectacle, designed to tour in East Anglia and to be performed in the round. In these plays, in keeping with the scale of the project and the demands of a large secular context, the passages of lamentation, drawing on the rhetoric of the planctus achieve their effect by being placed contrapuntally against other more robust modes of dialogue. The report, to the Virgin by Mary Magdalene, of Christ’s arrest is exploited by the playwright as an opportunity to insert a lament, vv. 1045–64, at the end of Passion Play I. The Virgin first addresses Mary, then God in heaven, then her son. Her reproach to God: O Fadyr of hefne, wher ben al þi behestys Ϸat þy promysyst me whan a modyr þu me made? sets up her role in the ensuing action and is taken up in the second Passion Play. She is there to whip up affective piety in the audience but also, in the position of limited understanding she expresses, she provides a pretext for Jesus and John to explain the meaning of events as they happen. A complete planctus, in English, is then apparently embedded in the second Passion Play, but its action is interrupted firstly for the Jews to mock Jesus and for him to address them from the Cross. The planctus material resumes after the forgiving of the good thief, the Virgin directly addressing Jesus on the Cross again. His response from the Cross is followed by a stage direction: Her oure Lady xal ryse and renne, and hales þe crosse (s.d. between vv. 854–55) She is reproved, and removed, by Mary Magdalene and John, making way for Caiaphas, Annas, and Pilate, who fix the sign to the Cross and return to their scaffold. What then follows are the last words from the Cross, more mocking by the Jews, and the death of Christ. The moment after the Nunc consummatum est, delivered in Latin, the Virgin breaks in again with a further elegiac stanza, this time of indeterminate address, in which she expresses her wish to die. This begins a section of eight stanzas of dialogue between the Virgin and St John which conclude the pageant in which St John fruitlessly offers consolation. As she prepares to leave, she kisses the feet of Christ who is still on the Cross, then falls down semi-mortua, before John finally leads her away to pray in the temple. The ninth stanza is delivered from the temple where she pledges to spend her time in mourning, but prays to God to comfort her with her son’s Resurrection on the third day. The underlying framework of the planctus is, therefore, interrupted by interpolated dramatic action, but also closely choreographed in a series of stage directions. 31

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In these plays, the planctus material is adapted as one strand within a large-scale episodic production, as characters can come and go to the Golgotha locus from their respective domi. Although the full planctus cast is present, the action is actually stripped down so that the only voice raised in sustained lament is that of the Virgin. St John and Mary Magdalene speak only as comforters. Even Magdalene’s customary action of embracing the base of the Cross is transposed to the Virgin, and the other two Marys have no lines of dialogue at all. The nature of the production builds on the emotional impact of the planctus, with large gestures and definitive movements across the set, allowing the Virgin to strike iconic poses, by turns prostrate and surrounded by her comforters, standing embracing the base of the Cross, kissing the feet of the dead Christ, falling into a dead-swoon, and finally in a posture of prayer in the temple. Meanwhile her conventional perlocutionary laments are dramatically contrasted with the mocking speeches of the Jews and the sober, reasoned, and theologically ‘correct’ words of John and of Christ himself. Despite its post-Reformation date, it is Chester’s Passion Play that contains the most straightforward embedded English vernacular planctus and one unequivocally written for a processional, festive, civic context.12 It is marked by the stage direction Tunc venit Maria lacrimans. This marks not only the entrance of a new character on the scene, in which Pilate has been debating with three Jews who have been jeering at Jesus’ claim to be their king, but a significant rhetorical shift. We should probably exercise caution in how we interpret the stage direction. Lacrimans may suggest a realistic action, but there are no indications by disruption of the stanzaic form that Mary in any real sense ‘breaks down’; her speech is formal and stylised, its delivery of the repetition of ‘Alas’ presumably accompanied by equally stylised gestures indicative of lamentation. Although the general mode of lamentation, the formal lyric structure, and the arrangement of the stanzas – three to the Virgin then one each to the other three Marys – is apparently liturgically orthodox, there is much in the Chester treatment which represents significant imaginative dramatic development through the way in which this embedded planctus is set up. For a start, the deixis of the Virgin’s address differs from that in the Latin play. She addresses Christ on the Cross, still alive and at least potentially an interlocutor, she then moves the direction of address into the non-specific territory that can include the audience, then, after she again addresses Christ, she turns to his tormentors and asks them to take her rather than him. Mary Magdalen joins in, although it is unclear when she enters the scene. Her stanza of lament begins as a lyric of lamentation with no specific addressee but ends, but God, that rules aye the right, give you mickell mischance. (vv. 271–72) This is tantamount to a curse. She is followed by Mary Jacobus and Mary Salome who both address Jesus, drawing attention to his wounds, but challenging him to 32

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come down and exercise his power to save himself and to defeat the forces of evil who are standing by and observing the scene. Consequently, for all their formality, the traditional planctus speeches in this pageant are framed in such a way that they become part of a dramatic conflict. Not only is there a living Christ on the Cross, displaying his wounds, enacting his suffering, and refusing to save himself, but also his antagonists, the Jews and Pilate, are present throughout. All four women invite responses from Christ and from his tormentors, and, by extension, from the audience. The scene, while preserving the affective force of the individual speech act, is also fully developed interactive drama, and the audience is not only moved to weep but incited to empathise in a much wider range of emotion, which includes frustration and anger. The movement from ritual to drama is complete here as the audience shares not only in the women’s grief, but take their part in a conflicted situation. The deployment of the planctus in the Towneley Crucifixion, though long, is, by contrast, the simplest of the English versions.13 It takes the form of an extended dialogue between the Virgin and John at the base of the Cross. Christ in this pageant speaks from the Cross on the ground, then it is lifted and dropped into the mortise. It is at this point that the Virgin Mary’s lament bursts in, unmarked by any stage directions. Her first speech is in four stanzas, the first and third beginning ‘Alas!’, all addressed directly to Christ, reminding him of their physical relationship and drawing attention to the detail of his suffering. St John then speaks, though it is unclear whether he has entered with her. He confirms what she has already said, but directs his address to her, offering her the consolation that her son’s death is the fulfilment of prophecy and in order to ransom mankind. The Virgin apparently ignores him, as her next stanza is again addressed to Christ, asking him why the Crucifixion has happened and entreating him to think of her. John again reproves her gently, this time offering her the knowledge that Christ foresaw his death but also his Resurrection. The first stanza of the Virgin’s following speech then focuses on her own inconsolability and is addressed indeterminately, possibly to John but equally possibly to the audience, as in her final stanza, after directing her address once more to the body on the Cross, she finally turns to the women in the audience and directly incites them to weep with her. Again John speaks, asking her to cease and reminding her of the reason for the death, and again she speaks out indeterminately, asking why the Jews treat him so why he has no friend, then turning again to address Christ directly. John offers consolation, but she speaks out asking to die, then reproaching the, presumably absent, angel Gabriel who promised her bliss and asking him how she is supposed to live now. The sequence is completed when Christ addresses her from the Cross, in a version of the stabat mater,14 explaining the cause of his death, asking the Virgin to take John as her child, and finally addressing ‘mankind’, the audience, pointing to what he is suffering for their benefit. The potential effects of this sequence depend very much on how it is played. If it were played for realistic effect, the Virgin would alternately address Christ and John, but there is another strong possibility, which is that their dialogue runs on two parallel and unconnecting lines as she apparently ignores John, addressing by turns her son on the Cross and the audience. This latter way of setting the 33

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scene, although perhaps less obvious to modern sensibilities, demonstrates in the Virgin and John two different responses to the Crucifixion – the affective and the theologically correct lament and consolation. The former, if the audience is directly addressed by the Virgin, is the more immediate and takes them through the process of grief to be consoled finally by Christ himself. In the York Cycle,15 the earliest extant English vernacular civic cycle, the planctus material is treated differently again. Instead of the elaborated but concentrated versions we have explored so far, York’s planctus material has no independent narrative cohesion but is dispersed. The Butcher’s pageant of the Death of Christ is shot through with isolated planctus lyrics. As in the other cycles, the audience already knows the Virgin because they have already witnessed her in interaction with her intimate family. This seems to free up the planctus to be less an element in the action, more a significant rhetorical mode, exercising its perlocutionary force in a number of different local contexts. The form – identified by lines repeatedly opening with ‘Alas!’ – is used proleptically, as in Mary’s lament for her child in The Flight into Egypt (Marshals, XVIII): Allas, why shulde I tharne My sone his liffe so swete? His harte aught to be ful sare, On slike a foode hym to forfare Þat nevir did ill, Hym for to spill, And he ne wate why. I ware full wille of wane My sone and he shulde dye, And I haue but hym allone. (vv. 136–45) Its form is repeated in the laments of the mothers of the Innocents (Girdlers and Nailers, XIX): II Mulier: Allas, þis lothly striffe, No blisse may be my bette, Þe knyght vppon his knyffe Hath slayne my sone so swette, And I hadde but hym allone. (vv. 210–14) and by St John and the three Marys on the road to Calvary (Shearmen, XXXIV: 106–89), e.g.: Johannes: Allas for syte what schall I saie? My worldly welthe is wente for ay, 34

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In woo euere may I wende. My maistir þat neuere lakke in lay Is demed to be dede þis day, Ewen in hys elmys hende. Allas for my maistir mylde That all mennys mysse may mende, Shulde so falsely be filed And no frendis hym to fende. (vv. 116–25) So when it reaches its climax at the base of the Cross, the job of whipping up emotion, which is given to supporting characters in the Latin plays and in the Bodley Burial, has been spread out across a much wider action and the Virgin’s lament needs no local preparation: Allas for my swete sonne I saie, þat doulfully to dede þus is diȝt. Allas, for full louely he laye In my wombe, þis worthely wight. Allas þat I schulde see þis sight Of my sone so semely to see. Allas, þat þis blossome so bright Vntrewly is tugged to þis tree. Allas, My lorde, my leyffe, With full grete greffe Hyngis as a theffe. Allas, he did neuer trespasse. (vv. 131–43) The York Play is not an Easter Passion Play, but a play for Corpus Christi, and as such the exploitation of the illocutionary function of the planctus is extended. In the Holy Week liturgy, the grief of the Crucifixion is alleviated by anticipation of the joy of Resurrection, and the burden of the corrective rhetoric is borne by St John. In York, however, lament for loss is dispersed across the cycle in a number of elegiac voices and is balanced not by one character, or one single action, but by an equally dispersed series of joyful greetings or reunions. In other words, the ‘Alas!’ of the planctus is balanced by the ‘Hail!’ formula associated with Elevation lyrics by which Jesus Christ is repeatedly welcomed. These too thread through and unify the otherwise disparate discourses of a number of processional pageants. So again the planctus is used to create contrapuntal discourse, but here, perhaps, it is also associated with the pattern of loss and restoration, embedded in the mystical understanding of the sacrament of the altar. These Englished planctus-es are all different in how they deploy the conventions they inherit from the liturgical trope. Their differences derive from their 35

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scale, occasion, and purpose. But all also have a number of things in common which control and even dictate the nature of their emotive effect. None of them shows any evidence of aspiring to realistic action – distraught rushing about or disrupted diction – despite what is clearly the more challenging and secular performance context of the civic cycles in particular. All involve significant stasis, and sorrow is marked rhetorically. Their dialogue, though drawing on a number of other sources connected with affective piety, holds close to a register reminiscent of liturgical ritual. They are not only recollective of the Easter liturgy in substance, but in style, not sung, but with a lyric or hymnal quality which suggests that they could be. What they demonstrate is that, however realistically elaborated by narrative padding and the construction of dramatic conflict, by the use of the vernacular, by costumes, sets, and props, the ways in which these moments incite their audiences to emotion was not achieved principally by the elaboration of the Virgin Mary’s role by plausible and psychologically sustained dramatic characterisation. It relied instead on the power of the iconic speech act and the recollection not of its ‘real’ historical moment but its annual ritual and festive moment in the celebration of Holy Week.

Notes 1 Jules Lutz and Paul Perdrizet, eds., Speculum Humanae Salvationis (Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1907), p. 56; Avril Henry, ed., The Mirour of Mans Saluacioune (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1986), pp. 143–49. 2 Elizabeth C. Parker, ‘Architecture as Liturgical Setting’ in Thomas J. Hefferman and E. Ann Matter, eds., The Liturgy of the Medieval Church (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001), pp. 273–326 (322–23). 3 For example, the seventeenth homily of Origen; the Officium de Compassione Beatae Mariae Virginis of Bonaventure. See Sandro Sticca, The Planctus Mariae in the Dramatic Tradition of the Middle Ages, tr. Joseph R. Berrigan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), pp. 171–72. 4 Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), I, 538, cited in Sticca, Planctus, p. 172. 5 See Sticca, Planctus, pp. 62–65. 6 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 30, notes that this was ‘ingrained practice’ by the time of the Reformation. 7 The Cividale Play was translated and set by Audrey Davidson, who has died since the production was staged. Its publication in Comparative Drama stands as a tribute to the creative and scholarly inspiration which made such material accessible to a wide audience. 8 Constantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, first published in English by Theatre Art Books, 1936 (London: Methuen, 1988). 9 David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 121; Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1980), pp. 156–59. 10 Frederick. J. Furnivall, ed., The Digby Plays, Early English Text Society, Extra Series, 70 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, repr. 1967, orig. 1896), pp. 171–200.

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11 Peter Meredith, ed., The Passion Play from the N-Town Manuscript, (London: Longman, 1990). 12 R.M. Lumiansky and David Mills, eds, The Chester Mystery Plays, Vol. 1, EETS, ss 3 (1974), pp. 303–24. 13 Martin Stevens and A.C. Cawley, eds, The Towneley Plays, Vol 1, EETS, ss 13 (1994), pp. 287–308. 14 The stabat mater, like the planctus, is a liturgical trope associated with Holy Week, replicating the supposed words of consolation and exhortation Jesus spoke to his mother from the Cross. Although it does not occur in medieval liturgies of English use, adaptations appear in vernacular lyric verse, suggesting it would have been known to the authors of the cycles. 15 Richard Beadle, ed., The York Plays (London: Edward Arnold, 1982), pp. 323–33, 164, 171–72, 309–11.

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4 THE END OF THE WORLD IN MEDIEVAL ENGLISH RELIGIOUS DRAMA From: Kathryn Banks, ed., Apocalypse Now and Then: Prophecy and Imagination from the Anglo-Saxons to the Moderns, Literature and Theology vol. 26, no. 4 2012, pp. 384–99 The tenacious understanding of English drama before the rise of the commercial playhouse is that it was dominated by cycles of mystery plays. Performed by members of trade and craft guilds annually at the feast of Corpus Christi, these ambitious productions tell the story of the world from Creation to Doomsday through a series of brief pageants, performed in many places processionally on wagons round a fixed route in the city streets. This understanding has been substantially undermined over the last half-century by the turn which led scholars to read documentary records of pre-modern performance rather than only surviving scripts.1 There remain, however, those scripts which are the surviving traces of what was performed and spoken: they are the York Corpus Christi Play, preserved in a civic register from the third quarter of the fifteenth century; the Chester Whitsun Play, surviving in antiquarian manuscripts from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; two ‘faux Cycles’, the so-called N-Town Plays, compiled in the midfifteenth century in East Anglia; and the pageants in the Towneley manuscript, some of them borrowed from York, with some association with Wakefield and probably datable to the first half of the sixteenth century. Additionally, there are fragments from elsewhere, notably two plays evidencing an ambitious cycle from Coventry. This article focuses on the York, Chester, and Towneley plays, taking their various anomalies as given. They all include end matters that seek to represent the end of the world in dramatic form. Each is differently nuanced, and we may presume that each calls on a consensual imaginary for its owning community. The following will, therefore, explore, with some attention to sources and influences, the theological and dramatic impulses behind each treatment of the subject, considering how the twin demands of presenting edification and climactic spectacle are managed in each case. The York Corpus Christi Play was performed, though in a form constantly being renegotiated, throughout the fifteenth and much of the sixteenth century.2 In the early years of the cycle’s emergence in the civic record, the Great East Window in York Minster was commissioned by the chapter and painted by Coventry glazier John Thornton in 1405–1408.3 That window, though not directly

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associated with the civic generation of the play cycle, also features a narrative of the beginning and the end of the world and is surmounted by an image of God the creator. Under this image at the window’s apex are the words alpha et omega; the York Cycle in its surviving form opens with God the creator saying, as a Latin preface to his opening speech, Ego sum alpha et omega. For the period of the play and the window, the beginning of the world contains the prophecy of its end as in a collapsed narrative within the knowledge, the Word or the logos, of a godhead who cannot foreordain or even foresee, for all time exists in an eternal present for God. This understanding of God, as containing all things that were, are, and will be, derives from mainstream medieval Augustinian theology. For example, in The City of God (11:21), Augustine wrote: It is not as if the knowledge of God were of various kinds, knowing in different ways things which as yet are not, things which are, and things which have been. For not in our fashion does He look forward to what is future, nor at what is present, nor back upon what is past; but in a manner quite different and far and profoundly remote from our way of thinking. For He does not pass from this to that by transition of thought, but beholds all things with absolute unchangeableness; so that of those things which emerge in time, the future, indeed, are not yet, and the present are now, and the past no longer are; but all of these are by Him comprehended in His stable and eternal presence.4 It is, therefore, the reception of visions of the end of the world that is prophetic, rather than their metaphysical reality; that reality is ever present for God, but also for the late medieval imaginary as the end of a story perpetually told. The representation of the end of all time as it is depicted in the Great East Window is, moreover, localised in place amidst the towers and steeples of a heavenly Jerusalem. It is not the perfect geometric abstraction of Revelations, represented at the centre of the Hereford map,5 for the semiotic of the window is less diagrammatic, more materially deictic, but nor is it York. As with the window, so in the York Play, it is the preserve of sentimental programme notes to suggest that the citizens of York conspired in the conceit that their city ‘became’ the heavenly city for the duration of Corpus Christi day; rather these are aesthetic gestures towards the possibility of an analogy for audiences aware equally of the fallingsshort of that analogy, part of what Alessandro Scafi has observed to be the ‘persistent reciprocal influence between local history and architecture and religious expectations’ that characterises the Judeo-Christian tradition.6 Equally, the narratives drawn from Matthew 25 and from Revelations7 are not treated as competing versions of the last day, but are cast as two different figural valencies: the one, Doomsday and the division of the sheep from the goats, tropological, the other, culminating in a vision of the permanence of access to heavenly bliss through divine atonement, anagogical. It is the first of these, the tropological, admonitory understanding of the end of the world that dominates this synthesis in 39

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the drama. Arguably, this is not because the drama is primarily didactic in intent, a rather Protestant misreading of its broadly sacramental frame of reference, but because the story as presented in the play is anthropocentric, its narrative frame the tripartite pattern by which God comes to make, to be, and to judge humankind. Accordingly, the vision of the end of world presented in the play realises imaginatively the prophetic words spoken by Christ during his lifetime on earth, the sounding of the last trump, the descent of Christ as judge, the rising of the dead, and the division of the sheep from the goats according to their behaviour in life. Around 1410, an individual layperson who was enthusiastically engaged with the campaign that may have paid for the East Window, commissioned a Book of Hours and compendium of very fashionable lay devotional materials, all illustrated by lavish, if very badly executed, miniatures.8 The manuscript ends with a full-page Last Judgement. Around ten years after the production of the Hours, and five after the instatement of the Great East Window, in 1415, the civic official keeping York’s A/Y Memorandum Book recorded the Ordo Paginarum, the ‘order of the pageants’ performed by the city’s trade and craft guilds in celebration of Corpus Christi, and the first record of the content of what was to become the York Cycle. The opening pageant is described as, Tanners: Deus pater omnipotence creans & formans cellos Angelos & archangelos luciferum & angelos qui cum eo ceciderunt in infernum. the closing one as, Mercers: Iesus Maria xij apostolic iiijor angeli cum tubis & iiijor cum corona lancea & ij flagellis iiijor spiritus boni & iiijor spiritus maligni & vj diaboli.9 The embedding of the narratives expressed in the window, Hours, and pageants in York’s urban lay culture, moreover, continues to be attested by similar manifestations throughout the fifteenth century. York merchant John Bolton III’s name is recorded in the Book of Hours in an obit of 1445. He was married to Alice, daughter of Nicholas Blackburn, another merchant, who endowed his parish church of All Saints North Street, with a stained glass window that shows someone who looks much as he would have, performing the Corporal Works of Mercy, which forms the substance of the account of how good will be divided from bad on the last day in Gospel account and pageant.10 Blackburn is thus reifying Christ’s prophecy as a form of insurance against his fate on the last day, but at a remove by which, in the manner of the purchased indulgence, he makes a material donation – the window – to his church in lieu of, or as well as, carrying out the prescribed actions himself. In glass, Hours, and play, we may observe a single discrete Foucauldian ‘authorising milieu’, a consensus between producer and receiver, giving concrete expression to the contemporary clerical injunctions 40

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to imaginare, that is ‘to picture to oneself’. They are like the modern Bible literalists discussed by Mathew Guest, constructing their ‘history written in advance’,11 and their inscribing of the self and the immediate environs is a primary act of piety designed to affect the outcome of that history for the individual actant. In his will, Blackburn cannily disposed of his worldly wealth according to patterns very closely allied to the Works of Mercy – clothing and giving food and drink to paupers, releasing small debtors from jail, endowing maisons dieu for the sick, and repairing bridges.12 The Boltons and Blackburns were merchants or mercers by trade. The history of the Mercers’ guild is well documented, although their pageant of Doomsday, recorded in the Ordo Paginarum, precedes its incorporation. The guild developed around 1420 out of the confraternity of St Mary, the Trinity, and All Saints, which had formalised the charitable arrangements associated with the hospital on Foss Bridge from the 1370s and was not constituted as a trade organisation until 1432. The following year that guild entered into an elaborate indenture with three pageant masters by which they handed over their stage properties and the management of their contribution to the festival of Corpus Christi.13 This is the most famous and informative document relating to the Corpus Christi Play in York apart from the script itself. Finally, returning to the Book of Hours, a continuing focus on the same devotional preoccupations can be seen in additions made to the flyleaves in a late fifteenth-century secretary hand. The body of the text, containing the horae proper, is written for female use,14 but it is bracketed by this lengthy confessional which is clearly both lay and male in focus, whose author confesses to having committed the seven deadly sins, notably covetousness and gluttony, and to having breached the Ten Commandments. The final pages refer to his breaches of the sacrament of matrimony and finally to his regrets that he has failed to perform the Corporal Works of Mercy. The confession suggests that the Hours had continued in lay mercantile use for the best part of a century, and the systematising of the confession around the seven deadly sins, the Ten Commandments, and the seven sacraments is drawn straight from lay devotional works such as the York-produced Lay Folks Catechism, and as such represents the staples of the practice of their faith for the urban middle classes.15 This personal, anonymous, material propels us again straight into the world of lay prophetic foreboding about the ultimate destiny of the individual soul. This history of the guild, and the religious climate in which it sponsored its pageant, may seem of limited interest here, but is necessary to rehearse as a background to the cultural moment in which there was a florescence not of beliefs about the nature of the last day and how the individual should prepare for it, but of imaginative modes for giving it relatively popular expression, most notably in civic-sponsored drama. The evolution of the York Play as it survives in the Register is half a century later than the Great East Window, the Ordo Paginarum, the Book of Hours, and Nicholas Blackburn’s window in All Saints’ Church. But it does belong firmly to the period following the Council of 41

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Constance, when Arundel’s archiepiscopate of Canterbury, with its anti-Lollard crackdown on vernacular religious practices enshrined in the Constitutions of 1407, gave way to the spirit of renewal in the Church in England led by those who returned from the Council of Constance to encourage new lay engagements in the substance and practices of worship. These manifested themselves in a revival and transformation of the Pechamist catechetical agenda for instruction of the laity, enshrined in Archbishop Thoresby of York’s Lay Folks’ Catechism, but were treated as the fifteenth century progressed to further multimedia manifestations in, for example, the design of chantry chapels and tombs, screens, stained glass windows, illuminated manuscripts of lay devotion, and, of course, plays.16 The Doomsday narrative and its visual representations are rich in allusive reference. In the visual arts, it has a simple triangular form, with the saved rising to heaven on Christ’s right and the damned on his left being hooked into hell-mouth by devils. At the apex is the second person of the Trinity, commonly displaying his wounds and seated on a rainbow. As with the compositions of the scene on the maps discussed by Scafi, we know enough about the representation of Christ the judge in the York Mercers’ pageant to see that those scenes too were designed to animate the future for the present, but a future that alludes to past events as significatory nodes of prophetic meaning. Amongst the Mercers’ properties conveyed to their pageant masters in 1433 are pieces of timber to make a rainbow and, for God, a ‘sark wounded’, that is a garment bearing the wounds of the Passion.17 The rainbow signifies the covenant made after the Flood as a reward for Noah’s obedience, while Christ’s bleeding side both invokes the sacrifice on the Cross and also, in the manner of the bleeding lamb of the Apocalypse, underscores the perpetual sacramental availability of grace. The receiving audience did not, like the largely detached and secular audience of Tony Harrison’s The Mysteries in 1980s London,18 have to be physically conveyed to heaven and hell at the end of the production to intuit its implications for each of them. On the other hand, the fact that the National Theatre’s production of Harrison’s rewrite was considered apt for reprise in celebration of the millennium is interesting in the light of some of the wider themes of the present volume. Obey God’s will and atone for your sins, it conveys to the viewer, and you will find a place on Christ’s right hand on the last day. Once the image is animated in the play, moreover, Christ’s division of the saved from the damned according to whether or not they performed the Works of Corporal Mercy during their lifetime further attributes a binary property to human agency through history. Vernacular sources for all English imaginative manifestations of the last day include most prominently the immensely long and hugely influential early fourteenth-century poem The Prick of Conscience.19 In all, 116 manuscripts of the poem survive, including a number of northern provenance, one of which may be the one mentioned in the will of William Revetour, a York cleric who died in 1447, and who also left a primer ‘ad modum Flandriae’ which may have been

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York Minster Add. 2, our Book of Hours, to John Bolton’s daughter, Isabel.20 The fifth and final book of The Prick of Conscience is devoted to Doomsday which contains an account of the fifteen signs of the Apocalypse. In All Saints North Street, Nicholas Blackburn’s church, in the same aisle as the Works of Mercy window, there is also a stained glass window which depicts these signs, each accompanied by a variant of the words of the poem.21 The fifteen signs do not appear in the York Play; for dramatic treatment of this material we travel to Chester, where they appear recited by the Expositor in the Chester Play of the Prophets of Antichrist.22 The more overtly didactic nature of the Chester Cycle is carried in large part by the continuity figure of the Expositor. Because the surviving manuscripts of the Chester Cycle are considerably later than the York Register, they reflect the form those plays had evolved to after the Reformation, by which time the cycle had moved from Corpus Christi to Whitsun and was eventually to be even further divorced from its origins in sacramental worship by moving again to Midsummer. The various versions of the Chester Cycle are unique among surviving English drama in preserving, as well as the Doomsday finale, two further plays based on apocalyptic material, ‘The Prophets of Antichrist’ and ‘The Coming of Antichrist’, believed by the plays’ most recent editor, David Mills, to be relatively late insertions into the cycle. The Chester Antichrist play also survives in stand-alone form in MS Peniarth 399, dated to the late fifteenth century, in the National Library of Wales. Mills and his co-editor R.M. Lumiansky suggest that it could represent a copy of the original, predating the ones made after the plays were discontinued.23 Whatever their date, these plays represent quite traditional understandings of the material they present. The coming of Antichrist is based to a large degree on Adso of Montier-en-der’s Libellus de Antichristo.24 The only preceding drama of Antichrist is the twelfth-century Latin drama from the Kloster Tegernsee in Bavaria,25 though it is, of course, unlikely that the Chester dramatist was aware of this play. Lately, however, Lawrence Clopper has pointed out that some thriving but lost tradition of plays on the subject of Antichrist must have existed in England as the late fourteenth-century Tretise on Mystery Playing inveighs against them.26 Clopper suggests that what is referred to is not civic plays but clerical productions of ludi theatrales of monastic cathedrals or monasteries, or, because the Tretise is in English, of parishes. He thus sees the origins of the currently unique Chester pageant as lying with the ‘steraclis’, or imitations of supernatural miracles, including masked devils designed to astonish and terrify. The rare word ‘steraclis’ first occurs in Dives and Pauper, where it is distinguished from ‘pleyys’, and amounts to an English translation of Latin spectacula. In a fifteenth-century record, ‘steraclis’ include wrestling and putting the stone.27 The perceived danger with such spectacles was always that their illusions merely entertained, whether that be the frisson of fear or the provocation of laughter, because ‘the audience is in on the illusions’.28 The theatricality of Antichrist as false imitator of Christ is fundamental, but what the Chester Play achieves is to

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turn the mode in which the audience is witnessing events back upon itself.29 As Antichrist is exposed, Elijah comments: They were no miracles but marvelous things That thou showed unto these kings.

(410–11)

He has turned trees upside down (81–88), apparently raised the dead (89–112), died and risen himself (121–204), and carried out other illusions that have led the kings he recruits as his followers to believe in him, but what the play exposes is the nature of illusion. Theatre as a mode of representation depends on its audience conspiring in particular conventions of illusion. It is a perennial commonplace in the theatre to explore creatively how that convention operates. A century apart, but contemporary with the long run of the Chester Cycle, are Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres and Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, both exploiting frame-breaking for comic effect.30 In recent times, the adaptations of Susan Hill’s macabre novel about paranormal events, The Woman in Black, for stage, radio, television, and now film, has exploited the nature of theatrical illusion to chilling effect and shown how the negotiation of imagination, truth, and irony discussed in the context of evangelical fiction by Mathew Guest in the present volume are inherent in the psychological complexities of rich and successful audience experience.31 In the Hill adaptations, the goal of the production and the desires of the audience are the generation of a frisson of manufactured fear; medieval religious plays may generate a similarly pleasurable frisson, while exploiting theatrical illusion specifically to interrogate the relationship between metaphysical and physical realities. The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, as Janette Dillon has observed, audaciously deploys illusion to explore the nature of true and false sacrament.32 Transubstantiation is, for the believer, like Christ’s miracles, truly transformative, while theatre can only imitate that transformation. The playful possibilities of this paradox are also, arguably exploited by Roman Catholic-raised William Shakespeare, particularly in the denouement of A Winter’s Tale.33 The Chester Cycle in its post-Reformation manuscripts reveals how early Protestant authorities, the Bible-believers of their time, mistrusted an audience’s abilities to distinguish between illusion and reality in a way comparable with the reactions of anxious American liberals to the reception of rapture fiction by evangelical conservatives in present times. Not only is the Chester Expositor ever-present, explaining the meaning of events and instructing the audience on how to understand what they have seen, but the post-Reformation ‘banns’ with which the cycle was prefaced refer anxiously to the kinds of representation in the plays as belonging to a ‘time of ignorance’, paradoxically assuming a greater theatrical sophistication in the sixteenth-century audience while also apparently feeling that they require firmer guidance towards interpreting what they see in the new theological climate.34 This demonstration of the perennial anxiety of religious believers about audiences’ 44

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abilities to tell truth from fiction – one of the main drivers behind the Cromwellian Commonwealth’s closure of all theatres – is underscored in the plays dealing with Antichrist. At the same period, the figure of Antichrist was being routinely appropriated to polemical treatises and identified with political enemies, notably the Pope. For the Protestant authorities, apparently the largely specious gap between simile and mimesis was definitive. The dramatisation of the Last Judgement in the Chester Plays predictably varies from York’s in casting the saved and the damned as good and bad popes, emperors, and kings, and at the end of the play bringing on the four evangelists to verify the authenticity of the entire preceding text. It is clear, then, that what the audience received in Doomsday plays was not only the communal vision of the end of the world, but prompts to their imaginations in projecting its implications for them as individuals. Arguably, the events clustering around the end of the world can be a focus of horrific interest, but will always return to the real question on which the late fifteenth-century agenda for lay piety focuses that concerns the fate of the individual soul. Doomsday concatenates the end of one life with the end of all, general with particular judgement. In plays, the end of the world is a future event enacted in the here and now, but is also a future event to which every individual audience member travels in the imagination, will travel at point of death and against which each must daily arm him or herself. The personalised reading of Christ’s lesson in Matthew 25 that led Nicholas Blackburn to perform specifically self-referential acts of piety is everywhere in civic biblical drama. In York, the crucified Christ buttonholes the audience directly from the Cross with an English version of the Impropreria, the Good Friday Reproaches, ‘All men who walks by way or street …’, just as in Doomsday he displays again the wounds of the Passion and addresses each saved and damned soul about their personal relationship of obligation to one another that is an obligation to him. It is conventional to divide medieval religious drama into the biblical, that is historical, and the morality play, which deals with similar material but in the mode of tropological allegory. The division is not hard and fast, however. The morality play Wisdom, for example, has both Christ and Lucifer in its cast list,35 and there is evidence that a number of plays depicting scriptural history were infiltrated by characters who remove the narrative altogether from geographical specificity and the historical continuum into the mode of tropological allegory whose only reality lies in the place and the moment of its enactment. The Impropreria seem to have been taken a step further in the alas no longer surviving Passion Play from New Romney in Kent, where the tormentors of Christ are Mischance, False at Need, Untrust, Faintheart, Unhappe, and Evil Grace.36 Their designation makes explicit what is implicit in other Passion Plays, which is the old aphorism that Christ is recrucified by the individual sinner daily. In another now missing Doomsday pageant, the Drapers’ spectacular finale of the Coventry Cycle, the cast list includes two ‘worms of Conscience’.37 Their source is Mark 9:42–47, but they are common amongst the pains of hell described in many popular vernacular works of late medieval piety, and take us back again to The Prick of Conscience as their most likely immediate source. 45

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The Prick of Conscience is more than a 10,000-line account of the history of the world from Creation to Doomsday and has a more discursive agenda than it is generally given credit for. It treats the beginning of man’s life, the instability of this world, death and the fear of death, purgatory, Doomsday, the pains of hell, and the joys of heaven. The first book recounts the Creation of the world and of mankind, but these are contextualised as the heritage of the individual Christian, the poet’s target audience. To ‘prick’ the conscience is to stir up the reader to look inwardly, to root out sin from thought and action, and to enter into a close encounter with the God, intimate and terrifying in equal measure. ‘Conscience’ as a concept is summarised in Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job as internus arbiter, the inner judge.38 For this poet, the project is to go beyond providing instructions on how to lead the good Christian life by urging the mobilisation of ‘inwit’, or selfassessment, and then to use this as a context for reproducing the usual narrative material which was relied upon to scare the reader into taking the author’s advice. The urgings of The Prick of Conscience’s author towards a particular mode of introspection may hold the key to the imaginative responses to visions of the end of the world over a century later that are under consideration here. The pageants in the anomalous Towneley manuscript – formerly known as the Wakefield Cycle – take things a step further.39 The Towneley Judicium uses the expanded York Doomsday pageant as a framework to which is added a lively interaction of devils, led by Tutivillus. Tutivillus has a long and complicated history, derived from his association with verbal sin.40 He is the recording demon, writing down the superfluous words of those who say too much and gossip in church, as well as the dropped syllables of priests guilty of syncope, slurring, or omitting unstressed inflectional endings in the Latin of the liturgy. In the Towneley Judicium, however, Tutivillus’s intervention, probably dateable to the early sixteenth century, goes beyond deficiencies in religious observation to focus on social crimes, such as putting fashionable clothing above the need to put food on the table for children. The failure to attend to the words of the divine office is extended into the realm of all manner of deficiencies in distinguishing matters for proper attention, all kinds of social distractions. The other appearance of Tutivillus in early English drama occurs in the East Anglian moral interlude Mankind.41 There, Tutivillus is simply a devil, apparently removed from the specific association with verbal sin. The whole of that play is, however, as several commentators have remarked, concerned with slothfulness of tongue.42 Vices who later persuade the audience to sing the play’s famously blasphemous song, engage in parodying the over-aureate Church Latin of Mercy, the play’s ‘virtue’. Newgyse, Nowadays and Nought are commonly called the ‘distraction’ vices, and the means by which they distract, not only the protagonist but the audience, are verbal, so that Tutivillus’s role is distributed across the play in which he is the governing genius. Similarly, in the Towneley Judicium, the bulk of the interpolated role of Tutivillus’s speech is directed at those who will go to hell for committing the seven deadly sins, exemplified across a broad spectrum of contemporary social behaviour, all of which carry moral hazard. 46

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The Judicium may concern the end of the world, but it is not the end of this problematic play manuscript. It is succeeded by the Raising of Lazarus. Not unreasonably, it has been assumed that this episode from Christ’s ministry simply came into the hands of the scribe too late to be copied in at the right place. Yet the Towneley Raising of Lazarus presents a singular version of the miracle, whereby the searching by the sisters Martha and Mary for Christ, and the latter’s performance of the resurrection miracle, are quite eclipsed by a long account by the risen and still shrouded Lazarus of what it was like to be dead. Lazarus is then customised as audience surrogate in the project of writing history in advance. Moreover, the Towneley play is not original in this, because Lazarus has a complex relationship in the devotional literature and arts of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, with understandings of general and particular endings. Lazarus’s account of his death is generally inserted imaginatively into the dinner at the house of Simon the Leper at which Mary Magdalene anoints Christ’s feet. It passed out of this context, however, and into popular tradition as the Visio Lazari, arriving in the English tradition at the end of the fifteenth century as part of the hugely popular Shepeards Kalender.43 The French original, the Kalendrier des bergiers, was printed in 18 April 1493 by Guiot Marchant. The Visio Lazari also appeared in L’art de bien mourir, with woodcuts by Verard in 1492, and the English version was printed by Pinson in 1506. Lazarus, according to a number of commentators including Ludolphus of Saxony, is primarily a figure of penance rather than a type of resurrection. He has been to hell and seen what awaits those who do not take prudent prophylactic measures. Moralised visions of the other world constitute a longer tradition from the twelfth century – the visions of Tondal, St Patrick’s Purgatory, and St Paul. It is predominantly a visual tradition and as such the natural successor to the great illuminated Apocalypses of the previous century. In addition to the printed versions of the Kalendrier and its later English redaction, six manuscript versions of the French Visio Lazari survive from the latter part of the fifteenth century.44 In both manuscript and print versions, Lazarus’s account focuses on the punishment for the Seven Deadly Sins and was frequently illustrated. It is included in books of moral instruction about virtue and vice or about preparations for death and the Last Judgement. Its concise moral lessons are easily grasped, but the violent, often disturbing illustrations convey the message in ways both more direct but also more imaginatively provocative. There are, however, also broader theological and iconographic associations between Lazarus, Judgement, and Apocalypse than the focus of the didactic material put into Tutivillus’s long speeches and Lazarus’s monologue suggest. The hagiographic legend of the afterlife of Lazarus has his relics brought to France by Mary Magdalene and lodged in the cathedral at Autun, leading to a particular density of treatments of the subject in Burgundy.45 The church of St Lazare at Autun was constructed in the twelfth century as a reliquary for Lazarus’s bodily remains when they were transferred from the adjacent cathedral of St Nazaire. The close iconographic association of the Raising of Lazarus and the Last Judgement is established physically at Autun, where the original main entrance was through the 47

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doorway in the north transept, surmounted by a now lost tympanum portraying the Raising. The western portal, over which the tympanum is Gislebertus’s overpowering Last Judgement, faced the cemetery, and burial prayers were recited beneath it. The Last Judgement, therefore, was associated with the Mass for the dead from the beginning, as it later came to be in devotional manuscripts. This connection was reinforced in the fifteenth century when Nicholas Rolin of Autun commissioned Van der Weyden’s Last Judgement for the chapel at the Hotel Dieu at Beaune and established the recitation of the Office of the Dead in the chapel there twice a day, observed by patients through a pierced screen.46 There are two Gospel readings for the Mass of the dead – John 5:25–29, The hour cometh, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live. For as the Father hath life in himself, so he hath given the Son also to have life in himself: And he hath given him power to do judgment, because he is the Son of man. Wonder not at this; for the hour cometh, wherein all that are in the graves shall hear the voice of the Son of God. And they that have done good things, shall come forth unto the resurrection of life; but they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of judgment. and John 11:21–27, which uses the Raising of Lazarus as a prototype for the resurrection of the dead: Martha therefore said to Jesus: Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died. But now also I know that whatsoever thou wilt ask of God, God will give it thee. Jesus saith to her: Thy brother shall rise again. Martha saith to him: I know that he shall rise again, in the resurrection at the last day. Jesus said to her: I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, although he be dead, shall live: And every one that liveth, and believeth in me, shall not die for ever. Believest thou this? She saith to him: Yea, Lord, I have believed that thou art Christ the Son of the living God, who art come into this world. The biblical account of the Raising of Lazarus then supplies a scriptural fons et origo for theological concatenations of general and particular judgement, heaven and earth, history and eternity. Remaining in Burgundy, we also observe how, also in the territories of the Dukes under their English dowager Duchess, Margaret of York, at the very end of the fifteenth century, the Visio Lazari was in vogue in a world of visual images and texts where manuscripts and printed books cross-fertilised one another. This was the same Burgundian court that produced Walter Marmion’s Vision of Tondall and one of the most celebrated illuminated Apocalypses. At the centre of Van der Weyden’s altarpiece is the figure of St Michael weighing souls at Doomsday. St Michael offers a further link between Doomsday and Apocalypse narratives, 48

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for he is the angel who finally exposes Antichrist for what he is and resurrects Enoch and Elijah, and thus becomes the hero of the Chester Play of The Coming of Antichrist, and it is St Michael then who sounds the last trump for the souls to rise and be weighed on Doomsday.47 Lazarus accreted through this mixed tradition of Burgundian popular hagiography and the vogue for visionary literature a peculiar status beyond his position in the chronological Gospel account. Yet he remains an admonitory figure who offered material substantiation of the metaphysical realities of Doomsday, reducing the focus on the fate of the individual sinner from the graphic but still near-unimaginable horrors of being boiled in pitch, broken on wheels, force fed frogs, or slowly disembowelled, to a reminder of the lonely and claustrophobic fate of every corpse as witnessed at each and every funeral. In this context, Christ is no gentle Jesus, but the austere condemner of those who failed to heed earlier warnings about the fate of the habitual sinner’s soul. His approval was all that stood between the individual sinner and the demons and devils, the destroyers and deceivers, and, at their centre, the terrifying figure of the Antichrist. But balanced against the grim promise of the Visio Lazari is Van der Weyden’s central luminous, white-clad archangel, who presents the viewer with reassurance, and the cautiously optimistic encouragement with which medieval Roman Catholics faced the prospect of the last days. Though their approaches differ, all the dramatists variously contextualised here, following the pressure for renewal of the lay devotional agenda between the mid-fifteenth century and the Reformation, had a number of rhetorical, theological, and imaginative tools in their kit to provoke their audiences into a state of personal reflection in which the apocalyptic vision is morally inflected, personal, participatory, and probably imminent.

Notes 1 The ambitious Records of Early English Drama project, working since 1978, has, in the production of its county volumes and latterly on the Patrons and Performance website, been instrumental in changing perceptions about the amount and nature of English drama before the commercial playhouse. See www.reed.utoronto.ca/, accessed 26 May 2012. 2 The authoritative edition of the York Play is Richard Beadle, ed., The York Plays: A Critical Edition of the York Corpus Christi Play as recorded in British Library Additional MS 35290. Early English Text Society, s.s. 23 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). The facsimile of the manuscript on which it is based is published as The York Play: A Facsimile of British Library MS Additional 35290, introduced by Richard Beadle and Peter Meredith (Leeds: University of Leeds School of English, 1983). 3 See Thomas French, The Great East Window (London: British Library, 2003). 4 New Advent: The Church Fathers, Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, book 11, at www.newadvent.org/ fathers/120111.htm, accessed 26 May 2012. 5 See A. Scafi, ‘Mapping the End: the Apocalypse in Medieval Cartography’, Literature and Theology 26 (2012) 400–16. 6 Scafi, ‘Mapping the End’. 7 Douay-Reims translation of the medieval Vulgate.

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8 York, York Minster Library, MS. Add. 2. A fuller description of this manuscript and its relationship with the York Play can be found in Pamela M. King, ‘Corpus Christi Plays and the “Bolton Hours” 1: Tastes in Lay Piety and Patronage in Fifteenth-Century York’. Medieval English Theatre 18 (1998 for 1996), 46–62. 9 York, ed. by Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978) 2 vols, I, 17. See also Pamela M. King, ‘York Plays, Urban Piety, and the Case of Nicholas Blackburn, Mercer’, Archiv fur das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 232 (1995), 37–50. 10 P.J. Shaw, An Old York Church, All Hallows in North Street (York: All Saints’ North Street Shop, 1908). 11 M. Guest, ‘Keeping the End in Mind: Left Behind, the Apocalypse and the Evangelical Imagination’, Literature and Theology 26 (2012) 474–88, quoting Gribben, Rapture Fiction, 56. 12 York, Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, Prob. 2, ff 605r–606r, translated in Shaw, All Hallows, 90–92. 13 York, REED, 55–56. 14 It contains an extra litany of female saints and adds Saint Sitha to the calendar, a canonised household servant, popular in the North, as well as giving Saints Agnes, Margaret, and John of Beverley non-standard red letter days. 15 The Lay Folks’ Catechism: Or, The English and Latin Versions of Archbishop Thoresby’s Instruction for the People; Together with a Wycliffite Adaptation of the Same and the Corresponding Canons of the Council of Lambeth, ed., T.F. Simmons, Early English Text Society, o.s 118 (New York: KrausReprint Company, 1973). See also A. Hudson, ‘A New Look at the Lay Folks’ Catechism’, Viator, 16 (1985) 243–45. 16 See G. Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England 1360–1461 (Oxford: OUP, 2005), passim. 17 York, REED: 55. 18 T. Harrison, Collected Plays, vol.1 (London: Faber and Faber, 1999). 19 Such are the editorial problems posed by the length of this text and the number of surviving manuscript witnesses that the only edition remains The Pricke of Conscience, ed., Richard Morris (Berlin: A. Asher, 1863). See Robert E. Lewis and Angus McIntosh, A Descriptive Index to the Manuscripts of the Prick of Conscience, Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature (Oxford: Medium Aevum Monographs, 1982). 20 York, Borthwick Institute, Prob. II, f. 137v. 21 See S. Powell, ‘The Fifteen Signs of Doom in Image and Text: the Pricke of Conscience window at All Saints’, North Street, York’, in Harlaxton Medieval Studies XII (New Series) Proceedings of the 2000 symposium: Prophecy, Apocalypse and the Day of Doom, ed., Nigel J. Morgan (Donington, Lincs: Shaun Tyas/Paul Watkins Publications, 2004), 292–316. 22 The authoritative edition of the Chester Cycle is The Chester Mystery Cycle, R.M. Lumiansky and David Mills, eds. Early English Text Society, s.s 3 and 9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974 and 1986). 23 David Mills, Recycling the Cycle: The City of Chester and Its Whitsun Plays (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 185. 24 Lynette Muir, Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), 150. 25 Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), II, 371–87. 26 Lawrence M. Clopper, Drama, Play and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 86–87. Extracts from the text of the Tretise is published in Medieval Drama: An Anthology, ed., Greg Walker (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 196–200. 27 Clopper, Drama, Play and Game, 80.

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28 Clopper, Drama, Play and Game, 105. 29 Mills, Recycling the Cycle, p. 172. 30 H. Medwall, Fulgens and Lucres, in The Plays of Henry Medwall, ed., A.H. Nelson (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1980); F. Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed., M. Hattaway (London: New Mermaids, 2002). 31 S. Hill, The Woman in Black (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983); S. Mallatratt and S. Hill, The Woman in Black (Acting Edition) (London: Samuel French, 1987); J. Goldman and S. Hill, The Woman in Black, directed by J. Watkins, distributed by Monumentum Theatrical (2012). See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ The Woman in Black. Accessed 28 July 2012. 32 J. Dillon, ‘What Sacrament? Excess,Taboo and Truth in The Croxton Play of the Sacrament and Twentieth-Century Body Art’, European Medieval Drama, 4 (2000), 169–79. 33 See K.S. Marsalek, ‘“Awake your faith”: Resurrection Drama and The Winter’s Tale’, in ‘Bring Furth the Pagants’: Essays in Early English Drama Presented to Alexandra F. Johnston eds., D.N. Klausner and K.S. Marsalek (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 271–91. 34 Walker, (ed.), Anthology, 201–5. 35 The Macro Plays: The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind, ed., M. Eccles, Early English Text Society, o.s. 262 (Oxford: OUP, 1969). 36 See Kent: Diocese of Canterbury, Records of Early English Drama, ed. by James M. Gibson, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 780. 37 See The Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, eds. Pamela M. King and Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2000) 38 St. Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, 31, 45, Patrologia Latina 76, col. 621A. 39 The authoritative edition of the Towneley Plays is The Towneley Plays, eds. Martin Stevens and A.C. Cawley, Early English Text Society, s.s 13 and 14 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). The facsimile of the manuscript is published as The Towneley Cycle: A Facsimile of Huntington MS HM 1, with an introduction by A.C. Cawley and Martin Stevens (University of Leeds: School of English, 1976). 40 Margaret Jennings, ‘The Literary Career of the Recording Demon’, Studies in Philology: Texts and Studies, 74.5 (1977). 41 Macro Plays, ed. Eccles, 153–84. 42 See, for example, Paula Neuss, ‘Active and Idle Language in Mankind’ in Aspects of Early English Drama, ed., Pauls Neuss (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1983), 112–28; Janette Dillon, Language and Stage in Medieval and Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 54–69. 43 The Kalender of Shepherdes. The Edition of Paris 1503 in Photographic Facsimile. A faithful Reprint of R. Pynson’s Edition of London 1506, edited, with critical introduction by H. Oskar Sommer (London 1892), 66–67. 44 Thomas Kren, ‘Some Illuminated Manuscripts of The Vision of Lazarus from the Time of Margaret of York’ in Margaret of York, Simon Marmion, and The Visions of Tondal, edited by Thomas Kren (Malibu, California: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1992), 141–70. 45 L. Seidel, Legends in Limestone: Lazarus,Gislebertus, and the Cathedral of Autun (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), especially 33–62. 46 Barbara G. Lane, ‘“Requiem Aeternam dona es”: the Beaune “Last Judgment” and the Mass of the Dead’, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, 19 (1989), 166–80. 47 Richard F. Johnson, Saint Michael the Archangel in Medieval English Legend (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), p. 104.

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5 THE EARLY ENGLISH PASSION PLAY From: Pamela M. King, Sue Niebrzydowski and Diana Wyatt, eds., Early English Drama, Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 41, 2013, 69–86

It is tenaciously assumed, despite much of the work done in the field in the last thirty years, that ‘mystery plays’ prevail as the major form of medieval biblical drama in the English tradition, and that these are cycles of short pageants mounted on processional wagons that tell the story of the world from Creation to Doomsday, such as those from York and Chester.1 Two things characterize English ‘mystery plays’ thus defined. Firstly, although they deal with an ambitious chronological span, that span is divided up into discrete short episodes. Secondly each episode seems to be relatively static in terms of on-scene movement. Both of these characteristics are fundamental to the exigencies of wagon performance. Common understanding also has it that, while England favoured the Corpus Christi cycle, the French favoured Passion Plays. In fact the French seem to use the terms passion and mystère interchangeably or, as in Le Mystère de la Passion Nostre Seigneur (1131), together.2 Even once we dispose of the false etymology that long connected ‘mystery’ with ‘guild’ where the plays are concerned, the pan-European use of the term ‘mystery’ and its variants is more permissive than the insular understanding outlined above, referring to any drama that enacts the revelation of religious truth.3 The late Graham Runnalls describes all the 230 surviving French medieval religious plays as ‘mystères’. The Passions form a major subset, and Eustache Marcade’s (d. 1440) four-day Passion d’Arras, the Passion of Arnoul Gréban (1455) which follows the model of Marcade’s, and the two Passions from Valenciennes (1547), derived from Gréban and famous for their set designs, dominate the study of French medieval drama in the way that the cycles of York and Chester conventionally have the English.4 Unsurprisingly, however, a second look at the English material gives a more fluid and complicated picture than the simple division into processional Creation to Doom cycles as the dominant form, in contradistinction to the French Passion, which was more restricted in subject matter but more expansive in its amphitheatrical staging. It is well known that in Coventry, where the two surviving pageants and the extensive records date from the mid-sixteenth century, there is no evidence of any Old Testament subjects, and the lost Smiths’ pageant appears to have covered much of the material of a Passion Play within a single pageant.5 Then there is the massive Ordinalia from Cornwall, performed in the round and 52

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devoting the whole of its second of three days of performance to the Passion.6 This discussion seeks to open the exploration of the evidence that England too had its tradition of Passions in the pure ‘French’ understanding of the genre that deserve attention, not as truncated or variant mystery cycles, but as representing a distinct native dramaturgy. Our starting point is necessarily Peter Meredith’s important critical edition of The Passion Play from the N-Town Manuscript.7 It is unnecessary to rehearse here more than briefly the codicological evidence which led Meredith to conclude that buried within British Library Cotton Vespasian D. VIII – itself not a cycle but a compilation project – is a two-part Passion Play. The first part is bound into the manuscript as a separate booklet, numbered as pageants twenty-five to twentyseven, dealing with the events from the beginning of the conspiracy to Christ’s arrest. Interpolated into it are two sections of what Meredith believes were originally pageants, but he concludes that the form of Passion Play 1 is largely clear, if unfinished.8 The second Passion Play, breaking off with Christ’s appearance to Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection, also shows the signs of being a separate play, although in the manuscript context it is much more disrupted and cannot be as easily detached as Passion 1. The ‘banns’ at the beginning of the manuscript offer inaccurate descriptions of the material in both parts of the play, giving prominence to the pageant material, thus further suggesting that the text as a whole is in transition.9 The incomplete adaptation of the material into a coherent whole is, however, fortunate in that the scribe has failed to efface entirely traces of the plays’ original form. For example, Passion 1 opens with an end fragment of a procession which seems to have opened the free-standing play, and the prologue to Passion 2 refers to events played in ‘þe last ʒere’ (l. 6). More recently, the editor of the Records of Early English Drama (REED) volume for Kent made accessible the extraordinary Passion Plays, known to Meredith,10 and performed annually in New Romney as a co-operative venture undertaken by the town itself and a number of surrounding villages. These records go back to a point in the fifteenth century, closely contemporary with N-Town, and are complemented then by more detailed documents from the mid-sixteenth century, continuing until 1568.11 The evidence requires careful handling: a fragment of a playwarden’s account from the 1480s is unlikely to relate closely to the performance that may be adduced from a variety of documents from the 1560s. Equally, the existence of the N-Town text without context and the New Romney context without text must not be allowed to generate certainties out of tunnel vision; indeed, lurking in the Essex records, John Coldewey discovered in the years before REED evidence of a play put on in Maldon, assisted by neighbouring communities, which hints at a similar enterprise, and there may be more.12 It is thus, as ever, upon a fundamentally problematic evidence base that the following tentative attempt at a taxonomy of the English Passion Play will be based. After two Prologues, the action of N-Town Passion Play 1 opens with the assembling of the conspirators, before moving on to dramatize the Entry into Jerusalem. The progress towards Jerusalem is interrupted by the invitation to 53

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attend the house of Simon the Leper, where the Last Supper and foot-washing take place. While Jesus is going to the House of Simon the Leper, Judas enters and strikes his bargain with the gathered conspirators. Then Simon’s house opens to reveal the Last Supper. After the Last Supper and the foot-washing sequence, Jesus departs with the disciples for Bethany, stopping at Mount Olivet where the Agony in the Garden is performed before the conspirators arrive, Judas identifies Jesus, Peter cuts off Malchus’s ear, Jesus is arrested and carried off, and the play ends with Mary Magdalene fetching the Virgin Mary, who delivers the first of her extended laments. This summary gives little of the flavour of the action that is conveyed by the spoken script and, in particular, its stage directions. In the opening sequence, Annas, on his scaffold, takes advice from his doctors who then go out to seek two judges, Rewfyn and Lyon. A messenger goes to Caiaphas, revealed on his own scaffold, and he agrees to the trial. Rewfyn and Lyon show themselves in another place, then all process to converge in ‘þe myd place; and þer xal be a lytil oratory with stolys and cusshonys clenly beseyn, lych as it were a cownsel hous’ (s.d. after l. 288). Immediately this sequence establishes many things about the use of space in this play, and already it seems incredible that it should have been read as a pageant in view of its evident expansive and multilocational action. In the following action, the citizens of Jerusalem set out barefoot and carrying their gowns which they put down for Jesus to walk on, and, all kneeling, cry to him for mercy (s.d. after l. 406). They are accompanied by singing children who scatter flowers (s.d. after l. 410). In his progress towards them from the opposite direction, Jesus cures two blind men, before being deflected to the house of Simon the Leper, whom they meet on the way carrying water. As Simon leads Jesus home, the disciples have to double back to meet him and accompany him. The movement, across the set and from event to event, continues to be briskly paced. The Last Supper will occur in Simon’s house, but before it opens to reveal the customary tableau, the council house ‘xal sodeynly onclose schewyng þe buschopys, prestys and jewgys syttyng in here astat lych as it were a convocacyon’ (s.d. after l. 518). Thus, action moves to focus on two oppositional ‘houses’ which are going to be linked by the next movement. At this point, Judas comes into the place and addresses the audience directly. He then goes to the Council House and strikes his bargain, before departing in search of Jesus. The stage direction reads, ‘Here Judas goth in sotylly wher-as he cam fro’ (s.d. after l. 650), but, in fact, he must get himself into Simon’s house for the next scene. Audience attention is deflected to watch the judges disperse in preparation for the arrest, each going back to his personal scaffold to assemble his ‘meny’. All movement then stops as now ‘xal þe place þer Cryst is in sodeynly vnclose rownd abowtyn, shewyng Cryst syttyng at þe table and hese dyscypulys ech in ere degree […]’ (s.d. after l. 662). Various events have competed for the audience’s gaze in the preceding actions, but at this moment, the stage direction indicates that all eyes are drawn to the single location of the Last Supper. Thus far, the play has had an expansiveness of movement that no pageant can have. Much of that movement is redundant in absolute terms,13 as characters meet 54

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and part, then meet again. Messengers scurry, but the main characters, lavishly dressed according to hints in the stage directions, most probably processed from place to place, their pace of movement mirroring their mode of speech, which often involves ceremonial address in the high style. The whole play reveals itself as designed for production on a grand scale, demanding that it fill its space and satisfy its audience with its scope. That space could be any shape, but the action suggests that it needs to be constantly occupied, and travelled through, as the cast works to embrace and engage a large audience. The Last Supper sequence brings all the movement to rest for a time, but is expansive in different ways. Jesus’s speech, almost a hundred lines long (ll. 663– 754), begins with an exposition of the Paschal Lamb in its Old Testament meaning, going on to define it as signifying the ‘old lawe’ and himself as the ‘newe lomb, þat xal be sacryd be me’ (ll. 684–85). Then, in the following exposition of the Mass bread, he makes a series of contrived typological connections with the Lamb of the Passover, before distributing the Mass to each disciple with the words, This is my body, flesch and blode, Þat for þe xal dey upon pe rode. (ll. 763–64) Judas is omitted from this blessing and asked to bring to an end what he has begun. At this point in the text there is an optional insertion, for as Judas departs to fetch the Jews, the stage direction adds, ‘and yf men wolne [the devil] xal mete with hym and sey þis speech folwyng – or levynt whether þei wyl […]’ (s.d. after l. 778). The Devil’s speech contributes little to the meaning of the scene; he simply tells Judas to hurry up and goes off to Hell to prepare a special place for him. It does, however, provide spectacle and counterpoint to punctuate the long sermon being preached by Jesus, so may have proved a shrewd insertion to distract restive elements in the audience, who perhaps did not enjoy perfect sight lines to the central tableau. As Jesus consecrates the wine (l. 799), the stage direction indicates that the disciples leave their places to receive it, before returning to their seats again. We cannot really tell how the dramatist envisaged the disciples being grouped at the Supper; when the event is shown in the visual arts, the disciples are rarely seated all around a table, except on roof bosses,14 but are lined up along one side. As Rosemary Woolf pointed out, however, in Fra Angelico’s Last Supper, the disciples stand in line waiting to receive the sacrament for which they kneel, underscoring the direct connection with the Mass.15 At the end of the distribution of the elements, Jesus further charges Peter and the others with the obligation to conduct the priestly duty of administering the sacrament. He then washes the disciples’ feet before resuming his seat to tell them what is going to happen next. The Last Supper sequence is perhaps closer in its procedures to the episodic cycle pageants than any other element of the play, and yet the elaborated preaching of the central character goes beyond anything a cycle dramatist has the time 55

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and space for. Whereas the Last Supper in York constructs, like many of the pageants, an affecting speaking picture, in this play the balance is fundamentally different, and the same episode is more a visually animated sermon. Hereafter the play moves back into its pattern of constant and busy multilocational movement. Once Christ and his disciples have arrived at Bethany, described as a little place like a park, the following Agony in the Garden sequence involves Jesus coming and going between the sleeping disciples and ‘Olyvet’ until ‘an aungel descendyth to Jhesus and bryngyth to hym a chalys with an host þerin’ (s.d. after l. 936). It is a huge source of regret that, in a play with so many detailed stage directions, there is no indication of where the angel comes from or goes to after delivering a brief speech putting Passion, institution of the Mass, priesthood, and the larger metaphysical meaning of events into the context of the Parliament of Heaven: Heyl bothe God and man indeed! The Fadyr hath sent þe þis present. He bad þat þu xuldyst not drede, But fulfylle his intent, As þe parlement of hefne hath ment, Þat mannys sowle xal now redemyd be. From Hefne to herd, lord, þou wore sent; Þat dede appendyth onto the. Þis chalys ys þi blood, þis bred is þi body, For mannys synne evyr offeryd xal be To þe Fadyr of heffne þat is almythty; Þi dysciplis and all priesthood xal offere fore the. (ll. 937–48) The Parliament of Heaven, otherwise known as the Procès de Paradis, is a prominent element in the French Passions. An allegorized expansion of Psalm 84, it represents the process within the Godhead whereby the Incarnation is determined by the reconciliation of Truth and Righteousness with Mercy and Peace. Although it is not fully dramatized here, it forms a major and elaborate element in the N-Town Mary Play. We cannot assume any particular pre-existing relationship between the two plays, and the Parliament, being an anagogical event, can take place equally either before the Incarnation or before the Passion, as theologically it sits behind and is a gloss to either or both. What the angel’s speech makes clear here is simply that the dramatist, as in the Last Supper sequence, and more broadly in the whole N-Town collection, has ambitions of theological sophistication to match the sophistication of his mise en scène. The subsequent arrest of Christ is then another moment of grand spectacle, as the arresting officers appear with a large retinue of armed men, presumably processing from their scaffolds even as the Agony sequence concludes. Then almost as a coda to the action, Mary Magdalene runs from the arrest to the Virgin Mary, thereby triggering the planctus (ll. 1045–76) with its customary rhetorical alternations of apostrophe and questions directed at God that concludes the play. 56

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Contemplacio, the distinctive commentator throughout N-Town, opens Passion Play 2 with a synopsis of Passion 2, then Herod is revealed on his scaffold. His appearance is out of sequence as Christ has yet to appear before Annas and Caiaphas, and Pilate. However, the continuous, multilocational, overlapping action of these Passion Plays allows for him, like the Demon who opens Passion 1 to threaten the audience and to reinforce proleptic foreboding of the coming action by suggesting that malign forces hover in the background, not only ranged against the protagonist but also viciously disposed towards him. He is easily put on hold, going to sleep to wait until he meets Christ. Action then explodes on to the scene with a Messenger who runs around the place with cries of ‘Tydynges, tydynges!’ and ‘Jhesus of Nazareth is take!’ (s.d. after l. 89), before giving an eyewitness account of the arrest of Christ to Caiaphas and Annas (ll. 90–117). Consequently, the continuation of the Passion narrative after a year’s break is set up by these three sequences – Contemplacio, Herod, the Messenger – as a sophisticated piece of dramatic writing that first engages the audience’s attention, then engages them emotionally by using Herod to trigger anxiety and foreboding, then by leading them excitedly into the moment at which the action last broke off through the activity of the Messenger, revivifying the playing place. The relationship between action and audience is to be developed further, as they will be cast as a crowd, worked on by the players who use various devices to incite emotion, but also witnessing an ‘on-stage’ crowd working itself up into a misdirected frenzy of emotion. Jesus is now subjected to a violent buffeting with chanting that parodies the game of ‘Blind Man’s Bluff’ or ‘Hot Cockles’,16 while a woman enters the place and challenges Peter, who then denies Christ as predicted, punctuated by cock crows. Caiaphas and Pilate exchange messengers, then, while the audience waits for Pilate to come to the ‘moot hall’, Judas enters the place, speaks, ‘Þan Judas castyth down þe mony and goth and hangyth himself’ (s.d. after l. 257). Caiaphas’s subsequent remark that a night has passed (l. 258) indicates some unspoken preceding action, strongly suggesting that Judas’s hanging did take place in front of the audience, further complicating the competing claims for their attention.17 Jesus is now ‘ledyn abowt þe place’ (s.d. after l. 265) to be brought before Pilate, now in the moot hall. The ensuing sequence shifts the focus from action to rapid dialogue, as Pilate’s desire to give Jesus a fair hearing is drawn out against pressure and threats from the Pharisees (ll. 266–377). Pilate establishes that Jesus was born in Herod’s jurisdiction whereupon Herod’s scaffold re-opens to reveal him seated in state, and all the Jews except Annas and Caiaphas kneel before him (s.d. after l. 377). The arrangement in the place allows here for a clear distinction to be made between the different types of authority before which Jesus is tried. Herod’s ensuing speech indicates that he is reconciled with Pilate, curious to see miracles, but then angered when Jesus refuses to perform or speak. He sends him off to be scourged ‘tyl he is all blody’ (s.d. after l. 469): presumably here, and in the later scourging, whips dipped in pigs’ blood or similar achieved the desired effect. 57

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What follows is further more complicated action as Jesus, dressed in white, is again led about the place, while the Devil gives a long speech, creating for the audience striking visual counterpoint. The Devil speaks of his resentment at Jesus’s failure to succumb to the Temptation, but asserts his continuing determination to ensnare him: ‘For al his barfot-goyng fro me xal he not skype’ (l. 509). The ‘barefoot-going’ is a striking epithet that refers to Jesus’s personal humility but is also, presumably, being enacted in the place simultaneously as it is spoken. However, the Devil, already apprehensive about what may happen should he succeed, warns Hell to prepare. He is answered from Hell, according to a stage direction, confirming the presence of Hell-mouth as part of the set, as is illustrated on all visual representations of place-and-scaffold staging.18 An anxious demon’s voice ‘off’ sets the scene for Satan’s visit to Pilate’s wife in an attempt to prevent the Crucifixion. She is apparently concealed in some area of Pilate’s scaffold, as the Devil creeps in, causing her to rush out in her ‘shert’ carrying her ‘kyrtle’ and making a ‘rewly noise’. She comes to Pilate ‘leke a mad woman’ (s.d. after l. 543), and just as Pilate has sent her back to bed with soothing words, Jesus is brought before him again. One assumes that Satan, who does not reappear, slips out of the back of Pilate’s scaffold to Hell-mouth, while the audience’s attention is directed to Jesus’s perambulations back in front of Pilate at the moot hall. The final trial sequence is beautifully set up, with comings and goings and repeated debate, to create the impression that Christ’s fate really does hang in the balance anew, despite the knowledge of the foregone conclusion shared by performers and audience alike. Once sentence is pronounced, detailing the ensuing action in the manner of a capital sentence (ll. 679–96), Pilate goes back to his scaffold with Annas and Caiaphas while the rest of the Jews strip Christ, bind him to the pillar, and scourge him once more. The stage directions which detail the scourging, crowning with thorns, and carrying of the Cross indicate the iconic importance of these actions (s.d. after l. 698). Before the cavalcade arrives at the centre point of the playing place designated to be Calvary, two women prompt Jesus to give his address to the ‘daughters of Jerusalem’ (ll. 707–18), Simon of Cyrene reluctantly shares the carrying of the Cross (ll. 727–38), and Veronica wipes Jesus’s face with her kerchief (ll. 739–46). There are two distinct elements to the crucifying itself. First, Christ is pulled down on to the Cross and nailed to it, with the customary indications, common in the visual arts of the period, that his body has to be stretched to meet ill-fitting bores (s.d after l. 746; ll. 747–82). Midway through the process, the crucifying Jews dance round the Cross, mocking Christ (s.d after l. 774). The Cross is finally ‘set up’ (l. 779). What happens thereafter, however, is distinctive to the elaborated nature of the Passion Play and to large-scale staging. Four or five ‘commoners’ assemble to look on (s.d. after l. 786), and so the Jews force them to nail up the two thieves. It may be assumed that these are ‘extras’, though they could equally be audience members. The attaching of the thieves to their crosses marks another moment when the action moves from one focal area of activity to a number of simultaneous ones. While the commoners nail up the thieves, the Jews dice for 58

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Christ’s coat and the three Marys arrive with John. The stage direction here is explicit: Here þe sympyl men xul settyn up þese two crossys and hangyn up þe thevys be þe armys. And þerwhylys xal þe Jewys cast dyce for his clothis, and fytyn and stryvyn. And in þe mene tyme xal Oure Lady come with thre Maryes with here and sen John with hem, setting hem down aside afore þe cros, Our Lady swuonyng and morning and leysere seyng … (s.d. after l. 790; my italics) At some compositional layer – probably that of the original – we are witnessing a dramaturge who envisaged precisely where and how he wanted action to be arranged on set. He not only had a desire to include as many elements of the Passion story as he could, but took measured judgements about which elements of that narrative should be treated as single focal points of action, and which could be run together or in overlapping sequence. In a large amphitheatre, the attention of all audience members would have been directed to the Crucifixion, which, like the Last Supper in Passion Play 1, presumably took place in the middle, whereas with simultaneous ‘lesser’ events, differently located sectors of the audience would have had different pieces of action played close to them. Practised audience members could thus take steps to ensure that they located themselves close to a favourite piece of action and/or performer. Equally, the play pushes the director towards blocking action such that there is something going on close by for everyone at some point. If we follow the perception psychologists in understanding the kinetics of looking,19 we can see how both Passion Plays, with all their movement across the place and breaks into simultaneous action, kept the audience’s gaze constantly shifting – now focusing on something happening in the middle of the place, now following a messenger ranging to and fro across the place, now distracted by an element of relatively minor action taking place very close to, or, equally, choosing to strain to see another element of minor action taking place on the other side of the place. The play thus demands very active viewing by its audience. Equally, the ability to use this kind of setting to offer an inclusive but well-paced performance solves problems of sequencing of what gospel harmonies suggest were simultaneous events. The following action, once Mary is in place at the base of the Cross, refocuses the audience on the central area of playing, but again keeps the eye busy. Mary speaks her formal planctus (ll. 791–98), and Jesus speaks from up on the Cross, forgiving the Jews (ll. 799–802), who continue to mock him from below (ll. 803– 18). The two thieves talk to and fro with each other and with Christ at the upper level (ll. 815–30), so that from below then the Virgin Mary complains that Jesus is ignoring her (ll. 831–42). His attention turns to her as he commits her to the care of John (ll. 843–54). John and the Marys then depart, and Pilate, Annas, and Caiaphas reappear on the scene (s.d. after l. 866). Pilate writes the board that is set 59

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above the Cross (s.d. after l. 874). Then Jesus cries from the Cross, is offered the vinegar rod, and dies (ll. 881–920). The content here and throughout is part of the well-worn narrative, and we are not concerned here with the specifics of the dramatist’s likely sources, thoroughly covered by Meredith;20 what is of note is the way in which that action is paced to keep the audience busy, yet drawn out because of the relatively expansive production time and the lavish use of space. This material has little in common with processional pageants other than giving dramatic treatment to bible stories in Middle English verse. If we consider the reception of the Crucifixion itself, we can see that the close-up in the restricted space of the street of York’s ‘Behold mine head, mine hands and mine feet’,21 taken from the Improperia of Good Friday, is televisual, while the N-Town Passion is cinematic. From here on, there is little new to add, and the integration of the ‘original’ Passion Play into the N-Town compilation becomes increasingly hard to disentangle. At line 993, however, the play incorporates a major coup de théâtre, also depending on simultaneous action. Anima Christi appears and makes a long speech, referring to the sacramental nature of his body, still hanging on the Cross. There is no indication of where he comes from; logically he has been separated from the body of Christ since the moment of death. The body is not yet in the tomb, suggesting that Anima Christi has either been concealed inside whatever device is used for the base of the Cross since the play began, like Anima in The Castle of Perseverance,22 or that he materializes from an otherwise unmentioned Heaven scaffold. What is particularly effective is the play’s unusual ordering of events here. Anima Christi sets off towards Hell-gates so that the Harrowing of Hell can commence in the shadow of the still-inhabited Cross (ll. 993–1026). Subsequently, with the entombed body under guard, he emerges from Hell leading Adam, Eve, Abraham, John the Baptist, ‘et aljis’ binds Belial and goes on to resuscitate his own body (l. 1368–s.d. after l. 1439). Unfortunately, there is no stage direction to indicate how this latter process, as theologically as it is theatrically challenging, was to be constructed. Other elements in the final sequences are worth noting as evidence of the quality of the underlying dramatic imagination: notably Longeus’ sight is restored because Christ’s blood runs down his arm and he wipes his eyes (s.d. after l. 1142). What the records from New Romney add to a textual analysis of the N-Town is further intelligence about how we might envisage such an ambitious production being organized and produced. While the N-Town Passion Play seems to have been split into two separate performances played a year apart, the New Romney play was rehearsed in Lent and produced on four days spread across the summer between Whit and September.23 In the fifteenth century, New Romney was in steady economic decline.24 In the early Middle Ages, the town had a more affluent south-western end, clustered around the harbour, while the south-eastern end of the town, which depended on fishing, faced the beach where the fishing fleet of smaller vessels was pulled up. The town now lies inland; in 1468–1471, booms were being set up across the harbour to protect shipping from the sandbars that had accumulated, and in 1497, £60 was spent to mend the harbour, but all to no 60

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avail.25 However, the town retained its ancient status as one of the Cinque Ports and staged its ambitious Passion Play, records of which go back to 1387, accompanied by a procession on a site called Crokhille, in the south of the town and near to St Lawrence’s church: The places from which the players came included members of the Cinque Ports confederation, New Winchelsea, Rye, Hythe, and Folkestone; minstrels also came from Sandwich. Players from small local places on or near Romney Marsh such as Ruckinge and Brookland and Appledore and Wittersham on the River Rother also ‘show[ed] their play upon the Crokhil’.26 As Draper and Meddens further observe, coastal contacts were consolidated by the play: for example, New Romney and Lydd used the opportunity of the gettogether to discuss collaborative ventures for trading with France. Production was not regular throughout the whole period in which the play appears in records, and particularly in the sixteenth century, the king’s leave had to be sought for its revival, but even so the ‘playboke’ was jealously guarded by civic officials. It saw its final heyday during the reign of Mary Tudor, and it is from that period that the most informative records survive. Also surviving is a processional cross of Continental origin, lost or more likely buried in the High Street. There is no direct evidence that it played a part in the play or its accompanying procession, but the High Street was paved in 1568, the last year in which the play was performed, and there may well be an ‘evocative link’ between cross and processional route.27 We might view this material relic alongside the fragmentary remnants of the opening procession that preface N-Town Passion Play 1, which the compiler of that manuscript also failed to bury irretrievably. The New Romney records emphatically confirm the scale of production. As we have seen from internal evidence, the N-Town play was constructed to engage a large audience; here we know that in the fifteenth century, crowd control was a major preoccupation for the town because of the influx of people from neighbouring communities, and Gibson makes some calculations that speculate that the audience ran to thousands, on the basis of mid-sixteenth-century gate receipts.28 This may be an exaggeration, but even a plausible 1000 amounts to a large crowd, probably effectively the whole community including the outlying villages, and possibly some visitors from further afield, including London, with implications for the design of the mise en scène. It is unsurprising, therefore, to find that by the sixteenth century at New Romney a ‘devisor’ was employed. In 1560 this was Gover Martyn, who was paid £4 for his services, and a further sum for ‘certen necessaryes’ he brought from London.29 This is not the place in which to enter the debate about whether we should imagine the devisor as working behind the scenes or fully visible on stage, but his existence is both necessary and apparent.30 Martyn thus joins the list of those who emerge from the shadows, from Nicholas Cysat of Lucerne, to Coventry’s Robert Croo who rewrote some pageants, supplied a hat, 61

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and played God, and later in the same city, upholsterer Thomas Massey, who acted as devisor and advocate of the city’s plays just when they were being forcibly shut down by Puritan authorities.31 The records of what seems to be a similar collaborative enterprise from Maldon in Essex, on the strength of the quantities and cost of raw materials gathered for staging and the numbers of labourers involved, reveal that that town employed Felsted of London, who supplied specialist paints and gunpowder, and had to be boarded in the town for six days.32 Returning to New Romney, a detailed account of 1483–1486 is labelled as the ‘playwarden’s’.33 The playwarden is probably not quite a devisor, but more likely equivalent to the ‘pageant masters’ named in the York Mercers’ indenture of 1433,34 and given responsibility for the production and, in particular, the custodianship of its properties. The New Romney playwarden held responsibility for the whole organization and quality control system of the production. He paid out a lot of money for food and drink. One John is paid for making ‘skochynnys’, that is, shields. These could be costumes for the soldiers at the Crucifixion, but context is everything. Other payments all relate to the setting up of the entire production: mowing the grass, minstrels, boards, shoeing the horse of a bann-crier, and 2 pence for those who ‘kept’, that is maintained or guarded, the place, thus suggesting that the scutcheons were integral to the whole set, a series of decorative shields or labels for various elements of staging. Payments are made for labour, but also for ‘reward’, giving a glimpse of the combination of paid labour and volunteer work as gradually the setting up procedures for a large, seasonal, outdoor community undertaking come into focus. There is careful monitoring of each sum restat in pixide [that remains in the cash box]. The Chamberlain’s accounts of the second play then begin to reveal some detail of the content of the production,35 besides payments for ‘grass’, rosin and paper, cloth, and transport, with a payment to Thomas Bursell, probably a smith, of 5d ‘pro Campanis pro inferno’ [for the bells of Hell]. The same Thomas receives half this sum for the macaronically expressed ‘garnysshynge de heven & pro le taking down & pro Clauibus’ [for decorating Heaven, taking it down, and for nails]. The Last Supper, in N-Town a major climax to Passion Play 1, was here part of the second play of the four, possibly its opening scene, as John Humfrey is paid for roasting the paschal lamb at his house. Thomas Taylor received 3s 4d for making the tormentors’ garments, and William Buckhurst 4d for their hoods. The Entry into Jerusalem has to occur between the Supper and the tormentors, and there it is, in the payment of a penny for two ‘halters for the asse’. Thomas Sedle was paid for six yards of ‘Blankett’, that is woollen cloth for making gowns for the bishops – by whom we imagine is meant Annas and Caiaphas – while there was also a payment for lambs’ skins, which we shall return to later. Thereafter the account moves to list the names of those who have loaned money for the play, followed by a list of money received by the banns-criers. Banns were called in Ivychurch, Folkestone, Hythe, Lydd, and Brookland, where money was collected. The amount of labour and the quantities of raw materials conjure up a production on a scale commensurate with the N-Town text in New Romney at around the 62

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same period in the fifteenth century. The play called on a number of organizational and artisanal skills, and with a reach from Sandwich to Winchelsea. This picture is then confirmed by the fuller accounts from the middle of the sixteenth century, during the reign of Mary Tudor. The New Romney civic government was, from the thirteenth century at least, in the hands of the ‘Jurats’, whose chief responsibility was to account to the commonalty for its finances, as well as to exercise limited judicial functions. A bailiff and sub-bailiff acted as the Jurats’ officers.36 The Jurats’ Record Book for 27 December 1555–1556 records three recognizances taken before Richard Bunting, the bailiff, by citizens who must each pay the Crown £5 on the feast of Epiphany as they have undertaken to be the players in the ‘stage playe At New Romeny […] and have recyvyd players Speches or partes in theseyd playe’.37 Where the Maldon records give the names of only two characters, John the Baptist and Christ, on which to build the supposition that theirs was a Passion Play,38 these recognizances supply seductively complete lists, as each lists the names of players and the characters they will play. The memoranda go on to promise that if each of the listed actors learns his part before the feast of Pentecost and plays the same, and shows up at New Romney for their rehearsals, then the recognizance shall be void, suggesting that these men are effectively standing surety for the production of the play, with the backing and encouragement of the Crown in an England newly restored to Catholicism. This sequence of three memoranda provides a wealth of information. The text is being split up into parts, as is familiar to historians of the Shakespearean stage, each actor receiving only his role, bracketed by cues. Those parts include a number of subsidiary characters; not only are there messengers, but the blind man for the miracle on the road to Jerusalem is furnished not only with a boy to lead him, but with parents, further supporting the picture developed above of how the N-Town play works in a large space for a large audience. We have evidence for the doubling of parts: Pilate’s messenger and Caiaphas’s messenger are played by John Pindall, Annas and the second devil by John Plomer, St Philip and the blind man’s mother by John Watt, one of the neighbours and one of the Jews by Robert Davy, and the fourth devil and Simon by William Hardyng. And we know that men took on all the female roles: John Crockey was Annas’s handmaid, John Wallis was Martha, James Christian played Mary Magdalene, and Robert Gallyn the Virgin Mary, throwing into question the rather ambiguous entry from 1480 that one Agnes Ford was paid 6s 8d ‘pro ludo interludij passionis domini’ [for the play (or performance) of the interlude of the Lord’s Passion].39 Then in a marginal note to the first memorandum, we find the information that each of the tormentors has a name that tips the play from biblical history into the realm of moral allegory. Played by Robert Edolf, Clement Stuppeny, Laurence Stuppeny, Simon Padiam, James Greenaway, and John Hollock, they are called Mischance, False at Need, untrust, Faintheart, unhap, and Evil Grace, and, moreover, the scribe adds after the name Faintheart ‘be me Symon padyam’, thereby signing the document.40 63

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Another conventional binary is here challenged by the New Romney accounts, and that is the divide between biblical, that is historical, and ‘morality’ drama, the latter also presenting the fall and redemption of humanity but in the mode of tropological allegory. We might set this slippage into the allegorical mode in a chance-surviving cast list, alongside the recurring anagogical references to Christ’s body in the N-Town Passion Plays, and the list of emblematic costumes recorded for the lost Coventry Smiths’ play in 1490 which included four jackets for the four tormentors with dice and nails on them, another four for another four tormentors, with damask lilies on them, as well as two jackets of buckram with crowned hammers on them. All bear witness to understandings of the meaning of represented events that is shared by the producers and consumers of these dramas. That meaning goes beyond narrative history and accords with the commonplaces of vernacular theology that urge their audiences to relive the events of the Passion, to own the burden of human guilt that necessitated those events, and to take comfort from the perpetual spiritual benefits they accorded. The signature ‘event’ that defines this mode of understanding is the Parliament of Heaven; Christ’s Passion is the imperative ‘event’ that enables the perpetual reconciliation of justice and truth with mercy and peace, the perpetual availability of grace, sacramentally affirmed. This is a fusion to which the eclectic semiotic systems of theatre are particularly well adapted. The words ‘mythic’ and ‘iconic’ are overused in present day culture, yet they accurately describe the apparent understanding of the Passion narrative, and the theatrical presentation of that understanding, that the plays under consideration here aspired to. The real challenge of the New Romney accounts, however, is to work out which episodes are being played. The memoranda do not list the whole cast; notably, Christ himself is not mentioned. Perhaps he had to be an ordained priest, as is the case in a number of Continental religious plays, or perhaps this record observes the same decorum that was unsuccessfully applied in the 1951 Festival of Britain production of the York Cycle, where the actor playing Christ was required to remain anonymous.41 The presence of the deity in the play is attested later, when, in 1560–1561, 8d is expended in making ‘the first godheddes Coote’.42 Christ changed garments from this one worn up to and during the arrest, followed by a second coat made of the lambskins for the Buffeting, then finally replaced by ‘di. Dosyn shepeskynnes for ye godheddes coote for the iiijth playe’.43 These gaps more convincingly demonstrate that the list of those standing surety is not the same as a whole cast list: we have a second and a fourth devil without a first and a third, let alone Satan himself, and we have someone playing one of the neighbours and one of the Jews, without the rest, and in 1560–1561, the previously unrecorded Centurion’s horse cast a shoe. The blind man with his attendants and Lazarus, Mary, and Martha demonstrate that the play extends back to the culminating miracles on Christ’s last journey to Jerusalem. The necessary characters for the trial scenes, minus the protagonist himself, are listed, as are the disciples, including Judas and excluding Matthias, for the Last Supper; Malchus’ presence implies an elaborated arrest of Christ, as would be expected; Simon of 64

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Cyrene is there to carry the Cross, but there is no mention of Veronica. But where does John the Baptist, whose coat is made from canvas fetched from Rye and later painted, fit in?44 He is there in the Maldon accounts too. It seems inherently unlikely that the play included a Baptism,45 so he is either, as in N-Town, a prophetic prologue figure, or there to issue from Hell when it is harrowed, but no others of the inhabitants of limbo are listed. On the other hand, that the final play had special effects is more than adequately supported by the explosive shopping list ordered up by Gover Martyn that enters the account in 1560–1561,46 where the Chamberlains record paying for ‘brymstone’, ‘red leade’, ‘red oker’, ‘rosset’, ‘fllorey’, ‘ardegrese’, and a dozen ‘goldskynes’ and a dozen sheets of gold foil. There are numerous other enigmatic records that cannot be explored here.47 The final account of income and expenditure for 1560–1561 allocates responsibilities for the building of stages: Pilate’s and the princes’, Annas’s and the tormentors’, the Pharisees’, Herod’s, Heaven, ‘the cave’, and Hell, which finally gives us some idea of the organization of the scaffolds in the place. The making of ‘the morteys for the iij crosses’ completes the scene.48 In conclusion, reading these fragmentary witnesses to essentially ephemeral events can assist us to an understanding of the English Passion Play as a distinct genre of early community-based biblical drama. These plays merit discussion in their own right. Their treatment of time and space, and of communication with the audience – indeed their whole approach to what modern Christian sculptor Antony Gormley refers to as art’s project of ‘domesticating the epic’ – is distinct in scope, scale, and dramaturgical treatment from the sequential cycles of pageants, which dominate popular understandings of ‘mystery plays’. The Records of Early English Drama project has already exposed the binary divide of medieval English drama into mystery and morality plays as inadequate; this essay suggests that in reading those assembled records, we attend to the subgenre of the English Passion Play as another quite distinctive loss to the English theatrical scene.

Notes 1 This position is reinforced by the continuing popularity of Rosemary Woolf’s influential and detailed study, The English Mystery Plays (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), which predates the work of the Records of Early English Drama project which has incrementally revealed the variety of religious drama in England, but see also Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/ Wiki/Mysteryplay [accessed 24 September 2012]; Answers.com, www.answers.com/topic/mystery-play [accessed 24 September 2012]. 2 Le Mystère de la Passion Nostre Seigneur, ed. by Graham A. Runnalls (Paris and Geneva: Librairie Minard/Librairie Droz, 1974). 3 See further, King, Niebrzydowski and Wyatt, ‘Introduction’, Early English Drama, p 7. 4 Graham A. Runnalls, ‘Gréban, Arnoul’, in The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French, ed. by Peter France (Oxford: Oxford university Press, 1995), at www. answers.com/ topic/arnoul-gr-ban [accessed 3 August 2012] and Graham A. Runnalls, Les Mystères franrais imprimes (Paris: Honore Champion, 1999), pp. 178–85. The Valenciennes set design is reproduced in Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature, at www.luminarium.org/medlit/medievaldrama.htm [accessed 24 September 2012].

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5 See The Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, ed. by Pamela M. King and Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), especially pp. 29–33. 6 See Brian O. Murdoch, ‘The Cornish Medieval Drama’, in Richard Beadle, ed, The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, 1st edn (Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 1994), pp. 211–39 (pp. 216–24). 7 The ‘Passion Play’ from the N-Town Manuscript, ed. by Peter Meredith (London and New York: Longman, 1990). 8 Meredith, ed., Passion Play, pp. 4–8. For the interpolations, see further Appendices 1 and 2, pp. 229–41. To follow the codicological arguments in the edition, see further Peter Meredith and Stanley J. Kahrl, The N-Town Plays, a facsimile of BL MS Cotton Vespasian D VIII, Leeds Texts and Monographs, Medieval Drama Facsimiles, 4 (Leeds: university of Leeds, 1977), pp. xiii–xiv. 9 Meredith, ed., Passion Play, pp. 8–9, 245–50. 10 Peter Meredith and John E. Tailby, eds., The Staging of Religious Drama in Europe in the Later Middle Ages: Texts and Documents in English Translation (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1983), pp. 27, 42, 60, 142. 11 James M. Gibson, ed., Kent: Diocese of Canterbury, 3 vols, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: Toronto university Press, 2002), pp. lix–lxiv, 738–94, 1183–1208. 12 John C. Coldewey, ‘Early Essex Drama: A History of its Rise and Fall, and a Theory Concerning the Digby Plays’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Department of English, university of Colorado, 1972), pp. 53–60, 261–84. I am grateful to Alexandra F. Johnston for drawing my attention to these records. 13 As observed by Meredith, ed., Passion Play, p. 25. 14 See, for example, the roof boss in Norwich Cathedral, illustrated at www.paradox place. com/Photo%20Pages/uK/Britain_Centre/Norwich_Cathedral/Norwich.htm [accessed 24 September 2012]. 15 Woolf, English Mystery Plays, p. 233. 16 Meredith, ed., Passion Play, p.197n. 17 There is nothing to suggest that Judas did not hang himself in front of the audience; the plans for the two-day Passion Play from Lucerne in 1583 contain a ‘Judas Tree’ as part of the set (see Meredith and Tailby, eds., Staging of Religious Drama in Europe in the Later Middle Ages, end papers), and the Coventry Smiths, responsible for the lost Passion pageant there in 1572, can be seen acquiring a coat of canvas, a pulley, an iron hook, and a noose for the hanging of Judas, then, in the following year, paying ‘Fawston’ 4d for hanging Judas and another 4d for cockcrowing. The hanging mechanism was further refined by theatrical entrepreneur Thomas Massey in 1578: see Coventry, ed. by R. W. Ingram, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: Toronto university Press, 1981), pp. 260, 265, 269, 285, 289. 18 See, for example, the Valenciennes Passion, the Cornish Ordinalia, and the Lucerne Passion; illustrations referenced in nn. 4, 6, and 17 above. 19 See, for example, Andy Clark, ‘Cognitive Complexity and the Semimotor Frontier’, in Semimotor Skills and Perception, ed. by Andy Clark and Naomi Eilan, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 80 (1), 43–65 (p. 44). 20 Meredith (ed.), Passion Play, pp. 19–22. 21 See Richard Beadle, ed., The York Plays: A Critical Edition of the York Corpus Christi Play as recorded in British Library Additional MS 35290, vol. 1, EETS, s.s 23 (Oxford: Oxford university Press, 2009), pp. 339–40. 22 ‘Mankyndeis bed schal be vndyr pe caste! and per schal þe sowle lye vndyr þe bed tyl he schal ryse and pleye’: see Mark Eccles, ed., The Castle of Perseverance, in The Macro Plays, EETS, 262 (Oxford: Oxford university Press, 1969), pp. 1–111 (p. 1). This play, although not a biblical-historical narrative, not only has a staging diagram showing the organization of scaffolds in the round, but includes a debate of the four

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23 24

25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41

42 43 44 45

daughters of God (II. 3129–3649) which also bear comparison with the N-Town play under discussion. Kent, ed. by Gibson, pp. lix–lx. Gillian Draper and Frank Meddens, The Sea and the Marsh: The Medieval Cinque Port of New Romney (London and Durham: Pre-Construct Archaeology Monographs, 2009), pp. 16–19. This archaeological study provides readings of the New Romney records that usefully supplement the REED volume, although as an interpretation of dramatic activity it is less well informed. Draper and Meddens, Sea and Marsh, p. 35. Draper and Meddens, Sea and Marsh, p. 56. Money also changed hands: for example, in 1466–67, 6s 8d to the players of Hythe and 22d for their expenses, and in 1467– 1468, 7s 11d to the players from Lydd (Chamberlain’s Accounts, Kent, ed. by Gibson, p. 738). Draper and Meddens, Sea and Marsh, p. 57. Kent, ed. by Gibson, p. lx. Kent, ed. by Gibson, p. 787. For discussion of the on-stage devisor’s role, see the essays in The Narrator, the Expositor, and the Prompter in European Medieval Theatre, ed. by Philip Butterworth (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007). For Cysat, see The Staging of Religious Drama, ed. by Meredith and Tailby, p. 52; for Croo and Massey, see Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, ed. by King and Davidson, pp. 52–53, and p. 33. Space here does not permit a full exploration of the intersection between Felsted’s activities in Maldon and his better-known theatrical work in London; his career is well documented in Meg Twycross, ‘Felsted of London: Silk Dyer and Theatrical Entrepreneur’, Medieval English Theatre, 10.1 (1988), pp. 4–16. Kent, ed. by Gibson, pp. 745–47. See York, 2 vols, ed. by Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: university of Toronto Press, 1979), pp. 55–56. REED: Kent, ed. by Gibson, pp. 747–50. Draper and Meddens, Sea and Marsh, pp. 46–47. Kent, ed. by Gibson, pp. 779–82. Coldewey, ‘Early Essex Drama’, p. 57. Kent, ed. by Gibson, pp. 738, 1183. Kent, ed. by Gibson pp. 738, 745–50, 779–94. Simon Padiam later goes to London on play business and is paid for writing out the play and the parts for the actors. His ‘chasing staff’, a halberd or bill – more likely than ‘chafing staff’ as read in the REED transcription – is lent, broken, and mended. The Daily Mail makes clear that the decision was at the instigation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, while the Daily Express made it its business to break the actor’s cover. See the director E. Martin Browne’s scrapbook, unpublished, in the E. Martin Browne Collection, property of Medieval English Theatre and held in the University of Lancaster. Kent, ed. by Gibson, p. 786. Kent, ed. by Gibson, p. 789. Kent, ed. by Gibson, p. 794. Gibson understands that the first play was ‘a sequence of five scenes mostly unique to the Gospel of John’ and covering the ministry of Christ. He includes the Baptism in this sequence, but it seems unlikely for a number of reasons, including the content of the liturgy for the end of Lent and Holy Week, from which the Passion narrative is distilled, that the play should reach back to this event, without, for example, including the Temptation. Kent, ed. by Gibson, p. lxi.

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46 Kent, ed. by Gibson, p. 791. 47 For example, the construction of the city of Samaria, although this could be the departure point for the journey to Jerusalem into which the encounter with the woman at the well may have been compressed, the importation of many wagonloads of ‘bowes’ (boughs for the entry into Jerusalem, because once ‘byrchyn bowes’ or bows?), grass (for strewing under foot as sweet herbs are in Continental processions?), and the payment for digging holes for the play, probably for the crosses. See Kent, ed. by Gibson, pp. 788, 787. 48 Kent, ed. by Gibson, p. 794.

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6 MEDIEVAL ENGLISH RELIGIOUS PLAYS AS EARLY FIFTEENTHCENTURY VERNACULAR THEOLOGY The case against From: Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry, eds. Devotional Culture in Late Medieval England and Europe (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2014) pp. 533–52 The various witnesses to medieval English scriptural drama, by no means itself a homogeneous tradition, were overlooked, along with other performance texts such as sermons, in Nicholas Watson’s seminal article about the negative impact of Arundel’s Constitutions on the vibrant proliferation in the late fourteenth century of English texts of vernacular theology.1 Kate Crassons later attempted to rectify the deficiency, proposing that ‘medieval drama both resists and complicates many of Watson’s central claims regarding the demise of vernacular theology in the wake of Arundel’s Constitutions’.2 Champions of late medieval drama, in the company of those who are re-examining Watson’s thesis, will be eager to endorse her argument. After all, performance records of the York cycle, in particular, place its initial florescence precisely at the critical moment in the first decade of the fifteenth century. When we look at the nature of the evidence, however, the argument is not quite as straightforward as it might at first seem. It is now an established fact, thanks to the accumulations of the Records of Early English Drama project, that there was a far wider variety of English religious drama in the late Middle Ages than the convergent model imposed by nineteenth-century scholars working with texts in the British Museum and the Bodleian Library, and still resistant to modification, allowed. Those same texts are read by drama scholars now against the increasingly populated record of parish plays, household plays, saints’ plays, large Passion plays, as well as some multi-episode ‘cycles’. It is now clear that even within the category ‘cycles’ there are as many variants as there are surviving traces, and that to see any of the surviving exemplars as normative is as misleading as the anthologies and undergraduate courses which suggest that the Towneley Secunda Pastorum in some way represents the kind of drama performed in the streets of Yorkshire in or shortly after Chaucer’s time.3 We will return to some of the complications posed by revisiting

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known texts in the post-REED environment later; first, let us explore how fifteenth-century dramatic texts at their best support Crassons’ argument. The so-called Mary Play was identified by Peter Meredith, working with codicological evidence, as a separable element which became embedded in the N-Town manuscript by that manuscript’s compiler.4 From it we can readily see how theatre, in Crassons’ words, ‘complicates straightforward narratives of time by making events, stories and places of the past fully present in the moment of dramatic performance’.5 It thus stands as a model of fifteenth-century innovation in vernacular theological writing, with many of the auspices of that transformational conservatism that have been attributed to the post-Arundel period. The Mary Play is deeply indebted to the late fourteenth-century Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost and to Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ.6 At its simplest level, we can see the play taking its cue from Love to animate the experiential nature of Bonaventuran writing, as in the dramatized version of the Annunciation to Mary by the angel Gabriel. Love’s meditation on the event, narrated in the authorial voice, urges the reader to consider how all creation waited for Mary’s reply: Now take here gude hede & haue in mynde, how first al þe holy trinyte is þere abydyng a finale answere & assent of his blessed douhtere Marie takyng hede & beholdyng likyngly hire shamefast sembland hir sad maneres & hir wise wordes. And forþermore how alle þe blessed spirites of heuen, & alle þe riʒtwislyuyng men in erþe & alle þe chosen soules þat weren þat tyme in helle as Adam Abraham Dauid & alle oþer desireden her asent in þe which stode þe sauacion of alle mankynde. And also how þe angele Gabriel standyng wiþ reuerence before his lady enclynande & with mylde semblande abideþ þe answere of his message. And on þat oþere side take hede how marie stant saddely with drede & meknes in grete auysment hauyng no pride nor veyn glorye for alle þe hye praisyng before seide. Bot þo souereyn ʒiftes of grace þat she haþ herd ʒiuen to hire þat neuer were ʒiuin to creatour byfore. Alle she aret only to þe grace of god.7 This passage is turned in the play into a poignant and personal plea from the angel: Here þe aungel makyth a lytyl restynge and Mary beholdyth hym, and þe aungel seyth […] Mary, come of and haste the, And take hede in thyn entent Whow þe Holy Gost, blyssyd he be, Abydyth þin answere and þin assent. Thorwe wyse werke of dyvinyté The secunde persone, verament, Is mad man by fraternyté Withinne þiself in place present. 70

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Ferthermore take hede þis space Whow all þe blyssyd spyrytys of vertu Þat are in hefne byffore Goddys face, And all þe gode levers and trew That are here in þis erthely place – Thyn owyn kynrede þe soothe ho knew – And þe chosyn sowlys þis tyme of grace Þat are in helle and byde rescu. As Adam, Abraham, and Davyd, in fere, And many othere of good reputacyon Þat þin answere desire to here And þin assent to þe incarnacyon, In which þu standyst as persevere Of all mankende savacyon. Gyff me myn answere now, lady dere, To all these creaturys comfortacyon. (ll. 1324–47) The change of mode enhances the suspense of the moment and turns the angel Gabriel into a dramatic character. It uses the deixis of the dialogue in an extraordinarily dynamic way as a counterpart to the evident visual arrangement of the scene. According to customary iconography, Mary was probably presented kneeling at her prie-dieu opposite the angel, who might be on one knee with the lily stretched out towards her. Moreover, the preceding action in the play suggests that God in Trinity, surrounded by angels, may have remained revealed in an elevated position on the set. By gesture and the repeated use of the second-person pronoun, the archangel draws the eye to the object of the audience’s gaze, the person of the Virgin at the moment of the Incarnation. The deixis of the speech then extends its immediate frame of reference from Mary to encompass the Trinity and the company of heaven, then refers outward to the good livers and true in the earthly space, which logically must be represented by the play’s audience, and finally the prophets and patriarchs are gestured towards in an unseen limbo. The affective, immediate, and inclusive nature of this speech, as delivered in performance, demonstrates precisely how vernacular theology is, in the right hands, peculiarly well adapted to the stage. When he works with the Charter, on the other hand, the dramatist in one instance turns the tables on the usual paradigm distinction between narrative prose and drama, converting material that the Charter author parcels out to different voices into the single voice of the play’s on-stage narrator, Contemplacio. In the prose text, Adam and Eve’s demise in exile is followed by a brief procession of Old Testament patriarchs who follow them in failing to reassemble the allegorical convent of virtues relinquished at the Fall, and whose voices are raised in macaronic lamentation: & Þer were amonges oþere foure gode men & trewe, þat is to weten Dauid & Salomon, Ysaie & Ieromye, þat were abouʒte day & niȝt to 71

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maken þis abbeye & to sechen vp þis couent; & for þei miʒten not han here wille, somme of hem maden mochel sorowe & mone, & I pray Ȝou listenip what þei seyden. Dauid seyde, ‘Laboraui clamans; rauce facte sunt fauces mee &c.’ ‘I haue’, he seyde, ‘so runne & cried aftir hem, þat my chaules aken & ben woxen al hose’. ‘Domine inclina celos tuos & descende &c., & þerfore, lord’, he seiþ, ‘bowe doun þin heuennes & com doon, & help me for to sechen þis abbesse & here couent þe whyche myn herte loueþ; for I may not fynde hem’. Seiþ Salomon, ‘Circuibo ciuitatem per vicos & plateas & queram quem diligit anima mea’. ‘I schal’, he seiþ, ‘risen vp & wenden al abouʒten þe citee be weyes & be stretys & I schal sechen þe abbesse and here couent þe whyche myn herte loueþe’. ‘Quisiui & non inueni &c.’, ‘A’, he seiþ, ‘I souʒte hem & I ne founde hem nouʒt; I cryed & noon of hem wolde here, non answere me wiþ word’. Þanne spake he mornandliche & seyde, ‘Reuertere, reuertere sunamitis, reuertere, reuertere, &c’, ‘A, torne aʒen, torne aʒen þou sely swete wyiʒt, & let vs see þe […]’. […] & þan wente Isaye þe prophete & souʒte þe abbesse & here couent many dayes & fele, & he founde hem nouʒt; & þanne he seyde þus, ‘Vtinam dirumpres celos & descenderes, wolde god’, he seyd, ‘þou wodest bresten heuene & com adoon, & helpen vs for to maken aʒen þe abbeye of þe holy gost & fynden vp þe couent þat is goon aweyes’. & þanne wente Ieromye þe prophete & souʒte hem also; & for he miʒte not fynde hem, he made a reuful mone & seyde þus: ‘Ve michi misero, quoniam addidit dominus dolorem dolori meo; laboraui ingemitu meo. Wo me wrecche’. he seiþ, ‘þat god haþ eked more sorowe to my sorowe; I haue trayayled wiþouten reste in sikynge & in kare I may not fynden þat I seke’.8 Contemplacio, sometimes commentator to the audience outside events in the play, is a dramatic character that may well have been inspired by the marginal annotations ‘contemplacio’ in the Mirror (e.g. fols 21r and 23r). Here he leads the audience into a participatory role, animating the contemplative exercise and acting as both their delegate and inciter to emotion. The procession of prophets that the source suggests is replaced by a speech that ends with an impassioned plea from Contemplacio in propria persona for the Incarnation to take place here and now: Fowre thowsand sex vndryd foure ʒere, I telle, Man for his offens and fowle foly Hath loyn ʒerys in þe peynes of helle, And were wurthy to ly þerin endlesly; But thanne xulde perysche ʒour grete mercye. Good Lord, haue on man pyté; Haue mende of þe prayour seyd by Ysaie; Lete mercy meke þin hyest magesté. 72

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Wolde God þu woldyst breke þin hefne myghtye And com down here into erth, And levyn ʒerys thre and threttye, Thyn famyt folke with þi fode to fede; To staunche þi thryste lete þi syde blede, For erste wole not be mad redempcyon. Cum vesyte vs in þis tyme of nede; Of þi careful creaturys, Lord, haue compassyon! A, woo to vs wrecchis of wrecchis be, For God hath haddyd sorwe to sorwe! I prey þe, Lorde, þi solys com se, How þei ly and sobbe for syknes and sorwe. With þi blyssys blood from balys hem borwe, Thy careful creaturys cryenge in captyvyte. A, tary not, gracyous Lord, tyl it be tormorwe! The devyl hath dysceyved hem be his iniquité. A, quod Jeremye, who xal gyff wellys to myn eynes Þat I may wepe bothe day and nyght To se our bretheryn in so longe peynes? Here myschevys amende may þi mech myght. As grett as þe se, Lord, was Adamys contryssyon ryght; From oure hed is falle þe crowne; Man is comeryd in synne, I crye to þi syght: Gracyous Lord, gracyous Lord, gracyous Lord, come downe! (ll. 1060–91) Michael Sargent has noted the ‘strongly visual character’ of the Meditationes vitae Christi in which the reader is prompted to ‘look’, ‘see’, ‘consider’, ‘understand’.9 Perhaps what we observe in visual art, drama, and meditative prose is not so much a hierarchical chain of mimetic influence – from its being conjured in the mind’s eye in meditative prose and lyric verse, to its realization in visual image and ultimately in multimedia drama – but a circular permeable ekphrastic relationship amongst these forms. The Mary Play is also unabashedly didactic and catechetical. Contemplacio’s Prologue briskly instructs the audience on the distinctions between ‘matter’, ‘sentence’, and ‘process’, following Peter Lombard’s commentary on the Psalms, translated into English by Richard Rolle.10 It also, following both Love and the author of the Charter, uses the allegory of the four daughters of God to expound the mystery of the Incarnation. But perhaps its most arresting example of how the tools of drama can be turned to transforming the lay instructional agenda comes at the culmination of the Virgin’s visit to Elizabeth, when the two women recite together the Magnificat – Mary in Latin, Elizabeth interpolating an English verse translation. In the macaronic text, Elizabeth does offer a direct vernacular 73

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translation of Mary’s Latin, and yet the auspices of the piece are surely more akin to an antiphonal, and therefore liturgical performance, than to preaching per se. In short, this is a playwright who is not only familiar with vernacular prose, but one who also intuits from his experience of the liturgy how to exploit the momentous and dwelt-on moment by combining iconic sight with sound. This is the catechetical agenda of Pecham, Thoresby, and Mirk transformed. The Mary Play, characteristic of its theological moment, is conservative in content but is radical in medium. The theological moment that produced the Mary Play bears closer and more precise examination; its terminus a quo is 1468, as that date is written on it by the main scribe at the close of the pageant of the Purification, a date confirmed by watermarks. Of course, the date of the manuscript is not the date of the material compiled within it; for that we are reliant on best guess based on linguistic evidence, and here, Richard Beadle has suggested that the material assembled in the manuscript was written between 1425 and 1450, the Marian material late within this window. Spector concludes that ‘much or all of the cycle may, in fact, date from no earlier than the 1440s, with substantial portions of the text having originated in the second half of the century’.11 This places the Mary Play at some distance in time from Arundel’s Constitutions, in a very different moment for English theology, which we will return to again later. Though intimate with Love’s Mirror and with the Charter, the playwright of the Mary Play was a later disciple rather than a contemporary of their authors. In looking to drama for counter-examples of the Constitutions’ impact, we need ideally to look for earlier exemplars. Kate Crassons points out that records of playing in York date back to the late fourteenth century and in Chester to 1422. Records are not, however, texts, a distinction that tends to be underplayed. The surviving play manuscripts from York and Chester bear an anomalous relationship with what was performed on the streets of either city at any given time in the long history of both Corpus Christi cycles. Moreover, very few of the surviving texts of English scriptural drama are, strictly speaking, scripts or ‘originals’, written for playing, and certainly, none of the four near-intact ‘cycles’. The people who wrote them down or commissioned them did so with intentions other than performance, so the metonymic intimacy generally assumed in the literary study of drama between script and irrecoverable performance is compromised. All the manuscripts are late.12 The various manuscripts of the Chester plays are antiquarian exercises which can be matched to, and contrasted with, the snapshots of what was performed in Chester available in civic records. All the manuscripts were written after the plays had ceased to be performed with the intention of recording and memorializing, after the event, performances that had passed into disuse for ideological reasons. Something is known of what was performed in Chester as early as the 1420s, but not what was spoken, so although the texts that survive manifest a thoroughgoing catechetical agenda and an intimate relationship with the Stanzaic Life of Christ, caution is indicated, particularly as the plays 74

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moved in the 1470s from Corpus Christi to Whitsun. Moreover, there has recently emerged, in the letters of Christopher Goodman, evidence that what one Puritan ideologue saw and inveighed against to Archbishop Grindal as late as the 1570s does not match the detail of the plays as recorded in manuscript witnesses a mere twenty or thirty years later.13 How much less reliable are those same manuscripts as witnesses to a performance that took place a century and a half earlier? The Towneley manuscript shares some pageants with the York Register, but its relationship with a putative Wakefield or Preston or Burnley or Doncaster civic cycle is still a matter of contestation.14 It is written in the hand of a single scribe without the running headings or craft attributions characterizing a civic document. Evidence at present seems to favour its being a compilation made possibly as late as the reign of Mary Tudor, and possibly with an impulse that is chiefly nostalgic, memorializing in the sixteenth century a largely lost performance tradition. The N-Town manuscript, terminus a quo 1468, was described by Peter Meredith as a ‘collection of miscellaneous texts roughly integrated with some concern for appearance and some for comprehensibility’, which taken as a whole represents a play of ‘dauntingly unwieldy proportions’.15 Alan Fletcher has suggested that the compiler was a cleric and that, although the manuscript fell into the hands of actors, ‘its glosses betray a desire to give it a certain literary “finish” indifferent to practical dramatic use’.16 The Register of the York plays (London, British Library, Additional MS 35290), terminus a quo 1467, is more closely related to performance but is an unfinished quality-control document, written with the intention of recording and regulating performance, if probably compiled from the playbooks owned by the various contributory guilds. Its ‘author’ was not a playwright; he was a civic functionary. All the texts are, at best, textual imitations of past theatrical performances, their ‘stage directions’ in the past tense, or the conditional mood. So, as well as their late dates, we should bear in mind that the production of our texts is a purposeful, creative cultural performance of itself, and one related only obliquely and retrospectively to any staged representation. Michael Sargent has drawn attention to another example which contributes a further cautionary note here: the plays of ‘The Burial of Christ’ and ‘The Resurrection of Christ’ in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS e Museo 160 betray that their scribe begins either by understanding the plays as devotional treatises or attempting to adapt them as such, before settling on copying them out according to the conventions of play texts.17 In short, the surviving play texts are very unreliable witnesses to publicly staged instances of vernacular theological material before the late fifteenth century. Moreover, the early records do not in any way support the leap of faith that persists in assuming that late medieval civic drama was a stable entity, notwithstanding the provenance of the textual witness. Our theatres may reproduce the plays of Noel Coward word for word as he wrote them, but the archival evidence suggests that medieval scriptural plays were actors’ theatre, not authors’ theatre, in that they were ephemeral and subject everywhere they were performed to constant rewriting and change. 75

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Bearing all the foregoing in mind, the remainder of this essay will consider what we tantalizingly do know, what we would like to know, and what we in the end do not and cannot know about what was performed in York in the immediate aftermath of the Constitutions. The earliest record of the content of the York cycle is the document known as the Ordo Paginarum, or Order of Pageants, on fols. 252v–255r in the city’s A/Y Memorandum Book.18 At first glance, this document witnesses to a York cycle already highly developed in 1415, the year after Arundel died. It appears to list fifty-six pageants, as opposed to the forty-seven witnessed in the later Register. In 1415, the delegation of high-ranking ecclesiasts that represented the Church in England was busy at the Council of Constance, Henry Chichele was in the first year of his episcopate, and the Carthusian house at Syon was founded. The severely defaced document comprises a list of ‘pageants’ with their guild assignations, a list of torch-bearers, a Proclamation, and another list of guilds with shorter descriptions of their pageants. The two lists differ markedly in the number of guilds and pageants, the division of the subject matter, and the cast lists from the pageants in the later Register. They also differ from each other. The document contains many erasures, alterations, and additions. The dominant view amongst many drama scholars, following an influential article by R. B. Dobson, is that the York play burst forth in a ‘big bang’ at the end of the fourteenth century for the very sound reasons that Dobson outlines connected with a particular moment in the development of York’s civic structure.19 Were this speculation to be an accurate reflection of the York cycle’s origins, it would deliver the possibility of there having been a performance of vernacularized scripture right under Arundel’s nose. It is well known that the York play, like N-Town, shows the direct influence of Nicholas Love’s Mirror, a text which was presented to, and whose dissemination was mandated by, Thomas Arundel.20 For example Love, in his account of Christ’s Nativity, places meditative focus on those traditional elements in all crib scenes, the ox and the ass – derived in fact from a mistranslation (in medio annorum) in Habakkuk 3:2, supporting a misinterpretation of Isaiah 1:3. In Love’s account, both beasts as their only possessions accompany Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem, where, once they are settled in the stable, ‘Joseph þat was a carpentary made hem a closeere & a crach for hire bestes’. Then again, when the child is born on the hay of the stable floor, after Mary has greeted and suckled him, he is wrapped in her kerchief and placed in the same ‘crach’. & anone þe Ox & þe Asse kneylyng done leiden hir mouþes on þe crach, breþing at hir neses vpon þe child, at þei knewen by resun þat at þat colde tyme þe child so simply hiled hade need to be hatte in þat manere.21 The Nativity pageant in York is noted for its simplicity and absence of clutter, without distracting midwives or other miracles. Joseph does not build a stockade, but does remark on the particular dilapidation of the stable before withdrawing 76

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in search of light and fuel, so that Mary gives birth to the child alone on the set, which is either a deliberate act of theatrical audacity or, which is much more likely, a simple reflection of the dramatist’s imagination of the scene prompted by his particular reading. The child is born spontaneously, and Mary greets him with a brief lyric that echoes those associated with the consecration of the Host at Mass,22 before taking him to her breast and wrapping him: Jesu my sone þat is so dere, Nowe borne is he. Hayle, my lord God, hayle prince of pees, Hayle mi fader and hayle my sone; Hayle, souereyne sege all synnes to sesse, Hayle God and man in erþ, to wonne. Hayle, þurgh whos myght All þis worlde was first begonne, Merknes and light. Sone, as I am sympill sugett of þyne, Vowchesaffe, swete sone I pray þe, Þat I myght þe take in pe[r] armys of myne And in þis poure wede to arraie þe.

(Pageant 12, ll. 55–67)23

When Joseph returns, he too greets the child in a form associated with transubstantiation, before remarking, O Marie, beholde thes beestis mylde, They make louyng in ther manere As thei wer men. Forsothe it semes wele be ther chere Thare lord thei ken. (ll. 122–26) The detail is a close reading of Love, for the beasts do not warm the child intuitively but, according to Love, ‘by resun’ mediated by the playwright as ‘as thei wer men’. Given Arundel and Love’s association with the city of York, Jonathan Hughes was seduced into speculating on a direct and deliberative association between the composition of both works and locating it in York. That argument has been largely dismissed, however, and the inscrutable circumstances of the association between Love and Arundel shifted to after the latter’s move to Canterbury.24 The evidence of direct textual influence is strong, as it is in the N-Town play, though inflected differently, the York dramatist drawing inspiration from the concrete elaborations in Love’s work, while the N-Town dramatist strives to render 77

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concrete the metaphysical elaborations in the Mirror narrative. There is no prima facie evidence, however, for reading the York dramatist’s derivations from Love any closer in time or space to the compositional circumstances of the Mirror than is the case with the mid-century East Anglian play. Dobson’s ‘big bang’ argument has been widely adopted by drama specialists rightly to refute claims that the York play in any way ‘evolved’ slowly from a pre-existent Corpus Christi procession or, worse, from a liturgical precursor. It seems important to emphasize at this point, however, that there is no actual textual evidence to date any element of the York play as early as the two first decades of the fifteenth century, leaving Dobson’s argument open to further scrutiny. The nub of that argument is that it is not so much the case that the city authorities were quick to assert central control over the immense religious experiment that was the cycle, but that the York play was in all its essentials a creation of the civic elite. He suggests that urban productions accelerated the city’s collective expression of itself that ‘the emergence of ambitious sequences of plays actually initiated craft organization, that the Corpus Christi plays brought a sophisticated craft structure into being rather than vice versa’, and that the plays were a way in which the city identified the crafts and their members. He concludes that ‘the York Corpus Christi plays stemmed less from the craft fraternities themselves than from the predominantly overseas merchant elite who constituted the civic council’.25 This is sound civic history, but a gap opens up for the theatre historian with the use within Dobson’s argument of the word ‘play’, bringing with it the presumption that the immense festive enterprise was a series of plays ab origo, according to the literary – or manuscript – historian’s definition of a play, that is, a primarily verbal and textual construct. There is a middle way that allows the inherently more convincing ‘big bang’ over the evolutionary narrative for the development of the cycle favoured by mid-twentieth-century commentators, without necessarily placing the play as we know it from the Register into a position that implies direct defiance of the Constitutions. Moreover, it is a middle way which need not be argued for ex silentio, but for which there is body of codicological evidence. Dobson proposes that few if any of the constituent items in the surviving York play texts – whatever vicissitudes they may have undergone before the compilation of the unique Register between 1463 and 1477 – seem at all certain to have actually preceded the grand concept of a series of ludi relating the story of mankind from Creation to Judgement Day.26 If the York cycle at the beginning of the fifteenth century had not yet acquired its elaborate spoken dialogue texts, this need not mean that it was in some way a less ambitious theatrical production than the Register implies. An elaborated Corpus Christi procession is not the only alternative; it is clear that in York pageants and procession were distinct from an early date, following a different route, but the pageants still need not have been what we might call plays, narrowly defined. 78

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Theatre historians have no difficulty recognizing the Stuart court masque as a very ambitious theatrical enterprise, but one in which spoken text was neither extensive nor particularly prominent. It is perfectly possible that the York cycle started ambitiously, as Dobson suggests, as a huge theatrical spectacle, but one which was not primarily textual at all. Much hangs upon how one reads the Ordo Paginarum, which is a very distressed and problematic document. Meg Twycross’s work on the visible alterations is ongoing at the time of writing, but what has already been published adds substance to the speculation above that we are looking at a major enterprise from its origins, but one that could have changed in mode and character, accreting its elaborate spoken texts later in its history. Her examination using digital technologies is revealing a complex palimpsest or, as she puts it, ‘an enticing mess’. She notes importantly that the pageant descriptions in the first list are ‘rather strange’, mostly detailing the cast and, where action is described, using the present participle form. She concludes: The characters are apparently fixed in an eternal present […]. One has only to compare the Ordo with the N-Town or Chester Banns to sense a certain static quality, a snapshot of the action from a play rather than a plot summary. The question begs to be asked: are these descriptions of plays at all? Or could they conceivably be prescriptions for an earlier kind of pageant, groups of costumed characters either posed on a pageant wagon, or marching along the route, similar to the Dublin or Hereford Corpus Christi processions.27 Twycross’s proposal comes into focus if one attends Corpus Christi celebrations that have been in continuous production since the fourteenth or fifteenth century. In Valencia, for example, the present-day event is made up of a number of components: there is an elaborate procession, led by giants representing the ages of the world, followed by a large number of people and groups representing biblical characters, saints, and martyrs, carrying their attributes and ‘acting’ their parts in a rudimentary way. They are followed by the procession of the cathedral clergy accompanying the Host in its enormous silver gilt monstrance, and the army brings up the rear. Another procession involves troupes of dwarves, hobbyhorses, Lent and Summer, and wild men, each of which pauses on its processional route to perform a brief dance at regular intervals. In one case, there is a maypole topped by a pomegranate – according to popular iconography a sign of the Virgin Birth – which opens to reveal the Host. There are pageant wagons too, some dating from the sixteenth century. These have acquired a series of Baroque tableaux of biblical scenes and classical allegories, but they used to carry real people in tableau, possibly with some acting. And every year, one of Valencia’s six surviving short Corpus Christi plays is performed on a large public stage in the main square.28 Fifteenth-century York is a long way from twentieth-century Valencia, but the fact remains that if one were to have nothing left but the texts of Valencia’s six short plays, most of the substance of what is a complex, mixed-mode civic 79

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celebration, with different types of mimetic activity within it, would be impossible to reconstruct. The Ordo Paginarum itself is one of those manuscripts, like the York Register, which is better read as witness to a process than as a finished product. For example, Meg Twycross has identified the second hand’s additions to the first scribe’s original list. This second scribe is involved in inserting the names of additional characters, like Herod’s messenger in the first Goldsmith’s pageant, and Mary Magdalen in the Ironmongers’ pageant of Jesus in the House of Simon the Leper. Amongst other reorganizations she notes, the major amalgamation of 1421/2, when the Saucemakers’ (Suicide of Judas), Tilemakers’ (Trial before Pilate), Turners’, Hairsters’ and Ballers’ (The Scourging and Crowning with Thorns) and the Millers’ (Dicing for Christs Garment) pageants became one play, The Condemnation of Christ, has left its mark across the bottom third of fol. 253v and the top of fol. 254r, where the Millers’ pageant has been erased, tantalizingly, not quite completely.29 There are other amalgamations, merging, for instance, the pageant of the footwashing with the Last Supper. In all cases, the later description seems more like a play and throws the tableau-like quality of the earlier into relief. The accumulation of this evidence strongly suggests that the York cycle in the first quarter of the fifteenth century may have been an elaborate processional performance, on wagons very possibly, but it need not have stopped at stations to perform playlets of elaborate dialogue involving vernacularized and glossed passages of scripture or liturgy. The vocabulary of the records permits this, as ludus has a sufficiently permissive semantic range in its medieval uses to take in a range of possible ludic activity, while the word ‘pageant’ refers equally to the vehicle and to what was performed on it. The pageants were clearly peopled from an early date, but when the characters began to speak, and how much, is a different issue. Again, comparison with a modern civic festival that has been in consistent production is instructive. In Bruges, the procession celebrating the Holy Blood, which is held in a reliquary in the city’s cathedral, has taken place in one form or another since 1291. In the present-day event, the procession is interspersed with wagons bearing tableaux of live actors that move very slowly through the streets. The characters on them perform embryonic plays. For example, in the pageant of the Last Supper, Christ stands in the midst of a scene arranged according to iconographic custom, slowly spreads his hands, and enunciates, in Flemish, the words of the Institution from the liturgy of the Mass, Hoc est corpus meum, etc. The action is repeated at intervals, but without stopping, around the route. At other points, biblical scenes are enacted on the ground by characters as they move in the procession, and processional elements in the biblical narrative are woven into this event, so that the wagon representing Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem is preceded by characters in biblical costume waving palm branches and chanting 80

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Hosannahs. The production is elaborate, but the wagons do not stop, and the vernacular spoken text is minimal.30 The event as a whole is, like Valencia’s Corpus Christi celebrations, complex and eclectic, made up of a number of components that mix biblical narrative with civic ceremonial and holiday misrule. In Bruges, the processing biblical characters speak some minimal lines; in Valencia they do not. Both are, however, ludi, and more importantly for present purposes, both could be described in the terms of York’s 1415 Ordo Paginarum and, in the continuous nature of their action, invite the use of the present participle in describing their action. The York play, as it is preserved in the Register, also contains a number of cues for music, something often overlooked by all but the musicologists. The whole play opens and closes with angel song. The kind of elaborate early fifteenth-century production we are speculatively envisaging here with minimal or no spoken dialogue, would undoubtedly have been accompanied by singing, and singing, as is still the case in the Register, in Latin, offering little or nothing to offend against the Constitutions’ embargo on scriptural text in the vernacular. Just as liturgical tropes accreted mimetic text, is it not natural to perceive that a massive theatrical project like the York play accreted its dialogue? It is only because a record of dialogue is what survives that it is read as the fundamental and central element in the irretrievable and ephemeral event. It need not be read as such, and certainly not for the entire life of the play. An ostentatious visual display, showing representations of biblical scenes and accompanied by liturgical singing, elaborating the events of Corpus Christi day in York, answers both the hunger of the city fathers for displays of conspicuous expenditure and divine validation and the project of the Church establishment to recalibrate popular worship in ways that focus attention on its central and indispensable sacramental function. It is recognized that a gradual freeing-up of the draconian censorship signalled in Arundel’s Constitutions followed during the archiepiscopate of Henry Chichele.31 In social terms, the genie was out of the bottle, and urban affluence coupled with lay literacy ensured that the laity would henceforward demand a more active role in the practices of worship, a trend to which Margery Kempe’s life story bears oft-cited witness. There is also, however, a more tangible explanation of change, and that is the experience that a number of senior English churchmen had as participants in the Council of Constance. That Council, not unlike the Lambeth Council of 1281, had a significant focus on the education of the laity, which led England’s conciliar delegates to instigate a number of initiatives that revivified the catechetical agenda for a new age. Robert Hallam, leader of the English delegation, was never to return from the Council, dying there in 1417, but he was accompanied by the bishops of London (Richard Clifford), Bath (Nicholas Bubwith), Winchester (Henry Beaufort), Lichfield (John Catterick), Hereford (Robert Mascal, former confessor to Henry IV, who died in 1416), and Bangor (Benedict Nicholls). Many of this generation of English ecclesiasts owed their positions to the reshuffle that took place after the controversial execution of York’s archbishop, Richard Scrope, for his part in a 81

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conspiracy to overthrow Henry IV. All were royal choices, career administrators, and perceived as safe hands. All had come to prominence under Arundel. Chichele himself did not attend the Council, but had a long affiliation with Hallam, with whom he had been at the Council of Pisa in 1409, Chichele’s first public appointment. Coming from a family of middle-ranking officials of the duchy of Lancaster, Chichele remained throughout his life passionately loyal to the Lancastrian monarchs under whom he served, leading to an uneasy relationship with the papacy when the interests of Crown and Rome conflicted such as over the matter of the Jubilee of Thomas Becket, which was celebrated in 1420 against the wishes of Martin V. He was also a Wykehamist, educated at Winchester and New College Oxford, and his connections with Oxford, to culminate in the foundation of All Souls’, helped to smooth Crown relations with the university in the post-Wycliffite period. Chichele worked hand in glove with Henry V, who concerned himself more than most late medieval monarchs with the health of the Church in his care.32 The difference between Arundel’s and Chichele’s regimes should not here be overstated, as Arundel too was committed to conciliar reform; the same Arundel who reacted decisively to the Lollard threat with his Constitutions had earlier been zealous in his pursuit of reform. Those from the same ecclesiastical coterie who survived and succeeded him, further inspired by their experience at Constance, were able to return to the project of asserting a degree of autonomy from Rome and to the issue of lay education. As Gerald Harriss puts it, Public worship was elaborated and revitalized in the first half of the fifteenth century in response partly to the challenge of Lollardy, and partly to royal and Episcopal initiative. By 1430 the general adoption of the Sarum Use imparted greater uniformity to common worship while it also afforded opportunities for liturgical elaboration and the burgeoning fashion for polyphonic settings. New feasts were inaugurated to express popular cults, and votive masses incorporated private devotions. Laymen figured alongside clergy in public processions accompanying the Host, and within the church icons multiplied on altars, furnishings, and walls. Much of this ‘Theatre of Devotion’ represented the external manifestations of piety, but it undeniably reflected a recovery of nerve and a sense of identity in the English Church.33 It seems likely that the York play’s loquacity belongs to a period later than its inception as a major theatrical show, to the mid-fifteenth century, like the pageants in the N-Town compilation, as part of the broader ecclesiastical movement towards these same revitalizations. According to this model, the ‘big bang’ theory of the inception of civic cycles makes perfect sense in terms of the pressures on evolved town life and urban control from the later fourteenth century onwards. The theatrical phenomenon of civic pageantry could have arrived thus – expensive, ambitious in scale, visually elaborate, iconographically intricate, musically enchanting, and verbally 82

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inoffensive. It is, however, both possible and, perhaps, in the circumstances of ecclesiastical politics of crisis that characterized the first decade of the fifteenth century, prudent to divorce this first phase from textual elaboration which accords better with a slightly later moment. The evidence surmised from the additions to the Ordo suggests that spoken text begins with scriptural text and accretes vernacularized liturgical forms and adaptations of Bonaventuran texts, then perhaps instructional material, point to a movement that is much more in keeping with the spirit of the second quarter of the century. We then have to wait until the 1460s and beyond for dramatic dialogue to incorporate vernacular dialectic forms drawn from the universities and the law, for the theological debates in Mankind and Wisdom, and the debate on faith and reason in the middle of the Coventry Pageant of the Shearmen and Taylors, all late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. Much of this is informed speculation, and fully realized plays as we understand them may well have burst forth as a very publically performed vernacularized scripture, continuing from the late fourteenth century to fly in the face of the Constitutions, just as they were later, through popular demand, to resist the pressures of the Protestant reformers. On balance, however, the historical, linguistic, and codicological evidence suggests that the securely datable fifteenth-century texts did not originate as acts of defiance directed at Arundel in the heat of the moment immediately following the promulgation of the Constitutions. It seems inherently more likely that these plays evolved into the form in which they were recorded at a later moment that perfectly accords with the auspices that were identified for the Mary Play above. This delivers a picture of the drama we know from those late manuscript witnesses developing naturally in step with the religious reformers who set to the work of renewal after the Council of Constance. The older generation, led by Chichele and Hallam, were men who had been there with Wycliffe and internalized the arguments about the need for lay empowerment, but had gone their own ways, surviving to revitalize the Pecham agenda; the younger ones, like Bekynton, were fiercely intellectual educators with humanist inclinations and increasingly European perspectives.

Notes 1 Nicholas Watson, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409’, Speculum 70 (1995), pp. 822–64. 2 Kate Crassons, ‘Performance Anxiety and Watson’s Vernacular Theology’, English Language Notes, 44 (2006), pp. 95–102 (p. 95). I am grateful to the author for her assistance in sourcing this publication. 3 The growing number of county volumes of the Toronto-based Records of Early English Drama project can be found on the project website www.reed.utoronto.ca/ index [accessed 17 January 2011]; the provenance of the Towneley manuscript, and of the plays in it, remains a contested topic, but a date for the Secunda Pastorum before the early sixteenth century seems increasingly unlikely. 4 Peter Meredith, ed., The Mary Play from the N-Town Manuscript (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997). Line references in the text are to this edition.

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5 Crassons, ‘Performance Anxiety’, p. 99. 6 The Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost is published in Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle of Hampole an English Father of the Church and his Followers, ed. by C. Horstman, 2 vols (London: Swan Sonnenschien, 1895), I, pp. 337–63; see also Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, Based on Cambridge University Library Additional MSS 6578 and 6686, edited with introduction, notes, and glossary by Michael G. Sargent (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2005). 7 Love, Mirror, edited by Sargent, pp. 26–27. 8 Charter, edited by Horstman, pp. 346–47. 9 Michael G. Sargent, ‘Mystical Writings and Dramatic Texts in Late Medieval England’, Religion and Literature, 37.2 (2005), pp. 77–98 (p. 79). 10 See Alistair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1988), p. 191, quoting Hope Emily Allen, ed., The English Writings of Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), p. 7. Much of the material in this part of my argument draws on my exploration of how the Mary Play uses different poetic modes in ‘Drama: Sacred and Secular’: in Corinne Saunders, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Medieval Poetry (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2008), pp. 235–62 [included in this volume]. 11 Stephen Spector, ed., The N-Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D.8, EETS, s.s.11 and 12, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), II, pp. xxxviii–xli. Richard Beadle, ‘The Medieval Drama of East Anglia: Studies in Dialect, Documentary Records and Stagecraft’, 2 vols (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of York, 1977), I, p. 88. 12 All the major manuscripts have been published in facsimiles which, more than the edited texts, immediately signal their anomalous relationship to performance. They are The Towneley Cycle: A Facsimile of Huntington MS HM1, with an introduction by A. C. Cawley and Martin Stevens (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1976); The Chester Mystery Cycle: A Reduced Facsimile of Huntington Library MS 2, with an introduction by R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills, Leeds Texts and Monographs, Medieval Drama Facsimiles, 6 (Leeds: University of Leeds, 1980); The Chester Mystery Cycle: A Facsimile of British Library MS Harley 2124, with an introduction by David Mills, Leeds Texts and Monographs, Medieval Drama Facsimiles, 8 (Leeds: University of Leeds, 1984); The N-Town Plays: A Facsimile of British Library MS Cotton Vespasian D VIII, with an introduction by Peter Meredith and Stanley J. Kahrl, Leeds Texts and Monographs, Medieval Drama Facsimiles, 4 (Leeds: University of Leeds, 1977); and The York Play: A Facsimile of British Library MS Additional 325290 Together with a Facsimile of the Ordo Paginarum Section of the A/Y Memorandum Book, with an introduction by Richard Beadle and Peter Meredith and a note on the music by Richard Rastall, Leeds Texts and Monographs, Medieval Drama Facsimiles, 7 (Leeds: University of Leeds, 1983). 13 Elizabeth Baldwin, Lawrence Clopper, and David Mills, eds., Cheshire Including Chester, Records of Early English Drama, 2 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), I, pp. 146–48. 14 See, for example, Barbara D. Palmer, ‘Recycling “The Wakefield Cycle”: The Records’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 41 (2002), pp. 88–130; Theresa Coletti and Gail McMurray Gibson, ‘The Tudor Origins of Medieval Drama’, in A Companion to Tudor Literature, ed. by Kent Cartwright (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2010), pp. 228–45; but note that, at the time of writing, arguments are being put forward which cast doubt on the dating of the Towneley press mark and are also reconsidering the Wakefield evidence. 15 Peter Meredith, ed., The Passion Play from the N. Town Manuscript (London: Longman, 1990), p. 3.

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16 Alan J. Fletcher, ‘The N-Town Plays’ in Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 183–210 (p. 187). 17 Sargent, ‘Mystical Writings and Dramatic Texts’, p. 92. A facsimile of the two plays in this manuscript may be found in The Digby Plays: Facsimiles of the Plays in Bodley MSS Digby 133 and e Museo 160, with an introduction by Donald C. Baker and J. L. Murphy, Leeds Texts and Monographs, Medieval Drama Facsimiles, 3 (Leeds: University of Leeds, 1976). 18 Black-and-white photo facsimiles of the Ordo Paginarum are included in The York Play: A Facsimile of British Library MS Additional 325290, in the pages following pp. li–lix, which serve to illustrate the problematic condition of the manuscript. A full transcription of the Ordo Paginarum is printed in Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, eds., York 2 vols, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), I, 16–26, but note corrections made in Twycross; see below, note 27. 19 R. B. Dobson, ‘Craft Guilds and City’ in Alan E. Knight, ed, The Stage as Mirror: Civic Theatre in Medieval Europe (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 1997), pp. 91–106 (p. 101). 20 Love, Mirror, edited by Sargent, pp. intro 153–55; p. 7. 21 Love, Mirror, edited by Sargent, p. 40. 22 For the use of ‘elevation lyrics’ in the York play generally, see Pamela M. King, ‘York Plays and the Feast of Corpus Christi: A Reconsideration’, Medieval English Theatre, 22 (2002 for 2000), pp. 13–32. 23 See Richard Beadle, The York Plays: A Critical Edition of the York Corpus Christi Play as Recorded in British Library Additional MS 35290, vol. I, EETS, s.s. 23 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 96–100. Line numbers in the text are cited from this edition. 24 Jonathan Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries: Religion and Secular Life in Late Medieval Yorkshire (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1988), pp. 288–90, but see Love, Mirror, edited by Sargent, pp. intro 34–35. 25 Dobson, ‘Craft Guilds and City’, pp. 101–5. 26 Dobson, ‘Craft Guilds and City’, p. 101. 27 Meg Twycross, ‘The Ordo Paginarum Revisited, with a Digital Camera’, in David N. Klausner and Karen Sawyer Marsalek eds., ‘Bring Furth the Pagants’: Essays in Early English Drama Presented to Alexandra F. Johnston (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 105–31 (p. 111). 28 See further Pamela M. King, ‘Corpus Christi: Valencia’, Medieval English Theatre, 15 (1993), pp. 103–10 [included in this volume]. 29 Twycross, ‘Ordo Paginarum Revisted’, p. 119. 30 Again I am grateful to Meg Twycross for giving access to her video footage of the event. A range of still photographs of elements of the procession, including the wagons, is available on the Bruges information website, www.brugesinfo.com/albums/25/Processionof the-%3Cbr%3EHoly-B1o.htm, and, at the time of writing, a number of short video clips are available on YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=lk7VPAiOxoo [both accessed 21 January 2011]. 31 Equally, we must acknowledge that Arundel’s Constitutions remained in force in the Southern Province until the Reformation. The Northern Province was relatively resistant to legislation emanating from Canterbury, although Archbishop Nevill reaffirmed the Constitutions in the mid-century, so that Arundel cast a longer shadow than a focus on the inception of the original Constitutions suggests. See H. Leith Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 134–96, and Alexandra da Costa, Reforming Printing: Syon Abbey’s Defence of Orthodoxy, 1525– 1534 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 65.

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32 For this section of my argument, I draw on Gerald Harriss, England 1360–1461 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), but also on E. F. Jacob, Archbishop Henry Chichele (London: Nelson, 1967), and on my own biographical work on Chichele and Bekynton in ‘Contexts of the Cadaver Tomb in Fifteenth-Century England’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of York, 1987). 33 Harriss, England 1360–1461, p. 370.

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Part 2 DRAMA AND POETRY

7 DUNBAR’S THE GOLDYN TARGE A Chaucerian masque From: Studies in Scottish Literature, 19, 1984, 115–31 (available at https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol19/iss1/10) Modern critical opinion concerning Dunbar’s The Goldyn Targe has ranged from reserved praise to outright condemnation and righteous bafflement. In order that we are not unjust to Dunbar’s rhetorical skills in conveying the matter of his poetic imagination, it is clearly only fair to attempt to identify precisely what he was imagining. In this connection, recognizing the influences upon the poet becomes peculiarly important both to the reader’s appreciation of the poem and, vicariously, to the poet’s reputation. The critical commonplaces surrounding our reading of the poem in the last twenty-five years include discussion of its ‘craft,’1 its ‘superficiality’2 and even its ‘technology.’3 These terms call to mind an essay by Francis Bacon, ‘On Masques and Triumphs,’ which, with equal equivocation, regards an art form familiar to Dunbar in its infancy: These things are but toys to come amongst such serious observations. But yet, since princes will have such things, it is better that they should be graced with elegancy, than daubed with cost … It is true, the alternations of scenes, so be it quietly and without noise, are things of great beauty and pleasure; for they feed and relieve the eye, before it be full of the same object. Let the scenes abound with light specially coloured and varied; and let the masquers, or any other, that are come down from the scene, have some motions upon the scene itself before their coming down; for it draws the eye strangely, and makes it with great pleasure to desire to see that it cannot perfectly discern … But enough of these toys.4 Amongst the voices of bewilderment and dismissal have been two5 who have urged readers of The Goldyn Targe to look outside literary sources and analogues for an understanding of the poem, particularly to the masquing and pageantry of the court of James IV. Disappointingly, the conclusion has been that the poem, by its high degree of artifice, demonstrates that it was probably intended as an occasional poem for some such court extravaganza. In other words, its relationship to pageantry has been judged to be a strictly metonymic one. 89

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It is my view that The Goldyn Targe is related to court pageantry in a more intimate manner than heretofore explored, and that a corrected reading of the poem from this point of view in turn elucidates its relationship with the medieval dream vision. I should like to adopt a metaphoric view of the poem as masque, tournament or disguising. The suggestion that any poem has this kind of relationship with theatre does, of course, call to mind the seductive arguments of Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens.6 He has argued: All poetry is born of play: the sacred play of worship, the festive play of courtship, the martial play of the contest, the disputatious play of braggadoco, mockery and invective, the nimble play of wit and readiness …7 To Huizinga ‘play’ is the common denominator of all poetry within the broadly courtly genre. Without joining battle in this larger arena, it is certainly possible to isolate certain characteristics in certain poems within the tradition which bear specific relationships with Huizinga’s definition of ‘play.’ These can range from overt references to mimetic forms to emulation of those forms within the movement of the poem itself. The suggestion that The Goldyn Targe relates to the masque metaphorically, however, neither links it with an external occasion nor claims that its mimetic qualities exist at so deep a level as ‘the structure of the creative imagination.’8 The Goldyn Targe’s relationship with ‘play’ is quite specific: it is a highly self-conscious celebration of the rather outmoded dream vision convention. What is more, the method of celebration is based upon mimetic forms current in the Scottish court and familiar to the poet. The poem exists, in other words, in relation to The Romance of the Rose in the manner that later Jonson’s Masque of Hymen related to the marriage of the earl of essex to Lady Francis Howard.9 It remains, therefore, to demonstrate the central importance of mimetic activities to the milieu in which the poet moved, to look at the affinities that other poems of the Chaucerian and post-Chaucerian period have with masque forms and to identify the mimetic and emblematic features demonstrated in The Goldyn Targe. It was obviously in the poet’s interests to impress that most ambivalent of monarchs, James IV. Whether we view him as the ideal renaissance prince of Ayala’s glowing testimony,10 or as the imprudent and decadent monarch suggested by Tom Scott,11 there can be no doubt that he was a king who enjoyed ostentatious show. His military exploits are notorious, particularly the construction of those two impressive naval white elephants, the Great Michael and the Margaret. It has been suggested that James’s schoolboyish love of ships and guns accounts for the inclusion of a ship in The Goldyn Targe.12 It would, however, be facile to suggest that Dunbar put a ship in his poem, as one puts cherries in a cake, simply to please a royal patron. The ship may be no ‘ship of fools’ or ‘bowge of court’; but the manner in which it is presented in the poem shows that it is only real in the sense that the Great Michael and the Margaret were ‘real’ in the mind of their creator. This monarch was the master at organizing tournaments, yet led his country full 90

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tilt into the series of disasters which ended at Flodden. His involvement in the Scottish build-up of shipping and artillery reflects the same preference for show over reality. Ayala is moved to say: He is not a good captain, because he begins to fight before he has given his orders, He loves war so much that I fear, judging by the provocation he receives, the peace will not last long.13 Both these predictions were to be borne out by later events. Scotland saw her monarch preparing for conflict by, for instance, personally firing a cannon at the newly completed Great Michael.14 The chronicler, robert Lindsay of pitscottie, tells us: ‘this scheip was of so great statur and tuik so mekill timber that scho waistit all the wodis in Fyfe, except Falkland wode ….’ Fortunately, the king’s grand gesture ‘derit her nocht and did hir lyttil skaith.’15 Returning to the ship in The Goldyn Targe, we note its approach: A saill, als quhite as blossum apon spray, Wyth merse of gold, brycht as the stern of day, Quhilk tendit to the land full lustily, As falcoune swift desyrouse of hir pray. (lines 51–4)16 The extension of the landscape imagery to describe the ship with its sail like ‘blossum’ and its merse ‘brycht as the stern of day,’ does not suggest a warlike machine so much as a breathtaking spectacle. even its predatory approach, ‘as falcoune swift,’ is couched in courtly imagery. nor does this ship require to drop anchor, it curiously ‘tendit to the land’ where its passengers disembark unimpeded. One may argue that the stylized nature of the dream makes these features an inevitable part of the illusion; but I would suggest that this ship is a piece of ingenious tournament machinery, which arrives, as Bacon would wish, ‘quietly and without noise.’17 Furthermore the ship’s departure, ‘realistic’ though it appears to be, could simply indicate the departure of such an ingenious piece of machinery: In a twynkling of ane eye to schip thai went, And swyth up saile unto the top thei stent, And with swift course atour the flude thay frak; Thay fyrit gunnis with powder violent, Till that the rake raise to the firmament, The rochis all resounit wyth the rak … (lines 235–40) Such spectacular effects were at least as much a part of pageantry as of real warfare. In To Aberdein, the poem in which Dunbar describes the entry of the new Queen Margaret into that city, he notes: Gryt was the sound of the artelyie. (line 15) 91

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Dunbar is not, then, trying to represent the arrival of a real ship but of an elaborate piece of stage machinery. Such a machine would doubtless surprise and impress a king who seems to have seen all statecraft in terms of stage management and a court milieu particularly given to ostentatious and dramatic display, often ‘daubed with cost’18 at that. Dunbar’s poem, with an elaborate mimetic approach to a venerable poetic genre would have been both popular and aesthetically topical. elaborate ships as elements of stage machinery in pageants are recalled by Aurelius in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale, as he muses on his problem concerning the removal of the black rocks. He, like readers of The Goldyn Targe, has trouble distinguishing the spectacle from the real thing: For ofte at feestes have I wel herd seye That tregetours, withinne an halle large, Have maad come in a water and a barge, And in the halle rowen up and doun. Indeed, quite apart from concrete references such as this one, Dunbar is not the first by any means to write poetry which has some affinity with pageantry. His occasional poem To Aberdein has important precursors in Lydgate’s poem celebrating the entry of Henry VI into London in 1432 and the Mummings devised by the same poet.19 King Henry VI’s Triumphal Entry into London, 21 February 1432, gives an eye-witness account of the actual pageant including descriptions of liveries and of the procession. The description of allegorical characters here gives Lydgate considerable opportunity to extrapolate, in, for example, his account of Nature: The ffirst of hem called was nature As she that hath vnder her demeyne Man, beeste and ffoule and euery creature With-inne the bondys of hire goldyn cheyn; eke heven, and erthe, and euery creature This emperesse of custume doth embrace …20 Here Lydgate is essentially describing pageantry in his poem, unlike Dunbar who is emulating the form. Hence descriptions of characters in The Goldyn Targe, as I shall demonstrate below, are kept to the emblematic minimum, the very opposite of Lydgate’s expanded accounts which take up the essentially literary associations. The difference is not simply one of Lydgate’s prolixity contrasting with Dunbar’s economy, but shows us again that Dunbar’s poem does not behave like an occasional poem, that we must look elsewhere for poetic analogues. The same distinction can be made in the case of Lydgate’s Mummings, for example, The Mumming at Hertford.21 Again the poem depends upon an external concrete event and is thus strictly occasional. In this case, the poem fulfils the role of proclamation and commentary designed to accompany the action for the benefit 92

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of the royal spectator and his entourage. Although Lydgate’s poems, therefore, bear some resemblance to The Goldyn Targe in terms of their content, their varied personifications drawn from allegory, the Bible and mythology, they are related to pageantry in a strictly formal and metonymic way. Their connection with ‘play’ then is altogether different. Another type of affinity between poetry and pageant, closer to the sweeping evaluations of Homo Ludens, has recently been examined by Richard Firth Green.22 He considers in particular the late medieval dream vision and its relationship to so-called ‘courts of love.’ It seems that the existence of these courts remains open to question; but Green goes as far as to suggest: We cannot be wholly sure that what is being portrayed is not rather an idealized ‘game of love’ than an allegorized love affair. It is as if, life having modelled itself on art, art in its turn had begun to seek inspiration in its own social reflection.23 It appears that the integration of court poets into court societies where the audience themselves could be both poets of love and participants in the game of love led to the production of ritualized love poetry and self-consciously dramatic narrators. The resultant poetry, seeking ‘inspiration in its own social reflection,’ takes the form, in an extreme instance, of The Floure and the Leafe, which Green sees as ‘allegory, as it were, at one remove – rather eye-witness accounts of an allegorical masque than the thing itself.’24 In this concept we must have a near analogue to The Goldyn Targe, the mimetic process reflected in the poetic mode. For The Floure and the Leafe contains its own masque within the experience of its dreamer-narrator, described by him as an ‘uncouth disguising.’ The poem also places great emphasis upon the colours green and white. The emblematic use of colour in this manner was popular in pageantry to denote allegorical significance. In The Floure and the Leafe, then, as in The Goldyn Targe, affinities with formal court games lie within the poem itself rather than referring to one concrete occasion. Once again, however, it seems necessary to make a distinction. In The Floure and the Leafe, ultimately, one cannot rule out the possibility that an actual court game of love is being described within the dream framework. In Dunbar’s poem, it is not the matter of love vision but the form that interests the poet; it seeks its inspiration from older dream visions, not from any current ‘social reflection.’ Dunbar’s opinion of ‘games of love’ is well documented in Quhone he list to feyne.25 In other words, whereas The Floure and the Leafe seems to derive its very form as a love poem from the mimetic activities, albeit imaginary, of a court of love, The Goldyn Targe is deriving purely its method of presentation from contemporary court masque. Indeed, at the level of form and meaning, as shall later be seen, the poem presents a parody of earlier love poetry. In these terms, The Goldyn Targe is more closely related to Chaucer’s House of Fame, another poem more about poetry than love. The House of Fame book III presents the audience with the ultimate pageant, the successive processions of all those who seek fame. 93

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even the process of poetic inspiration is formalized in a mimetic manner in the transmission of tidings. Above all, the narrator-dreamer is, like Dunbar, the selfconscious poet-spectator. If The Goldyn Targe is, then, not so much an occasional poem as a poem borrowing forms of presentation from court occasions in order to celebrate the dream vision mode, it is now necessary to explore the characteristics of court masque in Dunbar’s time in order to assess the particular influences we are referring to. Clearly, Dunbar was familiar with stylized combat in the form of the tournament and with other forms of occasional pageantry such as the disguising and the royal entry, if not with the ‘game of love.’ He did, indeed, write poems which were obviously intended to be associated with individual occasions, even if, in my view, it is not necessary to see The Goldyn Targe as one such. Anna Jean Mill states that the tournaments arranged by James IV in 1507 and 1508 ‘attracted attention far beyond the bounds of Scotland.’26 These were among the first tournaments anywhere to deal in really elaborate allegorical themes.27 They centred upon a challenger, a Wild Knight, who took on all comers in defence of his prize, a real negress. Despite Dunbar’s own lukewarm response to the lady’s charms,28 it appears that in response to the illuminated ‘articules’ sent to France, combatants came to edinburgh from overseas to prove their valour in the Garden of patience, where grew the Tree of esperance bearing the leaves of pleasure, the flower of noblenesse and the fruit of Honour.29 These two events are probably somewhat later than our poem, but we need to look very little further for suitable mimetic analogues for The Goldyn Targe. We know that Dunbar was present at the elaborate ceremonies described by Leland,30 surrounding the king’s marriage to Margaret Tudor in 1503, and similar events which surrounded Katherine of Aragon’s marriage to prince Arthur in 1501 are known to have been advertised in Scotland. Thus the first decade of the century alone provides adequate comparative material. One of the chief problems posed by the poem to modern critics is the way in which Dunbar strips the dream vision of all its psychologically penetrating elements and all its internal debates. He presents the reader instead with a reluctant lover-dreamer, a mere eavesdropper, who is met by a list of barely differentiated assailants. There is no mediator between the dreamer and the world of his dream and no explicit opposition between the two courts from whom the attack emanates. These factors combine to make the poem a curious representative of the dream vision genre altogether; they are more clearly reminiscent of a series of challengers meeting a champion, endeavouring to win a prize, in a tournament: Unto the pres persewit Hie Degre Her folwit ay estate, and Dignitee Comparisoun, Honour and Noble Array, 94

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Will, Wantonnes, renoun and Libertee, Richesse, Fredome and eke Nobilitee: Wit ye thay did thair baner hye display; A cloud of arowis as hayle schour lousit thay And schot, quhill wastit was thair artilye, Syne went abak reboyit of thair pray. (lines 172–80) The organized onslaughts of each group of assailants is closely allied to the manner of proceeding at any event involving jousting, while the allegorical names given to the combatants and their more elaborate weaponry is in keeping with the elaborate tournaments described above. Allegorical figures had been gaining in popularity in public shows since those devised by Lydgate and cited above.31 Pageantry, particularly the tournament, may also be used to explain the surprising concision with which Dunbar describes the allegorical characters who people the dream. Glynne Wickham says of the tournament: One man in armour looks very like another, so that in tournaments of the general melee sort the combatants would be known neither to the spectators nor to each other. Colour was the simplest method of assisting recognition. It remains so on the football field today. By the turn of the thirteenth century more definite means of individual identification had been evolved – usually a personal attribute.32 In Dunbar’s verbal tournament, it seems that colour, favour or attribute has been transmuted into label or name. no one fails to understand the grouping of, for instance, ‘youth’ with ‘Grene Innocence,’ schamefull Abaising,’ quaking Drede’ and ‘humble Obedience.’ The attraction of Dunbar’s catalogue lies in its careful emblematic arrangement rendering psychological exploration unnecessary. One is, in turn, led to think of the scaffolds on which tableaux vivants were presented at a royal entry. When Margaret Tudor reached edinburgh for the first time, she was greeted by: a Scarfawst maid, wher was represented Paris and the Thre Deessys, with Mercure that gaffe hym th Apyll of Gold, for to gyffe to the most fayre of the Thre, wiche he gave to Venus. In the Scarfawst was represented also the Salutacioun of Gabriell to the Virgyne, in saying Ave gratia, and sens after, the Sollempnizacion of the varey Maryage betwix the saide Vierge and Joseph. More faurther was of new maid One other yatt, apon the wiche was in Sieges the iiij Vertuz. Theys is to weytt, Justice, holdynge in hyr right Haunde a Swerde all naked, and in t’other a Pair of Ballaunces, and she had under hyr feet the King nero: Force, armed, holdyng in hyr Haund a Shafte, and under hyr feete was Holofernse, all armed: Temperance, holdyng in hyr Haund a Bitt of an Horse, and under 95

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hyr Feete was epicurus: prudence, holdynge in hyr Haunde a Syerge, and under hyr Sardenapalus.33 In the cramped space presented on the scaffolds erected against city gates, it is obviously necessary to economize on action and explanation, replacing them with careful arrangement and clear labelling. It seems that Dunbar adopted the same principle in writing his poem. The emblematic treatment of characters in extravagant occasional entertainments reached its most sophisticated heights when Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones derived costume designs for their masques from emblem books.34 Whereas Dunbar’s Reason strays from the emblematic norm by being male, he does seem to combine the classical emblem-book character with the tournament champion. Denton Fox is right when he notices that Dunbar does not present us with an ‘empty’ list because of its ‘careful arrangement.’35 I would further suggest that that arrangement and the naming of characters, each with his or her own single descriptive adjective, is derived from the common emblematic treatment of mythical and allegorical characters in the masque and related events. In talking about the masque proper, we are inevitably led to consider whether the true analogue of The Goldyn Targe is not the indoor ‘disguising,’ an event more fully dramatically developed than the tournament or royal entry. Unfortunately, Leland is evidently not as interested in describing these as he is in outdoor events. We know simply that the betrothal of Margaret Tudor to James IV by proxy was accompanied at richmond palace by ‘divers Sortes of Morisks’ and a ‘goodly disguising.’36 Similar events accompanied the marriage celebrations in edinburgh.37 We do, however, have an eye-witness account of the tournaments and disguisings which were held in the english court two years earlier when prince Arthur married Katherine of Aragon. The place of these events in Dunbar’s experience is, of course, far more speculative, although they were advertised and, no doubt, reported in Scotland; I include this account simply because I think that The Goldyn Targe bears comparison with a more fully developed mimetic event and because it demonstrates one example of the use of the ship as a popular stage conceit. The pageant cars in this instance appeared first in the tournament, the ship being the pavilion of William de la ryvers, ‘a goodly shippe borne up wtmen, himself ryding in the myddes of the sides of the ship [were] covered wtcloth peynted after the colour or lykenesse of water’. Later the same cars appeared in the disguising: The secunde pagent was a shippe in like wise sett upon whelys wtout any leders in sight, in right goodly apparell, havyng her amstys, toppys, saylys, her taclyng, and all other app[ur]ten[au]ns necessary unto a semely vessell, as though it hade been saylyng in the see; … till they cam byfore the kynge, sumwhat beside the castell. At the which tyme, the masters of the Shippe and their company in their counten[au]ns, spechis and demeanor usid and behavyd them silf after the manr and guyse of Marynours. And there [they] cast their ankkers. In the which 96

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shipp[e] there was a goodly and a faire lady, in her apparel! like unto the p[ri]ncess of Hispayne. Owte and from the seid shippe descendid down by a ledder two weelbeseen and goodly p[er]sons, callyng themsilf Hope and Desire, passyng toward the rehersid castell, wt their baners in maner and forme as ambassadours from Knights of the Mownte of Love unto the ladies wtin the castell … for th’entente to ateigne the favouris of the seid ladies p[re]sent; The seid ladies gave their final answers of utt[e]rly refuse and knowledge of any such company … The two seid ambassadours, therw[ith] takyng great displeasure, shewed the seid ladies that the Knights wolde for this unkyend refusall make bataill …38 As an analogue to The Goldyn Targe, this occasion gains weight when we consider how it is simply one example of the ship as a pageant car. Glynne Wickham considers39 that it goes back traditionally to the pageant car used by the London fishmongers to celebrate the birth of edward III in 1313. Certainly, when one considers that every Mystery Play cycle had its Noah’s Ark, pageant cars decked as ships can be accepted as a widespread phenomenon. What is more, Withington, in his history of english pageantry, notes of these events: The 1501 disguising shows the ‘court of love’ theme complete; the tournament is recalled by the storming of the Castle; that the Castle represents the ladies’ hearts is suggested by the names of the two ambassadors Hope and Desire. The ladies will not yield without some pressure but they fall before the determined attack of the cavaliers.40 It seems that as the tournament came to incorporate more and more allegorical and fully dramatic devices, as it moved towards masque, it also became more and more concerned with the battle for the unattainable lady. This is demonstrated by the theme chosen for James IV’s great tournaments of 1507 and 1508, as well as in the minor encounter staged to entertain Margaret Tudor near edinburgh in 1503. Leland describes the pavilion in a meadow, ‘whereof cam out a Knyght on Horsbak, armed at all peces, havyng hys Lady paramour that barre his Horne. And by Aventur, ther cam an other also armed that cam to hym and robbed from hym hys sayd Lady ….’41 A battle for the lady, of course, ensued. This is not to say, however, that The Goldyn Targe presents a conventional ‘court of love theme’ inspired directly by such events. That would be to suggest that it was nearer to The Floure and the Leafe in tenor than it truly is. Tom Scott has suggested that The Goldyn Targe represents a parody of the conventional love vision as the dreamer is an unwilling party and womanhood is the predator in Dunbar’s garden. If we return to Quhone he list to feyne and recall what Helen Shire calls the ‘wicked overplaying’ Dunbar gives the court of love in that,42 it becomes possible to see the poem as a comic inversion of the ‘court of love’ tournament. Certainly, in Dunbar’s scenario the knight has to be defended by the champion Reason, against assailants representing womanhood, instead of the helpless lady 97

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being rescued by the champion. Ultimately the reversal, whether of love vision poetry or of ‘court of love’ tournament, reinforces the view that it is not the matter so much as the form of the love vision which Dunbar seeks to celebrate. So far I have tried to account for the narrative balance of Dunbar’s poem by reference to contemporary pageantry. There is also a point of actual interpretation which this reading of the poem can help to clarify. Four stanzas in the poem are devoted to the disembarkation of two courts of assorted gods and goddesses. While it is recognized that Venus, nature and Cupid have a traditional role in the dream vision, the need to list so many others, so carefully arranged without creating any obvious opposition between the two parties, seems obscure. e. Allen Tilley offers an ingenious explanation: ‘As the first court was an analysis of physical and moral situation the second is an internal analysis.’43 According to this arrangement of deities within the courts, this seems to be a plausible account of their functions. If this were Dunbar’s intention, however, at best it is rhetorically underdeveloped. The second court plays no part in the ensuing action except that the blowing of eolus’ horn breaks up the conflict. It may be that Dunbar is importing the lists directly from another poem44 and that they have no developed function because of the derivative nature of the poem. If, however, the courts are seen as the audience at a tournament, made up of interested parties on either side, Tilley’s argument gains credibility. The court of Venus, the other females and Apollo support and direct the assailants, whereas Cupid and the other male gods, representing passion and turbulence, support the dreamer, reflecting his weaknesses. Opposing parties within the audience, or, to use Wickham’s analogy, the football match, are then represented by the two courts. Leland describes some of the jousts which were held in the aftermath of the marriage of James and Margaret, and here it is clear that on three occasions the king and his companions watched from one location, supporting one set of combatants, while the queen and her ladies watched from somewhere else, supporting the opposition: At the Wyndowes was the Kynge accompanyed of the Archbyschops of Seint Andrew and york, and of the Byschop of Durham, and of other prelatts, the said Wyndowes being well appoynted. The Qwene was at the Wyndowes of hyr grett Chammer, accompanyed of hyr Ladyes, and of others of the reyme.45 Parallels with contemporary occasional celebrations, then, help to explain much of what has drawn adverse criticism to The Goldyn Targe in terms of its balance and arrangement. They can also contribute to a better understanding of the message borne by the poem’s allegorical core. In the Stuart masque, the centre of the action and of the allegory is invariably the monarch, and the narrative celebrates the values of the society which inhere in that monarch. The early masque, disguising or allegorical tournament also introduces a narrative in which the forces of right are threatened but always vindicated. When art is idealized, imitative and celebratory, social order must be affirmed in the end, but not before the unpleasantness of the alternative has been explored. 98

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Looking at The Goldyn Targe from this point of view, it seems as if the forces of the anti-masque are very nearly triumphant. Order in the central figure’s world – this time the dreamer-poet – is threatened by figures who blind his reason and cause the landscape of his dream to collapse: All was hyne went, there was bot wildernes There was no more but birdis, bank and bruke … (lines 233–4) Not only is the order in his world threatened, his relationship with God is in danger of collapse when he gives in to the physical attractions of deceitful womanhood: For rede it semyt that the raynbow brak. (line 241) But as the dreamer awakes, the landscape is restored to its former splendour: And as I did awake of my sueving, And joyfull birdis merily did syng For myrth of phebus tendir bemis schene … (lines 244–6) The message of the allegory is a severe one, particularly in view of James IV’s philandering habits: to allow Reason to be blinded by female sexuality can destroy harmony. Whatever Dunbar’s poetic masque celebrates, it is not the ‘court of love’ per se. The harmony, however, signalled by the landscape of the poem, is further equated in The Goldyn Targe with the rhetorical harmony of earlier love poetry, particularly that of Chaucer. The allegory itself exists as a testimony to the belief, wry though it seems in a love vision, that it is better to travel than to arrive. Dunbar’s poem then has the dual function of parodying the matter of courtly artifice surrounding the battle of the sexes, while mimicking its manner. The admiration which Dunbar’s rhetoric has won is like that which Bacon shows for elaborate and subtle stage machinery, ingeniously lit. The Goldyn Targe bravely asserts the supremacy of art over life, of art as a refinement of life, in a manner almost baroque. It anticipates the flowering of the imitative spectacular artifice of Ben Jonson’s masques; but it also causes us to look back more carefully at other love visions, particularly in the fifteenth century, to reconsider their relationship to any recognized reality. It was Jonson who said, ‘all representations … public spectacles, either have been or ought to be mirrors of man’s life.’46 Dunbar presents us with a spectacle in poetry, the perfect architectured mirror of great medieval poetry, and, as such, a monument to the maker’s craft.

Notes 1 Lois A. ebin, ‘The Theme of poetry in Dunbar’s Golden Targe,’ Chaucer Review, 7 (2) (1972), pp. 147–59. 2 Denton Fox, ‘Dunbar’s Golden Targe,’ English Literary History, 26 (1959), pp. 311–34.

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3 Frank Shuffleton, ‘An Imperial Flower: Dunbar’s The Golden Targe and the Court Life of James IV of Scotland,’ Studies in Philology, 72 (1975), pp. 193–207. 4 edward Arber, ed., Francis Bacon, A Harmony of the Essays, ‘Of Masques and Triumphs,’ (London, 1871), pp. 539–40. 5 Kurt Wittig, The Scottish Tradition in Literature (edinburgh, Oliver and Boyd, 1958), p. 65. The second scholar is Frank Shuffleton. 6 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (London, Maurice Temple Smith, Ltd., 1970), passim. 7 Huizinga, p. 151. 8 Huizinga, p. 155. 9 Stephen Orgel, ed., Ben Jonson, The Complete Masques (new Haven, yale University press, 1969), pp. 75–106. I am here indebted to Thomas Zugic of york for providing access to his unpublished work on the Stuart Masque. 10 A.F. pollard, The Reign of Henry VII from Contemporary Sources (1914. reprint new york, 1967), I, p. 197 (‘Ayala’s Description of James IV of Scotland’ from ‘Spanish Calendar,’ I, p. 169). 11 Tom Scott, Dunbar: A Critical Exposition of the Poems (edinburgh, Oliver and Boyd, 1966), pp. 1–21. 12 Shuffleton, pp. 200–1. 13 pollard, pp. 198–9. 14 Aeneas J.G. Mackay, ed., Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie, The Historie and Chronicles of Scotland, Scottish Text Society, 1st Series 43 (edinburgh, 1899), pp. 251–2. 15 Lindsay, pp. 251–2; Shuffleton, p. 201. 16 W. Mackay Mackenzie, ed., William Dunbar, The Poems (London, 1970), pp. 112–9. All references to Dunbar’s poems will be to this edition. 17 Bacon, p. 539. 18 Bacon, p. 539. 19 Henry noble MacCracken, ed., John Lydgate, The Minor Poems, eeTS, o.s., 192 (1934), Secular poems, pp. 630–83; pp. 675–82. 20 Lydgate, pp. 113–9. 21 Lydgate, pp. 675–82. 22 Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto press, 1980). I am indebted to professor Derek pearsall, University of york, for drawing my attention to the relevant passages in this work. 23 Green, p. 119. 24 Green, pp. 119–20; D.A. pearsall, ed., The Floure and the Leafe and The Assembly of Ladies (London, nelson, 1962). 25 Dunbar, pp. 99–100; Helena M. Shire, Song, Dance and Poetry of the Court of Scotland (Cambridge, Cambridge University press, 1969), pp. 2–16. 26 Anna Jean Mill, Medieval Plays in Scotland, St. Andrews University publications, 24 (edinburgh, 1927), p. 53. 27 robert Withington, English Pageantry: An Historical Outline (new york, 1918), I, pp. 80–1. 28 Quhai for hir saek, with speir and Scheid preiffis maest mychttelye in the feld, And fra thyne furth hir luff sall weld: My ladye with the mekle lippis. Of Ane Blak-Moir, p. 66, lines 16–20. The poem was undoubtedly written on the occasion of the tournaments of 1507 or 1508. 29 Mill, p. 53.

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30 Joannis Lelandi Antiquarii cum Thomae Hearnii, De Rebus Britannicis Collectanea (London, 1774), pp. 256–300; ranald nicholson, Scotland: The Later Middle Ages (edinburgh, 1974), p. 554. 31 Lydgate, pp. 630–83, 675–82. 32 Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages 1300–1669 (London, 1959), I, p. 45. 33 Leland, pp. 289–90. 34 Jonson, pp. 79–80. 35 Fox, p. 329. 36 Leland, p. 263. 37 Leland, p. 299. James appears to have employed John Inglis and his players to stage an interlude on more than one occasion. 38 Wickham, I, 44 and 209, from Cambridge MS. 1st M 13, ff, 57–8. 39 Wickham, I, 201. 40 Withington, p. 115. 41 Leland, p. 288. 42 Shire, p. 7, n 6. 43 e. Allen Tilley, ‘The Meaning of Dunbar’s The Golden Targe,’ Studies in Scottish Literature, 10 (1973), p. 228. 44 ronald D.S. Jack, ‘Dunbar and Lydgate,’ Studies in Scottish Literature 8 (1971), pp. 215–27. 45 Leland, pp. 298–9. 46 Stephen Orgel and roy Strong, Inigo Jones and the Theatre of the Stuart Court (London, 1973), p. 2; from Tempe Restored (1631).

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8 ‘HE PLEYETH HERODES UPON A SCAFFOLD HYE’? From: Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 33 (2001) pp. 211–28

English medieval drama is a phenomenon of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, late for the Middle Ages even by English standards. No one knows where it came from, although theories abound, from the now largely discredited view of E.K. Chambers and others that it mysteriously evolved from the sung Latin drama of the medieval church,1 to the more current ‘big bang’ theory which sees it as a product of a particular set of socio-economic circumstances.2 Although the work of Records of Early English Drama has done much in recent years to demonstrate that religious drama of some kind or another was played all over late medieval England, the surviving texts of the great cycles still mean that for literary scholars it remains a predominantly northern phenomenon. That the earliest references to the medieval stage’s most celebrated stock bombastic characters, Herod and Pilate, should occur in The Canterbury Tales is, accordingly, as troublesome as it is well known. Both references are associated with the Miller and his Tale. The Miller is first heard crying ‘in Pilates voys’ (line 3124) when he disrupts the orderly proceedings of the newly opened tale-telling competition, whereas it is Absolon, the failed lover in the Miller’s fabliau parody of the Knight’s courtly romance, who, it is improbably claimed, ‘pleyeth Herodes upon a scaffold hye’ (line 3384).3 These references, comprehensible to any modern reader familiar with the fifteenth-century cycles from York, Wakefield, Chester and Coventry, clearly also held meaning for Chaucer and his London-based, late fourteenth-century audience. In what follows, I will offer some circumstantial evidence and some speculation about Absolon and his theatrical prowess. The Miller’s Tale is a rich and self-sufficient, not to say over-read, narrative, which needs no new readings, but an understanding of its possible theatrical context may enrich the modern reader’s appreciation of its range of imaginative resonances. Absolon is a comic fantasy poised between the outlandish and the effeminate. Crul was his heer, and the gold it shoon, And strouted as a fanne large and brode; Ful streight and evene lay his joly shode. His rode was reed, his eyen greye as goos. 102

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With Poules window corven on his shoos, In hoses rede he wente fetisly. Yclad he was ful smal and proprely Al in a kirtel of a light waget; Ful faire and thikke been his pointes set. And thereupon he hadde a gay surplys As whit as is the blosme upon the ris. A myrie child he was, so God me save. Wel koude he laten blood and clippe and shave, And maken a chartre of lond or acquitaunce. In twenty manere koude he tripe and daunce After the scole of Oxenforde tho, And with his legges casten to and fro, And pleyen songes on a smal rubibile; Therto he song som time a loud quinible; And as wel koude he pleye on a giterne. In al the toun nas brewhous ne taverne That he ne visited with his solas, Ther any gailard tappestre was. But sooth to seyn, he was somdeel squaymous Of fartyng, and of speche daungerous. (ll. 3314–38) His hair is outlandish by any standards. Generally, it is considered to link him with Absalom in 2 Samuel who was hanged by his luxuriant hair from an oak tree. This can seem a delightful critical dead-end, if it were not that Adam of Usk in his partisan Lancastrian Chronicle compared the deposed Richard II with Absolon also.4 Chaucer is probably taking a satirical sideswipe at the petty disobediences of the minor clergy in matters such as the tonsure, using a comparison with Absolon in matters concerning pride in appearance which was voguish, even if the specific political reference is too late for the Tale. In general, however, the application of the tools of practical criticism to the portrait of Absolon, with his array of small town accomplishments, while yielding such rich results which permit the reader to conceive a vivid individual identity for a pathetic burlesque character, conveniently evades the question of what a ‘normal’ parish clerk for Chaucer might be like. ‘The name of the office is hardly distinctive: it is almost misleading’, wrote Toulmin Smith in 1857.5 Both before and after the Reformation, the privilege of appointing parish clerks was a matter of dispute between priest and parish, but by whichever means they were appointed they had freehold of their office and could not be turned out without just cause. The parish clerks of London, in particular, were incorporated by a charter of Henry III and authorised to make by-laws and ordinances for their own regulation.6 The office appears to have changed little between the earliest records, which considerably predate Chaucer, and the nineteenth century except insofar as the activity surrounding the divine office which 103

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they supported was changed by the Reformation. The parish clerk, before and after the Reformation, has always been connected with the carrying out of the supportive duties and rituals concerned with the services of the church. His duties are distinct from those of the churchwarden, being concerned with the management of the conduct of church ritual and ceremony rather than the administration of church security, finance and fabric. Before the Reformation parish clerks were often, but not always, in holy orders, so, while Absolon might have been tonsured, he need not have been. They seem to have been chosen from among those who, had they better social origins, would have sought a clerical career and held an office ‘half-way between that of a curate or assistant minister and that of a church menial’. Dr Johnson remarked in 1781 that ‘a parish clerk should be a man who is able to make a will or write a letter for anybody in the parish’.7 They assisted the priest in the administration of divine office, such as censing, taking up the collection, leading the responses and singing. Parish clerks, seen as the poor parish’s substitute for a deacon or sub-deacon, were chosen from amongst promising scholars in local schools and were in their turn expected to engage in teaching the children of the parish, duties laid down in 1230 in the Decretals of Gregory IX.8 In particular, they supported themselves from the office of aquaebajulus, that is, of carrying the holy water around the parish for the priest’s use, for which they received a customary allowance and also their popular alternative name, ‘holy-water clerks’. Their other income seems to have come chiefly from customary gratuities from the wealthier members of the congregation every Sunday, as well as bread at Christmas, eggs at Easter and sheaves at harvest time.9 Most of the duties feature either directly or obliquely in Chaucer’s portrait of an enthusiastic and accomplished holder of the office, whereas an understanding of the means by which parish clerks received their remuneration goes some way towards explaining Absolon’s sycophancy with the more impressionable members of the congregation, his evident need to supplement his income from other sources and his conviction that gifts of food and money will help to win Alison’s heart (lines 3375–82). The relationship of the late medieval office of parish clerk to general clerical rules of celibacy, critical to an understanding of Absolon’s moral status, if such things matter in this Tale, seems to have been anomalous. By the 1420s in London, the office had emerged as a new lay profession, whereas the records from Chaucer’s period suggest they were in transition from the previous position of being in minor orders. Norman James, who is currently editing the Bede Roll of the London Parish Clerks’ Company, writes, In fourteenth-century London the evidence is fragmentary, but we have examples of married parish clerks, although in at least one case there is a glimpse of a stalled ecclesiastical career in the will of a married parish clerk leaving books appropriate to priestly studies. We do not have enough source material to suggest exactly when the majority of the London parish clerks was first composed of laymen, content to remain in 104

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this office with no aspirations to join the higher ranks of the clergy. By the time of the Bede Roll this was a fait accompli.10 The position under canon law was set out in 1429 by the Official Principal of the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Lyndwood, in his Provinciale. According to Lyndwood, the parish clerk married once may enjoy all the privileges of a cleric in minor orders. Should he marry more than once, however, he will be considered a layman except that, as long as he continues to wear clerical habit and the tonsure, he retains benefit of clergy under the law.11 Married or celibate, the holy water clerk, like the friar, might in the course of his duties, visit townswomen in their homes while their husbands were away, something which attracted a certain reputation for sexual seduction to the office. At least one contemporary lyric appears to suggest a rather racy reputation for the office: Ladd I the dance a Midsomer Day: I made smale trippe as, soth for to say. Jack oure haly-water clerk, com by the way, And loked me upon – he thought that it was gay. Thought I on no gile … The victim of this clerical lothario continues to think on no guile after a night of passion, Till my gurdle aros, my wombe wax out.12 The humour of Absolon’s chaste ardour would presumably be enriched for contemporary readers if they were accustomed to a stereotypically sexually predatory image of the holy water clerk. Such stereotypical expectations would also go some way towards explaining Gervase the smith’s laconic reception of the clerk who turns up playing the thwarted lover in his smithy in the middle of the night (lines 3766–71). Chaucer, however, never once refers to the parish clerk’s customary duties as aquaebajulus in the Tale. Absolon certainly does go around the parish enjoying intimate encounters with local wives of the parish: This Absolon that jolif was and gay, Gooth with a censer on the haliday, Sensynge the wyves of the parisshe faste; And many a lovely look on hem he caste … (ll. 3339–43) Chaucer, however, focuses not on aspersion with holy water but on the other clerical duty of censing. In a tale in which so much depends on water, or the lack of it, this may seem a lost opportunity. Chaucer was evidently confident that such were the stereotypical expectations of the holy water clerk that they could be realised 105

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in their frustration; his strategic choice of incense replacement over holy water is then free to contribute to the construction of the obsessively hygiene-conscious Absolon whom Paul Strohm has memorably called, ‘the most orally fastidious character in literature’.13 Anyone fitted to fulfil the office of parish clerk was bound to be an asset in the production of religious plays. It was, after all, the clerk who had charge of all aspects of the ceremonial trappings that accompanied the round of church feasts and fasts, as well as the conduct of the quotidian rituals of the parish. He was a modest scholar, with sufficient literacy to run a parish school; he could lead choral singing, read sacred text coherently, process and genuflect in an exemplary way and care for and dispose correctly all the church vestments and plate. A parish clerk was, therefore, vocationally practised in what we might call stage management and public self-presentation. Unsurprisingly, therefore, we find parish clerks featuring in English parish drama records, deployed in a number of ways in ensuring that the show went on. As far as the great cycles are concerned, in York we find that Robert Hewyk, a parish clerk from Leeds, was, along with Thomas Fitt, tapiter, and Henry Clayton, weaver, both of York, appointed pageant-master by the mercers in 1454.14 In Coventry, the city waits were also clerks at Holy Trinity, so references in the sixteenth-century records there to payments for singing clerks who participated in the plays probably refer to them.15 Ingram assumes that the city waits served as singing clerks at Holy Trinity, but it is equally likely in view of the elaborate rules governing the office of clerk enshrined in the 1462 constitution of Holy Trinity parish, that the combination of duties might be more accurately expressed the other way round.16 In the southern counties, beyond the scope of the great urban play cycles, there is more evidence. From Salisbury’s records, Audrey Douglas has demonstrated conclusively that dancing was an integral part of pre-Reformation parish activity as part of liturgical ceremony and as a means of raising money for the church or cathedral fabric. The money is receipted in churchwardens’ accounts. It is particularly, but not exclusively, at Whit that processional ceremonies seem to have included dance.17 Regrettably, most parish entertainment from Chaucer’s time, in which parish clerks might have participated, goes unremarked, and it is only after the Reformation that we learn of the persistence of ancient customs, by which time the church and its scions are firmly set against the traditional festive activities of their parishioners. This is not always the case, however, and Barbara Palmer, in her search for records of early dramatic activity in West Yorkshire, discovered one parish clerk, John Birkbie of All Saints, Moor Monkton, who appears to have been a throwback to a livelier age, for he vesthe veine vndecent apparell namelie great britcheis cut and drawen oute with sarcenet and taffitie, and great Ruffes laid on with laceis of gold and silk and of late toke vpon him to minister or saie devine Service in the Churche of Rippon vpon a holie daie in the assemblie of the people in 106

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his Cote without gowne or Cloke with a long sword by his side. And he is also vehementlie Suspected to be a notable ffornicator, and he haithe divers in the night time bene taken abroade in the towne of Rippon by the wakeman and other officers with Lewde women, and he vseth to Daunce verie offencivelie at alehowsesand mariages in the presence of Common people to the verie evell example of others and the greate Slaunder of the ministerie …18 One cannot help but imagine that, in the ecclesiastical climate of 1567, this behaviour was the equivalent of the conscript appearing on parade with his underpants on his head, contrivedly seeking dishonourable discharge. Alexandra Johnston’s work on plays in the Thames Valley has also generated another possible context for Absolon’s playing activities. One of the problems, or elisions, of reading The Miller’s Tale has always been that one mention of Absolon’s playing Herod leads to an association with the mystery cycles, northern and far too late, though probably cheek by jowl on the same undergraduate course on Middle English literature. Chaucer’s audience in the late fourteenth century must have found the idea of a New Testament play, performed on a scaffold in the vicinity of Oxford at least comprehensible enough for it to trigger humour. Johnston finds that ‘what is clear is that small scale Biblical drama was far more common than the ambitious processional plays of the midland and northern cities’, and a particularly common form of parish drama was the Easter play, possibly paraliturgical in form, and a useful element in bringing in modest amounts of revenue to the parish.19 The records are still all too late for Chaucer, but the scale, the parish as the organisational structure, and the mode of performance in a number of places along the Thames Valley, as well as more widely across southern England as the Records of Early English Drama project develops, suggest a playing tradition more appropriate for our reading of Absolon’s dramatic activities than the great cycles of York or Coventry. The records of all such events survive in the churchwardens’ accounts, because it was the churchwarden who was responsible for raising funds. This does not, however, make the churchwardens the initiators of the entertainment itself; the money collected swelled the fabric funds, but the likeliest ‘facilitators’, because of the nature of their regular parish duties, were the parish clerks. Chaucer may have been a detached cosmopolitan bystander at the performance of a parish biblical play on one of his visits to the environs of Oxford. We know that he had other reasons for visiting Oxford, which also made their mark on The Miller’s Tale. One of his associates was the philosopher Ralph Strode of the Merton school of astronomers, and Chaucer’s young son Lewis, for whom he wrote the Treatise on the Astrolabe, lived, and probably went to school, in Oxford. One of the same circle of astronomers at Merton was Nicholas Lynn, whose fashionable theories on the measuring of shadows Chaucer makes enthusiastic use of elsewhere. Derek Pearsall has suggested that Nicholas in The Miller’s Tale was named after him.20 107

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Oxford may have inspired the provincialism of The Miller’s Tale, and the character and astrological interests of Nicholas, but I want to suggest that Chaucer did not have to leave London for the theatrical inspiration of the Tale, nor for the character of Absolon, although their transposition into Oxfordshire depended too on parish playing traditions in that vicinity. For evidence of parish clerks engaged in Bible plays in Chaucer’s lifetime, one need go no further than Clerkenwell. Not far from the City, Clerkenwell was the semi-rural site of the annual Bartholomew Fair, close both to Smithfield and to the surviving medieval church of St Bartholomew the Great. The name ‘Clerkenwell’ derives from the fact that throughout the late fourteenth century, the independent confraternity of parish clerks of London performed their plays there. The origins of the London confraternity are obscure, although it is traditionally said to have been granted a charter by Henry III in 1233. On 22 January 1441/2, Henry VI granted a charter confirming the foundation of the body, though no trace of the earlier thirteenth-century document has ever been discovered, and the confraternity made no return to the court of Chancery as was required of all guilds in 1389. The 1442 charter refers, however, to forty years’ or more previous activity by the brotherhood.21 A celebrated performance by the brotherhood was that performed before Richard II in 1391, for which payment of £10 is recorded in the Issue Rolls: 11 July. To the clerks of the parish churches and to divers other clerks of the city of London. In money paid to them in discharge of £10 which the Lord the King commanded to be paid to them of his gift on account of the play of the ‘Passion of Our Lord and the Creation of the World’ by them performed at Skynnerwell after the feast of St Bartholomew last past. By writ of Privy Seal amongst the mandates of this term – £10.22 The London antiquarian, Stow, provides an account of a production in 1390: The third [well] is called Clarkes well, or Clarken well, and is curbed about square with hard stone, not farre from the west ende of Clarken well Church, but close without the wall that incloseth it: the sayd Church tooke the name of the Well, and the Well tooke name of the Parish Clarkes in London, who in old time were accustomed there yearely to assemble and to play some large hystorie of holy Scripture. And for example of later time, to wit in the yeare 1390, the 14, of Richard the second, I read the Parish Clarkes of London, on the 18 of July, playd Enterludes at Skinners well neare vnto Clarkes well which play continued three dayes togither, the King, Queene, and Nobles being present.23 Stow follows this immediately with an account of a further production attended by royalty in 1409, and lasting eight days. Adams believes that the plays were presented regularly from 1384 onwards, possibly deriving some original connection 108

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with St Bartholomew’s Fair instituted by Rahere to pay for his new buildings at Smithfield. The plays are traceable to the early sixteenth century.24 There is no definitive dating for The Canterbury Tales, let alone The Miller’s Tale, although 1387 is usually cited as terminus ab quo. The clerk’s plays took place in July 1390, the middle of a hot summer during which plague raged in London,25 and during which Geoffrey Chaucer had the misfortune to be stuck in the capital in his position as Clerk of the King’s Works. The post was, as Crow and Olsen put it in the Life Records, ‘no sinecure’ and involved arrangements for the procurement, transportation and care of a great store of many kinds of building materials, tools, implements, containers, machines etc., needed for construction and repair. If any of the materials were carried away, he had to see they were brought back. Also he had to supervise the sale of branches and bark from the trees purveyed for the king’s works.26 From his appointment, he was engaged in work to complete a wharf at the Tower of London, work inherited from his predecessor and completed by June 1390. His other big job that summer was superintending work at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, but he was not commissioned to do that until 12 July. During the same period, he was engaged in superintending the erection and dismantling of scaffolds for two jousts in Smithfield, one in May and one in October. A mandate was issued on 1 July to meet the costs he incurred in May.27 This was an anxious time for Chaucer, dealing with eminent men like Henry Yevele, as well as other workmen, holding responsibility for quantities of capital plant, meeting contract deadlines and carrying large pay-packets around London and its suburbs. The records are confused, but it seems that during the same summer he was personally mugged and robbed at least twice.28 Derek Pearsall observes that Chaucer’s involvement in the tournaments may have led him to revise the description of the lists in The Knight’s Tale. The composition of that tale is known to predate the Tales as a whole, as it is mentioned in the Legend of Good Women.29 It is at least conceivable that The Miller’s Tale, the complex companion piece to The Knight’s Tale, was inspired by Chaucer’s experiences that same summer. He had become perforce, during that hot summer, intimately knowledgeable about carpenters, their materials, tools and work, as can be observed from the indenture by which dead stock was transferred to Chaucer by Elham, his predecessor as Clerk of Works in November 1389. videlicet: Infra palacium Westmonasterii: viii paria aundyems quorum pedes ii franguntur et devastanturi par scipparum i patella i rake i ladel et i soudour pro officio plumbarii i ymago eris ii ymagines lapidee non depicte vii ymagines facte ad similtudinem regum xv clavi vocati clergyngnaill pro officio vitriarii ii molendina manualia quorum deficiu[n]t ii paria wynches i lathe pro officio carpentarii i parva campana vocata Wyron i grossum fern[um] cum toto apparatu i crowe ferri i instrumentum vocatum ramme cuius stipes (frangitur el devastatur) i grossus anulus in superiori parte et les stayinghokes franguntur et devastantur i 109

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trabs ferri stannati cum statera lignea diversa pondera plumbi continencia Ccxli libras ii grossa fanes nuper facta pro magna aula ii spyndles ferri pro eisdem i olla plumbea pro glutine v casus ferrei pro fenestris vitreis certe parcelle unius carre facte pro Rege Edwardo videlicet ii paria rotarum ferro ligaturum iiii pecie pre celura camere viii pecie ordinate pro costeriis dicte camere iiii pecie pro costeris aule i somere cum axella ii staybarres ferri stannati xii pecie meremii pro carra predicta i countre coopertum de novo cum viridi panno pro domo compoti i stopp i botell pro inclaustro i pixis pro pulvere i piciosia ii scale i cable xii hirdles pro scaffoldes i par de lystis duplicatis continentibus in circuitu xxxi perticatas i quartronus viii libre stanni pro soudura xxi panelli vitrei in casibu ferreis firmati pro fenestris camere regis CCxv petre de Stapulton continentes xliii doliata i par ptentegamettarum pro quodam ostio i par grossarum potentegarnettarum cum iiii boltis ferreis ii colers ferri numper facta pro quodam ponte vertibili iii vertivelli ferrei pro ostiis iiii hopes ferri pro rotis carri ix [a]nuli ferrei pro barruris predictarum lystarum i vetus trabs pro ponder’ i vetus ferramentum ii tabule pro officio vitriarii quarum una est parva ii slynges pro le crane ii tribula ferrata quarum i debilis ii crowdeweyns xii petre re Reygate pro ii fenestris. [that is to say: within the palace of Westminster: 8 pairs of andirons of which the feet of 2 are broken and destroyed. 1 pair of dry measures, l small pan, 1 rake. l ladle, and l solder (soldering iron?) for the office of plumber, 1 statue (eris?), 2 statues of unpainted stone. 7 statues made in the likeness of the king, 15 keys called ‘clergyngnaills’ for the office of the glazier, two mills, the handles of which are missing, 2 pairs of winches, 1 lathe for the office of carpenter, 1 poor bell called ‘Wyron’, 1 gross windlasses with all apparatus, l iron crow-bar, l instrument called a ram of which the posts are broken and destroyed, 1 gross of rings of which the fixing hooks at the upper ends are broken and destroyed, l steel-yard of tinned iron with a balance of diverse woods containing weights of lead. 241pound weights. 2 gross banners newly made for the great hall, 2 spindles of iron for them. 1 lead pot for glue, 5 cases of iron for the window glass, certain parcels relating to a carriage made for King Edward that is to say 2 pairs of wheels with iron braces, 4 pieces for the canopy of the chamber. 8 pieces ordained for the hangings of the same chamber, 4 pieces for the hangings of the hall, 1 beam with an axel. 2 staybars of tinned iron, 12 pieces of timber for the aforesaid carriage, 1 new counting-cloth with greenwood timbers for the counting house, 1 stoup, l butt for nails (?), 1 vessel for powder, l pick-axe, 2 scales, l cable, 12 hurdles for scaffolds, l pair of double lists containing 31 perches (banks of eating?) in its circuit, 1 quarter-weight, 8 pounds of tin for solder, 21 panes of fortified glass in cases of iron for the window 110

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in the king’s chamber, 215 Stapleton stones contained in 43 tuns, 1 pair of cross-garnet hinges for a certain door, 1 pair of large cross-garnet hinges with 4 bolts of iron, 2 collars of iron newly made for a certain drawbridge, 3 hinges of iron for doors, 4 hoops of iron for the wheels of a carriage, 9 rings of iron for the barriers of the aforesaid lists, 1 old shaft for a heavy old piece of ironwork, 2 tables for the office of glazier of which one is poor, 2 slings for the crane, 2 shovels of iron, one of them weak, 2 handcarts, 2 Reigate stones for 2 windows.] This is just the inventory of items at Westminster, which includes the scaffolds and barriers for the lists; he took into his keeping further miscellaneous items at the Tower (including one bucket and one frying pan) and more still at Sheen, Eltham, Kennington, Childern Langley and Byfleet, all equally assorted.30 Whether Chaucer assiduously checked them off one by one, and to what extent he had hands-on experience of the use of such items in the following months, is anyone’s guess. He would have been familiar with projects such as the out-oftown work that John the carpenter is described as being involved in, would know how long it could take to fetch a load of timber and possibly encountered local residents as dense as the monk who is unable to tell Absolon quite where the carpenter might be. In short, there can be no doubt that he was involved in the world of the building trades and their tackle, and that in the course of his duties, he was commuting to and fro between Smithfield, Westminster and the Tower so could not have avoided knowing about, if not watching, the elaborate amateur theatricals of the parish clerks at Clerkenwell.31 Theatricality in The Miller’s Tale goes well beyond what inspiration Chaucer may have derived from plays at Clerkenwell in his construction of Absolon’s character as recent criticism has acknowledged. John Gamin and Linda Lomperis have both noticed how the Tale is preoccupied with dressing up and with roleplaying, although Absolon is the only one labelled as an actor.32 Alison is dressed as the petit bourgeois wife. Absolon plays at being the stereotypical courtly lover, and Nicholas pretends to be a foreteller of the future, which leads to his persuading John and Alison, albeit for different reasons, to play at Noah and his wife. There, by a couple of simple moves, we are back with Bible plays. What I want to do now is to push the acting analogy a little further and suggest that amateur performance of Bible plays provides more than just a footnote in this Tale; it supplies a set of metaphorical resonances based on the idea of pretending to be what you are not, which supplies the mainspring of the Tale’s satirical thrust. Modern readers persist in seeing Absolon as effete, even effeminate. There is the hair for a start. His eyes, too, provide us with a detail of indeterminate significance. Grey eyes are associated with the ideal courtly lady; his are a debased burlesque version, grey as a goose (line 3315). But there is no innuendo about Absolon’s sexual orientation to match that directed at that other flaxen-haired falsetto, Chaucer’s Pardoner; on the contrary, Absolon is rather keen on women, if fastidious and precise about his appearance. To be able to sing falsetto is a 111

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skill not an affliction, and there is nothing to suggest that Absolon spoke like the Pardoner. The balance of probability is that no women participated in the London Clerks’ plays, as the organising body there was exclusively male, so some of the participants would have developed the skills necessary to take on female roles. There has been some debate in recent years about whether women took part in medieval theatricals which there is not the space to rehearse here.33 For present purpose, I want to suggest that some of the humour of The Miller’s Tale depends on Chaucer's having seen biblical plays with all-male casts. In particular, the joke on Absolon, the multi-talented parish clerk and seasoned performer, is not simply that he is rather effete and, therefore, woefully miscast as Herod, but that he is modelled on either an individual or a stereotypical cross-dresser, a parish-clerk actor accustomed because of his appearance, as well as certain physical and vocal skills, to being cast in some female role, even as the Virgin Mary. To understand the portrait of Absolon in this way explains how he can at once suggest characteristics which the modern reader perceives as effeminate, but can also be a showoff, would-be courtly lover, and womaniser. The theatrical analogy can be pushed further. There is a proto-mystery play in The Miller’s Tale, but it is not a play containing a Virgin Mary or a Herod, it is a Noah Play. The London parish clerks performed ‘The Passion of Our Lord and the Creation of the World’, one assumes not in that order, which may have contained a Noah’s ark. Alexandra Johnston has pointed out that, although parish Bible plays were often Easter plays, the Brome and Northampton plays of Abraham and Isaac fall into the category of parish dramas. Old Testament episodes were not, it seems, exclusive to the large civic cycles. The famous burlesque action of a Noah play involved the antediluvial marital strife of ancient Noah and his wife. It is frequently remarked that John the carpenter and Alison belong to the stock fabliau mal mariée tradition, often connected, as in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale, with the story of Joseph and Mary. In The Miller’s Tale, another biblical partnership is invoked, however, as John and Alison end the story playing Noah and his wife in their kneading tubs. The ‘play’ is a construct of Nicholas’s imagination, and, if Nicholas the intelligent outsider who gets the girl is Chaucer’s surrogate here, it is the author’s imagination which puts this provincial Noah and Mrs Noah into kneading tubs in a village duck pond. Epic theatre is always difficult to produce convincingly on parish scale. If Alison, then, is Mrs Noah in our proto-drama, she needs to be shrewish. This she qualifies for well. Her voice is ‘as loude and yerne/As any swalwe sittinge on a berne’ (ll 3257–58). The contemporary rules of female speech emphasise the desirability of silence and the need for demure speech, which call to mind Chaucer’s paragons Griselda and Virginia.34 The only exception to the rule is the bold speech of female virgin martyrs, and indeed when Alison has her first encounter with Nicholas, fearing rape, she does speak entirely in expletives; the trouble is that she is no virgin, and we remain unconvinced that she means it. Her 112

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‘Out! Harrow!’ would, nonetheless, not be inappropriate on the medieval stage. She also, however, needs to be a man. The famously anthologised portrait of Alison at the beginning of the Tale generally provokes commentary along the lines that Alison is a picture of female vitality which is, nonetheless, at odds with the courtly archetype of the sexually attractive woman. Generally, commentary focuses on the fields of imagery, farmyard and mercantile, as the explanation for this, and demonstrates how the portrait therefore differs from that of Emily in The Knight’s Tale. Alison’s appearance merits another look, however. She is very tall and, in modern parlance, ‘straightup-and-down’. To be as tall as a mast, upright as a bolt and slender as a weasel is to be more like a youth than a voluptuous girl. Then there is the loud voice, the elaborate figure-concealing dress – again the arbiters of conduct proscribe superfluity of clothing35 – in particular, the broad collar and the apron and the plucked eyebrows. Absolon may not be the only female impersonator in this Tale. There is, of course, a robust strain of contemporary criticism that finds interest in the complexities surrounding gender in The Miller’s Tale, all based on the observation that no one inhabits his or her gender identity in a simple way. Laskaya has remarked that The Miller’s Tale seems to see men who worship women according to the courtly love tradition as effeminate, that all the men in the Tale seek to control their world through their own versions of masculinity: John is the working man who creates with his hands, Nicholas the intellectual who creates with his mind, and Absolon is the courtly lover whose goal is to love women.36 All are vulnerable because their culturally constructed masculine roles depend upon assumptions about other men and about women, which turn out to be unreliable. Lomperis finds that there is no evidence that Alison is caged by John, whose main attitude to her seems loving and protective, that ostensibly the Tale pits Nicholas’s aggressive masculinity against Absolon’s passive effeminacy, yet it is Absolon who wields the phallic coulter at the end. Alison is not so much a passive sex-object either, but seems to be Nicholas’s willing partner. Her conclusion is that all the characters are highly theatrical. She remarks that cross-dressing characterised the medieval theatre that people gain attention in the Tale by their acting abilities, dressing up, role-playing and keeping up appearances. She relates this to fashions at the court of Richard II, where heterosexuality may not have been the only acceptable sexual practice.37 Elaine Tuttle Hansen’s focus is the denouement, where the emphasis on Alison’s ‘queynt’ shifts to one on her ‘hole’, from the specifically female organ to ‘the undifferentiated anus’, concluding that this shift is set up and is writ large by the subsequent substitution of Nicholas’s body for Alisoun’s, a maneuver that returns agency to the male but in doing so also exposes the humiliating and frightening lack of difference between male and female bodies.38 She observes that Absolon’s first anxiety when he reels back from his kiss is that he has kissed a man’s mouth rather than a woman’s. She goes on to explore 113

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further the sequence of confusions arising from what she calls ‘cross-undressing’ as anticipatory of Freudian narrative.39 I find the same features in the Tale’s characterisations but would wish to tie them to a more specific and literal source. Yes, there is a ‘humorous substitution of the male body for the female’, not just in the articulation of body parts at the Tale’s denouement, but throughout. Absolon’s capacity for manly action is fatally underestimated because he chooses on occasion to play the woman, and Alison in many respects is a man. Chaucer’s experiences as Clerk of Works in the long hot summer of 1390, working on the scaffolds at Smithfield, may well have inspired more than the description of the lists in The Knight’s Tale. In the same summer, he spent a lot of time in intimate contact with artisans in the building trade, particularly carpenters, and had every opportunity to observe the all-male amateur theatricals put on nearby by the Company of Parish Clerks. His court audience would have shared much of this experience, as they attended both the tournament and the plays, and we know from Froissart’s account of the rickety nature of the scaffolds from which the tournament was viewed, that a story which ended with a carpenter falling from a great height and breaking his arm is unlikely to have missed its mark.40 The Miller’s Tale is an acknowledged palimpsest of The Knight’s Tale, so it seems entirely appropriate to suggest that they were polished into the form in which they survive in The Canterbury Tales together. That being the case, it is unsurprising that both Tales draw elements of their imaginative worlds, and contemporary references for their original target audiences, from the experiences Chaucer had and the events that he witnessed in London during that summer.

Notes 1 E.K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage, 2 vols (Oxford, 1903), 2, 69–70. 2 See, for example, R.B. Dobson, ‘Craft Guilds and City: The Historical Origins of the York Plays Reassessed’, in Alan E. Knight, ed., The Stage as Mirror (Woodbridge, 1997), 91–106. 3 All references to The Canterbury Tales are taken from Larry D. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer (Boston, 1987). 4 Nigel Saul, ‘Richard II: Author of his Own Downfall’, History Today (September 1999), 36–41, 37, points out that Lancastrian chroniclers used comparisons with Absalom, Solomon and Chosroes of Persia to imply that Richard was brought down by the turning of Fortune’s wheel. 5 J. Toulmin Smith, The Parish, its Power and Obligations at Law (London, 1857), 197. 6 John Steer, Parish Law (London, 1830), 99. 7 Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Local Government from the Revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act: the Parish and the County (London, 1906), 32–34, especially 32n.2. 8 P.H. Ditchfield, The Parish Clerk (London, 1907), 17; Reginald H. Adams, The Parish Clerks of London (London and Chichester, 1971), 4–5. 9 Steer, 96–102; Adams, 2–3. 10 I am very grateful to Dr Norman James of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts for his illuminating correspondence on the subject. An edition of the Bede

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11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33

Roll of the Parish Clerk’s Company, Guildhall Library, London, MS 4889, with an explanatory introduction, is being prepared by Norman and Valerie James for publication by the London Record Society. Ditchfield, 18. Gonville and Caius College Cambridge, MS 383, 41, quoted from R.T. Davies, ed., Medieval English Lyrics: a Critical Anthology (London, 1963), 205. Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 135. Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, eds., York, 2 vols, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto, 1979), I, 87. R. W. Ingram, ed., Coventry, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981) 491, 183, 475–76, 478–80. Ditchfield, 36–38. Audrey Douglas, ‘“Owre Thanssynge Day”: Parish Dance and Procession in Salisbury’, English Parish Drama, ed. Alexandra Johnston and Wim Hüsken (Amsterdam, 1996), 41–63. Barbara D. Palmer, ‘“Anye disguised persons’: Parish Entertainment in West Yorkshire’, English Parish Drama 81–93, 89. Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘“What revels are in hand”: Dramatic Activities Sponsored by the Parishes of the Thames Valley’, English Parish Drama 95–104, 98–99. Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 217. Adams, 7. Ditchfield, 131 John Stow, A Survey of London (Oxford: Calrendon Press, 1908), 15. Adams, 7. The Westminster Chronicle 1381–1394, ed. and trans. by L.C. Hector and B. Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 438–39. Martin M. Crow and Claire C. Olsen, Chaucer Life Records (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 473. Ibid., 470–72. Ibid., 477–89. Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 212. Crow and Olsen, Life Records, 406–8. In 1419, one of the confraternity of parish clerks of London rose to be Town Clerk and wrote the Liber Albis (Adams, 14). His name was John Carpenter, a fact which must remain simply a coincidence, as Nicholas Rogers reports, ‘I am afraid that there is no John Carpenter among the few parish clerks from fourteenth century London who are known by name’ (private correspondence). John M. Gamin. Chaucerian Theatricality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Linda Lomperis, ‘Bodies That Matter in the Court of Late Medieval England and In Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale’, Romanic Review, 86 (1995), 243–64. See Peter Meredith, ‘“Item for a Grone – iijd” – Records and Performance’, Records of Early English Drama: Proceedings of the First Colloquium, ed. JoAnna Dutka (Toronto, Records of Early English Drama, 1979), 55 n.42, who points out that what evidence there is all points to women ‘roles having been taken by men’. Meg Twycross, ‘“Transvestism” in the Mystery Plays’, Medieval English Theatre 5:2 (1983), 123–80, adheres to the same argument, supported by practical experiment. On the other side, Jeremy Goldberg, ‘Craft Guilds, the Corpus Christi Play and Civic Government’, The Government of Medieval York: Essays in Commemoration of the 1396 Royal Charter, ed. by Sarah Rees-Jones (York, 1997), 141–65, 146–47, has recently suggested that the scant evidence of women’s participation in civic ceremonial is connected with the fact that the survival of records is directly related to the growth of civic control over mystery plays, but that it is reasonable to speculate that women may have performed in

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34 35 36 37 38 39 40

the civic cycle plays before their participation came to be proscribed by the controlling civic authorities. Margaret Hallisey, Clean Maids, True Wives, Steadfast Widows: Chaucer’s Women and Medieval Codes of Conduct (London: Greenwood Press, 1993), 59–74. Ibid., 113–34. Anne Laykaska, Chaucer’s Approach to Gender in the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995). Lomperis, ‘Bodies that Matter’. Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1992), 228. Ibid., 231–36. Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 231.

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9 DRAMA Sacred and secular From: Corinne Sanders, ed., The Companion to Medieval English Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 2010) pp. 626–46 The full extent of the lost entertainment industry of medieval England is still emerging. The Records of Early English Drama project continues to unearth material offering new contexts in which to study the relatively few surviving play scripts. No longer can we fall back on a secure, coeval body of ‘mystery cycles’ and ‘morality plays’. In the former category, the only complete true cycles are York’s and Chester’s – although the manuscript history of the latter is complex – as the pageants in the Towneley manuscript and the so-called N. Town plays from East Anglia are now recognised to be compilations.1 And although there are enough sixteenth-century moral interludes to establish the auspices of a genre, the medieval moralities consist of only the three plays in the Macro manuscript (The Castle of Perseverance, Mankind and Wisdom), the Anglo-Irish Pride of Life and Everyman, which is a translation from the Dutch.2 The surviving body of English medieval plays is more securely viewed as a random and eccentric corpus of texts written by unknown authors for ephemeral performance and recorded in a variety of manuscripts. They are not a crosssection of the largely lost dramatic activity of medieval England, nor can they provide us with the centrifugal and centripetal patterns of influence offered by the products of high culture. There is virtually no record of the spoken texts of dramatic entertainments outside the royal entry, regularly enjoyed by courtly society in pre-Tudor England. Moreover, the manuscripts in which English medieval plays survive were written for a variety of different reasons, but hardly ever as performance scripts. Many of them are not strictly ‘finished’, but are imperfect, ongoing and interrupted attempts at civic control, or at record-keeping, or are the products of early antiquarian exercises in retrospective preservation. All post-date original performance, some by a considerable period. For example, the surviving manuscripts of the Chester Play all date from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, by which time the play had ceased to be performed. They include modifications made to the play to accommodate the Reformation, but we can also be confident that they represent much of what was performed in the streets of Chester in the fifteenth century. Equally, we know that Coventry had dramas based on salvation history throughout the fifteenth century, although the two 117

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surviving pageants are a rewrite from the 1530s of the Weavers’ Pageant, and an early nineteenth-century antiquarian copy of the lost pageant of the Shearmen and Taylors.3 Yet, when all the difficulties presented by the corpus of texts have been taken into account, we can be confident that what survives of medieval English drama is most usefully understood in the context of the long fifteenth century. All surviving medieval English plays are written in verse, and the search for poetically well-made plays could drive us back to the anthology pieces that reliably stand up against the canon of Ricardian and Lancastrian poetry, in yielding satisfyingly rich close readings. Another approach is proposed here in open acknowledgement of the fractured canon of medieval drama, and that is that we look at examples of the textual and modal variety across the range, rather than at the consistency and quality of single scripts, in search of the auspices of this very particular kind of performance poetry. Most surviving medieval plays in English are persuasive in purpose and devotional in content. Commonly persuasive performance is associated with the ‘colours’ of rhetoric, and some playwrights do indeed display knowledge of formal rhetorical theory, particularly in Prologues. Predictably, Everyman, the English translation of one of the products of a Dutch rederijkerskamer, ‘chamber of rhetoric’, clearly signals in its opening stanzas the formal distinction between ‘matter’, ‘intention’ and ‘manner of presentation’:4 Messenger. I pray you all gyue your audyence, And here this mater with reuerence, By fygure a morall playe. The Somonynge of Eueryman called it is, That of our lyues and endynge shewes How transytory we be all daye. This mater is wonders precyous; But the entent of it is more gracyous, And swete to bere alwaye. The story sayth: Man, in the begynnynge Loke well, and take good heed to the endynge. Be you neuer so gay! (ll. 1–12) The source is not Cicero but Peter Lombard, omnipresent in ecclesiastical libraries in England, who discusses these distinctions in his commentary on the Psalms. It was translated into English by Richard Rolle: Ϸe mater of þis boke es Crist and his spouse þat es, haly kirk, or ilke a rightwys mans saule. Ϸe entent es to confourme þo þat ere fyled in Adam tille Crist in newness of lyf. Ϸe maner of lare es swilke: vmstunt he spekys of Crist in his godhead, vmstunt in his manhede, vmstunt in þat þat he vses þe voice of bis servauntes.5 118

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Here is the character called Contemplacio, opening the N. Town Mary Play: Cryst conserve þis congregacyon Fro perellys past, present and future, And þe personys here pleand, þat þe pronunciacyon Of her sentens to be seyd mote be sad and sure, And þat non oblocucyon make þis matere obscure, But it may profite and plese eche persone present, From þe gynnynge to þe endynge so to endure Ϸat Cryst and every creature with þe conceyte be content.

error

This matere here mad is of þe modyr of mercy, How be Joachym and Anne was here concepcyon, Sythe offred into þe temple, compiled breffly, Than maryed to Joseph, and so, folwing þe salutcyon, Metyng with Elyzabeth, and þerwith a conclusion In fewe wurdys talkyd þat it xulde not be tedyous To lernyd nyn to lewd, nyn to no man of reson. Ϸis is þe processe; now preserve ʒow, Jhesus.6 The figure called Poeta, who opens the Digby Killing of the Children, also distinguishes between ‘story’, ‘entent’ and ‘process’.7 This apparent formality in the mode of telling plays to a tenacious understanding that medieval drama is ‘didactic’ in a narrowly scholastic way. It is, however, a mode almost entirely concentrated in openings, and often the matter of late additions.8 In the Middle Ages, rhetoric and poetry were recognised to be modally distinct. Hermann the German is clear on the subject: The purpose of rhetoric is to make the opposing side abandon vice by vanquishing it. But the purpose of poetry is to win its listeners to the practice of virtue through praise and encouragement. He adds, ‘rhetoric is not an adequate method of proceeding in moral matters’.9 Two early witnesses support the understanding that despite its public, performative and persuasive function, devotional drama owes more to the procedures of poetry than to the formal rhetoric of either Cicero or the pulpit. The author of the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge observes: ofte syþis by siche myraclis pleyinge men and wymmen, seynge þe Passioun of Crist and Hise seyntis ben movyd to compassion and devocion, wepyng bitere teris, þanne þei ben not scornynge of God but worschipyng.10 Then, in the early sixteenth century, Nicholas Grimald, in his dedicatory epistle to his Latin play Christus Redivivus, gives an author’s account of the process of 119

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writing scriptural history as dramatic dialogue. He reflects on the need to create a sense of immediacy, to match register to character and circumstance, to control metrical arrangement, to avoid padding with bad jokes, to bear in mind that the central character is the originator of language, and therefore not to be too contrived but to make the plain story vividly eloquent by the means available to a writer for the theatre: Primum enim non id me suscipere atque profiteri, ut reuelem atdita mysteria: sed ut undum ac veram historiam enarrem. & modo quodam Pöetica, hoc est. claro et illustri spectaculo patefaciam. [I did not attempt or profess to reveal hidden mysteries, but to tell a plain unadorned tale, and to set it forth in a certain poetical manner, so to speak, that is, by a bright and glorious spectacle.] Grimald goes on to commend ‘earnest reflection and unremitting prayer’ over ‘the Ciceros, Aristotles, and Galens’.11 Just as this drama derives its modes of expression from a repertoire wider than that offered by formal rhetoric, so too its devotional content is theologically eclectic.12 The combination of faith, plus knowledge of scripture, plus Aristotelian logic – scholastic theology – was on its own admission elite. Evidently aware of this, playwrights, while sporadically showing off their schoolroom understanding of the nature of Holy Writ, draw more heavily on the monastic theological tradition to foster lay piety. This is, in turn, further elaborated to make it powerfully and directly accessible through the procedures of the most fundamentally poetic of medieval theologies, now referred to as ‘vernacular theology’, with its direct appeals to spirituality. The project was to move the community of believers to penance, hence the works which more profoundly influence the quality of English verse scriptural drama are not those of Aquinas. Lombard and Abelard, but in Latin the Meditationes Jesu Christi, Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, Richard Rolle’s lncendium Amoris (The Fire of Love), and in English such works as The Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost and, of course, Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ. In short, the inspiration behind the imaginative construction of most English devotional drama derives not from the schoolroom marriage of classical rhetoric and scholastic theology, but from an understanding of the goals of vernacular theology transmitted to the audience through a variety of poetic discourses whose overall aesthetic goal is to move. The presenter figure in the Prologue to the Bodley Burial of Christ is closer to this understanding of what constitutes a play.13 From the outset, the function of the play is presented as affective: A soule that liste to singe of loue Of Crist, that com tille vs so lawe 120

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Rede this treyte, it may hym moue, And may hym teche lightly with-awe

read this treatise (1–4)

Elsewhere, the business of conveying the story is fully integrated into the dialogue. In the Old Testament sequence in the York Play,14 it is God himself who takes on the explicatory role at the start of each pageant. As the Mary Play progresses, Contemplacio, initially a presenter figure, responds directly and emotionally to the action, inhabiting the same time-scheme as the other characters. Thus, on the brink of the Annunciation, he prays: Wolde God þu woldyst breke þin hefne myghtye And com down here into erth, And levyn ȝerys thre and threttye, years Thyn famyt folke with fode to fede; famished To staunche þi thryste lete þi side blede, For erste wol not be mad redempcyon. Cum vesyte vs in þis tyme of need; Of þi careful creaturys, Lord, haue compassion!

(1068–75)

Anticipating the debate of the four daughters of God which follows, he elides the historical Incarnation of Christ with the perpetual presence of mercy in the world, and in particular, the ritual means of its fulfilment through the sacrament of the altar. Contemplacio truly is a liminal figure, at once participant in the drama of the Incarnation and celebrant in its sacramental mirror. The sacraments of the Church, especially the sacrament of penance, are a major focus in fifteenth-century English vernacular theology. At the heart of penance is contrition, and to arrive at true contrition, the believer must be moved, preferably to tears. English scriptural plays, responding to the devotional climate in which they flourished, developed their own performance poetics of affect. Affect is achieved in religious prose by anatomising and offering up for meditation the human sufferings of Christ and the Virgin Mary in a homely register or middle style. Various things happen when this is adapted to the exigencies of drama. Here is the Angel Gabriel urging Mary to submit to the Holy Ghost in the Mary Play: Mary, come of and haste the, And take hede in thyn entent Whow þe Holy Gost, blyssyd he be Abydyth þin answere and þin assent. Thorwe wyse werke of dyvinyté The secunde persone, verament, Is mad man by fraternyté Withinne þiself in place present. 121

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Ferthermore take hede þis space Whow all þe blyssyd spyrytys of vertu Ϸat are in hefne byffore Goddys face, And all þe·gode levers and trew living people That arre here in þis erthely place – Thyn owyn kyndrede þe soothe ho knew – And þe chosyn sowlys þis tyme of grace Ϸat are in helle and byde rescu. As Adam, Abraham, and Davyd, in fere, together And many othere of good reputacyon Ϸat þin answere desire to here And þin assent to þe incarnacyon. In which þu standyst as persever recipient Of all mankende savacyon. Gyff me myn answere now, lady dere, To all these creaturys comfortacyon. (ll. 1324–47) Gabriel’s expression of urgency and anxiety about Mary’s reply follows Nicholas Love’s Mirrour closely. Love’s text is, however, a narrative meditation in the authorial voice on how all creation waited for Mary’s reply15; it is the playwright’s stroke of dramatic genius to turn this into a poignant and personal plea from Gabriel. What the dialogue adds to the source is an enhancement of the suspense of the moment. Its cool middle style turns the Angel Gabriel into a dramatic character and invites the audience to participate in the momentous responsibility faced by both. It also uses the deixis of the dialogue, that is, the way in which what is referred to is ‘pointed at’, in an extraordinarily dynamic way as a counterpart to the visual arrangement of the scene. The stage direction immediately preceding Gabriel’s speech reads: Here þe aungel makyth a lytyl restynge and Mary beholdyth hym, and þe aungel seyth … One imagines Mary, as is iconographically almost invariable, kneeling at her priedieu opposite the angel, who is probably on one knee with the lily stretched out towards her. By gesture, and by the repeated use of the second person pronoun, the archangel draws the eye to the person of the Virgin at the very brink of the Incarnation. Gabriel then opens out the picture from the intimate confines of the chamber to encompass first the Trinity and all the company of heaven, then the good livers and true in the earthly space, including the audience, and finally the prophets and patriarchs waiting below in limbo. The audience is, thereby, affectingly included in the moment at which all the cosmos holds its breach waiting for a particular girl to ‘come off and haste’, to ‘take heed’, as imperative verbs issuing from a gorgeous, friendly, but impatient archangel urge her on to make the most momentous decision 122

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since Eve took the apple from the serpent. This is, broadly, the way that vernacular theology is, in the right hands, peculiarly well adapted to the stage. The strategic insertion of meditative moments into narrative dialogue is often used by medieval dramatists as a way of controlling the pace and nature of the emotional impact of the action. The most obvious examples are the speeches spoken from the Cross by the crucified Christ, drawing on a variety of non-gospel sources. The dramatist of the York Pinners’ pageant develops his from the Good Friday Improperia, drawing direct inspiration from the liturgy.16 The later Towneley dramatist’s Christ, in a pageant that develops and amalgamates the material of the York Pinners’ and Butchers’ pageants, is more vocal still.17 Using a technique similar to that observed above in the Mary Play, the Crucified Christ here speaks out directly to the audience. The pattern of an almost haranguing series of rhetorical questions – improperia means ‘reproaches’ – is followed by the affecting quietude of the declarative statement of the speaker’s unique lack of sanctuary. The image is biblical, not the poet’s own, but is here exploited poetically for maximum affect, drawing the audience’s eye not to the conventional five effusions of blood but to the iconic gesture of the head resting on the shoulder, a tiny movement of immense pathos: My folk, what haue I done to the, That thou all thus shall tormente me? Thy syn by I full sore. What haue I greuyd the? answere me, That thou thus nalys me to a tre, And all for thyn erroure; Where shall thou seke socoure? This mys how shall thou amende? When that thou thy saveoure Dryfes to this dyshonoure, And nalys thrugh feete and hende! All creatoures that kynde may kest, Beestys, byrdys, all haue·thay rest, When thay ar wo begon; Bot godys son, that shuld, be best, Hase not where apon his hede to rest, Bot on his shuder bone.

fault compels accord with nature

(244–60)

In the York Butchers’ more complex pageant of the Death of Christ,18 the dramatist uses dialogue to move the narrative from one moment to the next, then freezes the action whenever it resolves into an iconic image, accompanying the chosen moment of stasis with an affecting lyric, such as when the Virgin delivers her conventional complaint at the base of the Cross, and when Longeus speaks a hymn of praise for Christ’s restoration of his sight: 123

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O maker vnmade, full of myght, O Jesu so jentill and jente Ϸat sodenly has sente me my sight, Lorde, louyng to þe be it lente. On rode arte þou ragged and rente, Mankind for to mende of his mys. Full spitously spilte is and spente Thi bloode, lorde, to bringe vs to blis Full free. A, mercy my socoure, Mercy, my treasuure, Mercy, my sauioure, þi mercy be markid in me.

praising make amends for his sin spitefully killed

(300–12)

In this way, lyric tropes accompany iconic visual images to create meditative nodes for reflection. The York Winedrawers’ Christ’s Appearance to Mary Magdalene is a comparatively simple two-hander in which Mary Magdalene encounters Christ as the gardener after the Resurrection.19 Yet this whole pageant is shot through with expressions of emotional state with a more complex trajectory. Mary insistently refers to her distress in her first speech. This is held in the foreground while the dialogue also works proleptically, so that the audience is led to anticipate the fulfilment of her wishes to be reunited with Christ. She acts as an inciter of emotion throughout the sequence, although the audience’s comfort anticipates hers as they immediately identify her interlocutor.20 Christ then draws further attention to her emotional state and keeps it continuously in the foreground. He does not himself express explicitly any emotions, but his look-but-don’t-touch body, its wounds displayed, is the fetishised object of the scene, offering both the comfort of looking at it and the possibility of renewed pity for which the Magdalene has served as the warm-up act. Between them, they then offer a compressed retrospective narrative of the Crucifixion, culminating in her renewed expressions of distress: Of bale howe schulde I blynne? To se þis ferly foode Þus ruffully dight, Rugged and rente on a roode, Þis is a rewfull sight.

woe: make an end wondrous person pitifully put to death (107–11)

Christ then reveals that she must soon relinquish his physical presence for good, so there is no apparent narrative justification for Mary’s sudden emotional reversal: Alle for joie me likes to synge, Myne herte is gladder þanne þe glee, 124

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And all for joie of þy risyng Þat suffered dede vpponne a tree.

(124–26)

She has, however, been through an emotionally cathartic process which releases her to dwell on the Resurrection. The pageant thus ends by completing the emotional cycle of distress, comfort and joy, which may be seen as analogising confession, contrition and satisfaction. What we are observing here is a contrapuntal relationship between the shape described by the narrative of the scene and that described by the development of its affective rise and fall. The sustained monologue of lament by Mary at the base of the Cross in the Bodley Burial of Christ,21 effectively a vernacular planctus Mariae – the liturgical trope which imitates the Virgin Mary’s lament at the base of the Cross – works in a similar way. In these examples, the audience is first brought into emotional proximity with remote biblical characters, then put through a cathartic experience. The chief tools in this process are not those of dramatic realism but of performance poetry. Geoffrey of Vinsauf, in his Poetria Nova, found three languages that should be used in reciting: ‘first, that of the mouth; next that of the speaker’s countenance, and, third, that of gesture’. His view of oral delivery is highly stylised, matching tone of voice and pace to subject matter. He then takes as his example how to replicate anger: If you represent the person of this angry man, what, as a speaker, will you do? Imitate true rages. Yet be not yourself enraged; behave partially like the character, but not inwardly. Let your behaviour be the same in every detail but not to such an extent; and suggest wrath becomingly.22 Modern analyses of how emotion is represented in performance poetry are interestingly close to Geoffrey’s. In performance, the choice has to be made of whether or not to add direct expression – gasps, sobs, sighs – or to trust to the particular arrangement of the spoken text. In life, emotional cognition does not share the same temporal dynamic as thought and speech: at moments of great emotion, incoherent expletives precede articulation. What affective poetry does is to unify the timescales of emotion and concept in its own verbal music: the poet can make the speed of thought and the speed of imagined emotion coincide, since conceptions share the same time-scale. He distances the real emotion and uses it rather as a painter uses paint; whereas the aesthetic emotional tension may be high. Moreover, Intonation cannot mime its reaction to imaginary emotion without copying the necessary relation it has to real emotions: the coding is already 125

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there in the usage of language … our delicacy in perceiving the emotional effect of intonational patterns is even more fine in poetry than in ordinary speech, owing to the more evident patterning.23 Aesthetic success with affect is dependent on the authenticity of the intonation pattern and in dramatic actions the success of a scene depends on its visual and aural reception working in concert. Affect is not achieved only by concealed artifice or by the middle style favoured by prose writers such as Love; it can, in this drama, also be the product of high style and grand artifice. Taking an example once more from the Mary Play, at the culmination of the Virgin’s visit to Elizabeth, the two women recite together the Magnificat, Mary in Latin, Elizabeth interpolating an English verse translation. In the macaronic text, the English expounds the Latin, but that is not the primary effect. Rather, metrical and aural patterning dominate and give the verse a sinuousness reminiscent of antiphonal chant, moving forward recursively to the conclusion. Here the fulfilment of a stylised pattern provides the audience with a sense of completion. Liturgy’s handling of scriptural history stands in particular relation to poetry, for it does not work according to the procedures of narrative telling, but has a recursive and thematic construction following the patterning of the hours of worship.24 This thematic recurrence is not simply aesthetic, but characterises Augustinian figural views of history. In liturgical performance this is replicated in the antiphonal use of voices, as lesson, response and versicle move to and fro between events and their outcomes, dwelling on selected verses from the gospel text of the day. The pattern is interspersed with psalmody which is wholly lyrical in mode and other familiar non-narrative materials of which the Magnificat is one, along with the Te Deum, Nunc dimittis and the hymns of Fortunatus.25 The memorable climaxes of liturgical telling are not concerned with narrative agency but with vocalisation as part of the devout sensuality of sound, gesture and incense. Playwrights steeped in the procedures of worship knew how to exploit the momentous and dwelt-on moment by combining iconic sight with sound. We know from the visual arts how stylised and demonstrative action may have resolved itself into familiar images, but we have paid less attention to sound. In performance poetry, rhythm gives a sense of movement by combining prosody and intonation. Anticipating modern musicology, John of Garland recognised how rhythmic patterning generates emotional impact. The seventh book of his twelfth-century Parisiana Poetria, ‘Incipit ars rithmica’, relates rhythm in poetry to music.26 The English fifteenth-century dramatists were demonstrably also aware that the poetics of affect depend not only on simple accessibility, but on the emotional impact afforded by the memory and memorability of the Church’s special discourse and on its concomitant highly stylised aural arrangement. In passus XII of the B-text of Piers Plowman, Will mounts a defence of the supremacy of poetry over the didactic discourses of the Church, distinguishing between ‘kind wit’ and ‘clergy’, the former being a superior way of arriving at 126

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truth. The argument is uncannily similar to what Samuel Taylor Coleridge was later to describe in his theory of poetry as the ‘ideal of compression … a commingling of thought and feeling which defies and overrides the sequential operation of the reasoning faculties’. Coleridge observed that there is ‘something in the human mind which makes it know … that in all finite quantity there is infinite, in all measure of time an eternal’ concluding: The symbolic language of poetry is thus by its nature sacramental, for it connects finite and infinite consubstantiality.27 Poetry, expressed in these terms, takes on the special properties of a metadiscourse enacting the operation of the Word. Understood in this way, the moments of highly stylised poetry not only allude to sacred text, but call to its service particular intonational patterns matched to moments of iconic stillness of visual image. This produces a peculiar compression and heightening that supplies an emotional range beyond that of prose. It is capable not only of generating sorrow, contrition and comfort, but also of leading the audience at strategic moments into wonder and awe unrelated to the scale of the theatrical production. It is particularly important to deploy all these tools at the moment of opening a large performance which has to capture the attention of a street audience at a festive event, and this is exactly the strategy of the author of the York Play’s first speech, as God opens the Barkers’ Fall of the Angels.28 Attracted by the resonant Latin of the first line, the attentive audience member holds and savours the whole stanza in the immediate memory, uniting past and future in the present moment – in the manner that the ear receives a symphonic theme in music: God Ego sum Alpha et nouissimus. I am gracyus and grete, God withoutyn begynnyng, I am maker vnmade, all mighte es in me; I am lyfe and way vnto welth-wynnyng, I am formaste and fyrste, als I byd sall it be. My blyssyng o ble sall be blendyng, countenance dazzling And heldand, fro harme to be hydande, pouring forth hiding My body in blys ay abydande, remaining Vnendande, withoutyn any endyng. (ll. 1–9) This is the expression of the word by the Word, the logos, in preparation for the ultimate speech-act, the act of Creation. Dramatic writing is not simply a matter of big speeches, however; in all drama, narrative is dispersed amongst a series of different voices. Each speaking voice emanates from a particular material body, but the goal need not be one of verisimilitude of person, any more than staging aims always to reproduce particularities 127

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of real space in real time. Vernacular theology offered the authors of scriptural drama a range of creative opportunities which achieved three things: first, it evaded doctrinal issues by not engaging in scholastic argument; second, it realised the potential of the direct aural effect of spoken text, of the musicality of metre and the familiar yet luminous quality of liturgical Latin to move its audience in ways that owe more to chant than to semantics; and third its meditative dwelling on images in the mind’s eye translated itself perfectly into a deictic style that allowed for the intersection of the verbal and the visual. All of these are the tools of a very specialised form of performance poetry. There is, however, another type of dramatic writing in many of the plays that exploits the self-conscious textuality on which we have focused so far to anatomise the ungodly by foregrounding different forms of disorderly language. The York Coopers’ Satanas29 gives the audience rather redundant warning that they are about to hear lies. Lying, like disguising, is second nature to the forces of evil. In the York pageant of the Resurrection,30 the newly awoken soldiers who were supposed to have been guarding Christ’s tomb conclude their lively exchange of frantic questions with the resolve: II Miles

Vs muste make lies, for þat is need, Oureselue to saue.

(320–21)

Language is a particularly morally charged sign system in this drama. Taking its cue from the theology which understands the deity to be an embodiment of the logos, it consistently exploits its own metatextual potential to collapse sign and signified together. Moreover, this takes place against the background of an Augustinian tradition which casts verbal perversion as deviant. A strong catechetical tradition anatomised sins of speech, while at the same time imposing strict ordering principles on the systematised utterances through which individuals affirmed their faith and orthodoxy. The catechetical tradition is in turn reflected in the drama, when, for example, the Chester apostles at Pentecost recite the Creed,31 the N. Town Mary and Elizabeth, as we have seen, say the Magnificat, and the sheep are divided from the goats in all Last Judgement pageants according to the duly rehearsed Works of Corporal Mercy. We see the influence of this tradition of systematised statements of faith, which reduces poetry by its repetitive formulaic structure to its mnemonic function, reflected in Anima’s affirmation of her faith in Wisdom, where the form as much as the content signals her soundness: Soveren Lord, I am bounde to Thee Wan I was nought Ϸou made me thus gloryus; Wan I perysshede thorow synne Ϸou savyde me; Wen I was in grett perell Ϸou kept me, Cristus; Wen I erryde Ϸou reducyde me, Jhesus Wen I was ignorant Ϸou tawt me truthe; 128

led me back

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Wen I synnyde Ϸou correcte me·thus; Wen I was hewy Ϸou comfortede me by ruthe

pity

(239–42)32

Books like The Lay Folks’ Catechism, and The Stanzaic Life of Christ, influential, in particular, on the Chester Play, offer much of the catechetical agenda in vernacular verse, which is memorable and accessible. In the hands of a good dramatist, such material can provide a punctuating and arresting moment, but one of the challenges of the stage is that disproportionate language, that is, the language of evil, presents so many opportunities for more engaging dialogue. Audiences are, by turns, seduced, warned and cajoled into an understanding that the word is the deed, as these dramatists demonstrate the correct and perverted uses of language, a barometer of moral condition. There are good speakers, like Mercy in Mankind, who deliver their messages in the Latinate discourse of the Church, in orderly whole lines of metrical regularity, often in whole stanzas.33 But then there are also bad speakers, like the scions of Herod’s court in the York Christ before Herod, who speak French, false Latin, and some notable nonsense: I faute in my reuerant in otill moy, I am of fauour, loo, fairer be ferre, Kyte oute yugilment. Vta! Oy! Oy! Be any witte þat Y watte it will waxe were

(239–42)34

Here, orderly stanzas degenerate into stichomythic dialogue and broken syntax in which everyone seems to be rudely interrupting everyone else. The message that there is no authoritative voice needs no overt statement. The elaborate alliterative stanza of this and the other trial pageants in the York Play lends itself particularly to chaotic dialogue, as much as to the pomping speeches of a succession of tyrants whose mouths are as overfull of words as their heads are full of their own deluded self-importance. In the post-Wycliffite period, the use of the vernacular in matters associated with Holy Writ had become politically charged. The language of poetry is a disguise, a mask, which sometimes slips to reveal the unruliness of the tongue and to warn the audience that the power of the word, which can lead them into greater spiritual enlightenment or move them to pious tears, can also bring about a fall. In discussing why the Holy Spirit took the form of tongues of flame at Pentecost, the author of the Golden Legend warns that the tongue is the member of the body that is hardest to control, yet most useful when well controlled, so most needful of the direct intervention of the Holy Spirit.35 ‘Bad’ or subversive language is given a particular focus in two medieval English plays: in Mankind and in the Towneley Judicium;36 the devil in charge of punishments associated with the unruly tongue, Titivillus/Tutivillus, is cast as a dramatic character. He has a long and complicated history, derived from his association with 129

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the two types of verbal sin: saying too little and saying too much. Specifically, although the Church valorised silence in a number of contexts, it deplored the lazy priest who omitted words or syllables from the divine office, so that Titivillus, in one of his incarnations, collected them up in his sack. This sack-carrying devil described by Jacques de Vitry in the early thirteenth century is, as Michael Clanchy remarks, concerned with oral rather than literal skills in the clergy and is vividly depicted in The Myroure of Oure Ladye.37 Related to him, and also appearing in the thirteenth century, is, however, the recording demon, concerned with writing down the superfluous words of those who gossiped in church. In verse sermon exempla, references to Tutivillus are characteristically macaronic, beginning in Latin before descending into English epithets for those who bungle the delivery of divine office. One such verse, in MS Lansdowne 765, a treatise on music, deplores the ruination of the ancient music of the Psalms by slothful priests: Destestacio contra perverse psallentes Qui psalmos resecant, qui verba rescisa volutant, Non magis illi ferent quam si male lingue tacerant, Hi sunt psalmos corrumpunt nequitur almos: Quos sacra scriptura dampnat, reprobant quo que jura; Ionglers cum Jappers, Nappers, Galpers, quoque Drawers, Momlers, Fforskippers, Over(r)enners, sic Overhippers. Fragmina verborum TUTIVILLUS colligit horum. condemn perverted singers of the Psalms, who shorten them and rumble about the excised words. They say no more than if their evil tongues had been silent (?), those who corrupt sweet Psalms wretchedly. Those whom sacred scripture condemns, they also reject the laws, such as Jongleurs, Japers, Nappers, Gulpers, as well as Drawers, Mumblers, Foreskippers, Overrunners, and Overhippers. It is fragments of these words that Tutivillus collects.38 What is interesting for our purposes is again the cross-over between music and language: it is the violation of the sound of divine office that is condemned. The syllables that Titivillus collected were the result of syncope, or the omission of unstressed syllables, as the slovenly priest did not understand his Latin grammar, so simply slurred over or omitted the unstressed inflectional endings. True syncopation is not mimicked in any of our dramas, but evil characters do tend to speak in short lines with a predominance of accentuated syllables. Consider Lucifer in Wisdom. Wisdom is written predominantly in an eight-line stanza, with lines of nine or ten syllables rhyming ababbcbc, whose pivotal fourth and fifth lines convey to the ear a sense of the progress of reasoned symmetrical argument which contributes to the tone of this most genteel of dramas. How much more striking is it then, when Lucifer bursts in upon the scene and delivers four 130

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stanzas, in short regular lines of one spondaic foot followed by an iamb, each line beginning and ending with a stressed syllable, and rhyming with an equally emphatic aaabaaab – the devil is angry: Owt, harrow, I rore! For envy I lore. My place to restore God hath made a man. All cum þey not thore, Woode: and þey wore. mad I xall tempte hem so sorre, For I am he þat syn begane.

(325–56)

In this play, metrical change is managed closely to reflect moral degeneration in a way that presages John Skelton’s Magnificence, where ‘Skeltonics’, the author’s signature verse form, is used to chart the fall of the protagonist into folly.39 Recognition of the mirroring of moral degeneracy by linguistic collapse in Mankind has become a commonplace in criticism.40 The verbal crimes associated with Titivillus are both evidenced in the play. Notably the audience is seduced into idleness of tongue by their participation in the obscene audience song with its blasphemous refrain, ‘Hoylyke, holyke, holyke! Holyke, holyke holyke!’ (344). The play’s use of ‘dog’ Latin is also well known: in ‘Corn seruit bredibus, chaffe horsibus, straw fyrybusque’ (57), Mischief’s addition of the final grammatically exact ‘que’ gives the line an additional twist of insolence. Two lines further on, the ending ‘et reliqua’ (‘and the rest’) explicitly parodies lazy priests: the words are part of the rubric after the incipit of biblical readings in the Breviary, indicating that the rest should be read. Mankind’s own language disintegrates as he falls into sin, to ragged expletives: ‘A tapster, a tapster! Stow statt stow!’ (730). Although, in this play, ‘no word, whether Latin or English, is incorruptible’, individual characters, and their audience, are free to resist the degeneration of language, and ‘while the surface play of words enacts subversive manoeuvres, the structure of the action recuperates the authority of the sacred Word’.41 Within the logic of the play’s overarching structure, this is indisputable, as Mercy ends directly addressing the audience: Mankend ys wrechyd, he hath suflicyent prowe Therefore God grant ʒow all per suam misericordiam Ϸat ye may be pleyferys with þe angellys abowe And hawe to ʒour porcyon vitam eternam Amen!

advantage through his mercy share; eternal life (912–15)

Yet in terms of muscular discourse, supported by striking theatrical devices, in delivery and reception, the devil does indeed have all the best tunes. Titivillus, 131

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coming ‘with my leggys wnder me’ (454), possibly on stilts, and evidently with a huge devil-mask, his ‘hede þat is of grett omnipotens’ (461), sets up an immediate rapport with the audience, by enlisting them as co-conspirators in his plot to make Mankind ‘schyte lesynges’: Not a worde. I charge yow, peyn of forty pens. on pain of (a fine) A pratty game xall be scheude yow or ʒe go hens shown; before Ʒe may here hym snore, he ys sade aslepe. Qwyst! pesse! Ϸe Deull ys dede! I xall go ronde in hys ere. whisper Alasse, Mankind, alasse! Mercy stowl a mere! has stolen He ys runn away fro hys master, þer wot no man where; knows Moreover, he stale both a hors and a nete. ox (590–96) In the Towneley Judicium, Tutivillus has a much broader role, setting deficiencies in religious observation in the broader context of what amounts to general fecklessness, such as the wearing of fashionable clothing by the ‘wives’ (344) while their children starve. Those who chatter in church and fail to pay attention are gathered up with a list of others whose chief failing seems to be a grievously short attention span and the desire to get rich quick and make a flashy show. Though he describes himself as ‘master Lollar’, this Tutivillus is no linguistic slouch, thanks to the poetic virtuosity of his creator:42 Of the rownde tabill, Of breffes in my bag, man, Of synnes dampnabill; Vnnethes may I wag, man, For-wery in youre stabill Whils I set my stag, man …

writs scarcely stir unruly horse

(326–32)

Women are, according to this Tutivillus, peculiarly prone to the sins which he specialises in recording: And Nell with her nytyls Of crisp and of sylke, Tent well youre twyfyls, Your nek abowte as mylke; With youre bendys and youre bridyls Of Sathan, the whilke Sir Sathanas idylls You for tha ilke, This Gill knaue It is open behynde, 132

fripperies ruffles sashes; braids makes worthless those same Jill-knave

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Before is it pynde; Bewar of the west wynde, Your smok lest it wafe

(469–81)

The decision of the latest editors of the Towneley Plays to present the ‘Wakefield’ pageants in thirteen-line stanzas points up the comparability in sheer verbal dexterity, of Tutivillus’ attacks on sinners, with poems such as John Skelton’s ‘The Tunnyng of Eleanor Rummyng’, or William Dunbar’s ‘Ane Dance in the Quenis Chalmer’. All share the property of injecting energy and movement into subjects which are essentially grotesque descriptive snapshots. Manipulation of the same verse form is deployed to a variety of purposes in the famous Secunda Pastorum. Here the stanza is used for burlesque action, as when the shepherds discover that Mac’s ‘heir’ is their lost lamb: Tercius Pastor. Gyf me lefe hym to kys And lyft vp the clowtt. What the dewill is this? He has a long snowte.

(842–45)

But equally, in the opening speeches of the shepherds, it can evoke the lyric of popular complaint, and, in the voice of the Virgin Mary, it can be turned into the poetry of high ceremonial seriousness as she sends her visitors on their way. One suspects that one attraction to the modern reader of Secunda Pastorum, apart from the evident quality of the writing, is the fact that its subplot offers a piece of secular invention in the midst of so many Bible stories. England has few surviving secular dramatic texts from the Middle Ages; little to rival the farces which survive from the Low Countries and France. The Records of Early English Drama project may have revealed a landscape rich in theatre, but without texts we can say little about the poetic qualities of the numerous lost plays. The scraps of Robin Hood plays that survive contain dialogue made up of formulaic prompts to action and nothing of the reflective or lyrical.43 The literary secular drama of late medieval England belonged to the milieux reflected in the Records of Early English Drama electronic databases of aristocratic patrons and hired performers, a growing catalogue of long-lost and anonymous entertainments.44 What these statistical accumulations do demonstrate is the close affinity, even the interchangeability, between minstrelsy and playing in socially refined circles which retained or hosted troupes of entertainers. And if liturgical chant lent its peculiar lyricism to scriptural drama, we can surmise that secular balladry and romance crossed over into the plays with which the well-to-do layman was entertained. The poem known as ‘The Nut Brown Maid’, for example, attributed to the fifteenth century and preserved in 133

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the commonplace book of affluent early sixteenth-century London grocer Richard Arnold, the so-called Customs of London, demonstrates the performability by two voices of a text which would more usually be categorised as a tail-rhyme romance rather than play, and how the boundary between plays and other genres of writing is very permeable in a culture of mixed oral entertainment.45 The few secular plays from court circles which survive, however, display a literary taste far removed from popular balladry. Henry Medwall had wide experience of a number of dramatic traditions from his London city upbringing and his years as a student at Cambridge.46 His two extant plays, Fulgens and Lucres and Nature, are richly mixed entertainments, encompassing low-life topical repartee, mock jousts, dancing and singing – but their poetry belongs to a very particular milieu and influence which brings us back full circle to classical rhetoric via humanist dialogue and the procedures of legal pleading: Who taught the cok hys watche howres to observe And syng of corage with shrill throte on hye? Who taught the pellycan her tender hart to carve For she nolde suffer her byrdys to dye? Who taught the nyghtyngall to recorde besyly Her strange entunys in silence of the nyght? Certes I, Nature, and none other wyght

(43–90)

This is the character Nature in Medwall’s play of the same name providing advice to Man, and the humanist argument, about the need to find a temperate mean between the extremes of reason and sensuality in the long voyage through this world, will develop as the lengthy speech progresses. The fact that it is delivered in rime royale contributes rhetorical colouring, but also perfectly imposes a reasoned control on delivery that matches the message. As Medwall’s editor has observed, the gravitas of a character is marked by speeches in complete stanzas, often, as here, with a single thought being sustained throughout. Delivery, that is speaking, is all the action in the early scenes of this play. Later, by contrast, different stanza forms characterise the rapid dialogue of the vices. The same formula is applied in Fulgens and Lucres, where Gaius, the suitor of worth as opposed to birth, wins the day and the girl by delivering a speech of seventeen rime royal stanzas. The play is marked out as a coterie piece written for connoisseurs of rhetorical technique, the polar opposite of dramas which have to use their dialogue to capture the attention of a street audience. Yet Fulgens and Lucres, taken as a whole, is also a supremely sophisticated piece of theatrical writing: A: Tusshe, here is no man that settyth a blank By thy consell or konneth the thank – Speke therof no more! 134

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They know that remedy better than thow. But what shall we twayne do now? I care most therfore – Me thinketh that matter wolde be wist. B: Mary, we may go hens whan we lyst – No man saith us nay. A: Why than, is the play all do? B: Ye, by my feyth, and we were ons go It were do streght way.

choose over if we were to go (866–77)

With these characters A and B, who emerge from the audience and have the last word, Medwall shows that, in addition to the high style of the main plot, he can write verse dialogue that exhibits a different kind of artifice from all the examples examined above and one set to win the approbation of our own times. Henry Medwall’s poetry here so closely imitates natural speech rhythms that ‘a man shall not lightly/ Know a player from another man’ (55–56).

Notes 1 For background to the disputed provenance of the pageants in the Towneley manuscript, see Barbara D. Palmer, ‘Recycling “The Wakefield Cycle”: The Records’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 41 (2002), pp. 88–130. For the status of the N-Town plays, see Peter Meredith, ed., The Mary Play from the N-Town Manuscript, Revised 2nd edn. (Exeter: Exeter University Press), first published London: Longman, 1987. For the difficulties presented by the surviving forms of the Chester Play, see David Mills, ed., The Chester Mystery Cycle (East Lansing, Michigan: Colleagues Press, 1992) esp. p. xvii. 2 Pamela King, ‘Morality Plays’, in Richard Beadle and Alan Fletcher, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Theatre, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008) pp. 235–62. 3 For the textual history of the Chester and Coventry Plays, see the introductions to their recent editions. Respectively, David Mills, ed., The Chester Mystery Cycle (East Lansing, Michigan: Colleagues Press, 1992) and Pamela King and Clifford Davidson, eds., The Coventry Plays (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000). 4 A.C. Cawley, ed., Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays (London: Dent, 1956) pp. 205–34. 5 Alastair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1988) p. 191, quoting H.E. Allen, The English Writings of Richard Rolle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931) p. 7. 6 Meredith. It is now commonly understood that British Library MS Cotton Vespasian D VIII, the so-called N-Town Plays, is a compilation of East Anglian provenance, incorporating a number of formerly free-standing dramas, including a play about the early life of the Virgin Mary, a Passion play and a play of the Assumption of the Virgin, all built into a scriptural cycle which covers similar material to the York and Chester plays.

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7 Baker, Donald C., John L. Murphy and Louis B. Hall jr. eds., The Late Medieval Religious Plays of Bodleian MS Digby 133 and e Musaeo 160, Early English Text Society, o.s. 28 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) pp. 96–115. Oxford. Bodleian Library MS Digby 133 is a compilation of plays on biblical subjects, dating from the early sixteenth century. The original circumstances of their production are obscure, but there is evidence that they were written for annual performance, The Killing of the Children at Candlemas, and possibly associated with Chelmsford in Essex. See further John D. Coldewey, Early English Drama: An Anthology (London: Routledge, 1993) pp. 253–73, 256. 8 Ritch, K. Janet, ‘The Role of the Presenter in Medieval Drama’ in David N. Klausner and Karen Sawyer Marsalek eds., ‘Bring Furth the Pagants’: Essays in Early English Drama Presented to Alexandra F. Johnston (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007) p. 237. 9 Quoted in A.J. Minnis and A.B. Scott, with the assistance of David Wallace, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c. 110–1375: The Commentary Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) pp. 311–12. 10 Walker, Greg ed., Medieval Drama: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) p. 198 11 Merrill. L. R., The Life and Poems of Nicholas Grimald (Hamden, CT: Ardon Books, 1969); first published (Newhaven, CT: Yale University Press, 1925). 12 I am grateful for having the access to Carolyn Muessig’s forthcoming article ‘Communities of Discourse: Religious Authority and the Role of Holy Women in the Later Middle Ages’, which focuses on inclusive definitions of medieval theology. 13 Baker et al, pp. 141–68. 14 Richard Beadle, ed., The York Plays (London, Edward Arnold, 1982). 15 Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, Michael J. Sargent, ed. (Exeter, Exeter University Press, 2005) p. 26. 16 Beadle, pp. 315–23. 17 Martin Stevens and A.C. Cawley, eds., The Towneley Play, 2 vols, Early English Text Society, s.s 13 and 14 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) pp. 294–95; Rosemary Woolf, ‘The Theme of Christ the Lover Knight in Medieval English Literature’ Review of English Studies, 13, pp. 1–16. 18 Beadle, pp. 323–33. 19 Beadle, pp. 356–59. 20 On how such characters serve in the performance circumstances of processional production to incite emotion in the crowd, see Meg Twycross, ‘Playing the Resurrection’ in P.L. Heyworth, ed., Medieval Studies for J.A.W. Bennett. Aetatis Suae (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 273–96. See also Meg Twycross, The Materials of Early Theatre: Sources, Images and Performance, Sarah Carpenter and Pamela King eds. (London and New York: Routledge, 2018) pp.115–34. 21 F.J. Furnivall, ed., The Digby Play (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967); first published Early English Text Society, e.s. 70 (London: K. Paul, Trench and Trubner, 1896) pp. 171–200. 22 Geoffrey de Vinsauf, Poetria Nova in J.J. Murphy, Three Medical Rhetorical Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971) pp. 105–60. 23 Douglas Oliver, Poetry and Narrative in Performance (London: Macmillan, 1989) p. 168. 24 Pamela M. King, The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006) p. 56. 25 King, York Mystery Cycle, p.146. 26 John of Garland, The Parisiana Poetria, Traugott Lawler, editor (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971) pp. 136–223.

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27 Lawrence Poston, ‘Poetry as Pure Act: A Coleridgean Ideal in Early Victorian England’, Modern Philology 84 (2), 1986. pp. 162–84. 28 Beadle, pp. 49–53. 29 Beadle, pp. 64–69. 30 Beadle, pp. 344–55. 31 R.M. Lumiansky and David Mills, eds., The Chester Mystery Cycle, 2 vols, Early English Text Society, s.s. 3 and s.s. 9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974 and 1986) I, pp. 378–95. 32 Mark Eccles, ed., The Macro Plays, Early English Text Society, o.s. 262 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). 33 Eccles, pp. 153–84. 34 Beadle, pp. 270–82. 35 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) I, pp.304–5. 36 Stevens and Cawley, pp. 401–25. 37 Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) pp. 183–88. 38 Margaret Jennings, ‘Tutivillus: The Literary Career of the Recording Demon’, Studies in Philology, 74 (5), 1977 pp. 1–95. 39 John Skelton, Magnificence, Paula Neuss, editor (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980). 40 Paula Neuss, ‘Active and Idle Language: Dramatic Images in “Mankind”’, in Medieval Drama, Neville Denny, ed., Stratford on Avon Studies 16 (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), pp. 41–68 and Kathleen Ashley (1975). ‘Titivillus and the Battle of Words in “Mankind”’, Annuale Medievale, 16, pp.128–150. 41 Janette Dillon, Language and Stage in Medieval and Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) pp.65–66. 42 For the continuing vigorous debate about the status provenance and authorship of the pageants in the Towneley manuscript, see notably Palmer. 43 Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, eds., Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS Medieval Texts, 1997) 44 Patrons and Performances Web Site; http://link.library.utoronto.ca//reed. Records of Early English Drama Patrons and Performances 2003–2019. 45 From Richard Arnold, Customs of London (London, 1502), and published in modernised spelling in Arthur Quiller-Couch (1919). 46 Alan H. Nelson.ed., The Plays of Henry Medwall, 2 vols (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1980).

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Part 3 REVIVALS, SURVIVALS AND AUDIENCES – MOSTLY ABOUT SPAIN

10 LA FESTA D’ELX The festival of the Assumption of the Virgin, Elche (Alicante) From: Medieval English Theatre, 8.1, 1986, 21–50 [with Asunción Salvador-Rabaza] Every year on the 14th and 15th of August, the town of Elche, famous for its date palms, its early Iberian remains, and its shoe industry, celebrates the feast of its patron saint, Saint Mary of the Assumption, in a spectacular music-drama with many aerial machines. The origins of this event are problematic but nonetheless clearly ‘medieval’ as, to a surprising degree to one accustomed to Northern European secular society, is the spirit with which the citizens of Elche preserve their tradition. What follows are the reflections of two people who attended the Festa in 1985 – the first a native of Elche who has grown up with the Festa and who is now a post-graduate student in the University of Valencia, studying English medieval plays on Marian themes; the second a non-Spanish-speaking English academic, also interested in English medieval plays, visiting the Festa for the first time. Between us, we aim to offer some views of the event which will be useful to the student of medieval English drama for comparison and contrast, but also we hope to encourage people to travel to Elche and experience the Festa for themselves.

Historical perspectives – Asunción Salvador-Rabaza Despite recent attempts to pull Elche into line and to call its religious drama the Misterio de Eiche, the term ‘mystery’ was never applied to the performances in Elche. It is a literary term imposed by journalists and writers, which nowadays competes with the traditional title Festa d’Agost, a more apt description of something which is perceived locally not only as a devotional drama, but as a festival embracing the whole populace. The name Festa d’Agost is the one used by the people of Elche, the earliest written record of its use dating from 1370, in a letter from Dona Maria de Aragon.1 In the 17th century, Cristobal Sanz mentions only the name Festa, which he repeats throughout his work,2 and Gaspar Soler Chacon, author of the book containing the oldest surviving version of the text, says, Consueta de la Festa de l’Assumtió de la gloriossfsima Mare de Deu dita vulgarament la Fest de la Villa de Elig ques celebra a catorce y quinze de Agost perpetuament.3 141

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On the other hand, the first written record of the use of Mysterio comes from the 19th century in the Marques de Molins’ speech for admission into the Academia de la Historia in Madrid, in 1869.4 In the Preface and Decree of 15 September 1931, it was declared to be of National Historical Interest, and therein the title gained official sanction. Since then, several ‘foreign’ authors have used the term Misterio, whilst native commentators, for example, Rafael Ramos5 and Pedro Ibarra6, still prefer to talk of the Festa. The cyclo (‘cycle’) of the Festa consists of three parts: the pre-cycle of the arrival of the Virgin; the cycle itself, at the centre of which is the performance of the Festa; and the post-cycle. The pre-cycle takes place on 28 December and is a re-enactment of the legendary finding of a coffer on the beach which contained the image of the Virgin and the text and music for the performance. According to popular tradition, a soldier who was patrolling the coastline near the town in 1370, at the end of the War of the Two Pedros, found this coffer which had been miraculously carried to Elche on the tide, took it back to his superiors, and ever since then, Elche has performed the play and housed the image and her successors in a shrine within a succession of churches dedicated to the Virgin of the Assumption. The date does not, however, coincide with that given by Gaspar Soler Chacon, who says, The Festival of the Assumption of our Lady according to tradition, dates from the first people who lived in Elche after the Reconquest from the Moors by Jaime I, in 1265 on the fifteenth of August, the day of Our Lady of the Assumption. They started celebrating the Festival the following year on the fourteenth and fifteenth of August as a commemoration of the victory.7 It is of course possible that from 1266 the Festa existed in some form, but that the first written dramatic text dates from 1370. The cycle of the Festa itself begins with the setting up of the scenic devices in the church of Sta Maria. In the days which follow, a formal examination of voices takes place and the roles are distributed amongst the actors. A rehearsal then takes place to check that all the aerial machinery is in working order. During the day of 13 August, there are firework displays in the streets, which increase in number and volume leading up to Nit de l’alba (‘white night’) at midnight. On the afternoon of 14 August, the first part of the Festa is performed, called the Vespra or Angel. The Virgin Mary expresses her wish to die in order to join her beloved Son; she receives the palm from the angel and dies surrounded by apostles and virgins (the ‘Marias’). During the early hours of the morning of 15 August, the devout, holding lighted candles, pass through the streets of the town, following the same route that the funeral procession will take later that morning. On the afternoon of 15 August, the second part of the Festa is performed, called the Festa, or Coronado, representing the burial of the Virgin Mary, which is delayed by Jews who are converted and then participate in the burial 142

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ceremony. Angels carry the body and soul of the Virgin to heaven where her Coronation by the Trinity takes place. The post-cycle continues throughout the following days. Masses with sermons and salve are held, which, like the Corpore in Sepulto post-cycle, are dedicated to the deceased and continue throughout the following days. The chief part of this element is the singing of the goigs (‘the Joys’), songs written in Catalan, which summarise the plot of the Festa. The sources of the oldest surviving text of the Festa (1625) are, of course, ultimately to be found in the Apocrypha. Gonzalo Girones attributes it to the narrations of Transitus w and Pseudo Melito.8 The material from these sources is scattered throughout the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Varagine, which had a great influence on the whole of Europe during the Middle Ages. In these are the sources of many of the scenes: the prayers of the Virgin and her attendants; the descent of the Angel with the palm; the arrival of the Apostles; the Death of Mary and the Assumption of her soul; her burial; the arrival of the Jews and the descent of angels to take the body of the Virgin. The rest of the scenes, the late arrival of St. Thomas and the Coronation, are attributed to the Apocrypha of Joseph of Arimathea. The Coronation is the material, symbolic, and local version of the Enthronement: a popular image, as in this staging it is easier to crown the Virgin than to enthrone her in the heights. It would be impossible to stage an aerial version of the Enthronement. The Legenda Aurea material probably came from Italy, via the Lauda of Perusa (probably from the 13th century) and Orvieto (probably later than the Lauda of Perusa but not after the 14th century), arriving in Elche across the Mediterranean through Mallorca or Valencia. The Lauda of Perusa is the first written literary record of the Coronation of the Virgin, but by Christ, not by the Holy Trinity. In it, as in the Festa, Christ is absent from the scenes of the Death and Assumption, as is St. Paul. The Lauda of Orvieto incorporates the scene of St. Thomas watching the Assumption with the rest of the Apostles, and the Coronation by Christ. The lines of communication through Mallorca and Valencia were Elche’s most common maritime links in those times. It is known through written and pictorial records that the Mystery of Mallorca, although no copy of it survives, included the same scene involving St. Thomas as the Festa d’Agost of Elche. The Misterio de Valencia may be the direct link with the Festa because, in addition to the inclusion of the first scenes from the Legenda Aurea, it includes an aerial machine called the araceli, like Elche, and some of the scenic elements already known in Italy and Mallorca. They were more elaborate in Valencia, with similar details to those of the Festa, for example, the main staging, the cadafalc; the placing of the grave under the cadafalc; the Holy Places at which the Virgin pauses during her first entrance; the replacement of a live actor by an image of the Virgin; and having heaven set in the ‘heights’, closed off by a door. In the light of the scattered available information, it is possible to develop a theoretical reconstruction of the Festa’s evolution through three stages. Being a traditional, popular event, it has evolved and adapted to suit each age it has 143

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encountered. The three stages may be defined by three dates which delimit three rather different Festas – a late Romanesque period based on the key date of 1265, the Reconquest of Elche by Jaime I, King of Aragon; a Gothic period around 1370, the year of the legendary arrival of the Virgin and the end of the War of the Two Pedros; and the period from the Renaissance, dated from the beginning of the Council of Trent in 1545. The first period In 1265, actually in November, and not in August as stated by Chacon, Elche was restored to Christendom,9 having previously been snatched from Alfonso X el Sabio by an uprising of its southern Moslem population. The Reconquest was a major shock for Elche, because in a short time, a complete social reorganisation took place, as the town was reintegrated into the kingdom of Castille and was now totally absorbed, whereas in the past, it had simply been occupied and owed feudal allegiance. The Medina, the Moslem town, was emptied to be occupied mainly by Aragonese and Castilian knights. The Moslems had to look for another settlement. The mosque was immediately converted into a Christian church, and the only parts which survived were its only minaret, which was turned into a bell-tower, its front courtyard, which was turned into a cloister, and a canal of water which passed in front of the main door, which was previously used for providing water for ablutions. Alfonso X el Sabio, whose brother Don Manuel was the governor or viceroy of Elche, knew the town quite well and stayed there on his itinerary.10 The church of Sta. Maria appears in the Cantigas of Alfonso X in Cantiga 126, ‘How the Virgin Mary healed a man who was wounded by an arrow in the face in Elche’, and Cantiga 133, ‘How the Virgin Mary healed a child who was brought to her altar’.11 Alfonso gave orders that there should be painted in the Cantigas the town wall of Elche, with its canals and palm trees and the image of the Virgin of Sta. Maria as a Madonna with a child in her arms. When the nephew of Alfonso, Don Juan Manuel, was born, he inherited the domain of Elche and spent long periods of time there. He was a Dominican and wrote a tract in which he reasoned that the Virgin Mary is in Paradise in body and soul. It is just possible that he could have been moved to write by a controversy stirred by a version of the Festa,12 already extant in some form at that time,13 as has been claimed.14 The chief social upheaval at this time lay in the forced adoption of certain religious customs, notably the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, second only to Christmas in magnitude. There are no reliable records of the type of celebration which accompanied the feast, but it would have resembled that of the rest of Christendom. The celebrations in the Church of Sta Maria would, therefore, have been Vespers on the feast of the Assumption, celebrated after the sixth monastic hora. The Valencian journalist, Martin Dominguez Barbera, has pointed out that the text of the Festa d’Agost opens with the words, ‘the vespers finished’.15 144

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After the liturgical Vespers had been celebrated, in Elche as elsewhere in towns with a strong Marian tradition, the local ‘Vespers’ would be celebrated. The local Vespers would characteristically have contained certain elements which later developed into the Festa. The image of the Virgin, known from Alfonso’s Cantigas to have been a Madonna, would have been omitted and a ‘real’ Virgin, an actor, substituted. Three small choirs, two of children (the Marys and the Angels) and one of adults (the Apostles) would have participated. The music of the first half of the present Festa is monodic, dating from this era and probably has the characteristics of the musical element of the original ‘Vespers’. The scenic space would, of course, have been very simple, either in the church or the cloister with a few indispensable scenic devices, such as the palm and a couch for the Virgin to lie on. It is possible also that the celebration included a procession which took place before dawn, as was the case in the 19th century, simulating the time of a real burial at that time of year. Nowadays there are three processions which are integral to the Festa: the Roa, or the procession of the devout with lighted candles in the early hours of the morning; the burial procession later in the morning, and the procession of Jews and Apostles within the performance itself. On the basis, then, of some fragments of historical information about local circumstances in this period, and comparison with traditions in other places with a strong Marian tradition, it is possible to speculate about the nature of an early precursor to the Festa. At this stage, it would not have been ‘mystery’ or fully developed liturgical drama, so much as an extended ceremony designed to venerate the saint and mark the day, such as was celebrated all over the Christian world. The second period It is to the period from the late 14th century to the beginning of the 16th century that most authors (without taking the previous and posterior stages into account) attribute the probable origin of the Festa. During the 14th century, Elche suffered several upheavals. In the first decade, it passed from the hands of the Castilian kingdom to the house of Aragon. In 1334, the Moor Roduan invaded the town and destroyed the church. Later, from 1364–69, the town went through the War of the Two Pedros, in which Pedro I el Cruel was murdered by his stepbrother Henry II and Pedro IV el Ceremonioso, King of Aragon. During this period, the town was severely damaged, the church destroyed once more. If the image of the Virgin was not burned by the Moors in 1334, it was certainly destroyed during the ensuing turbulence. Henry II ruled Elche until 1375, as it lay on the borderland of the Kingdom of Aragon. It was after this period of fresh social and political upheaval that Elche acquired its new image of the Virgin, this time not a Madonna. At this time also the text of the Festa with its music arrived, inspired by the Italian transitos and by the mysteries of Palma de Mallorca and Valencia.16 It is probable, then, that in this period, certain elements of the Festa developed: the new image of the Virgin would be incorporated into the performance and scenic machinery could easily have been 145

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developed following the construction of a rebuilt and enlarged church in 1334, making multiple levels of performance possible. In addition, it was probably in this period that the Festa acquired many of its more secular elements – besides the choirs of Marys, Angels, and Apostles, dramatic characters like the Jews would have entered the action. The Gregorian monodic music of the earlier period had incorporated into it elements of popular song and oriental melody, possibly of Moorish influence, as the Moors stayed in Elche in their own ghetto until 1609. One may plausibly conceive of this, then, as being the period when a former liturgical celebration developed into full-scale drama. The scenic space was multiple, and simple machines were used. These were made possible after 1334, as the church was rebuilt and enlarged. The third period It is to the third putative period of the development of the Festa, however, the period from around 1500 to the present, that all the extant records, texts, and music belong. From 1470, the people of Elche suffered greatly under a hard overlord, Don Gutierre de Cardenas. Their constant pleas to successive kings of Spain had little effect, and they can be seen in this period taking consolation from their religious traditions. For during this period, in 1492, the construction of a new church began. This was replaced in 1566 by a church which lasted until 1672, when it collapsed and was immediately replaced by the present building. During the 15th century, a guild was formed with responsibility for the performance of the Festa, and the job of choirmaster was instituted. The choirmasters and scenic directors incorporated and adjusted new pieces for the performance. The text was finally updated by the Council of Trent and received a Bull of approval from Urban VII, a noted patron of the arts. During the Renaissance period, polyphonic music was introduced at certain points in the performance, although earlier Gregorian and popular elements

Image 10.1a General view of Santa Maria, Elche, showing housing for winding gear

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Image 10.1b Roof terrace, angels dressing rooms and scenery storage

survive. The scenic space certainly became more complex, becoming the present multiple set in the horizontal and vertical planes. The new churches were increasingly designed to accommodate complex heavenly machinery. The text suffered no more modifications after the Council of Trent, which purged it of inappropriate elements. In this the Festa was more fortunate than some of its counterparts which were abolished altogether. Since the 17th century, the performance of the Festa has taken on a fixed form, but, of course, whereas the text and music have remained constant, many other elements still undergo periodic replacement as they wear out. The last major refurbishment of the church took place after it was sacked by the Communists during the Spanish Civil War.

Festa d’Agost 1985 – Pamela M. King A visit to Elche during the August Festa is the closest any specialist in medieval English theatre will come to time travel to York or Chester during the feast 147

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of Corpus Christi. The Festa may be barely comparable with an English cycle in concrete terms, being the large-scale, sung dramatisation of one event, the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, close, one imagines, to what Inigo Jones might have done with a Latin trope play, and more post-Civil War baroque than medieval. But, after years of asserting that Corpus Christi in York was inseparably concerned with devotion, civic pride, holiday, and theatre, it is delightful to visit Elche to discover that experience at first hand. It was just that particular combination which led a detached foreign observer of firmly Presbyterian upbringing to carry a candle in the Virgin’s funeral procession. To hold oneself aloof from the corporate devotions of Elche at Festa is to miss one whole dimension of the theatrical experience. Conversely, to submit to this special variety of ‘audience participation’ appears to be the only point of view from which to understand the nature of a theatrical event which I attended expecting to be interested, but not anticipating the degree to which I was to be moved. Both parts of the Festa last around one and a half hours and are sung in early Catalan. Part One, the Vespra, open with the arrival of the Virgin Mary, accompanied by her cushion bearers, by Mary Salome and Mary Jacobi. They process from west to east, down a central raised walkway, the andador, halting and kneeling at the ‘holy places’ along the way, representing Gethsemane, Calvary, and the sepulchre of Christ. Eventually they reach the raised central staging, the cadafalc, under the dome, which serves as the Virgin’s house during the Vespra (see Figure 10.1). All parts are taken by small boys, apparently around the age of eleven. When Mary has arrived at her house, she kneels on her couch, surrounded

Figure 10.1 Horizontal arrangement of cadafalc

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Figure 10.2 Horizontal arrangement of cadafalc

Image 10.2a Mangrana descending and opening

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Image 10.2b Mangrana descends to Virgin

by her attendants, and the doors of heaven open above her to reveal, in a burst of loud organ music, the pomegranate, or mangrana, which slowly opens and descends, bearing the palm-carrying Angel of the Assumption, also a small boy, who sings his four-stanza hymn in celebration of the Virgin as he descends. He lands, alights, assisted by the cushion bearers, delivers his palm and his message, and returns, singing, whence he came. At this point, the Apostles begin to assemble, entering again from the west and beginning with St. John. Each demonstrates wonder at his sudden arrival and proceeds to venerate the Virgin. Although there are no machines involved in the miraculous transportation of the Apostles into the Virgin’s presence, such as are suggested in, for example, the N-Town Plays, each clearly shows his astonishment at the gran misteri of his sudden arrival by means of stereotypical facial expression and gesture. This has given rise to the local idiom, ‘to act like an Apostle’, applied to anyone openly displaying astonishment. The Apostles gather around the Virgin’s bed, she asks them to bury her in the Vale of Josaphat, lies down, and dies. At this point, the boy who has up until now played the part of the Virgin is cunningly exchanged for the image from the shrine, which is to lie in state all night, be carried round the town the following day, and take part in the Assumption. The 150

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doors of heaven open once more to more organ music and the araceli, the machine bearing two boy angels, two men angels, and Christ descend. One angel strums a guitar, whilst another mimes with a harp; all sing. They collect the soul of the Virgin, a doll, which is transported to heaven as the Vespra comes to an end. On the second day (Figure 10.2), the arrangement on the cadafalc is changed to indicate that the setting is now the Vale of Josaphat. Balustraded off in the centre of this area is the large square hole of the tomb, and the Virgin’s couch, now topped by her bier, is on the audience’s right. The action opens with St. Peter leading the Apostles and Marys in a planctus – St. Peter must be played by an ordained priest, as he conducts the funeral ceremony. He, at this point, formally hands over the palm to John, a minor anomaly as John received it from the Virgin in the first place. At this point, the ceremony is interrupted by the arrival of the ‘Jews’, who brawl with the Apostles. Another local expression, quite a strong insult this time, is to ‘look like a Jew’, as they epitomise dirt and disorder. Their hands are paralysed – unlike those of the notorious York Fergus – then they are all

Image 10.3a Araceli ascends with the image

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Image 10.3b The Coronation of the Virgin

converted and fall down to venerate the corpse. They are then assimilated into the ceremony, as all process around the cadafalc with the bier, before lowering it into the tomb, with St. Peter acting as celebrant and censing the ‘body’. The assembled company sing the Vulgate psalm, In exitu Israel de Egipto, their most memorable theme. Heaven opens once more and the araceli descends, this time right down into the tomb, restoring the soul to the body, substituting the image for Christ and the soul, and returning with the image on her journey to heaven. The araceli this time halts in mid-air as St. Thomas arrives late, pays his respects to the Virgin, and apologises que les Indies me an ocupat. At this point, the detailed stage directions are at variance with what actually takes place – the Trinity are supposed to be waiting a la porta del sel (at the doors of heaven), but what, in fact, takes place is that a further machine is lowered from heaven bearing the Trinity, which then performs the Coronation. Both machines return to heaven and the doors in the sky close for the last time. The dramatic structure of the Festa, though apparently simple, attains a pleasing balance, there being 140 lines of sung text on Day One, 118 on Day Two, of 152

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uniform versification, aabb, throughout. The climax of each half is the visit of the araceli – on the first day to collect the soul, on the second the body. The heavenly intrusion of the angel in the mangrana, which sets the sequence of events in motion on Day One, is mirrored by the intrusion of the ‘Jews’ on Day Two, a form of anti-masque which threatens the divinely ordained plan, only to be absorbed into it. There is, of course, a major difference in emphasis between the Festa and any English mystery play of the Assumption, in that here there is no attempt to link events to broader sacral history. Particular reference is not made even to the Passion; the event is its own self-sufficient focus, alternating complaint with celebration as the Virgin passes from her temporal role as inspirational figure-head of the Apostles to her eternal task of providing inspiration and intercession on behalf of all mankind. The highly formal patterning of events is enhanced by this being entirely sung drama, which is so elaborately staged. These are the elements which merit most attention before the Festa may be replaced in its broader holiday context. The music of the play has perhaps received most scholarly attention until recent times. The music of the second half is later and more complex than that of the first half. Three authors have been distinguished17: Juan Perez (b. 1548) of Orihuela, later attached to the cathedral of Valencia, Antonio de Ribera, a chorister in Rome in the 1520s, and Lluis Vich, who was master of the chapel and organist in Elche, dying in 1594. The music of the Vespra is clearly much earlier and anonymous. The monodic singing of Mary and of the angel of the mangrana, rendered in harsh nasal voices which are a surprise to ears accustomed to the characteristic English choir-boy, has been connected with Byzantine liturgical chant. The beautiful three-part song of the Apostles when they first assemble, perhaps the piece of music which is most moving of all, and the four-part song of the first visit of the araceli are also of unknown authorship. A broad distinction is generally drawn, therefore, between the medieval element in the music and that which is clearly 16th century, coinciding, it has been suggested, with the church building of 1566. Regarding instrumental accompaniment, one recent commentator18 has noted that in the manuscript of 1625, it is stated that Mary’s arrival and the opening of heaven should be accompanied by organ music, bells, and gunfire, whereas the elevation of Mary to heaven should be accompanied by flageolets. There is no indication as to what instruments the angels should play, but it is suggested that time-honoured tradition dictates the guitar and harp – certainly the museum of the Festa has some 19th-century harps amongst its exhibits. Only the guitar is now actually played and at a faintly amateurish strum at that. Perhaps it is too much to expect instrumental virtuosity from a boy who is also singing four-part harmony whilst being lowered forty metres on the end of a rope. The sung music has, at any rate, received a great deal of critical attention. Not so has, until recent years, the staging of the Festa, undoubtedly the most interesting element both to the visiting layman and theatrical historian alike. This is one production in which the scenic devices entirely steal the show from the performers and receive the preponderance of the applause. This is openly acknowledged 153

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Image 10.4a ‘Jews’ and Apostles fight

by the civic organisers who offer visitors the opportunity to attend public rehearsals on the three days preceding the actual performance. The text is, of course, rehearsed almost all year, but the full machinery only on these days – a rehearsal which it would be impossible to keep private in any case. On these occasions, the text is considerably cut to accommodate the whole play and all its scenic elements in two hours. Those who attend these performances, mostly tourists and the press, are, however, cheated of the climax, as the Coronation is played only on 15 August. The image of the Virgin at these rehearsals is played by an ‘understudy’, an identical effigy, whilst the real image in the shrine in the apse is curtained off but left undisturbed until the actual event. Anyone wishing to attend the Festa in order to study the scenic devices is strongly recommended to make efforts to acquire one of the restricted issue of tickets to ‘heaven’, the roof terraces, during at least one rehearsal, in order to watch the machinery at work. It is also possible indoors to obtain standing room in the narrow galleries in order to look down at the Burial and Assumption. The actual two-day performance, however, should be seen from the best seats on either side of the andador, where the illusion is most complete. The current Basilica de Santa Maria was not consecrated until 1784, although begun in 1673. While it was being built, the Festa continued in the church of S. Salvador.19 The basilica has a broad central aisle, side aisles, and an apsidal east end, over which is constructed the dome. Round the perimeter there are many 154

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Image 10.4b Araceli descends with the soul

chapels. The main doors are in the centre of the west wall, while there are other entrances in the south and north walls, one bay before the apse. On the south side behind the interior apse is the museum of the Festa,20 access to the shrine and stairs to the roof terraces and dome. Around the interior perimeter there is a narrow gallery on the same level as the shrine which occupies the centre of the apse, above the high altar. In the north gallery, the large pipe organ is housed. The whole church was gutted by fire during the Civil War and has since been refurbished, the shrine at least as an exact copy of the original in which the Virgin stands serenely on her pile of silver clouds for 363 days of the year. For the duration of the performance, the empty shrine is concealed behind an oil painting of the Virgin, and the base of the dome has stretched across it a diaphragm of canvas painted with clouds. In this, on the east side, are the doors of heaven. Inside the dome, this canvas is covered by a safety net in case of accidents. The perimeter of the dome has in it, at intervals, stained glass doors letting out 155

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Image 10.5a Trinity prepares to descend

on to the roof terraces, except on the east side. Here the opening which should have a glass door in it forms the mouth of a tunnel of metal out to the roof terrace, housing the winding gear for the machinery (Figure 10.3). The doors of heaven are sliding sections of a wooden platform built out over the canvas on this side. The entire platform is around three metres square. The doors are opened and closed by ropes operated from the other side of the dome, as all space on the platform is required by those man-handling the machines. The doors close above each machine, leaving only a hole for the rope. Members of the audience arriving early may see the golden tail of the mangrana dangling down through this hole, a sign that the performance is set up ready to begin. Each machine is let down slowly on one stout hemp rope, its rate of descent and ascent controlled by the winch operators. The rope is passed through a pulley on top of a set of primitive timber sheerlegs, supported precariously by a hook set in a stone armorial achievement on the masonry of the dome. The rope is carefully wrapped in a length of blue cloth as it is paid out. Surprisingly, the machines, once they are dangling in the middle of their forty metre descent, do not begin to revolve – they are simply held steady by main force as two or three stage-hands lie on their stomachs on the platform and hold the ropes in a vice-like grip. 156

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Image 10.5b Heaven – manipulating the mangrana

The first and most memorable descent is made by the most interesting machine, the mangrana, bearing the Angel of the Annunciation. Somehow the araceli, with its five passengers, ought to be more breath-taking, but is not. The red and gold orb of the mangrana, as soon as it clears the gates of heaven, opens by lifting segmentally to reveal the angel in its gilded interior. The machine is made in several sections: an interior iron-work frame in which the angel is supported and the outer casing, made of light wood, which lifts off in its separate segments for ease of manoeuvrability and storage. The mangrana is opened by sliding a bracket to which are attached cords from each segment, up the supporting rope. The earliest reference to this legendary machine is found in P. Villafane’s Compendia historico de las milagrosas imagenes de Maria Santisima que se veneran en los mas celebres Santuarios de Espagna.21 In the text of 1625, there is a precise description of a device on which the present machine is modelled. Juan Castano Garcia’s recent work on the machine has revealed that there is evidence of similar apparatus elsewhere – more or less globular hanging devices with some 157

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Figure 10.3 Vertical arrangement

means of mechanical opening to reveal a character within – for example, from 1479 in Barcelona and from 16th-century Valencia. He illustrates some modern analogues, all cruder than the Elche device. No one seems to know where the idea originated. The araceli is a gilded framework bearing four angels, two men kneeling above two boys who also kneel. Between the two sides is a central place for the Son, who is replaced by the image of the Virgin when the araceli descends into the tomb. Incidentally, all the occupants of heavenly machinery are firmly held in place by concealed safety harness. Every detail was considered in the construction of the church, and the angels even have a purpose-built stone dressing room on the roof 158

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Figure 10.4 Concealed exchange of ‘live’ Virgin and image

terraces, where there are also storage sheds for the machinery, as the only access apart from by machine is by a narrow spiral staircase. There are also scenic devices below stage level. Before the soul is collected at the end of the first day, the Apostles have to exchange the boy-actor playing the Virgin for the image which takes the part from death to Coronation. The Virgin’s deathbed is, consequently, a most ingenious device (Figure 10.4). The platform on which the boy lies down operates like the top of a roll-top desk, neatly allowing him to be deposited feet-first underground, whilst simultaneously the bed bearing the recumbent image is raised. This move is impossible to see from any vantage point during the performance, as the Apostles all cluster round; one can only hope to be lucky by hanging around while the machinery is being tested early on one of the rehearsal days. The Virgin’s tomb is simply a large square hole (3 × 2 metres) in the centre of the cadafalc (8 × 7 metres). The araceli descends right into the tomb on its visit to collect the image prior to the Assumption. This time the araceli pauses in mid-air as St. Thomas arrives. Then the doors of heaven open again for the descent of the Trinity. Their machine is very like the araceli, but has only three seats on it, obviously arranged horizontally. Heaven is at its most tense, and most beer is consumed, whilst the two parallel machines are being controlled. The Trinity is simply suspended on a second rope, fed through a parallel set of winding gear, and also covered by blue cloth. It is important to keep both ropes separate and to avoid having the Trinity collide with the other rope. At the moment of the Coronation, the Trinity pauses some height above the araceli and lets down the crown on a cord. The Angel places it on the image’s head. One of the two notable intrusions of modern technology in the staging procedures is used at this point to great effect, as an electric fan on the end of a length of ducting is used to blow golden confetti down on to the entire scene from the doors of heaven. The other is the necessary use of a telephone link to synchronise action in heaven with that on earth. There is a link from heaven, from where it 159

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Image 10.6a Festa – funeral of the Virgin

Image 10.6b Erecting the railings around the tomb after the vespra

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must be remembered nothing can be seen most of the time, to the organ gallery and to the church of St. Sebastian round the corner from where each entrance begins. Apparently, these cues used to be given by the strategic use of large white handkerchiefs. Before considering the horizontal staging, which is the point at which the play most obviously encroaches upon the town, it would seem apposite at this point to pause to consider costume and gesture. The costumes are not the most striking features of the Festa, with the notable exception of the image of the Virgin. Least appealing are the angels and the Trinity, whose gold evening sandals and blonde nylon bubbly wigs appear bizarrely camp close to and especially in contrast to the ill-concealed blue chins of the older men among them. They all wear white for the Coronation, but the angels of the araceli wear bright mint-green tunics in Part One. The angels’ wings are constructed of white leaves of paper or fine cloth like the conventional theatrical property. The Marys are, however, more pleasingly attired in white surplices and

Image 10.7a Effigy being taken from araceli after the Assumption

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Image 10.7b Manipulating the ropes for araceli and Trinity, fan ducting for gold flakes

blue robes, with heavy veiling, which is most effective. They all wear wooden gilded haloes with their names inscribed on them in Latin. The cushion bearers wear rose-pink with more of the unfortunate wigs. The costume archive in the museum indicates that the Apostles too used to wear haloes bearing their names, but, apparently, they ceased to wear these as they were uncomfortable. Nowadays, apostolic drapery in self-colours is the order of the day except in the case of St. Peter, who, in the second part, wears ecclesiastical vestments. Most of the Apostles wear wigs, although a few clearly prefer to grow hair and beard appropriate to the role. Their rich but sober draperies are effectively contrasted with the ‘Jews’ who wear an assortment of shorter tunics, around knee level, blankets and scarves, much dishevelled hair, and interesting hats. In general, there seems to be a hazy inherited notion of how characters should appear which has been leavened with a degree of personal exhibitionism to produce the current situation. Some details are pleasing nonetheless, and St. James the Greater in 1985 was a splendid figure with deep bass voice and full beard in his crimson robes, complete with scallop shells and pilgrim’s staff. The image of the Virgin is in a class on her own when it comes to costume. As the venerated icon from the shrine, she has many sumptuous robes, all heavily 162

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appliquéd and embroidered, in which she is dressed at different times in the church year, the most elaborate being the robe she wears for the Festa. She is at once the object of touching popular reverence and a sort of celestial doll to be dressed and undressed. Indeed, the dressers of the Virgin, two matrons in black mantillas, are given pride of place in the funeral procession round the town. It was surprisingly easy to discover what the Virgin wore under her robe, since, as a rather curious act of reverence, her skirts are pulled over her head when she is necessarily manhandled in the heavens after her Assumption. What was revealed was, predictably, layer upon layer of fine lawn petticoat. No detail is spared in her attire – the soles of her slippers are particularly beautifully embroidered, a feature much in evidence as she spends much of the Festa lying down with her feet to the audience. Her head is severely wimpled and she appears to have no hair. She is the only member of the cast to wear a mask, as she begins her role wearing a ‘dead’ face, which is very pale with eyes and mouth shut. This is, in fact, a mask, which is removed when she boards the araceli in the tomb, to reveal her own face with wide blue eyes, delicate blush, and enigmatic smile. Her elaborate sun-burst halo is also removed at this point so that the crown can be placed easily on her head. As one would expect in large-scale sung drama, gesture tends to be broadly demonstrative. The Marys keep their hands firmly together in a gesture of prayer throughout; the Apostles all embrace one another on meeting, all kneel to reverence the Virgin. The intrusion of the ‘Jews’ as a disorderly rabble is a striking contrast, and when they too all kneel around the bier order is visibly restored. Thereafter the burial assumes a formal, ceremonial cast, as St. Peter officiates in a replication of a burial ceremony. As the vertical action, the comings and goings from heaven are slow, solemn, and processional, so too is all horizontal movement on the set. Performers, who

Image 10.8a Vespra – Virgin and attendants progressing past the chapels on the andora

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Image 10.8b Dressing room, San Sebastian, Elche

Image 10.9a Operating the winches on the roof terrace

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Image 10.9b Funeral procession of the Virgin, Festa morning

do not enter from heaven, enter the church by the central west door. It might, however, be more accurate to say that their performance begins when they leave the tiny Gothic church of St. Sebastian in a neighbouring street, as each entrance from there is treated processionally. The church of St. Sebastian is linked with the early history of the Festa and is now used as the dressing room and meeting place for all the local dignitaries who are involved in the organisation of the Festa. This little church is packed to the doors with photographers and families of the performers, except at the east end where the ‘Jews’ were to be observed smoking and playing cards.22 As each character is required to appear, he is collected from the church by the two ‘honorary knights’. Throughout the entire performance, at the entrance to the cadafalc, sit four important men: the officiating priest who blesses the performance, the ‘master’ of the Festa, an important civic dignitary, and his two ‘knights’. The latter three wear black frock coats and sashes and carry fine brass staffs. All four process to the basilica when the Virgin makes her first appearance, and the two ‘knights’ solemnly march out again each time a new character is cued to appear. Consequently, at the moment when the araceli is descending into the tomb, they abruptly rise and leave to collect St. Thomas. Each entrance is thus turned into a subsidiary ritual in its own right. Indeed, at her first entrance, the Virgin is not only accompanied to the door of Sta. Maria by her own attendants, but also by these officials and a small brass band. 165

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Once inside the basilica, all performers proceed along the raised walkway, the andador, to the cadafalc. There are no exits within the action. The andador represents the holy places on the way to the Virgin’s house in the Vespra and the road to Josaphat in the Coronacio. The effect of the horizontal action combined with the vertical action is one of a pleasingly symmetrical procession to a focal area. The mixture of liturgical ceremony and theatrical spectacle which the Festa forces upon the participating audience member, has broader implications: all the action persistently overflows into and embraces the town of Elche itself. It is impossible to separate the theatrical from the devotional or the civic ceremonial. The basilica of Sta. Maria was so clearly purpose-built to accommodate the Festa, that it is as much a theatre as a church, with its integral dressing rooms on the roof terraces and its below-stage facilities in the altar area. Yet the degree of reverence with which the image of the Virgin – in theatrical terms, simply a special-effects dummy – is treated makes apparent the inappropriateness of such distinctions. Similarly, during the night between the two parts of the performance, as the Virgin lies in state, masses are constantly said around her, local beauty queens process with thousands of flowers to her bier, an invited orchestra group serenades her and well into the night, thousands of people buy their candles and walk on the Roa, which is seriously conceived by many as an act of penance and intercession. In the years before transport was easy, the people who flocked to the Festa from the surrounding countryside could not possibly be accommodated in the town, so they spent the whole night in these ritual acts of vigil. For the foreign visitor too to opt out of participation in the Roa in favour of a good night’s sleep would be to miss one dimension of the theatrical continuum. At ten o’clock the following morning, the Virgin is taken out of the basilica in a solemn procession around the same route, accompanied by the entire cast, civic dignitaries, and several brass bands. The cacophonous results produced by the Apostles singing their In exitu Israel in competition with the ubiquitous bands is, perhaps, a point at which the religio-theatrical and the civic meet least happily. The whole Festa is understandably a sustained moment of immense civic pride, as well as being a civic event conducted with near theatrical ceremony. At noon on 13 August, there is a public meeting at which the budget of the Festa is formally approved and the dignitaries involved in special capacities make their speeches. This is, in fact, attended by only a handful of the public – a number much smaller than the platform party – and reporters from all local newspapers, local and regional radio stations. What the general public is more interested in is the later Nit de l’Alba, the ‘White Night’, or fireworks display of terrifying proportions which signals the start of the holiday. The whole week is, indeed, a time of processions, concerts, and feasting, staying up all night around the cafes and stalls in the streets. The play is only the focal point. The nature of the event in the eyes of the town can best be witnessed in the very different audiences of the rehearsals and of the two days of the Festa proper. Whereas the audience of the rehearsals is made up mostly of visitors who are there purely for the play, and thus watch in rapt silence, on the 14 and 15 August, it is a far noisier audience of local 166

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people for whom events hold no surprises. Many of those in the best seats, where being ostentatiously late is de rigeur, are clearly there as much to be seen as to see. Yet, paradoxically, although this audience pays far less attention, the performers are more visibly nervous, and the younger angels can be seen exchanging smiles with what are presumably family and friends. At the end of the whole thing, St. John gives bunches of palm fronds to the organisers who distribute them to the occupants of the best seats. It is only comparatively recently that the Festa d’Elx has attracted full-scale scholarly attention. Much of the work which has been done since in reconstructing the history of the event, the text, and its music is fascinating for the scholar of theatre history. It is to be hoped, however, that too great a consciousness of medieval origins does not contaminate the Festa of the late 20th century with a spurious ‘authenticity’, an impulse to reconstruct. As a visitor who is advertised as being interested in medieval drama, one is constantly met with apologies about the corrupt text, the baroque setting and the late-20th-century trimmings. The old adage applies: ‘This is my grandfather’s spade: my father renewed the handle and I renewed the blade’. Nonetheless, it is the contemporary evolving nature of the Festa which no authentic reconstruction in a country where popular religious drama is long dead can ever hope to emulate. To produce a version, as is the professed ambition of some parties, which is stripped of modern intrusions, loud organ music, and ‘bad taste’ would be an interesting exercise, but would deny the relationship between the Virgin of the shrine and the Virgins made of flowers and fireworks.

Notes 1 Pedro Ibarra Ruiz, El Transito y la Asuncion de la Virgen (Elche, 1925). 2 Cristobal Sanz, Recopilacion en que se da cuenta de las cosas ansí antiquas como modernas de la ínclitica villa de Elche (Elche, 1621). 3 Gaspar Soler Chacon, Llibre de la Festa de Nuestra Señora (Elche, 1625). 4 Marques de Molins, cited by Rafael Ramos Folqués, Leyenda del Misterio de Elche (Madrid, 1956), 95. 5 Molins, 102. 6 Pedro Ibarro, Elche: Materiales para su Historia (Cuenca, 1926) 15. 7 Gaspar Soler Chacon, Llibre de la Festa; although Alfonso Ballesteros Bereta, Alfonso X el Sabio (Barcelona, 1963) 392–93, says the Reconquest in Elche took place in November, not August. 8 Padre Gonzalo Girones, Los Origenes del Misterio de Elche (Valencia, 1983). [Modern versions of the story of the Reconquista now acknowledge the anti-Moslem bias of these accounts, such that we must consider that Elche, like many cities in the region, may have been a settled and affluent Moslem community prior to the enforced reassimilation into Christendom. PK.] 9 Alfonso Ballesteros Bereta, Alfonso X, 392–93. 10 Ibid. 11 Walter Mettmann, ed., Alfonso X el Sabio, Cantigas de Santa Maria (1959) No. 126. ‘Esta é coma Sancta Maria guareceo un ome en Elche dun saeta que lle entrava pelos

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12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22

ossos da faz’ No. 133. ‘(E)sta é como Sancta Maria ressuctou huus minya que leveron morta ant ‘o seu altar’ Felix Huerta, ‘Un escrito mariologico del infante D. Juan Manuel’, Revista Española de Teologia 8 (1948) 82. Jose Mauel Bleuca, ed., D. Juan Manuel, Libro Infinido y Tractado de la Asuncion (Zargoza, 1952). ‘E par ende vos digo que el otro día, que era la fiesta de la Asumption, a que llaman en Castiella sancta Maria de Agosto mediado, oy dezir a algunas personas onradas e muy letradas que algunas poniam dubda si era sancta María en cuerpo e en. alma. en parayso’ [This essay is c. 1342]. Jose Vallejo, ‘Sobre un aspecto estilístico de D. Juan Manuel’, Homenaje ofrecido a Menendez Pidal (Madrid, 1925) 2.63–85. Martin Dominguez Barbera, paper given on 9 November 1982 in Elche. Gonzalo Girones, Los Origenes del Misterio de Elche (2nd ed., Valencia, 1983). Enrique A. Llobregatalo, La Festa D’Elx (Elche, 1983) 20. Jesús-Francesc Massip, Theatre Religiós Meedieval als Paisos Catlans (Barcelona, 1984) 156. [The best book for those uninitiated in Catalan.] Massip, 158. Since the time of writing, the museum has been transferred to the Casa de la Festa. Juan Castaño Garcia, ‘Aparatos Escenicos de la Festa d’Elx: La Nuvol o Mangrana’ Ayuntamiento De Elche, Festa d’Elx-84 (Elche, 1984) 49–58, 52.Since the time of writing, many elements of costume have been ‘improved’, but the major change occurred when the Casa de la Festa was constructed and took over the role of the hermitage of St. Sebastian. All photographs copyright Pamela King.

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11 ELCHE AGAIN The Venida and the Semana Santa From: Medieval English Theatre 12.1 (1990) 4–20

The Festa of Elche in Spain is generally well known, particularly for the spectacular aerial machinery by which each year the Assumption of the Virgin Mary is celebrated. When I visited Elche in 1985 and wrote about the Festa for Medieval English Theatre,1 I was chiefly impressed by the way in which the play not only embraces all the horizontal and vertical space within the church, but also the way in which the horizontal or processional action overflows the boundaries of both space and time to embrace the old city.2 It occupies the night between the two parts of the performance with the Roa (the procession of penitents) and the following day with the funeral procession of the Virgin. Return visits to Elche in subsequent years and at other times of year have led to an extension of these assertions: it now seems to me that Elche’s celebration of its patron saint, St Mary of the Assumption, in fact, occupies the whole year. I have made the case for this elsewhere in general terms,3 but here want to look more closely at the two other festivals of the year in which the Virgin actually leaves her shrine in the church. Semana Santa, Holy or Easter Week, is noted throughout Hispanic lands as being a time of elaborate processions and celebrations, Seville’s being the most famous. Elche too has its processions at that time, but these take a form which is radically adapted and reorientated to accommodate the image of the Virgin of the Assumption as a focus which rivals the resurrected Christ himself. More particularly, the celebration in December of the little-advertised Venida (Vinguna in Valenciano) of the Virgin is another major festival generated in her honour, which not only contributes an additional dimension to the main Festa, but has a dramatic focus all its own. It is founded on a local legend which explains further why the image of the Virgin of the Festa is an object of veneration and truly La Virgen d’Elx. Daba fin a su carrera el año de la humana Redempcion 1370, quanda el dia 29. de Diciembre, saliendo de la Torre. que llama ban Cabo de Aljup, y oy Castillo de Santa Pola, un soldado, llamado Francisco Canto, vecino de la Villa de Elche, à guardar, y reconocer la Costa del Mar, hasta la Torre del Pinest: hallo en su Playa un hombre, vestido de Marinero; y queriendo reconocerle (pensando seria acaso Espia de alguna Argelina 169

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Fragata, como de ordinario, por la proximidad, acontecè; ò perdido Marinero, que de algun derrotado Baxel havria tornado tierra en alguno de sus fracmentos) para cumplir con su obligacion, se llego à èl, quanto pudo, y encontro un hombre de garvosa estatura, hermoso rostro, y con una modestia, y sossiego ageno de toda sospecha, sentando sobre una area, el qual, quando viò se le acercaba el Soldado, se le adelantò, y saludando le cortès, le dixo, como venia de lexas tierras, solamente para traer à Elche aquella Arca; y que supuesto se hallaba con cavallo, y sabia el camino, le estimaria la trasladasse a dicha Villa, en cuyo termino estaba. Repondiò à esto el Soldado, que no era permitido à los de su empleo abandonar la Costa por ningun caso; fuera de no ser aquella hora commoda para semejante viage; yà por el peso que se dexaba discurrir en la longitud del Arca, muy desigual las fuerzas de su cavallo. Oida por el imaginado Marinero la repuesta del Soldado procuro atraerlede à su voluntad, assegurandole no haria la menor falta à su oficio: añadiendole haria ela viage en breve tiempo, pues el Arca; aunque grande, era ligera; y que sin detenerse en Elche, la podia dexar en la primera casa, ò lugar, donde viesse luz; y a estas añadiò otras eficaces razones para convencerle, como con efecto la consiguiò; y dicho esto, desapareciò el gallardo Joven; y Francisco, no sin alguna turbacion del caso, sin mas detenerse, acomodò el Arca sobre su cavallo, y emprehendiò el camino de Elche. Serian las quatro de la mañana, quando entrò por la Villa; y despues de haver registrado varias calles, y reconocido en todas el silencio ordinario de la noche; viendo, que ni aùn en las Iglesias se dexaba registrar la luz, que havia de ser termino de su camino, discurria salirse de la Villa, como lo executara, à no reparer, que de la Hermita del glorioso Martyr San Sebastian (que entonces era Hospital) salia un rayo de luz, tan resplandeciente, que alumbraba todo el espacio cercano. Alegròse con la novedad, y llamando à la Puerta, abrieron dos Beatas, que alli assistian, cuidando de los enfermos. Deposito el Arca, y esperando hasta rompes el dia, fue a dàr cuenta los Senores del Govierno de todo lo que le havia passado; los quales vinieron en forma acompañados de Francisco Mirò, Procurador General, y de algun cortcurso del Pueblo. Llegaron al Hospital, y entonces el Licenciado Mos. Juan Mena, Presbytero, abrio el Arca, y encontraron la Soberana Imagen de Nuestra Senora de la Assumpcion, que oy tiene la Villa de Elche por patrona, vestida pobramente, y con ella todos los papeles, y letras, que oy en su fiesta se cantan en los dias 14. y 15. del mes de Agosto; y sobre la cubierta del Arca un rotulo, que en lengua Valenciana decia: Pera Blig, esto es, para Elche.4 ‘It came to the end of its journey in the year of Our Lord 1370, when on the 29th of December, a soldier called Francisco Canto, an inhabitant of the city of Elche, coming out of the Tower which was called Cabo de Aljup (now the castle of Santa Pola), to guard and reconnoitre the 170

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sea-coast up to the Tower of Pinet, saw on his beach a man dressed as a sailor, and wanting to investigate him (thinking he might perhaps be a spy from some frigate from Algeria, which often happened because of its proximity; or a shipwrecked sailor who had come ashore on some of the fragments of a vessel driven off course), and in order to do his duty, he went close to him as he could. He met with a man of graceful stature, a beautiful face, modest, and, calming all suspicion, sitting on an ark; who when he saw the soldier approaching him, moved towards him, and greeting him courteously, told him that he had come from far-away lands specifically to bring that ark to Elche: and given that the other had a horse and knew the road, he presumed that he would carry it to that town, which was its destination. The soldier replied to this that those in his position were not allowed to leave the coast for any reason whatsoever, and also that this was not a convenient time for a journey like that, especially since the weight which the length of the Ark indicated was too much for the strength of his horse. The supposed sailor, after hearing the response of the soldier, managed to bring him round to his wishes, assuring him that he would not be contravening his duty in the slightest; adding that the journey would take a very short time, since the ark, although large, was light, and that without being detained in Elche, he could leave it in the first house or place where light was to be seen; and to these arguments he added other good ones to convince him, in which he succeeded. Having said this, the dashing young man disappeared; and Francisco, not without some anxiety about the matter but without more ado, accommodated the ark on his horse, and took the road for Elche. It was four o’clock in the morning when he entered the town, and after having reconnoitred several streets, in all of which he encountered the customary silence of the night, seeing that not even in the churches could he discern the light could have been an end to his journey, he was considering leaving the town; which he would have done if he had not [suddenly] noticed that from the Hermitage of the glorious martyr Saint Sebastian (which was at that time a hospital) there came a ray of light, so brilliant that it lit up all the surrounding area. He rejoiced at this new development, and knocked at the door. Two religious women, who were present there caring for the sick, opened it. He left the ark there, and waiting until daybreak, went to tell the Governors of the city everything which had happened to him; they duly came accompanied by Francisco Miro, the Procurator General, and a small crowd of townsfolk. They arrived at the hospital, and then the priest Mgr. Juan Mena opened the ark and found in it the sovereign image of Our Lady of the Assumption which today the city of Elche holds as its Patroness, poorly dressed, and with her all the papers and letters which today are sung on her festival on the 14th and15th of August; and on the lid of the ark an inscription, which said in the Valencian language, Pera Blig, that is, “for Elche”’. 171

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Cristòbal Sanz, the first commentator on the Festa in 1621, did not mention this legend at all, believing that the origins of the Misteri were obscure.5 Yet in the 18th century, accounts began to appear which were remarkably similar in detail, although arguing about date,6 and which insist enthusiastically on the appearance of the Virgin of Elche, complete with a copy of the text of the play of the Assumption in an ark on the seashore. The above account, from 1740, is the earliest detailed version of the story, which, during the following century, came to be the focus of a December festival in many respects as elaborate as the celebration of the Feast of the Assumption in August. The Feast of the Venida is really a 19th-century phenomenon. In the later 18th century, there are scattered references to processions, but these are generally accepted to have been liturgical and to have taken place in the environs of the church. The first detailed account of any iconographic presentation of the legend dates from 1805, when on the festival of St Serapio (29 November), there appeared various triumphal carts, one treating the Venida as its subject, presented in gratitude for the city’s liberation from an epidemic.7 In the years which followed, triumphal carts went on being brought out by trades’ guilds, some of them having plays written in verse to accompany them. In 1807, an extensive programme of events was published for 27, 28, and 29 December, which includes a nineteen-page, double-column romance in octosyllabic couplets about the arrival of the Virgin.8 On the first day, there was a procession of nine carts: the carpenters’ guild represented the ark of the Virgin and Judith with the head of Holofernes; the shoemakers had a new composition showing the famous joker Juan Romero; the hemp-workers a boat with a crew of Turks; the millers a decorated windmill; the bakers a representation of the various stages of their craft; the blacksmiths a working anvil; the blind men, with disguised faces, played various kinds of music; the innkeepers had a car which displayed several fountains of their wares; and the hunters a scene involving a king on a throne, surrounded by courtiers and guards, demonstrating various drills. On the second day, the romance was told, using two fortified sets for Moors and Christians, as well as six altars set up in the street to illustrate different scenes. On the third day, all the elements combined in a succession of masses and processions, in which the Virgin was given pride of place, accompanied by gunfire and music. A very similar sequence of events is reported as being put on in 1813 to celebrate victory in the War of Independence.9 From this point forward, the celebration of the Feast of the Venida of the Virgin in Elche on 29 December (also Innocents’ Day with traditions similar to our April Fools’ Day) seems established, despite the rise and fall of the guilds’ system and the particularly turbulent history of Spain in the 19th century. Indeed, unusually elaborate and protracted versions of the Venida became the accepted way in which the city celebrated contemporary triumphs. In parallel with the development of the festival, documentation of the ‘real’ events, which it purported to celebrate, much of it spurious, proliferated. In 1855, a three-act theatrical work called La Venida de la Virgen was written by Don 172

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Pascual Caraceno,10 which Castaño believes directly gave rise to the foundation, ten years later, of the Society of the Venida, which still organises the celebrations in the present day. From the same time date three completely fictitious documents, which nonetheless are cited by many commentators which follow.11 Two of the documents are given prominence in Don Emilio Moreno’s Glorias Religiosas de España: an account by the governor of the tower at Santa Pola, describing the appearance and discovery of the ark on the beach, and another from the governor of Elche describing the arrival of the ark, its discovery by Cantó, and its deposit in the Hermitage of San Sebastian. Caraceno, who wrote the play mentioned above, claimed the continuing existence of the parchment from within the ark, on which instructions for the performance of the Misteri of the Assumption were supposed to be given. Tellingly, this does not include the incident of the ‘Jews’ attempt to disrupt the Virgin’s funeral, an element of the performance which was suppressed between the mid-19th century and 1924 and, therefore, about which the document’s inventor knew nothing. The last and most influential of the various 19th-century accounts cited by Castaño is that of Pedro Ibarra y Ruiz, whose grossly overwritten 1895 Historia de Elche indelibly fixed the event in the popular imagination. Historical evidence that the festival of the Venida is an elaborate piece of 19thcentury medievalism is borne out by the experience of the celebration in the present day.12 Events begin before dawn on the morning of 28 December, when large numbers of citizens gather on the beach at Tamarit, near Santa Pola, to await the arrival of the ark. Waiting is itself part of the experience, as bonfires are lit and wax torches distributed. Dawn is expected at around 7.30 a.m., but from 6.30 a.m. onwards, a dark shape can be detected bobbing on the waves, about thirty metres from the shore. Half an hour before dawn breaks, the name of Cantó is murmured amongst the assembled company around the bonfires, as the silhouette of a horseman in a long cloak appears and canters through the shallows and then disappears in the half light. As soon as it is light enough to see, the long line of spectators spreads out along the water’s edge, again to observe Cantó as he rides into the water and ‘discovers’ the ark, which is dragged ashore, the lid removed, and the image inside revealed amid pious rejoicing. The event retains much of the romance of the early accounts, but certain practical details must also be recorded. In 1988, the Patronato de la Venida, the organising confraternity, laid on twenty buses to convey the faithful from Elche to Tamarit, but in the cold December dawn, only six were needed. Less uncomfortable elements of pageantry, later on in the day, were more enthusiastically supported. The media were, however, out in their usual obtrusive force, such that no bystander was able to witness the opening of the ark, as we were cordoned off carefully to allow the television cameras an unimpeded view of the great moment. We were, however, able to watch the opening of the ark on local television later that day. The ark itself, which like most of the ‘props’ associated with the Festa, dates in its present form from 1940, is wooden, built with a keel and a watertight 173

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lid. It is not, however, entrusted to the waves unprotected, but floats incongruously in the kind of rubber inflatable dinghy generally associated with amateur scuba-diving. The tides are such that it can be dropped into the sea off the resort of Santa Pola and guarantee to fetch up at Tamarit, an uninhabited stretch of sand and scrub dominated by the local salt-works. Just in case something does go wrong, the number two, or understudy image of the Virgin, is put to sea, although back in Elche in the church of Santa Maria, the shrine is decorously concealed to preserve the illusion. To ensure that the ark bobs in the sea at the ideal spot for discovery, three men in waders regularly run into the sea, under cover of darkness to rearrange its position. In view of the logistics of the re-enactment, it is indeed fortunate that the legend does not report the ark being discovered in broad daylight. A Mass in thanksgiving for the discovery was said in the open air, in the courtyard of the farm at Tamarit, because of the expected crowds. The re-enactment of the finding on the beach dates back to the year after the formation of the Patronato in 1865. In 1870, the members erected a stone pillar on the beach to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the events in the legend, and, in 1879, began to build a chapel at the beach in which masses could be said, but building did not get beyond the foundations. It was later completed in 1911, only to be considered too small now for practical use.13 While Mass was being said, on the other side of the courtyard wall, a collection of animals and people was assembling. Two ‘oxen’, actually Murcian cows, were yoked together to pull the cart, decorated with foliage and flowers, which would carry the Virgin on her journey to Elche. This was accompanied by an assortment of other decorated vehicles drawn by horses, ponies, and donkeys. Principally, there was an assortment of men, women, and teenage boys on horseback. No one was especially dressed up for the occasion, but the quality of the horseflesh demonstrated that we were in the company of Elche’s equestrian society, from which the expert horseman currently playing Cantó had been drawn. Those on foot and on horseback were issued, as at a Sunday-school picnic, with little canvas bags containing savoury pastries and an orange for the twenty-kilometre Romería to the city, enacting the translation of the image from the beach to Elche. In the late 19th century, the shoemakers’ guild used to distribute bread to the poor at the city gates during the Venida; our sustenance was sponsored by the local television station, Tele Elx. The organisation of the very complicated processions, by which the translation of the Virgin is re-enacted, has been a matter of trial and error. In 1866, there was an attempt to reconstruct the whole procession all the way from the beach, but this was not repeated as the distance was too far. In the previous year, the newly formed confraternity had used an orchard, the Huerto de las Puertas Encarnadas (‘Orchard of the Red Gates’) on the outskirts of the city, to simulate the beach, and they reverted to this practice.14 Nowadays, there are, in fact, two processions, cunningly compromising between the discovery on the beach and the use of the orchard. The Romería procession accompanies the Virgin, Cantó, and the ark as far as the orchard, stopping for a grand picnic in a field along the 174

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way. When this cavalcade arrives at the orchard, Cantó performs his now famous gallop, unaccompanied, to the city centre, entering the Ayuntamiento, the Town Hall, to announce his discovery. Crowds of people, many in traditional costume, carrying bleached palm branches, await his arrival and prepare to accompany him back to the orchard (alias the beach) to collect the image. The gallop itself is an important element in the celebration, reinforcing the heroism of Cantó, carefully timed in the hope of a broken record and particularly popular when the streets are wet and there is added danger of an accident. Before his return to the orchard, Cantó changes his lightweight horse for the dressage stallion which he will ride for the rest of the two-day festival, putting it through carefully controlled paces in streets full of children, balloons, and fireworks. The procession with palms is urged on by Cantó’s repeated cry of ‘A la playa, Ilicitanos!’ (‘To the beach, people of Elche!’), as it moves at a stately pace through the streets, led by heralds who stop at regular intervals along the route to announce the discovery and read aloud the instructions from the document found in the ark. At the orchard, the two processions converge and the Virgin is led into the city by Cantó to cries of ‘Viva la Mare de Deu!’ (‘Long live the Mother of God!’), the crowd replying ‘Viva!’. As the procession moves through the streets, balloons are dropped from balconies, church bells ring, and whole volleys of rockets are set off from the rooftops and in the streets. The ubiquitous town bands play local tunes. Horses and oxen are, somehow, kept under control until the procession reaches its destination at the Basilica of Santa Maria, where the Virgin is removed from the ark and taken into the church, where during the night a special service of Matins is said.15 On the following day, Cantó, again on horseback, leads another solemn procession around the boundaries of the old city. This procession conforms closely to the pattern of the Roa (the procession of penitents which takes place on the night between the two halves of the Festa in August), but it moves in the reverse direction. The main procession is made up of priests from the church, members of the confraternity of the Venida and other local dignitaries, Cantó, and the image of the Virgin, crowned, wearing an elaborate allegorical gown and standing on a large paso (‘float’) with angels at four corners and covered in flowers. The streets are then lined by two single files of all those who want to process, carrying red candles. Modern arrangements for the celebration of the Venida may seem elaborate, but they are a pale imitation of the height of activity in the late 19th century, when events might occupy four days and included flights in balloons, cockfighting, bicycle races, and full-scale mock battles between ‘Moors and Christians’.16 The last of these fell into disuse at the end of the 19th century, to be revived in 1977 as a separate festival in its own right, detached from the Venida and celebrated either in early August or October.17 Although what happens in Elche at the end of December does not have the venerable pedigree of the Festa de Agost itself, it lends interesting and corrective dimensions to the way in which scholars are prone to look at medieval plays and quasi-dramatic events which appear to have persisted in continuous tradition. The Venida is the dramatic realisation of a legend about the Middle Ages. It 175

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is rendered peculiarly dramatic by the development of the character of Cantó, a true hero of popular romance. Playing opposite the horseman-actor who takes the part of Cantó is the Virgin Mary. If it is unclear in the Festa whether it is the ‘real’ Virgin Mary or a statue which is venerated by the city, that question is resolved in the Venida, for the statue here takes the role of a statue, the one found by Cantó on the beach. The young boy who plays the Virgin in the Vespra, the first half of the Festa, does not have his role taken over by a special-effects dummy for the Assumption itself; he is the special-effects dummy by whose aegis the Virgin of Elche, always and only a statue, is animated. The opposition of Cantó and the image of the Virgin also create an additional narrative-historical layer for the whole Festa, interlaying medieval local legend between apocryphal or biblical narrative and contemporary re-enactment. The famous ‘genuine medieval’ play of the Assumption is, then, a play within a play, the legend of Cantó forming a framing narrative. Ironically, just as the account of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary is the stuff of medieval apocrypha, claiming historical veracity for invented material to which it is quite close in date, so too the legend of the Venida, while also laying claim to historical authenticity, appears to be no more than another invention which is more or less contemporary with the impulse for its re-enactment. This of course begs the complex question of why such a custom should appear spontaneously when it did. Nineteenth-century trends for medievalism in Northern Europe are well attested, but Spain does not appear to boast a particularly strong Romantic tradition, or not in poetry at any rate, despite imitators of Sir Walter Scott and Byron.18 When one departs from the strictly literary tradition, however, and looks at religious spectacle, the evidence for a Romantic revival is stronger. Manuel J. Gómez Lara and Jorge Jiménez Barrientos’ recent book on the Semana Santa in Seville suggests similar trends.19 They find that ‘the 19th century, above all in the second half, was the moment when almost all the features which are currently associated with the procession appeared or were consolidated’. This is variously attributed to the resurgence of Catholic traditionalism, encouraged by a highly conservative governing class with tastes in the Romantic, and to an aristocratic revival in which the commercial bourgeoisie was encouraged to participate in order to gain social prestige. The exotic, antique, and Romantic were for the first time, in Seville in severe economic difficulties, perceived as likely to encourage tourism. Perhaps more important to remember in the case of Elche is the background of the papal pronouncement of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854 and the reports of the miracles at Lourdes in 1858. That the 19th century was also a period of consistent political instability in the Iberian Peninsula may not be unconnected with the ascendancy of the Venida in the calendar of Elche: for Elche’s Virgin reputedly came from the sea to protect the city during a period when the risk of invasion from North Africa and from pirates was considerable. Indeed the city has not been invaded since that period, and the Virgin is perceived locally as a protectress. Hence it is interesting that when the cult of the Venida was at its height, protracted celebrations of the feast were arranged whenever there was a military or political victory. 176

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The legend itself is obviously derivative of related fertile traditions. The Virgin Mary has ancient associations with the sea.20 In the writings of Saints Jerome, Anselm, and Bernard, she is given the name stella maris, ‘Star of the Sea’. This imagery persisted beyond the Middle Ages, to arise in several contexts associated with metaphors of man’s life as the storm-tossing of a rudderless boat and Mary as the pure shining constancy which assists with the voyage of life. Nor is Elche unique in having an image of the Virgin purporting to have come from the sea: for instance, a very similar story is told of the arrival of the black Madonna of Tindari in Sicily. Marina Warner also records that, in the 16th century, attempts were made to link the Virgin with the pearl, something pure, enclosed, and coming from the sea. The allegorical robe designed for the Virgin to wear on the procession of 29 December by Ibarra y Ruiz in 1917 was known as the manta de las conchas (‘cloak of shells’), incorporating among other symbols the mystic anchor of salvation against the perilous sea of life, and spangled with pearls, stars, and shells.21 Clearly the legend of the Venida lies somewhere between these almost primaeval myths associating the sea, both with childbirth and purity, and the many correlatives in the related traditions of romance and saint’s life which the story suggests. It demonstrates the kind of typological decorum which characterises medieval Christian apocrypha, with a symbolic encounter; the figure of Cantó as prophet, owing something to both Moses and John the Baptist in the account; the Romería as pilgrimage or Exodus, and with covenant offering special protection to the chosen people of Elche.22 On Villafañé’s version quoted above, the Virgin, cast adrift in a boat in poor clothes but with some vital token of her credentials, is reminiscent of the English Emaré, which owes much to a similar intersection of narrative traditions. The special status of Elche’s statue of the Virgin, which can be inferred from the Venida celebrations, in turn goes some way towards explaining the evident distortion of the usual pattern of Semana Santa celebrations, which her participation brings about. Gómez and Jiménez devote a whole chapter of their book to the names of the Virgin, the different iconographic attributes associated with the different portrayals of the Virgin Mary in the Seville processions of Semana Santa.23 As it currently stands, Elche’s Semana Santa celebrations can be securely dated no earlier than 187224 but there too the complex iconography of the Virgin in her various aspects during the sequence of the Passion is preserved. Rivalling La Virgen d’Elx, therefore, are images of other Virgins which appear on pasos throughout the week. One of these is La Estrella (‘The Star’), the traditional image of the Virgin Mary as the stella maris, surrounded by hundreds of lighted candles. There is also Maria Santisima del Amor Doloroso (‘Most Holy Mary of Grievous Love’) and La Mater Desolata (‘The Forlorn Mother’), who has an encounter in the street with the paso of El Cristo del Perdon (‘Christ of Forgiveness’). There is the Virgen de los Dolores (‘The Virgin of Sorrows’), the Virgen de la Victoria, and La Esperanza (‘Our Lady of Hope’, though esperanza also means ‘expectation’, with a hint of ‘endurance’), traditionally clad in green, who meets with the 177

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Cristo de la Fe (‘Christ of Faith’, submission to the will of God) in an encounter known as El Encuentro de la Paz (‘The Meeting of Peace’), when white doves are released. This is to say nothing of the many figures of Christ which also appear, including the very small and old figure of the Cristo de Zalamea, a statue with a considerable local partisan following who believe he can perform miracles, and a Veronica with mechanical arms. All are sumptuously clad and movingly portrayed, if not of the antiquity and sculptural quality of the Seville figures, the majority being post-1940. Corporately they, accompanied by long files of anonymous nazarenos (penitents) in their capirotes (pointed hoods), represent the local variant of the standard received iconography of a Spanish Semana Santa. In Elche, however, the events of Semana Santa have another focus and meaning. All the figures, particularly those of the Virgin, which process through the week are also a preparation for the appearance of the Virgin in her most favoured aspect, as the image of the Virgin of the Assumption is brought out of her shrine yet again, for the final and most

Image 11.1 Cantó leads the procession

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spectacular encounter on the morning of Easter Sunday, when she is carried through the streets to meet the paso of the Resurrected Christ. On this occasion, the image is dressed in another gown, this time with palms as its dominant imagery, recalling the palm procession of the preceding Sunday, but also the symbolism of the palm (Elche’s most important agricultural crop) in connection with eternal life, and, particularly, with the Assumption of the Virgin. As the Virgin makes her way through the streets on this occasion, bells ring, bands play, and volleys of rockets are let off as usual, but in addition she is showered with aleluyas, little squares of coloured paper with holy pictures printed on them which are available from local stationers by the thousand. As the Virgin passes through some of the narrower streets of the city centre where all apartment blocks have terraces, the sky is literally blotted out by this multicoloured deluge. The paso bearing the image of the resurrected Christ is rather fine: it consists of the tomb, which is constructed as a pastoral grotto, surmounted by the figure of

Image 11.2 The Virgin rescued from the sea

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Image 11.3 Heralds of the Venida

Image 11.4 Palms at the Romería

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Image 11.5 Christ of the resurrection

the Risen Christ, with his banner. The image is 19th century and the composition, standing quite high above the ground, is impressive. When the two pasos meet, white doves are released from inside the tomb. Nonetheless, it is the image of the Virgin for which the excitement and press of crowds reach their pitch in the streets, and which is returned to the main Basilica of Santa Maria as the focal point for the final Mass of the week. Christ is reduced to the role of co-star, as La Virgen d’Elx usurps the major festival of the Christian year.25 Without taking account of these ephemeral appearances of the Virgin, one’s view of the Festa of the Assumption with its famous play is necessarily distorted. This play is more than an anomalous survival from the Middle Ages in a town otherwise devoted to the harvesting of dates and the making of shoes. Indeed, its medieval pedigree must be subjected to careful qualification.26 The play is, however, the culmination of the annual cycle of festivals, religious and profane, as they are celebrated in Elche, where, as in other Spanish cities, they have a dual focus on the major feasts of the Western calendar and upon the cult of the local patron saint. How the city relates to that saint, and, indeed, precisely what

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Image 11.6 Virgen d’Elx and aleluyas

or whom they are venerating in the Festa, cannot be fully understood without the wider context. The Festa, in its different manifestations, does indeed go on all the year round, even annexing for itself the pan-Hispanic traditional celebrations of Holy Week. Looking at the pattern of these related festivals, and how they have developed through time, also sounds a note of caution about what we understand as ‘medieval drama’, particularly in countries where a case can be made for a continuous tradition. As students of literature, we know our Malory from our Tennyson, but drama depends on the ephemeral and the transient, on the constant process of improvement and replacement. If we, as comparatists, are going to use the living Spanish tradition to tell us anything about medieval drama in Britain, Spain, or·elsewhere, we need to be secure in a definition of the medieval which detaches it from the purely temporal. 182

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Notes 1 Pamela M. King and Asunción Salvador-Rabaza, ‘La Festa d’Elx: The Festival of the Assumption of the Virgin, Elche (Alicante)’ METh 8:1 (1986) 28–50. Also in this volume. 2 Discussion of the organisation of scenic space has been one of the major preoccupations of recent Spanish commentators, for instance, Jesús-Francese Massip Teatre Religiós Medieval als Paisos Catalans (Monografies del Teatre 17, Institut del Teatre, Barcelona, 1984). 3 First read as a paper at the Sixth Triennial Colloquium of the International Society for the Study of Medieval Theatre (SITM) at Lancaster, England 13–19 July 1989. Published as Meg Twycross, ed., Festive Drama (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996) 99–109. Also in this volume. 4 P. Juan de Villafañé, Compendio histórico en que se da noticia de las milagrosas y devotas imágenes de la Reina de los cielos y tierra, Maria Santísimo, que se veneran en los más celebres santuarios de España (Madrid, 1740), excerpted in facsimile in ‘Soc per a Elig’: Revista de la Sociedad Venida·de la Virgen a Elche, 2 Epoca, Número l (Sociedad Venida de la Virgen, December, 1989) 21–28. 5 Joan Castaño Garcia, Apuntes sobre la Venida de la Virgen a Elche (Sociedad Venida de la Virgen, Elche, 1984) 41. 6 Castaño, Apuntes, 46; Elche was reconquered from the Moors in 1265, which doubtlessly accounts for the earlier suggested date of 1266. Events were subsequently agreed to have taken place in 1370. 7 Castaño, ‘Els maitines de la Vinguda de la Mare de Deu’, in ‘Soc per a Elig’, 49. 8 Castaño, Apuntes, 49–51. 9 Castaño, Apuntes, 52. 10 Castaño, Apuntes, 17. 11 Castaño, Apuntes, 19–20. 12 I was present at the Venida in December 1988. 13 Castaño, Apuntes, 63–64, 70. 14 Castaño, Apuntes, 55; Rafael Ramos, Fernandez Historia de Elche (Diario Información, Elche, 1989) 261–68. 15 Castaño, ‘Els maitines’, 49–52. 16 Castaño, Apuntes, 56–77. 17 Castaño, ‘Antecedentes de las Fiestas de Moros y Christianos en Elche’ in Fiestas de Moros y Christianos, Elche, del 5 al 10 Agost de 1985 revista (Asociación Festera de Moros y Cristianos, Elche, 1985) unpaginated. 18 Enrique Piñeyro, The Romantics of Spain, translated E. Allison Peers (Institute of Hispanic Studies, Liverpool, 1934). 19 Manuel J. Gómez, Lara y Jorge, Jiménez Barrientos, Semana Santa Fiesta Mayor en Sevilla (Ediciones Alfar, Sevilla, 1990) 33. The translation and paraphrase are mine. 20 For a general account, see Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1976) 265–68. Further research into this aspect of the cult of the Virgin would seem to be indicated. 21 Castaño, Apuntes, 74–75. 22 Jose Soler Cardona, ‘Religiosidad popular en la Venida de la Virgen’ in ‘Soc per a Elig’ 37–38, suggests some of these connections, but in support of the pedagogic importance for the church of popular festivals, rather than as evidence of the apocryphal nature of the celebrated event. 23 Gómez and Jiménez, Semana Santa, 21–25. 24 I was in Elche for Semana Santa in 1990. 25 Ramos, Historia de Elche, 269–74 (see note 14). 26 King, ‘The Festa d’Elx: Civic Devotion, Display, and Identity’. Also in this volume.

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12 THE FESTA D’ELX Civic devotion, display and identity From: Meg Twycross, ed., Festive Drama (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996) pp. 95–109 The early Catalan-sung drama of the Mystery of the Assumption of the Virgin, otherwise known as the Festa, has been performed in the basilica of Sta Maria in Elche, complete with elaborate aerial machinery, continuously since the fifteenth century. Texts and records become more numerous in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the play is of clear medieval origins. Its self-consciously eclectic mixture of monodic song and late medieval polyphony, quasi-liturgical procession, and baroque stage machinery testifies to its almost unbroken evolution. There were years when it was not performed, of course, when the basilica of Sta Maria fell down in the eighteenth century, and during epidemics of yellow fever and cholera in the nineteenth. In 1885, performance was deferred only until October, when it was offered in thanksgiving for relief from the epidemic. Cholera has, typically, not struck Elche since. It was the Civil War of 1936–1941, however, which caused a wilful and premeditated attempt to stop performance for all time. Hence, to understand the Festa of the late twentieth century as a civic event, whilst acknowledging its continuity, it is as important not to ignore in it dimensions of post-war reconstruction not, perhaps, too dissimilar to the York Mystery Plays’ revival for the Festival of Britain in 1951. This paper will not discuss the nature or the history of the play itself,1 but will look at aspects of its economic organisation, the personnel involved in it, and its non-mimetic festive context, in order to explore the relationship between civic-religious drama and the community. A lack of documentary sources makes it impossible to establish how the Festa was formally organised and funded before the sixteenth century. Earliest records2 indicate that the performance was the object of the patronage of one noble Elche family, the Perpinyas, the earliest documentation of this coming from 26 September 1530. At the same time, there existed in the town a Confraria de la Mare de Déu, dedicated to the celebration of Marian festivals culminating in the Festa. The chapel of this confraternity was the little hermitage of St Sebastian built in 1489 and just around the corner from Sta Maria. On 11 March 1609, the municipal council took on the financing of the performance out of local taxes and revenues levied from individual trades for the purpose. At this stage in its 184

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organisational evolution, the office of the honorary cavallers (‘knights’), answerable to the municipal government for aspects of performance, was instituted. These honorary posts are still symbolically represented by the three dignitaries who sit at the end of the andador (‘walkway’) throughout the performance, coming and going to fetch each group of performers for their entrances from that same chapel of S Sebastian, in more recent times used as the dressing rooms. Over the ensuing three centuries, the organisation of the Festa became an established part of municipal government with various trades’ associations of devotional leanings, as well as local wealthy magnates making their own special contributions. The church of Sta Maria itself was also involved throughout the period of the earlier records in the organisation, training, and supplying of the singers. This duality of organisation was not without its potential for friction, coming to a head in 1734 and 1740. As a result, in the 1790s, a clear division was made, whereby the town was responsible for the performance of the Festa itself, but the church took care of the processions, Masses, and other surrounding events and also looked after the church building. This organisational arrangement is reported to have led to the slow deterioration of the authenticity and quality of performance, particularly in the late nineteenth century, for in 1924 Pere Ibarra, an Elche-born intellectual and others formed the Junta Protectora al Patronat Nacional (‘Committee for the Protection of the National Heritage’) in an attempt to restore performance to what was then perceived to be an authentic state on the evidence of the available historical documents.3 Further opinion and legislation followed in 1930 concerning the role of the Patronato or guild which has traditionally attended to the organisation of the Festa.4 It was suggested then that the area of the Patronato’s competence was in urgent need of formal demarcation, that it should not involve itself in public affairs, but that it should restrict itself to the ‘artistic purity’ of the Festa and all matters pertaining to it. As guardian of the Festa, it required autonomy from interference from the Ayuntamiento, the Town Hall. It was at this time suggested that there should be three types of person recruited to the Patronato, categories which bear some relevance to its present-day social make-up: those born in Elche, those elected from current residents, and, in addition, young and active people who are judged to be suited to the task and unlikely to renounce their traditions. In effect, the present-day Patronato is made up of businessmen, professionals, and young artists and poets, all of whom have a long-standing connection with the town. The following year, further attention was drawn to the national significance of the Festa and the necessity of instituting clear measures for its conservation.5 Singled out for emphasis was the importance of traditional sung theatre to all musical history and to folklore, particularly when the material was passed down from father to son. There was a deeply felt danger that without regulation, the original would become infested with impurities and be lost little by little. Commercial tourism, now recognised as a controllable and positive force in the preservation of popular works of art, was then perceived as a risk factor. It was suggested that

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the way in which the Festa could best be protected was by declaring it a national monument. This duly took place, under the Republic, in September 1931. It was, of course, not many years thereafter that Civil War brought an abrupt halt to all such activities. The basilica of Sta Maria was gutted by fire and then used as a garage, so that in 1941, it was in need of complete restoration. The Franco government in Madrid shouldered the burden, appointing a national committee for the restoration of the Festa under the then Minister of National Education.6 A local sub-committee was established simultaneously. This Junta, established as a controlling and enabling body, was transformed in 1948 into the present two-tier Patronato, which was perceived as the means by which the Festa could be funded and also controlled by the state in perpetuity.7 In the immediate post-war Franco era, there is every indication that, because of its bringing together of secular and ecclesiastical authority in the production of an intensely traditional festival, the Festa became tantamount to an organ of political propaganda. In any case, the channelling of energy in a community into religious rituals has been observed by anthropologists as consistently characterising societies in which the men are politically comparatively impotent.8 The initial brief of the Patronato was that it should concern itself with guaranteeing annual performance conforming to traditionally established modes, that it should see to the conservation of the church building itself, and that it should propagate information about the Festa. Its honorary presidents were to be the (national) Minister of Education and the Director General of Fine Arts. The first vice-president was the mayor of Elche, the second the chief priest of Sta Maria, both ex officio. There was then to be a third vice-president, a secretary, and eight ordinary members nominated by the Ministry of Education. This made up the national committee. As was the case with the Junta for restoration, a local Patronato was also established to deal with the actual running of the Festa. The national committee was given three months, May to July 1948, to draw up its full constitution, which was further amended in December 1950, amplifying in particular upon the function of the local body. The national body gained two more honorary vice-presidents, the Bishop of Orihuela and the Civil Governor of Alicante, as well as having the number of ordinary members increased to fourteen. The local Patronato was led by the mayor, the chief priest of Sta Maria, and another managing president, with below them a vice-president, secretary, treasurer, archivist, and twelve ordinary members. This local body was obliged by the constitution to take on all the ongoing work to which the Festa gives rise, holding regular meetings on the first Wednesday of each month and Friday of the same week, with a provision for extraordinary meetings to be held on the instigation of the president or any five members. The treasurer was to be responsible for accounting to the national Junta for the annual expenditure of centrally supplied finance. Also established at the same time was the Capella of the Misteri, a standing organisation of great importance intended to preserve the purity of both music and text and to prepare local people of aptitude for performance. Seventy men 186

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and thirty boys currently make up the membership of the Capella, allowing ample provision for understudying roles from year to year. Each year, on 6 August, a ceremony called the Prova de veus is held in the Town Hall, presided over by the mayor, obviously a symbolic occasion, serious auditioning having taken place much sooner, but harking back to the era when the town governors administered the Festa directly. Masters of the Capella were charged with responsibility for musical and scenic production, and so were, and have remained, the chief aesthetic arbiters. With that, the structure which has financed and governed the Festa ever since was finally in place. Since the post-war re-establishment of the Festa as a national monument with direct state funding and its two-tier administrating Patronato, annual performances have progressed smoothly,9 with a replacement of all costumes in 1960, the same year in which the music was first recorded, and, in 1965, the first filming of the performance for television. The constitution of the Patronato, though largely the same in outline, has undergone several modifications of detail. In 1974, the number of ordinary members of the local body was doubled from twelve to twenty-four, with the twelve new members to hold office for six years only, rather than for life. In 1986, the number was again increased to forty.10 Folques, who wrote a history of the Patronato, concludes by stating that the reconstruction of the Festa under direct state control and finance during the 1940s and beyond is tangible evidence of Spain’s victory over Communism. This published attitude perhaps begins to explain some of the perceptible tensions in present-day Elche surrounding the preservation and performance of the Festa. Undoubtedly, in the Franco era, the Festa d’Elx signified, by tangible and popular means, the reunification of church and state. On 1 November 1950, for example, Pius XII’s proclamation of the dogma of the Assumption was the subject of enthusiastic and special celebration in Elche.11 Since Franco’s death and the shift in Spanish politics towards the secular Left, another influential lobby of opinion, which is in many ways ideologically incompatible with the immediate post-war reconstruction, has become concerned with the Festa. Many of those actively involved in preserving and studying the Festa are secular ‘leftist’ intellectuals, interested in the performance for its aesthetic qualities. Its potential as a tourist attraction, with all the economic benefits attendant on that, has also not escaped notice. Indeed, the Patronato’s function in promoting the Festa has become a serious part of tourist publicity, and the performance and peripheral events are ‘media events,’ with, unfortunately, many of the best vantage points being reserved for the cameras. Nonetheless, all groups unite in a desire to preserve the Festa, with much continuing argument about what constitutes ‘purity.’ There have been what might be seen as attempts to purge it of twentieth-century intrusions, but there again, it is difficult to strike a balance between the unselfconscious evolution of a popular festival event and the loss of, or contamination of, its aesthetic coherence. The late 1980s saw another change in administration, as state control of the Festa was devolved to the Generalitat Valenciana, who keep close and direct 187

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control over the financing of the event. The Patronato still administers, but real economic control lies elsewhere with the regional Department of Education and Science which clearly sees the way forward for the Festa as lying in the secular sphere. It is packaged as a facet of the distinctively Catalan culture, aimed at foreign visitors who want to do more than lie on the beach, but who are in no sense experts. It has been simultaneously brought to the notice of international scholarship, particularly with the sponsoring of the travelling exhibition, Mon i Misteri de la Festa d’Elx, which was assembled in 1985. Administrative devolution was most evidently marked, however, by the construction of La Casa de la Festa, opened in 1988, a building round the corner from the basilica with the provision of exhibition and archive space, meeting rooms, costume stores, and dressing rooms. Ironically, the construction of the Casa breaches tradition in that it removes the vestigial role played by the hermitage of S Sebastian, for so long part of the history of the Festa. Since 1989, major repair and replacement work has been done on the scenery and aerial machinery too.12 A sense of the shifts and balances in the perceived role of the Festa in the post-war era is reinforced by the attitudes of participants. Fortunately, the local press constantly and assiduously interviews those involved every year in special supplements devoted to the subject, so there is no shortage of accessible raw material. Certain elements clearly emerge, such as the immense status which goes with being a performer and the clear hierarchy of roles, the continuity of performance achieved within individual careers, as boy singers become adult singers and tasks are passed down the generations of an individual family. Least clear are the answers to the often-asked question, ‘And what does the Festa mean to you?’ There are a total of twenty-six boy singers involved in the production, all under the age of fourteen.13 The reminiscences of Emilio Señaris, a ‘young veteran,’ afford some access to their impressions.14 At twenty-eight years old, he already has nineteen years’ experience in the Festa. Brought up in Brazil until he was six, he first took the part of an angel at the age of nine. He recalls vividly the impression from above when the doors of heaven first open, of the immense heat which rises from the church below, and of the huge height when you are hanging above it waiting to descend. Asked whether he ever suffered from vertigo when playing the angel in the mangrana (‘pomegranate,’ the first aerial machine to appear), he replied that he simply recalls it being a great adventure and says that he began so young that it did not occur to him to worry. It was later when he was on the araceli that he remembers having more time to imagine possible consequences. But, he adds, as soon as you begin to sing, you forget all that. The worst moments on the aerial machines are, therefore, those which involve hanging in mid-air and doing nothing, as, for instance, when the araceli listens to St Thomas’s solo to the Virgin, or considerably higher, when the Trinity hangs in mid-air while the Virgin is crowned. In general, however, he recalls that as a child it was the height which he enjoyed. Certainly, the boys whom I spoke to in 1988, who had descended on the aerial machines, were much more concerned about how sore it was on the knees than the giddying height from which they are lowered. Señaris claims 188

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that participation for him is more than a religious or cultural experience, but has become something which he simply cannot live without. The distinct impression that, for the performers, the music is everything is borne out in all accounts. The machinery is something to which they become accustomed to a lesser or greater extent, usually from an age when unquestioning faith in the adults who operate it – and, who knows, in the protective powers of the Virgin – means there is mercifully little anxiety expended on being suspended on the end of a hemp rope and some primitive winching gear. The machinery is only in reality involved for one week in August, whereas the training of singers takes place in the Capella over several months. The master of the Capella has all the usual problems of those who train children, starting with mothers who wish their sons would spend their time doing ‘something more practical.’15 Antonio Berenguer Fuster describes the agonies of the cycle of preparation which begins in earnest after Easter. They are not able to do much prior to that because of the commitments which the boys have to school. The eternal problem is not only that of boys’ voices breaking, but of competing with all the other distractions which attract boys of around thirteen, not least that in July they would rather be at the beach. When a boy is recruited, it is a complete lottery whether his voice will permit him to participate for one year or for four. This is particularly critical in the case of the Virgin Mary, who is, naturally, played by an older and more experienced boy singer. More illuminating, perhaps, in terms of what the Festa has meant to the local populace are the reminiscences of retired performers. It seems to be the view that once an adult singer is cast in a role, he has a commitment for life.16 The normal pattern is for a singer to begin in the crowd of Jews who interrupt the funeral and are then converted, from where, depending on the quality of his voice, he may move on to become an Apostle. The life of a performer then involves considerable sacrifices, of time for rehearsals and of holidays, with the constant obligation to exercise his voice. Retired performers share with the new generation the difficulty in defining what the magic of the Festa amounts to for them, but reach the same conclusion that it is the pure joy of the music, although in the older performers this is explicitly linked with focusing their faith in the Virgin. The reflections of Ibarra Reyes, nicknamed ‘Peny,’ who played second tenor amongst the Jews for thirty-seven years, are typical.17 For him, the Festa has been part of his whole life, as his father participated in it before the Civil War. The singers of the Festa were the supermen of his youth, and he describes his own admission to the Capella as a sueño, a dream come true. He cannot remember when he was not steeped in the music of the Festa, a great escape-valve like all the local traditional festivals in which he participated in his youth. His one regret is that he never had an exceptional solo voice. The Capella was for him one big family, but a traditional one which ends with his own generation. It is a source of regret that his son has showed little interest in following him in his obsession and a participation which he sees not only as a great source of pleasure but an honour. 189

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The Festa also has its superstars. The rich baritone voice of Francisco Garcia Llinares,18 in the role of St James, is perhaps the most memorable of all. He has been one of the elected delegates of the Capella on the local Patronato for fourteen years, but has participated in the Festa for thirty, having played the role of the Virgin, of an angel on the araceli, and part of the Trinity as a boy. He was, like most others, a Jew before being promoted to Apostle. He is a businessman, but his whole life and hobbies have been coloured by the Festa, as his chief interests are music and popular theatre. He finds the times when he feels that he has transmitted something (he does not say what) to his audience most rewarding, the most trying when there are internal divisions in the Capella to be resolved. Sixto Marco claims that his St John is a very personal emotional interpretation based upon inspiration taken from art, from a conception of an apocalyptic visionary whom he compares with secular literary examples, but also infuses with something personal. The whole of the music conveys powerfully to him the sense that God, ‘if he exists,’ is not dogmatic but welcoming. He does not see the performance bounded by the constraints either of religion or of theatre, but more than both. One of his three major occupations in life – along with football and painting – is opera, but he firmly feels that the Misteri is not designed for trained operatic voices, that the sound of the traditional singing of the boys especially does not appeal to the same taste as professional sopranos. The Misteri is for the people and of the people: there are many superb voices in Elche who are not in the Capella and who ought to be,19 in his view. Others who play the role present slightly different views, one, notably, feeling that his obligation is to the text and to an interpretation of the role based on the ‘real’ St John, not mediated through any other art form. For him, the Misteri confirms his faith in the Virgin.20 Another, Pedro Pomares, puts it even more strongly, stating that he feels sorry for those who have no faith, feeling that artistic and popular values in the Festa are necessarily secondary to the veneration of the Virgin.21 There is also a distinct category of performer, in that the roles of St Peter, Christ on the araceli, and God the Father in the Coronation must be played by priests. They must also, of course, have good voices. The Reverend Luis Lopez,22 having played first God the Father, then St Peter, feels that, although he is playing traditional priestly roles (St Peter actually has to conduct the funeral ceremony of the Virgin), his prime responsibility remains, like the others, as a singer. For him, personally, it brings to life the realities of his faith. Clearly, he is less coy about religious experience and expresses himself in terms much less ambivalent than those of most of the participating laymen, who fight shy of expressions of spiritual certainty, favouring responses to the Festa’s qualities as a traditional cultural event. Beyond the performers there are, of course, the many men who are involved in operating the machinery, organised by a ‘stage manager’ who directs operations during performance by a telephone link from the organ gallery. He is an important lay member of the local Patronato, but much of the setting up and superintending of prior arrangements within the church is undertaken by a sacristan. Each of the 190

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operatives has his own specific task, both within the tomb and above in the dome. These have been, in many cases, passed on from father to son. Despite a tradition of rivalries, therefore, laity and clergy continue to co-operate in bringing forth the annual production. Most of the ‘ordinary people,’ who are annually interviewed by the press about their reaction to the Festa and their assessment of its importance, have as much trouble expressing their answer as do the participants themselves. Thirteen of the fifty people interviewed23 in one survey had never attended a performance, but still claimed that it is traditional, should never fall into the hands of professionals, and that it is in some way good for Elche to continue its tradition. The sense that it is good for the town is made more explicit by the number of people of all ages who believe that it should have more national television and radio coverage, although certain aspects seem to the outsider, at least, to have already become largely media events. The only interviewees who explicitly stated that the performance had chiefly a religious significance were, ironically, the young, for this reason, and the elderly. The middle ground all prefer to use the words ‘culture,’ ‘tradition,’ and ‘ilicitanismo,’ that is, in who stayed away describing the event as peculiar to Elche – Ilicitanos are the people of Elche. If one way in which the outsider can attempt to understand the nature of the Festa is by simply exploring the history and attitudes of those involved, another involves attempting to understand the formal semiotics presented by the event in its broader semi-mimetic festive contexts. To see the music-drama of the Festa on its two days of performance in the church of Sta Maria is to experience ‘live’ devotional theatre in every sense of the word. Anyone present in Elche for the Festa will observe, however, that it is impossible to delimit performance to the two halves of the play itself, played in the early evening of two consecutive days. The festival itself, as opposed to its narrowly mimetic components, begins with the symbolic preuvas, or tests, of the voices on 5 August, and of the angel’s courage on the aerial machinery on 11 August, on which day in the Town Hall the budget of the Festa is formally approved. All of these events, formerly administrative, are now pure formalities; their preservation a part of the ritual enactment of the celebration of the Assumption in its widest festive sense. There again, the two halves of performance have a specific celebratory context which contributes much to the understanding of what the Festa actually means to the town of Elche. After the preliminary ritualised preparations and public rehearsals, all of which carefully stoke anticipation and court considerable media interest, the beginning of the Festa proper, that is the public holiday, is marked by the Nit de L’Alba,24 or ‘white night,’ a firework display of impressive proportions during the official part of which a large cluster of fireworks in the shape of a palm is set off every five seconds. The display culminates at midnight, with the lighting of over 700 rockets simultaneously on the top of the tower of the basilica, forming the shape of the biggest palm, the major agricultural crop of the city and also, of course, symbolic of the Assumption. The unanimous assent of the entire town is marked by the fact that the electricity supply is cut at the central power station so that the climax of 191

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the display can be appreciated in total darkness. After midnight, the streets truly come to life with the less official, but no less traditional, fights with hand-rockets, carried on by gangs of youths until dawn. The display involves a lot of family and commercial rivalry, with the desire to set off bigger and better fireworks. A programme25 for the official display requests that no one let off their fireworks until around 11.30 p.m. It includes the timetable of sponsored fireworks with the time they are to be set off at ten, then five-second intervals from 11.15 p.m. onwards, and their location. Here the blend of the devotional, the civic, and the commercial, which characterises the Festa, is perfectly encapsulated. Most of the fireworks are listed as being sponsored by commercial companies, including Elche’s many large shoe manufacturers, as well as hotels, restaurants, and insurance companies. The short line provided for a statement under each entry in the programme creates a certain sense of incongruity as, in among what amounts to commercial advertisements, there are entries which show that some fireworks are sponsored by private individuals as memorials for their dead. The 1988 programme lists, for example26: 228. Calzados Pikolino’s S.L., 11.36.45 Fabrica de Calzados, ‘Marca la moda, busca la marca’ Desde el Banco Bilbao-Vizcaya 229. En Memoria de 11.46.40 Manuel Peral Agullo Desde C.P. Candalix Some express dedication to the Virgin, others do not. The Patronato of the Festa, of course, does its share of sponsoring, as does the Ayuntamiento, which is responsible for the last and biggest cluster on the church roof. The references to the Nit de L’Alba begin in 1574. A deaf ear was turned to eighteenth-century prohibitions of fireworks pronounced by Carlos III, but the event led to the establishment of the town’s very efficient fire brigade.27 Carlos III’s prohibition was founded partly on the disastrous effects which firework festivals had on a town’s buildings, and even now in Elche, the following day’s papers are full of the night’s disasters, though most of these arise from the later hand-rocket fights, which are every bit as dangerous as they look. In 1988, the fire chief hired reinforcements and mounted a four-point watch throughout the night. He advised all bars to take down canvas awnings and asked people not to go near waste ground on which there was combustible rubbish.28 In the event, no buildings did catch light, although 253 people were reported to have been injured, seven seriously, three of whom lost fingers. At least three babies were among the injured, one, aged two months, having a lighted firework land in her perambulator.29 Although all this is reported punctiliously and at length in the local newspapers, it seems that the toll is not thought to be either unusual or unacceptable. 192

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The second night of the festival is very different in mood, as it involves the extended celebration of the Virgin’s funeral after the performance of the Vespra, the first half of the play. This ends with the death of the Virgin and the araceli’s descent to take up the soul. The second day’s performance will begin with the funeral procession set within the play, interrupted most dramatically by the Jews, who will be converted and assumed into the celebration. Throughout the night, the town continuously observes events which combine mourning and celebration, penance and holiday, united by procession. In the early evening, a ceramic portrait of the Virgin is set up outside the church. Young girls in traditional costume bring bunches of flowers to it. The secular entertainment continues with an invited group of musicians from overseas performing a Serenade to the Virgin on a platform erected outside the west door of the church. This music is always secular and light, of broad popular appeal, and has little connection with the main event beyond contiguity. In the meantime, however, Masses are said inside the church around the statue of the Virgin, which lies in state on her funeral bier in front of the high altar, and candle-sellers’ stalls spring up, selling the candles which will be carried around the boundaries of the old town of Elche in the procession known as La Roa. Traditionally, La Roa and the Masses were the means by which the faithful who came to Elche for the Festa passed the night, there being no room to accommodate them. The focus of this procession is penance and thanksgiving, and even nowadays, some go barefoot, generally again the elderly who believe in the efficacy of La Patrona’s intervention for their sick and their dead. The whole town is united in its wakefulness as the procession of those keeping the vigil pass through streets full of revellers and stalls selling souvenirs and churros. The following morning, the penitents are still walking but are joined by the costumed girls, members of the Ayuntamiento, the Patronato, and the entire cast, accompanied by a brass band, as the Virgin is carried around the town on her bier. Again, the mixture of civic celebration and devotion, as the bands play local folk tunes in competition with the Apostles’ singing, objectifies the complexities of the meaning of the event. A visit to Elche in August, therefore, alerts the spectator to the way in which the play not only divides into horizontal and vertical action within the church, but overflows the boundaries of both the space and time of play to embrace the boundaries of the old town and to occupy the intervening night. To return to Elche in December, however, is to be forced to acknowledge more radically that Elche’s mimetic celebration of its patron saint, in fact, occupies the whole year. The celebration on 28 December of the less widely known Venida de la Virgen not only contributes an additional dimension to the understanding of the main Festa, but has a distinct dramatic focus which is founded on local legend and which demonstrates exactly why the image of the Virgin of the Festa is of itself an object of veneration and is truly La Virgen d’Elx. La Venida is a re-enactment of the legend of the arrival of the image of the Virgin in 1370, when a guard called Francisco Cantó, protecting the town from the incursions of invaders and pirates, discovered in the early hours of the morning 193

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an ark washed up on the beach bearing the words Soc pera Elig (‘I am for Elche’). Cantó then galloped back to the town for help, the ark was collected by the townspeople, brought back with rejoicing, and enshrined in the church where the statue, or her successor, has been ever since. The re-enactment of La Venida has developed as a complicated series of processions. It begins on the beach of Tamarit at dawn, where the image in the ark, already placed in the sea in a rubber inflatable boat, is ‘discovered’ by Cantó, a part played by an extremely accomplished horseman, in front of many citizens and the media. A Mass is said near the little hermitage which has been built on the site of the original one in which the ark was reputedly lodged while Cantó galloped to warn the citizens. The accompanying crowds then set out on foot or horseback with Cantó and the Virgin in a cart pulled by oxen, on the procession known as the Romeria, accompanying the Virgin on the twenty-kilometre journey to the town. What then happens is complex: this procession stops at another hermitage on the outskirts of the town, which stands in for the one at the beach, while Cantó executes a hazardous gallop through narrow cobbled streets, each year an attempt to break the record, to tell the townspeople to go to the beach. Another procession, a formal one including dignitaries and the usual brass bands, then sets out carrying huge palm fronds to meet the first one. Everyone then brings the Virgin into the town amid rejoicing, with fireworks being set off at every corner, church bells ringing, and streamers and balloons thrown from balconies along the route. When the Virgin arrives at the church, Mass is said, and she is serenaded, only to be brought out again the following day to be carried around the town, standing erect on a very elaborate paso, in yet another procession led by Cantó on a fine dressage stallion and followed by ranks of dignitaries. For this procession, the people lining the streets and walking with the Virgin carry red candles, the arrangement being similar to that of the Roa. The details of the origins of the legend and aspects of its re-enactment have been studied in detail elsewhere,30 but in the present context, it illuminates certain points about the nature of Elche’s festival which would otherwise remain obscure, even though it is in many respects a distinct event, undocumented before the eighteenth century, and organised by a separate body known as La Sociedad Venida de la Virgen. It is not a festival of medieval origins, therefore, but a mimetic-processional realisation of a medieval legend. What makes it particularly dramatic and incidentally characteristic of its flourishing in the nineteenth century is the elaboration of the character of Cantó as a romantic hero. Playing opposite the actor who takes the role of Cantó is the statue of the Virgin Mary. If it is unclear in the Festa in August whether it is the ‘real’ Virgin Mary or the statue which is venerated by the town, the question is resolved here, for the statue in the Venida takes the role of another statue, the one found on the beach in 1370. In a sense, then, when a young boy plays the Virgin in the Vespra, the first half of the Festa, his role is not taken over by a special-effects dummy – he is the special-effects dummy, or perhaps the stuntman, by whose aegis La Virgen d’Elx, always and only a statue, is able to walk and to sing. The opposition of Cantó and the image of the Virgin 194

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also create an additional narrative-historical layer of meaning to the entire Festa, interlaying medieval local legend between apocryphal or biblical narrative and contemporary performance. The play of the Assumption of the Virgin in Elche is then, a play within a play, the legend of Cantó forming the framing narrative, to which a further dimension is added when the Virgin again leaves the church during Holy Week to meet her Son in yet another procession. In theatrical history, the Festa d’Elx may be unique, but in its local context, it can be seen simply as the most impressive of many popular festivals which its home town and region celebrate annually. Some of these, though festivals with organisational structures in their own right, such as the December Venida and the Holy Week processions, are intimately connected with the Festa and part of the continuing popular tradition of linking local tradition with the universal celebrations of the Christian church calendar. Others, however, celebrate different aspects of regional identity and are in some cases recent inventions. Only when the whole pattern of contemporary festivals has been set around it can the continuing significance and interest of the Festa for the late twentieth century be approached with any degree of confidence. The constant assertion of the value of ilicitanismo by those interviewed about the value of the Festa has now, at least, something to do with a consciousness of the connection between tourism and prosperity in a town close to Benidorm and one of the most intensively exploited sections of Spanish costa, as it has to do with regional chauvinism. The town councillor, with special responsibility for fiestas in general, went as far as to complain that Elche now has nineteen days of fiesta in August, which can be disruptive. His suggested solution is, however, that they all be pushed into five or six days, turning the streets into a permanent fiesta, of greater benefit to the town and likely to attract more tourists.31 The Patronat Provincial de Turisme in Alicante produces monthly timetables of local festivals for the whole region, specifically aimed at the tourist market. The commonest elements are, as one might expect, processions of floats, dances, fairs, pilgrimages, floral displays, feasts of traditional dishes, costumed processions, firework displays, bonfires, battles, sports, and religious rites, generally connected with a local saint. There are, of course, special events, like the ‘bulls in the sea’ festival in Denia in July. In this context, the entry ‘Misterio de Elche, Nit de L’Alba, La Roa, Entierro de la Virgen’ passes almost unremarked. What is more, it occurs cheek by jowl with the very popular festival of Moros y Cristianos (‘Moors and Christians’), which is celebrated throughout the region in the early weeks of August. The history of the festival of Moors and Christians in Elche is in turn connected with that of the Venida of the Virgin,32 in so far as, during the early nineteenth century, the Venida and other religious processions began to develop secular accretions. In 1806, on 29 December, various trades-guild floats took part in the Venida procession, as well as two ‘castles’ of Moors and Christians, which were raised up in the Plaza Mayor and the Plaza de las Barcas.33 The special significance of the Virgin as protector of the city against invaders from the sea is, of 195

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course, a major element in the Venida in particular. Then in 1899, the celebration of the fiesta of Moors and Christians became a separate event in its own right, taking place in early August. In 1977, the Asociación Festera de Moros y Cristianos was created to have special responsibility for the event. The programme for the present-day celebration is very elaborate, consisting of processions, calls to arms, mock battles, parades of women and children, and concluding with the conversion and baptism of the defeated infidels. In that it necessitates the central involvement of a huge number of people drawn from all ranks of society, the festival of Moors and Christians is more markedly ‘popular’ than the Festa, but is not so completely divorced from it, as might at first seem to be the case, either in terms of its history or its place in the local imagination. Much more recently, Elche has developed another August festival, also quasimimetic and processional in character. This is the festival of the Pobladores, a celebration of all the races who have contributed to Elche’s history – the Iberians, Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, barbarians (Visigoths), Byzantines, Syrians, and Aragonese. The festival was consciously begun in 1979 and seems to have been inspired by a wave of archaeological finds in the Elche area, which took place around that time. Each poblador is run as a separate society, having its own programme of events for the period of the festival which lasts for around four days in the first week in August, but can extend beyond that. These programmes include the establishing of a camp, processions, and enactments associated with the invading race in question, as well as feasts, sports, and discotheques34. There are, naturally enough, few reflections as yet upon what might loosely be called the ‘iconography’ of the festival, all commentary concentrating on the dissemination of the actual history which the festival has evolved to celebrate. Although the proliferation of festivals in Elche, particularly in August, might seem to rival one another for attention in physical terms, they are not so unrelated actually as aesthetic considerations might suggest. Their links are, to begin with, tangibly historical: the glossy brochure produced by the Association for the organisation of the Moors and Christians uses as its frontispiece a photograph of the Virgin in her shrine, just as many publications about the Festa show photographs of the ancient Iberian statue of La Dama d’Elx. It is all part of ilicitanismo, and the statue of the Virgin, found by Cantó during a particularly troublesome time in the town’s history, has protected Elche from incursions of Moors, pirates, and other unwelcome visitors ever since. Those who were not repulsed successfully in the ages before the arrival of the Virgin were assimilated, became part of the identity of the people, and are now celebrated in their own right. All such events are now consciously developing and adapting in the common cause of drawing further varieties of pobladores, those who come to spend rather than to pillage, while recent secular academic and cultural interest in the Misteri itself ensures simultaneously that it remains central but somewhat aloof from its less self-conscious festive context. This still leaves unanswered, to some extent, the question of why Elche continues to proliferate festivals at all. The nature of the Misteri may be largely unique, 196

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but all over Spain, processional, quasi-mimetic festivals remain the tenacious form of popular holiday entertainment, tourism probably notwithstanding. In this area, recent developments and opinions about the Misteri itself are helpful, since its preservation has been addressed in such a self-conscious manner, owing to its being ancient, unique, religious, and aesthetically respectable. An examination of the history of its organising body strongly suggests that revivification has conformed to certain social patterns in the aftermath first of the Civil War, then of the Franco era. The Civil War also brought to an end another pan-Hispanic festival which has never been revived, that of Mardi Gras, or Carnival. One of the most plausible local explanations I heard in Elche for the continuing enthusiastic proliferation of processions and festivals is that they are still filling the gap left in the popular imagination by the loss of Carnival, the occasion on which religion, insular chauvinism, and outright profanity became the seamless coat of popular festival at its best.

Notes 1 Pamela M. King and Asunción Salvador-Rabaza, ‘La Festa d’Elx: The Festival of the Assumption of the Virgin, Elche (Alicante),’ Medieval English Theatre 8:1 (1986), 21–50. Also in this volume. 2 Joan Castaño Garcia, ‘L’Organització de la Festa a Través dels Temps,’ Món i Misteri de laFesta d’Elx (Generalitat Valenciana, Valencia, 1986), 55–68. 3 Castaño, ‘L’Organització,’ 64–65. 4 Castaño, ‘L’Organització,’ 65–66; Alejandro Ramos Folques, Annales del Misterio de Elche (Elche, 1974), 47–48. 5 Castaño, ‘L’Organització,’ 49–51. 6 Castaño, ‘L’Organització,’ 53–54. 7 Castaño, ‘L’Organització,’ 55–66. 8 For example, David D. Gilmore, ‘Sexual Ideology in Andalusian Oral Literature: A Comparative View of a Mediterranean Complex,’ Ethnology 22 (July 1983), 241–52. 9 Gilmore, ‘Sexual Ideology,’ 81–83. 10 Private correspondence with Joan Castaño Garcia. 11 Folques, Annales del Misterio, 67; Isabel Martinez Cerda, ‘El Misterio de Elche,’ Cien Años de la Historia de Elche y de su Caja de Ahorros (1886-1986) (Caja de Ahorros, Alicante, 1986) 32–39. 12 Gomez Orts, ‘Antonio Serrano, el Arquitecto de las restaura ciones’: interview in La Verdad: Misteri-88 (August 1988), 7–9. 13 ‘Misteri d’Elx,’ Cuadernos de Informacion (August 1988), 18. 14 Gomez Orts, ‘Emilio Señaris, un caso paradójico,’ La Verdad: Misteri-88 (9 August 1988), 20–21. 15 Gomez Orts, ‘El Mestre de Capella se queja de las madres que prefieren que sus hijos se dediquen a cosas más practicas,’ La Verdad: Misteri-88 (9 August 1988), 14–15. 16 Profiles of veteran performers are a favourite with the local press in their special supplements. Typical examples include: Gomez Orts, ‘Juan Sempre se repuso de una enfermedad que le alejaba de las representaciones’ and ‘La importancia de los protagonistas anónimos,’ La Verdad: Misteri-88 (9 August 1988); ‘La opinion de cinco cantores,’ Cuadernas de Informacion: Misteri d’Elx (August 1988). 17 Orts, ‘La importancia de los protagonistas anónimos.’ 18 ‘Cinco cantores,’ 13 (Francesco Garcia Llinares died in 2014).

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19 Antonio Gonzalez Beltran, ‘San Juan: Cuatro hombres frente a un personaje,’ B.V. Periodico de Elche Comarca: Festes-85 (August 1985) (Sixto Marco died in 2002). 20 ‘San Juan,’ B.V. Periódico. 21 ‘San Juan,’ B.V. Periódico. 22 Gomez Orts, ‘De Padre Eterno a San Pedro,’ La Verdad: Misteri-88 (August 1988), 3–5. 23 ‘Encuesta Baix Vinalopó sobre el Misteri,’ B.V. Periodico de Elche: Festes-85, 42–45 24 Enrique A. Llobregat, La Festa D’Elx (Patronato Nacional de! Misterio de Elche, Elche, 1983). 25 Excmo. Ayuntamiento de Elche Nit de L’Alba (Elche, 1988). 26 Nit de L’Alba. 27 El Periodico (13 August 1988). 28 La Verdad (9 August 1988). 29 Información (15 August 1988). 30 Juan Castaño Garcia, Apuntes sabre la Venida de la Virgen a Elche (Elche, 1984); Pamela M. King, ‘Elche Again – The Venida and Semana Santa,’ Medieval English Theatre 12:1 (1990), 4–20. See also this collection. 31 El Periodico (13 August 1988). 32 Juan Castaño Garcia, ‘Antecedentes de las Fiestas de Moros y Cristianos en Elche,’ Fiestas de Moros y Cristianos Elche (Asociación Festera de Moros y Cristianos, Elche, 1985) unpaginated. 33 Castaño, ‘Antecedentes.’ 34 Pobladores de Elche (Pobladores, Elche, 1985) passim.

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13 CORPUS CHRISTI, VALENCIA, 1993 From: Medieval English Theatre, 15 (for 1993), 1995, 103–108

Spain tantalises the medieval theatre specialist with an ostensibly continuous tradition in festival represented by Holy Week processions, Corpus Christi celebrations, and the sung drama of the Assumption of the Virgin from Elche. All are civic and amateur in their provenance, occasional in their production, and employ scenic devices, which delight and amaze the Northern European or American medievalist familiar with pageant waggons and ingeniously opening heavens only from manuscript illumination or from account books. But, as theatrical performance is by nature ephemeral, it is usual to discover that what is enthusiastically preserved is a product of largely unselfconscious evolution rather than of cultural atrophy. Valencians show you the Holy Grail in their cathedral, and Corpus Christi is the major event in their busy liturgical calendar. The real treasure for the medieval English drama specialist, however, is the survival of a set of waggons, four of which are actually survivals from the early sixteenth century. For those of us who are interested in the structure of the English fifteenth- and sixteenth-century pageant waggons, these provide rare examples of contemporary construction. In particular, the sub-structures demonstrate a type of contemporary steering axle, pivoting on a single pin.1 The front wheels, which are smaller than the rear ones and are contained under the superstructure, are attached by means of stub axles to the lower of a pair of massive horizontal axle beams. This double beam is held together by bolts, secured at the bottom through a metal plate. The pin which acts as the steering pivot appears to pass through both axle beams as well as the lateral centre beam, the end of which can been seen in a recess cut between the axle beams in the middle. How the pin is secured at the top cannot be seen. The central shaft which is used for towing and steering the vehicle is then spliced into a fork which passes through the double axle beam on either side of the steering pin, and is finished under the waggon with a crosspiece. The whole is an ingenious piece of engineering which copes with a range of huge stresses and weights from a period before materials which are really strong under stress were available. Its longevity under fairly rough use is a mark of its success as a design, and it is completely invisible, hidden beneath the waggon skirts when the vehicle is in use. 199

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Figure 13.1 View of the front axle and shafts of the waggon of the Immaculate Conception, first constructed in 1542. The yoke for the horses is laid across the front shafts when parked, and the draught pole is raised

The waggons are stored all together in their original pageant house, with its flat for a caretaker on the roof forming part of the original construction. Their decking, bellied like a ship, resembles the pageant cars illustrated in seventeenthcentury triumphs, as do the accompanying wheeled beasts, although these are 1940s reconstructions. A painted cartouche on the back of each waggon records its history. The older ones were lowered earlier this century to enable them to pass below the new electricity cables. It appears that the plinths carrying the major statues were reduced in height by as much as a metre at this time. The iconography of the tableaux on the waggons – Fame, Blind Faith, St Michael, etc. – owes more to the Renaissance emblem book than to the biblical iconography probably expressed in the original scenes. Original subjects are again recorded on the cartouches, although whether the originals were tableaux of statues or real people is not at this point clear. For example, the waggon which currently carries St Michael was constructed in 1528 for the Last Judgement. Texts of plays from a Valencian Corpus Christi cycle survive, but only one play is now performed each year. In 1994, it was The Massacre of the Innocents, played on a large outdoor fixed stage and accompanied by heavily amplified background music by Wagner and Beethoven. It was very popular. The waggons are now marginalised from the main event, forming a procession of their own, when they are loaded up with members of the Confraternity and a band, and pulled by pairs of surprisingly small ponies. The popularity of the waggon procession these days is rather dismaying: it is the focus of some very heavy 200

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Figure 13.2 Side-on view of front shafts and axle. Nb. head of centre pole in recess between axle bed and bolster

betting over which ponies will make it up a certain uphill section of the route and which collapse trying. The animals are driven hard with their huge loads, metalshod hooves slipping frantically on the greasy metalled road in midsummer heat. But there is also a main procession in which biblical figures alternate with dancing troupes of dwarves, hobby-horses, and a mumming of Virtue and the

Figure 13.3 Back view of front axle and shafts, from under waggon. Nb. crosspiece

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Seven Deadly Sins. The procession is led by giants, representing the races of the world, and finishes with the cathedral clergy carrying the Host in its monstrance, which is showered with rose petals from surrounding balconies. The army brings up the rear. In the main procession, however, interest lies not in the authenticity of individual elements, but the eclectic nature of the whole process. A maypole dance in which the maypole is topped by a pomegranate containing a representation of the Host, a figure of the Virgin Birth, supplies one example of an ancient mixture of folk and official Christian art, whereas the contiguity of the army in combat gear with the cathedral clergy says more about the period of the middle of this century in Spain when religious observances such as this were revived. Spain is stuffed with lesser lay religious festivals proudly proclaimed muy viejo by their local populaces. Commonly one is taken to one side by the historically knowledgeable and warned that there is little or nothing of what is currently to be seen which is truly medieval, that what survives is somehow dangerously ersatz. And disillusion encourages peripheral focus on the obvious later accretions and improvements, annoyance that when inevitably a moving part, or a costume, or a statue has been replaced, the replacement has not been a faithful copy of the original. But the chronological Middle Ages were over a long time ago. The survival of practices from that time and the survival of ephemera are not always compatible, unless the ephemera are as robust and functional as the sub-structures of the Valencia waggons, which may be why they are known locally as rocas (‘rocks’). I am grateful, as ever, to Asunción Salvador-Rabaza Ramos for first drawing my attention to these constructions in 1990, when I benefitted from an exchange to the University of Valencia for three months under the ERASMUS scheme.

Note 1 The computer graphics illustrating this essay were prepared by Meg Twycross, from photographs taken by Pamela King. The construction appears to be roughly the same as that described by James Arnold in his Farm Waggons and Carts (David and Charles: Newton Abbot and London, 1977), 18 and 25. John Marshall discusses the date of the re-introduction of the pivoted front axle into Europe in the Middle Ages in ‘“The Manner of These Playes”: The Chester Pageant Carriage and the Places Where They Played’ in Staging the Chester Cycle, edited David Mills (Leeds Texts and Monographs NS 9: University of Leeds School of English, 1985), 25. The four earliest Valencia pageant waggons are said to date from 1512, 1528, and 1542.

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14 CORPUS CHRISTI Valencia From: European Medieval Drama, 4, 2000, 181–205 Umberto Eco famously suggested that there are many Middle Ages, all of them states of ‘dreaming’: The Middle Ages (unlike classical antiquity) have never been reconstructed from scratch: we have always mended them or patched them up as something in which we still live.1 This paper offers a reflection on utility, on ‘experience’ over ‘auctoritee’. Or, if you are a student of English mystery plays, what attending as an active spectator at surviving Spanish religious spectacle can tell you, that staying at home, reading account books and using your imagination cannot. Spain tantalises the medieval theatre specialist with an ostensibly continuous tradition in festivals such as Holy Week, Corpus Christi celebrations and Elche’s sung drama of the Assumption. All are civic and amateur in their provenance and occasional in their production, tied to liturgical feast days. The preservation of continuous tradition has led for the most part to unselfconscious improvement rather than actual cultural atrophy. The student of the chronological Middle Ages needs to view discriminatingly. All performance is ephemeral. For Valencians, who can show you the Holy Grail in their cathedral, Corpus Christi is the major event in a busy liturgical calendar. Moreover, their real treasure is the survival of a set of pageant wagons, known as ‘rocas’, four of them dating from the early sixteenth century. These provide us with contemporary examples of steering pivoted on a single pin, as well as helping to confirm current thinking about orientation of wagon performance – end-on rather than side-on – which I have published elsewhere.2 They are also stored in their original pageant house, the Casa de Rocas. Although the tableaux which are currently on top of them are later, and their total height was reduced with the introduction of overhead electricity cables, their decking, bellied like a ship, is original and resembles the pageant cars illustrated in seventeenth-century triumphs.3 The accompanying wheeled beasts also appear to come from the same tradition, although the Valencian ones are modern reconstructions. 203

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The wagons no longer carry the casts of ‘live’ mystery plays, but are surmounted by tableaux of statues, symbols of the civic and religious values of Valencia in the manner of a Renaissance emblem book. The subjects are described as La Diablera, a huge statue of Lucifer towering over Adam and Eve, Sant Miguel, again a single figure of the angel Saint Michael defeating the dragon, La Santisima Trinidad a Trinity, La Fe, the blindfolded female figure of Faith, Sant Vincent Ferrer, the popular local saint on the largest and most recent wagon constructed in the 1940s, La Purisima, the female figure of chastity, Valencia, a figure bearing the city’s arms, La Fama, Fame with her trumpet, and El Patriarca, a seated female figure in Roman armour carrying the shield of the Valencian nation.4 Each wagon has information about its history inscribed on an escutcheon at the back and from these we learn, for example, that La Diablera was originally constructed in 1528 for the play of the Last Judgement. The wagons are lined up in a cul de sac on the city outskirts several days before the procession, then, on the evening preceding Corpus Christi, they are taken down to the square at the back of the town hall from where their procession begins. They form a procession of their own, loaded up with musicians and members of the confraternity that looks after them, and they are pulled by ponies. The wagon procession these days is the focus for some very heavy betting over which ponies will pull steadily on the greasy road surfaces and which falter. All this goes on quite separately from the Corpus Christi procession proper. Texts of the Valencia cycle of Corpus Christi plays do survive, but they too have been marginalised from the main celebrations, although the casts walk in the procession. Only one play is actually performed each year, on a large fixed stage in the main square, accompanied by heavily amplified music drawn from the popular classics. It is, nonetheless, very popular and draws a large crowd. The main procession is led by eight giants, followed by dancing troupes, biblical and allegorical figures, and finishes with the cathedral clergy carrying the host in its vast silver-gilt monstrance which is showered with rose petals from surrounding balconies. A company of soldiers in combat gear brings up the rear. In the main procession, both the choice and meaning of individual elements and the eclectic nature of the whole are fascinating. Folk and official Christian art are mixed together, and the contiguity of the army and the cathedral clergy reminds the viewer of the enthusiastic spirit with which Franco’s regime encouraged the revival of religious festivals as part of a project to reunite the church with a strong military state. The focus of this paper is the main procession. The most lasting reflections that I brought away from Valencia’s Corpus Christi celebrations, once the initial excitement of finding the wagons had worn off, was an understanding of how procession as a mode of performance develops meaning. Also, and arising from that first point, I developed a sense of how, although it ostensibly embraces the whole community, Christian festival always has and still does polarise that community in patterns of inclusion and exclusion. These are the elements of the Valencia procession that are explored further here. 204

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The beginning of the procession is led by a parade of mounted police, who, although splendid in appearance in their own right, are there principally to act as space-clearers and crowd control. They are followed by the giants. Giants have long been an element in Christian festival. In England, midsummer shows in the Middle Ages, such as that of Coventry, included giants,5 and they remain a living and distinct festive tradition in Spain. Barcelona has hosted giants’ conventions, and the main secular element of the celebration of the feast of St James in Compostela is a procession of giants very similar to the Valencian ones. There are eight giants in Valencia, said to represent the races, more properly continents, of the world – Europe, Asia, America and Africa. They, like the wagons, are got out, and refurbished by their owning guild, then walked into the central square and parked in a corner the day before the procession. They then have their own procession on the day, two hours before the main one which they then lead. They are, like the wagons, an arresting autonomous element in the wider celebrations as well as part of the cumulative meaning of the whole. The giants are followed in the main procession by a sequence of dance troupes, each with its own music, stopping at appointed stations along the route to perform their dance. These include a troupe of dwarves, the traditional big-heads – dancers representing pairs of male and female dancers in rural costume with large grotesque false heads. The dancers look out through the mouths. The programme confidently asserts that the giants demonstrate how the Eucharist is worshipped all over the world, and, in combination with the dwarves, that large and small alike worship the Eucharist. This is highly unconvincing as an explanation for the existence of these two elements at the start of the procession; giants and dwarves may be better understood as signalling the suspension of ‘ordinary’ expectations which is fundamental to the shift into festive mode. The other dance troupes become harder and harder for the programme to integrate into its smooth narrative: a mumming in which a white-shrouded ‘woman’, her head covered in flowers, is buffeted around by a troupe of seven festively clad men is suggested to demonstrate the triumph of Virtue over the seven deadly sins. In Carceres at Corpus Christi, a dance of virtues and vices also takes place before the monstrance.6 The precise meaning of the Valencia dance, and even which party triumphs, remains at bottom obscure. In particular, the festive appearance of the ‘sins’, and their treatment of the lone ‘virtue’, is more reminiscent of battles between the forces of Carnival and Lent. Celebrations of the first of May too often include similar mummings in which a bare cross is covered in flowers, part of the Christianisation of Mayday celebrations. In the procession, this dance is followed by a maypole dance, a hobby horse dance, wild men who pelt the crowd with hard sweets and a dance of Turks. The wild men clearly owe something to the generic heritage of the ‘homo salvaticus’ of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, and the Turks appear to offer some reprise on the popular battles of Moros and Christianos which are still celebrated in the eastern provinces of Spain. A number of conclusions can be drawn from this sequence. Fundamentally, it illustrates for those of us working with no longer surviving processional 205

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performance that some elements of performance, in this case sequence pattern-dancing, can be incorporated into a moving procession.7 The procession moves slowly enough, ebbs and flows sufficiently, to allow for all manner of semi-ambulant performance. That is a minor practical point. More substantially, these elements pose the question of whether a single coherent meaning is developed in a procession, or whether a number of simultaneous meanings can be held together. The dominant mode of procession is narrative, if only because the audience experiences it sequentially: procession is fundamentally concerned with sequence. This fits well to a Hebraic or Christian context, where historical narrative predominates, supported by images such as Jacob’s ladder and Jesse’s tree. The biblical figures which follow the dancers are certainly organised according to Christian narrative sequencing. But this pre-procession of grotesques, burlesques and dancers is hard to subsume within the same mode of reading, and the programme, which is intent on a monolithic theme, struggles to demonstrate that all are related in some way to eucharistic worship. Giants are central to Christian mythology on the origins of the human race, many accounts attributing not only staggering age to Adam, Noah and Abraham, but also vast size. The Book of Enoch relates how giants were generated by the illicit liaison between angels sent to guard the earth and the women they encountered.8 A relief on the west front of Lincoln Cathedral shows the races of giants drowned in the Flood. The association of giants with the origins of life on earth is, however, wider than Christian apocrypha. Norse and some Native American mythologies, among others, claim that giants preceded Gods on the earth and existed in sworn rivalry to them. Men lived in constant fear of a final show-down which would signal the end of the world. Humanoids of abnormally large size, therefore, denote aboriginal states more widely than the official Christian narrative suggests. Although the dwarves and wild men may also denote versions of pre-Christian primitivity, the other dancers in the procession fit even less easily into any chronological sequence. What is chiefly impressive about the early sequence is the way in which one is made aware of a project of inclusivity which characterises Corpus Christi as an event and as the node of a belief system. All that giants, dwarves, hobby horses and wild men represent for the modern world is its folklore. If we follow Bakhtin rather than the programme notes, we could read these elements as carnival, essentially expressing the body of the populace, concerned with the body, the stomach, with dance, combat, and play rather than the official Christian narrative which is to follow. But their very inclusion in the procession, rather than as a rival procession or performance elsewhere within the broader festivities, also articulates the assimilative project of Corpus Christi. Far from being subversive, although that is their potential as they defy simple narrative exegesis, they are adapted to refer to the focus of the event. In particular, the maypole dance has a climax anticipating the climax of the whole procession. On top of the maypole is a pomegranate that opens into segments to reveal the host. The whole dance is, therefore, re-orientated as a celebration of the virgin birth. The pomegranate full 206

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of enclosed seeds is a popular and arresting symbol of Mary’s virginal fecundity, famously used to convey the angel of the Assumption to earth in Elche’s play, but also used as the emblem of Catherine of Aragon, sometime wife of Henry VIII of England. The pomegranate had become part of the Spanish coat of arms in 1492 with the conquest of Granada, which was probably the point at which it was incorporated in sacred as well as secular iconography. The host within the pomegranate on top of the maypole is immediately intelligible as a figure of the deity made flesh. Maypoles are traditionally used to celebrate the abundance of summer from sowing to harvest time, a time of year with which Corpus Christi, always close to the midsummer solstice, coincides. And food, in the form of fruit and bread, commonly associated with festive dancing and carnival, here becomes mystic food, the fruitfulness of the Virgin and the bread that is the body of Christ. Corpus Christi as it is celebrated is a conservative restatement of the power of civic authority, church and state, of church within state. It functions rather as the Renaissance court masque did to affirm the existing order and its authority. I would submit, then, that these opening dances in the Corpus Christi procession proper are robbed of their potential or original carnival power to distract and subvert by being impregnated with official meaning. Like the Renaissance antimasque, they are part of a project of assimilation that both articulates the power of the host, God among us, and confirms the power of the ‘official’ culture to include, and by that inclusion, to control. The dancers are followed by a sequence of biblical figures. Again the programme which is distributed to the audience tells them how each character relates to the Eucharist. The pattern is unsurprisingly a standard historical narrative sequence, united by typology which is indicated by the attributes which each character carries. Thus each processional item is the epitome of a significant typological episode in the Old Testament, and, like a mystery play, requires to be read by the audience in the manner of a sacred picture. The meaning of the whole is, in addition, cumulative. The sequence and the meanings given in the programme are as follows:

The Old Testament 1) St Michael, carrying a flaming sword, accompanied by a white and a black soul. 2) Noah, carrying the dove. 3) Abraham and Isaac, carrying the fire of sacrifice, said to represent the sacrifice of the Old Law. 4) Melchisedek, high priest of the Old Law, carrying bread and wine, prefiguring the Eucharist. 5) Jacob’s ladder, carried by two porters, representing the ascent of the patriarchs to heaven. 6) Jacob and his twelve sons. There is a long explanation of the origin of this item in the programme. The thirteen figures are said to be based on those 207

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7) 8)

9) 10) 11)

12) 13) 14) 15)

16) 17) 18) 19) 20)

surrounding the doorway of a church in Valencia, with dual dedication to Saints John the Baptist and John the Apostle, a common dedication in the province. Moses with the tablets of the law, and Aaron with a sceptre, both protagonists of the Exodus and spectators at the miracle of manna from heaven, another symbol of the Eucharist. A Levite carrying the bronze serpent raised by Moses on a cross-staff, traditional typological symbol of Christ’s passion made explicit in John’s gospel, 3:14: ‘As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness so shall the Son of man be lifted up’. Levites, representing the four aids of the Judaic priesthood carrying unleavened bread and censers for the ceremony of the Tabernacle, also seen as prophetic symbols of the Eucharist. Eight priests of the Old Law carrying the ark of the covenant, followed by another tabernacle on which rest the tablets of the law, the lamb and the rod of Aaron. Seven angels carrying musical instruments, supposedly deriving from the book of Revelations (chapter 8) as heralds of the second coming of Christ. There used to be a dance of angels in front of the altar of the sacrifice performed by the Millers’ guild in the eighteenth century. Eight Jews carrying a sacrificial altar with the seven-branch candelabra. On the altar lit by the candelabra is a lamb and a knife for sacrifice. Again the eucharistic imagery is plain. Gideon and Caleb leading the explorers of the promised land, including the spies who went to the limits of Canaan and returned with miraculously huge grapes strung upon a pole. Joshua with a sun in his right hand, a sabre in his left. He is chief of the tribes of Israel. The programme notes that his representation is singular, with three steps and gestures which he performs throughout the whole of the procession. Samson, with a small bronze lion under his arm. This is a curious symbol of the Eucharist but apparently derives its meaning from the fact that, after it died, the lion had a honeycomb in its mouth from which Samson was nourished. It is therefore, another image of mystical food. Samson is also, of course, a standard type of Christ, though generally represented carrying the gates of Gaza in anticipation of the Harrowing of Hell. Saul, crowned and armed, a symbol of justice. David and the four blind musicians of Israel, each with his musical instrument. Solomon, symbol of wisdom, with sword and orb, accompanied by the Queen of Sheba, together symbols of the royal line of Christ. Elijah, with the angel of the desert of Horeb which pursued Jezebel (1 Kings 18), and Jezebel, the angel offering bread and wine. The principal Old Testament prophets: Daniel, with a dragon’s head in his hands, Jeremiah, with a chain in his right hand and a scroll in his left, Isaiah with a scroll in his right hand and pliers in his left, Ezekiel with a scroll in his left hand and a globe in his right. 208

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21) The matriarchs, symbolising the four cardinal virtues: Celia, symbol of prudence with a tambourine, Jabel, symbol of justice, with the head of Caesar, Judith, symbol of temperance, carrying the head of Holofernes, and Ruth, symbol of fortitude, with a bunch of ears of corn. They are followed by Deborah with sword and shield, Rebecca with crook and basket, Esther with crown and sceptre, Rachel with a pitcher and Abigail with a serpent in her hands. 22) The minor prophets with symbols prefiguring Christ’s sacrifice and described as carrying various allegorical symbols: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, who notably carries a small and rather unthreatening bath-tub whale by the tail, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zechariah, Haggai and Malachi. 23) Raphael and Tobias, the first in blue with white wings and a standard in his hand, leading Tobias by the hand. Tobias has a fish. They stand for the action of divine providence, the fish being one of the central symbols of Christianity. This marks the end of the procession of Old Testament figures, flanked by the two angels, St Michael and Raphael, after which follows a number of patron saints of local churches finishing with the Guardian Angel of the City, said to represent the presence of the city in the procession. The complex relationship between procession and city is explored further below. A number of heralds then follow, also said to represent the city in the procession. First, there is a group in Napoleonic livery, carrying a pair of kettledrums, then heralds crowned and wearing tabards. They wear the yellow and red livery of the city of Valencia and carry escutcheons of arms and have names – Illustrious, Proud, Magnificent, Crowned, Ensign and Two-ways Loyal. The programme tells us that the wands they have in their hands were used in olden times to point with or to uncover the spectators’ heads, that is, to remove the hats of those who omitted to do so when the monstrance passed by. They are accompanied by ‘La Senyera’, the huge flag which is the city’s main emblem, and are followed by a civic band. Three eagles on wheeled trolleys came next in the procession in 1994, although the programme indicated they would follow on from the New Testament figures. The two small ones stand for the union of the churches of Rome and Spain and have the initials RE on their chests. They are accompanied by yet more heralds this time, dressed as Roman soldiers. The large eagle is the eagle of Patmos, holds a dove in its beak and carries a scroll between in its wings reading, ‘In principio erat verbum et verbum erat apud Deum’.

The New Testament 1) Simeon and Anna, who announce the arrival of the figure of the Messiah. 2) Saint John the Baptist, who is represented by a little boy with a lamb, carrying an Agnus Dei standard. He symbolises the Eucharist in the form of the lamb of God. 209

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3) The apostles – Simon the Canaanite with a saw, Matthew with a book, Judas Thaddaeus with an axe or halberd, Andrew with his cross, Simon Peter with a huge key, John with a cup and serpent, Thomas with a lance, Saint James the Great with a pilgrim’s staff, Saint James the Less with a mace, Philip with his cross and Paul with a sword. He replaces Judas Iscariot. 4) The evangelists – first, there is a moving tableau derived from the vision of Ezekiel (chapter 10). Saint John the Evangelist carries a book in his left hand and a golden palm in his right and is accompanied by the angel of Patmos, with its head crowned with flowers and palm fronds. They are accompanied by strange creatures, formerly represented like dwarves with big-heads. Then follow representations of the four evangelists themselves: Saint Matthew with his angel, representing human genealogy, Saint Mark, carrying a lion, Saint Luke with a bull, and Saint John with an eagle. They are in turn followed by a number of patron saints associated with Valencia and its churches and two guilds. The casts of characters of the vestigial cycle of mystery plays proper come next. The first subject is Herod and the Three Kings (the Kings, three pages, two horsemen, Mary on a donkey, Joseph, Angel, three counsellors, four midwives, four reapers, a gleaner, three Hebrew soldiers, a trumpeter, a mounted official, King Herod and his executioner). Then there is the less complex Mystery of Saint Christopher and the pilgrims, starring the saint, the infant Jesus, a hermit, a pilgrim and the priest of the pilgrims. This is followed by the Mystery of Adam and Eve (the Fall of Man), with God the Father, who wears an elaborate triangular headdress symbolising the Trinity, two angels, Adam, Eve, the serpent and Death. The inclusion in the procession of the entire cast of the erstwhile mystery plays is interesting from a narrative point of view, for here, one mode of representation contains within it another, procession cross-referring dramatic enactment or mimesis. The fact that each year now only one dramatic enactment takes place again implies that the procession is the unifying event, that other events can be partial, or can have disappeared altogether, so long as the procession presents a sequence which can be read as a completed narrative. Plays in Valencia, in the present time at least, are clearly a secondary adjunct to procession and need only be indicated within it by the presence of their casts to convey meaning. Then comes Saint Margaret, pulling her giant tortoise on wheels, symbolising the demon which she overcame, Saint George with his dragon, and Saint Martha with her Tarasc, again a large wheeled beast. St Margaret’s tortoise is particularly popular in iconography around the Mediterranean. The significance of all these saints from the period since the end of biblical history, together with the beasts they conquered, clearly relates to eucharistic worship as the culmination of the battle between good and evil. Completing this section of the procession are a number of local schools and other organisations, including the fire brigade, new communicants and a number of religious confraternities. Then there are Els Cirialots, twenty-six (or should it 210

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be twenty-four?) kings in white tunics, with beards and wigs of the same colour. The candles (which they carry) each weighs 15 kg and is 2.65 m long, 17 cm in diameter. They are said to represent the ancients who worship the Lamb, from the book of Revelation, looking forward to the ultimate future event in the story of God’s relationship with humankind as centrally represented in the action and spiritual meaning of the mass. They complete the religious symbolism of the procession and are followed by a number of parties of invited civil and military groups, with the army and the host itself bringing up the rear. Miri Rubin considers that the Corpus Christi procession developed out of a context in which eucharistic worship had accrued both ‘processional’ and ‘expository’ features.9 Looking specifically at the Valencia procession, Meg Twycross has said that narrative history and narrative allegory are developed further here by conceptual relationships, as all figures are selected specifically because they are types of the Eucharist.10 At bottom, the religious sequence in the procession seems to conform to that peculiarly medieval way of presenting moralised history by visual schemae organised around a unifying theme. The procession is something of an animate Historia Theologiae. In book form, these schemae are represented by mnemonic wheels, trees and other patterns. The procession in this respect has comparable function and organisation. The sequence has a number of unifying features that depend on the interlacing of different modes. Firstly, and broadly, it moves from Old to New Testament in a pattern of prophecy and affirmation of the mystery of the Eucharist. Because prophecy cannot be verbally articulated in procession, it is instead indicated by the objects carried by the processing figures, many of whom are arranged by fixed and significant number – four evangelists, seven angels of the apocalypse etc. – numbers which also originally had mnemonic function. Hence, the viewer does not only read the sequence of the procession, but is called upon to be adept at decoding the embedded narrative represented symbolically by each figure or group. The official programme exists largely to assist the audience with this decoding exercise. Most of the prophets carry scrolls, indicating sacred text, but many also carry mystical symbols. All characters carry the object associated with their part in biblical narrative which connects them most clearly with salvation history. Clearly, then, the processional elements drawn from the Bible, liturgy and apocrypha carry their own meaning, though arguably there are few in the audience who now are fully equipped to decode that meaning. The audience enjoys and participates in these animate symbols of Corpus Christi in another secular and festive way, also described by the official programme, as some elements have developed traditional local and unofficial meanings. These are new irreverences introduced as elements collect the inevitable auspices of carnival which the occasion invites. The nicknames are characterised by the way in which they draw upon the physical appearance of the processional item rather than its religious meaning. Usually they derive from some aesthetic inadequacy, but they are also affectionate ways of asserting ownership in the way that supporters give their local football teams nicknames. For example, the figure of Noah is 211

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known as El Aguelo Colomet, literally ‘Grandfather Little Dove’. Joshua, with his strange step dance, is known as ‘qui para el sol’, the one who stops the sun. St Matthew’s angel is known as the Angel Bobo, literally ‘Angel Idiot’, because of the admittedly daft expression on the face of this unfortunate papier-mâché model, and St Mark’s lion is known as the Mule because the limited skills of the same model maker have produced a lion’s head that looks disconcertingly equine. These affectionate nicknames are barely subversive, but they are indicative of the holiday spirit in which the city audience receives this carefully constructed sequence of highly serious theological symbols. The containment within the procession of various elements representing the city of Valencia itself is also interesting, and a vestige, possibly, of civic pageantry of the past. The city is represented within the procession emblematically while actually it is the city that contains the procession. The worship of the sacrament celebrates the perpetual presence of the deity in the midst of the company of believers. Showing of ‘monstrance’, which is the unifying purpose of the procession and surrounding events, not only invokes the healing power of the sacrament, like any saint represented in effigy in Spain’s many patronal processions, but is actually about invoking the real presence of Christ in the mass. Devout bystanders behave on seeing the host pass according to the same formulaic pattern of movement and speech, which accompanies the elevation of the host during the consecration at the mass. They kneel, lift their hands to the host and mutter prayers calling on Christ to be with them and welcoming him into their community. Again, Meg Twycross in interpreting the procession suggests: When it finally appears, the Host takes on multiple meanings – guarded by the clergy and preceded by the laity in ceremonial costume, but playing themselves, it is the Sacrament made available to us today; as the Body of Christ it has been foreshadowed typologically in biblical history; seeing it following on the four-and-twenty Elders and the Eagle of the Revelation of St John, it is easy to read it as Christ of the Second Coming enshrined in the tabernacle of the New Jerusalem. It thus manages to focus past, present and future in itself.11 The procession takes on spatial as well as temporal meaning, as it refers not only to the history and typology of the Eucharist, but also to the presence of Christ through transubstantiation in the community. This symbiosis is represented by the encircling of the city boundaries by the circle described by the processional route and also by the presence within the procession of the city represented in various symbolic forms. The community, therefore, is a community unified in Christ; Valencia, for the day, is analogous to the New Jerusalem. Another way of looking at how processions develop and articulate meaning is, then, to consider not only their content but their route, for they are always journeys, characteristically describing a circular route that begins and ends in the cathedral and takes in the main streets, quarters and boundaries of the old 212

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city in its progress. Its meaning, in this respect, is about inclusiveness, communitas. It could even be said that the participation of the crowd who traditionally shower the host with rose petals thrown from high balconies is also the way in which the procession includes the vertical dimension of the space it occupies too. Interestingly, in fifteenth-century York, the community was not so successfully unified by the Corpus Christi procession, for there were three: the famous civic one, which stopped outside the precincts of the Minster, a separate procession of the minster clergy which kept to the Minster precincts and yet another procession outside the city walls but within those of the Benedictine Abbey of St Mary’s. The three processions describe precisely the distinct geographical spheres of influence which reflect the political divisions and tensions of medieval York. In modern Spain, multiple processions also occur – Seville has at least four at Corpus Christi – but those undertaken by the inhabitants of an individual quarter are adjuncts rather than rivals to the main event.12 What I have said so far seems to imply that the Corpus Christi procession in Valencia powerfully affirms the unity of the community in Christ through the Eucharist. It variously articulates acts of inclusion. The inclusion of all biblical history through the predetermined Christian patterns of typology, as well as the assimilation of prehistoric or folkloric elements – the potentially disruptive – is achieved within the ambit of the procession and its larger meaning. Not only does it include various representatives of the city in the form of its schools, guilds, civic, religious and military organisations, it also includes, as processional ‘items’, representatives of the whole city. The route then describes that city and unites the whole community along the route in a single act of celebration. It is, however, possible to overstate this inclusivity in modern times. In 1995, the star of the procession was clearly the woman who took the part of the Queen of Sheba. She was the most gorgeously arrayed single processional item, and the crowd demonstrated clear recognition by cheering her as she passed. It hardly needs saying, but, of course, processions strive even less than mystery plays for mimetic verisimilitude, and the performers are always principally themselves. The biblical figure may carry attributes, but the whole costume is also an attribute of the status of the person taking on the role. Moses’ designer sunglasses and ostentatious wristwatch were as much attributes of significance – of a certain status – as his tablets of the law. Returning to the Queen of Sheba, it is a mark of equality of opportunity in modern Valencia that a woman should hold office as mistress of ceremonies, which was indeed her role behind the scenes. But, in fact, the Queen of Sheba was the only prominent role available to her in the procession, for, as an act of celebration, Corpus Christi remains singularly ill-adapted to modern gender relations in the community. While Corpus Christi contains all manner of signs of the unification of the community in Christ, it in fact exposes a community riven by gender division which the procession and surrounding events serve to accentuate. It is commonly accepted that in fifteenth-century religious drama, in England at least, women were represented by men, though there has been some recent 213

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Image 14.1 The ‘roca’ of Faith. This and all images in the chapter by the author, Corpus Christi, Valencia, 1994

debate,13 so that the Virgin Mary and the Magdalene were played by young men or boys. We also know something about the social, legal and cultural position of women in the society that produced those plays, and in particular, it is now accepted in England at any rate that the economic autonomy of women in the period after the Black Death has been underestimated. What women did not do was to participate visibly in any numbers in official civic societies, especially trade and craft guilds, therefore their economic activity is also disguised. Court, law and church remained wholly male preserves, and the best education and freedom for a woman was available only by taking the veil. Spanish women participate just as fully in the benefits of European Community provisions for equality of opportunity, but many also collude on religious holidays in an older patriarchal social organisation which exists in tension with the 214

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Image 14.2 The ‘roca’ of Fame

recently won freedoms of secular life. Spanish society has changed immeasurably, of course, since the mid-1970s, when there was still a significant number of enclosed nuns, for example. Some women have been admitted as Nazarenos in Seville, and Epiphany processions have added the female role of La Estrella (the Star) to the all-male Magi, but women who enjoy normal European equalities of opportunity in secular life still play a marginal part in lay religious festivals. The liturgical business is, of course, the preserve of the priesthood, while those elements which require physical strength, like carrying giants, are also clearly allmale pursuits. Audiences are different, with many women and children and nuns a reliable presence. The female images which are presented in modern lay religious festivals divide into three categories. Firstly, there is the statue. The rocas in Valencia are surmounted by female figures of Faith, Purity, Fame, etc. The adoption of female 215

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Image 14.3 A wheeled dragon

allegories by the happy accident of Latin grammatical gender says little about the position of real women in the society from which they emanate.14 Another statue of a woman appears only in miniature in the procession, on the top of a guild banner. She is the subject of another summer festival and represents Valencia’s patron saint, Santa Maria des Desembarados. Statues of the Virgin Mary whether she is, as in Valencia, protecting abandoned children, or is Elche’s powerful Queen of Heaven, or Seville’s grieving Macarena, with the tracks of her gluey tears stuck forever to her otherwise perfect makeup, all represent the biologically impossible ideal which exalts this one woman to the detriment of all others who necessarily fall short. The main vehicle for the promotion of this ideal is the religious festival, and it comes home most forcibly to the visitor placed amongst an audience in which elderly pious laywomen and nuns are a significant presence. To return to Valencia’s procession, some other female roles are taken by cross-dressed men. Currently this practice is restricted to the burlesque roles. The female giants, clearly, are carried by men (they weigh c. 200 kg each), and the female dwarves, when they remove their heads to bow to the audience, are seen also to be men. All the mummers are male also. But whatever past practice was, the female biblical figures in the procession are now played by women. Moreover, it is apparent that these female roles have been constructed according to male ideals. Male roles, patriarchs, prophets and apostles, are frequently wigged and bearded to convey venerability and gravitas to the men adopting the roles. The female characters on the other hand, such as Judith, St Martha and St Margaret are all taken by beautiful young women, sexily dressed, the fact that they are 216

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Image 14.4 Giants

commemorated for their stoicism, courage and chastity in the defeat of horrible monsters or the decapitation of their husbands notwithstanding. The participation of real women in these roles is a comparatively new departure, and they have yet to achieve the dignity of their male precursors. Spanish women choose to collude for the sake of tradition in their holiday disempowerment, or to translate religious disempowerment into displays of conventional and genteel sexuality. Many women I met in Valencia, faced with this choice, feel uncomfortable and choose to ignore the whole event entirely. There is also evidence of a more traditional female response, however, and of another choice for women. This, from what I was able to discover, is probably an older female response to the patriarchal dominance of the official event and is by no means unique to Valencia. It also strongly suggests to me that women, back to 217

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Image 14.5 Dancing dwarf

Margery Kempe and beyond, have responded to the impulse to create for themselves a role on the margins of festivals from which they are otherwise excluded by a wholly male official culture. In Valencia, the real host is carried through the streets by men, as the procession culminates with civic authority, the military and the priesthood out in force. But in the main square, there is another representation of the host, standing silent at the west end of the cathedral. It has been made by women from thousands of flowers. It is ephemeral, perishable, an insubstantial imitation of the real thing, but it is also very big and, like the construction of various flower icons, equally traditional. What I am left wondering, inevitably, is whether townswomen in fifteenthcentury York engaged in marginal activities either sympathetic to or subversive of the main Christian festival of Corpus Christi. It is a level of activity which, by its nature, is unlikely to have been recorded. Record is again a matter of official culture imposing a hierarchy over what is authoritative and included and what is extraneous to the main event. Even today, the ‘peripheral’ activities in Valencia do not earn themselves many column inches in local press recordings of the festival. Nor do they all necessarily feature in the programme. They belong to a level of perception of the entirety of the festive event that can be captured only by being there. What this paper has attempted to do is to draw out of the direct experience of witnessing one festive event, levels of understanding which are not instantly available at second hand. Valencia’s Corpus Christi procession is inescapably 218

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Image 14.6 Hobby horse dance

Image 14.7 Vice and Virtue

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Image 14.8 Wild men dancing

of our time, even by the very way in which it mediates medieval traditions, but it still has much to offer the student of medieval festivities. In particular, it demonstrates what can and cannot be done in procession and how the audience of procession may receive meanings. It demonstrates the power of a festival like this to assimilate all that comes before it, witnessed in the maypole dance which culminates in the symbol of the pomegranate opening to reveal the host. The assumption that local festivals like this function to bond the community together, to assert its special difference from those who do not live in the locality so are not a part of it, can be overstated, however. It is challenged particularly when gender roles within the festivity are explored. Women are completely

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Image 14.9 Maypole dance

excluded at some levels, notably the main climax, where all they can do is throw rose petals over the solemn male phalanx. Elsewhere, they are assimilated by their willingness to conform to male ideals, or are engaged in rival activities such as the construction of the huge flower host, which offer their particular commentary on the main event.

Image 14.10 The host in the pomegranate

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Image 14.11 St Michael leads the procession with one black and one white soul

Image 14.12 The spies with grapes from the Promised Land

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Image 14.13 Jonah and his whale

Image 14.14 The play of Herod and the Magi

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Image 14.15 St Margaret’s Tortoise, St Martha’s Tarasc

Image 14.16 The ‘Mule’ and the ‘Angel Idiot’

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Image 14.17 The Host

Spain abounds in lesser lay religious festivals. Commonly, the visiting scholar is taken to one side and warned that what survives is inauthentic. The trouble is that the Middle Ages, as we understand the term, were over a long time ago. The survival of practices from that time and the survival of ephemera are not always compatible, unless the ephemera are as robust and functional as the substructures of the Rocas. The survival of a medieval prompt copy, or costume, or stage property, depends on it having been set aside from use before it wore out. It is through observing praxis that medieval scholarship can be informed by the continuous self-renewing tradition of playing, not by being distracted by the authenticity or otherwise of things.

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Image 14.18 Audience throwing rose petals

Image 14.19 Solomon and the Queen of Sheba

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Image 14.20 The floral Host

Notes 1 Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (London: Picador, 1986), 67–68. 2 Pamela M. King, ‘Corpus Christi: Valencia’, Medieval English Theatre, 15 (1993), 103–110. See Chapter 13. ‘Corpus Christi: Valencia 1993’. 3 See, e.g. Jan van Alsloot, ‘The Triumph of Isabella’ and other illustrations such as those discussed in Meg Twycross, ‘The Flemish Ommegang and Its Pageant Cars’, Medieval English Theatre, 2:1 (1980), 15–41. See also in Sarah Carpenter and Pamela Kings, eds., The Materials of Early Theatre: Sources, Images and Performance (Routledge: London and New York, 2018) 337–390. 4 All official descriptions of elements in the procession are taken from the programme leaflet published in 1990, Corpus de Valencia, 1990 (Valencia: Generalitat de Valencia, 1990). 5 R. W. Ingram, ed., Coventry, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 176 et passim. 6 I am grateful to Prof. Rafael Portillo of the University of Seville for sharing his views with me in relation to this and other observations in the paper. 7 Meg Twycross also has video footage of the revived procession of the Holy Blood in Bruges, in which elements of narrative drama, in this case the Last Supper, are perfectly comprehensible to the crowd when performed as the wagon moves slowly along the processional route. 8 Sarah Teale, Giants (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979), 16.

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9 Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: the Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 243. 10 Meg Twycross, ‘Some Approaches to Dramatic Festivity’, in Festive Drama, ed. Meg Twycross (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1996), 13. 11 Meg Twycross, ‘Some Approaches to Dramatic Festivity’, 13. 12 I am grateful to Rafael Portillo of the University of Seville for contributing this information and for his comments upon the paper in general. 13 The most eloquent argument to the contrary has been put forward by Jeremy Goldberg, ‘Craft Guilds, Corpus Christi Play and Civic Government’, in Sarah Rees-Jones, ed., The Government of Medieval York (York: Borthwick Studies in History, 3, 1997), 145–148. 14 Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (London: Picador, 1987), 19ff.

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15 CONFRATERNITIES AND CIVIC CEREMONIAL The Siena Palio From Margaret Rogerson, ed., The York Mystery Plays: Performance in the City (York: York Medieval Press, 2011), pp. 181–203 Theatre historians in England traditionally have recourse to two principal sources for understanding how and in what spirit pre-Reformation plays, shows, and processions were organized in York, Chester, Coventry, Norwich, and other major civic centres outside the capital. The first is documentary, involving the piecing together of evidence from archival sources and surviving scripts. The second, arising from the first, is by staging reconstructions. Here, however, I shall argue for a third kind of methodological approach to understanding the lost civic festive dramas of medieval England, and that is to visit cities where there is an unbroken and evolving tradition of civic celebration that reaches back to the late Middle Ages.1 It may be argued that surviving festivals suffer from the disadvantage that, as locals are always at pains to point out, almost nothing survives that is ‘authentically medieval’, because they are subject to constant change, and the material elements in performance wear out through long use and are replaced. To dismiss them in this way is a misperception, however; observing how a successful living tradition adapts to the aesthetic tastes, mores, and materials of the times can in fact act as a potent reminder that our pre-Reformation plays were once part of a living tradition too, and as such were also subject to constant change. In other words, this methodology first of all foregrounds the ephemerality of performance, offering a useful counter to textual and reconstructive approaches which carry, albeit implicitly, the sense that a definitive or authoritative version of the original is, or ever was, there to be discovered. One of the values of witnessing a living civic festival is that it provides the only way of experiencing how a whole city’s social life can be driven by its festive tradition, how a network of streets turns into a theatre, and how all the bodies inhabiting those streets unite as an audience not of detached bystanders and connoisseurs but of knowledgeable participants whose life experience has been shaped by that very festival. To witness and be absorbed into that audience is to approach an understanding of what it might have been like to be in, for example, York on Corpus Christi Day in the fifteenth century. It sheds light on the way in

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Image 15.1 Siena. Piazza del Mercato with the racecourse set up

which citizens, audience members or performers, define their identity as individuals by reference to a hierarchy of belonging, to family, neighbourhood, occupation, confraternity (or guild), and whole civic community, and how that identity finds periodic fulfilment through the endeavour that culminates in an annual defining festive event. A number of festivals present themselves as suitable test beds for this methodology. Some, like the Misteri of the Assumption of the Virgin in Elx (Elche) and the celebrations of Semana Santa in Seville, of Corpus Christi in Valencia, and of the Holy Blood in Bruges, not only have medieval origins but deal in subject matter which has an obvious affinity with the surviving civic festive dramas of medieval England.2 Other native British festivals, like the Selkirk Border Ridings, the Lewes Bonfires, Preston Guild, and Lerwick’s Up Helly Aa are important because, although they deal in very different subject matter and are not medieval in origin, they expose deep organizational structures similar to those underpinning medieval civic dramas. They also reveal something of the processes by which ‘tradition’ evolves that is remarkably congruent with the first group mentioned here.3 In this essay, however, the focus is a festival with unimpeachable medieval origins, and a major devotional focus, although the defining event is a horse race: Siena’s Palio. The thrilling and dangerous central event of the Palio takes place in the Piazza de Mercato (market square), a dished amphitheatre with a circumference of around 230

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one kilometre, in front of the Palazzo Pubblico (town hall) (see Image 15.1). It is held on two days devoted to the Virgin Mary every summer, 2 July, the feast of the Madonna di Provenzano, and 16 August, the day following the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin. Each jockey is sponsored by, and wears the livery of, one of the city’s contrade (neighbourhoods). Why the focus of Siena’s civic festivities should take the form of a horse race is not the business of this paper. Many Italian cities once had races of this kind in the medieval and early modern period, and, in common with the other survivals listed above, it is unclear why Siena’s has survived in unbroken tradition. What is more interesting is that all these festivals, and the Palio supremely, give access to one common factor, the nature and operation of the confraternity as the primary organizational unit in civic celebration. The nature of the defining event of confraternal celebrations is, of course, important, but can also distract us from the deeper social structures and impulses that lie behind it. Single studies of such events tend to proclaim their uniqueness. Set aside the defining event, however, and a range of commonalities emerge which no doubt reveal much to the social scientist about civic communities, but which also inform the theatre historian seeking to understand the organizational principles of events past and present in which the whole city becomes a stage. We are going to analyze the Palio as festival selectively with the specific purpose of linking it to what we know and attempt to understand about medieval English civic celebrations, and, studying details of process, certain major thematic areas will emerge again and again. We shall observe how the civic, the devotional, and the military, in their many manifestations, not only defy segregation but how these are probably unhelpful distinctions to apply here. We shall see, however, how what we might call ‘worthiness’, or civic respectability, finds numerous modes of articulation through the event. We shall also explore how the contrived and fine balance between competition and corporate endeavour, most obvious in a sporting event with a ‘winner’ but which characterizes all confraternally organized events, is fostered by the overarching governing structures as a major guarantor of ‘quality’. Palio literally means ‘banner’. That is what the winning contrada receives, and its significance can be traced to the event’s medieval origin: The precious fabric of the ‘Great Banner’ often came from elsewhere, from Florence or Lucca, from Bologna or Venice. To stuff the 1430 Palio with silk rosado, 18 ‘Sienese arms’ long (13.42 meters), with fringe and bands of silk and gold, 1,400 vaio pelts were needed. In 1447 the Palio was made of crimson velvet, and 30 ‘arms’ (22.38 meters) were purchased.4 The award of a Palio as a prize for civic games in Italy – hunts, boxing matches or horse races – had the function of circumventing strict sumptuary laws by supplying the winner with a resource of fine stuffs and jewels from which to make altar 231

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cloths and ceremonial clothing. These days the banner, carried on a ceremonial wagon pulled by four white oxen, brings up the rear of the pre-race procession. It occupies a position analogous to the host in a Corpus Christi procession and apparently has apotropaic powers attributed to it, as people clamour to touch it. It epitomizes in a number of respects the marriage of sacred and secular, which, as we shall see, characterizes the eponymous event. Compare the use of ‘Palio’ with the way in which ‘pageant’ is pervasively used in our Middle English sources for both a wheeled vehicle and the drama performed on it, and how the same word came to define the whole civic event.5 In both cases, the synecdoche of naming indicates what is perceived to be the climax or the distinctive focus of the event by its owning community. The Palio as horse race, over in ninety seconds, is the climax of a week of intense activity, triggered by the selection of the jockeys and the horses that will participate. There are daily prove (trial races), which officially exist to allow jockeys and horses to get to know one another, but which form the basis of the elaborate partiti, the deals done between contrade, on which hang huge sums of money.6 The prove are public rehearsals.7 It is difficult to rehearse a horse race in the city’s central piazza without public access, but these ‘proofs’ – and the word is important – not only stoke anticipation, but also empower the owning community to be more than an audience of bystanders by inviting them to discriminate, to approve and to censor, the quality of the performance which is to take place in their name. The prove tell us, therefore, something about the particular participatory nature of ‘audience’ in these events. In the modern theatre, rehearsals are held strictly behind closed doors, and the play is brought forth to its public in fully finished form. It is ‘produced’. But records of rehearsals of civic events in the Middle Ages reveal a quasi-ceremonial status much closer to the Sienese prove, suggesting that their audiences expected a similar level of discriminatory and critical ownership of their recurring ceremonies. When we look at references to rehearsals in the records of York and, in particular, of Coventry, we can see evidence that they formed part of the larger ceremonial occasion. For example, we know from as early as 1465 that the Coventry Smiths incurred expenses by rehearsing ‘in the parke’, presumably a public space.8 More tellingly, rehearsals involved the provision of a guild supper, substantial enough for the ingredients to be itemized. In 1479, we find the Smiths’ rehearsals requiring the provision of bread, ale, eggs, and butter on Black Monday (the octave of Easter Monday), of ale, bread, ground beef, and mustard on Sunday 16 May, and of a meal including geese on the Tuesday of Whitsun week.9 They are still engaged in these formal rehearsals, with supper provided, in 1493.10 The references to rehearsals in the York records are much sparser, but the way in which they occur further suggests that rehearsing was conducted in front of an audience of other guild members if not the ‘general public’ and was a social occasion in its own right. There the Mercers’ rehearsals are intimately connected with the annual taking out of the pageant and the necessary repairs to the vehicle, props, and costumes. Informed by the experience of contrade-based events leading up to the 232

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Palio in Siena, the accounts from the York Mercers begin to take on an intelligible narrative shape of their own, itemizing the components of the larger festive event from the point of view of the participating guild. They record in sequence a guild supper, followed by the bringing out of the pageant, its repairs, the rehearsal, playing, eating, drinking, and finally putting everything away again.11 The sense that the rehearsal has itself an interested audience of guildsmen and is not confined to participants is further implied by the Mercers’ record of 1467, in which payment is recorded ‘to Wylliam Clark & his players for [he] rehersyng’.12 The four days during which horses and jockeys are prepared for the Palio itself are likewise busy with other events, many of which take place within the confines of the individual contrada. There is processional attendance at the church of the Provenzana (July) and at the Duomo (August) for the blessing of the Palio banner. There is a big pre-race dinner in the streets of the contrada (conducted with ingenuity and aplomb during a thunderstorm in August 2008) on the eve of the race. And there are the remarkable services in the individual contrade chapels at which each horse is brought to the altar to be blessed by the contrada priest. Moreover the events of the week are, in turn, simply the climax of an annual round of contrade-organized events for which the Palio is the important cohering reference point.13 Our records of the lead-up to major guild endeavours like the York or Coventry Corpus Christi plays may be, as we have seen above, even more shadowy than those of the event itself, but we do know, for example, that in York events were triggered by the delivery of the ‘billets’ in April, a practice that appears in the City Chamberlains’ Rolls as early as 1396 and is being described in the House Books 150 years later, in 1546, as taking place ‘according to the auncyent Custome’.14 In York, the Corpus Christi procession was eventually separated from the play, something which in this context can, perhaps, be read not only as a matter of pragmatics, but also as evidence of the owning community’s impulse to further extend the time occupied by its defining event, as the urban population grew in size and affluence. Acknowledging that the play was no more the whole civic event in York than the horse race itself is in Siena must lead us to explore afresh the semantics of the total event. What is the climax of Corpus Christi celebrations for York? Is it the appearance of Christ the judge in the Doomsday pageant, the climax of a sequence of successive spectacular plays, or is it the host in its monstrance, the ‘real’ body of Christ, bringing up the rear of the hierarchically organized procession the following day? Does displacement of the procession from Corpus Christi Day itself indicate the greater importance of the play, or, in the common semantic arrangement of civic ceremony, is the best still kept for the end? Certainly, the account of the procession survives as a matter of high ceremonial seriousness unmatched by many of the contemporary records of the play. The high register of the account is a product of the fact that it is preserved in Latin in the ordinances of the Corpus Christi guild, but underlying it is real evidence of a very solemn, formal, and stratified ceremony indeed.15 In the play, the citizenry, or those who count, the freemen, are represented by the actors who take on the roles in the spectacular 233

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sacred drama; in the procession, they are present in their proper persons, preceding the host, and mustered in their guilds. The Sienese contrada’s primary identifier is the region of the city that it represents – the nearest translation of contrada is ‘neighbourhood’. Historically they enjoyed levels of political independence, and today can be observed functioning like villages within the city. The received historical understanding is that the contrade were founded as wards of the city with responsibility for the physical condition of the streets, the provision of clean water, maintenance of order, the collection of taxes, and the provision of military service, and that when Siena ceased to exist as an autonomous city-state in 1555, they lived on as ceremonial associations.16 Current work on medieval civic confraternities suggests, however, that such implicitly hierarchical understandings of the vital raisons d’etre for civic confraternities should be treated with caution. In England the ostensibly occupational associations – merchant and craft guilds for traders and artisans – were long assumed to have a primary, protectionist, economic function, but guilds’ protectionist powers were always imperfect, and it is now broadly agreed that protectionist economic motives alone are not sufficient explanation for their longevity.17 Equally, religious confraternities turned into occupational associations and vice versa, as part of the overall project to divide civic society into categories and neighbourhood zones by which city governments governed, and, one might add, through which civic wealth could be managed and farmed. In all this, there is no hard evidence to justify seeing ceremonial activity as in some way secondary to the occupational, devotional, or indeed the military.18 Social and ritual activity was what gave privileged access to local government, and it is this that may actually account for the tenacity of the nominally occupational guilds that remained strong into the early modern period. Civic pageantry was how a city, through its secular government, could demonstrate its legitimacy as a discrete place, with a particular history, a particular spatial organization, a religious and moral order, what was usefully gathered up in the term ‘worship’. As Gervase Rosser has pointed out, people came to towns for social benefit, for honour, status, and religion, benefits which affected not only the whole of this life but seamlessly merged with provision for the next.19 What urban culture offered the individual was the opportunity to legitimize and to customize social identity. Certainly, occupation, religious preference, and military protection were important components of that identity, but it was validated by display. Siena’s contrade probably offer the most emphatically articulated surviving experience of what it is to belong to a medieval confraternity. Membership of a contrada is traditionally dependent on being born in the ward, and membership is clung to tenaciously even by those who have moved away.20 The contrade, like ceremonial confraternities in all cities with a living tradition, organize the annual round of meetings, balls, popular shows, games, banquets, and other gettogethers. They exist to affirm the particularity of their space, validated by history. Within that space, they display civic strength, through unity and amity that extends from the preservation of order on the streets to the promotion of economic 234

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affluence within the membership. Through religious devotion and charitable work, they also serve as an object lesson in active Christianity, performing the Works of Corporal Mercy. Thus they confirm through the way in which they celebrate their own histories, their current activities, and the symbolism they apply to both, that it is fruitless to attempt to distinguish the devotional, the military, the occupational, the economic, and the purely festive as their raison d’etre. Their operation does, however, underscore Gervase Rosser’s observation that medieval civic guild organization was a major marker of respectability.21 It is respectability or ‘worship’ that encompasses all the other functional categories. Spatial identity remains the primary demarcation of Siena’s contrade and the way in which the Palio is organized. Strong neighbourhood bonds are still evidenced by social behaviour within the contrada, as surely as the zones are indicated in the streets named after the contrade and decorated in their livery. Young mothers with children under school age within the contrada appear to form a coherent and close-knit social group, and teenage contradaioles of both sexes hang out together. The streets of the contrada have bars, cafes, and shops marked by the subtle incorporation of contrada colours in their permanent decorative schemes and, during the days of the Palio, contrada banners hanging from the first storeys of buildings join the more permanent street light fittings designed around contrada symbolism; thus the designation of the neighbourhood is made constantly apparent and the boundaries clear. Neighbourhood zoning in the English medieval city is evidenced most emphatically in the surviving street plan of York, but there it is directly linked to the occupations that clustered around them as many of the street names suggest (Shambles, Spurriergate, Coppergate, Colliergate etc.). In Siena, doubtless certain occupations dominated areas of the medieval city too, and the links between contrade and their former occupational designations are something acknowledged by contradaioles. In the complex symbolism of the pre-race procession, occupational banners precede the contrade’s more pervasive heraldic/symbolic identifiers that are repeated on processional flags and banners, as well as on contrada ephemera. Here liveried figures bearing the banners of the occupational guilds, with which the contrade are historically associated, follow the ceremonial representatives of the Republic of Siena (see Image 15.2). The occupational correlations are: notaries (Aquila); silkworkers (Bruco); leatherworkers (Chioccola); shoemakers (Civetta); bankers (Drago); painters (Giraffa); blacksmiths (Istrice); bakers (Lupa); potters (Nicchio); dyers (Oca); carpenters (Onda); apothecaries (Pantera); weavers (Selva); masons (Tartuca); woolcarders (Torre), and wool-vendors (Val de Montone) (see Appendix, p. 243.).22 There are, however, no consistent correlations between the occupational guilds and the more recent symbolic identifiers of the contrade; Bruco’s silkworm and Val de Montone’s ram are the only immediately evident matches of occupational and symbolic identifiers. In contrade symbolism, their ceremonial identities have almost completely eclipsed their occupational devices. The former go back to records from the sixteenth century of ceremonial hunts in the piazzas of Siena and 235

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Image 15.2 Occupational banners, pre-race procession

Florence, in which men from the safety of fearsome animal floats prodded real animals with spears. The complete list of seventeen contrade animals was in place for this purpose by 1546.23 Another of the overlapping sets in the Venn diagram that is confraternal life in Siena is religion. Horse races tend to be secular activities, and the Palio is ostensibly secular in focus, but each contrada also has its church; the same applied to guilds with ostensibly secular focus in English medieval cities of course. In many cases the parish church in the occupational neighbourhood zone occupied by the guild, and so incidentally colonized by its members, simply accreted decorative trappings from that association. This is the case with some contrade churches too. In other cases, however, as with the designated guild chapels in St Michael’s church in medieval Coventry, Sienese contrade have dedicated chapels, closed to outsiders, decorated with contrada emblems, and used only for contrada ceremonies. Each contrada also has its priest, who officiates in some ceremonies. 236

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But, as Alan Dundes and Alessandro Falassi have pointed out, even within the consecrated space of the church, the devotional and the secular are curiously confused. Each contrada is dedicated to a particular saint, but on its patronal festival, it undertakes a secular baptism ceremony in its church at which new members, chiefly babies born to contradaioles in the intervening year, are welcomed. The contrada priest is present, but the baptism is conducted by the priore, the secular head, of the contrada. Conversely, the priest officiates at the blessing of the Palio horse in a special closed and very emotional ceremony that takes place inside the contrada church, at the high altar, on the afternoon of the race. There is another location, apart from the contrada church, that is absolutely closed to casual visitors and literally sacrosanct. The backstreet stalla is the contrada’s stable, used to house the racehorse that each contrada is assigned, according to a complex series of trials and drawing of lots, three days before the race. It is occupied by a horse for only six days in the year. The stalla is thus the ceremonial building of each contributing association in the Palio, and to describe it merely as a stable is to miss the point. The stalla is in fact a valuable piece of real estate in the heart of confraternity territory with exclusively ceremonial function. It is also, incidentally, a stable. Moreover, because of the apparently real possibility of a contrada’s horse being nobbled by the opposition, the stalla is also a secret location and one, unlike every other geographical, historical, and symbolic detail of the contrada’s identity, that is not published in the local newspaper information on the event. It bears comparison in a number of respects with the medieval ‘pageant house’. The earliest and the latest records of the Corpus Christi Play in Coventry concern, respectively, rentals for, and the disposal of, the guilds’ pageant houses.24 Just as the York Mercers’ 1433 pageant indenture25 dispelled forever the idea that pageant wagons were adapted farm carts, the plethora of records concerning pageant houses has long suggested that they were clearly much more than just garages or cart-sheds. The ceremonial activities involved in the ‘getting out’ and ‘putting in’ of wagons testifies to this, as do the valuations of these occasionally used buildings. Observing the ceremonial reverence accorded to the Sienese stalla enriches our understanding of this type of record evidence. Beyond our understanding of the defining meaning of the Palio for each contrada, there is another area that merits exploration in this quest to arrive at a greater understanding of our lost ceremonial events through the experience of what is cautiously proposed as a cognate living tradition. The interactions between contributing confraternities and the governing structures of the whole city in producing the Palio reveal a fine balance between competition and collaboration, both of which seem necessary to sustain the annual effort and level of engagement required to stage the event. Each contrada has its own administrative structure, again blending devotional, civic, and military connotations and emulating the ethos of the Italian Renaissance city state from which they derive.26 The whole membership of the contrada forms the consiglio generale, or ‘general council’. With minor variations, it is then run by a very complicated administrative structure. The seggio, or executive, consists 237

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of the priore, his deputy, the vicario to supervise the administrative and financial affairs, and the camarlengo, who acts as treasurer. The forbiddingly named correttore is the contrada priest and the only officeholder of the seggio who cannot be a woman. The economic and legal functions of the society are then reinforced by a further proliferation of officeholders: the bilanciere in charge of the budget, the economo who keeps the inventory of contrada property and regalia, and the cancelliere, who is the minuting secretary. This executive organization is then backed by a Collegio dei Maggirenti, or committee of elders including all former priori, and backed financially by its Protettori. When it comes to the focal event of the ceremonial year, however, the seggio of each contrada gives carte blanche on the running of the two Palios to a capitano and his two lieutenants (tenenti) called mangini. In its sporting aspect, the Palio may be seen, like the medieval tournament, as a ceremonial event that doubles as a practice and display of military prowess, and the capitano in particular is key in delivering a result and in making the tactical and financial arrangements, or partiti, or inter-contrada deals, which are at once strictly forbidden by the city’s regulations of the event and essential to its conduct.27 In a different, more directly theatrical context, the York Mercers employed their ‘pageant masters’, who were not occupational mercers, members of the guild, nor, in at least the case of a parish clerk from Leeds, even citizens of York.28 Nor were they ‘professionals’, any more than the capitano is a serving cavalry officer. What the pageant masters presumably were was ‘experts’, theatrical impresarios. So too the contrade delegate the responsibility for success in the Palio to specialists. Margaret Rogerson has analyzed the Coventry records to show how participants in the Corpus Christi Play there had different and complex relationships with the guilds with which they engaged for the purposes of the play.29 In particular there is an identifiable group recruited to guilds for reasons that are not occupational, and who are paid for their ceremonial activities. Amongst their number is the Coventry capper, Robert Croo, who rewrote the Weavers’, the Shearmen and Taylors’, and the Drapers’ pageants, made a hat for the Pharisee, and played God in the Drapers’ Doomsday.30 In the Sienese contrada, the two key figures are both bought in, neither of them members of the contrada nor even Sienese: they are the Jantini – the jockey – and the horse. Without the overarching organization of the civic authority, the contrade could not organize the Palio. Clearly, it is the civic authority that sees to the erection of bleachers around the Piazza, supplies police to marshall the crowds, imports and has laid the packed earth on the racetrack, and clears up afterwards. It is also the civic authority that starts the race and provides and presents the Palio (banner) to the winner. These activities mirror the operation of the mayor and aldermen in medieval York, in Coventry the Leet, in the management of good order on Corpus Christi Day, issuing the rules that say when and where the play will start. In Siena, it is also the civic authority that conducts the selection process by which ten of the seventeen contrade are chosen to race, and it is the civic authority that organizes the supply of horses. Three days before the race, there are numerous trials around the Piazza in which jockeys wearing the city’s black and white livery put 238

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numerous horses through their paces so that the contrade’s capitanos can select the ten that will race. The civic authority then organizes the complicated lottery by which they are allocated to the ten running contrade. This level of activity is mirrored in medieval English records not in the perennial overarching organizational role of the city government, but in the numerous ad hoc entries into York’s A/Y Memorandum Book and Coventry’s Leet Book which show the city arbitrating for which guilds must merge in order to secure the continuance of some pageants, and, in the celebrated case of the York Masons, sanctioning the abandonment of the tonally disastrous pageant of The Funeral of the Virgin (a.k.a. ‘Fergus’) and arranging for the Masons to collaborate with the Goldsmiths in the unique double pageant of Herod and the Magi: Thomas Snaudon maior necnon Aldermanni & consilium camere huius ciuitatis voluntates & desideria hominum arcium predictarum beniuole acceptantes & ea honestati consona reputantes considerabant quod Aurifabri predicti in diminucionem grauium onerum suorum exonerentur de vna paginarum suarum scilicet Herodis Et similiter quod cementarij predicti sint exonerati & quieti de pagina ffergus & quad ipsi cementarij habeant eis & arti sue predictam paginam herodis quam Aurifabri per prius habebant. [Thomas Snauden, mayor, the aldermen, and the council of the Chamber of this city, willing and receiving kindly the wishes of the men of the aforesaid crafts, and judging them consonant with probity, decided that the aforesaid Goldsmiths, for the lessening of their heavy burdens, be freed of one of their pageants, i.e., that of Herod, and similarly, that the aforesaid Masons be freed and quit of the pageant of Fergus, and that those Masons have for themselves and their craft the aforesaid pageant of Herod which the Goldsmiths had to produce formerly.]31 And just as some of the Coventry guilds were no longer able to participate in the Corpus Christi Play in the economic recession of the late fifteenth century,32 Siena too has its ‘suppressed’ contrade, represented decorously in the civic procession by six masked riders.33 The fundamentally competitive nature, not only of the horse race itself but of the contrade’s displays of flag-throwing, drumming, and lavish costuming, has a quality-control function, ensuring that individual contrade vie with each other in skill, daring and splendour, but all managed within the framework of the huge civic procession that precedes the horse race (see Image 15.2). The procession is the climax of the events leading up to the race itself. It moves around the streets to various locations significant to the former city state as a whole, then around the Piazza itself. Thereby it articulates, according to the remarkably consensual decorum of civic processions, the historical narrative and social meaning of the whole event. The disengaged audience of tourists tends to see the procession as 239

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at best a warm-up act, at worse a delaying irrelevance, whereas the ordinary contradaioles line the streets to watch the procession go past, waiting until the last possible moment to push their way into the centre of the Piazza to see the race.34 The procession begins and ends with figures representing the city. It is led by a group that ‘represents Siena and all of the former towns, principalities, manors, and castles owing allegiance to the Republic of Siena’ and includes the civic standard-bearer, mace bearers, trumpeters, and a band,35 and of course it ends with the Carroccio (wagon), pulled by four white oxen, and carrying the Palio banner itself. A ceremonial wagon belonging to the city state of Siena has been traced back to the fourteenth century. Called Il Carro degli Angeli (The Wagon of the Angels), it was originally ‘a machine holding up youths dressed as angels, and a complicated system of ropes and pulleys made them rise and fall around an image of the Madonna’.36 The youths threw oranges to the crowd as they passed. As today, it was on this wagon that the Palio banner was carried. The semantics of processions always invite the question of whether first or last is most important. In the Siena procession, the first and the last offer an interesting mirror for the York Barkers’ Fall of the Angels and the Mercers’ Doomsday, the first establishing the inclusive parameters on which all that follows will draw, and the last reprising the statement of the first but carrying within it the essence of the particular denouement that all the preceding narrative has anticipated. And just as the heaven, earth, and hell of York’s first and last pageants include by implication every member of the audience, so too the civic statement made by the beginning and ending of the Siena procession includes not only every element that intervenes, but all the participating audience too.37 Of all the elements in the events of the Palio, the one that vies for spectacular prominence with the horse race itself is the virtuoso display of flag-waving that marks every contrada’s presence in the intervening procession.38 The relationship between guild banners like the contrade’s occupational ones, and like those recorded in Leuven’s Renaissance Liber Boonen, and what are more properly flags, is an interesting one.39 Both involve the display of heavily encoded visual symbolism, but sedately displayed vertical guild banners seem to be chiefly concerned with asserting civic hierarchy, while flags denote the expression of something more adversarial with military connotations. The relative importance of the guild is denoted by its banner’s position in the narrative order of a procession, while the flag asserts its owning confraternity’s place in the hierarchy competitively, depending on the bystanders’ approval of the virtuosity of the display. Here again in the Palio we can see how the quality of the whole event is controlled by confraternal relationships in which competition for position in an established hierarchy is key, but we can also consider how too, within the English Corpus Christi Play, an individual sponsoring guild’s performance challenges and competes with others in the sequence. This is particularly evident in the attention-seeking boasting speeches of successive tyrants in, for example, the York trial pageants.40 Embedded within the records of medieval York, Chester, and Coventry, we also see city authorities arbitrating for, but also obliquely 240

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Image 15.3 Bruco’s victory procession

encouraging, inter-guild competition as a secure guarantor of the overall quality of the ceremonial event.41 The question that the theatre historian approaches most cautiously when considering ceremonial events and rituals is that of fundamental meaning. Various speculations about what the events surrounding Corpus Christi meant to the population of medieval York have been entered into, the most popular perhaps being that it proposed an equation between the earthly city and the heavenly Jerusalem, but scholars generally now resist such definitive pronouncements.42 Modern-day civic festivals enjoy the advantage of being studied by professional anthropologists, and in the Palio, there is much for them to work with. For example, for the final race only, the jockeys are issued with whips, described in the tourist information as ‘ox-gut’ but actually specifically made from the dried stretched penises of unweaned male calves. Then the winning contrada, after a night of carousing, marches the streets once more with drumming and flag-throwing, but with the additional detail that both the comparse and ordinary contradaioles take part in the victory procession sucking infant comforters or baby bottles – though admittedly the latter may contain wine rather than milk (see Image 15.3). 241

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Meanwhile the losing contrade go home early to bed with no celebrations after the race and are supposed to take a purge. And all this takes place in a city whose foundation is attributed to Remus and where the civic crest is the she-wolf suckling the twin brothers. Siena’s particular saint also happens to be the Virgin lactans. Dundes and Falassi present a complex analysis of the metaphorical meaning of the event derived from Freudian Oedipal psychology while stressing that the event as a whole is more than ‘simply a ritual of rebirth or a male initiation rite or a dramatic enactment of male-female relationships (including the mother-son complex)’.43 What this highlights, albeit perhaps too simplistically in anthropological terms, for the historian of confraternal and guild drama is the complexity of what it means to join in civic brotherhood. It suggests, for example, that in focusing on the way in which medieval civic hierarchies look like royal feudal hierarchies in miniature, we may miss the full force of the familial analogy that confraternal life proposes.44 In particular, where the continuation of the biological familial line is precarious, as was the case in the disease-ridden cities of the Middle Ages, it was the extended family forged through ties of mutual interest – from physical protection to economic prosperity – i.e. the confraternity, that simulated and reinforced the advantages of the nuclear unit. The ceremonial climax of the civic year can, then, be understood in terms of birth, rebirth, and necessary affirmation of the strength of the communal body evidenced in the status and affluence of its elders and the vigour of its youth. Equally the Palio informs us further about the way in which confraternal ceremony describes the hierarchies of civic space and competition within that space. It invests particular places within the city with symbolic significance, some for the individual confraternity, others for the whole corporate body. Defining the bounds of the civic space is recognized to be the commonest spatial function of ceremonial, but what the Palio demonstrates is that simply to recognize this is inadequate; ceremonial contains and occupies the civic space according to complex and hierarchical understandings of power and ownership, connecting it to subgroups and to the whole corporate group both competitively and consensually. The contrade issue, from their particular neighbourhoods, process through the city to a number of significant ‘stations’ – including, most secular, the historic Monte dei Paschi Bank, traditional underwriter of the entire event, and, most holy, the Duomo – before, at the climax of events, encircling the central Piazza full of the people of the city and, therefore, serving as the microcosm of the whole community. In medieval York there were, as well as the route of the pageants, three competing Corpus Christi processional routes, those of the cathedral clergy and of the monks of St Mary’s Abbey asserting ownership of their portions of the civic space at the same time as the civic procession took its route around the secular space of the city, turning back into the city from Minster Gates.45 In Coventry, the route of the pageants was never fixed, it seems, as influential individual citizens paid to have the play pass by and stop at their houses. In an essay of this scope, it is not possible to offer exhaustive analyses of all the dimensions in which civic ceremonies organized by confraternities are unique 242

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and those in which there is some commonality. What I have set out to do, however, is to suggest, by particular reference to Siena’s Palio, that the observation of surviving ‘live’ confraternal civic ceremonies, however disparate and unique of themselves, could be developed as a methodology for further understanding the lost civic ceremonies of medieval England.

Appendix Each of Siena’s seventeen contrade has a specific heraldry, distinctive colours, a motto, a symbolic quality, military order, and patron saint, as well as a geographic location within the city that includes its oratory and guildhall. Those of the ten running in 2008 are set out below, along with the number of Palio victories each contrada has achieved in its history.46 Aquila (eagle) Device: a black two-headed eagle with a crown ancient, bearing in its claws a sceptre, two swords in the right, and an imperial globe in the left, with a radiating sun at its centre, on which are the initials u.I., for umberto I. Running colours: yellow with black and blue decorations. Motto: ‘Dell’Aquilla il rostro, l’ugna e l’ala’ [of the eagle in the beak, the claw and the wing]. Symbolic quality: fighting spirit. Patronal feast: the Holy Name of Mary, 12 September. Oratory: Saint John the Baptist on Via del Casato. Museum: Casata di Sotto 82–88. Guildhall: Il Rostro in vicolo del Vechione 6. Baptismal fountain: sculpted by Bruno Buracchini in 1963 in the Piazza Postierla, on which is carved ‘unguis et Rostris’ [talon and beaks]. The contrada is twinned with Valetta in Malta. Allies: Civetta and Drago. Enemy: Pantera. 24 victories between 1719 and 1992. Bruco (caterpillar) Device: gold shield, a silk worm on a twig with green foliage, with a grand-ducal crown. The head quartered in red and silver with a cross quartered in silver and red. Running colours: yellow and green with a turquoise border. Motto: ‘come rivoluzion suona il mio nome’ [My name rings out like a revolution]. Symbolic quality: industriousness. 243

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Patronal feast: The Madonna of the Disciplina Maggiore, first Sunday in July. Oratory: in via del Commune, dedicated to the Visitation of Maria. Museum: via del Commune 44. Guildhall: via del Commune 44. Baptismal fountain: work of Lorenzo Borgogni, 1978. Allies: Istrice, Nicchio, Torre. 37 victories, the first in 1653. Winner in August 2008. Drago (dragon) Device: shield of silver, a green dragon with a spear, crowned ancient enclosing a blue pennant with the initial u (umberto I) in gold. Running colours: old rose and green with a border of yellow. Motto: ‘Il cor che m’ arde divine fiamma in bocca’ [The heart which burns within me becomes flame in my mouth]. Symbolic quality: ardour. Patronal feast: Saint Catherine of Siena, last Sunday in May. Oratory: St Catherine’s in Piazza Matteotti (formerly the nunnery of Paradiso). Museum: Piazza Matteotti 18. Guildhall: via del Paradiso 21. Baptismal fountain: work of sculptor Vico Consorti, 1977, bearing a dedicatory inscription to the contrada from the sculptor and situated in Piazza Matteotti. Ally: Aquila. 346 victories between 1650 and 2001. Nicchio (shell) Device: a blue shield, a silver shell, with a grand-ducal crown between two branches of red coral, three knots of Savoy, and two rosettes of Cyprus, one red, the other silver. Running colours: blue with a border of yellow and red. Motto: ‘E’ Il rosso del corallo che m’arde in cor’ [And the red of coral gives me ardour in my heart]. Symbolic quality: discretion. Patronal feast: Saint Gaetano Thiene, 7 August. Oratory: between via de Pispini and via dell’Oliviera. Museum: via dei Pispini 68/70. Guildhall: via dei Pispini 112. Baptismal fountain: Fonte dei Pispini (16th century). Nicchio is twinned with the city of Asciano. Allies: Bruco, Onda, Tartuca. Enemy: Valdimontone. 42 victories between 1666 and 1998. 244

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Oca (swan) Device: a shield of gold, a swan crowned royal within a foliate wreath, round its neck a blue ribbon from which hangs a cross of Savoy. Colour: white and green with a red border. Motto: ‘Clangit ad arma’ [united in arms]. Symbolic quality: prudence. Patronal feast: Saint Catherine of Siena, 29 April. Oratory: constructed between 1464 and 1474 from the habitation of Fontebranda, long associated with St Catherine. Museum: vicolo del Tiratoio 13. Guildhall: via Santa Caterina 55. Baptismal fountain: fountain of Fontebranda (12/13th century) next to the street of the same name. Oca is twinned with the city of Trieste. Allies: none. Enemy: Torre. 63 victories between 1644 and 2007. Pantera (panther) Device: a silver shield, a panther rampant, quartered white and blue with the initial u. Running colours: red and blue with a white border. Motto: ‘“La Pantera ruggi ed il populo se scosse” Il mio slancio ogni ostacolo abate’ [‘The panther roars and the people jump’. My leap always overcomes obstacles.] Symbolic quality: boldness. Patronal feast: Decollation of St John the Baptist, 29 August. Oratory: the contrada uses the church of Carmine in Pian de’ Mantellini, but officially their church is attached to the Carmelite convent. Museum: via San Quirico 26. Guildhall: Due Porte, via San Querico 20. Baptismal fountain: bronze made by Ciulio Corsini in 1977, on a base inscribed with the motto of the contrada, in Piazza del Conte. Allies: Chioccola, Civetta, Giraffa, and Leoncomo. Enemy: Aquila. 26 victories between 1691 and 2006. Selva (forest) Device: a shield of silver, a rhinoceros at the base of an oak tree on whose trunk is figured a hunting trophy, surmounted with a sun with gold rays and with the initial ‘u’ on a field of blue. 245

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Running colours: green and orange with a white border. Motto: ‘Prima Selvalta in Campo’ [The first oak in the field]. Symbolic quality: power/influence. Patronal feast: Assumption of the Virgin Mary, 15 August. Oratory: the church of St Sebastian in via Franciosa. Museum: Piazzetta della Selva 5. Guildhall: via Vallepiatta 26. Baptismal fountain: the work of Vinicio Guastatori, 1965, surmounted with a rhinoceros and the contrada’s motto, in Piazza della Selva. Allies: Chioccola, Tartuca. Enemy: none. 36 victories between 1685 and 2006. Tartuca (tortoise) Device: a shield of gold, a tortoise in a field of gold, spangled with blue nuts of Savoy alternating with daisies. Running colours: yellow and dark blue. Motto: ‘Forza e costanza albergo’ [Strength and constancy accommodated together]. Symbolic quality: firmness. Patronal feast: St Anthony da Padova, 13 June. Oratory: St Anthony of Padova, via Tommaso Pendola. Museum: via Tommaso Pendola 21. Guildhall: via Tommaso Pendola 17. Baptismal fountain: work of Bruno Buracchini, 1951, in via Tommaso Pendola. Tartuca is twinned with the city of Trento. Allies: Leocorno, Onda, Nicchio, Selva. Enemy: Chioccola. 45 victories between 1651 and 2002. Torre (tower) Device: a shield of gold, an elephant on a grassy base, bearing a red caparison with a white cross and a fortified tower with a red pennant with a cross of silver. Running colours: crimson red with a border of white and blue. Motto: ‘Oltre la forza, la potenza’ [As well as strength, power/influence]. Symbolic quality: strength. Patronal feast: St James the Great and St Anne, 25 July. Oratory: via Salicotto. Museum: via Salicotto 78. Guildhall: via Salicotto 92. Baptismal fountain: work of Mauro Berrettini, 1984, replacing one by Fausto Corsini, 1954, inscribed with the motto, and ‘Victoria’, in via Salicotto. 246

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Ally: Bruco. Enemies: Oca and Onda. 43 victories between 1652 and 2005. Valdimontone (ram) Device: a shield of gold, a ram rampant, crowned ancient, in the upper left corner the letter ‘u’ in gold, crowned royal on a field of blue. Running colours: red and yellow with a border of white, and, to distinguish the jockey from others, the jockey wears a short jacket and breeches in pink. Motto: ‘Sotto il mio colpo la muraglia crolla’ [under my blow, the wall collapses]. Symbolic quality: perseverance. Patronal feast: Madonna of Good Counsel, 26 April. Oratory: Church of the Blessed Trinity. Museum: via de Valdimontone 6. Guildhall: Piazza Manzoni 6. Baptismal fountain: erected at the church on the patronal festival. Ally: Onda. Enemy: Nicchio 43 victories between 1654 and 1990. The remaining seven non-competitors in 2008 were: Chioccola (the snail), Civetta (the owl), Giraffa (the giraffe), Istrice (the porcupine), Leoncorno (the unicorn), Lupa (the wolf), and Onda (the wave, with dolphin).

Notes 1 For an earlier application of this approach, see P. M. King, ‘The Festa D’Elx: Civic Devotion, Display and Identity’, in Festive Drama, ed. M. Twycross (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), pp. 95–109. (See in this volume.) 2 See M. J. G. Lara and J. J. Barrientos, Guia de la Semana Santa en Sevilla (Seville, 1992); P. M. King, ‘Corpus Christi: Valencia’, European Medieval Drama 4 (2000), pp. 181–205 (See in this volume); Las Fallas, Valencia website at www.valenciaval encia.com/culture-guide/fallas/fallas.htm (accessed 16 June 2010); Procession of the Holy Blood, visit Belgium website at http://www.visitbelgium.com/mediaroom/_baks/ holybloodprocession.htm.0001.33eb.bak (accessed 16/06/10). 3 See C.G. Brown, Up-Helly-Aa: Custom, Culture and Community in Shetland (Manchester, Manchester university Press, 1998); G. K. Neville, The Mother Town: Civic Ritual, Symbol, and Experience in the Borders of Scotland (Oxford: Oxford university Press, 1994). 4 ‘The Reinassance [sic]: Floats, Symbols, and Colors (1400–1500)’, http:/ /www. comune.siena.it /main.asp?id=936&l=en (accessed 16/06/10). 5 The Oxford English Dictionary gives the origin of ‘pageant’ as unknown, but its appearance in, for example, Pageant of the Life of Richard Beauchamp Earl of Warwick (British Library, MS Harley 367), c. 1480, indicates use in relation to a narrative sequence with accompanying visual material.

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6 A. Dundes and A. Falassi, La Terra in Piazza: An Interpretation of the Palio of Siena, 2nd edn (Berkeley: university of California Press, 1984), pp. 72–92. This collaboration between a Sienese and an outsider provides an exhaustive anthropological analysis of the twentieth-century Palio. It is used here chiefly for its invaluable guide to what happens where and when. I am also grateful to one of the authors, Professor Alessandro Falassi, and to Professor Balustracci of the university of Siena, for corresponding with me, and to the members of the Selva contrada, especially Gina Stipo, who generously gave me access to many of the events’ behind the scenes during the August Palio of 2008. 7 In Elx there is a public ‘preuva del angel’ in which the boys singing the parts of the angels of the Assumption have their courage tested in their first encounter with the aerial machinery on which they will perform. 8 R.W. Ingram, ed., Coventry, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: university of Toronto Press, 1981), p. 44. 9 Coventry, p. 62. 10 Coventry, p. 77. 11 Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, eds., York, 2 vols. Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: university of Toronto Press, 1979) I, p. 9; II p. 287. 12 York, I, pp. 99. 13 For observations on how the defining event colours the community’s whole annual round, see Dundes and Falassi, La Terra in Piazza, pp. 142–61, and, for example, P. M. King, ‘Elche again: The Venida and Semana Santa’, METh 12:1 (1990), pp. 4–20. (See in this volume.) 14 York, I, pp. 9, 287. 15 York, I, pp. 116–7. 16 For a synopsis of the nature of the Palio alongside Siena’s other historical points of interest, and a useful illustration of the coats of arms of the contrade, see P. Cesarini, Siena: History, Art and Traditions (Florence, 1987), pp. 89–96. 17 See, for example, S. R. Epstein, ‘Craft Guilds, Apprenticeship, and Technological Change in Preindustrial Europe’, Journal of Economic History 58.3 (1998), pp. 684– 713. 18 See, for example, A. Prescott, ‘Men and Women in the Guild Returns’, in Gender and Fraternal Orders in Europe, 1300–2000, ed. M. F. Cross (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), pp. 30–51. I am grateful to Andrew Prescott for access to his unpublished bibliographical notes on medieval guilds. 19 G. Rosser, ‘urban Culture and the Church 1300–1540’, in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, I, 600–1540, ed. D. M. Palliser (Cambridge: university of Cambridge Press, 2001), pp. 335–69 (pp. 336–7). 20 Similarly, in Lerwick (capital of the Shetlands), where the population is a mere 7,000, the success of Up-Helly-Aa depends on returning members of the Shetland diaspora to their squads, particularly in the year that an individual squad takes the lead as Jarl’s Squad. Gwen Kennedy Neville notes that in the Selkirk Border Riding, a special guild has been formed for natives of the town who have moved away, in Neville, Mother Town, p. 29. 21 Rosser, ‘urban Culture and the Church’. 22 Dundes and Falassi, La Terra in Piazza, p. 103. 23 ‘The Reinassance’ [sic]. 24 Coventry, pp. 3 (1392) and 329–30 (1590). 25 York, I, pp. 55–6. 26 Dundes and Falassi, La Terra in Piazza, pp. 33–4. 27 Dundes and Falassi, La Terra in Piazza, devote a chapter to the operation of partiti, pp. 72–92, such is their centrality to the underlying anthropological meaning of the event.

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28 York, I, 87; II, 764–5. The Mercers’ arrangements for managing their pageant are found in the 1433 indenture by which they transfer their properties and costumes to the appointed pageant masters; York, I, pp. 55–6. 29 M. Rogerson, ‘The Coventry Corpus Christi Play: A “Lost” Middle English Creed Play?’ Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 36 (1997), pp. 143–77. 30 P. M. King and C. Davidson, eds., The Coventry Corpus Christi Plays (Kalamazoo, Medieval Institute, 2000), p. 53. 31 York, I, p. 48; II, p. 732. See also Sheila Christie, ‘Bridging the Jurisdictional Divide: The Masons and the York Corpus Christi Play’ in Margaret Rogerson, ed., The York Mystery Plays: Performance in the City (York: York Medieval Press, 2011), pp. 60–3, 65, 73. 32 Coventry, p. 79. 33 Dundes and Falassi, La Terra in Piazza, p. 109. The six suppressed contrade are Gallo (the cock), Leone (the lion), Orso (the bear), Quercia (the oak), Spadaforte (the strong sword), and Vipera (the Viper). 34 The August Palio in 2008 coincided with the Beijing Olympics, and the tourists in the Piazza del Campo clearly viewed the process as equivalent to the opening ceremony of the Games, many not even bothering to stand up to see what was happening until the jockeys and their horses emerged from the Cortile de Podesta. 35 Dundes and Falassi, La Terra in Piazza, p. 102. 36 Ibid. 37 I am grateful to Sheila Christie for suggesting that I consider the semantics of procession, in particular the hierarchical relationship between first and last, and also for helping this enthusiastic returnee from the Palio to shape experience into argument. 38 Although Siena’s is the most celebrated modern example of these ceremonial skills, it is not unique. Gwen Kennedy Neville notes the importance of flag-throwing in the Selkirk Border Riding, in Neville, Mother Town, pp. 48–9; it also characterizes the parades of the Orange Order in Belfast; see N. Jarman, Displaying Faith: Orange, Green and Trade Union Banners in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s university, 1999). 39 See York Doomsday Project, www.lancaster.ac.uk/users/yorkdoom/boonen.htm (accessed 16/06/10), M. Twycross: ‘The Liber Boonen is a manuscript History of Leuven, its antiquities and ceremonies, written by William Boonen, a Clerk of the City Registry, in 1593/1594. It includes a full description of the city’s famous ommegang or procession’. 40 Richard Beadle, The York Plays, 2 vols. EETS s.s. 23 and 24 (Oxford: Oxford university Press, 2009), pp. 241–2 (Cayphas), pp. 256–7 (Pilate), pp. 277–8 (Rex, i.e. Herod), pp. 292–3 (Pilate), and p. 305 (Pilate). 41 For example, the legislation passed by Coventry Leet in 1494–1495 regulating the management of the Corpus Christi Play, Coventry, pp. 78–80, 82–4. 42 See, for example, M. Stevens, Four Middle English Mystery Cycles: Textual, Contextual, and Critical Interpretations (Princeton: Princeton university Press, 1987), p. 52. 43 Dundes and Falassi, La Terra in Piazza, p. 185. 44 See also discussion of the notion of ‘family’ in the York Play by Mike Tyler, ‘Group Dynamics: The Noah Family in the York Pageant of The Flood’ in Margaret Rogerson, ed., The York Mystery Plays: Performance in the City (York: York Medieval Press, 2011), pp. 75–90. 45 D. Cowling, ‘The Liturgical Celebration of Corpus Christi in Medieval York’, REED Newsletter (1976:2), 5–9. 46 All details of the affiliations and devices of each of the 2008 competing contrade are taken from ‘Corriere del Palio’, Corriere di Siena, 16 August 2008, pp. 39–50.

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16 TWENTIETH-CENTURY MEDIEVAL DRAMA REVIVALS AND UNIVERSITIES From: Medieval English Theatre, 27 (for 2005), 2007 pp. 105–30 The slim journal Theatre in Education, issue 5, number 25, for April 1951, carried three interestingly linked articles. First there is a report on the preparations for the forthcoming Festival of Britain, the country’s great post-war self-celebration. What is specifically reported here is the outcome of Ministry of Education Circular 231 of 15 December 1950, which gave a general outline of what the role of schools and colleges was to be in the Festival, embodying the hope that ‘most schools will find in their local history, etc., a rich accumulation of treasures and achievements that could properly be studied as part of a national festival of thankfulness and legitimate pride’. The report moves on to preview plans for the revival of the York Mystery Plays, listed alongside Cambridge’s plans to stage Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Tempest or Enchanted Isle by Dryden, Davenant, and Purcell. Norwich planned to put on Shakespeare’s Pericles and The Taming of the Shrew in the Madder Market, as well as a production by the Pilgrim Players of Christopher Fry’s Sleep of Prisoners in the medieval church of St Peter Mancroft. In Canterbury, there was to be a new play by Robert Gittings about St Alphege and the Danish invasion entitled Makers of Violence; in Oxford, Henry IV Part 2 and Samson Agonistes were being put on in college gardens. Stratford was contributing four of Shakespeare’s history plays, from Richard II to Henry V, and, in Battersea Festival Gardens in London, Harold Turner was appearing in a new ballet based on Orlando’s Silver Wedding. The reporter remarks on how London was lagging behind the provinces in what was clearly seen as a major and appropriate endeavour in patriotic drama. The discussion of York’s plans presciently adds that ‘One had the general feeling that this revival, if successful, may become a permanent feature if not of every summer season then as often at least as Edinburgh will see the revival of the “Thrie Estatis”’. Moreover, the account notes that other revivals of medieval scriptural drama for the Festival were to include an adaptation by Rev and Mrs Joseph McCulloch in Chester – ‘where the Chester plays have not been done in their entirety for four hundred years’ – directed by Christopher Ede and performed by a wholly amateur cast in the refectory of Chester Cathedral. Surrey 250

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Community Players were also, improbably, planning to put on the Towneley Creation and Fall on a horse-drawn cart with two levels, which was to be taken from street to street around ten stations in the town on two Saturdays, 19 and 26 May. At the end of the report is an advertisement for Canon Purvis’s adaptation of the York Plays, published by SPCK, claiming that ‘Written originally for amateurs, the plays do not demand subtle acting but rather the direct and simple sincerity born of faith’. A few pages further on in the journal, we find a report on another newsworthy development: Bristol University’s Department of Drama was celebrating the completion of its new custom-built drama studio. The department, the first university Drama Department in the UK, was another post-war development, founded four years previously in 1947. The studio had been designed by Richard Southern and had opened with productions of Hamlet and Louis McNeice’s play The Dark Tower, directed by head of department Glynne Wickham and chosen to demonstrate the flexibility of the space which could be adapted from a proscenium arch arrangement to theatre in the round in fifteen minutes. Finally, there is a report on a Colston Research Symposium, hosted by Bristol’s Drama Department, on ‘The Responsibility of the Universities to the Theatre’. The report notes with approval certain outcomes of the symposium. Unanimous support had been given to the views of participants Richard Southern and Nevill Coghill that it was time that the universities took over research into theatre history from the amateurs, and Professor Agne Beijer from Stockholm, Director of the Drottningholm Theatre, is reported as pleading for research to extend to the archaeology of theatre buildings. The view expressed by E. Martin Browne that drama is ‘a form of creative leisure and a fruitful means of re-creation’ that should be for the community as a whole was also uncontentious. The debate on whether the universities had any business training actors, or whether they should stick to the ideal of learning for its own sake, remained, however, unresolved. Glynne Wickham kept this copy of Theatre in Education,1 as he kept all the documents from the symposium, and they now form part of the Glynne Wickham archive in the Bristol University Theatre Collection. He was secretary to the symposium and also directed a cast of drama students in Milton’s Comus as an afterdinner entertainment.2 The cast of participants in the symposium is worth listing because it offers a way into the story of how this volume of Theatre in Education demonstrates the connection between the development of drama in the universities in Britain with the larger account of the revival of English medieval drama. The universities were represented by Agne Beijer, professor of drama at the University of Stockholm, Nevill Coghill from Exeter College, Oxford, a moving force behind Oxford’s extracurricular dramatic activity and Glynne Wickham’s mentor. Professor A. Dalla Pozza from the Academia Olimpica de Vicenza joined Professor Agne as custodian of an ancient theatrical site, and Professor Sawyer Falk was there from the Drama Department at the University of Syracuse, New York (established 1929), where facilities allegedly outstripped anything available on Broadway. From the world of the theatre, there was the director/playwright 251

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Tyrone Guthrie. Hugh Hunt and Michel St Denis attended from the Old Vic, and Gustaf Grundgens from Theatrintendant in Dusseldorf. In addition, E. Martin Browne, billed as director of the British Drama League, took time out from directing the forthcoming York Play to attend, along with Richard Southern, from the Society for Theatre Research and editor of its journal Theatre Notebook. John Garrett, Head of Bristol Grammar School was also there; Pierre Chevrillon, the Parisian playwright; Norman Marshall, one of the moving forces behind the formation of the National Theatre; and E.A. Harding, Assistant Head of Drama at the BBC.3 Glynne Wickham’s own notes suggest that discussion at the symposium eddied around how to educate audiences ‘satiated’ with television and radio, so that they could appreciate live theatre.4 The hope was expressed that to produce graduates of drama would be to educate that audience as well as to breed a new generation of good theatre critics who could steer a prudent path between the sentimental and the destructive. Little headway was apparently made, however, towards a rapprochement between the academics, who thought drama was only properly a matter for literary study, and the hard-line men of the theatre, who thought the universities had no place interfering with their profession, despite the fact, as we shall see, that the vociferous adversaries were products of the same stable. More of that later. The proceedings of the symposium were summarised in a broadcast on the BBC Home Service on the 6 April by V.C. Clinton-Baddeley under the title ‘Much Throwing About of Brains’.5 Clinton-Baddeley noted that until recently the idea of studying theatre in university would have been ‘fantastic’, but since the 1920s, things had begun to move with the revolutionary productions of the provincial repertory companies. Since World War II, there had been a further shift into state adoption through the foundation of the Arts Council and plans for the National Theatre, and the Society for Theatre Research had been formed. Given the newfound state sponsorship of the theatre and the increasing interest in research into its history, he continues, the universities could no longer afford to leave it out of the curriculum. He endorsed the view of Oxford’s Nevill Coghill, however, that drama was not a large enough subject on its own for a degree, and that university involvement should be at the level of specialist postgraduate study and, in particular research. He, too, noted Richard Southern’s observation that theatre research had too long been a matter ‘for a devoted few at their own expense’. What the records of the symposium do not record directly is that in the same year, 1951, as well as finishing his own doctorate, ‘Medieval Pageantry and the Court and Public Stages of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’,6 Glynne Wickham founded the Bristol University Theatre Collection,7 the archive to which his own papers, as well as the huge image collection which Richard Southern had amassed,8 now belong. The story of how the history of university drama, and that of the revival of interest in the production of medieval plays, in England, and how they are intertwined – what we might call the road to 1951 – is inevitably complicated. I cannot 252

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do justice to it all in this paper. Nor do I know it all. (There is, at the very least, a nice, publishable, doctoral dissertation here for someone.) What I hope to do, however, is to demonstrate that a simple evolutionary pattern to revival led by theatrical innovators – William Poel, Nugent Monck, E. Martin Browne – is not the whole story. Also, I am aware, that in offering this particular new strand to that established account, I am writing part of our own history. If this is worth doing, it is a tribute to the maturity and legitimacy of our field of study, born both out of academic interdisciplinarity and practical experimentation. Nor is the history of academic involvement in the story of the revival of medieval drama of itself a simple one, as it cannot be wholly detached from the much larger history of experimental reconstructions of the plays and playhouses of Shakespeare, as in its early days, our field hitched a ride along with the more apparently ‘important’ history of Shakespeare’s theatre. And finally, because everyone involved was an innovator, this story is intimately bound up with the development of avant-garde twentieth-century theatre. Glynne Wickham (1922–2004), who is at the centre of this study, needs no introduction. His is one of the great names in medieval and early modern theatre scholarship. He was the first professor of drama at Bristol, England’s first university department of drama, instrumental in separating the study of drama from English studies, and in building connections between university drama on the one hand and the professional theatre on the other. His work, especially the huge Early English Stages project,9 was in the vanguard of academic studies in suggesting that if we once freed ourselves from the tyranny of the surviving script, we could see the medieval theatre as a much more exciting and multifarious beast. It was his treatment of medieval theatre as theatre history, rather than as poor relation of English literature, that built on the work of E.K. Chambers by not only drawing scholarly attention to Latin tropes, late imperial Roman comedy, tournaments, processions, and entertainments at banquets, but by searching out pictures of them, and all before the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project had been thought of. The influences on Glynne Wickham which set him on his own road to 1951 are there among the cast of characters at the symposium. He shared with representatives of the whole spectrum of interest in the debate – Tyrone Guthrie for the professional theatre, E. Martin Browne for community drama, and Nevill Coghill for the academy – a background in Oxford University drama, in particular the Oxford University Dramatic Society, popularly known as ‘OUDS’. E. Martin Browne had been the first, as an undergraduate of Christ Church College, having a walk-on part in As You Like It in 1919.10 Going up to Oxford initially in 1940, and returning after war service in the RAF, Glynne Wickham found his place with others who had been engaged since before the war in the struggle to see the earliest surviving English play texts understood as performable theatre and returned to performance. The OUDS is itself a venerable institution with a very long prehistory. The history of university drama in Oxford (as well as in Cambridge) is, moreover, as any 253

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attentive reader of REED knows,11 as least as old as the plays which were revived there when Glynne Wickham was a student. Alan Mackinnon, who founded the Society in 1885, understood its spiritual prehistory as deriving not from ‘saints’ plays’ and ‘miracles’ but from the Boy Bishop ceremonies which ran in parallel with the more official dramatic entertainments produced in city and university for the monarch and visiting dignitaries.12 The office of Boy Bishop transmuted into Prince of Revels and the particular accounts of the legendary Tommy Tucker’s hapless tenure of the position in 1607, though barely relevant to the present discussion, are irresistible as a scene-setter: After long uncertainty and an enormous amount of discussion, it was decided to make the first appointment by formal election. The general choice fell on a Mr Thomas Tucker, who in after life obtained the third stall in the Cathedral Church at Bristol. No sooner was he aware of his new dignity than he instantly hid himself (being of a retiring disposition) and for sometime managed to elude his over-zealous subjects: he was, however, soon discovered, and forced to accept his new honours … The first task of the newly elected King being to provide himself with money, an indiscriminate collection was made, one of the contributors being Mr Laud, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. This was followed by the public installation of the Prince, which took place on the evening of St Andrew’s Day. Ara Fortunata, or Fortune’s Altar was the first play produced, but its success was not an unmixed one. The Hall, being crowded, there was very little room for the actual performance of the play; while at the second out-burst of admiration from the audience, the canopy of the Altar of Fortune suddenly collapsed. No damage was done, but the Prince’s Fool sat down rather hurriedly at his monarch’s feet, and broke his staff in two.13 At the second performance on Christmas Day, an ‘ingenious interlude’ consisting of Saturnalia finished off the evening. Then on 29 December, the tragedy Philomela was performed. By now, Tommy Tucker had a very bad cold, which was evident in his delivery of his lines as Tereus, and the carpenters hadn’t finished the stage. But worse was to follow in the shape of a production of Time’s Complaint on New Year’s Day. Tucker and his train processed through the Quadrangle to the accompaniment of three volleys from fifty or sixty guns without mishap, but the Prologue, ‘having only six lines to say, was totally unable to remember any of them: the “Good wife Spigott”, one of the comic characters, appeared before she should have done, and tried to fill in the interval with “patter” … [and] the comedian acting the part of a drunken cobbler gave far too realistic a representation, and only succeeded in filling his hearers with disgust.’ The later history of student drama at Oxford, particularly from the foundation of OUDS in the late nineteenth century, was, however, to become a distinctive

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tradition of very proficient performance. Nonetheless, even in the mid-twentieth century, it was regarded by many that the fitting place for drama in the universities, however well productions were researched and produced, was amateur, extracurricular, and not to be taken too seriously. Yet ironically it is out of that tradition that many of the luminaries of the early twentieth-century professional theatre emerged, as well as the intellectual genesis of systematically researched and truly experimental theatre, theatre design, and intelligent revival. It was also to be a major force in articulating the opposition to the atrophied traditions of theatre censorship. The greatest single influence on Glynne Wickham, by his own acknowledgement, was Nevill Coghill: ‘Nevill Coghill was commonly regarded as one of the most stimulating teachers we had ever met’. He attributed to his experience not with OUDS itself, nor to College drama, but to his engagement with the wartime ‘Friends of OUDS’, under Coghill’s direction, ‘all my own thinking about plays and play-production, even to the creation of a drama department in another university’.14 Coghill was born in 1899, younger son of Anglo-Irish baronet. He served in World War I before going up to Exeter College, where he was elected a fellow in 1924. Where he developed his distinctive interest in theatrical revival is unclear, but his first production seems to have arisen in response to a challenge when a student in an essay declared of Milton’s Samson Agonistes that it ‘would never play’.15 Coghill was a don who involved himself in what was fundamentally a student-led activity, bringing to it a superior knowledge based on research as well as what we might now call ‘modelling best practice’, and that makes him the precursor of the development of university drama departments. Part of Coghill’s role was a product of the exigencies of war. OUDS was suddenly disbanded at the outbreak of hostilities and found itself deeply in debt. It was an all-male society, and the life of the male student was, of course, disrupted by the exigencies of military service during the war. Coghill, a mature don of forty when war broke out, put together what was effectively a rescue package, entering negotiations with the university which led to the formation of the ‘Friends of OUDS’ with the specific purpose of putting on productions throughout the war to pay off that debt, using whatever students passed through on short courses on their way to call-up.16 Glynne Wickham, as a new undergraduate at New College in 1940, was in precisely that situation himself. He wanted to produce Much Ado About Nothing in the College gardens, but found that his college’s dramatic society had been officially ‘dissolved for the duration of hostilities’. So he approached Coghill who was looking with increasing desperation for productions which would help to pay off the OUDS debt rather than increasing it. There being no financial help available from that direction, Wickham did a deal with Coghill whereby he produced his play in the name of OUDS, but funded the production out of his own Post Office savings account. He made £100 profit which went straight into OUDS coffers. But Coghill was sufficiently encouraged to venture a production

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of Hamlet, for which Wickham auditioned and was cast as the Prince. This also made a profit. John Bryson’s review praised the production while commenting on the extreme youth of the players, including an Ophelia more apt ‘to retire to a nursery than to a nunnery’. Coghill himself, an inveterate smoker, played the ghost and, Wickham reminisced, was ‘perhaps the only ghost who added a natural cough to its other ailments’. Glynne Wickham was later inspired to write a set of notes for an actor approaching the role of Hamlet which was included in a Festshrift for Coghill.17 The students who played Laertes, Polonius, Horatio, and Osric were all killed in action. When the war ended after what had been a period of total Coghill monopoly over student drama, under the interim arrangements of the Friends, OUDS did not immediately re-form. According to the Society’s historian, a new spirit largely attributable to Coghill had entered university drama at Oxford: In a quiet way, Coghill had entirely changed the undergraduate attitude to acting. Those who took small parts in his productions were given the impression that they were just as important as the leading actors, and something like ‘company work’ began to be found in OUDS performances.18 What Mackinnon does not observe is that this change looks remarkably like a move towards drama being treated as an academic subject, where the common enterprise is one in which each participant is accorded equal weight as a reflective learner. Later in its history, the reformed OUDS was to continue to import guest producers and directors from the professional theatre which for a few students paved the way for direct entry into a career on the stage. For many more participating in student drama, at OUDS or college level, the activity was not undertaken as preparation for a career in the professional theatre, but was approached with the same research-based creativity that characterised their core studies. In the post-war period, therefore, these amateur student associations were not primarily a nursery for the professional stage, but were directly instrumental in giving weight to an evolving understanding of drama as a nascent ‘professional’ academic subject. Wickham, having returned to Oxford from the RAF in 1947, immediately became involved again and, in the coldest winter since records began, directed the last project to be undertaken under the auspices of the Friends. The ill-fated, and inadvertently hilarious, production of Ibsen’s The Pretenders was performed in front of the Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish ambassadors, all issued with rugs and hot-water bottles. The play had last been produced by OUDS in 1921, when it had starred Tyrone Guthrie, then a student at St John’s, but later to be one of the participants in the 1951 symposium, most vociferously opposed to the universities’ interference in the theatre.19 Though not a success, Wickham’s production returned sufficient profit to lead directly to the reconstitution of OUDS, and Wickham concluded his time at Oxford as the Society’s first post-war president.20 The Society he presided over no longer dominated the Oxford dramatic scene, but acted as an advisory body for the proliferating dramatic activity of individual colleges and also slowly gave way to the inexorable pressure to admit women. 256

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Although he published little by modern standards, and certainly did not found a university drama department, Nevill Coghill’s impact both on the integration of drama into the university syllabus, and the place within that of pre-Shakespearian drama, is key. Wickham noted that English and Modern Language departments everywhere had, by the end of the war, begun to relate the reading of dramatic text to its practical production in their teaching. Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, Birmingham, and Edinburgh are singled out as having moved substantially in this direction, while at Oxford and Cambridge, the gifts of theatrical benefactors – Judith E. Wilson at Cambridge and Alexander Korda at Oxford – made the question of what now to do with drama within the syllabus itself unavoidable. So it was that Nevill Coghill became a member of a Drama Commission who went to the USA in the spring of 1945, to see how drama was taught there.21 The Commission met Allardyce Nicoll, professor of drama at Yale, where the department had been founded in 1918, and Harley Granville-Barker, who taught at Yale and Harvard. Both, however, paradoxically urged that undergraduate acting was a waste of time and distracted students from the study of plays. So there would be no department of drama at Oxford. There was instead to be a new experimental University Theatre, constructed as a flexible space to accommodate all desirable set-ups from the Renaissance to the present day. This project was, however, also not to be fulfilled, because of the staggering expense involved, some £187,000, and the idea of integrating drama teaching at Oxford seems to have petered-out.22 Coghill’s enterprise and distinctive style continued unabated, however, and he notably went on to write The Masque of Hope, which Glynne Wickham designed and directed for production in front of Princess Elizabeth in 1948,23 and the memorable 1949 production of The Tempest in Worcester College Gardens. Nevill Coghill’s engagement with university drama, and, in particular his interest in medieval drama, considerably predates Glynne Wickham’s arrival at Oxford in 1940, however, and, cannot be attributed only to the special circumstances of wartime. His first production for OUDS was its jubilee production of Hamlet, the Society’s first in the newly renovated New Theatre, for which Edmund Blunden wrote a special prologue, and in which Peter Glenville starred to general critical approval. But all his other pre-war activity involved college productions rather than OUDS and arguably illustrates his fundamental impulse to educate through creative practice. In these pre-war productions, he developed a reputation as an unconventional director who did not attend to verse speaking or details of blocking, but who was already adept at making the most of his performers, and who was particularly inspired in the use of unconventional locations, in the devising of visual effects, and, of course, in seeing the potential in old and, at the time, relatively obscure scripts. Never really at home on an indoor stage, he would create some stunning outdoor coup de théâtre in a college garden or quadrangle, simply by considering the possibilities of the setting – trees, water, a tower, or some other feature. Dacre Balsdon, a fellow don at Exeter, recalled an early example of this when Coghill produced the medieval Noah’s Flood with a group of young unemployed 257

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Welshmen at a camp organised by the university, alongside the Thames at Pinkhill Lock. ‘What wiles did you employ on the lockkeeper’, Balsdon asks, ‘to produce … the flood itself, when he opened the lock gates?’24 Amongst Glynne Wickham’s papers in the Theatre Collection are mementos which tell us more about this particular production.25 A review in the Times also vicariously reveals the painfully slow awakening of what one might call ‘modern received opinion’ to the acceptance that medieval scriptural plays, even when performed by amateurs, need not be the quaint and rustic theatrical disaster that one might anticipate. It may be assumed that the reviewer, though 200 years out with his dating of the Chester plays, may be trusted on other matters relating to what he saw. The play was performed at Eynsham, near Oxford, and the unemployed were drawn mostly from the Risca district of South Wales and from Bethnal Green in London. The men lived under canvas and worked in the mornings, so far as trades unions would permit them to be productively employed. The afternoons were given over to games and hobbies. They were also taught German by two German students who were part of the project. The camp was not a charity, but the men had to pay from their dole. They were, however, also subsidised by public donation, and this was attracted by what they did in the evenings. Large numbers turned out from Oxford and the surrounding area to participate first in community singing al fresco, then to watch the play. It was set against the keeper’s lodge at Pinkhill lock, between two willow trees, where God’s throne was erected. Noah and his family occupied a lawn on the near side of the lock. The lock, therefore, lay between heaven and earth. Lighting was provided by what the Times report calls ‘an ingenious system of footlights, composed of motor-car headlights’. The cast had had a week to rehearse, and most of the actors had never performed before, but the angels sang hymns in harmony, ‘as only Welshmen can’. God and Noah were also Welsh and spoke ‘their quaint but engaging lines without mouthing or mumbling, and their gestures were dignified, easy and appropriate’. The animals were played by less talented performers, and by pastel drawings, but there was also, offstage, ‘a fine animal mimic’. And the flood was indeed provided by the opening of the lock gates. In this rustic environment, one might have expected so curious and old-fangled a piece to degenerate into burlesque; yet nothing of the sort happened. The performance was not merely serious, it was even devout, and though the humorous situations – and there were plenty of them – were made the most of, the tone was set by the beautiful unaccompanied singing of the Welsh ‘chorales’. Indeed, the camp performers succeeded far better than more sophisticated players, amateur or professional, have done in recapturing the real spirit of the medieval mystery. The programme shows that Coghill himself played ‘a bad man’. Nor was this Coghill’s only excursion into medieval drama. The same report in the Times records that the costumes used at Pinkhill Lock had been adapted from the Exeter College Drama Society’s production of Everyman earlier in the summer of 1934 and were judged ‘highly appropriate’. The production of Everyman 258

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was also a Coghill project, and again Glynne Wickham acquired, and kept, a copy of the programme.26 The programme notes indicate that the spirit in which the play had been produced was broadly Fabian. It was dedicated to William Morris, enjoyed the patronage of John Masefield, then poet laureate, and is commended for the clarity of its reflection of a particular view of the nature of human life, and for the decorous simplicity with which this is translated into performable drama. In the following year, 1935, Coghill took Noah’s Flood, Everyman, and the ‘unplayable’ Samson Agonistes to the Tewkesbury Festival.27 Nevill Coghill, with George Rylands from Cambridge, was to be briefly engaged by the professional theatre to direct for John Gielgud at the Haymarket in the 1940s, but this did not play to his forte. He apparently lacked the craft to direct professionals with precision, which again reinforces the impression that his true talents lay in the yet-to-be developed field of drama education.28 He achieved a more durable legacy in his creation of the Experimental Theatre Company (ETC), again at Oxford, in 1936. ETC opened up opportunities for university performers and directors to move away from the Shakespeare-dominated repertoire of OUDS to experiment with new plays and with lesser-known plays from the past. It also provided more opportunities for women in an era when OUDS was a strictly all-male preserve. It was, indeed, ETC which staged The Castle of Perseverance in 1938, with a cast which included a number of female students.29 The play was later to be produced in 1950, now under the auspices of a mixed-gender OUDS, by a Somerville student, Shirley Catlin, later Dame Shirley Williams.30 It was clearly his contact with Nevill Coghill, and his privileged knowledge of the latter’s experiments in the 1930s, that led Glynne Wickham into an early interest not only in the archival survival of medieval plays, but into the thick of the controversy over their performability. The year before the 1951 symposium he directed an experimental production of Sir David Lindsay of the Mount’s The Thrie Estatis in Bristol’s Victoria Rooms, which was received enthusiastically by the Western Press (21 February 1950) as an example of how ‘research, pronunciation, medieval idiom, mime, movement, and stage technique can be achieved simply’, and this despite an amateur cast of forty-five people. It did not go unnoticed by the national press either, as the Observer also commended it (25 February) as the first performance of the play since the sixteenth century.31 Later in the 1950s, he went on, like his mentor, to produce scriptural pageants as part of the Tewkesbury Music Festival, in 1957, a Passion Play, and in 1958, the York Epiphany pageant. The latter was believed by the anonymous reporter from the equally anonymous, but evidently local, newspaper from which Wickham kept the report, to have been from the ‘thirteenth century’. The production’s ‘artistic balance’ – whatever that is – was, however, commended, particularly when, the Holy Family appeared with their lowlier brethren in the scheme of Creation – the ox and the ass. The players had by no means an easy task because the language of their script was as antique as that of Chaucer’s 259

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‘Canterbury Tales’. Mainly because of their sincerity and deep feeling for their theme they were able to overcome this handicap and make a strong emotional appeal.32 The performance appears to have made full use of the existing layout of the Abbey and its fixed furnishings – pulpit, lectern, choir-stalls, and altar. Glynne Wickham went on to produce his own version of Everyman, too, as part of the Bristol Shakespeare Festival in 1963/64.33 Hereafter, Wickham appears to have moved away from producing pre-Shakespearean plays to concentrate on writing about them. When his department undertook the most ambitious reconstruction of a medieval play of its era, the production of Cornish Ordinalia in the summer of 1969 in the round at Perranporth; it was directed by Wickham’s colleague, Neville Denny.34 But Glynne Wickham’s writing was not, in the late 1950s and 1960s, confined solely to scholarly books and articles about the medieval theatre; he engaged actively in the campaign to have medieval plays publicly understood, and, in particular, to bringing to an end the outdated scruples about impersonating the deity in the theatre, which had for so long impeded the production of all religious drama including the revival of medieval scriptural plays. Around the same time that E. Martin Browne began to engage in delicate negotiations to be able to cast Christ in his Festival of Britain production in York,35 Glynne Wickham, as Head of Drama at Bristol University, was writing to the press in angry response to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s request that all texts of Nativity plays be submitted to the bishop of Dover for examination before rehearsals begin.36 Wickham saw this as the ‘virtual censorship’ upon what he called the ‘recent revival of interest in religious drama’. He pointed to the absurdity of the church on the one hand declaring its intention to use modern methods, like film, to bring its message to a wider audience, while strictly controlling the revival of medieval plays on the other: One assumes that it is the performance in recent years of the sheep-stealing scene in the Wakefield Shepherds Play and representing St Joseph’s bewilderment at the Incarnation in the Coventry Nativity Play which have caused objection to be raised and a censorship imposed. Yet emasculated texts, divorced from the realities of human life and the mediocrity in performance which such texts receive in consequence, will not inspire that wide audience, accustomed to the vitality of the cinema, which the Church aims to attract. The secret of success in the medieval mysteries [sic] cycles lay in the fact that they portrayed the Bible stories in such a way that the whole audience could appreciate their significance in terms of their own experience. He goes on to say that the York Building of the Ark is attractive because the shipwrights knew how to build ships, and that the Wakefield Pilate was a local JP: 260

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Any hope that a new religious drama may arise and flourish is already vain unless our plays have an equally direct bearing on contemporary life. A censorship may well eliminate occasional errors in taste and judgment, but by strangling originality of treatment and stifling enthusiasm it may well destroy the vitality essential to success. In tracing this path to 1951, and inserting the Academy into the early history of the revival of medieval English drama, I have painted a picture which is very focused on the contribution of amateur university drama at Oxford. The networks which radiate from that which were to bring Tyrone Guthrie, E. Martin Browne, and Nevill Coghill back together in Bristol in 1951 present a coherent narrative, but, I am aware, a partial one. A number of other interventions contribute to the whole picture to which I cannot do justice here. One in particular deserves mention, however briefly, if the picture is not to be skewed too much in favour of the élite, and it is the parallel role of the teacher training colleges and, in particular, the part played by Martial Rose. Martial Rose began his career as a teacher at Leyton County High School (LCHS), having graduated from King’s College Cambridge (where he held a scholarship) in 1946, and was in his penultimate year there when the symposium, at which he was not present, took place in Bristol. His successor at the school, Bobby Brown, pays tribute to his early legacy: I was very lucky to inherit, when appointed to LCHS in 1952, in my function of ‘looking after the Drama’, a veritable posse of thrusting, questing young thespians previously guided, and thrashed on and reined in, by Martial Rose. I had glimpses of him and them rehearsing Macbeth and recalled later that I’d seen a very young Derek Jacobi sitting on a bench near the gym waiting to tear on with a lantern as a storm-tossed Fleance. We all have to start somewhere! Martial was almost on his way to lecture at Bretton Hall in Yorkshire … LCHS, like many other hardworking schools, had no Drama Department as such. For English staff it obviously ‘got into’ classroom teaching but it was otherwise an afterhours activity. I came flushed with a heady spate of acting and directing at University – and then got down to preparing the annual play.37 LCHS was not in any sense unique in having a strong tradition of the school play in this era, but it is clear that this was an area in which Martial Rose made a more than usual impact. Bretton Hall College of Education opened in 1949, as the product of negotiations between the Department for Education and Science and the West Riding County Council (WRCC), following the purchase of the buildings by the latter, in the same year as Bristol University opened its Drama Department. Under the guidance of the Chief Education Officer for the WRCC, Alex Clegg, the plan hatched by the government’s Department of Education and Science to open a college for music teachers was expanded into a project which created a 261

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highly specialised college, which had as its basis the studies of music, art, and drama.38 It was to this environment that Rose progressed in 1952. In 1958 he produced the Towneley Plays there, the same year as Glynne Wickham was producing the York Epiphany pageant at the Tewkesbury Festival. Bretton Hall lies just outside Wakefield, the then undisputed home of the Towneley Plays. But Martial Rose then went on to achieve something that neither Coghill nor Wickham managed successfully and that was to make the crossover as educationalist into the professional theatre. He was commissioned to prepare an adaptation of eighteen of the plays from the Towneley manuscript in modern spelling to fit a runtime of three and a half hours for a production on the London stage.39 The producer was Bernard Miles, and the play went on in April 1961, at Miles’s then fairly new Mermaid Theatre in Puddle Dock. Martial Rose, like Bernard Miles, was a member of the British Drama League along with Dorothy L. Sayers, Norah Lambourne, and, of course, E. Martin Browne. The production at the Mermaid was the first time that God had appeared on stage in an English playhouse since the late sixteenth century, and Bernard Miles remarked, ‘life was a unity – swear words, sexual references, prayer and devotion unashamedly mixed’.40 Later Rose became Principal of King Alfred’s College, Winchester, another Higher Education College with a fine tradition in drama education. An investigation of the renaissance of medieval theatre and its relationship to the growth of university drama in England draws attention to the intimate connection between theatrical experiment and scholarly advance in our field. It does this by highlighting the negative: while conventions of state censorship kept most of the plays from the period before the playhouses off the stage, because most of the texts involve the problem of ‘playing God’, drama scholarship too focused elsewhere. This becomes particularly apparent when we look into the resources available to those pioneers working in the period up to 1951. E. Martin Browne and Norah Lambourne relied heavily, in designing the Festival of Britain production in York, on the work of Allardyce Nicoll, whose magisterially wide-ranging Masks, Mimes and Miracles contains fundamental and major misunderstandings about such things as the date of the York Play. Because the performance of the plays had been so long neglected, there was a commensurate lack of hands-on familiarity with the original documents relating to the York in which they were first produced. Nor was there the experience of frequent attempts to produce them, however badly, as pieces of theatre, which has developed since the 1960s and 1970s. Theatre practitioners had to rely on their professional intuitions, supplemented by what accessible published guidance there was, and that was not much.41 In this context, Richard Southern’s plea at the Bristol symposium for the universities to involve themselves in theatre research takes on real significance. Southern’s own varied career had led him to compile an unrivalled collection of pictorial resources relating to early theatre which he amassed on his travels all over the world. He and Wickham frequently sent each other postcards of theatrical sites and informative examples of medieval iconography which were filed in their respective collections. Southern’s not only provided the research material 262

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for his own publications, but was made available, at a charge, in his studio off St Martin’s Lane in London, and as a travelling exhibition. The published material he had to draw on for the type of visual information he needed was scant: the best being the twelve-volume Monumenta Scenica,42 although he also used Victor E. Albright’s The Shakespeare Stage (1909), and later on A.M. Nagler’s Sources in Theatrical History (1952).43 He and Glynne Wickham, though much of their work is in turn now showing its age, were among the first, truly modern scholars who began to offer the theatre practitioners more informed and detailed material, and in particular visual material, to work with. The acknowledgements in Glynne Wickham’s DPhil thesis also reveal a world in which although some aspects of medieval theatre research were much more difficult some were easier. For example, he thanks the Director of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence for opening the print room specially for him, although it had been closed since the outbreak of war, and he thanks Richmond Herald of the College of Arms for lending him a medieval manuscript for three months.44 The introduction shows particularly how, under Coghill’s guidance, he was trailblazing as he aims to survey entertainments from the Middle Ages which, Because they lack literary merit, have received only scant attention from theatre historians, but which nevertheless warrant closer study if considered as dramatic spectacle.45 He was already developing what became a characteristic impatience with the work that others in the field had achieved and goes on to complain that G.R. Kernodle’s From Art to Theatre (Chicago, 1944) lacks detail and is, therefore, ‘hypothetical and inadequate’.46 He was later to write a tepid review for the Times Literary Supplement of Hardin Craig’s then groundbreaking English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages (1955) as ‘less erudite and less graceful’ than the works of Chambers and Young, and to use the review to lament the loss of the Devonshire manuscript of the Chester Plays, as well as the Towneley manuscript and the Macro Plays to collections in the USA.47 The problem in England he had already diagnosed in his thesis: This bias towards a purely literary approach is however quite understandable considering how recent is the serious study of theatre history and how little of the burden had been undertaken by practising men of the theatre. And here, most unfortunately, the mutual suspicion with which theatre artists and theatre historians regard one another’s interest has blighted the healthy development of both.48 The search for a solution to this problem from his position within a university’s department of drama, was, surely, the goal of the 1951 symposium. 1951 came and went. All the medieval plays planned for revival at the Festival of Britain went ahead without, as some church authorities feared, provoking riot,49 263

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and specialist scholar-practitioners continued the project of producing plays of medieval origin. Finally, in 1968, theatrical censorship was laid aside in Britain, so there was no further obstacle to ‘playing God’. Glynne Wickham’s interest in reconstructions of medieval theatre continued unabated as interest grew in the post-censorship decades. I shall close, therefore, with his preface to the programme for some pageants directed by Bill Tydeman, Head of Drama at Bangor, another specialist in the growing field: ‘Quaint’, ‘crude’, ‘childish’, ‘naïve’: such are typical adjectives that were used by critics in the nineteenth century and the first half of the present century to describe their reactions to the surviving texts of mediaeval religious plays and to descriptions surviving from the seventeenth century of the manner in which they were performed. Generations of students in schools and universities have thus grown accustomed to formulating mental images of illiterate peasants – Pennine shepherds, East Anglian fishermen or Midland grocers and drapers as the case may be – disporting themselves on clumsy carts in market towns disguised as Biblical characters and reciting verses scarcely worthy of an average Sunday-school today. Quaint, crude, childish, naive: the cap fits.50 Only in quite recent years have scholars begun to notice, and to proclaim, that such epithets were themselves of relatively modern coining, being substitutes for ‘superstitious’, ‘idolatrous’, ‘papistical’, and other adjectives of a familiar tone and colour which had characterised critical comment on the plays in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This of course is the language of Protestant Reform; and once this has been recognised, it becomes possible to measure the degree of simple prejudice and positive polemic informing the choice of such descriptive adjectives. Here he can be seen still inveighing, as sadly some of us still have to, against the patronising assumptions about what early theatre was like, and arguing for its continuing value not only in the classroom, but also in modern performance.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Bristol: Bristol University Theatre Collection GW/AC/441/8. Bristol Theatre Collection GW/AC/441/2, 3. Bristol Theatre Collection GW/AC/441/1. Bristol Theatre Collection GW/AC/441/1/4. Bristol Theatre Collection GW/AC/441/6. Bristol Theatre Collection GW/AC/24/2. The history of the Bristol University Theatre Collection, as well as a catalogue of those holdings which have been digitally catalogued to date, may be found at www.bristol. ac.uk/theatrecollection/ 8 The section of Richard Southern’s collection concerned with the medieval theatre can be found at Bristol: Bristol University Theatre Collection RS/008 and 011. Richard

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9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35

Southern’s collection of glass lantern slides is being digitised and catalogued at time of writing. Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages 5 vols (London: Routledge, 1959) p. 810. Humphrey Carpenter, O.U.D.S.: A Centenary History of the Oxford University Dramatic Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) p. 73. Oxford: the University and the City edited John R. Elliott, Jr, Alexandra F. Johnston, Alan H. Nelson, and Diana Wyatt, 2 vols, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). Alan Mackinnon in The Oxford Amateurs: A Short History of Theatricals at the University (London: Chapman and Hall, 1910) pp. 3–9. Mackinnon, Oxford Amateurs, pp. 6–9, quoting ‘Mr Courtney’. Carpenter, O.U.D.S., p. 145. Carpenter, O.U.D.S., p. 135. Carpenter, O.U.D.S., p. 143. Carpenter, O.U.D.S., pp. 144–5. The Festschrift is To Nevill Coghill from Friends edited W.H. Auden and John Lawlor (London: Faber and Faber, 1966). Both editors were also students of Coghill, and their later careers show evidence of his personal influence. Carpenter, O.U.D.S., p. 149. Carpenter, O.U.D.S., p. 76. Carpenter, O.U.D.S., p. 154. The established nature of North American university drama within the curriculum is another story, but is summarised effectively in a brief article by Janet Hills for a publication entitled The Schoolmaster, which she sent in manuscript draft to Glynne Wickham following the 1951 symposium: Bristol University Theatre Collection GW/ AC/441/9. Carpenter, O.U.D.S., p.158–63. For papers relating to The Masque of Hope, including production photographs, Glynne Wickham’s hand-drawn designs and his letter of congratulation from the Princess, see Bristol Theatre Collection GW/AC/343. Carpenter, O.U.D.S., pp. 136–7. Bristol Theatre Collection GW/AC/476/1. Bristol Theatre Collection GW/AC/476/2/1. Bristol Theatre Collection GW/AC/476/3/1. Carpenter, O.U.D.S., p. 137. Carpenter, O.U.D.S., pp. 145–6. Carpenter, O.U.D.S., p. 165. Bristol Theatre Collection BDD/000415. Bristol Theatre Collection BDD/000416. Bristol Theatre Collection BDD/000038. Bristol Theatre Collection GW/AC/419. The film of the production, designed as a teaching aid in collaboration with the University of California but never released because of problems with the soundtrack, is also preserved in the Theatre Collection and shortly to be re-mastered on DVD. Primary source material relating to the production of the York Play for the Festival of Britain in 1951, produced by Keith Thomson and directed by E. Martin Browne, and to subsequent York Festival productions, is preserved in the E. Martin Browne Archive which belongs to the journal Medieval English Theatre and is lodged at the University of Lancaster, along with Norah Lambourne’s designs for the production. (Norah Lambourne’s archive has since been lodged in the Bristol University Theatre Collection.) See also the web pages of York Doomsday Project at www.lancs.ac.uk/ depts/yorkdoom/emb.htm and www.lancaster.ac.uk/depts/yorkdoom/norah.htm.

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36 Bristol Theatre Collection GW/AC/438/3. 37 Paul Estcourt ‘Leyton County High School for Boys at Its Peak’, http://www. sparrowsp.addr.com/ articles/excerpt_from_leyton_county_high_.htm 38 Bretton Hall, 1947–2007: http://www.bretton-hall.co.uk/history.html 39 The text was published: Martial Rose, The Wakefield Mystery Plays (London: Evans Bros, 1961). 40 Time magazine archive, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,872276,00. html 41 Allardyce Nicoll, Masks, Mimes and Miracles (London: Harrap, 1931). Norah Lambourne references Nicoll in her recollections of the 1951 production, ‘Designing for the York Cycle of Mystery Plays in 1951, 1954 and 1957’ Costume 30 (1996) pp. 16–36. 42 Monumenta scenica [Denkmäler des Theaters]: monuments of the theatre, scenery, decorations and costumes for the theatre and the great festivals of all times edited Josef Gregor, 12 portfolios or Mappe (Vienna: National Library, 1925–1930). 43 See, for example, Bristol Theatre Collection RS/008 and 011. I am also grateful to Norah Lambourne for sharing her personal reminiscences of Richard Southern. 44 Glynne Wickham, ‘Medieval Pageantry and the Court and Public Stages of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’ (unpublished DPhil thesis; Oxford, 17 March 1951): Bristol Theatre Collection GW/AC/24/2, front papers. 45 Bristol Theatre Collection GW/AC/24/2, p. xiii. 46 Bristol Theatre Collection GW/AC/24/2, p. viii. 47 Bristol Theatre Collection, GW/AC/108. The works he approves of are E.K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903), and Karl Young The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933). 48 Bristol Theatre Collection GW/AC/24/2 p. iii. 49 See letter to E. Martin Browne from Keith Thomson (9 November 1949), E. Martin Browne Collection, Medieval English Theatre, University of Lancaster. See also Olga Horner, ‘The Law That Never Was: A Review of Theatrical Censorship in Britain’, Medieval English Theatre 23 (2004) pp. 34–96. 50 Bristol Theatre Collection GW/AC/40/2.

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17 SPATIAL SEMANTICS AND THE MEDIEVAL THEATRE From: James Redmond, ed., Themes in Drama, Volume 9, The Theatrical Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 45–58. © Cambridge University Press 1987. From the manner in which liturgical tropes apparently used the interior of the Romanesque church comes an understanding of the nature of the playing space in outdoor vernacular religious drama, which has proved both useful and tenacious. The locus, or sedes, is recognized as the unit of specified place, often sacral in significance, like the crib or Easter Sepulchre, the focus of performance analogous with the altar, the focus of worship. As simple tropes extend into narrative drama, a multiplication of loci occurs within one play, as in the Fleury Play of Herod, where both crib and Herod’s court are thematically opposed foci of action. The area between and around the loci, where commuting and other non-specifically localized action takes place, is known as the platea. Glynne Wickham confidently asserts, These two concepts, platea or acting area, and loca or symbols for identification of place, are the basis of all medieval stagecraft and of the Public and Private Theatres of Elizabethan England.1 Certainly, any cursory examination of text and stage directions in, for instance, The Castle of Perseverance, the N-Town Plays or Ane Satire of the Three Estates, shows that the fundamental concept of the use of the theatrical space involves a division between locus, or scaffold, and platea, or, confusingly, ‘place’. What is more, the configuration of scaffolds within the playing space appears, in some places, to have maintained the traditional orientation of the church, with heaven in the East. In processional productions, such as the York Cycle, we could argue that the pageant waggon continues the function of locus – ark, crib, Eden – and the street around, the platea. There is scant evidence that all the waggons drew up together to form the traditional configuration at any one station, although the idea should not be dismissed as a possibility. Within the York Cycle there is one interesting parallel with the Fleury play in that Herod and the Magi was played with two waggons. The Goldsmiths supplied the Magi and the Bethlehem locus, whereas the Masons were responsible for supplying Herod’s court. It seems probable that there are other instances less clearly documented in which a similar arrangement may be envisaged. In the Coventry Pageant of the Shearmen and 269

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Taylors, a play which demands multiple locations of action, there is at least that famous stage direction, ‘Here Erode ragis in the pagond and in the strete also’.2 More expansive raging takes Herod out of his locus into the platea. The discreet functions of locus and platea are, then, widely accepted, and visualizing the space in these terms seems more appropriate at least than the stage-on-wheels. The locus is a confined area, probably dependent to a large degree on static placing of scenic elements and actors to create visually intelligible context, even arrangement like a devotional picture. The platea is the location of movement and action, of transition between those pictures. In that it represents non-localized space, it tends to be thematically neutral except where the journey or procession is thematically important within the play. In a drama dedicated to the articulation of man’s relationship with the Deity according to an almost feudal order, the movement or disorder of the platea, alternating with the order presented by the loci, presents constantly a spatial articulation of the central preoccupations. Recent years have seen many advances in particular reconstructions of staging. In the field of Corpus Christi drama, in particular the labours of the Records of Early English Drama (REED) uncovering large quantities of often inconclusive evidence have led us to question the tidy picture of the development of medieval stagecraft depicted by earlier scholars. The popularity of descriptive reconstructions based on fragmentary record material has in its turn led to actual theatrical reproductions from which interesting empirical observations have been derived about how the space operates. From reports of reconstructed performance comes an increasing awareness of the diverse relationships that the complex theatrical space created between the world of the play and that of the audience. Previously it appears that most accounts assumed that the audience observed, interpreted, learned, but on a plain consistently distinct from the players. Reconstructions have led to observations on how the audience becomes ‘involved’ in the elements of the play which use the platea. of course, they do not really join in, but we are struggling now to articulate the nature of the observable changing relationship between play and audience within this complex space. one very useful piece of recorded observation of the phenomena is to be found in Meg Twycross’s account of ‘Playing “The Resurrection”’.3 She here confirms that the space divides clearly into the traditional functions of locus and platea, but also demonstrates that different spaces are intelligible in terms of the nature of the contract between the play and the audience at any individual point in the action: The extreme distancing comes when the ‘framing effect’ of the waggon posts and fascia is exploited so that the playwright, in the midst of events, suddenly resolves the action into a familiar picture. By contrast, the physical closeness of action in the street made audience very much an active factor in performance, but despite lack of physical separation, the actors are still inhabitants of the world of the play, the audience still onlookers. The illusion is not ‘broken’.4 270

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‘Distancing’, ‘active factor’ and ‘broken’ all suggest that we now need a vocabulary not for defining elements within the space itself, but to describe this sophisticated contract between play and audience which generates meaning, what is, effectively, the contribution of the use of space to the semantics of the play. The figural approach has long been used by literary analysts, such as V.A. Kolve5 and Erich Auerbach,6 to demonstrate the manner in which script generates meaning. It has the advantage of being a habit of thought familiar to dramatist and audience, as well as being a system of analysis accessible to medievalists. Certainly, the breaking down of the use of the space into figural elements can complement analysis of text. But figura are necessarily static. What the use of space in theatre depends upon and what the audience responds to is not a fixed arrangement, but a series of figurally inspired signals. What is here proposed, therefore, is that the figural approach can usefully import selected terms from semiotics7 in this area where empirical observation seems to ask for a more articulate means of expression. When we conventionally talk of ‘playing space’, we mean delimited space, with defined boundaries, chiefly that between the stage, or world of the play, and the ‘real’ world of the audience. one factor which all observations of locus and platea productions seem to have in common is that barriers between different spaces within the playing space are more carefully and consistently maintained than this assumed barrier between audience and play. David Parry, producer of the York Cycle in Toronto, in 1977, has observed the following: Here was a child who obviously wanted to sit down, but the conditions were extremely wet, and he didn’t want to get his bottom wet, so he went and sat at the foot of Pilate’s throne. It didn’t obtrude at all.8 We also tend to make the assumption about theatre space that the audience, in the act of buying their tickets, separate themselves from the rest of the world. David Parry again observed, the general reaction, once people had realised how the thing operated, was that they could move in and out of what was going on … These plays are obviously part of the whole continuum of life.9 These phenomena peculiar to fixed and processional locus and platea productions invite explanation. our most important piece of original evidence about the nature of space is the diagram which accompanies the text of The Castle of Perseverance.10 Richard Southern’s reconstruction of this space11 was based on the assumption that it showed a theatre, a contained space, on the not unreasonable basis that some Cornish rounds survive, as do some manuscript illuminations which seem to show playing in rounds. Southern was succumbing to a need to define the whole 271

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area occupied by play and audience, cut off from the rest of the world. Since his work appeared, individual place and scaffold plays have been excepted from the pattern which he suggests. Paula Neuss’s work on the staging of the Cornish Creacion of the World,12 for example, suggests a semicircular arrangement. The Banns of The Castle of Perseverance suggest that it is to be played ‘on the green’,13 and commentators have moved towards a consensus view that the plan is not a drawing of a theatre, but the design for a set which may or may not then be put into an existing round. The containing space, if any, is not shown. If we can look at the diagram freed from the idea that it represents an area marked out as a theatre, we can begin to look at how as a set design it delimits different types of space. Different types of space are more important than the contained nature of the space itself. Figurally, the plan is, in many respects, straightforward. The dominant feature is the castle itself with Mankind’s bed beneath it. The action concerning the virtues is concentrated here. It is a castle fortified against vice. The other dominant feature of the plan is the circle: This is the water a bowte the place, if any ditch may be mad ther it schal be played or elles that it be strongly barred all abowt and lete nowth over many stytelerys be withinne the place. The definition of this feature as the outer boundary of the theatre in Southern’s account depends on ‘a bowte the place’. As Natalie Crohn Schmitt has demonstrated, however,14 ‘a bowte’ can be used in the sense of ‘to go about’ and ‘place’ could be the locus of the castle. It certainly seems ambiguous enough to allow flexible interpretation. Practical considerations, if the play is a touring production as the Banns suggest,15 make it distinctly more likely that the ditch is a moat around the castle. Feudal allegories of the late medieval period in sermon and poetry frequently placed God as the lord of a moated castle.16 outside the circle are the scaffolds, which do not assume prominence because they are not illustrated, only labelled, probably because some standard construction type was envisaged by the artist. The placing of the scaffold of God is very interesting. Conventionally God, heaven, is in the East, as is the case here; but in feudal allegory, the castle is the seat of the Deity. The dual location of the loci of virtue on this plan takes us some way towards understanding the figural meaning of the space, and, by extension, the placing of the audience as is directed on the plan. Above the castle is written, This is the Castle of Perseverance that standyth in the myddyl of the place but lete no man syte ther for lettynge of syt for that schal be the best of al.

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The action of the play, the battle of vice and virtue for the soul of man on his journey from cradle to grave, is conducted at a tropological level. The good and bad angels, the virtues and vices, the moated castle called Perseverance, all pertain to the spiritual progress of one man, like the pilgrimage of Will to Truth in Piers Plowman. The set, in that respect, represents the microcosm, the soul of man. The set also, however, is a figure of the macrocosm of the universe, since the scaffolds, Heaven, Hell, Flesh and World, represent properties of the entire universe, constant features against which the drama of Mankind is literally acted out. The placing of the audience, or their exclusion from the castle area, seems to fit with this interpretation of the space. They are not apparently controlled outside the moat, amongst the scaffolds, an area which represents the universe as they understand it, and Mankind’s life is spent largely in the same platea, Langland’s ‘field full of folk’, peopled by the audience. As the chief thrust of the play is a warning against covetousness specifically, that is given prominence, a scaffold in the North East on the plan. The people’s spiritual state during the course of the play is, however, constant, whereas Mankind’s is dynamic. The area associated with spiritual growth is the area of the castle which is specific to him. The audience therefore are not allowed there – as well as ‘for lettynge of syte’ – but are themselves given figural meaning peopling the platea of the universe beneath the loci which are fixed topographical points, indices of mortal existence. The barrier of the moat is thus figurally the important division between the world at large and its temptations, and individual moral fortification. Heaven remains in the East as God, of course, presides over good and evil alike. As the world outside the moat is a mimetic presentation of everywhere at all times, it can have no containing boundaries. Figural analysis thus attributes broad semantic values to elements of the plan and places the audience intelligibly within it. The members of the audience share a common figural identity. But we still have to articulate how the audience perceive that figural role, how they submit to delegating action to the performer playing Mankind. Meg Twycross’s audience clearly acknowledged that, the actors are still inhabitants of the world of the play, the audience still onlookers. The illusion is not ‘broken’.17 Individual audience members do not rush to enter the castle, do not attempt to join in and ‘destroy the play’.18 What is happening is that the audience, whilst aware of different levels of physical barrier within the play, also remain aware of the non-topographical barrier between real world and world of play. They recognize that the space in which they figure is not the real universe but a sign of it. Most theatrical spaces are icons of some real topography.19 In this instance, the plan does not represent an image icon, which suggests identity of detail between set and world, but a metaphorical icon, having bare reference points. The audience communally understands the iconic nature of the space in the same way as one can look at a map, put a pin in it and say, ‘We are here’, without trying to get into

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the map. The pin is delegated to act as a metaphorical icon of the traveller – it can also be moved around iconically to represent where one has been and where one might go. Mankind in The Castle of Perseverance is the metaphoric icon of each member of the audience. In this manner, ‘illusion is not “broken”’, but the audience is ‘very much an active factor’. But we have already seen that the figural meaning of this set and of all locus and platea spaces, depends on the ‘active’ role of the audience being engaged and disengaged at different points in the action, in different places within the space. In fact, of all the theatrical systems identified by Elam,20 tone, mime, gesture, etc., the system governing the use of space is the first one to strike the spectator. He absorbs the syntax of spatial relationships on entering the space and prepares to apply the cultural codes available to him to elicit meaning from that space. In The Castle of Perseverance, interstitial placing clearly functions as a syntactic system which may be interpreted according to the theory of proxemics, ‘the interrelated observations and theories of man’s use of space as a specialized elaboration of culture’.21 The proxemic system, with which everyone is familiar, involves the way in which we distinguish between personal space, social space and public space. The acceptable limits of these cannot be assumed to be the same for all cultures in all ages, but the response elicited from an audience by a performer at public distance on a scaffold is clearly different from that when the performer enters the social space on the platea. Violation of the personal space of an individual audience member is best observed when a masked vice-figure decides to move in close and pick on someone at random. Normal transcodification breaks down here, as the mask withholds normal facial expression which is important at this proximity. When the proxemic code fails to match the kinesic or gestural code the audience member responds by sensing an invasion of personal space. The importance of interstitial placing and the possibilities afforded by its manipulation are witnessed by Meg Twycross again22 when she notes that to observe in a Resurrection play the laments of the three Marys at the tomb of Christ, ‘at a distance, as private persons undergoing emotional crisis’, becomes tedious; but, set them down in the audience, on their level … and their role suddenly becomes quite different. They are almost agitators, incitors to emotion. In auditorium or fixed-form theatre, the interstitial relationship between audience member and play is constant. The individual is isolated in his own allocated space, his seat, where he privately decodes information from various systems, not necessarily replicating the information of the playwright, actor or director. The Castle of Perseverance and other plays like it depend on informal, or semifixed, theatrical space. In this, and particularly because of constantly changing interstitial relationships between the audience and the play, the spectator is forced to respond as part of a unit. His response, then, is social rather than personal. The social response, in which the audience as social unit affirms communally the meaning generated by the play, is entirely in keeping with the role of information 274

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systems in determinist drama. The meaning of the theatrical space in The Castle of Perseverance depends on the meaning of the everyday space consented to by the audience, and the articulation of that meaning rests to a great extent upon the use of the space. Similar criteria may be applied to processional Corpus Christi drama. The figural reading of bible-history drama has already been supplied in part in the chapter on Adam and Eve in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis.23 Auerbach supplies an excellent model for a figural reading of text which can be extended into space. His argument hinges upon the view that the momentous or mythic is merged with the topical or everyday by rhetorical means. The high style, sermo gravis, and low style, sermo humilis, are deliberately mixed in religious drama in order stylistically to embody the philosophical Bernardine mystery of the dual nature of Christ, who by humility is exalted: The medieval Christian drama falls perfectly within this tradition. Being a living representation of Biblical episodes as contained with their innately dramatic elements, in the liturgy, it opens its arms invitingly to receive the simple and untutored and to lead them from the concrete, the everyday, to the hidden and the true.24 The choice of metaphor here is interesting – ‘opens its arms invitingly … to lead …’. Again, the question of audience ‘involvement’ is being courted: And the spirit of the form which encompasses them is the spirit of the figural interpretation of history. This implies that every occurrence, in all its everyday reality, is simultaneously a part in a world-historical context through which each part is related to every other.25 By drawing analogies with the figural interpretation of history, in which old Testament events are types of New Testament events, Auerbach demonstrates the manner in which the audience is engaged in biblical drama, by, at its most banal, the way it impresses its relevance upon them. His reading is, however, based solely on text, or rhetorical style of discourse. The other theatrical systems at work in these plays support the figural reading of the text. As the best place to examine the way the systems are established in a play is the beginning, it is proposed to consider the opening of the whole York Cycle, God’s first speech in the Barkers’ Creation and Fall of Lucifer. Elizabeth Burns has pointed to the manner in which certain induction techniques operate in a play to define space and to establish historical boundaries.26 The speech which opens the York Cycle represents a very special type of induction: GoD: Ego sum Alpha et 0: vita, via, veritas, primus et novissimus. I am gracious and great, God without beginning, I am maker unmade, all might is in me; 275

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I am life, and way unto wealth-winning, I am foremost and first, as I bid shall it be. My blessing of blee shall be blending And hielding, from harm to be hiding, My body in bliss ay abiding, Unending, without any ending.27 The first stanza, spoken by a masked actor, an iconic symbol of the Godhead, establishes by deixis the properties of the Godhead as first and last, without beginning and ending. The cycle’s function is to denote all sacral history, but what God’s first speech establishes, by reference to his eternal present, is the connotative property inherent in patterned history; in other words, it proposes that the represented events are not simply part of historical time, but of all time and time now as represented in the church calendar with its recurrent Christmas and Easter. The properties of time in the cycle are established rhetorically by the first and last lines, ending in ‘without beginning’ and ‘without ending’, respectively. Historical time is thus adumbrated through the proposal of a direct relationship between the fictional ‘now’ of the plays and actual time to which the audience belongs. The space occupied by God is identified by deixis: Bainly in my blessing I bid at here be A bliss all-bielding about me, In the which bliss I bid at be here Nine orders of angels full clear, In lofing ay-lasting at lout me. Then the angels sing ‘We praise thee O God, we acknowledge thee to be the Lord’. Here underneath me now a nexile I neven Which isle shall be earth. Now all be at once Earth wholly, and hell, this highest be heaven. (lines 20–27) As God speaks, the space to which He refers must be realized as an iconic diagram as the waggon opens out to reveal heaven, earth and hell-mouth. The discourse uttered by God is, of course, itself iconically related to the Christian concept of creation by word. Induction techniques in the theatre more commonly serve to point the illusion of space and time – the Prologue to Shakespeare’s Henry V is a classic example. Here, however, the technique is short-circuited in order to propose that the space and time iconically represented are closer to the everyday world, rather than more remote. All systems here conspire to ‘open their arms invitingly’ as Auerbach perceives. 276

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As the space is rendered intelligible in terms of time and place in this manner, the audience must be absorbing the interstitial relationships of the parts of the diagram of heaven, earth and hell and interpreting them. Just as the important is foregrounded, downstage, on the proscenium set, on the multilevel pageant waggon, high is important and admirable; low is less important, evil. In this instance, the locus itself is semantically subdivided. The space they perceive does not, in this instance, contain the audience, which is why it is a diagrammatic rather than a metaphorical icon. The establishing of diagrammatic intelligibility of all that follows in the cycle depends upon this first play and the way in which it displays the universe in almost two-dimensional terms. The method is one fitting and familiar to a society accustomed to emblematic modes of expression, such as the arma Christi or heraldry. The waggons, or loci, of the following plays, and their use of the platea, all depend syntactically upon the first waggon for their meaning. Angels and devils in the Virgin’s house or Pilate’s wife’s bedchamber are synecdochically dependent on the initial diagram of heaven and hell. More importantly, the action which moves into the platea, shepherds and soldiers, the ordinary mortals of the cycles, fabled for their anachronistic discourse, invade the social space of the audience whilst remaining tied by synecdoche to the earth-space indicated on waggon one. Concurrently with this dependency, the cycle of course extensively employs conventional theatrical synecdoche, what Umberto Eco calls, ‘member for its class’.28 Herod’s throne represents his court; three soldiers and three women represent a massacre. only the first and last plays do not depend on synecdoche to establish place, since they are the framing icons which render the world of the play intelligible.29 As the action on the platea throughout the cycle has explored the role of the audience within the world of the play, in the Last Judgement, the souls of the damned and the saved rise up from the locus of earth as intelligible figures to whom action has been delegated in the same manner as with Mankind in The Castle of Perseverance. In processional plays, therefore, the important boundaries are those between different loci, particularly heaven, earth and hell, rather than between play and audience. It is again important to the figural meaning of the cycle that, although the boundary of ‘illusion’ cannot be ‘broken’, it is desirable not to reinforce it physically, but rather to create a counter-illusion, that of the world of the play running over into the world of the audience at the edges. Various sign-systems can be shown to achieve this effect in the York Crucifixion. In this play, the soldiers come from the platea and use the language of everyday workmen, like Auerbach’s Adam and Eve, whilst they attach Christ to the cross on the ground. As the cross is raised on the waggon, the interstitial relationship between Christ and the audience is radically altered and is immediately followed by direct address: All men that walk by way or street, Take tent ye shall no travail tine. Behold mine head, mine hands, and my feet, 277

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And fully feel now, ere ye fine, If any mourning may be meet, or mischief measured unto mine. My father, that all bales may beet, Forgive these men that do me pine. What they work, wot they not; Therefore, my father, I crave, Let never their sins be sought, But see their souls to save.30 The deixis which refers in turn to Christ, to the audience and to God, combined with the complexities of interstitial placing, briefly proposes iconic identity between the audience and those who performed the Crucifixion. Just as the boundaries between play world and audience world are manipulated, so too boundaries between audience and the rest of the world, at any given moment, are unclear in processional production, as David Parry confirmed.31 Delimitation of playing space into locus and platea combines with a significant abstention from dividing playing space from audience, theatre from the world. This is the way in which space operates semantically in a theatre of which Auerbach says, there is but one place, the world, and but one action – man’s fall and redemption … the whole is always borne in mind and figurally represented.32 What is offered here is no more than an approach to a possible approach, born out of the belief that in medieval drama studies, we need to explore methods of analysis which can be applied to all the systems at work, not only the verbal, and one which caters for the moving, changing combinations of signs where the figural describes only the static. Empirical observation of plays in reconstruction invites the formation of predictive models. of course, any such model is only as good as the data it can be formed on, and staging evidence is fragmentary, modern audiences decode and respond differently. A multisystem approach to medieval drama still seems desirable and not at all incompatible with the traditional figural method.

Notes 1 Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages 1300–1576 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 160. 2 Hardin Craig, ed., Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, EETS e.s., 87 (1957), p. 27. 3 Meg Twycross, ‘Playing “The Resurrection”’, in P.L. Heyworth, ed., Medieval Studies forJ.A.W. Bennett Aetatis Suae LXX (oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 273–96. See also Meg Twycross, The Materials of Early Theatre: Sources, Images and Performance (London: Routledge; New York, 2018), pp.115–33. 4 Twycross, The Material, pp. 274, 275, 277.

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5 V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (London: Edward Arnold, 1966). 6 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), especially chapter 7, ‘Adam and Eve’, pp. 143–73. 7 Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1980) provides useful models. I should also like to acknowledge the valuable advice received from Jackie Johnston, doctoral candidate at the University of York, in this area. 8 David Parry, ‘The York Mystery Cycle at Toronto, 1977’, METh, 1:1 (1979), pp. 19–31, 26. 9 Ibid., p. 25. 10 Mark Eccles, ed., The Macro Plays, EETS o.s., 262 (1969). 11 Richard Southern, The Medieval Theatre in the Round: A Study of the Staging of The Castle of Perseverance and Related Matters (London: faber & faber, 1957). 12 Paula Neuss, ‘The Staging of The Creacion of the World’ in Peter Happé, ed., Medieval English Drama: A Casebook (London: MacMillan, 1984), pp. 186–200. 13 Eccles, The Macro Plays, p. 7. 14 Natalie Crohn Schmitt, ‘Was There a Medieval Theatre in the Round? A Reexamination of the Evidence’ in Jerome Taylor and Alan H. Nelson, eds., Medieval English Drama Essays Critical and Contextual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 292–315, 297. 15 Eccles, The Macro Plays, p. 7. 16 The set diagram is now widely accessible and can be viewed at, for example, https://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle_of_Perseverance [accessed 18/08/2019] 17 Twycross, ‘Playing “The Resurrection”’ p. 275. 18 one of the accusations levelled at character B by character A when both are masquerading as audience members in Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres, ed., Peter Meredith (University of Leeds, School of English, 1981), p. 11. 19 Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, pp. 21 ff. 20 Ibid., e.g. p. 37. 21 Ibid., quoting Edward T. Hall (1966). 22 Twycross, ‘Playing “The Resurrection”’, p. 283. 23 Auerbach, Mimesis, pp. 143–73. 24 Ibid., p. 155. 25 Ibid., p. 156. 26 Elizabeth Burns, Theatricality: A Study of Convention in the Theatre and in Social Life (London: Longman, 1972), pp. 23ff. 27 Richard Beadle and Pamela M. King, York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling (oxford: oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 2–3. 28 Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, p. 29, quoting Umberto Eco (1976). 29 Since the time of writing, numerous hypothetical reconstructions have been made based on the surviving evidence for the Doomsday pageant waggon. 30 Beadle and King, York Mystery Plays, p. 220. 31 Parry, ‘The York Mystery Cycle at Toronto, 1977’, passim. 32 Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 158.

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18 MINORITY PLAYS Two interludes for Edward VI From: Medieval English Theatre, 15, 1993 pp. 87–102

Lusty Juventus and Nice Wanton1 are two moral interludes of the early Reformation, if we must begin with premises. In this paper I will explore the radical specificity of these two plays and demonstrate how they contribute to a historical reading of the reign of Edward VI, or to the reconstruction of his inscrutability. First of all, some terminological anomalies need to be exposed, some historical foreground to be drawn in. There is more or less a consensus understanding of what constitutes a moral play or ‘interlude,’ though the genre is not founded upon the rock of exemplary medieval referents which is often assumed. Apart from the textually corrupt Pride of Life, the three surviving morality plays of the pre-Tudor period, Mankind, The Castle of Perseverance, and Wisdom, survive in the single manuscript compendium known as the ‘Macro Plays.’ On these, and that well-known translation of a Dutch original, Everyman, the parameters of a whole native English dramatic genre have been based. All the other sixty-odd examples, which include Lusty Juventus and Nice Wanton, are late variants, share with the prototypes a list of characters whose names are either, in the case of Lusty Juventus, mostly abstract qualities, or, in the case of Nice Wanton, biblical stereotypes of moral qualities. Their action, too, conforms broadly to the (comic) pattern of crisis and resolution. If, in the eyes of their critics, Tudor morality plays resemble their fifteenthcentury prototypes structurally, they are equally acknowledged to diverge from them thematically, that is ideologically, as the vehicle of moral instruction in the precepts of the Roman Catholic faith is turned to serve the tenets first of Erasmian humanism (Skelton’s Magnificence), then of the full-blown radicalism of Protestant reform (John Bale). Subscribing to the existence of the genre ‘moral play,’ therefore, impels at this point the designation of subgenres to account for these departures. One of these, to which both plays discussed here belong, is commonly referred to as ‘the Prodigal Son play.’ In Prodigal Son plays, the protagonist’s learning experience became synonymous with the maturation process; consequently, the plays are fora for the discussion of the good and bad influences which contribute to the education of youth. These influences take on the roles of the vice and virtue characters. In its simplest form (Youth 1513–1529), the young man’s departure from the values of his elders and later restoration to them clearly conforms to the pattern of the parable in Luke’s gospel. When, however, 280

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the Reformation rendered the values of elders synonymous with those of the corrupt old faith, the youthful protagonist might be encouraged by characters representing the voice of Reformation to cast aside the values of his elders in order to conform to a new orthodoxy. The generational conflict evident in this group of plays, of which Lusty Juventus is a notable example, has been convincingly demonstrated to use Terentian New Comedy, where old values are laughed into impotence to modify the narrative archetype of the parable.2 Similarly, the reception of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination appears to have occasioned Nice Wanton’s curious distortion of the subgenre, whereby two sons and one daughter of an indulgent parent demonstrate the conditions of, respectively, damnation, election, and last-minute salvation through God’s promise of mercy. The superficial absence of a pattern of fall and restitution in this play has led at least one confused critic to claim it for tragedy.3 To sieve these plays in search of what they have in common is to marginalise their individual particularity. A critical reading which privileges what a text has in common with its predecessors over the text’s singularity has well-established political implications for the reading of all historical texts. Lusty Juventus and Nice Wanton, as well as being moral interludes (Tudor Protestant variant), are plays written for performance during a particular brief period of political and doctrinal turmoil in the English state. Wever’s Lusty Juventus, on the evidence of built-in economy of production, was probably the property of a touring troupe of players and therefore could have reached a geographically and socially wide audience; Nice Wanton, with its preponderance of female characters and more restrained scenes of debauchery, is a choir-boy play which may have been performed at court. They are both plays written about childhood, which, on internal evidence, can be attributed incontrovertibly to the period of the brief reign of the child-monarch Edward VI. The milieu of the post-Reformation Tudor court, which is to say the legacy of Erasmian Humanism, coupled with volatile political and ecclesiastical power bases, both presented a new freedom to the forces of government to ‘self-fashion,’4 and exacted high social and political penalties for sending out inappropriate signals. Under the circumstances, hard on the heels of the 1534 Act of Supremacy and attendant legislation which had conferred unprecedented autonomy upon Henry VIII and his successors, it was peculiarly inconvenient for those interested in building on recent constitutional gains to have a delicate child of nine inherit the throne of England. The art and literature of his brief reign show, as one might expect, the semiotics of a royal supremacy in tension with another system of signs deriving from Protestant doctrines concerning the relationship between child and elder in the God-fearing society of the Elect. Edward VI’s supreme power was wielded throughout his short reign by proxy: he was, indeed, systematically fashioned by others. Irony and conflict may have no demonstrable part in the conscious intentions of the artists and writers in question, but are nonetheless available when the particular interface between the work of art and its social, intellectual, and political milieu are explored: the individual ‘moral interlude’ may have been conceived as an expression of eternal verities, but may 281

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be perceived as a contribution to a particular historical moment. Furthermore, it is not just the reflection of, or vehicle for, propaganda, but witness to a received or nascent ideology and its subversions. The shaping of Edward was controlled by his stepmother, Catherine Parr, reputedly a moderate Protestant of Erasmian piety,5 his tutors from St John’s College, Cambridge – Cheke, Ascham, Grindal – all of whom would have educated Edward on the same humanist principles, and, of course, his uncle the Lord Protector, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset. Real power lay not with the boy king, but, in the early years, with Somerset, who annexed Edward’s monarchical power to his own personal use: his conduct of government … was highly unconventional. He had attained supreme power through the acquiescence of his fellow councillors, and common sense as well as custom suggested the need to maintain their support by consulting them regularly. In fact, Somerset did almost precisely the opposite … The Privy Council faded into the background during his regime and the result was that when he needed the councillors’ support … he found himself politically isolated. His preference for a highly ‘personal’ style of government is confirmed by his use of proclamations.6 After Seymour fell, government was conducted according to a more constitutionally conventional pattern by the Privy Council under the leadership of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, but there is still not a scrap of evidence that the monarch himself instigated legislation, and less likely still, that he was his own man. The presentational makeover occasioned by the monarch’s extreme youth was clear enough to contemporary commentators. Stephen Gardiner, the reactionary Bishop of Winchester, actually used the royal supremacy to argue against radical change, by pointing out that the duties of the Council were only to mind the shop for the king. He warns of the dangers of making irrevocable changes which Edward might wish to change when he reached his majority: A king’s authority to govern his realm never wanteth, though he were in his cradle. His place is replenished by his Council, as we have now my Lord Protector. And yet it is a difference in the judgement of the people to direct and order things established, and to make in the highest innovations.7 Looking back on the reign, a foreign commentator recorded the careful manipulation of the young king: On the death of King Henry he was succeeded by King Edward, a youth of very handsome presence, with which his mental endowments corresponded. 282

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Whilst under the guardianship of his uncle, the Duke of Somerset, he attended to his studies with marvellous success, learning not only Latin and Greek likewise, though when the government was changed and Somerset replaced by the Duke of Northumberland, who was a soldier at heart and by profession, he changed the king’s studies accordingly, and had him taught to ride and handle his weapons, and to go through other similar exercises, so that his majesty soon commenced arming and tilting, managing horses, and delighting in every sort of exercise, drawing the bow, playing rackets, hunting and so forth, indefatigably, though he never neglected his studies.8 Even Edward’s Protestantism, the founding dogma on which his style of monarchical government depended, could be dismissed by its opponents as the product of undue influence exerted in his youth: his Majesty’s obstinate adherence to the heresy, alone detracting from so many merits, though for this also he may be excused as he was educated according to its precepts.9 At the beginning of the reign too, the Spanish ambassador noted: There is preaching every day before the King, and the preachers seem to vie with each other as to who can abuse most strongly the old religion, he who excels the others in this respect being most highly favoured.10 The most celebrated preacher before the king was Hugh Latimer, whose sermons of the spring of 1549 accomplish amazing feats of intellectual balancing by simultaneously commending King Edward, by comparison with juvenile paragons from the Old Testament such as Josiah and Solomon, for his precocious wisdom in the matter of governing the realm and exhorting the young king to do as he is told by his elders.11 It is in the nature of the contemporary theatre that it should both participate in this carefully orchestrated presentation of young Edward and expose its anomalies. The place of the theatre in the dissemination of the broader Protestant doctrines favoured by the Protectorate is abundantly substantiated.12 Again there is the witness of the Spanish ambassador: It is quite true that the Protector and those principally associated with him in the government are much attached to the sects, the result being that at present the common people, unrestrained by reason of the late king’s death, publicly and undisguisedly confess their sentiments quite contrary to our religion, of which they make all sorts of farces and pastimes, above all of the good bishops.13 There is also the evidence of a deluge of legislation, first to unmuzzle the theatre, which had been subject to the late Henrician (1543) ‘Act for the advancement of 283

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true religion and for the abolishment of the contrary,’14 then to control it again, demonstrating eloquently its perceived power. First the Act of Uniformity (1549) forbade interludes ‘depraving and despising’ the Book of Common Prayer, then a royal proclamation of 1551 effectively introduced censorship, as it forbade the printing, publishing, or selling of any play without the permission of the Privy Council.15 In Lusty Juventus, the eponymous hero is early supplied, in his evident need, with the support and assistance of two characters called Good Counsel and Knowledge, who give him a book. They also explain to him that his parents failed to instruct him correctly because they were misled by false preachers. They present no answer to the central problem: how can the youth distinguish the good from the bad teacher? They preach a doctrine of self-reliance and knowledge, of casting aside the guidance of parents, and yet insist that youth is lost without good counsellors. Juventus is indeed lost without them, falling first into the hands of Hypocrisy, then of Fellowship and Abominable Living, all types of bad influence. Juventus has to be isolated so that the temptation scene may take place. The absence of both Good Counsel and Knowledge, though necessary to the mechanics of the plot at this point in the play – to say nothing of the exigencies of doubling in performance – is allegorical nonsense. Free the play from the requirement to conform as a moral interlude, however, and it readily offers another possibility, that of representing a moralised, but non-specific, single instance. The play is underdeveloped as universal allegory, although there remains a latent possibility for reading the seduction scene and its actors as a reconversion to Catholicism, commonly designated in terms of whoredom. On the other hand, the play also resists the specificity of satire in which meaning is self-restricted by cumulative detailed reference to a single historical or contemporary reality. There resides in this middle ground a permissive metaphorical structure which is able to articulate the poignant isolation and vulnerability of the boy king within the doctrinal and political systems in which he was trapped. The nature of these systems may be clearly read in a play which condemns as dangerous both parents and playmates, in effect all kinds of social intercourse attractive to the young, and warns both of the necessity of choosing good advisors and simultaneously of youth’s lack of experience in doing this reliably. The youth is given study and prayer as his only props, and that is all that lies between him, despair, and damnation. The protagonist is, however, restored to good spirits, for this is a comedy, by some brisk preaching from Good Counsel and God’s Promises in the end. The play then ends with a triple epilogue, in which Juventus offers the generalised message of the play to his audience: Neither kindred nor fellowship shall you excuse, When you shall appear before the judgement seat, But your own secret conscience shall then give an audit All you that be young whom I do now represent, Set your delight both day and night on Christ’s Testament: 284

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If pleasure you tickle, be not fickle, and suddenly slide, But in God’s fear everywhere see that you abide: In your tender age seek for knowledge, and after wisdom run, And in your old age teach your family to do as you have done. Good Counsel then dedicates the play to the youthful king, with the prayer: That in his godly proceedings he may still persevere, Which seeketh the glory of God above all other thing: O Lord, endue his heart with true understanding … Then finally Juventus offers a prayer for the lords of the realm, the king’s supposed good counsellors: Also let us pray for all the nobility of this realm; And, namely, for those whom his grace hath authorised To maintain the public wealth over us and them, That they see his gracious acts published; And that they, being truly admonished By the complaint of them which are wrongfully oppressed, May seek reformation, and see it redressed. These speeches propose that the play is a generalised instance of the folly of youth and a vehicle for the basic tenets of the brand of Protestantism promoted by the Protectorate, a Protectorate which is merely fulfilling the wishes of the young king. Yet the action of the play resists so simple a reading. Many of the preoccupations which are aired and revealed in the play are available in Latimer’s sermons preached before the king in the spring of 1549. He spoke of good and bad counsellors, the purchase of offices, charity to the poor, worth versus birth, with a rhetorical style heavily dependent on the creation of hypothetical voices, and not far removed from the discourses of contemporary theatre. Powerfully metatextual, the sermons assert that the act of preaching is virtuous behaviour and advise the young monarch that, instead of following the ways of his father, he should exercise personal power in consultation with suitable elders and should, like all good monarchs, listen in matters spiritual to the advice of God’s ministers.16 It is in the second (15 March) and third (22 March) sermons that Latimer confronts the subject of the child-king’s exercise of supreme power: we may be sure that God blessed this realm, although he cursed the realm whose ruler is a child, under whom the officers are climbing, and gleaning, stirring, scratching and scraping, and voluptuously set on banqueting, and for the maintenance of their voluptuousness go by-walks. And although he be young, he hath as good and as sage a council as ever was in England; which we may well know by their godly proceedings, and 285

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setting forth the word of God. Therefore let us not be worse than the stiffnecked Jews. In king Josias’s time, who being young did alter, change and correct wonderfully the religion, it was never heard in Jewry, that the people repined or said, ‘The king is a child: this gear will not last long: it is but one or two men’s doings: it will not tarry but for a time; the king knoweth it not.’ Wo worth that ever such men were born! Take heed lest for our rebellion God take his blessing away from us!17 The youth of the king is acknowledged, but the congregation is reassured in two matters: that he would not, on the example of Josiah, be the first child-monarch to rule well and autonomously, but that, in any case, he has an irreproachable council of ministers to rule on his behalf. As the point is developed through to the fifth sermon (5 April 1549), it becomes clear that, in recommending the king’s independence of judgement, the preacher really intends chiefly that he should not seek to emulate his father. All sons are not to be blamed for not walking in their fathers’ ways. Ezekias did not follow the steps of his father Ahaz, and was well allowed in it. Josias, the best king that ever was in Jewry, reformed his father’s ways, who walked in earthly policy. In his youth he took away all idolatry, and purged his realm of it, and set a good order in all his dominions, and wrestled with idolatry.18 Latimer then defends Somerset for his manner of guiding the young king, ‘I am sure he hath been brought up so godly, with such schoolmasters, as never king was in England, and so hath prospered under them as never none did.’19 The young king demonstrates his power, virtue, and autonomy, therefore, by the correct selection of those to whose authority he chooses to submit. This is the interestingly subversive sophistry to which those who would shape Edward subjected him: it is also the mainspring of dramatic tension in the Edwardian ‘youth’ plays under consideration. The court itself was the milieu in which Nice Wanton was performed by children.20 This play reorganises what is essentially the same structural pattern as Lusty Juventus to present a more optimistic model for the young king’s independent action. In Nice Wanton, the protagonist is trifurcated, not for the first time in the moral interlude, so that the prodigal becomes three separate characters according to Calvinist principles – two males, one damned, the other elect, and one female who is retrieved from damnation by God’s promise of mercy. The play remains comic in structure, as this composite protagonist is eventually purged of its corrupt elements. Two stanzas of verse preceding the text set out the prospectus for the play’s moral message: Wherein ye may see Three branches of an ill tree: The mother and her children three, 286

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Two naught, and one godly. Early sharp, that will be thorn; Soon ill, that will be naught: To be naught, better unborn; Better unfed than naughtily taught. There is immediate tension here between the fifth to seventh lines in which the pair of images suggest that ‘naughtiness’ is innate, a topical Calvinist argument, and the sense of the eighth line which suggests that the same ‘naughtiness’ is a product of nurture. This tension, a fundamental contradiction, invites a parallel with the issue of the theoretical and real extent of contemporary royal power and is maintained throughout the play. It presents a problem, however, only in establishing responsibility for Ismael and Dalila’s spectacular departures from the straight and narrow; Barnabas’s unwavering virtuous conduct is the more striking and remarkable in the face of such apparently feckless parenting. In the character of Barnabas, therefore, I would suggest, there is available an idealised model for the young king from the beginning, reinforced by the prologue’s reference to Solomon to whom Edward had publicly been compared by Latimer. That he is only one-third of the whole protagonist neatly allows the paradoxes evident in both Lusty Juventus and Latimer’s preaching to be sidestepped. Barnabas first enters quoting a text from Ecclesiasticus, ‘Man is prone to evil from his youth.’ This is the text of his preaching: the moral play in which he takes part is a preacher’s exemplum, an analogy to the substance of the text. Ismael and Dalila are every bit as bad as Barnabas is good, although they are clearly a lot more fun. They enter singing. Barnabas upbraids them for cutting school, wasting time and learning, for ‘Learning bringeth knowledge of God, and honest living to get.’ His parting shot is actually a text from St Paul. Unmoved, they plan a day of truant vice in the alehouse with ‘lusty companions two or three,’ and before they leave, they throw away their schoolbooks, ‘Away with book and all!’ John N. King has demonstrated the iconographic power of the book21 in representations of Edward VI: knowledge of the Bible is the only way to know God’s laws, obedience to which is the only passport to eternal life. At this moment in the play, a kind of anti-iconoclasm, a potent image for its time, occurs, as Ismael and Dalila reject at one blow the Erasmian doctrines of education on which the young king had been reared, and the substance of faith as available in the book alone. The central section of the play introduces more characters, firstly Eulalia, the voice of the incorrupt older generation, who vows to correct the mother in a neighbourly way. She, like Barnabas, is both preacher and exemplum, this time, of responsible parenting. Balancing her supportive influence is the subversive influence of Iniquity, the ‘conventional’ Vice figure and agent of Ismael’s and Dalila’s fall. It is not entirely clear what Iniquity’s role is in the play beyond the opportunity for burlesque, as the splitting of the protagonist into the elect Barnabas and his already corrupt brother and sister leaves him with no one to tempt, for he never 287

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comes into contact with Barnabas, and the other two are quite capable of falling all by themselves. There follows a playground orgy of gambling, scrapping, singing, and stolen kisses. Necessarily, there is an abrupt change and visual shock necessary to allow an improving message to be retrieved from the romp the play has become. Dalila enters, crippled and hideously disfigured, ‘stuffed with diseases.’ Like Robert Henryson’s venereally leprous Cresseid, Dalila has come to realise too late what has brought her to this pass. Barnabas meets her, preaches repentance, and takes her in, extending the hand of corporal mercy to her in approved manner. Ismael’s fall is enacted in a courtroom scene, where he is found guilty of felony, burglary, and murder and is condemned to hang. He turns king’s evidence against Iniquity, and both are led out in chains. Yet another character, Worldly Shame, then takes credit for Xantippe’s negligence as a parent. He comes with news of the two errant children in order to induce her to suicide. Xantippe turns fallen protagonist and is saved from knifing herself at the last moment by her son Barnabas in the role of preaching Virtue. And preach is precisely what he then does to end the play, first addressing thirtyfour lines to his mother on the upbringing of children, then turning the full force of his gospelling zeal upon the audience, interpreting the interlude as an example of the frailty of youth and the need for good parental guidance: Even so by children: in their tender age Ye may work them like wax to your own intent. The play ends on a prayer for the king. The play is a comic celebration of the triumph of incorrupt Protestant youth, armed with gospel text and a sense of innate rectitude, over the misguided recidivist tendencies of parents. The old morality play protagonist is divided into ‘three branches of an ill tree,’ two of whom fall, while the third is never even tempted. Barnabas is able to select Eulalia, a right-thinking neighbour, as his support in preference to his wrong-headed mother. Edward VI, son of Henry VIII, who was widely believed to have slithered back into popery towards the end of his life, was also one of three children of the same parent, the other two being girls whom, it was greatly feared,22 would marry unwisely and hand the throne back into the hands of the church of Rome, the Whore of Babylon, of whom Edward himself had obediently written a play. The most immediate influences in his young life had also come from the domestic circle, his Protestant uncle, Edward Seymour, and his Protestant stepmother Catherine Parr. Nice Wanton must belong to the period of Somerset’s Protectorate, as it supports in quite precise detail the mythography surrounding Edward VI, the young king Solomon with a wise head on young shoulders, capable of autonomous virtuous action, capable on one hand of advising children to obey their elders, but also showing himself able to discriminate the sensible from the fond amongst those elders from an early age. But as a play clearly written for performance at court at 288

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a particular period, it also echoes in fairly precise detail the propaganda to which the young king was subjected by the dominant faction at court. It illustrates precisely how malleable, how devoid of true power, the young king was, and how, within the closed circle of the court, his generation could be theatrically directed, fashioned by their elders, to serve whatever myth of ideal youthful behaviour happened to be current. Lois Potter has observed that the ‘spare the rod’ message is made nonsense of in plays, notably Nice Wanton, in which Calvinist teaching about predestination is confirmed.23 Yet she, like many who have studied these plays, stops short, in adopting a generic approach to the material, of examining how plays about children, even performed by children, are repositories of information about the specific problems of the Reformation state with its child-monarch. Not only do the plays adapt old tools to the self-conscious promotion of Protestant doctrine; simultaneously they reveal for us the shaping of policy at a moment of peculiar political and ideological crisis within the state. For whom was the mythologising of Edward intended? Sidney Anglo sounds a note of caution in reminding us of how little of its detail would have penetrated ordinary people’s consciousness.24 The scepticism of influential voices outside the immediate court circle has nonetheless already been noted. The Spanish ambassador, smarting from a perceived social snub at Edward’s coronation, wrote further: When the king himself came out I bowed to him, and having commenced my greeting to him in French the Protector told me to address the King in Latin, which he said he understood better than French; but, truth to tell, he seemed to me to understand one just as little as the other.25 For the sake of the prosperity and stability of the state, against such voices the public relations campaign had to be relentless: What people are they that say, ‘The king is but a child?’ Have we not a noble king? Was there ever a king so noble; so godly; brought up with so noble counsellors; so excellent and well-learned schoolmasters? I will tell you this, and I speak it even as I think: his Majesty hath more godly wit and understanding, more learning and knowledge at his age, than twenty of his progenitors that I could name, had at any time of their life.26 Whether Edward himself fell prey to the image created by his managers is a trickier question. In his own writings, notably the Discourse on Reform, he wrote that the ills of the Commonwealth must be put right by: good education; devising of good laws; executing the laws justly, without respect of persons; encouraging the good; ordering well the customers; and engendering the friendship in all parts of the commonwealth,27 all of which show him tractable enough. That he remained childlike, however, is borne out by his thoughtful addition that the more ‘tedious’ statutes of the realm should be made short and understandable. 289

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Contemporary portraits of the boy king demonstrate the same tensions I have been exploring. Two portraits of Edward survive by the court painter William Scrots. One shows the young monarch, full-length, legs apart, his gloves in one hand, the other on the hilt of his sword, in every detail the youthful personator of his father in the Holbein mural formerly in Whitehall, so that to modern eyes it verges on the pastiche. Only the base of the classical column in the background indicates any new departure. The other Scrots painting is the grotesque anamorphic portrait of 1546, merely an exercise in perspective or a most tangible testimony to the young monarch’s malleability.28 Elsewhere, John King29 has pointed out that in many representations, Edward, although afforded the trappings of monarchy, is rarely shown alone, but is accompanied by influential adults. The woodcut in the printed edition of Latimer’s sermons is a case in point, as it shows the preacher in his wooden outdoor pulpit facing the monarch: ‘two adult men share the viewer’s attention with Edward in what constitutes a symbolic dilution of his authority.’ Around 1548, an unknown artist painted Edward at the centre of the larger composition known as ‘Edward VI and the Pope.’30 Here the boy king sits in state, but at an angle, his head tilted towards his father. Henry VIII, on his deathbed, points at his son, either electing him his successor or admonishing him to do what he is bidden. The whole picture seems to represent the monarch surrounded by the trappings of his power, but that power has moved out to the edges of the picture, as the forlorn figure at the centre, dwarfed by the throne on which he diffidently perches, is surrounded by too many choices of parental authority. Below his feet, lending the picture its usual title, is the defeated figure of the pope. The rejection of the pope as authority is unambiguous: ‘all fleshe is grasse’ is written on his chest, he wears scrolls reading ‘idolatry’ and ‘supersticion,’ and ‘feyned holines’ is written to his left. The Holy Father appears to have had his neck broken by a book open at the page which reads, ‘The worde of the Lorde endureth forever.’ To the young king’s left stands the figure of Somerset, the Lord Protector, and beyond him members of the Council are seated at a table. Above them, through a window as it were, is a scene of iconoclasm, as soldiers with pikes or poles are shown in the process of knocking a statue of the Virgin and Child from its column. All of the alternative sources of authority are compromised except the committee of ministers, each of whom is pictured in his robes and chains of office, not looking deferentially or expectantly to their young monarch, but, self-absorbed, staring straight ahead.

Acknowledgement This paper was first published in Comedy: Essays in Honour of Peter Dixon edited Elizabeth Maslen (Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, 1993) and was reprinted in Medieval English Theatre by kind permission of the editor. 290

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Notes 1 The plays are printed together in Early English Dramatists: the Dramatic Writings of Richard Wever and Thomas Ingeland edited John S. Farmer (Guildford, Traylen, 1966), Lusty Juventus from 1–42, and Nice Wanton from 93–115. The edition gives no line numbers. 2 See Ervin Beck, ‘Terence Improved: The Paradigm of the Prodigal Son in English Renaissance Comedy,’ Renaissance Drama NS VI (1973), 107–22. 3 John N. King, English Reformation Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 276. 4 The term, which has been perhaps overused in recent works on this period, is borrowed from Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 5 King, English Reformation Literature, 23. 6 Alan J.R. Smith, The Emergence of a Nation State: The Commonwealth of England 1529-1660 (London and New York: Longman, 1984), 65–70. 7 D.M. Loades, Politics and the Nation 1450–1660 (London: Fontana, 1986), 198. 8 Rawdon Brown, ed., Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Affairs Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, Volume 5: 1534–1554 (HMSO, London: Longman, 1873) 18 August 1554, 934, ‘Report of England made to the Senate by Giacomo Soranzo, late ambassador to Edward VI and Queen Mary,’ 535. 9 Calendar of State Papers Venetian 5, 18 August 1554, 934; ‘Report of England made to the Senate by Giacomo Soranzo, late ambassador to Edward VI and Queen Mary’ 536. 10 Martin A.S. Hume and Royall Tyler, eds., Calendar of Letters, Despatches, and State Papers, Relating to the Negotiations between England and Spain, Preserved in the Archives at Vienna, Simancas and Elsewhere Volume 9: Edward VI, 1547–1549 (HMSO, London: Longman, 1916), 7 March 1547, ‘Van der Delft to the Queen Dowager,’ 50. 11 Revd George Elwes Corrie, ed., Hugh Latimer Sermons (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1844), 84–281. Particular references to Latimer’s sermons and preaching style are noted in notes 16–19. 12 See also David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics: a Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 97–106. 13 Calendar of State Papers, Spanish, 9: 7 March 1547, ‘Van der Delft to the Queen Dowager,’ 50. 14 Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve, Government Regulation of the Elizabethan Drama (West Port Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1975), 8. 15 Gildersleeve, 9. 16 Latimer, Sermons, 85. 17 Latimer, Sermons, 119, 131–32. 18 Latimer, Sermons, 176–77. 19 Latimer, Sermons, 187. 20 H.N. Hillebrand, The Child Actors: A Chapter in Elizabethan Stage History (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 11, nos 1, 2, 1926) was first to point out the evidence that Nice Wanton was adapted for its performance before Elizabeth, shortly after its printing in 1560, ‘queen’s’ being substituted for ‘king’s’ (rhymes with ‘things’) in the dedication at the end of the play. He also believed that it could have been adapted for Mary, which in view of its doctrinal stance is quite impossible. It could, of course, have been revived by Elizabeth because she was present at the first performance and enjoyed it. 21 John N. King, Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 22 E.g. Latimer, Sermons, 91.

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23 Lois Potter, ‘Reformation and the Moral Play’ in Norman Sanders, Richard Southern, T.W. Craik, and Lois Potter, eds., The Revels History of Drama in English 2, 1500– 1576 (London and New York: Methuen 1980), 177–206, at 194–95. 24 Sidney Anglo, Images of Tudor Kingship (London: Seaby, 1992), especially final chapter. 25 Calendar of State Papers, Spanish 9, 7 March 1547, ‘Van der Delft to the Queen Dowager,’ 147. 26 Latimer, Sermons, 118. 27 W.K. Jordan, ed., The Chronical and Political Papers of Edward VI (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966) 159–67. 28 The first hangs in the Renaissance Gallery at Hampton Court, the second in the National Portrait Gallery. 29 King, Tudor Royal Iconography, 90, 97. 30 National Portrait Gallery.

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19 RULES OF EXCHANGE IN MEDIEVAL PLAYS AND PLAY MANUSCRIPTS From: Roger Sell. ed., Dialogic Analysis: Literature as Dialogue (Turku: John Benjamins, 2014) pp. 177–96 Materials There was a wide variety of dramatic activity in England before the establishment of the first purely commercial playhouses in the London of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. We know from passing references in records and account books that the emerging urban cultures of England, like those across continental Europe after the Black Death, developed a thriving entertainment industry. Some of this consisted of what we would now call pageantry, but some of it was scripted: what we would now consider to be drama. Most of those scripts have been lost. Those that survive were for a long time taken to be the sum total of English medieval drama, and hence to typify the dramatic tradition of England in the period. To this day, general histories of the theatre in the British Isles often assert that the only dramatic activity before the foundation of the playhouses was amateur and religious and consisted of long cycles of mystery plays, which told the story of the world from Creation to Doomsday, and shorter morality plays, which also told stories of fall and redemption, but as allegory. This is particularly the case with popular web sites, often now the first port of call for investigators. Perversely the best known early English play is Everyman, which is not a native piece at all, but a translation of the Dutch play Elckerlijc. In brief, we now know, largely as a result of the ambitious Records of Early English Drama (REED) project, that what survives cannot be taken to be typical.1 This preamble is important, because the following essay will focus on surviving play texts, all based on stories from the Bible, but will not be aiming to reinforce the view for the non-specialist that this was the only, or even the dominant, kind of dramatic activity in England in the Middle Ages. The fact is simply that, in order to discuss dialogue, we need scripts. The scripts that will form the focus of what follows come from MS Cotton Vespasian D VIII in the British Library, a manuscript which is not what it seems, and which provides an opportunity to explore the auspices of both performed and read dialogue. Its content is the so-called N-Town Plays.2 Between the first moment that this manuscript attracted attention at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, up until at least the 1970s, there were attempts to read the plays within it as a cycle of mystery plays such as those surviving from York and 293

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Chester.3 The York and Chester plays are strings of short pageants, each dramatising an episode from the Christian story from Creation to Doomsday, designed to be performed processionally on wagons that moved in sequence on a set route around the city streets. Each pageant was the responsibility of a trade or craft guild, while the civic authorities, the elite aldermanic group within the city, acted as the producers of the whole event. The N-Town manuscript looks superficially like another version of the same thing, in that it does contain, among other things, a similar sequence of pageants. The whole is prefaced by a proclamation, or ‘banns’, a series of verses spoken alternately by three ‘vexillators’ or flag-bearers, apparently written to act as a trailer, or set of programme notes, for the unlettered. In the final stanza, the third vexillator announces: A Sunday next, yf þat we may, At vj of þe belle we gynne oure play In N-town; wherefore we pray That God now be ʒoure spede. Amen. (ll. 525–29)4 The letter ‘N’, as in mathematics, stands here for a variable that is to be replaced with any value, or in this case, any location. It is ridiculous to contemplate that the whole long sequence could possibly have toured. So it is generally accepted that this is a compilation of plays written down so that it could be taken up in part or in whole anywhere. Lincoln and Coventry have variously laid claim to it, such that it was long known as the Ludus Coventriae [Play of Coventry],5 despite the fact that separate plays and accompanying accounts survive from that city6, and the Coventry antiquarian Thomas Sharp, and Francis Douce, keeper of manuscripts in the British Museum, in a correspondence from 1819 preserved by the former, can be seen to have agreed that the attribution was wrong.7 It is now accepted that the manuscript is a compilation. Accordingly, although elements within it suggest that they were performed, this version was possibly primarily written for reading rather than for acting from. Among other things to have emerged since Block’s edition is that its structure is more complex than that of a civic mystery cycle, or sequence of short pageants, on the model of York’s. In particular it has been demonstrated that the manuscript contains a discrete and self-contained sequence on the early life of the Virgin Mary, the parts of which were marked with a cross in the margin by the scribe,8 two separate long Passion Plays written for performance in a large outdoor amphitheatre rather than on wagons,9 and an elaborate stand-alone play of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, clearly designed for indoor performance,10 all embedded within the longer sequence. In other words, the scribe appears to have drawn his project from a number of separate source manuscripts, and, moreover, not to have fully completed the exercise, as the banns do not match up with what follows them. What we have could be described more properly as an anthology of medieval plays arranged in approximate chronological order, rather than a single entity. 294

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The N-Town Play may appear to be an unnecessarily complicated, and possibly compromised, text to discuss in a volume not directed at medieval drama specialists. However, aside from the fact that there are no ‘simple’ medieval play manuscripts, the N-Town manuscript precisely in being a compilation demonstrates something of the lost or buried variety of medieval English religious drama. Although we know that this type of drama was performed from at least the 1370s, that is Chaucer’s lifetime, most of the surviving texts are very late, and many of them actually sixteenth century; this manuscript on the other hand can be securely dated to the mid-fifteenth century. Its main scribe wrote ‘1468’ at the close of the pageant of the Purification of Mary, and that date has been confirmed by watermarks, but the material within the manuscript has been dated on linguistic grounds to a period between 1425 and 1450, its latest editor concluding most of the material in the manuscript dates from the middle years of the century.11 And another good reason for examining it here is that it yields some very interesting results when we consider how its dialogue is formulated. It actually provides some substantive variations on the expected range of types of dialogue in plays.

Contrasting modes of dialogue Modern play scripts, by authors such as Alan Ayckbourn, might be assumed to conform to the fundamental requirement that they convince their audiences that they simulate dialogue in the real world – that the interlocutors convince the audience that they are engaged in conversation. Of course, even in the most naturalistic drama other things are going on: put crudely there is the requirement that the play follow a certain narrative trajectory from its opening to its closure, and that, generally without an omniscient narrator, that narrative is carried and conveyed to the audience by dialogic transactions between characters. Those transactions are also contrived to convey thematic material connotatively, and often to draw attention as much to failures in human communication as to perfectly achieved acts of exchange. There are also, in the theatre, certain established conventions, such as the soliloquy, the aside, direct address to audience, and having everyone speak verse, that depart from the requirement that everything that is spoken emulates speech transactions in the real world. All this is reasonably obvious, and territory that professional linguisticians are better equipped to expound further. Early English religious drama, however, produces particularly unsatisfying results when subjected to the conventional analytical tools that might be fruitfully applied to mainstream theatrical works written for the stage from Shakespeare to the present. There are numerous reasons for this, all of which prompt the conclusion that what is ostensibly written or delivered as dialogue is in fact performing a range of communicative actions which comply to very different rules than those dictated by either Aristotle’s Poetics, which define the unities of place and time, or the Gricean maxims and other sophistications of them applied to speech acts by modern linguisticians. In what follows we will consider three examples. 295

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Passion Play II within the manuscript takes up the story of Christ’s Passion from his betrayal by Judas and subsequent arrest with which Passion Play I ends. At the climax of this piece of dramatic action, various characters come and go across what we assume to be a large outdoor amphitheatre which has the Golgotha scene with its three inhabited crosses at its centre. Action is mixed with dialogue. The Virgin Mary is in place at the base of the Cross from where she speaks a formal lament12; Jesus speaks from up on the Cross, forgiving the Jews (ll.799–802), who continue to mock him from below (ll.803–18). The two thieves who flank Christ talk to and fro with each other and with Christ at the upper level (ll.815–830), until with another outburst the Virgin Mary calls his attention back to her at ground level (ll.831–42). He commits her to the care of St John (ll.843–54), who takes her away. Pilate, Annas, and Caiaphas come back and Pilate writes on the board that is set above the Cross (stage direction after l.874). Finally, Jesus cries from the Cross, is offered a drink from a sponge soaked in vinegar and gall on the end of a pole, then dies (ll.881–920). At the centre of the scene is the iconic image of Christ on the Cross. Through all this action, his interaction with the Virgin Mary is of a different verbal order to the other exchanges, and picks up on the ending of Passion Play I. There, by way of a coda, the Virgin Mary came on to the set having been informed of the trial and arrest of Christ by Mary Magdalen, so that that play ended with a thirty-one line lament in the Virgin’s voice beginning, A, a, a! How myn hert is colde! A, hert hard as ston, how mayst þu lest Whan þese sorweful tydyngys are þe told? So wold to God, hert, þat þou mytyst brest. (ll. 1045–48)13 This lament sets up her role in the ensuing action, and is taken up here in Passion Play II. Her verbal interaction with other characters on the set is only sporadic, and she seems to be there to whip up emotion in the audience and also, in the position of limited understanding she expresses, she provides a pretext for Jesus and John to explain the wider theological meaning of events as they happen. In other words, the Virgin’s sequence of laments is not presented as, nor to be received as, a naturalistic response to bad news that changes in pitch or tone as the narrative sequence of events unfolds, but rather establishes her voice as belonging to a different rhetorical order. The climax comes just as Christ dies: Jhesus: In manus tuas domine Holy fadyr in hefly se I comende my spyryte to þe For here now hendyth my fest I xal go sle þe fende þat freke Ffor now myn herte be-gynnyth to breke Wurdys mo xal I non speke Nunc consummatum est. 296

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Maria: Alas Alas I leve to longe To se my swete sone with peynes stronge As a theff on cros doth honge And nevyr ʒet dede he synne Alas my dere shyld to deth is dressyd Now is my care wel more in-cressyd A myn herte with peyn is pressyd Ffor sorwe myn hert doth twynne. (ll. 913–28) 14 The Virgin’s lamentation takes its inspiration from the elaborated liturgy of Good Friday, in which the audience would be accustomed to hearing the choir sing a planctus, a stylised representation of the lament of the Virgin at the base of the Cross. In the play, the Virgin’s passages of lamentation, drawing on the rhetoric of the planctus, achieve their effect by being placed contrapuntally against other modes of dialogue, such as the exchange between the Jews which immediately precedes the speeches quoted above: Tertius Judeus: Ȝour thrust sere hoberd for to slake Eyʒil and galle here I þe take What me thynkeyth a mowe ʒe make Is not þis good drynk To crye for drynke ʒe had gret hast And now it semyth it is but wast Is not þis drynk of good tast Now telle me how ʒe think. Quartus Judeus: On lofte sere hoberd now ʒe be sett We wyl no lenger with ʒou let We grete ʒou wel on þe new get And make on ʒou a mowe. Primus Judeus: we grete ʒou wel with a scorn And pray ʒou bothe evyn and morn Take good eyd to oure corn And chare awey þe crowe. (ll. 896–912)15 A complete planctus, in English, is thus threaded through the second Passion Play; its action is interrupted firstly for the Jews to mock Jesus, for Jesus himself to address them from the Cross, and for Caiaphas, Annas, and Pilate, to approach, fix the sign to the Cross, and then return to their scaffold. The interrupted action is closely choreographed in a series of stage directions.

Liturgical stylisation and empathy What the Virgin’s highly stylised mode of performance demonstrates is the speech act as a unit of empathy. It works firstly through an accumulation of absolute 297

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illocutionary consistency. It is also specifically perlocutionary, in that it has a particular goal to provoke complementary response-action in the receiving audience, to which end it is prepositional in that the speaker models the desired behaviour by enacting it herself.16 As Nils Holger Petersen has reflected, it is likely that in its original liturgical context this rhetorical mode would have led the congregation experience ‘some kind of spiritual transfer to a transcendant space’, collapsing the ‘then’ of the events of the Passion with their ‘now’. In his comments on representations within liturgical practice itself, Peterson suggests that ‘this is not necessarily a dramatic technique; it would seem rather to be a ritual technology’.17 What is interesting in the N-Town Play is its adaptation of customary liturgical representations.18 In the most fully developed versions of the liturgical rite, such as the thirteenth-century example which survives from Cividale in Italy,19 the planctus is distributed across members of the choir representing a number of voices – John, the two attendant Marys, Mary Magdalen and Mary mother of James – all voices reinforcing one another in a single mode of lament but with varied deixis, sometimes addressing one another, sometimes addressing Christ on the Cross, sometimes God in heaven, and sometimes talking out to the congregation, in a series of exclamations and questions (all this sung in Latin of course). In these rituals, Christ is not represented by a human body, but by the Cross, sometimes though not necessarily with a statue attached to it. In the N-Town Passion Play, however, although many from the planctus cast are on set, the speeches delivered in the mode of sustained lament are reserved for the Virgin. St John and Mary Magdalen address themselves to her. It is the Virgin herself who embraces the base of the Cross too, an action customarily attributed to Mary Magdalen: Here Oure Lady xal ryse and renne and hales þe crosse. (stage direction at l. 854)20 One strand within the production is therefore that it exploits the emotional impact of the traditional planctus, both directly and by allusion to its familiar ecclesiastical context which would have been part of the shared experience of the original audience, and that it does so by concentrating the generation of that impact in a single character, such that it becomes her unique signature mode within the larger dialogue. Stage directions make clear, moreover, that the Virgin’s highly stylised speeches are accompanied by iconic gesture and movement. The Virgin, for example, prostrates herself in grief, embraces the base of the Cross, kisses Christ’s feet, swoons, and finally adopts a posture of prayer. Meanwhile, her conventional perlocutionary laments, are dramatically contrasted with a range of other dialogic strategies. The presence of an actor representing Christ and engaging in exchanges with others on the set underscores the way in which the play is fully realised drama, rather than ritual. In the Good Friday representation, the monolithic rhetorical mode of lament figures verbally a true absence, as the consecrated host, generally reserved in the Church and understood theologically to be the body of Christ, is absent on Good Friday, to be restored as part of the ensuing 298

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Easter rituals. It is accompanied by the lament’s rhetorical opposite which is the liturgical salve of praise and welcome. As drama, the N-Town Passion Play is compromised by, or at any rate exploits, the dialogic procedures of another mode of representation, the liturgical ceremonies of the Church. We will now look at two other examples of the dramatist’s transposition of material from the experience of worship, both this time from the embedded Mary Play which dramatises the largely apocryphal story of the early life of the Virgin Mary. What should have been established by now is that the tone in these plays is not one of evangelical enthusiasm; their texts imply an understanding that emotionalism is not stirred up by instruction but by empathy. Empathy (sharing feelings) as opposed to sympathy (understanding feelings) is now generally associated with naturalism in art, and Stanislavski believed we have to be convinced of the ‘emotional authenticity’ of dramatic performance before we can participate in those emotions. I have suggested more fully elsewhere in my study of the naturalised planctus that this is not so,21 and I shall now take up some examples which suggest that we need to look elsewhere in order to better understand the reception of these texts. In the Mary Play, liturgical material is used in a number of ways, sometimes interpolated in the original Latin. When the pregnant Mary pays her visit to the older Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist, the dramatist is presented with the opportunity to realise another iconic and moving moment in Christian history, frequently illustrated in the art of the period all over Europe. In the prestige visual arts, the women are always shown in an arrangement of affecting intimacy, often embracing, as in Fra Angelico’s predella painting for an Annunciation altarpiece now in the Museo Diocesano in Cortona (1433–1434), or kissing, as in Master Schottenaltar’s altarpiece in the Schottenstift in Vienna (1469–1480), or placing hands on each other’s pregnant bellies, as in Dieric Bouts the elder’s triptych of the Virgin, now in the Prado in Madrid (c. 1445). These postures are repeated in numerous representations of the popular scene in illumination in books of hours, in ecclesiastical sculpture, and in stained glass, all over Western Europe including England in the fifteenth century. In East Anglia, the region from which the N-Town manuscript comes, for example, there are images in glass surviving in the parish churches of East Harling near Thetford, and Salle near Norwich. What the dramatist does with this popular and affecting encounter, reputed to mark the inception of the ‘Ave Maria’ and therefore of the rosary itself, is to have the two women greet each other, then recite together the Magnificat, verse by verse, Mary, in Latin, and Elizabeth translating into English. It is necessary to quote here in full to illustrate what a distinctive and substantial element in the play this constitutes. Maria: Elizabeth:

For þis holy psalme I begynne here þis day: Magnificat:anima mea dominum Et exultauit spiritus meus: in deo salutari meo. Be þe Holy Gost with joye Goddys son is in þe cum, Þat þi spyryte so injouyid þe helth of þi God so. 299

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Maria: Elizabeth: Maria: Elizabeth: Maria: Elizabeth: Maria: Elizabeth: Maria: Elizabeth: Maria: Elizabeth: Maria: Elizabeth: Maria: Elizabeth: Maria: Elizabeth: Maria: Elizabeth:

Quia respexit humiltatem ancille sue Ecce enim ex hoc beatam me dicent omnes generaciones For he beheld þe lowness of hese hand-maydeʒe, So ferforthe for þat all generacyonys blysse ʒow in pes. Quia fecit mihi magna qui potens est Et sanctum nomen eius For grett thyngys he made and also myghtyest And ryght holy is þe name of hym yn vs. Et misericordia eius a progenie in progenies Timentibus eum Ȝa, þe mercy of hym fro þat kynde into þe kynde of pes, For all þat hym drede, now is he cum. Fecit potenciam in brachio suo Disspersit superbos mente cordis sui The pore in his right arme he hath mad so; Þe prowde to dyspeyre and þe thought of her hertys only. Deposuit potentes de sede Et exultauit humiles The prowde men fro hey setys put he, And þe lowly vpon heyth in þe sete of pes. Esurientes impleuit bonis Et diuites dimisit inanes Alle þe pore and þe nedy he fulfyllyth with his goddys, And þe ryche he fellyth to voydnes. Suscepit Israel puerum suum Recordatus est misericordie sue Israel for his childe vptoke he to cum, On his mercy to think for hese þat be. Sicut locutus est ad patres nostros Abraham et seminis eius in secula As he spake here to oure forfaderys in clos, Abraham and to all hese sede of hym in þis werd sa. Gloria Patri et Filio Et Spiritui Sancto Preysyng be to þe Fadyr in hevyn, lo, Þe same to þe Son here be so, Þe Holy Gost also to ken; Sicut erat in principio et nunc et simper Et in secula seculorum Amen As it was in þe begynnynge, and now is, and xal be for evyr, And in þis werd in all good werkys to abydyn then. (ll. 1492–1537)22

Magnificat is the title commonly given to the Latin text and vernacular translation of the Canticle (or Song) of Mary. It is the opening word of Luke 1:46–55 in the 300

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Latin Vulgate Bible: Magnificat anima mea Dominum [My soul magnifies the Lord]. In the fifteenth century it was one of the texts in which young boys were catechised by their parish priests, along with the Our Father, the Creed, and the Hail Mary. Arguably, then, the dramatist is here taking the opportunity to embed didactic material into his play. The didactic reputation of medieval religious drama dies hard. As a concept, the idea of teaching the simple folk about their bibles is unthinkingly post-Reformation in its understanding of how the Christian Church promulgates its doctrines. Medieval Roman Catholicism is sacramental, and experiential, and is as much corporeally, and sensually, felt as intellectually understood. It could be argued that the English macaronic text here is not present primarily to expound the Latin so much as to create a metrical, and therefore aural, effect. It has a patterned ebb and flow that is reminiscent of antiphonal chant. Liturgical chant does not progress in a linear, narrative way, but doubles back on itself in patterns of verse and refrain, folding its conclusion back into its forward movement. The playwright here seems to understand from his own experience of liturgical chant how to stop the narrative action at an iconic moment, and to delight eye and ear in a way that is both celebratory and conducive to meditative reflection. Moreover, it is entirely possible that, as the Magnificat was chanted in its original liturgical setting, the actor who played Mary sang or chanted the Latin, while the other actor, playing Elizabeth, spoke the interpolated translation. It is equally possible that they chanted/spoke simultaneously, with Elizabeth ‘voicing over’ Mary’s Latin, or that both characters sang. On the modern stage, and in film, the conventions of opera, or of the popular musical, accept the aria or the ‘big song’ as markers of emotionally heightened moments; and those set pieces, often for two voices responding to each other, are customarily excerpted and take on a self-sufficient life of their own. In this play, something of a reverse process of this dialogic strategy seems to be happening, as free-standing elements of stylised liturgical chant are embedded into a wider pattern of dramatic dialogue.

The manuscript’s appeal to readers Up to this point we have proceeded on the assumption that these texts are to be read as performance scripts. The modern student of literature is trained to read a Shakespearean play, for example, not as one would read a novel, with the action fully realised in the ‘real’ world in the mind’s eye, but as a script written for a particular set of performance conditions. So as soon as a text is laid out on page bearing the auspices that we associate with a play-script, with two orders of text – the directive such as speakers’ names, and stage directions, and the words intended to be spoken, which is the dialogue – we as readers dutifully categorise the text as an adjunct to another aesthetic output, a performance, rather than regarding it as a primary output itself. Again, the picture and the categorisation are not straightforward where the material object, the manuscript, that contains the N-Town Play is concerned. The manuscript is a compilation, and impossibly unwieldy for taking on to the set even by a ‘director’, if any such role existed. Like 301

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all our major witnesses to medieval scriptural drama, it testifies only obliquely to a playing tradition, but was written for other reasons, memorialising past performance, envisaging future performance, or conjuring performance in the mind’s eye. Recent readings, in particular explorations of the eye of the mind, suggest a different reading that need not refer back to, and depend on, the physicality of performance but can shift investigations of these dialogic strategies on to the physicality of reading, and on to the way the dialogue’s construction in the manuscript also illuminates the reading process. The remainder of this study seeks to explore how the type of dialogue already identified as characterising the N-Town Play works not only in assumed performance, but as read text. At an earlier moment in the Mary Play, the three-year-old Virgin leaves her parents, Joachim and Anna, and ascends the steps of the temple, reciting the Gradual Psalms. The account, like all the scenes from the life of the Virgin prior to the Annunciation by the angel Gabriel, draws on the so-called ‘infancy gospels’, chiefly the Protevangelium and the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, apocryphal back stories to the life of the Virgin Mary. These apocrypha served Mariology by allowing the Virgin an early life that mirrors the early life of Christ, much like the patterning and variation of a symphonic themes and sub-themes. The Virgin’s parents, Joachim and Anna, conceive her miraculously in their extreme old age; she is dedicated to the temple at the age of three – inspiring the scene we will examine below; but then there is a competition for her betrothal, which is won by another old man, Joseph, whose rod miraculously bursts into flower. Mary and Joseph are then subjected to trial by detractors who do not believe they have remained continent. In the Mary Play, the division between these scenes from her early life and the Incarnation narrative is marked by an allegorical episode more commonly interpolated in Passion Plays, the Parliament of Heaven, or Proces du Paradis, an elaboration of Vulgate Psalm 84 attributed to originate with Bernard of Clairvaux, by which, in brief, the Incarnation is made possible by the reconciliation of Mercy Truth, Righteousness, and Peace, styled the ‘Four Daughters of God’. This amounts to a theological justification for God’s apparent change of mind when he determines to exercise mercy upon humanity. Accordingly, early in this free-standing sequence in the Mary Play, the threeyear-old Virgin leaves her parents to enter the temple and sets out to climb its steps. She is prompted to recite the Gradual Psalms by the temple priest: Episcopus:

Come, gode Mary! Come babe I þe call! Þi pas pratyly to þis plas pretende. Þu xalt be þe dowtere of God eternall If þe fyftene grees þu may ascende. It is miracle if þu do. Now God þe dyffende! From Babylony to hevynly Jherusalem þis is þe way, Every man þat thynk his lyff to amende, Þe fyftene psalmys in memorye of þis mayde say. (ll. 347–54)23 302

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The priest thus begins by addressing the child Mary who is about to embark on a symbolic, but also physically challenging, feat, but ends by stepping out of the historical time frame of the event to address the audience directly, inviting them to recite the Gradual Psalms in symbolic emulation of the protagonist. The modern viewer of a reconstruction of the play may find the ensuing sequence charming, as the child ascends the steps reciting the Psalms, but will basically wait for it to come to an end so that the story can move on, perhaps recognising the Gradual Psalms and registering them as an interpolation. For the medieval reader who commissioned this compilation, however, this section of the dialogue is likely to have triggered a range of more complicated responses. Along with the Magnificat, the Benedictus, the Nunc Dimittis, and the litany, the fifteen Gradual Psalms were the most thumbed pages in devotional manuscripts commissioned by those who could afford it for private devotional reading. In the Vulgate they were Psalms 119–33, which formed one of the anchor texts in the development of luxury manuscripts of lay devotion. From the monastic breviary, the liturgical manual that set out the daily offices for the regular religious, grew the lavish Books of Hours, which supplied comparable regimes of regular prayer and meditation for the pious member of the lay leisured classes. The core of the Book of Hours was sometimes called the Primer, precisely because it contained the texts from which medieval lay people learned to read. The Gradual Psalms were an obligatory inclusion throughout the process. They were rendered in the Vulgate as canticum graduum, translated in the Douay-Reims version as ‘a gradual canticle’. Originally, they were associated with the songs that pilgrims to Jerusalem recited at the end of their journey as they ascended the steps to the temple. In the King James Bible they were called Songs of Degrees, Songs of Ascent, and Songs of Steps, in modern revisions.24 They were, even by the standard of the Psalms, particularly lyrical, epigrammatic, celebratory in tone, and memorable. Chanted in the daily liturgy, they were also fundamental to literacy. For monastery novices the words of the Psalms would have been inseparable from their daily-practised chant patterns and the processional movements and gestures that went with them, and so would have been memorised in their bodies. They were equally familiar to the pious lay person reading a book of hours, and their use in teaching children to read extended well beyond the monastery walls too, for primers can be found in the wills of well-to-do laity. Moreover, a popular subject in stained glass in the fifteenth century was St Anne teaching the Virgin Mary to read, and where the words in the book can be discerned, it is the Gradual Psalms. Hence this specifically fifteenth-century lay iconography has been used to argue that women may not have been able to write, but that in affluent parish contexts little girls may well have learnt to read at their mothers’ knees, or the image would be meaningless for the viewer.25 We can be reasonably sure that the original commissioner or reader of the N-Town plays, given the location and date of the manuscript, was familiar with some or all of these contexts. All medieval play manuscripts owe their layout to service books, particularly their habit of putting all non-spoken text, speakers’ names and stage directions in 303

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red, the original and literal sense of ‘rubrication’. A play manuscript, unlike the customary modern layout, puts the speakers’ names in the right-hand margin, and has the stage directions extend across the whole line, from margin to margin. In contemporary bibles, the verse divisions in the Psalms had also come to be distinguished by coloured ink, alternating the initial capital letters beginning each verse in red and in blue. The N-Town scribe, having observed the rubrication convention throughout the manuscript, when he arrives at this passage in the embedded Mary Play, as well as using red for stage directions, also puts the initial capitals of each of the Gradual Psalms spoken by the infant Virgin in red, breaching the play-text convention of what is black, what is red. In this way the scribe signals materially a shift in the perception of the nature of this part of the text that is probably a consensus between him and his reader. What this leakage of coloured ink into spoken text suggests is that the scribe at this point neglects the functionality of his manuscript as a performance script, and essentialises the Gradual Psalms. Nominally here the speaker of the Psalms is the infant Virgin, but that too can be ‘forgotten’ in the reception of the texts by the scribe who is transmitting them and, because of his mise en page, by his reader. Just as the modern reader may make a note in the margin on identifying the spoken text as the Gradual Psalms, our scribe chooses to demonstrate his recognition of the special status of this piece of copied text. What contributes to this blurring of source with context is that one of the characteristics of the whole Psalter is its very indeterminacy of speaker. Officially and historically, the Psalms are songs sung by David, but in liturgical settings they are often cast as the words of God, and of Christ. Equally, because modally they are imprecations, they are cast as the words of the universal Church or of any individual voice in prayer. The fifteenth-century reader of the Mary Play is on this page invited to experience a slippage whereby the words of the infant Virgin become his or her own words, words heard in Church but also repeated, experienced, performed, sung as part of the very enterprise of learning to read, and the act of committing to memory. To return to the prefacing verse of the priest – ‘Every man þat thynk his lyff to amende, / Þe fyftene psalmys in memorye of þis mayde say’ – it becomes apparent how this experience both in performance, but also read on page, connects the fifteen steps of this temple to the steps of the temple in Jerusalem, and then, drawing on commonplace metaphor, to the ladder which the individual soul ascends to the heavenly city. The scribe reminds the reader that the recitation of the fifteen Psalms is itself, by a further metaphorical sleight of tongue, another kind of climbing. The reader is offered them on page not as an aide memoir to their content, but as a reminder of their connection with the Virgin Mary and her role as intercessor, in spiritual ascent. In both its associative, metaphorical, logic and its activation of the memory through triggers that work in the body, the reception appropriate for this page of dialogue is less as a script for performance, more an introverted and profoundly literary experience. The infant Virgin Mary’s recitation of the Gradual Psalms, therefore, engages the impact of associative thought in the production of meaning, a striking instance 304

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of conceptual blending, by which we understand that ‘selective projection from the long-term memory on the one hand and from present circumstances on the other is available for constructing such blends, which like all blends can have their own elaborate emergent structure and material anchors’.26 Here units of information drawn from the memory of hearing or performing the Psalms in a liturgical setting are integrated with understood inferences and predictions, and experienced anew in this particular setting. And because the experience of reading the Psalms also synthesises information directly inputted by the sense organs, the particular appearance on the page of a given text contributes to the construction of those associated fields of meaning by giving the blend a ‘material anchor’. In the Mary Play embedded in this manuscript, the mise en page prompts both the experience of attending a play and of reading and performing liturgical actions, while the underlying account continues to exert the usual ‘literary’ pressure on the reader to negotiate cognitive and affective relationships with the protagonist. In the blend is, potentially, the recollected experience of reciting or singing the Gradual Psalms. This may be direct and personal, but could equally be a further blend with the recollected experience of private reading in a book of hours. The matter is not simply one of reverie and imagination, however, unless we think of private reading as a passive experience. At the period when this manuscript was copied, books of hours, like devotional objects, images, music, were believed to involve the observer, reader, or listener in a corporeal transaction. Cognitive psychology and perception theory are now remarkably consonant with medieval theories of sensory perception: ‘we enact our perceptual experience; we act it out’.27 Much medieval vernacular religious prose assumes that it is a small step from ‘imaginare’ – ‘to picture to oneself’ – to the injunction to ‘see’ and ‘fully feel’ that apparently incites the reader to engage corporeally with Christ. This is particularly the agenda of vernacular prose writers in the Bonaventuran tradition working near to the play manuscript both in time and in location. The Revelations of the Norwich anchorite, Julian of Norwich, are noted for her vivid evocation of Christ’s Crucifixion and her emotional and physical responses to the event from the point of view of a spectator.28 Richard Rolle of Hampole in Yorkshire (1300–1349), whose Latin and English works were very influential on a whole generation of vernacular writers in this tradition, offers a good example in The Form of Perfect Living of this corporeal engagement in which the Psalms are instrumental. He writes that the ‘singular’ love of Christ, that is the highest that a human being can aspire to, is when all comfort and solace is closed out of thine heart, but of Jesus alone. Other joy it delights not in. For the sweetness of Him in this degree is so comforting, and lasting in His love, so burning and gladdening, that he or she who is in this degree can as well feel the fire of love burning in their soul, as thou canst feel thy finger burn if thou puttest it in the fire. But that fire, if it be hot, is so delectable and so wonderful, that I cannot 305

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tell it. Then, thy soul is loving Jesus, thinking of Jesus, desiring Jesus; in covetousness of Him breathing; in him resting. Then the song of praise and of love has come. Then thy thoughts turn into song and into melody. Then it behoves thee to sing the psalms which before thou said’st. Then must thou be long over a few psalms. Then, thou wilt think death sweeter than honey, for then thou art full of sighs to see Him whom thou lovest. (Then mayst thou boldly say, ‘I languish for love’.) Then mayst thou say ‘I sleep, and my heart wakes’.29 The feeling evoked by such writing is itself designed to be transformational and visceral, to prompt feelings of pain and grief, engaging the brain’s ‘mirror neurons’ in emulating the actions observed, recalled, conjured in the memory. The ‘mirror neurons’ in our brains cause not only our emotions but our bodies to respond to simulacra in a way, albeit diluted, that mirrors the felt response to equivalent lived experience. As neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese puts it: the ‘as if’ response is an integration that takes place in the brain that reduces the gap between self and others, ‘We use our mind to put us in the mental shoes of others’.30 The intervention of the Gradual Psalms in the Mary Play, on the read page, sets up far more than a simple narrative enactment of the imagined events of the early life of the Virgin; it leads the reader back through recollections of intermediate recollected personal experiences. These, because of their contexts are both emotional and aesthetic, and induce felt responses in the body. The sequence could be said to be ekphrastic. The N-Town plays abound with interpolations from the liturgy which make the vernacular play text act as commentary on the liturgical extract, but that commentary is not simply explicatory or even recollective; by means of a series of conceptual blends the page in the play text which sets out the Psalms stands in metaphorical potential to a number of complex experiences, direct and/or assimilated through looking, listening, performing, or other reading. Moreover, the mise en page, in which red ink leaks from rubrication into the initials of spoken text, in emulation of Psalters and books of hours, betrays the fact that the scribe himself is experiencing these blends.

A complex invitation to addressees The after-history of the manuscript is equally complex, and it may well have been used in whole or in part for production. Notwithstanding, Cotton Vespasian D VIII exhibits a process lodged in the mind of its compiler that performs a fundamentally self-contained aesthetic. It is not unique in this; wherever we have play manuscripts with stage directions in the subjunctive, or physical arrangements that do not lend themselves to the actor or director’s immediate needs, we are looking at texts the production of whose imaginative written content remains a purposeful, creative performance of itself. When we read, for example, in the pageant of Noah’s Flood , performed in Chester by the Waterleaders and Drawers of Dee, that God is to appear ‘in some high place … or in the clouds if it may be’, 306

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this is not an instruction; it is an aspiration, the transferral on to page of an ideal performance in the mind’s eye. There are many kinds of dialogue in the surviving body of texts that constitute the corpus of medieval English religious drama. There is quick-fire burlesque dialogue between shepherds in the Chester pageant and the well-known First and Second Shepherds’ pageants in the anomalous Towneley manuscript, as there is between Noah and his sons as they build the ark in the Chester and the Towneley plays. There are fifteenth-century imaginaries of marital strife, as Noah’s wife, again in Chester and Towneley, refuses to board the ark, but also, in all instances as Adam and Eve argue over exactly who was responsible for the decision to eat the forbidden fruit. There are long speeches addressed to audience, particularly as the plays’ tyrants, the Pharaohs, Pilates, and Herods, introduce themselves. There is debate in hell, both between devils and, notably in the York play, between Satan and Christ about the devil’s ‘rights’. All these varieties of dramatic dialogue would, however, serve to reinforce the beliefs on non-specialists that medieval religious drama was didactic in purpose, narrative in mode, and written purely for amateur performers. This study has sought rather to suggest how these play texts deploy other materials, particularly from the Latin liturgy, and how in so doing their affective range and dialogic strategies are more eclectic than the casual observer generally acknowledges. Moreover, historical and codicological examinations of the surviving manuscripts problematise the relationship between any of these texts and any actual performance in real time, such that their dialogic strategies suggest a relationship between producer and receiver designed to operate no less on the page than on the stage.

Notes 1 See Records of Early English Drama: https://reed.utoronto.ca 2 Stephen Spector, ed., The N-Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D.8, 2 vols, Early English Text Society, supplementary series 11 and 12 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 3 Richard Beadle, ed., The York Plays, Early English Text Society, supplementary series 23 and 24 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 2013); R.N. Lumiansky and A.D. Mills, eds., The Chester Mystery Cycle, 2 vols, Early English Text Society, supplementary series 3 and 5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974, 1986). 4 On next Sunday, if we may, / at six o’clock we begin our play / in N-Town; wherefore we pray / that God speed you. / Amen. Spector. p. 21. 5 Katherine Salter Block, ed., Ludus coventriae: or, The plaie called Corpus Christi, Cotton ms Vespasian, Part 8, Early English Text Society extra series 120 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960). 6 Pamela M. King and Clifford Davidson, eds., The Coventry Corpus Christi Plays (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000). 7 Sharp, London MS B.L. Additional 43645: f.240r. 8 Peter Meredith, ed., The Mary Play: From the N-Town Manuscript (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997). 9 Peter Meredith, ed., The Passion Play from the N. Town Manuscript (London and New York: Longman, 1990).

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10 11 12 13

Spector, I pp. 387–409. Spector, The N-Town Play I: xxxviii–xli. Meredith, The Passion Play, ll. 791–98. Ah, ah, ah, how my heart is cold! / Ah, heart hard as stone, / how can you endure when you are told / these sorrowful tidings? / Would to God that you, my heart, might break. (Meredith, The Passion Play.)

14

Jesus: Into your hands, lord [in Latin] Holy father in your heavenly seat, / I commend my spirit to you, / for here now my fast is ended. / I shall go and kill that creature the devil, / for now my heart begins to break. / I shall speak no more words. / Now it is done [in Latin]. Mary: Alas, alas, I live too long / to see my sweet son with strong pains / hang upon the cross like a thief, / when he never yet sinned. / Alas my dear child is put to death. / Now my care is indeed increased the more, and my heart is pressed with pain. / For sorrow my heart breaks in two. (Meredith, The Passion Play)

15

Third Jew [in Latin]: To slake your thirst, sir knave, / I take here vinegar and gall. / What – it seems to me you are pulling a face! / Is this not good drink? / You were quick to call for drink, / and now it seems only to be wasted. / Does this drink not taste good? / Now tell me what you think. Fourth Jew [in Latin]: Sir knave, now you are set on high, / we will spend no more time with you. / We greet you well according to the new fashion, / and pull a face at you. First Jew [in Latin]: We greet you well with scorn, / and pray that evening and morning, / you pay good attention to our corn, / and scare away the crow! (Meredith, The Passion Play)

16 Pamela M. King, ‘Lament and Elegy in Scriptural Drama: Englishing the Planctus Mariae’, in Adrian P. Tudor, Mario Longtin, Catherine Emerson, eds., Performance, Drama and Spectacle in the Medieval City, Essays in Honour of Alan Hindley (Louvain: Peeters, 2010) pp. 239–52. Also in the present volume. 17 Nils Holger Petersen, ‘The Ordo ad repraesentandum Herodem from the Fleury Playbook: Biblical Reception and Representational Ritual’, Universitat de ValenciaEstudi. No date. http://parnaseo.uv.es/ Ars/webelx/Pon%C3%A8ncies%20pdf/Petersen. pdf Spain: Valencia [retrieved 6 October 2012]. 18 Joseph R. Berrigan, trans., Sandro Sticca, The Planctus Mariae in the Dramatic Tradition of the Middle Ages (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1988), pp. 62–65. 19 Audrey Ekdahl Davidson and E. Rosanne Elder, ‘Planctus Mariae from Cividale: A Performance Edition’, Comparative Drama, 42 (2008), pp. 271–85. 20 Here Our Lady (i.e. the Virgin Mary) shall rise and run and embrace the Cross. Meredith, The Passion Play. 21 King, ‘Lament and Elegy in Scriptural Drama’, pp. 239–52. 22

Mary: For I mark the beginning of this holy Psalm here this day: / ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord. / And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour’. [in Latin, here and throughout as translated Douay-Reims Bible]

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Elizabeth: By the Holy Spirit God’s son has come into you with joy, / so that your soul enjoyed your God’s health so Mary: Because he hath regarded the humility of his handmaid; / for behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. [in Latin] Elizabeth: For he beheld the humility of you, his handmaid, / so as a consequence all generations now bless you in peace. Mary: Because he that is mighty, hath done great things to me; / and holy is his name. [in Latin] Elizabeth: For he made the greatest and most mighty things, / and his name in very holy to us. Mary: And his mercy is from generation unto generations, / to them that fear him. [in Latin] Elizabeth: Yes, from his natural mercy into the nature of peace, / for all who doubted him, now he is come. Mary: He hath shewed might in his arm: / he hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart. [in Latin] Elizabeth: He has set the poor on his right hand, / and has made the proud to despair in their hearts. Mary: He hath put down the mighty from their seat, / and hath exalted the humble. [in Latin] Elizabeth: He has put the proud men from their high seats / and has set the humble on high on the throne of peace. Mary: He hath filled the hungry with good things: / and the rich he hath sent empty away. [in Latin] Elizabeth: All the poor and the needy he has filled with his goods, / and the rich he has brought down to emptiness. Mary: He hath received Israel his servant, / being mindful of his mercy. [in Latin] Elizabeth: He took up Israel to come as his boy, / thinking of the mercy that was his. Mary: As he spoke to our fathers: / to Abraham and to his seed for ever. [in Latin] Elizabeth: And he spoke here to our forefathers face to face, / Abraham and all the seed of him in this world so. Mary Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. [in Latin] Elizabeth: Praising be to the Father in heaven, lo, / and the same to the son here be it so, \and also the Holy Ghost to know. Mary: As it was in the beginning, is now, and always shall be, / forever and ever. Amen. [in Latin] Elizabeth: As it was in the begi nning, and is now, and shall be forever, / and in all good works in this world to remain then. (Meredith, The Mary Play, pp. 80–82) 23

Bishop: Come, good Mary. Come babe I am calling you! / Attempt to make your steps prettily to this place. / You will be the daughter of eternal God if you ascend these fifteen steps. / It will be a miracle if you do, now may God defend you! / This is the way from Babylon to heavenly Jerusalem. / Every man who thinks to amend his way of life / should say these Psalms in memory of this maid. (Meredith, The Mary Play, p. 43)

24 www.newadvent.org/cathen/06718a.htm

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25 Pamela Sheingorn, ‘“The wise mother”: The Image of St Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary’, in Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, eds., Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003) pp. 105–34. 26 Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 264. 27 Alva Noe, Action in Perception (Cambridge MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004), p. 1. 28 Frances Beer, trans., Julian of Norwich Revelations (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1998). 29 Geraldine E. Hodgson, trans., Richard Rolle, The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises (London: Thomas Baker, 1910), pp. 48–49. 30 Vittorio Gallese, ‘Neuroscientific Approach to Intersubjectivity’ in T. Fuchs, H.C. Sattel, P. Henningsen, eds., The Embodied Self: Dimensions, Coherence and Disorders (Stuttgart: Schattauer, 2010), p. 82.

310

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Books and editions York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling (World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984; 2nd edition 1995). Edited with Richard Beadle. La Festa D’Elx, Elche (Alicante), Patronato de La Festa D’Elx, 1992. Co-translated and edited with Asunciòn Salvador-Rabaza Ramos. London and Europe in the Middle Ages (London: Westfield Publications in Medieval Studies, 1995). Edited with Julia Boffey. Coventry Mystery Plays (Coventry: Historical Association Publications, 1997). Chaucer: The Miller’s Tale (York Notes Advanced. London: Pearson Education, 1999). The Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000). Co-edited with Clifford Davidson. Metaphysical Poets (York Notes Advanced. London: Pearson Education, 2001). Chaucer: The Merchant’s Tale (York Notes Advanced. London: Pearson Education, 2004). The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City (Cambridge. D.S. Brewer, 2006). According to the Ancient Custom: Essays Presented to David Mills, Parts One and Two. Medieval English Theatre, 29 and 30 (for 2007 and 2008). Edited with Phil Butterworth and Meg Twycross. Medieval Literature 1300–1500 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). Yearbook of English Studies 2012: Early English Drama (London: MHRA, 2013). Edited with Sue Niebrzydowski, and Diana Wyatt. The Routledge Research Companion to Early Drama and Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2017). Editor and contributor. The Materials of Early Theatre: Sources, Images and Performance: Selected Essays by Meg Twycross (London and New York: Routledge, 2018). Edited and introduced with Sarah Carpenter. ‘Porci ante Margaritam: Essays in Honour of Meg Twycross,’ Leeds Studies in English, n.s. XXXII, 2001. Edited with Sarah Carpenter and Peter Meredith. ‘The Best Pairt of Our Play: Essays Presented to John J. McGavin. Parts One and Two,’ Medieval English Theatre 37 and 38 (for 2015 and 2016). Edited with Sarah Carpenter, Meg Twycross and Greg Walker.

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Book chapters ‘The Treasurer’s Cadaver in York Minster Reconsidered,’ The Church and Learning in Late Medieval Society, Harlaxton Medieval Studies XI, eds. Caroline M. Barron and Jenny Stratford (Ipswich: Shaun Tyas, 2002), pp. 196–209. ‘The York Cycle and Instruction on the Sacraments,’ Learning and Literacy in Medieval England and Abroad, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 3, ed. Sarah Rees-Jones (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 155–78. ‘Postscript,’ Tudor Drama before Shakespeare, 1485–1590, eds. Lloyd Kermode and Jason Scott-Warren (Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 249–56. ‘Doomsday as Hypertext: Contexts of Doomsday in Fifteenth-Century Northern Manuscripts, 2: British Library Add. MS 37049,’ Prophesy, Apocalypse and the Day of Doom: Proceedings of the 2000 Harlaxton Symposium, Harlaxton Medieval Studies XII, ed. Nigel Morgan (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2004), pp. 391–403. ‘The York Mystery Plays,’ The Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, 1350–1500, ed. Peter Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 491–506. ‘The Morality Plays,’ Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre c.1350–c.1520, revised 2nd edition, eds. Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 235–62. ‘Memorials of Ralph Woodford (d.1498), Ashby Folville, Leicestershire: the Death of the Author?’ Recording Lives in England in the Later Middle Ages: Proceedings of the 2005 Harlaxton Symposium, Harlaxton Medieval Studies XVII, eds. Julia Boffey and Virginia Davies (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2008), pp. 182–88. ‘The Drama: Sacred and Secular,’ The Companion to Medieval English Poetry, ed. Corinne Saunders (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), pp. 626–46. ‘Squads and Ha’s: Civic Space and Gender Roles in Lerwick’s Up Helly Aa,’ Gender and Fraternal Orders in Europe, 1300–2000, ed., Maire Fedelma Cross (Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), pp. 244–59. ‘Confraternities and Civic Ceremonial: The Siena Palio,’ The York Mystery Plays: Performance in the City, ed. Margaret Rogerson (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2010), pp. 181–204. ‘Lament and Elegy in Scriptural Drama: Englishing the Planctus Mariae,’ Performance, Drama and Spectacle in the Medieval City, Essays in Honour of Alan Hindley eds. Adrian P. Tudor, Mario Longtin, and Catherine Emerson (Louvain: Peeters, 2010), pp. 239–52. ‘John Heywood, The Play of the Weather,’ The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama, eds. Thomas Betteridge and Greg Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 207–23. ‘“They Have Eyes that Might not See”: Exploring Object, Display, and Gaze in Religious Drama,’ Ritual, Images and Daily Life: The Medieval Perspective, ed. Gerhard Jaritz (Münster, Vienna, London: LIT. Verlag, 2012), pp. 191–207. ‘The Passion Play in the British Isles,’ Yearbook of English Studies: Early English Drama, eds. Pamela King, Sue Niebrzydowski, and Diana Wyatt (London: MHRA, 2013), pp. 69–86. ‘Medieval English Religious Plays as Early Fifteenth-Century Vernacular Theology: The Case Against,’ ‘Diuerse Imaginaciouns of Cristes Life’: Devotional Culture in England 1300–1550, eds. Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), pp. 533–52.

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‘Rules of Exchange in Medieval English Religious Plays,’ Dialogic Analysis: Literature as Dialogue, ed. Roger Sell (Turku: John Benjamins, 2014), pp. 177–96. ‘“Medieval” and “Renaissance”: The Problems of Events, Their Records, and Their Players,’ Medieval or Early Modern? The Value of a Traditional Historical Division, ed. Ronald Hutton (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015), pp. 125–45. ‘“Introduction”, and “Manuscripts, Antiquarians, Editors, and Critics: The Historiography of Reception,”’ The Routledge Research Companion to Early Drama and Performance, ed. Pamela M. King (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 1–10; 277–95. ‘York Cycle,’ The Encyclopaedia of Medieval Literature in Britain, eds. S. Echard, R. Rouse, and R. Wiley (Oxford: Blackwell, 2017) (doi:10.1002/9781118396957. wbemlb593). ‘Biblical Drama,’ The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain, eds. S. Echard, R. Rouse, and R. Wiley (Oxford: Blackwell, 2017) (doi:10.1002/9781118396957. wbemlb594) ‘Patronage, Performativity, and Ideas of Corpus Christi,’ Renaissance College: Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in Context, c.1450–c.1600, ed. J. Watts, History of Universities Series (32/2). (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 59–80. ‘Gavin Douglas, Aesthetic Organisation, and Individual Distraction,’ Manuscript and Print in Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain, eds. Rajsic and Tamara Atkin (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2019), pp. 533–552. ‘The Coventry Playbooks,’ Early British Drama in Manuscript, eds. Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), pp. 33–54.

Journal articles ‘Eight English Memento Mori Verses from Cadaver Tombs,’ Notes and Queries, 28(6), 1981, pp. 525–26. ‘Dunbar’s The Golden Targe: A Chaucerian Masque,’ Studies in Scottish Literature, XIX, 1984, pp. 115–31. ‘The Iconography of the Wakeman Cenotaph in Tewksbury Abbey,’ Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 103, 1985, pp. 141–48. ‘La Festa d’Elx: The Festival of the Assumption of the Virgin, Elche (Alicante),’ Medieval English Theatre, 8(1), 1986, pp. 21–50. ‘Elche again: La Venida and Semana Santa,’ Medieval English Theatre, 12(1), 1990, pp. 4–20. ‘The Cadaver Tomb in England: Novel Manifestations of an Old Idea,’ Church Monuments, 5, 1990, pp. 26–38. ‘La Festa D’Elx: A Modern English Translation of the Text with Asunciòn SalvadorRabaza Ramos,’ Medieval English Theatre, 14, 1992, pp. 4–21. ‘York Plays, Urban Piety, and the Case of Nicholas Blackburn, Mercer,’ Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 232, 1995, pp. 37–50. ‘Corpus Christi, Valencia,’ Medieval English Theatre, 15, 1995 (for 1993), pp. 103–108. ‘Minority Plays: Two Interludes for Edward VI,’ (revised and expanded version) Medieval English Theatre, 15, 1995 (for 1993) pp. 87–102. ‘Beyond REED? The York Doomsday Project,’ Medieval English Theatre, 17, 1997 (for 1995), pp. 132–148.

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‘Records of Early English Drama: Reflections of a Hardened User,’ Medieval English Theatre, 17, 1997 (for 1995) pp. 52–57. ‘The York and Coventry Mystery cycles: A Comparative Model of Civic Response to Growth and Recession,’ Records of Early English Drama Newsletter, 22(1), 1997, pp. 20–25. ‘Calendar and Text: Christ’s Ministry in the York Plays and the Liturgy,’ Medium Aevum, LXVII, 1998, pp. 30–59. ‘Corpus Christi Plays and the ‘Bolton Hours’ 1: Tastes in Lay Piety and Patronage in Fifteenth-Century York,’ Medieval English Theatre, 18, 1998 (for 1996), pp. 46–62. ‘Seeing and Hearing: The Audience of Medieval Plays,’ Early Theatre, 3, 2000, pp. 155–66. ‘Corpus Christi: Valencia,’ European Medieval Drama, 4, 2000, pp. 181–205. ‘He Pleyeth Herodes upon a Scaffold Hye,’ Leeds Studies in English, XXXII, 2001, pp. 212–28. ‘York Plays and the Feast of Corpus Christi: A Reconsideration,’ Medieval English Theatre, 22, 2002 (for 2000), pp. 13–32. ‘“My Image to be Made All Naked”: Cadaver Tombs and the Commemoration of Women in Fifteenth-Century England,’ The Ricardian, XIII, 2003, pp. 294–314. ‘The York Plays in Performance: Civitas versus Templum,’ Medieval English Theatre, 24, 2005, pp. 84–97. ‘Twentieth-Century Medieval Drama Revivals and the Universities,’ Medieval English Theatre, 27, 2007 (for 2005), pp. 105–130. ‘Losing Faith in Transformation: Protestantism and Theatre,’ Mediaevalia, 29, 2008, pp. 79–94. ‘Playing Pentecost: Transformations and Texts,’ Essays on Medieval English Drama in Honour of David Mills, eds. Philip Butterworth, Pamela King, and Meg Twycross, Medieval English Theatre, 29, 2008, pp. 60–74. ‘Texts in Plays: The Case of Mankynde,’ Medieval English Theatre, 33, 2011, pp. 45–57. ‘The End of the World in Medieval English Drama,’ Apocalypse Now and Then: Prophecy and Imagination from the Anglo-Saxons to the Moderns, ed. Kathryn Banks, Literature and Theology Special, 26, 2012, pp. 384–399. ‘Poetics and Beyond: Noisy Bodies and Aural Variations in Medieval Outdoor Performance,’ The Best Pairt of Our Play: Essays Presented to John J. McGavin, Part 2, Medieval English Theatre 38 (for 2016), pp. 129–144. Reviews in: Times Literary Supplement, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Comparative Drama, The Ricardian, Times Higher Education Supplement, Theatre Notebook, Medieval English Theatre, Medium Aevum.

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Page numbers italic denote figures. Abelard, Peter 7–8, 120 allegory: general 92–99, 284, 292–293; allegorical garments for the Virgin 175, 177; classical 79; convent virtues relinquished at the Fall 71; feudal 272; Four Daughters of God, 56, 73, 302; in the Valencia procession 204, 209, 211, 215–216; tropological 45, 64 Ambrose, St 14 Ane Satire of Three Estates 269; performed in Bristol Victoria Room (1950) 259 annunciation to the Virgin Mary 3, 9, 30, 70, 121, 157, 299, 302 Anselm, St of Canterbury 6–7, 179 apostles: in English Pentecost plays 13–15, 17–19, 21, 128; in the Corpus Christi Procession, Valencia 210, 216; in the play of the Assumption of the Virgin, Festa d’Elx 142–143, 145–146, 150–151, 153, 154, 159, 162–163, 166, 193 Aquinas, St Thomas 8, 120 araceli 143, 151, 151, 152–153, 155, 157–159, 161, 161–162, 163, 165, 188, 190, 193 argument 4, 6, 10, 22, 69–70, 77–78, 83, 98, 127, 171, 187, 275; Calvinist 287; fideist 6; humanist 134; scholastic 128; seductive 90; symmetrical 130 Aristotle 7–8, 120, 295 Arnold, Richard of London 15th century 134 Ars componendi sermones (Art of Composing Sermons) 21 Arundel, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury (1396–1414) 42, 69–70, 74, 76–77, 81–83

Auerbach, Erich 271; figural reading 275–278 Augustine, St 19, 22, 39 authenticity 45, 126, 167, 185, 202, 225; emotional 27, 299; historical 176 Averroes 7–8 Bacon, Francis 89, 91, 99 Bangor 81, 264 bann-criers: New Romney Passion Play 62; N-Town 294 banns: Castle of Perseverence 272; Chester Plays 79, New Romney Passion Play 62; N-Town 53, 79, 294; post-Reformation Chester Plays 18, 20–22, 44 Barbera, Martin Dominguez, Valencian journalist 144 Bartholomew Fair 108 Bath 81 beatitudes 21 Beaumont, Francis (The Knight of the Burning Pestle) 44 Benedictus 303 Bernard, St of Clairvaux, 8, 275, 302 Bethphania (the Marriage at Cana) 21 Blackburn, Nicholas of York 40–41, 43, 45 Bodleian Library 69, 75 Bodley Burial of Christ 29, 35, 75, 120, 125; Bodley Resurrection of Christ 75 Boethius of Dacia 8 Bolton, John of York 40–41, 43 Books of Hours 40–41, 43, 303, 305 Bristol University Theatre Collection 251–252

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INDEX

Bristol: Grammar School 252; Shakespeare Festival 260; symposium 262; University Department of Drama 251, 260–261; Victoria Rooms 259 British Museum 69, 294 Brookland 61–62 Browne, E. Martin 251–253, 260–262 Bruges, procession celebrating the Holy Blood 80–81 Burnley 75 Byfleet 111 cadafalc 143, 148, 148–149, 151–152, 159, 165–166 calendar: church 195, 276; festal 14; liturgical 13, 199, 203; of Elche 176; Western 181 Cappers ‘pageant vestures’ 10 Castle of Perseverance 60, 117, 259, 269, 271–272, 274–275, 277, 280 Catholic 44, 49, 63, 284, 301; faith 280; traditionalism 176 celebrations: comic in Lusty Juventus 288; in Elche 144–146, 150, 153, 169, 172–173, 175–176, 184; in Festival of Britain 250; in Siena 231, 242; in The Goldyn Targe 90, 96, 98; in Valencia 193, 196, 199, 203–206, 213; liturgical 146; Semana Santa 177, 230; Venida 177 ceremonial: activity 234, 237–238; address in N-Town Passion 55; associations 234; building 237; burial in Elche Assumption of the Virgin play 163; cast 163; civic 81; climax 242; clothing 232; confraternities 234; costume 212; dignitaries attending Elche Assumption of the Virgin play 166; event 241; function 237; hunts 235; identities 235; in York and Coventry 232; occasion 232; quasi- 232; representatives 235; reverence 237; seriousness 133, 233; trappings 106; wagon 232, 240; year in Chester 20 Chacon, Gaspar Solar 141–142, 144 Chambers, Edmund Kerchever 102, 253, 263 Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost 70–71, 73–74, 120 Chaucer, Geoffrey 69, 90, 99, 259, 295; as Clerk of the Works 108–111; Franklin’s Tale 92; House of Fame 93; Knight’s

Tale 109, 113–114; Legend of Good Women 109; Merchant’s Tale 112; Miller’s Tale 102–114 Chester Cycle: Antichrist play 43; banns 7; Christopher Goodman’s opinion 18, 21; civic authorities 240; comparison with York Pentecost 21–23; cycle 3–4, 6, 38, 52, 102, 117, 147, 229, 294, 306–307; dating 22, 74; domination of English scholarship 52; dramatist, 43–44; early 20th century performances 250, 258; evangelism 19–20; expositor 6, 43–45; manuscripts 74, 263; pageant of Pentecost 18–21, 128; pageant of the Last Judgment comparison to York 45; Pageant of the Passion 32; pageants of Antichrist 43–45; Passion Play 32; Pentecost pageant 18, 20, 22; played at Whitsun 13, 20, 43, 75; post-Reformation Banns 18, 21; processional wagons 52; protestant authorities opposed 44–45; sources 129; uniqueness 43; wagons 202; Whitsun Play 13, 38 Chester city 22, 43, 52, 74, 102, 117, 229, 240, 250 Chichele, Henry, archbishop of Canterbury (1414–1442) 76, 81–83 Childern Langley 111 Christ’s Appearance to Mary Magdalene 124 Christian 46, 172, 175, 195–196, 205–206, 209, 213, 235; apocrypha 177, 206; art 202, 204; church 144, 195, 301; concept of creation 276; festival 204–205, 218; history 5, 299; life 46; medieval drama 275; mystery 9; mythology 206; narrative 206; primitivity 206; revelation 6; story 294; world 145; year 181; see also Judeo-Christian Christus Redivivus 119 City of God 39 clergy 27, 79, 82, 103, 105, 126, 130, 191, 212; cathedral 202, 204, 242; minster 213 Clerkenwell 108, 111 Coghill, Neville 251–253, 255–259, 261–263 Colclow, Thomas, skinner of Coventry 10 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: theory of poetry 127 Comestor, Peter 22

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INDEX

confraternities 231, 237, 242; ceremonial 234; civic 234; medieval civic 234; religious 210, 234 Constitutions of Archbishop Arundel 42, 69, 74, 78, 81–83 contrade, Siena: see Palio Cornish Creacion of the World 272 Cornish Ordinalia 22, 260; modern production 271–272 Cornish rounds 271 coronation: of King Edward VI 289; of the Virgin see Festa d’Elx Corporal Works of Mercy see Works of Corporal Mercy Corpus Christi: animate symbols of 211; feast of definition and dating 14; festival of 41, 218; guild 233; mistaken idea about relation to early English drama 38–39; movement of Chester plays from Corpus Christi to Witsun 13, 20, 43, 74–75; plays 78–79, 233, 237–238, 240; procession 78–79, 204, 207, 211, 213, 218, 232–233, 242; symbols of 211; York plays for Corpus Christi 35, 40; see also Corpus Christi plays/cycles Coventry, York; processions and plays Valencia, York costume 36, 62, 161–162, 187, 193, 202, 213, 255, 232, 258; archive 162; biblical 80; ceremonial 212; characters 79; designs 96; emblematic 64; processions 195; rural 205; stores 188; traditional 175, 193 council: City Council of York 78; civic 78; general 237; House 54; municipal 184; of Constance 41–42, 76, 81–83; of Lambeth 1281 81;of Pisa 82; of Trent 144, 146–147; Privy Council of Edward VI 282, 284, 290; UK national Arts Council 252 court: audience 114; English 96; extravaganza 89; games 93; general 214; Herod’s 4, 18, 129, 269, 277; masque 93–94, 207; of Chancery 108; of love 113; of Venus 98; pageantry 90; poets 93; Scottish 90; societies 93; Stuart 79; Tudor 281 courts: of Edward VI of England 281, 286, 288–289; of Henry VIII of England 96; of James IV of Scotland 89–90, 92–94, 97–99; of Richard II of England 113–114; royal Burgundian 48 Coventry: guilds 238–239; medieval 236

Coventry cycle 3, 38, 45; argument 6–10; civic management 230–240; comparison with Siena Palio 229–242; debate between fideistic theology and Aristotelian logic 6–10, 83; guild involvement 233, 238–239; Midsummer Show, giants 205; missing pageant Draper’s Doomsday 45; missing pageant Smith’s Passion 64; pageant houses 237; pageant routes 242; parish clerks associated 106; plays 3, 8, 10, 52, 83, 102, 107, 117, 260, 269; processions 229; rehearsals 232 Crassons, Kate 69–70, 74 creation: in Prick of Conscience 46; in York Cycle 127, 276 Creed: in Chester Cycle 18–19, 22, 128; in Higden’s Polychronicon 128; taught to young boys 301 Croo, Robert of Coventry 4–6, 10–11, 61, 238 Crucifixion: in Bodley Burial of Christ 29–30; in New Romney 62; in York Cycle 124, 277–278; in N-Town Passion Plays 33–35, 58–60; in Revelations of Julian of Norwich 305 cultural 41, 75, 113, 189–190, 196, 199, 203, 214, 274 Cur Deus Homo 6 Davidson, Audrey, translation of the Cividale text 28 De civitate Dei 22, 39 De Spirito Sancto 14–15 Derivationes 22 devotion: agenda 49; Books of Hours as sources 40–41, 303; ceremonial 166; climate 121; compendia 26; content 120; contexts 13; corporate 148; drama 119–120, 141; focus 230; illuminated manuscripts of 42; in Festa d’Elx 141, 166, 191–193; in medieval English plays 13, 18, 20, 49,118, 121, 148, 262; in Siena Palio 230–231, 234–235, 237; lay 303; leanings 185; literature 47; manuscripts 48, 303; materials 40; objects 305; picture 270; preoccupations 41; private 82; reading 303; religious 235;sources of 47–48, 75, 82, 119–120, 303; theatre 191; treatises 75; works 41 dialectic 6–9, 83; investigation 6; justifications 7

317

INDEX

Dives and Pauper 43 Dobson, R. Barry, ‘big bang theory’ 76–79 Doncaster 75 Douce, Francis, keeper of MSS at British Museum 294 drama: Biblical 45, 52, 65, 107, 275; civicsponsored 41; community 253; Corpus Christi 270, 275; devotional 119–120, 141; didactic 9; English 38, 43, 46, 65; guild 242; interactive 33; Latin 43, 102; liturgical 4, 145; medieval 52, 69, 75, 102, 118–119, 141, 167, 182, 251, 253, 257–258, 261, 275, 278, 293, 295; morality 64; multimedia 73; music- 141, 191; narrative 269; naturalistic 295; parish 107; patriotic 250; proto- 112; records 106; religious 45, 69, 102, 141, 167, 184, 213, 260–261, 269, 275, 295, 301, 307; sacred 234; scholars 69, 76; scriptural 69, 74, 120, 133, 250, 302; secular 133; specialists 27, 78; studio 251; sung 153, 163, 184, 199, 203; vernacular 29 Drapers of Coventry 10–11, 45; Domesday play 10, 238; pageants 238 Dunbar, William 89–99, 133 Dundes, Alan 237, 242 Eco, Umberto 203, 277 education: Church Councils to encourage lay 81–82; drama 259, 262; Erasmian doctrines of 287 good 289; medieval 9; of youth 280; plays as 9 Elche, Spain 141–148, 153, 158, 166, 169–177, 199, 230 Eltham 111 empathy 27, 29, 297, 299; Franciscan 20 Epiphania 21 Eucharist see Valencia evangelism 19–20 Everyman 117–118, 258, 293; performed in Bristol Shakespeare Festival (1963– 1964) 259–260 evolution 41, 143, 184–185, 187, 199 Experimental Theatre Company (ETC) 251, 280–281, 287 expositor in Chester Cycle 6, 43–44 faith: articles of 21, 41, 120, 128; in Coventry Shearmen and Taylors’ pageant 6–8, 10, 83; in players in the Assumption play of Festa d’Elx

189–190; in York performance 1951 251; of Edward VI 280–281, 287 Festa d’Elx, Assumption of the Virgin Play: aerial machines (araceli) 151, 151, 152–153, 155, 157–159, 161, 161–162, 163, 165, 188, 190, 193; authenticity 167, 176, 185–187; cooperation of clergy and laity 191; coronation of the Virgin 143, 152, 152, 154, 159, 161, 190; costumes 161–163, 187; evolution 143, 184–187, 199; mangrana 149–150, 150, 153, 156–157, 157, 188; Nit de l’alba 142, 166, 191–192, 195; Semana Santa 176–179; set cadafalc 143, 148, 148– 149, 151–152, 159, 165–166; Venida 169–177, 193–196; see also Moors and Christians Festival of Britain (1951) 64, 184, 250, 252–253, 260–263 Festival of the Assumption of the Virgin see Festa D’Elx feudal: allegiance of Elche 144; order 270; royal feudal hierarchies 242; see also allegory Fleury Play of Herod 269 Flodden 91 Folkestone 61–62 Franciscan: empathy 20; spirituality 26 Freiburg, John of 21 Fulgens and Lucrece 44, 134, 154 Gallese, Vittorio, neuroscientist 306 Garland, John of 126 Ghent, Henry of 21 Goldsmiths of York 239, 269 Good Friday: Improperia 45, 60, 123; performance on 29, 30; worship on 26–27, 297–298 Goodman, Christopher of Chester 18, 21, 75 Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew 302 Gradual Psalms 302–305 Gregory the Great 46 Grimald, Nicholas 119–120 Guest, Matthew 41, 44 Guthrie, Tyrone 252–253, 256, 261 Hallam, Robert, bishop of Salisbury (1407–1417) 81–83 Henry of Ghent 21 Hereford 39, 79, 81

318

INDEX

Hewet, James, leader of the waits of Coventry 10 Higden, Ranulf 20–23 Holy Spirit see Pentecost Holy Week 13, 195, 203; liturgy 35; processions in Elche 195; see also celebration Homo Ludens 90 Hugutio of Pisa 22 Huizinga, Johan 90 humanism: Erasmian 280–281 Hythe 61–62 illocutionary: consistency 27–28, 298; force 27; function 35 illuminations 299; see also manuscript illuminations illusion/s 43–44; between audience and actors 270, 273–274, 276–277; in Assumption Play of Festa d’Elx 154, 174; in Coventry Shearmen and Taylors pageant 5, 9; in The Goldyn Targe 91 incarnation 56; in Coventry Shearmen and Taylors pageant 5–6, 8; in N-Town Mary Play 71–73, 121–122, 302 Incendium Amoris (The Fire of Love) 120 Ingram, Reginald 10, 106 International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo 27 Isidore of Seville, author of Etymologiae 22 Ivychurch 62 John of Freiburg, author of Summa Confessorum 21 John of Genoa, author of Catholicon/Summa Grammaticalus 22 Johnston, Alexandra 107, 112 Jones, Inigo 96, 146 Jonson, Ben 96, 99; Masque of Hymen 90 Judeo-Christian tradition 39 Julian of Norwich 305 Jurats 63 Kempe, Margery 81, 218 Kennington 111 Killing of the Children 119 King Henry VI Triumphal Entry into London 92 king of Scotland James IV 89–91, 96–98 kings of England: Edward III 97, 110; Edward VI 280–283, 286–290; Henry II

145; Henry III 103, 108; Henry IV 81, 250; Henry V 82, 250, 276; Henry VI 92, 108; Henry VIII 207, 281–282, 288, 290 lament 26–35, 263, 274, 296, 298–299; extended 54; formal 296; macaronic in N-Town Mary Play 71; monologue of 125; of the Virgin Mary 26, 33–35, 125, 296–297; perlocutionary 32; stylised 27 Lancaster 82 Latimer, Hugh 283, 285–287 Lay Folks Catechism 41–42 Le Mystère de la Passion Nostre Seigneur 52 Legenda Aurea 120, 143 Leland, John 93, 96–98 Lerwick’s Up Helly Aa 230 Lewes Bonfires 230 Libellus de Antichristo 43 Lichfield 81 Linacer, Thomas of Coventry 10 liturgy/liturgical 13–14, 16–19, 27, 29, 35–36, 81, 106–107, 125–126, 128, 133, 145, 166, 174, 184, 199, 203, 215, 269, 297–299, 301, 303, 304–306; in the N-Town Mary Play 299, 305–306; singing 81; Vespers 145; see also planctus Lollard crackdown by Archbishop Arundel 42, 82; Nicholas Love’s opposition 14 Lombard, Peter 73, 118, 120 Lomperis, Linda 111, 113 London 3, 42, 61–62, 75, 81, 92, 97, 102–104, 108–109, 112, 114, 134, 250, 258, 262, 293 Love, Nicholas 14, 19–20, 22, 70, 73–74, 76–78, 120, 122, 126 Lucerne 61 Lusty Juventus 280–281, 284, 286–287 Lydd 61–62 Lydgate, John, poet 92–93, 95 Mackinnon, Alan, founder of OUDS 254, 256 Magnificat 73, 126, 128, 299–301, 303 Magnificence 131, 280 Mallorca Island, Spain 143, 145 mangrana 149–150, 150, 153, 156–157, 157, 188 Mankind 46, 83, 117 129, 131, 280 Manipulis curatorum 21

319

INDEX

manuscript illuminations 199, 271; of the Virgin and Elizabeth mother of John the Baptist 299 Marian festivals 184; material 74; themes 141; tradition 145 Masons: Siena 235; York 239, 269 masque 89–90, 93–94, 96–99; anti- 99, 153; poetic 99; Renaissance 207; Stuart 79, 98 Maundy Thursday 26 medieval religious drama: types of 45, 52; Biblical 65, 69, 74, 107, 133; Passion Plays 65; Corpus Christi 270, 275; morality 64; played in parishes 107; sung 153, 163, 184, 199, 203; nineteenth-century scholars 69; see also Chester, Coventry, devotion, Festa d’Elx, N-Town, Towneley/Wakefield, York, Valencia Meditationes Jesu Christi 19, 73, 120 Meditationes vitae Christi 19, 73 Medwall, Henry 44, 134–135 Meredith, Peter 53, 60, 70, 75 Middle Ages 119, 133, 143, 175, 177, 181, 202–203, 205, 225, 232, 242, 263, 293; early 60; late 3, 26, 69, 102, 205, 229; Latin 8; western 6 Middle English 26, 60, 107, 232 midsummer 13, 16, 205, 207; in Chester 20, 43; Midsummer Shows 205 Mills, David 20, 43 mime 73, 125, 151, 259, 274 Mimesis 275 mimetic 73, 80–81, 90, 92–94, 96, 184, 191, 193–194, 196–197, 213, 273 Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ 14, 20, 55, 70, 72, 74, 76, 78, 120, 122 Misterio de Valencia 143 Moors (Moslems) 144–146; reconversion of southern Spain 144 Moors and Christians 205; see also Festa d’Elche mummers 216 mumming 92, 201, 205, 216 music 15, 18, 81–82, 126–128, 130, 142, 145–147, 153, 167, 172, 186–187, 189–190, 193, 204–205, 208, 261, 301, 305; ancient 130; background 200; -drama 141, 191; element 145; history 185; instruments 208; modern 126; monodic 146; organ 150–151, 153, 167; polyphonic 146; services 10; settings

27; singing 15, 145–147, 153, 188–190, 301, 305; teachers 261; verbal 125; see also Assumption of the Virgin Play, Festa d’Elx, Venida mythology 93; Christian 206 nativity 76; in Coventry 3–5, 9, 260; in Towneley 260; see also N-Town Plays, Towneley/Wakefield Plays, York Cycle Nature 134 New Romney town 60–61, 63; see also Passion Play New Testament: Matthew 18, 21, 39, 45, 210, 212; Luke 26, 210, 280, 300; John 16–17, 27–28, 30–35, 48, 150–151, 167, 177, 190, 208, 210, 212, 296; Acts 16, 18, 21; I Corinthians 6, 13; Colossians 6; Revelations 39, 208, 211–212, 305 New Winchelsea 61 Nice Wanton 280–281, 286, 288–289 Nicoll, Allardyce 257, 262 N-Town manuscript BL Cotton Vespasian D. 8, 53, 293, 306; as a ‘faux cycle’ 38; as a compilation 117; as reading text 303–304; comparison with New Romney play 60–65; comparison with York plays 77–78; date 295; discussion 70–74, 119, 121–123, 126; discussion of 53–60, 296–299; east Anglian origin 117, 299; mistaken name 294; Passion Plays 31–32; Pentecost Play 14, 17; the Mary Play 56, 299–303 Nunc Dimittis 303 Oculis Sacerdotis 21 Old Testament: Exodus 13, 177, 208; Numbers 4; Deuteronomy 13; 2 Samuel 103; Isaiah 4, 76, 208; Ezekiel 22, 208, 210 Owst, G. R. 21 Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS) 253, 255–257, 259 pageant 4, 10, 14, 16–20, 22, 33, 40–41, 46, 52–54, 56, 79–80, 82, 173, 200, 232–233, 239–240, 242, 264, 293, 306–307; in Chaucer’s House of Fame 93; numbering episodes in N-Town manuscript as pageants 53; pageant as an entire civic event 232; pageant as group of non-speaking costumed

320

INDEX

characters 79; pageant length in Wakefield 133; pageant of the Last Supper in Bruges 80; pageants as sequential sequence 65; pageants processional 35, 60; Potters’ 15; see also Chester, Coventry, N-Town, Towneley/ Wakefield, York pageant masters 10, 41–42, 62, 106, 238 pageant wagons 15, 58, 199, 200, 203–204, 237, 269, 270, 277; pageant as wagon 80; pageant wagons of Valencia 199–202 pageantry: civic 234; in Festa d’Elx Venida 173, 203; in The Goldyn Targe 96–97 Pagula, William 21 Palio, Siena, ceremony 232–233, 235, 238, 40; comparison with Leuven’s procession 240; confraternities 231, 237; contrade 234–235, 237–238; extended family 242; occupational correlation aquila (eagle) 235, 243–245; bruco (caterpillar) 235, 241, 243–244, 247; chioccola (snail) 235, 245–247; civetta (owl) 235, 243, 245, 247; drago (dragon) 235, 243–244; giraffa (giraffe) 235, 245, 247; istrice (porcupine) 235, 244, 247; leoncorno (unicorn) 247; lupa (wolf) 235, 247; nicchio (shell) 235, 244, 246–247, oca (swan) 235, 245, 247; onda (wave) 235, 244, 246–247; pantera (panther) 235, 243, 245; tartuca (tortoise) 235, 244, 246; valdimontone (ram) 244, 247; priests blessing horses 233; religious confraternities 210 Parisiana Poetria 126 Parry, David 271, 278 passion 52–53; French 56; in Festa d’Elx Semana Santa 177; narrative 26–27, 64 Passion d’Arras 52 Passion de Arnaul Gréban 52 Passion Plays: in N-Town manuscript 26, 31, 35, 45, 52–60, 65, 259, 294, 296–299, 302; New Romney, Passion Play 45, 53, 60–65; see also Chester, Towneley/Wakefield, York Pearsall, Derek 107, 109 Pentecost 13–15, 129; feast of 63; resonances 15; Spirit at 16 Pentecost Plays: Chester 18–23, 128; N-Town manuscript 14, 17; Towneley/ Wakefield 13; York 14–18

perlocutionary 27, 29–30, 32, 34, 298 Petersen, Nils Holger 298 Phagophania (the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes) 21 Piers Plowman 126, 273 piety: affective 31, 36; Erasmian, 282; lay 45, 82, 120; medieval 45 planctus 26–27, 29–35, 59, 125, 151, 297–299 players: 16th century touring 281; Hamlet’s advice to the players 3; in a performance of Noah’s Flood in 1934 258–259; in N-Town Pasion Play 2, 57; in the New Romney Passion Play 61, 63; modern performances Surrey Community 250–251; of OUDS 256; of the York Mercers’ guild 233; Pilgrim Players 250; relation to audience 270 playhouses 262, 293; commercial 38, 293 playwarden in New Romney 53, 62 Poetria Nova 125 poetry: in The Goldyn Targe 90, 92–93; performance 98–99, 118–119, 125–129, 133–135 politics: early 15th century 83; ecclesiastical 14; Spanish 186–187 Polychronicon 20–21 post-Reformation Government Actions: Act of Supremacy (1534) 281; Act of Uniformity (1549) 284 Preston 75; Preston Guild 230 Prick of Conscience 42–43, 45–46 Pride of Life 117, 280 processions: Corpus Christi 38, 78–79; English civic 229; in Chaucer’s House of Fame (see also Coventry, York); in Dublin 79; in Elche 145, 166, 169, 172, 174–175, 185, 193–194; in Hereford 79; in Seville 177; in Siena 239–240; in Valencia 204–218; public 82; religious 195; Roman 253; Spanish 197; successive 93 Processus Prophetorum 4 prophecy 4, 9, 26, 30, 33, 39–40, 211 prophets’ dialogue: see Coventry protestant 22, 40, 44–45, 83, 264, 280–283, 288–289 protestantism 20–21, 283, 285 Protevangelium 302 puritan 18, 62, 75

321

INDEX

queen of Scotland Margaret Tudor 95–98 queens of England: Catherine Parr 282, 288; Katherine of Aragon 96; Mary Tudor 75 Quhone he list to feyne 93, 97 Records of Early English Drama (REED) 53, 65, 69–70, 107, 117, 133, 253–254, 270, 293 Reformation 18, 43, 49, 103–104, 106, 117, 281, 289; early 280; post- 32, 44, 281, 301; pre- 21, 106, 229; see also banns Renaissance 90, 144, 146, 205, 257; antimasque 207; emblem book 200, 204; Italian 237 resurrection of Christ 13, 18, 30–31, 33, 35, 124–125; see also York revival 42, 61, 174, 204, 250–253, 260–261, 263; aristocratic 176; intelligent 255; Romantic 176; theatrical 255 revivals of medieval English plays in 20th century: in early years 250–264; 1961 London plays from the Towneley manuscript 262; 1977 Toronto 271, 287; 1980s London by Tony Harrison 42 Rolle, Richard 73, 118, 120, 305 Roman Catholic 44, 49, 63, 176, 280, 284, 301 Romance of the Rose 90 Rosser, G. 234–235 Ruiz, Pedro Ibarra 173, 177 Rye 61, 65 Sandwich 61, 63 Sanz, Cristobal 141, 172 Sargent, Michael 73, 75 Scafi, Alessandro 39, 42 scholarship: in medieval drama 253, 261–262; international 188 Scott, Tom 90, 97 Selkirk Border Ridings 230 Selva (forest) 235, 245–246 Semana Santa see Festa d’Elx semantics 128, 233, 240, 271 Seville, Spain 176–178, 213, 215, 230 Shakespeare, William 44, 63, 250, 253, 259–260, 276, 293, 295, 301; A Winter’s Tale 44 Sheen 111 Siena, Italy 229, 233–236, 238–240

Siger of Brabant 8 Skelton, John 130–131, 280 Smithfield 108–109, 111, 114 Southern, Richard 251–252, 262, 271–272 Speculum curatorum 21 Speculum humanae salvationis (The Mirror of Man’s Salvation) 26 Stanislavski, Constantin, emotional authenticity 27, 299 Stanzaic Life of Christ 20–21, 74, 129 Summa confessorum 21 symbols 177, 204; in Valencian procession 204–212, 269; see also allegory Tamarit, Spain 173–174, 194 Tewkesbury: Festival (1935) 259; Music Festival (1957–1958) 262 The Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost 70, 120 The Croxton Play of the Sacrament 44 The Floure and the Leaf 93, 97 The Golden Legend 14–15, 17, 19, 21, 129 The Goldyn Targe 89–99 The Mirour of Mans Saluacioune 26 The Mumming at Hertford 92 The Myroure of Oure Ladye 130 The Mysteries 42 The Romance of the Rose 90 The Venida see Festa d’Elx theatrical 10, 14, 44, 64–65, 75, 77–79, 81–82, 102, 108, 112, 113, 127, 148, 161, 166, 199, 238, 251, 255, 262, 264, 269–270, 273–275, 277; 289, 295; amateur at Clerkenwell 111, 114; angels’ wings 161; benefactors 257; challenging 60; devices 131; disaster 258; history Festa d’Elx 153, 195; illusion 44; imagination 13; impresarios pageant masters as 238; William Poel, Nugent Monck and E. Martin Browne as innovators 253; work, La Venida de la Virgen (1855) 172 theatricality of Antichrist: in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale 111; in Chester 43 theological: 47–49; 15th century orthodoxy 23; emphasis in Chester Pentecost 20; in debates Mankind, Wisdom and Shearmen and Taylors Pageant in Coventry 83; in laments and elegies 32, 34, 38; justification in the Four Daughters of God scene in the N-Town Mary Play 302; meaning of

322

INDEX

Venida see Festa d’Elx vernacular theology 22, 64, 69, 71, 120–121, 123, 127–128 Vespra 142, 148, 151, 153, 160, 163, 166, 176, 193–194 Vinsauf, Geoffrey 125 virtues 21, 71, 205, 272–273; cardinal 209 Visio Lazari 47–49 Voragine, Jacobus de 18; The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints 120

N-Town Passion Play 2 296; moment that produced the N-Town Mary Play 74–75; monastic tradition 120; offence of dramatizing the Nativity 4; Reformation 44; sophistication and innovation of N-Town dramatist 56, 70; symbols in Valencia Corpus Christi procession 207–212; York Potters’ Pentecost Pageant 13–18 theology 128; Augustinian 39; Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas 8; fideistic 6–10; men involved in fideistic debate: Sts Anselm of Canterbury, Augustine 6; scholastic 120; Thomas Arundel’s Constitutions 42, 69, 74, 76, 81–83; see also vernacular theology Theophania (the Baptism) 21 Thoresby of York, Archbishop 42, 74 Tindari, Sicily 177 Torre (tower) 235, 244–246 tournament 109, 114, 253; in The Goldyn Targe 90–91, 94–98; 109; 114; medieval 238; see also allegory Towneley/Wakefield cycle 4; 1958 production 262; 1994 edition 133; character of Pilate 260; Creation and Fall pageant 250; first Shepherd’s pageant, 307; Judgment pageant 46–47, 129, 132; manuscript 13, 38, 117, 263; Noah pageant, ark, character of Noah’s wife 307; Passion pageant 33; presentation of Christ 123; Raising of Lazarus pageant 47; second Shepherd’s pageant 133, 260, 307; town of Wakefield 262 transubstantiation 14, 44; in York Pentecost 22; Nativity 77 Tretise on Mystery Playing 43 Trinity 8, 14, 42, 122; in La Festa d’Elx Assumption Play 143, 152, 156, 159, 161, 162, 188, 190; in Valencia Corpus Christi procession 210; in York and Chester Pentecost plays 18–19, 71 Tutivillus 130–131, 280 Twycross, Meg 79–80, 211–212, 270, 273–274

war: Civil War (1936–1941) 148, 184, 186–189, 197; English 17th century Civil War 148; First World War 255; Second World War 250–253, 255–257, 263; War of Independence (1813) 172; War of the Two Pedros 142, 144–145 Westminster 110–111 Whitsun 14, 18, 22, 38, 232; see also Chester Wickham, Glynne. 10, 95, 97–98, 251–260, 262–264, 269 William of Auvergne 21–22 Winchelsea 63 Winchester 81–82, 262, 282 Wisdom 45, 51, 117, 128, 120, 280 Woolf, Rosemary 13, 18, 23, 55 Works of Corporal Mercy 40–42, 128, 235; depicted in window of All Saints North Street, York 40–41

Valencia city 143, 145, 153, 158, 203–205, 208–218, 230 Valencia Corpus Christi procession and plays 204–227; costumes 213; treatment of the Eucharist 205, 207–209, 211–213

York city 22, 39–43, 52, 74, 76–77, 79, 81, 102, 106, 147–148, 213, 218, 229, 232–233, 238, 240–242, 250, 260, 262, 293 York Cycle 3, 13–15, 35, 107, 117, 147–148; 1951 production 64, 250, 252, 260, 263; 1977 production in Toronto 271; adaption of text 251; Barkers’ Creation and Fall of Lucifer pageant 38, 127, 240, 275; Butchers’ pageant of the Death of Christ 34, 123–124; Carpenters’ Resurrection pageant 128; civic control 233, 240; comparison to Corpus Christi Procession in Valencia 213; comparison to East Window of Yorkminster 39; comparison with Chester 18–20, 22; comparison with Chester Judgement 45; comparison with play in Fleury 269; comparison with Siena Palio 233, 235, 238; comparison with Towneley/Wakefield Judgement

323

INDEX

46; consideration of the ‘climax’ of Corpus Christi celebrations 233; Coopers’ Man’s Disobedience pageant, 128; Corpus Christi celebrations: date established by Easter 14; creation of text 82; dating 22, 38, 74, 76, 78–80 (see also Barry Dobson), 262; deleted ‘Fergus’ pageant (Masons’ Funeral of the Virgin pageant) 151, 239; domination of English scholarship 52; dramatist 77–78; evolution 41; feasting 233; Girdlers’ and Nailers’ pageant of the Slaughter of the Innocent 34; Listers’ Christ’s Trial before Herod pageant 129; manuscript/register 38, 41, 43–44, 75–76, 78; Marshalls’ pageant of the Flight into Egypt 34; Masons’ and Goldsmiths’ Herod and Magi double (Epiphany) pageant 80, 239, 269; Mercers’ 1433 Indenture 41–42, 62, 237; Mercers’ Judgment pageant 40, 240; Mercers’ pageant masters 238; music in the York Plays 81; Old

Testament sequence 120–121; Ordo Paginarum A/Y Memorandum Book 40, 69, 76–78, 239; performed in 1958 259; Pinners’ and Painters’ Crucifixion pageant 60, 123, 277–278; Potters’ Pentecost pageant 13–18; processional performances 269, 293–294; processions 242; rehearsals of pageants 232; relationship to civic Corpus Christi Procession 75, 78, 81; Saddlers’ Harrowing of Hell pageant 307; separation of procession from pageants 233; sequential pattern 4; Shearmens’ Road to Calvary 34; Shipwright’s Building of the Ark pageant, 260; sources 14, 20–22, 45, 76–77, 123; text date 82; Tile-Thatchers’ Nativity pageant 76–77; treatment of planctus 34–35; Trial pageants 129, 240; wagons 52; Winedrawers’ Christ’s appearance to Mary Magdalen pageant 128; women’s involvement 213–214, 218 Young, Karl 26, 263

324