Enacting the Bible in medieval and early modern drama 9781526131607

Table of contents :
Front matter
Contents
List of figures
List of contributors
Introduction
Part I: Medieval drama
Lay piety and impiety: the role of Noah’s wife in the Chester play of Noah’s Flood
Typology, community, and stagecraft in the N-Town ‘Trial of Mary and Joseph’
Embodiment and joint attention: an enactive reading of the Middle English cycle plays
Part II: From medieval to early modern drama
From medieval to early modern choric threnody in biblical plays
The itinerant healer as a stage role: its origins in religious drama
Citing scripture in late medieval and early modern English morality drama
Religious violence and dramatic innovation in the Tudor interlude: John Heywood’s The Pardoner and the Friar
Elizabethan biblical drama
Part III: Early modern drama
Protestant place, Protestant props in the plays of Nicholas Grimald
Staging prophecy: A Looking Glasse for London and the Book of Jonah
Early modern dramatic martyrdom
‘Samson Figuru nese’: biblical plays between Czech drama and English comedy in early modern Central Europe
To play the Fool: the Book of Esther in early modern biblical drama
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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ENACTING THE BIBLE IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN DRAMA

Series editors: Anke Bernau, David Matthews and James Paz Series founded by: J. J. Anderson and Gail Ashton

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Advisory board: Ruth Evans, Patricia C. Ingham, Andrew James Johnston, Chris Jones, Catherine Karkov, Nicola McDonald, Sarah Salih, Larry Scanlon and Stephanie Trigg Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture publishes monographs and essay collections comprising new research informed by current critical methodologies on the literary cultures of the Middle Ages. We are interested in all periods, from the early Middle Ages through to the late, and we include post-medieval engagements with and representations of the medieval period (or ‘medievalism’). ‘Literature’ is taken in a broad sense, to include the many different medieval genres: imaginative, historical, political, scientific, religious. While we welcome contributions on the diverse cultures of medieval Britain and are happy to receive submissions on Anglo-Norman, Anglo-Latin and Celtic writings, we are also open to work on the Middle Ages in Europe more widely, and beyond. Titles available in the series 16. Nonhuman voices in Anglo-Saxon literature and material culture James Paz 17. The church as sacred space in Middle English literature and culture Laura Varnam 18. Aspects of knowledge: Preserving and reinventing traditions of learning in the Middle Ages   Marilina Cesario and Hugh Magennis (eds) 19. Visions and ruins: Cultural memory and the untimely Middle Ages   Joshua Davies 20. Participatory reading in late-medieval England   Heather Blatt 21. Affective medievalism: Love, abjection and discontent   Thomas A. Prendergast and Stephanie Trigg 22. Performing women: Gender, self, and representation in late-medieval Metz   Susannah Crowder 23. The politics of Middle English parables: Fiction, theology, and social practice   Mary Raschko 24. Contemporary Chaucer across the centuries   Helen M. Hickey, Anne McKendry and Melissa Raine (eds) 25. Borrowed objects and the art of poetry: Spolia in Old English verse   Denis Ferhatović 26. Rebel angels: Space and sovereignty in Anglo-Saxon England   Jill Fitzgerald 27. A landscape of words: Ireland, Britain and the poetics of space, 700–1250   Amy Mulligan 28. Household knowledges in late-medieval England and France   Glenn D. Burger and Rory G. Critten (eds) 29. Practising shame: Female honour in later medieval England   Mary C. Flannery 30. Dating Beowulf: Studies in intimacy   Daniel C. Remein and Erica Weaver (eds) 31. Enacting the Bible in medieval and early modern drama Eva von Contzen and Chanita Goodblatt (eds)

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Enacting the Bible in medieval and early modern drama EDITED BY EVA VON CONTZEN AND CHANITA GOODBLATT

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2020

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While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. An electronic version of chapter 9 is also available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) licence, thanks to the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation, which permits non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction provided the editor(s), chapter author and Manchester University Press are fully cited and no modifications or adaptations are made. Details of the licence can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN  978 1 5261 3159 1  hardback

First published 2020

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Front cover— Bodleian Library MS. Bodl. 264, fol. 21v, photo Bodleian Libraries Typeset by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

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Contents

List of figures List of contributors Introduction Chanita Goodblatt and Eva von Contzen Part I:  Medieval drama 1 Lay piety and impiety: the role of Noah’s wife in the Chester play of Noah’s Flood Lawrence Besserman 2 Typology, community, and stagecraft in the N-Town ‘Trial of Mary and Joseph’ Jonathan Stavsky 3 Embodiment and joint attention: an enactive reading of the Middle English cycle plays Eva von Contzen Part II:  From medieval to early modern drama 4 From medieval to early modern choric threnody in biblical plays Silvia Bigliazzi 5 The itinerant healer as a stage role: its origins in religious drama M. A. Katritzky 6 Citing scripture in late medieval and early modern English morality drama Cathy Shrank 7 Religious violence and dramatic innovation in the Tudor interlude: John Heywood’s The Pardoner and the Friar Greg Walker

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13 28 43

65 81 104

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8 Elizabethan biblical drama Paul Whitfield White

135

Part III:  Early modern drama 9 Protestant place, Protestant props in the plays of Nicholas Grimald 157 Elisabeth Dutton 10 Staging prophecy: A Looking Glasse for London and the Book of Jonah 175 Hannibal Hamlin 11 Early modern dramatic martyrdom 192 Monika Fludernik 12 ‘Samson Figuru nese’: biblical plays between Czech drama and English comedy in early modern Central Europe 211 Pavel Drábek 13 To play the Fool: the Book of Esther in early modern biblical drama 232 Chanita Goodblatt Bibliography 253 Index 281

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Figures

The Marys buying spices, carved stone capital, c. 1190–1220, Cugat Monastery, Sant Cugat del Vallés (cloister, South Capital 4N b). Photograph copyright: www.monestirs.cat page 83 5.2 Anon. Italian, St Mary Magdalen buying spices, manuscript illumination, mid-fourteenth century, in St Bonaventure, Meditations on the life of Christ. MS CCC 410, fol. 147r, Corpus Christi College, Oxford. By permission of the President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford (photo courtesy Harriet Patrick) 84 5.3 Anon. Italian, The Marys preparing spices, manuscript illumination, mid-fourteenth century, in St Bonaventure, Meditations on the life of Christ. MS CCC 410, fol. 147v, Corpus Christi College, Oxford. By permission of the President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford (photo courtesy Harriet Patrick) 85 5.4 Christ expelling the traders from the Temple (detail: ‘The Toothdrawer’), late sixteenth century, oil on panel, Kadrioru Kunstimuuseum, Kadriorg Palace, Tallinn, Eesti Kunstimuuseumi 86 8.1 Samson Carrying the Gates of Gaza. Woodcut by Virgil Solis. Bishops’ Bible (London: Richard Jugge, 1568) 136 12.1 Komedia o Králi Šalamúnovi (‘The Comedy of King Solomon’), Prague, 1604. Collection of the National Museum, National Museum Library, 27 F 7, Prague, Czech Republic 213 12.2 Komedie Česká O ctné a šlechetné Vdově Jůdýth (‘A Czech comedy of the virtuous and noble widow Judith’), Prague, 1605. Collection of the 5.1

viii Figures

12.3

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13.1

13.2 13.3

National Museum, National Museum Library, 27 F 7, Prague, Czech Republic Historia duchovní o Samsonovi (The Sacred History of Samson), Prague, 1608. Collection of the National Museum, National Museum Library, 27 F 7, Prague, Czech Republic A German Fool (Narr). Reproduction of an old German print in Francis Douce, Illustrations of Shakespeare, and of Ancient Manners (London: Thomas Tegg, 1839), plate IV. Courtesy of Robarts Library, University of Toronto A Fool. Washington Haggadah (1478). Courtesy of the Library of Congress The Historye of Queen Ester, of King Ahasverus and of the Haughty Haman. Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre 2009. Reproduced with the permission of Vít Hořejš and Jonathan Slaff

218

221

235 236

237

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Contributors

The late Lawrence Besserman was Professor Emeritus of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Silvia Bigliazzi is Professor of English Literature at the University of Verona, Italy. Pavel Drábek is Professor of Drama and Theatre Practice at the University of Hull, United Kingdom. Elisabeth Dutton is Professor of Medieval English at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Monika Fludernik is Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Chanita Goodblatt is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Hannibal Hamlin is Professor of English at the Ohio State University, USA. M. A. Katritzky is Barbara Wilkes Research Fellow in Theatre Studies at the Open University, United Kingdom. Cathy Shrank is Professor of Tudor and Renaissance Literature at the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom. Jonathan Stavsky is Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University, Israel.

x Contributors

Eva von Contzen is Junior Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg, Germany.

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Greg Walker is Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom. Paul Whitfield White is Professor of Renaissance Literature at Purdue University, USA.

Introduction

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Chanita Goodblatt and Eva von Contzen

This collection brings together international scholars working on the enactment of biblical themes and narratives in European drama from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries. Scholarly attention paid to the connection between drama and the Bible has revealed their interpretive relationship.1 Presented on stage, biblical themes and narratives can exert an influence quite different from that of written forms of intellectual and theological debate, and can comment on these debates from a perspective that literally gives voice to a range of positions and opinions. Within this context, the present volume offers a sustained focus on biblical drama, as it developed from the medieval to the early modern periods. Over the last decade or so, the study of the Bible in relation to drama has gained a central position in scholarship. A number of noteworthy publications highlight the impact of biblical material on drama. These studies pay particular attention to the question of how the changing parameters – not only religious, but also social, cultural, and political – within the late medieval and the early modern period were negotiated in and through drama.2 Our collection is firmly set in this trajectory and seeks to broaden the horizon of the existing scholarship. The structure of this collection is chronological: we move from the medieval mystery and cycle plays, to early modern drama and baroque influences. This arrangement, though somewhat conventional, is but the framework within which we distinguish three primary dimensions: the first two involve the spatio-temporal, manifested in specific multitemporal and transnational aspects; the third is conceptual, pertaining to aspects of performance and form. The historical dates of plays and events thereby provide but the benchmark for our scrutiny of very complex intertwined processes that have as their focal point the Bible – or in a wider sense, biblical material – and its uses and functions in drama.

2 Introduction

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Multitemporality Whenever the Bible is used in plays, several temporalities are simultaneously present. There is the time-frame of the biblical events, which may be anchored in a historical context to a greater or lesser extent (David’s Kingship or the Nativity, for instance, can evoke a specific historical context, whereas extracts from the Psalms or Paul’s Epistles may not). There is also the contemporaneous context in which plays are set – the actual context of the performance, the present moment of acting, and audience involvement. These references to and uses of the Bible generate a multitemporality of events, which is often further enriched by intertextual links and references to various political or historical events, both past and present. In discussing these connections and layers in their chapters, our contributors collectively make a case for a flexible, continuous framework of the pre-modern that extends from the late medieval to the early modern period. The development of biblical drama is not perceived as constituting a single coherent and consistent process; rather, dramatic traditions from the medieval and early modern periods are seen as existing side by side during the Reformation. We therefore situate this volume in the ongoing debates of what constitutes ‘the pre-modern’, and to what extent it may be liberating to go beyond the established boundaries of periodisation that inhibit rather than foster our understanding of cultural processes.3 Transnationality The flexible temporal dimension is complemented by a broad spatial one, as this volume attends to what Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson have recently termed ‘transnational’ perspectives.4 We cross religious and cultural boundaries – from the revitalisation of Catholic liturgical practices for the medieval lay audience outside Church venues, to the Protestant effort to translate and interpret the Bible, and then to the mutually enjoyed popular performances in the Christian and Jewish communities. The different chapters thus cover a wide range of linguistic and cultural dimensions: languages (Latin, English, German, Czech, Yiddish); dramatic traditions (cycle plays, popular drama, marionettes); and religious cultures (Catholic, Protestant, Jewish). This opens up the opportunity for a highly international approach – fostered by the international character of the scholars themselves – that raises larger questions about religious and cultural relations among the Christian countries of northern Europe, as well as between Christian and Jewish communities. In

Introduction

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doing so, the volume as a whole thus calls into question binaries (e.g. Catholic–Protestant, Christian–Jewish, popular–professional theatre), which may seem to exist; in reality, the categories are very often overlapping and integrative. What is more, this volume is characterised by an ongoing effort to highlight the complex interaction of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English plays within their religious contexts. Performance and form The third focus of this volume resides in its emphasis on performance and form. The various enactments of biblical themes and narratives are discussed from different theoretical perspectives, which illuminate the parameters of the performance itself (or the possibility of performance, as far as it can be reconstructed or assumed). Our contributors use both established approaches (new historicist; source study) as well as more experimental ones (narratological; cognitive) in order to scrutinise the performativity of the plays in relation to their biblical material.5 Closely related to the question of performance is that of form: which functions can be ascertained for the various forms and formal arrangements employed in the plays in order to convey their message? As Caroline Levine argues, dramatic form inherently affords the negotiation of political and ethical issues because it is by definition built on presentation, argumentation, and description.6 Discussions of performance and form are linked with more general questions of the enactment of religious concepts. Are there discernible differences between Catholic and Protestant plays and their approaches to the biblical material in terms of speech, perspective, or scene?7 To what extent does the Bible function as a means of negotiating (criticising, debating, supporting) a particular religious concept and its contemporary relevance? Ultimately, these chapters argue that biblical plays are much more than either straightforward religious instruction, or the reprising of salvation history, or the subversion of religious hegemony. In conclusion, this volume opens up new horizons for the study of biblical drama by putting special emphasis on a framework that capitalises on the dimensions of multitemporality and transnationalism, as well as that of performance and formin relation to the uses of the Bible in medieval and early modern drama. These three dimensions are not to be treated as separate or distinct phenomena, but rather as intertwined: we discuss biblical material in a wider European context of genres, audiences, and religious debates; particular modalities of

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4 Introduction

performance evolve, adapt, and are re-created as they intersect with different historical times and circumstances. Our three dimensions relate to aspects such as dramatic traditions, confessional and religious rites, dogmas and debates, conceptualisations of performance, and audience response – whenever the Bible is evoked for performative purposes. In doing so, we offer a perspective that decentralises the focus on the English tradition (in particular Shakespeare and a few other playwrights), and is also conceptually innovative by drawing on a range of approaches and methods. Read side by side, our contributions demonstrate the breadth and depth of the Bible and its dramatic realisations in Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish cultures across Europe. The chapters The thirteen chapters in the present volume are divided into three parts. In the first part, titled ‘Medieval drama’, the focus is on English mystery plays preserved in the Towneley, Chester, York, and N-Town Cycles. Lawrence Besserman discusses the role of Noah’s wife – a voiceless cipher in the biblical account – as a radical, impious questioning of both patriarchal and divine authority. He argues that in the performative foregrounding of this character, her refusal to board the Ark can be seen as coinciding with the emergence of outspoken female critics (e.g. Margery Kempe, Joan White, anonymous female Lollard ‘preachers’) of a male-dominated Church hierarchy. For his part, Jonathan Stavsky analyses the representation of Jewish–Christian relations in the N-Town ‘Trial of Mary and Joseph’. He situates this play within a wide intertextual context, including the Apocryphal source and its Middle English retellings. Considered in this way, Stavsky proposes that the play offers a nuanced vision of Christianity’s roots, as it translates salvation history to fifteenth-century East Anglia in order to forge a just community capable of resisting scandalmongers. In the final chapter of this part, Eva von Contzen discusses the enactment of the Creation, the Fall, and the Nativity. She focuses on the concept of ‘joint attention’ through which characters not only act out – literally embody – the events from the Bible, but also invite the audience to imagine the actions in an active, experiential way. By means of this strategy, the plays interpret the shared humanity of Christ in a very literal, experiential sense for the audience and believer. In these three chapters, English medieval drama is presented as enactments of central contemporaneous Christian issues, with the plays

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Introduction

5

both redefining and intensifying biblical situations, characters, and beliefs. The five chapters in the volume’s second part illuminate the transition between medieval and early modern biblical drama. The first three chapters focus on illustrating the shared characteristics of plays from these two periods. Silvia Bigliazzi traces the development of lamentation scenes through different patterns of chorality. She first devotes special attention to the laments of the three Marys in the York and Towneley Cycles. Bigliazzi then discusses George Peele’s early modern play, The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe, in which the two formal Choruses comprise a religious device subservient to a political design of male power. Thus this play ultimately demonstrates how female pathos is no longer part of the tragic ritual. M. A. Katritzky studies the evolving changes to the ‘merchant scene’ in European (French, Catalan, Romansh, Latin, and German) plays. This scene specifically relates to the Holy Women’s Visitatio Sepulchri, developed from Gospel accounts of the Marys’ visit to the tomb of Christ. Katritzky considers this scene in juxtaposition with significant manuscript and stone images, thereby underlining how it intersects with evolving traditions of the biblical stage as it absorbs and reflects varied historical, political, religious, and transnational influences. Cathy Shrank’s chapter also bridges the two periods by considering the impact of citing scripture in fifteenth-century English morality drama. She studies its evolution from a genre that focuses on the psychomachia of the individual human soul to one that maps a struggle for the soul of the nation. Furthermore, Shrank explores what happens to biblical quotations – and the language in which they are cited – and how they are used to establish the ethos of characters in performance after the Reformation. The subsequent two chapters discuss biblical drama in Reformation England. Greg Walker discusses John Heywood’s The Pardoner and the Friar, focusing on a confrontation between a seemingly evangelical friar and a corrupt pardoner. He argues that Heywood’s innovative dramatisation of a specific incident from the early English Reformation is a means of powerfully embodying the jarring nature of contemporary religious controversy. Walker also argues that beyond the linguistic and physical disorientation, the interlude pursues a deliberate affective strategy, cueing audience responses to shift several times through the evolving drama to powerful creative effect. In the final chapter of this part, Paul Whitfield White challenges the accepted consensus concerning the decline of biblical drama in early modern England. He argues that during the latter

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6 Introduction

half of Elizabeth’s reign, and continuing into the seventeenth century, all of the major patronised companies operating both within London and beyond, including those travelling to the Continent, staged biblical plays. Furthermore, White proposes that these plays were characterised by diversity in dramaturgy, ideological purpose, and reception. This transition from the medieval to early modern drama – both generic and thematic – is firmly established in the third and final part of the volume, titled Early modern drama. Elisabeth Dutton focuses on how Reformation Protestant writers asserted the historicity of scriptural events. She asks a crucial question: How do the Protestant playwrights manage to create any form of ‘scene’ by which their audiences might be able to situate themselves in these events? Dutton argues that to encourage these audiences, these playwrights – specifically John Bale, John Foxe, and Nicholas Grimald – used the accessible, physical reality of props, to thereby overcome the challenges of presenting a Protestant history. Hannibal Hamlin focuses on one significant play, A Looking Glasse for London, by Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene. Called the most popular biblical play of the Elizabethan stage, it is rich in spectacle and scandal – designed to succeed in the popular theatre. Yet Hamlin proposes that in both moralising and stagecraft it looks back to the mystery plays of the earlier fifteenth century. It thus offers a unique Elizabethan example of staging God himself, though done in such a peculiar way as to avoid censure. Monika Fludernik also focuses on one play, William Rowley’s A Shoemaker, A Gentleman, comprising one of the few existing treatments of martyrdom in early modern dramatic literature. She studies this play within the context of earlier Elizabethan depictions of martyrdom, as well as with reference to the medieval tradition of saints’ legends. Fludernik also brings this play into dialogue with other contemporaneous plays about issues of martyrdom and religious identity: The Virgin Martyr, written collaboratively by Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger, and Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess. The final two chapters in this part turn from English drama to a consideration of transnational contexts. Pavel Drábek analyses three plays from the early seventeenth century: the Czech plays Ruth and Samson as well as a German comedy of Queen Esther. Despite their different backgrounds, the plays bear remarkable similarities. According to Drábek, this is due to a transnational theatrical culture that foreshadows elements of baroque aesthetics. In her chapter, Chanita Goodblatt

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Introduction

7

discusses English, German, and Yiddish dramatisations of the Book of Esther. She focuses specifically on the performative dimensions of the Fool, enacted through two different dramaturgical strategies: in comic interludes or inserted directly into the narrative. Goodblatt discusses the Fool as an exemplar of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, enacted through parodic language and embodying (in the material and corporeal aspects of its performance) his ultimate authority as incisive commentator on monarchy, family, and religious tradition. This volume thus presents a collection of chapters which together illuminate the co-presence of biblical and contemporary concerns in medieval and early modern drama – conceiving of such drama as a central participant in the dynamic struggle to both interpret and translate the Bible. The editors thank the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung for a grant that supported the international conference, The Bible in Medieval and Early Modern Drama, which convened at Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg (16–18 February 2017) and provided the original stimulus for this collection. The publication of this collection was also supported by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 338/16). We dedicate this volume to the memory of Lawrence Besserman, who sadly passed away in July 2017. He was an inspired scholar and teacher, and his presence at the Conference was deeply appreciated. May his memory be blessed, yehi zikhro barukh. Notes 1  See Lawrence Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Peter Happé and Wim Hüsken (eds), Staging Scripture: Biblical Drama, 1350–1600 (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Murray Roston, Biblical Drama in England from the Middle Ages to the Present Day (London: Faber, 1968); Adrian Streete (ed.), Early Modern Drama and the Bible: Contexts and Readings, 1570–1625 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Paul Whitfield White, Drama and Religion in English Provincial Society, 1485–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 2  See e.g. Chester N. Scoville, Saints and the Audience in Middle English Biblical Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); Beatrice Groves, Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare, 1592–1604 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Beatrice Batson, Word and Rite: The Bible and Ceremony in Selected Shakespearean Works (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010); Hannibal Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare

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8 Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). For an earlier precursor, see also David C. Fowler, The Bible in Middle English Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984); Thomas Fulton and Kristen Poole (eds), The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Studies have not been restricted to the English context; see e.g. Thierry Revol, Représentations du sacré dans les textes dramatiques des XIe–XIIIe siècles en France (Paris: Champion, 1999); Wolfram Washof, Die Bibel auf der Bühne: Exempelfiguren und protestantische Theologie im lateinischen und deutschen Bibeldrama der Reformationszeit (Münster: Rhema, 2007). 3 See Holly Crocker, ‘The Problem of the Premodern’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 16.1 (2016), pp. 146–52, as well as the groundbreaking study by James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 2: 1350–1547 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). The debate has also received important impulses by Gordon McMullan and David Matthews (eds), Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), as well as Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of  Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). For recent studies that focus on continuity, see Holly Crocker, ‘ “As false as Cressid”: Virtue Trouble from Chaucer to Shakespeare’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 43.2 (2013), pp. 303–34; Lisa Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 4 Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson (eds), Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater (Aldershot: Ashgate 2008); Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson (eds), Transnational Mobilities in Early Modern Theater (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014); Eli Rozik, Jewish Drama and Theatre: From Rabbinical Intolerance to Secular Liberalism (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2013). 5 See Manfred Jahn, ‘Narrative Voice and Agency in Drama: Aspects of a Narratology of Drama’, New Literary History 32.3 (2001), pp. 659–79; Bruce McConachie, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart (eds), Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn (London and New York: Routledge, 2006); June Schlueter, Dramatic Closure: Reading the End (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995); Jill Stevenson, Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture: Sensual Piety in Late Medieval York (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 6  Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 93. For an application of these and similar ideas to Shakespeare, see Evelyn Tribble, Early

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Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre: Thinking with the Body (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Julia Reinhard Lupton, ‘The Affordances of Hospitality: Shakespearean Drama between Historicism and Phenomenology’, Poetics Today 35.4 (2014), pp. 615–33. 7 See also Philip Butterworth, Staging Conventions in Medieval English Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Janette Dillon, Language and Stage in Medieval and Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

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Part I Medieval drama

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1 Lay piety and impiety: the role of Noah’s wife in the Chester play of Noah’s Flood Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Lawrence Besserman

The story of Noah and the Flood is found in chapters 6–9 of Genesis.1 God sees that the earth has become corrupt, and he decides to wash it all away in a flood. God then chooses Noah, the one righteous man alive, to build an ark in which he, his immediate family, and pairs of all the animal species will survive, in order to repopulate the earth once the floodwaters have receded (Genesis 6–8). After the floodwaters have subsided, Noah leaves the Ark, and in an unexpected turn away from his identity as the righteous patriarch, invents viticulture and promptly misuses the gift of wine. He becomes drunk, falls asleep uncovered, is seen naked by his brazen son Ham, and is covered by his respectful sons Shem and Japheth, whom he blesses (Genesis 9). Much has been written on the ways in which various aspects of this complex and multi-faceted disaster myth reverberate throughout Western literature, art, philosophy, and religious thought.2 How the Noah story was adapted in medieval and early modern vernacular biblical plays is a similarly complex and multi-faceted subject. In this chapter, I will shed light on one intriguing element of the pre-modern myth of Noah and the Flood: the complex role of Noah’s wife (hereafter Mrs Noah, from the biblical text) in the Chester play of Noah’s Flood (hereafter Uxor Noe, Latin for ‘Noah’s wife’, as she is called in manuscripts of the plays and in town and guild records). Looking back to Mrs Noah’s biblical origin, we find that throughout the entire Flood narrative Noah’s nameless wife is a voiceless cipher. She is mentioned as one of the mortals whom God orders Noah to bring into the Ark: ‘and thou shalt enter into the Ark, thou and thy sons, and thy wife, and the wives of thy sons with thee’ (Genesis 6:18). And come into the Ark she does: ‘And Noe went in and his sons, his wife and the wives of his sons with him into the Ark, because of the waters of the flood’ (Genesis 7:7). Mrs Noah is mentioned again when God tells Noah to disembark: ‘Go

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Medieval drama

out of the ark, thou and thy wife, thy sons, and the wives of thy sons with thee’ (Genesis 8:16) – and leave the Ark she does, with the rest of the family, and all the creatures who were on the Ark, as God commands Noah: ‘So Noe went out, he and his sons: his wife, and the wives of his sons with him’ (Genesis 8:18). And that is the last we hear of her. Nowadays no one is likely to overlook the fact that in the biblical account Noah’s nameless wife is deprived of agency; everything that happens to her is mediated through her husband. Attentive readers (and attentive auditors in the original audience) would also notice that God’s instructions are for Noah to board his sons before his wife (Genesis 6:18). After the floodwaters recede, however, God changes that order, as now Noah’s wife is given precedence over her sons: ‘Go out of the ark, thou and thy wife, [and] thy sons’ (Genesis 8:16). For a moment it seems as if, in addition to all the other postdiluvian changes (covenant of the rainbow, new meat-eating dietary guidelines, the Noachide Laws), the normative androcentric order of family relations has been upset, and woman’s status within the family hierarchy has changed for the better. But even if that was God’s intention, in the next verse Noah ignores it. Old habits die hard: ‘So Noe went out, he and his sons [and] his wife’ (Genesis 8:18). Was Mrs Noah unhappy about being placed at the back of the queue, behind her three sons and their wives, when entering and leaving the Ark? The Bible does not say. Immediately following upon the story of Eve, the archetypal mother of disobedience, the meagre account of biblical Mrs Noah’s career raises more questions than it answers. She is not even given a name. But Jewish, Christian, and Gnostic interpreters could, and did, have a field day filling in the details. From Late Antiquity and into the Early Middle Ages – in sermons, homilies, Latin and vernacular biblical paraphrases, and literary recastings – the absence of a history and character portrait of Noah’s wife in the Bible inspired vivid renderings of what she might have said and done, had she been allowed to speak and act on her own. Dramatic portrayals of Uxor Noe, in England of the later Middle Ages and Early Modern period, were similarly multifarious. There is, for example, an abundance of evidence testifying to the belief that Mrs Noah initially refused to enter the Ark. Did she act in defiance of the vexing social norm that positioned mothers and daughters as subordinate to the adult males in their family hierarchy? Or did her behaviour serve to support a misogynistic view of women as power-hungry troublemakers who do the opposite of what they are told? The growth of the

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traditions surrounding Noah’s wife only gives rise to further questions.

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I The representations of Noah’s wife evident in the following passages are intriguingly partial, contradictory, and without foundation in the Bible. Culled from religious and secular sources written over a period of approximately a millennium, they demonstrate that there was a long-lived, complex, and internally inconsistent tradition that had grown up around the figure of Noah and his family, upon which the authors of medieval and early modern English cycle plays could draw. Every time Uxor Noe is on stage, the audience can expect to be surprised, as she proves to be, variously, co-operative or recalcitrant; Noah’s equal, or his subordinate, or his tormentor; passive or active; virtuous or sinful; empathetic or indifferent. And sometimes she demonstrates several of these contrasting characteristics simultaneously – all within the same play. The first passage preserves an early Christian Apocryphal tradition from the lost Book of Noria. The fourth-century bishop Epiphanius of Salamis reports the sectarian view that Noah’s wife, whose name was Noria, was not allowed to join Noah in the ark, though she often wanted to. The archon who made the world, they say, wanted to destroy her in the flood with all the rest. But they say that she sat down in the ark and burned it a first and a second time, and a third. And this is why the building of Noah’s own ark took many years[.]3

According to this Apocryphal tradition, Noria was in league with the Devil. She actively opposed Noah’s efforts to follow God’s orders to build an ark. And after the Ark is built, Noria enables the Devil’s entry. The shadowy figure of Noria has been adduced to explain otherwise baffling depictions in medieval art and literature of Mrs Noah as an ally of the Devil.4 The second passage is from a fourth- or fifth-century rabbinic commentary on the Flood narrative: ‘R[abbi] Abba b[en] Kahana said: Naamah was Noah’s wife; and why was she called Naamah? Because her deeds were pleasing (ne‘imim).’ 5 Brief as it is, this midrashic comment is important, because it preserves a favourable view of Mrs Noah. What her pleasing deeds might have been is left to the imagination. On the Christian side, a mid-thirteenthcentury Bible moralisée claims that Noe significat Christum, uxor eius

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beatam Mariam (‘Noah signifies Christ, and his wife the Blessed Mary’).6 This allegoresis is representative of a large body of Christian exegetical and homiletical material in which Noah and his wife are interpreted as types of Christ and the Virgin Mary, or where Adam and Eve, the first parents of humanity, are interpreted de bono as intra-Old-Testament types of Noah and his wife, the second parents of humanity. Finally, the fourth passage, from Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, represents a different negative tradition about Noah’s wife than the one coming down from the Book of Noria. According to this other tradition Uxor Noe, while not actively sabotaging Noah’s building plans, refuses to follow his orders when it is time to embark: ‘Hastow [have you] nat herd hou saved was Noe, Whan that oure Lord hadde warned hym biforn That al the world with water sholde be lorn [lost]?’ ‘Yis’, quod this Carpenter, ‘ful yoore ago’. ‘Hastou nat herd’, quod Nicholas, ‘also The sorwe [trouble] of Noe with his felaweshipe, Er that he myghte gete his wyf to shipe?[’]7

The first character who speaks is that unscrupulously clever clerk whom Chaucer dubs ‘hende’ (‘handy, clever’), Nicholas. He refers to the Noah and the Flood story in order to set up the cuckolding of his gullible, biblically innocent landlord, ‘sely’ (‘blessed, simpleminded, silly’) John the Carpenter. John does not answer Nicholas’s query as to whether or not he knows the story of the ‘sorwe’ of Noah trying to get his wife on board the Ark. But Chaucer knows, and expects his audience to know, that this Apocryphal Noah-andhis-wife-in-strife motif would almost certainly have been more familiar to an illiterate, late fourteenth-century Englishman of Carpenter John’s estate than were the actual details of the canonical Noah story in Genesis. Nicholas’s strategically cruel joke at his expense only works if the Apocryphal scene of Noah’s wife’s refusal to board the Ark was widely known. In what follows, I focus on the words and deeds of the nameless Uxor in the Chester cycle play of Noah’s Flood. This Uxor’s few words and deeds are more layered and complex than most critics have realised. As we shall see, although the Chester Uxor initially helps to build the Ark, her later refusal to come on board and its unexpected charitable motivation create an impression of a woman and a wife very different from the stereotypically anti-feminist Uxor alluded to in the Miller’s Tale and found in any number of medieval

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and early modern biblical plays and Latin and vernacular poetry and prose of various genres.

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II The Chester play of Noah’s Flood is the third among twenty-four plays that make up this mystery cycle. In addition to Chester, the two other complete cycles that include a Noah play are York and Towneley (also known as Wakefield). Drawing on the same medieval anti-feminist stereotypes, all three agree in portraying Noah as a long-suffering, submissive husband married to a boisterous, sometimes violent termagant, one who challenges her husband’s authority and defies the Christian rule of absolute submission to God’s will.8 In each of these plays, Uxor refuses to board the Ark, but in each case the reasons she gives are different. In the Towneley Noah, she demurs because, she says, she has work to do: she must finish her spinning.9 The image of Uxor as weaver recalls the archetypal image of Eve as the original worker of the distaff, an essentialist image of womankind with reverberations, both positive and negative – but mainly the latter – from Eve to Uxor and beyond.10 In the York play of The Flood, Uxor says that before she can board the Ark, flood or no flood, she has to go home to pack her ‘tools’.11 The attitude of Uxor in Towneley and York towards the people left behind contrasts revealingly with that of Uxor in Chester. Towneley’s Uxor shows concern for the drowned humans only at the very end of the play. Responding to Noah’s statement that all the sinners have died and been ‘put unto payn [torment]’ (791), she asks Noah if they can ever return (792–3). Noah answers, ‘No, iwis [surely], / Bot [unless] he that myght hase [has the power] / Wold myn of thare mys [remember their plight] / And admytte thaym [them] to grace’ (794–7). York’s Uxor expresses a passing wish that her gossips and relatives might be allowed to accompany the selected family of eight (141–4) – but a mere ten lines later, she reports unemotionally that the friends she has left behind have drowned (151–2). Her final query as to the fate of her ‘kin’ and ‘company’ (269–70) elicits an unsentimental and unforgiving reply: ‘Dame, all are drowned, let be thy din / And soon [straightaway] they bought their sins sore [severely]’ (271–2). There are four scenes in the Chester Noah play in which Uxor speaks. Not everything she says, or that others say to her, contributes to her humorous depiction as a stereotypical shrew. On the contrary, Uxor’s speeches reveal her unexpected wish to play an extraordinarily

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ambitious role in the divine plan. In her first speech, she shares a stanza with Shem’s wife, forming a duet (4 lines each), as the family prepares to build the Ark:

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And we shall bring timber to [i.e. to the work] for we mon [may] nothing else do. Women been weak to underfo [undertake] any great travail [major work].12

Uxor’s declaration of women’s weakness is ironic. Bringing in the timber puts her in the lead in the implicit power games the characters are playing.13 The subtle or not-so-subtle husband/wife competition between Noah’s sons and their wives as to who will contribute, and what they will contribute, in order to help Noah build the Ark is about to give way to the full-blown verbal and physical battle of the sexes between Noah and his wife. Meanwhile, the wood, the chopping block to make the boards, the pitch to waterproof the ship, the pins to fasten the boards – all these essential materials are brought and put in place by the women. The competition (Can husbands and wives co-operate? Do wives carry their own weight? Who needs whom more? Who is the more productive worker?) is underlined by the vigorous and purposeful setting to work by the wives of Noah’s sons, as their husbands stand by in silence, axe, hatchet, and hammer at the ready, but useless until the timber is in place. This energetic display of feminine agency in the most unfeminine areas of carpentry and shipbuilding flies in the face of pre-modern (and still lingering) misogynistic prejudices. If earlier critics overlooked or undervalued the active, productive roles of the women in the Chester Noah, women’s roles are far less likely to be slighted now that scholars have combed city, guild, and church records for evidence of communal participation in the production of the plays as part of the Corpus Christi festival or, after 1548, as part of the Whitsuntide festivities, when the Corpus Christi feast had been abolished by Reform-minded churchmen.14 There is more to the matter. According to a standard exegetical-typological interpretation, the wood of the Ark is a type of the wood of the Cross. This commonplace interpretation of the mystery of the wood has been traced from the writings of the second-century Christian apologist Justin Martyr through works by Cyril of Jerusalem, Ambrose, Augustine, and others. Here is a representative quotation from Ambrose’s De Mysteriis: ‘You see the water; you see the wood; you perceive the dove – and do you doubt the mystery? … The wood

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is that on which the Lord Jesus was fastened, when He suffered for us.’ 15 When Uxor Noe says she will bring the wood, she is therefore speaking two languages: the language of the craft of shipbuilding and the language of typology. She is taking on a task that is doubly significant, both in the present and in the predicted future: now, to help build the Ark to save humanity and all living creatures from extinction in the Flood; and in the future, when the wood of the Cross will serve as the instrument of the Crucifixion, as well as universal salvation. When the Chester Noah calls on his wife to enter the Ark, she refuses, twice, each time uttering an ironically pious oath: Noah:  

Wife, in this vessel, we shall be kept. my children and thou. I would in ye leapt.

Noah’s Wife: In faith, Noah, I had as lief thou slept [rather you were asleep (dead?)].   For all thy Frenish fare [Frenchified doings],   I will not do after thy read [follow your advice]. Noah:

Good wife, do now as I bid –

Noah’s Wife: By Christ, not or [before] I see more need,   though thou stand all day and stare. Noah:          

Lord, that women be crabbed ay, and none are meek, I dare well say. … Good wife, let be all this bere [din] that thou makest in this place here, for all they ween that thou art master – and so thou art, by St John!16

Noah’s strange request that his wife should leap into the Ark (leap rather than enter, step into, ascend to, or come into) should give us pause. Once again, as with the timber of the Ark foreshadowing the wood of Cross, a typological layering of implicit meaning is subtly at work, as the contextually anomalous verb leap evokes the leaping in Song of Songs 2:8: ‘The voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.’ The leaping of the beloved in this verse was interpreted typologically de bono and de malo by Ambrose, Gregory the Great, and other exegetes and poets, in numerous Latin commentaries, vernacular sermons, and homiletical, mystical, and devotional texts such as the Ancrene Wisse and The Wooing of Our Lord (both dated to the thirteenth century). A typical formulation goes like this: Eve leapt at the apple, and mankind was doomed; Christ leapt into the womb

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of Mary, and humankind was redeemed.17 With Uxor Noe poised suspensefully at the foot of the Ark, when Noah utters the words ‘I would in ye leapt’ (98), the play implicitly positions her between Eve and Christ, the archetypal metaphorical Christian leapers. If Uxor Noe hangs back (which would be to leap with Eve), humanity is damned; if she leaps forward (as a type of Christ), humankind is saved. Will we be saved or damned? Uxor Noe’s reply to Noah’s typologically loaded instruction to leap is defiant: ‘I will not do after thy read’ (101). Her second refusal to obey God’s command to jump into the Ark – as delivered to her by her husband – starts with the oath ‘By Christ’ (103), the first explicit Christological anachronism in the play. This protest is answered by Noah’s asseveration beginning with ‘Lord’ (105) and ending with his first explicit New Testament anachronism, an oath ‘by St John’ (112). As Noah and Uxor quarrel, their anachronistic allusions remind the audience that shadowing this humorous domestic comedy is the drama of universal salvation. The last time Noah orders Uxor Noe on board, she objects once again: Yea, sir, set up your sail and row forth with evil hail [bad luck to you]; for withouten any fail [without any doubt] I will not out of this town. But I have my gossips everychone, one foot further I will not gone. They shall not drown, by Saint John, and [if] I may save their life. They loved me full well, by Christ. But [unless] thou wilt let them into thy chest [ark], else row thou forth, Noah, when thou list [wish], and get thee a new wife.18

What, if anything, were this play’s spectators expected to learn from Uxor Noe’s plea for her gossips, emphatically punctuated with anachronistic New Testament oaths of ‘Saint John’ (203) and ‘by Christ’ (205)? According to one view, Uxor Noe is here behaving like a second disobedient Eve: when she refuses to get into the Ark, her behaviour follows the standard medieval misogynistic paradigm, illustrating the wilfully perverse and sinful side of women. Is it not perverse of Uxor Noe to refuse to enter the Ark and be saved with the chosen family of Noah, and to threaten instead to stay behind and perish with all the evil sinners of the Family of Man, whom Noah was not instructed to rescue? And is not her perversity

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proven when, in the end, she takes one last swing at Noah? This scene of rough-housing exemplifies a type of dramatised husband– wife fisticuffs that is no longer considered a legitimate source of amusement, but it obviously amused audiences willing to overlook the real suffering behind the stylised violence in ‘play’: Noah:  

Come in, wife, in twenty devils’ way! – or else stand there without.

Ham:

Shall we all fetch her in?

Noah:    

Yea, sons, in Christ’s blessing and mine! I would ye hied [hurried] you betime for of this flood I stande in doubt [I fear]. …

Japhet:      

Mother, we pray you all together – for we are here, your own childer – come into the ship for fear of the weather, for his love that you bought [for the love of Him who redeemed you].

Noah’s Wife: That will I not for all your call,   but [unless] I have my gossips all. Shem:  

In faith, mother, yet thou shall, whether thou will or nought.

Noah:

Welcome, wife, into this boat.

Noah’s Wife: Have thou that for thy note [reward]!   And she gives him a blow Noah:  

Aha, marry, this is hot! It is good to be still.19

But just before she is forced to join the family in the Ark, between the two passages quoted above, Uxor makes one last effort to stay behind with her ‘gossips’ in a remarkable three-stanza interlude, variously headlined in the manuscripts as ‘The Good Gossip’, ‘The Good Gossips’, or ‘The Good Gossips’ Song’: The flood comes fleeting [flowing] in full fast, on every side that spreadeth full far. For fear of drowning I am aghast; good gossip, let us draw near. And let us drink or [before] we depart, for oft-times we have done so. For at one draught thou drinks a quart, and so will I do or I go.

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Here is a pottle [tankard] full of Malmsey good and strong; it will rejoice both heart and tongue. Though Noah think us never so long, yet we will drink atite [quickly].20

Who is speaking? David Mills infers from the first-person pronoun – ‘For fear of drowning I am aghast’ (227) – that ‘only one Gossip is speaking at the start, apparently to a second’.21 She seems to be addressing another gossip in her company – ‘let us draw near’ (the Ark?), and urging that they have a drink before they ‘depart’ (228–9). The grim irony between the kind of departing the speaker intends and the kind that will overtake her is chilling. She remembers better times, when her interlocutor could drink down a quart in a single swallow. The subsequent offer of a tankard of malmsey seems to indicate a change of speakers. Presumably, Uxor Noe is following up on the gossip’s suggestion of one last drink; her defiant reference to Noah supports the inference that the second speaker is indeed Uxor Noe. Comedy and pathos combine, as Uxor Noe and her drinking cronies take one last draught, before she is hijacked onto the Ark and the gossips disappear in the Flood. Do they all really deserve to drown, and she alone to survive? Returning to the final confrontation between Uxor Noe and the men in her life, one finds that Japhet closes his appeal to his mother to relent, come on board, and save herself with a marvellously ambiguous formulaic phrase ‘for his love that you bought’ (240) – a phrase that echoes countless times throughout the devotional literature of medieval and early modern England. Its function in this case is to deploy English genitival subject–object ambiguity to superb effect. For this phrase means all of the following things: ‘for your love of Him who redeemed you’, ‘for your Redeemer’s love for you’, ‘for His Love that redeemed you’, and ‘for your redeeming love of Him’. How can Uxor Noe refuse? Yet refuse she does, saying, ‘That will I not for all your call / but I have my gossips all’ (241–2). In this irregular iambic tetrameter couplet, sound artfully mimics sense. The couplet consists of all monosyllables, with one exception: ‘gossips’. The two strong trochaic interruptions of the rhythm – ‘That will I’ and ‘but I’ – convey Uxor Noe’s emphatic and non-negotiable demand that she be allowed to save her friends. This potentially tragic moment in the play – Uxor Noe will drown if she does not hurry and get on board – is the moment of her heroic triumph. For Uxor Noe offers her own life to save her friends. She and Noah fight. She is hoisted or pulled on board.

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From this point forward, God and Noah do all the talking. Having been tapped on the shoulder thrice previously by the anachronistic allusions of both Noah and his wife to Christ, and twice more by their allusions to St John, the attentive spectator or reader is now primed to see beyond Uxor Noe’s anti-feminist typecasting. The New Testament allusions in the dialogue between Noah and his wife align in a chiastic pattern: Christ, St John, St John, Christ. The repetition of the name St John ensures that the spectator or reader will recognise that Uxor Noe’s wish to save her gossips, and her attempt to defend them even with her body, exemplify St John’s formulation of the Gospel’s ideal of Christlike self-sacrifice: ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’ (John 15:13). III In conclusion, I wish to return for a moment to Noah’s final speech to Uxor Noe, after she has given him a blow. He begins with an oath by Mary, mother of Jesus (247),22 which hints broadly at Uxor Noe’s undiscovered other identity. Just as Noah foreshadows Christ, and looks back at the same time to Adam the first father of humanity, so too is Uxor Noe both a reprise of Eve, the mother of all living things, and a forerunner of Mary, the Queen of Heaven and source of grace and salvation for all who seek it. That simple lesson is where the play ends, having arrived there by artful dramatic pathways that are anything but simple. A stage direction says that the occupants of the Ark ‘shall sing the psalm “Save me, O God” ’ (probably a metrical version of Psalm 69).23 Then God receives the last word, as the play ends with the covenant of the rainbow and a blessing: Where clouds in the welkin [sky] been, that ilk [same] bow shall be seen, in tokening [as a sign] that my wrath and teen [anger] shall never thus wroken [avenged] be. The string is turned towards you and towards me is bent the bow, that such weather shall never show [appear]; and this behet [promise] I thee.24

The symbolism of this powerful religious image has been explicated ingeniously by Peter Travis: If God’s description is accurate, the stage property used to depict the bow in the clouds was a powerfully emblematic and strikingly

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unusual configuration: rather than a covenant of concord and harmony, it is an image of savage destruction – an archer’s bow aimed at God himself, its string within man’s reach. Having appeared in the pageant’s first episode ‘in the clowdes’, God in the pageant’s final episode places in the clouds an iconic prefiguration of the Crucifixion. God has just brought death to sinful man; but the bow in the clouds is a prophetic reminder (for the audience) that in the future, man – again sinful – will bring death to his own divine Redeemer.25

The literary meaning is indeed a vehicle for a deeper meaning. So too, for the typological imagination, in which wood is not merely ‘wood’ and leaping not merely ‘leaping’, and a rainbow in the sky pointing up towards God away from humankind is not merely a rainbow. Travis concludes his excellent study with the strong claim that the Chester Cycle as a whole is ‘a masterwork of Christian art directed unequivocally toward a single end: the salvation of humankind’.26 But this is not the whole story. Great works of art are rarely unequivocal. Harsh and repeated ecclesiastical and municipal condemnations of the treatment of scripture in the Chester plays provide oblique evidence that something doctrinally novel and even radical may indeed have been afoot. James Simpson has argued that medieval English biblical drama frequently had more on its mind than straightforward sacramental and devotional instruction or the reprising of salvation history.27 Rather than underwriting aristocratic and ecclesiastical master-narratives of obedience and hierarchy, the biblical plays often – to quote Simpson’s memorable formulation – ‘take possession of salvation history by writing the pain of family and political life into scriptural narrative’.28 The cycle plays are not necessarily Lollard in their theologies, but ‘they do emerge from the same cultural pressures that produced Lollardy’.29 Simpson asserts that the York and Chester plays consistently ‘promote a vernacular theology that is seriously critical of academic, episcopal, and royal repression of new religious movements’ – and, I would add, a vernacular theology seriously critical of patriarchal repression of female solidarity.30 Alfred David has put forward an even more radical claim regarding the Chester Noah play’s critique of ‘ecclesiastical master-narratives of obedience and hierarchy’; he finds that ‘the rebellion of Noah’s wife mocks the abstract and fanciful nature of typology itself, as a means of understanding our history and our future here on earth and in whatever world to come’.31 But detecting mockery here is to sell the power of typology short. Another way of assessing Uxor

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Noe’s rebellion would be to say that rather than mocking ‘the abstract and fanciful nature of typology’, the play exploits the traditional manifold potential of typology more fully, recognising in Uxor Noe not only Eve rediviva but Mary foreshadowed, the bringer of grace and salvation to sinners who might otherwise drown and leave this life, after one last drink, with no hope of redemption. Notes 1 All scriptural references are to the Douay-Rheims Bible (Challoner Revision). 2 In addition to the studies mentioned below, see Francis Lee Utley, ‘The One Hundred and Three Names of Noah’s Wife’, Speculum 16 (1941), pp. 426–52; Don Cameron Allen, The Legend of Noah: Renaissance Rationalism in Art, Science, and Letters (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949; repr. 1963); Francis Lee Utley, ‘Noah, His Wife, and the Devil’, in Raphael Patain, Francis Lee Utley, and Dov Noy (eds), Studies in Biblical and Jewish Folklore (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960), pp. 59–107; Jack P. Lewis, A Study of the Interpretation of Noah and the Flood in Jewish and Christian Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1968; repr. 1978); Richard W. Unger, The Art of Medieval Technology: Images of Noah the Shipbuilder (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991); Norman Cohn, Noah’s Flood: The Genesis Story in Western Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Ad Putter, ‘Sources and Backgrounds for Descriptions of the Flood in Medieval and Renaissance Literature’, Studies in Philology 94 (1997), pp. 137–59. 3 Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion, vol. 1, trans. Frank Williams, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 2.26.1.7–8, p. 91. 4 Anna J. Mill, ‘Noah’s Wife Again’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 56 (1941), pp. 613–26. 5 H. Freedman (trans.) and Maurice Simon (ed.), Midrash Rabbah, vol. 1: Genesis (London: Soncino, 1939), 23.3, p. 194. 6 Quoted in Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 376, n. 3. 7 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, 1.3534–40, cited from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). For a plausible demonstration of the ways in which Chaucer’s portrait of the Wife of Bath was influenced by the figure of Noah’s wife in the cycle plays, see Melvin Storm, ‘Uxor and Alison: Noah’s Wife in the Flood Plays and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’, Modern Language Quarterly 48 (1987), pp. 303–19. 8 For a feminist reading of the ‘unruly woman’ topos in the cycle plays, see Theresa Coletti, ‘A Feminist Approach to the Corpus Christi Cycles’, in Richard K. Emmerson (ed.), Approaches to Teaching Medieval English

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Drama (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1990), pp. 79–89. Two Noah plays that stand apart from Chester, Towneley, and York with regard to the depiction of Noah’s wife are the N-Town and Newcastle Noah plays. The latter, only a fragment, relates to Mrs Noah as an agent of the Devil who tricks her into revealing Noah’s secret plans to build an ark to survive the coming Flood and also tricks her into enabling him to sneak into the Ark. Mrs Noah in the N-Town play is compliant and pious; no anti-feminist caricature, she is a perfect mate for the righteous husband, and a perfect type of the Virgin Mary, her antitype. 9 Noah, lines 345, 486–90, 519–20, 525–30, 363–6, cited from Garrett P. J. Epp (ed.), The Towneley Plays (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2018). 10 See Laura F. Hodges, ‘Noe’s Wife: Type of Eve and Wakefield Spinner’, in Julia Bolton Holloway, Constance S. Wright, and Joan Bechtold (eds), Equally in God’s Image: Women in the Middle Ages (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), pp. 30–45. 11 The Flood, line 110, quoted from Richard Beadle and Pamela M. King (eds), York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). 12 Noah’s Flood, lines 65–8 (emphasis added), quoted from David Mills (ed.), The Chester Mystery Cycle: A New Edition with Modernised Spelling (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1992). 13 For contrary views of this passage, which stress the harmony of Noah’s family, see Peter W. Travis, Dramatic Design in the Chester Cycle (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 100; Christina M. Fitzgerald, ‘Manning the Ark in York and Chester’, Exemplaria 15 (2003), pp. 351–84. The latter sees in the Noah group ‘an Edenic domestic fantasy, where just one family-guild group comprises all society and there exist no competitive rivalries or even cooperative relationships with other guilds, much less any responsibilities beyond the domestic walls’ (p. 364). 14 On the role of the guilds in producing the Chester plays and the role of the latter in relation to the Chester economy, see David Mills, Recycling the Cycle: The City of Chester and Its Whitsun Plays (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). On the history of women and work in pre-modern England, see Barbara Hanawalt (ed.), Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Martha C. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986); P. J. P. Goldberg, ‘Women in Fifteenth-Century Town Life’, in John A. F. Thomson (ed.), Towns and Townspeople in the Fifteenth Century (Gloucester: Sutton, 1988), pp. 107–28. 15 Ambrose of Milan, The Mysteries, 3.10–11, quoted from Theological and Dogmatic Works, trans. Roy J. Deferrari (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1963).

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16 Noah’s Flood, lines 97–106, 109–12. 17 Discussions of this tradition include R. E. Kaske, ‘Eve’s “Leaps” in the Ancrene Riwle’, Medium Ævum 29 (1960), pp. 22–4; Catherine Innes-Parker, ‘ “Light Leaps”, in Ancrene Wisse VI: Wið lihtleapes buggen eche blisse?’, Mediaevalia 19 (1996 for 1993), pp. 384–403; Cristina Maria Cervone, Poetics of the Incarnation: Middle English Writing and the Leap of Love (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), pp. 105–17. 18 Noah’s Flood, lines 197–208. 19 Noah’s Flood, lines 219–24, 237–48. 20 Noah’s Flood, lines 225–36. 21 Noah’s Flood, p. 58. 22 For the Marian etymology of this asseveration, see Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 2018, http://www.oed.com/ (last accessed 11 April 2019), s.v. ‘marry, int.’. 23 Noah’s Flood, p. 59. 24 Noah’s Flood, lines 364–71. 25 Travis, Dramatic Design, p. 102. 26 Travis, Dramatic Design, p. 254. 27 See James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 2: 1350–1547 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 502–57. 28 Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, p. 509. 29 Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, p. 538. 30 Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, p. 538. 31 Alfred David, ‘Noah’s Wife’s Flood’, in James J. Paxson, Lawrence M. Clopper, and Sylvia Tomasch (eds), The Performance of Middle English Culture: Essays on Chaucer and the Drama (Cambridge: Brewer, 1998), pp. 97–109, at p. 106.

2 Typology, community, and stagecraft in the N-Town ‘Trial of Mary and Joseph’ Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Jonathan Stavsky

Introduction One of four surviving compilations of biblical plays from fifteenthcentury England, the N-Town manuscript (British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian D VIII) runs the gamut of salvation history with particular focus on the events of the Gospels and related traditions.1 This chapter considers its treatment of the story of Mary and Joseph’s ordeal, which takes place after the Virgin falls pregnant in ostensible violation of her vow to abstain from sexual relations. The earliest written sources of this apocryphal legend are the Greek Protevangelium of James and its Latin derivative the Infancy Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew.2 The story also circulated in several Middle English lives of the Holy Family, to be discussed below. The N-Town version is unique in two respects: first, in being its only known dramatic adaptation; and second, in devising a distinctive array of characters and events unattested elsewhere, as is often the case with scriptural drama. The play begins with a summoner who subpoenas a motley crowd of townspeople, presumably standing for or selected from its audience. Next, two Detractors spread scandal about Mary and Joseph. The couple must present themselves at court along with everyone else so as to clear their name. This done, order is restored and the slanderers are publicly confounded. Several previous studies have focused on the ambiguous situations created by Mary’s paradoxical body in this play, sometimes at the expense of addressing the ambiguities of its male protagonists.3 Others have discussed its possible consonances or dissonances with the heterodox Lollard movement that haunted late medieval England. According to Alison Hunt, Mary’s detractors are figures of this group who unjustly malign the established Church and its officials.4 Emma Lipton, by contrast, detects in this compilation of plays a valorisation of sacramental marriage that does not depend on

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consummation and links this agenda to an urban milieu receptive to Wycliffite critiques of clerical celibacy and misogamy.5 For Colin Fewer, the ‘rise of the Lollards after 1382 was only the most visible manifestation of a popular discontent with ecclesiastical corruption that intensified steadily after the 1350s’.6 Consequently, he argues that whether or not their authors saw themselves as Wyclif’s followers, the N-Town plays employ typology in order to equate the Old Law with the Church authorities and the New Law with private lay piety.7 Given the contrary findings it has yielded, localised historical inquiry does not suffice to determine what kind of social event the ‘Trial of Mary and Joseph’ stages.8 I propose to supplement it by examining the play’s engagement with biblical and related traditions in order to construct the religious and communal identity of its protagonists. My investigation falls into three parts. First, I shall formulate a conceptual framework based on the fortunes of ‘Susanna and the Elders’ (Daniel 13 in the Vulgate), which shares a number of key motifs and structural features with the lesser-known account of Mary and Joseph’s trial. Next, I shall bring the N-Town play into conversation with its Pseudo-Matthean source and other retellings of the story in John Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady and two anonymous texts, which scholars writing on the ‘Trial’ often mention but seldom explore in detail. In this light, the play will be seen to depart from the typological practice of pitting an immaculate Church figure against her adversaries, be they Jews, Lollards, or ungodly prelates. Though I acknowledge the anti-Jewish attitudes that punctuate the N-Town manuscript,9 I believe the piece in question offers a surprisingly nuanced vision of Christianity’s roots, which is necessary to achieving its social function. By translating salvation history to fifteenth-century East Anglia, it seeks to forge a just community capable of resisting scandalmongers from within its ranks – even when a defendant appears to be guilty beyond doubt.10 Contexts and analogues ‘Susanna and the Elders’ is the oldest known story to feature a falsely accused, tried, and exonerated heroine. P. A. van Stempvoort and Danny Praet argue that it inspired the account of Mary and Joseph’s trial in the Protevangelium, as well as other details from the same Apocryphal gospel.11 The Latin version of the ordeal in Pseudo-Matthew strengthens the link between these biblical women by adapting quite a few phrases from Daniel 13.12 Closer to our

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purposes, the pair of detractors who appear in the N-Town play may be modelled on the Elders or at least recall them. Medieval references to and retellings of this Old Testament narrative were a fertile locus for negotiating group identities. Doing so involved an interplay between two interpretive traditions, which I call intracommunal and intercommunal.13 The former approach locates Susanna’s trial in a single Jewish community that is capable of both righteous and sinful behaviour. When read or represented typologically, the story becomes a struggle between the just and unjust forces within the Church or Christian society at large. The latter approach turns her into a member or prefiguration of the Church who is maligned by the Synagogue. In this case, typology serves to position the community that authorises it as inherently just and its enemies as ipso facto unjust. Pseudo-Matthew combines these attitudes by presenting the miracle of Mary’s conception as both fulfilling and invalidating the laws of Judaism. The account of her youth attempts to reconcile her pre-eminent status among the virgins of the Jewish temple with the special order she receives from God never to know a man in the flesh, which goes against her people’s belief that procreation is sacred (chs 7–8). The same dialectic is carried over to Mary and Joseph’s trial. After the couple successfully pass the ordeal of bitter water prescribed in Numbers 5:11–31, the High Priest and the rest of the people are quick to accept the husband’s innocence, yet some of those present at the trial continue to disbelieve his wife. Not until she takes a second oath and repeats her vow of virginity are they prepared to acquit her. Whereas ‘Susanna and the Elders’ concludes with the heroine’s accusers being put to death in accordance with the demands of Deuteronomy 19:16–21 (Daniel 13:61–2), Mary pardons those who have suspected her. If properly executed, Jewish law is enough to accommodate Susanna, but for Mary it does not suffice. She requires a leap of faith, first from Joseph, whose doubts are dispelled by a vision of the Lord’s angel (chs 10–11), and then from the rest of her community. For this act of recognition to occur, Mary must first be brought to the limits of what Pseudo-Matthew imagines to be Jewish legal consciousness. Only if she remains part of her community after proving her innocence can its members, in turn, exclaim Sit nomen domini benedictum qui manifestauit sanctitatem suam uniuersae plebi Israel (‘Blessed be the name of the Lord who has manifested His holiness to the entire people of Israel’).14 The surviving Middle English adaptations of this story tilt the balance between Mary’s Jewish identity and her strangeness to

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Judaism in different directions. The earliest known version, from the South English Nativity of Mary and Christ, probably composed before the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 and circulating in some manuscripts of the South English Legendary,15 heightens Mary’s predicament. It does so by emphasising her alienation from the hostile Jewish priests (or bishops, as they are called in Middle English) by equating her sorrows with those of her son, by letting the people hurl a new accusation at her, and, finally, by stretching the leap of faith necessary to find her innocent. After Joseph passes the ordeal, the assembly’s relief gives way to unjust rage (297–8). Several lines later, a first-person plural voice that encompasses the narrator, his audience, and, proleptically and prophetically, Mary herself recalls the mockery and verbal abuse inflicted on Christ: Welle, Lord, muchel þoledestou [You suffered] on erþe vs to lere[.] þat me[n]16 scholde þe suche schame do and þenke ar þou ybore were[!] Wel raþe [too soon] þei þe [of thee] seyden schame; þou suffredest schame also Wel raþe for to ȝiuen [give] vs ensaumple so for to do.17

The pronoun ‘vs’ excludes all present at Mary’s trial, who, the South English Nativity implies, are still heaping shame on Christians over twelve centuries later. Next, she is charged with being a ‘wicche’ (313) by those dissatisfied with the results of her ordeal. (As will later be noted, the N-Town play also introduces a second calumny at this point.) The episode concludes with Mary’s exoneration, which follows Pseudo-Matthew with one important addition: the ‘folk’ (318) who have witnessed the ordeal declare that ‘þoru þe Holy Gost myd childe sche was ybrouht’ (321). In other words, they are halfway down the road to losing their Judaism, having accepted the first of two miracles essential to the Christian faith: the Incarnation (the other being the Resurrection). The apocryphal story resurfaces in a Life of St Anne written in tail-rhyme stanzas in around 1400.18 While free of incitement, this version nevertheless resembles its counterpart in the South English Nativity in that it too de-Judaises Mary. Its approach to doing so, however, differs significantly: whereas the earlier text modifies Pseudo-Matthew by means of addition, the later one subtracts a few crucial details and radically changes the import of others. Calling Abiathar ‘byshop of þe lawe’ (807), the Life of St Anne seems at first to follow the South English Nativity in emphasising the Jewish identity of Mary’s judge. Yet this connotation is neutralised by

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what soon develops into an in camera trial devoid of religious tension, where the people of Israel neither attend the proceedings nor participate in recognising Mary’s innocence. We know this because the narrative omits the Pseudo-Matthean scene where her ordeal is preceded by general lamentation. By the same token, the Life of St Anne lets Mary pass the ordeal without requiring further proof: When þai no signe in hyr face couth se, Þe bysshop sayde: how may þis be? & other wys men of lore, Mary es wreyghed [accused] here wrangwusly. Some says itt semes done for envy, Þat may þam rewe sore.19

The syntax of this passage is loose even by tail-rhyme standards. Apparently, the members of the council agree that Mary has been arraigned under false charges. Avoiding the question of who is to blame for this error, they nevertheless repent of having tried her. By referring to her judges as the ‘bysshop … & other wys men of lore’ (860–1) – that is, by crediting them with sapiential understanding – the Life of St Anne tones down the stereotypically Jewish legalism that in Pseudo-Matthew is responsible for the doubts surrounding the Virgin even after the ordeal. Her second oath, which follows this passage (865–70), is therefore unnecessary because Mary has already been acquitted. All that is left is for the ‘bysshops & prestes’ (871) to beg her forgiveness and send her back to Joseph ‘[w]ith ioy & myrth’ (876). Though perhaps a welcome alternative to Mary’s sorrows in the South English Nativity, the universalising and humanising character of this episode from the Life of St Anne comes at the expense of celebrating the miracle of her virginal conception and deprives her of the widespread communal recognition she achieves in Pseudo-Matthew. Though its literary sophistication distinguishes Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady (c. 1410) from the anonymous productions dealt with so far,20 his retelling of Mary and Joseph’s trial nevertheless deserves our attention because it attempts to reconcile the particular and the universal, the human and the miraculous, while also taking remarkable liberties in handling the apocryphal source. Lydgate’s touch is felt especially in the ordeal scene. On the one hand, by characterising it as the ‘statute, of the Rites olde’ (2.1516), he acknowledges the historical specificity of this practice and its origin in the book of Numbers (2.1420–2). On the other, the Jewish legal context of the

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narrative is secondary to Mary’s steadfast character and spiritual charisma. More so than even the Life of St Anne, the Life of Our Lady condenses the procedure of the ordeal: rather than blaming Joseph first and only when the bitter water has no effect on him, charging Mary with adultery, Abiathar intends to submit them to God’s judgement in close succession (2.1411–18). Instead of two prayers, one before and one after swallowing the drink, Mary begins with a single oration in order to focus attention on the divine intervention she is about to manifest (2.1530–50). Following the ordeal, ‘the people gan mervayle / And for astonede [in their astonishment], thought hir wittes fayle’ (2.1570–1). The very sense of wonder that is dissipated in the Life of St Anne becomes central to Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady as one miracle serves to confirm another. Crucially, this heightened pathos is achieved without pitting Mary against her people. Instead, Lydgate ascribes the suspicion surrounding her to a disembodied ‘Romour’ (2.1350). Once this uncertainty has been cleared away, he contents himself with a few vague references to ‘all thoo, that to fore gan muse [had wondered about] / Hir maydynhede, of malice to acuse’ (2.1598–9) or ‘men that wer in were [doubt]’ (2.1601). Joseph and Mary only appear to infringe the Jewish ‘lawe’ (2.1365, 2.1390); in fact, the ‘lawe’ (2.1437) works in their favour even as the people begin to realise the futility of the ordeal that it prescribes (2.1574–5). To sum up this discussion, the non-dramatic Middle English adaptations of Mary and Joseph’s trial exemplify three distinct approaches to the heroine’s communal identity: whereas the South English Nativity drives a wedge between her and the Jewish people in order to bring her closer to Christian readers in pre-expulsion England, the Life of St Anne steers clear of such conflict by transforming Mary into a universal – that is, non-Jewish – figure. Finally, Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady takes a historicising view of the ordeal but plays down the importance of legal procedure and interreligious polemic. This combination allows him to depoliticise the story while at the same time re-creating the miraculous experience missing from the Life of St Anne. Dramatising Joseph and Mary’s ordeal The N-Town ‘Trial of Mary and Joseph’ is the most complex and multi-layered reworking of this apocryphal narrative to be preserved. It succeeds in fleshing out the story’s communal and political

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implications without giving way to incitement. At the same time, it offers a universal moral yet manages to retain something of the pious awe evoked in Pseudo-Matthew. These effects are, to a large extent, achieved by specifically dramatic means. Whereas the Middle English poems examined above flatten the legal situation of Mary and Joseph’s trial by compacting or conflating its participants in various ways, the N-Town play both multiplies and individuates the parties who attend it. They fall into six categories: (1) the Dean who fills the role of summoner; (2) the thirty-four townspeople whom he subpoenas at the beginning of the piece; (3) the two Detractors who defame Joseph and Mary; (4) the bishop presiding over the case, whom the play calls Abizachar; (5) the Doctors of the Law who assist him; and, finally (6) the defendants. Not content with merely summoning people to court, the Dean repeatedly intervenes in the proceedings. First, he twice demands a bribe from the townspeople awaiting the bishop’s judgement (25–8, 154–61), which ‘may indicate that a collection was taken during the play’.21 He then outdoes the Detractors in slighting Joseph and Mary, dismissing their pleas of innocence as worn-out excuses (162–93). The Dean is especially rough with the Virgin: Ya, on this wyse excusyth here every scowte [scoundrel] Whan here [their] owyn synne hem doth defame. But lowly than they gyn to lowth [bow] Whan thei be gylty and fowndyn in blame. […] I shal yow tellyn, withowtyn glose: And ye were myn, withowtyn lak [without fail], I wolde ech day beschrewe youre nose And ye dede brynge me such a pak.22

Finally, he joins the Detractors in scolding Joseph when the old man walks around the altar with too slow a gait (258–61, 270–3). Threatening him with violence, the Dean mockingly urges Mary’s husband to show the same vigour he exercised in bed with his wife. His irreverent remarks are reminiscent of the ‘schame’ that she and the unborn Christ suffer in the South English Nativity. However, they operate differently: they are calculated to provoke laughter, not – or not only – indignation. Whether the play’s spectators chuckle or chortle in response, they become complicit with the Dean.23 Their position is further complicated by their likely identification with the group of people subpoenaed at the beginning of the play. When the Dean announces ‘I warne yow here all abowte / That I

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somown yow all the rowte!’ (5–6), one can imagine him beckoning to individual members as he draws on a repertory of names and epithets that could easily be adapted to local audiences. While some of the N-Town Passion plays call for an unusually large cast, thirtyfour is nevertheless an unmanageable number to be performed by actors, especially when their roles are silent.24 A litany of characters with no referent would both fail to capture attention and diminish from the effectiveness of the Dean’s solicitation of money. This is no ordinary ‘rout of lascivious, gossip-hungry people hastening to see the trial’,25 nor are they invited to play the part of jury, ‘tak[ing] interpretive action’ while maintaining a safe critical distance from the defendants.26 On the contrary, the venal Dean calls each suspect to face his or her own judgement in addition to witnessing that of Joseph and Mary. Some may be guilty of an offence that has yet to come to light; others may be innocent. However, everyone is meant to watch the dysfunctional tribunal with a mixture of amusement and apprehension: if the Mother of God is treated like a common adulteress, there is no guarantee that others will benefit from due process when they appear before it. This invitation to participate in the trial and to view it as immediately relevant to each spectator’s welfare contrasts sharply with the Life of St Anne, where the judicial proceedings take place far from the madding crowd. It also differs from intercommunal propaganda, which would have sought to make all members of the audience stand as one in the face of an outside threat. Whereas the Dean and the people he summons are drawn from East Anglian reality, the identity of the Detractors is more fluid and uncertain, and therefore richer in dramatic potential. Making a sudden appearance, the first of them addresses the audience directly: A, a, serys! God save yow all! Here is a fayr pepyl, in good fay! Good serys, telle me what men me calle – I trowe ye kannot be this day, Yitt I walke wyde and many way, But yet ther I come I do no good: To reyse slawndyr is al my lay [law, custom, creed] – Bakbytere is my brother of blood.27

For this speech to work, the actors playing the part of the Detractors must escape recognition by parishioners who might be acquainted with them. Would they have worn a mask, unusual clothes, or some other disguise associating them with members of another lay? If

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so, what attributes would they have displayed? Would they have been assigned the knobbed or funnel-shaped hat known as pileus cornutus or the Near Eastern garments associated with Jews in the visual culture of the fifteenth century?28 Would Joseph, Abizachar, and the Doctors of the Law have sported the same articles of clothing, the kind that Annas and his entourage are instructed to don in the stage directions of the N-Town ‘Conspiracy’ play? These questions deserve to be raised because they bear directly on the relationship between the Holy Family, the Jewish community, and the Detractors. Each choice of costume implies a different conception of the conflict among them, ranging from intracommunal (either all characters or none are visibly Jewish) to intercommunal (only the Detractors and some or all of the members of the court are so, but Joseph and Mary are not). Despite the paucity of production notes for this play, the possibilities listed above can be weighed by closely examining the extant text. While the line ‘Yitt I walke wyde and many way’ (38) and its rhyme word ‘lay’ (40) might, for a moment, recall the foreign and intimidating figure of the Wandering Jew, the Detractors soon reveal that all communities – including the one they are visiting – are susceptible to the kind of behaviour they typify. First, if this N-Town play was performed by travelling actors, they would have shared the itinerant lifestyle of the Detractors.29 Second, the names Backbiter and Raise Slander (66) are those of abstract, universal vices, the kind that would have been familiar to local audiences from morality plays or the widespread penitential discourse of the late Middle Ages.30 Third, like the Dean, they hurl deliciously humorous insults at Joseph and Mary with the same intended effect of provoking laughter from the audience (262–9, 306–13). Even when Raise Slander meets his final come-uppance and the joke turns on him, this outsider exposes the ambiguity underlying the entire dramatic situation, thereby insinuating himself into the very heart of the event he participates in re-enacting. This unsettling tension is rooted in the problematic status of the ritual on which the play is based and which it performs in an otherwise fifteenthcentury setting. Not only had the biblical trial of bitter water never been adopted by Western Christianity, but over two centuries before the production of the N-Town manuscript, the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 had banned priests from administering similar ordeals.31 As pointed out above, Lydgate’s narrator finds the custom very distant from his experience of the law. The Detractors create

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a crisis that both necessitates an obsolete rite and calls its validity into question. Doubts begin to rise when the second Doctor warns Mary, ‘With Goddys hygh myght loke thu not jape / Of thi purgacyon, wel thee avyse!’ (314–15). (Uncharitably, he does so immediately after the Detractors poke fun at her.) The word ‘jape’ has multiple senses, ranging from a ‘trick’ to a ‘light entertainment’ or even a ‘false legend’,32 all of which are operant here. In another metadramatic moment, Raise Slander agrees to partake of the drink he mockingly claims to have been ‘chaungyd by sum fals wyle’ (356). Though a severe headache makes him ‘[r]epent’ of his ‘cursyd and fals langage’ (366–7), he nevertheless leaves the audience with a lingering sense of anxiety: Mary had indeed kept her vow, but the process that confirmed her innocence has been a charade on at least one level.33 The rich polysemy of the Detractors is a challenge to intercommunal readings of this play. If its purpose had been to incite against the Jews, the Lollards, or the clerical establishment, it would not have devised such equivocal characters. As the corresponding episode from the South English Nativity illustrates, propaganda thrives on crude distinctions. Here, most of the protagonists resist them. Abizachar, for example, differs from his counterpart in PseudoMatthew (ch. 7) in being Mary’s ‘sybbe [relation]’ (113) rather than a self-interested father who has sought to wed her to his son. The Detractors repeatedly pick on this detail when calling for impartial judgement (114, 200), and later when contesting the results of the ordeal (355). Though led to mistrust her, Abizachar does not completely turn against Mary: unlike the bishop in the South English Nativity, he besets her with searing questions (202–9), not wrathful accusations. Is Abizachar, then, a virtuous if momentarily misguided Jew? Once again, the play fails to provide a definite answer, especially if read in the manuscript context that preserves it. The N-Town ‘Presentation of Mary in the Temple’ has Abizachar blur the boundaries between Judaism and Christianity even further by speaking of the ‘commaundementys ten, / Which … must be kept of all Crysten men’ (170–2) and then enjoining the audience to ‘[l]ove Fadyr, Sone, and Holy Gost’ (178).34 He can therefore just as easily have been perceived – or staged – as a Christian judge or cleric led astray by false suspicion. Even the Doctors of the Law, who debate with Christ and the Apostles in the New Testament, cannot be reduced to anti-Jewish caricatures in the ‘Trial of Mary

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and Joseph’.35 Always one step ahead of Abizachar in believing the Detractors, they nevertheless start by contesting their allegations (122–5, 130–3). Nor, despite their firmer attitude, do they join the Dean and the Detractors in slighting the defendants. Though possibly dressed in a similar fashion, they are a far cry from Annas and his entourage in the N-Town Passion cycle. In the absence of clear-cut identity markers, Joseph and Mary are distinguished from the other characters by their behaviour, not their group affiliation. No one can make them lose their faith in God’s justice or even riposte when insulted. Unruffled by the false charges brought against them, their speech is consistently straightforward, honest, respectful, and truthful. Only saints can withstand such abuse without once losing their composure. As Lipton puts it, Mary’s ‘language rather than her body … proves the divine meaning even of her body’.36 When everything and everyone around the Holy Family becomes increasingly ambiguous, they remain simple. This astonishing contrast gives rise to a sense of wonder. It also explains why Mary is worthy of carrying God’s Son and why Joseph – whatever attributes he was given in the original production, and however thorny his relationship with Mary comes across in several other N-Town plays37 – deserves to join his wife in taking care of Jesus. The Virgin’s spiritual perfection also inspires her to pray for everyone’s forgiveness (368–9, 374–7): the Dean, the spectators, the Detractors, Abizachar, and the Doctors of the Law. All join the bishop in kneeling before Mary (370). While the apocryphal episode staged in the ‘Trial of Mary and Joseph’ affords precious moments of comic relief, the play’s function exceeds the irreverent humour in which it revels. Or rather, its very status as interlude allows it to impart a radically new interpretation of the story it performs. In a world where God can no longer be counted upon to adjudicate every court case, perpetual vigilance on everyone’s part is needed to ensure fair procedure. Complicating the distinction between good and bad characters by resisting identitarian politics even as it draws on them for dramatic effect, it stresses that all of its protagonists belong to a single community and must learn to make it work together. While the rival factions of East Anglian society, on which the historicist studies cited at the beginning of this chapter have based their analysis of the play, are certainly relevant to reconstructing its topical implications, such readings are far from exhausting its performative potential and social significance, which its original take on the apocryphal story helps reveal.

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Notes 1 For ease of reading, all references are to Douglas Sugano (ed.), The N-Town Plays (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007). The standard critical edition is Stephen Spector (ed.), The N-Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D.8, Early English Text Society Supplementary Series 11, 12, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 2 The influence of Marian literature on this compilation is documented in J. A. Tasioulas, ‘Between Doctrine and Domesticity: The Portrayal of Mary in the N-Town Plays’, in Diane Watt (ed.), Medieval Women in Their Communities (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), pp. 222–45, at pp. 228–33. 3 Theresa Coletti, ‘Purity and Danger: The Paradox of Mary’s Body and the En-gendering of the Infancy Narrative in the English Mystery Cycles’, in Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (eds), Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 65–95; Cindy L. Carlson, ‘Like a Virgin: Mary and her Doubters in the N-Town Cycle’, in Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl (eds), Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 199–217; Emma Maggie Solberg, ‘Madonna, Whore: Mary’s Sexuality in the N-Town Plays’, Comparative Drama 48 (2014), pp. 191–219. 4 Alison M. Hunt, ‘Maculating Mary: The Detractors of the N-Town Cycle’s “Trial of Joseph and Mary” ’, Philological Quarterly 73 (1994), pp. 11–29. 5 Emma Lipton, Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), pp. 118–27. 6 Colin Fewer, ‘The “Fygure” of the Market: The N-Town Cycle and East Anglian Lay Piety’, Philological Quarterly 77 (1998), pp. 117–47, at p. 121. 7 Fewer, ‘The “Fygure” of the Market’, pp. 127–40. 8 Both Lipton, Affections of the Mind, pp. 92–3 and Hunt, ‘Maculating Mary’, 19 qualify their arguments by stressing the difficulty of distinguishing heterodox from orthodox patterns of thought and discourse. 9 See Merrall Llewelyn Price, ‘Re-membering the Jews: Theatrical Violence in the N-Town Marian Plays’, Comparative Drama 41 (2007), pp. 439–63. 10 The partly modernised legal setting of the play has been discussed by Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 175; Lynn Squires, ‘Law and Disorder in Ludus Coventriae’, Comparative Drama 12 (1978), pp. 200–13; Emma Lipton, ‘Language on Trial: Performing the Law in the N-Town Trial Play’, in Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington (eds), The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 115–35.

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11 P. A. van Stempvoort, ‘The Protevangelium Jacobi, the Sources of Its Theme and Style and Their Bearing on Its Date’, Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur 88 = Studia Evangelica 3 (1964), pp. 410–26, at pp. 415–17, 419–25; Danny Praet, ‘Susanna, the Fathers and the Passio Sereni (BHL 7595–6): Sexual Morals, Intertextuality and Early Christian Self-Definition’, Zeitschrift für antikes Christentum 14 (2011), pp. 556–80, at pp. 568–9. 12 Pseudo-Matthew 2 and Daniel 13:30, 33, 63; Pseudo-Matthew 12:3 and Daniel 13:23, 34, 46, 63; Pseudo-Matthew 12:4 and Daniel 13:41–3; Pseudo-Matthew 12:5 and Daniel 13:60, 63. Cf. Pseudo-Matthew 13:4 and Daniel 13:43. Another resonance of Daniel 13:2–3 appears in Pseudo-Matthew 6:2. 13 This distinction is further developed in Jonathan Stavsky, ‘As the Lily among Thorns: Daniel 13 in the Writings of John Wyclif and His Followers’, Viator 46 (2015), pp. 249–75. 14 Jan Gijsel (ed.), Libri de nativitate Mariae: Pseudo-Matthaei Evangelium, CCSA 9 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997), 12:5; my translation. 15 O. S. Pickering (ed.), The South English Nativity of Mary and Christ: Ed. from MS BM Stowe 949 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1975). 16 I adopt a variant reading rejected by Pickering, whose edition has ‘me’ instead. Other changes placed in brackets reflect the different sentence structure that results from it. 17 Pickering, South English Nativity, pp. 307–10. 18 Roscoe E. Parker (ed.), The Middle English Stanzaic Versions of the Life of Saint Anne, EETS O.S. 174 (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), pp. 1–89. 19 Parker, Life of Saint Anne, pp. 859–64. 20 John Lydgate, A Critical Edition of John Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady, ed. Joseph A. Lauritis, Ralph A. Klinefelter, and Vernon F. Gallagher (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1961); Gail McMurray Gibson, ‘Bury St. Edmunds, Lydgate, and the N-Town Cycle’, Speculum 56 (1981), pp. 56–90 traces N-Town to Lydgate’s monastic town and even makes a case for his authorship of this compilation. 21 Spector, ‘The Trial of Mary and Joseph’, note on line 25. 22 Sugano, ‘The Trial of Mary and Joseph’, 182–5, 190–3. 23 Woolf, English Mystery Plays, pp. 175–6; Richard J. Moll, ‘Staging Disorder: Charivari in the N-Town Cycle’, Comparative Drama 35 (2001), pp. 145–61, at pp. 146–9; Lipton, Affections of the Mind, pp. 103–4, 119–22; and Solberg, ‘Madonna, Whore’, pp. 193, 198–9, 203–7 link the sexual comedy of Mary and Joseph’s marriage in the N-Town manuscript to fabliaux such as Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale and Merchant’s Tale. Lipton argues that Mary refuses to play along with the rules of this genre. See also the studies cited in note 37. 24 For a compelling alternative hypothesis, see Moll, ‘Staging Disorder’, pp. 145, 153–7, who maintains that at least some of these characters would have assisted the Dean in mocking the defendants by mounting a ‘riding’.

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25 Pace Sugano, ‘The Trial of Mary and Joseph’, note on lines 9–32. 26 Pace Douglas W. Hayes, ‘Backbiter and the Rhetoric of Detraction’, Comparative Drama 34 (2000), pp. 53–78, at p. 68. Though he does argue that spectators are meant to view ‘the events of the play’ as ‘involv[ing] them and hav[ing] an impact on their lives’ (67), Hayes focuses on the repercussions of this incident for the history of salvation – and the audience’s fate in the afterlife. Had Mary been found guilty, the Saviour would not have been born: a false anxiety that, we have seen, is cultivated by the South English Nativity. 27 Sugano, ‘The Trial of Mary and Joseph’, pp. 34–41. 28 For the history and functions of these attributes, see Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 15–19; Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Naomi Lubrich, ‘The Wandering Hat: Iterations of the Medieval Jewish Pointed Cap’, Jewish History 29 (2015), pp. 203–44. Theresa Coletti, ‘Devotional Iconography in the N-Town Marian Plays’, Comparative Drama 11 (1977), pp. 22–44 considers the relevance of visual culture to reconstructing the performance of the plays belonging to this compilation. 29 Douglas Sugano, ‘ “This game wel pleyd in good a-ray”: The N-Town Playbooks and East Anglian Games’, Comparative Drama 28 (1994), pp. 221–34, at pp. 228–32 argues that the manuscript, rather than its owners, travelled across East Anglia. 30 Hayes, ‘Backbiter and the Rhetoric of Detraction’ compares the ‘Trial of Mary and Joseph’ with the Castle of Perseverance, another East Anglian play that features a vice called Backbiter. 31 For a broader treatment of the problems attending the ordeal, see Cindy L. Carlson, ‘Mary’s Obedience and Power in the Trial of Mary and Joseph’, Comparative Drama 29 (1995), pp. 348–62, at pp. 355–8. Hunt, ‘Maculating Mary’, pp. 12–15 explores other romance resonances of this play. 32 The Electronic Middle English Dictionary, University of Michigan, 2013, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/ (accessed 11 April 2019), s.v. ‘ja¯pe’ (n.), senses 1a, 2a, 1c. As Solberg, ‘Madonna, Whore’, p. 193 observes, Mary’s husband uses the verbal form of this word in the sense of ‘to have sexual intercourse’ in the N-Town ‘Joseph’s Doubt’, 43–4, for which see ‘ja¯ pen’ (v.), sense 3a. 33 Other reflexive moments in this play are discussed in William Fitzhenry, ‘The N-Town Plays and the Politics of Metatheater’, Studies in Philology 100 (2003), pp. 22–43, at pp. 34–6. 34 For a defence of reading the N-Town manuscript as a compilatio with its own coherence, see Lipton, Affections of the Mind, pp. 90–1. 35 Similar to Abizachar, the Doctors’ identity oscillates between Judaism and Christianity in the N-Town manuscript. ‘Christ and the Doctors’

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features another pair who starts by parading the learning typical of medieval professors (1–32). The only subject mentioned by the doctors that was not part of the university curriculum is ‘negremauncye’ (17). 36 Lipton, Affections of the Mind, p. 126. 37 Besides the example given in note 32, see Joseph’s remarks in the N-Town ‘Joseph’s Doubt’, 95–7 and ‘Nativity’, 39. His ambiguous character and religious identity in these plays are examined by Martin W. Walsh, ‘Divine Cuckold/Holy Fool: The Comic Image of Joseph in the English “Troubles” Play’, in W. M. Ormrod (ed.), England in the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1985 Harlaxton Symposium (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1986), pp. 278–97; Daisy Black, ‘A Man Out of Time: Joseph, Time and Space in the N-Town Marian Plays’, in Elizabeth Cox, Liz Herbert McAvoy, and Roberta Magnani (eds), Reconsidering Gender, Time and Memory in Medieval Culture (Woodbridge: Brewer, 2015), pp. 147–62. Further studies are referenced in note 23.

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3 Embodiment and joint attention: an enactive reading of the Middle English cycle plays Eva von Contzen

Popular religious drama of the medieval period was often criticised for its light entertainment as well as for its unruly, disruptive conflation of flesh and spirit. Yet at the same time, the plays were very successful, not least due to their engagement and activation of the audience. In the anonymous Wycliffite Treatise of Miraclis Pleyinge, the author admits – his profound criticism of miracle plays notwithstanding – that these plays are highly effective because they are so interactive and immediate; in his terms, they are ‘quick’ in contrast to ‘dead’ books, which can merely be read but lack the experiential dimension of theatre.1 We can deepen our understanding of this dimension by approaching the Middle English cycle plays in terms of their ‘enactivism’ – that is, those elements that ‘activate’ the audience to experience the action in a direct and dynamic way. Formally, such enactivism hinges on the characters’ self-description: the actors accompany their words with the actions and emotions they are describing (or vice versa: the actions and emotions underline the words). The effect is a doubling of the action: verbal action and bodily action correspond; they mutually enrich each other, and in doing so, they propel the audience to ‘join in’ the performance. This ‘joining in’ is not intellectual but experiential; it draws on the spectators’ experience as embodied human beings who perceive the world through and in their bodies, too. Building on recent developments in cognitive literary theory in general and the concept of ‘joint attention’ in particular, I will argue that we can focus on the cycle plays anew from a phenomenological, ‘enactive’ perspective of how the human bodies and their actions on the medieval stage bind their spectators’ attention in a highly effective and experiential fashion. I will begin by scrutinising the function of self-descriptions, running commentaries, and deictics in the plays, which demonstrate the striking preoccupation with embodied perception. In a second step, I will introduce the concept

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of ‘joint attention’ as a useful theory from current research in cognitive (literary) studies. This concept, as will be shown, complements established approaches from performance studies and can enhance our understanding of the formal arrangement of the plays and their potential effects against the backdrop of affective piety.

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Self-description and running commentary in the cycle plays It has become a commonplace to note that Middle English religious drama contains a high degree of self-description: the characters verbalise what they are doing on stage. Peter Meredith aptly calls this ‘third-person style’, that is, ‘a character telling the audience what he is doing at the same time as he is doing it’.2 At times, characters also explain or moralise their own or another character’s action, thus taking on an authorial, explicating role. In all extant cycle or mystery plays, the characters make abundant reference to their movements and bodily action. These references either take the form of a running commentary, or are implied in the characters’ speech acts in the form of deictic pronouns and imperatives. This strongly suggests that they were accompanied, in the actual performance context, by gestures, such as pointing or turning to an object or another character. A noteworthy running commentary is the story of the Creation in the second play of the N-Town Cycle. ‘Deus’ repeatedly reminds the audience that the various steps of the Creation were brought about due to his agency. He often uses the present tense, in the active voice; if not, he adds qualifications that make his influence clear: Deus:                

Now hevyn is made for aungell sake þe fyrst day and þe fyrst nyth. The secunde day watyr I make, The walkyn also, ful fayr and [br]yth. The iijde day I parte watyr from erthe; Tre and every growyng thyng, Bothe erbe and floure of suete smellyng, The jijde day is made be my werkyng. Now make I þe day þat xal be þe ferthe.

           

Sunne, and mone, and sterrys also þe forthe day I make in-same. þe vte day werm and fysch þat swymme and go, Byrdys and bestys, bothe wylde and tame. The sexte day my werk I do And make þe, man, Adam be name.

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In erthelech paradys withowtyn wo I graunt þe bydyng, lasse þu do blame. (N-Town, 1–16)3

For each of the six days, ‘Deus’ emphasises his agency. His words accompany the creation and stress his direct involvement in the making of the world.4 While the Creation only implies physical action, the ensuing running commentaries more directly refer to the characters’ bodily action and movement in space. After Eve has tasted the forbidden fruit, she walks over to Adam and accompanies her movement with the following words: Eva:                

To myn husbond with herte ful fayn þis appyl I bere, as þu byddyst me. þis frute to ete I xal asayn So wys as God is yf we may be, And Goddys pere of myth. To myn husbond I walke my way, And of þis appyl I xal asay To make hym to ete, yf þat I may, And of þis frewte to byth. (N-Town, 117–25)

When Adam receives the apple, he too describes his actions: ‘Of thyn hand I take it here, / And xal sone tast þis mete’ (163–4). Both Eve and Adam’s words are rich in their uses of deictics, that is, references that draw attention to the proximity and co-presence of objects, here the forbidden fruit: ‘þis appyl’ (119; 123); ‘þis frute’ (120); ‘þis frewte’ (125); ‘þis mete’ (164). Deictic references often go hand in hand with imperatives: characters show other characters something, point to objects, people, and places, and in doing so want the other to take action. This is a frequent pattern in all of the plays. When Eve offers the fruit to Adam, she not only uses five imperatives to persuade Adam to take a bite, she also urges him to take the apple into his hand: Eva:      

My semely spowse and good husbond, Lystenyth to me, sere, I ȝow pray: Take þis fayr appyl all in ȝoure hond, þerof a mursel byte and asay. (126–9)

Eve draws attention to the physical contact that is necessary to hand over the apple, as well as to the sensual pleasure of tasting the fruit. She closes her speech by repeating ‘þis appyl þu take out of myn hond; / A bete þerof þu take’ (137–8). Adam is at first

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horrified in view of the offer and urges Eve to throw the fruit away immediately:

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Out of þin hand with hasty spede Cast out þat appyl anon present For fer of Goddys threte! (145–7)

Adam repeats the reference to Eve’s hand and accentuates the presence (and thus imminent threat) of the apple. At the same time, the shift in the demonstrative pronoun from ‘this’ in Eve’s speech to ‘þat appyl’ is a clear marker that Adam tries to distance himself from the object of temptation. Many similar passages could be adduced from any of the biblical narratives that were put on stage in the later medieval period in England. They further illustrate the heavy reliance on self-description involving deictics and the characters’ movement and bodily action. In the N-Town Play of Joseph’s Doubts about Mary (Play XII), for instance, Joseph has accompanied Mary on her visit to Elizabeth. He does not follow his wife to Elizabeth’s house but – as he lets the audience know – sits down at some distance. Mary’s words imply that she not only has approached the house but also already seen her pregnant cousin: Joseph:      

A, a, wyff, in feyth I am wery. Therfore I wole sytt downe and rest me ryght here. Lo, wyff, here is þe hous of Zakary; Wole ȝe I clepe Elyzabeth to ȝow to apere?

Maria:      

Nay, husbond, and it plese ȝow, I xal go ner. Now þe blyssyd Trynité be in þis hous. A, cosyn Elizabeth, swete modyr, what cher? Ȝe grow grett! A, my God, how ȝe be gracyous! (N-Town, 43–50)

Both actions – Joseph resting at some distance from Elizabeth’s house and Mary approaching and greeting her cousin – are commented upon by the characters. In other plays, too, Joseph is a character who frequently verbalises his actions and thoughts.5 In the Chester cycle play of the Annunciation and Nativity (Play VI, The Wrightes’ Playe), he describes his carpenter’s tools as follows: Joseph:

With this axe that I beare, this perces and this naugere and hammer, all in fere, I have wonnen my meate. (Chester, 397–400)6

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Joseph directs the audience’s gaze to the objects that characterise his profession as well as to the thingness of the objects and props he is carrying at this very moment – note the repetition of the pronoun ‘this’, which may have been accompanied by a gesture of holding up or showing the items in question. The consistent use of self-description, often involving objects and physical movement on stage, can partly be accounted for by the realities of medieval performances: on moving pageants, in the narrow and crowded streets of the towns, the spectators were not always able to see much of the action, or to hear every word that was spoken.7 The latter may have been even more important than the former: Philip Butterworth notes that there are far more medieval references to ‘hearing’ a play or the players than to seeing them.8 At the same time, the very corporeality of the biblical characters on stage brought to the fore that they were human beings like the members of the audience, behaving and feeling in very similar ways. Critics have tried to describe the effects and attraction of the medieval mystery plays by stressing their links to liturgical practices, their embeddedness in the communal context, and the heavy reliance on visual cues and visuality, which ties in with practices of late medieval affective piety.9 I wish to take a step back and reflect on the potential effects caused by the aforementioned features (focus on bodily action, running commentaries, deictics that orient the action in the here-and-now of the performance context): what does the ‘third-person style’ mean for the actual context of the performance? This is, indeed, where the field of cognitive literary studies can potentially throw new light on old texts. To this field we now turn our attention. A cognitive approach to Middle English drama: joint attention In recent years, the field of cognitive literary studies has gained great currency. Questions range from the cognitive backdrop of literary production and the cognitive engagement and investment of readers, to the representation of mental processes in and through literary texts. Experience is a key term in this trajectory, most often evoked in the context of embodiment. Embodied knowledge is an important aspect of how we experience and make sense of literature, and the concept works well in order to elicit whole networks of ‘embodied’ configurations within and across literary texts.10 Maurice Merleau-Ponty famously argued that the lived body, that is, the fact of having and living in a body in the world, forms the basis of

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our perception and experience.11 Building on the phenomenological tradition, Alva Noë and others have developed the ‘enactive’ approach. Perceptual experience, Noë argues, is interactive: the embodied mind is constantly in dialogue with the physical environment. We thus necessarily rely on our perception, and then evaluation, of what is going on around us: on our upright posture, the body’s movement, sensual experiences, and so forth.12 While linguistically and conceptually, embodied perception may be expressed differently in different periods, the basic assumption is that embodiment as such has not changed in any significant way. Accordingly, scholars therefore highlight the specific – that is, the historically and culturally specific – manifestations of how cognition and literature have been enmeshed. In theatre studies, such experience-based, cognitive approaches emphasise the phenomenal, ‘lived’ body rather than the body as a representation or signifier.13 Bruce McConachie in particular has made a strong case for applying cognitive theories to theatre studies, for instance by drawing on recent work on mirror neurons and embodiment to describe the multiple ways in which theatre captures the audience’s attention.14 It goes without saying that embodiment is also a key concept in performance studies, which likewise builds on phenomenological ideas of the body ‘being in the world’.15 However, from a performance studies perspective, it is the actual encounter of actors and spectators in the moment of a specific performance that matters, not the text, which provides cues for the staging of a play, but remains otherwise fixed. Actual performances, the key object of study, are transitory because they happen ‘in action’. Of course we do not have access to descriptions of ‘original’ performances of medieval cycle plays; as medievalists, we have to rely on the textual evidence alone. It is in this context that a cognitive approach can bridge the gap, or at least provide an approximation to bridging the gap, between the dramatic text and actual performances. Reading the text as providing cues for patterns of behaviour that in turn have a certain effect on the audience comes close to offering an analysis of the semioticity and mediality of (a reconstructed, imagined) performance.16 For medieval drama, Jill Stevenson has demonstrated the merits of cognitive approaches, which can also fruitfully complement traditional literary theory. She uses conceptual blending and mirror neuron responses as two promising areas of cognitive research for medieval theatre scholarship.17 Both these theories can enhance our insight into audience engagement and the multi-layered aspects of

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the medieval plays, which suggest that a city like York is simultaneously the world created by God, the world as temptation, the community Christ saves, and the reality in which the spectators live their lives: ‘The spectators must live in the theatrical blend.’ 18 Building on Stevenson’s suggestions, ‘joint attention’, another concept from cognitive studies, can illuminate how the medieval cycle plays implicate and engage their audiences in the biblical plots they (re)present on stage. While all theatre can be said to engage the audience in a variety of ways, this is especially pertinent to the mystery plays, which took place in the midst of medieval town life.19 Previous studies on medieval theatre and audience involvement typically take a rather broad view on the topic, focusing on larger social and societal events and processes that reciprocally shaped, and were shaped by, theatrical performances. Matthew Sergi, for example, has demonstrated the striking influence of public practices on the Chester Cycle.20 Stevenson’s interest is likewise in the communal, public involvement to which the plays bear witness. The concept of ‘joint attention’, by contrast, allows us to hone in on the textual cues that offer potential triggers for audience engagement and thus contribute to the dynamic, experiential, enactive dimension of the plays.21 Originally describing a phenomenon in children’s cognitive development emerging around the age of twelve months, the concept of ‘joint attention’ has been transferred to other contexts in which two (or more) subjects attend to the same object, and are aware of their mutual awareness: Joint attention is typically defined as two individuals coordinating visual attention to an object of mutual interest. … [M]ore than two individuals can be involved, it can be any type of attention (e.g., visual or auditory), and the attention need not be to an object – it can be to an event, a location, an idea, or anything else. The most crucial part of the definition is the ‘coordinating’ part – the part that makes joint attention joint, rather than just parallel attention. Joint attention means more than just two individuals attending to the same thing; in addition, both individuals need to know together with each other that they are attending to the same thing. They need to be aware (in some sense) that they are sharing attention.22

Joint attention implies a triadic or triangular process between the three participants or parties that are joined in the experience: ‘x and y are jointly attending to z’.23 Its three key parameters, as Vasudevi Reddy points out, are perceivability, experienceability, and engageability24 – all three of which are crucial for the medieval plays as well.

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In literary, written texts, as Merja Polvinen and others have demonstrated, joint attention can be used to explain the phenomenon that readers are simultaneously aware of what is narrated and that it is narrated (the narrative story-world and the narrative as medium). Joint attention is generated in a process that moves between readers and characters: the embodied resonances of motion verbs, bodily states, and movements evoke proximity and invite enactment.25 In written narratives, however, joint attention can only ever be a metaphorical concept since the attention is by definition asynchronous. The story-world, as David Herman reminds us, ‘must be reconstructed on the basis of the textual blueprint itself rather than in conjunction with a speaker’s gaze, torso orientation, and gestural production’.26 In actual performance contexts, however, we are dealing with exactly these realities: the audience is literally attending the plays as well as ‘attending to’ their contents. Joint attention in the cycle plays Late medieval drama, then, is ‘enactive’ in the sense that it generates, through the characters’ words and actions, ‘joint attention’: the Middle English cycle plays capitalise on embodied perception and thereby increase their effectiveness by inviting the spectators into moments of joint attention. Against this backdrop, the frequency of characters’ self-descriptions and running commentaries in the cycle plays attains a different, more nuanced function: the audience is continuously provided with verbal anchors that allow them to participate, through their gaze and attention, in the action on stage. When Adam and Eve talk about the apple they are holding, they invite the audience into the shared experience of looking at this object, which can be seen, felt, and tasted. Through its phenomenological presence, and in its theological significance, the apple becomes a trigger that renders the biblical story ‘enactive’. This approach thus contributes to the understanding of theatre as a real event. David Z. Saltz distinguishes between ‘infiction’ and ‘outfiction’ in this context: infiction refers to the audience’s perception of the play-as-performance that evolves on stage (‘the fictional schema that structures the performance event’), whereas outfiction refers to the play-as-story (‘the narrative content that we extract from the performance event’).27 Joint attention feeds into both: experientially, it minimises the spectators’ distance to the events on stage and thus strengthens the engagement with the infiction; conceptually, it often

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underscores scenes and events of theological relevance and hence is meaningful also for the outfiction. Importantly, not every single scene is enactive in this sense; rather, enactive passages alternate with non-enactive ones and thus punctuate the plays. The effect is a rhythm of higher and lower intensity of audience engagement, which ensures that the audience (likely to be distracted by the sounds and sights that went hand in hand with such a public spectacle) would be drawn into the plays frequently enough to not lose interest. Scenes of heightened theological meaning are for obvious reasons particularly suited to create joint attention. When in the N-Town Play Satan (‘Serpens’) tempts Eve to take a bite of the apple, he uses both deictics and imperatives and evokes the sensual dimension of consuming the fruit: ‘Of þis appyl yf ȝe wyl byte / Evyn as God is, so xal ȝe be’ (100–1), and once again a few lines later: Take þis appyl in þin hond And to byte þerof þu fond. Take another to þin husbond … (N-Town, 109–11)

At times, the stage directions (if provided in the manuscripts) provide further evidence of how the actors accompany their actions with the words they are speaking, and vice versa. The Drapers’ Play (Play II) of the Chester Cycle is a good example of how the action that is implied in the characters’ speeches is meant to be performed: Then God taketh Adam by the hande and causeth him to lye downe, and taketh a ribbe out of his syde and saith Deus:              

Hit is not good man only to bee; helpe to him now make wee. But excice sleepe behoves mee anon in this man heare. One sleepe thou arte, well I see. Heare a bone I take of thee, and fleshe alsoe with harte free to make thee a feere. (Chester, 129–36)

Then God doth make the woman of the ribbe of Adam …

God muses on Adam’s loneliness and describes how Adam is sleeping (‘One sleepe thou arte, well I see’), drawing attention to the here and now of the situation when he takes ‘a bone’ (134) from the

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sleeping Adam to create Eve. The very same strategy is used in the episode after the Fall when Adam and Eve protect their nakedness: Eva:      

Adam, husbande, I reade we take this figge-leaves for shames sake, and to our members an hillinge make of them for thee and mee.

Adam:      

And therwith my members I will hide, and under this tree I will abyde; for surely come God us besyde, owt of this place shall wee. (Chester, 273–80)

Then Adam and Eve shall cover ther members with leaves, hydinge themselves under the trees.

The deictic pronoun in the phrase ‘this figge-leaves’ suggests that Eve is either pointing to the leaves or already holding them, just as Adam’s reference to ‘this tree’ implies not only the existence of the tree but also that he immediately hides there. The Nativity provides another context in which joint attention is created and in which the audience’s perception of the action is very effectively channelled. As in the apocryphal narratives, in the accounts of the cycle plays Joseph is absent at the moment of the birth. In the York version (Play XVI, The Tilethatchers), Mary describes the birth as follows: Nowe in my sawle grete joie haue I, I am all cladde in comforte clere, Now will be borne of my body Both God and man togedir in feere, Blist mott he be. Jesu my sone þat is so dere, Nowe borne is he. (York, 50–6)28

Guided by Mary’s running commentary, the spectators move from the ‘grete joie’ in Mary’s soul and the future tense ‘now will be borne’ to the resultative ‘Nowe borne is he.’ What is more, the Nativity plays of both Chester and N-Town include the apocryphal story about the two midwives Joseph fetches to assist Mary. One of the two, called Salome, refuses to believe that Mary is still a virgin. She touches Mary in order to convince herself of Mary’s virginity, whereupon her hand withers. While the actual act of touching Mary is described only in the (Latin) stage directions, Salome’s reaction, here taken from the N-Town

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version, is again provided in explicit terms that bind the audience’s attention to the events on stage in an enactive manner. First, the second midwife present, called Zelomye, touches Mary and instantly believes that she is witnessing a virgin conception and birth. Then Salome describes how she moves from disbelief to belief: Hic palpat Zelomye Beatam Virginem dicens: O myghtfull God, haue mercy on me! A merveyle þat nevyr was herd beforn Here opynly I fele and se: A fayr chylde of a maydon is born, And nedyth no waschynge as other don: Ful clene and pure forsoth is he, Withoutyn spott or ony polucyon, His modyr nott hurte of virgynité! (N-Town, 226–33) Hic tangit Salomee Mari[am] et, cum arescerit manus eius, vlulando et quasi flendo dicjt: Alas, alas, and weleawaye! For my grett dowth and fals beleve Myne hand is ded and drye as claye My fals vntrost hath wrought myscheve! Alas þe tyme þat I was born, Thus to offende aȝens Goddys myght! Myn handys power is now all born, Styff as a stykke, and may nowth plyght. (N-Town, 254–61)

Salome refers three times to her dead hand; the third reference occurs amid her long lament and regret of her disbelief: ‘My hand is dead and doth me greve’ (276). For Rosemary Woolf, this episode is an example of a trivial, sensational miracle that is ‘random and tasteless’ and that ‘nothing can make [the author’s] apocryphal subject-matter aesthetically pleasing’.29 Yet from an enactive perspective, this passage is neither tasteless nor trivial; it is a forceful and highly effective detail of the plot that channels joint attention by focusing on Mary’s holy body and the sinfulness of Salome’s doubts as they manifest themselves on her own body. Such attention-inducing scenes that rely on self-descriptions and running commentaries of the characters’ actions, coupled with references to their bodies and the senses, at times also occur in order to provide moments of comic relief. This is especially striking in the shepherds’ scenes, which are characterised by a heightened

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degree of realism.30 In the Second Shepherds’ Play of the Towneley Cycle, one of the shepherds complains about the cold and the rough weather, commenting on the physical effects the cold has on his body: 1 Pastor:          

Lord, what these weders are cold! And I am yll happyd. I am nerehande dold, So long haue I nappyd; My legys thay fold, My fyngers ar chappyd. (Towneley, 2–6)31

One could easily imagine that the shepherd’s words would have been accompanied by rubbing his hands and shaking out his legs. We thus find a combination of the description of the harsh realities of the shepherds’ life with a commentary on the characters’ movement on stage. In the York Play of the Nativity (XIV, The Tilethatchers), it is Joseph who adds a similar realistic aspect to the play when he comments on the harsh realities of his situation: For in grete nede nowe are we stedde As þou thyselffe the soth may see, For here is nowthir cloth ne bedde, And we are weyke and allwerie Andd fayne wolde rest. Now gracious God, for thy mercie, Wisse vs þe best. (York, 22–8) […] Þan wolde I fayne we had sum light, What so befall. It waxis right myrke vnto my sight, And colde withall (York, 39–42)

Some lines later, he again remarks, ‘A lorde God what þe wedir is colde, / þe fellest freese þat euere I felyd’ (71–2). By drawing attention to their physical well-being, the characters afford anchors for creating joint attention. The actors’ emphasis on embodied perception enables the audience to not only perceive but also to empathise with the characters and thus to feel particularly close to the action on stage. References to what the shepherds are seeing are a further characteristic of the Nativity plays. In all four Middle English cycles, the shepherds discuss in some detail what they see upon the coming

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of the star that guides them to Bethlehem. The shared perception is acted out, as in the following passage from the York Cycle (The Shepherds, Play XV, The Chandlers): I Pastor:     III Pastor: II Pastor:   I Pastor:     II Pastor:  

Steppe furth and stande by me right, And telle me þan Yf þou sawe euere swilke a sight. I? Nay, certis, nor neuere no man. Say felowes, what, fynde yhe any feest, Me falles for to haue parte, pardé! Whe, Hudde, behalde into the heste, A selcouthe sight þan sail þou see Vppon þe skye. We, telle me men, emang vs thre, What garres yow stare þus sturdely? (York, 40–50)

In this passage, joint attention is created between the characters: the two shepherds who are already following the star with their gaze (I Pastor and III Pastor) attract the third shepherd’s attention. The Chester Cycle version adds a particularly realistic physical detail in this context: Tunc sedebunt, et Stella apparebit, et dicat Primus Pastor: What is all this light here that blasses soe bright here on my black beard? … (Chester, 300–2) […] Secundus Pastor: Feard for a fraye nowe   may wee bee all nowe;   and yett it is night,   yett seemes yt day nowe.   Never, soothly to saye nowe,   see I such a sight. (Chester, 306–11)

The appearance of the star in this play is preceded by a long episode in which the first shepherd offers a tour of his herbs and their efficacies (prior to his sharing of a meal with his two fellow shepherds). Both passages are characterised by their high degree of experientiality: through deictic references and descriptions of their actions, the events become palpable from listening to them alone. The first shepherd draws attention to his herbs by saying ‘Loe, here bee my herbes safie and sownde’ (17) as well as ‘Here be more herbes, I tell yt you; / I shall recken them on a rowe’

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(25–6) – following this with a whole list of herbs. All three then take out the food their wives have prepared, one item after the other:

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Secundus Pastor:         Primus Pastor:         Tertius Pastor:

Here is bredd this daye was bacon, onyons, garlycke, and leekes, butter that bought was in Blacon, and greene cheese that will greese well your cheekes. (Chester, 113–16) […] Nowe will I caste of my cloacke and put ont parte of my liverye, put owt that I have in my poacke, and a pigges foote from puddinges purye. (Chester, 125–8) […] And of this bottell nowe will I bibbe … (Chester, 145)

Once again, references to physical action and descriptions that imply bodily movement (deictic references suggesting they were coupled with gestures), as well as the prospect of sensual experience (eating the food), take precedence. The actors’ bodies become the focal point for creating joint attention: they shape and direct the spectators’ attention to the various embodied aspects of the religious narratives. The effect is therefore indeed enactive: by underscoring both levels of infiction and outfiction – the play-as-performance and the playas-story – the audience is invited, even urged to engage with the narratives and their spiritual significance. Thus the ultimate effect is a devotional imperative, which is based on the believers’ bodies in a world they share with scriptural events. Conclusion As has often been noted, theatrical illusion is not the point of the mystery plays; with moving pageants in the audience’s everyday surroundings, and with familiar faces in the cast, spectators could hardly be expected to immerse themselves in the stories. The aim, then, is not immersion, let alone ‘the willing suspension of disbelief’, but moments of joint attention in which the narrative action takes precedence. Joint attention thus seems particularly suited to the analysis of medieval drama in its contexts of disruptions and distractions. The focus on the actors’ physical bodies and their actions in junction with the objects of their attention (the apple, the fig leaves, the shepherds’ food) afford moments of intense shared perception

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of the action on stage. The concept of joint attention complements Stevenson’s idea of conceptual blending: it adds a further dimension to the understanding of the plays from a cognitive perspective by taking the formal arrangement of the characters’ speeches in the cycle plays as a starting point and linking it with the actors’ (likely or potential) performance practices. At the same time, the ‘enactive’ approach to medieval mystery plays fits in well within existing approaches from the field of performance studies. Given that we do not have access to actual performances of the medieval plays and have to rely on the textual evidence alone, this approach allows us at least to approximate actual performances and their effects, including their semiotic and medial dimensions. As we have seen, the plays are ‘quick’ indeed: through the consistent and frequent emphasis that is put on the phenomenological bodies on stage, by means of running commentaries that capitalise on bodily movement, gestures, and sensual experience, the actors invite and activate the spectators to look closely, to fixate their gazes on the action on stage, and thus to participate together with the actors in the re-enactment of the biblical stories. From this ‘enactive’ perspective, scripture becomes an intense object of attention and thereby can also foster our understanding of what has been referred to as an ‘incarnational aesthetic’ by Gail McMurray Gibson, namely, the devotional practice prevalent in the later Middle Ages that puts emphasis on Christ’s humanity and is directed at the believers’ visual and emotional involvement.32 By means of the strategies of creating joint attention and stimulating enactive responses in the audience, the cycle plays exert their influence exactly because they transgress orthodox belief and engage the audience directly in the biblical events. They interpret the shared humanity of Christ in a very literal, experiential sense. Devotion is practice, to be lived and acted out in the everyday contexts of the believers. Notes 1 The adjective quick is used throughout the treatise; see lines 216–19 in the edition by Clifford Davidson, A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1981). On the Tretise and its criticism in relation to the plays, see the chapters in Theodore K. Lerud, Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 2 Peter Meredith, ‘“Nolo Mortem”’ and the Ludus Coventriae Play of the Woman Taken in Adultery’, Medium Aevum 38.1 (1969), pp. 38–54,

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at p. 47. See also Hans-Jürgen Diller, The Middle English Mystery Play: A Study in Dramatic Speech and Form, trans. Frances Wessels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) on the characters’ speeches, with special emphasis on time and space. 3 All quotations from the N-Town Plays are taken from the edition by Stephen Spector, The N-Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D.8, 2 vols, Early English Text Society Supplementary Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 4 While the Draper’s Play of the Chester Cycle contains a very similar running commentary that likewise stresses God’s agency in the creation of the world (see lines 16–50), other plays, such as the Towneley and York versions of the Creation, are much more careful and play down God’s agency by, e.g., relying on the passive voice (‘it shall be made’, etc.). 5 See also the York Play of Joseph’s Trouble about Mary (Play XIII, The Pewteres and Founders), where Joseph is walking about and musing over his old age (1–7), and Mary’s unexpected pregnancy (236–45). 6 All quotations from the Chester Cycle are taken from the edition by R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills, The Chester Mystery Cycle, 2 vols, Early English Text Society Supplementary Series (London: Oxford University Press, 1974). 7 See on the contexts of performance e.g. Philip Butterworth, Staging Conventions in Medieval English Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Clifford Davidson, Festivals and Plays in Late Medieval Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Penny Granger, The N-Town Play: Drama and Liturgy in Medieval East Anglia (Cambridge: Brewer, 2009); Peter Happé (ed.), Medieval English Drama: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1984); Stanley J. Kahrl, ‘The Staging of Medieval English Plays’, in Eckehard Simon (ed.), The Theatre of Medieval Europe: New Research in Early Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 130–48; James Mervyn, ‘Ritual, Drama and Social Body in the Late Medieval English Town’, in John C. Coldewey (ed.), Medieval Drama: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, Vol. II: English Cycle Plays: Studies Past and Present (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 70–97. 8 Butterworth, Staging Conventions, p. 169. 9 On the influence of the liturgy and the didactic potential, see e.g. Meg Twycross, ‘Books for the Unlearned’, in James Redmond (ed.), Drama and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 65–110. The communal context is stressed e.g. by Matthew John Sergi, ‘Play Texts and Public Practice in the Chester Cycle, 1422–1607’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2011 and the chapters in Alan Hindley (ed.), Drama and Community: People and Plays in Medieval Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999) and Simon, Theatre of Medieval Europe. On late medieval visuality and its affective dimension, see e.g. Hans Belting, The Image and its Public in the Middle Ages:

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Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion, trans. M. Bartusis and R. Meyer (New Rochelle, NY: Caratzas, 1990); Suzannah Biernhoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Andrea Louise Young, Vision and Audience in Medieval Drama: A Study of The Castle of Perseverance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 10 See e.g. Guillemette Bolens, The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) and Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). With respect to medieval texts, see also Jane Chance, ‘Cognitive Alterities: From Cultural Studies to Neuroscience and Back Again’, Postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 3 (2012), pp. 247–61. For medieval literature, the connections between the embodied mind and religion are particularly pertinent; see e.g. Cristina Maria Cervone, Poetics of the Incarnation: Middle English Writing and the Leap of Love (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 11 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (London and New York: Routledge, 2012). 12 See Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). In narrative theory, a group of scholars who call themselves second-generation cognitive theorists have conducted excellent work on embodiedness and enactivism in literary texts; see Marco Caracciolo, The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014) and Marco Caracciolo and Karin Kukkonen (eds), ‘Special Issue on Cognitive Literary Study: Second-Generation Approaches’, Style 48/3 (2014). For important groundwork on the mind–body relation, see Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1987) and A. R. Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (New York: Pantheon, 2010). In Stanton Garner’s apt phrasing, a phenomenological analysis can provide ‘a description of history as it is experienced, as its forces and outlines are perceived (or not). It can explore the particular modes of attention engaged by history, the ways in which history is both manifested and constituted in personal and intersubjective fields’ (Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994], p. 10). 13 See Garner, Bodied Spaces, p. 13. F. Elizabeth Hart stresses that language is already (cognitively) embodied, which then forms the basis and backdrop of communication; Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart (eds), Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies after the Cognitive Turn (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). 14 See Bruce McConachie, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); McConachie and Hart, Performance and Cognition; David Z. Saltz,

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‘Editorial Comment: Performance and Cognition’, Theatre Journal 59.4 (2007), pp. 547–51. 15 See e.g. Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. Saskya Iris Jain (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 84–90. 16 On the mediality and semioticity of performances, as well as on their materiality and aestheticity as the four central characteristics of performance, see Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies, ed. Minou Arjomand and Ramona Mosse, trans. Minou Arjomand (London and New York: Routledge, 2014) as well as Fischer-Lichte, The Semiotics of Theater, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992). See also Henry Bial (ed.), The Performance Studies Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). 17 Jill Stevenson, Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture: Sensual Piety in Late Medieval York (New York: Palgrave, 2010); Stevenson, ‘Embodied Enchantments: Cognitive Theory and the York Mystery Plays’, in Margaret Rogerson (ed.), The York Mystery Plays: Performance in the City (York: York Medieval Press, 2011), pp. 91–112. 18 Stevenson, ‘Embodied Enchantments’, p. 98. 19 As V. A. Kolve has pointed out, the plays were ‘never geographically localised, and there was no pretense that what went on there went on in an imagined locality relevant to the action. Action itself told the story, and it happened there in England, in front of and amid the spectators’ (‘The Drama as Play and Game’, in Happé, Medieval English Drama, pp. 54–71, at p. 64). Julian Hanich has applied joint attention to the spectatorship of films and argues that the shared activity and focus ‘on a collective intentional object’ can lead to a higher degree of emotionality through collectivity (‘Watching a Film with Others: Towards a Theory of Collective Spectatorship’, Screen 55.3 [2014], pp. 338–59, at p. 339). 20 Sergi, ‘Play Texts and Public Practice’. 21 My use of the term ‘enactive’ differs somewhat from P. B. Zarrilli’s, who uses it to describe a view on acting from ‘inside’, that is, ‘inside’ the actor’s perspective: ‘Acting should not be viewed as embodying a representation of a role or character, but rather as a dynamic, lived experience in which the actor is responsive to the demands of the particular moment within a specific (theatrical) environment’ (‘An Enactive Approach to Understanding Acting’, Theatre Journal 59.4 [2007], pp. 635–47, at p. 638). While the dynamic, experiential dimension is also something I wish to stress, the focus on the individual actor’s lived experience is problematic because it is something that is only indirectly, if at all, accessible. I understand ‘enactive’ in the more general term as it is used by cognitive literary theorists such as Caracciolo and Kukkonen; see e.g. Caracciolo and Kukkonen, ‘Special Issue on Cognitive Literary Study’.

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22 Malinda Carpenter, ‘Joint Attention in Humans and Animals’, in Norbert M. Seel (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning (New York: Springer, 2012), pp. 1663–4, at p. 1663. See also Malinda Carpenter and Kristin Liebal, ‘Joint Attention, Communication, and Knowing Together in Infancy’, in Axel Seemann (ed.), Joint Attention: New Developments in Psychology, Philosophy of Mind, and Social Neuroscience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), pp. 159–81, for an overview and a critique. For further definitions and applications in children’s development and psychology, see e.g. Naomi Eilan et al. (eds), Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005); Joel Krueger, ‘Extended Cognition and the Space of Social Interaction’, Consciousness and Cognition 20.3 (2011), pp. 643–57; Janet Metcalfe and Herbert S. Terrace (eds), Agency and Joint Attention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Peter Mundy and William Jarrold, ‘Infant Joint Attention, Neural Networks and Social Cognition’, Neural Networks 23 (2010), pp. 985–97; Michael Tomasello, ‘Joint Attention as Social Cognition’, in Chris Moore and Philip J. Dunham (eds), Joint Attention: Its Origins and Role in Development (New York and London: Psychology Press, 2014 [1995]), pp. 103–30; Michael Tomasello, ‘Reference: Intending that Others Jointly Attend’, Pragmatics & Cognition 6.1–2 (1998), pp. 229–43. 23 John Campbell, ‘Joint Attention and Common Knowledge’, in Eilan et al., Joint Attention, pp. 287–97, at p. 287. 24 Vasudevi Reddy, ‘A Gaze at Grips with Me’, in Seemann, Joint Attention, pp. 137–57, at p. 138. 25 Merja Polvinen, ‘Affect and Artifice in Cognitive Literary Theory’, Journal of Literary Semantics 42.2 (2013), pp. 165–80. See David Herman, ‘Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance’, Partial Answers 6.2 (2008), pp. 233–60 and the response by Caracciolo, ‘On the Experientiality of Stories: A Follow-up on David Herman’s “Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance” ’, Partial Answers 10.2 (2012), pp. 197–221; Gregory Currie, Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Adam Lively, ‘Joint Attention, Semiotic Mediation, and Literary Narrative’, Poetics Today 37.4 (2016), pp. 517–38; Vera Tobin, ‘Readers as Overhearers and Texts as Objects: Joint Attention in Reading Communities’, Scripta 18.34 (2014), pp. 179–98. 26 Herman, ‘Narrative Theory’, p. 252. 27 David Z. Saltz, ‘Infiction and Outfiction: The Role of Theatrical Fiction in Theatrical Performance’, in David Krasner and David Z. Saltz (eds), Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), pp. 203–20, at p. 214. This ties in with the notion that characters are simultaneously perceived as being individuals and examples of whichever moral concept they embody (Twycross, ‘Books’, p. 93).

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28 All quotations from the York Cycle are taken from the edition by Richard Beadle, The York Plays: A Critical Edition of the York Corpus Christi Play as Recorded in British Library Additional MS 35290, 2 vols, Early English Text Society Supplementary Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 2013). 29 Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 179. 30 On the shepherds’ scenes and their realism, see e.g. Lynette R. Muir, The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Woolf, Mystery Plays, p. 183. 31 All quotations from the Towneley plays are taken from the edition by Martin Stevens and A. C. Cawley, The Towneley Plays, 2 vols, Early English Text Society Supplementary Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 32 Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

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PART II From medieval to early modern drama

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4 From medieval to early modern choric threnody in biblical plays Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Silvia Bigliazzi

Performing grief In the course of four decades, between the first recorded performance of Gorboduc (1561) and Shakespeare’s first experimental lyrical tragedy presenting a substantial lamentation scene, Q2 Romeo and Juliet (1599), the word ‘lamentable’ identified a large group of tragic stories in Elizabethan England. The publishing sector in those years was invaded by titles explicitly advertising tragic stories of woe, some of which were tragedies including an individual or collective lament. As Wolfgang Clemen remarked, ‘the distinctive quality in the drama of this whole period is caught when in his Poetics Joseph Justus Scaliger lays special stress … on fletus, ululatus, conquaestiones’.1 Lament was in fact constitutive of the very idea of tragedy.2 It was a catchword promising a complex stage–audience experience of pleasure and pain: the pleasure of sharing feelings of loss and collectively releasing them; but also, as Cynthia Marshall argued, the pleasure of an experience of self-shattering, reflecting the contradictions inherent in a fluid conception of the subject, torn between contrary drives and sadomasochistic impulses.3 Despite the theatrical ferment of ‘lamentable plays’, however, there were very few collective laments on stage, where the expression of grief was mostly individual. English biblical drama was not an exception. In the 1590s only one play, George Peele’s The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe. With Tragedy of Absalon, had a choral performance indirectly linked to the tradition of the complaint. Interestingly, this unique example coalesces the classical and medieval traditions, conflating the genre of the ancient choral weeping for the dead and the liturgical, responsorial, psalmodic lamentation, in line with the dynamic system of ‘confluence’ of different traditions Bruce Smith demonstrated with regard to the early modern reception and appropriation of classical and medieval models.4 It is especially

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interesting because it confirms a shift towards a more individualised experience of grief also dramatised in secular drama in ways that synthesise classical and medieval stances, while involving reflection upon genderedness. In both classical culture and in early modern England, as well as in the medieval tradition of the Marian planctus, the lament was a gendered affair. It was women who traditionally wailed for the dead, as already in Iliad 22, where Hecuba performed a goos with the Trojan Women for Hector’s death (430–515). (The so-called goos in ancient Greece was a spontaneous form of wailing performed by kinswomen.) This scene of lament was later dramatised in Euripides’ The Trojan Women and passed down to Renaissance England especially through Seneca’s Troades. Restraining collective wailing meant, therefore, a move towards inwardness that attempts to contain excess of female emotionality. As has been pointed out, this was no new practice. As Foley has argued, already ‘[t]he sixthcentury [B.C.E.] legislation purportedly prohibited above all … everything disorderly and excessive in women’s festivals, processions (exodoi) and funeral rites’ (Plutarch, Solon: 21.5)’.5 Not surprisingly, modern playwrights ‘found in classical texts, echoes of England’s post-Reformation anxieties over mourning and burial’.6 Like tragic writers of the fifth century bce, the English playwrights incorporated contemporary tensions over the female lament.7 In the 1590s the post-Reformation ban on the collective wailing for the dead was still active, and this had social, political, and psychological implications. This ban had brought about a change of attitude in relation to the rite of choral weeping, when the lament for the dead was branded ‘as pagan, heathen, and therefore sinful and contrary to faith as much for political as theological reasons’.8 It was linked to the negation of Purgatory and of the intercessory function of prayer for the dead, shifting the focus upon a much more inward and solipsistic experience of mourning.9 Likewise, ‘[t]he banishment of the body from the burial rite’ further suggested ‘early Protestantism’s deep anxiety over any hint of a communicative link between the world of the dead and the community of the living’.10 Yet the memory of the women’s laments in medieval drama, such as the N-Town ‘Lazarus’, ‘Crucifixion’, and ‘Burial’ plays, was still fresh. It involved violent expressions of pain such as the use of ‘apostrophe, cursing, gestures of selfmutilation’, including ‘tearing the hair and throwing themselves on the ground’.11 In the case of the Virgin, that memory was of an archaic complaint of a mother grieving for the loss of her son, a figure much different

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from that of the canonical Gospels. As Velma Bourgeois Richmond has remarked with regard to the Digby Burial, ‘the wish for death’ dominates ‘Mary’s utterance’ and her ‘grief is given fresh expression with repeated questions that urge all to join in her sorrow and exclamations against the unkindness of the Crucifixion’.12 At the same time an incantatory, ‘skillful handling of the refrain “Who can not wepe, com lern at me!” ’, which appears ‘in many of the verse paragraphs (669, 676, 682, 693, 701, 708, 716), often in a terminal position’, gives emphasis to the performance and calls the people around her to join in dramatically.13 Mary’s performance of grief is exemplary for all mankind and the play itself is all but ‘pure lamentation’;14 the play is the funeral rite. Thus, erasing that communal rite and stigmatising it as ‘wommanish wayling and childish infirmitie’ (as Matthew Parker called it in his 1551 funeral sermon for Martin Bucer)15 suggested a radically different approach to mourning, implying a censorious judgement of female pathos and its collective voicing, alongside a political and societal reinterpretation of communal grief. Internalising pain not only shifted the focus to a more atomistic and discontinuous view of society, severing the link between the living and the dead, but also turned it into a private experience instrumental in individually coping with life and death. The idea of a theatricalised, collective lament was not neutral within the context of the political ban of communal wailing and its replacement with different practices – from the heraldic funerals for the aristocrats devised to ‘manipulate communal memory’,16 to the mediation of the priest and that of the written oration. Perhaps not surprisingly choral laments were virtually absent from the stage. Despite much wailing, in commercial theatre they were the result of the aggregation of individual characters assembled into informal Choruses. The women’s lament in Richard III II.ii and IV.iv (Q1 1597, Q2 1598) is a fitting example of an experimental handling of an informal choral threnody geared to the action and endowed with a clearly political intent. Goodland has proved how in this play Shakespeare dramatised the contrast between women and men through Gloucester’s and Buckingham’s fear of the former’s ‘lamentation as a threat’, showing that ‘it is the women … who articulate the communal consciousness and catalyze the healing of the kingdom’ through their laments.17 Shakespeare also handled choral threnody as an experimental piece of chorality, stretching it beyond the traditional antiphonal pattern and casting it into a polyphonic structure that superseded traditional liturgical performances. As I have argued elsewhere, in both Q1 and Q2

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Romeo and Juliet (1597; 1599), albeit in different ways, ‘[c]onfusion within harmony [was] the dramatic experimentation attempted by Shakespeare’ in the lamentation scene over the body of Juliet (IV.v), an extremely artificial piece ‘where he eventually recreate[d] [chorality] musically, through dissonance, in a choral performance without a Chorus’.18 Likewise ‘informal’ is the choral lament of the viceroys foreboding the ruler’s imminent death (V.iii.1–41) in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great Part II (1587–88; published 1590). As Clemen has remarked, ‘the ideas [that they present in aggressively defying the cosmic powers] are fundamental to the theme of the play’ so that this ‘is quite a normal choric extension of a theme by variations’, while ‘it prepares us to accept the death of the “scourge and wrath of God” as an event of universal significance’.19 This male regendered threnody as the expression of an antagonism against the heavens forgetful of traditional women’s forms of suffering sublimates the idea itself of collective female mourning into a spectacle of universal dissolution invoked by a male-dominated world suddenly grown aware of its own impotence before Death’s levelling power. It is not an act of submission, nor a choral acknowledgement of human finitude, not even the unyielding expression of a pathos aware of its impotence, but a last act of virile rebellion against the idea of loss and of male defeat. The Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine (1595), the only other play presenting in those years instances of collective lament, has no formal Chorus but rather eleven individual complaints,20 including one brief choral piece in III.i, in which Locrine, Gwendolin, and Camber mourn the death of Albanact. The first two short stanzas suggest an antiphonal response between Locrine and Gwendolin, although there is no actual dialogue between them, but a superficial echoing effect produced by the first and last lines with the repetition of the same words. The focus is upon an entirely individual experience of grief as underlined by the use of the first person ‘I’, precisely as in the lamentation scene of Q2 Romeo and Juliet, yet without its experimentalism in contrapuntal wailing.21 Concentrated upon (male) lament and (female) tears, respectively, the first two stanzas construct the two mourners as mythical figures out-lamenting Priam and Hecuba, the two Trojan ancestors of Locrine’s Roman father, Brutus. They do not converse either with each other, or with the Trojan myth, but only declare to outdo that mythical lament. In turn, Camber does not dialogue with either Locrine or Gwendolin,

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not even formally, but solipsistically emphasises his own despair, himself claiming to outbid Niobe’s own mythical grief (III.i.43–57).22 The mourners’ own solitude is not overcome, although it recalls the model of the three Marys in the formal pattern of the sequence of speeches and verbal repetition. Gestured at as a theatregram, that model surreptitiously introduces an idea of Christian passion from which, however, the scene steps back, not only by denying actual communal sharing between the three mourners, but also indirectly commenting upon its inappropriateness and need to be quickly stopped short (III.i.58–65). Banned from the action, the choral threnody is exposed as un-tragic; the mourners appear enclosed within their individual, solitary pain, and although the expression of their grief is bridled stylistically, their song is finally exhibited as socially useless, ridiculous, and harmful in ‘feminising the action’. Chorality in English biblical drama in the 1590s is framed by these examples of collective lament in secular drama. Perhaps significantly we possess only one such example, in a play showing traces of Marlovian influence:23 George Peele’s The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe. With Tragedy of Absalon (entered in the Stationers’ register in May 1594, printed 1599). In what follows, I will be concerned with how this single extant instance of biblical drama in the 1590s containing a collective lament responded to both this process of silencing the ‘liturgy of remembrance’,24 and to the possibilities allowed by secular theatres, which in the 1590s hosted prologic Choruses, yet no formal lamenting Choruses. I will begin with a crucial Senecan example of the tragedy of mourning and then will move on to its medieval counterpart in the Marian planctus, considering them as fundamental experiences in the process of gradual transformation of the choral threnody for the dead in the sixteenth century into apparently collective, yet deeply ‘solo’ performances. I will then consider Peele’s way of testing the dramatic power of an informal chorality by emphasising its aesthetic potential, which reflects performatively, and formally, a new individual experience of grief within a tragedy that could no longer be identified with the female choral complaint of the classical and medieval traditions. That performance, which in Seneca and in the Marian planctus affirmed the right to female pathos in a context which tried to silence it,25 was, I argue, radically resignified to stress individual male agency in dialogue with divine transcendence.

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Tragic rite: mourning and female pathos Traditionally, choral scenes of lament represent a specific type of loss with wider than personal significance. Differently from the goos, the threnos was a more polished and ordered choral lament performed by professional mourners and often associated with music, while the kommos was a particular type of wailing for the dead accompanied by wild gesticulation ‘with Asiatic ecstasy’.26 The lament was an elaborate piece – often bipartite, with one or more pairs of strophe/ antistrophe; sometimes tripartite, for the presence of an epodos (after the strophe and antistrophe); and/or one or more ephymnia (usually a shorter piece interspersed between the stanzas, or a refrain concluding them). Even when leading to an ecstatic performance, the lament as threnos or kommos was a well-structured rite, often articulated antiphonally and collectively. Not only did it allow for the partaking with the community of a private experience of bereavement, but also strove to establish contact with the underworld and the lost one(s). The famous initial kommos of Aeschylus’s Choephori (306–478), perhaps the longest lamentation scene in Greek tragedy, dramatises precisely this attempt at a communal reunion between the earth and the netherworld through the invocation of Hermes, the Psychopomp, escorting the deceased souls from the Earth to the afterlife, as well as the mourners’ own reunion with Agamemnon. This most famous of laments, located at the tomb of Agamemnon, from the outset connotes the tragedy as one of mourning, establishing a deep link with ritual. As Margaret Alexiou remarks, ‘The lament was always in some sense collective, and never an exclusively solo performance.’ 27 The kommos itself is an extremely elaborate, highly formalised type of song, suggesting patterns of repetition and inversion which have both an aesthetic and an entrancing function. This highlights the liturgical and incantatory dimension of the performance. In particular, the last but one strophe and antistrophe (the tenth) of Choephori are an invocation of Agamemnon and the gods sequentially sung by Orestes, Electra (one line each), and the Chorus (three lines). They mention what they are about to do, how they will perform it (423–4), how Clytemnestra denied the burial rite for her husband (429–34), and how they will sing a song of triumph rather than a dirge (340–4); finally they call their lament a hymnos which will be followed by their own victory (475–7). Criticism has increasingly suggested that Aeschylus’s Choephori might have been known in early modern England in the widely circulating Saint-Ravy 1555 Latin translation of Aeschylus, which contained

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a condensed version of Agamemnon and Choephori,28 followed by the Eumenides. As Louise Schleiner has contended, the now lost companion plays Agamemnon and Orestes’ Furies (1599) might have offered a vernacular dramatisation of that story.29 Be that as it may, the Seneca’s 1590s Troades and Agamemnon were well-known also in the vernacular renditions of Jasper Heywood (1559) and John Studley (1566), respectively, later collected in Thomas Newton’s 1581 Seneca: His Tenne Tragedies. In both plays, a Chorus of Trojan women performs a lament expressing the need for communal grief. In Troades, Seneca’s finely wrought initial kommos between Hecuba and the Chorus establishes, as in Aeschylus, the intrinsic link between lament and tragedy, casting as a dialogic antiphonal drama of grief the expression of communal pain for the deaths of Hector and Priam, as well as for their own fate of lost women, prey to the Greek conquerors. Heywood maintained the dialogic structure but simplified the text as well as the metre, casting their lines in fairly plain iambic pentameters with alternate rhymes, where Seneca used anapaestic dimeters and monometers and emphasised repetition. Heywood retained the intrinsically metatheatrical dimension of the scene, which has Hecuba in the role of both director and actor of a rite performed in front of the audience. It is exhibited like any other action, but in fact it constitutes the substance itself of the tragedy. Hecuba invites the women of Troy to enact physically their own grief by following a precise sequence of gestures that dynamise the action while increasing the pathos and producing an incantatory effect that reverberates through their song. Her commands suggest that a rite is taking place. Like the audience of the Marian lament recalled earlier, this spectacle solicits the sympathy of the spectators, inviting them to respond emotionally.30 Indeed, this extraordinary initial scene is key to Seneca’s reinterpretation of the idea of tragedy (and Euripides’ before him): casting the action from the start as a rite commemorating the death of the male heroes and the destruction of Troy occurring off stage means dismantling the idea of tragedy as dran, or action endowed with heroic values (Aristotle, Poetics, 1448b).31 It also dislocates the tragic construction of female identity as named in the play’s title to this ritual space, exchanging dramatic action with a ritual performance of pathos, a place of potential subversion of heroic codes and power residing in the celebration of memory and conversation with the dead. Thus, while the women evoke the loss of men and the destruction of Troy, they foreground the tragedy of female survival when all is lost: family, homeland, and selfhood itself.

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This kind of female ‘pathetic agency’, which is proactively impotent on stage, but strong in catalysing the emotion of the audience, is endowed with a potential for cultural and political subversion displayed as the assumed precondition for the tragedy of mourning, and as such it can be dramatised countless times. As the Trojan women say to Hecuba, they are ‘Not folk unapt, nor new to weep’ (I.ii.1),32 and are therefore ready to respond to her invitation to lament. Interestingly, repetition of this ritual does not help communion with the dead, as in Aeschylus’s Choephori. For Hecuba ‘Priam’ is ‘full happy’ because he is ‘free from bondage’ (I.ii.81, 82), while they are neither happy nor free. In their acknowledgement of solitude in grief and loss there resides their femaleness, and their tragedy. The choral kommos re-enacts precisely this sense of the tragic as a ritual of loss endemic to the female condition. The women’s lament is the locus of such revelation as well as of their tragic union. Beyond choral threnody Compared to the anglicised Troas, no English tragedy in the classical style presenting a formal Chorus even remotely engaged with choral lament in the same way. None had a kommos or a choral threnos. None cast a group of women as protagonists; none dramatised female pathos through collective rituals. The closest examples in the native tradition to what can be found in Troas were the complaints of the Virgin and the three Marys, although mystery plays suffered a drastic decline between the 1560s and 1580s as the living reminders of Catholic doctrine.33 The example mentioned earlier of the Digby Burial suggests that the Virgin’s invitation to the people around her (and the audience) to join in her complaint prefigured an unresponded kommos. What is also interesting is that, as in the women’s lamentations in Troas, the Virgin’s despair also denies the peripeteia. As Dronke has observed with regard to the Towneley Cycle: Mary’s sorrowing remains unabated to the end. She never attains a moment of peripeteia. In the Towneley Crucifixion, Jesus himself bids her to cease weeping (447–64). Yet we are not shown that she does so: the dramatist leaves her without any word of acquiescence. In these plays, that is, we have particularly forceful resurgence of the ancient non-theological traditions of women’s laments. These could be harnessed to Passion plays, lending them intensity and imaginative depth. Yet they originate not in the Christian mysteries,

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where the peripeteia that brings cognizance of the Redemption is always present, but in the unredeemable grief of women who have never ceased to sing the loss of those they love.34

In these plays, however, the Virgin’s complaint does remain a solo. Its choral version is the planctus of the three Marys as found, for example, in Play 38 (186–216) of the York Cycle or in the Towneley Resurrection of the Lord (334–63). In both, the three women feel suddenly bereaved and start wailing for their own solitude and Jesus’s distance from them; they have been abandoned, and no longer know to whom they may make their ‘mone’ (209, 356). But then they gather themselves into the choral group, leave off their solitary concern about their individual sense of loss, and begin sharing their grief collectively, as underlined by the formal echoing of anaphoric and epiphoric repetitions. The peripeteia occurs at a psychological level, not at that of the action, leading them back together and closer to Jesus, to whom they finally bring the anointments (213, 360). Their coming together, before the Angel’s revelation of Jesus’s resurrection, is the choral effect of their personal transcendence of individual solitude. Thus in the late sixteenth century the Trojan tradition of female suffering and the wailing of the three Marys coalesced into the memory of one model of collective performance of grief, which remained unique in the English panorama. Biblical drama did not develop the ancient example of classical tragedy nor of the Marian complaint. Biblical plays in Latin enjoyed their highest popularity between the mid-1530s and the mid-1550s, but very few cast groups of wailing women. An exception is Nicholas Grimald’s Christus Redivivus (1543), in which Magdalene and a Chorus of Galilean Women open the play with a lament for Christ’s death and rage against the Jews. The only voice we hear, however, is Magdalene’s, although we understand that some collective physical performance of sufferance takes place, as she mentions her own and the women’s ‘lachrymas gemitusque’ (shedding many tears, groaning’, I.i).35 Later, Joseph of Arimathea comments on their clamorous wailing: Amabo te, mi Nicodeme, animum attendito, ut / Foemineo plangore hortus totus personat? … Verum etiam profusis indulgent fletibus, / Pugnisque; frequentibus concutiunt pectora. / Breuiter, omnes omnia replent luctu loca (‘I pray thee, my Nicodemus, take note how all the gardens resound with women’s wailing … but they [the other women], too, indulge in profuse weeping. With clenched hands they frequently beat upon their breasts, and fill the whole place

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with their lamentations’, I.ii).36 Although the voco-visual dimension of the spectacle is introduced by the Prologue (iam silentio, huc / Aureis, oculos, mentemque; uestram intendite, ‘Now that the silence has been obtained, hither turn your own ears, your eyes, and your minds’),37 no emphasis is laid on the construction of female interaction, which is given as a fact, not produced through their performance as in a dialogic kommos. Grimald’s following attempt at biblical drama, Archipropheta (1548), the ‘Poema Tragicum’ (230) on the story of the Baptist, abounds in Choruses (four in fact), but they are all male and only the last one is a choral lament in liturgical form, with the Chorus of People reciting a refrain (O ploranda nimis tempora, tempora, ‘O times, times, much to be deplored!’) and the Disciples of John a four-line stanza of senarii. Mueller has noted that ‘Christian tragedy requires a narrowing of perspective and a focusing on situations of suffering and despair in which a full vision of transcendence is systematically withheld.’ 38 Accordingly, in this play the tragic emphasis falls within the compass of a story of tyranny, Herod’s, which distances the un-tragic Christian perspective transcending human affairs from the events of a tyrant eventually despairing for the deeds he has committed. The final wailing of the people and John’s disciples, accompanying the burial rite of the Baptist and lamenting the dark days awaiting Judea, provide an epilogue that brings back the attention to the religious context, rounding it off with a liturgical set piece closing on their last farewell to the prophet. John Foxe’s 1556 Christus Triumphans also stages a lament after the Crucifixion, but not in the tradition of the three Marys, as the opening scene shows Eve, the gateway of sin, and the mother of Jesus, the gateway of salvation, disputing who is more unhappy. Although Blackburn suggests a parallel with the women wailing in Richard III, IV.iv,39 chorality is here evoked neither in form nor in topic. Thus, we need to wait for Peele’s David and Bethsabe to encounter a choric complaint that shows some memory of the ‘Trojan-ThreeMarys’ tradition, while deeply regendering and revising it. The play is divided into three rather unequal parts by two formal Choruses, although the second, indicated as a fifth Chorus, incongruously speaks ‘a third discourse’ (1654).40 Clearly non-organic pieces unintegrated into the drama, both Choruses comment on the story, provide explanations and short narratives, but are not involved in the choral liturgy of ‘mourning’. Situated in scene x, at the centre of the play, this liturgy presents four priests (Ithay, Sadoc, Ahimaas, and Jonathan), with David as Chorus leader and first penitent.

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Compared to Troas, this ‘lamentation’ for his own salvation and that of his people, not for the dead, is not antiphonal in the way that that kommos was, casting Hecuba and the Chorus into a dialogue. As Clemen noticed, ‘it is not the Chorus and the leader of Chorus, or the Chorus and a single actor, who face each other and exchange their lamentations, but a number of characters take part in the exchange’ individually.41 Critically, Blackburn contrasted the moving simplicity of 2 Samuel 15:30 with Peele’s elaborate rendition.42 Yet in a play extensively featuring lyrical language – with the opening, sensuous gaze of David on Bethsabe and her highly erotic ‘Hot sun, cool fine’ song – 43 crude simplicity is not what one expects from a lament in atonement for concupiscence. In this respect Ewbank correctly reminds us that the ‘miserere mei’ of penitential Psalm 51 (‘When the Prophet Nathan came to him after David had Committed adultery with Bathsheba’) is perhaps the greatest literary expression of David’s repentance.44 It refers to a previous episode, dramatised in scene vi closely following 2 Samuel 15: 11–12, but furnishes a tacit subtext here. Commingling psalmodic lyricism with a new form of responsorial liturgy, Peele dramatises that verse of 2 Samuel by blending visual and acoustic performance in a tableau vivant that provides the score for a dynamic wailing rich in sound, phrasal, and gestural rhythmicity. ‘[B]arefoot, with some lose couering ouer his head, and all mourning’, David invites the priests and the ‘sonnes of Israel’ following him on their way away from Jerusalem to ‘Weepe with [him]’ and to ‘Lie downe with Dauid, and with Dauid mourne’.45 But the suggested collective wailing does not follow. What we have, instead, are individual responses in sequential counterpoint, underlining variation and amplification, whose position in the play recalls the poetry of the Marian planctus for its lyricism arresting the action and ‘intensify[ing] the Crucifixion scene or simply co-exist[ing] with the Passion as a separate type of lyric’.46 Prostrated on the ground, and ‘strewing’ it ‘with haire and garments torne’ (1051), Sadoc, Ahimaa, Jonathan, and Ithay pronounce three, four, five, and five lines each, taking up David’s verse on weeping (‘Weepe Israel, for Dauids soule dissolves’) and, in different lines, repeating (Sadoc, 1050), slightly altering (Ahimaa, 1053), and amplifying it to include the heavens in the rite (Jonathan, 1061–2). The closing line of each speech repeats the same idea with only a few lexical changes (‘For tragicke witnesse of your heartie woes’, 1052; ‘For witnesse we would die for Dauids woes’, 1056, 1061; ‘For witnesse how they weepe for Dauids woes’, 1066). A collective, yet not choral,

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rite of expiation for the lost purity of David, guilty of lust, and a prayer for God’s benevolence, this central piece suspends the action re-elaborating the lack of peripeteia of both the Senecan threnody and the medieval planctus as a type of freeze-frame of grief, resignifying the traditional female lament into a male imploration for atonement and divine support. That freeze-frame effect shows the extent to which aestheticising the rite helps contain grief formally, making it moderate in both content and expression, while at the same time reorienting the attention towards the transcendental in view of divine mercy for the people of God. At the end of the play there is another lamentation scene, in which David and Bethsabe mourn Absalon’s death. Yet this time it is individual and immoderate, and as such it must be checked. This second scene, in which Nathan rebukes them for their selfindulgent grief (1922–3), produces an echo effect by contrasting how far David’s liturgy of ‘mourning’ had moved from an idea of collective lament. It reminds one of the pain for a lost child passed in silence in scene vi, an episode of female suffering significantly erased from the text, precisely as in the Bible. That was when Bethsabe’s child had died as God’s punishment for David, and we only hear David urging her to ‘sigh no more’ (6741), while a banquet and solemnities take place for his purification before he announces his intent to prepare the ‘warlike engines for assault’ (6746). Private female grief is suffocated in the name of God’s will and David’s martial plans, precisely as choral threnody is lost in the expiation piece in scene x, showing how a Christian tragedy could comply with an idea of choral wailing at this stage: through displacement (from mundane suffering to transcendental mercy) and effacement (of female grief for the dead). Thus, choral weeping is at once deeply ingrained in the play’s thematic texture with its focus upon David’s power, and deeply alien to its dramatic unfolding. It is a threshold piece offering itself as a lyrical insertion, but also as a religious device subservient to a political design of male power; it displays grief, but also strategically contains it. The implication of the movement from communal voices and concerns to solo ones, even when these are collectively produced, as can be found here, is of a process of dissolution of the collective character with a new focus on the individual indirectly reflecting the 1590s postReformation preoccupations about collective wailing for the dead. A male regendering of the lament and a consequent marginalisation of female agency to create and even participate in a community of mourners reinforces this impression. Peele’s revision of the ancient

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and medieval female lament is outstanding. The stage direction specifies neither the number nor the action of the concelebrants (‘with others’), who remain silent, besides the priests. The rite is not for the loss of a person, but for the loss of the leader’s purity, tainted by lust for Bethsabe, who has no place whatsoever here, nor have other women. The rite follows the ancient kommos model of The Trojan Women, but without women, and with only apparent interaction between the speakers. Each individual address is sequential and has no actual response. Like a new Hecuba, David invokes Israel’s weeping and gestures of despair. All the mourners lie down with David, but we do not hear a Chorus engaged in continuous dialogue, as in The Trojan Women. Sadoc repeats David’s invocation, and the individual responses of Ahimaas and Jonathan, who claim their collective crying and sighing (‘our eyes’, 1,053; ‘our sighs’, 1,058; ‘our bleeding’, 1,060) stylise the ancient responsorial model, containing its emotional force, while Itahy closes the rite with an equally short invitation to weep addressed to the heavens. This cameo of male expiation is a masterpiece of ideological containment of the subversive power traditionally ascribed to the ritual of female lament. In fact, it alienates and expels the female factor as the origin of David’s own sin they are purifying through imagery of liquid cleansing. The interlacing of the strophes through the repetition of images, words, and phrases produces a counterpoint of voices that confines, formally and performatively, each mourner to his individuality. Tragedy and communal rite are definitely on two separate paths, precisely as female pathos is no longer part of the tragic ritual. The ancient collective kommos and the deeply human female grief of the Marys look like things of the past. Notes 1 Wolfgang Clemen, English Tragedy before Shakespeare: The Development of Dramatic Speech (London: Methuen, 1961), p. 214. 2 ‘Res tragicae grandes, atroces, … fletus, ululatus, conquestiones, funera, epitaphia, epicedia.’ Iulii Caesaris Scaligeri, Poetices libri septem (Geneva: Petrum Santandreanum, 1581 [editio secunda]), Poetices liber III, Tragoedia, Comoedia, Mimus, Caput XCVII, p. 366. It should also be remembered that for Scaliger the lament was a consequence of loss; it was not ‘a form of praise’: G. W. Pigman III, Grief and the English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 43. 3 Cynthia Marshall, The Shattering of the Self. Violence, Subjectivity & Early Modern Texts (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

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4 Bruce R. Smith, Ancient Scripts & Modern Experience on the English Stage 1500–1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 6. 5 Helen P. Foley, ‘The Politics of Tragic Lamentation’, in Alan H. Sommerstein, Stephen Halliwell, Jeffrey Henderson, and Bernhard Zimmermann (eds), Tragedy, Comedy and the Polis (Bari: Levante, 1993), pp. 104–5. 6 Katharine Goodland, Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama: From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), p. 7. 7 Goodland, Female Mourning, p. 6. On the classical treatment of lament see also Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (Lanham, MD; Boulder, CO; New York, and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); Nicole Loraux, Mothers in Mourning (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1998). 8 Goodland, Female Mourning, p. 203. 9 Jennifer Woodward, The Theatre of Death: The Ritual Management of Royal Funerals in Renaissance England, 1570–1625 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1997), pp. 40–3. 10 Goodland, Female Mourning, p. 138. 11 Katharine Goodland, ‘ “Obsequious Laments”: Mourning and Communal Memory in Shakespeare’s Richard III’, in Dennys Taylor and Denis N. Beauregard (eds), Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), p. 49. See also Goodland, Female Mourning, Part One. 12 Velma Bourgeois Richmond, Laments for the Dead in Medieval Narrative (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1966), p. 121. 13 Richmond, Laments for the Dead, p. 122. 14 Richmond, Laments for the Dead, p. 123. 15 Quoted in Goodland, Female Mourning, pp. 102–3. 16 Goodland, Female Mourning, p. 140. 17 Goodland, Female Mourning, p. 136; see also Harold F. Brooks, ‘ “Richard III”, Unhistorical Amplifications: The Women’s Scenes and Seneca’, Modern Language Review 75:4 (1980), pp. 721–37. 18 Silvia Bigliazzi, ‘Chorus and Chorality in Early Modern English Drama’, Skenè: Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies 1.1 (2015), p. 126; see also Giorgio Melchiori, ‘The Music of Words. From Madrigal to Drama and Beyond: Shakespeare Foreshadowing an Operatic Technique’, in Michele Marrapodi (ed.), Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Aldershot: Ashgate: 2007), pp. 241–50. 19 Clemen, English Tragedy, pp. 279–80. 20 For a brief discussion see Clemen, English Tragedy, p. 93. 21 Here Shakespeare seems to suggest dissonance through an operatic performance (see above, n. 18). On the ‘propensity for solipsism’ in this lamentation scene of Romeo and Juliet see Thomas Moisan, ‘Rhetoric and the Rehearsal of Death: The “Lamentations” Scene in Romeo and

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Juliet’, Shakespeare Quarterly 34:4 (1983), p. 394. Bigliazzi, ‘Chorus and Chorality’, pp. 121–6. 22 See Clemen, English Tragedy, p. 237. 23 On Marlowe’s influence see Annaliese Connolly, ‘Peele’s David and Bethsabe: Reconsidering Biblical Drama of the Long 1590s’, special issue, Early Modern Literary Studies 16 (October 2007), 9.1–20. Connolly suggests that it was written for the Admiral’s Men and was to be performed at the Rose, although it belongs to no company. This is the only extant biblical play, alongside Robert Green and David Lodge’s A Looking Glasse for London and England (c. 1590), of a flurry of thirteen plays which appeared between c. 1590 and c. 1602; see also Ruth H. Blackburn, Biblical Drama under the Tudors (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1971), pp. 160–91. 24 Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 180. 25 As Tanya Pollard has recently argued with regard to Euripides’ female characters and their early modern reappropriations, their theatrical power lies in their ‘successful solicitation of their audiences’ sympathies, which they achieve especially through roving performances of lament’: Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 7. However, Pollard focuses upon individual laments (especially on Euripides’ Hecuba in Hecuba; but see also Electra’s complaint in Euripides’ Electra, 112–66), which are quite different from the classical collective female laments I refer to here, which never take centre stage as tragic protagonists. 26 Alexiou, Ritual Lament, p. 103. 27 Alexiou, Ritual Lament, p. 134. 28 Agamemnon was about a thousand lines shorter and Choephori was untitled, as usually in Aeschylus’s printed editions to Pier Vettori’s one (1557). 29 See Louise Schleiner, ‘Latinized Greek Drama in Shakespeare’s Writing of Hamlet’, Shakespeare Quarterly 41:1 (1990), pp. 34–7; see also IngaStina Ewbank, ‘ “Striking too short at Greeks”: The Transmission of Agamemnon on the English Renaissance Stage’, in Fiona Macintosh, Pantelis Michelakis, Edith Hall, and Oliver Taplin (eds), Agamemnon in Performance: 458 BC to AD 2004 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 37–52. For a succinct summary of criticism on this point see https://lostplays.folger.edu/Orestes%27_Furies (accessed 9 September 2019). On the same topic see Tania Demetriou and Tanya Pollard, ‘Introduction’, in Tania Demetriou and Tanya Pollard (eds), Homer and Greek Tragedy in Early Modern England’s Theatre, Special Issue, Classical Receptions Journal 1 (2017), p. 18. 30 Not coincidentally, Mary’s grief retained something of Hecuba’s rage, which resurged in the literary memory of post-Reformist England after the silencing of the Mater Dolorosa of the medieval Passion plays. On this see Goodland, Female Mourning, passim.

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31 According to Martin Mueller that is why ‘Hecuba and The Phoenician Women [are] the two Greek tragedies to which the sixteenth century responded most immediately and intensely. The immense prestige of these plays was due to the interpretation of Troy and Thebes as emblems of tragic suffering. Erasmus chose to translate Hecuba not for its dramatic excellence but because the fall of Troy was the most tragic subject there was.’ See his Children of Oedipus, and Other Essays on the Imitation of Greek Tragedy, 1550–1800 (Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London: Toronto University Press, 1980), p. 21. 32 James Ker and Jessica Winston (eds), Troas, in Elizabethan Seneca: Three Tragedies (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2012), p. 80. 33 Blackburn, Biblical Drama, p. 156. 34 Peter Dronke, ‘Laments of the Maries: From the Beginning to the Mystery Plays’, in Dronke, Intellectuals and Poets in Medieval Europe (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1992), p. 489. 35 Le Roy Merrill (ed.), The Life and Poems of Nicholas Grimald (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1969), p. 120, 121. 36 Merrill, Life and Poems of Nicholas Grimald, p. 122, 123. 37 Merrill, Life and Poems of Nicholas Grimald, p. 114, 115. 38 Mueller, Children of Oedipus, p. 156. 39 Blackburn, Biblical Drama, p. 110, n. 41. 40 Following Arthur M. Sampley, ‘The Text of Peele’s David and Bethsabe’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 46 (1931), pp. 659–71, Inga-Stina Ewbank holds that the play we have represents a cut version for the stage added with the Solomon scene by Peele before he sent it to the printer: ‘The House of David in Renaissance Drama’, Renaissance Drama, 8 (1965), p. 7. 41 Clemen, English Tragedy, p. 262. 42 Blackburn, Biblical Drama, pp. 180–1. 43 For a discussion of the compelling power of words in this play see Inga-Stina Ewbank, ‘  “What words, what looks, what wonders?”: Language and Spectacle in the Theatre of George Peele’, in George Hibbard (ed.), Elizabethan Theatre V (Hamden, CT: Archon; London: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 124–54. 44 Ewbank, ‘The House of David’, p. 10. 45 George Peele, The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe (Oxford: Malone Society Reprints, 1912), pp. 1041–2. Subsequent quotations are from this edition. 46 Sandro Sticca, ‘The Literary Genesis of the Latin Passion Play and the Planctus Mariae: A New Christocentric and Marian Theology’, in Sandro Sticca (ed.), The Medieval Drama (Albany: State University of New York Press), p. 63. See also Robert S. Sturges, The Circulation of Power in Medieval Biblical Drama. Theatres of Authority (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 69–79.

5 The itinerant healer as a stage role: its origins in religious drama1 Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

M. A. Katritzky

Introduction In the merchant scene of the medieval and early modern religious stage, one or more healers, the earliest secular figures in European religious drama, sell unguents and spices, generally (but not exclusively) for the Holy Women’s Visitatio Sepulchri (the Easter visit of the Marys to the tomb of Christ). My focus is on studying evolving changes to this extra-liturgical episode between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, by considering merchant scenes in religious texts with reference to significant images – some previously unknown in this context (Figures 5.1–4). The basis for the liturgy of this Visitatio Sepulchri is provided by the four Gospel accounts of the visit of the Marys to the tomb of Christ. This liturgy is of fundamental significance for both the development of religious drama, and for an understanding of the origins of European theatre as a whole. Presentations of the Latin liturgy of the Visitatio Sepulchri within church services were performatively enhanced from at least the tenth century onwards. At its simplest, this took the form of dividing lightly edited versions of the liturgical text between individual spoken parts. Such Easter ceremonies are generally viewed as performatively enhanced versions of the liturgy incorporated within the Easter Mass. In the twelfth century, supported and encouraged by female leaders of Christian communities, some versions of the Visitatio Sepulchri liturgy were further developed into Easter plays, by the addition of the extra-liturgical merchant scene, starring one or more apothecaries or spice merchants. Who were these spice merchants? Non-biblical, and unknown in modern life, they were familiar figures in the medieval and early modern medical economy. A sub-section in a chapter on apothecaries, describing ‘all sorts of damaging practices of surgeons and eye-doctors’, in a 1616 edition of the civic regulations of Bavaria, identifies the spice merchant

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(or, as he is known in German, Salbenkrämer) as a sub-category of quack doctor; one of many types of itinerant healer who travelled around, selling medicines and health services. This was often, to the annoyance of qualified physicians, without due regard to the local taxes or regulations.2 The spice merchant occurs neither in the Gospel accounts of the Easter story nor in Visitatio Sepulchri Easter ceremonies. The surviving play-texts record both that this figure features in some, but by no means all Easter plays, and that this is not the only dramatic context in which the merchant scene occurs.3 Uniquely, the merchant scene features in a religious drama whose subject is the proverbial five wise and five foolish virgins (Sponsus), and in connection with the spice merchant’s procurement of his commercial licence from Pontius Pilate (Muri Fragment). Very occasionally in the iconography (Figure 5.2) or religious play-texts, spice-buying features in connection with Mary Magdalene scenes during Christ’s lifetime, as for example in the Benediktbeurer Passionsspiel or Wiener Passionsfragment.4 Sometimes there are two merchant scenes (as in the Muri, Pfäferser, Erlau III, Villinger, or Semur play-texts), or even three (as in the Berliner/Rheinisch Easter play).5 Rarely, it is not (or not only) the Holy Women who buy the spices in the Easter merchant scene, but Nicodemus. Arnoul Gréban’s mid-fifteenth-century French Mystère de la Passion has two Easter merchant scenes. A manuscript copy (dating to c. 1520) of Gréban’s fifteenth-century play-text illustrates them both: one in which the spices are being bought by Nicodemus, and a second in which the purchase is being made by the Holy Women.6 The theatrical context of these illuminations, not in a devotional manuscript but within a manuscript copy of Gréban’s religious play-text, greatly enhances their significance as documents of drama. Iconography relating to the medieval merchant scene is scarce, scattered, and of great importance in the history of theatre.7 Illustrated manuscripts of religious play-texts were produced for private devotional reading as well as in direct connection with specific productions.8 However, given the more usual appearance of images relating to the merchant scene in the overtly religious context, whether integral to ambitious illustrative schemes integrated into specific ecclesiastical buildings (Figure 5.1), within devotional books (Figures 5.2–3), or on altarpieces (Figure 5.4), the theatrical significance of the iconography rarely seems as clear as in the case of the Gréban illuminations. How and why was the non-biblical spice merchant or itinerant healer elevated to such an early and central role in the medieval

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5.1  The Marys buying spices, c. 1190–1220. Carved stone capital, Cugat Monastery, Sant Cugat del Vallés (cloister, South Capital 4N b)

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5.2  Anon. Italian, St Mary Magdalen buying spices, mid-fourteenth century. Manuscript illumination in St Bonaventure, Meditations on the life of Christ

Easter play? First, with reference to the Gospel texts, this chapter will examine the early development of liturgy and ‘Quem quaeritis’ trope, initially to the Easter ceremony, then into the Easter plays and Passion plays. Then, with reference to the iconography, it will consider the significance of the spice containers of the Holy Women. Finally, it will consider several early examples of the merchant scene in religious play-texts, notably the remarkably detailed merchant scene of the early fifteenth-century Erlau III Easter play: Visitacio Sepulchri in Nocte Resurrectionis.

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5.3  Anon. Italian, The Marys preparing spices, mid-14th century. Manuscript illumination in St Bonaventure, Meditations on the life of Christ

From liturgy to religious drama All four Gospels describe the Visitatio Sepulchri.9 Their accounts provide a wealth of mismatched detail. For the development of the merchant scene, the passages of central relevance in this story are those relating to the preserving spices with which the body of Christ was to have been annointed, and the precise origins of those spices. The Gospel of Matthew makes no mention of them. The Gospel

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5.4  Christ expelling the traders from the Temple (detail: ‘The Toothdrawer’), late sixteenth century, oil on panel, Kadrioru Kunstimuuseum, Kadriorg Palace, Tallinn

of John informs us that it was Nicodemus who brought and used the spices; the Gospels of Luke and Mark ascribe this activity to the Holy Women. The Gospel of Luke notes ‘spices and ointments’; the Gospel of John records them as 100 pounds of myrrh and aloes. Only the Gospel of Mark records the actual purchase of spices and the names of the purchasers. They are the three Marys: Maria Magdalena, Maria Jacobi, and Maria Salome: ‘And when the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweete spices, that they might come and anoint him.’ 10 All four Gospels are silent on the subject of where and from whom these spices were bought. The confusion of imprecisely matching details in the four Gospel accounts has considerably shaped the development of the merchant scene in European religious drama. Rather than a simple progression from liturgy to the Quem quaeritis trope, then on to the Easter ceremony, and then even further, into the Easter plays and Passion plays, this was very far from being a linear process of total displacement. Later forms only partially replaced the earlier ones,

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which continued to develop alongside and with reference to them, so that, for example, the Quem quaeritis trope is recorded well into the eighteenth century.11 A similar complexity is evident in the Visitatio Sepulchri iconography. Typically, two or three Marys are depicted, rarely four, five, or even six. There is no simple progression from the early depictions of the fifth and sixth centuries to later depictions. Theatrical interpretation of Visitatio Sepulchri images is challenging, multiple, even controversial. Detailed consideration of the impact of the liturgy on the post-classical development of the European performance tradition continues to generate intense scholarly debates. With recent reference to the Visitatio Sepulchri, Sarah Brazil cogently argues, ‘imitation does not always mean imitation … modern critical terminology is wholly unsuitable for the form of “agreed pretence” at work … in such liturgical performances’.12 Stefan Engels views the Visitatio Sepulchri, already from its tenth-century origins, as an exceptional dramatic interpolation in the liturgy; which by the fifteenth century may be regarded as a ‘theatrical scene’ involving roles, costumes, and props, even as a ‘ “performance within the official liturgy” ’, but neither as an ‘inserted play’ nor as ‘paraliturgical’.13 Here, I deliberately avoid the highly disputed term ‘liturgical drama’, not least because my focus is on itinerant healers. By their very presence, these non-biblical characters define the episodes in which they occur as staged rather than celebrated: as religious drama performed by actors, rather than liturgical ritual or ceremony represented by believers.14 Marco Benini helpfully defines the borders between liturgy and drama as ‘fluid’.15 Jesse Njus goes further: Devotional and theatrical performances in the Middle Ages were inextricably intertwined. Modern scholars who argue over the distinction between liturgy and theatre fail to realize that the absence of an obvious boundary is the key to understanding the relationship between the two dramatic forms. Separating the theatrical … from that which surrounds it obscures the mutual influence of medieval performance genres. … the liturgy is infused with dramatic forms … that … are not separate from the liturgy. The liturgy is dramatic.16

Rather than rigidly categorising medieval religious texts either with spiritual contemplation, or with communal ceremony, or with public performance, it seems reasonable to accept that their intended functions may combine reading, ritual, and drama in complex, unpredictable ways, and that nuanced use of theatrical terminology can facilitate helpful insights. Despite continuing disagreement on

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clarifying borders – or acknowledging overlaps – between liturgy and drama, and concerns to avoid tainted ideological or anthropological notions of cultural evolution, most specialists broadly agree that the origins of medieval religious drama are to be found in the liturgy.17 Within the context of the church service itself, already by the third century a performative enhancement of certain psalms and hymns was initiated. Rather than attempting straightforward mimetic or representational effects, their initial prop, costume, and staging strategies creatively drew on sophisticated interpretations of ‘agreed pretence’ to create astonishing ‘dramatic flexibility’.18 Medieval tropes, Latin prose amplifying specific liturgical passages, date from the sixth century onwards. The most well-known of these tropes is that of the early tenth-century Sankt Galler Quem quaeritis. Combining the four separate accounts of the Gospels into one short dialogue, opening with the angel questioning the Marys at the tomb: Quem quaeritis in sepulchro, o Christicolae?,19 this trope was sung by two choirs of monks during the Easter Mass. By the late tenth century, such tropes were being lengthened and further performatively enhanced, leading to the creation of Easter ceremonies. At first presenting only the Visitatio Sepulchri, involving four monks taking the roles of the angel and three Marys, their performance took place during the Easter Sunday early morning Mass. Valuable insights into the functioning and appearance of simple, rural Easter Visitatio Sepulchri performances, embedded within the Easter Sunday service inside the church itself, are offered by the thirteenth tale of Dil Ulenspiegel. Here, the legendary medieval German trickster Ulenspiegel, who has fooled a village priest into appointing him as sacristan, is responsible for producing and directing the customary Easter performance. Casting the priest and his housekeeper (who understand Latin) as Christ and the angel at the tomb, and himself and two male peasants from the congregation (who do not understand Latin) as the three Marys, he precipitates a vicious concluding fight by secretly coaching one peasant to meet the angel’s traditional ‘Quem quaeritis?’ in the actual performance with the innovative (Latin) response: ‘We seek the priest’s old one-eyed whore.’ This fictional account of 1515 is illustrated with a woodcut representing the brawling participants at the performance’s sorry climax. It confirms routine use of costumes and props, lay as well as clerical participants, and Latin text incomprehensible to the congregation.20 When such Easter ceremonies were taken out of the context of their religious services, they became more independent of the liturgy. This facilitated the creative expansion of their treatment

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of the Easter story with the addition of extra-liturgical scenes with little or no biblical authority, of which one of the earliest and most theatrically significant was the merchant scene.

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The Holy Women’s spice containers: from thurible to apothecary pot The study of iconography permits insights into the significance of the defining stage prop of the Easter Holy Women, their spice containers. These are most often depicted either as thuribles (liturgical spice censers developed for the processional carrying of burning incense by the clergy) or as medical apothecary pots (Figures 5.1–3). Holy Women bearing such objects feature in hundreds of images of the Visitatio Sepulchri, or visit of the Marys to the tomb of Christ, dating back to at least the fifth century. Many earlier works were made of ivory, wood, metal, and mosaic, while later iconography more often features drawings, stone carvings, enamel and textile work, and paintings. The Holy Women are often empty-handed in fifth-century Visitatio Sepulchri images, such as ivory carvings in London or Munich, but only rarely thereafter, as in the sixth-century Ravenna mosaics, or an illumination of around 1290 in a Book of Hours.21 From the sixth century onwards, each Holy Woman generally holds a spice container, with thuribles more common in the iconography until the tenth century, and apothecary pots increasingly dominant thereafter – as in the great altarpieces of Duccio (Maestà, c. 1310) or Jan van Eyck (Ghent altarpiece, c. 1423).22 This iconographic formula varied little for many centuries, and carried through into the early modern period. Only rarely do the Holy Women bear alternative receptacles, such as their oil lamps, as, for example, in a late fourteenth-century Armenian illumination in Paris.23 Although the apothecary jar never completely replaces the thurible in the iconography, from the start, a significant minority of images feature Holy Women bearing a mixture of thuribles and apothecary pots; rarely, as on the early thirteenth-century tympanum of Münster Cathedral, each Mary holds one of each. Why does the iconography record this clear historical progression from dominant thurible to dominant apothecary jar? I propose that this iconographic progression reflects the increasing performative enhancement of Visitatio Sepulchri presentations discussed in the previous section. The iconography documents the use, during Easter ceremonies integrated within church services, of the thurible (a liturgical instrument used solely by the clergy), and its gradual replacement in religious drama by the purely secular apothecary pot (a medicinal

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container widely available for general purchase, and used by commercial health practitioners). This process is captured in early texts such as the thirteenth-century Tours Ludus paschali, in which only one of the novices or clerics representing the three Marys carries a thurible, while the text clearly specifies unguent pots for the other two.24 In the iconography, the thurible is never entirely replaced, because it plays an important role in the liturgy, which is supplemented rather than replaced by religious plays. In religious drama, clarification of the origins of the Holy Women’s spices and their containers became sufficiently important to merit the creation of the entirely new and non-biblical merchant scene. Two tenth-century images bring the situation facing medieval stage directors sharply into focus. One, a mosaic in Ravenna’s Basilica di Sant’Apollinare, depicts the three kings bringing their gifts to Bethlehem. In the other, the Visitatio Sepulchri illumination of the Codex Egberti, the three Marys carry their apothecary pots to the tomb.25 Here we can identify a certain similarity between the iconography of the Christmas and Easter stories.26 Both for the Holy Women present at Christ’s tomb and for the Magi who celebrated his birth, the defining props are spice containers. Unlike the Easter Women, the Christmas Kings are recorded in only one Gospel, and they are foreign men, not local women.27 As they had made a long journey from foreign parts, the origins of their gold, frankincense, and myrrh were unproblematic both for the iconography and in religious drama. For the Easter story, the situation was very different. The Gospels do not mention what, if any, containers the Holy Women used to transport their spices to the tomb. However, such containers were significant props, both for the iconography and on stage. Despite the considerable scholarly attention focused on exceptional dramatists such as Canoness Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim Abbey (c. 935–1000), or the Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), there is continuing under-recognition of the influence exerted on religious drama by the highly educated female leaders of wealthy Christian communities. Perhaps encouraged by such female leaders, visual and theatrical representations of the spice-bearing Easter Holy Women moved ever closer to providing a deeply moving female counterpart – at the end of Christ’s life – to the male-dominated visit of the spice-bearing Kings who herald its beginning. Increasingly, a credible source was sought for the Easter spices. Medieval images and play-texts provided this source by creating a new, non-biblical role: that of the apothecary, spice merchant, or itinerant healer. A major goal of the earliest merchant scenes was

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to explicate the origins of the Holy Women’s spices and containers. In religious drama and images in which these were acquired from commercial healers, whether by the Marys, Nicodemus, or Mary Magdalene, the appropriate container was no longer the thurible but the apothecary pot (Figures 5.1–4). The earliest known illuminations of the Easter story merchant scene were commissioned in the early eleventh century by Abbess Uta of Niedermünster, and it seems likely that the canonesses of Klosterneuburg, whose thirteenth-century Latin Easter play features the earliest speaking spice merchant in the German-speaking regions, considerably influenced the content and structure of (and even actively participated in) their own liturgical observances, including their Visitatio Sepulchri.28 The Passional of Abbess Kunhuta, commissioned by Kunhuta (1265–1321), Abbess of the Benedictine Convent of St George at Prague Castle, contains a Visitatio Sepulchri play, with a merchant scene whose rubrics suggest that the abbess herself led the Marys to its quack apothecary.29 Deeply concerned, as abbess of the Paraclete Convent (near Nogent-sur-Seine), to create an authentic religious way of life appropriate to female needs, the poet and musician Héloïse (d. 1164) significantly shaped the textual and musical components of her community’s liturgy. Defining Héloïse as ‘a lyricist of great stature’, and her ‘influence on the tradition of the Easter plays’ as ‘notable and pervasive’, David Wulstan identifies her, rather than her husband Peter Abélard, as the main composer of the Verses pascales de tres Maries,30 whose ‘mercator iuvenis’ sells his ointment for a talent of gold to the Holy Women, assuring them in the Catalan vernacular that applying it to corpses protects them from any further decay or worm damage. Recorded in the twelfth-century Latin/Catalan manuscript of the Ripoll Monastery of Vich (near Barcelona),31 this earliest of all extant Easter play-texts to feature a speaking spice merchant drew on the Limoges Sponsus,32 and in turn inspired later Easter dramas, notably the highly influential and slightly later Benediktbeurer Passionsspiel. As the merchant scene is non-biblical, it can be assumed that its development in the visual arts and on the religious stage were not independent of each other. Any assessment of the images needs to factor in the impact of iconographic developments arising from habitual circulation and copying between artists. Even so, it may be assumed that certain long-term developments and innovations in the conventions surrounding the depiction of the Visitatio Sepulchri offer less a reflection of artists’ attempts to engage with the historical realities of life in biblical Israel, than valuable – if coded – insights

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into the costumes and props of the religious drama of their own local communities. One of the most significant of these long-term developments and innovations can be traced back to the eleventh century. This rarer iconography depicts the Holy Women not once, but twice. As noted above, the earliest image of this type occurs in the Uta Codex, an illustrated manuscript commissioned in the early eleventh century by Uta, abbess of the Bavarian convent of Niedermünster.33 The illuminations occur in two rondels at the top of the same folio. On the right, the Holy Women carry their apothecary pots to the tomb. The merchant scene requires a spice merchant, and on the left, the same women are depicted again, this time purchasing their spices at the trestle table of a young spice merchant. For well over half a century, this was the only image of an Easter merchant scene. Later manuscript illuminations of this extremely rare iconographic subject include one illustrated here (Figure 5.3).34 Already in the twelfth century, the Uta Codex was joined by a group of further such double images, whose artists were not German manuscript illuminators, but rather Mediterranean sculptors. At least six of their Visitatio Sepulchri double sculptures have survived. Most valuable are those still in situ in the context of their original iconographic cycles. On the frieze of the tympanum on the west façade of the Provençal church of St-Gilles-du-Gard’s south portal (c. 1130–50), the Holy Women visit the tomb on the right and the spice merchant on the left. Further examples are stone carvings in the cloister of the Church of Saint-Trophîme in Arles, and on the frieze of the church of Notre-Dame-des-Pommiers in Beaucaire, in both of which the Holy Women visit the tomb on the right and two spice merchants on the left, and a capital in the cloister of the Catalan Cugat Monastery near Barcelona not previously reproduced in this context (Figure 5.1).35 Two further stone capitals survive only as sculptural fragments in the Musée de Cluny in Paris and Modena’s Museo Civico. On one side of the Modena capital, the Holy Women weep at the tomb; on the other, they visit two spice merchants. The merchant scene in religious drama: an overview This study of the iconography has contributed to a clarification of the dramatic replacement of the Holy Women’s traditional spice container, the liturgical thurible, with secular apothecary pots, and of its promotion of the spice merchant as the source of their spices.

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Having investigated why medieval drama developed the merchant scene, we now turn to the play-texts to gain insights into its development on Europe’s religious stages. Specialists date the Uta Codex image of the Holy Women and the spice merchant to the early eleventh century (c. 1020). This image pre-dates by over half a century any other documented representations of a spice merchant in the iconography of the Visitatio Sepulchri, but also any documented play-texts of the merchant scene. The rich tradition of sculpture whose spread we have traced along the Mediterranean coast, in Catalonia, the South of France, and possibly Italy, developed only in the twelfth century. Not coincidentally, the origins of the two earliest examples of the merchant scene in religious drama can also be traced to precisely this time and region. As indicated above, they are the twelfth-century Easter play of Vich, attributed to Héloïse, and its probable source, the Sponsus of around 1100, written partly in Latin and partly in Romansh dialect for performance at the St Martial Monastery near Limoges. This is not an Easter play, but a play based on the Gospel parable of the wise and foolish virgins.36 Neither in this parable, nor in any other play based on it, is there any reference to a merchant. However, in the Sponsus, at least two ‘mercatores’, speaking Romansh dialect, attempt to sell their oil to the foolish virgins. The obvious starting point for tracing the further geographic diffusion of merchant scenes is the collection of around a thousand Latin and largely Latin performative Easter texts published by Walther Lipphardt. Some five per cent of them note unguents or spices being taken to Christ’s tomb by the three Marys. Of these, only thirteen explicitly feature merchant scenes with one on-stage spice merchant, and just two specify more than one spice merchant.37 These last two (both dating to the thirteenth century) are the Tours Ludus paschali – with two male quacks – and the Benediktbeuerer Passionsspiel – perhaps the earliest text to specify a quack couple in its merchant scene. By the start of the thirteenth century, the merchant scene had spread to religious drama in the German-speaking lands, also the site of the merchant scene’s most significant thirteenthcentury visual depiction, on the Mauritius Rotunda. Constructed in around 1270 as a replica of Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulchre, it now functions as an integral Romanesque chapel inside the much later Gothic Constance cathedral.38 The twelve-sided Mauritius Rotunda is around four metres high, and decorated inside and out with monumental, half-life-size painted single sandstone figures. All the inner figures belong to the Easter story. Directly opposite the Rotunda

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entrance, two sleeping soldiers guard the tomb. On the left, on entering the Rotunda, are the three Marys with the spice merchant, two already carrying apothecary pots, the third waiting while her container is filled; on the right, the same three Marys with the angel, this time all three carrying apothecary pots. The outer figures include the three gold- and spice-bearing Christmas Magi, a juxtaposition iconographically linking the spice-bearing figures of the Christmas and Easter stories in ways referencing and progressing sophisticated dramatic developments of the Rotunda’s time. The most important German play-texts of the Easter story featuring merchant scenes include three thirteenth-century manuscripts. They are the Latin Klosterneuburger Easter play, the earliest religious drama with a spice merchant from the German-speaking regions; the Muri Fragment, the earliest partly vernacular German Easter play with a spice merchant; and the Benediktbeurer Passionsspiel, the earliest known Latin and German Passion play with a merchant scene. Equally important is a fourteenth-century manuscript, the Frankfurter Dirigierrolle, preserving the earliest two-day Latin and German Passion play. This too contains a merchant scene. In the Klosterneuburg Easter play, the three Marys buy their spices from a ‘Specionarius’.39 The late thirteenth-century Muri Fragment’s spice merchant (‘Antonius’) appears not only in scene v, the actual merchant scene with the three Marys at the tomb, but also in a scene completely absent from the Gospels. This is scene iii, in which Antonius is granted his commercial licence by Pilate, and puffs his medical wares and services to lovers.40 The Benediktbeurer Passionsspiel’s spice merchant couple (‘Mercator’ or ‘Chramer’ and ‘uxor sua’) features no less than three times, albeit not in connection with the Visitatio Sepulchri Easter story, but visited three times before the death of Christ by Mary Magdalene.41 Depictions of this relatively widespread context for the merchant scene include a mid-fourteenth-century manuscript illumination in Oxford previously unknown in this context, identified by my researches (Figure 5.2). The merchant scene of the Frankfurter Dirigierrolle includes a widespread innovation of fourteenth-century Bohemian and German Easter and Passion plays. Here, the often unaccompanied itinerant spice merchant of the earlier religious drama is given a family-based quack-like troupe of assistants, reflecting traditional economic practice in the medieval itinerant health-care industry. Its three Marys buy their spices from a ‘Meyster Medicus’ supported by his own wife (‘Uxor Medici’), and also by a pair of young assistants, the ‘Mercator’ or ‘Kaufmann’ and his wife (‘Uxor Mercatoris’).42

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Although extensive dialogue for merchant scenes featuring quacklike troupes has only rarely survived, there is considerable evidence for their popularity. Sometimes, surviving supporting documentation for productions goes beyond the play-text itself. This is the case for Vigil Raber’s Passion, staged in Bolzano in 1514. Here, no merchant scene is indicated in the manuscript play-text or original stage plan, but cast-lists name four spice merchants by role (‘Medicus’, ‘Uxor Medici’, ‘Servus medicy’, ‘Puella medici’) and by the names of their actors, demonstrating that for this production, Raber exceptionally cast women in almost every female role.43 Another South Tyrolean playtext, Lienhard Pfarrkircher’s 1486 Passion, provides a possible key to this conundrum. Although it too lacks a merchant scene, a Latin sentence at the appropriate place in this play-text advises that this scene, though optional and unscripted, is customary: ‘here one can introduce the doctor and his servant, if desired’.44 Renward Cysat’s stage plans for the 1583 Lucerne Passion play list the apothecary (‘Appothegker’) and his boy (‘knaben’) among their roles, and depict their stall.45 Before turning to the lengthiest fully scripted merchant scene featuring a quack-like troupe, I wish to consider whether the iconography can cast any light on visual aspects of such troupes, such as their props or costumes. Most images feature a single male spice merchant, or at most two, both male. However, my research has identified one group of images whose quack family may perhaps be depicted in the context of the religious merchant scene.46 Three are in public museums in Tallinn, Estonia (Figure 5.4); Copenhagen, Denmark; and Glasgow, Scotland; a fourth was sold on the art market in 2009, from a French private collection. Variously painted by followers of Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Bruegel, their subject is Christ expelling the money-changers from the Temple. According to this story, featured in all four Gospels, Christ drove merchants, dealers, and money-changers out of the Jerusalem Temple, proclaiming that it was not a market-place but a house of prayer.47 Each of these paintings depicts an itinerant toothdrawer couple who have set up their posters, certificates, and table of medical wares against the outer wall of the Temple. He pulls the tooth of a female client; she attends to their baby. Elsewhere (with reference to Vigil Raber’s original sketch for the staging of his previously noted 1514 Bolzano Passion Play), I discuss why, rather than evaluating these altar paintings as attempts to depict the Gospel story itself, their artists might in fact be depicting a medieval simultaneous stage. I suggest that their artists were less concerned to depict the historically

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authentic Jerusalem Temple than to record fanciful theatrical evocations of the Jerusalem Temple of the type with which they were familiar from their own local Easter stages. In which case, the quack couple featured in these paintings is neither intended to represent biblical nor medieval healers, but performers in the stage role of the merchant scene’s spice merchant. Merchant scene as Easter play: Erlau III The Erlauer Visitacio Sepulchri in Nocte Resurrectionis is an early fifteenth-century Easter play from Kärnten, Austria, whose fully texted merchant scene features a quack-like troupe. The mostly vernacular German verses of Erlau III, totalling 1,331 in number, are divided into nine scenes. In its last quarter, the play closes with four short scenes. They are the Visitatio Sepulchri itself, the Hortulanus scene – in which the risen Christ appears at the tomb in the guise of a gardener to Mary Magdalene, an Easter sequence with Mary Magdalene and the doubting Thomas, and the race of the disciples, in which saints Peter and John run against each other. By far the longest section of Erlau III, representing the first three-quarters of the play, consists of an exceptionally long merchant scene, divided into two by being sandwiched between three brief Mary laments. Its seven speaking roles are the three Marys (‘prima Maria’, ‘secunda Maria’, ‘tercia Maria’) and four spice merchants: the ‘Medicus’, also called doctor (‘Arzt’), his wife (‘Medica’), evidently also a healer, and their two assistants, Rubinus and Pusterpalkch. Non-speaking roles include the couple’s children, and their maid (‘Gredlein’). In a prologue-like opening speech, Rubinus announces the doctor.48 He appears, and delivers an extended monologue recommending himself as a high-born, praiseworthy, and much-travelled Master. While the doctor’s wife hides, he persuades Rubinus to be his assistant, and Rubinus persuades Pusterpalkch to be his servant. Then the two assistants bring the doctor’s wife back. With much banter, including teasing that he will steal the doctor’s wife, Rubinus announces the medical skills of the doctor at great length, and Pusterpalkch announces those of his wife. The doctor commands the assistants to set up his stall and Rubinus delivers an extended medical oration to their spectators, recommending their ointments, including three for colouring hair, encouraging hair growth, and reddening cheeks, a fourth against ‘bad women’, others for the disabled, or for women wishing to regain their virginity. The doctor and his two assistants prepare further medications.

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At this point, there is a short second lament, during which singing angels and the three Marys appear on stage. After this, the merchant scene continues. Rubin informs the doctor of the Marys’ announcement that they are seeking ‘a man who can make good ointments’, and calls the women to their stall. The Marys enquire about the quality of the doctor’s ointments, and he praises them highly, especially singling out two for wounds and bruising. He sells the Marys his ointments, not without heated discussion reiterating their quality, and standing by his price of 100 marks, even when the third Mary complains that they are much too expensive.49 After the sale, the doctor’s wife argues that he sold them far too cheaply. The couple fight, and the wife is lured away away by Rubinus’s temptingly far-fetched promises of a new life with him, in an idyllic Land of Cockaigne.50 The merchant scene ends with Pusterpalkch informing the doctor of his wife’s abduction by his assistant, before the pair resume their travels without them.51 A lengthened version of the play adds a final, incompletely preserved, scene in which Rubinus meets St Peter and St John at the tomb. Only very seldom did a religious community commission a completely new play. The scribes who copied medieval religious drama from one manuscript to another wanted to save themselves the trouble of writing out every speech for each performer. Often, familiar liturgical songs were indicated only by title.52 The merchant scene, too, became so well known that it was rarely copied out fully (or even at all) in the manuscript copies of play-texts. Many Easter plays utilised or adapted existing merchant scenes. The detailed merchant scene of the Erlau III Easter play is quite exceptional in combining traditional elements of the merchant scene with freshly minted comic stage business. Conclusion This chapter examines the Easter play merchant scene by asking how and why secular healers were introduced into medieval religious drama. Talented retailers will never stop finding innovative ways of packaging their ‘hard sell’ as irresistible entertainment, and publicity relating to health and healing has a special power. Medieval itinerant healers carefully crafted their medical orations to attract, engage, and entertain, and to generate a feel-good factor that made potential customers want to associate with the product. Whether they improvised to the crowd or read out their handbills verbatim; whether their content was true, false, or a quackish combination

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of half-truths and fantasy; whether the healer travelled solo, with one performing assistant, or with a large troupe: the most successful medical orations were always a performance. Recognising the spice merchant’s performative nature, I study Easter story images to understand why medieval drama developed the merchant scene, and the play-texts for insights into how the merchant scene and its medical orations developed. Already from the eleventh century, non-biblical spice merchants became increasingly popular on the religious stage. Medical marketing became a rich source for comical interaction between performers and audiences in the Easter play merchant scene. This was based on the Gospel accounts of the visit of the Marys to the Sepulchre, which record that the Marys bought spices, but not who they bought them from. Specialists convincingly explain the introduction of spice merchants into Easter plays as a pragmatic decision to explicate the source of the Marys’ embalming spices. Questions surrounding why and how these non-biblical healers carved out such a prominent role for themselves in religious drama have received less satisfactory responses. Because the Easter story spice merchant is without biblical authority, images of these healers relate more directly to developments on the medieval stage than to the Gospel stories. Addictive techniques for using performance to market medicine have been developed, refined, and modified over many centuries. Whether the performative vehicle is a medieval spice merchant’s patter or a modern television ‘soap’ series, enticing potential customers to accept ‘free’ entertainment is the most effective way of selling products. Medieval theatre practitioners recognised the performative effectiveness of the medical harangue. Their first tentative inclusions of healers in plays document their early experiments in integrating non-biblical stage healers into religious plots. Encouraged by positive audience response, religious communities such as the one which sponsored the Erlau III play-text and its performance expanded medical content into increasingly popular elements of their Easter plays. Ultimately, it was the sheer skill and effort which practising healers invested into crafting successful commercial medical orations that facilitated the early and dominant theatrical integration of the merchant scene into medieval religious plays. Notes 1 I thank the Open University for research funding (OU-FASS-English REF Enhancement Award, 2017), and Cora Dietl and Elisabeth Dutton

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for invaluable advice and references. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. ORCiD: 0000–0001–9270–5419. 2 Landts- und Policeyordnung der Fürstenthumben Obern und Nidern Bayrn ([Munich: Henricus], 1616), p. 589: ‘allerhand schädlichen Miβbrauch der Schnitt- und Augenartzt: … Nachdem die Schnitt- und Augenartzt / durch die Landtfahrerey und umstraiffen im Landt / schreyen auff den Märckten / diese Kunst fast verächtlich machen / Allso wöllen wir fürterhin nit gestatten / daβ zu verschimpffung oder nothwendigen Kunst die Schnitt- und Augenartzt / auff den offnen Jar- und Wochenmärckten und Kirchtägen / wie die andern Zanbrecher und Salbenkramer / offentlich fail haben / und schreyen.’ On quacks and quack couples, see M. A. Katritzky, Women, Medicine and Theatre 1500–1750: Literary Mountebanks and Performing Quacks (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 3 For a summary table of named apothecaries, spice merchants, and other health-care roles in 70 religious plays (1100–1600), see M. A. Katritzky, ‘Text and Performance: Medieval Religious Stage Quacks and the Commedia dell’arte’, in Ingrid Kasten and Erika Fischer-Lichte (eds), Transformationen des Religiösen: Performativität und Textualität im geistlichen Spiel (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), pp. 117–26. 4 Eduard Hartl (ed.), Das Benediktbeurer Passionsspiel, das St. Galler Passionsspiel, nach den Handschriften herausgegeben (Halle an der Saale: Niemeyer, 1952), pp. 12–23; Richard Froning (ed.), Das Drama des Mittelalters. Die lateinischen Osterfeiern und ihre Entwickelung in Deutschland. Die Osterspiele, die Passionsspiele, Weihnachts- und Dreikönigsspiele, Fastnachtspiele (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1964), I, p. 315. 5 Rudolf Meier, Das Innsbrucker Osterspiel, Das Osterspiel von Muri, Mittelhochdeutsch und Neuhochdeutsch (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1962); Klaus Amann, Das Pfäferser Passionsspielfragment: Edition, Untersuchung, Kommentar (Innsbruck: Universität Innsbruck Institut für Germanistik, 2010); Wolfgang Suppan and Johannes Janota, Texte und Melodien der “Erlauer Spiele” (Tutzing: Schneider, 1990), pp. 54–81; Eduard Hartl, Das Drama des Mittelalters. Passionsspiele II: Das Donaueschinger Passionsspiel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1966); Peter T. Durbin and Lynette R. Muir, The Passion de Semur (Leeds: University of Leeds Centre for Medieval Studies, 1981); Hans Rueff, Das Rheinische Osterspiel: Der Berliner Handschrift MS. Germ. Fol. 1219, mit Untersuchungen zur Textgeschichte des deutschen Osterspiels (Berlin: Weidmann, 1925). 6 M. A. Katritzky, ‘Les représentations du charlatan pendant la première modernité, et leur origine dans la scène du marchand du théâtre religieux’, in Beya Dhraïef, Éric Négrel, and Jennifer Ruimi (eds), Théâtre et charlatans dans l’Europe moderne (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2018), pp. 99–116, 112 (Illustrations 10a, 10b). 7 Of fundamental importance are Sigfrid Hofmann, ‘Salbenkauf der Frauen’, in Engelbert Kirschbaum (ed.), Lexikon der christlichen

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Ikonographie, IV (Rome, Freiburg, Basle and Vienna: Herder, 1972), col. 12; Wolfgang Augustyn, ‘Frauen am Grab’, in Otto Schmitt et al. (eds), Reallexikon zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte (Munich: Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte and C. H. Beck, 2009 and 2010), Lieferung 113, cols 556–640, Lieferung 114, col. 641. See also Katritzky, ‘Les représentations du charlatan’; M. A. Katritzky, ‘Lucas van Leyden’s “Toothdrawer”, 1523: Passion Play Merchant Scenes and the Religious Origins of Quack Depictions’, in Birgit Ulrike Münch and Jürgen Müller (eds), Peiraikos’ Erbe: Die Genese der Genremalerei 1450–1550 (Wiesbaden: Reichert, Trierer Beiträge zu den historischen Kulturwissenschaften 14, 2015), pp. 125–47; Katritzky, Women, Medicine and Theatre, Plates 9–11; M. A. Katritzky, ‘What did Vigil Raber’s Stage Really Look Like? Questions of Authenticity and Integrity in Medieval Theatre Iconography’, in Michael Gebhardt and Max Siller (eds), Vigil Raber: Zur 450. Wiederkehr seines Todesjahres. Akten des 4. Symposiums der Sterzinger Osterspiele (25.–27.3.2002) (Innsbruck: Wagner, Schlern-Schriften 326, 2004), pp. 85–116; M. A. Katritzky, ‘Gendering Tooth-drawers on the Stage’, Ludica. annali di storia e civiltà del gioco 5–6 (2000), pp. 144–81. 8 R. L. A. Clark and P. Sheingorn, ‘Performative Reading: The Illustrated Manuscripts of Gréban’s Mystère de la Passion’, European Medieval Drama 6 (2002), pp. 129–54, at p. 140; Cornelia Herberichs, ‘Lektüren des Performativen: Zur Medialität geistlicher Spiele des Mittlelalters’, in Kasten and Fischer-Lichte (eds), Transformationen des Religiösen, pp. 167–85; Regina Toepfer, ‘Theater und Text in der frühen Neuzeit: Impulse des überlieferungsgeschichtlichen Konzepts für die Dramenforschung’, in Dorothea Klein et al. (eds), Überlieferungsgeschichte trans disziplinär: Neue Perspektiven auf ein germanistisches Forschungsparadigma (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2016), pp. 338–9. 9 The Holy Bible conteyning the Old Testament, and the New (London: Robert Barker, 1611), Matthew 28:1; Mark 16:1–2; Luke 23:55–6, 24:1, 24:10; John 19:38–42, 20:1. 10 Mark 16:1. 11 Cora Dietl, Das frühe deutsche Drama: von den Anfängen bis zum Barock (Helsinki: Universitätsverlag, 1998), pp. 24–52. 12 Sarah Brazil, ‘Forms of Pretence in Pre-modern Drama: From the Visitatio Sepulchri to Hamlet’, European Medieval Drama 20 (2016), pp. 181–20, at p. 181. Fundamental to this debate is Christoph Petersen, Ritual und Theater: Meßallegorese, Osterfeier und Osterspiel im Mittelalter (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004). See also Hans-Jürgen Linke, ‘Osterfeier und Osterspiel: Vorschläge zur sachlich-terminologischen Klärung einiger Abgrenzungsprobleme’, in Max Siller (ed.), Osterspiele. Texte und Musik. Akten des 2. Symposiums der Sterzinger Osterspiele (12.–16. April 1992) (Innsbruck: Wagner, Schlern-Schriften 293, 1994), pp. 121–33; Marco Benini, Die Feier des Osterfestkreises im Ingolstädter Pfarrbuch des Johannes Eck (Münster: Aschendorf, 2006); Heidy Greco-Kaufmann, ‘Von paraliturgischen Handlungen zum barocken Schauereignis: Genese

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und Entwicklung des Luzerner Osterspiels’, in Friedemann Kreuder, Stefan Hulfeld, and Andreas Kotte (eds), Theaterhistoriographie: Kontinuitäten und Brüche in Diskurs und Praxis (Tübingen: Francke, 2007), pp. 45–87; Herberichs, ‘Lektüren des Performativen’; Jan-Dirk Müller, ‘Die lateinischen Gesänge im “Innsbrucker Osterspiel” zwischen Theater und Liturgie’, in Cornelia Herberichs, Norbert Kössinger, and Stephanie Seidl (eds), Liturgie und Literatur: Historische Fallstudien (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), pp. 213–34; Johannes Janota, ‘Osterfeier oder Osterspiel? Zur Klärung der Terminologie’, in Elke Huwiler, Elisabeth Meyer, and Arend Quak (eds), Wat nyeus verfraeyt dat herte ende verlicht den sin: Studien zum Schauspiel des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2015), pp. 1–31; Stefan Engels, ‘Das Andere der Visitatio sepulchri in Liturgie und Geistlichem Spiel’, European Medieval Drama 21 (2017), pp. 101–22. See also Elisabeth Dutton in this volume (p. 164). 13 Engels, ‘Das Andere der Visitatio sepulchri’, pp. 101–3, 114. 14 Linke, ‘Osterfeier und Osterspiel’, p. 128. 15 Benini, Die Feier des Osterfestkreises, p. 326. 16 Jesse Njus, ‘Performing the Passion: A Study on the Nature of Medieval Acting’, Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, 2010, pp. 11–12, 17. 17 Greco-Kaufmann, ‘Von paraliturgischen Handlungen zum barocken Schauereignis’, pp. 45–8. 18 Brazil, ‘Forms of Pretence in Pre-modern Drama’, pp. 181, 199. 19 ‘Whom do you seek in the tomb, oh Christians?’ 20 Wolfgang Lindow (ed.), Ein kurtzweilig Lesen von Dil Ulenspiegel: Nach dem Druck von 1515 mit 87 Holzschnitten (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1966), pp. 33–41; Katritzky, Women, Medicine and Theatre, pp. 28–9, 32, Plate 6; Engels, ‘Das Andere der Visitatio sepulchri’, pp. 117–19. 21 British Museum (c. ad 420–30, ivory panel 3 from a Roman ivory casket); Bayerisches Nationalmusem (c. ad 400, inv-nr. mA 157); Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo (mosaic, sixth century); Walters Art Gallery (c. 1290, illumination, Book of Hours, MS W.102 f.7v). 22 Jan van Eyck: Inv. Nr. 2449, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Duccio: Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena. 23 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Ms. Armenien 333 f.7v. 24 Walther Lipphardt, Lateinische Osterfeiern und Osterspiele, 9 vols (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1975–90), V, p. 1670, Nr. 824: ‘Tunc tres Parvi uel Clerici, qui debent esse Marie: due uero deferant vas cum unguento pre ma nibus, Tercia autem turribulum.’ 25 Trier, Stadtbibliothek (c. ad 983, MS 24 fol. 86v). 26 On this point see also Katritzky, ‘Lucas van Leyden’s “Toothdrawer” ’, p. 128. 27 Matthew 2:1–12. 28 Michael J. Norton and Amelia J. Carr, ‘Liturgical Manuscripts, Liturgical Practice, and the Women of Klosterneuburg’, Traditio 66 (2011),

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pp. 67–169, at pp. 122, 130–1. Convents in England, France, and the Low Countries are the focus of Elisabeth Dutton’s research project on Medieval Convent Drama (University of Fribourg; with Olivia Robinson and Matthew Cheung-Salisbury; http://medievalconventdrama.org). 29 Kateřina Vršecká, ‘Towards a Way of Reading Scenic Space in Dramatic Texts of the Czech Middle Ages’, Theatralia 14.1 (2011), pp. 65–81, at pp. 72–3. 30 David Wulstan, ‘Novi modulaminis melos: The music of Heloise and Abelard’, Plainsong and Medieval Music 11.1 (2002), pp. 1–23, at pp. 1, 9–12, 16–19, 22; David Wulstan, ‘Liturgical Drama and the “School of Abelard” ’, Comparative Drama 42.3 (2008), pp. 347–57, at p. 355; see also Constant J. Mews, ‘Heloise and Liturgical Experience at the Paraclete’, Plainsong and Medieval Music 11.1 (2002), pp. 25–35, at pp. 31–3, 35. 31 Lipphardt, Lateinische Osterfeiern und Osterspiele, V, p. 1664, Nr. 823. 32 Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), vol. II, pp. 362–4. 33 Adam S. Cohen, The Uta Codex: Art, Philosophy, and Reform in Eleventhcentury Germany (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); Katritzky, ‘Lucas van Leyden’s “Toothdrawer” ’, fig. 2; Cornelia Herberichs, ‘Plädoyer für den Mercator: Zur hermeneutischen Funktion der Salbenkauf-Szene in bildliche Darstellungen des Mittelalters, im lateinischen Osterspiel sowie im Osterspiel von Muri’, in Herberichs, Kössinger, and Seidl, Liturgie und Literatur, pp. 243–7. 34 See also Katritzky, ‘Les représentations du charlatan’, ill. 9: Jörg Gutknecht of Augsburg, The Holy Women Collecting their Spice Pots from an Apothecary, 1515, Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, cod. lat. mon.19 201, fol. 164r. 35 For reproductions of the five not illustrated here, and full references, see Katritzky, ‘Les représentations du charlatan’, Ill. 1; Katritzky, ‘Lucas van Leyden’s “Toothdrawer” ’, figs. 3a, 3b, 3c, 4. 36 Matthew 25:1–13. 37 Lipphardt, Lateinische Osterfeiern und Osterspiele: one male: Nrs. 799, 801–4, 804a, 805, 822–3, 825, 827–9; two males: Nr. 824; or a couple: Nr. 830. 38 Barbara Dieterich, ‘Das Konstanzer Heilige Grab. Inszenierte Absenz’, in Carla Dauven-van Knippenberg, Cornelia Herberichs, and Christian Kiening (eds), Medialität des Heils im späten Mittelalter (Zürich: Chronos, 2009), pp. 165–88; Katritzky, ‘Lucas van Leyden’s “Toothdrawer” ’, p. 133; Herberichs, ‘Plädoyer für den Mercator’, pp. 250–60; Katritzky, ‘Les représentations du charlatan’, Ill. 2. 39 Lipphardt, Lateinische Osterfeiern und Osterspiele, V, p. 1705, Nr. 829. 40 Meier, Das Innsbrucker Osterspiel, pp. 128–35, 140–4. 41 Hartl, Das Benediktbeurer Passionsspiel, pp. 12–23. 42 Johannes Janota, Die hessische Passionsspielgruppe, Edition im Paralleldruck, 3 vols (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996, 2002, 2004), I, 27; II, 849–57.

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43 Vigil Raber’s Passion (manuscript Vipiteno VRS, Hs.III) and stage sketch, and other documents for the 1514 production, are in the municipal archive of Sterzing (now Vipiteno, Italy). For the play-text, see HansGert Roloff, Andreas Traub, and Walter Lipphardt (eds), Die geistlichen Spiele des Sterzinger Spielarchivs, 6 vols (Berne: Peter Lang, 1980–96), III, pp. 7–161. For Raber’s cast-lists see Bernd Neumann, Geistliches Schauspiel im Zeugnis der Zeit: Zur Aufführung mittelalterlicher religiöser Dramen im deutschen Sprachgebiet, 2 vols (Munich: Artemis, 1987), p. 201. See also Katritzky, ‘What did Vigil Raber’s Stage Really Look Like?’, pp. 85–116; Katritzky, Women, Medicine and Theatre, chs 1–3. 44 Roloff, Traub and Lipphardt, Die geistlichen Spiele, II, p. 155: ‘Hic potes introducere medicum cum servo suo, si placet.’ 45 M. Blakemore Evans, The Passion Play of Lucerne: An Historical and Critical Introduction (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1943), pp. 144, 166, 219. 46 Katritzky, Women, Medicine and Theatre, pp. 45–8, plates 9–11; Katritzky, ‘Lucas van Leyden’s “Toothdrawer” ’, p. 137 and figs 6, 10; Katritzky, ‘What Did Vigil Raber’s Stage Really Look Like?’, plates 2–5, Tafel IX–XII; Katritzky, ‘Gendering Tooth-drawers on the Stage’, p. 147; Erma Hermens (ed.), On the Trail of Bosch and Bruegel: Four Paintings United under Cross-examination (London: Archetype Publications, 2012). 47 Matthew 21:12–13; Mark 11:15–17; Luke 19:45–6, John 2:13–16. 48 Suppan and Janota, Texte und Melodien, p. 54, ll. 57, 69: Tunc veniet Rubinus proclamando ludum; ‘wier wellen haben [ein] Spil’. See also Stephen K. Wright, The Erlau Playbook: Five Medieval German Dramas for Christmas and Easter (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2017). 49 Suppan and Janota, Texte und Melodien, pp. 74–6, ll. 733–7, 753–5, 781–2. 50 Suppan and Janota, Texte und Melodien, p. 79: Rubinus (ll. 875–80): ‘nue gebt mier her eur hant: / ich wil euch füern in ein lant / da get di gans gepraten / und mit pheffer wol weraten, / sie trät das meβer in dem snabel / und das wüerzl in dem zagl’. 51 Suppan and Janota, Texte und Melodien, p. 80, ll. 923–6. 52 Renate Amstutz, Ludus de decem virginibus: Recovery of the sung liturgical core of the Thuringian ‘Zehnjungfrauenspiel’ (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2002), pp. 171–3.

6 Citing scripture in late medieval and early modern English morality drama Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Cathy Shrank

Introduction This chapter considers scriptural citation in fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury English morality drama. As scholars such as John Wasson and Pamela King note, the survival rate of plays that might be considered ‘moralities’ does not ‘supply adequate evidence of a coherent “movement” within the development of native theatre’.1 Nonetheless, as King herself argues, the extant examples – including The Castle of Perseverance (c. 1400–25), Wisdom and Mankind (both c. 1460–75), and Everyman (printed c. 1515) – do share certain conventions, which suggest ‘some consensus about the morality play form’: namely, the use of allegory for moral instruction; a protagonist representing humankind, whose fate and soul is fought over by ‘polarised figures of good and evil’; and a plot that ‘concerns alienation from God, and return to God, presented as the temptation, fall and restitution of the protagonist’.2 This chapter traces what happens to biblical quotations in this type of drama: first, under what Vincent Gillespie has called the ‘long shadow’ cast by Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions (1409), which placed strict limits on vernacular translations of scripture; secondly, in response to the various phases of the English Reformation, in the light of the onus that Reformers placed both on the Bible – rather than the Church – as the source of religious authority, and on worship in the vernacular, not (as previously) in Latin.3 ‘Moralities’ have been selected for this study because they are not rooted in a biblical source; this means that, in theory, their authors have a high degree of flexibility about how they engage with scripture, and the degree to which they do so. The fifteenth century The chapter is concerned with the deliberate deployment of biblical quotations for dramatic, rhetorical, or ideological effect, and therefore

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focuses not on allusion, but rather on moments of explicit citation. However, ascertaining what counts as ‘citation’ is not necessarily straightforward. The line is hard to draw when the potential reference is in English, especially in the later sixteenth century, once worship in the vernacular as well as the regular reiteration of texts from standardised versions would have meant that the Bible provided a linguistic and cultural resource that, potentially, could be tapped into almost subconsciously. Yet the appearance of Latin can also raise questions, as with the earliest of the case studies, The Castle of Perseverance, preserved in a single copy, made around 1440.4 The Latin in that text frequently disrupts and expands the structure of the stanzas, interrupting rhyme and metre, and it is generally accepted by scholars and editors that not all the Latin would have been spoken: David Parry has estimated that as few as seven of the forty-three extra-metrical lines are part of the play-text, with the remaining Latin (stage directions aside) operating as glosses, commenting silently on the on-stage dialogue.5 Yet, Castle perhaps accommodates more performance of the Latin than Parry allows. Certainly later sixteenth-century plays, such as Thomas Lupton’s All for Money (1578) or Nicholas Udall’s Respublica (1553), contain frequent and lengthy Latin passages that swell the lines as well as disrupt metre and rhyme, as in the following instance from Castle: ‘Example I fynde in holy wryt,’ declares the Good Angel, ‘He wyl bere me wytnesse./ Divicias et paupertates ne dederis mihi, Domine’ (360–2). The Latin – a version of Proverbs 30:8 (Mendicitatem et divitias ne dederis mihi, ‘give me not poverty or riches’)6 – does not fit the metrical scheme of four strong stresses per line, adds a line to the pattern of thirteen-line stanzas, and disrupts the rhyme scheme (ababababcdddc), signalled in the manuscript by its exclusion from the vertical braces that link the rhymes.7 Nevertheless, without the Latin being uttered aloud, the evidence cued by ‘holy wryt’ has not been supplied. We see something similar in Humility’s argument with Pride: ‘this schalt thou knowe: / Deposuit potentes de sede et cetera’ (2105–6; ‘he hathe put downe the mightie from their seats’, Luke 1:52). Again, the biblical quotation would seem to be part of the script, since the text makes less sense without it. Nor does the presence of ‘et cetera’ necessarily indicate that the quotation is for visual consultation, rather than oral performance: as Hans-Jürgen Diller argues, because biblical texts ‘are ready-made’, they do not need to be ‘quoted in full [in the play-text]. The first line …, often followed by an etc.’, could be ‘sufficient for the purposes of the original producers’.8

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That more of the Latin is intended to be spoken than Parry allows is backed up by the distribution of biblical quotations across the play, as the use of Latin ‘becomes more insistent and more dominant as good triumphs over evil and salvation is affirmed’.9 This contrasts with the dearth of Latin in general, and scriptural citations in particular, between lines 520 and 1506, much of which coincides with the part of the play in which the Vices are in the ascendant. If the Latin lines were purely a gloss, then we could expect biblical commentary on the Vices as well as the Virtues: the Bible catalogues plenty of errant behaviour, after all. It would also be unusual for glossing to increase as the play progressed: the tendency of many copyists – witnessed across manuscript culture – is to adopt ‘non-essential’ practices enthusiastically at the outset, and then tail off. Janette Dillon is among those scholars who assume that much of the Latin was spoken, ‘usually giv[ing] holy sanction to the words of those who speak it’.10 In Castle, Folly is the only Vice character whose speech is associated with scripture: Werldly wyt was never nout But wyth foly it were frawt. Thus the wysman hath tawt A-botyn in his boke. Sapiencia penes Domini (516–20)

The reference to what the ‘wysman’ taught in his ‘boke’ points backward (to the observation that ‘werldly wyt’ is always mingled with folly), rather than introducing the Latin quotation, a loose version of Ecclesiasticus 1:1, Omnis sapientia a Domine Deus est (‘all wisdome cometh of the Lord’). The status of the Latin – as gloss or script – thus remains ambiguous. If unspoken, it comments ironically on Folly. If part of the play-text, it is an incongruous thing for Folly to say. Nevertheless, it would work dramatically, highlighting Folly’s folly, as he cites scripture for the superficial authority it lends his speech, while being unaware of the inappropriateness of the biblical verse he chooses. The liberties here taken with the Vulgate – whether by Folly or a glosser – is not a reflection of the Vice’s fallen nature. Of the forty-three Latin quotations from the Bible in Castle, almost twothirds (twenty-seven) differ in some way from the Vulgate text: by substituting synonyms (replebitur for implebitur when citing Ecclesiastes 5:9; 2661); by omitting or adding words; by changing the order slightly (with onus suum in Galatians 6:5 becoming suum honus, 3188); or by adapting the grammar (so the second-person te …

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dereliquisti in Deuteronomy 32:18 becomes the third-person se … dereliquit, 3426). The loosest of paraphrases seems possible, as when John 8:11 – amplius noli peccare (‘sin no more’) – is rendered by Shrift as posius noli viciare (1537): the sense and syntactical structure are the same, but the diction is almost entirely different. Such variations may result from memorial reconstruction, or from quotations relying on non-biblical sources, such as commentaries. Certainly very few of the alterations are dictated by poetic form. The exchange of eternum for saeculum in the quotation from Psalm 116:2 (Geneva 117:2) is one of the few cases when a change to the Vulgate can be attributed to the demands of form, as the line qui veritas manet in eternum (‘the trueth of the Lord endureth for euer’) is made to rhyme with the non-biblical couplet that follows: Tendit homo ad infernum, / Numquam venit at supernum (‘Man goes to hell, / and never comes to heaven’, 3311–13). Castle thus serves as a useful measure of scriptural citation before the Reformation. Even if we take a cautious view of the amount of Latin spoken on stage, it is evident that it is predominantly associated with the Virtues and with Mankind while in a state of grace, and that it brings a certain solemnity to the proceedings, lending authority to those that speak it. At the same time, there is a degree of verbal laxity: the biblical quotations do not follow scripture to the letter, but often play quite freely with it. Perhaps more surprising, in the wake of Arundel’s Constitutions, is the high proportion of English renderings of biblical texts: almost half the Latin quotations from scripture are accompanied by some sort of translation or rough paraphrase, and there are two quotations solely in English, both of which are explicitly tied to a book of the Bible and are therefore readily identifiable as biblical translations. The first is spoken by Charity towards the end of Mankind’s first temptation, as the Virtues start to push back against the Vices: ‘Poule in ys pystyl putteth the prefe / “But charyte be wyth the[e] chefe” ’ (1616–17), a rendering of 1 Corinthians 13:13: maior autem his est caritas (‘the greater of these is charitie’).11 The second is Mercy’s declaration that ‘God’s ‘mercy is … wyth-outyn ending /… as David seyth … / In scripture is no less’ (3504–6), the first line of which translates Psalm 99:5 (in aeternum misericordia eius).12 The impact of Arundel’s decrees on fifteenth-century vernacular theology and on devotional and didactic writings aimed at the laity has been much discussed since Nicholas Watson’s 1995 article surveyed fifteenth-century literature in the light of Anne Hudson’s ground-breaking archival work on Lollardy.13 Little attention has

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been paid to the consequences for drama, however. Arundel’s Constitutions regulated who preached, and what they preached; they policed what was taught and debated at university; and – importantly for our purposes – they restricted making or reading English translations of the Bible, ordering that, in John Foxe’s translation: no man hereafter by his owne authoritie, translate any text of the Scripture [textum sacrae scripturae] into English, or any other tongue, by way of a booke, libel, or treatise, and that no man read anye suche booke, libel or treatise, nowe lately set foorth in the time of Iohn Wickliffe, or sithence, or hereafter to be set forth, in part or in whole, priuily or paertly: vpon paine of greater excommunication.14

As Watson states, ‘the phrase “textum sacrae scripturae”… was intended in the widest sense, to include even single verses translated into written form’.15 Permission could be granted ‘by the Ordinary of the place, or (if the case so require) by the Councell prouinciall’, but in practice, the Constitutions curbed the composition and circulation of vernacular material: ‘once its effects had taken hold, the commonest and most influential response to the legislation and their scribes was silent compliance’, creating ‘an atmosphere in which self-censorship was assumed to be both for the common good and (for one’s own safety) prudent’.16 Licensed preachers were still allowed to translate biblical texts into English during their sermons: presumably, the impermanence of the spoken word, the public – rather than privy – nature of the occasion, as well as the fact that such transmission of the Bible relied on clerics whose orthodoxy had been pre-established as part of the process of regulation made this much less dangerous than a written text. Drama, however, is poised between orality and textuality. Performances might be transient, public (or semi-public), and received aurally, but play-texts are written records, open to consultation by unregulated readers. The effects of the Constitutions were also long-lasting. As James Simpson observes, from 1409 ‘until the 1530s the punitive state and ecclesiastical legislation of the early fifteenth century holds’; ‘given the intense scrutiny of any religious matter written in English after Arundel’s Constitutions’, this meant that ‘even the most apparently anodyne devotional matter in English had an ecclesiological resonance’.17 What concerns this chapter is whether fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century (i.e. pre-Reformation) moralities show writers succumbing to the stifling pressures of Arundel’s orders. Although the only copy of Castle postdates the Constitutions, it is highly

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possible that its composition either pre-dates those decrees, or comes from a time before the self-censorship they encouraged had been fully assimilated. However, Everyman, translated from the Dutch Elckerlijc (first printed in 1496), provides some suggestive evidence of Arundel’s impact. Direct citation from the Bible is scant, but does appear towards the end of the play, as Everyman prepares to meet his maker. ‘In uwen handen … / Beveel ic u minen gheest’, the Dutch protagonist prays (838–9); ‘In manus tuas … commendo spiritum meum’, comes the English equivalent (886–7), converting the Dutch vernacular into biblical (and liturgical) Latin (‘into thine hands I commend my spirit’; Luke 23:46).18 A second biblical quotation only appears in the English version, and is again in Latin, when – in the closing lines (which depart from the Dutch) – the Doctor quotes Matthew 25:41: ‘ite, maledicti, in ignem aeternum’ (‘depart from me ye cursed, into the everlasting fire’, 915). Neither quotation is translated or paraphrased. The paucity of scriptural citation throughout Everyman obviously mirrors the text it translates, but the recourse to Latin (over the vernacular) is unique to the English version and may well reflect the influence of the Constitutions over a century after they were ordained. For the English translator of Everyman, Latin is indisputably the language of scripture. Mankind, probably written some four or five decades earlier, is often regarded as a ‘metalinguistic play’, testing the cultural authority of Latin.19 ‘No other extant play of the period mounts such an extended attack on Latin and Latinate English’, Dillon writes.20 It is still the non-Vice characters, particularly Mercy, who cite the Bible most frequently, and Mankind meditates on the words of David – ‘Nec in hasta ne in glaudio salvat Dominus’ – as he prepares to ward off the Vices with his spade (‘the Lorde saveth not with sworde nor with speare’; 1 Samuel 17:47).21 However, the Vices are prone to echo and ridicule such quotations. Nought rhymes Mankind’s Dominus with the macaronic spadibus and hedybus (398–9), and Mischief turns Mercy’s paraphrase of Matthew 3:12 – ‘the corn xall be sauyde, the chaffe xall be brente’ 22 (43) – into doggerel: ‘Dryff-daff, Mysse-masche, / Some was corne, and some was chaffe, / My dame sayd my name was Raffe’ (49–51). As well as responding to the deployment of scripture by the nonVices, the Vices themselves also initiate such discourse, as when New Guise enters citing the Psalms (324–6). Over and over, the Vices reduce scripture to fragments, which are extracted from their biblical contexts and bleached of spiritual resonance. Nought peppers his speech with snippets of scripture – ‘Ye pley in nomine patris,

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choppe!’ (440; Matthew 28:19) – and uses biblical phrases to describe those he will spare from arrest: ‘Master Woode of Fullburn / He ys a noli me tangere’, and ‘Master Alyngton of Botysam / Ande Hamonde of Soffeham / For drede of in manus tuas’ (511–12, 514–16; see John 20:17, Luke 23:46). As the Bible becomes empty verbiage, it is fitting that the play’s Master Vice is Titivillus, the demon who corrupts the work of scribes and collects the idle conversations that take place in church or words of the service that are mumbled or mispronounced. Mankind thus displays a more troubling use of scripture than Castle: its presence in a character’s mouth does not guarantee that character’s moral worth. Nonetheless, the play is tellingly orthodox in terms of the language in which the Bible is cited. There are twenty-six biblical quotations across the play (a more frequent rate of citation than Castle, which – at 3,700 lines – is a much longer play). Of these, there is one straight translation from Latin into English (850–2), two loose paraphrases, without the Latin being supplied (43, 173–7), and one quotation half in Latin, half in English (767); the rest are Latin. The Latin also follows the Vulgate much more closely than in Castle: of the twenty-four Latin quotations, only eight (one-third) deviate in diction or word order (in comparison with almost two-thirds in Castle). Lawrence Clopper and Thomas Pettitt have both challenged the perception of Mankind as a designedly populist play.23 The amount of untranslated Latin is certainly suggestive of a more select audience (even the Vices’ macaronics require knowledge of Latin grammar); but it may also indicate a degree of caution about Englishing scripture, or – at the very least – an assumption that, for all the Vices’ mockery, Latin is still the conventional language for biblical citation.24 Even the Vices reflect this. When Mischief burlesques Mercy’s paraphrase of Matthew 3:12, the evocation of scripture (however subversive) triggers a code-shift into mock-Latin: ‘Corn servit bredibus, chaffe horsibus, straw fyrybusque’ (57). The use of ‘straight’, unparodied Latin also intensifies in the final hundred lines (eight biblical quotations, all in Mercy’s mouth), as Mercy redeems Mankind and quashes the carnivalesque atmosphere created by the Vices. In contrast to Mankind, Wisdom is – on the one hand – less destabilising in its deployment of scripture, and – on the other – more radical in the language used. Like Castle, it is the non-Vice figures who cite scripture, with just two exceptions, both spoken by Lucifer (394, 401). In addition, biblical citations increase markedly towards the end, as the Virtues reassert themselves: ten of the play’s

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twenty-two quotations from scripture come in the final hundred lines, a pattern also found in Castle and Mankind.25 Strikingly, though, of these twenty-two quotations, two are given in English only (270, 401), and eleven of the Latin ones (over 50 per cent) are also translated or loosely paraphrased. In terms of its fidelity to the Vulgate, Wisdom sits between Castle and Mankind, with just over half the Latin quotations (eleven) departing from that text in minor ways. The predominance of Latin over English citations of scripture in fifteenth-century moralities would thus seem to be a legacy of Arundel’s Constitutions, which created a culture that ‘demonised English as the language of potential heretics’ and fostered ‘a turn back to Latin’.26 Less expected, considering Arundel’s strictures, is that they contain any, or so much, English translation. The second half of this chapter examines what happens when the language politics of fifteenth-century England were turned on their head by the English Reformation, with its emphasis on vernacular worship. The sixteenth century Sixteenth-century Reformers habitually attacked the attitude of the Church of Rome to the Bible on two fronts: first, that followers of the Pope misrepresented scripture for their own ends; and secondly, that they endeavoured to keep scripture from the people, by denying them an English Bible. As the character Englande insists in John Bale’s play King Johan (probably written and performed in the late 1530s, and revised in the late 1550s): ‘The popys pyggys may not abyd this word to be herd / Nor knowyn of pepyl or had in anye regard’.27 The provision of a vernacular Bible thus became totemic for English Reformers, as can be seen in the attempts to detach a desire for an English Bible from support for Lutheranism in William Barlow’s counter-Reformation work A Dialoge Describing the Originall Ground of these Lutheran Faccions (1531). In morality drama, characters changing their name alerts audiences to their duplicity; in post-Reformation moralities (like King Johan), using ‘Catholic’ oaths, such as ‘by the Mass’ or ‘Gogs blood’, performs a comparable function, signalling characters’ ‘ “popish” unregeneracy’.28 This next section consequently explores whether Reformed writers used Latin citations of the Bible – as opposed to English ones – as a similar signifier of morally dubious characters. Albion, Knight was printed in 1566 but written earlier (possibly as early as 1537). It exists only as a fragment of six leaves, where

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we see Injury (a Vice, who will soon try to pass himself off as Manhood) using a biblical text (John 7:24) to justify his frivolous (‘light’) apparel.29 ‘Christ taught you syr how ye shuld iudge men’, he tells Justice: ‘Nolite iudicare secundam faciem’ (‘iudge not according to the appearance’), although significantly he does not complete the verse (‘but iudge righteous iudgement’). Justice brings Matthew 7:20 as a counter-text – ‘ex fructibus eorum cognoscentis eos’ (‘by their frutes ye shal knowe them’, sig. B1v) – which Injury rudely rejects: ‘with the same text I pray you wipe your nose / Hee said not Ex vestibus eorum cognoscentis eos’ (‘by their clothes ye shall know them’). This exchange – containing the only scriptural citations in the fragment – shows Vice and Virtue contesting the Bible. However, what is at issue is the use and interpretation of the texts, not the language in which they are cited: warning bells are sounded about Injury because he manipulates and edits scripture, not because he cites it in Latin (the language also used by Justice). The use of the Vulgate seems no more problematic in King Johan, despite the fact that Bale elsewhere railed against the use of Latin in church worship, decrying the incomprehensibility caused when the priest ‘turneth his back to the people / and telleth a tale to the walle in a foren language’.30 The Bible is cited twenty-five times within the play: nine times by King Johan (described as ‘easily the most Bible-quoting character in all of English drama’); 31 five times by Englande; three times by Veritas; twice by Nobylyte; once by Imperyall Majestye; and five times by Vices, including Clergye, whom both King Johan and Cyvyle Order accuse of wresting scripture. ‘He presumyth the Scripturs to confownd’, the king states (469); ‘Me thynkyth yowr fyrst text stondeth nothyng with yowr reson’, asserts Cyvyle Order (461). When citing scripture, the Vices invariably use Latin. They also cite snippets of Latin liturgy, as when they abbreviate the Trinitarian formula (in nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti) to ‘in nomine patris’ (722), from where it is a short step to ‘in nomine Domini Pape’ (‘in the name of the Lord Pope’, 1149, 1188, 1231, 1802). Nevertheless, as with Albion, Knight, the language is not necessarily the issue: Englande, King Johan, and Imperyall Majestye all cite the Vulgate at least once. The difference lies in how the Vices and non-Vices use scripture. The latter draw on it as an authority, to back up what they are saying. The importance of this use of the Bible is demonstrated by King Johan’s words to Clergye: ‘Prove yt by Scriptur, and than wyll I yt alowe’ (1435), a command which elicits the revealing, self-damning response that ‘I passe not on the

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Scriptur: that ys inow for me / Whyche the Holy Father [the pope] aprovyth by his auctoryte’ (1438–9). In contrast, the Vices tend to employ scripture as ornament: Usurpid Power and Privat Welth enter singing lines from Psalm 135 (Geneva 136; 764–5); Dissymulacyon drops in superfluous phrases such as ‘vadam et videbo’ (‘go and see’, Genesis 45:28; 767). Nor, with the exception of Clergye, do the Vices translate or gloss the Latin (as the non-Vices invariably do). In short, citing the Vulgate is not automatically a sign of wrong thinking, and it is the Vulgate – the Bible of the Church of Rome – from which Bale takes his Latin quotations: only four out of nine deviate in any way from that text, and at least three of these deviations seem deliberate, as characters alter the tense to fit the context, or omit words for brevity or to skew the sense, as when Privat Welth substitutes ‘canticum bonum’ (‘good song’) for ‘canticum domini’ (‘song of the Lord’, 765). It is perhaps understandable that – for all his promotion of vernacular worship – Bale should continue to cite scripture in Latin: he was writing before the publication of an authorised English Bible and his knowledge of scripture would have been shaped by his pre-Reformation education with the Norwich Carmelites. However, the non-judgemental use of the Vulgate continues into the next generation, even found in two plays actually about the Reformation: George Wapull’s The Tyde Taryeth No Man (1576) and the anonymous New Custome (1573). We know little about their authors, but both plays were written at a point when worship in the vernacular and use of the English Bible were well established. Despite this, ‘Faithful Few’, Wapull’s Virtue, cites Romans 8:31 in Latin.32 There is a similar pattern in New Custome, even as the play promotes vernacular worship. The Vice, Perverse Doctrine, complains that ‘all’ is ‘scripture, scripture’, and that New Custome (who will transpire to be no novelty, but Primitive Constitution) commaundes the seruice in English to be readde. And for the holy Legende the Bible to put in his steadde. Euery man to looke thereon at his list and pleasure. Euery man to studie diuinitie at his conueninent leasure.33

Nonetheless, both New Custome and Light of the Gospell cite the Bible in Latin (sigs B1r, B4v, D2v); the Vices do not cite it at all. We might not know much about Wapull or the author of New Custome, but the life and ideological convictions of William Bullein, the author of our final text, are much better documented. The text in question, A Dialogue both Pleasant and Pietyful (1564), is not a

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play, but has been selected for comparison for two reasons: first, Bullein provides a useful test case, because the deployment of scripture in his fictive dialogue can be measured against the way that he marshals it in his more straightforwardly informational work, the medical dialogue Bulleins Bulwark (1562); and secondly, Bullein’s Dialogue is much more plot-driven than many English dialogues and has much in common with morality drama, as it traces the final days and eventual death of Civis (an Everyman figure). What is more, the dialogue – like drama – is presented purely through the interlocutors’ verbal exchanges. There is no explanatory narrative. Like the audience of a play, readers are thus required to ascertain the ethos of characters from what they say. Bullein was staunchly Protestant, resigning his rectorship in Suffolk soon after the accession of Mary Tudor, after which he turned to medicine, and then to writing.34 Despite this, in the Dialogue, there is no perceivable animus against the Latin Bible. The Bible is cited in Latin as well as English and – although vernacular quotations predominate – Latin does not mark out characters for disapprobation, a neutral use of the Vulgate also found in Bulleins Bulwark. Indeed, as with Bale’s King Johan or Albion, Knight, what matters is not so much the language as the use to which scripture is put. In the Dialogue, the corrupt physician Medicus self-interestedly cites Ecclesiasticus 38:1–2 in English: ‘Honour the Phisician, with the honour that is due vnto hym, because of necessitie, for the Lorde haue created him, and he shall receiue giftes of the kyng’, he tells his patient Antonius.35 The usurious atheist Antonius is quick to point out that Medicus has omitted ‘woordes in the middes of the matter’ that acknowledge God, not physicians, as the ultimate source of the gift of healing: ‘of the moste higheste cometh learning’ (sig. B3r). Antonius himself later abridges the Vulgate Psalm 13:1/52:1: his ‘qui dixit in corde suo non est deus’ (sig. B4v) crucially effaces the reference to the ‘inspiens’, the ‘fool’ who ‘hathe said in his heart, There is no God’ (Geneva 14:1/53:1). Medicus and Antonius – both self-confessed ‘nulla fidians’ (B4v) – know their Bible in Latin and English, but turn it, and excerpt it, to their own ends. It is their abuse of scripture – not the language in which it is cited – that is perturbing. When Bullein’s Civis misinterprets the Pater Noster (‘Ne nos inducas tentationem’; ‘lead us not into temptation’, Luke 11:4) and ‘indurabo core Pharaonis’ (‘I will harden [Pharoah’s] heart’), a phrase found at various points in Exodus (4:21, 7:3, 14:4), it is not because he is linguistically incompetent. His English translations of

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those sentences are accurate, and he has previously demonstrated that he is educated, showing both his knowledge of Latin and his iconographic literacy when he interprets for his wife some pictures on the walls of an inn, along with their accompanying mottoes (sigs H6r–I6v). Where Civis falls down is in his interpretation of the biblical texts, as he prioritises logic over faith, so that God is held responsible for ‘indurat[ing] the heart of Pharaoh’ and for ‘led[ing] vs into temptaction’ (sig. L7r). Nevertheless, these mistakes do not condemn Civis: he is at this point aware of his failings (‘Oh lord, how I haue erred’), and seeks elucidation from the learned Theologus. Even in the 1560s and 1570s, by which time authors and audiences would have grown up with English Bibles and worship in the vernacular, post-Reformation texts continued to cite the Bible in Latin without a sense of stigma. Naturally, not all conform to this pattern. In Nice Wanton (1560), for example, virtuous characters quote scripture in English only. However, they are not counterbalanced by wicked characters turning to the Vulgate: they do not cite scripture at all, although their speech is punctuated with ‘Catholic’ oaths, such as ‘mary’ or ‘by the masse’.36 Similarly, the problem with Sir Laurence Livingless in Lupton’s All for Money is not that he is quoting or misquoting a Latin Bible, but that he ‘hast not verie much studied [the] Gospell’ in any language.37 Reformation historiography – even as far back as John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments – has tended to focus on the struggle for, and subsequent influence of, an English Bible. In the process, the continued use of the Vulgate, even by committed Reformers, has been overlooked. Yet, Latin Bibles would still have been found on bookshelves38 and used in schools, as can be seen in Ludus Literarium (1612), written by the ‘strict Puritan’ John Brinsley as a practical guide for ‘country schoolmasters’.39 ‘Cause your Schollars to reade you a Chapter of the New Testament’, it advises, ‘One night to reade it out of the Latin into English … the next night to reade the same ouer againe forth of an English Testament, into the same Latine back againe.’ 40 Far from demonising it as ‘papist’, Brinsley advocates using the Latin Bible as an efficient way of inculcating ‘Religion, and Latine, all vnder one [exercise]’, ‘a most happy thing’. The Vulgate thus served as a resource on which the authors of post-Reformation moralities continued to draw, the switch into Latin perhaps helping to alert auditors to the presence of a quotation, in the same way that marginalia, parentheses, or a different font can function in written texts (typographic strategies that developed over the course of the sixteenth century).

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Post-Reformation biblical citations in Latin also tend to be much more faithful to the Vulgate than their fifteenth-century counterparts. Where words are omitted or changed it seems purposeful, as we saw with Privat Welth’s version of Psalm 136:4 (Geneva 137:4) in Bale’s King Johan. In contrast, English citations are often quite approximate. Bullein’s Dialogue is illustrative. His quotations from Ecclesiastes 38 (discussed above) follow the Genevan text exactly, but his rendition of Proverbs 6:6–8 (‘Goe thou idle bodie to the Ante, consider and marke well her waies and learne wisedome, she hath no gide, prince, nor law geuer, but gathereth in sommer to kepe her in winter’, sig. I6v) cannot be attributed to any of the extant printed translations (the 1535 Coverdale Bible, the 1539 Great Bible, and the 1560 Geneva Bible) – although it comes closest to Coverdale in syntax and diction.41 Perhaps the very familiarity of the English Bible by the 1560s, by which time it would have entered vernacular idiom, accounts for this laxity: writers might not feel they needed to check quotations. The freedom with Latin in Castle might be similarly explained. In contrast, during the post-Reformation period, the Vulgate would have become – for most Protestants at least – a more textual, occasional resource: something to read and consult, rather than something regularly heard and thus memorised. Examining patterns of scriptural citation in dialogue and drama, pre- and post-Reformation, is consequently a reminder of the value of examining practice, rather than relying on often polemical writings, when taking the ideological temperature of the past. Doing so reveals how Arundel’s Constitutions may have muted, but not silenced, scriptural translation on stage as well as on the page, and how an English Bible – once eventually authorised – did not sweep away its Latin predecessor. This coexistence is not simply the result of the confessional complexities of post-Reformation England, or the slow pace of religious change: as Brinsley’s pedagogical advice attests, the Latin Bible continued to be used, in some circumstances, by even the ‘hotter’ sort of Protestant, decades after authorised, and often affordable, English alternatives were widely available.42 Recognising these patterns also cautions against using ‘the Bible’ as a monolithic term: these texts remind us that there are multiple Bibles to consider, in different languages, different editions, and sometimes perhaps (imperfectly) reconstructed in the mind’s eye. Notes 1 John Wasson, ‘The Morality Play: Ancestor of Elizabethan Drama?’, Comparative Drama 13 (1979), pp. 210–11; Pamela M. King, ‘Morality

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Plays’, in Richard Beadle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 240–64, at p. 262. 2 King, ‘Morality Plays’, pp. 264, 240. 3 Vincent Gillespie, ‘Chichele’s Church’, in Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh (eds), After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 1–42, at p. 8. 4 Folger MS V.a.34 (the ‘Macro Manuscript’), which also contains copies of Mankind and Wisdom. ‘Macro’ is named after a former owner, the Suffolk clergyman Cox Macro (1683–1767); during his possession, it was part of a composite manuscript, broken up after coming into the possession of the collector Hudson Gurney in 1821. Prior to being bound into this composite manuscript, Mankind and Wisdom (both written, for the most part, in the hand of Thomas Hyngham, a monk from fifteenth-century Bury St Edmunds) had comprised a separate booklet owned by the Bury St Edmunds goldsmith Robert Oliver (d. 1570), before passing to Oliver’s son, Thomas (c. 1563–1610), a physician in Bury St Edmunds, and then to his son-in-law, James Cobbes (c. 1602–85), by – or at – which time it was bound with alchemical material. The earlier provenance of Castle is unknown. See Richard Beadle, ‘Macro MS 5: A Historical Reconstruction’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 16 (2016), pp. 35–78. 5 David Parry, ‘A Margin of Error: The Problems of Marginalia in The Castle of Perseverance’, in A. F. Johnston (ed.), Editing Early English Drama: Special Problems and New Directions (New York: AMS Press, 1987), pp. 33–64, at pp. 54–6. The lines he would include in the play-text are 3342–3 (spoken by Mercy) and the Latin in God’s speeches from 3604 onwards. Line numbering is from The Castle of Perseverance, in Peter Happé (ed.), Four Morality Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). 6 Unless otherwise stated, English translations are from The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2007). 7 Images of Castle can be seen at http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/ cy08pc (accessed 11 April 2019). 8 Hans Jürgen-Diller, ‘Code-switching in Medieval English Drama’, Comparative Drama 31 (1997–98), pp. 506–37, at p. 517. 9 Janette Dillon, Language and Stage in Medieval and Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 51. 10 Dillon, Language and Stage, p. 51. 11 The New Testament of Christ (Reims, 1582); this counter-Reformation translation (also known as Douay-Rheims) rejects William Tyndale’s controversial choice of ‘love’ as a translation of ‘caritas’ adopted by other English Bibles. 12 Mercy could also be translating the refrain in Psalm 135 (Geneva 136) or the synonymous ‘in saeculum misercordia eius’, the refrain of Psalm 117 (Geneva 118).

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13 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; Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). See also Gillespie and Ghosh, After Arundel, and Paul J. Patterson (ed.), ‘The Book and Religious Practice in Late Medieval England’, special issue, Religion and Literature 37 (2005). 14 John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), sig. 2Y5r. 15 Watson, ‘Censorship’, pp. 828–9. 16 Watson, ‘Censorship’, p. 831. 17 James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution: The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 2: 1350–1547 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 335–6, 391. 18 Clifford Davidson, Martin W. Walsh, and Ton J. Broos (eds), Everyman and its Dutch Original, Elckerlijc (2007), Teams Middle English Texts, http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams (accessed 11 April 2019). 19 Lynn Forest-Hill, ‘Mankind and the Fifteenth-Century Preaching Controversy’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 15 (2003), pp. 17–42, at p. 17. 20 Dillon, Language and Stage, p. 54. 21 Mankind, ed. Kathleen M. Ashley and Gerard NeCastro (2010), Teams Middle English Texts, http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams (accessed 11 April 2019), line 397. 22 ‘[He] will gather the wheat into his garner, but wil burne vp the chaffe with vnquenchable fire’ (Geneva). 23 Lawrence M. Clopper, ‘Mankind and its Audience’, Comparative Drama 8 (1974–5), pp. 347–55; Thomas Pettitt, ‘Mankind: an English Fastnachtspiel?’, in Meg Twycross (ed.), Festive Drama (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1996), pp. 190–202. 24 Compare Dillon’s arguments (Language and Stage, p. 25) about the use of Latin for biblical citation in The Boke of Margery Kempe. 25 Wisdom, ed. David N. Klausner (2008), Teams Middle English Texts, http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams (accessed 11 April 2019). 26 Dillon, Language and Stage, p. 11; Gillespie, ‘Chichele’s Church’, p. 24. 27 John Bale, King Johan, in Happé, Four Morality Plays, lines 119–20. 28 Paul Whitfield White, Drama and Religion in English Provincial Society, 1485–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 120. 29 Anon., A mery play … of albyon knyghte (1566?), sig. B1r. 30 John Bale, The Vocacyon ([Wesel?], 1553), sig. D6v. 31 Rainer Pineas, ‘Polemical Uses of the Scriptures in the Plays of John Bale’, Dutch Review of Church History 66 (1986), pp. 180–9, at p. 186. These figures exclude the recurrent use of ‘in nomine patris’. The phrase appears a number of times in the Bible, but is also liturgical, which seems to be its resonance for its heaviest user, Sedition (e.g. line 2049).

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32 George Wapull, The Tyde Taryeth No Man (1576), sig. F3v. 33 Anon., A new Enterlude No lesse wittie: then pleasant, entituled new Custome (1573), sig. A4r. 34 Patrick Wallis, ‘Bullein, William (c. 1515–1576)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com (accessed 11 April 2019). 35 William Bullein, A dialogue bothe pleasaunte and pietifull, wherein is a goodly regimente against the feuer pestilence with a consolacion and comfort against death (1564), sig. B2v. There are two editions printed in 1564. The one cited here is STC, 2nd edn, 4036.5. 36 Anon., A Preaty Interlude called, Nice wanton (1560), sig. A2r. 37 Thomas Lupton, A moral and pitieful comedie, intituled, All for Money (1578), sig. D4r. 38 ‘Private Libraries in Renaissance England’, https://plre.folger.edu/ (accessed 11 April 2019). 39 John Morgan, ‘Brinsley, John (bap. 1566, d. in or after 1624)’, www.oxforddnb.com (accessed 11 April 2019). 40 John Brinsley, Ludus Literarium (1612), sig. 2L3r. 41 ‘Go to the Emmet (thou slogarde) considre hir wayes, & lerne to be wyse. She hath no gyde, no teacher, no leder: yet in the sommer she prouideth hir meate, & gathereth hir foode together in the haruest’, Miles Coverdale, Biblia (1535), also known as the Coverdale Bible. 42 See, for example, John Day’s publication of Richard Taverner’s translation of the New Testament (revised by Edmund Becke) in six octavo volumes in 1549–50, a ‘small format publication [which] enabled individuals to spread the purchase of the volumes’ (John N. King, ‘Becke, Edmund (fl. 1549–1551)’, www.oxforddnb.com (accessed 11 April 2019).

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7 Religious violence and dramatic innovation in the Tudor interlude: John Heywood’s The Pardoner and the Friar1 Greg Walker

In his account of the year 1532, one London chronicler records a shocking incident on 17 August in the parish church of All Hallows, Bread Street.2 This incident was seemingly even more memorable than when, the previous year, a cook was judicially boiled to death in Smithfield in a brass cauldron for the crime of poisoning a servant of the Bishop of Rochester. For, where the chronicler noted the cook’s death in just twenty-five words, he afforded the events at All Hallows eighty-five, and mentioned them in two places, noting first the incident itself and, later, its judicial aftermath. What happened to so exercise him was the desecration of the church by two priests, whose initially verbal argument turned into a violent altercation within the church, ending in the drawing of blood. This led to the apprehension of the two men, their trial and imprisonment, the closure and ceremonial repurification of the church, and the public humiliation of the priests in a ritual of penance two months later. The chronicle records the story like this: The seventeenth day of August: two priests of All Hallows in Bread Street fell at variance, that the one priest drew blood on the other, wherefore the same church was suspended and no service said nor sung [there] in one month.

A little later the author returns to the story to record its sequel: The twenty-fifth day of October: ye two priests of All Hallown [sic] in Bread Street were joined in penance to go before the general procession with bare feet, bare legged and bare headed, before ye children with beads and books in their hands, and so did their penance.

The desecration was clearly a rare event, yet one with a wider resonance in the turbulent years of the early Reformation. Angry

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exchanges between clergy and their critics, traditionalists and Reformers, both in parliament and in the city’s streets and churches were a feature of this period, and were a cause for grave concern for many conservative Londoners and foreign observers alike.3 What made this different, however, was the violence between priests. Another writer who seems to have been struck by the same incident was John Heywood, for he seems to have used it as the inspiration for his most experimental and troubling interlude, The Pardoner and The Friar.4 The dates involved are not certain. The only fixed point is 5 April 1533, when the text of the interlude was printed by Heywood’s brother-in-law, William Rastell. So, as with much of the playwright’s biography, we are left with only conjecture to go on. Yet the possibility of a connection between the All Hallows incident and the play might explain something about its odd, abrasive dramaturgy, as well as allowing us to re-date the interlude to the period between late October 1532 (when the priests performed their penance) and April 1533, when the text was printed, with the Christmas period 1532–33 the most likely opportunity for a performance (Christmas, along with Shrovetide, being the key period for interludes both at court and elsewhere). The play is all about violence, both verbal and physical, and specifically violence between clerics committed in the body of a church (although, as Peter Happé has pointed out, the fact that the play’s events supposedly take place in a church is withheld from the audience until the explosive denouement5). It begins with verbal hints of the possibility of violence, albeit it rapidly disavows them, when the Friar declares of his own order, ‘Knife nor staff may we none carry / Except we should from the gospel vary’ (25–6). What follows, however, quickly develops into an abusive, cacophonous contest between the Friar and his adversary over which of them should have precedence. This finally erupts into violence, first between the two disputants, and then, all the more shockingly, between these two and the local priest and one of his parishioners. It is at this point that Heywood reveals, as a minor coup de théâtre, that the action has supposedly been taking place in church, which is, as a result, ‘pollute[d]’ (547) by the violence. There is considerable talk in this final section of the shedding of blood. The Pardoner, intent on assaulting his opponent, turns to the audience and asks to borrow a dagger, declaring, ‘I shall make that bald crown of his to look red! / I shall leave him but one ear on his head’ (535–6). The Friar’s response is equally belligerent: ‘But I shall leave thee never an ear, ere I go!’ (537).

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Then, as the stage direction makes clear, the verbal violence turns physical: ‘Then the[y] fight’ (following 538). In the absence of the requested knife, it is more a matter of ear- and hair-pulling (539–40), punching, ‘scratting’, and biting (543) at this stage, so actual bloodshed is thus far averted, as the Parson’s remark upon entering makes clear: Is there any blood shed between these knaves? Thanked be God they had no staves Nor edge-tools, for then it had been wrong. (573–5)

But his relief is short-lived, for when the disputants turn instead upon the Parson himself and Neighbour Pratt, the latter receives rather more serious wounds from the Pardoner. Alas, for pain I am almost dead! The red blood so runneth down about my head. Nay, and thou canst, I pray thee help me! (632–4)

But the Parson is unable to help as he is also being beaten, forcing him to concede that ‘The cursed Friar doth the upper hand win!’ (637). The legitimate authorities of Parson and parishioner must thus allow the interlopers to escape with a final curse (‘Then adieu to the devil, till we come again!’ [640]), and the play ends. Unlike Heywood’s other surviving interludes, then, this play concludes, not with the convivial restoration of the status quo, but in an unsettling anti-climax. The playing area is restored to something approaching peace, but the Parson and his neighbour must shuffle away, tending their wounds, and spectators are left to ponder the implications of the Pardoner and Friar’s brief but chaotic occupation of the performance space. As we shall see, the play provides a deliberately disruptive, disorienting experience for its spectators more generally; one like nothing they would have witnessed in the other surviving drama of the period. Its disorienting effects, however, are carefully modulated to prompt the audience to be swayed, first one way, then the other, in their engagement with the characters, before they are finally encouraged to disengage in horror from both during the startling denouement. What is more, central to the play’s contention is the claim to biblical authority. The process begins with the entrance of the Friar, whose opening lines offer a model of strategic misdirection of audience expectations. Addressing the audience directly as his ‘Dear brethren’ (3), he launches into a piece of insistently repetitive patter that seems

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to partake equally of the performative sermons of the charismatic Franciscan tradition and the sales pitch of the fairground huckster: Ye would be glad to know my intent, For I come not hither for money nor for rent, I come not hither for meat nor for meal, But I come hither for your soul’s heal. I come not hither to poll nor to shave, I come not hither to beg nor to crave, I come not hither to glose nor to flatter, I come not hither to babble nor to clatter, I come not hither to fable nor to lie, I come hither your souls to edify. (5–14)

Such an obviously rhetorical performance seems designed to encourage spectators to recognise in the Friar a version of the familiar flattering trickster of medieval anti-fraternal satire, not least as the vices he so fervently denies (avarice, gluttony, rapacious begging, sophistry, and showmanship) are precisely the qualities that this tradition satirises.6 If the audience does take the cue, and responds with cynical laughter, however, they are soon tacitly rebuked for that reaction. For, with an abrupt change of rhythm and tone, his next lines seem to offer a wholly more sincere account of his mission. He does not come for those things mentioned, he says: For we friars are bound the people to teach The gospel of Christ, openly to preach As did the Apostles, by Christ their master sent To turn the people and make them to repent … We friars are bound to search men’s conscience: We may not come for groats and pence; We friars have professed wilful poverty; No penny in our purse have may we; Knife nor staff may we none carry, Except we should from the Gospel vary, For worldly adversity may we be in no sorrow; We may not care today for our meat tomorrow. Bare-foot and bare-legged must we go also: We may not care for frost and snow. We may have no manner care, ne think Nother [neither] for our meat nor our drink, But let our thought fro such things be as free As the birds that in the air flee. (15–18, 21–34)

Having encouraged the audience initially to judge him critically, then, the interlude now seems to offer instead a vision of a friar

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who adheres to the life of apostolic poverty, significantly grounding it in scriptural injunction rather than in the traditions of the Church. The Friar then proceeds to set out his practice with close reference to Christ’s injunctions to the Apostles in Matthew 10:9–14: Our Lord, cleped sweet Jesus, In the gospel speaketh to us thus, ‘Through all the world go ye’, sayeth he, ‘And to every creature speak ye of me, And show of my doctrine and cunning. And, that they may be glad of your coming, If that ye enter in any house anywhere, Look that ye salute them and bid them peace be there. And if that house be worthy and elect, Thilke [that] peace there then shall take effect; And if that house be cursed or pervert, Thilke peace then shall to yourself revert …’ (35–46)

In one sense, there is nothing startling in what the Friar says: imitation of apostolic poverty was the founding principle of the mendicant orders. Yet as Axton and Happé first suggested, in the context of the heated religious culture of the 1520s there are enough hints here to cue an audience to suspect that this is no conventional mendicant, but rather a figure evocative of the religious dissent and radical preaching current in and around London.7 A number of the terms he employs are freighted with evangelical overtones. There is the insistent association with the Gospel itself, which, in the light of Luther’s injunction of sola scriptura, was a rallying cry for Reformers. Furthermore, the Friar’s hailing of the audience as ‘Dear brethren’ is again potentially a term of art, for, as Susan Brigden has demonstrated, ‘the brethren’ was a term that London Reformers who gathered secretly to read the Gospel in each other’s houses in the 1520s often used to identify themselves.8 Similarly, the Friar’s enquiry about whether a house ‘be worthy and elect’ before he will enter it to preach seems pointed, for ‘election’ was, of course another key term in the lexicon of the radicals. The allusion here seems all the more pointed, as Heywood has added the word ‘elect’ himself, where the Vulgate has only the single term (dignus [‘worth’], and digna). For a London audience living through the early Reformation years, then, the Friar’s entry, talking of brethren and the Gospel, and seeking an elect household in which to preach, would have suggested a more contemporary and radical figure than the venal

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friars satirised by Chaucer. Yet Heywood does not venture beyond such hints. His engagement with the real issues at stake in the doctrinal disputes of the period is superficial at best. And even his use of the biblical text is limited. For his point proves to be that the Friar’s teaching is actually not as rooted in the Scriptures as he claims; his evangelism is merely a pose. Hence this Reformer says nothing about the nature of Justification or about the mass or Real Presence; he makes no objection to the ‘idolatry’ of saint worship, the use of images, belief in purgatory, or the practice of pilgrimage. Unlike his uncle Thomas More, Heywood does not present the arguments of the Reformers in order to refute them; he seeks simply to mock the general idea of Reform rather than its specific claims, and to highlight instead the divisions it creates in civil society.9 He thus gives his Friar enough of a patina of illicit radicalism for spectators to identify him as an evangelical, and by implication one approaching the audience as if they were one of the secret conventicles of believers ready to receive his preaching. He leaves things there, however. Given this, it might seem all the more surprising that, after that initial suggestion of anti-fraternal satire, he gives the Friar such an apparently sympathetic hearing. Yet, as we shall see, the playwright’s strategy relies upon sequentially misdirecting the responses of spectators in the interests of a more striking and powerful final effect. The Pardoner, by contrast, is a rather simpler figure, linked throughout with familiar tropes drawn from anti-clerical satire. Entering while the Friar is seemingly at private prayer, he associates himself both with aspects of traditional religion such as saint worship and good works, and with the institutional machinery of the Roman Church, in a speech (97–182) borrowed directly from Chaucer’s ‘Pardoner’s Prologue’: … first ye shall know well that I come from Rome – Lo, here my bulls, all and sum! Our liege Lord[’s] seal here on my patent I bear with me my body to warrant, That no man be so bold, be he priest or clerk, Me to disturb of Christ’s holy work, Nor have no disdain not yet scorn Of these holy relics which saints have worn. (97–104)10

He subsequently lists a number of the ‘relics’ displayed by Chaucer’s pilgrim: the bone ‘of a holy Jew’s sheep’ (105–6); a mitten that increases corn yield (128–32) along with the non-Chaucerian ‘blessed

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arm of Sweet St. Sunday’ (134); a ‘great toe of the Holy Trinity’ (140); Our Lady’s ‘bongrace’ (sun-hat) – an aid to women in labour (145–52); and ‘Of All Hallows the blessed jaw-bone’, an infallible ward against poison (153–61). The quotation from Chaucer would have been unmistakable for an educated Henrician audience, not least as The Canterbury Tales had been newly reprinted in William Thynne’s monumental edition of Chaucer’s Works earlier in 1532.11 Moreover, the tone of the Pardoner’s speech is markedly more belligerent than the Friar’s at this point. So, at this stage the play seems to be setting a figure from traditional anti-clerical satire against one seemingly more rooted in an authentic Bible-centred, Reforming sensibility, very much to the advantage of the latter. This distinction continues in the next movement of the play, when Heywood takes the radical step of having both men talk simultaneously, making their pitch to the audience from different points in the performance space (‘Now shall the Friar begin his sermon, and even at the same time the Pardoner beginneth also to show and speak of his bulls, and authorities come from Rome’). This remarkable dramaturgical experiment potentially places considerable strain on the spectators’ capacity to follow the action, and gives them a degree of freedom over how precisely to attend to the unfolding drama. Where do they direct their attention at any given moment? No doubt different audience members will choose to follow different speakers, led by their own inclinations and positions in the room. But it does not matter too greatly which speaker one follows, as their speeches seem designed to allow the broad distinction between the two to be discerned, whichever of them one is attending to directly. Each of their pitches is built around an insistent leitmotif: the Friar’s being the biblical Word (with just a suggestion that it should be in the vernacular); and the Pardoner’s papal authority, traditional devotional practices, and the processes of formal pardon and indulgence. Even if one is only half listening to the Friar, one would be able to pick up on his repeated references to ‘scripture’ (190), ‘in our English tongue’ (194), ‘the gospel’ (200), ‘in scripture’ (210), ‘in scripture’ (214), and ‘as the gospel full nobly doth declare’ (226). What is more, while the stage directions do not explicitly state this, it would seem likely that the actor would carry a Bible to which he could gesture when alluding to the text to make the association still clearer. The Pardoner, on the other hand, clearly does carry props. The stage direction quoted says that he should ‘show’ as well as speak of his bulls, as he mentions ‘Pope Leo the

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tenth’ (193), ‘his bulls confirmed in lead’ (195), ‘pardon’ (199), ‘alms deed’ (203), ‘the holy chapel of sweet Saint Leonard’ (307), ‘the mass’ (211), ‘Pope Julius the sixth’ (a fictional pontiff, 217), ‘twelve thousand years of pardon’ (219), ‘Pope July, Pope Innocent, and diverse popes mo’ (225). The contrast between the two would, then, seem clear at this stage, regardless of how closely one attended to the precise claims of either. The Friar claims to speak of and for the Gospel, while the Pardoner represents the papal Church in all its institutional majesty. The play thus seems to represent a version of that division between the Reforming brethren and the orthodox, which many had seen as driving the fierce contentions of the first sessions in the Reformation Parliament.12 And Heywood seems, unexpectedly, to be indicating a clear preference for the seemingly humble preaching brother over the corrupt representative of the Roman Church. For, when they break off to confront each other directly for the first time, the ‘humble’ Friar can only cite scripture as his authority to be heard (‘Mary, fellow, I come hither to preach the Word of God, / Which of no man may be forebode, / But heard with silence and good intent’ [256–8]), whereas the Pardoner calls upon the formal apparatus of institutional excommunication and anathema to silence his rival, threatening to curse him (267) on the authority of cardinals and bishops (260), and on the strength of the king’s licence, ‘under his broad seal’ (267): Masters, I curse him openly, And therewith warn this whole company, By the Pope’s great authority, That ye leave him and harken unto me. For, till he be assoiled, his words take none effect. For out of holy church he is now clean reject. (206–11)

Here again we seem to see a dramatisation of precisely the sort of misuse of ecclesiastical power that the Reformers claimed was rife during the debates in Parliament, in which anyone who challenged the privileges of the clergy was subject to allegations of heresy. Yet then, just as spectators might be concluding that the playwright was throwing his weight all too obviously behind the critics of the Church, the interlude begins to change tack. In the next movement, in which the two men revert to trying to talk over each other, it becomes clear that both men are driven solely by greed, and that both profoundly undermine Christian teaching in the process. The Pardoner, still very much in the

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Chaucerian mode, spells out with brazen clarity the claim that money alone, ‘without confession or contrition’ (319), will bring complete absolution from sin, while at the same time the Friar reveals that all his talk of almsgiving had also been aimed at gathering donations for his own order: Who be these poor folk that should have your reward? Who be these poor folk of whom I speak and name? Certes, we poor friars are the same! (316–30, even lines only)

The final movement before the entrance of the Parson has the two men abuse each other directly and simultaneously for another carefully balanced passage: Friar: Pardoner: Friar: Pardoner:

What, should ye give ought to prating pardoners? What, should ye spend on these flattering liars … What, should ye give ought to these bold beggars? As be these babbling monks and friars…? (436–9)

Heywood’s point would seem to be not that one or other of the two is the more vicious, but that they are both self-serving, violent men. It is their contention itself, and the discord that it threatens to spread, that are the real problems. He thus places his spectators in a position where they are insistently invited to choose between the two speakers, but are proved to have been mistaken whichever of them they choose. Like a number of liberal Catholics of a broadly ‘Erasmian’ outlook, Heywood seems to have been as genuinely appalled by corrupt or ignorant orthodox clergy as he was of radical evangelicals. For he sees both as undermining the authority of the Church in the eyes of the laity, each in their own way – one too ignorant to read or preach the Gospel, the other wilfully perverting its message.13 Indeed, the damage done by the Pardoner seems to have appeared to Heywood the more obvious, so his character is quickly established with the open allusion to Chaucer’s pilgrim, and remains broadly consistent throughout. It is the Friar, and the deceptively honest evangelicalism that he gestures towards, that seems to have been more problematic for Heywood. Hence the rather more subtle approach the dramatist takes to the modulation of this character as a shifting figure is much harder to pin down and interpret. Heywood’s ultimate theme is the condemnation of division and discord, which he achieves by reimagining the audience and acting space definitively at the end of the debate as neither the home of one of the brethren nor the arena

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for a pardoner’s travelling indulgence show, but as a congregation in the shared communal space of a parish church. Spectators have, the play suggests, been on holy ground all along, and have unwittingly allowed that ground to be despoiled by antagonists who have brought their squabble into the heart of the parish and polluted it with their violence. The play thus leaves spectators with something approaching the shock of desecration felt by the London chronicler at the pollution of All Hallows, Bread Street. What started as a seemingly harmless comic confrontation ends in violence, which the interlude presents itself as unable to contain, leaving the matter unresolved with the Friar and Pardoner’s menacing threat that they will ‘come again’ (640). If I am right in re-dating The Pardoner and the Friar to Christmas 1532–33, then, it is surely Heywood’s most immediately contemporary and openly political interlude, one which grew directly out of very recent and local events. Prompted by the bloody brawl between two priests, and their subsequent public penance in late October 1532, the play reflects its author’s distress at the violent debates in parliament and across the capital of which this incident probably seemed symptomatic. Taking his cue from that sacrilegious brawl, Heywood constructed a play around a similar event, using it as a symbol of the wider crisis of Church and State. The play gestures towards a world of rancour and hostility, of contested claims to religious authority, and towards a religious culture falling apart in which nothing is what it seems, traditional assumptions and social structures no longer hold true, and conventional authorities have lost their capacity to bring order, while anarchy and violence prevail. The play offered Heywood an opportunity to reflect creatively upon, and attempt to digest, the implications of the troubled and troubling times in which he was living. Within months he would return to these themes – religious and social discord, the role of conventional authorities in the wake of the Royal Supremacy – to craft a more measured, allegorically sophisticated and ‘merry’ response to the national cataclysm in The Play of the Weather.14 But for now, his response was, in comparison with his other plays, a shorter, rawer, unpolished, experimental work essentially for two actors. In the search for an apt simile for the rancorous dialogue of the deaf that was convulsing English civil society, he hit upon the bold, disorienting technique of having his two main actors shout their lines at the same time, each trying to drown out the other with claims for a monopoly of religious truth and authority. Embodying discord quite literally in this way, the play attempted

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something that had not been seen on an English stage before, and rarely since. It is hard to imagine what audiences would have made of it, or of the demands it placed upon them. Where Heywood found the inspiration for such a striking innovation is a further puzzle. Possibly it was prompted by polemical Reformation woodcut images of rival preachers of the kind produced in Germany in the later 1520s,15 and Heywood conceived the additional twist of offering – not a diptych of good (Reformed) and bad (Catholic) preaching – but an image in which both preachers were misusing the pulpit. He might have been familiar with such images, or with the idea of them at least, through his connections with the More circle. But equally the idea may have come to him independently, a product of his musician’s sensibility, sensitive to the affective qualities of polyphonic harmony and dissonance in performance. Challenged to find a theatrical correlative of contemporary religious disputes, and spurred by the idea of the ‘variance’ between the two priests of All Hallows, he may have concluded that the kinds of formal schoolroom arguments that (however playfully presented) give structure to his other interludes were simply too orderly to represent the kind of violent altercation that he wanted to dramatise. Hence having the two disputants simply shout over each other rather than take turns to construct and refute logical arguments might have seemed, anathema to humanist principles though it was, the perfect reflection of the kind of destructive freefor-all he sought to evoke. Yet, as I have suggested, beneath the surface confusion – the mixture of seeming cacophony with antiphonic moments and counterpoint – the interlude was nonetheless carefully constructed to create its intended effects. It misdirected audience expectations and affiliations not once but several times, to modulate responses to the combatants, and especially to the Friar, with his associations with dangerous religious radicalism. Moreover, while it carefully held back until the final scene the revelation that the action was supposed to be taking place on holy ground, it nonetheless seeded the early scenes with allusions to potential priestly violence and All Hallows that would be harvested in the final scenes. To modern eyes, the broader conclusion of the play, in which legitimate parish authority concedes that it cannot discipline either the Friar or the Pardoner, and so a kind of enforced toleration must prevail, might not seem too terrible a prospect. But a hint of how troubling it might have been for contemporary conservative sensibilities can be gained from a brief exchange between Thomas More

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and his son-in-law William Roper, recorded in the latter’s Life of More. The two are encountered talking about the state of the realm at some point in the mid-1520s, and Roper takes the opportunity to commend ‘the happy estate of this realm, that had so catholic a prince that no heretic durst show his face, so virtuous and learned a clergy, so grave and sound a nobility, and so loving, obedient subjects, all in one faith agreeing together’. More’s response, however is rather less reassuring about the future: ‘Truth it is indeed, son Roper,’ quoth he, and in commending all degrees and estates of the same went far beyond me. ‘And yet, son Roper, I pray God,’ [said] he, ‘that some of us, as high as we seem to sit upon the mountains, treading heretics under our feet like ants, live not the day that we gladly would wish to be at a league and composition with them, to let them have their churches quietly to themselves, so that they would be content to let us have ours quietly to our selves’. After that I had told him many considerations why he had no cause so to say, ‘Well,’ said he, ‘I pray God, son Roper, some of us live not till that day,’ showing me no reason why [he] should put any doubt therein. To whom I said, ‘By my troth, sir, it is very desperately spoken.’ 16

For More, and those who thought like him, the explicit representation in Heywood’s play of precisely such a scenario – in which the Friar and Pardoner demand ‘Will ye leave, then, and let us in peace depart?’, and the Parson and Neighbour Pratt can reply only ‘Yes, by Our Lady, even with all our heart!’ (638–9) – would have appeared the dramatisation of a nightmare, and one made all the more dreadful by the rogues’ threat to return in the final line of the play: ‘Then adieu, to the devil, till we come again!’ (640). The Parson’s initial, horrified injunction to the two combatants serves to illustrate what was at stake in such a dispute, as it draws attention explicitly to the context of the pollution of a church through violence: Hold your hands! A vengeance on ye both two, That ever ye came hither to make this ado; To pollute my church – a mischief on you light [fall]. (545–7)

Equally as desperately spoken as those from More to Roper, these words carry an emotional weight that it is important to register if we are to appreciate the potential impact of the interlude on contemporary audiences. The Pardoner and the Friar is not simply a knockabout comedy, even if it might be tempting to play it that

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way today. It might start out in that vein, but, like the sacrilegious brawl in All Hallows, it had a capacity to shock Tudor audiences that we need to recognise. It was Heywood’s most striking creative response to what he saw as the dangers – and also the potential seductive appeal – of contemporary evangelicalism and the discord it brought with it. It would not be his last. The play, taken together with his other interludes touching on Reformation strife, Weather and The Four PP, thus helps us to see more clearly the nature of Heywood’s religious position. His reputation as a ‘merry’ advocate of moderation implies a rare tolerant sensibility in an age of increasingly intolerant confessionalisation and tyrannical politics. And there is indeed some truth in this. Yet Heywood was not arguing, here or elsewhere, for an ecumenical position, or for a halfway-house compromise between traditionalism and evangelical critique. His commitment, from first to last, was clearly to traditional beliefs and practice, to a theology of works and grace, centred on the Real Presence in the Eucharist, belief in Purgatory, and the traditional sacraments. Like Erasmus and More, he would accept that the Church was plagued with abuses and self-interest, just as was society as a whole. Yet his response, like More’s, was to condemn the obvious abuse while respecting the principle, condemning the fake relic while venerating the true, and to strive to live the good life oneself even if those around one did not. In the uncertain, post-truth world of the early Reformation, in which contradictory preachers and the claims of rival polemical texts left many individuals unclear about what was authentic belief and what was corrupt innovation or abuse, the need to resist the rush to private judgement was one of the playwright’s principal concerns. Hence Heywood deployed his comic talents to represent private judgement and partisan argument as always self-interested and partial, and modest deference to higher authority and reconciliation based on shared good intentions as the only reasonable response. Like the work of his father-in-law, John Rastell, Heywood’s interlude had a broader social function than simply to entertain – a function realised in whatever performances it enjoyed over Christmas 1532–33, and in its print publication a year later. It was written to affect, provoke, amuse, and persuade one or more of the communities with which Heywood was principally associated. But through print publication it would perform wider social and cultural work, raising the spectre of religious strife and its dangers for a readership, still broadly metropolitan perhaps, but significantly wider than the tight-knit communities for which it was initially devised.

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Notes 1 This chapter is part of a wider project on the life and work of the playwright John Heywood, supported by a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. I am grateful to the Trust for the chance to publish this work here, and to Professors John J. McGavin and Guillemette Bolens for their generous advice on earlier drafts of the argument. 2 ‘A London Chronicle: Henry VIII’, in Charles Lethbridge Kingsford (ed.), Two London Chronicles from the Collection of John Stow (London: Camden Society, 1910), pp. 1–17. See also Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 213. 3 See Brigden, London and the Reformation, passim. 4 In Richard Axton and Peter Happé (eds), The Plays of John Heywood (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1991). 5 Axton and Happé, Plays, p. 18. 6 For this tradition, see e.g. P. R. Szyttia, The Antifraternal Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); and Wendy Scase, Piers Plowman and the New Anticlericalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 7 Axton and Happé, Plays, pp. 40–1. 8 Brigden, London and the Reformation, pp. 70, 106–19; and Brigden, ‘Thomas Cromwell and the “Brethren” ’, in C. Cross, D. Loades, and J. J. Scarisbrick (eds), Law and Government Under the Tudors: Essays Presented to Sir Geoffrey Elton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 31–50. 9 For More’s strategy, see e.g. Thomas More, ‘A Dialogue Concerning Heresies’, in Thomas Lawler, Germain Marc’hadour, and Richard Marius (eds), The Complete Works of St. Thomas More 6, 2 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981). 10 For the relevant passages from Chaucer, see ‘The Pardoner’s Prologue’, lines 335–88, in Larry D. Benson (ed.), The Riverside Chaucer (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 11 For a discussion of that edition and its political contexts, see Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 29–99. 12 See Stanford E. Lehmberg, The Reformation Parliament, 1529–1536 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 76–104. 13 See Greg Walker, ‘Blurred Lines?: Religion, Reform, and Reformation in Sir David Lyndsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estatis’, in Peter Happé and Wim Hüsken (eds), Staging Scripture: Biblical Drama, 1350–1600 (Leiden: Brill and Rodopi, 2016), pp. 42–67. 14 See Walker, Writing Under Tyranny, pp. 100–19. 15 For this suggestion, see Wendy Scase, ‘Antifraternal Images in Reformation Pamphlets’, in Nicholas Rodgers (ed.), The Friars in Medieval Britain, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, vol. XIX (Donnington: Shaun

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Tyas, 2010), pp. 239–64, at p. 256. For the woodcut tradition itself, see W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda of the German Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 196–205. 16 William Roper, The Lyfe of Sir Thomas Moore, Knight, ed. Elsie Vaughan Hitchcock, EETS O.S. 197 (London: Oxford University Press, 1935 for 1934), p. 34. Roper places the conversation prior to 1527, at a point ‘before the matter of the said matrimony [the legitimacy of the king’s marriage to Queen Katherine] [was] brought in question’.

8 Elizabethan biblical drama

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Paul Whitfield White

Introduction The first documented reference to a play in a commercial theatre in Elizabethan England occurs in 1567. The play is ‘The Story of Samson’, based on the strong man chronicled in the Book of Judges from the Hebrew Bible. This play was chosen to premiere the opening of the Red Lion, an amphitheatre located in the east London suburb of Stepney and estimated to accommodate about two thousand spectators.1 ‘Samson’ at the Red Lion is an appropriate place to begin this discussion, as it raises important questions about how scholarship traditionally has treated Elizabethan biblical drama. First, it problematises the tendency to see early English drama as either strictly ‘religious’ or ‘secular’.2 For much of the twentieth century, criticism viewed biblical plays as typically ‘medieval’, amateur, provincial, didactic, and ideologically conservative (i.e. ‘Catholic’); whereas secular plays were viewed as ‘renaissance’, professional, London-based, commercial, and either advancing the status quo or ideologically resistant to religious principles – Protestant as well as Catholic.3 Moreover, as the Elizabethan period progressed, a traditional amateur religious theatre based largely in England’s provinces gradually gave way to, or evolved into, a fully secularised one based in the commercial playhouses of London and celebrated in the plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare. This chapter challenges that simplistic critical narrative. Secondly, the staging of ‘Samson’ in London’s first amphitheatre challenges exaggerated claims about state and local injunctions suppressing biblical and other religious drama, fuelled by a Protestant aversion to ‘idolatrous’ representations of sacred persons and stories in an age that privileged text over image.4 What scholarship of the last three decades has shown, however, is that state censorship of religion on the popular stage was sporadic and inconsistent, and that Elizabethan popular religion,

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with its mixture of traditional and Reformed elements, was far more open to visual forms of sacred expression than previously assumed.5 A striking feature of extant scripts and eyewitness accounts of Elizabethan biblical drama is its spectacular visual effects. Inspiration may have come from Reformation editions of the Bible, with their numerous scenic woodcuts. The year after ‘Samson’ was performed, the Bishops’ Bible was published, with four striking woodcuts of scenes from the hero’s life, including his shouldering the gates of Gaza, a memorable moment depicted on stage in a second known Samson play in 1602.6 Finally, ‘Samson’ is a lost play, and as such is typical of the vast majority of biblical plays of the period. Even the most popular of these plays rarely made it into print, possibly because they were blocked by the Stationers’ Company, possibly because they were deemed unsuitable for publication.7 Whatever the case, plays that were not printed did not usually survive. Because scholarship on Shakespeare and his contemporaries focuses almost exclusively on extant texts, the least appreciated part of the Elizabethan biblical drama story is the large output of scriptural plays performed by professional acting troupes in the closing years of the queen’s reign.

8.1  Samson Carrying the Gates of Gaza. Woodcut by Virgil Solis, Bishops’ Bible (London: Richard Jugge, 1568)

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In recovering their history here, I hope to show that biblical drama remained a vital and enduring presence throughout the Elizabethan era, from parish communities in provincial towns to the great amphitheatres of London. The discussion which follows examines the plays in order of their civic, parish, educational, and professional sponsorship and affiliation. Civic or guilds-based biblical drama The most extensively studied biblical plays of Elizabeth’s reign are the great mystery cycles, organised by urban craft guilds under civic leadership and staged on pageant wagons during summer festivals in the large towns of East Anglia, the Midlands, and the North. The creation-to-doomsday model of the four extant cycles owes much to St Augustine’s idea of the seven ages of scriptural history (based on the seven days of creation), in which one biblical figure represents each of the ages (e.g. Adam, Noah, and Abraham).8 We still tend to think of these plays as ‘medieval’, but they were deeply meaningful to the large audiences who thronged to see them in the opening decades of Elizabeth’s reign. They were also ‘Elizabethan’ in the sense that manuscripts of two of the surviving scripts, the Chester and Towneley, were transcribed and revised for performance during the latter half of the sixteenth century, when producers and antiquarians alike appreciated their value.9 Recent scholarship has situated them within specifically Elizabethan contexts, notably their engagement with urban commerce, their adaptation to new political conditions, and their popular reception in the Protestant age.10 The medieval labelling of the cycles also explains the popular view that they remained persistently, if not defiantly, Catholic to the end, and that Protestant authorities, led by the Crown, suppressed them out of existence by the mid-point of Elizabeth’s reign.11 The story is actually more complicated. There was in fact no systematic plan of suppression by the central government. A 1559 Proclamation introduced prohibitions against matters of Church and State in plays, but there is little evidence, that they were enforced, at least partly because the powerful charters of the towns sponsoring them seriously impeded Crown interference in their affairs. With the most offensive pageants on the Eucharist and veneration of the Virgin banned under Edward VI (revived briefly under Mary I), the initial ecclesiastical response in the 1560s was tentative and cautious. This is illustrated by the carefully worded letter of the

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Dean of York Minster, Matthew Hutton, to York city council when asked to peruse the Creed Play in 1568. He advised against performance ‘in this happie time of the gospel’, but voiced no objection to the biblical cycle at Corpus Christi in the following year.12 With Grindal’s appointment to the seat of York in 1570, and the Puritan Earl of Huntington’s as the Lord President of the North in the same year, the master copies of Creed, Corpus Christi, and Paternoster plays at York were eventually turned over and impounded by Protestant authorities, preventing any civic religious drama at York after 1572, despite a concerted attempt again in 1578.13 These acts of censorship and suppression notwithstanding, some civic leaders and pageant producers made a concerted effort to Protestantise the cycles. At Norwich, where the civic biblical drama survived until 1566, the ‘B text’ of The Fall of Man (a revision of its pre-Reformation extant original) depicts Adam and Eve’s marriage and fall into sin in specifically Calvinist terms, using the hybrid dramaturgy blending human and allegorical characters then favoured by Protestant interludes. The pageant wagon for its 1566 performance, featuring a Garden of Eden decorated with exotic fruits and other wares imported from abroad and sold by the sponsoring guild, the Grocers, shows how this affluent guild combined a devotional aim with middle-class Protestant entrepreneurship. At Coventry the New Testament cycle underwent Protestant revisionism as well. Coventry appears to have written new religiously Reformed pageants in the early 1560s, including ‘The Play of Protestancyon’ that features two allegorical figures called ‘the Wormes of Conscience’. No surviving documentation reveals local opposition to the biblical pageants. At Chester, the Late Banns, presented on St George’s Day before the midsummer 1575 performance, introduce the Whitsun plays as fully Protestantised. Their remarkably robust defence of staging the Scriptures – including the Passion of Christ – offers a unique contribution to the emerging Protestant debate in England over the propriety of staging the Bible, already discernible in the defensively written prologue to Calvinist Lewis Wager’s interlude, The Life and Repentaunce of Mary Magdalene (published in 1566). Many, perhaps most, of Chester’s pageants would not have offended moderate Protestants. As if to guard against playgoers getting too caught up in the stories, characters, and visual spectacle, the ‘Expositor’ makes frequent appearances throughout the cycle to cite scripture and explain the theological and spiritual significance of the action.14 Moreover, there is a pronounced emphasis in such pageants as ‘Christ on the Road to Emmaus’ (play 19), ‘The Prophets of Antichrist’ (play

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22), and ‘The Last Judgement’ (play 24) on the power and majesty of God and the pre-eminent role of grace in spiritual regeneration which anticipates similar emphases in Protestant theology. Others, notably ‘Noah’s Flood’, ‘Abraham and Isaac’, and ‘Balaack and Balaam’, reveal ‘a recurrent strain of covenant theology’ that was favoured by the Reformers but rooted in the Bible and reaffirmed by the Church Fathers.15 The cycles in Chester and York survived as long as they did largely because of the backing and influence of religious conservatives, including the local nobility, mayors, city councillors, and clergy. At Queen Elizabeth’s insistence, cathedrals were allowed to practise a more traditional form of worship in line with the religious ethos of the cycles, drawing on vestments, choral music, and liturgy found in pre-Reformation service books. Cathedrals, however, also employed the most zealously Protestant of university-educated clergy who opposed the cycle plays.16 We have noted Hutton at York; at Chester it was the prebendary John Lane. Lane joined a campaign to shut down the cycle led by the puritan Reformer Christopher Goodman, who resided in Chester during the period of the last three performances in 1568, 1572, and 1575. After perusing ‘the Old Original’(the master text of the cycle) in the spring of 1572, Goodman, Lane, and fellow Cestrian Robert Rogerson drew up a ‘list of absurdities’ that highlighted biblical inaccuracies and embellishments, along with ‘popish elements’, including that Noah’s Ark ‘is called a shrine’, Mary is depicted with two midwives ‘Tibill & Salome!’, and the shepherds are suspected to be sheep-stealers who make ‘vain offerings to move laughter & maintain superstition’.17 Goodman charged that even in instances where the script is corrected, players ignored the revisions, and he added that productions of the plays allowed papists to worship in secret. Corroborating evidence shows that four known Chester recusants suspected of popery, and two future mayors – including John Hanky, who defied Archbishop Grindal’s orders to stay the cycle in 1572 – were either present at rehearsals or performed in the Smiths’ deeply conservative Purification of the Virgin in that year. The most explicitly Catholic, and arguably treasonous after the papal bull justifying the queen’s assassination in 1572, is the script of the Weavers’ Last Judgement, which advocates purgatory and papal supremacy, although a censored version may have been staged in the final productions of 1572 and 1575.18 Chester’s Late Banns conclude with the admonition that spectators not confuse the actor with the gold-painted face playing God in the cycle with God himself, underscoring the anxiety Protestant

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authorities had with representations of any member of the Trinity on stage; indeed, all representations of the living Christ on a cross – in an image, object, or staged action – were deemed blasphemous by the early 1570s. Tessa Watt has observed these developments in printed woodcuts and other visual art beginning in the late 1560s, and they are at the centre of the order from the Ecclesiastical Commission at York in 1576 to shut down the Corpus Christi play at Wakefield: ‘that in the said [Corpus Christi] playe no pageant be used or set further wherin the Majestye of god the father, god the sonne or god the holie ghoste … be counterfeited or represented’.19 It is not insignificant that the crucified Christ was the image on the military standards wielded by soldiers marching in the Northern rebellion against the Crown in 1569. That rebellion, and the 1572 excommunication of Queen Elizabeth by Pope Pius V in response to the government’s relentless crackdown of Catholic activism in its wake, were clearly factors in the rapid decline and cessation of the great mystery cycles in the 1570s. However, the cycle plays were already vulnerable to other challenges. They imposed heavy demands on dwindling financial resources in the towns which staged them, and they faced declining interest – at least from the early 1570s – when touring professional companies were making them look very old-fashioned, increasing popular indifference and opposition towards their conservative religious values. Parish and small-town biblical drama under Elizabeth I Previous scholarship on biblical drama in Elizabethan England focuses on London and the cycle-play towns. Together, however, they represent less than 10 per cent of England’s population of 3.5 million in the later 1600s. What about the rest of the nation, especially the hundreds of small towns and rural parishes beyond the watchful eye of central authority? Archival research shows that many communities continued to offer biblical drama, though not creation-todoomsday pageants produced by guilds and performed on wagons. More typical were single plays or multi-play cycles that centred around the parish church during a period when small-town and parish leadership were one and the same and when the primary purpose was to raise money for church furnishing and repairs or the relief of the poor. What we find is that in all of England, especially the North and in the South-West, small-community biblical drama continued right through to the end of Elizabeth’s reign and beyond.

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Elizabethan parish biblical drama ranges widely in form and subject matter, although most of the plays are lost. We learn about their topics primarily from examining documents where the biblical characters and stories are identified, or they can be inferred from expenses for characters’ costumes and properties or scenery which indicates story settings. So, for example, by this means we know of plays centring on the life or crucifixion of Christ, along with their locations and dates: at Chelmsford in Essex (1562), New Romney, Kent (1558–69), Bodmin, Cornwall (1566), Kendal, Westmorland (from 1575), Wakefield, Yorkshire (1576), Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire (1578), Boston, Lincolnshire (1579), and Doncaster, Yorkshire (1582). ‘Place and scaffold’ staging seems to have been the preferred method for the large, multi-day productions in East Anglia, Kent, and Cornwall. At New Romney, no fewer than eight stages were built across the playing space, one each for Heaven, Hell, Pilate ‘& the princes’, Annas and ‘the Tormentours’, the Pharisees, Herod, ‘the iij crosses’, and ‘the Cave’ (for Christ’s burial and resurrection). Moreover, Christ is featured riding an ass (supplied with two halters) for the Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem and, subsequently, one of the Roman centurions rides in on a horse. Judging from the extant account of playwardens, a spectacular fireworks display must have been one of the entertainment’s main attractions. These were managed by the property player, Gover Marten, who ‘bought At London for our playe’ brimstone, glue, rosin, and other ingredients for pyrotechnics, with additional supplies of grease, pitch, and pack thread contributed by the town bailiff.20 In the North, many of the pageants in the Towneley Cycle may well have been offered with parish auspices (few scholars today believe that Wakefield was a setting for the full Towneley Cycle).21 How the stage scaffolds were configured in relation to one another in the playing place is an open question, although evidence drawn from a miracle play in Cornwall, as well as from extant play-texts from East Anglia, offer some important clues. As Richard Carew reported in his Survey of Cornwall (1602), The Guary miracle, in English, a miracle-play, is a kinde of Enterlude, compiled in Cornish out of some scripture history, with that grossenes, which accompanied the Romanes vetus Comedia. For representing it, they raise an earthen Amphitheatre, in some open field, hauing the Diameter of his enclosed playne some 40s or 50s foot. The Country people flock from all sides, many miles off, to heare &see it: for they haue therein, deuils and deuices, to delight as well the eye as the eare.22

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The type of amphitheatre Carew describes – a flat, circular playing space, surrounded by a sloping mound of earth – is known in Cornish as the ‘plain-an-gwary’ (playing place), of which 34 locations have been identified in the parishes of Cornwall, ‘many of them situated on the glebe-land of the church’, asserts O. J. Padel.23 As Carew indicates in his present-tense account published in 1602, the Cornish interludes were biblical and they were staged in late Elizabethan England. Further evidence for this comes from The Creation of the World, transcribed by William Jordan in 1611, which on the first day of performance dramatises episodes on Adam and Eve and Noah’s Flood; lost is the second day’s script in which the audience is invited to witness the rest of the story featuring the redemption of the world.24 It remains unclear whether the second play followed an important source of The Creation, the Cornish Ordinalia: Origino Mundi which, like the cycle plays, follows the seven ages of creation pattern, or whether it jumps straight to the Gospels. Paula Neuss and Martin Wiggins both attribute it to the reign of Mary I, without ruling out a later date. Its Elizabethan Cornish dialect, along with Richard Carew’s 1602 description of a possible setting, as well as comparable conditions documented at Bodmin in 1572, strongly suggests its late sixteenth-century performance.25 Most other known biblical drama of parish auspices is single-story, based on themes from the Hebrew Bible, including Nebuchadnezzar at Donnington, Lincolnshire (1564), Abraham and Isaac at an unnamed town near Oxford (1564–74), Holofernes at Derby, Derbyshire (1572), Sodom and Gemorah at Sherborne, Dorset (1572), The Apostles at Tewkesbury (1585), and Susanna at St Breock, Cornwall (1588). In some cases, interludes of professional auspices may have been staged in the parishes of their clerical authors. Such appears to be the case with John Bale’s history play Three Laws, which he rehearsed for production in the parish church of St Mary’s Bishopstoke, Hampshire during Christmastime 1548. Reprinted in 1562, it may have been revived as a parish play; this may have also been the case with Bale’s God’s Promises (reprinted 1578), with its stage directions and other features indicating performance designed for a church setting.26 Academic biblical drama That large-scale, outdoor biblical drama could be academic in its auspices appears to be the case during the 1560s in Shrewsbury,

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Shropshire. There Cambridge graduate Thomas Ashton, an ardent Protestant hired as town preacher and headmaster of Shrewsbury Grammar School in 1561, collaborated with local officials to produce the annual Whitsuntide play. Since the statutes of the school singled out acting as a required academic exercise, it seems likely that under his direction Ashton’s students acted in the Passion Play, staged in a huge semi-circular amphitheatre. This performance attracted as many as 20,000 (according to the poet Thomas Churchyard) at the height of the Whitsuntide event in the late 1560s. It is assumed that this was also the play that ‘lasted all the holly daies’ in 1569, and to which Queen Elizabeth planned to attend.27 Academic biblical drama, however, tended to address a select audience of students, faculty, and in some instances, townspeople. Its approach was learned, it was often in Latin or occasionally in Greek, and issues of theological and political debate were common. The script in Greek appears to have been a reason for reviving John Christophersen’s Jephtha (c. 1544), based on the warrior king in Judges 11 who killed his daughter to honour an oath to God, at Trinity College in 1566. This is an interesting choice, nevertheless, given that the author, as Bishop of Norwich under Queen Mary, vociferously denounced Protestantism.28 The Master of Trinity at the time, Thomas Legge, it is worth noting, was a suspected Catholic. Choir or grammar-school interludes such as the anonymously written Jacob and Esau and Theodore Beza’s Abraham’s Sacrifice (translated into English by Arthur Golding) were both explicitly doctrinal and entertaining. The former begins with a Prologue about predestination, the latter is a proof-text on justification by faith alone; and yet both must have seemed delightful, witty, and entertaining for the schoolboys who performed them and for their school audiences. Jacob and Esau, originally composed in 1557, has been interpreted as championing Elizabeth’s succession to Mary by comparing the younger sibling to Jacob, blessed by God and destined for greatness, and Esau as the reprobate Catholic Mary. Queen Elizabeth was fond of children’s drama, and among the most notable is the Westminster boys’ Sapienta Solominus, which hardly conceals the parallel between the queen and King Solomon, who approves a request from the Queen of Sheba to provide education for girls as well as boys. Edmund Grindal, we noted earlier, hosted its production. Godly Queen Hester, printed in 1561 and also evidently a choir-school play designed for royal chapel performance, similarly invited comparison of the young queen with a monarch on stage; her mother, Anne Boleyn, was compared to Esther, and arch-enemy Haman to

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Thomas Cromwell, by her chaplain in 1536, although scholars deem Hester more a comparison to Catherine of Aragon when it was originally composed about 1528.29 Elizabeth enjoyed a royal performance of Ezechias, about the godly King Hezekiah, during her visit to the University of Cambridge in 1564. Performed in a theatre constructed for the occasion, within King’s College Chapel, the play featured the Assyrian conqueror, ‘huge in body’, who attempted to take Jerusalem and champion idolatrous religion in Israel. A highlight of the action was the destruction of the image of the brazen serpent, which Protestants interpreted as a forerunner of the hated Catholic crucifix.30 Arguably the most experimental in dramaturgy of all Elizabethan biblical plays is John Foxe’s Latin ‘comedy’ Christus Triumphans, which mixes biblical character, narrative, and language with allegorical figures and pseudo-historical personages. The action begins shortly after the Crucifixion of Christ, but time and space are vastly expanded with the presence on stage of (among other biblical figures) Adam and Eve, Mary (granddaughter of Eve), Christ, St Paul, and the angel Raphael. The plot leads eventually to the end times, conceived as the present, with the Apocalypse and Day of Judgement imminent.31 With its bewildering array of multi-functional characters, stylised action, and abstract theological debate, it is no wonder that an official at Magdalene College Oxford requested that Foxe add a scene with the conversion of St. Paul for a performance there in 1562, which Foxe respectfully declined. The play was, however, performed at Trinity College Cambridge within the next year. As was typical at Cambridge, Trinity productions at this time were mounted on elaborately designed wooden stages which featured a square-shaped acting space raised five feet at one end of the hall, flanked by side houses for entrances, exits, and costume changes, and backed by an elevated spectator gallery for faculty and special guests.32 When the children’s companies of St Paul’s and the Chapel Royal rose to prominence in London during the late 1570s and 1580s, they evidently ceased to perform biblical drama. Indeed, this drama is absent from the universities as well from the early 1570s onwards. Yet with Cornelius Schonaeus’s Terentius Christianus, published in London in 1595, the grammar schools kept the tradition alive, if chiefly for the purpose of teaching Latin. Becoming ‘the most famous collection of foreign plays used in English schools’,33 Schonaeus’s collection included three biblical plays, Tobaeus, Juditha, and Pseudostratiotes. Murray Roston suggests that the English editor’s

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decision to restrict biblical plays to the Apocrypha suggests the hardening of opposition to New Testament subjects in drama and to embellishing scriptural stories. The ‘Introduction’ exclaims, ‘There is an old familiar proverb, it is not good to play with sacred things. And what is holier and more sacred than the divinely inspired canonical Scriptures? Therefore, to add, subtract, to omit anything from them, to insert speeches and characters, as poetic license permits, becomes a scruple in the eyes of some whom we do not want to offend needlessly’.34 Professional troupe plays on biblical topics Only five texts of biblical plays suitable for professional acting troupes were composed or printed during the first half of Elizabeth’s reign: Godly Queen Hester, John Bale’s Three Laws, Lewis Wager’s The Life and Repentance of Mary Magdalene, King Darius, and The Virtuous and Godly Susanna. Extant from the second half are A Looking Glasse for London and David and Bathsabe. Some scholars add to these two other plays performed by English troupes touring abroad and extant only in German editions, Esther and The Prodigal Son. Yet there are many other titles from both before and after 1585, all of them lost and few of them ever apparently intended for print. In all, scholars have identified upwards of thirty titles of likely professional troupe performance during Elizabeth’s reign.35 Given the view that biblical drama gradually declined during the Elzbethan period, it is noteworthy that only about ten plays are known from 1558 to 1580, while over twenty have been identified for the period 1585–1603. The titles and texts from the 1560s and 1570s vary generically. John Bale’s Three Laws (reprinted 1562) is a history play that focuses on the law under Adam, Noah, Moses, Abraham, David, and Christ; King Darius is a tyrant play from the Hebrew Bible; Godly Queen Hester, The Virtuous and Godly Susanna (c. 1563), and Mary Magdalene (printed 1566) are Protestant ‘saint’ plays (two based on the Apocrypha; the other on the New Testament). A century ago E. K. Chambers assumed that these Protestant moral interludes were reading texts that never saw performance, due to the Proclamation in 1559 prohibiting religion in plays.36 Yet no serious scholar shares that view today. Not only do their doublingschemes (‘offered for acting’ on title-pages) match up with the playing demands of numerous travelling troupes on record, but their highly explicit Calvinism corresponds with that found in other print

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propaganda of the 1560s and 1570s. Such propaganda was facilitated by the Earl of Leicester, his brother the Earl of Warwick, and the Duchess of Suffolk – prominent patrons of both preachers and acting troupes – in an effort to establish Protestantism in the new reign. These plays survive in print at least partly for this reason. This appears also to be true of other biblical interludes, lost but entered in the Stationers’ Register for publication, such as ‘The Two Sins of David’ (about David’s adultery with Bathsheba; 1562) and ‘The Ninevites’ (about Jonah and the Whale; 1569). Three other biblical plays partially or fully lost are based on New Testament parables. The Cruel Debtor (printed 1566), extant in fragmented form and inspired by the parable of the talents in Matthew 18, was written by William Wager, a preacher/playwright patronised by Leicester, and possibly connected with the earl’s popular playing troupe. The other two, The Prodigal Son (c. 1570) and ‘Dives and Lazurus’ (c. 1576), we know only because they appear in the repertories of professional troupes travelling abroad between 1580 and 1620. Influential scholars such as Ruth Blackburn and Michael O’Connell have argued that a paucity of biblical plays from the late 1560s to the late 1580s, along with the impassioned attack upon scriptural drama as blasphemous in anti-theatrical pamphlets during that time, indicates that a Protestant-led censorship took effect in midElizabethan England and suppressed not only the mystery cycles but all biblical drama.37 Surely, however, the outcry of Stubbes, Munday, and other London-based anti-theatricalists indicates the ongoing performance of biblical plays in the 1580s. Moreover, if censorship was effective, why were so many biblical plays performed in the 1590s, a period immediately in the wake of new sanctions against religion in drama drawn up by the court’s master of the revels in alliance with the city and court in response to the Marprelate Controversy of 1589? That alliance, formed in 1589, was never heard of again. A more logical explanation for the paucity of biblical titles in middle Elizabethan decades is that relatively few plays of any kind are known from that period. For example, a total of four plays are known for the year 1585; five for 1586. For the years 1580 to 1588 (after which the printing of drama sharply increased), Wiggins records a total of 62 play titles.38 William Ingram has calculated that with the ten known acting companies performing in London venues between 1576 and 1583, and with as many as thirty touring nationwide, we may estimate about 200 plays written and performed each year during this period.39

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The existing biblical drama of the late 1580s and early 1590s differs from early scriptural plays in its linguistic and artistic sophistication, its casting (a consequence of troupe size expanding to 10–12 actors), and its spectacular effects. In Peele’s David and Bethsabe (c. 1592), David’s richly textured blank-verse dialogue, especially in the opening and concluding scenes, draws extensively on the celebrated biblical epics of Huguenot poet Guillaume Du Bartas. Peele’s poetic artistry combines with on-stage pageantry and sensational spectacle such as the hanging of David’s rebellious son, Absalom. A Looking Glasse for London (c. 1589) works into its dialogue nearly every verse from the four chapters of ‘The Booke of Ionas’ in the Bishops’ Bible, with embellishments to the story from Josephus’s History of the Jews.40 The preacher/prophet Oseas makes a dazzling descent from the ‘heavens’ to the floor of the Rose Playhouse, Jonah arrives in the fourth act, ‘cast out of the whale’s belly upon the stage’, while two visitations of providential retribution involve an array of pyrotechnics. A Looking Glasse and Peele’s David and Bethsabe share in common with the earlier interludes a mixture of moral preachment, sensational violence, and sexual titillation. The extent to which the last two elements cancels out the salutary value of the first one is debatable. Like The Prodigal Son and ‘Dives and Lazurus, the repertoires of English troupes touring the Continent included several biblical plays. These include ‘David and Saul’, ‘The Tragedy of Job’ (by Robert Greene), Queen Hester, ‘Abraham and Lot’, ‘The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah’, and ‘Absalom’. 41 All of these plays may be dated from the late 1580s to the early 1590s. ‘David and Saul’, one of four ‘David’ plays of professional troupe affiliation, shows up in a cast-list owned by Edward Alleyn’s brother John, a member of Worcester’s and then of the Admiral’s Men. ‘Esther and Ahaseurus’ is recorded for performance at Newington Butts theatre in a joint booking for the Lord Admiral’s and Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and may be the Esther and Ahaseurus which survives in German translation. ‘Abraham and Lot’ is a Pembroke play staged at the Rose in 1594; ‘The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah’ may comprise with it a single play, since Lot and his daughters figure centrally in the Sodom and Gomorrah story. With Lord Strange’s Men performing A Looking Glasse at the Rose in 1593 and the staging of a play featuring Absalom by Worcester’s Men there in 1602, we have clear evidence of biblical drama in the repertoires of all the major companies based in London during the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign.

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The troupe that is best documented for bible drama is the Admiral’s Men. They launched three new plays in 1595 that are largely overlooked as biblical. All three appear to have drawn from the Hebrew Bible, with two forming a pair: ‘The Week’ (or ‘The Seven Days of the Week’, 1595) and ‘The Second Week’ (1596). In 1958 Lily B. Campbell observed the titles’ close resemblance to Guillaume Du Bartas pair of scriptural epics, Le Semaine (The Week, 1578) and Le Seconde Semaine (The Second Week, 1584).42 As mentioned above, Du Bartas’s biblical poetry had a great impact on biblical playwrights Peele and Lodge. Following Genesis 1:1–8, Le Semaine is divided into seven sections of approximately 700 lines, on each of the first seven days of creation. The sequel follows St Augustine’s dividing history into seven ages paralleling the seven days of creation. This model has already been observed in the medieval cycle plays, the Cornish Creation, and in Bale’s two ‘ages’ plays, Three Lawes and God’s Promises. So it is entirely plausible that ‘The Week’ and its sequel ‘The Second Week’ constituted a Du Bartas-inspired mystery cycle adapted for the professional stage, with various episodic ‘pageants’ centring on Old Testament patriarchs from Adam onwards. The possible treatment of the Fall in ‘The Week’ would have used ‘the bodice for Eve’ recorded in the Admiral’s 1598 list of apparel.43 The Admiral’s new play recorded by Henslowe in September 1595 (a mere two months or so later) entitled ‘The New World Tragedy’ (initially called ‘The World’s Tragedy’) may have been a biblical play involving Noah. Protestants identified Noah as ‘the father of the new world’ after the old world was destroyed by the Flood, his story recounted in a poem entitled The Old World’s Tragedy, published in 1596 when ‘The New World’s Tragedy’ continued to be staged at the Rose.44 Around this time, Noah was also identified as a model of the overseas explorer who colonised the Americas in Du Bartas’s Colonies (1598), dedicated by its English translator to the Admiral’s company patron, Charles Effingham, who led the English fleet over the Spanish Armada. The tragedy of Noah’s ‘new world’ could have focused on the ‘drunken’ and shame-ridden Noah of Genesis 9 who cursed his grandson Canaan (son of Ham) after the Flood, or the tragedy that beset this new world with the fall of the Tower of Babel, the building of which took place in the time of Ham’s great-grandson and the Bible’s first tyrant, King Nimrod.45 It is doubtful that Du Bartas influenced the Admiral’s ‘Nebuchadnezzar’ (1596), since his jour on Babylon does not extend

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chronologically to Nebuchadnezzar’s reign and figures only briefly in the section on David. The source text for this play was probably Daniel 1–4, which features all the ingredients of a box-office hit at the Rose (which the play was): a Tamburlaine-type tyrant; an eponymous hero in the prophet Daniel, who rises from condemned Jewish exile to governor after correctly interpreting Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams; a spectacular golden idol; the trial of the fiery furnace; and the king’s fall, conversion, and restoration to power.46 Wiggins has identified two other plays referenced directly or obliquely in the 1590s that may have been on scriptural topics, ‘The Play of Adam and Eve’ (c. 1597) and ‘The Poor Man’s Paradise’ (1599), but whereas the former shows little evidence of professional auspices, the latter has little to support its biblical status. The seven remaining known biblical plays of professional auspices during Elizabeth’s reign are all concentrated in the year 1602. For that year, Henslowe’s Diary shows evidence for six by the Admiral’s Men at the Fortune Playhouse and one by Worcester’s at the Rose. Expenses for them appear across the year; a ‘Judas’ playbook finished in December 1601, with costumes purchased in January; a prologue and epilogue paid for ‘Pontius Pilate’ the same month; payments for playbooks for ‘Jephthah’ and ‘Tobias’ in May and June, ‘Samson’ in July (with a known September performance), and ‘Joshua’ in late September; and a play by Worcester’s Men featuring King David’s son Absalom in October. ‘Judas’ and ‘Pontius Pilate’, however, may be alternative titles for the same play (a not uncommon practice), since these two betrayers of Christ are featured together as villains in the popular ballad The Dream of Judas’s Mother. What is more, the ‘Absalom’ play relies solely on a property for hanging David’s son, which also appears in a stage direction in Peele’s David and Bethsabe; the Worcester play may indeed refer to a revival of Peele’s play, the subtitle of which is ‘The Tragedy of Absalom’. Finally, as Annaliese Connolly shows, many of the Admiral’s Men’s biblical plays offered one variation or another on the Tamburlaine persona; in 1602 this made sense since Edward Alleyn, the company’s star actor, had recently come out of retirement to thrill audiences.47 Thus ‘Jepthah’ and ‘Joshua’ centred on a larger-than-life hero who exhibits great feats of physical strength and moral courage. What accounts for this extraordinary run of seven known biblical plays in 1602 at the Fortune and Rose playhouses? Gurr traces it to Alleyn’s increasingly religious commitment; John Astington ties it to the effort, perhaps led by Lord Admiral Howard, to solidify the claims of the Scottish James VI as successor to Elizabeth.48

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It could also be that Du Bartas continued to spur interest among writers in scriptural topics. A more mundane explanation is that the Hebrew Bible and the Aprocrypha provided fresh subjects at a time when packed amphitheatres demanded new plays – especially on topics that had already proved successful. Puzzlingly, this final surge of productivity was followed by the sharp curtailment of biblical drama under King James, effectively ending a popular dramatic tradition. While A Looking Glasse for London was revived once or twice, and while biblical plays remained popular among English companies abroad, very little evidence survives of them in early Stuart England. My guess is that declining audience interest was a factor, along with pressure from the likes of Henry Crosse, a London preacher who, in 1603, asked ‘must the holy Prophets and Patriarkes be set vpon a Stage, to be derided?’ 49 In 1604, the nation’s biblical experts began convening under royal mandate to produce what would become the King James Version of the Bible five years later. The crushing blow may have come in 1606, the Act to Restrain Abuses of Players, which inveighed against ‘the vse of the holy Name of God, or of Christ Iesus, or of the holy Ghost, or of the Trinitie’ in stage plays as acts of profanity and irreligion. Notes 1 Janet S. Loengard, ‘An Elizabethan Lawsuit: John Brayne, his Carpenter, and the Building of the Red Lion Theatre’, Shakespeare Quarterly 34 (1983), pp. 298–310. 2 I address this matter in Paul Whitfield White, Drama and Religion in English Provincial Society, 1485–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 5; see also Hannibal Hamlin, ‘Afterword’, in Adrian Streete (ed.), Early Modern Drama and the Bible (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 223–4. 3 See E. K. Chambers’s immensely influential Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), which contends, among other things, that the Protestant religious interludes of the 1560s and 1570s were reading texts rather than professionally performed, the critical consensus today. 4 Traceable to Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, it is a basic assumption in Ruth Blackburn, Biblical Drama under the Tudors (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), pp. 156–60; and Michael O’Connell, Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). In Biblical Drama in England (London: Faber, 1968), Murray Roston places less emphasis on state suppression and more on self-initiated censorship in which the drama moved down the ‘rungs of sanctity’ from Gospel topics, to Old Testament ones, and finally to Apocryphal ones. However,

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a slate of Old Testament plays closed out Elizabeth’s reign in the London playhouses. 5 On a generally ineffective system of state regulation of the drama, see W. R. Streitberger, The Master of the Revels and Elizabeth I’s Court Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Richard Dutton, Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991). For popular Elizabethan religion and the stage, see White, Drama and Religion, ch. 1, and sources cited there. 6 The woodcuts illustrate the Book of Judges, chs 13–16, in the 1568 edition of the Bishops’ Bible. See Bibles-online.net; see also John Astington, Stage and Picture in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 83–6. The 1602 lost play of ‘Samson’ has generated considerable interest from stage historians because of a reference to the hero’s carrying the gates of Gaza on his shoulders in The Family of Love (1606): ‘Beleeue it we sawe Sampson beare the Towne gates on his necke, from the lower to the vpper stage, with that life and admirable accord, that it shall neuer be equaled’. Since the Fortune is not known to have steps from the main stage to the upper, it is generally assumed that the actor (possibly Edward Alleyn?) carried a large prop of gates on a ladder up to the balcony level. 7 Why so few biblical plays were printed is unclear. Andrew Gurr believes that the stories were too familiar to bookbuyers to generate much interest. On the other hand, the Stationers’ Company were known to protect the interests of printers who faced competitors attempting to publish books on the same subject matter (e.g. poems and sermons on select biblical stories). I am indebted to Peter W. M. Blayney for this suggestion. 8 St Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson, intro. G. R. Evans (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), p. 377. See Rosemary Woolf, English Mystery Plays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); V. A. Kolve, The Corpus Christi Play (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966). 9 For the most recent discussion of the Towneley’s Marian date, see Philip Butterworth, ‘The Bible and the Towneley Plays of Isaac and Iacob’, in Butterworth, Staging Scripture: Biblical Drama 1350–1600 (Boston: Brill, 2016), pp. 92–124. For the Chester manuscripts, see R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills, The Chester Cycle: Essays and Documents (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). 10 See Jessica Dell, David Klausner, and Helen Ostovich (eds), The Chester Cycle in Context: 1555–1575: Religion, Drama, and the Impact of Change (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012); Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano, The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015); White, Drama and Religion.

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11 The classic study is Harold Gardiner, Mysteries’ End: An Investigation of the Last Days of the Medieval Religious Stage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1946). 12 Hutton, Edmund Grindal, the future Archbishop of York, and Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, were all at Cambridge when the continental Reformer Martin Bucer dedicated a pamphlet to King Edward VI outlining a national programme of religious drama on biblical subjects, and all three were participants, patrons, or advocates of the stage. Thus Grindal hosted a production of the scriptural Sapienta Solominus at his residence in 1567. Yet the northern civic cycles, with their medieval liturgy and doctrinally questionable subject matter, were different. 13 For a more detailed look at the late cycle plays and the Reformation, see White, Drama and Religion and ‘The Chester Cycle and Early Elizabethan Religion’, in Dell et al., The Chester Cycle in Context, pp. 111–32. 14 For the role of the Expositor and its relation to Protestantism, see Heather Hill-Vásquez, Sacred Players: The Politics of Response in the Middle English Religious Drama (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), pp. 17–50; for an earlier discussion, see David Mills, ‘Introduction’, in Mills (ed.), The Chester Mystery Cycle: A New Edition with Modernised Spelling (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1992), p. xxii. 15 David Mills, ‘Chester’s Covenant Theology’, Leeds Studies in English n.s. 32 (2001), pp. 399–412, at p. 400. Mills develops this line of thinking further in ‘Some Theological Issues in Chester Plays’, in David N. Klausner and Karen Sawyer Marsalek (eds), Essays in Early English Drama Presented to Alexandra F. Johnston (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 212–29. 16 R. V. H. Burne, Chester Cathedral, from its Founding by Henry VIII to the Accession of Queen Victoria (London: SPCK, 1958), p. 58. 17 Elizabeth Baldwin, David Mills, and Lawrence M. Clopper (eds), Records of Early English Drama: Cheshire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). 18 White, ‘The Chester Cycle and Early Elizabethan Religion’. 19 Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 20 James Gibson (ed.), Records of Early English Drama: Kent (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002, pp. 791–2. 21 See Barbara D. Palmer, ‘Recycling “The Wakefield Cycle”: The Records’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 41 (2002), pp. 88–130; Robert C. Palmer, Selling the Church: The English Parish in Law, Commerce, and Religion, 1350–1550 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 22 Rosalind Conklin Hays, C. Edward McGee, Sally L. Joyce, and Evelyn S. Newlyn (eds), Records of Early English Drama: Dorset and Cornwall (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 537.

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23 Appendix 3, ‘Ancient Parishes with Possible Examples of the Plainan-gwary’, in Hays et al., Records of Early English Drama: Dorset and Cornwall, pp. 559–63. 24 Paula Neuss (ed.), The Creation of the World, Garland Medieval Texts 3 (New York: Garland, 1983). 25 See Neuss, ‘Introduction’, in The Creation of the World and Martin Wiggins, in association with Catherine Richardson, British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue, Vol. II, 1567–1589 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 291–4. 26 On Bishopstoke, see John Bale, An Expostulation or Complaynte (London: John Daye, 1552), sig. C3. 27 Alan Somerset (ed.), Records of Early English Drama: Shropshire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). 28 Wiggins, British Drama, I, pp. 133–5. 29 See Eric Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 308. 30 Alan H. Nelson (ed.), Records of Early English Drama: Cambridge, 2 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), I, pp. 231–44. 31 John Foxe, Christus Triumphans, in Two Latin Comedies by John Foxe, the Martyrologist: Titus et Gesippus and Christus Triumphans, ed., trans., and intro. John Hazel Smith (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973). 32 Alan H. Nelson, Early Cambridge Theatres: College, University, and Town Stages, 1464–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 33 Roston, Biblical Drama in England, p. 60. 34 Cornelius Schonaeus, Terentius Christianus, sive Comoediae duae (London: Robert Robinson, 1595), A2. I quote from the translation by Frederick M. Carey, in Lilly B. Campbell, Divine Poetry and Drama in Sixteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), p. 165. 35 We might add The Two Sins of David (1562) and The Ninevites (1569), both entered in the Stationer’s register and on topics similar to those of later plays written for the commercial stage (A Looking Glasse and David and Bethsabe), but they might be academic interludes. 36 Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, I, p. 245. 37 Blackburn, Biblical Drama, pp. 156–60; O’Connell, Iconoclasm and Theater, pp. 106–7. 38 Wiggins, British Drama, II, 1567–1589, pp. xiii–xv. 39 William Ingram, The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan London (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 240–2. 40 R. A. Law, ‘A Looking Glasse and the Scriptures’, Studies in English (1939), pp. 31–47; Lilly B. Campbell, Divine Poetry and Drama in Sixteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), p. 248. Thomas Lodge was another great admirer of Du Bartas, though evidently not when he and Robert Greene wrote the play.

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41 For more on these lost plays, see their individual entries in Wiggins, British Drama, II and Vol. III (1590–1597). 42 Campbell, Divine Poetry, p. 240. 43 Wiggins, British Drama, II, p. 292. 44 The poem was published with the story of David: Adams complaint: The olde worldes tragedie. David and Bathsheba (London, 1596). 45 The idea of overseas colonisation of ‘the new world’ in the present as a repeat of the story of Noah and his sons who colonised the post-Flood world is developed in The Colonies, a section of La Seconde Semaine, translated by William Lisle in 1597 and dedicated to the patron of the Lord Admiral’s Men, Charles Howard. Howard was also the dedicatee of Lisle’s Babilon, also from La Seconde Semaine, which told the story of King Nimrod and the Tower of Babylon. 46 A seventeenth-century ‘closet drama’ on Nebuchadnezzar was once thought to be the lost text of this play, but recently that theory has been dismissed. 47 Annaliese Connolly, ‘Peele’s David and Bethsabe: Reconsidering Biblical Drama of the Long 1590s’, special issue, Early Modern Literary Studies 16 (2007), 9.1–20. 48 John Astington, ‘A Jacobean Ghost, and Other Stories’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 17 (2005), pp. 37–54, at p. 51. A summary of opinion is found in Misha Teramura, ‘Samson’, Lostplays. org (accessed 11 April 2019). 49 Henry Crosse, Vertues Common-wealth: Or the High-way to Honour (London, 1603), sig. 3Pr.

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Part III Early modern drama

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9 Protestant place, Protestant props in the plays of Nicholas Grimald Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Elisabeth Dutton

Early in the English Reformation the churchman, historian, controversialist, and Protestant convert John Bale (1495–1563), recognising the evangelical potential of theatre, set about harnessing it to the Protestant cause. His work is concerned not just with the ideas that might be presented in a Reforming play, but also with the manner in which a Protestant play sets up those ideas for performance, through material objects in time and space. In this chapter I will explore some of the ways that Reforming playwrights deploy these realities theatrically; in other words, considering ‘objects’ as props, and ‘time and space’ as the duration of the play and the space of its performance, I will explore how these dramaturgical phenomena are deployed by Reforming playwrights to present an argument about the same phenomena in the world beyond the play as understood in Protestant theology. I will focus on Bale and his friend the poet and dramatist Nicholas Grimald (1519–62), whose Protestant playwriting took place while he was a student at Oxford. Two of Grimald’s plays survive: the Latin scriptural dramas Christus Redivivus, a Resurrection narrative that was performed at Brasenose College in 1541, and Archipropheta, the John the Baptist story, that was staged at Christ Church in 1548.1 I will also allude to Andreas Höfele’s study of the comedy Christus Triumphans, by another of Bale’s friends, the historian and martyrologist John Foxe (1516/17–87): Foxe’s play was performed at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1561–62, and Bale’s Three Laws may also have been performed at Magdalen around the same time.2 Protestant writers sought to demonstrate that they were the true heirs of the early Church, revealing it in its first, pure, state, while also demonstrating that contemporary corrupt Catholic practices were both survivals of superseded Jewish practice from before the time of Christ and signs of the approaching end times. What came before, what happens now, and what comes next are all contested: Protestant drama may be deeply engaged with the pressing questions

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of its age, but in order to sustain this, it must embrace a decidedly confusing sense of time. In his Three Laws, John Bale (1538–89) chooses to portray on stage the whole of human history divided by period – the time of Natural Law, the time of the Law of Moses, and the time of the Law of Christ.3 Christ’s Law represents the written Bible, itself a continuation and confirmation of the purity of natural teaching; the Scriptures taken as a whole are seen to subsume the role of Moses within them. So time in Bale’s play is more complicated than simply one age succeeding another. The first scene shows all of the laws together, outside time and place. Moreover, while the majority of the action is apparently set in the past, the temporal differences are always elided – through both reference and dramaturgy – so that the play is actually understood to be referring to contemporary, Reformation England.4 A play, at least if it is written to be staged, must pay attention to the practicalities of chronology and geography: an actor’s body must occupy a time and space. When Deus Pater tells Naturae Lex that he must rule for ‘three ages’, from Adam to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, and from Abraham to Moses, Naturae Lex is puzzled: ‘Where must I remayne, for the tyme I shall be here?’ The reply, ‘In the hart of man’, may not appear the most helpful direction for the mise-en-scène. Similarly, when given their commissions, the Laws of Moses and Christ also ask, ‘Where shall I for that same season dwell?’, ‘Where shall I for that same time persever?’ 5 Neither God the Father, nor Bale, offers any clue as to how these questions should be resolved on the stage. Yet Bale’s strategy, making the question part of the play, both contains the issues and foregrounds one of the difficulties of Protestant drama.6 The Catholic mystery plays also present scripture while making their points about contemporary society, deploying creative anachronism in their costumes, oath, and references to social office; however, their overarching trajectory is always clear. The Protestant playwrights were presented with a particularly difficult temporal project because they had arguments to make about their Reformed practices in relation to the history of the Church, which inevitably involved them in telling history from a human perspective, while at the same time they sought to appropriate the ‘papist’ dramatic project of the mystery cycles – presenting soteriological time. Andreas Höfele writes of John Foxe’s Christus Triumphans (1556): Whereas the mystery cycles string out their episodes ‘from eternity to eternity’ in linear sequence, beginning with the Creation and ending

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with the Last Judgment, Foxe must supplement and synchronize this biblical chronology with a second narrative strand, the history of the Church from the days of the Apostles to the present. He thus has more to tell than the mystery cycles but much less time in which to tell it; for while the mysteries took a whole day or two (or even weeks as in France) to unfold their story, Foxe was constrained by the limits imposed by the five acts of a Latin comedy.7

Foxe’s answer to the five-act constraints is, as Höfele puts it, ‘radical conflation’.8 This conflation is temporal – as when, for example, Eve meets Mary on Easter Saturday – and also in a sense spatial, since Satan laments that he has become a homeless exile (Extorris e coelo eliminor, ubi / Loci nihil est reliquum, ‘Exiled, banished from heaven, where there is no place left’,9 I.iii.6–7), although he already has his residence in the underworld. The most striking moment of spatial manipulation is in Act V, when Satan, with his devils, visits his deputy the Pope – in Rome, one would imagine. Yet instead, when the papal Antichrist asks for directions to help him find the heretic Hierologus, we find that we are in Oxford: Ad forum cum acceditis escarium, Quadriuium illic est, transuersis plateis sese in angulos Rectos scindens. Hic relicta dextra, ad laeuam uergite … Versus utramque ursam. Illic secum portam … carcer Bocardo est. Ibi est. (V.ii.19–31)10 (As you approach the Cornmarket, you come to Carfax, where the intersecting streets go off at right angles. Ignore the right and turn left … towards the two Bears. There, beside the gate … is the prison, Bocardo. He’s there.)

At the time of Foxe’s writing the Bocardo prison counted Thomas Cranmer among its inmates; earlier it had also counted Latimer and Ridley. Clearly, the ‘heretics’ are these three men, the Oxford Martyrs, in the most pointed of contemporary references, before the play returns to its abstract apocalyptic war between Antichrist and Ecclesia. Time presents a further challenge to John Foxe: the Apocalypse, which will conclude his play’s action, has not yet come, and so Foxe can only end his play with a Chorus of Virgins who seem to be like the Wise Virgins of the parable, waiting with their oil lamps ready for the coming of the bridegroom: Paratum nunc sponsam, spectatores, cuncta ac Parata cernitis. Restat nihil, ipse

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Nisi paranymphus summam qui scenae imponat Catastrophen. Id quum fiet certum nemo Dicet. Poeta, quod possit, praestitit. (V.v.150–4) (Spectators, now you see the bride decked out and all things in readiness. Nothing remains except the bridegroom himself, who will bring the final catastophe to our stage. When that will happen none will say for sure. The poet has shown what he could.)

The author’s self-effacing phrase is interesting – that he has shown ‘what he could’ might imply a lack of skill or a lack of knowledge, although here it is in a way also a lack of material, since he wishes to write truly about something that has not yet happened. In any case, the result is that Foxe resigns his authorial responsibility and instead hands responsibility to the audience, who must wait prepared, must ‘be on your guard with prudence’ – and incidentally, ‘et plaudite’ (‘do clap, please!’, V.v.163). A satisfying connection being thus drawn between watching eagerly for the bridegroom Christ and watching receptively the present play, Foxe is able to put his pen down and enjoy the applause that concludes a play that is by definition unfinished in the present (which is to say, 1556).11 Of course, conflations of time and space are a marked feature of medieval drama, both secular and scriptural, too: the York Cycle, performed in the streets of York, both draws attention to the real streets and simultaneously transforms them into the streets of Jerusalem; in Fulgens and Lucres the dining hall in which the play is presented is sometimes just a dining hall, here and now, and sometimes Ancient Rome.12 But those are logical enough bi-locations; Foxe is doing something different. His audience veers exhilaratingly from Old Testament Jerusalem, to Rome, Oxford, Hell, the time of Christ, the history of the early Church, and the English Reformation. Foxe writes a five-act Latin comedy, but it is far from observing the unities of place, time, and action that might be expected in Latin comedy following dictates about dramatic structure derived from Aristotle’s Poetics. Unless, perhaps, we can think of ‘all places’ and ‘all times’ as unities of a sort. Possibly, by never solidly establishing a single setting, Foxe enables his audience to ignore the implausibility of the sudden scene-shifts: possibly his dramaturgy frees the audience from thinking literally. Grimald’s classical imitations include dramatic form and tropes – the five acts, the commentary of a Chorus, demons from the underworld, characters such as the cunning slave and the braggard

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soldier – as well as literary language: the Latin of these plays is classical Latin, and they often involve echoes of phrases, paraphrases, and extensive citation also from non-dramatic sources such as Virgil’s Aeneid and Horace’s Odes.13 For Grimald, the genres of classical drama also offered some way of avoiding the temporal perils besetting Foxe and Bale: it is clear that, when the protagonist is dead, the tragedy is complete. Thus Archipropheta finishes with the Chorus lamenting the death of John the Baptist. It is clear that when the confusions are resolved, the comedy is done. Thus Christus Redivivus finishes when Thomas has been brought from scepticism to belief. Grimald is also perhaps less concerned than Bale and Foxe to comment on the England of his age, although even the writing of a play about John the Baptist in 1547 may not have been an entirely innocent act, given the near-contemporary plays by prominent Protestants John Bale and George Buchanan on the same theme.14 Yet Grimald does not write a Latin or a medieval comedy. His plays look forward, of course, but with less contemporary weight: the risen Christ promises his listeners that if they wait a little while, they will receive the Holy Ghost, but His words echo Christ’s promise of Pentecost, and that is done. The Epilogue to Christus Redivivus is happy to assert that they are finished: Habetis rem totam, auditores optimi (‘Most worthy listeners, you have the whole play’, pp. 214–15). Archipropheta could not be more emphatic about its conclusion, which is the grave: Sepulchrum sic possum, sic autum funus est. Voce supremum ciemus iam: Vale, uale (‘Thus his grave is made, thus his burial is finished. Now let us raise our last cry, Farewell! farewell!’, pp. 356–7). Grimald’s plays loosely observe the classical requirement for unity of place. In the dedicatory epistle to Christus Redivivus, Grimald writes that his teacher praises the propriety of his classical style and form, and that Loca item, haud usque eo discriminari censebat: quin unum in proscenium, facile & citra negocium conduci queant (‘Likewise, he concluded that the scenes were not so far apart but they could easily, and without trouble, be reduced to one stagesetting’, pp. 108–9). In fact, although most of the action of Christus Redivivus occurs in the garden in which is Christ’s tomb, there are some hints of other locations: for example, the Marys narrate to the disciples what they saw in the garden ‘when we came there’, not ‘here’; Thomas declares that a spirit has entered hanc domum (‘this house’, pp. 198–9), in accordance with scriptural narrative that shows Doubting Thomas encountering the Risen Christ in a locked room. The term is richly suggestive in academic drama: as

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Tiffany Stern has explored, ‘house’ is a term commonly used in commercial theatre to refer to locations with specific functions – playhouse, tiring-house – and those functions included storage of valuable items like costumes and props.15 In Oxford, the term was used of a college’s hospitality – to be a domus (‘guest’) is to eat at the college’s expense. Thus the Risen Christ visits Thomas in his college, and in a play; for a brief moment the setting and the venue are one and the same. Most strikingly, the diabolical Cacodemon, and the Fury Alecto whom he sends to earth, dwell In haec loca tetra, horrenda, subterranea, / Terribilis, foeda, sent situ & squalida (‘in these realms beneath the earth, terrible, unclean, and foul with mouldering filth’, pp. 180–3). So there are also scenes that are located in Hell, and Hell is specifically below the earth. If there was indeed only one stage-setting, then it would either have to include a subterranean Hell, or it would have to assume that for these brief scenes the audience were happy to imagine Hell. Perhaps Hell was even among the audience, or behind them: in any case, it is created for the audience by the words of the demons that invoke people and places both scriptural and classical – Orcus, Tartarus, Acheron (p. 180), the garden of Paradise and the Stygian lake (p. 182), and lost Judas (p. 184). Archipropheta takes place almost entirely at the palace of Herod. Though John and his disciples are initially somewhere in the wilderness, this is defined principally by not being Herod’s court (since the king must send people to find John), as well as by John’s statement: Mouetur nunc viri mens nostra, saltibus ut / Relictis, deinde gressus per medias feram / Urbes (‘my soul prompts me to leave the wilderness and make my way into the midst of cities’, pp. 242–3). This statement is as geographically vague as it is symbolically, even soteriologically, loaded: the significance of the city in Christian thought was suggested by references, particularly in the Psalms, to the city of Jerusalem as the place where the tribes praise God (Psalm 122:4), in the book of the prophet Ezekiel that foretells the rebuilt Third Temple in Jerusalem (Ezekiel 45:6), and in the book of Revelation 21 to a ‘new Jerusalem’ that is Heaven on earth. The significance of this city was cemented by Augustine’s De civitate dei, which itself drew on St Paul’s comment in the letter to the Hebrews: ‘here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come’ (Hebrews 13:14).16 Augustine portrays human history as the conflict between the Earthly City and the City of God.17 In Grimald’s play, therefore, wilderness and city seem almost to be ideas as much as places: there is no effort to create a sense of their topography,

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or their material reality, and the movement from one to the other in John’s mind seems somehow to imply the movement from one to the other of John’s body. John tells the audience that his soul prompts him to go to the city, and without witnessing any journey the audience understands that he has done so. Grimald gives no stage directions, no indications of scene; he creates a sense of scripture through references to the Tishbite prophet, or Naaman the Syrian washed in the Jordan (pp. 242–3), to Pharisees and Levites, to Choruses of Idumaeans: it is as if by these references, demonstrating his intimate knowledge of the Gospels and also of Josephus, he makes ‘scripture’ a time and place all its own, in which the characters of Archipropheta can live and move. So similarly in Christus Redivivus the time-and-place ‘scripture’ is evoked through moments in which Christ’s miracles and teachings are narrated: on the way to the tomb Cleophis narrates the miracle of the wine at the wedding in Cana; Nicodemus recalls his furtive, night-time conversations with Christ; Mary Magdalene tells at length of the woman who was cured of bleeding when she touched Christ’s robes. These moments seem qualitatively different from those in the mystery plays, when actors offer brief reminders of action that has happened in earlier pageants: those serve mnemonic functions, but here the narratives seem to build a set, to create Christ’s Incarnation and ministry as a time and place to themselves. They are concerned with memory, but their aim is not an audience aidemémoire: Cleophis emphasises that she is recalling the time of miracles from her own earliest memories – Etenim memoria repetebam ultima Tempus (‘and indeed I was recalling the time from my earliest memories’, pp. 152–3) – not from what the audience has seen performed, and the audience perceives that time as a setting for the actions they witness, as a setting that is carried in the hearts and minds of the disciples, and, with dramatic irony, as a time that the audience but not yet the characters know is not complete in the scriptural setting of the play, for the greatest miracle, Christ’s resurrection, has not yet been revealed by the action. This is in a way the opposite of the mystery plays’ drive to bring scripture into the here and now. Protestant writers were presumably concerned to assert the historicity of scriptural events, and to separate them from the debased Catholic forms in which they were commemorated, but this may present a difficulty, since drama that asserts immanence, that its action occupies the audience’s time and place, is more immediately appealing than drama that insists that its action represents what actually happened, but in a remote time and place.

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Furthermore, theatre is the most material of arts, and Protestant playwrights needed somehow to make their theology of scriptural time and place, and eschatological history, nonetheless materially present to an audience in their own historical moment. As a result, they had to develop a particular dramaturgy of the material object, the theatrical prop. Andrew Sofer writes that at times of ‘semiotic crisis’ (such as the Reformation) the prop is a vital dramaturgical tool for ‘shaping dramatic and theatrical signification’: playwrights concerned that they could not ‘legislate’ a ‘prop’s impact’ sought particularly to ‘orchestrate the prop’s movement through concrete stage space and linear stage time’.18 Objects exist in time and space, obstinately so. Much though stage managers the world over might wish that props could be moved by the imagination, they hang around, sometimes accruing significance, sometimes gradually ignored, but still there.19 Their physical reality makes them accessible, but they have no spiritual reality: this of course was the argument of the Protestant iconoclasts. Scholarly thinking about props in early English drama has often focused, unsurprisingly, on the Eucharistic host. The theatricality of the Mass has been the object of discussion at least since Honorius Augustodunensis, in the twelfth century, made an analogy between the liturgical celebrant and an actor taking on the role of Christ: in the twentieth century O. B. Hardison went so far as to argue that in liturgy were the origins of English drama, though scholars, notably Lawrence Clopper, have argued firmly against this aspect of Hardison’s work.20 Discussion is dogged, as Bruce Holsinger points out, by an ‘all-or-nothing’ approach: liturgy is claimed to either be the only real source and substance of all drama or fundamental to none of it.21 Thinking very particularly about the bread and wine of the Mass, Sofer considers differing theological positions on the phenomenology of the Mass that can offer ‘distinct models for understanding how objects become signs on stage without effacing their material being’: the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation; the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation in which the host is both bread and flesh; and the Zwinglian doctrine that the bread and wine simply recall Christ’s body and blood and there is no ‘real presence’.22 I will not here focus on the Mass, but I follow Sofer in considering the ‘theological’ significance of the material being of props: how did Protestant playwrights engage with that materiality? Bale’s Three Laws is not really a scriptural play, in that its narrative is not one found written in the Bible; rather it is a sort of biblical apparatus, presenting as it were the section headings under which

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the whole history of salvation could be arranged. It is clearly the result of Bale thinking with great sophistication about what Protestant drama should do. He focuses considerable attention on props, explored as true and false symbols. Each of the vice figures who come in turn to corrupt the Laws brings with him a selection of religious objects – rosaries, candlesticks, images of angels, and so on. Bale does not explicitly state that these props are brought on stage, but given the uneven nature of medieval and early modern stage directions, this is not surprising: since the vices try to sell their wares, they are presumably carrying them. For example, Idolatria attempts to beguile his audience with an abundance of tricks and trinkets: Both brouches, beades and pynnes, With soch as the people wynnes Unto ydolatrye Take thu part of them here, Ad Idol. (658–63)

Idololatria’s faith is focused upon visible observance of Catholic ritual. Brooches, beads, and pins are nothing but props, but Infidelitas peddles them as idols. Catholicism is exposed in this play as a series of accretions, entirely unauthorised by the biblical source of God’s law. Evangelium foregrounds the issue of outward signs and inward significance: ‘Their worsyppynges are in outwarde ceremonyes’ (1348). Yet Deus Pater also gives props to the Laws: he gives the New Testament to Christ’s Law, and tablets of stone to Moses’ Law, and tells them that they are signs and tokens. At the same time, they are also props – objects given to actors – and the actors must do something with them. Moses’ Law is apparently expected to stagger around under the weight of two large stones for much of the rest of the play. The Law of Nature has the strangest problem, as he is given a heart – and he apparently does carry it around, as it prompts Infidelity to mistake him for a cook. The very weirdness of these props makes them egregiously dramatic – defamiliarised, perhaps – so that they cannot be corrupted through their interpretations as anything other than signs. In addition to this strategy of staging the bizarre, Bale deploys elemental props – fire and water – as true symbols that contrast with the painted icons of Catholic corruption: Vindicta Dei tells Infidelitas that he will punish him ‘with water … and with fyre’ (1824) and the stage directions confirm that he lympha percutit (‘throws water’, at 1860) on Infidelitas before ignis flamma (‘the flame of the fire’, at 1893) scares the Vice away. That

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the elements are material but ‘true’ symbols is connected to their lively materiality: they cannot be contained, packaged, and sold. So perhaps one answer to the issue of props in relation to iconoclasm is the use of explicitly ‘empty’ props; non-solid props, or incongruous props, or props that cannot quite be managed by the actors who must work with them. Foxe concludes his Christus Triumphans with the only stage direction in his play to mention props: Hic ex editori theatri loco, repansis cortinis ostendunt se uelut e coelo sedilia et libri positi (V.v.37–46) (Here from the upper part of the theatre, when the curtains open, are shown as if from heaven thrones with books placed upon them)

Books, it is true, are objects, but they are perhaps the most complex and suggestive props since their significance depends on what is inside them, and this is usually inaccessible to the audience: a book must be read, and as a prop the book therefore might lead the audience to consider a passage of time beyond that of the performance, in which the book is regarded, page by page, in order for its full significance to be appreciated. Within the time of the performance, of course, the audience may recall a book that they have read, but they cannot read a book: thus, the book is able ‘to image one thing and disclose another, to offer words or signs beyond the visible requisites of its presence’.23 Thrones too are very material, but their significance is related to the authority of the person seated in them, and these thrones are empty. The scene which Foxe creates clearly recalls the hetoimasia, the ‘prepared throne’ which was made ready for Christ at his Second Coming and thus came to symbolise the Second Coming: the image, which is common in early Christian art, may have drawn also on the Roman iconography of a judge’s seat. 24 The presence of a book on the throne would usually indicate that the image as a whole represents Christ, but that the thrones are plural complicates the interpretation of Foxe’s theatrical image. Perhaps there are four, and each book represents a Gospel, though it is odd that Foxe does not specify the number if this is the case. As Höfele writes, this stage direction ‘serves the purpose of allegory rather than localization’;25 arguably, however, the nature of allegory is to give a local habitation and a name, because it localises the abstract in the material object, whether prop, or actor’s body. A company staging Foxe’s play would have to decide on the number of thrones and books it would present, and in the localising process

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of engaging with this material reality would have to interpret the allegory for themselves, guiding also the interpretation of the audience. Grimald offers his audience an empty tomb and a severed head. The ‘Argument’ of Act I of Christus Redivivus declares, Christus in eo iacet sepulchro conditus (‘Christ lies buried in that sepulchre’, pp. 116–17). This establishes the presence of the tomb on the stage, but also what is hidden inside it. Mary Magdalene enters, complaining against the unjust Jews, and indicates the Sepulchre: Haec cine tecta? hasce sedes? hosce constituisti toros? (‘Is this the dwelling, this the abode, this the couch thou didst prepare?’, pp. 120–1). She then embraces the stone that, she asserts, covers Christ – presumably the stone covering the entrance to the tomb – and prays that Christ may quiescas hic molliter (‘rest here gently’, pp. 120–1). So far, the tomb could be represented by a Hell’s-mouth prop, appropriated, with a profound irony. But in the next scene, Joseph of Arimathea talks to Mary, who is apparently in medio posita marmore (‘within the marble tomb’, pp. 122–3), so perhaps this is a rather grander structure: for example, it could be a movable Easter sepulchre, formed, tent-like, from wooden poles with a cover, of a sort commonly found in late medieval churches.26 In any case, Mary is still clinging to the stone, so presumably is still outside the tomb’s burial chamber, and she refuses to let go of the prop that she believes is significant because it is occupied, because it contains something hidden – albeit a dead body. Her friends convince her to return home to collect spices with which, in the morning, they will anoint the body: Myrrham, costum, spicaeque (‘Myrrh, aloes, spikenard’, pp. 130–1). There are no explicit stage directions in Grimald’s script as it survives, but the Argument of Act III tells us that the Marys return to the tomb cum emptis noctu odoribus (‘bringing the perfumes that Mary had bought by night’, p. 148). Medieval iconography identifies the Marys on the way to the tomb by the jars they carry, and it is likely that in the dramatic tradition ecclesiastical objects such as thuribles were used.27 In Grimald’s play, Mary Magdalene cautions the other women, as they arrive at the tomb: Vos facitote, e gremijs ne quid odorum excidat (‘take care that no perfume fall from your bosoms’, pp. 158–9): the phrase, curiously, perhaps, redolent of erotic poetry, implies literally that the women carry the jars tucked into their costumes, so that they are perhaps concealed rather than displayed: at the same time it desolidifies the props by focusing

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attention on their contents, and the fragrance of their contents at that. Of course, if thuribles were used, the fragrance they scattered would have been that of incense rather than myrrh; however, a thurible that actually had smoking incense inside would have been too hot to carry tucked into a costume. In medieval-convent drama, the use of thuribles would have been a significant moment at which a female participant was permitted to touch an object usually reserved for male, clerical use:28 in Protestant drama, by contrast, if a thurible were used as a prop in this way, the effect could be at once to demystify ritual and to assert the primacy of the scriptural narrative which gives the prop a new significance, as a jar of ointment to anoint Christ. The tomb contains another of the very few props that Grimald’s play requires: linen cloths and a napkin. Though Mary Magdalene declares that there is nothing left in the tomb – nihil hic relinquitur (p. 158) – John later notes that there is nil, nisi linteamina (‘nothing but the linen clothes’, p. 160), and Peter explains their significance – Christ’s body was once wrapped in them: ecce uestem linteam, En qua caput inuoluebatur, calanticam (p. 160). Medieval Catholic liturgical performances of the Visitatio Sepulchri present a very similar scene, and then invite participants to reverence the sudarium, the empty head-cloth, to emphasise its reliquary power;29 by contrast, Grimald’s negating descriptions (nihil, nil) seem to deny significance to the material objects themselves, the emptiness of which requires interpretation, not reverence. In a sense, they were once costumes, but now they have become props because they are separated from the actor’s body but are still on stage, deanimated and requiring a new interpretation as props. John offers that interpretation, and it depends on a choice between two narratives: either Christ’s body has been stolen, or he has come to life. But, as John notes, if someone had stolen the body, they would not have placed the grave-cloths in order but would have taken them with the body. The grave-cloths signify because they are empty, but their continuing presence on stage as props points the disciples and the audience to a narrative that has not occupied the space and time of the performance, and that indeed requires a sense of divine, rather than human, space and time – the Resurrection of Christ’s body. The tomb has earlier been sealed by Caiaphas and Annas with a sigillum, or seal. In the Vulgate, the watch is set signantes lapidem, ‘marking the stone’,30 and this phrase was interpreted in medieval commentaries and later translations as ‘sealing the stone’.31 What

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exactly does this imply? In Grimald, the sigillum has been given to Annas by Pilate, who is to use it to close up the tomb – haec sigillum, quo hunc locus obsignem dedit (p. 138). That it could be thus given suggests that it is not a device for materially sealing up the tomb but is rather a wax seal on a letter, a device that symbolically seals up the tomb by placing Pilate’s authority on the order that it should be unopened. It is again a prop that resists its own materiality, here because its materiality would clearly be inadequate to the task of literally preventing entry. Four soldiers are set to guard the tomb. These soldiers are the boasting but ineffective miles gloriosus type of Latin comedy. Thus when Jesus is miraculously raised from the dead, they are easily bribed by Caiaphas (at the inspiration of Alecto, who comes up from Hell) into saying instead that the body has been stolen. Caiaphas offers the soldiers a purse filled with silver – what Caiaphas describes as intus latet, ‘what lies hidden within’. When the women return to the tomb and find it empty, and the stone rolled away, Cleophas declares, quid sibi tumulus inanis uelit, & pate / Factum claustrum coniectura non adsequor (‘what the empty tomb and the open door mean I do not understand’, pp. 158–9). This is Act III scene iii, at the heart of the play. The rest of the play will show us the disciples learning how to interpret the empty prop, the significance of which is precisely the emptiness that points to meaning elsewhere – the risen Christ. What is or is not inside – that is the question. In Archipropheta coins feature again as one of the few props, and again they are associated with folly: the fool Gelasimus offers a denarius and an obolus to the Syrian girl in exchange for a kiss (p. 262). Once again there are spices, used in Herod’s sacred ceremonies: the Chorus declare that they return from these ceremonies carrying galbanum, myrrh, and frankincense for the temple, as well as other objects used in sacred rites (p. 312); perhaps, like the jars carried by the Marys, these might have been ecclesiastical objects such as thuribles, in which case their ‘real-life’ use as objects enriches their theatrical significance as props. Perfumes also feature, however, in a more profane moment, enhancing the charms of Tryphera as she prepares for the seductive dance by which she will bring about the death of John the Baptist. The finishing touch to her toilette is again perfume: En fragrantes accipe Odores (p. 316), her mother enjoins. This scene is exceptionally heavy on props, although they may also be interpreted as costumes: when Tryphera is dressing to dance before Herod, Herodias describes in

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great detail the jewels with which she adorns herself and Tryphera. She commands the Syrian girl to bring ring-cases, jewels, sandals, and all the rest of her ornaments, and then admires each ornament in turn, both for its appearance and for its supposed lapidary power: Gerenti habe tutamen fidum jaspidem, In isthoc orbe complicatum argenteo. Hic Eliotropia est errare nescia. Clarus hic Berillus est for a sexangula. Hic uim uerbis addens Smaragdus clauditur. Tibi ecce Magnetem, qui perficiet labris In istis ut sedeat Suadela, et Gratia. (pp. 312–13) (Now take the jasper set in this silver circle, a faithful guard to the wearer. Here a striped jasper, which prevents its wearer from wandering. This shining beryl is six-angled in shape. Here is enclosed an emerald, which gives power to one’s words. See, here is a lodestone for you, which shall make persuasion and grace sit upon those lips.)

Here is a very particular approach to the materiality of props; Herodias simply asserts their talismanic power. Gems, of course, do have real physical properties – they can be striped or six-sided, and they can sparkle and adorn. Yet the idea that they can also have supernatural power, that they can make the wearer persuasive in speech, for example, is a superstition that would have been anathema to Reforming thinkers. Herodias’s misuse of the material, her effort to give supernatural significance to the purely physical, is a certain signal to Grimald’s audience of her doctrinal error. Archipropheta, inevitably, reaches its climax with the beheading of John, and the presentation of the head at Herod’s banquet. Ecce caput, the Chorus of Herod’s men exhort (p. 334). The Syrian Girl responds with a quotation from the Aeneid: Non ista poscit hoc tempus spectacula (‘the time demands no such sight as this’, pp. 334–5): though this might at the most literal level mean simply that a severed head is not an appropriate prop at a banquet, the quotation almost comically reminds us that props should appear at the appropriate time and place. 32 Herodias argues that John deserved his punishment, but her words seem lost in the visceral response of other characters to the sight of a severed head. The prop is, again, egregious; it does not fit the scene, and it does not belong at the king’s banqueting table – Sancti ora uiri mersa cruore, / Ensa nefando caput ablatum, / Medios inter gerit Horoäs / Regia mensa (‘The head

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of the holy man, stained with blood, the head cut off by impious sword, is displayed on the king’s table in the midst of great men!’, pp. 346–7). The Chorus define the prop, and then explain the horror of its inappropriateness – the question here is no longer whether John was a traitor or whether his preaching was true, his life moral, although this has been the question troubling Herod for most of the play. Rather, the audience, with the Chorus, must simply interpret the head as a shocking sign of Herod’s tyranny, revealed, with a sick comedy, perhaps, as the tyranny of a bad host with terrible table manners. Finally, of course, if there is a head there must be a trunk. This John’s Disciples claim from Herod, though, as Innogen knows, a headless body is also rather difficult to interpret.33 A headless body is even more empty than a severed head. The Disciples’ question – Hunc now o sancte te aspicimus uates? (‘Is this you that we look upon, O holy prophet?’, pp. 356–7) – is, comically, perhaps not simply rhetorical. How do we interpret these empty props? Perhaps the very uncertainty that they teach is the healthy scepticism about objects that Protestant drama demands. Notes 1 See L. R. Merrill (ed.), The Life and Poems of Nicholas Grimald (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1925). All references to Grimald’s plays will be to this edition, and translations of Grimald’s Latin are Merrill’s. 2 Records of Early English Drama: Oxford lists the plays of Bale and Foxe as ‘Extra-mural’ Oxford plays: see John R. Elliott (ed.), Records of Early English Drama: Oxford, 2 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 2, pp. 853–5. Andreas Höfele’s chapter is ‘John Foxe, Christus Triumphans’, in Thomas Betteridge and Greg Walker (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 123–43. On the possibility of Three Laws having been performed at Madgalen, see James McBain, ‘Recycling Authority: John Bale at Magdalen?’, Medieval English Theatre 36 (2014), pp. 24–47. 3 The division of history into three legal ages was a of course a religious commonplace, available, for example, from traditional Catholic authorities including Bede, and the fifteenth-century Speculum Sacerdotale: it was also available from Protestant sources, notably Tyndale’s The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528). 4 See James McBain, ‘Recycling Authority’, pp. 24–47. 5 Citations from the edition of Three Laws in Greg Walker (ed.), Medieval Drama: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), lines 109–10, 119–20.

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6 For discussion of possible ways of staging Three Laws, see Elisabeth Dutton, Maria Sachiko Cecire, and James McBain, ‘Staging and Filming John Bale’s Three Laws’, Shakespeare Bulletin 32.1 (2014), pp. 65–84. 7 Höfele, ‘John Foxe, Christus Triumphans’, p. 129. 8 Höfele, ‘John Foxe, Christus Triumphans’, p. 130. 9 See the edition in Two Latin Comedies by John Foxe the Martyrologist, ed. John Hazel Smith (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973). 10 For the suggestion that adaptations made to this speech might indicate a performance at Magdalen College, Oxford, see Daniel Blank, ‘Performing Exile: John Foxe’s Christus Triumphans at Magdalen College, Oxford’, Renaissance Studies 30:4 (2016), pp. 584–601. 11 Thomas Kirchmeyer’s violently anti-Catholic Pammachius, Foxe’s source for Christus Triumphans, has only four acts instead of five because, the Epilogue says, ‘the Son of God will come and provide his own catastrophe’. Bale translated Kirchmeyer’s Latin play into English. Howard B. Norland argues that Foxe’s play displays violent Apocalypticism because it was written in the reign of Mary: ‘John Foxe’s Apocalyptic Comedy, Christus Triumphans’, in Philip Ford and Andrew Taylor (eds), The Early Modern Cultures of Neo-Latin Drama (Leuven: University of Leuven Press, 2013), pp. 75–84, esp. p. 78. 12 See Elisabeth Dutton, ‘Secular Medieval Drama’, in Elaine Treharne and Greg Walker (eds), The Oxford Handbook to Medieval Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 384–94. 13 See Elisabeth Dutton and Stephanie Allen, ‘Seeing and Recognizing in the Sacred and New: The Latin Scriptural Plays of Nicholas Grimald’, in Peter Happé and Wim Hüsken (eds), Staging Scripture: Biblical Drama 1350–1600 (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 204–34. 14 See also Chapter 10 in this volume: Hannibal Hamlin comments that all prophecy is a form of anachronism, and John the Baptist is the Arch-prophet. 15 Tiffany Stern’s keynote speech at the conference ‘Digitizing the Stage: Rethinking the Early Modern Theatre Archive’, University of Oxford, July 2017. 16 Here cited from the 1560 edition of the Geneva Bible: The Geneva Bible: the Bible of the Protestant Reformation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007). 17 St Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson, intro. G. R. Evans (London: Penguin Classics, 2003). The City of God is ‘the Jerusalem which is eternal in the heavens’ (p. 939); the enemy of Jerusalem is ‘Babylon, the City of the Devil, whose name means “confusion” ’ (p. 747). 18 Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 62. 19 For a detailed exploration of theories about the relationships between temporality and the material object, see Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely

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Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 20 See O. B. Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays on the Original and Early History of Modern Drama (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), pp. 37–79; Lawrence Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001). For a recent discussion of the vexed question of the relationship between liturgy and drama, see Michael Norton, Liturgical Drama and the Reimagining of Medieval Theater (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2017). 21 Bruce Holsinger, ‘Liturgy’, in Paul Strohm (ed.), Middle English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 295–314, at p. 298. 22 Sofer, Stage Life of Props, pp. 50–1. 23 Charlotte Scott, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 10. 24 Philip Grierson, Catalogue of the Byzantine Coins in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection and in the Whittemore Collection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), vol. 5, part 1, p. 89. 25 Höfele, ‘John Foxe, Christus Triumphans’, p. 136. 26 These are described in Eamonn Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 31. It is frustrating that we do not know where, in Brasenose College, this play was performed, but it is unlikely to have been the chapel, which at the time was very small and apparently lacked any permanent stone sepulchre: see J. M. Crook, Brasenose: The Biography of an Oxford College (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Crook writes that ‘Even allowing for the diminutive size of the college in those early days, this first chapel can never have been commodious … . It was a tiny sanctuary’ (p. 19), and that it was ‘little more than the upper chamber in a house of the early days of Christianity’ (p. 14). 27 See M. A. Katritzky, ‘Lucas van Leyden’s “Toothdrawer”, 1523: Passion Play Merchant Scenes and the Religious Origins of Quack Depictions’, in Birgit Ulrike Münch and Jürgen Müller (eds), Peiraikos’ Erbe: Die Genese der Genremalerei 1450–1550, Trierer Beiträge zu den historischen Kulturwissenschaften 14 (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2015), pp. 125–47. 28 For a discussion of the possible effects of the use of thuribles in performance, see Olivia Robinson and Elisabeth Dutton, ‘Drama, Performance and Touch in the Medieval Convent and Beyond’, in David Carillo-Rangel, Delfi I Nieto-Isabel, and Pablo Acosta García (eds), Touching, Devotional Practice and Visionary Experience in the Late Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 43–68. 29 For example, the Ludus Paschalis from the Abbey of Origny Ste Benoite indicates that the Apostles present the sudarium to all present, and the three Marys then kneel and kiss the sudarium.

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30 Matthew 27:66. Jerome, Biblia Sacra Vulgata, ed. Robertus Weber and Roger Gryson, 4th rev. edn (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007). 31 See Peter Meredith, ‘The Sealing of the Tomb: N. Town and its Context’, Medieval English Theatre 29 (2007), pp. 75–88. 32 These are the words of the Sibyl to Aeneas when he contemplates wall paintings showing the history of Troy. See Virgil’s Aeneid, VI.37. 33 In William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, Innogen mistakes the headless trunk of her attacker Cloten for the body of her husband, Posthumous, in one of the most famously problematic cases of mistaken identity in theatrical history.

10 Staging prophecy: A Looking Glasse for London and the Book of Jonah Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Hannibal Hamlin

Despite the commonplace notion that ‘by the time Shakespeare began to write plays, the biblical drama of medieval England had all but died’, biblical plays were popular on some London stages in the 1580s and 1590s.1 Though none of the following texts survive, theatrical records indicate public theatre plays about Job, Abraham and Lot, Esther and Ahasuerus, Nebuchadnezzar, Samson, Jephthah, Pontius Pilate, Tobias, Judas, and Joshua.2 There are also two surviving plays: George Peele’s The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe (printed 1599); and A Looking Glasse for London and England, the subject of this chapter. Biblical and religious plays were even more common outside London.3 Moreover, many biblical stories were also represented in puppet plays. For example, The Fall of Jerusalem was performed with puppets in Coventry in 1584, 1605, and 1614, while in Oxford in 1628 an epic puppet play staged diverse biblical episodes from Genesis to the Gospels.4 The Lord Admiral’s Men specialised in this kind of drama, Philip Henslowe’s diary constituting the only record for much of it. Yet the most popular play based on a biblical story was a property of Lord Strange’s Men, patronised by Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange.5 Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene’s A Looking Glasse for London and England had four performances at Henslowe’s Rose Theatre in 1592, though the scholarly consensus is that this was a revival of a play first performed several years earlier, perhaps in 1589.6 First printed in quarto in 1594, there were at least four further printings in 1598, 1602, c. 1605, and 1617. Excerpts from the play were included in the anthology Englands Parnassus, printed in 1600. The date of the 1605 quarto is speculative, however, since the title page of the only surviving copy is missing. Manuscript markings suggest that this was a prompt copy for a performance some time in the 1610s or 1620s, probably, as Martin Wiggins argues, by Prince Charles’s Men. The play may even have been

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performed in German in 1605, as Ein Comedia aus den Propheten Jona, by an English company in Nördlingen, since the subject of A Looking Glasse for London and England is indeed the Book of Jonah from the Hebrew Bible, with notable additions. This chapter analyses Looking Glasse’s adaptation of the biblical text, its pervasive use of allusion to other biblical texts, and the interpretations of Jonah that it reflects. Furthermore, it argues that in the staging of a biblical story and in its specific stagecraft, Looking Glasse is in continuity with earlier traditions of religious drama that may have had a longer life than literary history has often maintained. Given its immense influence in both the Jewish and Christian traditions, as well as the sheer amount of plot it packs in, the biblical Book of Jonah is surprisingly short. God calls Jonah to prophesy destruction to the city of Nineveh. Jonah balks at the instruction and attempts to flee by boarding a boat bound for Tarshish. When a ferocious storm blows up, the sailors fear that the gods must be angry. Finding Jonah asleep below deck, they cast lots that point to him as the source of divine anger. On the sailors’ demand, Jonah tells his story and asks that they cast him overboard. They try to make it to shore without this sacrifice, but finally they do throw Jonah into the sea, whereupon he is swallowed by a huge fish. Jonah prays to God from the belly of the fish, God hears him, and the fish vomits (in the literal Hebrew sense) Jonah out onto the land. Jonah goes to Nineveh, tells the people they will be overthrown in forty days, and the king and all the Ninevites immediately repent. God hears them and decides not to punish them, which outrages Jonah, seemingly because his prophecy has been undermined. Jonah asks God to kill him, but he does not. Jonah leaves Nineveh and sits down in the sun. God causes a plant to grow and give Jonah shade, but he then causes a worm to destroy the plant. Again Jonah prays to die, but God explains that the plant was a lesson: Jonah had pity for a mere plant but not for the 120,000 citizens of Nineveh, despite their repentance. The biblical story is already full of oddities, but Greene and Lodge add many more, developing the representation of the Ninevites and their manifold sins and wickednesses. The arrogant King Rasni has delusions of godhood, and (following the model of Jupiter and Juno) decides to marry his sister Remilia. She is struck by lightning, however, but Rasni’s counsellor Radagon suggests that the king console himself with Alvida, the wife of the King of Paphlagonia. To facilitate matters, she poisons her husband. Eventually, Alvida

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tires of Rasni and tries to seduce the King of Cilicia, though he resists her kisses and caresses. While the kings and queens are preoccupied with pride and lust, other characters are introduced to cover the remaining deadly sins. The counsellor Radagon contemptuously rejects his humble family; his mother curses him, and a flame shoots up and swallows him. Another scene includes a usurer and his debtors, as well as a corrupt judge and lawyer. A smith’s apprentice, later named Adam, makes love to his master’s wife, and when the master threatens punishment, the apprentice beats him instead. When a man in a devil costume enters, quite gratuitously, and decides to have some fun with the apprentice and his master’s wife, the unfazed apprentice also beats him. An earlier scene features drunken commoners and a murder, which Rasni considers investigating, but he is distracted by the play’s low comedy and Alvida’s poisoning of her husband. Threaded through all of this extra-biblical material is the familiar story of Jonah, with his attempted flight, the sailors, and the giant fish. After Jonas cries, ‘Repent ye men of Ninivie, repent. / There are but forty daies remaining, / And then shall Ninevie be ouverthrowne’ (H3.30–2), Rasni, Alvina, and the other Ninevites are immediately stricken with remorse and terror, the king proclaiming that ‘man and beast, the woman and her childe, / For fortie daies in sacke and ashes fast’ (H3v10–11).7 The prospect of livestock in sackcloth may seem peculiar, as it did to Martin Luther, who commented, ‘Sackcloth is strange clothing for beasts of burden.’ 8 Yet Lodge and Greene are in fact following one of the oddities of the biblical text, in which the King of Nineveh proclaims, ‘let man and beast put on sackecloth’, and orders that no food or drink be tasted by ‘man, nor beast, bullocke nor shepe’ (Jonah 3:8).9 The usurer then has a scene by himself, which is no surprise, given Lodge’s preoccupation with that particular sin; in 1585 he published the tract An Alarum Against Usurers. In his despair, the usurer is tempted by an evil angel, who offers him a knife and rope. The usurer hears a contrary voice, however, telling him that ‘the Lord / Is mercifull to those that do repent’ (H4.26–7). He sits down, as the stage direction tells us, ‘in sacke-cloathes, his hands / and eyes reared to heaven’ (H4.35–6). Alvida and her ladies enter, wailing for their sins. Rasni and his nobles enter soon after and join in the frenzy of contrition, after which everyone rushes to the temple to pray for mercy. Following the biblical original, Jonas is angry that no fire and brimstone are forthcoming, and he sits down under a vine,

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which is ‘swallowed by a serpent’. An angel appears to provide the moral: Thou hast compassion Jonas on a vine, On which thou never labour didst bestow, Thou never gavest it life or power to grow, But sodeinly it sprung, and sodeinly dide. And should not I have great compassion On Ninivie the Citie of the world, Wherein there are a hundred thousand soules, And twentie thousand infants that ne wot The right hand from the left, beside much cattle. (I2.15–23)

After another low comic scene, with the apprentice caught breaking the imposed penitential fast, Jonas addresses the king and his court, and Rasni makes an honest woman of Alvida. Everyone praises Israel’s God and vows to honour him, and Jonas closes the play with an epilogue directed to ‘You Islanders on whom the milder aire / Doth sweetly breath the balme of kinde increase’ (I4v2–3). ‘Repent, O London’, he then cries, concluding with an anti-Catholic prayer that England’s shepherd, obviously Queen Elizabeth, ‘may bide the pillar of [God’s] Church, / Against the stormes of Romish Antichrist’ (I4v25, 27–8). Another of Lodge and Greene’s additions to the Jonah story derives from elsewhere in the Bible. Well before the entrance of Jonas, an angel brings the prophet Oseas (Hosea) from Jerusalem to observe not only the Ninevites but Jonas as well. Oseas consistently, and anachronistically, draws attention to the lesson the action provides for London. ‘London take heed, these sinnes abound in thee’, he cries. ‘The poore complaine, the widowes wronged be’ (C.5–6). The support of the poor, especially widows (and orphans), is a constant preoccupation of other prophets, as Isaiah (1:17), Jeremiah (7:6, 22:3), Ezekiel (22:7), Zechariah (7:10), and Malachi (3:5) all proclaim. In the play, Jonas also laments that in Nineveh, ‘the widow wants relief, / The fatherlesse is wrongd by naked need’ (D4v15–16). Despite all of Lodge and Greene’s additions to the Book of Jonah, they do follow the biblical original closely in the episodes featuring Jonas himself. The play as a whole is also rich with allusions to other biblical passages, even in the extra-biblical scenes. Some of these allusions are relatively straightforward, while others are clearly ironic. When Rasni describes his future wedding to his sister-bride-to-be, for instance, boasting that ‘Tyre shall yeeld me tribute of her gold, / To make Remilias wedding glorious’ (A4v11–12),

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his language draws on Psalm 45, which describes a magnificent royal wedding; the Psalmist sings to his bride, ‘So shall the King have pleasure in thy beauty / And the daughter of Tyrus with the riches of the people shal do homage before thy face with presents. / The Kings daughter is all glorious within: her clothing is of broydered gold’ (Psalm 45:11–13). Later, Remilia describes her own beauty in similar terms. Her make-up is ‘costly paintings fetcht fro curious Tyre’, and she has made her ‘perfumes of the purest Myrre’ (Cv1, C.35). The myrrh points to other biblical texts, either the Song of Solomon or Proverbs. In the former, the lover sings, ‘Who is she that commeth up out of the wildernes like pillers of smoke perfumed with myrrh and incense, and with all the spices of the marchant?’ (Song of Solomon 3:6). Myrrh is also used as perfume in Proverbs, with the woman saying, ‘I have perfumed my bed with myrrhe, aloes, and cinnamon.’ The woman here is the harlot whose house ‘is the waie unto the grave, which goeth downe to the chambers of death’ (Proverbs 7:17, 27). Remilia is more like a harlot, especially given the Christian interpretation of the lover of the Song of Solomon as the Church (or even, as the Genevan marginal note for this verse indicates, ‘the Church of Israel’, reading the wilderness as that in which Israel wandered after the Exodus).10 Thus this is an ironic allusion, which radically undermines Remilia’s self-satisfaction for an alert Christian audience, particularly within a biblical play. At his first entrance, Jonas gives a long speech peppered with biblical language (including reference to the widows and orphans mentioned above). ‘Loe Israell once that flourisht like the vine, / Is barraine laide’, he states (D4v11–12). The comparison of Israel to a vine or vineyard is a biblical commonplace. In Psalm 80, for instance, the metaphor is used to describe God’s freeing of Israel from slavery: ‘Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt: thou hast cast out the heathen, and planted it’ (Psalm 80:8). Isaiah’s ‘song of my beloved to his vineyard’ develops the metaphor more extensively, with God planting and hedging it, but the vine produces only wild grapes and is thus trodden down (Isaiah 5:1–7). Other biblical references in Looking Glasse are more specific, as when Jonas describes ‘proud Leviathan’, borrowing the language of Job: Loe here the apparent witnesse of thy power, The proud Leviathan that scoures the seas, And from his nosthrils showres out stormy flouds, Whose backe resists the tempest of the winde, Whose presence makes the scaly troopes to shake With humble stresse of his broad opened chappes … (F3v23–8)

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God describes Leviathan similarly to Job, in order to demonstrate Job’s weakness and insignificance, though God’s power, by contrast, is signalled by his being able to draw up Leviathan with a hook: The maiestie of his scales is like strong shields, and are sure sealed … Out of his nostrelles cometh out smoke, as out of a boyling pot or caldron … He maketh the depth to boyle like a pot, and maketh the sea like a pot of ointment … (Job 41:6, 11, 22)

This speech is a good example of Lodge and Greene’s intertextual practice. There is no mention of Leviathan in Jonah, though the ‘great fish’ that swallows him was often described as a whale, and so was Leviathan, as in the Geneva Bible note to Job 41, which offers a moralising paraphrase: ‘If none dare stand against a whale, which is but a creature, who is able to compare with God the Creator?’ 11 Thus, importing some of Job into Jonah made a certain associative sense. A more ironic allusion appears in the apprentice Adam’s defence to the city officers, arguing that he is not breaking Rasni’s order to fast, since the beer he is drinking is just ‘a bit to comfort my stomacke’ (I3.22).12 Paul did write to Timothy that he should ‘Drinke no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomackes sake’, but he was hardly defending drunkenness, especially during fast days (1 Timothy 5:23). More darkly ironic is Radagon’s dismissal of his impoverished family, ‘I know you not’ (E2v29). This is not an unusual phrase for the wicked Radagon to use in the context, but (again) in a play so biblically resonant it inevitably alludes to a striking use in the parable of the wise and foolish virgins: the virgins are all waiting for the bridegroom, but the five foolish ones neglect to take oil with their lamps, and while they are out looking for some, the bridegroom arrives and takes in only the wise ones who remembered to bring oil. The foolish virgins arrive too late, beg entrance, and are answered brusquely, ‘I knowe you not’ (Matthew 25:12). The point is obviously not about lamps and oil, or marriage customs, but about salvation: be prepared, because you never know when your time will come. Since Radagon is damned on two counts – as a pre-Christian pagan and as a wicked counsellor – he is not, in the terms of the parable, the dismissive bridegroom but a foolish virgin, and thus his comment rebounds onto his own head. There is a further allusive layer here, since Jesus famously rejects his family too, though not with the identical words.

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In Matthew his mother and brothers arrive and wish to speak to him. When he is told about this, he says, ‘Who is my mother? Or who are my brethren?’ He explains, ‘whosoever shall do the wyll of my father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, sister, and mother’ (Matthew 12:46–50). Jesus’s point is not that he does not care about his immediate family but rather that he preaches a wider more inclusive sense of family. If Radagon’s rejection of his family recalls that of Jesus, the point is sharply contrastive, especially since Radagon is also denying his family basic charity; they are starving after his father Alcon is cheated out of his cow by the usurer (Samia, Radigon’s mother, complains, ‘No charitie within this citie bides’, E2.13). A reference to Jesus is of course anachronistic in pre-Christian Nineveh, but this would not have troubled a Christian audience, accustomed to interpret the Hebrew Bible in terms of its fulfilment in the New Testament. In fact, Jonah himself was understood to be a type of Christ, especially since it was Jesus who introduced this interpretation a few verses before his comments on his family: when Jesus is asked for a sign by certain of the scribes and Pharisees, he chastises them, complaining that ‘the evyll and adulterous generation seketh a signe, and there shall no signe be geven to it, but the signe of the prophete Jonas’. He goes on to interpret the sign: For as Jonas was three dayes, and three nyghtes, in the Whales belly: so shall the sonne of man be three dayes, and three nyghtes, in the heart of the earth. The men of Ninive shall ryse in the judgement, with this nation, and condemne it, because they repented at the preachyng of Jonas: and beholde, here [is] one greater then Jonas. (Matthew 12:38–40)

Reinforcing this typological interpretation for English Christians was the standard translation of Jonah’s prayer in the belly of the whale. In the play, Jonas exclaims, ‘In trouble Lord I called to thee, / Out of the belly of the deepest hell’ (F3v34–5), which follows the Bishops’ translation quite closely: ‘out of the belly of hell cryed I, and thou heardest my voyce’ (Jonah 2:2). The Hebrew translated here as ‘hell’ is she’ol, usually an underworld place for the shades of the dead like classical Hades, but figuratively it can also mean a place of exile or state of sin. Since Jonah is actually in the belly of the great fish, the figurative sense is surely most appropriate, yet for Christians ‘hell’ inevitably points to Jonah as proto-Christ. Jonah’s three days in the whale prefigure Christ’s ‘three dayes, and

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three nyghtes, in the heart of the earth’, i.e. Hell. In the popular tradition, if not in canonical scripture, this is when Christ harrows Hell, bursting its gates and leading forth the virtuous pagans, presumably including Jonah and the other prophets. So Jonas speaks better than he knows. But why do we need two prophets in this play? Of what use is Oseas? As Beatrice Groves points out, Paul draws on Hosea to argue for Christianity’s supersession of Israel in the divine plan. ‘For they are not all Israelites, which are of Israel,’ Paul writes. ‘Neither are they all children that are the seede of Abraham: But in Isaac shall thy seede be called’ (Romans 9:6–7).13 Paul is also open about his reliance on Hosea, continuing, ‘As he sayth also in Osee [Hosea]: I wyll call them my people, which were not my people: and her beloved, which was not beloved. And it shall come to passe, that in the place where it was sayde unto them: Ye are not my people, there shall they be called the chyldren of the lyvyng God’ (Romans 9:25–6). Hosea had prophesied, ‘And to them whiche were not my people, I wyll say, Thou art my people: and they shall say, Thou art my God’ (Hosea 2:23). These passages reflect one of the predominant interpretations of Jonah in the Reformation. In the biblical account, God gives Jonah his command, and ‘Jonas rose up to flee into Tharsis from the presence of the Lorde’ (Jonah 1:3). No explanation or motivation is provided, but many readers supplied one: Jonah was stubbornly resisting the transfer of the covenant from Israel to the Gentiles. In her extensive study of Jonah and its afterlives, Yvonne Sherwood describes this as one of four main trends in Christian interpretation, one which has its origins in Augustine but was popularised in the Reformation by Luther, who saw the Jonah story as, in her words, a ‘drama of the anachronisation and invalidation of Judaism by the advent of Christ’.14 As Jerome put it with admirable compression, ‘the foreskin believes, but the circumcision remains faithless’ (Gentiles have the faith that Jews lack, so they inherit the covenant).15 Both Sherwood and Groves show how this interpretation, which Sherwood labels ‘Jonah the Jew’, led Luther and some English Reformation preachers to vehement anti-Semitism. In On the Jews and their Lies, for example, Luther wrote of Hosea that ‘this work of wrath is proof that the Jews, surely rejected by God, are no longer his people, and neither is he any longer their God’.16 Thomas Tymme, translating Johannes Brenz, follows this line of interpretation in his Newes from Nineveh to England (1570), arguing that ‘Christ preferreth the Ninivets, before the Israelites, because the Ninivets repented at the one onelye

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sermon of Jonas, and Israelites woulde not be converted unto the Lord by many sermons.’ 17 In Looking Glasse, after the angel arrives and gives him his orders concerning Nineveh, Jonah of course decides to disobey, but here he does expound on his motivation:       I see, yea sighing, see How Israell sinnes, yet knowes the way of truth, And thereby growes the by-word of the world. How then should God in judgement be so strict, Gainst those who never heard or knew his power, To threaten utter ruine of them all? Should I report this judgement of my God, I should incite them more to follow sinne, And publish to the world my countries blame, It may not be, my conscience tells me no. (E.10–19)

This is not exactly ‘Jonah the Jew’. Jonas is concerned for Israel, but his argument is twofold: first, the Ninevites will hardly listen to him, because Israel, God’s chosen people, are themselves wicked sinners, which implies that God’s threats are empty, and second, this will add to Israel’s embarrassing international reputation. Jonas returns to these thoughts when God spares Nineveh: I pray thee Lord remember what I said, When I was yet within my country land, Jehovah is too merciful I fear. (I.v.26–9)

Jonas seems to feel exactly the same about Nineveh and Israel: neither people will repent and reform their ways as long as God is too lenient. Furthermore, Lodge and Greene have significantly rearranged biblical history. The story of Jonah takes place before the conquest of northern Israel by the Assyrians, allowing some interpreters to suppose that Nineveh is spared because of God’s plan to use it later as an instrument of his wrath.18 The play begins with Rasni boasting, ‘I have made Judeas Monarch flee the field, / And beat proud Jeroboam from his holds’ (A3.34–5), which makes Jonas’s behaviour all the more reasonable. After he is chastised by the lesson of the vine, Jonas returns to Nineveh, urges the king and his court to cast off their ‘mournfull weedes’, and blesses the marriage of Rasni and Alvida. Jonas’s final remarks are addressed neither to Nineveh nor Israel, but to London. Oseas too, despite his preoccupation in the Bible with the wickedness of Israel, focuses on London in the play. When he is taken off by

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the angel, after Jonas’s first prophesying to Nineveh, he is to ‘return to great Jerusalem, / And preach unto the people of thy God’ (H.8–9). But his speeches throughout the play are directed to London. Groves argues that ‘A Looking Glass for London and England foregrounds Jerusalem throughout’, that the emphasis is on the transfer of the covenant from Israel to England, and that a key source text for the play is Josephus’s Jewish War, which described the destruction of Jerusalem in 66 ce, and which was translated by Lodge along with the rest of Josephus’s works (first published in 1602).19 The case for the influence of Josephus is strong, but in truth Looking Glasse foregrounds the British capital rather more than Jerusalem, and the message of the play seems less about ‘the end of God’s covenant with the Jews’ than with the lesson Nineveh provides (and Jerusalem later will provide) for sinful London. Elizabethan English readers of Jonah focused on the warning Jonah offers (by analogy) to England. John Chardon, for example, preached a sermon at St Peter’s Church in Exeter on the end of the world, in which he warned his listeners about the lesson of Jonah: Beloved, we have bene warned to leave our surfetting, and dronkennesse, and to forsake the superfluous cares of this life. We have bene exhorted to watchfulnesse, and to prayer, and stil are we called upon for these matters: Howbeit wee are lyttle or nothing the better. The men of Ninive shall arise at the day of judgement to condemne us. For they amended at the short preaching of Jonas. We have bene called upon with often, and long preaching, and yet cannot frame to lay from us the old man, that marreth him selfe with deceivable vanities.20

This warning is repeated regularly during the decades prior to and following the first performances of Looking Glasse, as in Thomas Law’s A Most Rare and True Report (1585): Verily beloved, the men of Ninivie repented at the preaching of  Jonas with ashes and sackcloth, and turned unto the Lord, who had pittie and compassion on them: The Queene of the South shall arise against us in judgement, for she came to heare the wisedome of Salomon, and we have greater then Salomon, or Jonas, when the Lord himselfe admonisheth us by earth quakes, comets, and signes in the ayre … Let us I say repent, be watchfull, and vigilant that our Lord and saviour comming (like good stewards) we may make account of our lives, and be readie for the comming of our father, when he shall discend in his glorious majestie to judge both the quicke and the dead.21

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Obviously, not only do these writers think of their fellow citizens as being in the identical plight as the Ninevites, but they imagine themselves as latter-day Jonahs. As the Anglican clergyman Francis Kett writes, with scarcely veiled self-reference, ‘he hath sent you many a Jonas, to recall you to repentance, and to teach you his doctrine of salvation therefore turne to God, least that Nynivie rise in judgement against you’.22 Peter Lake and Michael Questier compare Looking Glasse to what they call Paul’s Cross Jeremiads, popular preaching of the sort represented by Chardon, and many of Hosea’s speeches from the balcony would have sounded entirely familiar to Elizabethan ears.23 Of course, as Lake and Questier also point out, the play is not just a sermon but an entertainment, a mixture of ‘the miraculously providential with the scurrilous, the perverse and the depraved’.24 Yet in this, the play follows its medieval precursors like The Second Shepherds’ Play, which juxtaposes low-comical sheep stealing with the Nativity, or indeed Doctor Faustus, which features an erotic vision of Helen of Troy and slapstick scenes in the Vatican as well as good and evil angels and debates about sin and salvation. Moreover, Lodge and Greene’s debt to the longer tradition of biblical and religious drama is evident not just in its generic and tonal mixture but in its stagecraft. For example, the angels which appear at various points to transport Oseas, instruct Jonas, and tempt the Usurer must have looked much like those familiar from the mystery plays. The York Mercers’ Indenture of 1433 includes among its props list for The Last Judgement ‘ii pair of angel wings with iron in the ends’, just what would have been needed for Looking Glasse.25 The Indenture also lists a hell mouth, essential for a Judgement play, and for the end of Doctor Faustus, when Faustus is dragged down to Hell. Henslowe’s diary (and it was at Henslowe’s Rose Theatre that Doctor Faustus was staged) also includes a hell mouth among the inventory.26 No one is dragged to Hell in Looking Glasse, except perhaps for Radagon, if that is how we interpret his being swallowed up by fire from below, presumably from the trapdoor in the stage. Yet it seems highly likely that a hell mouth would have been adapted for use as the mouth of the whale, when Jonas is cast out of its belly. This would make practical sense if a hell mouth was on hand, but it also makes interpretive sense. For one thing, the hell mouth was traditionally represented in religious art as the mouth of an enormous demonic beast. There are many examples of sinners being swallowed up by such mouths in medieval manuscripts, and such scenes were commonly painted on church walls, like the one in Stratford’s Guild Chapel, which

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Shakespeare’s father was charged with whitewashing over. Some of these Last Judgement paintings may have survived long into the sixteenth century, and images carved on medieval cathedrals (as at Norwich, Lincoln, and Worcester) certainly did. Thus, adapting a hell mouth to a whale’s mouth may have required little imagination. More than this, though, the whale’s mouth in the Jonah story actually was a hell mouth, in a special sense, given the traditional yoking of Jonah’s three days in the whale and Christ’s ‘three days’ in Hell. This parallel is reinforced by Jonah’s apparent description of the whale’s interior as ‘the belly of the deepest hell’, as quoted above. Furthermore, ‘Jonah and Jesus as typological twins’ is another of Sherwood’s categories of mainstream Christian interpretation, along with ‘Jonah the Jew’, ‘Divine disciplinary devices’ (Calvin and others), and ‘Cataloguing the monstrous’ (the post-Darwinian effort to categorise the great fish and align the biblical and scientific).27 Sherwood represents these as more or less chronological, with the Church Fathers favouring typology, Reformation preachers emphasising discipline, anti-Semitism coming to the fore in the Enlightenment, and scientific efforts in the nineteenth century. All of these interpretations were afoot in the sixteenth century, however, and at least two, the typological and the disciplinary, are represented in Looking Glasse.28 If props and stage effects – the whale/hell mouth, the (presumably winged) angels, the fire from below, and lightning from above, as well as a threatening hand with a flaming sword appearing out of a cloud29 – signal a continuity of Looking Glasse’s stagecraft with earlier religious drama, another traditional element is both more surreptitious and more surprising. In A Looking Glasse for London, God is not only named but seemingly represented on stage. It is technically (according to stage directions) an angel which appears to both Oseas and Jonas, but there are at least two instances where the angel does more than simply convey the divine word. In Jonah, there is notably no angel, and the communication is directly between God and the prophet. The book begins, ‘The worde of the Lorde came unto Jonas the sonne of Amittai, saying: Aryse, and go to Ninive that great citie, and crye against it’ (Jonah 1:1). The headnote summary in the Geneva Bible makes this clearer, stating that ‘God gave him expresse charge to go, and denounce his judgements against Niniveh.’ 30 In A Looking Glasse, the angel’s first words to Jonah indicate the same speaker, i.e. God: Amithais sonne, I charge thee muse no more, (I am) hath power to pardon and correct, To thee pertains to do the Lords command. (D4v27–9)

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The play’s stage direction and speech prefix designate an angel, but would this be clear to the audience? The reference to God’s power and command could be statements by the angel, but God refers to himself in the third person all the time, as in the opening of Hosea, when he says to the prophet, ‘Go, take unto thee a wife of fornications, and chyldren of fornications: for the lande hath committed great fornication departing from the Lord’ (Hosea 1:2). Moreover, the so-called angel strikingly uses the name God gives himself, ‘(I am)’, which is further marked off in the printed text by being enclosed in parentheses. This usage may be unique among Elizabethan plays, as Groves suggests, but it was also used in printed non-dramatic works, albeit somewhat later than Looking Glasse. Theodore Herring, for instance, writes that in ‘regards of his Nature’, God ‘is ever (I am)’, while Thomas Adams, explaining God’s self-naming, states that ‘This (I Am) is an eternal word, comprehending three times; that was, that is and is to come.’ 31 The source of this usage is Exodus, where God names himself to Moses, saying, ‘I am that I am. And he said: This shalt thou say unto the chyldren of Israel, I am, hath sent me unto you’ (Exodus 3:14). This is not really a name at all, however, but rather simply a statement of being, and as Adams notes, the Hebrew verb has a temporal flexibility unavailable in English, so that this statement of God’s being is not just present tense, but past and future as well. Later believers seemed reluctant to take God at his word, and expanded the Tetragrammaton (the four Hebrew letters that mean ‘I am that I am’) to forms that look more like proper names: Yahweh or Jehovah. Pronouncing God’s name is forbidden in Jewish tradition, and even in some printed early modern plays, empty parentheses were used to designate God’s name, but these date from after or just before the 1606 blasphemy law.32 This is not the same usage as in Looking Glasse, where the parentheses signal not an omission, but a very special iteration of the name of God. The second instance of the blurring of identity between the angel and the God that he is supposed to represent comes later in the play, when the angel comes to explain to Jonas the lesson of the withered vine. As in the passage quoted above, the angel shifts to the first person: And should not I have great compassion On Ninivie the Citie of the world, Wherein there are a hundred thousand soules … (I2.19–21)

Surely it is God’s compassion, not the angel’s, which is at stake here? Furthermore, the angel has just asked Jonas if he is angry,

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and Jonas replies, ‘Yes I am angry to the death, my God’ (I2.14). The word ‘angel’ is never spoken in the play, and even if the character is wearing wings, Jonas seems to think he is talking to God, rather than God’s messenger. Are Lodge and Greene, even surreptitiously, putting God himself on the public stage in the 1580s and 1590s? It seems so. Modern readers might think of Lodge and Greene’s A Looking Glasse for London and England as a curious anachronism on the stage of the Rose Theatre in 1592, and even more so if it was performed into the seventeenth century: the plot is overtly biblical, starring no fewer than two Old Testament prophets, and even beyond the main Jonah story the text is replete with biblical allusions, the elaborate and spectacular stagecraft seems drawn from one of the mystery cycles, and God himself seems to appear on stage, though not as an old man with a white beard. The play must have been a terrific entertainment, and the many reprintings of the play testify to its popularity among readers in addition to playgoers. But there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of its moral intent. The spectators surely enjoyed the bursts of fire and lightning, but they probably also took seriously the warnings of Oseas and Jonas, just as they did those of the popular preachers at the St Mary Spital and Paul’s Cross. The audiences for such open-air sermons numbered in the thousands, after all, and sermons rivalled playbooks as some of the most popular printed literature of the period. Religion was at the centre of Elizabethan life, and this was as true for playgoers as it was for church congregants. They were often, in fact, one and the same. It is no real surprise, then, that biblical and religious subjects continued to be popular on the London stage long after the major mystery cycles were suppressed in the 1570s. The dramas of Kyd, Marlowe, and Shakespeare were indeed biblically allusive, but biblical plays of a more direct kind were simultaneously being staged through the 1590s and possibly even later, even if the loss of most of the play-texts has tended to skew literary and theatrical history. Notes 1 Jeffrey Knapp’s formulation, in Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 1, who mentions only Looking Glasse and David and Bethsabe. See also Annaliese Connolly, ‘Peele’s David and Bethsabe: Reconsidering Biblical Drama of the Long 1590s’, Special Issue, Early Modern Literary Studies 16 (October 2007), 9.1–20, at 1–9, and Chapter 8 in this volume.

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2 Manuscripts of two Job plays, Robert Greene’s The History of Job and a Tragedy of Job by an author named Good, apparently survived into the eighteenth century, in the collection of Thomas Warburton, but they were burned by his cook. W. W. Greg, ‘The Bakings of Betsy’, The Library 3rd series II (1911), pp. 225–59. Greg doubted the story, but for a different view, see John Freehafer, ‘John Warburton’s Lost Plays’, Studies in Bibliography 23 (1970), pp. 154–64. 3 Paul Whitfield White, Drama and Religion in English Provincial Society, 1485–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 4 Margaret Rogerson, ‘English Puppets and the Survival of Religious Theatre’, Theatre Notebook 52.2 (1998), pp. 91–111. 5 The Stationers’ Register entry in 1593/94 does not mention a company, and W. W. Greg argued that the play must originally have belonged to the Queen’s Men. This is conclusively refuted by Lawrence Manley and Sally-Beth MacLean, Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2014), pp. 101–2. 6 Martin Wiggins, in association with Catherine Richardson, British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue, Vol. II, 1567–1589 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 470–4. The information in the rest of this paragraph derives from Wiggins. 7 Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene, A Looking Glasse for London and England: A Critical Edition, ed. George A. Clugston (New York and London: Garland, 1980). All citations will be from this edition, which uses a combination of signature and line numbers, so references should also be easy to locate in the 1594 text. In quotations from early texts, i/j and u/v have been normalised and contractions expanded. Characters in the play will be named as they are there (Jonas, Oseas) to make it easy to distinguish them from their biblical counterparts (Jonah, Hosea). 8 Martin Luther, ‘Lecture on Jonah’, cited in Yvonne Sherwood, A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 22. 9 Unless otherwise indicated, all biblical quotations are from the 1568 Bishops’ Bible, The. holie. Bible conteynyng the olde Testament and the newe (London: Richard Jugge, 1568). The case for Lodge and Greene’s reliance on the Bishops’ Bible translation, rather than the more popular Geneva Bible, was first made by Robert A. Law, ‘“A Looking Glasse” and the Scriptures’, Studies in English 19 (1939), pp. 31–47. Not all of Law’s examples of allusions are equally persuasive in this regard, but the best case is in the play’s spelling of various biblical and historical names. 10 Note to Song of Solomon 3:6, The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, intro. Lloyd E. Berry (1969; rpt. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007), fol. 281r. 11 Note to Job 41:1, The Geneva Bible, fol. 234r. 12 Adam’s name may itself be a biblical allusion, if we remember the common use of ‘the curse of the olde Adam’ for original sin, as here in

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William Lawne’s An abridgement of the Institution of Christian religion written by M. Jhon Caluin ([London]: Thomas Vautrollier, 1585), p. 154. 13 Beatrice Groves, ‘ “They repented at the preaching of Ionas: and beholde, a greater than Ionas is here”: A Looking Glass for London and England, Hosea and the Destruction of Jerusalem’, in Adrian Streete (ed.), Early Modern Drama and the Bible (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 139–55, at p. 151. 14 Sherwood, Biblical Text, pp. 1–48. 15 Jerome, In Ionam, cited in Sherwood, A Biblical Text, p. 16. 16 Cited in Groves, “ ‘They repented’ ”, p. 151. 17 Newes from Ninive to Englande, brought by the prophete Jonas which newes in plainlye published in the godly and learned exposition of Maister John Brentius folowing, translated out of Latine into Englishe by Thomas Tymme minister (London: Henrie Denham, 1570), sig. A5r. 18 Sherwood, Biblical Text, pp. 19–21, 121–8. Even a Christian like Jerome can describe Jonah as a ‘patriot’, trying to preserve Israel. Jewish midrashists sympathise with Jonah all the more powerfully. 19 Groves, “ ‘They repented’ ”, p. 142. 20 John Chardon, A sermon preached in S. Peters Church in Exeter the 6. day of December last (London: Thomas Dawson, 1580), fols. 29v–30r. 21 Thomas Law, A most rare and true report, of such great tempests, straunge sightes, and wonderfull accidents, which happened by the providence of God, in Hereford shire, at a place called the Hay, and there abouts (London: Thomas Law, 1585), sig. A3v. 22 Francis Kett, The glorious beautifull garland of mans glorification (London: Robert Ward, 1585), sig. G3r. 23 Peter Lake, with Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 361–8. 24 Lake and Questier, Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, p. 365. 25 ‘The York Mercers’ Indenture [11 June 1433]’, in Christina M. Fitzgerald and John T. Sebastian (eds), The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2013), pp. 138–9. 26 Jim Casey, ‘Shakespeare’s Spirits: Staging the Supernatural on the Early Modern Stage’, in Annalisa Castaldo and Rhonda Knight (eds), Stage Matters: Props, Bodies, and Space in Shakespearean Performance (Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson, 2018), pp. 35–56, 38. 27 Sherwood, Biblical Text, pp. 11, 21, 32, 42. 28 Even the scientific approach appears centuries before Darwin. In Batman uppon Bartholome, Stephen Batman’s 1582 translation, enlargement of, and commentary on Bartholomeus Anglicus’s thirteenth-century compendium of knowledge ‘On the Properties of Things’, there is a long chapter, ‘Of Fish’, that cites Jonah as a source for the potentially vast size of some fish. Stephen Batman, Batman uppon Bartholome his booke De proprietatibus rerum (London: Thomas East, 1582), fol. 199r.

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29 Lawrence Manley argues that Lord Strange’s Men were specialists in various kinds of fire effects: ‘Playing with Fire: Immolation in the Repertory of Strange’s Men’, Early Theatre 4 (2001), pp. 115–29. 30 Headnote to Jonah, Geneva Bible, fol. 373r. 31 Theodore Herring, The triumph of the Church over water and fire (1625), p. 8; Thomas Adams, The happiness of the church (London: G. F. for John Grismand, 1618), p. 229 (second book of two books numbered separately). 32 Groves, “ ‘They repented’ ”, p. 141.

11 Early modern dramatic martyrdom

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Monika Fludernik

Biblical drama in early modern England seems to have been more prevalent than used to be assumed (see Chapter 8), yet there are only a few extant texts, the most prominent of which in the early seventeenth century are Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene’s A Looking Glasse for London and George Peele’s The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe (respectively discussed in Chapters 10 and 4 in this book). The present contribution therefore takes a more indirect approach to the subject of enacting the Bible in early modern English drama, paralleling Chapter 7 above, on John Heywood’s The Pardoner and the Friar. My focus will be martyrdom in early modern drama in England. Not only is the tradition of representing martyrdom clearly based on Christ’s Passion; moreover, as Alice Dailey has reminded us, the Bible also includes the episode of the Jews martyred under Antiochus in Maccabees 2.6–7.1 In fact, Dailey sees two traditions of martyrdom affecting Elizabethan controversialist hagiography, namely that of the imitatio Christi (based on the Bible and the saints’ legends) and that of the Corpus Christi plays (see Chapters 1 and 3). In this chapter I will discuss the representation of martyrdom in seventeenth-century English drama. As is well known, the English Renaissance was a period of extensive religious persecution, which resulted in huge numbers of deaths owing to executions and imprisonment. Under Henry VIII, Queen Mary, and Queen Elizabeth, Protestants and Catholics were in turn put to death and became glorified as martyrs by their co-religionists. As Susannah Brietz Monta2 shows, those burned at the stake saw themselves as re-enacting Christ’s Passion and the martyrdom of the saints; this link to the legendary literature and the story of Christ3 remained a strong influence on the narrativisation of these deaths in witness accounts that were later collected by the Protestant John Foxe in his Actes and Monuments (1563, 1570).4 Similarly, those Catholics who suffered as traitors under Queen

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Elizabeth I were keen to asseverate their martyrological credentials in the tradition of saints’ lives, as well as in the hagiographical literature about Thomas More, Bishop John Fisher, and the Carthusian monks. In this chapter I want to look at three dramatic representations of martyrdom, which I consider to be ultimately based on the template of Christianity as a religion that had its roots in confrontation with persecution. While martyrdom was a fact of life for an Elizabethan public, the literature of the early modern period, paradoxically, contains very little material that depicts religious martyrdom. Two plays that are usually mentioned here are Thomas Dekker’s and Philip Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr (performed 1620, published 1622) and John Dryden’s Tyrannick Love (performed 1669, published 1670). A text that has, however, received little critical attention so far is William Rowley’s A Shoemaker, A Gentleman (performed around 1618, published 1637), and it is this play on which I will primarily focus. The absence of martyrdom on stage is particularly surprising, given the prevalent violence in early modern theatre. In view of the volatile religious state policies from the 1530s to the 1550s,5 the presentation of a plot of religious persecution and death for one’s religious beliefs seems to have been thought too risky.6 However, this is not necessarily a convincing explanation. Certainly, a play about Catholic martyrs under Mary and – more likely one about Nicholas Ridley or Hugh Latimer under Elizabeth – could have been performed. Seeing that very sensitive political issues could be addressed in Shakespeare’s history plays, the strategy of choosing a plot taken from Antiquity or the Middle Ages should have been perfectly feasible, and one needs to ask why this possibility was neglected. Overall, it seems to be the case that the focus in drama was largely political and patriotic. Moreover, at least under Elizabeth, national identity came to be equated with the Anglican Church to the extent that religion was perceived as an identity marker for English national self-assertion or was manipulatively presented in this manner. By selling the Church of England as Englishness, the various strands of religious groups that were in disagreement, if not at war, with one another, could be placated and unified under a common banner. It is perhaps no coincidence that the plays by Dekker and Massinger, and by Rowley, were composed under the reign of James I, before national unity suffered a decisive shipwreck when the political consensus broke down under Charles I.

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There are four sections to my discussion. First, I will provide a brief summary of the typical features of hagiographic representations of martyrdom in non-dramatic legendaries and early modern texts. Secondly, I will summarise the strategies employed in the plays I have named. Thirdly, I will discuss Rowley’s A Shoemaker, A Gentleman and its idiosyncratic choices, before going on to summarise my argument. The representation of martyrdom: templates for hagiographical narratives Saints’ lives are traditionally dependent on the existence of miracles. To be accepted as a Catholic saint requires a long process of canonisation, including the authentication of the miracles that the saint has performed, documented to have occurred at death, at the tomb, or in connection with the saint’s relics. This long-drawn-out process of canonisation establishes whether a person can or cannot be declared a saint.7 Martyrdom therefore is not a necessary or sufficient criterion to turn someone into a saint; even Sir Thomas More’s canonisation was not officially acknowledged until 1935. In the legendaries, the prototypical saint’s martyrdom follows a script consisting of a recurrent sequence of episodes. (I here concentrate on the model of early Christianity, with an emphasis on virgin martyrs.) The story of martyrdom centrally revolves around persecution for one’s faith, a clash with worldly authorities (pagan rulers, frequently identified with Mahound or Islam, or with the Devil), a debate between the saint and secular authority on the topic of belief (with the saint’s refusal to give up the Christian faith), followed by the saint’s torture and eventual execution. The two centrepieces of this plotline are: (1) the antagonistic debate between the Christian subject and his or her opponent, the representative of the pagan religion; and (2) the sequence of useless tortures whose intended effect (to force the Christian to recant) is foiled by the martyr’s steadfast patience in suffering, and sometimes by God’s intervention (e.g. when St Catherine’s wheel is broken by divine agency). The saint’s death often constitutes an anti-climax, since the pagan ruler has been unable to hurt the saint in the course of the series of exquisite tortures which he ordered, but then the saint’s head can be cut off with a sword.8 The purpose of the paradigmatic saint’s legend can be linked to two strategic effects on the audience. On the one hand, the legend depicts the Christian triumph over paganism, which is equivalent

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to God’s triumph over the Devil and/or sin, by demonstrating the untouchability of the saint’s body (especially when we are dealing with virgin martyrs). The resistance of the saint is figured in the flesh, which becomes the page on which the pagan tyrant tries to inscribe his power and which repels that attempt through God’s grace (the saint’s body remains unharmed). Similarly, by evincing superhuman endurance and the ability to withstand torture (again through divine intercession), the martyr’s body becomes a battlefield on which the pagan antagonist loses against the Christian subject and does so, paradoxically, by imposing suffering on this body. Since the saint refuses to (re)convert to paganism and the tyrant is thus unable to impose his will on the saint, the ostensible triumph of the pagan ruler is sapped. Thus the execution becomes not an index of success but of failure – the martyr has frustrated the tyrant’s will and is put to death to end the tyrant’s repeated discomfiture and humiliation, which have compromised him in the eyes of his followers. The didactic effect of the scenario is that God is more powerful than either the Devil or paganism. The second aspect that deserves mention concerns the martyrdom’s effect on bystanders and audience. In the saint’s legend, the triumphant suffering and death of the martyr leads to conversions of prominent individuals or witnesses to the martyrdom – an effect that can also be observed in Elizabethan England.9 The actual audience of the legend was, therefore, not merely confirmed in their faith, but also interpellated to adopt an active role in the propagation of the Christian religion. By contemplating the suffering patience and fortitude of the saints, the contemporary readers or listeners could envisage themselves in a similar situation and thus feel encouraged to defend their beliefs, even under the threat of bodily harm or death. As Brad S. Gregory10 outlines in great detail, the possibility of becoming a martyr was an ever-present reality in the minds of Protestants and Catholics from the fifteenth century onwards. While the saints represent the Church triumphant, conveying an image of imperturbability under suffering and a strident engagement with the pagan ruler in a battle of wit and perseverance, the biblical model of Christ in his Passion emphasises the Saviour’s status as God become man and thus foregrounds Christ’s humanity and human frailty or vulnerability.11 Texts utilising the imitatio Christi tradition therefore tend to dwell on Jesus’s fear of death, despite His resolution to perform the will of His Father. A particularly impressive instance of this strategy of humanising Christ can be observed in Sir Thomas More’s De Tristitia Christi: ‘For a

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huge mass of troubles took possession of the tender and gentle body of our most holy Savior. He knew that His ordeal was now imminent and just about to overtake Him.’ 12 It is this emphasis on human fallibility which Alice Dailey also ascertains in many of the deaths at the stake narrated in Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.13 While the plays that thematise martyrdom are rare in England during the period before the Civil War, on the Continent there was an extensive dramatic literature dwelling on saints’ lives, with major authors like Corneille producing plays on that theme.14 The martyr plot on stage connects to the Counter-Reformation and Jesuit dramatic propaganda in the seventeenth century. As Anne Dillon15 shows, the Catholic reaction to Foxe’s Actes and Monuments reached its apogee in the hagiographic oeuvre of Robert Parsons’ Treatise of Three Conversions (1603–04), which focused on establishing a continuity between the traditional hagiography and the persecution of Catholics in England, the Netherlands, and France. In this historical reconstruction, More, Fisher, and the Carthusian monks finally received their due (having remained comparatively neglected in the sixteenth century) and were added to a revised calendar of saints’ feast days.16 The Counter-Reformation also responded to Protestant visual indoctrination in Foxe’s Actes and Monuments by, in its turn, producing several series of prints explaining and lamenting the cruelties committed against Catholics in England and on the Continent. Dillon17 devotes two chapters to this propaganda, concentrating on the murals in Douai18 and the engravings by Richard Verstegan (formerly Rowlands, c. 1548–1640), especially Praesentis Ecclesiae Anglicanae typus (Reims, 1582), Descriptiones quaedam illius inhumanae et multiplicis persecutionis, quam in Anglia propter fidem sustinent Catholicè Christiani (1583–84) and Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum nostri temporis (1592).19 Dillon also includes engravings by Giovanni Battista de Cavalleriis (1526–97) from his Ecclesiae Anglicanae Trophaea (1584). These prints, with their textual appendices that explain in detail what the engravings represent, highlight not only the barbarity of the persecutors, but also the direct link of their victims’ sufferings with the biblical model of Christ’s Passion. Thus, for the CounterReformation, the arrest of crypto-Catholics and Jesuits is likened to Judas’s betrayal (Mark 3:16–19; 14:10) by pointing to servants who denounce their masters, while their transfer to prison on horses without saddles, with feet bound underneath the horses’ bellies and hands fettered behind their backs, recall both the humiliations of Jesus (John 19:1–6) and His entering Jerusalem on a colt (Luke

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19:35). What is more, the whipping of Catholics and the clipping off and burning of their ears invoke not merely the scourging of Jesus, but also the cutting off of the servant’s ear in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 26:50). Most importantly, the use of the rack and the Elizabethan mode of execution for traitors are visualised expressly in a manner recalling the Crucifixion and the squabbling of the soldiers over Christ’s garments (John 19:24) in the traditional iconography of the Crucifixion. Many of the plates include graphic depictions of the saints’ bodies being mutilated by the executioners in visual constellations that recall the soldiers’ intentions towards Jesus’s garments at the foot of the Cross.20 Dillon also points out that one of the most distressing consequences of Protestant hagiography for English Catholics was its appropriation of English medieval saints from the Legenda aurea for the construction of a history of the Christian religion which eliminated the papacy from the historical record. Foxe relied on John Bale for such a ‘non-Roman, non-papal foundation’ 21 of the history of the British (Protestant) Church, with its subtle nationalist revision of Catholic (kat-holic) notions of martyrdom.22 For British Catholics, this new orthodoxy of the history of martyrdom risked marginalising them and their saints (like Becket and More). It was Robert Parsons who tried to counter this Englishing of the history of Christianity by integrating the Catholic martyrs into a new saints’ calendar, and by reverting to More’s notions of Protestant pseudomartyrdom, justifying Marian executions of Protestants as legitimate procedure to preserve the unity of the Christian religion.23 These controversialist debates, designed to heal the denominational split in Christianity, resulted in exacerbating mutual hatred and stubborn refusal to compromise, with the rift becoming permanent and unbridgeable. Thus the break-up of Christianity into numerous subdivisions of diverse Protestant denominations was rendered inevitable by the failure of Catholics to re-Catholicise England and to stem the tide of centrifugal forces unleashed by England’s opportunist adoption of Protestantism as a state religion and political ideology. Martyrdom on the early modern stage I now turn to the two better-known plays: Dekker and Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr and Dryden’s Tyrannick Love.24 Dekker and Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr (1620) is set in the Roman Empire, with no explicit connection with England. It has been argued that

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this play takes the name of the Roman Emperor Maximinus from Rowley (it should have been Maximianus).25 Yet despite being influenced by Rowley’s play A Shoemaker, A Gentleman (c. 1618), this drama (as will be seen) is much closer to Dryden’s play, which was in fact modelled on it. Furthermore, The Virgin Martyr is simple in its stark opposition between good and evil, comparable to plays performed in the late seventeenth century – including Dryden’s Tyrannick Love.26 According to Julia Gasper,27 Dekker and Massinger’s play can be read as a direct political intervention into the Thirty Years War in Bohemia, with the Holy Roman Empire and Catholic persecution of Bohemian Protestants allegorised as Romans versus Christians.28 From that perspective, the play could be argued to have direct biblical resonance (Romans versus Christians). The Virgin Martyr concentrates on Dorothea and her effect of destabilising the political system. The antagonistic struggle between Christianity and paganism is fought out between Theophilus and Antoninus’s father Sapritius on the one hand, and Dorothea on the other. As J. Hwang Degenhardt29 has shown, conversion plays a central role in the play, for instance in reference to Theophilus’s daughters, who are caught in the political toils of the system and end up martyrs with Dorothea. The warrior hero Antoninus is a figure of mediation and catalysation. He is in love with Dorothea and therefore turns down the offer of political advancement through marriage to Dioclesian’s daughter Artemia. Antoninus, like the ‘slave’ from ‘Brittaine’ (IV.i.151–2) who had refused to ravish Dorothea, converts and is slain. Finally, the conversion of Theophilus happens in unconventional manner since it is produced not directly by Dorothea’s example, but by the miracle of the fruit that Angelo tenders to him and whose consumption has the miraculous effect of making him believe in Christianity. As a consequence, he offers himself up to the Roman judiciary as a martyr sacrifice and in order to punish himself for his former crimes against Christianity. Theophilus thus echoes the conversion of Saulus in the Bible (Galatians 1:16; Acts 9:4–5). Dryden’s verse play Tyrannick Love; or, The Royal Martyr can be read as a variant on his heroic drama, improving on the typical love-versus-duty conflict in the figures of the tyrant Maximin and his wife Berenice (who stolidly abides by her hated marriage, despite her love for Porphyrius), as well as in Porphyrius himself (torn between loyalty to Maximin and love for Berenice). Dryden’s play inserted itself into a revival of the drama of martyrdom, influenced

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particularly by the comedy L’Amour tyrannique of Georges de Scudéry (1639). M. E. Novak lists several parallels between the two plays. Dryden’s play was extremely successful: If Tyrannick Love had a startling initial success, it was because Maximin outdid Catiline and Cethegus [from The Conquest of Granada] in his defiance of religion and morality, because Berenice was even more strictly concerned with her gloire and virtue than earlier heroines had been, because Saint Catherine represented chastity endangered by a brutal lust, because Nell Gwynn spoke an amazing epilogue, because the scenic and operatic effects of the fourth act surpassed anything seen up to that time on the English stage, and because the play was written in rhyme by England’s poet laureate and foremost exponent of the rhymed heroic play.30

One may want to speculate on Dryden’s sympathy for Catholicism, implicit in the play. Though the initial debate between the priest Apollonius and the captive queen Catherine in Act II outlines the more respectable or moral and less permissive nature of Christianity in comparison with Roman beliefs, their basic compatibility seems to suggest a closer approximation and therefore to imply an analogy with Protestantism and Catholicism.31 Anti-Catholic discourse would, of course, have identified the Romans with the Catholic Church and Catherine’s Christianity with Puritan virtue and stricter religious performance. Yet, given the historical source, the tyranny of Maximin represents paganism, and St Catherine persecuted Christianity; the depiction of the ‘Roman Church’ could very well be read allegorically as a critique of hypocritical Anglicanism. These ambivalences would have helped to make the play palatable to a British audience, especially in the context of several contemporaneous dramatic efforts to stage martyrdom. Dryden’s reworking of The Virgin Martyr complicates the straightforward hagiographic tale of Dekker and Massinger, which had used typical legendary material in depicting the sexual threat to the virgin protagonist. Dryden puts the emphasis on the tyrant’s illicit love for the captive queen; Maximin is motivated not only by greed, cruelty, and pride but by an overpowering sexual drive that turns into hatred when spurned by the chaste Catherine. The play extensively engages with the theme of power politics and the realities of government rather than merely concentrating on religious persecution. Dryden sets up numerous parallels among different groups of characters, thereby providing contrasts between good and evil, strong and weak characters. The constellation of Antoninus

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in love with Dorothea is rewritten into Porphyrius’s battle between love and loyalty. What is more, the relatively unimportant role of the emperor’s daughter Artemia in The Virgin Martyr turns into a major plot element in Tyrannick Love, which elaborates on Valeria’s love for Porphyrius and her sacrificial behaviour. She thus becomes a pagan counterfoil to St Catherine. Berenice, in her turn, represents virtue in adverse circumstances. She is able to conquer her love interest – a requirement of heroic drama – and decides to support her unloved and tyrannical husband. She even prevents his assassination, which would have opened the way for her freedom and the possibility of becoming Porphyrius’s wife and his queen. From the legend of St Catherine, Dryden takes the theological debate between the saint and the pagan scholars. Yet unlike the traditional legendary literature, this episode is given only brief exposure – Apollonius’s defeat by Catherine happens too quickly and hence strikes one as rather unconvincing; more generally, Catherine’s argumentation is presented in surprisingly cavalier fashion (Act II). Where Dryden significantly rewrites the plot of the hagiographic record is in the introduction of Catherine’s mother who, though a Christian, is terribly afraid of torture and death, and pleads for Catherine’s latitudinarian acceptance of the Emperor’s hand in marriage. Extensive space is given to the conflict between mother and daughter, which reprises the secular conflict between Berenice and Porphyrius. The arrival of the angel who destroys the wheel resolves the situation. This direct miraculous intercession can be seen as a variation on the fruit that Angelo delivers to Theophilus in The Virgin Martyr, but it also takes up the motif of divine involvement in human affairs depicted in Dryden’s angelic intervention earlier in Act IV. Dekker and Massinger depict the servants Hircius and Spungius as opportunistic villains,32 and contrast the devil Harpax with the guardian angel Angelo. By contrast, Dryden rewrites the morality play of The Virgin Martyr into a scenario of necromancy, with the priest Apollonius operating as a magician who tries to influence Catherine’s virtuous resolve. The angel’s intervention foils the effect of magic; moreover, it underlines the existence of supernatural powers, thereby implicitly identifying the magician and his magic as satanic. One of the reasons why Dryden’s play has received such minimal critical appreciation in recent decades may lie, precisely, in its conjoining of his analysis of power politics in the mode of heroic drama with a religious worldview featuring miracles, angels, and supernatural interventions in this world.

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A Shoemaker, A Gentleman: rewriting Deloney and Dekker Rowley’s A Shoemaker, A Gentleman belongs to the tradition of rewriting history from an English perspective for nationalist or patriotic purposes. The critical consensus proposes that the play was written during the reign of James I and in close proximity to The Virgin Martyr. One of the major distinguishing features of this play is that it presents a (fake) history of England, employing very similar strategies and motifs to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (written and performed in 1610/11, published in the First Folio in 1623). A Shoemaker, A Gentleman is based primarily on Thomas Deloney’s story The Gentle Craft (1597) and, to some extent, on Thomas Dekker’s play The Shoemaker’s Holiday (performed in 1599). In particular, A Shoemaker, A Gentleman uses two stories from The Gentle Craft and welds them together: that of St Winifred’s martyrdom and Sir Hugh’s love for her;33 and the folk myth of St Hugh’s bones, which provides the link to the two British princes (Elred and Offa), who hide as shoemaker’s apprentices34 at the shop of the Simon Eyre-like unnamed ‘Shoemaker of Faversham’.35 Ultimately, the valiant Elred’s success in battle smooths the way for a happy ending that puts a stop to Christian persecution and arranges not merely for a marriage between representatives of the former political enemies but also between British national interests and Roman political objectives. The play merges the two independent stories from Deloney’s The Gentle Craft, but it also combines generic frameworks in a surprising manner. The blending of a saint’s legend with a historical tale of patriotic resistance to Roman occupation is highly innovative. Yet the most interesting technique is that of linking the two tales by means of the shoemaker’s shop and the story of the apprentices. For Rowley also rewrites Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, from which he takes two important elements: the generous employment politics of Simon Eyre (in plain contradiction to the factual xenophobia against Dutch immigrants36) and Eyre’s successful intercession for the truant nobleman Roland Lacy, which brings about the play’s happy ending. Further parallels are the war in The Shoemaker’s Holiday, with the impressment of apprentices, as well as the love affairs between disguised apprentices and noble ladies. However, whereas in The Shoemaker’s Holiday the story focuses on class antagonism and Lacy’s dereliction of his aristocratic duty to go to war, Rowley’s play replaces class antagonism with national and religious conflict, employing also the motif of military valour as a

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plot strategy that serves to heal the enmity between Romans and Britons. (Lacy, of course, shirks his duties and is no soldier hero.) As a consequence, martyrdom and nationalistic heroism emerge as two sides of the same coin, and indigenous British traditions are asserted against Roman interference at both the political and the spiritual level. Rowley’s A Shoemaker, A Gentleman combines the national with the religious plot strand already in the first scene, in which Allured, King of England, dies on the battlefield against the Romans ‘Maximinus and Dioclesian’ (I.i.26),37 and his sons Elred and Offa exchange their royal battle gear for that of poor soldiers. Their mother refuses to leave the corpse of her husband, though entreated to flee by the Welsh nobleman Sir Hugh and the Christian hermit Amphiabel. The dialogue introduces the theme of Roman religious persecution and its threat to Amphiabel and the young noblewoman called ‘the virtuous Winifred’ (104).38 When the Romans enter the scene, Dioclesian awards the recently knighted Roman officer Albon the stewardship of Great Britain,39 but links the post with the duty to persecute the Christians in England. The Queen immediately identifies herself as a Christian to Maximinus and is consequently sent to prison in Rochester castle and threatened with torture and rape. Dioclesian then returns to France to fight the Goths and Vandals, leaving Maximinus to pacify the Welsh (‘Welshmen’; 211),40 while his daughter Leodice is to reside at Canterbury. What is particularly significant in A Shoemaker, A Gentleman is that Rowley here departs from his source, since neither Amphiabel nor Albon are characters in Deloney’s text. Rawley thus considerably expands the theme of religious persecution. In Act I scene ii, Elred (disguised as Crispianus) and Offa (disguised as Crispinus) are welcomed at the shoemaker’s shop by the shoemaker’s wife, Cicely, and their apprentices. The Queen, under guard, passes the shoemaker’s shop and thus affords her sons the opportunity to comfort her. The third scene introduces Winifred at her well, focusing on the themes of Winifred’s virginity and Sir Hugh’s insistent wooing. Winifred keeps putting Sir Hugh off, devoting herself to her ‘celestial bridegroom’ (I.iii.63).41 Even Amphiabel exhorts Winifred to marry (‘For wedlock is an ordinance from heaven’; ‘chaste wedlock’; 71, 73),42 but she rejects this proposal in pursuance of the ‘vow’ (75) she took after the magic spring emerged and she saw an angel (‘A heavenly shape’; 94). Amphiabel is converted by the reappearance of the angel, and decides to seek out Albon, the persecutor of Christians.

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In Act II scene i, the princess Leodice, daughter of Maximinus, is having her shoes fixed and falls in love with Offa/Crispinus. In Act II scene ii, Albon, a convert to Christianity thanks to Amphiabel, has been remiss in his persecution of Christians. Once Albon identifies himself as a Christian, Maximinus immediately instigates a search for Amphiabel, but Albon offers himself as a substitute sacrifice. Maximinus suspects Amphiabel is in Wales and orders the destruction of Winifred’s well. At the end of the scene, Maximinus receives a call for military support from Dioclesian and begins conscripting soldiers to be sent to Gaul. Act III scene i returns us to the amorous Sir Hugh, who finds that Winifred is now ‘contract[ed] and wedded’ to ‘heaven’, with her ‘nuptial Gordian’ ‘tied’ (43–5).43 She chides Sir Hugh for pursuing her: ‘You seek for that below [human love] that’s gone above’ (54).44 The scene continues with the arrival of Amphiabel, and then the Romans, who immediately arrest the Christians. The character Lutius loses his eyesight when he mockingly applies water from the well to his eyes, and is cured by Winifred. This can be argued to invoke Jesus’s healing of the cut-off ear (Luke 22:51). The miracle of the well in the past is thus corroborated by an observable miracle on stage. The prisoners are taken to Verulam (i.e. Verulamium, near present-day St Albans). Subsequently, Act III scene ii moves back to the shoemaker’s shop and shows Elred/Crispianus willingly signing up as a soldier. Then Sir Hugh appears and wishes to become an apprentice, too. He says he fought the Romans and is a Christian; we can therefore assume that the shoemaker’s shop is a cell of crypto-Christian resistance. These events are all Rowley’s invention, for in Deloney’s story Sir Hugh goes abroad, is shipwrecked, and returns to London in poverty – to take up a job with the shoemakers and to find out that Winifred is in prison, whereupon he goes to keep her company. Here, too, Rowley expands on the martyrological aspect of the source. In the battle scenes in Gaul, Elred/Crispianus rescues Dioclesian from the hands of Roderick, the king of the Vandals; he then recovers the Roman eagle standard and kills Huldrick, king of the Goths, taking Roderick prisoner. Dioclesian knights Crispianus and sends him to Maximinus in Britain. The shift to Gaul and back to England, moreover, serves to indicate a temporal gap of up to eight months. Act IV prepares us for Leodice’s pregnancy which she is trying to hide (scene i). In scene ii, Offa/Crispinus admits to Cecily that he has got his ‘wench with child’ (65)45 and that he has married the

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Emperor’s daughter.46 He receives Cecily’s advice on how to distract the Romans so that Leodice and he can escape in order for her to deliver the child at the shoemaker’s. The scene turns tragic, however, when Hugh, who has outed himself as Sir Hugh and ‘son to the King of Powys’ (211),47 joins Winifred, who is to be executed. Act IV scene iii depicts the sentencing of Albon and Amphiabel by Maximinus, while Sir Hugh and Winifred celebrate their wedding in death. Winifred asks to be bled to death, preceding Sir Hugh to Heaven. Cruelly, Sir Hugh is given a poisoned cup of Winifred’s blood to drink (which he treats as a chalice). He bestows the epithet ‘Gentlemen of the Gentle Craft’ (157)48 on the shoemakers’ guild and bequeaths his bones to them. While Maximinus and his lieutenant go in search of the missing Leodice, the shoemakers decide to bury Sir Hugh, calling him ‘Saint Hugh’ and christening the tools of their trade ‘Saint Hugh’s Bones’ (216).49 Elred/Crispianus returns from Gaul and hears from the shoemaker that Leodice has been delivered of a boy (V.i). Maximinus and Dioclesian want to reward Crispianus (V.ii), and he first asks for the life of his mother. Leodice returns to court, having been ‘found’ by the shoemakers, and is to be wedded to the soldier hero Elred/ Crispianus, but instead she asks to marry Offa/Crispinus, who ‘rescued’ her after her alleged kidnapping. This class-defying ‘madness of marrying a shoemaker’ is righted by Offa’s identification of himself as Elred’s brother and thus by the revelation of his nobility. In the course of the wedding celebrations, Offa asks for a monastery to be built to honour the martyrdom of Albon/St Alban, and Maximinus promises religious freedom for Britons: ‘Be true to Rome, none shall disturb your peace’ (197).50 This, too, is a clear innovation on Rowley’s part, significantly revising his source text by Deloney. Rowley’s A Shoemaker, A Gentleman in several respects indulges in wishful thinking. It depicts religious tolerance, which was historically and contemporaneously counterfactual, indeed unthinkable. Such toleration is striking also since it departs from the plot in Deloney’s novel, where the happy ending passes over the entire religious issue in complete silence. Secondly, Rowley’s play portrays the Christians as noble and courageous people, combining this commendation with British political resistance against the conquering Romans. This political nexus, too, is Rowley’s innovation, since no link exists between the happy ending and a Christian victory in Deloney. Finally, Rowley paints a social utopia of crafts and trades

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that ennobles the shoemakers by linking them to the native elite, here following both Deloney’s story and Dekker’s play. Thus, in Rowley’s drama, there is an important revision of the source materials, foregrounding and elaborating on the martyrdom plot. The martyrdoms in the play underline native courage and valour and serve to sustain the patriotic identity formation symbolised in St Alban’s monastic foundation. Though martyrdom has a biblical precedent, its enactment in Rowley is forcefully anchored in the native British tradition and updated to cater to contemporary nationalistic sentiment. Conclusion What do these plays tell us about martyrdom on the early modern English stage? It is particularly striking that the concept of martyrdom gives rise to quite ambivalent readings when observed from the perspective of the fraught relationship between Protestantism and Catholicism in the early seventeenth century. All plays juxtapose Roman paganism with Christianity, thus invoking an anti-Catholic equation of Rome with the papacy. However, they also cater to a Catholic viewpoint since the miracles they depict are associated with Catholicism. Moreover, in The Virgin Martyr Dekker and Massinger emphasise the issue of opportunism that also briefly shows up in Rowley’s A Shoemaker, A Gentleman and is thematised in the figure of Catherine’s mother in Dryden’s Tyrannick Love. In fact, while The Virgin Martyr could be read as a satire on tergiversation,51 Dryden’s play might be a disguised critique of Henry VIII’s sexual appetite and marital infidelity (resulting in religious apostasy), in which – contrary to historical fact – Catherine (in the role of Anne Boleyn, i.e. the desired paramour) refuses to bow to royal lust. Such a ‘Catholic’ reading can also be given to A Shoemaker, A Gentleman since British national identity is here propagated for the British Christians in late antiquity. Yet the fact that the story of Christian persecution of the early Church had been integrated by Foxe into the history of the true (Protestant) religion makes this argument less stringent than it might otherwise seem.52 What renders Rowley’s play – with its unmerited critical neglect – especially interesting is its savvy deployment of martyrdom for the constitution of a native political alignment against Europe (Rome). Moreover, the play can be interpreted as part of the Elizabethan and Stuart rhetoric of national identity, with its celebratory patriotism that depicts an idealised national and social unity. The

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play therefore suggests that sacrifices may be necessary to preserve a peaceful commonwealth in which all Britons need to acknowledge their national loyalty against enemies abroad, taking care to create social harmony at home. Given the increasing social and religious fault lines starting to break up in England at the time, this was a utopian project; it promised a symbolic heaven of present and future peace for England (instead of a glorious afterlife, as in the martyr legends). From a biblical and Christian perspective, this exploitation of the model of Christian persecution by Rome – entrenched in the Letters of St Paul, Acts, and in hagiography – can be argued to serve as a moment of secularisation of the medieval religious tradition, but also as a sacralisation of the emerging nation-state. Just as religion provided the foundation of national identity for the Old Testament, the sacrificial death founding the Kingdom of God is here used as a base support for the rise of Britain in victory over Rome (Spain, Catholicism). Martyrdom and conversion provide a biblical intertext for a popular myth that promised to be ideologically successful. Notes 1 Alice Dailey, The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2012), pp. 13–14. 2 Susannah Brietz Monta, ‘Representing Martyrdom in Tudor England’, in Oxford Handbooks Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.001.0001/ oxfordhb-9780199935338-e-71 (accessed 11 April 2019), at p. 2. 3 Thomas S. Freeman calls it a ‘bridge … with the apostles and the martyrs of the early church’ (‘Introduction. Over Their Dead Bodies: Concepts of Martyrdom in Late Medieval and Early Modern England’, in Thomas S. Freeman and Thomas F. Mayer (eds), Martyrs and Martyrdom in England c. 1400–1700 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007, pp. 1–34, at p. 1). See in detail Thomas S. Freeman, ‘ “Imitatio Christi with a Vengeance”: The Politicisation of Martyrdom in Early-Modern England’, in Freeman and Mayer (eds), Martyrs and Martyrdom, pp. 35–69, at pp. 43–50. See Julia Reinhard Lupton, Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996) as well as Dailey, English Martyr, chs 1, 2. 4 See Monta, ‘Representing Martyrdom’, pp. 3–6, 9–10. 5 Freeman notes: ‘Competing martyrological traditions flourished because the recurring shifts in English royal policy, which had created both Catholic and Protestant martyrs, meant that the danger of persecution

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always seemed present and that the subject of martyrdom always appeared relevant. And because these traditions, and the different confessions which fostered them, were in competition, with no certain victory before the end of days, martyrology and martyrological writing flowered in a hothouse climate of fear and hatred’ (‘Introduction’, p. 1). 6 Though the miracle plays were banned in the 1570s (Jane Hwang Degenhardt, ‘Catholic Martyrdom in Dekker and Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr and the Early Modern Threat of “Turning Turk” ’, English Literary History 73:1 [2006], pp. 83–117, at fn 3), that does not necessarily imply a ban of religious topics in the Elizabethan theatre. 7 See André Vauchez, La sainteté en occident aux derniers siècles du moyen âge: d’après les procès de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques (Rome: École française, 1981); William H. Woestman, Canonization: Theology, History, Process (Ottawa: Saint Paul University, 2002); Cherian Thunduparampil, The Role of Miracle in the Process of Canonization: A Study on the Current Legislation (Bangalore: Dharmaram Publications, 2003); Gábor Klaniczay (ed.), Procès de canonisation au Moyen Âge: aspects juridiques et religieux (études du Wallenberg Seminar au Collegium Budapest du 8–11 février 2001) (Rome: École française, 2004); Ronald C. Finucane, Contested Canonizations: The Last Medieval Saints, 1482–1523 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011). 8 See Theodor Wolpers, Die englische Heiligenlegende des Mittelalters: Eine Formgeschichte des Legendenerzählens von der spätantiken lateinischen Tradition bis zur Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1964): Vauchez, La sainteté; Thomas J. Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and Their Biographers in the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell (eds), Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); John R. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563–1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Karen A. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Karen A. Winstead, Chaste Passions: Medieval English Virgin Martyr Legends (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives and Women’s Literary Culture, c. 1150–1300: Virginity and Its Authorizations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Eva von Contzen and Anke Bernau (eds), Sanctity as Literature in Late Medieval Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). 9 See Monta, ‘Representing Martyrdom’, pp. 11–12, 15–16. On the effect of martyrdom in the early Church see Freeman, ‘Introduction’, pp. 3–4. Freeman, like Monta in ‘Representing Martyrdom’ and Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), also provides examples of conversion in the wake of witnessing martyrdom: Germain Gardener and John Larke were inspired by the deaths of More, Fisher, and the Carthusians;

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Laurence Saunders’ death led Joyce Lewes to renounce Catholicism; Julins Palmer witnessed the executions of Latimer and Ridley, embraced Protestantism, and died at the stake; Henry Walpole converted in the wake of Edmund Campion’s death (Freeman, ‘Introduction’, p. 2). See also Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 122–6 on the understanding of martyrdom as involving the emulation of Christ and the saints on the one hand and the all-important example of fellow Protestants or Catholics giving their lives for God. 10 Gregory, Salvation at Stake, pp. 47–62. 11 Compare Dailey, English Martyr, ch. 1. 12 Thomas More, De Tristitia Christi, in Clarence H. Miller (ed.), The Complete Works of St. Thomas More 14, Parts I and II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976). 13 Dailey, English Martyr, ch. 2. 14 Degenhardt, ‘Catholic Martyrdom’, p. 87; Chrisopher Semk, Playing the Martyr: Theater and Theology in Early Modern France (Bucknell, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2017); see also Maximilian E. Novak, ‘Commentary and Notes’, in J. Dryden, Tyrannick Love; or the Royal Martyr [1670], in Novak (ed.), The Works of John Dryden (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), pp. 380–432, at p. 388. 15 Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). 16 Dillon, Construction of Martyrdom, pp. 345–7. On martyrdom during the Reformation, particularly comparing Protestant and Catholic martyrdom, besides Gregory, Salvation at Stake; Dillon, Construction of Martyrdom; Monta, ‘Representing Martyrdom’; Monta, Martyrdom and Literature; see also Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom; Thomas Lederer, Sacred Demonization: Saints’ Legends in the English Renaissance (Salzburg: Braumüller, 2007); Dailey, English Martyr; David K. Anderson, Martyrs and Players in Early Modern England: Tragedy, Religion and Violence on Stage (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). 17 Dillon, Construction of Martyrdom. 18 Dillon, Construction of Martyrdom, ch. 4. 19 See Dillon, Construction of Martyrdom, chs 3, 5. 20 See for instance Verstegan’s ‘Cruelty in torturing Catholics’ (plate 3.12 in Dillon, Construction of Martyrdom, p. 158) or Cavalleriis’s ‘The execution of Edmund Campion …’ (plate 4.26 in Dillon, Construction of Martrydom, p. 232). 21 Dillon Construction of Martyrdom, p. 34. 22 Dillon Construction of Martyrdom, pp. 32–40. 23 Dillon, Construction of Martyrdom, pp. 331–67. 24 For the representation of martyrdom in historical drama (Munday’s Sir Thomas More [original manuscript ?1592–93] and Shakespeare’s Henry VIII [1613]) see Monta, Martyrdom and Literature, ch. 6). Thanks to Musa Gurniss-Farrell (‘Martyr Acts: Playing with Foxe’s Martyrs on

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the Public Stage’, in Jane Hwang Degenhardt and Elizabeth Williamson (eds), Religion and Drama in Early Modern England [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011], pp. 175–93), there is already an in-depth study of explicitly Protestant martyrdom plays modelled on Foxe for the period 1599–1606. 25 David Nicol, ‘A Shoemaker, A Gentleman: Dates, Sources and Influence’, Notes and Queries 50:4 (2003), pp. 441–3, at p. 443; Gina M. DiSalvo, ‘Saints’ Lives and Shoemakers’ Holidays: The Gentle Craft and the Wells Cordwainers’ Pageant of 1613’, Early Theatre 19:2 (2016), pp. 119–38. Dryden, too, uses the ‘wrong’ emperor’s name. Note also that both plays spell Diocletian ‘Dioclesian’. As Julia Gasper explains in detail (‘The Sources of The Virgin Martyr’, Review of English Studies 42:165 [1991], pp. 17–31), The Virgin Martyr draws not only on the legend of Dorothea in the Flos Sanctorum, a 1609 hagiographical work composed by Alfonso Villegas and distributed through Douai, but also on that of St Agnes, who had long been associated with Dorothea since they both were martyred in Cappadocia (Gasper, ‘The Sources’, pp. 17–18). Gasper also suggests that the story of St Agatha, which closely resembled that of St Agnes, and whose feast day was 5 February, just before Dorothea’s in the Flos Sanctorum, may have been a source (Gasper, ‘The Sources’, p. 23). 26 In 1668, Dekker and Massinger’s text was revived on the London stage (Novak, ‘Commentary and Notes’, p. 385) with Nell Gwynn as Angelo; Gwynn also played the lovesick Valeria in the Dryden performance (Novak, ‘Commentary and Notes’, p. 381). 27 Julia Gasper, The Dragon and the Dove: The Plays of Thomas Dekker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 135–65; Monta, Martyrdom and Literature, pp. 196, 198. 28 Thomas J. Moretti, by contrast, argues that The Virgin Martyr proposes a via media of religious tolerance in parallel to James I’s attempts for reconciliation and moderation in religious policy (‘Via Media Theatricality and Religious Fantasy in Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr [1622]’, Renaissance Drama 42:2 [2014], pp. 243–70). 29 Degenhardt, ‘Catholic Martyrdom’. 30 Novak, ‘Commentary and Notes’, p. 386. 31 For a similar argument on Dekker/Massinger, see Moretti, ‘Via Media Theatricality and Religious Fantasy’. 32 Holly Crawford Pickett, ‘Dramatic Nostalgia and Spectacular Conversion in Dekker and Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr’, Studies in English Literature 49:2 (2009), pp. 437–62. 33 Thomas Deloney, The Gentle Craft: Part I, in M. E. Lawlis (ed.), The Novels of Thomas Deloney (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1961), pp. 89–169, chs ii–v. 34 Deloney, Gentle Craft, chs v–ix. 35 William Rowley, A Shoemaker, A Gentleman [1637], ed. T. Darby (London: Routledge, 2002), p. ix. Deloney’s chapter x turns to the story of Simon Eyre, so there is a good reason for the similarity.

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36 See David Scott Kastan, ‘Workshop and/as Playhouse: The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599)’, in Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (eds), Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 151–63; Alison A. Chapman, ‘Whose Saint Crispin’s Day Is It? Shoemaking, Holiday Making, and the Politics of Memory in Early Modern England’, Renaissance Quarterly 54:4 (2001), pp. 1467–94; Andrew Fleck, ‘Marking Difference and National Identity in The Shoemaker’s Holiday’, Studies in English Literature 46:2 (2006), pp. 349–70; John Michael Archer, ‘Citizens and Aliens as Working Subjects in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday’, in Michelle E. Dowd and Natasha Korda (eds), Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 37–52; Crystal Bartolovich, ‘Mythos of Labor: The Shoemaker’s Holiday and the Origin of Citizen History’, in Dowd and Korda (eds), Working Subjects, pp. 17–36. 37 Rowley, A Shoemaker, A Gentleman, p. 8. 38 Rowley, A Shoemaker, A Gentleman, p. 10. 39 Rowley, A Shoemaker, A Gentleman, p. 13. 40 Rowley, A Shoemaker, A Gentleman, p. 14. 41 Rowley, A Shoemaker, A Gentleman, p. 24. 42 Rowley, A Shoemaker, A Gentleman, p. 24. 43 Rowley, A Shoemaker, A Gentleman, p. 47. 44 Rowley, A Shoemaker, A Gentleman, p. 49. 45 Rowley, A Shoemaker, A Gentleman, p. 72. 46 Rowley, A Shoemaker, A Gentleman, p. 76. 47 Rowley, A Shoemaker, A Gentleman, p. 77. 48 Rowley, A Shoemaker, A Gentleman, p. 84. 49 Rowley, A Shoemaker, A Gentleman, p. 86. 50 Rowley, A Shoemaker, A Gentleman, p. 103. 51 Degenhardt, ‘Catholic Martyrdom’. 52 Compare Monta’s reflections on the Catholicism vs Protestantism debate regarding The Virgin Martyr (Martyrdom and Literature, pp. 196–7).

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12 ‘Samson Figuru nese’: biblical plays between Czech drama and English comedy in early modern Central Europe Pavel Drábek

Všickní dobrˇí a ucˇení lidé s jakousi zvláštní chutí i chtivostí comediae od pohanských lidí sepsané mají obycˇej cˇítati a je sobeˇ rozjímati. Ruth 2014, A2r (All good and learned people, with a peculiar liking and desire, have the habit of reading and reflecting on comediae written by pagan people.)

These are the words of Adam Tesák Brodský at the beginning of his father Juraj Tesák Mošovský’s Comedy from a Book of God’s Testament Named Ruth (Komedie z Kníhy Zákona Božího, jenž slove Ruth; Ruth 1604), printed in Prague in 1604. What is more, Tesák Brodský admonishes that ‘nadto nesluší těmi, kteréž ex fontibus Israel, to jest, z studnic Písem svatých jsou sebrané, pohrdati’ (‘above all, it is unbeholding to scorn those comedies that are composed ex fontibus Israel, that is, from the springs of the Holy Scriptures’, A2r).1 Tesák’s biblical drama, however, did not actually need an apology for its genre. Plays based on the Old Testament were common fare in Central Europe for close to a century. The first such known play in Czech was Mikuláš Konáš z Hodiškova’s Judith (1547), based on Joachim Greff’s German play Tragedia des Buchs Judith, printed in 1536.2 The latter part of the sixteenth century produced a number of biblical plays, most likely inspired not only by Jesuit dramatic activities but also by Luther’s interest in the dramatic qualities of the Old Testament.3 Apart from the many school dramas performed in colleges across the Czech lands, various plays were based on German models – such as the dramas of the 1560s–1580s written by Pavel Kyrmezer (d. 1589), and several other anonymous works.4 The reason behind Tesák’s apologia is likely to have sprung from the new theatrical context of the early seventeenth century.

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This chapter analyses the specifics of the early seventeenth-century biblical play in Central Europe. These are a fusion of transnational influences; a specific dramaturgy interweaving heterogeneous plots, and something between a literal and a figurative enactment of the Scriptures, to which the quotation in the title refers – the character of ‘Samson carrying a figure’, a symbolic or metaphorical meaning. My particular focus is on three contemporaneous plays: the Czech plays Ruth (1604) and Samson (1608), and Comœdia von der Königin Esther und Hoffertigen Haman (Comedy of Queen Esther and the Haughty Haman), published in 1620 in the German collection Engelische Comedien und Tragedien.5 While they apparently arose from different backgrounds – Czech Reformed schools and English travelling theatre companies in Central Europe – they share far too many features to make the similarities coincidental.6 The striking developments of Central European biblical drama in the first decades of the seventeenth century, I argue, stemmed from a transnational theatrical culture that anticipated the figurative aesthetics of the baroque. ‘Comediæ od pohanských lidí sepsané’ [‘Comedies written by pagan people’]: synchronicity and similarity ‘One could find other reasons / that you would all prefer, / why Commediæ are useful to everyone, / and benefit God and good people’, says the anonymous 1604 dedication to the Comedy of King Solomon (Komedia o Králi Šalamúnovi; see Figure 12.1),7 following an account of classical Roman plays performed for the entertainment and instruction of the people. ‘Terentius, Plautus and others’ are cited among the learned and wise who spared no expense to write comedies in support of the virtues. Conventional religious moralism aside, it is worth observing the secular theatrical context for which biblical drama was created. Unlike the earlier biblical drama of the mid- to late sixteenth century, the extant texts of the plays published in the early 1600s were clearly written with theatrical performance in mind. These play-texts are not only presentations of scriptural wisdom and learning in a popular form as instruction manuals, but are arguably enactments of the situations and views of the dramatis personae to be staged. However, this hypothesis is based solely on textual evidence, given the frustrating paucity of other documents to corroborate it. As with so much theatre history, the awareness of the ‘size of all that’s missing’ presents a major corrective for the theatre

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historiographer.8 Especially in the Czech context, the surviving evidence and extant texts are few and probably unrepresentative. The cataclysm of the Thirty Years War that broke out after the Prague Defenestration of 1618 (at a point when an estimated two-thirds of the Czech population was Protestant) brought about several outbreaks of looting and destruction, followed by the oppressive Counter-Reformation which forced Protestants into exile or to conversion to Catholicism, and a systematic elimination of books that were perceived as heretic or suspect.9 All this was sanctioned by the several editions of the Catholic Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1559–1966), as well as by the infamous Jesuit Antonín Koniáš’s Clavis Haeresim claudens (1729).10 What has survived – escaping the inquisitors’ fire, widespread anti-theatrical prejudice, or simply the natural attrition of theatrical ephemera – is necessarily only a fraction of the wealth of early modern culture. Theatre history has also traditionally prioritised a national perspective – writing chapters on particular genres within a language culture or tracing foreign origins, sources, and inspirations for national histories. Recent decades have, however, witnessed a heightened critical interest in a transnational theatrical culture that complements the earlier perspectives.11 Eschewing ‘any simple understanding of “source” ’,12 transnational approaches to theatre offer complex connections between surviving texts and historical records that consequently problematise linear narratives or historiographic singularity of interpretation. The two biblical plays in Czech I analyse in this chapter (Ruth and Samson) thus can be seen to have more in common with the German-language biblical play Esther and Haman than with their Czech predecessors. Moving well beyond a literal dramatisation of the stories from the Old Testament, characteristic of the biblical drama of the 1540s–1580s, all three plays take creative licence, as the dramatic situations structurally overtake absolute fidelity to the original. Tesák Mošovský was clearly aware of these shifts. His play, Ruth, was sent to his son Adam, a regent at St Gallus (Havel) Church in Prague, probably to be performed by his pupils.13 Anxious to avoid heresy, Adam painstakingly defends his father’s dramatising strategies in the address ‘K čtenáři pobožnému’ (To the Pious Reader’): I also know full well, dear Reader, that it is improper to add anything to or take away from the Holy Scripture. … But here, in this composed comedy, in addition to what is written in the Bible, whatever has been added by my dearest father, has not been done to harm or belittle the Holy Script but rather for its clarification [or illustration], with a view to the present times. (Ruth 1604, A3r)14

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The argument ‘with a view to the present times’ is significant, I propose, since it defends the freedoms taken in the play. These are not only the comic interludes, which will be discussed below, but also the suggestive, dramatic representation of the situations in which the characters find themselves. Milena Cesnaková-Michalcová claims that the piece entails no special dramatic elaboration beyond telling a scriptural story; but rather is laid out as a dialogical retelling, free of any conflict.15 I will argue that the dramatisation presents a cathectic experience of the biblical events with a heightened sense of individuation – as could be seen in Noemis’s speech in the opening scene, when Elimelech tells her of his decision to go into exile: Noemis:                      

Co pak, můj milý manžele, mé srdečko roztomilé, dopustí-li Bůh smrt na vás a tam spolu rozloučí nás, co já sobě počnu s dětmi mezi neznámými těmi? Bylo by lép zde umříti nám oběma, než tam jíti/ a zavesti naše děti, kteréž mohou déle býti živi než my již oba dva, poněvadž chodíme ledva.

(What then, my dear husband, My sweetheart, If God sends death to you And separates us both, What shall I do with children Among all the strangers? It would be better to die here For both of us than to go there And take away our children, Who can stay longer alive Than either of us two, For we can hardly walk.) (Ruth 1604, A7r–A7v)

Noemis’s speech illustrates what happens in the story by means of affectively engaging the audience’s empathy. This is far removed from the impersonal retellings of scriptural stories in the earlier biblical plays, or devoid of any special dramatic elaboration (as Cesnaková-Michalcová asserts). Tesák Mošovský enacts the events by means of fully fledged dramatic situations and distinct personas. The dramatic form is used to convey the interaction between two stage figures, as well as between the two conflicting outcomes of

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the crisis (death versus exile), which is the structural dominant of the dialogue.16 This significant shift in dramatic form is arguably what Tesák Mošovský is also referring to when justifying the additions and changes to the biblical account, ‘with a view to the present times’. Ruth features a prominent Chorus figure (Epilogus), who provides a fixed moral anchoring between the acts. CesnakováMichalcová sees it as a strong moralising tendency;17 rather, it could possibly be viewed as a religious corrective to the imaginative experience of the play in performance. The dramatic dialogue abandons a literal recitation of the Scriptures in favour of an affective engagement; after each act, in a sermon-like explication (Tesák Mošovský was a Protestant minister), Epilogus provides an orthodox commentary and highlights the moral of the enacted story. In 1604, a second edition of Komedia o králi Šalamúnovi (‘The Comedy of King Solomon’) was published (see Figure 12.1). It was based on the Latin play Sapientia Salomonis, drama comicotragicum by S. Birck;18 no copy of the first edition of 1571 has survived. The dedication, cited above, to Lord Adam Myslik z Hyršova a na Košírˇích, was most likely penned for the second edition. In a thorough outline of the benefits of theatregoing for the promotion of virtue, the dedication extols that it is ‘Živými důvody’ (‘by means of live reasons’, A2r) – that is, with the help of embodied examples – that spectators are moved to virtue: Neb asponˇ Lidé když na to hledeˇli    Co cˇinili a neb propoveˇdeˇli, Tim obrazil jeden každý své Srdce (For when people watched it,      Whatever was done [acted] or spoken, Through that everyone pictured their heart.) (Šalamoun 1604, A3r)

This complex passage presents a refined understanding of the theatre as an instrument of affective experience, by means of which everyone’s heart may be pictured through whatever is acted or spoken. This heightened dramatic enactment of biblical stories is a common feature of both Czech plays and the Esther play of the English travelling comedians. While there is no evidence of performances available for any of the three play-texts, their synchronicity and structural similarity puts them in one group. The urge of the publishers of both Ruth and Samson (as will be shown below) to contextualise these new plays within a wider field may be indicative

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of a recent development of the theatrical culture in Central Europe. The English travelling actors are known to have toured the Germanspeaking countries from the late 1580s onwards. The first indirect evidence of their presence in Prague comes from 1595 and 1598, and the earliest confirmed visit is on 21 October 1602, but records suggest that ‘komedie enklická’ was not a novelty.19 The identity of the troupe is unknown, but Thomas Sackville was a prominent presence from 1592 till the 1620s, and he is thought to have been in Prague in 1598.20 In August 1597, Sackville and his company performed in Strasbourg and the surviving repertoire list suggests possible links, specifically including the Comœdia de Judith and Comœdia de Esther.21 In 1605, a Judith play was published in Prague entitled Komedie Česká / O ctné a šlechetné Vdově Jůdýth: A o Holofernovi Hejtmanu Krále Nabuchodonozora. Od Mikuláše Vrány Litomyšlského / z Německé Řeči v Českú přeložena (‘A Czech comedy of the virtuous and noble widow Judith, and of Holofernes, the General of King Nebuchadnezzar’), translated from German into Czech by Mikuláš Vrána Litomyšlský, Prague, 1605; see Figure 12.2). This play has apparently eluded the critical attention of scholars so far and nothing is known of its provenance beyond what the title-page provides. Given the presence of Sackville and his repertoire in Prague, it is conceivable that the developments in theatre culture at the turn of the century, to which the dedications of Ruth and Samson, and possibly also the publication of Judith, reacted, were connected with the English comedy. The repertoire of the English theatrical troupes is a much contended issue. The traditional interpretation is that they brought along English plays and performed them in ‘peeces and patches’, as the English traveller Fynes Moryson reported in 1592.22 However, despite occasional similarities in title, there is little evidence that the influence was solely in the direction of England to Germany. It would be reductive to assume so; it would also replicate a much later model of English cultural dominance and apply it anachronistically to a time when English actors ‘can bee Bankerupts on this side, and Gentlemen of a Company beyond-Sea’, as Thomas Dekker satirically put it in his The Run-Away’s Answer (1625, B2r). The Lost Plays Database provides a number of titles that have their namesakes in continental Europe – among them several biblical plays: Judith (1595), Samson (1602, assigned to Samuel Rowley), and Hester and Ahasuerus (1594); however, the critical commentary makes no links to biblical plays beyond England.23 A more plausible historiographic account should operate with a two-directional

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12.2  Komedie Česká O ctné a šlechetné Vdově Jůdýth (‘A Czech comedy of the virtuous and noble widow Judith’), Prague, 1605

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exchange, recognising the remarkable influence of German theatre and culture on the professional theatre in London.24 With a view to the surviving repertoire and play titles of the English comedians on the Continent, it should be noted that the plays were mostly handling thematic material that was local; the added value was the acting style rather than the stories.25 This approach to repertoire and genre would offer an alternative historiographical perspective and place synchronic plays produced in the same cultural space within one subgenre. The Czech plays Ruth (1604) and Samson (1608) would be placed in the same genre as the English comedy Esther and Haman (1620). ‘Pedellové ať nětco zalaškují / aneb Musæ ať nětco zaspíwají’ (‘Let the stewards make some fun or the musicians do some singing’): the interlude One of the distinctive features of this notional subgenre is the use of comic interludes. The English comedians’ Esther and Haman interlaces biblical scenes with down-to-earth and rather scurrilous comedy, featuring the clown Hans, his Wife, their Neighbour, and their Son. Hans, surnamed Knapkäse, also enters the main plot in a comic scene with Haman (Act III), and alongside his Wife in the final scene of the play (Act IV) with the King Ahasverus. The two modes – tragic and comic – are kept separate throughout, with these two exceptions. This dramatic logic is in evidence in several other plays written in the English style – both in the 1620 collection Englische Comedien und Tragedien and in separate texts, such as the unnamed play from Gdańsk (Danzig), known as Tiberius von Ferrara und Anabella von Mömpelgard, which gives a number of comic interludes with stock routines.26 The 1620 Fortunatus play is similarly interlaced with several non-specific stage directions indicating ‘Allhier agiret Pickelhering’ (‘Here acts Pickelhering’).27 Tesák Mošovský’s Ruth inserts interludes after individual acts, mostly calling for them in an unspecific but commanding stage direction, such as ‘Pedellové ať nětco zalaškují / aneb Musæ ať nětco zaspíwají’ (‘Let the stewards make some fun or the musicians do some singing’, A6r) after Act I; or ‘Musae canant aneb pedelové zašaškůjte’ (‘Musicians to play or stewards to do some fooling about’, D7v) after Act IV. There is no specified interlude after Act II, probably because the comic relief is provided by a scene of two lazy fieldworkers Elsa and Důra, rebuked by the Overseer, Šafář. At this point, Tesák Mošovský begins to integrate the additional

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comic material into the agenda of the play.28 Elsa and Důra serve as an exemplary scene to illustrate what the Epilogus calls ‘Najdeš deset povalečův, / lenochův a zahalečův, / z nichž by mnohý radče visel, / než by na dílo někam šel’ (‘You can find ten idlers, sluggards and lazybones, who would much rather hang than go and take up a job’, C3v). In Act VI, there is an added scene of Ruth leaving Moab’s threshing-floor at dawn and meeting Canthara the Old Hag Seducer (Baba Svodnice) and the Devil (Kornyfl). The Old Hag attempts to persuade Ruth to marry someone of her own station. When Ruth refuses and returns home to seek advice from Noemis, the Hag Woman threatens and begins flirting with the Devil Kornyfl. Kornyfl calls for another two impish devils (comically called Kvasnička and Špetle), who play the pipes, accompanying the Old Hag and Kornyfl as they tumble and dance. Kornyfl makes another appearance somewhat later, trying to dissuade Ruth and Noemis from coming to Boas; citing the Old Hag, he also advises Ruth to marry someone of her own station. These clowning sequences, tangentially interacting with the main plot, may be seen to fulfil the dramatic function of interludes as comic relief – ‘with a view to the present times’. Even more characteristic instances can be found in the anonymous Historia duchovní o Samsonovi silném a udatném někdy vůdci izrahelském: v způsob tragedie sepsaná (‘The Sacred History of Samson, once the strong and brave Israelite general: composed in the fashion of a tragedy’, Prague, 1608; see Figure 12.3). At the beginning of the play, under the extensive list of dramatis personae, a note is added: ‘Mezi tím přidány jsou pro kratochvíl pěkná Intermedia po každem Aktu’ (‘In between are added, to pass the time, nice interludes after each act’, A4r) – a structural logic recognised from Ruth. There are several comic incidents in Samson: the Barber (Chirurgus), who is paid by Dalida to cut off seven hairs from Samson’s head (H7v), or the gruesome comic Demorinus, who cracks jokes while plucking out Samson’s eyes on stage (H8v). Apart from these brief moments, there are two identifiable interludes included in the printed text. One of them, known as Helluo and Judaeus, is a farcical episode that counterpoints the events in Act IV. Helluo is a clown figure, who has participated in Samson’s wedding feast, mingling with the Philistines. His first appearance is after Samson’s monologue, when he has returned after killing and robbing thirty Ashkelonians to pay for the fraudulent lost bet (pace Judges 14:19). Samson’s oath that he will murder the Philistines for their treason is comically counterpointed by the monologue from Helluo, who

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12.3  Historia duchovní o Samsonovi (‘The Sacred History of Samson’), Prague, 1608

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is wondering where to get money to buy himself more drink (and respect) from the tavern landlady. After another sequence of the main plot, Helluo returns to the stage with a club and forces a wealthy Jew (Judaeus) to buy the club from him for thirty ducats. After a brief monologue relating to the main plot, Judaeus takes Helluo to a Magistrate (Praetor) to retrieve his money. Subsequently, following a comic twist, the Magistrate sides with Helluo and proclaims the deal legal. This semi-integrated scene shifts the locale; Judaeus says in comically broken Czech that he was ‘Šel jsem z Prahy přes ten Losfidrholec’ (‘Walking from Prague across the Wiederholz Forest’, F7r). Apparently, there was no intention of viewing the Helluo and Judaeus episode as anything more than a comic interlude with a stock trickster routine.29 Attached to the edition of Samson, following the epilogue at the end of the printed text, is another comic interlude, known as Polapená nevěra (‘Adultery discovered’). This four-scene playlet of 137 lines was probably intended to be interspersed among the individual acts of Samson, perhaps impromptu. Its plot is based on Boccaccio’s novella from The Decameron (Day 7, Novella 6), one that survives in England in two sixteenth-century variants. The 1620 edition of John Florio’s English translation gives the following argument: Madam Isabella, delighting in the company of her affected Friend, named Lionello, and she being likewise beloued by Signior Lambertuccio: At the same time as she had entertained Lionello, shee was also visited by Lambertuccio. Her Husband returning home in the very instant; she caused Lambertuccio to run forth with a drawne sword in his hand, and (by that means) made an excuse sufficient for Lionello to her husband. (Decameron 1620, K4v)

This story exists in a number of variants. In a simplified form it was in the stock of comic routines associated with Will Kemp, inherited allegedly from Richard Tarlton. A text called ‘Kemp’s Jig’ was entered in the London Stationers’ Register on 21 October 1595, but apparently was never published; it is assumed that it was closely related to (if not identical with) the most famous jig, The Singing Simpkin. Its surviving English text dates from six decades later, recorded in Robert Cox’s Actaeon and Diana (1655/56).30 Clegg and Skeaping trace the provenance of Kemp’s jig, listing Tales and Quicke Answers (c. 1532) and Mery Tales, Wittie Questions, and Quick Answeres (1567), and the version associated with Richard Tarlton, which appeared in the anonymous Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie (1590). Between 1595, when Kemp’s jig was registered, and 1655, when Robert Cox’s rendering of The Singing Simpkin

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was written down, there were other variants – published in German, Dutch, and later even in Swedish.31 While Kemp’s jig was not published in his lifetime, it entered with him into a simplified version as Falstaff’s second episode in A Most Pleasant and Excellent Conceited Comedy of Sir John Falstaff and the Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597; first printed in 1602). Most importantly, the German version of Kemp’s jig appeared in the 1620 anthology of Engelische Comedien und Tragedien. After the ten longer plays, the final section of the volume, known as Singspiels, is entitled Nachfolgende Engelische Auffzüge/können nach Beliebung zwischen die Comœdien agiret werden (‘The following English acts can be acted in between comedies as you like’). The Czech interlude known as Polapená nevěra, attached to the 1608 print of Samson, is also a variant of this jig. Will Kemp had a presence in northern Germany from the late 1580s, and was known in England to be associated with the ‘Emperour of Germany’ (The Return from Parnassus, Part 2 [1600], 4.3). It may be that he thus contributed significantly to the presence and popularity of the jig connected with his name in the Central European space. However, it would be a simplification to assume a onedirectional flow of influence in the case of this comic interlude. Boccaccio’s bawdy tales were traditional fare both in England and in Central Europe throughout the sixteenth century. The first Czech play based on the Old Testament, Konáš’s Judith (1547), was published in a triptych, which included an allegorical play Kniha o hořekování a naříkání Spravedlnosti (‘The Book of Laments and Complaints of Justice’) and the first Czech secular play based on Boccaccio, Hra pěknejch připovídek (‘A Play of Witty Tales’). Both the English and Central European theatrical cultures had a rich repertory of Italianate farces from which to draw. I would propose that the combination of biblical stories, jarringly juxtaposed with bawdy farce, was another characteristic feature of Central European biblical drama of the early 1600s. ‘Nebo Syn Boží, jehož Samson Figuru nese, / Jest náš vůdce’ (‘For the Son of God, whose Figure Samson carries, is our leader’): beyond the scripture Both the dramatic techniques analysed above – the affective enactment of situations experienced by biblical characters (as evident in Ruth), and the juxtaposition of sublime, serious matter, with staunch, bawdy comedy (present in Ruth, Samson, and Ester and Haman) – remove the audience from a literal engagement with the Scriptures. A more open approach was also used, allowing for a metaphorical or symbolic

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reading – not only a narrowly allegorical one in the medieval sense. This openness encouraged a move from blind dogma to knowing belief; figurations or figurative representations of characters, situations, and stories invited the audiences to a greater interpretive interaction as well as to a more holistic sensual enjoyment. Such dramatic developments went hand in hand with the changes in school drama – particularly of the German Jesuits, who mixed genres and styles, and incorporated practices from the professional stage.32 Contextually, Tesák Mošovský’s Ruth and the anonymous Samson were interacting with their contemporary theatre culture, both professional travelling actors and the classical drama performed in colleges. The dedication in Samson cites ‘pěkné Komedie a Tragedie’ (‘nice comedies and tragedies’, A2v) composed about illustrious men, ‘Holofernes / Hannibal / Ptolomeus, Pirrhus, Iulius Cæsar, M. Antonius, Augustus, Severus, Theodosius, Alexander Magnus, &c.’ All this is done pro snadší vyrozumeˇní a schopnost … / aby lidé v neˇ jako v neˇjaké Zrcadlo se vzhlédnouti / a bídu a nestálost života svého na tomto sveˇteˇ poznati / a k onomu Nebeskemu veˇeˇnemu a neskonalému Obcovánij strojiti se umeˇl. (for an easier understanding and grasping … so that people can, as if in a kind of mirror, observe themselves, and know the misery and inconstancy of their lives in this world, so that they knew how to prepare for the celestial, eternal, and unending dwelling.) (Samson 1608, A2v)

This liberal, enlightened approach to the benefits of theatre and its figurative readings of exemplary tales anticipates later developments in early modern theatre culture. Over the course of Samson, the playwright’s dramatic skill increases. While the play starts as a relatively conventional biblical play, the construction of dialogue, interweaving of motifs, and redeployment of named characters gradually become more complex – until a powerful conclusion is reached. Some of the fictitious names in the list of dramatis personae develop also into complex and individualised figures, such as Eulogus, Nemorinus, or Namazon. Similarly, one of the Philistines, listed as ‘Dromo, a servant’ (‘Dromo servus’), appears first in Act IV with a comic monologue, and subsequently receives orders from Porphirius to enlist in the army and do errands (fetching Samson to dance like a bear). Dromo is the only one left alive at the end of the play, after Samson has

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destroyed the entire city and killed all the Philistines (Judges 16:30). This is not the merciful outcome and closure offered by the Old Testament (Judges 16:31). Thus the play ends on a bleak note, with Dromo left on stage, subversively overriding the biblical righteousness of Samson’s slaying of the Philistines: Dromo: Ach nastojte prˇenešťastného pádu/ Co, kde, a od koho mám bráti Radu. Ach jak mnoho Palácův prˇevráceno/ Ach co tu množství Lidu potlačeno. Kde Knížata, kde znamenití Páni? Kde šlechetné Panny, kde jiné Paní? Kde Rytírˇstvo, kde Služebníci jejich? Zhynuli, nezůstal ani jeden z nich. Ach neníli nad cˇím lítost míti/ Kamenné Srdce musilo by býti/ Aby nad tímto pádem, nesplakalo/ A tak množství Lidu nelitovalo. Já ze všech jediný sám jsem pozůstal/ A jedné že jsem před tím od stolu vstal. Ten hle pád Meˇsta prˇišel nenadálý/ Nicˇehéhož toho jsme se nebáli. Byli jsme tehdáž nejlépe veseli/ Ale prˇekazil nám Posel kyselý. Ach co sobeˇ mám smutný pocˇínati/ Ach nebohý, ba ach co mám deˇlati? Otec a Máti tu mi se zasuli/ Prˇátelé mojí též všickni zhynuli. Kamž se mám smutný Sirotek podíti/ Kde a u koho svou Hlavu skloniti. Zde mi žádného není outocˇišteˇ/ Aniž jest mi kde jaké stanovišteˇ. Jiného mi již nepozůstává nic/ Než abych odsud vytáhl neˇkam prycˇ. Jižť já kam mne Nohy ponesou půjdu Vždy neˇkde do nˇákého Meˇsta důjdu. An tu již hrozno až vlasy vstávají/ Tak se ta Brˇevna lámí a praskaji. Půjdu odsud, nebudu plakati víc/ Neb vím že sobeˇ tu nevyplácˇi nic/ An vždy veˇtcˇí hrůza mne obstupuje/ Mne na srdci mém svírá a sužuje. Bůh teˇ žehnej ó má prˇemilá Vlasti/ Jdu precˇ abych nepadl do též pasti (Samson I3r–v)

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Early modern drama (Ah, behold the lamentable fall. What, where, and from whom to take advice? Ah, how many palaces are destroyed, Ah, what hosts of people slaughtered. Where is the prince, where are the worthy lords? Where are the noble maids, where are the other ladies? Where are the knights, where are their servants? Consumed, not one of them remained. Ah, is there nothing to pity? A heart of stone it would have to be Not to weep at this fall And pity the many people. Of all only I was left alive, Only because I left the table just before. This city fell unexpectedly, We never feared anything. We were at the height of our joy, But were cut short by the sour messenger. Ah, what should I, sad man, do, Ah, pity me, oh alas, what shall I do? My father and mother are buried down there, And all my friends perished as well. Where shall I, sad orphan, go, Where and with whom lay my head? There is no sanctuary here for me, Nor any refuge whatsoever. Nothing else remains for me But to leave and go somewhere far away. I shall go wherever my feet take me, And will come once to some city. For here the horror makes my hair stand on end, Hearing the beams cracking and breaking. I will go from here and will not weep, For well I know weeping will not help nor succour me. For the horror creeps more and more on me, Clasping and tormenting my heart. God give you blessing, my dearest homeland, To avoid ruin I must leave and go away.)

In the play’s epilogue, the author of Samson thanks the audience for coming and explicates the story as a parable: ‘Nebo Syn Boží, jehož Samson Figuru nese / Jest náš vůdce, a proti nepřátelům staví se’ (‘For the Son of God, whose Figure Samson carries, is our leader and confronts our enemies’, I4v). This formulation explicitly calls for a figurative, quasi-allegorical application of this Sacred History

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of Samson. Combined with the dramatic techniques that forestall a literal reading, the play therefore presents a complex enactment of the scriptural parable. The complexity disables a simple allegorical reading or a direct application of an exemplum. In keeping with the elaborate early modern European drama, it calls for a continued engagement with and contemplation of the figurative representation on the part of the audience. This figurative turn (as it might be termed), identified in Central European biblical drama of the early 1600s, intensified over the course of the seventeenth century. It culminated in the high baroque style represented by genres as diverse as opera, the popular and elaborate Haupt- und Staatsaktionen, or the influential and much liked puppet theatre,33 as well as in baroque iconography in painting, sculpture, and architecture, with its complex allegories.34 The dramatic enactments of biblical drama and its theatrical accompaniments have enjoyed a remarkable longevity: the English comedians’ play Esther and Haman was adopted by travelling puppeteers and remained in the repertoire until the mid-nineteenth century, alongside Doctor Faustus, Don Juan, Jenovéfa, and other plays.35 A script of a folk play of Esther was recorded and published in the early 1900s (and was performed in the Terezín Ghetto during the Second World War). The Boccaccian interlude Polapená neveˇra also entered folklore as Salička, an all-female charivari played during the carnival. This endurance bears witness not only to the plays’ dramatic qualities but also to their interpretive, figurative openness that allows an affective enjoyment beyond a literal and contextually rooted theological application. While Ruth and Samson have held a markedly different place in the history of dramatic literature from that of the English comedians’ Ester and Haman, they share many dramatic and theatrical features. Most remarkably, in contrast to their precursors among the extant biblical drama, they take significant licence with the foundational text of Christian belief. In allowing a more open reading and use of the Scriptures, these plays represent a significant development in the history of Central European theatre in that they gave creative and intellectual freedom to the performer as well as to the spectator. No longer dogma to be recited verbatim, biblical stories became metaphorical mirrors refracting the human condition here and now. This interpretive openness – the indeterminacy of figurative expression – was an epistemic mode that invited playwrights and performers to engage in the adaptation of traditional narratives ‘for ease of understanding and grasping’ and ‘with a view to the present times’.

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Notes 1 Cited from Milena Cesnaková-Michalcová, Juraj Tesák Mošovský: Komedie Ruth (Bratislava: Vydavatel’stvo Slovenskej akadémie vied, 1973), p. 53. This chapter was written as part of the research project Otakar Zich in the Context of Modern Scholarship and the Lasting Potential of his Concepts (Otakar Zich v kontextu moderní vědy a dnešní potenciál jeho konceptů, 2016–18), financed from Grant No. GA16–20335S from the GAČR (the Czech Grant Agency). I would like to thank my colleagues for their help and support: David Drozd, Martin Hanoušek, M. A. Katritzky, Lukáš Kubina, Eva Stehlíková, and Christopher R. Wilson. Part of this chapter was presented at the Theater without Borders conference hosted by the Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung in Cologne in June 2017, and another at the Theater Without Borders conference hosted by the School of Arts at the University of Hull in June 2018. Unless specified, all the translations are mine. 2 Milan Kopecký, České humanistické drama [Czech Humanist Drama] (Prague: ODEON, 1986), p. 8. 3 Kopecký, České humanistické drama, pp. 8–9. 4 For Pavel Kyrmezer, see Milena Cesnaková-Michalcová, Divadelné hry Pavla Kyrmezera [Pavel Kyrmezer’s Theatre Plays] (Bratislava: Vydavateľstvo Slovenskej akadémie vied, 1956); and Alena Jakubcová and Matthias J. Pernerstorfer (eds), Theater in Böhmen, Mähren und Schlesien: Von den Anfängen bis zum Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts. Ein Lexikon (Prague: IDU and Verlag der ÖAW, 2014), pp. 377–80. 5 Jiří Tesák Mošovský’s Ruth (1604), or Komedie z knihy Zákona božího, jenž slove Ruth, has been edited by Milena Cesnaková-Michalcová, Juraj Tesák Mošovský. For this chapter, I have used both her edition and the original print. The anonymous Samson has not been published since 1608, with the exception of two interludes, Helluo a Judaeus, and Polapená nevěra (most recently in Kopecký, České humanistické drama, pp. 273–9, 281–9). Manfred Brauneck (ed.), Spieltexte der Wanderbühne. Erster Band: Engelische Comedien und Tragedien, Vol. 1 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1970). 6 For the English comedy as a specific dramaturgy of travelling English companies of early modern Europe, see Pavel Drábek, ‘ “Why, sir, are there other heauens in other countries?”: The English Comedy as a transnational style’, in M. A. Katritzky and Pavel Drábek (eds), Transnational Connections in Early Modern Theatre (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2020), pp. 139–61. 7 ‘Jiné prˇícˇiny by se vyhledali, / Kterýmžto byšte všyckni místo dali, / Procˇ jsou Commediae všem užitecˇné, / Bohu i také dobrým Lidem vdeˇcˇné’ (Šalamoun 1604, A3r). 8 The ‘size of all that’s missing’ is Odai Johnson’s phrase and the title of his work-in-progress on the archival limitations of theatre historiography.

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9 For a comprehensive history of the Thirty Years War, see Peter H. Wilson, Europe’s Tragedy: A New History of the Thirty Years War (London: Allen Lane, 2009). 10 Both books are available in the Digital Repository of the Moravian Library at www.digitalniknihovna.cz (accessed 11 April 2019). 11 A transnational perspective of early modern theatre cultures has been explored by a number of historians, mostly associated with the Theater Without Borders research initiative (www.nyu.edu/projects/ theaterwithoutborders, accessed 11 April 2019). Apart from the publications of individual authors, the collective has issued three edited volumes, Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), Transnational Mobilities in Early Modern Theater (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), both edited by Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson; and Transnational Connections in Early Modern Theatre (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), edited by M. A. Katritzky and Pavel Drábek. The collective has also significantly shaped Volume 3 of A Cultural History of Theatre in the Early Modern Age (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), edited by Robert Henke. 12 Jeffrey Masten, ‘Introduction’, to Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, and Thomas Dekker, An/The Old Law, in Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (eds), Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 1334. 13 Cesnaková-Michalcová, in Jakubcová and Pernerstorfer, Theater in Böhmen, p. 689. 14 ‘Vím, cˇtenárˇi milý, vejborně i já to, že k Svatým písmum nic nenáleží prˇidávati ani ujimati … Však tuto, co se v komedí této složené, mimo to, co v bibli poznamenáno, od pana otce mého nejmilejšího prˇidáva, nestalo se nic na ujmu a zléhcˇeni Svatého písma, než více pro vysvětlení jeho, prohlídaje k cˇasům teˇmto.’ 15 ‘Das Stück enthält keine besondere dramatische Verwicklung; es ist eher als dialogisierte, konfliktfreie Erzählung angelegt’; see CesnakováMichalcová in Jakubcová and Pernerstorfer, Theater in Böhmen, p. 691. 16 For the theory of drama as interaction of stage figures, which I rely on here, see Otakar Zich, Estetika dramatického umeˇní [The Aesthetics of Dramatic Art] (Prague: Melantrich, 1931), pp. 57ff; for Roman Jakobson’s and Jan Mukarˇovský’s concept of the structural dominant see David Drozd, Tomáš Kacˇer, and Don Sparling (eds), Theatre Theory Reader: Prague School Writings (Prague: Karolinum Press, 2016), p. 16; Pavel Drábek et al., ‘The Prague Linguistic Circle and Formalism(s)’, in Drozd et al., Theatre Theory, pp. 603–6. 17 ‘[E]ine starke moralisierende Tendenz’; see Cesnaková-Michalcová in Jakubcová and Pernerstorfer, Theater in Böhmen, p. 691. 18 Jakubcová and Pernerstorfer, Theater in Böhmen, p. 335. 19 Pavel Drábek, ‘English Comedians in Prague, October 1602’, Notes and Queries 53.4 (2006), pp. 499–500.

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20 Otto G. Schindler, ‘Thomas Sackville’, in Jakubcová and Pernerstorfer, Theater in Böhmen, pp. 576–8. 21 Jakubcová and Pernerstorfer, Theater in Böhmen, p. 578. 22 Fynes Moryson, Shakespeare’s Europe: A Survey of the Condition of Europe at the End of the 16th Century. Being unpublished chapters of Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary (1617), with an Introduction and an Account of Fynes Moryson’s Career by Charles Hughes, 2nd edn (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967), p. 304; see also Pavel Drábek and M. A. Katritzky, ‘Shakespearean Players in Early Modern Europe’, in Bruce R. Smith (ed.), The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 1530–1, and Drábek, ‘ “Why, sir” ’, pp. 149–50. 23 To date, Samson and Hester and Ahasuerus have detailed accounts on the Lost Plays Database (www.lostplays.org). 24 Pavel Drábek, ‘English Comedy and Central European Marionette Drama: A Study in Theater Etymology’, in Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson (eds), Transnational Mobilities in Early Modern Theater (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 185–7. 25 I have argued this case in Drábek, “ ‘Why, sir” ’. 26 This play was probably related to the Comedia de quodam Duce Farrari, performed by Sackville and company in Strasbourg in 1597. For a discussion of the German manuscript in relation to the lost English play A Comedy of a Duke of Ferrara, see Matthew Steggle, ‘The “Comedy of a Duke of Ferrara” in 1598’, Early Theatre 19.2 (2016), pp. 139–56. 27 Brauneck, Spieltexte der Wanderbühne, pp. 137, 146, 154, 159. 28 For an alternative discussion of the comic interludes in Ruth (1604), see Cesnaková-Michalcová, Juraj Tesák Mošovský, pp. 26–7. 29 Thomas Sackville’s repertoire in Strasbourg in 1597 included Comedy of a Rich Jew (Comoedia de Judaeo divite). It has been speculated that this could have been Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice or possibly Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (Jakubcová and Pernerstorfer, Theater in Böhmen, p. 578). It could also have been Thomas Dekker’s lost The Jew of Venice (Dekker had a stronger association with Germany, if there is any point in reinforcing probabilities in historiography). Equally and perhaps most readily, the play could also have been a variant of the comic interlude that survives as Helluo and Judaeus. 30 Roger Clegg and Lucie Skeaping, Singing Simpkin and Other Bawdy Jigs: Musical Comedy on the Shakespearean Stage. Scripts, Music and Context (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2014), pp. 100–3. 31 Clegg and Skeaping, Singing Simpkin and Other Bawdy Jigs, pp. 100–2. 32 Pavel Drábek, ‘Circulation: Aristocratic, Commercial, Religious, and Artistic Networks’, in Robert Henke (ed.), A Cultural History of Theatre. Volume 3: A Cultural History of Theatre in the Early Modern Age (London: Methuen, 2017), pp. 102–4.

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33 For a link between the English travelling actors and Central European puppet theatre, see Pavel Drábek, ‘English Comedy and Central European Marionette Drama: A Study in Theater Etymology’, pp. 177–96; and Drábek, ‘ “His Motion is no Italian Motion but Made in London”: The Early Modern Roots of Czech Puppet Theatre’, in Christian M. Billing and Pavel Drábek (eds), Czech Puppet Theatre in Global Contexts, special issue, Theatralia 18.2 (Autumn 2015), pp. 7–18; and Bärbel Rudin, ‘Das fahrende Volk. Puppenspiel als Metier: Nachrichten und Kommentare aus dem 17. und 18. Jahrhundert’, Kölner Geschichtsjournal 1 (1976), pp. 2–11. 34 For the authoritative resource on baroque iconography, see Albrecht Schöne’s Emblematik und Drama im Zeitalter des Barock (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1964; 2nd edn, 1967). 35 Drábek, ‘English Comedy’. For a discussion of Esther and Haman as performed by the English comedians, see Chapter 13 below.

13 To play the Fool: the Book of Esther in early modern biblical drama1 Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Chanita Goodblatt

Introduction In ‘On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure’, C. G. Jung succinctly defines the Fool’s power by describing ‘the buffoon-like Hanswurst [the gluttonous name Sausage], who is an altogether negative hero and yet manages to achieve through his stupidity what others fail to accomplish with their best efforts’.2 This chapter will elaborate on Jung’s perceptive statement, by studying how the figure of the Fool is central to the dramatisation of the biblical Book of Esther in three early modern biblical plays. A discussion of the carnivalesque quality of the Book of Esther will first provide the opportunity to set out the performative aspects of the Fool in this biblical text. Subsequently, the chapter will trace out the enactment of the Fool in the early modern plays by looking at two different dramaturgical strategies: the insertion of comic interludes into one of the plays; and the insertion of the figure of the Fool directly into the dramatised biblical narrative in the other two. On the one hand, the comic interludes are dispersed throughout the English play (preserved in German) Comedie von der Königen Esther und Hoffärtigen Haman (‘Comedy of Queen Esther and Haughty Haman’), which focuses on Hans Knapkäse (the gluttonous name ‘Smartcheese’) and his wife as they enact a ‘comic parody on the marital troubles of the king’.3 On the other hand, the figure of the Fool – as the German Narr (Fool), or as the bawdy character of Mordecai – and his distinct use of idiomatic, proverbial, and liturgical language within the biblical narrative enhance the respective carnivalesque performances of Sachs’s Die Gantze Hystori der Hester (‘Comedy, The Entire History of Hester’) and the Yiddish Ein Schön Purim Shpil (‘A Beautiful Purim Play’). All three plays have only recently been translated into English, and so provide a new-found and fascinating opportunity to study what Pavel Drábek, in Chapter 12 of this book, terms a ‘transnational theatrical culture’.

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The carnivalesque and the Fool in the Book of Esther A study of early modern dramatisations of the Book of Esther must necessarily address this narrative’s carnivalesque quality. For this quality is widely acknowledged, whether discussed in terms of the ‘literary carnivalesque’ adapted from Bakhtin,4 or as engendering the Jewish holiday of Purim with its celebrations, costumes, and feasts.5 In this context, the conception of this book, proposed by Shemaryahu Talmon, introduces that most carnivalesque of characters, the Fool:6 We propose to define the Esther-narrative as a historicized wisdom-tale … . The author is not interested in the dramatis personae on their own account, but in the values, virtues and vices which they [the characters] represent … . In essence the three couples exemplify the traditional wisdom-triangle: the powerful, but witless dupe [AhaseurusVashti] – the righteous wise [Mordecai-Esther] – the conniving schemer [Haman-Zerash].

Talmon’s illumination of the biblical characters as emblematic figures is particularly interesting in its introduction of Ahasuerus as a ‘witless dupe’, the image of a Fool that has not been lost on the Jewish Midrash Rabbah (‘Great Instruction’) for the Book of Esther, which contains interpretive ‘comments on the whole book – on each chapter, on every verse, and at times even on every word in the verse’.7 Two particular passages from the Midrash are highly significant: [Book of Esther 1:4] While he [Ahaseurus] showed the riches of his royal glory and the splendor and pomp of his majesty for many days, a hundred and eighty days. ‘A fool spends all his spirit’ (Proverbs 29:11): this is Ahaseurus. [Hebrew: Kol ruḥo yotsi kesil’: zeh ‘Aḥashverosh]. Esther Rabbah8 [Book of Esther 1:22]: He [Ahaseurus] sent dispatches to all the royal provinces … that every man be lord in his own house. Said R. Huna, ‘Ahasuerus had a stupid policy. Under ordinary circumstances, if someone wants to eat lentils and his wife to eat beans, can he force her? Is it not the simple fact that what she wants is what she does?’ [Aramaic: La mah dehi baya ‘avdah]. Esther Rabbah9

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The Midrash underlines how royal magnificence and power are enacted to an overwhelming – and exaggerated – effect in the biblical passages:10 the vivid descriptions of the royal banquet, with its ‘ḥavle-vuts ṿe-’argama’ (‘cords of fine crimson cloth’), and ‘yenmalkhut rav’ (‘abundant royal wine’) served in ‘bikhle-zahav’ (‘golden vessels’); as well as the king’s ‘ḥamato ba’arah bo’ (‘rage [that] flared up within him’) against his wife, and his mandate that ‘śorer be-veto’ (‘every man should rule in his home’). The king’s misuse of both his monarchical and marital authority transforms him into that Fool discredited as the kesil (fool) in Wisdom Literature.11 These Midrashic readings of King Ahaseurus as the kesil thus illuminate several of his performative aspects: the use of ostentatious signs of power, to be parodied in turn by the early modern Fool’s colourful and fancy attire; anger as embodied cognition, wherein the readers of the biblical text envision this anger in physical terms (e.g. red face, rigid body) that will ‘directly activate the experience of specific bodily feelings’ on their part12 – and will be mimicked in the exaggerated gestures of the early modern Fool; and finally, the transposition of the desire for power and authority on to the carnivalesque attributes of food, marital discord, and language. These performative aspects of the Fool (costume, gestures, the carnivalesque) are apparent in the three dramatisations of the Book of Esther from the early modern period – a period in which biblical drama was performed in a secular venue, particularly in accessible (private and public) spaces.13 The two earlier plays are Comedie, Die Gantze Hystori der Hester (1536),14 the ‘oldest extant German Esther Play’,15 composed by the German Meistersinger Hans Sachs; and the Comedie von der Königen Esther und Hoffärtigen Haman (1620), performed in Europe by professional English actors and very conceivably an adaptation of the lost English play Hester and Ahasverus (1594).16 These plays participated in the Reformation attempt ‘to spread knowledge and awareness of the Bible in ways that were readily comprehensible to ordinary people’,17 particularly in reflecting on contemporaneous situations. Such is the case with other biblical plays of this period. Note, for example, the play A Newe Mery and Wittie Comedie or Enterlude, Newely Imprinted, Treating Upon the Historie of Jacob and Esau (performed by boy choristers in 1552–53; printed in 1568),18 which enacts a concern with predestinarian theology,19 or George Peele’s The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe with the Tragedie of Absalon (registered in 1594; printed in 1599),20 which ‘reflects the continuous series of familial tensions and civil rebellions that threatened the Tudor

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dynasty throughout the sixteenth century’.21 On their part, the two dramatisations of the Book of Esther enacted issues that possessed singular import for the Protestants – the victory of an embattled religious community and a woman’s moral character, as well as norms of monarchical and marital authority.22 The third play is the Yiddish Ein Schön Purim Shpil (1697),23 the ‘earliest representative’ of ‘Ahasuerus plays’,24 which enacted the biblical book as a secular performance during Purim festivities – and was directly influenced by the aforementioned German and English dramatisations of the Book of Esther.25 Three illustrations of the Fool, related to these plays, respectively illuminate his performative aspects, as he enacts what John Alexander has termed the ‘antinomial hybrid clown/fool persona’.26 The German Narr’s distinctive costume is that of ‘a Jester at princely courts, in the theater … mostly in colorful clothes, appearing

13.1  A German Fool (Narr). Reproduction of an old German print in Francis Douce, Illustrations of Shakespeare, and of Ancient Manners

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13.2  A Fool. Washington Haggadah (1478)

with bells and fool’s cap’.27 This costume is re-created in the figure of the foolish son from the Haggadah (the Jewish text setting out the order of the Passover meal) that, as Ahuva Belkin argues, also provides ‘early visual testimony’ in Jewish sources for the correspondingly foolish figure of Mordecai – consequentially demonstrating that the ‘framework of the early Purim Spiel has a close affinity with secular carnival plays of Germany’.28 Lastly, the marionette re-creation of the Comedie von der Königen Esther und Hoffärtigen Haman29 clearly indicates a modern preservation of the figure of the German carnivalesque Fool – particularly as represented in the costume (the traditional belled or buttoned fool’s cap),30 as well as through what Paul Piris discusses as the ‘co-presence’ of a puppet and a human actor, in which the latter’s exaggerated facial expressions

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13.3  The Historye of Queen Ester, of King Ahasverus and of the Haughty Haman. Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre, 2009. Puppeteers: Theresa Linnihan with Jester Kašpárek and Sarah Lafferty with his wife Kalupinka

and bodily gestures sustain a comic, even parodic, ‘dramaturgical meaning’.31 A similar use of exaggerated gesture is evident in the illustrations of the German Narr and the foolish son from the Haggadah; the former’s outstretched arm can variously inform ‘the spectators of things that unfold’ or invite ‘to show … [or invite] to laugh together or cry in company’,32 while the latter’s pointing at his mouth implies his traditional ‘muteness’.33 These varied modalities of performance – costume, gesture, and (befitting a dramatic text) language – will be discussed as providing the respective audiences with a comically alternative, even subversive, perspective on the events and issues of the Book of Esther.

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The comic interlude as dramaturgical strategy: Comedie von der Königen Esther und Hoffärtigen Haman

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In her classic study of the Comedie von der Königen Esther und Hoffärtigen Haman, Ruth Blackburn writes of the comic interlude:34 This subplot has been worked in with some skill, for the henpecked Hans is represented as much affected by the king’s order that women should be submissive to their husbands … . The whole Hans sequence is characterized by vulgarity and coarse humor which accords ill with the serious court scenes, but which probably went down well with the audience and provided the company’s clown with opportunities to disport himself in the expected manner.

A short comic interlude at the end of Act I is more fully developed in the longer one at the end of Act II;35 the cited passages encapsulate how Hans Knapkäse and his wife are performed (significant terms and phrases are cited in German):36 Hans Knapkäse enters, carrying a sword in his hand with a shield HANS: Now, now my wife will get her share, because now I have taken heart. Ho ho! I am as mad as a bull [toll als ein Bull]; Holy Shit [Potz Schlapperment], how I will beat that woman! Now she will come any minute like the devil [Teufel] and will want to beat me again, but let her come! Ho ho! I am not anymore, as I was before. Look here, see, the devil [Teufel] is coming!    […]      Wife Beats Hans Knapkäse [trapped in a crossbow] WIFE: Shall I be the master of the house [Herr im Hause], shall I be the master of the house, will you be subservient [unterthänig]? HANS: Oh wife, I beg you in the Lord’s name, don’t beat me anymore, I want to be subservient, but the King has prohibited it [aber der König hat es lassen verbieten]. WIFE: Hoho, what do I have to do with the King’s order [Hoho was hab ich mit des Königes Gebot zu thunde]? No, I have to beat you ten times better.             Wife beats Hans

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   […]             Wife sets Hans free

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HANS: O wife, I am half dead because you beat me so. WIFE: That hinders the devil [Teufel] in you. Look here, walk behind me and follow me with the basket. HANS: (Takes the basket). With pleasure, dear wife. WIFE: If you will not obey me, I will cut off your element [so wil ich dich Elementsding abschlagen]. HANS: Oh, dear wife, I will do with pleasure what you tell me.

The early modern audience would very probably have been alerted to the role of Hans Knapkäse through his traditional Fool’s costume. What is more, the dimensions of language distinctly develop this performative aspect, while the scripted stage directions alert the early modern – as well as the modern – reader to corresponding gestural performances. The language of both husband and wife emphasises the debasement of the physical and the holy. Thus Hans Knapkäse describes his angry response with the familiar phrase ‘mad as a bull’ – evoking an embodied cognition of raging brute strength and a violent unstoppable attack.37 His wife counters with a threat of physical and psychological castration. Additionally, there is the use of the sacrilegious epithet Teufel (‘devil’) and the phrase Potz Schlapperment (‘Holy Shit’) – a vulgarization of the German phrase Gottes Sakrament (‘God’s Sacrament’).38 Finally, the narrative or diegetic voice of the stage direction, ‘whose enunciating subject should be the narrator, not the author’,39 clearly sets out the actions and gestures that distinctly enact marital discord – from the husband’s combative actions, to his physical abuse at his wife’s hand, and to his final debasement as her lackey. The ‘comic violence’ of this scene thus demonstrates its connection with the street literature of early modern England and Germany, in which women ‘fall victim to this sanction as scolding wives or sexual offenders, but popular literature often allows them to reverse the established order and punish men for faults’.40 A third comic interlude concludes the play. In Act IV, the dramatisation of the biblical narrative reproduces the execution of

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Haman and his sons, the elevation of Mordecai, and the preservation of the Jewish community. This is truly a fitting narrative and ethical conclusion to the Book of Esther. Yet then Hans Knapkäse and his wife enter the Court, and appeal to the King to resolve their marital problems (significant terms and phrases are cited in German):41

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KING:

You two foolish people [Ihr zwei albern Leut], you really think, that if one is not master of the house one has to beat the other. No, you are wrong, But I can well see, that you will never reconcile. Therefore, we are resolved to divorce you. Man, you shall be kept at our court, that you may entertain us, and woman, I give you to my Queen. – Queen Esther, take her in for your entertainment.

ESTHER: I like her much, merciful King. KING

Now, how do you like this?

WIFE:

I did not ask for this, and I like it, that I will get away from my man.

HANS:

And I am pleased as well. But we will still be together at night, right?

KING:

Oh no, divorce means, to never be together again.

HANS:

Oh my dear, honorable Master King, this my heart does not allow me to do [solches kan ich nicht uber mein Herze bringen]. Oh my dear Master King, we cannot tolerate each other at day but at night we are good friends [aber des Nachts so seind wir gute Freunde].

KING:

Now, you odd [wünderlicher] Hans, so we will give in, that you will not be divorced at night, only during the day.

        Trumpets play. They exit             Finis.

As I have pointed out elsewhere, the wife’s disregard in the second interlude of the monarchical decree, as well as her threat of physical emasculation, establish her authority against king and husband. This ultimately provides a discerning comment on the

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biblical story of monarchical authority and marital relationships.42 This function of the comic interlude as a parodic, yet insightful, commentary on the monarchy is fully realised in this final interlude, as the Fool and his wife, presumably in recognisable costumes (preserved and parodied in the modern Czechoslovak-American Marionette production of Figure 13.3), invade monarchical space. In this interlude, the court is demeaned through the particularly carnivalesque aspect, which highlights the King’s acceptance of the Fool’s odd behaviour and sexual appetites. Very much the biblical couple ‘as the witless dupe’, the Fool and his wife thus transform the King and Queen (in this instance, Esther) into another such couple. Monarchical justice and prerogative are upstaged as the two couples exit, leaving the audience with an empty flourish of misused power. June Schlueter argues that dramatic closure ‘is not an ideologically neutral concept’;43 in this play it distinctly marks that moment in which the audience/readers (like the King himself) acquiesce to the Fool’s unique definition of monarchical and familial harmony, which ultimately confounds the narrative and ethical conclusion of the Book of Esther. The insertion of the Fool as dramaturgical strategy: Comedie, Die Gantze Hystori der Hester and Ein Schön Purim Shpil It is the distinctive use of language as a modality of performance – intriguingly bawdy and sacrilegious – that chiefly characterises the Fool in both Sachs’s Comedie, Die Gantze Hystori der Hester and Ein Schön Purim Shpil. Chone Shmeruk’s insight into Mordecai’s language is appropriate for both characters; he writes that the ‘entire point in Mordecai’s parodies lies in the fact that the audience recognised the texts [alluded to] in their serious context outside of the play’.44 In other words, the power of the Fool’s performance through language resides in its communicative and effective aspects,45 which are directly connected (in these two plays) to idiomatic, proverbial, and liturgical language. In Sachs’s Comedie, for example, the Fool as Court Jester reprimands the King for sending out a mandate that ‘the man shall be master of the house’ (proverbial phrases are cited in German):46 I will let you send out the mandate all right. You will not patch up the fur (coat) [Ir werd den beltz nit gar zuflicken]. You will not cast out the Simon [Den Simon werdt ir nicht vertreybn],

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He will nevertheless stay master of the house. But if you want to overcome him with force, You will have to lie alone.

The Fool’s reprimand distinctly reflects the treatment of matrimonial tensions in both the Midrash and Comedie von der Königen Esther und Hoffärtigen Haman – enacted specifically through the use of two proverbial phrases. The first concretises the impossibility of accomplishing a specific task through the carnivalesque image of costume.47 The second intensifies this situation of helplessness by enacting the figure of an aggressive and domineering woman – the Siemann (‘she-man’)48 – and drawing as well on the folk belief that ‘if a wife gets out of bed first on St. Simon’s [feast] day [28 October], she will rule over her husband for the next year’.49 The following three passages focus on the characters of the monarch and his chief adviser (idiomatic and proverbial phrases are cited in German):50      The Fool [Narr] speaks [to the King] Oh little master, what a child you are! Jealousy [of the Jews] made that one [Haman] blind. That is why he wants to make some noise. It would be better for you to look after your own matters And stop believing every sycophant, of everything He brings to you, beware. You do not know? One said in olden times [man jach vor alten zeitten], A walking man should ride donkeys [Ein geher man solt esel reyten]. […]    The Chamberlains tie up Haman; the Fool speaks I told you so, That you would dig yourself a pit [Du wurst dir selb ein gruben grabn] And fall into it [Und wurdest selber darein fallen]. May this happen to all flatterers Who put pious people in the kettle [in den kessel hawen]. […]           The Fool speaks It is only right that these idiots [the enemies of the Jews] Get a proper beating And infidelity meets its own master [untrew iren herren drift]. The bath was prepared for the Jews [Das bad den Juden wart gestifft].

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In each passage, an action is carried out: the King’s confirmation of Haman’s attack against the Jews; Haman’s execution; the killing of the Jews’ enemies. Furthermore, in each passage Sachs’s Fool can certainly be viewed as that figure, who, as Hélène Feydy writes, ‘dazzles between seriousness and jest’.51 Thus the Fool uses the proverb in the first passage to pronounce punishment on the King, as ‘a quick, irascible man [who] should ride on a donkey whose slowness makes him miserable’ 52 – essentially creating an image of a deserved fate that befits the arrogant, angry, and foolish person he has demonstrated himself to be. The subsequent continued use of idiomatic and proverbial phrases intensifies this enactment of fate as entrapment. Thus the Fool’s description of the Jews’ destruction adapts the vivid phrases ‘Jemanden in die Pfanne hauen’ (‘throw someone in the pan/kettle’)53 and ‘Einem ein Bad bereiten’ (‘to prepare a bath for someone’), in which taking a bath renders one vulnerable.54 What is more, the Fool’s comments on the fate of Haman and his minions emphasise the concept of one’s inescapable fate. He thus uses the proverb ‘Untrew iren Herren Drift’,55 as well as the more traditional wisdom of Psalms 7:15 adapted in the phrase concerning falling into a pit. In Martin Luther’s German translation this reads,‘Er hat eine Gruben gegraben und ausgefürht; Und ist in die Gruben gefallen, die er gemacht hat’ (‘He has dug a pit and made it; and is fallen into the ditch which he made’).56 The Fool’s use of this biblical citation thereby echoes the prophetic words, found also in the warning in the Book of Esther addressed to Haman by his advisers and his wife Zeresh (6:13): ‘If Mordecai is of the seed of the Jews, before whom you have begun to fall, you shall not prevail over him but you shall surely fall before him.’ 57 In this manner, the Fool intensifies the proverb’s function in early modern drama, as it ‘serves to impart moral advice in a simple and effective fashion’ 58 – ultimately serving to question the character of monarchical and political authority. In this text of the Comedie, Die Gantze Hystori der Hester, the Fool’s characterisation relies primarily on language as a modality of performance. This is also a distinguishing quality of Ein Schön Purim Shpil, particularly evidenced in Mordecai’s response to the decree of extinction against the Jews set out in the Book of Esther 4:1–4. In a long passage, from which certain sections are cited below, the Hebrew liturgical terms used within the Yiddish text are marked in italics:59 I go out to my stable, there my red cow stands and welcomes me. With her tail she makes a gesture of reverence, with her left foot

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she shakes a palm branch, with the right foot she thumps Ashamnu [Hebrew: We have sinned], with her backside she blows the ram’s horn. So I immediately saw that the situation is unfortunately not good. Therefore all you little children should pray: teshuvah, tefilah, tsedaḳah [Hebrew: repentance, prayer, charity], Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. With the leather Tefillin [phylacteries] bag [possibly the scrotum]! Joshua with a bear’s tail [dick], you should lead the children of Israel to the Holy Land [from the biblical Book of Joshua]. Get up, put on your wooden shoes, and run to all the whorehouses and pray for there is an evil decree. Moses, Aaron you sleep so soundly and have not heard how your children have been sold.60 Joshua, where are you, you have previously led us to the Holy Land. Now we are in Haman’s hand. Wake up quickly. And cancel the evil decree:    Mordecai goes and checks the Tsitses [knotted strands on a man’s undergarment]      and says one strand is invalid and he goes to the maidens and checks their breasts     and he walks and announces mitsvot [Hebrew: good deeds] and he walks and says words such as these Three pennies for pits pots [little penis] I meant to say mitsvot.             He says a blessing Barukh ‘atah [Hebrew: Blessed art Thou] all sheep-like Yotsrot [liturgical poems]. All calf-like Seliḥot [penitential liturgical poems]. All girls have tits. Those I like to use. Just as he has entered into the Covenant [of circumcision]. Haman should go, le-shem shedim [Hebrew: to the demons]: […] ‘Al [Hebrew: For]. I gladly go with the girls to the stable. Ḥet [Hebrew: A sin]. Much better [to go with them] to bed. She-ḥaṭanu [Hebrew: That we have sinned]. Even if it were a widow. Le-fanekha [Hebrew: Before You]. I will do it quickly. ‘Anenu [Hebrew: Answer us] Abraham.

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He has a big dick. Makes all the girls lame. ‘Anenu [Hebrew: Answer us] Isaac. His thing is very pointed. Makes all the girls amused. […] Mi she-’anah [Hebrew: He who answered] Abraham Fuchs, He will answer us, Mi she-’anah Samuel Lemberger, He will answer us. Mi she-’anah Schwartz Isekil, He will answer us. Mi she-’anah Netah Posner, He will answer us. Mi she-’anah Samuel Hess, He will answer us. Mi she-’anah Herschel Weltzer, He will answer us. Mi she-’anah Itsik Krakauer, He will answer us. Amen.

The first section comprises a chaotic mixture of various Jewish religious practices, disconcertedly attributed to an animal: ritual purification with the ashes of a red cow (Numbers 19:1–22); waving a palm branch during the holiday of Suḳḳot (the Feast of Tabernacles); thumping one’s chest during the prayers of Yom Ḳippur (Day of Atonement); blowing the ram’s horn during the prayers of the New Year; the use of Tefillin, phylacteries or small leather boxes (containing parchments inscribed with biblical verses) strapped on to the head and arms during weekday prayers; and the double entendre, in which the Hebrew phrase ‘le-shem shedim’ (‘to the demons’) replaces the traditional ‘le-shem shamayim’ (‘for heaven’s sake’). Mordecai’s discourse therefore comprises a highly developed instance of what Bakhtin terms the ‘life of the carnival square’, with its ‘ambivalent laughter, blasphemy, the profanation of everything sacred’.61 Yet it also provides a significant example of Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossic discourse, in which each ‘word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life … As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between the self and other.’ 62 Bakhtin’s attention to the social context of language is thereby connected to the construction of identity; Mordecai is most certainly the righteous figure turned sacrilegious, as (in Belkin’s words) he ‘interjects bits of prayers wherever possible, throwing in sexual allusions, scatology and curses … as a fool, stepping outside the social norms, he emphasises disorder’.63 In a text in which stage directions are few and far between, the extended stage direction that follows adds much to this characterisation of Mordecai, strikingly enacting him as a bawdy, subversive

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character. His checking of the maidens’ breasts is generated on the linguistic level by a homophonic resemblance between the Hebrew term tsitses/tsitsiyot and the Yiddish term tsitses, ‘breasts’.64 On a performative level, this action involving the women of the audience (with only male actors on stage)65 thereby indicates the breaking of the theatre’s fourth or imaginary ‘wall the audience looks through to hear and to see the events’ 66 – thereby removing (as Shmeruk notes) any ‘real barrier between the audience and the actors’.67 The narrative or diegetic voice of the stage directions adds, therefore, a visual and actual performance of the carnivalesque, correspondingly highlighting for the audience/readers Mordecai’s subversions of Jewish religious rituals and language. The final section enacts a structural and emotional crescendo of emotion, in which Mordecai recites – and reinvents – the Seliḥot, which are penitential liturgical poems recited during the religious observances of the Jewish New Year. As an act of liturgical closure, there is a progressive rhythmic and emotional intensification that accurately echoes the atmosphere of this season so fraught with piety and contrition. Yet there is also the breaking of this Hebrew chant’s effective aspect, through the interlacing of Yiddish profanities. As an act of dramatic closure that distinctly does not comprise (in Schlueter’s terms) ‘an ideologically neutral concept’, it thereby marks the transformation of Mordecai from a righteous leader of prayer into the Fool who subverts and sexualises ritual penitence. Further complementing this subversive element is the list of common European–Jewish male names, which turns the act of communal penance into a personal act solicited and experienced by an ordinary individual. Language as a modality of performance, enacted through the use of idiomatic and proverbial language in Sachs’s Comedie, Die Gantze Hystori der Hester, achieves a further, unsettling effect in Ein Schön Purim Shpil through the transformation of specifically liturgical language inherent in ritual and prayer. Conclusion This chapter has distinguished two dramaturgical strategies for enacting the Fool within several early modern plays relating to the Book of Esther. The first strategy comprises comic interludes involving the Fool and his wife, while the second comprises insertions of the Fool directly into the dramatisations of the biblical narrative. What, therefore, are the Fool’s achievements in the three plays discussed here? The Fool can certainly be seen to subvert the

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biblical narrative of monarchical and familial harmony. Furthermore, whether he is the product of early modern Germany and England, or of the Jewish community extant within a Christian Europe, it can be argued that the Fool also challenges his contemporaneous political and social structures. One can thus evaluate the impact of a performance of Comedie von der Königen Esther und Hoffärtigen Haman at the court of Duke Philipp Julius at Wolgast (northern Germany), from which it was most probably transcribed by the German lawyer and historian Friedrich Menius.68 Though such performances were condemned by the Protestant court pastor as ‘the work of the devil and the Pope combined’,69 it is perhaps the subversion by the Fool of ill-advised monarchical rule during a time of financial and political instability that resonated with its audience. A similar message is enacted by the Fool in Comedie, Die Gantze Hystori der Hester. It is reasonable to assume that, like all Hans Sachs’s dramas, this play would have been ‘ “vetted” by the Nürnberg City Council before it could be performed’.70 Could it thus be proposed that the Fool’s criticism of the attack against the Jews by the king and his adviser was sanctioned in its turn as part of the Reformation’s struggle against the dominant Catholic Church? Lastly, the perceived danger of the Fool’s response to the mandate against the Jews in Ein Schön Purim Shpil is attested to by the burning of a later version of its text and the banned performance of all such plays by Jewish authorities in the early eighteenth century – perhaps as much for its negative portrayal of Haman as a Christian enemy of Jews as for its profanity.71 Considering these possibilities opens up further significant potential avenues of research that bespeak the ultimate authority of the Fool as incisive commentator on monarchy, family, and religious tradition. Notes 1 Research for this chapter, as well as the translations of the German and the Yiddish plays into English, were supported by a grant from the Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 338/16). 2 Carl Gustav Jung, ‘On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure’, in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 2nd edn, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 255–72, at p. 255. 3 Wilhelma C. Garvin, The Development of the Comic Figure in the German Drama from the Reformation to the Thirty Years’ War (New York: Haskell House, 1971 [1923]), p. 28.

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4 Kenneth Craig, Reading Esther: A Case for the Literary Carnivalesque (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995). 5 Daniel Boyarin (ed.), Purim and the Cultural Poetics of Judaism, special issue, Poetics Today 5.1 (1994). 6 Shemaryahu Talmon, ‘ “Wisdom” in the Book of Esther’, Vetus Testamentum 13.4 (1963), pp. 419–55, at pp. 426, 440–1. 7 Moshe David Herr, ‘Midrash’, in Encyclopedia Judaica, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 2nd edn, Vol. 14 (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), pp. 182–5, at pp. 183–4, http://go.galegroup/ com (accessed 11 February 2015). 8 Jacob Neusner, Esther Rabbah I: An Analytical Translation (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1989), p. 63; Midrash Rabbah on the Pentateuch and Five Megilot [Hebrew], Vol. 3 (Jerusalem: Hekhalot, n.d.), p. 98, section 2, introduction. 9 Neusner, Esther Rabbah I, p. 115; Midrash Rabbah, p. 109, section 4, passage 12. 10 The English citations of the Bible are taken from Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, Volume 3: The Writings. A Translation with Commentary (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), pp. 718–20. The Hebrew citations are transcribed from Biblia Rabbinica: A Reprint of the 1525 Venice Edition, ed. Jacob Ben Hayim Ibn Adoniya, Vol. 4 (Jerusalem: Maḳor, 1972), pp. 330–2. 11 Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, The Brown–Driver– Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson 2014), p. 493. 12 Valentina Cuccio, ‘Embodied Simulation and Metaphors: On the Role of the Body in the Interpretation of Bodily-Based Metaphors’, Epistemologia 38 (2015), pp. 97–112, at p. 105. 13 For further discussion, see Jutta Baum, ‘Queen Esther’, in Dov-Ber Kerler (ed.), History of Yiddish Studies: Papers from the Third Annual Oxford Winter Symposium in Yiddish Language and Literature, 13–15 December 1987 (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic, 1991), pp. 71–9, at p. 75; Jerold C. Frakes, The Emergence of Early Yiddish Literature: Cultural Translation in Ashkenaz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), pp. 83–8; Eli Rozik, Jewish Drama & Theatre: From Rabbinical Intolerance to Secular Liberalism (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2013), pp. 152–5. 14 Hans Sachs, ‘Comedie, Die Gantze Hystori der Hester’, in Adelbert von Keller (ed.), Hans Sachs: Erster Band (Tübingen: H. Laup, 1870). This play has been translated by Sophie Kriegel; all citations are printed with her permission. 15 Frank Ardolino, ‘Hans and Hammon: Dekker’s Use of Hans Sachs and Purim in The Shoemaker’s Holiday’, in John Pitcher and Robert Lindsey (eds), Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England: Volume 14 (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001), pp. 144–67, at p. 150.

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16 Sophie Kriegel (trans.), ‘Comedy of Queen Esther and Haughty Haman’, in Chanita Goodblatt, Jewish and Christian Voices in English Reformation Biblical Drama: Enacting Family and Monarchy (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 187–224. For a discussion of the play’s provenance, see Goodblatt, Jewish and Christian Voices, pp. 65, 13 and 18–19 nn. 40, 41. 17 Philip Broadhead, ‘The Biblical Verse of Hans Sachs: The Popularization of Scripture in the Lutheran Reformation’, in Peter Clarke and Charlotte Methuen (eds), The Church and Literature (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2012), pp. 124–33, at p. 124. 18 ‘A New Mery and Wittie Comedie or Enterlude, Newely Imprinted, Treating upon the Historie of Jacob and Esau’, in Paul Whitfield White (ed.), Reformation Biblical Drama in England: The Life of and Repentaunce of Mary Magdalene. The History of Jacob and Esau. An Old-Spelling Critical Edition (New York: Garland, 1992), pp. 67–113. 19 Paul Whitfield White, ‘The Bible as Play in Reformation England’, in Jane Milling and Peter Thomson (eds), The Cambridge History of British Theatre, Volume I: Origins to 1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 87–115, at p. 102. 20 George Peele, ‘The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe with the Tragedie of Absalon’, in R. Mark Benbow, Elmer Blistein, and Frank S. Hook (eds), The Dramatic Works of George Peele: The Araygnement of Paris, David and Bethsabe and the Old Wives Tale (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 133–295. 21 Goodblatt, Jewish and Christian Voices, p. 14. 22 For further discussion, see Ardolino, ‘Hans and Hammon’, p. 150–1; Baum, ‘Queen Esther’, pp. 72–3. 23 Chone Shmeruk (ed.), ‘Ein Schön Purim’, in Yiddish Biblical Plays, 1607–1750 (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1979), pp. 155–210. This play has been translated into English by Oren Roman; all citations are printed with his permission. I also thank Roman for his insightful comments on the present chapter. For the most recent account of the transcription of this play, see Rachel Wamsley, ‘Characters against Type: Conversion, Mise-en-Page, and Counter-Exegesis in a Seventeenth-Century Purim Play’, Lias 44.1 (2017), pp. 59–88. 24 Frakes, Emergence of Early Yiddish Literature, p. 90. 25 For further discussion, see Baum, ‘Queen Esther’, p. 75; N. S. Doniach, Purim or The Feast of Esther: An Historical Study (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1933), pp. 160–7; Frakes, Emergence of Early Yiddish Literature, pp. 86–8. 26 John Alexander, ‘Will Kemp, Thomas Sacheville and Pickelhering: A Consanguinity and Confluence of Three Early Modern Clown Personas’, Daphnis: Journal of German Literature and Culture of the Early Modern Period (1400–1750) 36.3/4 (2007), pp. 463–86, at p. 464. 27 Duden Online-Wörterbuch (Berlin: Dudenverlag, 2018), https:// www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Woerterbuch (accessed 11 April 2019).

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28 Ahuva Belkin, ‘ “Habit De Fou” in Purim Spiel?’, Assaph. Section C: Studies in the Theatre 2 (1985), pp. 40–55, at pp. 41–4. 29 This play was preserved in the Czech marionette oral tradition as The History of King Asver and the Haughty Aman, which was reconstructed and printed by Bartoš in his 1959 anthology of Czech folk marionette plays. See Pavel Drábek, ‘English Comedy and Central European Marionette Drama: A Study in Theater Etymology’, in Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson (eds), Transnational Mobilities in Early Modern Theater (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 177–96, at pp. 181–3. 30 Francis Douce, Illustrations of Shakespeare, and of Ancient Manners: With Dissertations on the Clown and Fools of Shakespeare; on the Collection of Popular Tales Entitled Gesta Romanorum; and on the English Morris Dance. A New Edition (London: Thomas Tegg, 1839), pp. 509–11. 31 Paul Piris, ‘Co-presence and Ontological Ambiguity of the Puppet’, in Dassia N. Posner, Claudia Orenstein, and John Bell (eds), The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance (New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 30–42, at p. 31. 32 See the discussion of this type of gesture by the early modern Italian artist: Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting: A New Translation and Critical Edition, ed. and trans. Rocco Sinisgalli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 63. 33 Belkin, ‘ “Habit De Fou” ’, p. 50. 34 Ruth H. Blackburn, Biblical Drama under the Tudors (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), pp. 186–8. 35 Hans Knapkäse also appears alone twice in the play: in Act III as the Carpenter who builds the gallows, and in Act IV as the Hangman. 36 Kriegel, ‘Comedy of Queen Esther and Haughty Haman’, pp. 198, 204. The German phrases are cited from Julius Tittman (ed.), ‘Comoedia von der Königen Esther und Hoffärtigen Haman’, in Die Schauspiele der Englischen Kömodianten in Deutschland (Leipzig: F. H. Brodhus, 1880; repr. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2010), pp. 3–44, at pp. 18, 24–5. 37 Christian Ludwig, Teutsch-Englisches Lexicon (Leipzig: Johan Friedrich Gleditschen, 1765), p. 1724. 38 Kriegel, ‘Comedy of Queen Esther and Haughty Haman’, p. 222 n. 32. 39 Manfred Jahn, ‘Narrative Voice and Agency in Drama: Aspects of a Narratology of Drama’, New Literary History 32.3 (2001), pp. 659–79, at p. 668. 40 Joy Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), pp. 183–4. 41 Kriegel, ‘Comedy of Queen Esther and Haughty Haman’, p. 220. Tittman, ‘Comoedia’, pp. 43–4. 42 Goodblatt, Jewish and Christian Voices, p. 65. 43 June Schlueter, Dramatic Closure: Reading the End (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995), p. 39.

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44 Shmeruk, Chone, ‘Introduction’, in Yiddish Biblical Plays, 1607–1750 (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1979), pp. 13–99, at p. 53. My translation. 45 These terms refer respectively to the classic definitions of speech acts set out by Austin and Searle: illocutionary, the act of accomplishing some communicative purpose; and perlocutionary, the act of accomplishing some effect on the action, thoughts, or beliefs of the hearers. See J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975); John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). 46 Sachs, ‘Comedie’, pp. 114–15, lines 34–9. 47 Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Wander (ed.), Deutsches Sprichwörter-Lexikon. Band 3 (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1873), col. 1208, no. 55. 48 ‘Siemann’, in Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm auf CD-ROM und im Internet, 2017. Kompetenzzentrum für elektronische Erschließungs-und Publikationsverfahren in den Geisteswissenschaften, Universität Trier, http://dwb.uni-trier.de (accessed 19 August 2019). 49 David Price, ‘When Women Would Rule: Reversal of Gender Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century German Drama’, Daphnis: Journal of German Literature and Culture of the Early Modern Period (1400–1750) 20.1 (1991), pp. 147–66, at p. 156. 50 Sachs, ‘Comedie,’ pp. 119–20, lines 35, 1–7; pp. 127–8, lines 33–4, 1–4; pp. 130–1, lines 33–4, 1–3. 51 Hélène Feydy, ‘Der Narr bei Hans Sachs’, in Jean Schillinger (ed.), Der Narr in der Deutschen Literature im Mittelater und in der Frühen Neuzeit (Berne: Peter Lang, 2009), pp. 103–23, at p. 123. I thank Sophie Kriegel for her translation. 52 ‘Reiten’, in Deutsches Wörterbuch. 53 I thank Sophie Kriegel for this reference. 54 Wander, Deutsches Sprichwörter-Lexikon. Band 1 (1867), col. 219, no. 34. 55 Wander, Deutsches Sprichwörter-Lexikon. Band 4 (1876), col.1485, no. 12. 56 Martin Luther, Biblia: Das ist: Die Gantze Heilige Schrifft. Band 1 (Wittenberg: Hans Lufft, 1545), p. CCCXLI[v]. 57 Alter, Hebrew Bible, pp. 733–4. 58 Bartlett Jere Whiting. Proverbs in the Earlier English Drama (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938), p. x. 59 Shmeruk, Yiddish Biblical Plays, pp. 180–5, lines 573–94, 720–56. 60 This refers to the selling of Joseph (Genesis 37:28). 61 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoeveky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 129–30. 62 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 293.

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63 Ahuva Belkin, ‘Citing Scriptures for a Purpose – The Jewish Purimspiel as a Parody’. Assaph. Section C: Studies in the Theatre 12 (1997), pp. 45–59, at p. 54. 64 Shmeruk, ‘Introduction’, in Yiddish Biblical Plays, p. 52; my translation. 65 Shmeruk, ‘Introduction’, in Yiddish Biblical Plays, pp. 74–83; my translation. 66 Elizabeth Bell, Theories of Performance (London: Sage, 2008), p. 37. 67 Shmeruk, Yiddish Biblical Plays, ‘Introduction’, at p. 86; my translation. 68 Alexander, ‘Will Kemp’, p. 463; Jerzy Limon, Gentlemen of a Company: English Players in Central and Eastern Europe 1590–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 88–9. 69 Julian Hilton, ‘The “Englische Komoedianten” in German-speaking States, 1592–1620: A Generation of Touring Performers as Mediators between English and German Cultures’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oxford, 1984, p. 100. 70 Niklas Holzberg, ‘Staging the Fringe before Shakespeare: Hans Sachs and the Ancient Novel’, in Stelios Panayotakis, Maaike Zimmerman, and Wytse Keulen (eds), The Ancient Novel and Beyond (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 393–400, at p. 394. 71 Frakes, Emergence of Early Yiddish Literature, pp. 90, 96.

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Primary sources Alberti, Leon Battista, On Painting: A New Translation and Critical Edition, ed. and trans. Rocco Sinisgalli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Alter, Robert (ed.), The Hebrew Bible. Volume 3: The Writings. A Translation with Commentary (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019). Amann, Klaus, Das Pfäferser Passionsspiel fragment. Edition, Untersuchung, Kommentar (Innsbruck: Universität Innsbruck Institut für Germanistik, 2010). Ambrose of Milan, Theological and Dogmatic Works, trans. Roy J. Deferrari (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1963). Anon., The. holie. Bible conteynyng the olde Testament and the newe. [Bishops’ Bible.] (London: Richard Jugge, 1568). Anon., Komedia o Králi Šalamúnovi, z Trˇetích Kneˇh Královských vybraná, v Českém Jazyku na Rythmy složena, Létha M. D. LXXI. A nyní z novu Léhta M. DC. IV. [‘A Comedy of King Solomon, selected from the Third Books of Kings, composed in rhythms in the Czech Tongue, in the year MDLXXI, and newly in the year MDCIV’] (Prague, 1604). Anon., Komedie česká o ctné a šlechetné vdoveˇ Judith: A o Holofernovi hejtmanu krále Nabuchodonozora. Od Mikuláše Vrány Litomyšlského z neˇmecké rˇecˇi v cˇeskú prˇeložena [‘A Czech comedy of the virtuous and noble widow Judith, and of Holofernes, the General of King Nabuchodonosor. Translated from German into Czech by Mikuláš Vrána Litomyšlský’] (Prague, 1605). Anon., Historia Duchovní o Samsonovi silném a udatném neˇkdy Vu˚dci Izrahelském: v spu˚sob Tragedie sepsaná/ a vzatá z Kneˇh Iudicum od Kapitoly trˇinácté až do sedmnácté [‘A Sacred History of Samson, once the strong and brave Israelite general: composed in the fashion of a tragedy and taken from the Books Iudicum from chapter thirteen up to seventeen’] (Prague, 1608). Anon., ‘A London Chronicle: Henry VIII’, in Charles Lethbridge Kingsford (ed.), Two London Chronicles from the Collection of John Stow (London: Camden Society, 1910), pp. 1–17.

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254 Bibliography Anon., ‘A New Mery and Wittie Comedie or Enterlude, Newely Imprinted, Treating upon the Historie of Jacob and Esau’, in Paul Whitfield White (ed.), Reformation Biblical Drama in England: The Life of and Repentaunce of Mary Magdalene. The History of Jacob and Esau. An Old-Spelling Critical Edition (New York: Garland, 1992), pp. 67–113. Anon., ‘York Mercers’ Indenture 11 June 1433’, in Christina M. Fitzgerald and John T. Sebastian (eds), The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2013), pp. 138–9. Ashley, Kathleen M. and Gerard NeCastro (eds), Mankind (2010), Teams Middle English Texts, http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams (accessed 11 April 2019). Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson, intro. G. R. Evans (London: Penguin Classics, 2003). Axton, Richard, and Peter Happé (eds), The Plays of John Heywood (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991). Bale, John, An Expostulation or Complaynte (London: John Daye, 1552). Bale, John, The Vocacyon ([Wesel?], 1553). Bale, John, King Johan, in Peter Happé (ed.), Four Morality Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). Batman, Stephen, Batman uppon Bartholome his booke De proprietatibus rerum (London: Thomas East, 1582). Beadle, Richard and Pamela M. King (eds), York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). Beadle, Richard (ed.), The York Plays: A Critical Edition of the York Corpus Christi Play as Recorded in British Library Additional MS 35290, 2 vols, Early English Text Society Supplementary Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 [2009]). Biblia Rabbinica: A Reprint of the 1525 Venice Edition, volume 4, ed. Jacob Ben Hayim Ibn Adoniya (Jerusalem: Maḳor, 1972). [Boccaccio, Giovanni], The Decameron Containing An Hundred Pleasant Novels (London, printed by Isaac Iaggard, 1620). Cesnaková-Michalcová, Milena (ed.), Juraj Tesák Mošovský: Komedie Ruth (Bratislava: Vydavateľstvo Slovenskej akadémie vied, 1973). Chardon, John, A sermon preached in S. Peters Church in Exeter the 6. day of December last. (London: Thomas Dawson, 1580). Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Davidson, Clifford (ed.), A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1981). Davidson, Clifford, Martin W. Walsh, and Ton J. Broos (eds), Everyman and its Dutch Original, Elckerlijc (2007), Teams Middle English Texts, http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams (accessed 11 April 2019). Dekker, Thomas, The Run-Away’s Answer to a Book Called A Rod for Run-Aways (n. p., 1625). Dekker, T. and P. Massinger, The Virgin Martyr, in F. Bowers (ed.), The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, Vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), pp. 365–480.

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Index

Abélard, Peter 91 Abraham 137, 145, 158, 175, 182, 244 Abraham and Lot 147 Absalom 147, 149 Absalom 147, 149 Act to Restrain Abuses of Players (1606) 150 Adam 16, 23, 44–6, 50–2, 138, 142, 144, 148, 158 Adams, Thomas 187 Admiral’s Men 147–9, 175 Aeschylus 70–2 Agamemnon 71 Choephori 70–2 Agamemnon 70 Albion, Knight 111 Alexander, John 235 Alexiou, Margaret 70 All for Money 105, 115 All Hallows parish church, London 120–1, 126, 129–30, 132 violent incident as inspiration for Pardoner and the Friar, The 121 Alleyn, Edward 147, 149 Alleyn, John 147 altarpieces Duccio (Maestà) 89 Van Eyck, Jan (Ghent) 89 Annas 36, 38, 141, 168–9 Antichrist 159 Apostles, The 142 Aristotle 71, 160 Poetics 71, 160 Arundel, Archbishop 107–9, 111, 116 Constitutions 104, 107–8, 111, 116

Astington, John 149 Axton, Richard 124 Babel, Tower of 148 Babylon 148 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 233, 245 Bale, John 111–14, 116, 142, 145, 148, 157–8, 161, 164–5, 197 God’s Promises 142, 148 King Johan 111–12, 114, 116 Three Laws 142, 145, 157–8, 164 Barlow, William 111 Dialoge Describing the Originall Ground of these Lutheran Faccions, A 111 Basilica di Sant’ Appolinare, Ravenna 90 Bathsheba 75, 146 Battista de Cavalleriis, Giovanni 196 Ecclesiae Anglicanae Trophaea 196 Belkin, Ahuva 236, 245 Benediktbeurer Passionsspiel 82, 91, 94 Benini, Marco 87 Beza, Theodore 143 Abraham’s Sacrifice 143 Birck, S. 216 Sapientia Salomonis, drama comicotragicum 216 Bishops’ Bible, The 136, 147 ‘Booke of Ionas, The’ 147 Blackburn, Ruth H. 74–5, 146, 238 Boccaccio, Giovanni 222–3 Decameron, The 222 as source of comic interlude in Samson 222

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282 Index Boleyn, Anne 143, 205 Books of the Bible Acts [9:4–5] 198 Corinthians [13:13] 107 Daniel [1–4] 149 [13] 29–30 Deuteronomy [19:16–21] 30 [32:18] 107 Ecclesiastes [5:9] 106 [38] 116 Ecclesiasticus [1:1] 106 [38:1–2] 114 Esther 227, 232–5, 237, 240–1, 243, 246 Exodus [3:14] 187 [4:21] 114 [7:3] 114 [14:4] 114 Ezekiel [22:7] 178 [45:6] 162 Galatians [1:16] 198 [6:5] 106 Genesis [1:1–8] 148 [6–9] 13–14, 16, 148 [45:28] 113 Gospels John [7:24] 112 [8:11] 107 [19] 196–7 [20:17] 110 Luke [1:52] 105 [11:4] 114 [23:46] 109 Mark [3:16–19] 196 [14:10] 196 Matthew [3:12] 109–10

[7:20] 112 [10:9–14] 124 [12] 181 [18] 146 [25] 109, 180 [26:50] 197 [28:19] 110 Hebrews [13:14] 162 Hosea [1:2] 187 [2:23] 182 Isaiah [1:17] 178 [5:1–7] 179 Jeremiah [7:6] 178 [22:3] 178 Job [41:6] 11, 22, 180 Jonah [1] 182, 186 [2:2] 181 [3:8] 177 Judges [11] 143 [14:19] 220 Maccabees [2:6–7] 192 Malachi [3:5] 178 Numbers [5:11–31] 30 [19:1–22] 245 Proverbs [6:6–8] 116 [7:17] 27, 179 [30:8] 105 Psalms [7:15] 243 [13:1] 114 [45] 179 [52:1] 114 [122:4] 162 [324–6] 109 Revelation [21] 162 Romans [8] 113 [9:6–7] 182

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Index 1 Samuel [17:47] 109 2 Samuel [15] 75 Song of Solomon [3:6] 179 1 Timothy [5:23] 180 Zechariah [7:10] 178 Brazil, Sarah 87 Brenz, Johannes 182 Brigden, Susan 124 Brinsley, John 115–16 Ludus Literarium 115 Brodský, Adam Tesák 211 Buchanan, George 161 Bullein, William 113–14, 116 Bulleins Bulwark 114 Dialogue both Pleasant and Pietyful, A 113–14, 116 Butterworth, Philip 47 Caiaphas 168–9 Calvin, John 186 Calvinism 145 Campbell, Lily B. 148 Canaan (grandson of Ham) 148 Carew, Richard 141–2 Survey of Cornwall (1602) 141 Carthusian monks 193, 196 Castle of Perseverance, The 104, 105–8, 110–11, 116 Latin quotations of Scripture 105–7, 110–11, 116 deviation from Vulgate 106, 110– 11, 116 Catherine of Aragon 144 Catholics 128, 192, 195–7 crypto-Catholics 196 with a broadly ‘Erasmian’ approach 128 Cesnaková-Michalcová, Milena 215 Chambers, E. K. 145 Chardon, John 184–5 Charles I 193 Chaucer, Geoffrey 16, 125–6, 128 Miller’s Tale, The 16 Pardoner’s Prologue, The 125

283 Chester Late Banns 138–9 Plays Abraham and Isaac 139 Annunciation and Nativity, The (Play VI, The Wrightes’ Playe) 46 Balaack and Balaam 139 Christ on the Road to Emmaus (play 19) 138 Drapers’ Play, The (Play II) 51 Last Judgement (play 24), The 139 Noah’s Flood 13, 16–17, 139; New Testament allusions 20, 23; rainbow as prefiguration of the Crucifixion 23–4 Prophets of Antichrist (play 22), The 138–9 Purification of the Virgin, The 139 Whitsun Plays, The 138 children’s companies Chapel Royal 144 St Paul’s 144 choral threnody informal 67 Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine, The 68–9 Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe, The. With Tragedy of Absalon 65, 69, 74–6 Shakespeare 65, 67–8; Richard III 67, 74; Romeo and Juliet 65, 68 Tamburlaine the Great Part II 68 transformation in 16th century 69 Christ 16, 19, 34, 37, 49, 57, 85, 88, 94–6, 112, 123, 141, 149–50, 157–8, 160–2, 166–7, 182, 195 Crucifixion 75, 140–1, 144, 197 Passion 69, 75, 138, 192, 195 Resurrection 157, 168 Second Coming 166 Christ expelling the money-changers from the Temple 95 altar paintings by followers of Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Bruegel 95 depiction of medieval stage rather than Gospel story 95–6 figure of itinerant healer 95

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284 Index Christophersen, John, Bishop of Norwich 143 Jephtha 143 Christus Redivivus 73, 157, 161, 163, 167 Christus Triumphans 74, 144, 157–8, 166 Civil War (England) 196 Clegg, Roger 222 Clemen, Wolfgang 65, 68, 75 Cleophas 169 Clopper, Lawrence 110, 164 Codex Egberti 90 Comedie, Die Gantze Hystori der Hester 241–3 Comedie von der Königen Esther und Hoffärtigen Haman 232, 234, 238, 242, 247 marionette recreation of 236 comic interlude Helluo and Judeaus (in Samson) 220, 222 Polapená nevěra (in Samson) 222–3 source of Salička (all-female charivari) 227 Comoedia de Esther 217 Comoedia de Judith 217 Connolly, Annaliese 149 Conquest of Granada, The 199 Constitutions (1409) 104, 107–9, 111, 116 impact of decrees 104, 107–9, 111, 116 consubstantiation (Lutheran doctrine) 164 conversion 144, 149, 195, 198, 206, 214 Cornwall 141–2 biblical interludes Creation of the World, The 142 Corpus Christi play 140, 192 Counter-Reformation 111, 196, 214 Coventry 138, 175 Coverdale Bible, The 116 Cox, Robert 222 Actaeon and Diana 222 Singing Simpkin, The 222 Cranmer, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury 159 Creed Play 138

Cromwell, Thomas 144 Crosse, Henry 150 Cruel Debtor, The 146 Cysat, Renward 95 stage plans for 1583 Lucern Passion play 95 listing of apothecary and his boy 95 Czechoslovak-American Marionette production of The Historye of Queen Ester, of King Ahasverus and of the Haughty Haman 241 Dailey, Alice 192, 196 David and Saul 147 David, Alfred 24 David, King 74–7, 107, 109, 145–7, 149 De Scudéry, Georges 199 L’Amour tyrannique 199 Degenhardt, J. Hwang 198 deictics 43–7, 51–2, 55–6 function 45, 47, 52, 55 link with imperatives 44–5, 51 Dekker, Thomas 193, 197–201, 205, 217 and Philip Massinger 193, 197–200, 205 Virgin Martyr, The 193, 197–200, 205 Run-Away’s Answer, The 217 Shoemaker’s Holiday, The 201, 205 Deloney, Thomas 201–5 Gentle Craft, The 201–5 Destruction of Sodom and Gemorah, The 147 Dialogue both Pleasant and Pietyful, A 113 Digby Burial 67, 72 funeral rite 67 Diller, Hans-Jürgen 105 Dillon, Anne 196–7 Dillon, Janette 106, 109 Dives and Lazurus 146 Doctor Faustus 185 Dorothea see St Dorothea Dream of Judas’s Mother, The (ballad) 149 Dronke, Peter 72

Index

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Dryden, John 193, 197–200, 205 Tyrannick Love 193, 197–200, 205 Du Bartas, Guillaume 147–8, 150 Colonies 148 Le Semaine (The Week) 148 Le Seconde Semaine (The Second Week) 148 Duchess of Suffolk 146 Earl of Huntington 138 Earl of Leicester 146 Earl of Warwick 146 Ecclesiastical Commission, York 140 order to shut down Corpus Christi play in Wakefield 140 Effingham, Charles 148 Ein Comedia aus den Propheten Jona 176 Ein Schön Purim Shpil (Yiddish play) 232, 235, 241, 243, 246–7 Elckerlijc 109 Elizabeth I, Queen 140, 143–5, 192–3 papal excommunication (1572) 140 embodied perception 43, 48, 50, 54 Engelische Comedien und Tragedien 212, 223 Engels, Stefan 87 Englands Parnassus 175 English fleet 148 Epiphanius of Salamis 15 Erasmus 80, 132 Erlau III Visitacio Sepulchri in Nocte Resurrectionis (Karsten, Austria) 84, 96–8 merchant scene 84 Esther Rabbah (Midrash Rabbah, Jewish midrashic tract, on Book of Esther) 233 Eucharistic host 164 Euripides 66, 79 n. 25 Trojan Women, The 66 Eve 17, 19, 20, 25, 45–6, 50–2, 142, 159 Everyman 104, 109 Ewbank, Inga-Stina 75 Expositor 138 role in biblical plays 138 Ezechias 144

285 Fall of Jerusalem, The 175 Fall of Man, The (‘B text’) 138 Calvinist 138 Fewer, Colin 29 Feydy, Hélène 243 Fisher, John, Bishop 193, 196 Foley, Helen P. 66 Fool, the 114, 169, 232, 234–6, 239, 241–3, 245–7 appearance in comic interlude in the Comedie von der Königen Esther und Hoffärtigen Haman 238–41, 246 carnivalesque figure 232–3, 236, 242 central to dramatisation of Book of Esther 232 critic of contemporaneous political and social structures 247 distinctive use of language 241 Esther Rabbah 233 figure of Mordecai Ein Schön Purim Shpil 243–6 Purim Spiel 236 foolish son in Passover Haggadah text 236–7 illustrations of 235 and fig. 13.1, 236 fig. 13.2 insertion in dramatised biblical narrative 232, 246 Comedie, Die Gantze Hystori der Hester 241–3 Wisdom Literature (Jewish source) 234 Fortune Playhouse 149, 151 n. 6 Foxe, John 74, 108, 115, 144, 157–61, 166, 172 n. 11, 192, 196–7, 205 Actes and Monuments 115, 193, 196 Christus Triumphans 74, 144, 157–8, 166 Gasper, Julia 198, 209 n. 25 Geneva Bible, The 116, 180, 186 Gibson, Gail McMurray 57 Gillespie, Vincent 104 Godly Queen Hester 143, 145 link with Elizabeth I 143 Golding, Arthur 143 Goodland, Katharine 67 Goodman, Christopher 139

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286 Index Gorboduc 65 Great Bible, The 116 Gréban, Arnoul 82 Mystère de la Passion 82 Greene, Robert 147, 175–8, 180, 183, 185, 188–9, 189 n. 2, 192 Tragedy of Job, The 147 Greff, Joachim 211 Grimald, Nicholas 73–4, 157, 160–3, 167–70 Archipropheta 74, 157, 161–3, 170 Christus Redivivus 73, 157, 161, 163, 167 Grindal, Edmund, Archbishop 138–9, 143, 152 n. 12 Groves, Beatrice 182, 184, 187 guilds, urban craft 137, 140 Grocers 138 Smiths 139 Weavers 139 Gurr, Andrew 149, 151 n. 7 Haggadah, The (Passover Seder text) 236 and fig. 13.2, 237 figure of foolish son 236 and fig. 13.2, 237 hagiographic representations of martyrdom 194–7 hagiography 192, 196–7, 206 Ham 148 Haman 143, 219, 238, 240, 242–4, 247 Hanky, John 139 Happé, Peter 121, 124 Hardison, O. B. 164 Haupt- und Staatsaktionen (puppet theatre) 227 Helen of Troy 185 Héloïse, abbess of the Paraclete Convent 91, 93 Verses pascales de tres Maries 91 Henry VIII, King 192, 205 Henslowe, Phillip 148–9, 175, 185 Henslowe’s Diary 149, 175, 185 Herman, David 50 Herod, King 74, 141, 162, 169, 170–1 Herring, Theodore 187 Hester and Ahasuerus 217 Heywood, Jasper 71

Heywood, John 121–2, 124–32, 192 Four PP, The 132 Pardoner and the Friar, The 121, 129, 131, 192 Play of the Weather, The 129, 132 Hezekiah, King 144 Hildegard of Bingen, Abbess 90 Historia duchovní o Samsonovi silném a udatném někdy vůdci izrahelském: v způsob tragedie sepsaná 220 see also Samson (anonymous Czech play) Höfele, Andreas 157–9, 166 Holofernes 142 Holsinger, Bruce 164 Holy Women 81, 82, 84, 86, 89–93 double depiction 92 Catalan Cugat Monastery near Barcelona 92 church of Notre-Dame-desPommiers in Beaucaire 92 Church of St-Gilles-du-Gard, Provence 92 Church of Saint-Trophîme in Arles 92 Musée de Cluny in Paris 92 Museo Civico in Modena 92 Uta Codex, The 92–3 see also iconography Homer 66 Iliad 66 Honorius Augustodunensis 164 Horace 161 Odes 161 Hosea 178, 182, 185, 187 Howard, Lord Admiral 149 Hra pěknejch připovídek 223 Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, Canoness 90 Hudson, Anne 107 Hugh, Sir see St Hugh Hunt, Alison 29 Hutton, Matthew, Dean of York Minster 138–9 iconoclasts (Protestant) 164 iconography 82, 84, 87, 89–90, 92–3, 95, 166–7, 197, 227 complexity of Visitatio Sepulchri 87

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Index Münster Cathedral tympanum 89 spice containers of the Holy Women 84, 89–90 transfer of focus from liturgical thurible to secular apothecary pot 92 Tours Ludus paschali 90 Idumaeans 163 illustrated manuscripts of religious playtexts 82 imitatio Christi 192, 195 Index Librorum Prohibitorum 214 Infancy Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew 28– 32, 34 Ingram, William 146 itinerant healer 82, 87, 90, 97 central role in medieval Easter play 82, 84, 86–91, 93–5 see also spice merchant Jacob and Esau 143 link to Elizabeth I 143 James, King 150, 193, 201, 209 n. 28 James IV (of Scotland) 149 Jephthah 149 Jerome 182, 190 n. 18 Jesuit dramatic propaganda 196 Jews 29, 31, 36–7, 73, 167, 182, 184, 192, 243, 247 Anti-Jewish attitudes in N-Town manuscript 29 Job 175, 179–80 John the Baptist 157, 161, 169 joint attention concept 43–4, 49–50, 57, 60 n. 19 medieval cycle plays 49–57 Jonah 147, 176–7, 180–6, 190 n. 18 and the Whale 147, 176, 180–1, 186 as a proto-Christ 181–2, 186 Jordan, William 142 Joseph 28–36, 38, 46–7, 52, 54 Joseph of Arimathea 73, 167 Josephus 147, 163, 184 History of the Jews 147 Jewish War, The 184 Joshua 149 Judas 149 Judith 211, 217, 223 Jung, C. G. 232 on the Fool’s power 232

287 Kemp, Will 222–3 ‘Kemp’s Jig’ 222–3 possible connection with The Singing Simpkin jig 222 Kett, Francis 185 King Darius 145 King James Version 150 King Johan 111–12, 114, 116 King, Pamela 104 Klosterneuburg 91, 94 Canonesses 91 Kniha o hořekování a naříkání Spravedlnosti 223 Komedia o Králi Šalamúnovi 212, 216 Komedie Česká / O ctné a šlechetné Vdově Jůdýth: A o Holofernovi Hejtmanu Krále Nabuchodonozora. Od Mikuláše Vrány Litomyšlského / z Německé Řeči v Českú přeložena 217 Komedie z Kníhy Zákona Božího, jenž slove Ruth 211 Konáš z Hodiškova, Mikuláš 211 Judith 211, 217, 223 Koniáš, Antonín 214 Clavis Haeresim claudens 214 Kunhuta of the Benedictine Convent of St George at Prague Castle, Abbess 91 Passional with a merchant scene 91 Kyd, Thomas 188 Lake, Peter 185 lament 53, 65–77 choral lament 67–70, 72, 74 Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe, The. With Tragedy of Absalon 74–5 see also choral threnody gendered character 66 women traditionally wailing for the dead 66, 76–7; Iliad 66; Trojan Women, The (Euripides) 66; see also women’s lament individual versus collective 67–70 in ancient Greek and Roman drama threnos 70–1

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288 Index post-Reformation ban on collective lament 66–7 impact 67 private versus public 67 sadomasochistic impulses 65 Lane, John 139 The Last Judgement 139, 185 Latin citations of the Bible 104–16 gloss or script 105–6 use 106–7, 110, 113 Latimer, Hugh, Anglican Bishop 159, 193 Law, Thomas 184 Most Rare and True Report, A 184 Legenda aurea 197 Legge, Thomas, Master of Trinity College 143 Levites 163 Life of St Anne 31 Lipphardt, Walter 93 collection of performative Easter texts 93 Lipton, Emma 28, 38 Litomyšlský, Mikuláš Vrána 217 Lodge, Thomas 148, 175–8, 180, 183–5, 188, 192 An Alarum against Usurers 177 and Robert Greene 175–8, 180, 183, 185, 188, 192 Looking Glasse for London and England, A 175–6, 188 Lollard movement 24, 28–9, 37, 107 Looking Glass for London, A 175–6, 188 Lord Admiral’s Men see Admiral’s Men Lord Chamberlain’s Men 147 Lord Strange 147, 175 Lord Strange’s Men 147, 175 Ludus Literarium 115 Lupton, Thomas 105, 115 All for Money 105, 115 Luther, Martin 182 On the Jews and Their Lies 182 Lydgate, John 29, 32–3, 36 Life of Our Lady 29, 32–3 McConachie, Bruce 48 Mankind 104, 109–11

Marlowe, Christopher 68, 135, 188 Tamburlaine the Great Part II 68 Marprelate Controversy (1589) 146 Marshall, Cynthia 65 Marten, Gover 141 martyrdom 192–9, 201–2, 204–6 Mary (mother of Christ) 16, 20, 23, 25, 28–38, 46, 52–3, 67, 72, 139, 159, 167 depiction in Infancy Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew 28–30 Jewish identity in Middle English adaptations of her trial 30–1, 33 link to Susanna in ‘Susanna and the Elders’ 30 South English Nativity of Mary and Christ 31, 34 charged with witchcraft 31 Mary dejudaised 31 mockery of Mary linked to mockery of Christ 31 Mary (granddaughter of Eve) 144 Mary I, Queen (Mary Tudor) 114, 137, 142, 193 Mary Magdalene 82, 86, 91, 94, 96, 163, 167–8 Benediktbeurer Passionsspiel 82, 94 Wiener Passionsfragment 82 Mass (religious ceremony) 164 theatricality 164 Massinger, Philip 193, 197–200, 205 and Thomas Dekker 193, 197–200, 205 Virgin, Martyr, The 193, 197–200, 205 Menius, Friedrich 247 merchant scene in medieval cycle plays 81–2, 84 and fig. 5.2, 85 and fig. 5.3, 86, 89–98 Benediktbeuerer Passionsspiel 82, 93 Berliner /Rheinisch Easter play 82 Frankfurter Dirigierrolle 94 Klosterneuburger Easter play 94 Mauritius Rotunda in the Constance cathedral 93–4 Muri fragment 82, 94 Mystère de la Passion 82 Tours Ludus paschali 90, 93

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Index Visitacio Sepulchri in Nocte Resurrectionis 84, 96 Wiener Passionsfragment 82 Meredith, Peter 44 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 47 Monta, Susannah Brietz 192 morality plays 36 conventions 104 More, Sir Thomas 125, 130, 193–5 De Tristitia Christi 195 Moryson, Fynes 217 Mošovský, Juraj Tesák 211, 214–16, 219, 224 Komedie z Kníhy Zákona Božího, jenž slove Ruth 211 Mueller, Martin 74 Muri Fragment 82, 94 spice merchant and Pontius Pilate 82 Mystère de la Passion 82 mystery cycles 137, 140, 146, 158–9, 188 Creation-to-Doomsday model 137 N-Town plays Conspiracy Play, The 36 Creation, The (Play II) 44 Joseph’s Doubts about Mary (Play XII) 46 Presentation of Mary in the Temple, The 37 Trial of Mary and Joseph, The 29, 33, 38 Naaman the Syrian 163 Nebuchadnezzar 149, 175 Nebuchadnezzar 142, 148 Neuss, Paula 142 New Custome 113 New World Tragedy, The see New World’s Tragedy, The New World’s Tragedy, The 148 Newe Mery and Wittie Comedie or Enterlude, Newely Imprinted, Treating Upon the Historie of Jacob and Esau, A 234 Newton, Thomas 71 Nice Wanton 115 Nicodemus 163 Nimrod, King 148 Ninevites, The 146 Njus, Jesse 87

289 Noah 13–23, 137, 139, 145, 148, 158 Chester cycle play 19, 20–3 depiction as long-suffering, submissive husband 17 Genesis 13–14, 148 identified as model of overseas explorer 148 as proto-Christ 15–16, 23 Noah’s wife 13, 15–16, 23–4 as ally of the Devil 15 Chester cycle play 13, 16, 24 Genesis 14 Miller’s Tale, The 16 as nameless entity deprived of agency 14 as proto-Mary 15–16, 23 Noë, Alva 48 Northern rebellion against the Crown (1569) 140 image of crucified Christ on military standards 140 Norwich 113, 138, 143, 186 Novak, Maxmillian E. 199 O’Connell, Michael 146 Old World’s Tragedy (poem) 148 Ordinalia: Origino Mundi 142 Oseas see Hosea Oxford Martyrs 159 see also Cranmer, Thomas; Latimer, Hugh; Ridley, Nicholas Padel, O. J. 142 Pardoner and the Friar, The 121, 129, 131–2, 192 anti-climax 122 crisis of church and state 129 critique of Reformation and Catholic Church establishment 128 dramaturgical experiment 126–8 misuse of ecclesiastical power 127 potential impact on contemporary audiences 126 Parry, David 105–6 Parsons, Robert 196 Treatise of Three Conversions 196 Passion of Christ, The 138 Passion plays 35, 72, 84, 86, 94 Passional of Abbess Kunhuta 91

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290 Index Paternoster plays 138 Peele, George 65, 69, 74–6, 147–9, 176, 193, 234 Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe, The. With the Tragedie of Absalon 65, 69, 175, 192, 234 peripeteia 72–3, 76 Pettitt, Thomas 110 Pfarrkircher, Lienhard 95 Passion Play, The 95 optional merchant scene 95 Pharisees 141, 163, 181 Piris, Paul 236 Pius V, Pope 140 excommunication of Elizabeth I 140 planctus of the three Marys 73 Play 38 of the York cycle 73 Towneley Resurrection of the Lord 73 Plautus 212 Play of Adam and Eve, The 149 Play of Protestancyon, The 138 Wormes of Conscience, the 138 Poetics (Aristotle) 71, 160 Polvinen, Merja 50 Pontius Pilate 82, 175 Pontius Pilate 149 Poor Man’s Paradise, The 149 Pope, the 111, 140, 159, 247 Praet, Danny 29 Prague Defenestration 214 Prince Charles’s Men 175 Proclamation of 1589 prohibiting religion in plays 145 Prodigal Son, The 145–7 Protevangelium of James 29 pseudo-martyrdom 197 Purim (Jewish holiday) 233, 235 Quem quaeritis trope 86–7 Questier, Michael 185 Raber, Vigil 95 Passion Play, The 95 merchant scene, implied insertion of 95 women in cast of play 95 Raphael (angel) 144 Rastell, John 132

Rastell, William 121 Red Lion, amphitheatre in London 135 Reddy, Vasudevi 49 religious persecution 192–3, 198–9, 202 Respublica 105 Richmond, Velma Bourgeois 67 Ridley, Nicholas, Anglican Bishop 159, 193 Rogerson, Robert 139 Roper, William 131 Lyfe of Sir Thomas Moore, Knight, The 131 Rose Playhouse 147–9, 175, 185, 188 Roston, Murray 144 Rowlands, William see Verstegan, Richard Rowley, Samuel 217 Samson (attributed to) Rowley, William 193–4, 198, 201–5 Shoemaker, A Gentleman, A 193–4, 198, 201–2, 204–5 Royal Martyr, The see Tyrannick Love Sachs, Hans 232, 234, 241, 243, 246 Comedie, Die Gantze Hystori der Hester 232, 234, 241, 243, 246–7 Sackville, Thomas 217 St Augustine 137, 148, 162 De civitate dei 162 seven ages of scriptural history 137, 148 St Catherine 194, 199–200 St Dorothea 198, 200 St Hugh 201–4 St Martial Monastery near Limoges 93 St Paul 144, 162, 180, 182, 185, 188, 206 St Winifred 201–4 Saltz, David Z. 50 Samson 135, 176, 212 Samson (anonymous Czech play) 212, 214, 216–17, 220, 222–7 Sapienta Solominus 143 depiction of parallel with Elizabeth I 143 scaffolds 141 Schleiner, Louise 71

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Index Schlueter, June 241, 246 Schonaeus, Cornelius, collector of Latin plays 144 Juditha 144 Pseudostratiotes 144 Terentius Christianus 144 Tobaeus 144 Second Week, The 148 self-description 43–57 combined with deictics and movement 45–7, 51 ‘Joseph’s Doubts about Mary’ 46–7 corporeality of biblical figures 47 effect 47–57 embodied perception 48, 50, 54 function 47–57 joint attention in cycle plays 50–6 as means for generating joint attention 43, 47–56 running commentary 44–7, 52, 54 stage directions 51–2 Seneca 66, 69, 71, 76 Agamemnon 71 Troades (The Trojan Women) 66, 71 Sergi, Matthew 49 Seven Days of the Week, The see Week, The Shakespeare, William 65, 67–8, 135–6, 175, 186, 188, 193, 201 Most Pleasant and Excellent Conceited Comedy of Sir John Falstaff and the Merry Wives of Windsor, A 223 Richard III 67, 74 Romeo and Juliet 65, 67–8 Sheba, Queen of 143 Sherwood, Yvonne 182, 186 Shmeruk, Chone 241, 246 Simpson, James 24, 108 Skeaping, Lucie 222 Smith, Bruce 65 Sodom and Gemorah 142 Sofer, Andrew 164 Solomon, King 143 Son of God 226 as figure carried by Samson in Samson 226 Spanish Armada 148

291 spice merchant (Salbenkrämer) 81–2, 90–6, 98 absent from Gospel accounts of Easter story and from Visitatio Sepulchri Easter ceremonies 82 appearance in some Easter plays 82 as explanation of origin of Holy Women’s spices and container 82, 84, 90–2, 98 commercial licence issued by Pontius Pilate 82 quack doctor 81–2, 91, 93–8 role as itinerant healer 91, 93–8 see also merchant scene in medieval cycle plays Sponsus 82, 91, 93 source of Easter play of Vich 91 Stanley, Ferdinando see Lord Strange Stationers’ Company 136 Stationers’ Register 69, 146, 222 Stempvoort, P. A. 29 Stern, Tiffany 162 Stevenson, Jill 48–9, 57 The Story of Samson, The 135–6, 149, 219 Studley, John 71 Susanna 30, 142 Susanna and the Elders 29–30 Talmon, Shemaryahu 233 Tamburlaine 149 Tarlton, Richard 222 Terentius (Terence) 212 Thirty Years War in Bohemia 198 persecution of Bohemian Protestants 198 three Marys, the 69, 72–4, 86–8, 90, 93–4, 96–7 Mary (Maria) Jacobi 86 Mary (Maria) Magdalene (Magdalena) 86 Mary (Maria) Salome 86 Thynne, William 126 Tiberius von Ferrara und Anabella von Mömpelgard 219 Tishbite prophet (Elijah the Prophet) 163 Tobias 149 Towneley (Wakefield) plays

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292 Index Corpus Christi Play 140 Crucifixion, The 72 Resurrection of the Lord, The 73 Second Shepherds’ Play, The 54 Transubstantiation (Catholic doctrine) 164 Travis, Peter 23–4 Treatise of Miraclis Pleyinge 43 Trial of Mary and Joseph (N-Town play) 29, 33, 38 bitter-water ordeal 30, 33, 36 prescribed in Numbers [5:11–31] 30 dysfunctional tribunal 35 equivocal characters 37 Wandering Jew, allusion to 36 Troades (The Trojan Women) (Seneca) 66, 71 tragedy of female survival 71 Trojan Women, The (Euripedes) 66, 77 Two Sins of David, The 146 Tyde Taryeth No Man, The 113 Tymme, Thomas 182 Newes from Nineveh to England 182 Tyrannick Love 193, 197–200, 205 Udall, Nicholas 105 Respublica 105 Ulenspiegel, Dil 88 Uta Codex, The 92–3 commissioned by Abbess Uta of Niedermünster 91 Uta of Niedermünster, Abbess 91 Uxor Noe see Noah’s wife Van Stempvoort, P. A. 29 vernacular 91, 104–5, 109, 113, 115, 126 Verses pascales de tres Maries, The 91 attributed to Héloïse 91 Verstegan, Richard 196 Virgil 161 Aeneid 161, 170 Virgin Martyr, The 193, 197–201, 205 Virtuous and Godly Susanna, The 145 Visitatio Sepulchri 81–2, 85, 87–94, 96, 168 development into Easter plays 81

embedded within Easter Sunday service 88 iconography 87, 89–90, 92–3 liturgy 87–91, 168 performative enhancement 88–9 Vulgate, the 106–7, 110–15 use of in plays 112, 115 Wager, Lewis 138, 145 King Darius 145 Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene, The 138 Virtuous and Godly Susanna, The 145 Wager, William 146 Cruel Debtor, The 146 Wakefield plays see Towneley (Wakefield) plays Wapull, George 113 Tyde Taryeth No Man, The 113 Wasson, John 104 Watson, Nicholas 107–8 Watt, Tessa 140 Week, The 148 Wiggins, Martin 142, 146, 149, 175 Wisdom 104, 110–11 women’s laments Choeperi 72 medieval drama 66 Richard III 67 Troas (The Trojan Women) 72 Woolf, Rosemary 53 Worcester’s Men 147, 149 World’s Tragedy, The see New World Tragedy, The Wulstan, David 91 Wycliffe, John 29, 43 York plays Flood, The (Noah’s Flood) 17 Nativity, The (Play XVI, The Tilethatchers) 54 Play 38 (Play XXXVIII) 73 Shepherds, The (Shepherds’ Play, Play XV, The Chandlers) 55 Zwinglian doctrine 164