Play Time: Gender, Anti-Semitism and Temporality in Medieval Biblical Drama 9781526146861, 152614686X

Table of contents :
Front-matter
Dedication
Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Introduction: what God was doing before he created the world
The old man and the pregnant virgin: linear time and Jewish conversion in the N-Town plays
Grave new world: fantasies of supersession and explosive questions in the York and Chester Flood plays
Time out of joint: queering the Nativity in the Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play
Passion meets Passover: temporal origami in the Towneley Herod the Great
Conclusion: the spectator’s God’s-eye view
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Play time Gender, anti-Semitism and temporality in medieval biblical drama

daisy black

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

pl ay ti m e

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

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Advisory board: Ruth Evans, Patricia C. Ingham, Andrew James Johnston, Chris Jones, Catherine Karkov, Nicola McDonald, Haruko Momma, Susan Phillips, Sarah Salih, Larry Scanlon, Stephanie Trigg and Matthew Vernon 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 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 Ferhatovic´ 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) 32. Riddles at work in the early medieval tradition: Words, ideas, interactions Megan Cavell and Jennifer Neville (eds) 33. From Iceland to the Americas: Vinland and historical imagination Tim William Machan and Jón Karl Helgason (eds) 34. Northern memories and the English Middle Ages Tim William Machan 35. Harley manuscript geographies: Literary history and the medieval miscellany Daniel Birkholz 36. Play time: Gender, anti-Semitism and temporality in medieval biblical drama Daisy Black

Play time

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gender, anti-Semitism and temporality in medieval biblical drama DAISY BLACK

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Daisy Black 2020 The right of Daisy Black to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

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 4686 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 – The astronomical clock in Exeter Cathedral (DeFacto / Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Typeset by Sunrise Setting Ltd, Brixham

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

In loving remembrance of four strong women, Nora Scruby, Alice Black, Peggy Young and Lynda Swaine and with love for two in my present, Sue Black and Emma Rush.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Contents

List of figures page viii Acknowledgementsix List of abbreviationsxii Introduction: what God was doing before he created the world 1 1 The old man and the pregnant virgin: linear time and Jewish conversion in the N-Town plays38 2 Grave new world: fantasies of supersession and explosive questions in the York and Chester Flood plays75 3 Time out of joint: queering the Nativity in the Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play113 4 Passion meets Passover: temporal origami in the Towneley Herod the Great152 5 Conclusion: the spectator’s God’s-eye view186 Epilogue205 Bibliography207 Index229

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Figures

1 One of the soldiers helps the stage crew prepare the pageant wagon for the Crucifixion pageant. ‘The Death and Crucifixion of Christ’, performed by St Chad’s Church and the York Butcher’s Guild in The York Mystery Plays, dir. Tom Straszewski (York, 6 September 2018) page 6 2 A shining God watches as stage crew pull his platform into place. ‘The Creation of the World to the Fifth Day’, performed by the York Guild of Building in The York Mystery Plays, dir. Tom Straszewski (York, 6 September 2018) 7 3 A floodscape with distinctly medieval buildings and dead in a copy of Augustine’s The City of God. BNF, Manuscrits, Français 28, f. 66v 83 4 The dead beneath the ark in the Holkham Bible Picture Book. BL Add MS 47682 fol. 8r 84 5 Peter Baltens, A Flemish Kermis with a Performance of the Farce, ‘Een cluyte van Plaeyerwater’, c.1570. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 114

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Acknowledgements

Like the plays it studies, this book has demanded a true community performance during a fragile time. Life as an early career researcher holds much in common with some of the insecure, ‘queer’ models of time I address in Chapter 3, with its unstable signs and lack of reliable futurity. Each temporary teaching position produces materials with a limited future. The teacher will not be there to repeat those classes, and, in many cases, will not see their students graduate. Each unsuccessful job application represents a future that did not happen, and takes time and resources that might have been spent on research. Each conference reveals that a worrying number of scholars whose research has been crucial, innovative and brilliant, are absent. The current, precarious higher education climate survives on a cycle of endless striving which leaves its researchers open to feelings of amateurism and imposter syndrome. Several of the scholars whose work has been fundamental in developing this book are not currently in secure employment. I am now fortunate to have a position which has unequivocally and liberally supported this research. I have also been privileged to benefit from the support networks I list below, and from the financial and emotional support of my partner, Andrew. This book has only survived and grown due to a vast ‘guild’ of colleagues spanning many universities, disciplines, research environments and performance spaces. They have offered their time, encouragement, skills and dazzling belief in this project. This pageant is yours, too. This book would not have been finished without the stability and support provided by the University of Wolverhampton. I am indebted to their insightful Early Researcher Award Scheme, which gave me the time and structure I needed to complete this project.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

xAcknowledgements

Particular thanks to my colleagues Frank Wilson, Josiane Boutonnet, Aidan Byrne, Benjamin Colbert, Sebastian Groes, Debra Cureton and Sarah Schofield, who have given me so much support in all my academic work. Thank you also to my anonymous readers, whose detailed feedback has done so much to improve this book. Anke Bernau from the University of Manchester has shared her insight, encouragement and scholarly bravery from the very beginning of this project. Thank you to Jacqueline Pearson and Gale Owen-Crocker for sharing their wealth of knowledge, enthusiasm and eye for detail, and David Matthews and Greg Walker for their constructive feedback and support. Special thanks to my Manchester medievalist colleagues Hannah Priest, Kate Ash, Chris Monk, Stephen Gordon, Pam Walker, Kathy Frances and Linda Sever for years of advice, good humour and support. Particular thanks to Meredith Carroll, Tim Hyde and Sue Goodman for bringing this book from manuscript to publication. The early stages of this research were supported by the generous contribution of the Liddon Fund from the Society of the Faith. Thank you also to the AHRC for funding a performance of a mystery play as part of their Afterlife of Heritage Research project and for their sponsorship through the 2018 AHRC/BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinkers award. The support of my former colleagues at the University of Hull was also key in developing this book. I am particularly indebted to the constructive feedback on early drafts and the scholarly support of Janet Clare, Veronica O’Mara, Elisabeth Salter and Lesley Coote. Thank you to my community of mentors, allies and colleagues on the Gender and Medieval Studies network, who have seen this project develop over the years. Liz Herbert McAvoy, Patricia Skinner, Roberta Magnani and Laura Varnham have not only provided mentorship for my work but also regularly act as fierce supporters, advocates and opportunity-makers for many postgraduate and early career researchers in our field. Laura was particularly generous in helping me with the proposal stage of this book. Thank you to Rachel Moss, Diane Heath, Amy Morgan, Jade Godsall, Mary Bateman, Hannah Piercy and Charlotte Steenbrugge for organising key conferences during this project, sharing their knowledge and answering questions about things as diverse as theology, childbirth, queer time and sheep (for what I did not, in the end, call the ‘queer sheep chapter’). The collegiality and support of the global online community whose members gather to write under the #remoteretreat tag has also helped impose temporal structure on

Acknowledgements

xi

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the writing process. Particular thanks to my formidable battalion of proofing angels: Lucy Allen-Goss, Victoria Biggs, Aidan Byrne, Jan Danek, James Howard and Laura Kalas-Williams. Thank you to St Peter’s Chaplaincy, Manchester History Festival and Wolverhampton Literature Festival for enabling me to stage some of the plays featured in this book, and to my storytelling and folk communities for teaching me how community performance works and why it is important. Thank you always to my cohort of unruly women, Emma Rush, Carmel Clarkson and Rachel Mann, whose creativity inspires me so much. Finally, to my family, Andrew Swaine, David Black and Sue Black. No time spent with you is ever long enough.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Abbreviations

EETS Early English Text Society. EETS volumes are designated ‘o.s.’ (original series), ‘e.s.’ (extra series) or ‘s.s.’ (supplementary series). The various publishers and places of publication will be given separately for each text. GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies JEGP Journal of English and Germanic Philology JMEMS Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies METh Medieval English Theatre MLQ  Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History MLAA The Modern Language Association of America MRDE Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England NLH New Literary History PMLA  Publications of the Modern Language Association of America REED Records of Early English Drama ROMARD Research on Medieval and Renaissance Drama RORD Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama SPELL Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature TCR The Chaucer Review WSIQ Women’s Studies International Quarterly ZAA  Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik: A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction: what God was doing before he created the world

Time may change me But I can’t trace time. (David Bowie, Changes, 1971) You are my eternal Father, but I am scattered in times whose order I do not understand. (Augustine, Confessions, 379–400 AD)

In his 1971 hit Changes, David Bowie articulated a problem that also caused a great deal of bother for Saint Augustine. Although we may think we know what time is, and although we can see its impact on our lives through measuring change, as soon as we try to describe what time is, we struggle. Where Bowie’s song examined concepts of time through the relationship between generations and their experiences of gender, Augustine understood his own disordered experience of time in relation to a higher model of authority. Throughout chapter 11 of Confessions, Augustine negotiates the slippery relationship between God’s eternal divinity and the temporality constituted in the act of Creation. Longing for answers, Augustine vividly imagines what it would be like to question Moses in person about God’s creation of the world: May I hear and understand how in the beginning you made heaven and earth (Gen. 1, 1). Moses wrote this. He wrote this and went his way, passing out of this world from you and to you. He is not now before me, but if he were, I would clasp him and ask him and through you beg him to explain to me the creation. I would concentrate my bodily ears to the sounds breaking forth from his mouth. If he spoke Hebrew, he would in vain make an impact on my sense of hearing, for the sounds would not touch my mind at all. If he spoke Latin, I would know what he meant.1

Here, Augustine fashions Moses, father of Hebrew law, as a desired, embodied speaker from whom he might demand answers. In imagining

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

2

Play time

clasping Moses, Augustine becomes an urgent audience member, concentrating his ears and begging him to explain his scripture. Yet at the same time, Augustine recognises the impossibility of his imaginative act of desire. Separated from creation and scripture by the passage of time, he can only approach the mysteries of creation through the less visceral processes of oral and written narrative transmission and translation. Even if he were able to bring a figure from the Hebrew past to speak in his presence, Augustine recognises that he would still not understand him. Unless Moses were to speak in a language which did not exist in his own time – Latin, the language of the Christian church, rather than Hebrew, the language of Jewish law, in which Augustine believes Moses wrote the book of Genesis – their conversation would be fruitless. There is a tension between authority and intelligibility here. In this fantasy encounter, the very thing which would mark Moses as authentic is also the thing which makes his knowledge inaccessible. And yet, Augustine muses, if Moses did speak in Latin, ‘how would I know whether or not he was telling me the truth?’2 This articulates one of the central problems encountered when confronting questions of beginning. As all notions of ‘past’ and ‘beginning’ are formed and informed by the composite desires, ideals and languages of the present, the ‘truth’ will remain elusive. Augustine next famously grapples with the ‘old error’ assumed in the philosophical question, ‘what was God doing before he made heaven and earth?’3 Concluding that there was no time before Creation, he argues that all time, and thus human history, began in Creation: ‘Since, therefore, you are the cause of all times, if any time existed before you made heaven and earth, how can anyone say that you abstained from working? You made time itself. Time could not elapse before you made time.’4 Here, Augustine adopts an idea of divine eternity as atemporal – outside of time – with time, like the world, being a created thing. God’s eternity, in this model, is in a perpetual present.5 Yet his conclusion that time did not exist before Creation only underlines the disjunction between the ways in which he believed eternal, divine time operated and his own experience of time as a continuous if elusive ‘present’ composed of a succession of moments that might be called forth from the past and anticipated in the future.6 This feeling of disjunction later came to be one of the primary foci of medieval and early modern theological debates concerning personal and divine experiences of time and eternity, wherein time was associated with the postlapsarian world and yet also seen as redeemable,

Introduction

3

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

reclaimable and an essential part of personal salvation.7 Later theologians developed the way they imagined God engaged with time. Thomas Aquinas, like Augustine, claimed God’s experience of time was composed of an eternal ‘now’, but also adopted Boethius’s idea of divine eternity as a present in which all events, past and future, exist: ‘[God’s eternity] embraces the boundless extent of past and future, and by virtue of its simple comprehension, it ponders all things as if they were being enacted in the present.’8 These theologians tried to conceptualise God’s role in relation to human action. They asked whether God was an ever-present spectator of human action, his eternity situated somewhere spatially and temporally distant from the worldly ‘playing space’, or whether God shared all experiences with his human ‘actors’. Would God, for example, be able to experience moments of time-bound human emotion such as anticipation or surprise? For late medieval playmakers, however, the glib question ‘what was God doing before he made heaven and earth?’ held even more complications. Augustine’s embodied longing to resurrect physically a figure from the Hebrew past, to have Moses before him, to ‘clasp him and . . . beg him to explain to me the creation’, holds much in common with the religious lay performances of Bible pageants in England’s civic centres between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Plays seeking to dramatise the act of Creation, along with the other Bible narratives, engaged in the kind of dialogue and explication Augustine desired from his imagined encounter with Moses. They placed figures from the Hebrew and Christian scriptures in front of an audience, speaking the audience’s own language. In doing so, these performances, like Augustine, negotiated various models of time and eternity. These models included the typological and supersessionary narratives inherent in a Bible constructed of multiple ‘Hebrew’ and ‘Christian’ scriptures and histories; circular and parallel narratives dependent on prophecy and fulfilment; the birth of Christ and its effect on time; and events such as the Flood, whose waters promised both an end of time and a new beginning. While many of the plays within the surviving body of medieval biblical drama deal directly with questions of time, particularly in Creation and Doomsday pageants, others find questions and experiences of time a rich source of conflict, negotiation and, occasionally, laughter. This book argues that questions concerning divine and human experiences of time were not only the preserve of prominent early and medieval theologians and religious scholars. These questions were physically embodied in, appeared

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

4

Play time

in the dialogue of, and, to some extent, needed to be solved practically by medieval civic plays and their lay creators, performers and audiences. The book finds that these plays supported multiple, co-existing and subjective experiences of time, and that these experiences were intimately connected to experiences of gender and race. Moreover, it argues that one of the principal causes of antagonism between the characters of the biblical plays is their ability (or inability) to define, and thus to manage, time. Before Creation Any play, but especially a play which represents the first in a series of pageants, has to begin somewhere. The Fall of the Angels, the first play recorded in the surviving manuscript of the York pageants, BL Add MS 35290, was performed by the Barkers’ guild, who were responsible for the preparation of leather. It opens with God speaking in Latin, before addressing his audience in English. Yet in practical performance, this pageant would have begun long before this moment. Before God could give this speech, and before the ‘time’ of the performance could really begin, the performers would have had to clear and establish their playing space. As the first pageant performed at each station in the York cycle, this would have been no small feat. Each pageant was played on a moveable wagon stage at the first station, outside Holy Trinity Priory, at dawn on Corpus Christi day. From there, it proceeded down Micklegate and over the River Ouse, performing at the specified stations along the way.9 The pageants representing later episodes from the Bible followed in order and, as the day progressed, the proximity of the stations meant that it would have been possible to view the pageants out of chronological order. We know a number of problems attended this kind of processual performance, not least when certain pageants took unauthorised stops or delayed the whole procession by taking too long to move on. Such an incident occurred in 1554, when the Girdlers were fined 20 shillings for being too slow in leaving one station, thus ‘stoppyng of the rest of the pageantz folowyng and to the disorderyng of the same’ for ‘an wholle hower’.10 However, while The Fall of the Angels would not have had to deal with problems caused by other pageants in front of them, the Barkers had additional challenges to contend with. While the following pageants could have been sure of at least a defined, if rather busier, performance space, The Fall of the Angels would have been the first pageant to reach each station. The Barkers therefore

Introduction

5

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

needed repeatedly to perform the theatrical labour required to transform the street spaces of York into playing spaces. This labour would have been less of a challenge in the cycle’s early decades, when the pageants were a more integrated part of the Corpus Christi procession, whose passage through the streets would have established a sacred playing space for each guild’s performance.11 However, as Richard Beadle argues, when the civic Corpus Christi plays ‘began to displace the ecclesiastical procession of Corpus Christi from its own official liturgical occasion (the first Thursday after Trinity Sunday) to the day after’, this labour would have fallen on each guild’s pageant-makers.12 Before the York God could give his opening speech, and before the pageant’s performance time could begin, the company would have had to prepare and establish their space. In his discussion of staging conventions in medieval English theatre, Philip Butterworth draws attention to the stage-labour required to do this: The theatrical contract between player and audience begins when the player is first seen and/or heard in the guise of his adopted persona. Such recognition may occur before the player has started to play. However, the contract is reinforced when the player steps onto or over a demarcated threshold that constitutes the agreed playing space. [. . .] Delineation of the playing space did not always exist prior to performance. Sometimes the space needed to be created by the player on his first arrival into the ambit of the audience.13

This ‘theatrical contract’ had temporal as well as spatial functions. Before God could ‘create’ the heavens and earth, a number of practical things needed to happen. Space had to be made among the spectators for the wagon, then the wagon needed to be pulled into place and secured. Only then could the performer representing God enter this newly created performance space, his bodily presence investing it with meaning before he began his opening speech. The 2018 York plays, which were performed on wagons in the streets of York as well as in more structured outdoor performance settings, demonstrated the complexity of the mechanical and dramatic processes required to effect the transition between the pageants.14 Processional music from the York, Leeds, Doncaster and Gloucester Waits, as well as other local medieval music groups, heralded the arrival of each new pageant wagon. As the wagons were pulled into place, secured and set up, the audience could see the actors representing the Bible characters fully costumed and waiting to go on. Certain pageants, such as the Crucifixion (sponsored by the

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

6

Play time

1  One of the soldiers helps the stage crew prepare the pageant wagon for the Crucifixion pageant. ‘The Death and Crucifixion of Christ’, performed by St Chad’s Church and the York Butcher’s Guild in The York Mystery Plays, dir. Tom Straszewski (York, 6 September 2018).

York Butchers’ guild), blurred the roles of actors and stage hands, with the soldiers preparing the pageant wagon along with other stage hands even as they prepared to commit the theological and theatrical labour of crucifying Christ (Figure 1). Others, including God in the York Guild of Building’s The Creation of the World to the Fifth Day, stood aloof, not wanting to risk damaging their elaborate costumes in the mechanical stage business (Figure 2).15 We know that the medieval God was aided in establishing his performance space through the use of spectacular devices such as costume, brightly coloured cloths decorating his wagon and golden masks, an echo of which can still be seen in the gold-faced God surviving in the stained glass of York Minster.16 However, given that the wagons did not offer ‘offstage’ spaces, and would have been more manoeuvrable if the actors were not on them, it is likely that the early God, like his modern descendants, would have been visible to his audience throughout this space-preparation process.17

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

7

2  A shining God watches as stage crew pull his platform into place. ‘The Creation of the World to the Fifth Day’, performed by the York Guild of Building in The York Mystery Plays, dir. Tom Straszewski (York, 6 September 2018).

Unlike today’s Stanislavski-trained actors, medieval performers did not see themselves as inhabiting or ‘becoming’ the religious figures they played. Rather, they represented the personae of these figures for the brief duration of the play. Sharon Aronson-Lehavi has argued that ‘this differentiation posits the actor as a mediator who connects spectators with the holy characters while simultaneously maintaining his own identity as distinct from the character which is being performed’.18 This means it is unlikely that York’s God was, as modern theatre practitioners would term it, ‘in character’ before the pageant. This may have created an interesting dialogue between audience perceptions of the guildsman preparing the space for his performance and the Creator he is preparing to represent. For example, before the pageant began, ‘God’ might have helped his colleagues. Given God’s player would have been cast for having the clearest and loudest voice, this might have involved interacting with the audience and cast members to clear the area.19 While these actions are rooted in the mechanical concerns of the late medieval performance ‘present’, they also hold curious resonances with the ‘eternal time’ God was about to embody. In helping fashion a performance space, whether through physical or vocal labour, the guildsman performs the role of Creator before he plays the Creator: making ordered space out of chaos.

Play time

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

8

This means the pageant’s narrative of creation is not only repetitive; it is also prior: space must be created for Creation. An imaginative consideration of these mechanical theatrical necessities demonstrates what happens to theological concepts when they are placed within the physical processes of performance. This initial crafting of performance space enables God’s acts of creation within the pageant, in which he forms heaven, earth and hell. It also provides a microcosm of Augustine’s simultaneously temporal and eternal heaven and earth: ‘See, heaven and earth exist, they cry aloud that they are made, for they suffer change and variation. But in anything which is not made and yet is, there is nothing which was not previously present.’20 Distinguishing between performers and spectators and establishing a theatrical contract, the Barkers instigate change whilst creating a new thing – a performance space – out of a thing previously present – the familiar streets of York. Moreover, God’s occupation of this space as he ‘steps [. . .] over a demarcated threshold that constitutes the agreed playing space’ collapses the transient street-space into God’s own divine eternity.21 With play time beginning long before the first words are spoken, the practical processes of performance create out of the familiar streets a performance space touched by eternity. The Barkers’ guild would likely have given a brusque response to Augustine’s question, ‘what was God doing before he made heaven and earth?’ – noting that he was very busy indeed. Once the spatial and visual elements of establishing the performance space had been completed, the Barkers’ God would have been able to deliver his opening line: ‘Ego sum Alpha et O[mega], vita, via, Veritas primus et novissimus’ (I am alpha and omega, life, the way, / Truth first and last).22 Opening at the close, the York cycle begins with a quote which combines aspects of the gospel of John’s ‘I am the way and the truth and the life’ with The Book of Revelation’s ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end’.23 This hybrid approach to scripture suggests that, both in God’s experience of eternity and in the practical staging of the pageants, time occupies a circular moment which weaves a beginning and end of the same material. When it moves into the vernacular, however, God’s eternity becomes more troublesome: I am gracyus and grete, God withoutyn begynnyng, I am maker unmade, all mighte es in me. I am lyfe and way unto welth wynnyng; I am formaste and fyrste, als I byd sall it be.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

9

My blyssyng o ble sall be blendyng And heldand, fro harme to be hydande, My body in blys ay abydande Unendande, withoutyn any endyng. Sen I am maker unmade, and most es of mighte, And ay sall be endeles, and noghte es but I, Unto my dygnyté dere sall diewly be dyghte A place full of plenté to my plesyng at ply; And therewith als wyll I have wroght Many dyvers doynges bedene Whilke warke sall mekely contene, And all sall be made even of noghte.24

This speech introduces repetitive motifs which suggest that God’s creative work operates in a different way to the time-bound works of his medieval audience. Just as the Middle Ages supported a range of ways in which time was experienced, theologised and quantified, so concepts of eternity demonstrate a similar diverse complexity.25 This speech engages with eternity in a variety of those forms. For example, eternity was often presented as the divine experience of the human temporal state: God experiences all events as part of a simultaneous, eternal present, while humans only experience, and observe, time. This is reflected in the speech’s use of concepts of first and last, both of which hint at a linear understanding of time while simultaneously preceding and exceeding it. Alternatively, eternity might be conceived of as a concept entirely outside of time. We see this in God’s apparently paradoxical statement, ‘Sen I am maker unmade, and most es of mighte / And ay sall be endeles, and noghte es but I.’26 Time and eternity might also be constructed as antithetical, moralised concepts belonging to the pre- and postlapsarian worlds. We glimpse this kind of moralistic reading of time after the fall of Lucifer in this pageant. God notes that the light of the angels ‘faded when þe fendes fell’, and henceforth separates their darkness from his light. The angels’ fall and fading therefore embodies change while marking the first ever day and introducing the idea of quantitative, measured time into the cycle.27 Yet the medium of this speech as a dramatic performance repeatedly frustrates this figuring of divine eternity. Twice, God stresses that he is ‘maker unmade’, simultaneously calling attention to the fact that he, unlike the narratives of Creation that will follow, is not ‘made’. Yet the nature of the pageant disrupts this, as the audience have already witnessed a small part of the processes of theatrical ‘making’ and craft required for

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

10

Play time

the Barkers’ guild to represent the figure of God standing in front of them. While the York God’s actions are therefore rooted in the practical concerns of the pageant’s performance time, they also reflect the paradox of divine eternity inhabited by this ‘maker unmade’. Greg Walker has found in this passage evidence of the playwright ‘struggling with an impossibility, attempting to represent sequentially in time a mystery that was logically and theologically unknowable because it was beyond time, and so incapable of sequentiality’.28 This challenge is compounded by the fact that, even as the Barkers’ God attempts to outline the difference between his experience of eternity and the temporal state of his audience, his performance is also affected by audience time. In delivering these lines in the yet barely established space, the actor representing God would have had not only to get his audience’s attention at a potentially ungodly hour of the morning, but also to communicate across the competing attractions of his civic playing space.29 As the performances progressed, these might have included jostling, chattering crowds, food and drink merchants, music and other pageants playing in close proximity. This means that God’s first line, ‘Ego sum Alpha et O[mega], vita, via, Veritas primus et novissimus’, would have been ironic if pre-existing, late medieval noise threatened to impinge on God’s ultimate statement of beginning, ending and eternity. God’s speech also alters his audience’s physical experience of their ‘present’, introducing new rhythms to their soundscape. Delivered across the hubbub of an expectant cityscape, this speech would have broken up the random noises of the street by introducing a new time and beat. The patterns of stressed alliteration such as ‘maker, unmade, mighte’ on either side of a caesura would have introduced a regular rhythm to the street. This creates a sense of doubleness: the very speech God uses to assert his participation in eternity imposes temporal order upon his audience. God’s alliterative, stress-based speech sets the dominant verse form for the rest of the York plays, with the created beings that follow taking up and perpetuating his original ‘voice’. While the divine introduction of poetic order performs as an echo of God’s role as Creator by fashioning structure out of incoherence, it also calls into question God’s occupation of eternity. There are three states operating here: the unmade God; the created and sequential; and the simultaneous. Again, this poses a practical and theological problem similar to that confronted by Augustine. Arguing that God could not have created the word ‘without using a transient utterance’, Augustine claimed that ‘it is not the case that

Introduction

11

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

what was being said comes to an end, and something else is then said, so that everything is uttered in a succession and with a conclusion, but everything is said in the simultaneity of eternity’.30 Rather than collapsing eternity into the world, God’s words bring a new time into the medieval streets of York at the very moment he brings the world into being. Theatrical performance necessarily participates in succession and conclusion, and during its course the York God’s forty-line speech announces the successive creation of heaven, hell, earth and the angels. It also introduces Lucifer and, in so doing, anticipates the first moment of dramatic conflict. I am not claiming here that Augustine’s God and the York God are the same, or that York’s audiences and Augustine experienced time in a similar manner. However, what this analysis does show is that the kinds of theological and temporal problems which have conventionally been read by historians as being carried out chiefly within the religious classes were, in fact, being engaged with, embodied and even laughed at by the middle-ranking guild classes of York and their diverse audiences. In order to stage their plays, medieval producers of Bible pageants had to negotiate, confront and occasionally practically solve issues of time and eternity. They also had to wrangle with the theological issues engaged by their desire to present the disparate texts of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures as though they were all part of one divine, coherent, overarching narrative. Late medieval pageants often chose to do this through staging moments of character conflict, in which two characters appear to have very different experiences of their own time. As this book will later examine, the York God’s eternity differs greatly from that of Lucifer, who has a very different relationship to time. Other pageants, however, put Bible characters in conflict with one another when they ‘read’ their own times differently from one another. While early drama criticism has tended to focus principally on communal, shared experiences of time, little work has examined what happens to characters’ experiences of time when they are placed in dialogue with differing or opposing understandings – particularly where this occurs between two characters inhabiting the same moment. One character might define time in a way that does not hold true for another. Characters might also seek to manage how they and those around them experience time; invest their own time with meaning through recourse to prior (and future) times; or highlight the differences and similarities between the times from which their narratives derive and the late medieval contexts in which their pageants are performed. Characters may also be observed

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

12

Play time

changing their own temporal approaches by learning to read their time differently, as well as consciously attempting to assert control over time through violent action. This book argues that negotiations of time lie behind some of the most fraught depictions of conflict staged between biblical characters. It examines the functions this serves, asking what happens when moments in time are not universally experienced in the same way; how these subjective experiences of time resist conventional authorities; and why gender and race are so central to these conflicts. In doing so, it focuses on subjective, qualitative temporality (time as perceived, experienced and engaged with by an individual), as opposed to the quantitative temporality of mathematically constructed time (a scientific tool of measurement used for the calculation of change). Its methodology is aligned with arguments that claim a temporality rooted in a person’s, or in this case a character’s, understanding of the world. Experiential models of time have a long critical history, encompassing existential, historicist and phenomenological philosophical debates, including those of Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.31 The idea of time as something a human being projects onto the world is particularly useful when examining drama and live performance. As a medium that necessarily relies upon acts of communication between characters and audience, dramatic performance offers numerous possibilities for interpretation and opens up multiple perspectives on time and characters’ perceptions of their own place in time. Giving voices to many characters and inviting their varying viewpoints of roles within, and relationships to, their time, as well as an audience who, individually and collectively, bring their own associations and experiences, dramatic performance has the ability to bring several moments into close proximity. Temporal subjectivity is therefore central, both to the ways in which characters relate to each other and to the scriptural narratives in which they participate. Subjective character experiences of time tend to become highly visible when late medieval plays choose to stage episodes of conflict which do not appear in the Hebrew or Christian Bibles. These conflicts frequently occur between men and women. While moments of conflict between Mary and Joseph, and between Noah and his wife, have received a lot of critical attention due to their negotiations of gender, this book argues that their conflict is also deeply rooted in the characters’ opposing and subjective experiences of their scriptural narratives. Time is an overlooked and yet highly important part of these episodes of gender conflict, which in

Introduction

13

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

turn provide the vehicle through which the plays’ complex theological negotiations of time are conducted. An examination of the ways in which the plays present gender also has the ability to change the ways in which we look at time. Just as memory studies have witnessed differences in the roles performed by men and women in processes of community memorialisation and recollection, so female experiences of time in medieval drama often differ from male experiences.32 While time is not consistently ‘gendered’ in the plays, this book finds that several of the male characters it encounters – Joseph, Herod, Mak and Noah – tend to desire and expect time to be structured, whether this involves the passive assumption of a linear continuation of a certain state of time, the anticipation of the beginning of a new era, an attempt to conform to a linear family timeline based on reproduction, or an active attempt to direct the course of time. Where these characters try to order something that is, essentially, un-orderable, their perspective is consequently challenged or dismantled by the plays’ female characters, who provide alternative temporal viewpoints. However, while all the plays examined appear to offer overarching models of a Christological, typological time which brings events from Jewish and Christian scriptures into one narrative, this is not consistently or exclusively the approach of the men in the plays. The following chapters give examples of characters who threaten to interfere with scriptural narratives. The N-Town Joseph does this unconsciously by adhering to a pre-Christian belief system; the Noah’s wives of Chester and York delay the departure of the ark and challenge Noah’s self-figuring as a proto-Christ; the sheep-stealing antics of Mak in the Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play interrupt the narrative of the Nativity; and Herod takes deliberate action to prevent a (Christian) future from happening. While the women in the plays I examine – the pregnant Mary, the vocal Noah’s wife, resourceful Gyll and the militant mothers of the massacre of the Innocents – are involved in forms of temporal ‘unruliness’, it does not always follow that the resulting conflict is depicted as negative. In focusing on how such moments constitute theological negotiations of time, this book moves away from familiar readings which interpret altercation in early drama as being chiefly comic ‘unruliness’.33 The value of a feminist approach to these altercations has been ably underlined by Nicole Nolan Sidhu, whose work Indecent Exposure conducts an important critique of the ‘unruly woman’ category by placing figures such as Noah’s wife, Gyll and the mothers of the Innocents within their guild cultures. She argues that, rather

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

14

Play time

than merely playing to a comic type, these characters indicate the independence, confidence and self-command that made women productive members of their middle-rank households.34 Where other critics have read certain pageants as critiques of formulaic, comic literary misogyny (misogyny which is often thrown into relief when directed at the virtuous Mary), their approach can overlook how some of the other pageants’ troublesome women, as Chapter 4 demonstrates, are at least partially successful in their rebellions.35 While the pageants examined in the following chapters all contain elements of physical and verbal comedy, I have not made comedy the primary focus of my analysis. This is in part because it has been so well covered elsewhere – lately, in Emma Maggie Solberg’s fascinating examination of the N-Town Mary as a trickster and divine comedienne.36 In fact, the critical preoccupation with the comedy of episodes such as ‘Joseph’s doubt’ and the battle between Herod’s soldiers and the mothers of the Innocents has at times tended to obscure the huge amount of theological and emotional labour done in these scenes. Moreover, where the rebellion of Noah’s wife and Mak and Gyll’s ill-fated sheep plot have often been read as comic diversions from the ‘main events’ of their Bible narratives, this book shows that they also perform crucial roles in communicating the theological complexity of those narratives. In doing so, I demonstrate how the emotional tone of the plays, and the performance of emotion – whether it takes the form of Herod and Joseph’s fear, the mothers’ anger, Mary’s exasperation and tenderness, the shepherds’ political frustration or the spectators’ laughter – is the vehicle through which the plays illustrate and articulate the human experience of theological and intellectual conflict. As Chapters 1 and 3 argue in discussing the N-Town and Towneley pageants’ close focus on the bodies of Joseph, Mary, Mak and Gyll, this work aims to reframe how we approach moments of gendered conflict in these plays by asking new questions about the times and performances engaged in the act of dramatic embodiment. Whose time? The texts that form the basis for this study are all concerned with questions of theological transition, both in biblical narrative and in the plays’ own manuscript and performance contexts. When characters experiencing or interpreting time differently from one another are placed in dialogue, the resulting conflict threatens to destabilise one of their temporal perspectives. Contesting experiences of time

Introduction

15

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

in medieval biblical drama do their most interesting work during episodes of transition, supersession or communion between moments which, on a linear structuring of time, would otherwise be organised into the categories of past, present and future. Often, these moments of conflict highlight the fragility of transition, and in particular challenge the Christian preoccupation with what it presented as a superseded Jewish past. Kathleen Biddick argues that ‘Christians believed that the New Testament superseded the Hebrew Bible and redefined it as the Old Testament. Exegetically it maps the figures of the Old Testament onto their fulfilment in the New Testament.’37 Supersession, through which one state is replaced, redefined or succeeded by another, is a key principle throughout the course of this book, and was one of the chief methods used by medieval biblical drama to reconcile its stories into one narrative. Its fragility as a model becomes particularly visible in plays which dramatise episodes which do not securely belong to ‘Christian’ history or law. These include episodes from the Hebrew Bible which fall before Christ and yet were performed for an audience informed by Christianity, and times immediately before the birth of Christ or occurring during his infancy. Conflicts between characters in these plays therefore tend to show a preoccupation with the ways in which the past is understood, interpreted and experienced. The first chapter, for example, is specifically concerned with the ambiguity of supersession, examining how the N-Town Joseph, who comes from a time in which a virgin birth is an impossibility, fails to understand the meaning of his wife’s miraculously pregnant body. The result is a performance of doubt in which the holy couple, arguing from pre- and post-Christian viewpoints, cannot be reconciled without divine intervention. This conflict negotiates a moment of change by using Joseph’s doubt to ask when, exactly, Christian law replaced Jewish law. As indicated by the York Noah’s angry responses to his wife presented in Chapter 2, supersessionary models are threatened when placed in dialogue with different understandings of time. In interrogating the ways these models are subverted through characters whose world-views support alternative readings, this book also aims to re-evaluate the ways in which Jews, Judaism and Hebrew narratives are represented in medieval drama. Following Kathleen Davis’s linking of women and Jews as disruptive temporal forces, the idea that certain arrangements of time obfuscate and distort minority histories is particularly pertinent for this study.38 Lisa Lampert has also engaged with medieval Christian constructions of Judaism and

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

16

Play time

gender, arguing that both women and Judaism represented a point of origin for (male-centric) Christianity, and yet nevertheless also acted as obstacles to narratives of Christian supersession.39 The past proves troublesome in all of the plays studied, particularly where they involve the performance of Hebrew scripture in a late medieval Christian environment, or depict characters that were historically Jewish and not Christian. The past thirty years have witnessed exciting developments in the study of medieval Christian approaches to Judaism, particularly concerning what Gavin Langmuir has termed the ‘birth trauma’ of medieval Christianity.40 This comprised a set of beliefs that relied upon Hebrew scripture to validate the Christian present, while struggling with Judaism’s continued presence beyond the resurrection of Jesus. This figuring of Judaism both as superseded anachronism and as crucial in the formation of Christian identity appears throughout the narratives and the characterisations of the figures represented in this study. It should be emphasised at this stage that my usage of ‘Jewish’ here, and throughout this book, refers to medieval Christian constructions of Judaism, rather than the practices or theologies of real Jews.41 Given England had not contained any non-fictional populations of Jews since 1290, the Jews of late medieval English plays were imaginary constructions more influenced by local and European anti-Semitic stereotypes than drawn from encounters with real Jews or a deep familiarity with Jewish theology.42 Throughout the centuries following the expulsion, English narratives representing ‘Jews’ enacted a series of cultural and literary resurrections and defeats. These ranged from characterisations of Jews as violent torturers in blood libel and host desecration narratives, to depictions of learned but ultimately defeated verbal combatants of disputation literature.43 Most of these texts involved the conversion, counfounding or erasure of their Jewish characters, and late medieval biblical drama similarly structured their pageants around resistance or doubt followed by conversion and conviction. Due to its multiple roles in Christian society – teaching, selfjustification and literary heritage – the Jewish ‘past’ could neither remain in the past nor operate fully within the present. As a result, it was repeatedly resurrected, re-imagined, woven into typological discourses, cut away from and then reattached to medieval Christian faith.44 These multiple imaginings of Judaism have been awarded a range of terminologies, including ‘spectral’, ‘figurative’, ‘protean’ and ‘virtual’.45 Each of these terms encapsulate something that flits

Introduction

17

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

ambiguously between presence and absence, past and present. Models of time developed within Jewish culture were very different from those projected upon Judaism by medieval Christianity. Sacha Stern has noted that time, questions of time and the use of time are not prominent in early rabbinic literature, which, unlike the younger Christian religion, had no need to invest in constructing mutual interdependence between Hebrew and Christian, past and present.46 Medieval Christian configurations of ‘Judaism’ and ‘Christianity’, conversely, demanded a constant play with time; either through magnifying their distance and difference or by allowing the two religions to touch or overlap. The treatment of the past in the plays examined in this book, whether the ‘past’ is figured as ‘Jewish’, pre-diluvian or scriptural, likewise attempts to make sense of something that is both present and absent, close and distant. The past may be authorising or threatening as it is alternately used to bolster or destabilise the values of the present. Performances of Hebrew narratives for an audience whose faith was primarily informed by the Christian Testament were rooted in an endless quest for good time management. The plays’ negotiation of events from the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, and the complex typologies and acts of supersession they produce, calls for a re-evaluation of the representation of Jews, Judaism and the Hebrew Bible in medieval drama. Portrayals of Judaism in obviously anti-Semitic plays such as the Croxton Play of the Sacrament and the assumption of the Virgin pageants have received a great deal of critical attention, and have been particularly aided by the interdisciplinary studies of Lisa Lampert, Ruth Evans, Miri Rubin and Anthony Bale on the cultural stereotyping of Jews.47 Yet works that do turn their attention to portrayals of Judaism in early English drama tend to focus chiefly on those specifically named as ‘Jews’ in the plays. For example, although Stephen Spector has noted that ‘most of the characters in the mystery plays are ethnically Jewish, comparatively few are referred to as Jews’, he only engages with those characters unambiguously identified as Jews in the plays’ dialogue, stage directions or headings.48 As a consequence, his analysis covers only representations of Jews placed in specifically antagonistic roles, particularly those appearing as persecutors of Christ. While the more insidious anti-Semitism inherent in colonising narratives of time has been examined in relation to other texts, it is only now becoming an object of focus in relation to medieval drama. This book continues the work begun by Emma Maggie Solberg in Virgin Whore, which considers the racial

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

18

Play time

stereotyping of Joseph’s decrepitude as Jewish, by examining other characters who, while part of the Christian narrative, are also ‘ethnically Jewish’ and who are used to dramatise negotiations between scriptures and times.49 This book argues that, while these characters are figured through stereotypes designed to diminish their gendered authority, they nevertheless expose the problems with Christian supersessionary ideologies and thereby disrupt them. Through creating characters who articulate their subjective experiences of time, these plays covertly question what, exactly, constitutes ‘past’ and the difficulty of making it ‘stay’ in the past. Scattered times Biblical lay drama found a home within a period of increased public time-consciousness. Staged between the late fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, biblical pageants were performed across two centuries which saw changes in the ways in which time was available to be used, experienced, measured, commoditised, performed and dedicated to secular or sacred matters.50 Jacques Le Goff noted that from the twelfth century onward there was growing recognition of the co-existence of different understandings and models of time.51 This was due in part to theological and liturgical developments promoting what Mikhail Bakhtin has termed a ‘vertical’ model of divine time, in which biblical events were not only placed in typological dialogue with one another, with the present informing and re-forming the past, but also allowed for moments of simultaneity as well as the circular time of liturgy.52 Meanwhile, the structuring of time in medieval legal and historical chronicles privileged linearity and, seeking a complete record of events, did not necessarily establish causal relationships between them.53 Nor did chroniclers restrict their accounts to contemporary events; rather, they reconciled their work with earlier records. Some even included descriptions of the Last Judgement so as not to leave their narrative incomplete.54 Despite such completionism, enquiries into medieval narratives of national origin have suggested that a beginning was never absolute. Time resisted linear arrangement even within texts attempting to order it as such.55 In the vertical model of time, divine events could co-exist alongside the chronicles’ linear histories and the cyclical ‘church time’ of the religious year, which enabled certain historical moments (such as the Crucifixion on Good Friday) to be re-experienced annually.56

Introduction

19

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

At the same time, the rise of the merchant classes and the introduction of mechanical clocks to town centres in the fourteenth century meant that a lay person living, working and worshipping in a town was also aware of the multiple times of secular trade, work and economic reckoning.57 G. J. Whitrow has argued that the invention of the mechanical clock was preceded by an increased belief in discontinuous, atomic time which could be split into minutes.58 The installation of town clocks brought immediate time-consciousness into the public and economic sphere, encouraging people to consider where they and their activities stood in relation to time and exposing the differences between the rhythms of the craft and mercantile year and the liturgical calendar. Towards the last decades of the performances of biblical drama, some of these models were being challenged. Alec Ryrie has noted that time had become a tool of salvation that the diligent Christian was encouraged to use wisely, while time-collapsing events such as the Mass were re-theologised as performances of memory and Protestant theologies began to favour more linear spiritual narratives which saw humanity’s progress towards reconciliation with God.59 A flourishing of new critical works on the computation and perception of time in the medieval period have complicated earlier ideas that proposed medieval understandings of time as predominantly linear and cyclical.60 This has contributed to the exploration of experiences in which multiple times collapsed and overlapped, with the past present in the everyday and the sacred times of the Bible rubbing shoulders with the secular times of urban life.61 Recent research has included the concept of ‘palimpsested’ time, which suggests that certain works are formed by layers of temporal accretions that, Raeleen Chai-Elsholz argues, ‘cross-pollinate with their predecessors, contemporaries, and successors’.62 We are also gaining a greater understanding of how the past and the future were conceptualised and used. Mary Carruthers’ pioneering work on medieval memory theory has provided a valuable tool for literary criticism, including Theodore K. Lerud’s work on dramatic performance and devotional memory.63 Meanwhile, an increased focus on works dealing with medieval lay attitudes to prophecy and the future reveals contradictory beliefs. Michael Foster’s work, for example, has found beliefs in an imminent apocalypse co-existing alongside increased evidence of legal and financial investments for the future.64 Together, a range of discourses have developed on multi-temporality, topological time, temporal collapse and anachronic objects (where material artefacts accrue temporal associations which bring together incidents from

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

20

Play time

past, present and future).65 As a consequence, medieval lay understandings of time have emerged as every bit as complex as those held in religious and educational establishments, with lay time being polychronic, overlapping and simultaneous. These models of temporal multiplicity have led to the acknowledgement within literary studies that a variety of temporal perspectives may be present in a single medieval text.66 For example, Karen Elaine Smyth’s work on Lydgate and Hoccleve reads her texts as ‘agents and products of this hybrid and sophisticated secular time consciousness’.67 Other discourses have begun to focus more on the temporal experiences of small groups or individuals, while articulating a growing suspicion that ecclesiastical and secular depictions of historical linearity, narratives of origin and discourses of supersession exercise what Kathleen Davis has called an ‘exclusionary force’ which distorts or occludes minority histories.68 The idea that certain arrangements of time act to obfuscate the times of others is particularly pertinent to this study, as it rests at the intersection of gendered and racial histories of exclusion. As the following chapters demonstrate, this process is seen at work when the York Noah’s insistence that the Flood constitutes a new beginning attempts to override his wife’s remembrance of her friends; when the N-Town Mary’s Christian time overwrites the Hebrew time of Joseph; when the Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play poses a deliberate swerve away from the procreative, child-oriented drive of the Nativity story; and when the Towneley Herod attempts to alter the course of scriptural time by murdering infants. The idea that linear models of history operate to exclude or re-fashion the times of certain groups or people has been bolstered by postcolonial approaches towards time, nationhood and space.69 This was taken as the starting point for an important collection of essays edited by Elizabeth Cox, Liz Herbert McAvoy and Roberta Magnani, which examined how texts across a number of disciplines challenge linear time to ‘reveal the inherent instability of a coherent linear temporality or monolithic cultural memory’.70 This resistance of linear time also underpins the queer theories scrutinised in Chapter 3 of this work. While this book aims to challenge the idea of linear time as a ‘norm’, each of the plays examined does demonstrate that, while there might be an official, or authorised, way of reading time, it is not the only way of reading. The question of times being subject to an ‘exclusionary force’ has led to a search for different temporal models that facilitate the recovery of these minority histories. One of the most exciting

Introduction

21

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

attempts to do this in medieval studies can be found in Carolyn Dinshaw’s discussions of simultaneous, collapsed and asynchronous time.71 Focusing on individuals, Dinshaw works on the queer experiences of those who find they are out of sync with their own time. Chapter 3 of this book complicates this definition of queerness, noting that the multiplicity of experiences of time in operation in a performance resist the easy identification of a particular individual’s experience as either ‘normative’ or ‘queer’. However, it does find a highly useful model in Dinshaw’s examination of temporal experience as subjective and, as her discussion of Margery Kempe makes clear, often experienced in conflict with others. The idea that individuals in the Middle Ages experienced time differently from one another, and that these individuals may have been aware of this difference, is key in this study. This book also heeds Caroline Walker Bynum’s call for a ‘female’ approach to history – ‘history in the comic mode’ – as a response to what she considers to be the masculinity of the linear tragic narrative. Walker Bynum’s definition of comic narrative is particularly pertinent when considered in relation to narratives which interrupt or complicate stories of supersession or linearity: ‘If tragedy tells a cogent story, with a moral and a hero’, she argues, ‘comedy tells many stories [. . .] Comedy is about compromise. In comedy there is resolution only for a moment.’72 As Chapters 1 and 2 show, the multivalent narratives which emerge through the staging of temporal conflict between biblical characters are rarely comfortably resolved by the plays’ conclusions. This explains why so many of these episodes of temporal conflict happen in plays which are also considered comic (and, inversely, identifies the problem with simply discussing these plays as comic without going on to probe the questions they are asking). The following plays all exhibit a need to suppress certain temporal experiences which prove troubling. Yet because this occurs within scriptural time, or even happens when figures from the scriptures are the ones asking the awkward questions, weight is lent to those experiences which is never entirely lifted through laughter. Play time Narratives that pull moments into patterns of cause and effect tend to provide us with a model of time that must necessarily disregard simultaneity in favour of succession. Dramatic performance admits many more dimensions. Because it involves dialogue between characters as well as non-verbal forms of communication, particularly

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

22

Play time

facial expression, performance has the ability to generate multiple voices. This provides an opportunity for temporal perspectives and conflicts that other forms of literature do not as easily admit. For example, as we will see in Chapter 2, the book of Genesis only mentions Noah’s wife as an accessory to her husband: a silent member of the saved few. In medieval dramatisations, however, we see Noah’s wife is not happy with the supersessionary narrative of her plotline. She resists, remembers and remonstrates. She voices her opinions. This not only raises uncomfortable questions about the ethics of the Flood, but also forces Noah to think about and explain his own interpretation of what is happening. To stage the Bible involves introducing characters whose viewpoints might not necessarily align with their scriptural sources. Drama is in the business of enacting messy histories: resisting linearity and supersession, offering alternative narratives, forming diversions and raising questions which cannot be easily answered. While other works examining multiple perspectives on time have tended to focus on texts which were limited to those who were able to afford, procure and read manuscripts, medieval biblical plays were highly accessible, and enacted and explored their temporal questions in public. While the pageants employed a number of dramatic devices to engage the audience with a composite ‘now’ of medieval and scriptural times, performance time would not have been collectively experienced by its audiences.73 In giving flesh to a complex array of roles within and relationships to scriptural time, as well as involving an audience who, individually and collectively, brought to the plays their own associations, desires and values, dramatic performance is in the privileged position of conducting its temporal negotiations in a manner which crosses classes, education levels and genders. Frequently performed by sponsoring craft guilds, medieval biblical drama also promoted the intersection of urban, lay working time with religious time, intimately linking the crafts of these guilds with the act of Creation.74 Plays were used to mark time, and York and Chester’s cycles were initially performed annually during the feast of Corpus Christi: a feast of divine embodiment which celebrated the simultaneity of Christ’s presence in the consecrated bread, his body on the Cross and his last meal with his disciples.75 Choosing to celebrate the adoration of the Eucharist with drama depicting, as David Mills argues, ‘the reassuring framework of universal history from the beginning of Creation to the end of historical time’, the pageants at York and Chester dealt with a complex array of times as they aligned key moments from Hebrew and

Introduction

23

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Christian scriptures with the temporal rhythms of urban life.76 Their focus on Corpus Christi also meant that these plays were performing these histories during a feast particularly invested in the bodily and the visual. As well as performing time, the plays were themselves subject to time. Pamela King has examined how the movement of the Chester pageants to Whitsun changed the plays’ liturgical associations, as well as the selection of events to be performed, in order to accommodate the changing theologies of their performance contexts.77 The ways in which the plays were staged also affected how their narratives were received by their audiences. The annual, wagon-based York plays participated in very different relationships to narrative time in comparison to static, non-cyclic plays, which tended to take a more linear direction. An audience at York or Chester might have encountered episodes out of chronological order, in which events from Hebrew and New Testament scripture could be performed at adjacent stations and thus invite visual and aural comparison (and competition). Moreover, even repeated performances of biblical episodes would have appeared differently in each new space, potentially transforming that space for its future use. For example, the last performance station in the York cycle was the Pavement: a civic space used throughout the rest of the year for public punishment, including execution. The staging of the Crucifixion in such a space would have had the simultaneous effect of representing the ‘fit’ place for executing a criminal, aligning Christ with the criminals usually executed there, while problematically linking Christ’s persecutors to the civic authorities who sentenced medieval men to die in that same spot.78 While works in other areas of medieval literary studies show a growing interest in matters of time, time has long been a recurring theme in drama criticism. Among these, four approaches have proved most pervasive. These include work on the plays’ performance contexts;79 work assessing how the plays altered during the religious changes of the sixteenth century;80 work on the challenges of staging the plays in post-medieval/contemporary contexts;81 and work examining how specific temporal models or phenomena (such as anachronism, typology or topology) operate within the plays.82 Four of these areas are primarily concerned with the times encountered through the process of dramatic production; that is, the influence of time and context on the plays. This book intends to develop this last category, by examining the approaches to time created and experienced within the fabric of the plays themselves. Discussions of anachronism and prolepsis constitute some of the earliest temporal

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

24

Play time

approaches to the plays, and continue to be an important element of medieval drama criticism. V. A. Kolve, for example, aimed to situate the plays within medieval discourses of time, eternity and a seven-epoch history of the world.83 Listing the many kinds of anachronisms found within the plays (including medieval settings and costumes, figures of speech and references to local figures, places and buildings), he argued for a conceptual blurring between times. However, as I demonstrate throughout this book, identifying temporal play merely as ‘anachronism’ relies on the assumption that a pageant’s time runs in a predictably linear fashion, and this is rarely the case. Moreover, because Kolve argued that ‘the past was played as an image of the present time’ his primary focus was on the imaginings of similarities, rather than potential areas of conflict between times.84 Subsequent scholarship has likewise tended to continue to approach dramatic anachronism by assuming it arises from a need to suggest similarity between times. James Simpson, Elisabeth Dutton and Robert S. Sturges, for example, draw attention to the political uses of anachronism to challenge certain elements of the plays’ performance contexts – for example, by identifying where plays draw unfavourable comparisons between local powers and biblical tyrants.85 This book, however, discusses the temporal work done by incidents of anachronism that deliberately jar with their contexts, rather than draw similarities between them. What, for example, are we to make of the Chester Noah’s wife when she swears by Christ in a manner which defies medieval sermons against swearing and suggests a knowledge of the New Testament (a knowledge her husband does not appear to share)? Given she categorically refuses Noah’s fashioning of himself as a proto-Christ, her choice of swear-object is not accidental. It draws attention to the failure of typological associations between the Flood and Crucifixion, and invests the wife’s speech with a violent agency that resists Noah’s own interpretation of the Flood. Anachronistic difference can therefore be just as important as similarity. Discussions of anachronism continue to inform historicist approaches to early drama. Historicist, or contextual, approaches have formed the bulk of medieval drama criticism, and have been greatly supported by the valuable new sources of evidence emerging from the Records of Early English Drama project. Key studies from Gail McMurray Gibson and Penny Granger have discussed the N-Town plays in relation to their late fifteenth-century East Anglian context, and have expanded the possibilities of dramatic anachronism by conducting a detailed analysis of how plays and

Introduction

25

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

manuscripts related to the other contemporary cultural and religious products.86 These studies have also been supported by parallel investigations into aspects of modern performances of medieval plays, including staging, material culture, casting and acting.87 The contextual details these studies made available have opened the plays up to consideration of the ways in which audience members and actors might experience performances.88 These approaches have been complemented by works seeking to establish how medieval drama was shaped by the religious changes of the sixteenth century, showing that as audiences and authorities changed, the telling of biblical narratives changed too. This is part of a wider movement to resist the ‘canonical partition’ between medieval and early modern drama, and scholars have identified evidence that what had formerly been considered ‘medieval’ dramatic styles continued late into the sixteenth century.89 The focus of this book is therefore made possible by a wide range of approaches working to elucidate the historical, civic and religious contexts of late medieval biblical drama, particularly those concerning gender in the plays, the plays’ original performance contexts and dramatic receptions of biblical narrative. These investigations have identified the potential multiplicity of perspectives within audience, local authority and national political responses to medieval biblical plays. A need now arises for a corresponding analysis of the ways the characters represented in these plays also operate under multiple agendas and temporal perspectives. Where drama criticism has engaged with specific models of time in biblical drama, it has tended to focus on only one aspect of time, without asking whether the play also supports other co-existing or conflicting temporal truths. For example, Pamela Sheingorn finds that typological readings of the plays rely on ‘filling in the gaps’ in biblical narrative, and transform Hebrew scripture into a foreshadowing of Christ.90 Typology, she claims, insists that from the divine perspective – and, therefore, the only correct perspective – events in the Hebrew Testament point towards Christ.91 The creative and cultural influence of the pervasive typological analysis of the plays became particularly evident in the 2018 performance of the York Mystery Plays, in which director Tom Straszewski carefully re-structured that year’s pageants by typological pairing rather than chronological sequence. This allowed for the performance of pageants which had not always been included in prior productions. Yet while the importance of typology in the plays has rightly received a lot of critical attention, nobody has yet interrogated how

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

26

Play time

successful it actually is within the plays. Throughout this book, I demonstrate that typological machinations within the plays are vulnerable to contradiction, and that processes bringing together events from the Hebrew and Christian Testaments are just as likely to highlight the disjunctions between these times as secure Christological foreshadowing or anticipation. This is often due to the presence of a character who either unconsciously contradicts typological readings by responding to time in a different way, or is who is actively trying to deny typological processes. This kind of typological contradiction frequently occurs when the plays are, in Sheingorn’s words, ‘filling in the gaps’ and showing things that do not appear in the Bible, such as Joseph confronting Mary about her pregnancy, what the shepherds were up to before the angel arrived, Herod’s decision-making process before he orders the slaughter of the Innocents, and the members of the community who are drowned by the Flood. While typological readings of the plays have been by far the most popular of those approaches that do consider specific models of time, discussions of other experiences of time are also beginning to appear. Pamela King’s work on the York cycle’s relationship to the fifteenth-century liturgical calendar argues that the plays ordered their narratives so that all events derived meaning from the Christian ‘centre’ – that is, from Redemption.92 While she identifies the typological pairing of episodes from the Hebrew and Christian scriptures in both liturgy and pageants, she also suggests that the plays were also heavily invested with the organisation of history which saw Christ as a moment of definitive change. This is considered further in the first chapter of this book, which finds that the concept of a temporal ‘centre’ equally invites problematic ambiguity about where, when and with whom this ‘centre’ resides. When, as my colleague James Howard so delightfully phrased it in discussing this project with me, was ‘Christian o’Clock’? Works addressing typology in the plays are presently limited by the fact that, while they tend to consider a single aspect or experience of typology within a play or cycle, they rarely address what happens to these models when they are placed in dialogue with alternative models of time.93 This is in contrast to the work on time being done in later drama, in which models of temporal collapse, typology, spectrality, topology and queer experiences of time have informed readings of plays which dramatise or respond to the medieval ‘past’.94 In interrogating the ways in which medieval drama frames moments of gendered and Jewish–Christian conflict, the following

Introduction

27

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

chapters engage some of these methodologies to argue that time constitutes a crucial element in understanding both the staging of conflict and lay medieval attitudes towards these biblical episodes. It argues that not only were complex models of time in operation – often simultaneously – in these plays, but that they also provide evidence for the ways in which medieval laypeople engaged with, embodied and understood time. Resisting chronology Appropriately for a book which discusses conflicts that complicate linear models of time, I structure my argument out of sync with biblical chronology. Chapter 1 considers the Incarnation at the beginning of the gospels; Chapter 2 moves ‘backwards’ to examine the Flood; Chapter 3 considers the Nativity; and Chapter 4 looks at the slaughter of the Innocents. This deliberate movement across episodes which represent a series of ‘fissures’ that Christian theology claimed to have established in time is also related to the increasing complexity of models of time operating in each episode. Chapters 1 and 2 draw on medieval figurations of Judaism and of Hebrew texts as ‘past’ to examine how typology and supersession are used and challenged in the plays. Chapter 1 foregrounds the key issues raised in this study through a close examination of the Incarnation, an event frequently treated in medieval and modern chronologies as a point of transition. It examines the series of conflicts staged between Mary and Joseph in the Marian pageants of the N-Town manuscript in relation to the temporal problem of the Incarnation as a moment of supersession which ‘undoes’, or replaces, former understandings and laws. My choice of the N-Town pageants here is due to the fact that, of all the surviving medieval biblical pageant collections, they amplify the doubt narrative most by staging repetitive scenes of doubt, enlightenment and reconciliation. These plays also place Joseph’s body under as much scrutiny as Mary’s. Underpinned by work in Jewish studies, which theorises both Jewish and female bodies as resistant to narratives of supersession and assimilation, it finds that the play’s repetitive performances of conversion not only question how successfully Joseph has moved between ‘Jewish’ and ‘Christian’ times, but also challenge how successful linear, transitional models of time actually are. The second chapter, which witnesses Noah and his wife’s altercations before, during and after the Flood in the York and Chester cycles, complicates supersessionary models by introducing competing

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

28

Play time

models of temporal understanding. These plays demonstrate an ongoing concern with the past – how it is to be managed, recollected or forgotten – and examine what happens when characters experience an act of destructive divine punishment differently from one another. Noah’s wife refuses to forget the past. Engaging with medieval theories concerning remembrance, beginnings, annihilation and renewal, as well as Carolyn Dinshaw’s work on temporal collapse and Jonathan Gil Harris’s model of explosive time as ‘the untimely interruption of a past’, this chapter finds that, while Noah adheres to a supersessionary understanding of the Flood which demands the erasure of the past, his wife engages with models of time that recall the past into the present.95 The York wife’s performative speech acts and the Chester wife’s rejection of an exclusive model of salvation form a feminine counter-typology which frustrates Noah’s own typological understanding of himself as a precursor to Christ. Her acts of remembrance also puncture Noah and God’s desire for a new ‘beginning’ founded on oblivion. Where the first two chapters are concerned with the use and management of the past, Chapter 3 focuses instead on the questions of futurity and delay raised when a play deliberately complicates its own timeline. This occurs in the Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play, in which the sheep-in-the-manger plot forms a moment of creative play that interrupts the time of the Nativity. The chapter uses this play to re-evaluate current models of queer time, and particularly models that hinge on the presupposition that there is a normative, or homogenous, way of experiencing time. Rather, it suggests, we might more productively consider the play in relation to Lee Edelman’s narrower idea of queer narratives demonstrating a resistance towards concepts of futurity centred upon heterosexual reproduction.96 Engaging with ‘queer’ time as an interruptive complication of times directed towards procreation, the chapter examines the Play’s delayed and inverted Nativity where a woman appears to give ‘birth’ to a sheep. It includes a discussion of the non-linear production history of the Towneley manuscript, Huntingdon MS HM1, and its role as a nostalgia object, before examining the play’s grotesque figuring of human reproduction and pregnancy as failure. The images of parenthood which are so crucial in the other three chapters of this book are disrupted through the parodic interruption of Mak and Gyll’s curiously non-reproductive narrative. In doing so, the play substitutes the child with a sheep: a queer icon which produces a false signifier of futurity and frustrates the play’s initial drive towards

Introduction

29

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

reproduction. The final chapter examines the clash between mothers and soldiers in the Towneley Herod the Great pageant. It asks what happens when Herod recognises he occupies a time of theological transition and takes steps to prevent it. Engaging with Michel Serres’ ‘crumpled handkerchief ’ model of folded, topological time, it examines how the Towneley Herod the Great amplifies the ways its gospel source brings together multiple events from Hebrew and Christian scripture in processes of prophecy and validation.97 Terrified of both past and future, Herod enacts devastating violence in an attempt to tear his own pages out of history. However, as this chapter shows, the mothers of the Innocents act as agents of topological resistance to Herod’s plans, binding moments in Christian and Hebrew history securely together even as they fruitlessly fight his soldiers. The monograph’s conclusion returns briefly to York’s The Fall of the Angels to examine how structures of anticipation built into the play enabled the audience briefly to occupy God’s experience of eternity. It also asks what happens to this God-like perspective if a play breaks this contract of narrative anticipation. The conclusion also turns its attention to the temporal assumptions that are still prevalent in our own critical practice. In discussing a short episode from the 1611 manuscript of the Cornish play Gwreans an bys, it critiques ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’ critical periodisation and the supersessionary models of theatre they produce. In doing so, it finds that, like the moments of temporal conflict patterned throughout the plays of this book, such models are confounded by the rich diversity of ways in which the representation of biblical dramatic personae and their audiences seek to assimilate, deny, preserve or violently obliterate the past. Notes

 1 Augustine, Confessions, trans. by Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), XI. iii (5), p. 223.  2 Augustine, Confessions, XI. iii, p. 223.  3 Augustine, Confessions, XI. x, p. 228.  4 Augustine, Confessions, XI. xiii, p. 229.  5 Augustine, Confessions, XI. xiii, p. 230: ‘In the sublimity of an eternity which is always in the present, you are before all things past and transcend all things future.’   6 See Wesley Stevens, ‘A Present Sense of Things Past: Quid est enim tempus?’, in Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse, ed. by Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riaño (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 9–28.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

30

Play time

 7 During the sixteenth century Augustine’s theology was ‘reclaimed’ by various Protestant groups, who cast him as an early Protestant thinker. See Arnoud S. Q. Visser, Reading Augustine in the Reformation: The Flexibility of Intellectual Authority in Europe, 1500–1620 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 3–11 and Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 441–6.  8 Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, trans. by P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), V.6, ll. 16–17.  9 See Richard Beadle, ‘The York Corpus Christi Play’, in Medieval English Theatre, ed. by Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 99–124 (p. 102) and Meg Twycross, ‘Forget the 4.30 am Start: Recovering a Palimpsest in the York Ordo Paginarum’, METh, 25 (2005), 98–152. 10 Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, eds, REED: York, vol. 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), p. 312. 11 See Meg Twycross on the 1415 Ordo paginarum and on whether the guilds were performing plays or other dramatic displays in ‘The Ordo paginarum Revisited, with a Digital Camera’, in Bring Furth the Pageants: Essays in Early English Drama Presented to Alexandra F. Johnston, ed. by David N. Klausner and Karen Sawyer Marsalek (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 105–31 (pp. 110–11). 12 Beadle, ‘The York Corpus Christi Play’, p. 105. See also Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘The Procession and Play of the Corpus Christi in York after 1426’, Leeds Studies in English, 7 (1974), 55–62. 13 Philip Butterworth, Staging Conventions in Medieval English Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 78. 14 See https://www.yorkmysteryplays.co.uk/the-plays/ [accessed 1 September 2019]. 15 On the modern wagons used when the York plays are performed today and the physical challenges attending them, see the essays by Mike Tyler, Peter Brown and Tony Wright in The York Mystery Plays: Performance in the City, ed. by Margaret Rogerson (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011), pp. 116–34. 16 On the manipulation of light, see Meg Twycross, ‘The Sun in York (Part One): Illumination, Reflection, and Timekeeping for the Corpus Christi’, METh, 40 (2018), 148–94 and Richard Beadle, ‘Masks, Mimes and Miracles: Medieval English Theatricality and its Illusions’, in From Script to Stage in Early Modern England, ed. by Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 32–42 (pp. 34–5). 17 See Butterworth, Staging Conventions, pp. 78–90 and Erika T. Lin, Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 23–37. 18 Sharon Aronson-Lehavi, Street Scenes: Late Medieval Acting and Performance (Chippenham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 56. 19 On verbal delivery and auditions, see Butterworth, Staging Conventions, pp. 100–8 and Beadle, ‘The York Corpus Christi Play’, p. 105.

Introduction

31

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

20 Augustine, Confessions, XI. iv, p. 224. 21 Butterworth, Staging Conventions, p. 78. 22 Richard Beadle, ed., ‘The Fall of the Angels’, in The York Plays (London: Edward Arnold, 1982), pp. 49–53, l. 1. 23 John 14.6 and Revelation 1.8. All of the Bible quotations appearing in this book are taken from the Douay-Rheims Catholic Bible. See www. drbo.org [accessed 1 September 2019]. 24 Beadle, ed., ‘The Fall of the Angels’, ll. 1–16. 25 See for example the diverse approaches collated in Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riaño, eds., Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003). 26 Beadle, ed., ‘The Fall of the Angels’, ll. 9–10. 27 Beadle, ed., ‘The Fall of the Angels’, l. 148. 28 Greg Walker, ‘“In the Beginning . . .”: Performing the Creation in the York Corpus Christi Play’, in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama, ed. by Thomas Betteridge and Greg Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 36–54 (p. 39). 29 See Clare Wright, ‘Acoustic Tyranny: Metre, Alliteration and Voice in York’s Christ Before Herod’, METh, 34 (2012), 3–29. 30 Augustine, Confessions, XI. vii, p. 226. 31 See Barbara Adam, Time (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), pp. 34–64; James G. Hart, ‘Phenomenological Time: Its Religious Significance’, in Religion and Time, ed. by Anindita Niyogi Balslev and J. N. Mohanty (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993), pp. 17–45 and Mark Currie, About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 52: ‘For Heidegger, [. . .] time is not something which exists in the world and is then reflected in the human mind, but something which arises from a human being (Dasein) and is then projected onto the world.’ 32 See Elisabeth Van Houts, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe 900– 1200 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999) and Mette B. Bruun and Stephanie Glaser, eds, Negotiating Heritage: Memories of the Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008). 33 The wealth of work concerning medieval depictions of female ‘unruliness’ will be engaged with in more detail later. Early thinkers considering this characterisation have included Hardin Craig, English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955); V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966) and Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972). As the following chapters demonstrate, this category is proven unstable when the plays’ performance contexts are taken into consideration. 34 Nicole Nolan Sidhu, Indecent Exposure: Gender, Politics, and Obscene Comedy in Middle English Literature (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), pp. 190–206.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

32

Play time

35 See Katie Normington’s comprehensive investigation of gender in the plays in Gender and Medieval Drama (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), particularly her chapters on ‘holy women’ and ‘vulgar women’; 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 Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. by Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 65–95; and Emma Maggie Solberg, Virgin Whore (New York: Cornell University Press, 2018). 36 Solberg, Virgin Whore, pp. 9–10. 37 Kathleen Biddick, The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), p. 4. This book will throughout refer to the ‘Hebrew/Christian Testament’ or ‘Hebrew/Christian Bible’ in an attempt to avoid the supersessionary power structures implied by the use of ‘Old’ and ‘New Testament’, though along with other theologians I acknowledge that these terms are not entirely accurate due to the Aramaic texts making up the earlier collection of scriptures. 38 Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 39 Lisa Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 1–17. 40 See Gavin I. Langmuir, History, Religion, and Antisemitism (London: I.B. Tauris and Co. Ltd., 1990), p. 282. 41 Here, I adopt the definition of antisemitism proposed by Gavin Langmuir, which distinguishes anti-Judaism (a hostility towards the Jewish religion) from antisemitism (an irrational hostility directed against imagined characteristics of Jews which were fantastical and not visible in the practices of ‘real’ Jews): ‘If antisemitism is defined as chimerical beliefs or fantasies about “Jews”, as irrational beliefs that attribute to all those symbolized as “Jews”, menacing characteristics or conduct that no Jews had been observed to possess or engage in, then antisemitism first appeared in medieval Europe in the twelfth century.’ See Langmuir, History, Religion, and Antisemitism, pp. 297–8. 42 For an overview of the gradual curtailing of Jewish rights and their eventual expulsion see the essays contained in Patricia Skinner, ed., The Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary and Archaeological Perspectives (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2003), pp. 15–70 and Robert C. Stacey, ‘The Conversion of Jews to Christianity in Thirteenth-Century England’, Speculum, 67.2 (1992), 263–83. 43 See Anthony Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms, 1350–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 165. 44 See Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 7 and Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in Dispute: Disputational Literature

Introduction

33

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

and the Rise of Anti-Judaism in the West (c. 1000–1150) (Aldershot: Valorium, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1998), pp. 34–42. 45 See the chapters by Sheila Delany, Denise L. Despres, Timothy S. Jones and Sylvia Tomasch in Sheila Delany, ed., Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings (London: Routledge, 2002); Steven Kruger, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), p. xvii, which identifies ‘a dependence upon the Jewish ancestor that is simultaneously an erasure. [. . .] Jewishness is a spectral presence, strongly felt and yet just as strongly derealized.’ 46 See Sacha Stern, ‘The Rabbinic Concept of Time from Antiquity to the Middle Ages’, in Time and Eternity, ed. by Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riaño (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 129–45. 47 See Lisa Lampert, ‘The Once and Future Jew: The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Little Robert of Bury and Historical Memory’, Jewish History, 15.3 (2001), 235–55; Rubin, Gentile Tales, p. 39; Ruth Evans, ‘“When a Body Meets a Body”: Fergus and Mary in the York Cycle’, in New Medieval Literatures, Vol. 1, ed. by Wendy Scase, Rita Copeland and David Lawton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 193– 212 and Anthony Bale, Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), pp. 111–12. 48 See Stephen Spector, ‘Anti-Semitism and the English Mystery Plays’, Comparative Drama, 13.1 (1979), 3–16 (p. 6). This develops Edward N. Calisch’s early description of Jewish monstrosity in the New Testament plays in The Jew in English Literature, as Author and as Subject (Richmond, VA: The Bell Book Publishing Co., 1909), p. 20 and that of M. J. Landa, The Jew in Drama (London: P.S. King and Son, 1926), p. 15. More work has been conducted on depictions of the Jew in early modern drama, though again, this work is preoccupied with those specifically named as ‘Jews’. See James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 49 Solberg, Virgin Whore, p. 24. 50 See A. J. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, trans. by G. L. Campbell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), pp. 111–12, p. 139 and Charles Hepworth Holland, The Idea of Time (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 1999), pp. 7–20. 51 Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 29–42. 52 Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. and trans. by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 84–258 (p. 157): ‘everything that on earth is divided by time, here, in this verticality, coalesces into eternity, into pure simultaneous coexistence.’

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

34

Play time

53 For an overview of the development of ‘modern’ approaches to history, the increase of historical organisation into causal patterns and the drive to reconcile sacred and secular histories into complementary and continuous narratives, see Lynn Hunt, Measuring Time, Making History (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008), pp. 52–65. 54 Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, pp. 114–15. 55 See D. Vance Smith, The Book of the Incipit: Beginnings in the Fourteenth Century (Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Anke Bernau, ‘“Britain”: Originary Myths and the Stories of Peoples’, in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English, ed. by Elaine Treharne and Greg Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 629–48 and James Simpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 184–221. 56 See for example Carolyn Dinshaw’s discussion of the Northern Homily Cycle in which, she explains, ‘the preacher gives his lay audience what amounts to a tutorial on time, engaging concepts such as linearity and cycles, change and permanence, terrestrial time and human time’. See Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (London: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 44. 57 See Le Goff, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, p. 37. 58 G. J. Whitrow, Time in History: Views of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 71–86. 59 See Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain, pp. 410–27. 60 See for example J. A. Burrow’s influential work on the ‘six ages of man’ and A. J. Gurevich’s argument for linear and cyclical time models: one in which the birth of Christ determines the direction of all subsequent developments, and the other which witnesses the cyclical journey of the man and the world, ending with mankind’s return to the Creator and time’s own return to eternity. J. A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) and Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, pp. 111–12. 61 See D. Vance Smith, ‘Irregular Histories: Forgetting Ourselves’, NLH, 28.2 (1997), 161–84. 62 Raeleen Chai-Elsholz, ‘Introduction: Palimpsests and “Palimpsestuous” Reinscriptions’, in Palimpsests and the Literary Imagination of Medieval England, ed. by Leo Carruthers, Raeleen Chai-Elsholz and Tatjana Silec (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 1–20 (p. 2). See also Sarah Dillon, The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (London: Continuum, 2007), pp. 4–5. 63 Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 231– 33 and Theodore K. Lerud, Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 43–44. 64 Michael Foster, ed., Spiritual Temporalities in Late-Medieval Europe (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), pp. 1–8.

Introduction

35

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

65 See Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010). 66 See Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 66 on ‘the different temporal implications of described actions’ and Currie, About Time, pp. 1–10 on the workings of time in narrative fiction. 67 Karen Elaine Smyth, Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 1. 68 Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty, p. 3. 69 See Kathleen Biddick’s The Typological Imaginary, pp. 21–44 and The Shock of Medievalism (London: Duke University Press, 1997), and Jennifer Summit’s discussion of the Reformation’s cartographic attempts to erase the Catholic past in ‘Leland’s Itinerary and the Remains of the Medieval Past’, in Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England, ed. by Gordon McMullan and David Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 159–76. 70 Liz Herbert McAvoy, ‘Introduction: In Principo: The Queer Matrix of Gender, Time and Memory in the Middle Ages’, in Reconsidering Gender, Time and Memory in Medieval Culture, ed. by Elizabeth Cox, Liz Herbert McAvoy and Roberta Magnani (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2015), pp. 1–12. 71 See Carolyn Dinshaw, ‘Temporalities’, in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature, ed. by Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 107–23 and How Soon is Now? Dinshaw’s analysis, and that of others working on multiple temporalities in the Middle Ages, contradicts the belief that ideas of ‘simultaneous time’ only came into being with the synchronisation of the railways. See Adam, Time, p. 115. 72 See Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1991), p. 24. 73 John McGavin and Greg Walker, Imagining Spectatorship: From the Mysteries to the Shakespearean Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 1. 74 See 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). 75 See Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 271–87. 76 David Mills, ‘The Chester Cycle’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. by Beadle, pp. 109–33 (p. 115). See also Erica Magnus, ‘Time on the Stage’, KronoScope, 4.1 (2004), 95–126 (pp. 116–7). 77 See Pamela King’s extensive work on the relationship between liturgical and performance times, including The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006) and ‘Playing Pentecost in York and Chester: Transformations and Texts’, METh, 29 (2007), 60–74.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

36

Play time

78 Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. xv–xvi and Daisy Black, ‘“Nayles Large and Lang”: Masculine Identity and the Anachronic Object in the York Crucifixion Play’, Medieval Feminist Forum, 50.2 (2015), 85–104. 79 For examples of contextual approaches, see Clifford Davidson, Material Culture and Medieval Drama (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999) and Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 80 See Jessica Dell, David Klausner and Helen Ostovich, eds, The Chester Cycle in Context, 1555–1575: Religion, Drama, and the Impact of Change (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2012); Coletti, ‘The Chester Cycle in Sixteenth-Century Religious Culture’, pp. 531–47 and Richard K. Emmerson, ‘Dramatic History: On the Diachronic and Synchronic in the Study of Early English Drama’, JMEMS, 35.1 (2005), 39–66. 81 See Rogerson, ed., The York Mystery Plays: Performance in the City and Roland Reed, ‘The Slaughter of the Innocents’, Early Theatre, 3 (2000), 219–28. 82 See Thomas Rendall, ‘Visual Typology in the Abraham and Isaac Plays’, Modern Philology, 81 (1984), 221–32 and Pamela Sheingorn’s review of typological approaches in Pamela Sheingorn, ‘Typology and the Teaching of Medieval Drama’, in Approaches to Teaching Medieval English Drama, ed. by Richard K. Emmerson (New York: MLAA, 1990) pp. 90–100. 83 Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi, pp. 101–23. 84 Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi, p. 110. 85 See Robert S. Sturges, The Circulation of Power in Medieval Biblical Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Elisabeth Dutton, ‘Secular Medieval Drama’, in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English, ed. by Elaine Treharne and Greg Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 384–94 (p. 384) and James Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 2, 1350–1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 514–15 (p. 518): ‘By strategic use of anachronism [. . .] the cycle plays certainly projected a penetrating critique of institutions adjacent to, and standing over, the urban matrix of craft guilds.’ 86 McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion and Penny Granger, The N-Town Play: Drama and Liturgy in Medieval East Anglia (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2009). 87 Philip Butterworth, Clifford Davidson and Meg Twycross have provided some of the most extensive contributions to discussions of staging and costume in medieval drama since the late 1970s. See for example Butterworth, Staging Conventions; Clifford Davidson, Gesture in Medieval Drama and Art (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001) and Meg Twycross’ initiation of debates concerning

Introduction

37

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

cross-playing in her article ‘“Transvestism” in the Mystery Plays’, METh, 5.2 (1983), 123–80. 88 See Jody Enders on the transmission of biblical and social ‘truths’ through violence in medieval drama in Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 89 See Raphael Falco, ‘Medieval and Reformation Roots’, in A Companion to Renaissance Drama, ed. by Arthur F. Kinney (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 239–56; Coletti, ‘The Chester Cycle in Sixteenth-Century Religious Culture’, pp. 531–47; Greg Walker, ‘When Did “the Medieval” End? Retrospection, Foresight, and the End(s) of the English Middle Ages’, in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English, ed. by Elaine Treharne, Greg Walker and William Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 725–38 and Kurt A. Schreyer, Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft: Remnants of the Mysteries on the London Stage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014). 90 See Sheingorn, ‘Typology and the Teaching of Medieval Drama’, pp. 90–100; Walter Meyers, ‘Typology and the Audience of the English Cycle Plays’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 81 (1975), 5–17 and Rosemary Woolf, ‘The Effect of Typology on the English Medieval Plays of Abraham and Isaac’, Speculum, 32 (1957), 805–25. 91 Sheingorn, ‘Typology and the Teaching of Medieval Drama’, p. 90. 92 See Pamela M. King, ‘Calendar and Text: Christ’s Ministry in the York Plays and the Liturgy’, Medium Aevum, 67.1 (1998), 30–59 (p. 40). 93 One notable exception is Sarah Elliott Novacich’s Shaping the Archive in Late Medieval England: History, Poetry, and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), which will be examined in Chapter 2. 94 See for example Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Sarah Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Gordon McMullan and David Matthews, eds, ‘Introduction’, in Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 1–14 and Kathryn Schwarz, ‘Queer Futility: Or, The Life and Death of King John’ in Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. by Madhavi Menon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 163–71. 95 Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, p. 91 and Dinshaw, How Soon is Now? 96 Lee Edelmann, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 97 Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. by Roxanne Lapidus (Michigan, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 60.

1

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The old man and the pregnant virgin: linear time and Jewish conversion in the N-Town plays In December 2009, a New Zealand church celebrated Christmas with a new billboard. It depicted Mary and Joseph in bed together. A disgruntled-looking Mary stared primly off into the top corner of the frame, while Joseph gazed wearily out at the viewer. The image was captioned: ‘Poor Joseph. God was a hard act to follow.’ Within hours, the board had provoked angry complaints, and the image was defaced with brown paint.1 With a spectacular misjudgement of audience, the billboard outside St Matthew-in-the-City Church invited its viewers to participate in the domestic life of the Holy Family in a way many found uncomfortable. The Archdeacon defending the board claimed it was intended to lampoon the literal interpretation of the conception story, but his statement met with criticism from Christian groups who found the image disrespectful. Yet with its emphasis upon ‘Poor Joseph’, the image appeared less concerned with attacking Mary’s status than with exploring Joseph’s role within the Nativity narrative. Joseph’s earthbound gaze invited a connection with his audience in a way Mary’s heavenward gaze did not. Inviting sympathy and ridicule, Joseph appeared as a modern man with understandable insecurities about his sexual performance. Yet while the billboard provoked an iconoclastic response from its New Zealand audience, it also confronted questions which have a long history. Medieval dramatisations depicting Joseph’s doubts about Mary also grappled with and imagined solutions for these questions, which centre on how Joseph might have interpreted his wife’s virgin conception of Jesus as well as the practical consequences this might have had for the couple’s relationship. The popularity of scenes of domestic conflict in which Joseph interprets Mary’s newly pregnant body as unfaithful is evidenced by the fact that the Chester, Coventry, N-Town, Towneley and York plays all include depictions of Joseph’s doubts about Mary.2 The York and N-Town manuscripts dedicate whole plays to this subject

The old man and the pregnant virgin

39

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

matter. Only the Chester cycle avoids a scene of outright domestic conflict by giving Joseph a confessional monologue, where he directly tells his audience of his pain at Mary’s state and speaks of his plans to leave his wife quietly.3 In the Towneley, Coventry, York and N-Town pageants, Joseph interprets Mary’s pregnancy as incontrovertible evidence that she has slept with another man. An argument ensues where the burden of convincing Joseph of Christ’s virgin conception – a burden also taken up by early Christian theologians including Origen, Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine – is placed on Mary.4 A woman’s voice is rarely believed in matters of paternity, even when that woman is the mother of God, and Joseph is only convinced when an expert angel witness testifies on Mary’s behalf. While all four of these pageants stage their marital conflict as the result of the couple’s irreconcilable interpretations of Mary’s pregnancy, the collection of Marian pageants compiled in the N-Town manuscript amplify the couple’s argument rather more than the others. Cotton MS Vespasian D. 8 represents a compilation of plays which appear to have been used for touring, hence the ‘N-Town’ mentioned by the Vexillators advertising the plays. The manuscript’s pageants have been linked to a number of thriving East Anglian devotional centres, including Bury St Edmunds, Norwich and Thetford.5 Peter Meredith’s reconstruction of the original Mary play indicates that the Joseph’s Doubt pageant was an insertion taken from another source.6 However, the manuscript’s presentation of plays as discrete episodes and its potential use as a sourcebook for later productions admits inter-play comparison between what Alan Fletcher has called the ‘Marian’ plays.7 These expansions and additions mean that the confrontation between Mary and Joseph is one instalment of a repeated pattern of doubt and accusation which plays out across several pageants. The N-Town plays confront Mary with stringent interrogations from a line of sceptical characters, including Joseph, detractors at a public trial and a suspicious midwife.8 To balance these accusations, N-Town’s Mary has an equally impressive number of defendants consolidating her authority, including an array of prophetic and divine characters, three plays detailing her own immaculate birth and childhood and a dramatisation of the parliament of heaven.9 These challenges and defences place the N-Town Joseph’s domestic troubles within a repetitive narrative arc of doubt, detraction, enlightenment and belief. Mary’s is not the only body put to scrutiny in the N-Town pageants. Joseph’s elderly body also becomes an object of slander, ridicule and doubt, some of which comes from Joseph himself.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

40

Play time

The N-Town plays make Joseph’s elderly impotence particularly visible. From his first appearance, Joseph’s lines suggest that his performer exaggerated the physical effects of old age. ‘I am so agyd and so olde’, he says in the Marriage of Mary and Joseph pageant, ‘þat both myn leggys gyn to folde – I am ny almost lame!’10 While these lines draw spectator attention to the comic physicality of the actor’s performance, Joseph’s body also forms the basis of onstage scrutiny and speculation, both in front of his peers at the temple in the Marriage pageant and later, when he and his wife are put on trial and Joseph’s sexuality is speculated about in the streets in The Trial of Mary and Joseph. The depiction of Joseph as aged dates back to the second-century Greek Protoevangelium of James, which develops Mary’s narrative and attempts to navigate the gospels’ inconsistencies concerning Mary’s virginity, Jesus’ ‘brothers’ and Joseph’s role as father of Christ.11 All surviving medieval pageants covering Joseph’s doubt cite his age as ‘proof’ of his lack of responsibility for his wife’s condition, but N-Town places more verbal and physical emphasis on this than the others. This oppositional imagery stressing Joseph’s age and Mary’s youth developed in parallel with the appearance of the mismatched marriage plot in other, non-theological literary forms. In the comic medieval ‘elderly husband with a young wife’ fabliau and romance trope, the advanced age of the husband guarantees the infidelity of the wife.12 This mismatched marriage trope dated from antiquity but became particularly prevalent in the literature and iconography of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.13 Katie Normington and Brandon Alakas note the motif’s repetitive prevalence in early drama, while the fact that each pageant makes this trope its own by stressing different aspects of Joseph’s age suggests that it was adapted to provoke laughter from diverse audiences.14 This laughter may not necessarily have been as unsympathetic as that usually directed towards the lecherous old cuckold of medieval comic literature. As a character, Joseph is often highly self-aware. The N-Town Joseph, for example, reads his own situation in relation to the fabliaux tradition, and, in Joseph’s Doubt, warns the men in his audience: ‘all olde men to me take tent, / And weddyth no wyff in no kynnys wyse / þat is a зonge wench.’15 While he is the object of the audience’s joke, he also sets himself up as an exemplar for his spectators. He knows his marriage forms the basis of this common narrative, and shares this understanding with his audience, who of course know that he is due to be cuckolded, albeit by God. They also know Joseph’s position in biblical history will work against his desire for a quiet married life. Joseph’s appeal

The old man and the pregnant virgin

41

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

to his audience’s shared knowledge of secular and scriptural narratives therefore suggests that his character was carefully constructed to solicit both sympathy and laughter. Bringing scripture and medieval marital conflicts into co-existence, N-Town imagines a Joseph whose perspectives on marriage are informed by contemporary comic literature. Joseph’s awareness of his own intertextuality means he reads Mary’s body with the eyes of his audience: that is, as a medieval man might interpret his wife’s pregnant body. He also reads his own body in the same fashion. Yet the tension between N-Town’s holy couple performs something more temporally interesting than Joseph’s (anachronistic) figuring of himself as a product of medieval misogynist and ageist literature. Joseph’s old age and Mary’s youth embody the problems attending the idea of supersession, casting Joseph as representing an older law which offers little scope for comprehending the possibility of a virgin pregnancy. By the fifteenth century medieval depictions of the Holy Family tended to figure Joseph as elderly, often placing him in the background or on the edges of scenes.16 In the N-Town plays, Joseph’s age and infirmity performs yet another ‘proof’ of Mary’s virginity, as the suggestions of impotence remove from him the possibility of being Christ’s father. Yet Joseph’s age also functions as a marker of theological difference. Depictions of Joseph as elderly coincided with the growth in popularity of narratives which pitted Mary against Jewish doubters and persecutors.17 In the artwork of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, religious difference tended to be articulated through opposing, as Anthony Bale has noted, ‘grace and ugliness’, with Jews becoming disfigured and contorted against the harmonious beauty of Christian figures.18 This involved facial distortion, such as the hooked noses and elongated faces identified by Debra Higgs-Strickland; distortions effected by body-elongating clothing (including pointed hats and long sleeves); or bodily contortion, with Jewish bodies encroaching on an image’s frame, their arms and legs bent and contorted, or gesturing more dynamically than their Christian counterparts.19 Dramatised conflicts between Mary and Joseph which emphasise the age–youth polemic likewise exploit this motif of Jewish bodily distortion. Making old age Joseph’s defining characteristic, the N-Town plays repeatedly emphasise his lack of physical strength, giving particular attention to Joseph’s bent and contorted legs, which make it difficult for him to walk, and which mean he moves considerably more slowly around the playing space than other characters. The N-Town Joseph

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

42

Play time

complicates arguments which chiefly hold female bodies up as the chief projections of historical change, suggesting that Jewish male bodies also played a crucial role in constructing Christian narratives of change.20 While Sylvia Tomasch has argued that the Joseph of ‘Joseph’s doubt’ iconography tends to lose his ‘Jewish’ signifiers after he reconciles with Mary, this is not the case in the N-Town plays, which continue to make his physical decrepitude a focus of laughter.21 As a consequence, Joseph’s body acts as a visual exemplar of a Law increasingly depicted as aged, decrepit and confounded by the young theology heralded by the virgin birth. The importance of time in this characterisation of the holy couple has been briefly stressed in J. A. Burrow’s claim that ‘[Joseph’s] ill-matched marriage [. . .] is a portent marking a time when the order of nature is to be utterly transcended in the Virgin Birth’.22 More recently, Emma Maggie Solberg has aligned Joseph’s old age with the plays’ representation of Judaism, claiming that N-Town ‘represents Mary as the young, beautiful, blossoming flower of Christianity and Joseph as the superseded Old Testament – old taken to its comic extremity’.23 Yet the success of this alleged moment of supersession – the moment at which it occurs, or why this moment apparently has to be performed again, and again, and again – has not yet been evaluated. This is surprising given that the question of Jesus’ paternity which underlines Joseph and Mary’s conflict is as much about temporal order as it is sexual comedy. This chapter argues that Mary and Joseph experience the present of their own time very differently from one another, and that their understandings of this time are articulated through their readings of Mary’s pregnancy and of Joseph’s body. The N-Town Joseph’s Doubt exposes a disjunction between Mary’s physical embodiment of a new law and Joseph’s knowledge of Hebrew and natural law. This bears the influence of early medieval Christian attitudes towards the prior, Hebrew law which underpinned its doctrine as well as more contemporary medieval anti-Semitic tropes designed to navigate potentially troublesome doubts about Mary. In examining a debate about paternity as being also a debate about time, I question the supersessionary imagining of Christ’s Incarnation as a moment of historical change which instigated a ‘split’ between Jewish and Christian theologies. When two characters experience time differently, transition is called into question. Joseph and Mary’s conflict therefore gives rise to more fundamental questions, namely, what happens to understandings of time during moments of historical change, and also, how is it possible to identify exactly when such

The old man and the pregnant virgin

43

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

change has taken place? The second part of this chapter reads the pageant’s dramatisation of Joseph’s transition from doubt to belief as a narrative of conversion which attempts to lay to rest the doubts the play has raised. Although Joseph appears to ‘convert’ to a belief in Mary’s miraculous pregnancy at the end of Joseph’s Doubt, his new belief continues to be tested in the following pageants, as does his wife’s virginity. Examining recurring moments of Joseph doubting and being doubted in the Trial, Nativity and Purification pageants, this chapter finds that models of supersession are complicated even within those narratives most heavily invested in promoting them. (When) did history shatter?

The idea that the coming of Christ acted as a historical caesura informed English historiography even before Bede placed Jesus at the centre of chronological history, and has been adopted by medieval theologians and modern Western commentators alike.24 While the effects of this caesura have been less well agreed upon, there appears to be a consensus that the entrance of Jesus into time was an exceptional moment which altered all times before and after. For example, A. J. Gurevich argues that Christ’s birth was a ‘decisive sacramental fact’ which had a structuring effect on history by separating it into two epochs, while Peter Manchester views Jesus’ life as ‘a kind of permanent center of history, radiant of divine presence’.25 For Michel Serres, whose model of topological time underpins this book’s final chapter, Christ does not so much represent a break in time, but curiously forms the only fixed point in a time which Serres otherwise represents as malleable and ever changing.26 Anindita Niyogi Balslev and J. N. Mohanty, meanwhile, view Christian perspectives of time as interrupting the Hebrew Bible’s linearity, with Jesus’ appearance constituting a meeting between time and eternity and human and divine existence.27 Contrary to Serres and Gurevich, this appears to suggest that, rather than imposing structure on time, Christ introduces timelessness into human history. All of these historiographical approaches privilege Christianity as a definitive moment of change. Yet Kathleen Davis has identified that this common centring of Christ within Western history constitutes a violent act of colonisation. Situating the notion of ‘Christ-as break’ as developing during the time of Augustine, she argues that it was designed to legitimise the Christian political order: ‘attaching it, by way of the anno domini and the biblical supersession of the New Testament over the Old Testament (which

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

44

Play time

is to say Christian history over Jewish history), to a division in sacred time.’28 Davis’s work, which is chiefly concerned with the political uses made of periodisation, argues that Christ’s entry into time performed as a violent ‘shattering’ of prior histories which undermined the legitimacy of all historical models which did not centre Christ.29 This motif of time shattering suggests a messy, disruptive violent act. This is not the case in historical models characterising Christ as the introduction of eternity into time, or as a moment of transition. These indicate a decisive moment of change – either a definitive rift between ‘before’ and ‘after’, or a momentary halt in time’s linear trajectory before the Incarnation brought all times together into one narrative. Davis’s ‘shattering’, however, implies the messy dispersal and deformation of all times that have gone before. When a brittle or fragile object shatters, it is not damaged solely at the initial point of contact. Shattering is chaotic and unpredictable, splitting outwards and disturbing, even injuring, bystanders. Shattering hurts. The marital pain of the N-Town Mary and Joseph, whose narrative appears at the very centre of the Incarnation narrative, works somewhere between these models of supersessionary time. The entrance of Jesus into time, and into Mary’s womb, performs as a transformative moment of change for Mary, a ‘decisive sacramental fact’ which places her body at the centre of a divine transformation of past and future. Yet Mary’s time shatters the time of Joseph, and the pageants following her pregnancy witness the shards of his former belief structures trying to fall awkwardly into their new place in this regime. The conflict between N-Town’s Mary and Joseph is further exacerbated by the fact that few sources figuring Christ as caesura seem to agree on when this cataclysmic, time-bending change was supposed to have taken place. If there is critical indecision as to the precise effect of Christ on time, it is mirrored in the uncertainty about when during Christ’s life or death this change happened. Giorgio Agamben’s history of the early development of messianic law places this change, not during Christ’s lifetime, but during the Pauline reworking of Christ as messiah: a theological development which split the Jews from the Jewish–Christians. Here, he claims Paul situated the ‘messianic caesura’ at the resurrection, not the birth, of Christ.30 While Bede’s anno domini suggested ‘Christian’ time started during the human life of Christ, it took some time for his Western readers to recognise the difference between the Incarnation and the Nativity.31 This causes a problem when examining the times at work in N-Town’s Joseph’s Doubt. If

The old man and the pregnant virgin

45

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

this moment of historical change is dated from the Incarnation (and the angel’s Annunciation, calculated as 25 March), and yet Mary is the only human figure on stage who is aware that time has changed, we have a plausible explanation for the many episodes of doubt she encounters through the pageants. In this reading, Mary and her body have changed, but the rest of the world can only apply the logic of their pre-Christian time. This places immense importance on Mary’s role in establishing a new, ‘Christian’ perception of time. However, if historical change occurs after the nativity of Christ, this lends greater weight to the objections of Joseph and Mary’s other detractors, for in their experience, there has been no shift to a time where it is possible for a virgin to become pregnant.32 While the gospel of Matthew used the typological mistranslation of ‘young woman’ as ‘virgin’ in Isaiah 7.14’s ‘Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel’ to suggest there was Hebrew scriptural precedent for the virgin pregnancy, it seems that N-Town’s Joseph was not alerted to his scripture’s ‘new’ meaning.33 Joseph was not alone. Belief in the pregnant virgin as a marker of change heavily informed medieval perspectives on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. Mary’s virginal pregnancy was increasingly held to mark a religious transition between the Jewish laws of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian laws of the New Testament. This is clear from the emphasis placed upon her virginity in the Jewish–Christian debates of the twelfth century, as well as in Hebrew parodies of Jesus’ birth narrative and Talmudic denials, which were represented by Christian theologians as excessively focusing on the uncleanness of Mary’s womb.34 The virgin conception became a fundamental signifier of Christian belief and a ‘stickingpoint’ for Christians and Jews who found Mary’s virginity impossible to believe in.35 As Gavin Langmuir and others have noted, Christian doubts concerning the virgin birth and the miracle of transubstantiation following the proscription of both doctrines in 1215 were frequently projected on to ‘Jews’, who were accused of overly literal interpretations of scripture and doctrine and characterised as carrying out physical experiments to test these doctrines. Langmuir finds: ‘they defended their beliefs by imagining that the threats to their faith were external. They attributed cosmic evil to other human beings – heretics, sorcerers, witches, and Jews.’36 Christians who challenged these doctrines also risked being accused of being ‘Jews’. Such imaginings of Judaism were not designed to convert Jews, but to allay, or attack, Christian doubt.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

46

Play time

While belief in Mary’s virginity separated ‘Christian’ from ‘non-Christian’ belief structures, medieval miracle literature also ascribed to Mary a long history of supersession narratives involving conflict with ‘Jewish’ doubters. These stories featured Jews as Mary’s antagonists, and displace onto Jewish caricatures the physical, theological and geographical violence involved in Christianity’s attempt to supersede Judaism. For example, such narratives might feature depictions of Jews desecrating an image or statue of Mary, or, in the development of blood libel accounts, attacking a Christian (often a child) who exhibited a particular devotion to Mary.37 In other cases, Jews were depicted as attacking Mary herself, as happened in the N-Town Assumption of Mary pageant and in the troublesome York play ‘Fergus’.38 Plays dealing with episodes of Jewish–Christian conflict tended to end with the Jewish characters and spaces ‘disappearing’ from the narrative, either through voluntary or forced conversion (itself a form of supersession), through death or through dislocation.39 For example, in the N-Town Assumption, the one Jew who refuses to ‘forsake oure lawe’ is dragged to hell by demons, while the Croxton Play of the Sacrament stages a physical movement from Jewish to ecclesiastical spaces when its antagonists move from their home to the church, before being sent to wander the world in penance.40 These kinds of supersessionary narratives therefore tended physically and often violently to overwrite Jewish scripture, narratives, spaces and histories. The ‘shattering’ force of supersession also directs the plot of Joseph’s Doubt, as Mary’s husband moves through a similar process of denial, contest and conversion in which his reading of Mary’s body and of scripture is contradicted, invalidated by a higher (angelic) authority and eventually renounced. East Anglia provided a particularly fertile setting to stage this confrontation. While Peter Meredith notes that the N-Town pageants, likely compiled between 1460 and 1520, come to us ‘without theatrical or social context’, they do bear the evidence of specifically East Anglian devotional influences.41 The shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham, with its relic of Mary’s milk, drew pilgrims from across Europe, while the great number of churches dedicated to Mary supported what Gale McMurray Gibson has identified as an ‘incarnational aesthetic’ which placed particular emphasis on Mary’s role as mother and as virgin.42 Yet East Anglia’s location and trade networks with the Low Countries left the area open to polemic and accusations of heresy which, Theresa Coletti has shown, are articulated in Joseph’s Doubt.43 East Anglia was also home to the

The old man and the pregnant virgin

47

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

highly lucrative rival twelfth-century cults of William of Norwich and Robert of Bury. Founded on myths of Jewish ritual child-murder, these cults connected East Anglia to similar narratives on the continent and instigated local practices of devotion which survived four centuries.44 These stories, in which Jews kidnap, torture and kill Christian children, were linked to a history of Jewish persecution and displacement. The cults were part of a wider, cross-European process of Jewish removal and Marian supersession which had a physical effect on the medieval landscape. Miri Rubin, Kathleen Biddick and Kathy Lavezzo have demonstrated how the eleventh and twelfth-century growth of Mary as a public image coincided with the increasing number of Jewish expulsions throughout Europe, and the sites of former synagogues were replaced with Marian shrines.45 In East Anglia, the William of Norwich and Robert of Bury narratives likewise saw the displacement of Jewish bodies with the veneration of Christian child bodies. The year 1190 saw the plunder and murder of Jews at Lynn, the slaughter of Jews in Norwich on Shrove Tuesday and the execution of fifty-seven Jews in Bury St Edmunds on Palm Sunday.46 In the same year, Bury St Edmunds became the first English town to expel its Jewish population. Reproduced in manuscript illumination, painted on church walls and performed in pageants,47 East Anglian fantasies of Jewish doubt, testing and malevolence continued to feed the area’s cultural imagination long after the 1290 expulsion of England’s real Jews. This religious climate, which venerated Mary yet engaged with theologies which threatened her supremacy, exhibited a fear of Judaism which outstripped the fact that it was unlikely many in East Anglia would have encountered any real Jews. Deeply invested in this culture of anti-Semitic myth-making, the N-Town pageants appear particularly anxious to occupy Hebrew time. To stage Joseph’s Doubt, the playmakers needed to juggle three times: the ‘Jewish’ time of pre-Christian belief, the ‘Christian’ time of the gospels and the medieval East Anglian time of the pageant’s production and performance. Of all the surviving medieval drama collections, the N-Town manuscript is the most invested in situating the moment of supersession as early as possible. It dramatises the apocrypha covering the lives of Joachim and Anna, as well as episodes from Mary’s childhood which suggest that the N-Town’s ‘Christian time’ begins well before the Annunciation. In Mary’s apocryphal family tree, Solberg has noted, miraculous, sinfree births were not so much unusual as the norm.48 N-Town’s staging of Mary’s own Immaculate Conception suggests that, if Christ’s

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

48

Play time

entry into time does perform a form of historical ‘shattering’, then the shards fall backwards as well as forwards. This ambivalent status of time complicates the religious identities of the pageants’ characters. Joachim, Anna, Joseph, Mary and their contemporaries cannot be easily accommodated by the two common ways that medieval culture categorised ‘Jewish’ characters: either as grotesque characters who reject Jesus, or as exemplary figures like Abraham – a chosen people who prefigure and predict the life of Christ.49 In the N-Town pageants preceding the angel’s Salutation, for example, all the characters represented were historically ‘Jewish’, yet they participate in laws and customs informed and structured by medieval ecclesiastical traditions. There have been many readings, for example, of the Christian theology in the depiction of Mary’s childhood – particularly of her entry into the temple, where she exhibits an anachronistic yet comprehensive knowledge of medieval Catholic doctrine.50 The temple authorities, named ‘Episcopus’ and ‘Minister’, perform their equivalent positions in the medieval Catholic Church. As I have argued in an analysis of The Trial of Mary and Joseph, this staging of Hebrew and Christian laws as though they are the same presents problems, especially when it comes to reconciling Mary’s nun-like vow of virginity with the Hebrew emphasis on marriage.51 In this pageant, the fragility of this Christian imagining of Hebrew time is confounded when legislating over Mary’s virgin body. In its past-oriented drive to claim the years before Christ’s birth as Christian, the N-Town manuscript attempts to emphasise continuity between the religions. Like the gospels of Luke and Matthew, the Marriage play unusually stresses the importance of Joseph’s ancestry, which promotes continuity with the race of David.52 This is consolidated in N-Town’s Jesse Root pageant, which relies on theology that, Mette B. Bruun and Stephanie Glaser argue, situates Christ ‘as the present culmination of a generative past and as the future of which that past spoke’.53 The pageant marks the ‘bridge’ in the manuscript between the plays of Moses and those dealing with Mary’s childhood, and fills a narrative gap that other pageant collections often leave open. It depicts a succession of prophets and kings, including Isaiah, David, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, testifying to the coming of a new king born of a maiden.54 This is crucial to what Lisa Lampert has called N-Town’s ‘supersessionary trajectory’, making ‘biblical Jews actively proclaim Christian prophecy’.55 Erica W. Magnus has also identified the colonialist elements at stake in this form of historical and scriptural

The old man and the pregnant virgin

49

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

reworking, arguing that this allows ‘a type of revisionist history whereby the Christian framework colonized and claimed ownership of all time. The entire Old Testament in this light is merely a prefiguration of the New.’56 The N-Town manuscript seems particularly anxious to facilitate this revisionist history, even at the expense of raising awkward questions about Joseph’s role in Jesus’ birth. Where the apocrypha detailing Mary’s genealogy tended to downplay Joseph’s line, the N-Town’s dual emphasis on both Mary’s Immaculate Conception and Joseph’s Davidic line validates both of Jesus’ earthly parents, even though Joseph is not biologically related to his son.57 Reading blind

While the religious status of time is unclear in N-Town’s early pageants, this is brought to the forefront of Joseph’s Doubt, which enacts a conflict of religious interpretation over Mary’s pregnant body. Mary and Joseph’s altercation is introduced in the pageant by what operates as a ‘slow reveal’, in which the audience is aware of Mary’s pregnancy long before Joseph is. The twenty-five lines before Joseph realises his wife’s ‘wombe to hyзe doth stonde’ are littered with textual and staging signifiers which not only stress Mary’s divine, pregnant state, but also emphasise the narrative trope of Joseph’s cuckolding.58 There has been much exploration of the comic inversion of this trope due to the fact that, in all cases but Mary’s, Joseph would be right to be suspicious.59 The pageant begins with the physical exclusion of Joseph from his wife’s company. He has clearly been away from home for a long time to labour ‘in fer countré’.60 While this efficiently removes from Joseph the possibility of being Jesus’ father, this spatial and temporal exclusion also acts as a literary joke at his expense. Of the twenty-one cuckold stories collected in Nathaniel E. Dubin’s edition of the French fabliaux, eleven begin with the husband’s departure for labour or business reasons.61 The link between the postlapsarian necessity for a man’s ‘sore labour’, ‘to gete oure levynge’ and the marital infidelity his absence enables is emphasised in the N-Town Joseph’s misogynist proverb, ‘many a man doth bete þe bow, / Another man hath þe brydde’: that is, the husband may do all the work, but another man gets the bird.62 However, the trope of the absentee cuckolded husband held additional resonances for the mercantile and guild cultures likely to have sponsored and performed in these pageants. Joseph’s travels to earn his living reflect

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

50

Play time

a broader theme of travel which permeates East Anglian drama. Plays such as the Digby Mary Magdalen and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament also feature characters whose spiritual voyages and mercantile travel brings them into contact with religious viewpoints that threaten or diverge from that of Christianity.63 The Croxton Play, for example, shows the well-travelled Christian merchant Aristorius sell the host to a Jewish merchant, and plays on the fears of its East Anglian audiences, whose stakes in the international wool and food trades relied on the movement of goods and people. While Joseph’s long absence therefore falls within the structure of the misogynist fabliau, his travels also suggest that he has himself strayed from the (Christian) orthodoxy his wife represents. In Joseph’s absence, Mary has not only maintained the proto-Christian chastity she exhibited in the Marriage pageant, but has also consented to host the bearer of the new religion. Joseph’s travels have separated the couple in time as well as space. When Joseph returns home, he finds the door locked. The comic physical play with the locked door has often been interpreted as a dramatic manifestation of the bodily spaces Joseph has also been locked out of.64 Yet this episode also acts as a delaying tactic. Mary’s speech from within the house suggests that the audience can already see her pregnancy (and at any rate, they already know she is pregnant). This means that Joseph’s temporary inability to enter his house heightens the audience’s anticipation of his reaction when he does finally get access. However, once inside, the play delays this moment still further, when Joseph is temporarily blinded. Mary shines so brightly he cannot see her face: JOSEPH: Me merveylyth, wyff, surely! зoure face I cannot se But as þe sonne with his bemys quan he is most bryth. MARIA: Housbond, it is as it plesyth oure Lord, þat grace of hym grew. Who þat evyr beholdyth me, veryly, They xal be grettly steryd to vertu.65

While Meredith’s reconstruction of the Mary play does not include the door episode, this short exchange is retained. The Mary play omits the following sequence of Joseph’s doubts, suggesting that, in this version of the play, Joseph takes his wife’s glowing face as proof of her truth without further question.66 Meg Twycross’s detailed study of the staging of divine radiance reveals the great ingenuity of medieval staging and costuming techniques used to

The old man and the pregnant virgin

51

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

manipulate light, emphasising the fact that ‘divine radiance is so much part of any medieval presentation of God’ and that it makes it difficult to directly look at the face of God.67 Joseph cannot see his wife’s face because Mary carries God – indeed, ‘þe sonne’ – within her womb. As I argue elsewhere, Joseph’s description of his wife’s glowing face also constructs a typological link to a later moment in Christian time in which the divine and human meet: the Transfiguration of Christ.68 Through the Transfiguration, the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke stage a meeting between Jesus and Moses, the giver of the first law, and the prophet Elijah, who was said to herald the second. The event testifies to the legitimacy of Christ as bringer of the new law. The late fifteenth century saw an increased interest in devotional practices and iconography concerning this moment when a new feast of the Transfiguration was introduced between 1480 and 1490.69 Yet while the Transfiguration held an important role in late medieval religious cultures, the episode only appears in the York cycle, which gives Elijah and Moses extra-biblical speeches testifying to Christ’s authority.70 This pageant places an emphasis on the supernatural brightness of Jesus’ face, and, Twycross has demonstrated, seems to call for special effects to direct light onto the player’s face.71 The N-Town Joseph’s reaction in Joseph’s Doubt, ‘зoure face I cannot se’, similarly indicates that Mary has been touched by God’s divine authority. This also suggests that she bears a theatrical signifier of godhead, whether this takes the form of manipulated light, the use of reflective surfaces or golden items of costume or a mask, all of which would be consistent with what Theresa Coletti has identified as the plays’ ‘stage iconography’.72 The insertion of the Joseph’s Doubt material into the N-Town manuscript, however, means that where, in the Mary play, Mary’s divine glow acts as the sole evidence of her truth, here it creates a blindness which further delays the Joseph’s Doubt husband from discovering the truth. Blindness was also one of the primary qualities associated with Judaism in Christian polemic, artwork and secular literature. Appearing on cathedral architecture and wall paintings across Europe, two female figures enacted this juxtaposition of blindness and sight.73 Ecclesia, bearer of Christian law, was frequently placed, like the N-Town Mary and Joseph, across an architectural space and on a corresponding but opposite plinth from Synagoga of the Old Law, who was blindfolded and carried a broken staff. The use of a blindfold on Synagoga, who, from the fifteenth century, was shown facing slightly away from the composition, suggested that her blindness was not so much a physical condition

Play time

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

52

as a wilful choice. Read within this context, Joseph’s temporary blindness at the brightness of his wife’s face suggests that his subsequent interpretation of Mary’s body as adulterous is also partially an act of wilful misreading. Moreover, the theatrical linking between Mary’s divine glow and that of Jesus at the Transfiguration figures the meeting between husband and wife as a prefiguration of the moment in which authority is passed from the Hebrew prophets to Jesus, and, by extension, from Joseph’s time to Mary’s.74 Mary’s reply supports this reading, underlining her occupation of Christian time by referring to the miraculous powers of Marian iconography to inspire virtue in its viewers: ‘[w]ho þat evyr beholdyth me, veryly, / They xal be grettly steryd to vertu.’75 In the moments before Joseph realises his wife is pregnant, the couple’s encounter has therefore already set up a tension between spectacle and interpretation. Strangely enough Joseph, who does not yet occupy Christian time, does not seem to be particularly ‘steryd to vertu’ through his glimpse of Mary’s face. After watching Joseph’s gaze tantalisingly move from a locked door to Mary’s face, the audience is finally able to see it settle on his wife’s belly: JOSEPH:             

That semyth evyl, I am afrayd. þi wombe to hyзe doth stonde! I drede me sore I am betrayd. Sum other man þe had in honde Hens sythe þat I went! Thy wombe is gret, it gynneth to rise. Than hast þu begownne a synfull gyse.76

After a long delay, the pageant directs the gazes of both Joseph and the audience towards the physical, visual proof of Mary’s pregnancy. The emphasis on the ‘gret’ size of the womb in this scene suggests Mary’s pregnancy was represented using some form of prosthetic device, padding or false belly.77 This is supported by the metatheatrical reference made in The Trial of Mary and Joseph when one detractor observes, ‘her wombe doth swelle / And is as great as þinne or myne!’, indicating his costume also incorporated a comically enlarged stomach.78 The use of a false stomach also fits with the aesthetic of N-Town’s theatrically literal Annunciation, where a stage direction sees each member of the Holy Trinity descend to Mary through three ‘bemys’ and ‘entre all thre to here bosom’.79 A padded prop stomach would have increased both the potential comedy of this moment and amplified the effect of Joseph’s initial blindness,

The old man and the pregnant virgin

53

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

making the evidence of Mary’s pregnancy visible to the audience many lines before her husband realises. Once Joseph does notice Mary’s womb is rather larger than he remembers, his conclusion feels inevitable: she has ‘begownne a synfull gyse’. This sparks the debate the audience have been waiting for since Joseph entered the house, in which Joseph repeatedly demands the name of the child’s father, only to be told it is God’s – and his. Mary’s conception of Christ marks the beginning of a new spiritual and natural law for which Joseph is utterly unequipped. Medieval doctrine placed a great emphasis on belief in the unseen, particularly where transubstantiation and the virgin birth were concerned. These doctrines were the key points of contention in Jewish–Christian dispute narratives, which tended to conclude by asserting that an act of faith was needed to read beyond physical appearances and that ‘Jews’ were limited to literal, carnal ways of reading their own scriptures.80 This produced a tradition of representing Jewish theology as carnal and backwards-looking. With his repeated focus on Mary’s ‘to hyзe’ womb, Joseph is cast in this mould, reading her pregnancy as evidence of carnal sin while drawing on a literary tradition which predisposes him to interpret Mary as adulterous. To avoid the danger of generating too much audience sympathy for Joseph’s accusations, the pageant is careful to discredit his speech repeatedly. ‘Amende зoure mon’, Mary tells her husband, demoting Joseph’s accusation from a reasonable deduction based on current evidence to the incoherent category of moaning.81 As the following chapter demonstrates in relation to Noah’s wife, this strategy is a common way for early drama to neutralise an otherwise troublesome and valid protest. It is also a highly gendered form of attack. In Joseph’s Doubt the angel suggests Joseph’s distress is feminine by saying he ‘wepyst shyrle’ (shrilly).82 This emasculation of Joseph links him with the emasculated cuckolds of the fabliau and aligns his attack on Mary with the female ‘shrewish’ nag. This is consistent with the kinds of oppositional practice identified by Lisa Lampert, in which medieval texts depicted both Jews and women as part of ‘an exegetical tradition that links the spiritual, masculine, and Christian and defines them in opposition to the carnal, feminine, and Jewish’.83 The embodied nature of Joseph’s distress is further emphasised when Mary’s prayer for God’s intercession again focuses on her husband’s body. She configures Joseph’s disbelief as a form of illness which must be cured through divine intercession: ‘For vnknowlage he is deseysyd, / And þerfore, help þat he were esyd.’84 Calling her husband’s ‘vnknowlage’ a disease,

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

54

Play time

Mary associates her husband’s belief and body with illness in a manner which reiterates anti-Semitic tropes concerning physically corrupt ‘Jewish’ bodies which can only be cured through conversion.85 This invalidation of Joseph’s doubt is needed. Much of this pageant’s humour derives from the fact that most men would read this situation in the same way and, in all cases but Mary’s, they would be right to. Moreover, because Joseph’s doubts are so concerned with physical appearances, he also identifies the unreliability of the play’s own theatrical signifiers. For example, when Joseph tells Mary she must have been deceived – ‘sum boy began þis game, / þat clothed was clene and gay, / And зe зeve hym now an aungel name’ – his reading holds a metatheatrical truth.86 Mary was addressed by a boy beautifully clothed to represent an angel. Here, Joseph calls attention to the fact that their argument is itself part of a theatrical ‘game’ of biblical representation in which actors’ bodies stand in for true signs. Helen Marie Cushman argues that doubt and testing narratives which oppose carnal, physical readings with spiritual truths, particularly in performance, tend to expose the proximity between two kinds of Christian learning: the authorised, scriptural learning of the church and lay, experiential knowledge.87 Joseph draws attention to the gaps between the theological understanding of scripture and the real, lived experience of scripture, and the alternative truths that emerge when both of these are combined in performance. In misreading Mary’s spiritual ‘truths’ Joseph wryly conducts a literal, yet accurate, reading of his own performance context. His reading of his wife’s body exposes the joints of theatrical and theological representation. Mary, however, commands a different understanding of time. She reads her body typologically. Typology was one way in which Jewish history was manipulated to authorise Christian narratives, and was an important tool in manufacturing supersessionary models of time. Typological models read the events falling before the Christian gospels as prefiguring events in the life of Christ. Kathleen Biddick argues that this process ‘subsumed the Hebrew Bible into an “Old Testament” and conceived of this as a text anterior to the New Testament’.88 Typology was not without its cultural tensions. The infamous attack on early religious drama, A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge (1380–1425), demonstrates a deep concern about the effect of playing episodes from Hebrew and Christian scriptures in parallel. Continuing the association between Judaism and fleshly literalism, it stresses the need to maintain distinction between scriptures: ‘the Olde Testament, that is testament of the fleysh, may not ben

The old man and the pregnant virgin

55

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

holdun with the Newe Testament, that is testament of the spirit.’89 This definition of typology, as well as the essential difference between ‘fleysh’ and ‘spirit’ is also embodied in Joseph’s reading of Mary, also poses something of a conundrum for an analysis of N-Town’s couple. Joseph, as the earthly father of Jesus, cannot be considered anterior to the gospels because his role is necessarily interior. As Jesus’ earthly father, he is firmly at the heart of the Christian narrative. The typology of Joseph’s Doubt resolves this by teaching Joseph to ‘read’ the events of his own time differently and recognise in Hebrew scripture a precedent for the miracle of the virgin birth. Mary is able to conduct a reading of her own time which figures the Old Law not as a contradiction, but as a prefigurative verification of her new status. This is consistent with iconographical depictions of Mary at the Annunciation. Laura Saetveit Miles has shown that descriptions and images of Mary reading emerged from monastic contexts as early as the ninth century.90 The popularity of this tradition blossomed throughout the Middle Ages, and by the fifteenth century audiences would have been familiar with Annunciation images of Mary reading a book, the pages open at Isaiah 7.14 – unaware she is reading her own story even at the moment this ‘prophecy’ will be fulfilled.91 When the N-Town Joseph argues there is no precedent for the virgin birth, and that ‘God dede nevyr jape so with may!’, he misunderstands the typology that found this precedent in earlier scriptures.92 Attempting to convince her husband of a new truth, Mary performs an act of typological reading on her own body, reconfiguring Joseph’s accusations to reflect their ‘Christian’ significance: ‘It is no man but swete Jesus. / He wyll be clad in flesch and blood / And of зoure wyff be born.’93 Mary is privy to knowledge that Joseph is not. The play makes a joke out of the fact that Joseph’s belief structure has been superseded by one in which a virgin may become pregnant. Despite this, Joseph’s highly logical reading of Mary’s body is not completely invalid. Frank M. Napolitano has demonstrated that the N-Town Marriage pageant exposes the openness of visual signs to misinterpretation, suggesting that it advocates the blending of visual images with verbal, logical teaching.94 Where the Mary play excavated by Meredith relies on sign alone – Mary’s glowing face – the additional materials inserted in the manuscript’s construction of Joseph’s Doubt stage a debate about the difficulty of secure interpretation. Joseph’s accusations underline the fact that, for him, the laws of religion (and nature) have not yet changed. In his inability to read Mary’s pregnancy as part of an overarching, Christ-centric

56

Play time

history of salvation, his doubts muddy the idea of Christ’s birth as a point of clean transition. Joseph and Mary’s confrontation leaves both characters in a kind of temporal stalemate which can only be resolved through an act of divine intercession.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Joseph as convert Unlike Synagoga and Ecclesia, whose opposition relies on their stony stasis, plays depicting Joseph’s doubts about Mary hinge on his ability to change. The characters examined throughout this book all experience conflict as a result of their different temporal experiences and agendas. However, while, as the following chapters demonstrate, troublesome characters may be silenced, suppressed or removed from the stage, only Joseph is shown undergoing a process of change, moving from one experience of time to another. This is markedly different from early modern dramatic characterisations of Jewish men, whose ‘conversions’ are very often forced or reluctant, and who eschew any opportunity to repent or ask forgiveness.95 Far from being a stagnant repository of time, or an outdated remnant of a superseded past, Joseph performs a fluid process of doubt, conviction and conversion which ends, not with his broken defeat, but with him re-accepting his role as Mary’s husband and father to Christ. He becomes the first convert to one of medieval Christianity’s fundamental principles: belief in the virgin birth. Joseph’s theological transition from a literal to a spiritual understanding of Mary’s body is theatrically demanding, involving multiple movements across space. When he realises he can’t bring himself to report Mary to the bishop for stoning, Joseph exiles himself from their home. He intends to ‘forsake þe countré forevyr’ to avoid the public censure he believes will follow Mary’s condition being known.96 Inside her house, Mary’s prayer for her husband moves to the heavens, where God is shown tasking his angel with enlightening Joseph. The angel then leaves the heavens to speak to the weeping Joseph. This staging of movement through physical space breaks down the binaries of inclusion and exclusion constructed by Mary’s locked, enclosed house at the beginning of the pageant. Joseph returns to an open space which, like a good Catholic church, upholds Mary as its divine welcomer. Joseph’s journey from doubt to belief incorporates several motifs from other medieval accounts of Jewish conversion. At seventeen lines, Joseph’s conviction is shorter than those of the disputation

The old man and the pregnant virgin

57

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

accounts, but it does follow the divine evidence-driven pattern of conversion narratives in sermon exemplar, which often rely on a miraculous spectacle. In one example, a Jewish man disputing Mary’s virginity with a Christian is convinced when a lily flowers out of the wine pot standing between them. This domestic miracle prompts the Jew’s swift recapitulation: ‘Lady, now I believe that you conceived Jesus Christ, Son of Heaven through the Holy Ghost, and that you were a virgin both before and after.’97 In Joseph’s Doubt, this miraculous occurrence takes the form of an angel – who, this time, is not dismissed as ‘sum boy’ in angel’s clothing. The angel’s message, that Mary is as ‘clene mayd as she was beforn’, is again initially jeopardised by the motif of blindness: Joseph has been weeping and does not immediately realise the speaker is an angel.98 However, when he does recognise the angel, Joseph’s conviction is immediate. His next speech, like that of the sermon Jew, reaffirms the doctrine of the virgin birth: JOSEPH:                   

A, Lord God, benedicté. Of þi gret comforte I thank the þat þu sent me þis space. I myght wel a wyst, pardé So good a creature as she Wold nevyr a don trespace For sche is ful of grace I know wel I haue myswrought. I walk to my pore place And aske forgyfnes, I haue mysthought.99

This speech also follows the penitence structure Charlotte Steenbrugge has identified in three other English plays: Wisdom, The Croxton Play of the Sacrament and the N-Town Baptism.100 It shares some similarities with the speeches of the newly converted Jews in the Croxton Play, which shows a conversion to belief in the Eucharist as Christ’s body.101 When Jonathas and his companions are addressed by an image of Jesus, their first response, like Joseph’s, is to cry out to God. Both plays then see their Jewish protagonists admit their error, or in Joseph’s case, his ‘mysthought’. This is followed by a confession, repentance of their former beliefs, and the asking of forgiveness from the spiritual figure they have wronged. In the Croxton Jews’ case, this forgiveness comes from Jesus, but the N-Town Joseph asks Mary for forgiveness. He renounces his mis-thinking by demonstrating his willingness to transition to Christian time:

Play time

58 JOSEPH: A, mercy, mercy, my jentyl make, Mercy, I haue seyd al amys! All þat I haue seyd, here I forsake. зoure swete fete now lete me kys.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

MARY:

Nay, lett be my fete, not þo зe take; My mowthe зe may kys, iwys, And welcom onto me.102

Joseph approaches Mary as if he were a medieval sinner approaching her icon in a church: begging mercy and offering to kiss her feet. In so doing, he aligns himself not only with Mary’s time, but also with all of Christian time, which will see Mary act as intercessor between penitents and God. His retraction, ‘All þat I haue seyd, here I forsake’, marks his abandonment of his former beliefs. He defines his former doubts as erroneous, cutting them away from his present time. Yet Mary goes far further than the bishops and priests in other dramatised conversion and penance plays.103 When she asks Joseph to kiss her mouth instead of her feet, Mary reconciles her dual roles as the spiritual intercessor of medieval devotional practices and as an affectionate wife.104 The removal of Joseph’s ‘vnknowlage’ reinstates Mary to her place as an object of devotion, while also restoring Joseph to his role as husband and fitting adoptive father of the unborn Christ. This is again represented through the removal of Joseph’s blindness. Admitting he has been ‘wronge in syght’, Joseph expresses his transition to Mary’s theological time through the metaphor of seeing: JOSEPH:       

Now is þe tyme sen at eye þat þe childe is now to veryfye Which xal saue mankende, As it was spoke by prophesye.105

No longer obscured by Synagoga’s stony blindfold, Joseph’s vision is restored along with his recognition that his is ‘þe tyme’ spoken about in prophecy. Yet Joseph’s denunciation of all he has previously said and believed suggests that, while he now recognises the truth of his wife’s condition, he continues to experience time somewhat differently from her. Where Joseph wishes to forsake entirely his former beliefs, Mary is in the practice of refashioning the past in the service of the present – just as she converts and assimilates the authority of her ageing, irascible husband into her service. An enthusiastic convert, Joseph is full of good intentions, promising his

The old man and the pregnant virgin

59

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

wife ‘Xal I nevyrmore make such stryff / Betwyx me and þe’, announcing his intention to ‘amende’ after her own will.106 Yet like all supersessionary narratives, this staged ‘conversion’ cannot sustain this idea of a clear-cut movement from one understanding of time to another. Although Joseph appears to confirm what Lisa Lampert calls the ‘supersessionary trajectory’ of the N-Town plays, conversion is a process that must be endlessly performed.107 Despite his angelic encounter, Joseph’s ‘conversion’ is no linear, Pauline conversion from one state of belief to another.108 He cannot fully ‘amende’ his behaviour, and his subsequent N-Town appearances show him continuing to struggle with what belief in Mary entails. Conversion on trial Private conversion in the N-Town manuscript is never enough. Following the testing narratives which follow the Proto-gospel of James, Joseph’s new beliefs are publicly re-enacted, scrutinised, challenged and corrected. This is consistent with medieval narratives of Jewish conversion, which rarely ended with comfortable assimilation. As Lisa Lampert has identified in relation to the East Anglian conversion performances of the Croxton Jews, N-Town’s doubting midwives and the Jews who try to disrupt the virgin’s funeral, these stories do not find easy closure.109 Steven Kruger contends that entrenched anti-Semitic constructions of Judaism as blind, feminised and resistant to change hampered the movement of an individual’s identity from ‘Jewish’ to ‘Christian’: While conversion to Christianity was repeatedly encouraged, and indeed often coerced, converts clearly occupied an uncomfortable position in relation to both their old and their new religions, and perhaps particularly when it came to the possibility of being integrated into Christian sexual and familial structures.110

These beliefs left many Jewish coverts in a place much like that of the N-Town Joseph – a ‘gap’ between two faiths and dislocated from Christian family structures. If we read Joseph’s process of conversion as part of a larger narrative arc spanning several plays, we must also question not only how successfully Joseph has moved between ‘Hebrew’ and ‘Christian’ times, but also how successful a linear, transitional model of time actually is within the plays. Although Joseph is able to ‘amend’ his former belief in Mary’s infidelity, the fact that he remains an old man with a significantly younger wife continues to cause problems throughout N-Town’s

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

60

Play time

Marian plays. Joseph’s advanced age and physical infirmity remain under as much scrutiny, challenge and public speculation as the virgin, pregnant body of his wife. The social difficulty Joseph has in integrating into his new family role becomes the subject of ribald sexual mockery in The Trial of Mary and Joseph, where the audience is summoned together to act as public witnesses to Mary and Joseph’s shame. The Trial’s vice-like detractors, Reysesclaundyr and Bakbytere, exaggerate Joseph’s readings of Mary’s pregnancy to grotesque proportions. Where Joseph’s observation that Mary’s womb is great is followed by his question about paternity, here Reysesclaundyr constructs elaborate sexual fantasies about the lightness of Mary’s ‘tayle’.111 The slanderers turn equally vicious scrutiny onto Joseph’s body and sexuality. Joseph is alternately characterised as ‘þat old shrewe Joseph’: an old lecher who is accused of rape and seduction, and is placed in the fabliaux category his Joseph’s Doubt counterpart so feared: that of ‘olde cokolde’.112 This culminates in a public performance of body-shaming. To prove his innocence in relation to Mary’s pregnancy, Joseph drinks a truth potion, a ‘botel of Goddys vengeauns’, and walks seven times around an altar.113 Joseph cannot win in this situation, as the only possible outcomes of the trial will condemn him either as a fornicator or as a cuckold. Both will draw further ridicule from the crowd. As Joseph performs the ritual, he is heckled by the detractors and the Summoner and threatened with physical assault. These fifteen lines of abuse draw attention to his slow gait by mocking his legs that ‘folde for age’, and contrast his physical decrepitude with the vigour he would have needed to have sex with Mary.114 Where Mary’s body proved an unreliable signifier in Joseph’s Doubt, here the hecklers’ cruel but accurate interpretation of Joseph’s body as physically unable to impregnate his wife bathetically emphasise his innocence even before he completes the test. This public shaming takes place, as the Summoner’s opening speech suggests, in front of an audience representing both his biblical peers and spectators in a fifteenth-century East Anglian ecclesiastical court. It also underlines the fact that, unlike Mary, Joseph will never quite find his place in this community. Despite his conversion, Joseph remains dogged by associations with impotence, suggesting he is not manly enough to be fully assimilated into the Christian sexual and familial structures identified by Kruger. He remains an old man married to a younger woman, and will always have to deal with the social ridicule attending that position. While, in his analysis of this episode

The old man and the pregnant virgin

61

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

in the Proto-gospel of James, Christopher Frilingos argues the trial episode is ‘the first time Mary and Joseph face the same future’ and that ‘what holds true for Joseph holds true for Mary’, both the stakes and the outcome for each in the N-Town play are fundamentally different.115 Mary’s virgin pregnant body is eventually accepted by the pageant’s narrative arc of accusation, proof, contrition and forgiveness, which mimics that of Joseph’s Doubt. However, the accusations of age and impotence levied at Joseph remain valid, and his detractors never repent for them. The Trial also emphasises how correct Joseph was to fear being fitted into the fabliaux mould. The detractors’ accusations include a reference to the popular ‘snow child’ narrative which survives in the eleventh-century Latin Cambridge songs. In this tale, a Swabian merchant, like Joseph, goes travelling for work, leaving his wife at home. When she has a child by a lover she takes in his absence, she tells the returning merchant that, one snowy day, she quenched her thirst with snow and subsequently became pregnant. Several years later, the merchant takes the boy on a business trip and he sells him into slavery. He tells his wife the boy got caught in the fierce sun, ‘and he, born of the snow, melted’.116 In The Trial, Reysesclaundyr and Bakbytere adapt this tale in mocking Mary: 1. DETRACTOR: In fetth, I suppose þat þis woman slepte Withouwtyn covert whyll þat it dede snowe; And a flake þerof into hyre mowthe crepte, And þerof þe chylde in hyre wombe doth growe. 2. DETRACTOR: Than beware, dame, for this is wel iknowe: Whan it is born, yf þat þe sunne shyne, It wyl turne to watyr ageyn, as I trowe; For snoew onto watyr doth evyrmore recline.117

Their use of this particular tale in relation to Joseph’s cuckolding is telling. When read in conjunction with the fact that N-Town’s Joseph has already been associated with other anti-Semitic signifiers, this allusion to the snow-child story both underscores Joseph’s elderly impotence and introduces the new motif of the usury fable. As Lisa Lampert, Denise L. Despres and others have argued, usury was seen as an act of ‘sterile and unnatural reproduction’ which encroached on God’s mastery of time and threatened natural law.118 The Swabian merchant sees his stock increase in his absence, bides his time and then makes a tidy profit by selling his wife’s child. By stressing Joseph’s impotence, the N-Town Trial has

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

62

Play time

already emphasised Joseph’s inability to reproduce using his own seed, but this fable opens the possibility of cuckolding as a usurious form of turning other men’s seed into money. Backbytere’s warning that Mary may find her child ‘turne to watyr ageyn’ calls into question Joseph’s ‘conversion’ by covertly suggesting he is only pretending to believe her pregnancy excuse in the hope of making a profit. This also acts as a moment of foreshadowing by looking forwards to the moment at which Judas, a figure who was also frequently racially characterised as an avaricious Jew, exchanges Mary’s son for money.119 Where Joseph’s characterisation as old suggests he will remain on the edges of the Christian family, the detractors’ characterisation of him as an avaricious and wily cuckold calls the success of his conversion into question. Robert Stacey identifies a Christian fear of an ‘irreducable element to Jewish identity [. . .] which no amount of baptismal water could entirely eradicate’.120 He finds it was considered impossible fully to eradicate ‘Jewishness’, even with conversion. Joseph’s transition into Christian time is likewise surrounded by doubt in N-Town’s later Marian pageants, which perform further negotiations of Joseph’s desire to balance his adherence to secular and Hebrew laws and authorities and the newer, Christian desires of his wife. The Nativity pageant, for example, features a cherry-tree miracle derived from a similar palm-tree narrative in the gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. This episode is itself temporally displaced in N-Town, as it appears in the gospel’s account of the flight into Egypt rather than the journey to Bethlehem.121 While the N-Town episode stresses the companionate affection between the married couple, it soon becomes clear that they still have different interpretations of time and of Mary’s divine status. Mary, secure in the safety of God’s child, insists on accompanying Joseph to Bethlehem, yet Joseph is reluctant to take her. His concern for the safety of a pregnant woman during travel is a common theme in the medical texts of the period, and also appears in the Digby Mary Magdalen play, where the King of Marseilles attempts to prevent his own miraculously pregnant wife from making the sea voyage to Jerusalem.122 Mary, of course, has no need to worry. In the end Joseph capitulates, not because he believes in God’s protection of his son, but because he wants a quiet life: ‘women ben ethe to greve whan þei be with childe.’123 Yet time is also an issue in this episode. On their way to Bethlehem, Mary sees a tree and asks her husband what it is. When he answers that it is a cherry tree, but not yet in fruit, Mary responds first that the tree is in blossom, and then that it bears cherries:

The old man and the pregnant virgin

63

JOSEPH: Forsote, Mary, it is clepyd a chery rte; In tyme of зere зe might felde зow þeron зoure fylle. MARY:

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

MARY:

Turne ageyn, husband, and beholde зon tre, How þat it blomyght now so sweetly. [. . .] Now, my spowse, I pray зow to behold How þe cheryes growyn vpon зon tre.124

This moment of theatrical magic makes visible the temporal disjunction between the couple. Joseph, looking away, remains locked out of the space in which the miracle happens. Despite believing in Mary’s divine pregnancy, he still expects the laws of nature and of linear time to apply to the rest of his world. He assumes the tree will continue to obey its natural seasons, not bearing fruit until the right ‘tyme of зere’. Mary, conversely, knows that time has shattered in her favour, allowing a miraculous acceleration through blossom to fruit to satisfy her cravings. In a Christian time that has collapsed Hebrew texts into its new scriptures and refigured them as prophecy, the production of cherries out of season is a simple matter. In this pageant, Joseph has grasped the concept of divine change in his wife’s body, yet not the world-altering scale of this change. It is also clear from this episode that the question of paternity still rankles with him. After failing to reach the cherries for Mary, he exclaims, ‘lete hym pluk зow cheryes begatt зow with childe!’125 God obliges. The tree bows down. This episode provides yet another re-enactment of the conversion pattern of Joseph’s Doubt. The miracle makes Joseph realise he has again spoken ‘unkynde wurdys’ to his wife, and that worse, he has offended ‘God in Trinyté’.126 This contrition marks a new stage in Joseph’s conversion to Christian time. Where before he could not understand the unseasonal, untimely miracle of the tree, now Joseph appears to understand the concept of the Trinity: a theology not developed until the third century AD, and of which at least one member has not yet been born. This brings Joseph’s experience closer to that of Mary, who, from the N-Town pageants detailing her infancy and entry into the temple, also demonstrates an anachronistic and complex understanding of the key principles of medieval Christian doctrine.127 The work of Christian typology as a form of temporal colonisation becomes most visible in the N-Town’s Joseph.128 While obliged to repeatedly perform acts of conversion, Joseph, it seems, has nevertheless internalised (later) doctrine in a manner which makes him,

Play time

64

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

like the cherry tree compelled to bear fruit out of season, an untimely entity. By the pageant of the Purification, Joseph is finally beginning to understand what Mary’s pregnancy means in terms of scriptural time. He admits the theological implications of the virgin birth when he tells Mary that the purification rite is, in her case, redundant: JOSEPH:           

To be purefyed haue зe no need, Ne þi son to be offryd, so God me spede, For first þu art ful clene, Vndefowlyd in thought and dede; And anothyr, þi son, withouwtyn drede, Is God and man to mene.129

Joseph makes a statement of his belief in Mary’s own Immaculate Conception, her virgin pregnancy and in the status of Jesus as God. Yet Joseph is also aware of the importance of incorporating this new time with the laws of Moses, ‘to kepe þe lawe on Moyses wyse’.130 While considering the birth of Christ as a point of historical change, Christianity nevertheless relied upon its Jewish origins and scriptures for validation, demonstrating recognition even at the point of supersession.131 N-Town’s Joseph and Mary therefore remain part of a Hebrew community and obedient to its laws.132 This facilitates further typologies within this pageant, which imagine Jesus as the offering made at the altar: a device which, as Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate, foreshadows the Eucharist and the Crucifixion while looking back to the Passover lamb and the sheep sacrificed by Abraham in place of Isaac. If Joseph’s conversion is part of a pattern of doubt and misreading that repeats in each of his appearances in the N-Town plays, then this does at least demonstrate that he grows in knowledge and in understanding of his new place in time throughout the manuscript. It is significant that Joseph’s final speech in the Purification recognises the duties not of the temple, as the building is designated in N-Town’s earlier pageants, but as the ‘Holy Kyrke’. The church now stands in the place of the synagogue. Finding time The fact that Joseph’s acts of conversion must be repeatedly performed past the end of Joseph’s Doubt calls into question whether the conception of Christ really marks a moment of historical transition. The N-Town Marian plays present the introduction of

The old man and the pregnant virgin

65

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Christ into time as a continuous process of re-figuring, rather than a historical caesura or moment of epiphany. This has much in common with later Protestant ideas about conversion, which, Alec Ryrie has argued, read conversion as a process rather than a dramatic ‘thunderclap’ of enlightenment.133 This is also consistent with the wider practice of the N-Town plays to bring times together in a representation of Christological eternity, in which Christianity takes ownership over all historical time. Yet Mary and Joseph continue to live in a world governed by Hebrew law – even if this law is characterised by the medieval Christian audience of the plays’ performance context. Mary and Joseph’s domestic harmony relies as much upon the couple’s continued retention of former laws as it does on the supersession of them. Medieval works often present the Virgin and the Jew at opposite ends of a see-saw: mutually reliant on one another for dynamism and balance, yet made unstable by each other’s presence. If the Virgin is seen as eternal and unchanging, then the Jew, who affirms her through difference, must also remain unchanging. Yet while the consolidation of a Christian ‘truth’ frequently leads to an act of conversion and erasure, this chapter has found that oppositional models – between Jew and Virgin, old husband and young wife – are just as likely to be reconciled. Through an argument between an ageing man and a young woman, the plays unflinchingly admit ‘the carnal, the feminine, and the Jewish’ to the very heart of the Christian narrative, but not purely for oppositional purposes.134 There has been a tendency to view the Mary of the N-Town plays (and indeed, Mary as a figure in general) as a symbol of immutable, eternal purity set against a series of crude and loquacious doubters. It is tempting to read her as a constant: a provocative point around which the perspectives of the rest of the world move. Yet these plays emphasise that, for Joseph, Mary has changed in a way which is also spectacularly visible to his audience. This initial disjunction between the couple’s experiences of time and their subsequent conflict calls into question the role of the virgin birth as a historical caesura which re-works the times before it. The time of the Marian N-Town pageants is therefore more complex than the broadly supersessionary narrative arc of Joseph’s Doubt first appears to suggest. The pageants are deeply concerned with how the gospels’ protagonists might have experienced a period often identified as the one during which Christianity comes into being. This allows their holy couple to inhabit a complex and dramatically interesting space in which Christian and Hebrew identities

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

66

Play time

and times interweave. This works very differently to the supersessionary models considered in the following chapter, where Noah interprets the Flood as a moment of change which violently cuts the former world away from the present. In Joseph’s Doubt, what might have been a straightforward, linear conversion narrative snags on the ambiguous nature of Christian time. Yet instead of performing a supersessionary rupture with the laws of past, the couple’s narrative of doubt, conviction and conversion ends with Joseph not defeated, but reinstated as his wife’s partner. Joseph’s doubt provides opportunities to create playful knots in the gospels’ timeline. As the Aucklanders’ iconoclastic reaction to a billboard that dared to probe similar questions demonstrates, such knots retain their potential to spark humour, controversy and hostility.

Notes   1 See the BBC News article http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8417963.stm [accessed 14 August 2019].   2 See Richard Beadle, ed., ‘Joseph’s Trouble about Mary’, in The York Plays (London: Edward Arnold Publishers, 1982), pp. 117–24; Stephen Spector, ed., ‘Joseph’s Doubt’, in The N-Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D8, EETS, s.s., 11–12, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 123–52; R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills, eds, ‘The Wrightes Playe’, in The Chester Mystery Cycle, EETS, s.s., 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 97–124; George England and Alfred W. Pollard, eds, ‘The Annunciation’, in The Towneley Plays, EETS, e.s., LXXI (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1897, repr. 1966), pp. 86–96 and Hardin Craig, ed., ‘The Pageant of the Shearmen and Taylors’, in Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, EETS, e.s., 87 (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), pp. 1–32.   3 Lumiansky and Mills, eds, ‘The Wrightes Playe’, ll. 123–68.   4 See Miri Rubin’s discussion of early defences of the belief in Mary’s virgin pregnancy in Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (St Ives: Allen Lane, 2009), pp. 12–33.   5 See Normington, Medieval English Drama (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), pp. 106–10; Gail McMurray Gibson, ‘Bury St Edmunds, Lydgate, and the N-Town Cycle’, Speculum, 56.1 (1981), 56–90 and ‘Manuscript as Sacred Object: Robert Hegge’s N-Town Plays’, JMEMS, 44.3 (2014), 503–29.   6 Peter Meredith, The Mary Play from the N-Town Manuscript (London: Longman, 1987).   7 Alan J. Fletcher, ‘The N-Town Plays’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. by Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 163–88.

The old man and the pregnant virgin

67

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

  8 On the origins of the midwife test, see Denise Ryan, ‘Playing the Midwife’s Part in the English Nativity Plays’, Review of English Studies, 54.216 (2003), 435–48.   9 See Spector, ‘The Parliament of Heaven; the Salutation and Conception’, in The N-Town Play, pp. 111–23.   10 Spector, ‘The Marriage of Mary and Joseph’, ll. 226–8.   11 See Patrick J. Geary, Women at the Beginning: Origin Myths from the Amazons to the Virgin Mary (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 71–3 (p. 73): ‘his age, emphasized in the Protoevangelium and the Pseudo-Matthew, increases, as does his infirmity.’   12 See Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi, p. 249.  13 On medieval antifeminist narrative and satire see Alcuin Blamires, Karen Pratt and C. W. Marx, eds, Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). On dramatic interpretations of Mary within the context of this literature, see Richard Beadle and Pamela King, eds, York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 48; Normington, Gender and Medieval Drama, pp. 66–70; Coletti, ‘Purity and Danger’, pp. 65–95 and J. A. Tasioulas, ‘Between Doctrine and Domesticity: the Portrayal of Mary in the N-Town Plays’, in Medieval Women in Their Communities, ed. by Diane Watt (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), pp. 222–45.  14 Normington, Medieval English Drama, pp. 108–9 and Brandon Alakas, ‘Seniority and Mastery: The Politics of Ageism in the Coventry Cycle’, Early Theatre, 9.1 (2006), 15–36.   15 Spector, ed., ‘Joseph’s Doubt’, ll. 49–51.  16 See Geary, Women at the Beginning, p. 74: ‘The representation of Joseph and the flight into Egypt could be read, by the fifteenth century, as old, spent, broken, a fool’ and Rubin, Mother of God, pp. 358–60.  17 See Miri Rubin, Emotion and Devotion: The Meaning of Mary in Medieval Religious Cultures (New York: Central European University Press, 2009), p. 13 and Merrall Llewelyn Price, ‘Re-membering the Jews: Theatrical Violence in the N-Town Marian Plays’, Comparative Drama, 41.4 (2007–8), 439–63 (pp. 455–6).   18 See Bale, Feeling Persecuted, pp. 65–88 (p. 73): ‘reader-viewer undergoes their own Passion within their memoria passionis, oscillating between grace and ugliness, beauty and pain, good and evil, Christian and Jew.’   19 Debra Higgs-Strickland, Saracens, Demons and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 108.  20 See James Simpson’s argument that periods of turbulent historical transition were figured through the bodies of female religious figures in ‘The Rule of Medieval Imagination’, in Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm, ed. by Jeremy Dimmock, James Simpson and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 4–24 (p. 19). See also Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, p. 408 and Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: SAGE Publications, 1997), pp. 1–25.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

68

Play time

 21 Sylvia Tomasch, ‘Postcolonial Chaucer and the Virtual Jew’, in Chaucer and the Jews, ed. by Delany, pp. 69–85 (p. 73).  22 Burrow, The Ages of Man, p. 159.  23 Solberg, Virgin Whore, p. 27.   24 See Daniel P. McCarthy, ‘The Emergence of Anno Domini’, in Time and Eternity, ed. by Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riaño (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993), pp. 31–53.   25 See Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, p. 111 and Peter Manchester, ‘Time in Christianity’, in Religion and Time, ed. by Andindita Niyogi Balslev and Jitendra Nath Mohanty (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993), pp. 109–37 (p. 116).   26 Serres and Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, p. 95: ‘[T]here is a fixed point on whom we can rely: Jesus Christ, who is somewhere called the centre towards which all gravitates.’   27 See Balslev and Mohanty, eds, Religion and Time, p. 9: ‘for Christianity time and eternity meet, and it is at this meeting point that Jesus announces his presence. Eternity is thus, for Christianity, within time.’   28 See Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty, p. 4 and Jennifer A. Harris, ‘The Bible and the Meaning of History in the Middle Ages’, in The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages: Production, Reception and Performance in Western Christianity, ed. by Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly (Columbia, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011), pp. 84–104.   29 Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty, pp. 16 and 84.   30 See Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. by Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 63. ‘First, you have secular time, which Paul usually refers to as chronos, which spans from creation to the messianic event (for Paul, this is not the birth of Jesus, but his resurrection). Here time contracts itself and begins to end. But this contracted time, which Paul refers to in the expression ho nyn kairos, “the time of the now,” lasts until the parousia, the full presence of the Messiah. The latter coincides with the Day of Wrath and the end of time.’   31 See Leofranc Holford-Strevens, The History of Time: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 127: ‘It was quite frequent for years to be reckoned, not from 1 January AD 1 – a date disliked by the Church on account of the pagan festivities it had failed to suppress – but from 7 days previously, the 25th December 1 BC. This was the process in Anglo-Saxon England, [. . .] but it was ultimately supplanted by the rival principle of counting from the Incarnation proper on 25th March, the Annunciation, or Lady Day.’  32 See Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven: CT: Yale University Press, 1996).   33 Matthew 1.23. For an overview of the history of Christianity’s use of Isaiah in Passion iconography and in the cult of the Virgin Mary, see John F. A. Sawyer, The Fifth Gospel: Isaiah in the History of Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 65–99.

The old man and the pregnant virgin

69

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

  34 See Abulafia, Christians and Jews in Dispute, pp. 123–37 on Talmudic denials of Mary’s virgin pregnancy.   35 See Rubin, Mother of God, pp. 57–63.  36 See Langmuir, History, Religion, and Antisemitism, p. 263. See also Joan Young Gregg, Devils, Women, and Jews: Reflections of the Other in Medieval Sermon Stories (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), pp. 171–203; Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference, p. 14 and Higgs-Strickland, Saracens, Demons and Jews, pp. 39–52.   37 See Denise L. Despres, ‘Immaculate Flesh and the Social Body: Mary and the Jews’, Jewish History, 12.1 (1998), 47–69; Louise O. Fradenburg, ‘Criticism, Anti-Semitism, and the Prioress’s Tale’, Exemplaria, 1.1 (1989), 69–115 and Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book, pp. 57–102.   38 See Evans, ‘When a Body Meets a Body: Fergus and Mary in the York Cycle’, pp. 193–212 and Anthony Bale, Feeling Persecuted, pp. 109–17.   39 On Jewish character types in early drama, see Lampert, ‘The Once and Future Jew’, 235–55; Spector, ‘Anti-Semitism and the English Mystery Plays’, 3–16; Llewelyn Price, ‘Re-membering the Jews’, 439–63; M. J. Landa, The Jew in Drama, p. 15 and Calisch, The Jew in English Literature, p. 20.  40 Stephen Spector, ed., ‘The Assumption of Mary’, in The N-Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D8, EETS, s.s., 11–12, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 387–408, l. 472 and Norman Davis, ed., ‘The Play of the Sacrament’, in Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, EETS, s.s., 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 58–89.   41 See Peter Meredith, ‘Performance, Verse and Occasion in the N-Town Mary Play’, in Individuality and Achievement in Middle English Poetry, ed. by O. S. Pickering (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 205–22 (p. 209). On dating the N-Town manuscript see Douglas Sugano, The N-Town Plays: Introduction (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), available via the TEAMS website: http://www.lib. rochester.edu/camelot/teams/sdntintro.htm [accessed 2 July 2019].  42 See McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion, pp. 1–16 and Tasioulas, ‘Between Doctrine and Domesticity’, p. 223.   43 See Coletti, ‘Purity and Danger’, p. 79.  44 On ritual child murder narratives, see Anthony Bale, ‘Fictions of Judaism in England before 1290’, in The Jews in Medieval Britain, ed. by Skinner, pp. 129–44.  45 Rubin, Emotion and Devotion, pp. 11–13; Kathleen Biddick, The Typological Imaginary, pp. 45–59 and Kathy Lavezzo, The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), pp. 135–171.   46 Joe Hillaby, ‘Jewish Colonisation in the Twelfth Century’, in The Jews in Medieval Britain, ed. by Skinner, pp. 15–40 (p. 30).   47 See Merrall Llewelyn Price, ‘Re-membering the Jews’, 439–63.   48 See Solberg, Virgin Whore, p. 108. ‘Virgin births, the maculists complained, were breeding in Mary’s family tree like rabbits.’

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

70

Play time

  49 See William Chester Jordan, ‘The Pardoner’s “Holy Jew”’, in Chaucer and the Jews, ed. by Delany, pp. 25–42 (p. 31): ‘A few of these Jews were paragons and [. . .] were regarded by Christians as exemplary figures. [. . .] Post-scriptural Jews, with rare exceptions [. . .], were different. They authorized the killing of Jesus.’   50 See Spector, ‘The Presentation of Mary’, in The N-Town Play, pp. 81–94 (ll. 101–61); Frank M. Napolitano, ‘The N-Town Presentation of Mary in the Temple and the Production of Rhetorical Knowledge’, Studies in Philology, 110.1 (2013), 1–17, and McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion, pp. 128–33.   51 Daisy Black, ‘A Man Out of Time: Joseph, Time and Space in the N-Town Marian Plays’, in Reconsidering Gender, Time and Memory in Medieval Culture, ed. by McAvoy, Cox and Magnani, pp. 147–62. On chaste marriages, see Dyan Elliott, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) and Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing unto Others (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 28–58.  52 Spector, ‘The Marriage of Mary and Joseph’ (l. 160), Matthew 1. 1–16 and Luke 3. 23–38,   53 See the Introduction to Bruun and Glaser (eds), Negotiating Heritage, pp. 1–17 (p. 1).   54 See Spector (ed.), ‘Jesse Root’, in The N-Town Play, pp. 65–70.  55 Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference, p. 104.   56 Magnus, ‘Time on the Stage’, p. 110.  57 Geary, Women at the Beginning, p. 63: ‘Centuries of apologists and exegetes sought to resolve the paradox of how to place Mary as the only human parent of Jesus and yet preserve his descent from David.’   58 Spector, ed., ‘Joseph’s Doubt’, l. 26.   59 See Nolan Sidhu, Indecent Exposure, p. 211: ‘because in this case the young wife under suspicion is Mary, the most virtuous woman in Christendom, the joke is turned on its head.’   60 Spector, ed., ‘Joseph’s Doubt’, l. 10.   61 Nathaniel E. Dubin, ed. and trans., The Fabliaux (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2013).   62 Spector, ed., ‘Joseph’s Doubt’, ll. 11–12 and 82–3.   63 See Norman Davis, ed., ‘The Play of the Sacrament’, pp. 58–89 and Donald C. Barker, John L. Murphy and Louis B. Hall, ed., ‘Mary Magdelen’ in The Late Religious Plays of Bodleian MSS Digby 133 and E Museo 160, EETS (1982), pp. 24–95. See also Donnalee Dox, ‘Theatrical Space, Mutable Space, and the Space of Imagination: Three Readings of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament’, in Medieval Practices of Space, ed. by Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 167– 98; Ruth Evans, ‘The Jew, the Host and the Virgin Martyr: Fantasies of the Sentient Body’, in Medieval Virginities, ed. by Anke Bernau,

The old man and the pregnant virgin

71

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Ruth Evans and Sarah Salih (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), pp. 167–86 and Teresa Reed, Shadows of Mary: Understanding Images of the Virgin Mary in Medieval Texts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003, pp. 1–15.   64 See Solberg, Virgin Whore, pp. 31–2.   65 Spector, ed., ‘Joseph’s Doubt’, ll. 15–19.  66 Meredith, The Mary Play, ll. 1406–1410.   67 Twycross, ‘The Sun in York (Part One)’, pp. 156 and 175.   68 See Black, ‘A Man Out of Time’, pp. 156–7.   69 See Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (London: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 45–6 and R. W. Pfaff, New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England (London: Clarendon Press, 1970).  70 See Beadle, ‘The Transfiguration’, in The York Plays, pp. 192–98; Edmund Reiss, ‘The Tradition of Moses in the Underworld and the York Plays of the Transfiguration and Harrowing’, Mediaevalia, 5 (1979), 141–64 and Pamela M. King’s discussion of the Transfiguration play in the York cycle in ‘Calendar and Text: Christ’s Ministry in the York Plays and the Liturgy’, pp. 46–7.   71 For the full account of this episode, see Matthew 17.1–6. See also the account in Luke 9.29–32 and Mark 9.1–12. See also Twycross, ‘The Sun in York (Part One)’, p. 170.  72 Theresa Coletti, ‘Devotional Iconography in the N-Town Marian Plays’, Comparative Drama, 11.1 (1977), 22–44.   73 See Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book, p. 1 and Christine M. Rose, ‘The Jewish mother-in-law: Synagoga and the Man of Law’s Tale’, in Chaucer and the Jews, ed. by Delany pp. 3–23.   74 This is particularly the case in Matthew’s gospel, which, Chapter 3 demonstrates, was written for Jewish-Christians and invested in promoting continuity between the two theologies. See J. Andrew Overman, Matthew’s Gospel and Formative Judaism: The Social World of the Matthean Community (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1990).   75 See Madeline H. Caviness, Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle and Scopic Economy (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 1–15; Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (Reading: Picador, 1976; repr. 1985), pp. 285–98 and Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, pp. 383–457.   76 Spector, ed., ‘Joseph’s Doubt’, ll. 25–31.   77 On the use of prosthesis, see the description of false bellies in Butterworth, Staging Conventions, pp. 146–7.   78 Spector, ed., ‘The Trial of Mary and Joseph’, ll. 80–1 and 94–7.   79 Spector, ed., ‘The Salutation and Conception’, ll. 292–3. See also Coletti, ‘Devotional Iconography in the N-Town Marian Plays’, pp. 28–9.  80 See Rubin’s discussion of the Eucharist and Jewish conversion in Rubin, Gentile Tales, pp. 170–88; Kruger, The Spectral Jew, p. 171 and

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

72

Play time

Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 19–32.   81 Spector, ed., ‘Joseph’s Doubt’, l. 41.   82 Spector, ed., ‘Joseph’s Doubt’, l.147.  83 Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference, p. 2.   84 Spector, ed., ‘Joseph’s Doubt’, ll. 130–31.   85 Joshua Trachtenburg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 50–1 and Young Gregg, Devils, Women and Jews, pp. 177–8: ‘Several sermon exempla mark or associate Jews with physical corruption, disease, or disability, symbolic of their spiritual corruption; these conditions can only be cured by conversion and/or baptism.’   86 Spector, ed., ‘Joseph’s Doubt’, ll. 74–6.   87 Helen Marie Cushman’s ‘Handling Knowledge: Holy Bodies in the Middle English Mystery Plays’, JMEMS 47.2 (2017), 279–304.  88 Biddick, The Typological Imaginary, p. 1.   89 Clifford Davidson, ed., ‘A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge’, Early Drama, Art and Music Monograph Series Vol. 19 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993), pp. 93–115 (ll. 474–76).   90 Laura Saetvait Miles, ‘The Origins and Development of the Virgin Mary’s Book at the Annunciation’, Speculum, 89.3 (2014), 632–69.  91 See D. H. Green, Women Readers in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 119–22; David Linton, ‘Reading the Virgin Reader’, in The Book and the Magic of Reading in the Middle Ages, ed. by Albrecht Classen (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), pp. 253–76 and Coletti’s discussion of N-Town’s Annunciation staging in ‘Devotional Iconography in the N-Town Marian Plays’, pp. 27–30.   92 Spector, ed., ‘Joseph’s Doubt’, l. 44.   93 Spector, ed., ‘Joseph’s Doubt’, ll. 64–66.   94 Frank M. Napolitano, ‘“Here may we se a merveyl one”: Miracles and the Psalter in the N-Town Marriage of Mary and Joseph’, Early Theatre, 18.2 (2015), 37–56.   95 Female Jewish characters in these plays are, however, presented as more open to conversion, usually through marriage to a Christian man. See Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, pp. 131–65.   96 Spector, ed., ‘Joseph’s Doubt’, l. 112.   97 See Young Gregg, ‘A Jew Debates the Virginity of Mary’, in Devils, Women and Jews, pp. 226–7. See also Anthony Bale’s discussion of the miracle of the boy singer in Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book, pp. 57–103.   98 Spector, ed., ‘Joseph’s Doubt’, l. 157.   99 Spector, ed., ‘Joseph’s Doubt’, ll. 160–9.

The old man and the pregnant virgin

73

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

100 Charlotte Steenbrugge, Drama and Sermon in Late Medieval England: Performance, Authority, Devotion (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2017), pp. 116–17. 101 See Davis, ed., ‘The Play of the Sacrament’, ll. 741–6 and Rubin, Gentile Tales, p. 170: ‘The Croxton play [. . .] holds up the Jew as a didactic prop, as he conveniently converts to Christianity in the face of Eucharistic miraculous manifestation.’ 102 Spector, ed., ‘Joseph’s Doubt’, ll. 182–8. 103 Steenbrugge, Drama and Sermon, pp. 123–4. 104 This fluctuation between the divine and human roles of Mary see Normington, Gender and Medieval Drama, p. 4 and Reed, Shadows of Mary, pp. 1–15, which interrogates how depictions of Mary’s humanity came to represent an ideal of womanhood and wifehood. 105 Spector, ed., ‘Joseph’s Doubt’, l. 199 and ll. 170–2. 106 Spector, ed., ‘Joseph’s Doubt’, ll. 191–2 and 207. 107 Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference, p. 104. 108 On Mary’s ambiguous status within the N-Town plays, see Llewelyn Price, ‘Re-membering the Jews’, p. 452: ‘She is both female and notfemale. Similarly, she is both Jew and not-Jew; her anti-Semitism separates her from the Jews she punishes, while the repeated presence of the Jews in the tale is a continual reminder of her own religious background.’ 109 See Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference, p. 14. 110 Steven Kruger, The Spectral Jew, p. 105. 111 Spector, ed., ‘The Trial’, ll. 80–1 and 94–7. 112 Spector, ed., ‘The Trial’, ll. 82; the accusations in ll. 202–21 and l. 98. 113 Spector, ed. ‘The Trial’, l. 234. 114 Spector, ed., ‘The Trial’, ll. 258–73. 115 Christopher A. Frilingos, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph: Family Trouble in the Infancy Gospels (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), p. 99. 116 See Derek Brewer, ed. and trans., Medieval Comic Tales (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1973), pp. 147–8 and Jan M. Ziolkowski, ed. and trans., The Cambridge Songs (Carmina Cantabrigensia) (New York: Garland, 1994). 117 Spector, ed., ‘The Trial’, ll. 306–13. 118 See Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference, p. 69; Denise L. Despres, ‘The Protean Jew in the Vernon Manuscript’, in Chaucer and the Jews, ed. by Delany, pp. 145–64 (p. 148) and Le Goff, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, pp. 29–30. 119 On Judas and ugliness, see Bale, Feeling Persecuted, pp. 67–9. 120 See Stacey, ‘The Conversion of the Jews to Christianity in ThirteenthCentury England’, p. 278. 121 See Bart D. Erhman and Zlatko Pleše, Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 106–9. 122 See Barker, Murphy and Hall, ed., ‘Mary Magdelen’, ll. 1697–1709.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

74

Play time

123 Spector, ed., ‘The Nativity’, l. 21. 124 Spector, ed., ‘The Nativity’, ll. 26–33. 125 Spector, ed., ‘The Nativity’, pp. 153–63 (l. 39). 126 Spector, ed., ‘The Nativity’, ll. 44–5. 127 See Frank M. Napolitano on Mary’s ability to interpret scriptural truths through (later) scriptures in ‘“Here may we se a merveyl one”’, 37–56. 128 Magnus, ‘Time on Stage’, p. 110. 129 Spector, ed., ‘The Purification’, ll. 107–112. 130 Spector, ed., ‘The Purification’, in The N-Town Play, pp. 180–7 (ll. 114). 131 See Kruger’s discussion of Jewish ‘spectrality’, which recognises ‘a dependence upon the Jewish ancestor that is simultaneously an erasure [. . .] Jewishness is a spectral presence, strongly felt and yet just as strongly derealized.’ Kruger, The Spectral Jew, p. xvii. 132 See Coletti, ‘Purity and Danger’, p. 74 on Mary’s obedience to Jewish rites. 133 Hence Mary’s continued obedience to the Hebrew rites of childbirth in The Purification. 134 Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference, p. 2.

2

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Grave new world: fantasies of supersession and explosive questions in the York and Chester Flood plays

NOAH’S WIFE is doing her usual for comic relief She doesn’t see why she should get on the boat, etc., etc., while life as we know it hangs by a thread. [. . .] The woman’s disobedience is good for plot, as also for restoring plot to human scale: three hundred cubits by fifty by what? What’s that in inches exactly? [. . .] We find the Creator in an awkward bind. Washed back to oblivion? Think again. The housewife at her laundry tub has got a better grip. Which may be why we’ve tried to find her laughable, she’s such an unhappy reminder of what understanding costs.1

The verbose wife who, on finding her husband building a large boat and filling it with animals, wonders whether he is drunk or mad or both has long been cited as an example of comic disobedience or unruliness. Yet as poet Linda Gregerson illustrates so brilliantly, the ability of Noah’s wife to ‘restor[e] plot to human scale’ broadens her audience’s possible responses to the Flood. Gregerson’s awkward God is made temporarily impotent by a housewife’s determination to remember in the face of his act of oblivion. His authority can only be restored if we – as audiences and as literary critics – ‘find her

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

76

Play time

laughable’. Given the conventional reliance of revisionary histories on the silencing of women, this chapter focuses on the York and Chester Flood plays to ask why this wife’s practices of remembrance pose such a challenge to her husband, to God and to the Flood. Arguments between Noah and his wife in medieval biblical plays develop the Genesis account of the Flood, which provides vast detail about the dimensions of the boat but very little about the humans carried within it. Centred on God’s language of command and Noah’s obedient but silent action, the Genesis narrative is structured by patterns of divine cause and human effect. A sinful race disappears beneath the waters, the world is repopulated by Noah’s offspring and no dissenting voice is raised against the act of divine violence.2 Noah’s wife is only mentioned twice, and even then she appears chiefly in relation to Noah.3 Yet when this story was performed on the late medieval stage, Noah’s wife disrupted this simple, linear narrative. In four of the surviving Flood plays, the boarding (and, in the Towneley and Newcastle plays, the building) of the ark is accompanied by verbal or physical altercation as the couple engage in a battle of perspectives. These conflicts are indicative of broader anxieties, for example, concerning marital gender roles; relationships between domestic, economic and spiritual duties; divided responsibilities between the family and wider community; and domestic and public violence. All of these have received critical attention over recent decades.4 Yet whatever its surface cause, the conflict is also always rooted in the ways in which the couple comprehend the ‘time’ of the Flood itself. The York Register suggests the Flood episodes were among the most expensive to stage, but while it gives us some idea about how the ark was portrayed, it is not clear how the waters of the Flood were represented.5 This leaves us with a series of interpretative decisions to make. Were the waters physically represented, or did they exist in the space between the actors’ words and audiences’ imaginations? When the waters rose over the world, were they represented as cleansing or destructive? Did they make the terrain fertile, promising a fruitful future, or silt it over with the deposits and debris of the past? Was the surface of the water cloudy, concealing what was there before, or transparent? The answers to these questions may be glimpsed in the dialogue of the dramatic personae, which itself depends on the characters’ subjective experiences of their own waterlogged times. Noah, for example, subscribes to a linear time model which considers the punished world annihilated and the Flood a new beginning from which the survivors’ present and future

Grave new world

77

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

emerges. This is performed as part of the larger pattern of supersession and salvation within Christian historical understanding, which, as Chapter 1 showed, underpinned a typological reading designed to bring Hebrew and Christian scriptures into a single narrative. Yet Noah’s supersessionary perspective appears more absolute than those at work in the N-Town Joseph’s Doubt. While Mary and Noah are both future-oriented, Mary’s supersessionary model hinges on the conviction and conversion of her husband and attempts to assimilate the authority of the Hebrew past into the Christian present. Noah, conversely, is often portrayed as wishing completely to sever past from present. This severance is never fully realised due to his wife’s reluctance first to leave, and then to forget, the flooded world. While Noah subscribes to a model of supersession upon which his fantasy of a new, ‘clean’ world hinges, she remembers the time before.6 She posits a challenge to the authority of the play’s patriarch. While she remembers, neither God nor Noah have the ability fully to wash away the former world. Furthermore, due to the nature of the medium of drama, her performative acts of recollection command the ability to repeatedly bring the past back into the present. Conflict in the Flood plays occurs when readings of time are introduced which challenge the narrative model in which an old order is erased, leaving a blank space for the new. Noah’s wife resists her husband’s supersessionary fantasy by partaking in non-linear models of time. Across the surviving medieval plays, this is expressed by Noah’s wife viewing herself as a remnant of the past world, verbally recollecting what has disappeared, desiring to bring objects onto the ark which represent the labour and economy of the world about to be erased and stepping out of her own time to set up contrasts between Hebrew and Christian models of punishment, faith and salvation, as well as by moments of metatheatricality (such as acknowledging medieval performance contexts, spectators or landscapes). Each of these challenge the idea of the Flood as a ‘clean’ beginning, as memories and attachments carried onto the ark enable fragments of the supposedly eradicated world to survive. Arguments between Noah and his wife have received a long history of critical attention, which traces the history of the rebellious wife figure to the fourth century.7 Finding early versions in Christian European manuscript illumination as well as in Jewish and Muslim folklore, these early enquiries demonstrate that her rebellion was rooted in earlier, and not exclusively Christian, contexts. Sandy Bardsley has charted her appearance in European folk legend, noting that, although often associated with the devil, the wife is also always

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

78

Play time

defined by her relationship with Noah.8 The most pervasive approach over the past five decades has been concerned with categorising Noah’s wife as an ‘unruly woman’. This tends to view her dissent as the sinful antithesis to Noah’s Christological typology, linking her to the disobedience of Eve and gendering the disruptive voice as historically female.9 Yet these readings often underestimate the wife’s power to challenge the concept of the Flood. Any pattern of sinful repetition resists the function of the Flood as a performance of erasure followed by renewal – not least because, despite her disobedience towards Noah and God, the wife is still saved from the waters. Readings aligning Noah’s wife with Eve also overlook Noah’s not inconsiderable contributions towards the conflict, the violence he employs to get his wife to board and the anxieties this reveals about his own status. Natalie Zemon Davis argues that the ‘unruly woman’ type had the ability to encourage change by disrupting male-directed processes of order: ‘Play with the concept of the unruly woman is partly a chance for a temporary release from traditional and stable hierarchy; but it is also part and parcel of conflict over efforts to change the basic distribution of power within the society.’10 The Bakhtinian idea of a ‘temporary release’ – a suspension of time in the service of laughter – views the wife’s function as articulating a desire for change while expressing the assumption that, as a temporary condition, any such change will be short-lived.11 Melvin Storm develops this argument when he examines Noah’s wife as fighting ‘against the constraints of [. . .] history’, while Anthony Gash finds that, unlike Eve, Noah’s wife eludes punishment and becomes a ‘liminal’ figure in the salvation narrative.12 This kind of critical language is deeply concerned with time, and particularly with the transient, the temporary and the delayed. Yet fashioning the behaviour of Noah’s wife as a temporary aberration underestimates just how much of an influence she has, not just in challenging Noah’s authority, but in questioning the whole concept of time being erased in the Flood. Feminist and gendered readings have increasingly found the ‘unruly woman’ category unstable, as it relies upon the assumption of a fixed social norm against which the figure rebels.13 Through expanding and complicating this category, this research raises new questions concerning the time of the Flood plays by placing an emphasis on their late medieval performance and production contexts. This focus has opened up discussions of the play’s metatheatrical elements, particularly concerning the relation of Noah’s wife to her audiences, as well as much debate over what Meg Twycross has called the ‘transvestite’ effect of male actors playing female roles.14 Another line of enquiry led by Ruth Evans, Theresa Coletti

Grave new world

79

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

and Katie Normington examines the wife’s relation to contemporary socio-economic positions of medieval women.15 Nicole Nolan Sidhu has argued that, far from being ‘unruly’, figures such as the Chester and Towneley wives demonstrate the independence, confidence and management skills which made women companionate partners in marriage and productive members of their middle-rank households.16 Readings placing Noah’s wife within a late medieval socio-economic sphere have therefore opened up the ‘now’ of the plays’ performance contexts by underlining the affinities she held with the men and women watching and producing the plays. This greater understanding of the wife as a late medieval woman underlines the complexity of her role, marking her as a figure who not only has the capacity to remember the previous world, but is also firmly involved in her ‘future’ medieval community. This wife lives in several different times simultaneously. Where the first chapter examined a debate across a moment of supersession which concluded with Joseph and Mary united, if tentatively, in mutual understanding, this chapter finds that, while the York and Chester Noah and wife have entirely different ways of reading time from one another, no such moment of reconciliation is reached. This makes temporal subjectivity a far more disruptive force. The chapter first examines the York Noah’s need to understand the Flood as a moment of rupture, and the role of the ark as a focus of Noah’s typology. It then shows how the York wife challenges this model, her speeches engaging with the properties of explosive time as she repeatedly recalls troublesome remnants of the past. ‘Explosive’ time is a category identified by Jonathan Gil Harris as ‘the untimely interruption of a past that disputes the present, and with explosive consequences’.17 This is matched by the related processes of temporal collapse engaged in by the wife and Gossips appearing in the Chester Noyes Fludd, which allow multiple temporalities to be supported within a single moment.18 I argue that the wives produce a feminine counter-narrative to Noah’s pattern of Christological salvation. The spouses’ conflict as they negotiate these multiple ways of experiencing time testifies to the insufficiency of human relationships to accommodate the temporal and social transitions which God’s act of destruction enforces. Working all new: the York ark’s typological imaginary The time of the Genesis Flood is itself already characterised by aspects of temporal multiplicity. Situated between the Fall, the

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

80

Play time

division of nations and the Babylonian splitting of languages, the Flood is part of a Hebrew history that narrates ongoing, repetitive processes of erasure, re-formation, scattering and gathering.19 These traumatic early narratives were adapted by early Christian theologians to justify the newer religion’s legitimacy against that of Judaism. In the fifth century St Augustine read these events as prefiguring the later dispersals of Jewish populations after Christ’s death, and thus as confirmation that God had withdrawn his blessing from his former people.20 Later theologians devised various means of claiming continuity with the Hebrew Bible, but the Flood narrative particularly lent itself to two complementary approaches: the belief in the supersession of one order by another and the practice of typological reading. With its destruction of an old world and the saving of a few chosen people, the account of the deluge follows a narrative pattern which was not only part of the original Fall narrative, but was also adopted by medieval secular historiography.21 Yet the Flood’s time, which was postlapsarian and pre-Christ, occupies an uncertain place within the overarching salvation narrative captured by the York cycle’s staging of history. This constitutes a challenge for medieval attempts to understand Noah’s role typologically (and anachronistically) as a saviour figure and, as such, a precursor to Christ. While this might have encouraged audiences to see the ark as foreshadowing Christian salvation, the York and Chester plays never seem entirely convinced by this. While the Noahs of both pageants subscribe to the idea of a Flood which cleanses the world and leaves a blank space, this idea demands the full, uncritical acceptance of God’s decision, unhesitating obedience and a refusal to look back. Essentially, it rests upon Noah’s ability either to forget or to cut himself away from what has been destroyed. The difficulty of this, and of Noah’s unsatisfactory performance as a proto-Christ, is amplified by his wife. The York Shipwright’s The Building of the Ark begins with God’s speech, in which he recounts his Creation, expresses his regrets at having made ‘outhir man or wiffe’, and outlines his intention to erase the world and start again: ‘wirke þis werke I wille al newe.’22 A version of this appears in all surviving Flood plays, which open with monologues from God or Noah, telling of Creation and the world’s descent into disobedience. However, in the N-Town, Newcastle, Towneley and Chester plays, the Flood is devised purely as an act of punishment, rather than a purgation and renewal.23 This view of the Flood as a punishment for specific sins frequently appears in medieval literature, although, as the late fourteenth-century poem

Grave new world

81

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Cleanness demonstrates, divine justice still admits sympathy for human suffering as people cling together in the rising waters.24 The Flood in all but the York plays is therefore figured as an end, not a beginning, and Noah’s family do not know whether they can expect a new start or whether they are merely survivors, remnants in a world stripped of its past. Unusually, the speech of the York God suggests that, in these early days of the world, he believes it is possible to erase and make his work anew. Yet as the play develops it becomes clear that an entirely new beginning is not possible. Like all discourses of erasure and beginning employed by those seeking to annihilate or overwrite an uncomfortable history, the new world must accommodate remnants of the old.25 These remnants, however, are not particularly promising. God’s choice of Noah to select and preserve what Sarah Elliott Novacich has called the ‘archive’ of the ark meets its first challenge when Noah seriously doubts his shipbuilding skills are up to the task.26 The archive is not, it seems, in competent hands. The Noah of the second York play, The Flood, is more confident, viewing himself as part of a greater salvation narrative. Recollecting how his father Lamech prayed for a son, Noah’s legitimacy hinges on his father’s prediction: NOE:               

When I was borne Noye named he me, And said þees wordes with mekill wynne: ‘Loo’, he saide, ‘þis ilke is he That shalle be comforte to mankynne’. Syrs, by þis wele witte may ye, My fadir knewe both more and mynne By sarteyne signes he couthe wele see, That al þis worlde shuld synke for synne.27

Just as medieval Christianity read Judaism as its own prefiguration, so Noah reads his father’s words as a prophecy which invites the typological paralleling of Noah and Christ. Pamela Sheingorn views typological readings as both comparative and supersessionary, with newer scripture assimilating and succeeding the older to ‘foreshadow the life of Christ’.28 The vision of Noah as a ‘comforte to mankynne’ suggests the scope of salvation represented by this ark will reach far beyond the short cast list admitted in Genesis. It also mimics the kind of prophetic foreshadowing and patterning I will scrutinise in relation to the gospel of Matthew and the massacre of the Innocents in Chapter 4. Just as Matthew’s gospel carefully narrates how Christ fulfilled the messianic predictions of the Hebrew prophets, so Noah is given his own prophetic father as he

Play time

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

82

plays out his rather more exclusive salvation narrative. Making Noah a kind of proto-Christ acknowledges the Christian present of the play’s performance context while attempting to make the Genesis Flood theologically ‘safe’ by situating it within the Christian narrative. However, this is an unstable process. Rosemary Woolf claims the Flood plays’ narrow foci on the saved family is ‘justified by typological interpretations of the story, which saw Noah as a type of Christ, [. . .] the ark a type of the Cross [. . .], and occasionally in Noah’s wife a type of the Virgin’. Yet such readings may invite contrast just as easily as comparison.29 The York Noah’s typological ideal can only be sustained for the length of his speech. As soon as monologue is replaced with dialogue, the audience meets someone for whom this version of events does not work. Noah’s wife challenges her husband’s role as a ‘comforte to mankynne’ by conducting a debate in which Noah is unable to offer any comfort concerning the drowned world.30 This reaches its denouement when she announces her intention to fetch her cousins and friends: VXOR:

Nowe certis, and we shulde skape fro skathe, And so be saffyd as ye saye here, My commodrys and my cosynes bathe, þam wolde I wente with vs in feere.

NOE:

To wende in þe water it were wathe, Loke in and loke withouten were.

VXOR:

Allas, my lyff me is full lath, I lyffe ouere-lange þis lare to lere.

I FILIA: Dere modir, mende youre moode, For we sall wende you with. VXOR:

My frendis þat I fra yoode Are ouere flowen with floode.31

Stressing the words ‘skape’, ‘skathe’ and ‘saffyd’, the wife disturbs the typology of Noah’s opening speech by emphasising the fact that, on the ark, salvation is exclusive. When her family seeks to reassure her, it becomes increasingly clear that her definition of being ‘saffyd’ does not match theirs. A similar contradiction occurs in the Chester play, where, Katie Normington notes, ‘[the wife] is the only character in the Chester deluge pageant to show consideration for other human beings’.32 Noah, to his wife, is an inadequate saviour.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Grave new world

83

3  A floodscape with distinctly medieval buildings and dead in a copy of Augustine’s The City of God. BNF, Manuscrits, Français 28, f. 66v.

Her remembering of her ‘co-mothers and cousins’ troubles Noah’s idea of himself as prefiguration of Christ, reasserting distance between the two salvation narratives. The Noah who argues with his wife in the York plays does not behave as a Christ figure and makes no personal sacrifice; the enclosed space of the ark proves a more selective vehicle of salvation than the open arms of the Cross, and those ‘baptised’ in the waters are not those who are saved.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

84

Play time

4  The dead beneath the ark in the Holkham Bible Picture Book. BL Add MS 47682 fol. 8r.

The selectivity of the ark was similarly emphasised in medieval art, which often showed it floating on waters full of submerged and dismembered bodies, or, as in a fifteenth-century French manuscript illustrating Augustine’s The City of God (Figure 3), floating serenely as the distinctly medieval landscape around it fills with broken buildings, dying animals and waterlogged people grabbing hold of trees as they try to stay afloat.33 In the early fourteenth-century Holkham Bible Picture Book (Figure 4), the ark rides above the sinuous corpses of the dead and the floodwater takes up most space on the page. Meanwhile, William de Brailes’ thirteenth-century illustration of the Flood does not show the ark at all but instead

Grave new world

85

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

focuses its entire attention on the accumulated sedimentary layers of dead livestock, birds and humans.34 The fact that Noah’s wife sees her survival as an unwelcome continuance of life after changes she cannot accept constitutes a challenge to these pictorial and theological discourses of supersession and typology. The realisation that her relatives and fellow mothers are dead informs her own feeling of belatedness. Her line ‘Allas, my lyff me is full lath / I lyffe ouere-lange þis lare to lere’ suggests Noah’s wife feels she has lived beyond the end of her allotted time, and also that she is ill-equipped to learn a new ‘lare’.35 If Noah’s authority lies in his unhesitating obedience and refusal to look back, Noah’s wife reads herself as something untimely: something left over from before which can’t be easily assimilated into the new order. The wife’s inability to learn beyond a point of supersession echoes medieval anti-Semitic readings of Jews as a people lingering on past the advent of Christianity. These characterised Jews as wilfully belated: deliberately misinterpreting their scriptures in order to deny their fulfilment in Christ.36 A reading of Noah’s wife as a figure who, like the N-Town Joseph, operates as a kind of belated, past-oriented ‘Jewish’ character type is particularly pertinent to her portrayal in the York cycle. The York Flood pageants demonstrate a preoccupation with knowledge and silence, and feature the extraordinary complaint that Noah’s wife has been kept ignorant of her husband’s knowledge of the Flood. Jane Tolmie and Sarah Elliott Novacich read this early conflict as expressing an ongoing theme of exclusion from spaces and from knowledge.37 The depiction of a husband and wife divided in knowledge appears in several dramatic versions of the Flood, most spectacularly in the fragmentary Newcastle play, which depicts Noah taking directions from God while his wife is persuaded by the devil to trick Noah into telling her what he is up to.38 While the York Noah is celebrated for his master–apprentice relationship with God, it appears that she has been sitting quietly at home wondering why her husband has developed a sudden passion for large-scale carpentry. If her ignorance is read as participating in medieval characterisations of Judaism’s wilful ignorance, two possibilities emerge. The first is that Noah had informed his wife about the Flood and she has forgotten, or, like the condemned community, refused to believe him. In this reading, she is saved only as accessory to her husband. This is supported by the fact that, even when convinced of the truth of the Flood, the York wife still returns to collect her tools.39 While this practical choice suggest she underestimates the Flood’s

Play time

86

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

immanency, it also underlines her connection to the world, anticipating her ability to create (and re-create) beyond the Flood, and her investment in a continuing future economy and trade which belies the destruction to come.40 However, a reading of wilful ignorance is problematised by her rebuke of Noah, which hints at a more fundamental communication failure: VXOR: Noye, þou myght haue leteyn me wete; Erly and late þou wente þeroutte, And ay at home þou lete me sytte To loke þat nowhere were wele aboutte. NOE:

Dame, þou holde me excused of itt, It was Goddis wille withowten doutte.41

Noah’s reason for the century-long gap between his knowledge of the Flood and telling his wife of it is disturbing. In an inverted parallel of Adam’s excusing himself to God by blaming Eve in the York Fall of Man, Noah commits the rather more audacious act of excusing himself to his wife by blaming God.42 While his defence, ‘it was Goddis wille’, might refer to the Flood rather than his wife’s ignorance, the rhyme and alliteration sequence of the accusation ‘were wele aboutte’ is reproduced in Noah’s reply, ‘wille withowten doutte’. This indicates that his excuse directly answers her charge, and that her ignorance is commanded by God. Although no such command appears in either pageant, the concept of God-ordained silence holds an affinity with medieval exegetical readings of John 20.37–40, which argued that the God of the Jews had blinded his people to the meaning of their own scriptures as punishment for their failure to recognise Christ. Unlike the N-Town Joseph, whose learning process and eventual reluctant acceptance of the new laws is dramatised across his pageants, the York wife believes she has lived ‘too long’ to learn. Perhaps this is because she finds out about the Flood far too late. Beginning by ending Yet reading the wife only as a ‘Jewish’ type narrows the temporal possibilities of the narrative, and sits uneasily with the fact that, even though she refuses to recant or convert, she is brought onto the ark, albeit forcibly. Moreover, her questions work to dismantle, rather than assert, her husband’s typological reading of his own time. To understand the Flood as an opportunity for a new

Grave new world

87

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

beginning, the York Noah demands an active ‘cutting off’ of one time from another. He wants to remove the past from his experience of the present entirely. Kathleen Biddick’s study of Christian attempts to distinguish themselves from Jews captures several of the key features of this kind of supersession: Early Christians straightened out the unfolding of temporality (with its gaps and vicissitudes) into a theological timeline fantastically based on two distinct but related notions. First, they posited a present (‘this is now’) exclusively as a Christian present. They cut off a Jewish ‘that was then’ from a Christian ‘this is now’. [. . .] They believed that the Christian new time – a ‘this is now’ – superseded a ‘that was then’ of Israel.43

This image of artificial temporal ‘straightening’ explains Noah’s need to assume the role of comforter to mankind, enabling the York play to map Yahweh’s act of destruction onto a linear timeline directed towards fulfilment in Christianity. However, it is difficult to find a critical model of supersession that does not also acknowledge its fragility. Lisa Lampert’s work finds supersessionary and typological models frequently challenged by figures who were difficult to assimilate – particularly women and Jews, who acted as embodied ‘residues’ of the past.44 This is pertinent given that, in the York, Chester, Newcastle and Towneley Flood plays, interjections interrupting Noah’s supersessionary ideal come from his wife. Supersession is destabilised whenever remnants of a previous time resurface. The critical discussion of this has chiefly examined themes of belatedness: the anachronic nature of objects which survive their original contexts to engender new meanings in a later time or, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has argued, are themselves changed by being ascribed new meanings in later times.45 As Kurt Schreyer notes in his discussion of the influence of medieval stage properties on the post-Reformation London stage, and as I have argued concerning the nails used to crucify Christ in the York Crucifixion pageant, certain objects forge networks of connections between sacred and secular times and often work provocatively within their new performance contexts.46 Yet this becomes even more explosive when characters, rather than objects, are figured as remnants, as they can express their own embodied belatedness through speech. For Noah, God’s requirement to begin anew hinges upon his ability to forget, or at least block out, what existed before. This required forgetfulness is a common feature of medieval narratives of beginning and origin, which stabilised and legitimised emerging

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

88

Play time

powers by erasing what was prior to them.47 Such beginnings, particularly those imagined in medieval theological exegesis and historiography, often relied upon discourses of erasure and oblivion. Nevertheless, these narratives rarely succeeded in constructing an absolute beginning. They instead formed multiple repetitions of earlier firsts which could only be treated as beginnings if what existed before was completely and collectively forgotten.48 D. Vance Smith’s extensive study of the multiple beginnings in Piers Plowman, for instance, finds in the Flood a chance to ‘cleanse the legacy of Cain, to erase the beginning’.49 Elsewhere, Smith describes the Flood as the ultimate act of historical erasure, whose ‘obliteration marks not the terminus of knowledge but its beginning’.50 However, this establishes a contradiction: the Flood is the beginning of history, yet time is lost in it. It is this necessity to lose time that drives the York Noah’s response to the Flood. Beginnings reliant upon willed forgetting are frail. Mary Carruthers’ study of medieval memory interrogates techniques for training the mind, but spends little time on the art of forgetting. In the texts she examines, forgetting is characterised as an involuntary action to be combated through rigorous mental training.51 Nevertheless, she does indicate that willed forgetting was thought incredibly difficult, and argues that the ‘purging’ of memories relied not so much upon their negation, or obliteration, but rather their transformation: ‘a matter of largely willed “re-placement” and displacement.’52 This is expanded upon by Wim Verbaal, who identifies a spiritual longing to be free of the past in Bernard of Clairvaux’s advice that new monks cultivate forgetfulness concerning their previous secular lives.53 Bernard’s advice suggests the past is never obliterated, but rather is transformed to serve new purposes. ‘Willed’ forgetting requires an active engagement with the past which is not unlike the typological readings considered so far: the past is retained, but refashioned. The York Noah is incapable of this. While ideas of purgation and oblivion initially seem consistent with his longing to begin again, he is not like the more malleable Joseph and advocates a rigid culture of silence that resists memory re-formation. Instead, Noah attempts to silence the past by shutting down any avenues of speech which threaten to resuscitate it. Rather ironically, this attempt to suppress his wife’s memories acts counter to the scholarly traditions employing the ark as an aide-memoire. The ark commands a history of mnemonic significance in practices of medieval instruction, famously appearing in Hugh of St Victor’s work as a tool to structure memory patterns for theological learning.54 Where

Grave new world

89

here, the ark is used as a container and organiser of memory – and particularly, of historical memory organising the whole of Christian time into one imaginary space – the York Noah imagines his ark as a site of forgetting. In trying to silence his wife’s memories, the shipwright is working against the very grain of his vessel.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Explosive questions The difficult nature of beginnings, particularly within supersessionary discourses which simultaneously acknowledge and invalidate what has gone before, goes some distance towards explaining why Noah is so anxious that his wife be silent about the time before the Flood. While Christina Fitzgerald has suggested that the Flood provides a ‘joyful new beginning’ for Noah but not for his wife, I argue that because of Noah’s wife’s refusal to forget, neither experience a new beginning, let alone a joyful one.55 This is most forcefully represented in the wife’s questions concerning the drowned world, which enact a refusal of Noah’s supersessionary, forward- looking time. The role of Noah’s wife as someone who acts as store and transmitter of the past is consistent with Elisabeth Van Houts’ argument that early medieval women acted as conduits of community memory, forming ‘crucial links in the chain of traditions binding one generation to another’.56 Women’s promotion of social and familial memory became particularly important after traumatic historical changes. For example, Van Houts argues that, in the decades after the Norman invasion, women forced to marry into Norman families kept their heritage alive through giving their daughters the Old English names that had run in their families before the invasion. This extended to the woman’s symbolic role too. James Simpson has argued that the woman became a paradoxical figure during the years of religious reform: representing both social and religious change and the disruptive retention of belief.57 Likewise, as the following chapter will demonstrate, women also had a crucial role in the material transition of memory-objects associated with childbirth. Women’s roles as future-makers were deeply linked to their role as memory-holders. The York wife’s questions concerning the drowned world enact a refusal of Noah’s perception of forward-moving time. This questions the success of the Flood as a mode of divine punishment or expurgation. Her acts of retrospection in the York, Chester and Towneley plays take the form of questions concerning missing objects, places and people, and demonstrate an ability to re-call

Play time

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

90

what is absent. Remembering involves re-membering those who have been dismembered by the Flood. Moreover, because of the way the Flood itself is figured through language within the plays, her questions also have the power to re-create the past. With the exception of the Chester Noyes Fludd, the punished world is invisible in the Flood play texts. Dialogue performs three roles in relation to the flooded world: it constructs the world itself; it announces the appearance of the Flood; and it enables the past world to be re-called into the present. York’s Flood was, at least in part, ‘created’ for its audience through the speech acts of the performers. The dramatic use of speech acts to create and to remove provides an interesting parallel to the way the York God creates the world through monologue.58 This relationship between speech and staging does particularly intriguing things to time, enabling speech to act performatively, by recalling and banishing the recent past. The Flood is not present until Noah says it is: VXOR: Nowe certis, and we shulde skape fro skathe, And so be saffyd as ye saye here, My commodrys and my cosynes bathe, þam wolde I wente with vs in feere. NOE:

To wende in þe water it were wathe, Loke in and loke withouten were.59

There is no time during which Noah or his wife comment upon the gradually rising water levels, as happens in the Chester, N-Town and Towneley plays. The Flood is brought into being in the moment Noah says ‘to wende in þe water’. Flooding the landscape, Noah’s words make it impossible for the wife to reach her companions. His reply therefore acts performatively: defining his wife’s time as past and introducing the new present, or presence, of the Flood.60 Noah’s speech both performs as water at the moment of utterance and admits the ritualistic element of illocutionary speech acts identified by Judith Butler. Making use of what Philip Butterworth has termed the ‘agreed pretence’ between spectator and performer, Noah’s speech act allows the biblical Flood to ‘exceed itself in past and future directions’, establishing its presence in the ‘now’ of the late medieval performance.61 Having followed her husband’s direction, ‘loke’, Noah’s wife confirms this change, removing her friends from the landscape with her words: ‘My frendis þat I fra yoode / Are ouere flowen with floode.’62 Yet while Noah’s statement invites her to redefine her temporal tense (the Flood as present),

Grave new world

91

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

she secures the present in relation to the past, asserting the memory of her friends even as she acknowledges their disappearance. Surviving only through the dialogue of the ‘saved’ protagonists, the world’s existence is tied to speech. Worlds destroyed in speech acts may just as easily be re-called. By repeatedly expressing her desire for her lost ‘frendis’, the wife uses her words’ purchase over the audience’s imaginations to summon them back into the present. Where the wife’s understanding of herself as a belated remnant resisted Noah’s new beginning, her verbal ability to summon the past into the post-Flood world forms an even more direct challenge to Noah’s supersessionary authority. Her absent friends are mentioned three times in this pageant. The first two instances appear in the passages discussed above. In the 111 lines following Noah’s announcement of the Flood, the hitherto vocal wife speaks only twice, praising God’s preservation of her family. If the Flood in the York pageant was created only through the performative speech of those on the ark, the wife’s silence here suggests an effort on behalf of the rest of her family to erase this past. This is the only point in the play during which the Noah family are depicted as united and experiencing time together. They focus concertedly on their present experiences, giving thanks to God and sharing the navigational tasks until the first hills are sighted. This section of the play compresses the six-month voyage, establishing temporal and spatial distance between the ark and the beginning of the Flood. Yet these rapid six months are not long enough for the wife to forget what she has left behind. Another question resurfaces: VXOR: But Noye, wher are nowe all oure kynne And companye we knwe before? NOE:

Dame, all ar drowned, late be thy dyne, And sone þei boughte þer synnes sore.63

Even as Noah catches his first glimpse of what he hopes will be the new world, his wife recalls the old. This third reference to the drowned community receives a different response from the others. Her previous wishes to fetch her friends were denied as not only untimely (being expressed after the waters had already risen), but also doctrinally incorrect – only God could dictate who was to be saved. Yet Noah’s more brusque response to this third question, ‘Dame, all ar drowned, late be thy dyne, / And sone þei boughte þer synnes sore’, suggests her repetitive questions have gone from being

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

92

Play time

untimely to requiring urgent silencing. Refusing to recognise her question as speech, he tries to dismiss it as ‘dyn’ – as discordant noise – thus negating the performative potential of her question. Categorising speech as ‘dyn’ both denies its referentiality and tries to exorcise its performative capacity. Perhaps afraid that his wife’s words might dramatically re-create the absent ‘kynne and companye’ in the imaginations of the audience, Noah swiftly acts to silence her. This also diverts attention away from the fact that Noah cannot answer his wife’s question: where are they? Noah does not appear to have any theology of the afterlife, suggesting he believes the dead of the Flood have been erased in a way which medieval Catholic theology, with its concept of eternity in one of three possible destinations, did not support.64 When Noah’s wife asks where her kin and company are, she therefore gives voice to a theological conundrum which marks the limits of Noah’s authority. Noah’s ‘all ar drowned’ can only answer what the absent people are, not where they are. Although Noah’s earlier language carried some of the trappings of medieval Christian understandings of salvation, his time is very different. The dialogue between Noah and his wife concerning the drowned world has a repetitive pattern. A question interrupts Noah’s forwardoriented approach to the Flood; Noah denies or obstructs the question, and the question is either ignored or neutralised. This patterning has much in common with what Jonathan Gil Harris terms the ‘temporality of explosion’. Defining this as ‘the untimely interruption of a past that disputes the present with explosive consequences’, Harris asserts that such experiences work both within and against the supersessionary temporalities they destabilise: Those who subscribe to the temporality of supersession respond to polychronicity by reworking traces of the past-in-the-present as dead or obsolete matter, subordinated to the agency of a progressive present and future [. . .] [P]ractitioners of supersessionary time often revivify that which they wish to pronounce dead, thereby granting the supposedly superseded past a new lease of life in the present. Those who practice what I am calling the temporality of explosion seize on this possibility and amplify it. In explosive time, the traces of the past acquire a living agency within, and against, the present.65

Harris’s work examines what he terms the ‘untimely’ ability of objects from the past (in his work, objects from a pre-Reformation past) to accumulate different meanings and so challenge supersessionary discourses.66 The concept of explosive time suggests fragments of ‘the past-in-the-present’ can provide a direct challenge to

Grave new world

93

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

supersessionary models by delaying, or disrupting, future-oriented progression – even when the past has been recalled in aid of supersession. The possibilities of temporal explosiveness are widened when ‘untimeliness’ is communicated through characters who have their own ability to accrue and articulate meaning. In the York Flood, the wife’s explosive acts of remembrance are presented as interruptions of a narrative flowing forward towards the repopulation of the earth. Her third question interrupts and blows apart her family’s joy at their sighting of the first hills and returns their discussion to the ‘woo’ of the Flood.67 Her response requires swift management from Noah, whose dedication to a new beginning requires him to rework her question, and her friends, as ‘dead or obsolete’. This process is repeated every time the wife refers to those outside the ark, with Noah’s responses increasingly emphasising the ‘dead-ness’ of their friends. He seeks to manage the explosive potential of her speech by repeatedly re-enacting the original moment of supersession. His last reply, ‘all ar drowned’, affirms their absence. Yet Noah is hampered by the transience of this action. This kind of performative recollection need not always be disruptive. A similar event occurs in the exchanges of the Towneley Noah family. When they recall the ploughs and castles of their former landscape, they are not merely reminiscing: they are pulling local objects and buildings from the medieval audience’s memories into the drowned landscape of the play.68 The recollection of the drowned world only becomes explosive when set in direct conflict with another character. For example, each time the York Noah’s wife mentions the community left outside the ark, it has the effect of directing the speech of the others away from praising God. By explosively introducing an element of the past, the wife enables one element of the former world’s disobedience to alter the course of God’s ‘new’ present. Here, I challenge Sarah Elliott Novacich’s claims concerning Noah’s wife and narrative in her recent, powerful study of the archive in medieval performance. Elliott Novacich argues that the wife’s protestations are a means of challenging the authority of Noah’s archive, showing where it is exclusive and incomplete.69 While I agree that the plays’ chief struggle concerns who gets to admit items into the archive, she also claims that, once on board the ark, the wife loses her ability to produce and influence narrative: The Flood plays dramatize the disappearance of Uxor’s narrative perspective, representing it as coinciding with her loss of the right to remember the world from which she departs. [. . .] An ontological

94

Play time

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

shift takes place when Uxor steps onto the gangplank of salvation; she begins as a potential narrator, a spinner who might encode in text or textile the series of events she both witnesses and experiences, and then, aboard the ship, she becomes netted in the narrative of another.70

This does not hold true for the York Noah’s wife. The play’s choice to stage these acts of female remembrance legitimises them, particularly in plays which were performed annually. The inclusion of her resistance in the script guarantees that the flooded world enters the archive, particularly in the case of the York plays, which themselves constitute a form of official archive aimed at directing and controlling the performance present and future. The strategies the York Noah’s wife uses – figuring herself as a remnant, exploiting the theatrical performativity of speech and asking questions about the drowned – takes part in the kinds of oral transmission of family memories examined by Van Houts. While her first questions about the world begin as untimely, they continue beyond the voyage to bear witness to destruction and breathe into the audience’s imaginations her memories of those beneath the waters. Her questions are not merely an inconvenient temporary interruption of masculine narrative formation: they entirely derail the divine objective set out in the first pageant, The Building of the Ark. Mrs Noah’s commemorative ‘dyn’ means that even God is unable to ‘wirk þis wirk al newe’.71 Noah’s wife’s explosive agency continues until the York pageant concludes with the appearance of the rainbow.72 The rainbow causes the family to reconsider their own relationships to time, and they all interpret it differently. The second son believes it signifies that the world is eternal, while Noah predicts the world will end in fire. The wife mistrusts the rainbow, fearing further ‘myscheffe’ will follow. Noah’s reply provides little comfort; he tells her to not be afraid as ‘зe sall noght lyffe þan yore / Be many hundreth yhere’.73 Again, Noah’s temporal approach is rooted in (his own) experience, at the exclusion of all others. Just as he wished to forget the recent past, from which he has been saved, he likewise feels little connection to the distant end of the world, for which he will not be present. Yet the wife’s view of time invests both past and future with personal meaning. She has learnt from the past, and it has taught her not to rely upon God’s providence as her husband does, but to anticipate further acts of divine destruction. Consequently, she responds: ‘owre hertis are soore / For þes sawes that зe say here.’74 A figure prone to experiencing non-linear time, she cannot disassociate herself from the suffering of future generations, however distant, and however beautiful the rainbow.

Grave new world

95

Collapsed time in Chester’s Noyes Fludd

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

While the drowned world of the York Flood becomes visible through dialogue, the dynamics between Noah, his wife and time change significantly when a play physically represents the flooded world. The Chester Noyes Fludd characterises those who will be drowned with a flamboyant performance of female disobedience, and in doing so adopts an approach to time which enables past and present to exist simultaneously. This is partly due to the fact that this wife’s dissent is reinforced by her community of ‘Gossips’, who embody those who will be drowned and identify, in ways that prove to be problematic, the time of the Flood with a medieval, Christian, female community. This brings the narrative of Genesis into the medieval Catholic present of its performance, while aligning the drowned world with medieval female communities associated with birth, motherhood and Christian baptism. Unlike the models of time examined so far, the Chester Gossips and their relationship with the wife contribute towards temporal processes which collapse the medieval ‘future’ into the present of the Flood. Medieval audiences would have been familiar with experiences of time which collapsed different moments from history and scripture into a single moment. Not only is it in the nature of dramatic performance to bring disparate moments from the past into a present moment of experience, audiences were primed by experiencing the temporal conflation of the Last Supper, the Crucifixion and their own local time each time they celebrated Mass, and would therefore have been open to similar conflations performed on stage.75 While discussions of multi-temporality and temporal collapse have informed critical approaches to medieval time for the past five decades, works have tended to assume that moments of collapse were experienced homogenously and collectively, for example, by an entire audience attending a play or by a congregation partaking in the Eucharist. The first sustained discussion of temporal collapse being experienced by an individual appears in Carolyn Dinshaw’s examination of Margery Kempe’s emotive experience of the pietà.76 Noting that Margery responds to the pietà as if she were in the actual presence of the crucified Christ, Dinshaw argues: ‘In Margery’s narrative world, past-present-future times are collapsed into a very capacious now.’77 This highly individualistic experience is not shared by those around Margery, and proves particularly problematic for the priest who rather ineptly attempts to console her. While Margery is performing according to Christian models of divine

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

96

Play time

time, she is also performing a denial of historical time by collapsing the space in between events.78 This same incident has also been used by Margaret Rogerson to make a convincing case for the possibility of medieval players using the methods learnt through affective piety to prepare for their roles by imagining themselves as experiencing various moments in scripture.79 The devotional contexts of both performers and audiences made them particularly receptive to the capacious potential of the ‘now’. Dinshaw proceeds to claim that Margery’s ‘now’ constitutes a ‘queer’ form of temporal experience which is out of sync with that of the priest, who assures her that ‘Ihesu is ded long sithyn’.80 The priest’s response bears some resemblance to the York Noah’s response to his wife’s question concerning the end of the world: ‘ȝe sall noght lyffe þan yore / Be many hundreth yhere.’81 Dinshaw’s idea that certain queer forms of time are characterised by actively desiring a past that is not part of the ‘now’ goes some way to explaining why, desiring the past, the wife’s response to the Flood is very different from Noah’s.82 As I examine in more detail in the following chapter, I am somewhat cautious concerning Dinshaw’s claim that experiences of collapsed time are to be read as queer; nor do I agree with her implied assertion that ‘everyday life’ is normally experienced as linear, although certain narratives can be. Incidents of temporal collapse may be observed throughout late medieval pageants, and are used for a multiplicity of purposes, from the direct address of the icon/actor Christ in the York Crucifixion and staging of an ecclesiastical court in the N-Town Trial of Mary and Joseph, to the comic depiction of the Towneley Cain as a medieval ploughman.83 The many contexts in which such moments occur suggest that collapsed time was a standard part of the plays’ dramatic arsenal, and thus cannot necessarily always be considered disruptive, unusual or ‘queer’. However, what is highly useful in Dinshaw’s approach is that she examines what happens when an individual experiences a moment of temporal collapse which those around them do not. Her work is therefore particularly useful for this enquiry into Noah and his wife’s experiences of the Flood. Collapse operates slightly differently from anachronism, which also features throughout the Chester play. For example, when Noah anachronistically employs medieval misogynist tropes to joke with the men in his audience, he acknowledges his playing space and a body of literature beyond the play, but this does not challenge the progression or concepts of the Flood narrative. Yet when times are collapsed with the entry of the Gossips into Noyes Fludd, a series of

Grave new world

97

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

new associations emerge which trouble typological readings of the ark as a prefiguration of the Cross. The Chester Gossips situate the sinful world, not as external or prior to the community watching the play, but squarely within it. This is reflected in their name ‘Good Gossips’, as well as in the women’s relationship with Noah’s wife. The word ‘gossip’ identifies them with a Christian, medieval, female community which, Susan E. Phillips argues, performed an important social and spiritual function: ‘In Middle English, “gossip” refers not to speech but to a pastoral office, connoting not triviality but spiritual responsibility. A gossip was a godparent, a baptismal sponsor bound in spiritual kinship to both the godchild and its parents.’84 Acting as spiritual guides during the lives of children, godmothers would also accompany the mother-to-be through the lying-in stage of her pregnancy. This promoted the formation of close-knit female communities which, Christina Fitzgerald argues, provoked misogynist fears, resulting in the characterisation of the Chester Gossips as ‘an unruly counterpart to the ordered microcosm of Noah’s patriarchal guild-family’.85 Gossips, and gossips’ memories, also performed other social functions. A number of court records show godparents called on to testify to events in the lives of the families with which they were affiliated – most frequently, attesting the date of their godchild’s birth. A gossip’s recollection could therefore open the means for a young man wishing to claim his inheritance. Their representation here references a female community specifically invested in promoting continuity with the past. As with the York Noah’s wife, their power lay in their social memory. Although the Gossips are presented unambiguously as sinners in Noyes Fludd, the presence of the medieval baptismal sponsor in a narrative about water which proclaims not eternal life, but death, evokes a later religious context which calls into question Noah’s desire to shut the ark’s window. The Chester play depicts a community the wife is emotionally invested in, but with which Noah and his sons have little involvement. Calling these women ‘Gossips’ hints at deeper familial responsibilities, indicating that the sons who encourage their mother to abandon her friends are turning away from those who helped in their own birth chambers and who were intended to provide them with spiritual guidance throughout their lives. Noah’s sons follow their father in seeking to cut away what are represented as the feminine traces of their past. While this does not extend to cutting away the mother who bore them, Noah’s children intend to walk out into the new world as ready-formed adult men. The characterisation of these women

Play time

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

98

prevents this implied kinship being developed: it is to be assumed that the Gossips, despite the wry ‘good’ in their title, have failed in their role as moral instructors and instead occupied their time in leading the mother astray. There is a certain temporal irony in operation here. The women are washed away in a Hebrew purgation of sin which inversely foreshadows the baptisms which, in this collapsed Judeo-Christian time, gives them their name, ‘gossips’. The Gossips’ appearance in Noyes Fludd prompts the collapse of three times – the time of the Flood, the time of the late medieval playing space and the time of the Crucifixion – into one moment. Drinking together despite the rising water, the Gossips are presented as pleasure-seeking exemplars of the sinful world: THE GOOD GOSSIPS:       

The fludd comes fleetinge in full faste, one everye syde that spredeth full farre. For fere of drowninge I am agaste; good gossippe, lett us draw nere.

       

And lett us drinke or wee departe, for oftetymes wee have done soe. For at one draught thou drinke a quarte, and soe will I doe or I goe.

 Here is a pottell full of malnesaye good and stronge;   yt will rejoyse both harte and tonge.   Though Noe thinke us never soe longe,   yett wee wyll drynke atyte.86

Speaking with one voice as they dull their fear with ‘malnesay’, the Gossips offer a memorable image of drunken, verbose resistance. Turning to drink (a form of self-drowning), the Gossips create their own microcosmic Flood as they continue to engage in the activity that, the play suggests, provoked their punishment in the first place.87 Their speech also contains several temporal markers which draw into question the ways in which they interpret their own relationship with the Flood. Their speech moves backwards and forwards in time, indicating their belief in their own futurity with ‘or wee departe’ and ‘though Noe thinke us never soe longe’.88 This suggests they realise they have only a limited time with which to conclude their drinking, but think Noah is waiting for them; mistakenly reading the ark as the vehicle of their salvation, yet wanting to enter it in their own time. In believing that they are making Noah wait, the Gossips are asserting the value of their own

Grave new world

99

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

time against that of the patriarch. Like the N-Town Joseph, the Gossips fail to read their time correctly and do not recognise that their destruction is the object of the Flood. The verse form with which these lines concludes, however, reveals their error. The final four lines mark a change in register out of the a/b/a/b rhyme scheme used by the first two stanzas. A triplet followed by a shorter, unrhymed line, this echoes the verse structure employed in the speeches of the Chester God at the beginning of the play, in which he announced his decision to flood the world.89 Disruptive characters’ propensity to mimic the speech and verse forms of moral characters is a common comic dramatic tool, and a particular feature of morality plays such as Mankind, where the play’s vices appropriate the Latinate language and versification of Mercy’s speech to turn his moral reasoning into bawdy nonsense.90 However, where the morality vices, like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, adopt the rhetorical and formulaic trappings as a means of appropriating ‘auctoritee’, the Gossips’ speech underlines their foolishness.91 Their adoption of God’s speech patterning draws on the audience’s own aural memories of the speeches which opened the play and decreed who would live and who would drown. This moment of aural recollection reminds their audience that all outside the ark will perish. While the Gossips’ speech therefore moves between moments in recent past and anticipated future, the futility of their resistance is emphasised through the form in which it is uttered. As with the York Noah’s wife, the momentary threat posed by the Gossips lies in their speech. While they cannot be read through the sixteenth-century meaning of ‘gossip’, which was at this time more likely to be called ‘idle talk’ or ‘janglyng’, the Chester Gossips nevertheless suggest a female community which resists silencing whilst promoting continuity between present and past.92 The potential challenge posed by such speech is evident in the amount of material produced condemning it, arguing that it was dangerous to both speaker and listener.93 This included sermons attempting to stop ‘janglyng’ in church, conduct literature concerning the dangers of idle talk, misogynist narratives featuring the inability of women to keep secrets and court prosecutions for public slander and scolding.94 In the twelfth century, idle talk was even assigned its own demon, Tutivillus, to record it.95 In addition, the root of all unruly speech would surely have been in the minds of those watching the Chester Noyes Fludd, particularly if they had seen the performance of Eve’s transgressive, persuasive speech in the Drapers’ pageant. This might have prompted an audience to look forward to

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

100

Play time

an argument used by St Paul concerning the dangers of female public speech and their holding authority over men.96 The Gossips’ rejection of God and Noah’s authority could thus appear as a continuation of Eve’s disobedience as well as a Pauline nightmare – bringing themes from Hebrew and Christian texts together into one condemnation of female fault. The Gossips’ drowning also collapses the punishments of different times. Transgressive female speech was increasingly legislated against towards the end of the fourteenth century, and late medieval jurisdiction occasionally resorted to the ducking stool as a form of punishment. This could involve the ‘ducking’ or submerging of a scold in a river, pond or lake with the dual intention of silencing and humiliating her.97 While the drowning of the Chester Gossips enacts God’s justice, it therefore also references the kinds of penalty used to threaten Chester’s own loquacious women. Associating rebellious speech with watery punishment thus allows the play to bring audience time and Flood time into simultaneity. The effect this temporal collapse might have had upon the audience is hinted at when, having forced his wife onto the ark, Noah shuts the window. A stage direction, likely added to the manuscript after the performance, tells us, ‘Then shall Noe shutt the windowe of the arke, and for a little space within the bordes hee shalbe scylent’.98 While the audience may have laughed at the Genesis sinners, they too are shut out of the ark with them. During this ‘little space’ which brings the ‘now’ of the Flood to the medieval street, the audience joins the Gossips in the place of the drowned and are held in a kind of stasis until the onboard action is resumed. Presumably, this would have given the audience ample opportunity to reflect upon their own misdemeanours, and to consider whether they, too, would have found themselves in a damp situation. The inclusion of this stage direction also allows for this experience to be repeated for those reading the play manuscript, providing a ‘little space’ in the dialogue for reflection. The Gossips provide the chief source of conflict between Noah and his wife. Where the York wife sat at home in ignorance, the Chester wife fully collaborates in the building of the ark, which demands the whole family’s participation, albeit while comically reflecting on the gendered hierarchies of their tasks.99 Trouble only occurs when she refuses to board before fetching her gossips. Putting her loyalty towards the Gossips above family duty, she says: NOES WYFFE:  But I have my gossips everyechone,   one foote further I will not gone.

Grave new world

101   They shall not drowne, by sayncte John,   and I may save there life.        

The loved me full well, by Christe. But thou wilte lett them into thy chiste, elles rowe forthe, Noe, when thy liste and gett thee a newe wife.100

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Threatening self-exclusion from the ark, the wife adds emphasis to her resolution by swearing by Christ and St John, both of whom were killed for either procuring or spreading the news of salvation for others. Her juxtaposition of drowning with St John is particularly apt: while John carried out the first New Testament watery episode of Christ’s baptism, he was also represented in medieval iconography as precursor to Christ and a martyr in his own right.101 This provokes a moment of temporal collapse which usurps Noah’s role as the typological ‘saviour’ with a parodic inversion of a form of salvation that is not yet open to those the wife wishes to save. Collapsing her own time with events beyond the Flood’s historical frame, she highlights how Christian typological models of salvation prove an inadequate match for the ark. As Chapter 4 will emphasise, points of engagement between different moments in time are not always invested in stressing similarity or continuity. They can also stress difference. This difference between times is further maintained in the fact the wife uses these figures to swear by. From the late fourteenth century, the act of swearing by Christ or by parts of his body was depicted as an act of temporal collapse; a form of mystical violence through which swearers physically tore Christ’s body in their present time. This belief gave rise to sermons, exegetical literature and images representing a mutilated Christ surrounded by men clutching the dismembered body parts they have torn off by their words.102 These scenes bore a resemblance to similar depictions of Jewish torturers mocking Christ at his Crucifixion, images of host torture and images of the arma Christi: narratives and images which collapse Crucifixion and Eucharist into one temporal space and which, as Lisa Lampert has argued, were ‘perpetual and simultaneous, existing beyond a linear temporal frame’.103 The ability of swearing as speech act to injure Christ poses an interesting problem for modern theories of performative speech. Inflicting injury at the moment of utterance, it falls into Austin’s illocutionary category of performative speech. However, Searle’s more recent work suggestions illocutionary performances must be spoken with intent.104 Medieval swearing occupies a more ambiguous position. While swearing

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

102

Play time

performs as an act of violence at the moment of utterance, that violence is never the primary intention of that speech act; rather, this tends to be emphasis. The temporal collapse which medieval swearing initiates, as I have shown, has consequences beyond the tearing of Christ’s body, which itself looks forward to a salvation otherwise absent in the time of the Flood. In performance, the relationship between speech act and intent changes again, as the aim of medieval performance was not, as in later, post-Stanislavski eras, to embody the past, but to re-present it.105 Evidence from tracts such as the ‘Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge’ does raise broader anxieties concerning the relationship between Crucifixion-time and medieval time through the ‘playing out’ of Christ’s tortures.106 However, the frequency with which swearing appears across all forms of late medieval drama indicates that it is probable that belief in the performative violence of swearing did not extend to words spoken in dramatic performance. If it had, the defences of the York and Chester plays as acts of devotional piety would have been undercut by the heavy damage their acts of swearing must have done to Christ’s body in each of the plays. Swearing is often, though not exclusively, placed in the mouths of antagonists, particularly figures such as Herod, Cain, Anna, Caiaphas and the soldiers who crucify Christ. It is also almost always temporally ironic, with antagonists swearing by figures who do not yet exist in their own time, or by ‘hym that me dere boght’, while failing to perceive that the man in front of them – the man they are interrogating, torturing or crucifying – is he by whom they swear. As a physical action, swearing was also more often placed in the mouths of men than women, suggesting that the Chester Noah’s wife is participating in a male speech form. This circumvents the gendering of performative disruptive speech as female and enables her verbal transgression to collapse gender roles as well as moments in time.107 The temporal collapse instigated by her swearing therefore significantly complicates her character. While the speech acts of the York wife engage processes of remembering, the Chester wife’s speech acts dismember. This engagement with violent speech at a violent moment in biblical history collapses multiple events together even in an act intended to sever past from present. Through her collapsing of time, the Chester Noah’s wife therefore finds a different way of challenging the linear narrative form of the Genesis Flood to that of her York counterpart. Her stand against Noah concerning the fate of her Gossips brings Flood, Crucifixion and baptism together in a moment which, like Margery Kempe’s

Grave new world

103

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

pietà, engages with the idea that Christ suffers because of human sin throughout all time. Her rebelliousness is more overt than that of the York wife (whose threat to linear, supersessionary time lies in her untimely questioning rather than outright refusal of the ark). It is also less successful. Instead of disruptively recalling what Noah wishes to remain drowned, the Chester wife’s attempt to bring the condemned community onto the ark only provides further opportunities for Noah to cut away the past. As a consequence, while the Flood of the York play remains, until the end, vulnerable to temporally explosive questions concerning the drowned world, performances of collapsed time in Chester cease after the wife is forcibly carried onto the ark: NOAH: Our tarryinge here mee highly greeves. Over the lande the water spreades; God doe hee as hee will.108

While the wife’s ‘tarryinge’, that is, the illicit wasting of time, has momentarily delayed Noah, God’s Flood is unstoppable. Despite her bid to bring unsanctioned cast members onto the ark, by the end of the Chester play, the saved family and the drowned are exactly where they should be at the end of Genesis 8. The wife’s silence following this demonstrates her own unwilling acceptance of God’s supersessionary time. Unlike the York wife, she has no need to ask her husband where her kin and company are, as she is fully aware of the consequences of her failure to save them. Yet despite this, the collapsed time she experiences comes with a small victory. The Gossips vanish from the dialogue, but the medieval audience, for whom they act as warning and as caricature, remains: living proof that the sin of the ‘old’ world continues. Remembering against authority Women’s memories have always had the potential to challenge the authority of patriarchal narratives. This chapter was written towards the end of a long year in which several high-profile men in arts and politics were subject to allegations of past sexual assaults. Long female memories have the ability to topple present authorities, or at the very least interrupt their success. However much they use the weight of their male authority and privilege to cut away their past from their present, these men, like Noah, will likely spend the rest of their careers waiting for the next unruly question to bob up from the murky depths of the past.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

104

Play time

Collective commemoration can also act as protest art. This was recently demonstrated when women around the world stitched, like Ovid’s Philomela, into a commemorative quilt the names of 598 women killed in the United Kingdom by their partners between 2009 and 2015.109 Instigated by Labour councillor Roxanne Ellis, the quilt was presented at Parliament on International Women’s Day 2017. Through their craft, women across the globe formed a community of modern ‘gossips’ to honour those whose names and deaths might otherwise be allowed to be forgotten. Attempts at silencing women’s memories are usually ineffective as, like flotsam and jetsam, they are sure to resurface elsewhere. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s exhaustive study of the history of silence finds that, in the Hebrew Bible, silence often follows divine acts of destruction and defeat. Conflicts between Noah and his wife in medieval pageants tend to end with a silencing of one figure, rather than a reconciliation or eventual conviction.110 Yet when performed, silence can give a dramatic persona even more subversive power than a character who is speaking.111 The dialogue of the York wife becomes increasingly interruptive as she and Noah seek to advocate their irreconcilable temporal perspective. Her eventual silence does not provide the erasure that Noah longs for. Her repetitive recollections have facilitated the explosive proliferation of remnants from the past so successfully that her silence at the play’s end merely builds anticipation, both of her next speech act and of the next repetitive cycle of human sin and divine punishment. Meanwhile, the speeches of the Chester wife instigate moments of temporal collapse which resist the supersessionary linearity of the Genesis Flood. As a consequence, they highlight differences between models of salvation, challenging God’s narrative of erasure by collapsing it to meet the sacrifice of his son, who will die to save the ultimately unchanged, still sinful earth. The waters rise, the Gossips vanish from the script, but human sin continues. Neither play continues the story of Noah’s family past the landing of the ark. They are left gazing out at a radically changed landscape, uncertainly wondering at their places within it. Narrating an unstable beginning, the York and Chester Flood plays cannot even end convincingly. Instead, they progress into a vague, ever widening future which will facilitate further abrupt leaps between plays bearing episodes from the Hebrew Bible and the far more complete body of plays on the life of Christ. Survivors of the old world, the Noah family seem unsure of what, exactly, they are supposed to do with this empty, ‘new’ one. And Noah – he is still on edge. Waiting for his wife’s next question.

Grave new world

105

Notes

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

  1 Extract from Linda Gregerson, ‘Noah’s Wife’, Poetry, 173.2 (1998), 162–3.   2 Medieval traditions held that Noah’s three sons founded the peoples of Asia, Africa and Europe. See Bernau, ‘“Britain”: Originary Myths and the Stories of Peoples’, p. 630.   3 Genesis 6.18: ‘And I will establish my covenant with thee, and thou shalt enter into the ark, thou and thy sons, and thy wife, and the wives of thy sons with thee.’   4 See Christina M. Fitzgerald, ‘Manning the Ark in York and Chester’, Exemplaria, 15.2 (2003), 351–84; Alan Nelson, “Sacred’ and ‘Secular’ Currents in the Towneley Play of Noah’, Drama Survey, 3 (1964), 393–401 and Melvin Storm, ‘Uxor and Alison: Noah’s Wife in the Flood Plays and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’, MLQ, 48.4 (1987), 303–19.   5 Clifford Davidson, Material Culture and Medieval Drama (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999), pp. 1–15.   6 Richard Beadle, ed., ‘The Flood’, in The York Cycle, ll. 269–70.   7 This early criticism follows the pattern of E. K. Chambers’ thoroughly contested ‘evolutionary’ theory of the development of medieval drama in The Medieval Stage, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903). See Katherine Garvin, ‘A Note on Noah’s Wife’, Modern Language Notes, 49.2 (1934), 88–90; Anna Jean Mill, ‘Noah’s Wife Again’, PMLA, 56.3 (1941), 613–26 and Arthur Brown, ‘Folklore Elements in the Medieval Drama’, Folklore, 63.2 (1952), 65–78.   8 Sandy Bardsley, Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 58.   9 See Woolf, The English Mystery Plays, p. 133 and Richard J. Daniels, ‘“Uxor” Noah: A Raven or a Dove?’, TCR, 14.1 (1979), 23–32 and Craig, English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages, pp. 8–11.   10 Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women on Top: Symbolic Sexual Inversion and Political Disorder in Early Modern Europe’, in The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, ed. by Barbara A. Babcock (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 147–90 (pp. 154–5).  11 See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 24–5 (p. 25).   12 See Storm, ‘Uxor and Alison’, p. 319 and Anthony Gash, ‘Carnival against Lent: The Ambivalence of Medieval Drama’, in Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology and History, ed. by David Aers (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986), pp. 74–98 (p. 79).  13 It is doubtful whether such a norm existed in an environment that witnessed great change in social, religious and economic roles within marriage. See Anna Dronzek, ‘Gender Roles and the Marriage Market in Fifteenth-Century England: Ideals and Practices’, in Love,

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

106

Play time

Marriage, and Family Ties in the Later Middle Ages, ed. by Isabel Davis, Miriam Müller and Sarah Rees Jones (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 63–76 and Neil Cartlidge, Medieval Marriage: Literary Approaches, 1100–1300 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 1–32.   14 See Twycross, ‘“Transvestism” in the Mystery Plays’, 123–80; Peter Happé and others, ‘Thoughts on “Transvestism” by Divers Hands’, METh, 5.2 (1983) 110–22; Richard Rastall, ‘Female Roles in AllMale Casts’, METh, 7.1 (1985), 25–50; Robert L. A. Clark and Claire Sponsler, ‘Queer Play: The Cultural Work of Crossdressing in Medieval Drama’, NLH, 28.2 (1997), 319–44 and Jane Tolmie, ‘Mrs Noah and Didactic Abuses’, Early Theatre, 5.1 (2002), 11–35.   15 See Ruth Evans, ‘Feminist Re-Enactments: Gender and the Towneley Vxor Noe’, in A Wyf Ther Was: Essays in Honour of Paule MertensFonck, ed. by Juliette Dor (Liège: Liège Language and Literature, 1992), pp. 145–54; Theresa Coletti, ‘A Feminist Approach to the Corpus Christi Cycles’, in Approaches to Teaching Medieval English Drama, ed. by Emmerson, pp. 79–89; and Katie Normington, ‘Giving Voice to Women: Teaching Feminist Approaches to the Mystery Plays’, College Literature, 28.2 (2001), 130–54.   16 Nolan Sidhu, Indecent Exposure, pp. 191–3.   17 Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, p. 91.   18 Carolyn Dinshaw first initiated a discussion of multiple temporalities experienced in one simultaneous moment in her article ‘Temporalities’, pp. 107–23. This was expanded in her more detailed study of asynchrony and ‘queer’ experiences of time, How Soon is Now?   19 See Genesis 10 for the record of the division of the lands between Noah’s offspring, and Genesis 11.1–9 for the subsequent scattering of the people of Babel.   20 See Augustine, City of God, XVII. 7. From the University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/ modeng/public/AugCity.html [accessed 25 August 2018].   21 See Jeanie C. Crain, Reading the Bible as Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), p. 38. On secular uses of supersessionary temporal models, see Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty.   22 Beadle, ed., ‘The Building of the Ark’, ll. 16 and 24.  23 See Lumiansky and Mills, ed., ‘The Thirde Pageante of Noyes Fludd’, in The Chester Mystery Cycle, pp. 42–56, ll. 37–8; Spector, ed., ‘Noah’, ll. 92–125 and Davis, ed., ‘The Newcastle Play’, in Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, ll. 1–38.  24 Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, eds, ‘Cleanness’, in The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript (Exeter: University of Exeter Press; 1978, repr. 2007), pp. 111–84 (ll. 399–403).   25 See Anke Bernau’s discussion of the tricky business of forming a new beginning atop a former culture in ‘Beginning with Albina: Remembering the Nation’, Exemplaria, 21.3 (2009), 247–73 and Wim Verbaal,

Grave new world

107

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Bernard of Clairvaux’s School of Oblivion’, in Negotiating Heritage, ed. by Bruun and Glaser, pp. 221–37 (p. 221).   26 Elliott Novacich, Shaping the Archive, p. 22.   27 Beadle, ed., ‘The Flood’, ll. 29–36.   28 See Sheingorn, ‘Typology and the Teaching of Medieval Drama’, p. 90.   29 See Woolf, The English Mystery Plays, p. 133.   30 Beadle, ed., ‘The Flood’, l. 32.   31 Beadle, ed., ‘The Flood’, ll. 141–52.  32 Normington, Gender and Medieval Drama, p. 127. See also Jane Tolmie on the ways Noah’s wife makes the cruelties of the play apparent in Tolmie, ‘Mrs Noah and Didactic Abuses’, 11–15.   33 BNF, Manuscrits, Français 28, f. 66v. See also the ark riding above the sinuous corpses of the dead in The Holkham Bible Picture Book, BL Add MS 47682 fol. 8r and William de Brailes’ thirteenth-century illustration of the flood in Walters Art Museum Ms. W.106, fol. 3r, which does not show the ark at all but instead focuses its entire attention on the accumulated sedimentary layers of dead livestock, birds and humans.   34 See BL Add MS 47682 fol. 8r and Walters Art Museum Ms. W.106, fol. 3r.   35 Beadle, ed., ‘The Flood’, ll. 147–8.   36 See Kruger, The Spectral Jew, pp. 175–8 and Cohen, The Friars and the Jews, pp. 19–22.   37 See Tolmie, ‘Mrs Noah and Didactic Abuses’, p. 12: ‘Mrs Noah’s trouble-making highlights the loss of life caused by the Flood, and hints at some painful exclusions – of wives from the inner lives of husbands, of persons from life itself and from salvation as well’ and Elliott Novacich, Shaping the Archive, pp. 86–90.   38 See Davis, ed., ‘The Newcastle Play’, pp. 19–31.   39 Beadle, ed., ‘The Flood’, ll. 109–10.   40 See Normington, Gender and Medieval Drama, pp. 125–32 and, on the idolatrous implications of man’s ability to re-create, Shannon Gayk, Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 123–54 (p. 125).   41 Beadle, ed., ‘The Flood’, ll. 113–8.   42 See Beadle, ed., ‘The Fall of Man’, in The York Plays, pp. 64–9 (ll. 141–2).  43 Biddick, The Typological Imaginary, p. 1.  44 Lampert calls these troublesome figures the ‘hermeneutical Jew and hermeneutical Woman, whose residues stubbornly challenged the transformative Christian paradigm’. Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference, p. 14. See also Patrick Geary, Women at the Beginning, pp. 60–75.   45 See Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, pp. 13–32 and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Time Out of Memory’, in The Post-Historical Middle Ages, ed. by Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 37–62 (p. 384).

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

108

Play time

  46 See Schreyer, Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft and Black, ‘“Nayles Large and Lang”’, 85–104.   47 See Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 29–62; Geraldine Heng, ‘The Romance of England: Richard Coeur de Lyon, Saracens, Jews, and the Politics of Race and Nation’, in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 135–71 (p. 135); Bernau, ‘Beginning with Albina: Remembering the Nation’, 247–73 and Ruth Evans, ‘The Devil in Disguise: Perverse Female Origins of the Nation’, in Consuming Narratives: Gender and Monstrous Appetite in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. by L. H. McAvoy and Teresa Walters (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), pp. 182–95.   48 See Anke Bernau in ‘“Britain”: Originary Myths and the Stories of Peoples’, p. 634, which finds beginnings linked to both the need to forget and the need to repeat.   49 Vance Smith, The Book of the Incipit, p. 137.   50 Vance Smith, ‘Irregular Histories: Forgetting Ourselves’, p. 168.   51 See Carruthers, The Book of Memory, pp. 75–7.  52 See Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 95–8 (p. 97).   53 See Verbaal, ‘Bernard of Clairvaux’s School of Oblivion’, pp. 221–37 and Janet Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 155–68. See also David Lowenthal’s Preface to The Art of Forgetting, ed. by Adrian Forty and Susanne Küchler (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2001), pp. x–xiii.   54 See Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory, pp. 231–3; Theodore K. Lerud on dramatic performance and devotional memory in Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama, pp. 43–4; J. A. H. Lewis, ‘History and Everlastingness in Hugh of St Victor’s Figures of Noah’s Ark’, in Time and Eternity, ed. by Jaritz and Moreno-Riaño, pp. 203–22 and Elliott Novacich, Shaping the Archive, pp. 52–85.   55 See Fitzgerald, ‘Manning the Ark in York and Chester’, p. 383.   56 See Van Houts, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900–1200, p. 147.   57 James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, pp. 406–12.   58 See Beadle, ed., ‘The Creation’ in The York Plays, pp. 54–8. It appears that the speech between Noah and his wife inherits God’s divine (and dramatic) ability to speak things into being.   59 Beadle, ed., ‘The Flood’, ll. 141–6.   60 See Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, eds, Performativity and Performance (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 1 and John R. Searle, ‘How Performatives Work’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 12 (1989), 535–58.

Grave new world

109

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

 61 See Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 3; J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 52 and Butterworth, Staging Conventions, p. 12.   62 Beadle, ed., ‘The Flood’, ll. 151–2.   63 See Beadle, ed., ‘The Flood’, in The York Plays, pp. 83–90 (ll. 269–72).   64 For an overview of the changes developing in late medieval Christian theologies of the afterlife, see Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 301–78.   65 Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, p. 91. Gil Harris’ theories are chiefly concerned with objects rather than dialogue, and have not before been applied to speech acts which imply, but do not necessarily require, the physical presence of something (be it object, landscape or person).   66 See also Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, pp. 13–32.   67 See Beadle, ed., ‘The Flood’, l. 268.   68 England and Pollard, eds, ‘Noah and the Ark’, ll. 534–40.   69 Elliott Novacich, Shaping the Archive, p. 103.   70 Elliott Novacich, Shaping the Archive, p. 97.   71 Beadle, ed., ‘The Building of the Ark’, l. 24.  72 For an overview of medieval scientific, folkloric and theological approaches to rainbows, see Raymond L. Lee and Alistair B. Fraser, eds, The Rainbow Bridge: Rainbows in Art, Myth and Science (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), pp. 168–205.   73 Beadle, ed., ‘The Flood’, ll. 305–8.   74 Beadle, ed., ‘The Flood’, ll. 303–4.   75 On the Eucharist’s ‘intersection of history and eternity’, see Daniel P. Poteet II, ‘Time, Eternity, and Dramatic Form in the Ludus Coventriae “Passion Play I”’, Comparative Drama, 8.4 (1974–5), 369–85 (p. 369); Dutton, ‘Secular Medieval Drama’, pp. 384–94, and Magnus, ‘Time on the Stage’, pp. 117–20. See Lerud, Memory, Images and the English Corpus Christi Drama, pp. 63–75 on the mnemonic and political consequences of the drama’s transformation of familiar public spaces.  76 As I note in my introduction, discussions of temporal collapse have been present in medieval drama criticism since the work of V. A. Kolve.   77 Dinshaw, ‘Temporalities’, p. 109.   78 See D. Vance Smith’s discussion of history as the measurement of intervals in ‘Irregular Histories’, p. 164.   79 See Margaret Rogerson, ‘Affective Piety: A “Method” for Medieval Actors in the Chester Cycle’, in The Chester Cycle in Context, ed. by Dell, Klausner and Ostovich, pp. 93–107.   80 Dinshaw, ‘Temporalities’, p. 107.   81 Beadle, ed., ‘The Flood’, ll. 307–8.  82 Dinshaw, How Soon is Now?, p. 4.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

110

Play time

 83 See Beadle, ed., ‘The Crucifixion’, pp. 315–23; Spector, ed., ‘The Trial’, pp. 139–52 and England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Killing of Abel’, in The Towneley Plays, pp. 9–22.   84 Susan E. Phillips, Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), p. 6. The definition ‘god-sib(be (n.)’ in the Middle English Dictionary centres the term on both spiritual and social relationships: ‘(a) One’s sponsor at baptism or confirmation, a godparent . . . A close friend, companion, pal . . . as item of direct address.’ See http://quod. lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED18998 [accessed 12 September 2013].   85 Fitzgerald, ‘Manning the Ark in York and Chester’, p. 365.   86 Lumiansky and Mills, eds, ‘The Thirde Pageante of Noyes Fludd’, ll. 225–36.  87 The Gossips’ drunkenness also appears to prefigure Noah’s own drunkenness in Genesis 9.20–25. Although The Newcastle Play hints at this later event when the demon-influenced wife gives her husband a drink, Noah’s drunkenness is otherwise absent in the Flood plays. See Norman Davis (ed.), ‘The Newcastle Play’, ll. 56–60 and Genesis 9.20–25.   88 Lumiansky and Mills, eds, ‘The Thirde Pageante of Noyes Fludd’, l. 235.   89 See Lumiansky and Mills, eds, ‘The Thirde Pageante of Noyes Fludd’, ll. 1–40.   90 Mark Eccles, ed., ‘Mankind’, in The Macro Plays: The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind, EETS, o.s., 262 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 153–84 (ll. 45–52). See also Steenbrugge, Drama and Sermon in Late Medieval England, pp. 59–62.   91 Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue’, in Larry D. Benson (ed.), The Riverside Chaucer (Bath: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 105–16 (l. 1).   92 See Susan E. Phillips, ‘Gossip and (Un)official Writing’, in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature, ed. by Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 478–90 and Deborah Jones, ‘Gossip: Notes on Women’s Oral Culture’, WSIQ, 3 (1980), 193–8 (p. 194).   93 See Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 56–92, and Sylvia Schein, ‘Used and Abused: Gossip in Medieval Society’, in Good Gossip, ed. by Robert F. Goodman and Aaron Ben-Ze’ev (Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 1994), pp. 139–53.   94 For court prosecutions of idle female speech, see Bardsley, ed., Venomous Tongues, p. 46 and, in literature, the fifteenth-century lyrics collated in Salisbury, ed., The Trials and Joys of Marriage. For preachers’

Grave new world

111

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

arguments against chattering in church, see Susan E. Phillips, ‘“Janglynge in cherce”: Gossip and the Exemplum’, in The Hands of the Tongue: Essays on Deviant Speech, ed. by Edwin D. Craun (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), pp. 61–94.   95 See Miriam Gill, ‘From Urban Myth to Didactic Image: The Warning to Swearers’, in The Hands of the Tongue, ed. by Craun, pp. 137–60; Margaret Jennings, ‘Tutivillus: The Literary Career of the Recording Demon’, Studies in Philology, 74.5 (1977), 1–95 and Kathy Cawsey, ‘Tutivillus and “Kyrkchaterars”: Strategies of Control in the Middle Ages’, Studies in Philology, 102.4 (2005), 434–51.   96 1 Timothy 2.11–14: ‘Let the woman learn in silence, with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to use authority over the man: but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed; then Eve. And Adam was not seduced; but the woman being seduced, was in the transgression.’   97 See Bardsley, Venomous Tongues, pp. 142–3.   98 See the stage directions in Lumiansky and Mills, eds, ‘The Thirde Pageante of Noyes Fludd’, ll. 260–1.  99 The women of the play are given less skilled work than the men, as Noah’s wife claims: ‘women bynne weake to underfoe / any great travell.’ This is undermined by the fact that the women perform most of the carrying of heavy building materials for the ark, suggesting that they are weak in skill, rather than strength. Lumiansky and Mills, eds, ‘The Thirde Pageante of Noyes Fludd’, ll. 67–68. 100 Lumiansky and Mills, eds, ‘The Thirde Pageante of Noyes Fludd’, ll. 201–8. 101 See Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 315. 102 See Gill, ‘From Urban Myth to Didactic Image: The Warning to Swearers’, pp. 137–60. 103 Lampert, ‘The Once and Future Jew’, p. 243. See also Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book, pp. 145–68. 104 Austin, How to Do Things with Words, p. 45 and Searle, ‘How Performatives Work’, 535–58. 105 Clare Wright, ‘Ontologies of Play: Reconstructing the Relationship between Audience and Act in Early English Drama’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 35.2 (2017), 187–206. 106 See Davidson, ed., ‘A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge’, p. 97 (ll. 133–5), which maintains that, ‘sithen thes miraclis playeris taken in bourde the ernestful werkis of God, no doute that ne they scorned God as diden the Jewis that bobbiden Crist’. 107 See Patricia Parker, ‘On the Tongue: Cross Gendering, Effeminacy, and the Art of Words’, Style, 23 (1989), 445–65; Lochrie, Covert Operations, p. 57 and Craun, ed., The Hands of the Tongue, pp. xiii–xiv. 108 Lumiansky and Mills, eds, ‘The Thirde Pageante of Noyes Fludd’, ll. 250–2.

112

Play time

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

109 See The Women’s Quilt site: ‘the most beautiful project that shouldn’t exist.’ https://thewomensquilt.wordpress.com [accessed 1 January 2020]. 110 See Diarmaid MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History (St Ives: Allen Lane, 2013), pp. 11–29. 111 Daisy Black, ‘Commanding Un-Empty Space: Silence, Stillness and Scopic Authority in the York Christ Before Herod’, in Gender: Places, Spaces and Thresholds, ed. by Victoria Blud, Diane Heath and Joseph Klafter (London: IHR, 2019), pp. 237–50.

3

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Time out of joint: queering the Nativity in the Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play

This voice, wanting and unfulfilled in the now as it is conventionally construed, this voice whose desire requires, even demands, another kind of time beyond such linearity, empty and homogenous, is a queer voice.1 MAK:  And ilke yere that commys to man   She bryngys furth a lakan,   And some yeres two.2

Carolyn Dinshaw’s ground-breaking work How Soon is Now? provides an insight into how it might feel to be an anachronism in the Middle Ages. Identifying ‘forms of desirous, embodied being that are out of sync with the ordinary linear measurements of everyday’, she confronts narratives in which human beings experience temporal displacement which isolates them from those around them.3 Yet while Dinshaw’s work has been highly formative in the development of this book, her ideas of queer time, like those of her contemporaries, hinge on the presupposition that there is a normative or homogenous way of experiencing time, and that ‘straight’ time takes a linear form.4 However, medieval plays tend to frustrate any idea of time as homogenous, let alone as a shared or lived experience. In the plays examined in the previous chapters, not only do the on-stage figures experience the time of their narratives subjectively, independently and differently from one another, but they also acknowledge that their audiences experience time subjectively. This chapter argues that early theatre might also be productively read against certain ‘queer’ models of time and, in turn, provide a set of tools with which we might re-assess the role and scope of those models. The diversity of audience and performer experiences of time becomes particularly visible in representations of medieval street performance. For example, Peter Baltens’ 1570 painting of a performance of a Flemish farce (Figure 5) shows the remarkable variety of

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

5  Peter Baltens, A Flemish Kermis with a Performance of the Farce, ‘Een cluyte van Plaeyerwater’, c.1570.

Time out of joint

115

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

ways in which a crowd might engage with play time.5 The spectators densely crowded around a temporary stage seem to be engrossed in the dramatic narrative ‘present’ of the play. They are engaged by the gesture of the player representing the woman being kissed onstage: perhaps she is bringing them into the joke, or calling on them as witnesses in the hope of ending the kiss. Meanwhile, a man in a red cap is more preoccupied with the play’s mechanical present as he passes his colleague a stool through the back of the pageant’s curtain. Some watch from less legitimate positions. One man has climbed a ladder to watch the play from the thatch of a house, and two others stand on scaffolding raised above a dining table. All three of these audience members are simultaneously experiencing the play’s narrative while their bodies remain aware of the possible future implications of their precarious, unstable positions. For those perched above the dining table, the sound of the diners would merge with their consciousness of the play, overlaying the onstage dialogue. Other spectators seem to be looking at other audience members and gauging their reaction to the play, perhaps in order to decide whether they will react in the same manner themselves. An isolated couple in black-and-white garb stand in the middle of the crowd, resolutely refusing to engage with the performance’s ‘time’ at all, but staring straight out to engage with the time of the painting’s viewer, sharing and inviting judgement on the spectacle behind them. The time of the play even seems to affect those not in the vicinity of the performance space. In the lower centre of the painting a couple embrace. Although they are not paying any attention to the play, their posture mimics that of the players. Baltens humorously draws attention to the similarity between the stage performers and this couple through his use of colouring and costume. For this couple, the play is forgotten – a thing of the ‘past’ – and yet their actions suggest they are still influenced by its action. None of Baltens’ spectator positions suggest a straightforward or linear engagement with the play’s narrative. Instead, its painted figures engage with multiple simultaneous presents, or ‘nows’, as Dinshaw calls them, as well as in processes of memory and anticipation. Because of this diversity of experience, the analysis of dramatic spectatorship requires the exercise of what Greg Walker and John McGavin call ‘speculation and imagination’ in order to comprehend the multiple, simultaneous individual responses to a performance.6 This diversity of temporal experience is not a phenomenon relating only to drama, but is common to many performance forms. This is perhaps why so many queer theorists working on temporality tend to centre film within their arguments, with its ability to freeze

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

116

Play time

frames, rewind, replay and show the same event from different camera angles.7 Alicia Spencer-Hall has strikingly demonstrated the validity of this kind of cinematic approach in analysing the times and motifs at play in medieval hagiographies, which also show saints experiencing time in a different way to their in-text ‘audiences’.8 Queer theorists such as Rebecca Schneider, Jaclyn I. Pryor, José Esteban-Munˇoz and Jack Halberstam have also turned their attention to other live performance forms, including drag, music, immersive theatre and historical re-enactment, to examine what Schneider characterises as ‘the tangle of explicit theatricality and time’.9 These works demonstrate the queerness of experiences of time which have much in common with those examined throughout this book: time which repeats, doubles, pauses, lingers, remembers and deviates.10 The modelling of time as ‘queer’ likewise risks a similar homogenising of experiences of time which, as the dramatic personae explored in this book show, are diverse, personal and set in opposition to each other. Annamarie Jagose’s observation during a roundtable which theorised queer temporalities is pertinent here, although it was not fully addressed at the time: ‘I wonder about the ease with which we reify queer temporality, that adjectival “queer” throwing a proprietary loop around properties or characteristics that have long been theorized as at the heart of “time” or, for that matter, “history.”’11 The term ‘queer’ is itself currently undergoing critical interrogation due to its worrying propensity to erase, or homogenise, a wide and diverse spectrum of sexualities and gender expressions.12 As a consequence, ‘queer’ models of time have also become increasingly nuanced, with much of the discussion moving towards the kinds of agenda behind any historiographical structuring of time as linear and how these structures have been used to silence those who resist this pattern.13 Surprisingly, given that medieval biblical plays were very much in the business of facilitating embodied and desiring moments of ‘touch’ across time, few theatre scholars have attempted a queer reading of the ways they interact with time. Garrett P. J. Epp’s discussion of sexual desire and theatrical representation in the Passion plays and in the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge demonstrates the rich possibilities such an approach can open up, particularly when considering the plays’ use of gaze and symbolic representation.14 This chapter examines what happens to queer experiences of time if the kinds of diverse temporalities employed to such dynamic effect in Baltens’ painting and in the clashes between religious figures such as Mary and Joseph are considered the ‘norm’ of early performance. That is: what can plays which

Time out of joint

117

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

frequently disrupt notions of linear time teach us about what ‘queer’ time might be? The answers can be found in a play which performs a deliberate swerve away from its gospel narrative. The Nativity story represented in the sixteenth-century Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play is a little stranger than those of its contemporaries. The play opens predictably enough, on a cold, windy hillside. Three shepherds enter one at a time, and each has a speech which, ‘in maner of mone’, complains about the weather, the injustices of land ownership and management and the tyranny of wives over their husbands.15 As night draws on, Mak enters. A flamboyant thief with a love of disguise, he casts a spell on the shepherds to make them fall asleep and steals a fat sheep. When Mak returns home, he finds his wife Gyll is less than impressed. She tells him he’s sure to be hanged for sheep stealing. When Mak panics, she comes up with ‘a good bowrde’ (jest).16 They swaddle the sheep in cloth, tying its four feet together, and place it in a cradle. When the shepherds search the house, Gyll lies on a bed, moaning and groaning and pretending she has just given birth. The trick is eventually discovered when one of the more observant shepherds returns to give the child a gift, and spots that the ‘baby’ in the cradle has a long snout. The shepherds punish Mak by tossing him in a blanket and return to the hillside, where they settle down to sleep. Moments later, they are awakened a second time by a chorus of angels, who tell them to travel to Bethlehem. The shepherds go, and find the Nativity scene the audience has, presumably, been waiting for all along, with the Virgin Mary in the stable and a baby in its proper place in the manger. This diversion from biblical subject matter in the Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play marks it apart from other contemporary religious drama, and is one of the reasons why the play is one of the most anthologised in modern editions. Much work has attempted to make sense of the play’s structure, particularly of how the Mak, Gyll and sheep episode relates to what is often characterised as the chief subject matter of Christ’s Nativity. Several studies read the sheep-in-the-manger plot as a moment of creative anachronism, parody and symbolism which engaged the medieval audience with the complex iconography surrounding the Lamb of God.17 Yet while the sheep episode is often read as a form of prophetic foreshadowing, other critics have noted that it also acts as a delaying mechanism. C. Clifford Flanigan, for example, argued that ‘the playwright has constructed a drama which persistently frustrates that expectation [of the Nativity] until the closing lines’.18 Lawrence Ross, meanwhile, resists reading the play as a sequential

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

118

Play time

narrative. He claims the sheep episode forms an ‘uncanny Nativity’ out of proportion to the ‘proper matter of the play’, which he considers to be the ‘displaced’ adoration scene.19 Ross’s challenge of the critical drive to assimilate this episode comfortably into the fabric of the Nativity is crucial, and holds much in common with other models of time which displace or disrupt linear narratives. Certain elements of the Second Shepherds’ Play – particularly concerning the diverted, or inverted, ‘Nativity’ narrative and Gyll’s giving ‘birth’ to a sheep which is destined to be eaten – play heavily into narratives of time which work in opposition to procreative linearity. These manifest linguistically and bodily, and the play’s often grotesque images of pregnancy and birth provide a contesting narrative to the (offstage, unseen and miraculously pain-free) birth of Jesus. This plot, which complicates, delays and disrupts the Nativity’s narrative drive towards the Christ-child’s birth, holds much in common with one specific model of queer time. In 2004, Lee Edelman constructed an act of queer resistance towards what he called ‘reproductive futurism’; that is, a political and social system which fetishises the child as an emblem of futurity.20 Questioning the heterosexual use of the child endlessly to reproduce heteronormative values, Edelman was also reacting against the social figuring of homosexuality as future-less in the wake of HIV/AIDS and in an environment in which it was (and still remains) difficult for Western same-sex couples to adopt or become parents.21 Later responses have complicated this model, and José Esteban-Munˇoz responded that giving up on futurity is not an option, arguing that queerness ‘is always in the horizon’.22 Subsequent attempts to historicise queer time in the light of Edelman have stressed that ‘queerness’ is not necessarily about sexuality or desire, but about how an individual’s experiences of time and futurity might be out of sync with the (often linear) narratives of the status quo.23 Jack Halberstam argues that ‘[q]ueer uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction’.24 Meanwhile Elizabeth Freeman has argued that our understanding of history and our approaches to historical research have been repetitively influenced by chrononormativity. This means that life events partaking of a ‘normative’, family-oriented procreative timeline, such as births, marriages, christenings, comings of age and deaths, tend to be recorded, while other events and relationships are not.25 Carla Freccero has also investigated the assumptions at work in the act of periodisation. Her volume Queer/Early/Modern does for queer histories what Kathleen Biddick’s The Typological Imaginary did for Jewish

Time out of joint

119

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

histories, examining how establishing (heterosexual, Christian) linear patterns of chronology as normative has systematically relied on the overwriting, erasure and making spectral of other histories.26 Halberstam has suggested that we might excavate some of these spectral, non-linear histories by examining the ‘ludic temporalities’ of those whom society might not consider productive, either economically or sexually.27 Halberstam’s suggestion that we turn towards ‘the silly archive’ in order to recover these histories holds particular resonance for my analysis of the Second Shepherds’ Play.28 As with the pageant arguments of Mary and Joseph and Noah and his wife, comedy, laughter and ‘silliness’ can often tell us stories the ‘serious matter’ of the Bible narratives do not. While the silliness of the sheep in the manger provokes laughter, however, it also generates associations and images which deny the kinds of reproductive futurity linked either to the Christ-child’s divine salvation or to that signified by a more ordinary human child. Although the physical and theological comedy of the sheep episode is important, this chapter therefore asks what happens if we dare take Gyll and Mak seriously. While this chapter maintains the arguments made in the previous chapters about the inherent subjectivity of time in performance, it finds a useful model in the queer theorists’ work on histories which actively resist linear time forms which posit family reproduction as a desirable confirmation of futurity. As such, it represents my rethinking both around my response to Dinshaw’s work in relation to medieval performance cultures, and around queer time more generally. The earliest audiences of the Second Shepherds’ Play would have expected a narrative with which they were highly familiar, beginning with an angel’s appearance on a hillside and ending with the shepherds’ adoration of the baby Jesus. This chapter finds that the sheep episode constitutes at best an interruption of the Nativity story, and at worst a derailment of it. I also examine the heavily embodied nature of this interruption, whose iconographical play is so entrenched in images of pregnancy, birth and reproduction, despite the fact that Gyll and Mak’s house is curiously child-free. In reading the couple against chrononormative assumptions, it finds that Mak and Gyll’s ‘bowrde’ orchestrates a form of gendered play where a sheep in a cradle destabilises the meaning of the baby in the manger. Non-linear compilation The Towneley manuscript, Huntingdon MS HM1, has had almost as many histories and origins attributed to it as there are drama

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

120

Play time

specialists working on it. The manuscript contains a compilation of pageants, including material from York’s cycle, ordered into a Creation-to-Doomsday narrative. Peter Happé’s exhaustive study, aptly titled Unity and Diversity, has pointed to evidence that the scribe tried to make these disparate texts look all of a piece through the use of speech headings, consistent layout and continuous writing: ‘in assembling the parts at his disposal, he was striving to create something coherent.’29 This suggests a conscious attempt on the part of the compiler to impose linear narrative on texts that carried different meanings in their earlier performance contexts. For example, Alexandra Johnston has argued that the Second Shepherds’ Play was originally intended as a ‘stand-alone’ play for Christmas, and was only later compiled into the manuscript.30 Christmas plays, she notes, were often longer than the cycle Nativity pageants, and sometimes employed professional and semi-professional players. Like the Mary play of the N-Town manuscript, Johnston suggests that the play has been put in scribal juxtaposition with other types of biblical drama, which also explains the Towneley manuscript’s rather eccentric treatment of gospel chronology. As Diane Watt and Roberta Magnani argued in discussing ‘the queer temporality’ of medieval manuscripts, texts tend to survive because they have been copied, included or salvaged due to their inherent value in supporting (patriarchal) authority.31 Scribal error, omission, compilation or re-writing can enact a ‘ludic scrambling’ of these structures.32 Arthur Bahr has also argued in his important study of assembled manuscripts that compilations rarely tend to signify in ‘straightforward, conclusive ways’, and that they complicate the history of the texts they contain.33 For example, this happens with the Towneley manuscript’s inclusion of two shepherds’ plays containing nativities, but no individual pageant showing the birth of Christ. In both the First and Second Shepherds’ Plays the baby Jesus appears already born. While the manuscript’s scribe was clearly prioritising linear, episodic chronology, the moment of Christ’s birth which, as my first chapter argued, was so often centralised in the Christian structuring of time, is conspicuously absent.34 This also means that the manuscript encourages its readers and spectators to encounter the Nativity through the eyes of the shepherds. While it is plausible to consider the Towneley manuscript as either a performance text or a record of plays that were once performed, we don’t know whether they were designed for indoor or outdoor theatre, for public or private audiences, or where the plays originated from. The town of Wakefield has conventionally been

Time out of joint

121

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

associated with the Towneley manuscript due to the fact its name appears on the first folio and the records of performances in the town in 1556, 1559 and 1576. However, since Barbara Palmer’s study it has been generally accepted that some of the pageants came from other civic centres, including Doncaster, Beverley and Pontefract.35 This admits the possibility of a considerable amount of time elapsing between the likely fifteenth-century composition dates of the different plays and the date of the mid-sixteenth-century compilation.36 Developing Palmer’s analysis, Murray McGillivray claims the manuscript was compiled as a result of ‘an order to revive the performance of Corpus Christi Pageants after a considerable interval’ during the reign of Queen Mary.37 This would explain the reason for the manuscript’s compilation, as well as for the heavy borrowing from York. McGillivray reads the plays as ‘nostalgic cultural objects [from] a fractured society rather than . . . the confident productions of comparatively undisturbed medieval cultural ease’.38 The Towneley manuscript is a nostalgic production, seeking to stitch together the illusion of linear narrative and historical precedent from a diverse range of performance texts, times and provenances. Nostalgia, as Dinshaw has argued, is another form of desire for the past, a ‘longing for another kind of time beyond linearity’.39 As a nostalgic compilation, the Towneley manuscript produces a different form of play time management compared to, for example, that documented in York, where play lengths were managed and guilds fined if they erred beyond their allotted times. If the manuscript were a Marian production, then its relation to other examples of medieval drama is also retrospective. Either the play text is, like Noah’s wife, an anachronism, survivor and relic, or it is a deliberate act aimed at (re)constructing the past and articulating the hope that the plays may continue to be performed in the future. Gail McMurray Gibson argues that medieval dramatic manuscripts in a post-Reformation climate became ‘bookish shrines’ which frequently resisted reformer narratives of supersession and erasure: the texts of late medieval performances [. . .] that claimed omnitemporality at the same time they were being extinguished by Reformist edict, necessarily charged the embodiment of the passing show of the lost religious past with the numinous power of the holy relic. These texts even rendered the medieval drama manuscript a kind of bookish shrine.40

If the manuscript were compiled during the Catholic reign of Mary, it later became an object of recusant remembrance when, in 1604,

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

122

Play time

it came into the possession of the Catholic Lancashire Towneley family – two decades after the last recorded performance of biblical drama in England.41 As such, the history of the manuscript reflects several of the qualities of queer time outlined by Dinshaw. If it were a Marian production, then the compilation of play scripts into a cycle was a late or belated attempt to resurrect and recall into coherency fragments of a recent past. The hands which attributed the scripts to the town of Wakefield and to various guilds suggest a clear investment in the ‘now’ of the manuscript’s possible performance and its role in forming civic identities and histories. They also suggest a desire to associate the plays with places and crafts for future readers, suggesting the hope that the compilation of plays might facilitate the stretching of this ‘now’ into the future. Yet given its status as a product of a time of fragile Catholic restoration, this future cannot have been assured; hence, perhaps, the scribes’ desire to preserve this association. Later on, in the hands of the Towneley family, the manuscript became an antiquarian, possibly even a sentimental object of desire – yearning backwards towards a vanished tradition even as it simultaneously functioned as an icon of resistance to the ‘present’ religious and theatrical climate. As such, the manuscript might have functioned as a deposit of memory in recording previous productions, and as an act of futurity – anticipating a time when the plays might be staged again. The manuscript itself also allowed the plays to be repeatedly re-lived in the present through the imagination of its reader. As such, the sixteenth-century manuscript, like its pageant material, resists linear historicist categorisation and participates in several times simultaneously. Embodied time The Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play has long been used as an exemplar of how medieval biblical drama used anachronism to make the biblical past ‘present’ for its audiences. In the play, the methods include the use of medieval names, fashions and places; topical social commentary; and the common device of having characters mention people and events not yet present in the timeline of the play, such as the Crucifixion, Mary and Joseph, ‘Crystes crosse’, saints and even, in Mak’s case, Pontius Pilate.42 However, merely identifying such devices as ‘anachronisms’ is misleading, as the concept of ‘anachronism’ presupposes that the play subscribes to an understanding of time that is consistent and normative. The Second Shepherds’ Play does not present linear time as normative.

Time out of joint

123

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

From its opening, the play is riddled with devices which aim to establish a ‘now’ shared with the time and place of its audience, while frequently reminding them that they are watching a play. These include moments which anticipate the plot to come (including Gyll and Mak’s outrageous trick); moments of direct address; and metatheatrical moments, such when the second shepherd exposes the theatrical labour of his performance by declaring ‘My parte have I fun’.43 These frustrate an attempt to situate the play within a single specific point in either gospel or late medieval time, instead establishing a time which at once feels deeply familiar, yet also not quite reliable. The play opens with the first shepherd’s lament about the weather: PRIMUS PASTOR: Lord, what these weders ar cold! / and I am yll happyd; I am nere hande dold, / so long haue I nappyd; My legys thay fold, / my fyngers ar chappyd, It is not as I wold, / for I am al lappyd, In sorow.44

Depending on performance conditions, this speech would generate different temporal experiences for its audience. If performed on an outside stage during bad weather, or indoors in a cold building, the speech would generate affinity with its audience’s own physical experiences and collapse their environment into the shepherds’ windy hill. Here, the conditions shared by player and audience work together to build the play’s setting as a composite of present and scriptural times. However, if the weather were fine, or the play performed indoors, then the speech would be asking its audience to collaborate imaginatively with the players. The shepherd’s evocative and dynamic language, detailing his legs bent against the cold and his ‘chappyd’ fingers, encourages his spectators to remember the last time they felt such bitter cold themselves. This complex imaginative process involves taking an existing memory and reproducing it in the present. McGavin and Walker’s work on the processes of mirror neurons during performances also speculates that spectators might minutely mimic a performer’s body language.45 This means that an audience watching the first shepherd physically co-perform the experience of bitter cold might emulate his reaction, and, in doing so, reproduce a memory of past coldness in their immediate present. Through meteorology and physical embodiment, the first shepherd’s speech brings performers and players,

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

124

Play time

biblical, recent and present times, into what Dinshaw calls ‘a kind of expanded now in which past, present, and future coincide’.46 Yet while it stresses the mutual sharing of time, this ‘now’ is cautiously vague. The shepherd’s complaint seems to refer to both a nonspecific and a recent time which, given the specific social abuses of which he and his colleagues complain, is set a little earlier than the time of a late fifteenth-century audience, and much earlier than the manuscript’s compilation if it took place during the Marian restoration. Robert S. Sturges argues that the Second Shepherds’ Play is more class conscious than the First Shepherds’ Play, and this is reflected in its presentation of the shepherds, who, as ‘lord fest’ manorial peasants, suffer social injustice.47 In the next part of his speech, the first shepherd complains of the problems faced by those working on the land, stressing their poverty, high taxes and the abuses visited on them by the landowners and their finely dressed overseers.48 Building on the audience relationship already established by the sharing of weather conditions, this speech invites sympathy for the shepherds and unites them and their audience against a common enemy. However, this speech is not as radical as it first appears. The shepherd’s adversaries are carefully kept non-specific, being referred to only as ‘thyse gentlery men’, ‘these men’ and ‘thay’. This device is particularly apt for a play collected in a manuscript intended to be performed at a later time, as it enables an audience to project whichever political enemy or oppressor is relevant to their own time.49 If challenged, it also allows the play’s performers, audiences and manuscript owners to argue that the shepherd is complaining about biblical oppressors such as Herod. The shepherd’s performance of politically aware, rustic masculinity therefore generates affinity with his spectators, while remaining sufficiently generic and removed from audience time to be understood as a serious threat to the status quo. This vaguely pre-Reformation, almost recent past is as much a work of fiction as medieval drama’s representations of the multiple ‘pasts’ of the Bible. The speeches of the other two shepherds also expand their gospel narrative roles. The second shepherd launches a misogynist diatribe against marriage, echoing the N-Town Joseph by warning the young men of his audience, ‘Be well war of wedyng’.50 The third shepherd demonstrates how the repressive power structures of which the first shepherd complained also operate lower down in society, as he is mocked by the other two shepherds and declares that employers who pay badly will get poor labour in return. He also introduces the play’s recurring theme of hunger, which, as

Time out of joint

125

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Sturges has noted, both underpins the play’s Eucharistic imagery and provides the motivation for Mak’s crime.51 However, while the speeches of the three shepherds anticipate events to come later in the play, they do not significantly alter the gospel narrative of the shepherds’ adoration of Christ. The three shepherds’ entrance onto a bitter hillside at night, along with their desire to rest from their labour, suggests that the angelic visitation is imminent. The entrance of a fourth figure, disguised as a yeoman, changes this, adding a new character and plotline to the Nativity. The fact that Mak’s entrance will constitute a disruption to the gospel narrative is first signalled by the shepherds’ reaction to him. The third shepherd anticipates the theft of their sheep when he realises Mak has arrived: ‘Is he commen? Then ylkon look to his thing.’52 The joke of Mak’s absurd disguise and impersonation of a yeoman also signals the play’s movement to what Elizabeth Freeman calls a ‘ludic’ time founded on the deconstruction of signifiers: ‘“Ludic” queer theory [. . .] tends to align itself with deconstruction, with the play of signifiers and the possibilities opened up by understanding identities as relational, constructed, and endlessly devoted to meanings outside themselves.’53 Mak’s costume and fake southern accent are the first of the play’s series of false signifiers. His fabricated identity as the king’s yeoman is immediately deconstructed and mocked by the shepherds. This deconstruction is necessary because, for the audience, there is no difference between one player in elaborate costume impersonating another and those playing the shepherds. Until Mak is called out on his disguise they may be prepared to take him for one of the flamboyantly dressed, bragging tyrants so associated with this form of performance.54 Where N-Town’s Joseph claimed Mary had been seduced by ‘some boy’ dressed like an angel, the Towneley shepherds demonstrate that Mak really is a thief dressed like a yeoman. The irony, of course, is that Mak has entered at the very point in the play where the angel might have been expected. His implausible disguise instigates a turn which diverts the play’s anticipated timeline into another narrative, which then produces a series of other false signifiers. This swerve away from the Nativity narrative is accompanied by a similar movement away from a heteronormative futurity based in reproduction and childbirth. At first glance, it might appear that the chief comic characters of the Second Shepherds’ Play, Mak and Gyll, exemplify this reproductive drive. Gyll is characterised by her husband as being excessively fecund. From his opening speech, Mak associates himself with children and childbirth, desiring death as an

126

Play time

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

escape from the weeping of children at home: ‘Now wold god I were in heuen, / for there wepe no barnes.’55 Rather than bearing the angel’s joyful news about the birth of God’s son, Mak craves death as an escape from his children. This linking of children and death is revisited later. When the first shepherd asks after his wife, Mak answers: MAK:  [She] lyys walteryng, by the roode / by the fyere, lo! And a howse full of brude / she drynkys well to; yll spede othere good / that she wyll do! Bot so Etys as fast as she can, And ilk yere that commys to man She bryngys furth a lakan, And som yeres two. Bot were I not more gracyus / and rychere befar, I were eten outt of howse / and of harbar.56

Mak’s image of ‘a howse full of brude’ in which his wife lies ‘walteryng . . . by the fyere’ prepares the ground for the sheep-in-the-cradle plot which follows. This speech echoes the ‘moans’ of the three shepherds, and Mak’s depiction of Gyll as wallowing, like a pig, and excessively bringing forth children holds much in common with the animal imagery used in the second shepherd’s own misogynist speech, where the shepherd compares wives to clucking hens – ‘She cackyls, / Bot begyn she to crok, / To groyne or [to clo]k, / Wo is hym is of our cok, / ffor he is in shekyls’ – and figures his own wife as a bear, a pig ‘browyd lyke a brystyll’ and ‘as great as a whall’.57 These speeches provide what Nicole Nolan Sidhu has called ‘a veritable anthology of obscene comedy misogamy’, which, in its animalistic exaggeration, ‘introduces questions regarding the misogynist man’s judgement and reliability’.58 Mak continues where the second shepherd left off, exaggerating this initial image of a whale-like wife into his own carnivalesque figuring of Gyll as repeatedly and constantly pregnant. In this process, Mak conflates childbirth with gluttony, creating a viscerally grotesque image of a woman whose body is defined by processes of excessive entrance and exit. Gyll’s pregnant body is therefore fashioned here as the antithesis of the Virgin Mary’s closed body, whose boundaries are not permeated. This is a classic example of the kinds of bodily grotesque identified by Mikhail Bakhtin, which figure the body’s taking in and expanding beyond its natural limits and draw attention to the orifices which blur the relationship between the body and the external world.59 However, it also

Time out of joint

127

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

plays into what Paige Martin Reynolds identifies as the common theatrical trope of the woman who gorges herself during her lying-in period.60 Childbirth in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries required careful preparation and planning, particularly from a community’s female members. Those who could afford to would provide for the mother during her lying-in with special foods intended to nourish her and aid with the birth, while popular vernacular childbirth texts and medical manuals gave recipes for hastening and easing the pain of the birth.61 This, along with the female-controlled space of the birthing chamber, gave rise to male fears about female homosociality and consumption during this period. The attendants of the gluttonous mother were her drunken gossips, whom we met in the Chester Flood play. The association of female gluttony with pregnancy is visible in several of the attacks on motherhood in the plays studied in this book. As I examined in the N-Town Trial, the vice Reysesclaundyr compares Mary’s stomach to his own, conflating his gluttony with her pregnancy.62 Mak’s speech, which juxtaposes the idea that Gyll eats ‘as fast as a she can’ with her annual reproduction, fits into this pattern, and also gives the impression that Gyll’s womb is somehow turning food and drink into babies. The image of the female womb acting as an oven in which the child is ‘cooked’ appears in several sources, including hagiographic birth miracles and medical texts.63 Miri Rubin has also identified the troubling aspect of this image, arguing that both womb and oven could be both life-giving and ‘a place where children were destroyed’.64 Here, however, Gyll seems to be reversing the Virgin’s Eucharistic timeline. If Mary’s womb ‘cooked’ the Eucharistic child that turned into bread during the Mass, Gyll, according to her husband, seems to have a special skill for turning bread into children.65 The grotesque extremity of Mak’s depiction of Gyll destabilises the modern idea of procreation as a desirable norm. If as Freeman argues, the goal of chrononormativity is to ‘organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity’, then Mak clearly considers that Gyll has become far too productive.66 Where safe childbirth is usually presented in medieval texts as a desirable outcome, here Mak presents it as an unruly aberration. Gyll’s gluttonous productivity, Mak claims, is the cause of his own starvation. Even if he were rich, he says, he would be ‘eten out of howse and of harbar’. Later, Mak laments his ‘house full of yong tharnes’, claiming ‘wo is hym has many barnes, / And therto lyttyll brede’.67 This refashioning of reproduction as failure provides one answer to Carla Freccero’s question about ‘how queering can happen within

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

128

Play time

the normative frameworks of reproductivity and transform them’.68 If the child in Edelman’s thesis is the symbol of futurity, Mak’s vast number of children, who eat him out of house and home, seem to threaten the futures and livelihoods of their own parents. When Mak’s complaint is placed in the context of the Nativity, these images of reproductive and bodily excess have an unsettling effect. While Mak and Gyll’s active (hetero)sexual relationship appears, at least by Mak’s account, to work in opposition to the chaste marriage of Mary and Joseph, the images of whales, wallowing and gluttony in the first half of the Second Shepherds’ Play draw attention to the parallel unnaturalness of Mary’s pregnancy. Except in images showing the visit to Elizabeth, where the Virgin’s physical pregnancy is the focus, medieval images showing Mary’s pregnancy tend to show her at most with a modest bump, or with little physical evidence of her being pregnant at all. The gospels’ rapid movement from Annunciation to Nativity likewise posed a technical challenge for the episode’s adaptation into sequential plays such as the York Annunciation and Visitation, where Mary’s pregnancy needed to be visible soon after the Annunciation.69 Modern performances occasionally make theatrical jokes of this, using inflatable stomachs for Mary’s bump and collapsing the gestation period with the same comic rapidity also widely mocked in the first series of the 2015 BBC drama Poldark. While Mak’s complaint about Gyll’s fecundity sets up the sheep trick to come, the lack of time between her pregnancies also operates as a metatheatrical joke on the impracticality of physically representing divine gestation on stage. The holy couple are further parodied in Mak’s failure to assume any responsibility for his ‘howse full of broode’. He presents Gyll’s pregnancies as though they were nothing to do with him: ‘And ilk yere that commys to man / She bryngys furth a lakan, / And som yeres two.’ While this might be read as hinting at Mak’s suspicions of his wife’s infidelity, it also wryly reflects the position of Joseph by suggesting that Gyll has miraculously conceived without his help. This would have been further emphasised if we accept Alexandra Johnston’s claims about doubling within the play’s staging and casting. She finds an efficient staging of this pageant would double the house of Mak and Gyll and the stable, and claims it is possible to perform the play with five actors if Gyll and Mary are doubled and Mak is doubled with the Angel (and possibly also with Joseph, although as Joseph does not have a speaking role we cannot be sure whether he was present).70 If Mak did play both roles, this would not only consolidate his alignment with the divinely cuckolded

Time out of joint

129

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

husband of Mary, but would also suggest there is something unruly about Jesus’ own birth. The play draws further parallels between Mak and Joseph when Mak, having cast a sleeping spell on the shepherds and stolen a sheep, arrives home to find the door locked, thus mimicking the sequence also dramatised in the N-Town pageants between Mary and Joseph. However, the fact that Gyll’s door, like Mary’s, is closed to her husband is the first signal that Mak’s depiction of her body as open is unreliable. Gyll’s first speech immediately suggests that several of the things Mak has been telling us about her are not true. Where the arguments of the couples in the previous chapters were based in their differing interpretations of time, here Mak and Gyll’s chief conflict concerns their use of time. Although Mak had described Gyll’s chief activities as ‘wallowing by the fire’, eating, drinking and giving birth, none of this is obvious from Gyll’s behaviour. Instead, Gyll says she is engaged in work: GYLL:  Who makys sich dyn / this tyme of nyght? I am sett for to spyn / I hope not I might Ryse a peny to wyn, / I shrew them on hight; So farys A husswife that has been To be raysed thus between here may no note be sene ffor sich small charys.71

Gyll, like Mary and Noah’s wife, is shown spinning, in the hope of adding to the household income and to ‘raise a penny in profit’. In her rethinking of female ‘unruliness’ in early drama, Nicole Nolan Sidhu makes the important point that the prominence of women’s labour in religious plays reflects the crucial role of women in middle-ranking households, and that ‘both Mrs Noah and Gyll are valuable because they are good workers’.72 As happens in the Towneley Noah and the Ark pageant, where Noah’s wife sits spinning while her family urge her to board the ark, Mak and Gyll have different priorities for their labour and time.73 Gyll makes it clear that Mak’s interruption of her labour will have economic consequences: a housewife who is interrupted can’t turn a profit from these small jobs. Spinning is a task that requires stillness once settled. Mak, on the other hand, is not a good worker. He puns: ‘I am worthy my mete, / ffor in a strate can I get / More than thay that swynke and swette / All the long day.’74 Where he earlier accused

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

130

Play time

his wife of laziness, here Mak seems to revel in his ability to do little work and yet get more than those that work hard all day. Their attitudes to work suggest that Gyll invests in the future through her labour in a way that Mak does not. This is reflected in the forms their labour takes. Mak’s sheep-stealing is finite. It can only end in the death of a sheep which will be soon eaten, and, as Gyll reminds him, likely end in Mak’s own hanging too. Sheep-stealing is therefore an investment not in a prosperous future, but in death. Spinning, however, is a far more sustainable activity. As it does not destroy the sheep, wool can continue to be harvested and Gyll will always have a legitimate source of income. The fact that Mak interrupts his wife’s work reinforces the differences between their uses of time. Like Noah’s wife, whose spinning is interrupted by the Flood, Mak’s interruption of Gyll’s work will be a long one, and we do not see her return to her spinning during the play. Spinning is not the only work Gyll does, however. Later in the play she responds to her husband’s chastising by elaborating on her household tasks and contrasting them with Mak’s behaviour: GYLL:  why, who wanders, who wakys, who commys, who gose? who brewys, who bakys? what makys me thus hose? [. . .] ffull wofull is the householde That wantys a woman.75

Rather than consuming all the food and drink in the house, as Mak claimed, Gyll says she is the chief provider of food, drink and clothing. In Time Binds, Elizabeth Freeman notes that it is exactly these sorts of repetitive, cyclical domestic task that tend not to be recorded in linear history even as they ‘consume the female body’.76 Gyll’s labour has certainly not been recorded or counted by Mak, who, when asked how his wife is, reports that she does nothing but consume and reproduce. Perhaps it is Gyll’s refusal to make her labour timeless and invisible that makes her so unruly in Mak’s eyes. However, one very important aspect of household labour is missing from Gyll’s description of how she spends her time. She does not mention the extensive labour associated with childbearing and rearing. Absent children Throughout his interaction with the three shepherds, Mak’s speeches about Gyll’s fertility and ‘barnes well more than enough’

Time out of joint

131

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

lead his audience to anticipate ‘a house full of yong tharnes’.77 His characterisation of Gyll, combined with the alarming rate at which, he claims, she brings forth children, fashions Mak’s house as a place of domestic extremes: noisy, overcrowded, chaotic and, of course, hungry. Mak’s complaint about the many mouths he has to feed is crucial in generating at least a little sympathy for his theft, although as Sturges argues, this sympathy has its limits given Mak is stealing from those who are equally poor.78 Yet Mak’s crowd of children are conspicuously absent from the play. His house is quiet and empty, except for his wife. If the play’s staging doubled the same structure for Mak and Gyll’s house and the Nativity’s stable, and because both Mak and Gyll stress their poverty, it is likely the house was represented as a single room. The presence of a bed in the living and working space forms a second stage upon which Gyll ‘performs’ her false childbirth scene, and also indicates that the house has only one room. Although it was not unusual for beds in multiple-room households to be moved into the main room to be close to the fireplace during childbirth, the bed appears to be present in that space before Gyll knows she will need to pretend to have just given birth.79 The absence of children is also supported by the shepherds’ search of the house. The third shepherd claims: ‘I can funde no flesh, / hard nor nesh, / Salt nor fresh, / Bot two tome platers.’80 These two empty platters suggest the house is only equipped for Gyll and Mak, rather than a brood of children. The search gives no suggestion that there are other rooms aside from that represented onstage, or that Gyll is afraid they will wake any children other than her disguised ‘child’ in the cradle. Except for the empty cradle, there is no hint of the presence of children in these scenes; nor do Gyll or Mak refer to their children in the scenes in which they are alone together. This calls their existence into question. It is curious that, while Mak’s role as a peddler of lies and double meanings has long been a focus of criticism of this play, no scholars have yet questioned whether Mak is telling the truth about his huge family. This is perhaps not surprising, particularly given how many works accept without challenge Mak’s claim that Gyll is drunk and lazy.81 Even feminist critiques which do dismantle everything else Mak says about his wife still seem to accept his story about their parenthood. For example, Emma Maggie Solberg claims that ‘Gill demonstrates the easiness of imitating the supposedly inimitable Virgin Mother – especially for a duplicitous and sluttish shrew’, which suggests that, even though Solberg reads Gyll’s childbirth scene as an act of imitation, she still believes Mak’s story about

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

132

Play time

Gyll’s sexual voracity (and, by implication, motherhood).82 Katie Normington makes the important point that Gyll never steps beyond the door of her house, but argues that ‘Gyll tends her children within the frame of the locus’.83 This lack of questioning is due to the fact that, as critics, we are also subject to models of chrononormativity and the assumption that reproduction is a normative trajectory. This assumption is understandable given the fact that most of the major female characters in medieval Bible drama, and indeed all the other female figures examined in this book, are deeply defined in relation to their motherhood. While a cradle seems to act as a signifier of the presence of children in the house, this assumption that Mak’s stories about his wife are true prevents us investigating what other kinds of narrative might lie behind the play’s empty cradle. In 1518, an ecclesiastical court record from Lincoln told of a married couple, John and Alice Phipes, being brought forward on suspicion of idolatry. The foundation of this suspicion was the couple’s strange domestic behaviour: ‘They have a cradle near their bed every night and it is used as if there were an infant in it.’84 The record does not tell us whether this accusation was upheld, or the reasons the couple gave for their behaviour. The claim that they used the cradle ‘as if there were an infant in it’ suggests that the cradle might have become a site of ritual performance, either articulating the hope that the cradle might one day be filled or commemorating a child that had been lost. This behaviour is consistent with other kinds of material practice identified by Roberta Gilchrist and Katherine French, who note that certain items connected to childbirth, such as cradles, swaddling bands and smocks, tended to be carefully preserved by families: ‘These items preserved memories of a baby, now grown up or deceased, but they were also ready for the next baby who needed them.’85 That John and Alice Phipes were reported to the ecclesiastical court suggests their night-time performances were seen as unruly: expressing a longing which transgressed accepted processes of memorialising or anticipating children through material objects. Stories of infertility are common in biblical drama, particularly in relation to Joachim and Anne and to Elizabeth’s miraculous and longed-for pregnancy, which provides the sister narrative to Mary’s.86 Reading the empty cradle in the Second Shepherds’ Play as evidence either of Mak and Gyll’s failure to conceive or of miscarriage or infant loss suggests that their narrative is unable to participate in the productive futurity of childbirth which underpins so many of the other biblical plays. In The Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam characterises the ‘darker territories of failure associated

Time out of joint

133

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

with futility, sterility, emptiness, loss, negative affect in general, and modes of unbecoming’.87 Mak and Gyll respond very differently to this failure. Gyll twice refers to the cradle as ‘my credyll’, suggesting that she, at least, is invested in the idea of a child and has planned for one. Yet her possessive ‘my’, rather than ‘my baby’s’ or ‘my children’s’, hints that the cradle has not been filled with her and Mak’s offspring.88 Mak, however, seems to be using the cradle as a prop: a signifier of the heterosexual, reproductive, virile masculinity he cannot actually perform. Keeping up this fiction of fatherhood holds social benefits for Mak. It means that, while he is mocked by the shepherds as a bad performer of his disguise and an untrustworthy thief, Mak does not suffer the kinds of vicious and violent bodily mockery which were attached to other ‘infertile’ characters such as Joseph and Joachim. The comic extremity of the imagery Mak uses in his depiction of his constantly pregnant wife suggests that his complaint is a carefully constructed performance designed to generate sympathy and trust on the part of the other men. This is also visible in Rachel Moss’s early research into medieval men’s use of speech denigrating women as a form of homosocial bonding, which supports the patriarchy through marking women as a threat.89 Mak’s lie also signals to the shepherds that he and Gyll are bound by God’s punishment of Adam and Eve’s transgression. That is, because he represents Gyll as bringing forth children, so Mak implies that he himself labours, misdirecting the shepherds away from his actual intention to steal.90 Sure enough, Mak’s performance works. By aping the kinds of misogynist, anti- marital language earlier performed by the second shepherd, Mak becomes, albeit temporarily, one of their company. Immediately after this speech, the second shepherd declares his intention to rest and, although they make Mak lie between them, they still trust him enough to go to sleep. Yet all Mak’s mention of children does is prepare for the comic business with the sheep. Despite the fact that Mak initially appears to experience a linear conception of time which privileges heterosexual reproduction, its chief signifier – the child – is missing. In replacing the child with a sheep, Gyll and Mak use their cradle as a performance space in an act which, like that of John and Alice, might also be considered idolatrous. Performing labour The idea that Gyll may not have successfully borne children is further emphasised by her rather unconvincing, comic performance of

Play time

134

childbirth. When she devises the trick to disguise the sheep and outwit the shepherds, Gyll figures it as a form of theatrical play:

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GYLL: A good bowrde haue I spied / syn thou can none. here shall we hym hyde / to thay be gone; In my credyll abyde / lett me alone, And I shall lyg besyde / in chylbed, and grone.91

In setting this scene, Gyll plans how she will costume the sheep – she says ‘this is a good gyse (disguise) and a far cast (clever trick)’ – and recognises that her own performance will be crucial in making this story credible. When Mak returns from the hills with news that the shepherds are searching for their sheep, Gyll acts as stage manager, swaddling the sheep and giving her husband instructions on how to perform his own role: GYLL: I shall swedyll hym right / In my credyll. If it were a gretter slight / yit couthe I help tyll. I wyll lyg downe straight; / com hap me. [. . .] Com and make redy all / and syng by thyn oone; Syng lullay thou shall / for I must grone, And cry outt by the wall / on mary and Iohn, ffor sore. Syng lullay on fast when thou heris at the last; And bot I play a fals cast, Trust me no more.92

Here, Gyll takes control of her space. Intending to ‘play’ her part well, she casts the sheep and her husband in the roles of newborn and father, and asks Mak to support her performance by tucking her in and singing a lullaby. This kind of conscious performance of motherhood, and faking participation in the narrative of childbirth (as opposed to that of sheep-stealing), holds affinity with the kinds of self-conscious performances of ‘passing’ attempted by queer people trying to align themselves with linear time. E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen argue that this demands a performance from the subject and a reworking of their environment: ‘Queer subjects are not only performatively reworking themselves, but also simultaneously reformulating the property, attributes, qualities, or actions that surround them.’93 However, Gyll’s performance of childbirth

Time out of joint

135

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

does not ‘pass’. Calling out on Mary and Joseph, Gyll draws on medieval childbirth rites and hagiographies which showed saints coming to the aid of a woman unable to deliver her child.94 This untimely calling on Jesus’ parents, who have not yet entered the plot of the play, draws attention to the fact that Gyll’s birth scene parodies that of Mary. This is the only birth scene represented in the Second Shepherds’ Play, and it falls at a point in the narrative when Mary’s own (painless) birth of Jesus might have been simultaneously occurring in the stable in Bethlehem. Gyll’s ‘false’, overperformed labour scene is therefore a surrogate for Mary’s, and collapses the house-and-stable spaces into one spatio-temporal moment. As such, Gyll’s performance mimics a moment rarely represented in medieval iconography or drama.95 Her untimely performance also casts doubt on the gender performances of the couple. Gyll overdoes her performance of the pangs of childbirth, complaining that she can’t breathe, and that the shepherd’s footsteps in the house ‘goyse thorow my nese’.96 In short, she performs childbirth as a man playing a woman performing childbirth might. Mak’s performance of fatherhood is equally unconvincing. Michelle Ann Abate notes that Mak makes a woman giving birth sound like a chicken laying an egg, and claims that ‘Gill makes noises similar to those that Gyb associates with his wife: feigning the pains of childbirth, she not only “kakyls”, but begins “to croke / To goyne or to clok”’.97 In groaning and crying, Gyll appears to still be in the act of giving birth, even after the ‘child’ has been born. There is an element of truth in this, as it is through this trick that Gyll is hoping to ‘deliver’ both the sheep from the shepherds and her husband from the gallows. Gyll’s groans might have been appropriate if she were still delivering the afterbirth and in need of further care. However, this draws the shepherds’ attention to the awkward question of where her midwives and gossips are. Other contemporary plays show an awareness that a midwife is needed for a safe birth. For example, in the N-Town and Chester Nativity pageants, Joseph goes to fetch midwives for Mary, while in the Digby Mary Magdalen the Queen of Marseilles makes it clear that her childbirth death is due to the lack of women to attend her. ‘Alas, þat wommannys help is away!’ she laments, ‘For defawte of women here in my nede, / Deth my body makyth to sprede.’98 Gyll’s absent gossips not only point to the artificiality of her performance, but also mark the birth scene as non-normative and potentially dangerous. Gossips needed to be present during and after the birth in case the child died and an emergency baptism

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

136

Play time

needed to be performed. They also, crucially, gave witness to the parentage of the child: a witness Mak and Gyll cannot provide.99 This is the first thing that makes the third shepherd suspicious that all might not be as it appears, and he asks Mak and Gyll, ‘Bot who was his gossypps / so sone rede?’100 Mak can’t immediately come up with names, and stalls for time, which makes the first shepherd suspect he is lying. When he does invent names, the ‘gossips’ are all male: ‘Parkyn’, ‘Gybon Waller’ and ‘John Horne’, which suggests that Mak is thinking of his new child’s baptismal sponsors rather than the women who should have been present at this birth.101 While early historical research into medieval childbirth had assumed that childbirth was chiefly a woman’s domain, Monica Green’s useful review of medical texts suggests that there was not such a clear-cut female monopoly on gynaecological and childbirth literature.102 Where normal childbirth tended to be supervised by women, complicated childbirth could also involve the presence of men.103 By the fourteenth century, vernacular translations of obstetrical books were common. The De passionibus mulierum of the Trotula ensemble was widely copied, and its reputation had also passed into popular literary culture.104 A large number of the surviving women’s medical manuscripts came from the more prosperous urban sectors: the kinds of middle-ranking guild, craft and civic communities that were involved in putting on pageants.105 This means that those involved with the Second Shepherds’ Play (and certainly the community’s mature women, who would have attended several births) would have been familiar with the processes of childbirth, and able to enjoy Gyll’s parody of the process. As such, Gyll’s birth-play participates in what Elizabeth Freeman has called ‘temporal drag’, by emphasising its failure.106 Mak, like his wife, is also untimely in his performance. Although the words of his lullaby are not recorded, he is clearly tuneless and out of time, as the musically skilled shepherds note ‘hard I never none crak / so clere out of toyne’.107 Mak is clearly not a man used to singing lullabies, and the cacophony made by Gyll’s groaning and his singing comically contrast with his asking the shepherds to ‘spekys soft’ to avoid waking the child or giving Gyll a headache.108 In an early article on the play, Claude Chidamian noted that Mak pays for his involvement in the childbirth trick by being tossed in a blanket in a variation of Hippocratic succession: ‘Mak, the perpetrator of a false childbirth, is tossed on a blanket like a woman in difficult labor.’109 However, the tossing in the blanket was more often used in the case of a stillbirth. The Trotula’s directions ‘on

Time out of joint

137

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

extracting the dead fetus’ instructs that the patient be placed on a linen sheet ‘held by four strong men at the four corners’ who will ‘make the sheet be pulled strongly this way and that at the opposite corners’.110 While Tamás Karáth has developed Chidamian’s argument by suggesting that this blanket-tossing scene marks ‘the reintegration of the lapsed Mak into the community and his willingness to compensate for the lost trust of his fellows’, the means by which this is carried out continues to resist the paternal fiction Mak had earlier used to suggest his affinity with the other shepherds.111 Having failed to ‘deliver’ the sheep, Mak is cast queerly as a pregnant woman who has lost her child, even as the play re-emphasises the suggestion that he is not able to perform as a father. As such, he can no longer take part in the family futurity he has attempted to perform for the shepherds. Between them, Mak and Gyll’s performance of childbirth, with its errors, excesses and moments where characters call attention to what they are doing, draws attention to its constructedness as a performance, and suggests that their cradle may never be filled with a living or legitimate occupant. Sheep as queer icon Just as Mary’s pregnancy was gradually revealed to Joseph in the N-Town Joseph’s Doubt, so the revelation of this scene is drawn out over a series of discoveries. When the shepherds return to give the child sixpence, they notice first that he is ‘peeping’ at them from the cradle, then that he has a ‘long snowte’. The second shepherd initially blames the child’s strange features on his parents, claiming ‘Ill spon weft, iwys, / ay commys foull owte’.112 In using a saying linked to wool manufacturing to criticise the child he does not yet know is a sheep, the second shepherd’s cloth-making metaphor holds multivalent meanings. It looks back to Gyll’s work earlier in the play – the spinning which was interrupted by Mak’s entrance and to which she has not been able to return due to having to hide the ‘ill spon weft’ of her husband’s unthrifty theft. However, this comment also reads as an attack on Mak and Gyll’s morality and sexuality. Drawing on Hippocratic traditions, a baby’s ugliness or disfigurement might be interpreted in the Middle Ages as God’s punishment for parental sin; a consequence of the mother’s unguarded gaze during gestation; the consequence of adulterous or incestuous sex; or the consequence of the woman thinking of someone else during sex.113 Despite Mak’s protest ‘I am he that hym gatt, and yond woman hym bare’, the second shepherd implies that either Mak has been

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

138

Play time

cuckolded by his wife or there is something deviant in this child’s conception and birth.114 The shepherd’s surprise at the baby’s ugliness contrasts with the image of the beautiful Christ-child in the episode which is to follow. As Anthony Bale has explored, ugliness was also heavily linked to racial and religious stereotypes. Jewish faces in medieval manuscripts were depicted as ugly, animal-like or deformed, and set in contrast with the perfect beauty of Christ: ‘Thus the Jews prevent a fully focussed, uninterrupted gaze on Christ and they interrupt the harmony and delicacy of the book.’115 In obstructing the act of looking at Christ, the ugliness of Mak and Gyll’s parodic sheep-child interrupts the harmony of the Nativity. Moreover, in challenging Mak’s sexual performance, paternity and masculinity, the shepherd’s comment holds undertones of the kinds of malicious sexual joking directed at Joseph’s Jewish body in the N-Town Trial. He figures Mak and Gyll’s sexual act as an ‘ill spon weft’: work that is malformed, warped and kinky. Realising the child ‘is lyke to oure shepe!’, the shepherds finally realise the ‘frawde’: their sheep’s four feet have been swaddled together.116 This ‘slow reveal’ that the baby in the cradle is, in fact, a sheep draws out the recognition for maximum comic effect. That it is most definitely their sheep is attested when it is identified using one of the play’s few stable signifiers: ‘I know hym by the eere marke / that is a good tokyn.’117 Finally, it becomes clear that the occupant of the cradle is not a human child. Yet neither it is a lamb, which would have prefigured the Eucharist’s Agnus Dei. It is an adult sheep with horns: Sagh I neuer in a credyll A hornyd lad or now.118

While for some medieval sheep breeds both ewes and rams had horns, in other common breeds only the rams had horns.119 The fact that the shepherd refers to the sheep as ‘hym’ in ‘I know hym by the eere marke’ suggests that the sheep in the cradle is a ram. This creates a further set of sexual jokes at Mak’s expense. Lambs tend to be represented as Christ-like in early bestiaries. In MS Bodley 764, for example, the lamb is presented as the symbol of Jesus; innocent, blessed and blameless.120 Lambs were also aligned with Mary’s conception of Christ due to a belief that they were impregnated by the wind. L. A. J. R. Houwen notes that this belief was ‘skilfully adapted by some Church Fathers to demonstrate that the Virgin Birth of Christ was not an impossibility’.121 Rams,

Time out of joint

139

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

however, had slightly less virtuous reputations and breeding habits. N. C. W. Spence finds that ‘in English, ram is one of the names of male animals used to designate sexually-active men’, while horned animals had a long history of association with cuckoldry.122 For example, in one fourteenth-century comic story from Spain, a man paints a picture of a lamb on his wife’s torso to ensure her fidelity while he is away. He returns to discover that her lover has repainted the lamb as a ram with large horns.123 In making Mak’s child a ram, the play therefore further mocks his sexual failure. The ram also looks back to an earlier act of sacrifice that the sacrifice of Christ, Lamb of God, aimed to supersede. Philip Butterworth has demonstrated that the Towneley manuscript shows particular care over scriptural fidelity in its presentation of the plays of Isaac and Jacob, while the Abraham pageant also shows a close relationship with its Hebrew source.124 The missing two pages at the end of this pageant, however, mean an important element of the story is missing. When God reprieves Abraham of the command to sacrifice his son in Genesis 22, Abraham sees a ram stuck by its horns among the briers, and offers this in Isaac’s place.125 Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac was paralleled both with the Christ-child sacrificed in the Mass and with Jesus’ presentation at the temple. Theresa Kenney and Leah Sinanoglou have explored in detail the visual parallels drawn between manger and altar in images of Abraham and Isaac, the presentation at the temple and the Mass. Sinanoglou notes that ‘the Abraham and Isaac plays reverse the pattern of the York Purification Play, in which Joseph announces that the Christ Child will substitute for the lamb usually offered in the temple’.126 The use of a ram in the Second Shepherds’ Play muddles this iconography even further. Where medieval Christian typologies tended to align Isaac’s willingness to be sacrificed with Christ’s death on the cross, the Second Shepherds’ Play resists this, suggesting that Mak and Gyll’s ‘child’ has more in common with the ram caught by its horns: an animal which neither volunteers itself as sacrifice nor is itself offered as a last-minute salvation. It is killed because, through God’s desire to save Isaac, it became stuck in the right place at the right time. Several critics have also noted that this edible sheep-child looks forward to the Eucharist – thus linking the play’s comic matter with that powerful moment of mystical trans-temporal simultaneity which united the times of the Last Supper, the Crucifixion and the community partaking in it. As the following chapter examines in more detail, the Agnus Dei linked the Crucifixion of Christ with the

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

140

Play time

sacrificial lamb of the Jewish Passover, thus giving the Crucifixion the authority of precedent and bringing Hebrew and Christian texts into one narrative. However, the Second Shepherds’ Play takes a rather more nihilistic turn towards Eucharistic themes. While the child born in the stable represents salvation and Christian futurity, Mak and Gyll’s sheep-child will meet with a grislier fate. The lack of futurity embodied in the sheep is emphasised through the language concerning eating which surrounds it. While the shepherds search the house, Gyll makes the astonishing pronouncement: I pray to god so mylde, If euer I you begyld, That I ete this chylde That lygys in this credyll.127

This forms the climax of several lines concerning eating. Mak has made it clear from the sheep’s entry into the house what his intentions are: ‘I wold he were slayn, I lyst well ete.’128 Gyll’s oath also operates as a joke about dramatic and scriptural interpretation. When she tells the shepherds, ‘If euer I you begyld, / That I ete this chylde / That lygys in this credyll’, she knows the shepherds will take her words figuratively, where she means them literally.129 This produces an intriguing reversal of the kinds of reading I examined in Chapter 1, where Joseph’s literal reading clashed with a figurative reading of Mary’s body and scripture. This device is also typical of the presentation of Jewish speech in early modern drama. Shakespeare’s Shylock and Marlowe’s Barabas, like Gyll, also use the Christian propensity to read figuratively to manipulate and trick the Christian characters. Often, this produces a pleasing effect for the audience, who know very well that Gyll intends literally to eat her child, and that Shylock will be demanding his pound of flesh before the play is out. Gyll’s statement also offers an alarming solution to Mak’s claim that children starve their parents by suggesting Gyll will feed upon her own baby. This spectre of cannibalism references another body of medieval literature which aimed to project Christian anxieties about the Eucharist onto external communities. The development of the adoration of the host and the feast of Corpus Christi in the thirteenth century meant the doctrine of transubstantiation received increased scrutiny. Heather Blurton notes that during this time theologians and lay people alike expressed concern that Eucharistic communion might also constitute an act of cannibalism.130 This concern became apparent in accounts of Eucharist miracles in

Time out of joint

141

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

which doubters – often Jews, but also women and monks – would have visions of the host as a beautiful child being divided and eaten by a congregation.131 Meanwhile, anti-Semitic blood libel accusations across Europe claimed that Jews killed Christian children for their blood to be consumed as wine or ground into food as part of their Passover rituals.132 Merrall Llewelyn Price notes that this narrative ‘demonstrates the denial of ritual Christian cannibalism, instead projecting it onto the Jews’.133 Lee Edelman argues that this kind of external projection has the effect of queering those caught within its structure, while Judith Harber has persuasively argued that this kind of queering also applies to Jewish characters in early modern drama, whose plots also tend to deny them futurity.134 This is particularly visible in medieval anti-Semitic works depicting the rarer phenomenon of maternal cannibalism. The fourteenth-century poem Siege of Jerusalem features a Jewish mother, Maria, who, starved by the occupying Romans, eats her own child: The smel roos of the rost right into the strete, That fele fastyng folke felden the savere; Doun thei daschen the dore: dey scholde the berde That mete yn this meschef hadde from men layned. Than saith that worthi wif, in a wode hunger, ‘Myn owen barn have I brad and the bones gnawen; Yit have I saved you som,’ and forth a side feccheth Of the barn that ho bare – and alle hire blode chaungeth.135

This story grew in popularity during the production of Crusade literature between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries: the same period which saw the development of Eucharistic theology and Corpus Christi devotion. Like the Shepherds’ Play, the Siege plays with time, anachronistically attributing the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE and destruction of the temple to divine vengeance for the death of Jesus. While the poem uses many of the phrases usually associated with the Virgin Mary – the Jewish Maria is ‘a mild wyf’ and a ‘worthi wif’ – her cannibalism means she is also the Virgin’s negative image.136 Maria consumes her own child’s flesh in an act of self-salvation that does not extend to the other ‘folke’ also starving in the street. Likewise, Mak and Gyll’s attempt to ‘deliver’ the sheep is an act which aims to end their own hunger at the expense of the shepherds, who are equally in need. Both the Siege and the Second Shepherds’ Play figure this act of child-eating as cyclical. Mak and Gyll strive to ‘gett’ and ‘deliver’ the sheep-child in order that it might be eaten, while Maria sees her child as returning to the flesh

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

142

Play time

she gave it: ‘Therfor yeld that I thee gaf, and agen tourney / And entre ther thou cam out.’137 As a consequence, Gyll’s culinary desire refigures the Eucharist’s eternity as annihilation. Going further than Edelman’s vision of a queer time which eschews the child, Gyll’s joking image of the child-eating mother acts as a monstrous denial of futurity. Again, her stomach becomes a form of oven. The danger of this is averted by the fact that Gyll is talking about a sheep, and not a real human child. Despite all the creative energy she expends to present the sheep as a child, her theatrical illusion is not up to the task. Yet unlike the lambs of the Passover and the ram of Abraham, which stood between children and death, or the Lamb of God, which looked towards the resurrection, the sheep of the Second Shepherds’ Play is never really saved. Although it is rescued by the shepherds, the star-object of this play gains only a temporary reprieve from being eaten. While the sheep-child queers the medieval typologies holding the Christian and Hebrew narratives together, this temporary suspension of the sheep’s certain death sentence has much in common with Tim Dean’s reassessment of queer futurity in the wake of the availability of antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV/ AIDS. Dean notes that now one is doubly exposed to time, ‘since the prior temporality of the death sentence is merely suspended, not obliterated, by the expanded sense of time that medicine now makes available’.138 As a valuable commodity, the sheep’s rescue from Gyll’s cradle only means that it will be eaten later – perhaps by the corrupt landowners mentioned at the play’s beginning. Kinking the weft The Towneley lost sheep narrative has frequently been viewed by critics as a light-hearted and comic digression; a kink in the main plot of the Nativity. Yet at 637 lines, this digression actually forms the greatest part of the play. The majority of the audience’s attention and experience is therefore invested in this plot. This shows a marked difference to the treatment of the Nativity in other dramatic sources. In the York, Chester and N-Town manuscripts, the pageants concerning the birth of Christ and visitations occupy the central part of the narrative. They form the bridge between the drama’s Hebrew and Christian sources, as well as forming some of the play collections’ most memorable iconographic images. In the Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play, however, the Nativity almost becomes a digression itself from the business of Gyll and Mak. Ill-spun weft reshapes the nature of its fabric.

Time out of joint

143

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The Second Shepherds’ Play does not re-enter gospel time until the angel arrives just over a hundred lines from the play’s end. This is marked by a change in the play’s presentation of time. The action follows the more linear structure of the Nativity accounts in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, and there are fewer instances of the kinds of time-collapsing moments of anachronistic swearing that are common during the rest of the pageant. Where the shepherds do engage with different temporal registers in this section, they echo the gospel-authorised processes of reworking Hebrew texts as Christian prophecies. On the way to meet Jesus, the second shepherd dutifully recalls the ‘prophecies’ of David and Isaiah: 2 PASTOR:  we fynde by the prophecy [. . .] of dauid and Isay / and mo then I myn, Thay prophecyed by clergy / that in a vyrgyn shuld he lyght and ly / to sloken oure syn And slake it, Oure kinde from wo; ffor Isay sayd so, Citè virgo Concipiet a chylde that is nakyd.139

The shepherd’s speech performs its own temporal machinations, looking back to Hebrew texts and (re)interpreting them as prophecies foreshadowing the birth of Christ. However, while this speech expresses a crucial hope for the future in a child ‘to sloken oure syn’, it is part of the more familiar, normative, typological temporality of Christian scripture. In 2011, Jack Halberstam wrote of the Montreal-based band Lesbians on Ecstasy: Contemporary queer performers try deliberately to scramble the predictability of generational models of transmission and the static relations between copies and originals in their performances, and they highlight and emphasize an investment in impersonation, imitation, and derivation.140

In a surprising moment of what Carolyn Dinshaw might call ‘queer touch’ across cultures and times, Halberstam’s words might just as fairly be used to describe the kinds of queer performance activity employed by the Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play. Through its use of comic play, disguise, impersonation and the troubling of the relationship between parody and scripture, copy and original, the

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

144

Play time

play scrambles the predictability of the Nativity narrative in a moment of queer play. When Lee Edelman claimed that ‘[t]he sacrilization of the Child [. . .] necessitates the sacrifice of the queer’, he did not go on to acknowledge the cultural influence of the most sacred child in Western history.141 Yet in figuring the birth of Christ as a kind of epilogue, the nihilistic Nativity staged by Mak and Gyll disturbs this centralising of divine infant futurity. While their plot interrupts, or kinks, the Nativity narrative, Gyll and Mak act both as negatives and as companion images to the figures of Mary and Joseph. Together, their ravenous parenthood imagines an alternative way to tell one of the most frequently depicted stories in Christian theology. These narrative threads refuse to lie straight. Notes   1 Dinshaw, How Soon is Now?, p. 4.   2 George England and Alfred W. Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, in The Towneley Plays, EETS, e.s. LXXI (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1897; repr. 1966), ll. 241.   3 Dinshaw, How Soon is Now?, p. 4.   4 Jaclyn I. Pryor coins the term ‘straight time’ in opposition to non-linear temporal experiences in Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017), p. 10.   5 Peter Baltens, A Flemish Kermis with a Performance of the Farce, ‘Een cluyte van Plaeyerwater’, c.1570. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-A-2554 [accessed 1 September 2019].   6 See McGavin and Greg Walker, Imagining Spectatorship, p. 42. See also Lin, Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance, pp. 28–9.   7 See for example Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005) and The Queer Art of Failure (London: Duke University Press, 2011); Edelman, No Future, and Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (London: Duke University Press, 2010).   8 Alicia Spencer-Hall, Medieval Saints and Modern Screens: Divine Visions and Cinematic Experience (Husholt: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), pp. 65–102.   9 Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Time of Theatrical Reenactment (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), p. 6. See also José Esteban-Munˇoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009) and Jack Halberstam, ‘Keeping Time with Lesbians on Ecstasy’, in Queer Times, Queer Becomings, ed. by E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2011), pp. 333–44.

Time out of joint

145

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

  10 See Pryor, Time Slips, p. 9: ‘because time was given permission to do those deviant things it is not supposed to – move backward, lunge forward, loop, jump, stack, stop, pause, linger, elongate, pulsate, slip – I was given recourse to feel the violence of linear time and historical “progress” and a way out of this narrow view of history.’  11 See Annamarie Jagose et al., ‘Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion’, GLQ, 13.2–3 (2007), 177–95 (p. 186).   12 See Noreen Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer and Diane Watt, ‘Introduction’, in The Lesbian Premodern (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 1–17 and Lucy Allen-Goss, Female Desire in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women and Middle English Romance (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2020).   13 See for example Valerie Traub, ‘The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography’ in The Lesbian Premodern, ed. by Noreen Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer and Diane Watt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 21–34 and Esteban-Munˇoz, Cruising Utopia, pp. 65–81.   14 See Garrett P. J. Epp, ‘Ecce Homo’, in Queering the Middle Ages, ed. by Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 236–51.   15 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, l. 47.   16 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, l. 332.   17 See for example M. F. Vaughan, ‘Mak and the Proportions of The Second Shepherds’ Play’, MF Papers on Language and Literature, 18.4 (1982), 355–67; Leah Sinanoglou, ‘The Christ Child as Sacrifice: A Medieval Tradition and the Corpus Christi Plays’, Speculum, 48.3 (1973), 491–509; William M. Manly, ‘Shepherds and Prophets: Religious Unity in the Towneley Secunda Pastorum,’ PMLA, 78 (1963), 151–5; Linda E. Marshall, ‘Sacral Parody in the Secuda Pastorum’, Speculum, 47 (1972), 720–36; Margery M. Morgan, ‘“High Fraud”: Paradox and Double-Plot in the English Shepherds’ Plays’, Speculum, 39 (1964), 676–89; and Michelle Ann Abate, ‘Oversight as Insight: Reading The Second Shepherds’ Play as The Second Shepherd’s Play’, Early Theatre, 8.1 (2005), 95–104.  18 C. Clifford Flanigan, ‘The Conflict of Ideology in Late Medieval Urban Drama’, ROMARD, 52 (2014), 85–92.   19 Lawrence J. Ross, ‘Symbol and Structure in the Secunda Pastorum’, Comparative Drama, 1.2 (1967), 122–49 (pp. 122–3 and p. 135).  20 Edelman, No Future, pp. 3–5.   21 Changes in law and in the development of antiretroviral medicines have encouraged a rethinking around queer relationships to time and asynchronous temporalities. See for example Tim Dean, ‘Bareback Time’, in Queer Times, ed. by McCallum and Tuhkanen, pp. 75–100.  22 Esteban-Munˇoz, Cruising Utopia, p. 11.   23 Jack Halberstam does this particularly movingly in describing their teenage experience of being out of sync with their school’s mapping

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

146

Play time

out their life trajectory via wifehood and motherhood. See ‘Theorizing Queer Temporalities’, p. 182.  24 Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, p. 1 and 5.  25 Elizabeth Freeman, ‘Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography’, Social Text, 23.3–4 (2005), 57–68 (p. 57).   26 See Carla Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (London: Duke University Press, 2006) and Biddick, The Typological Imaginary, p. 1: ‘This study grapples with an unsettling historiographical problem: how to study the history of Jewish-Christian relations without reiterating the temporal practices through which early Christians, a heterogeneous group, fabricated an identity (“Christian-ness”) both distinct from and superseding that of neighbouring Jewish communities.’   27 Halberstam first uses the term ‘ludic temporality’ in In a Queer Time and Place, p. 5.  28 Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, p. 12 and p. 20.  29 Peter Happé, The Towneley Cycle: Unity and Diversity (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), p. 2.   30 Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play: A Play for the Christmas Season’, METh, 37 (2015), 134–48.  31 Diane Watt and Roberta Magnani, ‘Towards a Queer Philology’, postmedieval, 9.3 (2018), 252–68 (p. 260).   32 Watt and Magnani, ‘Towards a Queer Philology’, p. 253.  33 Arthur Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 257–8.   34 See also Garrett Epp, ‘Thus am I Rent on Rode’: Taking Apart the Towneley Crucifixion’, METh, 37 (2015), 119–33, which reads the Crucifixion pageant as a play imperfectly pieced together from a diverse range of sources.  35 See Barbara Palmer, ‘Recycling “The Wakefield Cycle”: The Records’, RORD, 4.1 (2002), 88–130; Peter Meredith, ‘The Towneley Cycle’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. by Beadle, pp. 134–62; Happé, The Towneley Cycle, p. 231.  36 Happé, The Towneley Cycle, p. 18 argues that there was ‘plenty of time for change and development before the compiler put this text together’.   37 Murray McGillivray, ‘The Towneley Manuscript and Performance: Tudor Recycling?’, in Editing, Performance, Texts: New Practices in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama, ed. by Jacqueline Jenkins and Julie Sanders (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 64. See also Garrett Epp, ‘Re-editing Towneley’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 43 (2013), 87–104, on the disorderly nature of the manuscript.   38 Murray McGillivray, ‘Tudor Recycling?’, p. 65.  39 Dinshaw, How Soon is Now?, p. 36.   40 McMurray Gibson, ‘Manuscript as Sacred Object: Robert Hegge’s N-Town Plays’, 503–28.

Time out of joint

147

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

 41 Happé, The Towneley Cycle: Unity and Diversity, p. 19: ‘It was no doubt the Towneley family’s religious allegiance which led them to preserve the volume after the mystery cycles had gone out of fashion and performance had been discontinued.’   42 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, ll. 118 and 267.   43 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, l. 79. On the shepherds’ speeches predicting events to come, see Abate, ‘Oversight as Insight’, 95–104. This examines the second shepherd, Gyb, as a foreshadower of key events in the play.   44 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, ll. 1–4.  45 McGavin and Walker, Imagining Spectatorship, pp. 44–8. See also Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 20, which suggests that people participate in the production of (artistic) knowledge just by being present in the performance space.   46 Dinshaw, ‘Temporalities’, p. 190.  47 Sturges, The Circulation of Power, pp. 88–9.   48 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, ll. 10–27 (l. 18).   49 When I workshopped this part of the play with UK students in 2019, they chose to costume the first shepherd wearing a ‘Jeremy Corbyn’ badge. This subtle costuming choice refigured the shepherd’s complaint by imagining the character’s support for the contemporary UK Labour Party leader and his attack on the austerity government of the 2010s. This worked in two ways: it acted as a satire of Corbyn’s ideals, while also upholding his critique.   50 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, ll. 91–2.  51 Sturges, The Circulation of Power, pp. 89–93.   52 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, l. 201.  53 Freeman, Time Binds, p. 9.   54 The tyrant figure will be examined through the figure of Herod in my final chapter.   55 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, l. 194.   56 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, ll. 236–45.   57 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, ll. 68–72 and 100–5.   58 Nolan Sidhu, Indecent Exposure, p. 199.  59 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, pp. 303–67.  60 Paige Martin Reynolds, ‘Sin, Sacredness, and Childbirth in Early Modern Drama’, MRDE, 28 (2016), 30–48 (p. 30).   61 On the lying-in period, see Katherine French, ‘The Material Culture of Childbirth in Late Medieval London and Its Suburbs’, Journal of Women’s History, 28.3 (2016), 126–48. On medical manuals and recipes, see Monica H. Green, ‘Obstetrical and Gynaecological Texts in Middle English’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 14 (1992), 53–88; Beryl Rowland, ‘Women’s Health Care and Trotula’, Florilegium, 8 (1986), 56–70 and Fiona Harris Stoettz, ‘Suffering and Survival in Medieval

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

148

Play time

English Childbirth’, in Medieval Family Roles, ed. by Cathy Jorgensen Intyre (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996), pp. 101–20.   62 Spector, ed., ‘The Trial’, ll. 80–1 and 94–7.  63 See Harris Stoettz, ‘Suffering and Survival’, pp. 107–8 and William D. Paden and Frances Freeman Paden, ‘Swollen Women, Shifting Canon: A Midwife’s Charm and the Birth of Secular Romance Lyric’, PMLA, 125.2 (2010), 306–21 (p. 311): ‘Pregnant women [. . .] feared overcooking the fetus – that is, killing the unborn child by allowing it to gestate too long.’  64 Rubin, Gentile Tales, p. 25.  65 On the Virgin Mary as Christ’s oven, see Theresa Kenney, ‘The Manger as Calvary and Altar in the Middle English Nativity Lyric’, in The Christ Child in Medieval Culture: Alpha es et O!, ed. by Mary Dzon and Theresa M. Kenney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), pp. 29–65 (p. 54).   66 Freeman, ‘Time Binds’, p. 3.   67 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, ll. 391–4.   68 Carla Freccero et al., ‘Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion’, GLQ, 13.2–3 (2007), 177–95 (p. 187).   69 Beadle, ed., ‘The Annunciation and Visitation’, in The York Plays, pp. 110–17.   70 Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play: A Play for the Christmas Season’, p. 145.   71 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, ll. 297–304.   72 Nolan Sidhu, Indecent Exposure, p. 203.   73 England and Pollard, eds, ‘Noah and the Ark’, ll. 336–66.   74 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, ll. 310–14.   75 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, ll. 415–21.  76 Freeman, Time Binds, pp. 40–1.   77 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, l. 391.  78 Sturges, The Circulation of Power, p. 93.  79 See French, ‘The Material Culture of Childbirth’, pp. 130–1 and Angela Florschuetz, ‘Women’s Secrets: Childbirth, Pollution, and Purification in Northern Octavian’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 30 (2008), 235–68.   80 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, ll. 544–7.   81 See for example Abate, ‘Oversight as Insight’, pp. 99–100, which argues that Gyb’s misogynist speeches ‘prefigure the personality of Mak’s wife’, including her ‘tough demeanour and copious fertility’.  82 Solberg, Virgin Whore, p. 125.  83 Normington, Gender and Medieval Drama, p. 77.   84 P. H. P. Goldberg, trans. and ed., ‘Church Court, Diocese of Lincoln. Latin. 1518–19’, in Women in England, c. 1275–1525 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 133. Thank you to Rachel Moss and Lucy Allen-Goss for bringing this example to my attention. See also Rachel Moss, ‘The Vulnerable Academic Body’, LA Review of Books, 21 June 2018 at https://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2018/06/21/

Time out of joint

149

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the-vulnerable-academic-body/?fbclid=IwAR2NA0iPb5CHwF770ziyp8ixlX56oNpIcEw-CVLa4GVrW9GvLk5A9gkeaL0 [accessed 25 August 2019]. Lucy Allen-Goss is also currently in the early stages of researching the medieval practice of nuns being given empty cradles and encouraged to pretend they were mothers of the infant Jesus. She suggests that the Phipes couple were appropriating maternal performances more appropriate to the monastery.   85 See French, ‘The Material Culture of Childbirth’, p. 136 and Roberta Gilchrist, Medieval Life: Archaeology and the Life Course (Pershore: The Boydell Press, 2012), pp. 13–19 and pp. 135–44.   86 These episodes are discussed in detail in Solberg, Virgin Whore, pp. 110–15.  87 Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, p. 23.   88 England and Pollard, ed., ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, ll. 334 and 432. It is also possible that the cradle was from Gyll’s own childhood, and brought into the house in anticipation of her own offspring.   89 This is part of Moss’s new project Beyond Between Men: The Medieval Homosocial Imagination. These ideas were examined in her conference paper: Rachel Moss, ‘Locker Room Talk: Homosocial Discourse in Late Medieval England’, unpublished paper delivered at the conference Leeds International Medieval Congress (University of Leeds, 2–5 July 2018).   90 Genesis 3.16: ‘To the woman also he said: I will multiply thy sorrows, and thy conceptions: in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children, and thou shalt be under thy husband’s power, and he shall have dominion over thee. And to Adam he said: Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldst not eat, cursed is the earth in thy work; with labour and toil shalt thou eat thereof all the days of thy life.’   91 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, ll. 332–5.   92 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, ll. 432–48.  93 E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen, ‘Becoming Unbecoming: Untimely Meditations’, in Queer Times, Queer Becomings, ed. by E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen, pp. 1–21 (p. 12).  94 On calling on saints during childbirth, see Stoetzz, ‘Suffering and Survival’, pp. 105–10 and Paden and Freeman Paden, ‘Swollen Women, Shifting Canon’, 309–10.   95 See Gail McMurray Gibson, ‘Scene and Obscene: Seeing and Performing Late Medieval Childbirth’, JMEMS, 29.1 (1999), 7–24 on the discreet offstage or curtained births given to Mary in European nativity drama.   96 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, l. 488.   97 Abate, ‘Oversight as Insight’, p. 100.   98 Barker, Murphy and Hall, eds, Mary Magdelen, ll. 1759–63.  99 See Martin Reynolds, ‘Sin, Sacredness, and Childbirth in Early Modern Drama’, p. 32.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

150

Play time

100 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, l. 559. 101 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, ll. 562–5. 102 Green, ‘Obstetrical and Gynaecological Texts in Middle English’, p. 57. 103 On the birth room as a female space, see Laura Kalas-Williams, Margery Kempe’s Spiritual Medicine: Suffering, Transformation and the Life-Course (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2020). 104 Lorrayne Y. Baird-Lange, ‘Trotula’s Fourteenth-Century Reputation, Jankyn’s Book, and Chaucer’s Trot’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 1 (1984), 245–56. 105 See Rowland, ‘Women’s Health Care and Trotula’, p. 63. 106 Freeman, Time Binds, pp. 72–3. 107 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, l. 477. 108 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, l. 484. 109 Claude Chidamian, ‘Mak and the Tossing in the Blanket’, Speculum, 22.2 (1947), 186–90 (p. 190). 110 Monica H. Green, ed. and trans., The Trotula: A Medieval Companion of Women’s Medicine (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), p. 123. Thank you to Rósín Donohoe for this reference. 111 Tamás Karáth, ‘Staging Childbirth: Medical and Popular Discourses of Delivery and Midwifery in the Medieval English Mystery Plays’, SPELL, 28 (2013), 187–206 (p. 191). 112 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, l. 587. 113 See Patricia Skinner, Living with Disfigurement in Early Medieval Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 5–6; A. W. Bates, Emblematic Monsters: Unnatural Conceptions and Deformed Births in Early Modern Europe (New York: Rodophi, 2005), pp. 42–3 and Dana Oswold, Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature (Chippenham: D.S. Brewer, 2010), p. 15. 114 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, l. 603. 115 Bale, Feeling Persecuted, p. 73. 116 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, ll. 581–99. 117 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, l. 611. 118 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, ll. 600–1. 119 M. L. Ryder, ‘Medieval Sheep and Wool Types’, The Agricultural History Review, 32.1 (1984), 14–28 (p. 15). 120 See Richard Barber, trans. and ed., Bestiary: MS Bodley 764 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1992), pp. 79–81. 121 L. A. J. R. Houwen, ‘Animal Parallelism in Medieval Literature and the Bestiaries: A Preliminary Investigation’, Neophilologus, 78 (1994), 483–96 (p. 488). 122 N. C. W. Spence, ‘The Human Bestiary’, MLA, 96.4 (2001), 913–90 (p. 918) and Malcolm Jones, ‘Folklore Motifs in Late Medieval Art III: Erotic Animal Imagery’, Folklore, 102.2 (1991), 192–219 (p. 208). 123 Derek Brewer, ed. and trans., ‘Pitas Payas, the Breton Painter’, in Medieval Comic Tales (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1996), p. 39.

Time out of joint

151

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

124 Philip Butterworth, ‘The Bible and the Towneley Plays of Isaac and Iacob’, in Staging Scripture: Biblical Drama, 1350–1600, ed. by Peter Happé and Wim Hüsken (Leiden: Brill Rodophi, 2016), pp. 92–124. 125 Genesis 22.13. 126 Sinanoglou, ‘The Christ Child as sacrifice’, p. 503 and Kenney, ‘The Manger as Calvary and Altar in the Middle English Nativity Lyric’, pp. 29–65. 127 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, ll. 535–8. 128 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, l. 323. See also Sinanoglou, ‘The Christ Child as Sacrifice’, p. 508, ‘[g]iven the tradition of the Chris Child as sacrifice, we can recognize in Gyll’s oath the greatest and most evocative Nativity prophecy of all; that is, the eating of Mary’s child.’ 129 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, ll. 535–8. 130 Heather Blurton, Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 6. 131 See Sinanoglou, ‘The Christ Child as Sacrifice’, pp. 491–3. 132 See Merrall Llewelyn Price, Consuming Passions: The Uses of Cannibalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 34–6. 133 Llewelyn Price, Consuming Passions, p. 36. 134 Judith Haber, ‘Marlowe’s Queer Jew’, Renaissance Drama, 47.1 (2019), 1–20 and Edelman, No Future, p. 30. 135 Michael Livingston, ed., Siege of Jerusalem (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2004), ll. 1089–96. 136 Livingston, Siege of Jerusalem, ll. 1081 and 1093. 137 Livingston, Siege of Jerusalem, ll. 1087–8. 138 Dean, ‘Bareback Time’, p. 75. 139 England and Pollard, eds, ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play’, ll. 674–82. 140 Halberstam, ‘Keeping Time with Lesbians on Ecstasy’, p. 334. 141 Edelman, No Future, p. 28.

4

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Passion meets Passover: temporal origami in the Towneley Herod the Great

I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.1

A simple story. A man hears a prophecy. He takes action to avoid its consequences. This action ensures it is fulfilled. What is curious about this core narrative is not just that it has been frequently worked and reworked across times, literatures and cultures, but that the story is so remarkably open to manipulation. Little flesh needs to be added to these narrative bones to form very different kinds of tragic performance: A king is told he will die at the hands of his son. When a son is born, he orders him killed. Out of pity, a servant exposes the child on a hillside. This forms the first of the multi-layered prophecies ensnaring the protagonist of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. A supremacist receives news of a prophecy suggesting that the one with the power to defeat him will be born in the seventh month. He attacks a baby, but this marks the boy with the very power that will ensure his own defeat. This prophecy drives J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. A king is troubled by news that the king of the Jews has been born in a town under his jurisdiction. He plans to kill all the town’s male children under the age of two. This sets into motion a pattern of Hebrew– Christian ‘prophecies’ which end with Jesus being named ‘king of the Jews’ at his Crucifixion.

While the men – and they are nearly always men – in these prophetic narratives are shown struggling against the force of prophecy, the women suffering as a consequence are more frequently shown to be assisting prophetic fulfilment. Lily Potter’s attempt to defend her son gives Harry the power that enables him to defeat Voldemort. In medieval dramatic adaptations of the gospel of Matthew, the laments

Passion meets Passover

153

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

of the Bethlehem mothers similarly resist Herod’s violent bid to disrupt Christian chronology by drawing the times of Hebrew matriarch Rachel and the Virgin Mary into close proximity. While the extant late medieval English pageants of the massacre of the Innocents show Herod’s violent attempt to thwart prophecy meeting with energetic resistance from Bethlehem’s women, this moment of verbose and physical conflict is often minimised in modern adaptations of the plays. The desperate, yet comic tone of these pageants not only raises problems for academic critics; it also seems to work counter to a modern desire to make the plays’ violence, as director Roland Reed said of the York Slaughter of the Innocents, ‘immediately and horrifyingly relevant to our time’.2 This awareness directed Reed’s production for the 1999 University of Toronto festival, aiming to ‘liberat[e] the biblical story from the prison of the past’ by drawing on contemporary incidents of violence in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq, Kosovo, Rwanda and Somalia. Similarly, the 2013 Chester Mystery Plays saw the mothers silently open out their bundled babies into world flags. In so doing, these productions played on the political undercurrents which, as Nicole Nolan Sidhu and others have shown, also allowed medieval plays to act as covert criticisms of contemporary authorities.3 However, while both modern and medieval performances draw parallels between the act of violence in Bethlehem and acts of violence in their performance contexts, the silencing of the verbose mothers in modern adaptations removes an essential element of the plays’ relationships to prophetic time. Erasing the mothers’ verbal and physical resistance in favour of the silent poignancy brought by modern parallel, these adaptations overlook the ways in which the fighting wives of the medieval pageants were also agents of the prophetic structures Herod’s violence is attempting to overcome. Performed under the influence of the liturgical and devotional practices surrounding the feasts of Corpus Christi and the Holy Innocents, the slaughter plays in the Towneley, Chester, Coventry, York, Digby and N-Town manuscripts oscillate between many moments, including an act of violence in Bethlehem, the Crucifixion and events in the lives of Moses, Mary, Rachel and Jesus. Where the pageants considered in the earlier chapters of this book worked both to construct and rupture notions of a distinct ‘before’ and ‘after’, those dealing with the slaughter of children at Bethlehem invite different approaches to time. Unlike the other major acts of biblical violence depicted in medieval pageants, such as the Fall, the murder of Abel, the Flood, the Crucifixion, or Doomsday, the slaughter of the

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

154

Play time

Innocents does not substantially change the laws of its world. Occurring after Christ’s birth but before his teaching marks a difference in law, and well before the Crucifixion, the slaughter occupies the flexible space between Jewish and Christian theologies. These pageants are also unusual in that they feature a dramatic persona who believes he has the ability directly to influence time. Ever the supreme theatrical egotist, the tyrant Herod thinks his violent intervention can invalidate the ‘prophecies’ of the Old Law and prevent the coming of the New. Yet these temporal negotiations have the effect of bringing together further scriptural moments that validate Jesus’ authority. This knitting together of times is emphasised when Herod’s soldiers face opposition from Bethlehem’s mothers, who do not let their children die without a fight. This chapter argues that the mothers’ resistance is instrumental in furthering the meetings between scriptural times which Herod is attempting to suppress. This moves beyond works examining the role of grief as a means of female social resistance to examine its role as engaging with prophetic time.4 Where Herod deliberately attempts to alter time through his act of violent rupture, the mothers’ anger at his soldiers unconsciously promotes the overlapping and encounter of past and future moments. Although they lose their children, they successfully perform temporal processes that fully undermine the masculine control of Herod and his soldiers. This process is particularly striking in the depiction of the Bethlehem slaughter in the Towneley manuscript’s Herod the Great pageant.5 Herod the Great and the preceding Offering of the Magi both feature episodes where Herod commands his men to search their books ‘for any thing / If ye find of sich a kyng’.6 This gives the past a textual nature which has the ability both to threaten and to inform present action, as Herod’s councillors scour the pages of scripture to guide the king’s actions. Unlike the other dramatic personae discussed so far, Herod actively reads time as the product of ‘bookys’, and thus as malleable as the vellum on which his strikingly medieval library was written. This figuring of time as textual construct places a greater emphasis on the intertextual force of the words of the Bethlehem mothers, which flick back and forth across time by emphasising their links to the Hebrew figure of Rachel and to the Virgin Mary. The processional format of the encounters between mothers and soldiers also moves between dramatic texts and traditions, using some of the formal elements of the earlier liturgical Ordo Rachelis.7 Where the Towneley Herod believes his authority depends on tearing his narrative away from scripture, the mothers underline the futility of his attempt.

Passion meets Passover

155

Temporal origami

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Unlike the temporalities examined in the other chapters of this book, which employ themes of rupture, supersession and interruption, the slaughter narrative exploits models of fulfilment and continuity. The first two chapters examined the frequently anti-Semitic processes of conversion or supersession operating in plays which bring times, texts or events perceived as ‘Hebrew’ or ‘Christian’ into contact. These models become unstable when dramatised, particularly when dealing with temporal ‘survivors’, such as the wife who steps out into a new world haunted by her memories of the old one. Moreover, models of collapsed and supersessionary time rarely allow for distinctions to be made between times as they are brought together. If a distinction is made, it is chiefly in order to assert the superiority of one time over another. Chapter 3 showed a medieval plot-line working as a queerly interruptive force on the Nativity, in which anachronism, doubling and iconography disturbed and interrupted, but did not fundamentally threaten, the timeline of the Nativity. The Innocents plays, however, rely on maintaining differences between moments in time even when brought into proximity. Time in these plays tends to move back and forth between events in the past and future of the massacre. While this movement confers legitimacy on the ‘present’ of the massacre, moments never collapse into simultaneity or suggest supersession or erasure. This provides evidence of a more complex medieval lay understanding of how religious and scriptural time worked. The ways in which dramatic personae relate to the mutually validating yet distinct interconnections between time and text in Matthew’s account of the massacre and in its Towneley dramatisation therefore call for a different model of time to those examined so far. Such a model can be found in the work of a philosopher whose studies, like those of Herod’s academic cronies, moved between classical literature, mathematics, science and religion. Michel Serres explained his topological understanding of time using the metaphor of a crumpled handkerchief: If you take a handkerchief and spread it out in order to iron it, you can see in it certain fixed distances and proximities. [. . .] Then take the same handkerchief and crumple it, by putting it in your pocket. Two distant points are suddenly close, even superimposed. If, further, you tear it in certain places, two points that were close can become very distant. This science of nearness and rifts is called topology, while the science of stable and well-defined distances is called metrical geometry.8

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

156

Play time

Serres’ topological model is one of several he offers as alternatives to the directional concept of linear time.9 The dynamics of this model were inspired by the non-linearity of chaos and complexity theory, but initially began as a method of defending Serres’ own academic practice of oscillating between examples from different cultures and times.10 Yet while topological time has since been refined in philosophical and literary criticism, its proponents have often chosen to eliminate Serres’ original possibility of tearing. Steven Connor even defines topology as ‘the study of the spatial properties of an object that remain invariant under homeomorphic deformation [. . .] actions of stretching, squeezing, or folding, but not tearing or breaking’.11 This resistance to the topological possibilities of tearing time is itself part of a movement against concepts of ‘breaks’; particularly in historiographical practice where, as the previous chapters have shown, each moment is open to multiple simultaneous experiences of time which defy the possibility of making a definitive break between ‘then’ and ‘now’.12 Until the point of tearing, Serres’ handkerchief offers a model of time that can be shaped and folded, but essentially retains its status as one piece of cloth. Unlike the temporary act of folding, a tear bespeaks a violent agency which effects a permanent distortion which cannot be easily re-assimilated into the fabric. In the Towneley Herod the Great, tearing does appear as an example of topological manipulation, even if it proves to be one that is not ultimately successful. When Herod consults his scriptures before trying to take control of his present, he is hoping to enact a ‘tearing of time’. His intention is to disassociate his own time from the Hebrew scriptures that precede it, and the Christian texts which follow. Serres’ topological model also implies that a handkerchief can always be ironed flat again. While acts of crumpling and folding bring moments into proximity, these moments are not permanently altered by their encounter. Where collapsed times bring moments into a single fabric – Dinshaw’s ‘capacious “now”’ – crumpled time retains difference between them.13 If Herod attempts tearing, the mothers who resist his soldiers unconsciously manufacture crumpling – bringing moments of scripture into proximity without permanently altering them through the encounter. Their vociferous and violent opposition to Herod’s soldiers therefore constitutes an act of temporal, as well as social, resistance, securing links between scriptures during the very act that attempts to dislocate them. While Serres’ malleable topology has been used as a productive model through which to approach time in early modern drama, it

Passion meets Passover

157

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

has received less attention with regard to earlier performance.14 The critical possibilities opened by typology have been well demonstrated by Isabel Davis’ discussion of the use of Lamentations at the York death of Christ, which identifies the ‘layering’ effect produced by medieval scriptural reading and the cyclical liturgical year, which together brought distant moments into close proximity.15 With its propensity to bring different moments together, Serres’ topology is particularly suited to the discussion of intermediary spaces, or what Kathleen Biddick calls ‘unhistorical temporalities’.16 The Nativity plays partake of such an intermediary space because Christ has come, but has not yet died. As the following examination of the gospel shows, this is a moment which falls awkwardly between Passover and Passion, Hebrew and Christian law, Incarnation and Crucifixion, and prophecy and prefiguration. While Serres himself argued that, despite time’s topological and percolating nature, Jesus Christ was nevertheless ‘a fixed point [. . .] towards which all gravitates’, this book has consistently demonstrated that medieval religious drama was particularly unclear about where such a ‘fixed point’ stood – particularly when staging an episode based on a gospel account invested in promoting continuation, not rupture.17 Scriptural legitimacy in the gospel of Matthew The propensity of late medieval plays to present the slaughter of the Innocents as a meeting point between several different moments is partly a consequence of the way time works in its source. This episode is only present in the gospel of Matthew – a collection of texts which present the story of Jesus from the perspective of Jewish Christianity.18 It is therefore invested in typologies designed to persuade its audience of Christ’s legitimacy. It does this through a number of parallels that align Christ with Moses, stressing that he is both a continuation of and a successor to Mosaic law. Owing to its internal typology, this gospel became a popular resource in medieval Jewish–Christian disputation literature, as well as being used to buttress medieval Christian typologies.19 The gospel itself, however, tends to privilege the rhetoric of continuation over that of fissure, repeatedly depicting Christ not as abolisher of Law, but as the fulfilment of it.20 Its account is therefore patterned with formulaic phrases designed to link past and present, such as ‘you have heard it said [. . .] but I say unto you [. . .]’, and ‘this fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet [. . .]’.21 This is characteristic of Jewish scholarship, which, Balslev and Mohanty observe, reads scripture

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

158

Play time

as part of a prophetic time that maintains historical patterns, with time in Judaism eschewing uniform linearity in favour of ‘a series of leaps’.22 Through validating present with the past, this textual process disassociated moments from their original contexts, applying them instead to the interpreter’s community.23 While the Christian Bible relied upon the scriptures of the past for validation, it also engaged in processes of historical dislocation which anticipated the ways late medieval playmakers adapted scripture according to the needs of their own communities. A looseness in the use of the term ‘prophecy’ must therefore be acknowledged when referring to fragments of Hebrew scripture that have been taken out of their original contexts and aligned with Christian events. Prophecy was understood by early medieval writers such as Thomas Aquinas as knowledge revealed by God, while a popular growth in millenarianism and apocalyptic literature in the late Middle Ages placed an emphasis on the direct revelation of knowledge between divine agents and human beings.24 Although it is named ‘prophecy’, the kinds of scriptural interaction found in Matthew might be more properly called typology, engaged as they are with appropriating, decontextualising and reconfiguring earlier scriptures as proof of precedent. However, as the Herod of the Towneley play reads and responds to these scriptures as prophecies, it makes sense to continue to refer to them as such in this analysis. Matthew 2.13–23 presents a number of movements in time and space, which turn several different events from Hebrew scripture into a series of prophecies that work within the timeframe of events at Bethlehem. The account begins with an angel warning Joseph to take Jesus and Mary into Egypt, ‘for it will come to pass that Herod will seek the child to destroy him’.25 The gospel validates the Holy Family’s translocation by claiming these events occurred ‘that it might be fulfilled which the Lord spoke by the prophet, saying: Out of Egypt have I called my son’.26 This first ‘fulfilment’ cites Hosea 2.1, which refers to God bringing the nation of Israel out of Egypt. This has the effect of making Jesus a second Moses figure and, by extension, a worthy bearer of a new law, as well as stressing his status as God’s ‘son’. For Jesus to arrive from Egypt and re-enact the journey of Moses, bringer of the first Law, he needed a reason to go there. Herod’s killing spree provides that reason. This figures the events at Bethlehem as a crucial and causal link between Hebrew and Christian scriptures. The male children of Bethlehem are killed in order that Jesus may be read as a continuation of the Hebrew law.

Passion meets Passover

159

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

After the wise men do not return, Herod orders Bethlehem’s male children under the age of two to be killed. Here, Matthew refers to a second scripture in recording the grief of the town’s mothers: ‘Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremias the prophet, saying: A voice in Rama was heard, lamentation and great mourning; Rachel bewailing her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.’27 This brings the massacre together with two other moments in Israel’s history. Jeremiah 31.15 records Israel’s captivity by the Assyrians using the motif of Rachel. Showing Rachel weeping, Jeremiah imagines the mother from whom the northern tribes of Israel were descended mourning for her children. Motherhood had been a particularly fraught experience for Rachel, who was childless for a long time before giving birth to Joseph and dying bearing Benjamin.28 Her motherhood was therefore twice linked to mourning: initially through her inability to bear children and later, when she had borne sons, through her own painful death, which caused her to name her second son ‘Benoni’, or ‘the son of my pain’.29 The child’s renaming by his father Jacob as Benjamin, or ‘son of the right hand’, was paralleled in the figuring of Jesus in medieval devotional literature. This showed Jesus as the son at the right hand of the father, but, for his mother Mary, as a son of pain. For example, the mid-fourteenth-century ‘The Dispute Between Mary and the Cross’ depicts the Virgin’s sorrow as she gazes at her crucified son. Recalling in detail her son’s birth, she accuses the Cross of cruelty: ‘With my brestes my Brid I fed; Cros, thou yevest Him eysel and galle!’30 The ‘Dispute’ Mary’s memory of childbirth is placed in opposition to the Cross’s use of male Hebrew figures, including Adam and Moses, to contextualise her son’s death within the salvation narrative. Here, female grief is resistant to the masculine ordering of time into prophecy and prefiguration. Remembering and re-experiencing her birth pain at the Crucifixion, the medieval Mary, like Rachel, linked childbirth and death at the moment Jesus assumed his place at his father’s right hand. Matthew’s referencing of Rachel is also linked to another event involving grieving mothers and dead children: the Passover. Rachel was mother of Joseph, the first Israelite sold into Egyptian slavery. This brings the massacre together with the sparing of the Israelite slaves from the tenth plague visited upon Egypt: the death of the first-born of ‘both man and beast’.31 This final plague directly preceded Moses’ leading the Israelites out of Egypt. An early Sahidic fragment of The Life of the Virgin developed this narrative to

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

160

Play time

feature the story of a second woman named Rachel from the tribe of Levi. Forced to work while pregnant, Rachel miscarried the night before the Passover. While the other Israelites rejoiced, she wept, alone, for her dead child.32 This narrative is particularly pertinent in explaining the ways the mothers of the Innocents might have been understood in performance. While Christians reading the slaughter narrative were encouraged to celebrate the escape of Jesus and honour the Innocents as the first Christian martyrs, the grief of the mothers – who were not party to this knowledge – was also acknowledged. During the Feast of the Holy Innocents, these mothers, like Egypt’s Rachel, were depicted grieving while the Holy Family’s escape was celebrated. Like Mary addressing the Cross, the mothers’ grief challenges the necessity of the structural theologies in which their story participates.33 Matthew’s account therefore opens out sections of the past like a folding telescope: extending backwards into scripture and jointing together three different moments. By the time of the Towneley Herod the Great, further narrative accretions had built up, incorporating references to later apocryphal texts as well as the collective memory of feast traditions and dramatic and liturgical practices. In this sense, the processes at work within late medieval imaginings of the Bethlehem massacre might potentially be described as cumulative and palimpsestic, with Christ’s birth contributing the top ‘layer’ of meaning to a series of moments throughout Hebrew history.34 This is similar to the temporal work observed by Pamela Sheingorn when she identified an ‘antitype’ of typological patterns in medieval religious drama.35 However, the figure of the palimpsest presents too rigid a model with which to understand the processes at work in Matthew 2 and in the Towneley Herod the Great. This is because a palimpsest suggests a superimposition of one thing over another. Although, unlike certain models of supersession, this does not necessarily entirely efface the thing underneath, it does impose a hierarchy of meaning. The thing on top, being the most recent, is also the most legible, and suggests scribal choices which privilege certain texts over others.36 The times brought together by the Bethlehem slaughter require a more malleable structure. Like the points on Serres’ handkerchief, and the ‘Dispute’ Mary’s inability to be consoled by contextualising her grief within a broader Christian history, Matthew’s moments in time also stand alone as separate, distinct entities. The retention of difference between moments in time is crucial to the staging of this episode.

Passion meets Passover

161

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The account of the Bethlehem killing therefore incorporates prior texts and presents them as ‘prophecies’ intended to consolidate the young Jesus’ position as new prophet and law-maker.37 These structural devices were adapted by the late medieval plays dealing with the slaughter, which consequently present a different view of the Hebrew past to those discussed so far. Rather than presenting Judaism as backward-looking or valuable chiefly through processes of typological reading, the structures of ‘prophecy’ and ‘fulfilment’ established in Matthew 2 suggest that the gospel is not overwriting the Hebrew past but deferring to its authority. This process is emphasised in the two incidents of Herod’s recourse to his ‘bookys’ in the Towneley Magi and Herod the Great pageants, which show how Herod’s reading of Hebrew texts as ‘prophecy’ directs his response to the rumours of a new king. Herod: a true King of the ‘Jews’?

The Herod of English medieval drama has arguably attracted more critical attention than any other persona. A compendium of condensed rage, spouting blasphemous, bodily and violent speech, Herod’s dramatic persona emerged from liturgical traditions and boasts an impressive inter-textual legacy, appearing in medieval and early modern sources.38 These appearances indicate that his characterisations tended towards the ridiculous. Chaucer gives his role to the hapless lover Absolon, who inappropriately plays him with ‘lightnesse and maistrye’ in The Miller’s Tale, while Herod famously survives the performances of the civic dramas by appearing, rather unfairly, as an example of outdated performance styles in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.39 Moving away from readings of Herod as a mad sinner, critics have identified the great variety in his representations, which imagine him in roles as diverse as comic braggart, tragic ruler, hero and antihero.40 Miriam Skey has also compared the ‘arrogant, blustering, blasphemous tyrant’ of the English plays to his representation in wider Europe, where he is often presented as a sophisticated medieval ruler.41 Later approaches have located his performance in relation to his medieval playing contexts, identifying his function as a safe conduit for grievances concerning local abuses of power.42 The diverse interpretations and dramatic functions of Herod suggest that the prophetic chronology of Matthew’s plot is not the only supple element of medieval Innocents plays. The king himself is multi-textual, endlessly malleable and able to move between different

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

162

Play time

moments in time. Herod’s identity – and, crucially, his temporal identity – is further complicated by the fact medieval plays often conflate two historical kings in their characterisation. King Herod the Great (c. 74–4 BCE), the Roman-appointed King of Judea who ordered the massacre at Bethlehem, is often not distinguishable in characterisation from Herod Antipas (c. 20 BC – 40 AD), to whom is attributed the death of John the Baptist and the interrogation of Jesus. This conflation lends the Herod persona a curious sense of somehow having transcended a specific historical moment in order to act as a malevolent force at both the beginning and the end of Jesus’ life, bringing the Nativity and Passion together. In Herod the Great, this is used to both ironic and prophetic effect when, in one of the common anachronisms given to morally dubious figures, Herod swears ‘by gottys dere nalys’.43 This oath works on several levels. As argued in Chapter 2, this kind of anachronistic swearing functioned as a violent speech act which collapsed time by physically tearing the body of Christ.44 Here, it foreshadows Herod’s own act of violence against Christ at the massacre. Yet in swearing by the nails which pierced Christ, Herod also refers to the event he most fears, folding together his time with the very moment when Jesus is ‘crowned’ and named ‘King of the Jews’.45 While designed for emphasis, Herod’s violent speech act confirms the futility of his attempt to organise time. Herod’s temporal flexibility also means that he performs some of the characteristics of the ‘protean Jew’ identified in Chapter 1.46 His characterisation demonstrates a remarkable adaptability to fit any number of corrupt secular and religious authorities across time. The historical Herod was Jewish through his father’s conversion, and this association with Jewishness was frequently emphasised in medieval texts which sought to moralise his actions.47 The violence of the hatred with which the Towneley Herod pursues the prophesied child-king holds much in common with other contemporary constructions of Jewish antagonism towards Christ’s body in the sacrament and on the Cross.48 In fantasising about what he intends to do with Jesus’ body, ‘I shuld with this steyyl brand / Byrkyn all his bonys’, Herod plays into a number of tropes figuring Jews both as child-murderers and as the specific enemies of Christ.49 Like his York, N-Town, Chester and N-Town counterparts, the Towneley Herod refers to a God he names ‘Mohammed’.50 This reflects the late medieval tendency to conflate Islam and Judaism, and such acts of conflation were specifically associated with the slaughter of the Innocents in medieval artwork.51 The use of

Passion meets Passover

163

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Mohammed’ to stress Herod’s religious otherness performs a similar function to the characterisations of Herod’s soldiers in medieval artwork which, from the thirteenth century, overlaid the Bethlehem massacre with blood libels of Jewish ritual child murder and crusade propaganda which depicted Saracens spearing babies.52 These narratives were usually constructed to validate the violence inherent in Christian spiritual and warfare practices. If the Bethlehem massacre is theologically necessary for the validation of Christian theology, it therefore follows that its violence be projected onto a source characterised as external. The medieval Herod may therefore be examined as the ultimate ‘protean’ character: able to accrue associations from a variety of times, religions and traditions which produce a cumulative performance of antagonism towards Christ. Yet the Herod appearing in the Towneley Herod the Great appears unconscious of his multi-temporality. The character’s belief in his own authority over dramatic, temporal and spiritual narrative is clear from the play’s beginning, when Herod tries to regulate audience speech and movement: HERODES: Speke not or I haue told what I will in this stede, ye wote note All that I will mefe; Styr not bot ye haue lefe, ffor if ye do, I clefe you small as flesh to pott.53

Herod’s threat to ‘clefe’ his audience ‘small as flesh to pott’ if they fail to cease talking of a king performs another anti-Semitic stereotype by referencing narratives of ritual cannibalism during the Paschal feast.54 Yet in commanding silence and stillness, Herod is also attempting to enforce stasis upon his audience, while inflating his kingly authority to divine proportions.55 As Claire Wright and I have argued elsewhere, a tyrant’s speech makes several changes to an audience’s experience of the playing space: changing its soundscape, altering the ‘rules’ of behaviour in that space, and casting the audience as Herod’s subjects, bringing them into the biblical ‘now’ of Herod’s time-frame.56 This, of course, relies on the audience members’ complicity. Some may choose to obey Herod, while others might resist by heckling or laughing: actions which re-assert their own power as medieval audience members rather than the subjects of a volatile tyrant. Yet Herod’s attempt to control audience

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

164

Play time

time and his subject’s words signals his belief that he has the power to thwart the spread and fulfilment of prophecy through violence. This belief produces tragic consequences as the play unfolds. When Herod’s bid to silence the rumours of a new king fails, he tries a different approach. While the York plays show Herod ordering the slaughter on the basis of the Magi’s report, in the Towneley and Chester pageants Herod does his homework first. The episode in which Herod checks scriptures for confirmation of the Magi’s news appears twice in the Towneley manuscript: once in the Offering of the Magi and once in Herod the Great. In the earlier Towneley play, Herod asks his advisors and doctors of law to search their ‘bookys’: a command which produces what the second doctor calls ‘a prophecy’ from ‘that profett Isay’.57 In Herod the Great, however, the tyrant narrows the parameters of the literary search by giving his ‘clerkys’ specific instructions about both where to search for information and what to look for: HEROD:  Oone spake in myne eere / A wonderful talkyng, And sayde a mayde shuld bere / another to be kyng; Syrs, I pray yow inquere / in all wrytyng, In vrygyll, in homere / And all other thyng Bot legende; Sekys poece tayllys; lefe pystyls and grales; Mes, matyns, noght avalys, All these I defende. I pray you tell heyndley / now what ye fynde.58

The references to Virgil and Homer, as well as epistles and collections of myths, suggest Herod has access to a library fit for a late medieval nobleman. The fact he is careful to direct his counsellors to look in specific places shows he values some texts over others, including some that seem a little unlikely. Herod does not mention any of the Hebrew scriptures in which his counsellors go on to find their typological references to the birth of Christ, but directs them to look ‘in vyrgyll, in homere / and all other thyng / Bot legende’.59 This is very different to Herod’s directions during the equivalent episode in the Chester cycle. In the Chester Vintners’ play, Herod instructs his Doctor to ‘look up thy books of prophecye, / of Daniell, David, and Isaye’, as well as a providing a thorough reading list of other Hebrew authorities in order to verify the Magi’s predictions.60 The Chester Herod therefore seems a little more aware of the Christian use of Hebrew scripture, and has a shrewd idea

Passion meets Passover

165

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

that he might find the information he is seeking in texts commonly subject to typological interpretations. As a consequence, the typology of the Chester play is far more heavy-handed than that of the Towneley equivalent, and its list of Christ-anticipating Hebrew ‘prophecies’ take up more than 100 lines. The Chester doctor, for example, names the child of the prophecies ‘Christ’, and claims he is the Jewish king prophesied by Jacob, Daniel and Michaes, while Herod and the Doctor quote scripture (in Latin) to validate the authority of their arguments.61 This means that while, unlike his Towneley counterpart, the Chester Herod seems more entrenched in Christian theology and debate culture, his subsequent rage and decision to order the massacre suggests a fundamental failure in the learning and logic deployed so far.62 The Towneley Herod the Great takes a slightly more realist approach to its Herod than that of Chester. Like the N-Town Joseph, he is unaware that ‘Christian’ time has begun. While Bob Godfrey reads the Towneley Herod’s recourse to Classical texts (as opposed to Hebrew texts) as evidence of his lack of knowledge, the fact Herod does not consider the works of Virgil and Homer to be ‘legende’ is entirely appropriate for his historical position as a Roman-appointed leader for whom the Classical works were viewed as histories, rather than fiction.63 Furthermore, in advocating these authorities, Herod’s choice of books reflects the ambivalence with which these texts were approached in late medieval Christian literary culture, inspiring both rejection and reverence.64 The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw an increasing drive towards reclaiming Classical authors and historical figures as righteous heathens. In this context, Virgil was sometimes read as a forerunner of the apostle St Paul, yet just as frequently condemned as a pagan whose works might lead Christian scholars astray.65 While recognising the authority of pagan authors, the Towneley Herod exhibits a cautiousness regarding the anachronistic Christian texts stored in his library. He excludes the epistles, the ‘grales’ (a service book containing the scriptural and sung parts of the Mass) and the liturgical texts of the Mass and Matins. The reference to these is, of course, anachronistic, but it is also ironic, as their presence affirms the fulfilment of repetitive, liturgical Christian time even as Herod searches for scriptures that deny it. Although it is possible to read Herod’s belief in ‘poece taylls’ at the expense of ‘Christian’ texts as further evidence of his poor moral character, it also constructs a series of time-related jokes at the monarch’s expense: particularly because his enquiry performs the

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

166

Play time

same practices of late medieval typological reading that validated Christ’s authority. There is an inherent irony in the fact that one of his sanctioned authors, Virgil, was connected to St Paul: writer of the very ‘pystels’ (epistles) that Herod instructs his counsellors to reject. Moreover, Herod’s reliance on ‘poece taylles’ also performs a kind of prefiguration of its own. Referring to two poets whose work was heavily invested in the workings of prophecy surrounding the destruction of Troy, the king’s reading choices anticipate his violent yet unsuccessful response to the Bethlehem problem by suggesting Herod will follow the pattern of the protagonists of those books whose authority he trusts. Like Virgil’s Priam, Achilles and Hector, the more Herod struggles to prevent the fulfilment of a prophecy, the more securely he ensures its realisation.66 He is the tragic misreader: unable to apply the knowledge gained from either his Classical texts or his scriptures. Herod’s recourse to the past to make sense of the present therefore aligns with some of the medieval Christian characterisations of ‘Jewish’ approaches to reading examined in the first chapter of this book. Herod reads selectively but erroneously. Faced with a problem of political and theological change, his initial response is to read backwards to find scripture that will defend his position. Yet in seeking this scriptural consolidation of his own authority, Herod is also participating in Christian practices of assimilating prior texts into its narrative as ‘prophecy’. This claiming of all time as messianic time is one of the principal structuring devices used both in Matthew’s gospel and in Herod’s rejected ‘pystels’ of Paul, who, in 1 Corinthians, constructs typological relations between his own time as a Jew and his time as an early follower of Christ.67 The level of detail invested in constructing these textual ironies throughout Herod’s book search suggests at least some members of the play’s audience would have been aware of their comic inconsistencies. Herod’s bid to intervene with prophetic time turns his research into a joke that the audience, who knows what will transpire, shares at his expense. He is a nobleman who has amassed a great library, but has not the wit to learn from his texts. Herod does not like what is found. Diligent academics working under pressure, his counsellors expand their search beyond the proscribed reading list to find the reference in Isaiah 7.14 to the virgin birth and another concerning the birth of a king at Bethlehem.68 His fears confirmed, Herod’s reaction is predictably violent. This violence is not initially directed at the town’s children, but against his counsellors’ learning and against the books themselves:

Passion meets Passover HERODES:         

167

Thou can not half thi crede! outt, theyfys, fro my wonys! ffy, knafys! ffy, dotty-pols, with youre bookys! Go kast thaym in the brookys!69

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Herod’s outburst attempts to discredit the readings of his counsellors by calling them ‘dotty-pols’ (simpletons) and by claiming that they do not know their creed – another anachronistic reference to Christian knowledge that confounds Herod’s desire to alter time. He then directs his anger against the books themselves, ordering the counsellors to throw them into the stream. This act of bibliographic violence gives the impression that Herod is quarrelling both with the past and with God’s word. Herod’s fear enacts what Poteet and Spector have identified as the Jewish ‘fear of change’ in medieval drama.70 When he cannot make past texts perform according to his agenda, he aims to obliterate them. Yet if this passage is considered in relation to Serres’ topological time, another reading emerges. Returning to the handkerchief metaphor, Serres claims: ‘if [. . .] you tear it in certain places, two points that were close can become very distant.’71 Herod’s command to destroy the books articulates a desire to refuse the prophetic power of Hebrew scripture by cutting it away from his own time. The tyrant wishes to sever his pages from the Bible; to detach his own time not only from those times preceding it, but also from any potential fulfilment in future scriptures. If, as I argued in Chapter 3, the Towneley manuscript was a product of the Marian restoration of Catholicism, this staging of political textual erasure would have held particular resonances for its audience. While Nicole Nolan Sidhu, Claire Sponsler and others have examined the political implications of plays staging the mothers’ resistance to Herod as class warfare, the Towneley focus on the written text as enemy and victim of a despotic king suggests that the play also conducts a specific critique of contemporary religious reform.72 The king who quibbles with his books and the advisors who pander to him produce a caricature of Tudor Protestant literary and theological reform, the efficacy of which is testified against by the survival of the Towneley manuscript itself. Moreover, when Herod accuses his advisors ‘thou can not half thi crede’ he charges them with an act of scriptural misreading concerning the Eucharist, whose performance creed, liturgy and definition had been at the heart of Edwardian reform. While the 1549 Book of Common Prayer kept

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

168

Play time

the structure of the Mass, it had also made cuts to reframe the nature of the host from sacrifice to gift. The demands of the prayer book rebellions illustrate that a significant portion of the theological resentment expressed focused on what Eamon Duffy identifies as ‘not only the Mass, but [. . .] the full ceremonial range of medieval Catholicism’.73 Herod’s claim that his councillors do not know half their creed points to the fact that these reforms had made unholy cuts: stripping text away from its proper ceremony. Moreover, in the Towneley and York dramatisations of this narrative, it is the counsellors, rather than Herod, who first suggest that the answer to his textual problem lies in a slaughter.74 The councillors present the idea as though it were an elegant answer to a question of logic: if Herod kills every child under the age of two, then the prophesied child will also be destroyed.75 By making the massacre the idea of an advisor, the Towneley play somewhat insulates itself from the political force of the accusation it is making. The transposing of blame away from the king and onto royal advisors was a common trope in early Tudor political drama.76 John Bale’s 1538 King Johan is careful to show its king as fundamentally well-intentioned but misled by the influence of his Catholic and aristocratic advisors, while John Heywood’s 1533 The Play of the Weather sees Jupiter’s authority manipulated by his Vice mediator ‘Mery Report’. In the Towneley play, however, rather than insulate Herod from culpability, this device stresses his weakness: particularly as his attempt to interfere with time is already too late. The time-frame of the events of the massacre varies between the English plays. The Digby, N-Town, Chester and Coventry plays place the angel’s warning to Joseph between Herod’s order to his soldiers and their entry into Bethlehem, giving the impression of a narrow escape. In Towneley and York, however, the inefficacy of Herod’s action is emphasised by placing the escape to Egypt in a separate play, which takes place before the slaughter. The divine intervention therefore happens well in advance of the tyrant’s decision. This emphasises the primacy of prophetic, divine time against human time: the angel knows the actions Herod will take and warns the Holy Family to flee even before Herod knows his own plans. It also demonstrates the problem with Herod’s act of linear reading. Understanding prophetic scripture in terms of cause and effect, he believes that, if he takes the right course of action, it will be possible to forestall prophecy. Yet as my previous chapters demonstrate, any attempt to apply or anticipate a temporal structure tends to produce non-linear consequences. As relationships between past

Passion meets Passover

169

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

and present do not behave in a linear fashion, Herod’s critical activities cannot secure them within patterns of cause and effect. The performance of the massacre therefore merely initiates further opportunities for temporal encounter. Herod’s orders are always already ineffective even before they have been resolved upon. The futility of the Towneley Herod’s attempt to alter his own time is most devastatingly demonstrated during the scenes of the massacre. It is here that meetings between moments in time multiply. This is chiefly conducted through the staging of the soldiers’ encounters with Bethlehem’s resistant mothers: a gendered conflict which creates new folds as medieval, Christian and Hebrew times are brought into a bloody dialogue which defies Herod’s attempt to enforce temporal distance. Folding by fighting

With their defiant language and brandishing of domestic implements, the mothers of the Innocents have long been read as undignified female counterparts to Herod’s male excess.77 Like Noah’s wife, they have often been placed in the conveniently elastic category of ‘unruly woman’.78 To this end, it is perhaps not surprising that the greatest part of critical attention has been focused on the mothers appearing in the York and Chester plays, in which they perform a particularly active role. Feminist critiques have, however, disagreed on the form and function of this ‘unruliness’. For Theresa Coletti, this has meant addressing an implied inversion of gender roles when the Chester mothers ‘adopt male attributes of combat to challenge, taunt and mimic Herod’s soldiers’.79 Denise Ryan and Robert Sturges, in contrast, direct attention to their use of insult as a specifically feminine model of attack which delegitimises and emasculates the soldiers.80 Claire Sponsler addresses the play’s civic economic context, reading the mothers’ struggle to protect their children as a contest between men’s and women’s work, while Nicole Nolan Sidhu views their struggle for political expression as prioritising matters of class over those of gender.81 However, as my discussions of Mary, Noah’s wife and Gyll have demonstrated, the ‘unruly woman’ category becomes particularly unstable when applied to dramatic personae performing in plays which represent moments of change, violence or trauma. If female unruliness relies upon a societal ‘norm’, then this presupposes some sort of social stability. This is not the case in times of massacre or of disasters such as the Flood, or at moments of divine intervention or religious

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

170

Play time

change. As a consequence, while the mothers of Bethlehem presented in the Innocents plays do attempt to resist the orders of the plays’ male personae, they are nevertheless rare examples of ‘fighting women’ acting as a positive force. Where the resistance of Noah’s wife may be conceived of as troublesome because it complicates Noah and God’s supersessionary time, and Gyll’s comic plans for her sheep-child delay the Nativity, the Bethlehem mothers disrupt the temporal manipulations of Herod, who is unambiguously evil. This poses a major ethical problem for readings striving to categorise the mothers of early medieval biblical drama as unruly. Where discussions of the mothers in other plays rightly focus on the socio-economic and political implications of their resistance, the thing that makes the Towneley mothers the greatest threat to Herod is not their refusal to submit to his authority. In addition to the usual oaths, insults and blows, the Towneley playmakers place another weapon in the mothers’ arsenal: time. Having decided to defy prophecy, the Towneley Herod sends for ‘the flowre of knyghthede’ to carry out the deed.82 When he wants something from his soldiers, Herod performs as the courtly and gracious ruler that he is figured as in plays from France, Spain, Germany and Italy.83 Setting his raging speeches aside, the Towneley Herod is generous to those who serve him – though his kingly generosity jars with the murderous acts he is rewarding. The use of medieval courtly language in this part of the play works rather differently from the interactions between medieval and scriptural time considered elsewhere in this book. When the Chester Noah’s wife ‘collapses’ the time of her Gossips into that of the Flood, the two times are staged as though they are one. Yet in the ‘medieval’ court of Herod the Great, the times brought into proximity are never collapsed, stressing the distance between them. This is in part due to the fact that Herod’s courtly language and his calling his foot-soldiers ‘knyghts’ was antiquated by the time of the Towneley manuscript’s production, suggesting Herod is aspiring to a courtly ideal which was already out of date. Moreover, the language of the court becomes comically and troublingly inappropriate when placed in the context of a massacre. For example, Herod rewards the counsellor who suggests the massacre with promises of castles, lands and even the title of Pope.84 This brings the Bethlehem massacre together with the kind of rewards a powerful king might be able to dispense. Given the cross-period performance histories of the Towneley manuscript compilation, this astonishing offer of the title of ‘Pope’ as a reward might have been understood

Passion meets Passover

171

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

by a Catholic audience as evidence of Herod’s corruption, or, if read by Protestant audiences, as a criticism of the papacy. Although it mocks the political nature of papal appointments, this particular line clearly remained provocative, as the manuscript’s later owners partially erased the word ‘Pope’ from Herod’s speech. Not only does the proposed title underline the futility of the counsellor’s child-murdering ‘solution’ (in order for that title to be awarded, Christ must survive), but its offering to a man aiming to kill Christ produces a temporal blasphemy that stresses the incongruity between times even as they are brought together. Courtly times may be folded to meet the times of the scriptures in Herod the Great, but they may not be experienced as simultaneous. This temporal disjunction extends to the portrayal of the massacre itself, when the first soldier’s knightly language is undermined by his encounter with the first mother: PRIMUS MILES: Dame, thynk it not yll, thy knafe if I kyll. PRIMA MULIER: What, thefe! agans my wyll? Lord, kepe hym in qwarte!85

The soldier’s polite address as he asks forgiveness for the deed he is about to perform is more suited to a minor social misdemeanour than child murder. The soldiers are participating in a campaign of violence against women and children, not an honourable demonstration of knightly prowess. The mother’s reaction immediately demonstrates the fragility of this courtly veneer by calling the soldier ‘thefe’. The use of this insult answers the soldier’s courtly language with an accusation used in cases of rape and commonly used to raise the social defence mechanism of hue and cry on a medieval street.86 As such, it frustrates the soldier’s performance of courtly language. Moreover, the insult also projects forward in time by referring to the fate of the child who escapes the slaughter, only to be crucified flanked between, and in the place of, thieves. The mother’s protest therefore brings together the soldier’s identification with courtly time with a biblical massacre and the insults of the medieval street, in a manner which deliberately jars in a way that many of the deliberate anachronisms identified so far have not. It also touches on the ‘present’ of the play’s audience, calling them to the mothers’ aid and re-asserting the pointlessness of the violence by anticipating the death of Christ at Golgotha. Although Serres initially proposed his topological model of crumpled time as an alternative to the ‘quarrel’

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

172

Play time

of linear, supersessionary time, this suggests that, in situations of violence, the re-assertion of distance and difference between times can also form an effective tool of confrontation.87 The Towneley play stages its violence in an orderly fashion, condensing the killing of the 144,000 infants reported dead at the end of the play into three encounters.88 These follow a pattern. A soldier approaches a mother. The mother expresses apprehension. The soldier reveals his intention to kill the child. The mother responds by insulting and threatening the soldier. The mother physically attacks the soldier. The soldier kills the child. The mother laments over the dead body. The laments also follow a repetitive structure: first the women exclaim over what has happened and abuse the soldiers, then they express their grief and, finally, they call to God for vengeance. Certain words recur in each encounter, particularly the exclamatory ‘out! out!’ and references to ‘my chyldys bloode’.89 While repetition has long been identified as a component of public performances of female lamentation, it is unusual that, here, the entirety of the encounter and not just the lament is subject to processes of repetition.90 Although the language of the dialogues varies slightly, the encounters do not vary in content or structure, and the figures perform identical roles throughout. The processional structure means one performance of bloodshed is followed by another in quick succession. This not only presents the massacre as one moment repeated several times, but also resembles the dramatic devices used in earlier liturgical drama. The successive nature of this violence recalls the kinds of liturgical drama Karl Young argues belonged to an Ordo Rachelis or Ludus Innocentium tradition, likely performed around Innocents Day.91 Eleventh-century Latin and vernacular texts from Freising and Limoges, the twelfth-century Laon manuscript and the Fleury playbook attributed to the monastery of St Benoit indicate that choirboys, in some instances carrying a lamb to represent the lamb of the Passover and Christ, Lamb of God, were killed, one by one, by soldiers.92 This was done either as part of a dumb show or accompanied by words of pleading from the Innocents or their mothers, which were repeated with each encounter. The mothers, or, as in the case in the Laon Officium Stella, a single mother named Rachel, were then left grieving, thus illustrating the fulfilment of the ‘prophecy’ of Jeremiah and providing a prefiguration of the grief of Mary for the death of her own son on the Cross.93 The performance of killing and grieving in the liturgy was highly repetitive, often involving identical words and phrases. The appearance of similar patterns of encounter in Herod the Great therefore adapts

Passion meets Passover

173

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

structures from a religious dramatic form invested in linking the slaughter to the grief of both the Hebrew Rachel and that of the Virgin Mary. It also gives the impression that this pattern of violence and maternal bereavement is repeated again and again through scriptural time. Again, the performance of emotion is the vehicle through which this play chooses to articulate the human experience of theological conflict. There are similarities to be drawn here between the Massacre and the Flood plays, in that the staging of both events shows the divine plan appearing to progress with indifference to, or even specifically directing, the pain of a wider community. In both, a single family designated as ‘holy’ is saved while the rest of the community suffers. The key difference is between the plays’ emphasis on the moral status of the two communities. The fact the mothers’ speeches draw alignments with Mary hints that their suffering is also part of Christ’s suffering and looks forward to the later celebration of the Innocents as the first Christian martyrs. This is one of the reasons why their speeches, while creatively assertive, also generate pity. The words spoken in the Towneley laments continue to produce structures through which different scriptural moments meet. The second mother’s speech brings together several of the moments Herod’s massacre is trying to prevent from connecting: SECUNDA MULIER: Outt! morder! man I say / strang tratoure and thefe!  Out! alas! and waloway! / my child that was me lefe!  My luf, my blood, my play / that neuer dyd man grefe!  Alas, alas, this day! / I wold my hart shuld clefe / In sonder!   Veniance I cry and call,   on herode and his knyghtys all!   veniance, lord, agayn thaym fall,   And mekyll warldys wonder!94

Stressing the innocence of her child ‘that neuer dyd man grefe’, the second mother’s speech anticipates the grief of the Virgin Mary watching her sinless son die on the Cross. From the early thirteenth century there had been a growth of emphasis on the Mater Dolorosa, with images of the Crucifixion showing Mary as imitator of Christ’s sufferings at his Passion and as a model for Christians also seeking to experience the suffering of Jesus.95 Crucifixion imagery

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

174

Play time

shows her body becoming agitated as she swoons, cries and clasps the Cross, while lyrics imagine her witnessing the tortures performed upon her son’s body and lamenting his death; often, as the second mother does here, by emphasising their shared blood.96 If the Virgin’s laments were designed to provoke worshippers to mimic her grief, the Towneley massacre, which Godfrey speculates might have been staged at the same level as the audience, also held the potential to evoke emotion.97 The mother’s speech directly demands a response, as her cries of ‘tratoure and thefe’ call for community retribution. If these cries were staged from the same level of the audience, this would have included them as part of the attacked community and, as such, recalled their civic duty to defend the mothers against their attackers. This folds together the time of the audience with the anguish of the mothers at Bethlehem and Mary’s grief at the Cross. It also reinforces the idea that the Holy Family’s escape is only a temporary reprieve for Mary. The Innocents, and their grieving mothers, are the prototypes for an act of violence yet to happen. The fact all three Towneley mothers mention the spilling of their children’s blood and cry out for vengeance also brings their time together with one other significant event: the first murder. The call for vengeance does not appear in the Ordo Rachelis plays or in other secular religious plays.98 In Genesis 4.10, God says that the blood of the murdered Abel ‘crieth to me from the earth’, prompting his punishment of Cain.99 Bettina Bildhauer has noted that the spilling of blood prompts retribution: ‘The notion of blood crying out thus suggests not only that it cannot be hidden, but that it always has to be avenged.’100 However, here, the repetitive cries of the mothers articulate a difference between the Bethlehem massacre and justice structures of the Hebrew Bible. Where Cain is cursed and banished for his deed, and the Herod of other medieval slaughter plays is punished, the Towneley mothers’ cry appears unheard. The mothers are also denied the protection given to their ancestors by the blood of the Passover in Exodus, in which the sacrifice of a lamb protected the firstborn of each Israelite family from death.101 For the Towneley mothers, concepts of eternal time or Christological salvation are inaccessible. Nor does the play stage divine consolation, as happens in some of the earlier liturgical plays, which feature a visitation from an angelic counsellor who tells them their children will be granted the status of holy martyrs.102 They, like Mary and Rachel, are depicted weeping at moments representing the salvation of a wider community and, in their grief, challenging the necessity of the violence wrought upon

Passion meets Passover

175

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

their children in what Robert Sturges calls ‘a refusal that resists divine as well as political power’.103 The folding together of scriptural moments underlines the difference between narratives in which God fights for and saves his chosen people, and those in which he allows them to suffer. Moreover, the mothers’ unanswered cries suggest that, despite the crucial role of Hebrew scripture in the playing out of the massacre, at this moment in time God no longer privileges the race of Israel. The God of the Christian Testament does not protect his people from violence, but instead offers protection to the fleeing Holy Family who escape the bloodshed in a manner which suggests a supersessionary transference of divine allegiance. The restitution called for by the Bethlehem mothers comes not through divine vengeance, but through the spilling of another child’s blood when he takes the place of the Passover lamb and dies flanked by two thieves. Yet the grieving mothers of the Towneley play receive no consolation. Vengeance is denied them and their children, unlike Mary’s son, will not rise again. Despite the fact that the play uses the mothers to stage the meeting of many moments in scriptural time, the mothers themselves are left in the uncomfortable troughs folded between Passover and Crucifixion. Although several moments in medieval and scriptural time are folded alongside the narrative of the massacre, it is therefore the differences between them that matter. The mothers’ speeches fold together the times of the Crucifixion, Passover and the first murder in Genesis, but this process tends to articulate dissimilarity as frequently as it does alignment. The slaughter performs as an inverse Crucifixion, with many children dying for the sake of one child, where later one child will die for the sake of many. Likewise, late medieval depictions of Mary’s intense grief at the foot of the Cross are a long way from the Towneley mothers, who clout the heads, noses and groins of their assailants. Just as Serres claimed his crumpled handkerchief might be straightened, so distance and difference between moments are retained and re-asserted in Herod the Great. This is because the time (that is, the time that has passed between the occurrences of each event) does not disappear but remains caught in the folds between the points that have been drawn together. This inelastic property of crumpled time is particularly helpful in relation to the intersection of prophetic and scriptural time in this play, as it suggests that, although time may be structurally distorted (for instance, through Herod’s violent attempt at tearing), the ‘handkerchief’ can always be flattened again and fixed distances and proximities re-asserted. The numerous biblical and medieval

176

Play time

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

moments woven into the play’s fabric therefore retain their properties throughout their encounter without being fundamentally distorted. In this respect, I respond to Bruno Latour’s rather exasperated assessment of Serres’ ‘time-machine’ approach to his work – ‘you are absolutely indifferent to temporal distances’ – by agreeing that, often, it is the distance that matters.104 Connecting violence The English plays all imagine different endings for Herod, and in all but the Towneley play, he does not get off lightly for his crimes. York’s Herod recognises that he has failed to kill the prophesied child, and that all the bloodshed has been futile. The N-Town Herod’s celebratory feast is rudely interrupted by the Devil and Death, who carry him off to hell, while in the Chester Gouldsmythes Playe, Herod’s ‘victory’ is marred by his discovery that his own son has been killed.105 He feels his body decay soon after receiving the news and is taken to hell by a demon.106 In seeking to manufacture a tear between scriptural past and present, the Herod of these plays only succeeds in ‘tearing’ a full stop into his own dynasty and timeline. Only the Towneley Herod the Great concludes with a triumphant king: alive, unpunished and believing he has succeeded in thwarting prophecy. Yet the Towneley Herod’s closing speech, boasting of the numbers he has had killed, continues to deny linear time by returning, cyclically, to his opening address. Directly addressing his audience again, he anticipates that this time it will be himself, not the new king, who will form the subject of their chatter: ‘It shuld haue bene spokyn / how I did me wrokyn, / were I dede and rotyn / with many a tong.’107 This temporally ambiguous ‘shuld haue’ indicates the reversal of effect and cause and looks towards Herod’s future reputation. The audience should have been – and indeed, likely were – speaking about Herod’s violent deeds as they chattered while waiting for the play to begin. These words see Herod imagine his own literary future, anticipating his own notoriety long after his death. Of course, such fame depends upon the writing of the scriptures that Herod has taken such pains to suppress. If Herod and the mothers are part of a larger theological time that they cannot control, they respond differently to this situation. While they do not succeed in saving their children or in calling down vengeance, the mothers’ language in Herod the Great does successfully thwart Herod’s attempt to prevent the fulfilment of ‘prophecy’. Herod imagines that time works as it does in his books:

Passion meets Passover

177

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

running in a straight line but composed of easily detachable pages – a codex format like that in which the Towneley plays are themselves preserved. What he does not realise is that time is pliable, and that the voices of the mothers will amplify this property. As quickly as Herod tries to iron out his timeline or tear distance between his own present, scriptural past and his prophesied future, the mothers form new folds, bringing Passion, Passover and matriarchs from Hebrew and Christian scriptures into dizzying proximity. Through topological interactions, the Towneley mothers therefore find other ways to resist Herod’s soldiers than merely acting pugnaciously. Their vocal resistance denies Herod the temporal control he craves – even though their own topological engagement with time is unconscious. Nevertheless, the folding of time in the mothers’ speeches undoubtedly plays out as the most successful element of their resistance. It performs several functions, including stressing the untimeliness of the soldiers’ knightly aspirations, opposing Herod’s attempt to forestall a prophecy and calling into question the web of prophecy and violence in which they find themselves enmeshed. If the Towneley mothers can be considered ‘unruly’, then they perform a different kind of unruliness to that seen in the other resisting female figures discussed in this book. The play makes it clear that the mothers want to disrupt Herod’s plan, but they are of course unconscious that theirs is also part of a bigger, divine narrative. Although their words undermine Herod’s structuring attempt to direct or dictate how time should be read, they cannot save their sons. Had they succeeded, the Christian typological processes which were essential to the theology of Jesus as the new Moses would not have been possible. It is perhaps strange that, in addressing a narrative that promotes continuity, this chapter works with a model of time which was itself prompted by what Michel Serres experienced as the traumatic rupture of Hiroshima.108 While the philosopher’s work invested heavily in the alignment of different historical moments, he nevertheless believed in the ability of violence to rupture. Yet the massacre of the Innocents is an unusual act of violence. Where this book’s earlier chapters showed human figures attempting to negotiate the complexities of a theological divide, Herod the Great denies such a divide, presenting Hebrew and Christian scriptural times as mutually fulfilling. Unlike the many other moments of biblical violence depicted in late medieval drama, the slaughter plays provide comparatively rare examples of an act of violence that does not stress rupture, collapse or change, but continuation. Although,

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

178

Play time

in ordering the massacre, the tyrant attempts an expurgation of a prior scripture which threatens to jeopardise his present purpose, he is not God constructing a new beginning through erasure. This suggests that medieval lay theology did not only comprehend the relationship between the Hebrew and Christian texts of the Bible in terms of linearity or supersession. It could also conceive of them as a connected and interdependent cloth woven of associated, yet very different, moments. The success of topological processes depends upon who participates in them. Despite the fact that Serres’ topology was introduced as a way of theorising his own academic approaches, the importance of individual engagement in topological construction has rarely been addressed. Yet models of crumpled topology necessarily demand some kind of human interaction with the deforming and re-forming of time, whether this comes from the writer of the gospel of Matthew, a medieval playmaker’s imagining of a biblical king or a late twentieth-century Toronto director’s attempt to align biblical with modern acts of violence. Characters in Herod the Great likewise situate themselves differently in relation to the many moments with which they connect. For the play’s characterisation of Herod, it is imperative that past and future times are prevented from touching. For his counsellors, time is a political tool: the prophecies of the past may be studied in order to gain rewards and favour, or just as quickly discarded or altered. The soldiers discover a temporal disjunction when their knightly ideals conflict with the task they are being asked to perform. For the mothers, time is something unconsciously crumpled in their reactive expression of resistance and grief. None of these figures can sustain agency over their own times, and any attempt to resist or alter scriptural relations meets with failure. Nor do they experience the play’s time in the same way as their audience. While the highly interactive nature of Herod the Great uses a number of devices, including direct address, implied gesture, sound and physical proximity, to bring its audience into a shared ‘now’, the play also acknowledges its audience as an all-knowing presence set outside the play. With knowledge of the consequences and relevance of the massacre, the medieval audience experience and analyse time in a way Herod cannot. The ludicrous nature of the Towneley Herod, rather like the York Lucifer discussed at this book’s opening, is therefore emphasised because he, unlike his audience, does not share God’s eternal, all-timeencompassing perspective. Herod’s ‘now’ is too narrow. Like the man who rode all day to reach Samarra, time’s joke is on him.

Passion meets Passover

179

Notes

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

  1 W. Somerset Maugham, ‘Sheppey’ in W. Somerset Maugham Plays: One (Reading: Methuen, 1997), III. p. 100. In the play, Death tells the dying protagonist a story loosely adapted from Sukkah 53a of the Babylonian Talmud. In Maugham’s version, a merchant sees Death in a Baghdad marketplace and flees to Samarra – only to find that Samarra is exactly where Death expected him to be. This story has been dispersed widely in modern popular culture, most recently forming the underlying plot in the fourth season of the BBC’s Sherlock (see ‘The Six Thatchers’, Sherlock, BBC One, 1 January 2017).   2 Reed, ‘The Slaughter of the Innocents’, p. 219, on directing the York Cycle’s Slaughter of the Innocents for the 1999 University of Toronto festival.   3 See Nolan Sidhu, Indecent Exposure, pp. 219–21 and Sturges, The Circulation of Power, pp. 64–5.   4 On the gendered conflict between female grief and male control, see Katharine Goodland, Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance Drama: From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 54–75.   5 A detailed discussion of the Towneley manuscript’s relation to the York plays and its role as queer compilation appears in Chapter 3.   6 George England and Alfred W. Pollard, eds, ‘Offering of the Magi’, in The Towneley Plays, EETS, e.s., LXXI (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1897; repr. 1966), ll. 403–4.   7 See the plays collected in Karl Young, ed., Ordo Rachelis (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1919).   8 Serres and Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, p. 60.   9 Serres’ other models include time as percolating (a model which defies the directionality implied by the popular model of time as flowing), and time as a complexity of random wells, accelerations, gaps, proximities and distances. Serres and Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, pp. 57–9.   10 See Maria L. Assad, Reading with Michel Serres: An Encounter with Time (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999); Herzogenrath, ed., Time and History in Deleuze and Serres, p. 6 and Donald Wesling’s discussion of chaotic percolating time in ‘Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, and the Edges of Historical Periods’, CLIO, 26.2 (1997), 189–200 (p. 193).   11 Emphasis mine. Steven Connor, ‘Topologies: Michel Serres and the Shapes of Thought’, Anglistik, 15 (2007), pp. 105–17 (p. 106).   12 See Peter Burke, ‘Reflections on the Cultural History of Time’, Viator, 35 (2004), 617–26 and Vance Smith, ‘Irregular Histories: Forgetting Ourselves’, pp. 161–4.  13 Dinshaw, How Soon is Now?, p. 107.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

180

Play time

  14 See the discussion of material stage properties and crumpled time in Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, pp. 169–87.   15 Isabel Davis, ‘“Ye that pasen by þe Weiye”: Time, Topology and the Medieval Use of Lamentations 1.12’, Textual Practice, 25.3 (2011), 437–72 (p. 438).  16 Biddick, The Typological Imaginary, p. 2: ‘“unhistorical temporalities” [are] not about divisions between then and now, but about passages, thresholds, gaps, intervals, in-betweeness.’ Steven Connor’s description of Serres’ work finds it ‘self-consciously and even programmatically inhabits intermediary spaces: between culture and science, between past and present, between myth and physics’. Connor, ‘Topologies: Michel Serres and the Shapes of Thought’, p. 105.   17 See Serres and Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, p. 95 and Manchester, ‘Time in Christianity’, p. 116.  18 See Delbert Burkett, An Introduction to the New Testament and the Origins of Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 174.  19 See Abulafia, Christians and Jews in Dispute, p. 35; Biddick, The Typological Imaginary, pp. 4–8 and the discussion of Nicholas of Lyra’s 1330s anti-Jewish treatises in Cohen, The Friars and the Jews, pp. 180–91 (p. 185).   20 See Matthew 5.17–18: ‘Do not think that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.’   21 See Matthew 5.21–22 and Matthew 2.23.   22 Balslev and Mohanty (eds), Religion and Time, p. 9.  23 Burkett, An Introduction to the New Testament, p. 184.   24 See Ian P. Wei’s discussion of Thomas Aquinas’ approach to prophecy in ‘Predicting the Future to Judge the Present: Paris Theologians and Attitudes to the Future’, in Medieval Futures: Attitudes to the Future in the Middle Ages, ed. by J. A. Burrow and Ian P. Wei (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2000), pp. 19–36; Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn, eds, The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992); Ann Williams, ed., Prophecy and Millenarianism: Essays in Honour of Marjorie Reeves (Harlow: Longman, 1980) and, on secular and political uses of prophecy, Lesley A. Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs in Later Medieval England (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2000).   25 Matthew 2.13.   26 Matthew 2.15.   27 Matthew 2.17–18.   28 See Genesis 30.1–25 and Genesis 35.16–20. See also W. M. Temple, ‘The Weeping Rachel’, Medium Aevum, 28.2 (1959), 81–6.   29 See Genesis 35.18: ‘And when her soul was departing for pain, and death was now at hand, she called the name of her son Benoni, that is, The son of my pain: but his father called him Benjamin, that is, The son of the right hand.’

Passion meets Passover

181

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

  30 Susanna Grier Fein, ed., ‘The Dispute Between Mary and the Cross’, in Moral Love Songs and Laments (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998), http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/fein-morallove-songs-and-laments-dispute-between-mary-and-the-cross [accessed 31 October 2018].  31 See Exodus 11.1–10, particularly the description of the Egyptians mourning, which resembles that in Bethlehem: ‘and there shall be a great cry in all the land of Egypt.’  32 See the account in Forbes Robinson, Coptic Apocryphal Gospels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896), pp. 22–3: Rachel was the wife of a man of the tribe of Levi named Eleazar, who lived at the time when the children of Israel were in Egypt. He was diseased in his feet, and unable to work at making bricks. The taskmasters struck his wife, and compelled her to work. She was in a state of pregnancy, and the work was beyond her strength. Her child was prematurely born. The next night God smote the firstborn, and the Egyptians in fear sent the Israelites forth. The Israelites were joyful; but Rachel was weeping for her child in the midst of the children of Israel, and no one could comfort her.

  33 See Aelfric’s homily depicting the Innocents as blessed witnesses of the Saviour even though they did not know Christ. Reproduced in Temple, ‘The Weeping Rachel’, pp. 85–6.   34 I accredit the term ‘palimpsestuous’ to Gérard Genette, who uses it to describe literature in which the value of a palimpsest’s layers lies in their relation to one another (as opposed to something which merely has a layered structure). See Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), pp. 398–9.   35 See Sheingorn, ‘Typology and the Teaching of Medieval Drama’, p. 99: ‘the antitype [is] serving as a cumulative pattern within which the outlines of chronologically earlier images are seen. Thus, behind the image of the Annunciation one sees the burning bush.’ See also King, ‘Calendar and Text’, 30–59.   36 Raeleen Chai-Elzholz, ‘Introduction: Palimpsests and “Palimpsestuous” Reinscriptions’, pp. 1–17.   37 A third appears in Matthew 2.23, which tells of Herod’s death and the holy family’s return. Mary and Joseph hear Herod’s son Archelaus reigns in Judea, so they travel to Galilee. This is also said to fulfil a prophecy, although ‘He shall be called the Nazarene’ does not have an identifiable Hebrew source.  38 On the exaggerated aspects of Herod’s characterisation in earlier liturgical drama, see Laura Jacobus, ‘Motherhood and Massacre: The Massacre of the Innocents in Late-Medieval Art and Drama’, in The Massacre in History, ed. by Mark Levene and Penny Roberts (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999), pp. 39–54, p. 40.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

182

Play time

  39 See Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Miller’s Tale’, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry D. Benson (Bath: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 68–77 (ll. 3383–4) and William Shakespeare, ‘The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark’, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. by G. Blakemore Evans (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997), pp. 1189– 245 (III. 2, 13–14).   40 See David Staines, ‘To Out-Herod Herod: The Development of a Dramatic Character’, Comparative Drama, 10 (1976), 29–53.   41 Miriam Anne Skey, ‘Herod the Great in Medieval European Drama’, Comparative Drama, 13.4 (1979), 330–64 (p. 333).  42 See Margaret Rogerson, ‘Raging in the Streets of Medieval York’, Early Theatre, 3 (2000), 105–25; Denise Ryan, ‘Womanly Weaponry: Language and Power in the Chester Slaughter of the Innocents’, Studies in Philology, 98.1 (2001), 76–92 and Nolan Sidhu, Indecent Exposure, pp. 219–21.   43 England and Pollard, eds, ‘Herod the Great’, l. 116.  44 See Gill, ‘From Urban Myth to Didactic Image: The Warning to Swearers’, pp. 137–60.   45 Jesus is mocked as ‘king of the Jews’ by his torturers in both Matthew 27 and John 19.   46 See Despres, ‘Immaculate flesh and the social body’, 47–69.  47 See Bob Godfrey, ‘Herod’s reputation and the killing of children: Some theatrical consequences’, in Staging Scripture: Biblical Drama, 1350–1600, ed. by Happé and Hüsken, pp. 253–76 (p. 255).   48 See Rubin, Gentile Tales, p. 39, and Davis, ed., ‘The Play of the Sacrament’, ll. 455, in which Jasdon claims, ‘with owr strokys we shall fray hym as he was on þe rood’.   49 See England and Pollard, eds, ‘Herod the Great’, pp. 166–81 (ll. 107– 08) and Theresa Tinkle, ‘Exegesis Reconsidered: The Fleury “Slaughter of the Innocents” and the Myth of Ritual Murder’, JEGP, 102.2 (2003), 211–43.  50 See Beadle, ed., ‘The Slaughter of the Innocents’, pp. 167–73 (l. 19); Spector (ed.), ‘The Slaughter of the Innocents: The Death of Herod’, in The N-Town Play, pp. 187–97 (l. 36) and Lumiansky and Mills, eds, ‘The Gouldsmythes Play’, in The Chester Mystery Cycle, pp. 185–205 (l. 55).   51 See Blurton, Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature, p. 105, which examines the appearance of a Saracen figure in the depiction of the Bethlehem massacre in the 1161 Winchester Psalter.   52 See Spector, ‘Anti-Semitism and the English Mystery Plays’, p. 13 and Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book, pp. 54–72.   53 England and Pollard, eds, ‘Herod the Great’, ll. 94–9.   54 See Llewelyn Price, Consuming Passions, pp. 30–3.   55 Of course, the Towneley audience are not Herod’s subjects, and he has no control whatsoever over their actions. He misrecognises them as his subjects in another temporal disjunction.

Passion meets Passover

183

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

  56 See Wright, ‘Acoustic Tyranny: Metre, Alliteration and Voice in Christ before Herod’, pp. 3–29 and Daisy Black, ‘Commanding Un-Empty Space’, pp. 237–50.   57 England and Pollard, eds, ‘Offering of the Magi’, ll. 402–20.   58 England and Pollard, eds, ‘Herod the Great’, ll. 199–208.   59 England and Pollard, eds, ‘Herod the Great’, ll. 202–3.   60 Lumiansky and Mills, eds, ‘Magi’, ll. 234–5.   61 See Lumiansky and Mills, eds, ‘Magi’, ll. 249–349.  62 Herod is punished for this failure in Chester in a way he is not in Towneley. One of the Chester doctor’s ‘prophecies’ concerning the illegitimacy of Herod’s bloodline is realised in the subsequent Innocents play, in which Herod’s own son is killed in Bethlehem.   63 See Godfrey, ‘Herod’s Reputation and the Killing of Children’, p. 268.  64 See Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 1–9 (p. 2): ‘any pagan writer, but especially a pagan writer who dealt with the gods, had to be the object of ambivalence in a Christian world.’   65 See Frank Grady, Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 1–16.   66 See Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), pp. 101–52, on agency, prophecy and fate in tragic narrative.   67 See Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains, p. 74.   68 England and Pollard, eds, ‘Herod the Great’, ll. 209–23.   69 England and Pollard, eds, ‘Herod the Great’, ll. 229–32.  70 See Spector, ‘Anti-Semitism and the English Mystery Plays’, p. 10: ‘The Jews are repeatedly made to hear of and witness [a] miracle only to reject it’, and Poteet, ‘Time, Eternity, and Dramatic Form in Ludus Coventriae “Passion Play I”’, p. 380, which sees the Jewish conspirators Annas and Caiaphas as ‘burdened by precedent and fears of change’.   71 Serres and Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, p. 60.   72 See Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 140–6 and Nolan Sidhu, Indecent Exposure, p. 220.   73 See Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 464–6 (p. 466).  74 The counsellors are also the source of this idea in plays from Sainte-Geneviève, St Gall and the Fleury Interfectio puerorum, among others. See Sturges, The Circulation of Power, p. 56.   75 See England and Pollard, eds, ‘Herod the Great’, ll. 246–59.   76 On drama as propaganda and protest, see Greg Walker, Reading Literature Historically: Drama and Poetry from Chaucer to the Reformation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 13–35.   77 See Normington, Gender and Medieval Drama, p. 78; Rebecca Krug, ‘Natural Feeling and Unnatural Mothers: Herod the Great, The Life

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

184

Play time

of Saint Bridget, and Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale’, in Laments for the Lost in Medieval Literature, ed. by Jane Tolmie, M. J. Toswell and Derek Pearsall (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 225–41 and Jacobus, ‘Motherhood and Massacre’, pp. 50–2, who observes that artistic and dramatic depictions of the mothers become increasingly ‘virago-like’ during the course of the fifteenth century.  78 See Joy Wiltenburg’s discussion of rebellious women in Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1992), pp. 7–25 and Woolf, The English Mystery Plays, pp. 120–45.   79 Theresa Coletti, ‘“Ther Be But Women”: Gender Conflict and Gender Identity in the Middle English Innocents Plays’, Mediaevalia, 18 (1995), pp. 245–62 (p. 247).   80 Ryan, ‘Womanly Weaponry’, pp. 76–92 and Sturges, The Circulation of Power, pp. 63–5.  81 Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, pp. 140–6 and Nolan Sidhu, Indecent Exposure, p. 219.   82 England and Pollard, eds, ‘Herod the Great’, l. 272.   83 See Skey, ‘Herod the Great in Medieval European Drama’, p. 333.   84 England and Pollard, eds, ‘Herod the Great’, ll. 262–70.   85 England and Pollard, eds, ‘Herod the Great’, ll. 330–4.   86 See Bardsley, Venomous Tongues, p. 40 and Ryan, ‘Womanly Weaponry’, pp. 86–8.   87 See Serres and Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, p. 49.   88 The number of children killed varies according to sources. See England and Pollard, eds, ‘Herod the Great’, ll. 487–8.   89 England and Pollard, eds, ‘Herod the Great’, ll. 343–89.  90 On structural devices and female performances of grief, see Velma Bourgeois Richmond, Laments for the Dead in Medieval Narrative (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1966) and Katie Goodland, ‘“Vs for to wepe no man may lett”: Accommodating Female Grief in the Medieval English Lazarus Plays’, Early Theatre, 8.1 (2005), 69–94 (pp. 69–71).  91 Young, Ordo Rachelis, pp. 3–14.   92 This summary of action is drawn from the plays collected in Young, Ordo Rachelis. See also Sturges, The Circulation of Power, pp. 66–8 on the use of repetition in the mothers’ mourning. See also David Bevington, Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), pp. 57–66.   93 See Young, ‘Ordo Stella’ in Ordo Rachelis, pp. 13–7.   94 England and Pollard, eds, ‘Herod the Great’, ll. 361–9.   95 See Rubin, Mother of God, pp. 243–55 and Donna Spivey Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul: Understanding Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2001), p. 79.

Passion meets Passover

185

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

  96 See for example the lyric ‘O litel whyle lesteneth to me’ in Middle English Marian Lyrics, ed. by Karen Saupe (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999), ll. 14–30, in which Mary stresses the innocence of her child as well as focusing on the blood of the Passion.   97 Godfrey, ‘Herod’s Reputation and the Killing of Children’, p. 266: ‘It is a space where the children will be butchered in the very face of the audience and would almost certainly be at ground level.’   98 In the Chester ‘Gouldsmythes Play’, for example, the mothers do not call on God at all, but rely on their own strength and words to avenge the deaths of their children. See Lumiansky and Mills, eds, ‘The Gouldsmythes Play’, ll. 281–396.   99 Genesis 4.10. 100 See also Bettina Bildhauer, Medieval Blood (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006), p. 46. 101 Exodus 12.1–30. 102 See Laua Jacobus, ‘Motherhood and Massacre’, pp. 40–1. 103 Sturges, The Circulation of Power, p. 60. 104 Serres and Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, p. 44. 105 See Spector, ed., ‘The Slaughter of the Innocents’, ll. 233–85 and Lumiansky and Mills, eds, ‘The Gouldsmythes Play’, ll. 377–457. The inclusion of the accidental killing of Herod’s son also appears in the French Passion d’Arras, and here, as in the Chester play, the discovery that he has killed his son prompts the onset of madness and disfiguring illness. See Skey, ‘Herod the Great in Medieval European Drama’, pp. 343–4. 106 See Lumiansky and Mills, eds, ‘The Gouldsmythes Play’, ll. 409–33. On the decay of Herod’s body, see Carolyn Elaine Coulson-Grigsby, ‘“Wormys mete is his body”: Enacting the Diseased Spirit of Herod the Great on the Late Medieval English Stage’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Connecticut, 2006). 107 England and Pollard, eds, ‘Herod the Great’, ll. 492–5. 108 Serres and Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, p. 15: ‘Hiroshima remains the sole object of my philosophy’ and Wesling, ‘Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, and the Edges of Historical Periods’, p. 192.

5

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Conclusion: the spectator’s God’s-eye view

In 2016, I went to see Philip Breen’s adaptation of the York Mystery Plays at York Minster. As the charismatic actor playing Jesus underwent a series of trials at the hands of Herod, Annas, Caiaphas and Pilate, a curious thing happened. Part of my mind became increasingly convinced he would be let off. These interrogators were utterly incompetent, and their case so full of contradictions that there was no way Jesus could be convicted. I was convinced of this even though I was simultaneously aware of how the narrative would develop and the Crucifixion it would lead to. If it had not, we would not have been gathered to watch this particular story unfold in a medieval Minster in twenty-first century York. This experience is familiar to many who have watched a play they know very well. We feel a surge of joy when Edgar defeats his manipulative brother in King Lear, even though we also know the worst is yet to come. We mentally egg on the messenger carrying the friar’s letter to Romeo, hoping perhaps this time the letter will arrive and tragedy will be averted. We anticipate Dr Faustus will repent even at the twelfth hour, hope Oedipus will stop his foolish digging into the past before the truth is revealed and expect, along with Estragon and Vladimir, that Godot will turn up. Really, he will. Any . . . moment . . . now. Watching a live performance of a familiar play demands a complex kind of doublethink from the spectator. To engage emotionally with the performance and the characters, spectators must temporarily suspend their knowledge of what is to come. That medieval audiences also experienced such moments when watching plays is evidenced in the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, which is concerned about the emotion generated by spectators too engaged with the play’s ‘now’: ‘[T]he weping that fallith to men and wymmen by the sighte of siche miracle pleying, as they ben not principaly for theire oune sinnes ne of theire god feith withinneforthe, but more of theire sight withoutforth.’1

The spectator’s God’s-eye view

187

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The tract complains that men and women weep at the emotive spectacle of Christ’s pain, rather than anticipating his resurrection. The Tretise writer recommends that, if an audience is going to weep, they should at least weep for their own, present-day sins, which are in urgent need of faithful contrition. Here, a highly emotive moment encourages its audience temporarily to forget all other moments outside that represented in the immediate present. In other plays, however, particularly those with flamboyant antagonists, the fact the spectators do know how events will unfold gives them an advantage over the characters represented in the playing space, who do not have access to such foreknowledge. This provides opportunities for pleasurable moments of irony and comedy, and less pleasurable moments of frustration. For example, the audience knows that Herod’s attempt to prevent Jesus becoming king of the Jews will fail. This knowledge that Herod is powerless to achieve his desire makes his vainglory and bluster all the more comically compelling, at least until his imperfect knowledge leads to the futile spilling of blood. This makes for a tension between foreknowledge and immersion. The spectator’s experience is therefore informed both by the present moment represented in the pageant and by their anticipation of its culmination. Where the chapters of this book have examined subjective experiences of time portrayed on stage, I want to conclude by asking how this temporal play might have been experienced by late medieval spectators. Following the lead of the York God and closing at opening point, I return to The Fall of the Angels to demonstrate how structures of anticipation built into the play, as well as its status as an annual event, might have enabled its audience to share God’s experiences of eternity and time. I also ask what happens if an audience exploits this God-like perspective to disrupt the performance. The York cycle’s annual repetition of plays over the course of many years would have made for a highly knowledgeable audience. Not only were the cycle’s urban audiences have been familiar with the Bible narratives these performances represented, they would also have acquired a deep knowledge of each pageant’s staging and structure. This familiarity with the performance material would also have meant that certain experienced audience members had a detailed kind of ‘foreknowledge’ of the events to come. This creates a future-oriented relationship between the pageant material and its spectators, who would have been highly aware of how the narrative would progress. As the previous chapters have demonstrated, medieval biblical pageants relied on this ‘foreknowledge’ to

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

188

Play time

draw their structures of typological linking (for example, between the ark and the cross as means of salvation). Yet these chapters have also shown the importance of dramatic devices which sought to engage the audience in the performance present. Like Augustine, an audience in fifteenth-century York would therefore have been able to witness and engage with the disjunction between a version of eternal time, in which all moments in Jewish and Christian history are simultaneously ‘true’ of their playing space, and the sequential time enacted by the figures represented in the performance. Their knowledge of the past (scriptures) would have informed their knowledge of the ‘present’ performance’s ending, or ‘future’. Yet while possessing foreknowledge of the choices the represented dramatic personae would make, the audience was limited in their ability to influence those choices. Even if a spectator were to shout out a warning, Eve would still eat the apple, otherwise all the following pageants would be rendered redundant. In Shaping the Archive, Sarah Elliott Novacich acknowledges the impossibility of accurately capturing the diverse experiences of the past: The full bulk of the past eludes us; textual records, new performances, and re-enactments offer only tantalizing glimpses of a past that, even in its own moment, could hardly be perceived in its entirety. And if it is difficult to perceive one’s own age in its entirety, efforts to encompass all of history must surely falter.2

As this book has demonstrated, this is particularly the case in relation to dramatic performance, which generates experiences as unique as each player and each member of their audience. However, several of York’s scripts do offer ‘tantalising glimpses’ of the ways audience members might have experienced the plays. Moreover, certain plays acknowledge and exploit the fact that its spectators knew what was to come, particularly when they represent times touched by divine eternity. The York The Fall of the Angels plays with this situation, aligning its audience’s experience of time with that of the God and undermining the figure of Lucifer through anticipating his Fall. While this book’s introduction examined the imagery of endlessness and eternity in the depiction of the Barkers’ God, the extent of this character’s foreknowledge remains ambiguous. In some places, it even appears that God, unlike his audience, is unaware of Lucifer’s imminent betrayal. When forming the nine orders of angels, God says he intends them to be ‘In louyng aylastande at lowte me’.3 His first act of ‘worthely warke’ is therefore

The spectator’s God’s-eye view

189

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

already frustrated.4 Even the pageant’s title indicates that at least some of these angels will not continue in an eternity of divine love. The question of whether God himself knows this is answered when he creates the earth, heaven – and hell: Here vndermethe me nowe a nexile I neuen, Whilke ile sall be erthe. Now all be at ones Erthe haly, and helle, þis hegjeste be heuen.5

God’s fashioning of hell before he has need of it indicates a level of foresight which suggests that, although he performs his Creation narrative in a linear fashion, God is simultaneously experiencing and anticipating the consequences of the two imminent Falls. Moreover, the revelation of hell also seeks to generate anticipation in the audience. Hell was one of the most spectacular locations of the late medieval stage, and tended to be represented through the use of bright paints, diabolical costumes and pyrotechnics.6 When God creates hell, his audience are therefore primed to anticipate the event and spectacle of Lucifer’s Fall. Throughout the following boasting and praise sequence between the good and bad angels, hell remains, clearly present – an empty playing space waiting to be filled. Where God’s speech intended the love of his angels to be ‘ay-lastande’, the language of the pageant’s good angels suggests their bliss is conditional – awarded only ‘To-whyls we aere stabyll in thought’.7 This suggests that the ability of eternity to be eternal (as opposed to time, which measures change) requires the angels’ own constancy. By introducing the concept of duration into the play, the words of the good angels further emphasise that the need for hell is imminent. This obedient eternity, like time, is not universally experienced by all characters. Lucifer’s opening speech introduces new elements of time by making a shift into the present tense. He boasts of his beauty and claims: ‘þe bemes of my brighthode ar byrnande so bryghete, / I so seemly in syghte myself now I se.’8 Lucifer’s stress on the words ‘are’ and ‘now’ introduces a level of irony: the audience knows this state is temporary. This places them in a position of power. The more Lucifer boasts of his present beauty, the more his spectators anticipate its reversal, which will see him fall from the highest to the lowest point of the pageant wagon and see his beauty reduced to diabolical dirt. As the audience knows more than the character represented, Lucifer’s boasts appear more laughable than threatening. Lucifer also introduces aspiration – a form of desire engaging with the future – into the play:

190

Play time

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Ther sall I set myself full seemly to seyghte, to ressayue my revuerence throwe righte o renowne; I sall me lyke vnto hym þat es shyest on heghte. Owe, what I am derworth and defte – owe! Dewes! All goes downe!9

Where the introduction of the present tense created an ironic tension with the good angels’ concept of conditional duration, this use of the future-oriented ‘sall’ (shall) as Lucifer attempts to ascend to ‘þe hyeste of hewun’ is followed by his Fall.10 At this point of the play, God’s eternity has passed into time, with present and future being established. The concept of past appears shortly after. The bad angels’ movement from eternity into time is marked by the exploration of their grief through comparing their fallen present with their past glories. Lucifer complains: ‘Nowe am I laytheste, allas, þat are was lighte. / My bryghtnes es blakkeste and blo nowe.’11 Another devil blames Lucifer, claiming ‘[w]e þat ware beelded in blys, in bale are we brent nowe’.12 The oppositional rhetoric of these statements adopts what Katharine Goodland identifies as a ritual form of expressing grief in early drama, in which the fissure between past and present is emphasised and the joys of the past are contrasted with the present misery.13 Lucifer, however, remains defensive, claiming that, even before his Fall, he had no idea of the events that would follow: ‘I wyste noghte tis wo sculde be wroght.’14 Admitting that he did not know what would happen suggests Lucifer never shared God’s eternal state. This statement works as a bitter joke for Lucifer’s audience, for they knew very well what the consequences of his boasting would be. Through its use of tense, The Fall of the Angels turns the casual listing of hell into an anticipatory joke shared between God and audience which works against Lucifer. With foreknowledge of the consequences of the angels’ vanity, the audience is able to experience, analyse and perhaps even laugh at time in a way that Lucifer cannot. However, even as they stress Lucifer’s own time-oriented perspective, Lucifer’s words still work as ‘prophecies’ of events to come later in the cycle. His declaration immediately before his Fall, ‘I sall me lyke vnto hym’, reminds his audience that this is the first of two Fall events by looking forward to the serpent’s promise to Eve. Furthermore, his claim ‘I wyste noghte þis wo sculde be wroght’ prefigures Christ’s words at his Crucifixion: ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’15 As a consequence, even Lucifer’s time-bound disobedience holds the ability to collapse different moments within the York cycle’s biblical narrative. Although brief, the devil’s reference both to the sin following his and to the

The spectator’s God’s-eye view

191

words that will redeem it challenges the spectator to adjust their immersion in the ‘present’ narrative of the Fall of the Angels and prompts anticipation of what is to come. Unruly foreknowledge

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

If audience foreknowledge was used to undermine a character such as Lucifer, this also raises questions about whether this knowledge might also have served less orthodox purposes. What, for example, if an audience were to act on their foreknowledge of what is to come? From at least the sixteenth century, the York Register was used to check that each pageant’s first performance outside Holy Trinity Priory was not deviating too far from the text.16 This means it is likely that older members of the audience, particularly those who had themselves performed in the past, would also have known many of the plays’ lines. That plays were aware of this is suggested by the fact that certain types of characterisation and speech writing seem to anticipate audience response, particularly the highly memorable, vain and bombastic ‘tyrant’ speeches, which Lucifer provides the model for and Herod later perfects. This may have led to a similar effect to the kinds of audience-led engagement seen in today’s modern Rocky Horror Show, where audience members actively participate through a series of well-prepared heckles and physical interventions. There is some evidence to suggest that repeated audience interaction occasionally caused problems during the York plays. In 1431, the York Masons complained about staging the Fergus pageant: On the other hand the masons of this city grumbled among themselves about their pageant in the play of Corpus Christi in which Fergus was scourged, because the subject matter of that pageant is not contained in holy scripture and gave rise to more laughter and noise than devotion. Sometimes quarrels, disputes and fights arose from it among the people; and they could seldom or never produce and play their pageant by daylight like the earlier pageants. The masons, there-fore, desired with a great desire to be freed from this pageant, and to be allowed another, which should be in accordance with holy scripture and could be produced and played by daylight.17

Here, we have an example of the audience using their ‘divine’ foreknowledge of what is to come for diabolical means: asserting their own power over time to delay a pageant. Fergus, which fell near the end of the cycle, showed Jews trying to disrupt the Virgin Mary’s funeral. One Jew was dragged along by her bier when his hands

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

192

Play time

became miraculously stuck. Clifford Davidson has noted that ‘this play was [. . .] genuinely unpopular with its producers’ and suggests that audience reactions to it were ‘inflamed by anti-Semitism’.18 The Masons’ complaint indicates a repeated and concerted effort on behalf of the audience to (violently) interact with this particular pageant, which ‘produce[d] more noise and laughter than devotion’. This suggests that the highly physical subject matter of the play, combined with the fact that it was performed at night and at the end of a very long day, provoked a response from its audiences that both threatened the progression of the pageant and disrupted its story. In this record, we see the unruly shadow of an unauthorised shadow-script of audience action and sound. The ‘laughter and noise’ which sometimes escalated into ‘quarrels, disputes and fights’ suggest that this play had become a focus of premeditated audience unruliness.19 Diana Taylor has argued that performance produces a ‘repertoire’ of actions which are embodied in the collective memory of its spectators. While this involves the actions, gestures, speech and movement of the performers, it also involves the embodied experience of spectators: ‘the repertoire requires presence – people participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by “being there,” being a part of the transmission.’20 It seems that here, the transmission of the anti-Semitic Fergus play exceeded the performance of the players and saw the play’s comic violence reperformed, or mimicked, by its audiences. Curiously, however, the Masons’ complaint uses the public misrule only as an additional argument to support their primary concern, which is that the events of this pageant are not part of the ‘official’ history of Christianity as recorded in the gospels. Their request focuses on the theological, the mechanical and the temporal, asking for a new pageant ‘in accordance with holy scripture [which] could be produced and played by daylight’. There is no evidence that The Fall of the Angels encountered such extreme spectator responses. Perhaps disruptive audience members were not early risers. However, the fact that the play does such important work in establishing the cycle’s dominant verse form, as well as introducing the bragging, glittering tyrant model that every subsequent stage villain has tried to outdo, suggests it too may have generated collaborative, anticipative and repeated responses from its audiences. In discussing how medieval drama manages its audiences, John McGavin has argued for a reciprocal relationship between the performance of narrative change on stage and the spectators’ absorption of and adjustment to that

The spectator’s God’s-eye view

193

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

performance. He claims that ‘the decision to spectate is a decision to act, and to act in a way which has consequences’.21 On some occasions, these consequences might allow an audience member a brief glimpse into God’s experience of eternity. On others, they might support the emergence of an ‘unofficial’, more disruptive shadow-script of embodied memories and spectator behaviour which was repeated each year during the pageants and threatened their process. In the case of the Fergus pageant, this unruly spectator reaction had a material effect on the shape of the York cycle. Due to its untimeliness, or because of its lack of scriptural authority, or because the Masons were successful in their complaint, Fergus is missing from the pageant manuscript. In successfully excising the text of their pageant and consigning it to oblivion, the York Masons succeeded where many of the characters examined in this book did not. Tracing time This book has demonstrated that diverse experiences of time make the narratives in which they occur more complex. Sometimes, times interact constructively, for example when aspects of the past validate later moments, thus suggesting a closeness and congruity between biblical narratives and the places in which their performances took place. At other times they interact disruptively, such as when one time is considered more ‘valid’ than another, when the appearance of the past in the present is treated as an unwelcome or frightening intrusion, when times digress from the anticipated narrative or when steps are taken to prevent a feared future coming to pass. The lay producers of the plays examined in this book were not afraid to get their hands dirty with time, manipulating and managing multiple, co-existing and subjective experiences of time and staging conflicts between them in mundane, everyday spaces. Where Sharon Aronson-Lehavi has argued that ‘theatre comfortably brought together the highest, most sacred metaphysical themes alongside society’s mundane and concrete concerns’, this book has shown that the plays’ use of time was not always comfortable, particularly when connected to experiences of gender.22 Joseph’s aged impotence performs a theological, racial and temporal function within the N-Town plays; Gyll ‘gives birth’ to an inverted saviour who promises only worldly sustenance; Herod can be analysed beyond his role as a comic braggart to reveal a character faced with a choice about how to protect his power in the incredibly complex

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

194

Play time

Judeo-Christian time which he inhabits. Meanwhile, the texts examined here reveal a great diversity in how narrative oppositions of ‘Jew’ and ‘Christian’ were deployed to articulate temporal problems. These tropes, which were as reliant on principles of interdependence as they were on mutual rejection, reflect the surprising complexity of the ways in which late medieval playmakers figured the power structures between times and scriptures. The quotations from David Bowie and St Augustine which opened this work suggested that part of the nature of time is that it resists our inability to define it.23 One of the principal causes of antagonism between the characters examined in this book has centred on their inability to define, and thus to manage, time. A critical focus on each character’s ability to read, or misread, their time not only permits a new avenue through which we might understand their characterisation but also broadens our understanding of medieval lay approaches towards the scripture. The first chapter of the book, for example, examined what happens when characters representing two times and religions happen to be married to one another. Mary and Joseph’s debate, with its engagement with typology, prefiguration, symbolism and literalism, placed great value on being able to read time (and, indeed, bodies) correctly. Yet the play also understands that reading time is not at all easy, particularly when religious status is ambiguous. The N-Town plays both challenge and satirise the identification of Christ’s entry into time as the moment of scriptural and theological change through imagining how a human couple, Mary and Joseph, might have experienced this period and the effect it might have had on their marriage. These plays provide important evidence for the ways in which late medieval communities understood and performed the relationships between their own time and between the times of the Hebrew and Christian Testaments. While early drama invests heavily in antiSemitic cultural tropes concerning redundancy, conversion and supersession, it also demonstrates an awareness that these tropes alone could not distract from the fact that Christian narratives of supersession stood on very shaky ground. My discussion of the dramatisation of the Flood in the York and Chester plays complicated these questions of supersession and transition further. The times of the Flood are markedly different from those of Joseph’s Doubt, as they come from what is, in Genesis, a relatively straightforward narrative recording the destruction of a sinful order. Character conflicts in these plays are rather due to the presence of remnants of the past, which challenge supersession when they threaten to muddy the

The spectator’s God’s-eye view

195

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

distinction between ‘before’ and ‘after’. These draw attention to the difficulty of securely defining the end of one time and the beginning of another. Supersession in the Chester and York Flood plays does not, therefore, perform in the same way as the linear plot structure of the Flood in Genesis, but is instead presented as a ‘fantasy’ held by Noah and contradicted by his wife. I therefore wish to question whether it is ever possible to successfully stage a moment of supersession. As this book has demonstrated, narratives which are presented as linear or sequential in the Bible become complicated when they are placed on stage. The N-Town Marian plays and the Flood plays suggest that past times cannot be comfortably assimilated into an overarching Christological typology. Moreover, times which prove disruptive to linearity are often experienced by characters who are consequently themselves characterised, either by society or by modern critics, as disruptive, as they introduce elements of conflict or ambiguity which are not present in the biblical narratives. The third chapter further examined non-linear ways of understanding time as a source of disruption. While the Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play is not as invested in staging a debate across a moment of supersession, change or transition, it nevertheless disrupts traditional models of time. Where Mak and Gyll’s sheep plot has conventionally been read as a diversion from the Nativity narrative, this chapter examined the importance of considering non-linear, diverted histories in a theatre tradition already highly invested in embodiment and incarnation. This play demonstrated that times which deviate from the expected narrative, whether that be the Nativity or the heteronormative drive towards reproduction, hold the ability to reshape, disturb and call into question the priorities of other time models to confront theological truths on the scale of human narratives. Mak and Gyll’s plot is neither superseded nor squashed, but continues to inform the events following it. The final chapter addressed how medieval drama responded to and amplified the gospel of Matthew’s bringing together of many moments from the Hebrew and Christian Testaments in a legitimising narrative that is prefigurative, prophetic, typological and topological. Its discussion of Serres’ folded time in relation to the Towneley dramatisation of the Bethlehem slaughter examined how the play bound together the liminal time between the birth and teachings of Christ with other moments in scripture and medieval devotional culture. This play demonstrates the futility and the danger of temporal and scriptural misreading – first, in Herod’s

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

196

Play time

reliance on classical texts; second, in his wish to destroy the Hebrew scriptures and thus negate their power; and finally, in his belief that he can tear apart the past, present and future. Like the York Lucifer, whose temporally loaded language occurs at the moment of his Fall, Herod’s active, if failed, attempt to direct time exposes a belief that time might be consciously managed and responded to, but that to do so is to encroach on God’s territory.24 This consciousness of the potential for human agency over time also became a prominent feature of the Protestant theologies during the Reformation. Alec Ryrie argues that a Protestant fear of repetitive devotional actions and prayers – anything that might lead to spiritual stagnation – co-existed alongside desires to always treat the present moment as a time of repentance and a fear of wasting divinely allotted time.25 However, while Protestant exegesis increasingly promoted the importance of individual time-consciousness and responsibility, early drama offers few positive demonstrations of characters consciously acting to direct scriptural time. Human attempts to exert control over time remain fraught. Academic fantasies of supersession If this book highlights the complex ways in which characters respond to the various kinds of past appearing in late medieval biblical drama, then it also draws attention to the need for further research into the how the past is manifest in other forms of drama performed during and after the Reformation. Several works seek to dismantle the periodisation which has generated the supersessionary organisation of our studies, publication and teaching on the ‘medieval’ and the ‘early modern.’ Like the obscure beginnings of Christian time, the relationship between these periods is famously indistinct, and all the plays examined in this book, like N-Town’s Joseph and Mary, find themselves caught uncomfortably between these periods. My work as a reviewer for the ‘Middle English: Drama’ section of the Year’s Work in English Studies, for example, requires an annual decision about whether each item of scholarship I review belongs in my section or in one of the three ‘Renaissance’/‘Sixteenth Century’ sections. The act of making what often feels like an arbitrary choice about which section an article will appear in, or even having items I have reviewed for this section removed as they are duplicated by my later colleagues, further emphasises the artificial, performative nature of period categories. In organising my colleagues’ work into periods, I am contributing

The spectator’s God’s-eye view

197

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

to a fiction of time that much of the scholarship I review is doing a great deal to dismantle. It is not, therefore, surprising that studies of early drama have formed the source for some of the formative approaches aiming to challenge this periodisation.26 The findings of the REED project, for example, have greatly expanded the historical reach of what had been considered ‘medieval’ performance forms.27 Meanwhile, Shakespeare scholars are examining what Kurt A. Schreyer calls ‘a cultural re-formation and re-membering of bonds between early modern subjects and medieval artefacts’, in which narratives, items, staging and practices from medieval performance culture survived and were integrated, adopted and adapted by later performances.28 The importance of this work is evident from the kinds of histories that are obscured or excluded by the supersessionary models of theatre produced by the ‘medieval’/‘early modern’ periodisation. In a special edition of Renaissance Drama on gender, cultural mobility and theatre history, Melinda J. Gough and Clare McManus demonstrate that conventional periodisation, along with a dominant focus on London’s all-male playhouses, has had the effect of excluding women’s performance cultures from theatre histories.29 We also risk portraying early performance forms in a way similar to how medieval Christian dramatists conceptualised Judaism: as containing useful aspects that might be adopted to suit later stages, but as otherwise being overly literal in their interpretations, unsophisticated and outdated. James Stokes, for example, has noted that the frequent relegation of sixteenth-century performance forms which involved women to the category of ‘traditional theatre’, or folk performance, diminishes the importance of the rich historical evidence that ‘women participated as performers and patrons at every level of society during the medieval and early modern periods’.30 The cultural violence of supersession still holds implications that inform views of history, gender and cultural production. These are repeatedly reproduced even by those critically challenging them. This book has identified the rich diversity of ways in which drama uses the subjective temporal experiences of its dramatic characters to accommodate, assimilate, deny, protect themselves from or attempt to obliterate the past. This also introduces a new model with which we might also approach the ways in which later sixteenth-century drama constructed its recent, Catholic past. Aspects of certain later plays bear a striking resemblance to the ways in which biblical drama figured its ‘Jewish’ past and

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

198

Play time

characters. Shakespeare’s mechanicals’ play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet’s scathing speech to his players invest heavily in supersessionary models of theatre which mock in order to erase the past, and are among the most famous examples of how early guild performances were characterised as unsophisticated, too earnestly ‘literal’, untimely and outdated. The drive to subsume or supersede previous times was as important a part of Reformation theology and historiography as it was in medieval Christian approaches to Judaism. James Simpson’s account of Protestant ‘evangelical reading’ (supersessionary reading by another name) may be just as accurately suited to the dramatisations of the Flood discussed in Chapter 2: ‘Like many other revolutionary cultures, it demanded a clean break with the obscurantist past, and correlatively praised novelty. Its personal model was one of rebirth and conversion, which also produced a historical model of the sudden, absolute turn.’31 Despite the fact that supersessionary models advocating a ‘clean break’ frequently invite challenge, they have nevertheless continued to influence periodisation and polemic throughout historical practices. It is therefore worth asking whether Catholics essentially became the new ‘Jews’, as post-Reformation drama attempted to accommodate another kind of uncomfortably ‘present’ past. This has some critical precedent. Lisa Lampert has argued that Protestant authors adopted supersessionary models that had formerly been applied to Judaism in their condemnation of Catholic practices, while Brett D. Hirsch has examined the transposition of the figure of the owl (a bird associated with medieval anti-Semitic portrayals of Jews) onto the Roman Catholic Church and onto Puritan groups considered to be participating in subversive practices.32 Moreover, the dramatic character’s encounter with a difficult theological past has also been examined in Shakespearean criticism addressing the ambiguous nature of Hamlet’s meeting with the ghost of his dead father, as well as in studies concerned with the troubling portrayal of a religious and justice culture that operates uncomfortably between Catholic and Puritan values in Measure for Measure.33 Yet drama scholarship has yet to address this painful, present and foundational Catholic past via an examination of how it appears when characters, like those examined in this book, experience time differently from one another. Like the dramatic figure of the Jew, the Catholic must also be converted or erased by the end of a play. In Measure for Measure, for example, Isabella’s Catholicism stands in queer opposition to the

The spectator’s God’s-eye view

199

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

heteronormative drive towards marriage which characterises so many of Shakespeare’s plays. An attempt to neutralise her Catholicism occurs in the Duke’s proposal, yet, as with the N-Town Joseph, Isabella’s ‘conversion’ is unstable and unconvincing.34 Just as Mak and Gyll’s performance of new parenthood destabilised the symbolism of the Nativity, so Isabella’s performance, and particularly her silence at the end of the play, exposes the flaws, absurdities, rotten power dynamics and inconsistencies of heteronormative marital timelines.35 Nicole Nolan Sidhu noted that the traditional idea that Protestant authorities suppressed civic biblical drama because of its Catholic doctrine is ‘based on the assumption that the primary (indeed the only) subject matter of the drama is religious’.36 This study has demonstrated how the religious matter of the plays was only one mechanism for exploring other social and gendered issues and roles. Given the rich and prominent use of subjective experiences of time as a source of dramatic conflict in biblical lay drama, this approach would offer a new way of examining how lay people in the sixteenth century also figured processes of change through their dramatic characters. Burying to preserve Towards the end of the Cornish play Gwreans an bys (The Creation of the World), Seth shows four books to his audience. He knows the world is due to be destroyed by either fire or flood, and he wants to preserve its history: SETH:  Rag henna gwrens tues dowtya   An tase Dew that offendya   Der neb maner for in beyse          

Rag voydya an peril na, Scryffes yma thym pub tra A thallathfas an bysma, Nay fova leall recordys A vyns tra es ynna gwryes.

         

An leverow y towns y omna – Why as gweall, wondrys largya; He pub tra oil in bysma Skryffes yma in ryma, Dowt navons y ankevys.

(Therefore let men fear / to offend God the Father / in any sort of way in the world.

200

Play time

In order to neutralise that danger / I have had everything written down / from the beginning of this world / so that it be truly recorded / about everything that has been done in it.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Observe the books here – / amazingly big, you see them; / and everything in all this world / is written down in these, lest it should be forgotten).37

Seth’s concern is that if people forget their history, they will forget to fear God, and the cycle of human disobedience and divine punishment will never end. He therefore founds the first library. He builds two pillars, one brick, one marble, which he hopes will offer resistance to fire and water. The books themselves offer a compilation of histories, containing ‘[m]aterial from every variety of all books [. . .] just as the varieties of information / are put into them according to a plan, different and the same’.38 This curious miscellany suggests that Seth does not know which records will be most useful in the future, but he recognises the importance of an archive that contains diverse sources, voices and narratives. His showing these books to his audience, and engaging them as witnesses to his act of preservation, suggests that Seth believes he is performing a community service. In the York and Chester Flood plays, both God and Noah seemed to suggest that forgetting is a desirable thing if the world is to pass on to a cleansed new era unhampered by recollections of the sinful past. Seth’s act in service of community memory, however, holds more in common with Mrs Noah than it does with her husband. Furthermore, the Cornish Seth is a rare example of a biblical character who attempts to control time and memory and who, unlike the Towneley Herod and Mrs Noah, succeeds. Had he not provided this ‘origin story’ for the survival of the world’s early history, the medieval biblical drama sequences would have started with the Flood, rather than Creation. Seth’s desire to retain and record his past, and his assumption that his audience also fears the loss of records of the past, may lie in the way the Gwreans an bys manuscripts interact with their own times. Thought to have been performed until the 1550s, but with its earliest copy enduring in a 1611 manuscript copy, the Gwreans an bys is the first and only surviving part of an earlier two-part drama performed on consecutive days, and spanning from Creation to Redemption.39 Yet the play also contains three extra-biblical episodes which one might not expect to find in a drama performed well after the first wave of Protestant reform. These episodes include Lamech’s accidental shooting of Cain; the Oil of Mercy narrative, in which Seth returns to Eden in the hope of comforting the dying

The spectator’s God’s-eye view

201

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Adam; and this book-burying episode. As I have argued elsewhere, these narratives bring together multiple moments within Christian and Jewish theologies, as well as engaging heavily with Catholic devotional practices such as pilgrimage, Marian iconography and visionary literature, suggesting that the play also sought to revivify religious narratives and practices beyond its own story.40 Coincidentally, like the four books buried by Seth, the play survives in four manuscripts, and the 1611 edition was likely transcribed from the prompt copy of an earlier script. The copying of this manuscript, and the fact it was considered important enough to be reproduced four times, suggests that the play, like Seth’s books, participates in an attempt not only to preserve the past, but to recognise its ability to release meaning for future generations. This suggests that the 1611 manuscript itself participates in the cultural preservation of a form which, while still thriving in Cornwall, had been increasingly legislated against across the rest of England. The presence of three apocryphal episodes suggests an act of deliberate anachronism, resisting the political and religious changes which, under Protestant reform, were increasingly discrediting narratives which had no scriptural basis.41 Faced with its own ‘flood’ of political and religious reform, the play, like Seth’s library, draws together the knowledge of times threatening to disappear.42 The Gwreans an bys thus engages in its own act of temporal resistance by working narratives about preservation and the interlinked nature of Christian time into the fabric of its own time. Perhaps the manuscript’s scribes, and the plays’ performers, saw themselves as participating in a medium threatened with extinction, and yet hoped for its future recollection and resurrection. In articulating this desire through the archivist Seth, the Gwreans an bys resists the supersessionary discourses of reform. However the authorities of the time might spin their ‘official’ historical and theological narratives, lay biblical drama defends the right of each individual to experience, resist, complicate and challenge time in their own fashion. Seth therefore records not just one narrative in his books, but many, suggesting that historical truths can only be imaginatively accessed if we listen to voices in dialogue, not monologue. Notes   1 Clifford Davidson, ed., The Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, ll. 302–6.   2 Elliott Novacich, Shaping the Archive, p. 162.   3 Beadle, ed., The Fall of the Angels, l. 24.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

202

Play time

  4 Beadle, ed., The Fall of the Angels, l. 17.   5 Beadle, ed., The Fall of the Angels, l. 25–7.   6 On hell in early drama, see Pamela Sheingorn, ‘“Who can open the doors of his face?” The Iconography of the Mouth of Hell’ as well as the chapters by Philip Butterworth and Peter Meredith on flame effects and stage iconography in The Iconography of Hell, ed. by Clifford Davidson and Thomas H. Seiler (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992), pp. 1–19.   7 Beadle, ed., The Fall of the Angels, l. 62.   8 Beadle, ed., The Fall of the Angels, l. 51.   9 Beadle, ed., The Fall of the Angels, ll. 89–92. 10 Beadle, ed., The Fall of the Angels, l. 88. 11 Beadle, ed., The Fall of the Angels, ll. 100–101. 12 Beadle, ed., The Fall of the Angels, l. 107. 13 See Katharine Goodland, Female Mourning and Tragedy, p. 3 and pp. 14–18. 14 Beadle, ed., The Fall of the Angels, l. 116. 15 Luke 23.43. 16 Beadle, ‘The York Corpus Christi Play’, pp. 105–6. 17 1431 entry in the York Memorandum. See Johnston and Rogerson, eds, REED: York, p. 732. 18 Clifford Davidson, ‘York Guilds and the Corpus Christi Plays: Unwilling Participants?’, Early Theatre, 9.2 (2006), 11–33 (p. 21). See also Evans, ‘“When a Body Meets a Body”: Fergus and Mary in the York Cycle’, pp. 193–212. 19 See Claire Sponsler, ‘The Culture of the Spectator: Conformity and Resistance to Medieval Performances’, Theater Journal, 44 (1992), 15–29. 20 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, p. 20. 21 John McGavin, ‘Medieval Theatricality and Spectatorship’, Theta VIII, Tudor Theatre (2009), 194. 22 Aronson-Lehavi, Street Scenes, p. 57. 23 See Stevens, ‘A Present Sense of Things Past: Quid est enim tempus?’, p. 10: ‘It is an intriguing puzzle for [Augustine] and for us that one may feel and measure periods of time, perhaps even understand time, but also lack the concepts to explain it, the right words to clarify it.’ 24 This resonates with medieval discourses condemning human attempts to exert agency over time in the form of usury – another ‘Jewish’ practice. It was argued that the charging of interest over time was sinful because all times belonged to God. See Le Goff, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, pp. 29–30. 25 Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain, pp. 420–46. 26 See Dell, Klausner and Ostovich, eds, The Chester Cycle in Context; Aronson-Lehavi, Street Scene; Brett D. Hirsch and Christopher Wortham, eds, This Earthly Stage: World and Stage in Late Medieval

The spectator’s God’s-eye view

203

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

and Early Modern England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010) and Pamela King, ‘Losing Faith in Transformation: Protestantism and Theatre’, Mediaevalia, 29.1 (2007), 79–94. 27 See for example James Stokes, ‘Women and Performance in Medieval and Early Modern Suffolk’, Early Theatre, 15.1 (2012), 27–43 and ‘Women and Performance: Evidences of Universal Cultural Suffrage in Medieval and Early Modern Lincolnshire’, in Women Players in England, 1500–1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage, ed. by Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin (Chippenham: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 25–44 as well as cross-period studies such as Walker, Reading Literature Historically. 28 Schreyer, Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft, p. 2. See also the essays contained in Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper and Peter Holland, eds, Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Helen Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010) and, on performance and theology, Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 29 Melinda J. Gough and Clare McManus, ‘Introduction: Gender, Cultural Mobility, and Theater History Inquiry’, Renaissance Drama, 44.2 (2016), 187–200 (pp. 188–90). 30 James Stokes, ‘The Ongoing Exploration of Women and Performance in Early Modern England’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 33:1 (2015), 9–31 (p. 10). 31 James Simpson, Burning to Read, p. 184. 32 See Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference, pp. 65–100 and Brett D. Hirsch, ‘From Jew to Puritan: The Emblematic Owl in Early English Culture’, in This Earthly Stage, ed. by Hirsch and Wortham, pp. 131–71. See also L. O. Fradenburg, ‘Making, Mourning, and the Love of Idols’, in Dimmick, Simpson and Zeeman, eds, Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image, pp. 25–42 (p. 27). 33 See for example Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory; Roy W. Battenhouse, ‘The Ghost in Hamlet: A Catholic “Linchpin”?’, Studies in Philology, 48.2 (1951), 161–92 and Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness, pp. 59–81 (p. 73). Beckwith notes that the Duke’s disguise as a friar in Measure for Measure is particularly troubling, as, while playing into anti-fraternalist conventions associating friars with deceit, it also allows him to exploit the Catholic practice of confession and make ‘the secrets of the soul [. . .] fully available to the sovereign state’. 34 Paul Morrison has also examined the queerness of Angelo and Mariana’s desire in ‘Measure for Measure: Same-Saint Desire’, in Madhavi Menon, ed., Shakesqueer (London: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 209–15. 35 Pascale Aebischer, ‘Silence, Rape and Politics in Measure for Measure: Close Readings in Theatre History’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 26.4 (2008), 1–19. 36 Nolan Sidhu, Indecent Exposure, p. 232.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

204

Play time

37 Paula Neuss, ed. and trans., The Creacion of the World: A Critical Edition and Translation (London: Garland Publishing, 1983), ll. 2168–80. 38 Neuss, ed. and trans., The Creacion of the World, ll. 2198–2202. 39 For discussions of both plays’ performance context and manuscripts, see Brian O. Murdoch, ‘The Cornish Medieval Drama’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. by Beadle, pp. 211– 39; Brian O. Murdoch, ‘Creation, Fall and After in the Cornish Gwreans an bys’, Studi Medievali, 29 (1981), 822–36 and Normington, Medieval English Drama, pp. 110–12. 40 Daisy Black, ‘The Time of the Tree: Returning to Eden after the Fall in the Cornish Creation of the World’, Medieval Feminist Forum, 50.1 (2014), 61–89. 41 See for example the account of the removal of non-biblical material from Chester in Coletti, ‘The Chester Cycle in Sixteenth-Century Religious Culture’, 531–47. 42 This drive to preserve also extends to the Cornish language, as the first play manuscript was copied some six decades after the 1549 Cornish Prayer Book rebellion opposed the replacement of Latin with English in religious practice. See Vivian Salmon, Language and Society in Early Modern England: Selected Essays 1982–1994 (Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1996), p. 93.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Epilogue

What does it feel like to be on the brink of transition?1 The date of writing is important. Much of this book was written during two years of negotiations counting down to Britain’s exit from the European Union. As I worked towards this book’s first deadline, I watched the political clock tick down several times as exit dates came and went. I hoped for infinite delay. As the late medieval playmakers understood, our experiences of time, and of writing, are heavily influenced by our politics. Underpinning much of the desire for Brexit is a nostalgic desire for the past. That is, the desire for an idea of a colonial and industrial past based in British (English) sovereignty. The desire to define borders, identity and laws. An image of the past projected onto a supersessionary fantasy of the future. All sides of the debate figure Brexit as a moment of change, although they disagree on whether the outcomes of that change will be beneficial or damaging. What does it feel like? It feels like being the sheep in Gyll’s manger, wondering how I got from my windy, predictable Yorkshire hillside to this. I worry how many of the colleagues quoted in this book will be able to or choose to stay in the UK if we leave. I worry that those of us who did not want to leave will, like Noah’s wife, become anachronisms left floating in a grim, flooded world. Like Joseph, I feel exhausted with novelty. Like Mak, I queerly struggle to perform to the new timelines expected of me. Like Bethlehem’s mothers, I keep searching for connections between things that appear broken.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document 206Epilogue

Note

1 The companion question to Dinshaw’s ‘What does it feel like to be an anachronism?’

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Bibliography

Manuscripts BNF, Manuscrits, Français 28, f. 66v BL, Add MS 47682 fol. 8r Walters Ms. W.106, fol. 3r

Primary sources

Andrew, Malcolm, and Ronald Waldron, eds, The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1978; repr. 2007). Augustine, Confessions, ed. and trans. by Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Barber, Richard, trans. and ed., Bestiary: MS Bodley 764 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1992). Barker, Donald C., John L. Murphy and Louis B. Hall, eds, ‘Mary Magdelen’ in The Late Religious Plays of Bodleian MSS Digby 133 and E Museo 160, EETS (1982). Beadle, Richard, ed., The York Plays (London: Edward Arnold Publishers, 1982). Beadle, Richard, and Pamela King, eds, York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, trans. by P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Brewer, Derek, ed. and trans., Medieval Comic Tales (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1973). Chaucer, Geoffrey, ‘The Canterbury Tales’, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry D. Benson (Bath: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 3–328. Craig, Hardin, ed., Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, EETS, e.s., 87 (London: Oxford University Press, 1957). Davidson, Clifford, ed., ‘A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge’, in Early Drama, Art, and Music Monograph Series, Vol. 19 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993), pp. 93–115. Davis, Norman, ed., Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, EETS, s.s., 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970).

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

208Bibliography Dubin, Nathaniel E., ed. and trans., The Fabliaux (New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2013). Eccles, Mark, ed., The Macro Plays: The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind, EETS, o.s., 262 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). England, George, and Alfred W. Pollard, eds, The Towneley Plays, EETS, e.s., LXXI (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1897; repr. 1966). Erhman, Bart and Zlatko Pleše, Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Goldberg, P. H. P, trans. and ed., Women in England, c. 1275–1525 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Gregerson, Linda, ‘Noah’s Wife’, Poetry, 173.2 (1998), 162–3. Grier Fein, Susanna, ed., ‘The Dispute Between Mary and the Cross’, in Moral Love Songs and Laments (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998). Johnston, Alexandra F., and Margaret Rogerson, eds, REED, York, Vol. 1 (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1979). Livingston, Michael, ed., Siege of Jerusalem (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2004). Lumiansky, R. M., and David Mills, eds, The Chester Mystery Cycle, EETS, s.s, 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974). Neuss, Paula, ed. and trans., The Creacion of the World: A Critical Edition and Translation (London: Garland Publishing, 1983). Meredith, Peter, The Mary Play from the N-Town Manuscript (London: Longman, 1987). Robinson, Forbes, Coptic Apocryphal Gospels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896). Salisbury, Eve, ed., The Trials and Joys of Marriage (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002). Saupe, Karen, ed., Middle English Marian Lyrics (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999). Shakespeare, William, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. by G. Blakemore Evans (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). Somerset Maugham, W., ‘Sheppey’ in W. Somerset Maugham Plays: One (Reading: Methuen, 1997). Spector, Stephen, ed., The N-Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D8, EETS, s.s., 11–12, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Young, Karl, ed. and trans., Ordo Rachelis (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1919). Ziolkowski, Han M., ed. and trans., The Cambridge Songs (Carmina Cantabrigensia) (New York: Garland, 1994).

Secondary sources Abate, Michelle Ann, ‘Oversight as Insight: Reading The Second Shepherds’ Play as The Second Shepherd’s Play’, Early Theatre, 8.1 (2005), 95–104.

Bibliography

209

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Abulafia, Anna Sapir, Christians and Jews in Dispute: Disputational Literature and the Rise of Anti-Judaism in the West (c. 1000–1150) (Aldershot: Valorium, Ashgate Publishing, 1998). Adam, Barbara, Time (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004). Aebischer, Pascale, ‘Silence, Rape and Politics in Measure for Measure: Close Readings in Theatre History’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 26.4 (2008), 1–19. Agamben, Giorgio, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. by Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). Alakas, Brandon, ‘Seniority and Mastery: The Politics of Ageism in the Coventry Cycle’, Early Theatre, 9.1 (2006), 15–36. Allen-Goss, Lucy, Female Desire in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women and Middle English Romance (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2020). Aronson-Lehavi, Sharon, Street Scenes: Late Medieval Acting and Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Ashley, Kathleen M., ‘Medieval Courtesy Literature and Dramatic Mirrors of Female Conduct’, in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 25–38. Austin, J. L., How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). Bahr, Arthur, Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Baird-Lange, Lorrayne Y., ‘Trotula’s Fourteenth-Century Reputation, Jankyns Book, and Chaucer’s Trot’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 1 (1984), 245–56. Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. and trans. by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981). Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, trans. by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984). Bale, Anthony, ‘Fictions of Judaism in England before 1290’, in The Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary and Archaeological Perspectives, ed. by Patricia Skinner (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2003), pp. 129–44. Bale, Anthony, The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms, 1350– 1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Bale, Anthony, Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion Books, 2010). Balslev, Anindita Niyogi, and J. N. Mohanty, eds, Religion and Time (Leiden, NY: E. J. Brill, 1993). Bardsley, Sandy, Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Baswell, Christopher, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

210Bibliography Bates, A. W., Emblematic Monsters: Unnatural Conceptions and Deformed Births in Early Modern Europe (New York: Rodophi, 2005). Battenhouse, Roy W., ‘The Ghost in Hamlet: A Catholic “Linchpin”?’, Studies in Philology, 48.2 (1951), 161–92. Beadle, Richard, ‘The York Corpus Christi Play’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. by Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 85–108. Beadle, Richard, ‘Masks, Mimes and Miracles: Medieval English Theatricality and its Illusions’, in From Script to Stage in Early Modern England, ed. by Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 32–42. Beckwith, Sarah, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (London: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Beckwith, Sarah, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). Bernau, Anke, ‘Beginning with Albina: Remembering the Nation’, Exemplaria, 21.3 (2009), 247–73. Bernau, Anke, ‘“Britain”: Originary Myths and the Stories of Peoples’, in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English, ed. by Elaine Treharne and Greg Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 629–48. Biddick, Kathleen, The Shock of Medievalism (London: Duke University Press, 1997). Biddick, Kathleen, The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). Bildhauer, Bettina, Medieval Blood (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006). Black, Daisy, ‘A Man Out of Time: Joseph, Time and Space in the N-Town Marian Plays’, in Reconsidering Gender, Time and Memory in Medieval Culture, ed. by Liz Herbert McAvoy, Liz Cox and Roberta Magnani (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2015), pp. 147–62. Black, Daisy, ‘“Nayles Large and Lang”: Masculine Identity and the Anachronic Object in the York Crucifixion Play’, Medieval Feminist Forum, 50.2 (2015), 85–104. Black, Daisy, ‘The Time of the Tree: Returning to Eden after the Fall in the Cornish Creation of the World’, Medieval Feminist Forum, 50.1 (2014), 61–89. Black, Daisy, ‘Commanding Un-Empty Space: Silence, Stillness and Scopic Authority in the York Christ Before Herod’, in Gender: Places, Spaces and Thresholds, ed. by Victoria Blud, Diane Heath and Joseph Klafter (London: IHR, 2019), pp. 237–50. Blamires, Alcuin, Karen Pratt and C. W. Marx, eds, Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Blurton, Heather, Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

Bibliography

211

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Bourgeois Richmond, Velma, Laments for the Dead in Medieval Narrative (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1966). Brown, Arthur, ‘Folklore Elements in the Medieval Drama’, Folklore, 63.2 (1952), 65–78. Bruun, Mette B., and Stephanie Glaser, eds, Negotiating Heritage: Memories of the Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008). Burke, Peter, ‘Reflections on the Cultural History of Time’, Viator, 35 (2004), 617–26. Burkett, Delbert, An Introduction to the New Testament and the Origins of Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Burrow, J. A., The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). Butler, Judith, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997). Butterworth, Philip, Staging Conventions in Medieval English Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Butterworth, Philip, ‘The Bible and the Towneley Plays of Isaac and Iacob’, in Staging Scripture: Biblical Drama, 1350–1600, ed. by Peter Happé and Wim Hüsken (Leiden: Brill Rodophi, 2016), pp. 92–124. Calisch, Edward N., The Jew in English Literature, As Author and As Subject (Richmond, VA: The Bell Book Publishing Co., 1909). Carruthers, Leo, Raeleen Chai-Elsholz and Tatjana Silec, eds, Palimpsests and the Literary Imagination of Medieval England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Carruthers, Mary, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Carruthers, Mary, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Cartlidge, Neil, Medieval Marriage: Literary Approaches, 1100–1300 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997). Caviness, Madeline H., Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle and Scopic Economy (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). Cawsey, Kathy, ‘Tutivillus and “Kyrkchaterars”: Strategies of Control in the Middle Ages’, Studies in Philology, 102.4 (2005), 434–51. Chai-Elzholz, Raeleen, ‘Introduction: Palimpsests and “Palimpsestuous” Reinscriptions’, in Palimpsests and the Literary Imagination of Medieval England, ed. by Leo Carruthers, Raeleen Chai-Elsholz and Tatjana Silec (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 1–17. Chambers, E. K., The Medieval Stage, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903). Chester Jordan, William, ‘The Pardoner’s “Holy Jew”’, in Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings, ed. by Shelia Delany (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 25–42.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

212Bibliography Chidamian, Claude, ‘Mak and the Tossing in the Blanket’, Speculum, 22.2 (1947), 186–90. Clark, Robert L. A. and Claire Sponsler, ‘Queer Play: The Cultural Work of Crossdressing in Medieval Drama’, NLH, 28.2 (1997), 319–44. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ‘Time Out of Memory’ in The Post-Historical Middle Ages, ed. by Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 37–62. Cohen, Jeremy, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982). Coleman, Janet, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Coletti, Theresa, ‘Devotional Iconography in the N-Town Marian Plays’, Comparative Drama, 11.1 (1977), 22–44. Coletti, Theresa, ‘A Feminist Approach to the Corpus Christi Cycles’, in Approaches to Teaching Medieval Drama, ed. by Richard K. Emmerson (New York: MLAA, 1990), pp. 79–89. Coletti, Theresa, ‘Purity and Danger: The Paradox of Mary’s Body and the En-gendering of the Infancy Narrative in the English Mystery Cycles’, in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. by Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 65–95. Coletti, Theresa, ‘“Ther Be But Women”: Gender Conflict and Gender Identity in the Middle English Innocents Plays’, Mediaevalia, 18 (1995), 245–62. Coletti, Theresa, ‘The Chester Cycle in Sixteenth-Century Religious Culture’, JMEMS, 37.3 (2007), 531–47. Connor, Steven, ‘Topologies: Michel Serres and the Shapes of Thought’, Anglistik, 15 (2004), 105–17. Cooper, Helen, Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010). Coote, Lesley A., Prophecy and Public Affairs in Later Medieval England (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2000). Coulson-Grigsby, Carolyn Elaine, ‘“Wormys mete is his body”: Enacting the Diseased Spirit of Herod the Great on the Late Medieval English Stage’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Connecticut, 2006). Craig, Hardin, English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955). Crain, Jeanie C., Reading the Bible as Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010). Craun, Edwin D., ed., The Hands of the Tongue: Essays on Deviant Speech (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007).

Bibliography

213

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Currie, Mark, About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). Cushman, Helen Marie, ‘Handling Knowledge: Holy Bodies in the Middle English Mystery Plays’, JMEMS, 47.2 (2017) 279–304. Daniels, Richard J., ‘“Uxor” Noah: A Raven or a Dove?’, TCR, 14.1 (1979), 23–32. Davidson, Clifford, Material Culture and Medieval Drama (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999). Davidson, Clifford, Gesture in Medieval Drama and Art (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001). Davidson, Clifford, ed. with Thomas H. Seiler, The Iconography of Hell (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992). Davidson, Clifford, ‘York Guilds and the Corpus Christi Plays: Unwilling Participants?’, Early Theatre, 9.2 (2006), 11–33. Davis, Isabel, ‘“Ye that pasen by þe Weiye”: Time, Topology and the Medieval Use of Lamentations 1.12’, Textual Practice, 25.3 (2011), 437–72. Davis, Kathleen, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Dean, Tim, ‘Bareback Time’, in Queer Times, ed. by E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2011), pp. 75–100. Delany, Sheila, ed., Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings (London: Routledge, 2002). Dell, Jessica, David Klausner and Helen Ostovich, eds, The Chester Cycle in Context, 1555–1575: Religion, Drama, and the Impact of Change (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2012). Despres, Denise L., ‘Immaculate Flesh and the Social Body: Mary and the Jews’, Jewish History, 12.1 (1998), 47–69. Despres, Denise L., ‘The Protean Jew in the Vernon Manuscript’, in Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings, ed. by Shelia Delany (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 145–64. Dillon, Sarah, The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (London: Continuum, 2007). Dinshaw, Carolyn, ‘Temporalities’, in Oxford Twenty-First Approaches to Literature, ed. by Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 107–23. Dinshaw, Carolyn, How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). Dox, Donnalee, ‘Theatrical Space, Mutable Space, and the Space of Imagination: Three Readings of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament’, in Medieval Practices of Space, ed. by Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 167–98. Dronzek, Anna, ‘Gender Roles and the Marriage Market in FifteenthCentury England: Ideals and Practices’, in Love, Marriage, and Family

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

214Bibliography Ties in the Later Middle Ages, ed. by Isabel Davis, Miriam Müller and Sarah Rees Jones (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 63–76. Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (London: Yale University Press, 1992). Dutton, Elisabeth, ‘Secular Medieval Drama’, in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English, ed. by Elaine Treharne and Greg Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 384–94. Eagleton, Terry, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003). Edelman, Lee, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (London: Duke University Press, 2004). Elliott, Dyan, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Elliott Novacich, Sarah, Shaping the Archive in Late Medieval England: History, Poetry, and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Emmerson, Richard K., ‘Dramatic History: On the Diachronic and Synchronic in the Study of Early English Drama’, JMEMS, 35.1 (2005), 39–66. Emmerson, Richard K., and Bernard McGinn, eds, The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). Enders, Jody, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). Epp, Garrett P. J., ‘The Towneley Plays, or, The Hazards of Cycling’, RORD, 32 (1993), 121–50. Epp, Garrett P. J., ‘Ecce Homo’, in Queering the Middle Ages, ed. by Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 236–51. Epp, Garrett P. J., ‘Re-editing Towneley’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 43 (2013), 87–104. Epp, Garrett P. J., ‘Thus am I Rent on Rode’: Taking Apart the Towneley Crucifixion’ METh, 37 (2015), 119–33. Esteban-Munˇoz, José, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009). Evans, Ruth, ‘Feminist Re-Enactments: Gender and the Towneley Vxor Noe’, in A Wyf Ther Was: Essays in Honour of Paule MertensFonck, ed. by Juliette Dor (Liège: Université de Liège, 1992), pp. 141–54. Evans, Ruth, ‘“When a Body Meets a Body”: Fergus and Mary in the York Cycle’, in New Medieval Literatures, Vol. 1, ed. by Wendy Scase, Rita Copeland and David Lawton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 193–212. Evans, Ruth, ‘The Devil in Disguise: Perverse Female Origins of the Nation’, in Consuming Narratives: Gender and Monstrous Appetite in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. by L. H. McAvoy and Teresa Walters (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), pp. 182–95.

Bibliography

215

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Evans, Ruth, ‘The Jew, the Host and the Virgin Martyr: Fantasies of the Sentient Body’, in Medieval Virginities, ed. by Anke Bernau, Ruth Evans and Sarah Salih (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), pp. 167–86. Falco, Raphael, ‘Medieval and Reformation Roots’, in A Companion to Renaissance Drama, ed. by Arthur F. Kinney (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 239–56. Fitzgerald, Christina M., ‘Manning the Ark in York and Chester’, Exemplaria, 15.2 (2003), 351–84. Flanigan, Clifford, ‘The Conflict of Ideology in Late Medieval Urban Drama’, ROMARD, 52 (2014), 85–92. Fletcher, Alan J., ‘The N-Town Plays’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. by Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 163–88. Florschuetz, Angela, ‘Women’s Secrets: Childbirth, Pollution, and Purification in Northern Octavian’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 30 (2008), 235–68. Foster, Michael, ed., Spiritual Temporalities in Late-Medieval Europe (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). Fradenburg, Louise O., ‘Criticism, Anti-Semitism, and the Prioress’s Tale’, Exemplaria, 1.1 (1989), 69–115. Fradenburg, Louise O., ‘Making, Mourning, and the Love of Idols’, in Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image, ed. by Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 25–42. Freccero, Carla, Queer/Early/Modern (London: Duke University Press, 2006). Freeman, Elizabeth, ‘Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography’ Social Text, 23.3–4 (2005), 57–68. Freeman, Elizabeth, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (London: Duke University Press, 2010). Freeman, Elizabeth, and others, ‘Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion’, GLQ, 13.2–3 (2007), 177–95. French, Katharine, ‘The Material Culture of Childbirth in Late Medieval London and Its Suburbs’, Journal of Women’s History, 28.3 (2016), 126–48. Frilingos, Christopher A., Jesus, Mary, and Joseph: Family Trouble in the Infancy Gospels (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). Garvin, Katherine, ‘A Note on Noah’s Wife’, Modern Language Notes, 49.2 (1934), 88–90. Gash, Anthony, ‘Carnival Against Lent: The Ambivalence of Modern Drama’, in Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology and History, ed. by David Aers (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986), pp. 74–98. Gayk, Shannon, Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Geary, Patrick J., Women at the Beginning: Origin Myths from the Amazons to the Virgin Mary (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

216Bibliography Genette, Gérard, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). Giffney, Noreen, Michelle M. Sauer and Diane Watt, ‘Introduction’, in The Lesbian Premodern (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 1–17. Gilchrist, Roberta, Medieval Life: Archaeology and the Life Course (Pershore: The Boydell Press, 2012). Gil Harris, Jonathan, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). Gill, Miriam, ‘From Urban Myth to Didactic Image: The Warning to Swearers’, in The Hands of the Tongue: Essays on Deviant Speech, ed. by Edwin D. Craun (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), 137–60. Godfrey, Bob, ‘Herod’s Reputation and the Killing of Children: Some Theatrical Consequences’, in Staging Scripture: Biblical Drama, 1350– 1600, ed. by Peter Happé and Wim Hüsken (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 253–76. Goodland, Katharine, ‘“Vs for to wepe no man may lett”: Accommodating Female Grief in the Medieval English Lazarus Plays’, Early Theatre, 8.1 (2005), 69–94. Goodland, Katharine, Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance Drama: From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear (New York: Routledge, 2016). Gough, Melinda J. and Clare McManus, ‘Introduction: Gender, Cultural Mobility, and Theater History Inquiry’, Renaissance Drama, 44.2 (2016), 187–200. Grady, Frank, Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Granger, Penny, The N-Town Play: Drama and Liturgy in Medieval East Anglia (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2009). Green, D. H., Women Readers in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Green, Monica H., ‘Obstetrical and Gynaecological Texts in Middle English’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 14 (1992), 53–88. Greenblatt, Stephen, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Gurevich, A. J., Categories of Medieval Culture, trans. by G. L. Campbell (London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1985). Haber, Judith, ‘Marlowe’s Queer Jew’, Renaissance Drama, 47.1 (2019), 1–20. Happé, Peter, The Towneley Cycle: Unity and Diversity (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007). Happé, Peter and others, ‘Thoughts on “Transvestism” by Divers Hands’, Medieval English Theatre, 5.2 (1983), 110–22. Halberstam, Jack, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005).

Bibliography

217

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Halberstam, Jack, ‘Keeping Time with Lesbians on Ecstasy’, in Queer Times, Queer Becomings, ed. by E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2011), pp. 333–44. Halberstam, Jack, The Queer Art of Failure (London: Duke University Press, 2011). Harris, Jennifer A., ‘The Bible and the Meaning of History in the Middle Ages’, in The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages: Production, Reception and Performance in Western Christianity, ed. by Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly (Columbia, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011), pp. 84–104. Harris Stoettz, Fiona, ‘Suffering and Survival in Medieval English Childbirth’, in Medieval Family Roles, ed. by Cathy Jorgensen Intyre (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996), pp. 101–20. Hart, James G., ‘Phenomenological Time: Its Religious Significance’, in Religion and Time, ed. by Anindita Niyogi Balslev and J. N. Mohanty (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993), pp. 17–45. Heng, Geraldine, ‘The Romance of England: Richard Coeur de Lyon, Saracens, Jews, and the Politics of Race and Nation’, in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 135–71. Hepworth Holland, Charles, The Idea of Time (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 1999). Herbert McAvoy, Liz, ‘Introduction: In Principo: The Queer Matrix of Gender, Time and Memory in the Middle Ages’, in Liz Herbert McAvoy, Reconsidering Gender, Time and Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2015), pp. 1–12. Herzogenrath, Bernd, ed., Time and History in Deleuze and Serres (London: Continuum, 2012). Higgs-Strickland, Debra, Saracens, Demons and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). Hillaby, Joe, ‘Jewish Colonisation in the Twelfth Century’, in The Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary and Archaeological Perspectives, ed. by Patricia Skinner (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2003), pp. 15–40. Hirsch, Brett D., ‘From Jew to Puritan: The Emblematic Owl in Early English Culture’, in This Earthly Stage: World and Stage in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. by Brett D. Hirsch and Christopher Wortham (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 131–71. Hirsch, Brett D., and Christopher Wortham, eds, This Earthly Stage: World and Stage in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010). Holford-Strevens, Leofranc, The History of Time: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Houwen, L. A. J. R., ‘Animal Parallelism in Medieval Literature and the Bestiaries: A Preliminary Investigation’, Neophilologus, 78 (1994), 483–96. Hunt, Lynn, Measuring Time, Making History (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008).

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

218Bibliography Jacobus, Laura, ‘Motherhood and Massacre: The Massacre of the Innocents in Late-Medieval Art and Drama’, in The Massacre in History, ed. by Mark Levene and Penny Roberts (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999), pp. 39–54. Jaritz, Gerhard and Gerson Moreno-Riaño, eds, Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003). Jennings, Margaret, ‘Tutivillus: The Literary Career of the Recording Demon’, Studies in Philology, 74.5 (1977), 1–95. Johnston, Alexandra F., ‘The Procession and Play of the Corpus Christi in York after 1426’, Leeds Studies in English, 7 (1974), 55–62. Johnston, Alexandra F., ‘The Second Shepherds’ Play: A Play for the Christmas Season’, METh, 37 (2015), 134–48. Jones, Deborah, ‘Gossip: Notes on Women’s Oral Culture’, WSIQ, 3 (1980), 193–8. Jones, Malcolm, ‘Folklore Motifs in Late Medieval Art III: Erotic Animal Imagery’, Folklore, 102.2 (1991), 192–219. Kalas-Williams, Laura, Margery Kempe’s Spiritual Medicine: Suffering, Transformation and the Life-Course (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2020). Karáth, Tamás, ‘Staging Childbirth: Medical and Popular Discourses of Delivery and Midwifery in the Medieval English Mystery Plays’, SPELL, 28 (2013), 187–206. Kenney, Theresa, ‘The Manger as Calvary and Altar in the Middle English Nativity Lyric’, in The Christ Child in Medieval Culture: Alpha es et O!, ed. by Mary Dzon and Theresa M. Kenney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), pp. 29–65. King, Pamela M., ‘Calendar and Text: Christ’s Ministry in the York Plays and the Liturgy’, Medium Aevum, 67.1 (1998), 30–59. King, Pamela M., The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006). King, Pamela M., ‘Losing Faith in Transformation: Protestantism and Theatre’, Mediaevalia, 29.1 (2007), 79–94. King, Pamela M., ‘Playing Pentecost in York and Chester: Transformations and Texts’, METh, 29 (2007), 60–74. Kolve, V. A., The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966). Krug, Rebecca, ‘Natural Feeling and Unnatural Mothers: Herod the Great, The Life of Saint Bridget, and Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale’, in Laments for the Lost in Medieval Literature, ed. by Jane Tolmie, M. J. Toswell and Derek Pearsall (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 225–41. Kruger, Steven, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Lampert, Lisa, ‘The Once and Future Jew: The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Little Robert of Bury and Historical Memory’, Jewish History, 15.3 (2001), 235–55. Lampert, Lisa, Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

Bibliography

219

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Landa, M. J., The Jew in Drama (London: P.S. King and Son, 1926). Langmuir, Gavin, History, Religion, and Antisemitism (London: I.B. Tauris, 1990). Lavezzo, Kathy, The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016). Lee, Raymond L., and Alistair B. Fraser, eds, The Rainbow Bridge: Rainbows in Art, Myth and Science (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001). Le Goff, Jacques, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Lerud, Theodore K., Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Lewis, J. A. H., ‘History and Everlastingness in Hugh of St Victor’s Figures of Noah’s Ark’, in Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse, ed. by Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riaño (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 203–22. Lin, Erika T., Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Linton, David, ‘Reading the Virgin Reader’, in The Book and the Magic of Reading in the Middle Ages, ed. by Albrecht Classen (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), pp. 253–76. Llewelyn Price, Merrall, Consuming Passions: The Uses of Cannibalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2003). Llewelyn Price, Merrall, ‘Re-membering the Jews: Theatrical Violence in the N-Town Marian Plays’, Comparative Drama, 41.4 (2007–8), 439–63. Lochrie, Karma, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). Lowenthal, David, ‘Preface’, in The Art of Forgetting, ed. by Adrian Forty and Susanne Küchler (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2001), pp. x–xiii. MacCulloch, Diarmaid, Silence: A Christian History (St Ives: Allen Lane, 2013). Magnus, Erica W., ‘Time on the Stage’, KronoScope, 4.1 (2004), 95–126. Manchester, Peter, ‘Time in Christianity’, in Religion and Time, ed. by Anindita Niyogi Balslev and J. N. Mohanty (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993), pp. 109–37. Manly, William M., ‘Shepherds and Prophets: Religious Unity in the Towneley Secunda Pastorum,’ PMLA, 78 (1963), 151–5. Marshall, Linda E., ‘Sacral Parody in the Secuda Pastorum’, Speculum, 47 (1972), 720–36. Martin Reynolds, Paige, ‘Sin, Sacredness, and Childbirth in Early Modern Drama’, MRDE, 28 (2016), 30–48. Mazo Karras, Ruth, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing unto Others (New York: Routledge, 2005). McCallum, E. L., and Mikko Tuhkanen, ‘Becoming Unbecoming: Untimely Meditations’, in Queer Times, Queer Becomings, ed. by E. L.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

220Bibliography McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2011), pp. 1–21. McCarthy, Daniel P., ‘The Emergence of Anno Domini’, in Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse, ed. by Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riaño (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2003), pp. 31–53. McGavin, John, ‘Medieval Theatricality and Spectatorship’, Theta VIII, Tudor Theatre (2009). McGavin, John, and Greg Walker, Imagining Spectatorship: From the Mysteries to the Shakespearean Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). McGillivray, Murray, ‘The Towneley Manuscript and Performance: Tudor Recycling?’, in Editing, Performance, Texts: New Practices in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama, ed. by Jacqueline Jenkins and Julie Sanders (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). McMullan, Gordon and David Matthews, eds, Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). McMurray Gibson, Gail, ‘Bury St Edmunds, Lydgate, and the N-Town Cycle’, Speculum, 56.1 (1981), 56–90. McMurray Gibson, Gail, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1989). McMurray Gibson, Gail, ‘Manuscript as Sacred Object: Robert Hegge’s N-Town Plays’, JMEMS, 44.3 (2014), 503–28. Meredith, Peter, ‘The Towneley Cycle’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. by Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 134–62. Meredith, Peter, ‘Performance, Verse and Occasion in the N-Town Mary Play’, in Individuality and Achievement in Middle English Poetry, ed. by O. S. Pickering (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 205–22. Meyer Spacks, Patricia, Gossip (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Meyers, Walter, ‘Typology and the Audience of the English Cycle Plays’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 81 (1975), 5–17. Mill, Anna Jean, ‘Noah’s Wife Again’, PMLA, 56.3 (1941), 613–26. Mills, David, ‘The Chester Cycle’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. by Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 109–33. Morgan, Margery M., ‘“High Fraud”: Paradox and Double-Plot in the English Shepherds’ Plays’, Speculum, 39 (1964), 676–89. Morrison, Paul, ‘Measure for Measure: Same-Saint Desire’, in Shakesqueer, ed. by Madhavi Menon (London: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 209–15. Murdoch, Brian O., ‘Creation, Fall and After in the Cornish Gwreans an bys’, Studi Medievali, 29 (1981), 822–36.

Bibliography

221

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Murdoch, Brian O., ‘The Cornish Medieval Drama’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. by Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 211–39. Morse, Ruth, Helen Cooper and Peter Holland, ed., Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Moss, Rachel, ‘Locker Room Talk: Homosocial Discourse in Late Medieval England’, unpublished paper delivered at the conference ‘Leeds International Medieval Congress’ (University of Leeds, 2–5 July 2018). Nagel, Alexander, and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010). Napolitano, Frank M., ‘The N-Town Presentation of Mary in the Temple and the Production of Rhetorical Knowledge’, Studies in Philology, 110.1 (2013), 1–17. Napolitano, Frank M., ‘“Here may we se a merveyl one”: Miracles and the Psalter in the N-Town Marriage of Mary and Joseph’, Early Theatre, 18.2 (2015), 37–56. Nelson, Alan, ‘“Sacred” and “Secular” Currents in the Towneley Play of Noah’, Drama Survey, 3 (1964), 393–401. Nolan Sidhu, Nicole, Indecent Exposure: Gender, Politics, and Obscene Comedy in Middle English Literature (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Normington, Katie, ‘Giving Voice to Women: Teaching Feminist Approaches to the Mystery Plays’, College Literature, 28.2 (2001), 130–54. Normington, Katie, Gender and Medieval Drama (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004). Normington, Katie, Medieval English Drama (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009). Overman, J. Andrew, Matthew’s Gospel and Formative Judaism: The Social World of the Matthean Community (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1990). Oswold, Dana, Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature (Chippenham: D.S. Brewer, 2010). Paden, William D., and Frances Freeman Paden, ‘Swollen Women, Shifting Canon: A Midwife’s Charm and the Birth of Secular Romance Lyric’, PMLA, 125.2 (2010), 306–21. Palmer, Barbara, ‘Recycling “The Wakefield Cycle”: The Records’, RORD, 41 (2002), 88–130. Parker, Andrew, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, eds, Performativity and Performance (London: Routledge, 1995). Parker, Patricia, ‘On the Tongue: Cross Gendering, Effeminacy, and the Art of Words’, Style, 23 (1989), 445–65. Pelikan, Jaroslav, Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). Pfaff, R. W., New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England (London: Clarendon Press, 1970).

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

222Bibliography Phillips, Susan E., ‘Gossip and (Un)official Writing’, in Oxford TwentyFirst Century Approaches to Literature, ed. by Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 478–90. Phillips, Susan E., ‘“Janglynge in cherce”: Gossip and the Exemplum’, in The Hands of the Tongue: Essays on Deviant Speech, ed. by Edwin D. Craun (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), pp. 61–94. Phillips, Susan E., Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). Poteet II, Daniel P., ‘Time, Eternity, and Dramatic Form in Ludus Coventriae “Passion Play I”’, Comparative Drama, 8.4 (1974–5), 369–85. Pryor, Jaclyn I., Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017). Rastall, Richard, ‘Female Roles in All-Male Casts’, Medieval English Theatre, 7.1 (1985), 25–50. Reed, Roland, ‘The Slaughter of the Innocents’, Early Theatre, 3 (2000), 219–28. Reed, Teresa, Shadows of Mary: Understanding Images of the Virgin Mary in Medieval Texts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003). Reiss, Edmund, ‘The Tradition of Moses in the Underworld and the York Plays of the Transfiguration and Harrowing’, Mediaevalia, 5 (1979), 141–64. Rendall, Thomas, ‘Visual Typology in the Abraham and Isaac Plays’, Modern Philology, 81 (1984), 221–32. Rice, Nicole R. and Margaret Aziza Pappano, The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015). Rogerson, Margaret, ‘Raging in the Streets of Medieval York’, Early Theatre, 3 (2000), 105–25. Rogerson, Margaret, ‘Affective Piety: A “Method” for Medieval Actors in the Chester Cycle’, in The Chester Cycle in Context, 1555–1575, ed. by Jessica Dell, David Klausner and Helen Ostovich (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), pp. 93–107. Rogerson, Margaret, ed., The York Mystery Plays: Performance in the City, ed. by Margaret Rogerson (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011), pp. 116–34. Rose, Christine M., ‘The Jewish Mother-in-Law: Synagoga and the Man of Law’s Tale’, in Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings, ed. by Sheila Delany (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 3–23. Ross, Lawrence J., ‘Symbol and Structure in the Secunda Pastorum’, Comparative Drama, 1.2 (1967), 122–49. Rowland, Beryl, ‘Women’s Health Care and Trotula’, Florilegium, 8 (1986), 56–70.

Bibliography

223

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Rubin, Miri, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Rubin, Miri, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). Rubin, Miri, Emotion and Devotion: The Meaning of Mary in Medieval Religious Cultures (New York: Central European University Press, 2009). Rubin, Miri, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (St Ives: Allen Lane, 2009). Ryan, Denise, ‘Womanly Weaponry: Language and Power in the Chester Slaughter of the Innocents’, Studies in Philology, 98.1 (2001), 76–92. Ryan, Denise, ‘Playing the Midwife’s Part in the English Nativity Plays’, Review of English Studies, 54.216 (2003), 435–48. Ryder, M. L., ‘Medieval Sheep and Wool Types’, The Agricultural History Review, 32.1 (1984), 14–28. Ryrie, Alec, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Saetvait Miles, Laura, ‘The Origins and Development of the Virgin Mary’s Book at the Annunciation’, Speculum, 89.3 (2014), 632–69. Sawyer, John F. A., The Fifth Gospel: Isaiah in the History of Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Schein, Sylvia, ‘Used and Abused: Gossip in Medieval Society’, in Good Gossip, ed. by Robert F. Goodman and Aaron Ben-Ze’ev (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1994), pp. 139–53. Schneider, Rebecca, Performing Remains: Art and War in Time of Theatrical Reenactment (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011). Schreyer, Kurt A., Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft: Remnants of the Mysteries on the London Stage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014). Schwarz, Kathryn, ‘Queer Futility: Or, The Life and Death of King John’ in Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. by Madhavi Menon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 163–71. Searle, John R., ‘How Performatives Work’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 12 (1989), 535–58. Serres, Michel and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. by Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995). Shapiro, James, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Sheingorn, Pamela, ‘Typology and the Teaching of Medieval Drama’, in Approaches to Teaching Medieval English Drama, ed. by Richard K. Emmerson (New York: MLAA, 1990), pp. 90–100. Sheingorn, Pamela, ‘“Who can open the doors of his face?” The Iconography of the Mouth of Hell’ in The Iconography of Hell, ed. by Clifford Davidson and Thomas H. Seiler (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992), pp. 1–19.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

224Bibliography Simpson, James, The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 2, 1350–1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; repr. 2007). Simpson, James, ‘The Rule of Medieval Imagination’, in Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image, ed. by Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 4–24. Simpson, James, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Sinanoglou, Leah, ‘The Christ Child as Sacrifice: A Medieval Tradition and the Corpus Christi Plays’, Speculum, 48.3 (1973), 491–509. Skey, Miriam Anne, ‘Herod the Great in Medieval European Drama’, Comparative Drama, 13.4 (1979), 330–64. Skinner, Patricia, ed., The Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary and Archaeological Perspectives (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2003). Skinner, Patricia, ed., Living with Disfigurement in Early Medieval Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Smyth, Karen Elaine, Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2011). Solberg, Emma Maggie, Virgin Whore (New York: Cornell University Press, 2018). Spector, Stephen, ‘Anti-Semitism and the English Mystery Plays’, Comparative Drama, 13.1 (1979), 3–16. Spence, N. C. W., ‘The Human Bestiary’, MLA, 96.4 (2001), 913–90. Spencer-Hall, Alicia, Medieval Saints and Modern Screens: Divine Visions and Cinematic Experience (Husholt: Amsterdam University Press, 2017). Spivey Ellington, Donna, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul: Understanding Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2001). Sponsler, Claire, ‘The Culture of the Spectator: Conformity and Resistance to Medieval Performances’, Theater Journal, 44 (1992), 15–29. Sponsler, Claire, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Stacey, Robert C., ‘The Conversion of Jews to Christianity in ThirteenthCentury England’, Speculum, 67.2 (1992), 263–83. Staines, David, ‘To Out-Herod Herod: The Development of a Dramatic Character’, Comparative Drama, 10 (1976), 29–53. Steenbrugge, Charlotte, Drama and Sermon in Late Medieval England: Performance, Authority, Devotion (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2017). Stern, Sacha, ‘The Rabbinic Concept of Time from Antiquity to the Middle Ages’, in Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse, ed. by Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riaño (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 129–45. Stevens, Wesley, ‘A Present Sense of Things Past: Quid est enim tempus?’, in Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse, ed. by Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riaño (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 9–28.

Bibliography

225

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Stokes, James, ‘Women and Performance: Evidences of Universal Cultural Suffrage in Medieval and Early Modern Lincolnshire’, in Women Players in England, 1500–1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage, ed. by Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin (Chippenham: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 25–44. Stokes, James, ‘Women and Performance in Medieval and Early Modern Suffolk’, Early Theatre, 15.1 (2012), 27–43. Stokes, James, ‘The Ongoing Exploration of Women and Performance in Early Modern England’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 33.1 (2015), 9–31 (p. 10). Storm, Melvin, ‘Uxor and Alison: Noah’s Wife in the Flood Plays and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’, MLQ, 48.4 (1987), 303–19. Strohm, Paul, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Sturges, Robert S., ‘“Nerehand Nothyng to Pay or to Take”: Poverty, Labor, and Money in Four Towneley Plays’, in Money, Morality, and Culture in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by Juliann Vitullo and Diane Wolfthal (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2010), pp. 13–32. Sturges, Robert S., The Circulation of Power in Medieval; Biblical Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Summit, Jennifer, ‘Leland’s Itinerary and the Remains of the Medieval Past’, in Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England, ed. by Gordon McMullan and David Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 159–76. Tasioulas, J. A., ‘Between Doctrine and Domesticity: The Portrayal of Mary in the N-Town Plays’, in Medieval Women in their Communities, ed. by Diane Watt (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), pp. 222–45. Taylor, Diana, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). Temple, W. M., ‘The Weeping Rachel’, Medium Aevum, 28.2 (1959), 81–6. Tinkle, Theresa, ‘Exegesis Reconsidered: The Fleury ‘Slaughter of the Innocents’ and the Myth of Ritual Murder’, JEGP, 102.2 (2003), 211–43. Tomasch, Sylvia, ‘Postcolonial Chaucer and the Virtual Jew’, in Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings, ed. by Sheila Delany (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 69–85. Tolmie, Jane, ‘Mrs Noah and Didactic Abuses’, Early Theatre, 5.1 (2002), 11–35. Trachtenburg, Joshua, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970). Traub, Valerie, ‘The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography’ in The Lesbian Premodern, ed. by Noreen Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer and Diane Watt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 21–34. Twycross, Meg, ‘“Transvestism” in the Mystery Plays’, Medieval English Theatre, 5.2 (1983), 123–80. Twycross, Meg, ‘Forget the 4.30 am Start: Recovering a Palimpsest in the York Ordo Paginarum’, METh, 25 (2005), 98–152.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

226Bibliography Twycross, Meg, ‘The Ordo paginarum Revisited, with a Digital Camera’, in Bring Furth the Pageants: Essays in Early English Drama Presented to Alexandra F. Johnston, ed. by David N. Klausner and Karen Sawyer Marsalek (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 105–31. Twycross, Meg, ‘The Sun in York (Part One): Illumination, Reflection, and Timekeeping for the Corpus Christi’, METh, 40 (2018), 148–94. Vance Smith, D., ‘Irregular Histories: Forgetting Ourselves’, NLH, 28.2 (1997), 161–84. Vance Smith, D., The Book of the Incipit: Beginnings in the Fourteenth Century (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Van Houts, Elisabeth, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe 900–1200 (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1999). Vaughan, M. F., ‘Mak and the Proportions of The Second Shepherds’ Play’, MF Papers on Language and Literature, 18.4 (1982), 355–67. Verbaal, Wim, ‘Bernard of Clairvaux’s School of Oblivion’, in Negotiating Heritage: Memories of the Middle Ages, ed. by Mette B. Bruun and Stephanie Glaser (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 221–37. Visser, Arnoud S. Q., Reading Augustine in the Reformation: The Flexibility of Intellectual Authority in Europe, 1500–1620 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Walker, Greg, ‘Medieval Drama: The Corpus Christi in York and Croxton’, in Readings in Medieval Texts: Interpreting Old and Middle English Literature, ed. by David Johnson and Elaine Treharne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 370–85. Walker, Greg, ‘When Did ‘the Medieval’ End? Retrospection, Foresight and the End(s) of the English Middle Ages’, in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English, ed. by Elaine Treharne, Greg Walker and William Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 725–38. Walker, Greg, ‘“In the Beginning. . .”: Performing the Creation in the York Corpus Christi Play’, in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama, ed. by Thomas Betteridge and Greg Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 36–54. Walker, Greg, Reading Literature Historically: Drama and Poetry from Chaucer to the Reformation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Walker Bynum, Caroline, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991). Ward, Karen, ‘Polysemy, Metatheatricality, and Affective Piety: A Study of Conceptual Blending in the York Play The Crucifixion’, in Spiritual Temporalities in Late-Medieval Europe, ed. by Michael Foster (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), pp. 127–38. Warner, Marina, Alone of all Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (Reading: Picador, 1976; repr. 1985). Watt, Diane, and Roberta Magnani, ‘Towards a Queer Philology’, postmedieval, 9.3 (2018), 252–68.

Bibliography

227

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Wei, Ian P., ‘Predicting the Future to Judge the Present: Paris Theologians and Attitudes to the Future’, in Medieval Futures: Attitudes to the Future in the Middle Ages, ed. by J. A. Burrow and Ian. P. Wei (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2000), pp. 19–36. Wesling, Donald, ‘Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, and the Edges of Historical Periods’, CLIO, 26.2 (1997), 189–200. Whitrow, G. J., Time in History: Views of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Williams, Ann, ed., Prophecy and Millenarianism: Essays in Honour of Marjorie Reeves (Harlow: Longman, 1980). Wiltenburg, Joy, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1992). Woolf, Rosemary, ‘The Effect of Typology on the English Medieval Plays of Abraham and Isaac’, Speculum, 32 (1957), 805–25. Woolf, Rosemary, The English Mystery Plays (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972). Wright, Clare, ‘Acoustic Tyranny: Metre, Alliteration and Voice in York’s Christ Before Herod’, METh, 34 (2012), 3–29. Wright, Clare, ‘Ontologies of Play: Reconstructing the Relationship between Audience and Act in Early English Drama’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 35.2 (2017), 187–206. Young Gregg, Joan, Devils, Women, and Jews: Reflections of the Other in Medieval Sermon Stories (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997). Yuval-Davis, Nira, Gender and Nation (London: SAGE Publications, 1997). Zemon Davis, Natalie, ‘Women on Top: Symbolic Sexual Inversion and Political Disorder in Early Modern Europe’, in The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, ed. by Barbara A. Babcock (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 147–90.

Websites Augustine, City of God (University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center), http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/AugCity.html BBC article: ‘Unholy row over New Zealand Mary and Joseph billboard’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8417963.stm Baltens, Peter, A Flemish Kermis with a Performance of the Farce, ‘Een cluyte van Plaeyerwater’, c.1570. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, www. rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-A-2554 Douay-Rheims Catholic Bible, www.drbo.org Joy, Ellen, ‘In The Medieval Middle’, www.inthemedievalmiddle. com/2009/03/signaling-to-each-other-from.html Middle English Dictionary, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

228Bibliography Moss, Rachel, ‘The Vulnerable Academic Body’, LA Review of Books, 21 June 2018, https://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2018/06/21/the-vulnerableacademic-body/?fbclid=IwAR2NA0iPb5CHwF770ziyp8ixlX56oNpIcEwCVLa4GVrW9GvLk5A9gkeaL0 Sugano, Douglas, The N-Town Plays: Introduction (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/ sdntintro.htm TEAMS, www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/tmsmenu.htm The Women’s Quilt, www.thewomensquilt.wordpress.com York Mystery Plays, www.yorkmysteryplays.co.uk/the-plays/

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index

Abate, Michelle Ann 135 Abraham 48, 64, 139 Agamben, Giorgio 44 age, old 40, 41, 42, 60–1 Alakas, Brandon 40 angels 9, 39, 53, 56, 57, 117, 119, 143, 158, 188–92 antagonism 4, 17, 46, 102, 162–163, 187, 194 anti-Semitism 16–17, 85, 141, 163, 192, 194, 198 see also conversion; Jews, stereotyping Aquinas, St Thomas 3, 158 Aronson-Lehavi, Sharon 7, 193 audience see spectators and spectatorship; supersession Augustine, St 1–2, 8, 80, 188, 194 Bahr, Arthur 120 Bakhtin, Mikhail 18, 126 Bale, Anthony 17, 41, 138 Bale, John 168 Balslev, Anindita Niyogi 43, 157 Baltens, Peter 113–15, 116 Beadle, Richard 5 Bernard of Clairvaux 88 bible, Christian 15, 23, 43–4, 49, 54–5, 152–3, 154, 155, 157–62, 175 bible, Hebrew 15, 23, 25, 43–4, 45, 49, 54–5, 80, 104, 174 Biddick, Kathleen 15, 47, 54, 87, 118, 157

Bildhauer, Bettina 174 blindness 51–2 Blurton, Heather 140 body elderly 39–40, 42, 60 maternal 15, 38, 41, 42, 49, 60, 61, 126–7 sexual 38, 41, 49, 52, 60 virgin 27, 38, 44, 48, 54–5, 60, 61 Bowie, David 1, 194 Brailes, William de 84 Breen, Philip 186 Brexit 202 Bruun, Mette 48 Burrow, J. A. 42 burying 199–201 Butler, Judith 90 Butterworth, Philip 5, 90, 139 cannibalism 140–1 Carruthers, Mary 19, 88 Chai-Elsholz, Raeleen 19 Chaucer, Geoffrey 161 cherry-tree miracle 62–3 Chester plays 2013 Chester Mystery Plays 153 context 22–3 Corpus Christi 22–3, 153 plays Annunciation and Nativity, The 135 Noyes Fludd 79, 90, 95–103

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

230Index Slaughter of the Innocents, The (Gouldsmythes Playe) 176 Three Kings, The (Vintner’s play) 164 Chidamian, Claude 136 childbirth 89, 125–7, 130–7, 159 children, absent 130–3 chronology, resisting 27–9 City of God, The 83, 84 clocks 19 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 87 Coletti, Theresa 46, 78, 169 colonialism 48–9 compilation, non-linear 119–22 conflicts 3, 11–15, 21–2, 24–7, 29, 193–5, 199 character conflicts 11–12 see also supersession conversion 43, 45, 46, 54, 56–64, 65, 77, 194, 198–9 Corpus Christi, feast 22–3, 140, 153 costuming 50 Coventry, plays 38–9, 153, 168 Cox, Elizabeth 20 cradles 131–3 creation, before 4–14 Croxton Play of the Sacrament 57 cuckold 40, 49, 60, 61–2, 138, 139 cults 47 Cushman, Helen Marie 54 Davidson, Clifford 192 Davis, Isabel 157 Davis, Kathleen 15, 20, 43–4 Dean, Tim 142 Despres, Denise L. 61 Dinshaw, Carolyn 21, 28, 95–6, 143, 156 disguises 125 Dubin, Nathaniel E. 49 Duffy, Eamon 168 Dutton, Elisabeth 24 East Anglia 46–7 Ecclesia 51, 56

Edelman, Lee 28, 118, 128, 141, 144 Elliott Novacich, Sarah 81, 85, 93, 188 Ellis, Roxanne 104 emotions 3, 14, 97, 173–4, 186 Epp, Garrett P. J. 116 Esteban-Munˇoz, José 116, 118 eternity 2–3, 24, 29, 92, 187–90, 193 God’s 8–11 Evans, Ruth 17, 78 failure, sexual 139 feminism 13–14, 78–9, 131–2, 169 fighting 169–176 see also violence Fitzgerald, Christina 89, 97 Flanigan, C. Clifford 117 Fletcher, Alan 39 forgiveness 57 Foster, Michael 19 Freccero, Carla 118, 127–8 Freeman, Elizabeth 118, 125, 127, 130, 136 French, Katherine 132 friends, absent 91 futurity 28, 98 Gash, Anthony 78 gender 1, 4, 12–14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 25–6 Gilchrist, Roberta 132 Gil Harris, Jonathan 28, 92 Glaser, Stephanie 48 gluttony 126 God 1–11, 28, 29, 51, 56, 63, 75–6, 77, 80–1, 90, 139, 174, 175, 187, 188–9, 190, 200 Godfrey, Bob 165, 174 godparents 97 Goodland, Katharine 190 Gospel of John 8, 86 Gospel of Matthew 45, 48, 51, 143, 152–3, 155, 157–62 Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew 62 gossip (speech) 97, 99, 135 Gough, Melinda J. 197

Index

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Granger, Penny 24 Green, Monica 136 Gregerson, Linda 75 guides, spiritual 97 guilds barkers 4–5, 8, 10 building 6, 7 butchers 6 craft 22 masons 191, 192–3 shipwrights 80 vintners 164 Gurevich, A. J. 43 Gwreans an bys 29, 199–201 Halberstam, Jack 116, 118–19, 132–3, 143 Hamlet 161, 198 Happé, Peter 120 Harber, Judith 141 Hegel, Georg 12 Heidegger, Martin 12 Herbert McAvoy, Liz 20 heritage 89 Heywood, John 168 Hirsch, Brett D. 198 histories 2, 12, 15, 20–2, 24, 26, 28–9, 159–60 spectators 188, 192, 197, 199–200 see also supersession HIV/AIDS 118, 142 Holkham Bible Picture Book 84 homosociality 127, 133 Houwen, L. A. J. R. 138 Howard, James 26 hunger 124–5 Husserl, Edmund 12 icons, queer 137–42 illnesses 53–4 Immaculate Conception 47–8, 49 impotence 40–1, 60–1, 193 Incarnation 45 infertility 132–3 infidelity 49

231 Jagose, Annamarie 116 Jesus 43–4, 48, 51–2, 55, 57, 64, 120, 129, 138, 154, 157, 158, 159, 161, 162, 177 Jews characterisation 16–17, 45, 56, 62, 85, 140, 162–3, 166 medieval 16–17, 157–8 protean 162–3 spectral 16–17 stereotyping 16, 17, 18, 138, 163 Johnston, Alexandra 120, 128 Joseph 13, 14, 15, 18, 27, 38–43, 44–5, 48–66, 128–9, 135, 158–9, 194 Judaism narratives 3, 12, 13, 15–16, 17, 27, 46 scriptures 3, 11, 16, 17, 23, 25, 26, 29, 45, 46, 53, 54–5, 64, 77, 85, 86 Kant, Immanuel 12 Karáth, Tamás 137 Kempe, Margery 21, 95, 102 Kenney, Theresa 139 King Johan 168 King, Pamela 23, 26 knowledge 2, 24, 186–8, 190–3, 201 Kolve, V. A. 24 Kruger, Steven 59 labour 5–7, 14, 49, 77, 122, 124 domestic 129–30 performance 133–6 labour, performing 133–6 Lampert, Lisa 15, 17, 53, 59, 61, 101, 198 Langmuir, Gavin 16, 45 language 2–3, 189, 196 Latour, Bruno 176 Lavezzo, Kathy 47 legitimacy 81 scriptural 157–61 Le Goff, Jacques 18 Lerud, Theodore K. 19

232Index

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Life of the Virgin, The 159 Llewelyn Price, Merrall 141 Lucifer 9, 11, 188–91 Ludus Innocentium 172 McCallum, E. L. 134 MacCulloch, Diarmaid 104 McGavin, John 115, 123, 192 McGillivray, Murray 121 McManus, Clare 197 McMurray Gibson, Gail 24, 46, 121 Magnani, Roberta 20, 120 Magnus, Erica W. 48 Manchester, Peter 43 Mankind 99 marriage 40–1, 48, 124, 199 Marriage of Mary and Joseph, The 40 Martin Reynolds, Paige 127 Mary Magdalen, Digby 50, 62, 135 Mary, Virgin 38–43, 44–66, 127, 128, 141, 159–60, 173–4 masculinity 124, 133, 138 Measure for Measure 198 Meredith, Peter 39, 46 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 198 Miller’s Tale, The 161 Mills, David 22 Mohanty, J. N. 43, 157 Moses 1–2, 3, 51, 64, 157–9 Moss, Rachel 132 motherhood 95, 127, 132, 134, 159 mothers, Innocents 13–14, 29, 160, 169–70, 172, 174 music 5 Napolitano, Frank M. 55 Newcastle flood pageant 80, 85, 87 Noah 13, 15, 20, 22, 24, 28, 76–104, 195, 200 Noah’s wife 13–14, 22, 24, 28, 75–9, 82, 85, 89–91, 92, 93–4, 97, 102–3, 170 Nolan Sidhu, Nicole 13, 79, 126, 129, 153, 167, 169, 199 Normington, Katie 40, 79, 82, 132

nostalgia 121, 202 N-Town plays context 24–5, 46 plays Assumption of Mary, The 46 Baptism, The 57 Jesse Root 48 Joseph’s Doubt 77, 137, 194 Marriage of Mary and Joseph, The 40 Nativity, The 43, 62 Salutation and Conception, The 48 Slaughter of the Innocents: The Death of Herod 176 Trial of Mary and Joseph, The 40, 48, 52, 60–1, 96, 127, 138 Ordo Rachelis 154, 172 Palmer, Barbara 121 parenthood 28, 131, 144, 199 passionibus mulierum, De 136 paternity 42 performance spaces 4–8, 115, 133 performers 4, 7–8, 192, 197, 201 Phillips, Susan E. 97 Phipes, Alice 132 Phipes, John 132 Piers Plowman 88 pietà 95, 103 playing spaces 4–5 Play of the Sacrament 17, 50 Play of the Weather, The 168 pregnancy 26, 28, 39, 97, 118, 119, 126–7 prophecy 152, 158, 161, 170, 176 Proto-gospel of James 59, 61 Pryor, Jaclyn I. 116 punishments 100, 137 Queer Art of Failure, The 132–3 Queer/Early/Modern 118–19 queer theory 20–1, 26, 28, 96, 155, 198

Index

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

race 4, 12, 41, 48, 76, 175 radiance 50–1 reading 49–56 REED project 197 Reed, Roland 153 recollection 13, 77, 93, 99, 104 remembering 103–4 rhyme and rhythm 10, 19, 23, 99 Robert of Bury 47 Rogerson, Margaret 96 Ross, Lawrence 117–18 Rubin, Miri 47, 127 Ryan, Denise 169 Ryrie, Alec 19, 65 Saetveit Miles, Laura 55 Schneider, Rebecca 116 Schreyer, Kurt 87, 197 scriptural legitimacy 157–61 scriptures 11 Searle, John R. 101 Serres, Michael 29, 43, 195 sexuality 40, 60, 116, 118, 137 Shakespeare, William 161, 198, 199 shaming, public 60 Shaping the Archive 188 sheep 137–42, 202 Sheingorn, Pamela 25–6, 81, 160 Siege of Jerusalem 141–2 silence 104 Simpson, James 24, 89, 198 Sinanoglou, Leah 139 Skey, Miriam 161 Smith, D. Vance 88 Smyth, Karen Elaine 20 Solberg, Emma Maggie 14, 42, 47, 131–2 Virgin Whore 17 spaces, performance 7–8 spectators and spectatorship 5, 7–8, 14, 77 foreknowledge 186, 187–8, 190, 191–3 interpretation 115–16, 123, 187, 192–3 unruly 191–3

233 Spector, Stephen 17 speech, performative 28, 77, 90–1, 92, 101–2 Spence, N. C. W. 139 Spencer-Hall, Alicia 116 Sponsler, Claire 167, 169 Stacey, Robert 62 Steenbrugge, Charlotte 57 Stern, Sacha 17 Stokes, James 197 Storm, Melvin 78 Straszewski, Tom 25 Sturges, Robert S. 24, 124, 169, 175 supersession 3, 15–18, 20–2, 27–9, 75–9, 121, 194–8, 201–2 academic fantasies of 196–9 swearing 101–2 Synagoga 51–2, 56, 58 Taylor, Diana 192 time and temporality anachronism 23–5, 63, 96–7, 113, 122, 155, 171 Christian 20, 27, 44–5, 47–8, 52, 57–8, 63, 89, 165, 201 collapse 19, 79, 95–7, 98, 100, 101–2, 103, 104, 155, 156, 170 conflict 21, 22, 24, 25, 27, 29, 42–3, 56, 65, 76, 77, 79, 129, 193, 199 drag 136 embodied 122–30 explosion 89–94 folding/topology 23, 29, 43, 155–7, 160, 162, 167, 171–2, 175, 177, 178 Hebrew 20, 47–8, 169 historical 65, 96 linear 9, 13, 15, 18, 19, 20, 24, 27–9, 43–4, 59, 83, 76–7, 94, 103, 114, 116–17, 119, 122, 156, 176 non-linear 77, 94, 119–22, 195

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

234Index performance 90, 94, 95, 102–3, 115, 119, 154 queer time 21, 26, 28, 96, 113, 115–17, 118, 120, 122, 134, 141–2 reproductive 118, 119 scattered 18–21 shattered 43–9, 63 supersession 3, 15–18, 20–2, 27–9, 75–9, 121, 194–8, 201–2 typology 23, 25–6, 27, 28, 54–5, 63–4, 85, 157–8, 165 Tolmie, Jane 85 Tomasch, Sylvia 42 Towneley plays context 28, 76, 79 manuscript 119–22 plays Abraham 139 First Shepherds’ Play 124 Herod the Great 154, 170–4 Isaac 139 Jacob 139 Noah and the Ark 76, 79, 87, 93, 129–30 Offering of the Magi 154, 164 Second Shepherds’ Play 20, 28, 113–19, 195 Transfiguration 51–2 transubstantiation 45 Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, A 54, 116, 186 Tuhkanen, Mikko 134 Twycross, Meg 50–1, 78 Unity and Diversity 120 Van Houts, Elisabeth 89, 94 Verbaal, Wim 88

violence 153, 176–8 Virgil 165–6 wagons (wagon stages) 4–6, 23, 189 Walker Bynum, Caroline 21 Walker, Greg 10, 115, 123 Walsingham 46 Watt, Diane 120 William of Norwich 47 Woolf, Rosemary 82 Wright, Claire 163 York Corpus Christi plays 2016 186 2018 5–6, 25 context 4–5, 11, 22–3 Corpus Christi 4–5, 22–3, 153, 191 Register 76, 191 plays Annunciation and Visitation 128 Building of the Ark, The 80, 94 Creation of the World to the Fifth Day, The 6, 7 Crucifixion, The 5–6, 23, 87, 96 Death of Christ, The 157 Fall of the Angels, The 4, 29, 187, 188, 190, 192 Fall of Man 86 Fergus 191–2 Flood, The 27–8, 81–3, 85–9 Purification, The 139 Slaughter of the Innocents, The 153 Young, Karl 172 Zemon Davis, Natalie 78