Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America 9781501729928

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Performative Historiographies. Medieval Drama and the Making of America
CHAPTER 1. Performing Conquest. The Jémez Matachines Dances
CHAPTER 2. Selective Histories. Albany’s Pinkster Festival
CHAPTER 3. Philadelphia’s Mummers and the Anglo-Saxon Revival
CHAPTER 4. Reinventing Tradition. Brooklyn’s Saint Play
CHAPTER 5. America’s Passion Plays
CHAPTER 6. Medieval Plays and Medievalist Players
Epilogue: The Future of Imported Rituals
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Ritual Imports

Ritual Imports Performing Medieval Drama in America Claire Sponsler

coRNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

I Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2004 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 1485o. First published 2.004 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sponsler, Claire Ritual imports : performing medieval drama in America I Claire Sponsler p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8014-429 s-8 (cloth: alk. paper) I. Drama, Medieval-History and criticism. 2. Performing arts-United States. PN 17 5 r.S66 2004 792.1'6'0973-dc22 2004017453 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acidfree papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of non wood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

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I. Title.

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Performative Historiographies Medieval Drama and the Making of America

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r. Performing Conquest The jemez Matachines Dances

CHAPTER

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Selective Histories Albany's Pinkster Festival CHAPTER 3. Philadelphia's Mummers and the Anglo-Saxon Revival CHAPTER 4. Reinventing Tradition Brooklyn's Saint Play CHAPTER 5. America's Passion Plays CHAPTER 6. Medieval Plays and Medievalist Players Epilogue: The Future of Imported Rituals

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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CHAPTER 2.

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Acknowledgments

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his book owes its existence to the generous assistance of many individuals and institutions. Thanks are due first and foremost to the people who welcomed me into their homes and communities, gave me access to private photographs and recollections, and shared their memories and experiences with me. I am especially grateful to Dee Dee Galasso, Charlie Marrone, Msgr. David Cassato, Vera Badamo, Joe Peluso, and Larry Laurenzano, all of whom willingly submitted to filmed interviews and with wit and candor shared their experiences of the Brooklyn play. The company of Dan Marano, Carol Peeples, Jason Silverman, Christian Leahy, and Bruce Smith enriched my visits to Jemez and Santa Fe, as did the hospitality of Pauline and Gerry Romero and their family, who kindly invited me to lunch at their house in Jemez. Jack Cohen, director of the Philadelphia Mummers' Museum, went well beyond his curatorial duties in sharing information and providing contacts, and the members of the Woodland String Band kindly allowed me to watch their rehearsals and conduct interviews. Pam Clements's hospitality made research trips to Albany much more pleasurable than they would otherwise have been, and, along with Kate Forhan and Mary Meany, Pam offered a knowledgeable local perspective on Albany's Tulip Fest. My debt to dozens of librarians and archivists will be obvious from my notes. Research for this book took me to the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, The John Carter Brown Library, the New York Public Library, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York State Library in Albany, the Albany Institute of History and Art, The Museum of New Mexico, the Special Collections Department of the University of Iowa Libraries, the Library of Congress, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. At all of these places, the staff was unfailingly helpful. Generous support from the University of Iowa enabled me to conduct research, attend performances, and have the time to write this book. By offering me the chance to teach on the New Mexico campus of the Bread Loaf School of English during the summers of 1999-2001, Jim Maddox unsuspectingly paved the way for chapter r. I could not imagine having had more astute and supportive readers and listeners. Chapter 6 began as a paper delivered at the American Society for Theatre Research Conference in 1994 and later appeared in Theatre Annual under Vll

vm Acknowledgments the title "Producing the Past: Modern Reconstructions of Medieval Drama," and I gratefully acknowledge the permission to reprint portions of my article granted by the College of William and Mary. The Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington invited me to present an early version of chapter 5 on American passion plays; that chapter benefited from the comments of Barbara Fuchs, Ben Schmidt, John Coldewey, and Barry Witham. A version of chapter 4, on Brooklyn's saint's play, appeared as "Brooklyn's Giglio and the Negotiation of Ethnicity" in Essays in Theatre in 1997 and profited from the comments of readers and editors for the journal. I also want to thank Kathleen Ashley and Veronique Plesch for inviting me as a plenary speaker to the New England Medieval Conference in 1998 and subsequently including my revised paper, "In Transit: Theorizing Cultural Appropriation in Medieval Europe," in their special edition of the Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies in 2002. Thanks are due also to Sarah Beckwith, who solicited "Medieval America: Drama and Community in the English Colonies, rs8o-r6ro," for another special issue of the same journal in I998. Although neither of those two essays appears in Ritual Imports, the work I did on them gave me the opportunity to reflect on broader issues of cultural appropriation and transatlantic exchanges. A number of colleagues offered advice and encouragement that have helped move this project along. Max Harris, Bob Potter, Theresa Coletti, Charlotte Stern, Larry Clopper, Sam Kinser, Kathleen Ashley, and Bob Clark all shared their work or provided support for this project at crucial stages, for which I am very grateful. I am also indebted to my colleagues and students at Iowa and the Bread Loaf School of English for advice and a good ear, particularly Kate Flint, Jon Wilcox, Huston Diehl, Miriam Gilbert, Teresa Mangum, and Kim Marra. Judith Pascoe and Jeff Porter read the entire manuscript and offered suggestions that have made this a much better book than it would otherwise have been, and Jeff's films of the Nola, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia performances have been an invaluable help in recalling stories and scenes that would otherwise have been forgotten. Finally, no author could wish for better or more astute critics than Jody Enders and the second, anonymous reader for Cornell University Press, or for more supportive editors than Bernie Kendler and the staff of Cornell Press. I do not imagine that the chapters that follow will live up to the expectations of all these supporters, but I trust that they will find parts of them captivating and illuminating-and will from time to time catch glimpses of their own indispensable contributions.

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Ritual Imports

INTRODUCTION

Performative Historiographies Medieval Drama and the Making of America

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n I 58 3, sir Humphrey Gilbert sailed from Plymouth, England to Newfoundland, taking with him, so he said in his subsequent report on the expedition, "Morris dancers, Hobby horsse, and Maylike conceits" for the "allurement of the Savages" and the "solace of our people."l To anyone schooled in the standard history of late medieval and early modern theater, this is surprising cargo, since according to that history the years between I 5 69 and I 5 So saw a thorough dismantling of the ceremonial year in England and along with it the death of the communal dramas and entertainments that had been its centerpiece for at least two hundred years. The largescale urban biblical plays associated with cities like York, Norwich, and Chester were systematically shut down and parish-based festivities like morris dancing, king games, and Robin Hood plays were suppressed, making way for the professional, commercial theater of London, whose dominance would bring about the final destruction of amateur, community-based festivities. What, then, are these remnants of a supposedly banished medieval tradition doing in the hold of a ship engaged in the quintessentially early modern acts of discovery and empire building? Why did Gilbert devote precious space to the props and paraphernalia of an outmoded cultural form? What made him imagine that May Games would be useful in winning over the "savages" he expected to meet and bucking up the spirits of his own men? And, most important for anyone interested in the history of transatlantic exchanges, what happened to those props and the performances they presumably were used in once they reached the New World? 2 This book considers these-and other-questions about the importing of ritual performances from the Old World into the New, a phenomenon that occurred with some frequency, despite how odd Gilbert's boatload of entertainments might now seem. Consider the twelve Franciscan friars, for example, who arrived in New Spain in I524 with a repertoire of miracle plays, religious processions, and other ritual performances that they immediately put to use in converting the indigenous people. they encountered, while also no doubt consoling themselves with familiar rituals in a strange land, as Gilbert imagined his hobbyhorses would do. In other parts of the Americas as well, dramatic I

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performances were a crucial, even if now not often noticed, part of the cultural cargo shipped out of Europe-in the sixteenth century and beyond-and imported into the Americas. In the years since, many of those dramas have surprisingly persisted, although seldom without substantial reshaping. The performances examined in this book-Puebloan matachines dances, Afro-Dutch Pinkster festivals, Philadelphia mummers, Brooklyn saints' rituals, GermanAmerican passion plays, and scholarly reenactments of medieval English plays-are all in some way, albeit often an indirect and slippery one, tied to the dramas of medieval Europe. To tease out the implications of those connections, particularly in terms of what they say about the uses of the premodern past in America, is the task of this book. To make a claim for medieval drama's influence on American history is to fly in the face of common perceptions that drama has played little or no role in the settling of what would become the United States. It is true that drama appears to be almost entirely nonexistent in the early history of North Americaif by drama we mean secular plays produced by known playwrights, performed by professional actors in playhouses for paying audiences. The first such play known to have been performed in the English colonies by a fully professional company was Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, which was staged in Williamsburg, the capital of Virginia, on September I5, I752. As Christopher Bigsby and Don Wilmeth observe in their introduction to the Cambridge History of American Theater, it is notable that this performance took place in a southern colony, since theater did not readily find a home in the northern part of the continent, where the Bible was the authorized text and "the frivolous, the sensual, the illicit were to be shunned." In the English settlements, theater was, in their words, "born into an immediately hostile environment-physically demanding, philosophically suspicious, and culturally uncertain. A communal art, it found itself in a society whose priorities had to do with subordinating the natural world and enforcing covenants that foregrounded spiritual or commercial imperatives." 3 Even in southern Williamsburg, the first formal playhouse was not built until more than a century after the original settlement there, and the first theater in Boston was not constructed until fifteen years after the revolution. Outside the English settlements, there is evidence of earlier quasi-professional performances, but they also apparently did not take place in playhouses for paying audiences. Two comedias were performed at a Spanish mission in Tequesta, Florida, near present-day Miami, in I 567, and comedias and interludes were performed in Cuba in the I 590s. 4 The Jesuit Relations, which detail the activities of the French in the Great Lakes region, note a performance on December 3I, I645, referred to as the sit (probably Corneille's Le Cid); the Relations do not specify who the actors were, but do mention that the audience was made up of both the Jesuit fathers and local Indians. Le Cid was performed again in I 6 5 I, the same year in which Corneille's Heraclius was pre-

Performative Historiographies 3

sented. Moliere's Tartuffe was staged in r694. 5 This sparse record certainly makes the theatrical landscape of colonial North America seem a near wasteland. Early theatrical activity appears more pervasive, however, if we expand our sights to take in the performances often described as paratheatrical-that is, those enactments that were religious, nonprofessional, and staged in improvised locations such as streets, homes, open fields, or hilltops for audiences of nonpaying community residents. It is true that sparse settlement, enormous spaces, and in some cases lack of institutional and community sponsorship hampered the transplanting of Old World performance practices, such as the fairs, seasonal festivities, games, and folk rituals that were the basis of popular theater in Europe. But in streets, markets, plantation yards, religious campgrounds, summer gardens, and museums traces of a dramatic tradition can be found. 6 The Dutch in New York maintained their ritual traditions, as did the French in the Great Lakes region, the Spanish in Louisiana and the Southwest, and even the English along the east coast. Accounts from New France offer an unusually full record of these performances, with frequent mention of processions, plays, and other ritual ceremonies. The Jesuit Relations of r64o describe processions and public prayers to drive out a plague of insects in Quebec, as well as bonfires, processions, and a tragicomedy performed in honor of the Dauphin's birth. The play for the Dauphin was staged by Sieur Martial Piraube, who also acted the chief part. "In order that our Savages might derive some benefit from it" ("afin que nous Sauuages en peussent retirer quelque vtilite"), the governor asked the Jesuits to add something that might "strike their eyes and their ears"; accordingly, the Jesuits included the soul of an unbeliever pursued by two demons who hurled the soul into a hell that vomited flames. The account reports that the struggles and cries of the soul and demons (who spoke in Algonquin) made such an impression that "a savage" told the Jesuits two days later that he had dreamt that night about the demons pursuing him and a gulf belching flames ("vn gouffre horrible, d'ou sortoient des flames & des demons"). In another instance of coercive symbolism, a procession was held in r 6 3 8 on the day of the Assumption of the Virgin. In the procession, Indians marched behind Frenchmen, in a spectacle that was reportedly a pleasure to behold, as the natives in their painted and decorated robes marched decorously along in pairs ("II faisoit beau voir vne escouade de Sauuages marcher apres les Fran