Staging History Essays in Late Medieval and Humanist Drama 9004449493, 9789004449497

Table of contents :
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of contents
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
1 Preliminaries
2 Towards an Understanding of Medieval Concepts of History: Four Kingdoms and Six Ages
3 Intellectual Background: Dislocation, Theatrical Characteristics, Ambiguity and Uncertainties
4 Staging History
Bibliography
Chapter 1 From Mrs Noah’s “Rok” to Absalom’s “Kultour”: The Trail of the Spinning Woman and the Great Rising of 1381
1 Introduction
2 “That Wolde I Witte”: Mrs Noah as Spinning Woman
3 “Out into the Squares and Marketplaces and Even the Fields”: The Luxurious Liberality of Textual Access
4 From Mrs Noah’s “Rok” to Absalom’s “Kultour”: The Trail of the Spinning Woman
Bibliography
Chapter 2 Playing with the Past: History in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament and King Johan
1 Introduction
2 History in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament
3 History in John Bale’s King Johan
4 Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 3 Historical Elements in Bale’s Plays
1
2
3
4
Bibliography
Chapter 4 History in the Long Shadow of Allegory: Revisiting the Morality Heritage
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Bibliography
Chapter 5 Mirror, Mirror on the Wall … History in Late Medieval Drama from the Low Countries
1 Introduction
2 The ‘Historic’ Setting of Esmoreit and Gloriant
3 Charles the Bold, Margaret of Austria, and Emperor Charles v
4 Jacob Duym, King Edward and the Women of Weinsberg
5 Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 6 “An Easy Commerce of the Old and New”: Rhetoricians and the Use of the Past
1 Introduction
2 Rhetoricians’ Drama
3 Drama and Poetry as Political Exemplars
4 All Human Life is Here …
5 The Suspension of Disbelief?
6 Die Belegheringhe van Samarien: The Source and the Art
7 Tspel van Judith: Little Women? Educated Women!
8 Tspel van Hester en Assverus: A ‘Godless’ History?
9 Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 7 Staging Reformation as History – Three Exemplary Cases: Agricola, Hartmann, Kielmann
1 Introduction
2 The Dramatized ‘Historia’: Johannes Agricola’s Tragedia Johannis Huss (1537)
3 Carefully Compiled Sources: Andreas Hartmann’s Curriculum Vitae Lutheri (1599/1600)
4 Why Mention Any Sources? Heinrich Kielmann’s Tetzelocramia (1617)
5 History – Or Rather: Commemoration on Stage
Bibliography
Chapter 8 Dramatising History in Schoepper’s Ioannes Decollatus and Grimald’s Archipropheta
1 Introduction
2 Schoepper’s Ioannes Decollatus
3 Nicholas Grimald’s Archipropheta
4 Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 9 Helvetic Henry? A Swiss Adaptation of Henry v, or Something Near Enough
1 Introduction
2 Shakespeare and Swiss History
3 Language and Power
4 Constructing the Enemy
5 Custom and Kissing
6 Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index of Names
Index of Subjects
Geographical Index

Citation preview

Staging History

» LUDUS « Medieval and Early Renaissance Theatre and Drama

Edited by Peter Happé Wim Hüsken Volume i: Volume ii: Volume iii: Volume iv: Volume v: Volume vi: Volume vii: Volume viii: Volume ix: Volume x: Volume xi: Volume xii: Volume xiii: Volume xiv: Volume xv: Volume xvi:

English Parish Drama Civic Ritual and Drama Between Folk and Liturgy Carnival and the Carnivalesque Moving Subjects Farce and Farcical Elements Cyclic Form and the English Mystery Plays Performance and Ritual Interludes and Early Modern Society The St Gall Passion Play Spectacle, Rhetoric and Power Les Mystères: Genre, Text and Theatricality Staging Vice Staging Scripture Pathos in Late Medieval Drama and Art Staging History

volume 16

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​lud

Staging History Essays in Late Medieval and Humanist Drama Edited by

Peter Happé and Wim Hüsken

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Detail from Zacharias Dolendo, after a design by Jacob II De Gheyn, “The women of Weinsberg carry their spouses out of town on their backs” (1606). Amsterdam –​Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. RP-​B-​BI-​7118 –​ public domain. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Happé, Peter, editor. | Hüsken, Wim N. M., editor. Title: Staging history : essays in late Medieval and humanist drama /​ edited by Peter Happé and Wim Hüsken. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill | Rodopi, [2021] | Series: “Ludus” -​ Medieval and early Renaissance theatre & drama, 13850393 ; vol.16 | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020055062 | ISBN 9789004449497 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004449503 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Drama, Medieval–History and criticism. | Humanists–Europe. Classification: LCC PN1751 .S73 2021 | DDC 809.2/​02-​-​dc23 LC record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​2020055062

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface. issn 1385-​0 393 isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 4949-​7 (hardback) isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 4950-​3 (e-​book) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-​use and/​or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Notes on Contributors vii    Introduction 1 Peter Happé and Wim Hüsken 1 From Mrs Noah’s “Rok” to Absalom’s “Kultour” The Trail of the Spinning Woman and the Great Rising of 1381 36 Heather Hill 2 Playing with the Past History in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament and King Johan 62 Thomas Betteridge 3 Historical Elements in Bale’s Plays 78 Peter Happé 4 History in the Long Shadow of Allegory Revisiting the Morality Heritage 97 Richard Hillman 5 Mirror, Mirror on the Wall … History in Late Medieval Drama from the Low Countries 125 Wim Hüsken 6 “An Easy Commerce of the Old and New” Rhetoricians and the Use of the Past 157 Elsa Strietman 7 Staging Reformation as History –​Three Exemplary Cases Agricola, Hartmann, Kielmann 192 Cora Dietl 8 Dramatising History in Schoepper’s Ioannes Decollatus and Grimald’s Archipropheta 229 Mike Pincombe

vi Contents 9  Helvetic Henry? A Swiss Adaptation of Henry V, or Something Near Enough 247 Elisabeth Dutton  Index of Names 267  Index of Subjects 273  Geographical Index 276

Notes on Contributors Thomas Betteridge is an expert in English Reformation literature, and in particular medieval and Tudor drama. He has been awarded funding for a number of research projects including one focusing on Tudor medicine. He was also a member of the research team that mounted the first ever full-​scale production of David Lyndsay’s play, A Satire of Three Estates, at Linlithgow Palace, Scotland. His publications include numerous books, chapters and articles, among them Tudor Histories of the English Reformations, 1530–​1583 (1999) and Shakespearean Fantasy and Politics (2005). His most recent monograph is a study of the writings of Thomas More: Writing Faith and Telling Tales: Literature, Religion and Politics in the Work of Thomas More (2013). He edited a number of collections of essays including The Oxford Handbook to Tudor Drama (2012), with Greg Walker. Professor Betteridge’s current research project is a study of William Tyndale and the English Reformation which will be a companion volume to Writing Faith and Telling Tales. Cora Dietl studied German and English medieval studies, and philosophy at Tübingen and Oxford. Between 1996 and 1999 she was a Feodor-​Lynen scholar and visiting professor for Germanic Philology at Helsinki. In 2004 she finished her Habilitation about early Southern German Humanist drama. After having taught at the Universities of Konstanz and Münster, she moved to Giessen in 2006 as full professor for the history of German literature, with a focus on the medieval and early modern periods. She was president of the International Arthurian Society (2014–​17) and president of the Société international pour l’étude du théâtre médiéval (2013–​19). In 2017 she was awarded the prize “friend of the University of Lodz”. Her major research interests are early modern theatre, high and late medieval courtly epics, and medieval German literature in Eastern Europe. Elisabeth Dutton is Professor of Medieval English at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland; before moving to Switzerland she was Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. She is the author of Julian of Norwich: the Influence of Late Medieval Devotional Compilations (2008) and of an edition of Julian of Norwich (2008) and of John Gower:  Trilingual Poet (2010). More recently, she has published articles on the dramaturgy and performance of early English plays inspired by her

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experience of directing them. She has staged, among other plays, the N Town Plays, The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, John Bale’s Three Laws and Skelton’s Magnyfycence. She heads two theatre research projects: ‘edox’ (Early Drama at Oxford), and ‘Medieval Convent Drama’. Both projects take archival and performance-​based approaches, staging and filming little-​studied scripts originally produced in very different institutional contexts. Peter Happé retired Principal of Barton Peveril Sixth Form College, studied English at Queens’ College, Cambridge and Birkbeck College, London. He has researched and published on a range of early theatre subjects from the medieval drama to the works of John Bale, and the recent editions of the collected works of Ben Jonson and James Shirley. He is at present a Visiting Fellow in the English Department of the University of Southampton, and he has taught at Cambridge and Tours Universities. He is interested in performance and bibliographical topics, and has edited texts for the Revels Plays Companion Library and the Malone Society. Heather Hill is Professor of English at the University of Detroit Mercy where she has also served as Associate Dean for the College of Liberal Arts and Education and as Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. Her publications include Sacred Players: The Politics of Response in the Middle English Religious Drama (2007), a critical edition of the N-​Town Nativity Play, and articles on Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, on women and leadership, on a phenomenological analysis of hysterectomy, and on gender and intersectionality in The Hunger Games and To Kill a Mockingbird. Richard Hillman is Professor Emeritus of English literature at the Université de Tours/​Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance. His monographs include Self-​Speaking in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama:  Subjectivity, Discourse and the Stage (1997) and four books focussing on links between early modern English theatre and France, among them, most recently:  The Shakespearean Comic and Tragicomic: French Inflections (2020). He has also published translations/​ editions of a number of early modern French plays, including Coriolan by Alexandre Hardy (2019) and The Guisian (Le Guysien) by Simon Belyard (2019), the latter online in the collection “Scène européenne − Traductions introuvables” (https://​sceneeuropeenne.univ-​tours.fr/​traductions).

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Notes on Contributors

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Wim Hüsken specializes in late-​medieval and early Renaissance drama from the Low Countries. He was a lecturer and senior lecturer at the universities of Nijmegen, Melbourne and Auckland. He recently retired as curator of the Stedelijke Musea of Mechelen. In 2005 he published a two-​volume edition of the complete plays of Cornelis Everaert, awarded the Kruyskamp-​prize by the Leyden “Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde”. In 2020 he published a monograph on the last major competition of rhetoricians, held in 1620 in Mechelen. Mike Pincombe is professor emeritus at Newcastle University, UK, and visiting professor at the Friedrich-​Alexander-​Univeristät in Erlangen-​Nürnberg, Germany. He is the author of The plays of John Lyly (1996), Elizabetan humanism (2001), and co-​ editor, with Cathy Shrank, of The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–​ 1603 (2009). Elsa Strietman retired as Senior Lecturer in Dutch at the University of Cambridge and is Fellow Emerita of Murray Edwards College (Cambridge). Her research has focused on the drama of the rhetoricians in the fifteenth-​and sixteenth-​century Low Countries with a particular focus on the functioning of these plays in their urban, religious and political context. She has translated a number of rhetoricians plays into English, most recently she has edited and translated, together with Peter Happé, the two surviving texts of a cycle of seven mystery plays from Brussels: the Bliscappen or Joys of Our Lady.

Introduction Peter Happé and Wim Hüsken “History is the knitting together of rival interpretations: deliberate manipulations of the truth and sometimes alternative facts.”1 “an historie is the very tresury of mans life, whereby the notable doings and sayings of men, and the wonderfull aduentures & straunge cases … are preserued from the death of forgetfulness”.2 “Where by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one supreme head and king, having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial crown of the same, unto whom a body politic, compact of all sorts and degrees of people divided in terms and by names of spirituality and temporality, be bounden and ought to bear, next to God, a natural and humble obedience; he being also instituted and furnished by the goodness and sufferance of Almighty God with plenary, whole and entire power, pre-​eminence, authority” … (Act in Restraint of Appeals, 1533)3

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Preliminaries

In this introduction we shall look at some of the characteristics of plays embracing historical material in them. It does not seem that they contain any 1 Opening lines of Lucy Worsley’s bbc4 documentary American History’s Biggest Fibs (17 January 2019). See https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=WugWyvn77s4 (accessed 17 November 2019). 2 Plutarch, The lives of the noble Grecians and Romanes, compared together by that graue learned philosopher and historiographer, Plutarke of Chæronea: translated out of Greeke into French by Iames Amyot … and out of French into Englishe, by Thomas North (London: Richard Field, 1579), sig. *iiiv. The editors acknowledge the appositeness of this quotation to Richard Hillman who used it in his essay in the present volume. 3 Gerald Bray, ed., Documents of the English Reformation, 1526–​1701 (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co Ltd, 1994 [rpt. 2004]), 780. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004449503_002

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preconceived issues that need to be taken into account except perhaps the authors’ interest, for whatever reason, in what went on in the past. The reasons for this interest are many and various. However, we are not concerned with a definition of what constitutes a genre of ‘historic drama,’ if such a ‘genre’ exists at all,4 but instead with individual plays whose values and purposes deserve our special attention. We will therefore focus on plays in which historical events are central to the action on stage or play a distinct role in the background. Few studies have ventured on establishing a relationship between drama and history; this topic is seldom the subject of a fully-​fledged monograph. Greg Walker’s Plays of Persuasion approaches Henrician English drama, “while stressing the political and historical implications of the material under consideration.”5 So does the sequel to this book, Politics of Performance in Early Renaissance Drama (1998), by the same author. Yet Walker, while showing that some of the plays he studies carried polemic messages favouring old customs and beliefs, appears to be more interested in their political aspects than in their historical background. In his pioneering book, The Stripping of the Altars, Eamon Duffy also demonstrates how persistent orthodox traditions were during Elizabethan times. For example, vicars and church-​wardens concealed images, books, relics and, in the case of Morebath, church vestments.6 At the same time, late sixteenth-​century performances of the Corpus Christi cycles held on to staging scenes more or less unchanged since times immemorial when the greatest possible efforts were undertaken “to obliterate the memory of traditional religion.”7 In his book Duffy created an opening towards studying the influence of historical traditional views on religion in theatrical practices of a later era. In Gender and Medieval Drama, Katie Normington, focusing on the role of women in the English mystery plays, notes that “[t]‌he creators of the cycles present images of womanhood which were shaped by cultural,

4 Even within the field of Elizabethan drama study there are scholars who have their doubts as to whether a distinct genre of ‘history plays’ existed. See Paulina Kewes, “The Elizabethan History Play: A True Genre?,” in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, vol 2: The Histories, eds. Richard Dutton & Jane E. Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 173–​93. 5 Greg Walker, Plays of Persuasion: Drama and politics at the Court of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 5. 6 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars. Traditional Religion in England, c.  1400-​c.1580 (New Haven-​London: Yale University Press, 1992), 491–​92. For Morebath see also his book, The Voices of Morebath:  Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2001). 7 Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 582.

Introduction

3

social and historic influences.”8 The Ale-​wife in the Harrowing of Hell pageant of the Chester cycle is a case in point here. The woman was punished to stay in hell after she had “kept no true measure” of cans. With “ashes and herbs I blend among /​and marred so good malt,” she admits.9 Four days before the plays were performed, on Whitsun 1540, a decree was published by the Chester authorities banning women between fourteen and forty years old from running an alehouse. Referring to Judith Bennett who established this link, Normington surmises: “It is possible that her punishment reflected local attempts to curb female brewing.”10 The ‘historic event’ of Christ releasing the redeemed from hell is thus appropriated by supplementing it with a comic dimension to serve a topical social goal. In France history was also employed in a dramatic context. Jelle Koopmans studied the relationship between the genre of chanson de geste and “Chivalric Mystery Plays” observing a remarkable characteristic of contemporary records in that they often use the words for ‘history’ and ‘mystery’ as synonyms.11 In French morality plays history is used to give contemporary situations a deeper meaning. Mireille Devlaeminck discusses plays in which allegorical characters appear on stage representing time. The Moralité de l’argent (1470; Morality Play of Money), for example, includes a person called Le Temps qui court (Time Passing By). In relation to this type of plays Devlaeminck asks herself (here quoted in translation), “whether an audience viewing a play staging events of fifty or one-​hundred years ago felt they watched a show set in the past or whether they judged it to be still relevant and understandable even though the times had changed.”12 8

Katie Normington, Gender and Medieval Drama (Cambridge:  D. S.  Brewer, 2004 [rpt. 2006], 4. 9 The Chester Mystery Cycle: A New Edition with Modernised Spelling; ed. David Mills (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1992), 313–​14. In The Chester Mystery Cycle: Essays and Documents (Chapel Hill-​London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 47, L. M. Lumiansky and David Mills associate the “Ale-​wife Scene” with “the liquor laws of Mayor Henry Gee in 1533.” 10 Normington, Gender and Medieval Drama, 120. 11 Jelle Koopmans, “Turning a Chanson de Geste into a Mystery, or Non-​Religious and Chivalric Mystery Plays,” in Les Mystères: Studies in Genre, Text and Theatricality; eds. Peter Happé & Wim Hüsken (Amsterdam-​New York: Editions Rodopi, 2012), 220. 12 Mireille Devlaeminck, “Pour un théâtre de l’instant:  les moralités (xve-​x vie  siècles),” Questes [online] 40 (2019), published online 19 April 2019, accessed 09 August 2020 (http://​journals.openedition.org/​questes/​5185); “Le spectateur confronté à une pièce antérieure de cinquante ou cent ans avait-​il la sensation de contempler un spectacle du passé, ou bien cette pièce lui semblait-​elle toujours actuelle et compréhensible quoique les temps aient changé?”.

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Other examples related to the study of European late medieval drama may be given here but for this introductory paragraph we decided to limit to just a few. The plays discussed in this book are meant to serve as further evidence of the presence of an historic awareness in late medieval and early Renaissance playwrights. In the following we will focus on two aspects related to history as part of a dramatic tradition: time and the use of it, and the intellectual background of some of the plays. The latter aspect includes dislocation, theatrical characteristics, and some uncertain factors and ambiguities arising out of the plays’ context and reflecting their ‘destiny’.13 Inevitably time was a concern for those interested in historical topics, though it does not necessarily point to one definitive or unique approach to them. One notable feature of chronicles was their poor reliability because there was little discrimination about what was fit to include and what to ignore.14 The influence of unchecked legend, built upon what seemed appropriate (without corroboration), was powerful enough on the grounds of being ostensibly fitting, whether proven or not. Apparently material was included on arbitrary grounds of choice, or perhaps on customary assumptions based upon non-​historical criteria. Some material might have been omitted on the grounds that it was necessary or convenient to suspend the use of historical time in order to enrich the narrative or the flow of events.15 Such changes might be made by an assumption about the subversive power of time, though this may also be affected by ideological motivation of various kinds, such as ideals of chivalry or patriotic loyalty.

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Reflecting on destiny, or fate, Sir Walter Raleigh dubbed Fortune as essentially the will of mankind, as distinct from the divine will, a position open to vigorous dissent. Raleigh also saw history as a summary of human knowledge. See Michael Hattaway, Renaissance and Reformations; An Introduction to Early Modern English Literature (Oxford:  Wiley-​ Blackwell, 2007), 119. Ben Jonson took a broader view, having the ‘tragedy of the individual’ surrounded by the ‘tragedy of state’. See Paulina Kewes, “The Elizabethan History Play,” 181. Within the limited scope of this introduction we cannot possibly go into a lengthy discussion of the degree of veracity of medieval chronicles. This topic has been given a more detailed treatment, interlarded with many telling examples, by Chris Given-​Wilson in “Telling the Truth,” the first chapter of his Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England (London-​New York: Hambledon & London, 2004), 1–​20. For example, according to Matthew Woodcock, “Narrative Voice and Influencing the Reader,” in The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles; eds. Paulina Kewes, Ian W.  Archer & Felicity Heal (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2013), 338, the summaries preceding each chapter in the 1587 edition of the Chronicles, “occasionally impose an editorial interpretation or imply a causal narrative linking events described.”

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Another feature of the manipulation of time was the recognition that even if there was an awareness of the passage of time, that concept should always be measured against an idealized Christian background, “the religious perspective that viewed all human actions under the aspect of eternity.”16 In the managing of chronicles their appeal was broad indeed, as Phyllis Rackin makes clear. The need for discriminating between facts to be included and information to be disregarded remained a limitation for many years, until Renaissance historians started approaching history from a point of view of cause and effect, recognized anachronisms, and questioned the reliability of sources.17 This change in attitude, as a result of the turbulent times, is most notably present in the role politics plays on the European stages as some of the papers in this book highlight. We shall return to the uncertainty surrounding time and what it comprised, but here it suffices to note that creating history in dramatic texts, and what is attributed to it, are objectives which are determined by a range of purposes. Some are consciously ideological, as in the constructing and manipulation of power sustaining authority. An example from British history related to the Tudor regime may serve to illustrate this point.18 This would involve the promotion of the power of the monarch, even though it could hardly be challenged because of the presumed backing of divine support. But perhaps because of the uncertainties of religious belief, enhanced by the impact of the Reformation, chronicles accumulated many voices which emphasized the adversity of the devil’s ways and strengthened the effects of ambiguity. The multiplicity of voices in history remains one of its richest resources. But their focuses upon history are strikingly diverse, and these are mirrored by the many views which drama of various kinds can offer. Among these were large political issues like the fear of social unrest and revolution on the one hand –​the topic of the essay by Heather Hill in this volume –​and of the spread of tyranny on the other, especially in terms of the absence of limits upon regal power. Against such apprehensions which might be conflicting, we should note an optimism about the fate of the polity especially when measured by the optimism inherent in the trust in a beneficent divinity, whose intervention in human affairs was diligently sought ‘in our time’. More philosophically there was a concern 16 17 18

See Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History:  Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 1990 [rpt. 1993]), 6. Ibid., 5. Note the use of the word “empire” above in the first sentence of the Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533), presumably part of an aim drafted by Thomas Cromwell who may have been closely associated with its composition.

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to transcend time and to consider events without the constraints of cause and effect. Presenting time and the varieties it contains invites the development of patterns and structures. Such organised thinking suggests the working of divine intervention, as we have already noticed, but it is apparent that creators and observers of history generate their own preferred patterns. Parallels between different ages were a recurring feature of the perception of order in time, and were related to the concept of divine order in history. Thus John Bale’s The Chief Promises of God unto Man imposes a pattern of seven ages on history from Creation to Incarnation. (We will return to this concept in more detail below.) Yet there have been more mundane trans-​presentations which generated a common and widespread culture. For example, Marsha Robinson has dwelt upon a form of allegory which attended to the development of known and prominent political and religious events as moral forces. In King Johan she notes Sedition as a dangerous political agency and the Catholic bishop Stephen Gardiner as a manifestation of Satan, present among humans and thus operating to increase a conflict between spiritual and human forces.19 In such a conflict there arose an anxiety about the nature of the ‘true’ Church which might conflict with the possibility of the operation of a divine will. In this way the Church was to become constrained by ‘traditions’ which usurped and destroyed its authority. It meant that the search for the true Church and its validation were urgent and ran parallel to one another. Bale’s character King Johan was intrigued by the role required for the Protestant kingdom he envisaged. In his contribution to this volume Peter Happé will discuss Bale’s use of history in more detail. There was constraint as well as magnificence and latitude, and this might function as a projection, creating a new authority, welcome as foresight to some Protestant reformers. However, we should take account of the uncertainties of the time. Though some people may have had firm and unshakeable beliefs, we should note how broad time was. While some moved rapidly in time, others shifted in substance and change could be radical. For some penitence was the key, for others who depended on confession, it was a kind of betrayal.20 We can also recognize that belief could be involved in patriotism or loyalty. For others the uncertainties 19 20

Marsha S. Robinson, Writing the Reformation: “Actes and Monuments” and the Jacobean History Play (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). In Bale this might be replaced by Scripture which became a type of lens for reading the crimes of the papacy. See Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 623.

Introduction

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of belief had to be negotiated before acceptance.21 Features like this were not clear cut, but one may suspect that they were rarely without some effect. Then again the religious world might be embedded in a strictly organized system, prescribed by authority. Or it might be without a firm structure as in that imagined by Machiavelli and his followers, where much depended upon the individual and independent mind. For some, such systems of belief might have been wholly coherent and organised, whereas others still needed guidance and instruction. These preliminary observations, sketchy as they may seem, deserve some further background for our understanding of the concept of history in late medieval and early Renaissance times. How people looked at the past differed greatly from the way we look at it now. We need to avoid falling into the trap of superimposing twenty-​first-​century ideas on concepts of history held more than five-​hundred years ago. Let us therefore look at how human beings, then and there, dealt with past events, at the same time trying to fit them into a coherent picture. Two theories in particular, the viewing of the past as seen from the point of view of four successive kingdoms as described in the Old Testament Book of Daniel and St Augustine’s attempt to getting a grip on time by dividing it up into six eras, will be looked at in more detail (paragraph 2). After having discussed this we will return to a more detailed treatment of how history was incorporated as an extra dimension in dramatic texts (paragraph 3). 2

Towards an Understanding of Medieval Concepts of History: Four Kingdoms and Six Ages

Whereas we, nowadays, regard the Big Bang of about 13.8 billion years ago as the start of time, and hence of history, until recently God’s creation of the world was seen –​and many still adhere to this view –​as the beginning of our existence. In 1178, the Jewish physician and philosopher Moses ben Maimon, better known as Maimonides (c. 1135–​1204), calculated that God had created Adam 4938 years earlier which, according to our Christian calendar, would be in the year 3760 bc. Until today, the Jewish calendar holds on to this date; when the sun set on 18 September 2020 it marked the start of a new year, numbered 5781. In principle there is no difference between our twenty-​first-​century idea of the 21 The contrasts between systematic Catholicism and the greater uncertainties of Machiavellianism are examined by Elisabeth Dutton in her contribution to the present volume, with special attention to the variable function of causation in Shakespeare’s Henry v.

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creation of the universe 13.8 billion years ago and God’s creation of the world in 3760 bc, both being equally arbitrary. Even more so, in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance –​and even far beyond –​the latter approach represented the only possible way of dealing with history. How people looked at history is a different story. From the many books that have been written on how history was conceived in the Middle Ages we can conclude that medieval historians –​and dramatists did not differ from them, we hasten to say –​looked at ‘historical facts’ in a manner we have only gradually learned to understand.22 Historians as well as dramatists followed their own, or rather their patrons’, agenda. What was it that made playwrights turn to topics from the past to deal with in their plays? What areas of history did they turn to and why? These questions differ from case to case and cannot be answered in general terms. As far as drama is concerned this book can only offer a very limited idea of what kept them busy. But let us first sketch the wider background from which they viewed historical facts. How did they perceive history? In the Middle Ages history was not an academic discipline; at Oxford, for example, it was only by the year 1850 that it was introduced as an independent subject.23 As in late antiquity, in medieval times it was at its best “wedged between grammar and rhetoric.”24 However, theologians did deal with questions such as periodisation and the succession of the various empires ruling over the then known parts of the world. For the latter of the two topics the Old Testament Book of Daniel  –​the influence of which on medieval thinking stretching as far the sixteenth century has been attested by Norman Cohn in The Pursuit of the Millennium25  –​showed them the way. Chapter  2:31–​45 describes how the prophet interprets a dream King Nebuchadnezzar had during the second year of his reign. The king saw a statue, the head of which was

22 23 24

25

See for a introduction into this topic Justin Lake, “Current Approaches to Medieval Historiography,” History Compass 13 (2015): 89–​109. R. W. Southern, “The Truth about the Past,” in History and Historians. Selected Papers of R. W. Southern, ed. R. J. Bartlett (Malden [etc.]: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 120. Beryl Smalley, Historians in the Middle Ages (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 18. In his Etymologiae, Isidore of Seville (560–​636) ranged the writing of histories under the discipline of grammar: “A history (historia) is a narration of deeds accomplished … This discipline has to do with Grammar, because whatever is worthy of remembrance is committed to writing” (The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, [trans. and ed.] Stephen A. Barney et al. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006], 67). Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium:  Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970; revised and expanded edition), 33–​34, 124, and 238–​39.

Introduction

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cast in gold, its breast and arms made of silver, its belly and sides of brass. Finally, the legs were made of iron whereas the statue’s feet and toes were part iron, part clay. Daniel explains this vision as follows: Nebuchadnezzar’s kingdom is represented by the statue’s golden head, the other bodily parts are three subsequent kingdoms. The fourth kingdom, attempting to combine elements as alien to each other as iron and clay, is characterised by internal discord. The moment a rock tumbling down from a mountain hits its feet the statue will disintegrate and eventually be totally demolished. In ­chapter 7:1–​14 the prophet has a dream himself. Out of the sea came four giant beasts. The first resembled a winged lion, the second and third a bear and a leopard respectively, the fourth unidentified animal being the most ferocious of them. It had iron teeth with which it devoured the other animals, trampling everything else in its neighbourhood. On its head it had ten horns and an eleventh, much smaller one. Soon, however, this little horn started growing, causing three other horns to be torn out and eventually replacing them. Thrones were put in front of this beast and an elderly man (antiquus dierum) took his seat in one of them, surrounded by thousands of people serving him. On opening his books the old man, acting as a judge, destroyed the fourth beast for its bragging words by casting it into a stream of fire running in front of his throne. Then a young man approached; apparently he was the son of the judge. To him was given everlasting power and his kingdom would be eternal. Now it is the prophet who asks for an explanation of this vision. One of the men standing near the old man’s throne tells him the four beasts symbolise four kingdoms. The ten horns on the fourth beast’s head represent ten kings, the eleventh horn referring to an eleventh one being mightier than the others. Eventually this king shall be judged and his power will be given to the people obeying the saints of the High One (populo sanctorum altissimi) inaugurating an eternal kingdom. According to Beryl Smalley, a Christian interpretation of these two chapters from the Book of Daniel could only point in one inescapable direction: “The destruction of the statue and of the fourth beast of the prophecy would herald the coming of Antichrist, signified by the eleventh horn on the head of the beast.”26 Following St Jerome’s interpretation of the Book of Daniel,27 medieval theologians and historians identified the fourth kingdom mentioned in Nebuchadnezzar’s vision and Daniel’s dream with the Roman empire.28 Yet 26 Smalley, Historians in the Middle Ages, 35. 27 See Karl Heinrich Krüger, Die Universalchroniken (Turnhout: Éditions Brepols, 1976), 25. 28 The prophet himself probably identified it as the kingdom of Macedonia, the first three being the Assyrian or Babylonian, the Persian, and the Median kingdoms. After the Roman empire had replaced Greece’s hegemony of the Mediterranean world, medieval scholars

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figure. 0.1 Alexander’s horse tramples King Ninus and King Cyrus of the first and second kingdom (Dan. 2). Out of the sea emerges a four-​headed monster (Dan. 7). Adriaen Collaert after Maarten de Vos, “Alexander the Great as the third king in Daniel’s vision,” 1570–​1618 amsterdam –​ rijksprentenkabinet, inv. rp-​p -​1 904–​3 249 –​ public domain

thought it necessary to view the Persian and Median kingdoms as one. Otherwise they could not possibly have been able to interpret the Roman empire as the fourth kingdom (Smalley, Historians in the Middle Ages, 35). Other divisions have been suggested as well, e.g. by the influential Spanish priest Orosius who in his Adversum paganos (417 ad) saw Carthage as the third kingdom, after the Babylonian, Median and Persian peoples (seen as one), Macedonia and Rome taking second and fourth position respectively. By dividing the four kingdoms over these regions, Orosius comfortably positioned them in the East, the North, the South and the West (Krüger, Die Universalchroniken, 25). The Chronica Regia Coloniensis (Royal Chronicle of Cologne) associated the Babylonian empire with Nimrod, Ninus and Semiramis, the empire of the Medes and the Persians with Darius and Cyrus, the Macedonian kingdom with Alexander the Great, and the Roman empire with Romulus, Augustus and Julius Caesar (see for an illustration from this source Marco Mostert, “De geschiedenis,” in De middeleeuwse ideeënwereld, 1000–​1300, ed. Manuel Stoffers [Heerlen-​Hilversum: Open Universiteit-​Verloren, 1994], 306).

Introduction

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to maintain that they were still living in the Roman era they had to seriously wriggle. After all, in 330 ad Emperor Constantine (306–​37) not only moved his empire’s capital to Byzantium, less than four-​hundred years later (800 ad) it was a Frankish king, Charlemagne (c. 768–​814), who was crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and in 962 this dignity was bestowed on the German king, Otto i († 973). How could medieval scholars account for these successions without viewing themselves as no longer forming a part of the Roman empire and living in a later era than the time envisaged in the Bible? For this, eleventh-​and twelfth-​century historians proposed their theory of translatio imperii, the handing over of power from one dynasty to another within the same political constellation, hence issuing from the olden days of the Romans. The transfer of the Byzantine empire to the West, at Charlemagne’s coronation, was justified for three different reasons: first by the fact that in the East a woman, Irene (797–​803), had accessed the imperial throne as sovereign ruler, reason why Pope Leo iii (795–​816) declared the seat of Byzantium void in 800; secondly because of previously held heretic views in this empire on religion (iconoclasm); and third as a result of the Byzantines’ refusal to support Pope Stephen ii († 757) in his struggle with the Lombard king Aistulf (749–​56).29 For these reasons, Charlemagne was rightly crowned and as long as he would be succeeded future emperors would guarantee the continuation of the Roman empire, these historians argued. Neither c­ hapter 2 nor ­chapter 7 of the Book of Daniel mentions the names of the four kingdoms. Chapter 8 is more specific in this respect. Here a male goat, coming from the west, defeats a powerful ram who, with its mighty horns, previously pushed towards the west, the north and the south without any other beast being able to resist it. Once more Daniel asks for an explanation of this vision and an angel, named Gabriel, tells him the ram stands for the king of the Medes and the Persians (rex Medorum est atque Persarum) whereas the he goat symbolises the king of the Greeks (hircus caprarum rex Graecorum est). After five Greek kings will have ruled, the first of them (Alexander the Great) being the most powerful one, another king will come forward with an impudent face proposing shameful deeds (rex impudens facie et intelligens propositiones). To what extent do these prophecies in the Book of Daniel figure in medieval drama? The most obvious play to turn to is the Play of Daniel, two versions 29

Wilma Keesman, De eindeloze stad. Troje en Trojaanse oorsprongsmythen in de (laat)middeleeuwse en vroegmoderne Nederlanden (Hilversum: Verloren, 2017), 72–​75, esp. 74, offers a brief description of the idea of translatio imperii as an argument in favour of a continuation of the Roman empire at the transfer of its seat to Byzantium in 330 ad, and for its second transferral to the West in 800 ad.

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of which exist:  the Beauvais Ludus Danielis and Hilarius’ Historia de Daniel Representanda.30 Both plays stage the popular stories of Daniel explaining the mysterious words mane, techel, phares written on the wall of Balthasar’s palace at a feast during which he used the holy vessels the king’s father had stolen from the temple at Jerusalem, and the story of Daniel in the lions’ den (Dan. 5 and 6). Apart from a single remark in the Beauvais play to “The law of the Parthians /​ And the Medes” (Lex Parthorum /​et Medorum)31 there are no references to the two visions of the prophet as related in ­chapters 2 and 7. Remarkable are the words with which both plays end –​the Beauvais play has, for example, “Ecce venit sanctus ille, sanctorum sanctissimus, /​Quem rex iste jubet coli potens et fortissimus” (Behold that holy one comes, most holy of holies, Whom this king orders you to worship, mighty and most powerful)32 –​, announcing the birth of Christ. But as Stephen K. Wright clearly explains, these words are directly related to the time of the year when the Play of Daniel was performed, either at the occasion of the Feast of the Circumcision or at Epiphany (1 and 6 January respectively). Moreover, Daniel’s reference to Christ’s birth is directly “rooted in the tradition of the Ordo Prophetarum, a liturgical practice for Christmas day and its octave, that consists of short passages spoken by a sequence of prophets concerning the coming of Christ.”33 Looking for plays in which Daniel’s visions of the statue or the four beasts are staged our harvest yields examples from a wide area though limited to relatively few linguistic backgrounds. In sixteenth-​century Germany the Book of Daniel was quite popular.34 From the period of the 1530s to 1615 some twenty plays are known in which parts of it served as their main topic. 30

See for editions of these plays David Bevington, Medieval Drama (Boston:  Houghton Mifflin Company, 1975), 137–​54, and Stephen K.  Wright, “The Twelfth-​Century Story of Daniel for Performance by Hilarius: An Introduction, Translation, and Commentary,” Early Theatre 17 (2014): 9–​48 respectively. See also The Play of Daniel: Critical Essays; ed. Dunbar H. Ogden (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996). 31 Bevington, Medieval Drama, 151. The story of the merging of the Parthians, the Medes and the Persians c. 550 bc is too complicated to be related here. Further information may be gathered from I.  M. Diakonoff, “Media,” in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. ii:  The Median and Achaemenian Periods, ed. Ilya Gershevitch (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2008), 142–​48. 32 Bevington, Medieval Drama, 153. 33 Wright, “The Twelfth-​Century Story of Daniel,” 47, note to l. 336. The author also notes an “emphasis on Eucharistic imagery” (ibid, 22) in this play, which equally evolves from the text’s anachronistic character, a topic we will return to later on in this introduction. 34 Whether this popularity was inspired by Thomas Müntzer’s millenarianism of the 1520s (see Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, 238–​39 and 248) is difficult to ascertain and needs further study.

Introduction

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On 6 September 1615 a performance of a Comoedia von den vier Monarchien (Comedy of the Four Monarchies) took place in the city of Strasburg. In the same year Caspar Brülow (1585–​1627) composed his Nebucadnezar in which he dramatized Dan. 1–​4, with an extension from Dan. 7. Both the statue and the four beasts are staged in this play.35 During the seventeenth century, the story of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the statue (Dan. 2)  was reiterated by Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–​81) in his Mística y real Babilonia (1662). For this play he may have used a few earlier dramatic renderings of this biblical story, among them the Auto del sueño de Nabucodonosor handed down in the sixteenth-​century Códice de Autos Viejos.36 Another play on this topic seems to have been known in Catalonia.37 Medieval historians not only dealt with the end of time by looking at the four kingdoms in the Old Testament Book of Daniel but they also attempted to break up time, from Creation to Last Judgement, into different eras.38 Here it is St Augustine (354–​430) who, in his Civitas Dei, set the tone for future treatment of dividing up time into aetates (eras), parallel to the six days of Creation as outlined in the Book of Genesis, followed by the seventh during which God rested from his work. Furthermore, commenting on Christ’s genealogy as presented by Matthew (1:1–​17) he noticed that the evangelist identified three eras consisting of fourteen generations of kings: from Abraham to David, from David to the Transmigration from Babylonian captivity, and from Transmigration to Christ. Between Adam and Abraham there were twenty generations, ten from Adam to Noah and an equal number from Noah to Abraham. To St Augustine this scheme suggested a succession of five eras, followed by a sixth inaugurated by Christ’s birth. The seventh would start on Doomsday after the Last Judgement and Christ’s second coming. Even though St Augustine’s scheme was adopted by most historians and theologians after him, his fifth era, the cutting point of which was the Transmigration from Babylonian exile, was seen as problematic, not the 35 36 37 38

See Michael Hanstein, Caspar Brülow (1585–​1627) und das Straβburger Akademietheater. Lutherische Konfessionalisierung und zeitgenössische Dramatik im akademischen und reichsstädtischen Umfeld (Berlin-​Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2013), 327–​409. See Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Mística y real Babilonia, ed. Klaus Uppendahl (Berlin-​ New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1979), 12–​15. Lynette R. Muir, The biblical drama of medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 81–​82, though without giving its title. The following observations are mainly based on V.  A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 1966), 88–​100; Smalley, Historians in the Middle Ages, 27–​49; and John Wesley Harris, Medieval Theatre in Context. An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1992), 93–​105.

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least because it lacked a biblical figure with which it could be identified. It was the Venerable Bede (c. 672–​735) who proposed an alternative succession of aetates limiting himself to five instead of seven. Rather than seeing them, as St Augustine did, as stages in the development of human beings, from infancy and childhood to youth, manhood and middle age, and finally to senility in the sixth era,39 Bede compared his five ages with the hours at which the workers in the vineyard were hired (Matthew 20:1–​16)40 and he regarded every new stage in the relationship between God and mankind as the starting point of a new era. He left out Augustine’s fourth and fifth eras (David and the Transmigration) and replaced them by Moses, with whom God made a new covenant through the Ten Commandments. Adam was the first person God entered into an agreement with, but by the eating of the apple this pact was broken. After Noah, together with a few elected righteous, had been saved from God’s wrath a new covenant was made. God’s decision to make Abraham the forebear of His elected people was the reason for the start of a new era. The fourth began with Moses receiving the Ten Commandments and Christ’s birth would initiate the fifth.41 Other subdivisions –​either in addition to St Augustine’s or Bede’s or independently –​were proposed as well, though they were less influential than the Church Father’s attempt to subdivide time into eras. V. A. Kolve presents an example of an alternative arrangement by referring to Ranulf Higden’s (c. 1280-​ c. 1364) Polychronicon and the Speculum sacerdotale (c. 1415), a collection of texts used as a source of inspiration for festival sermons. From the latter he quotes the following passage in which time is seen from the point of view of God as lawgiver: Vnderstondeþ wel we dyuyde alle the tyme of this world by thre tymes. The firste tyme is that [that] was of natural lawe fro Adam vnto Moses. The secounde tyme is of written lawe that was fro Moses vnto the aduent 39 Smalley, Historians in the Middle Ages, 30. This subdivision of time seen as a parallel to the six stages in human beings’ lives is shown in an illustration in the Liber Floridus written c. 1120 by Lambert of St Omer. However, the author thought the sixth age had been concluded by Godfrey of Bouillon’s capture of Jerusalem in 1099 after which the seventh age had commenced (Mostert, “De geschiedenis,” 307). 40 Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi, 91. 41 For a succinct treatment of Augustine’s aetates and Bede’s ingenious adaptation of this scheme see also R. W. Southern, “ Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing. 2: Hugh of St. Victor and the Idea of Historical Development,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 21 (1971):  160–​63; rpt. in History and Historians, ed. Bartlett (Malden [etc.]: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 31–​33.

Introduction

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of oure lord. The thridde tyme is tyme of grace þat is fro the aduent vnto the ende of the world.42 A possible source for this subdivision of time into three eras is to be found in Hugh of St Victor’s († 1141) De Sacramentis (On Sacraments) in which he identifies “three stages in a continuous process of ascent towards God after man’s Fall,” the first lasting until the times of Abraham, the second from Abraham and Moses until Christ and the third beginning with Christ’s birth.43 According to Kolve’s schematic representation of the various ways in which medieval scholars split time into eras,44 the Old and the New Testaments in themselves represent two different times, a “Time of Misdoing (Justice)” and a “Time of Grace (Mercy)” respectively. In itself the former is subdivided, as in Higden and the Speculum sacerdotale (Mirror of Priesthood), in an era of Natural Law during the three aetates up to Moses, and one of Written Law from Moses until Christ’s birth. The New Testament “Time of Grace” equals the “Law of Charity (The Law Fulfilled).”45 It is precisely this division into three Times that we come across in John Bale’s The Three Laws as discussed by Peter Happé in his contribution to the present volume. Taken together, Kolve labels these attempts at splitting up time into different eras under the common denominator of “time as artifact.” Time is not seen as a linear sequence of events but as a vertical connection between separate phenomena.46 This approach makes it possible to accept anachronisms in medieval texts such as, for example, Herod’s frequent invocations of “Mahowne” (Mohammed) in the Towneley cycle. Instances like these reveal a 42 Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi, 97–​98. 43 Southern, “Hugh of St. Victor,” 166–​67 and 36–​37 respectively. 44 Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi, 120. 45 The Times of Natural and Written Law and the Time of Grace, as quoted from the Speculum sacerdotale above, reflect Hugh of St. Victor’s observations in De Sacramentis. See Southern, “Hugh of St. Victor,” 166–​67 and 36–​37 respectively. 46 Kolve’s concept of “time as artifact” equals the more widely used expression “universal time” employed, among others, by Glynne Wickham in The medieval theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 [3rd rev. ed.], 64): “the past was reflected in the present and the future.” In his turn Harris (Medieval Theatre in Context, 101) compares the vertical way of looking at history with “a rising spiral, so that history continually repeated itself as it progressed.” For God a horizontal or a vertical approach of history is not relevant because, as St Augustine pointed out, for Him time does not exist: “what is future to God who transcends all time? If God’s knowledge contains these things, they are not future to Him but present” (quoted by Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Idem, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. Ralph Manheim [New  York:  Meridian Books, 1959], 43).

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vertical conception of time in that events of the past are fully relevant for the present. Moreover, “the interest of the past consists not in what it can teach us of the past but in how it can remedy the present” and “[t]‌he past was played as an image of present time,” Kolve notes.47 As a result events scattered over time can be piled up from the point of view of one overarching perspective: “Human time is the artifact of God; it is shaped by Him and expresses His truth, through a multitude of correspondences, congruences, and paradoxes.”48 Similar remarks can be made about the ‘bringing up to date’ of biblical locations in medieval art and literature. Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s (1564–​1638) famous paintings of the Massacre of the Innocents and St John the Baptist preaching, set in a Flemish landscape, do not betray an artist’s misunderstanding of local (biblical) conditions but his wish to make historical events topical. Hence there is no problem for an Old Testament character in an English medieval play to refer to Christ or for a shepherd present at the Nativity to use expressions related to everyday life in the countryside. New Testament scenes in particular are relevant for a late-​medieval audience because they teach moral lessons from which spectators can learn how to live a just life: “the interest of the past consists not in what it can teach us of the past but in how it can remedy the present.”49 Without attempting to provide a comprehensive overview of European plays reflecting the seven aetates arrangement50 we can safely assert that the succession of pageants in the English cycle plays closely follows this subdivision of time.51 Even though they are seldom explicitly referred to, the choice of 47 Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi, 108 and 110. Kolve’s approach to anachronism in the English mystery plays has been criticised by, among others, James J.  Paxson, “The Structure of Anachronism and the Middle English Mystery Plays,” Mediaevalia 18 (1992), 321–​40, positing that “the especial deployment of anachronism as a poetic device or trope in the mystery plays discloses a complex structural state of affairs, a state that in turn advertises anachronism as a poetic property uniquely situated in a native dramatic tradition.” (321). 48 Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi, 122. 49 Ibid., 108. 50 A survey of biblical drama characterized by a cyclic structure in which Old and New Testament episodes are staged is given by Peter Happé, Cyclic Form and the English Mystery Plays. A Comparative Study of the English Biblical Cycles and their Continental and Iconographic Counterparts (Amsterdam-​New York: Editions Rodopi, 2005), 33–​59. 51 Kolve (The Play Called Corpus Christi, 51)  tries to identify a “protocycle” for the extant mystery plays, reflecting “the essential structure gradually achieved by the various cycles.” Ultimately this prototype leads him to connecting these plays to Augustine’s aetates. However, the Records of Early English Drama (reed) project has shown that there was much more variation in the composition of Corpus Christi plays than could be surmised on the basis of extant texts:  “the picture which has emerged is one of ever-​changing circumstances and locations” (Peter Happé, “A guide to criticism of medieval English

Introduction

17

subjects staged in the various scenes is based on this scheme, most notably in the Chester cycle. Plays 2–​5 exactly reflect four of Bede’s eras: from Adam and Eve to Noah’s Flood and from Abraham to Moses. Many cycles show a distinct emphasis on the New Testament with the majority of their pageants staging scenes ranging between the Annunciation and the Virgin Mary’s Assumption, Doomsday and the Last Judgement inaugurating the seventh era.52 The same scheme lies at the foundation of John Bale’s play God’s Promises as discussed by Peter Happé below. On the continent of Europe this structural element is also present, be it less markedly. In France, where Passion plays are preferred over Corpus Christi plays –​the main difference being that in the latter the concluding episode of Doomsday is left out –​the Passion de Semur includes scenes with Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, and Moses yet interlaced with other episodes.53 In this respect Semur betrays similarities with a small number of other French biblical plays, the Mystère de la Passion de Valenciennes en 20 journées, the Mystères de Lille, the Passion de Troyes, and the Passion d’Amiens/​Mons in particular.54 The Mystère du Viel Testament contains all traditional scenes related to the five Old Testament aetates but once more, they are supplemented here with a large number of other scenes.55 Indeed, the tendency to proliferate episodes is probably one of the attractions of this dramatic form. However, the structure of the French plays seems to have been shaped to a much smaller extent by this ordering principle than the English mystery cycles.

52

53 54 55

theatre,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. Richard Beadle [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], 325). The theory of the Seven Ages as a guiding principle for the structure of the Corpus Christi plays, the Chester cycle in particular, has been challenged by Lawrence M.  Clopper (“The Principle of Selection of the Chester Old Testament Plays,” The Chaucer Review 13 (1979): 273), not only because Chester “lacks a play for the fifth age, that of David,” but also because Kolve “implies that omissions in individual cycles of some of the Ages do not argue against that theme as a controlling principle.” Instead Clopper suggests: “A more obvious and exclusive principle of selection for the Chester cycle is its development of the concept of the Old Law and the consequent opposition of the Old to the New Law” (ibid., 274). See for an edition of this play The Passion de Semur, text P. T. Durbin, ed. Lynette Muir (Leeds: Centre for Medieval Studies, 1981). The filiation of all French passion and mystery plays has been studied by Graham A.  Runnalls, “Les Mystères de la Passion en langue française:  tentative de classement,” Romania 114 (1996): 468–​516. The editor of the Mystère du Viel Testament spotted many passages in the Chester mystery cycle directly translated from this collection of plays (see Le Mistére du Viel Testament, ed. James de Rothschild [Paris: Firmin Didot, 1878], vol. i, viij), three editions of which have been preserved between 1507 and 1542.

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The same conclusion can be drawn from the few German Fronleichnamsspiele (Corpus Christi plays) that have come down to us. Perhaps only one of them, a play generally entitled Egerer Fronleichnamsspiel,56 reflects a subdivision of time into aetates. Part of it deals with stories from the Old Testament: the Creation of the World (ll. 29–​92) and the Fall of Lucifer (ll. 93–​316) precede the Creation of Adam and Eve, followed by their Fall (ll. 317–​512). Next Cain and Abel (ll. 513–​674), Noah and his Ark (ll. 675–​755), and Abraham’s Sacrifice (ll. 757–​810) are staged. The following scene contains the story of Moses, the Golden Calf and the Ten Commandments (ll. 811–​1000), followed by a short episode with David defeating Goliath (ll. 1001–​34). The staging of Old Testament scenes ends in an episode depicting Solomon’s Judgement (ll. 1035–​1106). In short, apart from the scenes with Cain and Abel and Solomon, the other stories run parallel with a mixture of Augustine’s and Bede’s aetates.57 In Spain Corpus Christi processions and plays were (and still are) organised in many towns all over the country. According to Margaret R. Greer, “[o]‌ne branch of the religious theatre tradition, the Corpus Christi theatrical performances, was particularly important to the growth of the theatrical institution.”58 Archival records from Toledo cathedral show that by the end of the sixteenth century plays were staged in town on thirty-​three pageant wagons relating material stretching from Creation to Doomsday.59 Similar traditions existed in Murcia, Málaga and Oviedo.60 From Catalonia there is also a small collection of Corpus Christi plays, but the relatively late manuscript into which

56 See Egerer Fronleichnamsspiel, ed. Gustav Milchsack (Tübingen: [n.pl.], 1881). Line numbers refer to this edition. According to Wilhelm Creizenach (Geschichte des neueren Dramas, vol. i: Mittelalter und Frührenaissance [Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1893], 224) this play rather represents a passion play rather than a Corpus Christi play. 57 The play’s subdivision into scenes is not indicated in its manuscript but based on Milchsack’s analysis. According to the editor (Egerer Fronleichnamsspiel, ed. Milchsack, 348), this manuscript dates back to c. 1480. A remarkable similarity of this play with the Chester mystery cycle is, apart from the fact that both reflect in their treatment of Old Testament scenes the traditional aetates, a performance over three days. 58 Margaret R. Greer, “The development of national theatre,” in The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature, ed. David T.  Gies (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2004), 239–​240. 59 See Charlotte D.  Stern, “The medieval theatre:  between scriptura and theatrica,” in Idem, 123. 60 See Ronald E.  Surtz, “Spain:  Catalan and Castilian drama,” in The Theatre of Medieval Europe. New Research in Early Drama, ed. Eckehard Simon (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1991), 198.

Introduction

19

they have been copied contains only three plays: a Misteri de sant Cristòfol, a Misteri d’Adam i Eva and a Misteri del rei Herodes.61 In the Low Countries Corpus Christi was a day during which in most towns processions were held but relatively little is known about the performing of drama during or after this event. In many cases the procession would have ended in a performance on the market square but whether there were stations along the route the procession would take through the narrow streets of the town with wagons on which biblical scenes were staged we do not know. The exception to this rule is the city of Oudenaarde, a town situated on the banks of the river Scheldt south of Ghent. Its annual Corpus Christi procession, for which the earliest references date back to 1407, was famous all over the southern Netherlands well into the seventeenth century.62 The number of tableaux vivants staged during this procession was huge. According to the civic records of 1459–​60 thirty-​nine scenes were part of it; in thirteen cases even their titles are mentioned. Barely twenty years later the procession included no less than sixty-​three scenes, forty-​one of which were identified in the records with their respective titles.63 But even though the traditional scenes of Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham and other pageants related to St Augustine’s seven aetates formed part of it –​the episode with Noah’s ark apparently making rare appearances only –​the fact that there was no strict order between the scenes depicted on the stations or on pageant wagons shows that there was no preconceived ordering principle behind its programme.64 Information related to other Flemish towns or cities in the northern parts of the Low Countries is limited. As in other countries the topic of the scenes staged during Corpus Christi processions may not always have been related to the salvation of mankind, from Creation to Doomsday. Moreover, not all extant records have been studied in detail and their interpretation is sometimes difficult. In Mechelen, for example, we find an entry in the civic accounts of 1438 awarding a sum of money to those who performed the Hours of Our Lord at Easter and on Corpus Christi day (“[die] de ghetyden speelden van onsen heere te Paesschen ende in Sacramentsdaghe”65). Knowing that on both days 61

62 63 64 65

See for details regarding editions and secondary literature related to these plays Francesc Massip & Lenke Kovacs, “A Typology of Catalan Play Manuscripts from the Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Century,” in Les Mystères. Studies in Genre, Text and Theatricality, eds. Peter Happé & Wim Hüsken (Amsterdam-​New York: Editions Rodopi, 2012), 296–​97. B. A. M. Ramakers, Spelen en figuren. Toneelkunst en processiecultuur in Oudenaarde tussen Middeleeuwen en Moderne Tijd (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), 2. Ibid., 435. Ibid., 314–​15. E. Van Autenboer, Volksfeesten en rederijkers te Mechelen (1400–​1600) (Gent: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Taal-​en Letterkunde, 1962), 49. This entry is somewhat puzzling

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processions were held in town this entry may perhaps refer to a Passion play enacted in seven short episodes:  Betrayal, Christ before Pilate, Flagellation, Cross-​Bearing, Crucifixion, Deposition, and Burial.66 However, an acute lack of detailed information causes this theory to remain conjectural. Further research into Corpus Christi processions in the Low Countries is therefore necessary. Let us now return to a more detailed analysis of aspects of history relevant to late medieval and early Renaissance dramatists and how they dealt with historical facts in their plays. 3

Intellectual Background: Dislocation, Theatrical Characteristics, Ambiguity and Uncertainties

The changes in Western European society in the first half of the sixteenth century are hardly to be seen as unifying. In fact it transpires that they were marking that what was happening, as well as changing and disordering it. While F. J. Levy tried to create an ordered structure for the history of the period related to Tudor England, as though history is the great tidying up of incompatibles, it is often felt that disorder won the day.67 There had been religious conflicts before, but the impact of Lollardy followed by the divisive attacks upon the fifteenth-​century Catholic Church served as a severe threat to the established order, heavy with the danger of disunity. These came as a shock when for some, perhaps many, it was thought to be a time of valued unity.68

in that it refers to a performance at Easter as well as at Whitsun. It would make more sense without the word “ende,” thus implying that the topic of the play was the Hours of Our Lord at Easter performed at Whitsun. 66 In the third century ad an association of the canonical hours with Christ’s Passion was already established for the third, sixth and nineth hour in works by Hippolytus and other Doctors of the Church (see Henry Chadwick, The Early Church [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967 (rpt. 1984)], 272–​73). In medieval Dutch prayer books and other sources the calling to mind of Christ’s Passion by associating it with the seven hours  –​it was St Benedict who expanded this number to eight –​was a popular and widespread theme. By the turn of the sixteenth century we still find this tradition in printed books, e.g. in an edition of c. 1508 by the Antwerp printer Thomas van der Noot in Die vii ghetiden op die passie ons heeren (digitally reproduced on https://​anet.uantwerpen.be/​digital/​opacmpm/​mpm /​dg:mpm:1269/​N). 67 F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1947), passim. 68 The Constitutions of Archbishop Arundel promulgated in 1408 had a unique part to play on religious division in the fifteenth century. See After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-​Century England, eds. Vincent Gillespie & Kantik Ghosh (Turnhout:  Brepols, 2011), 423.

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If history functioned on the one hand as a means of unifying  –​from a Christian perspective all historical facts pointed in one direction: the salvation of mankind –​it appears that on the other it also generated a need to be disregarded, switched off, not least because in various ways it encompassed trickery, revenge, heresy, selfishness, outrage and the inevitability of tragic fate, uncontrollable by mankind. In other words: dislocation and uncertainty. It can be said that for some people history was immutably providential and that every soul might look for salvation, but the future was no longer one of a united religious flock. The Vice in English morality plays reflects this uncertainty. It is not surprising therefore that Sedition is one of the major villains of Bale’s plays. He qualifies by his corruption of wealth, verbal trickery, large scale deception, and a shift towards the supremacy of the secular power, closely linked with the papacy.69 Though society is portrayed as corrupt there is no doubt that Bale’s representation of it is concentrated upon verbal means, something perhaps derived from the concentration of the literate Protestant culture at Antwerp.70 The ultimate result would have been welcomed as apocalyptic by many. Bale, working on the interlocking of past-​present-​and-​future, is bringing his world up to date, and to a certain extent history becomes prophetic. In the role of King Johan Bale finds a foreshadowing of Henry viii. Studying history became the best way of foreseeing the future.71 One might ask what are the characteristics which make drama particularly valuable or attractive in dealing with history. It is immediately obvious that this can be answered at a number of levels, and one alone will hardly suffice. One level would relate to practical theatre conventions like the prominence of the use of soliloquy. Some of these speeches are simply name givers or superficial identifiers, but we might also consider how soliloquies are used to preach (i.e. persuade), to entertain, to encourage dance, to indulge wordplay or juggling, or punning so that the audience is engrossed by the performer and the exploitation of his performing skills. The audience must be recognised as part of the performance, and this is instrumental in the growth of

69 70 71

Benjamin Griffin, “The Birth of the History Play: Saint, Sacrifice, and Reformation,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900 39 (1999): 230. Andrew Johnston & J.-​F. Gilmont, “Printing and the Reformation in Antwerp,” in The Reformation and the Book, eds. J.-​F. Gilmont & Kevin Macey (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 188–​213. Janette Dillon, Shakespeare and the Staging of English History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 106.

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a sense of its own self-​awareness.72 To illustrate this point we may look at John Skelton’s Magnyfycence in which soliloquies serve to bring across ideas relevant to the general theme of “howe sodenly worldly welth dothe dekay” (l. 2548). By having the vices Counterfet Countenaunce, Clokyd Colusyon, Courtly Abusyon and Crafty Counveyaunce express their inner motives in soliloquies the audience is enabled to better understand Magnyfycence’s ultimate despair. This reminds us that the complexity of communication of the drama in performance provides a rich and effective technical capacity for expression, not least because there is a three-​way intercourse between author, actor and character, leaving aside the adjoining contribution of the audience who are themselves multi-​performers as individuals and not in unison as far as performance is concerned. The presence of comic and tragic items in person and action is underlined by the presence of parody, as in the imitation of the nativity by the shepherds in Towneley and the crucifixion by four knights over the murder of Thomas Becket in Bale’s King Johan.73 Besides the contradiction in points of view and emotional intention, there is the spectacle of violence which appears in many places in the mystery cycles, centred on the moments of the crucifixion itself. This often contained physical portrayal, as with the murder of the innocents and the emotional agony of their mothers, and it should be remembered that, apart from the element of reverence, the enactment of horrific cruelty was entertaining and approvable in itself, turning drama into a form of reality and reality into drama.74 Christmas and Passion Plays originating from Germanic territory also include scenes in which cruelty and violence are staged or referred to in vivid descriptions. Limiting ourselves to the former of the two genres the acting out the slaughter of the innocents will also have been a common element here so much so that the influential German Church reformer, Gerhoh von Reichersberg (1092/​93–​1168), explicitly referred to this particular scene in theatrical church performances. Together with other scenes, such as the staging of Antichrist, he judged it to be unchristian for reasons of too realistic a depiction

72

Benjamin Griffin, Playing the Past:  Approaches to English Historical Drama, 1385–​1600 (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), 41. 73 Ibid., 45. 74 Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty:  Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca-​ London: Cornell University Press, 1999), 3, argues “that the ‘truth’ of medieval torture is cast in terms of dramatic verisimilitude, probability, character, and catharsis and adumbrated with a panoply of theatrical, illusory, subjective, and aesthetic terms while the ‘truth’ of highly rhetoricized medieval plays is frequently enhanced by scenes of torture.”

Introduction

23

of a historical event.75 The French Fleury Playbook shows us in more detail how this scene was staged.76 The part of the children was performed by young boys who, at the start of this scene, sing a farewell to the Lamb, followed by their mimed slaughter: Interim, occisoribus venientibus, subtrahatur agnus clam, quem abeuntem salutant Innocentes: Salve, Agnus Dei! Salve, qui tollis peccata mundi, alleluia! Tunc matres occidentes orent occisos: Oremus, tenerae natorum parcite vitae! […] Infantes jacentes: Quare non defendis sanguinem nostrum, Deus noster? [Meanwhile, as the murderers approach, let the lamb be removed stealthily, to whom as it is departing the Innocents bid farewell: Hail, Lamb of God! Hail, you who take away the sins of the world, alleluia! Then let the mothers, falling down, pray for the victims: Let us pray: spare the tender life of our sons! […] The children lying slain: Why do you not defend our blood, our God?]77 The plentiful enactment of horror and violence had the significant advantage of bringing to life, as it were, what was difficult to realise, and it might allow the realisation of that which was mysterious and appealing to represent. This is one of the most potent features of drama. There is, however, another feature which is complementary to the physical manifestation of power which plays a significant role at this period of its development: the genre of drama represented a literary culture, and one which came to depend upon the complex materials necessary for an art form based upon the production of printed texts and the possibility of disseminating it. The interlocking of these elements is unique to this genre, one of its most salient features being that acting realizes 75

David Brett-​Evans, Von Hrotsvit bis Folz und Gengenbach: Eine Geschichte des mittelalterlichen deutschen Dramas, vol. ii:  Von der liturgischen Feier zum volkssprachlichen Spiel (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1975), 61–​62. 76 The Fleury Playbook, as this collection of ten liturgical dramas is called, dates back to the end of the twelfth century. According to Grace Frank, in a chapter devoted to the plays in this manuscript of her still useful book The Medieval French Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954 [rpt. 1960]), 44, “[t]‌hese plays on biblical subjects are among the most finished of their respective types.” See for a more detailed treatment of various aspects related to this collection of plays The Fleury Playbook: Essays and Studies; eds. Thomas P. Campbell & Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1985). 77 Bevington, Medieval Drama, 69.

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text and vice versa. The one needs the other and can enforce it. This development was equally discernible in other European cultures than the English, most prominently in Germany and the Netherlands. The act of dramatization also carried with it something close to justification and if it contained within it the establishment of respect and glorification, as it most effectively did in Catholic drama, where the conception depended upon ritual and the systematic repetition associated with it. This would be noticeable in the functioning of confession and forgiveness in early morality plays, even though so few have survived in evidence for our consideration.78 The best example here is the play of Everyman, both the English version and its Dutch original.79 Perhaps because of the literary and religious features of their theatrical world, they shared certain relationships with other dramatic forms as well. Among these there was an awareness of farce and tragedy while writing on either side of the division of ‘heresy’. In the sixteenth century this aspect was acutely sensitive.80 Robert Potter summarized this in the following words: the traditional morality play is not a battle between virtues and vices, but a didactic ritual drama about the forgiveness of sins. Its theatrical intensions are to imitate and evoke that forgiveness. In a morality play the events in the plot unfold, not with the tension and surprise of melodrama, but with the relentlessness of tragedy –​towards a happy ending.81 The literary exploitation of ambiguity82 has a long history, but whether it is a coherent or deliberate process in drama is open to question. Often it may seem accidental or unintentional. Here we can point at a number of features 78

The case for the centrality of confession and absolution was made by Robert Potter, The English Morality Play:  Origins, History and Influence of a Dramatic Tradition (London-​ Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 16–​29 and 98. 79 After this dispute was settled by the end of the 1930s, the Dutch play of Elckerlyc’s priority over the English Everyman has now been generally excepted. Robert Potter, “The Unity of Medieval Drama: European Contexts for Early English Dramatic Traditions,” in Contexts for Early English Drama; eds. Marianne G.  Briscoe & John C.  Coldewey (Bloomington-​ Indianapolis:  Indiana University Press, 1989), 48, terms it “a much-​debated but well-​ established scholarly fact.” 80 See Dermot Cavanagh, “Political Tragedy in the 1560s: Cambises and Gorboduc,” in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–​1603, eds. Mike Pincombe & Cathy Shrank (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 489. 81 Potter, The English Morality Play, 57. 82 See the reference to Judith H.  Kennedy, Light and Dark, on ambiguity, above at note 4. Conflicting oppositions are considered by Ivo Kamps, Historiography and Ideology in Early Stuart Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 51.

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25

of early morality drama which can raise doubt about whether meaning is as structural or as convincing as it might appear. Analogy, like ambiguity, may be equally creative and lead to fruitful opposition. The same seems to be the case with uncertainty over the perception of history. For example, in relation to the role of Sedition in John Bale’s King Johan we observe that the virtuosic features embedded in this part were copied and enlarged by the author from what he had composed many years before. One of the most remarkable aspects in the political sphere is the manipulation of allegory in this character. It appears more developed in the part of the text that was revised, given a number of additional characteristics Bale carried out in his own hand, making insertions in the ‘original’ manuscript. In doing this83 he followed the conventions in action and language developed for the Vice, as well as interplay in wickedness with other villains. It is not certain whether these were necessarily his own additions, or improvisations by the players arising during the performance, and then incorporated in the text by the author. The ambiguity of meaning noted above illustrates a distinct uncertainty of interpretation, in morality plays with a historical background in particular. As Jean Howard suggests, man is not transhistorical but rather a creature of history.84 In drama history works creatively in the same manner as in literature being, so it seems, most concerned with the creation of new truths. In his contribution to the present volume Richard Hillman consequently observes that this can include the deliberate invention of motives in contrast with the apparent need for history to tell the truth. With a slight variation on Lucy Worsley’s opening lines of her bbc4 documentary “American History’s Biggest Fibs,” broadcast on 17 January 2019, we may therefore conclude: History is the knitting together of many different kinds of truth. This remark brings us to surveying the contents of this volume which the editors conceived many years ago and has now finally materialised. 4

Staging History

The following essays deal with history from very different angles. Heather Hill and Thomas Betteridge focus on the relationship between drama and society in English poetry and drama ranging from Chaucer and the mystery cycles to 83

For more details see Peter Happé, “Sedition in King Johan: Bale’s Development of a ‘Vice’,” Medieval English Theatre 3 (1981): 3–​6. 84 Jean E.  Howard, “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,” English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 13–​43.

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the Croxton Play of the Sacrament and John Bale’s King Johan. Peter Happé also concentrates on Bale, focusing predominantly on the highly influential King Johan but he includes observations on God’s Promises and Three Laws as well. Richard Hillman looks beyond the borderlines of morality drama by acknowledging the continuation of allegorical principles of this type of drama in Elizabethan history plays, such as Norton and Sackville’s Gorboduc and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. Wim Hüsken and Elsa Strietman turn their attention towards Dutch drama, ranging from the late-​fifteenth-​century abele spelen to early-​seventeenth-​century plays on moral issues, the subject matter of which may vary from biblical to dynastic and purely historical backgrounds. Cora Dietl and Mike Pincombe venture an exploration of German and neo-​ Latin Reformation drama, the authors of which saw men like Martin Luther and Johann Tetzel already as historical figures. Finally, Elisabeth Dutton takes us to modern times. In 2015, the historical character of Henry v, as represented in 1599 by William Shakespeare, was staged in a Swiss context thus creating a double historical layer for an heroic character whose political and military power, victorious in the Battle of Agincourt (1415), was to a large extent based on rhetoric. Heather Hill starts her pursuit of “The Trail of the Spinning Woman” with Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale in which a clever clerk dupes a gullible carpenter by claiming that a second Great Flood is imminent, thus referring to the biblical story of Noah. The carpenter is hoisted up in a tub which clears the way for the clerk to woo the carpenter’s more than willing wife. The story allowed Chaucer to incorporate a sense of everyday reality in a depiction of inexpedient marital relations subjecting it to satirical treatment at the same time. In all likelihood, Hill argues, Chaucer was introduced to Noah’s wife via older versions of the mystery cycles predating the manuscripts handed down to us. From here Hill directs her attention towards a possible interpretation of the character of Noah’s wife, in both the cycles and Chaucer’s tale, as a model for the ‘spinning women’ of the Great Rising of 1381. The frequency of Mrs Noah’s impersonations in the English mystery cycles makes them plausible advocates for a complex of attitudes which have both social and secular objectives. Hill seeks to identify the role of women, made more telling by the context of social unrest at the time of Chaucer, a time when the mystery plays had a vigorous performing life. The place of women in them, concentrated upon the spinners, has a chiefly secular intention in that they give much information about the social stress of the time, equally implying a challenge to dominating male narratives. Hill’s observations include an intriguing parallel between the relationship between women and men, especially husbands, alongside the one between laity and clergy. Both conceal hidden or secretive rebellion, which

Introduction

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she seeks to locate in the stress of the contemporary unrest. The share women took in the Great Rising of 1381 may well have been prompted by the image of Mrs Noah in the cycles. In search of the treatment of historical truth in late-​medieval texts Thomas Betteridge starts his observations by analysing an entry in Thomas Elyot’s Bibliotheca Eliotica on “Britania.” How medieval authors dealt with ‘historical truth’ differed greatly from that of humanist historians like Thomas More. The Croxton Play of the Sacrament is taken as a case in point with its perception of history different from later times and ours. Indeed it contemplates the limits of historical accounts in dramatic form by viewing history as cyclic, a-​temporal. Betteridge posits that the Croxton Play of the Sacrament was drawn upon by two later texts: Thomas More’s The History of Richard iii and John Bale’s King Johan. However, Betteridge also convincingly shows that these texts reveal fundamental differences as to the nature of belief. The Sacrament has roots in imaginative engagement, whereas the other texts are much closer to punishment and the healing of offences. For the former the ending of history can be contemplated, but for the latter two the solution depends upon a final judgemental structure overshadowed by the organised structure of the Church. Temporal history has to give way to an anticipation of the Second Coming which operates outside time. In the case of King Johan history is connected with contemporary politics and the priorities of the monarchy which Bale tried to influence. The theatrical trickery in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament (the use of an oven) works through a different theatrical mode from Bale’s King Johan, rich in allegories explicated by the inserted Interpretour. Peter Happé notes that John Bale’s concerns with a variety of historical material exemplify the difficulty of deciding what history actually is. Bale responded to contemporary events, linking together, as noted by some, the past, present and future.85 He was particularly alert to the need for the exercise of authority and the management of it. This includes the response to change over many years from his conversion in the 1530s until he died in 1563. Bale saw and contributed to the development of theatre and its polemical adaptation of medieval stage practice as an actor, director and playwright. He was deeply interested in historical narratives, already early in life as a Carmelite friar and later as a Protestant bishop in Catholic Ireland. In this context Happé sketches Bale’s activities over many years, resulting in plays intended for the stage in the 1540s and 1550s, in which he voiced his new belief. In pursuit of this he sought to influence public response in the Protestant direction he advocated, 85 Rackin, Stages of History, 94.

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an activity in which he tried to influence two reigning monarchs successively. Bale’s developing ideas about history are reflected in three plays in particular, God’s Promises, Three Laws and King Johan. The two versions of the last play are given special attention in that they reveal Bale’s religious development and his evolving sense of history and politics between the 1530s and 1550s. The chief thrust of Richard Hillman’s essay is to enquire whether there is such a genre as history play, ‘emerging’ sometime in the sixteenth century, and who has made use of it. The author scrutinizes the relationship between allegory and history –​thus elaborating on an observation by Peter Happé in his contribution to the present volume  –​while taking note of the idea that history in drama had to use allegory as a means of realising it. Hillman, then, asks himself, “what is essential, respectively, in a dramatic claim to historicity and in the deployment of allegorical devices?” A first remarkable trait of proto-​Elizabethan history plays is the all-​encompassing presence of allegorical figures in dumb-​shows, yet counterbalanced by the use of non-​allegorical names for characters who, otherwise, display all features of allegory. The latter happens, for example, in Norton and Sackville’s Gorboduc. Furthermore, Hillman notes that revenge (embodied in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy as a personage with this name) is “the incarnation of a metaphysical vindictive mechanism that takes control of physical historicity.” Allegory is by no means limited to comedy as Hillman convincingly argues. Indeed Kyd’s work thrives upon the mixing of modes and it takes on an existence which is transcendental. Hillman’s observations eventually lead him to the conclusion “that there is no such thing as a ‘non-​allegorical’ history play,” but influenced by the Reformed discourse on the relationship between the physical and the metaphysical the ‘genre’ of history play would, on the Tudor and Stuart stages, enter into a new and dynamic phase. The plays selected by Wim Hüsken range from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries, thus reflecting the rich heritage which late medieval Dutch drama can pride itself upon. In many of them historical topics are dealt with, from biblical history and mythology to dynastic and political issues. Three of the four abele spelen from c. 1400 are set in a Christian and a Muslim environment alternatively, referring to quasi-​historical events. Rather than studying the reasons behind the choice for these stories, Hüsken is interested in knowing how accurate the information was which the author or authors of these plays presented in their texts. Educational motives lie behind the coming into being of a small collection of plays originating in a Brussels context, dated about a century later. Staging biblical, dynastic and mythological themes serves here as an eulogy for the then Burgundian rulers yet these plays mostly function as a sample card for Rhetoricians wanting to know how to

Introduction

29

combine historical, political and moral motives in a single script. About a century later Jacob Duym, active in Leyden, published a collection of six emblematic plays each illustrating a certain virtue. Two of these plays focus on subject matter from medieval times, relating to the English king Edward iii and the Hohenstaufen king Conrad iii respectively. Duym was clearly interested in educating his audience at a time when the young Republic was still in search of a solid basis. Hüsken finally attempts to pin-​point a common denominator behind the very different reasons why over such a long period of time historical subjects were dramatized for the Dutch stages in the first place. The essay by Elsa Strietman explores the use of the past in the drama of the Dutch Rhetoricians starting from the premise that it could be characterised as, in T. S. Eliot’s words, “an easy commerce between the old and new. … ” After a brief sketch of the variety of plays available for research and a quick look at how Rhetoricians themselves dealt with their own work, Strietman turns her attention to the same small collection of plays from Brussels earlier discussed by Hüsken. Supplementing his observations Strietman asks herself what special authority these plays may have had for contemporary citizens so as to survive their initial time of creation at a time when political turmoil was not yet imminent. This brings her to discussing plays which either reflect on current events (e. g. by Cornelis Everaert, who commented on the victories of Emperor Charles v, favourably in relation to the Battle of Pavia in 1525, yet increasingly critical towards his later exploits, betraying an Erasmian desire of peace) or, during a later stage in the development of Rhetoricians’ drama, revert to facts set in an earlier yet not all too distant past (e. g., Duke Albert and two versions of a play on Essex, both from ’s-​Gravenpolder). Central to Strietman’s contribution to this volume are her reflections on a number of biblical plays from Hasselt. The manuscript of this collection dates back to the end of the seventeenth century but it contains copies of earlier scripts. Why is it, she wonders, that audiences liked to return to older material, in this case written in the by now obsolete style of the Rhetoricians, while more modern plays on the same or similar topics were available as well? Cora Dietl’s contribution focuses primarily on how the nobility and the common people dealt with the history of the Reformation as reflected in plays from German extraction. Her essay shows a continuing concern for the value and reliability of the information which lies behind it. She suggests that there is a persistent anxiety about the truth of this, positing that the three dramatists, Agricola, Hartmann, and Kielmann, hardly settle their decisions, or are liable to change them as in Agricola’s Tragedia Johannis Huss (1537). Apart from Luther Dietl discusses Tetzel as well, an anti-​hero, who represents the Catholic hierarchy and makes profit from the trade in pardons, illustrating

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the damage to the true Church identified by Lutherans. Conversely, the execution of Johannes Hus is characterized by, and shadowed with, martyrdom and the Passion of Christ. There is an expectation that there is already a certain knowledge of what should be firmly believed and which, therefore, should not require special teaching, but it depends upon improvement and memory. Faith is to be learned and not merely revealed. There is room for parody and the mockery of some characters as well as some indispensable hints of tragedy which cannot be avoided. A general sense of the power of doubt is suppressed, and there is little indication of the forces of conflicting argument, which was characteristic of the Reformation debate. The main feature of Mike Pincombe’s two neo-​Latin academic versions of the martyrdom of John the Baptist, Jacob Schoepper’s Ioannes decollatus and Nicholas Grimald’s Archipropheta, lies in the adaptation of the biblical ‘history’ to tragic modes. Operating a distinction between veracity and verisimilitude, these playwrights see a value in classical practice, yet at the same time they aim to make a response to ordinary circumstances, such as a classroom environment. This exemplarity is a feature centred upon the presentation of Herod and Herodias as monsters with didactic value. Pincombe distinguishes the sense of tragedy in the differing gospel presentations of Matthew (Jacob Schoepper) and Mark (Nicholas Grimald), and discusses the extent to which a tragic event is modified to different levels, noting that neither actually confines himself to a purely tragic objective. The events portrayed even show the inclusion of a clown who was considered appropriate to a monarch and the use of ‘godly literature’ as perceived in the gospels seen as a vehicle for piety. Elisabeth Dutton takes us forward to the twenty-​first century and the performance, in November-​December 2018, of a Swiss adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry v, following the commemoration, in October 2015, of the Battle of Agincourt, six-​hundred years ago. Rather than a mere translation into a mixture of German, French and Italian Shakespeare’s text was “historically and geographically re-​contextualised.” The Swiss Stage Bards, who staged this play, had a famous example in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1970 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Here the author highlighted his aversion to nationalism which is expressed in an overzealous love of the fatherland. He regarded his country’s neutrality during World War ii as cowardice. The English and the Swiss versions of Henry v’s story show a very different common denominator though, namely language. In Shakespeare’s play Henry uses pure Anglo-​ Saxon words to motivate his soldiers and the French Princess Katherine learns English so as to be able to better communicate with the king. For a Swiss audience multilingualism is a matter of everyday practice. On the other hand, there are also huge differences in terms of rulers and of religious authority between

Introduction

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the English and the Swiss. The latter, for example, have never known a king nor a united Church. After having re-​contextualized Shakespeare’s Henry v, the question is who would be the enemy for his Swiss counterpart? The Swiss Bards solved this problem by imagining the French as enemies by using an extremely cunning theatrical device. Dutton finally arrives at the conclusion that by adapting a play regarded as ultimately ‘British’ in a Swiss rendering the historicity of the original text is replaced by the discovery of the surprising power of language, even in politics. The present collection of essays is meant to arouse researchers’ interest in the many aspects that can be studied when approaching late-​medieval and early-​Renaissance dramatic texts from the point of view of history reflected in them or playing a role in the background. So far this topic has received only little attention, perhaps because current academic boundaries between historians and drama scholars have seldom stimulated the exchanging of views. The editors of this book hope to encourage both groups to work closer together to explore the richness of this field of study.86

Bibliography

Archambault, Paul. “The Ages of Man and the Ages of the World. Al Study of Two Traditions,” Revue d’Etudes Augustiniennes et Patristiques 12 (1966): 193–​228. Auerbach, Erich. “Figura.” In Idem, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, translated by Ralph Manheim, 11–​76. New York: Meridian Books, 1959. Barney, Stephen A. et  al., trans. and ed. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Bevington, David. Medieval Drama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1975. Bray, Gerald, ed. Documents of the English Reformation, 1526–​1701. Cambridge:  James Clarke & Co Ltd, 1994 (rpt. 2004). Brett-​Evans, David. Von Hrotsvit bis Folz und Gengenbach:  Eine Geschichte des mittelalterlichen deutschen Dramas, vol. ii: Von der liturgischen Feier zum volkssprachlichen Spiel. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1975. Calderón de la Barca, Pedro. Mística y real Babilonia; kritische Ausgabe und Kommentar von Klaus Uppendahl. Berlin-​New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1979.

86

The editors are very grateful to two anonymous external readers of the essays in this volume, who suggested many improvements of the texts submitted to the publisher. However, the responsibility for the final outcome remains with the authors and the editors.

32 

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Campbell, Thomas P. & Clifford Davidson, eds. The Fleury Playbook: Essays and Studies. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1985. Cavanagh, Dermot. “Political Tragedy in the 1560s:  Cambises and Gorboduc.” In The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–​1603, edited by Mike Pincombe & Cathy Shrank, 488–​503. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Chadwick, Henry. The Early Church. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967 (rpt. 1984). Clopper, Lawrence M. “The Principle of Selection of the Chester Old Testament Plays.” The Chaucer Review 13 (1979): 272–​83. Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages; revised and expanded edition. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1970. Creizenach, Wilhelm. Geschichte des neueren Dramas, vol. I:  Mittelalter und Frührenaissance. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1893. Devlaeminck, Mireille. “Pour un théâtre de l’instant: les moralités (xve-​x vie siècles).” Questes [online] 40 (2019), published online 19 April 2019, consulted 09 August 2020 (http://​journals.openedition.org/​ questes/​5185). Diakonoff, I. M. “Media.” In The Cambridge History of Iran. Vol. II:  The Median and Achaemenian Periods, edited by Ilya Gershevitch, 36–​148. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2008. Dillon, Janette. Shakespeare and the Staging of English History. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012. Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars. Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400-​c.1580. New Haven-​London: Yale University Press, 1992. Duffy, Eamon. The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Frank, Grace. The Medieval French Drama. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1954 (rpt. 1960). Gillespie, Vincent & Kantik Ghosh, eds. After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-​ Century England. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. Given-​Wilson, Chris. Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England. London-​ New York: Hambledon & London, 2004. Greer, Margaret R. “The development of national theatre.” In The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature, edited by David T. Gies, 238–​50. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2004. Griffin, Benjamin. “The Birth of the History Play:  Saint, Sacrifice, and Reformation,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900 39 (1999): 217–​37. Griffin, Benjamin. Playing the Past: Approaches to English Historical Drama, 1385–​1600. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001. Hanstein, Michael. Caspar Brülow (1585–​1627) und das Straβburger Akademietheater. Lutherische Konfessionalisierung und zeitgenössische Dramatik im akademischen und reichsstädtischen Umfeld. Berlin-​Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2013.

Introduction

33

Happé, Peter. “Sedition in King Johan: Bale’s Development of a ‘Vice’.” Medieval English Theatre 3 (1981): 3–​6. Happé, Peter. “A guide to criticism of medieval English theatre.” In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, edited by Richard Beadle, 312–​ 43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Happé, Peter. Cyclic Form and the English Mystery Plays. A  Comparative Study of the English Biblical Cycles and their Continental and Iconographic Counterparts. Amsterdam-​New York: Editions Rodopi, 2005. Harris, John Wesley. Medieval Theatre in Context. An Introduction. London: Routledge, 1992. Hattaway, Michael. Renaissance and Reformations; An Introduction to Early Modern English Literature. Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2007. Howard, Jean E. “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies.” English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 13–​43. Johnston, Andrew & J.-​F. Gilmont. “Printing and the Reformation in Antwerp.” In: The Reformation and the Book, edited by J.-​F. Gilmont & Kevin Macey, 188–​213. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998. Kamps, Ivo. Historiography and Ideology in Early Stuart Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Keesman, Wilma. De eindeloze stad. Troje en Trojaanse oorsprongsmythen in de (laat) middeleeuwse en vroegmoderne Nederlanden. Hilversum: Verloren, 2017. Kewes, Paulina. “The Elizabethan History Play:  A True Genre?” In A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, vol 2:  The Histories, edited by Richard Dutton & Jane E. Howard, 173–​93. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Kolve, V. A. The Play Called Corpus Christi. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966. Koopmans, Jelle. “Turning a Chanson de Geste into a Mystery, or Non-​Religious and Chivalric Mystery Plays,” in: Les Mystères: Studies in Genre, Text and Theatricality; eds. Peter Happé & Wim Hüsken, 219–​45. Amsterdam-​New York: Editions Rodopi, 2012. Krüger, Karl Heinrich. Die Universalchroniken, Turnhout: Éditions Brepols, 1976. Lake, Justin. “Current Approaches to Medieval Historiography.” History Compass 13 (2015): 89–​109. Levy, F.J. Tudor Historical Thought. San Marino: Huntington Library, 1947. Lumiansky, L.  M. & David Mills. The Chester Mystery Cycle:  Essays and Documents. Chapel Hill-​London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983. MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Reformation. London: Penguin Books, 2005. Massip, Francesc & Lenke Kovacs. “A Typology of Catalan Play Manuscripts from the Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Century.” In Les Mystères. Studies in Genre, Text and Theatricality, edited by Peter Happé & Wim Hüsken, 271–​321. Amsterdam-​ New York: Editions Rodopi, 2012. Milchsack, Gustav, ed. Egerer Fronleichnamsspiel. Tübingen: [n.publ.], 1881.

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Mills, David, ed. The Chester Mystery Cycle:  A New Edition with Modernised Spelling. East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1992. Mostert, Marco. “De geschiedenis.” In De middeleeuwse ideeënwereld, 1000–​1300, edited by Manuel Stoffers, 295–​316. Heerlen-​Hilversum: Open Universiteit-​Verloren, 1994. Muir, Lynette R. The biblical drama of medieval Europe. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1995. Muir, Lynette R, ed. The Passion de Semur. Text by P. T. Durbin, edited with an introduction and notes by Lynette R. Muir. Leeds: Centre for Medieval Studies, 1981. Ogden, Dunbar H., ed. The Play of Daniel: Critical Essays. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996. Rothschild, Baron James de, éd. Le Mistére du Viel Testament. Publié, avec introduction, notes et glossaire. 6 vols. Paris: Firmin Didot, 1878–​91. Plutarch. The lives of the noble Grecians and Romanes, compared together by that graue learned philosopher and historiographer, Plutarke of Chæronea:  translated out of Greeke into French by Iames Amyot  … and out of French into Englishe, by Thomas North. London: Richard Field, 1579. Potter, Robert. The English Morality Play: Origins, History and Influence of a Dramatic Tradition. London-​Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975. Potter, Robert. “The Unity of Medieval Drama:  European Contexts for Early English Dramatic Traditions.” In Contexts for Early English Drama; edited by Marianne G. Briscoe & John C. Coldewey, 41–​55. Bloomington-​Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989. Rackin, Phyllis. Stages of History:  Shakespeare’s English Chronicles. Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 1990 (rpt. 1993). Ramakers, B. A. M. Spelen en figuren. Toneelkunst en processiecultuur in Oudenaarde tussen Middeleeuwen en Moderne Tijd. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996. Robinson, Marsha S. Writing the Reformation: “Actes and Monuments” and the Jacobean History Play. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Runnalls, Graham A. “Les Mystères de la Passion en langue française:  tentative de classement.” Romania 114 (1996): 468–​516. Smalley, Beryl. Historians in the Middle Ages. London: Thames and Hudson, 1974. Southern, R. W. “ Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing. 2: Hugh of St. Victor and the Idea of Historical Development.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 21 (1971):  159–​79; rpt. in History and Historians. Selected Papers of R.  W. Southern, edited by R. J. Bartlett, 30–​47. Malden [etc.]: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Southern, R. W. “The Truth about the Past,” in History and Historians, edited by Bartlett, 120–​34. Malden [etc.]: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Stern, Charlotte D. “The medieval theatre:  between scriptura and theatrica.” In The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature, edited by David T. Gies, 115–​34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Introduction

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Surtz, Ronald E. “Spain:  Catalan and Castilian drama.” In The Theatre of Medieval Europe. New Research in Early Drama, edited by Eckehard Simon, 189–​ 206. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Van Autenboer, E. Volksfeesten en rederijkers te Mechelen (1400–​1600). Gent: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Taal-​en Letterkunde, 1962. Wickham, Glynne. The medieval theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 (3rd rev. ed.). Woodcock, Matthew. “Narrative Voice and Influencing the Reader.” In The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles; edited by Paulina Kewes, Ian W. Archer & Felicity Heal, 337–​53. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Wright, Stephen K. “The Twelfth-​Century Story of Daniel for Performance by Hilarius: An Introduction, Translation, and Commentary.” Early Theatre 17 (2014): 9–​48.

­c hapter 1

From Mrs Noah’s “Rok” to Absalom’s “Kultour” The Trail of the Spinning Woman and the Great Rising of 1381 Heather Hill Abstract Focusing on the rebellious Mrs Noah who appears in a number of the cycle plays as well as the reference to her in the Miller’s Tale (which creates its own version of the Noah story), this essay suggests that repeated performances of the Noah pageants may have invoked a much larger episode of rebellion in the late fourteenth century: the Rising of 1381 or Peasants’ Revolt. Exploring first the situations, motivations, and characteristics of the rebellious Mrs Noahs in the cycle plays, we will then turn, in the following section, to an examination of accounts of the Peasants’ Revolt. What in Mrs Noah’s behaviour might have resonated for audiences post-​Rising? What did the Rising continue to invoke, unsettle, mean? Continuing, in Section 3, to attend to Mrs Noah as an example of a disruptive woman, I address more specifically in this section how references to spinning, distaffs, and spindles suggest how figures whom I have termed ‘spinning women’ serve further to connect and shed light on the Revolt, the rebellious Mrs Noah, and the Miller’s Tale itself.

Keywords Mrs Noah –​Cycle Plays –​Miller’s Tale –​Geoffrey Chaucer –​Great Rising of 1381 –​Distaffs

1

Introduction

At the centre of Chaucer’s fabliau-​inspired Miller’s Tale is the clerk Nicholas’ restaging of the Noah episode from sacred history. Of course, Nicholas’ motivations are far from pure: convincing John, the carpenter, that a second Great Flood is coming allows Nicholas to spend an amorous night with Alison, John’s wife, while John (a kind of inept second Noah) snores away in his kneading tub, suspended from the ceiling of his barn. Yet, while Nicholas deserves credit for his creativity, John plays a major role in his own duping: in order to

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004449503_003

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engineer his plan, Nicholas relies as much (if not more) upon what John doesn’t know of the Noah story as upon what he does. John, for example, seems to have forgotten, or is unaware of, God’s promise not to destroy the world again through water and he also blindly accepts Nicholas’ rationale –​the disruptive behaviour of Noah’s wife –​for the three individual tubs which allow Nicholas and Alison to have their tryst: “Hastou nat herd,” quod Nicholas, “also The sorwe of Noe with his felaweshipe, Er that he myghte gete his wyf to shippe? Hym hadde be levere, I dar wel undertake At thilke tyme, than alle his wetheres blake That she hadde a ship hirself alone.”1 Since Noah’s wife receives merely a passing mention in Genesis, it is almost certain that Nicholas’ reference here alludes to the Mrs Noah of the cycle plays who refuses to board the Ark.2 The fact that Nicholas successfully uses a reference to Mrs Noah’s disruptive behaviour to manipulate John into believing that separate ‘ships’ are perfectly legitimate for his second flood speaks to John’s rather limited imagination, but the reference, I  would suggest, also directs Chaucer’s audience to a figure whose desire for knowing sharply contrasts with the very unknowing of the character whom Nicholas is able to fool. For while John is simply willing to go along with his Noah story, Mrs Noah, as I will discuss, is not.3 1 The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D.  Benson (Boston:  Houghton Mifflin, 1987, 3rd edition), 72, ll. 3538–​43. All references are to this edition and line numbers are hereafter provided parenthetically in the text. V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), 207, notes John’s unquestioning nature. This essay is dedicated to John C. Coldewey, quite nearly –​if not completely –​the antithesis of the John of the Miller’s Tale. 2 Chaucer also points us to the cycle plays through two other references in the Miller’s Tale. In the prologue to the Tale, the Miller loudly interrupts the Host “in Pilates voys” (l. 3124) and, in order to impress Alison, Nicholas “pleyeth Herodes upon a scaffold hye” (l. 3384). Beryl B. Rowland, “The Play of the ‘Miller’s Tale’: A Game Within a Game,” The Chaucer Review 5 (1970): 140–​46, suggests other allusions to the cycle plays in the Miller’s Tale. 3 Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, 201–​04, reviews possible antecedents for the rebellious Mrs Noah but concludes “the tradition of marital discord is unequivocally represented only in the medieval drama” (p. 203). However, Jeffrey Alan Hirschberg, “Noah’s Wife on the Medieval English State: Iconographic and Dramatic Values of Her Distaff and Choice of the Raven,” Studies in Iconography 2 (1976): 25–​40, argues that the legend of the rebellious Mrs Noah was fairly widespread, as does Anna J. Mill, “Noah’s Wife Again,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 56 (1941): 613–​26.

38 Hill Much has been made of Mrs Noah’s physical resistance to boarding the Ark and her general tendency for trouble-​making.4 At the risk of adding just another voice to the chorus of scholars who have attempted to address her extended portrait in these plays –​she rebels in York, Towneley, Chester, and Newcastle –​I want to explore the possibility that the specific reference to her in the Miller’s Tale serves as more than a mere plot device and, in fact, points us to a revealing example of the symbolic figure of the rebellious female in the later Middle Ages. Elsewhere, I have written about the Wife of Bath as a particularly exuberant example of such a figure and argued that Chaucer crafted her as an entertaining, but likewise meaningful, portrait of independently-​ minded lay religious energies, a figure who engages with and reinterprets theological texts and doctrines from her own personal perspectives and experiences. For authors –​such as Lydgate and Hoccleve –​less enamoured of such religious independence (and its potential Lollard connections) and writing somewhat later than Chaucer and thus in an era less indulgent of lay liberties, portraits of such females may serve as warnings regarding the challenges such

4 See Katie Normington, Gender and Medieval Drama (Rochester:  D. S.  Brewer, 2006), 121–​ 25, for a review of scholarship. Like Normington, I believe that many previous approaches to Mrs Noah have been too narrow by employing a typological focus that reduces her to a second Eve and/​or an example of disobedience to God meant to contrast Noah’s obedience. For examples of typological approaches, see Hirschberg, “Noah’s Wife;” Melvin Storm, “Uxor and Alison:  Noah’s Wife in the Flood Plays and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath,” Modern Language Quarterly 48 (1987):  303–​19; Peter Travis, Dramatic Design in the Chester Cycle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); and Jeffrey Helterman, Symbolic Action in the Plays of the Wakefield Master (Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1981), 47–​72, who mistakenly refers to Mrs Noah’s spinning tools as a spinning wheel. See also Edgar Schell, “The Limits of Typology and the Wakefield Master’s Processus,” Comparative Drama 25 (1991): 168–​ 87; Laura F.  Hodges, “Noe’s Wife:  Type of Eve and Wakefield Spinner,” in Equally in God’s Image: Women in the Middle Ages, eds. Julia Bolton Holloway, Joan Bechtold & Constance S. Wright (New York [etc.]: Peter Lang, 1990), 30–​39; and Richard J. Daniels, “ ‘Uxor’ Noah: A Raven or a Dove?,” The Chaucer Review 14 (1979):  23–​32. Howard H.  Schless, “The Comic Element in the Wakefield Noah,” in Studies in Medieval Literature In Honor of Professor Albert Croll Baugh, ed. MacEdward Leach (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961), 233, tidily fits Mrs Noah’s disobedience into the “biblical level of the play.” Alfred David, “Noah’s Wife’s Flood,” in The Performance of Middle English Culture, eds. Paxson, Clopper & Tomasch (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), 106, argues that Mrs Noah mocks the abstract and fanciful nature of typology itself as a means of understanding our history and future here on earth and in whatever world would come.” Andrea Bobac, “Lay Performance of Work and Salvation in the York Cycle,” Comparative Drama 43 (2009): 254, provides a sympathetic analysis of the York Mrs Noah and argues that, because of her compassion for the loss of her friends and others, she “has lost all similarity with Eve, and may even be seen as a prefiguration of Mary, the epitome of mercy, in The Last Judgment.”

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laic religious desires –​interpretive, textual, or otherwise –​might well pose to the authority of realm and state.5 Despite the range of associations which authors and authorities might attach to them, these figures share fundamental characteristics:  they are talkative, rebellious, and authority-​resistant, ornery and prone to tongue-​lashing their husbands, socially disruptive and independently minded, crafty and scheming. And, they are often connected, directly or indirectly, to distaff and spindle, weaving and cloth-​making, as well as to the power of speech, text, and word. Thus, they are ‘spinning women’ –​women who spin words as well as thread –​ and, who, alternatively or simultaneously, might invoke, for example, Eve’s disobedience as well as the Virgin Mary who clothed Christ the Redeemer.6 Mrs Noah shares these symbolic markers of the spinning woman, not least in the Towneley Noah pageant where she sets up her spinning in direct opposition to boarding the Ark.7 Moreover, as with other iterations of her kind, she presents her own unique qualities and context that suggest what her embodiment of the spinning woman might reveal to us. Specifically, I wish to examine how Mrs Noah’s concern for and insistence upon knowing what Noah knows –​ along with her response to and relationship with that information once she has obtained it –​may have invoked, through repeated performances of the Noah pageants, a much larger episode of rebellion in the late fourteenth century: the Rising of 1381 or Peasants’ Revolt. I want to suggest that Mrs Noah’s challenges to marital hierarchy, to the authority of her husband, and to the theological narrative which he wields gesture toward similar impulses that seem to have emerged in the course of the Rising. As with other examples of the spinning woman figure, Mrs Noah is both a comically disobedient female challenging her subordinate place in society as well as a potential (and often safely disguised) figure for representing and harbouring disruptive energies with even larger societal implications.8 Moreover, as a character portrayed by a male 5

6

7 8

See Heather Hill-​Vásquez, “Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, Hoccleve’s Arguing Women, and Lydgate’s Hertford Wives: Lay Interpretation and the Figure of the Spinning Woman in Late Medieval England,” Florilegium 23 (2006 [2008]): 169–​95. For related work on women and spinning in the Middle Ages see Frances M. Biscoglio, “ ‘Unspun’ Heroes: Iconography of the Spinning Woman in the Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 25 (1995): 163–​76. See Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theatre of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 137–​76; Idem, “The Thread of Life in the Hand of the Virgin,” in Equally in God’s Image: Women in the Middle Ages, eds. Julia Bolton Holloway, Joan Bechtold & Constance S. Wright (New York [etc.]: Peter Lang, 1990), 46–​54; and Hill-​Vasquez, “Chaucer’s Wife of Bath,” 172. Storm, “Uxor and Alison,” 303–​19, compares Mrs Noah and the Wife of Bath. As I have explored elsewhere (“A Lesson of Response to U.S. Family Separation Policy: ‘Re-​ membering’ a Late Medieval Play of the Slaughter of the Innocents,” Modern Language

40 Hill actor, Mrs Noah’s representational potential is perhaps even more emphatic. While on the one hand, her resistance to the marital hierarchy may have been played, ostensibly, for laughs by a man in a dress, on the other hand, as a man merely disguised in a dress, the Mrs Noah character provides the audience with an opportunity to envision larger forms of social rebellion. What I propose in this essay, then, is that Chaucer’s reference to this particular spinning woman can likewise point contemporary readers to how both Mrs Noah and his own Miller’s Tale may reveal what kinds of cultural energies and historical meanings the Peasants’ Revolt continued to invoke in the later Middle Ages.9 Following this reference, then, in a tale that creates its own version of the Noah story, I explore first the situations, motivations, and characteristics of the rebellious Mrs Noahs in the cycle plays. I then turn, in the following section, to an examination of accounts of the Peasants’ Revolt. What in Mrs Noah’s behaviour might have resonated for audiences post-​Rising? What did the Rising continue to invoke, unsettle, mean? While I continue to attend to Mrs Noah as an example of a disruptive, spinning woman in Part 3, I address more specifically in this section how references to spinning, distaffs, and spindles suggest how the spinning woman figure serves further to connect and shed light on the Revolt, the rebellious Mrs Noah, and the Miller’s Tale itself.10

9

10

Association International Symposium: Remembering Voices Lost. Lisbon, Portugal, 2019), the distaff-​wielding mothers of the Innocents in the Digby and Chester versions of the “Killing of the Children” who do battle with the soldiers who have come for their children provide further examples of the spinning woman figure whose resistance to the gender hierarchy, as with Mrs Noah’s, imply other forms of rebellion from below. See also Anthony Gash’s suggestion regarding Mrs Noah in “Carnival Against Lent:  The Ambivalence of Medieval Drama,” in Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology, and History, ed. David Aers (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1986), 78: “She must have answered some deep social and expressive needs for late medieval communities since her rebellious and anarchic behavior in unauthorized by the Bible.” Moreover, the possibility that Chaucer’s reference to the boarding (or not boarding) of a ship might be an allusion to the Rising is suggested in Gower’s Vox Clamantis. In his dream vision dedicated to the Rising, Gower imagines the Tower of London, to which King Richard and members of his household retreated on June 12, as a ship, occupied by “almost all those of gentle birth, crowded together and terrified, seeking refuge from the furies” and “the fury of the mob,” a ship which, notably, Gower immediately and willingly boards (The Complete Works of John Gower, vol. 4:  The Latin Works, ed. G.  C. Macaulay [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902], xxxix). In his discussion of the direct reference to the Rising in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale –​a reference which I discuss later in this essay –​Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 223, argues for Chaucer’s awareness “that the author cannot control the social reach of his text, and that there are potential though unimagined audiences who might make words spoken in innocence something guilty.” While I  agree with the spirit of this statement, specifically regarding Chaucer’s

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2

41

“That Wolde I Witte”: Mrs Noah as Spinning Woman

In contrast to the cursory reference she receives in the Bible, the character of Mrs Noah is developed into a rebellious trouble-​maker in four of the five Noah plays for which we have extant manuscripts.11 Since all of these manuscripts post-​date the likely composition of the Miller’s Tale in the late fourteenth century (c. 1392–​95, per Benson) by 100–​200 years or more, Chaucer’s reference to Mrs Noah’s resistance to getting “to shippe” demonstrates that at least slightly earlier productions also likely included this extended portrait in order for Chaucer to be aware of it.12 While the comedy implicit in a wife rebelling against her husband’s authority, especially in the larger context of the Great Flood, may explain the continued inclusion of this particular domestic squabble in the plays, a more complex reason may be found in the fact that the Mrs Noahs of the York, Towneley, Chester, and Newcastle pageants are all wives whose husbands have pretty much kept them in the dark regarding Flood and Ark and that this, perhaps even more importantly, does not, to say the least, sit well with those wives. While there is precedent for God commanding Noah to keep this information secret, those associated with these pageant versions of the Noah story apparently considered it worthwhile to dramatise in significantly more detail what it might mean to not keep one’s wife informed.

11

12

clever awareness of the power of texts, I think Chaucer was just as interested in drawing upon and employing various references, symbolic or otherwise, in creative and pointed ways as he was in safeguarding what meanings might be read into his work. In fact, as I will argue, in part, in this essay, his use of the spinning woman figure cleverly allows for a safely disguised reference to disruption because the figure may just as easily be seen as a comically ridiculous as well as a legitimate representation of other forms of resistance. In addition to York, Towneley, Chester, and Newcastle, we have detailed records from Hull regarding that town’s Noah play but no performance text. These records indicate what Anna J.  Mill, “The Hull Noah Play,” The Modern Language Review 33 (1938):  495, says are “substantial fees” for the actors playing Mrs Noah which “would seem to indicate a distinctive role … and perhaps … as in the Chester and York and Towneley cycles, her traditional recalcitrance.” Diana Wyatt, “Arks, Crafts and Authorities:  Textual and Contextual Evidence for North-​Eastern English Noah Plays,” Yearbook of English Studies 43, Early English Drama (2013): 48–​68, provides a comparison of the York, Towneley, and Newcastle Noah play texts and local documents with a focus on the Ark. See Seth Lerer, “The Chaucerian Critique of Medieval Theatricality,” in The Performance of Middle English Culture, eds. Paxson, Clopper & Tomasch (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), 70, for a discussion of the importance of “not … re-​engag[ing] the positivist search for ‘sources and analogues’ of Chaucer’s works.” The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, 847, note to ll. 3538–​43, states that Nicholas’ allusion “is a clear reference to the comic scenes in the mystery plays in which Noah’s wife refuses to enter the ark.”

42 Hill Indeed, moving beyond the comedy of wifely disobedience, Mrs Noah’s queries and her desire to understand that in which she is being required to participate seem quite reasonable if also rambunctious even as, of course, late medieval audiences would have known the full story of the Great Flood. In York, for example, when her son (at Noah’s orders) comes to fetch her, she wants, understandably, to know: “Were? That wolde I witte” (l. 65), and later chastises Noah for his delay in keeping her informed: “Noye, thou myght have leteyn me wete.”13 Similarly, in Chester (even after she has contributed to the building of the Ark), she refuses to follow Noah’s command to board until “I see more neede” (l. 103). Throughout the majority of Towneley, moreover, she exists in a general state of frustrated confusion based upon a lack of information despite her efforts to find out what is afoot: “Do tell me belife,” she demands of Noah, “Where has thou thus longe be?” and later: “Why, syr, what alis you? /​Who is that asalis you?” Her eventual refusal to board the Ark, moreover, is based upon her confusion and fear –​“I dase and dedir”14 –​a response to being told she must acquiesce to something that she has not been given the opportunity to understand. In Newcastle, in fact, much of the dramatic focus is on the Devil’s offer, after he asserts that submitting to her husband’s plans means death for herself and her children, to provide her the means to “weet all [Noah’s] will” and “every Deal.”15 In fact, Mrs Noah’s insistence upon as well as genuine concern about not knowing what her husband knows presents Noah as a sole, silent, and even tyrannical master of a grand narrative in which her muted participation is merely expected no matter what she is, or isn’t, told. In balking at this expectation, especially when couched in the familiar trope of marital discord, she exhibits an understandable desire that this narrative be revealed and its details brought out into the open so they may be examined from her perspective. That Mrs Noah knows, moreover, what it is like to be controlled by such a narrative is communicated by her clever awareness in Towneley that her husband’s pessimism, whether merited or not –​“For thou are always adred /​Be it fals or trew” (ll. 291–​92) –​requires her, too, to always follow his lead and also act distraught:

13 14 15

The York Plays, ed. Richard Beadle (London: Edward Arnold, 1982), 85, l. 113. All references are to this edition and line numbers are hereafter provided parenthetically in the text. Martin Stevens & A. C. Cawley, eds., The Towneley Plays, 2 vols., eets s.s. 13 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), vol. 1, 33, ll. 278–​79; 37, ll. 426–​27; 38, l. 454. All references are to this edition and line numbers are hereafter provided parenthetically in the text. Non-​Cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. Norman Davis, eets s.s. 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 22–​23, ll. 129–​31. All references are to this edition and line numbers are hereafter provided parenthetically in the text.

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If he teyn, I must tary, Howsoeuer it standys, With seymland ful sory Wryngand both my handys For drede … (ll. 304–​08) However, even when the true details of the situation are revealed, Mrs Noah continues to question and challenge, in light of her own life experiences, the voices of authority that assume she will merely accept and obey. Having achieved access to the narrative to which she is expected to submit mutely, she instead attempts her own interpretation and/​or counter narrative. Her very resistance to boarding the Ark, for example, posits the possibility of an alternative path or story for her, while her attempt to save her friends (in York, Towneley, and Chester) likewise challenges the terms of God’s (and her husband’s) mandate. In Chester, in fact, she tells Noah that, unless her friends are allowed to come aboard, he can row off and find himself another wife (ll. 206–​08). In York, she tells Noah: “In faithe, the were als goode /​To late me go my gatte” (ll. 97–​98) and soon after insists that she needs to go home before boarding the Ark in order to gather her “tolis,” likely her spindle and distaff. Having acquiesced, her assertion that it is necessary for her to gather these and bring them along is an attempt, nonetheless, to insert a small, but meaningful, detail from the reality of her daily life into the overriding narrative about which she has only recently been informed: “Nay, nedlyngis home me bus, /​For I have tolis to trusse” (ll. 109–​10). Like the clothmaking Wife of Bath who asserts: “Experience, though noon auctoritee /​Were in this world, is right ynogh for me /​To speke of wo that is in marriage” (ll. 1–​3), Mrs Noah questions and challenges, with reference to her own daily realities, the voices of authority and the assumption that she will merely obey. Like Chaucer’s Alison she seeks a form of access to, and even partial ownership of the text or texts which are meant to control and dominate her. And, when that text does not correspond with her experience, she attempts, as does Alison, to interpret it on her own terms, and even to craft her own. In Towneley, in fact, Noah’s recognition that his wife may try to spin her own tale, may rebel against his authority as husband and as God’s designated auteur, is revealed by his specific reference to the spinning woman’s tools of the trade. Trying to convince Mrs Noah to leave her house (he has yet to explain the whole situation to her), he asserts: “Ther is garn on the reyll /​Other, my dame” (ll. 431–​32), thus presenting the Great Flood as an alternative narrative to that which he sees her trying to spin. That she desires to create her own, oppositional, story becomes all the more overt when, in the very presence of

44 Hill the Ark that has been constructed to put the ostensibly more authoritative tale in motion, she forcibly declares: Sir, for Iak nor for Gill Will I turne my face, Till I have on this hill Spon a space On my rok. Wel were he myght get me! Now will I downe set me … (ll. 486–​92) A few lines later she will likewise insist that she will not move until she has spun and released all her yarn: “This spyndill will I slip /​Apon this hill /​Or I styr oune foote” (ll. 528–​30).16 The Towneley Mrs Noah emerges as the emblematic version of Noah’s rebellious wife whose distaff and spindle present and represent a challenge, as Noah himself acknowledges, to the dominant tale in which her husband expects her, as his subordinate, to meekly participate.17 As we have seen, her counterparts display similar traits that posit them, too, as spinning women. Disruptive, loquacious, and rebellious, they challenge authority through questioning and inquiry and, specifically, share a strong desire that the story that runs the show –​the words that assert the authority to command and control –​be revealed and substantiated. In turn, as with other spinning women, the rebellious Mrs Noahs are avid interpreters and re-​interpreters of those words, drawing upon their own life experiences and perspectives in an attempt to create and spin their own counternarratives even as, of course, it is Noah’s “garn on the reyll” (l. 298) that prevails.18 16 17

18

Hirschberg, “Noah’s Wife,” 32, interprets Mrs Noah’s distaff as almost exclusively a symbol of Eve’s humility. I believe it has a more expansive meaning. The Towneley Noah contains additional references to Mrs Noah’s spinning, as well as to cloth and clothing. For example, Mrs Noah tells Noah that he ought to “be cled /​In Stafford blew” (ll. 289–​90), an apparent reference to a particular kind of cloth made in that region, and a creative way (as Stevens and Cawley, eds., The Towneley Plays, vol. 2, 450, note to l. 290) and others have argued) to tell him that their fighting will make him black and blue. Beating him black and blue with her distaff to make him look like the cloth from Stafford would make the reference all the more suitable. The temporary nature of Mrs Noah’s resistance to the marital hierarchy, along with her inevitable ‘settling down’ and boarding the Ark, provides an example of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque  –​the world-​turned-​upside-​down  –​followed by the return of the established social order. See Gash, “Carnival Against Lent,” 78–​82, and Ruth Evans’ discussion, “Feminist Re-​Enactments:  Gender and the Towneley Vxor Noah,” in A Wyf Ther Was: Essays in Honor of Paule Mertens-​Fonck, ed. Juliette Dor (Liège: Liège Language and

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45

“Out into the Squares and Marketplaces and Even the Fields”: The Luxurious Liberality of Textual Access

In the Middle Ages, the relationship between husband and wife, male and female, often provided a representation of a hierarchy and authority structure analogous to the relationship between clergy and laity and/​or God and man.19 In another article, I have examined how portraits of subordinate women rebelling against male authority –​spinning women –​provided an opportunity, then, for representing and exploring (either overtly or not) laic desires and ideas that might be construed as oppositional to the Church and its doctrines.20 Bearing in mind the often intricate intertwining of Church and state power in the late medieval period, portraits of rebelling women could likewise prove useful (and provocatively so) for representing forces potentially disruptive to king and

19

20

Literature, 1992), 147, of the Towneley Noah play with reference to carnivalesque ‘battles’ between husbands and wives such as those connected with Hocktide. Paul Strohm, “ ‘A Revelle!’: Chronicle Evidence and the Rebel Voice,” in Idem, Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-​Century Texts (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1992), 53–​56, argues that the chroniclers portray the rebels, too, as participants in a form of the carnivalesque as their disruption, too, is quelled. See also 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. and intr. Barbara A. Bancock (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 147–​90, on disorderly women, sex role inversion, and world-​turned-​upside-​down. Gibson, The Theatre of Devotion, 43, discusses the “mock battles between the sexes” which took place as part of the festivities of the annual celebration of St Distaff’s day on January 7. Victor Turner is, of course, a principle source for discussions of the carnivalesque. See his From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: paj Books, 2001); The Anthropology of Performance (New York: paj Books, 1988); The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-​Structure (New York, Routledge, 1969); and The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967). In Chapter 5 of this collection, Wim Hüsken explores another wifely disruption of the marital hierarchy with likewise comedic elements and historically representative possibilities in a scene from an early seventeenth-​century Low Countries tragi-​comedy in which wives rescue and then carry their imprisoned husbands on their backs. Evans, “Feminist Re-​Enactments,” 145, states that, in the Towneley play, “Noah’s exercise of male physical power over his wife is divinely ordained; their worldly marriage is a paradigm of the spiritual relationship between God and man which would have been instantly recognizable by a medieval audience …” and that “the play clearly demonstrates … the need to maintain the status quo by keeping wives in order, a need which is given considerable religious authority because of the parallels between sovereignty in the secular and religious sphere” (p. 146). Mrs Noah may also be seen here as perhaps questioning the intermediary, priestly role that her husband plays.

46 Hill realm.21 Such, I believe, is the case with Mrs Noah. Including a specific reference to her in his Miller’s own socially disruptive tale –​the Miller forestalls the Monk’s Tale and endeavours to “quite the Knyghtes’ tale” (l. 3127) –​Chaucer directs us to a figure that embodied, for his audience, rebellion and resistance to authority. Recognisable as a spinning woman, Mrs Noah and her particular form of resistance, portrayed through multiple performances of the Noah play over the course of several decades, may have routinely invoked the yearnings, albeit from a safe and comic distance, of those peasants in the Rising of 1381 to challenge their own position of subordination at the hands of their masters and to do so, at least partially, through managing a form of interaction and association with texts and documents not previously envisioned. Along with the other chronicles, Thomas Walsingham’s account of the Peasant’s Revolt in his Chronica Maiora is interlaced with references to the commoners’ gaining access to authoritative documents: court rolls and muniments, customary records, charters, registers, etc. While he highlights their destruction of these texts (primarily by burning) –​he asserts, for example that “they decided to consign to the flames all the rolls of the courts and the old records, so that, once the memorials of the past had been wiped out, their masters would be absolutely unable to make any claims on them in the future”22 –​ he also describes vividly the peasants’ triumphant removal of texts from the private holds of religious and secular offices in order to display them in public and open spaces, often marketplaces. Documents are “shown to the commons” (p. 137), “display[ed] publically at the market cross” (p. 141), “brought into the marketplace for all to see” (p. 144).23 Like Mrs Noah who wants the words and 21

22

23

See Hill-​Vásquez, “Chaucer’s Wife of Bath,” 182–​92; Rita Copeland, “Why Women Can’t Read: Medieval Hermeneutics, Statutory Law, and the Lollard Heresy Trials,” in Representing Women: Law, Literature, and Feminism, eds. Susan Sage Heinzelman & Zipporah Batshaw Wiseman (Durham:  Duke University Press, 1994), 260; Vincent Gillespie, “ ‘Lukynge in haly bukes’: Lectio in Some Late Medieval Spiritual Miscellanies,” in Spätmittelalterliche geistliche Literatur in der Nationalsprache, ed. James Lester Hogg. Analecta Carusiana, 106 (Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1984), vol. 2, 4; Zemon Davis, “Women on Top,” 150. The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham (1376–​1422), trans. David Preest, annotations and intr. James G. Clark (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2005), 122. All references are to this edition and page numbers are hereafter provided parenthetically in the text. Susan Crane, “The Writing Lesson of 1381,” in Chaucer’s England: Literature in Historical Context, ed. Barbara Hanawalt. Medieval Studies at Minnesota, 4 (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 214–​17, discusses how the Wife of Bath’s burning of Jankyn’s book may elude to the Peasants’ Revolt. In using Walsingham’s and other accounts of the Revolt, I am aware, of course, of the bias of their upper class authors. I  approach the accounts, nonetheless, as documents that can reveal more than just subjective opinions and participate, in fact, in the elucidation

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story revealed that provide Noah with the power to order her aboard ship and control the future course of her life –​in short, as she asserts in York, “that wolde I witte” (l. 65) –​the peasants, too, want access to the documents and texts that control their situation and lives. John Ball, moreover, as described by Walsingham, is a chief instigator of the textual desires in which the peasants engage and which the rebellious Mrs Noah evokes. Having been prevented from preaching in the bishops’ churches, Ball “took his sermons out into the squares and marketplaces and even the fields” where “[h]‌e was never short of hearers from among the common people” (p. 162). The mere idea of sermonising out in the open is identified as a dangerous practice as it is the accessibility of Ball and his words, as well as what those words say, that make him so appealing to “the common people.” Ball’s heresy, then, may derive at least in part from his embodiment of this accessibility which, in Walsingham’s rendering, posits him as a portentous figure encouraging the peasants, as an energising part of their rebellion, to engage in accessing, assessing, and challenging the texts and writings of those claiming authority over them.24 What Mrs Noah demands of her husband –​to tell her what God has told him –​Ball willingly provides and models “even [in] the fields.” Full of murder, weaponry, and mob mentality, Walsingham’s account contains as well, then, a marked attention to the commoners’ success in gaining access to not only individuals and places of authority but also to the texts which these individuals and places hold and contain. The texts, themselves, are thus seen as the mechanisms which bestow and maintain the authority

24

of ideas and energies involving much larger sections of the late-​fourteenth century population. Strohm, “ ‘A Revelle!’,” 34, discusses his own invaluable approach to this issue: “In my treatment, interpretive schemes are likely to be the property not just of a single social segment but of a society as a whole.” I am more interested, however, in exploring what ideas continued to circulate and resonate than in, necessarily, exposing, as Strohm does, the argumentative strategies of the chroniclers. In L. C. Hector & Barbara F. Harvey, eds. and trans., The Westminster Chronicles 1381–​1394 [Oxford:  Clarendon Press,  1982], 15)  Ball is “a priest in every respect unworthy of the priestly style” [presbiter presbiterali per omnia indignus caractere], who “has preached up and down the towns of England.” The teachings of Wycliff, from which Walsingham insists Ball was preaching, also encourage an access to texts considered heretical and dangerous by religious authorities. However, there seems to be no definitive evidence that Lollardy specifically inspired Ball’s sermons. Rather, as Alastair Dunn, The Great Rising of 1381: The Peasants’ Revolt and England’s Failed Revolution (Stroud: Tempus, 2002), 62, points out, Knighton saw Ball as an influence on Wycliff. For a discussion of the role of the spinning woman figure and Lollardy, see Hill-​Vásquez, “Chaucer’s Wife of Bath,” 179–​82, 188–​89.

48 Hill of individuals and places in large part because what those texts contain and say has, at least from the perspective of the rebels, been kept hidden. Once brought out into the open, those texts and their contents are revealed and, perhaps more significantly, their ownership is expanded.25 Indeed, while we may shudder at the destruction of texts at the hands of the rebels, we might also recognise that such a choice might indicate not only an attempt to undo their masters’ grip on them but also a response to an unprecedented experience of textuality, an almost luxurious access to knowledge and that which contains it. Thus, the choice to destroy is also a choice based upon access.26 We do not, of course, see Mrs Noah destroying physical texts. Nonetheless the story which she attempts to thwart, and its authority, would, for the plays’ audiences, have resided in its documentation and textual presence in the Bible. Thus, her resistance, significantly embellished by bodily attacks upon her husband, may also be seen as a threat to the material reality of the Noah episode. Moreover, for both commoners and Mrs Noah, revealing and resisting words and texts (and thus those who wield these as a form of control) also affords an opportunity for interpretation and assessment of those words as well as for the creation of alternative narratives.27 In both Walsingham and Froissart’s

25 Justice, Writing and Rebellion, 66, argues that the rebels attempted a revolutionary form of literacy through their actions in the Revolt:  “How far ‘literacy,’ in any full and modern sense of that word actually extended through the rural population, the insurgents claimed that they had it, had enough of it to claim the prerogatives of the literate and to govern themselves.” 26 This unprecedented and even luxurious experience of textuality, access, ownership seems supported by Crane’s reflection (“The Writing Lesson,” 210) on the Ball letters: “I believe it is possible that the letters meant more to the rebels as documents per se than as meaningful messages: whatever the writing said or failed to say, the letters would have provided those normally beyond the pale of literature culture with documents of their own to pass from hand to hand.” Perhaps an example of an overly liberal response to this access –​which also helps the authorities to identify the dangers of such access –​can be seen in the apparently large number of false conspirator accusations described, for example, in Hector & Harvey, eds., Westminster Chronicles, 19. Here, too, there is an attention to how this access has contributed to a breaking down of previously established hierarchies including, significantly, those governing marriage: “With penalties so favourable to the aspirations of jealousy it was saddening to see the servant accusing his master, the citizen rising up against his neighbour, the wife convicting her husband … and subordinates bursting the restraints of self-​control and making monstrous charges against their superiors” [Miserum erat intueri zeli voto faventibus penis servum dominum accusare, civem in sibi conterminum insurgere, uxorem dampnare maritum … et subditos disruptis tollerancie frenis suos inordinate calumpniare rectores]. 27 Cf. Dunn’s description (The Great Rising, 120) of the St Albans rebels: “the burning of the old charters, and the extortion of confirmations of liberty from the Abbey, were little less

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accounts, for example, the peasants succeed (albeit it temporarily) in rewriting the entire class system when the king writes ‘letters of authority’ after apparently taking what amounts to direct dictation from them: Good people, I am your lord and king. What are you asking for? What do you want to say to me?” Those who were near enough to hear him replied: “We want you to make us free for ever and ever, we and our heirs and our lands, so that we shall never again be called serfs or bondmen.” The King answered:  “That I  grant you  … I  will have letters written at once. …28 So, too, can we see Mrs Noah moving from merely resisting Noah’s grand narrative to then perceiving and acting on the possibility of an alternative –​the spinning of her own opposing path (e.g., in York: “In faithe, the were als goode /​ To late me go my gatte” [ll. 97–​98]) through which she may even entertain the possibility that Noah may no longer be her master  –​as she tells him in Chester: either “lette” my friends “into thy chiste, /​ells rowe for the, Noe, when thy liste /​and gette thee a new wife” (ll. 206–​08). In Walsingham’s account, the peasants progress, similarly, from demanding that authorities draw up new charters (p. 136) to demanding that they be provided with the “clerk … [,]‌inkhorn and parchment,” in order to create their own (p. 137).29 Working from the basic details of the Noah story –​that Noah will, of course, row away in the Ark –​Mrs Noah encourages her audience to engage with that story from a different perspective, to perceive of possibilities that may diverge from the authoritative narrative that Noah controls. So, too, does Ball begin his open-​air sermon at Blackheath with an alternative way to understand the familiar homily of “When Adam delve, and Eve span” (p. 162).30 The reference here to Eve’s spinning suggests another connection to Mrs Noah as a spinning woman whose rebellion in the Noah plays is linked to speech, words, and texts as well as the disruption of hierarchies. But perhaps just as significantly, it is Ball’s creative reinterpretation of Adam and Eve’s toil as a call to

than an attempt to rewrite and redefine the history and status of the community of St. Albans.” 28 Froissart, Chronicles, ed. Geoffrey Brereton (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), 221. See also Hector & Harvey, eds., Westminster Chronicles, 7. 29 See also Westminster Chronicles, eds. Hector & Harvey, 11. 30 Ball draws on a familiar homily but revises its meaning so it may serve as a rallying cry. See G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961), 290–​92.

50 Hill natural equality that has been lost –​“Who was then a gentleman?” (p. 162) –​ that spurs so much of the Rising and which Walsingham finds troubling: “using the words of the saying which he had taken for his text, he tried to introduce and to prove the argument that in the beginning all men had been created equal by nature …” (p. 162). Rather than emphasising that toil as postlapsarian punishment, Ball offers both a call for change as well as an alternative perspective: positing a literacy of reinterpretation as a basis for the Revolt while also publicly and openly demonstrating a way of responding to an authoritative text that may have helped to inspire the rebels. Just as Mrs Noah reinterprets the foundational narrative of Noah’s Ark and thus conceives of a way to break free of it, so, too, does Ball suggest that a reference to servitude may, in fact, be re-​formed as a call to liberation for the peasant classes. Furthermore, once access is obtained to the information, to words and/​or documents that are the basis for their subordinate roles, both peasants and Mrs Noah engage in forms of resistance, revelation, reinterpretation, as well as attempts at their own text-​ making in response to them. Obtaining, accessing, revealing, seeing, responding to, handling, interpreting, rewriting the words and texts of authorities, like Mrs Noah, the peasants of the Rising engage in all of these in connection with their attempt to resist the control and domination of their masters. Thus, when Walsingham describes Ball’s preaching at Blackheath as Ball’s attempt to “infect still more people with the poison of his preaching” (p. 162), he may be as concerned about the potential way of being with texts and authority that Ball is modelling as he is with Ball’s words. In fact, the authorities’ responses to the forms of textual interactions in which the peasants seem to have newly engaged, and whose potential they have newly realised, reveal a significant fear about those interactions that, in turn, suggests that they may represent a new kind of threat to the current social structure.31 In Walsingham’s account that threat is the intertwining of the proximity obtained by the rebels to texts, to those who ordinarily have the authority to write and control those texts, as well as to the writing process itself. As he describes the situation in St Albans: the leading citizens of the town entered the abbot’s chamber, and forcefully demanded the charters of liberty accorded to the agreement of the 31 Justice, Writing and Rebellion, 17, asserts that the chroniclers’ accounts of “the rising are black fantasies about the victimization of written culture and its agents at the hands of those who could not coherently speak (much less think or write) and who could look at writing only with a rage for its destruction.”

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­f igure 1.1  “Richard ii meeting with the rebels of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381” jean froissart, chroniques, fol. 154v; bibliothèque nationale de paris, wikimedia commons, public domain

day before. Their prayers were granted. They dictated their wishes themselves, sitting beside and standing over the clerk, until in their presence all the points had been inserted in the charter which they had decided upon to gain their liberty (p. 140). Walsingham communicates a discomfort regarding the physical presence of the commoners:  as they insert their points into the charter so, too, do they insert their physical bodies, drawing attention to spaces which it has never been previously conceived that they might occupy. They create, in fact, a void so they may fill it. Like the rebellious Mrs Noah, who has no Biblical precedent,

52 Hill they draw attention to their past traditional silence and obedience and then proceed to disrupt it.32 Henry Knighton, too, is concerned by the situation of such close and open access to authoritative texts by illegitimate persons. Identifying Ball as the inspiration for the rebels of the Rising as well as for Wycliff, Knighton describes access to that most important of texts, the Gospel, as an act of defilement in which women, too, are shockingly allowed to participate: he made that common and open to the laity (apertum laicis), and to women who were able to read, which used to be for literate and perceptive clerks, and spread the Evangelists’ pearls to be trampled by swine. And thus that which was dear to the clergy and the laity alike because as it were a jest common to both, and the clerks’ jewels because the playthings of laymen, that the laity might enjoy now forever what had once been the clergy’s talents from on high.33 From a certain perspective, then, what does Mrs Noah do with the Noah story but try to make it into a jest or a plaything? Or is she more a woman trying to obtain, ‘read’, and remake the words to which she is being subjected? Either way (or both) and while, she does not, of course, manage to overcome the grand narrative of the Great Flood, Mrs Noah does present unexpected challenges which directly target that narrative, causing Noah a great deal of trouble. For Knighton, that trouble is serious business and that access to knowledge –​Mrs Noah wants to know what Noah knows; the laity want to know what the clergy know –​even indicates that the apocalypse has begun.34 Yet another example of how dangerous the governing classes considered the alternative narratives which the peasants managed is demonstrated by the enforced and emphatically tangible retrieval and public destruction of the king’s recently created letters of authority which granted the peasants’ demands. As described in Froissart: “Any of the villains who had obtained royal letters were … ordered in the King’s name to give them us, on pain of death … The King had them taken and torn up in front of them” (p. 228); “the King decided to make a tour of his kingdom … to punish the evil-​doers and take back the letters which he had been forced to grant to various places, and to restore 32 33 34

So, too, Crane, “The Writing Lesson,” 201, who argues that “absence is an important feature of the rebels’ cultural status.” Knighton’s Chronicles 1337–​1396, ed. and trans. G.  H. Martin (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1995), 242–​45. Ibid., 244–​45.

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the kingdom to proper order” (p. 229); “The letters which had been granted them were called for. They were brought and handed to the legal officers, who tore them up and scattered them in the presence of the whole population” (p. 230). Physically tearing to pieces in the presence of the peasants who instigated and composed the words written upon them, the king eliminates not only the documents which the peasants managed to create but tries, as well, to deny that the peasants ever had the right to engage in or oversee the composing. As with Mrs Noah whose own forms of story-​making rebellion are washed over –​the rising waters force her to stop her spinning, for example; the friends whom she tried to save by adding them to the Ark story are drowned; she is forcibly carried into the Ark, etc. –​destruction indicates that proper order is restored, the Ark sails, voices and words are silenced, and obedience returns. 4

From Mrs Noah’s “Rok” to Absalom’s “Kultour”: The Trail of the Spinning Woman

Concerned about what ails Nicholas who hasn’t emerged from his room in some time, John the carpenter concludes: Men sholde nat knowe of Goddes pryvetee. Ye, blessed be alwey a lewed man That noght but oonly his bileve kan! (ll. 3454–​56) Unlike Noah’s rebellious Wife, John is an obedient soul who is convinced that a state of unknowing is a blessing so he blindly accepts Nicholas’ orchestrated version of the Great Flood. Not wanting, it seems, to appear a fool, yet simultaneously revealing the ignorance he has cultivated, he responds industriously to Nicholas’ repeated “Hastow nat herd [of Noah]?” (ll. 3534, 3538) by following his instructions for surviving this new flood. Subordinating himself to the grand narrative which Nicholas merely need mention in order to launch his scheme, John is the inversion of the rebellious peasants of the Revolt, serving at the will of the master clerk and the authoritative text which he wields, a text, furthermore, which John shows no interest in accessing, knowing, or questioning even though the master he follows has the text (intentionally) all wrong. More than a just a ridiculously failed second Noah, then, John presents to Chaucer’s audience a comedic as well as, by the end of the tale, a tragic way of being with texts and words: for John is duped, in large part, by his own insistence that he “sholde nat knowe” (l. 3454) and by what he believes is his own good devotion as “a lewed man” (l. 3455). In contrast, as we have seen, Mrs Noah

54 Hill insists upon learning the Flood story to which she will be subjected  –​“that wolde I witte” (l. 65) –​and then proceeds to interrogate and resist that story. As Chaucer has Nicholas describe her, it is she who temporarily disrupts the Great Flood story, and the authority whom God has placed in charge of it, by being difficult about being “gete … to shipe” (l. 3540). While Chaucer presents John as a comically extreme example of willing unknowing (who goes to ship, or kneading tub, all too easily), he also points us, then, to the Mrs Noah of the Noah plays who, in wanting to know, affords her audiences an opportunity to reexperience a very different way of being with words and texts –​a desire to access, examine, disturb, challenge, alter –​reminiscent of the anti-​authoritarian desires realised and expressed in and through the Peasants’ Revolt. As I have suggested throughout this essay, this way of being with words, texts, and authorities was often associated in the later Middle Ages with the spinning woman figure and Mrs Noah appears as another example of this figure, here engaged not only as a comic disrupter of marital hierarchy or a typological second Eve but also as a means for invoking the particularly resonant energies of the Peasants’ Revolt. Identifying and attending to the presence of spinning women figures can, I believe, serve a valuable function in assessing and reassessing historical and cultural moments of disruption, especially in connection with emerging ideas regarding rights of access to texts and the definition and practice of literacy. Thus, there are significant and revealing connections to be found between the references to spinning, distaffs, and spindles which emerge, for example, in John Ball’s incendiary reinterpretation of “When Adam delve, and Eve span” (p. 162); in the opposition between spinning and boarding the Ark which Mrs Noah sets up in Towneley; and, furthermore, in Chaucer’s inclusion of a distaff in his only direct reference to the Peasants’ Revolt: “Ha, ha! The fox!” and after hym they ran, And eek with staves many another man. Ran Colle oure dogge, and Talbot and Gerland, And Malkyn, with a dystaf in hir hand, … So hydous was the noyse –​a, benedicitee! –​ Certes, he Jakke Straw and his meynee Ne made nevere shoutes half so shrille. (ll. 3381–​84, 3393–​95) While we hear no more about Malkyn and her distaff in the Nun’s Priest’s tale, Chaucer nonetheless provides another reference that associates women as spinners with discord, disruption, and verbal noise, an association strong

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enough, in fact, to merit a comparison with Jack Straw and his rebels.35 Similarly, when Noah uses the phrase “Ther is garn on the reyll  /​Other, my dame” (ll. 431–​32), not only to assert that there is other business at hand but also to counteract his wife’s spinning with his Great Flood narrative, he reveals a recognition shared, too, by Towneley playwright, actors, and audience that a woman’s spinning may readily represent larger forces of rebellion and disruption. Placed within the context of the play’s re-​enactment of the Noah story, Mrs Noah as spinning woman may be seen to engage attitudes and behaviours akin to Ball’s creative reinterpretation of the spinning Eve (and delving Adam) and the textual (and related) provocations of the rebels he inspired. Does the contrast, then, between ignorant John who so easily acquiesces to Nicholas’ Noah story, who gets on board with no trouble, and the rebellious Mrs Noah to whom Chaucer cleverly refers, suggest Chaucer’s potential allegiance with the rebels, with Ball and/​or other persons or ideas connected with the Revolt?36 If we follow the trail of the spinning woman a bit further we find an intriguing echo of the Towneley Noah’s phrase in the Miller’s Tale that may help in forming a response to this question. When Absalom arrives at Gervys the blacksmith’s shop to procure the “hoote kultour” (l. 3776) he will eventually use on Nicholas’ backside, Gervys concludes that Absalom must have “som gay gerl” (l. 3769) on his mind. The Miller, however, counters this with “he hadde moore tow on his distaff /​Than Gerveys knew” (ll. 3774–​75).37 Again, while the phrase, as in the Towneley Noah play, communicates that Absalom has other business to which he wishes to attend, Chaucer’s particular reference to a distaff, and the associations with which that woman’s tool resonates including resistance to male authority, suggests we look more closely at Absalom’s use of

35 36

37

Malkyn, states Benson (ed. The Riverside Chaucer, 941, note to l. 3384), was “a typical name for a country girl or serving maid” and “[i]‌n medieval art, it was a regular feature of the chase of the fox for the woman to carry a distaff as a weapon.” Asserting that the Rising, along with other examples of peasant revolts in the later Middle Ages were struggles, in part, against the idea of “serfdom as an intrinsic and permanent condition of sinfulness,“ Lee Patterson, “The Miller’s Tale and the Politics of Laughter,” in Idem, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 264, argues that the Miller’s Tale participates in resisting this form of ideological oppression of the peasant classes. Strohm’s point (“ ‘A Revelle!’,” 36–​39) that the chronicle accounts inaccurately and intentionally present the rebels primarily as peasants may suggest upon which sources Chaucer based his understanding of, response to, and representation of the Revolt. See Bartlett Jere Whiting & Helen Wescott Whiting, “Tow,” in Idem, Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases From English Writings Mainly Before 1500 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1968), 606.

56 Hill his own vertical weapon. Not a poker but, rather, the blade from the front end of a plough, the kultour, in fact, evokes the ploughman of another of the John Ball letters associated with the Peasant Revolt.38 Seeking revenge with his fire-​ heated plough blade, Absalom, reminiscent of the rebels, seeks out the author of the grand narrative in which he has been trapped in order to expose him, as well as that author’s manipulation of that narrative for his own benefit at the expense of others.39 (Might Absalom, in his public anger at another member of the clerical classes, be a version of John Ball?40) And, in fact, what results from Nicholas’ loud shout in response to the branding of his backside is a kind of public revealing, a version even of the ‘Raising of the Cry’ in which neighbours and town folk are called out to bear witness.41 Yet what is born witness to is not, of course, Nicholas and his masterful fabrication, his use of an authoritative text to suit his own needs to trick poor John and make a fool of Absalom. Instead, following the trail of distaff to hot plough blade leads us to the public shaming not of the grand narrator Nicholas but his toothless victim John whom the town, encouraged by Nicholas and Alison, decide is mad: For whan he spak, he was non bore doun With hende Nicholas and Alisoun. They tolden every man that he was wood; He was agast so of Nowelis flood (ll. 3831–​34)42

38 39 40

41

42

Patterson, “The Miller’s Tale,” 257, has already pointed to the reference to millers in these two John Ball letters. Patterson states that the Miller’s portrait of Nicholas is “a biting exercise in cultural criticism, turning the materials of clerical culture against its proprieter and revealing … how defamatory –​and self-​protective –​are its misrepresentations” (ibid., 270). Richard J. Daniels, “Textual Pleasure in The Miller’s Tale,” in The Performance of Middle English Culture, eds. Paxson, Clopper & Tomasch (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), 121, argues that the change in Absalom from “squeamish clerk” to “manly brander” is appealing to Chaucer’s audience. Carter Revard, “The Tow on Absalom’s Distaff and the Punishment of Lechers in Medieval London,” English Language Notes (March 1980):  168–​70, suggests a link to the punishment of sex-​related crimes which required an individual to carry in public a distaff with tow on it. When Alison participates in duping the village regarding her husband has she become his text –​as opposed to John’s or Absalom’s –​to own and manipulate? Chaucer’s reference to her in this passage seems to present her as a source or piece of evidence (textual, corpus) that Nicholas is using to argue his case against John. She is a piece of evidence more than a co-​author of the argument. This Alison, then, is certainly not a spinning woman.

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As John is kept from speaking on his own behalf, the control of Nicholas’ manipulative narrative continues, including a subtle or not so subtle suggestion that commoners such as John are simply not equipped to handle an authoritative text such as the Noah story on their own. After all, because what has John done with that story except to make a fool of himself? Like John, the rebels of the Rising are called mad by multiple chroniclers43 and, like John, the end of their story is less than glorious. They, too, are suppressed and quieted, their attempts to access, reinterpret, and write their own authoritative texts dismissed and destroyed. To return to my previous question:  rather than offering sympathy for the rebels does Chaucer’s portrait of John instead imply the rebels’ textual desires, resistances, and provocations to have been foolish, wrong-​minded, futile? For even the rambunctious spinning woman to whom Chaucer directs his audience and who echoes these desires is also suppressed, her rebellion quelled, by the inevitable flood that comes, and her husband’s ship which sails. As with Chaucer’s characterisation of John, then, one might argue that the extended portrait of Mrs Noah in the Noah plays might well serve as a mockingly comedic reminder to both lower and upper classes of the futility of such textual high mindedness. The access to the Noah story which she obtains, as well as her attempts to resist the control of the words and text that are that story, are eliminated. So, the grand narrative of the Noah episode becomes, as well, a narrative of destruction, overcoming the peasants’ arrogant and disorderly desires. Her rebellion, as with the Revolt, is merely temporary, and the authorities whose grip over words and texts are momentarily loosened regain their power and control –​as does “hende Nicholas” (l. 3832). I do not here want to negate this possible use for, or reception of, the disruptive Mrs Noah, nor do I  want to suggest that audiences might not have responded similarly to the Miller’s Tale and John the Carpenter’s end: a hard lesson learned regarding a desire to challenge hierarchy and the texts which help to enable that hierarchy.44 Very importantly, however, John has never 43 44

See Patterson, “The Miller’s Tale,” 272–​73, for a summary of these references. With specific attention to the Miller’s Tale, Lerer, “The Chaucerian Critique,” 60, argues that the Canterbury Tales demonstrate Chaucer’s attempt to critique and contain “a potential challenge to alternative forms of English literary authority” and suggests that Richard ii’s tournaments and pageants included a similar goal, not least as a response to the Peasants’ Revolt. While seeing in the portrait of John “an act of peasant self-​criticism” (p.  270), Patterson, “The Miller’s Tale,” 258–​73, explores the Miller’s Tale primarily as a critique, instead, of the governing classes and the clergy’s defamatory ideological control of the peasant classes. Yet, Lerer, “The Chaucerian Critique,” 76, concedes that, while Chaucer may have found fault with “competing forms of structures of public drama,” he also “may deploy them with a knowledge of their detail  … fully in keeping with what

58 Hill expressed such a desire. He has never resisted or exhibited characteristics that necessarily align him with the rebels’ insistence that the words and texts which govern and control them be revealed and known. Rather, it is to the spinning, rebellious Mrs Noah whom Chaucer points his audience for the echoing embodiment of those desires. Presented, as is John, with a story that is likely to control her future she attempts a very different way of responding to that story and the authority who holds it over her. Subtly shifting his audience from his version of the Noah story to yet another enacted version which includes her expanded portrait of rebellion, Chaucer suggests that it is to her, rather than John, then, to whom audiences could look for a more accurate representation of the rebels’ disruption of textual control and authority. As with the fiery mark which Absalom’s plough blade leaves on Nicholas’ backside –​the plough blade to which the spinning woman’s distaff provides a trail  –​Mrs Noah remains permanently, if perhaps covertly, suspended within Chaucer’s tale as a rebellious force, a consistent reminder of the mindset and behaviours regarding words, texts, and authority that provided a particularly energising aspect of the Revolt. Thus, while, like the rebels, Mrs Noah is contained and quieted by the end of her rebellion, her resistance and its possibilities resonate and remain available to those willing to see and hear. The same can be said of the spinning woman for whom Mrs Noah offers us a powerful and potent example. Carefully disguised as a mere uppity and therefore comic wife, her insistence on knowing the story, her resistance and attempt to remake that story rather than mutely obey, places her among the ranks of her sister rebel rousers who evoked, performed, and embodied disruptive desires that existed on a much larger scale in the late medieval period, desires which could both terrify and inspire and, as with the rebels of the Great Rising (and Absalom, too), also potentially singe, scar, and resist erasure.

Bibliography

Aston, Margaret. ”Corpus Christi and Corpus Regni: Heresy and the Peasants’ Revolt.” Past and Present 143 (1994): 3–​47. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World, translated by Hélène Iswolsky Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Beadle, Richard, ed. The York Plays. London: Edward Arnold, 1982.

modern readers have come to appreciate as Chaucer’s voracious experimentalism in his work –​his almost uncanny ability to ventriloquize voices of alternative literature.”

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Benson, Larry D., ed. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Biscoglio, Frances M. “ ‘Unspun’ Heroes: Iconography of the Spinning Woman in the Middle Ages.” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 25 (1995): 163–​76. Bobac, Andrea. “Lay Performance of Work and Salvation in the York Cycle.” Comparative Drama 43 (2009): 247–​71. Copeland, Rita. “Why Women Can’t Read: Medieval Hermeneutics, Statutory Law, and the Lollard Heresy Trials.” In Representing Women: Law, Literature, and Feminism, edited by Susan Sage Heinzelman & Zipporah Batshaw Wiseman, 253–​ 86. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. Crane, Susan. “The Writing Lesson of 1381.” In Chaucer’s England: Literature in Historical Context, edited by Barbara Hanawalt, 201–​21. Medieval Studies at Minnesota, 4. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Daniels, Richard J. “ ‘Uxor’ Noah: A Raven or a Dove?” The Chaucer Review 14 (1979): 23–​32. Daniels, Richard J. “Textual Pleasure in The Miller’s Tale.” In The Performance of Middle English Culture, edited by Paxson, Clopper & Tomasch, 111–​23. Woodbridge:  D. S. Brewer, 1998. David, Alfred. “Noah’s Wife’s Flood.” In The Performance of Middle English Culture, edited by Paxson, Clopper & Tomasch, 97–​109. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998. Davis, Norman, ed. Non-​Cycle Plays and Fragments. eets s.s. 1.  London:  Oxford University Press, 1970. Dunn, Alastair. The Great Rising of 1381:  The Peasants’ Revolt and England’s Failed Revolution. Stroud: Tempus, 2002. Evans, Ruth. “Feminist Re-​Enactments: Gender and the Towneley Vxor Noah.” In A Wyf Ther Was:  Essays in Honor of Paule Mertens-​Fonck, edited by Juliette Dor, 141–​54. Liège: Liège Language and Literature, 1992. Froissart, Chronicles. Edited and translated by Geoffrey Brereton. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968. Gash, Anthony. “Carnival Against Lent:  The Ambivalence of Medieval Drama.” In Medieval Literature:  Criticism, Ideology, and History, edited by David Aers, 74–​98. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1986. Gibson, Gail McMurray. The Theatre of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Gibson, Gail McMurray. “The Thread of Life in the Hand of the Virgin.” In Equally in God’s Image: Women in the Middle Ages, edited by Julia Bolton Holloway, Joan Bechtold & Constance S. Wright, 46–​54. New York [etc.]: Peter Lang, 1990. Gillespie, Vincent. “ ‘Lukynge in haly bukes’:  Lectio in Some Late Medieval Spiritual Miscellanies.” In Spätmittelalterliche geistliche Literatur in der Nationalsprache, 2 vols., edited by James Lester Hogg, vol. 2, 1–​ 27. Analecta Carusiana, 106. Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1984.

60 Hill Hector, L. C. & Barbara F. Harvey, ed. and trans. The Westminster Chronicles 1381–​1394. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Helterman, Jeffrey. Symbolic Action in the Plays of the Wakefield Master. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981. Hill, Heather. “A Lesson of Response to U.S. Family Separation Policy: ‘Re-​membering’ a Late Medieval Play of the Slaughter of the Innocents,” Modern Language Association International Symposium: Remembering Voices Lost. Lisbon, Portugal, 2019. Hill-​Vásquez, Heather. “Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, Hoccleve’s Arguing Women, and Lydgate’s Hertford Wives: Lay Interpretation and the Figure of the Spinning Woman in Late Medieval England.” Florilegium 23 (2006 [2008]): 169–​95. Hirschberg, Jeffrey Alan. “Noah’s Wife on the Medieval English State: Iconographic and Dramatic Values of Her Distaff and Choice of the Raven.” Studies in Iconography 2 (1976): 25–​40. Hodges, Laura F. “Noe’s Wife: Type of Eve and Wakefield Spinner.” In Equally in God’s Image: Women in the Middle Ages, edited by Julia Bolton Holloway, Joan Bechtold & Constance S. Wright, 30–​39. New York [etc.]: Peter Lang, 1990. Justice, Steven. Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Kolve, V. A. Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative:  The First Five Canterbury Tales. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984. Lerer, Seth. “The Chaucerian Critique of Medieval Theatricality.” In The Performance of Middle English Culture, edited by Paxson, Clopper & Tomasch, 59–​76. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998. Lumiansky, R. M. & David Mills, eds. The Chester Mystery Cycle, 2 vols. eets s.s. 3, 9. London: Oxford University Press, 1974–​86. Macaulay, G. C., ed., The Complete Works of John Gower, vol. 4:  The Latin Works. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902. Martin, G. H., ed. and trans. Knighton’s Chronicles 1337–​1396. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Mill, Anna J. “The Hull Noah Play.” The Modern Language Review 33 (1938): 489–​505. Mill, Anna J. “Noah’s Wife Again.” Publications of the Modern Language Association 56 (1941): 613–​26. Normington, Katie. Gender and Medieval Drama. Rochester: D. S. Brewer, 2006. Owst, G. R. Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961. Patterson, Lee. “The Miller’s Tale and the Politics of Laughter.” In Idem, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 244–​79. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Paxson, James J., Lawrence M. Clopper & Sylvia Tomasch, eds. The Performance of Middle English Culture: Essays on Chaucer and the Drama in Honor of Martin Stevens. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998. Preest, David, trans. The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham (1376–​1422), with annotations and an introduction by James G.  Clark. Woodbridge:  The Boydell Press, 2005.

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Revard, Carter. “The Tow on Absalom’s Distaff and the Punishment of Lechers in Medieval London.” English Language Notes (March 1980): 168–​70. Rowland, Beryl B. “The Play of the ‘Miller’s Tale’: A Game Within a Game.” The Chaucer Review 5 (1970): 140–​46. Schell, Edgar. “The Limits of Typology and the Wakefield Master’s Processus.” Comparative Drama 25 (1991): 168–​87. Schless, Howard H. “The Comic Element in the Wakefield Noah.” In Studies in Medieval Literature In Honor of Professor Albert Croll Baugh, edited by MacEdward Leach, 229–​44. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961. Spector, Stephen, ed., The N-​Town Play, 2 vols. eets s.s. 11–​12. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Stevens, Martin & A. C. Cawley, eds. The Towneley Plays, 2 vols. eets s.s. 13. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Storm, Melvin. “Uxor and Alison: Noah’s Wife in the Flood Plays and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath.” Modern Language Quarterly 48 (1987): 303–​19. Strohm, Paul. “ ‘A Revelle!’: Chronicle Evidence and the Rebel Voice.” In Idem, Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-​ Century Texts, 34–​ 56. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Travis, Peter. Dramatic Design in the Chester Cycle. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1982. Turner, Victor. The Forest of Symbols:  Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 1967. Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-​Structure. New York, Routledge, 1969. Turner, Victor. The Anthropology of Performance. New York: paj Books, 1988. Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: paj Books, 2001. Whiting, Bartlett Jere & Helen Wescott Whiting. Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases From English Writings Mainly Before 1500. Cambridge, MA:  Belknap Press, 1968. Wyatt, Diana. “Arks, Crafts and Authorities:  Textual and Contextual Evidence for North-​Eastern English Noah Plays.” Yearbook of English Studies 43, Early English Drama (2013): 48–​68. 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, edited and introduced by Barbara A. Bancock, 147–​90. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978.

­c hapter 2

Playing with the Past

History in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament and King Johan Thomas Betteridge Abstract This chapter examines two historical plays, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament and John Bale’s King Johan. Both plays are concerned with similar issues as those addressed by Thomas Elyot in his Bibliotheca Eliotae (1542) and by Thomas More in his History of Richard iii in relation to the status of historical truth. In the Play of the Sacrament, as in More’s work, history is produced through the interaction between past and present as mediated by and for the audience. Bale’s play was written in a very different context and in many ways its historiography provides the key context for Elyot’s scepticism concerning the stability of historical knowledge.

Keywords Croxton Play of the Sacrament –​John Bale –​King John –​Thomas More –​Richard iii

1

Introduction

Most of Thomas Elyot’s definitions in the 1542 edition of his Latin-​English dictionary, Bibliotheca Eliotae, are relatively short but the entry on “Britania” is long and detailed. In this entry Elyot discusses the provenance of the name “Britania” looking back over various historical mentions of the name including that of Julius Caesar. Having completed this discussion he then tells a story concerning the discovery of an ancient manuscript: About .xxx. yeres passed, it hapned in wildshere at a place called Yuy churche … as men were digginge to make a fundation, they founde an holowe stone fast keuered with a nother stone, whiche beinge broken there was in it a booke hauynge lyttell aboue xx. leues (as they sayd) of very thyck velome, wherin was some thyng written …

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004449503_004

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Unfortunately, the priests and cannons who were given this book could not read it and tossed it about so much that it was torn. Later Elyot himself got possession of the volume and passed it to Richard Pace, “than chiefe secretary to the kynges mooste royall majestie, whereof he exceedynglye reioyced, but bycause it was partly rente partly defaced, and blourred with wete, whyche had fallen on it, he coulde not fynde any sentence perfyte.” All that Elyot and Pace managed to derive from this work is that it uses the word “Prytania” for “Britania.” Elyot concludes his discussion of the definition of “Britania” by rejecting outright the idea that the country was founded by the Trojans, “causours of the destruction of theyr owne countreye, by fauourynge the auoutry of Paris and Helene,” and instead suggests the Greeks or a mixture of them as the progenitors of Britain. Elyot’s definition of “Britania” is circuitous. In particular, the story of the finding of the ancient book seems almost pointless. What is being illustrated here which helps with the definition of the word “Britania”? A potential important context for this section of Elyot’s dictionary are, however, the arguments and propaganda used to defend the Henrician Reformation which consistently relied upon assertions of historical ‘facts’ based on nothing more substantial then, “sundry old authentic histories and chronicles,” as cited in the preamble to the Act of Restraint of Appeals (1533). Elyot’s account of the provenance of an ancient document that in the end proved nothing, but which was nonetheless of interest to the king’s chief secretary appears in the context of the Henrician Reformation as an act of parodic resistance. What is the status of key legitimating historical arguments if they were based on such obscure and uncertain evidence? In these terms the concluding comments rejecting a Trojan/​Imperial past for Britain and in its place the advancement of a Grecian origin for the country are also potentially critical of Henry’s rule. The history of “Britania” as it appears in Bibliotheca Eliotae reflects a deep scepticism of the legitimating potential of historical knowledge. There appears to be in this passage no relationship between the status of the work found in Wiltshire and Pace’s pleasure in receiving it. Indeed it is possible that the ambiguous nature of the document made it more useful to Pace, not less. Elyot was a learned writer and a humanist. He was committed to the idea of returning ad fontes, to the original un-​corrupted sources of learning. But what did this mean in the context of weaponization, the use of history to justify the Henrician Reformation by apologists such as Pace? In his seminal work, Tudor Historical Thought, F. J. Levy draws a clear distinction between medieval and humanist history on the basis of the latter’s greater emphasis on evaluating sources. For Levy medieval history was distinguished by its preparedness to sacrifice historical accuracy for predetermined religious

64 Betteridge narratives and its failure in relation to chronicle history to have a principle for selectivity. Despite a number of important recent studies of Tudor historiography Levy’s key arguments still stand.1 As Levy points out many medieval chronicles appear to work on the basis of including everything they can on the basis that their role is to record or capture the past on the page in almost graphic terms. Thomas More’s Richard iii is a key work in Tudor Historical Thought. Levy comments: “More, for all his minor inaccuracies, was perfectly capable of evaluating sources. When he became deliberately vague, when whisperers began to mutter among the pages, this too was part of the total effect.”2 More’s Richard iii is knowingly historical. It consistently invites its reader to witness the historical record in the process of being made. The most striking example of this process is the famous passage when More comments on the fact that the proclamation announcing Lord Hastings’ execution had clearly been written before Hastings had stood trial and been condemned: Now this proclamation was made within two hours after that he [Hastings, T. B.] was beheaded, and it was so curiously composed, and so fairly written in parchment in so well a set hand, and therewith of itself so long a process, that every child might well perceive that it was prepared before.3 More’s sense of the provisional, and frankly untrustworthy, nature of the historical record is, however, kept at arms distance by the confidence he articulates through his text in the reader’s ability to discern the truth. Richard iii is a celebration of the historian’s craft working with a learned reader to produce truthful history. 2

History in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament

The Play of the Sacrament has a strange place in the history of medieval English drama. As David Lawton has recently suggested it is a play which seems overdetermined as regards the meanings that critics have ascribed to it. In particular, recent criticism has concentrated considerable attention on the status of Jewish characters in the play, especially their possible status as representing 1 See Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England II: c.1307 to the Early Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1982). 2 F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1967), 71–​72. 3 St Thomas More, The History of Richard III and Selections from the English and Latin Poems, ed. Richard S. Sylvester (New Haven: Yale University Press: 1976), 54–​55.

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another key ‘alien’ figure in medieval England  –​Lollards. It is important to note, however, that the Play of the Sacrament clearly states in its Banns that it is based on and is staging a real historical event. secundus [vexillator]. S[o]‌vereyns, and yt lyke yow to here þe purpoos of þis play That [ys] representyd now in yower syght, Whych in Aragon was doon, þe sothe to saye, In Eraclea, that famous cyté, aryght: Therin wonneth a merchaunte of mekyll myght Syr Arystorye was called hys name … (ll. 9–​14).4 The Banns for the Play of the Sacrament stress the location of the events depicted in the play and later the date at which they happened. In this sense the play is historical. But it also has the tension between history and revelation at its heart. The Play of the Sacrament dramatises the re-​enactment of Christ’s Passion as a historical event which took place when five Jews led by Jonathas buy a Host from Syr Arystorye and subject it to the same tortures that Christ suffered. The play ends with Jews converting to Christianity and being welcomed into the Church by a Bishop. The Jewish characters first stab the Host with daggers and when it bleeds they resort to ever more drastic measures to try and stop the flow. This leads to Jonathas losing an arm when they nail the Host to a post. A cauldron the Jews have thrown the Host in boils over with blood. Finally, in desperation Jonathas and his companions place it in an oven: jasdon. I stoppe thys ovyn, wythowtyn dowte; With clay I clome yt uppe ryght fast. (ll. 709–​10) Despite Jasdon’s best efforts to seal the oven, however, it bursts open to reveal an image of Christ with “woundys bleding” (l. 712, s.d.) who then directly addresses Jews: jhesus …   Oh ye merveylows Jewys,   Why ar ye to yowr kyng onkynd,

4 ‘The Play of the Sacrament’, in Medieval Drama:  An Anthology, ed. Greg Walker (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 215.

66 Betteridge   And [I]‌so bytterly bowt yow to my blysse? (ll. 719–​21) Not surprisingly the Jews are instantly converted and recognise Christ as their saviour. As a number of critics have noted, one of the central concerns of the Play of the Sacrament is to defend the doctrine of transubstantiation. It achieves this, however, through complex theatrical machinery. Indeed, there is a sense in which Jasdon’s emphasis on the sturdiness of the oven is akin to a modern magician emphasising that the hat is empty before pulling out the rabbit. The Play of the Sacrament claims to be staging a historical event and also restages Christ’s crucifixion –​which is itself both an event from history and the point in time from which all human history is made meaningful. The crucifixion is at once historical and ahistorical. In this context it could be argued that the status of Jews as Jews becomes heightened since their presence encourages the audience to draw links between the events in Spain during the fifteenth century that the play stages and those in Palestine when Christ was killed. Sarah Beckwith has commented in relation to the York Corpus Christi plays: In placing the body of Christ at once in the very body of an actor, and in the community of participation that was those who received, as well as that which was received, Resurrection theater embodies sacramentality through the resources of acknowledgement rather than knowledge, trust and imagination rather than doctrine.5 Beckwith’s argument is that during the York Corpus Christi plays a kind of sacramental time travel took place with the audience/​community turning the streets of York into a Resurrection theatre so that the action of the play exists in the present and at the same time through an act of historical imagination in Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion. The participants, audience and actors, understood that they were taking part in a drama but also that their performance harked back to events that had happened and, in a sense, would continue to happen over and over again until the Second Coming. There is an inherently apocalyptic, and for non-​Christians implicitly violent, undercurrent to both the York Corpus Christi plays and the Play of the Sacrament since by looking back to historical events in the present they also look forward to the moment when from a Christian perspective human history would end, and Christ return to earth.

5 Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 89.

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The Play of the Sacrament embodies a clearly apocalyptic logic since it stages one of the key signs of the Second Coming, the conversion of Jews. In these terms David Lawton suggests: “The Jews are the true Christians, who know the value of the Host throughout against Christian backsliders, the merchant who steals it and sells it and the priest who fails to guard it. Though Jonathas begins as torturer, he comes to undergo exemplary pain, pain that empowers. …  ”6 The Jewish characters are being played by actors who, along with the other performers of the drama, are giving the audience a theatrical history lesson. In these terms the Play of the Sacrament is less communal and more directive then the York Corpus Christi play. As Heather Hill suggests, “the Croxton play transforms what seems an inadvertent re-​enactment of the Passion into an opportunity for redemption, carefully shepherded and controlled by the church representatives. …  ”7 The play ends with a clear assertion of clerical authority in the person of Episcopus, a Bishop, who enters and brings the drama to a safe conclusion: Crystys commandementys x there bee. Kepe well them; doo as I yow tell. Almyght God shall yow please in every degré, And so shall ye save yowr sollys from hell. For there ys payn and sorow cruell And in heuyn there ys both joy and blysse, More than eny towng can tell. (ll. 996–​1002) The Play of the Sacrament ends with order being restored, albeit potentially by a player in the role of a Bishop. In the process of the popular devotional aspects of the Host miracle, its ability to simultaneously collapse history and look towards the Second Coming are integrated back into the body of the Church, along with the now converted Jews. Gail McMurray Gibson comments that “the Croxton Play of the Sacrament is not a play about judgement and punishment, but about penance and healing acceptance. It is a play that assumes the presence of doubt and is just as forthright about assuming the power of drama to restore from doubt.”8 This is undoubtedly one on of the key 6 David Lawton, “Sacrilege and Theatricality: The Croxton Play of the Sacrament,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33 (2003): 296. 7 Heather Hill-​Vasquez, “The precious body of Christ that they treytyn in their hondis: ‘Miraclis Pleyinge’ and the Croxton ‘Play of the Sacrament’,” Early Theatre 4 (2001): 54. 8 Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theatre or Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1989), 38.

68 Betteridge messages of the drama, it is however important to place that the conversion of Jews at the end of the Play of the Sacrament within the context of the pervasive and violent persecution that Jewish people suffered throughout the medieval period. Michael Mark Chemers comments that “the represented violence against Jewish characters in plays like the Play of the Sacrament … cannot be separated from the operation of medieval anti-​Semitism, in which both this fictional trauma and centuries of real violence against real Jews is legitimized and encouraged.”9 The incorporation of the Jewish characters in the Play of the Sacrament into the community takes place by eliding the violence implicit in their conversion. The play can only conclude once there are only Christians left on stage. As Robert L. A. Clark and Claire Sponsler suggest: In the Play of the Sacrament issues of body and embodiment are played out in a fantasy of ever-​widening circles of inclusion and incorporation –​ the body of the Host, the body of Christ, the body of believers, the bodies of believers, and, finally, the othered bodies hovering on the outer edge of the circle who, this time anyway, are absorbed into it.10 This absorption, however, relies on a moment of violence in which the anti-​ Semitic fantasy of a world without Jewish people is enacted on stage. There is an apparent historiographic confidence running through the Play of the Sacrament that however inscrutable God’s ways are to humanity and however badly humans behave, like the Jews in the play or the Christian merchant Aristorius, there is a pattern to history. And that the Church is the proper custodian of this resolution. More’s Richard iii may appear a long way from the Play of the Sacrament. This is partly, however, due to misleading modern assumptions about a difference between ‘medieval’ and ‘humanist’ historiography. In Richard iii, More asks his readers to notice history in the making, through rumours, half-​truths and dubious documents. In the Play of the Sacrament the audience see history staged through the skills of the performances and complex stage effects. The Play of the Sacrament relies on its audience being able to engage imaginatively with the events it depicts in order to discern their essential truthfulness. It also, 9 10

Michael Mark Chemers, “Anti-​Semitism, Surrogacy, and the Invocation of Mohammed in the Play of the Sacrament,” Comparative Drama 41 (2007): 36. Robert L.  A. Clark and Claire Sponsler, “Othered Bodies:  Racial Cross-​Dressing in the Mistère de la Sainte Hosties and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29 (1999): 69.

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however, relies on them ignoring the erasure of Jewishness as the price paid for theatrical closure. There is a confidence running through this play that the audience does have the skills to see miracles staged and to be able to separate historical truth from its performance on stage. In this context the role of the Church is crucial since it operates like More’s narrator through the figures of Episcopus to frame and guide the reader’s/​audience’s understanding of the historical events being depicted. 3

History in John Bale’s King Johan

Peter Happé in his authoritative edition of King Johan distinguishes three key sources for John Bale’s play:  English history, the idea of King John as a proto-​martyr for Protestantism as developed by a number of early English Protestants, most successfully by William Tyndale, and matter intended to satirise the Catholic Church.11 The relationship between these different sources and history is a key driver for the play since at one level in this work Bale plots an escape from history understood as popish corruption. In King Johan the audience is given the certainty that is offered at the end of the Play of the Sacrament, but it is located in Imperyall Majestye not the Church. Bale also lacks the confidence of the writer of the Play of the Sacrament or indeed that of More in the ability of the reader or audience to properly discern historical truth. King Johan is ultimately a play in which history’s truth can only be taught and handed down by an all-​powerful secular ruler –​and even he fails, certainly given the almost irresistible power of the play’s papist vices. King Johan opens with a history lesson or perhaps more accurately, a meta-​ history lesson. In his opening speech he boasts he is king of England: To shew what I am I thynke yt convenyent: Johan, Kyng of Ynglond, the cronyclys doth me call. My granfather was an emperowre excellent, My fathere, a kyng by successyon lyneall, A kyng my brother, lyke as to hym ded fall. (ll. 8–​12) As in the Play of the Sacrament Bale’s work explicitly announces itself as a play based on historical events. In this context the reference to chronicles is

11

Peter Happé, ed., The Complete Plays of John Bale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985–​86), vol. 1, 14–​16.

70 Betteridge significant but also misleading. The King John of Bale’s drama is not the King John of the chronicles. Or perhaps more accurately what King Johan shows its audience is that the reality of what happened in King John’s realm is not what is recorded in the chronicles. The Play of the Sacrament asserts a number of times that the events it depicts are true and fit within an overarching narrative in which Christ’s promises are revealed through time in the custody of the Church. King Johan is a lesson in revisionist history in which the play teaches the audience not only what really happened during John’s realm, from Bale’s perspective, but also a more general set of historiographic lessons. And the first person to learn these lessons is King John himself at the very beginning of the play. Having entered and boasted to the audience about winning the crown he is then confronted by a woman, a poor widow, who has come to seek redress for wrongs done her. [englande]. Than I trust yowr Grace wyll waye a poore wedowes cause,   Ungodly usyd, as ye shall know in short clause. (ll. 22–​23) John asks the widow what is the matter and who has caused her distress. Englande tells him that it was Suche lubbers as hath dysgysed Heads in their hoodes, Whych in ydelnes do lyve by other menns goodes. (ll. 36–​37) John is concerned and at this point asks the poor widow who she is:

k. johan. Lete me know thy name or I go ferther with the. englande. Ynglond, syr, Ynglond my name is; ye may trust me. k. johan. I mervell ryght sore how thow commyst chaungyd thus. (ll. 40–​42)

John seems not to notice the irony of a monarch not recognising the country he is meant to be ruling. It is also noticeable, however, that while superficially this opening exchange seems to reflect a similar approach to history as the Play of the Sacrament, in practice what is happening here is very different. Despite their behaviour it is clear that the Jews at one level ‘know’ the Host is Christ and although they are unwitting participants in the miracle they provoke they are repeating a moment of Christian history. The historical lesson of the Play of the Sacrament is that history contains an essential truth that even the play’s Jews are forced to be part of. John’s position is very different, as is illustrated when his conversation with England is interrupted by the entry of Sedicyon:

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sedicyon. What, yow ij alone? I wyll tell tales, by Jesus!   And saye that I see yow fall here to bycherye. (ll. 43–​44)

The entry of Sedicyon introduces an entirely new element into the play. In particular, what Sedicyon represents is a principle of corruption in all its forms, political, social and sexual. King Johan dramatises in its first part the historical effects of Sedicyon on England and specifically the way in which Sedicyon and the other vices in the play plot and cause John’s downfall. The second part of the play moves the action to the present and depicts Imperyall Majestye’s victory over the vices. The play consistently offers the audience lessons in historical and political interpretation through the person of King John who having not recognised England at the play’s opening repeats this failure throughout the first half of the play. For example, he does not recognise Sedicyon as a vice and has to ask him who he is:

k. johan. What arte thow, felow, that seme so braggyng bolde?   Sedicyon. I am Sedycyon, that with the Pope wyll hold   So long as I have a hole with in my breche. (ll. 89–​91)

When John tries to reform his realm and purge it of the vices, he finds that his natural allies, Nobylyte and Cyvyle Order, have been corrupted by Sedicyon and his fellows through the use of private confession. And when he turns to Commynnalte John finds that the support he needs is lacking. The people have been blinded by the vices dressed as clergy:

k. johan.

How cummyst thow so blynd? I pray the, good fellow, tell me. commynnalte. For want of knowlage in Christes lyvely veryte. englande. This spirituall blyndnes bryngeth men owt of the waye   And cause them oft tymes ther kynges to dyssobaye. (ll. 1552–​55)

The Play of the Sacrament depends on its audience being able to imaginatively engage with the events it depicts, even to the extent of ignoring the obvious theatrical trickery of some of the ‘special effects’, in order to discern the truthfulness of the events it depicts. King Johan at one level, particularly in Act i, appears to articulate a similar confidence in its audience to understand and learn from John’s constant failures to see what is happening before his eyes. The audience of Bale’s play are given a lesson in how to see under the surface

72 Betteridge of history and discern papist corruption through its staging of the vices’ ultimately successful attempts to undermine John’s rule. King Johan, however, ultimately articulates a very different historiography to either the Play of the Sacrament or More’s Richard iii. This is illustrated at the end of Act i when a character called The Interpretour enters to explain to the audience what they have just seen and what will happen in Act ii. At a superficial level The Interpretour has a role similar to that of Episcopus, both characters synthesising the message of the play they appear in are associated with a meta-​historical discourse that positions the action of the plays within an overarching narrative. Episcopus, however, appears at the end of the play and is clearly part of the play’s dramatic world. The Interpretour’s appearance in the hinge between Act i and ii means it is not possible for this figure to produce real closure and, at the same time, there is a clear sense that The Interpretour’s role is extra-​dramatic. More specifically, in explaining the play The Interpretour suddenly introduces an entirely new and contemporary set of references to the action: Thys noble Kyng Johan, as a faythfull Moyses Withstode proude Pharao for hys poore Israel, Myndynge to brynge it out of the Lande of Derkenesse. But the Egyptyanes ded agaynst hym so rebell That hys poore people ded styll in the desart dwell, Tyll that duke Josue, whych was our late Kynge Henrye, Clerely brought us in to the lande of mylke and honye. (ll. 1107–​13) The Interpretour’s speech collapses history into contemporary politics in a way that has not been prefigured during the proceeding action. The historical and political become one with the implication that the kind of closure produced by Episcopus in the Play of the Sacrament, which involves an acceptance of the playing out of Christian history, could be produced through the actions of rulers like Henry or Imperyall Majestye. Bale, however, ultimately leaves the audience in no doubt that the process of reformation will never be complete. For example, when Imperyall Majestye catches Sedicyon (after the character Veritas, who represents a reformed clergy, has left the stage to preach to the people), the vice tells him:

sedicyon. In your parlement commaunde yow what ye wyll,   The Popes ceremonyes shall drowne the Gospell styll.   Some of the byshoppes at your injunctyons slepe,

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  Some laugh and go bye, and some can playe boo pepe. (ll. 2522–​25)

When Imperyall Majestye questions the veracity of Sedicyon’s boasts, the vice asks him: sedicyon. What can in the worlde more evydent wytnesse bere?   First of all consydre the prelates do not preache   But persecute those that the Holy Scriptures teache. (ll. 2539–​41) Sedicyon is referring here to the current behaviour of the Bishops in mid-​ sixteenth-​century England. When the character asks Imperyall Majestye to look at the world to see the truth of his boast of the continuation of papist power, this point is also being made to the play’s audience. They too are being asked to apply King Johan’s history lesson to the present day. It appears, however, that this lesson will be ongoing. In particular, King Johan constructs a tension between different kinds of language. As Rainer Pineas has pointed out, King John is “quite incapable of speaking without citing Scripture,”12 while the vices are equally incapable of speaking without introducing confusion, bawdy jokes and linguistic confusion. This includes creating parodies of Church rituals which at times seem to come close to nonsense, which from Bale’s perspective was probably how he viewed them: dissymulacyon.         sedicyon.

12

I owght to conseder yowr Holy Father-​hode, From my fyrst infancy ye have ben to me so good. For Godes sake, wytsave to geve me yowr blyssyng here, A pene et culpa that I may stand this day clere. Knele. From makyng cuckoldes? Mary, that wer no mery chere. dissymulacyon. A pena et culpa: I trow thow canst not here. sedicyon. Yea, with a cuckoldes wyff ye have dronke dobyll bere. (ll. 845–​51)

Rainer Pineas, “William Tyndale’s influence on John Bale’s polemical use of history,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 53 (1962): 88.

74 Betteridge Dissymilacyon as a vice knows that the blessing he is asking for is doubly meaningless since he does not really want to repent and even if he did, Sedicyon is clearly not capable of granting him absolution. At times in King Johan the vices seem to be in danger of losing all control of their speech and as with the episode in More’s Richard iii, where the gap between the writing of the proclamation of Hastings and his execution is used to teach the audience an important historical truth about history, the vices often reveal to the audience the reality of papist power. For example, when Usurpid Powre (as the Pope) upbraids Dissymulacyon, when the latter boasts on stage about the tricks/​religious practices, the clergy/​vices will deploy to maintain their power after they have defeated King John:                 the pope.  

The Popys powr shall be abowe the powrs all, And eare confessyon a matere nessessary. Ceremonys wyll be the ryghtes ecclesyastycall. He shall sett up ther both pardowns and purgatory; The Gospell prechyng wyll be an heresy. Be this provyssyon and be soch other kyndes We shall be full suere all waye to have owr myndes. [Usurped Power returns as the Pope …] Ah, ye are a blabbe! I perseyve ye wyll tell all. I lefte ye not here to be so lyberall. (ll. 1019–​27)

In King Johan the vices do ‘babble’, but they also have the theatrical power to constantly endanger the peace and prosperity of the realm. Bale’s play ends on a very different note to the unifying conclusion of the Play of the Sacrament:

cyvyle order.            

Praye to the Lorde that hir grace maye contynewe The dayes of Nestor to our sowles consolacyon And that hir ofsprynge maye lyve also to subdewe The great Antichriste with hys whole generacyon In Helias sprete, to the confort of thys nacyon; Also to preserve hir most honourable counsell, To the prayse of God and glorye of the Gospell. (ll. 2685–​91)

King Johan appears to have been largely written in the 1530s, with further revisions in the 1540s and 1550s. This final speech was clearly a late addition since it refers to Elizabeth i. But in fact this process of rewriting and the deferment in terms of the logic of the play would have to be continuous. The kind of

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closure produced at the end of the Play of the Sacrament is not available for Bale. The logic of Bale’s position is that Imperyall Majestye has taken on the role of Episcopus and in the process combined religious and secular power in a way that is profoundly Henrician but also potentially radical in that it creates the possibility, only fully spelt out by the Fifth Monarchists one hundred years after Bale wrote, that the action of secular power could in itself bring about the final reform of the realm, the ushering in of a truly Christian commonwealth and the end of history. 4

Conclusion

John Foxe’s play, Christus Triumphans, ends with an explicit invocation of the Second Coming: [ecclesia]



But what new light, what wondrous fragrance of perfume suddenly breathes upon my senses? And now the very earth seems to tremble. [Here from the upper part of the theater, when the curtains open, are shown as if from heaven thrones with books placed upon them. At the same time garments are lowered in which Ecclesia is dressed and prepared for the wedding.] chorus 5. Quickly then, sisters, let each one see that her torches are ready. The bridegroom is now near the door. … chorus of virgins. Spectators, now you see the bride decked out and all things in readiness. Nothing remains except the bridegroom himself, who will bring the final catastrophe to our stage.13

Foxe’s play is written within a similar historical discourse as Bale’s, albeit with the emphasis in this work being on the inevitability of an apocalyptic Second Coming. Christus Triumphans is a history play that literally ends with the end of history. The Jewish characters in the Play of the Sacrament ultimately make such a closure impossible. Anthony Bale has recently suggested,

13

Two Latin Comedies by John Foxe the Martyrologist: Titus et Gesippus –​Christus Triumphans, ed. and trans. John Hazel Smith (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), 363 and 371.

76 Betteridge “the eternal obstinacy of the Jews … frequently takes the form of the Jews perceived inability, as in the Croxton Play, to read and interact correctly with Christian texts and images, a failed legible practice in and of themselves.”14 At the end of the Play of the Sacrament, after his conversion, Jonathas tells Episcopus that: Now wyll walke by contre and cos Owr wyckyd lyvyng for to restore And trust in God, of myghtys most, Never to offend as we have don before. (ll. 884–​87) Despite their conversion the Jewish characters still seem to have no settled place. As Bale suggests there is a sense in which the anti-​Semitic figure of the endlessly wandering Jews remains as an echo, obstinately preventing the final closure of the play. Elyot’s discussion of the providence of the word “Britania” is a defence of the provisional and always partial nature of historical knowledge. It reflects a sense that history can never be finished or complete. In the context of the Henrician Reformation this was an act of resistance against the constant attempts of Henry’s apologists to use history to impose finality and closure. John Bale’s King Johan reflects this agenda, and also its failure in its multiple endings and additions. Elyot’s work, and in a very different way the Play of the Sacrament, reflects a sense of history that the confessional Christianity of Foxe and Bale, and their Catholic opponents was increasingly to reject during the course of the Reformation.

Bibliography

Bale, Anthony. Feeling Persecuted. Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages. London, Reaktion Books, 2010. Beckwith, Sarah. Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Chemers, Michael Mark. “Anti-​Semitism, Surrogacy, and the Invocation of Mohammed in the Play of the Sacrament.” Comparative Drama 41 (2007): 25–​55.

14

Anthony Bale, Feeling Persecuted. Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages (London, Reaktion Books, 2010), 113.

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Clark, Robert L.  A. & Claire Sponsler. “Othered Bodies:  Racial Cross-​Dressing in the Mistère de la Sainte Hosties and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29 (1999): 61–​87. Gibson, Gail McMurray. The Theatre or Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages. Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1989. Gransden, Antonia. Historical Writing in England II: c.1307 to the Early Sixteenth Century. London: Routledge, 1982. Happé, Peter, ed. The Complete Plays of John Bale, 2 vols. Cambridge:  D. S.  Brewer, 1985–​86. Hill-​Vasquez, Heather. “The precious body of Christ that they treytyn in their hondis:  ‘Miraclis Pleyinge’ and the Croxton ‘Play of the Sacrament’.” Early Theatre 4 (2001): 53–​72. Lawton, David. “Sacrilege and Theatricality:  The Croxton Play of the Sacrament.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33 (2003): 281–​309. Levy, F. J. Tudor Historical Thought. San Marino: Huntington Library, 1967. More, St. Thomas. The History of Richard III and Selections from the English and Latin Poems, edited by Richard S. Sylvester. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. Pineas, Rainer. “William Tyndale’s influence on John Bale’s polemical use of history.” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 53 (1962): 79–​96. Smith, John Hazel, ed. & trans. Two Latin Comedies by John Foxe the Martyrologist: Titus et Gesippus –​Christus Triumphans. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973. Walker, Greg, ed. “The Play of the Sacrament.” In Medieval Drama: An Anthology, edited by Greg Walker, 212–​33. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.

­c hapter 3

Historical Elements in Bale’s Plays Peter Happé Abstract John Bale took history very seriously and made it part of his polemic and his dramaturgy. His bibliographical work was much concerned with chronicles, which he collected for his personal use, in some cases saving them from destruction at the dissolution of the monasteries. In his plays he constructs and develops a number of different approaches to historical ideas, and the historical material is selected and applied according to his varied mission as a preacher through drama. In this paper I shall consider the ways he uses history in three plays which have different dramatic methods a well as having different aspects of historical thinking: God’s Promises, Three Laws and King Johan. These plays show that his application of historical detail was developed over a number of years in response to changing needs and that his historiography could address a variety of objectives.

Keywords John Bale –​King John –​Henry viii –​ Elizabeth i –​ Protestantism –​ morality plays –​ The Vice –​ papacy



1

Bale’s interest in history and the use he made of it were manifest over a number of years. Apart from his achievements as a dramatist, his other literary activities included collecting books, many of them chronicles, as well as cataloguing them and writing summaries, and at times he had extensive freedom to enter libraries and to correspond with other scholars who might be interested in his work. At one point when he had to flee from Dublin, he says he left two cartloads of books behind.1 Before his conversion at some point in the early 1530s 1 For a list of his books lost in Ireland in 1553, see the Scriptorum Illustrium Maioris Britanniae … Catalogus (Basle:  Oporinus, 1557–​59), vol. 2, 159–​67 (Catalogus hence forward); and for

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004449503_005

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he had spent many years studying the legendary history of the Carmelite order in which he had grown up. This included a compilation of works dealing with the order itself, which he later completed up to the dissolution of the order, and a collection of lives of Carmelite saints.2 It seems likely that it was during his early work that he acquired an interest in documentation which remained with him for many years, and that he was inclined to look for a coherent interpretation of history.3 Perhaps the chief motivation was a Protestant one in that this new religion needed a scriptural authority for its critical beliefs and in the same vein the history of man’s achievement was seen to pale before the reassurance of God’s presence. It might be better to think of his concern with history as comprising a number of different approaches, as he sought to respond to changing times and circumstances in a challenging era. What we know about his life indicates that before his conversion he wrote some lost plays in accordance with his Catholic faith.4 After his conversion he became deeply engaged in presenting Protestant doctrines through writing a further series of plays, most of which are also lost. These plays owed something to the medieval Catholic mystery cycles which were still being performed in several places including York, Chester, and Coventry in the early 1530s, but Bale meant his plays to be a Protestant version written to comply with his new, evolving faith. The subjects he chose for the individual plays are similar to many in the traditional cycles.5 Later in the autobiographical entry in the Catalogus he acknowledged that he had the support of the ‘pious’ Thomas Cromwell for his commitment to polemical drama, presumably because his work as writer, director and performer was a part

2

3 4

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his notebook which he used when collecting information about books (Bodley ms Selden supra 64) see Index Britanniae Scriptorum: John Bale’s Index of British and Other Writers, eds. Reginald Lane Poole & Mary Bateson, intr. Caroline Brett & James Carley (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990). Appendix iii, 484–​95, of the latter lists chronicles identified by Bale. Bodleian Library ms Selden Supra 41, fol. 107–​93 and 197–​220. For a detailed description of Bale’s manuscript compilations see Leslie P. Fairfield, John Bale: Mythmaker for the English Reformation (West Lafayette:  Purdue University Press, 1976), 157–​64; and W.  T. Davies, “A Bibliography of John Bale,” Oxford Bibliographical Society, Proceedings and Papers 5.4 (1940): 204–​79. All the chroniclers he mentions at King Johan, ll. 2200–​02, are included in the Catalogus, vol. 2, 159–​67. As with the plays about the Lord’s Prayer and the Seven Deadly Sins which were included in his record in Anglorum Heliades but omitted in the corresponding places in the Illustrium Maioris Britanniae … Summarium (Wesel:  Dirk van der Straten, 1548)  (Summarium hence forward), a work printed after his conversion, see my edition of Complete Plays of John Bale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985–​86), vol 1, 9. See my “John Bale’s Lost Mystery Cycle,” Cahiers Élisabéthains 60 (2001): 1–​14.

80 Happé of the developing Protestant mission in which Cromwell was engaged.6 On Cromwell’s fall in 1540 Bale went into exile and he does not appear to have sustained his active participation in the drama for a time. It was probably at this period in his life that he studied history most extensively, noticeably after the years when he was active as a dramatist or a performer. These were years when it was increasingly expedient, indeed necessary from a Protestant viewpoint, to shed new light on the past, or to re-​create it with new criteria. In the years of this first exile he turned to writing polemical prose tracts and volumes in which he sought to uphold the Protestant cause. Some of these, like The Actes of Englysh Votaries (Antwerp, 1546), had a narrative which implied a continuing historical analysis.7 Eventually he had four of his plays, which had been written about ten years earlier, printed at Wesel, probably in 1547–​48, perhaps in anticipation of being able to return safely to Protestant England now ruled by Edward vi. Once back he did apparently resume his dramatic interest as there was a rehearsal of Three Laws in preparation for a performance at Winchester in 1551, though it is not known whether it did reach the stage.8 Later, in 1553, he arranged performances of three of his biblical plays at Kilkenny in defiance of local Catholic sentiment.9 That year marked his departure for his second exile as he sought refuge from Queen Mary’s regime which was aiming at the restoration of aspects of traditional religion (1553–​59). In these years he continued to write polemical non-​dramatic works, but his main effort was the completion of his monumental Catalogus of English authors which was eventually printed in 1557–​59. Though this was finalised after the years of his known dramatic compositions it is noteworthy that he constructed within it a polemical history of the deeds of the popes as Acta Romanorum Pontificum, as well as compiling many short historical accounts of authors’ lives. The Acta was eventually printed separately from the Catalogus (Frankfurt-​am-​Main, 1567, with a German translation in 1566). There is no doubt that his intention to preserve the writings of previous generations was undertaken systematically and he 6 Catalogus, vol. 1, 702. 7 For other historical schemes, especially those dealing with the periodisation of historical material including the release of Satan after he had been imprisoned for 1000  years by Christ, see Fairfield, John Bale, 69 and 75–​79. This legend appeared in Thomas Kirchmeyer’s Pammachius (1538) which Bale translated. As the date of translation of this play is unknown it is not certain when Bale first encountered it  –​possibly too late for direct influence on King Johan. 8 John Bale, An Expostulation or complaint agaynst the blasphemyes of a frantyke papist of Hamshyre ([London: S. Mierdman, 1552?]), C2v-​C3 (stc 1294). 9 The Vocacyon of Johan Bale to the bishoprick of Ossorie in Irelande ([Wesel: Hugh Singleton?], 1553), Cviiiv (stc1307).

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was successful in preserving information about writers and books otherwise unknown to us. During the years of this narrative there are a series of occasions when Bale’s changing interest in the formation of a historical approach shows itself, and the three plays considered here may help to reveal the phases in the development of his ideas about history. These are Three Laws which divides the whole of history into three ages; God’s Promises which gives an overview of history, structured upon the promises given by God to an outstanding man in each of the seven ages, the traditional stages of salvation history; and King Johan which turns upon a parallel perceived between King John and King Henry viii.10 The emphasis on numerical systems indicates that he was seeking order or a pattern. The first two were printed at Wesel in 1547–​48,11 but as far as we know King Johan remained in a much revised manuscript, as we shall see. Each of these plays has a historical scheme or structure of its own, and we should notice that they are not necessarily compatible. They each are constructed to meet a situation which is unique to them and in that process Bale’s attitude to and exploitation of history was developing on individual and largely separable lines. As we shall see, Three Laws, which he probably wrote before 1536 and may well be the first of the four surviving printed plays, depends upon an overview which divides the whole of history from Adam to John the Baptist into the ages containing the Law of Nature, the Law of Moses, and the Law of Christ. This scheme is found in the fifth chapter of St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, and it was followed by St Augustine, as well as more recently, the widely used Middle English Speculum Sacerdotale.12 The play is notable for the expectation of the future with the anticipated Second Coming of Christ, as well its version of the past. Striking too is the fact that Bale makes very little reference to actual historical events. The action is largely conducted by means of abstractions, as in a morality play. It includes the theatrically effective Infidelity who Bale showed at his destructive work, with his appropriate henchmen, in all 10

It is said that Henry himself commented upon the parallel, presumably independently of Bale’s work. See John Bale’s King John, ed. Barry B. Adams (San Marino: The Huntingdon Library, 1969), 26, n. 5. In the following discussion I have used the spelling Johan for Bale’s protagonist, and John for the historical person. 11 John Bale, A Comedy concernynge the thre lawes of nature, Moses and Christe (Wesel: Dirk van der Straten, [1547–​48?]); and idem, A Tragedye or enterlude manyfestyng the chefe promyses of God unto man by all ages in the olde lawe, from the fall of Adam to the incarncyon of the lorde Jesus Christ (Wesel: Dirk van der Straten, [1548?]). 12 See Speculum Sacerdotale, ed. from British Museum Ms. Additional 36791 by E.  H. Weatherly, eets o.s. 200 (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), 7–​8; Fairfield, John Bale, 193, n. 25; and Thora B. Blatt, The Plays of John Bale (Copenhagen: C. E. G. Gad, 1968), 68.

82 Happé three ages. But the last age of the Law of Christ is managed by Vindicta Dei, Deus Pater and Fides Christiana. Infidelity is sent burning into hell (l. 1853 and s.d.). After the unique triumph of Henry viii, here called Josias, in putting the pope to flight, Christi Lex celebrates that the realm of England is on the true path (l. 2030). The caveat is “if they now folowe it wyselye” (l. 2031) they shall receive salvation under the rule of Edward vi. This points to the necessity to sustain the work of the Reformation as it is not yet complete, a theme notable in King Johan. God’s Promises is strictly ordered into seven acts each of which in parallel contains a dialogue between Pater Coelestis and a chosen figure from biblical history or legend stretching from Adam to John the Baptist. The purpose is to show the way to salvation by encouraging faith in God’s promises made after Adam bewailed his fall (l. 29). In each act God shows disapproval of the ways of men and there is retribution, but new promises are made one by one whereby God’s mercy will be shown in spite of the shortcomings. It is noticeable that in most episodes there is a complaint about idolatry, as well as a portrayal of God as merciful even though each act begins with an account of human shortcomings. There are also suggestions about the future and the salvation which is to come. It is likely that this particular play was conceived as the first episode in the cycle of Protestant plays we have already noticed. At about the same time Bale had found another interest in history which is embedded in his King Johan and depends upon a perceived similarity between the story of King John who defied the pope and the circumstances in Bale’s own day whereby Henry viii separated the English Church under his own authority from that of the contemporary pope. Whilst the perception of such parallels between the past and the present was not new in religious writing, Bale’s development of the historical parallel in the form of a play appears innovative, or it is at least a very early survivor of such an undertaking. The main advantage of this was that it helped to alter the view of a historical past in order to support the changes in religious outlook which were being promoted by reformers, and it also might suggest a model for Henry viii and Elizabeth i, and lead to further changes.13 Historical writing is commonly polemical, but Bale moved further into historical detail because he had specific issues he wished to raise regarding the national and religious circumstances in which he found himself in the 1530s. We shall see that the process was in fact selective as he had to make decisions about his priorities and what he thought was achievable. The need to 13

Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (London:  Methuen, 1965), 36. See also Ritchie D. Kendall, The Drama of Dissent: The Radical Poetics of Non-​ conformity, 1380–​1590 (Chapel Hill-​London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 114.

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construct a new past was undoubtedly pressing in order to give authority and authenticity to new ways of thinking. Before considering these, however, we need to identify and characterise some features of the revisions he made to the manuscript of King Johan because different parts of this composite text, which was revised over as many as twenty years, may be related to phases in Bale’s thinking about historical material. From the extant manuscript14 and some external evidence in his biographical work, we may conclude that Bale seems to have created at least three versions of King Johan. The reference to a lost play in two parts (libri) in the autobiographical account in Anglorum Heliades gives the name of the play and indicates that it was in two parts.15 Because the wording of the incipit of this putative first version differs from that in the other two versions, recording that it was composed in two books, it would seem that the surviving sections constitute most of a one-​book revision, usually known as the A text, which forms the bulk of the manuscript. However, this version is incomplete in the manuscript because Bale undertook a further revision, initially making alterations on the pages of the A text, and rejecting some leaves from the original ending. In this process he once more divided the play into two parts. The changes he wanted became so extensive that he cancelled the ending sheets of the A  text, and made a fair copy of the new conclusion which he fitted into the manuscript. The manuscript then consisted, as it still does, of modified pages of the incomplete A text, running continuously into the inserted new ending on pages that were of different size from those used for the A text previously: this constitutes what is now known as the B text, and in spite of Bale’s changes in intention, the B text appears to be a complete and whole version. The A text is in the hand of an unknown scribe, but the majority of the revisions, including the sheets of the fair copy of the ending, are in Bale’s distinctive autograph, using a script he adopted as early as 1537.16 This makes it possible to derive some conclusions 14 15 16

Ms HM3 at the Huntington Library, California. British Llibary, Ms Harleian 3838, fol. 111v-​112v. The chief item supporting the date 1538 is the mention of a “joynt of Darvell Gathyron” (l. 1229), part of a painting of a Welsh warrior saint which was brought to London and burned at Smithfield, with a friar, on 30 May in that year. It has been suggested, however, that as Bale’s reference to this event is very short and he gives little polemical attention to it, without mentioning the actual burning of the relic or the fate of the friar, the text may have been earlier, as the painting was well known; see Jeffrey Leininger, “The Dating of Bale’s King John: A Re-​examination,” Medieval English Theatre 24 (2002): 122. Support for revision of the B text after 1558 comes at the end of the play with the praise for a queen who has subdued the papists (l. 2678). For the script Bale uses in the alterations, see King Johan, ed. John H. P. Pafford, Malone Society Reprint (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

84 Happé about parts of history which Bale thought significant at different times when the play was being composed or revised. The dating of each of these possible versions is somewhat problematic, but we can perceive that the two surviving states show revisions which were made to conform to changing public awareness. It appears that the earliest, now lost, version was created by 1536, the presumed date of parts of Anglorum Heliades. Most of the A text, written in the scribe’s hand, suggests that this version was created by 1538, and some subsequent revisions which define the B text were added in or after 1558, the year of the accession of Elizabeth i. Possibly the A text may be associated with the performance of a play in Cranmer’s house in the winter of 1538–​39.17 The alterations in the B text completed after 1558 may indicate that another performance under Elizabeth was envisaged, but such an event cannot be confirmed. As Bale made many corrections to punctuation and spelling on the manuscript, it is still possible that he was working towards a printed edition. From these assumptions it appears that Bale may have made his principal alterations from the A text to create parts of the B text at some time after 1538 and before 1558. Many of the items he deals with can be associated with political and religious issues that were topical during the later years of the reign of Henry viii, particularly within the 1530s and 1540s, the years of struggle over his divorce from Anne Boleyn and the subsequent religious upheaval as Henry’s policies, some of which favoured the Reformation, were developed. To put it briefly, it appears that the A text was probably intended to refer to the circumstances of the late 1530s, while the revised B text was relevant to later events including the death of Henry viii in 1547, and the accession of Elizabeth i.18

2

In dealing with Bale’s use of history in King Johan the first question to be considered is the way in which Bale sought to bring influence to bear on the king,

17 18

1933), xi. This latter edition was the first to establish the relationship of the parts of the manuscript. See James Gairdner & R. H. Brodie, eds., Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, vol. 14, part 1: January-​July 1539 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1895), 337. King Johan, ed. Pafford, xvi-​xvii, suggests that the reference to Leland implies that some of the changes were made during the reign of King Edward vi (1547–​53), but he concedes that Elizabeth’s reign is also a possibility.

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bearing in mind that the break with Rome had a dynamic over a number of years and that his objectives were by no means the same as those of Bale and other reformers.19 Indeed the contradictions in the king’s approach made the task of the reformers all the more difficult, but one might find it necessary to pursue them. Bale was in a position of welcoming moves that had been made, but wanting to induce or encourage further changes, and this would have to be done taking account of what it might be possible to persuade the king to do. We shall then consider the use which Bale made of historical source material, which reflected his wide familiarity with the documented past. This also needed to be directed carefully in order to be effective. For one thing it would be appropriate to welcome some of what had been done already. The next step is to assess the dramatic methodology used for Sedition who is the key opponent of King Johan throughout the play –​the antagonist –​and he shows how Bale’s theatrical invention could be applied to his polemical objectives. The consideration of this role thus has both theatrical and ideological aspects, and it is here that Bale’s adaptation of history through theatrical innovation is at its most remarkable. Finally because the play was revised to meet later circumstances we shall look at the revised ending of the B text which shows that Bale was sensitive to the need to adjust his material to make it effective in different conditions. Bale’s is not the only adaptation of the drama to the political and religious crisis of his time as a means of political persuasion, as the nearly contemporary plays of John Skelton, Sir David Lyndsay, and possibly Nicholas Udall show in their particular approaches to change.20 But his theatricality does convince us that he could assess the dramatic mode by his perception of the contemporary scene, and while his theatrics may be robust his political perception was sensitive enough to try to make his aim effective. Two factors would seem to have been important for Bale’s point of view and his strategy in King Johan: that the king went some way in his reform of the Church in his rejection of papal authority, but had not accepted change in many other features by the late 1530s; and that his priorities for change were not those Bale might have desired. It is worth noting that both in their

19

20

As George Bernard, The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church (New Haven and London:  Yale University Press, 2005), 281–​86 and 487, has pointed out, the king was not sympathetic to many of the central features of Protestant belief including justification by faith, and he adhered to retention of the seven sacraments, prayer to saints and for the departed, and the necessity of good works. See respectively Magnyfycence (written c. 1518 and printed c. 1530); Ane Satire of the Thrie Estaitis (written 1540–​53, printed 1603); and Respublica (attributed to Nicholas Udall, with the date 1553 on the manuscript).

86 Happé individual ways came to reform by leaps and bounds, over some years as circumstances changed: for neither was it a process of Pauline revelation. As we have seen, it appears that Cromwell had some influence on Bale by supporting him, and at one point paying for a performance at one of Cranmer’s houses. As George Bernard has shown in his illuminating study of the king’s leading part in the Reformation, the king went through a complicated and lengthy process of consultation, study and compulsion in arriving at his decisions about what it was necessary to change, often taking the initiative himself.21 Such a process must have been difficult to follow because the king altered his mind a good deal. To have an effect upon the king was a bold undertaking, especially at a time when errors over such matter was likely to prove fatal.22 If the A text was indeed designed to influence Henry’s approach to reform, it would not be surprising if Bale devised a further updated version to influence that of his Protestant daughter. In the process we shall find that Bale’s objectives led him to invent two new figures exercising royal functions. From the discussion of the evolution of the B text from the A text itself it is clear that King Johan was present in the A text and his role is substantially unchanged in the revisions towards the B text. But, the historical king having died on stage, Bale inserted Imperial Majesty into his new ending to carry forward his conception of a reforming monarch and supported him with another new character in Veritas.23 In this addition, the play switches to a different dramatic mode, one relying upon allegory and avoiding historical detail, and, as it happens, recalling the morality-​play methodology by its use of abstract characters who speak to the audience in a didactic manner. This development is supported by praise for the new queen, a feature which underlies that the play is concerned as much with political evils as with moral ones. In King Johan we find that Bale may have been subject to three principal influences. From the 1520s onwards the first group comprises English reformers, probably known to one another, who set out to present the abuses in the Church which came to draw much attention. Though Erasmus may have been partly a stimulus through his criticism of Church practices, these were

21 Bernard, The King’s Reformation, 241. For Henry’s intention to reform the monasteries see idem, “Reflecting on the King’s Reformation,” in Henry VIII and the Court: Art, Politics and Performance, eds. Thomas Betteridge & Suzannah Lipscomb (Farnham:  Ashgate, 2012), 9–​26. 22 Robert Barnes, whose work, we shall see, was probably one of Bale’s sources for King Johan, was burnt for heresy on 30 July 1540. 23 As neither of these characters appear in the two surviving cancelled sheets of the A text it may be supposed that they were new insertions.

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reformers who sought to make progress, as they saw it, through polemical writing, but outside the drama. Unlike Erasmus they did not remain Catholic. Thus Simon Fish, addressing the king in a plea for those he thought impoverished, pointed to a connection between the yearly exactions by the holy thieves who by their actions would “exempt theimsilves from thobedience of your grace.”24 He made a link between the money collected by the clergy and their disobedience which involved rebellion. He goes on to cite the particular disobedience of the clergy and the way they behaved towards “your [i.e. King Henry’s, P. H.] nobill predecessor king John” over the French invasion under Prince Louis, the future French King Louis viii, in 1216. In this passage Fish touches upon a virtually tragic theme which Bale took up in drawing attention to John’s yielding to the papacy, “more fearing and lamenting the sheding of the bloude of his people then the losse of his crownje.”25 William Tyndale, who wished to revise history so as to establish the reformers as the true Church,26 exhorts his readers to go to the chronicles of England for examples of rebellion and disobedience. Referring to a case of coining false money, he notices how John, in punishing the wrongdoers, was forced to allow a wicked clerk to “gooscapfre” while laymen suffered the death penalty for “halfe so great fautes.”27 On the invasion by the French under Prince Louis he refers to the pope’s “pleasure” in fighting and murdering which takes the place of faith in the testament of Christ.28 Robert Barnes in another address to the king, draws a parallel with King John.29 His account of the invasion by the French saw King John excommunicated and his land served with an interdict until he agreed to crushing and costly conditions for release. In this passage Barnes draws attention to the poisoning of John by a monk of Swynyshed who received absolution from the abbot in advance of committing the murder. In 24

Simon Fish, A Supplicacyon for the Beggers (Antwerp, [Johannes Grapheus, 1524?]), sig. 3r-​v. 25 Cf. King Johan, ll. 2057–​58. For consideration of tragic elements in the play see Dermot Cavanagh, “Reforming Sovereignty: John Bale and Tragic Drama,” in Interludes and Early Modern Society:  Studies in Gender, Power and Theatricality, eds. Peter Happé & Wim Hüsken (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 191–​209. 26 Greg Walker, Plays of Persuasion: Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 184. 27 William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Cristen Man (Marburg:  Hans Luft [= Johannes Hoochstraten], 1528), fol. 157r-​v. 28 In order to make a polemical point against the papacy Bale later has Imperial Majesty condemn the Clergy for following the “pleasure” of the pope in similar circumstances (ll. 2391–​95). 29 Robert Barnes, A Supplicacion unto the most gracious prynce H.  the viii (London:  John Byddell, 1534), B4v-​B6r.

88 Happé his description Barnes makes a link with treason which affects the king as well as “the youngest chylde that lyethe in the cradell.”30 Bale’s familiarity with the chronicles gave him much narrative detail for the events surrounding King John, and he was able to use many items from them. It is not always clear which particular chronicle he used for individual details because the chronicles formed a sort of network of narrative with items overlapping including many that Bale might use. At one point Bale lists some of the authorities who may have influenced him (ll. 2200–​03). In the Brut, for example, we find an accumulation of information about how individual bishops behaved at this time over the interdict and the excommunication.31 The account there is particularly detailed about how John’s poisoner prepared the draught. It describes how he found a toad in the garden and put her into a cup where he pricked her with a brooch to extract the venom. This he put in a cup which he filled with good ale and took it to the king, who insists that the monk takes the first (fatal) sip before drinking himself and dying (169.24–​29 –​170.4). This account by an author supporting the pope is noticeably hostile to King John and in several places it highlights the rightful behaviour of the bishops. Bale’s version is turned in the opposite direction, giving instead the praise to Johan for defying the pope. If the chronicles were used for narrative detail Bale could have found other influence in the plays of his predecessors. The main inheritance lies in the use of abstract characters who are used to control the response of the audience in a way which owes much to the morality plays. This tradition is the most didactic aspect of King Johan though we shall need to consider further who exactly was being addressed. However, it is here that Bale takes a step which appears to be innovative in respect of history plays. Having established the dangerous significance of Sedition, Private Wealth, and Usurped Power he cons them into Stephen Langton, the cardinal and the pope respectively.32 They become manifestations or examples of vices in the form of real historical people who can 30

31 32

It may be only coincidental, but there is an intriguing similarity between this incident and the warning given to Norfolk in 1537, as he dealt with the rebels, that he should not stay in a monastery for fear of being poisoned by the monks (Bernard, The King’s Reformation, 393). The Brut, or The Chronicles of England, ed. from Ms. Rawl. B 171, Bodleian Library, &c by Friedrich W. D. Brie, 2 vols., eets o.s. 131 and 136 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1906–​ 08), vol. 1, 152–​70. Stage direction at l. 983. The content of this direction would not be known to the audience, but the links between the abstractions and the human beings are clearly intended, and would be known to the actors. We may therefore assume that they would be made plain in the performance, perhaps by costume, movement or gesture.

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be recognised as such. He does this partly by means of costume changes which no doubt brought contemporary images on to the stage. He makes the link quite clear to the audience, in case they need reminding, when King Johan says on Sedition’s entry disguised as Stephen Langton, “Me thynke this bysshope resembleth moch Sedycyon” (l. 1783). It should be noted, however, that Sedition is a political evil rather than a moral one.33 We have seen that Sedition is the leading villain or opponent in King Johan and his part is written with theatrical awareness. Bale may have taken the link between the clergy and disobedience from Protestant sources, but he also takes much for this role from the behaviour of evil characters in the morality plays. One may, however, suggest that there is innovation. For example, villains often used aliases to conceal their true nature from those they were trying to seduce and this could turn into an elaborate game of names, as it does with Avarice and his associates in Respublica.34 Sedition is treated differently since he reveals his real name instantly and perhaps defiantly, without an alias, to King Johan when asked, adding a scabrous detail: “I am Sedycyon, that with the Pope wyll hold /​So long as I have a hole with in my breche” (ll. 90–​91).35 Bale’s decision here was no doubt polemical since he wanted to acknowledge a strong relationship between Sedition and the pope at this early moment in the play. If, as we have noticed, Bale aimed to show support or approval for the king’s policy against the papacy this link would be advantageous, as the king had already promoted legislation for royal supremacy in the early 1530s, and Bale might here give this his recognition. Bale is signalling that he understood the effect of an undesirable separate authority for the clergy other than the king’s. If he can gain credibility here it might serve him elsewhere in the play including places where he might want to promote his own reforming ideas that the king might be inclined to reject or resist.36

33

Lynn Forest-​Hill, Transgressive language in medieval English drama: signs of challenge and change (Farnham: Ashgate, 2000), 177. 34 See Respublica, ed. W. W. Greg, eets o.s. 226 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), act 1 scene 4, ll. 343–​433. 35 Walker, Plays of Persuasion, 186, speaks of his “open defiance.” 36 It has been pointed out that there is very little in King Johan about transubstantiation, or the sacrament of the altar, that was an issue of great dispute. We may suspect that the matter was so controversial that Bale chose to avoid it for fear of jeopardising topics that he was more hopeful about changing. As Bernard, The King’s Reformation, 501, shows, the king was deeply interested in it at the time of the Six Articles, adding to a draft that after the consecration by a priest there remained “none other substances but the substance off his foresaid natural body.”

90 Happé Sedition’s exchanges with Johan at this early point are thick with polemical detail as Bale makes sure to establish his function as a supporter of the pope (ll. 190–​240). The latter empowers Sedition, who was born in Rome and will support the pope in many countries. He describes how sedition can be found in a variety of ecclesiastical clothing (ll. 195–​210), and this may be a reflection of the king’s belief that the monasteries were associated with sedition.37 But perhaps the key point made by Sedition is that the pope’s “prehemynence” overrides the authority of kings, and he shows that as long as there are bishops whom Johan has to recognise –​in anticipation of what is to come –​they can depose a king.38 King Henry’s legislation about royal supremacy had already dealt with the implications of what Sedition describes, but Bale shifts the focus to something he wished to attack but which had not yet been changed by the king’s reforms. In doing so he has Johan prompt Sedition’s eagerness to tell, thus stressing the point dramatically:

K. Johan Sedicyon K. Johan Sedicyon K. Johan Sedicyon  

Thow art not skoymose* thy fantasy for to tell. *reluctant Gesse at a venture –​ye may chance the marke to hytt. Thy falssed to shew no man than thy selfe more fytt. Mary in confessyon under-​nethe benedicite. Nay, tell yt ageyne that I may understond the. I say I can dwell whan all other placys fayle me In ere* confession undernethe benedicite. (ll. 261–​67) *ear

To emphasise the point further Sedition ends the exchange by going off to change into a religious costume, but not before drawing attention to his control of the spirituality, the nobility and the lawyers (ll. 177–​88, 305–​06). Furthermore we can link the king’s policy over auricular confession with the play, assuming that it was written c. 1538. We find that the Six Articles of 1539 retained the practice along with other traditional matters including celibacy of the priesthood, and the continuation of private masses.39 There is a further link with the morality plays when it comes to conspiracy by Sedition and his associates who turn out to be members of the same family. Bale constructs an allegory based upon this family relationship. Dissimulation, son of Falsed is Sedition’s cousin, Sedition’s father is Privy Treason, Falsed’s brother, and their father is Infidelity (ll. 673–​76). This pinpoints the false faith which Bale was seeking to destroy. Later we find that Sedition adopts yet 37 Ibid., 442. 38 Cf. “and that wyll appere by yow” (l. 242). 39 Bernard, The King’s Reformation, 503–​04.

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another alias as Holy Perfection when he tries to hide from Imperial Majesty, but by now Nobility is able to spot his true identity (l. 2479). The choice of this particular name is a prompt towards Bale’s persistent portrayal of him as claiming holiness when it is in fact a cover for disobedience. The relationship between the villains is demonstrated by yet another allegory, this time with a distinctly visual aspect. Sedition explains what is to happen “in pagent” (l. 786) asking Usurped Power to bring him in on his back: That yt maye be sayde that fyrst Dyssymulacyon Browght in Privat Welth to every Cristennacyon, And that Privat Welth browght in Usurpid Powre And he Sedycyon in cytye, towne and tower. (ll. 793–​96) Another instance of Bale making use of the political rhetoric of the time is found in his naming one of the villains as Usurped Power. These words are found, for example, in a draft proclamation of April 1539 which speaks of “the olde devotion to the usurped power of the bishop of Rome.”40

3

Several of the revisions Bale made to the A text expanded the part of Sedition. We can identify these because they are added in margins, or on additional sheets, or they occur on pages which can be checked against the cancelled sheets. Probably Bale was aware of the increasing theatrical reputation and effectiveness of the role known as ‘the Vice’ during the middle of the sixteenth century. Some of the things he added can be recognised as hallmarks of the role, including a noisy outburst (ll. 1378–​91), uncontrollable laughter (ll. 1694, 1700–​01), detecting a fart (l. 1757), a proverb (l. 1816), and a Catholic oath (l. 1921).41 Further typical additions come in the tongue-​twisting, alliterative list of monastic orders (ll. 447–​58), and an outrageous cluster of dud relics (ll. 1221–​ 25). Besides these performance items Sedition’s part is enlarged with contributions including interaction with Treason (ll. 1842–​47), a celebration of papal triumph (ll. 1975–​81), and calling for the French invasion (l. 2000). After line 2161 we cannot be certain of what Bale added in the concluding episodes of the play. Nevertheless the text as we have it in the manuscript is 40 41

Ibid., 497. See also the use of the phrase by Richard Beerly to Cromwell, ibid. 244. See my “Sedition in King Johan: Bale’s Development of a ‘Vice’,” Medieval English Theatre 3.1 (1981): 3–​6.

92 Happé the one which embodied his intentions at some point after the accession of Elizabeth i and it was another attempt to reinforce a move towards further reform, though now Elizabeth’s intentions had yet to be revealed. Sedition makes it clear that the papacy threatens disorder, and that it continued to threaten to be ignorant of Scripture and to persecute those who held by it (ll. 2252, 2267). When asked why he supports the pope his answer is that it is because the pope is a merry fellow. The ending of the play is dominated by the abstract characters Veritas and Imperial Majesty as Bale goes back to the mode of a morality play to lay out his concluding position. It seems likely that Bale continued to aim at impressing the powerful and promoting and establishing further reform, but after the deaths of King Henry and two of his children, he needed to address the new power in Elizabeth i. Noticeably he is less specific about individual issues in the revised text, perhaps because he was not yet aware of the details of her policies. Veritas is engaged in telling the ‘truth’ about Johan, but as Adams has noted, Bale uses him to change John’s reputation for the better from that found in a list of chronicles.42 Veritas celebrates the qualities of Johan which are suspected by the estates Nobility, Civil Order and Clergy and brings them to repentance. He will himself preach God’s word and he presents, or rather repeats from an earlier time, the special relationship between God and a monarch: A kynge is reserved to the Lorde Omnypotent. He is a mynyst’er immediate under God, Of hys ryghteousnesse to execute the rod. (ll. 2355–​57) Presumably Bale is emphasising that this important principle needs reinforcing or renewing. At the beginning of a new reign it might well have seemed desirable. This may well have been the reason for the invention of Imperial Majesty who is an example of worthy kingship as well as being prophetic. He renews the questioning of the mistakes made by the three estates against King Johan and asserts his position as head of the Church. Endorsing what Veritas has said he looks to the future: He [Veritas, P. H.] sayth that a kynge is of God immedyatlye Than shall never pope rule more in thys monarchie (ll. 2385–​86) 42 See John Bale’s King Johan, ed. Adams, 26–​29, and ll. 2200–​03 with note on 191.

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The word of God is to be supreme (l. 2438). This point of view, which Bale wished to assert in the later version is in marked contrast to the king’s earlier intention which is stated as “all diversity in the manner of teaching and preaching may be avoided.”43 Imperial Majesty has to carry out one other important action in this conclusion by bringing Sedition to justice. Sedition blames Veritas for his fall (l. 2519). However, the process is not without comedy as Sedition makes ridiculous claims about his future fame. By the 1560s the punishment of the Vice figure had become a comic turn even though there was an underlying implication that he might live to fight again, perhaps because he was an abstraction rather than a human being. But he also tells the truth by exposing the falseness of the disguised coats and bald crowns of the clergy (l. 2572), and he admits that he intended to treat Imperial Majesty in the same way he had treated King Johan (l. 2575). Imperial Majesty orders Civil Order to take him to execution at Tyburn and to place his head on London Bridge (ll. 2579–​84). This was probably meant to have the appearance of the execution of a traitor. In the exploitation of the comic possibilities he claims that for taking the Church’s part he ought to be put in the litany alongside Becket, and as he is taken away he calls for candles appropriate to his new sainthood (ll. 2589–​92). Bale is probably doing two things here: ridiculing the cult of saints and martyrs, but also suggesting that these practices are not completely abolished and that there is a need for further vigilance. This is further implied by the last speeches in the play which celebrate the new monarch but recall that the Queen has only recently (on 22 September 1560) proclaimed that the Anabaptists must leave the country on pain of imprisonment.44 However, the action ends with a kiss between Imperial Majesty and the estates, as required by a stage direction added in Bale’s hand (l. 2645).

4

To conclude, it appears from the use Bale made of history in his plays that he saw it as containing messages for the present, partly because of similarities and the patterns he could find within it. From this he could establish his religious teaching by exploiting the theatrical possibilities he could employ. Such was his pragmatic approach, however, that he could allow himself to identify 43 Bernard, The King’s Reformation, 281. It is noticed here that the king was preoccupied with “unity of outlook and removal of dissent” (ibid., 477). 44 See John Bale’s King Johan, ed. Adams, 23–​24, and ll. 2680–​81 with note on 196.

94 Happé different interpretations of it from time to time. There is a strong sense that in his interpretation he was always ready to change as he perceived new needs. Thus he remained true to the doctrine of the supremacy of the monarch over the Church because that would limit the power of the papacy, but circumstances changed so much from the 1530s to the 1550s that he had to be ready to change his objectives and the ways in which he approached them. The years when he was concerned with his King Johan were so challenging that he had to modify his approach to the monarchy’s policies. The task was made more complex because those very policies were subject to change and development. It is clear that in this play in particular he could not do without a historical parallel, but also that the means of persuasion must be varied. If he did try to influence the monarchs, he seems to have been aware that Henry and Elizabeth presented different targets for persuasion. Moreover, such was his position that he had to use his theatrical skills to change the ways of bringing persuasion to bear which the play was pursuing, and that one single play might encompass a series of purposes or intentions such as approval and encouragement as well as the enforcement of dogma. Underlying all this there seems to be a need for authority which he sought and found in historical writings, and yet he was sometimes driven to depart from his sources, as in the case of Johan’s reputation.45

Bibliography

Adams, Barry B., ed. John Bale’s King John, with an introduction and notes. San Marino: The Huntingdon Library, 1969. Bale, John. A Comedy concernynge the thre lawes of nature, Moses and Christe. Wesel: Dirk van der Straten, [1547–​48?]. Bale, John. A Tragedye or enterlude manyfestyng the chefe promyses of God unto man by all ages in the olde lawe, from the fall of Adam to the incarncyon of the lorde Jesus Christ. Wesel: Dirk van der Straten, [1548?]. Bale, John. Illustrium Maioris Britanniae … Summarium. Wesel:  Dirk van der Straten, 1548. Bale, John. An Expostulation or complaint agaynst the blasphemyes of a frantyke papist of Hamshyre. [London: S. Mierdman, 1552?]. 45

It has been pointed out that the chronicles Bale might have used were composed by Catholic scholars who were loyal to the papacy and naturally tried to worsen John’s reputation. Bale uses the point in a speech by Nobility to Clergy: “Yt is yowre fassyon soche kynges to dyscommed /​As yowre abuses reforme or reprehend” (ll. 583–​84).

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Bale, John. The Vocacyon of Johan Bale to the bishoprick of Ossorie in Irelande. [Wesel: Hugh Singleton?], 1553. Bale, John. Scriptorum Illustrium Maioris Britanniae … Catalogus, 2 vols. Basle: Oporinus, 1557–​59. Barnes, Robert. A Supplicacion unto the most gracious prynce H. the viii. London: John Byddell, 1534. Bernard, George. The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005. Bernard, George. “Reflecting on the King’s Reformation.” In Henry VIII and the Court: Art, Politics and Performance, edited by Thomas Betteridge & Suzannah Lipscomb, 9–​26. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Blatt, Thora B. The Plays of John Bale. Copenhagen: C. E. G. Gad, 1968. The Brut or The Chronicles of England, edited by Friedrich W. D. Brie from Ms. Rawl. B 171, Bodleian Library, &c., 2 vols., eets o.s. 131 and 136. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1906–​08. Cavanagh, Dermot. “Reforming Sovereignty: John Bale and Tragic Drama.” In Interludes and Early Modern Society: Studies in Gender, Power and Theatricality, edited by Peter Happé & Wim Hüsken, 191–​209. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Davies, W. T. “A Bibliography of John Bale.” Oxford Bibliographical Society, Proceedings and Papers 5.4 (1940): 204–​79. Fairfield, Leslie P. John Bale: Mythmaker for the English Reformation. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1976. Fish, Simon. A Supplicacyon for the Beggers. Antwerp: [Johannes Grapheus, 1524?]. Forest-​Hill, Lynn. Transgressive language in medieval English drama: signs of challenge and change. Farnham: Ashgate, 2000. Gairdner, James & R. H. Brodie, eds. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, vol. 14, part  1:  January-​July 1539. London:  Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1895. Greg, W. W., ed. Respublica, eets o.s. 226. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952. Happé, Peter. “John Bale’s Lost Mystery Cycle.” Cahiers Élisabéthains 60 (2001): 1–​14. Happé, Peter. “Sedition in King Johan: Bale’s Development of a ‘Vice’.” Medieval English Theatre 3.1 (1981): 3–​6. Happé, Peter, ed. Complete Plays of John Bale. 2 vols. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985–​86. Kendall, Ritchie D. The Drama of Dissent: The Radical Poetics of Non-​conformity, 1380–​ 1590. Chapel Hill-​London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Lane Poole, Reginald & Mary Bateson, eds. Index Britanniae Scriptorum:  John Bale’s Index of British and Other Writers, introduction Caroline Brett & James Carley. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990. Leininger, Jeffrey. “The Dating of Bale’s King John: A Re-​examination.” Medieval English Theatre 24 (2002): 116–​37.

96 Happé Pafford, John H. P., ed. King Johan, Malone Society Reprint. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933. Ribner, Irving. The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1965. Tyndale, William. The Obedience of a Cristen Man. Marburg:  Hans Luft [= Johannes Hoochstraten], 1528. Walker, Greg. Plays of Persuasion:  Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry VIII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Weatherly, E. H., ed. Speculum Sacerdotale, from British Museum Ms. Additional 36791. eets o.s. 200. London: Oxford University Press, 1936.

­c hapter 4

History in the Long Shadow of Allegory Revisiting the Morality Heritage Richard Hillman Abstract In exploring the evolving relations between allegorical practices and historical material in the early modern English theatre, this essay takes as its starting point, and object of interrogation, the common critical position that the history play ‘emerges’ as a genre from mid-​to late-​sixteenth-​century dramatic techniques conditioned by medieval allegory. Arguably, however, allegory in history plays does not simply disappear as a dramatic device. On the contrary, even as it continues to reach back to medieval signifying theory and practice, allegory develops into a wide range of more-​or-​less mimetic operations which contribute extra-​literal significance to the staging of events and personages. In relation to this process, the impact of Reformation thought on theatricality can be better appreciated as at once radical and conservative, its insistence on ‘true’ meanings rendering inevitable its distrust of the dramatic medium.

Keywords History play –​allegory –​early modern –​medieval –​signification –​mimesis –​Reformation



1

There has been a good deal of salutary attention in the late twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries both to the polymorphous elusiveness of the early modern history play as a genre and to the complexity of allegory as a signifying practice stretching from the Middle Ages, and before, to the Elizabethan period, and beyond.1 Fitting together the jagged edges of these shifting 1 On the first point, see, notably, Paulina Kewes, “The Elizabethan History Play:  A True Genre?,” in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, vol. 2: The Histories, eds. Richard Dutton & Jean E. Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 173–​93; Ivo Kamps, Historiography and Ideology

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004449503_006

98 Hillman conceptual blocks has not necessarily been made easier however –​on the contrary –​and, consequently, the simplifications of established narratives remain tempting. Deep grooves were cut by Irving Ribner’s magisterial 1965 study, which, although remarkably comprehensive and attentive to detail, was preoccupied with tracing “The Emergence of a Dramatic Genre.”2 This implied a broader context of progression through late medieval to “high Renaissance”3 modes of signification in a way which finally consigned allegory, identified essentially as a morality-​play throwback, to special effects in the later drama, as in the emblematic mutual killing of father and son in Shakespeare’s 3 Henry vi (ii.v).4 With regard to this “allegorical statement of his theme,” Ribner, assuming a duality that this essay will both develop and interrogate, comments that Shakespeare “seized upon morality devices to make its meaning clear, clearer than the factual method of the chronicles themselves could make it.”5 Otherwise, the history play had seemingly by this time ‘emerged’ in its own right. Already in John Bale’s King Johan (1539) it could be perceived “emerging from the morality, for in it the two exist side by side,” neatly illustrating the

in Stuart Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Benjamin Griffin, Playing the Past: Approaches to English Historical Drama 1385–​1600 (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001); and Janette Dillon, Shakespeare and the Staging of English History, Oxford Shakespeare Topics (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012). On the second, I  have found particularly stimulating Jon Whitman, Allegory:  The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979); Clara Mucci, “Allegory,” in A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 298–​306; John Watkins, “The Allegorical Theatre: Moralities, Interludes, and Protestant Drama,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 767–​92; Thomas H. Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation (Chicago-​London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 34–​ 76; and Bart van Es, Spenser’s Forms of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). A valuable basic exploration of the subject remains Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery: Some Mediaeval Books and Their Posterity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). The following discussion intersects with points raised by several of these authors but takes a fundamentally distinctive synthetic approach. 2 This is the title of ­chapter 2 of Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare, rev. ed. (London: Methuen, 1965). 3 The term is that of David M. Bevington, From ‘Mankind’ to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 191, speaking most immediately of the evolution of theatrical romance beyond “hybrids of romantic and allegorical figures.” 4 Shakespearean references are to Gwynne Blakemore Evans & John Joseph Michael Tobin, eds. The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 5 Ribner, English History Play, 57–​58.

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point that the “political morality plays represent a stage of evolution through which the history play had to pass.”6 Some sixty years after Ribner, the habit persists of opposing ‘history’ to ‘allegory’ in the name of dramaturgical progress. Thus Charles H. Forker in 2011, introducing George Peele’s The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England (1589–​90), staked a particular claim for that play’s pioneering role in, again, “The Emergence of a Genre,” a genre which he pointedly qualified as “non-​ allegorical.”7 Like Ribner  –​but with more particular reason  –​Forker, too, sought to draw a contrast with “the early morality play by the incendiary anti-​ papist John Bale,”8 whose sources are less plausibly historical than those of The Troublesome Reign and whose dramaturgy thoroughly (and ingeniously) mingles historical and allegorical representation. Bale’s King Johan is ineluctable in any consideration of allegory in relation to the staging of history in early modern England, and I will return to it, albeit as an instance of a signifying pattern that, far from being unique in its kind, arguably stretches both backward and forward. For the moment, it seems more useful to consider in some detail the allegorical elements in several instances preceding the history play’s full-​blown “emergence,” hence where allegory tends to be taken for granted, or even overlooked.

2

For Forker, one of these lies particularly close at hand, yet it is perhaps not surprising that The Battle of Alcazar (1588?), also by Peele and virtually contemporary with his Troublesome Reign, falls outside the editor’s generic field of vision. That play’s dramaturgy, to start with, features a frank admixture of allegorical ­figures –​Nemesis, Death and Fame –​in the dumb-​shows introducing each act. This is, in itself, a frequent procedure, which will call for further comment. At the same time, the historical dimension is far removed from that of the English chronicles, and the work’s ambiance, for audiences, would no doubt have more closely approached the exotic Orientalism of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (1587) and other ‘eastern’ dramatic romances, such as Soliman and Perseda (1592), attributed to Thomas Kyd, or Selimus, Emperor of the Turks 6 Ibid., 34, 36. 7 Charles R.  Forker, “Introduction,” in George Peele, The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England, ed. Charles R. Forker, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 1. 8 Ibid., 2.

100 Hillman (published in 1594), putatively by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge. This remains true even if the events Peele depicted were pregnant with more immediate consequences for contemporary Europe (the battle of Alcácer Quibir in 1578 having led to Portugal’s incorporation into Spain) than those in the other three plays, or indeed in The Troublesome Reign itself.9 Peele’s simultaneous authorship of a work that thus resists integration into the smooth narrative of generic development illustrated, according to Forker, by The Troublesome Reign may usefully redirect our attention to basic mimetic questions: what is essential, respectively, in a dramatic claim to historicity and in the deployment of allegorical devices? The first point to make is an obvious one –​namely, that, however unruly it may appear from the perspective of ‘achieved’ dramatic form, the fluid mixture of representational modes in The Battle of Alcazar is closer to the early and mid-​Elizabethan norm. Also evident is the blurring of the boundary  –​ evident in early modern titles generally, including those of Shakespeare’s early editions –​between dramatised history, implicitly claiming to privilege the documentation of facts, and tragedy, which by definition presents a plot, ‘historical’ or not, as charged with meaningful form and resonance.10 Peele might seem at first simply to be superimposing tragic significance on his raw material, for it is the spectacular and portentous dumb-​shows, adorned with Furies and rhetorically assisted by the Presenter, which invest the history with its weight of retributive significance, particularly by ensuring that Muly Mahamet assumes the role of arch-​villain, engaging cosmic mechanisms of revenge: Nemesis, high mistress of revenge, That with her scourge keeps all the world in awe, With thundering drums awakes the god of war And calls the furies from Avernus’ crags, 9

10

On the historical sources, see Charles Edelman, “Introduction,” in The Stukeley Plays:  The Battle Of Alcazar by George Peele and The Famous History of the Life and Death of Thomas Stukeley, ed. Charles Edelman, The Revels Plays Companion Library (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2005), 26–​27; on the European impact of the death of Sebastian of Portugal, see also Richard Hillman, “Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama, eds. Thomas Betteridge & Greg Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 572–​73. As is well known, Richard ii, grouped with the histories in the First Folio (1623), had figured as a “tragedie” in its First Quarto (1597), while King Lear, a tragedy in the Folio, had been designated a “True Chronicle Historie” in the First Quarto of 1608, like the older anonymous play of King Leir, published in quarto in 1605.

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To range and rage and vengeance to inflict Vengeance on this accursèd Moor for sin.11 Arguably, however, the two layers of representation at work are closely intertwined. As has been thoroughly documented, dumb-​shows can perform a variety of functions within Elizabethan dramaturgy.12 Invariably, however, they effect a disjunction in register, establishing a self-​contained dramatic space which announces, if nothing else, the addition of a layer of representation beyond the primary mimetic one. Often, moreover, as in Peele’s play, they interrupt linear time and stake a claim to transcendental significance: they are felt at once to emerge from purported ‘factuality’ and to feed a higher meaning back into it. Thus, to recall Ribner’s example of Shakespeare’s interpolated emblematic encounter in 3 Henry vi, the ‘extra-​historical’ scene metadramatically supplies a specifically tragic dimension to action thereby revealed as calling for it: in effect, the civil-​war horrors chronicled by Hall and Holinshed conjure a second-​ order dramatic epitome. It is possible to apply to these cases Jacques Derrida’s logic of the supplement, that which defines a lack by filling it.13 But, as I will be proposing, medieval signifying practices may make such recourse unnecessary. The most direct precedent for the dumb-​show effect in The Battle of Alcazar, although at some thirty years’ distance, is probably Gorboduc (1561), Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s theatrical caution, presented in the Inner Temple as a Christmas entertainment, against political self-​destruction as a result of disputed succession. Gorboduc, in fact, has a surprising amount of light to shed on the functioning of allegory in what might be termed the proto-​or quasi-​historical Elizabethan drama. The main action is based, however loosely, on British chronicle-​legend, the history of Geoffrey of Monmouth, while, seemingly for the first time, dumb-​shows are employed to explicate and moralise it.14 The cumulative effect is similar to that in The Battle of Alcazar: the 11 Peele, The Battle of Alcazar, ed. Edelman, 65 (Prologue 35–​36). 12 See especially B. R. Pearn, “Dumbshow in Elizabethan Drama,” Review of English Studies 11 (1935): 385–​405, and Dieter Mehl, The Elizabethan Dumb Show: The History of a Dramatic Convention (London: Methuen, 1965). For a recent reappraisal, see Jeremy Lopez, “Dumb Show,” in Early Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry S.  Turner (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2013), 291–​305. 13 This was most extensively developed in his De la grammatologie (1967), published in English as Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, intr. Judith Butler (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 14 See Alice Hunt, “Dumb Politics in Gorboduc,” in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama, eds. Betteridge & Walker, 547, 548. The text is cited here from Thomas Sackville & Thomas Norton, Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex, in Drama of the English Renaissance, vol. 1: The Tudor Period, eds. Russell A. Fraser & Norman Rabkin (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 82 ff.

102 Hillman succession of highly theatrical shows introducing each act places the primary ‘show’ of history metatheatrically within a framework of tragedy, which in turn, somewhat paradoxically, validates the main matter’s claim to historicity.15 While there are no allegorical personages as such, three Furies appear before Act Four to signify that unnatural murder will be committed, and avenged. Moreover  –​and this technique is allegorical in the most basic etymological sense of saying one thing in terms of another –​the moral is expounded by symbolic action, whose meaning, while made explicit in the printed text, would also have guided spectators without much difficulty. The same is true of the breaking of single but not bundled sticks (Act One), the fatal choice of the poisoned golden cup over the glass one (Act Two), the show of mourning (Act Three), and the show of combat (Act Five). Gorboduc also features a Chorus on the Senecan model, which points the moral at the conclusion of the first four acts –​and effectively personifies the qualities it evokes: “When growing pride doth fill the swelling breast, /​And greedy lust doth raise the climbing mind” (ii. ii.89–​90); “The lust of kingdom knows no sacred faith, /​No rule of reason, no regard of right” (iii.i.170–​71). At the conclusion, however, the (lengthy) moral summing-​up is given instead to Eubulus, a participant in the action from the start, but one who does not derive from the chronicle source, and whose name (from the Greek for ‘well-​counselling’) expresses his function within the plot. When he steps outside it, epilogue-​like, that function, too, becomes metatheatrical, setting the seal on the transformation of history into tragedy that was in the cards from the start. Like many subsequent epilogues, he carries with him the essential meaning of the dramatic experience. Naming Eubulus in (Latinised) Greek bespeaks more than the authors’ classical aspirations: it serves to preserve a balance between the (hi)story presented, however transparently fictional this may be, and the moral and political lesson to be derived from it, the general significance of the particular.16 If 15

16

Another (later) Elizabethan case where this second effect stands out involves the moralised dumb-​shows featuring legendary historical personages (Semiramis, Cyrus, Sesostris) that are interpolated in three of the Choruses in Robert Greene, The Scottish History of James the Fourth, ed. Norman Sanders, The Revels Plays (London: Methuen, 1970), 128–​32. Their moral, the rather stale one of the vanity of earthly glory, seems decidedly secondary to the function of attaching historical status to a fanciful romantic plot. Indeed, it may be argued that the play’s engagement with recent and contemporary Scottish and English realities is deeper than has usually been supposed. See Richard Hillman, “Scottish Histories: Robert Greene’s James the Fourth (c. 1590) in the Light (and Shadow) of David Lyndsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (1552),” Scottish Literary Review 9 (2017): 57–​83. Cf. Ribner, The English History Play, 46–​47, on the play’s combination of “historical reality” and “morality abstraction,” including the allegorical naming.

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the character were identified by his function in English (‘Good Counsel’), he would unequivocally qualify as an allegorical figure, and the register would be shifted to that of the traditional morality play. Hence, arguably, the onomastic diffidence displayed by later comedies which flirt with morality-​play form but keep their distance from it. Many of these liberally label characters according to their qualities, but they keep allegory in balance with ‘real’ plots by inventing ingenious names and eschewing traditional ones, or, as in Jonson’s Volpone, through linguistic distancing. Nor is the tactic limited to comedies. Cyril Tourneur’s or, more probably, Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy likewise keeps its modes in balance through Italianisation: the likes of Sordido, Lussurioso and, most obviously, Vindice, whose name is made the subject of self-​conscious equivocation. Modes are insouciantly mixed, of course, in numerous popular plays whose assertion of historicity is perfunctory or non-​existent. (It is very much to the point that the term ‘history’ in the period may apply to any story without carrying generic prejudice or, indeed, any serious claim to truth.) The anonymous rambling romance Clyomon and Clamydes (1560–​70?), which brings Alexander the Great on stage twice, with as little claim to factual substance as his spirit when conjured by Marlowe’s Faustus,17 features Providence, Knowledge and Rumour. The last of these proved useful even to Shakespeare, of course, in one of his most forthrightly historical sequences, serving to link the first and second parts of Henry iv in a way that, by conjuring the confusion after Shrewsbury field, ironically comments on the chronicles’ inadequacy as a stable repository of truth. Still more flagrantly variegated than Clyomon and Clamydes is Cambyses, King of Persia, by Thomas Preston (1560?). Cambyses deploys a certain historical basis but makes an explicit claim for tragic status (albeit notoriously “Mixed Full of Pleasant Mirth”), from which, however, its admixture of allegories, ranging from Diligence to Small Ability to Cruelty, is generally taken to detract. The resulting hybrid may appear “perched between … real history and the personification of the morality play, so that an authentic monarch debates with a character named Commons’ Cry and employs another named Execution.”18 To works such as these may usefully be added Horestes (1567?), 17 18

Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, A-​and B-​Texts (1604, 1616), eds. David Bevington & Eric Rasmussen, The Revels Plays (Manchester: University Press, 1993), A-​Text, iv.ii.53–​73. Norman A. Fraser & Stuart Rabkin, “Introduction” to Cambyses, King of Persia, Drama of the English Renaissance, in Drama of the English Renaissance, vol. 1: The Tudor Period, eds. Fraser & Rabkin, 59. On the “true history” involved, see Don Cameron Allen, “A Source for Cambises,” Modern Language Notes 49 (1934): 384–​87; W. A. Armstrong, “The Background and Sources of Preston’s Cambises,” English Studies 31 (1950): 129–​35; and Ribner, English

104 Hillman by John Pickerynge, likewise replete with personifications, and whose full title might as well be tracing the production of tragedy within the play-​text: A Newe Enterlude of Vice Conteyninge, the Historye of Horestes with the cruelle revengment of his Fathers death, upon his one naturall Mother. Significantly, the transformation is catalysed here by a Vice explicitly, if intermittently, identified as Revenge.19 This procedure may shed light on the tragic trajectory in Cambyses, for there, too, the vindictive principle, although it takes the form of an invisible deus ex machina, is perceived as generated by the action and making explicit its intrinsic tendency. Ribner points out that divine punishment of the wicked ruler by providential ‘accident’ is built into Preston’s immediate sources,20 and it should not be forgotten that authors of historical drama do, after all, choose their material and, in general, follow the contours to which it has previously been shaped. At the same time, numerous playwrights chose, even as the genre of the chronicle history was in formation, to supplement the documentation of facts with a panoply of metatheatrtical devices, which, while not strictly necessary to explicate –​or even moralise –​the action per se, served to signal its functioning on a level beyond the literal. The persistent phenomenon of the dumb-​show may perhaps be partially accounted for in these terms,21 and it is suggestive that allegorical, or quasi-​allegorical, figures, who increasingly have no place

History Play, 50–​56. The developmental and normative approach to historical drama dominates the criticism. Hence, Robert Carl Johnson, “Critical Introduction,” in A Critical Edition of Thomas Preston’s Cambises, ed. Robert Carl Johnson (Salzburg:  Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1975), 1, speaks of a “hybrid” which is “surely not tragedy” but marks “the transition between the morality play and the chronicles’ and, consequently, features a conflict between story and message.” 19 See the analysis of Howard B.  Norland, “The Allegorising of Revenge in Horestes,” in Tudor Theatre: Allegory in the Theatre /​L’allégorie au théâtre, ed. Peter Happé, Theta, 5 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), 169–​85. 20 Ribner, English History Play, 53; Johnson, “Critical Introduction,” 1–​2, aptly evokes the Mirror for Magistrates tradition but is unduly restrictive concerning the anticipation of revenge. 21 Not all dumb-​shows are redundant with respect to the action, but many are. Cf. Lopez, “Dumb Show,” who pushes the principle of redundancy (p. 295) toward the conclusion that “[d]‌umb shows … occur at a moment where the theatre tries to do more than the theatre can –​not by becoming more theatrical, but rather by acting more like a text” (p. 299). Especially given the supplementary redundancy often added in printed editions, the notion of such interpolations as “struggling mightily to express something that is either beyond or all too obviously within their reach” (p. 292) seems rather a matter of theatrical coding: what is essential is to indicate to spectators or readers that an interpretative function is in place.

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within a work’s plot as such, continue to make appearances within such interpolations, often in the company of mythological and moral emblems. A semiotic affinity exists, too, with the framing inductions and choruses which superficially dispute the genres of works such as Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda (via the competing claims of Love, Fortune and Death) and Mucedorus (featuring Comedy versus Envy). The principle may be further extended to choruses such as those in Shakespeare’s Henry v, The Travels of the Three English Brothers by John Day and William Rowley  –​whose Chorus actually assumes the identity of Fame –​or indeed Pericles, by Shakespeare and, putatively, George Wilkins. There Gower introduces and supplements dumb shows (“What’s dumb in show I’ll plain with speech” [iii.Cho.14]), besides obtruding morals of the most obvious kind (“Bad child, worse father” [i.Cho.27]), as part of his markedly medieval baggage. That Gower’s “song that old was sung” (i.Cho.1) frankly crosses the always tenuous boundary between ‘history’ and ‘tale’22 is part of the point: his presence is essentially metatheatrical, serving as much to remind the spectator of a signifying function as to exercise it, and this aspect remains functional even when moral direction and containment are obviously required, as, for instance, in the Chorus of Doctor Faustus. Plays-​within-​play, whether or not formally presented as such, contribute a similar displacement in perceptual register. Whatever their specific contributions to particular works, all of these devices introduce a layer of signification operating beyond the literal, yet deriving from and depending on it, and to this extent such techniques may arguably be grouped under the rubric of allegory. Far from disappearing, therefore, the latter function is developed and enlarged –​if sometimes beyond recognition, compared with its earlier manifestations.

3

A conjunction between an internal pre-​disposition to tragedy and an allegorical function that catalytically transforms historical material is starkly visible in the single play most generally held to initiate several vital trends in the late Elizabethan drama:  Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. Much critical attention has been paid to the historical and political resonances that the play would have possessed for its first audiences. These obviously concern

22

Cf. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, i.i.132–​33:  “for aught that I  could ever read, /​Could ever hear by tale or history.”

106 Hillman England’s relations with Spain, even if there is no consensus as to whether the work precedes or postdates the Armada (1588). Part of that issue, in turn, as previously mentioned, is the imposition of Spanish hegemony upon Portugal, following the death of King Sebastian in Morocco, which Peele’s play confirms as a topic of intense contemporary concern.23 As in that work, and in Gorboduc, it is a metaphysical vindictive mechanism that takes control of physical historicity, and that operation here is incarnated, as it were, in the figure of Revenge, but only partially. For it makes a fascinating illustration of the complicity of purportedly ‘factual’ material with its tragic inflection that the chain of vengeance pointedly proceeds, within the fiction, from the human to the supernatural level: Don Andrea’s ghost is responsible for Revenge’s presence with him on stage. Thereafter, Revenge metatheatrically presides over, and palpably influences, the action from start to finish, and indeed beyond. For so thorough is Revenge’s transformative influence that he gets the last word, promising the ghost of Don Andrea to pursue his enemies in the underworld: “For here, though death hath end their misery, /​I’ll there begin their endless tragedy.”24 The transcendental status thereby arrogated by Revenge is arguably not just a matter of sensational overkill (a hallmark of the genre as it would develop), but a point that bears tellingly on signification. It calls attention to an essential contrast between the action of historical depiction, a series of events unfolding according to linear time, and the significance that may be imparted to them. Such significance is, in itself, no more subject to time than is the abstract personage of Revenge itself, and no more inherent in, or constrained by, the ‘factual’ situation to which it may be attached. The subsequent drama abounds with confirmation that ‘revenge’, in particular, becomes a floating signifier, one which characters within plots of various kinds may appropriate, successfully or not, in the cause of metatheatrically skewing them. A salient and highly ironic instance is the attempt of Shakespeare’s Tamora, presenting herself as Revenge, to entrap the outraged and distracted Titus Andronicus, a figure supposed, of course, to occupy a ‘real’ place within the unfolding of Roman history. Yet it is actually Titus who appropriates her allegorical intervention, identifying her sons, at once falsely and truly, as Rape and Murder (Tit., v.ii.45), then incorporating them into a tragedy of his own devising, which radically alters the historical trajectory.

23 24

See Hillman, “Thomas Kyd: The Spanish Tragedy,” 571–​74. Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. J. R. Mulryne, intr. and notes Andrew Gurr, 3rd ed., New Mermaids (London: Methuen, 2009), iv.v.47–​48.

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A similar capacity for appropriation is more subtly displayed in The Revenger’s Tragedy, which, as already mentioned, nominally pre-​endows its protagonist with a half-​hidden allegorical function foregrounded as the object of grim playfulness:

Lussurioso. Vindice. Lussurioso. Vindice.

Thy name? I have forgot it. Vindice, my lord. ’Tis a good name that. Ay, a revenger.25

Regularly, to cast oneself as a revenger, determined to reshape the linear course of the story, whatever it is, into tragic form, is to renounce the letter for the spirit, to invest physical persons and deeds with metaphysical significance. Shakespeare’s Hamlet begs the Ghost to reveal Claudius’s crime, “that I, with wings as swift  /​As meditation, or the thoughts of love,  /​May swoop to my revenge” (Ham., i.v.29–​31). He thereby appropriates, by means of simile, two allegorical identities –​although not, one cannot help noting, that of Revenge itself. He supports his cause, or supposes he does, with a dumb-​show and an allegorical display. (The Player King and Queen, as well as the ‘Italian’ murderer –​all the more so for having the gesture of a name, Gonzago –​are extra-​ historical functions, if not wholly abstract.) A more convincing self-​casting is that of The White Devil’s Francisco, who, “To fashion my revenge more seriously,” summons up his sister’s memory, which duly materialises as her ghost; he emerges from the experience as a self-​conscious and subtle metadramatist: “My tragedy must have some idle mirth in’t.”26

4

If this discussion has strayed from the function of allegory in history plays, in the narrow sense of both terms, it is in order better to grasp the broader and more basic issue at stake: the intersection of two conceptions of reality, operating on different planes. These correspond, in effect, to what Benjamin Griffin, writing about Bale’s King Johan and picking up C. S. Lewis’s notion of “sacramental symbolism,” distinguishes as “the temporal ‘remembrance’ ” and 25 26

Cyril Tourneur, The Revenger’s Tragedy, ed. Lawrence J. Ross, Regents Renaissance Drama (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), IV.ii.166-​70. John Webster, The White Devil, ed. Elizabeth M.  Brennan, New Mermaids (London: Methuen, 1966), iv.i.97, 118.

108 Hillman “the eternal ‘presence’,” or “individual identities” and “cosmic qualities,” or “particulars” and “universals,” or, again, “historical individual characters” and their “figurative significance.”27 Griffin sees Bale as innovative in this respect and stresses that the “ ‘real’ reality of which the individuals are mere reflection” takes precedence in his thinking, Sedition, therefore, predominating over Stephen Langton. Certainly, Bale’s extension of the convention of shape-​shifting Vices to include historical personages, combined with his energetic management of these mutations, produces dazzling theatrical effects in his didactic cause. It is clear, as well, that a typological mode of relating particular incarnations of abstract principles is at work, as is further illustrated by Imperial Majesty’s capacity to stand for both Henry viii and, in the latest revised version, Elizabeth i. Arguably, however, King Johan is exploiting, albeit with signal brilliance and polemical energy, a technique of double-​layered signification thoroughly embedded within early modern culture. An acute consciousness of this semiotic issue is displayed by the two contrasting versions extant of Nathaniel Woodes’s The Conflict of Conscience, all the more clearly because the common application of allegory to transform history into tragedy is conspicuously short-​circuited, and apparently for reasons dissimulated by the text itself.28 In both states of its only known edition (1581), the play mingles representational modes with particular freedom. There are characters purporting to be individuals and ‘purely’ allegorical ones:  Conscience, of course, but also Sensuall Suggestion, Spirit and Horror; Vices transparently evoking the Catholic Church on the model of Bale (Avarice, Hypocrisie, Tyrannye); as well as sound and benevolent counsellors (Theologus, Eusebius). Satan also appears as, naturally, the éminence noire of Catholicism. The key difference between the two states of the text is that the first assigns the protagonist a recognisable historical identity, naming him as the Italian Protestant Francesco Spiera, whose weak-​willed recantation of his faith and subsequent agonies of conscience were currently accepted matters of fact. The action then duly traces his course, as recorded in the sources, to

27 Griffin, Playing the Past, 41–​42. 28 Cf. Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 239–​43, who, however, takes the text’s explanation of the revision at face value. See also Bevington, From ‘Mankind’ to Marlowe, 245–​51, on the play’s “dual tendency, to describe both a particular man and a universal spiritual principle” (p. 246). The alternative endings are attributed to the “struggle between the impulse toward biography and the impulse toward generic representation” (p. 250).

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despair and self-​destruction by hanging: tragedy indeed, and explicitly leading to the eternal kind (“endles paine”), which, like Marlowe in Doctor Faustus, Woodes dares to present as divine punishment (“he plagues vs in the end”).29 The revised version suppresses the name, denoting the protagonist merely as Philologus, and adds a report of his final acceptance of divine mercy, hence a comic ending: the “dolefull newes”30 announced by the Nuntius at the conclusion is succinctly altered to “ioyfull newes” (sig. I4r). Of special interest here is the Prologue’s explanation of the revision’s obscuring, however transparently, of the protagonist’s historical identity. He declares that the basis of the play is “a Hystory straunge and true, to many men well knowne.”31 But the author thought it better, he maintains, “the true name to omit,” First, because a Comedie, will hardly him permit, The vices of one priuate man, to touch particulerly, Againe, nowe shall it stirr them more, who shall it heare or see, For if this worldling had been namde, we wold straight deem in minde, That all by him then spoken were, our selues we would not finde. (sig. Aiiv) And so the name Philologus, “one that loues to talke” (ibid.), was chosen, to serve as a warning to all who merely pay lip-​service to God’s word but do not put it into practice. Nevertheless, we are assured that, although “This Hystorie” shows the wretched state of a sinner who cannot repent, God finally grants him that mercy. As is not unusual in the period, the term “Comedie” is ambiguous. It may merely signify any dramatic work. Still, the argument that comedy as a classical genre does not expose the vices of individuals but aims at touching consciences generally is a familiar one (usually a defensive strategy), and suggests a connection between the de-​individualising of the protagonist –​effectively, the assimilation into allegory of the original’s insistently ‘real’ element –​and the 29 30 31

For the first state of the text I cite, by line numbers, Nathaniel Woodes, The Conflict of Conscience, eds. Herbert Davis & F. P. Wilson, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), ll. 2424, 2416. Ibid., l. 2410. Nathaniel Woodes, An excellent new commedie intitutled, The conflict of conscience contayninge a most lamentable example of the dolefull desperation of a miserable worldlinge, termed by the name of Philologus, who forsooke the trueth of Gods gospel, etc. (London: Richard Bradocke, 1581), sig. Aiir. Cf. Woodes, Conflict of Conscience, eds. Davis & Wilson: “Fravncis Speraes History, to most men fully known” (Prologue 30).

110 Hillman revised version’s happy ending. The corollary would be that the original ‘history’ tended toward the tragic, as indeed is obvious from the despairing suicide of the protagonist. However, the anxiety expressed that the audience would not have perceived the specific case as sufficiently universal, hence broadly admonitory, risks appearing disingenuous:  after all, the identical moral and allegorical apparatus is attached to the original in a way that already, according to the signifying principle observable elsewhere, including Bale’s King Johan, transforms a nominally historical figure into a cautionary exemplum. In this light, the transformation into comedy effected by the revision suggests that the point of anxiety was, instead, the representation of a ‘real’ instance of despair leading to perdition. This was a risk that Marlowe appears to have been virtually alone in taking, and it runs counter to the general hopeful practice, in those morality plays that directly engage the question of salvation, of showing divine mercy as always available and accorded.32 In this reading, the rationale for revising the original would actually be quite contrary to that stated in the Prologue –​the result is less acutely minatory, not more –​but in any case the distinction drawn there between historical specificity and universal significance shows awareness of the contribution of both to the making of meaning and the shaping of genre. That these issues of signification, hence the assumptions behind them, were not limited to texts actually intended for the stage is confirmed by a quasi-​ dramatic work universally acknowledged as lending impetus to, and helping to define, the chronicle history play. The Mirror for Magistrates virtually evolved, under composite authorship, alongside that dramatic form, with multiple editions ranging from 1559 to 1610. I have elsewhere discussed the discursive phenomenon by which its successive speakers, in retailing their stories, construct themselves as de facto tragic protagonists on the stage of history.33 Each presents a highly personal and specific narrative, but what renders their narratives 32

This point is made by Spivack, Allegory of Evil, 236–​39. A  provocative exception is the heavily Calvinistic Latin morality, Mercator seu Judicium (first published 1540)  by Thomas Kirchmeyer (alias Thomas Naogeorgus), which is explicitly designated as a tragedy and balances the salvation of its central character by the damnation of several others who adhere to Catholic teachings. For an edition of this work, see Thomas Kirchmeyer, Tragoedia alia nova Mercator:  mit einer zeitgenössischen Übersetzung, in Thomas Kirchmeyer, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2: Dramen 2, ed. Hans-​Gert Roloff (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1982). For its influence on Marlow, see Richard Hillman, “Faustus Face to Face with Damnation: Another Morality Model,” Notes and Queries 64 (2017): 256–​64. 33 See Richard Hillman, Self-​Speaking in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama: Subjectivity, Discourse and the Stage (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1997), 76–​77 et passim.

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tragic in the dramatic sense is less the unhappy outcome in each case –​that would simply repeat the medieval de casibus model –​than the universal moral lesson that the character himself, from beyond the grave, deduces and propounds. By this catalytic mechanism, the speaking persona, whose physical existence was circumscribed within the confines of mortality, is transformed into an exemplum, an allegorical signifier, putatively valid for all eternity.

5

To find this process so thoroughly functional within a non-​dramatic text contemporary with the evolution of stage-​practices confirms that King Johan did not invent the mingling of historical and allegorical representation. It also pushes strongly towards the conclusion that, in the larger sense, and despite the traditional narratives of literary history, there is no such thing as a ‘non-​ allegorical’ history play. We need, then, on the one hand, to delve deeper into the nature of allegorical signification in the period and, on the other, to examine its ‘hidden’ persistence in the later drama. A useful starting point may be the deceptively simple but shrewd observations of Rosemond Tuve concerning the allegorical procedures found in many medieval narratives, and to a lesser extent dramatic texts. Essentially, at the basis of her erudite analysis of medieval and early modern practices, one finds the observation that allegory is as allegory does: What is so characteristically allegorical about these figures is not the element of an abstraction personified, doing actions, but the fact that the suffocating, piled-​up concretions define and realize a universal that has a life and a nature of its own.34 Here she cites those self-​revelations of Chaucer’s Pardoner that, in defiance of any psychological realism, transform the character into the essence of Covetousness in human form: this is surely not remote from the first-​person narrative technique of The Mirror for Magistrates. Tuve further points out that “[e]‌ven in Guillaume [de Deguileville]’s truly allegorical fiction [Pélerinage de la vie humaine] the line between a proud man, an envious man, and Pride or Envy embodied, is easily crossed.”35 This is a principle that opens the way

34 Tuve, Allegorical Imagery, 176–​177. 35 Ibid., 177.

112 Hillman forward to the early modern theatre in all genres, and while comedy exploits it most self-​consciously, from ‘City Comedy’ and the ‘Comedy of Humours’ to the later ‘Comedy of Manners’, the historical drama is obviously implicated. Overtly allegorical naming tends to be confined to interior comic or serio-​ comic milieus: one thinks of Nimble and Ignorance in Thomas of Woodstock, or of Shakespeare’s Silence and Shallow, who, along with Pistol and Falstaff himself, smoothly make the transition to comedy, with nominal assistance, in The Merry Wives of Windsor. But the point can be expanded, most obviously by way of nicknames, as with “Hotspur,” an emblem of the character’s qualities, forfeited with his death: “Harry Percy’s spur was cold” (2 Henry iv, i.i.42). And the effect may even be related to allegory thematically evoked, rather than labelled: a weak monarch, such as Shakespeare’s Richard ii, becomes a detachable signifier for weakness in monarchy, as Elizabeth i was famously quick to perceive. Obviously, the conflation identified by Tuve of the individual character with its universal signification depends on an initial and dynamically ongoing doubleness, each element of the dichotomy having a claim to distinct status. Hence, to the extent that legitimacy is accorded to the act of representation, a special challenge existed for those Reformers who, at least in principle, rejected images, glosses and commentaries –​all of these often identified, moreover, as ‘allegories’ –​as being the work of man, not God. Thomas H. Luxon, preoccupied with the slippery status of allegory in Reformation thought, offers especially acute analysis of attempts to differentiate traditional scholastic allegorising from legitimate typological readings, so as to arrive at what Barbara Lewalski describes as “the identification of the typological-​anagogical meaning as the symbolic dimension of the literal text.”36 Fundamentally, Luxon cites the distinction made by Jean Calvin between legitimate material or literal representation –​including “presumably pictures and sculptures representing historical events” –​and “systems of symbols” and allegorical representation, which are to be rejected.37 As Luxon points out, appealing to Erich Auerbach38  –​ but the point dovetails with the post-​structuralist perspectives of Paul Ricœur, Hayden White and others39  –​this presumes, in ‘historical’ discourse, an 36

Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-​Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 120, as cited by Luxon, Literal Figures, 97. Luxon’s entire ­chapter 3 (p. 77–​101), is pertinent here. 37 Luxon, Literal Figures, 47–​48. 38 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask, intr. Edward W. Said, new ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 39 Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin & David Pellauer, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–​85); Hayden White, The Content of the

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impossible freedom from interpretative intervention, that is, from mimesis.40 It also presumes as background the argument of Aristotle, still influential, as Philip Sidney’s Apology reminds us, and serving at least as a tacit and general justification for historical drama, that poetically embellished history is finally more truthful in a universal sense than a simple record of facts.41 Perhaps not for Calvin himself, or for his more militantly iconoclastic and anti-​theatrical disciples, but for both Catholic and Reform practitioners of allegory, there were certain ways of accommodating the representational function within historical fact. One of these has already been mentioned:  the virtual primacy accorded by Bale, in Griffin’s analysis of King Johan, to ‘substantive’ spiritual realities over the ‘accidental’ historical ones that (re)incarnate them.42 This is ultimately what enables Bale to adapt the traditional saint play,43 and to create a protagonist virtually able to disappear as an actor on the historical stage –​certainly by comparison with his avatars in Peele and Shakespeare –​ while recuperating his meaningful place upon it, including a capacity virtually to re-​appear in the form of his historical antitype, Henry viii. The language and thinking of typology are inescapable in approaching Bale’s theatre, and it has been abundantly demonstrated, perhaps most importantly by Lewalski, that typological thinking received a vital second wind from Reform inspiration. One should not forget, however, that this is a renewal of a Catholic tradition, which notably expressed itself, amongst other means, in and through the theatre. The argument made some fifty years ago by E. Catherine Dunn for a line of descent from the biblical cycles to the chronicles reads naively now, in view of the extensive studies of medieval drama since undertaken, yet the thesis itself deserves revisiting, not least because Dunn assumed the medieval model of human history to be thoroughly spiritualised.44 It would be temptingly facile to apply to the English medieval dramatic genres some version of Form:  Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 40 Luxon, Literal Figures, 51–​55. 41 See Anthony Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 35, who thoroughly explores the implications for historiography in the period in relation to Aristotle’s Poetics, 1451b.5–​11; cf. Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), 109–​12. 42 Griffin, Playing the Past, 40. 43 See Peter Happé, “The Protestant Adaptation of the Saint Play,” in The Saint Play in Medieval Europe, ed. Clifford Davidson, Early Drama, Art, and Music, Monograph Series, 8 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1986), 205–​40. 44 E. Catherine Dunn, “The Medieval ‘Cycle’ as History Play: An Approach to the Wakefield Plays,” Studies in the Renaissance 7 (1960):  76–​89. In applying her thesis to Bale’s King

114 Hillman the famous four-​fold system of biblical exegesis, with its division between categories of signification: Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, Moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia.45 The biblical plays, in a strict application of this scheme, obviously belong on the first level, claiming representation of gesta –​literally, facts or acts –​while the ahistorical morality plays occupy the third, given that “allegoria” is here used in the sense of ‘typology’. But of course these neat distinctions are no more absolute than they were at bottom meant to be, since they unite in promoting a salvific objective which stands indefinitely outside linear time, as the very existence of the Doomsday pageants demonstrates.46 Beyond this, and further deconstructing generic categories, it is evident that the biblical plays are organised on figurative principles so as to show “quid credas,” while moral lessons, too, are everywhere apparent in them, even if the only intrusion of a formal allegorical personage into the surviving English biblical plays is that of Death in the N-​Town Death of Herod. Such lessons may receive reinforcement from presenter figures, notably in the Chester plays, but they are more generally implicit, mainly in the form of accepting or rejecting the divine will and thereby incurring blessing or curse. The ‘histories’ drawn from the bible do not hesitate to universalise by interpellating contemporary spectators and spanning space as well as time –​witness the socially aggrieved shepherds in the Towneley Secunda Pastorum (not to mention Mak’s “Sothren tothe” [l.  215]) and Cain’s request, in the same collection’s Mactatio Abel, to “Bery me in Gudeboure at the quarell hede” (l. 367).47 And in the opposite semiotic direction, the dominant field of abstract signification in Mankind, for instance, opens widely to incorporate a raft of concrete neighbours for the Vices to pillage (ll. 505 ff.), and perhaps a fellow townsman to accompany

45

46 47

Johan, however, Dunn strangely dismisses the “allegorical characters” as “accidental stage devices” (p. 88). “The letter teaches what was done, allegory what to believe,/​Morality how to behave, anagogy where you will go” [trans, rh]. Cited, and valuably placed in context, by D. W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 293. On the cross-​ fertilisation of the medieval dramatic genres, cf. Happé, “Protestant Adaptation,” 207. I refer to A.  C. Cawley, ed., The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958).

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them.48 Finally, the intermingling of ‘historical’ documentation with its multiple significance –​typological, moral and anagogical –​is the very stuff of the saint or ‘miracle’ plays, to judge from the few instances surviving in English, as well as numerous Continental examples.49

6

History in all these cases means sacred history, by definition informed by and communicated through the divine Word, which infuses it with significance. As forms of more-​or-​less historical secular history moved into place as the dominant source of basic matter for dramatisation, it is evident, at least in the early stages, that moral, indeed providential, overtones were assumed to be an indispensable part of the form itself and so needed to be built into it. The punishment of Cambyses, a figure transformed before the spectators’ eyes from a ‘historical’ phenomenon to an emblem of tyranny, is paradigmatic in this respect, and in case the point is missed, it is made by the protagonist himself (“A just reward for my misdeeds my death doth plain declare”50), then echoed by an anonymous Lord: “A just reward for his misdeeds the God above hath wrought, /​For certainly the life he led was to be counted naught” (ll. 249-50). It is arguably the reassuring presence of meaning in such moralised (pseudo-​)history that makes Marlowe’s quite clinical treatment of the death of Tamburlaine such a radical move: to dare to deny not just significance but signification itself to the ‘scourge of God’, the archetypal instrument of divine punishment, is to dare God out of his heaven indeed.51 I would almost suggest, with due diffidence, that the allegorical/​typological reflex is so strongly bound up with the staging of the putatively factual that criticism –​notably in providential readings, such as E. M. W. Tillyard’s, privileging the ‘Tudor myth’ in the chronicle histories52 –​may sometimes have 48

49

50 51 52

This is a possible reading of Tityuillus’ line in sending them forth: “Take William Fyde, yf Ʒe wyll haue ony mo” (l. 503). I cite Mankind from Mark Eccles’ edition of The Macro Plays:  The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind, The Early English Text Society (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). For a perspective on the French drama, see Alan Hindley, “ ‘Laisser l’Istoire … et Moralisier ung Petit’: Aspects of Allegory in the Mystères’, in Les Mystères: Studies in Genre, Text and Theatricality, eds. Peter Happé & Wim Hüsken, Ludus, 12 (Amsterdam-​New York: Rodopi, 2012), 189–​217. Fraser & Rabkin, eds. Drama of the English Renaissance, vol. 1: The Tudor Period, 79, l. 228. I paraphrase Robert Greene’s famous attack on Marlowe, in Perimedes the Blacksmith (1588), for creating the ‘atheist’ Tamburlaine. E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959).

116 Hillman taken for an ideological imperative what is more fundamentally a dramaturgical one. That is, the need to assert significance through patterns and relations may constitute a motive force in itself. Such a force is not bound, moreover, to result in coherence. Indeed, the ubiquity of the signifying mechanism would also allow for the contradictory and subversive meanings that work against ideological hegemony in those more complex dramatic texts where characters become generators, not merely vehicles, of significance. It is precisely because the production of meaning through and by characters becomes inseparable from their representation on the literal level that positive and negative readings of, say, Prince Hal and Falstaff can develop, and co-​exist, despite their presumptive moral and political association with order and disorder, respectively. Similarly, Shakespeare’s Henry v can acquire multiple facets as he moves in and out of the discursive spaces opened by the Chorus, playing the roles of a heroic warrior, a throat-​cutter, a shirker of moral responsibility, a winsome wooer and finally, translated to yet another signifying sphere in which allegory takes the form of metaphor, “this star of England” (Epi., 6). As the typological framework that governed the production of meaning in the medieval theatre fragments into lingering and shifting stereotypes (tyrants, rebels, heroes, villains, victims), nominally historical characters from the 1590s onwards increasingly make meanings of their own, re-​inventing themselves and each other in a proliferating tangle of allegories, which, in metatheatrical terms, compete for legitimacy. Such a process is quite compatible with the particular development of the history play that Lorna Hutson attributes to Shakespeare, notably as he reworked models present in the Queen’s Men’s repertoire:53 He adapted the forensic strategies of argument typical of classical intrigue plots into more inward dramas of inference and conjecture, prompting us, as readers or audience, to participate in the processes by which characters rhetorically invent the intentions, motivations, occasions, and histories which enable them –​and us –​to construe the ‘facts’ of their own and one another’s ‘cases’, or causes.54 53

54

On this repertoire, which included Peele’s The Troublesome Reign and the anonymous The Famous Victories of Henry V, see notably Scott McMillin & Sally-​Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), who include allegory among the devices that now stand out as “old-​fashioned” (p. 121), as in Robert Wilson’s The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (published in 1590), which “cannot be thought of as history, tragedy, or comedy” (p. 124). Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 219–​20.

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After all, why should Hotspur not change his mind about the signified of a “sweet lovely rose” (1 Henry iv, i.iii.175) and a “canker” (1 Henry iv, i.iii.176), if neither allegorising image has a greater claim to reality than the other? To “construe … ‘facts’ ” has become everybody’s business, onstage and off. Still, the dualism of the process remains no less present as such. Moreover, however outstanding Shakespeare’s contribution in retrospect, the effect is hardly confined to his work. When history is thoroughly made matter for the stage, what finally lends the authority of reality to the actor embodying John Ford’s Henry vii in the face of the one ‘playing’ Perkin Warbeck?

7

It may most fundamentally be not because mankind must not usurp the divine work of creation but because one cannot help doing so  –​because facts cannot be represented without interpreting them, as Calvin apparently sought to believe  –​that the theatre presented Reformers with the choice either of closing it down or of smothering it beneath layers of acceptable signification. (After all, the Word of God as authentically rendered in the Geneva bible is replete with glosses, sometimes almost crowded off the page by them.) Such smothering is evidently impossible in actual conditions of performance –​all metatheatrical indicators are ultimately reminders of this fact –​but an intriguing glimpse of the impulse to do so is offered by the para-​textual interventions of Simon Goulart, a prominent and prolific disciple of Calvin, in an especially fecund source of historical matter, one enjoying a long-​standing claim to edification in the manner of moral humanism but also posing particular dangers of uncontrolled signification. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of the Greeks and Romans was first published in Jacques Amyot’s monumental translation (Les vies des hommes illustres) in 1559.55 Goulart entered the picture, seemingly, in 1583, with his own edition of Amyot, which was in its turn multiply reprinted, and whose amplified title reflected the decidedly moralistic imperatives of his project: this reads (in English) as follows: The lives of illustrious men … translated by Monsieur Jacques Amyot, … enriched in this latest edition … by moral annotations in the

55

Amyot’s work, of course, is best known to Shakespeareans as the original of Thomas North’s translation, which provided the playwright with the history  –​hardly in itself, moreover, a mere sequence of facts devoid of commentary –​that he drew on so heavily for his Roman plays.

118 Hillman margin showing the benefit one may derive from reading these histories … The whole arranged by S. G. S.56 I have elsewhere discussed the way in which a particular moralistic gloss by Goulart on the death of Cleopatra was virtually stood on its ear by Shakespeare, with the intertextual effect of validating the script of renewal and affirmation which that heroine opposes, in her defiant act of suicide, to the dismissive Roman reading of her love of Antony, a reading which Goulart resoundingly endorses in his margins.57 At issue is clearly a contest over allegories (as it happens, on the banks of the Nile, but that is another story58). Goulart could hardly have foreseen Shakespeare’s version in particular, although he could certainly have known the Plutarchian dramatisations of Étienne Jodelle (Cléopâtre captive, published in 1574) and Robert Garnier (Marc Antoine, 1578). In any case, the larger issue of dangerously variable interpretation was by no means lost on him, and it is especially suggestive that, in his introductory matter, he presents it using the familiar metaphor of the world as a stage, and explicitly as the theatre of God’s judgements. This makes a notable addition to the lengthy original preface of Amyot, comprised of eight dense pages in folio (“To the Readers,” as translated by North), which had, in effect, come remarkably close to claiming that history could speak for itself, or at least would do so, willy-​nilly, because “an historie is the very tresury of mans life, whereby the notable doings and sayings of men, and the wonderfull aduentures & straunge cases  … are preserued from the death of forgetfulness.”59 The objective, several times repeated, is to afford both pleasure and profit. Amyot by no means disallows the latter –​on the contrary. What is striking, however, is that the individual reader is credited with a power of discernment, judgement and application independent of the raw material itself. Indeed, allowance is also made for distortions produced by unworthy historians, for “that is not the fault of the historie” –​a term, by 56

Simon Goulart, ed., Les vies des hommes illvstres Grecs et Romains Comparees l’vne auec l’avtre par Plutarque de Chæronee translatees par M. Jacques Amyot, … enrichies en cette derniere edition … d’annotations morales en marge qui monstrent le profit qu’on peut faire en la lecture de ces histoires. … Le tout disposé par S. G. S. ([Dijon]: Ieremie des Planches, 1583). 57 Richard Hillman, French Reflections in the Shakespearean Tragic:  Three Case Studies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 138–​41. 58 Cf. Mrs Malaprop in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals, iii.iii, in Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Six Plays, ed. Louis Kronenberger (New York: Hill & Wang, 1957), 47. 59 Plutarch, The lives of the noble Grecians and Romaines, compared together by that grave learned philosopher and historiographer, Plutarke of Chæronea: Translated out of Greeke into French by Iames Amyot … and out of French into English, By Sir Thomas North Knight (London: Richard Field, 1579), sig. *iiiv.

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the way, which the translation uses interchangeably with “storie” –​but of “the men that are partiall.”60 Certainly, history is duly acknowledged as a record of the “iudgements and definitiue sentences of Gods Court,” but Amyot equally insists that these are by no means always within the grasp of “our weake naturall reason,” but are indeed sometimes “aboue and against all discourse of mans vnderstanding.”61 The historiographer’s ideal, then, is the neutral presentation of a factual field, the equivalent, one might have supposed, of the ‘pure’ (re)presentation theoretically allowed by Calvin, as if harking back to the basis of medieval basics: “Littera gesta docet.” By contrast, Goulart palpably recoils before such a division between history and allegory, with its possibilities for slippage between signifier and signified, and effectively transforms history tout court into an all-​encompassing history play on his divine informant’s terms. When one sees and hears these ancient Romans and Greeks, he opines, “ramenez sur le theatre du monde par le sage Plutarque” (brought back upon the theatre of the world by the wise Plutarch), one feels that his works have been saved from destruction “par vne siguliere prouidence de Dieu” (by a singular providence divine) and will serve “pour condamner deuant Dieu & les hommes tous ceux qui vivent desordonnément” (to condemn before God and men all those who live disorderly lives).62 The point is pressed home in an introductory sonnet: Ce liure est vn Theatre, où Plutarque le sage Ameine vn milion de mortels, reuestus De vestemens divers de vices & vertus, Qui iouent à leur honte ou à leur auantage. Mais parmi tant de cas tragiquement diuers, Regarde ce grand Dieu, Iuge de l’vnivers, Qui garde verité, ruine le mensonge, Abat l’ambitieux, maintient le genre humain, Veut que petits & grands tremblent dessous sa main, Et leur dit par ceux-​ci, que le monde est vn songe.63 [This book is a Theatre, where the wise Plutarch brings in a million mortals, clothed in different costumes of vices and virtues, who play to their shame or to their credit. But among so many cases, tragically diverse, see that great 60 61 62 63

Ibid., sig. *vr. Ibid. Les vies des hommes illvstres, sig. **iir. Ibid., sig. **iiir.

120 Hillman God, Judge of the universe, who preserves truth, destroys lies, strikes down the ambitious, maintains the human race, wills that small and great tremble beneath his hand, and tells them by these examples that the world is a dream.] For Goulart, the danger in reading history consists in mistaking shadow for substance, and the theatrical metaphor serves him as a means, somewhat paradoxically, of redeploying the entire medieval signifying system, premised on an all-​pervasive providence and conditioned anagogically. The metaphor remains, however, a metaphor, and a defensive one, a bulwark against the magnetic attraction of the historical to meanings of various kinds in different contexts and from different perspectives. The multiple representations of history that emerged on the late Tudor and Stuart stages furnish ample evidence of the propensity of divergent meanings to proliferate and the difficulty of keeping them under control when history actually takes to the stage –​or, rather, the stage takes to history. It is difficult indeed to imagine Goulart, any more than most of his fellow hard-​line Reformers, at ease with the prolix processes of performance. And it would not have reassured him (or indeed, probably, have made any sense to him at all) to suggest that the essential principle of allegorical representation, the forming of meaningful bonds between the physical and the metaphysical, has not broken down but entered into a new and dynamic phase. Undeniably, however, that principle moved away from dismissing this world as a dream towards an interest in the possibilities of infinitely dreaming it, allegorically.

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Plutarch. The lives of the noble Grecians and Romaines, compared together by that grave learned philosopher and historiographer Plutarke of Chæronea:  Translated out of Greeke into French by Iames Amyot … and out of French into English, By Sir Thomas North Knight. London: Richard Field, 1579. Plutarch. Les vies des hommes illvstres Grecs et Romains Comparees l’vne auec l’avtre par Plutarque de Chæronee translatees par M. Jacques Amyot, … enrichies en cette derniere edition … d’annotations morales en marge qui monstrent le profit qu’on peut faire en la lecture de ces histoires. … Le tout disposé par S. G. S., edited by Simon Goulart. [Dijon]: Ieremie des Planches, 1583. Quilligan, Maureen. The Language of Allegory:  Defining the Genre. Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 1979. Ribner, Irving. The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare, rev. ed. London: Methuen, 1965. Ricœur, Paul. Time and Narrative, translated by Kathleen McLaughlin & David Pellauer, 2 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–​85. Robertson, Jr., D. W. A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962. Sheridan, Richard Brinsley. Six Plays, edited by Louis Kronenberger. New York: Hill & Wang, 1957. Sidney, Philip. An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poetry, edited by Geoffrey Shepherd. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973. Spivack, Bernard. Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil:  The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958. Tillyard, E. M. W. Shakespeare’s History Plays. London: Chatto & Windus, 1959. Tourneur, Cyril. The Revenger’s Tragedy, edited by Lawrence J. Ross, Regents Renaissance Drama. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966. Tuve, Rosemond. Allegorical Imagery:  Some Mediaeval Books and Their Posterity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966. Watkins, John. “The Allegorical Theatre: Moralities, Interludes, and Protestant Drama.” In The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, edited by David Wallace, 767–​92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Webster, John. The White Devil, edited by Elizabeth M. Brennan, New Mermaids. London: Methuen, 1966. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form:  Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Whitman, Jon. Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Woodes, Nathaniel. An excellent new commedie intitutled, The conflict of conscience contayninge a most lamentable example of the dolefull desperation of a miserable

124 Hillman worldlinge, termed by the name of Philologus, who forsooke the trueth of Gods gospel, etc. London: Richard Bradocke, 1581. Woodes, Nathaniel. The Conflict of Conscience, edited by Herbert Davis & F. P. Wilson, Malone Society Reprints. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952.

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Mirror, Mirror on the Wall … History in Late Medieval Drama from the Low Countries Wim Hüsken Abstract Within the large collection of plays written in the Low Countries between c. 1400 and 1620 a subgenre of ‘history plays’ does not exist, even though a number of texts refer to historical events or have their action take place in a distant past. In this essay we will concentrate on three different time frames so as to investigate whether any developments in the use of history has taken place. The earliest collection of secular plays in the Low Countries, composed by the end of the fourteenth century, includes four abele spelen, three of which deal with chivalric matter with a (pseudo)-​historical background. The plays of Esmoreit and Gloriant deserve our special attention. Next we will focus on a Brussels collection of plays, written between 1480 and 1520, in which history is employed for political and dynastic reasons. Finally we will study two plays from Jacob Duym’s Spieghelboeck (1600). One of them focuses on the English king Edward iii and his relationship with the countess of Salisbury. The other play relates to the story of the women of Weinsberg, in the southwest of present-​day Germany, who, in 1140, managed to free their husbands from their town besieged by the Hohenstaufen king, Conrad iii.

Keywords Esmoreit –​ Gloriant –​Colyn Caillieu –​Jan Smeken –​Jacob Duym –​Edward iii –​ The Black Prince –​The Countess of Salisbury –​Conrad iii –​ Weinsberg

1

Introduction

Over the past few decades late medieval drama from the Low Countries has received considerable attention outside the world of Dutch and Flemish scholarship. Previously it had been virtually unknown to specialists working on other European traditions. Many scholars, especially those working on English

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004449503_007

126 Hüsken drama, are now fully incorporating international research on theatre and drama from across the North Sea in their own work.1 Translations of play texts into English have helped to increase their knowledge of this rich tradition, the students of which can boast of having at their disposal a corpus of about 670 texts, ranging in time between c.  1400 and c. 1620, some forty of which are available in an English translation.2 Compared to other European theatre traditions Low Countries drama shows many similarities but also quite a few differences. With France it shares a special predilection for the genre of farce, with England it shows a great interest in morality drama in which the English Vice and the Dutch sinnekens play similar roles.3 But unlike English drama the Low Countries do not have any mystery cycles, such as the York or the N-​Town plays. In itself the tradition of acting out scenes on pageant wagons during Whitsuntide or on other days within Eastertide was not unknown here but no texts, comparable to the mystery play collection from Lille in neighbouring French Flanders, have survived. On Dutch soil the genres of Passion and Easter plays, so abundantly available in German speaking countries, were also lacking while their Fastnachtspiele resemble the genre of Dutch farce. 1 See for an introduction into the study of Low Countries late medieval drama Elsa Strietman, “The Low Countries,” in The Theatre of Medieval Europe: New Research in Early Drama; ed. Eckehard Simon (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1991), 225–​52, with a bibliography on pages 284–​88, and W. M. H. Hummelen, “The Drama of the Dutch Rhetoricians,” in Everyman & Company:  Essays on the Theme and Structure of the European Moral Play; ed. Donald Gilman (New  York:  ams Press, 1989), 169–​92 with an equally extensive bibliography on pages 252–​65. The extent to which scholarship on Low Countries drama has meanwhile pervaded international scholarship can be gauged by consulting Lynette R. Muir’s The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe (1995) in which the author involves more than twenty play texts from the Netherlands. 2 To list only the most important collections of translations: Netherlandic Secular Plays from the Middle Ages: The “Abele Spelen” and the Farces of the Hulthem Manuscript; transl. with an introd. and notes by Theresia de Vroom (Ottawa:  Dovehouse, 1997); Medieval Dutch Drama:  Four Secular Plays and Four Farces from the Van Hulthem Manuscript; transl. with an introd. by Johanna C. Prins (Asheville: Pegasus Press, 1999); For Pleasure and Profit: Six Dutch Rhetoricians Plays. Vol. i: Three Biblical Plays. Vol. ii: Three Classical Plays; eds. Elsa Strietman & Peter Happé (Lancaster & Tempe: Medieval English Theatre & acmrs, 2006–​ 13); Comic Drama in the Low Countries, c. 1450–​1560. A Critical Anthology; ed. and transl. by Ben Parsons & Bas Jongenelen (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012); The First and Seventh Joys of Our Lady: Bilingual Texts of two Dutch Biblical Plays; ed. and transl. by Elsa Strietman & Peter Happé (Tempe: acmrs, 2017). Further translations can be found in Dutch Crossing (1984) nr. 24, (1985) nr. 25, (1986), nr. 86, and (1991) nr. 44. 3 See for a comparison between the two ‘versions’ of this stage character, among other publications, Charlotte Steenbrugge, Staging Vice: A Study of Dramatic Traditions in Medieval and Sixteenth-​Century England and the Low Countries (Amsterdam-​New York: Rodopi, 2014).

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A special position in the history of Low Countries late medieval drama is occupied by ten plays in a manuscript kept in the Brussels Royal Library, the Van Hulthem collection. Four of these plays are of a serious nature, labelled abele spelen, six are farces (sotternien). Within the context of European drama the former take a unique position in that they, dating back to the last quarter of the fourteenth century, belong to the oldest specimens of a secular play genre. This collection in particular has received a great deal of attention in the Anglo-​ Saxon world of drama scholars. Various translations into English have been made of these texts and an increasing number of essays in languages other than Dutch are being published on them as we speak.4 It is to this collection of plays, more particularly to two of its abele spelen in which history plays a remarkable role in the background of their plots, that we shall first turn. 2

The ‘Historic’ Setting of Esmoreit and Gloriant And my dear father, in very truth Is ruler of Hungary’s mighty kingdom5

The words quoted above are translated from one of the plays in the above-​mentioned Van Hulthem collection entitled Een abel spel van Esmoreit tconincx sone van Cecielien (An able play of Esmoreit, the king of Sicily’s son).6 Its unknown author uses an exotic setting for his play in which the unnamed mother of the title character claims to be the daughter of a Hungarian king. But is she? At the start of the play a young Sicilian prince –​still a baby –​is sold to a foreigner, named Platus, astrologer at the court of Damast. The name of this town refers to Damascus in present-​day Syria, hence a location within Crusader territory. How long ago the ‘events’ took place staged in this play the author does not tell. At best we will be able to reconstruct this from circumstantial 4 For an introduction to the abele spelen and a brief description of the Van Hulthem manuscript in which they appear see Hans van Dijk, “The drama texts in the Van Hulthem manuscript,” in Medieval Dutch Literature in its European Context; ed. Erik Kooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 283–​96. 5 An Excellent Play of Esmoreit Prince of Sicily, transl. Jane Oakshott & Elsa Strietman (Preston: Alphaprint, 1989), 23, ll. 669–​70. 6 The meaning of the word abel is difficult to fathom, not only in English but also in Dutch. In English it has been translated as ‘beautiful’, ‘clever’, ‘excellent’, ‘goodly’, ‘ingenious’, ‘professional’, ‘serious’, etc. Herman Pleij, Het gevleugelde woord. Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse literatuur, 1400–​1560 (Amsterdam:  Bert Bakker, 2007), 42, interestingly associates it with ‘professionalism’.

128 Hüsken evidence provided in the play. A particular constellation of stars had taught the astrologer that one day a foreign prince would come to his land, murder the king of Damast and elope with his daughter who would convert to Christianity. Esmoreit is sold by the king of Sicily’s nephew, Robberecht, who, after the child’s birth, had lost his claims on the throne. Platus takes Esmoreit to Damast where he is brought up by the king’s daughter, Damiet. Back at the court of his uncle, Robberecht accuses his aunt of having killed her son. Without further ado the king believes his nephew and he orders the imprisonment of his wife. After eighteen years one day Esmoreit, by now a handsome young man, overhears Damiet who has fallen in love with him. Not knowing that he is listening she calls him a foundling. Assuming that he was her brother, Esmoreit wants to know his family background. This is why he sets off to the West, wearing the beautifully embroidered cloth in which he was sold to the astrologist as a turban. He sails to Sicily where he arrives at a prison. The imprisoned queen, Esmoreit’s mother, recognises the turban and she tells him he is the son of the king. On hearing this news Esmoreit visits the castle and makes himself known to his father –​a scene not shown in the play. The king, overwhelmed with joy, welcomes Esmoreit as his lost son but he strongly advises him to embrace Christianity, which the young man instantaneously does. His father pardons his wife and orders Robberecht to release her. Meanwhile Damiet can no longer wait for Esmoreit’s return and disguised as a pilgrim she too sails west, together with Platus. In Sicily she is recognised by Esmoreit who takes her to his parents. The king renounces his throne in favour of his long missed son. Esmoreit and Damiet will soon be joined in matrimony. Finally, Platus –​ an unequivocal sympathetic character in the play7  –​uncovers Robberecht’s treacherous act of having sold Esmoreit to him, whereupon the evildoer, in vain trying to deny everything, is hanged. In a pioneering essay on the historical background of the play, L.  Peeters identified the Sicilian king and queen in the play as Frederick iii of Sicily (1272–​1337) and his wife Eleanor of Anjou (1289–​1341).8 Frederick’s brother-​in-​ law, Robert of Anjou (1275–​1343), king of Naples, would inherit Sicily should 7 According to Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009 [rpt. of the 1993 revised ed.], 342, in chansons de geste –​the most likely source for this play (see further down this essay) –​“the Christians are right and the ‘pagans’ are wrong, but the setting is heroic and it assumes that society is much the same on both sides of the divide. There are both Christian and Saracen goodies and baddies.” 8 L. Peeters, “Esmoreit tconincx sone van Cecielien: Siciliaanse historie als abel spel,” Spiegel der Letteren 19 (1977): 253–​67. See for an English summary of Peeters’ conclusions: Jacques Tersteeg, “The fourteenth-​ century, middle-​ dutch, secular play of Esmoreit,” European Medieval Drama 1 (1997): 258–​60.

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his sister Eleanor fail to give birth to a successor. As it happened, not long after they had married, in 1303, Eleanor’s son Peter (c. 1304–​43) was born. As a consequence Robert of Anjou saw his claims on the Sicilian throne go up in smoke. The historical data thus seem to fit the situation depicted in the play like a glove. So far Peeters’ conclusions have not been contested. Yet the author assumes that Eleanor’s father, Charles ii of Naples (1254–​1309) became king of Hungary as a result of his marriage with Mary of Hungary (c. 1257–​1323).9 This, however, is incorrect.10 Charles ii never held this high position. Mary and Charles married in 1270. Two years later her father, Stephen v (c. 1235–​72), died but Stephen’s lawful successor was Ladislaus iv (1262–​90). The latter married Elizabeth of Sicily (1261–​1303), daughter of Charles i of Anjou (1227–​85), but the couple remained childless. After Ladislaus’ death, on 10 July 1290, Charles ii and Mary tried to push forward their eldest son, Charles Martel of Anjou (1271–​95), as king. Instead it was a grandson of a former Hungarian king, Andrew ii (c. 1177–​1235), who, on 23 July 1290, was made king of Hungary as Andrew iii (c. 1265–​1301). Soon after Andrew’s death, on 14 January 1301, Charles Martel’s son, Charles i of Hungary11 (1288–​1342), had himself crowned but he encountered opposition from the Hungarian barons who, on 27 August 1301, opted for Wenceslaus iii of Bohemia (1289–​1306). In 1305, Wenceslaus, who was betrothed to Andrew’s daughter Elizabeth, became king of Bohemia; he decided to leave the Hungarian crown to Otto iii, duke of Bavaria (1261–​ 1312). However, Charles i of Hungary kept fighting for his crown, proving to be “unrivalled on the battlefield.”12 By doing so, he eventually succeeded in getting the support of a majority of Hungarian barons who, in 1307, arrested Otto and chose Charles as their new king. On 27 August 1307 he was officially crowned. In conclusion, instead of Charles ii of Naples it was his grandson, Charles i, who would become the first king of Hungary. Eleanor of Anjou was his aunt. Charles i married three times and had three sons and one daughter, Catherine of Hungary († 1355), but she cannot possibly have been Esmoreit’s mother since she married Duke Henry ii of Świdnica (c. 1316–​45).

9 10 11 12

Peeters, “Esmoreit,” 254. See for the complicated situation in Hungary after the death of King Stephen V, Engel Pál, The Realm of St Stephen: A History of Medieval Hungary, 895–​1526 (London-​New York: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 107–​39, on which the following is based. In Hungarian history Charles i of Hungary is better known as Charles i of Anjou (ibid., 124–​39), but in order to avoid confusion with the king of Sicily, his great-​grandfather, I shall name him Charles i of Hungary. Ibid., 130.

130 Hüsken In conclusion, should the queen of Sicily in the play of Esmoreit be equated with Eleanor of Anjou, she could not possibly have claimed her father to be king of Hungary (ll. 669–​70). Moreover, in the play Robberecht is a nephew of the king of Sicily, whereas Robert of Anjou was Frederick iii’s brother-​in-​law.13 It seems, therefore, that the historical details do not match the situation as we find it in the play. Peeters’ attempt to identify the royal couple as Eleanor and Frederick must, therefore, be declared unsuccessful. Are there, perhaps, other candidates for Esmoreit’s mother as queen of Sicily? Until now we have been looking at the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when Sicily was a well-​established kingdom. Yet its status as a monarchy goes in fact back to the twelfth century. On 25 December 1130, Roger ii (1095–​ 1154) was crowned as the first king of Sicily, after having been elevated to this position two months earlier, on 27 September, by the antipope, Anacletus ii. Roger’s father, Rogier de Hauteville (1031–​1101), was the second count of Sicily, following in the footsteps of his brother Robert Guiscard (1015–​85). Rogier left behind two sons, Simon and Roger ii, but at his death both were too young to take over from him. From an earlier marriage Rogier had a daughter, Felicia. In 1097 she married the Hungarian king Kálmán (c. 1070–​1116). The couple had three children, one of them a daughter named Sophia. Unfortunately very little is known about her and it is, therefore, unlikely that she would have been portrayed in the play as queen of Sicily. At first sight there is, therefore, no reason to look at these early stages in the history of the kingdom of Sicily. Moreover, the entourage of Rogier de Hauteville and his son Roger ii do not yield any personages that could have stood model for the characters of Robberecht and Esmoreit. Could the author of the play of Esmoreit perhaps still have borrowed a motif from their history? During the years prior to Roger’s majority –​he officially succeeded his father in 1112 –​his mother, Adelaide del Vasto (c. 1075–​1118), served as regent of Sicily, appointing a son of the duke of Burgundy as her substitute. Shortly after Roger had come of age she was accused, in one of the chronicles14 in which 13 14

Peeters, “Esmoreit,” 264. In the Middle Ages historical information was predominantly supplied in chronicles and annals. It was only during the Renaissance that Humanist scholars embarked on composing ‘histories’ in a modern sense of the word. More often than not annals were more objective than chronicles, the latter of the two in most cases commissioned by noble patrons for the greater honour and glory of their ancestry: “Chroniclers were not modern detached historians. They were opinionated, often deeply partisan, and intensely personal. Idiosyncrasy and anecdote pervade their accounts. Yet their value to historians is inestimable” (see the “Introduction” to Chronicling History: Chroniclers and Historians in Medieval and Renaissance Italy; ed. Sharon Dale, Alison Williams Lewin & Duane

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she figures, of having poisoned this man but the chronicler who relates this crime is known to have had a predilection for stories in which women act as poisoners.15 Do we encounter an echo of this story in Robberecht’s accusation of Esmoreit’s mother? Summarising:  since Charles ii of Naples was, despite his marriage with Mary of Hungary, never king of Hungary, his daughter Eleanor could never have referred to him as such. No historical situation can be found that exactly mirrors the claims held by Esmoreit’s mother and we must therefore conclude that the author of the play merely may have wanted to give his story greater credibility by giving it a Sicilian-​Hungarian setting. In hindsight it is difficult for us to ascertain whether it really did. But we still can ask ourselves why he may have done this? Peeters detects in the play a Franciscan spirit in the way topics such as the perception of faith, the portrayal of mankind, nature and love are presented.16 By the mid-​fourteenth century, the conflict between the Guelphs and the Ghibelines, political parties emerging from the Investiture Controversy supporting the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor respectively, was still undecided. Both the Franciscans and Duke John iii of Brabant (c. 1300–​55) sided with the Ghibelines, against the House of Anjou and the Pope. Only towards the end of his life John yielded to the French party. What is more, Eleanor of Anjou and Frederick iii of Sicily were, still according to Peeters, clearly in favour of a Franciscan spirituality, making them sympathetic in the

15

16

J.  Osheim [University Park:  Pennsylvania State University Press,  2007], ix). According to M. R. P. McGuire, “Annals and Chronicles,” The New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York [etc.]: McGraw Hill, 1967), vol. i, 554, “[t]‌he distinction between annals and chronicles largely disappeared in the 12th century.” On chronicles see also the Introduction to the present volume above, p. 4. Hubert Houben, Roger ii of Sicily: A Ruler between East and West, transl. Graham A. Loud & Diane Milburn (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2002), 24–​29. Adelaide del Vasto may not have been unknown in the Low Countries. For about five years, until 1117, she was married to King Baldwin i of Jerusalem (c. 1068–​1118). In actual fact, Baldwin was still married to Arda of Armenia when he started his bigamous affair with Adelaide. In 1105, Arda had been repudiated by him, either because she had been unfaithful to her husband or because she had been raped, in 1101, on her way to Jerusalem. In 1117, the alliance between Baldwin and Adelaide was annulled by the Patriarch of Jerusalem. The latter had been reinstated in this position by Pope Paschal ii (1099–​1118), after he had been deposed, in 1112, for having married them. Referring to Christopher Dawson, Medieval Essays (London-​New  York, 1953), 178–​81, Peeters, “Esmoreit,” 272, speaks of a Franciscan “new vision on everything related to man and his environment,” in which “ideas about nature, women and love are positively valued and idealised.”

132 Hüsken eyes of a Brabant nobility.17 With this in mind as a further background for the play, it is not surprising that Eleanor’s brother Robert of Anjou (if he really was the character the author had in mind) emerges as a villain. In this sense the play may have contained a hidden political message favouring the Ghibelines. This brings us to the second play in the Van Hulthem collection: Een abel spel ende een edel dinc vanden hertoghe van Bruuyswijck hoe hi wert minnende des roede lioens dochter van Abelant, or: An able play and a noble affair of the duke of Brunswick, how he fell in love with The Red Lion’s daughter of Abelant.18 From the remainder of the play it becomes obvious that Abelant must be seen as a Muslim town somewhere in the Middle East.19 The main character in this play, Gloriant, is referred to as duke of Brunswick. His object of admiration, Florentijn, is a daughter of the ruler of Abelant, The Red Lion. Apart from Gloriant, Florentijn and other (fictional) characters the author of the play also introduces a certain Godevaert, a companion of Gloriant’s uncle Gheraert of Normandy. As we will shortly see Godevaert, whose position at the court of Brunswick remains unclear, may have been a ‘pseudo-​historical’ personage. Research has given only little attention to this seemingly unimportant character, but on closer inspection he will turn out to be a rather interesting person. The play’s content reads as follows. After a prologue the play opens with a dialogue between Gheraert and Godevaert. They agree on the fact that it is time for Gloriant to find a wife. Godevaert suggests the daughter of the king of “Averne,” according to Gheraert a good choice. They suggest this idea to Gloriant but he rejects their proposal. In Abelant lives a noble girl named Florentijn, harbouring the same ideas. So far she has rejected all suitors. However, she has heard of a duke living in Brunswick who seems to have the same opinion regarding marriage. She 17

18 19

That the audience of the abele spelen consisted of the nobility has been advocated, among others, by Bart Ramakers who, in relation to the play of Gloriant, notes that they formed the earliest public interested in romantic themes derived from chivalric literature, with topics such as love, marriage, standing and status. In the fourteenth century, urban audiences would not have felt any sympathy for a man reluctant to wed. See B.  A.  M. Ramakers, “Met zwaard en paard: epische sfeer in ‘Gloriant van Bruuyswijc’,” in Karolus Rex: Studies over de middeleeuwse verhaaltraditie rond Karel de Grote; eds. Bart Besamusca & Jaap Tigelaar (Hilversum: Verloren, 2005), 219. See for an English translation of this play: Netherlandic Secular Plays, transl. De Vroom, 109–​44. Willem Kuiper, “Abilant,” Neder-​L (2010), June 17 (http://​nederl.blogspot.com/​2010/​06/​ abilant.html), spotted a reference to “Abilant” in Girart de Vienne, a French chanson de geste. The Encyclopedia Brittanica (London:  Cambridge University Press, 1910–​11), vol. 1: 62, describes it as “a town of ancient Syria, the capital of the tetrarchy of Abilene … generally called Abila of Lysanias.”

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decides to send him her picture. Kindred spirits may find each other and by seeing her portrait his mind may change. Florentijn sends her servant Rogier to Brunswick to hand Gloriant her image. Rogier is ordered to tell him that her father is Abelant’s “rode lioen” (Red Lion). The moment Gloriant sees Florentijn’s portrait he falls in love with her, wishing to meet her. Back in Abelant Rogier reports this message to Florentijn, saying that Gloriant intends to meet her in about seven weeks’ time. Meanwhile, Gloriant discloses his innermost feelings for Florentijn to his uncle Gheraert who tells him that such an alliance is unthinkable because he beat The Red Lion’s father on the battlefield and Gloriant’s father killed The Red Lion’s uncle Eysenbaert and two of his aunt’s children. The Red Lion would, therefore, never condone a marriage of his daughter with Gloriant. The young duke does not want to listen to reason and he sets off to Abelant, disguised as an errant knight. Once in Abelant, Gloriant meets Florentijn in an orchard outside the city gates. There he declares his love to her. After the duke has sworn to honour her and make her his wife she agrees to follow him to Brunswick. Apparently their words have been overheard by Floerant, Florentijn’s cousin, who tells everything he has seen and heard to his uncle. While the couple are asleep in the orchard waiting for the city gates to be opened again, he even steals Gloriant’s sword and horse. Early next morning, Floerant and The Red Lion arrest Gloriant who is locked up in a dungeon. Threatening to burn her at the stake, The Red Lion puts Florentijn in gaol too. There the girl happens to be able to speak to her servant, Rogier. She asks him to help them escape. Rogier obeys her wishes; moreover, he hands Gloriant his sword and returns him his horse. Meanwhile acting as a double spy, he advises The Red Lion to execute Florentijn and to hang Gloriant. Paying heed to this advice, The Red Lion orders his executioner to kill Florentijn. Facing death –​allegedly after having embraced the Christian faith –​the girl prays to God to save her soul.20 Suddenly Gloriant appears on his horse, chases Florentijn’s father away and elopes with his bride. Back in Brunswick the couple are greeted by Gheraert who welcomes Florentijn as a most noble woman, acknowledging her as the daughter of The Red Lion, whose father was the Sultan of Babylon and mother a daughter of the Lord of Antioch. What are the implications of the information given in the narrative in terms of potential historical veracity? The duchy of Brunswick-​Lüneburg was 20

In a prayer to God she embraces death, “Om den ghenen, diese doer mi ontfinc /​Ende naect ane een cruce hinc” (For the sake of Him who, because of me, received death and hung naked on a cross). Does this prayer perhaps reveal an ‘error’ by the author who could couch Florentijn’s words to a divine being only in Christian terms?

134 Hüsken established in 1235 when Emperor Frederic ii (1194–​1250) bequeathed to Otto i, duke of Merania (1204–​52), nicknamed ‘the child’, the territories surrounding two towns in the northern parts of present-​day Germany. In 1269 the two were separated; both would continue as principalities with a prince as sovereign but still they were referred to as ‘duchy’. Neither a duke of Brunswick named Gloriant nor an alliance with a princess from a Muslim country is known. Then why is there an explicit reference to Brunswick in this play? A. M. Duinhoven thinks the scribe who copied the play in the Van Hulthem manuscript (or one of his predecessors, we might add) may have misread the geographic reference. Instead of “vrancrijc” he may have read “bruswijc.”21 A relationship with the daughter of a king of Averne and a certain Gheraert of Normandy as his uncle would make much more sense for a king of France than for a duke of Brunswick, Duinhoven claims. Joris Reynaert who, in his observations about this play and that of Esmoreit included one of the most likely sources, the chanson de geste of Baudouin de Sebourc, noted that in the French text Gloriant and Esmoreit are sons of the king of Nijmegen (“roi de Nimaie”). From the times of Charlemagne onwards Nijmegen was an imperial seat of the Holy Roman emperors; one of these emperors was Otto iv (1175/​76–​1218) of Brunswick.22 Finally, Willem Kuiper reminds us of a German text written by a certain Augustyn entitled Der Herzog von Braunschweig (The Duke of Brunswick) in which the duke is said to have owned France, “Avernen” and other areas such as Babylon as well.23 Reviewing these attempts to account for the addition ‘Brunswick’ in the name of the main character of the play, a convincing explanation why the duke is named as such is, in my opinion, still lacking. As was the case in the play of Esmoreit, other names and geographical references in the play are taken from Baudouin de Sebourc as well. “Rouge-​lion” and the city of “Abilant,” set in Saracen24 territory, figure prominently in this

21 22 23

24

A.  M. Duinhoven, “Tekstreconstructie een abel spel,” Spiegel der Letteren 19 (1977):  212. Duinhoven does not explain, however, why the scribe replaced the word “coninc” (king) by “hertogh” (duke), a most unlikely case of misreading. Joris Reynaert, “De abele spelen, de ‘profane’ Miracles de Notre Dame par personnages en de veertiende-​eeuwse Franstalige epiek: Aanzet tot een vergelijking van de ethische posities,” Nederlandse Letterkunde 18 (2013): 24, note 67. Willem Kuiper, “Oorsprong, betekenis en functie van de eigennamen in de abele spelen Esmoreit, Gloriant en Lanseloet van Denemerken,” in Spel en spektakel: Middeleeuws toneel in de Lage Landen; eds. Hans van Dijk, Bart Ramakers et al. (Amsterdam:  Prometheus, 2001), 106. See for an earlier reference to this text Ramondt, “Florentijn,” 298–​99. According to Daniel, Islam and the West, 32, the word Saracen, meaning “ ‘a man who holds the same religion as Muhammed’ … is rightly used for the chansons de geste” and it should not be regarded as a derogatory expression.

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chanson de geste. But not all the characters are mentioned in this source. The name Eysenbaert, for example, seems to be known only from one Dutch source, Loyhier en Malaert, in which Gloriant is also mentioned.25 As for the character of Godevaert, A. M. Duinhoven wondered why he was added as a cast member in the first place.26 His only task consists of serving as a soundboard for Gheraert at the start of the play when he voices his concerns relating to the fact that Gloriant is still single (ll. 1–​87). In his attempt to change Gloriant’s mind (ll. 88–​187) Gheraert could easily have done without him. However, when we turn to Baudouin de Sebourc, a possible source of the play, an explanation for his presence might become clearer. In the play Gheraert claims to have killed The Red Lion’s father himself but the French text instead names the famous Godfrey of Bouillon (1060–​1100) –​who in 1099, during the First Crusade, captured Jerusalem –​instead. On his way to the Middle East to rescue his brother from imprisonment, thus reads the chanson de geste, King Ernoul of Nimaie encounters a hostile fleet with The Red Lion on board one of the ships. On identifying Ernoul’s vessels as being Christian, The Red Lion decides to avenge the death of his father who had been killed by Godfrey of Bouillon at the siege of Antioch. He addresses his men in the following words: Signour, vous qui m’amez, au jourd’ui je vous prie Que la mort de mon père soit maintenant vengie: … Godefrois de Buillon a fait mon cuer dolant; Par devant Antioche desconfi Corbarant, Et ochist Brohadas et mon père devant.27 [Sirs, you who love me, today I beseech you /​That my father’s death will now be avenged: /​ … /​Godfrey of Bouillon hurt my heart; /​For in front of Antioch he beat Corbarant  /​And he chopped off Brohadas’ head and my father’s before that.] In medieval Dutch texts the historical person referring to Godfrey of Bouillon is almost always named Godevaert. The character acting in the play under this name cannot, of course, be equated with Godfrey. And yet there may be a subtle 25 26 27

Gerrit Kalff, Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Letterkunde (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1906–​ 12), vol. 2: 27. A. M.  Duinhoven, “ ‘Gloriant’ en ‘Floris ende Blancefloer’,” Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal-​en Letterkunde 106 (1990): 109–​11. Li romans de Bauduin de Sebourc IIIe Roy de Jhérusalem; poème du XIVe siècle; ed. Louis-​ Napoleon Boca, (Valenciennes: B. Henry, 1841), vol. 1, 12, ll. 393–​404.

136 Hüsken hint at this historical person in the fact that it is precisely Godevaert who suggests the daughter of the king of Averne as a suitable wife for Gloriant.28 From the last quarter of the thirteenth century until well into the fifteenth century, starting with Robert v of Auvergne (c. 1225–​77), Boulogne, where Godfrey was born, and Auvergne were closely related because the counts of Boulogne were counts of Auvergne as well. The author of the play may have introduced this character, hinting at the historical Godfrey of Bouillon, being one of the most important Flemish crusaders that ever lived in this country, yet without explicitly wanting to identify him as such. The reason why he did remains unclear. Were there, as in Esmoreit where the conflict between the Guelphs and the Ghibelines may have played a role, dynastic or political reasons for this subtle reference? Firm conclusions cannot be drawn from the observations above but our discussion of the historical background of these two plays has elucidated one thing: for one reason or another the author(s) of the two abele spelen, Esmoreit and Gloriant, thought it necessary to employ history for the plot of these plays. In both cases the references lack precision in the sense that historical personages do not exactly match with the characters on stage. A possible reason why these plays have been given a historical backdrop is to give the love stories depicted in them a certain credibility, which would be especially effective in an audience consisting of noble persons, more often than not very much aware of their own family history.29 In other words, the moral lessons to be learnt from them –​in Esmoreit treacherous behaviour and deceit are punished and in Gloriant love proves to be stronger than stubbornness –​may have acquired greater veracity by placing them in a historic setting.

28

29

A “coninc van Averne” (king of Auvergne) is also mentioned in Lanseloet van Denemerken. In this play, Sanderijn begs the noble knight she meets in the forest, after having left Lanseloet’s castle, to treat her in a courtly manner:  “Sanderijn benic gheheten,  /​Ende mijn vader hiet Robberecht,  /​Ende was een wael geboren scilt knecht,  /​Ende diende metten coninc van Averne” (ll. 460–​63; My name is Sanderijn and my father was called Robberecht. He was a free born shield-​bearer who served the king of Auvergne). See Een abel spel van Lanseloet van Denemerken; eds. Roemans & Van Assche, 102. See for an English translation of this play: Netherlandic Secular Plays; transl. De Vroom, 155–​87. The suggestion has been made that “Averne” here refers to the Spanish kingdom of Navarra instead of French Auvergne which never was a kingdom. See Wim van Anrooij & Remco Sleiderink, “Averne, Auvergne en Navarra. Over de betekenis van een geografische aanduiding,” Spiegel der Letteren 38 (1996): 185–​88. See for the idea of the abele spelen having been performed for a noble audience, note 16 above.

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The fact that in both cases the most likely sources of these plays are French romances set in the times of the Crusades automatically brings in the motif of religion. The authors could have decided to limit themselves to mentioning oriental locations such as Damast and Abelant but in Gloriant in particular religion plays a substantial part. For in her prayer in prison Florentijn is shown to have really embraced Christianity. In Esmoreit the situation is slightly different. Here the title character of the play adopts Christianity only after his father has advised him to do so. Since Damiet will be united in matrimony to him she will probably convert too but this is not shown. From a Western point of view these conversions are a matter of course. After all, for medieval audiences Christianity was superior to any other religion. But for the authors of both plays the idea of true love –​whatever that may have meant in the later Middle Ages30  –​between marriageable young couples seems to have been more important than religion. Differences in religion can easily be overcome, so the authors seem to say, as long as love prevails. Their use of a pseudo-​ historical setting  –​partly set in an exotic, Islamic environment, within the context of a still lingering wish to recapture the Holy Land during a new crusade –​will have made these stories more attractive for the audience. Perhaps it may even have given them greater credibility. They will not have objected to the appropriation of historical facts as long as ideas about love and courtly behaviour are brought across in the first place. Yet there is more to it than appears at first sight. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the influence of Islam on European soil was increasingly perceived as a real threat to Christianity.31 Even though a Muslim presence on the Iberian Peninsula had been confined to the Taifa of Granada, in Eastern Europe the Ottoman Empire was steadily expanding northward. By the end of the fourteenth century Pope Boniface ix (c. 1350–​ 1404) called for a crusade against the Turks but the European rulers did not pay heed to this wish. The Franciscans, who have been associated by Peeters with some of the ideas behind the play of Esmoreit, took a different stance.

30

31

Annelies van Gijsen, “Love and marriage:  fictional perspectives,” in Showing Status: Representation of Social Positions in the Late Middle Ages; eds. Wim Blockmans & Antheun Janse (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 262, justifiably warns us not too look at love in medieval texts from too modern a point of view: “Whatever we find in medieval fiction –​‘courtly love’, conjugal love, amour-​passion, true love, etc. –​we always and naively tend to colour and judge the concepts with our own ideas and standards of romantic love, which is a far more modern invention.” A classic study of western European attitudes towards Islam, based on texts written before the mid-​fourteenth century, is Daniel, Islam and the West, already referred to above.

138 Hüsken Rather than fighting Muslims, which in principle they did not eschew, they preferred converting them, thus following in the footsteps of St Francis himself who, in September 1219 while in Egypt during the Fifth Crusade in an attempt to liberate the city of Damietta,32 tried to persuade Sultan al-​Kâmil to embrace Christianity.33 Two-​hundred years later Franciscan views towards converting Muslims had not changed: “Missionary zeal directed against Muslims and hostility towards Jews and conversos was a main feature of Franciscan ideology,” Ana Echevarria claims in relation to fifteenth-​century Spain.34 Do the abele spelen, Gloriant in particular, perhaps reflect this Franciscan “[m]‌issionary zeal”?35 For the way history was employed as a backdrop for dramatic texts written some one-​hundred years later we will turn to a manuscript from the first quarter of the sixteenth century. It is kept at the Royal Library in Brussels and it contains, among other texts, three plays related to Burgundian-​Habsburg rulers.36 32

33

34

35

36

Does the name Damiet in the play of Esmoreit perhaps in a sophisticated way refer to this town? Her name also appears in the chanson de geste of Baudouin de Sebourc, a rich source for other names and locations mentioned in the abele spelen. In his edition of the play, A. M. Duinhoven (Esmoreit, [Zutphen: W. J. Thieme & Cie, (1975)], 54–​56), also reminds us of Jacob van Maerlant’s thirteenth-​century Rijmbijbel (Bible in Verse), in which the story of the finding of baby Moses’ in a basket on the banks of the river Nile by the daughter of the Egyptian pharaoh, named Termit, is related. However, should Damiet as a name subtly refer to the town where St Francis tried to convert the sultan to Christianity, this would be yet another indication for a Franciscan background of the abele spelen. See John Tolan, Saint Francis and the Sultan: The Curious History of a Christian-​Muslim Encounter (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2009). Daniel, Islam and the West, 140–​41, interprets St Francis’ advise not to fight the Muslims near Damietta in a battle, rather than viewing it as an act of peacefulness, as an indication of the saint’s “prophetic knowledge of defeat; he does not oppose fighting.” Ana Echevarria, The Fortress of Faith: The Attitude towards Muslims in Fifteenth Century Spain (Leiden [etc.]:  Brill, 1999), 53. According to the same author “[p]‌reaching to Muslims became an extension of preaching to Christians, and both were the new order’s most important aims” (ibid., 202). Both Peeters, “Esmoreit tconincx sone van Cecielien,” and Duinhoven, ed., Esmoreit, 36–​37, pointed at more Franciscan elements in the text, which are the reason why the latter believes the play was adapted, c. 1340, by a scribe working in a Brabant Spiritual-​ Franciscan environment. The most comprehensive description of this manuscript and its contents is by Samuel Mareel, Voor vorst en stad. Rederijkersliteratuur en vorstenfeest in Vlaanderen en Brabant (1432–​1561) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 143–​81. See for the date of the manuscript Robert Stein, “Cultuur in context. Het spel van Menych Sympel (1466) als spiegel van de Brusselse politieke verhoudingen,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 113 (1998): 312.

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139

Charles the Bold, Margaret of Austria, and Emperor Charles v

In or shortly after 1480 a Brussels author, referred to as “Colyn,”37 composed a play celebrating the birth of Margaret of Austria, daughter of Mary of Burgundy and Maximilian i of Austria. It is followed by a play in which two allegorical characters try to define the high qualities of a prince named “Chaerle van chaerloos” (Charles of Charolais), better known as Duke Charles the Bold (1433–​77). It was composed on the occasion of one of his Brussels visits, in the winter of 1466.38 The third play in this collection is by Jan Smeken, another famous author from Brussels. Central to it is Charles v, according to the play’s title in his capacity of Holy Roman Emperor but, as we shall see, written earlier.39 The first of the three plays in this collection, entitled Op die geboorte van vrou Margriete dochter van vrou Marie van Bourgonnyen perfect (On the birth of lady Margaret, daughter of the excellent lady Mary of Burgundy), concludes with a tableau vivant showing mother and child in “Bethleem” (Bethlehem).40 Three characters, representing the King of Knowledge (Cuenync der Scyenscyen), the King of Nobility (Cuenync der Edelheyt) and the King of Labour (Cuenync des Aerbeyts) bring them their gifts:  a golden apple from Hercules’ orchard, a rose from Solomon’s temple and leaves from the Tree of Life in Paradise respectively.41 The appropriateness of these gifts is explained in great detail by 37

38

39 40 41

The author has been identified as Colijn Keyart or (in French) Caillieu (c. 1430–​85). Most probably he was the author of a collection of four plays, published in 1561 as De spiegel der minnen (The Mirror of Love) under the name “Colijn van Rijssele.” He may also have written a play entitled Narcissus ende Echo in which both his full name, Colijn Keyart, and the expression “den amorösen Colyn” (the amorous Colyn) appear. See for the identification of the person hiding behind these names as one and the same author: J. E. van Gijsen, Liefde, Kosmos en Verbeelding. Mens-​en wereldbeeld in Colijn van Rijsseles Spiegel der Minnen (Groningen: Wolters Noordhoff /​Forsten, 1989), 13–​21. On solid grounds Stein, “Cultuur in context,” 292–​96, dates the performance of this play on 31 January or 3 February, 1466. W. M. H. Hummelen, Repertorium van het rederijkersdrama, ca. 1400–​1620 (Assen: Van Gorcum & Cie., 1971), 342, erroneously identified “Chaerle van chaerloos” as the future Emperor Charles. In her contribution to this volume Elsa Strietman, on p. 161–​64, also discusses this collection of plays, speculating on the reasons why they might have been copied out in a manuscript many years after the events depicted in them had taken place. An edition of this play is given by E. De Bock, “Een presentspel van Colijn Cailleu,” Spiegel der Letteren 6 (1963): 241–​69. These objects refer to Hercules’ stealing of the golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides (one of the twelve labours assigned to him as punishment after he had, in a frenzy, killed his own children), to the queen of Sheba’s visit to King Solomon’s temple at which she presented him with many gifts, among them a rose, and to the Tree of Knowledge from the Garden of Eden. In the play they are allegorically explained, referring to power, nobility, and loyalty.

140 Hüsken illustrating their allegorical meaning for mankind, especially after the fourth character, Experience (Experyencye), has joined the three kings. Of course the kings are reminiscence of the Magi visiting the Virgin Mary and her Child on the day of Epiphany. The reason for this is obvious: Margaret was born in Brussels on 10 January 1480. At the same time the kings represent the Three Estates: clergy, nobility, and labourers. The text is an elaborate eulogy on the newborn child. Bethlehem is to be understood as the Palace of Love and the House of Peace (“tpaleys van mynnen en thuys van vreden,” l.  264), as Experyencye explains. Bethlehem equals Brussels, she says. The author of the play gave his text the shape of a subgenre known as presentspel, a type of dinner play in which the offering of one or more presents is central to the dialogue of the characters on stage. For the audience of this play Margaret of Austria, Mary of Burgundy and her child were living personalities which seems to downsize its ‘historicity’. Yet we should realize that for contemporary ‘historians’  –​as well as for modern historians  –​also the most recent events in a person’s life belong to (his or her) history, which makes even this play ‘historical’. The general tone in this play is, of course, one of praise for mother and child, which can be expected of a performance for which the town’s authorities took the initiative. More exciting from a historiographical point of view is the second play in this collection, the play of Menych Sympel ende Outgedachte ende van Cronijcke (Ordinary People, Ancient Memory and Chronicle).42 According to Robert Stein, the historical details themselves are less interesting than the way they are presented.43 At the start of the play Menych Sympel informs Outgedachte that he intends to focus his mind on Die hoogheyt, de edelheyt, de innigheyt crachtich Van Chaerloos onsen yongen prience machtich.44 [The high esteem, the nobility and the powerful devotion  /​Of Charles, our young mighty prince.]

42

43 44

The author of this play is unknown, but he has been identified as none other than Colijn Caillieu (Stein, “Cultuur in context,” 297). “Menych Sympel” represents a good willing, not too clever commoner, and “Outgedachte” a well-​informed citizen, embodying the urban population and the elite respectively (ibid., 291). Van Gijsen, Liefde, Kosmos en Verbeelding, does not involve this play in her observations on the identification of Colyn Keyart. Stein, “Cultuur in context,” 304. Ibid., 313, ll. 30–​31.

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Outgedachte is of the opinion that this aim is somewhat beyond Menych Sympel’s grasp, adding that, should he be able to understand what nobility really implies, he would rejoice, because it is the noble class that protects the world and assures that Christians can live peacefully. Without them man would live like a beast, with violence and arbitrary rule chasing away lawful justice. This is exemplified by Charlemagne who ‘restored law and order’ after the Huns, the Goths, the Vandals and the Longobards had destroyed Western civilisation, Outgedachte notes. Charles the Bold, now visiting Brussels, is his direct descendant. Next Outgedachte leads Menych Sympel to Chronijcke, a noble and beautiful woman fit to serve the nobility. Using a richly illustrated pedigree as a visible aid, probably shown in a tableau vivant,45 she elaborates on the noble lineage of Charlemagne, singing the praise of a large number of his descendants, eventually arriving at Philip the Good (1396–​1467), his seven sisters, his wife Isabella of Portugal (1397–​1472) and, most importantly, their one and only son, Charles the Bold. Whether or not the duke himself was present at this performance we do not know.46 Stein thinks he may have arrived shortly before the end of the play, when an angel informs the three other characters on stage of Charlemagne’s closeness to God in heaven.47 More importantly, his offspring is equally dear to the Lord. Therefore, the angel, in his conclusion, addresses the duke directly and exhorts him to follow in Charlemagne’s footsteps: Daerom ghij Karel, die nu regnerende es, Erfgenaem van den grooten Karel sijt, Volgt hem na in sijn wercken wijt. God sal u bijstant doen en stercken u!48 [Therefore, you, Charles, who are now ruling, /​Are Charlemagne’s heir, /​Follow him in his great works. /​God will stand by you and strengthen you!] In this play, Charlemagne’s descendants are referred to in order to show the worthiness of their noble heir, Charles the Bold, as future duke. In other words, 45

Twice in the text, preceding her extensive explanation of Charles’ pedigree, Chronijcke uses expressions hinting at ‘showing’ (my italics): “Dat willic u thoonen, van grade te gra” (That I will show you, from one step to the other [l. 285]), and “dat ict toogen wille bij figuijren” (that I want to show it by using images [l. 296]). 46 Mareel, Voor vorst en stad, 150, too, judges it to be rather unlikely that Charles attended this performance or part of it during his entrance into Brussels on 31 January 1466. 47 Stein, “Cultuur in context,” 291. 48 Ibid., 320, ll. 552–​55. By saying that Charles is ‘now ruling’, the author of the play does not refer to Charles’ (future) role of duke, but of captain general, a position he took over from his ailing father, Philip the Good, on 27 April 1465 (ibid., 292).

142 Hüsken history is employed to add lustre to a ruler’s name. Yet there is more.49 The play also figures in a dispute between Charles the Bold and Jean de Bourgogne (1415–​91), who was also claiming a right to the duchy of Burgundy. Initially favoured in this respect by the French king, Louis xi (1423–​83), Jean had been imprisoned by Charles, in October 1465, after he had lost Louis’ support. At the time of the performance of this play, late January or early February 1466, Jean had not yet dropped his claims. He would do so only on 22 March 1466. Charles the Bold was viewed as the youngest and most capable scion in the genealogical tree of Charlemagne’s noble lineage. In this manner the local authorities assured the young prince of their loyalty towards him and of their support once he would follow into his father’s footsteps as duke of Burgundy. In conclusion, praise of a noble person, comparable to that in Op die geboorte van vrou Margriete, is supplemented here with a political message by referring extensively to his noble predecessors. The title of the third play in this collection, Een spel op hertoge Karle ons keyser nu es, is somewhat misleading: “A play on duke Charles, now our emperor.”50 It suggests it was written after Charles of Burgundy (1500–​59), the eldest son of Duke Philip the Fair (1478–​1506) and Joanna of Castile (1479–​1555), had been crowned Holy Roman Emperor on 28 June 1519 and that it consists of an eulogy on his person. However, its author, Jan Smeken, died on 15 April 1517, two years before Charles became emperor. The wording of the play reveals that the text was written at an earlier time. The approximate date for this is closely related to the way the author depicts Charles’ parents, Philip the Fair and Joanna of Castile.51 The frequency with which expressions such as “ons conync” (our king) and “ons cuenyngynnen” (our queen) are used, points to a date after which Philip the Fair and his wife had inherited the kingdom of Castile, hence after Isabelle of Castile’s death on 26 November 1504. On 14 January 1505 the deceased queen was commemorated with great solemnity in Brussels’ cathedral and shortly after, the new king and queen were welcomed there as future rulers of Castile. On this occasion elaborate festivities were held in town. The play hints at the four children of the royal couple thus suggesting that the two youngest children, Mary (15 September 1505) and Catherine (14 January 1507),

49 50 51

See for the following observations: ibid., 307–​10. The play was edited by Ton Van Bruggen, “Een spel op hertoge karle ons keyser nu es. Een allegorisch toneelspel van Jan Smeken,” Jaarboek [van de] Koninklijke Soevereine Kamer van Rhetorica ‘De Fonteine’ te Gent 55 (2005): 9–​78. See for the dating of the play and details regarding the succession to the Castilian throne by Philip the Fair and Joanna of Castile: Mareel, Voor vorst en stad, 167–​70. The following is mainly based on his observations.

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had not yet been born. In all likelihood the play was therefore written on the occasion of the festivities of Philip and Joanna’s elevation to the crown in the spring of 1505. Whereas the setting for the two plays discussed above was biblical and dynastic, Een spel op hertoge Karle ons keyser nu es employs a mythological background, adding to it the usual allegorical layer which helps to explain its meaning. Audiences attending performances at the beginning of the sixteenth century would have expected this extra dimension to be added to the play’s discourse. Afraid that the duke and his wife, once officially inaugurated, would prefer to spend most of their time in Castile the author, speaking on behalf of those who commissioned this play, introduced an argument borrowed from Greek mythology: as long as Troy would house a famous statue of Pallas Athena, named the palladion, the town would be safe. Brussels’ prosperity too, the author argues, depends on the continued presence of the couple, Joanna of Castile in particular, within its boundaries: sij es tpaladyum vol van vyertuyten die appolo die talder wijsheyt gewelt heeft ynt ylyon van troeyen met eeren gestelt heeft en soe lange als wij tpaladyum behouwen ons cuenyngynne die wij betrouwen en sal tprijeel van troeyen nyet vergaen noch ons conyncx landen52 [She is the palladion, full of virtue, /​Honourably put in Troy’s Ilion /​By Apollo, who has power over all wisdom, /​And as long as we will keep the palladion, /​ Being our queen in whom we trust,  /​The garden of Troy will not perish,  /​ Neither will our king’s territories] If Joanna would spend most of her time in Brussels, so would Charles, the person for whom the play was composed. In his turn, as her son he is compared to a torch placed within the palladion. The three plays in this collection have been regarded as models for the various ways in which rhetoricians can approach political events.53 They are built on three types of ‘historical’ data: biblical, dynastic, and mythological. As such this collection could be used by future authors to learn how to compose plays about political events using different ways to amplify their texts.

52 Van Bruggen, “Een spel op hertoge karle,” 62. 53 Mareel, Voor vorst en stad, 144–​45.

144 Hüsken How and for what reasons authors used historical information by the end of the sixteenth century is something we will explore in the next paragraph. 4

Jacob Duym, King Edward and the Women of Weinsberg

During the first decades of the seventeenth century, rhetoricians and other dramatists in the Northern Low Countries embarked on staging parts of their own recent history, mostly related to the revolt against their suppression by the Spanish-​Habsburg authorities. One author in particular, Jacob Duym (1547–​ 1612/​16), paid special attention to this topic in a collection of plays the title of which reveals his stance in the conflict between the foreign rulers and the Dutch rebels:  Een Gedenck-​boeck, het welck ons leert aen al het quaet en den grooten moetwil van de Spaingnaerden en haren aenhanck ons aen-​ghedaen te ghedencken (A memory book, teaching us to remember all evil deeds and the huge malice perpetrated by the Spaniards and their allies).54 Six years earlier he had published a first collection of plays, entitled Een Spiegelboeck inhou­ dende ses Spiegels waer in veel deuchden clear aen te mercken zijn (A Mirror Book containing six Mirrors in which many virtues can be clearly noticed), in which he put half a dozen of high moral standards into the limelight. Two of these plays deserve our special attention because they are set against a background of stories the origin of which is located in medieval times. The fact that from a historical point of view not all details in these plays are correct, notably in the first of the two plays to be discussed below, must have been less important for the author. We will shortly discover why. In Den Spieghel der Eerbaerheyt (The Mirror of Virtue) an alleged affair between the English King Edward iii and the countess of Salisbury is staged. The play opens with a prologue by a stage character who represents the poet himself.55 Dressed in a gown and wearing a laurel wreath he outlines the play’s content. In the first scene two allegorical characters, the sinnekens Carnal Lust 54 55

For more on Duym’s Gedenck-​boeck see Jeroen Jansen, “Staging Dutch History: Linking Past, Present and Future,” Journal of Dutch Literature 8 (2017): 47–​66. I. Duym, “Den Spieghel der Eerbaerheyt,” in Iacob Duym, Een Spiegelboeck inhovdende ses Spiegels, waer in veel deuchden claer aen te mercken zijn (Leyden: Ian Bouwensz., 1600). Digitally reproduced on https://​dspace. library.uu.nl/​handle/​1874/​36246. The play dates back to c. 1595. On 6 April 1595, the Flemish Chamber of Rhetoric in Leyden received permission from the local authorities to perform a play entitled “Een spiegel der Eerbaerheyt” during the annual fair in town (F. C. van Boheemen & Th. C. J. van der Heijden, Retoricaal memoriaal: Bronnen voor de geschiedenis van de Hollandse rederijkerskamers van de middeleeuwen tot het begin van de achttiende eeuw [Delft: Eburon, 1999], 532–​33).

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(Vleeschelicke Begheerte) and Evil Inspiration (Quaet Ingheven), prepare themselves for their visit to King Edward’s court.56 This brave warrior who won a battle near Poitiers in France, apprehended the French king and sent him as prisoner to the Tower of London seldom showed any interest in women, the two remind themselves, but now his mind seems to have completely changed. They call to mind his heroic war against the Scots as well. In it his friend, Montagu, acted as his deputy for which he was awarded the title of count of Salisbury. Together with the count of Suffolk, the king sent him to Flanders where he was imprisoned by the enemy. The Scots saw this as an opportunity to besiege Salisbury castle, where the count’s beautiful wife was living, but King Edward dashed to her help. It was then that he fell in love with Montagu’s wife, Carnal Lust notes. The count’s sudden death upon his return to England gave Edward the chance to make advances to her but she decided to remain virtuous. Enter King Edward. What’s the use of being a king, he sighs, if one has to live without the person with whom one is deeply in love. The sinnekens offer him their help. In a final attempt to soften her heart the king sends Carnal Lust to her castle with his letter. In a monologue, the countess, named Elips, expresses her great concern regarding the king’s unchaste interest in her person. Carnal Lust hands her Edward’s letter but she sends him away telling him to inform the king that he need not try again. Upon hearing this the king decides to invite the countess’ father to his castle. Edward bluntly orders him to tell his daughter that he will forcefully take her, whether she is willing or not. Elips’ father is outraged to hear such ignoble words, but he also realises the king’s revenge will be merciless if he does not yield. Back at home the countess and her parents desperately consider the options. Elips’ mother is of the opinion that her daughter should give in, lest her family face poverty and loss of noble standing. The father sides with his daughter, tenaciously upholding his wish to deny Edward’s plan to carry out his lustful intentions. Together with his three sons he leaves his home to escape the king’s fury. Meanwhile Edward’s patience has come to an end. Once more Carnal Lust is sent on an embassy. He is to summon the countess’ mother to bring her daughter to the king, but Elips says she would rather die than see herself defiled. Not until her mother has fainted and nearly died, does Elips’ resistance break. She promises to accompany her mother to the king, yet secretly planning to kill herself in front of him. On meeting the king, Elips begs him to take his sword 56

Sinnekens are stock allegorical characters representing evil on stage comparable to the Vice in English morality plays. See Peter Happé & Wim Hüsken, “ ‘Sinnekins’ and the Vice: Prolegomena,” Comparative Drama 29 (1995–​96): 248–​69, and Steenbrugge, Staging Vice, passim.

146 Hüsken and kill her. If not she will do it herself, then he can use her body as he wishes. Beholding her virtuousness Edward changes his mind. He vows to honour her and make her his queen. After her parents and brothers have joined the scene the couple are bound in holy matrimony and Elips is crowned queen. The play ends in a dialogue of Carnal Lust and Evil Inspiration who look forward to the banquet in celebration of the happy ending of this adventure, feigning to rejoice in the outcome of this story. Jacob Duym indicated on the title page of this play that he borrowed its plot from a book entitled Histoires Tragikes. By doing so he referred to a collection of Novellas by the Italian humanist author, Matteo Bandello (1485–​1561), translated into French by Pierre Boiastuau (also known as Pierre de Launay [c. 1517–​ 66]) and published in Paris in 1559 as Histoires tragiques. Duym follows this example in most details but he confuses King Edward iii (1312–​77) with his son Edward of Woodstock, the Black Prince (1330–​76), having misread his source, when, in the first scene of Act i, he lists the heroic deeds of the person central to his play. It was indeed King Edward iii who appointed William Montagu, 1st earl of Salisbury (1301–​44), as his deputy in the war against the Scots but it was the Black Prince who, on 19 September 1356, defeated the French king, Jean ii (1319–​64), taking him as prisoner to England.57 What about the story itself? From a historical point of view the affair between Edward iii and the countess of Salisbury is apocryphal even though it kept surfacing for many years. In 1596, for example, a play attributed to William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd, The Raigne of King Edward the third, starts with the king’s attempted assault on the countess. The version of the story of King Edward’s wooing of the countess of Salisbury resulting in their wedding, as described in Bandello’s Novellas and in Duym’s play, ignores the fact that Edward’s wife, Philippa of Hainault, died in 1369 whereas Montagu’s wife, Catherine Grandison, died as early as 1349. In that case the affair between Edward iii and Montagu’s wife would have happened between 1344 and 1349, at a time when the king was still married to Philippa. Other renderings of a story of an alleged relationship between Edward iii and the countess of Salisbury speak of an attempted rape by the king, but this variety represented, more likely than not, anti-​English propaganda by the French at a time when the Hundred Years’ War (1337–​1453) was still raging.58 The name of William Montagu’s widow, Elips, not only appears in Duym’s play but also in the Histoires tragiques. In Shakespeare’s Edward iii she remains 57 58

Michael Jones, The Black Prince (London: Head of Zeus, 2017), 211–​27. Antonia Gransden, “The Alleged Rape by Edward III of the Countess of Salisbury,” The English Historical Review 87 (1972): 341.

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unnamed. Elips is almost certainly a corruption for “Alice,” a name mentioned in Jean le Bel’s Vraye Chroniques (written after 1357), Froissart’s Chroniques, and the Chronographia Regum Francorum, an early fifteenth-​century chronicle written on French soil, ‘reporting’ the earliest accounts of Edward iii’s alleged rape of the countess of Salisbury.59 Le Bel and Froissart may have confused her name with the name of Edward Montagu’s wife, Alice of Norfolk (c. 1324–​52), William’s sister-​in-​law.60 The love story itself, told in Duym’s play and his source, the Histoires Tragiques, brings us back to the Black Prince.61 On 10 October 1361, aged thirty-​ one, he married Joan of Kent (1328–​85). For Joan this was her third marriage for in May 1340, at the tender age of twelve, she had secretly married Thomas Holland (c. 1314–​60), who was double her age. Barely a month later Thomas was sent on a military expedition to Flanders where, on 24 June, the English fleet defeated the French near the village of Sluys. Keeping silent about the fact that she had given herself in matrimony to Holland, Joan was married in January 1341 to William Montagu (1328–​97), 2nd earl of Salisbury, the eldest son of the first earl, who was of the same age as his young spouse. More than six years later, in October 1347, Thomas Holland claimed Joan for himself, referring to their wedding in May 1340. After he had brought his case to be decided over by Pope Clement vi, his claim was declared valid. On 13 November 1349 Joan’s marriage to the earl of Salisbury was consequently annulled. Less than a year after Thomas’ death, on 26 December 1360, Joan married the Black Prince on 30 October 1361. For the Black Prince his marriage with Joan of Kent was the culmination point of a long period of infatuation with the woman who was described as “the most beautiful woman of England.”62 As a young girl Joan, having been brought up at the king’s court and in Salisbury at her father-​in-​law’s castle, allegedly caught the eye of both the king and his son, the Black Prince. Shortly after Calais had been taken by the English, on 4 August 1347, the young countess (her husband William had followed in his father’s footsteps as 2nd earl of Salisbury after the first earl’s death on 30 January 1344)  –​the source for this postdates the events by a century and a half! –​is said to have made an

59 60

See for the degree of veracity of late-​medieval chronicles, note 13 above. Ibid., 336. See also: Froissart, Chronicles, ed. Geoffrey Brereton (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), 59. 61 For the historical facts summarised in this paragraph, see Richard Barber, Edward, Prince of Wales and Aquitaine: A Biography of the Black Prince (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1998), 172–​73, 240, and Jones, The Black Prince, passim. 62 Barber, Edward, Prince of Wales and Aquitaine, 172.

148 Hüsken ineradicable impression, on King Edward iii in particular, at a banquet in celebration of this military success: Every man was left awe-​struck by her beauty; King Edward could not stop looking at her, for he thought that he had never before seen so noble or so fair a lady. He was pierced to the heart by a pulsating love, one that endured for long afterwards.63 The choice of Joan of Kent as his spouse was not an obvious one for the Black Prince because she was his first cousin, King Edward i (1239–​1307) being grandfather to both. Pope Innocent vi had to grant them dispensation for their marriage, which was given on 8 September 1361. According to various chronicles the two married for love, something not necessarily a prerequisite for a royal wedding at the time. Duym’s Spieghel der Eerbaerheyt may hint at their love story but, from a historical point of view, this would be impossible because Joan’s parents, who play such an important role in the play, were already dead. In actual fact, nothing certain is known about their emotional relationship. As one of the Black Prince’s more recent biographers notes: “On the prince’s private life we know very little: there are no personal letters, no private anecdotes.”64 King Edward iii or the Black Prince, Alice of Norfolk or Catherine Grandison, an alleged rape or a love marriage  –​all these elements are muddled up in Duym’s play but the author did not have the intention to present a historically correct story. For him it was all-​important to show that virtue prevails over brutal force, a lesson he wanted to teach his audience using a historical setting so as to enhance his argument. The same collection of plays includes another tragi-​comedy with a historical background set in medieval times: Den Spieghel der Ghetrouwicheyt (The Mirror of Loyalty). Here our attention is directed towards an event in German history dating back to the year 1140. On 21 December the inhabitants of Weinsberg castle had to surrender to King Conrad iii (1093–​1152) –​in Duym’s play named Conrardus –​after a siege that had lasted for several weeks. The play was performed in Leiden on 31 August 1600. In a note preceding his play the author describes what needs to be provided in terms of costumes and stage props. Contrary to what we have seen in the previous play where historical

63 Jones, The Black Prince, 130, quoting Polydore Vergil (c. 1470–​1555) from his Anglica historia, a chronicler mentioned at the start of the first story, on King Edward and his Elips, in De Launay’s Histoires tragiques. 64 Barber, Edward, Prince of Wales and Aquitaine, 240.

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­f igure 5.1  Zacharias Dolendo, after a design by Jacob ii De Gheyn, “The women of Weinsberg carry their spouses out of town on their backs” (1606) Amsterdam –​ Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. RP-​B -​B I-​7 118 –​ public domain

accuracy is not aimed at, here it is one of his most distinct preoccupations. In translation this note reads: Careful attention must be paid to the sally out of the town, the storming, and all other things happening, which need to be done in accordance with customary military operations. The fireworks from within [the castle] have to be executed with burning rope to be thrown onto the shields. Firearms are not permitted because in those days they were not used. Instead soft bricks of peat or other materials must be thrown but do take care that nobody be hurt.65 After a prologue by the author, Welphus opens the play in a monologue pitying himself now he has been defeated by Emperor Conrardus in an attempt to rob him of his imperial throne. His field marshal advises him to flee to Weinsberg. Paying heed to this advice he leaves behind his horses, wagons 65

I. Duym, “Den Spieghel der Getrovwicheyt,” in Duym, Spiegelboeck, fol. S3r.

150 Hüsken and armaments. When the emperor enters the battle field he wonders where Welphus and his army are. His field marshal suspects them of having fled to Weinsberg, after which the emperor decides to lay siege to the castle. But before doing so he asks his herald to make them change their mind by surrendering to him. The inhabitants of the town are not pleased with the present situation. Speaking to the herald one of them bitterly remarks: “Buyten is onsen vrient /​en den vyant is binnen” (Outside is our friend, the enemy is in here).66 On the other hand, Welphus is convinced his allies will soon relieve the town and chase the emperor away. Conrardus’ herald having returned emptyhanded, the siege of Weinsberg is now inevitable. Four captains67 receive orders to surround the town at all four quarters of the compass. A sally out of Weinsberg by Welphus’ men woefully fails leaving many dead. After having besieged the town for some time, Conrardus decides to venture an assault but he instructs his men to save all loyal citizens, the women in particular. The two sides engage in a heavy battle. Eventually Welphus’ troops beg for mercy by tossing their hats into the air. They want to speak with the emperor. Two burgomasters of Weinsberg ask him to spare the inhabitants of the town who have always been loyal to him. The emperor grants them their wish but he does not want to forgive Welphus and his army. Suddenly some women, among them Welphus’ wife, appear in front of the emperor. They beseech him to turn a blind eye to their husbands’ crime and to let them leave the town unharmed. Conrardus refuses but he promises to set the women free. Welphus’ wife asks him a final favour: would he allow them to carry out of town all things dear to them? The emperor agrees to honour this wish and the women return home. Meanwhile Emperor Conrardus and his field marshal wait outside the city gates. Once the women will have left, they intend to enter the town and kill Welphus and his army. Much to his surprise the women emerge from Weinsberg castle carrying their husbands on their backs. All men and women fall on their knees begging the emperor to keep his promise. For a moment Conrardus hesitates, but he is impressed by the women’s loyalty towards their spouses and he decides to forget everything as if nothing had happened. Welphus admits his crime and he swears to remain loyal to the emperor. Conrardus and his army enter the town to celebrate their victory. On the title page of this play Duym notes that he based himself for its content on various authors, without indicating which. Some scholars have 66 67

Ibid., T4v. The four captains carry funny names:  “Strijthaen,” “Ruymstraet,” “Cloeckhelt,” and “Wijcknoy,” the approximate meaning of which would be Gamecock, Street Clearer, Brave Hero, and Reluctant to Budge.

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contested the historicity of the heroic deed of the women, judging it to be a legend, others accept the story as historical fact.68 In any case, one of the oldest sources for the women’s cunning ruse, the Kölner Königschronik or Chronica Regia Coloniensis, composed c. 1175 with sequels from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, includes the following entry. Translated into English it reads: A. D.  1140. The king besieged one of Duke Guelph of Bavaria’s castles, named Weinsberg, gaining its surrender after he had permitted the wives and other women living there, out of royal generosity, to take on their shoulders all they could. The women, out of loyalty towards their husbands as well as concerned about the wellbeing of all others, left their household goods behind, came down the hill carrying their spouses on their shoulders.69 One of the most important sixteenth-​century sources for the history of the women of Weinsberg is Philipp Melanchthon’s Guelfus redivivus, an academic speech (declamatio) delivered in 1539 and published in the same year by Veit Winsheim.70 In 1563 a German translation of this text appeared in print.71 Duym may have read this booklet, the more so because at the time when he wrote his play, he had wholeheartedly embraced the Reformation, of which Melanchthon was one of the most important proponents. An element shared by Duym and Melanchthon is the fact that both call Conrad emperor, whereas he was never actually invested with this high office. On the other hand, there

68 69 70

71

See for a survey of opinions regarding the historical character of this story: Uwe Israel, “Von Fakten und Fiktionen in der Historie. Das neuzeitliche Leben der ‘Weiber von Weinsberg’,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 52 (2004): 600–​05. See for the Latin text:  Monvmenta Germaniae Historica; ed. Georgivs Heinricvs Pertz [Hannoverae: Avlici Hahniani, 1861], vol. 17, 759. See Heinrich Meibom d. Ä., Poemata selecta (1579–​1614): Ausgewählte Gedichte; ed., transl. and comm. Lothar Mundt (Berlin-​Boston:  De Gruyter, 2012), 591. Despite the fact that the story on the women of Weinsberg is characteristic of a tale of a legendary nature, Herbert Grundmann, Geschichtsschreibung in Mittelalter. Gattungen –​Epochen –​Eigenart (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1965), 28, judges this Kölner Köningschronik to be well informed, though Staufen biased (“gut informiert und staufisch gesinnt”). Eine schöne herrliche Declamation /​darinn erzelet wirt /​welcher gestalt der Guelff /​Herzog zu Bayern /​so inn der Statt Winszberg von Kaiser Conraden /​dem Schwaben /​schwärlich belägert war … Von Magistro Winszheim in der Vniuersitet Wittenberg zu Latein gantz artlich beschriben /​vnnd jetzo inns Teutsch gebracht Durch Georgium Lauterbecken (Franckfurt am Mayn:  Georg Raben & Weygand Hanen Erben, 1563). Work originally published by © hab Wolffenbüttel (http://​diglib.hab.de/​drucke/​alv-​mf-​125-​6s/​start. htm?image=00001).

152 Hüsken are many differences between the two texts so it is very unlikely that Duym would have used this booklet as his only source. As mentioned before, he indicated on the title page of his play that he used more than one. In both plays Duym’s main reason for employing historical material as the background of his dramatic plots is to be found in the exemplary character of the heroes depicted: Elips, in Den Spieghel der Eerbaerheyt (Mirror of Virtue), is the epitome of virtue and the saving of the men by the women of Weinsberg, in Den Spieghel der Ghetrouwicheyt (The Mirror of Loyalty), is regarded as an act of ultimate loyalty. In the four remaining plays of this volume moral values are central to the action on stage too. For Duym, history was an attractive excuse for his wish to teach his audience valuable moral lesson especially at a time, during the Dutch Revolt, when human relations may not always have been easy. 5

Conclusion

Whoever employs history as a backdrop for a play  –​whether intended to instruct a fourteenth-​century noble audience watching of one of the abele spelen, a civic community in Brussels around 1500 attending a performance about one of its distinguished rulers, or a Leiden audience around the turn of the seventeenth century watching plays in which moral lessons take centre stage –​does so in order to hold up a mirror in front of the viewers, trying to exhort them to become better individuals. History is never turned to for the sake of history itself. It may be easy to enjoy Shakespeare’s history plays nowadays because they give us an interesting view of the vicissitudes of a particular historical person, but in his days the lives and the deeds of these individuals were highly relevant for contemporary audiences. When, during the first decades of the 1600s, Dutch Renaissance dramatists chose to stage stories from a historic past looking at the times of the counts of Holland, they did so because they recognised in these histories the germ of a sense of a national identity, which had come to maturity in the creation of the Dutch Republic. Addressing an audience aiming to instill moral lessons in them, characteristic of the way rhetoricians used to approach their audiences, seems to have moved to the background in these plays but this goal was never fully abandoned. For example, moments before his town will fall into the hands of the enemy the title character in Joost van den Vondel’s play Gysbreght van Aemstel (1637), the story of which is set at the start of the fourteenth century, predicts Amsterdam’s future greatness. The man embodies the unwillingness to surrender, a message

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for the audience at a time when the Eighty Years’ War had not yet come to an end and its outcome was still hanging in the balance.72

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72

I am grateful to Prof. Bart Ramakers (Groningen) who kindly read an earlier version of this essay, supplying positive feedback. Elsa Strietman (Cambridge, UK) reviewed the text, suggesting a substantial number of improvements resulting in a much more sophisticated essay. Moniel Verhoeven (Saint-​Christophe-​sur-​Condé, France) also gave valuable advice. Yet the final responsibility for this article resides with me.

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Conraden dem Schwaben schwärlich belägert war. Von Magistro Winszheim in der Vniuersitet Wittenberg zu Latein gantz artlich beschriben vnnd jetzo inns Teutsch gebracht. Franckfurt am Mayn: Georg Raben & Weygand Hanen Erben, 1563. (Work originally published by © hab Wolffenbüttel.) http://​diglib.hab.de/​drucke/​alv-​mf-​ 125-​6s/​start.htm? image=00001.). Mareel, Samuel. Voor vorst en stad. Rederijkersliteratuur en vorstenfeest in Vlaanderen en Brabant (1432–​1561). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010. McGuire, M. R. P. “Annals and Chronicles.” In: The New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. i, 551–​56. New York [etc.]: McGraw Hill, 1967. Meibom d.  Ä., Heinrich. Poemata selecta (1579–​1614):  Ausgewählte Gedichte, [edited, translated and commented by] Lothar Mundt. Berlin-​Boston: De Gruyter, 2012. Oakshott, Jane & Elsa Strietman, eds. An Excellent Play of Esmoreit Prince of Sicily, translated from the Dutch. Preston: Alphaprint, 1989. (Previously published as “Esmoreit: a goodly play of Esmoreit, Prince of Sicily.” Dutch Crossing nr. 30 (1986): 3–​39.). Pál, Engel. The Realm of St Stephen: A History of Medieval Hungary, 895–​1526. London-​ New York: I. B. Tauris, 2005. Parsons, Ben & Bas Jongenelen, eds. Comic Drama in the Low Countries, c. 1450–​1560. A Critical Anthology. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012. Peeters, L. “Esmoreit tconincx sone van Cecielien:  Siciliaanse historie als abel spel.” Spiegel der Letteren 19 (1977): 245–​79. Pertz, Georgivs Heinricvs, ed. Monvmenta Germaniae Historica, vol. 17. Hannoverae: Avlici Hahniani, 1861. Pleij, Herman. Het gevleugelde woord. Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse literatuur, 1400–​ 1560. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2007. Prins, Johanna C., ed. Medieval Dutch Drama: Four Secular Plays and Four Farces from the Van Hulthem Manuscript; translated with an introduction. Asheville: Pegasus Press, 1999. Ramakers, B. A. M. “Met zwaard en paard: epische sfeer in ‘Gloriant van Bruuyswijc’.” In Karolus Rex: Studies over de middeleeuwse verhaaltraditie rond Karel de Grote, edited by Bart Besamusca & Jaap Tigelaar, 217–​30. Hilversum: Verloren, 2005. Ramondt, Marie. “Florentijn en de hertog van Bruyswyc uit den Gloriant.” Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsche Taal-​en Letterkunde 42 (1923): 292–​303. Reynaert, Joris. “De abele spelen, de ‘profane’ Miracles de Notre Dame par personnages en de veertiende-​eeuwse Franstalige epiek: Aanzet tot een vergelijking van de eti­ sche posities.” Nederlandse Letterkunde 18 (2013): 1–​25. Roemans, Rob & Hilda van Assche, eds. Een abel spel van Lanseloet van Denemerken. 8th ed. Antwerp: De Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1982. Steenbrugge, Charlotte. Staging Vice:  A Study of Dramatic Traditions in Medieval and Sixteenth-​Century England and the Low Countries. Amsterdam-​New  York: Rodopi, 2014.

156 Hüsken Stein, Robert. “Cultuur in context. Het spel van Menych Sympel (1466) als spiegel van de Brusselse politieke verhoudingen.” Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 113 (1998): 289–​321. Strietman, Elsa. “The Low Countries.” In The Theatre of Medieval Europe: New Research in Early Drama; edited by Eckehard Simon, 225–​52 and 284–​88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Strietman, Elsa & Peter Happé, eds. For Pleasure and Profit: Six Dutch Rhetoricians Plays. Vol. I: Three Biblical Plays. Vol. II: Three Classical Plays. Lancaster & Tempe: Medieval English Theatre & ACMRS, 2006–​13. Strietman, Elsa & Peter Happé, eds. The First and Seventh Joys of Our Lady: Bilingual Texts of two Dutch Biblical Plays; edited and translated by Elsa Strietman & Peter Happé. Tempe: acmrs, 2017. Tersteeg, Jacques. “The fourteenth-​century, middle-​dutch, secular play of Esmoreit.” In European Medieval Drama. Papers from the Second International Conference on ‘Aspects of European Medeival Drama’, Camerino, 4–​6 July 1997, edited by Sydney Higgins, vol. 1, 253–​71. Camerino: Università degli Studi di Camerino, 1997. Tolan, John. Saint Francis and the Sultan:  The Curious History of a Christian-​Muslim Encounter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Van Bruggen, Ton. “Een spel op hertoge karle ons keyser nu es. Een allegorisch toneelspel van Jan Smeken.” Jaarboek van de Koninklijke Soevereine Kamer van Rhetorica ‘De Fonteine’ te Gent 55 (2005): 9–​78. Vroom, Theresia de, ed. Netherlandic Secular Plays of the Middle Ages:  The “Abele Spelen” and Farces of the Hulthem Manuscript; translated with an Introduction and Notes. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1997.

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“An Easy Commerce of the Old and New” Rhetoricians and the Use of the Past Elsa Strietman Abstract Many rhetoricians’ plays from the Low Countries use material that is judged to be historical:  stories from the Bible, the classics, European history, the latter sometimes drawn from contemporary or near-​contemporary events. This essay will explore how and why playwrights used this material, to what extent they showed an awareness of the past as ‘other’ and how they dealt with that otherness. These playwrights seem to appropriate and absorb into their own reality the potential ‘otherness’ of the past effortlessly and unquestioningly. Moreover, there seems to be a strong sense of continuity, or rather, connectedness:  one’s own time can be seen in the light of the past and different parallels with the past are highlighted. Special attention is paid to the fact that certain plays about historical events, be they related to dynastic topics or to biblical stories, appeared not to have lost their relevance for later generations; the result is that a play written decades ago became historical in itself. This remarkable fact is in greater detail illustrated in an analysis of a number of plays, notably from a rhetoricians’ chamber from Hasselt still active at the end of the seventeenth century.

Keywords Rhetoricians’ drama  –​use of biblical  –​classical and historical material  –​evaluation and appropriation of the past –​Robert Lawet –​Peeter Heyns –​Hasselt –​siege plays –​ Judith –​ Esther

In the collective memory, factual history is transformed into myth; yet this transformation does not make history unreal. Quite to the contrary, it thereby becomes reality, in the sense of a normative force. The group selectively takes possession of history and imbues

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004449503_008

158 Strietman it with meaning, in such a way as to create a fiction of continuity that serves the group’s self-​definition.1

∵ 1

Introduction

The focus of the present volume is the consideration of reasons and motivations for the use of historical material in early modern drama. The editors have suggested some aspects which might be worthy of exploration in this context, based on their premise that history has undoubtedly proved attractive to playwrights and performers. They point at such motivations as ‘an escape from the present’ or, by contrast, history as a way to illuminate and/​or enhance the present and they suggest that, more often than not, history will have been employed for political reasons. The awareness of the past, the evaluation of its significance for the present has of course not always been the same. L. P. Hartley’s now iconic opening lines of his novel The Go Between (1953) stress the otherness of the past: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”2 That is a view of the past which highlights the gap between ourselves and that other reality and suggests an unbridgeable or problematic gap in understanding those who peopled the past and expressed their experiences, their hopes and fears in artefacts, buildings, songs, music, poems, stories, drama. The awareness of the past in the drama of the rhetoricians is a very different one: it could be characterised, in T. S. Eliot’s words, as “an easy commerce between the old and new,”3 in the sense that the potential ‘otherness’ of the past is effortlessly and unquestioningly appropriated by the rhetoricians and absorbed into, and made use of, in their contemporary reality. Moreover, there seems to be a strong sense of continuity, or rather, connectedness: one’s own time can be seen in the light of the past and the parallels with the past are

1 Gevert H.  Nörtemann, “Memories and Identities in Conflict:  The Myth Concerning the Battle of Courtrai (1302) in Nineteenth-​Century Belgium,” in Presenting the Past. History, Art, Language, Literature, eds. J. Fenoulhet & L. Gilbert, Series Crossways, 3 (London: Centre for Low Countries Studies, 1996), 99. 2 L. P. Hartley, The Go-​Between (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953), 7. 3 T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”, Four Quartets, in Collected Poems, 1909–​1962 (London, Faber and Faber Ltd, 1963), 221.

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important. Visual examples of this can be found in frescoes, manuscript illustrations and stained glass windows, where events from the Old and the New Testament are linked with each other and with ‘contemporary’ history.4 If it is a universal human characteristic to look back to the past, then it is for a variety of reasons, and the emotions, the effects, the conclusions and the potential influence of the past on the present, seem endlessly varied too. Even though the rhetoricians would seem to have included the past into their present unquestioningly, that does not mean that there is no variety in their reasons for doing so or that the effects they intended were always the same. 2

Rhetoricians’ Drama

The period in the Low Countries when the rhetoricians were active roughly spans the fifteenth, sixteenth and early seventeenth century. However, the majority of their plays were written and produced in the sixteenth century: this was an era in which rhetoricians’ drama became a common means of communicating in an entertaining manner, something that was deemed important, and the spectators who came to see and listen sat or stood outdoors, for hours on end. That they did indeed come and listen is not often explicitly documented but we do have the evidence of the fact that some six-​hundred plays have survived. In their texts we have the inherent evidence that they were written and meant to be performed:  they are brimful of techniques which only make sense if there were an audience to impress, amuse, educate, persuade. Explicit and implicit staging indications, remarks about costuming or décor all point to an audience that was shown something in the act of watching and listening, not merely an audience that was asked to imagine something in the act of reading. A great deal has been done to unearth and evaluate the vast corpus of rhetoricians’ plays, though there are still individual plays and collections which have lain quietly and disregarded for centuries, apart from sudden flurries of interest, and then again subsided into near oblivion.5 Even though we have the texts and the enormous amount of textual and contextual scholarship which 4 See for this Jasper van der Steen, “The Political Rediscovery of the Dutch Revolt in the Seventeenth-​Century Habsburg Netherlands,” The Early Modern Low Countries 1 (2017): 297–​ 317 (https://​www.emlc-​journal.org/​articles/​10.18352/​emlc.28/​). 5 See for a discussion of new approaches to rhetoricians’ studies: Arjan van Dixhoorn, Samuel Mareel & Bart Ramakers, “The relevance of the Netherlandish rhetoricians,” Renaissance Studies 32 (2018): 8–​22.

160 Strietman has brought to light a wealth of knowledge and understanding, we are still left with only the texts, words which were once spoken, sung, declaimed on stages with props and with actors in costumes, with stage effects producing visual aids, noises, smells … Apart from that we have visual evidence in paintings, engravings, woodcuts, sometimes linked to a particular play or to a series of plays in a competition.6 Moreover, we find circumstantial evidence in town accounts, chronicles, diaries and other documentary writings.7 The survival of individual plays or of collections was of course largely dictated by chance: rhetoricians’ chambers kept their manuscripts in their own storage chests, sometimes for potential repeat performances but even plays written for individual special occasions were kept as part of the chambers’ possessions. More than half of all the plays handed down to us were compiled in manuscript collections, sometimes by an author collecting his own plays, as in the case of the Bruges playwright Cornelis Everaert (c. 1480–​1556), sometimes by a particular chamber which collected its own as well as plays written and performed elsewhere: such is the case of the extensive collection owned by the Haarlem chamber Trou Moet Blijcken (Loyalty Needs Proof).8 Naturally, with the advent of the printing press the chances of survival became greater:  even if fate, war, fire destroyed books in one place, copies might be preserved elsewhere. However, rhetoricians did not, on the whole, jump at this chance of preserving their works and their names for posterity and the printing of plays developed surprisingly slowly in the Low Countries, especially taking into account the incredible burgeoning of printing all manner of

6 Such as in a painting by Pieter Balten who depicted the farce Playerwater, c. 1570 (Rijksmuseum Amsterdam) or the engraving of the stage of the Ghent rhetoricians’ competition in 1539, in Joos Lambrecht’s edition of 1539: Spelen van zinne by den xix. geconfirmeirden Cameren van Rhetorijcken. Binnen der Stede van Ghendt comparerende vertooght … op de questye welc den mensche stervende meesten troost es? … den xij. Junij int Jaer M.CCCCC.xxxix, Ende wierden vulspeilt ende ghehendt, Den xxiij. vanden Jare ende maendt voorschreuen. See for a modern edition of these plays De Gentse Spelen van 1539, eds. B. H. Erné & L. M. van Dis, 2 vols. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982). 7 One example out of many is that of the staging for the performances, over many years, of the Seven Joys of Our Lady, of which only the First and the Seventh Joy are extant, funded by the town of Brussels, as is mentioned in a by-​law of 19 February, 1448. See Die Eerste Bliscap van Maria en Die Sevenste Bliscap van Onser Vrouwen, ed. W. H. Beuken (Culemborg: Tjeenk Willink/​Noorduyn, 1978), 12; for a translation of the plays, see The First and the Seventh Joys of Our Lady, Bilingual texts of two Dutch Biblical Plays, ed. and trans., Elsa Strietman & Peter Happé (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2017). 8 Trou Moet Blijcken. Bronnenuitgave van de boeken der Haarlemse rederijkerskamer ‘De Pellicanisten’, eds. W. N. M. Hüsken, B. A. M. Ramakers & F. A. M. Schaars, 8 vols. (Assen: Quarto, 1992–​98).

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books from the late fifteenth century onwards. It is perhaps worth noting that of the four extant editions of the Elckerlijc, three are early printed books (1495, 1501, 1525) and, oddly, one manuscript which was written as late as 1593–​94.9 However, Elckerlijc is an exception in this respect. It is clearly a product of the rhetoricians’ tradition but it has never been linked to a chamber. Most plays, by contrast, are linked to a chamber of rhetoric and/​or an individual author or copyist and it may be that plays were kept in portfolio so that they could be used again; bringing them into the public domain in a printed version might have diminished their novelty and suitability for re-​performance. Moreover, there is a sense that printing one’s work was seen as vain and ambitious:  after all, the chambers saw themselves as writing for the greater glory of God and the Virgin Mary and the noble art of rhetoric. Playwrights were seen as representatives of their chambers and their cities and it was not till the second half of the sixteenth century that we find individual poets, rather than playwrights, publishing their work in print.10 3

Drama and Poetry as Political Exemplars

In some cases plays were copied much later, such as those in the Leemans Collection, which contains plays written and used for particular festive activities in Brussels in the fifteenth-​and the early sixteenth-​century. These plays were written with clear political and dynastic contemporary incentives but copied again by Gillys Leemans, very likely between 1519 and 1526.11 The motivation for this is not immediately evident. There was a lively tradition of drama competitions in the Low Countries and in some cases a whole collection of 9 10

11

Den Spieghel der Salicheit van Elckerlijc, ed. R.  Vos (Groningen:  Wolters-​Noordhoff, 1967), 27–​28. One example is that of the Ghent poet Lucas d’Heere, who published his Den Hof en Boomgaerd der Poësien in Ghent in 1567, but not without a modesty clause in which he stated to have done this only because his friends urged him to do so; it didn’t stop him displaying his name prominently on the title page and announcing all his talents as an author and a painter: “Autheur Lucas d’Heere, Schilder van Ghend”, Den Hof en Boomgaerd der Poësien, ed. W. Waterschoot (Zwolle: W. E. J. Tjeenk Willink, 1969), 1, 2–​3. See for this Samuel Mareel, Voor vorst en stad:  Rederijkersliteratuur en vorstenfeest in Vlaanderen en Brabant (1432–​1561) (Amsterdam:  Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 143–​81, who discusses the plays in this collection in depth. The remarks following below are all to be found in more detail in Chapter vi, “Diplomatie in verzen-​De verzameling-​ Leemans.” See for the reference to the possible dates for the compilation p. 143. See also, Wim Hüsken, ‘Mirror, Mirror on the Wall … History in Late Medieval Drama from the Low Countries,” in this volume.

162 Strietman competition plays were printed in a commemorative volume immediately after their performance. That implies that their value was their actuality, not their historical or even their commemorative importance.12 That was very likely not the case with the Leemans Collection as the three plays in this manuscript were written for specific occasions: one for a ducal Entry, that of Charles of Charolais (also known as Charles the Bold), son and heir of Philip the Good, one to celebrate the birth of a princess, Margaret of Burgundy, daughter of Mary of Burgundy, by Colyn Caillieu and one, for an as yet unidentified occasion, but with a clear focus on the dynastic expectations surrounding the small son of Philip the Fair and Joanna of Aragon, the future king and emperor Charles v, by Jan Smeken. Also in the collection is a ballad by the famous Bruges rhetorician Anthonis de Roovere, equally complex and enigmatic with regard to the exact reason and occasion which inspired De Roovere but, just as the three plays, taking as its subject a scion of the Burgundian/​ Habsburg dynasty, in this case Charles of Charolais.13 It is worth noting that the authors of the plays, Caillieu and Smeken, are well-​known poets and playwrights, very much part of the Brussels’ theatrical scene in which they functioned frequently as poetic propagandists for their town and its centrality as part of the Burgundian, then Habsburg, dynasty and government. Notwithstanding this line-​up of important playwrights and celebrated occasions, the Leemans Collection did not get printed and exists only in a fairly sloppy manuscript. Samuel Mareel argues that the manuscript does not have the appearance of something put together as a memorial and/​or luxury manuscript. Rather, its workaday form suggests it was meant to be used; indeed, there are many manuscripts which served as repertory texts for rhetoricians’ chambers such as that of the Haarlem chamber, Trou moet blijcken. It is, however, improbable that plays for specific occasions, having taken place between 1480 and c. 1505, would still warrant a compilation manuscript which very likely came into being in the period between 1519 and 1526. What unites these texts is their raison d’être; each was written for a princely celebration or commemoration in which, with the help of historical, biblical and mythological material a complex set of messages was conveyed, aimed at an audience of princely, future, rulers, an urban elite, and an urban population. 12

13

As is the case of, for instance, the competitions of Ghent in 1539 (see above), Antwerp in 1561:  Spelen van sinne vol scoone moralisacien, uutleggingen ende bediedenissen op all loeflijcke consten (Antwerp:  Willem Silvius, 1562)  and Rotterdam in 1561:  Spelen van sinne vol scoone allegatien, loflijcke leeringhen ende schriftuerlijcke onderwijsinghen (Antwerp: Willem Silvius, 1564). All four texts are contained in Ms. 1171 of the Royal Library at Brussels.

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Each of these are ‘stakeholders’ in the desired prosperity and peace of the towns and the provinces and each has its own awareness of its status, its identity and its roles in the complexity of the ebb and flow between rulers and ruled. Mareel convincingly advances the theory that the four texts remained worthy of note for their exemplary functions even at a much later period in the history of the Low Countries, possibly even as late as the middle of the sixteenth-​century. Each of the plays, and the poem, convey messages which were, in their varied ways, aimed at the enhancement of the Burgundian dynasty as the natural, divinely appointed rulers of the provinces of the Low Countries, a dynasty which throughout its history had had to legitimize itself in the eyes of the powerful trading towns. Dynasty and towns were in constant dialogue to delineate the extent of their power, military and financial, and more than once differences of opinion threatened to destabilize the delicate balance of power and degenerate into armed conflict.14 This may explain the compilation of the Leemans Collection: the texts may have been seen as historical examples from which Leemans’ contemporaries could learn how to fashion their own literary creations when they were meant to take a speaking part in the serious game of instruction, persuasion and entertaining that was the hallmark of rhetoricians’ drama.15 Mareel speaks of the four texts as ‘diplomacy in velvet wrappings’ and we know well that successive rhetoricians’ playwrights, poets, producers and performers were in need of safety masks and obfuscating guises when they ventured to express potentially controversial political, social or religious opinions. What may have added to the ‘authority’ of these texts as exemplars for playwrights addressing dynastic topics, especially later in the turbulent sixteenth century, is that by then the occasions for which they were written were of course ‘history’ but the material from which they were fashioned, apart from ‘straightforward history’, also used revered biblical material as well as mythological stories which had gained the validity of historical material and had, so to speak, interbred with verifiable historical stories. The ubiquitous presence and the prominence of the centrality of Charlemagne and his descendants 14

15

One example of this is the conflict between Philip the Good and Ghent when the duke threatened to take down the walls of the city if its inhabitants did not comply with his taxation requests. The situation got resolved and was the cause of a magnificent Joyous Entry in 1458. Equally, a conflict between Ghent and Charles v in 1540 did result in military action: Charles marched his army into the city and the rebels surrendered; it was a total humiliation and a very costly affair: the city had to pay Charles a large amount of money and was stripped of all its privileges and freedoms. Thus we can see these plays as having biblical, mythological material encased in contemporary dynastic material and in a sense being used as exemplars for the future.

164 Strietman in the plays (and the poem) in the Leemans Collection, reaching back into the foundation stories of the Burgundian and the Habsburg dynasties, speak volumes. That in its turn is in some ways underpinned by the mythology of Troy which had by the twelfth century seeped into many of the justifying foundation myths which Western European princely rulers were only too eager to adopt (and adapt).16 It is tempting to surmise that Leemans’ efforts to preserve some of the past for his own contemporaries may also be seen as a gesture to the future, as we will shortly see in yet another fine collection of rhetoricians’ plays, from Hasselt, quite a few of which were performed till late in the seventeenth century. 4

All Human Life is Here …

Apart from plays for special occasions such as we have seen recorded by Leemans, the drama of the rhetoricians in the fifteenth-​, sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century Low Countries shows a varied use of historical material. In the corpus of some six-​hundred extant rhetoricians’ plays, it is clear almost at first glance that many playwrights excavated the rich collective memory of Europe for their material. First, and naturally, for its Judaic-​Christian traditions:  there are about ninety plays employing specific biblical material.17 Classical myth and history, such as the matière de Troi, have inspired a smaller corpus of plays but show that the rhetoricians’ explorations of such material gave ample scope for their poetic and dramatic as well as for their performative talents and skills.18 A large part of rhetoricians’ drama consists of allegorical 16

See Wilma Keesman, De eindeloze stad: Troje en Trojaanse oorprongsmythen in de middeleeuwse en vroegmoderne Nederlanden (Hilversum: Verloren, 2017). 17 W. M.  H. Hummelen, Repertorium van het rederijkersdrama, 1500-​ca. 1620 (Assen:  Van Gorcum & Comp. [etc.], 1968), is still an authoritative and extremely useful database. Additions to the Repertorium can be found in H. van Dijk et al., “A Survey of Dutch Drama before the Renaissance,” Dutch Crossing nr. 22 (April 1984): 97–​131. For a brief survey of biblical plays see Elsa Strietman, “Biblical Plays in the Low Countries,” in According to the Ancient Custom. Essays presented to David Mills, Part ii, eds. Phil Butterworth, Pamela M. King & Meg Twycross, Medieval English Theatre 30 (2008): 121–​36. 18 Ovid’s Metamorphoses in particular have inspired rhetoricians’ playwrights:  there are ten plays extant based on his work, see for this:  Anke van Herk, Fabels van liefde. Het mythologisch-​amoureuze toneel van de rederijkers (1475–​1621) (Amsterdam:  Amsterdam University Press, 2012). Classical history is barely represented in the plays of the rhetoricians apart from the topic of Troy, seen as real history, which of course features prominently in visual and narrative art as well. Aeneas’ history too is deemed to be ‘real’ history and takes a prominent place in the foundation myths of several European countries and

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plays and in these too, the awareness of biblical, classical, patristic as well as contemporary religious and secular history comes to the fore. Individual plays based on contemporary history are few and most of them occur later in the sixteenth-​century. One example of an early playwright reacting to or reflecting on contemporary historical situations is the Bruges playwright Cornelis Everaert whose work features many of the concerns and pre-​occupations of his contemporaries.19 Trade and employment, finance, social conditions affecting the man in the street, the arrogance of the rich impacting negatively on the lives of artisans, shopkeepers, the poor, the multitude of pitfalls in the relations between the sexes: all human life is here and Everaert’s focus is on events in his own lifetime. He fashioned this into drama which vividly brings to life the smaller and larger dramas of the ordinary man. He does so while employing all the possibilities of rhetoricians’ versification, personification and allegorisation, poetic means which to modern eyes and ears might seem distancing but clearly held the attention of the audience. In competition plays in particular all these poetic tools were closely scrutinized to judge whether they qualified for prizes and that implies an appreciation from sophisticated fellow playwrights and poets. Frequent background to these ‘small’ lives is furnished by the vagaries and crises of international politics and economics. The war between France and the Habsburg Empire and François i’s subsequent captivity, finally resolved after tortuous negotiations resulting in the Treaty of Pavia in 1526 caused Everaert to write a play for the celebrations in Bruges. Its title already indicates that celebration might be alright for some but war takes its toll on ordinary people: The Play of Willing Labour and Tradesmen. The same Treaty inspired Everaert to write a second play, this time focused on the many Spanish inhabitants in Bruges, in particular those from Aragon: financiers, merchants and diplomats. Everaert naturally focuses on the joy they will feel about the victory of their emperor but allows some of his allegorical representatives of local citizens to reflect on the possible consequences of the friction between the defeated French and the victorious Habsburgs which might well have an impact on

19

dynasties, including those of the Low Countries. That did result in a lengthy dramatic version by the Antwerp playwright Cornelis van Ghistele: Van Eneas en Dido: twee amoröse spelen ghemaeckt ende ghespeeldt tAntwerpen, anno 1551 (Of Eneas and Dido:  Two Amorous Plays Created and Performed in Antwerp, 1551). There is an enormous corpus of Neo-​Latin literature in the Low Countries and there are rhetoricians’ plays which translate and adapt, for instance, Sophocles’ Antigone, Seneca’s Troades and Terence’s comedies: see Hummelen, Repertorium, 272–​76. See Cornelis Everaert, De spelen, ed. W. N. M. Hüsken, 2 vols. (Hilversum: Verloren, 2005).

166 Strietman Bruges’ international trading.20 The Play of Unstable Currency reflects international economic fluctuations and financial speculation and their effect on the livelihoods of citizens, in particular the smaller traders and artisans.21 Everaert uses contemporary material in accordance with one venerable theory of historiography which exhorted chroniclers to use only material within the span of their living memory or that which came from unequivocal sources, such as eyewitnesses. Older material, by its very nature therefore elusive, should be shunned by the bona fide writer. That history and literature are littered with seemingly trustworthy sources and terribly plausible eyewitness accounts, we will leave aside for the moment. Other political events too left their traces in rhetoricians’ drama, such as the Twelve Year Truce between Spain and the Dutch Republic: Hertogh Albertus (Duke Albert) reflects the very difficult negotiations which finally brought a halt, be it temporarily, to the long-​drawn out war between the two Countries. This play forms part of a manuscript collection which originated in ’s-​Gravenpolder, a village on the island of Zuid-​Beveland, part of the province of Zeeland. The same collection contains two parts of a play about Queen Elizabeth i and the Count of Essex: a story of intrigue and betrayal, resulting in the execution of Essex, which Elizabeth afterwards bitterly regrets. It would seem to have been written in 1629, not so very long after the end of the Twelve Year Truce and ten years after the execution of the statesman Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, tried and condemned for supposed treason: this event sent shockwaves through the Republic and remained extremely controversial. Might the story of Elizabeth and Essex reflect the unease around Oldenbarnevelt’s execution?22 Another example of rhetoricians’ drama inspired by contemporary (foreign) affairs, is a 20

Tspel van Ghewillich Labeur ende Volck van Neeringhe, in Everaert, Spelen, ed. Hüsken, vol. i, 386–​412. 21 Tspel van dOnghelijcke Munte, in ibid., vol. i, 493–​526. 22 For Koningin Elysabeth (Queen Elisabeth) and Koningin Elysabeth. Hier begint het spel vanden graef van Essex uut Engelant (Queen Elisabeth. Here starts the play of the Count of Essex from England), see Hummelen, Repertorium, 132–​33. The two copies of the play are dated respectively 1629, possibly the date of composition twenty-​nine years after Essex’s execution, the other bears the date 1694, an indication that the play was newly transcribed and/​or performed and therefore of interest nearly a century after the events which formed its subject. Wim Hüsken, “Queen Elizabeth and Essex:  A Dutch Rhetoricians’ Play,” in Porci ante Margaritam: Essays in honour of Meg Twycross, eds. Sarah Carpenter, Pamela King & Peter Meredith, Leeds Studies in English, New Series, xxxii (Leeds: University of Leeds, School of English, 2001), 151–​70, addresses this question and concludes that Essex’s connections with the Low Countries and in particular his role as a spokesman for Dutch Protestants in England and his conviction that the welfare and the prosperity of the Low Countries and England were closely connected: he became a popular figure in the Netherlands whose fame, as is evident, also percolated down to a small

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play about the death of Henri iv, King of France: one of five plays by Abraham de Koning (1588–​1619).23 It is a play which reflects on regicide: that was not pertinent to the contemporary history of the rhetoricians though the murder of William of Orange in 1584 did become material for a great number of Neo-​Latin as well as contemporary vernacular literary texts and plays such as, for instance, Jacob Duym’s Moordadich Stuck van Balthasar Gerards (1606; Murderous Plot by Balthasar Gerards). Duym’s extensive oeuvre is steeped in the contemporary history of the Republic and Moordadich Stuck was printed together with five of his other plays in a Ghedenck-​Boeck (1606). Its long title is programmatic in itself, translated into English:  “A Memorial-​book, which teaches us to remember all the evil and the great malice of the Spanish and their supporters which was unleashed upon us. And to remember forever the great love and faithfulness of the Prince of the house of Nassau lavished upon us. Fashioned into plays by Jacob Duym, printed in Leyden by Henrick Lodowijcxszoon van Haestens, in the year 1606”.24 Duym’s heroic and beloved prince honoured here was not William the Silent but his son, the Stadtholder and military commander, Maurice of Nassau. The book contains two plays focusing on the sieges of Leyden (1573–​74) and Antwerp (1584–​85) and a play about the capture of Breda (1590) by means of a trick not unlike Ulysses’ Trojan Horse: a peat barge in which soldiers were hiding allowed Maurice’s troops to enter the town and open its city gates for his armed forces. The late-​fifteenth-​ and the early-​sixteenth-​century history of the Republic provided ample, graphic and horrific, material about sieges.25

village in a remote area away from the hothouse of Dutch politics in The Hague. Even that does not explain why the rhetoricians’ chamber of ’s-​Gravenpolder still kept two copies of the play in the late seventeenth century. 23 Hummelen, Repertorium, 136, for Abraham de Koning, Tragi-​comedie over de doodt van Henricus de Vierde Koning van Vranckrijck en Navarrae, ed. G. R. W. Dibbets (Zwolle: W. E. J. Tjeenk Willink, 1967) and Hummelen, Repertorium, 277–​78 for Jacob Duym, Moordadich Stuck van Balthasar Gerards, begaen aen den Doorluchtighen Prince van Oraignen, 1584, ed. L. F. A. Serrarens & N. C. H. Wijngaards (Zutphen: W. A. Thieme, 1976). 24 Jacob Duym, Een Ghedenck-​Boeck Het welck ons Leert aen al het quaet en de groten moedwil van de Spaingnaerden en haren aenhanck ons aengedaen te ghedencken (Leyden, 1606); A  modern edition of the complete Ghedenck-​Boeck does not exist. Short summaries are given by Klaas Poll, Over de Toneelspelen van den Leidschen rederijker Jacob Duym (Groningen: J. B. Huber, 1898) and individual plays have been edited. See also Hüsken’s contribution in this volume. 25 See for a discussion of siege plays, B. A. M. Ramakers, “De Gespeelde Stad. De opvoeringspraktijk van het rederijkerstoneel getoetst aan zeven belegeringsspelen,” Verslagen en Mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal-​en Letterkunde (1993): 180–​233.

168 Strietman 5

The Suspension of Disbelief?

Wherever rhetoricians do employ historical material it would seem that they do so not inspired by any desire to set on the stage a visual and verbal reality that aims to represent, to revive, a historical situation. Our modern sensibility when it comes to staging non-​contemporary plays ranges from attempts to reconstruct as accurately as possible, in costume, décor, props, an imagined ‘original’ performance or a particular historical past, to performances which aim to bring the past to the audience in a contemporary form, again, in costume, décor and props. Anyone who has seen modern performances of the English Mystery Cycles, foremost amongst them the York Cycle performed in the streets of York, has witnessed the most painstaking attempts to reconstruct older drama. Anyone who has seen Shakespeare plays in contemporary form, knows how effective and infinitely varied such performances can be too. Questions about the relationship of rhetoricians playwrights with historical material come to the fore in many plays but here I wish to concentrate on one particular case which has long intrigued me:  that of the collection of plays written for, and performed by, the rhetoricians’ chamber De Roode Roos (The Red Rose) of Hasselt, the ancient capital of the Belgian province of Limburg. There is not a great deal of evidence about the activities of De Roode Roos but tangible proof of their existence, and longevity, has survived in the form of a collection of fourteen plays.26 As is often the case with collections of rhetoricians’ plays, ‘Hasselt’ contains a random variety of texts but they are a representation of the genres and topics of rhetoricians’ plays in general and they do shed light on the activities and preoccupations of the members of De Roode Roos. Chambers operated, not exclusively, but predominantly, in towns and cities and the Hasselt plays, like many others, throw light on the urban context in which they were generated. The plays have been the subject of some publications and several individual plays have been edited. The manuscript was meant as a register and an inventory of all the plays in the chamber’s possession, collected and in part transcribed from the original texts by one Rener Comans, who states that he began to do so on 2 March 1611. In the table of contents, possibly also written by Comans, titles are accompanied by dates on which the plays were performed: these continue as far as the end of the seventeenth century (1695) and must therefore have been added by other people besides Comans. 26 Hummelen, Repertorium, 114–​22.

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As in ’s-​Gravenpolder, this would seem to imply that the subjects of the plays remained of interest long after they were written. In some cases, such as that of the seven plays based on Old Testament stories, that interest might seem timeless: not till the later twentieth century will biblical stories and figures lose their importance as common cultural currency in the heritage and the consciousness of Western Europe. The other plays, all allegorical, portray moral dilemmas and human shortcomings which would damage one’s chances of salvation: again, these might be thought timeless even though their dramatic and poetic form were no longer fashionable after the 1620s in either the southern provinces or the northern Republic. Their unquestioning Catholic context would not have commended them to an audience in the late sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century Republic but would not have been felt to be out of date in the southern provinces where the Counter-​Reformation had re-​conquered even the cities where the first open resistance against the official Catholic Church had been most virulent, such as for instance in Ghent and Antwerp, where the great Iconoclastic Fury happened in 1566.27 In what follows I shall concentrate on three plays in the collection which seem to me particularly interesting in the context of the uses of historical material: all three plays employ material from the Old Testament. Two focus on women who act as the saviours of their people, Tspel van Judith (The Play of Judith) and Tspel van Hester (The Play of Esther); a siege is an important part of the narrative Die Belegheringhe van Samarien (The Siege of Samaria) as well as in Tspel van Judith. An overarching theme in all three plays is the liberation from seemingly overwhelming destructive forces.28 27

28

A still authoritative account of this is Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), in particular:  68–​117. See for an account of the Catholic re-​building in Ghent, for instance, Michal Bauwens, “Under Construction? The Catholic Community in Ghent after the Beeldenstorm,” BMGN –​Low Countries Historical Review 131 (2016): 81–​98 (https://​www.bmgn-​lchr.nl/​article/​10.18352/​bmgn-​lchr.10180/​). The only edition of the whole collection of fourteen plays was undertaken by O.  van den Daele & Fr. Van Veerdeghem, De Roode Roos. Zinnespelen en andere tooneelstukken der zestiende eeuw voor het eerst naar het Hasseltsche Handschrift uitgegeven (Bergen:  Dequesne-​Masquillier en Zonen, 1899). The editors described the manuscript and the collection and transcribed and edited the complete texts of the three spelen van zinne (allegorical plays) in detail but merely described and paraphrased the remaining seven so-​called historiaelspelen (plays with historical material), a Prologue Play and the three plays with contemporary historical material by the Brussels playwright Johan Baptista Houwaert (1533–​1599). See also Hasseltse “historiael” spelen:  Coninck Balthasar –​Die belegheringhe van Samariën, ed. K. Ceyssens, Leuvensche Tekstuitgaven, 3 (Leuven: Keurboekerij/​Amsterdam: E. van der Vecht, 1907), id., “Melchior van Daelhem’s Spelende prologhe van 1614,” Bulletin des Mélophiles 29 (1907): 25–​54, and Lisette Claes, “Judith: Een onuitgegeven Hasselts Historiaelspel,” Jaarboek De Fonteine 11 (1961): 19–​34.

170 Strietman 6

Die Belegheringhe van Samarien: The Source and the Art

This play is based on an episode in the life of the prophet Elisha (2 Kings 6,7) who is instrumental in saving the town of Samaria from a siege waged by Benadab, king of Syria. Samaria seems doomed to be destroyed by a terrible famine. King Joram’s initial reaction is to abandon all hope in the Lord of Israel and even to kill His messenger, Helizeus (Elisha). Instead, Helizeus prophecies that Samaria will be saved and indeed, the following day Benadab’s army flees in confusion, hearing sounds of what seem to be massed armies bearing down upon them: Samaria is saved. The message that trust in God is always justified, is conveyed in an elaborate sequence of events set in different locations and with a host of characters: messengers, guards, kings, armies, citizens, mothers, lepers, spies, and sinnekens. As usual, the latter, exacerbators of evil are working in a pair but here they are not united in intent: one sinneken is convinced Samaria cannot be saved whereas the other puts its trust in God, a nice ironic departure from the inherent negativity sinnekens mostly embody.29 The town of Hasselt, in the Dutch-​speaking County of Loon, experienced a brief period of religious conflict in the 1560s but was rapidly brought back into the fold of Catholicism after the iconoclastic upheavals which affected the southern Low Countries severely in the 1560s. Earlier on in the sixteenth-​ century Loon had seen much disturbance because of the presence and the activities of Anabaptists in the 1530s and records also exist of ‘Lutherans’, indicating heretics of whatever persuasion, being punished.30 This region, as others in the southern provinces, was strongly targeted by the reconquista launched by the Spanish secular authorities and the Catholic Church. After the late 1560s there is, however, no indication that further religious conflict affected the town or its rhetoricians’ chamber De Roode Roos. Whether there might be a link between the religious upheaval in the area and the genesis of the play is uncertain.

29

30

There is no printed version or modern edition of Tspel van Hester (The Play of Hester). One other play with a siege in this manuscript, Tspel van Josue (The Play of Joshua), I leave out in this article. See for an extensive discussion of the sinnekens and their diverse functions, Charlotte Steenbrugge, Staging Vice. A  Study of Dramatic Traditions in Medieval and Sixteenth-​ century England and the Low Countries, Ludus, 13 (Amsterdam-​New York: Editions Rodopi, 2014); still a standard work about the sinnekens is W. M. H. Hummelen, De sinnekens in het rederijkersdrama (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1958). See for a more detailed discussion of the religious, economic and political situation in Hasselt during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, note 37 below.

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Siege plays originating in the northern provinces, written by Calvinist playwrights about events that were still in living memory celebrated the triumphant victories over Spain and the forces of Catholicism and clearly had a raison d’être for using material from their own history. The Hasselt siege plays all use Old Testament material; since the southern Low Countries eventually remained part of the Spanish-​Habsburg realm, such triumphalist rhetoric is not likely to have provided the impetus for the Hasselt siege plays or for their repeated performances in the seventeenth century.31 Even so, at whatever date De Belegheringhe van Samarien was written, it had a considerable afterlife: the index made in the seventeenth century of the Hasselt plays records performances of Samarien in 1608, 1634 and 1670: its subject was clearly still of interest.32 It has to be noted that the town, whilst not a backwater, was quite removed from the great cultural centres, such as Brussels and Antwerp, where renaissance and baroque literary culture became prominent: rhetoricians’ chambers, playwrights and poets gradually were no longer seen as celebrated representatives of a city’s culture. In Hasselt the rhetoricians did not have to compete in the same way with the new literary and cultural fashions. This may in part explain the longevity of the chambers and their plays in this town.33 The texts were kept and even 31

32

33

It might be interesting, in this respect, to quote Bart Ramakers who, in his book Spelen en figuren. Toneelkunst en processiecultuur in Oudenaarde tussen Middeleeuwen en Moderne Tijd (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), 256, discusses the increase in Old Testament tableaux in Oudenaarde’s procession of the Holy Sacrament during the sixteenth century: “Zelfs de tendens taferelen uit het Oude Testament om hun intrinsieke, historische waarde te vertonen en niet vanwege hun typologische of morele betekenis, wil niet zeggen dat de organisatoren in reformatorische hoek gezocht moeten worden.” (Even the tendency to show tableaux with images from the Old Testament for their intrinsic, historic value and not because of their typological or moral meaning, does not mean that the organisers of the procession must be sought in reformatory circles.) This is especially interesting in connection with Judith and Hester because here there is a deliberate explicit connection between performances of Old Testament stories and history too. As said above, Hasselt would seem to have been predominantly catholic in the seventeenth century, the era in which many of the Hasselt plays continued to be performed. The earliest date appended in the manuscript to De Belegheringhe van Samarien is 22 September 1608 with the remark that it was “Ghespeelt maendachs in die kermisse tot Hasselt” (performed on Monday at the fair in Hasselt); two other dates 1634 and 1670 are given, the latter again with the information: Played on Monday 22 September at the Fair. Whether the play was written before 1608 is uncertain. The contrast with other siege plays should be noted: those about Leyden and Antwerp were written by Jacob Duym in 1606 and could therefore be seen as part of collective, living, history; they have a clear political intent with a strong awareness of their own identity as Republican plays. Clearly Hasselt had an active rhetoricians’ culture long after most chambers had ceased their activities; chambers in the southern provinces did on the whole continue longer

172 Strietman copied anew in 1612 and any play was no doubt a draw for citizens: several of the other plays in the index are also noted as having been performed more than once and also till quite late into the seventeenth century. The lasting attraction of these plays may also have lain in their material: stories from the Old and the New Testament were felt to be relevant: moral and religious lessons could be drawn from them and indeed, that is what the playwrights did focus on. Moreover, the fact that seven of the fourteen Hasselt plays, including Samarien, were performed on the day of the Fair sets the biblical material in a particular context: the great Fairs were not only important commercial events, they also were religious feasts, often linked with the patron saint of a town.34 Also, then as now, people might have liked to watch plays about warfare: Samarien is an excellent example of the spectacular ingenuity of the rhetoricians’ stagecraft; one of the many stage directions in the play promises: Hier comen die Syriers te perde en te voet met trommelen en trompetten (Here the Syrians arrive on horseback with drums and trumpets). In terms of ‘staged history’ Samarien was full of spectacle:  it is quite a racy play with characters, events, decor and props creating a lively sequence of scenes. Is this a modern hinein-​interpretation? Are we, unlike the Hasselt audiences, less likely to be enthralled by the long, static ‘persuasion plays’ with religious, moral, social argumentation which form such a great part of the legacy of the rhetoricians and which obviously drew crowds? 2 Kings 6:24–​33 and 7:1–​20 relate an episode in the life of the prophet Elisha.35 The biblical text itself is full of tragic events and the playwright has followed the text faithfully but also added quite a few flourishes of his own. The staging must have been an elaborate affair, partly to incorporate the many characters and the different locations, acted as well as narrated but also

34

35

than those in the Republic but even against that background the Hasselt chamber, if the performance dates are correctly recorded, had an exceptionally long performance tradition. Hasselt’s rhetoricians seem not to have had a strong connection with St Stephanus, the patron saint of the town in the earlier middle ages but may have had a special devotion to Our Lady; Hasselt’s parishes each had different patron saints. The word kermisse means ‘church mass’. Elisha is a popular subject for the rhetoricians, attested to in at least three other plays: De propheet Eliseus [Hummelen Repertorium, 65], Johan Fruytiers’ Spel van sinne performed in Rotterdam, 1561 [ibid., 184], Naaman prinche van Syrien [ibid., 33] and possibly another play (now lost) in Oudenaarde in 1556–​57: De historie van Horam, coninck van Israel ende de vertroostinge van den coninck van Samarien duer den prophete Eliseus. See B.  A.  M. Ramakers, Spelen en figuren:  Toneelkunst en processiecultuur in Oudenaarde tussen Middeleeuwen en Moderne Tijd (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), 156. The performance of Horam took two days and was a dramatisation of two episodes in Elisha’s life: the campaign of Horam against Moab (2 Kings 3) and the siege of Samaria (2 Kings 7).

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because of the frequent scene changes: there are a number of intervals, pausae, some of which may have had music. Changes of register too add to the liveliness, ranging from comic, sometimes farcical, to serious, even horrific ones. Stark mood changes occur frequently. A number of stock characters, the messenger, the town guard, are used and these vary in linguistic register and physical movements, as far as the stage directions allow us to conclude, sometimes coarse and with detailed attention to bodily and sexual functions.36 Some examples may illustrate the fusion of biblical historical text and the embroidery of the playwright aiming to entertain his contemporary audience: the first appearance of the king of Samaria strolling on the walls of his city is couched in a veritable Natureingang where all the delights of a (northern) spring and the resulting happiness of mankind are outlined37. Then the messenger from King Benadab appears, threatening the total destruction of the city. Later, the guard, seeing a mass of Syrian soldiers swarm towards the town, loses control of his bowels, is frightened of what his wife will say when she will have to wash his trousers but tries to chase away his fear by singing a rousing song and then blows his trumpet to warn the citizens. We do not have the music but the song is reminiscent of many of the geuzenliederen, the songs used by the rebels in their revolt against the Spanish oppressor, often sung on existing well-​known melodies, such as hymns and psalms, with their standard exhortation to trust in God and the equation between ‘us’ and the Israelites, be they the Dutch rebelling against the might of Spain and the Catholic Church, or the Old Testament Jews in Egypt or the Samarians beset by the Syrians. Past and present are effortlessly interwoven: the seventeenth-​century Hasselt rhetoricians, peacefully part of a reinvigorated Catholic Habsburg province, still apparently saw nothing strange in cherry-​picking the modes and moods of their, now past, history, to get their message across and entertain their audience. What is striking to the modern reader is that this history of a siege, far away in biblical times and perhaps not even based on a real historical event, was clearly an interesting topic for the Hasselt playwright, and by implication, for his fellow citizens, whether the prophet Elisha was a real historical figure or whether he really did play a crucial role in the saving of the city from 36 37

The ‘spectacularity’ found in this Hasselt play is also a feature of another one in the same collection, Tspel van Judith (see below). This truly medieval stylistic device was frequently adopted by the rhetoricians and we have a similar example of it, also in an incongruous setting, in Tspel van Hester where it is used at the moment just before Mardocheus learns of the planned destruction of his people creating a shocking and abrupt switch of mood (see below).

174 Strietman one of the frequent sieges it seems to have suffered. Samaria, according to archaeological scholars,38 was a real town, the capital of a northern kingdom in Israel in the ninth and the eight century bc. But did it matter to the Hasselt spectators? What was conveyed was that trust in God was something real, that His endless mercy could save those who believed in Him from the most frightening predicaments; faith, after all, defies reason. To the sixteenth-​century playwright the biblical story was, very literally, Gospel truth, and he imbues it with a meaning that is present in the biblical story but that, mutatis mutandis, was just as relevant for him and his sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century spectators. They too, as an identifiable group, the citizens of Hasselt, the Catholic citizens of Hasselt, can trust their God.39

38

39

Samaria attracted several archeological expeditions. The earliest seems to have been that of archeologists from Harvard (George A. Reisner, “The Harvard Expedition to Samaria. Excavations of 1909,” The Harvard Theological Review 3 [1910]: 248–​63). Later, from 1931 to 1935 and from 1965 to 1967, followed a joint expedition of several institutions, led by John Winter Crowfoot. Fawzi Zayadine of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan and archeologists from Israel and other countries undertook further excavations. It is very tempting to speculate about this particular theme of trust in God, which also, as we shall see, is a most prominent aspect in the plays of Judith and Esther. In the light of the impact of the departure from orthodox Catholic dogma towards the various forms of reformational ideology in the sixteenth century with its central tenet of sola fides might we surmise that the playwrights of Die Belegheringhe, Judith and Hester ende Assverus inclined towards a reformational emphasis on ‘trust in God’? We do not know where the playwrights in question came from, whether they were Hasselt citizens or whether their plays had come into the possession of the chamber from elsewhere. We do know that De Roode Roos operated in a town which, after a brief period of religious conflict in the 1560s, to all intents and purposes seems to have resettled safely in the shelter of the Catholic Church after the iconoclastic outbreaks of 1567. As briefly indicated above, there is evidence of earlier religious conflicts, notably in the 1530s, when Anabaptists were actively proselytizing in and around Hasselt and there are records of a great number of ‘Lutherans’, loosely indicating heretics of whatever persuasion, being punished in the same area. In the end, the reconquista of the southern provinces by the joint forces of Spain and the Catholic Church seems to have been decisively successful and the performances of the plays in the seventeenth century were clearly welcomed in a solidly Catholic town. Documentation about the Anabaptists and the widespread persecution of ‘Lutherans’ in Hasselt can be found in J. Lyna, “De wederdopers in het graafschap Loon,” Bulletin de la Société Scientifique et Littéraire de Limbourg 25 (1920): 89–​100, and id., “De Protestantse revolutie te Hasselt (1566–​1567),” Verzamelde opstellen, uitgegeven door den Geschied-​en Oudheidkundigen Studiekring te Hasselt 10 (1934): 235–​62; 11 (1935): 295–​96. See also J. G. C. Venner, Beeldenstorm in Hasselt 1567. Achtergronden en analyses van een rebellie tegen de prins-​bisschop van Luik, Maaslandse Monografieën, 48 (Leeuwarden/​ Maastricht: Eisma, 1989).

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Tspel van Judith: Little Women? Educated Women!

The appearance, disappearance and relocation of the Book of Judith, as well as its historical veracity, its place in various biblical canons, its continued adoption by a number of Catholic theologians and its rejection by Protestants would fill a volume in itself. For our purposes here, suffice it to say that it was included in the Vulgate, and would therefore still have been available in that translation as one of the libri historici in the sixteenth century as indeed it was in early translations into French and Dutch in the mid-​sixteenth century.40 We have here, as a source for a rhetoricians’ play, a text which has come to be seen as a non-​historical text but its ‘authority’ as a biblical story which inspired countless representations in art, literature and drama is unquestioned.41 In the Low Countries, however, its popularity in art was far greater than in drama: there seem to be no vernacular texts before the end of the sixteenth-​century except in a play from 1577 in two halves by a Roeselare playwright, Robert Lawet (c. 1530-​c. 1596), Judich ende Holifernes, of which only the first part has survived. It takes the story only as far as Judith’s preparations to go to Holofernes’ camp.42 Even so, there is enough of the play to allow an insight in the interpretative flexibility of Lawet’s portrayal of his heroine. Lawet does not show here, as he does in one of his other biblical plays, that of the Prodigal Son, a marked anti-​Catholic stance but focuses on Judith’s steadfastness, sprung from her unswerving faith, with which she carries out her plan to bring Holofernes down. She is portrayed as the Christian warrior sallying forth to defeat evil, 40

41

42

It was included in the compilation of the Hasselt plays by Rener Comans who started it in 1611: the only dates pertaining to Judith in the inventory is that of 1642, when it was performed and it is likely that it was included in the manuscript no later than 1615. That is no proof that it was already in existence in the sixteenth century but Vulgate texts continued to be used and, as is the case with the other Hasselt plays, Judith too is in all respects a product of a rhetoricians’ tradition which continued rather longer in the Southern provinces than in the North. Luther’s German bible translation of 1534 took a number of books out of the Hebrew and/​or Greek canon and placed them in a separate intertestamental section, often referred to as the Apocrypha; the Book of Judith is one of these. The Louvain Bijbel, translated by Nicolaes van Winghe, was published in Louvain in 1550, and produced as a Catholic countermeasure to the translations of Luther’s bible into Dutch. Edna Purdie, The story of Judith in German and English Literature (Paris:  Champion, 1927) lists 103 renderings of which 76 in drama; in the Low Countries there are a number of sixteenth-​century Neo-​Latin versions as well as seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century vernacular renderings. A. Van Elslander & L.  De Scheerder, “Een teruggevonden spel van den Roeselaersen Rederijker R.  Lawet,” in Album Prof. Dr.  Frank Baur (Antwerp:  Standaardboekhandel, 1948), vol. i, 244–​49. This essay unfortunately does not contain the text, merely a description of the play. The manuscript (Antwerp, Plantin-​Moretus, M.16.10) has not been edited.

176 Strietman here personified in Nebuchadnezzar’s megalomania and his blasphemous presumption to become “king and god of all the earth.”43 Anne Marie Musschoot, in a penetrating chapter in her book on the Judith plays, sees Lawet’s Judich ende Holofernes as strongly indebted to the medieval mystery plays in its structure and in the stark contrast in the portrayal of the two protagonists: Judith as the force of good, the redeemer, and Nebuchadnezzar and Holofernes as the twin forces of evil, the devil and his henchman.44 That indebtedness is even stronger because Nebuchadnezzar’s blasphemous pride infects his captains and threatens to destroy all countries, including that of the Jews. The resistance, like that of David against Goliath, is wholly fuelled by a woman, the proverbially weak link in creation, and a striking example of the way in which the weak can resist the strong. This can of course be interpreted in the context of Christian faith and morality, but also in the contemporary political context, that of the resistance of the Dutch against their Spanish rulers. Other rhetoricians’ plays about Judith have not survived, though both Catholic school drama and Protestant humanist drama, in the Low Countries and in Germany, do employ her as a model or example of their own ideologies.45 This flexibility of religious interpretation is not only present in the Judith plays but in much of biblical sixteenth-​century drama, proof of an (implicit) political and contemporary historical awareness on the part of the playwrights. A striking example of a sixteenth-​century rendering in French is by an Antwerp schoolmaster with a moral, religious and political agenda, to be performed by his female pupils.46 Peeter Heyns was a well-​known Calvinist but his school was visited by both Catholic and Protestant girls and it is for their education and edification that he wrote three Miroirs: each focusing on a stage in a woman’s life: Jokebed, Miroir des vrayes meres (Jochebed, Mirror of True Mothers), Susanne ou Le Miroir des Mesnageres (Susanna or The Mirror of Housekeepers) and Le Miroir des Vefves. Tragedie sacrée d’Holoferne & Judith (The Mirror of Widows. Sacred tragedy of Holofernes and Judith).47 43 44 45 46 47

Anne Marie Musschoot, Het Judith-​thema in de Nederlandse letterkunde (Gent: Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal-​en Letterkunde, 1972), 83. Ibid., 84–​85. Ibid., 96. Hubert Meeus, “Peeter Heyns’ Le Miroir des Fefves: meer dan schooltoneel?’, in Mémoire en temps advenir. Hommage à Theo Venckeleer, eds. Alex Vanneste et al., Orbis /​Supplementa, 22 (Leuven: Peeters, 2003), 115–​34. Le Miroir de Vefves seems to have been written, and very likely performed, in 1582 but the three plays were not published till respectively 1595, 1597 and 1596 by Heyns’ son, Zacharias Heyns, a publisher and bookseller in Amsterdam (ibid., 116).

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Heyns structures his plays according to classical rules: five acts with a prologue and an epilogue. The story of Judith, Le Miroir de Vefves (1582), embeds the story of Judith in an allegorical setting, with a great cast of characters, no doubt to include many or all of his pupils. They consist of allegorical, biblical, non-​biblical and specific characters and Heyns cleverly employs the allegorical characters to embody the moral meaning of the play but also to bring to life the graphic realities of war: Dame Noble and Matrone Rustique are refugees fleeing from Holofernes’s scorched earth policy and have been subjected to rape and witnessed murder, arson and pillage and they foresee that Bethulia will experience famine and water shortage. The inhabitants of Bethulia, and the Jewish people in general, as well as, by extension, the audience of the play, are all included in a community of potentially true believers, with, it is true, the doubters and the fearful who advocate surrender to avert a worse fate. The play serves ultimately as a warning to tyrants and an affirmation of the absolute truth that God will not forsake his people. Heyns’ choice of characters and modes of staging were clearly determined by the fact that he was writing for his female pupils but he seems at the same time to have had an eye on his audience of parents and relatives: throughout the play there are echoes of and references to the actual political situation in the Low Countries: to the war with Spain, to Philip ii and his feared and ruthless representative the Duke of Alba.48 William of Orange’s Apologia was published in 1581 in response to Philip ii’s ban against him; the States General’s Act of Abjuration followed in the same year: declaring Philip’s rule null and void. Most of the provinces of the Low Countries had suffered from the frequent military clashes, the sieges of individual towns and the ravages of often hungry and unpaid mercenary armies. Judith’s own deliberations whether in the circumstances she is justified to employ deceit, to commit murder, to rebel against a king, reflect the questions that then and long afterwards were debated in the Low Countries in political and philosophical treatises, and in poetry and drama, the latter from the rhetoricians to P.  C. Hooft and Joost van den Vondel. Heyns’ own religious beliefs add another dimension: the struggle of the Protestant churches against its detractors is implicitly portrayed in the struggle of the Jews against the tyrant Nebuchadnezzar who wishes to be honoured as a God. Bethulia’s beleaguered citadel is the community of the true believers, of the Jews who are God’s Chosen People and from there it is an easy step to the equation so often 48

Ibid., 128–​30.

178 Strietman found in Protestant literature: the Protestants, like the Jews, are God’s Chosen People.49 There are quite a few similarities between Lawet’s play, Heyns’ French play written for girls in Antwerp and the Dutch play performed in the much smaller town of Hasselt. For a start, they are elaborate: even Lawet’s incomplete play has twenty-​eight characters and a complex structure with frequent scenes of ‘ordinary people’ allowing multiple perspectives and some comic relief.50 It also highlights the stagecraft of the rhetoricians in alternating and interweaving serious and comic matter, which is clearly designed to keep the audience interested and entertained. Heyns’ play is much more tightly structured but it too, interweaves the serious with some comic aspects: such as the diatribes of Vefve Mondaine against Judith, whom she sees as sanctimonious, hypocritical, all set for some sexual adventure as well as for an escape from the famine afflicting Bethulia.51 All three plays follow the biblical story faithfully and in detail, emphasise the ‘trust in God theme’, create ‘excursions’ in the casting and the staging of the biblical story to accommodate, in Heyns’ case, a very specific group of performers and a wider audience, and in the Hasselt case, a non-​specific audience in a non-​specific town: whether the Hasselt Judith was also written in and for Hasselt is not at all clear. The portrayal of women in rhetoricians’ drama is not often positive: women are frequently seen as tricksters, seducers, the ones who persuade the male protagonists to leave the narrow righteous path and take the wide road to moral laxity and depravity. By contrast most of the ‘wise counsellors’ in the allegorical plays are male. In the case of biblical characters that picture shifts a bit: Delilah and Jezebel are proverbially wicked but we do also have Susanna, Judith, Esther, Martha and Mary, the repentant Mary Magdalene. In the case of Judith and, as we shall see, in that of Hester, there is an emphasis on their Jewishness and on the fact that they are the saviours of their people:  truly heroic women.52 49 For other examples of plays taking the same line: ibid., 130–​33. 50 Musschoot, Judith-​thema, 77–​106. 51 Meeus, “Peeter Heyns’ Le Miroir des Fefves,” 118. 52 It is worth noting that the topos of ‘weakness’ overcoming ‘strength’ is strongly present in rhetoricians’ drama. In most cases both are combined in one individual in the sense that the main protagonist has to abandon his seemingly entrenched wickedness in favour of adopting a vulnerable, morally just course of behaviour. The play of Elckerlijc (Everyman) provides a paradigmatic example of this. A further manifestation of this idea is that of the weak woman triumphing over the strong male or a male group. Whereas they are frequently portrayed as detractors, seducers, betrayers, or the wily whose underhand tactics undermine men, those who are not so portrayed, are, strikingly, the women from the

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For all the differences in the three Judith plays under discussion, the portrayal of the female saviour of a people allows the emphasis on the struggle against tyranny. In the case of Heyns with a clear Protestant propagandistic aim, in the case of Lawet’s Judich ende Holofernes there is no clear religious propaganda linked to the contemporary sixteenth-​century context but the theme of resistance against tyranny is emphatically present. The differences between Heyns’ play and the Hasselt Judith stem in part from the dichotomy of specific and non-​specific circumstances of cast and audience and in part from their religious aims: whereas Heyns sees his Protestant community of believers as the justly righteous, the Hasselt playwright portrays the conflict between, on the one hand, the tyrants and those who lack faith in God, and those who continue to put their absolute trust in God and derive their justification from that. That is then presented as a clash between infidels and Jews (and for the latter, read Christians). Nebuchadnezzar, in the Hasselt play, is an important centre-​stage character, in the Antwerp play he is, of necessity, as a man, a non-​acting character: represented but not heard at first hand.53 In the Hasselt Judith his opening monologue and subsequent dialogues are more than a tenth of the text (158 out of 1480 lines). The boundless pride and outbursts of

53

Old Testament stories. In these plays they become the living proof that God is on the side of His Jewish People showing that trust in Him is justified, however unlikely it may seem in particular circumstances. This seems to me to be reflected in the plays featuring Judith and Esther. Even though we do not know anything about the political background of the authors of these plays, the struggle of the rebellious factions against the Spanish-​ Habsburg rulers and Catholicism in the Low Countries is often portrayed as being fought by God’s Chosen People. Both the Jews in the Old Testament and the Dutch rebels are fighting against overwhelming odds where only their belief in the righteousness of their cause and their trust in God gives them the ultimate victory. Bearing in mind that the portrayal of women and of Jews in early modern literature and drama is frequently negative, the contrasting portrayal outlined above is made possible, or at least made acceptable, because of the authority of the Bible. Hill makes a strong case in her article in this volume for the positive portrayal of Mrs Noah and the popularity of this powerful character in drama after the English Peasant’s Revolt of 1381, although there it is not so much the authority of the biblical story which facilitates that portrayal but an already existing (visual and narrative) tradition. As becomes clear from the list of characters and their functions in Heyns’ play:  Fama reports Nebuchadnezzar’s plans to conquer the whole world but after that the spotlight is on Holofernes as the ‘executive tyrant’. Heyns of course needed to minimize the use of male characters and Holofernes and his behaviour too are ‘reported’, mainly by Fama, but also by Judith and some other characters. The only male figure allowed on the stage, and even that briefly and ingloriously, is that of Achior, the rebel in Holofernes’ camp who switches his allegiance to the Bethulians; his only ‘active’ appearance is the moment when he is shown the bloody head of Holofernes by Judith, and promptly faints (ibid., 116–​119 and 124).

180 Strietman tyrannical anger in which both the king and Holofernes indulge, demonstrate the excess and therefore the moral invalidity of these characters. Holofernes is merely an extension, the executive arm, as it were, of the tyrant.54 Excess too is shown in his sexual indulgence, gluttony and drinking, and serves as a general example that such behaviour leads people away from the awareness of God and moral living.55 It may be difficult for an audience to identify with a tyrant but everyone can identify with indulging in excess of one kind or another. However, in the plays under discussion, there must have been an implicit awareness of what tyrannical rule is:  all three are the product of an era in which the Low Countries were beset by the actuality or the aftermath of Philip ii’s rule and the excesses of his executive representatives, notably the Duke of Alba and the Inquisition. The portrayal of Judith herself as an exemplary heroine who is aware that without God she will not achieve anything, is in essence the same in all three plays. Given that we do not have the second part of Lawet’s Judich ende Holofernes, we can only surmise what the treatment of the heroine might have been, and discuss that of the heroine in Heyns and in the Hasselt play. It is marked that in both the plays there are forms of excess around Judith. In Heyns’ play Judith’s detractor is the character of Vefve Mondaine, a frivolous widow whose husband has left her very well off and the war situation is a galling impediment to the life she is determined to enjoy as a free woman. Her spleen causes her to try and undermine Judith, whose exemplary sober widowhood seems to her no more than hypocrisy. Judith’s preparations to go to Holofernes’ camp seem to confirm that: clearly she is preparing herself for a sexual adventure or an escape from the famine. The rumours that Judith is trying to deceive Holofernes into believing that the town will be an easy target merely confirm Vefve Mondaine’s suspicions.56 Judith’s own assessment of herself adds to this disparaging view: she is not at all sure that what she is planning is justified and there is a soul-​searching self-​questioning:  having considered a number of ethical and political arguments for and against and some precedents in the Bible, she comes to the conclusion that in this case the means justifies the end.57 Even with that certainty she is nevertheless astonished to 54

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The Jewess Judith and personified by her, the Jewish people, could well have echoes for a sixteenth-​century audience which had seen the consequences of tyranny. Even if they did not sympathise with the various factions of Protestant or political rebels, they had seen the terrible and random effects of war and civic strife, both on those who fought for their convictions and on the innocent non-​participants. See also Claes, “Judith,” 19–​34. See Meeus, “Peeter Heyns’ Le Miroir des Fefves,” 116–​18. Here too echoes of many of the deliberations in the debate about the rebellion against Philip ii: is it permitted to use lies and deceit against tyranny? Is it permitted to rebel

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find that the magistrates of the town listen to her plan to trick Holofernes and are prepared to act on it.58 The contrast between the two widows and Judith’s deliberations of course serves the dramatic irony:  how wrong was Vefve Mondaine’s assessment of Judith and her motivation, how splendid does the heroine’s dangerous exploit turn out: a blessing for the town, for all the Jews, for, implicitly, all who are the victims of tyranny. Heyns’ conclusion indeed moves away from the specificity of the story of Judith and instead makes the link with the contemporary situation: Conclusion, the Epilogue speaker, gives a clear declaration of support for William of Orange, for the Protestant Church, for the view of Protestants as the Chosen People (like the Jews). William of Orange is likened to Achior and the essence of the Epilogue is that it is an exhortation to rebellion.59 In the Hasselt play the portrayal of Judith seems to verge on the risky in terms of keeping hold of the main thematic strands. This shows itself in the scenes in which Judith gains entry into Holofernes’ tent. They are reminiscent of other scenes in rhetoricians’ plays where the main protagonist is exposed to all manner of worldly temptations, be they indulgence in feasting, drinking, luxurious living, sexual incontinence or the denial of God’s laws and the reckoning that will come with the Last Judgement. Not surprising is that Holofernes indulges in excessive expressions of his lust, and in equally overheated fantasies about the gratification which he takes for granted. What is remarkable is that Judith seems to give as good as she gets. She answers his advances in an equally amorous refrain, promising to stay with him until death. That, of course, is effective dramatic irony, but it is undermined rather by the heaping onto another of references to famous star-​crossed lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe, Hero and Leander, all this in a glittering display of rhetorical versification. Judith, too, is shown as indulging in excess, of language and emotion. However frequent an element the warnings against excess are in rhetoricians’ drama, the presentation of excess here has consequences for the structure of the play which consists of loosely connected scenes, with banquets, amorous episodes, musical intermezzi, classical allusions, Old Testament references, and military parades: such a variety of ‘spectacular’ elements we do not often encounter in rhetoricians’ plays.60 All this leads Musschoot to evaluate

58 59 60

against a prince even if he is a tyrant? And, important for Protestants: Nebuchadnezzar wants to be ‘a God on earth’, i.e. a Pope. Meeus, “Peeter Heyns’ Le Miroir des Fefves,” 118, 121–​22. Ibid., 128–​33. It has to be said that we encounter a similar ‘spectacularity’ in Die belegheringhe van Samarien.

182 Strietman the Hasselt Judith as a brief new development in rhetoricians’ drama, a merging of the morality with popular entertainment drama, which does, however, not turn into a rhetoricians’ ‘genre’ but does manifest itself prominently in the German Volksschauspiele of the sixteenth century.61 8

Tspel van Hester en Assverus: A ‘Godless’ History?

Another of the Nine Heroines,62 and equally as popular as Judith in the visual and literary arts, was Esther. However, as far as we know, there is only one rhetoricians’ play, from the sixteenth century, about her, though a number of Latin school dramas do dramatize her story. The location of the Book of Esther in the biblical canon has varied. In the Hebrew scriptures this text belonged in the historical books: it related how the Jewess Esther, married to the Persian King Ahasuerus was, together with her adopted father, her uncle Mordecai, instrumental in preventing the complete destruction of her people in Ahasuerus’ realm.63 Ahasuerus is persuaded that the Jews are an inside threat to his power and his realm by the Amalachite Haman, himself from a people who had a longstanding feud with the Jews.

61 Musschoot, Judith-​thema, 87–​93. 62 The Nine Heroines were a fourteenth-​century construct in response to the Nine Worthies. The list of the chosen women varies in various visual and literary presentations but, again in accordance with the male heroes, there is a tendency to group them in threes: three pagan, three Jewish and three Christian women. The pagan group, not always the same, could consist of women conquerors and military leaders, such as queens and Amazons. However, one variation is shown in a set of woodcuts made by the German craftsman Hans Burgkmair (1473–​1531) which includes male and female figures. The three pagan women there are Lucretia, Vetura and Virginia, the Jewish women Esther, Judith and Jael, and the Christian women Helena (mother of Constantine), Saint Bridget of Sweden and Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. Whatever the combination of women, many people might have been familiar with the idea of nine heroines from frescoes, woodcuts, sculptures and popular stories. 63 In the Hebrew Bible and the Vulgate the king is called Ahasuerus, though in the Addenda to the Book of Esther he is named Artaxerxes. The English Authorized Version of 1611 uses Artaxerxes in the canonical text and in the Addenda. In the Statenvertaling, the Dutch reformed authorized version of 1638, he is called Ahasverus. There is a truly Babylonian confusion about the two names and the various rulers they might refer to; the Hasselt playwright throughout refers to Assverus. In the Vulgate the Addenda to the Book of Esther are placed immediately after the canonical text, whereas in Roman Catholic bibles they are interwoven in the canonical text but clearly distinguished from it. In Protestant bibles the Addenda are placed in the Apocrypha. The Dutch authorized version of 1638 does not include them at all.

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Haman’s fury was incited by the refusal of one man, Mordecai, to kneel before him in obeisance, because, it was known, Mordecai was an Israelite. Mordecai, however, prevented a plot against the king, had implored his niece Esther to warn the king and the perpetrators were duly punished. Oddly, though this event “is recorded in the book of the annals in the presence of the king” (Esther 2:19–​23), there is no mention of a reward for Mordecai, instead the king elevates Haman to the most powerful position in the kingdom apart from the King himself.64 In contrast to the story of Judith, the salvation of the Israelites in the Book of Esther is a straightforward historical account of which the chief function seems to be that it explains the origins of the Feast of Purim.65 Nowhere is this story placed in a religious context nor is Hester portrayed as the saviour of God’s chosen people, only as the saviour of her, Hester’s, people. Judith, it may be remembered, is wholly embedded in the relationship between God and his chosen people. The additions to the Book of Esther, with a translation of the entire Greek text and these Addenda too, are placed in different locations in various biblical canons.66 In the Vulgate they follow on immediately after the Book of Esther, in later Catholic bibles the Addenda are integrated in the text but in a different font, in Protestant bibles they are placed in the Apocrypha. It is not possible to determine the exact sources the Hasselt playwright could have used, and his inspiration may of course have come from textual as well as from visual sources. His narrative order follows broadly the story as it appears in the canonical Book of Esther but he also adopts elements from the Addenda.67 In what follows I will draw attention to some of the decisions the playwright seems to have made with regard to the inclusion of various parts of the Addenda as well as the way he has chosen to represent the canonical text, though this is not an exhaustive discussion. In contrast with the canonical

64 See Biblia sacra iuxta Vulgatam Clementinam, eds. Alberto Colunga & Lorenzo Turrado (Madrid:  Biblioteca de autores cristianos, 1965, 4th edition), Liber Esther 2:21–​23, and The Holy Bible. New Revised Standard Version containing the Old and the New Testament with the Apocryphal or Deuterocanonical Books (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Esther 2:19–​23. 65 An explanation seen as doubtful by modern biblical scholars, since there is good reason to believe that this feast had been celebrated long before the time of Queen Esther. 66 The Addenda are in the Roman Catholic, Greek and Slavonic bibles but not in the Protestant bible: see also note 58. 67 Biblia sacra, eds. Colunga & Turrado 414–​24. For the Roman Catholic canon, see, for instance La sainte Bible; traduite en français sous la direction de l’Ecole biblique de Jérusalem (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1956) where the Addenda to the Book of Esther are incorporated in the canonical text.

184 Strietman Bible text, the Hasselt playwright, very much in keeping with the customary style of rhetoricians’ plays, uses forms of address, pious wishes, epithets, which set the story in a religious framework. There are a few instances where God is invoked which are more elaborate: here the playwright uses material from the apocryphal Addenda to create pleas to God from Mardocheus (as Mordecai is named in the Hasselt play) who realises that the selection of Hester for the king’s harem might well benefit the oppressed Jews in the kingdom.68 In addition, the playwright has added a declaration by Mardocheus, which is neither in the canonical text or in the Addenda. Mardocheus’ refusal to do obeisance to Haman (“Aman” in the play) is explained merely by the hearsay information that he himself has stated that he is a Jew. This is further substantiated in Mardocheus’ answer to the question why he does not honour Aman: Ke, daer aen leyt cleyn lieff oft leet. Tes een dwaeshyt, dus laet u genueghen. Sou ick voer Aman myn knien bueghen en hem toe vueghen alle eeren? Den Coninck der hemelen en Heer der heeren, Synen loff salmen vermeeren in eeuwicheden want na onser wet en salmen niemant aenbeden, met geenen reden, sterffelycke creatueren. (ll. 840–​47) [Well, that is neither here nor there. It is folly, that should satisfy you. Why would I bend my knees to Aman and give him all honour thus? The King of heaven and the Lord of lords, His praise should be sung for ever and ever, For according to our law no one should worship a mortal being, for whatever reason.] The ‘otherness’ of the Jews is emphasised by Aman when he alerts the king to the presence of a separate group of people in his kingdom: the Jews ‘seek their own profit’ and obey different laws; that they worship another God is not mentioned. Aman interprets this as ‘scorning’ the king, denying his authority and his power. When Mardocheus learns of the plot to destroy all the Jews, his extensive lament does not closely follow the text of his prayer in the Addenda but the implications are not so different: may the almighty God of Israel save his people from the gruesome fate which Aman is preparing to unleash upon them. 68

See Appendix A and B below. The text is an elaboration by the playwright: the Addenda do contain prayers by Mordecai and Esther but they are uttered after Haman’s plot for the destruction of the Jews has been discovered and, indeed, the playwright uses this as the basis for log laments by Mardocheus [ll. 1252–​83] and Hester [ll. 1455–​62 and 1467–​90].

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The secularity of the text nevertheless dominates: the introductory episode about Vasthi, Assverus’ wife, takes up roughly a sixth part of the text and the secular focus is made to appear even stronger by the use of the sinnekens, allegorical figures used in many rhetoricians’ plays in a variety of functions, notably as commentators on events and characters. They often embody negative feelings or actions and frequently present themselves as decisive movers and shakers in the plot while all the time being aware that they are completely dependent on God’s will and only instruments of evil in so far as he allows. They predominantly bring comic elements into the plays, though often rather black and dark, and with their own brand of raucous, coarse, cynical, scatological discourse, sexual voyeurism and vicarious indulgence. Most of their share of a play will be in separate scenes and their chief dramatic function is therefore always as a link with the audience. In Tspel van Hester their names denote envy and hubris, Nydich Grondeken (Envious Heart) and Groot Vermeten (Boastful Demeanour) and their share of the play too occupies about a sixth of the total text, quite a considerable portion, yet not uncommon for rhetoricians’ plays. In this case their imagined influence on the development of the story is negligible: they are commentators and as such fulfil their didactic function with regard to the audience although their explanations are mostly self-​evident and repetitive. They are, as sinne­ kens go, very run-​off-​the-​mill with nothing remarkable except for some small indications that their sympathies are with the Jews, and they foretell Aman’s fall and delight in the prospect of his execution. The epilogue of the play is not, as might be expected, concerned with the fact that the Jews are out of danger nor that this has in any way been brought about with God’s help. Aman has a last monologue in which he fully excepts that he is guilty and deserves to die and forgives his executioners. Hester pleads with the king to allow Mardocheus to come to court and be honoured; the king agrees and sets him the task of revoking the mandates which were sent out to have the Jews in the entire realm killed. One of the courtiers ends the play with a brief speech exhorting people to live in harmony with each other: thus they will earn God’s grace and may God and Mary protect all. Although broadly following the canonical text and clearly inserting some of the religious element of the Addenda, the playwright has, deliberately or not, missed out some of the most dramatic episodes that these texts offer: for instance, Mardocheus’ dream (which would have looked good in the Book of Revelations), with dragons and earthquake and thunder, causing all the nations preparing for war to fight against the righteous nations; the great splendour of Assverus’ feasting; the account of the revenge of the Jews upon their enemies, sanctioned by the king, is not included either.

186 Strietman To sum up, in comparison with that other great rescue of the Jews from destruction, as narrated in Tspel van Judith, the focus on the Israelites as a chosen people, on the absolute certainty that God will save his people as long as they put their trust in him, is much weaker in Tspel van Hester. That may be accounted for by the secularity of the canonical Book of Esther but even though the playwright clearly does incorporate material from the Addenda, the play does not have the single-​minded cohesion of the Book of Judith and the Tspel van Judith. That is not, I hasten to say, a value judgement: it is a remark to demonstrate how the historical books of the Old Testament, be it just these selected stories, are dramatically presented in a diversity of ways by rhetoricians’ playwrights –​ and in the case of Judith by an Antwerp schoolmaster who wrote in vernacular French. In some cases their sense of biblical history, which to them was ‘Gospel truth’ (to coin a phrase) is given relevance for their sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​ century audiences by an awareness of the circumstances of their own more or less contemporary history and concern as we see the reality of a town besieged dramatized in Die Belegheringhe van Samarien and Tspel van Judith and many others. In some cases the biblical history of the community of Jewish people seems simply equated with the history of Christian communities where the tenets of the Christian faith, i.e. obedience to God and trust in His care for His chosen people are a central focus, as it is in Judith and to some extent in Hester. In the latter a timeless story is told: that of standing up to be counted, as does Mardocheus, of wounded pride and disastrous jealousy, as in the case of Aman: it is not an allegorical play in the sense that it has allegorical characters (apart from the sinnekens) nor is it a story of everyman, of divine punishment or salvation: but it is a moral play: goodness is rewarded, evil is punished, there is something here for everyone. As we saw in the conclusion to Tspel van Judith: the audience can derive more than one message to take to heart and/​or profit from, whether this is an awareness of the triumph of all those who trust in God, or, rather more pedestrian, the awareness of the way drunken excess and forgetfulness of self can have terrible consequences. The cohesive community of the faithful with all the implied benefits is starkly contrasted with the individual ‘otherness’ of lechery and indulgence, clearly a group which would not be a desirable community. 9

Conclusion

Whether or not the biblical stories which form the bulk of this discussion were seen as ‘mythical’ or as ‘history transformed into myth’ by their

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sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century creators and their audiences, has not become clear. What has become clear though is that these far off histories were felt to be valuable and valid material: for entertainment, as persuasive moral arguments, as facilitating awareness of the realities of war, famine, sieges, of human pride, envy, of the triumph of steadfast goodness and of the reality of God. Last but by no means least, as showcases, linguistically, poetically, theatrically, for the dramatic poetry of the rhetoricians and for their stagecraft. They selected these bits of history and made them their own, imbued them with meaning, their chosen meaning, creating fictions of continuity. The transformation into drama of old history, so far-​off from the daily reality of the audience, did not make it unreal, on the contrary, for the duration of the play the audience could engage with an alternative reality which they could link with their own. Maybe it was not a very welcome continuity: war, famine, hardship, human failings have always been with us and will continue to do so. But also a heartening continuity: God is with us, goodness is with us. All this allows for self-​definition:  we too survived a siege, we the citizens of Leyden, Hasselt, Samaria. We too kept our trust in God and were saved or finally liberated, from alien occupation, from a tyrant, we the citizens of the Low Countries, of Antwerp, of Bethulia. We managed to keep our faith and the community of the faithful intact in the most adverse circumstances: we the citizens of Ghent, of Antwerp, we the Israelites in the realm of the Persians. Whatever the rationales behind the choice of material and the long-​lasting popularity of these rhetoricians’ plays and of rhetoricians’ drama in general, it proved to be ‘an easy commerce of the old and new” …69 Appendix A Mardocheus’ prayer at the moment that Hester is brought into contact with the court official selecting beautiful maidens for the King’s harem: Mardocheus Ick hoep, dat Godt u hulp sal wesen en onsen druck sal genesen, werde nicht vercoren, want Assverus, ons coninck hoochgeboren,

69

I am extremely grateful to Wim Hüsken for his patient, painstaking and substantial contribution to this article.

188 Strietman heeft doen vergaderen over all van schoonen maechden een groot getal, waer uut hy sal tot synen behouwe een uut kiesen voer syn eyghen vrouwe. Waer duer ick betrouwe aen Godt almachtich, dat Hy Syn volck sal syn gedachtich, dat langhen tyt, crachtich, wel heeft moeten gedoegen. Ick hoop, ghy sult gratie vinden in Syn oeghen, waer duer wy moghen werden bemint. (ll. 406–​20) .

[Mardocheus: I hope that God will be your aid and will relieve our burden, beloved cherished niece, for Assverus, our noble king, has brought together from everywhere a great number of beautiful maidens, from which he will, for his pleasure, choose one for his own wife. I trust therefore in God almighty that he will remember his people who for a long time now have had to bear much. I hope that you will be pleasing to his eyes so that we may be cherished.]

Appendix B Mardocheus’ prayer after Hester has been taken into the harem: Mardocheus O coninck der hemelen, dien niet en is verborghen, ick roep aen U, o Heer der heeren, wilt ons doch helpen uut onsen verseeren en wilt van ons keeren dit groot gequel. Dat bidt ick U, God van Israel, want wy syn verdruct met allen seeren. Wilt U gramschap van ons weeren, Godt vol genaden, en wilt doch Hester nu staen in staden en wilse beraden aen den coninck hoochgeboren. Dat bidt ick U, almogende Heer vercoren. (ll. 454–​63) [Mardocheus: Oh heavenly king, from whom nothing is hidden, I call on you, oh Lord of Lords, that You may help us out of our sorrow And will free us from this great torment. For that I implore You, oh God of Israel, For we are oppressed by great grief. Please avert your anger from us, God full of mercy and be an aid to Hester and commend her to the noble king. For that I pray You, almighty noble God.]

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189

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190 Strietman Hüsken, Wim. “Queen Elizabeth and Essex:  A Dutch Rhetoricians’ Play.” In Porci ante Margaritam:  Essays in honour of Meg Twycross, edited by Sarah Carpenter, Pamela King & Peter Meredith, 151–​70. Leeds Studies in English, New Series, xxxii. Leeds: University of Leeds, School of English, 2001. Hüsken, W.  N.  M., B.  A.  M. Ramakers & F.  A.  M. Schaars, eds. Trou Moet Blijcken: Bronnenuitgave van de boeken der Haarlemse rederijkerskamer ‘De Pellicanisten’. 8 vols. Assen: Quarto, 1992–​98. Keesman, Wilma. De eindeloze stad:  Troje en Trojaanse oorprongsmythen in de middeleeuwse en vroegmoderne Nederlanden. Hilversum: Verloren, 2017. Koning, Abraham de. Tragi-​comedie over de doodt van Henricus de Vierde Koning van Vranckrijck en Navarrae, edited by G.  R.  W. Dibbets. Zwolle:  W.  E.  J. Tjeenk Willink, 1967. Lyna, J. “De wederdopers in het graafschap Loon.” Bulletin de la Société Scientifique et Littéraire de Limbourg 25 (1920): 89–​100. Lyna, J. “De Protestantse revolutie te Hasselt (1566–​1567).” Verzamelde opstellen, uitgegeven door den Geschied-​en Oudheidkundigen Studiekring te Hasselt 10 (1934): 235–​ 62; 11 (1935): 295–​96. Mareel, Samuel. Voor vorst en stad: Rederijkersliteratuur en vorstenfeest in Vlaanderen en Brabant (1432–​1561). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010. Meeus, Hubert. “Peeter Heyns’ Le Miroir des Fefves: meer dan schooltoneel?” In Mémoire en temps advenir. Hommage à Theo Venckeleer, edited by Alex Vanneste et al., 115–​34. Orbis /​Supplementa, 22. Leuven: Peeters, 2003. Musschoot, Anne Marie. Het Judith-​thema in de Nederlandse letterkunde. Gent: Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal-​en Letterkunde, 1972. Nörtemann, Gevert H. “Memories and Identities in Conflict: The Myth Concerning the Battle of Courtrai (1302) in Nineteenth-​Century Belgium.” In Presenting the Past. History, Art, Language, Literature, edited by J. Fenoulhet & L. Gilbert, 99–​113. Series Crossways, 3. London: Centre for Low Countries Studies, 1996. Parker, Geoffrey. The Dutch Revolt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Poll, Klaas. Over de Toneelspelen van den Leidschen rederijker Jacob Duym. Groningen: J. B. Huber, 1898. Purdie, Edna. The story of Judith in German and English Literature. Paris: Champion, 1927. Ramakers, B. A. M. “De gespeelde stad: De opvoeringspraktijk van het rederijkerstoneel getoetst aan zeven belegeringsspelen,” Verslagen en Mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal-​en Letterkunde (1993): 180–​233. Ramakers, B. A. M. Spelen en figuren: Toneelkunst en processiecultuur in Oudenaarde tussen Middeleeuwen en Moderne Tijd. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996. Reisner, George A. “The Harvard Expedition to Samaria. Excavations of 1909.” The Harvard Theological Review 3 (1910): 248–​63.

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Steen, Jasper van der. “The Political Rediscovery of the Dutch Revolt in the Seventeenth-​ Century Habsburg Netherlands.” The Early Modern Low Countries 1 (2017): 297–​317 (https://​www.emlc-​journal.org/​articles/​10.18352/​emlc.28/​). Steenbrugge, Charlotte. Staging Vice. A  Study of Dramatic Traditions in Medieval and Sixteenth-​century England and the Low Countries. Ludus, 13. Amsterdam-​ New York: Editions Rodopi, 2014. Strietman, Elsa. “Biblical Plays in the Low Countries.” In According to the Ancient Custom. Essays presented to David Mills, Part ii, edited by Phil Butterworth, Pamela M. King & Meg Twycross. Medieval English Theatre 30 (2008): 121–​36. Strietman, Elsa & Peter Happé, eds. and trans. The First and the Seventh Joys of Our Lady, Bilingual texts of two Dutch Biblical Plays. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2017. Van den Daele, O. & Fr. Van Veerdeghem, eds. De Roode Roos. Zinnespelen en andere tooneelstukken der zestiende eeuw voor het eerst naar het Hasseltsche Handschrift uitgegeven. Bergen: Dequesne-​Masquillier en Zonen, 1899. Van Elslander, A. & L. De Scheerder. “Een teruggevonden spel van den Roeselaersen Rederijker R. Lawet.” In Album Prof. Dr. Frank Baur, vol. i, 244–​49. Antwerp: Standa ardboekhandel, 1948. Venner, J. G. C. Beeldenstorm in Hasselt 1567: Achtergronden en analyses van een rebellie tegen de prins-​bisschop van Luik. Maaslandse Monografieën, 48. Leeuwarden/​ Maastricht: Eisma, 1989. Vos, R., ed. Den Spieghel der Salicheit van Elckerlijc. Groningen: Wolters-​Noordhoff, 1967.

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Staging Reformation as History –​Three Exemplary Cases Agricola, Hartmann, Kielmann Cora Dietl Abstract With his Tragedia Johannis Huss (1537) Johannes Agricola established a new form of commemorative drama, which depicts the history of the Reformation. This paper presents three different ways through which sixteenth-​and early seventeenth-​ century dramatizations of the Reformation sought to establish the historical truth and the value of Reformation history in their plays:  Agricola’s Tragedia Johannis Huss pleads with the audience to learn from history in order to prevent possible repetition. For this purpose, the spectators need to know the course of events as accurately as possible. An eye-​witness account with original documents implied a guarantee for the truth. Andreas Hartmann’s Curriculum vitae Lutheri (1600) shows the positive effects of learning from history, and it warns that history should not be forgotten, otherwise its achievements will be lost. The remembered history should be as close to ‘truth’ as possible. Therefore, modern historiographical methods, collating many different reliable sources need to be applied or will be claimed to doing just that. With Heinrich Kielmann’s Tetzelocrama the awareness of Reformation history reaches a new stage: the basic facts of the Reformation are expected to be known and do not need to be based on specified sources any more. The purpose of Reformation drama is now to interpret the history of the Reformation as part of Salvation history.

Keywords Reformation –​Identity –​Johannes Hus –​Martin Luther –​Johannes Tetzel –​Johannes Agricola  –​ Andreas Hartmann  –​ Heinrich Kielmann  –​ Eye-​Witness-​Accounts  –​ Sources –​Allegory –​Salvation History

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004449503_009

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Introduction

When, in 1537, Johannes Agricola published his Tragedia Johannis Huss, he could not know that the play, which was soon to be severely criticized for being badly written,1 would inaugurate two new sub-​genres of German drama. This tragedy is a forerunner of Lutheran martyrs’ drama, which became rather popular in the late sixteenth,2 as well as in the seventeenth century with Andreas Gryphius as a celebrated champion of this type of literature,3 and it heralds the beginning of a new type of commemorative historical drama.4 Early Humanist German historical drama had often dealt with relatively recent (or simply projected) historic events such as wars and battles or triumphs of emperors and princes, serving as encomium or as dramatized newe zeittung (news reports), supporting the emperors’ or the princes’ politics.5 As 1 See for this attack on Agricola by Johannes Cochlaeus in Ein heimlich Gsprech vonn der Tragedia Johannis Hussen, zwische D.  Mart. Luther vnd seinen guten Freunden, Auf die weiβ einer Comedien ([s.l.]:  Johan Faber, 1538):  Cora Dietl, “A Polemical Theatre Review on Stage:  Johannes Cochlaeus’ Ein heimlich gsprech Vonn der Tragedie Johannis Hussen,” European Medieval Drama 16 (2012): 91–​97. 2 See my current project Inszenierungen von Heiligkeit im Kontext der konfessionellen Auseinandersetzungen, https://​gepris.dfg.de/​gepris/​projekt/​241971380, described in Cora Dietl, “Martyrs’ Plays in the Context of Inter-​Confessional Debates in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Century,” Romard 51 (2012): 10–​11. 3 See, for example, Ferdinand van Ingen, “Die schlesische Märtyrertragödie im Kontext zeitgenössischer Vorbildliteratur. Märtyrerdrama und Märtyrerbuch,” Daphnis 28 (1999):  481–​ 528; Peter Burschel, Sterben und Unsterblichkeit:  Zur Kultur des Martyriums in der frühen Neuzeit (rpt. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 83–​116. 4 For the extensive discussion about the German term ‘Geschichtsdrama’ as opposed to ‘Historiendrama’ or ‘historisches Drama’, distinguishing between drama that presents historically documented events and individuals and interprets their historical importance, or drama that simply has a plot situated in past times, see: Elfriede Neubuhr, Geschichtsdrama (Darmstadt:  Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980), 3–​4; Wolfgang Drüsig, ‟Einleitung. Zur Gattung Geschichtsdrama,” in Aspekte des Geschichtsdramas. Von Aischylos bis Volker Braun, ed. Wolfgang Drüsig (Tübingen: Francke, 1998), 2–​6; Dirk Niefanger, Geschichtsdrama der Frühen Neuzeit 1495–​1773 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2005), 13–​24, 40; Bernd Beise, Geschichte, Politik und das Volk im Drama des 16. bis 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 12–​14. 5 For example: Jacob Locher, Historia de Rege Frantie (1495), Tragedia de Thurcis et Suldano (1497), Spectaculum more tragico concinnatum de regibus et proceribus christianis (1502), Libellus dramaticus novus sed non musteus (1513); Johann Kitzscher, Tragicocomoedia de iherosolemitana profectione Illustrissimi principis pomerani (1501); Hieronymus Vehus, Triumphus Boemicus (1504/​05); Hermann Schottenius Hessus, Ludus Martius sive Bellicus (1526). See:  Cora Dietl, Jacob Locher und die frühe Humanistenbühne im süddeutschen Raum (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005); Niefanger, Geschichtsdrama, 62–​74; Cora Dietl, ‟Neo-​Latin Humanist and Protestant Drama in Germany,” in Neo-​Latin Drama in Early Modern Europe, eds. Jan Bloemendal & Howard B. Norland (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 115–​23.

194 Dietl early as 1538, in his tragedy Pammachius Thomas Naogeorgus used the description of historical, present and future events as a means of criticizing the pope, who is the anti-​hero of his play, and the Roman Church.6 Other history plays dramatized ancient, biblical or early medieval plots, not clearly distinguishing between history, literature and mythology, because historical correctness was less important than the chance to use the play as a mirror for contemporary politics or ethics.7 Moved by the persecution and execution of the Lutherans Heinrich Voes and Johann van Esschen on 1 July 15238 and of his friend Heinrich von Zütphen on 10 December 15249 Johannes Agricola, at that time still one of Martin Luther’s close friends, commemorates a 100 year-​old event as a mirror and warning for the present time: the Council of Constance and the death of Johannes Hus. As opposed to the dramatizations of ancient history, he claims a historical accuracy yet unknown to German history plays, and he does not use it as an encomium for a prince, nor as a general moralistic message. He focusses on one eminent historical individual stressing his importance for the Reformation as an ongoing process in Church history. He thereby appeals to the audience to take lessons from history, to position themselves on the side of Hus and to establish a new identity based on the history of the Reformation. A series of further plays about the Reformers’ lives and ideas followed, with a peak around 1617.10 In the following, I shall concentrate on three exemplary 6 7

See Niefanger, Geschichtsdrama, 72–​74. For example: Jacob Locher: Spectaculum de iudicio paridis (1502); Hans Sachs: Tragedia von der Lucretia (1527). See: Dietl, Jacob Locher, 243–​76; Niefanger, Geschichtsdrama, 95–​104. 8 See: Der Actus vnnd hendlung der Degradation vnd verprennung der Christlichen dreyen Ritter vnd Merterer Augustiner ordens geschehn zu Brussel. Anno M.D.  xxiij. Prima Julii (Augsburg: Melchior Ramminger, 1523); Johann Georg Kirchner, Historische Nachricht von dem Märtyrertode der ersten Lutherischen Blutzeugen Jesu Christi, Heinrich Voes, Johann Esch und Lamperti Thorn (Halle: Waisenhaus, 1755). 9 Agricola notes in a Bible, which he had bought from Heinrich von Zütphen: ‟Haec biblia emptus est per me M. Johannem Agricolam a Viro Henrico Zutphanensis anno mdxxi[i] Qui postea apud Ditmarienses vi Sathani et monachorum coronatus est anno mdxx[iv]” (This Bible has been bought by me, Master Johannes Agricola, in 1522 from the hero Heinrich von Zütphen who afterwards, in 1524, at the instigation of Satan and the monks was ‘crowned’ at Dithmarschen). See Konrad von Rabenau, ‟Ein Buch des evangelischen Märtyrers Heinrich von Zütphen, erworben von Johannes Agricola,” Einband-​Forschung 31 (2012): 64. 10 Nicodemus Frischlin, Phasma (1580, printed 1592); Jörg Nigrus, Der Calvinisch Post-​Reuter (1592/​93), Zacharias Rivander, Lutherus redivivus (1593); Friedrich Dedekind, Papista conversus (1596); Andras Hartmann, Vita Lutheri (1600); Martin Rinckart:  Der Eißlebische Christliche Ritter (1613), Indulgentiarius Confusus, Oder Eislebische Mansfeldische Jubelcomoedia (1617), Lutherus Magnanimus (lost), Lutherus desideratus (lost), Monetarius Seditionis (1625), Lutherus Augustus (lost), Lutherus Triumphator (lost); Heinrich Hirtzwig, Lutherus Drama (1617); Heinrich Kielmann, Tetzelocramia (1617), Balthasar Voigt, Echo

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plays marking an equal number of salient moments in the development of the early German dramatization of the Reformation:11 the ‘prototype’ by Johannes Agricola, the first dramatization of the (entire) life of Martin Luther by Andreas Hartmann, and one of the plays written for the centenary of the Reformation: Kielmann’s Tetzelocramia. All plays reflect their own use of the dramatic form for historical subject matter, ignoring (owing to the long time span covered by them) the idea of Aristotelian (Humanist) drama, yet not breaking away from the tradition of medieval plays illustrating sacred history. By selecting central scenes and their use of space, they interpret the history presented, finding ways to involve the audience directly and to convince it both of the historic ‘veracity’ of these plays, and of their interpretation of history. 2

The Dramatized ‘Historia’: Johannes Agricola’s Tragedia Johannis Huss (1537)

Johannes Agricola, schoolmaster at Eisleben, did not primarily design his Tragedia Johannis Huss as a school play but rather as a court play performed at Torgau Castle on 31 December 1537, most probably commissioned by Johann Friedrich I of Saxony, who also paid Lukas Cranach a large sum of money for the performance, probably for stage decoration.12

11

12

Iubilaei Lutherani (1617). See Ruth Kastner, Geistlicher Rauffhandel:  Form und Funktion der illustrierten Flugblätter zum Reformationsjubiläum 1617 in ihrem historischen und pu­ blizistischen Kontext (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1982), 151–​57, 316–​18; Adalbert Elschenbroich, ‟Der Eißlebische Christliche Ritter von Martin Rinckart. Reformationsgeschichte als luthe­ rische Glaubenslehre im volkstümlichen Drama des 17. Jahrhunderts,” in Literatur und Volk im 17. Jahrhundert. Probleme populärer Kultur in Deutschland, ii, ed. Wolfgang Brückner et al. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1985), 559–​62; Detlef Metz, Das protestantische Drama. Evangelisches geistliches Theater in der Reformationszeit und im konfessionellen Zeitalter (Köln: Böhlau, 2013), 633–​709; Matthias Luserke-​Jaqui, Eine Nachtigall die waget. Luther und die Literatur (Tübingen:  Narr, 2016), 54–​61; Irmgard Scheitler, ‟Lutherus redivivus. Das Reformationsjubiläum 1617. Mit einem Ausblick auf das Jubiläum 1717,” Jahrbuch für Liturgik und Hymnologie 55 (2016): 196–​210; Carsten Nahrendorf, ‟Luther auf der Bühne,” in Luthermania. Ansichten einer Kultfigur, ed. Hole Rößler (Wiesbaden:  Harrassowitz, 2017), 173–​77; and Manfred Karnick, “Luther im Drama,” Anstöße 29/​4 (1982): 96–​97. For later plays about Martin Luther see Hans-​Gert Roloff, ‟Martin Luther als Bühnenfigur im Drama des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Die Bedeutung der Rezeptionsliteratur für Bildung und Kultur der Frühen Neuzeit (1400–​1750), ed. Laura Auteri et al. (Bern: Peter Lang, 2016), vol. iv, 315–​39. Hans-​Gert Roloff, ‟Der Märtyrer und die Politik: Johann Agricolas Tragedia Johannis Huss. Zur Entstehung eines protestantischen Kampfdramas 1537,” European Medieval Drama 19 (2015): 39–​40.

196 Dietl In the dedication of his work, Johannes Agricola clearly explains the aim and purpose of his tragedy: WIewol zu dieser zeit fast jeder meniglich  /​welche vom Satan nicht gantz vorblend /​des Babsts betriegerey /​diebstal /​mord vnd reuberey /​ so er nu etzlich hundert jar her hat geübet /​offenbar vnd bekandt sind /​ jedoch ist es fast nützlich  /​vnd auch nicht one not  /​das solche seine schande jmmer je langer /​mehr vnd mehr entdeckt /​vnd von jederman an tag gebracht werde (Aijr)13 [Even though nowadays nearly everyone, not totally blinded by Satan, is aware and knows about the pope’s fraud, robbery, murder and burglary that he has been practicing now for several hundred years, it is still beneficial and somewhat necessary that his aforenamed disgrace should be uncovered again and again and should be displayed to everyone.] Like Naogeorgus’ Pammachius, the play aims at disgracing the pope –​not an individual pope, but the institution of the papal Church as suppressor of the Word of Christ, and at warning its audience not to trust the pope. People should rather turn to the light, “so jtzt zu vnser zeit scheinet” (Aijv) (which shines now in our days), which is the light of divine grace, i.e. the ‘light’ of the Reformation. He wants to prove visibly, he claims, that the truth of the divine word could not be burned and extinguished together with Hus’ body, … sonder sie hat stets /​von der zeit an /​mehr vnd mehr glimmet /​bis so lang /​das jtzund zu vnser zeit /​der wind also starck vnd hart darein geblasen /​das dieser Antichristischen Rott /​nicht allein die augen gar vol gestoben /​sondern auch ein solch feur daraus angangen /​welches zu leschen … auch das ganze Meer vile zu klein sein wird (Aiiijr) [… but since that time it has always been smouldering more and more, until in our time, the wind has blown into it so strongly that it has not only flown into the eyes of Antichrist’s mob, but has also kindled such a strong fire, that the whole sea would not suffice to extinguish it.] The fire kindled by the Reformers which cannot be extinguished, hitting the representatives of the papal Church into their faces, had been described in similar words in a popular pamphlet printed in Augsburg in 1524:  Ein 13

Johannes Agricola, Tragedia Johannis Huss welche auff dem Vnchristlichen Concilio zu Costnitz gehalten allen Christen nützlich vnd tröstlich zu lesen (Wittenberg:  Georg Rhau 1537).

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Tragedia oder Spill gehalten in dem künigklichen Sal zu Pariß.14 It describes the fictive performance of a play at the royal court at Paris. There the Reformers fanned a fire, which was originally thought to burn heretics such as Hus, so that it hits and burns the papal court. Agricola uses the intertextual reference as a confirmation of the power of the ‘field fire’ of the Reformation. The cross-​reference helps to establish a connection between the fifteenth-​century reformer Johannes Hus and the sixteenth-​century Lutheran Reformation: the historical event and the person presented in the play are linked to the audience by the development that began in those days and culminates in the present time. Agricola warns his audience that councils have never brought any good to Christianity. He thereby clearly refers to the planned Council of Mantua, which Martin Luther and his entourage were afraid would possibly be a repetition of the Council of Constance.15 The prologue does not only link the time of Hus with the time of Luther; Agricola also refers back to Gregory of Nazianzus’ critique of councils in general (Avjv-​vijr) and he recalls Tertullian’s description of the persecution of early Christians and his conviction “das der Christen blut seer fruchtbar sey /​vnd je mehr man Christen würgt /​je mehr aus jrem blut wachssen” (that the blood of Christians is very fertile and the more one strangles Christians the more grow from their blood).16 Hereby Agricola clearly defines Hus as a Christian martyr, similar to those of the early Church. He explicitly compares Hus with the first Christian martyr Stephanus (Avv) and with Christ himself (Avv), who were also condemned by an unjust council. Thus Agricola does not only claim a relevance for Hus in secular history but also in Salvation history. For his argument, which blatantly ignores historical differences (for example concerning the institution of a council), it is essential that both parts of the comparison are true. He and his audience do not doubt the veracity of the biblical account of Christ’s passion and Stephanus’s martyrdom; now it is his task to avoid any doubts concerning the veracity of the ‘passion’ of Johannes Hus as it is presented in the play. Therefore, Agricola claims that his drama is based on historiographical sources:

14

See Cora Dietl, ‟Erasmus, Reuchlin und Ulrich von Hutten als ‘Gewaltgemeinschaft’? Ein Tragedia oder Spill gehalten in dem künigklichen Sal zu Pariß,” in Rules and Violence –​ Regeln und Gewalt. Zur Kulturgeschichte der kollektiven Gewalt von der Spätantike bis zum Konfessionellen Zeitalter, ed. Cora Dietl & Titus Knäpper (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 209–​21. 15 For the political context see Roloff, ‟Der Märtyrer,” 34–​35. 16 Agricola, Tragedia Johannis Huss, Aiiijv.

198 Dietl Derhalben /​nach dem die historia /​des heiligen Merterers Johannis Hus jnn reime vnd einer Tragedien weise /​vorfasset /​habe ich gerne gesehen /​ das solche Historia auch dermassen gelesen vnd gespielt würde (Aijv) [Thus, when I had turned the historia of the holy martyr Johannes Hus into rhymed couplets and had given it the form of a tragedy, I was glad to see people read this historia in this form and also perform it.] Agricola expects his audience to know which historia he is talking about. In 1520 he had discovered a Latin manuscript in the private library of Paul Rockenbach at Zeitz. It contained an eye-​witness account of the Council of Constance and the execution of Johannes Hus, written by the Czech Petr z Mladoňovic, a student of Hus and dean of Prague University. Agricola had Nicolaus Krumpach translate the report into German and published it in Hagenau in 1529 under the title History und Warhafftige Geschicht, wie das Heilig Euangelion mit Johann Hussen, im Concilio zu Costnitz, durch den Bapst und seinen Anhang, offentlich verdampt ist (History and true report how the holy Gospel was publicly condemned together with Johannes Hus by the pope and his entourage at the Council of Constance).17 The title of the book clearly interprets the history presented in the book: Hus stands for the Gospel, while the Council is nothing but the entourage of the pope, who acts as Antichrist, condemning the word of Christ. The prologue by Mladoňovic makes clear that his book tells historical truth, “selbs gesehen vnd gehört” (seen and heard by myself).18 The veracity of the source should also guarantee the veracity of the play. Agricola faithfully turns the prose History covering a time span of one and a half years into a five-​act drama. He keeps all the characters19 and most of the plot. He cuts off only short bits from the beginning –​and the execution of Hus

17

Petrus de Mladenovic, History vnd warhafftige geschicht wie das heilig Euangelion mit Johann Hussen ym Concilio zu Costnitz durch den Bapst vnd seinen anhang offentlich verdampt ist ym Jare … 1414. Mit angehenckter Protestation des Schreibers der bey allen tucken vnd puncten gewesen ist (Hagenau: Johann Setzer, 1529). A modern German translation can be found in: Hus in Konstanz. Der Bericht des Peter von Mladoniowitz, ed. and transl. Josef Bujnoch (Graz: Styria, 1963). See Hans-​Gert Roloff, ‟Quelle –​Text –​Edition. Johann Agricolas Tragedia Johannis Huss,” Editio 11 (1997): 82. 18 Agricola, Tragedia Johannis Huss, Ajv. See Roloff, “Der Märtyrer,” 38. 19 See Hans-​Gert Roloff, ‟Zur Funktion der volkssprachlichen Rezeption neulateinischer Reformationspropaganda, aufgezeigt an Beispielen der Rezeption von Kampfdramen von Johann Agricola und Thomas Naogeorg,” in Die Bedeutung der Rezeptionsliteratur für Bildung und Kultur der Frühen Neuzeit (1400–​1750), ed. Peter Hvilshøj Andersen-​ Vinilandicus & Barbara Lafond-​Kettlitz (Bern: Peter Lang, 2015), vol. 3, 238.

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itself at the end. The first act highlights all aspects necessary to understand the plot: the prologue explains the history of prophets sent by God and persecuted by a Church ruled by Antichrist; the chancellor of the Council explains the purpose of the gathering: the fight against heresies endangering the unity of the Church; the pope confirms the promise of security given to Hus by Emperor Sigismund; the cardinals and bishops gather the accusations against Hus. Their list is (except for the rhyme) a literal citation from the source. The explicit numbering of the articles invites the reader of the printed drama to check, just in the same way as explicitly mentioned biblical chapters do in sixteenth-​century Lutheran biblical drama. When Hus enters the stage for the first time in Act ii, he and the audience recognize who his antagonists are:  the bishops and cardinals forming the council, not the pope. The latter explains in a side-​scene that he has no power against the council, and then he disappears from the play. Similarly, the emperor who finally turns up in Act iii immediately realizes that he can say nothing against the council and chooses a totally passive role. Now that the key players are identified, the stage setting becomes rather fixed: throughout the following acts it consists of the consultation room of the Council. Time changes are marked by the actors leaving and entering the room. The audience sitting in the same room participates in all important sessions of the council but similar to the emperor it has a passive role. The audience hears Hus speak sentences that sound as if they were quotations from Luther,20 such as: … Vnd wo ich vnterweist werd /​ Das ich geirt hab angefehrt. Bin ich bereit demütiglich /​ Straff zu leiden /​zu bessern mich. (Cijr) [… And if you teach me that I have been wrong in some point, I am humbly willing to accept punishment and to correct myself.] These lines are taken directly from the prose History,21 ‘proving’ the similarity or rather a kind of typological relationship between Hus and Luther. When

20 See: Ein Vorrede D. Mart. Luthers vber das Erste Theil seiner Bücher wie sie inn Lateinischer Sprach außgangen sind darinnen er kürtzlich begriffen alle seine handlungen biß auff den Reichßtag zu Wormbs Anno 1521 gehalten, in Vita Lutheri  … sampt andern weitläuffigern Historien vnd geschichten …; transl. & ed. Matthias Ritter (Frankfurt: David Zöpfel [Erben], 1564), fol. 58r. 21 Mladenovic, History, Br: ‟… vnd wo ich vnterweiset werde /​das ich etwan geirret /​bin ich bereit /​demütiglich straffe zu leiden /​vnd mich zubessern.”

200 Dietl Luther re-​uses Hus’ words, he reflects Christ re-​using the words of the Psalms, and he demonstrates that he is the announced prophet. The listening audience would recognize the typology, the reading audience could check in the Historia and find out that it is ‘true’. During the continued interrogation in Act iii and iv, Hus, who strictly argues on the basis of Scripture, becomes more and more obviously a parallel to Luther. The audience witnesses an unfair and finally aggressive trial which would be equally unfair for Luther. The last act begins with the original sermon delivered by the Bishop of Lodi on the last day of the trial in Constance22 as a full-​length literal quotation from the prose text (Dviijv-​Evjv). The sermon interrupts the dramatic mode of presentation and appeals to a different receptive habit of the audience: ‟Der Landonensis Bischoff sol den nachfolgenden Sermon auff der Cantzel thun /​ So er zu lang were /​so mag man ein kurz Argument daraus begreiffen”23 (The Bishop of Lodi should speak the following sermon from the pulpit. If it were too long, you might take an abstract from it). Here the audience is addressed as church congregation. Forewarned by what it has witnessed in the previous acts, however, it will quickly realize that the very harsh sermon against heretics does not only threaten Hus, but all those who follow the Word of Christ instead of the teaching of the Church. That is, the intended Lutheran audience will experience the aggressive position of the Church against themselves and will be warned of the enemy misusing the pulpit in such a way. Thus, the highest historical authenticity (the full-​length documented sermon) is combined with the very effective mode of integrating the audience into the play in a role which reflects its normal life. In the previous plot, rhymed quotations from the source stressed the veracity of crucial turning points of the trial. Here, the veracity has reached its highest degree when the verse play text pauses for a prose quotation from the source. The veracity combines with the verisimilitude of a situation when a preacher speaks to the audience. This concord of veracity and verisimilitude should convince the audience that the play does not only present the true history of an event one-​hundred years ago, but a real threat for the spectators’ present time. Up to this moment, Agricola’s play is rather different from contemporary biblical plays, owing to the elaborate source that needed to be abridged instead of being elaborated,24 to the possibility of using an original sermon, while plays 22

Ibid., K6r: “Derselbige Sermon folget also von wort zu wort” (“The named sermon follows in a word-​by-​word quotation”): K6r-​Lv. 23 Agricola, Tragedia Johannis Huss, Dviijr. 24 See Mike Pincombe’s contribution to the present volume, “Dramatising History in Schoepper’s Ioannes decollatus and Grimald’s Archipropheta.”

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of St John or St Stephen for example have to make up their heroes’ sermons, and to the minor need of bridging historical differences. As a non-​biblical play, Agricola’s tragedy cannot easily play on the generally accepted truth of the biblical story that forms the basis of biblical plays.25 This is why Agricola needs to stress his loyalty to his trustworthy source. However, since the play claims to present a part of Salvation history, it needs to draw connection lines to the truth of a biblical story. Right after the sermon which has made the audience experience the threatening power of the ‘Church of Antichrist’, the play adopts crucial elements from Passion Plays.26 Hus is not allowed to react to the points of accusation; three times his attempt to speak is stopped by yelling masses: “Da sollen die Cardinele vnnd Bischoffe /​allzumal die köpffe schütteln vnd schreien Du Ketzer /​schweig stille”27 (Here all the cardinals and bishops shake their heads and shout “You heretic, be quiet!”). This is an extrapolation from the History, where Hus is also stopped three times, but finally is allowed to speak.28 When the death sentence is read out, Agricola’s Hus does not respond,29 but

25

As Pincombe (ibid.) demonstrates, loyalty to the biblical source does not limit the freedom to add details and side-​actions, neither in Catholic nor in Protestant drama. In Protestant drama, the idea of sola scriptura rather means that nothing should be added that could disturb the reception of the biblical story in its ‘proper’ sense (which certainly is a matter of theological interpretation). See Jakob Rueff’s introduction to his Passion Play: “das man sehe das in disem gerym deß Passion nüt anders vnd übrigs herzuo gesetzt syge dann was der text selber vermag vnd zierlich syn moechte dem Spyl vnd siner action … das wider den text nüt yngefuert ald zuogsetzt ist das diese histori des lydens vnsers heilands in verachtung bringen sonder das ein yeder durch dises in flyssigere und ernstere betrachtung deß selbigen kommen moechte.“ (In my rhymed text about the Passion you can see that I have not added anything else than things that are already potentially contained in the text or serve as decoration of the play and its action. … Nothing has been inserted or added against the sense of the text that could dishonour the story of the Passion of our Lord, but only things that support everybody’s conscientious and serious contemplation of the Passion. Jakob Rueff, Das Züricher Passionsspiel (Das Lyden unsers Herren Jesu Christi das man nempt den Passion, 1545); ed. by Barbara Thoran (Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1984), ll. 212–​15 and 218–​23. See: Cora Dietl, “Passionsspiele sola scriptura?,” Der Ginkgo-​ Baum: Germanisches Jahrbuch für Nordeuropa 15 (1997): 265–​76. 26 See Cora Dietl, “Für oder wider Brüche in der Theatertradition des 16. Jahrhunderts. Johannes Agricolas Tragedia Johannis Huss als ‛protestantisches Passionsspiel’,” in Das Geistliche Spiel des Spätmittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Wernfried Hofmeister & Cora Dietl (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2015), 414–​17. 27 Agricola, Tragedia Johannis Huss, E7v. 28 Mladenovic, History, Lijr-​Liiijr. 29 Ibid., Lvijr-​v.

202 Dietl immediately falls on his knees and says a prayer which is also reported in the History,30 but slightly extended here: Jch bit Herr Christ an dieser stat /​ Vergib mein feindn ir messethat. Vmb deiner grossn barmhertzigkeit /​ Du weist mein not vnd grosses leid. Wie felschlich sie mich bschüldt han /​ Falsch zeugnis wider mich gethan. Auch falsch Artickel auffgericht /​ Wider mich erlogen vnd erdicht. Thus ihn barmhertzigklich verzeihen /​ Vnd mich von allen sünden freien. Das gantze Concilium sol Johannem Huss zornig ansehen vnd ihn offentlich verlachen. (F2r) [I ask you here, my Lord Jesus Christ, in your great mercy to forgive my adversaries their trespasses. You know well my distress and deep sorrow, how wrongly they have accused me, what false testimony they have brought forward and how badly they have invented wrong accusations against me. Forgive them mercifully and free me from all my sins. The whole Council shall angrily stare at Johannes Huss and openly laugh at him.] Twice Hus repeats Christ’s words, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). He calls on Christ’s sympathy, who knows what it means to be accused by wrong testimonies. The more Hus turns into a Christ-​ like figure, the more aggressive the Council becomes. They laugh and shout at him, and when they start the rite of degradation, Hus continues stressing his parallel with Christ. When he puts on the alba –​the symbolic meaning of this rite lies in the following divestiture of the alba –​he explains: Jhesus Christus mein Gott so zart /​ Als er von Herod gefürt ward. Jm weissen kleid ward er verspott /​ Das leid für mich mein Herr vnd Gott. (F2v)31

30 31

Ibid., Lvijv. The first three lines are taken from Petrus de Mladenovic’s History (Lviijr), the last one, which stresses the Lutheran view of the Passion (“for me”), is Agricola’s addition.

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[When Jesus Christ, my mild God, was taken to Herod he was mocked in a white dress. This is what my Lord and God suffered for me.] Hus uses the short moment when he wears the alba to speak to the people, like Christ at the last rest. Yet in the play, not in the source, he warns all “die auch noch heut zu tag /​Die warheit predgen”32 (who, still today, preach the truth) that they will have to suffer. These words clearly point at Luther and his contemporaries. He continues adding references to Christ’s Passion. When the chalice is taken away from him, he expresses his faith that he will drink from it in God’s kingdom the same day (Luke 23:43).33 And when the paper hat designating him as a heretic is placed on his head and the Bishop of Alexandria commits his soul to the devils, Hus replies: So befehl ich sie dem lieben Gott /​ Meim herrn Jhesu inn der not. Hat für mich armen menschen zwar /​ Ein schwerer dorne Kron verwar. Vnschuldig zu seim todt tragen /​ Auff den wil ichs frischlich wagen. Vnd wil auch diese laster Kron /​ Jtzt williglich auch tragen thon. (Fiiijv)34 [And I commit it to my dear God, my Lord Jesus, in distress. In the hour of his death he, who was without any guilt, has worn a heavy crown of thorns. He did it for me, a poor man. Thus, I will freely take the burden and will also wear the crown of shame willingly, in the praise of his name today, even though it is a far lighter crown.] Finally, when he is handed over to the executioners, Hus accepts his fate and says: Herre Jhesu Christ inn solcher not /​ Befehl ich dir meim Herrn vnd Gott. Mein seel heut vnd stetiglich /​ Herr nim sie in dein ewig Reich. (Fvr)35

32 Agricola, Tragedia Johannis Huss, Fiijr. 33 Ibid., Fiijv, and see Mladenovic, History, Lviijv. 34 See ibid., Mr. 35 See ibid., Mv.

204 Dietl [My Lord Jesus Christ, in deep sorrow I commend my soul to you, my Lord and God, today and forever. Lord, take it into your everlasting kingdom.] And a few lines later, when he is led off the stage to be burned, he repeats: “Jnn dein hend befehl ich meinen geist”36 (Into your hands I commend my spirit). These words, spoken by Christ at the moment of his death (Luke 23:46) and by Hus, are the last sentence of the played action and thereby clearly highlight the intended interpretation of the plot. The History, too, has all the references to Christ and already pictures Hus as a Christ-​like martyr. The play, however, condenses the action and has the Bible citations quickly following one another so that they cannot be overlooked. The references to the Passion appeal to the audience’s compassion and do not allow them to take the part of anyone else but Hus’, because it is evident that Hus represents Christ, while the Roman Church is seen as representing the Jews of the Passion plays. A  double epilogue, one by a prophet and the other by an actor concluding the play, finally reinforces the understanding of the text: the prophet reminds the audience of Hus’s famous prophecy that one-​ hundred years after him, the ‘burnt goose’, there will be a swan whose song cannot be stopped –​a prophecy which Martin Luther referred to for the first time in 1531 and from then on applied to himself.37 The actor’s epilogue reminds the audience of the Hussite wars, proving that the decision to burn Hus caused great harm to the Christian world and to Germany in particular. The message Agricola conveys to his prince and to all spectators and readers is very clear: he wants both the nobility and the people to learn from history and to be warned of a possible new council that could accuse Luther of heresy. He wants his audience to identify with the history of the Reformation, which in his view started with Hus and culminates in Luther. For his argument it is crucial that the plot is true. Historical truth is confirmed by using one single source, which is not only an eye-​witness account but it also contains original documents such as the lists of accusations and the sermon. Literal or near-​ literal quotations from this source guarantee the historicity of the plot –​while by shortening and condensing its text, Agricola focuses the audience’s attention. The stage arrangement helps the audience to recognize the main agents and to identify parallels between the play’s plot and their own lives. 36 Agricola, Tragedia Johannis Huss, F5v. 37 Martin Luther, Aüff das Vermeint Keiserlich Edict Ausgangen im M.D.XXX. iare nach dem Reichstage des M.D.XXX. iars. Glosa ([s.l.]: [s.n.], 1531), WA [Weimarer Ausgabe] 30/​i ii, 387. See Philip Haberkern, “After Me There Will Come Braver Men: Jan Hus and Reformation Polemics in the 1530s,” German History 27 (2009): 187.

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Carefully Compiled Sources: Andreas Hartmann’s Curriculum Vitae Lutheri (1599/​1600)

Andreas Hartmann, who had been sub-​notary in the consistory in Dresden from 1586 to 1593 and chancery secretary in Merseburg from 1593 to 1599, returned to Dresden in 1599.38 The collection of his diplomatic letters that have come down to us might suggest that he served the court of the Electorate and that, like his earlier performance of Amadis (1587), he designed the planned cycle of plays about the life of Luther for public and/​or court performance in Dresden.39 His dedicatory letter, in which he explains that he had the book printed at his own expense after it had been on the shelves for a year, could be interpreted as a hint that he did not manage to receive or secure the patronage of the house of Saxony for the book or the cycle. In any case he expresses his willingness to be at the service of the princes, to whom he dedicates the book, because Saxony, he explains, is the homeland of the Reformation. When the book came out in Magdeburg in 1600, seventy-​nine years had passed since the Diet of Worms, Hartmann states at page Avijv of his book.40 By mentioning the date, the author indicates that he commemorates a major event in his play. One year later, eighty years after the Diet of Worms, it was published once more,41 possibly as a pirate edition, perhaps by Henning Große at Leipzig, who ignored the privilege by the Electorate of Saxony.42 38

39 40

41 42

Wilhelm Scherer, ‟Hartmann, Andreas,” in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, vol. 10 (Leipzig:  Duncker & Humblot, 1879), 680; Metz, Das protestantische Drama, 673; Leigh T.  I. Penman, ‟Paraluther:  Explaining an Unexpected Portrait of Paracelsus in Andreas Hartmann’ Curriculum Vitae Lutheri (1601),” in Religion, the Supernatural and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jennifer Spinks & Dagmar Eichberger (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 169. Ibid., 169. The only known extant copy is held at the Anna Amalia-​Library, Weimar, ppn 222552654. Johannes Bolte (‟Schauspiele in Magdeburg 1535–​1631,” in Georg Rollenhagens Spiel von Tobias 1576, ed. Johannes Bolte [Halle: Niemeyer, 1930], xix) mentions Magdeburg editions from 1600 and 1624. See Bernhard Jahn, “Zur Rolle des Buchdrucks bei der Aufführung und Rezeption frühneuzeitlicher Dramen am Beispiel der Magdeburger Drucke bis 1631,” in Prolegomena zur Kultur-​und Literaturgeschichte des Magdeburger Raumes, ed. Gunter Schandera & Michael Schilling (Magdeburg: Scriptum, 1999), 136 and 138. Due to its title, Jahn assumes that it is a play in Latin. A second print from Magdeburg is not known today; the 1624 edition, entitled Lutherus redivivus, was printed by Peter Schmied in Hall/​Saxony, without any foreword, possibly after the author’s death. See Metz, Das protestantische Drama, 674. Andreas Hartmann, Erster Theil des Cvrricvli vitae Lvtheri … [s.l.]: [s.n.], 1601. Penman, ‟Paraluther,” 178.

206 Dietl The full title of the play reads: Erster Theil /​des Cvrricvli vitae Lvtheri. Das ist: Warhafftige vnd kurtze Historische Beschreibung /​der Geburt vnd Ankunfft /​ Auch Lehr /​Lebens /​Wandels /​Berueffs /​Stands vnd Ampts /​Vnd sonderlich der beharlichen vnd standhafftigen Glaubens Bekendtnis /​bey reiner Euangelischer Warheit /​vnd in Summa /​der gantze Laufft /​beydes Lebens vnd Sterbens /​Des Ehrwirdigen /​Hocherleuchten /​Gottseligen vnd Tewren Mannes Gottes /​Herrn D. Martini Lutheri /​etc. Heiliger Gedächtniß (First part of Luther‘s curriculum vitae. That is: true and short historical description of the birth, the upbringing, the learning, living, habits, profession, rank and office, and especially of the steadfast and constant confession of faith and loyalty to pure evangelic truth, and to sum up, the whole course of both life and death of the honourable, highly enlightened, pious and worthy man of God, Doctor Martin Luther, to be kept in holy memory). These words clearly state that the play wants to be understood as historical documentation, offering a comprehensive (though still ‘short’) account of the biography of Luther, who is seen as holy and leading figure in religion. Hartmann specifies the purpose of his play and of historiography in general, and his method of writing a historical drama: history, he says, serves to keep the memory of important people such as Martin Luther alive and intends to secure their achievements for the present time. There is some danger that people, and especially young ones, would forget history. This could have fatal results. The printer uses double size fonts for the following lines: … das die wahre Christliche Religion widerumb von vns würde genommen werden  /​vnd solchs neben anderen Vrsachen  /​auch wegen der Vrsachen /​auch wegen der Vndankbarkeit /​in deme man der Wolthaten Gottes /​die wir durch das liebe Euangelium empfangen /​baldt vergesse. (Aiijr-​v) [… that we might again be deprived of the true Christian religion, among other reasons because of our ungratefulness, which we display when we quickly forget the grace of God given to us through the precious Gospels.] Hartmann explains that God does not grant His grace of the Word as a constant flow, but rather at intervals like cloudbursts. After such a cloudburst, the sun could come and wipe everything away.43 Historiography should prevent that and fight the devil who supports the process of forgetting.44

43 Hartmann, Cvrricvli vitae Lvtheri, Aiijv. 44 Ibid., Aiiijr.

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Do doch bey den Alten /​fast in aller Welt /​wie die Historien zeugen /​das Widerspiel /​ein gemeiner Brauch gewesen /​das /​wann man sonderlicher /​mercklicher Geschichte /​hocher grosser Monarchen /​Regenten /​ Heupter /​vnnd anderer führtrefflicher /​wolverdieneter Leute /​vnuor­ geslichen  /​vnnd (also zu reden) ewig bey allen Nachkommenden gedencken wollen  /​hat man gewisse Festa vnnd Ferien, Statuas vnnd Seulen /​vnnd andere dergleichen vielerley monumenta, offtmals nicht mit wenigen Vnkosten geordenet /​gesetzt vnnd auffgerichtet /​ja denselben die allerschönsten Ehrentitel zugeschrieben /​dabey man der vergangenen Geschichte /​vnnd verstorbener löblichen Helden /​mit Processen /​ begengnissen  /​Lobgesengen vnd Lobsprüchen  /​vnd anderen dergleichen Gebräuchen mehr /​rühmlich vnd ehrlich erwenet vnd gedacht (Aiiijv-​Avr) [Nearly all over the world, as history books show, in former times people used to do the contrary (to forgetting): Whenever there were important, noteworthy events, high and mighty monarchs, rulers, leaders, and other excellent people of merit, who should not be forgotten and (so to say) be eternally remembered by all following generations, they have arranged and organised certain feasts and festivals, erected statues and columns, and established various other similar monuments. They paid high prices for it. They also bestowed most decorous honorary titles on them. Historic events and former honourable heroes were remembered with processions, celebrations, praising hymns and glorifying poems and many other customs of this sort. People honoured, praised and remembered them.] Since even secular heroes deserved such honouring memorials, Hartmann argues, Luther, whom he calls Liberator Germaniae invictus (Avv) for his brave deed to free Germany from Roman (papal) suppression, should deserve it even more. Hartmann admits that he is not the first to praise Luther: Johann Mathesius held a series of seventeen sermons about Luther’s life in Joachimsthal. Hartmann intends to reiterate Mathesius’ sermons, because he is convinced of the didactic effect of repetition.45 However, he chooses a different genre: Mir auch Gottlob nicht vnbewust  /​das man mit Rythemis, vnd sonderlich mit Christlichen reinen vnd schönen Comoedien nit allein der jugend /​sondern auch woll mehr jarigen offtermals die vnbekantesten vnnd schweresten Sachen /​Historien /​Geschicht vnd Händel /​leichtlich 45

Ibid., Avjr.

208 Dietl einbilden  /​vnnd Anmütig machen kann  /​welche sonsten von dem gemeinen Manne /​beuor auß den vnachtsamen Weltkindern inn Wind geschlagen /​vnnd nicht angesehen werden (Avjr-​v) [Thanks to the Lord, I am well aware of the fact that by the use of rhythms and especially by that of pure and beautiful Christian comedies you can easily engrave rather unknown and difficult things, historic facts, stories and acts not only into young but also into older people’s minds, and turn them into pleasant things for them which, otherwise, unlearned people and especially ignorant worldly people would have rejected and ignored.] In other words, Hartmann turns the hagiographic sermons, which Johann Mathesius had written between 1562 and 1565 and published in 1566,46 into a drama. Though clearly hagiographic  –​Mathesius praises Luther as “Wunderman” and “Deutsche[r]‌Prophet”47  –​the sermons were regarded as historiographic and spread far,48 clearly further than a similar, even more hagiographic cycle of twenty-​one sermons written by Cyriacus Spangenberg and held in the years 1562–​73, always on the day of Luther’s baptism and the day of his death.49 Though Mathesius’ sermons are addressed to a wide audience in the usual rhetoric of sermons to persuasively convey their contents, Hartmann decides to use the dramatic genre which he believes is more persuasive than sermons. The audio-​visual medium makes the contents ‘pleasant’ and thus accessible to those who normally refuse to listen to sermons, and it makes it more convincing, since it visualizes abstract things, and it fixes them into the minds of those who ‘eye-​witnessed’ them. In Hartmann’s idea of historical drama, history and the most persuasive medium of drama form a unity: the purpose of history is to fight the devil-​driven tendency to forget the Word of God, which is being revealed and repeated by God’s grace with long intervals. These revelations of the Word are the major events in human history, and thus Luther, who re-​instated the ‘pure’ Word and liberated the Germans from Roman Church rule is, in Hartmann’s view, the optimal object of history. A history which mainly serves as revelation of God’s

46

47 48 49

Johann Mathesius, Historien Von des Ehrwirdigen in Gott seligen thewren Manns Gottes Doctoris Martini Luthers anfang lehr leben vnd sterben … (Nürnberg: Ulrich Neuber, 1566); Johann Mathesius, Dr.  Martin Luthers Leben, ed. Carl Büchsel (Berlin:  Evangelischer Bücherverein, 1883). Ibid., Aijv (foreword), and in similar words again in the first sermon. See Marcel Nieden, Ketzer, Held und Prediger. Martin Luther im Gedächtnis der Deutschen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2017), 24. Ibid., 24.

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Word needs to be presented as trustworthy and true as possible since historical veracity cannot be separated from religious truth. Therefore, Hartmann does not only want to surpass Mathesius in persuasiveness but also in historical accuracy. This is why he compares his sermons with other sources: als habe ich mich darüber gemacht  /​vnnd nach Anleitung wolgedachtes HErrn Mathaesij Predigten /​aus dem Schleidano, Herrn Philippo, Tomis vnnd Colloquijs Lutheri, Promptnario Exemplorum, vnnd anderen vielen dergleichen reinen vnnd glaubwirdigen Autoribus, gegenwertiges Curriculum Vitae Lutheri extrahiret. Dasselbe mit sonderem fleisse allent­ halben gegen einander Collationiret, es ordentlich zusammen bracht  /​ nach gelegenheit der materien vnterschiedlich abgetheilet /​vnnd durch­ auß Comoedien weise zu formalisiren, für mich genommen. (Avjv) [Thus I  started working on it and I  followed the line of the above mentioned sermons of Mr Mathesius, and I  extracted from Sleidan and Philipp (Melanchthon), from Luther’s works and Colloquia, from the Promptnario Exemplorum and other similarly unspoilt and trustworthy works and authors this Curriculum Vitae Lutheri. With special diligence I have collated them all and wrote them into one text and structured it according to the material, and tried to bring it suitably into the form of a comedy.] Hartmann claims to have consulted the central texts of early Lutheran historiography: Johann Sleidan is often called the ‘father of Reformation history’.50 Encouraged by Jakob Sturm and Martin Bucer, and commissioned by Johann Friedrich I  of Saxony and Philipp of Hesse,51 he wrote the first official history of the Reformation, De statu religionis et reipublicae, Carolo Quinto, Caesare, Commentarii (1555), reporting all events from Luther’s publication of the ninety-​five articles in 1517 until the Diet at Augsburg in 1555. He tried to include as many original sources and eye-​witness reports as possible; therefore, he asked Reformers and Protestant princes for all sorts of material, visited archives and libraries, and used some 460 documents all together.52 For Protestant authors of the time, he represents the ultimate authority to be mentioned when it comes to Reformation history.53 50

Donald R. Kelley, ‟Johann Sleidan and the Origins of History as a Profession,” The Journal of Modern History 52 (1980): 573. 51 Alexander Kess, Johann Sleidan and the Protestant Vision of History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 1–​2. 52 Kess, Johann Sleidan, 105. 53 See ibid., 122. In the following I  use the first official German translation by Heinrich Pantaleon:  Johannes Sleidan, Wahrhafftige Beschreibung Geistlicher vnnd Welltlicher

210 Dietl Philipp Melanchthon’s Historia de vita et actis revendissimi viri D.  Martini Lutheri syncerioris Theologiae Doctoris, published for the first time in 1547 by Johannes Pollicarius in Weißenfels, had an equally high reputation as reliable source concerning Luther’s life; it claims to replace the autobiography that Luther had promised to write but never finished.54 The Promptuarium Exemplorum by Andreas Hondorf, published for the first time in 1568, and frequently reprinted, is the most popular early Protestant book of exempla. It uses manifold sources, which are listed at the beginning of the book,55 among them the Book of Martyrs by Ludwig Rabus. He inserts a biography of Luther into the chapter about the Third Commandment, which he understands as an exhortation to preach properly. Mentioning these sources plus Luther’s own works, Hartmann clearly situates his play in the context of authentic and well-​researched literature of the inner circle around Luther. The method of collating and comparing the sources, which he copies from Sleidan, implies the highest possible accuracy in historiography. However, Hartmann follows Mathesius closely; none of his slight deviations from Mathesius seem to result from his consultation of other sources (except, perhaps, for his careful treatment of Luther’s publication of the ninety-​five articles). The changes compared to Mathesius owe much to Hartmann’s dramatic concept. The way in which Hartmann combines historiographical, dramatic and other modes to claim truth and relevance for his play, can already be seen in the prologue, which is the prologue of the complete cycle:56 JEtzt send es nach der Rechnung clar /​ Hundert vnd fünnf vnd Achtzig Jahr /​ Da zu Costnitz in grosser Summ /​

54 55

56

sachen vnder dem großmechtigen Keyser Carolo dem fünfften verloffen, transl. Heinrich Pantaleon (Basel: [s.n.], 1556). Philipp Melanchthon, Historia de vita et actis reverendissimi viri D. Martini Lutheri …, in Melanchthon und Luther. Marti Luthers Lebensbeschreibung durch Philipp Melanchthon, ed. and transl. Harald Weinacht (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 2008), 14. Andreas Hondorf, Promptvarivm Exemplorvm. Historienn vnd Exempel buch: Aus Heiliger Schrifft, und vielen andern bewerten vnd beglaubten Geistlichen vnd Weltlichen Büchern vnd Schrifften gezogen (Leipzig: [s.n.], 1568), Φiijr-​iiijv. Heidemarie Schade (‟Andreas Hondorffs Promptuarium,” in Volkserzählung und Reformation. Ein Handbuch zur Tradierung und Funktion von Erzählstoffen und Erzählliteratur im Protestantismus, ed. Wolfgang Brückner [Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1974], 654) discusses how trustworthy Hondorf’s information is that he used some sixty-​five sources. The prologue announces on page Biiijr that the audience will see how the Confessio Augustana came to be fixed in 1530. The plot of the first part, however, terminates in 1521.

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Wurd ghalten ein Concilium, Darinn Johann Huß der Märtrer Tewer /​ Ward vnverschuld verbrant im Fewer. Dieser /​wie er zur Marter gieng /​ Zu Weissagen also anfieg: Heut wird von Euch eine Ganß gebraten /​ Künfftig wird euch nicht so geraten /​ Denn ich euch sagen thue vorwhaar /​ Von jtzt an vber Hundert Jahr /​ Da wird kommen ein lauter Schwahn /​ Den müst jrh Vngebraten lahn. (Bijv) [Properly calculated it is now eighty-​five years since a large Council was held at Constance, during which Johannes Hus, the precious martyr was burned at the stake innocently. When he was going to be martyred he made the following prophecy: ‘Today you grill a goose, but in the future you won’t be so successful any more. I foretell you in truth that in hundred years’ time there will be a swan you will have to leave unroasted.’] A clear date and a well-​known quotation (the latter highlighted by the printer in a double-​sized font), both typical signs of historiographical accuracy, stand at the beginning of a speech which draws long lines of history, involving the audience’s presence and thus stressing the relevance of the past action presented. The quoted prophecy is repeated and thereby strengthened by another prophecy, namely that by Johannes Hilten (c. 1425–​1501/​02).57 Andreas Hartmann uses the logic of Salvation history (where repeated prophecies can hardly fail), in order to claim truth for what he is about to present about the ‘German prophet’,58 the ‘best from Japhet’s blood’,59 the ‘holy man’, sent by God to free his people from papist suppression and to re-​establish God’s Word.60 All these epithets are taken from Mathesius. The advent of the God-​sent prophet, a post-​figuration of Christ, should be staged, as it seems, on a large simultaneous stage, similar to that of the large French and German-​ speaking late medieval and Catholic Counter Reformation religious plays. This means a performance on a public square with all the stage-​settings of the various scenes (‘mansions’) present from the 57

Both prophecies are also mentioned in Mathesius’ first sermon on Luther. See Mathesius, Dr. Martin Luthers Leben, ed. Büchsel, 6. 58 See Hartmann, Cvrricvli vitae Lvtheri, Aijv. 59 See Mathesius, Historien, ed. Büchsel, 5. 60 Hartmann, Cvrricvli vitae Lvtheri, Biijr.

212 Dietl very beginning of the play, and the actors and –​depending on the size of the square –​possibly also the audience moving from one mansion to the other. At the beginning of the performance, all actors enter the square. A stage direction notes: “Immittelst nehmen die Personen jhre geordnete scenas nacheinander ein /​wie sie auffgezogen” (Meanwhile the actors occupy their mansions in the order in which they entered).61 This stage-​setting means that the audience can simultaneously see the major stations of Luther’s life, and follow him from one to the other:  Eisenach, Erfurt, Wittenberg, Augsburg, and Worms. Leipzig is left out –​because Mathesius, too, leaves it out.62 Walking with the actors –​the larger distances are covered in the middle of the acts, i.e. the journeys are part of the action –​the audience is entirely involved in the action. It experiences the plot’s relevance for its own Lutheran Protestant identity, and it ventures into following Luther’s example. As Metz noted, Luther is the one and only outstanding figure in the play.63 He has helpers and followers and he has adversaries but he  –​who is designated “Daß er ein Christlicher Ritter sey”64 (that he be a Christian knight) –​has nobody equal to him.65 His teaching, however, has forerunners. It is depicted as the desired Reformation. In Act i, Luther’s father is a very strong figure who severly criticizes the monasteries, Da man Christi leidn nicht betracht /​ Vnd seinen Herrlichen Sieg veracht /​ Sondern auff eigne Werck vertrawt /​ Vnd auff irdische Heiligkeit bawt. (Bvjr) [Where the Passion of Christ is neglected and His glorious victory is despised, while people trust in their own works and rely on secular sanctity.] He also warns his son that whatever frightened him so much when he became a monk, could well have been caused by the devil.66 Soon Martin Luther indeed discovers the dark sides of the monastery. His father, however, cannot offer him a viable alternative, because the only thing that can free him from his fears is the Bible. Following Mathesius,67 Hartmann depicts Luther

61 Ibid., Biiijv. 62 Metz (Das protestantische Drama, 675) is somewhat bewildered by this choice. 63 Ibid., 681–​82. 64 Hartmann, Cvrricvli vitae Lvtheri, Bvijr. 65 Mathesius, Historien, ed. Büchsel, 7. 66 Hartmann, Cvrricvli vitae Lvtheri, Cijr. See also Mathesius, ed. Büchsel, 7. 67 Mathesius, Historien, ed. Büchsel, 7.

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reading the Bible secretly, because he was not allowed to do so openly in the monastery. After his confessor (who remains anonymous in Hartmann and Mathesius68) has explained the basis of the justification sola fide to him, Luther learns how to understand the Bible. This ‘discovery’ of the Word of God by Luther coincides with Johann von Staupitz’ furtherance of Luther, leading to his invitation to hold the chair of Bible studies at Wittenberg University. Now that his hidden passion for the Bible has turned into an official profession, Luther becomes an ardent defender of sola scriptura, whereupon Mellerstadt, the rector of the university, articulates this prophecy: Vorwar der Münnich wird /​glaubet mir /​ alle Doctores machen jr /​ Weil er thut auff dje Bibel dringen /​ Wird er ein newe lehr auff bringen /​ Die Römische Kirch vnd jhre lehr Noch reformieren gantz vnd gar (Cviijv)69 [In truth, this monk will  –​believe me  –​drive all professors mad, since he insists on the Bible. He will introduce a new teaching and he will fundamentally reform the Roman Church and its teaching.] Again, the prophecy is repeated70 and thus confirmed to be right. It describes Luther’s role in the remaining plot. For the time being, however, the point of attention shifts to the anti-​hero Johannes Tetzel, who dominates Act ii. The audience hears him speak well-​known phrases such as: Denn so bald jhr nur Geldt herbringt /​ Vnd der Pfenning in Kasten klingt /​ So fehrt die Seel von stundan drauff /​ Auß dem Fegfewer gen Himmel nauff. (Dvr-​v)71 [For as soon as you bring along your money and the coin can be heard falling into the box, the soul will immediately leave purgatory and ascend to heaven.] Famous, frequently quoted phrases like these confirm the authenticity of Hartmann’s report even within a rather comedy-​like Act ii. Tetzel is shown to 68

Ibid. Melanchthon (Historia, ed. Weinacht, 22) mentions Johannes Greffenstein. The play rather suggests that it was Johann von Staupitz. 69 See also Mathesius, Historien, ed. Büchsel, 8. 70 Hartmann, Cvrricvli vitae Lvtheri, Evijr. See also Mathesius, ed. Historien, Büchsel, 20. 71 See also Mathesius, Historien, ed. Büchsel, 18.

214 Dietl convince Herr Omnis, i.e. the common man, but for a short time, until Luther starts preaching against him and the fool reveals Tetzel’s dark history, which again was well-​known from Mathesius, but also from polemical literature against Tetzel. Now a lansquenet can fool Tetzel, and a simple miner starts arguing against him, i.e. the simple people already disrespect Tetzel’s teaching before Luther publishes his ninety-​five articles and fixes them to the Castle Chapel. It is remarkable that the most symbolic scene of the Reformation is not shown on stage, but only reported  –​perhaps due to doubts whether it actually happened. Melanchthon reports it, and so do Mathesius and Hondorf, but Sleidan does not.72 The public presentation of the articles might, however, have been unimportant for Hartmann because from now on the discussions about Luther’s teaching and person do not concentrate on public opinion. The play’s focus is now on the Church authorities and the nobility. Accordingly, the scenery changes from an open area to various rooms in Augsburg, Worms and Wittenberg. Luther rushes from one place to the other; his body is in constant motion but his mind is perfectly steady. His opponents and helpers, on the contrary, are constantly changing their minds and plans. Again and again Luther is reminded of the warning example of Hus, while the emperor and Friedrich III of Saxony are tempted to follow the ‘good’ example of King Sigismund, who did not keep his promise of security to Hus. Both of them, however, prove that they have learned from history, and they won’t break their word. The helpless agitation of Luther’s enemies finally shows that there are no arguments against his argumentation, which is based on Scripture, and that there is no way to put a steadfast saint, who fully trusts in God, under pressure. Hartmann explicitly quotes Luther’s famous words that he will go to Worms, “Solt Worms gleich so voll Teuffel sein /​Als viel Dachziegeln da sein mügn /​ Vnd in worms auff den Dechern liegn”73 (even if there were as many devils in Worms as there are tiles on Worms’ roofs) and “Ich kann nicht anders  /​ ich sthee allhier /​Gott helff mir Amen /​Amen schier”74 (I cannot do otherwise, I stand here. God help me. Amen. Amen). The drama ends with Luther’s abduction to the Wartburg after his condemnation in Worms. The stage trick that he is taken out of the audience’s sight in the final scene stresses the parallel to Agricola’s Tragedia Johannis Huss. However, Luther knows who his kidnappers75 are –​and the audience does so, too. The parallel between swan and 72 Melanchthon, Historia, ed. Weinacht, 28; Mathesius, Historien, ed. Büchsel, 19; Hondorf, Promptvarium, fol. 123r; Sleidan, Wahrhafftige Beschreibung, i. 73 Hartmann, Cvrricvli vitae Lvtheri, Jijr; see also Mathesius, Historien, ed. Büchsel, 38; Hondorf, Promptvarium, fol. 124r. 74 Hartmann, Cvrricvli vitae Lvtheri, Lr. 75 See Mathesius, Historien, ed. Büchsel, 46.

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goose leads to the expected end: that the swan could not be stopped singing, and has reformed the Church. Compared with Mathesius nothing is new in Hartmann’s Curriculum vitae except for some comic scenes around Tetzel. But by strengthening the role of the father, of the confessor and of Staupitz, who all have similar thoughts as Luther, yet either do not have access to the Bible or lack Luther’s power and courage; by introducing the figure of Herr Omnis; and by the use of a simultaneous stage, Hartmann clearly depicts the ‘public’ support for the desired Reformation. When it comes to the opposition against Luther, the common people disappear from the scene: obviously, they would not oppose him since they already acted against Tetzel before he published the ninety-​five articles. Luther’s enemies are the same enemies as Hus’s: the cardinals and bishops and the councils. The German nobility, however, has learned from history, and the idealised Saxon prince has learned how to base his politics on the Word of God. Tendentious as the play is, it can claim to be true because it uses, or rather claims to use an up-​to-​date historiographical method and trustworthy sources. 4

Why Mention Any Sources? Heinrich Kielmann’s Tetzelocramia (1617)

When in March 1617 a group of professors of the University of Wittenberg asked permission to celebrate the jubilee of the Reformation on 31 October, Johann Georg i of Saxony ordered that throughout Saxony the jubilee should be celebrated as a three-​day feast, according to the pattern of religious feasts.76 Several Protestant countries followed the example of Saxony. In Pommerania Heinrich Kielmann, vice-​ rector of the Pädagogium at Stettin, which was directly linked to the Pommeranian court and had the duty to support and spread Lutheran teaching,77 was commissioned to write a play for the celebration of the jubilee in Stettin.78 Kielmann wrote his

76

77 78

Dorothea Wendebourg, ‟Vergangene Reformationsjubiläen. Ein Rückblick im Vorfeld von 2017,” in Der Reformator Martin Luther 2017. Eine wissenschaftliche und gedenkpolitische Bestandsaufnahme, ed. Heinz Schilling (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 264–​65; Wolfgang Flügel, ‟Und der legendäre Thesenanschlag hatte seine ganz eigene Wirkungsgeschichte. Eine Geschichte des Reformationsjubiläums,” Berliner Theologische Zeitschrift 28 (2011): 30. Werner Buchholz, ‟Frühmoderne Staatsbildung, Reformation und Fürstenschule. Das Pädagogium in Stettin und seine Studenten im 16. Jahrhundert,” in Kindheit und Jugend in der Neuzeit 1500–​1900, ed. Werner Buchholz (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2000), 39. See Metz, Das protestantische Drama, 657–​61; Cora Dietl, ‟Reformationsjubiläum 1617 in Stettin: Heinrich Kielmanns Komödie Tetzelocramia,” In Die Reformation 1517 –​Zwischen

216 Dietl Tetzelocramia79 in close accordance with the sermons and speeches held at the jubilee by Daniel Cramer, rector of the Pädagogium.80 Cramer designed an emblem for the jubilee, which directly refers to the final scene of Kielmann’s Tetzelocramia.81 Both Cramer and Kielmann closely follow the festival order by Philipp ii of Pomerania-​Stettin, which itself follows the Saxonian pattern.82 Philipp’s festival order requests sermons dealing with Luther’s disputation about Tetzel’s indulgences on Friday 31 October and Saturday 1 November 1617.83 The readings from the New Testament on 31 October should be from Luke 10:17–​22 (Satan’s fall) and 2 Thess. 2:1–​12 (wrong prophets in the latter days);84 on 1 November:  Luke 2:49–​51 (question who should inhabit God’s house), and 1 Tim. 4:1–​5 (wrong faith spreading in the latter days).85 In his sermons Cramer relates Luke 10:17–​22 to the pope, who has lost his power, and Luke 2:49 to Luther, who has freed the house of Christ from the merchants selling indulgences. He appeals to the audience not to deviate from the path that Luther has indicated to them and not to follow the Antichrist (i.e. the Jesuits) who tried to make people forget Luther. Obviously, Cramer’s understanding of the value of commemorating the Reformation is similar to Hartmann’s. Gewinn und Verlust, ed. Cezary Lipiński & Wolfgang Brylla (Göttingen:  V&R unipress, 2020), 91–​104. 79 Heinrich Kielmann, Tetzelocramia. Daß ist Eine Lustige Comoedie Von Johan Tetzels Ablaßkram wie GOtt der Herr denselben Itzo für Hundert Jahren durch sein erwehltes Rüstzeüg. D. Martinum Lutherum … umbgestoßen vnnd außgetrieben … (Wittenberg: Helwig and Matthäsius, 1617). 80 Feyrliche Begängnus des Hochpreißlichen Ersten Evangelischen JubelJahres, wie dasselbe Auff des … Herrn Philippi II. Hertzogen zu Stettin Pommern … gnedigen Befehl … gehalten worden (Alten Stettin: Reichard and Kellner, 1617). 81 Ibid., Bijr-​Biijv. Also as pamphlet:  Daniel Cramer, Emblema Auff das Erste Evangelische JubelJahr:  Tandem Triumphat Veritas (Alten Stettin:  Kellner, 1617). See:  Kastner, Geistlicher Rauffhandel, 312–​19; Christian Schmidt, ‟Der geküsste Papst. Ritual-​und Zeremoniellparodien in Heinrich Kielmanns Tetzelocramia zum Reformationsjubiläum 1617 in Stettin,” in Reformatio Baltica, ed. Heinrich Assel et  al. (Berlin:  De Gruyter, 2018), 480. 82 See Volker Leppin, ‟‘… das der Römische Antichrist offenbaret und das helle Liecht des Heiligen Evangelii wiederumb angezündet’. Memoria und Aggression im Reformationsjubiläum 1617,” in Konfessioneller Fundamentalismus. Religion als politischer Faktor im europäischen Mächtesystem um 1600, ed. Heinz Schilling (München: Oldenbourg, 2007), 117–​18. 83 Philipp (ii von Pommern-​Stettin), Unsere von Gottes gnaden Philipsen Hertzogen zu Stettin Pommern … Bevehl vnnd Ordnung welcher gestalt in unsern Fürstenthümern unnd Landen das Christliche Evangelische Jubilæum sol gehalten vnnd begangen werden (Alten Stettin: Kellner, 1617), Aiiijr. 84 Ibid., Aiijv; Feyrliche Begängnus, Aiiijr-​v. 85 Philipp ii, Bevehl vnnd Ordnung, Aiijv; Feyrliche Begängnus, Aiiijv.

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Kielmann, on the contrary, does not discuss the question of forgetting at all. In his Latin prologue he makes it clear that the jubilee’s idea is to celebrate that God, in his mercy, “Sanam sui verbi doctrinam à sordibus /​Papatus puram reddidit Germanae”86 (… has returned the salubrious teaching of his Word to Germany, cleansed from the soil of papism). It serves to glorify God and to praise Philipp ii, who made the festivity possible. In defence of his chosen dramatic form he argues that a comedy can serve these purposes as well as a tragedy and that his jokes are neither impia nor pudenda, but are rhetorical strategies to underline the message of the drama: “Hi rem ceu sale condiant necesse est” (They are the necessary salt in the matter). They do not affect the historical truth of the play: “Nec fictis tamen hic notare Papam, /​Sed veris, velut acta sunt, libebat”87 (The author did not wish to write anything fictional about the pope, but true things as they happened). Cramer supports Kielmann’s argument quoting Horace: it is an old custom to tell the truth with a smile (ridendo dicere verum), he explains, since the truth expressed in comedies is willingly accepted while the wrong (such as the trade with indulgences) is effectively ridiculed.88 Thus, both Kielmann and Cramer claim there is some truth in the play, but Kielmann does not make any attempt to name historical or other sources which he used and dramatized. He only admits that the songs in his play are not his own and that alii (others) should be thanked for them.89 The cast list90 clearly reveals how little Kielmann tries to claim historiographical accuracy: except for Johannes Tetzel, Luther, and Bugenhagen there are no historical characters in the play; they consist of types and personifications, devils and angels. The Tetzelocramia is far closer to an allegorical morality play than to a historical drama, but it still serves the purpose of explaining a historical event (Luther’s abolishment of the indulgences) and to prove visually and impressively that “Lutherus recte discutit, atque docet”91 (Luther argued and taught right), as Christopher Sticherus explains in his poem added to the printed text. The play, however, does not present Luther discussing, preaching and teaching; it rather expects the audience to know what he said, and only displays that it was necessary that he said something against the miserable state of religion. In fact, the allegorical character of Religion is the main character of the play. In 86 Kielmann, Tetzelocramia, A3r. 87 Ibid., A2r. 88 Ibid., A2v. 89 Ibid., A2r. 90 Ibid., Av. 91 Ibid., A3r.

218 Dietl the opening monologue she presents herself as equally miserable as Boethius’ Philosophy: ICH armes Weib Religio, Wird ich doch nie auff Erden froh, /​ Ach weh mir Armen Witwen weh /​ Ich bin verlohrn /​wie ich hie steh /​ Nichts bin ich /​nur ein blosser Nahm /​ Daß ich mich meines stands auch scham (Avr) [I, miserable woman, Religio, I will never be happy on earth. Woe me, miserable widow, woe! I am totally lost as I stand here. I am nothing but a mere name, and I am ashamed of my state.] Religio, as a pious widow who does not have anyone to protect her in this world, realizes that she has lost her identity and is reduced to a mere name, since there are no more ‘proper’ Christians in the world. She has three very different children: Gnathaster –​obviously a wordplay: German Gnad-​Haster (‘man yearning for grace’) or Greek gnathos (‘jaw’), reminiscent of the typical parasite Gnathon in Roman comedy92  –​is in Rome as the pope’s castellan. The other two children are Hypocrisis, who has entered a monastery and lives among monks and nuns, and Veritas, Religio’s favourite daughter, whom she calls a gift of divine grace.93 She has a difficult life while the other two, the aberrant outcome of religion, fare well as Act ii demonstrates: the pope, carried along in a sedan chair, demonstrates his power in a ridiculous procession, which is accompanied by an old Pesach-​song.94 He announces the basic rules of Christian obedience, gives Tetzel the privilege to sell indulgences, and has everyone, including the nobility, kiss his feet. Only the fool refuses to do so. And as soon as the fool is chased away, the carriers of the pope’s chair lift him –​ and let him fall.95 He is furious and curses them in words that are far below the stylistic register of a pope; in early modern plays they are rather used by devils:  ‟Potz wunder  /​Potz was hie geschicht”96 (Gosh miracle, Gosh, what happens here!). Verbally the pope underlines his own fall, which is visible on

92 See Schmidt, ‟Der geküsste Papst,” 484. 93 Kielmann, Tetzelocramia, Avjr. 94 See Irmgard Scheitler, Schauspielmusik. Funktion und Ästhetik im deutschsprachigen Drama der Frühen Neuzeit (Tutzing:  ortus, 2013), vol. 1, 399; Scheitler, ‟Lutherus redivivus,” 198. 95 Kielmann, Tetzelocramia, Cvjr. 96 Ibid., Cvjv.

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stage, and which is Kielmann’s interpretation of the day’s lecture (Luke 10:17–​ 22). Out of the blue a choir of boys, dressed in white shirts like angels, appears and celebrates the fall of ‘Satan’:

 

Darauff kommen die Kinder in weissen Hembden auff den Platz gelauffen  /​vnd fangen mit laut an zu lachen. Expleto cachinno fangen sie an zu singen vnd zu Tantzen. pueri: Der Babst hat sich zu Tod gefalln /​   von einem hohen stule /​   Mit wem soll denn mein arme Seel /​   forthin nun weiter buhlen.   Jesus Christus der soll es sein /​   kein ander lieber werden /​   macht vns von allen Sünden frey /​   im Himmel vnd auff Erden …   Der Babst hat seinen Schlüssel verlohrn /​   was wil er nun beginnen /​   das thut jhn aus der massen zorn /​   er kann sie nirgends finden.   Ein frommer Man aus Sachsen Landt /​   hat rechte Schlüssel gfunden /​   Martinus Luther ist er genant /​   den Christen GOtt wilkommen. … (Cvjv-​vijr)

[Now the boys run to the square, dressed in white shirts, and start laughing loudly. Once they have laughed at him enough, they start singing and dancing. The boys: The pope has fallen down from his high chair and is dead. Whom should my poor soul love now? It should love Jesus Christ, and no one should be dearer to me. He frees us from all sins, in heaven and on earth … The pope has lost his keys, what should he do now? He is so extremely furious that he cannot find them anywhere. A pious man from Saxony has found the proper keys. He is called Martin Luther, welcome to the Christians in the name of God.] The song, which, as Kielmann openly admits, is not by him, was published for the first time in a pamphlet at Zwickau in 1535. It was used in several other anonymous pamphlets in the second half of the sixteenth century and found its way into the Stettin book of hymns.97 Thus, the audience is familiar with

97

See Scheitler, Schauspielmusik, vol. 1, 399; Scheitler, ‟Lutherus redivivus,” 198; Schmidt, ‟Der geküsste Papst,” 486–​87.

220 Dietl the song, which does not only interpret the play and foreshadow the rest of the plot, but also integrates the audience into the play. The boys, marked as innocent and angelic in their white shirts, are the boys of the town, part of the spectator community, singing ‘their’ familiar song about the fall of the pope, and about the desired Reformation by Martin Luther, which, since it is part of the congregation’s official book of hymns, does not need any further proof of truth. After Act ii has staged an interpretation of Luke 10:17–​22, Act iii concentrates on the topic of the wrong prophets (2 Thess. 2:1–​12) and the people led astray from the true faith (1 Tim. 4:1–​5): Tetzel, inspired by the devil, successfully sells indulgences. He has Pope Leo x’s privilege read aloud in the Latin original. This is Kielmann’s only obvious reference to historic reality, as if to erase any possible doubt that the Church really supported Tetzel. The nobility is shown very susceptible to indulgences: an anonymous prince, reminiscent of Georg of Saxony (1471–​1539), acquires dispensation for marrying incestuously. Tetzel’s success among simple people, however, is not unquestioned: Kielmann copies Andreas Hartmann’s Act ii,6 (the lansquenet robbing Tetzel of his money) into his play as Act iii,6. He also copies part of Hartmann’s Act ii,7 (the miner arguing against Tetzel), but he has the arguments of this scene voiced by Veritas, who tries to stop Tetzel (act iii,7). The latter, however, dominates this scene: he instigates a ridiculous act of exorcism over Veritas –​quoting the official Latin formula of exorcisms  –​and has her imprisoned. By including this scene, Kielmann blatantly ridicules the idea of exorcism as such. Another addition, the Song of Roland which had been published as a pamphlet in 159998 and might well be familiar to Kielmann’s audience, marks the final turn of the action. The song tells the story of a clever peasant who cheats a lascivious monk who had seduced the peasant’s wife. In Tetzelocramia the song serves as an introduction to Act iv and v, in which the question is answered who should inhabit the house of God (Luke 2:49–​51). Simple peasants come and see Religio, who explains ‘the divine’ (i.e. Luther’s) teaching of Grace (sola fide) to them. They spread the news and even rescue the previously mentioned prince, who is about to commit suicide driven by his guilty conscience concerning his incest. Together they form a front of resistance against Tetzel, while the archangel Michael sets Veritas free. Michael has Religio and Veritas enter into a confrontation with Tetzel and his helpers. The devils lead Tetzel to hell, while Michael presents Luther and Bugenhagen as the new defenders of faith. Veritas takes their oaths: 98

Roland genandt. Ein Tewr new Lied der Engellendisch Tantz genandt zugebrauchen auff allerley Jnstrumenten etc. Gar kurtzweilig zusingen vnd zu Dantzen:  Jn seiner eignen Melodey ([s.l.]: [s.n.], 1599).

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Darumb es vns sämbtlichen gefelt /​ Das jr falt nieder auff die knie /​ Vnd schwert mir Veritati hie /​ Das jr die Heilge Bibel werth Wolt halten jmmr /​vnd also Lehrt Wie es darin geschrieben stat. Den solchs allein safft vnd krafft hat. Luth. Promitto, et juro, Bug. Et ego juro. (Hijv-​Hiijr) [Thus it pleases us all if you now fall on your knees and swear to me, Veritas, here, that you will always honour the Holy Bible und will always teach according to what is written in it, because this is the only thing that has power and value. Luther: “I promise and I swear.” Bugenhagen: “I swear, too.”] She gives them writing quills as their future ‘weapons’ and a ring as a sign of their marriage to Veritas, and Luther and Bugenhagen confirm:  “Schrifft Schrifft sol der Probierstein sein /​Wenn Babst vnd Ketzr sprechn lauter nein”99 (Scripture, scripture should be the touchstone, whenever pope and heretics openly contradict you). Finally, Veritas rejoices: “O tandem, tandem, tandem bona causa triumphat”100 (O finally, finally, finally the good side triumphs), and Religio prophesies: “Gottes Wort Lutheri Lehr /​Vergehet nun vnd nimmermehr”101 (God’s Word, Luther’s teaching, will never perish). These two phrases are used in the above mentioned emblem designed by Cramer for the jubilee. The latter was a quotation from the medal printed for the jubilee in the Electorate of Saxony.102 Kielmann’s drama is very closely related to the celebration remembering the beginning of the Reformation in 1517. The festivity took place in the Church of St Mary; the performance most probably in front of it,103 since in the scene of the fall of the pope a square is mentioned. Otherwise, the stage-​setting is rather undefined; it needs a door for the prison scene, and a neutral stage for the rest –​similar to that of Roman comedies. Though commissioned by the dukes, the stage marks the play as a community event –​and it interprets the Reformation as a community event, too. The contents, however, follow the religious order for the feast day, featuring the fall of Satan, the appearance 99 Kielmann, Tetzelocramia, Hiiijv. 100 Ibid., Hiiijv. 101 Ibid., Hvr. 102 Margildis Schlüter, Münzen und Medaillen zur Reformation 16. bis 20. Jahrhundert aus dem Besitz des Kestner-​Museums Hannover (Hannover: Kestner Museum, 1983), 84. 103 Schmidt, ‟Der geküsste Papst,” 478.

222 Dietl of the wrong prophets and the endangered faith at the end of the world, and the cleansing of God’s house. Luther and Bugenhagen (as the Reformer of the North East) appear as prophets sent by God, resembling Enoch and Elias. This is rather an interpretation than a presentation of history. The plot is a farce about the pope and about Tetzel, the latter partly taken from Hartmann, but including the original document of Tetzel’s privilege to sell the indulgences. It is an allegorical play and it includes songs known to the audience from different contexts. Luther’s and Bugenhagen’s teachings are reduced to their obedience to the Scripture, and they are only referred to but not presented, and Luther’s teaching of grace is voiced by Religio when she teaches the simple people. It is, therefore, interpreted as ‘common sense’. In the same way, the history of the Reformation is treated as common sense, i.e. commonly known –​ nothing needs to be told or even proven or established by quoting sources. It can simply be referred to. 5

History –​Or Rather: Commemoration on Stage

With the Tragedia Johannis Huss (1537) Johannes Agricola established a new form of commemorative drama, which depicts the history of the Reformation. It establishes a group identity of Protestants, based on common history, not unlike the Christian group identity that medieval religious plays established and confirmed, yet dramatizing different source texts: not Bible narratives but Church history, i.e. the history of Bible interpretation and loyalty to the Word of God form the centre of this new kind of drama. While the Bible is expected to be known and accepted as true, Church history needs to be explained and its historical truth needs to be proven –​at least in the sixteenth century. The plays by Agricola, Hartmann, and Kielmann display three very different ways of presenting Reformation history on stage. All three talk about Luther, but their protagonists are different: Hus, Luther, and Tetzel or rather Religio. They all stress the importance of what happened in the past for the present time of the audience, and try to strengthen the Reformation as a factor of identity for their mixed noble and ‘common man’ audiences, which in all cases are clearly identified as German audiences. Agricola’s intention is, however, different from that of the other two authors: he wants to warn his audience, and especially the princes, not to repeat history in another Council, but rather to learn from history. Therefore, he needs to stress that all he describes is historically true. The way he proves historical truth is rather traditional: he faithfully follows an eye-​witness account (not suspecting that it might be subjective), and includes original documents.

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Hartmann’s intention is mainly to preserve the achievements of history and not to forget them. He displays the habit of a ‘modern’ historian, comparing sources –​even if he does not really do so, he does mention all necessary authorities, who in turn are known to have compared many sources (though Protestant ones only). In his view, commemorating correctly means commemorating with historiographical accuracy –​at least seemingly. The positive figures in his play (Luther and the German nobility) have learned from history, while the negative figures (the council, the bishops and cardinals) try to repeat history without change –​at the same time ignoring the Word of God, which is revealed to mankind with larger intervals, thus structuring history. In Kielmann’s case commemoration means something rather different. He is not interested in historiography; he expects his audience to know the history of the Reformation –​at least as well as necessary. His main concern is to interpret the Reformation as part of Salvation history. He does not see the need to mention his sources, he will be glad if his audience recognizes the songs and parts of the plot as something ‘already known’ and therefore unquestionably true. In the end his way of treating Reformation history resembles the treatment of biblical history in medieval religious plays, even though the theatrical language has meanwhile changed.

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Niefanger, Dirk. Geschichtsdrama der Frühen Neuzeit 1495–​1773. Tübingen:  Niemeyer, 2005. Neubuhr, Elfriede. Geschichtsdrama. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980. Penman, Leigh T.  I. ‟Paraluther:  Explaining an Unexpected Portrait of Paracelsus in Andreas Hartmann’ Curriculum Vitae Lutheri (1601).” In Religion, the Supernatural and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe, edited by Jennifer Spinks & Dagmar Eichberger, 161–​84. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Rabenau, Konrad von. “Ein Buch des evangelischen Märtyrers Heinrich von Zütphen, erworben von Johannes Agricola.” Einband-​Forschung 31 (2012): 64–​65. Roloff, Hans-​Gert. ‟Quelle –​Text –​Edition. Johann Agricolas Tragedia Johannis Huss.” Editio 11 (1997): 78–​85. Roloff, Hans-​ Gert. “Zur Funktion der volkssprachlichen Rezeption neulateini­ scher Reformationspropaganda, aufgezeigt an Beispielen der Rezeption von Kampfdramen von Johann Agricola und Thomas Naogeorg.” In Die Bedeutung der Rezeptionsliteratur für Bildung und Kultur der Frühen Neuzeit (1400–​1750), vol. 3, edited by Peter Hvilshoj Andersen-​Vinilandicus & Barbara Lafond-​Kettlitz, 235–​50. Bern: Peter Lang, 2015. Roloff, Hans-​Gert. ‟Der Märtyrer und die Politik: Johann Agricolas Tragedia Johannis Huss. Zur Entstehung eines protestantischen Kampfdramas 1537.” European Medieval Drama 19 (2015): 33–​45. Roloff, Hans-​ Gert. ‟Martin Luther als Bühnenfigur im Drama des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts.” In Die Bedeutung der Rezeptionsliteratur für Bildung und Kultur der Frühen Neuzeit (1400–​1750), vol. 4, edited by Laura Auteri et al., 315–​39. Bern: Peter Lang, 2016. Schade, Heidemarie. ‟Andreas Hondorffs Promptuarium.” In Volkserzählung und Reformation. Ein Handbuch zur Tradierung und Funktion von Erzählstoffen und Erzählliteratur im Protestantismus, edited by Wolfgang Brückner, 647–​703. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1974. Scheitler, Irmgard. Schauspielmusik. Funktion und Ästhetik im deutschsprachigen Drama der Frühen Neuzeit, vol. 1. Tutzing: ortus, 2013. Scheitler, Irmgard. ‟Lutherus redivivus. Das Reformationsjubiläum 1617. Mit einem Ausblick auf das Jubiläum 1717.” Jahrbuch für Liturgik und Hymnologie 55 (2016): 174–​215. Scherer, Hartmann. ‟Hartmann, Andreas.” In Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 10 (1879): 680. Schlüter, Margildis: Münzen und Medaillen zur Reformation 16. bis 20. Jahrhundert aus dem Besitz des Kestner-​Museums Hannover. Hannover: Kestner Museum, 1983. Schmidt, Christian. ‟Der geküsste Papst. Ritual-​und Zeremoniellparodien in Heinrich Kielmanns Tetzelocramia zum Reformationsjubiläum 1617 in Stettin.” In Reformatio Baltica, edited by Heinrich Assel et al., 475–​89. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018.

228 Dietl Wendebourg, Dorothea. ‟Vergangene Reformationsjubiläen. Ein Rückblick im Vorfeld von 2017.” In Der Reformator Martin Luther 2017. Eine wissenschaftliche und gedenkpolitische Bestandsaufnahme, edited by Heinz Schilling, 261–​81. Berlin:  De Gruyter, 2015.

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Dramatising History in Schoepper’s Ioannes Decollatus and Grimald’s Archipropheta Mike Pincombe Abstract The two neo-​Latin versions of the martyrdom of John the Baptist, Jacob Schoepper’s Ioannes decollatus and Nicholas Grimald’s Archipropheta, show adaptations of a biblical ‘history’ to tragic modes. Operating a distinction between veracity and verisimilitude, the plays follow classical practice, yet at the same time they also aim to offer a response to ordinary circumstances, such as a classroom environment. This exemplarity is a feature centred upon the presentation of Herod and Herodias as monsters with didactic value.

Keywords Nicholas Grimald –​Jacob Schoepper –​John the Baptist –​Herod –​Herodias –​veracity and verisimilitude

1

Introduction

When sixteenth-​century playwrights turned to the history set out in the Bible as the material for one of their plays, they faced (at least) two simple but difficult dramaturgical problems. First, there was the problem of veracity: how far should they stick to the truth as it was represented in the text that they were using as material? On the whole, and for obvious reasons, they tried to stay as close as they could to the text of the Bible. But, if it was a story from the gospels, then there was always the possibility of two conflicting versions of the truth. In fact, this is the case with the story of the fatal banquet as described by Mark and Matthew. In the first, Herodias’s dancing daughter has to leave the room and consult with her mother as to what she should ask for, and then go back to the room when Herodias has told her to ask for the head of John the Baptist. In Matthew, Herodias has already told her what to say, so the girl

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004449503_010

230 Pincombe can just come out with the answer. Schoepper follows Matthew, and Grimald Mark, but both of them contradict the story by having Herodias present at the feast, whereas she is obviously absent in the Bible. However, this is the only occasion on which our authors stray from the source so blatantly –​and I think they get away with it. Second, there was the problem of verisimilitude: how far should they go in inventing new material which was somehow similar to this truth? Generally, as in the case of the story of John the Baptist which served as the model for Grimald and Schoepper, there was simply not enough material in the source in order to dramatise as a full-​length play, certainly not a tragedy or comedy in the traditional forms they recognised from ancient drama. More material needed to be invented, and it was, in great quantities of new materials. Here they followed the principle of verisimilitude, so that their audiences would not be able to see the joint between the old and the new, between the Word of God and their own words. This is the practical problem that will interest us in the essay that follows. The history of John the Baptist, of course, was good material for a tragedy: the saintly martyr suffers death at the hands of a cruel tyrant. But we shall not be much concerned with John in this essay, nor with the Herod and Herodias, the other two characters who might be said to be tragic agonists. Rather, we shall concentrate on characters who we would more likely associate with comedy. For example, both Schoepper and Grimald wanted to have a clown in their play, and there were no clowns in the Bible story. In fact, it was not so hard to add a clown as we might think; and it was even easier to add the household servants who will serve as the main focus of our attention in this essay. But these comical characters can take on a life of their own, and that is what I find so interesting. In Schoepper’s play, the clown and the servants remain quite strictly bound by the principle of verisimilitude, but this is not the case in Grimald’s Archipropheta, as we shall see. And the play is all the better for it! 2

Schoepper’s Ioannes Decollatus

We will start with Schoepper’s Ectrachelistis, sive Ioannes decollatus (henceforth shortened as Ioannes decollatus), since he is much more self-​consciously aware of the two problems outlined in our introduction. Grimald’s awareness of these problems seems to have been more intuitive. Jacob Schoepper (Schöpper) was a young man when he wrote what was the first of the six or seven plays he composed during his brief life. He was born in Dortmund between 1512 and 1516, wrote Ioannes in 1543, when he was acting as

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chaplain at the new gymnasium built in his home town the year before by the city fathers; he died in 1554.1 Schoepper had been chosen as chaplain because he was a friend of the first master of the school, Johann Lambach, and he wrote his play as a sort of scriptural supplement to the secular education provided for the boys by Lambach and his fellow-​teachers. In the dedication of the play to the city fathers of Dortmund, written in December 1544, Schoepper explains that he wrote it, not only to encourage them to continue in their support of learning in Dortmund, but also to demonstrate the good use of his talents, and, most importantly, to provide enjoyable teaching-​materials for the boys at the new school. He praises Lambach and his colleagues for making the boys perform in literary exercises (litteraturae progymnasmata) which would help them speak Latin well and confidently: “declamations and disputations, and especially by acting in comedies.”2 Would it not be well, he thought, if they had “some new and godly theme” (materiem aliquam pietatis novam) in addition to all these excellent exercises? So instead of writing a play in imitation of Terence or Seneca, he would write a tragoedia nova et sacra, which is how Ioannes decollatus is described in its title. This seems all very unexceptionable, but Schoepper was treading carefully here. He had received the usual education in litterae humaniores, first at the school in Münster, then at the university of Louvain in Flanders. But now that he was chaplain at the gymnasium, and from 1544, also priest at the church of St Peter in Dortmund, he wished to send a clear signal that he was more concerned with what he calls pietas, by which he seems to mean literature based directly or indirectly in scripture. He says: “When I was casting about in my mind for some task to go about, I wanted one that was drawn from godly literature rather than from ballads or profane history” (malui eum pietati, quam naenijs aut historijs prophanis uendicare). The word prophanis could be translated as ‘secular’, but I have kept closer to the Latin here, because Schoepper uses it in its etymological sense of ‘before’ (pro-​) the ‘sacred place’ (phanum). Profane things were by definition not sacred, because they were excluded from the phanum, and had to wait outside, as it were. Nowadays, we tend to use the word profane, if we use it at all, to refer to bad language, words which have

1 See Ralf Georg Czapla, “Schoepper, Jacob ( Jacobus de Tremonia),” in Neue Deutsche Biographie; herausgegeben von der Historischen Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2007), vol. xxiii: 432–​33. 2 Jacobus Schoepper, Ectrachelistis, sive Ioannes decollatus (Coloniae: Mart. Gymnicus, 1546), sig. [A4v]:  “Declamationes, item & disputationes, Comica praesertim actione” (quoted from the edition on Austrian Literature Online [http://​www.literature.at/​viewer.alo?objid=10956&viewmode=fullscreen, accessed 30 July 2019]).

232 Pincombe been banned from polite speech, and especially those which take the form of curses or oaths in which God’s name is taken in vain. It is easy to see how the word prophanus might have both the neutral and negative senses in this passage, and that is why Schoepper has to be careful. He does not wish to say that the teaching of Terence and Seneca to schoolboys is somehow opposed to pietas, in a detrimental sense, but the possibility of such a misconstruction is always present. Schoepper also knew that the mere fact of turning a Bible story into a neo-​ classical five-​act tragedy could land him in trouble with some critics. To the printed text of Ioannes decollatus, published in 1546, by which time our poet was also priest at the church of St Mary, Schoepper added a long prologue addressed to the zoili –​carping critics –​who he knew would find fault with his play. First of all, he expects some people to complain that he will be blamed for writing in classical metres: “Because I have dared to translate sacred things (sacra) into profane verses (uersibus /​ Prophanis)” (sig. [A6v]). Here we see that same problematical opposition between the sacred and the profane, but this time prophanitas has a more negative sense. There is worse to come: “By others I will be judged worthy of a thousand deaths because I have freely added to the sacred history material of my own invention” (Quod sacrae historiae scilicet /​ Quaedam affinxerimus libere). The word affingo is derived from fingo, which means ‘to invent’ which is the root of our English word fiction. What we might call ‘affiction’ involves inventing something and then adding it to something else. The possibility of a negative construction along the lines of contamination and deception is obvious. And we have returned to the problem of verisimilitude discussed in our introduction. The problem of veracity lurks behind the polarised opposition of the sacred and the profane. If you are not with us, you are against us; and if you do not stick to the text of the Bible, you must be speaking lies, and you are probably a toe of Antichrist to boot –​and so on. The radical scripturalist was a familiar figure in the days of Schoepper and Grimald, but, really, there seems to have been very little attention paid to the more extreme forms of scripturalism when it came to dramatising stories from the Bible. If there were, then there would not have been so many –​and there are hundreds of them in the sixteenth century. The real problem is that of verisimilitude, or preventing affiction drifting from the neutral to the negative position with respect to the original text, from a necessary extension of the original in the same spirit as it was written, to one in which extension seems to involve –​unintentionally, of course –​a deviation which threatens to undermine the integrity of the original. In fact, Schoepper had nothing to worry about, for his affictions are uncontroversial. But he was worried nevertheless.

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In the preface to the spectators of Ioannes decollatus, Schoepper makes the following not quite truthful declaration: “We have come here, with Christ as our director (Christo auspice), to show you a spectacle; not one that has been made up in any way (haud quidem /​Fictum), but completely true (uerissimum); not funny and silly, but very serious; not trivial and useless, but extremely fruitful; and one, moreover, that takes nothing at all from fairy-​tales, nor from the poets’ fables (prodigiosis Gentium  /​Commentis, aut Poetarum etiam fabulis), but deals only with the most well-​authenticated history of the sacred evangelist [sacri Euangeliographi /​Historia compertissima).”3 In fact, most of Ioannes decollatus is fictum, or affictum, for there is simply not enough material in the Bible to fill out a play. But Schoepper means that the play is not completely made-​up, but ‘based on a true story’. Notice the reappearance of the sacred-​profane opposition, with new genres, fairy-​tales and fables and no doubt other fanciful concoctions, joining the ballads and ‘profane stories’ of the earlier passage. Note, too, that the sort of play Schoepper was determined not to write was probably quite comical; and here we dimly see a further opposition lining up behind the original one, with tragedy being attracted to the ‘good’ pole, and comedy to the ‘bad’. So Schoepper was aware of the problem of maintaining verisimilitude in the affictive process, and he saw it as part of a more general problematic of writing in a way that was conformable to pietas. Let us give an example of how he proceeded to engage with these problems, which he does, on the whole, rather successfully. The clown mentioned earlier seems an obvious place to start. He is called Morio, which means ‘fool’, and he is the court-​jester in the household of Herod and Herodias. Frederick S. Boas finds him rather weak: “Schoepper’s Morio, who appears only in Act ii.iv, and Act iii.ii and iii, cuts a few conventional capers, but his main function –​which is far from appropriate –​is to tell Herodias how the Baptist had denounced Herod for his incestuous marriage.”4 This is hardly fair, however, for Schoepper does not introduce Morio in order to make the audience laugh, or the other characters in the play for that matter. He is there because Herod is a king, and kings have jesters. There is no jester in the Bible, but Schoepper merely extends his material in a way which he felt was consistent with historical verisimilitude. Morio is not really a caper-​cutter, either, though he cracks a bitter jest at the expense of his superiors from time to time. They do not laugh, however, but tell him to shut up. Typical is Herod’s response to Morio’s first mild taunt: 3 Ibid., sig. B1r-​[B1v]. 4 Frederick S. Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1914 [rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1971]), 35.

234 Pincombe He. Tace Morio, /​ Dicere, nondum est partium. Mo. Sile /​Hem Morio nisi uapulare gaudeas.5 [Herod: Be quiet, Morio. It is not yet your place to speak. Morio: Be silent, Morio, unless you enjoy being flogged; ii.iv] Only in his long scene with Herodias (iii.ii) does Morio have the chance to speak at length, but here he still answers Herodias’s question very guardedly, and certainly not funnily, when she makes him tell her how John told Herod he must give her up in the earlier scene. Again, I cannot agree with Boas that Morio acts in a way that is “far from appropriate”6 here. Far from it, since the court jester was precisely the person who had licence to speak the truth in the conventions of the time. In fact, do we not hear in Boas’s objection an echo of Sidney’s patrician exasperation with the way English playwrights were fond of “mingling kings and clowns”?7 This is not to deny that there is a certain grotesquery in Herodias’s tigerish innuendo at the expense of her amiculus; but it points towards Wilde’s Salome rather than Sidney’s Apology for Poetry. Let us have another example of the way in which Schoepper dealt with the problem of achieving verisimilitude in adapting the materials of the Bible to the sort of play he wished to write. We should note that Ioannes decollatus is not strictly neo-​classical in terms of its imitation of ancient models, for where, say, Seneca is very sparing in his dramatis personae, Schoepper most definitely is not. There are no fewer than forty-​eight named characters, as well as a crowd of disciples and a cohort of Herod’s men. As H. A. Junghans comments: “Many characters seem to be introduced solely to get as many schoolboys as possible on the stage in front of the audience.”8 Junghans also notes that Schoepper’s metre is “by no means always pure iambic trimeters” –​though the zoili would no doubt still have growled; and that although his language is not unadorned, “it is monstrously broad (‘ungeheur breit’) at the beginning and end of every 5 Schoepper, Ioannes decollatus, sig. [C7v]. 6 Boas, University Drama, 35. 7 Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poesy; ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London:  Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1965 [2nd ed. Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 1973]), 135. 8 H. A.  Junghans, “Jacob Schöpper als theologischer und dramatischer Schriftsteller”, in A.  Döring, Johann Lambach und das Gymnasium zu Dortmund 1543–​1582. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Humanismus und seines Schulwesens und der Reformation, 92 (Berlin: Calvary & Comp., 1875; Bayrische StaatsBibliothek digital [https://​reader.digitale-​sammlungen.de/​ de/​fs1/​object/​ display/​bsb11308177_​00005.html; accessed 30 July  2019]):  “Viele Personen scheinen nur deszhalb eingeführt, um möglichst viel Schüler auf die Bühne zu bringen und so auch das zuhörende Publikum zu verstärken.”

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scene, when all the characters exchange greetings in some detail.” Junghans has a point here, for Schoepper seems to be worried that his character’s entrances and exits would be regarded as unmotivated; they did not explain what they were about each time. Again, we are reminded of Sidney’s derisive comments on the English vernacular drama of about the same period: “the player, when he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived.”9 In Schoepper, it is a question not of ‘where’ but ‘why’. But these scene-​openings are a particularly rich source of affiction for our poet. Here is the beginning of the first scene of Act v, in which king Herod comes on with two pages, Doryphorus and Somatophylax.10 Herod says: “You can go back indoors now, boys. I have no need of you at present, and I feel like strolling around here for a bit, as I usually do” (Solita pro consuetudine).11 At first glance, this looks like clumsy dramaturgy, for the boys must surely know what their master’s habits are. This is an expository hint to us, the audience, we think. But it is not the case, for Doryphorus says that they will do what Herod says willingly, of course, but that otherwise it would be “improper” (praeter decorum) to leave the king by himself. Herod: “I know, but right now it isn’t necessary.” In other words, Herod’s earlier words are now shown to be somewhat out of order, and we are lead to expect something interesting. Then Somatophylax commends the king to the protection of the gods; Herod piously hopes they will look after him; and off go the boys. And finally, the king gets down to business: “Ye gods!” –​and he reveals to the audience the excruciating mental agony he suffers being caught between wanting to obey John, on the one hand, who wants him to get rid of Herodias, and, on the other, Herodias, who wants him to get rid of John. This little episode could be staged quite effectively, I think, indeed, dramatically, to present a character gripped by conflicting demands: Herod is exploding with frustration, but he has to hide this from his pages in order to keep it secret. However, Junghans is right to wonder if Schoepper did not overplay his hand somewhat. Here is the opening of the scene with Herodias and Morio cited above. We will have it in full, to give a flavour of the style which Junghans calls “monstrously broad,” but which I think is simply colloquial:

9 Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, 134. 10 By the way, there is a slight error here in the text: “Dorymestor” is the name given here, but he is actually one of the soldiers in an earlier scene, and “Doryphorus” is the name given in the cast list. 11 Schoepper, Ioannes decollatus, sig. F5r.

236 Pincombe A C T V S III. S C E N A  I. Herodias. Abra. Pedisca, pedissequae. Prime. Manete uos hem uirgines in aedibus Et curate omnia ut intus purè candicene. Ab. Te ne sequemur iam Domina foras. He. Haud est opus Modò. Vos curate tantum, quae curanda sunt. Ab. Pro omni uirili. Pe. Est praeterea quod nos uelis Hera? He. Nihil impraesentiarum, quod mihi Occurat. Pe. Vale igitur interim Domina. He. Sed Heus. Ab. Adsumus paratae. He. Vt & uesteis simul Omnes ac ornamenta caetera nitidè Repurgentur, suoque; reponantur loco, Efficite. Ab. Curabuntur sedulò omnia. He. Demiror hercle . . . Sola loquitur.12 [Herodias, with Abra and Pedisca, her attendants. (Herodias) first: You girls stay inside and take care that everything in there is bright and clean. Abra: So we’re not coming out with you then, your majesty? Herodias: There’s no need right now. You just take care of everything that needs taking care of. Abra:  We’ll do our best. Pedisca: Is there anything else you want from us, your majesty? Herodias: Nothing comes to mind at the moment. Pedisca: Well, goodbye for now, your majesty. Herodias: Just a moment! Abra: We’re ready and waiting. Herodias: Take care that my clothes are clean, and my accessories, too, and all put back in their proper places. Abra: We’ll take care of everything. Herodias: By Hercules! … (Speaking alone.)] Next she launches into a long soliloquy in which she asks herself what has got into Herod to make him so distant –​and then in comes Morio. Here we have two very minor characters who at first may seem to be brought in simply to be dismissed, as if Schoepper could only introduce monologue by means of a little inconsequential dialogue (which is not in fact the case). But we might also argue that he uses the brief conversation to show, let us say, that Herodias is better able to control her impatience than Herod is, citing the otherwise ‘unnecessary’ detail of her calling back her maids after she has first dismissed them. My own explanation, however, is rather different. I believe that Schoepper actually enjoyed writing the kind of trivial

12

Ibid., [D3v]-​D4r.

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conversation which I have described as ‘inconsequential’ –​in the sense that nothing follows on from it (Latin consequor, to follow as an effect) –​or that it leads nowhere. Inconsequential episodes are de facto unaligned with the action of the play in terms of its plot, which is always moving relentlessly forward to its climax, at least, if we follow the line of analysis set out by Aristotle. For him, the praksis of the play –​its action –​is composed of pragmata, the scenes, or even the parts of scenes, in which one event follows on from another in a chain of cause and effect to the teleūte, or ‘conclusion’. But not all the material of the play is devoted to these scenes: “The rest is episode [epeisodia]” (xvii.v). The exchanges which begin and end Schoepper’s scenes are tiny little episodes in the Aristotelian sense. As such, they are potentially distracting, though their position in the scene probably minimises this risk. Nonetheless, they may also be regarded as distractions in a more interesting and unexpected way. Distraction is a difficult theoretical concept, unless it is clearly defined in a fairly coherent system, as in the Poetics. This is perhaps not the place to theorise at any great length on this topic, so we will merely pick up a phrase from Schoepper’s letter to the city fathers of Dortmund. He says here that he wanted to write a play that would conform to pietas, and help the boys on to a career in the Church, even, but one also “which they would enjoy performing” (cuius actione oblectetur).13 The word oblecto means ‘delight, amuse, divert, entertain’. This seems innocent enough, but the word is derived from lacto, which means ‘to lead on, induce, entice’, and comes itself from lacio, or ‘to entice, inveigle’. But the negative core sense of leading astray in lacio is mollified as the word develops towards the idea of passing the time agreeably. But there is still something of the old sense in the word as it is used by Schoepper. We might compare the English word ‘divert’, which means both to entertain and to make something turn away from its course. So it is that the oblectation of performance might turn the school boy actor away from the pietas which he is supposed to be learning in order to make him a better minister of God’s word and a better upholder of the religious culture of his society. The sheer fun of dressing up in Herodias’s gorgeous clothes and tinkly accessories could become an end in itself. But let us leave Schoepper with this piquant image of the head-​boy in drag, and turn to Grimald and his Archipropheta.

13

Ibid., [A4v].

238 Pincombe 3

Nicholas Grimald’s Archipropheta

Nicholas Grimald, like Schoepper, wrote his play for academic performance, although for university students rather than schoolboys.14 Born about the same time as Schoepper, in 1519, Grimald had studied at Cambridge before migrating to Oxford, to Brasenose, where he wrote Christus redivivus during the winter of 1541–​42. Then, when Henry viii re-​founded King’s College as Christ Church in the winter 1545–​46, Grimald became one of the new fellows, apparently, on the strength of the display of talent and pietas evidenced by his Archipropheta.15 Later on, he resigned his fellowship, took orders, and became chaplain to the bishop of London, before recanting in dubious circumstances in 1555, and dying obscurely a few years later.16 If, as is generally supposed, Grimald took Schoepper as his model, then he must have read Ioannes decollatus soon after it was published in 1546. On the whole, critics have accepted Herford’s judgement that Grimald did not attempt to imitate Schoepper, but only took a few hints here and there.17 As we have seen, Boas drew a comparison between Schoepper and Grimald in their deployment of what he calls the “comical element,” and he certainly finds in favour of the English dramatist. The clown’s function is much better exercised by Grimald’s Gelasimus (his name is derived from gelos, the Greek word for mirth): “In Archipropheta, with his fellow servants, a Syrian slave and maid, he forms a true foil to the regal and tragic figures.”18 In other words, the comical element is subservient –​literally, almost, given the status of these servant characters –​to the tragical element. We will not quarrel here with the ancient and venerable concept of the ‘foil’; but that is not what is really happening in Archipropheta –​or not only. Boas probably means that the servants command our attention only insofar as they throw light on Herod and Herodias, and perhaps also Tryphera, which is the 14

Grimald was not the only playwright who saw the value of Schoepper’s Ioannes decollates. Cornelius Schonaeus also used the text in his own Baptistes in Haarlem in 1603. See Cora Dietl, “A Secret Message by Intermedial Reference? Cornelius Schonaeus’ ‘Catholic’ Baptistes in Reformed Haarlem,” [in press]. 15 L.  R.  Merrill, ed., The Life and Poems of Nicholas Grimald (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1925; rpt. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1969), 220. 16 Michael G.  Brennan, “Grimald, Nicholas (b. 1519/​20, d.  in or before 1562),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. From the Earliest Times to the Year 2000; eds. H.  C. G. Matthews & Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), vol. xxiii. 17 Charles H. Herford, Studies in the Literary Relations between England and Germany in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: University Press, 1886), 115–​19. 18 Boas, University Drama, 35.

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name Grimald gives to Salome. John is not regal, true, but the other characters insistently harp on his majesty; and he is, of course, tragical. In any case, whatever else the servants may do on stage, when they are not throwing light on these other characters, they are apparently a distraction, since they are not carrying out from their ‘appropriate function’. Now it is quite true that the servants throw light on their regal characters, whereas the regal characters do not throw light on their servants. This is because, in accordance with traditional wisdom, servants gossip and masters do not. So, for example, the first time we see Syrus and Syra together, they are singing the praises of their mistress. They come on stage together, and Syrus delivers a blazon of Herodias which is almost salacious in its detail, such as this one: Papilla laxum haud prominens implet sinum, Sed circumcisa, mollis, blanda, eburnean, ac Tenero aequalis botro sedet rotundula.19 [“Her breasts do not swell to fill a flabby bosom, but stand there trim, soft, charming, white as ivory, rounded like tender grapes.”20] We have not seen Herodias yet, and this may be a way of preparing us to view the flat-​chested boy-​actor as a voluptuous woman; but there is still something gloating about Syrus’s description. Syra is more discreet, and her paean dwells only on Herodias’s pampered life-​style; but she, too, ends on a saucy note: “Soporam feruido dat noctem coniugi, /​Et somno” (The drowsy nights she gives to her ardent spouse, and to sleep).21 Then Gelasimus comes on and tries to buy a kiss from Syra with a penny tip he has just got from the pharisees. It looks almost as if Syrus and Syra, inspired by the lyricism of their encomiums, have just embraced and kissed as the clown enters. In any case, the point of the scene is not only to throw light on Herodias, but also on Syrus and Syra. Boas rightly notes that their celebrations of her beauty and life-​style “might have been written of the revellings of Antony and Cleopatra,” and that the “amorous ecstasy” of the exchange between the king and queen in the following scene anticipates “the most glowing of Shakespearian scenes.”22 He has a point here; 19

Nicolao Grimoaldo, Archipropheta, tragoedia iam recèns in lucem êdita (Coloniae: Marti. Gymnicus, 1548), sig. B4r (Internet Archive, https://​archive.org/​details/​bub_​gb_​ pBNlnTwzhqYC/​page/​n21; accessed 31 July 2019). 20 Merrill, ed., Life and Poems of Nicholas Grimald, 263. 21 Grimoaldo, Archipropheta, sig. [B4v]; Merrill, ed., Life and Poems of Nicholas Grimald, 263. 22 Boas, University Drama, 36.

240 Pincombe and I would extend the comparison to the way Shakespeare fills out Charmian and Iras, and, of course, Enobarbus, as characters who seem to have a life of their own, as real parts that an actor might wish to play, not just as functions of the tragic action. Boas seems to ignore the fact that the encomiums of Syrus and Syra tell us as much about their authors as their subjects. Let us note also that here is a scene in which the servants jest with each other on stage in the absence of their masters. In Schoepper’s play, this does not happen. Herod comes on with his pages, and then dismisses them; Herodias does the same with her maids –​and in a later scene Salome will do the same with her maids (v.iv). For Schoepper, these attendants only appear in attendance on their master or mistress, though, as we have seen, they still have a role to play in their brief exchanges with those whom they serve. In this respect, Doryphorus, Abra and the others really are true foils to the regal and tragical characters –​ and much more so than Syrus and Syra. In fact, there are many scenes, or parts of scenes, in which the servants appear by themselves in Archipropheta, and Grimald clearly conceived this kind of scene as a dramaturgical unit in a way that Schoepper did not. There is even an element of concatenation between these scenes. As we have just noted, when Gelasimus comes across Syrus and Syra in Act ii.iii, he produces the coin that he has just been given in the previous scene. This gives rise to a repeated gag, where the clown tries to kiss the girl and is rebuffed in Act iii.v. Moreover, in Act ii.ix, Gelasimus gives a mock sermon on the creation, with Syra and the chorus of Herod’s men as his audience. It is clearly meant to be funny: sy. Ha, ha, he: cho hero: Ha, ha, he.23 Then, in Act iii.v, Syra comes on with Gelasimus and Syrus, and tells the latter that he has missed something really funny by not being at the sermon –​and Gelasimus demands a kiss: “sy. Ah nequissime” (O you bad, bad man!).24 The concatenation is very slight, but it is enough to keep us interested. And yet, in between the sermon scene and its comical sequel, Syra has been playing the part of Herodias’s confidante. In Act iii.ii, Herodias confides that she cannot sleep for anxiety that Herod might listen too obediently to John; and Syra tries to console her with a little unexpected philosophy:  “sy. Irarum campo idoneum adde terminum,  /​ Quem praetor nemo potest impunè

23 Grimoaldo, Archipropheta, sig. [C2v]. 24 Ibid., sig. [C7r]; Merrill, ed., Life and Poems of Nicholas Grimald, 295.

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currere” (Place that bound to the field of your passions, beyond which no one can pass unpunished).25 Herodias does not listen and exits, leaving Syra on stage to deliver an expository monologue which begins very ominously: “Syrus solus. /​ Per caput hoc iuro, iamdudum tragoediae /​ Acerbae apud nos excitantur & graues” (On my life, I swear that tragic circumstances, grave and painful, are coming upon us).26 And it is Syra who delivers the verdict on the atrocity of John’s beheading at the fatal banquet, when all the banqueters have left the stage to enjoy yet further revelling: “Deum immortalem. Quod peractum nunc scelus est? /​ Non ista poscit hoc tempus spectacula” (Immortal God! what crime has been committed now? The time demands no such sight as this).27 And it will come as no surprise to learn that it is Syra who plays the traditional part of the messenger, who (with a little imaginative license) passes on the bad news to John’s disciples and the people at large in Act v.iii. Is Syra really just a foil to the regal and tragical characters? Surely she is more than that. Her part is too rich and varied for her to be reduced to a function of the tragic action, though she certainly has an important part to play in that as well. One could almost work out a little life-​story for her, in which she is converted to a kind of pietas. In the sermon scene, where Gelasimus’s humour is clearly directed at John, Syra laughs along with Herod’s men, as if all of these household servants took a party-​line drawn up by Herodias in derision of the preacher. But, in the end, she turns against Herod and his ‘ferocious wife’, when she gives her message to John’s party at the end of the play. We should not make too much of this conversion –​but not too little either. The way in which her character is formed and her story is told, however rudimentary, suggests to me that Grimald actually found her interesting in herself. Here we should perhaps pause for a moment. What I am suggesting here is that Grimald was overtaken by his own inventions in Archipropheta. His intentions in writing the play are given quite clearly in his dedication of Archipropheta to Richard Cox, the new master of Christ Church. For his own part, he says, he wrote the play to improve his style, or, at least, to keep his hand in; and also because it gave him spiritual comfort to write sacred dialogue (“sermonis … sacri”28). But he also emphasises the didactic value of the play, in giving its spectators and readers examples of good and bad behaviour. John’s sanctity is important, of course, against which is set those “hypocrites,” who are “blind …

25 Grimoaldo, Archipropheta, sig. [B4v]; Merrill, ed., Life and Poems of Nicholas Grimald, 291. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., [E7v] and 345. 28 Grimoaldo, Archipropheta, sig. A3r.

242 Pincombe in self-​love,”29 by whom are meant the pharisees Philautus (Greek: ‘self-​love’) and Typhlus (Greek: ‘blind’). Herod’s monstrosity is singled out, and also “the wantonness of women, regal luxury, the flattery of courtiers.”30 This last list certainly refers to Herodias, though Tryphera (Greek: ‘voluptuous’) is actually a lamb rather than a tiger; but the flattery of courtiers is harder to pin down on any particular character. In any case, neither Gelasimus nor the two Syrian servants are in any way alluded to as items of the intentional structure of the play. Yet they have a role to play on the dramatisation of “this history of John the Baptist.”31 But if Grimald did not intend them to be there, how is it that they are there at all? And why should they be so interesting? It is always difficult to analyse texts with a view to the interests of their authors, since we usually have to deduce them from the text. In the case of our two plays, we certainly have a clear statement of authorial intention; but we have also seen that such statements do not always –​perhaps never –​cover every element of the text. Even if we cast our net a little wider, Syra still escapes. We could argue, after all, that Grimald was not only working with the well-​ known story of John the Baptist, but also within a certain non-​classical tradition of the mixed play, in which serious and jocose elements were combined. Indeed, the lengthy dedication to Gilbert Smith of Christus redivivus explains at some length the principles of combination which allowed him to call his play a “Comoedia Tragica, sacra & noua.” He notes how his old tutor, John Airey, had observed that “great things had been interwoven with the small, joyous with sad, obscure with manifest, incredible with probable.”32 Now Archipropheta is billed quite simply as a “Tragoedia,” but it, too, has its joyous aspects, in the lyrical scenes, and I suppose we could describe the scenes with the servants as depicting small things rather than large things. But the significant role given to Syra still remains unexplained by these make-​shift remarks on genre. It seems to me that we have here a fairly straightforward case of the emergence of an element which was not predictable from the materials which the author had at his disposal. The principle of verisimilitude accounts for the servants easily enough, as generated from the historicised context of the story in the Bible, and we may bring in generic expectations if we wish; but it cannot be made to predict the part played by Syra. She is to be explained by recourse to some other motivation. But what? I would suggest that the answer lies in the problem at the heart of the concept of exemplary literature. Grimald tells Cox 29 30 31 32

Merrill, ed., Life and Poems of Nicholas Grimald, 235. Ibid. Ibid., 233. Ibid., 109.

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that the reader or spectator “will observe … how so impious a monster as Herod is rejected of God.”33 Herod is thus an example of monstrous impiety, and his story is an exemplum –​an exemplary narrative –​in which it is shown that impious monsters are rejected by God. Very well; and we could argue that Grimald does indeed successfully depict Herod as a monster of impiety (“impium  … monstrum”), and that God has rejected him, for Jehovah himself says that it is his design to make the Abels known by means of the Cains (“Abelos per Caïnos ostendere;” Act v.i).34 We do not even need to take God’s word for it, for we see not only Herod but also Herodias maddened by guilt in the scenes that follow. Very well; but who amongst the audience of the play would ever think to compare himself with Herod or herself with Herodias? The whole point of a monster is that it is hard to identify with it as an ordinary human being, and a monster is by definition so far removed from ordinary humanity that we may goggle at it in fear without a shred of empathy. The word monstrum refers to portents, in fact, things which demonstrate that they are beyond the course of our ordinary experience, and are thereby invested with an extraordinary if mysterious significance. Put more simply, how can a clown empathise with a king, or a servant-​girl with a tyrant. Syra is finally revolted by Herod: “Atrocem ô regem: flebile ô spectaculum: /​O dirum, ô horrendum, ô tyrannicum scelus” (O cruel king! O doleful spectacle! O dire, terrible, and tyrannical crime!).35 The spectators no doubt all nod solemnly in agreement: we would never do such things. True, because none of them are in the position to do them in the first place. They can watch the tyrant wreak havoc with a degree of equanimity, because a king is already so far removed from their own experience, without even needing to be a monster. It is not with Herod that any audience –​Tudor or modern –​can be expected to identify, nor with Herodias, nor John, for these ‘regal and tragic characters’ are all monstra in a way. Exemplary literature is based on the principle that its characters show (Latin: monstro) us how to behave and how not to behave. The further removed they are from ordinary human experience, the more monstrous they become, precisely because they seem less and less ‘human’. But Syra presents a character who is not obviously exemplary, but can still engage us in terms of the ‘human interest’ which is still so often despised by the professional intellectual. Grimald was interested in her because he was human, too. His world was the world of ‘small things’, at least, until he was imprisoned in 1555, and apparently threatened with the traitor’s death of 33 34 35

Ibid., 233. Ibid., 349; Grimoaldo, Archipropheta, sig. [E8v]. Ibid., sig. F1r; Merrill, ed., Life and Poems of Nicholas Grimald, 351.

244 Pincombe hanging, drawing, and quartering. He escaped, most probably by recanting, perhaps by playing the informer, having only two years earlier declared to an assembly of bishops at St Paul’s, in a sermon which must have been the high-​point of his life so far: “Much better it is to be deprived of life for God’s sake than to be deprived of God himself for the sake of life.”36 So he was no John the Baptist, after all, but the usual fallible human being, anxious about his own mortality. 4

Conclusion

A great deal more might be said of the way in which Schoepper and Grimald adapted the Bible story in their dramatisations of the history of John the Baptist. There are some more or less technical points of interest, such as the way in which they approach the difference between Mark and Matthew with respect to the girl’s response to the rash boon. The influence of the different national-​vernacular traditions would also be worth considering in greater detail with regard to the ways of mixing comedy into tragedy. But what I have tried to do here is to show how there is more to the process of dramatising history than the two principles of veracity and verisimilitude are ever likely to cover. This is partly because we need always to be aware of the secret operations of distraction, which diverts attention –​the author’s as well as the audience’s –​away from what appears to be the intentional structure of the text. But it is also because this type of distraction tends to be of that intuitively human kind, which dwells on the ordinariness of life, its banality or smallness. And we might even say that there is a certain greatness in this smallness. At one point in Ernst Klingemann’s Nachtwachen von Bonaventura, the narrator is moved to exclaim: It is a mark of human greatness to be able to carry on with other business in the presence of sublime objects, for example, to watch the sun come up whilst smoking a pipe, or to eat macaroni during the catastrophe of a tragedy.37 36 37

Ibid., 348. “Es gehört zur menschlichen Grösze in der Nähe erhabener Gegenstände, Nebengeschäfte zu betreiben, z. B. der aufgehenden Sonne mit der Pfeife im Munde ins Antlitz zu schauen, oder während der Katastrophe einer Tragödie Makkaroni zu speisen” ([Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann], Nachtwachen von Bonaventura; ed. Hermann Michel [Berlin: B. Behr, 1905], 126).

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I think this is true. Tragedy has acquired an inordinate amount of cultural prestige over the ages, though it has always also had its detractors. But keeping an emotional distance from tragic catastrophe, rather than trying to feel fear or pity, seems to me an appropriate response to the ineradicable inhumanity of –​ to choose a notorious ­example –​Seneca’s Thyestes. What is there to learn from this spectacle? Or, for that matter, from Oedipus rex? Philological reconstruction is a very worthy endeavour, but it will never recreate the emotional world in which these plays were watched or read, or that of the two plays we have been considering here. No doubt the audience knew what lessons they were meant to draw and drew them accordingly. But I wonder if we learn more from the ‘unofficial’ aspects of these plays? If, in fact, the story of Syra is much more interesting and important to us than the story of John –​which is certainly my own opinion. In fact, could we not even speak of a ‘tragedy of Syra’? Grimald called Christus redivivus a tragicomedy because “just as the first act yields to tragic sorrow, in order that the subject-​matter may keep its title, so the fifth and last adapts itself to delight and joy.”38 The ordinary tragedy works in reverse:  it starts with joy –​Syra’s happy life with the other servants –​and ends with sorrow –​her pain and disillusion as she tells the story of John’s death to the people at large. It is not a full tragedy, of course, because Syra’s micro-​praksis is buried beneath the weight of the main tragic action. It is, to borrow a phrase from Schoepper, an actiuncula (little action) not an actio. Syra remains a character of the episodes extended from the main historical action by the principle of verisimilitude, but there is still the potential here for what we might call (only slightly facetiously) a non-​historical non-​tragedy with Syra as its protagonist. That Grimald probably did not intend to write such a ‘little action’ when he sat down to compose his Archipropheta is not the point. It emerges from the process of writing –​and from his ordinary humanity as opposed to his professional strategies as a career reformist.

Bibliography

Boas, Frederick S. University Drama in the Tudor Age. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1914 (rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1971). Brennan, Michael G. “Grimald, Nicholas (b. 1519/​20, d. in or before 1562).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. From the Earliest Times to the Year 2000, edited by

38

Merrill, ed., Life and Poems of Nicholas Grimald, 109.

246 Pincombe H. C. G. Matthews & Brian Harrison, vol. 23. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, http://​www.oxforddnb.com/​ view/​article/​11629. Czapla, Ralf Georg. “Schoepper, Jacob ( Jacobus de Tremonia).” In Neue Deutsche Biographie, herausgegeben von der Historischen Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. 23: 432–​33. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2007. Dietl, Cora. “A Secret Message by Intermedial Reference? Cornelius Schonaeus’ ‘Catholic’ Baptistes in Reformed Haarlem,” [in press]. Grimoaldo, Nicolao. Archipropheta, tragoedia iam recèns in lucem êdita. Coloniae: Marti. Gymnicus, 1548. Internet Archive, https://​archive.org/​details/​bub_​gb_​pBNlnTwzhqYC, accessed 31 July 2019. Herford, Charles H. Studies in the Literary Relations between England and Germany in the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge: University Press, 1886. Junghans, H. A. “Jacob Schöpper als theologischer und dramatischer Schriftsteller.” In A. Döring, Johann Lambach und das Gymnasium zu Dortmund 1543–​1582. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Humanismus und seines Schulwesens und der Reformation, 85–​ 99. Berlin: Calvary & Comp., 1875. Bayrische StaatsBibliothek digital, https://​reader. digitale-​sammlungen.de/​de/​fs1/​object/​ display/​bsb11308177_​00005.html, accessed 30 July 2019. [Klingemann, Ernst August Friedrich], Nachtwachen von Bonaventura, herausgegeben von Hermann Michel. Berlin: B. Behr, 1904. Merrill, L. R., ed. The Life and Poems of Nicholas Grimald. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925 (rpt. Hamden: Archon Books, 1969). Sidney, Philip. An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poesy, edited by Geoffrey Shepherd. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1965 (2nd ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973). Schoepper, Jacobus. Ectrachelistis, sive Ioannes decollatus. Coloniae: Mart. Gymnicus, 1546. Austrian Literature Online, http://​www.literature.at/​viewer.alo?objid=10956&viewmode= fullscreen, accessed 30 July 2019.

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Helvetic Henry? A Swiss Adaptation of Henry v, or Something Near Enough Elisabeth Dutton Abstract This article describes the processes of translation, cutting and rearrangement by which Shakespeare’s Henry v, a play often identified with ‘Britishness’, is adapted for a modern Swiss audience. As a play celebrating a national ‘hero’ and a military history largely unknown to the Swiss, Henry v is adapted to an exploration of political power in the abstract, in particular the political power of rhetoric which Shakespeare’s Henry exemplifies and which can be richly presented using the multiple languages and dialects of Switzerland. Like the adaptation by Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, the translation not just of words but also of context occasions a certain black humour by which the subversive aspects of Shakespeare’s text are foregrounded and accentuated, and any sense of heroism stripped away. In particular, Shakespeare’s parodic presentation of the French army is pushed to absurdity in order to highlight the rhetorical construction of ‘the enemy’. This essay explores the influence of geography on the use of history in drama, and brings the arguments of other essays in this volume up to the present day, suggesting why the topic of dramatized history continues to be important.

Keywords William Shakespeare  –​Henry v  –​Switzerland  –​The Swiss Stage Bards  –​Battle of Agincourt –​Friedrich Dürrenmatt –​George Chapman –​multilingualism –​translating Shakespeare

1

Introduction

In October 2015, the United Kingdom marked the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, in which an English army led by Henry v defeated French King Charles vi’s much greater force, with a series of exhibitions and events

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004449503_011

248 Dutton including a banquet at the Guildhall and a service at Westminster Abbey.1 Comment on these commemorations was often complacently aware of the remoteness of history  –​Harry Mount in the Telegraph, for example, telling us, on 23 October 2015: “The closest restaurant to the hallowed battlefield of Agincourt is the Restaurant Charles vi [where] even patriotic Englishmen will enjoy the €18 (£13) set meal; my duck and smoked salmon were extremely good.”2 But some comment was more troubled. Ed West, writing in the Catholic Herald, characterised Agincourt as part of “a spurious war of aggression carried out by one of the worst monsters in English history,” Henry v, who “left behind nothing but corpses and grieving mothers.”3 West notes, among other atrocities, the massacre of French prisoners ordered by Henry –​a slaughter which, even if explained as a military precaution within an English triumph against overwhelming odds, casts a long shadow over a battle that was also part of an opportunist invasion. West, therefore, wonders “why this is worth celebrating, except as a way of expressing our appreciation of the Bard.” Certainly, the Bard featured prominently in the anniversary events. “A Concert of Agincourt Music and Readings” at All Hallows by the Tower included scenes from his Henry v and other readings by Esmond Knight, who played Fluellen in Olivier’s film of Shakespeare’s play. At the Guildhall banquet, there were recitations, including the St Crispin’s Day Speech, by Sam Marks from the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Henry v. At Westminster Abbey, actor and noted longbow expert Sir Robert Hardy performed passages of Shakespeare’s play. Although for military historians the victory of an outnumbered English and Welsh army at Agincourt was a matter of weaponry, tactics, and the weather, in the popular imagination Agincourt is the triumph of the Englishman, the Welshman and the Scotsman, fighting together and urged on by the rhetoric of their charismatic young king: the ‘band of brothers’, the ‘happy few’; arguably it was not Agincourt 1415, but Shakespeare’s Henry v, a play written in 1599, that, indirectly, was commemorated in 2015.4 1 The 2015 events are documented at https://​www.futurelearn.com/​courses/​agincourt/​0/​ steps/​15340. 2 https://​www.telegraph.co.uk/​travel/​destinations/​europe/​france/​nord-​pas-​de-​calais/​articles/​Agincourt-​600th-​anniversary-​A-​return-​to-​the-​muddy-​battlefield-​where-​Henry-​V-​ triumphed/​. 3 https:// ​ c atholicherald.co.uk/​ c ommentandblogs/​ 2 015/ ​ 1 0/ ​ 23/ ​ a gincourt- ​ i s- ​ n othing- ​ to- ​ celebrate/​. 4 That Shakespeare’s myth transforms historical ‘fact’ in the collective memory is exemplified by Gevert H. Nörtemann’s thesis, quoted at the beginning of Elsa Strietman’s essay in this volume, that history becomes myth that serves “the group’s self-​definition.”

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Shakespeare’s play tells the story of the young English king Henry v, who, with the support of the Church and on the basis of an ambiguous claim to the French throne, invades France. With an army of Scottish, Welsh, and English soldiers, he advances through France and wins a major victory, against a much larger French army, at Agincourt. Hearing that the French have killed English non-​combatant boys, Henry orders the slaughter of French prisoners. He then woos the French princess, Katherine, and marries her as part of a settlement that recognises him as heir to the French throne. The play featured explicitly on the United Kingdom’s national scene three years before the Agincourt commemorations, as part of the cultural programme that accompanied the 2012 Olympics. The Globe Theatre’s use of Henry v as the climax of its 2012 “Globe to Globe” season was much commented on: the play was chosen for presentation by an English company, in English, when the other works were presented by actors from many different nations in a range of different national languages. In a festival that celebrated internationalism, the nationalism of Henry v and its mocking presentation of non-​English characters as culturally and linguistically inferior seems at best tactless.5 In the same year appeared Thea Sharrock’s small screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, starring Tom Hiddleston, as part of the Hollow Crown series. Henry v had of course already been twice adapted for the big screen: in Laurence Olivier’s patriotic film of 1944, and in Kenneth Branagh’s de-​glamorised, gritty but nonetheless ambiguous post-​Falklands version of 1989. As discussion of these films reveals, the play has become a statement about ‘Britishness’ or perhaps ‘Englishness.’6 But, although Shakespeare may sometimes seem to offer the “common cultural currency in the heritage and the consciousness of Western Europe” that Elsa Strietman argues the Dutch rhetoricians found in Scripture,7 not all his plays are equally internationally

5 For tempered accounts of the production’s presentation of nationalism and the figure of Henry, see Stephen Purcell, “Shakespeare, Spectatorship, and the ‘Olympic Spirit’,” in Shakespeare on the Global Stage:  Performance and Festivity in the Olympic Year, eds. Paul Prescott & Eric Sullivan (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2015), 133–​62, and Abigail Rokison, “ ‘From thence to England’: Henry V at Shakespeare’s Globe,” in Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment, eds. Susan Bennett & Christie Carson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 303–​07. 6 On Branagh’s use of Vietnam war movie codes and the tensions between his images and music, see Maurice Hindle, Studying Shakespeare on Film (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 147–​51. On Branagh’s film as a struggle with Olivier’s, see Peter S. Donaldson, “Taking on Shakespeare: Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 60–​71. 7 Elsa Strietman, “An easy commerce of the old and new”: Rhetoricians and the Use of the Past,” in the present volume, 169.

250 Dutton known, and Henry v does not appear to be very important to anyone apart from the British. But Henry v does not appear to be very important to anyone else. This may be because the histories are generally much less performed than the tragedies and comedies outside the United Kingdom: for example, from September 2016 to January 2017, the German Shakespeare Society lists sixty-​ one premieres of productions (including theatre, opera and dance) of or based on Shakespeare plays; only two were productions of history plays –​a Richard iii in Hamburg and a two-​part project, in Freiburg im Breisgau, which condensed all the history plays into a theatrical sequence dealing with the struggle for power and the political and theatrical enactment of violence.8 Of course, whereas in Britain the histories offer a dramatization of national history, in Germany they do not. But there may be additional reasons for the European neglect of Henry v in particular. In France, Jean-​Michel Déprats reports that Henry v was not performed in French until 1999, and not just because of indignation at the play’s disparaging treatment of the French military:  “French directors shirk from staging Henry v because of its dominant heroic notes and jingoistic politics.” Today’s directors want their Shakespeare “disillusioned” with “the violence of history,” and are therefore troubled by Henry v, which “can be judged as less dialectic and ambiguous” than the other history plays.9 In fact, the British, too, are troubled by Henry v. The play has not only been repeatedly revived in times of national crisis, but has also been ‘consistently rewritten’ on those occasions. “When patriotism wants a play, the play Shakespeare produced  –​for just such an occasion  –​is found insufficiently simple and unnecessarily disquieting.”10 The play was first staged in 1599 yet the 1600 Quarto edition already omits much that complicates audience understanding of its action and its protagonist: as Gary Taylor notes, it is always “the more serious scenes” that “suffer the most drastic surgery.”11 The 1600 Quarto cuts Shakespeare’s opening scene, and lines in the second scene, that show clerical machinations behind ecclesiastical support for Henry’s claim to the French throne; thus it reduces the evidence that Shakespeare apparently provided to undermine arguments about Henry’s right to invade France. It also

8 9 10 11

See listings made available by the Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft (German Shakespeare Society), http://​shakespeare-​gesellschaft.de/​theater/​premieren-​spielzeit-​ 201617.html. Accessed June 13, 2017. Jean-​ Michel Déprats, “A French history of Henry V,” in Shakespeare’s History Plays: Performance, Translation, and Adaptation in Britain and Abroad, ed. Ton Hoenselaars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 75. William Shakespeare, Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 11. Ibid.

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cuts much of Henry’s violent speech to the Governor of Harfleur in scene 3.3, a change which must surely have allowed for a gentler, less savage presentation of the protagonist. 2

Shakespeare and Swiss History

The Swiss Henry v described here thus breaks the play’s tradition of ‘Britishness’ while at the same time continuing its tradition of adaptation to the shifting political ideals of the historical moments at which it is performed. The production, by the Swiss Stage Bards, was billed as Shakespeare’s Henry v (sort of ) /​ mehr oder weniger /​plus ou moins and was staged in November-​December 2018 at various locations around the city of Fribourg: the Centre Fris, the Gallery Fri-​Art, and the Gutenberg Museum. The Swiss Stage Bards began their Multilingual Shakespeare project at the officially French-​German bilingual University of Fribourg: they produce ‘Swiss Shakespeare’ that exploits the diverse linguistic resources of a tiny country that, located at the heart of Europe, has four official national tongues and numerous dialects as well as a rich array of languages brought by immigrants. The script of the Helvetic Henry v united German and French, as well as Italian, but the play was not just translated; it was also historically and geographically re-​contextualized.12 This ‘translation’, etymologically a ‘carrying across’, not just of language but also of context, is similar to the 1970 translation, by Swiss playwright Dürrenmatt, of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus: Dürrenmatt left the overt setting of his fictional text unchanged, presenting the action as historically and geographically removed, but created characters whose sensibilities and verbal styles betray an unmistakable contemporaneity, giving rise to an absurd feeling of dissonance. As Lukas Erne discusses, Dürrenmatt translated Shakespeare’s tragedy into black comedy, and did so in order to illustrate one main point: the futility of patriotism. This was, in Dürrenmatt’s view, the important message of history, whether fictionalised, like Titus Andronicus, or recent and real:  World War ii had demonstrated the dangers of ideologies of the ‘fatherland’, and neither the Swiss political establishment, which argued in the years after the war that their skilful politics and the deterrent powers of the Swiss army had saved the country from German invasion, nor the anti-​establishment, which accused the Swiss government of collaboration

12

So far this adaptation has not yet been published but an online edition of it may appear in the near future. Quotes from this play in the current essay are from its typescript.

252 Dutton with the Nazis, had properly understood this message. Dürrenmatt therefore adapted Titus to focus not on the protagonist’s loss of his family (it is particularly noticeable that his mutilated daughter Lavinia, pre-​eminent symbol of suffering in Shakespeare’s play, barely features), but on his loss of belief in justice and fatherland. Dürrenmatt thus “arguably tries to legitimate the views his play advances … by means of the label ‘Shakespeare’,” while his adaptation remains an example of “fascinating misreadings of the Shakespearean original that are profoundly and inevitably local.”13 Similarly, the Swiss Henry v is full of deliberate ‘misreadings’ that facilitate the translation of Shakespeare’s history not only into languages that are, in some cases, international, but in Switzerland are caught up in a series of esoteric relationships, but also into a localised political context informed by Swiss history. Switzerland’s ‘national’ history is very different from that of France or England; it has not long been a nation state. The Swiss in Shakespeare are mercenaries, fighting for money, not nationhood. Switzerland’s famous  –​or perhaps infamous –​neutrality during the Second World War moves the Swiss Henry v impossibly far from Olivier’s patriotic film adaptation: as Dürrenmatt recognised, for a country that is tiny and sandwiched between the big, and historically belligerent, European countries, Germany and France, “In unworthy times, an entirely worthy attitude is impossible,” and “Politicians cannot be expected to be heroic.”14 There is thus an additional irony:  the Switzers, known in Shakespeare’s day for their ferocity as soldiers, have now become a by-​word for not fighting, for neutrality. Neutrality is an ongoing official policy in international affairs: the Swiss have not sent fighters to any of the recent international conflicts, although they are involved in peace-​keeping  –​for example, Swiss soldiers guard the border between North and South Korea. The continuing high visibility of the Swiss army in the international imagination is perhaps mostly to do with pen-​knives; in daily Swiss life, the army is visible because military service is compulsory for all Swiss men –​students often have to excuse themselves from class because of it. However, the army is conceived non-​aggressively as a home guard, and the Swiss air force, notoriously, operate only in office hours.15

13 14 15

Lukas Erne, “Lamentable comedy or black tragedy?: Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s adaptation of Titus Andronicus,” in World-​wide Shakespeares: Local appropriations in film and performance, ed. Sonia Massai (London-​New York: Routledge, 2005), 94. Dürrenmatt, cited by Erne, “Lamentable comedy,” 93. This was revealed amid much ridicule in 2014. The army, that guardian of traditionally masculine behaviour patterns, reacted by announcing that the air force would operate around the clock by 2018 or 2020, at an additional cost of around 25 million Euros per year.

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But there is an important connection between Shakespeare’s Henry and Swiss History –​a sense of the importance of language. Shakespeare’s play is highly engaged with language, for example imaging the French Princess learning English so she can talk to Henry, or showing Henry’s manipulation of language in his call to arms, which uses only Anglo-​Saxon words, with no French loans.16 Indeed, in Shakespeare’s play it is Henry’s skill with language that enables him to inspire his audiences as well as his soldiers. The Swiss adaptation of Henry v therefore concentrated on this theme, creating a Henry who could say whatever people needed to hear, in whatever language they needed to hear it. Furthermore the tribal rivalries, echoed in dialect, of the Englishman, the Welshman and the Scotsman that Shakespeare’s play explores in the ranks of Henry’s army were echoed in the linguistic rivalries of the Swiss national languages –​French, German, Italian.17 Like the film adaptations and the 1600 Quarto, the translators of Swiss Henry v were troubled by scenes in which the Church legitimises Henry’s war, and by the historical fact, presented in Shakespeare’s play, that Henry ordered the killing of prisoners on the battlefield. The strategy for dealing with these difficulties lay in a consideration of the production’s target audience: since the Swiss have never had a king, Henry as ‘king’ is immediately alien to a Swiss audience even as he is, doctrinally at least, the embodiment of their own nation to a British audience. The Church as validating kingly power is also, of course, alien to Switzerland, and indeed there is no unifying Swiss Church, the confessional diversity and independence of the Swiss Cantons having been an essential aspect of Swiss history for centuries. Swiss Shakespeare assumes that, while there may be a Helvetic consciousness of, say, Hamlet, there is not yet a Helvetic Henry v, and that translation must therefore be pragmatically radical: no kings, no priests nor Church, indeed no lineage of ‘fifthness’. There is, consequently, no drive to idealise Henry. 3

Language and Power

Paradoxically, in creating a Swiss Henry v, Swiss Shakespeare creates a Henry v for all nations and none: the adaptation moves beyond inter-​national wars and exposes the drive to power in which ‘nations’ are simply particularly 16 17

David Steinsaltz, “The Politics of French Language in Shakespeare’s History Plays,” Studies in English Literature 1500–​1900 42 (2002): 317–​34. We were unable to find an actor to perform in Rumansch, the fourth national language, but the Hostess spoke a few words of Rumansch in the opening scene.

254 Dutton convenient concepts by which to manipulate others. Dürenmatt’s presentation of the futility of patriotism is thus reinforced and developed, in a creative tension with the impulse of many dramatized histories, as discussed by Wim Hüsken, to seek “the germ of a sense of national identity.”18 The first two scenes of Shakespeare’s Henry v, from the conversation between Canterbury and Ely to Henry’s solemn declaration of his intention to go to war, can easily be read as a portrait of power politics and of interest groups vying for access to and influence over the nation’s power-​centre. The first act suggests that there are crucial decisions to be taken, and that the course of policy is truly open and up for debate; but politics in the rest of the play is largely focused on Henry’s skilled implementation of the decisions –​military, diplomatic, and domestic –​taken at the outset. In these opening scenes, then, casting Henry as a political leader presiding over a cabinet meeting does no great violence to Shakespeare’s original. The arguments presented sound remarkably familiar to a modern reader: war is a means to unite the nation (1.2.115–​35),19 but also a potential risk to internal security (1.2.136–​83); interest groups offer monetary incentives “for mitigation of this bill /​Urged by the Commons” (1.1.71–​72) by adopting a militarised foreign policy (1.1.76–​82, 1.2.132–​35), and eventually the provocative outsider appears –​in this case, an ambassador from the Dauphin, who is not even the declared enemy’s main political leader and could therefore in principle be ignored (1.2.234–​97) –​to serve as a personalised and affectively charged justification for a political decision that has effectively been taken on other grounds already. Thus, with only minor terminological adjustments, the opening sequence of Henry v can seem remarkably like contemporary political analysis in blank verse, and is readily translated. The “spiritual convocation” (1.1.77) whose interests Canterbury represents becomes the German Planungskommitee (planning committee):  this change is motivated by the intention to re-​contextualise the play, but it also neutralises the original’s 18 19

Wim Hüsken, “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall … History in Late Medieval Drama from the Low Countries,” in the present volume, 152. William Shakespeare, Henry V, in Stephen Greenblatt et al., ed. The Norton Shakespeare (New  York-​London:  W. W.  Norton, 1997). Jonathan Dollimore & Alan Sinfield, “History and Ideology:  the instance of Henry V,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London-​New  York:  Methuen, 1985), 215, write that “foreign war was a straightforward ground upon which to establish and celebrate national unity,” a ground, however, which “in practice … was the site of competing interests, material and ideological.” On the other hand, Alexander Legatt, Shakespeare’s Political Drama: The History Plays and the Roman Plays (London-​New  York:  Routledge, 1988), 122, reports that the motive “to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels” is “never mentioned” in Henry V –​we would argue that it is not very well hidden either.

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appeal to a divine justification for political hierarchies and military expeditions, the persistent assumption that legitimate power “derives from an inherent natural and human order encoded by God.”20 In the Swiss adaptation of Henry v, multilingualism becomes the characteristic feature of the local political setting. Shakespeare’s play is transplanted to modern, multilingual Switzerland by means of a frame that also inverts the order of Shakespeare’s opening scenes. Shakespeare shows the emergence of hostilities at the international level in his first act, and then at the beginning of the second act moves from the political realm of military expeditions to the intensely personal sphere of commoners Nym and Pistol coming to blows:  Bardolph attempts to mediate between the two disputants, but their aggression is only laid to rest when Bardolph reminds them that they “must to France together” (2.1.81–​82) –​the nation and its citizens are now to “task [their] thought /​That this fair action may on foot be brought” (1.2.309–​10). In the Swiss version, this is the most radically re-​written scene, and is presented before Act I as a Prologue. Bardolph, Nym, Pistol and the Hostess, whose first languages are German, French, Italian and Rumansch respectively, are audience members.21 Nym is noisily exchanging angry text messages with Pistol, who is now with his ex-​girlfriend, the Hostess:  Bardolph tries to calm him down to concentrate on the stage performance they have come to watch, but they come to blows, with Bardolph still trying to negotiate peace –​while Shakespeare’s Bardolph “will bestow a breakfast to make you friends” (2.1.9), Swiss Bardolph offers to invite them for brunch, and is ignored. Bardolph both struggles to appeal to Nym and Pistol in single words of French and Italian (Attends … Attendi) and tries to convince them by drawing attention to their situation as audience members, or spectators of, rather than actors in, political theatre: “Ihr könnt euch hier nicht schlagen. Die Leute schauen euch zu!” (You can’t fight here, people are watching you). Pistol’s angry speech to Nym (2.1.40–​ 47) is translated directly from Shakespeare’s text into Italian and delivered at furious speed –​Shakespeare’s language and Italian, less commonly spoken in Switzerland than French or German, here combine to render the lines semantically opaque to most, but, in performance, certainly expressive of anger.

20 21

Dollimore & Sinfield, “History and Ideology,” 213. We are not the first to place these characters in the audience. Stephen Purcell, “Shakespeare,” 147, describes a performance during which they were among the audience during the “Once more unto the breach” speech (3.1.1–​34), loudly responding to Henry’s call to arms. In that production, however, the characters started out as parts of Shakespeare’s historically distant world:  we reverse this process, identifying Nym, Bardolph and Pistol as audience members before removing them to the action on stage.

256 Dutton The scene is interrupted by the arrival of Canterbury and Ely, and focus returns to Bardolph, Nym and Pistol only after the first act has presented the political decision for military action. In a projected news flash, Henry reads out a solemn declaration of war in his most serious and statesmanlike, but also media-​adapted, manner. Bardolph, Nym and Pistol comment (rather critically) on Henry’s decision to go to war: chillingly, Fluellen then appears on stage, announcing in German, French and Italian that all citizens must report for military service; Bardolph, Nym and Pistol realise that they have changed from spectators into actors. The rewritten scene takes from the original the repeated theme of inter-​personal animosity and aggression and the unifying effect of displays of military strength. However, in its modernisation and attempt to set the action in a partly imaginary, but very local, present, it also demonstrates that the worlds of scenes 1.2 and 2.1 depend on and reinforce each other. For every Henry appearing on screen, there is a Fluellen appearing on stage, and every spectator is a potential participant. By presenting the audience with the ‘common man’ figures of Bardolph, Nym and Pistol first, and the politics second, the Helvetic Henry positions its audience in relation to the action, invoking the ongoing Swiss experience of military conscription as they, too, move from the world of the auditorium to the world of Henry’s military campaigns. In the Swiss adaptation, Henry draws his power not from divine election, but from linguistic skill. The multilingualism of the Swiss adaptation was positively invited by Shakespeare’s presentation of Henry as a kind of information nexus in scene 1.2. Henry is a political leader empowered by his ability to gather and exploit information from all sides and, in the Swiss version, in all languages. Staging Swiss Canterbury as a (secularised) external advisor who makes a bilingual, German-​French meeting presentation, complete with confusing powerpoint, and Henry’s entourage as ministers and representatives of various parts of the country, each speaking their own language, reinforces the image of Henry as the polyglot personification of authority, a controlling centre of the multitude of voices which make up his environment. During the Salic law speech, the original form of which might present “two perfectly clear arguments” which, however, are “so overlaid with incidental detail that it sounds confusing,”22 Henry himself takes on the role of an interested audience for a presentation further obfuscated by Canterbury’s code-​switches among German, French and Swiss-​German dialects, and by textual alterations which, at times, might tip the speech into parody. Canterbury rattles through a list 22 Legatt, Shakespeare’s Political Drama, 121 (emphasis in the original).

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of paragraph numbers, accompanied by slides providing increasingly obscure and irrelevant glosses –​for example, one slide declares: section 9, sub-​section 2 of an old German customs-​union treaty was itself engendered by aversion to section 13, number 2, point 3 of female-​hotel-​ workers’ regulations. The term ‘female-​hotel-​workers’ is taken to include all women regularly employed in restaurants, bars, coffee-​shops, fast-​ food joints, ice-​cream vans or any similar businesses under a commonly accepted understanding of the word ‘similar’ or synonyms thereof. Canterbury’s speech itself is full of stylistically impossible (but neatly iambic) German compounds such as die Gastgewerbsarbeiterinnenordnung: however, it is certainly plausible that a Swiss speaker presenting various parts of an argument, even in a relatively formal, internal meeting, might make some of his points in French and others in German, and then close with a final statement in Swiss-​German dialect. As the speech’s on-​stage addressee, Henry is expected to be able to take everything in, or, perhaps, to unveil the practical consequences of the linguistic avalanche unleashed by his interlocutor –​and here he becomes the kind of expert-​audience who knows what they are supposed to understand in detail and what they can safely ignore. When he eventually interrupts with a simple question:  “Kann ich mit Fug und Recht Anspruch erheben?” (May I  with right and conscience make this claim? [1.2.96]), he directs Canterbury to get to the point and offer one clear statement of legitimisation for a clearly favoured political project. Canterbury responds in clear, intelligible German. Henry knows his job, which, in this instance, is to hear and understand precisely as much as he needs to, precisely when it is necessary. Henry’s eloquence and rhetorical genius  –​or, in less admiring terms, his skilful manipulation of his own discursive appearance –​have often been discussed.23 Again, the multilingual adaptation is an invitation to take literally the suggestion that Canterbury’s praise of Henry in the first scene (1.1.39–​60) is directed as much at his mastery of a wide array of linguistic registers as at his overall wisdom and practical competence. The Swiss adaptation reinforces the construction of Henry as the multilingual image of national unity, in whom all linguistic differences are taken up and merged into one, by dividing 23

See, for instance, ibid., 126–​27, or, for an investigation of some twentieth-​century appropriations and reactions to the powerful buy worryingly bellicose rhetorical power of Shakespeare’s text, Ton Hoenselaars, “Shooting the Hero: The cinematic career of Henry V from Laurence Olivier to Philip Purser,” in World-​wide Shakespeares, ed. Massai (London-​ New York: Routledge, 2005), 80–​87.

258 Dutton Canterbury’s speech in praise of Henry between Canterbury and Ely: the two praise Henry in turn, one speaking French, the other German: they are brought into a bilingual dialogue by the common theme of Henry’s almost superhuman omniscience and omnipotence:

Ely:     Canterbury:      

Orientez-​le sur n’importe quel sujet politique, Et il en dénouera le nœud gordien Aussi facilement qu’une jarretière Und wenn er spricht Hält selbst die Luft in ihrem Treiben inne, Und stummes Staunen steckt in allen Ohren, Um was er sagt wie Honig aufzusaugen.24

[Canterbury: … Turn him to any cause of policy. The Gordian knot of it he will unloose, familiar as his garter: that, when he speaks, the air, a charter’d libertine, is still, and the mute wonder lurketh in men’s ears, to steal his sweet and honey’d sentences. (Henry v i.1 45–​51)] They need Henry, as a political agent for the implementation of their own agenda, and to unite their linguistically divided discourse into a coherent statement of nationality and policy. The explicitly re-​contextualising Swiss adaptation, however, develops more fully hints in Shakespeare’s text that Henry’s political power might in fact be rather shallow.25 Henry’s invitation to Canterbury to present his argument for military action, which offers the first of the play’s many explicit renderings of the horrors of war (1.2.9–​32), can also be read as a slick, rhetorically stream-​lined statement prepared for media consumption, a token declaration of Henry’s commitment to righteousness and humanity which in fact transfers responsibility for the consequences of the later decision onto Canterbury and other, less public figures.26 In the Swiss adaptation, then, this speech exemplifies political theatre’s pre-​emptive disavowal of responsibility, as it is directed in statesmanlike posture to a group of journalists and rolling cameras. When Henry directs Canterbury “Under this conjuration, speak, my lord” (1.2.29), this is rendered in German: “Jetzt sind Sie eingeschworen, sprechen Sie” (Now you 24 Compare Henry v, 1.1.45–​51. 25 And it can find more textual support in the original. Henry’s speech at 4.1.212–​66, lamenting the hardships of his position, can be read as questioning the extent of Henry’s real power to shape his own fortune (see Dollimore & Sinfield, “History and Ideology,” 222–​23). 26 The notion that Henry is “touchy on the question of responsibility, always trying to shift the burden” is also found in Legatt, Shakespeare’s Political Drama, 133.

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are sworn in, speak), suggesting a curt handling of official formalities before a political hearing which, set in a context of power politics, challenges a critical audience to expect some degree of insincerity. This simultaneously ‘modernises’ the figure of Henry and makes him less powerful. He publicly transfers responsibility to Canterbury, but thereby partly denies his own power of decision. The scene of deliberation becomes a ritualised information gathering on the part of stately dignitaries, skilfully shaped to ensure that nobody will end up looking truly and fully responsible: this emphasises the extent to which, in Alexander Legatt’s words, Henry is aware that “his principal task is not the arrangement of his soldiers on the field [or, indeed, deciding whether to arrange them at all] but the preparation of their minds”27 –​his task, whether it be rousing his troops, identifying and punishing traitors, or interacting with the enemy, is executive rather than legislative; it concerns the implementation of policies, not their formulation. Swiss Shakespeare took a similar approach to Henry’s infamous order to kill the French prisoners: in this version it is in fact Canterbury who decides the action and first orders, “Dann soll jeder seine Gefangn’nen töten” (Then every soldier kill his prisoners): Henry merely commands that the order be disseminated: “Gebt den Befehl” (Give the word through). This in no way exonerates Henry, though it might make clear that responsibility is shared; at the same time, it demonstrates that for all his linguistic prowess, Henry’s political power is limited. 4

Constructing the Enemy

A particular problem for Helvetic Henry was the identity and nature of the enemy. Once Henry is taken out of his historical religious, monarchical, national context, it is no longer obvious who could be particularised as his foe. A solution to this difficulty was found in the nature of Shakespeare’s presentation of the French army, which is highly parodic and appears to draw on national stereotypes of French vanity, for example. Arguably, Shakespeare presents the French through the eyes of the English:  they are the enemy as imagined, rather than as actually encountered. The Helvetic Henry pushed this idea to the extreme by implying that the enemy was in fact purely a product of the collective imagination of the play’s characters, their fears stoked and fed by Henry’s skilful rhetoric, to his own political ends. Thus, scenes of negotiation 27

Ibid., 131.

260 Dutton with the French Dauphin, for example, were ventriloquised by Bardolph, Nym and Pistol who, in order to pass the time in the military camp, made sock puppets and imagined the negotiations of their political masters: Bardolph: Der Botschafter fordert Henry auf, sich zu ergeben.   Ich weiss, wie das aussieht:   (als Botschafter) Mein Befehlshaber sagt: Sag du dem grossen Henry: Auch   wenn es schien, dass wir tot sind, wir haben nur geschlafen … Nim: Henry répond:   (als Henry) Retourne sur tes pas,   Et dit a ton maitre que je ne le cherche pas encore.28 [Bardolph: The ambassador asks Henry to surrender. I know what that looks like: (As ambassador) Thus says my leader: Say thou to Harry the Great: Though we seemed dead, we did but sleep … Nim: To which Henry responds: (as Henry) Turn thee back, And tell thy master I don’t seek him now.] When Gower, who in the Swiss adaptation has become an embedded journalist, needs images of the enemy lines, he trains the audience also to hold up sock puppets and shout aggressively. These sock puppets are then ‘slaughtered’ by Bardolph, Nym and Pistol using camp cutlery in parodic versions of Shakespeare’s battle scenes: the audience were thus reminded of the relevance to them of the power play presented while also provoked to laughter which rendered absurd the rhetoric –​sometimes violent, sometimes stirring –​with which Henry surrounded the play’s battles.29 Where they were threatened with infants spitted on pikes, the audience saw sock puppets thrown to the floor, and the expected valour of the ‘happy few’ was nothing more than men facing dirty laundry. In this setting, Henry’s vigorous and celebrated speeches made him appear ridiculous and far removed from the audience, who were enthusiastically participating not in a battle but in a game. Importantly, however, Bardolph, Nym and Pistol were slaughtering the enemy in earnest: they were in the world of Henry’s rhetoric, not the sock puppet game. The scene demonstrated the dangerous power of skilful politicians to manipulate people’s fears in order to create an exaggerated imagining of an enemy, and then send an army to fight a real war. 28 Compare Henry v, 3.6.87–​88 and 111–​12. 29 Elsa Strietman’s essay in the present volume draws attention to the common practice, in adapting a historical text, of adding comical elements that are also often rather dark, and may be used to expose the horrors of war.

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Custom and Kissing

In the final scene of Shakespeare’s play, Henry stages a political reconciliation by wooing the daughter of the enemy’s leader. The diplomatic settlement on which the ritual depends has already been prepared and is now being finalised off-​stage by negotiators who have … free power to ratify, Augment or alter … Anything in or out of our demands (5.2.86–​89)30 Therefore, no real political power is employed in the making of the onstage scene, although the scene demonstrates a fresh aspect of the relationship between language and power in dialogue; the power that Henry gains from non-​ understanding. This is related to Henry’s ability, foregrounded in the Helvetic Henry, to know exactly how much to understand of Canterbury’s explanation of Salic Law: responsibility is passed to the interlocutor –​Canterbury, or here Katherine –​and thus abdicated by Henry. Henry claims not to speak French: the onus is at first on Katherine to speak English. Katherine has been preparing for this moment, studying English by learning the names of body parts from her lady in waiting, Alice. If the naming of body parts does not seem the highest priority in language for international diplomacy, we are reminded of course of the symbolism of the king’s two bodies, and furthermore that Katherine’s diplomatic role is simply to hand over her body to Henry in marriage. The scene is the most celebrated multilingual moment in Shakespeare’s work; it depends on the enduring appeal of the interlingual pun, the schoolboy delight that a word quite innocent in one language can sound smutty in another. The Swiss translators therefore built their scene around appropriate equivalent puns, first producing a list of words to do with bodies and clothing that could be obscenely translated, and with the advantage over Shakespeare that their puns could be German, French or Italian, since their Katherine was an English speaker learning ‘Swiss’. The list prepared, the translators could then follow the structure of the Shakespearean scene, translating Shakespeare’s French into English (in Alice’s case English with occasional errors, to signal that she is a native German speaker) and substituting Shakespearean ‘double entendres’

30

Katherine Eisaman Maus (“Introduction” to Henry v, in Greenblatt et  al., The Norton Shakespeare, 1451) calls this scene “quite endearing onstage” but also “entirely beside the point.”

262 Dutton for ‘triple entendres’ made available by the multilingual setting of the play. For example, having learned that one of the languages of Switzerland is Italian, Katherine asks the Italian for ‘head’ and ‘clothing’:

Alice: ‘Testa’, madam, and ‘vestiti’. Katherine: Testi … and Vest titties. Oh my God! These words sound ugly, venal,   barbarian and lewd, and are not to be used by ladies of class: I wouldn’t pronounce these words in front of important men for all the world.31

However, Katherine’s practice at the naming of parts is not the best preparation for her subsequent scene with Henry, who, in Shakespeare’s original, addresses her not only in English but also in a string of conceits and puns that at first cause her to distrust him and declare “les langues des hommes” (the tongues of men) to be “pleines de tromperies” (full of deceits; 5.2.115–​16). Intriguingly, the comment seems to indicate that Katherine does in fact comprehend not only English but also Henry’s conceits and the deeper intention of them:  though Henry and Katherine both assert their lack of proficiency in each other’s tongues, they seem also to understand each other perfectly. Henry first asserts that he lacks facility not in French but in the language of love –​he could win a woman “at leap-​frog” yet “cannot look greenly, nor gasp out … eloquence” (5.2.135–​41). When he finally addresses Katherine in French, his speech is not of love but of possession –​language which, though it could sound romantic, seems more a surprisingly frank revelation of Henry’s priorities –​and is both direct and logical: “Je quand suis le possesseur de France, et quand vous avez le possession de moi … donc vôtre est France, et vous êtes mienne” (When I am the possessor of France, and when you have possession of me … then France is yours, and you are mine; 5.2.172–​75). It is ironic, of course, that Henry, the master rhetorician, asserts that it is easier for him to win a woman through actions than words, and his wooing scene is as fine a display of rhetorical persuasion 32 as any. Finally, Henry asserts a mutuality –​Katherine will possess France and him as he possesses France and her –​but the gain is always

31 Compare Henry v, 23.3.46–​52. 32 According to Gary Taylor, the word order “Je quand suis” would have been acceptable French, but it seems unidiomatic now and might well have seemed so to earlier audiences. See Shakespeare, Henry v, ed. Taylor, 273, note 176.

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on the English side: discussing their future heir, he declares: “Kate, you will endeavour for your French part of such a boy, and for my English moiety take the word of a King” (5.2.200–​02). Moiety is loaned from French33 but of course never given back. Nonetheless, Henry announces his intention to operate through actions rather than words and kiss her. Katherine’s response, in French, that it is not the custom for women in France to kiss before they are married, makes an important point for theatrical translation:  manners are a culturally variable code, like language, and thus need to be translated as much as words. Henry has no time for local custom, arguing his royal right to make manners. Nonetheless, the theme of national codes of kissing seems to have struck a chord with Shakespeare’s contemporaries;34 this scene from Henry v is echoed in a scene of Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany, a play that pushes the potential of the macaronic text, this time German-​English, much further than Shakespeare’s Henry v. Prince Edward, meeting the German princess Hedewick whom he intends to woo, kisses her, and she exclaims: “See dodh, dass ist hier kein gebranch, /​Mein Got ist dass dir Englisch manier, dass dich.”35 Although the Emperor explains that “here in Germany /​To kiss a Maid” is “a fault intollerable,” Edward refuses to acknowledge national differences: “Why should not German Maids be kist aswell /​as others?,” “I am an Englishman, why should I not?.” Edward’s uncle tries to manage the situation through words: … because you did not know the fashion And want the language to excuse your self I’l be your spokes-​man to your Emperess.

33 34

35

The English word comes from Old French moite, which also gives the modern French moitié. See https://​www.etymonline.com/​word/​moiety. For an intriguing reading of a rather different kiss, between two decapitated heads, that depends on “the legibility of the kiss as a signifier of social and political power,” see Kellie Robertson, “The Rebel Kiss: Jack Cade, Shakespeare, and the Chroniclers,” in Renaissance Retrospections: Tudor Views of the Middle Ages, ed. Sarah A. Kelen (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013), 132. The German is inaccurate and nonsensical, but seems to have been intended to mean something like: “See here, that is not the custom here. My God, is that the English way, that you do.” The errors are possibly introduced by the typesetter: for example, ‘gebranch’ is created by a misinterpretation of the minims in ‘gebrauch’. In the printed edition of 1654, the German lines are in rather smudged blackletter which is difficult to read. George Chapman, Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany, ed. Herbert F. Schwarz. (South Yarra: Leopold Classic Library, 2015 [rpt. in facsimile from the edition of 1654]) act 2, scene 1, 14.

264 Dutton but Edward, like Henry, asserts his preference for deeds in “English Courtship”: “I’l prove it with my Sword.”36 Our Helvetic Henry foregrounds Henry’s lack of political power, his absurd avowal of actions over words, his linguistic colonization of Katherine, his disregard of custom; however, since we have signalled Henry’s verbal power through his multilingual abilities, this scene requires a different device, not simply that Henry does not understand Katherine’s language. The final scene of Shakespeare’s play is presented in the Swiss adaptation as a further scene-​ within-​a-​scene  –​a puppet show staged for the surviving characters. This emphasises the potential of military power-​play to be retrospectively overlaid by a symbolism of sexualised ‘conquest’, and indeed of war to become retrospectively ‘domesticated’. The scene has a deceptive appearance of light-​hearted playfulness. While Chapman’s Alphonsus reframes motifs from Henry v in a different register and thereby functions as a literary comment on Shakespeare’s text, our staging of the scene locates Henry outside his own play, watching a comical performance that, though staged to celebrate his power, holds the mirror up to him in a different role, turning history into a spectacle with its eponymous hero as a mere spectator. Shakespeare has Henry ostentatiously struggling to play the lover as it is not his usual role: whereas Shakespeare’s Henry incorporates this difficulty into his rhetoric, the Swiss Henry must passively watch his puppet-​avatar clumsily enact rituals of sexual conquest, his power taken out of history and reduced to code-​switching, words uttered by puppeteers without deeds. 6

Conclusion

The 600th Anniversary of Agincourt was also, in an interesting historical coincidence, the 500th Anniversary of the Battle of Marignano. In 1515 the Swiss fought one of the most significant battles of their history against the French:  their crushing defeat by the French led the Swiss to sign the Treaty of Fribourg, which achieved a ‘Perpetual Peace’ with France that, apart from a brief Napoleonic incursion, has been sustained. Marignano is seen as the beginning of Swiss neutrality, and was marked by commemorative ceremonies in Fribourg in 2015. It might have been possible, instead of creating Helvetic Henry, for the Fribourg-​based Swiss Stage Bards to devise a play that celebrated, 36

George Chapman, Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany, reprinted in facsimile from the edition of 1654, with an introduction and notes by Herbert F. Schwarz (New York-​London: The Knickerbocker Press, 1913), act 2, scene 1, 17–​18.

A Swiss Adaptation of Henry V, or Something Near Enough

265

in Switzerland, a moment of Swiss history. But the ostensibly rather perverse desire to instead adapt the alien history of an ambiguously heroic king, as told by the literary star of a foreign nation, presented a creative challenge that bore sometimes surprising fruit. The process of translation led to an inherent but also thematic focus on the role of languages and language in causing political events, interpreting their significance, and creating and staging a national history.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the contribution to this article of Thomas Aeppli, with whom much of this material was prepared for presentation at the European Shakespeare Research Association conference in Gdansk, 2017. I am indebted to the Swiss Stage Bards, and especially the Producer of their Henry v, Alina Willi, to Raphael Berthele, and to the translators of Swiss Shakespeare: Thomas Aeppli, Aurélie Blanc, and Elisa Pagliaro.

Bibliography

Déprats, Jean-​Michel. “A French history of Henry V.” In Shakespeare’s History Plays: Performance, Translation, and Adaptation in Britain and Abroad, edited by Ton Hoenselaars, 75–​91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Dollimore, Jonathan & Alan Sinfield. “History and Ideology: the instance of Henry V.” In Alternative Shakespeares, edited by John Drakakis, 206–​27. London-​New  York: Methuen, 1985. Donaldson, Peter S. “Taking on Shakespeare: Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V.” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 60–​71. Erne, Lukas. “Lamentable comedy or black tragedy?: Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s adaptation of Titus Andronicus.” In World-​wide Shakespeares: Local appropriations in film and performance, edited by Sonia Massai, 88–​94. London-​New York: Routledge, 2005. Greenblatt, Stephen et al., ed. The Norton Shakespeare. New York-​London: W. W. Norton, 1997. Hindle, Maurice. Studying Shakespeare on Film. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Hoenselaars, Ton. “Shooting the Hero: The cinematic career of Henry V from Laurence Olivier to Philip Purser.” In World-​wide Shakespeares, edited by Massai, 80–​87. London-​New York: Routledge, 2005. Legatt, Alexander. Shakespeare’s Political Drama:  The History Plays and the Roman Plays. London-​New York: Routledge, 1988.

266 Dutton Purcell, Stephen. “Shakespeare, Spectatorship, and the ‘Olympic Spirit’.” In Shakespeare on the Global Stage: Performance and Festivity in the Olympic Year, edited by Paul Prescott & Eric Sullivan, 133–​62. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2015. Robertson, Kellie. “The Rebel Kiss: Jack Cade, Shakespeare, and the Chroniclers.” In Renaissance Retrospections:  Tudor Views of the Middle Ages, edited by Sarah A. Kelen, 127–​40. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013. Rokison, Abigail. “ ‘From thence to England’:  Henry V at Shakespeare’s Globe.” In Shakespeare Beyond English:  A Global Experiment, edited by Susan Bennett & Christie Carson, 303–​07. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Shakespeare, William. Henry V; edited by Gary Taylor. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Steinsaltz, David. “The Politics of French Language in Shakespeare’s History Plays.” Studies in English Literature 1500–​1900  42 (2002): 317–​34.

Index of Names Adams, Barry B. 92 Adelaide del Vasto 130–​131 Agricola, Johannes 29–​30, 193, 194, 195–​204, 214–​215, 222 Airey, John 242 Aistulf, king of the Lombards 11 Alba, 3rd duke of 177, 180–​181 Alexander the Great 10, 11, 103 Alice of Norfolk 146–​147, 148 al–​Kâmil, sultan 137–​138 Amyot, Jacques 117–​119 Anacletus ii, pope 130 Andrew ii, king of Hungary 129 Andrew iii, king of Hungary 129 Anrooij, Wim van 136n28 Arda of Armenia 131n15 Aristotle 113, 237 Artaxerxes 182n63 Arundel, Thomas 20n68 Auerbach, Erich 112–​113 Augustine, St 7, 13–​15, 16n51, 18, 19, 81–​82 Augustus, emperor 10n28 Bakhtin, Mikhail 44n18 Baldwin i, king of Jerusalem 131n15 Bale, John 21, 99, 113 Acta Romanorum Pontificum 80 Anglorum Heliades 79n4, 83–​84 King Johan 6, 21, 22, 25–​26, 27–​28, 69–​75, 76, 81–​87, 88–​89, 92, 93–​94, 97–​99, 107–​108, 110, 111, 113 Scriptorum Illustrium Maioris Britanniae ... Catalogus 79–​82 The Actes of Englysh Votaries 79–​81 The Chief Promises of God unto Man 6, 17, 25–​27, 81–​82, 91 Three Laws 15, 25–​26, 27–​28, 80 Ball, John 47, 48n26, 49–​50, 52, 54–​56 Balten, Pieter 160n6 Bandello, Matteo 146 Barnes, Robert 86n22, 87–​88 Becket, Thomas 22, 93 Beckwith, Sarah 66 Bede see Venerable Bede Bennett, Judith 3

Benson, Larry D. 41, 55n35 Bernard, George 85n19, 86, 89n36 Betteridge, Thomas 25–​26, 27 Bevington, David M. 98n3, 108n28 Boas, Frederick S. 233–​234, 238–​240 Bobac, Andrea 38n4 Boethius 218 Boiastuau, Pierre 146 Boleyn, Anne 84 Boleyn, Thomas, earl of Wiltshire 63 Boniface ix, pope 138 Branagh, Kenneth 249 Breughel the Younger, Pieter 16 Brülow, Caspar 13 Bucer, Martin 209 Bugenhagen, Johannes 217, 220–​222 Caillieu, Colyn see Keyart, Colijn Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 13 Calvin, Jean 112–​113, 117, 119 Catherine of Hungary 129 Chapman, George 263, 264 Charlemagne 11, 134, 141–​142, 163–​164 Charles i of Anjou 129 Charles i, king of Hungary 129 Charles Martel of Anjou 129 Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy 139, 141–​142, 162 Charles v, emperor 29, 139, 142–​143, 162, 163n14 Charles vi, king of France 247–​248 Chaucer, Geoffrey 25–​26, 37, 43, 46, 53–​55, 57, 111 Canterbury Tales  The Miller’s Tale 26, 36–​37, 38–​39, 40, 41, 53–​54, 55–​58 The Monk’s Tale 46 The Nun’s Priest’s Tale 40n10, 54–​55 The Wife of Bath 38–​39, 43, 47n22 Chemers, Michael Mark 68 Clark, Robert L. A. 68 Clement vi, pope 147 Clopper, Lawrence M. 17n52 Cohn, Norman 8 Colijn van Rijssele 139n37

268  Collaert, Adriaen 10 Comans, Rener 168, 175n40 Conrad iii, king of the Holy Roman Empire 29, 148, 151–​152 Constantine the Great, emperor 11, 182n62 Cox, Richard 241–​243 Cramer, Daniel 215–​217, 221 Crane, Susan 46n22, 48n26, 52n32 Cranmer, Thomas 84, 86 Cromwell, Thomas 5n18, 79–​80, 85, 91n40 Cyrus, king of Persia 10, 102n15 D’Heere, Lucas 161n10 Daniel, Norman 128n7, 134n24, 137n31 Daniels, Richard J. 73 Darius, king of Persia 10n28 David, Alfred 38n4 De Deguileville, Guillaume 111–​112 De Gheyn, Jacob ii 149 De Roovere, Anthonis 162 Déprats, Jean-​Michel 250 Derrida, Jacques 101 Devereux, Robert see Essex, 2nd earl of Devlaeminck, Mireille 3 Dietl, Cora 26, 29–​30 Dolendo, Zacharias 149 Duffy, Eamon 2 Duinhoven, A. M. 134–​135, 138n32, 138n35 Dunn, Alastair 47n24, 48–​49n27 Dunn, E. Catherine 113–​114 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich 30, 251–​252 Dutton, Elisabeth 7n21, 26, 30–​31 Duym, Jacob 29, 144–​152, 167, 171n32 Echevarria, Ana 138 Edward i, king of England 148 Edward iii, king of England 29, 144–​148 Edward vi, king of England 80, 82, 84n18 Edward of Woodstock, the Black Prince 146, 147–​148 Eisaman Maus, Katherine 261n30 Eleanor of Anjou 128–​130, 131–​132 Eliot, T. S. 29, 158 Elizabeth i, queen of England 74–​75, 82, 84, 92, 108, 112, 166 Elizabeth of Sicily 129 Elyot, Thomas 27, 62–​63, 76

Index of Names Enders, Jody 22n74 Erasmus, Desiderius 29, 86–​87 Erne, Lukas 251–​252 Esschen, Johannes van 194 Essex, 2nd earl of 29, 166 Evans, Ruth 44–​45n18 Everaert, Cornelis 29, 160, 165–​166 Fernando Álvares de Toledo see Alba, 3rd duke of Fish, Simon 87 Forker, Charles H. 99–​100 Foxe, John 75–​76 Francis, St 138 Frank, Grace 23n76 Frederick ii, emperor 134 Frederick iii, king of Sicily 128–​129, 130, 131–​132 Friedrich iii, elector of Saxony 214 Froissart, Jean 48–​49, 51, 52–​53, 147 Gardiner, Stephen 6 Garnier, Robert 118 Gash, Anthony 40n8 Geoffrey of Monmouth 101–​102 Georg, duke of Saxony 215–​216 Gerhoh von Reichersberg 22–​23 Ghistele, Cornelis van 165n18 Gibson, Gail McMurray 44n18, 67–​68 Gijsen, Annelies van 137n30, 140n42 Given-​Wilson, Chris 4n14 Godfrey of Bouillon 14n39, 135–​136 Goulart, Simon 117–​118, 119, 120 Gower, John 40n9 Grafton, Anthony 113n41 Grandison, Catherine 146, 148 Greene, Robert 100, 102n15, 115n51 Greer, Margaret R. 18 Gregory of Nazianzus 197 Griffin, Benjamin 107–​108, 113 Grimald, Nicholas 30, 230, 232, 237–​244, 245 Grundmann, Herbert 151n70 Gryphius, Andreas 193 Haestens, Henrick L. van 167 Hall, Edward 101 Happé, Peter 6, 15, 17, 26, 27–​28, 69 Hardy, Robert 248

269

Index of Names Harris, John Wesley 13n38, 16n46 Hartley, L. P. 158 Hartmann, Andreas 29–​30, 195, 205–​215, 216, 220, 222, 223 Hastings, William, lord 64, 74 Helterman, Jeffrey 38n4 Henri iv, king of France 167 Henry ii, duke of Świdnica 129 Henry v, king of England 26, 30–​31, 116 Henry vii, king of England 117 Henry viii, king of England 21, 81–​82, 84, 108, 113, 238 Herford, Charles H. 238 Heyns, Peeter 176–​181 Heyns, Zacharias 176n47 Hiddleston, Tom 249 Higden, Ranulf 14–​15 Hilarius, poet 12 Hill, Heather 5, 25–​27, 67 Hillman, Richard 1n2, 25–​26, 28 Hilten, Johannes 211 Hippolytus 20n66 Hirschberg, Jeffrey Alan 37n3, 44n16 Hoccleve, Thomas 38–​39 Holinshed, Raphael 101 Holland, Thomas 147 Hondorf, Andreas 210, 214 Hooft, P. C. 177 Horatius Flaccus, Quintus (Horace) 217 Houwaert, Johan Baptista 169n28 Howard, Jean 25 Howard, Thomas, duke of Norfolk 88n30 Hugh of St Victor 15 Hummelen, W. M. H. 139n38 Hus, Jan 29–​30, 194, 195–​204, 211, 214–​215, 222 Hüsken, Wim 26, 28–​29, 44n18, 254 Hutson, Lorna 116 Innocent vi, pope 148 Irene, empress of Byzantine 11 Isabelle of Castile 142–​143 Isabelle of Portugal 141 Isidore of Seville 8n24 Jahn, Bernhard 205n40 Jean de Bourgogne 142 Jean ii, king of France 146 Jean le Bel 147

Jerome, St 9 Joan of Kent 147–​148 Joanna of Aragon 162 Joanna of Castile 142–​143 Jodelle, Étienne 118 Johann Friedrich i, elector of Saxony 195, 209 Johann Georg i, elector of Saxony 215 John iii, duke of Brabant 131 John, king of England 70, 71, 73, 74, 81–​82, 87–​88 Jonson, Ben 4n13, 103 Julius Caesar 10n28, 62 Junghans, H. A. 234–​235 Justice, Steven 40n10, 48n25, 50n31 Kálmán, king of Hungary 130 Keesman, Wilma 11n29 Keyart, Colijn 139n37, 140n42, 162 Kielmann, Heinrich 29, 195, 215–​222, 223 Kirchmeyer, Thomas 80n7, 110n32, 194, 196 Klingemann, Ernst 244 Knight, Esmond 248 Knighton, Henry 47n24, 52 Kolve, V. A. 14–​17, 37n1, 37n3 Koning, Abraham de 167 Koopmans, Jelle 3 Krumpach, Nicolaus 198 Kuiper, Willem 132n19, 134 Kyd, Thomas 26, 28, 99–​100, 105–​106, 146 Ladislaus iv, king of Hungary 129 Lambach, Johann 231 Lambert of St Omer 14n39 Lambrecht, Joos 160n6 Langton, Stephen 88–​89, 108 Lawet, Robert 175–​176, 178, 179–​180 Lawton, David 64, 67 Leemans, Gillys 161–​164 Legatt, Alexander 254n19, 259 Leland, John 84n18 Leo iii, pope 11 Leo x, pope 220 Lerer, Seth 41n12, 57–​58n44 Levy, F. J. 20, 63–​64 Lewalski, Barbara 112–​113 Lewis, C. S. 107–​108 Lodge, Thomas 100

270  Lopez, Jeremy 104n21 Louis viii, king of France 87 Louis xi, king of France 142 Lumiansky, L. M. 3n9 Luther, Martin 26, 29–​30, 175n40, 194–​195, 197, 199–​200, 203, 204, 205–​215, 216–​ 217, 219–​223 Luxon, Thomas H. 112–​113 Lydgate, John 38–​39 Lyndsay, David 85 Machiavelli, Niccolò 7 MacLean, Sally-​Beth 116n53 Maimonides see Moses ben Maimon Mareel, Samuel 138n36, 141n46, 161n11, 162–​163 Margaret of Austria 139–​140, 162 Margaret of Burgundy see Margaret of Austria Marks, Sam 248 Marlowe, Christopher 99, 103, 105, 108–​110, 115 Mary of Burgundy 139–​140, 162 Mary of Hungary 129, 131 Mary, queen of Scotland 80 Mathesius, Johann 207–​209, 210, 211–​214, 215 Maurice of Nassau 167 Maximilian i of Austria, emperor 139 McGuire, M. R. P. 131n14 McMillin, Scott 116n53 Melanchthon, Philipp 151–​152, 209, 210, 213–​214 Mellerstadt 213 Metz, Detlef 212 Middleton, Thomas 103, 107 Milchsack, Gustav 18n57 Mill, Anna J. 37n3, 41n11 Mills, David 3n9 Mohammed, prophet 15–​16 Montagu, William 146–​147 More, Thomas 27, 64, 68–​69, 72, 74 Moses ben Maimon 7 Mount, Harry 248 Musschoot, Anne Marie 176, 181–​182 Naogeorgus, Thomas see Kirchmeyer, Thomas Nimrod, king of Mesopotamia 10n28

Index of Names Ninus, king of Assyria 10 Noot, Thomas van der 20n66 Normington, Katie 2–​3, 38n4 North, Thomas 117n55, 118 Norton, Thomas 26, 28, 101–​102 Oldenbarnevelt, Johan van 166 Olivier, Laurence 248, 249, 252 Orosius 10n28 Otto i, duke of Merania 134 Otto i, king of Germany 11 Otto iii, duke of Bavaria 129 Otto iv of Brunswick, emperor 134 Ovidius Naso, Publius 164n18 Pace, Richard 63 Paschal ii, pope 131n15 Patterson, Lee 55n36 Paxson, James J. 16n47 Peele, George 99–​101, 106, 113, 116n53 Peeters, L. 128–​130, 131–​132, 137–​138 Peter ii, king of Sicily 129 Petr z Mladoňovic 198 Philip ii, king of Spain 177, 180 Philip the Fair, duke of Burgundy 142, 162 Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy 141, 162, 163n14 Philipp i, landgrave of Hesse 209 Philipp ii, elector of Pomerania-​Stettin 216–​217 Philippa of Hainault 146 Pickerynge, John 104 Pierre de Launay see Boiastuau, Pierre Pincombe, Mike 26, 30, 200–​201nn.24 Pineas, Rainer 73 Pleij, Herman 127n6 Plutarch 117–​118, 119 Pollicarius, Johannes 210 Pollich, Martin see Mellerstadt Potter, Robert 24 Preston, Thomas 103–​104 Purcell, Stephen 255n21 Rabus, Ludwig 210 Rackin, Phyllis 5 Raleigh, Walter 4n13 Ramakers, Bart 132n17, 171n31 Revard, Carter 56n41

271

Index of Names Reynaert, Joris 134 Ribner, Irving 98–​99, 101, 104 Richard ii, king of England 40n9, 51, 57n44 Ricœur, Paul 112–​113 Robert Guiscard 130 Robert of Anjou 128–​129, 130, 132 Robert v of Auvergne 136 Robinson, Marsha S. 6 Rockenbach, Paul 198 Roger ii, king of Sicily 130 Rogier de Hauteville 130 Romulus 10n28 Rowland, Beryl B. 37n2 Rowley, William 105 Sackville, Thomas 26, 28, 101–​102 Schless, Howard H. 38n4 Schoepper, Jacob 30, 230–​237, 238, 240, 244, 245 Sebastian, king of Portugal 100n9 Semiramis 10n28, 102n15 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus 102, 165n18, 231–​232, 234, 245 Sesostris 102n15 Shakespeare, William 100, 105, 113, 116–​117, 146, 152, 168 3 Henry vi 98, 101 Antony and Cleopatra 118 Edward iii 146–​147 Hamlet 107, 253 1 Henry iv 103, 117 2 Henry iv 103, 112 Henry v 7n21, 30–​31, 105, 116, 247–​265 King Lear 100n10 Richard ii 100n10, 112 Richard iii 250 The Merry Wives of Windsor 112 Titus Andronicus 30, 106, 251–​252 Sharrock, Thea 249 Sidney, Philip 113, 234–​235 Sigismund, king of the Holy Roman Empire 199, 214 Skelton, John 22, 85 Sleidan, Johann 209, 210, 214 Sleiderink, Remco 136n28 Smalley, Beryl 8n24, 9 Smeken, Jan 139, 142, 162

Smith, Gilbert 242 Sophocles 165n18 Spangenberg, Cyriacus 208 Spiera, Francesco 108 Spivack, Bernard 108n28 Sponsler, Claire 68 Staupitz, Johann von 213, 215 Stein, Robert 139n38, 140, 141 Stephanus, St 172n34, 197 Stephen ii, pope 11 Stephen v, king of Hungary 129 Sticherus, Christopher 217 Storm, Melvin 38n4 Strietman, Elsa 26, 29, 139n39 Strohm, Paul 45n18, 47n23, 55n36 Sturm, Jakob 209 Taylor, Gary 250, 262n32 Terentius Afer, Publius (Terence) 165n18, 231–​232 Tertullian 197 Tetzel, Johann 26, 29–​30, 213–​214, 215–​222 Tillyard, E. M. W. 115–​116 Tolan, John 138n33 Tourneur, Cyril 103, 107 Turner, Victor 44n18 Tuve, Rosemond 111–​112 Tyndale, William 69, 87 Udall, Nicholas 85 Venerable Bede 14, 17, 18 Voes, Heinrich 194 Vondel, Joost van den 152–​153, 177 Vos, Maarten de 10 Walker, Greg 2 Walsingham, Thomas 46–​51 Warbeck, Perkin 117 Wenceslaus iii, king of Hungary 129 West, Ed 248 White, Hayden 112–​113 Wickham, Glynne 15n46 Wilde, Oscar 234 Wilkins, George 105 William of Orange (the Silent) 167, 177, 181 Winghe, Nicolaes van 175n40

272  Winsheim, Veit 151 Woodcock, Matthew 4n15 Woodes, Nathaniel 108–​109 Worsley, Lucy 25 Wright, Stephen K. 12

Index of Names Wyatt, Diana 41n11 Wycliff, John 47n24, 52 Zemon Davis, Natalie 44n18 Zütphen, Heinrich von 194

Index of Subjects Abele spelen 26, 28, 127, 132n17, 136, 138, 152 (see also Esmoreit, Gloriant, Lanseloet van Denemerken) Act in Restraint of Appeals 1, 5n18, 63 Anabaptists 93, 170, 174n39 Antichrist 9, 22, 74, 196, 198–​199, 201, 216, 232 Apocrypha 175n40, 182n63, 183 Auto del sueño de Nabucodonosor 13 Baudouin de Sebourc 134–​135, 138n32 Belegheringhe van Samarien, Die 169, 170–​174, 181n60, 186 Bible  Old Testament  Genesis 13, 37 Book of Daniel 7, 8–​13 Book of Esther 182–​183, 186 Book of Judith 175, 186 New Testament  Gospel of Matthew 13–​14, 30, 229–​230, 244 Gospel of Mark 30, 229–​230, 244 see also Hebrew Bible, Vulgate Biblical figures  Abraham 13–​14, 15, 17–​18, 19 Achior 179n53, 181 Adam 7, 13–​14, 17–​19, 49–​50, 54–​55, 81–​82 Ahasuerus, king of Persia 182–​186 Balthasar, king of Babylonia 12 Benadab, king of Syria 170, 173 Cain and Abel 18, 114, 243 Christ 3, 12–​13, 15, 16, 20, 30, 39, 65–​66, 68, 70, 80n7, 81–​82, 87, 196, 197–​198, 200, 202–​204, 211–​212, 216, 219, 233 Daniel, prophet 8–​13 David 13–​14, 17n52, 18, 176 Delilah 178 Elias, prophet 222 Elisha, prophet 170, 172–​174 Enoch 222 Esther 178, 182–​186 Eve 17–​19, 38n4, 39, 44n16, 49–​50, 55 Gabriel, angel 11

Goliath 18, 176 Haman 182–​183, 184 Herod 15, 19, 30, 37n2, 115, 202–​203, 230, 233–​236, 238–​243 Herodias 30, 229–​230, 233–​234, 235–​237, 238–​243 Holofernes 175–​177, 179–​181 Jezebel 178 Jochebed 176 John the Baptist 16, 30, 81–​82, 229, 230–​ 237, 238n14, 242, 244 Joram, king of Juda 170 Josias, king of Juda 82 Judith 171n31, 175–​182, 183, 186 Lucifer 18 Mary Magdalene 178 Martha 178 Mordecai 182–​183, 184 Moses 14–​15, 17–​18, 81, 138n32 Nebuchadnezzar 8–​9, 13, 175–​176, 177, 179, 181n57 Noah 13–​14, 17–​18, 19, 26–​27, 36–​58 Noah, Mrs 36–​58, 179n52 Paul, apostle 81, 86 Salome 234, 239, 240 Solomon 18, 139 Susanna 176, 178 Virgin Mary 17, 38n4, 39, 140, 161, 178, 185 (see also Antichrist, Satan) Brut, chronicles 88 Carmelites 27, 79 Christmas, plays/​entertainment 12, 22–​23, 101 Chronica Regia Coloniensis see Kölner Königschronik Chronographia Regum Francorum 147 Clyomon and Clamydes 103 Comoedia von den vier Monarchien 13 Corpus Christi plays 2, 16n51, 17–​20 Chester 3, 17, 18n57, 38, 40n8, 41, 42–​43, 49, 79, 114 Coventry 79 N-​Town 114, 126 Newcastle 38, 41, 42

274  Corpus Christi plays (cont.) Towneley 15, 22, 38–​39, 41–​44, 46n19, 54–​55, 114 Wakefield see Towneley York 38, 41, 42–​43, 47, 49, 66–​67, 79, 126, 168 Counter-​Reformation 169 Croxton Play of the Sacrament 26, 27, 64–​69, 76 Cycle plays see Corpus Christi plays Easter plays 19, 126 Eerste Bliscap van Maria, Die 160n7 Egerer Fronleihnamsspiel 18 Elckerlijc 24n79, 161, 178n52 Esmoreit 127–​132, 133, 136–​138 Everyman 24 Fastnachtspiele 126 Fifth Monarchists 75 Fleury Playbook 23 Franciscans 131–​132, 137–​138 Ghibelines 131–​132, 135–​136 Gloriant 132–​138 Guelphs 131–​132, 136 Hebrew Bible 182 Hero and Leander 181 Hertogh Albertus 166 Herzog von Braunschweig, Der 134 Histoires tragiques 146–​147 Hocktide 44n18 Holland, counts of 152 Holy Roman Empire 11, 131, 134, 139, 142 Hulthem, Van, collection 127, 132, 134 Jews 65–​68, 70, 76, 138, 173, 176, 177–​179, 181–​182, 184, 185–​186, 204 Kölner Königschronik 10n28, 151 Konstanz (Constance), council of 194, 197–​198, 200, 211 Lanseloet van Denemerken 136n28 Lollards 20, 38, 47n24, 65 Loyhier en Malaert 135 Lutherans 30, 170, 174n39, 193, 194, 197, 199, 200, 209, 212, 215

Index of Subjects Mankind 114 Mantua, council of 197 Mirror for Magistrates, The 104n20, 110–​111 Misteri d’Adam i Eva 19 Misteri de sant Cristòfol 19 Misteri del rei Herodes 19 Moralité de l’argent 3 morality plays 3, 21, 24–​26, 81–​82, 86, 88–​89, 90, 92, 98–​99, 103–​104, 110, 114, 126, 145n56, 217 Mucedorus 105 Muslims 28, 132, 134, 137–​138 Mystère de la Passion (Valenciennes) 17 Mystère du Viel Testament 17 Mystères de Lille 17, 126 Ordo Prophetarum 12 Parthian empire 12 Passion d’Amiens/​Mons 17 Passion de Semur 17 Passion de Troyes 17 Passion plays 17, 18n56, 20, 22, 126, 201, 204 Peasants’ Revolt (1381) 36 Play of Daniel 11–​12 Playerwater 160n6 Protestants 6, 21, 27, 69, 79–​80, 82, 86, 89, 108, 166n22, 175–​176, 177–​179, 181, 182n63, 183, 201n25, 209–​210, 215, 222–​223 Pyramus and Thisbe 181 Records of Early English Drama (reed) 16n51 Reformation 5, 26, 29–​30, 82, 84, 86, 112, 151, 174n39, 192–​223 Henrician 63, 76 (see also Counter-​Reformation) Respublica 85n20, 89 Roman empire 9–​11 Roode Roos, De, chamber of rhetoric 168, 170, 174n39 Satan 6, 80n7, 108, 194n9, 196, 216, 219, 221 Saxony, house of 205 Sevenste Bliscap van Onser Vrouwen, Die 160n7 Six Articles (1539) 89n36, 90 Song of Roland 220 Speculum sacerdotale 14–​15, 81

275

Index of Subjects Spelen van sinne (Antwerp 1561) 162n12 Spelen van sinne (Ghent 1539) 160n6, 162n12 Spelen van sinne (Rotterdam 1561) 162n12 Spinning women 26, 36–​58 Swiss Stage Bards 30, 251, 264–​265

Trou Moet Blijcken, chamber of rhetoric 160, 162 Tspel van Hester 169, 173n37, 182–​186 Tspel van Josue 170n28 Tspel van Judith 169, 173n36, 175–​182, 186

Tableaux vivants 19, 139, 141, 171n31 Thomas of Woodstock 112 Tragedia oder Spill gehalten in dem künigklichen Sal zu Pariß, Ein 197

Vulgate 175, 182n63, 183 Westminster Abbey 248 Westminster Chronicles 47n24, 48n26

Geographical Index ’s-​Gravenpolder 29, 166, 169 Agincourt 26, 30, 247–​249, 264 Antwerp 20n66, 21, 165n18, 167, 169, 171, 176, 178, 179, 186, 187 Aragon 65, 165 Assyria 9n28 Augsburg 196–​197, 209, 212, 214 Babylon 9–​10n28, 13–​14, 133–​134 Beauvais 12 Bethulia 177–​178, 187 Blackheath 49–​50 Brasenose 238 Breda 167 Bruges 160, 162, 165–​166 Brunswick 133–​134 Brunswick-​Lüneburg 133–​134 Brussels 28–​29, 127, 138, 139–​140, 141, 142–​143, 152, 160n7, 161–​162, 169n28, 171 Burgundy 130, 142 Byzantium 11 Cambridge 238 Carthage 10n28 Castile 142–​143 Catalonia 13, 18 Damietta 138 Dortmund 230–​232, 237 Dresden 205 Dublin 78 Eisenach 212 Eisleben 195 England 1, 20, 65, 69, 73, 80, 82, 87, 99, 106, 116, 126, 145, 146, 147, 166n22, 252 Erfurt 212 France 3, 17, 126, 134, 145, 165, 249–​250, 252, 255, 262–​263, 264 Freiburg im Breisgau 250 Fribourg 251, 264

Germany 12, 24, 134, 176, 204, 207, 217, 250, 252, 263 Ghent 19, 160n6, 161n10, 162n12, 163n14, 169, 187 Greece 9n28, 11, 63, 117–​118, 119 Haarlem 160, 162, 238n14 Hagenau 198 Hamburg 250 Hasselt 29, 164, 168, 170–​186, 187 Hull 41n11 Ireland 27, 78n1 Jerusalem 12, 14n39, 66, 131n15, 135 Joachimsthal 207 Kilkenny 80 Leipzig 205, 211 Leyden 29, 144n55, 167, 171n32, 187 London 40n9, 83n16, 93, 145, 238 Louvain 175n40, 231 Low Countries 19–​20, 44n18, 125–​153 Macedonia 9n28 Magdeburg 205 Málaga 18 Marignano 264 Mechelen 19 Media 9–​10n28, 11–​12 Merseburg 205 Morebath 3 Morocco 106 Münster 231 Murcia 18 Netherlands, the 19, 24, 126n1, 166n22 see also Low Countries Nijmegen 134 Oudenaarde 19, 171n31, 172n35 Oviedo 18 Oxford 238

277

Geographical Index Palestine 66 Pavia 29, 165 Persia 9–​10n28, 11, 103, 182, 187 Poitiers 145 Portugal 100, 106 Rome 9, 10n28, 11, 81, 85, 90, 91, 106, 117–​119, 218, 221 Samaria 169, 170–​174, 187 Saxony 205, 215, 219, 221 Smithfield 83n16 Spain 18, 66, 100, 106, 138, 144, 166, 171, 173, 174n39, 177 St Albans 48–​49n27, 50–​51 Stafford 44n17

Stettin 215–​216, 219–​220 Strasburg 13 Toledo 18 Troy 143, 164 Tyburn 93 Wartburg 214 Weißenfels 210 Wesel 80–​81 Winchester 80 Wittenberg 212–​214, 215 Worms 205, 212, 214 Zuid-​Beveland 166 Zwickau 219