Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Playmakers and their Strategies

Nadia Thérèse van Pelt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429514142
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe moves away from the customary conceptual framework that artificially separates 'medieval' from 'early modern' drama to explore the role of drama and spectacle in England, France, the Low Countries, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and the German-speaking areas that now constitute Austria and Germany.

This book investigates the ranges of dramatic and performative techniques and strategies that playmakers across Europe used to adapt their work to the changing contexts in which they performed, and to the changing or expanding audiences that they faced. It considers the different views expressed through drama and spectacle on shared historical events, how communities coped with similar issues and why they ritually recycled these themes through reinvented or alternative forms that replaced or existed alongside their predecessors. A wide variety of genres of play are discussed throughout, including visitatio sepulchri (visit to the tomb) plays; Easter and Passion plays and morality plays; the French civic mystère; Italian sacre rappresentazioni performed by choirboys in the context of the church; Bürgertheater from the Swiss Confederacy; drama performed for the purpose of royal entertainment and propaganda; May and summer games; and the commercial, professional theatre of Shakespeare and Lope de Vega.

Examining the strength of drama in relation to the larger cultural forces to which it adapted, and demonstrating the use of social, political, economic, and artistic networks to educate and support the social structures of communities, Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe offers a broader understanding of a shared European past across the traditional chronological divide of 1500. It is ideal for students of social history, and the history of medieval and early modern drama or literature.

1

MASS MURDER

Shocking spectators of late medieval sacrament plays

‘The most anti-Semitic play of which we are aware’

It should be mentioned from the outset that the elements of cultural expression or dramatic performance that shock or offend twenty-first century spectators are not necessarily similar or even comparable to late medieval and early modern spectatorial concerns. This is because the codes through which we understand cultural expression are constantly under the influence of change and, even more importantly, so are the audiences that watch and participate. Indeed, the multiplication of meanings that spectators attribute to events over time, caused by changing performance contexts, creates a fluidity, and, with that, unpredictability, in dramatic expression as well as in the symbols it employs; something that is most visible in stagings that polarise groups according to their ethnic backgrounds, political views, or religious beliefs. When symbols and their meanings change, performances are either discontinued because they are perceived as awkward or insulting, or they find themselves appropriated to the new performance context. This usually depends on a number of factors including the severity of the offence to (parts of) audiences, local investments in a tradition—both emotional and monetary—and pressure from third parties. The Oberammergau Passion play is one such tradition that exemplifies a dramatic custom that has negotiated its existence throughout time by accommodating itself to its performance context, and that introduces the anxieties at play in the liturgical drama to which this chapter turns.¹ The play, most recently performed in 2010, in the village of Oberammergau, in Bavaria, Germany, depicts Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, his suffering, death, and resurrection, and has long been understood as notoriously anti-Semitic. Legend has it that the play was first performed in 1634, after an outbreak of Bubonic Plague had killed a great number of the local population. It was said that the surviving villagers, grateful to have escaped a terrible death, vowed to commit themselves to performing the play once every decade if God would protect them from further outbursts of the disease. This firm rootedness in religious celebration and belief combined with civic pride—and perhaps the appeal of commercial gain enjoyed as a side-effect of the elaborate performances—would have driven villagers to carefully protect their local dramatic tradition, and it seems that in doing so, they did not spurn adapting their play.² James Shapiro observes that ‘every time the Oberammergau play has been staged before or since, it has been altered’.³ For instance, in 1770, Passion plays were banned from performance across Bavaria, so the villagers had to forego the performance that they were about to stage. However, they cleverly renamed the play The Old and New Testament in 1780 to suggest a different tone and genre, leading Church authorities by the nose, and securing a formal approval for the play to be performed again.⁴ Then again in 1793, plays addressing a religious theme were once more prohibited by the Church, as they supposedly kept people ‘from true devotion and worship, removed from their business, seduced to idleness and only too frequently to other kinds of excesses’, which was again cleverly circumvented by the villagers who returned to the stage in 1801 after having made a few alterations to their play.⁵ In the years immediately before the Second World War the play’s anti-Judaic prejudice and racial stereotyping found favour with the Nazis, who in 1934 smoothly incorporated the play in their propaganda machine, when the ‘Strength Through Joy’ movement (Kraft Durch Freude) singled it out as an approved tourist destination, and guaranteed a commercial success.⁶ Adolf Hitler attended performances of the play in 1930 and 1934, and congratulated the villagers on their staged representation of the Jews, which he deemed spot-on.⁷ Shapiro reminds the reader that in August 1939, an official publication records ‘an unnamed leading figure in the Nazi party’ who asserted that ‘the Passion play is the most anti-Semitic play of which we are aware’.⁸ However, only ten years later, the play was given the missio canonica (official blessing) by the Roman Catholic Church, confirming that the play successfully conveyed Church doctrine.⁹ As far as the village was concerned, their play had now been officially justified by the clergy, their tradition safeguarded, and the play’s acceptability to the ideology behind the Holocaust forgotten. However, the play was soon to meet with ecclesiastical opposition for its engagement with the issue of ‘who killed Jesus’, as well as Christ’s ‘Jewishness’.¹⁰ While the play had been boycotted and protested against for its anti-Semitic contents by Jewish groups and individuals for decades, the year 1965 finally marked an important doctrinal change in the Catholic Church that was to accelerate Oberammergau’s change in its approach to the representations of the Jews in the play. During that year, the Catholic Church signed the ‘Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions’, also referred to as the Nostra Aetate, which passed the Second Vatican Council under Pope Paul VI. In this declaration, the Church formally condemned the deicide canard: that is, the idea that ‘the Jews’ were to be held responsible for Christ’s death.¹¹ Recently, younger generations of performers and script-writers under the leadership of director Christian Stückl—anxious to clear Oberammergau of its reputation as a town that endorses and stimulates anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism—have sought to revisit the play to remove all traces of negative stereotyping of Jews in the play text and costuming. This included, among other things, a move to underscoring Christ’s Jewishness, making the character occasionally speak Hebrew and presenting him as a rabbi and, most importantly, removing the lines that repeated the blood-oath from the Gospel of Matthew in which the Jews insist on their responsibility for Christ’s death through the lines: ‘His blood be on us, and on our children’.¹² The 2000 and 2010 Passions instead impugn evil priests and leaders, and a raging mob represents all of humankind. One of the side effects of Jesus being represented as a Jewish rabbi is that the Last Supper is staged as a Pesach Seder, including the youngest person at the table—John in this case—asking why this night is different from all other nights. The ideological and moral difference for the playmakers and spectators is mostly one of recognising the importance of a ‘historical Jewish Jesus’ over a ‘New Testament Jesus’, the former being more appropriate to the context of the twenty-first century Passion play that is not just watched in the privacy of a local performance for a relatively homogeneous group of spectators used to their own traditions but that invites the attention of the whole world through modern media. The latest changes to the play make the Passion play into a more universal play about love and sacrifice, but also carry implications in terms of theatre making: an increasing sense of realism in representations of traditional Judaic rituals means that the dramatic representation of the Eucharist is removed from the play. As such, the more sympathetic understanding of the roles of Jews in this play has led to a revision of the boundaries between ritual and drama, symbolism and reality.

Who killed Jesus?

The problematic relationship between staging the Eucharist and the question of ‘who killed Jesus’ found itself at the heart of the medieval sacrament plays that were performed within the context of Corpus Christi across Europe. Sixteenth-century plays performed in various parts of southern and western Europe show the techniques and strategies that were used by playmakers to manage the unpredictability of a type of drama that both celebrates and accuses, and mixes fun and theatricality with solemn ritual form: a potentially explosive cocktail of religious, civic, political, and ideological cultural expression. A devotional play from Breda in the Low Countries called The Play of the Holy Sacrament of the Niervaert (Tspel vanden Heilighen Sacramente vander Nyeuwervaert) (c. 1500), can be seen to deviate from other sacrament plays in its choices regarding the visualisation of the Host on stage.¹³ The Breda playmaker decided not to blame Jews for the suffering of the Host—and with that, Christ—but instead to blame the devil and his underlings. With these choices, it is understandable that this play should be the only remaining European sacrament play to have still been performed during the tw...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Credits
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Select Chronology of Plays and Events
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Mass Murder: Shocking Spectators of Late Medieval Sacrament Plays
• 2 The Strumpet Saint: Eroticism and Artifice in Mary Magdalene Plays
• 3 Wilhelm Tell and Robin Hood, Outlaws or Elite?
• 4 The Perils of Public Festivity
• 5 Conclusion: Playmakers and Their Strategies
• Bibliography
• Index