Murder by Accident

Medieval Theater, Modern Media, Critical Intentions

Jody Enders

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780226207834
• eBook ISBN: 9780226207858
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria medieval y moderna temprana

Over fifty years ago, it became unfashionable—even forbidden—for students of literature to talk about an author's intentions for a given work. In Murder by Accident, Jody Enders boldly resurrects the long-disgraced concept of intentionality, especially as it relates to the theater.

Drawing on four fascinating medieval events in which a theatrical performance precipitated deadly consequences, Enders contends that the marginalization of intention in critical discourse is a mirror for the marginalization—and misunderstanding—of theater. Murder by Accident revisits the legal, moral, ethical, and aesthetic limits of the living arts of the past, pairing them with examples from the present, whether they be reality television, snuff films, the "accidental" live broadcast of a suicide on a Los Angeles freeway, or an actor who jokingly fired a stage revolver at his temple, causing his eventual death. This book will force scholars and students to rethink their assumptions about theory, intention, and performance, both past and present.

Part I / Back to the Medieval Future

1 / Behind the Seen: All Hell Breaks Loose

The artist is responsible for everything that happens in his work—and not just in the sense that it is done, but in the sense that it is meant. It is a terrible responsibility; very few men have the gift and the patience and the singleness to shoulder it. But it is all the more terrible, when it is shouldered, not to appreciate it, to refuse to understand something meant so well.
STANLEY CAVELL, Must We Mean What We Say?

One fine Parisian day, Jehan Hemont, apprentice at the bathhouse, went along to the theater to help out a friend of long standing, one Guillaume Langlois. Their lives were never to be the same. When all was said and done, Guillaume found himself the subject of a criminal investigation into his handling of the theatrical props in his charge; and Jehan Hemont had no life at all. On 27 March 1380, he was mortally wounded during the Crucifixion scene of a Passion play during which, one might say, all hell broke loose. Something had gone wrong with one of the ten cannon that had simulated, according to “customary practice,” the fire and brimstone of divine wrath.¹ It was something that raised serious legal questions about liability, responsibility, and morality at the theater, just as it clarifies now for us the types of intentionality that we shall be exploring: ACTUAL, ACHIEVED, DECLARED, and PERCEIVED INTENTIONS.

Guillaume Langlois was the special effects man; Jehan Hemont was the victim. But whose victim? How does something meant so well happen so wrong? What are the ramifications of doing what one does not intend? Medieval Parisians also posed a question that few contemporary scholars dare to ask in the current political climate: Was theater responsible for his death? This chapter is devoted to the surprising answer to that question as we focus, along the way, on the common-sense connections between theater and law.

In 1380, Jehan Hemont did not die for political reasons, and his accidental death had little to with any politics save those which had allowed representation to be so dangerous in the first place.² That is why we know about these two men at all. Their story survives in a letter of remission that was issued to Guillaume Langlois during the following month of April on an unspecified day that seems to coincide with Jehan’s passing. In that letter, King Charles V absolved Guillaume of all criminal (if not civil) wrongdoing in the fatal accident that had caused the death of his friend Jehan. A remarkable document that was first edited and published in Romania in 1900 by Antoine Thomas, the letter tells a tale of that terrible moment when risky representation becomes reality.³ Although Charles V might readily have pronounced theater guilty for the fatality, he arranged instead for all plays “staged and established in honor and remembrance of the death and passion of our Lord Jesus Christ” to get off scot-free (fol. 152v; Appendix, Document 1.1). Moreover, he forgave Guillaume Langlois, who had lacked the requisite intent to be branded a criminal, in large part because of the good life that Guillaume had led—and which goodness was demonstrable (tautologically) by his very participation in the useful, instructive, and godly commemoration of the life of Christ that had hosted the accident: “Disposed to grant his plea…and acknowledging that the plays in which he was engaged were in signification and example of goodness and that the aforesaid complainant is of good name, repute, and honest conversation, we have forgiven, acquitted, and pardoned the supplicant in the aforementioned case of the actions which thus occurred” (fol. 153r).

In this legal document about medieval theater gone awry, there is no such thing as an Intentional (or Biographical) Fallacy. Guillaume Langlois received a royal pardon because, before 27 March 1380, he had authenticated, with a history of good conduct, his noble intentions and his equally noble life story. It would therefore be a grave error today to discount as immaterial the very story that proved so material to both his terrestrial legal case and his eternal salvation.⁴

Other questions were to arise regarding Guillaume’s civil liability; but, for now, we are obliged to admit that the one proposition that was not open to question was the absolute virtue of religious drama, regardless of its potential for mortal danger. No matter how vituperatively we might condemn medieval censorship and regulation of the stage, there is no escaping the fact that, in a culture in which men were what they did, Charles V defended the artistic medium in which art is action: theater. To paraphrase the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives, theater in 1380 was no “sword in the hand of a madman”:⁵ it was no sword at all so long as it was brandished by good men for good works.

Modern scholars thus find themselves in the curious position of acknowledging that a medieval king endorsed a relatively simple answer to the very question that haunts us today as lawsuits proliferate against various art forms.⁶ Did the MTV cartoon figures, Beavis and Butthead, cause a Chicago child to set fire to his house? Did Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers inspire copycat criminals? Did depressing rock music cause an unstable teenager to commit suicide? Did the spectacle of “fun-boxing” cause a young mother’s death on 18 June 2003? Does rap music instigate real violence against women? Or, in perhaps the closest American equivalent to a medieval Passion play, does the latter-day pageant wagon known as Hell House, which depicts rape, abortion, and “sinners” dying of AIDS, foster hatred and homophobia?⁷ All such inquiries hark back to Plato’s complaints that theater precipitates transgression, anarchy, and unorthodox opinions, compromising the legal bedrock of the polis. Innumerable, likeminded medieval accusations charged that theater was guilty, by association, of all manner of sins of commission and omission: crime, violence, fornication, and all-around unchristian behavior.⁸ Notwithstanding today’s tendency to attribute such questions to the enemies of art who seek to contain, curtail, or censor it, the failure to ask such questions actually does a disservice to history, historiography, and to theater itself, which is largely absent from modern indictments of the arts. Not everything associated with art is artistic; and, if there is no guilt by association alone, there is no art by association.

No doubt about it: the usual clichés about the Middle Ages will not do as we try to understand the complexities of what is, at the very least, a story of religious art for art’s sake. Passion plays and their participants were not criminally liable for the deadly acts that occurred within the so-called “boundaries” of those plays (however blurred and imprecise those boundaries might have been).⁹ Jehan Hemont died in 1380, and it would have been very easy to say that, but for theater, he would have lived. However, it was also easy to respond that if an incontrovertibly legal, moral, and necessary theater were outlawed, then only outlaws would have theater.

Whence a startling insight. What sounds like the artistic version of the conservative slogan of the National Rifle Association—”if guns were outlawed, only outlaws would have guns”—actually corresponds to a contemporary, liberal, protheatrical position: a position voiced, no less, by what passes these days for the incarnation of repression, a medieval king. Charles V and/or his lieutenants recognized that while individual actors, special effects men, and the like might be held responsible for the equivalent of today’s civil torts, their individual parts did not culminate in the condemnation of the whole of theater. That art form might well have constituted both the instrument and the scene of the crime, conjuring the wisdom of the Digest of Justinian that “it makes no difference whether someone kills, or provides the occasion of death.”¹⁰ Likewise, the death of Jehan Hemont was the outcome (eventus) of “what is done” (facta), which was “to be considered, even if [the act] was done by a most inoffensive man, although the law punishes the man who is in possession of a weapon for the purpose of homicide no less than him who kills.”¹¹ But that same book of the Digest also proffered a clear distinction between murder and accident on the basis of intention: “[I]f someone draws his sword or strikes with a weapon, he undoubtedly did so with the intention of causing death; but if he struck someone with a key or a saucepan in the course of a brawl, although he strikes [the blow] with iron, yet it was not with the intention of killing. From this it is deduced that he who has killed a man in a brawl by accident rather than design should suffer a lighter penalty.”¹² The Passion play of 1380 definitely provided the “occasion of death,” but by accident; and there was no doubt about the purity of the representational intentions behind both the production and its violence.

Jehan Hemont met the Grim Reaper when a theatrical imitation of fire and brimstone was trumped by the real explosion employed to produce that effect. He suffered for several weeks afterward and ultimately “passed from life to death on the 27th day of the present month [of April] or thereabouts” (fol. 153r). There is no evidence that Guillaume Langlois intended to harm him in any way, so this was no “snuff drama.” Even in a culture that theatricalized executions, interrogations, death, warfare, and other rituals, Jehan Hemont did not die on stage (as related to our earlier taxonomy) from the deliberate commission of real violence viewed deliberately.¹³ He was no modern performance artist choosing notoriously to inflict pain upon his own body before spectators, à la Bob Flanagan or Karen Finley.¹⁴ Nor did he resemble a London actress who had supposedly chosen to be assaulted on the stage of the Real and True Theatre in the 1980s (SRT, 21). As far as we know, Jehan Hemont did not intend to commit “suicide by drama” (by analogy to the claims made by contemporary American law enforcement officers that the goal of certain individuals brandishing lethal weapons is to commit “suicide by police”).¹⁵ He did not choose to die at all; nor was he forced to participate in the spectacle of his own death. No actor he but, rather, a normally unseen stagehand,¹⁶ he was not there to do any pretending in his own person. Instead, he was participating in the theatrical esprit de corps that creates overall scenic verisimilitude and which, despite a long history of on-stage accidents, was meant to represent death, not to render it.¹⁷

And yet, death was rendered, coinciding performatively with Hell’s fire and brimstone. Was it an accident? A coincidence? An act of divine providence?¹⁸ Or was there, somewhere behind the seen, someone’s underlying murderous intent? As investigators endeavored to determine whether Guillaume Langlois had been responsible for Jehan Hemont’s death, they had a pressing question to resolve, which was not about the theater but about law and order: Did a crime occur or not?¹⁹ If Guillaume had never intended to kill Jehan, then his community could speak not of murder but of accidents that could be forgiven and of agents who might pay lesser penalties. Instead of extensive discussion of the affect that attends reception—how are we all feeling about this?—they inquired about the liability and consequences of intentional and unintentional acts. What did Guillaume intend to do—and believe he was doing—at a time when belief was everything?²⁰

The case of Jehan Hemont demanded a ruling as to whether death was creationally intentional and theater destructively performative. If, for J. Hillis Miller, a “true performative brings something into existence that has no basis except in the words,”²¹ then, in 1380, another true performative appears to have brought not something but someone into nonexistence. The medieval case thus focused on the very aspect of speech act theory about which Eagleton was so apprehensive: its potential for “smuggling in the old ‘intending subject’ of phenomenology in order to anchor itself “ (LT, 119). One cannot “smuggle in” something that is always already there; and the voice of Jehan Hemont speaks from beyond the grave to the importance of intentions, just as he had once spoken, before dying, to the issue of his own intentions. One week after the incident, on 3 April 1380, from his sickbed he memorialized in writing—so says Guillaume’s letter of remission—his forgiveness of his friend in a notarized document that has not survived:²²

After these things had thus transpired, the aforesaid Hemont, who was a good and true friend to the aforementioned complainant and who, on account of the wound he had thus sustained from the plug of the said cannon, did not wish [Guillaume] to be damaged in any way or to be prosecuted, either by him or on his behalf, either now or at some future time, the aforesaid Jehan Hemont, being of sound mind and body, of his own free will, without any undue influence, declared and proclaimed—for Guillaume and for his heirs, or for anyone having legal business with him—that the aforementioned complainant was entirely, truly, and absolutely innocent of the deed which had thus transpired and of any [other] accusation which might reasonably ensue on account of the event at some future date, saying and confessing that the two of them had been good friends. (fol. 153r)

Both Jehan Hemont and Guillaume Langlois proclaimed their good intentions to their king in order to explain and to resolve legally an accidental death at the theater. In theater as in life, meaning something is not the same thing as doing something.

On the medieval stage, reality made for good representation, and a sophisticated theatrical culture rose to the challenge of the proviso that better effects made for the better acting that made for the better message.²³ Guillaume Langlois had been “asked, requested, and charged by the actors playing the roles of the enemies and the devils to be present at the aforementioned plays in order to fire the cannon at the right moment [during the Crucifixion] in order to ensure that [the actors] would play their roles better” (fol. 152v; my emphasis). We will never know which one of the ten pieces of artillery malfunctioned or why. What we do know is that a death in connection with the fourteenth-century Parisian stage could not have been ruled accidental without an elucidation of the intentions of Guillaume Langlois and Jehan Hemont. We also know that, in a cruel irony, the man who worked all day with water at the bathhouse as a varlet d’estuves found himself ill prepared for theater’s deadly fireworks. Equally ironic is the portentous switch to the passive voice in Guillaume Langlois’s letter of remission, which elides the question of agency at its very moment of truth: “a red-hot rammer had been placed and stuffed into one of the cannon.”²⁴ Too tightly? Incorrectly? And by whom? We can only induce that Guillaume must have had some contact with the cannon, otherwise, he would never have needed a letter of remission when one of those cannon misfired—and in ways that even Austin could never have suspected when describing, as we shall see momentarily, the “unhappy performative” as a “misfire.” Jehan and Guillaume had

arranged and prepared the aforesaid group of cannon so that these would detonate and make noise at the specific time and place of the Crucifixion. And because, upon the place where the aforesaid complainant and Jehan Hemont were standing, there had been placed a hot rammer, which was stuffed into one of the cannon standing at that site, the plug [cheville] of the aforesaid cannon popped out and fired earlier and otherwise than the aforesaid supplicant and Hemont had anticipated or expected. [The explosion occurred] in such a way that the aforesaid Hemont was struck and, by chance [d’aventure],²⁵ wounded by this said plug in one of his legs; and from the strength of the explosion and of the flames that broke out, the aforesaid Guillaume was also burned and charred all over his face; and he was in great peril of being killed or mortally wounded. (152v; my emphasis)

In an unintentional and “infelicitous” act, the collateral deadliness of a deliberate theatrical explosion would not have met Austin’s conditions for performativity; but it does anticipate in quite remarkable ways his definition of a misfire: “[When] the act that we purport to perform…[does] not c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Mise en Scène
• Introduction: Doing Theater Justice
• Part I - Back to the Medieval Future
• Entr’Acte: This Fallacy Which Is Not One
• Part II - The Theater and Its Trouble
• Talk-Back: Black Box and Idiot Box
• Appendix: Original Documents in French and Latin
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index