Theater of the Word

Selfhood in the English Morality Play

Julie Paulson

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780268104627
  9780268104610
• eBook ISBN:
  9780268104641
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play, Julie Paulson sheds new light on medieval constructions of the self as they emerge from within a deeply sacramental culture. The book examines the medieval morality play, a genre that explicitly addresses the question of what it means to be human and takes up the ritual traditions of confession and penance, long associated with medieval interiority, as its primary subjects.

The morality play is allegorical drama, a "theater of the word," that follows a penitential progression in which an everyman figure falls into sin and is eventually redeemed through penitential ritual. Written during an era of reform when the ritual life of the medieval Church was under scrutiny, the morality plays as a whole insist upon a self that is first and foremost performed—constructed, articulated, and known through ritual and other communal performances that were interwoven into the fabric of medieval life.

This fascinating look at the genre of the morality play will be of keen interest to scholars of medieval drama and to those interested in late medieval culture, sacramentalism, penance and confession, the history of the self, and theater and performance.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Augustine, City of God 19.3, as quoted in Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a.75, 4.

2. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a.76, 1.

3. For recent studies that seek to correct the critical tendency to impose modern ideologies of the self onto medieval texts, see, in particular, Crane, The Performance of Self; Little, Confession and Resistance; and Spearing, Textual Subjectivity, and Spearing, Medieval Autographies.

4. In his narrative of emergent consciousness in The Philosophy of History (1837), Hegel establishes a decisive break between the medieval and early modern, identifying the Reformation with the “meditative introversion of the soul upon itself” (421). I discuss Burckhardt’s infamous and influential denial of interiority to medieval human consciousness in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (first published in English in 1878) in chapter 4. De Grazia, “World Pictures, Modern Periods, and the Early Stage,” provides a helpful overview of the history of periodization as it relates to early English theater.

5. Aers, “A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists”; Patterson, “On the Margin,” quotation at 99–100.

6. See Butler, Gender Trouble, esp. 34, 185–93, 193–99.

7. The only surviving text of the play was written onto a parchment account roll for the years 1343–44 for the Priory of the Holy Trinity in Dublin. The manuscript was lost in the explosion and fire that destroyed the Public Record Office housed at the Four Courts Building in Dublin in 1922. Our knowledge of the play today is based on a description and transcription made for the Royal Society of Antiquaries in 1891 by James Mills, the deputy-keeper of the Public Records. For a description of the manuscript history, see Davis, ed., Non-cycle Plays and Fragments, lxxxv–lxxxvi. Davis’s volume also includes the play’s text; hereafter, references to The Pride of Life are to Davis’s edition and are cited parenthetically by line number.

8. The play opens with the King of Life, attended by his knights Strength and Health, boasting of his power, bragging that there is “no man of woman iborre” (122) whom he cannot destroy, and rebuffing his queen and bishop when they implore him to remember his death and make a good end. The text breaks off just as the king sends out his messenger, Mirth, to search out and challenge Death to a fight. A full description of the play’s plot is included in its banns, indicating that the missing parts of the play dramatize the ensuing battle between the King of Life and Death, Death’s inevitable triumph, the devil’s seizure of the king’s soul, and the Virgin Mary’s intercession on his behalf.

9. The Macro plays are difficult to date with any precision. Here I follow Eccles, ed., Macro Plays, xi, xxx, xxxviii. But also see the attempts to connect the plays to specific political events by Gibson, “The Play of Wisdom and the Abbey of St. Edmunds,” who suggests that Wisdom may have been performed on the occasion of the Edward IV’s visit to the abbey in 1469, and by Brantley and Fulton, “Mankind in a Year without Kings,” who argue that Mankind was most likely written in 1471 during the period in which Edward IV was temporarily deposed.

10. For overviews of theories about the staging of the morality plays, see Twycross, “The Theatricality of Medieval English Plays”; Southern, Medieval Theatre in the Round, and Southern, Staging of the Plays before Shakespeare; Tydeman, Medieval English Theatre; Riggio, “The Staging of Wisdom”; and Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game. For the argument that the morality plays were put on by parishes, see White, Drama and Religion, 10–12, 35–37.

11. References to a “hostler” (722) and a “tapster” (725) suggest that Mankind was written to be performed in an inn yard or inn. However, as Clopper remarks, such references may suggest the playing area is simply being imagined as one, and the play may have been performed in any number of indoor settings, including a manor house, public hall, or church (Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, 191–92). All references to the Castle, Mankind, and Wisdom are to Eccles’s EETS edition of the Macro Plays and are cited parenthetically in the text by line number; stage directions are noted as “sd” with reference to the preceding line.

12. For a side-by-side edition of the two plays, see Davidson et al., eds., Everyman and Its Dutch Original, Elckerlijc.

13. Everyman, ed. Cawley; further citations refer to this edition and are given in the text by line numbers. As Katherine Little notes, Everyman is the only play among what are commonly called medieval morality plays that describes itself as a moral play; for the argument that Everyman is better understood in the context of sixteenth-century English humanism rather than medieval drama, see Little, “What Is Everyman?”

14. According to Bevington, the Castle is written in the dialect of Norfolk, with a northern influence, and Wisdom and Mankind use the dialect of Norfolk and Suffolk (Bevington, ed., The Macro Plays, vii–viii). Mankind contains references to Bury (274) and places in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk (505–15). A reference to the gallows of Canwick (2421), which stood just outside the town of Lincoln, suggests that the Castle may have been performed in, or originally been a product of, Lincolnshire.

15. On the variety of medieval East Anglian theater, see Coldewey, “The Non-cycle Plays and the East Anglian Tradition”; Coletti, Mary Magdalene; Gibson, Theater of Devotion; and Scherb, Staging Faith.

16. Gibson, Theater of Devotion, chap. 5, makes the argument for a Bury provenance. See also Baker et al., eds., Late Medieval Religious Plays, xiv. Horner, “The King Taught Us the Lesson,” describes Benedictine opposition to lollardy.

17. See Beadle, “Monk Thomas Hyngham’s Hand,” and Griffiths, “Thomas Hyngham, Monk of Bury.” For the earlier argument that the monk Hyngham was Richard Hyngham, who became the abbot of Bury St. Edmunds in 1474, see Baker and Murphy, “The Late Medieval Plays of MS Digby 133.”

18. For a discussion of the auspices of the Digby Wisdom, see Baker and Murphy, “The Late Medieval Plays of MS Digby 133.”

19. I do not include a discussion of The Pride of Life in the chapters that follo...

Table of contents

• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• ONE The Castle of Perseverance and Penitential Platea
• TWO A Theater of the Soul’s Interior: Contemplative Literature and Penitential Education in Wisdom
• THREE Speaking for Mankind
• FOUR Everyman and Community
• FIVE A New Theater of the Word: The Morality Play and the English Reformation
• Conclusion: Morality Drama Inside Out
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index