Abstract
Performance and spectacle were central components of the late medieval world, and humour played an essential role in dramatic endeavours. In England and elsewhere late medieval ‘Mystery Plays’ dramatised holy narratives of the history of the world for broad and ‘popular’ audiences, wielding comic elements and raising laughter in a way that ultimately reinforced devotional orthodoxy. This chapter sets out in part to question the prevailing assumption that such performed humour was highly simplistic, created for audiences lacking the sort of sophistication taken for granted in spectators of the proceeding centuries. It does so by reassessing the critical application of ‘Superiority Theory’ to a number of plays from the ‘York Cycle’ and the Towneley MS starring the tyrant Herod. Herod was loudly bombastic, posturing, and evil, drawn comically in ways that made his character incredibly popular—despite the fact that contemporary audiences would have considered him a historical figure, who committed atrocities and attempted to kill Christ. This chapter complicates the long-held convention that within this dramatic tradition humour was present solely to mock evil or folly. Instead, it is argued that a far more complicated dynamic is being staged here, where laughter and temptation are brought hand-in-hand.
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Notes
- 1.
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 6, 72, 82. Indeed, within this dichotomy ‘folk culture’ is an ambiguous and—in the context of early biblical drama especially—a misleading label.
- 2.
McGavin and Walker, Imagining Spectatorship, 8–16; Richardson, ‘The Other Readers’ Response’, 31–33, 44–46; see also Lopez, Theatrical Convention and Audience Response, 13–34.
- 3.
See for example Williams, ‘The Comic in the Cycles’, 109–23; Wickham, ‘Medieval Comic Traditions and the Beginnings of English Comedy’, 40–62; Tricomi, ‘Re–Envisioning England’s Medieval Cycle Comedy’, 11–26; Diller, ‘Laughter in Medieval English Drama’, 1–19.
- 4.
Staines, ‘To Out–Herod Herod’, 31–32; Wright, ‘Acoustic Tyranny’, 4–7.
- 5.
Mitchell-Buck, ‘Tyrants, Tudors, and the Digby Mary Magdalen’, 241.
- 6.
See Epp, ‘Passion, Pomp, and Parody’, 157; Wright, ‘Acoustic Tyranny’, esp. 10–14.
- 7.
Mitchell-Buck, ‘Tyrants, Tudors, and the Digby Mary Magdalen’, 256 n.1: she cites Records of Early English Drama: Coventry, 61.
- 8.
Chaucer, ‘The Miller’s Tale’, in The Riverside Chaucer, 70–71, ll.3383–86; Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.2. ll.13–14.
- 9.
Gray, ‘Caesar as Comic Antichrist’, 1–31; Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, 80–84.
- 10.
Carpenter, ‘New Evidence: Vives and Audience Response’,10.
- 11.
Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater, 70–71.
- 12.
Gilhus, Laughing Gods, Weeping Virgins, 97; see also Godfrey, ‘Herod’s Reputation and the Killing of the Children’, 271.
- 13.
Staines, ‘To Out–Herod Herod’, 31–2.
- 14.
Ibid., 36.
- 15.
Skey, ‘Herod the Great in Medieval European Drama’, 332–33.
- 16.
See Wright, ‘Acoustic Tyranny’, 18, 21.
- 17.
Staines, ‘To Out–Herod Herod’, 50–51.
- 18.
Ramey, ‘The Audience-Interactive Games’, 60.
- 19.
See Mitchell-Buck, ‘Maintaining the Realm’, 184; Records of Early English Drama Coventry, 71; Records of Early English Drama: York, I, 47–48. The proto-Christian nature of the Magi sets them in stark contrast to Herod, although all of them were probably portrayed as visually interesting ‘Oriental’ figures. See Ashley, ‘Strange and Exotic’, 84–85.
- 20.
Records of Early English Drama: York, I, 334.
- 21.
See Smith, Images of Islam, 94–5; also Hourihane, Pontius Pilate, Anti–Semitism, and the Passion in Medieval Art, 148, 153, 271–2.
- 22.
Leach, ‘Some English Plays and Players’, 205–34, 213–34; Woolf, The English Mystery Plays, 391–92, ft. 64. Twycross and Carpenter, Masks and Unmasking in Medieval and Early Tudor England, 216.
- 23.
Akbari, ‘Placing the Jews in Late Medieval English Literature’, 33; Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, 80–84.
- 24.
All quotations are taken from Epp, The Towneley Plays and Davidson, The York Corpus Christi Plays.
- 25.
Ashley, ‘Strange and Exotic’, 77.
- 26.
See Lilley, City and Cosmos, 20–25, 78.; Morris, ‘Pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the Middle Ages’, 141–63, esp. 143–44; Norako, ‘Crusades in Literature’, 575–83.
- 27.
Lomperis, ‘Medieval Travel Writing and the Question of Race’, 147–56, esp. 153–54; Mittman, Maps and Monsters in Medieval England; also Wittkower, ‘Marvels of the East. A Study in the History of Monsters’, 159–97.
- 28.
Herod’s feigned control of the skies is set up in contrast with the learned astronomical practices of the Magi. See Beadle, The York Plays, II, 131. On contemporary interest in classical deities see Phillips, ‘Medieval Classical Romances’, 3–25; Fumo, The Legacy of Apollo, esp. 76–123.
- 29.
Williams, The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare, 58–59.
- 30.
Medieval Drama, ed. Walker, 200, l.115.
- 31.
McGavin, ‘Medieval Theatricality and Spectatorship’, 194–95.
- 32.
See Akbari, Idols in the East, 200–203.
- 33.
Akbari, ‘The Rhetoric of Antichrist in Western Lives of Muhammad’, 297–307. See also The Prophet of Islam in Old French, trans. and ed. Hyatte, 2–12; Paull, ‘The Figure of Mahomet in the Towneley Cycle’, 192, 197, 201.
- 34.
Parker, The Aesthetics of Antichrist, 95–96; see also Taylor, ‘The Once and Future Herod’, 126–27.
- 35.
See Tolan, ‘European accounts of Muhammad’s life’, 226–250, esp. 232; Meserve, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical, 9–14.
- 36.
Akbari, ‘Rhetoric of the Antichrist’, 298, 302–3.
- 37.
Eppley, ‘A New Perspective on Islam in Henrician England’, 593.
- 38.
Whilst the Crucifixion is of course another result of Herod’s evil, in neither York nor Towneley is the tyrant actually a witness to this event.
- 39.
Godfrey, ‘Herod’s Reputation and the Killing of the Children’, 271.
- 40.
Edminster, The Preaching Fox, 165–67.
- 41.
On the comic character Watkyn in this episode in the N–Town Plays see McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion, 42.
- 42.
Lewis, Screwtape Letters, 55.
- 43.
McGavin and Walker, Imagining Spectatorship, 8–16
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Beckett, J. (2020). ‘Lightness and Maistrye’: Herod, Humour, and Temptation in Early English Drama. In: Derrin, D., Burrows, H. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Humour, History, and Methodology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56646-3_14
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